Frisk: A Novel (Cooper, Dennis)

by Dennis Cooper

  I wanted to know what happened after I left.

  "At first I was scared," he said. His face seemed confused, but there were too many new little wrinkles and details to tell. "I couldn't decide if I should go to the emergency room. Then I thought, Fuck it. I laid around, took drugs, watched TV, and pigged out for a month. It was fun. That's why I'm fat, if you noticed."

  I said I had, now that he mentioned it. Then I asked if it bothered him.

  "No way, Spit." He shook his head, then stopped, nodded. "Well, it did at first, okay, sure." He laughed, which made his scars really stand out. "But it was weird being cute. It's not as great as you think." He took a swallow of beer and leaned back on the wall of the cave. "So, no." Then his eyes got this icy, removed look I sort of expect in the people I fuck. "Not anymore."

  When I was twenty-eight ...

  After I lost it with Samson, I spent a few years avoiding serious, ongoing relationships as a precaution. The few times I had sex were one-night affairs with guys I'd never have to run into again. Mostly hustlers.

  The hustler I remember best for some reason was a thin, heavy-metal-style teen standing along the so-called porn strip, a few city blocks not far from my apartment. He grabbed the crotch of his jeans as I drove by. I swerved to the curb. He ran up to the passenger window, leaned in. I asked if he wanted to "party." He named his price (I forget), I agreed, he joined me, we drove off.

  He was almost exactly my type. The only flukes were his neck, which was quite long and thin, a crooked nose crusty with snot, and he may have had one lazy eye. He said his name was Finn. I had him spell it. He said he got that nickname because when he was younger he'd either resembled or acted like Huckleberry Finn. I said it was obviously "acted like" since his namesake was just a character in a book. But Finn said his copy had illustrations.

  It wasn't that I didn't fantasize murdering hustlers. It's just that I tend to be too scared or shy the first few times I sleep with someone to do' what I actually want. The worst that could, and did, happen was I'd get a little too rough. But the hustler would stop me, or I'd stop myself, before things became more than conventionally kinky, as far as he knew.

  My perfect type tends to be distant, like me. I don't mean matter-of-fact, I mean shut tight. Like he's protecting himself from other people or pain or both by excising himself from the world in every way, apart from the obvious physical stuff you need to get by such as walk, talk, eat, etc.

  All the way home I kept turning to look at Finn's face. It was almost beautiful. He didn't even notice me studying, he was so uninterested or overly involved in himself.

  Usually I'd offer hustlers a beer. We'd sit around, lie to each other, but as soon as I let Finn inside he asked, "Where's the toilet?" When he came out of the toilet, he said, "Let's get this over with." I'm trying to remember his voice. I just can't. He found my bedroom all by himself, and the bed, even though there was no light at all. Even I had some trouble negotiating the furniture and stuff.

  I felt around on the bed until my hand held a foot. I sat down next to it. I rubbed it for a while, wondering what to do, say. AIDS was an issue by then, so I'm pretty sure I said I wanted to turn on the lamp and examine him, period, to which he relaxed or moved his foot in a way I understood to mean "fine" or "who cares?"

  I flicked on a lamp and knelt over Finn's nude body. The smell off of him was intense, like leaning over a barbeque, only more subtle and hard to describe. I mean sweet, but kind of spoiled. Like there was something wrong with him, hidden away in there.

  Finn was thin, tall, pale. He had so few hairs on his legs that I counted them. His buttocks were springy as balloons. His asshole looked like a photo I saw of a bullet hole. He had big, red, droopy balls. His cock was thin with a pointy head. Black pubic hair, thick and smelly. His ribs almost pierced through his chest and back. His nipples were tiny pink matterhorns. He was warm all over except for his ass, hands, and feet, which were freezing. If you held out his arms at a particular angle you could fit tennis balls into his underarm cavities, they were so deep and round. His face was bluish-white with brown eyes that seemed one thought behind or ahead of me constantly. Full red lips, nicotine-stained teeth, huge mouth, beer breath.

  I went over his body once more to make sure I got everything right. He was silently jerking off, squinting up at the ceiling, forehead rippled down the middle. I'd been hard all along without touching myself, but when I finished my study I started to jerk my cock. I inched forward until it was hanging over his chest. I think I imagined that we were on top of an Aztec pyramid. I held a knife or whatever they used in those days to sacrifice Finn to whoever they thought they worshiped back then.

  I couldn't sustain an illusion like that for more than a second or two, so I came on his chest, with a groan I'm sure. Then I leaned back and caught my breath, watching the splatters of sperm run together. The lacy pattern they formed reminded me of those tacky vests gays used to wear at the height of the disco craze. That totally wiped out the last of my lust.

  Finn stopped jerking himself, closed his eyes, and lay there in the rumpled sheets, letting my sperm dry all over him.

  I'd seen what I wanted to see and went into the toilet to wash off my cock in the basin. When I looked up one time I saw Finn behind me in the mirror, waiting his turn, I guess.

  Part of me wanted to kill and dismember him, which I probably could have done without getting arrested, but most of me gave him -a towel, then humored him until he left.

  Afterward I lay in bed putting Finn through hell in my thoughts. I tore up his body like it was a paper bag and pulled out dripping fistfuls of veins, organs, muscles, tubes. I made his voice as otherworldly as civil defense sirens had sounded to me as a kid. I drank his blood, piss, vomit. I shoved one hand down his throat, one hand up his ass, and shook hands with myself in the middle of his body, which sounds funny, but it wasn't.

  When I was thirty ...

  The detours around AIDS weren't marked yet. A lot of guys my age, even younger, were testing positive, sick, dead. Samson (I went to his funeral), a lot of friends and fucks I haven't mentioned, (according to the rumor mill) Henry. I avoided sex, no matter how tentative, talked on the phone, and occasionally had drinks with a few male friends-predators and aesthetes like me, as opposed to "my type."

  One of these friends, Samuel, an actor, although he'd never actually been in any movies or plays, had grown romantically obsessed with this clerk at the Sears where he worked parttime. When Samuel described Joe one day, I got obsessed secondhand. Not only did Joe meet my strict physical requirements (pale, thin, smooth, dark hair, dark eyes, big lips, spaced-out, boyish), but his only passion, as far as Samuel could tell, was splatter films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc. In other words, Joe seemed so right I got sloppy. I told Samuel, If you don't click with Joe, please play Cupid. He hemmed, hawed, agreed.

  Eventually Samuel seduced the boy. I'd been trying to downplay my interest, but when Samuel called one night, post-sex, disappointed because Joe turned out to be this extremely serious masochist, I insisted he introduce us. He said he would, though he'd already passed Joe the telephone number of some character actor who was notoriously sadistic in bed.

  Samuel spent much of the weekend coaching me with Joe trivia so I could waltz into Sears the following Tuesday and meet him, totally primed. Tuesday morning Samuel called. Hold off, he said. Joe hadn't shown up for work. A week passed, no Joe. A month, two.

  One day there was a sketch in the newspaper of a seemingly pretty young man. Cops had found an anonymous, dismembered corpse in the yard of that very character actor. They asked for anyone who recognized this conjectural portrait (apparently drawn from the corpse) to contact them. Samuel said it looked a little like Joe, he couldn't be sure, and I'm not sure the cops ever figured out who the corpse was.

  The case was perfect fodder for my interest in sexual death. I grew obsessed for a year, following it through the media, researching Joe's life via friends of friends, filling in bl
anks with my own fantasies. I even spent several months trying to channel the info I'd gathered into an artsy murder-mystery novel, some salvageable fragments of which are interspersed through the following section.

  TORN

  1986 (1987)

  Thursday night, Friday morning

  Joe pried up the trapdoor. He crouched, aimed a flashlight beam into his basement. The view was milky with cobwebs, so he kicked a hole. That framed the top several rungs of a rope ladder. He studied them for a few seconds, shrugged, and jumped into the black.

  Thud.

  He ran his light over the concrete walls, found a few nails where tools used to hang. Now there were shadows of saws, hammers, wrenches. A wooden shelf held some crumbly newspapers. He riffled through. They spewed ticklish dust. "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-choo!" Between two comics sections somewhere near the base of the pile, he spied the buttocksshaped end of a large, white bone. When he drew the thing out, it was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen inches long.

  "Hmm." He forced one end of the bone into the back pocket of his faded jeans.

  The floor of the basement was empty, apart from some waterlogged, mass-market paperbacks off in a corner. Softcore porn, detective novels, sci-fi, etc. He razed a garish stack with one kick.

  Climbing the rope ladder, he tried to imagine his skeleton folding and straightening out inside his skin, but his knowledge of bodies was slight, and his brain such a weakling it couldn't conceptualize a crisp image.

  The phone rang. His answering machine picked up. It was his friend Samuel, who mentioned switching on channel 9. Joe laid the bone on the dining room table. Dropping into an armchair, he reached out and snagged the remote control unit.

  An old man was strangling a boy. He winced, squealed, gulped, pleaded. A shorter old man held a knife an inch or two from the boy's chest. It was sporting an Iron Maiden T-shirt. The men laughed and eyeballed each other. One winked. Then the shorter man shoved the blade into Iron Maiden's intricate logo.

  Joe opened his eyes after what felt like seconds but could have been hours. The cigarette had burned out. At the spot where its nub came to rest on the fabric, smoke rose in a wavering column. Far off, his TV set framed some completely uninteresting static.

  He slapped the smoldering arm, switched off the TV, headed upstairs, and caught a few hours of actual sleep in his bed.

  When his coffee got cold the next morning he studied the bone he'd found, occasionally rubbing his own bones by way of comparison. It almost matched the size and shape of the one in his forearm. Still, his seemed a little less round. Hard to tell through the padding and shit. He squeezed his shoulders. Their bones were overly complicated. He felt down his body. Ribs, too flat and delicate. There was nothing particularly worthwhile in his waist, as far as he could surmise, so he skipped to his hips, which reminded him of a Mobius strip.

  Pushing his jockey shorts down to his knees, he started studying the hipbone, digging into its hollows and nooks with his fingertips. He bent over, spread his legs, knelt, squatted ... He'd never realized how inventive his skeleton could be. It had just been in storage inside him for twenty-six years, like a piece of unfashionable sculpture.

  He pulled up his shorts, hit the kitchen, dumped chilly coffee, and washed out the cup.

  Trotting back down the hall he punched PLAY on his phone machine. Samuel's message played again, only this time he sounded depressed. Shit, Joe thought, glancing up at the clock. 8:47.

  Rrrring, click. "Hello?" Samuel said groggily.

  "It's me." Joe despised his own voice. It was too deep or something. No matter how he distorted it, it had the fake homeyness of those DJs announcing classical music or soft rock.

  "Oh, Joe. Hi. You got my message? Did you catch anything of that show I mentioned?"

  "I'm not sure," Joe said. "I sort of fell asleep."

  "Too bad." Samuel snorted. "That actor you look like, Keanu Reeves, was getting physically fucked up by psychopaths."

  "How come?"

  "How come what?"

  "How come they fucked him up?"

  "I don't know, who cares," Samuel muttered, yawned. "Obviously because he was so fucking cute."

  Joe yawned, eyed the greasy brown clock face set into his distant stovetop. 8:53. "Bye. I'll see you at work."

  Click.

  (I'm writing this en route from LAX to Kennedy Airport. I must be insane to just take off. But I'm famous for this kind of shit. And for not thinking thoroughly. That's my friends' problem, not mine. Jealousy, that's what their idiocy is about. I'm more "experienced" than any of them. I've imagined scenes they couldn't even start to think up. And one of the things that goes on when you mentally explore a certain area of life like I do is you start to understand all of it. Or else you know exactly what you want out of it, and the rest doesn't matter. For me this want begins with a physical type. Over the years I've decided or figured out that there's a strain of the human race I'm uncontrollably drawn to. Male, younger, lean, pale, dark-haired, full-lipped, dazed looking. I think the lineage stretches back to those pictures of Henry at Gypsy Pete's. He, or they, were the original. Every guy I've wanted since has had his same basic look. I suppose in a sense it's like being involved with the same person over and over without getting bored. That's how I think of it. Anyway, it's the closest I'll get to a long-term relationship. But finding cooperative guys isn't easy, at least since I've grown so obsessed with the idea of murdering someone. That's the area of life I was hinting at earlier. And that's why I'm flying to NYC. I keep thinking about this boy Pierre Buisson who I recently saw in a porn video, All of Me. He's the most perfect human being I've seen since, well, Kevin at least. Like most porn stars these days he's a hustler on the side. Available. Through a particular escort service advertised in The Advocate. In New York. Without the mess of real relationships. Let me say before I go on that everything I do is based on an urge that I don't understand, though I keep trying to understand it.)

  Friday morning

  Sears had been painted light purple a month, six weeks back. That was supposed to attract a younger clientele. Instead it seemed to antagonize regulars. Joe's station was empty, apart from a few figures lingering along the border of Men's Wear and Home Entertainment. He leaned on a cash register and was quickly sucked in by an image on one of the distant TVs.

  A muscular man with a flattop was holding a gun on some teenaged boys. They didn't care. They sneered and yelled things until the man fired, so many shots, even when they were sprawled on the ground, that there was obviously lots of psychological baggage concealed by the set's lack of volume.

  "Great, huh?" said a nasal voice. Joe glanced at Samuel, who was hanging around in an aisle near Joe's station, straightening stacks of blue jeans. Lately he'd gotten so tan he looked Mexican. "The film," Samuel added, nodding at the distant, rectangular image.

  "Think so?" Joe said cautiously. Samuel had one of those voices that could have been dripping with irony or totally serious. Who knew? "Hmm, well ..." He noticed a customer standing a few aisles away. "... Yeah, great, uh, excuse me a sec?"

  Joe trotted off, holding his tie in place. Ten feet away from the customer, a short, red-haired man, he skidded to a stroll. "Hi," he smiled. "Need some help?"

  The redhead looked up from the One-Half-Off rack, smiled toothily. "Couldn't hurt."

  Joe suddenly had a mild deja vu. It whited out his view for a second.

  "I want a nice shirt," the redhead continued through the clearing haze. "Not too elegant, but not. . . jarring."

  That voice was so familiar, Joe thought, though more uncertain and/or high-pitched than usual. Obviously the guy was famous or something. "I'm a fan of your work," he mumbled, to see what would happen. - - -- - - - - - - - -- -

  The redhead was stroking the sleeve of a bright yellow shirt with a cowboy-esque motif embroidered on the cuffs. He had predictably wee, freckled hands. "Is this silk?" he asked.

  "Banlon," Joe said.

  The redhead dropped the sleeve like it was sca
lding. He blew on his fingertips, and kept blowing until Joe realized he was supposed to respond, and laughed a little stiffly.

  Satisfied or whatever, the redhead stuffed the sleeve back into the sleeve cliff.

  Joe pretended to straighten the cliff up a bit. "Did you hear what I said?"

  "Mm-hm. Thanks ..." The redhead crossed his arms, eyed the plastic tag on Joe's pocket. "... Joe."

  "No problem. Anyway, you must get harassed by fans like me all the time, I guess."

  The redhead smiled toothily again. "Actually, most people don't take my kind of acting that seriously, per se."

  Actor, Joe thought. "Well, they're wrong. . ." He bullshitted for ten, fifteen seconds, hoping something would draw out the names of some movies or something. ". . . Anyway, what's next for you, I mean role-wise?" That should do it.

  "This." The redhead shut his eyes, blanked out his freckly face. "Ready?" he whispered, not waiting for a reply. "Now." He smiled again. One hand shot upright and clenched, as though wielding a knife or sword. He jabbed "it" in Joe's general direction a few times. "Imagine you're ... screaming ... spurting blood," he said through clenched teeth.

  Joe's cock hardened instantaneously. He was reaching down to conceal it when .. .

  "You wish," Samuel sniffed from somewhere behind Joe. He'd joined them without either one noticing.

  The redhead shoved his hands into his pants pockets, glanced at Joe's crotch, mumbled something to Samuel, and walked away without buying anything.

  Joe could feel his cheeks burning. "Oh, hi, Samuel, uh ...'

  "Listen, Joe," Samuel whispered as soon as the redhead was out of earshot. He looked unusually emotional. "Watch yourself around Gary. I'm talking major sadist, okay? One time this cute `ex' of mine accidentally went home with him and. . ."