Futureproof (21 page)

September

These are the things you notice with the sound off. Sometimes I like to pop in a porno and watch it silent. I know I won't be able to cum, what with the junk coursing through me, but that's not the point. The point is that the
Moonlight
Sonata is playing on the stereo, and as the piano tinkles and rises then converges, and I watch the expressions on the girls' faces on the screen as they get their orifices pounded for money, it occurs to me that porn stars are possibly the saddest people on the planet. In the slow-motion shots, where the camera is focused on the girl's face, she with the gritted teeth and the furrowed eyebrows, I can think of nothing better than to make love to a porn star.

They will never know the pleasure of pure lovemaking. They probably never have. Or maybe they did once and lost it and porn
was their only recourse once they decided that love was irrevocably deleted from their lives. They are doing things with complete strangers that most of us will never do with spouses of thirty years.

But we are all doing what we have to do to get by, medicating to make it possible to live with ourselves. I wonder if porn stars ever contemplate offing themselves because their destitution is reenacted on a daily basis.

He's doing her from behind now, his hand squeezing the sensitive space between her hip and her thigh. He has her skin bunched there in his hand like he's manipulating one of those stress relief balls and she accepts the pain for a long time before she finally reaches back and makes him let go of her, all the while maintaining the illusion that she's enjoying the fuck.
These are the things you notice with the sound off.

The piano crescendos. The girl closes her eyes while the faceless stud squirts thick into her mouth.

 

My mother asks me to go to church with her and for the first time in years I decide I'll give it a shot. My mother says I have so many problems because I don't try to keep “communion” with God. Church, for my mother, is like smack to a junkie. It used to be anyway. Then we got a TV and started listening to secular radio when I was twelve and now she only goes when there's some serious shit going down. She's vehement about getting her God fix then.

I leave Alice sleeping off a hangover and meet my mother at the church at 10:30 sharp. People can judge me all they want about my life choices, but at least I'm punctual.

Seeing all the clean-cut, well-rounded God followers milling about the church parking lot immediately makes me regret showing up. Standing there waiting for my mother to do some last-minute alterations of her makeup, I am underwhelmed by uptight white
bread assholes and their shiny cars and their spotless credit reports and their perfect orthodontia and their limp, patronizing handshakes. And their twice-monthly haircuts that are always the same. They all look alike, with their functional upbringings and their always-a-kind-word ethos. It makes you want to pop the shit out of one of 'em, just to see how kindly and faux-understanding they'd be then. That's what it makes you want to do.

I bring my church everywhere with me. I kneel at the crooks of my arms. And sometimes, when the hit is just right, I can feel the hand of God—maybe even hear His voice. I can't make out what it's saying, though. I am a prisoner in my cage of bone, my ear to the wall, trying to understand.

The service starts with a load of singing. The songs are some kind of nouveau gospel tripe. Then comes the earnest prayer, then more music, then money collecting, before the preacher finally takes the stage.

He doesn't speak in puritanical, Jonathan Edwards fire-and-brimstone metaphor and simile, which is what I always expect coming into these things. Hell, I probably decided to meet up here with my mom specifically because I thought that is what I'd be hearing.

But no, his is a message of Love. He implores the congregation of thousands to put aside their prejudgments of all who have fallen from God's favor. He cites that Bible verse where Jesus tells the people who want to stone the hooker to death to freely cast the first stone if any of them are without sin. “There are lost souls out in the world,” the preacher says, “maybe in this very house of worship, who are without solace, who don't know where to turn, who have exhausted every possible avenue in search of an answer that will not come. They still wait for the miracle.”

He continues on in this vein for a good forty-five minutes, and as he's admonishing the sorry fucks that make up his congre
gation I begin to feel sad or something. I can't help but cry.

My mother is rocking back and forth with her eyes closed with her arm around me. I lose track of time and the preacher's voice recedes to the background as I am overcome with emotion, relief flooding out of me. I want to run out of the church and head straight to the ghetto, find the pregnant woman who's always wandering around down there, pull her aside, tell her that we are not abandoned, only underused—that this is not the final act.

We are acknowledged, goddammit.

God has His eye on all of us.

 

When I get home Alice is watching TV with my grandmother's afghan wrapped around her. She looks like hell. All the shades are drawn and the apartment is like a fucking dungeon. Splinter comes out of the bathroom not looking much better.

This is the problem with having epiphanies, I've realized. In order to follow through on them you have to get everyone around you to make the same positive choices you have or else it won't add up to shit.

As Splinter rummages through the kitchen and Alice clicks through an endless litany of channels, I realize that I have to get rid of both of them.

I begin yanking open the blinds without answering Alice's imploration to make a run down to the Bluff.

“There's no fucking milk, Luke,” Splinter whines, holding a bowl of cereal by his side like a six-gun. His boxer shorts have holes in them.

I ignore both of them. I'm above this now.

“I don't give a shit about the milk, Luke,” Alice says. “I just want to go downtown. I
need
to go downtown.”

Splinter drops his empty bowl on the counter and goes back in
the bathroom, shuts the door. Alice throws the remote on the couch and closes the bedroom door behind her. The woman on the TV says she's gonna get revenge. If it's the last thing she does, she'll get that bitch, she says.

Sativa rubs against my legs, purring.

Bushwick the Lesbian comes out of Splinter's room, hacking up a lung as she heads to the bathroom. Bushwick attached herself to Splinter's jock at a bar downtown the night before and for some ungodly reason he brought her back here with him. Apparently Bushwick the Lesbo got wasted and decided she had a newfound hankering for dick. It's not that I have anything against lesbians or anything. I, like most red-blooded American males, like nothing better than fantasizing about two hot lesbians going at it. Not the butch kind, of course, with the mullets and the mustaches, but the porn industry–endorsed
lipstick lesbians
. Unfortunately for Splinter's pathetic ass, Bushwick is not of the lipstick persuasion. Though she does claim to have bagged Penthouse Pets on more than one occasion.

Bushwick comes out of the bathroom fully clothed, acts all gregarious, says she has to get something out of her car. She never comes back.

This is when it hits me.

I yank my wallet out of my pocket. It's all gone, all seven hundred bucks. She snuck into my room while I slept off the previous night's party and robbed us blind.

“Do you have any fucking clue where Bushwick lives?” I ask Splinter.

“Who the fuck is Bushwick?”

“The fucking lesbian! She stole the rent!”

“No, man. I have no clue. I don't even know her fucking name.”

“How could you fucking bring someone like that into our house, man? I mean, what the fuck are we going to do?”

“Well, dude, I guess this'd be the best time to tell you that I'm leaving for New York in a week. I gave you my share of this month's rent because I felt like I owed it to you. But now that this shit's happened it feels like a sign.”

“A sign? You're on the fucking lease! You're not doing me any favors by paying your share of the rent if you're just going to leave.”

“I know, man, but I have to go where my heart leads me. There's a whole lot of shit happening up there and I've gotta be part of it. You only live once and all that shit.”

“Well, what the fuck am I going to do, Splinter?”

“Fuck this place, Luke. Come with me.”

“To New York? I can't live up there, man. I'll never stay clean if I live up there. And if you're smart you won't go either because we've both heard the stories about how easy it is to cop every drug in the universe in New York. A place like that will eat people like us alive.”

“Maybe so, but at least we'll have fun getting eaten.”

 

Later that night a couple of Splinter's hippie friends come over and we get stoned. Alice continues working on me to take her to the Bluff. It's on the third bowl-pack when I decide definitively that she has to go. I'll never get straight with her perfect ass always tempting me, her fucking voluptuous tits wagging in my face, her baby-talk begging for more of everything that feels good, her exquisite blow jobs, her nihilistic outlook on life.

The next day I take her to Little 5 Points and drop her off in front of the pizza place. I tell her to call me but she never does after that. Jonas tells me months later that he saw her in the ghetto giving head to some dealer for smack.

Splinter leaves for New York that same day with a hippie who goes by the name Laughing Horse. Seriously. I asked him what his name was and he said, “Laughing Horse.”

These fucking people.

Not that “Splinter” is much better, but at least he's a noun without the extraneous action verb attached to it.

I get paid on Friday and hit the Bluff one more time with Jonas and Karen. It's somehow easier to do it this way, now that Splinter and Alice are gone and I don't have to feel responsible for them.

And I have a plan to save the apartment. So there's that to celebrate.

 

Trizden agrees to meet with me at the Smyrna Lanes bowling alley. He wanted it that way. We haven't spoken since the suicide. But now's not the time for pride or standing on principle. Now's not the time to hold grudges, to remind him that he ditched me just because I like getting fucked up.

We trade in our shoes and grab a pitcher of beer.

“Have you ever heard of Lord Byron?” I ask him between turns.

“Is that a new D & D thing?”

“Fuck no, man. I'm talking about the poet. The Romantic?”

He shakes his head, looks at me blankly.

“All right, fuck it, I'll tell you about him. Lord Byron was this guy who was born with a clubfoot and ended up being one of the greatest poets that ever lived. He was a legend in his own time. And not only that, but he was a goddam lord in the British House of Commons. And not only
that
, but he was infamous for his sexual exploits with literally thousands of women, all across Europe. He was so attractive, this guy, that even his nanny was infatuated with him when he was just seven or eight years old.

“But then, after having everything he ever desired—fame, fortune, women—he realized he was totally burned out, he had nothing left inside him.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, man?”

“Just hear me out, alright? C'mon. For months you've treated me like a piece of shit. Like you don't know me, for Christ's sake. You don't even invite me over anymore. That's why we're at a goddam bowling alley, right? You can at least hear me out.”

Animal Mother looks at the floor. I continue.

“The thing is, Byron realized that, at only thirty-two or thirty-three years old, he had lived a lifetime without really
helping
anyone, without any kind of self-sacrifice. He needed a cause to fight for. And that's the same point I'm at, Mother. I've squandered myself. And now I'm ready to fight. I've put myself in a hole and I need you to help me get out. I need you to help me turn my life around.”

“How?”

“Well, see, this is the beautiful part. Byron went to Greece to help the people in their war for independence or something. He fought for them ferociously. Or so the legends say. And to this day he is still revered there, by the Greeks, as a national hero. He found a noble cause and fought for it. And now you are presented with that same opportunity.”

“By doing what?”

“Damn it, man. I don't know how else to say it. Fuck. I need to borrow some money.” I let him ruminate on that one for a minute while I take my turn. I get the dreaded seven-ten split on the first roll and miss completely with the spare.

“You're saying that by my loaning you money I'd be just like some fucking poet who saved Greece?”

“What? I'm not saying
you're
akin to Lord Fucking Byron just by lending me money.
I'm
the Lord Byron of this analogy. I don't know what else to do, Triz. I'm at my breaking point. I'm trying to stay off the dope and start living like I give a fuck but every time I try to get out, ‘
They pull me back in.'
”

“What the hell was that?”

“You know, from
Godfather III
, when Pacino is trying to make a break from the crime syndicate and shit?”

“Why you'd ever quote part three, the worst of the
Godfather
movies, is beyond me. Plus, your Pacino sucks.”

“I need you to loan me money so I can make my fucking rent, man. So I can start my life over.”

“How much?”

“$650.”

“What? Holy shit, man.”

“I promise you I'm good for it, Trizden. I swear. I'm turning over a new leaf and everything, dude.”