By Nate Lippens.
Shane’s clothes were more sealant than fabric—sprayed on, shiny finish. He wore them like the hard shell of a toy animated to life by others’ imaginations. I was more like a hologram, a cheap illusion. He told stories about yearning to be tough, scraping his knuckles on cement until they bled, cultivating calluses and rough spots, the pride he took in scars, lowering his voice and moving his mouth less beneath a slit-eyed gaze. We were alike. Both of us shot into the world still marked by our makers like bullets streaked by their barrels. And we had collided.
Shane had a place and I needed one. I slept on the couch and he took the bedroom, bringing home a train of one-night stands after bar time. I lay awake with one eye shut as they fumbled through the next half-hour: stabs of light, burnt smells, water splash- ing, doors creaking open and shut.
One night Shane brought in a thick, sweet- faced middle-aged man. The man looked at me, then back at Shane.
“How much extra for the little one?”
I went along with it.
That summer my face organized itself. My lips were ripe. My eyes were bright. I have photos.
In the beginning I didn’t think to use a pseudonym. We started turning occasional doubles together. Shane had a car, and I didn’t drive. We’d go out and he’d make the moves and do the talking. The men thought I was shy. That was hot. Eventually Shane had me work alone. He still drove me around, so I gave him a cut.
My clients offered advice. Usually, it was to get out of the business.
“I wish you’d value yourself more.”
“Do you want to pay more?”
I did value myself. I set a price and it was more than I made bussing tables or washing dishes. I’d finish those shifts with little in tips, exhausted and demeaned. At the end of my pay period, I’d get a check and barely make rent. Turning tricks wasn’t so bad. I was treated like an object, but I was an object with money.
It was mostly keeping it up for the ugly and fat ones, but I’d always been able to get turned on by someone else’s attraction to me. The power of holding someone in thrall moved my blood. I looked so young I figured I was practically doing a public service. Giving pedophiles a way to blow off steam.
Shane and I stayed out all night and drove home at dawn with the windows down. My arms were peeling from sunburn. The dead skin moved like tiny flowers in the wind. We stopped and watched the rowers on the lake. Their long, fluid strokes became parts, mechanics pushing them along. The catch, the drive, the finish, the recovery. Legs compressed, braced to push off the foot stretchers, the power of the drive, the way the body hung from the oars by the hands.
I thought I could save us, rescue us from men and money and tight rooms with hard light. I thought we could go somewhere else and change and be together. I pictured us like salamanders emerging from the fire with bright iridescent scales.
Tricks of the trade, Shane called them. Giggle nervously and look away or down, then back at the john’s eyes.
“Older dudes love that shit from little guys like you.”
Shane dispensed these street wisdoms and they worked. It maddened me. I wanted less predictability. Why was everyone so perfect to type? But if they weren’t, if they threw off the behaviors and codes, I knew it wouldn’t be good. It wouldn’t be a human moment between us. It would be a monster movie. The hand grabbing the ankle from under the bed.
Shane taught me to haggle in cars, to get forty for a thirty-dollar job, to look away from the young boys. Block it out. You can’t change it. You can’t save anyone. Third time a guy circles the block, back away and ignore him. Unless it’s freezing cold, your stomach is growling, and you’re strung out. Then go. So, always go.
In a hotel room in downtown Madison, a man wore a robe and came in while I stood at the sink in my underwear with shaving cream on my face looking in the mirror at him behind me. It was the same scenario each time. One holiday season he brought a badger bristle brush and lather and used a straight razor. That got my attention. I was hard at the glint of steel. Not that he noticed. He was lost in the workings of his dream, one he had played out countless times with boys like me and maybe even long ago as a boy like me.
A friend drove over a thousand miles to surprise Shane for his birthday. This was the height of allegiance, a brother or sisterhood we strove to live. The visitor stood in the living room of the decrepit house, posing in Sunday morning light, and we gathered around. Tomorrow someone would fuck a friend’s man, steal something for drugs, run a scam for fifteen bucks, but today, with the smell of burnt coffee in the air and cigarette ash mixed with slush on the floor, we greeted his odd arrival with love. Lemme take your coat. Lemme get you coffee. Have a seat. Need a bath? A blanket? Are you hungry? How do you like your eggs? Five boys playing mom.
“Bitter crown, don’t be that queen,” Shane sang. A made-up song in a surprising voice.
“You can really sing, man,” I said.
“Nah.” He laughed, dripped beer on a rug, wiped it up with his finger and stuck the tip in his mouth.
Bitter crown, bitter crown.
Another night, another room. Naked and mad at God because the guy kept saying, “Oh God, oh God.” Rapture already and get off me.
The john sucked my fingers. We smoked pot, which I never liked, and watched TV. I found it pleasantly distracting but looking at the time I decided I wanted to get this over. I rolled onto him and he smiled. An ad played in the background. Suck, suck, suck. “The quicker-picker-upper…” Oh yeah, daddy…
Pop a Valium. Keep even. We were in a hotel downtown, a nice one, and I was thinking we’d be asked to leave. No matter how much money our trick had, it wasn’t likely such an establishment would tolerate what Shane and I meant. But we weren’t asked or told anything. We glided through the lobby’s reflecting pools to its smeared metal elevators and were scooped up and taken to another floor. My feet snagged at each step, but I was trying on a smile.
John’s eyes and skin were jaundiced. Couldn’t be good… didn’t matter. No matter. Matter and energy, that was us. I held Shane’s hand. John wanted schoolboys. We had a set of improvisations. Shane went Method, all Lee Strasberg, and I followed. John had whiskers like a sturgeon, bottom-feeding the whole time. Was that all he wanted? Maybe. Probably not. I threw myself out of my body and watched what happened. I was the passenger pitched from the car. I watched it burn.
Everything took twice as long as it should have, but then it was over. Money was exchanged. Shane’s hand to his pocket and we hit the door soar- ing, down elevator, lobby, street. Into the night. We were headed somewhere to make more money or spend what we’d made.
Walking through the cold, Shane and I shared a pair of gloves. He wore the right and I wore the left. I put my other hand in my pocket. Shane’s pants were too tight for the pocket to accommodate his hand, so he opened his jacket and tucked it in the lining, looking like a painting of Napoleon.
The man was dressed in all black except for his strange tan shoes. He talked too much. It worked to cover something up and created imbalance. I told him to go clean up in the bathroom and as soon as the faucet turned on, I grabbed my coat and left.
“Did he seem like a cop?” Shane said.
We sat in a lousy all-night diner with an assort- ment of human wrecks and Shane stared at his plate of ketchup-sodden fries and coffee, too high to eat.
I nodded but I didn’t think so. Cops worried me, they could tangle you up or toy with you, but I was afraid of psychos who’d torture and kill you, disperse you in trash bags along the highway.
The guy had a slender build and a shock of gray hair. He was like a beloved regional college—small but well-endowed. I beat him. I called him worthless, ugly, and stupid. I slapped his face, spit on him, and made him strip. I insulted his cock. I forced him out-side onto the balcony and locked the door, berating him. He wept and begged to be let back in. He pressed his naked body against the sliding glass door and shot his load. Afterward he told me I had done a great job and he wanted to see me once a week.
We shuffled our feet to stay warm behind the arcade. No cars were out but an occasional yellow cab.
Everything was still.
I jangled coins in my pocket. Shane rattled his keys.
We sang our ditty in low voices. A penny for your thoughts, a nickel for your kiss, why does your pussy smell like old man’s piss?
The door barely cleared the bed when opened. The room was a closet with flocked wallpaper the texture of old newspapers and carpet like moss and the window faced a brick wall. In that furred claustrophobia a man stood nervously, not wanting to sit down on the bedspread.
“You a cop?” I said.
“No, I’m a salesman.”
“Where are you from?”
“No Name, Colorado.”
He smiled and loosened up. His shoulders dropped. His hometown was usually a conversation starter for him. No Neck from No Name went on for a bit and I let him. It was his hour. He ran out of things to say, and I told him to get undressed.
“I’m going to the bathroom to take a leak. I’ll be right back.”
The bathroom was tiny and had a shower stall with a plastic curtain that looked like a used condom. The lighting was sallow, making my bruises pop for inspection. I’d known they were there but hadn’t realized how many there were. They were in various stages of blooming and fading.
I opened the door, and No Neck was under the covers. He had draped his button-down shirt over the bedside lamp. Ambience. The bed was spongy, and I straddled him with the filthy blanket between us so I could turn off the other lamp.
“That better,” I said. It wasn’t a question. We were shadows and I went to work.
An old man, with thick flecks of dandruff on his silk robe patterned in black-and-red swirls, told me, “I feel so alone.” I offered comfort—for a price. But our whole arrangement said this: you are.
The dark sky peeked through heavy clouds, lit from below by distant streetlights. The only stars were scattered on the beach towel bunched up in the grass.
“Let’s swim!”
Shane stripped off his shorts. His slender legs and flopping cock flashed by as he ran toward the water, his filthy soles flipping up and down.
I was so high. This was all beloved. Everything powdery.
I moved my head and there was my childhood. A basement, a shooting gallery, Xeroxed punk show fliers, dingy rooms. I was back on the beach. I traced the stars on the towel and thought of leaving. That would be something.
Shane and I teamed a trick. He was huge and sweating. Shane was in a strange mood about the guy. We had him bookended. Shane was behind him, and I stood in front of him, sinking into the mattress and catching awful glimpses in the mirror across from me. My unfocused eyes zeroed in on my face in feigned ecstasy.
Usually for this sort of trick I watched Shane for inspiration, but he was hamming it up, slapping the guy’s ass as if he was keeping time. Shane had obviously crossed that line between loosened up and sloppy drunk. He started talking dirty, fake cooing and trilling, “Oh yeah, daddy.”
Finally, I cracked, laughing so hard I spit. Shane broke into a grin, then a gust of laughter, until he wheezed. Like a rhino, the trick moved with amazing dexterity, standing up in one motion and wiping his mouth.
“Get the fuck out of here you fucking bitches.”
Ha ha ha. Bitches!
“I hope you whores get AIDS!”
Ha ha ha ha. AIDS!
The trick threw our clothes in the hall where we dressed quickly.
“What about our money?” Shane said, dancing from foot to foot as he shimmied into his pants.
“Fuck you.”
We cackled and crowed. Everything triggered more hysterics: the buttoned-up passenger on the elevator, the serious night clerk at the desk, a passing police car. Tears streamed down our faces.
This is an excerpt from My Dead Book by Nate Lippens, published by Pilot Press. My Dead Book is currently on the shortlist for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nate Lippens is a writer from Wisconsin. His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Little Birds (Filthy Loot, 2021), Responses to Derek Jarman’s Blue (Pilot Press, 2022), and Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles (Grove, 2022). My Dead Book is his first novel.
