and, not to mention . . . meet Ben and Peter
So, I was bored and thinking, what do we do when we're bored? We write. You might notice that this is a theme around here.
And I started writing, no concept of a story, just to amuse myself, and then I suddenly had like pages of the thing done and realized that I did know where I was going with this, at least for a little while longer before it escapes me again.
Anyway. It counts as original fiction, I suppose. It's . . . considerably fucked up. But don't worry. Everybody who counts already made it out alive.
And I'm planning on adding to it. It's looking to be longer'n hell, before I'm through. For now, it's incomplete, in progress and interred for your perusal.
Warnings: Violence. Drug use. Lots of theft. Illegal acts by the score. Boys making out. Suicidal tendencies and an imperfect history. The bad wayfinding of young men. Beware.
This is not a true story, though a lot of it actually happened.
Ben and Peter
By Candle Beck
1. The Last Time
And the last time I saw you, you had blood on your face. We were in the parking lot after the rock show and the guy you’d just beaten the hell out of was broken on the pavement, his hand spread out on a black slick of grease like a pale flag. The cops were there, they had your arms wrenched behind your back, hauling you away. You were bleeding from a gash on your forehead, there was blood in your eyes, and you were grinning at me maniacally, and there was blood on your teeth too.
We’ve come this far. You can’t sleep until you’ve had the exhaustion pounded into you by someone else’s fists. Sometimes I think you prefer to lose these fights rather than win them, because you are wilder when you are losing, you are frantic and your breath shrieks through you, and after it’s over, I take you away and lay you down in the back of the car and you can pass out then with a bruised smile on your face.
Our friends see you with your raccooned black eyes, your swollen lip, the abrasions on your knuckles, and they say to me, ‘Jesus Christ, he’s your best friend, can’t you do something to stop him?’
But what could I say to you? While you sleep off your injuries in the backseat of the car, I’ve got a hand mirror balanced on my knees in the front, a razor blade between my teeth and a truncated straw spinning around my fingers, two hard lines and I drop my head back against the seat with a gasp of pain, the crystal burning up my nose and down my throat, my eyes tearing, and you mumble in your sleep as I flood through with color and light.
We can’t say anything to each other about our respective self-destructive tendencies. We’re pretty inarguably going to hell, but at least we’ll be going together.
And when we were kids, I thought you knew everything.
You toss me a pack of cigarettes, you trace your graffiti on my skin. We go out to the beach during a hurricane, down on the tapering Gulf Coast, and it’s like the world is ending, right here before us. You throw me into the water, and I get caught up, taken in, dragged under. My hands touch the sand at the bottom, strips of seaweed wrap around my legs, and you swim down to hook an arm around my waist and pull me back up to the surface.
One of us isn’t going to survive this.
You scream my name and blow out smoke rings to the beat of the music, evenly timed, dozens of them floating away from your circled mouth like soap bubbles. I’ve still got the scar on my arm where you put a cigarette out when we were sixteen.
You fuck me up and leave me with scratches on my back, bracelets of bruises around my wrists, and then you come back and run an ice cube over the places where you’ve torn my skin. The day will come when I’ll have to explain to someone where all these marks came from, why my body is such an imperfectly scoured plane.
I wake up with dust in my mouth and you’re gone. You’ve stolen my stash money, it was nearly four hundred dollars, you son of a bitch. I’m keeping track, you know, someday you’ll be accountable for all that you’ve taken from me. And now I can’t get a gram bag like I planned, and yeah, that fucks up my plans for the weekend a little bit. You fucking useless motherfucker.
You watch the news with your mouth cocked open, transfixed. You eat cereal dry and pick out all the marshmallows to save for last. You’re drawn to neon signs like a moth, you can’t stay away. Every time I’m ready to get over you, you come around and push me down, bend me over something, tighten your hands on my hips, you fall to your knees and stare up at me with something like insane devotion in your eyes. You come around and I’ve got no choice, man, I’ve got nothing.
It’s not my fault, your hands are my memory, your body is the only history I want. You tell me all the things I can’t say to myself, you say ‘fuck’ and you say ‘more’ and you say ‘this here now’ and you say ‘never again,’ but there’s never gonna be a last time between us.
You get drunk and I let you drive.
And when we were in Texas, you kissed me behind the gas station and neither of us heard the pack of white trash boys sneaking up on us until one of them snarled ‘fucking faggots,’ and tore you off me, slammed you into the wall and I saw your head hit the stone, I saw your eyes shut and that good smile creeping on your face. And then there was an arm strangling around my neck and hurling me to the ground and after they’d left us there, you crawled to me, dragging yourself along on your elbows, breathing jaggedly and coughing blood, and when you touched me, I howled because two of my ribs were broken and neither of us knew it yet. You laughed roughly and your hands were shaking so bad. You ripped off a swath from your shirt and cleaned the blood off my face. I was weeping and you petted my hair and we were lying there together on the shattered concrete, and you kept saying ‘it doesn’t matter, it’s not real, none of this is real.’
Your heart is weak and hard and the first time I told you to get the fuck out, your eyes flinted and you didn’t leave my apartment for the next three months. You think that you know everything about me, and you do. I don’t know shit about you, I never have.
I’ve always been gay, and when it looked like I was falling in love with that boy from art school, you flattened your hands on my chest and decided that you were gay too, but I’m pretty sure you just didn’t want to see me with anyone else. That art school boy was sweet and kind, his hair was softer than yours and he didn’t push me away in the night. You’ve never given me anything worth having, but I still wouldn’t change a thing.
I play the piano until my fingers bleed, and you lie on the carpet counting the cracks in the ceiling out loud until I tell you to shut up. We eat frozen sour green apples and share a glass of orange juice at four in the morning in my kitchen, the lights off and you’re just a shadow, holding your arm out so I can suck the thin flavor off the heel of your hand. I stretch you out on the bed and lay down lines of crank in the hollowed trenches of your ribs. Your hands are behind your head, your chest is smooth and taut and perfect, and I do three lines in one quick harsh snort, and then lick the remnants away as you laugh breathlessly, and I’m dizzy with the edgy fatal taste of speed and the salt of your skin shivering on my tongue.
When I show up places without you, nobody recognizes me at first.
And when we were seventeen, I was the one who bandaged your wrists. I was the one who picked you up off the floor of the bathroom and stopped the bleeding with my hands and held you down so you couldn’t get to the blade again, I was the one who pinned your shoulders to the bed and kissed you until we were both crying. You stupid fucking cliché-what the fuck did you think I was gonna do without you?
My parents consider you their second son, which is good, because yours kicked you out after your dad walked in on us in the boathouse at the lake, and haven’t spoken to you since. My parents don’t know about us, which is probably why they still smile when they see you and hug you before we leave for another road trip.
That I could never leave you, that I could never live without you . . . does this really surprise you that much?
There’s no difference between what you sound like laughing and what you sound like crying. Either way, it’s something broken loose within you, it’s this terrifying rattle, scraped and hoarse. You are arrogant and you want to die, and when you fall through the cracks, I disappear into my addiction and emerge months later, ripped-down skinny and as pale as smoke. You come find me, you say ‘where did you go,’ and I wrap my arms around you as tight as they will go.
You like to claim that you can’t feel pain, but I’ve proved you wrong a thousand times.
When we were small, we loved each other like brothers, better than what we are now. I climbed way too high in the sprawling oak tree in your backyard, and got too scared to come back down, trembling up there, hugging the trunk with my arms and legs, because I was eight years old and already knew what it would feel like when my body hit the ground. You climbed up next to me, fearless and swinging by one arm from a branch, and you said, ‘c’mon, scaredy-cat, c’mon,’ but I was mute and just kept shaking my head, so you said, ‘close your eyes, I’ll get you down,’ and when I was blind, you took my foot and moved it down to a lower branch, and then one of my hands, and then the other, and we moved so slowly, you guiding me the whole way, it took us most of the afternoon to reach the ground again, and I didn’t open my eyes, not once.
And I watched the cops haul you off, you with that beautiful sneer on your beaten face, you were fierce and cruel and astonished by the depth of your despair, you were grinning through the blood, your eyes did not leave mine and that was three days ago, three days since I saw you last, saw you victorious and stunning in defeat, I saw you there spitting red onto the asphalt, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, that this is the life we have been bound to, that it’s me you have to destroy, I’m sorry, my love, but I can’t let you go, you’ll have to pull me under with you, because there’s nowhere else in the world that I belong.
*
2. Getting Into Trouble
Peter goes over to Ben’s place a week later, and the door’s standing open.
He walks in, sees the familiar wreck of the apartment. There’s cardboard duct-taped over the broken window, shards of glass glinting on the sill. The coffee table is two cinderblocks and a sheet of plywood stolen from a construction site, covered in baseball cards. Ben’s been going through his collection again. The television’s got tinfoil wrapped around the rabbit ears antennae, and there’s a fine sheen of ash on everything.
Ben’s asleep on the kitchen floor, the dark shadow of a bruise on one of his cheekbones. The cut on his forehead is scabbed over, but it didn’t need stitches. Peter slides down with his back against the wall, his knees up. The linoleum’s cracked and stained yellow like smoker’s teeth. Ben’s breathing shallowly, pulling in air raggedly, coughing in his sleep.
Peter touches his shoulder, his neck, his cheek. Ben’s face twists, his forehead lining. Peter touches Ben’s closed eyelids with the tips of his fingers, whispers Ben’s name.
Ben’s eyes come open slowly, looking wary and uncertain the way he always does when he wakes up. He blinks until his vision clears, and his mouth crooks slightly as he sees Peter sitting beside him. They haven’t seen each other in a week, but they won’t talk about all that kept them apart, not just yet.
“Hey,” Ben says, rasping.
“Hi,” Peter says back. “Your door was open. You’re gonna get robbed if you keep doing that.”
Ben yawns, and Peter can see the rows of his teeth, clean white with silver fillings in the back. Ben lives off coffee and cigarettes, but you wouldn’t know it to see him smile.
“Nothing much here to steal,” he answers. He sits up, reaches for the table, pulling down an open can of Coke. He grimaces at the flat taste, but kills the whole thing in one swallow anyway, his head back, his throat exposed and moving smoothly.
“Did you fight last night?” Peter asks, brushing his knuckles across the mark on Ben’s cheek, Ben wincing and drawing away.
Ben shoots him an irritated look. “Did you get fucked up last night?” he says back, his words sharp.
Peter’s hands are still shaking; he hasn’t slept. He shrugs. “Only coke. Natalie’s out of town.”
Ben hikes an eyebrow skeptically. “Really?”
Peter holds out his hand to his friend. “Go ahead and taste, if you don’t believe me.”
Ben circles Peter’s wrist with his fingers and licks the hollow of Peter’s hand, the place where his thumb runs down into his arm, where Peter’s been tapping out bumps of cocaine all week long. Ben flicks his tongue over his lips, smiles. “I love it when it goes numb like that.”
“Yeah, so do I.” Ben’s still hanging onto his hand. “So, did you fight?”
Ben lets him go, crosses his arms over his chest. “No.”
Peter pulls out a pack of cigarettes, lights two and hands one to the other man. “What happened to your face, then?”
Ben draws hard, the smoke spilling out in two even streams from his nose. “I don’t know.” He pokes at the bruise with his fingers. “I was pretty drunk.”
“Yeah,” Peter sighs.
Ben’s wearing a torn thrift store T-shirt with a silkscreen of a horse on the front. The shirt’s faded yellow, and his arms looked tanned and strong coming out of the sleeves. He’s got one shoe on, the other wedged half under the refrigerator. His hair is flat in the back from being pressed to the floor all night, and his eyes are insomniac-swollen, so that Peter knows he wasn’t asleep for that long. Peter probably shouldn’t have woken him up; neither of them gets enough sleep as it is.
Peter leans his head back against the wall, each breath clouded gray. They pass the empty Coke can back and forth, using it for an ashtray. Peter smokes nervously, fiddling the cigarette between his fingers. Every few moments, a tremor wracks through him.
“I need to borrow some money,” Ben says, and Peter brings his gaze back down.
“What for?” he asks, his eyebrows pulling together.
Ben shrugs, not meeting his friend’s eyes. “It’s only about a hundred.”
Peter’s mind automatically clicks, ‘that’s a gram bag from Natalie.’ He’s got maybe fifty in his wallet, another ten in change on his dresser at home, and he can pick up the other forty tonight if Jack needs someone to play piano at the restaurant.
“I don’t have it.”
Ben doesn’t believe him. “If I tell you what it’s for, will you give it to me then?” he asks impatiently.
Peter flicks the end of the cigarette into the sink, sparks of orange dusting around them, dying on the ground. “You telling me what it’s for isn’t gonna make the money suddenly appear in my pocket.”
Ben glares at him for a second, his eyes muddy green. Peter holds his gaze steadily, in exhaustion. Eventually, Ben blows out a breath and sucks down the last of the cigarette’s smoke, then says, “You got any coke left?”
Peter laughs without humor. “Since when do I ever have any left?” He’s shivery and cold, he feels hollowed like he always does after a night like last night, a week like this past ungodly week. His sinuses are clogged and he can taste the remnants of the coke drip in the back of his throat every time he swallows. Three of his fingers are badly ragged, slowly clotting blood from where he’s been gnawing on them for days. His lips are chapped, his skin papery, his eyes watery and red. Cocaine wrings him out. It’s not his drug of choice, at times far far from it, because the high is so short, he constantly has to do more lines, until there are glittering white stars in his vision and he’s stumbling from the choke of it. Over the past week, he’s run through more grams than he can count, and all this because his meth dealer has gone to visit her brother in Sacramento.
He’s blinking back tears when Ben’s hand crawls up his leg, taps on his kneecap. “Please stop shaking, man,” Ben whispers, his face clean and his eyes mournful.
Peter shakes his head, something terrible and hopeless cracking within him, but he’s got no words, so he reaches out and pulls Ben to him, Ben’s face against his neck, Peter’s arms around his friend’s back, Peter’s cheek against the lank curls of Ben’s short hair. Ben slips his arm between Peter’s back and the wall, and hangs onto him.
“I missed you,” Peter says softly, brokenly. “I got into trouble without you. I got into so much trouble.”
Ben’s hand skims down his side. “What’d you do that’s so bad?” he murmurs, pressing a brief kiss to Peter’s throat.
Peter makes a sound like a moan, buries his eyes in Ben’s shoulder. “Spent so much money, I’m broke forever now. Didn’t go to class, not once. Haven’t . . . haven’t really slept. Kept doing lines, even when it didn’t touch me anymore, I couldn’t stop. Got caught stealing cash from Jesse, now he says he doesn’t want me living there anymore. I . . . I crashed my car.”
“You crashed Harvey?”
Peter nods, not taking his head from Ben’s shoulder. “Only a busted tail-light and some dents. But still. Nothing . . . I haven’t been able to do anything right since you got arrested.”
“And you couldn’t even get any crystal to help you through it,” Ben says sympathetically.
Peter chokes down a sob, tightens his arms around Ben. “You can’t get arrested again. I go crazy when you’re not around.”
Ben laughs lightly, burring against the other man. “Well, it’s not something I was exactly trying to do.”
Lifting his head, Peter sniffs, his throat thickly numb from swallowing drip, and wipes his eyes with the side of his hand. “How was jail?” he asks, trying to get himself under control again, the muscles in his arms shuddering.
Ben half-grins. “Oh, not so bad. Kind of restful. Didn’t have to worry about anything except being in jail.”
Peter combs his hand through Ben’s hair distractedly. “Who ended up bailing you out?”
Ben’s eyes flash. “My cousin Sammy,” he answers, and Peter waits for him to ask where the fuck Peter was all week, why Ben had to call Sammy to get him sprung, but Ben just cuts his gaze away.
Peter spent the week fucking up in every way available to him. He spent Ben’s bail money on as much blow as he could get his hands on. He didn’t come by county lockup to see his best friend, didn’t bring him books or magazines or a carton of cigarettes or any of the things that he knew Ben would want. For the week that Ben was in jail, Peter hadn’t so much as said the other man’s name out loud. But Peter was still the first one he’d called when he’d gotten out the morning before, even if it was another day before Peter checked his messages, Ben’s best-loved voice chafed and hoarse, saying, “Fuck you, motherfucker. Get over here before I have to kick your ass.”
Peter presses his lips to the bruise on Ben’s cheek, his eyes closed. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, and Ben holds him tighter, breathing slowly in time on the kitchen floor.
*
3. Thievery
The police hadn’t taken off the handcuffs for all that first night. Ben had been swearing viciously, blind stupid drunk in the cop car, slamming his bound hands on the wire mesh that separated him from the officers in front, so they left him chained, the metal biting into his wrists, jerking him out of his unsteady dozes.
His wrists still hurt, a little, but the fierce red circles have faded, leaving only the old scars behind. Peter’s asleep on the mattress on the floor of the living room/bedroom and still fully dressed, strewn out with his arm hanging off one side, his hand on the hardwood. The comedown from the cocaine hit pretty hard, and Peter’s got a week of consciousness to make up for.
Ben’s smoking on the fire escape, staring out over the city. He’s tired too, most of the way dead on his feet, but he’s still getting re-accustomed to the fullness of the light and the scope of space that exists outside jail. Ben isn’t wearing shoes, the iron freezing under his feet. It’s not yet seven in the morning, and the September sunlight is coldly blue, seeping over the mountains to the east. If this early autumn is any indicator, it’s going to be a brutal winter.
He didn’t mind it so much, in jail. Waking up there the first morning wasn’t exactly the best thing that’s ever happened to him, rolling off the thin bunk to crash onto the concrete floor, startled awake with his hands numb, his head throbbing from the hangover and the blows it’d received the night before.
But it was easy, once he figured out where he was and why. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in county lockup, although this wasn’t just a drunk tank, he was probably going to end up with assault charges against him. Still, he could count the passage of hours and he got used to the rhythm of the place. He probably didn’t really need a whole week to scare up bail money, but once he realized Peter wasn’t going to come with the cash, he kind of lost his interest in getting out.
Ben can hear Peter talking in his sleep through the open window.
He stubs out the end of the cigarette on the rail, tucks it down the drainpipe. He climbs back in the window and rifles through Peter’s pockets as the other man mutters, pressing his face into the pillow. He finds fifty dollars in Peter’s wallet, sticks it in one of the shoeboxes under his bed that is stuffed with carefully categorized baseball cards, makes a mental note that the money is hidden in the 1973 Oakland A’s line-up.
He also finds a ticket stub for the rock show that they went to the night Ben got arrested. He looks at it blankly for a long moment, wondering if this means that Peter’s been wearing the same pair of jeans all week, or maybe just been carrying around the ticket as a reminder, not like either of them will forget that night for awhile.
Ben sits at the end of the mattress, pulls Peter’s shoes off. Peter barely even made it to the mattress before collapsing, and he’s always been able to sleep through just about anything, so Ben doesn’t bother to be subtle about it.
There’s something in one of Peter’s socks, something small and hard and irregularly shaped, notched against his ankle. Ben pulls it out, and it’s the Matchbox car that was Ben’s favorite when they were ten years old, the dark blue one with the white stripes on the sides. Ben stares down at it; he hasn’t seen this car in a decade. He didn’t know that Peter had been using this as a good luck piece, he didn’t know that Peter needed this kind of luck.
At once, he is young and heartbroken, and he looks at his best friend, lying there with his hair falling soft and days-unwashed onto the pillow, the little cuts from the razor blade on the tips of his fingers, the drawn lines of his face, tender bad-sleep bruises under his eyes, something dense closing Ben’s throat. Ben slides up the mattress, his hand trembling as he lightly smooths it down Peter’s hair, Peter sighing and shifting closer to the touch.
Ben lies down beside him, rests his forehead against the back of Peter’s neck and breathes out slowly. The Matchbox car is still in his hand, curled in a loose fist and resting on Peter’s hip.
“Ah, babe,” he whispers, lifting his head to place a kiss on the first bump of Peter’s spine. “Nobody’s been watching out for you, but I’m here now, I’m here.”
Ben doesn’t sleep, but he stays there with Peter for hours as the day sprawls in through the window, covering them over with dusty yellow light, painting them untouchable, far away from all the bad that they’ve done.
*
4. Life Before Drug Addiction
They were fifteen. Skinny-armed, gangly-legged, messy-haired, Ben wore his Bruce Springsteen T-shirt almost every day and Peter always left his shoelaces untied, trailing behind him.
They collected baseball cards religiously, and read everything they could about their favorite game and certain bands, passing magazines back and forth while they lay on Peter’s bed, which was bigger and better suited to their unfamiliar too-long bodies. At Ben’s house they slept in the attic, sometimes in the blue tent, sometimes not.
Their obsessions were quick and total, their memories finely attuned to names and dates and statistics, though they’d both failed algebra last term. But it was the summer. You don’t worry about that kind of stuff during the summer. They had temp jobs with strange hours, Peter filling in on piano and guitar for local groups, Ben busing tables at his uncle’s restaurant, and often had whole afternoons to kill, well-known in the bleachers section at the ballpark, recognized on the community college’s fields after summer classes got out, kicking a soccer ball and working on their curves.
It was this kind of day, a three o’clock with nothing to do until ten, and they were in the attic, Ben on the couch and Peter on his stomach on the rug, reading comic books they’d stolen from Ben’s little sister, gnawing absently on melted chocolate bars.
Ben reached over to bat Peter on the head, showing him a page of the comic Ben had been reading. “Back me up on this, that girl is slammin’.”
Peter rolled his eyes. “For the cartoon world, yeah, she’s a fox. But dude, she’s definitely a drawing, so it’s kinda weird, s’all I’m saying.”
Ben bugged his eyes in exaggerated disbelief. “Your eyesight fails you, buddy. Seriously.” He fell back, holding the book above his head and whistling in appreciation.
Peter went back to his own comic. It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand how Ben would see the comic girl as hot. It just . . . didn’t interest him. Ben seemed to have a pretty clear focus to each day, a study of and distraction by lovely women, but Peter was still in some aesthetic phase of his adolescence, he didn’t think the hormones had arrived yet.
Peter looked over at his friend. Ben had his legs sprawled out over the arms of the couch, brown and easily muscled, still wearing his long-drying swim trunks. There was a smear of chocolate on Ben’s forearm, and Peter snorted a laugh. Ben lifted his head to cock an eyebrow his direction, his hand sleepily rubbing his stomach, and Peter could see the line of his neck, running down into his collar, the soft weight of his summer-thick mop of dark hair, a sliver of his stomach as the shirt was tugged up.
Peter swallowed, looked away. Ben examined him for a moment longer, then put his head down with a familiar, ‘kid’s fuckin’ crazy’ sigh..
The light from the skylight in the corner was purely trapezoidal, thick enough to pocket with dust motes. Ben kept yawning, squirming to stretch on the couch. He was making more a mess of his second chocolate bar than he had with the first.
Peter tossed down his comic. “I’m bored,” he declared. “I’m bored and you’re covered in chocolate.”
It was true. It was on his face, on his chin, on his neck. It honestly looked like it might be on his collarbone. Ben blinked down at him, wiggling his smeared fingers back and forth menacingly.
“Told you to bring the cooler. You wanted to be all punk about getting it up the ladder, but look what happens,” Ben said blamelessly, sucking on his thumb. “Anyway, s’good.”
Peter nodded insincerely. “Oh, yeah, looks delicious.”
Ben smiled, chocolate on his teeth. “Try,” he said, holding his hand out. Peter looked at him curiously. Was this a dare? They didn’t turn down dares, surely Ben knew that, Ben taught him that. Ben kept his eyes steady, not a joke either, that look of Ben’s Peter knew pretty well.
Well. Is this for real, then? Just Ben’s hand, held out to him. Peter took his friend’s wrist, gently clasped his fingers in a loose bracelet. Ben’s wrist was so skinny, odd and boyishly slender. He pulled Ben’s arm down, lowered his head, touched his tongue to the chocolate on Ben’s fingertips before licking his way down, his teeth scraping on the calluses, his tongue sweeping roughly.
Ben watched him, no reaction in his face, but his breathing began to get ragged. Peter couldn’t do a whole lot to keep himself from rising to his knees and moving to hold Ben down by the shoulders, nosing his way against Ben’s throat, kissing and licking away the chocolate there, Ben drawing in quick unsteady rips of air. Peter’s hand was on Ben’s stomach, smoothing his thumb down the new trail of sparse hair, tugging at the drawstring of Ben’s swim trunks, not really too urgent about it, kind of lazy and warm the way these afternoons get.
One of their comics was under Ben’s head. He was wrinkling the pages, moving around like that. The place where Ben’s neck met his shoulder, where his T-shirt got pulled out, smelled like grass and laundry detergent and chlorine, smelled warm and rusty, tasted like sweat and skin, clean August sunlight. Peter nibbled carefully around Ben’s ear, his hand slipping over the front of Ben’s trunks, the material thin and softened like worn cotton. And Ben’s arms were abruptly around him, holding him tight and doing two strange things: licking the hollow just under the line of Peter’s jaw, and then kissing him, dryly on the lips, almost chaste, before Ben shuddered and his head dropped back.
Peter lowered his head to rest in the curve of Ben’s shoulder, waited for the other boy to regain his breath. He rubbed absently at his shorts, not really looking to do anything about it, just trying to make it a little easier on himself.
Eventually, Ben’s hands pushed gently on his chest, and Peter sat back, Ben straightening, pulling his hands through his hair, down his shirt. He wasn’t looking at Peter, that was pretty clear.
Ben drank some soda, cleared his throat and then said, sounding fully normal, “You gonna lend me that Fantastic Four Special Edition today or what?”
Peter looked at him for a long moment, grinned. “Yeah. Yeah. It’s at my house, we can . . . you can come for dinner.”
Ben grinned back at him, kicking his legs up off the arm of the couch. “Is there cake there?”
“Just for you,” Peter said with an eye-roll, and after that it was easy, to switch comics and talk about going down to the river, after that it was easy to pretend it hadn’t happened, until the next time it happened, and by that point it was already kind of habit to ignore this new secret of theirs, this latest in the long line of summer diversions, all of them boredom-induced and vaguely ambitious, quite often fraught with peril.
*
5. Scamming and Full Pockets
Ben leaves Peter a little past noon, stuffing jeans and old T-shirts into a garbage bag, his favorite Pumas from high school. It’s unfairly cold outside and pretty soon Ben’s heat is going to get cut off, but he’s got other debts today.
The used clothing place on Fillmore takes his clothes for thirty dollars straight, so Ben goes down to the park.
In the Haight, Ben pulls the vending-machine-ate-my-buck scam on the guy working the gas station, who seems rather too intent on his bike magazine to care about getting hustled for a dollar by a mildly scarred white kid. He hooks another fifty cents out of the tip jar at the hippie coffeehouse and has enough to buy a slice for lunch, shoplifting a soda and a candy bar from the bodega with the Bob Marley mural on the front. Living in the city under these circumstances has made him in expert in such things.
Golden Gate Park, at the foot of Haight Street and running away to the ocean up north, is cool and green on the inside, through the gates and under the tunnels. These are good autumn trees, rich and bright with the chilled sunlight.
It’s not too late, and there are still families, young mothers with shiny blonde ponytails, toddlers on the plastic swings. There are guys in football jerseys whipping a Frisbee across the lawn, and quartets of senior citizens shuffling by slowly, talking about gas prices and the past.
Ben ducks into the trees past the rainbow playground, seeks out Mexican Eddie, who hails him and toasts his new freedom with the 40 he’s taking slugs out of. Ben drinks a bit, smokes half of a perfectly rolled joint, and then buys an eighth off Ed for thirty dollars. Mexican Eddie invites him to the drag races on Saturday and Ben shrugs a lot before making his way back out to the path.
He goes out to the middle school in Pacific Heights, leaning against the bus stop across the street and tugging at his pocket until a couple of thirteen year olds with dyed black hair and safety pins home-pierced through their ears, expensive coats and accessories, come sidling up to him. He takes the youths past the chain link fence into an alley, sells them the eighth for sixty bucks. These fucking kids-nobody’s got an eye anymore. They don’t even know price range, this is probably the best deal they can find.
With this and the fifty he snagged from Peter, he’s officially ten dollars up.
Ben goes home. The door’s locked and Peter’s gone. There’s a note taped to the television, reading, ‘I want my fifty fucking dollars back. And buy some food, Jesus,’ and even this seems tired, something they’ve done a million times before.
But Ben’s pretty sure they’re coming up on another span of time in which Peter lives at Ben’s house, just forgets to go home for months on end, so call this rent money. Especially if Jesse is serious about kicking Peter out. Times come when Peter doesn’t want to let Ben out of his sight, and Ben always makes sure he is well-compensated for the loss of his singular life.
He watches part of a Cubs game, drinking Heineken and smoking Kools, feeling in a John Lennon sort of mood. When it gets late enough, he goes over to Nicky’s Bar, a street above the Safeway at Church and Market.
Jeremiah the bouncer spots him at the door and shakes his head, precariously astride a stick-legged chair, saying with regretful admiration, “Lord, boy, you don’t waste time. Not outta jail a day and you’re already busting shit up.”
Ben shrugs, squirming a finger in the hole at the elbow of his jacket. “Hey, gotta get back on the horse, right?”
Jeremiah laughs, rumbling the whole street. “Guess so. Zally know you’re coming?”
Ben rubs the back of his neck. “Probably he should be expecting me.”
Jeremiah shoos him in, and Ben moves through the sparse early-evening crowd, business suits and nice shoes, still a couple of hours away from the punk club kids and Catholic school uniforms that the night will eventually bring.
Zally’s behind the bar, pouring kamikazes and vodka martinis. He’s got a cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth and an intricate black tattoo crawling from his back out the collar of his T-shirt onto his neck. He shoots Ben a glance as the other man settles his arms on the bar.
“Benjamin. Newly freed. Newly fucking up. What a pleasant surprise.”
Ben sighs. “How you doing, Zal?”
“Tell you how I’m doing, Benj,” Zally bites off cleanly. “The cops came by here for the first time in almost a year last night, thanks a whole fucking lot. I’ve been keeping this place as cool as I can for good kids like Peter and that Bernal Heights crowd, you know that. But if the police are gonna be pulling searches on this place and targeting us as a trouble spot, we won’t even be able to smoke in here anymore, much less all the other shit you people get up to.”
Ben pushes a hand through his hair, runs his fingertips lightly across the cut on his forehead. “Who called the cops?”
Zally flips his hand through the air, clattering the drinks onto a tray and the tray onto the bar, lighting a fresh cigarette off the end of the last and saying, “I think that guy in the Lacoste shirt that you almost hit with the glass you threw. He lives around here. Got a mean-looking dog. He didn’t exactly leave happy.”
Ben hooks a bottle of Jameson’s from behind the bar, pours a short. He’s ten dollars up, after all. “I’ve got your money, though.”
Zally’s eyebrow arcs up smoothly. “The money for the Yankees series?”
Ben pauses with the glass halfway to his mouth, blinks. “I . . . didn’t bet on the Yankees series. I was in jail for the Yankees series.”
Nodding, Zally agrees, “That’s right, it’s just that whenever I see Oakland losing against the Yanks, I always know I got a piece coming from you on the game.”
Ben rolls his eyes. “Anyway. It’s the money for the glasses and the mirror. Figured a hundred should cover it.” He pulls out the crumpled bills, the ten dollars in ones he got from the eighth graders, the four dollars in change he’s been accumulating the last two days. The money rings on the bar, lies wrinkled in wet patches.
Zally looks down at the pile, then up at Ben again, his face indignant. “What the fuck, man?” he asks angrily.
Ben’s confused, checks to make sure that it’s just money on the bar, not something unexpectedly offensive. He hedges, “Well, I thought . . . a hundred should pay for the damage I did last night.”
Zally shakes his head, irritation and exasperation tense on his features. “Dude, you got out of jail, you got fucked up, you broke some shit . . . it happens. I don’t expect you to get me back for that. Jesus. Tomorrow I’ll be over at your house trying to wake you up by chucking rocks at your window, and you better not pull this IOU crap on me. It’s my bar, that mirror’s a write-off.” Zally stops, gives him a long look. “You’re living hand-to-mouth, Benny, anybody could see that. Why do you wanna make it any harder?”
Ben stuffs the money back in his pockets, shrugging uncomfortably, a blush turning the tips of his ears dark red. “Didn’t want you to think I was a punk.”
Zally laughs. “Bro, there’s nothing you could do to keep me from thinking you’re a punk, at this point. Never met a punk like you, my God.”
Ben breathes out a laugh, kills his shot of whiskey. Now he’s got money. Where’s Peter, they need to go to the grocery store. The book store. They need to buy new coats and thrift-store jeans for five bucks a pair. They need to get haircuts. Peter’s car needs to be fixed. Is Peter playing at the restaurant tonight, that’s even more. The fold of money in his pocket, nothing quite like it.
Zally takes a phone call, comes back and says casually as he wipes down the bar with a white rag, “You wanna run some candy across the bridge?”
Ben rests his elbow on the bar, his chin on his hand. Candy is acid. Zally’s been getting into blotter recently, which is terribly . . . nostalgic of him. “Which bridge?” wondering if the Muni’s running on time today, what day is it, Friday, he’s pretty sure it’s Friday. Weekend traffic.
“Bay Bridge. Out to El Cerrito.”
Ben pushes his thumb along the wood grain of the bar, considering, then says decisively, “Ten percent with a twenty-dollar minimum. Plus buy me a week card for the trains.”
Zally grins, his front tooth broken. “Done. And good for you, Benj, that was some nice bargaining. For a mule.”
Ben shoves him, knocks another shot of Jameson’s. “How much, Zal?”
Winking, Zally leans close. “Seven hundred and fifty straight. Some kind of rave out in the hills, from what I can gather.”
Seven hundred and fifty . . . seventy-five dollars. They could start buying condiments again.
Ben smiles, he is rich and going over the bridge, and this is more like the life he dreamed about in jail than it has been so far, this is more like what he’s been expecting.
*
6. The Stairs at Balboa Park
Peter wakes up and there’s a Matchbox car in his hand, a still-smoking cigarette
in the chipped ashtray Ben stole from a bar in Berkeley a couple of months ago. Peter feels immeasurably better to have slept, his skin calming, chilled by the wind.
It’s possible that he’ll never be in the mood for food, not ever again, but the high’s better if it’s got some energy to tear down. He fixes soup and crackers, pretty much the only options in Ben’s empty cabinets, the Matchbox car in his pocket, and realizes that Ben has stolen all the money he had on him.
“Motherfucker,” he says to himself, but he really should have expected nothing else, because Ben needed money and Peter had money and somehow, when that’s the case, there’s nothing Peter can do to keep from going broke.
He calls Jack on the busted phone in the kitchen, holding up the mouthpiece from where it dangles off the handset by wires, yelling into it. The restaurant sounds quiet, they’ve not yet seen the pre-theatre crowds.
“Jack? It’s Peter.”
“PJ!” Jack exclaims. Peter bends a slight smile. He’s got no idea where the name PJ came from. It’s got nothing to do with him, but seems to fit.
“How’s it going?”
“Doing all right. Haven’t seen you around in awhile.”
Peter swallows, rubs at his eyebrow. “Been kind of a . . . long week. Ben was in jail, I guess you probably heard.”
Jack’s chin hits the phone as he nods, a staticky thumping sound. “There was a rumor going around that that was the case. He’s out now, though?”
“Yeah, yesterday. Anyway . . . I was wondering if you needed a pair of hands tonight. I’m kinda strapped.”
“You might be in luck, PJ. Maury was gonna come but then his girlfriend had her baby. Can you get down here by five?”
Peter checks his wrist; his watch is gone. He blinks down at his arm for a second, no memory of where his watch has gotten to. He looks up, the clock on the microwave. “Five should be fine. Thanks man.”
“Anytime. Tell that boy of yours to stop picking fights with cops.”
Peter smiles. His arm’s gotten tired from holding the mouthpiece up. “I’ll tell him. See you later, Jack.”
He hangs up the phone and drums out a piano break on the table. Friday night at the restaurant . . . they’ll want to hear a lot of Billy Joel and Andrew Lloyd Webber. This is what he gets for having a straight job. Peter sighs, goes to make sure Ben’s got a white dress shirt he can wear.
He clears more than fifty dollars at the restaurant, the brandy decanter he keeps on the piano for tips stuffed with bills and phone numbers scribbled on the backs of receipts. Toni, the hostess for the night, took one look at him when he walked in, sat him down and fed him scalloped potatoes and half the appetizer menu until he felt like he was about to die.
“There’s nothing to you, Petey,” she fretted, her fingers pattering on his shoulder. “You’re a twig, you look like you could blow away.”
Peter only shrugged, thinking that she didn’t know the half of it.
Fifty’s enough to get a half, anyway. Peter pages Natalie from a payphone near the Opera Plaza, punches in the secret code to let her know it’s him, then rocks back and forth on his heels waiting for her to call back, his hands in his pockets, glaring away anyone who looks like they are about to try and make a call.
Natalie talks around the only subject on both their minds, saying, “Come over, I’ll tell you about Sacramento. My mom’s home, though, meet me on the stairs at Balboa Park.”
Balboa Park’s across the highway. Peter doesn’t have money for gas so he takes a series of buses and streetcars, the night looking smooth and brightly eager out the scratched plastic windows. He ends up walking over the overpass anyway, hip to the rail as the cars blow past.
It’s a bad area of town. So’s the area where Ben lives, but Balboa Park takes it a step further. The windows are shuttered, the car windshields have splintered impact points, watermelon-sized dents in the doors. The back stairways of the apartment blocks are where all the best stuff happens. You have to know passwords, a whole other language of slang and sharp expressions of understanding, to get past the men who lean against the stucco walls and peer from behind black sunglasses, no matter the hour. Peter’s seen five cop chases in a half a year, out here.
The stairs are at the end of the street, where the hill runs up and becomes too steep to build on anymore, almost too steep to climb, edged by wildly overgrown trees. There’s probably more than a hundred stairs; Peter’s never counted. Sitting on the steps, scraping rough concrete and tufts of grass, he’s way high up and can see everything.
Natalie comes walking up the street in her black hoodie, her hands in her pockets and her head down. She’s not five foot tall, this girl, bone-skinny with enormous black eyes to go with her woolen black hair. Natalie’s half-British, spent the first eight years of her life in London. You can still hear it in her accent, occasionally, although mostly she is strict California punk, talking too quickly and jamming her conversation with all the best words she’s picked up that week.
“My man, Peter the great,” she says as she climbs the steps, pushing back her hood and grinning at him. Her teeth are not in good shape, but her skin’s still all right, and that’s where methamphetamine addiction usually gives itself away first. Speed bumps, they’re called. Peter’s never had a problem with that either; he shows himself much less subtly with his carefully askew street style, his thirty-years old baseball cap and holey jeans, the astonishingly well-kept shoes with blue swoops that he found on the street, his racecar jacket.
“Kid,” he greets her. “Returned from the north.”
Natalie rolls her eyes. “Glad to be, dude, so glad. Sincerely. Sacramento’s where they should imprison child-rapists.”
Peter grins. “Harsh.”
“Fully appropriate, though,” she replies, and sneaks a look over her shoulder before slipping her hand into her sweatshirt pocket and neatly palming Peter the half-gram, Peter’s money making the trip back a second later.
“You have a good week without me, kid?” Natalie asks, hooking one wire-thin arm over his shoulders.
Peter shrugs. “Nah, man, wasn’t even worth my time. I said, fuck, if Natalie’s not gonna be there, I ain’t even getting out of bed today.”
Whenever he sees Natalie, his vocabulary becomes slightly harder, his attitude tough and cool the way urban teenagers are cool. Ben’s always got to remind him, you’re white, dude, very very white.
Natalie can pull it off, though. She’s the girl you don’t fuck with in the bar. She’s the one who could probably kick your ass if she put half a mind to it. Something uncaged in her, something fierce. Nineteen year old crystal meth dealer. Owned a brand-new Audi and a computer that cost as much as Peter’s tuition last semester. When Peter goes clean, Natalie’s company is one of the things he will miss, in addition to the friend-discount she grants him and her twenty-four hour response time, excepting the hours when she’s at her job. As a matter of fact, he’ll also miss the free cookies and coffee she always hooks him up with when he comes to visit her at work. Fuck. What you leave behind.
Peter’s heart is beating faster. He’s scored. There’s always doubt up until the moment the crystal is in his hand. Something will go wrong-anything could go wrong. No matter how many times a deal goes down flawlessly, this remains. But now, he can feel the crunch of the glass between his fingers in his pocket, and the nagging coke hangover is gone, the press of worry upon him, wherever Ben is now . . . all of this means nothing, because he has scored.
Natalie’s hand is rapping at his shoulder. He looks over and she smiles darkly at him, says, “You’re gonna have a good night.”
*
7. Fixing Up
Ben gets home late, having celebrated the successful deal with Zally and Tate, who came down from the USF campus, wearing an old Seals cap over her slick ebony hair. He’s not too drunk, but he’s certainly not steady on his feet, either.
It’s dark in his apartment, but Peter’s coat in on a chair in the kitchen and his ragged shoes are by the mattress on the floor. There’s a strip of light from under the bathroom door, the clink of razor and tile.
Ben sits on the floor by the door of the bathroom, leans his head against the wood. “Hey?” he says quietly.
“Hey,” Peter answers, equally soft through the door. Ben can almost hear him breathing, it’s so still.
“What’re you doing?”
There’s a long moment, then the doorknob turns and the door is edged open, slowly, Ben seeing the stringy dishtowel on the tile floor, the smooth round crystal meth pipe snug down in the valleys, a small Ziploc bag and a short length of straw, and Peter with his eyes huge, all black with a thin little rim of blue-green at the outside, Peter looking terrified and alight, whispering, “Fixing up.”
Ben stares at him, his mouth dry. Peter’s hands are moving quick and sure; Peter’s hands shake almost all the time, unless it’s a razor or a tiny plastic bag he needs to maneuver. He’s always steady, then. Peter taps crystal into the bowl, the burned black patch of skin on the pad of his thumb from the lighter’s wheel, and Ben tries to keep still as he comments, “Didn’t know you’d gone back to smoking it.”
Peter nods, his eyes intent on the bowl. He’s cooking up now, the flame melting the crystal down to liquid, hardening swiftly. “My nose isn’t really thrilled with me right now. Basically it hates me. Thought probably the lungs needed to take a turn.”
He takes a hit, his eyes almost crossing to watch the smoke flee up the stem, between his fingers, into his lungs. He holds it for a long time, and lets out a stream. The smoke is so thin. It’s always so thin.
“Looks like good stuff,” Ben says, reaching out to take the Ziploc, study it closer. The crystal is almost clear enough to see through.
Peter’s taking another hit, breaking up his response. “It is. It’s . . . ah . . . clean.”
Every inhale, Peter’s chest rises and he lets his head fall back, his eyes closed and his face pulled smooth. The vapor-smoke twists out of his nose, slips easily from the corners of his mouth.
Ben looks away. “I came out ahead today.”
Peter angles him a glance from under his eyelashes. “You started out ahead today by stealing from me. Remember?”
Ben pulls two twenties and a ten out of his sock. “Here. Fast pay makes fast friends.”
Peter smirks slightly, holding the pipe up to the light to see if there’s any left. “Your dad used to say that. All the time, he used to say that.”
Ben digs around in his pockets, building a little nest with the rest of the money. Peter takes the remainder of his profits for the night out too, and they consider the messy stack.
“I bought a carton of Marb reds,” Ben says. “But we need to get food.”
Peter’s turning the pipe, moving the lighter flame evenly under the bowl. His face is tight with concentration, his eyes calm. “Won’t be eating much for a day or two, I don’t think,” he tells Ben absently. “But get some of the good bread. And ice cream. Lots of ice cream.”
Ben yawns, tilting his head back against the wall. Peter raises an eyebrow, offers him the pipe. “Hit?”
Ben waves it away. He hasn’t taken a hit from Peter in almost two years. Peter still asks, almost every time.
“So, you’re not so much going to sleep tonight,” Ben says, tugging at the ends of Peter’s jeans, touching his fingertips to Peter’s ankle.
Peter shrugs. “I’ve still got some Ambien. This’ll be my last session, in a couple hours I’ll knock out.”
Ben doesn’t argue it, doesn’t believe it either. Peter’s last session is never at one in the morning. The night’s only just begun.
“You’re gonna stay up with me, right?” Peter asks, looking at him with his shattering eyes, his face tinged by a flush, licking his lips compulsively. There’s sweat in the crooks of his elbows, shiny patches under his eyes and on the back of his neck, thin and sleek. His hair is darkened down two or three shades, to some deeper wood color, mahogany, maybe, oak. Even just sitting on the floor, Peter gives off the impression of trembling, the way he will feel under Ben’s hands, shuddering and jerking and too far gone with speed and desire to stay in control.
Ben scoots into the bathroom, leans against the side of the bathtub with his arm against Peter’s, their legs tangled. “Yeah, I’m gonna stay up,” he says, and rests his head for a second on Peter’s shoulder before he straightens up again and watches Peter get fucked up for awhile longer.
*
That's it, thus far. Stay tuned.
And I started writing, no concept of a story, just to amuse myself, and then I suddenly had like pages of the thing done and realized that I did know where I was going with this, at least for a little while longer before it escapes me again.
Anyway. It counts as original fiction, I suppose. It's . . . considerably fucked up. But don't worry. Everybody who counts already made it out alive.
And I'm planning on adding to it. It's looking to be longer'n hell, before I'm through. For now, it's incomplete, in progress and interred for your perusal.
Warnings: Violence. Drug use. Lots of theft. Illegal acts by the score. Boys making out. Suicidal tendencies and an imperfect history. The bad wayfinding of young men. Beware.
This is not a true story, though a lot of it actually happened.
Ben and Peter
By Candle Beck
1. The Last Time
And the last time I saw you, you had blood on your face. We were in the parking lot after the rock show and the guy you’d just beaten the hell out of was broken on the pavement, his hand spread out on a black slick of grease like a pale flag. The cops were there, they had your arms wrenched behind your back, hauling you away. You were bleeding from a gash on your forehead, there was blood in your eyes, and you were grinning at me maniacally, and there was blood on your teeth too.
We’ve come this far. You can’t sleep until you’ve had the exhaustion pounded into you by someone else’s fists. Sometimes I think you prefer to lose these fights rather than win them, because you are wilder when you are losing, you are frantic and your breath shrieks through you, and after it’s over, I take you away and lay you down in the back of the car and you can pass out then with a bruised smile on your face.
Our friends see you with your raccooned black eyes, your swollen lip, the abrasions on your knuckles, and they say to me, ‘Jesus Christ, he’s your best friend, can’t you do something to stop him?’
But what could I say to you? While you sleep off your injuries in the backseat of the car, I’ve got a hand mirror balanced on my knees in the front, a razor blade between my teeth and a truncated straw spinning around my fingers, two hard lines and I drop my head back against the seat with a gasp of pain, the crystal burning up my nose and down my throat, my eyes tearing, and you mumble in your sleep as I flood through with color and light.
We can’t say anything to each other about our respective self-destructive tendencies. We’re pretty inarguably going to hell, but at least we’ll be going together.
And when we were kids, I thought you knew everything.
You toss me a pack of cigarettes, you trace your graffiti on my skin. We go out to the beach during a hurricane, down on the tapering Gulf Coast, and it’s like the world is ending, right here before us. You throw me into the water, and I get caught up, taken in, dragged under. My hands touch the sand at the bottom, strips of seaweed wrap around my legs, and you swim down to hook an arm around my waist and pull me back up to the surface.
One of us isn’t going to survive this.
You scream my name and blow out smoke rings to the beat of the music, evenly timed, dozens of them floating away from your circled mouth like soap bubbles. I’ve still got the scar on my arm where you put a cigarette out when we were sixteen.
You fuck me up and leave me with scratches on my back, bracelets of bruises around my wrists, and then you come back and run an ice cube over the places where you’ve torn my skin. The day will come when I’ll have to explain to someone where all these marks came from, why my body is such an imperfectly scoured plane.
I wake up with dust in my mouth and you’re gone. You’ve stolen my stash money, it was nearly four hundred dollars, you son of a bitch. I’m keeping track, you know, someday you’ll be accountable for all that you’ve taken from me. And now I can’t get a gram bag like I planned, and yeah, that fucks up my plans for the weekend a little bit. You fucking useless motherfucker.
You watch the news with your mouth cocked open, transfixed. You eat cereal dry and pick out all the marshmallows to save for last. You’re drawn to neon signs like a moth, you can’t stay away. Every time I’m ready to get over you, you come around and push me down, bend me over something, tighten your hands on my hips, you fall to your knees and stare up at me with something like insane devotion in your eyes. You come around and I’ve got no choice, man, I’ve got nothing.
It’s not my fault, your hands are my memory, your body is the only history I want. You tell me all the things I can’t say to myself, you say ‘fuck’ and you say ‘more’ and you say ‘this here now’ and you say ‘never again,’ but there’s never gonna be a last time between us.
You get drunk and I let you drive.
And when we were in Texas, you kissed me behind the gas station and neither of us heard the pack of white trash boys sneaking up on us until one of them snarled ‘fucking faggots,’ and tore you off me, slammed you into the wall and I saw your head hit the stone, I saw your eyes shut and that good smile creeping on your face. And then there was an arm strangling around my neck and hurling me to the ground and after they’d left us there, you crawled to me, dragging yourself along on your elbows, breathing jaggedly and coughing blood, and when you touched me, I howled because two of my ribs were broken and neither of us knew it yet. You laughed roughly and your hands were shaking so bad. You ripped off a swath from your shirt and cleaned the blood off my face. I was weeping and you petted my hair and we were lying there together on the shattered concrete, and you kept saying ‘it doesn’t matter, it’s not real, none of this is real.’
Your heart is weak and hard and the first time I told you to get the fuck out, your eyes flinted and you didn’t leave my apartment for the next three months. You think that you know everything about me, and you do. I don’t know shit about you, I never have.
I’ve always been gay, and when it looked like I was falling in love with that boy from art school, you flattened your hands on my chest and decided that you were gay too, but I’m pretty sure you just didn’t want to see me with anyone else. That art school boy was sweet and kind, his hair was softer than yours and he didn’t push me away in the night. You’ve never given me anything worth having, but I still wouldn’t change a thing.
I play the piano until my fingers bleed, and you lie on the carpet counting the cracks in the ceiling out loud until I tell you to shut up. We eat frozen sour green apples and share a glass of orange juice at four in the morning in my kitchen, the lights off and you’re just a shadow, holding your arm out so I can suck the thin flavor off the heel of your hand. I stretch you out on the bed and lay down lines of crank in the hollowed trenches of your ribs. Your hands are behind your head, your chest is smooth and taut and perfect, and I do three lines in one quick harsh snort, and then lick the remnants away as you laugh breathlessly, and I’m dizzy with the edgy fatal taste of speed and the salt of your skin shivering on my tongue.
When I show up places without you, nobody recognizes me at first.
And when we were seventeen, I was the one who bandaged your wrists. I was the one who picked you up off the floor of the bathroom and stopped the bleeding with my hands and held you down so you couldn’t get to the blade again, I was the one who pinned your shoulders to the bed and kissed you until we were both crying. You stupid fucking cliché-what the fuck did you think I was gonna do without you?
My parents consider you their second son, which is good, because yours kicked you out after your dad walked in on us in the boathouse at the lake, and haven’t spoken to you since. My parents don’t know about us, which is probably why they still smile when they see you and hug you before we leave for another road trip.
That I could never leave you, that I could never live without you . . . does this really surprise you that much?
There’s no difference between what you sound like laughing and what you sound like crying. Either way, it’s something broken loose within you, it’s this terrifying rattle, scraped and hoarse. You are arrogant and you want to die, and when you fall through the cracks, I disappear into my addiction and emerge months later, ripped-down skinny and as pale as smoke. You come find me, you say ‘where did you go,’ and I wrap my arms around you as tight as they will go.
You like to claim that you can’t feel pain, but I’ve proved you wrong a thousand times.
When we were small, we loved each other like brothers, better than what we are now. I climbed way too high in the sprawling oak tree in your backyard, and got too scared to come back down, trembling up there, hugging the trunk with my arms and legs, because I was eight years old and already knew what it would feel like when my body hit the ground. You climbed up next to me, fearless and swinging by one arm from a branch, and you said, ‘c’mon, scaredy-cat, c’mon,’ but I was mute and just kept shaking my head, so you said, ‘close your eyes, I’ll get you down,’ and when I was blind, you took my foot and moved it down to a lower branch, and then one of my hands, and then the other, and we moved so slowly, you guiding me the whole way, it took us most of the afternoon to reach the ground again, and I didn’t open my eyes, not once.
And I watched the cops haul you off, you with that beautiful sneer on your beaten face, you were fierce and cruel and astonished by the depth of your despair, you were grinning through the blood, your eyes did not leave mine and that was three days ago, three days since I saw you last, saw you victorious and stunning in defeat, I saw you there spitting red onto the asphalt, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, that this is the life we have been bound to, that it’s me you have to destroy, I’m sorry, my love, but I can’t let you go, you’ll have to pull me under with you, because there’s nowhere else in the world that I belong.
*
2. Getting Into Trouble
Peter goes over to Ben’s place a week later, and the door’s standing open.
He walks in, sees the familiar wreck of the apartment. There’s cardboard duct-taped over the broken window, shards of glass glinting on the sill. The coffee table is two cinderblocks and a sheet of plywood stolen from a construction site, covered in baseball cards. Ben’s been going through his collection again. The television’s got tinfoil wrapped around the rabbit ears antennae, and there’s a fine sheen of ash on everything.
Ben’s asleep on the kitchen floor, the dark shadow of a bruise on one of his cheekbones. The cut on his forehead is scabbed over, but it didn’t need stitches. Peter slides down with his back against the wall, his knees up. The linoleum’s cracked and stained yellow like smoker’s teeth. Ben’s breathing shallowly, pulling in air raggedly, coughing in his sleep.
Peter touches his shoulder, his neck, his cheek. Ben’s face twists, his forehead lining. Peter touches Ben’s closed eyelids with the tips of his fingers, whispers Ben’s name.
Ben’s eyes come open slowly, looking wary and uncertain the way he always does when he wakes up. He blinks until his vision clears, and his mouth crooks slightly as he sees Peter sitting beside him. They haven’t seen each other in a week, but they won’t talk about all that kept them apart, not just yet.
“Hey,” Ben says, rasping.
“Hi,” Peter says back. “Your door was open. You’re gonna get robbed if you keep doing that.”
Ben yawns, and Peter can see the rows of his teeth, clean white with silver fillings in the back. Ben lives off coffee and cigarettes, but you wouldn’t know it to see him smile.
“Nothing much here to steal,” he answers. He sits up, reaches for the table, pulling down an open can of Coke. He grimaces at the flat taste, but kills the whole thing in one swallow anyway, his head back, his throat exposed and moving smoothly.
“Did you fight last night?” Peter asks, brushing his knuckles across the mark on Ben’s cheek, Ben wincing and drawing away.
Ben shoots him an irritated look. “Did you get fucked up last night?” he says back, his words sharp.
Peter’s hands are still shaking; he hasn’t slept. He shrugs. “Only coke. Natalie’s out of town.”
Ben hikes an eyebrow skeptically. “Really?”
Peter holds out his hand to his friend. “Go ahead and taste, if you don’t believe me.”
Ben circles Peter’s wrist with his fingers and licks the hollow of Peter’s hand, the place where his thumb runs down into his arm, where Peter’s been tapping out bumps of cocaine all week long. Ben flicks his tongue over his lips, smiles. “I love it when it goes numb like that.”
“Yeah, so do I.” Ben’s still hanging onto his hand. “So, did you fight?”
Ben lets him go, crosses his arms over his chest. “No.”
Peter pulls out a pack of cigarettes, lights two and hands one to the other man. “What happened to your face, then?”
Ben draws hard, the smoke spilling out in two even streams from his nose. “I don’t know.” He pokes at the bruise with his fingers. “I was pretty drunk.”
“Yeah,” Peter sighs.
Ben’s wearing a torn thrift store T-shirt with a silkscreen of a horse on the front. The shirt’s faded yellow, and his arms looked tanned and strong coming out of the sleeves. He’s got one shoe on, the other wedged half under the refrigerator. His hair is flat in the back from being pressed to the floor all night, and his eyes are insomniac-swollen, so that Peter knows he wasn’t asleep for that long. Peter probably shouldn’t have woken him up; neither of them gets enough sleep as it is.
Peter leans his head back against the wall, each breath clouded gray. They pass the empty Coke can back and forth, using it for an ashtray. Peter smokes nervously, fiddling the cigarette between his fingers. Every few moments, a tremor wracks through him.
“I need to borrow some money,” Ben says, and Peter brings his gaze back down.
“What for?” he asks, his eyebrows pulling together.
Ben shrugs, not meeting his friend’s eyes. “It’s only about a hundred.”
Peter’s mind automatically clicks, ‘that’s a gram bag from Natalie.’ He’s got maybe fifty in his wallet, another ten in change on his dresser at home, and he can pick up the other forty tonight if Jack needs someone to play piano at the restaurant.
“I don’t have it.”
Ben doesn’t believe him. “If I tell you what it’s for, will you give it to me then?” he asks impatiently.
Peter flicks the end of the cigarette into the sink, sparks of orange dusting around them, dying on the ground. “You telling me what it’s for isn’t gonna make the money suddenly appear in my pocket.”
Ben glares at him for a second, his eyes muddy green. Peter holds his gaze steadily, in exhaustion. Eventually, Ben blows out a breath and sucks down the last of the cigarette’s smoke, then says, “You got any coke left?”
Peter laughs without humor. “Since when do I ever have any left?” He’s shivery and cold, he feels hollowed like he always does after a night like last night, a week like this past ungodly week. His sinuses are clogged and he can taste the remnants of the coke drip in the back of his throat every time he swallows. Three of his fingers are badly ragged, slowly clotting blood from where he’s been gnawing on them for days. His lips are chapped, his skin papery, his eyes watery and red. Cocaine wrings him out. It’s not his drug of choice, at times far far from it, because the high is so short, he constantly has to do more lines, until there are glittering white stars in his vision and he’s stumbling from the choke of it. Over the past week, he’s run through more grams than he can count, and all this because his meth dealer has gone to visit her brother in Sacramento.
He’s blinking back tears when Ben’s hand crawls up his leg, taps on his kneecap. “Please stop shaking, man,” Ben whispers, his face clean and his eyes mournful.
Peter shakes his head, something terrible and hopeless cracking within him, but he’s got no words, so he reaches out and pulls Ben to him, Ben’s face against his neck, Peter’s arms around his friend’s back, Peter’s cheek against the lank curls of Ben’s short hair. Ben slips his arm between Peter’s back and the wall, and hangs onto him.
“I missed you,” Peter says softly, brokenly. “I got into trouble without you. I got into so much trouble.”
Ben’s hand skims down his side. “What’d you do that’s so bad?” he murmurs, pressing a brief kiss to Peter’s throat.
Peter makes a sound like a moan, buries his eyes in Ben’s shoulder. “Spent so much money, I’m broke forever now. Didn’t go to class, not once. Haven’t . . . haven’t really slept. Kept doing lines, even when it didn’t touch me anymore, I couldn’t stop. Got caught stealing cash from Jesse, now he says he doesn’t want me living there anymore. I . . . I crashed my car.”
“You crashed Harvey?”
Peter nods, not taking his head from Ben’s shoulder. “Only a busted tail-light and some dents. But still. Nothing . . . I haven’t been able to do anything right since you got arrested.”
“And you couldn’t even get any crystal to help you through it,” Ben says sympathetically.
Peter chokes down a sob, tightens his arms around Ben. “You can’t get arrested again. I go crazy when you’re not around.”
Ben laughs lightly, burring against the other man. “Well, it’s not something I was exactly trying to do.”
Lifting his head, Peter sniffs, his throat thickly numb from swallowing drip, and wipes his eyes with the side of his hand. “How was jail?” he asks, trying to get himself under control again, the muscles in his arms shuddering.
Ben half-grins. “Oh, not so bad. Kind of restful. Didn’t have to worry about anything except being in jail.”
Peter combs his hand through Ben’s hair distractedly. “Who ended up bailing you out?”
Ben’s eyes flash. “My cousin Sammy,” he answers, and Peter waits for him to ask where the fuck Peter was all week, why Ben had to call Sammy to get him sprung, but Ben just cuts his gaze away.
Peter spent the week fucking up in every way available to him. He spent Ben’s bail money on as much blow as he could get his hands on. He didn’t come by county lockup to see his best friend, didn’t bring him books or magazines or a carton of cigarettes or any of the things that he knew Ben would want. For the week that Ben was in jail, Peter hadn’t so much as said the other man’s name out loud. But Peter was still the first one he’d called when he’d gotten out the morning before, even if it was another day before Peter checked his messages, Ben’s best-loved voice chafed and hoarse, saying, “Fuck you, motherfucker. Get over here before I have to kick your ass.”
Peter presses his lips to the bruise on Ben’s cheek, his eyes closed. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, and Ben holds him tighter, breathing slowly in time on the kitchen floor.
*
3. Thievery
The police hadn’t taken off the handcuffs for all that first night. Ben had been swearing viciously, blind stupid drunk in the cop car, slamming his bound hands on the wire mesh that separated him from the officers in front, so they left him chained, the metal biting into his wrists, jerking him out of his unsteady dozes.
His wrists still hurt, a little, but the fierce red circles have faded, leaving only the old scars behind. Peter’s asleep on the mattress on the floor of the living room/bedroom and still fully dressed, strewn out with his arm hanging off one side, his hand on the hardwood. The comedown from the cocaine hit pretty hard, and Peter’s got a week of consciousness to make up for.
Ben’s smoking on the fire escape, staring out over the city. He’s tired too, most of the way dead on his feet, but he’s still getting re-accustomed to the fullness of the light and the scope of space that exists outside jail. Ben isn’t wearing shoes, the iron freezing under his feet. It’s not yet seven in the morning, and the September sunlight is coldly blue, seeping over the mountains to the east. If this early autumn is any indicator, it’s going to be a brutal winter.
He didn’t mind it so much, in jail. Waking up there the first morning wasn’t exactly the best thing that’s ever happened to him, rolling off the thin bunk to crash onto the concrete floor, startled awake with his hands numb, his head throbbing from the hangover and the blows it’d received the night before.
But it was easy, once he figured out where he was and why. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in county lockup, although this wasn’t just a drunk tank, he was probably going to end up with assault charges against him. Still, he could count the passage of hours and he got used to the rhythm of the place. He probably didn’t really need a whole week to scare up bail money, but once he realized Peter wasn’t going to come with the cash, he kind of lost his interest in getting out.
Ben can hear Peter talking in his sleep through the open window.
He stubs out the end of the cigarette on the rail, tucks it down the drainpipe. He climbs back in the window and rifles through Peter’s pockets as the other man mutters, pressing his face into the pillow. He finds fifty dollars in Peter’s wallet, sticks it in one of the shoeboxes under his bed that is stuffed with carefully categorized baseball cards, makes a mental note that the money is hidden in the 1973 Oakland A’s line-up.
He also finds a ticket stub for the rock show that they went to the night Ben got arrested. He looks at it blankly for a long moment, wondering if this means that Peter’s been wearing the same pair of jeans all week, or maybe just been carrying around the ticket as a reminder, not like either of them will forget that night for awhile.
Ben sits at the end of the mattress, pulls Peter’s shoes off. Peter barely even made it to the mattress before collapsing, and he’s always been able to sleep through just about anything, so Ben doesn’t bother to be subtle about it.
There’s something in one of Peter’s socks, something small and hard and irregularly shaped, notched against his ankle. Ben pulls it out, and it’s the Matchbox car that was Ben’s favorite when they were ten years old, the dark blue one with the white stripes on the sides. Ben stares down at it; he hasn’t seen this car in a decade. He didn’t know that Peter had been using this as a good luck piece, he didn’t know that Peter needed this kind of luck.
At once, he is young and heartbroken, and he looks at his best friend, lying there with his hair falling soft and days-unwashed onto the pillow, the little cuts from the razor blade on the tips of his fingers, the drawn lines of his face, tender bad-sleep bruises under his eyes, something dense closing Ben’s throat. Ben slides up the mattress, his hand trembling as he lightly smooths it down Peter’s hair, Peter sighing and shifting closer to the touch.
Ben lies down beside him, rests his forehead against the back of Peter’s neck and breathes out slowly. The Matchbox car is still in his hand, curled in a loose fist and resting on Peter’s hip.
“Ah, babe,” he whispers, lifting his head to place a kiss on the first bump of Peter’s spine. “Nobody’s been watching out for you, but I’m here now, I’m here.”
Ben doesn’t sleep, but he stays there with Peter for hours as the day sprawls in through the window, covering them over with dusty yellow light, painting them untouchable, far away from all the bad that they’ve done.
*
4. Life Before Drug Addiction
They were fifteen. Skinny-armed, gangly-legged, messy-haired, Ben wore his Bruce Springsteen T-shirt almost every day and Peter always left his shoelaces untied, trailing behind him.
They collected baseball cards religiously, and read everything they could about their favorite game and certain bands, passing magazines back and forth while they lay on Peter’s bed, which was bigger and better suited to their unfamiliar too-long bodies. At Ben’s house they slept in the attic, sometimes in the blue tent, sometimes not.
Their obsessions were quick and total, their memories finely attuned to names and dates and statistics, though they’d both failed algebra last term. But it was the summer. You don’t worry about that kind of stuff during the summer. They had temp jobs with strange hours, Peter filling in on piano and guitar for local groups, Ben busing tables at his uncle’s restaurant, and often had whole afternoons to kill, well-known in the bleachers section at the ballpark, recognized on the community college’s fields after summer classes got out, kicking a soccer ball and working on their curves.
It was this kind of day, a three o’clock with nothing to do until ten, and they were in the attic, Ben on the couch and Peter on his stomach on the rug, reading comic books they’d stolen from Ben’s little sister, gnawing absently on melted chocolate bars.
Ben reached over to bat Peter on the head, showing him a page of the comic Ben had been reading. “Back me up on this, that girl is slammin’.”
Peter rolled his eyes. “For the cartoon world, yeah, she’s a fox. But dude, she’s definitely a drawing, so it’s kinda weird, s’all I’m saying.”
Ben bugged his eyes in exaggerated disbelief. “Your eyesight fails you, buddy. Seriously.” He fell back, holding the book above his head and whistling in appreciation.
Peter went back to his own comic. It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand how Ben would see the comic girl as hot. It just . . . didn’t interest him. Ben seemed to have a pretty clear focus to each day, a study of and distraction by lovely women, but Peter was still in some aesthetic phase of his adolescence, he didn’t think the hormones had arrived yet.
Peter looked over at his friend. Ben had his legs sprawled out over the arms of the couch, brown and easily muscled, still wearing his long-drying swim trunks. There was a smear of chocolate on Ben’s forearm, and Peter snorted a laugh. Ben lifted his head to cock an eyebrow his direction, his hand sleepily rubbing his stomach, and Peter could see the line of his neck, running down into his collar, the soft weight of his summer-thick mop of dark hair, a sliver of his stomach as the shirt was tugged up.
Peter swallowed, looked away. Ben examined him for a moment longer, then put his head down with a familiar, ‘kid’s fuckin’ crazy’ sigh..
The light from the skylight in the corner was purely trapezoidal, thick enough to pocket with dust motes. Ben kept yawning, squirming to stretch on the couch. He was making more a mess of his second chocolate bar than he had with the first.
Peter tossed down his comic. “I’m bored,” he declared. “I’m bored and you’re covered in chocolate.”
It was true. It was on his face, on his chin, on his neck. It honestly looked like it might be on his collarbone. Ben blinked down at him, wiggling his smeared fingers back and forth menacingly.
“Told you to bring the cooler. You wanted to be all punk about getting it up the ladder, but look what happens,” Ben said blamelessly, sucking on his thumb. “Anyway, s’good.”
Peter nodded insincerely. “Oh, yeah, looks delicious.”
Ben smiled, chocolate on his teeth. “Try,” he said, holding his hand out. Peter looked at him curiously. Was this a dare? They didn’t turn down dares, surely Ben knew that, Ben taught him that. Ben kept his eyes steady, not a joke either, that look of Ben’s Peter knew pretty well.
Well. Is this for real, then? Just Ben’s hand, held out to him. Peter took his friend’s wrist, gently clasped his fingers in a loose bracelet. Ben’s wrist was so skinny, odd and boyishly slender. He pulled Ben’s arm down, lowered his head, touched his tongue to the chocolate on Ben’s fingertips before licking his way down, his teeth scraping on the calluses, his tongue sweeping roughly.
Ben watched him, no reaction in his face, but his breathing began to get ragged. Peter couldn’t do a whole lot to keep himself from rising to his knees and moving to hold Ben down by the shoulders, nosing his way against Ben’s throat, kissing and licking away the chocolate there, Ben drawing in quick unsteady rips of air. Peter’s hand was on Ben’s stomach, smoothing his thumb down the new trail of sparse hair, tugging at the drawstring of Ben’s swim trunks, not really too urgent about it, kind of lazy and warm the way these afternoons get.
One of their comics was under Ben’s head. He was wrinkling the pages, moving around like that. The place where Ben’s neck met his shoulder, where his T-shirt got pulled out, smelled like grass and laundry detergent and chlorine, smelled warm and rusty, tasted like sweat and skin, clean August sunlight. Peter nibbled carefully around Ben’s ear, his hand slipping over the front of Ben’s trunks, the material thin and softened like worn cotton. And Ben’s arms were abruptly around him, holding him tight and doing two strange things: licking the hollow just under the line of Peter’s jaw, and then kissing him, dryly on the lips, almost chaste, before Ben shuddered and his head dropped back.
Peter lowered his head to rest in the curve of Ben’s shoulder, waited for the other boy to regain his breath. He rubbed absently at his shorts, not really looking to do anything about it, just trying to make it a little easier on himself.
Eventually, Ben’s hands pushed gently on his chest, and Peter sat back, Ben straightening, pulling his hands through his hair, down his shirt. He wasn’t looking at Peter, that was pretty clear.
Ben drank some soda, cleared his throat and then said, sounding fully normal, “You gonna lend me that Fantastic Four Special Edition today or what?”
Peter looked at him for a long moment, grinned. “Yeah. Yeah. It’s at my house, we can . . . you can come for dinner.”
Ben grinned back at him, kicking his legs up off the arm of the couch. “Is there cake there?”
“Just for you,” Peter said with an eye-roll, and after that it was easy, to switch comics and talk about going down to the river, after that it was easy to pretend it hadn’t happened, until the next time it happened, and by that point it was already kind of habit to ignore this new secret of theirs, this latest in the long line of summer diversions, all of them boredom-induced and vaguely ambitious, quite often fraught with peril.
*
5. Scamming and Full Pockets
Ben leaves Peter a little past noon, stuffing jeans and old T-shirts into a garbage bag, his favorite Pumas from high school. It’s unfairly cold outside and pretty soon Ben’s heat is going to get cut off, but he’s got other debts today.
The used clothing place on Fillmore takes his clothes for thirty dollars straight, so Ben goes down to the park.
In the Haight, Ben pulls the vending-machine-ate-my-buck scam on the guy working the gas station, who seems rather too intent on his bike magazine to care about getting hustled for a dollar by a mildly scarred white kid. He hooks another fifty cents out of the tip jar at the hippie coffeehouse and has enough to buy a slice for lunch, shoplifting a soda and a candy bar from the bodega with the Bob Marley mural on the front. Living in the city under these circumstances has made him in expert in such things.
Golden Gate Park, at the foot of Haight Street and running away to the ocean up north, is cool and green on the inside, through the gates and under the tunnels. These are good autumn trees, rich and bright with the chilled sunlight.
It’s not too late, and there are still families, young mothers with shiny blonde ponytails, toddlers on the plastic swings. There are guys in football jerseys whipping a Frisbee across the lawn, and quartets of senior citizens shuffling by slowly, talking about gas prices and the past.
Ben ducks into the trees past the rainbow playground, seeks out Mexican Eddie, who hails him and toasts his new freedom with the 40 he’s taking slugs out of. Ben drinks a bit, smokes half of a perfectly rolled joint, and then buys an eighth off Ed for thirty dollars. Mexican Eddie invites him to the drag races on Saturday and Ben shrugs a lot before making his way back out to the path.
He goes out to the middle school in Pacific Heights, leaning against the bus stop across the street and tugging at his pocket until a couple of thirteen year olds with dyed black hair and safety pins home-pierced through their ears, expensive coats and accessories, come sidling up to him. He takes the youths past the chain link fence into an alley, sells them the eighth for sixty bucks. These fucking kids-nobody’s got an eye anymore. They don’t even know price range, this is probably the best deal they can find.
With this and the fifty he snagged from Peter, he’s officially ten dollars up.
Ben goes home. The door’s locked and Peter’s gone. There’s a note taped to the television, reading, ‘I want my fifty fucking dollars back. And buy some food, Jesus,’ and even this seems tired, something they’ve done a million times before.
But Ben’s pretty sure they’re coming up on another span of time in which Peter lives at Ben’s house, just forgets to go home for months on end, so call this rent money. Especially if Jesse is serious about kicking Peter out. Times come when Peter doesn’t want to let Ben out of his sight, and Ben always makes sure he is well-compensated for the loss of his singular life.
He watches part of a Cubs game, drinking Heineken and smoking Kools, feeling in a John Lennon sort of mood. When it gets late enough, he goes over to Nicky’s Bar, a street above the Safeway at Church and Market.
Jeremiah the bouncer spots him at the door and shakes his head, precariously astride a stick-legged chair, saying with regretful admiration, “Lord, boy, you don’t waste time. Not outta jail a day and you’re already busting shit up.”
Ben shrugs, squirming a finger in the hole at the elbow of his jacket. “Hey, gotta get back on the horse, right?”
Jeremiah laughs, rumbling the whole street. “Guess so. Zally know you’re coming?”
Ben rubs the back of his neck. “Probably he should be expecting me.”
Jeremiah shoos him in, and Ben moves through the sparse early-evening crowd, business suits and nice shoes, still a couple of hours away from the punk club kids and Catholic school uniforms that the night will eventually bring.
Zally’s behind the bar, pouring kamikazes and vodka martinis. He’s got a cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth and an intricate black tattoo crawling from his back out the collar of his T-shirt onto his neck. He shoots Ben a glance as the other man settles his arms on the bar.
“Benjamin. Newly freed. Newly fucking up. What a pleasant surprise.”
Ben sighs. “How you doing, Zal?”
“Tell you how I’m doing, Benj,” Zally bites off cleanly. “The cops came by here for the first time in almost a year last night, thanks a whole fucking lot. I’ve been keeping this place as cool as I can for good kids like Peter and that Bernal Heights crowd, you know that. But if the police are gonna be pulling searches on this place and targeting us as a trouble spot, we won’t even be able to smoke in here anymore, much less all the other shit you people get up to.”
Ben pushes a hand through his hair, runs his fingertips lightly across the cut on his forehead. “Who called the cops?”
Zally flips his hand through the air, clattering the drinks onto a tray and the tray onto the bar, lighting a fresh cigarette off the end of the last and saying, “I think that guy in the Lacoste shirt that you almost hit with the glass you threw. He lives around here. Got a mean-looking dog. He didn’t exactly leave happy.”
Ben hooks a bottle of Jameson’s from behind the bar, pours a short. He’s ten dollars up, after all. “I’ve got your money, though.”
Zally’s eyebrow arcs up smoothly. “The money for the Yankees series?”
Ben pauses with the glass halfway to his mouth, blinks. “I . . . didn’t bet on the Yankees series. I was in jail for the Yankees series.”
Nodding, Zally agrees, “That’s right, it’s just that whenever I see Oakland losing against the Yanks, I always know I got a piece coming from you on the game.”
Ben rolls his eyes. “Anyway. It’s the money for the glasses and the mirror. Figured a hundred should cover it.” He pulls out the crumpled bills, the ten dollars in ones he got from the eighth graders, the four dollars in change he’s been accumulating the last two days. The money rings on the bar, lies wrinkled in wet patches.
Zally looks down at the pile, then up at Ben again, his face indignant. “What the fuck, man?” he asks angrily.
Ben’s confused, checks to make sure that it’s just money on the bar, not something unexpectedly offensive. He hedges, “Well, I thought . . . a hundred should pay for the damage I did last night.”
Zally shakes his head, irritation and exasperation tense on his features. “Dude, you got out of jail, you got fucked up, you broke some shit . . . it happens. I don’t expect you to get me back for that. Jesus. Tomorrow I’ll be over at your house trying to wake you up by chucking rocks at your window, and you better not pull this IOU crap on me. It’s my bar, that mirror’s a write-off.” Zally stops, gives him a long look. “You’re living hand-to-mouth, Benny, anybody could see that. Why do you wanna make it any harder?”
Ben stuffs the money back in his pockets, shrugging uncomfortably, a blush turning the tips of his ears dark red. “Didn’t want you to think I was a punk.”
Zally laughs. “Bro, there’s nothing you could do to keep me from thinking you’re a punk, at this point. Never met a punk like you, my God.”
Ben breathes out a laugh, kills his shot of whiskey. Now he’s got money. Where’s Peter, they need to go to the grocery store. The book store. They need to buy new coats and thrift-store jeans for five bucks a pair. They need to get haircuts. Peter’s car needs to be fixed. Is Peter playing at the restaurant tonight, that’s even more. The fold of money in his pocket, nothing quite like it.
Zally takes a phone call, comes back and says casually as he wipes down the bar with a white rag, “You wanna run some candy across the bridge?”
Ben rests his elbow on the bar, his chin on his hand. Candy is acid. Zally’s been getting into blotter recently, which is terribly . . . nostalgic of him. “Which bridge?” wondering if the Muni’s running on time today, what day is it, Friday, he’s pretty sure it’s Friday. Weekend traffic.
“Bay Bridge. Out to El Cerrito.”
Ben pushes his thumb along the wood grain of the bar, considering, then says decisively, “Ten percent with a twenty-dollar minimum. Plus buy me a week card for the trains.”
Zally grins, his front tooth broken. “Done. And good for you, Benj, that was some nice bargaining. For a mule.”
Ben shoves him, knocks another shot of Jameson’s. “How much, Zal?”
Winking, Zally leans close. “Seven hundred and fifty straight. Some kind of rave out in the hills, from what I can gather.”
Seven hundred and fifty . . . seventy-five dollars. They could start buying condiments again.
Ben smiles, he is rich and going over the bridge, and this is more like the life he dreamed about in jail than it has been so far, this is more like what he’s been expecting.
*
6. The Stairs at Balboa Park
Peter wakes up and there’s a Matchbox car in his hand, a still-smoking cigarette
in the chipped ashtray Ben stole from a bar in Berkeley a couple of months ago. Peter feels immeasurably better to have slept, his skin calming, chilled by the wind.
It’s possible that he’ll never be in the mood for food, not ever again, but the high’s better if it’s got some energy to tear down. He fixes soup and crackers, pretty much the only options in Ben’s empty cabinets, the Matchbox car in his pocket, and realizes that Ben has stolen all the money he had on him.
“Motherfucker,” he says to himself, but he really should have expected nothing else, because Ben needed money and Peter had money and somehow, when that’s the case, there’s nothing Peter can do to keep from going broke.
He calls Jack on the busted phone in the kitchen, holding up the mouthpiece from where it dangles off the handset by wires, yelling into it. The restaurant sounds quiet, they’ve not yet seen the pre-theatre crowds.
“Jack? It’s Peter.”
“PJ!” Jack exclaims. Peter bends a slight smile. He’s got no idea where the name PJ came from. It’s got nothing to do with him, but seems to fit.
“How’s it going?”
“Doing all right. Haven’t seen you around in awhile.”
Peter swallows, rubs at his eyebrow. “Been kind of a . . . long week. Ben was in jail, I guess you probably heard.”
Jack’s chin hits the phone as he nods, a staticky thumping sound. “There was a rumor going around that that was the case. He’s out now, though?”
“Yeah, yesterday. Anyway . . . I was wondering if you needed a pair of hands tonight. I’m kinda strapped.”
“You might be in luck, PJ. Maury was gonna come but then his girlfriend had her baby. Can you get down here by five?”
Peter checks his wrist; his watch is gone. He blinks down at his arm for a second, no memory of where his watch has gotten to. He looks up, the clock on the microwave. “Five should be fine. Thanks man.”
“Anytime. Tell that boy of yours to stop picking fights with cops.”
Peter smiles. His arm’s gotten tired from holding the mouthpiece up. “I’ll tell him. See you later, Jack.”
He hangs up the phone and drums out a piano break on the table. Friday night at the restaurant . . . they’ll want to hear a lot of Billy Joel and Andrew Lloyd Webber. This is what he gets for having a straight job. Peter sighs, goes to make sure Ben’s got a white dress shirt he can wear.
He clears more than fifty dollars at the restaurant, the brandy decanter he keeps on the piano for tips stuffed with bills and phone numbers scribbled on the backs of receipts. Toni, the hostess for the night, took one look at him when he walked in, sat him down and fed him scalloped potatoes and half the appetizer menu until he felt like he was about to die.
“There’s nothing to you, Petey,” she fretted, her fingers pattering on his shoulder. “You’re a twig, you look like you could blow away.”
Peter only shrugged, thinking that she didn’t know the half of it.
Fifty’s enough to get a half, anyway. Peter pages Natalie from a payphone near the Opera Plaza, punches in the secret code to let her know it’s him, then rocks back and forth on his heels waiting for her to call back, his hands in his pockets, glaring away anyone who looks like they are about to try and make a call.
Natalie talks around the only subject on both their minds, saying, “Come over, I’ll tell you about Sacramento. My mom’s home, though, meet me on the stairs at Balboa Park.”
Balboa Park’s across the highway. Peter doesn’t have money for gas so he takes a series of buses and streetcars, the night looking smooth and brightly eager out the scratched plastic windows. He ends up walking over the overpass anyway, hip to the rail as the cars blow past.
It’s a bad area of town. So’s the area where Ben lives, but Balboa Park takes it a step further. The windows are shuttered, the car windshields have splintered impact points, watermelon-sized dents in the doors. The back stairways of the apartment blocks are where all the best stuff happens. You have to know passwords, a whole other language of slang and sharp expressions of understanding, to get past the men who lean against the stucco walls and peer from behind black sunglasses, no matter the hour. Peter’s seen five cop chases in a half a year, out here.
The stairs are at the end of the street, where the hill runs up and becomes too steep to build on anymore, almost too steep to climb, edged by wildly overgrown trees. There’s probably more than a hundred stairs; Peter’s never counted. Sitting on the steps, scraping rough concrete and tufts of grass, he’s way high up and can see everything.
Natalie comes walking up the street in her black hoodie, her hands in her pockets and her head down. She’s not five foot tall, this girl, bone-skinny with enormous black eyes to go with her woolen black hair. Natalie’s half-British, spent the first eight years of her life in London. You can still hear it in her accent, occasionally, although mostly she is strict California punk, talking too quickly and jamming her conversation with all the best words she’s picked up that week.
“My man, Peter the great,” she says as she climbs the steps, pushing back her hood and grinning at him. Her teeth are not in good shape, but her skin’s still all right, and that’s where methamphetamine addiction usually gives itself away first. Speed bumps, they’re called. Peter’s never had a problem with that either; he shows himself much less subtly with his carefully askew street style, his thirty-years old baseball cap and holey jeans, the astonishingly well-kept shoes with blue swoops that he found on the street, his racecar jacket.
“Kid,” he greets her. “Returned from the north.”
Natalie rolls her eyes. “Glad to be, dude, so glad. Sincerely. Sacramento’s where they should imprison child-rapists.”
Peter grins. “Harsh.”
“Fully appropriate, though,” she replies, and sneaks a look over her shoulder before slipping her hand into her sweatshirt pocket and neatly palming Peter the half-gram, Peter’s money making the trip back a second later.
“You have a good week without me, kid?” Natalie asks, hooking one wire-thin arm over his shoulders.
Peter shrugs. “Nah, man, wasn’t even worth my time. I said, fuck, if Natalie’s not gonna be there, I ain’t even getting out of bed today.”
Whenever he sees Natalie, his vocabulary becomes slightly harder, his attitude tough and cool the way urban teenagers are cool. Ben’s always got to remind him, you’re white, dude, very very white.
Natalie can pull it off, though. She’s the girl you don’t fuck with in the bar. She’s the one who could probably kick your ass if she put half a mind to it. Something uncaged in her, something fierce. Nineteen year old crystal meth dealer. Owned a brand-new Audi and a computer that cost as much as Peter’s tuition last semester. When Peter goes clean, Natalie’s company is one of the things he will miss, in addition to the friend-discount she grants him and her twenty-four hour response time, excepting the hours when she’s at her job. As a matter of fact, he’ll also miss the free cookies and coffee she always hooks him up with when he comes to visit her at work. Fuck. What you leave behind.
Peter’s heart is beating faster. He’s scored. There’s always doubt up until the moment the crystal is in his hand. Something will go wrong-anything could go wrong. No matter how many times a deal goes down flawlessly, this remains. But now, he can feel the crunch of the glass between his fingers in his pocket, and the nagging coke hangover is gone, the press of worry upon him, wherever Ben is now . . . all of this means nothing, because he has scored.
Natalie’s hand is rapping at his shoulder. He looks over and she smiles darkly at him, says, “You’re gonna have a good night.”
*
7. Fixing Up
Ben gets home late, having celebrated the successful deal with Zally and Tate, who came down from the USF campus, wearing an old Seals cap over her slick ebony hair. He’s not too drunk, but he’s certainly not steady on his feet, either.
It’s dark in his apartment, but Peter’s coat in on a chair in the kitchen and his ragged shoes are by the mattress on the floor. There’s a strip of light from under the bathroom door, the clink of razor and tile.
Ben sits on the floor by the door of the bathroom, leans his head against the wood. “Hey?” he says quietly.
“Hey,” Peter answers, equally soft through the door. Ben can almost hear him breathing, it’s so still.
“What’re you doing?”
There’s a long moment, then the doorknob turns and the door is edged open, slowly, Ben seeing the stringy dishtowel on the tile floor, the smooth round crystal meth pipe snug down in the valleys, a small Ziploc bag and a short length of straw, and Peter with his eyes huge, all black with a thin little rim of blue-green at the outside, Peter looking terrified and alight, whispering, “Fixing up.”
Ben stares at him, his mouth dry. Peter’s hands are moving quick and sure; Peter’s hands shake almost all the time, unless it’s a razor or a tiny plastic bag he needs to maneuver. He’s always steady, then. Peter taps crystal into the bowl, the burned black patch of skin on the pad of his thumb from the lighter’s wheel, and Ben tries to keep still as he comments, “Didn’t know you’d gone back to smoking it.”
Peter nods, his eyes intent on the bowl. He’s cooking up now, the flame melting the crystal down to liquid, hardening swiftly. “My nose isn’t really thrilled with me right now. Basically it hates me. Thought probably the lungs needed to take a turn.”
He takes a hit, his eyes almost crossing to watch the smoke flee up the stem, between his fingers, into his lungs. He holds it for a long time, and lets out a stream. The smoke is so thin. It’s always so thin.
“Looks like good stuff,” Ben says, reaching out to take the Ziploc, study it closer. The crystal is almost clear enough to see through.
Peter’s taking another hit, breaking up his response. “It is. It’s . . . ah . . . clean.”
Every inhale, Peter’s chest rises and he lets his head fall back, his eyes closed and his face pulled smooth. The vapor-smoke twists out of his nose, slips easily from the corners of his mouth.
Ben looks away. “I came out ahead today.”
Peter angles him a glance from under his eyelashes. “You started out ahead today by stealing from me. Remember?”
Ben pulls two twenties and a ten out of his sock. “Here. Fast pay makes fast friends.”
Peter smirks slightly, holding the pipe up to the light to see if there’s any left. “Your dad used to say that. All the time, he used to say that.”
Ben digs around in his pockets, building a little nest with the rest of the money. Peter takes the remainder of his profits for the night out too, and they consider the messy stack.
“I bought a carton of Marb reds,” Ben says. “But we need to get food.”
Peter’s turning the pipe, moving the lighter flame evenly under the bowl. His face is tight with concentration, his eyes calm. “Won’t be eating much for a day or two, I don’t think,” he tells Ben absently. “But get some of the good bread. And ice cream. Lots of ice cream.”
Ben yawns, tilting his head back against the wall. Peter raises an eyebrow, offers him the pipe. “Hit?”
Ben waves it away. He hasn’t taken a hit from Peter in almost two years. Peter still asks, almost every time.
“So, you’re not so much going to sleep tonight,” Ben says, tugging at the ends of Peter’s jeans, touching his fingertips to Peter’s ankle.
Peter shrugs. “I’ve still got some Ambien. This’ll be my last session, in a couple hours I’ll knock out.”
Ben doesn’t argue it, doesn’t believe it either. Peter’s last session is never at one in the morning. The night’s only just begun.
“You’re gonna stay up with me, right?” Peter asks, looking at him with his shattering eyes, his face tinged by a flush, licking his lips compulsively. There’s sweat in the crooks of his elbows, shiny patches under his eyes and on the back of his neck, thin and sleek. His hair is darkened down two or three shades, to some deeper wood color, mahogany, maybe, oak. Even just sitting on the floor, Peter gives off the impression of trembling, the way he will feel under Ben’s hands, shuddering and jerking and too far gone with speed and desire to stay in control.
Ben scoots into the bathroom, leans against the side of the bathtub with his arm against Peter’s, their legs tangled. “Yeah, I’m gonna stay up,” he says, and rests his head for a second on Peter’s shoulder before he straightens up again and watches Peter get fucked up for awhile longer.
*
That's it, thus far. Stay tuned.