“Skins” is included in Everything I Have Is Blue:
Short Fiction by Working-Class Men About More-or-Less Gay Life

“Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field….”
—T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

 

I slap him across the face.

“But Rat,” he says to me.

He’s got a slippery voice that Crow. It’s good for telling stories, or singing whiskey-slurred lullabies in those haunting hours between night and morning. When you finally nod off you can still hear it, subliminal and ceaseless, like the backbeat in a song. This time I’m not listening.

I look up, away, anywhere. The sky is the color of a grainy photograph left too long in the back pocket of your only pair of jeans. Jeans cured to ancient blue and frayed at the knees. One day you reach in, lookin’ for a quarter, maybe a cigarette butt, and you come across this photo you been keeping, but you can’t tell what it’s a picture of anymore. That’s what the sky looks like. A memory condemned to a smear of gray. Somehow the sunlight bleeds through, so I know it ain’t yet night.

My gaze jumps from grainy sky to duct-taped boots to the tarpaper rooftop where he’s sprawled, all jutting ribs and skinned elbows and black feather pants. His eyes are twice as black and just as shiny. So is what’s left of his hair, a few clumps hanging ropy from the top, hanging like his wings would if he had any. I watch them flutter, a feeble, first-instinct response, like raising your arm before a machete. Makes me wanna hold him, promise it’ll all be okay. It won’t. He looks back up at me, underlip caught between his teeth. Crow.

“Get up,” I says. His eyes gloss over like spit-polished thrift store buttons. Like maybe he don’t wanna see me, so he’ll see through me instead. He’s got an arrogant nose that Crow, sharper and straighter than a switchblade. A slag-like spurt of blood from one nostril. He licks it away.

“Rat. Please.” I flinch at the word. My gaze scurries over the roof-top’s cinderblock edge, reels at the dizzying drop that ends in a gutted alley twenty-one stories below us. There, squad cars howl red blue spirals and circle like wild dogs before a kill. I close my eyes. The pressure builds behind them, like a pipe before it busts. I wish I could believe.

Runnels of fresh sweat cut tracks beneath my leather, through last week’s dirt and cheap cologne. “I’m sorry,” I says.

And I am. Like it matters.

Let me tell you ‘bout Crow. I was tanked on vodka and methedrine the night I found him on Crescent Boulevarde. He wasn’t hustling then, just hanging out. All the boys wore jeans and maybe leather. He had on them black feather pants, and more Mardi Gras beads than a Bourbon Street lamppost. It must not a been Mardi Gras or I woulda been drunker. I thought he was a boy, but I weren’t too sure. He’s like that, Crow. He wears his skin in such a way as you can’t tell, smudging the lines everyone else takes for granted. But I guess that’s what I was drawn to. That sense of limitless possibility. Me, I stay close to the ground.

But the one thing I was sure of. He was beautiful and outta place, like somethin’ sprouted from out a crack in the sidewalk. I felt my tail twitch, even though I didn’t have one. I told myself it was just the drugs. Maybe even I believed it.

Thing is, most of the other queers I’d met that weren’t on the boulevard were calling councils, begging the city for a few crumbs of civil rights. They wore their skins beneath their suits, if they still wore them at all. They came down to the strip sometimes, bearing gifts. The condoms found their way into greedy pockets. Sometimes we even remembered to use them. The instruction pamphlets, crumpled in junk-hungry fists, fell unread into the gutter. They always brought us more.

A couple of them invited me to council once, asked my name. I says my name’s Rat. That’s not a name, they says. Well that was it. They could keep their votes and rights and suits as far as I cared. I cussed ‘em all as the worst kinda whores. They says, child you’re the one we found on Crescent Boulevarde. I says I guess it takes one to know. Well I never went back to council after that, and I avoided them when I saw them in the street. Unless they were handing out condoms.

But this one wasn’t getting into any cars and he wasn’t a suit. More like a bright tangle of cheap beads and smeared lipstick and ragged black feathers, flinging gestures through the swears and spit and sully like he were fearless, or maybe just reckless. I saw through his beads, saw through to his wings, which trembled beneath my fingers later that night in my tunnel beneath the Atlantic building. Mouths running hot with rich, narcotic secrets. Skins rubbed raw by feather and fur.

“I love you,” he says, afterwards.

I was digging through my crumpled jeans for a cigarette. My stomach dropped, like when that sixth-precinct rookie hit me in the ribs with his nightstick. But then I got this crazy idea that if I didn’t say something, he’d maybe disappear. Don’t ask me how. It ain’t like he could fly.

Maybe it was just the skins we wore. But when I looked up from my cigarette and into his black-bulb eyes, I saw they weren’t at all afraid. Of me, of anything. I thought, that is one reckless Crow. And suddenly I wanted to be reckless with him, wanted to shed the shit-skin of my only pair of jeans, festoon myself with Mardi Gras beads, part the spit-strewn sidewalks and lay him like a sacrament beneath the thrumming neon lights.

But I couldn’t. Maybe it was the fear that started talking. Fear of the swears and spit and sully, fear of a nightstick in the ribs. Maybe it was that fear what told him flaunting his feathers would get him nothing but killed, that the going price of love was sixty bucks an hour. That he should ask for seventy and let them bargain him down. You ain’t in bum-fucked Kansas anymore, Dorothy.

It’s funny how the softest, most secret noises sound crazy loud down in the tunnels. His sobs echoed something eerie, like when an animal dies. It was so dark it was safe for me to reach out in silent apology. I held him soft and raw and shaking naked ‘til he’d cried himself to sleep, skin sticky with tears and sweat and god knows, maybe blood. I mean, I wasn’t sure whether or not he was a virgin. It was too late to ask.

“Y’ever have rat dreams?” he says.

This was weeks later. He’d been staying with me in the tunnel. It was a while ‘til he stopped feeling claustrophobic. Or maybe he just stopped complaining.

Hiking down to the beach was his idea. My knuckle grip turned white when he stood up on the Ferris wheel, spread his wings. We fed each other cotton candy, took our pictures in the one-dollar booth. Then we climbed down the broken spine of boardwalk. Crow, he ain’t so good at climbing, so he jumped, and I caught him, and we fell laughing in the sand. There wasn’t a soul or skin around. Molt-stricken seagulls fought over scraps, and oil-slick tide pools sucked at empty plastic bags. The ocean hissed a fierce brown spray of sewer and salt.

“Rat dreams, huh?”

I picked a half-smoked cigarette from the sand. It was crusted with lipstick. I shoved it between my teeth, lit a match. Maybe I’d scavenge enough to fill my pockets. The sky was the color of the sea. The one bled into the other, erasing the horizon. I thought it was goddamn beautiful, like something you’d see on a flyer for the art museum. Only real.

Crow crouched down, plucked a feather from the sand, and I saw then that his fist was full of them. And I thought he had been scrounging for cigarette butts with me. I wrapped my arms around him ‘til we stood chest to chest. Skin to skin. His hair was in two braids, like a schoolgirl, or a warrior. His thoughts soared above us, picking at things I couldn’t see. I knew when we got back to the tunnel he would tell erratic stories by the flicker of a match while I fixed us up. Sad, wild stories of talking beasts and ancient forests and doomed love. They couldn’t shake the acrid chemical reek of boiled meth and scorched tinfoil. There’s not much that can.

The gulls wheeled. His eyes followed. They looked dull and dry, like he’d forgotten to polish them. Face pinched and eyes unpolished he looked more like a rat himself--not the kind you’d find in a tunnel, but some child’s sleek, miserable pet.

“I mean like, do you ever dream that you’re a rat?” he asked.

The gulls were calling and he called back, but his call was something awful, like a throat full of twigs.

“I don’t have dreams,” I says.

It wasn’t like I turned him out or anything. I just didn’t make enough for the both of us to cop. He didn’t wanna be picking scabs all hellish night while I got straight. So it was his choice, as much as it ever is anyone’s. I just made the connections, from skin to cash to meth to skin. A closed circuit, like this tattoo I saw once of a snake eating its tail. Ain’t no end or beginning.

I don’t remember when it was he got the lice. We’d been together less than half a year, but it’s different out here. A day on the street is like a week anywhere else. A week is a month; a month is a year. A year is forever….

The lice eggs clumped in the crook between his braids, a live colony speckled white and itching mad. He crouched before me on a broken milk crate behind the 7-Eleven as I cut them free with my switchblade. I could count every button of his spine. The braids fell flapping to the blacktop, the lice scattered, the spine sagged. I tried to keep the blade’s edge from touching his scalp, but we’d run out of needles sometime before sunrise and my hands jerked in withdrawal, laying open skin to blood. The blood sluiced tributaries down the shorn nape of his neck. My tongue caught the runnels, lapped him clean like I’d seen an alley cat do to all her kittens, but he only bled faster. Head wounds are like that.

We headed down to a new needle exchange at Thirteenth and Washington. It’d been a while since I’d seen Crow in the stark glare of daylight. The sharp spokes of his hipbones fought with gravity to keep his pants on. Most of the feathers had fallen off. Long fingernails scratched at the sores that clung to his lips. He’d tried to cover them with lipstick. It made him look both sultry and ridiculous, but I wasn’t gonna tell him. He was still beautiful, in a relentless sort of way, like an autumn leaf before the wind rattles it free.

We straggled down Thirteenth Street, past flat glass stares and hidden slurs, his dirty fingers laced in mine. I didn’t care who saw. The van where they gave you fresh works squatted on one corner, across from a Dunkin’ Donuts and a twenty-one-story parking garage. Random street folks scuttled toward it, past skyscrapers and wind-blown bags and pinstripes driving silver bullet BMWs, too rich or too bored to follow common traffic laws. I thought of when I’d light a candle down in the tunnels, how some of the bugs were drawn toward it. Funny how only the ones with wings felt the pull, fluttered dangerously close. The smart ones scurried for cover, slid quick and deep into cracks to finish out their lives in subterranean obscurity. When you don’t have to look at them, it’s easier to pretend they ain’t there.

He didn’t wanna go with me to the van to get the needles. He’s a shy one, that Crow. I dug a fistful of loose change outta my pocket. The window of the Dunkin’ Donuts was tinted dark. It turned our reflections to faceless shadows, one all shoulders and stubble and scuffed leather, the other a skinny smudge of beads and tattered black.

“Here.” I spilled nickels and pennies into the cup of his palm. “Go get a coffee or somethin’. I won’t be long.”

I crossed the avenue and got in line behind a woman old enough to be my grandmother, but she was wearing hot-pink jeans and plastic hair clips. Made her look like a wrinkled little girl with knowing eyes. The eyes were pus-yellow shot with red, like a sunset. I looked away. My knuckles tapped a nervous rhythm on the leg of my only pair of jeans. The guy handing out the fresh needles smiled at me in recognition. I didn’t know who the hell he was. A terrible ridiculousness struck me, that he coulda been someone I tricked with once, and my face went near bloodless at the thought. Then I remembered.

“It’s Rat, isn’t it?”

That was why I didn’t recognize him. When people dress in suits, you never really see them. Today he slummed in pleated khakis and a green polo shirt. It looked as if it’d never seen a stain. The button pinned above his left pec caught my eye with white block letters. Plant a Tree.

I chewed the inside of my lip, turned my eyes to cobble.

“I’m Matt,” he says to me. Pretending not to notice my curled lip, slit eyes. I guess that’s the polite thing to do when you’re a suit. Expert hands shove condoms and vacuum-wrapped syringes into brown paper. Like a check-out clerk at some fantasy headshop where no one has to pay. I let out a bark of laughter. For some reason, he doesn’t look at me like I’m insane.

“Listen, I’m sorry about what Gary said to you at council. He gets too big for himself sometimes, y’know? Thinks he’s the king of Sodom.” It was his turn to laugh alone now. “There’s a council tonight at six.... We’ll be opening a gay-specific drop-in center soon. Y’know, some-where to watch TV, eat hot food, take a shower. You should stop by tonight to give us input. The Center for Civil Rights, first floor, second door on the left. Bring your friend with if you want.”

He handed me the brown paper bag. “I’ll see ya later, Rat.”

I walked to the corner, wondering whether this Matt guy was hot for my tail or just retarded. Maybe it was neither, maybe he’d just got off a bus from Idaho or bum-fucked Kansas, maybe some other ludicrous place where people planted trees and voted and smiled too much at drug-addicted strangers. I realized I never even said anything back to him. What the hell was I supposed to say?

“Fucking faggot piece of shit!”

My head snapped up as if they’d called my name, but the fight was already in action and the name was not for me. I heard the sickening thwap of fists cracking connective tissue. The blond had on one of them amber Cuervo T-shirts they give you at Shenanigan’s for your twenty-first birthday. The other wore a backward baseball cap and a gut-ugly sneer. Maybe once he had been beautiful. They looked as big and dumb and angry as cattle.

I dunno why I noticed the one standing in a widening pool of spilled coffee last. Maybe because he was more like a shadow than an opponent, bird-boned and shrinking backward until the wall of the parking garage left him nowhere else to go. Maybe because he was absorbing all the light as they reflected it--black clothes, black tufts of hair, black eyes in a white face smeared lolly red with lipstick and blood. Crow.

My first thought was that he had it coming to him, but that didn’t stop me from jerking forward into the street. Beetle-like cars honked and swerved, whished rushing past like racing monsters and I stutter-stepped back to the curb. Red light.

I watched powerless while drunken knuckles pummeled shots into his stomach. It bent him over double so he couldn’t see the next blow coming from the side. Steel-toed shit-kickers met with a thunk against the flower stem of his spine. Crow staggered, raised both arms over his head like they would stop the blows, like they would fly him away, but of course they didn’t and the fuckers just went for his torso. I felt almost responsible. I mean, I never thought to teach him how to fight.

There was the green light, arms piston pumping at sides, boots carrying me quick over blacktop and boulevard. There was the last one to hit him, knuckles busted and half out of breath, blond hair plastered with sweat against his forehead. Then there was the terrifying thrill of my adrenaline funneling into a fist, the satisfying crunch of cartilage beneath my knuckles, the sluggish spurt of blood from a nose that had been broken one too many times.

His breath popped like a busted condom. The one behind me hit me sharp in the kidneys, threw an arm across my throat. I slammed my heel into his shin, snapped my head back. Lips split warm like bruised fruit against my skull and the arm dropped.

But the blond had recovered. “Cocksucker,” he spat, nose bleeding and bent at a crazy angle. His fist met with my jaw something terrific. I heard a crack, and blood burst on my tongue. I flailed, gulped air, tried to call for Crow, but something from behind hit me in the ribs first. I reeled gasping to my knees. My vision flickered like a broken neon light. I thought I heard sirens in the distance. Maybe my ears were ringing. Either way it was a bad sign. My hand went for the switchblade in my boot.

Someone yelped. The one in the baseball cap, cheek raked open. I swerved my gaze to Crow. His nails clumped with blood and shreds of skin. His eyes were polished, glinting bright with fear or madness. “You’ll die of AIDS!” he shrieked. But I didn’t get to see the guy’s reaction. His friend kicked me in the head.

The world turned black around the edges, like a tunnel. I could see the blond guy’s waist before me and beyond it the light at the end. No way I could let it end like this. No goddamn way. The blade trembled in my palm. They hadn’t noticed. Blood dripped into my eyes, but it wasn’t like I had to aim. I plunged it hilt-deep into his belly, through the fragile cotton layer. Through the skin. A dark stain blossomed on his Cuervo T-shirt and my knuckles drowned in blood.

I staggered to my feet. Still gripping the knife in his guts. Bile rose into my throat. My tongue pushed it back down, pushed up against loosened teeth, and an even deeper loosening, the loosening of that crucial stitch that sets a sweater to unravel.

I wrenched the blade and tore it free. The blood gushed slippery and dark down his jeans, down my arm. His hand went to the wound, pressing in his slick guts. Everything stopped. The stabbed guy’s eyes went wild with sudden clarity. He cursed beneath his breath. They all looked at me in vague horror and awe, jaws slack and eyes gleaming, like I’d done something impossible and wrong. Even Crow. Especially Crow.

The sirens wailed louder closer faster. I shoved blood-slick knife back into boot and drug Crow to his feet. There was nothing to say. We ran into the shelter of the parking garage, pounding blood and breath and bones, hurtling over the candy-striped gate and into the elevator’s hull.

He looked supreme. Forget the bruise and blood and lipstick. Forget the feathers and the scabs. His eyes glittered with a frightening peace. I couldn’t meet them.

“Rat,” he began.

“Just press a goddamn button!”

His blood-caked fingernail touched plastic square twenty-one. Magic number when boys become men in smoky downtown bars, friends and fathers nudging amber bottles past their teeth down their throats chug it down nice and easy ‘til they throw up die pass out fall over get up go out and beat up a faggot. The orange numbers glowing as the elevator moved.

I want to ask Crow how old he is but I’m too scared of the answer. Up on the rooftop anything seems possible, he could be sixteen, fourteen, ten, or older than this city. Like some fairy tale he wove us into while I was sleeping. The sun bleeds stronger through the sky’s grainy photo paper lens, melts it open like a cigarette’s hot cherry. The wailing sirens die away below us, but the lights still pulse their red blue skywrite. There’s nowhere to hide up here, nowhere to disappear to.

I look over. Standing two feet in from the edge I can’t see much, but I’m afraid to get too close. Crow’s not. Gray roof meets with gray sky under a drizzling of sunlight, flecking it all with tiny spots of gold. The gold’s already there, in the cement; it’s just that it needs the light to bring it out.

When I turn back to Crow, he’s gone.

“I love you,” he says to me.

My head swivels to his voice. He stands on the concrete ledge, the sun shooting fiery rays at his form, highlighting blood and bruise and beads. The wind ripples through what’s left of his hair and torn T-shirt, sets what few feathers he’s got left to dancing. The panic sends my heart thudding like a terrific shot of speed. Neurons fire at machine-gun speed from brain to battered body. I lurch forward, duct-taped boots crossing a tarpaper forever and the beat of the blood in my mouth in my veins like the beating of wings in the distance. Open eyes mouth fists guts heart and I’m split open gushing like a cracked glass bottle.

He spreads his arms. His face is turned up toward the sun. Still beautiful.

I lunge. He rocks back on his heels. The scuffed black leather of my arm stretches between us. My fingers, slick with straight-boy blood, clutch at ropes of plastic beads. For one brief still of a second the beads hold against the weight of his body in the sky, before the strain of gravity pops them open to rattle free in my fist.

I want to fling myself after him, tell him all the things I could never bring myself to say. Tell him how beautiful he is, how it takes guts to be beautiful, how I would do anything, fight for him, die for him. It doesn’t happen. My heart is beating, my lungs are breathing, I am alive.

I step back, close my fingers tighter around the beads. I can’t bring myself to watch. I’m afraid to get too close, afraid of falling. I haven’t had my fix. Spastic shrieks echo up from the passersby twenty-one floors below me.

The sun will not stop shining. My eyes tear. Mouth ratchets open to birth some sob or scream. Nothing comes out but I can hear it anyway, silent and spiraling and endless.

Crow will only distract them for so long. I must get moving. I sneak slowly back into the building, scurry quick down through the floors, between the cars, between the cracks. They’ll never find me.

I’m out on the street six blocks away when I reach into my pocket for a cigarette. That’s when my fingers slide across it. Edges stained rusty brown and torn ragged in one corner. I can’t make out the image at first, but then I remember—the beach, the booth, the buck, the blinding flash. It’s a picture of him.

Six o’clock. The Center for Civil Rights. My reflection in the plate-glass window. Leather jacket. Beaded necklace. Broken teeth. I push the door open, follow the hallway, second room on the left. A milling of people, gray and tan and pinstripe blue, faces aghast and who can blame them. I spot the khakis and green polo shirt, stop. Matt. His eyes blink in startled recognition, face pale with however much he knows. I mean, he was less than a block away.

He starts across the room. I want to run but I can’t move. My tongue curls dead and limp behind loose teeth. Matt says something soothing. A Styrofoam cup of coffee appears like magic in my hand. My hand starts shaking. He takes the cup away.

“I’m so glad you could make it.” He’s using that voice that people do when they’re trying to get their cat to come back in, but I can tell he really wants to help me. It’s not that I don’t want him to. I’m just not sure he can.

I don’t know where to sit. The table is a circle. Ain’t no end or beginning. It reminds me what I done. He was so unreal to start with. I shoulda never tied his arm off. Shoulda never let him trick. The pain stretches open its claws. I pull out a chair next to Matt’s.

“We usually begin by going around and introducing ourselves,” Matt explains. Sitting this close, I can see the scars the track marks left in the crook of his elbow. The scars look old, faded. I wonder if any of the others here have noticed. Doubt it. I guess it takes one to know.

“I’ll go first,” he says. “I’m Matt, and I’m facilitating this evening.”

My turn.

I feel the beads beneath the dried blood, beneath my leather, against my skin. I remind myself that under all their suits their skin’s the same as mine.

“My name’s Rat,” I says.

 

© 2005 Rick Laurent Feely - Contributor's Bio

 

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