16- William from Connecticut

One of the walls in Tim Tim’s living room had a huge poster for an old crime movie, To Live and Die in L.A..  I’d never seen it before.  The poster showed a man with a briefcase and a gun, standing with his back to a concrete, graphitized wall, bathed in so much shadow that I couldn’t even make out his face.  He was wearing sunglasses and he looked disheveled and dirty.  This guy was supposed to be a crook or a cop?

            “A federal agent is dead,” it said in bold, white print.  “A killer is on the loose.  And the City of Angels is about to explode.”

            I looked around the room and I saw a lot of stuff like this, movie posters, a big screen TV, dozens of DVD cases scattered about the floor around the TV.  The couch I was sitting on was covered in clothes and CD cases.  Albums by Journey and Air Supply, emotional 80s cheese rock.  Scattered about the floor were cans of butane, the kind you would use to refill a cigarette lighter.  Tim Tim liked to sniff them.

            I was sitting on this couch and listening to Tim Tim have sex in the other room with a forty year old man. I felt a lump under my ass and I reached into the cushion of the couch and pulled out a G.I Joe action figure, the small kind, not the old 12 inch kind you got in the 60’s. I stared at it for a moment. A child’s toy in my hand, a small plastic man, articulated, once lost in the crevasse of this couch. In the next room, a child toy in the grasp of some forty year old piece of shit’s grasp, also articulated, but still very lost in a different type of crevasse.

            There was another man- he said his name was Bob- sitting in the living room with me.  He was in his underwear- tight, white, and not big enough- sitting in a chair across from me.  I was still wearing my clothes, and Bob, who was plump and hairy everywhere except his head, which was sheathed in thinning brown hair that was combed over his pale scalp, and who was sitting only a few feet away from me.

            “Where are you from, William?” he asked me.  I never tell them my real name.  “Are you from the city?”

            “I grew up in Connecticut,” I told him, lying again.  “My father’s a professor at a small state school there.”  I’ve never even smelled Connecticut.

            “We have a summer house in Connecticut,” he said.  “Me and my family.  Do you still talk to your dad?”

            I took a pack of cigs out of my jacket and I put one in my mouth.  “Do you mind if I smoke?” I asked.

            “It’s fine,” he said.  “My son smokes.  I wish he wouldn’t.”
            “Surgeon General says they’re bad for pregnant women,” I said, lighting it up, “but I’m not a pregnant woman, so who gives a shit, right?”

            Bob laughed.  His nipples where hard.  I think he was just cold.  Inside, Tim Tim was moaning and screaming the name of the grease ball inside with him.  This was a routine.  For Timmy it was like Fred dancing with someone who couldn’t match the steps of Ginger.  There was a step-by-step procedure, Tim Tim told me, for giving a man a good time, and most of it included a lot of moaning and screaming and fake little orgasmic shutters.  I don’t know if a man actually can orgasm during that kind of sex.  I never do.  But then again, I might not remember.  I’m never sober for it.  I opened a beer.  It was my fifth.

            “What do you do, Bob?”

            “I don’t think I should tell you too much about me.”

            “You keep asking me questions,” I said.

            His face turned red.  “I’m sorry.  I don’t…I mean I don’t really know how to…”

            “You’re going to pay me,” I said.  “Right?”

            He nodded.

            “Then it’s not a question of you being charming,” I said.  “It’s a question of me having a few more beers.  I’m not drunk enough yet.”

            Tim Tim let out a long, shrieking moan from inside, and Bob looked over, his hands digging into his hairy thighs, incidentally licking his lips.

            “I have a son,” he said.

            I’m starting to sweat.

            “He’s about the same age as that little one in there.  They think he’s going to be All-City this year- only a freshman.  Point Guard.”  There was a moment of terrific pride there before his face became drawn and dark.  “He’s a handsome kid.  He looks a lot like his mom, to be honest.  I work late, so I don’t get to see too many of his games.”

            “Where does he go to school?”

            “Lincoln, same school where Marbury played ball.  Best basketball school in the city.  We moved near Coney Island just so the kid could play there.  We used to live in Howard Beach.  He was all set to go to Adams, but I didn’t figure he’d get much exposure there.  You a Knicks fan?”

            “Not really,” I said.

            I took a long, deep swig of beer.  The bottle was almost empty.

            “He’s such a handsome kid.  I just…”  I finished the beer and opened another one and took down the neck of it with a single, short swallow.  “....I think about things sometimes,” he said.  “Things I shouldn’t think about.”
            I thought about Pink and what she was doing at that moment.  I was a whore in (sort of) love with a whore.  I thought about who she was doing at that moment.

            “Do we have to talk about this?” I asked.

            “Are you gay?” he asked me.

            “If I’m drunk enough,” I said.

            “Do you have a girlfriend?”
            “Do you want to pass me a new beer?”  I drank down the rest of the one I had in three or four quick swallows.  I found myself praying to pass out.  I opened up the new beer.  It was warm, but I drank half of it without stopping to take a breath.

            “That’s why I came here tonight,” Bob said.  “I came here because of that little boy in there.  I mean,” he said, pausing as if he was hurting my feelings.  Yeah, this was a chubby middle-aged family man sitting across from me in his tighty whitey BVDs who now had his hand on my leg.  “You’re a handsome boy, but that one in there…he’s so young and pure.”

            “He’s not so pure,” I said and I drank some more.

            “He reminds me so much…” Bob said, and then opened up one of the beers and took a few sips.  “I mean I see people on TV and in the newspapers who do shit like that, to their own children.”  Bob was crying.  His non-beer hand was further up my leg.  “I don’t want to be one of those fucking people.  I do this because I love my son.  Because I’m a good father.”

            I finished my beer.

            “How old are you?” Bob asked.

            “Eighteen,” I said, lying again.  I’m thin and my hair’s a little bit too long.  I can pull off eighteen when I shave.

            Bob was finished with his beer, and his hand was touching the crotch of my jeans.            “Use protection, okay,” I said, his hand grabbing between my legs.

            I thought about Tim Tim, moaning, screaming, accepting.  I thought about To Live and Die in L.A., a movie I still haven’t seen.  I thought about the scruffy man with the suitcase and the gun and the Wayfarers sunglasses.  I thought about the Aurora Project, and the Government and Richard Milhouse Fucking Nixon and the assassination of Mahatma Ghandi.

            For the next hour I made four hundred dollars.  Enough to pay the rent.  Enough to buy a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of Jack.  I went home, only a few doors down, stumbling, drunk, through the door, and I stripped off my clothes.  The floor was moving like the Atlantic in a storm and my feet were made of jelly.  I fell down with my pants and shorts around my ankles.  A small, cheap coffee table toppled over, spilling cigarette ashes all over the floor.  I was lying on the floor, naked, with ashes on my face, and I never wanted to get up.  But, after a while, I got up and climbed into the shower.

            The water, too hot, welcoming.  It scalded my skin at contact, and it felt like I was going to die.  Still, I lay there for a while.  I wasn’t sure if I was bleeding.  I wasn’t sure if something was…torn…inside me.  I curled up on the floor and let the water strike me, passive, immobile.  I curled my knees up to my chest and tried to cry. 

            Nothing came.

            When I finally turned the water off, I could hear thunder somewhere outside, somewhere far off.  Coney Island, maybe.  A storm was coming.  I lay on the wet, tiled floor with my face pressed into the rubber mat, the water beading, and scalding my skin, and I prayed that the rain would wash away the whole fucking city.