Shuck (5 page)

Fuck-you notes in champagne bottles cast to sea, private blackness left to ache to itself, a lifetime of secrets and a headful of inside jokes, breakup emails snagged by the spam filter.

Derek was busy blowing his head open with color experiments.

I learned to recognize the pattern: a crazy look in his eye, shades of an impossible hue splashing itself on the inside of his head, and then days of pouring and mixing, tinting and distilling, all in a mad quest to replicate it in reality so his world could be sane. Anyone in his position would do the same. The rainbows you see have to match
the ones in your head. They just have to.

Say it's a shade of Ajax blue that haunts him, some shadowy mix of peacock and ultramarine, with a touch of afternoon sky. There's a certain Sunlight dish-soap yellow that's elusive and hard to describe, even though there's no mistaking it. Or it will be the ice-mint green in his tube of Aquafresh.

I remind him that not every color in the household product universe is sold in tubes, or can be replicated, but he disagrees. He won't give up.

He'll agonize over a seafood cream sauce for hours, hunched over a nonstick T-Fal pan brooding over the tint, wondering if white was always off-white, becoming more sure with every stir that only the blind can see the color that milk is supposed to be.

Here is a partial list of the color schemes that Derek spends his life trying to create, with varying degrees of success:

Nasturtiums bashed to death in their own pollen.

Butterfly wings lit by moonlight.

Tire skid marks on new pavement.

Charred African violets dipped in wine.

Brittle hail in a lightning storm.

Cut-up gums medicated with strawberry juice.

Sea foam green.

The scabby red of scratch marks healing on my back.

The blackening of blood is particularly hard to capture because it's always in a state of change. Derek can never decide when it's reached the peak of beauty. He fawns over my back from moment to moment.

He dribbles and spatters, stirs and folds, mashes and kaleidoscopes
until the insanity of being perpetually
almost there
makes him throw the whole mess against the wall.

And, of course, colors are never the same when they dry.

I have something to confess to you. That part about getting beat up behind a dumpster, it wasn't all true. I'm kind of embarrassed about it, but I wanted you to experience the emotional grit I felt. The guy was real, and so was the hundred bucks between my cheeks, but he fucked me in a hotel room, not behind a dumpster. It's just that I wanted you to see me the same way he did—as a piece of trash. If I told you about the room service and champagne bucket, would you have been able to relate to my pain? Probably not.

The donkey-punch was also a bit of a stretch. It was more of a playful slap, but I needed you to see the humiliation in full bleeding color. The bruises were real, but I had to give them to myself. I had to make the outside of me match the inside of me.

I know what you're thinking. You're wondering if everything I've told you is a lie, and you have every right to be suspicious. But you have to know that I'll never lie outright, I'll just transform, until you get the point of what I'm trying to say.

I haven't had a friend in years. Derek doesn't count because our web gets sticky. I'm talking about someone you can spill your guts to without worrying you'll hurt them. Emotions on a dimmer switch.

You know ... a buddy?

Cops on every corner, undercover feds in navy blue Crown Victorias, detectives pretending to be cab drivers.

Multiplying like amoebae, ticketing urinators, narcing through the five boroughs, talking sideways into radios, cleaning up, ticketing smokers, bleaching Broadway, closing peep shows, clamping down, speeding up, erasing the smell of cum from Eighth Avenue, the smell of beer from the subway, ticketing other cops, hauling in rent boys, stealing joints, stealing turf, turning shoplifting into a bloodsport, catching us all.

I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever get published. They say that writers should scribble something every day, but these days the words come so hard.

I can't even write at alt.coffee, a supposed writers' café where inspiration comes in three forms: iced coffees, lattes, and Nanaimo bars with some kind of insane shit in them, either speed or Drano.

The incessant whine of the coffee grinder isn't what bothers me, and it's not the horrible décor: decrepit sofas in puke yellow and blister red, lamps with torn velvet shades. It's not even the conspiracy nuts, swapping theories over deafening laptop key clatter, who drive me crazy. They talk about the Internet as if it'll still be around in five years.

It's the actors, the ones so slick that gum doesn't even stick to their shoes, who make me want to retch.

A Colgate smile flashed in front of my face.

“Hey, I'm Chase, and a school bus crushed my legs.”

They looked intact to me.

“
Terror Firmer
by Troma Films.”

“Excuse me?”

“He's an actor and he's almost famous,” an earthy girl beside him said. “Famous people are allowed to speak in incomplete sentences. I'm Forest.”

“Oh.”

“They had a school bus crush my legs.”

“Brilliant,” I said.

“He is,” Forest said from under her beige Stevie Nicks shawl.

“Are you famous, too?” I said.

She smiled like she had eaten a lemon.

“So what do you do, dude?” Chase asked me.

That shock of conditioner-soaked hair.

“I enjoy life.”

He and Forest laughed in measured staccato notes like they had rehearsed this before. I was playing my part exceptionally well, considering this was my first run-through.

“You have to do
something
,” she said. “You can't
not
do anything. This is
New York
.”

“I'm a writer.”

“Rock the Casbah,” Chase said.

“Wait—are you published?” Forest said.

“Not yet.”

“So then what do you really do? Don't be ashamed of how you spend your life.”

“Dude, he said that he's a writer. He's cool.”

Chase checked out the café, I'm guessing to see who was admiring
his hair, and Forest took my hand in hers in a creepy way.

“I can feel that you're a communicator.” Her eyes shot wide open. “A
great
one. Unpublished writers have so much potential. You're bursting, aren't you? I can ... mmm ... feel it.”

“I
told
you he was a writer,” Chase said, and slapped me on the back.

I know I'm going to sound like a snob, but it needs to be said—if you don't have Fiorucci sneakers like mine, your life will be shit, and I can prove it.

Do you think blisters are the way to happiness? If you're not wearing calfskin uppers, you're going to need a lifetime supply of Band-Aids. Hacks like Salvatore Ferragamo think they can get away with rubber soles when they should be leather, while cheapskates like Bruno Magli use proper leather soles but make them too thin. They either want you to destroy your arches or puncture yourself with city sharps.

I wonder how Manolo Blahnik expects to build a fashion brand around glue. Even people who cripple themselves with mediocre footwear know that sewn construction is the only way to keep a shoe together. It's common sense.