The Artists - 10. Truths and Lies

How am I supposed to do this with a hole through me?

“Didn’t I tell you that you are just a manifestation of yourself,” the old man said. He walked over to the boy and put his hand on the boy’s abdomen. The hole was covered with skin when he removed his hand. He did the same thing to the hole in the back, the open wound where the foreskin had been removed, the swelling, and discoloration of the scrotum, and took the bandage off the boy’s eye. “There you go, all back to normal. When are you going to figure out that this is all in your mind? None of this is real!”

When you tell me I don’t have to stick this spear into the demon.

“Ah, yes, well, you have to slay the demon. It’s in all the storybooks, the hero slays the dragon and lives happily ever after with the fair maiden. Don’t you want your fair maiden and live happily ever after?”

It’s a fair lad.

“Yes, well, I was only speaking figuratively. Now, try it again. You have to hit the silly thing above the waist for the spear to have any chance of doing its part in this.”

The boy threw the spear, but it went wide to the left and missed the target entirely. The next went right and the one after that, thrown with extra frustration, went completely over the target.

The eagle took off and began retrieving the spears, one at a time.

“You ever have a dog as a kid?” The old man asked.

Yes, his name was Buddy. He was a black lab. He died.

“Old age?”

No, he was hit by our neighbor’s car.

“What was he doing in the road? Or, did the car come into your driveway and get him while he was napping on the warm concrete?”

Buddy was running after our car because Dad was teaching Devon how to drive and Mister Peters, our neighbor, hit Buddy when he backed out of his driveway. It was an accident. Mister Peters didn’t like Buddy because he barked at him, but I was at a friend’s house so I didn’t see it happen.

“You don’t believe it was an accident, do you?”

No. Mister Peters did it on purpose.

“More than likely the eagle is Buddy,” the old man said as he put his arm across the boy’s shoulders. “The mind works like that sometimes when you’ve tried like hell to mess it up and, trust me; you’ve done a bang up job of messing up your mind. Look around you, all of this is your mind trying to come to terms with what happened and none of it is going away until you kill the demon.”

Even you?

“No, I’m real. We’ll talk about it when you’ve killed the demon. First things first. A step at a time, I always say. Now, try to throw the spear with a little more concentration. Aim for the center of the chest, that’s where it keeps its measly little heart.”

I thought the heart was a bit off to the left.

“That’s people. Demons aren’t people.”

Oh.

The boy threw the first spear; it struck the target a little high and to the left. He adjusted his stance, thought a moment, and threw the second; it struck a little low and to the left. The third spear was his last chance. He thought a moment, raised the spear as the old man showed him, and threw; it struck the target squarely on the little heart.

There, now we can go slay my demon.

“You do that consistently and we’ll do that,” the old man said as he lightly caressed the boy’s neck. “But first you’ll have to learn how to use the short sword.”

Sword?

“You have to disembowel the bugger to see if it has a little demon inside. Sometimes these things are only a manifestation of the actual demon hiding in the gut. It’s all rather complicated and too much to go into right now. Just throw the spear and then I’ll teach you how to look for and kill the real demon.”

This is like school, it never ends.

Jim watched the city of his youth out the window of the 757 as it made its approach into Newark Airport. There were many more tall buildings. It was the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings of his day, he and Bobby left before the Twin Towers, but he was positive there had to be a few survivors of the epidemic who still lurked about in the nooks and crannies down at street level. It was just a matter of looking in the right places. Seventy and eighty-year-old men hung out in all the usual places no matter what city you were in. Of course, if they had a computer, the search was simplified a hundredfold. If they, too, were looking, well, all you had to do was look with them and eventually your paths crossed.

His hotel, the same hotel where he stayed when he first arrived in The City back in the Fifties was now a boutique hotel catering to middle-aged couples coming in for a New York moment. Jim took a suite, the best suite, on the top floor in the corner with a view onto the intersection, which wasn’t as busy as it had been back in the early days. The neighborhood had definitely changed.

The diner in the lobby was now an upscale restaurant with a Food Channel chef and it was impossible to get reservations. Luckily, they also took care of the hotel’s room service and the deli was still across the street, though now it was owned by a Vietnamese family that had a few grandsons hanging around and acting as if they belonged to some gang. They were the delivery boys.

At first, Jim was leery of the way the boys acted when they delivered, but that changed one evening when he went over and met the family. They’d been there quite a few years and Grandma Nguyen was about as Americanized as a farm mother in the middle of Nebraska, just the lilt of her voice gave away the country of her birth.

When Jim walked in, his two regular delivery boys suddenly stopped what they were doing and hightailed it to the backroom. There was a flurry of voices and they sheepishly returned to their duties.

“Hi boys,” Jim said as they walked past him.

They continued to the few tables that needed cleaning, completely ignoring him.

“Hey! You two be nice to the customer,” a middle-aged woman called out from the counter.

‘Be nice,’ thought Jim, what a strange concept in the city where rush is normal.

“That’s okay, they’re embarrassed because they recognize me,” Jim said.

“You’re too old to be gay,” the woman said. “I’m Mrs. Bian. My friends call me “Bea,” you know Aunt Bea, from Andy Griffith.”

Jim stood for a moment trying to gather his thoughts. He wondered which one of the boys was gay.

“He’s not gay Auntie,” the boy who said his name was Tommy called out. “He’s the half Rueben, slaw, and coffee from the hotel.”

‘If they only knew,’ Jim thought.

“I’m so sorry, I just assumed because you said you knew the boys,” Aunt Bea said. “They’re cousins and work here in the evening. They’re working on their masters; Tommy at NYU and Donnie at Columbia. They tell everyone in the family they’re going to get married as soon as it’s legal, but they’re first cousins and we won’t let them. That’s right, isn’t it? First cousins can’t marry in America?”

“Yes, I think that’s the law in most states,” Jim said. He glanced over at the boys who glanced at him at that same moment. Silent messages passed between their eyes, messages blocked by their age difference. “Most people assume I’m gay because of the long hair. I usually keep it in a braid, but I need help with that. Do you have any chicken soup?”

“Oh god! He asked about the soup!” Donnie exclaimed.

“And how many kinds of chicken soup do we have?” Tommy asked.

“Well, there’s,” Donnie started.

“Hush you two!” Aunt Bea exclaimed. “We have twenty-five different styles of chicken soup.”

Aunt Bea went on to explain the different types of chicken soup from a simple light broth to a concoction that could almost be described as chicken stew. The various ingredients were kept warming all day and all they had to do was combine them to produce the desire soup. The more popular ones—chicken broth, chicken with and without noodles, chicken with and without vegetables, chicken noodle with and without vegetables, and cream of chicken—could be ladled out of the pots in the kitchen. The more exotic types such as the wonton chipotle chicken took a bit of preparation.

Jim stood at the counter dutifully listening to her and getting hungrier and hungrier. He’d just come in for a cup of chicken broth and maybe a half knockwurst and edam, but he was beginning to think a bowl of the chicken with noodles and summer vegetables sounded pretty good. He certainly didn’t need the sandwich. He ordered the soup and found an empty table by the window, which wasn’t hard as most of them were empty. It was obvious suppertime was not the busy hour in the deli.

Tommy came over and sat down opposite him. He was wearing faded blue jeans that were tight enough to constrict the flow of blood and a short-sleeved white shirt that showed off his incredibly slender forearms. His black hair was long and pulled back into a short ponytail. His skin appeared soft, touchable.

“Are you NYU or Columbia?” Jim asked as he tried to soak up as much of the boy’s youth as he could. Tommy looked no more than fourteen, yet had to be nearly twenty-five.

“NYU for psychology,” Tommy said. His eyes sparkled as they danced seductively. “Donnie’s the writer in the family. He’s already had a short story published and has an agent, too. He says the MFA will be mostly for show. What do you do? Or, should I ask, what did you do?”

“I was a writer back in the days when The City of full of writers,” Jim said. “Bobby and I left all of this in the Sixties so he could set up an art school out on the West Coast.”

“Then you are,” Tommy said with a smile.

“Yes, I am,” Jim said. They’d gotten it out of the way and now could talk freely without having to skirt certain difficulties. “Back in the early Fifties when I first arrived in New York I stayed at the hotel across the street. It was under a different name back then and the rooms were cheap, but thankfully clean. I ate at this deli practically every day. Then I met Bobby and we moved uptown.”

It wasn’t his choice, of course. His choice was to stay in the Village where he felt a sense of belonging to something bigger than himself, but Bobby was the man in his life and he followed along like a puppy. It was almost as if Bobby wrote up a list of things to do every day as their life together sank into a repetitious pattern of events: wake up, have a piss, suck Bobby, shower and jerk off, fix breakfast, fix Bobby’s lunch, eat, say goodbye to Bobby, write, have lunch with friends or alone, write, fix supper, listen to Bobby complain about the day, eat, clean up, write, get ready for bed, get fucked, go to sleep.

“Then a few weeks ago things changed where I was living and I decided to come back here to see if any of my old friends were still alive,” Jim continued. “You get to be my age and friends have a bad habit of showing up on the obit page. Bobby had a very nice one, I wrote it.”

“You must have loved him very much,” Tommy said. His seductive eyes continued to blatantly flirt with Jim. “Was he a writer, too?”

“No, painter, Bobby was very good,” Jim said as he gave up on trying to avoid Tommy’s eyes. The black silkiness of them was so inviting. It was like walking through the doors into an avant-garde movie theatre after the black and white feature had started, blackness enveloped you yet you continued on to your seat.“I think he has a few scattered around the museums here in town. I went for the money and did quite well with paperbacks under about seven pseudos. That was Bobby’s idea so I could maximize my creative potential. Bobby went for fame and fortune followed. Now, I doubt anyone has heard of James Waters, sci-fi writer.”

“Hey Bobby!” Tommy called out. “Have you ever heard of James Waters, sci-fi writer?”

“Oh, god, yeah, ol’ Sandstorm is always talking about him and all the other Beats,” Bobby said as he walked over to the table. He was chunkier than Tommy. His face was rounder, the eyes too far apart, the lips too full, and his ears stuck out too far. It was probably only a face Tommy could love.

“Ta da! James Waters, sci-fi writer,” Tommy said.

“Eddy, I mean Edward Sandstrum, he’s still alive?” Jim asked.

“Eddy? As in you know Sandstorm personally?” Tommy asked.

“We were friends in college,” Jim said. He thought of the first time they’d made love, real love. Eddy was so sweet back then.

“Friends?” Bobby asked.

“Okay, we were boyfriends, but it was different back then,” Jim said as an image of their little one bedroom furnished apartment came to mind and the two twin beds that were never used because they slept together on the sleeper sofa in the living room. “How long ago did you see Eddy?”

“Last week at lunch,” Bobby said. “He’s sort of my ex officio advisor. He’s got all your books and the way he often talks about you makes me believe he wished he would’ve come to New York with you instead of going to Chicago. Do you want to meet him? He’ll be here, right where you’re sitting, next Tuesday for lunch.”

“After all these years,” Jim said.

He wondered if Eddy was living with someone. Was it possible to dream of them together after so many years? He tried to remember how it had been for them together that first night, inexperienced virgins who didn’t know what to do to please another man except to do to the other person what they wanted done to themselves. There was a lot of learning about each other’s body and what pleased the most. Could they have it back, after all these years?

Casey nervously sat down on the well-worn sofa as he watched Cheri go into the kitchen to make more popcorn and fix some drinks for them. They’d gone to a movie, something foreign at a theatre that specialized in dubbed movies. Personally, Casey didn’t like reading movies, but this one was from Mexico so he didn’t have too much trouble following along.

Even though her face was black and blue from where she’d walked into a cabinet in her studio, Tiffani agreed to go with them, but it just didn’t seem to work for them. There was something going on between Cheri and Tiffani, something unspoken, yet still palpable. The tension was so bad, Casey insisted on sitting between them.

“Sure, Casey, now we look like three lesbians out on a date,” Tiffani said, “instead of a queer and two lesbians.”

“I’m not queer,” Casey said, silently wishing Tiffani wouldn’t talk so loud. People were looking at them.

“I didn’t say you were,” Tiffani said.

Casey sat down and tried to figure out which of the two girls looked queer to Tiffani, who did look more like a boy than a girl. Maybe she thought she looked queer because Karl liked her to dress like a guy or did she know something about Cheri. Maybe she knew the truth about Cheri. It had been Casey who suggested taking Tiffani. Cheri balked a little, but he said they could go to her apartment afterward, alone.

So, here he sat waiting for a girl to sit down beside him and do whatever it was that girls did to boys on old worn sofas. He had a pretty good idea what was going to happen. They were technically adults, so anything was possible including the condom thing, but he didn’t have enough of a thing to put in a condom, even when it was hard.

The urologist said they were going to see what the pills and injections did, give them a year or so, then they’d decided about surgery. He couldn’t expect anything spectacular, probably nothing more than a three or four inch erection, if that much. Casey said as long as it didn’t hurt when he had an orgasm he’d take anything they gave him.

They told him he might need to see a neurologist about the pain, but any relief in that area might involve cutting some of the nerves, which might deaden too much. They, the endocrinologist, and the urologist, sounded against any involvement by a neurologist as if they thought a surgical and pharmacological solution might be best for Casey’s problem.

The important thing, though, was to lose the excess weight and skin. Nothing was going to happen until things could be seen in their “normal” situation; or, as the urologist said, “You just might have an average penis, but all the extra fat and skin is camouflaging what is actually there. We might not need to do any surgery at all. The pain might just be the result of excess fat pressing on a nerve at the time of ejaculation. I advise we wait and see what Dr. Henry can do for you.”

Dr. Henry, the endocrinologist, was zeroing in on the pituitary gland via an MRI and possibly the hypothalamus, too. More tests were scheduled. Time was of the essence, though, as Casey was rapidly approaching the age when adolescence was scheduled to stop and adulthood begin.

Cheri put a large steel mixing bowl full of popcorn and two glasses of some sort of beverage on the coffee table. She plopped down beside Casey, up close so their hips and thighs were touching. She put an arm behind him and placed the other hand on his belt.

“Okay, big boy, this is how I see our evening,” she said, “we can skip the movie, popcorn, and whatever, and go straight to my room, take our clothes off, and start making mad, passionate love as a means of getting to know each other.”

“Or, we can sit here and watch a movie and talk,” Casey said.

“We can do that,” Cheri said, “but that sounds kind of boring to me. Sure you don’t want to get naked?”

“Are you always this pushy?” Casey asked.

“Tiffani says you’re sleeping with the cook,” Cheri said as she untangled herself from Casey.

“Tiffani is a gossip,” Casey said, relieved that he’d succeeded in avoiding the bedroom, at least for now.

“I know Euphorbia,” Cheri said. She’d gone over to the DVD rack and was scanning the selection. “Or, rather, mother knows Euphorbia; they’re friends in some unknown, adult way. Do you want kiddy, adult, or porn?”

“You don’t have any porn,” Casey said.

“Well, not exactly porn, but it has naked guys in it,” Cheri said as she turned on the television and put the DVD in the player. “You being gay and all, you probably want to see some naked guys.”

“I’m not gay,” Casey said, not believing the words he said and feeling slightly sickened that he couldn’t admit it. He leaned his head back and shut his eyes because the last thing he wanted to see was a bunch of good-looking naked guys while sitting next to someone who just might be one, too.

“Then why do you sleep with Euphorbia?” Cheri asked.

“I don’t sleep with Euphorbia,” Casey said, keeping his eyes shut. He felt her hand on his stomach. “I sleep with Peter. There’s a difference, if you know what to look for.”

“I know Peter,” Cheri said. “He used to take me to the zoo and stuff when I was little. Do you let him fuck you?”

“No, it’s not like that,” Casey said.

“’cause you know, if we get to be close friends and end up in bed, I don’t want to share you with a sixty-year-old man who still likes to play dress up,” Cheri said.

Casey felt her hand softly caressing his stomach. There was no movement downward or upward. Then he felt her lips on his cheek. Without opening his eyes, he turned slightly and their lips met. A symphony wasn’t heard in the background, birds didn’t twitter, and fireworks didn’t go off. He opened his lips as he’d read about and felt her tongue slowly venture inside.

“Where were you this afternoon?” Kevin asked Eric as his lover walked into Six’s room. They kissed and then Eric took the chair on the other side of Six.

“I had to see a specialist about a lump,” Eric said. “Now, don’t go getting yourself into another tizzy, it’s just a tiny lump in an unobtrusive place that has little meaning. Dr. Larsen was just concerned when he examined me. It might have a lot to do with the way I’ve been feeling lately. He said it shouldn’t be anything to worry about.”

“It’s not one of those TV things, is it?” Kevin asked. “I know how much you want to get on TV with one of those weird little conditions someone only gets if they were born on a blue moon in the month of August somewhere between forty-five degrees and fifty degrees north latitude.”

“Well, that lets me out,” Eric said with a chuckle and happy he’d defused the announcement. The last thing he wanted right now was to get Kevin worrying about him when they had Six to worry about. “How’s our boy?”

“They won’t tell me, but I think he’s getting worse,” Kevin said. “There’s a lot of hmms, uh-huhs, and a few oh-ohs going on when someone comes in. They put something in his IV a little bit ago and he’s been restless. Does that ficus seem alright to you?”

“What ficus?” Eric asked, looking around the room.

“The one in the corner,” Kevin said.

“Is that a ficus?” Eric asked, looking at the shrub. “I always thought they were taller.”

“Well, they eventually get taller, but they have to start small like everything else,” Kevin said. “Do you ever wonder what it might have been like if we had children?”

“Since we don’t fuck, I assume you mean adopting or fostering,” Eric said. He looked at Kevin and wondered how it would’ve been for them to have kids around the house. They’d definitely have to move out of Charles House, so maybe their property in Montana could be put to good use. Was it too late to think about the possibility of having kids? Would the lump squash any hopes in that area?

“Very funny,” Kevin said. “No, I was just thinking about that for the past few days sitting here with Six. Neither of his parents care about him; his father hates him for the same reason he hates me; and his mother is too busy, plus her boss is homophobic and having Six around has caused a few problems. Her fucking job is more important than her son.”

“Have you talked to them?” Eric asked.

“Yes, I called both of them today to let them know how their son was doing, like I do every day,” Kevin said. He stood up and went to the window. He felt an uneasiness standing beside the ficus and walked back to stand beside Eric. “Michael told me to quit calling because as far as he was concerned he never had a son named Kevin David Charles, VI. I never got to speak to his mother. Her secretary was screening calls and said she’d take a message. I’m afraid, for the time being, we have a boy. We’ll put him in the guest room and bring in a private nurse. Is that okay?”

“I’ll put it before the other members of the foundation, but I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” Eric said, as he thought of fly-fishing in their creek in Montana before another thought of the lump on his prostate came to mind.

Suddenly, Six’s body began to jerk as a seizure overwhelmed him. Eric ran out of the room to get a nurse and when he returned with more than one, Kevin was struggling to hold Six on the bed.

“Excuse me sir,” one of the nurses said, pushing Kevin out of the way. “We’ll take it from here.”

Kevin moved from the bed and went over to where Eric was standing. Soon more medical staff came into the room and the two men went out into the hall.

“He’ll be okay,” Eric said. “You have to expect a little set back now and then. He’s been doing so well.”

“But to have convulsions, that isn’t a little set back,” Kevin said. “If you remember, I spent a long time in a place where grand mal seizures were a daily occurrence. This isn’t good.”

A gurney came down the hall and went into Six’s room.

“Oh, god, they’re taking him somewhere,” Kevin said.

“It’ll be okay,” Eric said, trying to reassure him. He wondered if it would be the same for him when his time came.

“We’re taking him up to surgery,” one of the nurses said as they wheeled out Six. “The doctor thinks there might be infection in his abdomen. Do you know where the surgery waiting room is?”

“Yes, we’ve been there before,” Eric said as Six and his attending crowd of hospital staff turned a corner down the hall headed toward the service elevator.