Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  “Yeah, see you around,” I told him. He didn’t hug me or shake my hand or anything—though he did hug Carlos. Carlos held him like that, facing me and looking over Scott’s shoulder right into my eyes for the longest time—this look I can still remember but have no idea what it meant, only that I think I knew it from seeing it in some of those pictures in the library book Sammy took me to see that time.

  EARL WAS IN HERE AGAIN TODAY, BRINGING ME A couple of articles I’d asked him for. He took the opportunity to get out those pictures of his kids one more time. Does he really not remember he’s showed them to me?

  Today he said, “I love my boys. I don’t ever want anything to happen to them. But they’re growing up, Tony. I can’t stop that. I came home yesterday and my wife, Doreen, was crazy—out of her head crazy. You see, the boys went out on their bikes—they ride around the block, but we don’t let them go farther than that. So they went out on their bikes, but they didn’t come back. It was seven o’clock, pitch dark, and they still weren’t back. ‘Boys’ll be boys,’ I told her. But Tony, I had this fright. Sure, they got back okay—turned out they’d been at some friend’s house. He’d got this electric train set for his birthday, and they went and forgot all about the time. You know: boys’ll be boys.

  “But Doreen was furious. She went out in the backyard and cut a switch, and she switched them right there in the kitchen. Made them take their pants down and everything. And you know what one of them said? He turned to his mother and said, ‘Now what do you think this is gonna prove?’

  “I guess I understand why Doreen was so furious. She loves those boys as much as I do. But I got this awful feeling, Tony—like I was looking into the future. You know how you can’t hold onto anything? That’s what I was looking at.’’

  Looking at Earl’s face while he told me all that, I realized something. I’d seen that look before: this woman on the jury, who kept looking at me the same way. For three weeks, no matter who was on the witness stand or what was getting said, she just kept looking at me—this black woman, I guess about sixty, sixty-five. One thing about her—she wore a turquoise-blue dress one day, and a green dress the next, and then back to the turquoise and then the day after that it’d be the green one again. All through that trial, only two dresses. And the same pillbox hat: rainbow-colored, made out of feathers. You could tell life hadn’t been too great to her. But there she was, doing her jury duty. And looking at me the whole time like I had some kind of answer to all the stuff that was getting said. Like everything that got said was some kind of question to her, and she was desperate to know the answer.

  I’ve got lots of reasons for writing all this, but that old black woman’s one of them. Earl too. I don’t imagine I can clear anything up for either of them, but I can at least try to tell my side of things the way they really happened—even if it does make me look bad sometimes. Because I feel sick to my stomach when I think about what went on at that trial. It was my trial, right? I should at least’ve called a few of the shots. But I didn’t. I let my lawyer do everything the way he wanted. I let him stand up there and call Carlos a “totally unnecessary human being.’’ I let him say that. I let him tell the jury, with his voice all emotional like a preacher’s when he gets to the part of the sermon where he asks for money, how Carlos went and took this young kid, practically stole him out of his mother’s house. How he destroyed my life, and then wasn’t content to just throw me away when he was finished with me, but had to go on hounding me even when I tried to find some normal life for myself.

  I let my lawyer say that, I guess because I was scared and anything he could say to convince those people sitting there on the jury that what I did was what I had to do, then I was going to let him say it. I didn’t know any better. I was too scared of dying.

  For the record, I’m taking back everything my lawyer said. This time around, I’m trying to get it right.

  DURING THOSE THREE YEARS BETWEEN THE TIME we finished making The Gospel and when I met Monica, we made what lots of people think are some of Carlos’s best movies: The Only Bitterness of Anna, which was Verbena’s big acting role and I had only this tiny part in; Creeping Bent, starring me and Sammy, which we filmed on that old estate up the Hudson River; and Cloud Pavane, that documentary he did about people living down in the subway tunnels. They were tamer than The Gospel, which is why they got released and shown around. But like I said earlier, without making The Gospel and then stashing it away like it was some kind of wound he didn’t want anybody else to know about, he couldn’t have made any of the others.

  During all that time Carlos and I never had sex again after that night when he said we shouldn’t. That changed lots of things between us. It was pretty hard for me for a while, just to have it end like that. Making The Gospel, though, put some kind of barrier between the way we used to be, and the way we were now, and it didn’t really seem like either of us could go back. Once I’d fucked Scott, that was sort of it between us—for us to have sex anymore might’ve been fun, but it also would’ve been pointless. Even I could understand that.

  It freed me up, in sort of the same way that going with Sammy to the public library that first time had freed me up. It wasn’t long after we made The Gospel before I was going out on my own and getting dates. That was Carlos’s word for it—he treated my dates the way he’d treated my running all over the city that first winter: like some great adventure that I’d learn tons from. And he was right.

  He’d always say, “So, do you have a date?” Which meant, Was I planning to go out to Uncle Charlie’s or the St. Mark’s Baths and pick somebody up and fuck them? And lots of nights—or afternoons, or even mornings—the answer was yes. I guess I just sort of said, Fuck it, and once I said that I wasn’t scared anymore. I didn’t mind going out all hours of the night all over the city, just looking around to see what was what. And once you start looking, at least in New York, it’s all there—the bars, the clubs, the baths. If I couldn’t have Carlos, then I was going to have everything else.

  I had bike messengers and telephone repairmen, and a cop, and a businessman from Uganda in the Plaza Hotel, who paid me six hundred dollars. I had models who were doing shoots for GQ, and a ballet dancer and about twenty different waiters. I had two French sailors from the SS Joan of Arc, and a graduate student from NYU who was writing his dissertation on the early films of Carlos Reichart and of course had no idea who I was. I had a fifteen-year-old Puerto Rican drag queen who said his name was Ramonda Ramrod with the biggest dick I ever saw, and a Pakistani cab driver who took me to Queens and we did it in the back of his cab parked on the shoulder of the BQE in broad daylight.

  I never stopped wanting Carlos to fuck me again, but he never did. He’d gone on to other things, and I had to respect that. I had to respect him for knowing where things stopped. It didn’t change anything else between us. In fact, you could say the instant he stopped fucking me, Carlos started treating me like one of the important people in The Company, somebody he depended on, like Sammy or Verbena or Seth. I started to understand how that was Carlos’s pattern with people—he set his mark on them, and then when he knew he had them, he went on to collect somebody else. I don’t resent that—I think I did for a while, but I don’t anymore.

  I think I even remember the exact instant I stopped resenting it. I’d been at this bar and got picked up by some guy I didn’t find all that great-looking, but that didn’t matter. During the big sleep—which is what I call those years—I was interested in just seeing whatever would happen and I didn’t really care with who. So we were walking down the Bowery toward this guy’s apartment—it was late at night, probably four o’clock—and somebody was coming toward us along the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, and I thought to myself how that person looked completely lonely and sad.

  Then I saw it was Carlos. I don’t know where he was coming from—he might have been up all night editing and just taken the train in from Brooklyn. Maybe he’d been trailing some boy around town but he’d fina
lly lost the scent. Who knows? We didn’t say anything—but we looked at each other and just nodded as we passed. It was like we were saying to each other, Well, what do you know? Like we knew everything we had to say, so there wasn’t any reason to stop and talk.

  The guy I was with—I’ve completely forgotten everything about him—didn’t know a thing about what was happening, and that was the way it should be. It was still me and Carlos, however things looked, and we both knew that. I remember thinking, almost saying it out loud while we walked on down the street, You’ve got me in your hands, Carlos, you know you’ve got me in your hands.

  One other big thing happened to me in all that time: I stopped drinking. I mean, I didn’t stop drinking totally, but I changed a lot from that kid I used to be, who couldn’t get through the day without taking a couple of shots of Canadian Club every hour to keep me steady. Now, a couple of beers and I was content. No more Canadian Club. It’s funny, but part of what stopped me from drinking was hanging out in bars trying to pick up guys I thought were sexy. The last thing I wanted was to be sloshed in Uncle Charlie’s—there was too much to pay attention to.

  It’s hard to put my finger on why I stopped being the drunkard kid I was and started being some kind of adult, but I think it started in that warehouse in Brooklyn. I don’t know whether Carlos knew it at the time, but those three days he locked me up in that warehouse were the longest time in five years I’d gone without a drink, and it was pretty severe. To be honest—the main reason I wanted to leave there, that time Carlos pulled the pistol on me, wasn’t because I’d seen Scott shooting up. That was just an excuse. The real reason was, I needed a drink, and I was embarrassed to tell Carlos I was dying for a drink, I was out of control for a drink. So when I saw Scott with his needle, that did it.

  Actually, Carlos must’ve known what was going on with me. That must’ve been one of the reasons he locked me up there in the first place. I’ll never know for sure, but what happened was, when I came out of that warehouse after those three days, my first thought was that I had to get to the nearest bar and slug something into my system to keep it going.

  I remember standing there on the street outside that warehouse, with everybody packing the van to go back to Manhattan, and wondering how soon I was going to be able to snatch a drink somewhere. Wondering whether there might be some bar around the corner where I could just disappear.

  I set out to see. At the end of the street, under these concrete piers that held up an elevated expressway, there was this stripped-down car. I wandered over to it—everything you could take out of it had gotten taken away, there was nothing left. And it’d been burned too—it was this rusty-black color. So while Carlos and Seth and Verbena were loading the camera equipment, I climbed inside that car skeleton. I don’t know why I did—it was odd sitting in there, not going anywhere. There were a bunch of needle works lying around on the floorboard, and a couple of condoms—which made me remember this story I’d heard, I can’t remember where, of somebody who went around picking up used condoms off the ground and sucking the come out of them. I just sat there and looked at those condoms and thought about that. It didn’t make me sad or gross me out or anything—it was just something to think about while I could hear Carlos’s voice talking in the distance, and then Verbena, and the sounds of them loading the van. I thought about all the things that must’ve happened in that burned-out car, and how nobody would ever know.

  I picked up one of those condoms from off the floor and held it between my fingers. It’d been there for a while, whatever come was in its tip dried up a long time ago. But I remembered something from way back—what Carlos had once said to me the first time he ever gave me a blow job, when he said how your come holds all the information there is about you, and I thought about the dried-up come in that condom and how that was true here too, only here it was just thrown away, all that information.

  When it was time to leave Carlos came over to me—I guess he’d seen me sitting there in that car, but he hadn’t wanted to bother me. He probably figured I’d earned a few minutes to myself.

  “Tony, you okay?” he asked me, leaning in at the window.

  “Dad,” I told him, “you never gave me a car for my birthday.”

  It just came into my head to say that.

  “Your old dad’s not a rich man,” Carlos said, playing along with it. I don’t know whether he thought it was odd or not. “Your old dad gives you what he can.”

  “I know,” I told him.

  And I think I did know. I felt fine. I felt quiet. When we got back to Manhattan I didn’t go to a bar like I’d planned. I went home and fell asleep for a long time, and when I woke up I wasn’t an alcoholic anymore, which was the first time in probably six years.

  Of course I’ve never stopped drinking completely. But even though there were always nights where I’d drift back to the Canadian Club, it was only once every three months or so and then I was back on the wagon again. It’s some old self I have to get out of my system, and when I drain it dry, then that’s it.

  One other thing I should say here too, which somehow in my mind’s all connected up with me not drinking anymore. About a month or so after we finished making The Gospel, Carlos dumped Scott Farris just like he dumped me. It was all for still some other kid who I don’t think I ever met—there were a bunch of them in those years, though they never lasted very long. And for Scott, some pretty bad things happened one after the other. He got into big trouble back at his prep school for dealing, and there was some trial where he fingered somebody completely other than Carlos—which I’m sure is some twisted-up story if only I knew it—and then he ended up in a detox program.

  Seth was the one who told me all that—Carlos never said a word about it, even during the trial when he must’ve been pretty nervous that anything could happen. But Carlos and I never talked about Scott after The Gospel—it was like he never existed. When I say Carlos dumped Scott the way he dumped me, dump’s not the right word, even though I probably would’ve felt like it was exactly the right word at the time. You could say he eased us back down—that’s more what it was than dumping, because I have to say about Carlos that you never for an instant got the sense he stopped loving you just because he moved on to somebody else. In fact, I think I only started to understand that he loved me after he did dump me.

  I think now that in some way he had to move through that stage of completely desperate fucking with somebody before he learned how to love them. Maybe I’m trying to make myself feel better—I don’t see any reason why I should at this point, but maybe I still am. But I really think whatever relation we had with each other grew up the instant he moved on to Scott. I think in a way what it told me was—all right, from now on you’re going to have help, you know where help is, but the only person who’s going to save you is you. Because, like I said, I basically stopped drinking, and for a while I even got this on-again off-again job working in a paint supply store on Second Avenue—which Carlos didn’t ask me to do, I just did it because I thought I needed to. I started to go around thinking about myself as this regular person who’s got his head down against the wind but he’s determined to make it. And I think the same thing went for Scott too, what with the detox program and everything. I think if you asked him he’d give Carlos some kind of credit too.

  Every once in a while over the next few years I’d run into Scott. Whenever that happened, we were always friendly—I don’t think he blamed me for the movie at all, I think in fact he felt like we’d been through this certain thing together, and that was some bond we had.

  I think it was some kind of politeness on both our parts that we never talked about Carlos, even though something would come up now and then and we’d both just look at each other and know.

  I remember the one time we ever did talk about Carlos. It was in the winter, late at night, and I’d wandered into this bar off Christopher Street. I wasn’t drinking, I was just checking out various places to see if there was anybody I
wanted to go home with. Or not even go home with—just guys to meet and talk to. And there was Scott sitting at the bar drinking some tropical-looking fag drink. Once the prep school kid, always the prep school kid. He had on this black leather jacket that looked great.

  I edged in beside him at the bar.

  “So, Tony Blair,’’ he said.

  I was always surprised when he remembered my name. In lots of ways it was like we didn’t know anything about each other—though it was also strange to look at him and think, I’ve pissed on this guy’s face. I’ve had my fist inside him.

  Scott had had a few drinks already. I was standing with my foot on the lower rung of his bar stool, and he took my knee and pulled it in so it rested against his crotch. I was a little surprised by that, but I kept my knee there.

  It’s odd how one thing’ll trigger something else. What I remembered the instant he did that was something I always told myself I meant to ask Scott if I ever saw him again, but then whenever I did see him, I’d forget. But this night I remembered it.

  “That junk you used to be on,’’ I asked him. “Who got that stuff for you?”

  He just looked at me like he didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “Carlos got it for you, didn’t he? You can tell me. I never see Carlos these days.”

  Scott smiled that smile of his that was going to get him through life. I put some pressure on his crotch with my knee, which I guess he liked. He ordered himself another drink.

  “Don’t you want anything?” he asked me. “I’ll buy.”

  “I want to know if Carlos was giving dope to little kids. That’s what I want.”

  “You mean me in particular?”

  “Yeah. For starters.”

  He swirled his new drink with the little umbrella that was stuck in it. I’d have been embarrassed to drink something like that, but he was smiling at it like it was some friend of his.