Guide, p.7
Guide, page 7
I’m in my office, typing a draft of the previous chapter. Several minutes ago, I pushed PLAY on my boom box.
Blur: I met him in a crowded room / Where people go to drink away their gloom.
The office is smallish and barren, apart from my desk, a file cabinet, a filthy Macintosh laptop, and a bulletin board pinned with pictures of people whose beauty inspires me for whatever reason.
On the bulletin board, left to right: Smear crouched in a cornfield, a close-up of Menswear’s Chris Gentry, Brad Renfro in swim trunks, Tinselstool’s Daniel James making a goofy face …
Two weeks after our kiddie porn festival, I stopped by Mason’s one night. He sat me down, fed the VCR, and, click, there he was fucking Drew Baldwin, the teenage son of a local art collector. Apparently, Mason had hidden his videocam in a pile of dirty laundry. Point is, I was torn. On the one hand, I had Mason dupe me a copy. On the other hand, I was so horrified by Mason’s act that I phoned Drew the following day to confess and console him. I thought the tape’s existence would freak the kid out, but apart from a few “wows,” he basically wanted to know if it made him look dorky or not. Anyway, we had the first of what became dozens of long, involved talks about intergenerational sex, which it turns out he’s totally into. Weird kid.
“Wake up, Chris.” Pam poked, poked. She was weighing a gnarly idea. “I’m counting to five, then I give you a salt shot. One … two …”
Chris had nodded out at her desk. “Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled.
Guided by Voices: Are you the person I’m scheduled to meet / To assess my skeleton’s worth?
Pam leaned in close to his ear. “I have an idea,” she said. “Take off your clothes, and go stand next to Goof.”
Pam’s idea: If Goof’s hair was dyed blond, he could pass for a much younger Chris. I.e., he’d make a decent stunt child for the violent scenes in our collaborative project. Light Goof mysteriously, face him away from the camera, and he could appear halfalive—meaning, drugged or unconscious. He could be tortured, mutilated, dismembered, et cetera, and thereby spare Pam the expense and/or hassle of faking such things. There was a huge moral issue involved, naturally, but first things first. And she explained this to Chris, who was too high and envious and shocked or whatever to respond complicatedly. Then Pam phoned me.
“Hi, Pam,” I whisper, so as not to disturb you-know-who. “What’s going on?” I’m up to the part in the chapter where Luke goes to bed.
Blur: No one here is alone / Satellites in every home.
“Listen,” said Pam’s voice. “About our project … I know this is jumping the gun, but would you mind if I shot one of the sex scenes today?”
“I guess not,” I say, half-listening. “Why?” Then I cringe while she explains her idea.
I know the Pam, Goof, and Chris story line is preposterous. But I’m in this dilemma. I’m still fascinated by kiddie porn, snuff, and so on, but I want to diminish their presence in my thoughts and, consequently, in my work. And the only way I can think to remove them is through a kind of gentrification, since I guess they still have to be here, as long as I can’t keep them out, which I obviously can’t. I’ve tried. What I want here is nothing but Luke and me lost in mutual affection. That’s what you’d be reading if I wasn’t so deeply fucked up.
Alex, Smear’s bass player, opens his eyes. Oh, yeah, hotel. They’re wrecked from the post-gig festivities. “Bloody hell,” he says.
Across the room, Damon, Smear’s singer, is watching TV. He’s a scrappy young blond with a cynical mind and huge, technically innocent eyes. “We have an interview out by the pool in an hour.” He points at the screen. “Look at this bollocks.”
MTV: Some long-haired grunge band stomps around in a strobe-lit graveyard, singing heroin’s praises.
Alex sits up. “I need a pack of fags,” he says, throwing off the covers. “Want anything?”
Alex, twenty-eight, is an insecure, self-involved, artsy borderline alcoholic with a blandly witty manner, passable musical talents, amazing luck, and this humongous IQ that he exercises only on occasion. Thing is, he’s cute beyond belief, if you’re into that type. Until the age of eleven or so he was a pudgy math nerd with thick glasses. Then he grew three feet, thinned, styled his hair, found a look, switched to contacts. Now he’s sublime—on the surface, at least. It has something to do with his modelesque features, and how they’re so thrown out of whack by his odd personality, and how unsuccessfully he has adopted a snooty demeanor to try to seem cool. Anyway, he makes a smallish segment of the rock music audience lose their shit, sexually.
Pam was comparing Goof’s ass, genitalia, and nipples to Chris’s. “Christ,” she joked. “Its dick’s bigger than yours.”
“Fuck you,” Chris yelled. He knocked down a couple of light stands. “This is fucking hard for me.”
“Look,” she yelled back. “All of this shit is for you, you stupid junkie. If you’d just—” The rest was drowned by the doorbell.
“What fucking now?” Chris staggered to the door, put his eye to the spy hole. “It’s your girlfriend,” he said, and automatically unlocked the door.
Back in the comic, Luke’s proving no match for the monster. With each frame Luke just becomes cuter and more ineffectual, and the monster grows more hideous and omniscient. There’s a reason for this, if you’re curious. In the real world, Scott’s torn between envying Luke’s naive faith in the power of magic and thinking the boy needs some serious therapy. And he’s pissed at himself for caring what Luke believes. And most important, Scott’s into Luke on a sexual level. All that’s in his comic somewhere. Plus, I’m sure there’s other stuff Scott can’t begin to acknowledge and, consequently, stuff I can’t begin to describe.
Scott laid down his pencil and shook out some early arthritis.
On the radio, a strangely good song by the Lemonheads, whom Scott normally hates or, more specifically, thinks could be up with the indie-rock gods, i.e., Pavement, Guided by Voices and Sebadoh, if they cared a little less about fame.
Scott’s thoughts, in summary: Maybe I’m jealous.
The Lemonheads: Mark my path / Mark my path down.
Love’s never been easy for me, especially when there’s sex in the mix. My best relationships have almost always involved an unspoken, fierce sexual tension and/or an attachment I couldn’t explain except in vague, spiritual terms. I’ve always loved people younger than me, often significantly so. Paul, whom I’ll tell you about very shortly, is a perfect example of the former. Luke must be the ultimate example of the latter. But my actual lovers—guys I’ve committed myself to emotionally and sexually, and who have desired or loved me in return—are these incredible blurs, like long-forgotten drug highs. What we went through together was far too intense, self-incriminating, and confused to rethink, much less put into words.
Alex walks into the daylight. To the hotel’s west, whitish glare. To the east, a line of garishly painted storefronts with trendy names like Cyberia, Web Pagers …
His outfit: a red Elastica T-shirt with slightly rank armpits; eggshell white boxer shorts; baggy black jeans sans belt; scuffed brown loafers, no socks.
Heading east, he sticks his head into store after store. Crap, crap, crap … Then he hears his name. Somewhere over his shoulder.
“Hi, uh …” said a thin, fey man carrying a six-pack of Pepsi. Unfortunately or fortunately, it was Mason. “I … liked your show last night.”
When I fall in love, it’s extreme. I don’t fall that often. In most cases, people unnerve me. Love tends to decimate my slightly distant and flaky persona. I become warm, awestruck, there, devoted, and selfless—so much so that it frightens and pisses off people I know but don’t love—meaning, most of my acquaintances and friends—because I deprioritize them to such an obvious degree, quit returning their calls, act distracted around them, et cetera. But the high is so great that it’s worth losing comrades.
Mason was so tense his voice sounded English. Maybe that’s why he seemed trustworthy. “Are you … staying near here?”
Alex approaches. Even in sandblasty daylight, his beauty is almost inhuman. “Just up the road. Listen, mate, you wouldn’t have a spare pack of fags?”
“I think I might, actually,” Mason said. “Look, I live right here.” He pointed up at a second-floor window. “Come on in for a second.”
When I was thirty, a friend threw a party to celebrate the publication of one of my books. Midway through the evening, this boy wandered in and immediately joined a few chums in one corner. He was so beautiful that my eyes whited out. I had to grab an acquaintance’s elbow to stay on my feet. In retrospect, he looked a lot like Smear’s Alex, with a suave, childlike face, devilish eyes, straight black hair chopped off just below the earlobes, and a slight, curvaceous body. We cruised each other for a while, then he left. The party’s host, noting my interest, rushed over and filled in some details. Paul was an art student, twenty, into slightly older men, and currently unattached. The host said he’d phone Paul the following day and suss out the boy’s sexual tastes. The next afternoon, my host called me excitedly. Paul loved my work, thought I was handsome, and we were all getting together for drinks late that night, if I was free.
“Jesus, Pam.” Sue had a newly shaved head, a nose pierce, and a boa constrictor tattoo that encircled her neck several times. “Get a grip, baby. This is insane.”
Guided by Voices: Send in striped white jets / In through stained-glass ceilings.
Pam tried to talk, but this sob kept exploding the ends of her sentences.
“And you,” Sue said. She kicked Chris’s wobbly ass. “Get your junkie ass out of my baby’s life. Now.”
After a few drinks, the host faked a personal crisis and left us alone in the bar. Paul was a bright boy, extremely vain, a bit tense and removed, with a soft, queeny voice that hesitated and wandered from topic to topic, undermined by his need to be loved or whatever. I’m excellent with people like that, so I had no trouble taking him home, although by the time we arrived we were too sloshed to do anything. He had to leave early for school the next day, but we agreed to start dating. When we finally had sex, it was parochial to say the least. Like, Paul insisted we wear our underwear the whole time. Apparently he’d been wooed, fucked once, and dumped quite a lot in his life, so he was sort of mother hen–ish about his dick, balls, and ass. Still, based on what I’d “accidentally” felt through the cotton, they seemed worth the wait.
Alone in the kitchen, Mason opened two Pepsis. Into one, he dropped several Rohypnols, then swirled the can.
“Ta,” Alex says when Mason hands him the soda. He glugs some. “Are these yours?” He walks to the wall where Mason’s thumbtacked some artwork.
“Things in progress,” said Mason. He was studying the seat of Alex’s pants. It was like looking at a rock pile and trying to imagine an avalanche.
One night, Paul asked if we could stop having sex altogether. When I got huffy, he burst into tears and told me stories of how he’d been sexually abused—things he’d never told anyone, et cetera. What he wanted more than anything else in the world was to be loved for himself, not just for his looks, and I cared enough about him that I agreed to a deep, primary, platonic relationship. Still, my attraction to him was severe, and repressing it made the desire go ballistic. Behaviorally, I was a saint. But when Paul wasn’t looking, I’d study his clothing, eyes peeled for the curve of an ass cheek, the eddy around a nipple, the bump of his dick. I got to be sort of a junkie. I tracked down his ex-lovers, got them drunk, clicked on a concealed tape recorder, and made them tell me every detail. I swiped his briefs, plucked his stray pubic hairs from the rim of my toilet, gathered cigarette butts, et cetera, and organized everything into small Ziploc bags which I labeled accordingly. I still have them in storage somewhere. I really should throw those out.
Scott filled in a frame. First he drew Luke in a comical, boxeresque stance. Then he encased the character in a gloomy industrial landscape.
Caption: And so the boy’s magical powers were put to the test.
For whatever reason, Scott filled the next frame with a close-up of Luke’s baggy jeans, specifically the crotch, not that anything showed.
Caption: If only he’d known what the monster was secretly after.
Rendering the chaotic ebb and flow of the denim, Scott got a hard-on. He was too busy being an artist to care, but it shifted the comic.
I mention Paul to emphasize how divided I am. And I bring that up again to introduce my dilemma regarding young Drew. We’ve become really close on the phone, flirtatious, chatty, and sort of scarily honest with each other. He knows I’m fascinated by kiddie porn. And that I think he’s incredibly cute. And I know he’s into much older men. And that he’s sort of into me. Anyway, after putting him off for as long as I could, he’s coming over tomorrow to hang out and look at that tape. I’m almost sure he sees this as a date. He’s said as much. I don’t know what I’m imagining. Or should I say I’ve discouraged his crush in this roundabout way that accidentally on purpose leaves open the remote possibility that something might happen just in case … God, I’m so fucked up.
Pam dropped to her knees. “Listen to me,” she said. “I was filming Chris and Goof, and the kid just dropped dead. That’s it.”
“So Chris shot him up,” Sue whispered. And she glared at Chris, who was standing over Goof, making a giant decision. “Don’t be naive, Pam. Junkies are evil incarnate.”
Guided by Voices: This is not a vacation / There is no place to go.
“I guess,” Pam said. She tried to sneak Chris a meaningful wince. “Yeah, I guess that’s what happened.”
†
I tend to get into things I can’t handle. Take Sniffles, one of the kids I wrote about in that Spin article. I’m still not quite ready to access the details, but for the moment, suffice it to say that the moral of that little story is: Given the right drugs, the wrong boy, the wrong mood, et cetera, I’m perfectly capable of evil, if such a thing exists. Like I said before, Sniffles’s trip was to be trashed during sex. Beating the shit out of boys isn’t one of my things, but I guess it was close to the murderous fantasies I had repressed around Chris, because I lost it. I literally had to throw myself off the bed at one point to keep from bashing his head in. Not that he knew or cared or anything. He just thought I was totally wild.
I should really call Sniffles and see how he’s doing. It’s been way, way too long. Unfortunately, tracking him down means a brief conversation with …
“Covenant House,” said a sugary voice. “Jeffrey Hitchcock speaking.”
“Hey, man,” I say. “What’s up? It’s Dennis. Look, I need to reach Sniffles.”
“Ah, yes, our delicious young punk friend,” said Jeffrey. Ugh. “Mm … I think I might just have a fax number. Let … me … check.”
First I have to hear about Jeffrey’s new “client,” a preteen illegal alien named Flaco who must be somewhere within earshot, since Jeffrey describes the poor kid in this ludicrous, pseudo-Shakespearean sonnetlike language that he adopts when there’s a fuckable boy in his presence. I.e., how the youth’s loins beckon kisses like a flower does bees or whatever. It astonishes me that kids fall for that shit, but I suppose Jeffrey’s nauseatingly stylized behavior could read as fairy-tale-esque if a kid were just nerdy enough and extremely attention-starved. Anyway, Jeffrey eventually gives me the number of a local AIDS hospice. Then I hang up, scribble a letter asking Sniffles to call me, and fax it. Almost the second I drop the receiver, the phone rings.
“You’re there,” Mason said. His voice had this … twist. It rang a weird bell. “So listen. You should come by. Right now.”
“Luke’s here,” I whisper. Last time Mason’s voice had that twist, I dropped by and he showed me the Drew tape.
Blur: We like to sing along / Although the words are wrong.
“So what?” Mason said. “Make some excuse. This is … well, let’s just say it’s important.” Then there was the time …
Mason strolled back to his studio. Alex had slumped to the floor. From the noisiness of his breathing, Mason could tell that the nap had turned serious. Mason coughed, poked the pop star’s arm, pulled a little hair. When he was positive Alex was soundproofed, Mason programmed his boom box to play Smear’s “Far Up” for the rest of eternity. It was the only song in the band’s catalog that featured Alex’s lackadaisical vocals. Then Mason knelt, separated the boy from the half-empty Pepsi, loosened his belt, eased him onto his stomach, relieved him of his wallet, and started digging around in the seat of his baggy black jeans.
Pam dragged Goof out the emergency exit. He was light, loose, a breeze, a broom. His soles left pale, crumbly, eraserlike trails across the parking lot.
Sue cracked the car trunk. She cast her eyes into the afternoon smog. When she heard the thud, she immediately slammed the trunk shut.
Pam squeezed into the passenger seat. “Head downtown,” she sniffed. Slam. “There’s this lot just off Seventh Street, down by the railroad tracks.”
Wait. Someone loved Goof—or, rather, someone loved Nicholas Klein. There’s this guy who’ll feel old-fashioned pain if he ever finds out what became of the kid. Two years ago, Nicholas crashed for a month at the home of Franz Holt, a well-connected if slightly insane pedophile. To Franz, fucking an eight-year-old kid was pretty much the sublime, so he moved Nicholas in, gave him stuff, paid the bills, investigated adoption proceedings. Nicholas liked Franz okay, but he preferred getting stoned. Thing is, Franz hated potheads. He thought they were evil. Maybe when he was a kid, one had murdered his dog. Anyway, he laid down the law about drugs. Nicholas, who had this irrational fear of sobriety, told Franz to fuck off and split. At the time, Franz was sort of relieved, but as bizarre as it sounds, he’s never met anyone half as cute since. Now he could shoot himself.
