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“A-OK”
Christopher Fletcher
I guess we are just standing around in Bryan’s parents’ living room waiting for someone to decide what we are going to do. It’s one of those never-ending nights when we are all away from school on summer vacation. It’s always like there isn’t a damned thing to do but we’re going to spend all night doing it anyway.
Bryan still has Amy Colberg hanging just off his shoulder, for the second year running, smiling broadly at him every other second like he is the most beautiful thing ever made by the Universe. I am kind of on my own as usual, and Bryan has invited into the house some chick named Kayla or Layla or something like that, and some awkward, gawky guy named either Dirk or Dork.
“I am really hungry and they have good food there,” Layla says.
“There’s also that bar near there. It’s called ‘In Cahoots’,” Dirk offers.
“I’d like to stop by the Meta-Lounge for a few minutes,” I suggest. “Justin is spinning records up there tonight.”
“Who’s Justin?” Layla says, and she says it like she completely hates the idea. Her upper lip twists into a sneer.
“He’s this dude,” I say. “He’s my friend,” I tell her.
She shakes her head. “I don’t know Justin.”
Well he probably doesn’t know whom the fuck you are either, I think but do not say.
“Hey, Bryan,” Layla says. “Does Justin go with Lori Vanderplah?”
I shake my head in disgust and wander to the door.
Bryan wants to have peace. “Wanna go for a ride?” he says.
***
Bryan Mueller was still only 16 years old when he bought the green Karmann Ghia. He earned $400 at his job that June, saved every bit of it and promptly handed it over to this kid who had no idea how to take care of such a fine car anyway and who had no idea that he could have gotten a lot more money for it.
There was nothing that Amy Colberg, who’s a year older than us , found more alluring than a kid in a classic VW, and she told Bryan so one night when we were getting stoned in his back yard. She said, “There’s nothing I like more than a cute boy in an air-cooled Volkswagen.” Nothing got Bryan hotter than a girl who knew what “air-cooled” means, and he and Amy Colberg started going together immediately, and it now seems like it will keep on year and after bloody year. I don’t always get along with her. I probably don’t like how she is the first person to get between me and my best friend.
She and I are of one mind tonight, though, when I whisper to Bryan, as we approach the car, that no way in fuck are all five us piling into that Ghia, and that Layla and Dork need to retire to their own vehicle, which I notice is a mid-eighties model Pontiac Le Mans.
“Right on, bruthah,” Amy says to me, close enough that I can smell the leather of her jacket. “No way I am riding with that plastic painted pansy.” I’m not sure which one she’s talking about.
“Oh come on, you guys,” and there he is again, poor Bryan, transfixed by our wrath. Moments like this I pity him. There he is trying to be nice to everyone, and all he gets for it is the implacable opposition of his girlfriend on one side and his best friend since birth on the other side. When it’s me versus Amy, as it usually is, he can sort of play the two sides against one another and usually reach an accommodation. When she and I join forces, the poor kid has no chance.
Bryan sighs and pulls at some of his blond hair. “Hey, Dirk, can you guys follow us in your car?” I can hear Dirk grunt something in the void behind me.
“How many rocks did you have to overturn to uncover those creeps?” Amy is saying as soon as we are shut inside the car.
“I don’t know anything about the dude, but Kayla’s in my contemp lit class and she’s really pretty nice.”
“If you were a senile old lady,” Amy says, “you’d be a cat lady, and years later someone would open up your house and find that all your cats are really rats.”
I don’t know what this means for sure, but it makes me laugh really hard, and Bryan laughs too even though it is a joke at his expense. He is good-natured like that.
I win tonight’s where-do-we-go-first contest, because Bryan drives us straight down to the Lounge. He does it not just because I want to hear Justin spin—Bryan doesn’t really even like bureau-anarchism music—but because Amy thinks she can score some weed or maybe even some Special D there. It also occurs to me that we can lose Kayla and Dork permanently by just staying there for a long time and literally boring them out of our company. We’ve done it before, and to more resilient pests than these two.
***
Did I mention that this Bryan that I’m talking about is the same Bryan Mueller who became a filmmaker in the early twenty-first century? Before he got into horror films, he pioneered a sub-genre of mostly heterosexual pornography that came to be known in the industry as NBP “nice boy porn.” The films were centered on very friendly, gentle young male leads who were interested primarily in pleasuring and respecting their intelligent non-breast-implanted partners. Other directors got into it, too, when they found out that women were buying the stuff, and it’s still a whole big thing that’s going on—not pertinent to this story, but illustrative of what kind of person he is and probably wanted to be.
***
It’s really noisy and pretty crowded when we get into the Lounge, but I notice right away that Justin isn’t DJing nor is anyone else. It’s just random music from the CD changer at the bar, a weird admixture of classic rock and 80s nostalgia. There’re a few people off in a corner booth whom I think I recognize as members of Justin’s posse and I ask them what’s up tonight.
“Yeah, man, J got like really fucked up tonight and never made it over here.”
This kid whose name I think is Matt, and who is maybe 15 years old at most, tells me that Justin and some guy named Roth or Moth dropped big doses of Moron-Q and are at Justin’s house being totally wigged out.
“We’re going over there to check it out.” Matt’s blond hair is cut really short and he has a green spiral painted or dyed on his head. “You can come with us if you want.” He smiles when he says that.
“What, you mean just to stare at him while he’s being fucked up?” I wonder.
“Yeah, well he’s really messed up, man.”
I tell him no and wander around for a few minutes trying to decide whether to buy a drink. I expect the bartender might ignore the “under 21” stamp on my hand. In another corner I relocate Bryan and Amy, and there with them are two other people I sort of know. Also with them is our friend Cabe.
Cabe is singing loudly like he thinks it’s a karaoke bar. Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” is the song on the stereo, and his voice keeps hitting this wild keening wail. I seem to know that he’s singing like that because he knows all the words, and he just really likes to sing loudly. I think his voice is actually pretty good.
Cabe is our only friend that we know to be gay. Sometimes when I’m with him I think about how he really does in fact touch other guys. When he mops back his dark hair with one hand I’m reminded that he thinks that he looks like Eddie Furlong, the actor. I suppose he does. I’ve heard for years that he actually gives head for money, and though I’ve known him almost all my life, I can’t ever bring myself to ask him if it’s true. When the song fades into Motley Crue’s “Looks That Kill”, and he keeps singing, I wonder if he really is some kind of all-purpose whore. I’m thinking about what it would feel like if he touched me, and I’m trying to make myself stop thinking about it when Bryan pulls me down into the booth next to him and says, “Do you wanna do something really fucked up?”
“There is no such thing as what you are talking about,” Amy is saying in a dry tone when we finally get ourselves trash-compacted back into the Ghia. Now there are five of us in the little car: Bryan is driving, Amy is squeezed in the back with this red-headed guy named Matt—not the same Matt that I talked to earlier—and I’m in the front passenger seat with Cabe on my lap, I guess because he’s the lighter of the two of us. The most comfortable position he can find for himself somehow requires him to grind his ass way into my crotch, and I want this ride to end quickly, and I try not to think about what it would feel like if he touched me.
“I’m telling you, it’s true,” Cabe says, and Matt echoes him.
“It’s like they’re freakin made of Ecstasy or something!” Matt says.
“I thought you said it was like meth,” Bryan inserts as he spins around a corner, g-forcing Cabe even more tightly against me.
“It totally depends on you and what you want,” Cabe says. “It can be different every time.”
I still don’t know what the fuck they’re all talking about. All I know is that they were talking about it in the Lounge, Bryan pulled me close and said “Do you wanna do something really fucked up?” I said yes, and here we are, once more in the Karmann Ghia looking for a drug. Or something.
Amy Colberg would later become a major national figure in a whole range of feminist and women’s issues, and would be a Cabinet member for two Presidents. I sometimes wonder, but never think to ask, if Bryan created NBP specifically to give her a kind of attempt at non-sexist triple X pornography. Even though they weren’t going together anymore at the time of their individual fame, I know that he never quit loving her.
***
We’re in a large room in the upstairs of a huge house in Forest Park. A valet parked our car. I could not believe it.
The room is lit by candles and also by one red light bulb hanging naked from the ceiling, and it’s piled high with futons and pillows. Stereo speakers somewhere are putting out music that sounds like Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins tunes. There’s a tie-dyed-looking piece of cloth hanging in the doorway between the room we’re in and the next room. The whole place smells like a patchouli factory and I kind of relax when I decide that this is probably just going involve smoking some shit, getting really sleepy and going home.
“They’re ready. Are you all together?” This question is asked by a rail-thin, nearly albino kid in a powder blue Vuarnet t-shirt and tiger-striped swimming trunks, who suddenly shows up in the center of the room.
“Yes, we’re all together,” Cabe says, and I see him hand the super-white kid a thick stack of cash. Cabe must see the alarm on my face, because right away he says, quietly enough so maybe just I hear it, “Don’t worry, dude. I’m buying tonight. I have wanted to watch you get off since we were kids.”
But it’s not because he’s spending money that I look worried. I know he has plenty. It’s because I still don’t know what we’re buying.
The albino kid leaves with the money and a minute later a girl and a guy about our age enter the room. They look kind of Asian or maybe Amerasian, and they look like they have got to be twin siblings. They are identical except for fairly subtle signposts of their genders.
“I am Mako,” says the girl, mostly to me and Bryan and Amy—they already know Cabe and Matt, apparently. “This is my brother Joshi. Welcome to our home.”
I really can’t stand it anymore. “Hey, um, nobody has even told me yet what it is we’re doing here.”
“You’re going to like it,” Mako says.
I notice how they are dressed. They’re wearing identical black and yellow striped t-shirts and baggy denim shorts and no shoes. But it seems like they should be wearing tae kwon do uniforms or togas or some kind of shiny Indian robes.
“Can I show you?” Joshi says. He has to ask it a second time before I know that he is talking to me. “Just a small taste to get started.”
It’s really only because I know that I would wander forever through life wondering what I had missed if I didn’t do it that I actually follow him onto one of the futons. “People get freaked sometimes on their first time,” Joshi says. “But it’s really A-OK.” He kind of signs “A-OK” at me with his thin fingers as he says it, and then he hands me a knife.
It’s a short little blade on a black handle that says “made in Pakistan” on it.
Joshi strips off his t-shirt, tosses it behind me and invites me to look at his chest. His whole upper body looks, in the reddish candle light, like a 3-D puzzle of cuts and scars. “What’s your name?”
“Lane,” I tell him.
“OK, Lane, I can tell that you are nervous.” And that makes me more nervous. It’s like when a big crazy mean dog is barking at you and someone hanging off your left ear says, “Don’t be afraid. It can tell that you are afraid.” Or perhaps even better: “At the first sign of fear, they attack!” It makes you freak out.
Joshi guides my hand, the one holding the knife, to a spot near his left shoulder below his collarbone. His skin feels very hot and dry. His eyes are silver in the light. I say no a few times when he tells me to cut him there. I try to explain to him that I just can’t cut into him--or anyone for that matter--with that knife, but even as I try to tell him why I can’t--why I won’t--draw his blood I find that I am making an inch-long slice into his skin.
I don’t know if he’s making me do it by forcing my hand or if I am just cutting him all on my own. My head feels like it’s full of hot burning fur for a minute and I can’t believe that cutting him is giving me an almost painful hard-on, and a part of me is sitting off to the side of my mind, amazed that I don’t hesitate at all to put my mouth on the cut and taste this weird kid’s blood.
The first taste is like a hot bitter liquor, like someone had dissolved a whole bottle of aspirin in a jar of sake, but it sweetens immediately. I think of a hot web of cotton candy spun from sugar and opium speading through my body, systematically replacing my blood cells with Joshi’s. I picture a domino effect: all of my nerves are being triggered in sequence, as if by a sophisticated bioelectric computer program, to feel like a continuous looping orgasm, as my DNA is re-sequenced to match his.
“Want some more?”
“Fuck yeah.” I don’t need much encouragement to lengthen the cut that I’m drinking from. I feel overheated and I want to be out of my clothes but I don’t think I can take my attention away from the skin and blood long enough to do it. I don’t even know if it would be appropriate to undress, because I don’t know how far we are paying to go. But I know that I am experiencing some kind of whacked time dilation because I look down and notice that Joshi has in fact managed to lose the rest of his clothing and that Cabe is also well into drinking Joshi from a spot on his right thigh. All this came about in what seemed like just a few seconds to me.
I feel like I have had all I can handle for the moment and I settle back onto the futon. I cradle Joshi’s head and watch Cabe continue to suck blood from him and I wonder if this is really any different than what it feels like when Cabe touches another guy. I think it is different, but I’m not sure why.
I notice Amy and Mako. Bryan and Matt have settled into stoned relaxation like I have, but Amy is still playing. That’s really hardcore, I think when I notice that Amy is actually taking blood from Mako’s dark mouth. Like what did she do, cut her tongue or something? I can see a river and a waterfall of spit and blood joining their mouths. Really hardcore, I keep thinking and keep watching. Amy’s black hair looks like it could be made of blood, and I notice that it’s cut almost the same way Mako’s is.
I rest there for what might be a long time just feeling every detail of my body, and somehow it ends up that that Joshi and Mako are no longer there and it’s now Cabe who is resting his head on my chest. “You know that I gave you a blowjob a few minutes ago, don’t you?”
“You did not,” I say.
“Yeah you’re right. I didn’t.” Cabe reaches around in his pockets. “Hey, you want a cigarette?” I say yeah sure. I don’t even smoke cigarettes, but it sounds really refreshing right now.
“You guys know we have been here for like six hours,” Amy says. Her voice seems so loud and resonant, so suddenly sober.
“No fucking way!” Bryan replies pulling himself to his feet, stretching.
But it is starting to be daylight when we emerge from the house and the valet brings our car around. It makes me wonder how much we paid for that experience, but I decide I won’t ask Cabe.
We’re getting into the car again, and I say to Bryan, “Hey, whatever happened to Layla and Dork?”
Amy kind of snorts and starts laughing.
“I don’t know, man. I don’t even know.” He sounds so tired and strung out, but he’s smiling and I feel like I want to spend the night at his house and eat cereal in the morning like we did when we were little kids. Except maybe in reverse this time.
“I’m just going to bed, Lane,” Bryan says. But Amy says she’ll eat cereal with me and we make him stop at the grocery store on the way home. In the full-on light of sunrise in the store parking lot, I can see a thin crust of blood on Amy’s lips, but it doesn’t look that bad.
