Head 01 Hot Head (19 page)

vocal. Dirty talk especialy. Whatever is happening, you should appear to enjoy it. That is the fantasy.”

“Sure.” Griff tried to imagine what he was supposed to say. He tried to imagine saying it with Dante sitting next to him. They realy were pressed together in

their gear the ful length of their sides. Once they dropped trou and started sweating, they’d be slipping on the leather and each other.
Gulp
. His meat plumped in his boxer briefs.

Alek looked between them. “The main thing is that you let me know if you are going to ejaculate. Yes? This is critical. I must get the pop shot on camera

from at least two angles.”

“Money shot, yeah.” Dante nodded in understanding and nudged Griff with an elbow, wanting to get the show on the road.

Griff nodded. Thank God for hard alcohol and extreme denial. If he tuned out, a couple hours would fly by without any disasters, and Dante would have

close to three grand for his house. His best friend was warm against his side, and his heart turned over.

I love you, Dante Inigo Anastagio. You’ll never know how much.

Alek nodded, like he’d heard the thought. “Shal we begin?”

So they did.

GUH
.

Griff opened a bleary eye and tried to figure out what time it was. His unmade bed, his cluttered basement room in his father’s dead house. The dimness

didn’t tel him anything worth knowing. Because of his weird schedule, his bedroom had blackout curtains.

Something bad happened
.

His mouth felt like someone had rented it out for use as a litter box to a bunch of mangy cats. His head hammered and his tongue was fuzzy as a towel. When

he puled himself upright, his stomach turned over, and he quickly staggered toward the john, praying he’d make it before—

Click.
Griff turned on the light, and the feeling passed as soon as he felt the cool tile under his feet. Bracing his hands on the sink, he took inventory of his face in the mirror. His skin was chalky and greasy under reddish stubble, his eyes so bloodshot the gray looked almost jade green. His mouth felt putrid and tasted like metal.

Turning on the tap, he tried to spit the flavor out into the sink, watching the water spiral the drain. His stomach turned over again with a gurgle. Abruptly, he sat down on the toilet lid and stared at the floor until the wave of nausea passed again. He dug through his thick, mushy head, trying to remember why he felt like this.

Something bad had made him go get trashed at the Stone Bone on a night off.

Gradualy, Griff registered that he was stark naked and freezing cold. His cock and bals had puled up as high as they could get without actualy disappearing

into his pelvis. His hands were shaking, and a sheen of cold sweat covered him. This kind of vertigo indicated many, many shots had been involved. He thought

about making himself vomit just to get rid of whatever was left in his stomach but couldn’t do it.

Hot shower
.

Griff heaved himself up on his aching joints to get the shower turned on as hot as he could stand it.

His dad had built this miniscule bathroom for him when Griff was nine. Right after his mom had died, when he had wanted to leave his little basement and

sleep upstairs on the couch to be closer to his father. This bathroom had gone in as a way to keep him down in his room where his father wanted him.

There was no space for a tub, and the toilet was wedged in between the tiny sink and a narrow prefab shower stal that was raised a bit to alow room for the

afterthought plumbing they’d had to fit under the drain. The whole thing felt like a toilet in a camper, and it had only gotten smaler as he had grown.

Now that he
was
grown, to stand “under” the spil of lukewarm water, Griff had to bend his knees, and when he turned, his elbows knocked al three slick wals and the door. This morning it felt like he was rinsing off inside a vertical fiberglass coffin.

Something bad had made him try to drown himself in a bottle of cheap scotch.

Another roil of nausea shuddered through him. His boyhood bathroom was so miniscule that he could reach from inside the shower to turn off the tap, which

he did. The spray from overhead was hotter immediately.

Crouched, Griff made a promise to himself that he’d move out of this basement before the holidays. Living with his dad the past several years had been great

for his savings but terrible for the rest of him. He knew his dad loved him, but sometimes it was way too easy to forget that. Griff looked like his mom’s family, and that hadn’t helped matters.

This place never felt like home and hadn’t since the Anastagios had al but adopted him.

Why am I here again?

He shook his head and tried to trace his steps forward from the Twin Towers faling to him standing alone in this shower.

Something bad had made him actualy glad to come back to his horrible room in this cold house.

Then Griff remembered: he’d done stuff with Dante on camera—sex stuff. He’d loved being able to touch Dante, to love him like that, but the rest of it felt

like a betrayal. Joking for the camera, playing up the straight-boys-being-sexy-together routine, even belowing his impossible pleasure at the end and spraying a load over his best friend’s torso, kneeling over him and rubbing it into his perfect, perfect, perfect skin while Dante squirmed and yelped and laughed. He’d loved it and hated himself both. The memory of it felt like a sack of nails in his chest.

Griff knew plenty of guys in the FDNY who had lost an arm or a leg. Most of them wound up stuck in crappy cubicles doing deskwork after whatever piece

had been lopped off and left them unable to do what they loved.

Those chopped-up guys always said they could feel their missing limb there, after it was gone, that the phantom limbs could itch and ache years after they’d

been cut off and taken away.
If your heart is broken, do you have a phantom heart?

In the space behind his ribs, Griff remembered sitting pressed against his best friend, the soft scrape of their legs rubbing together, the lights hot on their skin, their dicks standing tal side by side, and Dante’s pirate smile.

They’d gotten money for the bank note; that was good, right? Alek had been thriled ’cause they’d been “wiling to experiment.”

Alive! ALIVE!
Mad science for dummies.

Why did he have to feel so rotten? Why did he feel like a liar and a fraud and a chump? Against his better judgment, he’d done what everyone wanted.

Except Dante had been fooling around, and Griff had not been fooling anyone but himself.

Griff’s knees buckled, his guts knotted, and he doubled over gasping inside that narrow, slick space. Without realizing it, he let his hands slide down the close wals until he was huddled kneeling on the cheap fiberglass floor, retching right into the drain.

The water fel on his broad back from far above, washing the scalding tears down with everything else he’d had inside of him until it ran cold-cold-cold into

the sewers under the city.

GRIFF got himself dried off and into clean clothes and upstairs to his dad’s kitchen by eleven. He wanted to eat a bowl of oatmeal, get something in his stomach before he had to work at the Stone Bone tonight. It was Friday and he wasn’t back at the firehouse til tomorrow morning; he needed to pul it together before he showed up there and faced Dante.

The kitchen was almost unbearably bright. Back in the day, his mom had loved light kitchens because they looked so clean. Griff’s dad had put in a white

kitchen and painted the wals an icy blue.

When Griff was a little kid, this had been a homey, happy room, but it hadn’t realy been cleaned thoroughly since she had died.

So after twenty years, the wals were stil pale and the cabinets were stil white, but the room had a kind of dingy glare. Greasy smoke stains high up the wal

over the stove. The paint peeling on the ceiling. A box of cornflakes and leftover Chinese and a half an onion, wrapped in wax paper, sitting in a fridge too old to stay cold. No one came in here much anymore.

Squinting against the oily daylight, Griff filed a kettle with water and put it on the stove. The air outside the windows looked chily. Griff opened a cabinet to take down one of his mother’s scuffed bowls and filed it with two packets of instant oatmeal.

He felt something like déjà vu
standing here making himself breakfast; suddenly, he was eleven again and his mom had just died and he was making himself breakfast before taking the bus to school. Al of a sudden, his hands felt weirdly big as he wiped his mouth.

Griff looked down at the garden and saw the corpse standing in the middle of the dead plants.

But it wasn’t a dead man down there, just his dad.
Close enough
. In the last month, he’d almost forgotten he wasn’t alone in the house.

His father must have just gotten home, or else he was getting ready to leave on an investigation, because he was wearing his work clothes: blue polyester

pants and a shirt and tie under a windbreaker. Arsonists didn’t keep regular hours, and his dad tended to work whenever he wasn’t asleep or drinking until he got that way.

Griff opened the back door to say good morning. In the crisp air, his legs were shakier than he’d realized, so he leaned against the porch rail. They hadn’t

seen each other in over a week, even in passing.

His dad spoke without turning around, startling him. “I thought you were at the firehouse.”

Griff flinched, and for no good reason, his heart thumped in his chest.
Get a grip.
His dad had this way of making him feel like he was under constant, invisible scrutiny. Between that and the rotten hangover, he kept moving a little slowly so he didn’t yack.

Standing in one of the dry, gray flowerbeds, ankle-deep in dead oak leaves, Griff’s dad looked over his shoulder at Griff and nodded helo. He hefted a

smal, heavy bag of tulip bulbs, weighing them in his hand. The stark orange flowers on the label were the only color in the entire barren back yard, except maybe the fiery hair on Griff’s own head.

Griff’s eyes went right to the tiny blotch of orange petals. “You putting in bulbs? Those wil look nice, huh?” He clumped down the steps.

“Wel, it always looks like Satan’s balsack back here. It’s almost too late to get these in the ground, but I thought a little color come spring would be nice.”

“That’l look great.” He nodded and patted his dad’s hard, narrow back through the windbreaker.

Griff was about seven inches taler and forty pounds heavier, and the difference always caught him by surprise. His rugged build and fair complexion came

from his mom’s side. He felt vaguely guilty being bigger because he knew it annoyed his dad to no end. When he was eight, his father had towered over him.

It was cold out here. He wished he had grabbed a sweater, but it seemed like his old man was in a chatty mood, and those moments were too rare to be

wasted.

“Your mother always said waiting for flowers makes the spring come faster. I can’t take this fucking cold anymore.” Mr. Muir pushed his hands in the pockets of his uniform pants to fiddle with his keys. The badge on his belt flashed in the gray light. “I should retire and move to Tampa before I’m stuck in a wheelchair.”

Griff bobbed his head in agreement but knew his dad was just bluffing. Investigations for the FDNY were just about the only reason his old man got up and

put one foot in front of the other. Al his time, al his friends, al of his human contact was tied up in being a fire marshal.

His dad opened the tulip bag, unroling the paper to reach inside. “Nah. Florida is al Jews and fags nowadays. Disgusting.”

Fuck you.

But Griff kept his mouth shut. He knew his father had a bigoted streak. A lot of the old-timers did. Out of nowhere, Mr. Anastagio popped into his head,

short and loud and laughing.
You’re fine, kid
. Griff decided to believe his other father.

Mr. Muir rummaged behind the orange-tulipped label and puled out a knotty bulb. He held it up gently as an egg to look at it. “You ought to take Leslie

someplace warm. A cruise maybe.”

“Dad, we’re divorced.” Griff spoke softly and stood on the little steps that led to the back door. “Leslie and I split up almost ten years ago. She’s back with her parents.”

“Right. Right. I’d forgotten. After the Towers. You’re right.” He dropped the bulb into the bag and wiped his hands and looked sideways at Griff. He looked

so shrunken standing in the leaves. “I knew you’d screw the pooch on that one. She was a good woman, Leslie.”

The fuck?!
Griff stared at his dad, knowing how crazy this was, knowing this house was slowly suffocating him. Worse, he realized this feeling was familiar.

In probie school, they’d al gone to the smokehouse on the Rock and learned how not to smother in a bad fire without oxygen: you drop and crawl like a

baby. No matter how much your throat burns and your chest cramps, you drag yourself to the air before you let yourself fil your lungs. You have to get out without letting anything in.

Griff watched his dad watching the dry flowerbeds, keeping his breathing shalow.
I have to get away from this place before I’m like him.

For one irrational moment, Griff wanted to tel him about HotHead, about jerking off, and worse, for milions of horny, hunky homosexuals with his best

friend he loved,
yeslikethat ’cause I’m a fag-fag-fag, you bitter sack of shit
.

He wanted to see the shock on his father’s jowled, gray face; to make him feel uncomfortable and smal; to get a living, breathing reaction out of this angry

husk who didn’t love anything but ashes and smoke. Blame was something his dad thrived on.

Griff tried to swalow, but his mouth was dry. The hangover headache was an icepick behind his right eye.

The old man kicked the dead leaves, clearing the hard flowerbed. He didn’t even realize what he’d said about his son’s marriage.