98 Wounds

by Justin Chin

  Do you hear voices in your head? No. What voices? I do not. What the hell are you talking about? Do you hear a droning sound inside your brain? No, I hear a symphony and it’s playing a melody for you and me. Do you find yourself doing things you have no consciousness of? Only when I’m baking, Martha Stewart reports going into a trance state when she is baking with her cast-iron cookware, and she emerges from that trance with a tray of tasty sweets and doughy nut breads dusted in vanilla-scented confectioners’ sugar. Do you wake up and wonder where you are? I am always where I am. Are you afraid of bright lights? On the contrary, I seek out bright lights because I love wearing dark glasses to look at my tall, thin shadow. After last call at the bar, I turn myself towards the fluorescent lights in the ceiling like some night-blooming sunflower waiting to photosynthesize in the moonlight. Do you feel things crawling on your skin? I have dry skin and moisturizing constantly is a pain. Tell me what do you see? I see nothing I am not supposed to see. Do you hear voices telling you to do bad things? I don’t know what bad things are. Oh, come on now, everybody knows what bad things are.

  It was the first time we ever played. We played chemical from Day One for four days and we crashed together. Fell asleep and when I woke in his apartment with him, I knew he was the one. I had never crashed with anyone before; that I prefer to do on my own, in my own time, it is not a pretty sight. But as I woke with him and he with me, we knew that this was it. If you can wake from your crash with the person you played with and still want that person. If you are not repulsed, sick, sickened, anxious to be somewhere else. If you ever entertained the thought of playing clean with that person then you are in more trouble than you can imagine.

  This man.

  The floors of the Forbidden City in China are tiled with concrete slabs seventeen layers thick. Workers, indentured servants, slaves, and prisoners were forced to work year after year, generations enslaved to lay slab upon slab of stone to protect the emperor from evil conscienceless assassins who schemed to burrow under the palace, tunnel through the floors and break into the emperor’s room and stab him in his heart, slay without a careless thought. So it is with my love for him. I will peel away each layer, chip at the granite and marble, make him a maze through the underground, through the layers of cynicism and hurt, dig through the crusty bits of grief so that he may enter easily even as I sleep, and once there, he shall be the emperor of my heart.

  Coming down from a six-day high, I come home in the morning to the phone message machine blinking devilishly and a message from my aunt to go visit my mother in the hospital.

  I wash my face, and take a cab to General. Mom is lying in the bed with tubes, catheters, picc-lines and wires plugged into her. Everything smells chemical, medicinal, antiseptic, clean. It is the smell of healing, even though the chances are fifty-fifty or perhaps even less. She is lying in her blue hospital smock and lying back on the few flat pillows they provide and what Dad or an aunt has snagged from another room. She opens her eyes weakly when I enter.

  She smiles, she is genuinely happy to see me.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask, which is always the stupidest question ever though that seems to be the universal default in such situations.

  She says she’s okay, but she is not. The cancer has spread. She is in pain even with the morphine drip, she hurts like nothing I can imagine, even as my own body is aching like I’ve been torqued in some sadistic gym machine.

  Mom is lying there without her make-up on and the lines in her face are showing. Mom and make-up were always a twin deal. “There are no ugly girls, just lazy ones,” her pearl of wisdom she imparted to my sisters and girl cousins, extolling the virtues of lipsticks, blushes, eyeshadows and eyeliners, all to a wave of rolled eyeballs. Mom’s idea of perfect make-up is the panstick of Mary Kay and Avon ladies. Merle Norman was her goddess. But here she is, lying in pain and make-up-less; frankly I always thought she looked better without all that make-up on. But her face shows such exhaustion. And in the reflection in the stainless steel implements in the room, I can see how tired I look too.

  I pull up a chair and sit beside her, and I make my excuses: I had a project due. I had an out-of-town work assignment. I keep missing the window of visiting hours. Can she see the lies? They say parents always know. My siblings have all been in and out all week, on a schedule, a rotation that nobody even bothered to include me in or inform me of. I put my hand over hers. I’m not sure which of ours is colder or clammier. “You look tired,” she says. “You look so tired and so thin.”

  “I’m okay. I’m not. Don’t start to nag now.” I can hear myself getting slightly irritated and try to tamp it down a notch, try to sound good-natured and jokey. What the hell is wrong with me?

  “Okay,” she says. She senses that kernel of irritation, she’s seen it bloom and explode into such ugliness so many times in our life, she’s jousted against it so many times in the past but not now. Her tone turns apologetic. “It’s just that I worry about you a lot.”

  “Mom! We’re can all take care of ourselves. You don’t need to worry.” Don’t sound pissy. Be a normal fucking child for once, you shit. Be good. Be nice.

  “Mothers will always worry.” I have heard her say this so many times, even as I know that soon I’ll never hear it said ever again. “When you all were small, when you were younger, Dad and I, sometimes….”

  I put my head down on the side of the bed to rest my head. I am tired, so fucking tired, and I don’t want to see Mom like this. I want to see her in the kitchen roasting a chicken, sewing new curtains, working the salad shooter, going to church, arguing with Dad and me and my brother, gardening, plotting a trip to Australia and coming home with tacky souvenirs. She puts her hand on my head and strokes my head. My grandma lived with us when I was in preschool and during afternoon nap-time she would lie beside me and stroke my head and tickle my ear until I fell asleep. With Mom stoking my head, I feel like a little kid again.

  I wake with a start. I must have fallen asleep. Mom is sleeping quietly. It is late afternoon. I walk out of the hospital and head home, fingering the lighter in my pocket. It is a cigar lighter, a name brand no less, a heavy chrome thing that fires a fierce blue flame. It’s great for pipes since it burns cleaner and hotter. I go home, dig my pipe out of the bedside drawer, fire the lighter up, and smoke what’s left in the pipe until the glass bulb is clean. The smoke burns exquisitely into my cheeks and into my lungs, and the familiar bile-like taste fills my mouth and throat, and I can feel my energy returning. I wipe the lighter clean, it was something a trick left behind. I scrape together a couple of watches, some useless electronics. I head over to the pawn shop and bargain with the proprietor. In the end, he gives me a decent price. I head on past all the junkies, whores, and dealers on the street until I reach Church Street where I pop into the flower store. I buy a spray of flowers. Orchids, tulips, lilies, irises, a twig or two of cherry blossoms or was it pussy willows? The fey guy behind the counter graciously wraps the whole thing with greens and binds it beautifully with a rattan twine. I pop into the deli nearby and buy a small bag of the pineapple jam tarts that Mom likes so much, and head on back to the hospital. She is still sleeping when I return. I want her to wake to her favorite snack and a big colorful living vibrant thing in her room. To awaken to a loveliness and a treat, the way her life should have been, and not the haggard reminder of disappointment and worry that I’ve heaped on her for so long.

  I look at Mom in the yellow setting sunlight that is peeking through the blinds. Her face is pale, and it really has been a long time since I have seen her without her make-up. The thing about her face are her eyebrows. She had them tattooed on years ago – “now I don’t ever have to worry about penciling or plucking anymore,” she announced – and now she is lying here, her face is truly drawn and tired and I see how sick she really is, sicker than ever, and she is all eyebrows, eyebrows, thick dark painted-on sharp-edged eyebrows.

  Somedays, I want to just disappear, escape to some
where. Get in the car and drive, live out that Bruce Springsteen song and every other Springsteen song about driving on the heck outta there. I have two months back-rent to pay, the bills are piling up, the highs are higher, and the lows are no worse than they have ever been, my health is shorting out. I want to have a normal life, whatever that may be, and whether I’m even capable of that or not is questionable. I want to be a good man, a good man to more than one man. I want to know how to do this.

  We are still in mad love. We are in the truck headed for Pismo Beach, inspired by the Bugs Bunny cartoon. He is sleeping, breathing roughly, slumped against the car door, the seat-belt cutting into his cheek. My brain is telling me to stay awake, that I will be all right. My body is telling me that it is shutting down fast. My arm is twitching, my elbow hurts. I am afraid that I’m driving blind, about to fall asleep at the wheel. I look at the dashboard. There’s half a tank of gas; it’s enough to get us there.

  Goo

  You have the kind of cum that I like, thick yet fluid without the strange lumps that plague some ejaculates, a nice fine blend. Mine, on the other hand, has the consistency of the unnamed white stuff that you might find on tables in vegetarian restaurants. Walking down the street with you, people assume that I’m your little boy. Would they be surprised to know you let me put you on a leash and take you to public restrooms where men suck each other at urinals and masturbate each other under partitions leaving their jism in careless splatters on the tiled floors? You obediently go down on all fours and lap up the spatter, some turned liquid, some grey with shoeprint tracks, left by men whose urges have long subsided and gone.

  I call you on the phone and you rush to a designated restroom in a quiet office building where I have procured a decent puddle of cum for you. I place the collar on your fleshy neck with the spikes turned inward, attach the heavy chain to it, both pieces picked out by you, and take you to sex clubs and adult bookstores where you dash about like a naughty puppy, vigorously licking at every spot of cum you find. Often I have to jerk on the chain to calm you down. I take my task with some amount of gravity and would like to take you on a good methodical sweep of the premises, you would prefer to dash at every glob that you spy in any corner.

  No, people would not assume anything of that sort when they see how you rush to buy me drinks at bars, how dapper you look in your expensive clothes, how you fawn over me and hold my hand at the symphony. Your slowly receding hairline, your slightly paunchy belly, the lines in your face starting to show, your homosexual cravings sure. You look like a kindly uncle, an older professor indulging in some non-academic fancies.

  You are a connoisseur of your craving; you approach each spot of cum as if you were a zoologist in search of some elusive animal: this one was spat out, this was flicked from a hand, this one tried to dash to the safe place to prevent a mess, this was in a rush, this hadn’t cum in days. How much of this is fancy I do not question. This one went to the market, this one cried wee-wee-wee all the way home.

  Once I told you my theory of Mormons and how their cum would taste somehow different because Mormons were the human equivalents of range-free chicken. All that clean living and loose underwear must have some effect on those testicles, and you promised me that you would find out the truth about Mormon cum.

  Once, just once, we stumbled upon a rare find, something you never found again: a mid-sized puddle of cum with a spot of blood in it, perhaps the poor bloke had a bladder or urethral nick, perhaps there were bleeding gums. You put your face so close to the pool and instead of your usual vigor you very slowly dipped the tip of your tongue into the spooge. You took more than five minutes to finish lapping that small puddle. After that, you developed a deep fear of your craving and you wrote fifteen letters to sex advice columnists in several magazines and newspapers asking for some counsel. For weeks, you scanned the columns trying to find your letter, but the letters were always the same: small dicks, large dicks, burst condoms, fear of intimacy, can’t find small enough dicks, can’t find large enough dicks, regrettable sex, want to do something the other doesn’t and vice versa. You took this as a sign that all was well and your deviance was well within the range of normal deviances and in celebration of this epiphany I took you on another feeding.

  Once, in a private moment, I asked you what those puddles of jism tasted like, if each was in some way better than the other, if I should lead you to fresh splotches and forgo the ones sitting for so long till they become indistinguishable from snot. Your answer surprised me, you said they all tasted the same. It tasted of all the men you never had, you said. The urgency in your voice scared me, and I told you I had a dream about nachos.

  You tell me I am a faggot piece of shit and that I do not deserve your dick. You snap your finger and point to your boot. I go down and lick the tip of your shoe, allow you to step on my face, to cram the tip of your boot down my mouth. You reward me by spitting into my mouth and fucking my mouth in slow, sharp thrusts. On my knees when I look up at you, you purse your lips and a gleam of spit forms on your mouth that I take willingly into my mine. Sucking your dick, my mouth fills with the sour sting of your piss that I choke down. I let you pinch my nipples until they hurt for days.

  I adore your large-balled fists as they smack across my head, each blow a token of your affection and my worthlessness. I teach you how to cut into my flesh with a sharp knife like so many words. You say that I am your dog and I say less than that. You wrap your big hands around my neck, I have seen how you snap barbequed beef ribs into two at dinner tables, a messy display of strength to split a piece of yummy treat for us to share. You close your hands around my small neck, my face turns red, I cum hard and you eat the jism off my hands, off my thighs, and off the floor like a gentle goat at the petting zoo.

  With my hand up your arse, I can feel the strange squish of your colon in my gloved hand insulating me from your body temperature. The rubber glove, cool against my palm, not long enough to shield my forearm from your warm sphincter and the blood and juices staining my arm a medicinal pink, the color of fresh kill. I uncurl my fist and snap it close again like a sea anemone inside of you; I run my arm in and out of you as if I were digging crab traps on a soft, low tide beach.

  You wince when I grab the nub in your pelvis where your spinal cord ends, a hard lump that hides bundles of nerves and arteries, the stuff that tragic car accidents and snapped bungee cords are made of. With my free hand I caress the front of your body, fingering the nipples embedded in your hairy chest, running my hand down the bristly extent of your body, I say hoarse, Breathe, relax. Take a deep breath. But whatever you have punching your heart through your bloodstream doesn’t even allow you that comfort and I refuse to take my hand out of you even as you plead with me to. I lean over to place your cock in my mouth and you say Bite my dick. I clench my teeth down in the middle of your shaft, I draw your foreskin under my teeth and nip into the elastic flaps, you flinch and bear down on my fist sweaty from the heat of your body and the tight non-porous constraints of the rubber glove. I pull my hand out, turn the glove inside out, and hold it up to you. The insides of the glove now filled with traces of your shit and anal slime stained by your internal ruptures. You slip your hand into the glove, retrieve your fluid insides and devour it like a stupid dog that would slurp at anything in front of it. I wipe off the bloodied mucus from my forearms on your back and go home to my cat, my computer, my books.

  You put on your clothes, clean up, and return to your lover, your ex-wife and kids and job and politics and upper income life, you call to make plans to meet again, you drop everything when I call you, you do everything I tell you, you buy me gifts and take me to places I cannot afford to go, you tell me your problems with life, work, and love, I listen and make no judgments nor comment, I feed you my cum on occasion though you never ask for it and I seldom offer, and with each tender caress, each deeply done kiss, we slowly become the objects of our hate so much that we wish for nothing more than to see the other dead.

&nb
sp; The path is different for everyone… Drugs will take some

  people directly to Heaven, others to Hell. Some, to both

  over time. Your body is your temple and how you choose to

  worship amongst your own congregation is entirely up to you.

  —Neal Drinnan, Izzy and Eve

  Sugar

  The diarrhea had gotten so bad that fucking his ass was like poking at an overfilled water-balloon with the jagged-edged finger of a chronic nail-biter. He knew this would happen, it always does. He needed help and he needed help fast. No bulking agents for this boy. He wanted something hard, something that would score his ass. He ended up at his dealer’s. At any point of your life, you might have to have sex with your dealer, so it helps to have a dealer you wouldn’t mind having sex with.

  He is in a dingy residential hotel. Sitting in his underwear on the edge of the scant mattress. He feels the fleas or mites, something, biting him underneath his thighs, he thinks he can feel them burrowing into the elastic band, setting their nests. His dealer is arranging and measuring the baggies. Scattered on the bed is an assortment of dildos and buttplugs. Sticky half-used bottles of lube – some with dust balls and lint, matted twines of fur and stringy hairs stuck to them – litter the bed, too. His dealer lets him take a small hit from the glass pipe. But there are no small hits really, only ravenous gulps of air, and whatever might be in it. He wants more. He can feel his bowels solidifying. This is good, he thinks.