the brick wall like they tell me to, waiting for it to end.
Thirty, forty seconds it must have been. It happens so fast that it hardly registers in my mind as a single moment. It’s a string of slow-motion movement, one thing morphing into another. Everything blurs.
A siren wails and the assholes run off.
Then we’re in the hospital and he’s hunched over my lap. He pukes onto the floor and I clean it up. The nurses see how much blood he throws up, but we still have to wait. We have to wait because some Greenwich Village landowner cut his finger on a vegetable peeler and requires six stitches. They give Louis something to stop, or at least calm, the vomiting. They bring a needle full of pinkish liquid and it goes down clean into his arm. I hold the cotton ball onto the drop of blood.
Later they wrap Louis’s body in wide flesh-colored bandages. Broken ribs. Nothing has punctured his lungs and therefore it is not “too serious.” We should simply go home and keep him in bed for several days. He should have lots of liquids. He should not walk or move around much. Yet, he should try to take deep breaths to stretch the muscles in his torso, which in turn will help strengthen his body. The doctors give us a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of ibuprofen. In case either upset his stomach.
Another patient, a sickly guy with white hair and blue tinted glasses, covered his mouth with his hand. “Why on earth would anyone do something like this?” he said.
But I know why they did it. They told us over and over again. They told us every time they shoved his body onto the concrete. They told us each time he vomited. They told us exactly what we had done to deserve this.
At home, he falls asleep. For a few minutes I sit watching him, the sheets lifting up and down with his breathing.
I turn on the shower. The steam billows around the poster tacked up on the ceiling—a Calvin Klein ad from a Manhattan bus stop. It’s Louis in some briefs and a white pocket T. Farmer stole it from somewhere in the South Bronx. When I asked him how he got it out from behind the glass, he said, “I had some tools in my bag.”
I step onto the tile, facing away from the spray. Slowly, I step back, centimeters at a time, until I feel the water rise up my neck and loosen the matted hair on my head. When I’m back far enough so that the water begins to fall over my eyes and across my lips I feel myself getting heavier. The water runs faster and faster, taking away parts of me. I start to slide down the tile and I feel my body weighing hundreds of pounds, thousands of tons, perched in a short, tight stack on my shaking heels. My hand clutches my genitals and the water takes more and more of me away, peeling back the layers, melting the muscle. Dissolving the bone.
I feel buoyant and numb.
Chapter Six
I sleep about four hours. I try to sleep some when I do these middle-of-the-night appointments—if I know beforehand that they’ll be awful. I’ll sleep, do the deal, then come home and sleep some more. This way, I can slip the sex into an indiscernible time slot between drifting and consciousness. In other words, I won’t remember it as clearly. The whole mess will be blurred. The stupid shit will forget itself.
I think this guy lives in Florida, or at least I gather that from his talking about it nonstop over the phone. Gainesville? Tampa? One of those cities you forget exists. Coral-colored suburbs, alligator farms, and lime-green monkey grass. Shrimp on ice and suntan oil.
He stays in an apartment out in Jackson Heights. There’s a whole clan of thirty-something closet cases living down there who collectively rent this apartment, vacationing in it every so often, like a time-share. I’ve fucked there about a million times. I wonder if they sit around clambakes in St. Petersburg comparing notes. There was a bald man from Orlando who only licked my nuts over and over. He was there to paint the place as well—turquoise latex drips all over his arms and chest. The doorbell is broken, so there is a little plastic loop connected to a long cord that goes to the top of the stairs, and when you pull on it, the string tugs on a tiny brass bell. Of course, if the radio happens to be on, or the television, forget it. The first time I went there, Louis and I were doing it together. Louis thought it was real cute and smart, and he rang it a few times on our way out.
Mr. Orlando stopped calling after Louis refused to come with me to a fourth appointment. We’d done him together for a couple of nights in a row, and then Louis decided he’d had enough of his ball licking. Mr. Orlando was furious when I showed up without him. He got all Looney Tunes and bug-eyed, spouting things about ethics in business.
So I ring the damn bell, diddling the loop and watching the thin string jiggle all the way up into the building. I figure it’s near three, close enough to whenever I’m supposed to be here. He tells me to show up in the middle of the night. Says something about “Come when it’s no longer today, and not yet tomorrow.” And then he giggles.
I considered canceling this one, not wanting to leave Louis alone right away, but this guy didn’t answer his phone, and not showing at all could mean the end of the Florida Fuckers requesting some time spent with me, and I can’t afford to do that.
The guy comes down to let me in and I can tell right away that he’s off. His eyes are glossy and look like all different colors at once, like he’s rubbed them with Vaseline, like an oily parking lot slick with rain. And he looks sweaty, plastic, saccharine. He immediately starts kissing my neck and rubbing his hands in my crotch. Fucking door isn’t even closed yet.
He’s all misty and glistening, holding up a bag of little pills. Green triangle ones, blue capsules, yellow and white tablets. There’s a brown glass bottle with a dropper cap, something else wrapped in foil. Red dot pills that look like candy. He holds the bag out to me, pooches it open, and shakes the contents around. “Pick what you like,” he says. And, of course, I don’t. So he helps himself, and I mean really helps himself. Not even picking through them, swallowing a handful.
He’s rubbing his face all over my chest and stomach and he should be kissing me the way he’s moving his mouth up and down, but instead he’s dragging his limp mouth across my skin. Leaving slime wherever he stops. And he coughs and coughs and coughs. This goes on for about half an hour. Maybe more.
I start lowering myself into the flat place, where the only sound is a cavernous hush of wind, and everywhere it smells like burning sugar, teasing my nose. I count to four, focusing on the noise, on the distant horizon, which grows no closer no matter how far you walk, and I sink into the grayness.
Then this guy gets sick. Pukes all over the floor.
He collects himself, breathing hard, and wipes his face with a towel. He sits back, resting on his heels. “Why are your fingers so cut up?” he says.
Louis is sitting in the chair, which he moved to be near the window (and the TV), with his lap full of magazines. He set a floor lamp next to him too, and the whole thing makes for a little private space that looks quite calming. The sun hurls light down at the hardwood floor, and it feels good against my bare feet.
“I’m home,” I say.
“Like it?” He doesn’t look up.
“Architectural Digest, here we come.”
“Good Housekeeping,” I say, walking into the bathroom. I lift the toilet lid and unzip. I piss hard, emptying out my insides. My body shakes, that weird pee-shiver thing.
“Careful, I just cleaned that.”
“You shouldn’t be cleaning anything. Or moving furniture.” He has been staying here since he was attacked. He came here because he needed help doing little things, and he has yet to leave.
“I’m feeling okay today, actually. I won’t overdo it. Remember, it’s good for me to move around a bit.” He’s breathing heavily, conscious of the air moving in and out of his chest. “You know what,” he says, “the worst part of this whole ordeal is that I can’t work out. I haven’t been to the gym in over a week. Everything has atrophied.”
His side is painted in all shades of blue, brown, even