PARADOXIA (2 page)

T
hirty bucks from broke. Headed back up to the shitty little park. Trying to unload some pills. Turn the early shift. Catch the last of the late-night zombies as they stumbled home from The Galaxy or Max's Kansas City. Cross-section of freaks still jacked up on alcohol, pot, and coke, not quite ready to give up the high. A black beauty or two would give them all the incentive they needed.

Fragile old man waddles up to my bench. Yellow skin and teeth, smells like liver damage. Lowers himself down with obvious discomfort. Gives a weak and sickly smile. I force out a fake one. Trying to fabricate the best lie to milk him with. He takes up the initiative to start a conversation. Asks me why I'm so sullen. He doesn't realize I'm looking for a loophole to rip him off through. I lie and tell him I just got kicked out of where I'm staying. Play on his heartstrings. Tell him I'm hungry, homeless.

He offers to buy me a sandwich, some coffee. But I'd have to go get it, his legs aren't awake yet. I whisper a thank you, swallowing my sarcasm. He pulls out his wallet, fat with twenties. My attitude suddenly improves. He slips me one, asking if I'd be so kind as to bring him back a plain buttered roll, sweet tea. Old man's fodder. Of course. He still doesn't get it. I'll have the rest of that money before the morning's over.

I hit the Korean deli across from the park for coffee, tea, and two buttered rolls. Slip the change in my pocket, extracting a few singles for myself. It wasn't necessary. He told me to keep the change. Still chump, I wanted more from him than seventeen bucks. Another hundred was what I was aiming for. Tried to engage me in petty pleasantries. I listen with one ear, still scheming. Wondering if I should just pickpocket him, hit him over the head, and run, or plead. I didn't need to think too hard. He piped in with, “I could use a little company … if you know what I mean …” He winked at me with a runny yellow eye, crusted at the corner. I suppressed a retch. He suggested we go to the Kenmore, a sleazy, fading hotel a few blocks away. Said he'd pay for me to stay there for a few days, give me money for food, etc., all I had to do was rub him a little “down there.” And not to worry, he was very clean … married to the same woman for thirty-five years.
Right, like that means anything
, I mumbled under my breath. It seemed like an easy gig. I agreed.

We took a taxi to the hotel. Grandpa's legs hadn't woken up yet. We were greeted with a sly wink from the desk clerk, a World War II vet with a slight palsy shake. “Morning, judge. Room 322?”

“For two nights, please.”

We exited the elevator and passed a couple of teenage huffers sucking glue fumes from dirty paper bags. Cute, broken, skinny boys. Probably runaways from the Midwest. Short-shift hustlers. I'd look them up later. They wouldn't be hard to find. Sleeping in the stairwell between tricks. Pray I don't have to join them soon, if the hippies get a wild hair …

We reach the room which Grandpa opens with a little curtsy. Old man acting like a little girl. Awful. The dingy room stinks of violations and stale sex. A faint gray light trickles in through the moth-eaten curtains. The window faces a concrete shaft, two feet deep, six long. I close the curtains. Too depressing. I trace a large
X
in the dust on the dresser over the drawer holding the Bible. Take a deep breath, plant a phony smile, and turn back around to the old man occupying the edge of the droopy bed. He's lost for a few minutes. Can't remember where he's at. No longer in this room. I'm hovering over his flashback, strange how fifty years forward or backward can elapse within a breath's notice. I feel his fear, desperation, frustration. Running from the Nazi soldiers. Hiding in the bush, alongside the train tracks, watching mother, father, siblings being sucked up and consumed into the cattle cars en route to the concentration camp. He was small enough to hide. Run off. Be taken in and shuttled out of the country. Leaving the family's ashes to mingle with millions of other victims who never left the incinerators. Never able to recover from the guilt and shame of sole survivor. Made it to America by the late '40s. Worked his way through law school. Sworn in as judge three years ago on his sixty-first birthday. Still looking for Justice. Anxious for the peace of death.

He checks his watch, shakes off the reverie. Apologizes that he's got to go. As if I'd be disappointed. He slips eighty dollars into my hand, asking if he can please be allowed to return in the morning. He's not feeling too good. Gout's acting up again. He kisses my fingers murmuring, “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.” Talking to his dreams, not me. I close the door softly. Wait till I hear the elevator descend. Exit looking for the glue boys.

Timmy and Joey blew in to NYC on a Greyhound, like every other wasted youth who was looking to escape the boredom, abuse, and bullshit of family life. They boarded in Springfield, Missouri hopped up on NoDoz and Coca-Cola, not wanting to miss a single mile separating them and the previous fifteen years. Second cousins divorcing themselves from third-generation farmers who watched in desperation as the crops died and the land shrivelled, while days and nights blurred in drunken degeneracy. Sick of the senseless beatings heaped upon them and powerless against their mothers' broken noses, busted arms, bruised ribs, they split. Guilty at having left behind six sisters who would now bear the brunt not only of battery, but of the sexual abuse that had become a family tradition. They spent their days and nights hustling dirty old men incredibly reminiscent of the fathers, uncles, cousins they were attempting to erase from their own history.

I found them on the landing between the second and third floor. Playing
Gin
, counting change, and rolling Grand Centrals. Nasty cigarettes, hand-rolled from butts they'd gather from the ashtrays outside the elevators. Empty soda cans, crumpled potato chip bags, and glue tubes scattered in the corners. I plopped down a few steps above them. They didn't even notice. Immersed in a quiet argument about forgotten rules of a stupid card game. Their innocence and stupidity were touching. Homeless, nearly broke, living in stairwells on junk food, none of it mattered. Timmy won the game and expected to claim his half a dollar. They didn't have three bucks between them.

I interrupted and asked if they were hungry, wanted some breakfast or coffee. They said nah, we just ate, kicking the crumpled litter in the far corner with dirty sneakers. “But we could use a few bucks for later …” one of them said, a sneaky smile crusted with old food and nicotine stains. I crumpled up a twenty and threw it at him, bouncing it off his left knee. “Wow, are you rich?” one of them asked, new interest perked. “No, I'm just a better hustler …” Squeezing the last drop from an empty glue tube into a filthy paper bag, they offered me a huff. I passed, getting up to leave and head back to the park. Told them I'd check in on them later. “Cool …” Timmy slobbered, the sweet smell of glue filling the cubby. I climbed over them, using their greasy heads as balancing rods on my way down the stairs. Careful not to touch the grimy rails on my way out.

I hit the park again, trying to move the last of the shit. I had ten black beauties left and three weeks to go before I could head back up to the doctor in the Bronx. Waiting for something to give. A sleazy regular, Sal, offered to scoop the lot. Invited me back to a small café he ran next door to the Chelsea Hotel. The menu consisted of falafel, hummus, and Turkish coffee. It was little more than a glorified take-out stand with a few tables and chairs stuffed against the wall. Used as a front for something, the ridiculous rent would never be met by nickel-and-diming it over sandwiches.

I couldn't fucking stand Sal, his awful hair, black and greasy slicked back to cover a bald spot. He always stunk of booze and sex, filthy hands nervously checking front and back pockets, smoothing his oily mane, grabbing his own ass, running a dirty index over chapped lips. I tolerated him, intrigued by his cohorts from Long Island. Disturbed avant-jazz musicians who'd occasionally play the city, singing songs of basement torture and mutilation set over a backdrop of spastic din. The Night Stalker meets Albert Ayler. Strange brew. I dug it. Sal's the one who set me up with “Ill Will.” My short-lived affair with the benign cannibal. When I asked Sal for Will's address at Rikers, he said don't bother. He's in for life plus thirty years. End of subject.

Stalling over a second muddy coffee, when in walk the Long Island Four. A relief from the useless drivel, rude comments, and unwanted advances that were Sal's trademark. The pig just couldn't keep his hands to himself or his trap shut. Just to be a prick, he'd do shit like douse you in the face with beer, just to get a reaction, if he felt you were ignoring him. Which I did to the best of my abilities. Using him to unload pills, for free coffee or his unique acquaintances. I had a crush on the lanky one, the singer, who'd stand behind the drums, towering over, retelling gruesome tales of kidnapping and forced sodomy. He possessed a strange charm, a slippery smile which would light up the dull pauses between lengthy silences. Sal and the Long Island Four went back fourteen or more years, since their junior high school days. They had little left to chew over except the seedy details of things done and nearly forgotten, whose twisted memories would be shared and refuelled in simple phrases only they could decode. Like “Backseat Booby-trap,” “Gin-soaked Gangbang,” “Trial By Titty-torture”; references to their shared escapades of male bonding, female degradation. Cruel bastards for whom I had a soft spot.

They'd just blown in from the Island, taking a room upstairs at the Chelsea. Gina was coming in too, to show off her new tits. She was the only woman they ever mentioned by name. An irritable cunt with a shitty attitude. I detested her immediately, partly because she shared in the Long Island Four's sadistic history of sexual abuse, which until now I'd only got secondhand. Something about her just crawled up my ass. Her phony smile, condescending attitude, petty jealousy, dyed hair, fake nails, and JAP upbringing did little to endear her to me—I hated the way she bounced in the room eager to take us all upstairs to ogle the fresh scars and purple bruises from her implants, a gift from Daddy. I couldn't wait to smash her in the fucking face.

The Long Island Four had lucked out, securing one of the larger rooms in the Chelsea, which was by now, if it hadn't always been, a flea-bitten rat trap whose glorious history of bohemian rhapsody had long since ceased to resonate. The room overlooked 23rd Street, the noise of its traffic filling in the blank silence and greedy anticipation as speed was chopped out. I didn't do speed, I was edgy enough. I poured myself a glass of Jack Daniel's. Smoked some hash that was doing the rounds. Waiting for the show to begin.

Gina was already hopped up on caffeine and diet pills, so she contented herself with a single line. Greedy bitch. I still wanted to smack her. The Long Island Four settled into their usual ritual: snort a line or two, smoke some hash, pour a drink, and speak in code. Over and over again. Sal, acting as lead instigator, clapped his hands three times, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen … quiet, please … break out those fucking tits …” Shooting back a slug of Jack and slamming the glass down, he demanded Gina take off her top. A striped number which she slowly unbuttoned, basking in the attention. All eyes on her tits. Still swollen, black and blue around the edges, magenta scars, they were beautiful. A perfect 36C.

A debate ensued between Sal and two members of the Four. Votes taken on preference of real vs. fakes. Sal, outnumbered, sided with the silicone. Warren, the one I had my eye on for the past few weeks, insisted on an up-close comparison, suggesting I lend my tits to the conversation. Since I've always considered them one of my finer assets, I had no inhibitions about tweaking them once or twice, coyly exposing first the left, then the right, and finally releasing them from the prison of my clothes. Warren let out a small grunt, walking over and cupping first my tits, then Gina's, hers still sore from surgery. The self-proclaimed expert gently fondled the fleshy mounds checking for ripeness, fullness, contour, and sensitivity. Applying tongue and teeth to nipples, he gauged the response. Satisfied with the results, he declared my tits the winner, complaining that Gina's reminded him of a Granny Smith that had failed to blossom. They were stuck forever stitched in place, two hardballs miles from homeplate that might indeed help Gina to score, but had failed to win her this game. In a snit, she screamed, “Fuck off, you fucking speed freak!!!” and disappeared into the bathroom.

Warren and Sal celebrated her humilation with two more lines, another stick of hash, and more Jack Daniel's. The other three of the Long Island Four begged off, heading up to Show World to catch one of their girlfriends headlining a live sex show. Sal insisted they stay, he'd get Gina to put on a show as soon as she was finished in the bathroom. They shrugged it off as old news and split.

Warren invited me over to the fuzzy chair his 6'8” frame dominated, insisting I sit on his lap. He was in desperate need of flesh to bounce his speed jitters off of. He grabbed me by both tits, holding onto me like a small pony as he bounced me up and down. Stirring the fiery liquid which was slowly intoxicating me. I was only one more drink from drunk. I asked him to slow it down, let me do the bouncing. I began a slow grind against him, forcing my ass into his crotch, bearing down as I felt him stiffen. Big dick. Small hole. I was getting gooey. He slipped his hands between my legs. Felt the moisture. The heat. Responded by flexing his prick. Sniffing his finger. Sticking it in his mouth. Demanded to taste my pussy. I slip my pants off, straddle the chair. Tease his tongue with pussy. Bury his face in it, pull away. Slam it against him. Pull it away. He catches me between his teeth. Chews on my peach fuzz, the sweet flesh beneath it. Jabs at me with his fleshy tip. I shiver.

Sal, supine on the bed, all the while hissing out directions: “Spread those cheeks, show me some asshole, rim that cunt, suck it … suck it …” until Warren tells him to shut the fuck up. His running commentary a blight on our high. Gina saunters out of the bathroom in her panties and heels. She must have dropped a few more diet pills, you could almost feel her scars crawl. Sal instructs her to come no closer, to turn around, face the wall and bend over, to expose some pink. She smiles demurely mumbling a “Yes, Daddy” and does what's expected. Sal and Gina had been screwing each other for years. Hate-fucking.