In the Shadow of the American Dream (31 page)

I stood a few feet from the main window and hands in pocket, I stared. He caught on and waved me away and went back to mopping. I figured that was it but my legs wouldn't respond. I thought I better not push it but then even getting punched would ease the lust, the pressure of coming off speed, the need for connection, to be at the hands of another, to be led into some ritual or experience where flesh connects with flesh. It's funny, the chemicals that the body can manufacture. I could feel them burning through my solar plexus into my chest my heart my neck tightening my forehead and cheeks getting hot. He looked up again and seemed mildly angry, dropped his mop into the steel bucket and unhooked a mass of keys from his waist and walked towards me. I felt like I should run but stood my ground feeling weak in my arms and legs the way you do when you're about to fight a stranger or a group of teenagers are suddenly surrounding you. He swung open the door and in an impatient manner waved me inside. It was odd stepping out of relative darkness into such illumination—someone three blocks away could see every detail of our interaction. I felt naked and stupid. What do you want? He had locked the door again but left the keys dangling from the inside lock as if my answer would determine whether he moved forward or backwards.

Uh, you.

How much you pay me?

I never did this before, never even considered it. I sold my body literally thousands of times and always thought it was sad that people paid others for the use of their mouth arms legs hands assholes chest back feet. I don't know, I said. You like to get fucked? he asked. Yeah. Twenty dollars. All I had was a ten and some change. My head was pounding from blood. I'd decided. Ten dollars you suck me. You wanna get fucked it's twenty dollars. Okay, I said, reaching into my pocket. Not here, he said. Come in the back. We walked into the kitchen area, a long steel table covered in flour and confectioners' sugar, large steel pots hanging above a stove, scents from smoke or burning food. Where's the money? First the money. His belt was black with a gold buckle. I could see the outline of his underwear beneath the white cloth of his pants, the skin of his legs slightly darker.

I thought of all the truck drivers and factory workers that would be eating 69¢ breakfasts at the counters in the other room in a number of hours. Would they taste this moment of sex of energy in their donuts, in their meals? Would they sense it having taken place and say something to the waitress? How long does the smell of sex or its energy hang in the air? I handed him the ten. It was moist. He took it by the tips of his fingers and laid it gently on the steel table avoiding the flour dust. Then he started opening his belt. I kneeled down before him so that my face was just inches away and watched his magnified hands, each detail of his fingers as they unhooked the belt and slid it open. The zipper took hours to finish its ride from top to bottom. He pulled down the front of his underwear until it nestled tightly beneath his balls and his uncircumcised dick jutted out. I moved forward and turned my head to lick his balls and his hand pushed my head away. None of that, just suck it. As I took it in my mouth both his hands grabbed around the back of my head and roughly pulled me down on it. He started pumping like a piston. I unzipped my zipper and pulled out my dick. Somewhere in the back of my head I thought of my childhood and how it made sense to pay this guy. I kept trying to understand what it was I was thinking. No images formed at all, no continuous thoughts, everything fragmented, this dick in my mouth, the earlier sense of potential violence, the mouths I stuck my dick into as a ten-year-old and the rough texture of anonymous men's hands, wedding rings, old suits, hands opening wallets, a few old bills, hotel countermen and sign-in cards, registration cards with fake names and signatures, the sweet dust of sugar in the air, his hands tightening in my hair, the close-up of the white chef's trousers like hospital pants, the black pubic hair brushing my nose and his lips, the expanding qualities of his dick, the heat it was generating, his face looking down at me with a mixture of anger and the beginning sense of losing himself entering the dark pupils of his eyes. He came. I swallowed. I came and he stepped back pushing my head away and reaching for a paper towel to wipe his dick off with. He looked at the little splash of cum on the floor between my legs and looked disgusted. I felt confused. What did he think it was I got from putting my mouth around his dick?

[No date]

San Francisco

I would like to evaporate into the walls into the surfaces of things. I'll never fall in love again. He is shocked at me saying this. It doesn't shock me. It feels perfectly natural and sane. I mean I'm empty and I feel like I am dying and when you're dying it's not like you can make plans that aim like arrows into the future through the boring walls of this crammed up existence. I'm not unhappy. Only when I feel sick I feel unhappy. I feel more like my body is in neutral. On the television set they keep doing live reports from Sacramento because of the Thrill Killer who strikes on Tuesday nights. I might not be able to stop myself from laughing if the newscaster gets thrill-killed on live camera. This doesn't mean I am cruel, just that I am empty at the moment. It is not that I am cynical it's just that I am facing reality, I guess. In a movie house today on Market Street a man in the balcony sat down next to me and pulled out a fat wet dick, I couldn't see it only knew it was there when he wrapped my fingers around it. I have to admit he was repulsive. White like a body sucked dry of blood but that dick was thrilling to hold. It kept leaking all over my fist, his hand pushing the back of my head. I became iron and silently refused his dick—it wasn't that thrilling, if you know what I mean. It was just circumstances, the little kid on the movie screen dressed like a baby Satan and the vague sound of police helicopters shuttle over the theater blaring commands that lose translation in the circuits of their loudspeakers. Dying is boring—it narrows down too much. I keep dreaming of years ago when I wanted to be a hard-assed thief in a car on a road leading to any horizon and death would be a banner waving in miniature behind my eyes in my pupils seen only by the people I kissed and chances are the circumstances would be too ill-lit to be read and my body would slam into that hustler's body, I thought he was like a swimming pool I wanted to dive right into. This neighborhood in six months has gotten dark and heavy. I walked around after getting into town and it was like a blanket of violence had descended, something atmospheric and fragmented not made up of specifics just a wound drying up on that guy's face, the skinny bony queens with fake colored hair in thin windbreakers crouched next to bushes and basement windows on the side street waiting for customers and abuse in the fucking chill of evening. The woman maybe sixteen maybe seventy with a catalog of beatings still bloody or fading to bruises and she's not self-conscious walking into a cheap coffee shop asking to use the locked toilet and being refused. Groups of teenagers whose eyes you bypass because of their death banners waving waving waving waiting for the wind to stop blowing or the breeze to slow down. So silken death folds and twists and embraces you tighter at the throat. It's all fragmentation nothing specific and it's reading the signs the codes the walking moving evidences buried in shadows.

Hey Dave, he said. Gosh it's been a long time. How are ya? He still has his heavy metal haircut, jet black, feathered down his face and neck. He talks kinda funny though. I wonder if he's still a crack addict. How you doin'? I asked him, fishing for words. Fine since I found Jesus, and he smiled. When his lips peeled back they revealed a cage around his teeth, an obscene structure of miniature fencing and steel tubes and silver caps and deep blood bruises for gums. What happened? Oh I got hit by a car riding my bike, wired up my jaw but Jesus is in my life. I just pray, you should try it. He loves us all. The guy he was with was nodding out on the corner. God bless ya, Dave.

It's an enormous white wall about the size of a football field standing upright on its goal made of rough bleached stone. There are only two windows way at the top. One double window on single right next to it inches away. Both black with tinted glass in the slight fog. Rich people live there; they see sights the rest of us don't see. The news for them is and will continue to be good. They are very proud of their armies halfway around the world and the work they are doing. They are proud of themselves for how they have edited their view, their lives, their neighbors, us down below. They hear very little of our lives, they hear little of our hollers our screams our hunger our choking. They usually avert their eyes from below, they can look at any hour of the day into my room, my single room in this cheap hotel. They might see me naked reclining on my bed watching patriotism on every station on the dial. They have faith in god and country and concrete and steel and limited numbers of windows usually high up where no gymnastics or ladders can reach. I could close my curtains but I want them to struggle with the intrusion of their view. Nakedness is a difficult thing for anyone to ignore. We load it with symbols which have meanings our lives supply. My nakedness shows my hunger. My image can go where my voice would falter and dissipate. The rich have shades on their three windows, long black slats of designer materials. Two slats on the smaller window are parted maybe permanently. They may be at home, they may be away, it doesn't matter. I have all the time in the world. I experiment with small explosives and crude brand-name missiles temporarily made from stove matches tinfoil and now small steel cups. There are seven or eight spots on the white wall that look like attempts at spin art. They are my previous attempts. I'm getting better. I think of the smoke I will one day see pouring like death petals from those three windows. I think of the rich hanging over the balcony, the windowsills. I think of their full bellies. I think of their useless bank accounts. I think of their armies, their soldiers occupied halfway around the world. I do things in my bed that I imagine would appear rude and without taste to them if they were home and looking downwards for a change. I wave periodically.

GUY ON POLK STREET

He looked like a cigarette cowboy who had gotten into a bad accident in the last year. Like he'd been delivered a terrible blow from the rear, something so massive and total it was like he was hit with a machete the size of a refrigerator. The result pushed his skeleton so it rested just beneath the skin on the front of his body. The eyes were the only things that remained where they originally were—way back there. His body language recalled rodeos and steer herding but was more like clichés now, like old John Wayne movies. He had no great lines (words) spill from his lips like before commercial breaks. His eyes were advertisements for early death which probably no one would notice. His death would spark and sputter like a malfunction of a halogen light.

KID ON MARKET STREET

He reminded me of those wolf children they find in remote jungles or forests of India and bring snarling and spitting to one of Mother Teresa's orphanages where he will refuse to eat, walk on curled knuckles, and sleep in a dark corner on a small rug as opposed to the downy mattress, tortured by halogen lights and media crews. He will die within the year.

[No date]

When did the hard rain fall as predicted twenty-odd years ago? What language can we invent to replace that term rooted as it is in historical mythologies and dead-end media, fadeaways and blackouts? The war is close to an end interrupted by commercials for painkillers and rash creams. I'm in a cold wet city that is gasping for water in the worst way in its history and yet water makes some people miserable, the ones huddled in barely recessed doors around City Hall under wet sleeping bags. It recently became illegal to be homeless in this area after the civic center and stock exchange and department stores close up at night. Forget the “hard rain”—it takes so many forms whether carpets of bombs or the choking silence of people's invisibility. We starve or watch people starve—politely we turn channels on people's lives or deaths. We step out of their reach into autos and planes and luxuries too boring to list. A man pulled out an enormous black dick and stuck it through two heavy red velvet curtains at me and I sat with my back to it. The usher for this moist disintegrating movie house discovered him and shone a flashlight in his face until he fled into the rain. The guy with the dick should have been given a medal. It was such a lousy film and I felt an emptiness as wide as the missing sun. A kid of fourteen pressed his forehead against the glass separating us as I ate a small meal that has woken me up six hours later. If I am nauseous is it permissible to lay responsibility on the world and its movement? It feels something like car sickness only larger. The kid has a wet bundle of worldly possessions and he's looking for at the very least a hungry mouth more hungry than his own so that he can bargain. Forty Iraqi troops surrendered in the desert to a marine drone, a very small pilotless plane armed only with a video camera. My body has feet, my hands feel helpless, weary or useless when confronting the future of all this. The whole world is going on at a distance or maybe it's me who is at a distance or maybe it's me who is in the distance watching it grind to a creaking halt. How do you describe emptiness without using words? Making sound disrupts that emptiness but it isn't that easy because at some point you have to stop to breathe.

Trying to remember states of mind when I was seventeen. I'd bought a bus ticket to Ohio I think or maybe it was to the furthest state line in Pennsylvania. It doesn't matter because America had already passed the loan, destroyed itself like a self-destructive or suicidal amoeba, this was when everything was reformed and rebuilt to look the same in order to ease people's fears of foreignness and to induce them to travel without having to risk making new choices. I sat way in the back of the barely empty bus, the rest of the passengers clustered like flies behind the driver. He was sexy. I could see his face for the entire ride in the large rearview mirror. I pulled out my dick and wrote poems in my head for hours. I had a hard-on for 300 miles.