Blind hearts - 15. Slutty Sociopath

“Would you put on a shirt already?” Gilda screamed at Charles, who was flexing his flabby muscles at the kitchen sink. She snapped shut the clamshell of her vanity mirror and arose from the dining table, with a dour expression pinching in the newly farded eyebrows.

Charles kept on with his schoolboy poses while Dimov, still in his work suit and tie, yawned idly at the dining table. He thought it was about time to commit the ultimate sacrilege to the gods of the Friday Evening and spend the rest of the night huddled over his laptop, dispensing poker philosophy on poker forums. But glinting in there with Charles’ prideful smirk at the muscles hiding under the quarter-inch layer of fat, was an assertive glaze, warning Dimov that he would not get away with sacrilege.

He made to retire away quietly, but there was Gilda removing her satin haltertop like she was auditioning for a b-grade porno.

Her blue-lined eyes swung over to Dimov’s gimlet-eyed stare. “If he can be half-naked, I too can.”

The logic was nowhere self-evident to Dimov absorbing sight of the falling rolls of her love handles.

“Come off it, you’re scarring Dimi,” Charles said.

“Then, get a shirt on,” she growled.

Charles rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be getting drinks with girlfriends?”

“In another twenty minutes,” she said triumphantly.

“You two work it out. I’m heading inside,” Dimov declared, but he made ready for his disappearing act, Gilda cried back to him, “Wait, wait, what’s happening tomorrow night? Are we going to Miguel’s party?

“If Charley doesn’t care for it, then there’s no point,” Dimov said.

“Well then, Charley boy, make up with Miguel already!”

Queenly and rudely perturbed, Charles pulled the phone out of his jeans pocket and marching to the balcony, quipped, “the things I do for fat women.”

“Of course you balding fuck,” she shot back.

He flipped her off, like it was his last battle cry before going down to do what loyalty commanded, and then dashed open the screen doors.

“Mi’jo, why do you have to be the generalissimo? Pedro and Joachim have a say you know … I know, I know, but it won’t work out,” came Charles’ rapid lilt on the phone, not quite apologetic, but hopeful for understanding, “Yeah this love, you sure about that? I fall in love almost every day. It’s healthy for you, I hear, but it never quite sticks .... Plato had something about love in The Symposium. Love is so good that you just have to love everybody …”

Gilda shook her head, shined incredulous eyes onto Dimov, miming, “What the hell,” and chuckling, danced back to her room, leaving him with a full view of the love philosopher’s behind. Dimov thought he might as well as he took his seat again. The shoulders, not broad, not narrow, had the width weighty enough for him to wrap his hands around. Charles, rather girlish about unnecessary exertion, had superstitious ideas about fitness, and Dimov would concur that it was showing. There glimmered a faint definition of shoulder blades; one or two slats of muscle petered in there. One could forgive the less than precise muscle-to-fat ratio, as Charles’ buttocks swelled deliciously beneath the loose jeans.

Charles turned back sharply, twinkling an eye for Dimov, as though to cheer on the preternatural violation. Miguel seemed to have tired him because he paced back to the table, and flumped onto a seat next to Dimov. The phone call dragged out with more wearied assurances, “I know, I know, mi’jo,” while Dimov wandered over the less disturbing spread on the table: Gilda’s sequined purse, the chrome salt and pepper shakes, the folded up trapezoid of the newspaper looking ready to spring like a loaded up jack-in-the-box. Dimov moved to get up, but Charles stamped down on his thigh, stabbing up there a shard of pleasure. And he surrendered to the grassy, gratingly arousing scent of his old, old friend.

“Gilda’s thinking about moving out,” Charles said as an after thought to the phone call, his hand still possessive of Dimov’s thigh. “What are you going to do?”

The apt reply to abandonment was not immediate to Dimov glaring at the disappointing distance between the hand and his aching burden.

A door bang, heels clopping, a cloud of Fougère sweetness wafting in, and Gilda, gratefully clothed, peering out of the corridor. The evening dazzled with possibility in her shiny face.

“I was telling Dimov, you were thinking of moving out,” said Charles lifting the offending hand to smooth his clean-shaven cheek.

Her glow darkened. “I was just thinking aloud, you know.”

“When you know, let me know,” Dimov said, in a dislocated aura of denied possibility.

“Not for another few months at least, I feel bad leaving you alone here,” she said.

“Don’t worry. I can always hop on a plane to Philly,” Dimov said.

“You would?” Charles seemed elated, and his thighs jittered with joy as well, widening open, rubbing up against Dimov’s knee.

“I was joking,” Dimov grunted, hardening himself to a more solid feeling rising again.

With sterile poise, she picked up the purse and secured it under her arm and looked on softly at Charles nursing a secret hurt, and then to the mean and unyielding Dimov.

“The Universe rolls on,” she said, as if surrendering to the painful illogic of the cosmos. “I’m headed out. Charley, you still meeting the boy at Fairfax?

He shrugged. “I’m probably cancelling.”

“I’m going to bed,” Dimov said, arising, but Charles stamped him down.

“No, you’re not. You’re coming with me to Fairfax.”

“Good luck with making Dimov do anything,” Gilda said.

After the final door bang, the room was ringing, shaking up in Dimov’s ears, and Charles, with feline neediness, was stroking up and down the length of his thigh. His mouth was half open, and Dimov could see over the pinkish glints, the warm bed of his tongue, ready, waiting in there. Of a sudden, Dimov felt like a dead stone in the lake of his succulent feeling.

Charles was much taken up with the simple act of stroking of his knee. And over his painful and bursting state, Dimov riffled painfully past the moment to the maddening, unfulfilling existential echoes in Charles, love of his life Charles, being common again.

Dimov held onto Charles’ hand warm, wide, a finely hirsute. “Are you going to love me, Charley?”

Coldly, aloofly, Charles retrieved his hand, like switching off a boring channel. An air of exasperation spun as he interlaced his fingers over his lap and ruminated the dark vanish of the table.

He reconsidered him, and not with a ruffle of warmth in his eyes. “I fight to make you say you love me, while I tell you I love you everyday.”

“Yes, every six hours even ... but you tell everybody that.”

“Ah? You need to get over your hangup already.”

“Would you spare me your BULLSHIT?”

Dimov saw his hands were shaking and he saw Charles, in his usual longsuffering resignation, glance over his shaking hands. And the thought blatted down his ears: he had done it again. Again with being the idiot child. Again with this adolescent ruse of seeming irrevocably lost.

And when the next evening, Dimov was driving Charles and Gilda to Pedro’s house, his mind was encamped with the monstrous movements of the day before: the muddling senselessness of his anger, the fundamental logic of a hard cock in his pants. And Gilda, at the driver side seat, scatted freely: Echo Park was a trite ghetto, Silver lake was too silvery with hipsters, West Hollywood was fake. The Westside was full of momma bears. Downtown Los Angeles could be tolerable except for the omnipresent stink of piss. The Universe had willed Sedona to be perfect. She took a moment to press a black curl to her forehead, to comprehend the universal dispassion swallowing up her words, and then limped a glance to the backseat, to Charles clenching a fist on his lap.

“You’re pulling a Dimov, being so quiet there,” she said, “Martinis did not go so well last night?”

“He was a raging top,” Charles said.

“And? That’s so your thing.”

“I was in no mood to be topped.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, it happens.”

Gilda sighed long and hard enough to impel Dimov to swerve through a left turn. Something at last dropped out of his brain about Gilda’s plans to move out. No more Charles to scold about him being brooding and quiet. No more Gilda to cheer his sententious screeds against his Siberian temperament. Strange how they thought broodiness sinful. There were worse sins he could think of, selfishness yes, laziness definitely, or even paralysis.

Parking was another fifteen minutes of circling and two minutes of parking, and they came to Pedro’s house was entombed between two serious-looking apartment complexes. Dimov waited patiently through Pedro, Joachim, and Miguel crowding over Charles and Gilda with kisses on their cheeks and ululations of Charley, Charley, Charley, and this Charley himself, redder, bubblier by the moment.

“Amigos, let’s get this thing started,” Charles said, his gaze cascading down the corridor to a bronzed fellow in a jersey and jeans, his head a dome of long blond curls.

“You were standing there all along.” Miguel welcomed Dimov with a weak hand on his shoulder and an astringent mist over his face, and Dimov had a mephitic revelation of the rest of the evening.

“Finally Dimov, we get to talk,” said Pedro smiling at him and taking his arm in his. And his excited jabber guided Dimov through the murmur and the laughter, the jeers of good beer and the salutations that wished good health and better days, but not everlasting love.

Talking consisted of Pedro walking him around and introducing him with Spanish-flavored hoarseness, “Hola, meet Charley’s roommate.” Dimov persevered all right with a glass of seltzer. With Pedro warm at his side and glittering with sweat and smiles, he was assured of the hidden pearl of the evening when they could finally settle into the dark.

Then one man was amused enough to reply, “Hello Charley’s roommate,” which made Dimov take a distinct dislike of his metallic rimmed glasses and his sleek black ponytail.

“I’m Mike,” the man said, shaking Pedro’s hand too long and too vigorously.

Pedro was more engrossed in Mike’s introduction: an animator for the movie studios, connoisseur of cigars, how at twenty-seven he felt a little old for house parties.

Pedro enthused, “Animation like Bambi?”

Mike’s laughter was a trite scolding. “Something like that, more like special effects to supply the right atmosphere in the most boring movies you can think of.”

“Dios mio, movies are all fake,” Pedro said like Archimedes discovering his principle.

“Well yeah ...”Mike narrowed at Pedro’s hand limp and lithe over where Dimov’s heart lay. He excused himself and floated away to a trio of women united in praise for pop star tenors.

“There are a lot of people here,” Dimov said disappointingly. But Pedro’s gaze was far away to Miguel downing the contents of a cup then stumbling back into the wall.

“The party was more Francis’ idea,” Pedro said absentmindedly.

Must be one of the six tenants of the house, Dimov thought. The surroundings beamed the décor choices of uninspired bachelors: the large screen television, lonely and rudely out of place in the expanse of the living room, the chairs with ratted ends and the floor, hardwood presumably, but squishy with each footstep. The notion of six men, six young men living a house in Brentwood, was a little abusive.

In another hour, Pedro was skittering off histrionically to attend to Miguel micturating into a flowerpot by the television. And Dimov was the frightfully somber sentry languishing by the door to the garage—the intoxicated den of half-spoken wishes, slurred assertions, and piggish chatter. The garage was cooking with pot smoke. Getting stoned by proxy was a near impossibility, not when he could hear Charles’ high assents from somewhere in the far beyond of the living room or the verandah. No one in the garage took to his dry grits of sense in the bauble of frolic. He did not know anyone, and yet in the fragrant blur simmering under the glowing bulb, they all seemed to be a natural part of him, the lost souls of his childhood. The woman, bending over a bong, assumed the same long, round profile as his first love. Immediately, her moody smile was vivid over the powdered face, and yes, how could he have forgotten her only memorable line before leaving him for the high school wrestling champion, “He just grabs you and takes you and won’t let go. So, so exciting.” Her combative efforts at fellatio, her impenetrable air over lunches, the interminable panic over the symmetry of their phone calling came unbidden, belligerently. Dimov turned away from the garage, clucked. He was hungry.

Parties, they thundered your responsibility to shut up and have fun, but never quite supplied the hearty spread needed to fuel the night. Dimov grumbled miserably at the countertop overrun with bowls of chips and chips, salsa and more chips, mighty cylinders of soda and hard spirits, and on the floor by his knee, the pewter-hued keg of beer. The kitchen rocked aflame with the flickering fluorescents and asseverations of absinthe’s true fuck-you-up-index.

Salsa could be considered food, but not the bowl of a flattening mountain marked and pocked with slimy green and bile yellow. He really should have gotten over himself earlier and taken up Charles’ offer to microwave him a plate of macaroni pesto.

“Dimov!”

Pedro’s call was the last triumphant clash of cymbals at the end of a symphony, and Dimov bloomed with smiles but the plowing emptiness in his belly … and as he ran his hands over Pedro’s head, he fingered on another discontent. The haircut, too short, too clean, gave him an unnatural edge of meanness. It was as if Pedro had awoken suddenly and decided to look like Mike Tyson. But Pedro’s eyes were lulling, drifting off in a pleasured daze, and Dimov could not wait to have those eager lips all to himself.

“Ah, you’re enjoying yourself,” Pedro moaned, drunk with satiety, drunkenly pointing over to Charles hobbling over the bronze fellow with blond curls in a shadowed corner, “He’s enjoying himself.”

Utterly vanquished, Dimov pulled back Pedro’s arm to himself. “There has to be something more to eat than chips.”

“Pizza’s coming. Joachim phoned in an order.”

It was so depressingly American and adolescent, all of a sudden. All the cautious optimism he had managed to reap during the day, all to be squandered on the evening too miserly with its trove of goodly surprises.

“¿No quiero que la pizza?” came Miguel’s raspy whine approaching from behind Dimov.

“¿Y ahora qué?” Pedro growled.

But Miguel lingered over Pedro like a stupid dog, and Dimov wished he would either stand aside or get out of his face, but there like stupid dog continued moping and searching for an assurance of The Universe’s benevolence.

A droop of weariness was evident in Pedro’s face as he and Dimov walked Miguel to empty seat on the couch, then they returned to the counter.

“No good when he’s borracho with a sick heart like that.” Pedro leaned into Dimov’s arm, seemed to be gleaning a mysterious strength from its solidity. “Dios, what are you going to do after Charley leaves?”

The woman striding up to Dimov kidnapped his ruminative faculties. Her bouffant hair, her precariously short summer’s dress, the aggressive front of her big wide smile.

“You must be Dimov. I’m Catherine,” she said. “Gilda said you loooove poker.”

Dimov wanted to kiss Gilda wherever she was. Better yet, praise the Universe.

Within ten minutes they were exchanging numbers, all the while Pedro was making bad zinging noises to express his abiding love for slot machines and his hatred of poker. Mike came by, ostensibly, to refill his cup of beer.

“Did you want a beer?” he asked.

“No thanks. I’m the designated driver.” Dimov said. It took another ten seconds and the deep furrow in Mike’s brow for him to understand the question was meant for Catherine, not him. But she had already danced off to the babble-clogged verandah, stranding Mike between the beer keg and the space previously occupied by her orange-scented perfume

His pained nodding of the head was much too droll, and Dimov glanced away only to catch his eyes on Charles holding up his friend’s hand as if perusing the mysteries of fingers and bone. There was a spurt of a laugh, the nonchalant clinking together of foreheads, and a blood clot in Dimov’s heart.

“Pedro, You sure pizza is coming?” Dimov asked.

And Pedro was off again to ask about Joachim, and Dimov was a little distressed by Mike’s persevering hurt.

“You have an accent,” Mike said like it was a hidden flaw.

“Born in the Ukraine, moved here when I was twelve.”

The fact seemed to something to chewed over like bad leather.

“So what do you do?” Mike asked.

“I’m in securities … work in a boutique firm managing investments.”

“You play with stocks all day,” he accused.

“Not quite,” Dimov said delicately.

Mike was rubbing his sideburns, enthralled with a puzzling, private fact. “I make a fake movies for not-so-little money, you do fake work for a lot of money.”

And Dimov was glad for the smell of pizza. Where was the delivery boy?

Around the kitchen overflowing with conversation, Dimov’s gaze wandered, over the boys kneeling towards the television in dazed concentration, down the walkway skidding into a dimmed haze, and back to Mike nudging his arm.

“I was kidding …” A little laugh and everything was forgiven. “So what’s the hot stock to buy? And don’t say Google.”

Dimov prepared himself for the disappointment that was sure to follow. “I’d just do index funds. Simple and profitable for the long haul.”

“Come on, your kind don’t play with index funds.”

“In a roundabout way we do.”

Meatier, drenched with tomatoes, the smell bloomed stronger, but Dimov, bafflingly, could not locate its source. Willing himself to be patient, he grabbed a handful of chips. Mike nibbled as well, which made Dimov even more impatient. His mouth was nettled and stinging with all the nicks and cuts the trenchant chips scraping his gums.

“Dimov, you should have come to Joshua Tree.” Dimov turned just in time to catch Miguel falling over him then respectable as could be propped him up against the counter. Miguel smelled of beer and loss.

“It was beautiful,” Miguel said over and over, in between slurred dips and a dry sniffle. “Except for him being a puta with the policeman, it was beautiful. No one can catch him, eh mi’jo?”

Between Mike’s diffident scowl and Miguel’s face bleeding with hurt, Dimov negotiated for the true soul of the evening. Everything collapsed upon him a mess, a stupid sordid mess of no value whatsoever. And this Charley, what was there of him to catch? Meat and bones and nothing more. Nothing special, nothing magical, nothing lovely, or kind, or good—he was supposed to be over him.

“Do you know anything about pizza?” Dimov asked, dryly contained.

“You don’t care,” protested Miguel. “Ah I remember you’re just the landlord who rented him a room.”

“He’s over there enjoying himself with blond fluff. Sober up already,” Dimov said coldly.

Miguel was shivering in rage. A great, red patch burned over half his face, and he swept Dimov aside and marched, mighty with pain, to Charles’ jaunty corner.

Dimov rolled his eyes at Mike, who replied with an understanding smirk.

“Yeah, bullshit huh,” Mike said.

The kitchen had been alive with all manner of conversation on liquors with strange colors, and now there, faces charmed, paralyzed, entranced with bullshit. Leaving them alone would be prudent, but leaving them alone would be sacrilege. Irreparably divided, Dimov poured himself an orange soda. High fructose corn syrup should mollify him somewhat through the ignominious charade.

But Miguel flung open his heart, and as if imploring the cosmos to vindicate him, yelled, “Charley, you so bad, idiotas, puta!”

Dimov stiffened, almost crushed his plastic cup of soda. A vein ticking away in his neck obtrusively, Dimov squashed himself back into the tight vat of understanding that Charles could handle himself. And he was already. There was Charles, pudgy and jovial, entreating for love, friendship, blond fluff’s fantastic sailing hobby, love, Latin brotherhood, Fourth of July in Philly, love. His cheery lilt belied nothing of offense or even bafflement, but of the way of Zen and love for every single man on the planet.

Common again. Dimov turned away to face Mike pumping the keg gaspingly for another cup of beer.

“What are some of the movies you’ve done?” Dimov was affectingly moved with a colossal need to know.

Mike’s flushed cheeks lifted. “Yeah, yeah, … look for my name Micheal Bjornson in last year’s Oscar winner for best picture in the film credits. How much do you like blockbusters? You should definitely check out—”

Dimov could not ascertain what he was seeing in the amber haloes behind Mike nor what he was hearing amidst the anarchy of bass beats: a hand flying diagonally upward, the thwack, the trickle of blood, Charles nursing his jaw, Pedro’s torrent of sorries, maniacal Spanish interludes, Miguel leaping to slap Charles again, Joachim subduing Miguel onto a couch, Gilda lapping Charles with her Universe-flavored mercies, blond fluff scratching himself like bored a sea lion on the beach.

Dimov had crushed his cup of soda. Orange liquid dripped over his trouser sleeve, and his hand was sticky and clenched. His sights were trained on Miguel’s fragile head, his bloodshot eyes, his crushable neck, and Dimov’s legs quickened. But Charles wandered into his line of sight and flashed him a cold warning look to back off. I’m over him already, and he doesn’t need me. And he demurred, made motions for another draught of soda but hesitated on the bottle of vodka. The several inconsiderate sessions of Charles trying to make him drink in New York brought on a severe burning in his throat.

“Hell yeah, gay boy drama calls for vodka shots.” Mike bumped him approvingly, and Pedro was hovering over Miguel bowelled against the wall, still trying to get him to calm down about the puta.

The burn swarmed to Dimov’s head.

Mike graciously poured two shots, opining, “I have never seen such a clean and perfect bitch slap. The shaved guy just fucking took it like a—I dunno.” Dimov reflected upon his warm throat with a hawk-eyed glare. Mike added decisively, “He’s just a weak little bitch. A slutty bald bitch even.”

Dimov would not remember how he was able to hook Mike by the throat, bash his head cheeks flat against the counter, drag him by his ponytail across the shots of vodka, the bowls of chips and ice and salsa, pummel him down to the ground, and dump the noisome bowl of guacamole over his pleading face. But he did remember telling Charles, “Oh you little slutty sociopath! After you get back to Philly, never contact me again.”