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.

15- In Love or Something in a Phone Booth in Queens

I went to a Mets game one night, watched Al Leiter toss a two hit shutout at the Dodgers.  I don’t even like the Mets.  It’s all about time-killing, killing time.  I invited Tim Tim but he said he had to work, and he didn’t like baseball.  By the time I got out of Shea, it was dark, maybe ten-thirty.  People were leaving the park, families, couples, drunken groups of local meat-heads.  Four fat guys with an M, an E, a T and an S painted on each one of their flabby chests.

            I found myself standing in a phone booth a few blocks away from the stadium, with the receiver in my hand, and my index finger poised above the keys.  The sky was lit just a little by the bald, pock-marked face of the moon.  I wanted to call her.  I needed to call her.  It’d been three days since I’d spoken to her, three days since I’d heard that voice that kept me awake when I closed my eyes in the dark, and it felt like three weeks.  Christ, it felt like three years.  Shit, maybe it was three years.

            I didn’t remember what year it was.

            Still, the receiver on my ear as I lightly fingered, but never quite pressed the four button (the first of her number), I couldn’t find it within me to dial.  I let out a long sigh, which seemed to take near forever, and I placed the receiver back into its cradle.

            “She doesn’t want you to call,” I said to myself as I pressed my forehead against the filthy glass.  It was one of those old-time booths, a tower of dirty Plexiglas with the flimsy, fold-up door.  There was a torn to fuck phone book hanging down from the box by a thick metal cable.  There weren’t fifteen pages left in the entire phone book.  All of New York narrowed down to Althea Aaron to Michael Addams.  Either random vandalism, or someone’s fantasy of population control.  I tore out a page, doing my part, and crumpled it into a tiny little ball and I dropped it on the ground.  I stood inside that booth for a good ten minutes just reading the walls.

            Some of it was advertisement.

            WILL SUCK U OFF 4 FOOD, one screamed in black ink, adding a phone number.

            “She doesn’t want to hear from you,” I said again, this time louder.

            Some of it was public service.

            KEEP YO DICK OUTTA JUANITA RUIZ, this one hollered in thick magic marker, SHIT’S GONNA START TO ROT OFF!!!!!!!!

            Some of it was poetry.

            Scrawled in barely legible, tiny letters of blue, Gat, gat goes the nine of Willie Pimp when a nigga tries to skimp a hoe.

            “She doesn’t want to fucking talk to you,” I said.

            Finally, and maybe even more relevantly, there was one message directly above the payphone itself in blatant red ink, in tight, flawless print: Keep calling, bro.  The bitch can’t answer ‘cause she’s got her mouth around my meat.

                I stood there and, in spite of my mood, I let out a bit of a laugh.  I could feel warmth on my cheeks in spite of how cold it was outside.  I was crying.  Not a lot, just a few drops slipping down to my cheeks while I tried to fight off the rest, but I was crying.  Still, laughing made me feel a little better, even if it made the tears come a little faster than they’d been coming.

            I dialed Pink’s number, my forehead pressed against the dirty glass.  The booth smelled like piss or body odor, or maybe both.  Outside was the city, or Queens, anyway.  There was dirty water running down the gutters from an afternoon rain and there was steam rising visibly from a manhole up the street.  There was a woman, probably a whore, slamming down hard on top of some paying customer in an old brown Ford parked between a Korean grocery and a locksmith’s shop.  I was still close enough to see the cheesy neon figures on the outside of Shea, and that they were going to be playing the Padres next.  The phone was ringing on the other side, one, two, five times.  No answer.  Pink didn’t have an answering machine.  She didn’t believe in them.  I kept on the line.

            Be in this booth at 2:45 a.m. on July 18th, 2002, somebody had written, very, very tiny on the plexi-wall, and I’ll suck you into a fucking coma.  For a moment, I could still smell the encounter.  It seemed to me like half of New York had either taken a piss or fucked on that corner, or in that booth in particular.  Across the street, in the alleyway, the hooker silhouette screamed like mad and it made me think about Tim Tim, about sweaty middle-aged men and blood and semen and my ass filled with coiled barbed wire.

            “Who the fuck is this?” Pink’s angry, out of breath voice growled in my ear.  I tried to say something, but nothing came to me.  I called her before the game and I didn’t get an answer.  I called her three hours before that and got no answer.  At least at that point I knew she wasn’t across the street in the Ford getting a very public cock skewering.  “Hello,” she said.  “I’m fucking busy, and if you’re calling for an appointment…”

            I hung up.

            I wound up walking to some tavern in Ozone Park, the kind of place where Bruce is on the juke box, and a group of beer-swilling regulars wear bad T-shirts with nicknames and numbers on them and play softball against similar regulars from similar bars all over Queens.  Bruce and the E-Street Band were playing “Glory Days” and I was drinking a beer that tasted old and stale.  I had a headache, and I’d already done a shot of tequila and chased it with another stale shitty beer, thinking that it’d help.  It hadn’t done much yet except irritate my stomach.

            I scratched at the fold of my arm, at old, scabbed-over battle scars.  I wanted small, cheap hit of black tar.  I wanted a fistful of my mother’s valium.  I remembered my mother for the first time in months and I took another drink of stale beer.

            “So, I did what you said,” one meathead said to another in one of the booths.  They were wearing Queens College sweatshirts but looked more like bricklayers than students.  They had broad shoulders and thick necks and had about fifteen empty bottles in front of them and two empty baskets of chicken fingers and fries.  Tow-headed and probably blue-eyed, they looked, between the two of them, like an Army recruiting poster.

            “I told her,” the first meathead said, “I told her how I felt about her.”

            “What did you say?” the second asked.

            “I told her that I loved her, man.  I just, you know, just let it all hang out.  I told her that when I graduate that I want her to come with me to San Diego, and just, you know, start a life together.”

            The second meathead was laughing.  “And she said ‘no’, right?”

            “Well…yeah.”

            “Big mistake, man.  You don’t ever tip your cards like that.”

            The first kid looked like he’d been punched in the stomach.  “You said ‘seize the moment’ and all of that ‘change my destiny’ shit.”

            “I didn’t tell you that,” his friend said, sipping his beer.

            “Remember,” he said, “all that ‘founding fathers’ stuff, and how they seized the moment and grabbed what was theirs?”

            “Dude,” the second kid said, “I flunked Colonial History.  If I told you that shit, I was drunk and you should have just ignored me.”

            I laughed softly to myself and I took another sip of beer.  As always, The Jeffersons were moving on up on a TV above the bar, and I was watching, vaguely, as the neighbors, the mixed couple, whatever the fuck their name was, dropped by to see George, while Wheezy was, apparently, visiting her mother.  I guess I wasn’t really watching, as you might say.  It was more like I was staring at the screen with my eyes half open, dreaming.  I was thinking about Vermin.  I was thinking about two twenties, which I had in my pocket, and about a tiny square of junk that I could spike up with.  I was thinking that I didn’t have the energy to go to the Bronx.  I was thinking about Pink.

            Right about then was when I noticed that there were two muscle-bound, probable physical education majors from Queens College standing on either side of me, looking down on what looked to them to be a stain on their fraternity letter sweatshirts.  “Hi fellas,” I said.  “I think Jesse James is probably greasing up a chopper, and/or some tatted up porn star on 37.  Did you want to change the channel?”

            One of them, the one who failed Colonial History, grabbed me by the collar of my dirty fatigue jacket and growled at me.  “What exactly were you laughing at, faggot?”

            I looked up at him, and I felt a soccer ball catch in my throat.  The other one had this giant smile on his face.  Like his boyfriend had just said or done something very clever.  “Sorry guys, just watching the Jeffersons, that’s all.”  I smiled.  “I’ll try to keep it…”

            Before I could blink, a fist the size of a ham crashed into my face.  Half of my body went limp and the other half went numb.  This guy was holding me up as my chin dropped to my collarbone.  I held my breath but felt it forced out of my chest as the other one slammed his meaty paw into my stomach.  I tried to reach for my beer bottle but my limp hand only swatted it down, spilling beer onto the counter.  The amateur historian picked up the bottle, by the neck, beer pouring all over the floor and all over his hand, and brought the bottle down square onto the top of my head, spilling a few ounces of beer on to my forehead and neck, and littering my hair and shoulders with shattered glass.  I could feel blood running down my forehead.

            The good Samaritans at the bar, most of whom probably played on whatever softball team toured Queens’ public ball fields under the banner of the bar, cleared a path for the two men to drag me to the door.  Bruce was singing “Born in the USA” as I went face first into the pavement, tasting my own blood and without the slightest bit of feeling in my lower torso or below.

            “Stay out of this place, you drugged-up faggot,” one of them said.  “Or I’ll shove a fucking pool cue up your ass.”  He laughed.  They laughed.  The Samaritans laughed.  The door to the bar closed and I was having another great night.  I thought about calling Pink.  I thought about the quarter and dime in my pocket and a dirty, smelly phone booth in Flushing.  I thought about Vermin and begging for something to ease my pain.

            I thought about The Aurora Project.

            I might have fallen asleep.  I didn’t know.  But for a moment, maybe two, I wasn’t laying there anymore.  I was somewhere.  Somewhere different.  There was glass and bubbling green fluid, everywhere, like being inside a bottle of 7-Up.  Beyond that there were men with baggy white lab coats and clip boards, staring into my eyes, watching my mouth move as I tried to ask them who they were and where I was.  “Help me,” I was trying to say.  “Help me.”

            My mouth was filled with bubbly, sweet-tasting liquid and it didn’t seem to bother me.  I couldn’t feel my body, and it didn’t really bother me.  The room was all blinking lights and computer displays and a pretty woman with tied up, red hair in John Lennon glasses with a clipboard and a pen, tapping on the glass and mouthing something about auditory response time, whatever the fuck that meant.

            Two guys, sitting at a pair of computers and wearing cheap linen suits looked at me and then continued their conversation about how the Cubs still haven’t won a World Series and that they never would.  They walked past me, a man in a glass bottle, and didn’t bat an eye.  Maybe I was inside a water cooler.  Maybe I had become a water cooler.  One of the lab coat guys leaned in, close to the glass and said to me, with a stern look on his face, “Don’t come back here, faggot!”

            I woke up, covered in puke, but with most of the glass off my face and out of my hair and onto the ground.  I was still in Ozone Park.  I was still lying in the street.  I had no idea what time it was.  Maybe it was a dream.  Maybe I was going nuts.

            I probably just needed some pain killers.  I got up and started walking.  A few blocks later I was inside a CVS, browsing.  I opened a box of Advil and I took four.  I opened a bottle of Bayer and took five.  I opened a tube of Dramamine and took four of those.  I took a few more things I don’t really remember taking, except I remember that one of them, my mistake, treated pre-menstrual cramps.

            A man, a customer, middle-forties, fat, with a shiny, balding head stood next to me, staring at me, at the bits of brown beer bottle glass in my hair, at the cuts and bruises on my face.  He’d watched me walking up and down the aisle, you know, browsing.  “What in the name of God happened to you, man?” he asked.

            I smiled at him, and clapped him firmly on the shoulder.   “Love is grand, ain’t it, Wally?”

14- Fortune Cookie

                                                         PART II: DEEPER AND DEEPER

There was this girl who was a cousin of a friend of a friend of mine when I was a kid.  I was about fourteen and just starting to figure out exactly how the whole game worked.  I was a virgin, but whatever.  This girl, this Korean girl, she had this beautiful raven hair, full tits, for a Korean anyway, a face that was smooth and unblemished like a doll’s.  She was eighteen or nineteen, and we called her Fortune Cookie- I don’t remember her real name.  She’s Korean, and not Chinese, so looking back on it, I guess the name is stupid.

            Fortune Cookie, she always knew that we watched her.  She had to.  We’d spot her walking by all the time where we hung out.  Summer afternoons we’d head on down to the playground in front of the Elementary school and play basketball, and she’d always walk by.  She lived a few blocks over from the school with her mom, dad, and about seven relatives in a small split level on 149^th Avenue, and she worked in some office downtown, filing papers, and shaking her ass for some lawyer or some accountant.  There wasn’t any particular reason I could figure that always put her walking past that long chain-link fence.  She must have known she gave us instant wood when ever we caught so much as a whiff of her sweet little ass coming up on us.  Like fucking wolves, we could smell her- we all knew the scent of her perfume even if still today I can’t tell you the name of it.  She knew it because she was a slut.  Everybody knew that.  Kevin had friends, older friends who had gone to school with her, who even knew her real name.  Some of them had even had her.  The stories blew my MTV-soaked mind.

            Threesomes, foursomes, whips, chains- this girl liked to fuck, and apparently, she’d do almost anything to get off.  At fourteen, we didn’t have much chance, but at least we could watch all we liked.  It was a ritual.  Fortune Cookie would pass us by because she knew what we wanted, and she gave us a look because she liked it.  Each time she’d prance by us with her firm fucking tits sticking out and that ass wagging back and forth- it was like a test of our on-coming manhood, a gateway drug.  She wanted to see who would step up to the plate and be the batter up to conversation.

            I didn’t have a tenth of the guts it would have taken.

            Kevin, he knew people who knew her.  He even knew her name.  Her real one.  It made sense that he was the first one to talk to her.

            “Hey,” he said, as she walked by, “you have a cigarette?”

           Fortune Cookie stopped.  She…actually…stopped.  She was wearing a cute little flower-print dress and no bra.  “You like menthols?” she asked.

            Kevin smiled.  “My favorite,” he said.

            She smiled back and she dug into her purse and pulled out a pack of smokes, putting one between her supple lips and passing one through the chain-link.  She looked around for a lighter, but didn’t seem to find it.  It was the first time I wondered what exactly was with all of the shit inside a woman’s purse.

            “I got you,” he said, and he took out a lighter, a shiny little Zippo that I recognized as my father’s.  Had he stolen it?  It didn’t matter, because of the cool way he lit it up and offered it.  He flipped it open and lit the flame and she leaned forward, the smoke through the fence and he lit it.  She took a long, cool drag, the cherry burning bright as he lit his own cigarette.  The rest of us were just watching.

            Her legs were long and white- I’d never seen anything that white before.  She smiled at him.  “You know Big Phil, don’t you?” she said.  “I’ve seen you around.”
            “I’ve seen you too,” he said.  We’d been playing ball for a half an hour, and Kevin wasn’t even sweating.  Completely calm, completely cool.  Always.  “Phil says you’re uh…really something.”
            Her eyebrows rose and her lips opened up to a big, laughing smile.  She was gorgeous.  Nice teeth.  “You’re a little young,” she said, “but you’re kind of cute.  You get high?”

            “Depends on the high,” he said.  He looked around.  It was a Sunday, and the street was pretty empty.  He smiled.  “I might know a guy I can score some good shit from.”

            “Really?” Fortune Cookie asked.  Her fingers grabbed hold of the fence and she pressed against it lightly.  Her nipples were hard, pressing against her dress like they were going to rip through it.  “You’re a pretty resourceful kid.”

            Kevin took a long drag from his smoke, trying not to cringe.  He hated menthols.  “But if I’m going to take you to him, my friends and I have a little something we’d like you to do for us.”

            The Fortune Cookie locked eyes with him and her smile disappeared.  She drifted back a bit from the fence.  “I’m not a whore.  Whatever it is you jerk-offs hear about me, I do whatever I do for fun.  I don’t fuck for drugs and I don’t suck for weed.”

            “Baby, baby,” he said, smiling a coy little smile.  “I don’t want you to do anything, or, well, any of us for that matter.  Me, maybe, but not today.  Not like this.  What I want…is for you to just take the edges of that cute little dress of yours…and pull it up so we can see what you have under the hood.”

            There were six of us, most of us fourteen, most of us sweating and nervous, and she looked over all of our faces, considering.  She looked especially long at me and then back to Kevin and then back to me.  “You two know each other?”

            “Something like that,” he said, laughing.

            “He’s cute too.”

            “Funny,” Kevin said.  He smiled at her.  “What’s it gonna be?”

            She took a long drag of Kool menthol and let out a long stream of smoke.  She flicked away the lit smoke and looked around, her eyes darting back and forth up and down the block.  Nobody was around.  We were the only ones in sight.  The Fortune Cookie grabbed the edges of her dress and she pulled just a little bit upwards, slowly, showing off those smooth, cream-colored thighs.  Her almond-shaped eyes watching all of our faces in turn, she lifted it up higher and revealed a smooth-shaven mound of wet female flesh, the thing we’d all dreamt about.  The thing I’d seen before only in magazines and in shitty, cheap, stolen porn tapes.

            It was pink and it was beautiful.  Probably because it was the first, I guess.  It’s just that way.  When I imagine what it must have felt like from the inside out, that tight-lipped, perfectly shaven gash was everything we’d expected it to be and then some.  It was living smut- the first and last thing we’d think about when we pumped our meats at night for the next few years of our lives.

            A few weeks later, Kevin fucked her.  I had her a few years later after I’d been with a couple of other girls.  She told me that Kevin had told her to let me.  She wasn’t what I’d expected.  She wasn’t as tight.  She wasn’t as good.  Fantasies are never lived up to.  That’s a fact of life.

            I heard a few years ago that she’d married into money- a nice American boy with a nice house with a nice job, living in some nice small town up near Poughkeepsie. 

That’s what I heard, anyway.