In the City of Shy Hunters (71 page)

A vertical and a horizontal on Rose's extra-lovely cock.

Now my glistening perineum, Rose said.

Your glistening what? I said.

Between my asshole and my balls, Rose said. The root chakra.

A vertical and a horizontal on Rose's glistening perineum.

Rose's silver revolver was in Rose's Sahara Desert palm.

Here, Rose said. You're going to need this.

I am? I said.

You are, Rose said.

Rose's silver revolver in my hand again, so heavy, slick, shiny.

Then Rose's lips at my ear:

Rose placed his palm against my heart, a steady push away. My feet walked back to where the steps began. My foot hit the Courvoisier bottle, and the bottle rolled down the steps of Saint Patrick's. Broke on the third step.

Turn around now, Rose said, And keep going. And put the revolver in your pocket.

I stared at the silver revolver, put the silver revolver in my front pocket.

That a forty-five you holding, Rose said, Or are you just glad to see me?

Rose, I said.

Turn around! Rose said. Get your ass out of Dodge!

I was just over the yellow river of piss, just about to the steps when Rose said, Will?

I turned around.

Got a match? Rose said.

Language my second language.

In my back pocket, Fish Bar matches.

I pitched the blue pack of matches, an arch through the night air, into Rose's free hand, palm up.

Thank you, Rose said.

Now whatever you do, don't look back! Rose said. Or you'll turn into a pillar of salt.

Rose's chin up up, his eyes rolled back in his head, Saint Theresa Gone to Heaven.

My feet were soldiers, new-shoe stiff, about-face.

The splash of gas.

Left, right, left, right, my red Converse tennis shoes walked down Saint Patrick's steps.

The unmistakable sound: the match.

The cardinal a raven's scream, high-pitched, off, wrong, horrible, ripping the duct tape.

My breath in. My breath out.

Just like that, I turned slow, like an old snake in the sun. In my ears, the air imploded. In front of my eyes, a brilliance.

The touch of the match covered Rose's cassock and roman collar like a blue flame ghost.

A big bang, a big fucking bang.

The scream from Rose from another incarnation. Wild, finally home.

Finally free.

The scream we all live for.

Rose's lips, the inside color of his lips on fire, his shiny head, his ears, Rose's extra-lovely Sahara Desert palms on fire. His eight-ball cheeks, the prizefighter bump of his nose, the black serpents in Rose's eyes on fire.

Rose's free hand went up. Perhaps it was his final good-bye, but to me it looked like a fist.

Inside Rose, there was a crumbling down and back, like he'd leaned up against the fire, and a far greater fuchsia flame burst up, high sparks into the great Manhattan, into the greater dark sky.

Tiny illuminations in the dark.

The cardinal had the bronze door pulled open all the way. He was standing behind the door. The silver cuff hooked to the handle was all you could see.

Another crumbling and Rose was on his knees.

Rose was only fire now.

And smoke. Billows of fuchsia smoke.

The only sound was flames—and something else.

The muffled whimper from the tiny Catholic heart in the darkness behind the bronze door.

AT
50
TH STREET
, the
WALK
/
DON
'
T WALK
was
WALK
. I didn't look back, just walked. In Saks Fifth Avenue, the two skinny Art Family women in the little black dresses held their hands over their eyes.

In all the world, this distracted globe, policing my body, new-shoe stiff, my heart, the broken pieces scratching against my chest, my red Converse tennis shoes step by step, all the way down Fifth Avenue, along the windows of Saks, in each window, each of the Art Family people inside there, the men in tuxedos, the men in sports clothes, the women in navy blue suits and hats with veils, the woman in the long shiny red evening gown, every one of them, weeping.

Weeping.

The gnashing of teeth.

Weeping.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT

A
nything can happen, now that everything has.

Who knows how long everything happened after Rose died: three weeks, three years, three days.

On the evening news, Channel 7 had a special about a bum who'd been set afire by a gang of punks on the steps of Saint Patrick's Cathedral.

The black woman newscaster, holding the microphone with TV-7 on it, said, So if you're going to Saint Patrick's Cathedral you must use the side entrances.

Behind her was Saint Patrick's Cathedral. There was a big white tent in front of the bronze doors.

The headline in the
Daily News
was
BUM BURNED
.

The headline in the
New York Post
was
ST
.
PAT
'
S INFERNO
.

I shaved my head and mustache. Got a heart tattooed over my heart, a red heart, with a black circle around the heart. Across the top of the heart, an arc of black Magic Marker words,
William of Heaven
. I got my queer ear and my beer ear pierced. Gold loops.

Sleep was something I forgot how to do. Eating something I forgot too.

My Art Family and I stayed up all night, most nights, talking talking, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, drinking beers, tequila, Courvoisier VSOP, toking Rose's rabbit turds in the lovely erect pink penis, listening to WBLS at the end of the dial.

One night, I stood in the middle of my Art Family, and my Art Family held hands around me like in the hippie days trust-falling, and we sang “Slow Poke” or “My Buddy,” or harmonized on the “Idaho State Song” or “Song of Bernadette” or “Famous Blue Raincoat” or “America the Beautiful.”

We started writing on the red walls with Rose's black Magic Marker:
Amor fati. Asobase kotoba. Complete presence. Wolf Swamp. Crossover. Shy Hunters. Vertical incest. Horizontal incest. Hero. Monster. Savage
beast
. A
fuck-you kind of motherfucker joy. Tiny Catholic heart. Antigone. Polynices. The putrefaction of the flesh. The joke was on the white man. New York's only Irish Catholic homosexual. James Joyce's idiot savant daughter fucked a truck driver. Vin et Vous. Fuck hope. Sexy Totale. YUFAs. Even myself, I am just here, isn't it? Green Date. Fools and pharisees. To admit ignorance is the highest knowledge. Shit happens. The red road. The blue road. Noam Chomsky. Tony and Tina. Savoir faire. Postured disregard. Nowhere. Nowhere. Autumn Sonata. Stranded Beings Searching for God. The three Polaroids. Self-immolated Cambodian monks. The map of the Known Universe. Divide and conquer. Travel mode's the key. All daring and courage, all iron endurance of misfortune, make for a finer, nobler type of manhood. In this distracted globe. Hell of a fix. Up Shit Creek. In a world of hurt. Complete acceptance of whatever the Divine sets in your path. The lucid compulsion to act polemically. The space in between. Gordito. Lletre ferit. Policing my body. New-shoe stiff. The hope of theater to lay bare the human heart. The rule is to have some rules. The Badland Boys. Perfect, just perfect. Chaos is unrelenting brightness. If wishes were horses then beggars would ride. The only way out is in. Harlequin is the fool who knows he is hiding. Performance art is a man dancing alone in his room. Make it aware, make art out of it. Trickle down. Ronald Reagan and Nancy. No no Yoko Ono. Solitary illuminations in the night. Horrific whisper. Lips at my ear. Responsibility of the survivor to tell the story. Swooped rhinestone mirrors. With every gift there is a sacrifice. Never touch me. It's all drag. Never call Elizabeth Taylor Liz
.
Law of the jungle. Vicious Totalitarian Assholes ‘R' Us. A talent for reality. Not on the premises. Revelation the result of covering up. I can fuck you blind and keep it simple. Try me. Scared stallion. Exactly right perfect person
,
WALK
/
DON'T WALK
.
Wounded Male belly dance. The Song of Bernadette. Extra Strength Tylenol. The cure
.

THE NEXT DAY
, the headline in
The New York Times
was:

CARDINAL O
'
HENRY TAKES LEAVE OF ABSENCE
.
WILL WORK IN UNDISCLOSED HOMELESS CHARITY
.

The first two weeks, I was able to go to work, but not much more than that. I started getting afraid of the ironing board and the iron, so for those two weeks I bought myself a new white shirt every day I worked, and finally had to buy two more pairs of black pants. I was afraid of the '53 DeSoto too. I would stand in front of the '53 DeSoto, shaking shaking,
my hand too afraid to reach out and take the handle, and at the same time I was crying because I knew it was stupid to be afraid of a refrigerator. I had to start drinking my beer warm.

The shower too, I was afraid of the shower. Washed my face and hair, sponged off my pits and butt crack and crotch at the kitchen sink. But I couldn't step into the shower.

Forget about elevators.

The full-length mirror in the bathroom screwed to the door that whanged out my body in bulges, I hung my blue towel over.

The only other place, besides my apartment, where I felt safe at all was on the green bench near Ruby's Home Sweet Home in Dog Shit Park.

Not enough air. My breath in, my breath out could not bring in enough air. A high ringing of bees in my right ear. The strange sense of an otherness about me. Even myself, there was some other self of me hanging on my bones. Something about myself I'd never recognized before that was with me, that was on the objects of my world, on my body, the way after a hot shower fog gets on the mirror.

Rose's apartment was too too too much. But sometimes I'd go up there and turn on Maria Callas's
Norma
real loud and touch his brass coffee table from Kenya, the purple-velvet overstuffed chair, the blonde-fainting couch, the Randolph Scott lunch box, the Dwight D. Eisenhower ashtray, his red lava lamp, Joey Heatherton bed; touch Buddha; touch the fuchsia bathtub and sink, the fuchsia walls; touch the photographs of Elizabeth Taylor. Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra in the deco frame I gave Rose. The Italian crystal chandelabra.

The E.T.-phone-home guy got married. Across the courtyard, one night there was a party, and I stood in the dark and watched the E.T.-phone-home guy in a tux and a woman in a white dress and veil and a bunch of white guys and white chicks drink and dance all night. Just before it got light, E.T.-phone-home guy lay down on the couch. In the rose-colored light, with just his starched white tuxedo shirt on, he spread his legs and, still in her veil, his bride put his cock in her mouth. The up and down, up and down, of the white veil, his hand milky white against the white of the veil, the black hairs on the back of his hand, his gold watch. His argyle socks, the garters on his calves, his calves around his bride, his scream, the scream we all live for, a tiny sound in the big Manhattan dawn.

Mrs. Lupino died of heart failure. She was in her apartment with her cats for four days before they found her. I smelled her death but thought
I just needed a bath. The morning they hauled the dishonored putrefaction of her flesh out of 205 East Fifth Street, there was a knock on my door. I opened my door and it was Ellen's Uncle David's secretary in a blue outfit with matching espadrilles, red frizzy hair, and half-glasses that hung around her neck by a strand of pearls. All I was wearing was my underwear. She didn't even blink. She asked me why I had never reported to the office that Mrs. Lupino had twenty-seven cats.

I started at her blue-espadrilled feet and looked up, looked back down again, both times stopping my eyes just below her middle.

New York drop-dead fuck-you.

Speak up, honey! I said. Can't hear you!

I
said
, she said, Why did you not report to the management office that Mrs. Lupino had twenty-seven cats?

I pulled the front of my underwear down.

She looked at my cock, then back up at me.

It's a cowboy dick, I said. Suck on it.

Slammed the door.

MY LAST DAYS
at Café Cauchemar just about everybody was new. Daniel, the boss's brother, was on vacation, and Davey Dearest was in the hospital, and Walter was in the hospital, and Mack Dickson was in Florida on some sort of shoot. Nobody knew anything about Joanie.

I kept my head down, did my job. Hardly spoke to anybody but my customers. I walked home after work, never took the subway, couldn't bear it. I was afraid of cabs, so I walked. Didn't care if it was
WALK
or
DON'T WALK;
I just put one foot in front of the other. Everybody else had to move.

I was dead and everybody else was too.

THE FIRST POSTCARD
from True Shot was from somewhere in Pennsylvania. A photo of the Lazy Dutchman Motel on the card, the big neon sign
LAZY DUTCHMAN
red-white-and-blue, the kind of one-story white wood-framed U-shaped motel where you park your car in front of your room.

True Shot's handwriting was shaky like his eyes had been and all the sentences sloped down:

The second postcard was from Peoria, Illinois. A photo of a bunch of high-rises alongside a dirty river,
WELCOME TO PEORIA
in red letters. True Shot wrote: