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NB: rough. apologies. adult theme/language .
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He lies on his back, loose-knit and lengthy, his short, stubby fingers caressing his cock. Carelessly nude, as I pencil him in, taking care of his smudgy, blue, blood-group tattoo. They all have those, most of them anyway. He’s the same, same as all the other fucking boot-necks.
Left hand fondles my filigreed cross, makes sunspots dance off the roof of the van. What d’ you call that green stone again? Tourmaline, I tell him, green tourmaline.
Is it expensive?
It was my Nana’s. Why’ d you ask?
No reason.
You thinking of buying one? For your wife, maybe? Your girlfriend?
I told you, he says, I’m not married. Girlfriend then, I say. You must have one, for cover? He rolls on his belly and picks at his teeth. It isn’t a cover, he says.
Sure, that’s your real life, back in arse-end upon-tyne. You just keep telling yourself that.
I put down the pencil and stand up to stretch. He sucks his bottom lip and goes up on one elbow. Why’d you have to get a cob on with me for, eh? Every fucking time! It’s not like I make the rules, is it?
No, but you follow them.
And?
And I think you half like them. Makes it easy for you though, when you don’t have to think.
And what about you, he says, what about your rules? He crushes the cross in his big baby’s head fist, then he throws it at me, pitches it hard. It catches my collarbone, making a dent. There’s a hollow sound, like a popping cork, and three tourmaline stones fall free on the floor. Pinpricks of light dazzle over my feet, and I squat to retrieve them, dizzied. You dick, I tell him, you dumb fucking cunt.
He’s quick off the bed to take hold of me, rubbing rough consolation with sandpaper palms. I’m sorry, he says, I’ll fix it for you, let me take it away, find someone to fix it. I shake my head, him kissing my neck, his big, flat pate, smearing its sweat.
No, you can’t take it away.
Why not?
‘Cause those are my rules. What’s damaged, stays damaged. What’s damaged stays here.
He looks at me, out at arm’s length. He’s frowning, bewildered, his stub-nose screwed up like he’s smelling something bad. I think, I tell him, I’d like to sleep now. Get dressed, Danny, I want you to go.
…
And who’s using who I don’t know.
You frighten me, he tells me, one time, but he never explains to me how. I am half-asleep with my head on his chest and he’s making his fingers walk over my buttocks. It doesn’t bother him when I don’t go umm-humm. He’s not talking to me, he’s talking to hisself.
After he’s fucked me I cease to exist. It’s like some kind of trick to make me disappear. And maybe he fucks me so I will disappear. Maybe he fucks me so he won’t be afraid. And we’re like Botticelli’s Venus and Mars. And he’s always watchful. And who’s using who?
You frighten me, he tells me, one time. And he tells me again ‘til it becomes a theme. You’re mad, he says, you and your pictures. You don’t keep those, do you? Or what do you do with them? I send ‘em, I tell him, just to watch him panic.
You send them? Send them where?
Send ‘em fuck. I burn ‘em.
You don’t keep them at all?
D’ you want me too?
No… I guess not.
He’s disappointed though, I can tell, and it does disturb him, the fact that I burn them. Something voodoo in that, he is thinking. He asks me why then do I draw them at all.
It’s practice.
I see… is that what I am too? Practice?
No, you’re not practice. You practice for something you’ll want to do again.
I see, he says, pinching me, prodding me. I see, I see. And he gets up and goes.
…
And who’s using who I don’t know.
Like the Vietnamese whores in that Kubrick film, Danny. Me so horny, me love you long time. Both of us are fucking but only one of us is getting fucked. Which is which? I doubt Danny could tell you.
You came to me, don’t forget that, I say. Just like you all came. And now you are in my home and you are in my bed. And now you are in our city and you are in our country. Whatever you get, sex or death or guilt or whatever, you came to me, don’t forget that. And he tells me that stuff that I take is rotting my brain. And he tells me I’m mad, or half-mad anyway. Me and my pictures, me and my words. Me and my white and furious body. My religious tattoos. The scar on my belly.
He’s probably right, about my brain. But he’s not right about what has caused it. It’s you, I want to tell him. It’s you spirocheting in through my arsehole, burrowing in, riddling me. It’s you, I want to tell him. He needs to mean something to me, ‘cause that way he’s won. But he doesn’t, and that’s what frightens him. He doesn’t like to think that he matters as little to me as I do to him. He doesn’t like it, but our apathy has made us equal. I been raised up by the short and fucking curlies of my own sour ambivalence.
You’re not involved, I tell him. Like all the rest. You’re here but you’re not here. That’s how it works. It’s total fucking Zen. I don’t like it, he says, when you talk that way. Cover yourself up, put some clothes on.
It’s you, I want to tell him. I can’t give you up ‘cause I have to see my indifference trump yours, ‘cause that’s the only battle I’m still capable of winning. And you won’t let go of me. For exactly the same reason.
…
He’s not fucking me. He’s excavating me. Cock like earth-moving machinery. We have music going in the van. He says it’s morbid, maudlin rubbish. He says I’m unhinged, to want to fuck him to this. He asks me who I picture in my head. I s’pose he found out about me. You want to fuck me to funeral dirges, he says, you’re death-obsessed, the lot of you.
Not obsessed, no, that’s the wrong word.
What then?
Sympathetic.
You what?
Attuned… well versed. It’s intuitive, though. It’s hard to explain.
You’re off your head, he says, and I laugh. Do you carry a gun? He asks, and I laugh. Do you? He says. Do you?
…
Danny doesn’t know anything about me. In the beginning he used to ask was there anything I wanted. He would ask me did I want a drink. He would ask me did I want a cigarette. He would ask me did I want a blow-job or the radio on or to go someplace with him and on and on. In the end I told him it doesn’t work that way. You won’t win that way, with what you can do for me. It’s only about what you can do to me, to us. You can’t win that way, you can win or you can be the hero, the white knight, you and your shining armour. But you want to win more. You want to be right more than be good. And winning’s the same as right.
I don’t understand.
You can’t rescue me. You can’t fix me.
What’s damaged stays damaged. Is that it?
Aye, that’s it.
…
He told me I was going to die. He said he could see it, ‘cause of the way I talked, ‘cause of the way I looked. You don’t care about anything, he said. No, I tell him, I just don’t care about you. It’s not the same thing.
Sometimes I asked myself, really asked myself why, but it wasn’t something that could be reasoned. I did not find him attractive. He had tiny eyes, beady, blackish, swiney.
It wasn’t ‘cause I couldn’t either. It wasn’t ‘cause it was wrong, not exactly. He repulsed me, physically and morally. He repulsed me, but he was, in a way, all that I justly deserved. He was my self-negating tool of trade. A logical extension to the lifelessness I was learning. He was the way I degraded myself, a spiritual counterpart to the drink and the smack that were belittling my body. It was a kind of abuse, a kind of cutting, left me disfigured, ethically mutilated.
Yeah, that was it. I was killing myself. I was rubbing myself out. A more thorough form of suicide. And I’d made him my murderer and he was too fucking obtuse to notice. Whose victory was that? Which indifference wins?
It occurred to me more than once that he might actually kill me. He could have. It would have surprised nobody and I couldn’t have told then. Maybe he wasn’t so obtuse. Maybe he knew it didn’t really matter. Maybe he knew I was already dead.
Or maybe he just didn’t want to give me the satisfaction.
…
I pencil his pores in, mouthing their slack, love-sick sweat songs. Big open pores, gave him that loose-knit look. He bites his nails. I never noticed that before, those pinky-yellow ragged-raw rinds. He’s asleep and I draw him and I think about smothering him.
He got angry before, earlier on. He says he’d lose his job if someone found out. He says he doesn’t know why he has to come back. He looks at me like it’s my place to explain him, to make him make sense to himself.
I laugh at him. I laugh at him and he gets angry with me. He hits me and shakes me and I laugh and I laugh. I read to him from Genet and laugh and I laugh. He kicks at the van ‘til it rocks and I laugh. He tears up the papers and puts out the glass. I laugh and I laugh and I laugh. It isn’t that way, he yells at me, it’s not the way that you always make out that it is. Stop being such a victim, he screams at me, stop being such a cunting fucking victim. It’s evil, he howls at me, the way you go on. It’s evil, it’s mad, it’s mad and it’s evil and sick and it’s evil and sick. Finished? I ask him.
You make me feel ashamed, like I’m raping you, like you don’t want this.
I don’t want this.
But you let me.
I laugh some more. I hate you, he says. No you don’t, I say. And he pants on the bed like a dog on a hot day.
No, I don’t. You’re mad. You see that, don’t you?
Yes.
You’ll die.
Not just because you say so.
You’re laughing at me?
At everything. At life.
Oh, he says, and he calms down then. Have a drink, I tell him, rest a while. And he rests a while, as much as he ever does, watching me watching him. You know how to be still, he tells me, and he’s right, I do.
Danny sleeps. He will have to go soon. I don’t know if I’ll see him again. I am burning pictures again. I hold a strand of my hair out to the naked flame and think for a moment, consider my slow-burn, think on what he would say.
Genet says, what I read to Danny, about using menace and using prayer. I smile and I stand burning pages. And he does not wake up and he does not wake and silence is just something else to surrender to.
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The human race, the only race I know where everybody loses.
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we are not amused
