Choke (5 page)

I’m not so much a good friend as I’m the doctor who wants to adjust your spine every week.

Or the dealer who sells you heroin.

“Parasite” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

Denny’s wig flops to the ground, again. The words “Eat me” bleeding red in the rain, running pink down behind his cold, blue ears, trickling pink around his eyes and down his cheeks, dripping pink into the mud.

All you can hear is the rain, water falling against puddles, against thatched roofs, against us, erosion.

I’m not so much a good friend as I’m the savior who wants you to worship him forever.

Denny sneezes, again, a long hank of yellowy goob that snakes out of his nose and lands on the wig in the mud, and he
says, “Dude, do not put that nasty rug back on my head, okay?” And he sniffs. Then coughs, and his glasses drop off his face into the mess.

Nasal discharge means Rubella.

See also: Whooping cough.

See also: Pneumonia.

His glasses remind me of Dr. Marshall, and I say how there’s this new girl in my life, a real doctor, and for serious, worth the effort to bag.

And Denny says, “You still stuck on doing your fourth step? You need any help remembering stuff to write in your notebook?”

The complete and relentless story of my sexual addiction. Oh, yeah, that. Every lame, suck-ass moment.

And I say, “Everything in moderation, dude. Even recovery.”

I’m not so much a good friend as I’m the parent who never wants you to really grow up.

And facedown, Denny says, “It helps to remember the first time for everything.” He says, “My first time I jacked off, I thought I’d invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought,
This is going to make me rich.”

The first time for everything. The incomplete inventory of my crimes. Just another incomplete in my life full of incompletes.

And still facedown, blind to everything in the world except the mud, Denny says, “Dude, you still there?”

And I put the rag back around his nose and tell him, “Blow.”

Whatever lighting the photographer used was harsh and made bad
shadows on the cement-block wall behind them. Just a painted wall in somebody’s basement. The monkey looked tired and patchy with mange. The guy was in lousy shape, pale with rolls around his middle, but there he was, relaxed and bent over with his hands braced against his knees and his poochy gut hanging down, his face looking back over his shoulder at the camera, smiling away.

“Beatific” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

What the little boy first loved about pornography wasn’t the sex part. It wasn’t the pictures of beautiful people dorking each other, their heads thrown back, making those fake orgasm faces. Not at first. He’d found all those pictures on the Internet even before he knew what sex was. They had the Internet in every library. They had it at all the schools.

The way you can move from city to city and always find a Catholic church, the same Mass said everywhere, no matter what foster place the kid was sent, he could always find the Internet. The truth was, if Christ had laughed on the cross, or spat on the Romans, if he’d done anything more than just suffer, the kid would’ve liked church a lot more.

As it was, his favorite website was pretty much not sexy, at least not to him. You could just go there, and there would be about a dozen photographs of this one dumpy guy dressed as Tarzan with a goofy orangutan trained to poke what looked like roasted chestnuts up the guy’s ass.

The guy’s leopard-print loincloth is tossed to one side, the elastic waistband sunk into his tubby waist.

The monkey’s crouched there, ready with the next chestnut.

There’s nothing sexy about it. Still, the counter showed more than a half million people had been to see it.

“Pilgrimage” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

The monkey and the chestnuts wasn’t anything the kid could understand, but he sort of admired the guy. The kid was stupid, but he knew this was something way beyond him. The truth was, most people wouldn’t even want a monkey to see them naked. They’d be terrified about how their asshole might look, if it might look too red or baggy. There’s no way most people would
ever have the nerve to bend over in front of a monkey, much less a monkey and a camera and lights, and even then they’d have to do about a zillion sit-ups first and go to a tanning booth and get their hair cut. After that, they’d spend hours bent over in front of a mirror, trying to determine their best profile.

And then, even with just chestnuts, you’d have to stay somewhat relaxed.

Just the thought of auditioning monkeys was terrifying, the possibility of being rejected by monkey after monkey. Sure, you can pay a person enough money and they’ll stick stuff into you or they’ll take pictures. But a monkey. A monkey’s going to be honest.

Your only hope would be to book this same orangutan, since it obviously didn’t look too picky. Either that or it was exceptionally well trained.

The point was, there’d be nothing to this if you were beautiful and sexy.

The point was, in a world where everybody had to look so pretty all the time, this guy wasn’t. The monkey wasn’t. What they were doing wasn’t.

The point was, it’s not the sex part of pornography that hooked the stupid little boy. It was the confidence. The courage. The complete lack of shame. The comfort and genuine honesty. The up-front-ness of being able to just stand there and tell the world:
Yeah, this is how I chose to spend a free afternoon. Posing here with a monkey putting chestnuts up my ass.

And I really don’t care how I look. Or what you think.

So deal with it.

He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.

And even if the guy wasn’t loving every moment, the ability to smile, to fake your way through this, that would be even more admirable.

The same way every porno movie implies a score of people standing just off camera, knitting, eating sandwiches, looking at their wristwatches, while other people do naked sex only a few feet away…

To the stupid little boy, that was enlightenment. To be that comfortable and confident in the world, that would be Nirvana.

“Freedom” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

That’s the kind of pride and self-assurance the little boy wanted to have. Someday.

If it was him in those pictures with the monkey, he could look at them every day and think:
If I could do this, I could do anything.
No matter what else you came up against, if you could smile and laugh while a monkey did you with chestnuts in a dank concrete basement and somebody took pictures, well, any other situation would be a piece of cake.

Even hell.

More and more, for the stupid little kid, that was the idea …

That if enough people looked at you, you’d never need anybody’s attention ever again.

That if someday you were caught, exposed, and revealed enough, then you’d never be able to hide again. There’d be no difference between your public and your private lives.

That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you’d never want to own or do another thing.

That if you could eat or sleep enough, you’d never need more.

That if enough people loved you, you’d stop needing love.

That you could ever be smart enough.

That you could someday get enough sex.

These all became the little boy’s new goals. The illusions he’d have for the rest of his life. These were all the promises he saw in the fat man’s smile.

So after that, every time he was scared or sad or alone, every night he woke up panicked in a new foster home, his heart racing, his bed wet, every day he started school in a different neighborhood, every time the Mommy came back to claim him, in every damp motel room, in every rented car, the kid would think of those same twelve photos of the fat man bent over. The monkey and the chestnuts. And it calmed the stupid little shit right down. It showed him how brave and strong and happy a person could become.

How torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.

“Savior” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

And it’s funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people. All other people. Everybody.

The kid never knew the man’s name. But he never forgot that smile.

“Hero” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

The next time I go visit my mom I’m still Fred Hastings, her old
public defender, and she keeps me yakking all afternoon. Until I tell her I’m still not married, and she says that’s a shame. Then she turns on the television, some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.

The next visit, I’m still Fred but married and with three children. That’s better, but three children … Three is too many. People should stop at two, she says.

The next visit, I have two.

Every visit there’s less and less of her under the blanket.

In another way, there’s less and less of Victor Mancini sitting in the chair next to her bed.

The next day, I’m myself again, and it’s only a few minutes before my mom rings for the nurse to escort me back to the lobby. We sit not talking until I pick up my coat, then she says, “Victor?”

She says, “I need to tell you something.”

She’s rolling a ball of lint between her fingers, rolling it smaller and tighter, and when she finally looks up at me, she says, “Fred Hastings was here. You remember Fred, don’t you?”

Yeah, I remember.

These days, he has a wife and two perfect children. It was such a pleasure, my mom says, to see life work out for such a good person.

“I told him to buy land,” my mom says, “they’re not making it anymore.”

I ask her who she means by “they,” and she presses the nurse button again.

On my way out, I find Dr. Marshall waiting in the hallway. She’s standing just outside my mom’s door, leafing through notes on her clipboard, and she looks up at me, her eyes beady behind her thick glasses. Her one hand is clicking and unclicking a ballpoint pen, fast.

“Mr. Mancini?” she says. She folds her glasses and puts them in the chest pocket of her lab coat and says, “It’s important that we discuss your mother’s case.”

The stomach tube.

“You asked about other options,” she says.

From the nurse’s station down the hallway, three staffers watch us, their heads tilted together. One named Dina calls, “Do we need to chaperon the two of you?”

And Dr. Marshall says, “Mind your own business, please.”

To me, she whispers, “These small operations, the staff acts as if they’re still in high school.”

Dina, I’ve had.

See also: Clare, RN.

See also: Pearl, CNA.

The magic of sex is it’s acquisition without the burden of possessions. No matter how many women you take home, there’s never a storage problem.

To Dr. Marshall, her ears and nervous hands, I say, “I don’t want her force-fed.”

The nurses still watching, Dr. Marshall cups a hand behind my arm and walks me farther away from them, saying, “I’ve been talking to your mother. She’s quite a woman. Her political actions. All her demonstrations. You must love her very much.”

And I say, “Well, I wouldn’t go as far as that.”

We stop, and Dr. Marshall whispers something so I have to step closer to hear. Too close. The nurses still watching. And breathing against my chest, she says, “What if we could completely restore your mother’s mind?” Clicking and unclicking her pen, she says, “What if we could make her the intelligent, strong, vibrant woman she used to be?”

My mother, the way she used to be.

“It may be possible,” says Dr. Marshall.

And not thinking how it sounds, I say, “God forbid.”

Then real fast, I say that’s probably not such a great idea.