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  WORKS BY DENNIS COOPER

  Closer

  Frisk

  Try

  Guide

  Period

  My Loose Thread

  The Sluts

  God Jr.

  Wrong(Stories)

  The Dream Police: Selected Poems 1969–1993

  All Ears (Journalism)

  Jerk (with Nayland Blake)

  Horror Hospital Unplugged (with Keith Myerson)

  Try

  Dennis

  Cooper

  I’m very grateful to Walt Bode, Jesse Bransford, David Ehrlich, Mark Ewert, Amy Gerstler, Matt Greene, Michael Matson, Ira Silverberg, and Mitchell Watkins.

  Copyright © 1994 by Dennis Cooper

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  I Apologize is based on Raised by Wolves, a great and similar zine out of New Mexico, edited by Mr. Ed.

  The epigraph is from Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography (New York: Urizen Books, 1977).

  Hüker Dü quotes: p. 6, from the song “Celebrated Summer,” on the LP New Day Rising (SST Records); p. 11, from the song “59 Times the Pain,” on the LP New Day Rising; p. 21, from the song “I Apologize,” on the LP New Day Rising; p. 100 from the song “Everything Falls Apart,” on the LP Everything Falls Apart and More (Rhino Records).

  Slayer quotes: p. 15, from the song “Cleanse the Soul”; p. 25, from the song “Silent Scream”; p. 58, from the song “Cleanse the Soul”; p. 73, from the song “Live Undead”; p. 115, from the song “Cleanse the Soul”; p. 116, from the song “Spill the Blood.” All songs from the LP South of Heaven (Def Jam Recordings).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cooper, Dennis, 1953—

  Try / Dennis Cooper.

  I. Title.

  PS3553.0582T79 1994 813’.54—dc20 93-31364

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4772-2

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  for Casey

  The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them.

  —Robert Bresson

  Ziggy’s splayed in bed editing I Apologize, “A Magazine for the Sexually Abused.” Four or five copies have sold at this cool, mainly CD-cassette store where Calhoun, his best friend, works part-time. This’ll eventually be I Apologize No. 20. Last time Ziggy checked it was 1:37 A.M. At the moment he’s hunched over, filling up most of page eight with a self-portrait. Him scared. Not bad considering the nothing technique. Tick, tick, tick, tick . . . When Ziggy thinks his depiction’s okay, i.e., now, he moves the pencil to a different locale on the page, gradually clogging this straggly figure’s surroundings with words. Don’t panic get a grip you don’t have to sleep if you don’t want to. They’re twisting and winding all over the fucking place. Very . . . psychedelic? “Hm,” Weird how professional it looks. Last weekend, scribbling that sentence on a loose scrap of homework, he’d felt like “auditioning for a snuff film,” as Uncle Ken joked one time. “Shit.” He owes that old psychotic a call. 1:59 A.M. He pushes the part-finished zine aside, looking worriedly at a Polaroid he based the self-portrait on. It shows Ziggy shirtless, in cutoffs, head turned, eyeballing Calhoun before a bad thrift-store painting of Paris, face charged by a happy if slightly hysterical expression. Calhoun just looks . . . high, period. I’m handsome enough, Ziggy thinks. Definitely. Yeah, but . . . His body’s just sort of there. Neck down he could be, oh, sixty percent of the guys at his high school. Maybe he’d fuck himself if he was sure he was gay, but his taste in men is notoriously primitive, so . . . does that count? “Shit, shit . . .” Ziggy squints at Calhoun for a second, then flicks the Polaroid at the small table next to his bed, where it joins a black pushbutton telephone, the colorful if empty cassette case for Hüsker Dü’s New Day Rising LP, and a freshly rolled, unlighted joint. 2:04 A.M.

  Across town, Calhoun sits in his fake-antique desk chair injecting a huge dose of heroin. Nearby, a laptop computer’s screen exudes this turquoisey glow, into which a paragraph of his novel-in-progress dissolves, or appears to. He unties his arm, blinks, and a subsequent rush, though it’s more like an ease—warm, slightly sensual, trancy—cross-fades the world around him into a vague, distant backdrop as well as it can, for a few minutes anyway. That would be the scariest sight in the world—gentle, brilliant Calhoun and his writing in deep hibernation—but no one else sees. And to him, heroin’s perfection or whatever. Calhoun’s friends couldn’t understand what he’s experiencing right now, although one, maybe two of the people he knows worry almost incessantly, even melodramatically at times, irritating him when they announce their concern, since, to his mind, that “concern” is self-serving and thoughtlessly aimed. Take Josie, Calhoun’s long-distance girlfriend, whom he keeps half-abreast of his goings-on. She, Ziggy are neurotic as shit about the subject of heroin. Still, they’re the people who “love” him. They say so at least, far too often in fact, for whatever that’s worth. Calhoun’s slightly inscrutable, even to those select few who detect how kind and gifted he is behind an initial remoteness. Whatever, folks. He just wants to feel bliss via heroin. If his friends feel like hanging around with him anyway, fine.

  Across town, Ken, Ziggy’s overweight uncle, was sitting around making ultra–eye contact with Robin, a thirteen-year-old Heavy Metal fanatic.

  “Nice place,” the kid said, eyeing the man’s stupid furniture and shit.

  “Check it out,” answered Ken. He heaved-ho his huge body out of the faded green armchair.

  Robin stood, followed the man around.

  Room, room, room . . . room.

  “Here’s where I make porno videos.” It was a brightly lit room with a set. Outdated motel interior, it seemed. “Maybe we’ll make one,” he added.

  The kid snorted.

  “Maybe . . . soon,” said the man. He reached out, squeezed the drooping seat of Robin’s tattered black jeans.

  Un-fucking-believable-looking kid.

  “No, let’s get really, really, really stoned first.” Robin laughed, very jittery. “You know . . . ’cos . . .”

  So they traipsed off to the couch.

  Ken’s big blanched hand with two tiny blue UFOs jammed in the sweaty palm. “Take both,” he said.

  The kid pried them out, filled his mouth, felt around in a pocket, and traded the man a cassette of his favorite band Slayer’s most recent LP.

  Cover art: huge, rotting skull populated by demonic, half-human figures.

  “Looks good,” Ken said, not really thinking that.

  “Fuck, I worship them, man!” Robin brought a beer can to his mouth.

  “To their health.” The man smirked. And he raised his own beer.

  Both of them: “Glug, glug, glug . . .”

  Safely inside the kid’s guts, pills began to dissolve, meaning Ken could relax, right? He idly studied the Slayer art.

  “Put it on,” insisted Robin.

  “What, this?” Ken asked. He held up the ugly cassette
case.

  Excited kid’s brown bordering on reflective black eyes.

  “H-hello?” Nicole’s voice is sort of, uh, vague, à la Calhoun’s, though, fingers crossed, it’s just drowsiness, and not . . . whatever . . . heroin?

  “It’s me,” Ziggy says into the phone. “Ziggy McCauley. Uh, who always wears a jeans jacket?”

  “Oh, hi-i-i.” She yawns, a lengthy, multipitched type. Even thinned to a wisp by the mechanism, the sound’s totally erotic.

  “Hi.”

  Yawning apparently burned off the cloud since her voice turns a touch . . . crisp. “Ziggy,” she says. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay. Stoned. Uh, you?” He reaches down, wiggles his hardening cock.

  “A bit hazy, naturally. Oh, listen, I was thinking about you today.”

  “Really? Ha ha ha, sure.” Ziggy’s left foot starts spazzing out, a semiconscious bad habit that just makes him more overwrought, though it’s not as if he can adjust it.

  She hums a little melody like she’s pissed off or embarrassed to continue. It, the melody, sounds vaguely familiar. Like from MTV, radio. Ziggy narrows it down to a category (rap), and a gender (female), but the tinier details elude him. Shit. “So, what’s your opinion of Hüsker Dü?” he interrupts hopefully.

  Her song shorts out.

  “’Cos I love them,” he adds.

  “Mm. I’ve heard the name.”

  Ziggy reaches over, pushes PLAY on his cassette deck. New Day Rising comes on. “Listen to this. Just for a second, okay?” He holds the receiver to one of the speakers. “Celebrated Summer” happens to be playing. . . . I summer where I winter, and no one is allowed there . . . After a minute he hauls the receiver back up to his mouth, yells, “This is so fucking great” then shoves it back into the song for twenty, twenty-five seconds. . . . Then the sun disintegrates behind a wall of clouds . . . “Isn’t that genius?” Ziggy asks. “No matter what Bob Mould’s singing it makes me cry! Not really, but . . . you know what I mean? I hate it that they broke up! Assholes! Not really!” He snickers off “microphone.”

  “Interesting.”

  Ziggy turns down the stereo. “They’re great.”

  “I believe you. So what do you do on the days when you don’t come to school?”

  “Hang out with weird people mostly.” Ziggy looks around the room. Crammed with furniture, crammed with books, papers, etc., it’s practically a cave it’s so craggy and dusty and horribly lit by his desk lamp. “Work on my magazine, uh—”

  “Anybody I know?” There’s this new little twist in her voice Ziggy can’t quite identify other than to guess she’s even less out of it than before.

  “No, uh-uh,” he says. “Well, maybe. You might know this guy Calhoun.” She doesn’t say anything. “He’s my best friend. Then there’s this other guy, Ken. He’s my uncle, uh . . . stepuncle? I mean, I’m adopted, right? So he’s my . . . one of my dads’ brother, uh . . . ’Cos my parents are two gay men, right?”

  “Really? That’s . . . unusual.” She clears her throat.

  “I guess.” Ziggy’s cheeks have knotted painfully around his big nose the way they do when he’s nervous. “Anyway, uh . . . yeah, my uncle’s, like, totally psycho, but I happen to dig him. He teaches me stuff. Oh yeah, such as what, she asks? Ha ha ha. Well, about . . . uh, well . . .” A headache’s sort of eating his train of thought. “Well, okay . . . he’s into, uh . . . he’s got these kiddie porn videos. You know what those are? He makes them. That’s one thing . . . Uh, you still . . . okay?”

  Nicole doesn’t say anything, but she’s obviously there ’cos Ziggy can hear the inside of a house, meaning . . . how to describe it? A kind of textured silence, like that “music” his therapist plays in their background.

  “Okay, assuming you’re listening, uh . . . Uncle Ken’s got all these videos of young boys and him having sex. Even sixteen’s too old. Like I’m completely over the hill now. But we’re friends ’cos he’s into the idea of sexual abuse. Me too. I’m a victim, right? Anyway, that’s another long story. So, based on this, do you think I’m insane?”

  Nicole’s mouth makes watery noises. Swish, swish, swish . . . “I guess I’m . . .” swish, swish . . . “worried about you. I’ve been hearing things . . . Not about your uncle . . . but that you’re . . . com . . . ple . . .” Her sentence disintegrates into a yawn.

  “Complex! That’s good, yeah.”

  “I’m . . . wait . . .” The yawn does its thing. “. . . I’m not judging you, Ziggy,” she adds, seemingly composed again.

  “Oh, I know. That’s okay.” He’s sure now he really does like her. “I’m definitely weird, Nicole. My main dad—the one I still live with—has been beating me up, raping me since I was, uh . . . ten, and my other dad just wrote me this letter that was like . . . obviously sort of a, uh, love letter, and I guess . . . uh, I wrote one back, and now we’re gonna sleep together, which is probably this huge mistake. And . . . what else . . . ?” He pounds his forehead a few times. “But I really do like you. I do. I have for a while.” He blinks wildly at the cave.

  “I . . . like you too.”

  “What? That’s unbelievable!” Ziggy digs a hand into his longish brown hair. It used to be longer. “Can I . . . ? What about this weekend? I’ll come see you. I’ll hitchhike, I don’t care.” He rolls onto his side and starts pawing the black slice of air that separates his twin bed from the mashed-down shag rug.

  “That’d be nice.”

  “Great!” There’s so much dust under the bed it feels slippery. Like his hand’s sort of. . . not skiing exactly, but . . . what? “Maybe I’ll actually show up at school in the morning and shock everyone.” He’s still scrounging through invisible books, magazines, videocassettes, papers, stiff towels, etc. “Or . . . I’ll call you, okay?” Nicole answers, “That’s cool,” or whatever. He’s too busy hunting down one . . . particular . . . porn magazine. When he finally finds, yanks Broad Strokes 7, his hand wears a tangle of dust balls so dense and entwined it’s like a glove, or . . . the ghost of a glove, at first glance anyway. Pretty. Blink, blink, blink . . . “Jesus.” Shaking his hand, he reduces the grayish white bundle to fiberettes. “Uh, Nicole? I’ve gotta . . . go. Bye.” Ziggy hangs up, snickers down at the magazine’s lounging, inexplicably savory cover girl. She could be Nicole’s sleazier sister, maybe. Same mousy hair, button nose, close-set eyes. And the coiled snake tattoo on her ass could potentially lurk beneath one of the loose-fitting dresses Nicole tends to wear. So Ziggy closes his eyes and imagines it’s postschool tomorrow, Nicole’s parents’ house, which suspiciously resembles Calhoun’s loft since that’s no sweat to conjure up. They’ve been talking and smoking pot. It’s cool. They’re in a bedroom that looks like Calhoun’s . . . oh fuck, and, uh, Calhoun’s in the bathroom or something, and . . . Ziggy settles back with the magazine. Flip, flip. No matter how many thousands of times he’s turned these same thirty pages, there’s always a detail or two he never noticed before. Such as how in, like, ten of the pictures, another porn magazine’s just visible on the woman’s night table. The miniature cover of . . . of . . . Ziggy squints . . . Horny Horsetrainers shows several androgynous, entangled adults wearing cowboy hats. “Nicole’s” potbellied, bearded costar obviously needs this other porn to stay hard or something. Well, women are awfully nerve-racking, Ziggy thinks. Or maybe she needs porn. “Hm.” That makes more sense since her costar’s a slug, as far as Ziggy can figure. Anyway, “Nicole’s” such a loser who gives a shit what she requires? “Cool.” All this time, Ziggy’s been fingering his humid, squashed asscrack. Once, maybe twice, he has brought those fingers up to his nose for a sniff. Weird, he thinks, sniffing again, how this spicy-gross asshole aroma’s so priceless to him, but every girl he’s fucked didn’t care less, or else they kept their remarks to themselves. Wait, on second thought, girls never bury their noses way in there like gay guys he’s fucked usually do. Maybe, Ziggy decides, I’ll ask Nicole to, like, spelunk there. Or maybe she’ll take that route on her
own? The idea’s so amazing he flings Broad Strokes 7 away, squints at a bookcase, and pumps his cock, definitely ready to come. The book spines go unfocused like they’re on a movie screen, cross-fading into Nicole’s sort of Juliette Lewis–ish face, which Ziggy aims toward his splayed legs, beckons, beckons, then . . . slam-dunks so forcefully her cheeks ripple back to the hairline, bunching up around tiny, pink ears as if she’s . . . whatever, rocketing to Mars? Cool. Ziggy’s starting to spurt when he feels this . . . thing inside his chest, like a lodged rock. “The emotion bomb,” as his school therapist describes it. Sometimes as Ziggy has orgasms, the “bomb” goes off too, and the shambles that makes of his . . . soul, ugh, isn’t worth a momentary otherworldliness. So, forehead scrunched, he lets his dribbling cock loose and lies as still as he can. The “bomb” ticks frenetically under his rib cage. “No, please,” Ziggy sobs, slugs his chest. Now he shuts his eyes, picturing Calhoun, who’s the only human being he’s ever known who definitely gives a half-shit about him. “Cal . . . houn,” he chants very intently, until his friend’s big-nosed, dazed, Irish face blankets his thinking, immense as an IMAX screen. “Th-th-th-thanks,” he squeaks. No problem, Ziggy. Slug, slug. When the pain’s down a bit, Ziggy fades-out Calhoun, reaches over, grabs, lights, starts smoking the joint on his bedside, fascinatedly watching his sperm dry, his ballsac unfurl, against a faint, scruffy Hüsker Dü soundtrack. Sniffle. . . . 59 times the pain I could never be with you . . . Tick, tick, tick . . . With one hand Ziggy fingers the eggy white blobs hardening up on his belly, almost calm and/or stoned out enough to successfully snag the telephone with his other.

  When Ziggy called, I was at the Macintosh, Walkman cranked, so the phone machine answered. As a rock journalist, I’m often up late, speed-reviewing some concert from earlier that evening. And it wasn’t until my break several minutes later that I noticed the message light blinking.

  Perhaps a little background is in order. Ahem. I met Brice McCauley, unemployed hunk, at an Echo & the Bunnymen concert some sixteen years earlier. We fucked, got along, and wound up leasing a town house together—our stab at heterosexual-style bliss. We adopted Ziggy, a hyperactive, hard-to-place two-year-old, as part of this experiment. But I found the situation intolerable ere long, and moved to New York, at which point Ziggy was still a frantic, irritating toddler.