Members of the Blood gang always cross out the «C» in any of their tattoos. To deny any allegiance to the rival Crip gang. If someone has a tattoo with a «B» crossed out, that shows he's a Crip.
"Your dad taught you that?" says guy 137.
My adopted dad. Working on his model-train set. He never cheated on my adopted mom, but he could spend days photographing hookers and painting tiny figures to match them. He'd never take illegal drugs, but his tiny junkies or meth freaks, each one was a little masterpiece. Using a needle-thin paintbrush, my adopted dad would tag the walls of dinky factories and miniature abandoned tenements and flophouse hotels.
I tell guy 137 I'm sorry his TV series got canceled last season.
Number 137 shrugs. He says, "So you're adopted?"
And I tell him, "Only since I was born."
Waiting his turn with Cassie Wright, a flabby blond guy with a long beard stands with both arms folded across his chest. His yellow beard so stiff and coarse the hair juts straight out from his chin, not falling down with gravity. Maybe so dirty. His pale forearms are blotched with blurry black As and B's, swastikas, and shamrocks. Prison tattoos pricked with a broken guitar string, inked with the soot from burned plastic forks and spoons mixed with shampoo. The Aryan Brotherhood. Tattooed spiderwebs cover both his big, freckled elbows.
Near the Aryan guy, Mr. Bacardi hooks a finger in the gold chain around his own neck. At the lowest point of the chain, dangling over his throat, hangs a gold heart. A locket Cassie Wright's worn in a zillion scenes.
Bacardi pinches the gold locket between his thumb and gun finger and slides it back and forth along the neck chain.
"My real mom," I say, "she's a big star in movies, but I can't say who." I say how I've written tons of letters to her, care of her production company and distributors, even the agent that handles her, but she's never wrote back.
Guy 137 looks down at the flowers I'm holding.
"It's not that I want money or for her to love me," I say. "All I'm after is just to meet her. How I figure it, right now I'm the age that she must've been when she had to give me away."
If her agent or somebody is intercepting my letters and trashing them, I don't know. But I have a secret plan to someday meet her. My real mom.
Number 137 says, "You know your real dad?"
And I shrug.
Across the room, a black guy, the back of his shaved head is tattooed with a flag rippling, the flag bearing the number "415," symbol for the Kumi African Nation, a spin-off of the Black Guerrilla Family. At least according to my adopted dad, who'd recite these details as he held a magnifying glass in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, doctoring the little train figures that came from Germany as doctors, street sweepers, policemen, and hausfraus. Poking them with specks of new paint, he remade them as members of La eMe, the Mexican mafia; the Aryan Warriors; the 18th Street Gangstas. If I stood next to him and put my hand on his basement workbench, if I held still, my adopted dad would paint the «WP» and «666» for White Power at the base of my thumb. Then he'd tell me, "Hurry and go wash your hands."
He'd say, "Don't let your mother see."
My adopted mom.
Right now, up those stairs, the lady behind the door, she's neutral territory. A shrine where you pilgrimage a thousand miles on your knees to pay tribute. Same as Jerusalem or some church. Special to white supremacists and Bloods, Crips, and Ninjas, a lady who transcends turf wars for power. Who transcends race and nationality and family. Every man here might hate every other man, outside of here we might all kill each other, but we all love her.
Our Holy Ground. Cassie Wright, our angel of peace.
Next to me, guy 137 dumps a pill out of the bottle of blue pills he bought. Holding his autograph dog tucked under one arm, he dumps the pill into the palm of one hand and tosses it into his mouth.
Somebody's stepped in the nose blood puddled on the concrete floor. Different sizes of bare feet track bloody, sticky trails in every direction.
I ask what he's doing—right now, I mean—to restart his TV career.
And number 137 says, "This." And he shakes the little bottle of pills.
7. Mr. 137
Some humongous Mexican bitch-slaps this fat slob at the craft-services table, and then actor number 72, holding the bouquet of dead flowers, walks over and begins to explain the attack to me. The fight has something to do with model-train sets and the city of Seattle. The Mexican mafia and the Vatican. Rattling on, number 72 tells me, "Sorry."
I tell him not to mention it.
"I mean, about your TV series getting canned," he says.
I tell him to never mind.
"I mean, about all those gossip magazines," he says, "trashing you."
I tell him to forget it.
And this actor 72 says, "What are you doing, I mean, here?"
Branch Bacardi, number 600, holds a wad of toilet paper to his bleeding nipple, and every time I look in his direction he's looking back at me. Any minute, he's going to walk over here, and I don't have a good opening line ready. The star of Butt Pirates of the Caribbean and Smokey and the Ass Bandit, and he's cruising me.
Wouldn't you know it?
A person can't simply say, "Hello, Mr. Branch, I absolutely adore your dildo…"
Everyone I know, man or woman, keeps your dick in their bedside table. The battery-powered vibrator, or the manually operated regular dildo. Yours is the Goldilocks of dildos: not a long pencil dick, like the one copied from Ron Jeremy's erection. And certainly not one of those so massively big around that you feel plungered like a stopped-up toilet. No, with the length and girth of it, the Branch Bacardi is the one-size-fits-all of celebrity-replica sex toys.
But, no, compliment or not, that kind of dialogue would just never read.
Milling all around us, the too-naked men form a sea of tattoos and scars. Rashes and scabs. Stretch marks and sunburns. A catalogue of everything that can go wrong with your skin. Beyond the mosquito bites and pimples, Branch Bacardi stands with Cord Cuervo, the two of their heads leaned together, talking. Bacardi points at me, and Cuervo looks. Cuervo nods his head and whispers into Bacardi's ear, and they both laugh.
I say, let him laugh. The Cord Cuervo Super Deluxe tapers too much; from a circumcised head the size of a pencil eraser, the finger-long shaft spreads to a base big as a beer can.
An ergonomic nightmare.
One could always ask Bacardi about the mass-production aspects, the assembly lines in China where sweatshop workers wrap and package endless silicone-rubber copies of his erection, still hot from stainless-steel molds. Or they package and ship jiggling armies of pink plastic vaginas cast from the shaved pussy of Cassie Wright. Chinese slave labor, by hand, tweezing in pubic hairs or airbrushing different shades of red or pink or blue. Accurate down to Cassie's episiotomy scar. Bacardi's every vein and wart. The way people used to make death masks, casting plaster faces of celebrities in the hours between their demise and their decomposition.
Long after Cassie Wright becomes old and demented or dead and rotten, her vagina will still haunt us, tucked under beds, buried in underwear drawers and bathroom cabinets, next to dog-eared skin magazines. Or, showcased in antique stores, Bacardi's rubber erection, priced the same as the hand-carved scrimshaw dildos of lonely, long-dead Nantucket whaling wives.
A kind of immortality.
A person can always ask: How does it feel, that the cock of Branch Bacardi and the vagina of Cassie Wright are reduced to kitsch? Camp objets like Duchamp's urinal or Warhol's soup can.
A person could ask: Thanks to the Branch Bacardi Butt Plug, how's it feel to know that people around the globe go to work, to school, to church with your dick wedged up their anus?