I’ve done an equal number of rounds of Ketamine off my wrist, but where coke draws Sung’s lips over his teeth and animates his eyes, K lures me inward.
Here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty.
I love this drug.
I’ll forget I’ve lit a cigarette and light another. Laughing, Sung will smoke my other cigarette without comment. Worse, I’ll forget I’ve done a bump and do another. Forgetting that one, I’ll do another. Once I went to the bathroom and forgot to come out. It was just so
nice
in there. Of course Sung didn’t notice I was missing until he went to the bathroom to piss, and there I was, crouched on the wet floor, rolling a slimy, pisssoaked mothball I’d retrieved from one of the urinals between my fingers. Smiling away, I’m sure.
I didn’t move here to erase myself. However, once K’s smoky, marshmallow fungus began to converge on my memories, snuffing them out, I surrendered. It was like falling into a boiling parachute, the tentacles of its shredded tethers reaching out to pull me in.
I started smoking Marlboro Lights not because Sung did, but because I like the look of their cool stem, the gray-white smoke, new ingredients for my saltless soul.
This city is a picnic for sleepwalkers; everyone is together but completely separated, imprisoned in the library of his own particular dreamworld. This is a language of memory, one of images and places stitched together with bloody thread, thread stolen from the corpses of soldiers filling trenches with brown blood, so that your bedroom leads to your kindergarten class; the classroom’s window looks out on an ocean of burning questions. No wonder the thread that bridges these incomparable places smells like kerosene. Or mothballs.
I need this drug.
I miss reading, though. I just can’t seem to concentrate anymore. I’ll sit on the train, a thick tome swiped from the Strand on my lap. The words make perfect sense, I mean,
I get it
. But I don’t get very far. Fading away, I stare at the people on the train, weeding them until I only see the Asian boys, wishing earnestly the cute ones would stare back. And sometimes they do.
I used to have a ton of books at the apartment. They were a beer-rippled bridge to the past, proof I had gone to college: literary biographies, lives on paper about lives on paper. Pages that faded to white on the train. One day I came home from work and all of my books were gone. It was two days before payday and Sung had sold them so we would have money for dinner.
Another bump.
Sung does one, too
.
I can tell from the way he’s grinding his teeth that the coke has settled in the back of his throat, erosive and grainy. He gets up to get another drink. No. We’re at another bar. Not sure I recognize this place. Everyone a frozen neon blur, and the music has really long pauses, like valleys, dark Columbian jungles gripping crashed planes, vine-wrapped skulls knocking against each other in the breeze, providing impetus for a renewal of beats. The song returns. I blink and everyone speeds up to normal. Sung returns with two drinks. Sliding one to me he asks, “You all right?”
I nod and wag the cigarette between my lips at him. He smiles and gives me a light. Smoking the last of a butt from the ashtray (another cigarette I abandoned?), he looks through the cloudy remnants, past me; I know he’s gauging his internal clock. Time for another bump? He’s trying to hold out for as long as possible, make the bag last all night. To fuck with him I do another huge bump, snorting it loudly, flagrantly, off my wrist. He only laughs and nods; cutting a presumptuous line on the table, he snorts blow through a rolled-up bill. I can’t make out the denomination, though the dandruff-flaked president does wink at me, conspiratorially. I look around. Everyone is
alive
.
The next thing I know, we’re outside a club in midtown, the Next Bardo. This was where we met. A knot of Asian boys in a variety of Armani Exchange knockoffs tightens by the door. It must be after midnight if there’s a line to get in. Sung has left me smoking on the corner to see if he can get some old man to pay his cover. He’ll go in with the guy, ditch him and then come back out, licking the stamp on the back of his hand to press it to mine, hoping that the resulting blurry, manufactured contusion will be close enough to the real thing to fool the astute Japanese girl working the door, sulking in a tattered boa. This is the plan and it’s not working. Sung approaches every other old guy. The old men here are as cagey as they are desperate and intuit some kind of scam, waving him away. I’m bored and unsure of how we even got here. If we took a cab then half of our money for tonight is gone, wasted. Right now, I hate Sung. Taking these men by the arm, speaking in pleasing broken English when, having attended university in Australia, his diction is better than mine. Once he’s escorting these old men, there’s no reason to believe Sung will come back for me. He will leave me here.
Finally, a portly man consents to pay his cover. They go inside. I don’t want to wait for disappointment so I walk away.
If the inconvenience of emotion is
this
present and rising then it must be time for another bump. Taking the train downtown, I go to another bar. Not Boy Bar. If Sung comes looking for me I don’t want to be an easy find. I’m at a straight bar on Avenue B when I run into Lonnie. He laughs and feigns surprise when really his is a life where all surprise has long ago been drained away by rampant disenchantment and out-and-out lies. I mean, nothing surprises a drug dealer. But I get it and smile back. He’s out of cigarettes and, ordering both of us drinks, hands me a ten, asking me to buy him a pack. Taking the bill I turn and pause, he smirks. We both know I’m going to do this and he’s going to give me a bump.
In a bathroom stall we both smoke and take turns doing bumps off his wrist. He’s doing blow, which I don’t usually care for, it pulls me away from my K, drags me down the road of
now
, but I do it anyway.
Another bump off his wrist and as I lean in he puts his hand on the back of my head, gripping my hair.
I understand. Holding my nostril closed with one finger, inhaling coke, I feel a chemical heat sparkling up my nose. My other hand gropes Lonnie’s crotch. Eyes closed, I breathe my last breath above sea level. Plunging down to my knees, I work his tan cock too quickly out from between the lacerating zipper of his dirty brown corduroys. I sense him wince but see his dick gain tumescence from the pain of the slight metal teeth.
“Suck it,” he hisses.
Well duh
, I think, putting him to my lips. I teethe at the bitter pout of his penis and feel his spreading flange across my tongue. Surprise. Lonnie coaxes a coke-coated finger into my mouth as well. Sparkle and numb. His cock rises as he gently shoves me further down, to deep-throat his cock. Loosening his pants, he pushes his underwear down to his knees; his bulging pubes scratch my tingling nose. I suck at Lonnie thickening in my mouth as if he were a source of oxygen, life. Everything I need. Disintegrating granules of cocaine bounce off my teeth as a slather of precum glazes my tongue. The bathroom tile is cold against my knees. I steady myself by grabbing his skinny ass with both hands. His buttocks contract in utter discomfort; Lonnie forcefully pushes my hands away.
I forget Lonnie’s straight.
I pull away only to dive toward his balls. I gently tug at the loose, dank skin of his rubbery sac with my teeth, now pulling at my own hardening cock through my jeans. Lonnie expertly guides my mouth back onto his cock. He’s ready. I swallow his bland load. My hard cock aches as I stand up, unsteady but awaiting my reward. He pulls up his pants. We exit the stall.
“Thanks, bro.” Lonnie turns his back toward me and strenuously washes his hands, like he’s a surgeon having finished a particularly grizzly operation.
I just stand there, dazed. “Here you go.” He hands me a fat bag glowing with K, telling me to let him go out first, and then wait a few minutes before leaving.
I nod, ready to go back into the stall and do a bump. He aims his finger at me and fires off a shot and winks, just like he does with Sung.
Wavering outside another bar, the cigarette between my fingers a long, bent icicle of ash. I’m busy erasing connections, first painting bridges white, then finding doors to lock, so I’m annoyed when Sung approaches. He’s with a different old man than the one he went into Bardo with, and a really short, boyish-looking Japanese guy. Sung says something to me but I can’t hear him. The Japanese guy looks at me like I’m a monster and draws closer to the old man; the old man is smashed, red-faced, smiling loosely with that ridiculous, benevolent grin certain types of drunks like to throw around.
Sung speaks to me. I see his mouth moving but I don’t hear anything. The red starts to drip off the old man’s cheeks, pooling at his feet like a fresh crime scene while the Japanese boy shrinks further, darkening like a crow at his shoulder.
I don’t know what Sung is trying to say to me but I can tell it’s
awful
. It’s wrong. I swing at him. I want to put my fist in his mouth to stop the words. Desperately, I want to be the black boy that hit Sung. I always have. I miss him by what feels like a mile. The momentum of my swing spins me like a rubber corkscrew and I collapse on the sidewalk.
Sound returns. Sung’s laughing, the Japanese boy is making whispering sounds in the old man’s ear, the old man looks less red, more concerned, concerned I’ve stalled the oriental rotisserie of his sexual fantasies.
Reeling, stumbling, I tear away from him and rush toward Tompkins Square Park. The darkness suits me; the park clutches me and holds me to a bench. Collapsing, I pat my pockets for a pack of cigarettes. From where I’m sitting I see the old man hurriedly hail a cab. Holding the door he covetously ushers Sung and the Japanese crow into the backseat. I can’t find my cigarettes. Looking around, no cops, I shake out another bump.
Death must be this bright. Morning light stabs at the corners of my eyes. I’m still on the bench. My neck hurts, my legs hurt. Dew has settled deep into my clothes, drawing the chilly dawn air to wrap around my bones. Blinking, I look around. A thin, weary woman with a small, black dog on a leash is staring at me. She looks away as I focus on her. No one else is around, it must still be early.
Light through waxy leaves, the pleasant sky is a yellow-blue. Piles of soiled snow slump beneath certain trees, hiding from the light.
It hurts to stand; really, really hurts. As pain spiders through my knees I try to remember last night. Nothing. A huge marshmallow. No, I remember Lonnie, looking down at me. No, his eyes are closed, but he
is
above me, like a daft puppeteer. And Sung. But for some reason he’s red.
And Sung is striding down the street. When he sees me he waves vigorously and smiles. I blink. It’s really him. He comes up to me looking fresh, showered, though still in the clothes he was wearing last night, so I know he hasn’t been home.
At the diner again, dissolute carp hang in their overcast tanks. I seize my cup of tea between my hands for warmth. Sung orders soup. At his wrist a thick fold of twenties rests atop a fresh pack of Marlboros.
Sudden memory: we met at the Next Bardo. I wasn’t even that high. It was late and I was confident I would score with someone. On stage Lucinda Williamsburg, a fat Filipino transvestite with a huge, quivering mouth like candy-glazed tire tracks, lip-synched Whitney Houston. I was staring at this Japanese boy with feathery eyebrows tucked into a Gucci hat. Baggy pants low on pointy hips; he kept his feet tightly together, to better accent new shoes, a pair of Campers that perfectly matched everything he was wearing. Sipping his drink through a pink straw, he was perfect. Just as he smiled in my direction Sung came up from behind me, putting his hand on my shoulder. I turned around and ran right into his gleaming smile.
Memories are abrasions, aging me.
The waiter brings us both soup.
Where did he get the money for that ticket?
I stare at the arrogant pleat of twenties on the table. I think about the date on his plane ticket. Every day it gets closer.
When are you going to tell me? Are you going to just leave?
He’s always said he wanted to live in New York forever.
Just not with me.
I imagine him not telling me, just leaving. I’ll meet him there, at the airport, dressed in funeral clothes.
I watch him lift the bowl, nose parting the steam from his soup. His nails are long, the dirt deep in their seams moist and clumpy, the fresh compost of nightlife; seeing this makes my heart spiral.
I’ll rip the ticket up. I’ll steal the ticket and go to Kuala Lumpur, get a job in an American hotel gift shop, policing the aisles for shoplifters. No, Sung is in love with me. He knows our love can never be reconciled within his strict family, that his visa is expired. There is only one thing left to do. He’ll immolate himself up on our roof, like those Buddhist monks did during the Vietnam War. The fire will melt all of the snow from the roof. People on the street think it is raining. Tourists stare up at the fiery glow while New Yorkers push past, obviously there’s a movie being filmed. The ticket is meant for me. It’s my movie. I am to solemnly deliver his ashes to his parents. Without a word I will hand over the urn, warm from my lap in the cab ride from the airport. My face made calm by a permanent sadness, a soldier in a war I resolutely believe in. I’ll hand the ashes over to his father in the doorway, turning to leave without ever entering the house where Sung grew up. This single, direct movement will tell the father he has allowed his own familial shame to outweigh the very life of his only son.
The waiter comes to refill our tea. He is young, with black hair swept back like an oily, angry wave. I think I recognize him from the Next Bardo. He smiles at me, lingering at our table, filling my cup to the brim. I notice his pinkie fingernail is longer than his other nails, polished to a shine. When I lift the cup some of the hot tea is guaranteed to spill out onto my wrist. I smile back. Tomorrow I’ll come back for lunch while Sung is at work.