For The Boys

Usually, it shouldn’t be this hard to write out. You take one of those long dreary essays and stretch it out a couple of pages more out until there’s very little cohesiveness to it, and all you’re left is about 20 pages of the same stuff, really; it’s all about how you and your mother went to the store one day and how some gentlemen stopped you and asked your mother if she had dropped her coupon on the floor. And the hot brilliant sun of Southern California met your five year old eyes, and soon enough it was one of those dry afternoons in Moorpark and you weren’t sure where you feet ended and the road began…

“Have you met Miss Jones?”, they ask, and you respond, “I’m not sure how much I’ll get for bus fare but I know it’s enough,” and before too long you’re sitting at the back with some guy’s cock in your right hand and you’re blowing him and he’s loving it (God, how much he creeps you out); he’s got a wife and two kids back home in San Diego and once, just for once, he’s partaking of the sweet twilight of homosexual sex–the car windows all fogged up in the back of a parking lot on a damp summer night. Sheila and her other friend–the one with the blonde hair tied up at the back–watched the sunset from the red rocks and over the shale outcroppings of a long dead sea.

What you read in this catalog is not just the newest fads, they’re all part of the new trends for the millennium. Don’t you just hate having all that just thrown at you? She said, “I knew the man who raped me was at the closest intersection to the hotels and red light district.” God, he smells like shit. Or worse. I could have sworn I smelled booze on him once or twice while he kissed with his jagged mouth. Last night she stole a chili cheeseburger out of a dumpster in the cool, sinless air, and devoured its somewhat stale contents behind a storage facility. Children on the jungle-gym after school, in the broad sunlight of a TV afternoon.

Last night I killed a man in the bathtub of the former hotel. And now there are pines, the end of the drear forest with its one halflight and huge blocks of stifling grey clouds coming out of the mountains. God, why is it that he doesn’t miss me after so long, that all the hell we’ve been through that he doesn’t care? It is a confirmation of greater things yet to come, so that when I lay my body on this bed you might lay with me in the same manner. And she slammed the book down and said, “I’m not the woman you thought of me as–I’m not the lawyer you thought of me to be!” You are…well exactly what are you? Are you the young man you used to be? Wait, was that you in the high school yearbook maybe three years ago winning all those medals? And now what are you doing? Still paving the way for sunset glories at USC, with all the others? This television is so brand new, I can’t believe I stole so much to get it. And now you’re in someone’s car, blowing for another 50 dollars of money to support a habit and a cheating girlfriend. Last night I killed a man in the bathtub of the former hotel.

It was a flophouse. He was a businessman. And here come the businessmen. They’re always the first. Everything is a deal with them. They don’t politely ask, they negotiate, the way businessmen usually do. “Do you ever see things?” he asked me, and I said, “Yes, I do” and he said, “What?” and I said, “I see things”–it was blisteringly hot that morning in downtown and we were both sitting at the edge of the stoop and I could have blown him, but he was a friend and–not that it mattered if he was a friend. The businessmen come every day at nine o’clock in the morning. I see one in the back of his Lexus with broad shoulders and thick sunglasses on. He forces you to take it in slowly, not caring if it hurts or not. He never gets naked. It’s always in the back of his car, with his short stubby stump of a penis poking unprecariously out of his expensive tailor suits. On Saturdays there are usually nine or ten of them.

What about this new car you have? I heard he recently got married the last Saturday we were in Santa Monica but we didn’t get invited. My God, there was a cake and everything? I went back to Mom’s house in Twentynine Palms after some trucker gave me a ride with an old duffel full of sweaty dirty clothes. The night passes over the long blue mountains in the distance, out past the old rugged ridges of last night’s hangover with the boys. You know, this is the only time I have ever really been happy, here at the house. One sees visions at night. You were five and that man…you can’t say…

Lying on the table under a sad looking florescent light that buzzes indiscriminately with a feverish tic. There is something about these tiles, one after another in succession, and after awhile you see them and see their inconsistencies, such as where the grout lines swerve out of succession, where there are cracks in the individual tiles, where the colorations mottle from bone white to eggshell to cream, and where, despite the ministrations of some forgotten letter in some forgotten mailbox, you realize there is no hope. This one always comes in with the same requests. I’m not anything to him, I’m a body. We talked while I was putting my socks back on–and he said, you would have made someone great–I would have, like it’s impossible now or something? I looked back and said, “Ditto”.

They laid the first body out on an outcropping of rocks in the desert, and I remember the legs were open and you could see her snatch bathed in hot brilliant sunlight. Dead hooker, they said, and they said she had died from taking a little too much heroin after being with the Senator at the after-party last night. I didn’t blame her. I wish I could have joined her too, and killed myself having a good time. They told me he didn’t cry, and as for the other one still in the car…You know how the routine goes. He’ll say, I’m doing the best I can, Jesus Christ, I’m working as hard as I can, and even though he loves you, there’s no room for you. “This is the best I can do, dammit…”

I am not dreaming. Or am I? I think I am. But then again I know the sunlight is too real, and I know it hurts to cut myself on broken glass. And in the drear light of the afternoon, I can hear the trees explode with the sound of millions of tiny crystal birds, all singing a completely incoherent song