E-Book, Englisch, 228 Seiten
Benderson User
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-7396382-1-4
Verlag: Muswell Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 228 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-7396382-1-4
Verlag: Muswell Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Bruce Benderson is a novelist, essayist, journalist and translator who lives in New York. He has taught creative writing, urban culture and French literature at Deep Springs College, Nevada and lectured at Brown, Evergreen and Sarah Lawrence. He is bilingual and his work is hugely popular in France
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Mrs. Buster Huxton III, first name Sofia, an eighty-six-year-old Portuguese, still maintains an elegant triplex over her porno theater on Eighth Avenue. The discovery of her world lies beyond a musty, rubber-backed velvet curtain that must be swept aside upon entering. As the eyes slowly adapt to darkness, sweating walls become visible. You fumble down the aisle, using the sticky top edges of the leather seats as a guide, then slide into a row, your shoe likely to make an imprint in some viscous liquid.
In the second row are men with thinning hair and defeated shoulders, about to watch a dancer, whose name is Apollo, mount the stage in a black posing strap. Lit only by footlights, the room is orangey dark, and the lone silhouettes of the scattered spectators punctuate the gloom. In a moment the music will blast through scratchy speakers; the dancer, a pale-skinned mulatto with a mournful mouth, will leap barefoot onto the stage and lithely slip in and out of a few geometric poses. Then he will drop back onto the stale carpet and zigzag down the aisle to those few stranded men, to ask each under the cover of the blaring music if he might like a private show.
*
Call me Apollo—that dancer you watched in the shadows and said was mulatto—and you, my date, are somebody in the theater I was lucky or pushy enough to talk into a private show. Thirty’s the price I told you, but that will only get me two or three bags of dope this time of night. I only got one foil of crushed-up Dilaudid that I got from a doctor I tricked with. But what about cigarettes and a quart of beer for later?
I already know how to play you into coughing up another twenty. At just the moment when I say I don’t got enough to get back to Connecticut will be when you feel most off-guard. Right after you’ve shot your load, in other words. At this moment I imagine you being as high as I am. There is no explanation for this. Maybe it’s just being so close to your face. It’s that weird feeling of my eyes about to roll back as the Dilaudid races through my veins to begin the lick at my brain.
In a room below the stage, in the basement, a head keeps bobbing between Apollo’s splayed thighs, the taste of rubber blocking out the smell of sweat, mixed with the odor of mildew and cracking vinyl. Up and down the lips and tongue glide, while the bridge of the nose butts dully against him. Each dark, sparkling wave of Dilaudid hitting his brain, reversed by the teasing tongue on body parts.
This must be cozy as Mrs. Huxton feels in her high-class apartment above the theater. I saw it one time. It’s all carpet. There’s a silver tea service on the first floor in the sitting room. Polished sparkling furniture in the chandelier light and her lifting the control to that cable television … Nothing in this four-story building on Eighth Avenue except the theater and the basement, topped by Mrs. Huxton’s three luxury floors. Her middle-aged kids are begging her to sell out and move somewhere safe. But seems keeping up her husband’s business, which started as a tiny striptease joint on this very block in the 1930s and can’t pull in much now but is worth several million in real estate, became her thing. They told me the evening he finally croaked, and the corpse had to be carried down the stairs past the entrance, they switched the lights on and told guys with their pants down to leave, gave rain checks. It was years before I was even born …
Outside this room, in the dank corridor lit by one bulb, a fat man in pale clothes lurches by the entrance to a dingy lavatory. His sulfur gaze fixes on a dancer in a stretched-out jock strap hoisting a granite leg to the sink to wash off a thick foot, the calf of the other leg bulging in a big knot. In the faint, purplish light, dark hollows of muscle cleave his bending back. He lifts his head to gaze in a dull come-on at the fat man fumbling toward him and parting his lips in a soft popping sound like some marine creature.
Farther away, where the corridor rises in two steps leading to a fire door, crouches a boy shakily trying to light a match. The head of the first match disengages and sparks into the darkness, giving a glimpse of a bristling red crew cut, waxy skin. Then another match flares, revealing an opaline glass stem phosphorescent with smoke, pursing lips, and pinched features. He sucks in his breath as the end of the pipe glows brighter and the match fades.
In the dressing room, in front of a decrepit mirror that is missing bulbs, sits a downy-lipped teenager with large, shiny curls and grimy hands, squinting almost as if in performance in the dim light at the open math book in his lap.
Meanwhile, in the room with the so-called mulatto, the grunts of arousal have become more manifest. The gentleman’s hand jerks at the wan penis that sticks from the open zipper of his pants, groanings occur, and an ejaculation hits the black wall. The lips spasm around the half-erect member of the drugged dancer and then loosen. He sits up and clears his throat, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand; he tucks in his shirt and zips up, buckles his belt, and fishes into his pocket for the thirty dollars he had ready …
… My cock shrinking from the peeled bag that I toss on the floor with the others, speaking quick but soft so as not to ruin the mood, going heavy with the lingo of the street that puts the fear in some of you, and putting myself between you and the door, your only means of escape:
“You took too long, daddy, I got to take a cab to the station … man. I got to hit New Haven tonight on that last bus. Come on, I said, now pass me another twenty!”
I’ll go on and on without budging. The Dilaudid’s a drug for cancer patients that kills pain and tranquilizes, but I can get chatty and speedy from its rushes. I know that this must sound very flipped for a john who has come and now wants out of this little room with me blocking the door. But nobody’ll probably hear should you call out … And believe me, in Mrs. Huxton’s world scenes like this can turn into a bad dream. Even a big guy who is outraged will think twice before pushing this situation to the max. There might be an argument as you fumble too long in another pocket for more money … But even if you decide to stand up to me in the tiny room, I won’t take my eyes off your face. The Dilaudid gives me a strange kind of courage as you flip back and forth between decisions.
No one else is there to witness the standoff. The fat man wandering in the hallway and the dancer at the lavatory sink had disappeared together into another stall. At the sounds of agitation, the crack smoker and the curly-haired boy with the math book took the stairs two at a time. But perhaps in a room three floors above, sequestered from Eighth Avenue by concrete grillwork and ventilation ducts, an old woman shifts quaveringly in her sleep.
The so-called live show is over now. A tepid fantasy film colors the screen: the bedroom of a tract house somewhere in Southern California, an acrylic painting of a sunset seascape color-coordinated to the violet bedspread upon which loll two scraggly-haired teenagers whose locked limbs are at odds with the overlay of frantic disco music …
In the back by the curtained entrance, Casio, an ex-gang member who’s been the bouncer in this place ever since he got out of jail the second time, raises a brow over a dark-circled eye at the sound of the dull thuds coming from the private rooms. What was that crash? It could be that one of the boys is giving a trick some trouble. And with all the new construction changing the neighborhood, things have become hot; the authorities are waiting for an excuse to come in and shake the place down. By habit, the bouncer pricks up his vigilant, nocturnal ears, unconsciously compresses into an animal crouch … perches inwardly on the shot of dope that he did earlier to muster what remains of his old machismo.
But maybe the noise was just a seat slapping into position. Or a middle-aged trick stumbling on a stair. He strains to hear. All he can make out is the synthesized disco of the porno film, an occasional sigh or intake of breath. Then again, the unmistakable sound of a body thudding against a thin wall.
He moves toward the stairs but pauses. He’s reluctant to go down there before he decides: which of the five kids going out and coming in high and going out again and coming back in is it?
Carlos is no problem. He’s so doped up he don’t want no trouble—a papi-crazy faggot who comes off like a barrio homeboy and’ll always back down. And white-one-what’s-his-face, Red? Even if thirsted out for rockets he’ll crumble up the minute he see my face, ’cause of the time I found him doing that queen behind the movie screen for a toke.
But the half-breed nigger always talking crap about that Miss Huxton owns this place and inviting him to teas? Wacky enough to go the whole mile! … Oreo cookies’re like that. I just might end up having to nix his ass.
He marches grimly down the stairs with a sense of ailing authority. But the trick with the thinning hair has already dodged Apollo after being pushed against the wall by him, has fled the private room and ducked behind the stairwell.
Out of the...
