“The Zombie Pit” is from The Wild Creatures: Collected Stories of Sam D’Allesandro

Last night at a local bar, crowded and loud, Sid and I were the most entertaining of all those vying for public attention. I can’t remember all the details but later we debated a dim memory of my cock becoming exposed and whether I or someone else was responsible. My jeans have a seven-inch slice in the left rear-thigh zone and someone kept reaching inside, the hand unknowingly edging up toward the diagonal scar that cuts through my left cheek. A finger traced the ruby-ridged edge, curious and finding out. I liked that.

On the way out, I ran my hand around the narrow waist and over the gentle belly of the boy who’d been flirting from across the bar. I had danced with him a year earlier at a big party because the glint of gold through such a young nipple stopped me in my tracks. But he wouldn’t kiss me. This time I tell him, “I would have been your slave.” I don’t know why I say it since I don’t really mean it. I just want him to think about the possibility. I don’t wait for his reaction. I’m counting on not running into him for another year, that’s how long it took last time. I think he’s trouble, but he reminds me of someone in New Orleans, the one with the scars. And then I go all sloppy inside.

I’m naked right now. I’m dripping wet, just out of the shower. I’ve got a cup of Ethiopian Mocha Harrar espresso and I’ll kill anyone that tries to take it away from me. Sid left my bed exactly ninety minutes ago. In that time it takes to watch most American movies, I slept some more, made coffee, opened the blackout curtains, took a shower, and borrowed a porno magazine from my roommate’s bedroom. And I actually did it right over the magazine; I found the picture I wanted and I couldn’t stop staring at it—everything just right and all—until I’d made a ruin of it. Later that will smear and either stick the pages together or else take the ink right off the sheet. Either way, what was perfect for me this morning will be gone.

Last night when the bartender asked Sid and me what we wanted (“Anything,” we said) we thought it was free. That was wrong, but I guess it figures that reading a hulking guy named “Gidget” might be confusing. I still think we were being pretty entertaining. I remember being on the floor at some point but not how I got there. Also biting someone hard in the urinal, the trough that is. Maybe that was Sid. Or maybe it was the one flirting from across the bar, the one with the gold ring in his nipple. The one that looks like but isn’t the one with the scars. Farrell.

I’m telling you about Farrell because he’s the opposite of Sid. He’s so physically and sexually perfect for me that his failure in other areas is irrelevant. I can imagine living on welfare in an East L.A. barrio for him, just so I can be near him as he sleeps at night. I’m four years younger. It’s hot. A slight, barely cool breeze occasionally stirs the curtains around the open window. Outside a tiny backyard connects to an alley connected to the rest of Los Angeles. He’s naked, a wadded sheet entwining one leg and swathing the tan skin of his lower belly in white. The legs are long and akimbo. Arms reach up to clasp hands under his head, the dark hair in the armpits thick and curling with sweat. Tiny beads cross his smooth forehead.

I want to lick him all over. I pet the dark hair that covers his legs and fills the groove running down the center of his chest. I move on top of him, pressing my body so close that it melds to his. A rupture opens in the long torso. I pour into it. I’m taken, somehow, inside of him—sinking in until I disappear. My fears, insecurities, dissatisfactions all melt, until he’s left sultry and alluringly alone on the bed. Simple and solitary.

None of this happens since I’m afraid to chance waking him. I’m sitting against the wall in the room’s gray light, staring first at him, then out the open window into the L.A. night, then back at him.

Now I’ve let you in on one of my secret parts.

A different image appears. One that only Farrell and I can see exactly. A scene played over another cup of coffee laid out on a slightly grimy Formica table in West Hollywood. It starts like this: “Listen, not everything I say to you relates only to the fact that it’s being said to you. Some of it relates to me!”

He continues to stare out the window, stirring his coffee like a beautiful mechanized art piece animated for table amusement. A perfectly emotionless robotron. Annoyed with the vision and how much I want him anyway, I continue, even though I know we’d probably both be a lot better off if I’d just shut up now. I watch helpless as my mouth opens and develops my simple pronouncement into an ugly tirade. “Let’s face it. The self-indulgence I like best is my own. I’m the most important person in my head—I have to be. That’s not self-indulgence anyway, that’s survival, believe me, no one else, no one, cares that much whether I manage to stay intact or not. Least of all you.”

Two weeks later you would have thought I was responding to a totally different person. Actually it was just his other side coming out, like The Three Faces of Eve. (Strange that Sid would later refer to me as the One Hundred Faces of Eve.) This time it’s his busy-betty tyrannical half rather than the who-cares autonomy of two weeks earlier. In the Three Faces of Farrell, I suppose the third face would have to be his face itself. Farrell as angel. Farrell as a perfection I could never leave. Only, I did.

Before I left I finally had to say this: “I love whatever it is you are to me, but one thing that it’s not is my mother. There won’t be another mother in my life, ever. I am she, my own best superego in a constant and spectacular smashup with an impulsively conniving id. Just pieces of things, really, in pretty active disagree-ment. That’s who you’ve been dealing with. That’s what you’ve been up against.”

That left him speechless. I didn’t expect a big response; after all, I was the wordy one, while he was the one with the sultry, accusing looks. Still, he knew I only meant about half the intensity my tone implied. It was basically nothing more than a thin attempt at defense since if he had asked me to stay I would have.

Four years after leaving Farrell in L.A., what I want to know about Sid is whether he hates me or just wants to fuck me. There was a time when I believed everyone divided into those two categories. Poor Sid doesn’t deserve that, but the fact is it’s still there. One way or another he’ll have to deal with it.

Over coffee at Corbas I tried to explain to my friend Ed.

ME: Yesterday my glasses broke and then two people started crying for different reasons. One because his best friend is dying. The other because I don’t love him anymore. Actually I do love him, just not in the way he wants. I love somebody else that way, the one whose best friend is dying. Sid.

(In spite of the shower, coffee, masturbation, and day off, so far I’m irritable. I know if I can find someone to take it out on I will. Until I find that someone Ed is getting to be therapist instead. Outside the café there’s a horrible woman walking down the street with a birdcage in her hand. Suddenly everything’s overcast. The sun’s gone and I blame her.)

ME: Later I have to go out and buy a birthday present—an expensive one is expected, I know. I also have to buy a can of paint, a piece of plywood, and groceries. That’s the kind of life I lead these days. Task-level, that’s me.

Lately I keep telling everyone, it’s me you have to like, me, not some image that I can project or that can be projected on me. Eventually those all fall apart, under duress. Know what I mean? Like on 20/20 last week. Look at the difference between Elvis in that all-black skintight leather suit on his 1966 TV special, and those sickeningly bloated, barely predeath pictures they kept showing of him when Barbara Walters was interviewing Priscilla Presley, who actually looked like a Filipino drag queen in the old pictures herself. See what I mean? It’s the same Priscilla Presley whether looking like a 1966 drag queen or a beautiful forty-year-old passing for thirty on Dallas twenty years later. The same Elvis thin in sleek black leather as the post-Liberace nightmare we saw ten years down the road. It’s the same me, no matter what image I try to take on or what anyone else wants me to be. [Pause.] Actually I haven’t been saying that to everyone, only to one. Sid.

Right now I feel swollen, like I’m a depressed fifteen-year-old again, only I’m not depressed, just emotionally exhausted. Tired of thinking. Tired of talking just to talk. And of course that makes Sid think that I’m either depressed or that I no longer like him.

I keep wondering if I stop talking and being active and laughing if he’ll go away. Sid, I mean, the one whose friend is dying. It’s not that I want him to. It’s just that unless he’ll stay with me no matter what I figure he won’t stay. Someday he’ll go.

ED: If you stopped being active and talking and laughing I guess it would be the same as you going away for Sid. Emotionally at least.

ME: I never think of me leaving. I only think of Sid leaving me.

ED: He’s probably the same way. Why don’t you stop thinking about this relationship so much and just sit back and enjoy it a little? He seems to be the one you want.

ME: If you really want to know, he’s all wrong. He’s too happy. He’s always smiling and friendly to every-one. Everyone. You can’t trust what’s really going on beneath that. Besides, it makes me feel socially inadequate. I like brooders.

ED: You mean the ones you see leaning against a wall looking overly serious?

ME: Right.

ED: Actually, except for you, the person I know that sounds the most like is Sid.

Sid. He has a fear of fading into the background. He’s either handsome in a quirky kind of way or he’s not handsome, I can’t tell anymore. He dresses strangely—he doesn’t think carefully about what he’s doing, yet he always stands out. People stare at him in elevators and on the subway without quite knowing why. He doesn’t look that odd. He’s often slightly overformal in casual situations, but in a messy sort of way: the black shoes scuffed, the shirt unironed, the tie not quite knotted right.

When I met him, the things that stuck out in my mind were that 1) he made me laugh on a very bad day without pulling me out of the mood I needed to be in, and 2) he had the absolute messiest apartment I had ever seen. In the beginning I wanted not to care too much and just allow Sid to entertain me. That was only fair since he seemed to be entertained by me. Now I care a lot. A month after I met him he bought me a lava lamp named Sperm. Red lava bubbling in amber liquid. It lives in my room on the night table.

At different times Sid relaxes, excites, agitates. He splurges on Sushi Gen when all I really wanted was a hamburger, likes to see me cry but doesn’t like to make me cry, gives me a hundred kisses when I’m sad. He works in a coffee store and gives me half pounds of Kona and Ethiopian Mocha Harrar, the most expensive beans sold, for free.

ED: Which do you like the best, the coffee or the man who sells it?

ME: I like the man who sells it best, but best of all I like the one who sells it bringing me a cup afterward.

The first time I saw Sid was at the Pyramid Club in New York two years ago: he’s dancing with a girl in an aqua minidress and short black hair. She’s smiling at him. She grabs his hands for a moment and then releases them with a little whirling circle around her spot on the fluorescent-paint-spattered floor. She does that over and over. Grabbing, releasing, grabbing, releasing. At one point there’s even a quick little red-lipsticked kiss that leaves Sid looking either funny and devil-may-care or stupid and silly.

Then she crumples to the floor, eyes closed, head thudding audibly over the blare of the speakers, legs bent and curled to one side. Her arms splay awkwardly in the opposite direction. She’s so tiny that kneeling over her Sid looks like Godzilla. When her foggy eyes begin to clear, she reaches up and slaps him hard. The second swing comes even harder as her efforts regain focus: eyes flashing, mouth spitting and screaming, nails out and digging into the skin of his cheek. A layer of fleshy meat peels away, leaving a long, irregular red stripe. By the time the bouncer arrives, another woman has dragged her panting and crying to the aluminum-foil-covered bathroom. The bouncer asks no questions, pushing Sid out to the street with a threat and a kick.

It took another year after that for Sid and me to both wind up in the same city and bother to get to know each other. Now it’s like this, like the way I’ve been describ-ing. Indefinable, already important, vaguely trap-like.

Before I met Sid, I used to walk around talking to Farrell all the time, as if he were right there beside me rather than vanished from the face of the earth. I said lots of things I hadn’t been able to say when we were together. It was like a trance: I didn’t hear other people, didn’t see other people. Everything outside of my head had stopped, for about a year, year and a half.

I rode the subway a lot. If you stand at the front of the front car you can stare out the front window as it speeds along through the tunnel. It’s just blackness. Occasionally there’s a few little green or red lights, just specks, like fireflies, and some dimly lit gray spaces that could actually be a horrible little world where someone might be living. But I liked that blackness, that was the part that soothed me.

My money ran out and I had to get a job in a diner for a while. Bee’s Coffee Cup. The first real voices I’d heard in a long time were saying things like “Can I have some more coffee?” Just these customer voices. Just little sentences that didn’t mean anything except exactly what they said. “More coffee?”—more coffee.

“Can I have some more coffee?”

Looking up, the first thing I noticed was that his hair matched the little buttons on my black coat. Black-black, not just dark brunette. Then the scene from the Pyramid Club popped into my head. For the moment, I kept that knowledge to myself. I wasn’t used to talking much anyway. By the end of a short, mostly one-sided conver-sation, Sid was an address on a torn piece of paper I’d probably lose by the time I got home. Somehow he managed to escalate it from there.

Early Sid and me:

“I need something primitive. Like my friends, Dick and Sally. When they’re angry they scream at each other. If she’s mad at him she withholds sex and if she’s happy with him she cooks bigger dinners. He does the same thing, vice versa. They don’t love each other when they’re pissed off, and they don’t hate each other when they have sex.”

“I don’t think most of us are that clear-cut. My ex-lover and I always talked. About everything. It always left me sort of uncatharted. I mean it’s just too hard to be adult and practical about everything all the time. Something gets missed. I need something a little violent once in a while. Rough sex doesn’t always do the trick.”

“Right. Eat too much and you get sicker. It’s just like I’m saying: I want something more bestial; I want to run naked with snarling dogs in the park. You know, the brotherly bite, power of the pack, all that stuff.”

“Hmm. I’m not so sure. Primitivism may be fine for artists, but you can’t live off of it. I mean wake up and smell the coffee, you try running around naked in the park all night and you’ll freeze, coming home at 4 a.m. with a stupid look on your face, a cold ass, shriveled balls, and dog shit on your feet. That is if someone doesn’t catch you out there first, cut your head off, and seal you up in a fifty-five-gallon drum. It happens. Just last year.”

When I think about this conversation, I can only recall with effort which speaker was Sid and which was me. We never think exactly the same way about anything at the same time. Then the next week we change positions and take the opposite side. Things are never black and white for us. From the very beginning we’ve always worked better in the gray zones.

Sid taking one last stab at an increasingly nebulous subject: “Maybe what I mean is I want to either win big in life or else get put down in a big way. I need something big. I’m willing to take a chance. Why not, right?”

Once, in the beginning, I started to make love to Sid in the middle of the night thinking he was Farrell. I was dreaming that Sid’s body was Farrell’s body, down to the last detail. I was going crazy, kissing him, running my hands up and down him, when I suddenly realized it was Sid and froze. I couldn’t go on, the shock was too devastating. Like I’d just been punched in the stomach. I pretended to drop off to sleep again.

I’m telling you about Sid because he’s the opposite of Farrell. Sid and I have had this plan for a year to hit every low-life neighborhood cocktail lounge in the city. I’ve got a list: three down, twenty-three to go. We keep going back to the same three. Last night was our seventh or eighth trip to The Zombie Pit. So far, no matter what we’ve done, they’ve never thrown us out.

The other two places we like to go are The Buddha Bar in Chinatown and The Persian Aub Zam Zam. We always get thrown out but have fun seeing just how insignificant an abrasion of the rules will be required. Usually all nonregulars get tossed in less than fifteen minutes. Since we’re now up to about twenty-thirty minutes at The Buddha Bar, I think we may be on the way to being considered regulars someday. Then the biggest part of the fun will be over. Still, there will always be something deliciously mysterious and smarmy about having a Tsingtao beer beneath a giant gold Buddha lit with red candles.

Tonight our friend Dorrie comes along. She picks the bar. So far, tonight is the sleaziest I’ve ever seen in this town. I try not to touch anything. The place smells—if you shut your eyes, we could be in a South American marketplace at the end of a hot day. We’re sitting at a table in the back trying to look invisible. I don’t know why we’re still here except that Sid has half a beer left. On the way here, Dorrie said, “You’ll love this place.” I don’t know why I take the word of someone who works in a massage parlor that lures in Japanese businessmen with promises of sex and then offers no sex and very little massage. At dinner the other night, she told a story about riding one of her clients like a horse down the hall to the bathroom where she made him drink out of the toilet. I can’t help wondering if that’s what he thought he was paying for when he went in. “I’m so glad I found massage after that string of crummy jobs. It’s just perfect for me.” With that she smiles as serenely as an angel and reapplies startling red lipstick.

A young Latino guy who’s been dancing over by the jukebox is now up on top of the bar, the glasses and used napkins that no one’s bothered to pick up shoved to one side. I’m waiting for one of those little kicks he does to send a lipstick-coated beer bottle flying into someone’s face. When he peels off his shirt (I thought it was a straitjacket), his chest appears to be bigger naked than clothed. “How could that thin layer of cotton have held all that in?” He’s showing off a torso so tight it looks like you could pop the whole thing with a pin. The thought makes me nauseous. As I take another sip of Sid’s beer the pants come off. He’s wearing an aqua blue jockstrap beneath, one size too small, the first rows of public hair curling out the top. The ass is tan and smooth. I wonder if he shaves it.

Dorrie and Sid love this stuff. Somehow I can’t really get involved anymore. The guy rotates his hips around in an ever-widening arc, over and over, his whole body making a complete turn on the little bar every few seconds. He’s like a pirouetting ballet star on speed. Each complete turn tilts the head back, as if the rest of the body can only make its revolution in response to the tilt. The way he does it looks innate: tilt your head back at that angle and you whirl. I try it in my chair but it doesn’t quite seem to work. Anyway I’m starting to think about leaving. My attention’s starting to drift after about ten minutes of watching him execute this same move over and over. I decide it’s all designed to show off his navel and flat, brown belly, ricocheting off the broad hips like a Mad Mouse roller coaster about to go off the track.

“See that guy on the bar?” says Sid. “That’s Little Ricky, he does this all the time. This part’s nothing, he’s just warming up. Pretty soon he’ll be letting these old men stick quarters in his asshole.” A moment later I take my eyes off of Sid long enough to focus on the bar. Little Ricky’s maneuvering his ass toward someone, somehow managing to tame his gyrating hips just long enough to hold steady while the man spots his exact target and with a shaking hand pushes something inside. It looks like a dime. Of course, I have no way to be sure since it’s gone now.

“That looked like a dime,” I say to Sid, trying to sound casual while actually shocked.

“That was a dime. He starts out with dimes and then advances up to quarters later on. Every once in a while he goes in the back room behind the bar and empties out.”

I lean back in my chair as far as it will go without crashing to the floor, wondering if the thin legs might break. I’ve had enough of this place. Leaning still a dangerous inch further, what I’m really trying to do is get away. Distancing. I take possession of the rest of Sid’s beer. He and Dorrie are only three feet away. That’s enough to make them inaudible to me over the blaring disco music. That’s enough to make them across the room.

As Little Ricky continues his human piggy bank routine, I’m thinking about the act that was on when we first arrived. It’s like a nightmare I can’t get out of my head. An overweight woman with pasty skin, the kind that looks like you could put your finger right through if you touched her, like Muenster cheese, did a routine with fruit and vegetables. She’d place an item between her large breasts, demonstrate how it could stay by itself, do a little dance involving various shimmying moves (as if daring the piece of fruit to try and get away), and then offer a patron the chance to snare one of the edibles by mouth. Soon various men and one woman are smeared with juices dripping from their chins. Smashed bananas, peach pulp, cantaloupe seeds.

She suddenly abandons the bar, dancing across the wobbly tabletops until she’s standing on mine. Her fleshy figure looms above me. I shrink backward until I’m trapped against the wall behind me. I try to scream but nothing comes out. I’m afraid to look up, but I can hear her laughing above me, placing one sharp high heel against my chest. Bending menacingly toward me, her swaying chest aims at my head and in one swift maneuver entraps my face between the two enormous balloons of warm, sticky flesh. I’m suffocating, literally, my mouth and nostrils filled with her expanding skin and the remains of a cantaloupe. Using only her breasts, she shakes my head viciously from side to side, in the same way a dog kills a small rodent, until my neck snaps and I finally slump from my chair to the floor.

So this is the real entertainment. This is Sid’s betrayal. I’ve unwittingly fallen upon a snuff bar in which I’ve ended up the night’s main attraction. I should have known.

When I come to, Little Ricky’s up to quarters. Sid tells me he’s already disappeared a few times to empty out. I guess I missed that part. I’ve begun to develop an elaborate fantasy about the woman with the fruit in which she’s an everyday New Jersey housewife who just does this two nights a week for a little exercise and pocket money. At home in a cotton dress, in an overly sunny house painted white inside and out, she’s as prim and perky as Donna Reed.

“Juicing oranges for the kids before sending them off to school,” Sid adds.

I think the problem keeping us from the other twenty-three neighborhood cocktail lounges on our list is that we don’t like drinking that much anymore. As soon as I’m past the drinking part and into the just plain drunk part I always think I’d rather be either fattening up my cortex some more with late-night TV, or else drinking espresso with Sid until we’re both completely wired. We drink a lot of it, then right when we get to that edge where our eyes are popping and our brains will explode if we have one more pot, we have it and we’re over the top: speeding up until we’re both doing simultaneous monologues careening into a verbal hand-gesturing car crash 90 mph on a twisting turning psychic mountain pass, noise screeching, wind of our own voices cyclonic, everything on the little dinette table a blur and whaaaaam...we end up on the kitchen floor laughing hysterically with the chairs on top of us. It’s always simultaneous. We lie on the linoleum and have a cigarette. Then we either go to bed or else one of us goes home, depending on whose place we’re at.

Of course things aren’t always that symbiotic. At one point I had this to say to Sid: “I don’t think you ever really wanted me. You just needed someone around to bounce off of. Sort of like Ricky Ricardo was for Lucy, until she dumped him.”

SID: “I’d say it was the other way around. You think you can do anything, anything, and it will never be going too far because I’ll keep things from blowing up completely: make sure you get home on bad nights, make sure the rent gets paid, make sure the apartment doesn’t burn down, make sure you don’t accidentally kill yourself. Of course, I never really stop you from doing anything. My job is to watch. That’s what you need, not someone to be with, just someone to watch you.”

ME: “Come on, you’re sitting on the sidelines watching me? The real problem’s you can’t stop your own out-of-control propulsion long enough to take me into much consideration. You want whatever you want to be enough for me. You think I should just sit back and enjoy the design you have for our lives, easy. You’ve got the hard part, coming up with all the ideas, new things to entertain us, go here, go there. Well, it’s not enough. There’s another person involved here, you know. Me. Let’s face it, you don’t want a lover, you just want a sidekick. Someone new to tell your history to.”

Apparently there was a growing list of things that he was pretty sick of. After he told me that he didn’t want to have sex with me anymore and then showed up begging for it two days later; after he told me I was projecting my well-deserved self-deprecation on him every time I voiced a petty observation only meant for his own self-improvement; after he told me I wasn’t being straight with him when I once replied to a loaded inquiry, “You act like you’re talking to someone who gives a shit,” I had to say: “Come on, do you really think I’d bother to pretend I didn’t care if I did? Do you really think I would perform for you just to get your attention?”

Actually I would. I care that much about Sid. I care because he doesn’t...enough. In the beginning, I wanted to not care too much, to allow him to just entertain me. Now I care a lot. If he’s decided to want me, I want him to want me nonstop. I want him to want me until he’s completely drenched with me, saturated with my mannerisms—the cute ones, the gross ones, the ones that start out cute until you’ve seen them so many times they become gross—until he’s disgusted with his inability to live life any way but vicariously, through me, until he finds me so perfect in the arty mess of the shortcomings and unrealized potential smeared across my apartment, until he wants to be me so much, while simultaneously being so horrified of the thought, that he’ll have to kill me just to put a stop to the nightmare. I want to be that queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. The subject of his novel, the hard-on, the sexual anxiety, the neurotic obsession, the vertigo and salmonella and impetigo of a lifetime. Like some kind of dirt under his fingernails that’s driving him crazy and will never come out.

If he really wanted me, it would be like that. Then I would know I was loved. Then I would think he really cared.

ME: “Listen, don’t talk to me about who started what. You’re the one who accused me of being from another planet and inhabiting an innocent boy’s body. I don’t mind the statement, it’s the accusation part that gets me, the tone—like what you meant when you said it is that you think there’s something wrong with me. Maybe there is, but I’m not sure I need to hear it all the time. Don’t you understand? I am from another planet, one you’ve never been to. I thought you probably knew that.”

SID: “I think you know what the truth is. All I’m saying is I need more attention right now. Sometimes all you do is take. I can’t seem to fill you up.”

ME: “It’s hard not to take when I need so many things I’m not getting. Listening to your complaints, I feel like I have to be very careful what I reveal to you and how I reveal it, like balancing a pin on the surface of a glass of water. I’m neurotic in a different way than that. You should know that by now.”

SID: “I don’t want you to feel like you have to be careful, but you also can’t go around just dropping these little bombs about what’s wrong with us and then run away.”

ME: “I’m not sure that running away when a bomb’s dropped is an inappropriate response. I can’t always answer everything you ask. Sometimes you can learn a lot about someone through some small hints about the past you never could have gotten if the complete historical film had rolled instead. Maybe I shouldn’t say anything, you’re right, because it’s true I’m not always ready to say everything...but what’s not responded to is meaningful too. By the way, I dreamt about you last night.”

SID: “Don’t be coy. Let’s face it, I want love, you want to be left alone.”

ME: “First, don’t expect me to rise in anger and clarify if you’re going to use provocation as a ploy. Second, I don’t have time to be coy. The truth is, it doesn’t come that unpracticed to me.”

(With that, I suddenly realize that I’ve somehow bitten off more than I would like to chew at the moment. I’ve always hated the phrase “Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it” because I’ve always been so much better at dishing it out. I move to escape.)

“Actually I dreamt you had two sets of eyebrows. I thought they were pretty sexy.” Then I tell Sid about the rest of the dream. We’re in a motorboat speeding along on a lake. Sid’s driving, steering from the back of the boat with a lever that comes out of the engine. I’m in the front. My half of the boat sinks several feet and then continues to move forward at this new level, under-water. The water comes just to my forehead. My life jacket holds me to my seat and I can’t move to save myself. I’m beginning to drown. Only the front of the boat is underwater, Sid’s half is still fine. I wonder if he’s noticed what’s happening and will save me.

A friend told me about walking home one night and finding torn-out pages from boy magazines, one by one, strewn in his path all the way to his house. He followed them like bread crumbs. One of those pages could have been Farrell. I have a magazine like that, with a picture of him two or three years older than when I knew him. That’s the magazine I masturbated over this morning. That’s the picture I accidentally ruined.

I can’t help wondering about the significance. The only time Farrell tells me he loves me comes in the middle of postvomiting waves of nausea. I’m four years younger. It’s 4 a.m. Still hot. The car is stopped in a deadly quiet New Orleans neighborhood. No dogs, no crickets, no drunks. We’re on our way home from a goodbye crawfish feed. We are the ones being said goodbye to, tomorrow we leave for Los Angeles, pulling a U-Haul with a car that’s barely been making it around town as it is. When I cut the lights, I find there’s enough moon to throw shadows.

Farrell is shirtless, on hands and knees in the grass, eyes rolling. The body’s beautiful even while convulsing. The vomit smells only of the salty crawfish brine and red wine that caused it—almost sweet. Burgundy-hued in the warm air. “I love you” comes when he’s resettled and slouched in the car seat, near a pass-out he’ll never quite hit. His eyes are closed. For the first moment I only look at him and wonder if he meant it. In the second moment, I’m wondering if he even said it, if I ever heard it.

I start the engine and the car rolls off down the road. My hands are steering but my mind is so far away that I can’t recall the ground just covered. It’s a small shock when we actually reach the little house on St. Phillip. We lie down for two hours before both waking up hungover and unable to sleep. We load the car, leaving behind a huge pile of stuff on the curb that won’t fit, and drive off toward Texas. Toward Los Angeles.

In the bar, the very first night, I can’t stop looking at him, the deep chestnut hair, the perfect body, the fine features beneath the scars that draw me so completely. It’s as if I can smell his scent from across the room. From the very beginning, he’s something wild for me.

The markings that track his face are the only distraction from something otherwise classically pure in every way. They’re the uniqueness that makes him perfect for me. Alive. Not just a wonderful doll manufac-tured by a brilliant artist working with only my desires in mind. More. Better. They provide a rawness, a sexual charge to what would otherwise be only extraordinarily handsome. I look around. That’s when I realize for the first time that others are repelled by beauty in such an agonized state.

We’re sitting on a gray high-tech couch listening to a Blue Angels tape I’ve never heard before. He stops talking, as if suddenly realizing the unnecessity, and kisses me. The kiss doesn’t stop until my pants, shirt, and watch have been removed, until I’m led into the bedroom, onto the bed, and enveloped beneath a sheet of warm skin.

His body is the most beautiful. Since I clearly can’t get enough of it, he feels safe in asking if I’d like to rub it down with baby oil. After I do, in the middle of the part that follows, both of us are drenched with sweat, at the point when the highest pinnacle has been reached but still our lips won’t unlock—perhaps another peak could follow, as high or higher—in the middle of that part I reach up to touch his face. I know it’s too personal a move but I can’t help it. I’m drawn. The animal inside of me supersedes and the touch becomes inevitable. I have to, to verify the texture. To make sure it’s real.

He smoothly and firmly removes my hands and holds my arms against the bed. Then he resumes kissing me.

His face is like a map: Xs and lines curve around the cheekbones in a constant motion of intersections and near-misses. Little seams round the earlobes from an operation. The skin is damaged with a deep and haphaz-ard set of cuts I can only imagine coming from a violent moment. He doesn’t talk about that. He never lets me touch them.

Two months later this happens: I pin his arms and holding him against the wall I kiss his face all over. “Let me,” I say. He struggles but only vaguely. Instead a little whimper begins in his throat. His lips begin to kiss back at whatever part of my face they can reach. I move for the eyes, the curve of the mouth. I lick and probe every little trench and ridge and rent. Every movement my fingers have longed to trace. I’ve wanted to live in these scars, now I open the web and lie down inside, sucking out the invisible poison that’s kept us apart. When he lets me do it, I dare to imagine for the first time that he might love me.

Driving across the Southwest, my head in his lap, I watch headlights slowly swerve through the car’s interior in a rhythm. One at a time. In Texas, my turn driving, I spill coffee all over myself when I brake for a jerk in a Galaxie 500 reaching into his backseat to slap one of his kids. Farrell can’t stop laughing and I get mad. Later that night we sleep pulled over on the side of a back road. Farrell leans against the car door with his long legs stretched out on the seat. I sit between his legs and lie against him. It’s his idea. We sleep this way all night. I can hear his heart beat and feel the heat of his skin. The moment is so tender and bound to pass, that I’m nearly in tears.

I have an image of him at about eight or nine in a sunny, green, flower-filled meadow. He’s already handsome. His chestnut hair is shining. His skin is smooth. His vision is a blur of color—it’s so beautiful out that his eyes don’t need to focus, the picture’s the same intensity, fuzzy as it is sharp. Maybe more so fuzzy. He has no need for sharpness yet. He’s eight or nine and has no feelings of sadness, despair, or shame. No experience of being an outsider. The sun is shining, the meadow green and flowered, the boy nearly perfect.

Ten years later a different Farrell walks down a dark and narrow New Orleans street. It’s late. The street seems empty, but here and there a man can be spotted leaning against a doorframe, seemingly doing nothing. One of these is waiting for Farrell, will want to take him off this street and into a bed. One of these will want to touch him all night for one night, and then disappear. He may even leave money, or if he’s ugly he may offer mon-ey to begin with. At this hour, on this dark street, most of those present will want Farrell and will overlook the part of him they don’t like to get to the part they do. Farrell decides which he wants. He doesn’t care about the money, but if it comes he’ll take it. There’s an excitement in that for him that he accepts but doesn’t quite understand. None of these men who want him tonight will take him out to dinner, become his friend, or be seen with him in public again. He embarrasses them with his perfect face in ruins. They want him only in their bed. That means outside of their bed they don’t want him.

I had this idea I could protect him. Keep him from being hurt. I figured he must need that. Actually it turns out to be exactly the part he can’t take. He’s learned to live without protection. He’s convinced that he wants the men he picks up to disappear by morning. I’m one of a very few to ever be different. From the beginning, I tell myself his love was confirmed in that small way. It’s part of my evidence that it existed.

Everything will change when we get to Los Angeles. I already know that as I’m packing the car, as I’m kissing him for the last time in the now-empty house on St. Phillip, as I’m sleeping against his chest on the quiet back road in Texas. We’re about to exit the peacefully static territory between leaving here and arriving somewhere else. L.A. is Farrell’s new start—I was never part of that plan. Love was never supposed to creep into this deal.

In L.A., we take a drug and Farrell wears my red tennis shoes to Studio One. The place is packed but we don’t see anyone else the whole night. The next day, on Venice Beach, he tells me about the scars.

His hands absentmindedly grab up little fistfuls of the beige California sand, and then let them go again. The sky’s a deep blue, a hundred times bluer than the white-gray days that pass for clear in California. A blue like the sky in my picture of Farrell as a boy. He’s lying on his stomach, propped up on his elbows to create a perfect curve from his neck to his ass. A Speedo makes a tiny ridge against the tan skin. My eyes do a smooth and careful sweep, reconfirming what they already know, and return to the face. They fall into a deep line, in a swift diagonal, back over to the sudden conclusion of mouth—settling intently on the slow-moving lips. The lips are calmly reporting blood, violence, disaster, and pain in a soft monotone.

I want to tell him he doesn’t have to tell me. He says he knows that, he wants to. He’s been wondering when I would ask. I want to say I never would have, but since I really don’t know that I say nothing.

A month later at LAX, Farrell cries as he hugs me goodbye in a crowded airport waiting area.

I have a recurring dream. In it I’m chasing Farrell across barren, fog-shrouded hills. The grass is an icy glass crunching beneath me, making little cuts in the leather soles of my boots. Farrell is getting smaller and smaller, farther and farther away. Sensation sinks in slowly, it’s colder, the icy grass turns to snow. I look down to find my bare feet leaving tracks of blood against the white.

Then I’m back in my bed and realizing it was just a dream. Farrell’s face appears over my bed, hovering, staring sweetly. I try to reach up to him. I’m nailed to the ground, the bed’s disappeared. Each of my hands is marked with a big scrawly X. Above me, Farrell’s face begins to thin, like smoke, getting fainter. I pull harder against the nails, my skin gives a little but I still can’t get up. His voice is saying something about motion that I can’t quite get, over and over, as his image breaks up and he disappears.

I’m starting another pot of espresso on the stove. I’m thinking about how I used to imagine certain people out of my past that I’m no longer in contact with, watching me through a crystal ball or some sort of telepathic power I never knew they had. They’d be seeing everything: me being cooler than I used to be when they knew me, me tripping over the curb, me in particularly mortifying masturbation sequences (but doesn’t everybody have those?), everything. I wonder if Farrell can do that and if he’s doing it right now. There’s a little animal inside of me. It’s helped me to understand that a lot of things you wouldn’t think could really happen, do.

Like the being-made-invisible thing. I hate the way you have to fight to keep from being made invisible all the time. On the street sometimes people walk right through me. At parties I speak and the person I’m talking to doesn’t hear my voice, launching into their own story while I’m in midsentence. I hate the not-hearing of my words when it’s clear that the person’s not deaf but more like pretending my voice carries no volume. Not low volume, no volume.

It’s as if I’m just a mouth moving soundlessly in graceful dips and circles and rat-a-tat-tats. The teeth occasionally flash; lips press together in a sexual motion, dissolve into each other, quickly part, and then repeat in a series of convulsive jerks; coyly the tongue uncoils, begging release from between the prison of teeth before retreating into the dull cave of throat; little swirls and sparkles of sweet and embarrassingly untrained saliva manifest and pop, and all the while dark air funnels out in columns like smoke, to hover a moment before dissipating. All without sound.

That’s what people do to me. As if I wasn’t there. As if I’m some escaped idea that accidentally fell out of someone. Someone who has voice, has visibility, has embodiment. All the things I seem to lack. It’s as if I fell out of someone’s head and was forgotten and left behind. Sometimes I just sit and watch when it happens, wondering about the mechanics of feeling real while having no real form to others. Like a little story where only I can see what’s happening.

It’s not that I wouldn’t love to be able to become invisible—that could certainly have some advantages. It’s just that I don’t want other people making me that way at all sorts of odd moments. The way Farrell did. That makes me have to remind myself that Sid doesn’t. In a world of people looking through me, putting their hands right in me as if there were no barrier of skin between us, a world with a permanent image of parties where others take my volume away—all as if I wasn’t really there—Sid looks at me. Sid listens to me. In spite of almost continuous conflict, he’s becoming like a warm hallucination. Like just what I’ve needed for a long time. I know it sounds corny. It’s just that I was so glad when he told me he didn’t hate me and didn’t just want to fuck me.

There’s a baby named Sperm on the night table in my bedroom that Sid and I made together. He’s locked inside of an oblong glass bottle that’s sealed at both ends. Inside he bubbles around all day. He’s just molecules and he’ll never be anything more. It’s perfect. He’ll always be happy this way. I love to watch him. He’s mostly reddish-pink, no little veins or features or anything, beyond embryonic, nothing to mess up his total basicness, his incredible cellularness, his intense display of sheer unconscious animation, suspended in golden fluid. He will never die, and he can’t get away from me the way Farrell did. Long after Sid’s gone, he’ll still be here. Now I’ve told you another one of my secret parts.

Last night I dreamed there was a five-color map of the United States tattooed on my belly, just below the navel, Maine reaching up around the left-hand side. I can’t remember how and when the map got there. Nothing comes to mind, no sleazy tattoo parlor, no drunken sex partner with a pin and lots of colorful ink against the gray background of a tiny jail cell, no Arabian adventure with a modern twist. I can’t remember if it hurt to have it put on or if it would hurt to have it taken off.

This dream reminds me of how I wish I could sink into my dreams and find a way to live there. The way I’m drifting through my life right now makes me think I’d rather be doing that in a dream instead, where things are more interesting and an observer can really feel some-thing new is always happening. Fly, jump fifty feet, go around the world. Be invisible.

There’s a little animal inside of me. It has different names at different times and sometimes it has no name. Sometimes I think it’s made up of equal parts of Farrell, my mother, and LSD. Sid and I are its victims.

There’s a little animal inside of me. It’s eating me. It’s building me each day. It starts with a blank lump and animates the person it wants from it. It controls me. It makes me do things. It won’t let me stop thinking about it. Other times I can’t think at all and I become more like a small fire emitting a lot of sparks that pass for talking, sex, behavior. A walking zombie pit where anything can fall into me.

If the animal inside’s not sleepy, it doesn’t let me sleep. It tends to manufacture more mental violence than I can contain. Sometimes at night I’ll be lying in bed, almost asleep, everything almost right, and then it comes. It makes me start thinking about all sorts of terrible things and then I can’t stop thinking about them. Like what if I fall asleep and when I wake up I find out I’ve killed someone? Or what if I wake up and can’t open my eyes? What if the next time I answer the phone a wire short-circuits and sends a deadly wave of electricity shooting through my brain, only I don’t die and turn into a vegetable for the rest of my life? Or what if the next time I take a shower glass comes out instead of water and cuts me into little tiny pieces and then Sid comes in and doesn’t see me there in the bottom of the tub and washes me down the drain? What if I fall onto the subway’s electrified third rail during a drug flashback, or I wake up and everyone else in the world is dead, or I’m in a crowded department store and suddenly realize I’m naked, or my building moves while I’m at work and I can never find it again? What if my penis falls off or my fingers grow inside of my hands or my skin shrinks? I could be attacked in my own apartment by a rabid dog. The little kid down the street might finally brain me with his skateboard, beating me to death at the curb as all the other neighbors look on in a trance. What if I acquire a horrible smell and I’m never ever able to get rid of it and nobody wants to be my friend anymore? What if I wake up and I’m fourteen again and have to go through high school all over and everything that’s happened so far has just been a crazy dream? Sometimes I lie there at night with these thoughts flashing through my mind. It’s like a Ferris wheel in which each car contains a different little nightmare, spinning faster and faster. I’m on it and I can’t get off.

The little animal inside does that. It’s the thing that marks up my mind in the middle of the night. Marks it up into a messy smear. Until it’s the Zombie Pit. If it were on paper, my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Farmer, would have ripped it to shreds in front of the entire terrified class. David Reynolds smirks in the front row. Mrs. Farmer retreats to her fourteenth cup of coffee in the teachers’ lounge to bask in the glory of another humiliation skillfully executed.

I wake up and try to relax, meditate, forget about it, but a gigantic war between a mind riddled with neurotic impulses and enough residual Benzedrine to last three or four lifetimes breaks out and beats the meditative core of inner peace to a bloody, quivering pulp. I wake up and try to forget. I try to forget and go back to sleep; I try to forget and I can’t.

I wake up and remember. I sit upright in bed, sick-ened with a certainty that I’ve been a fool to believe Sid could love me. For a nightmarish moment, Mrs. Farmer’s hideous face blends with a superimposed image of Farrell’s scarred perfection. Then a transparent overlay of Sid appearing in his true form as a smirking David Reynolds sandwiches itself between the two. It’s the devil, it’s a pitiful Down’s syndrome child in a state institution, it’s a lover out for revenge, a ghost, a hunchback, a witch. It’s Vanessa Redgrave leering and drooling in The Devils as she points the accusing finger that will send me to the stake.

It’s a million things except the Farrell that held me when I woke up yelling in a strange hotel room, told me he loved me after he vomited crayfish, cried in a crowded airport waiting lounge while kissing me goodbye. He did all of those things. The little animal inside of me takes those moments and his beautiful scars and twists them into little sentences that say, “I never loved you.” Stacked row upon row across Farrell’s otherwise-smooth cheeks. Bending slightly as they round the high cheekbones. Now multiplying and shrinking simultaneously. Now so small it would take a magnifying glass to read them, like the tiny story etched into a Chinese ivory carving.

If I can’t get inside of a better dream, then I need a womb. Or a father, one who lets me do whatever I want, but pays the bills and makes the hard decisions. Or a drug that never lets me down, or a good fuck—good enough to get lost in and stay right at that point where you totally lose control. Good enough to stay right there for at least six hours and then pass out. A new fuck, a new engine, a new purr, something to stop a clicking mind on the rampage. I need a better dream I need a womb I need a father I need a drug that doesn’t let me down I need a fuck good enough to get lost in I need a triumph. Or maybe a good beating, because that’s when the little animal inside of me would lose control, if I let someone else take over.

Then, when it gets me back, it will probably really make some turmoil to compensate for anything it’s missed.

Now Sid’s image wafts through my head. He looks like an angel. His face is so sweet it confuses me. Sid claims that upon meeting him I was a study in cool. Just the right stance and naked silence. Heating up the small room with my careless sexual nature. That’s more or less what he reported. I remember the whole thing differ-ently, but I’m working on switching my perception of the event to follow his storyline. I want to learn to paint myself in as good a light as he does.

I want to be very perfect within each given setting. me: perfectly cool, uncaring yet fluidly conversational with the important/strange at the cocktail party where I know almost no one. me: cocky and interesting in a captivating sort of way as I heat up the room with a careless sexual nature that slightly threatens and promises absolutely nothing. me: perfectly in control of who will and will not even try to pick me up, and who will succeed. me: strong and incredibly adaptable in every sexual situation, seizing just the cream of what’s offered, devouring it, and tossing out the rest in a blameless manner. me: doing everything, tirelessly, with all the pleasure and assuredness due my experience. Me smooth, me subtle, me roughly suave. Me making very good and carefully impulsive choices, forever. When I think about Sid’s first impression, I can almost imagine being that person.

And he likes the little animal inside. According to Sid, I should admit that life really only comes out amusing when “I allow” the animal to get me whipped up. When it acts like my brain’s on fire, things really get hysterical. Sid says I should give it credit for that. Of course he doesn’t exactly understand the animal or he wouldn’t have thrown in that “I allow” part, but he has the general picture. After all, he lives with it.

With Sid’s view in mind, I’ve been trying to learn to be more cheerful. He’s helping me, just a little, to become friends with the animal. To think of it as part of me rather than just the powerful psychic parasite that it is. And that’s basically the same thing Ed was saying over coffee at Corbas: like it or not, this is living. Of course I prefer to put it a different way: the tongue’s on the wall and I think I’ve been swallowed.

It’s basically the same viewpoint. So I’ve decided to admit that I’m not yet rich nor egregiously hirsute, just two of the things I thought I might have wanted to be by now. And I’m ready to admit that sleeping next to a befurred Sid is as close as I’m going to get to Farrell. Maybe that’s enough. In fact I will never be egregiously hirsute. Sid is instead. I’m not living in an L.A. barrio on a warm night watching Farrell’s gorgeous sleep. I’m not getting closer to the goal of visiting all twenty-six local dives on the list with Sid, the one I want to love but will never love as much as I loved Farrell.

But the bars on the list are really my goal. Sid’s goal, from our first moments together, has been to try and get me to drop out of my head and into the world. Because that’s where he is.

At the turn of the century, the average age of death for the American male was 46.2 years, 48.3 for women. Sid would have eleven years to go. Farrell would have had sixteen. Now we’re up to 69.2 years for males and 76.9 for females. That would give both Sid and Farrell considerably more time left. My first lover died when she was twenty-three and already a mother. My mother died when she was thirty-two. Farrell disappeared when he was thirty.

Now I’ve let you in on a few more of my secret parts. I’m walking along a wide, steamy beach. Cold water, close by and hazardous. The colors of my tattooed “United States” are dim and graying in the thin light. Sid’s busy telling me about the girl in the aqua miniskirt getting him kicked out of the Pyramid Club the night before, as if it had happened just the night before.

We find a wedding dress, wet and tangled in a pile near the surf. Sid takes off his clothes and puts it on. His skin is red and mottled from the cold irritation of the sandy, clammy garment. It’s long, used to be longer, with little rips along the bottom. It’s beautiful and torn and forlorn. It’s filthy and ruined and drags along the wet sand in back. I picture an Italian girl with long black hair stopping her slow walk to remove the dress, letting it fall in a pile in the shallow waves before walking off naked down the shore. In the dark mist her skin is cold, but she doesn’t notice. Her hair is wet and salty, her gaze set on the distance. Feet move slowly, gracefully, knowingly, one after the other.

 

© 2005 Sam D'Allesandro - Contributor's Bio

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