Often Pickle would rub his groin — already soaked after only an hour — then suck his blunt, thick fingers. When Pickle saw Eric looking, he’d say, The salt taste’ good.
Once, a hopeful Eric said: Like eatin’ your…He dug a forefinger in one nostril, pulled it out, put it in his mouth. Huh?
Pickle frowned. Why you doin’ dat? Dat’s nasty. Pee’s better, ain’t it?
Which, as the other two bums there finally ambled off to panhandle outside the package store down by Ford’s Little Five Points Market, is when Frack — ready to go again — bawled: Hey! Get yo’ scrawny white ass ova’ heah, cocksucker!
A train whistle ripped apart the morning.
Under the highway, Eric pushed into high grass and sumac to giant-step through, arms to the side, over crackling Styrofoam and mushy cardboard and Mylar condom wrappers, till, behind the Verizon sign’s struts, the growth got shorter. On either side of the overhead roadway, the sky was now dark blue.
The men under the highway had changed all summer. Back in March during his spring break, one morning Eric had found a bearded German in a sleeping bag, who’d sat up naked in the grass, green canvas rucked down around a hirsute belly, pulled out a knife and, in a heavy accent, told Eric to get his faggot ass out of there. Eric had stayed away three days. When he chanced coming back, six hillbillies and a couple of niggers were lounging about or sleeping in the grass or sharing their Night Train, their Gypsy Rose. Finally two — a nigger and one of the hillbillies — took him behind the highway stanchion and let Eric blow them. Then the nigger brought him back to the others and announced he wanted to suck off all the guys there, and did — including Eric. It was one of the times when Eric was most surprised, because, complete to the gold wedding ring on his thick, cracked hand, the black guy was so muscular and masculine. What each of the others had to call him to get off was instructive:
Two called him a nigger cocksucker.
One called him a nigger bitch.
One of the black guys, without even closing his eyes, kept calling him his pretty blond baby.
Eric thought about all the cum in the black guy’s mouth already, around his dick, which made him shoot his own load.
With all the various comments and jokes — Eric, the other black guy, and two of the white guys went twice — that March Friday had been the most fun Eric had had under there, if not the most sexually exciting.
In general, the guys who used the place were pretty friendly. By summer vacation, Eric had decided the friendly ones — which, because of Joe and his coffee, he stretched to include Frack — trumped the unfriendly ones.
And the knife puller.
The German notwithstanding, apparently among the homeless the place had a reputation.
As Eric looked up at the overhead highway, along chyme-smeared girders pigeons preened and strutted, nest to nest.
With a breeze, from one corner came the stench of shit and ammonia. Most of the time, that’s where the guys relieved themselves.
He’d gotten used to that, too.
Eric walked back to the wall, then picked his way to the stanchion’s end. Maybe he should have done it back home in the garage. If he waited, of course, someone might come. Time spent hanging out, or trying to cajole a fuck or a blowjob from whatever homeless guys were around, could take from five minutes to five hours. He did best, though, when they’d slept there and he got to them as they were waking.
Stepping over a smashed baby carriage — a month ago it had been in the street, where, for days, cars and trucks and SUVs had repeatedly run it over, till someone had thrown what was left up here — Eric reached the stanchion’s far side. As he stepped from the shadow, through high weeds, at the world’s rim, the sun ignited.
Eric closed his eyes, pulling back.
He walked around another five minutes. But, as happened once or twice a week, that morning no one was out…
No Joe, no Frack — or even Pickle.
And because Mike was taking him to Diamond Harbor, he didn’t have hours.
Eric took a long breath, made the circuit once more (in case he’d missed someone, hugging himself down in the grass, beside the bridge support, maybe rolled up in a blanket, maybe not, off in a sleeping bag or passed out on his back in the weeds, an empty pint bottle inches from his head and mud under his hip, where he’d wet himself: that had been his first time sucking off hungover but affectionately grateful Pickle), then, with a resigned breath, started home from under the highway.
[D] A SLANT OF sun crossed Mr. Condotti’s yard.
Beside the house, Eric stepped onto the loud gravel. Through a basement window he glimpsed TV flicker on a back wall. A pebbly step on and he saw, down the rock-walled stairwell, the upper Dutch door — open — at Bottom’s.
The foundation of the world was in shadow.
As Eric passed, Bill moved into the frame, behind the lower door, and looked up. “Hey, Eric.” Bottom wore a black leather jacket unzipped, with yellow metal teeth, and no shirt. Also he wore a full gorilla head mask. “Isn’t it a little early for you to be out?” The stepwell hollowed his voice. He reached up and lifted the ape head away from an unshaven jaw and curly auburn.
Bottom was grinning.
Eric blinked.
“I thought during the summer all teenagers slept till noon.” It sounded less hollow with the head off. Bottom had on tight jeans with frayed patches all over, where you could see through to his skin.
“I got up early,” Eric said. “So I took a walk. What you watchin’? The news? I didn’t think nothin’ was on.” It couldn’t be much past six-thirty.
“DVD,” Bill explained. “King Kong.” He looked at the mask in his hands. “The uncut version that came out this past Christmas. That is an awesome fucking film. Did you see it?” Bill was a thirty-one-year-old accountant with a downtown Atlanta firm. He’d grown up in New York. “The new one, I mean. The three-disc version with deleted scenes.” Turning, he tossed the gorilla head to a couch or table out of sight — or maybe back onto a bed.
“Yeah. I saw the regular movie last year, with Mike — at a mall, when we were driving back to Atlanta. Mike liked it a lot. I thought it was okay…some of it. But the end was stupid — I mean, when she falls in love. How’s a woman gonna fall in love with a giant gorilla? She could like him, maybe. But not fall in love.” Now that the mask was gone, Eric chanced, “Where’d you get the gorilla…thing?”
“My personal theory,” Bill went on, not answering, “is that Peter Jackson was not really trying to remake the original. He knew it too well and loved it too much. What he was actually trying to do was remake the 1976 Dino De Laurentiis version, with Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges — with homages to the original one all through it. That’s the film he decided to remake the way it should have been made in the first place. And while he was at it, he worked a reconstruction of one of the scenes cut from the original back into it.” Bill opened the bottom door and stepped forward to the crumbling stair. “I’ve watched that lost spider-pit sequence twenty-five times, both the one Jackson did in his own version and the black and white one he made to fit back into the original. Hey, you want to come in and see it? It’s totally awesome. I was going to make some hot chocolate before I watched it again. The milk’s already heating.” He raised his brows expectantly. “If you’d like I can make some for us both.”