Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  The edge boys do oral. The edge boys do anal. The edge boys will do half and half. On laptops, in bedrooms, listings are posted, published to Web sites with classified sections accepting of this sort of fare. The edge boys were born 1990 or after. The edge boys can type very fast. Cross-legged on throw rugs, on low thread-count bed sheets, the edge boys’ shoulders hunch over flat screens, searching for what to say next. When their eyes blink, the edge boys don’t know that they’re blinking. On walls are taped posters of rock bands or rap stars or harmonizing Caucasian quintets. Square fans fill windows, their blades quickly turning. The rooms of the edge boys are never a mess. The rooms of the edge boys are kept swept and dusted, clothes hampered, corners absent of lint—quick work that functions as high-gloss veneer should parents, at some point, peek in. The edge boys do poorly on standardized testing; for them it will be junior college at best. There is flash on the brainpan and their bodies hunch tighter and their fingers, crookedly, tap: versatile bottom seeks high-class encounter. tan toned and ready right now. if you have the quarters come see my arcade. i have the best games in town. The edge boys review; the edge boys make edits. The edge boys are junk food, sweet cheap and addictive, so the edge boys call themselves twinks. With driveways vacated, with the highways now humming, with the sun burning dew from the grass, the edge boys are mid-morning entrepreneurs, undertaking new enterprise, assuming all risk. The edge boys are merchant fleet, caravan, troupe. The edge boys are both song and dance. The edge boys offer companionship, not fucking: any money exchanged is a gift for time spent. Pictures are uploaded alongside the squibs, photographic self-portraits in which the edge boys are shirtless, their faces made blurry or blacked out, as the edge boys must show what they have to offer without revealing too much of themselves. A lawnmower whirs; a car honks a street over. Hummingbirds hover inches from blossoms; the edge boys can see them through cracks in the blinds. Light falls in threads onto desktops and dressers. The rooms of the edge boys are often so still that the edge boys sometimes believe themselves dead. From hallways chime wall clocks; it’s seconds past ten. Windows are closed out and e-mail then opened and soon after the ads of the edge boys go live. The edge boys stand up and step out of lounge pants. The edge boys own phony IDs—crude fakes they self-publish on laser-jet printers while their parents, exhausted, succumb to canned laughter on prime-time TV—as the edge boys must be young looking but legal, twenty-one, twenty, nineteen, some age that confirms them as virile and nubile but rules out anything statutory, and with music put on and their wardrobe selected, the edge boys walk briskly to white-tiled bathrooms where towels hang folded in halves, the shower knob pulled out or turned right or left, the steam rising over the basin’s glass door, the wall mirror growing fogged in.

  And here the respondees, the white-collar lustful, alumni of Schools of Letters & Science, men in their twenties, their thirties, their fifties, men of all races and sizes, men who were born on American soil and men who at one point were naturalized, men who have been with the company for decades and men only recently hired, men who lean left and men who lean right and swing-voting men who will cross party lines should they really believe in the candidate, men with no voting record, men who watch sports ten hours each weekend and men who do not own a television, men who ride Harleys and men who drive hybrids; dumb men, who will not last through the next round of layoffs, and men who are workers upstanding, men who wear suits with ties Windsor knotted, men who wear lab coats and bow ties, men who are lead-end application designers and men who once worked on Wall Street, men with full knowledge of the Doha Round’s implications and men unsure of where Doha is located, men with low tolerance for processing lactose, men allergic to peanuts, to buckwheat; bearded men, bland men, men with thin fingers, men who are wearers of rings, men with tan lines where these rings once were but most aptly men of duplicity, men of the mask worn under the skin, men of coarse acts and good hygiene, men at once members of neighborhood watch groups and blackguards for their local sex industry, and these men of the condo, the townhouse, the Tudor, these men of argyle and khaki, who stay late or rise early and work hard or don’t, all of these men double-dealing—men of two forms, two positions in space, makers of both song and painting, men who are crooners of stanzas threnodic, peddlers of anapest, of trochee, men who know which sounds to stress and not stress to sell fables in a manner convincing: men of the midday trip to the dentist, men of cars whose oil needs changing, men who are fathers of very sick children, small boys or girls who abruptly fall ill at desks inside school buildings, and these children needing care, needing parent and transport, needing warm soup and cold remedies, so grave faces worn while approaching coworkers, or bosses in the middle of e-mailing: I just got a call from, You won’t believe this, He said and She said and Well they just told me—lines near canonical for each of these men, these scholars entrenched in the oral tradition of lying, as the edge boys are canvas that can’t be left blank, are these men’s passion, their calling, what they would choose if there was nothing else, no yard work, no anniversaries, no pushing of paper or processing words to sustain and increase yearly salary, so all manner of untruth composed and conscripted, the devotion to craft close to boundless, and here is the cell phone purchased in secret, and here the bank account no one else knows of, and here the PO box for these bills and statements, rented the next city over, as the lunch breaks of these men do not involve food but do very much include hunger, so daily or weekly, in the stalls of work bathrooms, or in cars parked in the dark of garages, the ads of the edge boys perused via BlackBerry, flipped through using touch screens on iPhones, and when the right hue is found, the precise chiaroscuro, these men then envision their paintings: art made amongst cheaply starched sheets of queen beds in rooms advertised as having free cable, or the bought trysts transpiring well into evening, subject and object in states of undress at rest stops on the city’s periphery, and sometimes the process goes very smoothly and on occasion the practice is rougher, but more important than outcome sustained feasibility, that these actions are able to be tried and retried, to be done again over and over.

  The edge boys want their donation up front. The edge boys take cash and cash only. The edge boys will wear any items you like, providing they then get to keep them. The edge boys can tell you which parts of lots can’t be seen from the street, from the freeway. The edge boys don’t ever kiss on the mouth though the men that they meet will lean in, will keep trying, and by now, my midforties, still married, still scared, still fake small meek and unsure, a member of gyms, a father of daughters, as someone who dishonored oath long ago but has largely upheld every contract, as owner of a house now fully paid off, as possessor of matching brass shoehorns, as someone who never stood up for himself and finds richness in acts done in shadow, in darkness, the edge boys, for me, serve as opera omnia, comprise a life’s work collected, and here early works: my third year at Lehigh, a major in civil engineering, freshly admitted to Tau Beta Pi and possessed by the deeds of Telford, of Jessop, both preeminent builders of canals, of artificial channels of water, this ’83, Rock Hudson infected, the disease often still called gay cancer, AIDS known to Reagan, who was two years away from using the term while in public, and winter in Bethlehem, bright but cold days, the steel plant still up and running, the historic downtown lined with bare elms, the clothiers and bookshops brick walled and stately, and for ten months by this time letters to parents, verse that spoke often of Daphne: Daphne of Cleveland, Daphne a senior, Daphne who too soon was graduating, and included therein our fake union’s minutiae, trips to Ohio or north to the Catskills or hikes to the top of South Mountain, the posts detailed but also disjointed, meant to seem rushed, to seem done in one breath, to convey I was in constant hurry, whereas in truth there was only course work and near-daily walks, done close to sunset, down to the bank of the river, brisk peregrinations from my Fountain Hill in-law past one side of St. Luke’s Memorial, where often a nurse, in pink scrubs and peacoat, stood smoking by a low bank of
generators, and with eye contact made and a quick nod hello his shoe tramps on the dirt path behind me, and these men my seniors by a decade or more—there were eight in two years, in total—and while I remember their faces and where they said they grew up and the deep grove of white pines we went to, I cannot recall a single one of their names or if they once ever told their names to me, but nonetheless closeness, something near respite, relief from a bleak way of seeing, as while I adored all the things human beings had made I mainly despised human beings: saw their design as shortsighted, their construction haphazard, their maintenance needing too much maintaining, but hidden by trees, dusk sinking to night, the singing of near-perfect industry, here pressure and density, here equations of state, here balance, breath measured, entropic, and when we were finished, had switched ourselves off and parted from each other’s company, within me was calm, flat neutral and static, the job done, the stars still indifferent, and so over time, and through acts of this manner, I came to see love as duty to work, a viewpoint not that uncommon, as I held great affection for accomplishing task, for procedure done forthwith and fitly, and by May of my last year in North Appalachia, that region of limestone and sinkholes, I knew I would always live two lives at once, a life seen and a life more invisible, and knew also that these lives would transpire in parallel, would move forward in space at a similar rate while remaining at all points equidistant, but ignored in this thinking Euclidean principle, as according to Euclid on a spherical plane all straight lines are turned into circles, bend warp and wrap, are bound by their globe, and thereby become geodesic, and with earth a sphere this meant points intersecting, meant contact made between two different things that I’d thought I could always keep separate.

  And here midcareer, the Near North Side loft, my wife holding a torn condom wrapper, the two of us poised on opposite sides of our kitchen’s marble-topped island, light pouring in through the balcony’s sliding-glass doors, reflecting from off Lake Michigan, this ’97, the boom in full swing, the country choking on money, and with one arm akimbo the person I married releasing the ripped piece of plastic, the object suspended and then falling slowly to the smooth beige Biancone counter, and on this woman’s wrist a chain of white gold, and on her finger a ring of white diamonds, and the condom itself, once contained in the wrapper, in a trash can at Anna Page Park west of Rockford, used in conjunction with a junior in high school, a boy named Brandon O’Cleary, taller than average and lithe and light haired and dressed in grunge-era trappings: ripped jeans and cloth high-tops and plaid flannel shirts, worn despite the damp heat of deep summer, button-down items undone by myself on at least ten separate occasions, the two of us coming to know one another per work for the firm that employed me, endeavors involving repeated site visits to dozens of area cities, as these places were ready to take on more people, were building hundreds and hundreds of houses, and along with these houses new schools and boutiques and plazas and fire departments, structures intended to be flanked by small ponds, by fountains and banks of bright flowers, and lawns would be needed and toilets and bathtubs and all this depended on water, as without water no dwellers could dwell, and no shoppers could do all their shopping, and no roads would be tarred and no sprinklers would hiss and the juice bars would have no crushed ice for their smoothies, so watershed checked for all types of pollutants, farmland surveyed for new aquifers, and here’s where to pipe in to existing storm drains and here’s how to maintain water tables—all of this data determined and gauged, collected for further analysis, and at night in hotel rooms in Schaumburg or Elgin calls home to the woman I married: I’m just checking in and yes things are fine and I can’t wait to get home and see you, sayings that in some ways were not utter lies as I loved my wife then and I still do, but with the receiver set down on its cream-colored base a walk to my car to start trolling, cruising each village—the malls and gas stations—for boys who were in need of money, who were willing to part with one type of resource in order to then gain another, as I wanted something soullessly epicurean and the edge boys had this to offer, could promise me dividend with low overhead if I was willing to become a partner, and at tables in food courts not far from arcades or in restrooms out west toward the toll roads, the edge boys and I would come to terms quickly, as we were living within a bull market, and yes there were blips—a kidney infection, a stop at a DUI checkpoint—but the tech bubble was big and said bubble was growing and past the continued growth rate of this bubble few other events seemed to matter, so repeated foray while my wife sat at home with first one and then both of our children, and the paychecks were big and I had money in hedge funds and things just kept growing and growing, and the first of our daughters grew out of her onesies and went to her first day of preschool, and the suburbs expanded, spawned acres of homes, replete with skylights and bird feeders, where young men and women, the moon overhead, supplemented their own genealogy, while beneath them new pipes pushed out all their sewage, carried their waste to wherever, but what I mean to say is there was no need to think, only an urge to keep doing, so when the condom’s torn wrapper touched down on the counter I looked at my wife very calmly, crossed my arms on my chest, and leveled my eyes and explained that conference in Denver, where by true chance I ran into someone that I knew from my days back at Lehigh, and her name was Daphne and she was from Cleveland and one drink had led to three others—and the story was seamless (there were parts told while weeping), and I beseeched my wife not to leave me, to accept my mistake and think of our daughters and think of the concept of family, something that I, for one night of my life, had so foolishly placed by the wayside, and while this tale was spun into something metallic, into something expensive and shiny, my thoughts went again, as they still sometimes do, to the image of Brandon O’Cleary, his long body leaning on a tall granite wall littered with weaving graffiti, his hair to midear, deep blond and unwashed and parted straight down the middle, the locks grimy enough to keep a clean angle, to roof his face in an A-frame, and Brandon liked music and Brandon liked pot and Brandon liked shooting home movies, and set up his parents’ bulky camcorder on a tripod each Sunday evening, where before dusk and until shortly after he filmed from his small bedroom’s window, the lens looking down the length of his street, looking, he told me, at nothing, at cars leaving driveways and children on bikes, at snowfall and rainfall and hail, and stacked in his closet were columns of tapes, some years old and some very recent, these acts of surveying disclosed to me while I set up my firm’s total station, a device that like Brandon’s sat too on a tripod, and was also used in surveying, and when Brandon approached and said what the hell is that I told him of angles and distance, of sight via prisms and data recording and how to look under and over and straight through the earth, how to see measure test and tell everything.

  But now it is summer and I’ve rushed through my life, only to find other summers, more seasons of heat, doubleheaders and picnics, more evenings of lush thrumming stillness, more weeks of monotonous unchallenging work, more checks written for property taxes, more vacations taken to mundane locales: lighthouses or churches or statues or bridges, trips now made most often without me, my wife and two daughters wanting time to themselves, a concept I don’t find surprising, as while I’ve been a good father in a number of ways I am also quite guilty of distance, of supporting my offspring with money, not love, of remaining emotionally absent, a shortcoming my spouse has said she equates to our children being not male but female, that I have had a hard time accepting my role in our family and that from this our family suffers, but when they pack up the Jeep for points west or east there is, within me, real sadness, deep melancholy that I’ve failed at my task, that I couldn’t perform any better, that on car rides to St. Louis to lay eyes on the Arch or to Utah to hike in the Tetons, I am spoken of poorly—not called spiteful names in tones bright with rage but wondered at, frowned upon, questioned, the way the favored team’s fans, having watched their club lose, leave the stadium bewildered and empty: they should hav
e done better and what were they thinking and man, I just can’t believe that, and to provide counterbalance to these feelings of shame I walk to my den and computer, boot up the hard drive, and sit down at my chair and see who is working this evening, who will meet me at street corners close to the mall, where the big summer sale is happening, where nightly the blacktops, like still inland seas, wait for the next day’s sojourners, temporary residents of these declining Edens, as America is reaching its summer, that point where all bloom has happened, where what has sprung from the earth shows off what it’s got and waits patiently for decomposition: the peaking of oil, the drying of rivers, the crops lying wrecked in their rows in the heartland or some other crippling paucity, and for this reason the edge boys are genuine artifact, Americana that’s highly collectible, each one like the last one but also unique, made individual via small details: a birthmark or scar or small discoloration, a type of deodorant whose scent is brand-new to me, a way of dyeing their hair that I’d never thought of or a piercing in some place that I had not seen, and on these evening drives to the malls or motels, I allow myself time to wander my city, take in each billboard and juice bar and gas pump, every neon, glowing marquee, and here is the semi just in from the freeway, its trailer filled with plasma TVs, and here the grease franchise, burgers and shakes, cars ringing three sides of the building, the doors locked but the drive-thru window still open, its panes retracting hydraulically, and out farther from town landfill and power plants and all manner of infrastructure unsightly—squat concrete structures where sewage is treated, as the clean must be kept from the dirty.