Starve the Vulture

by Jason Carney

  She says nothing, keeps looking down. Her body pulls tighter into itself. She does not like this story.

  “They pass her thug to thug, all night long. All the crack cocaine she wants for as many black dicks as she can suck and fuck.” His stare deadens. Mesquite, Texas boils just under his skin, supported by the look of betrayal in his gouged-out eyes. “How long were you there?” he asks her.

  She does not respond. I get the feeling his question is rhetorical. The room fills with rage. He reminds me of my father, Mesquite, Texas, and me.

  “All night long. Didn’t leave until the sun came up. How many dicks can you suck in a few hours?”

  She never makes eye contact with him, her frame as stiff as iron. I can feel the tears that build up behind her eyes. I feel like her whole being is about to rust.

  “I’m still pissed at you for fucking all those niggers,” he says.

  My fists clench. The word nigger reminds me that I have grown to hate intolerance. Especially spoken by halfwits who blame the woman they supposedly love for being the cause of their own rape. I bite my tongue. You just do not do certain things in this world. Some of us are slow to learn.

  The crack flows freely. The three of us miss the tragic truths of each tale. I let go of my tongue: “You shouldn’t use words like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Nigger,” I said.

  A look of confusion falls over him, he does not understand my objection. I want him to understand this so I speak slow and clear. “What kind of home do you provide her?”

  He starts to answer.

  “Don’t answer, just listen,” I interrupt. “You hustle your life away five dollars at a time for what lays inside that so-called nigger’s pocket. You rob, cheat, steal, and beg whatever it takes to get by for that day. You don’t do it alone. You brought her into this mess. This young girl whose life is ruined because of your love and choices. Sounds to me like you’re the biggest nigger in this story.”

  He does not seem to know what to say.

  “We choose this,” I say. “The choices I make to serve my addiction are no worse than the choices she makes. Who are you to blame others for our weaknesses? Don’t want her to suck dick? Get her off these streets. But you want the drug more, so she stays.”

  The room is still, quieter than it has been all night. I feel a fight coming. I light a square waiting for his response, verbal or otherwise.

  “You’re right,” she eventually says.

  A smile sprouts on my face. She heard me. He turns his gaze to her. He is reluctant to speak. He stands over the bed, over the girl, over the mound of free rocks. He loads a bowl, draws in an enormous hit.

  “Do you have a razor?” he asks. “I want to take a shower and shave.”

  “Hell yeah,” I say. “A shower will make you feel right.”

  I am thankful there is not going to be an altercation. I am too high to fight. I give him a new razor and a can of shaving gel from my kit.

  He enters the bathroom, stunned by the stand his meek girlfriend has taken. She looks at me and smiles as if to say thank you. Then right back to staring down, a position her head finds itself most comfortable.

  What fucked-up event from her past convinced her that this was love?

  She and I sit in silence. Her body twitches to a steady beat. She tries to move closer to the bathroom door. Trust does not come easy to her. She takes the smallest hits while he bathes. Careful not to waste any of the precious treasure.

  TREMORS

  1994

  THE TILE IS COLD BENEATH MY FEET. Stillness lingers over the house. “Stop it. Stop it!” I scream. “Stop doing that!”

  “What are you talking about?” Holly says. “I’m right here, baby.”

  “You know what you’re doing to me, you fucking bitch!” I shout. “I can see you lying there doing that.”

  Her soft green eyes search my face for signs of coherence. Tears and snot run down my cheeks. She drapes her robe over my back, wrapping the pink terry cloth around my shoulders. Her nude body pimples in the frigid room; the closer she presses against my back, the more I shake. My knuckles whiten against the oven door handle. This happens too frequently.

  We’ve been together for four months. Twenty-four years old, this is my first real relationship. It’s normal at first, casual but committed. Every night is sexually adventurous. Her inhibitions never get in the way of what she needs in the bedroom. We share evenings of laughter, drunk and high. We experiment all over the house.

  In the bedroom, when all is quiet, the ugliness of my childhood rears its broken head. She ignores this to the best of her ability. We spend our weekends at dinner parties with other couples; a large circle of friends who do not know the secret we are starting to share. This is my most intimate relationship. We laugh all the time, except in the middle of the night. Sharing a bed with a stranger is forcing me to confront my past. These episodes started two months ago. I have bad dreams. She tells me it is as if I am someone else. The person she knows is gone, replaced by a monster. She does not feel safe when the confusion and shakes take over. When the memories start, I am lost.

  “Come back to me, Jason,” she coos, stroking my hair.

  My eyes fixate on the red second hand as it moves around the stove’s clock. Every moment taking me farther from where this all began. I do not remember leaving the warmth of the bed and the bedroom. My breath falls in unison with her hand along my back. I grasp for something that will pull me back into the present.

  “Stop doing that! Please stop doing that. You’re hurting me.”

  The words barely able to form through my lips, the syllables jump and crack like a three-year-old’s whimpers.

  “You have to stop, you’re hurting me.”

  “I’m not doing anything. Jason, this has been happening for thirty minutes. What’s going on with you?” There is a panic in her voice, but the calm never leaves her hands.

  “You know what you’re doing to me. It’s disgusting.”

  “Jason, you’re not making sense.”

  “Stop doing that,” I whisper.

  “Stop rubbing your back? I don’t understand.”

  I do not have the courage to tell her. I do not know if what I think is real or not.

  “You’re touching yourself while I sleep,” I say.

  “Touching myself?” She half laughs at the absurdity of my statement.

  “Jacking off and laughing at me. What you’re doing to me is sick and dirty. Quit laughing at me!”

  We’ve done this hiding-in-the-kitchen thing six times now, each worse than the last, always ending with my screams about some weird sexual perversion. I accuse her and call her names. She is open arms with a soft touch, almost as if she recognizes the place I go even though she has never been there. She is two years older than I am, ten years more mature. She sees my promise through my scars.

  Our sex life is not vanilla. I watch her masturbate, frequently helping with a hand or a toy. Holly showed me a freedom in sex I had not known before. Our whole relationship builds off our powerful sexual attraction, equal roles in the bedroom, not based on power like most of my other sexual encounters.

  “D-don’t hurt me,” I stutter.

  This is the first time I have been able to talk with her about what drives these situations. I feel like I am asking for help and accusing her at the same time. I want to inflict pain on her because I think she inflicts it on me. I do not know what is real.

  “Bitch, better not hurt me!”

  My teeth clench to point of near breaking, my muscles strain with a voice of their own. The oven door shakes violently. I do not want to call her names. Do not want to feel this rage and delusion.

  Make it all stop. Make it all stop.

  “Baby, I’m trying to help you,” she says. “I just want to understand.”

  The other six times I’ve laid silent on the kitchen floor, crying until sleep retakes me. In the mornings, we never discuss the events of the previou
s evening. I usually do not remember them very well anyway. However, she remembers it vividly. I apologize as if I were sleepwalking.

  “Jason, I’m not doing anything. I was asleep,” she says. “Something’s going on with you again, baby.”

  How do I explain to this woman I am falling in love with?

  “Baby, you need to talk to me. I’m right here, you’re safe.” She starts to hum a song under her breath. I hear the words but the title escapes me. The melody rolls around my tongue. The muscles of my face unclench, exhausted. My knees unlock. My mind focuses on my surroundings.

  “I’m in the kitchen, everything is going to be fine.” I do not believe these words, but I speak them aloud anyway. The sweat on my forehead and back is cold. My toes cramp, sourness oozes through my stomach.

  “Good, come back to me. I’m right here. We need to get you some help.”

  “I don’t need help!” I snap.

  “You wake up shaking and violent. Half the time, you don’t know where you are. Yelling and making accusations. Jason, it’s not normal.”

  I am crazy as hell.

  “I’m fine,” I say. In the back of my mind, I know what is happening. Yet I don’t have the strength to admit the truth. When I dream, the taste of my father touches my lips.

  Most of my memories flicker like short movies, where dialogue takes a backseat to sensations and smells. I can’t piece it together. They are stilled movements, whispers, heavy silences. Flashes project in and out of focus, jumbled and disconnected. I can’t control my mind in the dark. I have glimpses of his hairy, hard cock trapped beneath panty hose, moist harsh breath along the rim of my ear, a large hand collapsing over my genitals, the building lust of a voice telling me everything is normal. The older I become, the more I see normal as a word that, when applied to my life, means imaginary. Only tremors of emotion from the deep let me know that these pieces of memory are real, living somewhere within my little-boy insides, my body’s memory.

  “I thought you liked it when I touch myself,” she says. “It’s totally normal.”

  “I know,” I respond, finally making a connection with her eyes. “Just stop hiding it.”

  “I do it in front of you; I don’t have to hide. Baby, what is going on?”

  “I’m all right,” I say. “Just give me a minute.”

  “Jason, the closer we become the more this stuff happens.”

  “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “I got a number for counseling. You need to discuss this with someone.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Jason, baby, you’re not fine. You need help. Let me help you.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this with anyone.”

  “Jason, if you don’t get help, I can’t be with you.”

  “Why do I feel like you’re doing this to me?”

  “I don’t know, but someone has done something to you.”

  I already know who the dark shadow face is. My life is in shambles from the wreckage of his love.

  “You can do this, you need help.”

  I look into Holly’s face and find only compassion.

  She doesn’t want to hurt me.

  I don’t want to hurt her.

  I don’t know it yet, but in this moment her kindness has changed my life.

  BLANK SPOTS

  1994

  FRAGMENTS—this is the way I recall my youth until I am twenty-four years old. A phone call with my father is the final breath of this life of lies.

  “I remember the things you did to my mom.”

  He remembers too. No one forgets one-sided fistfights or the rage that will cause you to choke a nineteen-year-old girl. But it was not just the four years of confusion, which occurred when Daddy made Mommy a punching bag. It was my stepmother’s black eyes during my summertime visits that occurred once every two or three years, from ages seven to twelve. There were midnight trips to his mother’s trailer that were the only semblance of me having my dad, back when I went to visit.

  “I never hurt you or your sister.”

  The truth of bathroom memory runs over me in a flood of shame and guilt. My fist tightens on the phone and the dangling noose I form with its cord in my free hand. I was five. My cousin was three and we played as usual in my grandmother’s house. Shortly after dinner, we roamed freely, as the adults were happy to have us out of their hair while they watched The Lawrence Welk Show and Hee Haw. As the oldest grandson, I bossed Neil around, commanding how and where we played. For some reason I led him into the bathroom and locked the door behind us.

  With an “Okay, Dad,” I, without warning, end our phone call.

  A feeling of enormity wraps around my lungs and sits me in silence and tears for an hour. An amazing sense of release comes over me and pieces that had been illusions in my nightmares for most of my life begin to fit together. This is a moment when I start to trust the voice inside myself and make myself whole.

  The rest of that evening I replay the scene of what Neil and I discovered in that bathroom. We saw confusion and pain on the faces of the adults as we were hurried down the stairs to the safety of Christian morality and bleached-blond beehive country hairdos. I tried to make myself invisible by tucking my chin down into my chest, hiding my eyes under my thick white-blond hair. The adults surrounded us in the living room, standing above us as large as trees. I felt small. They were going to have answers.

  My Aunt Barbra took Neil by the hands and asked what we were doing. My body clenched tight, I knew what we were doing was wrong. I broke the secret, our secret. This was the point that had caused so much frustration for me over the years, the shame of being dirty and bad. I had coerced my cousin, at five, to put his mouth on my penis; showing him how to use his tongue and lick it like ice cream.

  I remember small details all the way through the struggling of the adults as they asked over and over how I had learned this thing. I remember my mother and grandmother squatting, holding me by the arms, looking into my eyes with the love only they showed me. I can see myself shaking my head, No, no.

  Until this point in my life, at twenty-four, this is where my memory has stopped. The fierce head-shaking denial of a loving son. As the fog lifts, I remember the eye contact with my father that made me the keeper of secrets, the seeker of his approval; the good little boy who would never find love. His deep-brown eyes, there at the back of the living room. As if by telepathy, he carried the words silently behind the backs of my bewildered family members. I buried his secret for twenty years.

  He was unsure what direction his son would take, silence or the shattering of monster-lust secrets; this could be his undoing. The secret the little boy kept fell from my adult lips. I saw him there, urging my silence. He was the teacher of a language I wish I did not comprehend.

  I now travel freely the distance of the memory that haunted me with blank spaces and distorted fragments of time. The escape of my silence and my trembling knees; the urine that began to run down my leg that made the maternal figures before me distrust their questions. “Boys are just curious; it’s okay to be curious,” they sang with agreement and hugs, my grandmother taking a kitchen towel to the puddle on the brown tile floor.

  “Sounds kind of wrong to me,” my father responded nervously.

  The echo of those words became the undercurrent of most of my life. On the way home, he questioned my mother as to why I was so fruity and what kind of sexuality his son was going to have. He gifted me camouflage, the hiding of fangs under a smile, the silence of a shut door down the hall from sleeping souls. He used the magician’s touch of conjuring a shimmering fabric of lies to hold sickness together. The events of the evening were written off as normal by the time I was carried in from the car and placed in my own bed.

  BROTHER

  1996

  THIS IS THE DARKEST BAR, which is why they call it the Dark Room. I don’t mind not being able to see very far. This means other people cannot see me either. I am nervous, feeling out of place. T
he glow of the red-glass candleholders illuminates the tables, from certain angles they appear to float in the air. From other angles, the candles appear to be the center of a wagon wheel. A crowd of twenty roll around the small tables at the front of the stage; twenty more hover at the back of the room, where the bar sits with a few large booths. The Dark Room is a rectangle with high ceilings. Though the space is not packed, it feels crowded. I am the only person sitting alone.

  I am between homes. I live on a couch. Truthfully, I alternate beds at the apartment of two girls I know. I work at the world’s largest porn store. I am twenty-six and the last years of my life have been chaos. Holly and I split up shortly after I started seeing a counselor. The therapy lasted a year after I moved out of her house. My sessions became performances of revealing poems about myself to the poor man. I became bored with the narratives and the single-member audience. I made him uncomfortable. I married a woman and divorced her within nine months. The night she hit me in the head with a frying pan, I decided to become a true poet. The only relationship I believed I needed was with poetry. I thought this exactly as I signed the papers. The divorce was finalized by early spring. It is now mid-September.

  My life is not progressing. I promised myself to find friends who are poets. I realize a community of other artists will strengthen my resolve. Tonight, in this dark room, I am determined to live my dreams.

  “Next up, we’re going to have back-to-back poets named Jason,” the redheaded host of the evening announces. Her name is Jenna Weatherly. I met her when I signed up to read a poem. She made me feel right at home, even though I have never been here before. Her bubbly personality off the stage is represented in the powerful, political, yet funny and almost cabaret poems she has presented so far. I think she is outstanding and beautiful. The crowd loves her.

  “A first-time reader!” she says. I feel my stomach tighten and curdle. I think I am going to be sick. All of the sudden, I do not want to read my poem. But there is no backing out.