9- Sunglasses At Night

I was sitting in a window booth at the Sunshine Diner, drinking a shitty cup of coffee when this familiar face stopped and hovered over my table.  "Rick," he said.  "Holy shit, are you Rick Laird?"

            I said I was.

            “Holy shit, man.  It’s been like forever.”

            My head was hurting, already.

            I agreed that it had, and Joe, Jack, Jeremy, invited himself to sit down across from me.  My waitress- April, according to her little faux silver name tag- came over with a pot of coffee and a cup for Jack, Joe, or Jeremy.  She smiled at me as she asked, “Can I get you fellas anything else?”

            “Well,” he said, tearing open three sugars all at once and emptying them into his coffee, “I guess you can get me a grilled cheese on rye and a bowl of tomato soup.”  April wrote this down and asked if I wanted anything.  I said I didn’t.

            “You sure?” she asked.  “It is lunch time and all.”

            “I’m fine,” I said, “thank you.”

            She smiled at me again.  “Grilled cheese on rye and tomato soup coming up.”

            Jack, Joe, Jeremy’s eyes followed her ass behind the counter and back to the kitchen.  “Oh, miss.  Hold the mayo on that would ya?”

            She looked back, confused, and said, “Um…okay.  Whatever you say, buddy.”  She shook her head on her way into the kitchen.

             Jack, Joe, Jeremy smiled like mad, and he turned to me with his eyes rolled back in their sockets.  “Holy shit, man, did you see that girl, man?  Fucking hot.  When you want hot, always look for a fucking waitress, know what I’m saying?”

            I said I did.

            “She was giving you the fuck-eye, too, my man," he said.  "I think you should talk to her."

            "I just did talk to her," I said.

            "Nah, man, that's not what I mean.  I mean talk to her, get her number."

            I said maybe I would.

            “So how’s Kevin, man?  I haven’t seen him in years.”

            I told him I hadn’t seen him in years either.  I don’t know why I lied.

            Jack, Joe, whatever the fuck his name was, took a sip of his coffee and gave an approving nod.  "That's some fucking good coffee.  Jesus, man, posterior like that and a cup of coffee like this?  If you don't get her number, I will."

            "How do you know she made the coffee?" I asked.

            "Cooks are too busy to make the coffee," he said.  "It's always the waitress who gets stuck with it.  So, how you been, man?" he said, reaching an arm across the table and slapping my shoulder.  "What've you been up to?"

            "A little of this, a little of that.”

            "Yeah, man, I hear you.  I hear you.  I've been doing some work in the industry, you know, the movie industry…out in So-Cal.  I've only been a P.A. so far, but I'm trying to get a script or two in circulation."

            "That's cool," I said.  I asked him what movie he was working on at the moment.

            "Road Rage," he said.  "One of those empowering, man versus the system with an automatic weapon at his side kind of rampage movies.  Nothin’ special.  Falling Down without Michael Douglas."

            "At least it's work," I said.

            He nodded.  "Plus, the director's a pretty cool guy and he and I are talking about one of my scripts.  Just think of the poster, man.  Sunglasses at Night, by Jared Lockhart."

            A name.  I still didn’t know him.

            "So really, man, what do you do?"

            I laughed at myself a little bit and I shrugged my shoulders.  "Well, Jared, I don’t really have a job.  But for my last job, I had sex for money."

            His eyes opened wide.  "You're shitting me."

            I shook my head.

Jared smiled.  "It figures, man," he said.  "Only a guy like you would get a gig like that.  Classic, man, fucking classic."

            Clenching my teeth together, I forced a smile.

            "So what kind of chicks do you get to go in for this?  They hot?"

            "Depends on what you mean," I said, wishing he'd stop with the questions.

            "They're hot aren't they?  I mean tell me these aren't old ladies paying you to grease their wrinkled flesh."  He was laughing.

            I was still smiling.  "No, it's not like that, exactly."

            "Dude, I can't believe a guy I know, man, a guy I know from fucking high school is a fucking gigolo.  That's fucking cool.  Fuck it, man, that’s fucking hot!”

            The waitress, April, was headed back our way, sandwich and soup in hand.  Jared saw her too.  "Dude, I think you should talk to this girl."

            I could feel gears moving inside my head.  Mechanical parts.  Was this a hangover? This dull, building feeling that something is trying to rip a hole through my brain? Could that be a hangover? My head was going to explode.  I needed some coke.  I needed Xanax or Nembutal.

            "I don't think my lifestyle would accommodate her very much," I told him.

            He shook my statement off with a wave of his hand.  "Man, business, pleasure, people in your situation keep that shit separate all the tim..."

            "I fucked a man for money last night," I said, loudly.  April was maybe five feet away from our table, and she very nearly dropped Jared's sandwich and very nearly spilled the soup.  Jared sat across from me, his mouth hanging wide open while April set his order in front of him.

            "Thank you," I said, since Jared didn't really seem up to it, trying to get her to make eye contact with me.  I stared at her hard, feeling each cell of her body with my eyes.  Her eyes stayed on Jared and on the table and on the floor.

            When I asked her for my check, she smiled and looked out the window.

            I gave April a $20 and told her to keep the change.  I didn't mind too much that she didn't say thank you.  I got up and put on my coat.

            "It was nice seeing you again, Jared.  I'll keep my eyes open for Sunglasses."

            "Okay, man," he said, eyes on his soup.

8- How It Feels

          The first time you have anal sex is a lot like the first time a woman has sex.  You bleed, and it hurts, and it doesn't feel very good.  You bleed because of the tearing of tissue- vaginal, anal.  You bleed a little or a lot. For some people, you bleed for a long time afterwards.  My first time, I had to sit down with wadded up toilet paper crammed up my ass for three days.  Every time I sat down, I felt like I should have been checking the chair for great big shards of glass, and every time I stood up, I could feel this steady, digging pain from my upper thigh all the way up inside of me. 

            Each time it happens, I shit razor blades for almost two weeks. I don't know if it always hurts for a woman, but it always hurts for me.  Every time.

            How it feels is hot, like a heated knife digging into your skin.  How it feels is the tearing of your flesh.  These days, though, there isn’t much blood.

            You wake up in the morning, sore but paid.  You wake up, and you take a shower and you don't feel clean.  A bit of blood swirls around the drain, and when it’s over, you’re Ivory soap- 99.44% pure.  That’s as good as it’s going to get.

            You turn the cold water as far off as you can stand, and you feel that hot water digging into your skin.  The heat is going to blister you, and you feel it melting away layers of dirt, layers of skin.  Sometimes it gets so hot…you almost can’t stand it, and you feel like if you just stood there long enough, it’d all be over.

            You watch the shower door and the mirror fog up and you cover yourself in soap and shampoo and you wish it was bleach and Lysol toilet cleaner. 

            You do this whenever you don’t have another scam running.  You do this whenever you need some money to make rent, to score.  That’s it.  It doesn’t make you a faggot.

            You get out of the shower, and you wipe the steam from the mirror, and you’re forced to see your face.  You brush your teeth, and you still think you taste semen in the back of your throat, so you take two, maybe three hits of mouthwash.  This can become a ritual.  You brush again and again.  You go through a tube of toothpaste in a couple of days when it's a steady work week.  You brush until your gums bleed and your teeth gleam, and this time you swim your tonsils in Listerine until they burn.

            This is how it feels.

            And, tomorrow, maybe…you do it all over again.

7- Ten Years in a Heart-Shaped Box

           “Is this all you have to drink?” the guy asked.  He was naked, standing in Laird’s kitchen, wiping his dick clean with a dish-towel with one hand, holding up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s with the other.

            Laird was sitting on the couch, wearing only a towel, watching the news.  A car bomb in Iraq- twelve servicemen killed.  Some little white girl, a rapper, calling herself Kreayshawn, had a new album out- but who the hell was she?  Warm weather on the way, but rain this weekend.  Wasn’t it the weekend already?  A little girl was missing on the Lower East Side, and the police didn’t have any suspects.  The Yankees won, the Mets lost, and nobody really said anything about the how or the why.  Re-Elect…somebody from Jersey.  He changed the channel and Debbie Harry- hot, young Debbie Harry- was wearing too much make-up, and Blondie was signing “Call Me.”  The film was black and white, and her voice was out of sync with her lips in a way which made Laird want to close his eyes.

            “Hey, Conrad?” the guy asked.  “You hear me?”

            “Who?” Laird asked.  Bill Murray was committing suicide over and over again on Comedy Central.

            “You, Conrad.  That is your name, isn’t it?”

“What?”
            “Do you have anything else to drink?  I hate this Tennessee shit.”

            “There’s…um….water.”

            The guy…

Did he say his name was Donald?

…stuck his head in the fridge and shook around a few things- condiments mostly, maybe a box of baking soda.  The guy was black, forty, maybe- cheap suit, expensive tie- probably a salesman.  He was handsome, but getting soft around the middle.  Bending over wasn’t the most attractive thing he could do.  “There isn’t any water in here.”

            On the TV, Brad Pitt was talking about a new movie he was in, the Vice President was talking about securing our position in the Middle East, elections in Iraq, and some guy with a flap of black hair over his brow and a face that looked like it belonged in a high school year book photo was wearing a bowtie and was talking about political currency, liberal arts colleges in New Hampshire, Jack Kerouac, and Humphrey Bogart’s real name and why nobody knows about it.  “The tap,” Laird said.  The guy (Derek?  Devin?) shook his head and closed the refrigerator.  He took the Jack back down from the shelf and without looking for a shot glass; he took a short swig straight from the bottle.  He crossed the room and sat back down on the couch with the bottle in his hand, and he scratched at the hair on his chest.

            “Anything on TV?” the guy asked.  He’d paid for two hours an hour and a half ago.

            “They’re holding elections in Iraq, and Colin Farrell’s fucking Lindsay Lohan.”

            “Who are they?” Devin asked, taking another swig from the bottle.

            “I don’t know.  Are you gonna pay me for that?”

            He drank again.  “I thought it was free,” he said.  “I’ll give you an extra twenty.”

            “Whatever.”

            The two of them sat, watching TV.  Commercials: Kobe Bryant selling Sprite, Michael Jordan selling underwear, a new movie with Kristin Stewart, and a quick, easy new way to chop all of your vegetables and grind your own fresh coffee.  It was two in the morning.

            Donald asked, “Do you have a family, Conrad?”

            “Who’s Conrad?” Laird asked.

            “Didn’t you say that was your name?  Conrad Bain?”

            “My name’s Arnold,” he said, laughing.  “Arnold Palmer,” he said.  He lit a cigarette- cheap, generic brand, tasted like shit.  “My name’s Jack fucking Nicholson.”
            Daniel looked at him, bottle tipped slightly at his lips, his mouth hanging open.  He had large, droopy eyes- brown, like his skin.  They were red all around in random, scribbled patterns against stark white.  “Do you want to do some coke?”

            Laird didn’t really answer him.  He was going to say yes anyway.  Darren reached over into his jacket, and took out a little vial of white powder and spilled a gram out onto the glass surface of Laird’s coffee table right next to a copy of Rolling Stone with Kurt Cobain on the cover.  The headline was Kurt Cobain: Ten Years in a Heart Shaped Box.  Dennis used a credit card to sort out about a half dozen neat lines.

            “You want to hit this first?” he asked.

            Laird took a rolled up dollar bill from him and did the first hit, wiping a few loose grains away and wiping them over his teeth.  It felt like a buzz saw ripping through his forehead.  His face went numb all the way down into his throat and down into his stomach.  He felt his feet moving involuntarily.  Very good shit.

            A hand was on his chest now, Darren’s.  It dug its fingers gently into the flesh of his tit and ran through his hair.  Daniel did another big swig of Jack, his eyes darting back and forth between Laird’s lap and his face.  Laird closed his eyes.  Jennifer Lopez and Paris Hilton were going to be in a movie together- news at eleven.  Plus, what spice, found in any household, could cause seizures in the elderly?  These stories and more- tonight at eleven.

            “Where are your parents?” Damien asked.  “Do they live in New York?”

            “Nebraska,” Laird said.  He picked up the dollar and made sure it was rolled nice and tight and he hit another line of that fine ass coke, and his toes were dancing in the carpet and his eyes and his nose were running and his balls were tingling.  “Ma and Pa Kent,” he said, smiling.

            The hand was working its way down his stomach.  Laird was skinny- bones and muscle and whatever fat the body used to live off of.  Not fit- skinny.  On bad mornings he thought he could see his heart beating just under the skin.  Maybe that was just a dream.  Dickhead’s hand ran down the line of hair that traced down his chest and his abdomen and was fingering the pubic hair that hung just underneath.  One hour and forty minutes, the clock said.

            “They raise cattle,” he said.  “Cattle and unicorns.”

            “You’re very handsome,” Derek told him.  “You’re a very handsome boy.  Has anyone told you that?”
            A fifteen year old girl disappeared in Hell’s Kitchen yesterday while she was walking home from a friend’s apartment.  She was last seen on Eighth Avenue, had dyed purple hair, and was wearing leather from head to toe.  Police are investigating, and they don’t believe her abduction to be terror related.  News at eleven.

            “We still have twenty minutes,” David whispered to him and kissed his cheek.  Laird leaned over and did another line of coke and he could taste the rust salt taste of blood in his throat.  Darwin hadn’t done any of it yet.  The hand sunk down under the towel and ran over the hair and the skin of his balls and his cock, which was getting hard from the coke.

            “You like that, don’t you?” Damon asked him.  “Don’t you?”

            “Did you get this from Getch?” he asked and Devin’s mouth was on his, hungrily kissing his lips and sticking his tongue in Laird’s mouth.  He was starting to go numb all over, and maybe that was a good thing.

            The taste and the smell of Jack Daniel’s.  The feeling of a finger in his asshole.

            He kissed Daniel back, thinking about Hot Pink, thinking about Kim Basinger, thinking about something- fifteen year old girls in Hell’s Kitchen and the collective works of William Shakespeare.

            “Tell me that you love me,” Donald asked him.  The finger became two fingers, and they moved roughly, urgently.

            “I…um…love you.”

            Dennis sighed into his ear, pressing a stubbly face against Laird’s, rubbing cheek against cheek.  “Jack…Arnold…my wife hasn’t told me that she loves me in months.  I think she knows that I’m a fag.”

            “My name is F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Laird said and he started laughing.  “And my family lives in the…People’s Republic of China and make their living as bean sprout farmers, but they have a really great HMO.”

            “I want you to suck my cock,” said Dallas, lips right up against Laird’s ear.  “Is that okay?”

            Laird slunk away to the other end of the couch, feeling the rough, unplanned exit of two fingers from his asshole and pointed up at the clock.  David looked up at the clock and frowned.  “A hundred dollars more if you’ll suck my cock right now.”
            Laird looked down at the three lines of coke and at the bottle of Jack.  “Give me that,” he said, and Donald gave him the bottle.  Laird took a long, hearty swig of Tennessee’s finest, and he picked up the dollar bill straw. He sucked up two more lines of coke without breathing.

            He smiled up at Donovan, who was smiling back at him.  “My real name is Richard Laird,” he said.  “I think my parents are dead, I only like to fuck women, I went to Catholic school, and college for a little while until it got boring, you owe me twenty for the bottle on top of the hundred, and by the way…I love you.”

            The last line of coke went into his face like fire and before he could feel an inch of his body below his nose, he had Devin’s dick in his mouth.

            David was so happy that he started to cry.

6- All Out Of Love

             "You know what I always wondered, Laird?" asked Tim Tim as he bounced up and down on the trampoline in the courtyard while smoking a cigarette at the same time. He was wearing a leather jacket with the sleeves cut off, a T-shirt for some minor league baseball team in Scranton, and a pair of polka dot boxer shorts which hung on his narrow hips like a tent on a pole, billowing out with the wind when he went up and flipping and flapping around his skinny thighs on his way down.        

He wasn't sober.

            "What's that, Tim Tim?"  I was sitting in a lawn chair in my swim trunks by the empty pool, reading a book and trying to work up a free tan.

            "How come they never arrested Angela Lansbury in Murder She Wrote."

            I looked up from my book, short stories about baseball by W.P. Kinsella, and asked him, "You mean the show about the mystery writer who solved crime?"

            "Yo, that's just the thing, Laird, man," he said, real serious.  "You're going to tell me that this old broad rolls around from place to place, New England, California, Maine, and everywhere she goes, somebody happens to drop?"

            I rolled my eyes.  "You think that means she killed some of them?"

            Tim Tim came to a slow, bouncing stop on the tramp and hopped down onto his bunny slipper clad feet and came at me, taking a long, savoring drag off that smoke.  "Dude, you even listening to me?  She killed all of 'em.  Only thing that makes sense."

            "For material?"

            "Shit yeah, for material," he said.  "What else you think she was writing books about?  Shit, my man, only thing people write books about is the shit they know all about, and how else is Angela fucking Lansbury gonna know all about murder unless she's dropping mother-fuckers left and right?"

            Tim Tim was on the street when he was thirteen.  The story isn't even all that interesting.  Drunk father, ineffectual, cheating mother.  Gunshot wound to the head for her, twenty five to life in prison for him, and foster homes for the just about orphaned little boy.  Foster mother thought he was the child she always wanted and never could have.  Foster father thought he was the missing piece in a life full of unfulfilled desires and sexual frustration.

            He looked at the boy, and Tim Tim was a pretty cute kid.  He had anal sex with the wife and tried oh so hard not to call her Timmy.  It wasn't hard to figure out exactly where the story was going to go.  So Tim Tim was (maybe) fifteen and on the street for two or three years and staying in a small apartment, which was procured by his "agent" in the same complex as my little piece of shit place to live.  Twenty-four low rent apartments in Queens, not too far from Shea Stadium, composed of one bedroom, one bathroom, a small kitchen, three closets, a living room and a community laundry room, the machines in which cost a quarter a try.  $350 a month and bad plumbing.  Home sweet home.

            At least there was a pool.  No water, but a pool.  Inside that dried up, mildewed pool is where Tim Tim kept his trampoline.  And in the afternoon, when he was finally awake, if he wasn't off on a call, the odds were, that was where you'd find him.

            "Do you think that's how they wrote the show?" I asked, putting down Kinsella.

            Tim Tim's mouth curled up tightly and his eyes rolled up to the top of their sockets.  He told me that if you get these people, the ones who created this thing alone for like five minutes, they'd tell you that's the way they'd have ended the show if only the network would have let them.

            "It's fucking corporate politics, man."

            I laughed at him.  "You're fifteen, what the fuck do you know about corporations?"

            He shrugged and plucked a Newport from a crumpled pack in the inside pocket of his jacket, dexterously flipped open a Zippo and lit the cig.  He took a long tug on it and let out a quick break of smoke.  "Who knows anything about anything, right?  You got a car, Laird?"

            I shook my head.  "Kid, you know I don't have a car."

            Tim Tim took another drag.  "A john I met like last year offered to buy me a car, you know."

            "Oh yeah?" I asked, feeling my stomach tighten.

            "It's true," he said, crumpling up his pack of smokes and tossing it to the ground.  His non-cigarette hand was tugging at the fly of his shorts.  "Guy said I was 'special' and that I should have a ride that reflected that I was special.  I don’t have a license, but it’s nice to be, you know, ‘special.’"

            I was now standing at the edge of the pool and he was hoisting himself up out of the shallow end.  "What happened to the car?"

            "I don't know," he said.  "He didn't come around any more after that."  Tim Tim shook his head.  "Sometimes I think he stopped coming just because he felt bad not being able to produce the car."

            I nodded. 

            "Do you want to walk down to Wicker's with me and buy a pack of smokes?"
            I nodded at his attire.  "You going to put on a pair of pants?"
            Tim Tim smiled and looked down at himself.  He smelled like cheap bourbon.  I think it was the jacket.  "Nah, man, this is a good look for sales."

            The tiny grocery about four blocks down, and since I didn't have a car, we walked on the hottest day of the summer.  Tim Tim was standing by the freezer doors, looking at some Ben and Jerry's.  "Shit, Laird, why is Ice Cream so fucking expensive."  I said I didn't know, and I sidled up next to him, and I took out a small carton of Chunky Monkey and I held it against my forehead.  Ecstasy.  Ninety-five degrees and humid.  The guy at the counter had a fan.  The rest of the place felt like Hiroshima on the wrong day.  Tim Tim had made his way up the cooler doors to where the beer was.  He took out a six pack of Sam Adams and looked at me with a smile.

            There were days when I had seen Tim Tim hide everything smaller than a television in that leather jacket of his.

            He deftly slipped the six bottles, one by one by one, into his pockets and then made his jingling way calmly up to the desk, me close in tow behind him with my ice cream.

            "Pack of Newport please," Tim Tim said with a thousand watt smile.

            The counter man, a balding Greek in a wife-beater with a "don't fuck with me" expression that looked fucking tattooed on his face, asked to see some ID.

            Tim Tim, smiling away, produced Joseph Martin Shoffler's driver's license.  The counterman took a look at the ID which said that my man was twenty-two as of fifteen days before, and then a long, long look at Tim Tim.

            "You're twenty-two?"

            "And fifteen days," Tim Tim said standing up straight, puffing out his chest with pride.

            This counterman, this sweaty, bald, 250 pounds of meat and hair with a beard that was damn near behind every counter, in every corner store like the convenience store clerk cloning machine got stuck on the setting for bearded, bald, hairy, fat, asshole. He looked at this skinny, five-foot-seven kid and said, "Shoffler, huh?  You related to Lee Shoffler?  Owns a shooting range up in Astoria?"
            "Yeah," said Tim Tim with a confident smile.  "That's my uncle."

            The Greek leaned over the edge of the counter, pack of smokes in one hand, ID in the other.  "Come here, kid," he said in a hushed voice.

            Tim Tim leaned in, and by now he had to have been close enough to smell the booze on the kid.

            "Kid," he said, "I don't know anything about shooting ranges or Shofflers or anything like that, but I can spot a fourteen year old kid with a fake ID three miles away."  He sniffed.  "Especially one who washes his clothes in cheap whiskey."

            Tim Tim smiled.  "So you're not going to sell me the smokes?"

            The counterman smiled.  "I'll sell 'em to you if you're willing to pay ten bucks for the pack."

            "Uh, Joe," I said, a hand on Tim Tim's shoulder, "why don't I just buy the pack for you?"

            Tim Tim turned to me and laughed .  "Dude, it's not like I can't afford it."

            He handed over the ten bucks and we were on our way with an over-priced pack of cigarettes, my half pint of Chunky Monkey, and six bottles of pilfered beer.  We walked back, Tim Tim puffing on a smoke, me eating my ice cream with a plastic spoon I'd gotten from the counterman, wrapped in cellophane with a napkin like the silverware you get on an airplane. 
            "What have you got planned for the night?" Tim Tim asked me through a puff of blue smoke.

            "I don't know," I said.

            "I have a gig, could be a high roller.  You want in?"

            Again I felt tight in my stomach.  "I don't know.  I'm not really up to it."

            Tim Tim shook his head and laughed.  "See, Laird, man, this is why I can't very well have you buying me cigs.  You don't got any ambition."

            I let him grab the ice cream from me and take a few spoonfuls.  "Man, why don't you let me hook you up with Raymond?"

            The sun was at the top of the sky, and it was beating down on the Earth, furious.  "I don't want a pimp, Tim Tim."

            "How many times have I told you," he says to me, real serious-like, "he's not a pimp.  He's a manager.  Dude, it's steady work.  I mean you're skin of your teeth right now since Getch cut you off.  This guy gets me enough gigs so that I can live in the style to which I am accustomed," he said, tugging on his leather.  "You done with this?" he asked, holding up the Ben and Jerry's, and I nodded.  He tossed it on the way into the gate and took out a beer.

            "Want one?"

            I did.  I cracked open the beer using the bottom lip of a Bic cigarette lighter and took a long swallow.  It was hot and I was sweating.  I couldn't believe that under all that leather jacket, thick with pockets and stolen beer and God even knows what else, Tim Tim didn't have so much as a drop of moisture on his forehead.  Even still, he drank thirstily from his beer.

            I found Kinsella, still sitting beside the lawn chair, the bookmark about halfway through the book.  Tim Tim set the remaining four beers on the ground and jumped down into the pool.  He drank down the rest of his and hopped up onto the trampoline, bouncing up and down on his knees and on his back and on his ass.  At fifteen years old and less than 110 lbs, I think he was pretty drunk.

            "You heading inside?" he asked.

            Yeah, I told him.  I had some shit to do.  I was lying.

            "Take a few of those beers if you want," he said.  "I drink 'em all and I'm just gonna get sick."

            "Thanks, man."

            I headed up the stairs with two more beers and my book, and Tim Tim was singing in a cracked voice, “I’m all out of love…I’m so lost without…you.  I know you where right….believing for so looooong…..”

            He stopped and called after me.  “Hey, think about tonight, man.  Good money.”

            I closed the door and walked over to my couch and cracked open the book, Tim Tim still singing outside. He’d changed his tune. It was now Turn Me Loose by Loverboy. Although each time Tim Tim bounced to the highest point on the trampoline, he added another “Turn me loose” to the song, until the rest of the lyrics had fallen to the wayside. Now, he was simply reaching the zenith of every bounce chanting, “Turn me loose”.

            I put the book down, drowsy now. Not so much from Tim Tim’s trampoline lullaby, but more so because I wasn’t sleeping very well these days. I’d never been particularly good at falling asleep. I’d never had the knack of turning my brain off long enough to fall asleep without simply lying in bed and staring at the walls and the ceiling. Some folks, once their heads hit the pillow, they’re out like a light; not me. It just never worked that way. Even as a child, I needed a little something extra to get me to nod off, back then it was a warm glass of strawberry Quik, now, it’s usually a cocktail of generic muscle relaxers and Benadryl or some painkillers...or something stronger- if I'm holding.

            I walked to the bathroom, opened up the medicine cabinet, avoided looking at myself in the mirror, and fished out whatever muscle relaxers I could find. I then made my way to the kitchen area, and found a small first aid kit with some left over Benadryl tablets in it. I downed a fist full of the pills with a slug of beer and lay back down on the couch. 

             I stared at the piss colored stucco ceiling; I traced lines between the bumpy little crests of plaster embossing. I made whatever order I could from the uneven plaster chaos. For awhile, I literally found myself looking for the face of Jesus in the stucco, tracing patterns, hoping that I could be the guy on the news that claimed he saw Jesus in his shitty apartment plasterwork so I could start charging the fanatics admission to my rat-hole apartment to, “come and see the face of stucco Jesus!” No dice. Jesus wasn’t making any appearances. 

      Now, as the Benadryl and muscle relaxer mix took full affect, my eyes were heavy enough to close without forcing them to stay shut. As I dozed, I drifted to the sound of that voice, that odd voice, muttering softly in the back of my subconscious. That odd phrase...The Gateway, replaced, in cadence and tone, Tim Tim's bouncing serenade, and I fell asleep to the broken record like repetition of the words in my mind.

5- I Bet He Took All He Could Take

Part I: Some Time Later

          “This coffee sucks,” Pink said, quite loudly.  The Daily News was open in front of her on the table.  She was reading the gossip column, Rush and Malloy, about Lindsay Lohan and her legal problems in Switzerland and a designer whose boyfriend was having sex with the Prince of some Arab country.  Somehow…the two stories were related.

Pink, Laird and Tim Tim were sitting in a Starbucks a couple of blocks away from the Museum of Natural Science, where Tim Tim and Laird had spent the morning popping Xanax and drinking free coffee in the cafeteria in between tours of Pompeii and Alexandria.

            After a morning looking at plaster casts of people encased in ash for over a thousand years and listening to the single most boring presentation ever given about the death of a few thousand people (think Dan Rather on Ritalin and Wild Turkey and saying things like “capturing Pompeian life like a snap-shot”) Timmy thought coffee with a hooker was the perfect way to balance out the day.

            Tim Tim took his black while Laird took his with cream and four sugars.  Pink had ordered some pumpkin and cinnamon thing they were hoping to add to the menu in the winter.  Elvis Costello was playing “Alison” through a little juke box and the prognosis on the pumpkin coffee wasn’t looking good.

            “I mean it’s not that it’s bad,” she said.  “It’s just so…pumpkin.  It’s like drinking pumpkin pie,” she said.  “I feel like a woman with no teeth drinking Thanksgiving dinner.”  She took another sip.  “Try this,” she said to Tim Tim.

            He took a sip and shrugged his shoulders in vague approval.  A dollop of the cream that formed the top layer of this over-flavored coffee was spread out over the boy’s top lip in a thin froth.  Pink laughed and wiped his mouth with her sleeve.  “You, little boy,” she said, “are hopeless.  I can’t take you anywhere.”

            Tim Tim pulled away, blushing.  “I can do it myself.”

            She pinched his right cheek and smiled at him.  Tim Tim was smiling too, kind of.  He just didn’t want Laird to see it.

            “Somebody’s got to take care of you, kiddo,” she said.  She kissed him on the forehead and gave him the rest of her coffee, which he quickly drank up.  She flagged down the waitress, a pretty little blond thing who looked just out of high school.  She stopped at their table with a big smile on her face, which didn’t last once Pink got to talking.  “Let me get some real fucking coffee.  Cream, two sugars, and if I even smell pumpkin, I’m gonna vomit all over the table and those ten dollar shoes you’re wearing.”  She said all of this without ceasing to smile.

            Laird wasn’t really paying attention, however, to what she was saying…just what she was wearing.  She was wearing a hyper-short jean skirt and a red leather jacket with a white T-shirt that read, stretched tightly over her breasts, WISH YOU WEREN’T HERE.  He was looking at her legs.  Long, supple, tender flesh, thick at the thigh, trim at the calf.

            “Keep staring, and I’m gonna charge you, asshole,” she said, yanking down the hem of her thigh high skirt.

            “Charge me and I might have to demand my money’s worth.”

            Laird floated a smile at her, but she just laughed at him, and the smile turned into a tight-lipped smirk.

           Just as old Elvis was finished telling them all over and over that his aim was true, the juke flipped out the CD, with a loud, mechanical sound, kind of like a wind-up doll, and then put the exact same record back into the play slot.

            The first couple of chords came up and Laird cocked his head.  “Oh it’s so funny to be seeing you after so long, girl.  And with the way you look I understand that you are not impressed…”

            The waitress came by with the coffee.  Deborah was her name, according to the name tag, and she had a face full of freckles, and she set the coffee down a bit roughly.  She was kind of smiling, but she looked as if she’d just drank a half gallon of curdled milk without stopping to breathe.

            Pink licked her lips and smiled.  “I’ve had guys piss in my mouth before,” she said.  “So if you pissed in this, I’m going to know- and I’m going to kick the fucking shit out of you.  Dig?”

            “Whatever,” Deborah said and she tore the bill off a note pad and slapped it down on the table, shaking and rattling the coffee mugs.

            Laird, trying not to think about Pink getting pissed on, asked the waitress, “Is this the same song?”  Deborah, didn’t notice.  She just watched as Pink took a long sip of coffee.

            “See,” she said.  “Coffee.  No more fucking pumpkins.”  She took another sip and smiled at Deborah.  “Good girl.”

            Deborah was about to leave, fake smile on her face, gum cracking between her teeth, but Laird stopped her with a hand on her arm.  “Miss?  Is this the same song that was playing before?”

            “Um…yeah,” she said.  “So what?”

            “Is the machine broken?”

            She shook her head and nodded towards a gaunt little man with hollow cheeks that seemed to cave inwards on his face and a shock of black hair so dark it was almost blue.  He was drinking an iced coffee and sitting at a table in the corner, one hand on his drink, the other fingering one of five stacks of quarters.  He was setting up for the night.

            Nobody else was even looking at him.

            “So, do you go to school, Deborah?”
            Deborah squinted her eyes at Laird, and she laughed right in his face.  “Fuck off, you junkie asshole.  She pulled her arm away from him and walked back into the kitchen.

            In the corner, the old man was silently mouthing the words to the song.  “Well, I see you’ve got a husband now.  Did he leave your pretty fingers lying in the wedding cake?  You used to hold him right in your hand.  I’ll bet he took all he could ta-ake….”

            “Aaaaalison,” Tim Tim was singing so far off key that for a moment, Laird wasn’t sure what he was saying.  “I know this world is killing youuuu.  Oh-oh…..Aaaaaaaaalison………my aim is truuuuue.”

            Pink lit up a cigarette and took a long drag while Tim Tim was singing.  She tapped her ashes into Laird’s coffee when he wasn’t looking.  His eyes were fixed on the old man.  The guy, who looked at least eighty but probably wasn’t any older than forty or fifty, was crying in hard, trembling sobs that made his whole body shake.  His hand jerked suddenly and the plastic cup of iced coffee hit the ground with a large, wet slap and the coffee rushed out over the ground.  Some of the customers turned around with their mouths open, staring at this crying mess of an old man, but most of them just drank their coffee and read their newspapers.  Bush was considering invading Iran, Madonna was building a Kaballah temple on the Upper West Side- a very posh kind of temple where you really had to be somebody to get in touch with your inner, spiritual Jewish person- and Brad Pitt was impregnating Angelina Jolie.  That and, apparently, the lattés were particularly interesting that afternoon.

            Deborah came out of the kitchen in a very casual stroll, as if nothing of any interest was going on, and picked up the cup and the plastic lid.  “Refill this for you, sir?” she asked, and all the old man could do was cry and cry and cry and she took that as a yes and went bopping on back to the kitchen with an odd sort of spring in her step.

            The song was playing again, and the old man was actually singing this time, not mouthing the words.  “I’m not going to get too sentimental like those other sticky valentines, ‘cause I don’t …” he coughed, a deep, phlegm kind of cough, and he picked up right where the song was, not where he’d been, “…been loving somebody.  I only know it isn’t mi-ine…”

            “It’s sad,” Pink said, but she was filing her nails.

            “Yeah,” Tim Tim said, taking a cigarette out from behind his ear and lighting it.  “It’s a good song.  I wish I could fucking hear it.”

            Laird sat and watched as this old guy slapped the coffee-wet quarters from the table and sprawled himself over it, his face and his fine, thinning gray hair in a puddle of coffee and ice and he started to beat his head against the table.  His eyes were closed, and his mouth was twisted in a hoarse, soundless scream while he cried.

            A TV behind the counter was showing the Channel 9 news.  Ernie Enastos had a brand new tan, and his teeth looked newly bleached.  He was smiling as he read off some middle of the program story right after a report that Jim Morrison was spotted playing tether ball with retarded children in Wyoming.  “Police are baffled as fourteen people have been reported missing in Queens in the last five days.  The victims, including Richard O’Malley, a 69-year-old retiree from Ozone Park, all seem to have vanished without a trace, leaving no word with loved ones or family members.  The police have stepped up patrols throughout the borough, and…”

            “It’s the Rapture,” the old man said, sitting up straight, coffee pouring down his neck and into his shirt.  “The time of the lord is coming.”

            Kevin.  Kevin made fifteen.

            Deborah came out from behind the counter with a fresh coffee for the old man and she placed it in front of him and put his hand on the cup and gave him a pat on the head.  “You be good now.  The boss doesn’t want any trouble.”

            The old man took the lid from his coffee cup and he raised it over his head as if to throw it.  Kevin had been gone for almost a year.  Laird, his hands wringing together and his balls shrinking up damn near into his chest, watched as the old man tipped over the iced coffee and poured it all over himself.

            He started to scream.

            “The End Times are here,” he said.  “We’re doomed, all of us.  None of us is safe.”  He got up from his table so fast and hard that the table tipped over, and what change was left on it went flying like bullets across the room and the old man fell to his knees and sobbed and wept.

            Nobody came out from the counter, but here were sirens in the distance.  The show was about to end.  Fourteen people had disappeared, the Rapture was coming, or it had already begun, and God’s only messenger was crying and slamming his hands into the ground, and from the smell of things, he was also shitting his pants.

            Tim Tim giggled, and Pink stared, reaching up under her skirt to adjust her panties.  She looked at Laird, who wasn’t even looking at her legs anymore and she flipped him off without him knowing it.

            “The end times,” Laird said, thinking about Vermin and wondering if he still had credit with Verm for a deuce, or if he had any aspirin or sleeping pills or fucking birth control or something to make him forget what he’d just seen.  “I think this guy’s for real.”

            He was thinking about the Rapture, and he was thinking about Kevin.

            When the police came in, the juke box clicked and whirred and whizzed, and a record was retracted, and another one snapped into place and began to play.  “Well it’s so funny to be seeing you after so long, girl…”

            Laird started laughing.

4- Gone

            I have my eyes closed but I know that it’s morning because I can hear the birds chirping in separate, random bursts, like a bunch of clocks each with a different alarm announcing the arrival of another daytime.

I have such an intense headache I feel like I’ve had an axe driven through my skull by Paul fucking Bunyan himself. 

Do I have any aspirin?

My eyes are open now, and I’m staring through the venetian blinds, trying wake up, and I can see that the sun is rising somewhere past all the apartments, past the city and out over an ocean I can’t see and never take the time to go to. 

The light from that burning ball of gas lingering out there in the heavens will break through the blinds and burn my eyes and I’ll stare right at it until the last bearable second because that’s how stubborn I am.  It’ll burn my corneas and my rods and cones and whatever else is in these eyes, and I’ll feel like I’m dying but I won’t back down until I have to. It will be bright, and it will hurt, and I’ll hate it, because I’m hung-the-fuck-over.

I blink a few times to wet my eyeballs, as I finally pull away from the light. You win, Sun, you win.

I stand up and slam some Tylenol down my throat. When I take my first steps I feel like the room is on a tilt and I grab at the air, as if there were some imaginary handle I could grasp in an effort to hold myself up. I get a foothold that my hangover and I can agree with, and slowly I creep to the bathroom to puke the night out of me.

I’m staring into the toilet at someone else’s puke, which means someone is in the place with me, because I know I didn’t erupt last night. Or did I?  At least I think I didn’t.  It’s probably Tim Tim’s puke.  I think he’s still here. I flush the toilet and listen to the water flow through the pipes as I get comfortable and wait to get my sick on.

I start to comb through last night’s mental inventory. I remember the night was hard drinking with Kevin and Tim Tim and with Pink. I remember Tim Tim passing out after he had explained to me all about a tank of nitrous oxide he had with him, and that he had stolen it from a dentist he turned a trick for.  I remember him saying that he was going to do the whole fucking tank before the night was over.  That was his goal.

It’s good to have goals.

I’m dry heaving.

I remember Tim Tim going on about each type of fucking anesthesia as he was sucking gas off the tank, and how each has a different effect on a specific part of the nervous system, which results in a depression or numbing of nerve pathways.

I need numbing.

It’s been about forty-five minutes, and still I’m gripping the porcelain, white-knuckling the edge of the bowl. I reach my hand back and take a blind shot at the handle of the toilet tank. My finger tips hit the edge of the lever and flush the old puke stink away, which is instantly replaced by fresh stink. Again, I listen to the water gush through the pipes, knocking and bumping it’s way to wherever shitty water ends up in this city, and though as sick as I am, the shot of fresh stench in my face isn’t even enough to pop my cork. My stomach locked in tight pain.

Here I am, stuck in vomit limbo thinking of Tim Tim going on and on about that stupid tank he stole.

“General anesthesia affects the brain cells, which causes you to lose consciousness.”  Then he took another hit off the tank.  He said, “Regional anesthesia has an effect on a large bundle of nerves to a particular area of the body, which results in losing sensation and shit, to that area, without affecting your level of consciousness.” Tim Tim took another pound off the inhaler attached to the tank and then he said, “The cool thing is that local anesthetics cause you to lose sensation in a very specific area.  I mean…that’s pretty fucking cool- it’s control, man!” I remember watching him hit the final huff off the tank, and then I remember him hitting the floor. Yeah, that’s “control”. 

With each beat of my heart, another intense flash of pain through my cranium and outside I hear the sounds of cars on the highway. People coming, people going, productive people in the world moving and alive as I’m playing contortionist over the edge of the toilet, my gut wrenching with the pain of death.

Finally, I get to my feet. I open the medicine cabinet.  I skip the mirror because I hate what I look like.  I slap more pills down my throat from an unmarked bottle in the cabinet. I chew them into a bitter paste and wash them down with my own saliva because I’m too lazy to turn the faucet on even though there’s a cup on the edge of the sink.  I’m starting to remember pieces of what happened last night beyond Tim Tim and his tank, it’s all in fragments right at the moment, vignette with the residue of excess.  I close the medicine cabinet with my head hung low, I skip the mirror-look again, and I glance at the cup on the edge of the sink, and scoff to myself as my laziness really knows no bounds.

I look out the bathroom door, and I see Tim Tim, passed-out on the living room floor, cradling his nitrous tank, which is probably empty by now, like a teddy bear, or a blankie. I walk in softly, but kick Tim Tim hard; he wakes up from his coma.

“What time is it?” he asks.

I watch Tim Tim rub the gunk from the corners of his eyes.  He looks like a child in this light. The whole place filled with that morning, yellow-angled hue. He’s a mess, such a scrawny little mess. He looks like the Artful Dodger, from “Oliver Twist”, crossed with the rug from the set of a porn film from about 1976.

             “Day time,” I say.  I spark up a smoke and sit in one of the rickety kitchen chairs.  Tim Tim sits up with his legs folded over one another, and stands his nitrous tank at the foot of the couch noticing how light it feels.

            “Shit, Laird, how much did I do last night?”

            “All of it, I think. You did so much of that shit I thought you were going to float away.”

            “Far out,” he says; a grin on his face stretching from pointy ear to pointy ear as he playfully knocks on the tank and stands up, making fists into the floor with his bare tiny feet.  He takes another drag on my smoke and he hands it back.  “Where are the chicks?” Tim Tim asks, sitting down next to me while taking a cigarette for himself from my open pack and lighting it.

            “Were there chicks here last night?” I look around the room and I don’t see any chicks, but the place is a mess on top of a mess on top of a mess so maybe a “chick” could be hiding someplace, but I doubt it. Anyone in their right mind would be half a click away from this dump. I guess that’s why we’re still here.

“Maybe I dreamed them?” Tim Tim says, rubbing his head quizzically.

            “Gone back to hooker-land, I guess,” I say as I tap my cigarette ashes into an empty bottle of High Life and watch Tim Tim stand up and stretch his thin body in the yellow of the sunlight.  He’s a marmalade-colored boy skeleton, and he cracks at the joints softly.

            I take a deep breath of smoke-filled room air.  I run my fingers through my hair as I scan the mess.  “I’m not going to clean this place up.  I should just torch the whole fucking building.”

            “I know a guy that can help you out with that,” Tim Tim says looking out the window.

            “Torching the building, or cleaning this place?” I say, still scanning the mess until my eyes meet every piece of garbage, every bottle, every can, and I stand up and start walking towards the bedroom. And that’s when I notice Kevin is gone.

            “Torching the building,” Tim Tim says with a half crooked yet very serious grin splitting his boyish face.

             “Figures,” I look around the place some more, still no sign of Kevin. “Is Kevin still here?”

            “No bro, I don’t think so.  He got super-bummed towards the end of the night and went to chill out by the pool.  I was gonna go with him, but I got too blitzed and I couldn’t pull the tank that far. So, I just stayed here sucking fumes. You were passed-out already.”

            “Where the fuck around here is there a real pool? Kevin’s not going to just go chill out by our cement hole.”

             “Fuck…yeah, good point, I don’t know what he said, I was really fucked up.” Tim Tim stands up and grabs what’s left of my coffeemaker pot, which is essentially just a handle with a big chunk of broken glass attached to it.

“Use your fuckin’ head, kid.”

“I guess he’s not here,” Tim Tim says smoking the cigarette, which has been dangling between his lips the entire time as he tries to make heads or tails out of the busted coffeemaker pot.  He doesn’t so much as take the cigarette out of his mouth.  He just talks around it, holding the broken coffeemaker pot. “You do know your coffeemaker pot thing is broken, right?”

            “Where the fuck is he then?  We had a thing today, man.  We had to meet a guy about a…thing.”  I pick up another cigarette; I light it and let the nicotine warm my lungs as I try to calm down.

            “Maybe he went for breakfast?”

            “Fuck that.  Kevin hates breakfast.”

            “Kevin hates breakfast?” Tim Tim asks. “Shit…I love bacon.”

            “Yes, Kevin hates breakfast, so that’s not where he is.”       

“Why does he hate breakfast?”

            “Because breakfast beat him up in the school yard when he was a little kid, breakfast stole his girlfriend- how the fuck do I know?  You could ask him yourself if he was fucking here.”

            Kevin and I have an appointment.  I don’t usually have appointments, and he doesn’t usually break them.  The clock over my stove says that it’s almost nine o’clock.  The appointment is for an hour from now, at a little Greek diner near Crossbay Blvd.  I don’t own a car, and I’m wishing the clock could be broken. But it’s not. The coffeemaker pot thing is.

            “That’s the most important meal of the day,” Tim Tim says.  He’s got his nitrous tank parked near the kitchen table now, and he manages a small hit from it.  I thought it was empty.  He hacks a little bit and laughs and then he smokes. “He shouldn’t miss breakfast, it’s bad for you.”  He takes another hit.  “Maybe he left a note.  People usually leave notes when they go places, don’t they?”

            I look at the refrigerator, the door of which is hanging open, and I can see from here that they drank all of my beer last night.  There is a note on the freezer door.

            It’s the back of my electric bill- by the way I haven’t paid it yet- and I can see that it’s four days over-due.  I read the note. 

Afterward, I need a drink.

            “What’s it say?” Tim Tim asks, as I sit down at the other end of the table, literally feeling my brain swelling through my skull.     

“It’s not so much what it says, it’s what it means.”

“Is it bad?” Tim Tim sidles up to me, hovering over my shoulder, his nitrous inhaler dangling from his hand. I look up into his little kid eyes, his eyes look like Bambi’s eyes, or like the eyes of a character from some Japanese animation, big and bright, then I look down at his tank

I ask him, “Do you have any more of that shit left in there?”

Tim Tim smiles.

I need numbing.