Frisk: A Novel (Cooper, Dennis) (11 page)

The blonds look stupidly at Pierre. "Uh, right," Pierre answers. "Heiner and I have gotten Bob drunk and driven him back to this place, our place, I guess, right? To ... well, you tell me." Warren's nodding. "Yeah, right. Bob, you're the centerpiece. Act inebriated for a minute or two, then just get into the sex. Heiner, Pierre, don't forget, the kid drives you berserk."

Pierre shuts his eyes, fondles his cock. Heiner, who masturbates with a huge sawing motion, starts jabbing Pierre in the ribs with his elbow. So Pierre inches closer to Bob, who can harden without any help from his hands. And stay hard. That's why he's ubiquitous in porn at the moment. Great skin too, Pierre thinks, brushing against a relatively hairless stretch.

It usually takes Marv to get Pierre hard. That's why he doesn't get cast very often or very imaginatively, despite his cute, sleepy looks. A year ago he was the boy with the ass every costar was destined to eat, finger, spank, fuck, etc. That way he didn't need to get hard more than thirty, thirty-five seconds per project, footage of which would be chopped up, intercut through the video-at-large.

Now his asshole is overexposed, supposedly. So he has gone from star fuckee to second- or third-string fucker whose occasional lack of a hard-on is evident only to the porn aficionado. Or to hard-core Pierre fans, of which there are obviously a few ... psychotics ... He pictures a page of my letter. His hard-on immediately softens. Shit. "Pierre!" Warren yells from somewhere in the glare. "Concentrate!"

Pierre peeks at Bob who has a luxurious look in his eyes that makes his nose seem less big. Heiner's eyes, on the other hand, are a little too narrow and tense, as if they've been condemned to feel whatever they're feeling. "Okay, boys, start doing something fantastic," Warren yells. "Pierre, try your best. Bob, remember you're drunk. Ack-" Pierre cups his limp cock. "-shun!"

Pierre gets it hard on and off for the next hour. When it's not hard, he drops his jaw, squints, groans, and the cameraman shoots his body from the pubes up. "Not a problem, keep going!" Warren shouts to him over and over. After the shoot, everyone but Pierre gets extremely coked up. One by one they file out. As Pierre's leaving, Warren grabs his left biceps. "You, wait."

The way Warren cocks his head, smiles, winks, Pierre guesses he was beautiful in his younger days. Or seductive at least. Even if now, on such an awful physique, that kind of confidence translates as sliminess. "I'll pay you to stick around," Warren says. "Get it up, don't, I could give a shit. I'm into . . ." He draws a girlish butt in the air in front of his face, sticks his tongue out.

Pierre shrugs, stands up, stepping out of his jeans, underwear. "Then I'd better clean up," he says. "One sec." He walks into the bathroom nook, yanks off a few feet of TP, and scrunches it into a flowery wad. He sticks the wad under the tap for a second, dabbing his asshole. He thinks he looks pooped, in the mirror at least. Good thing asses don't communicate their owners' emotional states.

He centers his ass in the mirror, grabs and jerks it around until the flesh empurples, puffs out through his fingers, etc. When he lets go, it's still a smooth, two-part, rectangular slab that must be pretty top-notch as asses go, because enough guys like Warren fixate on it, even if they're just projecting stuff onto it/him, or casting it/him in mental porn movies.

When Pierre reenters the set, Warren's sprawled on the bed reading a short stack of papers, apparently my unfolded letter. The guy must have gone through Pierre's pants. Pierre feels totally stricken, but before he can blurt out some sort of admonishment, Warren looks up, dazed. "Is this real?" he asks, waving the papers. "This guy's ..." He starts reading again. "... out there. Way out."

"Yeah, I think so," Pierre says. He walks partway into the room and stands around hugging himself. "Gee, you don't seem like you'd know anybody this nutsy," Warren mumbles. Pierre shrugs. "The guy started writing to me," he says, "about this torture-and-murder-boys fantasy, I guess because I let him go on about that kind of stuff during sex. I always get weird johns. He was unusually weird though."

Warren puts down the letter. It folds up by itself. "You fucked this guy?" "Sort of," Pierre says. "The sex was extensive, but actually, nothing much happened. He looked at me, licked me a little, and talked a lot." Warren's shaking his head. "Yeah, but come on. This guy's a fucking murderer." "Well, if he is," Pierre says, "he was supposedly daydreaming then.

"His thing was he wanted to kill, but he couldn't. I can't remember why not. So he was tortured. He seemed like he knew the limitations. He talked about them with a lot of complexity, like where he thought sexual fantasies came from, tracing his back to incidents in his childhood. I never felt endangered, actually. And now it just seems like a scene in a documentary.

"But, okay, since he moved overseas I think something cracked and he decided to do it because, yeah, I mean you read the letter. It sounds like he's actually killing those boys, right? He's not saying, `I'm transcribing this daydream I had.' " Warren has picked up the letter again. He's squinting down at it, wagging his head. "It sounds real," he says. "But then how would I know?"

Pierre flops in a chair. "I don't know what I should do," he says, fingering his hair. "I could write back and say, `Leave me alone.' Still, I have to admit that I'm kind of addicted to the letters now. But then I'm such a fucking aesthete about everything." "Mm-hm," Warren nods wildly. "If I were you, I'd let him write. That way you can keep a close watch on him. I mean, who knows, I mean..-."

Warren's eyes get a glary sheen that might or might not be imploding emotion. Strange. Anyway, they're not green anymore. More, well, metallic-hued, like those contacts Peter Gabriel wore to look mechanical when he was in Genesis. Come, lube, sweat decorate the bed sheets with grayish polka dots. Under the lights, they must have started to cook because the area smells like a toasted cheese sandwich.

"I knew a guy," Warren continues. "Possibly equally nuts. To make these porns, see, I have to raise money. And one time I was introduced to this rich old gay guy who was interested in financing porn. I spent some weekends at his place. He wanted to pay me to make a snuff video, a real one. He had this cute Asian kid who lived with him who was supposed to be the victim.

"The guy says he'll finance my porns for the rest of my life if I do him this favor and shoot this snuff thing with this Asian kid, him, and a couple of guys I never met who'd do the actual killing. I said no, obviously. No way, of course. But the guy wound up making one anyway, I don't know how. But I know that for sure because, well..." Warren falls back in the scrambled sheets.

"A friend of mine in the industry was passed a copy. He described it to me one night, and I thought, Shit. I had him show me the first couple of minutes, before anything really violent happens, and it's that same Asian kid being tied to a bed, looking very, very upset. I said, `Turn it off.' But part of me thinks, as weird as this sounds, that I blew it.

"I mean, I couldn't even watch the video, so I don't know what I'm imagining, but you know, to have seen that Asian kid being killed in person, if it was going to happen anyway. I mean ... what an unbelievable thing to experience. After that, you'd never be the same person again, I'm positive. Imagine it. Jesus. But that's easy to say now when there's no fucking way."

Pierre's toying with one of his brown curls. "You sound like that Dennis guy," he says. "Or like Dennis's kid brother. Dennis was more, well, not solemn exactly, but centered about it or something. Hmm . . ." The sky's clouding up outside the window. Either that or it's late and the sunset's unusually colorless. "Nice." He hears Warren's clothes open. A dull, irregular pop, pop, pop ...

The yellow wallpaper's fake-elegant in a vaguely uninteresting way. Pierre spaces out studying it. The longer he stares, the more it resembles piss. Yawn. "Get your butt over here," Warren snarls jokingly. He's positioned on the bed, nude, overweight, penis stubby and hard. His hands form what looks like a very small chair. It's poised about a foot or so over his mouth.

As Pierre starts to sit, the chair rises to catch, stop him. "Wait," Warren says. "Have you been tested?" "Yeah, negative." "How's that possible?" Warren mutters. The chair reconfigures and grows slightly wobbly. "I don't know," Pierre says. The chair's about to collapse any second. "Well, okay, I believe you." Pierre's ass drops suddenly onto a face that makes a noise like a whoopie cushion.

Nine months later Marv opens the apartment door waving a sealed envelope. Pierre squints, reads the return address. "Shit." He staggers past Marv, drops the grocery bag on the dining room table, and heads down the hall. "Can I open it?" Marv yells after him. "Yeah," Pierre says, then rethinks. "Actually, don't, please? Just wait a ..." He slams the bedroom door.

The room smells like him, thanks to dirty clothes. Piles. Sometimes he lets himself fantasize bottling that stink or putting it in an aerosol can or whatever. It would be sold with a videotape of him jerking off, finger fucking himself, etc. But tonight the smell's painfully reminiscent of something. What? He lands, sniffling, bouncing, on the unmade bed.

Marv knocks. "P.?" "Just wait, okay?" Pierre shouts. "Start dinner, watch TV, whatever. I'll be out in a minute." After ten, fifteen seconds he hears the TV switch on in the living room. News. Plane crash. Tons dead. When he's sure the volume's loud enough, the news sufficiently bad to distract Marv, he starts sobbing. His whole body jerks, jerks, jerks.

The man who'd paid to fuck him this evening was obviously sick, AIDS, but Pierre had agreed to play saint just so long as the man used a condom, which was probably safe. Still, the guy's eyes were so far away the whole hour, or each time Pierre thought to check, like it either meant nothing or everything to have total access to a sterling, unjudgmental face and ass.

He himself had felt ... what? Maybe little to zero, as usual. Nevertheless, the guy's fear or pain or whatever rubbed off, as they say. Or it made his own numbness depressing, baffling. When you think about being in bed with somebody, Pierre thinks, sick or not, you're either so far away you think in total cliches, or else you're so close things blur, or ... Fuck.

"Fuck off." He lies there and shakes, drips, squeaks. Occasionally he holds his breath, makes sure the TV's still on in the other room. After a while he reaches over, picks up the remote control unit, and turns on the TV in this room, leaving the volume down. News. An old picture of what's-her-name rimmed in a thin, black frame, which must mean she's finally dead.

Marv's probably out in the living room, totally upset, not that he cares all that much about what's-her-name. He's just more connected to life's ... whatever, ups, downs, whereas Pierre feels so little about anything, much less what's-hername's predictable death. He's too ... whatever, bored, hardened, worried to have an opinion one way or another.

"P.!" Marv's at the door. "What's-her-name's dead!" "Yeah, I know," Pierre says, cringing at how weak his fucking voice sounds. There's an intense little silence outside the door. "You ... okay?" Marv asks. The knob turns very slowly. Shit. Pierre throws an arm over his eyes as the light from the hall slants in. Next thing he knows a hand's stroking his curly hair.

"What's up?" Marv whispers. The mattress squeaks and drops a foot near Pierre's shoulder. He can smell Marv, meaning Levi's. Actually it's Tide detergent he smells, not dyed cotton. Still, he associates the smell with his lover for some reason. "Today. The client," Pierre says. "AIDS. It was obvious. And it's weirding me out." He raises the arm as proof.

Marv looks astonished by all the moisture under there. On TV, a drug bust. Rows of boxes of cocaine about to be burned. The idea makes Pierre tingle slightly. "You're cold," Marv whispers. He's eyeing Pierre's raised arm. "Maybe you're ill, like the flu," he adds, running a fingertip over the greenishwhite goosebumps. "No," Pierre barks, pulls away.

They sit, lie around there a few endless minutes. Marv gets up, walks through the room like he's hunting for something. The third time he passes the TV set, he spins the volume up, sits on the end of the bed. A father and son are hugging, blubbering, in a circle of cameras and microphones, after the youngster supposedly escaped from a kiddie porn ring.

"You know," Pierre says. "I was about that kid's age when I made ... well, I think they're calling it Summer Camp now, but it was a super-eight loop at the time. I thought the man wanted sex, period, which was scary enough. Then, suddenly, there's this other man holding a camera ... Now I'm glad it's on record. I look so alive in it, so sharp. The way that man's gobbling my ass and I'm just going, 'Huh?"'

"Bullshit," Marv says quietly. "You looked terrified. And so does this kid. Watch." He leans forward, turns up the TV even louder. "... so my dad," the kid's mumbling, "wouldn't give up on me." "And I won't!" shouts the dad. The kid rolls his eyes in embarrassment. Reporters guffaw. The kid blows a little kiss to the assembled. The dad smacks the kid's head. "God," Marv groans, hurriedly turns down the volume.

"Terrified?" Pierre sniffs, and kicks Marv, not hard enough to hurt. Marv leans way, way forward, spaces out on the screen, or pretends to. A Hyundai commercial. Pierre turns on his side, spaces out on the wall, a little haunted by Summer Camp, specifically by the thought of his skinny legs waving around in the air on either side of a man's bald head like antennae.

"But it's weird, Marv," he whispers, "I mean in that Summer Camp thing, how amazed I look." Marv doesn't flinch. "If anything from my childhood influenced my adulthood," he continues, "it was that afternoon. To have an older man so completely, insanely worked up over me, like if I was where someone had buried some sort of treasure or antidote to something malignant in him.

"Because, you know, it's supposed to be people succeed in life depending on how many skills they have or lack. But in that loop, what's so great about me has shit to do with any skill. My behavior and ideas and so on are in the way, if anything. Which is insane, right? So what did that man see in me? I sure don't see anything great about my stupid little creepy self."