Black John

by Amy Lane

  “Tory used to drink soda too. And then inject heroin between his toes every night. I was sort of hoping you’d say beer.”

  “Well, I got out of rehab three days ago,” John snapped. “Give me a break if I’m still drinking the Kool-Aid.”

  “Oh.”

  Wow. That one syllable carried so much finality. The crackling of the ice into the tall glass was as loud as a frickin’ death metal rock concert.

  “That sounded a little judgy to me,” John observed after an uncomfortable silence. This guy wanted to judge him and Tory? Well fuck him.

  “Mostly disappointed,” Galen admitted. He came into the room with a giant glass of iced cola, and John half stood so he didn’t have to sit down without his free hand.

  “You should meet my mother,” John grunted. “And thank you.” Oh, caffeine. Not really a drug and not really a vitamin either.

  “It’s just,” Galen grunted and set himself down with great care into what looked to be a special orthopedic chair. John looked at the glass of soda again and realized that Galen’s in-the-bone hospitality had cost him, and then looked up expectantly for him to finish his sentence. The other man leaned back his head and breathed carefully for a few minutes. John waited in respect. You had to respect pain, because pain didn’t respect shit.

  “Just?” John prompted when it looked like Galen could think again.

  “Just that Tory always held you up—you were like, the guy he aspired to be. Man, I’ve lived here for three years, and all I heard was, ‘John’s not weak like this’ or ‘John’s got a better head for business.’ He’d ask for help on the rent and it would be ‘John was the one who used to keep my shit together.’ I just thought that maybe the almighty John who left him wouldn’t need rehab, you know?”

  John forced himself to finish the soda, because it had cost too much to ask for it, but he was pretty sure this was going to be a short fucking conversation. He set the glass down carefully so he wouldn’t break it.

  “Apparently we all need help,” he said, not able to filter the hostility out of his voice. “The important thing is what you do with it. Did you say he was using until the very end?”

  Galen nodded, his head still resting against the back of the chair. “Yeah. Or at least until he dropped off the map. He called it ‘recreational,’ like a glass of wine a day. A glass of wine at night to give him good dreams, he’d say. But liver cirrhosis doesn’t come with one glass of wine a night, you know?”

  John let out a sigh. “I know.” It had been a calculated risk, leaving Tory that last time, hoping he would wake up and stop using. It was either leave and hope he lived or stay and watch him die.

  The third option had been unthinkable, which was too bad, because John didn’t know what to do with it now that it was slapping him in the face.

  “Uhm, what was he doing? I mean, he had an apartment, and he must have paid rent sometimes. What was he doing?”

  The uncomfortable silence made John look up. Galen was sitting up now, apparently recovered, but he was looking out the one window in the apartment. John looked too, and saw that it was half-covered with blackout drapes. He stood restlessly.

  “Do you want me to open those?” he asked. “I’ll open those. Let some light in, shake the dust out. It’ll be good, okay?”

  “No—no, that’s okay. Don’t—”

  John yanked back the drapes and looked outside. The window was open, because it was March, and the sunshine glaring off the glass was hazy and halfhearted at best. On the street across from the building stood a variety of businesses—some mom-and-pop stores and some chain stores making do in the older buildings, so you had a vintage clothing company right next to a Starbucks, right next to a pawn shop, right next to a…

  Strip club, featuring a pink neon silhouette of a man with his hand on a red neon cock.

  “Charming,” John said, not sure if he meant it or not. “He didn’t even have to commute.”

  “He said it was the thing he did best.” He heard a faint note of accusation in Galen’s voice—he must know what John did for a living.

  “Sex is a beautiful thing,” John said, the passion in his voice surprising even him. Behind his eyes he had those images of Tory when they were young and experimenting and sex was the mystic potion that made Tory an individual and John a god. “It is. It’s like the closest thing our bodies get to magic. There’s nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with enjoying it, showing it off. But Tory… he wanted more and more and more. I couldn’t… I didn’t know… how do you fill that?”

  His voice trailed off, and he swallowed. “I’m not passing judgment on him because he stripped or put out for money,” he said after a moment. “I just wanted him to find what he was looking for. I thought it would be something different, that’s all.”

  Galen let out a grunt, and John turned to see him start to stand.

  “No—man, sit down. Whatever it is, let me get it. I don’t need to be waited on, okay?”

  “He left a box for you. I mean, you’re going to have to go through his apartment, and I don’t know what you’ll find there. But the box—I didn’t know where he was going, what he had planned. He just ran the box by.” Galen’s voice took on a tone of self-mockery. “‘Could you do me a favor, Gayby? My friend’s going to come by for this—John, you remember him?’ ‘Omigod, Tor, he’s gonna visit?’ ‘No guarantees—but I’m gonna try something to get him to come.’”

  Even at his most bitter, the boy was an amateur.

  “I’m so sorry,” John said, meaning it. “I sent him a Christmas card every year until he moved here. All he had to do was put a stamp on a fucking envelope.”

  “He never told me that.” Galen let out a humorless laugh. “In my closet,” he muttered. “Go into my room. Closet’s on the right—it’s a big shoebox with foil wrap all over it. I put it on the top shelf.”

  John grunted. Oh good. Tory had kept the box. Wasn’t that a kick in the nads?

  He walked into the bedroom with determination, but that didn’t stop him from looking around curiously. An ebony bed frame and a cherry red carpet, with red-and-white sheets and a comforter all swirled together in the center. A pile of medications in little brown bottles rolled around on the bedstand, and John stopped for a moment, staring.

  God. Think he had codeine in there? John had snorted codeine a couple of times—wasn’t coke, but it wasn’t soda either. Maybe some morphine or some oxy or something even stronger. It was all doctor prescribed—those fuckers could give you magic rainbow pills that made the world turn purple, right?

  “Do you see it?” Galen called, and John envisioned the scars—surgery scars, ripped flesh, places where bones had popped out. Galen had them. He hadn’t been embarrassed for John to see him, he’d just been tired. If Galen had that much medication, he needed it.

  “Uhm, yeah,” John muttered, opening the closet. His hands were shaking, and he wasn’t sure if it was from what was in the box or making himself turn away from that pile of almost-coke on the bed table. Either way, he tasted his heart as he reached for the shiny box. It felt heavy in his hands, and for a moment that distracted him from the real surprise in the closet.

  “Oh my God, look at all the three-piece suits!” They were made for a smaller man—someone his height and weight, or Galen, if he’d weighed about thirty pounds more. “Holy fuck, did you used to be a stockbroker?”

  “I used to be corporate lawyer,” Galen said, and this try at bitterness was just a tad more successful. “I had this really fucking awesome Ducati 1200,” he said. “And one night I had a drink—one drink, mind you—and drove myself home. And some fucker in a Ford decided that lane sharing was for pussies.”

  “Ouch,” John said, finding Galen’s bitterness worked as a rope to drag him away from all of those nifty drugs. “I take it no settlement?”

  Galen made a sour noise. “Do you not see the splendor around you?”

  John looked around the apartment and shrugged. “It could be worse
. God, you should see some of the shitholes my guys live in before they get their first checks. You haven’t seen hungry until you’ve seen a kid sharing a two-bedroom apartment with a family of seven.”

  “Are you saying you’re a benefactor for the young?” Galen asked, but he’d spent all his bitterness. This was just a little bit of leftover snark with a thin layer of Southern disdain.

  “I’m saying when you see a guy fucking himself raw to get his niece leukemia treatment, you start to think pornography isn’t the biggest sin you can commit in this country,” John said levelly as he walked into the living room. He believed that. He fought the temptation to look around and lower his voice, just in case Dex was there to hear him defend the gorilla with the soul patch, but until Kane had hooked up with Dex, John had to admit, he’d always kind of liked the guy.

  Galen grunted and leaned his head back against the chair. “Yeah. Well, I’d argue against that, but I can’t. Some of the shit we used to pull—tax loops, corporate takeovers, that sort of thing—and then we’d go high-five ourselves like we were champions. It’s one of the reasons I always loved Tory—he’d look at me and tell me I was a bigger whore than he’d ever been, but he’d say it with admiration, you know?”

  John laughed and sat down with the box on the coffee table. The foil was carefully folded and taped over the lid and sides of the box—they’d joked about how it was X-Ray proof. The only way someone would know what was in there was to open the lid, and then John and Tory would have to kill them. They’d tried to write on it once, with Sharpies, but the ink hadn’t stayed. What was left was blue and red bits, in the crinkles. John wished the big packets of rainbow Sharpies had been a thing back then. It could have been their rainbow porn box, and that would have been pretty fucking awesome.

  But it wasn’t awesome right now. It was terrifying. John sat and looked at it and tried to find something, anything, to say that would keep him from having to open this box.

  “So you see, Tory and I weren’t eighteen yet. I mean, we had plans to make legit porn when we turned eighteen, but we knew we’d get in way more trouble if we weren’t eighteen, plus anyone else Tory wanted to be with would be screwed if he was older and, you know… we just didn’t want the hassle. But in the meantime, we had, like, our entire senior year to fuck through, right? So I took pictures of him, but just for us. So, like, we asked this one queer kid we knew if he wanted to be in the pictures, ’cause he was still seventeen too, and he was so fuckin’ lonely—I mean, we first knew he was queer ’cause he was getting the shit banged out of him in the middle of a park. So just hanging out with guys who knew he was gay, it was like a big deal for him. I mean, before he got kicked out of the house, he had a fucking gun under his bed, and he was going to use it on himself ’cause he was just so miserable. But that was sort of a perk, really. All Tory knew was that he wanted me to take pictures while he got blown, and this guy was living with us at my nana’s too, and he might want to get down on that, right?”

  Galen nodded, his eyes wide, and John was aware that he’d just dumped his word vomit on a stranger’s coffee table, but he couldn’t seem to stop.

  “So anyway, Tory and I, we took pictures, and they weren’t on film, they were on the camera card. We really wanted them on film, but we didn’t know how to ask for the equipment, and the entire town knew us, so we had to wait until we went to college, and nobody gave a fuck. So we made this box, right?”

  “Right,” Galen said, and the bitterness that had permeated the air like burnt coffee blew away. “You made that box.”

  “Yeah. We made this box. And we put video games in it, but in the cases, we put the full camera cards. And it was every fucking picture I took for that year, and then we got them developed, and we put copies of the best ones in there.” His voice petered out. There was more. There was more, but now, here, in this stranger’s cozy little apartment, it was suddenly too raw. He grasped the box with both hands, thinking that this man did not want this box in his house. Who wanted this box in his house?

  “You don’t have to look at it today,” Galen said into the sudden oppressive silence.

  John stood up and plopped on the couch, throwing himself back against the cushions. He covered his eyes with his hands. “Thank God.”

  “When’s the service?”

  “Three weeks. We’re taking a boat out and dumping the ashes. Tory put that in his will, I guess.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “Do you want to come?” John looked up at him, nakedly begging. “I… I mean, I have a list of some people to call, but I don’t know anything about his life these last eight years. God, it would be nice if I wasn’t the only one on that boat. His family….” He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to talk about that. Fuck, he really didn’t. It was one thing for John to alienate his parents. That was only sane. But Tory, and his mother, who cooked spaghetti and lasagna and remembered everyone’s birthday and had kids running through her house to play….

  “I’m done for the day,” John said. “I mean, not done. I guess I have to find something to do. But if I have to look at that box, or at his room, or at his effects or his fucking bank account, today, I’m going to be snorting Boraxo to burn out the image.”

  “I’d love to come,” Galen said, and John’s attention suddenly shifted to his tense face and the rictus of a smile.

  “Do you not go outside often?” he asked, thinking that would make sense. If you couldn’t move around well, going outside by yourself had to be hella scary.

  “I have a physical therapist come by two times a week to make me go outside for walks,” Galen replied, grimacing. “I should have a treadmill set up in here, but….” It was his turn to look away. “I used to be pretty, you know?”

  John’s eyes widened. “Well weren’t you lucky. I never had that problem.”

  Galen snorted. “You’re not rough to look at, John Carey. And I’ve seen your porn—you’re used to looking at the beautiful, so—”

  “That’s not how they make it in the audition,” John blurted out, wanting him to understand. “I mean, yeah, the pretty is nice, but that’s not how we audition them.”

  Galen’s eyes were a really nice color now that the drapes were drawn. Pale green in skin that still had a brownish cast to it. He had dark lashes around them too. No—the guy needed to put on some weight and maybe walk more than when his PT visited, but he wasn’t hard to look at. “Thrill me,” he said, sounding legitimately curious. “How do you audition beautiful boys for gay porn?”

  “Some of it’s het,” John replied, mostly to be perverse. Yeah, he’d made that decision when he was high, and Dex had been living with the fallout. Fortunately for them both, Dex had some experience with women, because John knew the het shit had been some of the worst porn he’d ever shot.

  Galen shivered delicately, the most flamboyant gesture John had seen him make. Suddenly he wanted out of this dim little apartment and this sad part of town.

  “I want to go to the beach,” John said impulsively. “And eat a giant hot dog or taco or something and some ice cream, and talk about nothing that hurts. Do you want to come with me?”

  Galen met his eyes, looking worried. “I’m… I mean, I’ll need to change. My scars—I’m not really a beach date—”

  “Screw that!” John said, laughing. In his head he heard Tory. Who gives a fuck, John? Who seriously gives a fuck? “Man, me and this part of the country have nothing to prove to each other. I can spend about five minutes out in the sun—and that’s with sunblock—and you’re probably the same. Let’s go get a hamburger and spend five minutes in the sun, okay?”

  A tiny smile tortured the ends of Galen’s mouth. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. Let me put on some real clothes and take a med. Theresa will be proud.”

  “That your PT?”

  “Yeah. Nice lady. Lesbian. Doesn’t mind coming to this part of town.”

  John laughed, not because it was funny so much as because he was going to get out of this
room and away from this box. “Well then, go change. Man, I cannot wait to eat a fucking fish taco out by the beach.”

  Fish Tacos and Sunblock

  WATCHING GALEN in the car, with his head tipped back and a smile playing with his full lips, was sort of a revelation. This man hadn’t just been pretty—he’d been made of cheekbones and sex appeal. John stopped at a gas station and bought them both hats because even ten minutes was enough to turn Galen’s cheeks alarmingly pink.

  Galen had changed into a white cotton shirt a lot like the ones Dex had packed for John, and, yes, a pair of drawstring pants. A caustic comment was on the tip of John’s tongue as he came out of the bedroom, but Galen grimaced down at himself and shrugged. “Man, whatever’s easier to get on, right?”

  It had taken him ten minutes to get that on. God, John was an asshole sometimes.

  When he came out of the store with the two fisherman’s hats, Galen looked at the printed logo on the top.

  “If you don’t like fishing, you can kiss my bass,” he read with no inflection whatsoever.

  John grinned, knowing his smile was a little crooked and that he couldn’t charm a kitten, and pointed to the logo on his own hat.

  “Fishermen do it by inches,” Galen read, equally deadpan. He squeezed his pale eyes shut and shook his head. “Jesus, I should have gone into advertising. Those people need me!”

  John cackled and finished at the gas pump. “You still can! No rule says you can’t finish recovery and go back to work.”

  Galen grunted. “And leave the fabulous life I’m leading now, while being depressed, in pain, and sorry for myself? Not on your life.”

  John sobered. “Seriously—how long ago?”

  Galen looked away. “Three years. I got a diminished settlement because of the drink, did a budget, figured out how long I could make that money last while I got my body back.”

  “How long?” John asked, thinking about the pile of pain pills on the dresser.

  Galen shrugged and looked away. “This is as back as it gets, I guess. I mean, if I did PT every day and could get my ass down to the pool once in a while, I could probably build up some bulk and some range of motion.” He shrugged. “I guess I’m just not seeing the point.”