Western Palaces, page 2
Behind me there’s a buzzing. It’s the fluorescent lights of this twenty-four-hour donut shop and I’m suddenly famished.
A little Chinese woman stands behind the counter watching me now as I have my face pressed up to the glass case where rows of glaze-glistening donuts brighten my mood with sugary pinks, mint-greens, pearly whites, chocolaty browns, and so forth. The jelly donuts bleed neon-purple sludge from their assholes and one of them is begging me to pick it so I can put it out of its misery but I remember reading somewhere that pity simply multiplies suffering and so I have to ignore it and instead I ask for the cream puff and I swear the lady laughs at me but I shake it off and take the donut and shove it all in my mouth, the imitation whipped cream tingling unbearably under my tongue, so I let it all dribble out of my mouth, tell the woman her cream puffs disgust me, turn, and stroll out of the crackling light of the donut shop with chirped protests receding behind me.
***
In a blink I’m in Aberdeen Tower, and somewhere overhead, perhaps in the mezzanine, Alice is singing, “It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears,” and I peer down to the ends of my stool legs and look for flood water to make sure she’s not sobbing again and trying to drown us all.
My cell phone buzzes and it’s Cameron texting me, asking me to bring home some Special K and I can’t be sure if she means the cereal or the drug. She doesn’t say anything about our little tiff earlier and I wonder if it really was her I was having the tiff with or maybe some random woman down the hall I confused her for.
It doesn’t matter.
I text Cameron back: SURE THING, PEACH-TUSH! :-)
She likes emoticons and monosyllabic communication and while pity may be a problem for me I am exceedingly good at giving people what they want. It’s the reason my books sell so well that I can’t afford my own apartment.
Oh, I guess I forgot I had a cell phone. Not sure why I was on that payphone earlier.
I think it’s because I’m distracted by the words “Logan is the King of Swine – I am the King of Pain” scratched into the bar. I wonder who wrote that. I might have just written that, myself. Well, me or Sting.
Anyway, the angry, broad-shouldered Scottish bartender turns away from the cash register and we make eye contact and have a moment and in that moment I think I’ve finally broken through his steely, frightening exterior, but when I say “I’ll take a…” he turns away from me and stalks to the other end of the bar where he leans and smiles and shakes some tall bald guy’s hand. I think it’s Irvine Welsh. I want to walk down there and accuse him of stealing my manuscript, Fucking the Horse Instead of Racing It, which he changed to Trainspotting and got rich off of, but I decide against it. I’m a road-weary veteran in this game of letters and I know that stealing and plagiarizing is all part of it. So, instead, I lean over the bar and give a little wave and giant grin his way to show there’s no ill-will and he flips me off, mouthing the word “cunt,” which I decide to let go but file away in case I see him on the sidewalk later and my knuckles are feeling itchy.
Fortunately it’s Saturday night so there’s a second bartender, and it’s Eyre, my buddy who I apparently forgot all about and so didn’t even think to call when I got evicted. He’s an artist, sometimes paints my dreams, which are mostly pink and white, the close-up on the opening of a new wound. He’s a genius. My favorite artist, in fact. His paintings are so good I can actually hear the flesh tear in them, which reminds me of being born. As a C-section baby, I have a very vivid recollection of being sound asleep in my mother’s belly and being woken up by a lot of jostling and rocking and then a sudden gash of bright white light and these impossibly large white rubber fingers reaching in and tearing the gash bigger and bigger while all the fluids around me flushed by until there were hands around me, cupping me, bringing me out of a violent wound into an already dying world.
Having been taken by surprise, I barely had time to eat my twin within my mother’s womb, disposing of all evidence.
There can be only one.
“Alone tonight, Luke?” Eyre asks and I say, “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean? Jesus, pour me a goddamned Jim Beam, already, will ya?” and he thinks I’m funny and pours me a double on the rocks. I take it and tell him, “Thanks. Now go paint me some goddamned light, Mr. Kinkade—maybe do something worthwhile for once in your life,” and Eyre slings a rag over his shoulder, chuckles, shakes his head and pulls a cigarette from behind his ear as he heads toward the smoking room at the front of the bar.
It just occurs to me that today’s my birthday and that asshole didn’t even think to wish me a good one or comp my drink or offer me something in a tiny box wrapped in ribbon. It’s fine, though, as I think I have another birthday coming up sometime next week.
I wonder if I’m preoccupied with birthdays because I was never actually born.
Anyway, it all just gets my hackles up and I’m deciding between fisticuffs with Ol’ Welshy—who also stole my manuscript, The Chicken Sleeps in Shit Tonight, calling it Marabou Stork Nightmares—or burning down Kevin’s apartment. It’s a tough call.
***
A decision I apparently made because I’m standing across the street from Aberdeen Tower, looking up at Kevin’s lit-up windows on the second floor, each of my hands gripping beer bottles stuffed with gasoline and rags.
Someone’s windows up there are open and radio waves are spilling out and Bowie’s belting, “I’ve been putting out fire… with gasoline!” and it makes my lips pull back against my canines.
Zombies and giant crickets and lawyers all pass me without a word or hint of alarm.
I’m breathing heavy, staring up at Kevin’s windows, waiting, perhaps, for him and Christy or Kirsten or whatever to make an appearance so I can aim right for their dark, soulless silhouettes and give them the gift of liquid fire and a one-way ticket to eternity.
One second of compassion, friendship… pity. Pity. It’s all I needed, and I found none in my surroundings.
Just one moment…
But you just can’t depend on people. I’ve learned that. You can’t trust anyone—living or dead.
“You…. You, come in,” I hear, as if from miles away, while my vision tunnels in on the windows of Kevin’s apartment looming above me.
“Come in. You… come in now,” the small voice repeats and when I look I swear it’s the same little old Chinese lady from the donut shop but then I tell myself that’s racist and to stop thinking it.
Though, it might be the same lady from the donut shop.
“Me?” I ask, pointing at my chest with a sloshing beer bottle of gasoline.
“Yes. You. Come in, now,” she says from an open door next to a storefront window that’s blacked-out from the inside by light grey paper. She’s mere feet in front of me, the light beckoning like that at the end of the tunnel I see so many nights these days.
I’m being welcomed somewhere. I’m being invited. Someone has finally seen me and shown pity. This feeling… it’s… I don’t even recognize it. Maybe pity isn’t such a bad thing.
Where I’m being welcomed is this massage parlor I’ve passed by on countless occasions without a second’s thought when entering the security gate on its other side to get up to Kevin’s apartment where nearly all my friends at one point lived. I think I may be the only among our once-tight crew to never have stayed there, and the first to be denied. But, I spent countless hours up there in clouds of smoke and whiskey and laughter, dancing away New Year Eves with bottles of tequila, literary women, and my friends who blasted songs by Springsteen, The National, and Sinatra. Other endless nights of forties and talk of writing, reading, and futures. Other nights where Russ, that redwood of a poet, would get all misty on us and read us our fortunes with tarot cards before getting so blind drunk he couldn’t tell the difference between The Fool and Will Clark’s 1987 Topps rookie card with that wood-themed border. I slipped that into the deck nearly every time the evening was getting late enough that tarot was inevitable.
“Come, come, come,” the little old woman’s still saying although I’m now inside. It’s like a rundown doctor’s office in their waiting room: a peeling linoleum floor, a receptionist’s desk, a few folding chairs, too-bright lights, and cheesy spa posters boasting the benefits of massage. One says “Massage for Relief!” Another, “On to Better Health!” Yet another says, “Better Than a Lifetime Chained to the Water Heater in the Basement Eating Dishes of Dog Food Slid In Front of You in the Dark Each Night.” Another says something about sex slavery and I choose to ignore it. Each has a picture of a white woman on her stomach enjoying a stress-relieving rubdown, which is funny, given the only clients here are me and the skeleton-man with a fake mustache falling off his skull sitting in one of the chairs, smiling at me, but unable to help it, of course, since he has no lips or skin to hide that grin.
“I’m not…” I start to say, feeling like I should stop this wheel of events about to roll, feeling too low, even for pity.
“Give,” the woman says, and she takes my molotov cocktails and puts them up on the reception desk then walks down the white hall with low ceiling, flickering in fluorescent light. She’s wearing white scrubs and she almost disappears in the unnatural glare.
The hallway’s short, three or four rooms, and most of the doors are closed. One we pass is open and inside is just a big, puffy E-Z chair. In that chair, a giant cricket reclines, drinking a tallboy of PBR while watching an old videotape of Full House. I know this because he’s watching the opening credits and that family of pedophiles, murderers, and rapists is crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, their skins ripping away to reveal giant red ants that crawl out of the convertible and start snatching people from their cars and chomping their heads off before breaking the bridge apart with jittering mandibles.
It finally makes sense—this scene and that show’s existence, in general—when the giant cricket in the E-Z chair starts jerking off. It’s porn. Porn for giant crickets.
I think I know which episode it’s watching, too. It’s the one where Danny’s haunted by the ghosts of the Olson twin children and winds up sucking on the end of a warm shotgun—but only after dragging Joey, Jesse, and Rebecca by the hair over to Anton LaVey’s house, which is also on Alamo Square, just up the block from the Full House house. Danny hopes the sacrifice will rid him of the haunting but finds out there is no escape, so, he finds his own way out with that shotgun.
It’s surprising they were able to make seven more seasons after capping the first with an episode like that.
TV is magic.
Anyway, the little old Chinese woman brings me into a tiny white room at the back that has a massage table, a counter with a sink, and a boombox on that counter, which plays a CD of rain-sounds that mostly resemble the sound of fellatio.
Even still, the sound of that dick-sucking rain and all the whiskey I’ve had tonight and earlier today are making me feel a wee bit sleepy, so, when the lady dims the lights, tells me to lie down, and that someone will be with me shortly, I gladly undress, stretch out and start to doze off, my middle modestly covered by a towel.
I only start to come to when I hear a quiet voice whisper, “Relax. Relax.”
My eyes are too heavy to open. I feel drugged by the release of tension, having let go of my anger, somehow, from earlier.
This place is magic.
The voice keeps telling me to relax and I say, eyes closed, “Oh, I am. I am,” and the owner of the voice slowly works a hand up my thigh, traces fingers over my balls, and grips my cock, stroking it with gentle confidence.
“You like?” the voice asks. “Is OK?”
“Yes. Yes,” I say, and when I open my eyes to take in the visage of this goddess of relaxation I find Kevin standing over me in this dimly lit room, my cock in his hand, and Christy over in the corner, her hands covering her mouth, laughing hard.
“What the fuck!” I yell and jump from the table, away from Kevin and Christy. I snatch the towel from the table and wrap it around my waist, hyperventilating myself into a panic attack.
The lights flicker and the rain turns to loud thunder and the room shakes.
Kevin has both hands out, a gesture that’s supposed to calm me and let me know all is well. All’s going to be OK. Christy’s still laughing through her hands, though behind those hands I can see she’s hiding some embarrassment at this whole situation.
“Shh…” Kevin says, still approaching me. “It’s OK, dude,” he says through a shit-eating grin, and when he’s two feet from me I grab the boombox from the counter and swing it hard at his head, connecting with a solid thunk, dropping him to the stained linoleum floor.
Immediately Christy starts screaming and crying, asking me what I’m doing—what the fuck is wrong with me. Kevin’s motionless on the floor. Lifeless. I kick him in the head, anyway, and say, “You don’t understand compassion! You don’t understand friendship! You don’t understand pity!” giving a good kick to punctuate each sentence until Christy is huddled over Kevin on the ground, protecting him while crying, begging me to stop.
I’m sobbing, myself. Sobbing harder with each kick. My vision a rainy plate-glass window on a grey day.
And when I leave the massage room, the girl on the ground and bleeding, the old woman over her, tending to her, I mutter something about understanding pity. That I understand pity—how it only creates more misery.
In the waiting room, I grab my molotov cocktails then head out into the artificial light of the starless night and the grimy environs of the Tenderloin, without pity. Without an ounce of it.
EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OK
We’re in Cameron’s apartment on Geary, right above Bourbon Bandits, and I’ve got Cameron’s long brown hair wrapped around my forearm and she’s moaning and sliding her ass up against me, her slender back glistening with new sweat, but, I’m unable to finish, despite her pleas that I come inside her, because of the grunts and yelps of cricket-on-zombie action out the window, and, of course, because Abigail is watching us from the closet. I have my back to Abigail, and Cameron’s not facing her either, but I can feel her cold dead eyes on us burning with jealousy.
Grabbing Cameron’s hips and spanking her and thrusting hard now, I try—desperate—to climax, to give Cameron what she wants, especially since it’s been so long since I’ve finished with her, having had a hard time with that part of this thing we’re doing ever since the second or third month of moving in here with her.
Her kid down the hall complaining every other day of scalded hands and bloody tears hasn’t helped the situation, either.
I mean, Cameron’s place is a small one-bedroom—the kid gets the bedroom and her bed is set up in the living room that has the window overlooking Geary Street and all the noise and madness and feces-flinging hipsters and homeless that crowd outside bars and burrito joints, drunk on neon light and human excrement.
I find it all so frightening. It’s why I’m wearing a football helmet at this moment, even while in the throes of lovemaking. I’m not wearing a condom, but I still need protection.
Behind me, Abigail is blue and grey and slumped in the closet over cardboard boxes, surrounded by stuffed animals that belong to both Cameron and Toby, the kid. Abigail’s pulling off a less successful E.T.-in-the-closet scene, and when I turn my head, my hips thrusting away, keeping time with Cameron’s rhythmic “uh-UHHNNSS,” I see Abigail watching us. Just watching us. Her eyes wide open. Her red hair the only thing of her left with some semblance of vibrancy. And when her chest heaves and a wisp of blue miasma slips from her purple lips my back arches forward and my balls clench and I empty every ounce of backed-up sperm right into Cameron—so much so that my testicles feel like collapsed stars waiting to become black holes that destroy all matter and light that comes near me.
Quickly, I pull out of Cameron, remove the football helmet, move off to her side, and lean up against the wall so I can keep an eye on the closet. Lighting a Winston, I nervously blow smoke and wait for Abigail to move again. I keep the football helmet near in case I need the protection.
Cameron’s lying on her stomach next to me, glistening—fucking glowing. She looks at me and tells me she loves me. Her goddamned eyes smile. She thanks me. I feel sick and I get up from the bed, shut the closet door, and yell, “Goddammit, Toby, keep it down back there,” though the boy hasn’t made a peep.
“Are you cold?” Cameron asks, now leaning up against the wall herself, lighting up a Newport.
“Huh?” I say, grabbing my boxers from the floor, pulling them on.
“You’re shivering,” Cameron tells me.
“Huh? No, I’m not,” I say, but as I do I notice a bit of blue miasma slipping out between my lips. The closet door isn’t closed all the way, and I spy the sheen of one eye there in the dark, so, I slide the door all the way shut.
“Anyway,” Cameron continues, sitting forward on her knees, cigarette dangling from her mouth while she puts her hair into a ponytail. “Anyway, I gotta get cleaned up before Naomi gets here.”
“Who?” I ask, taking a long drag on my Winston and shuffling toward the adjacent kitchen to make myself a whiskey.
