I’m a devil for details. Matt’s departure from my life needed to be as tendered in hypocrisy as his entrance. I planned to wear a new pair of dark adobe leather pants that night. So it had to be clean. Clean and quiet. Easy enough, I thought, to get him drunk and go about the X method. Drugs and suffocation. Good night, sweet queen. I took my time shopping and found the perfect poison. HPNOTIQ liquor, product of France. It was Smurf-blue and bottled as to confuse the consumer whether it was bath gel or liquor. I bought two bottles.
We met at the Pepper Lounge. I used to blow the bartender and now he lets me bring in special bottles of choice. Matt proceeded to get drunk while we discussed everything from Johnny Depp to Mandarin collars; we never were at a loss for words with each other. Sleeping pills go down as easy as speed.
“Matthew, Eduardo’s incredible.”
“This is so different than I thought it would be.”
“Really, I kind of always figured we’d be here, sooner or later.”
Matt, the pathetic little peasant that he was, ate it all up. I thought for a second he was going to offer me a goodbye fuck in return for my tenderness. But then he started to feel the blue liquid settle in and I helped him to the bathroom. “Look, let’s get you cleaned up. Want to come back to my place?”
“Oh yeah. Okay. I’m so sorry. I feel like shit. I just need a shower and some coffee.”
“It’s early yet, we have plenty of time.”
“Stephen, I’m so happy.”
“Me too, mon ami, me too.”
He passed out on my bed. I lay down close, propped myself on an elbow, and studied his profile. “They all look like angels when they sleep.” I pulled on my kitchen gloves and couldn’t resist one last goodbye. I bit down hard on his bottom lip before slipping the plastic bag over his head, secured it around his neck, and poured a subtle Bordeaux. Never underestimate how the right wine enhances an experience. His slow breathing against the bag crackled like dry kindling. “Burn. Escape and burn, little soul. You are no longer inseparable from skin.”
I cranked Never Mind the Bollocks up to ten and took a deep breath to find my center. You should never rush moments like these; they simply do not come knocking all that often. I put the gun in his hand and, cupping mine over his, pointed it at his left shoulder. The sleeping pills did their work, and he barely twitched when I pulled the trigger. The scar, a death mouth tattoo, was going to be gorgeous. Now we all have what we want. I’m so happy.
Later, people will tell the cops they saw me leave the bar with him. People will say they saw me leave the apartment without him, maybe. I don’t care. I’d tell them too. It’s just some fag with a fetish committing suicide. The city gives and the city takes away. The cops think we’re a freak show anyway. No matter, the police don’t care and his Christian foster parents sure as sin don’t care. I got tickled thinking about that. And so we part. I left the note he gave me, the one he wrote, for just such an occasion, under his left hand. He was right to leave it without a date and his thoughtfulness made me smile.
I lay one finger on his wrist. The throb was mine.
“Eduardo is full-on.” The phrase made me laugh and it echoed a howl in the quiet room.
“He’s full-on.”
It was the first thing Matt had said to me about Eduardo.
And the last thing I said to Matt.
Eduardo was just coming off stage when I walked back in the club. He watched without moving as I covered the last distance between us.
“Well.”
“Like smothering a baby.”
“You are a wicked, wicked boy, Stephen.”
“I’m your wicked boy now. Any complaints?”
“Not from me. Come on, I want you to meet some people.”
He took my hand and drew me across the room behind him. The crowd gave way, then closed quickly over the wake of the new king.
Like a rocket with a beat
by Joe Meno
Lawrence & Broadway
1
High black cat is the worst kind of luck. It’s the luck of knowing your ghostly number is up. It’s the luck of the zero, the no one. It’s the record that automatically plays whenever the radio comes on. Like Donna Lee with the trumpet blaring.
“Shirley stole this record too,” Seamus cursed. “She took this one.”
He’d borrowed a coupe and the night was warm so we were out driving. At the time, he was up to number nine. Mister Ten might go walking by anytime. “Pull over,” he said suddenly. I slowed the automobile down, figuring it quick.
At the corner of Broadway and Lawrence, there was Cannonball Adams, the piano player, with a girl, standing unsuspecting. He was telling her the ideas he had about her — her legs and hair, the way she looked like a movie star in the lights of the evening. She was buying it because she wasn’t his wife. The girl was on the corner listening to the music Cannonball was whispering and he began leaning in at her with his enormous hands, and it was then that Seamus opened the passenger side door.
In a flash, Seamus was at the corner and had already slugged the fellah in the back of the neck. Seamus gave him two chops to the head and a shot to the kidney and then one more to the crown, which laid him out pretty well. Seamus hadn’t fought in the ring in years but he could still move like lightning. Then the heartbreak. Seamus raised his foot up.
“No, no, not my hands, not my hands,” Cannonball pleaded, and he had hands unlike any other man, three times the size of most men’s, they were the hands of a monster really. Seamus snarled and stomped down hard with his size-elevens on the sap’s fingers, a step on the right, then the left, then back and forth, then again. The girl didn’t like the idea. She swung her purse at the side of Seamus’s head. It only made him madder. He turned and grabbed the purse from her hand, then turned again. He came shuffling back to the automobile but he was slow now and sad. He closed the automobile door and I took off quick like that.
It was quiet for a while. The ghost of a small black cat cut across the snow, from one corner into a dark alley, its shadow stretching thin and long. That cat, and me seeing it, was just about the worst thing that could happen at that moment. I swore to myself. We went on driving and I looked at Seamus, and what he placed between him and me on the front seat made my eyes ache, but badly. It was the girl’s white purse: small, square-shaped, etc., etc. He had taken the girl’s purse for some reason.
“How come?” I asked, and he looked down, embarrassed, then turned his head and started to open the purse, sad that the whole thing had ever happened maybe.
“He was number ten,” he said.
“How come the purse then?”
“I don’t know,” he frowned, out of breath. “You want it?”
“No,” I replied. “It’s bad luck. I won’t touch it.”
“That settles it,” he said, “I don’t want to think about Shirley again,” and even as he was talking, I was sure neither of us was having it. Cannonball Adams was number ten, the tenth fellah to have fooled around with Shirley. Somewhere out there, I was sure, was number eleven.
I glanced over at Seamus’s big red face. He looked like he had lost the big fight. His left eye was twitching. He shrugged his thick shoulders then emptied the rest of the tiny purse in his lap. Inside there was a handkerchief and a makeup kit. A pair of fake eyelashes fell on out next. They landed right beside me, just like that, almost blinking. I didn’t say a word. I just stared at them. They were thick and black and tired and lovely. He tipped the purse over and what came out next was like a song where the lady singing mentions your name, but directly, something like, “I’m in love with a boy who makes my heart spin/I’m in love with a boy, a boy named Jim.”