“I’m going to ask you to do something for me, Ari.”
Ari looks at him, every sharp line in his gaunt face etched with exhaustion. The eyes are barely holding on.
“Will you show me your arms?”
A beat. Then the eyes flare into life. “What, you think I’m fucking high?”
Jav holds his gaze and holds still.
In a jarring, explosive movement, Ari rips off his jacket. He wears a short-sleeved T-shirt beneath, his arms like pipestems in the sleeves. He thrusts them over the desk toward Jav. Blue veins at his wrists and at the juncture of his elbows in clear, pale skin. No track marks. “Happy?”
“Very,” Jav says quietly.
“I don’t touch that shit.”
“Thank you for showing me.”
The hands curl into fists. “You have no fucking idea what it was like.”
“No, I don’t.”
Ari stands up abruptly, his chair falling over backwards behind him. With something close to a sneer, he goes for his belt buckle. “Want me to drop ‘em? You want to check my legs next, right? When my old man couldn’t find veins in his arms anymore, he went for his feet. But your feet suck for shooting up. Veins are too small, it’s hard to register a hit. And it takes forever to reach your brain…”
Tired himself and weary of the world where things like this are allowed to happen, Jav stares back stupidly.
“There’s a great vein in your groin,” Ari says. “But he was scared to use that one. A friend of his missed the vein and got the artery once. Man, that was some fucked up shit.”
“Ari—”
“You want to know the last time I ate? At home? My old man had better things to do with money. And with me.”
Jav stands up slowly, walks around the desk to right Ari’s chair. “Tell me.” He sits again but Ari doesn’t.
“When he had no money left? Oh, then it got fun. Shit started disappearing right and left. Electronics first. Then appliances. My mother’s jewelry. My art supplies, until I started locking them up. Motherfucker cleaned out my college savings. I had to start hiding my cash. He’d beat the shit out of me looking for it. And then he—”
He cuts off so fast, another alarm goes off in Jav’s head. A surge of anger behind his eyeballs.
Not good. This is not good.
“He what?” Jav says softly.
“Nothing.” Ari sits, breathing hard. “I got nothing now. Nothing except my dog. He’s all I got.”
“I’ll get you to him. I promise.”
A long time while Ari pulls himself together. Jav wishes he would cry and prays he doesn’t.
Slowly, Ari pulls his jacket back on. “So where’s this haven you’re taking me?”
With little thought, Jav’s original plan of the county’s halfway house is scrapped. “Lark House,” he says. “In Guelisten.”
A grunted chuckle. “Where the rich people live? What’s a juvy home doing there?”
“It’s not juvy. It’s a group home for transitional living.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
“Kids who are too old to be placed in foster care. Or kids who have aged out of foster care and are transitioning into independent living. It’s also a shelter for runaway teens.”
Ari picks up the pencil and twirls it through his fingers. “When do you age out?”
“Eighteen.”
“I’m seventeen.”
Going on forty, Jav thinks. “I know.”
“So… What, I belong to the state now?”
“Unless your parents named a legal guardian in their will. Did they have a will?”
“Doubt it.”
“Did they have a safe deposit box? Strongbox?”
“They sold everything.”
“You can’t sell papers. We’ll get into the house to look.”
“But if there’s nobody, and there isn’t, I’m a ward of the state until I’m eighteen?”
Jav nods this time.
“So who’s gonna…” Ari looks around, mouth working to formulate a question. “Who’s gonna help me?”
“I am.”
A long moment of eye contact, through which Ari blinks.
“This place… Lark House?”
“It’s a good place,” Jav says. “One of the best. Privately run.”
“It’s not like a…you know.”
“Jail?”
“Yeah.”
“No. It’s not Morgantown. It’s not a detention center.”
“I don’t want anyone…” Ari swallows and looks away. “I don’t want anyone touching me.”
Oh dear God. “No one will touch you.” Jav’s throat aches over the words and he digs fingernails hard into his leg to keep it together.
“I mean it. I’ll sleep on the street first.”
“No one will touch you. Go there tonight. We’ll only look at tonight. You can get something to eat. A hot drink. A place to put your head down. It’s safe. I give you my word.”
“Do I have to go?”
Jav thinks about it. “If they release you to me, then technically I have to take you somewhere secure. I’m accountable.” He attempts humor. “I could ask my father if there’s room here in the holding tank?”
“Who’s your father?”
“Sargent Landes. White hair. Gold tooth here.” Jav points to one of his own incisors. Rafael lost that tooth in a drug bust ten years ago. The gold replacement was his reward to himself.
“He’s the one who called Animal Control,” Ari says absently. The pencil is properly in his fingers now and he’s sketching a series of lines.
“He loves dogs.”
“You have one?”
I have Thomas, Jav thinks. “No. My apartment building doesn’t allow pets.”
Ari sighs, pushes the paper away. “All right.”
“All right?”
“I’ll go. I’m tired.”
“You’ve been tired a long time.”
Ari nods.
Jav drives Ari to Lark House. They’re kind there. He’s shown to a room and Ari seems glad its door can be locked from the inside. They get him a toothbrush, a pair of sweatpants. A charger for his phone.
“Are you hungry?”
Ari seems fascinated with the new toothbrush in its shrink wrapping. “No.”
Jav leaves his business card. “I’ll come back in the morning.” Which is only a few hours away. He’s supposed to meet Thomas for breakfast but fuck it, Thomas is getting on his last nerve these days anyway. To the point where Jav will spend a night on his parents’ couch and deal with his mother ignoring him.
His Father’s Arm
You can start to see it, right? Or at least, you can start to see Jav and Ari. They’re just cloaked in different costumes.
I let them keep trying things on. They led and I followed. Anything that came into my weird head went down on paper, no questions asked.
Sometimes, though, a thing goes from my head to the paper to the final draft almost perfectly intact. While everything around it shifts and rearranges and tangles, the idea stays magically the same and I know it belongs.
After sketching the scenes you just read, I wrote four chapters which made it almost verbatim into the final draft of Larks. When Jav picks Ari up from Lark House and they go to the coffee shop. Deane comes running through, steals a danish and Ari’s heart as well. Ari reuniting with his dog, meeting Alex. Going to the diner with Jav and then back to Lark House, exhausted and overwhelmed. These things were gelang from the start.
Sometimes things don’t belong. Not that they aren’t good. It’s just not their time. I started down a road with Ari and couldn’t continue, because his story would’ve become the whole book. It wasn’t something I could touch on a little and then have easily or magically resolved.
Simply put, what ended up being Geno Caan’s story was originally Ari’s story.
I’ll show you. —SLQR
Back in his room he gets out one of his sketchbooks and his pencils. His favorite way to draw is kneeling at the side of the bed and working on the mattress. He falls into his work, drawing bits of Deane Penda. A single grey eye, golden flecks by the pupil. He turns the page and sketches her leg. His thumb shades, bringing out the muscle definition.
He puts the pencil down, turns away from the bed and pitches forward onto his hands. He tries, for the first time in years, to do some pushups. He used to be able to fall out bed in the mornings and crank out a hundred. He can barely do ten now. His arms tremble and his heart bangs wildly against his ribs.
He’s so tired.
Heart still thumping, he breaks the new toothbrush out of its plastic wrap and uses it.
He gets into bed. Behind his closed lids he sees warm honey hair and grey eyes. Sculpted legs. For the first time in years, his own hand slides down the front of his sweatpants.
He falls asleep smiling.
He wakes out of a dream, his stomach iron, the bile rising up in the back of his throat. Moonlight coming through the window reflects off the crumpled plastic wrap on the desk.
“You play sports?” Deane Penda had asked.
“Not anymore.”
Once, Ari played football and wrestled. He was all-county his freshman year. Sophomore year, his coaches talked of scholarships. He was sixteen. Fit and built and strong. He had a girlfriend with a heart-shaped ass who loved to fuck him. Female eyes followed wherever he went.
Then his father’s eyes started growing desperate. Things disappeared. The house grew bare. Ari went to take money out from the ATM and overdrawn flashed up on the screen.
His father had friends over. Dealers. His father would sell anything to get a fix.
Eyes followed him. Watching as he ate. He was an athlete. He ate constantly. He had a lot of muscle to feed.
It must have been in his food that first time. Rohypnol or liquid ecstasy or Special K. It wasn’t enough to knock him out. Too much muscle. But enough to keep him from fighting back when that hand went down the front of his sweatpants.
His father made two hundred bucks.
“Two fifty if they didn’t have to slip you something,” his father said afterward. “You got what these guys want. They have what I want. You could help me out and take a cut. Start pulling your weight around here.”
Ari learned quickly not to eat at home. Like a suspicious medieval king, he ate nothing he hadn’t kept his eyes on at all stages of preparation. Nothing he didn’t see others eat first.
Then they got him by putting the shit on his toothbrush.
Another two hundred in his father’s arm.
He started brushing his teeth at school. He stopped eating. The muscle melted away as he tried to rid himself of what those guys wanted. To have the least amount of weight to pull. He dropped football first. Then wrestling. Then the girlfriend. He got two after school jobs so he could buy his own security detail. One salary he turned over to his father. The other he lived on, including buying Roman’s food.
The last time, about a month ago, he wasn’t drugged. He guarded his mouth but forgot to check his back. Two guys held him down for the third who had two hundred bucks to spend. He had grey eyes. He kissed Ari before going on his shopping spree.
From Ari’s mouth to his father’s arm. All the while Roman barked and howled from the back yard, clawing at the kitchen door.
Lark House is sleeping. Ari creeps down the hall to the communal bathroom and throws up until he has nothing anybody wants and no weight to pull. Back in bed, he keeps his mouth shut against the fiery sobs trying to break free. Nothing goes in. Nothing comes out.
So you can see how I start out with grandiose plots that get chiseled down to simpler stories, and while Ari was still beset by tragedy beyond his control, this particular tragedy of rape and forced prostitution would not end up being his. Still, writing it served a few purposes. It planted the idea that a male victim of rape would make an interesting story. It also gave me the idea that maybe Jav gets so emotionally invested in this kid’s story because once upon a time, it was Jav selling himself to survive.
Which turned out to be a thing. —SLQR
Exactly What I Wanted
This is some early, slightly chemical interaction between Jav and Alex. Remember at this stage of the game, Jav wasn’t an escort, he and Alex had never met before and he identified as gay. —SLQR
A few weeks after meeting, Alex calls Jav one night. Guelisten Animal Shelter is expecting an emergency drop-off, a rescue operation of seventeen dogs from an abusive situation. They need to clear as much space as possible. Alex will take Roman to his house and keep him there.
“But I don’t want Ari to… I just want him to be aware and give his consent,” Alex says. “You know, like he has control over the situation?”
Silence on the other end.
Alex feels dumb and intrusive and he’s not sure why. “If we could draw something up? An agreement that I’m just holding him temporarily? You know, make it official?”
It’s awkward. Jav is answering in rather terse monosyllables.
Finally, “Listen, am I calling at a bad time?” Alex says.
A pause. “I’m on a date.”
“Oh. Shit, I’m sorry. I’ll—”
“No, don’t worry. I understand what you’re getting at and it’s a good idea. I’ll let him know and we’ll figure something out.”
“No worries. Whenever. Sorry to interrupt.”
“It’s fine. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
“Sure.”
Next day, Jav is stiff and reticent when he brings Ari over to see Roman. Val seduces Ari with food. He and Deane bond over music and artwork and dogs.
“Let him stay a while,” Alex says. “You can pick him up later or I’ll drive him back to Lark House.”
He walks Jav to his car. A bit of small talk through the driver’s side window.
“I’m sorry about last night,” Alex says.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for, knock it off.”
“Is something wrong?”
Jav stares straight ahead a moment, knuckles tight on the steering wheel. He drops his forehead, laughs a little. “It was a shitty date.”
“Oh.”
“I was desperately looking for an excuse to get the hell out of there. And then my phone rang and it was you. It threw me off.” Reaches for seatbelt and buckles it.
“Threw you off?”
“Never mind.”
“No, what?”
“It’s just that… It was exactly what I wanted. On a lot of levels.”
“What do you mean?”
Jav smiles, shaking his head. “Nothing. Give me a ring or text me, let me know about Ari. He has to be back at Lark House by ten.”
“No problem.” Alex’s gaze gets snagged on Jav’s. A tiny electric frisson passes between them. Almost like chemistry.
Chemistry? What the fuck?
Foreign and disturbing as the idea is, he still feels reluctant to let Jav drive away.
“What was wrong with her?” he asks.
“Her who?”
“Your date.”
Jav puts the car in gear. “Him.”
Alex blinks. “Oh.”
Jav drives away.
Jav goes over to Tulip Street one day. Alex is sitting at the bottom of the staircase, his back against the wall, feet against the newel post. Halfway up the stairs, the Lark-Penda’s kitten, Esmeralda, is perched on a tread, mewing pathetically. On each step leading down to Alex is a little bit of cat kibble.
“What are you doing?” Jav says, leaning on th
e banister.
“Teaching her to come down.” Alex looks up and makes a whispering noise between his teeth. Esmeralda whines. She puts down a trembling front paw to the next tread and takes it back. She turns around and tries lowering a back paw but that doesn’t work. She cries.
“Dude, you’re so mean,” Jav says.
“She can do it,” Alex says. The light comes in the stairwell window and shines grey-green in his eyes. His lips move around that whispered beckon. “Come here,” he says. “Come.”
Jav swallows, briefly closing his eyes and wondering what that whisper sounds like against skin. In the dark.
“That’s it,” Alex says as Esmeralda takes another step and eats her reward. “See?”
She mews at him. He mews back, then laughs. “Drama queen.”
Jav watches, fascinated and longing as step by step, the kitten makes her way down to Alex. He picks her up in one big hand and rubs her face against his. “Good girl,” he says, laughing. “Look at that, huh? You did it.”
He curls her in a palm, feeds her another treat and tucks her against his chest. Above her head he grins at Jav. Tousled and unshaven. Body relaxed and muscular in jeans and a flannel shirt. “Tough love, man. It’s how they learn.”
Come, Jav thinks. Come here. You can do it…
Harris Tweed
I wanted so much for Ari and Geno to become friends. They’d complement each other beautifully and I can totally see Geno continuing his education at New Paltz. But there’s only so much you can pack into an epic novel. —SLQR
Jav invited Geno to come see his nephew’s art exhibit at SUNY New Paltz.
“Is this crossing the smudged boundary?” Geno said to Stef.
“Only if you punch me.”
“Awkward.”
“Sorry.”
He, Jav and Stef took the subway uptown to meet up with Roger Lark, The Treehouse Guy.
“My mother had a thing for you,” Geno said as they shook hands.
“I get that a lot,” Roger said. “And may I say, nice jacket?”
Geno was wearing Nathan’s Harris tweed jacket, nearly identical to the one Roger was sporting.
Tales From Cushman Row Page 12
