Futureproof (8 page)

Lydia reaches into her duffel bag and pulls out a bullwhip, leather tassels on the end and everything. She cracks Flick in the side of the head with the handle. He reaches over with both hands and starts to choke her and we're all wondering if somebody should do something because maybe this time it's gone too far. But then Lydia starts laying into him with the whip handle and
then
she says she's so fucking turned on that he has no other choice but to fuck her right now.

She turns toward us. We're sitting there trying not to act like this is the wackest shit we've ever seen. “Do you guys mind?”

“Fuck yeah. Let me see you fuck her, Flick,” I say.

Flick tears Lydia's clothes off of her faster than Animal Mother and the guys can get out of the apartment. They're tripping over each other to keep from witnessing this. I wish I could say I'm moral enough to do the same, but I've been drinking from the moment I woke up, called in sick to work on account of going crazy, and I'm ready to see some crazy-ass fucking.

They smack each other some more, Flick banging her on the ass with the whip. I slouch back in the lounge chair and drink more, and then I realize I'm really quite drunk, actually.

They get quiet after a while and I lean up a little to see if they've finally killed each other or something because they are never quiet.

They're both looking at me, grinning.

I am suddenly very afraid.

Flick says, “Luke, I want you to fuck my girlfriend. Wouldn't you like to have sex with Lydia?”

“No way.”

“Why not, Luke? Do you think I'm ugly?”

“Of course not. You're totally hot. If you weren't so fucked in the head I'd be all over you.”

“Please, man, she wants to take care of you,” Flick says. “You know, with the Michelle thing and everything. Lydia and me, we want to give this gift to you. To help you get through this.”

It's the old “fucking away your sorrow” angle.

“You've already seen
me
naked, if that's what you're hesitating for,” says Flick.

“Yeah, there's that, but it's also that I ain't into that whole ‘gettin' the piss smacked out of me while I'm doing it' angle.”

“Sweetheart, I would never dream of doing something like that to you,” Lydia reassures me. “The hitting is strictly between us. We'd never try to pull someone else into that. We're actually really happy that we are the only two people we know that like that kind of thing. It makes what we have more…
special.
”

“That or more fucked up,” I say, weakening, anticipation rising.

“So you'll do it?”

Finally, a woman begging me to screw her. I guzzle the last of my drink and slam the cup down triumphantly.

“I'll do it.”

Lydia's on me in a flash, takes my pants down to my ankles, puts my dick in her mouth. She blows me for a while and then says she wants me inside her. I turn around to see if Flick's about to bash me in the head with a baseball bat or something but he's still sitting calmly on the couch rubbing his crotch and nods his head at me for the go-ahead on the actual fuck action.

I tell her I'd go down on her, too, but she has to understand that
I just witnessed Flick shoot about eight loads in her. She says she doesn't hold it against me.

Then I'm fucking her. It feels like putting my dick in a bag of peach compote, really pretty gross, what with the whole Flick cum factor, but I don't give a shit at this point. I keep going. She is looking at me like no one ever has. She is so beautiful, her body a perfect receptacle for all my unquenchable suffering and shame. She is a willing martyr. She is showing me more love in these moments of raw unspeakable sluttiness than Michelle showed me the entire two months I went out with her. Lydia has given me her body so that I might find relief, a reason to live, to go on, to stake out another day. Her fingers glide along my torso, working their way delicately over my scabbed-over cuttings. She is tender with me. She knows everything.

Luke, I say to myself as we move together (pumping pumping pumping), all that came before now was just a warm-up for real life. Nothing should ever be reason enough to discontinue the searching out of the beauty that exists in the world. I will never hold back again, I will never believe that in order to live I must close down as some do after they've been destroyed by another's actions (faster faster). I will continue to throw myself across the train tracks of love and pray I'm not cut in half. And even if I am, I will sew back together. I
know
this. I will take every experience into my consciousness fully, as though it were my last. I will eat life with a fork and a knife, and when those utensils aren't available I will tear pieces off in chunks and swallow whole (she's yelling now, screaming). I will not lie down and die. Not for anyone. I am alive! I am banging a beautiful woman! She loves me! Right now, at this very moment, no one else exists in the universe but the two of us. We are one and the same. We are the same! We are the very essence of humanity. We are boiled down together, melted into each other. There is no differentiation between her and
me. The same blood flows between us. We trade life force. We feed off each other. We are the same! (cumming cumming cumming CUMMING)

I collapse on the floor, the moth-eaten carpet. Lydia lowers her body over me, leans in to my mouth and kisses me. I bury my hands in her cascading hair and caress the tops of her earlobes. “Thank you. Thank you, Lydia.”

They are quiet as they dress. I make no move to get off the floor.

“We're leaving now, Luke,” I hear Lydia say.

“OK.” I feel drunker now, somehow, in the afterglow. “Thanks, you guys.”

Then I hear Flick say, “You never kiss
me
like that, you fucking bitch.”

“You don't deserve to be kissed like that,” Lydia says.

The door slams, shaking the apartment.

July

My bedroom looks like a tornado touched down. There are food-encrusted plates scattered around the recliner. I become angrier by the second as I look around the room. Every poster I had pinned up in various angles and in triptych montage according to subject matter has been yanked down,
crumpled
, and tossed across the room.

There can only be one jerkoff at fault.

He has intentionally desecrated my stuff, my every representation of high school and teenage life encompassed in a few well-cared-for pieces of paper. I had set lists autographed by three different bands. I had a first-edition Spider-Man signed by Todd McFarlane. It's all gone. How could my mother marry a monster like that and continue to be married to him even now? How could she see the aftermath of his fury, taken out explicitly on my sacred ephemera, and not imme
diately gather one or two changes of clothes, pack the kids in the car, and get as far away from his obviously psychotic ass as possible?

I call Jonas into the room. I already have the words prepared, the “What the fuck happened in here?!” exasperation built up to unprecedented levels. But I pause to hug him and he hugs me back and then we're both squeezing the shit out of each other. He looks genuinely pleased to have me back, glowing really. I cannot wait until he's old enough to escape from here with me.

“What happened?” I ask, trying to sound calm.

“He just went nuts a couple of weeks ago,” Jonas says apologetically. “He said one of your posters was obscene.”

“Which?”

I scan the blank walls, trying to remember everything the way it was.

Jonas blushes.

“Which one?” I demand.

“It was a drawing of The Cat in the Hat…he had a…a boner. A boner with a sock on it. And it said, ‘If you're gonna dive in the hive, better put a sock on your cock.'

“I'm sorry I couldn't save any of your stuff. He just
lost
it. We were sitting in here watching a movie about Navy SEALs and during a commercial he started looking around the room and stared at that one for a while, got up out of the chair and stared at it. Even after the movie came back on he just kept staring at it and then he ripped it off the wall and tore it to pieces.” He looks down, nudges a crumpled poster with his foot, wipes his eye with his sleeve. “He didn't say anything. He just started walking around the room tearing everything off the walls.”

“I can't wait until you can get out of here and come with me.” I want to kill, I want to smash fucking everything. I want to fucking smash fucking everyfuckingthing. “I can't let this stand, bro. I don't
give a shit if he kills me. If I let him get away with this he'll think he can walk all over me, do whatever he wants. He's always spewing this bullshit Marine talk, about there being repercussions for every action; well he's gonna see some repercussions.”

I light a cigarette.

“When'd you start smoking?”

I tell my brother I've
been
smoking in that way that says, “Where the hell have you been?”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Jesus, Jonas, don't sound so frightened, man. I'm not going to implicate you or anything. What am I supposed to do? What? Am I supposed to act like this hasn't happened?”

“No…but I don't want him to hurt you again.”

“He won't,” I say, exhaling. “And even if he does, it'll be for a good cause.”

He starts crying, which irritates me for some reason.

“What are you crying for? Aren't you sick of living in fear of this fucking guy? Aren't you tired of having to tiptoe around him? I can't take another second of you or Mom or anyone else playing the condemned around him. Victor's a goddam tyrant. He's a monster. Don't you get that?”

He doesn't say anything, just nods, tears streaming down his cheeks, a low whine escaping his throat.

“It's gonna be OK. We'll get through this like everything else.”

We hug again and he helps me push all the poster refuse into a pile. We gather the nasty glassware and take it to the sink. I drop my handful of dishes as loudly as I possibly can without actually breaking any.

 

Victor opens the door to my room at 9 p.m. and ambles in like he owns the place. He turns on the TV, the volume so loud it's distorted.
I pretend to be reading a book, as though nothing he can do will make me incite him to further violence.

After about ten blaring minutes of a
Magnum, P.I.
rerun, he turns the volume down. And then, when he least expects it, I reach beside the bed and palm one of his old beer bottles. I'm on my stomach when I grab it. I turn my head back toward him. He's seated just to the right of the foot of the bed. I bring the bottle up, wing it at him as hard as I can, and watch it burst in slow motion across his head. His yelp is filled with surprise and anger more than pain. He knows he's been had.

He stumbles toward me, still clutching his current beer in one hand, the other hand over his face, blood spilling to the carpet. I grab another empty bottle, stand on the bed, and as he reaches for me with his beer, I clobber him across the left ear. He's screaming now, snatching furiously in the dark. He finds me and drops his beer on my bed. I look down to see it spilling out, darkening the comforter, and in that moment he grabs my arms and throws me hard against the outside door. He can't see, though. He can't finish. I fling the door open and run out into the night. He stumbles after me. I come across the side of the house, to the front yard, the headlights of passing cars momentarily lighting the lawn before it returns to darkness, a strobe light in slow motion. I start hollering. The front door opens and my mother and brothers look around for the source of the noise in the darkness. And then there we are, squared up in the passing headlights. His drunkenness cancels out his weight advantage and years of combat training. He lunges at me and I jump out of the way, turn and kick him in the ass as hard as I can. He goes down and then it's just like skinhead Dave told me. Once you get a motherfucker down, you make sure he stays down. You kick him until he doesn't move.

I kick Victor hard in the ribs, hear the wind rush out of him.
Then I take my boot to his face a few times for good measure. He doesn't move anymore after that.

Should I relish these moments? Probably not. But I do. I can't stop kicking him. I'm dancing like Ali and destroying like Tyson. And there's so much to kick, the fat bastard. He's worthless and bloody and heaving. He never asks me to stop, though. He doesn't beg. And soon I'm tired of kicking him and I can hear Aaron and Adam crying and they're hiding their faces in my mother's dress. I look over at Jonas and he's clearly invigorated. I smile, bend over to catch my breath, hands on knees. Victor is moaning.

I grab my suitcase, still packed, and my duffel bag filled with tapes and CDs, shoving my copy of
Black Boy
in at the last second. When I leave for the gas station to call Trizden, I'm so proud I'm beaming. I am born again.

November

I couldn't hack it in school anymore, dropped out with less than a semester to go after promising my mother I'd eventually take the G.E.D. For now, I've embarked on a career in telemarketing. Flick got me the job. We sell credit cards over the phone to college students who don't know any better. It sounds like free money to them and it's a totally easy sell.

I go to work for monotonous eight-hour days, come back to Animal Mother's and smoke up, drink a few rum and cokes. It's an ongoing cycle of working and self-medicating after work. But there's still the excitement of girls and the possibility of getting laid. That makes it all worthwhile. And going to shows.

I always go to concerts with Trizden. He's one of those guys whose life aspiration is to stay on top of the newest music. He always
knows more about every band than you could ever know, and six months before you know it, at that. This kind of shit is intuitive to him or something, because no matter what band you think you know about first, no matter how early you think you get in on the ground floor of liking some group, Trizden has been there first. And yet, despite this, he somehow always gets laid. Women couldn't give a good goddam about music, I've found. Most of 'em only care about Led Zeppelin, dance music (but only if you're listening to the dance music in a club), and the newest pop hits played ad infinitum on the radio. So the fact that he knows that Big Black's
Songs About Fucking
is a seminal post-punk record made by the guy that produced Nirvana's
In Utero
is little inducement in getting women to like him. But see, that's the key to staying cool. You have your elitist snobbery and all, make fun of the underlings who think they know something about something when they really know shit about shit, but you don't ever extend those same standards to the girls you're interested in. You'll almost always be disappointed, Trizden the Animal Mother has learned.

Since the beginning of time Triz has professed a love for Nirvana. He's had
Bleach
since it first came out. He had tickets to see them at the Masquerade when they weren't shit. He didn't get to go, he says, because he had the flu that night. But now they are here again, they are in Atlanta at the Omni, where the Hawks play. He has given me a ticket to see them for Christmas. Splinter is going with us. All three of us have general admission tickets, so there are no seats. We will be able to mingle freely in the pit, a roiling mass of bodies moved by music.

For the concert Splinter and I have obtained an eighth ounce of coke, an eight-ball, in the parlance of our times, and are planning to snort the whole thing before and during Nirvana's performance. We're gonna cut a few lines in the parking deck outside the venue and the rest we'll put in a couple of snuff inhalers (known in these
circles as “bullets”) so that we can stay geeked up during the show.

Trizden doesn't want to have anything to do with the shit. He doesn't take to drugs too keenly now. He says they're for losers, as though he has room to talk. Splinter and I have been dabbling in cocaine recently and Trizden thinks we're pathetic wasteoids because of this. But after the last Acid trip I had, I'm all about trying new shit. I can't keep this tripping bullshit up when it's making me want to blow people's brains all over the living room wall.

Animal Mother leaves us to our own devices in the parking deck and says he'll meet us on the right side of the stage. Splinter and I snort three fat lines each. By the time we get situated and climb out of the car we're soaring, smoking cigarettes like they're air. I pull the bullet out of my pocket and admire the vial at the bottom, filled to the brim with white powder. This is going to be a great night. “All signs point to this being a great night,” I say.

By the time Nirvana takes the stage after the two opening acts I am completely fucking gone. I've been snorting coke out of the bullet for an hour and a half. Splinter and Trizden and I stood in front of the stage through the first bands' sets as well as another half hour of bullshit standing around and geeking and smoking cigarettes and waiting before Kurt and company finally took the stage. The set decoration is incredible. There is an angel placed right in the middle, the same one that's on the
In Utero
album cover. At times Kurt stands in front of it wailing on his guitar and he appears to have wings. He is a fucking rock
god
.

The pit is a mess, there are kids flying everywhere, a boiling cauldron of teen angst and aggression. I periodically duck down and snort two or three bumps of cocaine out of the bullet, stand up reinvigorated and throw my body carelessly into the fray. They tear through all the classics, “School,” “In Bloom,” “Lithium,” “Drain You,” “Milk It.” And then I run into Sharon.

Sharon is Trizden's latest underage girlfriend. She is a redhead, cute as a fucking button, great fucking tits, and not even out of tenth grade yet. We stay close throughout the arrhythmic moshing and Kurt is screaming his goddam brains out and then we're kissing and all over each other, smothering in sweat and catching each other's breaths. The guitars are shrill and visceral, the drumming is tribal and banging harder than hell. Sharon snorts a bump of coke from my bullet and then we are practically screwing right there in the pit. I've got my hand under her shirt and she's grinding herself against me and this is the best fucking show I've ever been to. This is rapture.

Then Kurt stops the show right in the middle of “On a Plain” and says that he saw that, he saw that fucking guy feel that girl's tits as she was crowd surfing. He wants that guy taken out of here, he says. He says that people like that guy are fucking raped in prison for a reason and they deserve it. They have no respect for women, he says. The crowd is mostly silent. Splinter and Trizden are lost somewhere out there. Sharon and I are still slobbering all over each other in the silence. She continues moaning as I finger her. Then Kurt starts up again, recommences with “Territorial Pissings,” and the crowd is destroying everything again and Sharon is yanking on my dreads again and biting my bottom lip and I have no worry in the world, I'm so high on the music and the cocaine and the kissing that I could die right now and not care ONE FUCKING BIT.

Once they exit the stage everyone starts screaming louder than they have all night. We know it can't be over yet because they haven't destroyed everything, instruments are still intact all over the stage. The band finally comes back and plays another song or two and then they begin the inevitable destruction by bashing holes in the drums with the mic stands followed by the impaling of the speaker stacks and then Kurt is grinding his guitar into the fucking monitors and then he's standing on his guitar and it is making the shrillest, most
decrepit sounds we've ever heard and then they all take turns throwing one of the smaller monitors up in the air, trying to knock the mirror ball above the stage from its mooring and then Kurt does it, isn't that classic? Kurt dislodges the mirror ball from twenty feet above him and it crashes to the stage in a glittering display of broken glass and we are still screaming, the crowd is screaming, and both of my hands are down Sharon's pants, the right hand in the front, the left in back, and she has her arms wrapped around the back of my head, pulling on my dreads, and I have still more coke left for later. The monitors, what's left of them, are buzzing, moaning monotonally as Kurt and company leave the stage and we file out of the auditorium.

Sharon kisses me again at the door, sucks extra hard on my bottom lip, tells me not to tell Trizden, says, “That was fun, wasn't it?” and puts her finger to her lips in a “keep quiet” motion before disappearing into the departing crowd. I duck behind a trash can, suck up another four bumps, am still smiling when Splinter and then Trizden make their way through the door. Trizden punches me in the arm.

“Thanks for ditching me in the pit, jerkweed.” He's always got one grievance or another. He's temperamental. Like a woman.