User E-Book

Bruce Benderson

• Herausgeber: Muswell Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 363

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

A New York City hustler with a special gift for reeling in customers, Apollo, 'a pale skinned mulatto with a mournful mouth' strips at a gay sex theatre in Times Square. He is one of the most seductive and disturbing creations in recent American fiction. Unflinchingly describing the lives of hustlers, pimps, drug-addicts and transsexuals in 1990s Times Square, User speaks with the authentic voice of characters from the edge. This is a world filled with stark, hypnotic eroticism and mined with terrors peculiar to the subterranean city in the hours after midnight. A Queer Classic published in the UK and Australia for the first time. By the bestselling author of The Romanian, winner of the Prix de France. User is unmistakably brilliant' Los Angeles Times. 'Impressive, startling and eerie...hypnotically descriptive and powerfully rhythmic' Kirkus. 'User is a stunning novel. I both love and respect it even though parts of it challenge and disturb me' Matt Bates.

Leseprobe

USER

Bruce Benderson

FOR

Clay, Carlos C., James, Zack, Eddie M., Angel, Carlos, Tony R., Angel, Cisco, Carlos, Jarratt, Frenchy, Izod, Freddie, J.R., Sandro C., Sugar Bear, E.T., Tallulah, Nico, Pasquale, Rubber Band, Dice, Legs, Murphy, Ed R., Jason, Carlos, Angel, Lucas, Willie, Hector, Scorpio, Paris, Hammer Love, Bam Bam, George, Peter, Frank, Johnnie, Alex, Lionheart, Arsenio, Yvette, Little Angel, Shady Louie, Mike, Carlos R., Alberto, Keith, Green Eyes, Dennis, Antonio, Eric, Joey, Che Che, Chino, Tina, Coco, The Kid, Cheyenne, Ramon, Dr. Stephen Feld, Samantha, Hector Xtravaganza, Francisco, Sandy, Consuela Cosmetic, George A., Stuart, Douglas, Roxanne Spillane, Pepper, and Beverly.

My thanks toUrsule Molinaro, Kevin Mulroy, and Matthew Carnicelli for their advice on this manuscript.

To Anthony Colon, for his quiet courage and wisdom.

My gratitude to Joey P’tail, Kathy, Mayler, and the staff at T.’s.

He clasped a corpse: a body so cold that it froze him …

—Là-bas, J.-k. huysmans

Contents

Title PageForDedicationEpigraphIntroductionIIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXXIXIIXIIIXIVXVXVIXVIIXVIIIXIXAlso by Bruce BendersonCopyright

Introduction

This novel represents a benchmark in my life. Primarily, it was the only way someone like me could become involved in politics. It was, in fact, the “political” gesture I’d always intended to make; the principal backup to my combative disdain for movements, crusades, and the two-party system; a project whose goal was to make the inarticulate members of the lowest economic sector articulate, and to bring the minds and hearts of the poorest into the bookstores of the educated classes. It was, in other words, a determined attempt to force those who thought of the people of the street as nothing but a hassle to be avoided to stop for the first time in their lives and listen to what these people were saying. (It also was a way to assuage my guilt about not voting in the last two elections.)

My “dream” took several years to accomplish. During that time, I certainly enjoyed the “research.” From 1985 to 1995, I was spending five nights a week in the still unrenovated Times Square at the hustler and drag bars that proliferated before the big upscaling—or “Disneyfication”—of Times Square. After my first book about these experiences, a collection of short stories entitled Pretending to Say No (Penguin/Plume, 1990), was released, I was often told I was exploiting the people who were my subject matter because their income and education were so far beneath mine. There were even those who couldn’t imagine any approach not wholly journalistic and who would assume I’d spent my time in those places with a concealed tape recorder. Others, who could at least envision my participating in that world in a guise other than detached journalist, still wondered if I’d behaved any better than the typical colonizer, who profits from the disenfranchised by packaging what’s valuable about them and marketing it to the bourgeoisie.

The truth was that I was wholly invested in the dangerous world of Times Square. I was a denizen—but a denizen with a different pedigree. Beginning in 1985, just as crack was born and had begun to take over the streets of New York, I’d walked head-on into those scenes of chaotic pleasure. I’d shunned neither the drugs nor the sexual opportunities I’d found there as a “john.” But unlike my sex-and-drug partners, I often had something to do or somewhere to be the day after a night of drug-fueled sex—a piece of writing expected by a publisher or a freelance job in the world of New York media. I was walking a scary tightrope strung between the underclass world of the street and the middle-class world of work, and I would return to my world just in time to keep from becoming a permanent member of the exiled class. My partners, most of whom hailed from the South Bronx, had nothing but the resources of the street to fall back on.

This difference did not keep me from forming meaningful, sometimes lasting relationships with the people of the street, one of whom, a homeless Puerto Rican boy, I ended up adopting. As can be clearly sensed in my first book, at the beginning I could only portray Times Square as a comedy of manners in which the value systems of a middle-class person looking for pleasure—my main character—clashed, often humorously, with the lifestyles of those who provided that pleasure with their bodies. But for the next book—the one you are about to read—I took the formula further and developed a way to relate to the speech of my street characters and bring their struggles, voices, dreams, conversations, and life stories more and more to the fore. The middle-class characters diminished to supporting roles.

I built the world depicted in this novel not from surveillance tapes, but from the notes I scrawled in media res—on napkins, matchbook covers, and on the backs of receipts, which I tossed into an old suitcase each night upon returning from Times Square. Then, extracting the notes made on the run one by one, without any prior plan of order or structure, I built my new cosmology from scratch, fragment by fragment, with the goal of creating a loving, engaged valentine to old Times Square.

This process came to a discouraging halt in the late ’90s, when all the bars I frequented were shut down by Mayor Giuliani’s administration. Many of the buildings were torn down, and Times Square became a sterile, manufactured, police-monitored evocation of the past with overpriced, mediocre restaurants for families of tourists. My world had ended, and by some miracle, I’d emerged from it without once being arrested or ever becoming totally addicted to drugs; but it felt as if a rug had been pulled out from under my feet. At first, I sought that world elsewhere, which was the reason I took an assignment from an online journal about brothels in Eastern Europe. That project eventually brought me to Romania, a quest that ultimately resulted in a long memoir about my passion for a homeless Romanian rent boy entitled The Romanian: Story of an Obsession (Penguin/Tarcher, 2006).

Today feels like an optimum moment for the re-release of User, because our entire culture is in the throes of a radical transformation. Through the clamor of dissenting voices, I can hear minorities insisting on self-naming and rejecting the definitions of an identity previously foisted upon them by the ruling order. Such changes have affected me by making my central motivation the preservation of the past. My great fear is that the utopic trends we are experiencing may cause some people to succumb to the temptation of rewriting history. Those born after me may never learn that old Times Square once hosted an underclass population that served as the only social space outside their ghetto. Today, my fervent hope is that you’ll be as touched and changed by getting to know this now scattered population as I was.

Bruce Benderson

New York City, 2023

I

Mrs. Buster Huxton III, first name Sofia, an eighty-six-year-old Portuguese, still maintains an elegant triplex over her porno theater on Eighth Avenue. The discovery of her world lies beyond a musty, rubber-backed velvet curtain that must be swept aside upon entering. As the eyes slowly adapt to darkness, sweating walls become visible. You fumble down the aisle, using the sticky top edges of the leather seats as a guide, then slide into a row, your shoe likely to make an imprint in some viscous liquid.

In the second row are men with thinning hair and defeated shoulders, about to watch a dancer, whose name is Apollo, mount the stage in a black posing strap. Lit only by footlights, the room is orangey dark, and the lone silhouettes of the scattered spectators punctuate the gloom. In a moment the music will blast through scratchy speakers; the dancer, a pale-skinned mulatto with a mournful mouth, will leap barefoot onto the stage and lithely slip in and out of a few geometric poses. Then he will drop back onto the stale carpet and zigzag down the aisle to those few stranded men, to ask each under the cover of the blaring music if he might like a private show.

*

Call me Apollo—that dancer you watched in the shadows and said was mulatto—and you, my date, are somebody in the theater I was lucky or pushy enough to talk into a private show. Thirty’s the price I told you, but that will only get me two or three bags of dope this time of night. I only got one foil of crushed-up Dilaudid that I got from a doctor I tricked with. But what about cigarettes and a quart of beer for later?

I already know how to play you into coughing up another twenty. At just the moment when I say I don’t got enough to get back to Connecticut will be when you feel most off-guard. Right after you’ve shot your load, in other words. At this moment I imagine you being as high as I am. There is no explanation for this. Maybe it’s just being so close to your face. It’s that weird feeling of my eyes about to roll back as the Dilaudid races through my veins to begin the lick at my brain.

In a room below the stage, in the basement, a head keeps bobbing between Apollo’s splayed thighs, the taste of rubber blocking out the smell of sweat, mixed with the odor of mildew and cracking vinyl. Up and down the lips and tongue glide, while the bridge of the nose butts dully against him. Each dark, sparkling wave of Dilaudid hitting his brain, reversed by the teasing tongue on body parts.

This must be cozy as Mrs. Huxton feels in her high-class apartment above the theater. I saw it one time. It’s all carpet. There’s a silver tea service on the first floor in the sitting room. Polished sparkling furniture in the chandelier light and her lifting the control to that cable television … Nothing in this four-story building on Eighth Avenue except the theater and the basement, topped by Mrs. Huxton’s three luxury floors. Her middle-aged kids are begging her to sell out and move somewhere safe. But seems keeping up her husband’s business, which started as a tiny striptease joint on this very block in the 1930s and can’t pull in much now but is worth several million in real estate, became her thing. They told me the evening he finally croaked, and the corpse had to be carried down the stairs past the entrance, they switched the lights on and told guys with their pants down to leave, gave rain checks. It was years before I was even born …

Outside this room, in the dank corridor lit by one bulb, a fat man in pale clothes lurches by the entrance to a dingy lavatory. His sulfur gaze fixes on a dancer in a stretched-out jock strap hoisting a granite leg to the sink to wash off a thick foot, the calf of the other leg bulging in a big knot. In the faint, purplish light, dark hollows of muscle cleave his bending back. He lifts his head to gaze in a dull come-on at the fat man fumbling toward him and parting his lips in a soft popping sound like some marine creature.

Farther away, where the corridor rises in two steps leading to a fire door, crouches a boy shakily trying to light a match. The head of the first match disengages and sparks into the darkness, giving a glimpse of a bristling red crew cut, waxy skin. Then another match flares, revealing an opaline glass stem phosphorescent with smoke, pursing lips, and pinched features. He sucks in his breath as the end of the pipe glows brighter and the match fades.

In the dressing room, in front of a decrepit mirror that is missing bulbs, sits a downy-lipped teenager with large, shiny curls and grimy hands, squinting almost as if in performance in the dim light at the open math book in his lap.

Meanwhile, in the room with the so-called mulatto, the grunts of arousal have become more manifest. The gentleman’s hand jerks at the wan penis that sticks from the open zipper of his pants, groanings occur, and an ejaculation hits the black wall. The lips spasm around the half-erect member of the drugged dancer and then loosen. He sits up and clears his throat, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand; he tucks in his shirt and zips up, buckles his belt, and fishes into his pocket for the thirty dollars he had ready …

… My cock shrinking from the peeled bag that I toss on the floor with the others, speaking quick but soft so as not to ruin the mood, going heavy with the lingo of the street that puts the fear in some of you, and putting myself between you and the door, your only means of escape:

“You took too long, daddy, I got to take a cab to the station … man. I got to hit New Haven tonight on that last bus. Come on, I said, now pass me another twenty!”

I’ll go on and on without budging. The Dilaudid’s a drug for cancer patients that kills pain and tranquilizes, but I can get chatty and speedy from its rushes. I know that this must sound very flipped for a john who has come and now wants out of this little room with me blocking the door. But nobody’ll probably hear should you call out … And believe me, in Mrs. Huxton’s world scenes like this can turn into a bad dream. Even a big guy who is outraged will think twice before pushing this situation to the max. There might be an argument as you fumble too long in another pocket for more money … But even if you decide to stand up to me in the tiny room, I won’t take my eyes off your face. The Dilaudid gives me a strange kind of courage as you flip back and forth between decisions.

No one else is there to witness the standoff. The fat man wandering in the hallway and the dancer at the lavatory sink had disappeared together into another stall. At the sounds of agitation, the crack smoker and the curly-haired boy with the math book took the stairs two at a time. But perhaps in a room three floors above, sequestered from Eighth Avenue by concrete grillwork and ventilation ducts, an old woman shifts quaveringly in her sleep.

The so-called live show is over now. A tepid fantasy film colors the screen: the bedroom of a tract house somewhere in Southern California, an acrylic painting of a sunset seascape color-coordinated to the violet bedspread upon which loll two scraggly-haired teenagers whose locked limbs are at odds with the overlay of frantic disco music …

In the back by the curtained entrance, Casio, an ex-gang member who’s been the bouncer in this place ever since he got out of jail the second time, raises a brow over a dark-circled eye at the sound of the dull thuds coming from the private rooms. What was that crash? It could be that one of the boys is giving a trick some trouble. And with all the new construction changing the neighborhood, things have become hot; the authorities are waiting for an excuse to come in and shake the place down. By habit, the bouncer pricks up his vigilant, nocturnal ears, unconsciously compresses into an animal crouch … perches inwardly on the shot of dope that he did earlier to muster what remains of his old machismo.

But maybe the noise was just a seat slapping into position. Or a middle-aged trick stumbling on a stair. He strains to hear. All he can make out is the synthesized disco of the porno film, an occasional sigh or intake of breath. Then again, the unmistakable sound of a body thudding against a thin wall.

He moves toward the stairs but pauses. He’s reluctant to go down there before he decides: which of the five kids going out and coming in high and going out again and coming back in is it?

Carlos is no problem. He’s so doped up he don’t want no trouble—a papi-crazy faggot who comes off like a barrio homeboy and’ll always back down. And white-one-what’s-his-face, Red? Even if thirsted out for rockets he’ll crumble up the minute he see my face, ’cause of the time I found him doing that queen behind the movie screen for a toke.

But the half-breed nigger always talking crap about that Miss Huxton owns this place and inviting him to teas? Wacky enough to go the whole mile! … Oreo cookies’re like that. I just might end up having to nix his ass.

He marches grimly down the stairs with a sense of ailing authority. But the trick with the thinning hair has already dodged Apollo after being pushed against the wall by him, has fled the private room and ducked behind the stairwell.

Out of the private room stumbles the stoned dancer, looking for the vanished green. And what conspires next takes place only in Apollo’s mind. For only he could explain what happened in the stairwell: how running into the prematurely aged Casio with his glaring eyes and permanent scowl threw him into a rage—back to the South and shorts and a blackberry patch where he’d had the same feeling of being mistrusted for no good reason … had picked up a thorny branch lying on the dirt path and started swinging it …

Why the bouncer’s snide rictus smile filled him with spite at merely being a serf in the empire of Mrs. Huxton …

Until Casio’s eye exploded under Apollo’s scarred fist. The bouncer careened on his heels and fell back, tipped forward again to regain his balance, then fell back off the stairwell for good. His spine struck the floor in a wet smack, and he lay there with his back askew, while the trick crouched in his hiding place in fascination and dread.

Then Casio’s eyes rolled up, back, and his mouth dangled wide open. And he couldn’t stop hearing his ears ringing. Apollo the attacker ran down the sweltering street, his fist bleeding and pulsing. A dim shiver must have crept along his sweaty spine as he wondered how badly he had hurt Casio. He headed for a haven from revenge—the transvestite lounge just a few blocks up the avenue.

Tina, the drag-queen owner, was slipping her shoulders out of her three-quarter mink, which she wore to offset her expensive green pants suit, despite the summer heat. It fell into the hands of one of her waiters, who hastily locked it in the storeroom downstairs. At the same time, Tina’s index finger swept from the center of her siliconed chest to the door, like a sultan in a low-budget movie banishing a subversive subject. Standing near the door was the shirtless and breathless Apollo, who had no I.D. and whose knuckles showed congealed gashes in the orange light.

With glowering eyes, he held his ground until Tina took a step forward. Then he skulked into the street. Tina’s pointing hand unfurled into a flattened palm, which daintily patted her extravagant but provincial coiffure.

“Love the little ones,” she quipped, “’cause they’re real easy to push around.”

The embarrassed fugitive was bumped back into the no man’s land of Eighth Avenue, his mind seething with the indignity of being kicked out by an authority-figure queen. He headed north with his clotting fist. But the more he ran, the more his anxiety about what had happened diminished … Soon he let off steam by kicking over a box. It still held the three bottle caps and the pea that he had set up earlier as a betting game to dupe some German tourists. Leaping shirtless through the polluted, copper-colored mists, he became a smaller and smaller dot. For him, the dot of himself was shrinking so fast that it seemed as obscure as one of tonight’s tricks. His high dwindled as he dwindled, and he’d need another shot soon. Especially tonight, after what had happened.

As he moved from block to block, he passed other exiles barred from Tina’s, such as Angelo, a tall, rotten-toothed adolescent whose speech was permanently slurred by the rigid jaw of constant crack use, and whose bare toes poked from ripped sneakers. Angelo tried to lure him farther west, promising to get him a deal on a hit, but Apollo kept going, past big Cubby, also bare-chested, covered with tattoos that he claimed told the story of his life in stages, like stations of the cross, and who spit out wisecracks about Apollo’s butt and alternately pleaded for a dollar.

A shiny limousine caught up with Apollo and seemed to slow down to his pace. In his mind, it must have been Mrs. Huxton’s driver, whom she used for her rare outings or for transports of human and other cargo. For him, Mrs. Huxton was the principle of order in all this chaos, the final authority, even beyond Tina and the cops. She stood with the means and the schedules for things. Her high principles even seemed to regulate the ritual of taking dope, a revolving door she watched him go round and round in. If she’d ordained that he be brought in and punished for what had happened, then maybe he’d have to go; but the limo picked up speed again.

The air made his lungs smart. Tonight, the street stank of something worse than the bar or the theater. They had smelled like bug spray and filthy toilets and stale beer, but the street was perfumed by polluted river water or clothing rotting. He gasped for breath and slouched against a trash can.

The trick from the theater—the cocksucker with thinning hair and defeated shoulders—hadn’t given him more money after being knocked against the wall but had pushed past him out of the room with a weird smile on his lips. What was worse was that the money Apollo did get must have fallen out of his posing strap when he pulled his pants on after wasting Casio. There was nothing stuffed in the posing strap or in his pants pockets but a folded square of paper with a pinch of the Dilaudid he’d gotten from the doctor, a freaky M.D. who came straight from the emergency room to the theater during breaks from a nearby hospital. This and the Percodan he sometimes picked up from his friend who had AIDS were Apollo’s only pharmaceutical sources of downers.

He surveyed the spacious avenue, which made him feel like a sitting duck. Anybody who didn’t keep moving on this strip was obviously hooking, dealing, or looking to cop. Bobbing toward him on scrawny legs like a diseased chicken was Gloves (Georgie Golden Gloves, was that his name?), now and then almost losing his balance to shadowboxing. He was the angel-dust head who always carried around a frayed picture of himself losing a Golden Gloves tournament.

Apollo stomped into the middle of the sidewalk, and Georgie collided with him.

“Listen! I got a problem, I gotta get outta here, lemme stay with a couple dollars,” Apollo muttered as Georgie fumbled against him.

Apollo crashed against him again with more force, throwing his shoulders into it. But Georgie was numb and answered from the fantasy world of angel dust in the voice of Al Pacino’s Scarface:

“I took a little on the side, but I never fucked you, Frank.”

“Then gimme a stogie,” was how Apollo countered the non sequitur.

But Georgie Golden Gloves was already bobbing up the block.

An aftershock of Dilaudid, jammed in some capillary until now, troughed out a wave of high, and Apollo concentrated on riding it. He let the memory of the theater wash away by thinking of this morning’s clever evasion of arrest. It had a shiny coating of triumph from this high perspective.

There he was in “Dark Park” in the Bronx at 5:00 a.m. this morning, trying to cop with no I.D., when the cops stopped him, and he was carrying his blade and his works,

… the two white cops saying we don’t want ’em, and the P.R. cop saying give ’em to me, I’ll take his ass.

So they ran up a warrant check on me, but even though the name was right, the D.O.B. (that stands for date of birth, dork) was wrong. What are you, a black or a Hispanic? I got kids, I sobbed. So they just hit me with a D.A.T.—a desk appearance ticket. And let me go. So where does all the good luck come from, you’re wondering? People loving you, praying for you …

He crashed off the doctored memory with the realization that he was reciting it to himself as if he were telling it to somebody important. Getting ready to tell it is all! he caught himself philosophizing through the high. But then the departed wave of Dilaudid dropped him on his ass again, and pride about the incident deflated. He yawned and peered with fierce vigilance through the copper light of dilapidated Eighth Avenue.

Mercedes was flouncing across the street. The black transvestite, in an outrageous gold lamé outfit, had halted at the curb and yanked up her top to pop out her breasts, grabbing and squeezing them for him. In the shimmering pollution and from a distance, the image took on an idealized quality.

Glancing quickly both ways, she pulled her miniskirt up and panties down, kept her cock pressed between her dark, sinewy legs, and mimed a pussy dance just for him. The astonished passengers of an Oldsmobile stopped at a red light—theatergoers—clicked shut the locks of their car and lurched forward. Apollo delightedly mimed a jerking-off motion to the queen. It was only for a split second that a collapsed version of what had happened maybe two months—a year?—ago flared up in his mind. He’d been her boyfriend then.

Kind of. But well, then, one night I needed—something— from her purse …

All right! It was fix money, and when she found out, well …

She’d come looking for him on Ninth Avenue … And he’d had the bad luck of being in the act of rapping to another queen when she spotted him … “Mercedes, really, I woulda asked you.”

“I’ll fucking cut you, you son of a bitch!” reaching into her purse.

“No, come on now, put that shit away, there’s cops around.”

Mercedes’s big hand with its inch-long fingernails was whipping the gleaming blade from side to side. First it slashed open his shirt, then made some long cuts across his chest. She kept reaching for his face, but he fended her off, let her cut his forearm instead.

Winded, she let the knife drop to her side, her eyes streaming with tears, running the mascara. Her straightened hair had come undone and was plastered by sweat to her face.

It wasn’t so much being cut by a queen in public but noticing that one silicone-plumped cheek had fallen slightly below her prominent cheekbone that curled his fingers into a hard fist. It hit the cheek and her mouth, chipped part of a front tooth out …

“Is this guy giving you trouble, little lady?”

“Yes, officer, he tried to rape me.” Her head was bowed, her hand clasping her bloody mouth. She was sobbing.

“Against the wall! Put your arms up!”

“Can’t you see it’s a guy, officer! That’s no lady!”

“Keep your mouth shut!”

The cop found his works and a bag right away, so he was sent to Rikers, bleeding like a pig, and waited three months without bail.

The queen was gone. The space where she had appeared across the street was now a dull blot of dirty air, tinged with red neon from the porno marquee above it. With the sensual certainty of still being a little high, Apollo reassured himself he no longer had feelings for her, or anybody else on the street. The thought itself was anesthetic, so he slipped hypnotically into it, probing the dimensions of that lack of feeling.

He remembered a conversation about johns with another hustler from Tina’s. The hustler moved his out-turned palm up and down the length of an imaginary wall as if he were lathing it. The wall permanently divided “them” with the money from “us” out here. They’re fake, he kept repeating about the johns. They don’t exist, he kept saying. But us, we’re out here, we’re down by law …

A sentimental image of the boy—ripped jeans, big ass, blue tank top—flashed into Apollo’s stoned head. A white boy who was also hustling and doing dope. And then one night—

What happened? Oh, yeah. I ended up in bed with my buddy’s john. Hee, hee, hee.

A tiny smirk crossed Apollo’s lips. He marveled at his wispishness. He complacently pictured his own naturally lithe body and imagined steamy breath, those hungry caresses.

I didn’t plan to get over on ole buddy like that. But let’s face it that the drug acts like a wild aphrodisiac sometimes. People who say that you don’t like sex on dope don’t know their ass from their elbow. I can really turn a trick out some days when I’m high. So the john kicked him loose. And then moved me in.

A burst of breaking glass! Apollo and the john leaping out of bed in the middle of the night. The tank top and the ripped jeans! Apollo’s old, good buddy (who’d gotten skinny, lost his big ass) had shattered the kitchen window, was crouched by it.

Yeah, but had I already moved my things into the john’s house by then? Yeah, that must be how I lost that jacket …

Apollo’s thoughts flipped back once again to the guy’s working tongue, his inner thighs tensing and relaxing with wetness, before—crash! … My ole buddy has him facing the refrigerator and is trying to tie him to it. The john’s looking at me over the turns of rope with pleading eyes, like why don’t I help him? What the fuck am I supposed to do? You don’t treat a hustler like that to make him your favorite boy and then dump him for another. “Just don’t hurt him,” I told my ole buddy. But I had to let him lie in the bed he made …

*

After the john dropped Apollo for not protecting him, Apollo shortchanged the same hustler by buying him a bundle—ten bags of dope—and then cutting it with talc and baby laxative. Then he made a vow to fly solo, which he’d kept to this day. It was an obvious mistake to trust anybody in this world of sudden calamities and quick solutions. As if in confirmation of this idea, he saw Angelo, that crackhead he’d passed earlier, lurching out of the all-night fruit-and-vegetable store across the street with a bag-sheathed quart of beer. A tall, dead-faced guy in a stocking cap stumbled next to him.

Apollo squinted at them through the copper light, which seemed suddenly to have thickened, making everything look distorted, as if through gelatin. The cap had a shimmering white X on it, but it was too hot for a hat. So this guy is obviously worried about his hair looking nappy.

Through the rubbery light, Apollo watched Angelo snake abrotherly arm around the guy’s shoulder. But that’s the dude Angelo said killed his cousin!

Apollo momentarily wondered how Angelo could hang with a guy that murdered relatives. Then that thought too began to shimmer like gelatin. Something about Angelo’s cousin doing codeine that night? And Angelo said the guy slipped eye drops in his cousin’s drink that put him over the edge. A dude who always wears a big stocking cap that said X.

He squinted again. The X-cap was passing a few bills to Angelo, who palmed them quickly.

But is that really the one he said’s the murderer?

Either the guy seemed like somebody Angelo imagined had killed his cousin—and he’d probably imagined it when he was high—or the guy really was the killer. But now that Angelo was high he didn’t remember it. Or maybe wasn’t thinking about it. If you asked him about it now, his eyes would dim, he’d say, “Hey, you know why I know it wasn’t him? ’Cause I was with them all that night!” ’Cause the guy with the X-cap was his buddy, kicking in bucks toward another bag of rockets.

Apollo considered bolting across the street and trying to pry one of the bills out of Angelo. But he wondered how the X-cap guy would take it. That’s the way things worked out here. One minute you slithered your arm around a shoulder, the next you vowed to off somebody.

What’s a friend anyway but he gives you something? What a fool you are to give that to somebody. And knowing he does it makes you feel please don’t deny me ’cause I’m so hungry! It makes you feel low, so you just grab for it, it shows more balls. ’Cause both of ’em are games, pretending I care, pretending I … don’t care …

Apollo condescendingly watched the unholy couple moving up the block until they too were swallowed by the gelatinous light. His thoughts strayed to the one time he’d admitted having feelings for somebody and had gone to jail for it. It was a man who’d been to college. He supposed the guy had been well-meaning—in a white sort of way. In fact, now— just a year later—they were speaking again, the poor dude was sick with HIV symptoms. It was him Apollo got Percs from now and then.

Back then they’d kept tricking over and over. The guy had even wanted to help Apollo kick dope and get rehabilitated.

… So he buys me bags of dope and feeds ’em to me, trying to cut down the dose little by little. “I’m in love with you,” he keeps promising …

Until Apollo believed it was true. But whenever he tried to act appreciative it was the worst—he got goose flesh. He felt a force field of depression forming around him, pressing in and keeping everything out. It fed on the need for the dope and sucked everything good he had seen in the john out of him …

One night in the sex theater Apollo started to get the shakes because he needed more dope. The guy wouldn’t pass him any money.

I guess he was from a spoiled background and didn’t have the balls to keep up with my habit and turned into kind of an asshole.

Words started to shout in Apollo’s bursting head. He was sweating and puking.

Saying you care when you leave me here with diarrhea in the dirty toilet …

Apollo stalked him out of the theater to the street to try to explain things better …“Don’t leave me without a penny to my name when I told you plain and clear that I just needed help this very last time …”

… traipsed faster after the bright spot of money getting into a cab, pushed past the pain of his cramping legs to catch him before he got that taxi, rage at what had suddenly diminished to a retreating piece of green taking hold of him …

The guy was lying on the pavement, and Apollo was kicking him convulsively.

I didn’t really attack my friend, my withdrawal went into spasms.

Connecting with the guy, joining his pain to him with the toe of his boot …

So the man pressed charges, and Apollo went back to jail.

*

Some of the cons in jail had put ads in gay papers, about being lonely and needing a gay they could write to and call collect. After that you were supposed to write about your big dick until the guy cracked. You’d talk about all the things that would happen when you got out, and then hit him up for money and cigarettes.

For some, the person on the outside started to do all kinds of favors. He’d send cigarettes, books, commissary money, call relatives for you. Occasionally, the locked-up one got strung-out, so that the other’s generosity took on strange, impossible significations. Sexual identity stretched like a rubber band …

It was just Apollo’s luck yet again to attract one who wanted more than anything else to be a nice guy. This weird type kept popping up. “Don’t write me sexual letters. Let’s be honest with each other.” A series of “spiritual” letters passed between them, discussing third-world liberation and the prison system, which he’d learned about from his first white sugar daddy. The guy complimenting his intelligence. There was sensitive talk about relationships, the meaning of friendship, and dreams Apollo had had.

“May upon the arrival of this letter, it will find you in the best of health …” Apollo always began each letter, cursing the fact that his perpetual, damning, and desperate need always had to rear its ugly head again. “I sincerely hope that you …” “Please forgive my asking but …” “Hope you are well and by the way could you …” “I’m sorry we got to know each other under such bad circumstances for me but if you could …”

This time it was worse. When you’re alone in your cell after lights out, anguish might settle in. The loneliness seems limitless. You’re tempted to think that this guy could … Later it will seem absurd.

Nightmares of torture and sadism, witchcraft being performed on and by him. He felt, as he sat bolt upright in the bunk in the middle of the night, that it was only fair to warn his pen pal with whom he was dealing. “I’ve got to admit to you right off the bat that I’m not a very trusting person.” “I hate to say it but I’m full of bitterness and rage.” He even told him why he was doing time—for stomping the only guy he’d ever liked outside a sex theater.

But the admissions backfired. “I’ll take the chance … I can handle it” were the guy’s responses. An avalanche of feelings piling up. An intolerable need to believe that the guy really might understand everything. Ferocious hate about the better possibility that he would not. He wrestled with it and pushed it away.

“Dear Comrade …” But it was too late. The mark had already marked him.

There were sweet moments, his weakest, when he sank into the dream of a friend and protector who was taking care of everything. A kind of Frankenstein patchwork of a buddy-father-brother with a strange, scary erotic aspect. It intoxicated him like the dope. Coming off it was worse. The sense of injustice riddled him, made him feel murderous.

“This will be our last letter. For both our sakes, I think it better we stop communicating. I’ll never be able to make you happy.”

But the guy kept writing. Was he the con artist of the century? It had almost lulled Apollo into what seemed like a passive, infantile state. A desperate, intolerable need leaking with sexuality. It felt like incest. There he was daydreaming about lying in his arms like some kind of woman. He’d turn into jail pussy if he wasn’t careful …

Then on Christmas came the pair of Nikes he’d been asking for. And with it the letter that set his teeth on edge. “This should finally prove to you that I’m really thinking about you in the best possible way.”

What exactly was that supposed to mean? A man who needs shoes on his feet like anyone else having to bow down and suck the dick of the one who provides them? He wrote a grateful-sounding letter, but he had the gnawing sense that every word of it stoked the guy’s ego.

A month later the guy came to visit. Apollo was saving the expensive sneakers for when he got out and never thought of wearing them. Not thinking that the guy would not understand the communal nature of prison, he borrowed new sneakers from buddies to dress up for him. Traded a pack of cigarettes for hair gel, got a pressed shirt, and even some stolen cologne. He cleaned his teeth …

Sitting in the visitors’ room surrounded by couples with their tongues in each other’s mouth or hands up skirts, a sinking feeling as he tried to imagine what he would do when he got out to please his benefactor—the guy’s hairy arms, his schoolteacherlike clothes. He pushed it out of his mind, courageously promising himself not to let his benefactor down.

The guy is staring at my sneakers!

“I thought you said you desperately needed sneakers.”

“I did. I borrowed these from somebody.”

The guy is giving me a doubtful look! It made him feel lucky to be locked up, because all he wanted to do was slash up the guy’s face and hurl the sneakers into the wounds. Everything he’d suspected had come true in one overwhelming wave.

By accepting the sneakers, he had branded himself a user, coated himself with slime. And all of it had been ordained by the other person, who was always in power.

But for the guy it had obviously been no big deal. He kept up the sweetish letters, spelling out high ideals, forging a high-class image.

Apollo’s emotions like hot coals put all his strength into playing along, waiting for the chance to strike.

The guy’s letters and calls had a plaintive element now, because his father was dying. Apollo mimed the right sentiments.

I told him I was there for him … Until the guy wrote that his father had finally passed away. Then Apollo went right to work. “May upon the arrival of this letter, it find you in the best of health … I’ve got to admit what I think of you … Sad, lonely gay guy who likes to fantasize that he can control other people … felt sorry for you and appreciated what you did for me, I was willing to make some sacrifices for you when I got out—sacrifices, if you know what I mean!”

Gleefully, but with gritted teeth, he took his punishment as cigarettes, commissary money, books, and promises of lodging stopped abruptly. The rejection was exhilarating, as the reins fell back into his hands. The bitterness reinstated its bulwarks, and life became simple again …

Until his time was up. He was back on the streets with no place to live and no sponsor. Within a few days he was combing the sex theater with a needle in his coat pocket. It was almost as if time had stood still.

So still that here he stood: in the spot he had been hundreds of times before, a couple blocks from Tina’s bar. No money and a gnawing yen to get high. Eighty-sixed from his only source of money, the sex theater, for wasting that used-up bouncer Casio—who’d fallen half a flight and landed on his back with a wet smack.