by Richard Long
Crazy old coot. I was pissed at him for giving me the bum’s rush, but I had my treasure to ease the sting. I went back to my hotel and stayed up all night reading and writing. Had some revelations that bordered on the sublime, but my mind kept erasing those visions of a divine realm bathed in ethereal light and replacing it with the sight of a cramped closet filled with hatred, torture and sadistic glee.
I went back the next day. The store was closed. I cursed. Even stomped my feet. My plane was leaving in a few hours. I took the flight, figuring I’d come back again soon and get another dose of that horror of horrors. But I kept putting it off and putting it off. When I finally returned three years later, the store was empty of everything but cobwebs.
I couldn’t get that sick scrawling script out of my head. I was so preoccupied with what I’d seen that I started reading books about serial killers. Suddenly, they were much more interesting than all the horror books or the occult mumbo jumbo. Scarier too. Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer. The real monsters. Monsters like I saw in the Skin Library. I learned a lot about them. What they did. How they did it. Where they lived. It was the last category that really got me into trouble.
One day while I was wandering around my favorite flea market, I saw a painting of a clown. The seller had no idea who the artist was—I could tell by the price tag and his complete lack of interest when I forked over three dollars for it. But I knew. Oh, yes, indeed. John Wayne Gacy. After I went home and proudly hung it on the wall, I began to wonder: What if you could get your hands on some of the real collectibles from serial killers? The things they collected?
A few days later, that crazy bug of an idea shaped itself into a plan. I would go on a road trip. Stop by some of the homes and haunting grounds of these real-life monsters. Maybe visit some of the police precincts where they were captured and see what I could find. See what might be available. At this point, I suppose it wouldn’t surprise you that I was quite successful in my quest. I’m quite sure that certain people would do almost anything for a peek at my collection.
Who could blame them for their curiosity? I mean everybody knows about the severed heads that Jeffrey Dahmer kept in his refrigerator. But who do you know that has one?
Rose felt wonderful. She stayed in bed long after Martin had left, feeling the steam drift from her body in little clouds. Her whole body sighed with satisfaction, a deep, relaxed “now I know what everybody’s been talking about” contentment that everybody wants, but nobody seems to get. She hugged her chest with a pillow and sighed again with another feeling she couldn’t comprehend, a deeper, more elemental emotion...a feeling like...no, not love.
It couldn’t be love.
She shook her head to clear away the schmaltzy cobwebs and stared at the table. There was a big leather pouch lying between the candles. She looked at it for a long time, torn between curiosity and the comfort of her bed. Curiosity won out, as always, pulling her to the table. The pouch was heavy, about ten pounds she guessed. She opened the drawstring and peeked inside. Holy shit. It was gold. Tiny ingots, fat round coins. She spilled the contents onto the table, the falling chunks ignited by the flickering candlelight. Some of them fell in puddles of milky wax, melting them all over again, painting them gold, painting everything gold, the deep dark corners of the room now gold, a gold disco ball of rays on the ceiling.
Martin pointed at the bag and the ugly barren kitchen before he left. His last words echoed in her mind. “Finish it,” he said.
She stood there naked, sweating gold, knowing what he wanted, wanting it as much. Yes, she would finish it and make a golden nest for them. For them?
“Let’s not get carried away. He’s just a guy with a big dick and a bag of gold.” Then she picked up a one-ounce ingot and added, “Well, that’s not too bad for starters.”
Martin felt terrible. He felt cold and he felt hot. Was he sick? He never got sick. He sat on his favorite park bench, rubbing the worn wood under his palm, willing it to heal him, to cure the chill of confusion sweeping over him like a fever.
What happened to him? What was he going to do? Panic came in waves, but between the crushing tides, he felt something different, something struggling to come to the surface. It was a feeling for the girl, a feeling like…
Suddenly, he looked up. He was here. He knew it.
Martin looked in every direction. Nothing. He tried to relax and rubbed the wood. Words floated by in his head, calming him like a nursery rhyme…over and over and over. He closed his eyes and willed the world to go away. As soon as he calmed himself, the waves came back, propelled by an image of Rose smiling at him.
He snapped his eyes open. There he was. Over by the fountain. Martin watched as he came toward him in slow motion, his long black overcoat rippling in the sun, his stringy white-blond hair blowing from his shoulders. He smelled the stale alcohol on his skin as he lowered his beefy bulk next to him. Then he looked into those blue-gray eyes, watched that mustache curl into a smile, and felt the oldest fear he had ever known.
“Hello, Martin,” the big man said.
Martin took a long, slow breath and answered, “Hello, Paul.”
Paul didn’t say anything. Neither did Martin. He just looked into Paul’s cold eyes and wondered what he wanted. Whatever it was, he knew it was going to hurt.
Rose did tattoos and she did them well. Rat-tat-tat-tat. Wipe off blood. Rat-tat-tat-tat. She did piercings too and liked them even more. She had gained quite a reputation for doing what were known as technical piercings. “Technical” because they represented a level of difficulty requiring an equally demanding level of skill. Uvula piercings, for example. If you’ve ever seen a Warner Brother’s cartoon you know what a uvula is. It’s that quivering punching bag blob of flesh dangling at the opening of your throat. The one that wobbles like a bowl of pudding whenever Elmer screams at Bugs.
Why would someone want it pierced? Don’t ask me. The challenges are significant, not the least of which includes the ability to hold your mouth open a really long time without moving even a teeny, weeny bit because someone is trying to lance that squirming sucker with a six-inch-long needle. And that’s just the piercee. The piercer has to take that needle and…well, it gets pretty hard to describe without pictures.
Technical, very technical.
Rose had become skilled at even more challenging body modifications, involving grafts and implants. She was the one to install the row of eleven stainless-steel wedges into the shaved skull of Jim “Stegosaurus” Robbins.
In most countries, you would need seven or eight years of intensive medical training to perform this type of surgery on another human being, or at least a well-forged diploma. But God Bless America, all you need here is a reasonably steady hand and a compulsive desire to carve and mutilate the flesh of your fellow tribal community members.
Anesthesia isn’t a problem. Nobody wants it. Pain is more than a fetish in this neck of the woods, it’s a badge of honor. The more you can take, the greater your standing in the ink and metal clique.
Rose was no slouch either. Pain and pleasure had become so entwined in her brain that she would give herself a new piercing just to take the edge off a rainy afternoon. She had fifteen earrings, three nose rings (which she would alternate, being one to frown on ostentation), two nipple rings and dumbbell combos, one tongue ball, five labial rings on either side and two clitoral rings (just because the first one felt so good).
Needless to say, airport check-ins were a nightmare.
Rose, still in bed, flicked her clit rings back and forth, debating whether to skip work altogether or stop in for a quick tongue job scheduled for the early afternoon.
She looked at the bag of gold and looked at the kitchen. She thought about the tongue job and how much she loved her work. She thought about Martin and his big horse cock and fingered her clit so furiously it sounded like the phone was ringing.
If she jumped out of bed right now and didn’t shower (as if she would shower and wash off the smell
of him!), she could do the tongue job, sell the gold and still make it downtown to the fabric shop before closing time. She didn’t like to rush but she couldn’t bear to wait. She wanted it all: the warm blood, the cold cash and most of all, she wanted what every New York City woman wants, whether she’s a manicured, pedicured Upper East Side, Hampton Jitney JAP or a downtown magenta-haired bone-through-the-nose juke joint junkie.
She wanted to shop.
“You look troubled,” Paul said. “What would a big strong man, a great fine animal like yourself be troubled with on such a lovely day as this?”
Martin hadn’t seen him since…he couldn’t remember. It seemed like no time had passed from the way Paul was acting. He spoke in that showy way of his, that Irish brogue managing to sound happy, sad and angry all at once. He waved his arms broadly for emphasis, scaring away the ambling pigeons. Scaring the old couple on the next bench. Scaring Martin too.
“Ahhhh...it’s a woman isn’t it?” Paul asked, shaking his head. “It’s always a woman that brings out the worst in a fine young lad…shaking up the quiet sureness, the certainty, the solid knowing that is the very core and center of a man.”
Martin listened in amazement, transfixed as always in his presence, wondering once again how Paul always knew exactly what was bothering him. Had he been spying on him? No. He just knew. If it had anything to with pain, he knew.
“You want it back, don’t you?” Paul continued with a wink. “You want to know again for certain what is what and which way to go and how to get there. You want to take away all that gray and get back to good clean old black and white again. Don’t you, boy?”
The word “boy” cut into Martin like a knife. He gulped on it, and the big back slap that punctuated Paul’s question, but he couldn’t help but answer.
“Yes,” he said, surprising himself by how much he meant it.
Paul sighed a great big Paul sigh. Endlessly tired and endlessly amused at the folly of it all. “Come back,” he whispered, his tongue darting out to lick the chapped corner of his lips. “Come back and make the world the way it used to be.”
Martin looked away. Silent. Numb. Aching. He ached for the lost blankness within himself. He ached for…
Paul cut him off before his thoughts could trace the echoes of Rose’s smiling face. “Are ya comin’ or not boy? I don’t have all day,” he grunted, standing up slowly.
Martin closed his eyes, grateful for the sunshine and the red warmth of his glowing closed eyelids. Then an image of Rose elbowed its way back into his brain and with it came another cascade of raw unfiltered emotions: joy, hope, lust, anger, fear and finally…panic. He opened his eyes. Paul was standing directly in front of him, blocking the sun from his face.
Martin shivered inside the long dark shadow. He closed his eyes one last time and the silence in his head told him what he had to do, what he had to learn all over again, from the man who taught him how.
How to stop feeling.
Rose was standing in front of a sign that screamed WE BUY GOLD! in foot-tall red letters. Good. She certainly wanted to sell some. She couldn’t wait to go shopping, but first she needed to unload the loot she’d been lugging around in her backpack.
“Feels like a pair of bricks,” she groaned, hitching the strap higher on her shoulder, adjusting the weight as she stared at the sign. The sign was in the window of one of those WE BUY GOLD! jewelry stores on 47th Street in the so-called diamond district.
Diamond district, flower district, transvestite hooker meat-packing district. How strange and stupid it seemed, all these little stores, clustered together on the same street, fighting toe to toe in some kind of crazy medieval marketplace. They all looked the same. How were you supposed to pick one out? What criteria did you use? The size of the sign? “Fuck it,” she said, opening the door, “I need to get to the fabric district.”
It took about twenty minutes to conclude the transaction. She had come prepared. She knew the current price of gold ($393.75 per troy ounce as of 4/4/96) and weighed the bag to the milligram on a scale one of her co-workers used for selling crystal methedrine (3807.065 grams). The jeweler’s scale was a bit off and she calmly informed him of his error. “You’re light,” she said. A big racket ensued, but when the dust settled she left with $48,195 dollars and 23 cents.
I watched it all from the sidewalk. When she left the store, I followed behind from a safe distance until she ducked into the Rockefeller Center subway entrance. As I saw her bobbing head disappear, I picked up the pace, running down the stairs after her like I was chasing Alice down the rabbit hole.
Rose adjusted her backpack, practically skipping down the stairs. Cash was so much lighter than gold. She looked at her watch and smiled. There was plenty of time to make it downtown before the fabric stores closed.
I got into the same crowded car with her, at the other end but still within eyesight.
Just when I thought this was getting too easy, she looked right at me. I avoided the direct eye contact, letting my eyes drift around the passengers near her instead. I saw her do the same, her mind visibly busy, trying to figure out where she had seen me before.
Bitch! Sure my hair was longer and I had a three-day growth of stubble, but still! Even so, I didn’t actually want her to recognize me, not yet anyway. I got more and more nervous, until I watched her shrug and go back to the typical zombie state of all subway riders, reading Dr. Zizmore’s ad for dermabrasion.
I was so preoccupied I almost lost Rose as she exited at Broadway. I trudged up the stairs after her, not so enthusiastic anymore. As I emerged on the street, the afternoon glow had settled in, the sky bathed in silky golds and blue velvets. My eyes found a solitary bird hovering between the old brick towers. I glanced back down and saw Rose moving away at a fast clip toward the dingy storefronts below Canal Street. I knew I had to catch up fast, but first I had to steal one last look at that lonely bird.
My eyes searched and searched, but I couldn’t find it.
Hell is a lot like death, not at all what you’re expecting, always much worse because it’s real. You can smell Hell before you see it. It smells like rotten meat left on the kitchen counter for a week. Like a rat that died inside the walls. Like a toilet that hasn’t been flushed in a week. It smells like Paul’s apartment.
When Martin opened the door, the first thing he noticed was the stench. He once read that the sense of smell was more effective at triggering memories than any of the other senses. Martin had tested it out on his various belongings and discovered this hypothesis was so consistently correct that he promptly scrubbed, soaked, washed and practically sandblasted everything he owned until the scents were blessedly neutralized.
He closed the door behind him and wrinkled his nose, the scent instantly transporting him back to his first visit here. He could picture it perfectly, walking up the stairs behind Paul, waiting as he pushed the door open. And then…that smell.
Martin tried to shake off the memory. Paul smiled and put his hand on Martin’s shoulder. He hugged him warmly, then led him down another hallway away from the big bright room.
It got darker and darker as they walked.
Paul occupied the whole top floor of the old condemned building. None of the other squatters living there made much of a fuss when he took it all for himself. Understandably. He had restructured many of the inside walls so the interior was a giant rambling maze of gloom. Well, someone had done it. Martin found it difficult to imagine Paul doing any real physical labor, although he could clearly picture him gleefully smashing through the drywall with a sledgehammer.
They kept walking, making a few turns here and there, until the sight of a dim light ahead triggered another memory of a previous journey through the pitch-black maze. He was alone. Walking in total darkness. Suddenly, there was a light up ahead, leading to a door, no, not a door, a wall that opened like a door into a room filled with candles and…
Martin was jarred from his memory by the grip of Paul’s hand on his shoulde
r. The light they were approaching came from a normal-sized door, only a few more steps ahead. Paul squeezed his hand more tightly and led him into a small room, lit by a single dim bulb hanging naked from the ceiling at the end of a long black cord. The bulb hovered weakly over a round wooden table, unadorned except for a carpenter’s hammer and a thick steel nail about six inches long. “Let’s make ourselves comfortable,” Paul said, waving his hand at two large oak chairs. “Getting hungry?”
“Yes,” Martin said, his eyes drifting to the hammer.
Paul’s face turned to stone the instant Martin broke eye contact with him. Martin waited for the explosion, but none came. Instead, Paul’s face brightened and he rubbed his hands together shouting, “Me too! I could eat a horse!”
Martin heard some thumping noises and a muffled rustle directly behind his chair. He kept looking into the smiling face across the table, the light above casting long shadows into the sockets of his twinkling eyes. He wasn’t about to turn away again to see where the thumping came from.
Paul stood. His face was changing again…to the dead mask. Martin called it the “dead mask” the first time he saw it. He never said it to Paul’s face, but even if he had, Paul probably would have liked it, so apt was the description. It was a true mask, perfect in its utter emptiness, a mask you can’t argue with or plead with for mercy, because there was nothing behind it.
So pure. So empty. So dead.
Paul wore the dead mask like he was floating in heaven. He looked at Martin for a long time, enjoying the stillness around them. When he spoke, it was in a dull whisper that tolled like an old church bell. “What has become of you, Martin? Are you like other men?”
