I can’t name it. His expression never changes. It shows nothing.
I am instinctively afraid of him and repelled. N listens to him
intently. She looks almost female. Her body softens. Her eyes
are cast down. The music starts. He leaves. The legend sweats
and blares and spits and screams. He is even sloppier now,
more arrogant too, but we are drunker so it evens out. We
leave at dawn. We walk home in the hot haze. Junkies make
jokes at us. Men pee. Someone flashes a knife from a stoop.
We are tired. We sleep.
We wake up in early afternoon. The heat is stifling. Today
we are going to take the special acid we have been saving, N
and me and poor R. I am excited. N says first she has to meet
the guy from last night. She promised him. She just wants
forty-five minutes alone with him. He comes in the dead heat
of the afternoon. In the glaring heat of the sun he is still cold,
glistening, mean. He wears a suit. He wears a tie. He has on a
clean shirt, buttoned up to the top. His shoes are polished. His
face is set, he doesn’t try to smile, he has no expression, he
doesn’t sweat. Standing up he is towering, dangerous, cold. N
is happy to see him, reserved, courteous. I am bewildered and
afraid. I just want to fuck him, she says quietly to me. We
have dropped the acid. He is dangerous, I say. What are you
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going to do when you start tripping? He will be gone by then,
she says. One fuck, then he will go. I wait outside like she tells
me to. They go into our storefront. I expect to hear screams. I
hear nothing. I strain to hear but I hear nothing. Forty-five
minutes later they come out. Nothing has changed with him.
Suit. Tie. Clean shirt, buttoned up. Polished shoes. No expression. Still not sweating. N is glassy- eyed, creamy, content.
I got what I wanted, she said. Whad ya do in there, I ask,
casual but really scared, worse now since I see no sign of human
emotion or exertion in him. Just fucked, she says. He is not a
man who fucks. I can see that. He may kill but he doesn’t
fuck. Either the needle or he tied her up. I am pretty sure. She
is wearing a blouse with long sleeves, not her usual T-shirt. I
don’t see her naked for the next few days. Even as the street
begins to slide and whirl, I know that there are bruises on her
arm from one thing or another. I don’t exactly know the word
sadist but that is what I think he is anyway. I strain for the
word without finding it but I know what I mean. I am scared.
She is satisfied. I never see him again. I think he kills people.
Most of the violent men we see are sloppy, one way or another.
Their violence sort of oozes out. This man is a perfect diamond
cutting through glass.
*
There are the layers, the dumb, slobbering junkies, oozing pus
and grief, dealing a little, stealing, falling down on top of whatever doesn’t move fast enough; there are
