Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  He counted two guns drawn and another displayed in the waist of one’s baggy trousers before he showed them an avuncular smile, gave his face a half-turn, and lifted his walking stick to tap its pewter head upon the ruddy pad of skin over his cheekbone, below his widening eye.

  “Now if you’d take a moment from your busy schedules to look in here, we can wrap this up in a trice.”

  His eye continued to bulge, window to the soul flung wide. He thought of all and nothing, the vast repertoire of his days an open book. He bent his soul into a kind of parabola, on which they might focus through pupil and metacosm, and see reflected back at themselves a thousandfold what each had cast toward it — all their loathings and hungers, resentments and fears.

  It was absurdly simple. They did most of the work. And God alone knew what each one saw. Mischief-makers such as these were doers, not talkers, wasting no words to tell of terrible wonders.

  Two of them soiled trousers and ran. One turned his pistol on his friend a dozen times over, even while the fallen body twitched on asphalt; the final bullet he’d reserved to put through his own mouth. Another fell to the ground screeching, then hooked his long fingernails back to gouge out both offending eyes.

  The man in the gray top hat lowered his bulk to his haunches, beside the blind and whimpering brigand. Like Jack Horner seeking plums, he plunged his thumb into the runny well of one ruined eye socket. There he left it, while visions came and went, until he was satisfied: If the dead ones had lives and histories comparable to this one, he clearly had done them a favor.

  “Terribly sorry I came too late. Dreadfully sorry,” he said. “But in your case there was really nothing left to save, you see.”

  He tidied his thumb on the boy’s jacket, then righted himself and straightened his dingy frock coat. From a breast pocket he produced his card, dropping it onto the writhing boy’s chest. It was color of ivory and, bordered with filigree, read:

  And so announced to the asphalt harvest, he went upon his way in search of a warm fireside, soft cushions, and whatever passed for mulled wine in this place of ignoble rot.

  By the time of Terry’s funeral, Jared and I had had a couple of good years together. Career waiter and career video store manager — the tail of the world had somehow eluded our grasp. At least Jared was still giving it a good chase. Most of my running now was in circles, five miles each day and ending right where I’d started.

  I’d noticed him a half-dozen times in the video store before we’d exchanged any deeper words than when his rental was due back. Mid-twenties, a generous handful of years younger than I, and with round-lensed glasses and dark messy hair looking as if he could be equally at home in a law library or aerobics class. Danielle, my favorite co-worker, finally got tired of my doing nothing.

  “Let’s take a peek in his subconscious,” she said, and pulled up his rentals on the computer. I was happily intrigued to find mostly Japanese anime, Kurosawa samurai films, and everything we had directed by Ken Russell and Sergio Leone.

  The afternoon he asked if we had a copy of El Topo that we weren’t letting on about, I was smitten. Jodorowsky’s horrifying symbolist western that somehow veers into socioreligious parable — the boy was no fluff-monger. He said he’d looked all over the city for El Topo, and I had to tell him that he’d finally stumped the band, that it wasn’t distributed domestically.

  The instant he left the store, I phoned a gray market service in Miami for a rush-order dub off Japanese laserdisc. I had it in hand two days later when he returned his current rental, and invited him to a private screening. If he was interested. Since he was such a good customer, with such commendable taste in film.

  Several nights later, atop rumpled bedsheets, with our first taste of each other still on our lips, Jared said it had been the only TV date he’d had where the other guy hadn’t popped in a Jeff Stryker or Danny Sommers video, something like that.

  “When you see Beach Blanket Boner coming on again, it gets a little obvious,” he laughed.

  Jared laughed a few weeks later when his lease was up, at my suggestion he move in, saying all I wanted was a cheap way to enliven my apartment’s brick walls. For years he’d been trying to break into comics, with marginal success and rarely better than token payments. Within days of the move I was surrounded by prototypes of brooding existential loners, sketched in shades of gray, who wandered vaguely recognizable wastelands.

  He laughed when he showed me all his rejection slips from the better-paying costumed hero markets, saying that the art was only for killing time until he became headwaiter at his restaurant.

  He laughed while he told me about being on his own since he was eighteen, when his father kicked him out after finding a porno magazine. “If it’d been hetero,” Jared said, “he probably would’ve taken me out to get drunk instead, maybe even buy me a whore if he could’ve found one cheap enough.”

  He laughed when he told me about the former friends in high school who’d beaten him up for being too honest about himself when it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.

  But by this time I was noticing how forced his laughter could sound, a worthy try but no longer good enough to fool me, like the unnerved and tuneless whistling of someone lost in a cemetery.

  And that’s the way it sounded, more and more, until the day it stopped altogether.

  “There’s this guy…”

  No man wants to hear anything starting like this, tiny words that send heart and stomach skittering into sick panic. While you knew all along you were irreplaceable, everyone else knew better.

  “There’s, um, this guy…”

  Jared pulled it on me at one of the sidewalk tables in front of the beanery where we came for cheap, spicy meals served in crockery that would steam your face and warm both hands. A coterie of pigeons would always gather near occupied tables, to glean crumbs from the crusty bread served here.

  “There’s, see, there’s this guy…”

  It would be one of the last fine days of autumn before the killing frosts of winter took hold, the late afternoon sunlight golden even when the best it had to shine on looked otherwise run-down and corroded and ready for a renewal that would never come, because those with the power to decide these things knew that such places were easier destroyed than lived with.

  “There’s this guy,” Jared tried again, then drew into himself as though he couldn’t bear to say the rest.

  I wondered if this wasn’t some rebound thing, triggered by issues we’d gotten into last week, with Jared still smarting over Terry’s funeral and seeking … what? Reassurance in a world that offered him none?

  He’d interrupted my daily 200 sit-ups and suggested, since we seemed to be getting along so well, with an eye to far tomorrows, making it as official as we could. A same-sex union ceremony? Lots of couples were doing them, even if they legally wouldn’t hold the breath expended on the vows.

  “It’s not the legality of it,” he’d defended. “It’s the thing itself. It’s the ceremony that counts. The statement we’d make.”

  I’d thought of when we first realized we had something going. Got ourselves tested for the virus, passed six months of fidelity, then got tested again, praying for a rerun of dual negatives, then putting the condoms away afterward in relief. This was all the ceremony we needed. All the statement. A phony marriage seemed like a hoax to play on ourselves. Why pretend to join some club that wouldn’t have us for members?

  And it surprised me how much bitterness I heard in my voice, how much rage I thought I’d sunk to the bottom of my ocean, until it might break itself down into complete apathy over everything I was denied, that so many others took for granted. Say, walking down any street with someone I obviously loved, and not having to care who realized it. I listened to myself, hearing everything I’d never meant Jared to think was directed at him; said I was sorry.

  But once you’ve laughed in someone’s face, he’ll remember the sound forever, and only a saint can overlook your best reasons.


  “Serge isn’t coming back,” he’d told me. “I’m the one you’re stuck with now. I guess. I’m the one you have to settle for.”

  There’s. This. Guy.

  My Brazilian black bean soup cooled in its bowl.

  “Does he have a name?” I asked.

  “Probably.”

  “‘Probably.’ Well that’s good. Two years, and you can still surprise me over a bowl of beans. Jesus. I never took you for the toilet tramp sort.”

  Jared blinked at me in genuine surprise. “That’s the kind of conversation you think we’re having?” He shook his head. “I haven’t sucked off anybody in a toilet. I haven’t gone cruising the park, I haven’t even gone cruising the Personals.”

  “Then what kind of guy am I supposed to think you’re talking about? You’re not an altar boy, either.”

  He didn’t answer, was somewhere else behind his eyes. Then he leaned back to watch the pigeons strutting on the sidewalk, sleek heads bobbing as they pecked at promising tidbits.

  “I’ve never understood why so many people hate these birds,” he said. “Calling them rats with wings, and like that. What aren’t they seeing?”

  He was shredding bits of his bread; sowed a generous handful across the concrete. Wary, the pigeons lifted off a moment with a great snapping of wings, then settled back again to feast.

  “They’re not just gray,” he went on. “Look at those colors around their heads. All those different purples. Lavender. Greens, on some of them. Those are beautiful colors. So maybe they shit on statues, what’s to hate?”

  “Jared,” I said, “I don’t want to talk about pigeons now.”

  He nodded, sweeping more crumbs toward the birds. “There,” he told them. “Go shit on a statue for me.” Then it was my turn for his attention.

  “You know one thing I’ve always envied about you?” he said. “It’s the way you can deal with pain. You lock it up and once it’s in the box, you never open that box again. You must have skin like an alligator inside.”

  “Jared…” I said. “You’re giving me way too much credit for something I’m not even sure I’m flattered by.”

  “Don’t be ashamed of it. I wish I could cope like you, with all the things that are wrong. I look in your eyes, then I look in the mirror, and I don’t see the same quality. I wish I could, but I don’t.”

  “If you’ve got something to tell me,” I said, “quit dancing around the subject and tell it. Who have you met?”

  “Aren’t you listening? I haven’t met anybody.”

  A pair of sluggish flies buzzed into his bowl of red beans and rice. Impassive, he watched them crawl and feed; seemed capable of watching until their eggs hatched a new generation.

  “Everybody has a breaking point,” he murmured.

  And when I told him he wasn’t anywhere near his, that he was stronger than this, Jared didn’t even look at me as if to say How would you know? It made me question my credibility. If I conveyed nothing — no confidence, no faith, no belief — because nothing worth conveying was left. If, in experiencing most of the same intimate plagues that life had brought to Jared, the better qualities that were part of my essence hadn’t been burned away. Or worse, by my own hand been locked beyond retrieval.

  “I’m tired of hurting,” he said. “Tired of letting everything hurt me, just taking it, because there’s nothing else to do, until I don’t have anything left inside for it to grind down. So…

  “There’s this guy that I’ve heard about. Walks around looking like something out of Charles Dickens. I don’t know what he is, or where he comes from. But he’s supposed to make the pain stop.”

  I went with Jared as he sought his deliverer, not because I necessarily believed in rumors he’d heard, or because if they were true I believed myself capable of dissuading him from rash acts, but simply because I’d convinced myself that he’d be safer this way. The streets could be dangerous. He shouldn’t walk them alone.

  Like Serge had.

  Up streets and down alleys, inside bars and outside liquor stores, beneath neon and through shadows … we followed a winding course of anguish the same as we would follow a stream. Where it was created and where it deepened, where it bottomed out and where it became a roaring cascade that swept everything before it.

  We talked to hustlers who leaned against graffiti-thick walls or smoked between tricks under the trestles of the elevated train. Talked to runaways who warmed themselves over fires built in rusty oil drums. To castoffs who made homes in boarded-up warehouses, or factories where smokestacks held their last stale dying breath, beneath a sky that still looked irreparably seared.

  “Never heard of him” — this we got most often, a relief to me.

  “Oh yeah, I heard of that guy” — this, too, sometimes. And:

  “Hey, I think I saw him. He’s a killer.”

  “Right. Some kind of saint, right?”

  “Fag. Fags.”

  “You just missed him, by, like, a day.”

  Never enough to discourage Jared from continuing. Just enough to keep me from feeling certain this was mere rumor.

  There seemed to be no end of places to look, and if we began to think we must have covered them all, then we’d find more. More sprawl, more shadow, more derelict hulks etched against sooty new horizons. It made me recall something I’d been told by one of the street people I used to see all the time near the video store, for whom Danielle and I would sometimes buy sandwiches.

  The city grows at night, he’d told me. On its own. That’s why so many people can pass a spot for the hundredth time and look at some building as if for the first … even if logically they know, from the way it looks, it must’ve stood there crumbling for sixty, eighty, a hundred years. The only thing they can figure is that it has somehow escaped their notice until now.

  The city grows at night, and that’s why people can drive past some spot on their way out of the city and think, wait, last week didn’t it all used to end right around here? So they decide their memories must be playing tricks on them again, and knit the changes into the way it’s always been.

  Then most of them don’t give it another thought, he told me. But a few can still feel the city’s growth pains in the deepest places inside their dreams, and even those who don’t remember on awakening, at least awaken with a growing dread of the city and its demands, realizing that it’ll never be satisfied until it’s consumed everything there is to be had, making slaves of all who live there. Feeders, and those fed into the maw.

  He told me these things one day on my lunch break, then lived another month. Died of acute alcohol poisoning two blocks over, in the alley behind a Thai restaurant. But his face was gone, I heard. Rats. And maybe it’s only creative hindsight, but now I swear he told me these things like a man who’d already heard his death searching for him, stalked for dreaming too deeply and brushing dust from the wrong secrets.

  He’d said the city had sorted out long ago who it could use to maintain itself, and who would taste best between its teeth.

  But why listen to paranoid drunks, anyway?

  Hieronymus Beadle recognized intent as soon as he saw them coming, moving with trepidation through the musty Welsh pub until they could see him near the back, sunk comfortably into his chair and drowsing by the fire. During his sumptuous weeks in the city, his waistcoat had grown frightfully snug, buttons a-popping and threads a-straining.

  “Sit! Sit!” he bid them. “Been expecting you long before now, I have.”

  “How’s that?” asked the older of the pair, the more prickly. Clearly the skeptic, the sniffer out of charlatans.

  Mr. Beadle gestured toward the fire. “I’ve been watching the news, of course.”

  He could unfailingly spot those who’d made a concerted effort to find him, and such was this pair, if the elder against what he thought to be better judgment. But if that wasn’t love, Hieronymus Beadle didn’t know what was. Always most touching, when they came two by two.

  “Win
e?” he offered, showing them the stemmed glasses ranked before the fire, glowing purplish orbs. “There’s no place left to serve it mulled. Criminal, that. I’m forced to do it myself, but if you’ll look ‘round at the sad state of disrepair here, you’ll understand why they’re only too happy to allow me the indulgence. Cloves and cardamom, cardamom and cloves. They smooth and mellow, they round off the bite.”

  “Jared,” said the skeptic. “The man’s an escapee.”

  “Perhaps. But is it a true escape after the jail’s fallen to ruin? Of course not — it’s opportunity seized. Now. Seize some chairs, why don’t you? They’re not half uncomfortable.”

  When they moved to sit, he leaned forward as if to shake the skeptic’s hand, catching him by surprise and clenching tight.

  “Don’t mind me, just browsing,” he told the man, whose lean and startled face had begun to show the true lines of age and of character, and harder times in sorrow’s forge. “You’re possessed of a fitness mania to prolong the illusion of youth. You’ve a cat named … Voodoo, is it?, whom you feel you’ve quite ignored as of late. Your favorite sexual act is mutual oral, but you’ve never bothered to dig deep enough to understand why. Shall I tell you?”

  Always a treat, shocking doubters into silence.

  “I’ll take that as a tacit affirmative. Somewhere very, very deep within you, the act you call sixty-nine satisfies a yearning for wholeness in creation. Reminds you of the uroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail. Much more apropos, I say, betwixt two lads than lad and lass. You’re each half the world to the other then, yes?”

  “It’s like that, yeah,” he said, dry-throated, and yanked his hand free.

  “How…?” said the one in need. Jared.

  “Psychometry, plain and simple. A gaudy parlor trick, though, telling present and past. But the future, now, if I could only have managed that one, why, the world would’ve come to me instead of the other way around.” Hieronymus Beadle smiled, eyes crinkling above plump cheeks. “Still, here you are. You’ve met me halfway, at least. Tell me what carries you through yonder door.”