Guide, p.4
Guide, page 4
One of my fingers was up Chris’s ass. There was this hard rock of shit stuck in there like some horrid antique. I was poking it around. We were lying side by side on the couch. He seemed very far away. Or, should I say, I’d just noticed the distance. “What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He’d been staring at … what … the TV? By that point it was nothing but a frame with some grayish-white snow in the center.
“Tell me,” I said, absentmindedly pinching his nipples. They were already flowery from my twists, pokes, et cetera.
Chris’s hand fell on the top of my head. “I don’t know,” he repeated. He patted me several times. “I’m just so fucked up. I kind of hate it.”
“Like how?” And I squeezed a second finger up his asshole. “You mean, the heroin?”
“That,” he said. “But not only that. Can I tell you something weird?”
Chris turned onto his side very carefully, then adjusted his head until our eyes were aligned. I’ve never seen tinier pupils. Still, there was something irregular in them—I mean, apart from his perpetual dazed self-involvement. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to relate to the fingers I’d plugged into his ass, although they must have been affecting his thinking. Technically, I mean.
“I want to die,” Chris said. Then his eyes studied mine. “I had this feeling, during the sex, that you knew.”
“When?” It sounds strange, but if things get intense in my life, I grow extremely objective, like a journalist.
“I don’t remember. You seemed kind of angry.”
I’d just worked a third finger into his ass, so most of my thoughts were down there, relaxing in the snugness and heat. “That’s so weird,” I said. I’d just remembered the moment. We’d been fucking face-to-face, and a detail from one of my violent fantasies slipped out my mouth, and I think I’d said, “Die,” very softly. “Yeah, I was imagining killing you.”
“I could tell.” He looked up at the ceiling, but he might have been thinking of the sky. “Well, I kind of wish you had.”
“You shouldn’t say that,” I said. “It’s too amazing.”
Chris looked away, squinted at something, then checked back. “Listen, I just … oh, fuck.” He shut his eyes. “Please.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Come on.” I slid my unoccupied arm around his back, and we hugged for a while. I was very turned on from exploring his ass, so it felt like love, but in this backhanded way, if that makes any sense. Or it did to me. I mean, I felt totally relaxed, which I almost never feel.
“Think about it,” he whispered.
“I did.”
“You should kill me.”
“I’d get caught.” That was sort of a joke.
“I don’t care.” Chris let out a rough, whistly breath. “Wait here,” he added. Then he carefully eased himself off my fingers, struggled to his feet, tottered across the room, and shoved one hand into the bookcase. “Read this.” He yanked out a book, turned, and tossed it.
I skimmed the book. It was three-quarters cartoony pictures and one-quarter gigantic words, very few of them more than one syllable. A little boy who looked vaguely like Chris lost his way in a forest. He noticed a cabin and knocked on the door. A man who looked vaguely like me answered. The man was all friendly at first, but a few pages later he axed the little boy into millions of pieces. The pictures made it look magical.
We sat on the couch, reading books. Chris had grabbed about a dozen and stacked them between us. He was himself again, meaning he looked like an oversize child with unfocused blue eyes.
“They’re so violent,” I said.
“Mm-hm,” he mumbled. He seemed very involved in a story.
The book I was skimming concerned a little boy, maybe Swiss, who gets cooked in an evil dwarf’s oven. “How long have you wanted to die, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Oh, God,” he said, and put down the book. “Since forever. But it’s gotten worse. I think it’s the heroin.”
“You should quit.”
“I know, I know.” He reopened the book and tried to bury his eyes in it.
“I’ll help you,” I said.
Chris wasn’t listening. He was back in the book, but he didn’t appear to be reading. His eyes looked too starey to take language in. Still, they zigzagged down page after page. “I should have died when I was a kid,” he mumbled, and shot me a glance. It was … fraught. I don’t know how else to describe it. Like he had an idea that was too gargantuan and/or unformulated to pass through such minuscule pupils. “What if it wasn’t just you?”
“Meaning?”
“Because there’s this other guy.” He put the book aside, took a deep breath, lurched off the couch, and stumbled toward the TV. “I just did a porn with him. Tell me if I’m crazy.” He ejected the old tape and slotted in a new one.
In the video, Chris is himself. His costar is a small, flabby boy with a humongous dick—who I slowly realize is a dwarf. Chris is flat on his back, nodding out and in, while the dwarf crawls all over him, licking and nibbling his details. At one point the dwarf takes a seat on Chris’s chest, leans way over, gets Chris’s neck in a tight stranglehold, meets his eyes, and makes an angry or terrified face.
“That guy totally wanted me dead,” Chris said. He smiled serenely and pushed his face into the porn, as if the TV screen were a sunlamp.
“This is creepy,” I said. “It’s like kiddie porn from hell.”
“I don’t think it would make any difference,” Chris continued, still sunning away. “I’ll just get old.”
“You can’t know that.”
“If I’d died as a kid, the world would be totally the same. I haven’t done shit in my life. I don’t even have any friends.”
“We’re friends.”
“Yeah, maybe.” He opened his eyes—technically anyway. “But wait, watch this. Look at him. Isn’t he just …?”
The dwarf continues to choke Chris as murderously as he can, given the babyishness of his hands and the relative girth of Chris’s neck. He still looks upset in some manner that’s hard to pinpoint. Chris’s face is very bloated and purple, but his eyes are just blissed. And without their disapproval, he does make one’s mind wander in scary directions. Or my mind, anyway. But then, I’m sick.
“I need another fix.” Chris shot to his feet, which made his knees crack explosively. “Do you mind?”
“What? No, no.” I was lost in the porn.
The porn had this strange, silly, magical … I don’t know, charm. I guess it was mostly the fact that I was watching a dwarf, with all his fairy-tale baggage. Anyway, when he finally unhanded Chris, clutched his dick, gave a few whacks, and came, all I could think was What the fuck?
“Shit,” said a voice down the hall.
“You okay?” The porn had just faded to black.
“Yeah.” A distant chair creaked. “I have to tell you my fantasy,” he yelled. “I keep planning it out in my head.” There were some clinks, scrapes. “Sometimes I sit here and think about it and think about it.”
“Do tell,” I yelled back.
“Okay, shit … well …”
In Chris’s fantasy, he’s a ten-year-old lost in some forest. He sees a cabin with sweetly lit windows, and knocks. A monster of some sort invites him inside. As soon as the door shuts, the monster tears Chris’s clothes off, ties him down on a bed, and tortures him for hours and hours. Then they fuck, and as the monster comes, he brings out this machete and hacks Chris’s head off. That’s making a long story short.
“Hey.” Chris stumbled through the door and flopped down beside me. He draped one leg over mine. “So what do you think?”
“It sounds like a snuff fairy tale.”
“Yeah, of course.” He waved at the book pile.
“I mean it’s completely unfeasible.”
“I guess.” Chris yawned, leaned in close, kissed my neck, and laid his head on my shoulder. “But isn’t it perfect?” He pecked me again. “Because then the killer and I would be equally happy.”
“Maybe for a second or two,” I said. “Then you’d just be dead, and he’d be paranoid and guilty for the rest of his life.”
“Whatever.” Chris’s head shifted around on my shoulder. “I’m going to nod for a minute, okay?”
“Sure.” I needed some time to reorient, anyhow.
It’s strange about junkies. I mean, how they smell. The only other place I’ve ever smelled that particular odor was once, years ago, when a friend of a friend had an epileptic fit in my living room. But in that case the odor exploded right out of him, and with junkies it’s more like a radiance.
“Think about … about …” Chris swallowed. “… how you’d want … to do it. Because … I’m open.”
Actually, I’d just gotten the strangest idea.
In my fantasy, Chris’s death wish would be the plot of a porn film. I’d write the script, he’d narrate, and the star would be a boy who resembled the much younger him. Essentially, the porn would recreate the fantasy he’d just related. My logic was: Maybe if Chris’s fantasy could be enacted on film, he’d have it to study but he would still be alive. And, on a purely selfish level, I’d be halfway to literalizing a dream.
“I like mine better,” Chris said. He was trying to open his eyes.
“That dwarf could play the monster.”
“Oh, really?” He sat up, blinked. “So … wait. I’d be in a fairy tale, and I’d die, and then … the fairy tale would be a film, so I would still be alive but I could watch myself die for the rest of my life?”
“Exactly.” I hadn’t really thought it out this far.
“Hunh.” Chris slid a book from the stack. “I want to be him,” he said, cracking the cover. His finger dropped on a page. It showed a little blond boy walking into some scrawl of a forest. “Watch.” He turned the page.
The boy walked, it got dark, he saw a cabin, he knocked on the door….
Chris’s face was getting looser, crazier, lost in the plot. I followed along for a while, then the story’s predictable twists and turns lost me, and my eyes trailed off into the wilds of his crotch. It made me want to wander away from the world. So I did.
“That feels nice.” Chris patted my hand, snuggled close, and shut the book. “So tell me your fantasy again. You know, slowly.”
Those were a pretty few minutes. Chris nodded out, and I daydreamed aloud. And my fantasy, which put a ten-year-old Chris look-alike through a lyrical nightmare of hot sex and torture, worked its black magic, or became a bizarre fairy tale. It made me feel like a kid. Or maybe I felt like a parent, because it wasn’t as if the tale itself became real. But Chris did. Or his story did.
Sunshine Superman
I’ve been hallucinating for hours off and on. According to the acid, which has just hijacked my mind yet again, I’m standing—or, rather, floating around—on the set of a snuff film in progress. My eyesight’s gone quite otherworldly, so it’s very hard to say, but that could be Chris tied to a bed. His face is slightly detached from his head, a thin, silvery, masklike hologram of his agonized features, almost translucent, hovering about an inch from where they usually rest. Some guy is bent over Chris, knife out, hacking his genitals off. It only takes a few seconds to free them, but the action keeps repeating, as though it were looped, all in extremely tight close-up. Each time they loosen, the murderer moans, and Chris sucks in a breath. It creates this terse, danceable rhythm. Then it stops. There’s a cut or whatever. It’s later. The murderer’s gone. Chris seems dead. I think that coin-purse-looking lump on the floor is his balls. And there’s a lot of other stuff going on, but I couldn’t translate it if you paid me. I’m writing this account a few hours after the fact, and my brain’s still too fried to go into much detail. That’s the one annoying thing about acid. Everything’s so complicated and vivid when you’re tripping, but language is hopeless at capturing wherever you are, or, in this case, wherever you recently were. Words just dry out. So if this section seems sketchy and half-baked, that’s why. But I’m doing my very best, really.
Mason’s nose breaks the dream’s surface, which ripples out, dims, then eventually dissolves into the lines, sags, et cetera, which years of ironic detachment have imprinted on his face. He’s looking me square in the eyes. “Scott and I are leaving,” he says, for the third or fourth time, I think. All I really understand is the absence of Luke from that sentence. “Are you back among the living?”
“I’m cool.” I am, although, like I said, several seconds before I’d been in virtual reality, watching some figment of my imagination trash the spitting image of someone I … I was about to say love, but that’s not really true. “Where’s Luke?”
“Luke, Luke, Luke,” Mason says in this singsongy voice. He’s making his “I know you” face. I’m way too fucked up to describe it at the moment. “Luke’s going to ask if he can crash here,” he adds, overmeaningfully. Then his eyes become two thrift-store-painting-like takes on my emotions re Luke that are so much cheesier than the thing they depict that they’re sort of like souvenirs you’d pick up at Niagara Falls or wherever.
“Fuck off.” I hear the microwave ping in my kitchen. Because Luke must have caused it, it sounds like God, I swear.
“This was such a mind-fuck,” Scott says. I can’t quite make him out, but I’d know that whine anywhere. Oh, wait, there he is, across the living room, studying this framed pencil drawing he gave me last year—a pseudo-Japanimation frame which shows Astroboy, Ranma, Speed Racer, and Devilman rimming one another in a daisy chain—which is probably all scratched to shit by shooting-star-like light trails, if my eyesight’s anything to go by. “I can’t do acid anymore,” he continues. “It makes me think art is pathetic, and I can’t think art’s pathetic, even if it is.” Then he looks at Mason and me for approval, disclaimers. But I’m on acid, so art does seem pathetic, even though it isn’t, I’m sure.
Luke enters eating a grilled Swiss cheese sandwich. “Do you mind if I hang around?” he asks.
It’s so weird. As soon as Luke entered my peripheral vision, I became happy. And because I’m on acid, I can literally feel and even hear that emotion corrupt my interior. Every atom combusts or whatever. You know, like they’re wannabe embers, and my body’s a … I don’t know, fancy-shmancy fireplace or something. Point is, I’m glowing, et cetera.
“That’d be great,” I say. And I look into Luke’s immense, cartoony eyes with so much love that I feel like my skin offers no personal protection whatsoever.
Luke makes a happy, goofball face and gives the cheese sandwich a lionesque chomp. “I can’t believe I’m hungry,” he says between chews.
Scott and Mason are grayish, like pieces of the living room that just happen to be able to move.
“You have a cool place,” Luke says, looking around. “I’ve always thought so.” He must mean the run-down, eccentric, bread-box-shaped shell that I’ve crammed with CDs, books, and friends’ artwork. It was designed by some Frank Lloyd Wright type in the fifties. The roof leaks, the paint’s peeling, but it does look kind of fairy-taleish if you don’t have to live here. “The place I’m living is such a hellhole.”
“So why don’t you move in?” I guess that sounds insane, but frankly, I’ve been fantasizing for months about asking him to live here.
Luke stops chewing. “Seriously?” he says with his mouth full.
“Yeah.”
He swallows. “When?”
“Now. I won’t even charge you rent.”
“Why not?” He takes another bite.
“I don’t know. Because I’m okay financially. And I’d love you to live here.”
Mason and Scott are locating their coats or whatever.
“Cool,” Luke says, and swallows. “I’ll drop my stuff off tomorrow. Not that I have much, just some CDs, clothes, posters …” Then he smiles. From what I can gather, the smile means he’s happy, and that he can tell I appreciate his happiness, and that he appreciates my appreciation, and that he wants to be appreciated so unbelievably. It feels like love, whether it is or not.
Oh, Mason and Scott leave the house around now, I don’t care. Suffice it to say, Mason exudes a sleazy, conspiratorial air that I can’t relate to at all. Scott is sullen, wrecked.
I smile at Luke’s face, which is still smiling at me. There’s something in the air between us that I’ve never … what’s the right word? … experienced before, or not with this assuredness, and which I have decided to call love, because I want to be loved so unbelievably.
Luke’s face is more beautiful than it could possibly be—in the real world, I mean. It’s long and rather narrow, with deeply sculpted cheeks, a light spray of freckles, the beginnings of crow’s-feet, and a very faint five o’clock shadow. His eyes are huge, greenish-hazel, and engraved with a nervous expression. He has a small, pointy nose, full lips that seem to pout when he’s thinking, and big, mismatched ears. He keeps his long brown hair hiked up behind them, though several strands have fallen loose on one side and are jiggling around near his chin, which is square and abrupt, like a broken stalactite.
“How was your trip?” I say, because I have to say something.
“Nice,” Luke says. “I spent a lot of time looking at things. Like the parts of the walls that are all cracked and textured. And the rug. The patterns.”
“What about the kiddie porn?”
“Yuck,” Luke says. “TV’s too simplistic when you’re tripping. Or it is for me. And things like kiddie porn bore me.” He looks away, thinks a bit, pouts. “Can I say that Mason is starting to give me the creeps?”
“Me too. I used to think he and I were extremely alike, but I guess I’ve changed, or he’s changed. Probably both, because …”
Luke’s losing interest in the topic. He appears to be there, listening closely, but his eyes—or, rather, their beauty—have been refracted elsewhere by his fucked up mind’s movement. They’re being absorbed by his thoughts, which are probably weighing some personal issue, meaning they’ve become more and more sublime to think about—to me, anyway. Still, he nods politely. He does this a lot, i.e., moves on mentally. Sometimes I think he’s only about a third in the world at any given time. I’m probably the same way, except when he’s around. “Do you have any candles?” he asks softly from wherever he is.
