Читать книгу Sunshine on an Open Tomb - Tim Kinsella - Страница 20

I find it hypocritical, and decisively not auto-, if your Man helps tighten your noose when you fix your alligator.

My Help and my security detail dwindled until only Aaron remained.

I was a cushy assignment, and no one dared cut any budget that’d strip Aaron of this light retirement.

So I get financed to guarantee his job security, thanks to one line in a dense packet of single-spaced five-point font in the budget of some subcommittee that no one’s secretary’s assistant has ever glanced at before stamping.

Yes, Stately Reader, The Family has come to possess security so abundant that this security detail itself—with resplendent circular logic—supports the bountiful lifestyle of The Family’s most inutile offspring, moi.

Suited men in dark glasses with ear pieces just always loitered at the perimeter of any playground we brothers toppled around.

I was eight the first time I ever spoke to Secret Service and accepted that I had always known that they did linger for our sake.

This Big Guy, This Thug, stood in position at the gate of the playground.

What depths of insecurity and self-loathing could prompt such a desperate compulsion to dedicate yourself to so total a transformation, to warp your own body so that its every detail achieves its most intimidating potential, all the labor oddly on display?

The glum monster had veins up his neck thick as fingers.

And when I forgot my lunch one day, I approached him.

He put a finger to his ear and whispered into his collar, his expression flat.

Without even glancing down at me, he unfolded a crisp bill from his pocket—50 Big Georges—and handed it to me.

He told me to see what I could get in the cafeteria, run along, I’m not supposed to come to the edges of the playground.

Aaron is soft and pokey.

It was honing my erotic manual dexterity and ear nibbles that next provoked me to directly address Secret Service.

And then our contact was suddenly frequent.

They’d insist, We’re parked right over here. No one’s looking inside your car.

Thru those steamy aerobic moonlight grapples, they guarded me while I blossomed.

I was an alligator, switchblade hard with blood.

Those guys could identify a bone by the sound of its snap.

And they guarded me so that I was free to discern and dissect the workings of the raging dawn of my sexual urges in backseats muggy as tombs, elbows and knees knocking awk as rolling over in a coffin.

My dawning sex life protected by thugs felt like I was the Division A state football champions celebrating The Renaissance.

My dawning sex life protected by thugs felt like I was The Birth of Venus in shoulder pads calling a flea-flicker play after play.

My dawning sex life protected by thugs felt like Myth, History, and the invention of Perspective driving down the field, even faking a punt.

Those were the nights I’d later recall in that SkullnBones coffin, pulling my numb and spongy King Charles with my chalky palm, narrating in candlelight for the brothers under the skin and Don Quixote.