Part II: Journeys (Chapter 9)
SR 53 South under Ohio Turnpike at Exit 6–Fremont
I’ve decided that if I ever do myself in, I’ll choose
the best time possible – none of this holiday peak business – and I’ll plan my
death carefully.
No messy stuff.
I’ll arrange it so that I look
like I’m asleep.
But I’d have some fun first,
fucking complete strangers –
Don’t look at me that way.
I’ve no plans to end my life
anytime soon, but if I do, I’ll definitely go out with a bang.
Why should I miss out?
I’d go away, to Philly maybe,
check into an expensive hotel, find a bar that has music and dancing, and wait
for someone hot and bothered, probably some horny businessman – probably
married – to pick me up.
For the first week, I’d pick up
a different man every night, each one hotter and hornier than the last. For the
second week –
I’d look up Paulie.
Now there’s a hot one…
I ever tell you about him?
Paulie Quest.
Artist (maybe), raconteur, bad
boy, floating in the periphery of my life.
Met him by Grauman’s Chinese
Theater – I suppose you could say he picked me up, or did I pick him up?
Smooth, I tell you.
Slipped right through my radar.
He tried to slip inside me.
We parted ways.
Scary then, delicious now.
After our date, he called me,
but I was skittish, too young.
Seventeen.
He, 22.
I blew him off.
Regrets?
Don’t know.
Sometimes people intersect at
inopportune times, passions evaporating.
Poof.
Well, not totally.
I sometimes dream about what
could have been, where that fork might have taken me, what heights of passion I
might have reached.
Had we met a few more months
later, before Snake Bodine, who knows?
Me, a minute blip in his life.
Forgotten.
Just as well. He was either a
failed artist or a liar.
A loser.
Would you care if I fucked him
right now?
Don’t answer.
For my death fantasy, I would
stick to throwaways, strangers in the shadows.
I wouldn’t worry about AIDS or
anything like that. I’d have my fun and then –
Why end it all on a sour note
like Mother and her best friend Monique?
*
I ever tell you about Monique, the rich
bitch from Bel Air? What a piece of work, that one.
I’ve never understood Mother’s
fascination with her, especially since she – Mother, that is – disliked gay
people.
Monique lived in a big mansion
with Trish, her lesbian lover, and sat on a 50-million-dollar fortune, all
inherited. You would never guess her wealth by her appearance; Monique looked
like a refugee from Skag City. The kind of scum that hangs out at the local
bowling alley waiting for Big Red’s Heating & Plumbing team to finish knocking
over ten pins.
Leathery skin, straw hair, and
a hoarse voice – she cackled when she laughed. Told crude jokes about private
parts. Ugh.
I’ll never figure out what
Mother saw in her.
But you would’ve loved the
challenge of someone like Monique, the possibilities for her therapy. I could
see you going off to Esalen – you, Monique, and Fritz Perls jumping into the
hot tub, confronting each other in the here and now –
Oh, well, never mind.
And then one day Monique popped
39 Valium, “one for each year of my miserable life” – at least that’s what the
note said.
I was just 18 when the phone
call came from the dour Trish; I remember how Mother’s eyes remained dead for
years.
Soon after, her drinking became
an obsession.
Mission: death.
Though it would take another six or seven years to kill her liver....