Читать книгу Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now - Andre Perry - Страница 10
ОглавлениеWe Thought We Were Rock ‘n’ Roll
He was sucking me off and god he looked so hungry. His shoulders were broad, popping out of the straps of his dress. His face was like concrete and his mouth was warm. I’d grab the sides of his face and the stubble would scratch my palms. I turned him around but I couldn’t get the condom on. I kept going soft. That’s when people stopped watching. It was clear the show was over, their fantasies deflated by my limpness. I kissed him on the cheek and put my pants back on.
Upstairs, out of the dungeon of the sex club, my head was full of coke and whiskey and light beer. The night had started differently. It hadn’t been dirty, although beneath the surface, I suppose I have always been dirty, waiting for or even courting something like that, wanting it to happen. Or maybe I had really gone there for a woman and settled for anything with a hole. At any rate, it wasn’t worth the hundred dollars I paid to get in. The cashier, a short lady with brown hair who looked bored, glared at me on the way out. I worried that I might see her again, but in a legitimate venue and she’d look at me, pointing and whispering to her friends, telling them, “that guy is pure filth.” In daylight, I would tell myself, I was respectable and highly educated and she must be trash working at a place like that. Anything I could tell myself to make that darker version of me seem okay.
I stumbled along the streets of SOMA. Van Ness Avenue was as wide as a riverbed and empty, suffering a drought of cars. I trotted across the road, waiting for something, like getting caught in the crossfire of a drug deal gone bad, stabbed by a hooker or a mad homeless derelict, or struck by a drunk driver. But nothing dark ever happened on those streets. Or maybe nothing was dark to me anymore. Or I was too scared to go to the places where I really might get hurt. I slid into Christopher’s loft where I was poaching space for a couple of months. Christopher, his girlfriend, and the other poacher were all asleep, thinking the night had ended with that final drink in the bar, those last hugs, handshakes, and laughs. I pulled the covers over my eyes. It would be morning soon and my mother’s son was something like a whore, a street urchin, or a maggot.
*
Josh and I were walking up Mission Street. It was late. We could hear the echoes of the evening: drunks crawling home, cars parking and unparking themselves, and lights laughing off. The real drunks—the street folk—gathered around the edges of curbs and slid onto corners. Down the block a gunshot rang out and a bunch of guys ran to the other side of the street.
Oh shit, we said. That’s crazy.
We cut up 20th to Valencia where things were less dicey.
Josh worked at a bar that was too expensive for our friends. All of the drinks were top shelf and beers started at 10 dollars. I would go there looking a bit tattered and get drunk on his employee discount. I would filter into the crowd, full of rich patrons. There were imposters there too. The imposters put the tabs on their credit cards. Josh wore black shoes and liked his job because it wasn’t the sort of thing most of his friends did. He was an artist and he worked at an upscale bar. Later he would work as a writer on a popular television show. But before that, before his success, he wrote stories and when he tired of stories he wrote lengthy nonfictions—philosophies and reflections of the people around him, and the telephone poles, and the bus cables that ran a network across the city 14 feet above our heads. And he even wrote about the birds that sat on the cables, talking to each other like the drug dealers on the stoops of the low-income projects around which developers unveiled nouveau-riche neighborhoods.
The gunshot on Mission Street had rattled us slightly. We walked north, away from the Mission and all the way across town to the Marina and the bay. A couple of hours later, rich grapefruit slices of sunlight opened up across the bay and we watched men jump into the water with wet suits—out for morning swims, training for triathlons before work. We took the 22-Fillmore back to our side of town and I remembered a girl Josh had been with. Years ago we had gone to her house for a party and he had found her in a bedroom with another man. He left the house with precision—anger on his face—not as if he had been hurt but as if his calculations for an equation had proven erroneous, as if a closer proofread would have rendered the situation differently. He was disappointed in himself, not her. He brooded for two years and then we heard that gunshot and saw the sunrise by the bay. He left for Los Angeles with a new lover he had met at the upscale bar. She was freer, less of an East Coast equation. She was all West Coast with magnolia smiles and twinkling eyes. She made crafts with her hands and painted pictures of rock musicians and the birds that sat on the cables 14 feet above her head. They married and a year later she left him. He remained on the television show, which, although being a spin-off of another show, had become quite popular on its own and when I last saw him he wasn’t drinking anymore. He was sure of himself and the look on his face suggested that he wasn’t the one making errors in the equations; rather the women had been the wrong variables, foolishly slipping into his complex romantic theorems, entirely out of their league. Each of us walked with our own seemingly foolproof logic, expecting the rest of the world to understand and obey the rules of our perspectives. But it was each one of us that would need to adapt to or be crushed by the motion of life.
I descended from the 22-Fillmore. It was maybe nine or ten in the morning and I was just getting to bed. A roommate might have shaken his head at me and laughed. I just held tight to the covers and curved around my pillow like a lover, happy that my windows only looked upon the walls of other buildings.
*
It would happen every six weeks or so. Always on a weekend. I would be out with Gavin and Nick and we’d get the phone call. The caller ID would read: HAYDEN. I’d look at it and smile and then show it to Gavin and Nick. They’d laugh and shake their heads as if to say: Oh shit.
We would arrive at Hayden’s and his girlfriend would be happy and strung out. We’d all get hugs and people would be spread across the floor, sweating like the drug addicts you see in the movies. There would be knolls of cocaine on the table and mason jars full of weed—Hayden pacing around the kitchen, rolling coke around in a sifter like he was a chef at Chez Panisse.
We sat on the floor, listening to John Coltrane or The Velvet Underground. We talked about the latest issue of The Economist and the United States’ invasion of Iraq. We took sides, someone playing the devil’s advocate positing the war’s possible merits. Then we spoke of the future and jobs we might have and Nick didn’t do any coke. He said, “No thanks, I don’t do that, but don’t worry, I’m cool with it.” He sucked in a big drag of weed. It came out in a dense cloud of smoke. “Once in college,” he said, “I lost my mind. I had been up on coke and acid for days and at one point I just cracked, just lost it. I had to step away… But it’s cool. You guys carry on. It’s cool.” His eyes teetered side to side as he talked. I could see desire in those eyes, the hard tug at his will as he worked to hold the line.
I left alone, walking from Hayden’s apartment in Russian Hill. It was going to take forever and I had done a line that would carry my legs all the way across town to my bed. I floated over Pine Street, listening to the mechanical chatter of the trolley tracks. They mumbled all of the time, never stopped, like aging, bickering relatives, waiting for something to happen, waiting for a trolley to roll over them. I saw a prostitute on the corner—I had heard they came out at night around there. She was blond or close to blond and her fishnets revealed slim legs. Her red vinyl jacket just barely covered her large bust, which seemed perky in the cool morning air. I was immediately lustful for her but I had to walk because if I stopped walking she would notice me and wonder if I was a john or a cop or a druggie. I saw her face and it was gold. She was the goddess of the block. There wasn’t a car in sight or another john on foot. It was as if the girl had been placed there for me. I walked by her, turning right down Pine Street’s steep hill toward Polk. I chickened out from contributing to the carnage of human souls—hers, mine, the whole city. It wasn’t light outside quite yet but the thick darkness of night had begun to lift and I knew people in that neighborhood. Where would we go anyway? I couldn’t have her in the apartment.
I grimaced down Polk Street and saw another sex worker but she was different. Crossing over to Polk from Pine, the scene turned into a village of coarse beauties with lipstick, breasts, and cocks. They wore leather around their shoulders and they were never delicate, they were always brutal or rough trade. They didn’t have time for people who pretended to be gay. I walked by one, her face black like mine with wisdom and regret.
I asked her, “Are you a real woman?”
She spat at me, “Fuck you, nigga!”
I quickened my pace, that last line of powder lifting me across town like a magical cloud rising from the gutters of bizarro heavens.
*
During the time I was poaching a corner in his loft, Christopher liked to call me his artist-in-residence, as if he were some great benefactor and I was his charge, like Basquiat toiling away on masterpieces in a basement. Yet, I had no masterpieces and I didn’t paint. I was supposed to be a writer but the words refused to obey. Instead, I wrote pieces of songs on Christopher’s out-of-tune piano but nothing ever became of them. I played my guitar, enjoying the reverb in the loft. Deep inside, I hoped a melody and a lyric would eventually stick. I needed money, so I flew down to Los Angeles to do a freelance music writing job. I sat in the van of a rock band called Film School that was breaking up or more accurately breaking apart and awaiting reformation in a new version of itself. That’s what bands did. They broke up. The players always kept playing. I captured their story on a voice recorder and took notes at a show they played at The Echo in Los Angeles as well as in the van on their way back to San Francisco. They were dissonant to each other. One of them drove, telling jokes only to himself. Another sat shotgun, looking out the window, and another was in his seat, working on a laptop with his headphones, writing new songs for himself, not for the band. The leader and I sat in the back and he smiled oddly, like a king watching the kingdom dissipate in front of his eyes. He didn’t give a shit about the crumbling empire. He was older, had been around, and he understood the necessity of dissolution. He was poised to bounce back like an artist in a basement, churning out masterpiece after masterpiece.
*
Gavin and I were looking at each other, wondering what to do. We had beers in front of us and people had packed the bar but that didn’t seem like enough. We liked each other because the two of us, we were always looking for something more, something riskier, perhaps something worse. We believed that art was a filthy kernel at the end of a grimy tunnel. Gavin’s wide blue eyes held firmly on the glow of the beer in his pint glass. I looked at him and then away. We got a call but it wasn’t Hayden. It was Gavin’s friend, Mary Ann. She worked in bio-tech and was probably the smartest, kindest person we knew—but she lived in the horrible Marina District and we didn’t like going there. That night she wanted us to come over to help finish off her drugs. We had said enough, enough of that kind of stuff. It wasn’t getting out of hand but we could see how it might, how it would shift us off the tracks and turn us into caricatures. We didn’t want that. We already liked the caricatures we embodied: enlightened art-losers who smoked, drank, and maybe coked but weren’t cokeheads. The cab was 15 dollars and that hurt. Mary Ann welcomed us into her clean apartment. Everything was modern and her friends wore Ralph Lauren shirts tucked into khaki pants. There were North Face fleeces strewn on the backs of chairs. She was showing us off. We were her friends from the other side of town. They thought we were rock ’n’ roll.
They chattered loudly about finance while putting more of it up their noses. We just watched and smiled and they laughed at us for not doing it. Mary Ann—always looking after us, wanting us to be happy in her home—brought us a bottle of Maker’s and a bag of pistachios. Gavin and I went back and forth, drinking pinches of whiskey and cracking open the salty nuts. Every time they took long lines up their noses something hurt inside: we wanted it so badly but we didn’t want to give in. We wanted to prove to ourselves that we were in control of our lives. We finished the whiskey and smoked a pack of cigarettes. They kept doing lines and laughing about interest rates or maybe even the baseball team and the homerun record. It hurt so bad that Gavin and I started punching each other. The sound—that long snnIFFF—killed us, like the siren calls of devils on our shoulders. We found more whiskey and persevered. We were reeling around Mary Ann’s apartment, falling over furniture and punching the shit out of each other. A blow connected to my chest and I soared over a couch, tumbling to the floor. Mary Ann tolerated us with poise and dignity, always laughing with warmth, never embarrassed by her rogue friends. We passed out on her couches and while she was high she put covers on us, took off our shoes. All of that whiskey and smoke had taken years off our lives but we woke up and felt fresh for once. We retreated back to the south side of town, ready for brunch or The New York Times weekend edition or the park or whatever it is people do on Sundays.
*
We were in Golden Gate, and there was a festival going on around us. It was 10 in the morning and floats filled with fantastically costumed people—some of them nude—rode past us. Gavin and I had pancakes and champagne at his apartment earlier in the morning and now we absorbed the energy of the park. Golden Gate stretched on for a thousand city blocks and everywhere we looked there was nothing but striking mayhem. We had run out of beer and I asked a favor from a kid who was with a group of friends. They wore the uniforms of the Duke University lacrosse team, which was in bad taste as the mostly white team had been accused of raping a black woman in a team house in Durham, North Carolina, that spring. They played their roles so well. The guy told me to fuck off and shoved a beer into my hands. When we wanted some liquor we chased after a float that called itself “Snakes on a Float,” which was funny because there had been a movie called Snakes on a Plane that had caught popular culture’s attention that summer. Like the simple plot of that film—deadly snakes let loose on a plane—there was a bounty of lethal booze on that float. Men and women smiled at us as we chased after it. When we got close enough they poured vodka down our throats. Gavin and I smiled at each other and I knew then that the day would unfold endlessly, that I wouldn’t sleep that night and that I’d push myself to the edge of existence and balance my right toe on the tip of a cliff, daring a bastard wind to send me over.
*
I was alone at the Hyde Out when an ex-soldier started talking to me. He began predictably but that didn’t make him any less chilling: “It was crazy over there, man. Fucking crazy.” I wanted him to like me and I wanted the conversation to ramble on forever so I listened and nodded in earnest. I bought him more drinks when he finished his whiskies and he bought more pints when I finished my beers. “We were in a village, some dipshit of a town. Our guns were out and ready because we knew they were around us in the blown-out holes of windows.”
The bartender at the Hyde Out was striking—blond hair and green eyes. She always spoke in calming tones, she listened to my uneven chatter, and she smiled, knowing her smile could make any one of her customers feel better than the condition with which they had arrived. She told me she was going to be an actress. Wrong town, I thought to myself. But when I spoke aloud I encouraged her to push forward with the dream, to place herself center-stage in dramas that would move us to tears, and to become a starlet of the silver screen, a well-dressed icon of our generation.
Sometimes when I came to that bar alone she wasn’t there. My heart would sink a bit and another bartender, not as alive, not as filled anymore with such wondrous dreams, would serve me up whiskey and beer. I had come so far from my side of town that I couldn’t give up and walk home. I wanted to be a beautiful loser. That bar was full of unknowns and I wanted to be part of their family. Anyone could talk to anyone, young to old, sane to crazy, or sober to drunkard.
Smoking cigarettes with the bartender outside in the mild fog, I would look around the avenue and remember my first days in town when I spent time in the fancier bars of Nob Hill. I was clean-cut back then, the product of a prep school chopping block. But time took away my architecture and I turned into a sticky, knowing ooze that slid through the fault lines of an uncertain future.
“It happened like a fucking lightning bolt, like a missile out of the sky. My buddy went down. There was a bullet in his neck and I was holding him. The blood just kept coming out and I was over the edge. I left him there, I left everyone behind and I tracked down that sniper. I was full of rage. I got into position and unloaded into a hole in a building window. No one else on our team went down so I knew the sniper was dead or hurt bad. When I went in there to shoot him some more I saw that he was a kid, maybe 13 years old. I couldn’t shoot him again. I just held him in my arms and that’s the first time, the whole time I was over there that I cried. That’s the day I gave up, after all those years and all that work, I just gave up.”
When I looked into the ex-soldier’s eyes all I saw were the remnants of a detonation. We bought more drinks for each other and we touched hands to arms, as close and sentimental as we could get with him being a soldier and me being an unknown.
“I’m here now,” he said. “Live right up the street. I paint all day long then come down here to talk to you. Or him. Or her.”
*
I talked to another soldier but he wasn’t an ex. He was still in action. His name was Cash and he was Christopher’s brother. He was a Ranger and his work sent him to the nucleus of the war. The combat-jack, Cash told us, was when a soldier took a few moments off from fighting to get himself off. With bullets cruising through the air, there he is in his dusty hole and he’s got his cock out dripping desert cum all over himself. It seemed reasonable to me.
Cash wanted to stop dallying in small talk about the war and get off the couch, get out of his brother’s loft, go hit the streets, get drunk and wile some woman into his arms. He was in between tours and the break wasn’t long enough to relax from the images of bodies that had piled up on his watch. He had to fill his bloodstream with toxins, both real and metaphorical, turning the trip back home into one large blur, a chaotic dream before awaking to desert missions executed with utter precision and tight-lipped secrecy. Someone picked up a copy of The New York Times and remarked at the cover story—there was a bunch of soldiers in a blown-up town and a headline about some minor victory—“I didn’t know the Australians were involved in this mess too.”
“Well,” Cash said, “they might be, but that picture there, those aren’t Australians: those are our boys wearing Aussie stripes.”
Christopher looked at his brother uneasily. He was happy to see him but he didn’t want him to binge. Perhaps he wished they were kids again, trading the frisbee back and forth and dipping headfirst into the Pacific Ocean. I wasn’t getting any writing done so I was happy to indulge Cash. I knew we would go out and drink ourselves into a situation. Just then, a cliché fell out of his mouth: “Man, I’ve been out of the field for a while. I can feel myself getting soft.”
I looked at him, a rock of a man, a chiseled superhero. He surveyed the city’s bars, often courting women who were distinguished products of higher education in bourgeois attire. He culled them into concise romantic encounters and he would be gone before they woke up. A story leaked that while on R&R, Cash had beaten up people near his fort in Georgia and then driven a car so drunk that the police were more mystified with his ability to maneuver the vehicle than angry with his violation of the law. And later, there were stories about him controlling groups of women like platoons, sending some of them out on missions to get him food, laundry, and newspapers while he slept with others. He seemed to vacillate between the perverse desire to control everything and the nihilistic resignation to control nothing at all. I hadn’t been to war but in his eyes I could glean a flickering shadow of my own reflection.
Christopher told me he’d be in bed each night, worrying if his brother would ever be the same. I said he’d be okay but I should have told Christopher to be more honest. The truth was as clear as a director’s dailies: his brother, as likeable and charming as he was, would be projecting a horror film for the rest of his life.
*
I was in New York for three days. My friends had scattered about the city—the artists and liberals in Williamsburg, the frontiersmen in Long Island City, and the financiers on the Upper East Side. I bounced around the boroughs, trying to learn how they saw the world. I met up with a friend who had just returned from Thailand. He worked for a colossal financial institution downtown. This was before the Great Recession. We sat in a rundown bar just a few blocks away from the towers of finance and investment. He said, “This is where all of the bankers come for burgers and beers during work.” The burgers were huge and I found it difficult to wrap my hand around the large cups of cheap beer we were drinking. My friend had returned from the field, deeply embedded in Bangkok. He was not unlike Cash who had made his way back to home-base after his work in Iraq; only Cash traded in bullets and my friend traded in speculation.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Or we’ll be late for our appointment.”
We walked back to his office, back to work, the hazy effects of the cheap beer pulsing through my head. I presented my identification and signed a thick stack of papers to get into his company’s building. We went several stories up into the air. My friend dropped his bag by his office and, after looking at me curiously, he adjusted the collar of my button-down shirt. We got back on the elevator, went up a few more floors, and got off. We walked over to another elevator, a special-issue model. The door was open and an operator stood there, a gray-haired black man, maybe 65 years old. He wore a suit but not an executive’s suit, rather the kind of suit someone in service wears so that it is always clear who commands and who obeys. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you’re right on time.”
We got in the elevator and he took us up a few more flights. He let us off and said, “I will be back in 15 minutes to take you back down.”
The door closed behind us.
We were at the top of the building. My friend led me into the special room. It was so special that he had to schedule an appointment just to get us access. Fifteen minutes and not everyone even got that. I spun around, astonished. The room was cylindrical and its walls were windows that wrapped around the length of the entire space. We could see all of New York— every borough, every building, every detail. The expanse of the great city was before us and like accidental explorers we could see the vast spoils of the land, all within our reach. In the center of the room was a large rotating globe made of silver or platinum—something magnificent. Now the entire Earth sat in front of us. I stared at the globe, amazed and transfixed. My friend walked over to it and gave a hearty push. North America spun by, then Asia, then Africa. “This,” he said, “is where the rich white men decide how they will divvy up the world.” He laughed loudly, his voice echoing, filling up the room.
I was glad I had seen it. I was glad that I knew.
*
I kept writing but the words eluded meaning. I couldn’t understand myself so how was I to understand the world? For all of my privileges I felt vacant and broken. Despite this fog, new songs took form and I played a show at the Hemlock Tavern on Polk Street. Friends from past and present gathered ’round to see me, to see each other, and to begin the weekend. If it had happened in black-and-white then it would have been a film, the closing scene that walks us out of the woods to show that the masks we wear aren’t faces we can ever lose: someday we will have to wear them again or at least look at their faded and crinkled edges and realize they are just layers of skin we peeled away. If my parents had been there and had the first girl I ever fell in love with been there too, it would have been a Hollywood ending. But really, my movements are just endless episodes of a television show: slight changes in setting spliced against unforgettable, unshakeable patterns.
I saw Hayden and was happy to see him. He seemed clean and sharp, back on his feet with a modest cocktail in his hand. He had broken up with his girlfriend and other habits had left with her; though he did look a little pained and distant for choosing to live the straight life.
I played the show. Men and women shook my hand and hugged me. Everyone bought drinks. Amidst the swell of excitement, I snuck away, exiting my own dream, and converged with a familiar clutch of characters at a separate engagement on the south side of town.
We were at Gavin’s and Nick was there. There were women and men laughing and drinking wine. We listened to The Clash and I got close to a woman who had dated a rich friend of mine, a guy who always came to see me whenever I got it together to play a show. He was probably still at the show. She was sweating and we kissed. I wanted less to love her than for her to just give me someone or something to wake up to. And then there was Nick. He no longer told us the story about losing his mind at the end of college, he just said: cut me a line and make it fucking big. I was briefly dizzy and a feeling came over me, one of these moments I have from time to time. It occurred to me that there was nothing that had changed except my age. I was still black. I was still lost. Even to myself I was an invisible man.
I started to say something aloud to the group, but caught myself and pushed forward into the slippery cavity of the girl’s mouth.
