Guide, p.10
Guide, page 10
“I love when my hair looks like that,” Drew said.
“So what were you thinking?” I wondered.
“What do you mean?”
“Then,” I said. “While he was jerking you off.”
“I don’t know. I was probably hoping my hair looked okay. I’m really cute, aren’t I?”
“Well, duh.”
On TV, Mason kept jerking Drew off. He said, “I’m imagining you’re Chris Gentry from Menswear, so if I call you Chris, or say something that sounds incongruous, don’t worry.” Then Drew raised himself up on his elbows and said, “What is Menswear? Everybody keeps saying I look like somebody in Menswear.” Then Mason said, “They’re a cute, flash, disposable British pop band. Can you pretend you’re asleep?” Then Drew said, “Whatever, sure,” and did a kooky pratfall. Then his unconscious body said, “Are they any good?” Then Mason stood up, walked to the head of the bed, and blocked our view of Drew’s face with his ass. Then his ass started jiggling, and there were the faint squishy sounds of a mouth being fucked. Then Mason said, “They’re all right.”
“This part’s boring,” Drew said. “How long does this last?”
“Longer than it should.”
“So I’d look cute if I was dead, hunh?” Drew looked back at me—or, should I say, he tried to, because his neck wasn’t all that flexible, so I doubt he saw much.
“Maybe for ten minutes.”
Drew looked hurt. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you’d stiffen up.”
Drew thought about that. “I could still look cute, couldn’t I? One time my dad took a picture of me all crashed out and I thought I looked hot.” He turned to the screen. “This is taking forever.”
“Did you ever see that picture of River Phoenix in his coffin?”
“No, unh-unh.”
I got up, walked into my office, opened a drawer in the file cabinet, raised the River Phoenix file an inch higher than the rest, flipped through the dozens of stills, tear sheets, and magazine articles until I found a yellowed clipping I’d ripped from the National Enquirer, then closed the drawer and returned to the living room.
“Can I fastforward through this?” he asked.
“It’s almost over. Here, look.”
Drew turned just enough to snatch the clipping, then flattened it out on the rug. “Wow.”
“Yeah, well, that’s death.”
“Oh, my God, you mean I’d look like that? No way. It’s because he did heroin.”
In the picture, River Phoenix, whose cultist parents were spiritually opposed to beautifying the dead, was visibly rotting away.
“Hopefully you’ll be so old when you die that it won’t be that big of a shift.” That felt evil.
On TV, Mason’s ass cheeks stopped jiggling. He backed toward the camera. “Give me a second,” he said. “Don’t move.” Then he walked out of the picture. Then a very flushed, screwy-eyed, come-splattered Drew said, “That was cool,” and licked some sperm off his lips. Then Mason’s voice said, “You could say that.” Then Drew swallowed the sperm and said, “It must have been cool to see your dick in my mouth.” Then Mason’s voice said, “How so?” Then Drew, looking a little confused, said, “You know, because I’m cute,” and laughed nervously. Then Mason’s voice said, “What a curious statement.” Then Drew, looking more confused, said, “What do you mean?” Then Mason’s voice said, “Well, that you can be so objective.” Then Drew, who didn’t seem to understand what Mason meant, said, “Oh, sorry.” Then Mason’s voice said, “No need to apologize.”
Drew frowned at the screen. “My hair’s a mess,” he said. “It should always be hanging in my eyes, like it is now.” He turned slightly to show me.
“Why?” The difference seemed subtle. I’d just reached beneath Drew’s waist, found the snap on his jeans, popped it, found the little zipper tab and was dragging it all the way down.
“Because I have a weird forehead.” He turned and grinned at me. “What are you doing?”
“How is it weird?” I extracted my hands, then gripped the seat of his cutoffs and worked them down to his knees. The long, flimsy tail of his T-shirt was still in my way, but I lifted it up ceremoniously. His ass was doing its helmet thing, and yeah, okay, it was technically perfect, and yeah, okay, when I touched it I felt kind of faint.
“I don’t know,” Drew said. “It just is.” He reached back and squeezed his ass, maybe checking for lint, maybe to turn himself on. He handled each cheek, dug a fingertip into his ass crack, itched, itched, then brought that finger up to his nose and took a sniff.
“What’s the verdict?” I asked.
Drew looked horrified. “What? Oh, heh heh, I smell kind of cool. Check it out.” And he held out the finger. Luckily, it smelled gross.
My plan was to get Drew’s ass out in the open, then let whatever happened happen. I’d figured its beauty would dictate my behavior, i.e., what I said before about the Death Star. But in person the ass was a little too cutesy or something. Maybe if I’d been a kid I could have decoded whatever was sleazy and/or delicious about it, but I wasn’t, of course, so it was more like I’d just been given a toy that I was slightly too old for. Then I got an idea.
On TV, Drew was fingering his bangs into place. In life, he was cringing and shielding his eyes from the sight of his half-exposed forehead.
“You’re in the clear,” I said. I tried to pry his little ass cheeks apart with my thumbs, but the things might as well have been carved out of one piece of wood. “Relax your ass, okay?”
Drew checked the screen. “Yeah, but my hair can be so much better.”
“Relax your ass.” I sounded angrier than I felt.
“What? Oh, right.” It collapsed.
On TV, Mason was back in the picture. He set a jar of lubricant on the night table and unscrewed its lid, then joined Drew on the bed. Then Drew eyeballed the lube and said, “Cool.” Then Mason said, “Glad you think so,” and pursed his lips like he does when he’s thinking. Then Drew looked at Mason’s lips and said, “What?” Then Mason said, “You know how in calisthenics there’s this one exercise where you pretend like you’re riding a bike in the air?” Then Drew said, “Sure.” Then Mason said, “Do that now, only don’t pump your legs.” Then Drew said, “Cool,” positioned himself, and said, “What do I do with my legs?” Then Mason took one of Drew’s ankles in each hand, parted his legs, and said, “Keep them like that.” Then Drew scrunched up his face and tried very, very hard to stabilize his lower body. Then Mason said, “Perfect,” and buried his tongue in Drew’s asshole.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if you could sleep with yourself?” Drew asked.
“Maybe in your case.”
“Sometimes when I jerk off, I look in a mirror. Is that weird?”
“What? Oh, not in your case.” I was trying to think.
I got this idea of how to flush the innocence from Drew’s body. I mean, so I could think about fucking or eating him out or whatever. It involved digging my thumbs into his ass crack, prying it open, then smearing the cheeks to their respective sides of Drew’s body and securing them there with my fists. It was harder to do than it sounds. Things kept escaping. When every muscle and fat globule was in place, and the ass cheeks were razed, there was nothing to see but a smallish, misshapen plateau with a crude, pink, indented triangular splotch in the center.
“What are you doing?” Drew asked. He tried to look back, and I guess he saw something, however vague, because his eyes bugged. “Wow, that’s intense. Is it still sexy? Because I can’t tell.”
I thought for a second. “In the context of your body, yeah.”
“Cool.” He turned and checked the TV. “Okay, I know why Mason did this, heh heh.” He squinted. “I have a weird look on my face. What does it look like I’m thinking?”
“You tell me,” I said.
On TV, Mason was dabbing the lube onto Drew’s asshole. Then he wiped off his gooey fingertips on the bed, aimed his dick, pressed its head to Drew’s asshole, and shoved. Then Drew sucked in a gigantic breath and said, “Shit.” Then Mason said, “Please don’t make noise.” Then Drew pounded the bed with his fists and said, “Sorry, I’m sorry, I just thought …” but he couldn’t continue. Then Mason pulled his dick all the way out of Drew’s ass, paused, re-aimed, shoved it all the way in, and said, “What?” Then Drew breathed noisily a few times and said, “That you should always wear a condom.” Then Mason said, “No, that’s not true.” Then Drew opened his mouth very wide, closed it, sort of shrieked, and said, “Oh.”
“Just that it was cool, I guess,” Drew said. He was studying himself. “Do you think my voice is weird? Because sometimes I think it’s kind of … nosy. Or what do you call it?”
“Nasal. Come on, you must have been thinking more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you have emotions. You’re not stupid.”
“Really? You think so?”
I was suddenly so sick of giving him compliments. “Yeah. Look, shut up for a minute.” I freed his ass, and it bounced back.
“Why?” He turned and glanced worriedly at his ass, then at me.
“So I can pretend you’re that Menswear guy.”
“Him again,” Drew said sort of huffily.
Then I got an idea.
I crossed my legs, patted one of my knees, and said, “Here.” Drew raised himself up, like he was beginning a push-up. I slid my thighs underneath him. He collapsed, bent and unbent his legs until he was comfortable, then fixed his eyes on the screen. I spanked Drew for several minutes, and he laughed hysterically, and his ass got really smudgy and stupid. It fascinated me, sort of like that heat-sensitive coffee cup fascinates me, but I wasn’t exactly turned on. So after a while I gave up and thought, Maybe if he was unconscious. It sounds like a huge mental leap, but actually it was just the next obvious idea in line. About then the video ended, conveniently enough.
“Close your eyes,” I said. “Don’t move.”
I eased out from under him, walked to my bookcase, and removed The New Murderer’s Handbook, by Richard K. Krousher. I found the chapter on head injuries, then located the specific paragraph that described how you could hit someone on one particular part of the head, knock him unconscious, and cause permanent motor dysfunction without actually killing him. I replaced the book, walked to where the skateboard had rolled, picked it up, found a good place for it in my hands, then walked back to Drew and realized pretty quickly that it was going to be too hard to aim when his head was that close to the floor.
“I’m going to help you up,” I said, and grabbed ahold of his forearm. “But don’t open your eyes or you’ll ruin it.”
“This is really cool,” Drew said as I hauled him to his knees. “I mean, like, ‘What’s he going to do?’”
Drew’s chest was splotchy and pink—from the carpet, I guess —and he had a pointy hard-on, and his ass looked like a big vegetable, and—with his eyes shut, at least—his resemblance to Mens-wear’s Chris Gentry was kind of unnerving. “Open your eyes,” I said.
The first thing he saw was the skateboard. “Oh, cool,” he said.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
He looked bemused. “That’s funny.”
“I’m serious.”
“I don’t know. Something to do with art.”
“You want to be an artist?”
“Sure.”
“What do you want to express as an artist?”
“Oh, my God, seriously?” He closed his eyes, rumpled his face, made a few swishy noises with his mouth, then smiled and reopened his eyes. “The void at the center of everything.”
I guess I looked shocked.
“I’m kidding. No, my dad said that once about some painting he owns. I don’t want to be an artist. Artists are too weird. I wouldn’t mind if some artist fell in love with me and did nothing but make art about me and we got really famous and rich. That would be kind of cool.”
“That’s sort of more what I thought you’d say.”
“Yeah?” he asked. He looked at the skateboard. “So what’s that for?”
“I’m going to knock you unconscious,” I said.
He laughed. “How?”
“I’m going to hit you on the head with it.”
“Oh, sure,” he said.
“You won’t die. It’ll just make you sort of a zombie.”
“Oh, right,” he said sarcastically.
I assumed this position I vaguely remembered from gym class or somewhere, legs spread, all my weight on the right. I pretended the board was a bat and raised it over my shoulder. Then I thought about nailing Drew’s head. I imagined the staticky pop as it cracked. I saw him collapse. I saw myself pounce. I saw myself chew, lick, fuck, fist-fuck, claw, strangle, and whittle away until he was just a big oily red stain on my floor. It gave me a frightening hard-on. But maybe because Drew didn’t think I could do such a thing, or maybe because I’m just not very evil, I couldn’t go through with it. Or I didn’t in this case. It was a simple decision, seconds long, pain free, but I wouldn’t know how to describe how I made it. Point is, it felt like no big deal whatsoever, although it was easily the most significant decision I’d ever made. Anyway, I lowered the skateboard. “Kidding,” I said.
“Duh.” Drew sat back on his calves. He stretched, cracked his neck. His whole body emitted these soft little pops.
Then I got an idea.
I strolled into my office and dialed Mason’s number. He always screened calls, but I was sure he’d pick up if I used a particular tone of voice. It was our code for when one of us had an idea whose implementation required the services of a mock evil twin. I wouldn’t know how to describe it. Anyway, it worked.
“Yeah, hi,” he said. “Did you hear what happened to me? Oh, right, we were on the phone.”
“Scott told me some guy beat you up.”
“Smear’s roadie,” Mason said.
“You okay?”
“No, but it was worth it.”
“So look,” I said. “Drew’s here and there’s a remote chance I’m going to kill him. You want to come over and film it?”
Mason snickered, I think. “Sure. This is a switch.”
“You know me,” I said, and hung up.
I returned to the living room. Drew was lying facedown on the rug. I’d covered his mouth with electrical tape, blindfolded him with the R.E.M. T-shirt, and tied his wrists with a sock. When I approached, the floor creaked, and he tried to say something, but thanks to the tape, his conversational skills had been reduced to an appreciative “mm.” It was nice.
“Mason’s coming over to film us,” I said. “That’s cool, right?”
“Mm.”
“Just play along with whatever I say, okay? I’m going to tell him I’ve knocked you unconscious.”
I think Drew laughed, but it sounded like “Mm mm mm mm,” so as far as I knew, he could have been pleading with me to untie him.
I let Mason in. When I saw the damage Smear’s roadie had done to his face, I had this bizarre déjà vu. You know, as though he had walked through the door in a previous life. Strange. Then the déjà vu cross-faded into an LSD flashback, I guess. I was back in the kitchen eyeballing that glass of V8, and the doorbell was ringing. Then I was back in Mason’s presence again. I have no idea what it means. Anyway, it only lasted a second or two, after which we exchanged our hellos. Then he walked into the living room, saw Drew tied up, grabbed his videocam, put it up to his eye, and said, “Well, I’m impressed.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said.
“What’s wrong with him?” The damage to Mason’s face had made him seem more implacable than ever.
“I hit him on the head,” I said. “With that skateboard.”
Mason aimed at the skateboard. “You’re not really going to kill him.”
“I don’t know.”
“But I thought you’d gone raver.”
“I need to do this to put me over the hump,” I said. “Why, what’s your justification?”
“Oh, I have no problem with it.” Mason panned around the room. When his lens hit the couch, he zoomed in. “What’s that?”
We spent the next maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes opening Drew’s little gift. I’d told Drew about my collection of Paul souvenirs during one of our phone conversations, and I guess it had made an impression. What he’d given to me was a kind of Drew Baldwin Museum-ette. There were three small pill bottles. One held a half dozen nail clippings. One held a brown pubic hair. One held a brownish red flake. That bottle’s label read NOSEBLEED. There was a bulging envelope on which Drew had scrawled, I NEED THESE BACK. SORRY. It held a ragged deck of different-size photos. Most were Polaroids of Drew nude on a bed, hard and/or spreading his ass cheeks. He’d written stupid things on their backs like COME AND GET IT and WORSHIP ME. One showed a poorly lit, middle-age man who might or might not have been a local art dealer, Harry something or other. On its back Drew had scrawled, HE PAID ME TWO HUNDRED BUCKS FOR MY USED UNDERWEAR. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?! There were old shots of Drew in his crib, at his third birthday party, at Disneyland, at the zoo, in a Witchiepoo Halloween costume. Deeper down in the box, we found three mayonnaise jars. One was half-filled with piss. One contained a small turd. One was opaque with vomit. The whole thing was just so unbelievably charming— to us, anyway. And I thought, I can’t kill this kid. He’s too … something.
“Do you think he’s read Proust?” Mason was studying a shot of the very young Drew petting a llama. I’m not sure what he saw in there.
“Doubt it.”
He handed me the photo. “The kid’s brilliant. I had no idea.”
“It’s a really great gift.” I started putting everything back in the box.
“Oh, it’s incredible,” Mason said, watching the stuff go away.
I paused on one of the new Polaroids. It was a close-up of Drew’s ass. The shot had been overexposed and was just out of focus. “Didn’t you say you’ve had cannibal fantasies?”
