Mysterious Skin (23 page)

Wendy’s foot touched mine. “You just jerked off. That’s all?”

“That’s all.” Her foot moved away, then came back and stayed. I could tell she wanted to touch and soothe me with her hand—a typical sympathetic Wendy Peterson gesture in this situation—but her overriding anger only allowed me the comfort of her foot. “You’re mad at me,” I said.

“Maybe. You just have to be so, so careful,” Wendy said.
“You have to know that things are different for you now. This isn’t Kansas.” I’d heard that line so many times, but never from her.

The blue trapezoid shapes on the table’s Formica surface resembled ugly, swollen purplish brown blotches. I wanted to say something more. I could tell Wendy about Brian, but that seemed too complicated, beyond any explanation my confused state could offer. “For the first time in my life,” I told her, “I’m bothered by it. Sex. After tonight, everything just feels fucked up.”

A postcard from Eric arrived the first week of December. Not a postcard, exactly, but an old paperback book’s ripped cover—a romance titled
Gay Deceiver,
which I knew he’d stolen from United Methodist Thrift. On the other side was his trademark scrawl.

“Brian,” I said aloud. “Damn.” The idea of him meeting my mom seemed appalling. I wondered again what he truly knew about me, about Coach. Whatever he’d remembered, I hoped he hadn’t blabbed to Eric, or, god forbid, Mom. Why was this happening now?

Wendy had taped a calendar to the refrigerator. I stared at it, counting the days until my flight, until Kansas, until Brian. “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.”

After Zeke, I avoided East Fifty-third. I sat in the apartment, watching TV, numbed by boredom. But that couldn’t continue. Two days before Christmas, I contemplated the return trip to Kansas, my flight the following morning. I hadn’t the foggiest what to buy for Christmas gifts; besides, I didn’t have the dough.
One hundred and twenty dollars can be yours tonight,
I announced in a game show host’s bray. Wendy was at work, oblivious to my combed and slicked hair, my ironed shirt, my shoes that shone under the bathroom light. “This just isn’t me,” I said. Oh well. I had to go back.

The piano chanteuse remained as bawdy as ever, substituting nasty lyrics into Christmas standbys. “Jingle Bells” became “Jingle Balls.” “Chet’s nuts,” not “chestnuts,” were roasting on her open fire. I shouldered my way through the crowd, which consisted of three times as many hustlers as johns. The hustlers avoided one another: we were all competition.

“Merry Christmas.” I turned to see a kid named Stan, one of the few hustlers I’d chosen to befriend. His sense of humor made him my favorite, and I’d often chatted with him before getting down to business. He reminded me of Eric, thanks to his skinniness and dyed hair. When he spoke, he sounded truly prissy, enunciating vowels for utmost effect. He’d fabricated nicknames for some of the
regular johns. My favorites: Special Friend (who got his name due to a line he apparently always used), Snooty Tooty (a man who wore headbands, brooches, and garish, flouncy clothes), and Funnel of Love (a troll notorious for lying on the floor, popping a funnel between his lips, and asking tricks to piss into it).

I listened to Stan until he strolled toward a john who’d been ogling him. Minutes passed. I downed a beer, then another. No one seemed interested. As I finished a third, Stan stepped back to my corner and pulled me aside.

“No luck?” I asked. The singer wailed away, abandoning her sleazy carols for a tune from
Gyp?? y
or
Guys and Dolls
or some other musical. When I moved my head to hear Stan better, the dizzy feeling proved I was swimming toward drunkenness.

“This guy wants a three-way,” Stan said. “He’s been watching you. He thinks you’re ideal for fucking him while he sucks me off, all that. He’s willing to give us seventy-five each.”

“No way,” I said. I didn’t even think about it. My answer just popped out. And the reason I’d said no wasn’t because the seventy-five bucks was less than my usual hundred twenty. I said no because the three-way possibility reminded me of Brian. This person I didn’t know, this boy I’d shared with Coach, had managed to infect me somehow, to ruin my once-beautiful memories. I realized this now, as I stood in my hustler’s stance in Rounds, both drunk and unwanted. I turned away, swallowed the last of the beer, headed for the door.

The walk from Second Avenue to Third felt more like a run. After a while I noticed a red car behind me, slowly following. Before I reached the subway stop, the car inched forward to idle at curbside. The passenger window slid down. A Kewpie doll face hovered inside the shadows. The
face leaned forward into the light; I saw the driver wasn’t a doll at all, but a man sporting a buzz haircut and a pink polo shirt. “Hop in,” he said.

I half-remembered Stan lecturing me about trolls who preyed outside Rounds, men waiting for hustlers who hadn’t snagged a trick for the night, attempting to get reduced rates. Stan had explained how a typical cheapskate john would drive toward the river, park in this or that discreet shadow, unzip, push the hustler’s head toward a stubby dick, and hand over two or three twenties. Stan apparently had done this once and regretted it. “It’s not worth it.” I hadn’t asked why. But now, I didn’t care. I didn’t bother setting terms or getting acquainted first. I opened the door and crawled in.

“Mind going home with me?” the man asked. “No names. No bullshit. I’ll pay.” His baritone came in brief, hiccuped sentences, as if someone were regulating his speech through a control panel, one overzealous thumb pushing a button. I nodded, and his car tore downtown.

He looked fortyish, straight, slightly criminal. At that point it didn’t matter. We didn’t speak; I put my ear against the cold window. The sounds around us seemed slowed down, far away. Rev, zoom, honk-honk. The radio’s song droned on, a sugary voice repeating, “I guess I’ll have to love you in my favorite dream.” For some reason that sounded pretty. I dozed off at one point, due to the narcotic effects of the car heater and the beer.

I opened my eyes. The car was nearing my neighborhood, and I thought of Wendy.
Sweet dreams,
I almost said. We zoomed onto Delancey Street, then crossed the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. Things got incredibly quiet. Lights, brownstones, and storefronts blurred past. “Where are you taking me?”

“Brighton Beach,” he said. I’d seen those words on sub
way maps, and I knew Brighton Beach was miles from Manhattan. I opened my mouth to protest. “No more questions,” he spat. Surprise must have registered on my face, because he smirked and added a much calmer “I hope you’re horny.”

“Yeah, whatever.” I wanted to blurt, One hundred and twenty dollars horny, but it didn’t seem the time or place. My eyes closed again, and Zzzz.

When I woke, he was shutting off the ignition. He had parked beside an apartment complex. The world had hushed. I looked around, saw trees, residential houses, even a picket fence across the street. Only the orangy light from the nearby subway station remotely resembled New York. I wanted to be on that now, riding home. But I had work to do. He led the way into a claustrophobic elevator. His calloused finger touched the seven button. I noticed a black crescent on his thumbnail, a dark scar like a half-lidded eye. “Accident with a hammer?” I asked, my words slurring together. He didn’t answer.

We entered his apartment, number 703. He shuffled around, turning on lights, then dimming them. I fell into a couch as if it were a pool of warm water. Somewhere, romantic music was playing. Minutes passed. I fought the urge to close my eyes. When he entered the room, I sat up and took a good look at his face. He seemed emotionless, regular, the sort of average joe that crafty policemen might stick into a criminal line-up to help a victim identify a guilty felon. “The bedroom’s this way,” he said.

More dimmed lights. I saw a bed, a bookshelf without books, and a single poster on the wall advertising a jazz festival, its
J
shaped like a saxophone. The guy opened a drawer. His hands moved toward my face. One held a miniature plastic spoon, its yellow and red handle molded into the shape of Ronald McDonald’s grinning head. The
other cupped a hill of white powder. “Snort this.” I didn’t want to, but I was already fucked up, and the coke looked cute, like glistening grains of sugar. I brought some to a nostril and breathed in. “Again,” he said. Again.

He snorted the rest. Then he began tearing off his clothes and throwing them, arms flailing. Buttons popped; fabric stretched and ripped. He was evidently emulating scenes from various butch pornos. The polo shirt sailed past my head like a pastel pterodactyl. “Strip,” he commanded. His dick had already hardened. It looked massive, an image from a joke’s unfunny punchline, and it curved upward like a giant accusing finger. “Go down there, boy.”

I figured I’d been lucky, considering most of the johns I’d tricked with had been older milquetoast types who hadn’t forced me to suck or get fucked. A few had simply held me in wrinkly arms, whispering crap like “You’re daddy’s little boy” or something equally embarrassing. Now, with me drunk and god-only-knew-how-many subway stops from home, those elementary acts had slipped away. I fell to my knees and took his dick in my mouth.

“You like that, don’t you?” he said. He fucked my face. “Swallow it deep. Moan for me, let me know how good it is.” That seemed sickening for some reason. He thrust it farther, its head tearing at the back of my throat. It choked me, and I winced. I let up a little, pulling my head back, and as his dick slid out I felt him spit on me. I heard the distinct pull of the phlegm from deep in his throat, the pause, and finally the cartoony “phew” as the spit hailed from his mouth. A thumb-sized blob hit my cheek.

I stood. For the first time, I was scared. For the first time, I was fathoms away from my usual helm of control.

He shoved me onto his waterbed, the sloshing as sudden and loud as if I’d been tossed into an ocean. He placed a knee on the bed, grabbed his dick, and slapped my face
with it. It hit the blob of spit, and a tiny puddle splashed into my eye. “You’re not finished, slut,” he said, then slammed back into my mouth. I was drunk; this wasn’t supposed to be happening. I imagined corkscrewing his dick from his body and tossing it through the window, into his Brighton Beach garden, seven floors below. That image should have been funny, but it wasn’t.

His arm wrapped around my chest. He flipped me over in one motion, as if my body had been hollowed out. Slosh, slosh. “I’m going to give the slut what he needs.” His thumb wriggled around in my ass crack, then punctured the hole.

I pictured the black scar on his thumbnail, now fishing around in the place where only one other person had been, so many years before. I briefly drifted back there. “Tell me you like it, Neil, tell Coach how much you like it.” I’d told him so. Had that been truth, or just a stream of gibberish? “Tell me.”

“No,” I said. “It’s going too far.” My head reeled, and I hoped he could understand the garble. “This is what I don’t do.” I managed to squirm off the bed, my arm held out to keep him away. He lifted his knee and stood before me, eyes flashing.

The room grew quiet. In the outside hallway, I could hear footsteps, a walk breaking into a run. “You were at that place,” he said. “I know what you were there for. You’ll do what I tell you. That’s what a slut does.”

“I don’t know why I was there,” I said. “I really don’t.” The door to the adjoining room was cracked slightly, and when I peeked around his shoulder I could see a bathtub’s porcelain edge. “Just wait a minute,” I told him. “Let me piss. Then…I’ll be back in a second.”

I expected his meaty arm to shoot out and grab me, but it didn’t. I brushed past him, made it to the bathroom, slammed the door. It had one of those old-fashioned locks, a
little hook-shaped latch that fit into a silver eyehole. I fastened it and sat on the tub’s edge, breathing. The drug’s grains exploded through my brain. In a matter of hours, I would land in Kansas again. Calm down, I told myself. Calm
him
down. Be careful, finish, get the money.

Then I heard him, trying to get in. I looked at the door. The john had wedged the end of a butter knife into the crack, and he wiggled it higher, toward the space where the latch connected door with frame. I actually felt my body tremble. The knife pushed higher, meddling closer to the latch until their silvers struck. The latch came loose, clicking back against the door. A second of silence passed. Then the door flew open, and the john came thundering in.

He’s going to kill me,
I thought. I imagined the thin, pliable shape of the butter knife thudding against my skin over and over, at last breaking through to razor my heart. I held up one hand to stop him. But he wasn’t going to stab. Instead, he tossed the knife into the air. It made a half-revolution, and he caught it again, stepped toward me, and raised the thick handle. It smacked against my forehead.
Snap.

I fell backward. The room spun in a blurry maelstrom, the naked john its center. I landed in the bathtub. My face was turned away from him, toward the gold circle of the drain. I saw stray beads of water, a soap bubble, a black pubic hair. “You’re getting fucked whether you want it or not,” his voice said, and in the cold space of the bathroom it echoed like a barbarous god’s. “And I know you want it.”

For a second I thought of Zeke, sprawled on his hotel bed, disease dotting his skin. This trick was much worse. I felt my legs being pulled up, slabs of meat a butcher hoists toward the gleaming hook. He maneuvered me into a failed headstand, and the side of my face slammed against the tub’s bottom. Something made the sound of a walnut cracking.