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It was only because John was in the can that he was not given much of a say in the night’s plans, or at least that's what he told himself an hour later lying on the floor of a hotel room in Harlem. He returned to their corner of the bar to find Lou curled up in the booth with an elegant-looking man dressed in a tan buckskin jacket.
“Oh, there you are,” said Lou and John couldn't help but bristle at the sing-song cadence of his voice. He was doing the fag routine, softening his tone and elongating his movements, which rarely boded well for John’s public image. “This is Charles,” he added, tugging at the fringe on the man’s jacket.
“Pleasure,” said Charles.
“Charles is a preacher.”
“Yeah?” John gestured toward Lou. “So’s he.”
“Lewis was telling me that you're looking for work. I mean a place to play,” he added when John opened his mouth. He said that he knew a guy who booked acts for the ballroom at the Hotel Theresa up in Harlem and that he was sure he could get the Falling Spikes a gig if they didn’t mind the train ride all the way to 125th Street. Lou watched the man as he spoke, his eyes dark and damp through the veil of cigarette smoke, his tongue visible in the recesses of his absent smile. He looked drunker than he really was, which John knew because they'd only been able to afford two beers each and because Lou did this often enough for John to have noticed the way he acted dumb around certain men. It embarrassed him to realize that Lou thought an airheaded sissy was the more appealing version of himself.
Even in the beginning when he was still trying to pick him up Lou had never acted like that with John: that is to say pleasant, pliable. Suggestive, yes, and naturally shameless, but never anything that could be mistaken for nice.
“Listen, what are you angling for?” John asked him in an undertone as Charles went to leave a handful of bills on the bartop.
“Jesus, when'd you get so fucking square?”
“Are you trying to score or what?”
“I’m trying,” Lou said, “to have a good night. And maybe get us a goddamned paying gig. So relax, okay?”
John was doubtful but in those days they weren’t in the habit of saying no to much of anything, least of all an opportunity to make a little bread.
Outside the night air was sparsely freckled with snowflakes and so cold that it burnt John's throat when he drew breath. He noticed that Charles was of a height with himself, which meant he was slightly taller than Lou, which Lou used to his advantage, canting his chin downward so he could glance up at the other man through his eyelashes as they walked. He continued this coquettish little act into the relative warmth of the subway station and on to the Bronx-bound D train, leaning close to Charles as John leaned into his own shoulder, lulled into a momentary half-sleep by the movement of their passage uptown. When John opened his eyes again, he and Lou were the only white people left in the train car. Then Lou was dragging him back into the cold.
All pretense of honest work fell away when they stepped into the hotel lobby. It was far too elegant, if a little worn down. Brass fixtures gleamed in the scattered candlelight and heavy red velvet swathed the high windows that looked out onto Seventh Avenue. He could hear a muffled big band number somewhere past the lobby, something swingy, something you might dance to, nothing like the stuff that John and Lou and the erstwhile Elektrah and now Daryl played together on their street corners.
The elevator operator peered at them with obvious skepticism, but he nevertheless acquiesced to Charles’ request for the fifth floor. As soon as they were through the door to the suite John stalked directly into the bathroom, slinging his jacket onto the tile and tugging off his turtleneck. If nothing else he was determined to get a decent shower out of the night, because they didn’t often have the luxury of treating hot water and soap as anything other than precious resources.
Droplets of steam glimmered on the mirror and quickly gathered into a full-on fog, obscuring his reflection. He didn’t care to let the viola out of his sight but he was worried the condensation would warp its wood and the instrument was already mangled to his deliberate specifications, so he left it on the carpet just outside the bathroom door.
He inspected the little complimentary bottles of shampoo, like he did when he was at a girl’s place and found himself inexorably drawn to all the artifacts of femininity which were so foreign to him: lipstick, talcum powder, Noxzema, mascara, something labeled intriguingly as “Moon Drops.” Plus, he was always keen to discover if there were any pills in the medicine cabinet. Here in the hotel there were no pills and no clues as to the private workings of whomever he was about to or had just bedded. He distracted himself from that thought by wrenching back the shower curtain with more force than was necessary, relishing the squeal of the metal fastenings along the rail.
On the other side of the wall he could hear movement, laughter. Items—shoes, he guessed—fell softly to the floor. John stepped into the shower, self-conscious about being undressed so close to Lou and this other man, despite the locked door and the awareness that they were almost certainly no longer clothed, either.
The water hit his back with such force and sudden heat that it mimicked a hand clapped between his shoulder blades and he startled as if someone had really struck him. As the stiffness in his muscles dissolved he knew that he wouldn't be able to withstand the temperatures outside in order to return home by himself.
Time became malleable under the effect of drink and humidity as he slopped soap under his arms and scrubbed shampoo into his scalp. It only occurred to him later that he should have saved more of it to bring with him back downtown. When his piss hit the floor of the bathtub it forked into several sluggish rivulets that eventually ran down the drain. He observed this with a distant interest, reminded of the fat dark globules of sap that clung to the crotches of pine trees back home, the persistent stickiness that would muck up your hands for the rest of the day if you grabbed a branch without looking first.
He wanted to stay under the water forever but he knew that he would be subjected to an untenable amount of verbal humiliation from Lou if he hid in the bathroom all night. Something about sexual repression, being unenlightened. A closet case, of course, the worst he'd ever seen. Frigid, like he was a girl who wouldn't put out.
The hotel room was dark except for the neon residue that leaked through the vertical blinds.
Squinting, John could make out the misshapen silhouette of Lou’s coat tossed over a chair across the room. He moved along the wall and groped for it, hopeful, digging through the pockets once he’d gotten it dislodged, and nearly cursed out loud when there was nothing to be found within the worn leather.
His movement caught their attention and the proceedings paused momentarily, Lou’s pale back like a feeble beacon where the blush-colored light striped across it.
“What about your friend?” The man’s fingers traced Lou’s shoulder blade and then over each vertebra of his spine until he reached its natural conclusion. His hand was big, especially so on Lou’s skinny ass, which he gripped at with an apparent strength that John found unsettling.
“What?” Lou asked on an exhale, as though he'd genuinely forgotten. “Oh. No, she's not interested.”
Charles didn’t say anything in response, just dipped his hand into the shadowy space between Lou’s thighs to part them further.
A kind of heat pulsed behind John’s eyes. He lay on the floor like a dead man in a coffin and longed for silk-lined padding and a little pillow beneath his head instead of his own folded jacket. His clothes felt gritty against his freshly scoured skin.
There was no way to pretend that it was any other configuration than two men in the bed together, sounding the way men do in bed. Guttural baritone breathing, a graceless and urgent collision of skin. Spit descended harshly from someone’s lips and John felt his throat constrict as saliva flooded his own mouth.
He tried to be as still as physically possible. This was a sort of game he'd played as a child, mostly when he couldn't sleep but on other occasions, too, when he tried to will his body into a complete, impossible stillness. He would devote all his focus to this lack of movement, trying to slow his own breathing so his chest no longer rose and fell, resisted even moving his eyes beneath their closed lids. Of course he could not pause the myriad inadvertent inner workings of his existence, but he did what he could with what he was able to control because he thought that perhaps if he could make himself still enough he would be able to slip out of his body entire.
He discovered later that it was not dissimilar to playing a drone—in the vast depths of a single note you could eventually abandon the knowledge of the instrument which made it, the shape of the body which listened to it, and only hear space and time and in between.
So he lay with his arms at his side, very still, resolutely ignoring his half-hard cock pressing at the fly of his jeans.
He thought of vivisection, burst sewage mains, burn victims, Thalidomide babies, only the crudest and most lurid of National Enquirer clippings. He thought of the abattoir near Carmarthen where his uncle brought him once or twice as a boy, its cold, sweaty bowels through which no breath ever seemed to move. Even when he closed his eyes against the image of the hanging flanks of bloodied skin, pierced through by hooks as thick as his wrist, he could still feel the stagnant air pressing in close. He brought his free hand to his nose to block out the smell and then the taste was even sharper in his mouth, sweetly coppery and cold against his eyeteeth.
"Keep your hands off your face, lad," his uncle told him. John's whole arm shook with the timbre of his voice. He crammed his hand back into the pocket of his shorts, terrified that he’d inadvertently allowed something malevolent to crawl inside of him which was now wending its way through his sinuses and up into his brain.
He could not think of them as bodies because he himself had a body and that made it too easy to imagine it was he who would be dangling there next. In his mind he saw the hook and his pale form, unrecognizable except as something that had once been alive. He remembered the almost melodic desperation in the lowing of the cattle as they were herded into the steel latticework by men whose faces seemed lined with a permanent impassivity.
From the bed emerged a hurt little noise and John pretended that he didn't recognize the notes of Lou's voice in it. It was the same noise he made when he found a vein or when he liked some menacing flourish that John had added to his song. It's just skin, he tried to tell himself. Just the air moving in a particular way.
He had been curious as to why his uncle brought him to the slaughterhouse and he had known even then that he mustn’t ask. Later he realized that he was meant to see the truth of it: that the world was violent and ugly by necessity. Mostly, he surmised, it was to emphasize that anything, no matter how shocking at first, could be endured through repeat exposure. The mind would callous and grow a rind of thick, unfeeling skin as easy as on the heel of one’s foot or the tips of one’s fingers.
So when he told Lou, “I can't do needles,” and Lou only replied, unsympathetic and slightly muffled through the leather held between his teeth, “You’ll get used to it,” he knew it was true.
Charles was murmuring to Lou in a voice too low and unfamiliar for John to parse the words, not that he particularly wanted to know what he was saying. He didn’t know what men said in bed to each other, whether they called each other beautiful or sexy or anything similar. The idea made him want to laugh because Lou was so obviously neither. And yet there was some quality that drew men to him, anyway, a quality that John had no desire to examine because he suspected that it was one of the many that they shared.
He reversed tactics and instead thought of the last woman he’d fucked, which happened to be Daryl, and tried to focus on the memory of sinking into her lush warm cunt. Her bright gaze darted all over his face and rather than meet it he ducked his head between her tits, feeling her skin go humid with the sweat from his brow and the proximity of his own breath. The cartilage in his nose bent uncomfortably in its press against her sternum whose faintly ridged contours were always visible under that meagre layer of flesh and he wondered which would shatter first if he pressed hard enough. She wouldn’t let him come inside her because two children was enough, thank you, although the idea of it still privately appealed to John despite its utter life-ruining impracticality. He held that image in his mind, her growing round with a bit of himself lodged inside, as he pulled out and finished on her stomach which was in fact sunken enough that he might have encircled it with both his hands. Where did all her organs go, in a vessel that narrow? Where had they gone when she was with child?
He was so hard that it had begun to hurt.
He thought of being trapped beneath a collapsed colliery. He thought of being trapped in the Tombs, buffeted on all sides by the groans and hacking coughs of other men. One of them had fixed his bloodshot gaze on John and asked, “You a junkie?” There was a pale, gummy film deep in the creases at both corners of his mouth, congealed spittle or vomit.
Not yet, John wanted to say, or What gave it away? Instead he just nodded. The man’s face contracted in a piteous little frown and that—more than any other mortifying encounter from that night—made John’s stomach lurch with a sincere sense of shame. Pity from an old Bowery wino, hunched over in filthy clothes, hands twitching and eyes rolling around in their sockets. And yet he'd still gone and asked Lou for his help less than a year later.
He thought of the hospital even though he knew that his memories of the place were too fractured and dull to really recall. The most lasting image was that of the bank of fluorescent lights affixed to the ceiling directly above his bed. Its corners were dark with dead flies. The electricity’s movement through the glass tubing caused their tiny brittle corpses to vibrate against one another with an extremely faint buzzing that he probably wouldn't have noticed if there had been any other sound in the room at all. Each time he woke the air was still suffused with the scent of anaesthesia and always the same razor-like hum.
Decades must have passed, he thought, while he was stuck in that windowless room beneath an artificial light that never waned and offered no warmth or comfort. Upon his discharge, he half-expected to discover that he was now an old man. He was almost surprised to see his own face in the wing mirror of his father’s car, sallow and drawn, not quite able to grow any real facial hair yet. That was the whole extent of the hospital in his mind. He could recall the abattoir in far finer detail, and he’d only been in there for perhaps a total of three hours. All he could really say for certain was that the hospital smelled better.
In the bed the pace of their rutting had picked up and now Lou was making all sorts of horrible sounds, to the extent that John wanted to believe that he was faking it, or at least exaggerating. He could pretend he'd forgotten about John but that was impossible. John knew better than anybody how much Lou relished an audience.
He would have thought of needles but that didn't disgust or unnerve anymore except with the force of the want, strong enough that his vision sparkled and pitched.
In truth John was perfectly content with his occasional tendency to smoke or snort it until the first time he saw Lou shoot up. Like anyone with a real habit, he was dextrous with the works and enlivened by the whole process, basically unremarkable until he’d gone from smug and preening under John’s attention to nothing at all. It was an expression John recognized from paintings of martyred saints, beatific in their painlessness even as half their flesh hung from their flayed torsos. With a sickening clarity he realized that he wanted that particular stillness and he also wanted to be inside that particular stillness with Lou.
On heroin the capricious membrane of Lou's consciousness expanded and engulfed John's own, in the way a single-celled organism absorbs its prey, until they were both suspended in the cytoplasmic languor of it together, laughing, and touched.
By that March he was doing it with increasing frequency and quite often other people, but there remained a soft little tug even when he got high with Daryl, similar to what he felt on the occasions when he returned to play with La Monte and Marian, or even with Tony and Angus, terrifying in its implication yet no less true: it wasn't the same.
Once Daryl had somehow gotten her wires crossed even further than they already were and she’d said to him while they were in bed, “We should do it with him sometime,” to which John had replied, confused and barely conscious anyway, “Heroin?”
Daryl shook her head, eyes shut so tightly that the pinched skin looked like two badly-healed scars.
Beneath her, John’s joints all locked up.
“It would be so good,” she was saying, like she’d been thinking about it, like she’d already talked about it with Lou. Her cunt convulsed around him the way it did when she was really worked up, like she was going to get herself off on John’s cock while he just laid there, stunned into inaction, while thinking about Lou.
He struggled into a half-seated position, reached up to tangle his fingers in her fine yellow hair which was dark and filmy with oil because she hadn’t washed it in many days, and pulled until her chin was tipped back. What did he say to you, he wanted to ask. What filth did he put in your head.
She wasn’t deterred by his manhandling. “I’d have you at the same time,” she went on, addressing the ceiling. Her hand drifted to her shallow stomach as she continued to grind down on him. He imagined her imagining what it would be like to have them in her at the same time, separated by little more than an ungainly gasping layer of guts and whatever else was in there—he didn't know—and whether it would it make her full enough that it could be felt from the outside. The pale skin below her navel distended slightly, same as if her intestines were swollen with bile.
His grip on her hair tightened as he came with a high, shocked groan like he’d been hit, and then Daryl was scrambling off of him, shrieking angrily, but John wasn't listening by that point. He could only laugh, sort of hysterical, watching the semen running down the inside of her thigh.
He still wasn't sure whose idea it had been and he certainly wasn't going to ask. Daryl didn’t come to the door the next couple times he and Lou went over to her apartment, armed with a passel of instruments, though they could hear the sticky patter of her children running barefoot over the hardwood floor. The second time she refused to answer, Lou turned to John on the way out of her building and asked, “What the fuck did you do to her?”
“Nothing,” John snapped. “How do you know it was me? You’re always putting your foot in it.”
Lou shook his head. “It’s you, man.”
There was no way for John to refute it without talking about the exact details of his life which he consciously avoided in conversation with Lou: that is to say his dick, where he put it. So John merely drove his hands deeper into his coat pockets and hastened his strides until there was enough space between them on the sidewalk that he could breathe again.
Of course if she’d actually gotten pregnant they would still have to wait to see whether it came out with a head of dark curls rather than straight hair, and then it would be Lou whose life was fucked.
A miserable wet cry rang out from the bed, which was then muffled, but John could still hear the panting and whining from behind what he had to assume was Charles' hand and John prayed that the man would be successful in smothering Lou to death.
Then there was a pause, and the little room filled with the sound of breathing, and John dared to hope for a moment before they went right back to it.
John's sinuses prickled.
Outside the weather hadn't improved and it was still hours before the sun would rise, and Lou liked to sleep in.
He woke to the blunt edge of a boot digging into his ribs.
“Come on, sleeping beauty.”
A pair of bare, bony shins protruded from beneath a white terrycloth hem and tapered down into a pair of scuffed leather boots right next to John's head.
For a second John entertained the idea of crawling into the vacated bed to catch up on the sleep he was certainly owed. His body went lax with relief at the mere prospect of a surface softer than the floor, and then he remembered the dirty sheets.
“Where’s your friend?”
“It’s Sunday.”
John nodded as best he could.
Lou yanked his jacket from where it was draped over his body. “Christ, John,” he said, in a hushed tone that too closely resembled pity. After a beat, he asked, “You gonna pay for my dry cleaning to get this stain out?”
Of course it had to be the one day where John was not dressed in trousers dark enough to hide the evidence. He knew it hadn’t actually seeped into Lou’s jacket, that it was a wind-up, that Lou’s parents paid for his dry cleaning anyway—and yet it didn't matter. The cold spill of shame over his whole person was the same. Lou stood above him for a moment longer, staring down at John’s crotch with an appraising tilt to his head. From his fingertips the jacket dangled like a shapeless carcass.
Lou was not a short man but there was something about his wiry build that gave an impression of compactness in photographs or at a distance, and up close his fragility was so evident that he didn't seem to warrant any real consideration at all until he opened his mouth. It was only ever when he played music, nimbly concocting some story as he went, that his physical presence seemed to take on a real gravity. As John looked up at him from the floor, he finally seemed big. Later he would recognize this view of Lou from across the stage, jagged and practically wall-eyed with nerves or speed or some errant transfer of electricity and yet undeniably big. Larger than the life he'd been given and then tried to refuse in so many ways that John only knew the half of.
Eventually he grew bored with John’s refusal to rise to his bait and disappeared into the en-suite. As he left he tossed a carton of cigarettes over his shoulder in John's direction. He finally sat up, wincing as the dried mess in his pants tugged at his pubic hair.
After he lit one of the cigarettes, he looked around the room for the first time and found it almost disappointingly standard in the uncanny cool light of morning. There was a double bed flanked by two small tables, each with their own unlit lamp and crystal ashtray. Beneath the window Lou’s guitar case sat on top of a luggage rack and beside it there was a folding cot propped up against the striped wallpaper. Just beyond the frost-veined glass the air seemed very quiet, almost eerie compared to the typical daily cacophonies of the Lower East Side.
He'd succeeded in smoking the majority of the cigarette by the time Lou returned from the bathroom, exclaiming, “Hey, Cale! Look at these!” The earlier derision was replaced by a sincere childlike amazement as he held up the tiny shampoos and soaps so John could see. And then he was man-sized again, and young like himself, and somehow easy to forgive.
“Take the toilet paper, too,” John said. Lou’s face unfolded in the rarified expression of delight that John recognized from the first time he had sawn across the viola while Lou sang Heroin and thus proved his worth.
Whatever you can carry, he wanted to say. Whatever you can get away with.