Читать книгу Yield - Lee Houck - Страница 12

I get called to do this S&M party and although I don’t really want to go, I do anyway. I could use the money. At the last one someone paddled my nuts for like a thousand hours, and the next day it hurt to wear underwear. This guy’s basement is filled with all kinds of slings and sex appliances, even a mechanical chair that fucks you while you sit in it. (No thanks.) When I get there everyone is already in their chaps and harnesses. “Fantasies are completely unoriginal these days,” one of them is saying, “handed to us by Scandinavian illustrators and fake porn narratives from the seventies.”

Still, I think, here we are.

My clothes come off. I feel a mouth on my asshole and then a tongue reaching inside. One guy sucks on my nipple while I bite down on his fingers. Eventually, I come in somebody’s mouth.

Then I stand by the door while the host counts out my money, watching the faded green bills flip over in his hand, trying to count them as he’s counting them—one hundred, two hundred, two-fifty—without being obvious about it.

That’s my favorite part—the gathering up of clothes afterward. Everyone is more relaxed, the nervousness dissipates, and you can have interesting conversation sometimes. Boundaries are less important, and people tell you what they do for a living, or they complain about their boyfriends and how they never have sex anymore. They swear they’re good husbands and fathers, despite our transaction—I think most of them are. Sometimes you still sound like strangers afterward, which of course you are, even though you’ve shared something personal. Or deeply impersonal, which itself is a certain kind of intimacy—what it says about the person who requests it. And all that can’t make you completely unfamiliar. Can it?

After the party I went straight to work. From work to work, as I say. The hospital is basically calm today, nothing of note to relay—except a new brand of potato chips went into the snack machine in the waiting room. There seemed to be some ruckus in the emergency wing, but I didn’t hang around long enough to see what it was.

I did seventeen files immediately, all outpatient visits that I could hold in one hand without much effort. Then I started on two stacks of thicker files from surgical, which were mostly in the same area of the filing room, meaning not a lot of walking, and one even ended up on the bottom shelf, which isn’t all that common, because those files are older. The rest of the day was spent dealing with six cartons of files from the early ’80s—five hours and I didn’t even finish. It never ends. Last year’s numbers for the entire hospital system, which includes several facilities throughout the city, when touted around by the PR department went something like: 625,000 home care visits, 90,000 inpatient discharges, and more than 1,000,000 outpatient visits. The emergency rooms alone saw 255,000 people.

It’s not boring, what I do. It can be infuriating—when a particular file doesn’t know where it belongs, and so I have to pore through the paper innards looking for the right detail. Anything that looks like a patient number will do in some cases. And it can be numbingly mechanical. Sometimes I get four hundred incidents in a single day, none of them admitted, just treated and released. Those files lack any sort of tangible personality, and often you can file several of them at a time because they’re sequential, so there’s no detective work. But I never find it boring, exactly.

Boredom indicates that although you are mentally fixed on a single task—waiting, reading, listening to a stranger’s conversation—what you would rather be doing is something else. And I find that often what I would rather be doing is filing. Meaning, I never say to myself, “Wow, I’d rather be getting fucked right now by a dude on his lunch break.” I like the motion of this work, the back and forth between the aisles, the quietness of the room. The immediate gratification—when I’m finished, I’m finished, and I get to go home.

There is a peace to the bureaucracy. Among the crowds of humanity I feel infinitely small. Inconsequential. These files were here long before I was, and they’ll be here for years after I’m gone. I only intersect them briefly, passing into their lives and then out, invisibly. Someone once told me that the job sounded like horrific humdrum torture—stacks of befuddling paperwork and bloody, hapless fingertips—but I disagree. I take the opposite point of view. Didn’t Camus say that we have to imagine Sisyphus happy?

Mr. Bartlett is in the kitchen when I open the door.

“Come in, Simon. It’s so nice to see you again. I was wondering if you would show up today.” Our meetings are weekly and scheduled. He likes me to pretend that I happen to be stopping by; it creates the illusion of a genuine friendship. “Would you like a glass of water?” A blur of lavender and baby powder introduces him to the foyer. A blue wash pauses in the air, the nebula around him congeals. I wonder if he’s taken a bath.

He stands against the doorjamb, waiting for me to decide if I want a glass of water, which means he’s hoping that I’ll piss on him, or sometimes I piss in the ice cube trays so he can save it for later.

“Fine,” I say. Mr. Bartlett keeps my money in a purple envelope. He has a strange sense of morality—he would never actually hand me the cash—and so he leaves it on a desk near the front door. “So you won’t accidentally forget it,” he says. Does he remember that this is what I do for a living?

The first time I fucked him at this house I went into the kitchen after he offered me a glass of water and looked into the looming china cabinet, probably antique, only to see that there was one plate, one glass, and one set of utensils. “Why do you only have one plate?” I asked. “Oh, you know,” he said. “All the others must have broken.”

Mr. Bartlett continues his monologue. “I thought about cooking a little dinner for the two of us and then I said to myself, ‘You don’t even know what that dear young thing likes to eat, or if he even prefers to eat dinner at this hour. Instead, simply offer a glass of water. Something to fill his stomach.’ That’s what I said to myself. And do you know what? I think I was exactly right in thinking those thoughts, don’t you?”

“Water is fine,” I say.

“Perfect.” He smells my shoulder as he slides past me. “I’ve had the Brita in the cooler all day, because I knew you would say that yes, you would like a glass of water.” He fills a glass and hands it to me. I take a big gulp.

Today he looks like a sagging version of himself, like his skin is two sizes too large, and the real Mr. Bartlett must be shrunken, perhaps captive, inside. His feet are like props from a horror film, pale and rubbery. Sometimes he smells like medicine, like an old person. And I don’t tell him that, in some circles, there are plenty of men out there, some boys even, who would gladly do for free what I do for a measly hundred bucks. I wouldn’t even know where to start guessing his age. Seventy?

“Oh dear, your hands,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. “I know.”

“You’ve cut your fingers worse than ever.”

No, not worse than ever. I remember worse.

“What do you want to do today?” I say. The sooner we’re done the sooner I can get the hell out of here.

“Oh, honey, drink your water before rushing into the details of our evening. The last thing I want to do is to have my life planned out like prime-time television. Let’s do things at random. Do you know what I mean? Let our hair down?”

“Okay.” I finish the water and he offers to refill it. I decline. I had three glasses of iced tea an hour ago, figuring this would happen.

“Now, don’t call me cloddish, but I seem to have left the latex in the bedroom. Would you mind following me in to retrieve it?” He runs his finger along a moth-eaten hole in his sweater.

“Sure.” I follow Mr. Bartlett up the stairs and to the bedroom. He’s pulled the sheets off the bed so that I have to fuck him on the bare mattress, which is okay. We’ve done that before.

After, while I’m putting my pants back on, he bothers me about another glass of water, and when I tell him that he forgot to stick the pitcher back into the “cooler” his face sinks. His posture slacks.

“At least have a glass of milk. It’s still in the cooler, I’m sure.” He sounds confused, lost like a victim of horrible temporary amnesia.

“No thanks,” I tell him.

I take the envelope off the desk, open it, fold the bills and shove them into my pocket. He walks over and lays his hand on my shoulder. I try to move out of the way so he can’t touch me, because he just had his hands all over me. And the money is in my pocket, which means that we’re done, and if I don’t want him to touch me, I don’t have to let him.

“We could watch the television. I don’t have cable, who needs all those hundreds of channels? But I’m sure we could find something worthy of our attention. Come on, sit down over here on the couch and I’ll find something on the networks. Now, let me see.” Mr. Bartlett moves quickly, brushing past me with the remote. He motions me with it and pushes some clothes off the cushion next to him. “Want to watch the networks?” he says. The screen flashes talk-show hosts, soap operas, an advertisement for a seafood restaurant with a crab leg snapping at the joint. “They’re so different these days than they were when I was younger.” He tucks a strand of hair behind his ear. I turn back to face the door. “Maybe I can find a new situation comedy. There’re so many of them these days. Practically everyone watches different shows now. Oh, Simon, this electronic box used to bring whole neighborhoods together. Well, all that’s gone now. New shows each season. No one to root for, really.”

I don’t turn around to look at him. I don’t want to see him staring down at his feet, glaring at the loose skin, the old bones.

I do have a menu. And everything is negotiable. Blow job active, blow job passive, fuck top, fuck bottom, piss top, piss bottom. Jerk off and come, jerk off without coming, eat my own, come on my face, on my ass, come before, come during, come after. Pain, bad pain, really bad pain. Soldier, Motorcycle Guy, Surfer Dude, Captain of the Football Team, House Painter, Plumber, Farmboy, Airman, Marine, Cowboy, or Convict. Some people like Nazi stuff—I don’t have the clothes, but I can borrow them. Chaps or jeans or jocks. Boots can be short, tall, dull, polished, oiled, clean, scruffy, lace up, or spurs. Rubber or denim or gloves. Spread-eagle or upside down. Spanking, whipping, flogging, strapping, sometimes punching. Weights on balls, cock, nipples. Menthol, ice, wax. Blindfold, gag, mask, chains, plastic wrap, adhesive tape, chastity belt, rope, restraints, cuffs, harness, hood, straitjacket. Enema, catheter, suppository. Shaving. Psychodrama!

I leave the apartment building and hold the door in the hallway for a man carrying too many groceries. Carrot tops and French bread stick out of the top of the bags, like an advertisement for groceries, not just plain old food. He thanks me and I wait for the door to close and click behind him. I pause for a moment between the doors, standing quietly in the airlock, staring into the gold inlay art deco mirror above the no-longer-functional fireplace. In the mirror, a river flows out from between two giant mountains with a bare, rocky summit that looms over the empty valley. The river curves in a few places, moving toward you with each turn. In the widest part, where my face is reflected, two cranes walk around among the lily pads, fishing for breakfast, their twiggy legs and knobby knees all polished and antique. I stare at myself in the river.

After, I take the subway down to the hospital. I slide my card through and listen for the high-pitched ring of the machine. The little window lights up a faded green GO and the turnstile cranks me through.

The guy playing guitar on the opposite platform sounds a lot like Woody Guthrie. About two dozen people pass by while he’s playing but no one drops anything into the hat. He’s not good, not terrible, just average—which is worse than good or bad. The only lyrics I can make out are “unravel threads of sanity” and something about “sinuous,” which sort of destroys the Woody semblance. He’s wearing a limp T-shirt, dingy around the collar, to go along with the image of “I’m a starving whatever.”

Someone has drawn DIE FAGS in thick black marker along part of the tile. Then someone else, with another urgent agenda, has sprayed a big lavender smudge through it. Wow, I think, gay graffiti. The ceiling drips near the bench where I’m sitting, slick and greenish, seeping slowly into round drop-shaped mirrors. The guitar player looks over at me and sings some stupid line about “lace and cyanide,” and I wonder for a second about whether I could take him home. But like I said, there isn’t any money in the case—and I don’t do freebies for strangers.

Plastered on the wall behind him is a movie poster, Hollywood starlets interlocking arms, perfect white teeth and eyes the color of ocean water in Barbados, like Icelandic glacial runoff. The train’s headlights flash a muscular glare across my face and there’s the enormous rattle and squeal of metal on metal. I look back at the guitar player. The train barrels down the track, hiding us from each other, separating us with glass and steel, heavy wheels, and magnificent advertising. The doors open and I take a seat near the end of the car. The conductor complains to us about using all the available doors, blah blah blah, haven’t we all heard this before? Somebody with a baby stroller holds the door open for a man in a wheelchair and the people around me start to look annoyed. Stand clear of the closing doors, and the guitar guy is suddenly history. We pull away from the station, moving into the tunnel that runs under the river, and I sit back in the orange seat, watching the flashing lights go by, the knots of dirty plumbing.

I see my body reflected in the safety glass separating the steel-bright light of the train car from the dark of the tunnels. I shiver and pull my sweatshirt around me tighter until, when I grip my sides, I can only feel the soft bulky fabric and hardly any of my own skin. I look down at my legs and they look much larger than before. I feel embarrassed. I struggle, like in puberty, with my awkwardness, with what is suddenly—me.