The Holy Terror (5 page)

Givens looked up when he heard Haid unzipping his jacket. He had a knotted hand wrapped around a prize: a green bottle with a few swigs of wine at the bottom. The hustler gave Haid a gap-tooth grin.

“Hello.” Haid stood there with his hands in his pockets, his shadow angling up the cracked brick wall behind him. His first word was an offering. He felt so sad for this man who scrounged for a few drops of liquor. Father was right.

And Thy will be done. Or so he had been told in parochial school, before the fire changed everything.

“Been a bad day by all reckonin’,” Givens said, by way of explanation of his actions. “I won’t be makin’ a mess here like some people been known t’do.”

He thinks I’m going to yell at him, Haid thought with a smile on his face. Givens found the smile to be a good sign.

“Can I maybe int’rest you in a game of monte? Watch where the red queen is and...”

“No,” Haid interrupted gently. “Let’s just … talk a minute. Okay?”

“Why, you see me with anything better to do, best bring it to my attention!” He noticed the two fingers of Night Train at the bottom of the flask. “Well, howdydo dedo.”

He was addressing the bottle directly. Haid had reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a tiny black book, out of habit. Practicing the psalms.

Givens licked the lip of the bottle after wiping it with his sleeve, grinning up at Haid like a kid who had shit in his pants and thought the whole thing was fun tried to convey the message to his parent.

Haid stepped forward, Psalm 50 clear in his mind. A section of it was part of an advertisement on the Division Street bus, but it had also been a favorite of Father’s.

The hustler-turned-lush probed the inside of the upturned bottle with his tongue, then smacked his lips. The lower lip covered the upper lip on his right side as if like a kid trying to remember the answer to a tough question on a test. ”Name’s Reggie.” He offered up to Haid.

“Let me hear sounds of joy and gladness,” the taller man responded. His arms outstretched, Haid’s black turtleneck pulled up out of the waistband of his pants as he moved to embrace the black man.

“Hey, what?” Givens dropped the bottle. It hit Haid on the foot. Haid grabbed the other man, who now seemed pitifully small, at the shoulders. The man was shaking and Haid wanted to cry out in the coming rapture.

“I know a cop...”

“And I know Father,” Haid pulled the dealer closer, felt the man’s breath against his abdomen. He finished his recital.

“Let the bones which thou has crushed rejoice. Restore me to the joy of my salvation...”

Haid pulled the man forward, not upward. He grunted, misjudging the weight. But it was the first time of many. He would learn.

The remainder of Givens’ sounds were muffled. Haid did not intend to crush the man’s bones. Father wanted him intact. There was a suffused glow between his chest and Givens’ face.

When the flesh—his flesh—yielded, the man in the chair tried to scream and, for the briefest moment before he went inside, Haid felt his teeth trying to bite into his shirt.

Then his head was inside of Haid, Father telling him to keep on, Haid pulling forward in the most holy of all embraces, pushing shoulders closer towards him. His own shoulders becoming hunched with the effort, someone looking on might have thought Haid to be a Dr. Jekyll who had just partaken of his potion.

He could not believe how soundless it all was, as the crippled man’s flesh rippled beneath his clothes and he was consumed whole. He wasn’t certain why Givens’ bulky jacket and shirt followed him to the gloryland; Father had always said that you were naked in Heaven.

The body hadn’t even convulsed. By the time Haid had pulled Givens up into his chest to his waist, the legs were limp and even colder than they had been.

He stopped to catch his breath, noticing that it had stopped raining. Or maybe it was the soft glow around him. Improvising now, he pushed the wheelchair gently backwards into the side of the garbage compactor. A wedge so that he could simply lean in and consume the hustler’s legs, which he pulled up to lay on the seat of the chair.

He hadn’t really given much thought to it taking this long, but Father helped him through it. As he had so many times before.

When there was nothing left of Reginald Givens, Haid patted his shirt. Zipped up his jacket. Wiped sweat from his brow.

“This is my body, given up for you,” he said.

The ones who give the pain come in many guises. I know this because I am one of them. I mutilated my right arm when I was fifteen --
 
seven slashes just below the elbow with a Lady Gillette -- simply to better understand the pain. Now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. This damn tunnel that is my life.

Victor Anthony Tremulis walked out of the Hubbard Street adult bookstore, hands scrunched into the pockets of his Levi’s, the half-mast erection from the stroke palace up the block already fading. He had left the place just behind a bearded man in a wheelchair. There was something he could understand better than most: maybe a guy in a wheelchair could be sexually active. Tremulis didn’t hear the guy groaning in the booth next to him, even wondered how he could stick his dick into one of the slots in the dancer’s booth while sitting in the chair. Guy had legs, maybe he could walk.

One of the dancers’ booths had three holes so that she could give her blow jobs simultaneously. Didn’t anybody give a fuck about AIDS? What kind of physical pain would he go through if he caught HIV? He was hung up on physical pain because so many of the people in his life made him out for a mental case.

Thirty-three and wearing his forehead high these days, little yellow wisps falling onto his journal every time he bent down towards the blue-lined pages: Vic Tremble’s War Journal is what he called it.

He was at war with his thin-as-a-rail body, his folks, and the asshole commuters on the bus. Anybody who figured you were crippled only if you were stumbling along with a limp and had enough drool rolling down your shirt to get you a job as an extra in the next Romero zombie film. Sometime in the mid-seventies, he’d started experiencing chronic pain in his shoulders and arms. His father had decent insurance through the steelworker’s union, and he was sent on a merry jaunt through the doors of the Osteopathic Hospital of Illinois, Billings, Cook County, even saw some neurologist fuck who came to the conclusion that the pain was psychosomatic because he wasn’t drooling, or crumpled up like an empty pack of cigarettes. Cock-knocking pussies in their town cars.

In 1986, the Arthritis Foundation produced a pamphlet on myalgia, the destruction of the connecting tissues between muscles. By that time, everybody in his whole family assumed him to be just another troubled kid, inventing the pain for the attention it would get him. Dr. Basehart prescribed a mood drug called Elavil, the same kind of wonder drug that terminal cancer patients were given so that, well, they were in pain, but, hot damn, they were sure happy about it.

Give old Tremulis a couple of shots of Jack and give him the same effect.

He’d been thinking about a couple of bourbons at the Shelter, a flesh bar out over the river, after leaving the book store on Hubbard Street. He’d still do that, but he came across a magazine that gave him some incentive to write in his journal.

The store had various aisles, each devoted to the original sin of your preference -- guys and women fucking mailmen, lifeguards, landlords, neighbors, and the Marine Corps, in any variation. And animals. His favorite title was MY DACHSUND, MY LOVER. But the title of a magazine caught his eye. HUSKS. Photos of naked amputees and people wearing colostomy bags. He was fascinated and revulsed by it all. In one way, the pictures got his creative juices flowing and that was how he came to be writing in his notebook there on the corner of Hubbard and Franklin, in the dim light coming from a soup kitchen window.

* * *

I had burned my forearm as a baby (the journal entry continued), while attempting to play with an iron. Actually, the babysitter, a mousey girl named Charlene if I recall correctly, had plunged my arm up past my bony elbow and into a pot of scalding water she had placed on the kitchen floor. We lived in Wicker Park—the top floor of a three-flat on Honore—in the sixties. This was right before the big riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, and so it was that a screaming baby, wailing that could be heard through closed windows in March, was still not uncommon.

My mother used to have coffee with her friends Flo and Cel at Sophie’s Busy Bee a few afternoons a week. The water incident was the only sadistic thing the sitter had ever done that had left a scar. She had told me that if I didn’t go along with the iron story then she would be telling my mother I accidentally fell behind the radiator in the living room and that was that. I tell everyone still that it was my stupidity with the iron that gave me the burn scar. Last I heard, Charlene was an RN at St. Luke’s-Presby.

The light at the end. I wonder if I truly have the nerve to step in front of—no, walk down the tracks of the Washington Street subway into the oncoming northbound train. Walk it nice and slow, see if I can make out the color of the conductor’s eyes as his face shoots into focus before impact. Would anybody in the cars die? I think not. Maybe that magazine would print a photo of my desiccated body there on the steel. Make me a posthumous centerfold.

The burn. Now to get back to it. I went into the basement while my father was asleep in front of the Bears/Packers game and my mother and her friends were out at the old Riverview amusement park. Maybe the crush of not being allowed to go with them—to ride the Bobs or get lost in Aladdin’s Castle—added to my despondency.

My need for another experiment.

Standing in the shadows of my father’s basement workbench, I recalled my bandages being taken off the scar in 1959, and how I sat with horrid patience in the living room as Dr. Schmidtke unwound the gauze bandages. If I recall correctly, I Was A Teenage Werewolf was on our old black-and-white RCA. Michael Landon getting turned on by a girl doing splits in the gym.

I bit the insides of my lip as some of the skin peeled off because the doctor had put Vaseline or something underneath the gauze, but I would not under any circumstances allow my parents to see me cry. It was the same when I prayed.

So I cut into my arm. This was 1968 now. It wasn’t like I was contemplating the old suicide shuffle. I cut into the triangular piece of pulp to see if that scar from long ago would bleed. That was all. It did bleed, but only a little; like droplets of vampire baby spittle. A couple of Band-Aids did the trick and I was upstairs before halftime. No one asked, but if they had, I would have told them that I had fallen while raking leaves.

But they didn’t notice. At least, they didn’t say anything. The razor scars are long gone now. It’s been nineteen years.

All my life I have tried to understand pain.

I don’t believe the same god gave us both Jonas Salk and Richard Speck, one to save countless lives with a polio vaccine, the other to knife eight nurses to death in their dorm. A small number of cooling bodies, to be sure. But not to the families. Only to the Hitlers and Khadafys, of which Our Lord Quote Unquote has provided us with many.

I tend to place my beliefs in gods I refer to as The Givers of Pain and Rapture. Lesser gods. I do not pray selfishly. I pray that those lesser gods use my body as a vessel so that I can dissipate pain throughout me.

I’ll never pray for my own sake.

The most excruciating pain I have ever caused myself was an incident that occurred just over a decade ago. I had been staying with a friend up on Sheridan and Cuyler. It happened in the bathroom. I just wanted to know how it would feel. Naked after a shower, still wet, my balls were shriveled.

I opened the wicker hamper opposite the sink and let my penis and testicles droop over the edge. I gently lowered the lid and applied pressure against the top with my hands. My pubic hair was stretched taut in places. Still pressing downward, I then proceeded to pull my dick through the tiny crack, keeping the lid as tightly closed as possible.

It was like clenching your teeth and pushing your tongue through the cracks. Your tongue looks bloodless and it was like that with my penis. I almost panicked when I thought about my sac splitting open and my nuts bouncing down to the bottom of the hamper onto my friend’s boxers. Explain that one.

The right testicle was bruised for several weeks. But at least I knew what it felt like. The Givers of Pain and Rapture would certainly understand. Perhaps one day I will be allowed to see the rapture.

I wonder what it would feel like to put a bone saw against my cheekbone? Would I be blinded by bone chips? Which would I feel most, the agony of sudden blindness or that of the saw cutting downward into my jaw?

Is it really any wonder that I will never pray for my own sake?

* * *

Tremulis closed the book and checked his watch. He’d picked himself up a job at the Hard Rock Cafe that past summer; sure, it was only washing the glasses and straightening chairs, but at least it sounded good when you said you worked in a club. And he liked guessing the kind of girl by her lipstick stains or cigarette stubs. Himself, he liked the kind of girl who didn’t rely on the crutches of makeup and or smoking. Not that he had so much as kissed somebody who was outside of his immediate family in the last year.