Cowboy, or Convict. Some people like Nazi stuff—I don’t have the clothes, but I can borrow them. Chaps or jeans or jocks. Boots can be short, tall, dull, polished, oiled, clean, scruffy, lace up, or spurs. Rubber or denim or gloves. Spread-eagle or upside down. Spanking, whipping, flogging, strapping, sometimes punching. Weights on balls, cock, nipples. Menthol, ice, wax. Blindfold, gag, mask, chains, plastic wrap, adhesive tape, chastity belt, rope, restraints, cuffs, harness, hood, straitjacket. Enema, catheter, suppository. Shaving. Psychodrama!
I leave the apartment building and hold the door in the hallway for a man carrying too many groceries. Carrot tops and French bread stick out of the top of the bags, like an advertisement for groceries, not just plain old food. He thanks me and I wait for the door to close and click behind him. I pause for a moment between the doors, standing quietly in the airlock, staring into the gold inlay art deco mirror above the no-longer-functional fireplace. In the mirror, a river flows out from between two giant mountains with a bare, rocky summit that looms over the empty valley. The river curves in a few places, moving toward you with each turn. In the widest part, where my face is reflected, two cranes walk around among the lily pads, fishing for breakfast, their twiggy legs and knobby knees all polished and antique. I stare at myself in the river.
After, I take the subway down to the hospital. I slide my card through and listen for the high-pitched ring of the machine. The little window lights up a faded green GO and the turnstile cranks me through.
The guy playing guitar on the opposite platform sounds a lot like Woody Guthrie. About two dozen people pass by while he’s playing but no one drops anything into the hat. He’s not good, not terrible, just average—which is worse than good or bad. The only lyrics I can make out are “unravel threads of sanity” and something about “sinuous,” which sort of destroys the Woody semblance. He’s wearing a limp T-shirt, dingy around the collar, to go along with the image of “I’m a starving whatever.”
Someone has drawn DIE FAGS in thick black marker along part of the tile. Then someone else, with another urgent agenda, has sprayed a big lavender smudge through it. Wow, I think, gay graffiti. The ceiling drips near the bench where I’m sitting, slick and greenish, seeping slowly into round drop-shaped mirrors. The guitar player looks over at me and sings some stupid line about “lace and cyanide,” and I wonder for a second about whether I could take him home. But like I said, there isn’t any money in the case—and I don’t do freebies for strangers.
Plastered on the wall behind him is a movie poster, Hollywood starlets interlocking arms, perfect white teeth and eyes the color of ocean water in Barbados, like Icelandic glacial runoff. The train’s headlights flash a muscular glare across my face and there’s the enormous rattle and squeal of metal on metal. I look back at the guitar player. The train barrels down the track, hiding us from each other, separating us with glass and steel, heavy wheels, and magnificent advertising. The doors open and I take a seat near the end of the car. The conductor complains to us about using all the available doors, blah blah blah, haven’t we all heard this before? Somebody with a baby stroller holds the door open for a man in a wheelchair and the people around me start to look annoyed. Stand clear of the closing doors, and the guitar guy is suddenly history. We pull away from the station, moving into the tunnel that runs under the river, and I sit back in the orange seat, watching the flashing lights go by, the knots of dirty plumbing.
I see my body reflected in the safety glass separating the steel-bright light of the train car from the dark of the tunnels. I shiver and pull my sweatshirt around me tighter until, when I grip my sides, I can only feel the soft bulky fabric and hardly any of my own skin. I look down at my legs and they look much larger than before. I feel embarrassed. I struggle, like in puberty, with my awkwardness, with what is suddenly—me.
Chapter Five
Sometimes I can tell what sort of files are going to find their way into my hands, and into my life, before I’m even in the room with them. First I get a feeling, an ominous weight to the morning, perhaps. A drizzle of rain which turns to fog and back to rain again all before I get out of bed. Weather as foreshadowing. And then my MetroCard won’t read properly, and I swipe it ten times before the technology does what it is supposed to do, and I finally get on the train. Sometimes I say a quiet prayer—to nobody really, I don’t actually believe in that stuff—that the day will behave as planned and whatever turbulence arises won’t shake me right out of the sky.
For example, on my way to the basement a janitor accidentally dropped a tray full of silverware on the floor in front of me, forks skewing in every direction, the sound ringing down the corridors, halting movement in every direction. People in the waiting room covered their ears.
I knew right then that something in the files today would be a little too familiar. And now I’ve found it. It’s a gay bashing from a few months ago. I find more and more of them every day—maybe twenty in the last year alone, spreading like a rash. In this case, a fag walking home from the gym decided to take a shortcut through the park and—zap—they got him with a stun gun. For approximately twelve minutes, they got him. So says the police report, which is strangely included, along with other documents and written statements—some of the forms I’ve never come across before. Signatures everywhere.
He was treated for bruises and swelling in his face where they punched him, two broken fingers (left third and fourth), marks on his throat where they strangled him. One of the doctors suspects it was a telephone cord, or something similar. “Shoelace?” says one of the papers. Plus a mysteriously dislocated kneecap. And the place where the stun gun shot him through with electricity was burned and bleeding.
I’m thinking about that spot—the two tiny holes in his side, halfway up his rib cage, the only place where they managed to enter his body. I’m thinking about how that feels, to have your flesh opened up like that, your aura burst like a soap bubble. But he survived.
One of the most difficult parts of my job is not knowing the rest of the story. I process the incidents without having all the details—I only know the beginning and end of the story. I don’t know if a lover came to take him home, if family members rushed to the bedside. If they caught the jerks. There is an old custom of hiring mourners at a funeral, to be sure that the deceased are properly lamented. And that’s sometimes what I feel like: a grief vessel.
I swallow the pain, shove the folder into the rows with all the others, and walk back to the in-box, where I pick up ten or twelve more. And just like that, the day continues.
First thunder. Then the hot metal crack of lightning in the distance. The vein-crackled sky opens, flashing blue-yellow light across Louis’s face. He brushes the hair out of his eyes and stares up into the wind. His cigarette glows brighter as he inhales, and for the haze I can hardly see anything else.
The drops start to fall one at a time on my head; the air turns from moist to wet. The puddles that appear beneath us reflect Louis’s yellow raincoat, my red vinyl. The arms of the storm reach from one end of the city to the other. The night brightens as light from the sky, from the neon, from the blinking walk / don’t walk refracts and throws itself back up at us.
At the opposite end of the street several men are walking toward us in a pack. The smaller ones in front; the heavy strong ones in the middle; the fastest, most agile in the back. It occurs to me that what has been happening all over New York City in the past six, ten, twelve months is about to happen to us. I want to scream out. I want to punch my fists into the sidewalk.
I want to be responsible for my own bruises.
I feel a weight in my stomach and, seeing the world through a fish-eye focus, I move closer to Louis.
Drag queens can tell you what kind of lipstick covers best. They know which earrings hide scars. I thought at the time—you know, that shirt doesn’t look half bad with bloodstains. If only they would run down a little more to the left.
I hear the ribs cracking, caving in. Blood tastes different when it comes up from your guts and not from a pricked finger—when it comes in buckets from the inside out. There’s no sweet tang. It’s bitter and thick, like motor oil.
They hold his head