The Holy Terror

by Wayne Allen Sallee

  “Hey, what?” Givens dropped the bottle. It hit Haid on the foot. Haid grabbed the other man, who now seemed pitifully small, at the shoulders. The man was shaking and Haid wanted to cry out in the coming rapture.

  “I know a cop...”

  “And I know Father,” Haid pulled the dealer closer, felt the man’s breath against his abdomen. He finished his recital.

  “Let the bones which thou has crushed rejoice. Restore me to the joy of my salvation...”

  Haid pulled the man forward, not upward. He grunted, misjudging the weight. But it was the first time of many. He would learn.

  The remainder of Givens’ sounds were muffled. Haid did not intend to crush the man’s bones. Father wanted him intact. There was a suffused glow between his chest and Givens’ face.

  When the flesh—his flesh—yielded, the man in the chair tried to scream and, for the briefest moment before he went inside, Haid felt his teeth trying to bite into his shirt.

  Then his head was inside of Haid, Father telling him to keep on, Haid pulling forward in the most holy of all embraces, pushing shoulders closer towards him. His own shoulders becoming hunched with the effort, someone looking on might have thought Haid to be a Dr. Jekyll who had just partaken of his potion.

  He could not believe how soundless it all was, as the crippled man’s flesh rippled beneath his clothes and he was consumed whole. He wasn’t certain why Givens’ bulky jacket and shirt followed him to the gloryland; Father had always said that you were naked in Heaven.

  The body hadn’t even convulsed. By the time Haid had pulled Givens up into his chest to his waist, the legs were limp and even colder than they had been.

  He stopped to catch his breath, noticing that it had stopped raining. Or maybe it was the soft glow around him. Improvising now, he pushed the wheelchair gently backwards into the side of the garbage compactor. A wedge so that he could simply lean in and consume the hustler’s legs, which he pulled up to lay on the seat of the chair.

  He hadn’t really given much thought to it taking this long, but Father helped him through it. As he had so many times before.

  When there was nothing left of Reginald Givens, Haid patted his shirt. Zipped up his jacket. Wiped sweat from his brow.

  “This is my body, given up for you,” he said.

  Chapter Three

  The ones who give the pain come in many guises. I know this because I am one of them. I mutilated my right arm when I was fifteen -- seven slashes just below the elbow with a Lady Gillette -- simply to better understand the pain. Now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. This damn tunnel that is my life.

  Victor Anthony Tremulis walked out of the Hubbard Street adult bookstore, hands scrunched into the pockets of his Levi’s, the half-mast erection from the stroke palace up the block already fading. He had left the place just behind a bearded man in a wheelchair. There was something he could understand better than most: maybe a guy in a wheelchair could be sexually active. Tremulis didn’t hear the guy groaning in the booth next to him, even wondered how he could stick his dick into one of the slots in the dancer’s booth while sitting in the chair. Guy had legs, maybe he could walk.

  One of the dancers’ booths had three holes so that she could give her blow jobs simultaneously. Didn’t anybody give a fuck about AIDS? What kind of physical pain would he go through if he caught HIV? He was hung up on physical pain because so many of the people in his life made him out for a mental case.

  Thirty-three and wearing his forehead high these days, little yellow wisps falling onto his journal every time he bent down towards the blue-lined pages: Vic Tremble’s War Journal is what he called it.

  He was at war with his thin-as-a-rail body, his folks, and the asshole commuters on the bus. Anybody who figured you were crippled only if you were stumbling along with a limp and had enough drool rolling down your shirt to get you a job as an extra in the next Romero zombie film. Sometime in the mid-seventies, he’d started experiencing chronic pain in his shoulders and arms. His father had decent insurance through the steelworker’s union, and he was sent on a merry jaunt through the doors of the Osteopathic Hospital of Illinois, Billings, Cook County, even saw some neurologist fuck who came to the conclusion that the pain was psychosomatic because he wasn’t drooling, or crumpled up like an empty pack of cigarettes. Cock-knocking pussies in their town cars.

  In 1986, the Arthritis Foundation produced a pamphlet on myalgia, the destruction of the connecting tissues between muscles. By that time, everybody in his whole family assumed him to be just another troubled kid, inventing the pain for the attention it would get him. Dr. Basehart prescribed a mood drug called Elavil, the same kind of wonder drug that terminal cancer patients were given so that, well, they were in pain, but, hot damn, they were sure happy about it.

  Give old Tremulis a couple of shots of Jack and give him the same effect.

  He’d been thinking about a couple of bourbons at the Shelter, a flesh bar out over the river, after leaving the book store on Hubbard Street. He’d still do that, but he came across a magazine that gave him some incentive to write in his journal.

  The store had various aisles, each devoted to the original sin of your preference -- guys and women fucking mailmen, lifeguards, landlords, neighbors, and the Marine Corps, in any variation. And animals. His favorite title was MY DACHSUND, MY LOVER. But the title of a magazine caught his eye. HUSKS. Photos of naked amputees and people wearing colostomy bags. He was fascinated and revulsed by it all. In one way, the pictures got his creative juices flowing and that was how he came to be writing in his notebook there on the corner of Hubbard and Franklin, in the dim light coming from a soup kitchen window.

  * * *

  I had burned my forearm as a baby (the journal entry continued), while attempting to play with an iron. Actually, the babysitter, a mousey girl named Charlene if I recall correctly, had plunged my arm up past my bony elbow and into a pot of scalding water she had placed on the kitchen floor. We lived in Wicker Park—the top floor of a three-flat on Honore—in the sixties. This was right before the big riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, and so it was that a screaming baby, wailing that could be heard through closed windows in March, was still not uncommon.

  My mother used to have coffee with her friends Flo and Cel at Sophie’s Busy Bee a few afternoons a week. The water incident was the only sadistic thing the sitter had ever done that had left a scar. She had told me that if I didn’t go along with the iron story then she would be telling my mother I accidentally fell behind the radiator in the living room and that was that. I tell everyone still that it was my stupidity with the iron that gave me the burn scar. Last I heard, Charlene was an RN at St. Luke’s-Presby.

  The light at the end. I wonder if I truly have the nerve to step in front of—no, walk down the tracks of the Washington Street subway into the oncoming northbound train. Walk it nice and slow, see if I can make out the color of the conductor’s eyes as his face shoots into focus before impact. Would anybody in the cars die? I think not. Maybe that magazine would print a photo of my desiccated body there on the steel. Make me a posthumous centerfold.

  The burn. Now to get back to it. I went into the basement while my father was asleep in front of the Bears/Packers game and my mother and her friends were out at the old Riverview amusement park. Maybe the crush of not being allowed to go with them—to ride the Bobs or get lost in Aladdin’s Castle—added to my despondency.

  My need for another experiment.

  Standing in the shadows of my father’s basement workbench, I recalled my bandages being taken off the scar in 1959, and how I sat with horrid patience in the living room as Dr. Schmidtke unwound the gauze bandages. If I recall correctly, I Was A Teenage Werewolf was on our old black-and-white RCA. Michael Landon getting turned on by a girl doing splits in the gym.

  I bit the insides of my lip as some of the skin peeled off because the doctor had put Vaseline or something underneath the gauze, but I would not und
er any circumstances allow my parents to see me cry. It was the same when I prayed.

  So I cut into my arm. This was 1968 now. It wasn’t like I was contemplating the old suicide shuffle. I cut into the triangular piece of pulp to see if that scar from long ago would bleed. That was all. It did bleed, but only a little; like droplets of vampire baby spittle. A couple of Band-Aids did the trick and I was upstairs before halftime. No one asked, but if they had, I would have told them that I had fallen while raking leaves.

  But they didn’t notice. At least, they didn’t say anything. The razor scars are long gone now. It’s been nineteen years.

  All my life I have tried to understand pain.

  I don’t believe the same god gave us both Jonas Salk and Richard Speck, one to save countless lives with a polio vaccine, the other to knife eight nurses to death in their dorm. A small number of cooling bodies, to be sure. But not to the families. Only to the Hitlers and Khadafys, of which Our Lord Quote Unquote has provided us with many.

  I tend to place my beliefs in gods I refer to as The Givers of Pain and Rapture. Lesser gods. I do not pray selfishly. I pray that those lesser gods use my body as a vessel so that I can dissipate pain throughout me.

  I’ll never pray for my own sake.

  The most excruciating pain I have ever caused myself was an incident that occurred just over a decade ago. I had been staying with a friend up on Sheridan and Cuyler. It happened in the bathroom. I just wanted to know how it would feel. Naked after a shower, still wet, my balls were shriveled.

  I opened the wicker hamper opposite the sink and let my penis and testicles droop over the edge. I gently lowered the lid and applied pressure against the top with my hands. My pubic hair was stretched taut in places. Still pressing downward, I then proceeded to pull my dick through the tiny crack, keeping the lid as tightly closed as possible.

  It was like clenching your teeth and pushing your tongue through the cracks. Your tongue looks bloodless and it was like that with my penis. I almost panicked when I thought about my sac splitting open and my nuts bouncing down to the bottom of the hamper onto my friend’s boxers. Explain that one.

  The right testicle was bruised for several weeks. But at least I knew what it felt like. The Givers of Pain and Rapture would certainly understand. Perhaps one day I will be allowed to see the rapture.

  I wonder what it would feel like to put a bone saw against my cheekbone? Would I be blinded by bone chips? Which would I feel most, the agony of sudden blindness or that of the saw cutting downward into my jaw?

  Is it really any wonder that I will never pray for my own sake?

  * * *

  Tremulis closed the book and checked his watch. He’d picked himself up a job at the Hard Rock Cafe that past summer; sure, it was only washing the glasses and straightening chairs, but at least it sounded good when you said you worked in a club. And he liked guessing the kind of girl by her lipstick stains or cigarette stubs. Himself, he liked the kind of girl who didn’t rely on the crutches of makeup and or smoking. Not that he had so much as kissed somebody who was outside of his immediate family in the last year.

  He came from a close-knit Polish family; Mother Tremulis’s parents coming from some obscure town in the Carpathian Mountains, moving first to Relling, Pennsylvania in the thirties, and on to Division Street— Polish Broadway—in 1947. Diedre - Tremulis did not like the idea of “Wiktor” working at a bar. She’d been a dice girl at the Orange Lantern on Wolcott, and often had stories of those days. Her only child couldn’t get her to understand that the corruptions were a bit different these days. And he was glad for the time it kept him away from home.

  He backtracked east. The cafe was on the corner of Dearborn and Ontario, and he had about ten minutes to walk there.

  Chapter Four

  It hit him like a hammer in the gut. Gorshin had used to make wild, unexpected swings at him back at St. Vitus. The kid was small and there was no power to the punch. Yet Haid would double over and expel most every molecule of air inside him. It was like that now.

  He had felt more than a little shaky after the incident back on Couch Street, like the adrenaline pump he’d experience after receiving cortisone shots in his back. Like his body was fighting new antibodies, something like that.

  A hammer in the gut. He hurt so bad that he had stopped questioning Father on why he hadn’t explained to him that this was going to hurt so bad. This cleansing ritual, this act of contrition, whatever. For chrissakes, Father had never said it would hurt like this.

  Stumbling, one foot over another. Someone who looked like he had run the good race. Only the street was deserted. The gangbangers and psychos never strayed this far east, and the clubbers still had a few hours to spritz their hair and primp in the mirror before fashionably showing up at the bars just as they were getting crowded. Even Washington Square Park was empty. Known as Bughouse Square to the natives, because of demonstrators in the park during the fifties, the tree-lined paths crossed each other just a block north of the apartment that was still in Uncle Vince’s name. Later, young and old men both would feel each other up on the green park benches. It was here that John Wayne Gacy met many of his victims in the late seventies, driving back to his house on Summerdale to give them the ultimate sex thrill.

  So it was that no one saw him vomit on the sidewalk in front of Melone’s Baptist Ministry, within sight of his place. Long and hard projectile vomit, black and bloody. Shooting it out across Dearborn Street like his body was a lawn sprinkler.

  What went wrong? Didn’t He say that it would be fine?

  His body was rejecting the black street hustler. All there was to it.

  But. . . why?

  Haid fell to his knees, then to the ground—sudden as a kid with drop seizures—the dirt at the curb collected with the grey already in his hair. When he stood, carefully, his hair was a dust mop.

  He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket. Bringing his arm in a curve to his face, Haid’s Book of Psalms tumbled from the inside pocket. It dropped into the puke. Bluish splotches peppered the edges of his sight.

  He doubled over with the dry heaves once more before finally collapsing inside his front door, the kitchen tile cool to his face.

  As it was in the days when he hanged with Cassady and Barre over at Massie’s, he felt thoroughly shit-faced. The obsessive-compulsiveness kicking in, Haid held his breath, head cocked to the only other room in the apartment. He didn’t want to wake Father. Then he remembered that Father lived within him now, He rested on the cool kitchen floor.

  The relief was shortcoming; no sooner had he relaxed then his bowels loosened. He hurried to the small bathroom, hideously pasteled and cheerful, pounding the light switch on as he again fell, this time towards the bowl. Portrait of the man: pants around his ankles, his ten-yard stare just above the yellow-brown crap stains that bulls-eyed his BVDs.

  His defecation was long and constant.

  It was his cross to bear.

  * * *

  Haid had fallen asleep on the shitter, head tilting to the left the way a commuter’s on the El did. He dreamed that Father had an explanation for him.

  The night of September 27th. The nurses and the doctor attempted to shock his heart back to life, but he was dead. Haid knows this with all his heart. But he cannot cry.

  On the television screen, right there in the post-trauma wing at Henrotin, the TV that Vince Janssen was watching when he coded out, was the premiere of a cop show, set in 1963 Chicago. The prowl cars were Mercurys, the skyline in the credits was washed in cloudless blue.

  In the dream, as in real life, Haid has listened to a theme song by Del Shannon: Watching all the planes go by, some live and others die, well I wonder...

  Others die. Others die. Others die.

  He realized what had to be done. Thy will be done, the man in the holy fire had whispered in his ear. Had demonstrated the healing power that lay dormant in Haid. Until the day of September 27th, 1988. The Year of Our Lord.

/>   Son must heal Father.

  Jesus wept.

  He could save his god.

  The dream shifts.

  If he was doing what Father wanted, why had he gotten sick after leaving Couch Street? Why?

  The dream flutters back...

  Haid rushed to the window overlooking Oak Street and stared up at a sky that murdered the stars long ago. And in that polluted sky he sees the blackness of the monte dealer’s face, filled with false twinkle.

  He heard the shump shump of the machine, EKG, EMG, whatever its initials, his Uncle Vincent had coded again. The machine failed and suddenly Haid smelled charred flesh and burnt chest hairs. He screamed silently into his face of the reflection in the window. He pounds his fists into the concrete sill again and again.

  The hustler’s face whispers to him, coming close over the treetops. The false twinkle has become a conspiratorial wink. The hustler told him that with healing must first come pain... Haid understood. He did.

  He understands after he has broken his second finger and has felt the pain, the wondrous, joyous pain and he knew then that yes, his Father, his god, will live. Because of him, He will live.

  But he wanted to be certain. He broke his other hand and scrapes his nails hard against the tiled wall until it chips and splinters are driven through his fingernails and into the hand’s top-most knuckle joints.

  When he begins an undulating scraping of his skull on the sill, the cement surface bloodied and pocked, a nurse comes forward, and grabs him, holding his palsied hands to his side.

  Haid screams along with Del Shannon: Some live and others die, well I wonder. Haid screams I can hear the television bleeding -- Why Why Why Why Why... Puking up bits of his rib cage and crying through the rapture of it all, he saw two nurses giving the high five, one holding a soiled Fleet enema bag, laughing as she inadvertently smeared the shit of the still living man on the other’s palm and Del Shannon stops singing so a Maybelline commercial can be told, both nurses laughed and the doctors clapped each other on the back.