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Flames On Jordache Jeans -- David Connelly Right now, Kenny Costner is wearing baby blue chaps and swishing his depilated butt joyously between the brownstones of Chelsea, but when we were ten he kicked my ass. In a sense, he has kicked my butt through the last twenty years, because after he beat me up, as I sat crying on the marble patio that formed a soft white ring around the transcendent blue of his swimming pool, the look on his face above me, so disdainful and righteous for one so young, gave me the boot I needed to get out of that forlorn TV box my family called a home, to go to college and to seek my fortune here in New York City. It was my envy of that look on his face that got me where I am today. Last week, he took me in a cab across 14th street, raised me up into his nine thousand square foot Chelsea loft and led me into the exercise mat he calls a bed. Imagining a different life for myself now feels as impossible and indulgent as my weekly dreams of lotto victory. Kenny is trying to help and to understand. He's a good guy, but I can't help but wonder how different my life would be if, on that July afternoon twenty years ago, I had stood, wiped the tears from my face and plunged a fist into his gut then the other into his eye, broken his perfectly thin nose. At thirty my life had finally settled in. I'd achieved a pathetic and drunken success, making a little more money than my parents ever had. I graduated from a state college in Rochester. It wasn't much, but for my family, it was a source of tremendous pride. Still in mortar and gown, mom and I held hands and marched the streets all afternoon. She let her grown-up son buy her a drink. My tassel kept falling forward into my beer, and at every plop she let out a laugh that made the regular patrons, all old and semi-old men, turn to us and smile. Kenny graduated Yale a week later. She stood awed at the window watching the party on his property. An expression I had never seen hung over her whole body, a mixing of her awe and her despair that was new to me, but finally all the lines on her face I knew so well fell into place. She must have worn that look nearly every moment she wasn't looking at me. Across the street, half of Yale's faculty and a range of celebrities stood beneath giant yellow and white striped tents champagning themselves while a small orchestra played on the front lawn. Upstate towns were like that in those days, our unmowed yard, doubly-overgrown with Daddy-Bye-Bye's rusted cars, sat directly across from Kenny's house. Their's had been a small colonial cottage owned by the writer-farmer Hector St. Jean de Crevecouer, but they had added to it, on and on, until it became an antebellum mansion with an in-ground swimming pool and alarms on the door. We played together, Kenny and I. He wanted to be the cowboy. I ate the school's crayons and the government's cheese, and I wanted to be the Indian. That July was hot and bright enough to put everyone, even the ten year olds, in an angry and resigned funk. My mom developed a personal relationship with the sun, accepting it each morning with the same dead look she gave her smelly boss. Fiery blotches of rash puckered my skin like circles of lipstick. Kenny's mom prohibited me from their pool. I sat sweating on the mesh seats of our rusted cars waiting for the brief hours he would come out to play. Of all childhood games, cowboys and Indians is the closest metaphor for adult life. It is repetitive and the outcome is certain. After I ambushed Kenny that afternoon, I broke the rules and tied him to the telephone pole too tightly for him to escape. When I piled the kindling and sticks under him, even when I lit the match, he didn't guess our game could end any differently than it always had. But when the flames rode up the seams of his Jordache jeans, he started to blubber and plead. I didn't rub it in, didn't dance in a circle chanting "Aaay-yah- yaah! Aaay-yah-yaah!" The tears gushed down his cheeks, and I never made a face, just turned away. I didn't even smile when his sobs went silent while he peed his pants. In his backyard I stripped to my underwear and dove into the bright, welcoming blue of their swimming pool, taking the water into my mouth and squirting it out again. The chlorine made me sneeze. From their fridge in the bathhouse, I took an Orange Crush and drank it like an adult on vacation, lounging in a chair by the side of the pool. That's what I've been doing for the past ten years, lounging in bars pretending to have someone else's fun. It was getting old, and I was getting old. It's just that I couldn't tolerate anything better. I was thankful my fellow patrons let me sit and be a part of our great and gathered decline. They never kicked me out, even when they should have. I have lived the life of the well-liked and continually forgiven. Young women loved to forgive me. I was the most tragic character they could let into their beds. Their relationships with me took off in the fall and crashed in summer. We held hands and told our sadness under the obnoxious colors of the Botanical Garden's trees. In the winter, I frightened the family and broke Grandma's Christmas ornaments. Under the cold rains of spring, she would find me in a doorway fondling her best friend. After a summer bar-b-q, I inevitably crashed her car. Each forgiving she gave brought her closer to something she knew she had to learn about the world, gave her enough disappointment to deny her love of horses, car-struck bunnies and childish men. A year of loving me was an inoculation against some future, more important tragedy. After she ended it, each August found me a little more bitter than the last and mad at myself for having learned nothing at all. That is how, two weeks ago, I ended up alone in a booth in Barracuda, where, after ten years of absence, Kenny's depilated butt rubbed against the skin of my arm. "I'm SORRY! That I beat you UP," he said. We'd been talking five minutes and I wished he hadn't brought it up. "I was so ANGRY! How could you DO that, just LEAVE ME there, but I tell you, HONEY! I have YET to grow a SINGLE LITTLE hair on my bottom ever since. NOT to shatter the IMAGE you have of my father, BUT he was like CHEWBACCA down there. My MOM was no NEWborn BABE either. But THIS butt," he slapped it, "is like sweet sugared LIME in a hot, down SOUTHERN evening ICED-tea!" I had never known a gay man to talk like that. I'd never known anyone to talk like that. I also didn't know why he was apologizing for beating me up after I'd tried to set him on fire. Then I thought his speech was a game he was playing on me, still getting revenge or at least keeping his place. He hoped it would offend me, or freak me out. "OKAY!" I thought and took a big swallow of J.D. "When I SAW you there. Sitting there, in your UNDERwear! I was so ANGRY! I couldn't HELP it. I'm SORRY I beat you up, because I UNDERSTAND now. I UNDERSTAND! ALL the things that made you ACT like that. ALL of it, honey. And I'm sorry. I'm so SORRY." He told me all about himself. How he'd written two successful screenplays. Very SUCCESSFUL, they were. But he' never gotten the DIRECTORS or ACTORS he'd wanted so he was stuck with IDIOTS directing NOBODIES and GOD! Could it be worse than THAT? "You look like I writer. I always KNEW you had such GREAT things inside you. You MUST write something too. I'm certain it'd be FABULOUS!" He bought me whiskey, complimented and encouraged me. "I'm SO glad you drink that Jackie DAN stuff. You're such a GUY." At last call he said there was no way I was going ALL THAT WAY back to Brooklyn. "It'll be just like those slumber-parties we used to have. And I have a TREAT. I just can't WAIT to show you." I followed him into the cab and up the freight elevator to his loft. His screenplays must have been VERY successful. In Chelsea, a place like his had to go for five thousand. It was rent-CONTROLLED he told me. It was just a FLUKE he'd gotten it at ALL. He poured me more whiskey from the wet bar and then produced his treat, videos of Battlestar Galactica. JUST like we used to watch. While Starbuck shot Cylons at the edge of space, he ran his fingers up the hair on the back of my neck and kissed me below the ear. I'd figured that gay couples, on average, practiced anal sex more often than those of us in the straight world, but I never assumed they were inclined to rush into it on the first date. I stood there as he undressed me, kissing my loose, booze-sweating skin. His whole body was hairless and gym-perfected, and with the blue light shining blankly from his eyes, it seemed he had crawled down from an ad on the subway walls. I say that, but really I was completely thoughtless as this envy of my childhood stood above me naked and hard all over. When he laid me down on his exercise mat, I didn't protest or think. It felt like the most inevitable and most natural thing in the world. He was asleep before I could speak. Gay men aren't more sensitive, they're just gay. I laid there stunned, hurt and amazed. He let out a loud, contented fart, and this got me out of bed. Behind the bar I found a bottle of Bacardi 151, cracked the seal and poured. From his humidor, I took a Nat Sherman havana and lit it up. After Kenny found me by the pool and kicked my ass, his father went to the telephone pole to investigate. He came back with a scorched piece of rope and said Kenny's pee must have kept down the fire in front while the vinyl cover of the ground wire led the flames directly up to the rope that tied his hands, burning it enough for Kenny to break free. Really though, I probably just couldn't tie a knot for shit. I could never explain the good luck of the rich and the bad luck of the poor. I don't think about it anymore, just like I don't think about how I can never do anything right. Trying to figure out the whys and hows made the evidence against me seem overwhelming and, more essentially, unfair. I was always smarter than him, better at sports, friendlier. But we were ten, even if I had mustered all my strength, gathered every force which had contributed to creating me, I could never have won that fight. A sort of unchallengeable halo hung over his blond hair, poured from the bright, swimming-pool blue of his eyes. His success and my failure went too far back, it might as well have been spoken aloud in the sound of the Big Bang and was echoed in that last great fart. Now I was standing there, slightly bent, watching him chew his thumb while he slept. He might have been lying in the arms of his beautiful mom. With a knife from behind the bar, I pried the flame-retarding screen from the top of the 151, took a deep swig and then poured it over the carpet around his bed. The fire came up smokeless, bright and blue. With a little left in the bottle, I headed down the exit stairwell. Someone had left a banana peel on the steps. A cat ran under my feet. Maybe I was just too drunk, but when the firefighters pulled me out, I never woke up, and the sprinklers in Kenny's building worked just fine. Russ, the prison guard, probed his finger deep into the lemon meringue and then licked it off. "Yum," he said and grinned. "No files in THERE, you ugly HUNK. I might feel inSPIRED, but PLEASE." Kenny talked from behind the wire mesh. "I made that for HIM, and all his new PRISON buddies. I just HOPE you're NOT one of them. ANYway," he turned back to me, "my LAWYER will take care of all of this...PRISON stuff. When I got in that trouble with COPPOLA, he fixed the WHOLE thing right up." Kenny was wearing Cuban heels and a vintage replica of Jordache jeans. He'd forgiven me for trying to burn him, twice, and now he had his lawyer trying to get me off. "Don't worry, you didn't wreck the place TOO bad. I called Leonardo. He came RIGHT away, with a whole CREW. Can you iMAGINE? Now the place is ONE HUNDRED AND TEN. I can't WAIT for you to SEE it. And don't WORRY, when you get out of this...this PLACE, and need somewhere to crash? It's all BEHIND us. DON'T give me that LOOK. I KNOW it's hard for you. I UNDERSTAND now. I UNDERSTAND, and TRUST me, cross my heart. It just CAN'T happen like that ANYmore..." After twenty years, he'd finally taught me something important. I should have kicked his ass. It just wasn't my day. If he got me out, I'd get him good, and this was the only right thing to do. I smiled, thanked him and watched flames rising up beneath his chair, catching on the hems of his jeans. I held his hand through the wire mesh and watched him crisp. The fluorescent lights made the fire look cold and clear as it did its work, burning him, the guard, and this whole damn world to the ground. |