exhausted brain, everything he says to me sounds goofy. “Simon, how’s Louis?” He pulls a sack of pills from his pocket and finds a medium-sized yellow tablet.
“He’s fine. Still living with me.” I poke my finger at the plastic bag. “What’s that?”
“Multivitamin.” He throws his head back and the pill vanishes down his gullet.
“I don’t know why he hasn’t gone back to his own apartment. He’s still a bit creaky, but he’s really okay.”
“Who wants to be alone in the city? Fags are getting their asses kicked all over town.” There were more reports yesterday. Three guys beaten up outside their apartment building in SoHo. One of them, all the bones in his face had been shattered. The doctors thought he had been in a car accident, thought he was thrown through the windshield.
“He could leave if he needed to,” I say.
“You mean he could leave if he wanted to.”
“I guess. What’s the difference?”
“He’s never going to go unless you make him. Quit being such a picnic in the park.” I know this tone, which Jaron uses when he thinks he knows what’s best for you and the rest of the world. “I knew this would happen,” he says. “And Farmer, as soon as you called to tell us that Louis—”
“I don’t really mind him. And his ribs are broken.”
“Not anymore.”
I know that Jaron is right, but right now he bores me, and when I get bored I get nasty. “Shut up,” I say. “Just shut up.” I suck at the straw again.
“Of course.” He shifts his weight on the seat in a way that tells me that if we’re going to continue this conversation, I’m going to have to say something next. The workmen start jackhammering into the walls, cracking the white and purple tile. Concrete dust lifts into the air. The tunnels smell like water underground. Another garbage train rumbles past, this one loaded with black bags, bulging with last night’s dinners, unwanted clothes, broken furniture.
“I don’t necessarily want him there, but I won’t tell him he has to leave. He’ll go when he’s ready.”
“Fine.”
“Jaron, why do you have to be so difficult?”
“You’re getting the short end. Sooner or later you’ve got to push his ass out of the fucking nest. And toss that damned Calvin Klein underwear out after him.”
“If you ate something you might not be so grumpy.”
“And while you’re at it, toss out those eternal stacks of headshots.”
“Breakfast or something.”
“Also his portfolio.”
“Are you even hearing me?”
“Yes.”
“Well then?”
“Well then what?”
“He’ll go when he’s ready. I said that.”
Jaron’s voice becomes violently clear as he looks into my eyes. “He didn’t tell you that he’s lost his apartment, did he? That his agent dropped him? He’ll never work again, most likely. Nobody wants him.” He sits back and tries to ruffle himself back together. He fiddles with his hair.
I say, “He’s getting better.”
“That’s the way that industry works. Yesterday he’s a superstar and tomorrow he’s a nobody. The look is over. Beauty is fleeting, it’s fickle, and they all know it.” That tone begins again. “It’s no wonder he doesn’t leave. You let him hike a trail across your back. I know that you have a habit of looking pitiful and acting even more pitiful. But if you don’t wake up you’re going to find that he’s got you in a cage.”
I suck on the straw again, trying not to explode.
“And stop that incessant sucking, the cup is fucking empty.”
I stand up and walk to the metal trashcan at the end of the small row of seats on the platform, and I toss the cup inside. Someone has thrown away a fashion magazine, and even in the darkness of the garbage bin the cover shines like perfect white teeth.
A rumbling begins inside me, pulsing out toward the edges. A tremor slides down my arm and I tighten my fingers into a fist. I take a deep breath, squeezing my hand and gripping the floor from inside my shoes. “Jaron, I’m completely sick of you.”
“Well, sick or not, here we are in this forsaken subway station waiting on a train that’s never going to come and that’s that. Where are you going to go, Simon?”
I lean over and grab both of his shoulders with my hands, pulling him toward me. I’m a lot stronger than I thought. He’s surprised also. The quaking expands, the blood pounding in my ears. I want to tear off his face and toss it into the dark tunnel. I want to close a bag of stinging bees over his head. I want to tear open his chest and look at his heart.
He feels like a rag doll in my arms. He makes a noise, a pitiful wincing. I’m screaming words that I can’t understand, hardly even hearing my voice.
Jaron is so weak, so disgustingly complacent, I’m afraid I might snap his arms completely off. And I let go of him, sliding down onto my knees. The trembling subsides; I feel it draining out of me, disappearing, falling away. My head falls in his lap. Jaron rubs his hand across my neck, softly along the smooth part of my ear. He brushes the hair from my mouth. “Simon, the train is here.”
Later, I’m with a sexy black guy from the Lower East Side. And when I ask him what he wants he says he wants to “try some new shit.” He’s got a bunch of piercings, some tattoos on the back of his shaved head. His apartment is covered in High Times and Latin Inches magazines. We’re watching the eleven o’clock news and this talking head is blabbing on and on about a woman who was pushed from the subway platform onto the tracks in front of an oncoming E train. They had to shut down the line for a couple of hours and we agreed that if it had been another train it wouldn’t have been down so long. What happened was this: Some guy asks the woman for the time. She’s listening to her headphones and doesn’t hear him. So he pushes her off the platform, right in front of the oncoming train. A businessman with glasses was on the news saying that he thought “random violence” was so terribly frightening. This black guy agreed, but that’s not the way it is, is it? It’s not random. The situation was perfectly clear: She was ignoring him, and he needed the time.
We get our clothes off. His fingers, coated with that nice kind of lube in the black squirt bottle, are stuffed into both ends of me at once.
I start to go to the place where everything is flat, to the place where nothing is. For a few seconds before the landscape appears, the noise in my head is unbearable, peeling my brain like a grape, and then the grayness opens, and the sky glows, bleeding pure light and brightness. Flash-bulbs go off from above, cracking the real world in half, and in half again, over and over until the pieces flutter away like confetti and are gone.
The flat place spirals out in front of me; the horizon line emerges, like a closed circle, miles away in the distance. In the flat place it’s quiet, like the sound of slow water, and the air smells like ashes, like sweet honeysuckle on fire.
A memory surfaces: Edward Burke. Blue Kool-Aid eyes and soft pink lips, so soft you could hurt him if you kissed too hard. Edward fucked girls. Mostly. I sucked his cock. His mother worked at a beauty shop. Sometimes I sat in the sticky plastic chairs, staring at Mrs. Burke and her emery board scratching back and forth, thinking that Edward had the fattest purple cockhead I had ever seen.
Then this black guy is moving looser than before, and I’m sinking into the bed, staring out into the flat place. The door is open and the TV is blaring Family Feud in the other room, the old version with Richard Dawson, and he kisses every woman on the whole fucking stage, even the teenagers. The volume is up really, really loud