|
This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN#/ISBN# issue/book “War of Water” cc&d, v282 (the April 2018 issue) Order this as a 6"x9" paperback book:  |
|
|
| ||
The Rise and Fall of Edward Bartholomew
Joshua Copeland
The girl and I watched TV in the lounge. The show was black and white and scratched and undercranked. A jaunty piano theme played on the soundtrack. A damsel was tied to train tracks. I recognized the movie as The Perils of Pauline. The actress—Betty Hutton, with long, sumptuous blonde hair—was gagged and roped just above her breasts and below, her ankles were tied together, and her hands were corded behind her back. She was gagged with a kerchief. I imagined her muffled grunts. She kicked and wiggled. Michael Farrington stood over her, leaning against a 147 mile post, with his arms folded and his ankles crossed. Like a bastard. Betty wore a white calf length dress with a ruffled hem line and her cleavage was prominent. The girl next to me said, “This is triggering me. Can we please change it?”
“Aw come on,” I said. “This place is antiseptic enough already. Can’t we have a little fun?”
“Do you want me to cry? I’ll do it. Right here, right now.”
One of the female patients said, “If Cheryl wants it changed, I vote we change it.”
Five of us sat in there. Lounge etiquette required a majority vote to change the television. I lost. Cheryl got up, stood on her tip toes and turned the dial a few times till she came to another show. An old Batman starring Adam West. Batgirl was knotted to the sidewalk with steel cables. Yvonne Craig wormed and squeaked while people just walked by. She wore a purple one piece bat suit, a black cape, a black eye mask, a bat head piece, and black leather high heels.
“God,” Cheryl said. “What is up with TV shows today? They’re all sick and twisted.”
“This looks harmless,” I said.
“Harmless my ass,” she said.
She flipped the TV a few more times till she got to a soap opera. A brunette dressed in a pink nightgown with perky shoulders ran into the arms of a man wearing a black muscle shirt and tight jeans, broad thighs. “I don’t know what to do, Carter!” the lady cried, sobbing.
“Thaddeus will know.” The guy said. “He got us into this jam in the first place. Don’t you worry. It will be okay.”
I sighed loudly, hoping to impress upon Cheryl my mood.
“I’m sorry,” she said defiantly. “But I was raped when I was fifteen. Twice. Within a three day period.
“It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay,” I said.
I met him the next day. He was tall, like six four, tan skinned, long dark hair, and a beard. A dead ringer for the Robert De Niro character in Angel Heart. And he acted like De Niro acted in the climactic scene, too. He looked to be in his mid-thirties. Big hands. He wore a tan and gray flannel shirt, a bulging gut underneath that, and his jeans were too tight, so he wore them unsnapped. A walking Good Will ad, I thought. He sat down next to me on the sofa while I read Ham on Rye. “Is this all you do?” he asked me. “Read all day? You’re supposed to socialize with the other patients and talk to staff.” He smiled. “I’m Mo.”
“Ed. Nice to meet you.”
“Eddy, get out and live a bit.”
“I love to read. I’m a writer.”
“A student of life, huh?” He clicked his tongue.
“My creative writing prof said I was born for it. I have a long line of straight A’s on all my stories.”
“What’s with the bandage on the back of your head?” He scratched it lightly.
“I totaled my parents’ Lamborghini drunk. My head against the headrest. Crashed it out into a field of rocks and miscellaneous vegetation off I – 9.”
He sneezed and pulled out an ancient tissue and wiped his nose. “So what are you doing here? You should be in Western Pen.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Such is life. The paramedics gave me a break. They didn’t put down I was drunk on their Ambulance Call report. They sent me here instead.”
“Lucky you. With your looks, you wouldn’t have lasted two seconds in the house.” He grinned again.
I lent him some of my Hunter S. Thompson books and my Buk books and Queer and Junky and Homeboy. We talked about them. He said he had been homeless for a lot of his life and identified with the characters in the books. The staff had to separate us a lot and tell us to move around and talk to the other patients. I always sat next to him in group. The day I got out we exchanged phone numbers.
My mom was cooking spaghetti squash. She sliced the yellow squash on the chopping block with a large knife, making violent, stuttering motions. The smell of garlic and butter filled the kitchen. I sat at the table stretching and snapping a rubber band against my thumb. She grabbed the hollowed out squash and threw it into the trash like a baseball pitcher. “Your days here are over! Through! Into the sunset! Done and gone! No more sucking mommy and daddy dry!”
“But mom...”
She mimicked me. “‘But mom...’ You can stay here a couple of more weeks till you get your shit together! Then it’s off to Crossroads! Our standing in Squirrel Hill is ruined!”
“But mom, people piss on each other’s beds there.”
“I could care less.”
“Couldn’t care less.”
I walked to Forbes and Wightman to catch the 61C to meet Mo. I guessed I was going to have to get used to taking buses. I wasn’t familiar with them. A hurricane of wind scattered a pile of red leaves and they sounded like they were laughing at me. At seven fifty p.m. the bus arrived. It was five minutes late. The bus was mostly empty and smelled like rubber cement just out of the bottle. It ferried me to the Quad on the Pitt campus. Mo was waiting. He wore a gray Chatham U sweat jacket with “Cougars Lacrosse” on front and a roaring cougar’s head on back (The jacket was too small for him). Under that, the same clothes he wore in the hospital. Students walked the sidewalks in hordes, laughing and cajoling, nudging, their arms around each other, and the air glowed neon. “Lookin’ good there,” Mo said. “Let’s go catch the 54A. It will takes us to my apartment. We’ll hang.”
“Sure thing.” We began walking.
A group of students was behind us for a bit. “I passed out in a bathtub last Friday night on Mellors,” a guy with a deep growl said. “It was all that Mad Dog.”
“That’s your fault,” a girl said. “I’ll say it again and I’ll never quit saying it: Liquor before beer, never queer. Beer before liquor, never sicker.”
“The window was open and I froze like a motherfucker. I think I caught a cold.”
“Then don’t come near me,” the girl said. “Don’t touch me, don’t talk up close to me, don’t come near me.”
There was the huff of a breath.
“Quit it, fucker,” she said. “I have midterms coming up.”
We crossed Barrington and the crowds diluted. “You know, you really look young to be a Pitt student,” Mo said.
“I’m eighteen.”
“You look fourteen. And you’re short. What are you, like five-five?”
“Hey,” I said in mock offense. “I’m five-nine.”
He laughed a social laugh. “Yeah right.”
We passed a girl who sat near me in Russian Lit. She wore hoop earrings, was made up, her eyes hued blue and her cheeks rouged, and she wore a tight white shirt with acid wash jeans. She seemed to recognize me and looked at me funny. “You know,” I said, “The first sexual experience I ever had was with Marge Pickard. She was thirty-three. She was a tech on the adolescent unit in St. Francis. I met her at Eat n Park after I got out and we went back to her efficiency and she seduced me. She had great tits and smelled like cinnamon.”
“Eh, you got to watch out for those older women. They’re always looking to marry.” He twisted his finger in his beard. I noticed his arms were a lot longer than they should be, and when he walked, he swung them as if they were motorized. We paced by the student towers. “This place is like a gold mine. I can sell all the weed I want to here.” As we passed the stores, The Double O, The Pitt Bookstore, Wendy’s, our shadows grew and stretched under the streetlights. Mine, much shorter than his. “How much does it cost a year to be at Pitt?” he asked.
“My parents teach there. I got a free education.” His face twitched. “Well, not anymore. It’s looking like I’ll have to find a job and an apartment.”
“Fuck that. You can move in with me.” He squeezed my neck lightly.
Three skateboarders rolled at us, their boards loud on the sidewalk. They yelled and laughed. Mo hugged me towards him. I thought that unnecessary. “Hey!” he yelled. “This isn’t Quentin Skate Park! Get out of our way! You almost hit him!” Which they did not. “Did you ever read A Clock Orange? These kids today, they’re punks and bitches.”
We walked down Fifth Avenue and up to North Craig and caught the 54C. It was dirty and smelled like salmon and was packed with students. I fed my dollar and dime into the machine and asked for a transfer. We walked down the grungy aisle. Mo stopped by a guy reading The Pitt News. A backpack was in his lap. There was an empty seat next to him. “Let’s sit here,” Mo said. He sat next to the kid. “Get up, man. Give my bud here a place to sit.”
The kid lowered his paper. “Excuse me? What?”
“You heard me. Get up. I’m asking you nicely. I’m not going to ask you again. Just move. Before I move you. Pronto. There are open seats in the back. See?” He pointed.
The student folded his paper, sighed, stood up, and slung his backpack over his shoulder. “You don’t have to be a dick about it,” he said. “Your kid is capable of standing.” The whole bus stared at us. I sat down.
The lady bus driver yelled. “Y’all just calm down back there! You hear?!”
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said.
“He was a geeky college Izod. He deserved it.”
We got off in Bloomfield and walked three blocks to a 7-11. “What kind of beer do you want?” Mo asked when we walked in.
“Beer’s beer.”
He pulled a case of Natty Light out of the fridge and brought it up to the counter. “Hey, it’s Mo,” the elderly Middle Eastern clerk said. He looked at me and bit his lip. I pulled out my Saint Laurent Continental wallet and offered to pay half.
“I got this,” he said. He handed the clerk a ten from his pocket, no wallet.
The register chimed open. “You don’t look like you have too much money,” I said.
“I get cash here and there. Don’t worry about it. Sometimes I do janitorial work at Saint Dionysios church by the Bloomfield Bridge. They pay me under the table.”
We walked. He carried the case under one arm back to his place, a block away. It was an old one floor house that had been converted into two apartments. No address. He pulled out a key ring. There was only one key on it. He jiggled it into the door. It opened up to a small hall with a payphone, two doors on the left, one on the right. No apartment numbers. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling by a thick chain wound with electric cord. He stuck his key in the closest door on the left—I felt a small wind from the space under it—and pushed it wide open.
The hall light brightened the room. He walked over to a dresser and lit a long pink candle on top with his lighter. The room was a studio apartment without a bathroom or kitchenette. It smelled of burnt hamburger meat and Raid. A tan sofa with scripted shapes on it sat up against the wall, next to that a snug and faded green easy chair. A twelve inch black and white TV with an antenna was next to the candle. A 1980s VCR next to the TV. No closets. In the corner stood a white sculpture of a nude boy who looked to be eight years old. Two large and muscular veiny hands with talons for fingernails gripped his waist from behind, fingers spread wide, and the forearms stuck out into space. The boy’s penis was tiny. He had no rocky tangle of pubic hair. There were tiny brown globular stains on the pedestal and the thin green carpet around it. A tripod with an easel stood with the painting of an adolescent—I guessed he was an adolescent because of the sparse mustache—with his mouth wide open, eyes shut hard, meaty tongue, shiny gums. A latex gloved hand held what I now know are extraction forceps and they were yanking out a bicuspid. You could see the red roots. On a small white plastic table next to the picture lay red, white and pink paint tubes and a small wooden palette with the respective colors dabbed onto it. A whoosh of air sounded through the whole place and I couldn’t tell where it was coming from; there were no windows. I felt it on my hands and the back of my neck. The whole apartment felt arid and cold, like Seven Springs Mountain Resort. I shut the door.
“Sounds like you got a hole somewhere. It’s letting in a gale.”
“Eh, it’s always been like that. It could be calm outside and there would still be a cold wind in here. I have no idea where it comes from. Keep your jacket on. I have to sleep with extra covers.” We practically shouted over the sound. He coughed up some yellow mucus, spit it out, rubbed it into the carpet with his shoe, and turned on the TV. It had thirteen buttons, a button for each channel. Death Wish was on. Charles Bronson held a Latino thug at gunpoint in a garbage dump. Mo sat down on the sofa. Next to him was a book, When Good Things Happen to Bad People. I sat down in the easy chair. It was soft and deep and I sunk into it, trapped. The candle flickered violently in the wind and even with the TV, our shadows crackled spastically.
“That candle’s going to blow out,” I said.
“Nope. I douse it with Kosenine every morning.”
“Wouldn’t it be more feasible to have an electric light?”
“Eh, I got to save cash for my art.”
He ripped open the case, opened the beers, handed me a can, and we drank. He kicked off his generic tennis shoes and his socks were worn and holey. I smelled feet. For a bit he rubbed his heels. “Let’s toast to a new friendship,” he said. “Mo and Ed.” We banged cans lightly. “It’s great being on Lithium,” he said. “I get drunk after only like three beers.”
The TV was loud. It had to be because of the icy breeze. “Don’t your neighbors across the way complain about how loud your TV must always be?”
“Sometimes. Tonight it’s Friday. They’re at The Luna. They’re assholes anyway. They got the bigger apartment.”
“How do you sleep? Where’s the bed?”
“I sleep on the sofa. Same thing.”
“Cool. The life of the impoverished.” I looked at the statue. The boy’s face was pained, his eyebrows raised. He looked like he was being kidnapped. His arms reached out, palms wide, tiny fingers splayed, and you could almost hear the cry for help emanating from him. A cobweb under his armpit billowed. “What’s with the statue?”
“Isn’t that sweet? I bought it at a garage sale. It’s a sculpture of Ganymede.”
“I know who that is. He was the son of Plato—”
He made a buzzer sound. “Wrong. It’s ancient Greek mythology. He was a young innocent boy who Zeus kidnapped and flew up to Mount Olympus, where he fucked the kid’s brains out.”
“No. He was Plato’s son.”
“Nope. He was Zeus’s fuck buddy. With a last name like Christakos I should know. I got all this shit down. You know how they separate the men from the boys in Greece?”
“How?”
“With a crowbar.”
I guffawed. “What are those stains around him?”
“Oh, those. I dunno.”
We watched TV. A gang member followed Chuck down a dark hallway. Bronson swung around and pointed a 38 at him. Like an eighteen year old, I guzzled. I felt the effect of beer; I was looking to drown in something, anything. How could my mom do this to me? I didn’t have the equipment necessary to make it in the world without her help. It was like a third trimester abortion. With winter on the way. But in the end, adversity builds character. And if this was the way she wanted it, that’s the way it would be. Fuck her. I needed nobody, no one. “I can’t believe I’m kicked out of the house,” I said.
“For what? For smashing mommy and daddy’s Lamborghini?” He looked like he was concentrating hard on me. His brow was furrowed.
“Yeah.” I rolled my eyes. “Oh well. All writers get sandpapered some time in their lives. I’ll face the streets with my head held high. I got into Sterrit Academy based on my short stories.” I took a swig and stared up at the ceiling. “So I think I’ll be okay. I think I have a future. I write and read like crazy.”
“You know, your boy Bukowski, I’ve lived through a lot of what he lived through.”
“Interesting, interesting.” I rubbed my hand between my knees. The wind was getting to me.
“Yeah, I lived in ghettos, listening to the niggers have sex all day and all night: ‘I’m gonna bust you baby!’”
I howled—I really tried to lose myself in the beer—and raised my eyebrows. “That sounds like them.”
“Yeah, I really been through the ringer. Some African monkey tried to mug me. I kicked the knife out of his hands and ran the other way.” We shone and blinked in the arrhythmic candlelight. I saw the twisting of the flame reflected in his irises.
“Wow.”
“See this tiny lump on my forehead?” He pointed to a displacement of flesh the size of a dime and tapped it with his forefinger a few times. “It’s a sliver of a 135 Grain RNP bullet. At this bar El Norteno, in East Galveston, some wetback tried to be a cowboy and he fired a revolver into the ceiling. The bullet ricocheted and hit me. And all everyone cared about was me snitching. I’m on the floor, blood like a maxi pad, all the gang members huddled over me: ‘Leesten Homie, we know where you live at. Keep your mouth shut.’ And that catheter...”
“You’ve lived the scribbler’s life.”
“That was back a long time ago. From 1980 to 1990 I took a small vacation. And now I’ve toned it down quite a bit, with my job and all.”
“How can you support yourself on a part time job?”
“Father Alexopolous pays me just enough. Five dollars an hour under the table. He and the sisters feed me: layered eggplant, baklava, triopites. As long as I come to church every Sunday. My suit and tie over there in the corner, that’s what those are for.”
I downed my fourth beer and pulled open a fifth. I was really going at them voraciously. “Where’s the pisser? Uh, how do I handle this?”
“There’s a bathroom.” He motioned with his can. “It’s in the entry hall. To the left.”
I got up and walked to the bathroom. Things were beginning to swim. On the sink was a predominantly bare-of-bristles toothbrush with red gunk in it. A small picture on the wall read “Home Sweet Home” in front of a sunrise or sunset. The mirror was fissured right down the middle with white splotches all over it. The knobs looked to be from the 1940s. Green mold caked the sink. The whole place had a sulfuric smell. I noticed no toilet paper. A stick with a globular sponge attached to the top leaned next to the toilet. The sponge was coated brown and the pores were ground down. I pissed. Well, at least I’m having a good time, I thought. Whorls of tan stained the toilet. Some backsplash speckled the rim. I pulled the toilet seat down, and it was flowered, meager, and ripped. There was hardly any water pressure when I flushed. As I turned the hot water knob it squeaked loudly and I heard the hydrodynamics behind the wall, pipes thumping and grinding, and the lukewarm water poured out as a drizzle and ran down the sink wall. I had to cup my hands to it.
I already thought of Creative Writing. I could use Mo’s life for a story. It would freak the wussy students out, and hopefully get the attention of that gorgeous redhead with a dragon tattooed on her back. She had written a story about going to college during the day and moonlighting as a stripper at The Cricket by night. I walked back to the room and grabbed hold of my Natty Light.
“This movie sucks dick,” Mo said. “Makes wealthy America feel good about itself. Keeps the money away from the proles. Fuck this. I got something to show you.” He stood up, shut the TV off, and knelt down under the sofa and pulled out a crinkled and stained magazine. His eyes opened wide with delight as he handed it to me. Two nude boys were on the cover. They had their arms around each other and looked to be about twelve. Sandy hills of Marram grass surrounded them. The title read FKK Nudist Zeitshrift. “I found it under the sofa when I moved in.”
The boy on the right was blonde and held a red sand bucket. The boy on the left, a little shorter, with long red hair and freckles, held a yellow inner tube sporting a duck’s head at his side. They smiled in camaraderie. A nude adult man with tan lines, a brown beach hat, sunglasses, and a gut lay out a towel in the background. I paged through it. Naked adolescent boys on the beach. Some lacking body hair. Some with tulips and daisies on their heads. One blonde with a trophy and a crown of laurels. The pictures strobed in the violent candle light. I had to press the pages down with my palms because of the gusts. “The guy must have been a pervert,” I said. “This is William Burroughs terra firma. You should have called the police.”
“Nudist mags are legal. How puritanical of you. They don’t fit the Dost factors. Want to see something illegal?” He beamed.
“Sure.”
“You’ll love this.” He stood up and walked over to the VCR and pressed eject. He held up the cassette to me. “Anthropothysies #12” was written on the side in red marker and in small letters.
I tried to say it aloud. “Anthro-what?” I squinted.
“‘Anthropothyseis.’ It means ‘human sacrifice’.” I saw his teeth in the candlelight.
He shoved it into the VCR and lay back down, his head on the pillow nearest me, his hands clasped behind his hair, his ankles crossed. A shrieking and nude infant flailed on the screen, laying on thick brown grass. It was a boy and he was covered in red bumps. He dribbled bubbly and chunky white vomit. A sirloin steak with a fork stuck in it sat on his top left. A triangular portion was cut out and you could see the pink inside. On his top right was a palm sized silver bowl full of what looked to be chocolate pudding. A spoon lay in the mass of brown. On his bottom right was a pizza in an open pizza box. Grease wet the box. A can with the letters “Kok” on it in Coke a Cola logo stood on his lower left. It was opened. Ants swarmed all over the food, some of them dotted the boy, and big flying bugs I had never seen before breezed around, humming. A burp cloth with a picture of a gray elephant, a yellow pacifier stuck in its trunk, hung off a stick. What I know now as an adjustable steel tripod movie lamp spot lit the infant. The wind picked up in the room, and I felt it underneath my coat and on my neck and hands and face.
“And?” I asked. “A baby and entrees. What’s so illegal about it?”
“It’s a Greek thing. You wouldn’t understand. My cousin Jack in Thessaloniki sends me this stuff. You know how in Ancient times Greeks would expose unwanted babies? Well, that’s what this is. There’s a whole worldwide underground for it. Some dirt-poor and penniless couple without a drachma to wipe their ass with will contact the industry—it’s called Namliss, Greek for ‘Nameless’—and hand their baby over. They get paid good money for it. Then the Namlis camera crew will hike up into the mountains in Cythera with the baby and expensive dishes in tinfoil made beforehand. They’ll leave the baby there with the food, set up a video camera on a tripod, and camp out nearby. Every six hours they replace the cassette. And the baby starves. Well, I mean, it dies of dehydration first. But there’s all this food around the baby and it can’t reach it. Like Tantalus.”
“Right. Tantalus. He was the dictator of Athens—”
Mo screwed up his face. He paused. “Wrong. Again. Tantalus was the dude in Hades who was trapped in a spring. When he reached down to the water to drink it dipped away from him, and when he reached to the plum branch above him for a plum it shifted away.”
He lay, and I sat, and we watched. The infant’s cries sounded strangled, and he gurgled loudly in between screams. I felt myself drifting off. The chair was so absolute with gravity, so comfortable, I was so down about my prospects for the future, so disgusted with myself for trashing the car, so sad about losing my bedroom and my parents, all I wanted to do was sleep. I felt woozy, nodded off, quickly came to. I saw that Mo stared at me with a smile, firecracker eyes. His chin rested on his hands, which were flat on the sofa arm. He looked like a groupie. “Well,” I said, “I think it’s time to be heading back to home sweet home. Can you show me the way back to the 54C? I have a transfer.”
He placed his hand on my crotch.
I knocked it off and stood up. “What are you doing?!” I yelled.
His delight was conversational. “Copping a feel.” This galvanized me. I had heard about things like this, but only in books and movies. Legends. Sob stories. Suddenly, without warning, I was as inside of myself as someone could be. I back as far away as I could, to the wall, not far enough. I felt the tightness of the room.
“I’m not like that!” My hands were out, pushing away air.
He stood up, towering over me, and stepped towards me slowly. “Oh Ed. I’m just playin’ with ya. I didn’t really mean it. A gag, that’s all it was. A prank.”
I forced a laugh. “Don’t do that dude. You had me scared. Christ.”
He lunged at me and put me in a bear hug. I smelled rotten potatoes and soaked wool.
“Get off me! Stop!”
He chuckled. I remember thinking clearly: Well, if he’s laughing, and I’m struggling my toughest, adrenaline amping me up, then, compared to him, I must be fragile and flimsy. I was a play thing, an infant’s rattle. I elbowed, I kicked, but I couldn’t move my torso an inch. My POV flung and slanted and spun. He threw me around. Our movements looked disjointed in the blowing candlelight, stop motion animation. I kicked the dresser. I kicked the easel down.
“Hey, watch it,” he said. “Chill out. This stuff isn’t replaceable. I have no mommy and daddy to pay for it. Take it easy.” He chortled at my efforts.
How did he think this was so funny? It was the first time in my life I had ever experienced such a cut off, such a night and day between the handler and the handled. There was my insectile fright, and there was his giddiness. We fell into the easy chair. I was on his lap. His beard tickled my cheek.
“Help me! Help me!”
He covered my mouth. “No one can hear you. No one’s around. Help! Help! See?” There was no exertion in his voice. He talked calmly, breathing regularly. He unsnapped my Phat Farm jeans. I had laughed with my friends at the rape scene in Deliverance. Now I was on the other side of the TV. I went blind to everything in my whole entire life except getting away. It occurred to me once you’re raped, and you’re a guy, that’s a blank fucking page every day for the rest of your life. I was the lowest of the low, the most oppressed rank in the caste system, an untouchable. Leprous. He placed his hand under my shirt over my belly button. I thought about my mom. I will not cry out for my mom, I thought. I will not cry out for my mom. Then he let go of me.
It took a split second to leap from his arms to the door. It felt like an eternity. I moved in ether, like Zeno’s paradox: A foot, six inches, three inches, one inch. Would it open when I twisted the knob? It did. I ran out into the hall and stopped. To this day I ask myself why I didn’t just crash through the hall door and out into the night air. I was attempting to save face. My heart raced and I felt like I was on fire. Mo came to the doorway, pleasant and amused. “You’re a faggot!” I yelled. “You’re-you’re a Goddamn Greek faggot!”
“Aw come on. You’ve never done anything like this before, Edward? Haven’t you ever wanted to experiment?”
“I’m not gay!”
“Hey, my Gadar is never off.”
“No! Never! I’ve had girlfriends!”
“It’s not that bad, it’s not that bad. You don’t shit for a couple of days, no biggie.” He playfully reached out and tried to yank my pants down. I backed up against the door. Thing was, I thought I was safe out there. “I didn’t know you could be so homophobic,” he said. I vibrated. I heard my heart in my ears.
“I’ll go to the police! You’ll go to jail!”
He stopped smiling and grimaced. Then he launched himself at me. I spun around to open the door and I was in a bear hug. This, all over again. And I had been so close to freedom. I saw a Chevrolet pickup pass by through the door window, its red taillights ghostly in the night. “I’ll teach you,” he said. “You’re one of the biggest dick teases I ever met. Did anyone ever tell you that? And I’ve met quite a few.” I struggled for my life, kicking and doing my best to fling my one free arm around.
The whole episode was absurd and surreal. Here it was happening, in modern western civilization. Husbands in houses nearby watched Night Court. A fifteen-year-old boy made out on a snug couch with a girl while they both ate Lays potato chips, a hand under the bra. A little girl slept soundly in bed in pink pajamas with a glass of water on her nightstand. A Cop with a five o’ clock shadow drove around aimlessly, listening to WDVE, sucking Jolt cola out of a straw, just looking for someone to arrest. Pitt kids downed bottles of frosty Coors at house parties while Guns n Roses blasted on the stereo, Axl crooning about how dangerous LA was. A high school sophomore named Kristin stayed home to review for a Social Studies exam by desk lamp. My parents watched Twin Peaks. And here something was about to be done to me that should never be done to anyone, ever.
“Help!” I screamed. “I said No! Getthefuckoffme!” I shouted at the top of my lungs so much so that I was screeching, I sounded like a banshee, a girl.
“You will not get me revoked.”
“Okay! I’m sorry!”
“Don’t you worry. I’ve been known to be quick on the draw.” He carried me back into his apartment under one arm. I stuck my legs out against the door frame to keep myself outside, and he yanked at me. It was useless. I was back inside the room. With an arm still cradling me, he shut the door with his free hand. Through all the electricity I noticed he didn’t even bother to lock it.
I had sobered up.
