How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy? (3 page)

The light came on, but I couldn’t see much; my face was being pushed into the floor by someone’s boot. Then I heard Warner’s voice. “Ease up. I don’t want him to pass out. I want him to feel it. But for chrissakes hold him.  You let him get so much as a hand loose, he’s liable to kill you with it.”

They hoisted me to my feet. There was nothing I could do about it. There was a strong man assigned to each of my arms and legs. All I could move was my head.

I was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. Someone pulled the pants down and shoved KY jelly between my clenched asscheeks. Warner was telling me that I was about to learn what happens to fags who don’t respect their superiors.

I felt my stomach go into spasms, and I felt like crying. Then, as always when I was this scared, I didn’t feel anything. “I guess your mother wasn’t available,” I said.

“Oh, you’re gonna learn to love me,” said Warner. His men laughed. Then I felt his hard cock rubbing against me.

I pulled to my right, and the guy holding my left arm pulled me back. When I felt him pull, I pushed, going toward him, aiming to head-butt him in the face. The guy who had my right arm kept me from getting enough force behind it to do any damage, so instead I lunged like an attack dog, trying to grab the guy’s face with my teeth. I was aiming for his nose, but he moved and my jaws closed on his eyebrow. I moved down, covering his eye with my mouth, biting, sucking.

Then his eye was in my mouth, a string of bloody nerves dangling from my lips. I couldn’t believe how easily it came out. Even the feel and taste of it wouldn’t have convinced me if I hadn’t been looking straight into his fountaining red socket as I listened to him scream.

As soon as he let go of me, I swung the heel of my free hand into the ear of the guy holding my right arm, and he went down hard, starting to hyperventilate. I turned at the waist and with both hands I grabbed Warner by the hair. I drove the top of my head into his face four times, and felt the target get softer and wetter with each impact. The guys who’d been holding my legs let go and ran for the door, accompanied by a couple of onlookers. I let Warner fall. I spat out the eye. The guy I’d taken it from was on his knees, still screaming. I kicked him in the head and he shut up. The other guy, the one with the newly shattered eardrum, was running toward the door. I went after him, but my legs were weak and shaky and I didn’t catch him. My hair was soaked in Warner’s blood, and it was running down my face and neck.

I walked carefully back to Warner, and I stomped him until he lay in a pool of red piss. Then I sat down on a bench and began to shake so violently I could hear my teeth chatter.

After the class, we all went inside the house. I helped Laurie make coffee and tea. I chatted with the students for a while. Their reactions to the class seemed varied—some were shocked by what I’d taught them, others couldn’t wait to go and suck somebody’s eye out.

When the last of the students had left, Laurie and I sat in meditation for a half-hour. Then I left, saying I’d come to the gig she was playing the following night. I drove along Rural until it became Scottsdale Road. Some people I knew were playing at Sutter’s Gold that night. I pulled into the parking lot, turned off the engine and lights. But I didn’t get out of the car. I sat there for a minute or two, trying to decide whether to go in or not. I started the engine again, pulled out of the lot.

I took the long way home, following Scottsdale to Camelback, then Camelback to Seventh and Seventh to Bethany Home, where I lived. There was a dim, flickering light coming from the window of my apartment. I unlocked the door and went in. Janine was lying on the couch, watching TV in the dark. She wore shorts and a tank top and was barefoot.

She used the remote to shut off the volume on the TV. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

“How’re you doing?”

“Wiped out,” I said. “How about you?”

“I’m okay.” She turned off the TV. Then she stood up. She put her arms around me. “God, you stink.”

“I’ll bet.”

“You’d better take a shower.”

“I think I’ll take a bath.”

“I’ll cook something while you’re doing it.”

“Great. Thanks.”

I expected her to let go of me then, but she didn’t. She kissed my mouth, and I realized what she wanted, realized that she’d been waiting for me to come home. She kept kissing me as she pulled down my shorts. I was so tired I just stood there, both of us together in the light that trickled between the blinds.

Our tongues touched delicately as she took my cock in her hand. She ran her tongue from my mouth to my ear. Her breathing was excited and heavy, though I knew she might be exaggerating it for my benefit. She stroked my cock, pulling the foreskin up and down, until I said, “If I don’t lie down I’m going to fall down.”

She pushed me toward the couch, and I sat on it. She knelt on the floor between my legs and took hold of my cock again. I looked at her, the blonde curls falling everywhere, her long limbs and muscles. I saw her in silhouette, but I knew enough to fill in the blanks and I sighed as I came in her hand.

I reached for her shorts, but she stopped me by taking my hands. “Later,” she said. “You’re tired and you need to eat. Let’s feed you first.”

She stood up and turned on a lamp. I closed my eyes against the sudden glare of light. I got up and hurried to the bathroom before my come could dribble off my stomach. I grabbed a piece of toilet paper and wiped my stomach and the head of my cock.

I pulled my shorts up and went to the kitchenette. Janine was chopping avocados in half. “Stuffed avocados okay?” she said.

“Yeah. I’ll help you.”

“No need.”

“It’s okay. I feel like it. If I sit down while I wait to eat, I’ll just fall asleep.”

Miles Davis played on the stereo. I chopped garlic and cheese, scooped the avocados out of their skins and mashed them while Janine scrambled salad in a bowl. I put the puréed avocados back in their skins, mixed with the garlic and cheese. Then I put them in the oven.

I got a bottle of water from the fridge. “Pour me some,” said Janine. I did. Then we sat on the couch and I drank the rest of the bottle and she nudged me anytime I started to doze off. When the avocados were ready, we ate them with the salad. We didn’t say much. Comfortable silence. She sat with my legs in her lap.

I took a bath, then we went to bed. I had just about enough energy left to finger her until she came. Then I slept.

TWO

Janine was a trust fund baby. I was a trailer park kid, and in the months before we met I didn’t even have a trailer. I was living out of my car. After getting out of uniform, I’d lived in the complex at Park Lee, but within a few months I’d run out of money and I still had no job. I couldn’t make rent on the place, so I got evicted.

I’d bought the car the week after I’d come back to Phoenix. I couldn’t really afford it, but if you live in Phoenix you need a car. It was a 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass that belonged to one of my neighbors. It looked like a wreck and it guzzled gas like you wouldn’t believe, but its engine was in surprisingly good shape and it ran pretty well. My neighbor sold it to me for eight hundred, which was a little bit more than it was worth, but he needed the money and couldn’t sell it for less, and I was tired of asking people for rides.

Living in the car wasn’t much weirder for me than living in the apartment. I’d spent nearly fifteen years in the army and didn’t know anything about civilian life. I’d joined the army as a kid because I didn’t know what else to do. That was my reason for joining, but not for staying for almost a decade. I stayed because I liked being a soldier, and still consider it an honorable profession. Pacifism is a beautiful ideal, but if you say no to fighting then you say yes to concentration camps, torture, oppression. You say yes to Auschwitz and Dachau. You can’t go up to an Adolf Hitler or Idi Amin and say, “Look, this isn’t very nice. Why don’t you knock it off?” You’re going to need guns to shoot them with and bombs to drop on them if you’re going to stop what they’re doing.

But to be a soldier with any dignity, you have to believe in the things for which you’re risking your life and taking away other people’s lives. And I didn’t anymore. I didn’t feel like a warrior defending my country—I felt like a member of a uniformed gang, hired to further the interests of a bunch of besuited racketeers. In the Gulf, many of us learned that you don’t feel heroic killing or being maimed in a petty, manufactured war. You feel like a murderer or a fool.

But, in Phoenix, people kissed my ass because I’d been in the army. They grumbled about how shocking it was that someone like me should be homeless, while continuing to vote for the pricks and cunts who made it that way.

If you enjoy pissing into the wind, try getting welfare in Phoenix. Arizona is a “Right to Work” state, which means that everyone has the right to a miserable job for an unlivable wage. I applied for food stamps, but they fucked around so much that I told them to shove it.

My years as a soldier came in handy when I lived in my car. The fear and isolation were worse than anything I’d ever experienced in combat. In the combat zone you have people you rely on and who rely on you. On the street I had no one. I could only sleep for an hour or two at a time before being wakened by a cop who wanted to hassle me or a bunch of assholes who wanted to ridicule me—and sometimes the one was the other. I heard stories about gangs dousing homeless people in gasoline and setting them on fire as they slept. I took to driving out of town, to North Mountain or the Verde River, and parking there. But that used up about ten dollars of gas a day, which I couldn’t afford. I only had about five hundred left in my bank account, and I was afraid I’d be denied access to it if the bank found out that I was no longer at the address they had for me, and that I had no current address. I lived mostly on the dollar hot dogs from Circle K. When I let myself splurge, I’d get a five-dollar combo—burger, fries and coke—from Jack in the Crack. On chilly evenings, I’d sit in Denny’s and drink hot tea.

No one will come near you if you’re homeless. If you approach someone to so much as ask them what the time is, they shake their head and walk away from you just as you start to speak. I tried panhandling a few times, but I couldn’t do it. A mixture of shyness and embarrassment stopped me from going up to people. Everything I thought of saying to them sounded so stupid—that I was a soldier, that I’d served my country, that I was having a hard time... Even when it worked, the amounts they gave me were too small to make it worth the time and effort.

I dropped contact with the few friends I’d made since coming back to Phoenix. I just didn’t know how to deal with them from the position I was in. I’d few real social skills, and I’d no experience of being helpless. My misplaced pride made me afraid that people might want to help me. I heard that Mara was looking for me in the cafes she knew I frequented, so I stopped going to them.

Sometimes I’d drive to South Phoenix, to where the trailer park I grew up in used to be. My mother and father were dead now, and the trailer park was gone. It was now a barrio, and sometimes I drove around it, trying to remember exactly where the park had been, exactly which spot our trailer would have occupied.

I wasn’t the first child my parents had. There was one before me. His name was Stewart, and he died a few hours after being born. My mother loved to talk about him when she was drunk, which was most of the time. Sometimes she’d tell me, “I wish Stewart had lived instead of you. I wish you’d died.” Sometimes I shared her sentiments. I never knew what it was that Stewart died of; maybe he popped out of the womb, took a look at his progenitors and found a way to commit suicide.

The only time my mother hid her mean streak was when she milked Stewart’s death to elicit pity from people—thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years after he’d died. There were two young women who used to visit the trailer park, proselytizing for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Neither of my parents were religious, but my mother would invite the women in, let them preach at her while she drank, and then she’d burst into tears and ask them why God had taken Stewart away from her. They’d give her the standard Jesus-freak explanation, and she’d hug me in front of them and say that at least God had seen fit to give me to her. When she was alone with me she’d tell me that I was a useless fucking bastard and that Stewart’s afterbirth was worth more than I was.

Even as a kid I knew it couldn’t be my fault that my parents hated me, because they’d hated me since I was too young to have done anything to earn their hatred. The memories I have of being an infant are of my mother punching me in the face. I also remember being about three or four, being alone in the trailer with my father. He was lying on the couch, drunk, and I was crying because I was hungry. He kept yelling at me to shut up, but I couldn’t. He was too drunk to get up and batter me, so he threw the couch cushions at me, one at a time. He was a strong man, and each time a cushion slammed into me I’d stagger, coughing, trying to catch my breath. Eventually he fell asleep. I was still crying, but he couldn’t hear me anymore.

My father was held in high regard around the trailer park. Many people pitied his situation—being married to a poison-tongued lush, and working a miserable job in the post office, sorting mail six days a week for ten and sometimes twelve hours at a time. He was known for his generosity—he would lend people money if they needed it, even when he was short of it himself. He was good at carpentry and house-painting, and he would give up his time to work on neighbors’ trailers for free. He told jokes and he laughed a lot.

But the neighbors didn’t see him hold me by the hair and kick me in the face. They didn’t hear him call me a “black bastard.” The name made no sense, but I understood: he hated black people and he hated me, and in his hatred my white skin was invisible to him.

I never owned a toothbrush until I was fifteen and bought one myself. That was after all of my back teeth were pulled.

I had never been taken to a dentist before then. My parents never brushed their teeth, and never seemed to care that their teeth were brown with decay and partly dissolved by vomit. They seemed impervious to toothache, but I didn’t inherit that trait. By the age of nine, about half of my teeth were rotted black. If I pressed hard on a tooth it would crumble, until finally it would be a broken stub sticking out of the gum. I couldn’t chew with anything but my front teeth, which somehow remained white and had only a few minor cavities. When I had toothache, my mother would give me an aspirin or my father would let me gargle a mouthful of his whiskey. Both worked at first, but by the time I was fifteen they had no effect.