Boys of Life

by Paul Russell

  I can’t say when it first started to happen—I was just starting to calm down a little and get used to the things I was seeing up there. The candle light was wavery and dim, and mostly it was just arms and legs and backs and a dick that could’ve been anybody’s dick sliding in and out of what could’ve been anybody’s asshole. Anyway, I’ve never been all that good with faces in the first place—I’ve always said, if I see somebody I know from one city walking down the street in some other city, I wouldn’t even recognize them. Not even my own brother.

  It’d been eight years since I saw Ted. He was only fourteen when I left Owen, and lots of things can happen in eight years. I knew it was impossible, even when it suddenly clicked. It had to be impossible. I kept looking and looking at that angel, and most of the time he looked like some complete stranger I’d never seen before in my life, but other times—the way he smiled like the camera was always catching him off-guard—there was this terrible feeling I got.

  This all makes me really uncomfortable to talk about. What I have to say is, by the time Carlos and the angel finished making love in that room with all the candles and bleeding statues, I knew it was Ted, even though I still couldn’t see how it could possibly be Ted. There were even long stretches through the rest of the movie when I was able to convince myself I had it all wrong, and it was the pressure of watching Carlos in a movie that was making me see things. It just seemed impossible even somebody like Carlos could’ve come up with Ted, especially when he’d never even met him. And I also couldn’t imagine Ted ever being in any movie like Boys of Life. But then I remembered the sorts of things Carlos had been able to talk me into, and I’d start feeling cold all over again. Carlos would still be Carlos, I knew, even after all these years. If he wanted you to do something in one of his movies, he’d find a way of getting you to do it. He’d even make you think it was what you’d been wanting to do all along.

  I’ve done some pretty wild things in my time, which you already know about, but nothing I ever did got me ready to see the kinds of things I saw in that next hour and a half, once Carlos and Ted got those boys rounded up and started in on them. I remember being aware other people were getting up and leaving the theater, so that when the lights finally went up I was about the only one still in there.

  I’d been thinking I couldn’t stand this, I couldn’t stand to see another kid get fucked and then his tongue cut out or his dick lopped off, or shit on or hanged. I didn’t care whether all this was about how consumer society does to our minds what the Nazis did to people’s bodies, or any of the other stuff the movie kept saying it was about in these voiceovers that came and went during the torture scenes. I didn’t care whether the torture scenes were staged or real or what. And just when I couldn’t stand it anymore, that was the end. We were back outside the hacienda, everything looked so peaceful you’d never in a million years guess the kind of stuff that was going on behind those white plaster walls. Under this desert-looking tree these two little girls were playing a flute and a violin, the way little kids play who just barely know how, and these two little boys are dancing with each other, like they’re this old-fashioned couple dancing some waltz.

  “What’re you doing tomorrow?” the girl who’s playing the violin asks one of the little boys.

  He starts to answer her, but then the screen goes black and it just says in white letters against the black, IN MEMORIAM TED BLAIR 1966-1986.

  “No!” I remember yelling at that screen, this deep yell that started way down inside me and just went and went till there was no yell left. And before I knew it the words were off the screen, like maybe they’d never been there in the first place. I’d only imagined them—and that was the end.

  In one of the rows behind me, this woman was crying. The man she was with, the man with the pretentious voice, kept hugging her and saying, “It’s only a movie. It’s not real, it’s only a movie.”

  One of the ushers peeked in the door—I guess he heard my yell.

  “Everything okay in here?” he asked me. He was wearing this stupid uniform—blue pants, red jacket—and carrying a flashlight.

  “What did that say on the screen?” I asked him.

  “What did what say?”

  “There at the end,” I told him.

  But he just shrugged. He hadn’t seen it. “Personally,” he said, “I don’t think people have any business watching stuff like that, is what I think.”

  “Well fuck you,” I told him. It was some last bit of loyalty to Carlos.

  “You can’t talk like that in here,” he warned me.

  Out in the lobby, a few brave people had made it in for the next show. I could hear the crowd outside shouting “Shame! Shame!” but it was dark by now, so I couldn’t see them. It felt like there were thousands of them, though.

  I didn’t know what to do. I could see the usher keeping his eye on me. For a minute I thought, Maybe this is what having a heart attack feels like—I was all out of breath, my chest was throbbing like somebody was sitting on it. I climbed the stairs up to the projection booth.

  A girl who looked like a college student was in there. She was rewinding the movie.

  I think I startled her—the way I tore into the booth without knocking or anything.

  “This is private up here,” she said. “Employees only.”

  “Look,” I told her, “Can you play back just the last minute of that movie? Just the very end. It’s very very important to me.”

  Even though they had the air conditioning on full blast in that theater, I was sweating like crazy—which in fact is what she probably thought I was.

  “It’s already rewinding,” she said. She was very edgy with me, I think she was trying to figure out how to make a dash for it if I tried anything. “Nothing I can do,” she told me. “You can stay and watch it again. You don’t have to buy a new ticket.”

  I could hear the usher coming up the stairs behind me. “Okay,” I told her. “Sorry to bother you.”

  The usher gave me this hard look. He was holding his flashlight like a club. I think I was making everybody extremely nervous—which I didn’t want to do, they were already nervous enough with that crowd outside. It was just that I was out of my head there for a few minutes.

  “I’ll watch the movie again,” I told the usher. “She just told me I could.” He looked at me as I passed by him and hefted his flashlight like it was going to keep me in line.

  The second time, it was worse. Everything started to come together, the ending with the beginning and all the things I’d figured out in between. I was crying through most of it, which I guess was a good thing, because the more I cried the calmer I got. I knew what the worst was going to be—there couldn’t be any surprises this time around. It was like I was already starting to grieve.

  Ted, I was crying, Ted, Ted. Because there was my brother, there he was, and he was dead.

  I should put in here, for the record, what Carlos wrote at the beginning, that poem he made out of his own blood and then passed out from.

  Maybe it was silly how I hugged that tree the winter I drove out of Hermillosa so drunk I could barely see & laughed where I nailed him down nailed his dick down because they called yesterday from the hospital where he died a week after I nailed him & I hugged that tree & cried I held on tight to my boy wanted to make him live wanted to love him again see his face like all God’s face light up Drunk crying 50 years old I went down in the dirt where his blood spilled I got the dirt in my eyes in my nose my mouth into cockhole & asshole I burrowed into my boy’s blood crying where I nailed his dick to a tree.

  I think I mentioned somewhere earlier how Carlos wrote three books of poems before he ever made his first movie, and nobody ever paid any attention to those poems. I guess you could say it took Ted Blair to finally make Carlos into a poet anybody’d ever heard of.

  ANYBODY WHO SAW ME COME REELING OUT OF that theater probably thought I was completely drunk. And I was, in a way. I managed to climb into my truck—but the
n I just sat there for the longest time. I couldn’t start the engine, and even if I had I wouldn’t’ve known where to go or what to do. I kept thinking, This is it, this is it. But I didn’t know what It was. I only knew something had happened that finished everything else. Everything that’d started a long time ago and been working itself out till now.

  The crowd outside had all disappeared by then—I guess they figured there’s only so much you can do, and anyway most of them had to go to work the next day. Pretty soon even the people who’d been in the theater had driven away too, and I was alone there in the parking lot. I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there before a police car pulled up next to me and stopped. I guess they were patrolling pretty thoroughly that night. Probably he thought I had a can of gasoline and was going to torch the place, but that was the furthest thing from my mind. Still, I had the strangest feeling—like finally, after all these years, I’d been caught. And I wasn’t going to put up a fight—I just sat there like some fugitive who’s been run to ground.

  The policeman looked a little jumpy, but he rested his elbows on the window of my truck to try and hide it. He was smiling this goofy smile, like it embarrassed him to be doing this. “Anything wrong?” he asked.

  Like I could tell him what was wrong.

  “I’m fine,” I told him.

  “That’s good,” said the policeman. He still seemed embarrassed. “This lot is, uh, closed right now. We had a little ruckus here this afternoon, so if you wouldn’t mind parking somewhere else that’d be just fine.”

  “I know,” I told him. “I was just going.”

  He sort of nodded, like he didn’t really believe me and was wondering what he was supposed to do next. Off in the distance there was a siren, but we both realized after a second that it didn’t have anything to do with us. I started the truck’s engine up. He nodded again, and I eased the truck away from him. It must’ve been midnight. The streets were empty, and I felt like I was about to explode.

  I kept trying to remember Ted, but I couldn’t. Ted the way he’d been when he was my brother. But all I could see was that movie, and who he was in that movie—the bad angel dressed all in white who tortures and kills pretty-looking Mexican boys. No Ted I could recognize, but it was Ted, it was Ted playing his part in the movie, it was Ted who was somehow dead now, I didn’t know how. It was the Ted I’d recognized even before the movie came to an end. I tried to think about things we did together when we were kids, and what he looked like then—but everything was a blank. That movie took it right away from me.

  The only thing I knew was, when I was a kid and Ted was a kid I was crazy about him. I was in love with him. I never knew it, but I was in love with him and of course you can’t be in love with your brother, not the way I was in love with him when we used to swim around together in the pool outside the Paradise Grotto.

  Everything else, Carlos and New York and the bars and Monica—it all just followed from me loving Ted when we were kids. That started it, because if I hadn’t loved Ted I wouldn’t’ve felt so shut out and sad hearing him dry-humping the mattress all alone in that trailer of ours, and with Carlos I wasn’t alone that way. It was the natural thing for me to take off with Carlos the way I did and be in his movies or any of the other scenes he ever sprung on me down through all those years, and however Carlos came to find Ted wouldn’t’ve happened if I hadn’t known Carlos in the first place, and Ted wouldn’t be dead now.

  I didn’t have any idea where I was driving—I was just driving around aimlessly, though where I ended up was at Tom Lee Park on the river bluff.

  It was after midnight, and nobody was around except this one car with its lights off—and you could tell by the way it was rocking what was going on in there. In front of me I could see the monument to Tom Lee: A WORTHY NEGRO. I don’t know why I did what I did next, but suddenly I was out of the truck and scrambling down the steep bank to the river. Before I knew it I was in the water, up to my knees, to my waist—and then the river current took hold of me like a fist taking me up. It knocked me under and when I came bobbing up I could see the lights in the skyscrapers up on the bluff, and I knew the river was shooting me downstream.

  I hadn’t swum in years. I guess maybe I was hoping if I drowned then that would solve everything and I wouldn’t have to do anything. Actually, I don’t think I was thinking much of anything. I was just doing something because I didn’t have any idea what else to do.

  I kept managing to come up for air, though I kept getting these mouthfuls of ugly-tasting water too—and I tried to swim toward shore. But the river kept pushing me on—I could see the bank sliding past, incredibly fast—and the river went on tugging me out into the current no matter how hard I kept trying to swim against it. I thought about just letting go and having it carry me. I used to watch all that river running past and think how it went to New Orleans and then out into the ocean, and it used to comfort me somehow to think that—but I never thought I’d be in the middle of it.

  I guess I wanted something I thought the river was going to give me, but then when it didn’t I started fighting it. I must’ve gotten carried about a mile downstream, because I remember going past the piers of the Interstate 55 bridge, and when the current pressed around those piers it let me get some momentum and I drove on in toward shore.

  I was trembling all over, coughing up big spews of muddy water, and my wallet was gone. But I’d been down in the river and come back again. I was laughing too, I think—and maybe crying some. And just gasping and gasping at all those lungs full of night air. I lay on my back there on the muddy sand. It was a hazy night, and the sky was all orange with the glow of the city. I felt like if I was supposed to’ve died right then, I would have. But I wasn’t supposed to, and so I was still alive. Ted was dead, but here I was still alive.

  And somewhere Carlos was alive too.

  I knew I had to find him. Whether he knew it or not, he wanted me to find him—and I was going to do it.

  I guess I felt all sorts of things, but mostly just amazed, if that makes any sense. Amazed by everything. Stunned by it, the way you might be stunned to look up at some night sky way out in the country and see all those clear stars pressing down on you, and their light that’s coming from so far away that some of those stars are completely burned out before their light ever gets to you. Which is all something I know because Carlos once told it to me, I think on the roof of that apartment in New York—how the stars are like ghosts, and people can be the same way, their light can come to you from a long way off and reach you only after they’ve already gone and burned themselves out completely.

  I had this terrific headache, and a long scratch down my left arm that was bleeding. I took off my T-shirt and tried to wrap it into some kind of tourniquet—but the cloth was so wet it didn’t really work, so I decided it wasn’t bleeding that bad and I’d let it alone. I guess making that tourniquet was just something to do while my head finished clearing up.

  I didn’t quite know where I was—south of the bridge, but that was all I was sure about. I picked myself up and the first thing I saw in the dark in front of me was some woods, and when I walked toward them I saw that in the middle of trees was this boat, an old steamboat. It didn’t make any sense. The boards had all split apart, trees were growing up through it and it was covered in vines. For a minute it seemed completely impossible. I thought maybe I really was dead after all, with dead being just some place where nothing made sense, where there were boats sitting high and dry in the woods with trees growing up through their hulls.

  But I wasn’t dead. I went on past that boat which turned out to be real—at least I think it was real. Somebody should maybe go below the bluffs south of the Interstate 55 bridge in Memphis and see if there really is an old steamboat in the woods. The bluff turned out not to be as steep as I thought, and I was able to scramble on up to the top. Then the river was down below me again—this dark flat plain I couldn’t believe I’d almost lost my life in just a few minutes ago
.

  It took me about an hour to walk back to where the truck was. I didn’t pass a soul—there was that eerie late-at-night feeling when you think it’s completely possible everybody else has died, and you’re the only one left. The only sign of life was that car in the parking lot of Tom Lee Park, just where it was when I left and still rocking back and forth on its springs. I wondered if the whole time I was drowning those two people had kept on fucking, not knowing for an instant anything else was happening in the world. I liked those two in that car—I didn’t know anything about them, I never would, but somehow I thought maybe it was their living it up like they did that’d saved me in the river, and they’d never know it.

  I was pretty much dried off, though there was this film of mud on me, and when I ran my hand through my hair it was all stiff and tangled. When I got in the truck and looked in the mirror, I was shocked—it was still me, still my face—but it also didn’t have a thing to do with me. I don’t know whether being in the river added something, or took something away, but I think I’d have to say that ever since that moment there’s been something different about me that’s never quite gotten back straight.

  Which if you think I’m trying to get out of something here, I’m not.

  What happened next was, I passed out. Maybe it was the shock of everything finally settling in, or maybe just sheer exhaustion from my fight with the river—but the next thing I knew, it was dawn and I was slumped over the steering wheel like some dead man. For a minute, in that hazy gray light, I was disoriented—but then something in me snapped to. I hooked into this pure sharp electricity that everybody must have stored away somewhere deep in them, but they never stumble on it.