Guide, p.8
Guide, page 8
Frame 7: Luke’s eye in tight close-up. It’s a crisp oval, quickly blacked in, blurrily reflecting the monster’s … horny, slobbering face?
Caption: “What’s wrong? My powers have failed me.”
Scott: Scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch …
Frame 8: Luke’s crotch, extreme close-up, his dick vaguely outlined amid the general crinkling.
Caption: “What in the world does it want from me? Think, think.”
All the beauty in my world is either sleeping, unconscious, or dead. Luke, Goof, Chris, Alex. Life’s a scary place without them. All that’s left are the artists, the users, the interpreters. Us. Mason, Scott, Pam, Sue, and myself. We’re so imaginative and lonely, and their immobility is such an inspiration for some unknown reason. The balance of power is totally off. Maybe I should qualify that. I’m a traitor, okay? I’m making this narrative safe for Luke’s character, whatever that takes. I don’t care whom I destroy along the way. I only wish I could do the same thing in the less malleable life we’re beginning to share.
Mason’s apartment is a roadside museum of dusty, curled posters of third-rate rock bands with angelic lead singers. “What the fuck’s up?” I say.
“I want your opinion on something,” he said, cracking the studio door. “I’m trying my hand at a new medium.”
Smear: Silent in the fly at light / Out into the Silky Bay.
“No way.” I take a few staggery steps toward the body. I can’t count the times we’ve half-jokingly wished for this exact situation. “How the hell did you—?”
Mason’s story: He was on his way home from the 7-Eleven. He saw Alex walking along, looking rather confused. They cruised each other, believe it or not. Mason invited him up. They talked for a while. Sex was definitely in the cards. Alex requested drugs. All Mason had was this bottle of mood equalizers that he’d been prescribed for suicidal depression. Alex swallowed a few. They got naked, made out. Mason told him about me and sort of suggested a three-way. Alex was into the plan. Mason walked into the living room, phoned me, and by the time he came back, Alex had passed out in this very spot and position. About that time I arrived, and … Ta-da. Obviously that’s 99 percent bullshit. Still, it’s astonishing what you’ll believe when you want to believe in something badly enough.
†
Chris unfolded a wee scrap of paper. It was practically lint. He flattened it out on Pam’s desk. There were tiny blue markings in its tender little craw.
“Hello,” said a scrunched, weasly voice. It gave Chris a quick, useless, influential semi-boner.
“This is Chris. We made a porno together last year. Anyway, shit … do you feel like killing me? I mean right now.”
“Okay, sure.” The dwarf was trying to remember. Blond? “I’ll spring for a cab.” Then he squeaked out direct— “Wait. Did you say … ‘kill’?”
The dwarf, a.k.a. Don Haggarty, is a stunted, prematurely decrepit twenty-something-year-old with a dwindling trust fund and a nasty degenerative disease. Not that he was ever humongous and cute. Thank God for the fetish porn market, because he works steadily enough to pay huge doctors’ bills. This dwarf will fuck anything. Kids, dogs, fat guys, paraplegics. Scat, S&M … he’s game. He’s even got his own line of specialty videos, Terrible Tales of the Dwarf. They’ve been profiled in nonporno contexts like Artforum, Sight and Sound, and the like. Their ugliness is a social critique, to some ways of thinking. Thing is, who cares? The dwarf’s not complex anymore, if he ever was. It’s probably the pain. Anyway, if some fucked-up young guy wants to help him enlarge his repertoire … Still, it’s all speculation until Chris actually walks in the door. Then when the dwarf gets a load of his victim, well, it makes all the difference in the world. Oh, him.
Smear: My tie in the light sty, won’t cry? / Steeply my lamb I snore away …
Mason is sculpting Smear’s bass player into a slut. We’re talking facedown, legs splayed, mouth and ass crack wide open, fists balled at his sides.
Alex: kkhdfflppw …
“Okay, I’ll leave you two alone,” Mason said. He stood, checked his watch. “Half hour tops. And don’t muck him up.”
From the neck down, Alex is just sort of there. His body’s so plain that you’d think he was born wearing clothes. Really, as if God or whoever was working on deadline, and so much time was spent molding the ultimate head that the other three fourths of him had to be built in a hurry. Problem is, I’m also describing my type. There’s just nothing like stripping some cute fashion plate and discovering a thin, pale, weirdly proportioned young dweeb underneath. I love how guys like that lose their cool, hunch over, cover their dicks, and hobble into my arms. It’s such a huge transformation. It can seem like the greatest magic trick in the world—in the moment, at least. Or should I say, it makes me feel all-powerful, which is hot.
Chris was stripping midroom in this slow, messy, junkie-esque way. It looked hot—to the dwarf, anyhow.
“Let’s pretend I’m a kid,” Chris said. “And … I got lost in a forest and knocked on your door. And you’ve decided to kill me because … okay, don’t get offended, but … because you hate beautiful people.”
“Fair enough,” said the dwarf. That was pretty much the story here anyway. “And you promise that nobody knows where you are.”
“Nobody knows,” Chris said. “And nobody cares. Cross my heart.”
Photographs don’t do Smear’s bass player justice. When I saw the band live, it was heavy. I had to grab Mason’s elbow. I fantasized I was ravishing Alex the whole time Smear played, including several encores. Why him? He must resemble some boy I had a crush on in sixth grade or something. Isn’t that the current thinking on how beauty works? That it tweaks memory? It’s so different from how I feel looking at Luke, whose beauty is less fixed, less architectural, and more the result of some ulterior spirit or force that just happens to mesh perfectly with his sweet, nervous, gawky persona. Anyway, that’s why the Luke character isn’t sprawled on Mason’s floor. Or flopping around in the trunk of Pam’s car. Or hanging around at the dwarf’s, for that matter. Just on a technical level, it wouldn’t make sense.
Goof ended up on a huge, oil-stained, Texas-shaped scrap of cardboard.
Pam looked this way, that way. Nothing, nothing. Oh, railroad tracks, Sue’s car, a distant homeless encampment …
Car radio: I know you think you’re deep, all right / But you should stay in the shallow end.
“I wish …” Pam said. She was speaking to Goof, meaning death, meaning her own imagination. “… that you’d had a better life than you did. I—”
“Pam,” yelled Sue’s voice. “There’s a car coming. We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”
I know this amazing mental trick. When I come across someone I’d love to have sex with, then murder, I close my eyes and imagine I’m inside his skin. Then I make him/myself walk around, strip, shower, jerk off, take a shit, piss. It almost always disempowers his beauty, humanizes it, gives it this nonchalance, this invisibility, and connects it to my own set of bodily concerns, which are mostly organized around issues of maintenance. Here’s a perfect example: Thanks to the aforementioned daydream, I haven’t laid a finger on Alex. Granted, I may regret holding back for the rest of my life, but at the risk of sounding overly therapy-damaged or something, I’m so proud of myself that when Mason checks up on me ten minutes early, I wave him inside.
Frame 11: The monster has torn away Luke’s hippie clothes. They’re rags fluttering in its baroque, candelabra-like claws.
Caption: The boy accepted defeat by denying that it was occurring.
Scott: Scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch …
Frame 12: The monster is down on its knees, its vast, shimmering, broochlike face inches away from Luke’s cutesy-wootsy dick.
Caption: “This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.”
Chris peed. He used the dwarf ’s Norelco on his pits, crotch, legs, sideburns. He mussed up his hair. Cool. He kissed his mirror image goodbye. When he emerged, newly kidlike, the dwarf and he improvised an absurd little scene that established the fairy-tale narrative. The dwarf steered them into the kitchen. Maybe Chris was overacting a bit, because at one point the dwarf slapped his face for no reason at all. Chris pretended to cry. When he wouldn’t or couldn’t stop crying, the dwarf grabbed a knife off the counter and stuck it in Chris. Nothing fatal. Still, the pain was a shock. It ruined Chris’s concentration, but … oh, well. He dropped to his knees, really screaming. When he wouldn’t or couldn’t shut up, the dwarf stabbed him a half dozen times. Chest, stomach, back. He fell backward. Things were way, way off game plan, but … oh, well. The world was becoming so dreamlike that Chris didn’t need to reopen his eyes. But then he felt something down in his crotch that was incomprehensible.
†
“Fuck. Oh, fuck.” Chris forced his eyes open a slit. His testicles were resting three feet away, in the dwarf’s tiny palm. He tried to get into their primitive beauty.
“Shut up.” The dwarf stabbed Chris’s thigh. He was trying to grasp death’s complexity or something.
Chris’s shock was so dense and complex that it collided with the world’s very different complexity, sort of like what happens when a very strong light hits a very big jewel.
This part’s almost over. It has to be gross, a touch abstract, and relatively implausible. Otherwise I’ll get too emotionally involved. If it’s any consolation, Chris is in pain, period. That’s the thing. Without the imagination’s elaborate input, dying’s no different from breaking your leg. And Chris’s mind is too busy sedating his wounds to contemplate the big picture. At least he’s not disappointed. Even that relatively simple emotion is too big a task at the moment. Compared to Chris, the dwarf feels amazing. It won’t last. He’s just turned on. People romanticize these kinds of moments. I certainly have. But this is just an incomprehensible, private, interpersonal trip, i.e., something whose meaning is inseparable from the minute particularities of two strangers’ chemistry.
Sue hit the gas. Maybe two seconds later, the slowly enlarging headlights grew a third one. It had vibrant, crusty edges and a cold, purplish center.
“Shit.” Pam shut her eyes, prayed to the effect that if she wasn’t arrested she’d … Jesus Christ, anything.
Radio: It was crushed to bits / And it looked like you and me.
“Be cool.” Sue turned down the radio, pulled the car over. “Here’s our story. We’re dykes. We thought this was a great place to snuggle.”
†
Smear’s remaining three quarters are standing waist deep in the Bel Age hotel’s rooftop pool. Those were MTV’s orders. It’s meant to make them look Beatles-esque, probably. Stupid Americans. Up on the deck, some guy’s running around with a camera. On the diving board, some over-made-up but not unattractive bikini-clad woman clicks on a directional mike. “How’s the tour going?” she wonders aloud. She points it at Smear. “As well as could be expected,” says Damon. Neither he, guitarist Graham, nor Dave the drummer are thinking a thing about Alex’s absence. He always pulls shit. “Where’s your bassist?” she asks. She points the mike. “That’s him,” Damon says, indicating a dead potted palm on the pool deck. British humor. “What’s the matter?” she wonders. “Can’t he swim?” American humor. Smear’s members roll their eyes charmingly. MTV loves it. It’s so … so Beatles-y or something. “Great! Thanks, lads.” Cut.
Mason tossed me his camera. “Can you do me a favor?” he said. Then he dove face first into Alex’s ass.
“I fucking hate you,” I say half-jokingly, and snap off a photo. “I expect a full report later.”
Mason raised up and frowned at me. “Wait a second.” Snap. “You didn’t even rim him, did you?” Snap. “What has that Luke weirdo done to you, Dennis?” Snap. “And quit wasting the film.”
“Fuck off.” I aim the camera at Alex’s face. Snap.
Before I met Luke and reassessed my morality, my favorite image on earth was a picture I’d found in an old German textbook on violent death. It showed a very young boy who’d been axed in the head by his father. Death had either freeze-framed the look on his face or molded him a new one. He looked astonished. Like he couldn’t believe his life was already over. Point is, Alex just brought him back. Actually, I used to see that boy’s face every time Chris nodded out. I even thought about him watching Luke and Scott space out on acid. I wonder where they were. I wonder if their weirdly similiar expressions meant anything. I wonder if I’ve been there myself. Is the experience as indescribable as an acid trip? Or is what they felt so obvious that, to quote my mom, were it a snake, it would have already bitten me?
The dwarf fucked Chris’s ass with the knife. “What are you hiding in here?” he said. The point had just bumped into something.
Chris’s ass: kkyphtsllmb …
“Nothing,” Chris said. Or maybe he just thought it. It might not have made it as far as a word.
The dwarf buried one hand inside Chris, felt around, and returned to the world with … well, a handful of gore to be blunt. But there was something peculiar inside it.
Scott has abandoned the “comic strip”—for tonight, anyway. Its style is too slavishy true to the Japanese model. Its mechanisms are far too reductive to signify … what? He doesn’t even know what he wants it to do. He just has these conflicting emotions re Luke, that’s all. And art’s where he works out his shit. But it can only do so much, at least when so much of that shit is circumscribed by denial. So he files the finished pages and walks to his bedroom. It’s the one uncomplicated place in his life. It’s like the last oxygenated compartment in a sunken submarine. Once he has shut the door, stripped, and slid under the covers, there’s nothing between Luke and him. Or maybe there’s everything between them and nothing inside them.
Officer King had a receding blond crew cut. “We stopped you,” he told Sue, “because we observed some suspicious behavior.”
“Here.” Sue handed over her license, registration. “Look, we’re lesbians, okay? We were feeling romantic. We had a little spat, but it’s cool now.”
Officer Sullivan walked through the vacant lot, pointing a flashlight at everything that wasn’t perfectly flat. Weed … McDonald’s bag … cardboard box … “Oh, shit.”
About Robert and Tracy. They used to be promising writers. Occasionally they’d show me their work, and I’d offer encouragement. Anyway, they developed this father fixation on me, as best I can tell. That happens a lot. I seem to encourage that behavior in people unconsciously. But once they got addicted to dope, they quit writing. We drifted apart. When I met Luke and became so devoted to him, they got paranoid and jealous. I used to hear all this shit secondhand. To make a long story short, they tried to get Luke on heroin, basically to hurt me. They said as much to Scott, who passed along the word. Luckily Luke was too scared to shoot up. But when I heard what they’d done, I chopped them out of my life. And now I’ve removed them from Luke’s—in this novel, at least.
“I should go,” I say. The roll’s shot. Not to mention that the acid is finally dead or, at the very least, stagnant. I’m literally falling asleep.
Smear: Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run …
Maybe it’s just my mental haze, but I’d swear there’s a smidgen more presence in Alex’s face than there was a few minutes ago. “I hate to tell you this,” I whisper. “But I think he’s reviving.”
Mason cranes his neck. “Hm, you’re right.” But he was certain I wasn’t.
As soon as I left, Mason did what he’d thought about doing for hours. Actually, were that truly the case, Mason would have lobotomized Alex, or at least given it the old college try, à la Jeffrey Dahmer. Instead, he fucked Alex harder than he’d fucked anyone in his life. The physical effect was sublime, but it wasn’t enough. He wanted Alex to stay. Like, until they got old. Mason would have settled for a zombie, if need be. That’s how cute the boy was. I can sort of relate. Maybe that’s why we’re still friends, despite our incompatible morals. Difference is, I want to earn someone’s loyalty. I want to love someone so selflessly that he would never even think about going away. I suppose that’s what most people want. In fact, that’s probably why we don’t kill one another all the time. Everyone’s just a little too lonely to risk it.
The dwarf turned on a faucet. He held the gore under the spray. The sink purpled. “What the …?”
It was just a big, petrified turd, glazed a yellowy white by a hundred men’s undisturbed come. But the dwarf didn’t know anything about junkies and/or their little physical problems so …
Chris was this impossibly motionless humanesque form with an astonished expression.
“Are you alive?” asked the dwarf. Maybe Chris’s eyes altered very slightly, or not. “Well, if you are, what the hell is this?”
Scott’s having sex with a simplified Luke—in his dreams, anyway. Their sex consists of Scott’s hard-on, his blurry right hand, and some chemical or other in his body. And his imagination, of course. Scott’s mental image of Luke is almost unrecognizable. On the surface, sure, yeah, that’s basically Luke. Activity-wise, though, he might as well be some bimboesque slut. Granted, I don’t know how Luke acts in bed. But I’m positive this isn’t it. Luke’s too deep, tense, reserved. Scott’s spent too much time watching porn videos. Luke can’t be reduced to the facts of his physical makeup. He’s too avant-garde, multilayered. That’s why Scott’s crazed ravishing of the Luke look-alike doesn’t bother me. He’s not even close.
“You’re awake,” Mason said. He was over at his work table, pretending to glue something down. It was a small totem pole of Goof heads for the record.
“I s’pose,” Alex says blearily. He sits up. That’s when he knows something’s wrong. His ass feels too … there. Normally, it’s just unassumedly doing its job. “Can you tell me the time?”
Sebadoh: It’s not my job to undo / the dying prophecy of you.
“Almost five,” Mason said. “I tried … to wake you up … a few hours ago … but …”
