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  After ten years of zero contact, I ran into my older, more beautiful son at a Nomeansno concert on one of my frequent business trips west, and, ever since, we’d been slowly reinventing our dad-son relationship, mostly via letter and phone, with the occasional, briefish visitation as my travel schedule allowed.

  Recently Ziggy had written requesting information on my sex life, as he was attempting to sort out his own, and I, being something of a blabbermouth, spelled out my predilection for teens, even going so far as to specify the act—rimming—which particularly obsessed me re: them. Almost instantaneously Ziggy wrote back, claiming his actual interest in asking had been a snowballing love, of a sexual/romantic sort, for yours truly, and could we make love, fuck, etc., at my convenience of course?

  I was shocked, but it wasn’t as if I hadn’t fantasized similarly over the most recent years, since Ziggy’s physical charms combined with our familial closeness—plus our lack of actual blood ties—had made the boy queasily attractive. So I wrote back, detailing my ennui at Ziggy’s confession, then ultimately accepting his offer, and adding a multipart footnote, namely that he move to New York, live with me, accept the new post of “lover,” keep mum re: our past, thereby legitimizing our love in such a way as to avoid explanations that would inevitably be awkward, even among chums. And I had been waiting anxiously for a reply since a week ago Tuesday.

  I immediately phoned Ziggy back. The boy sounded stoned—his natural state, when around me at least—though less stoned than he’d seemed just a few weeks before, thanks, it appears, to the interventions of some sort of post-Freudian, psychoanalytical counselor type at his school. After querying Ziggy about his recent activities, rather too perfunctorily no doubt, I took a deep, noiseless breath and refreshed his memory re: my most recent missive’s proposal. Ziggy agreed to the plan in a sweetly put stock phrase or two, then all but begged me to fly out and see him. So I checked my appointment book—Ziggy said Brice would be away for the weekend—and agreed to arrive the next morning, stay a day or two, fully expecting that we’d consummate our relationship and set into motion his transference East.

  Throughout this conversation, Ziggy mumbled agreeably in stops and starts—rushed, inarticulate, vague, loosely poetic—a “music” I cherish in all teens, particularly, in this case, emitted by such an impeccable face, which I could even then picture—sleepy-eyed, cute, crowned with filthy brown hair, big lips moving a little too rapidly at the opposite extreme of the continent.

  Slayer’s latest LP crushed and splintered Ken’s living-room air.

  Robin head-banged mechanically, long hair whipping around.

  Ken was stroking the kid’s ribby back through his untucked T-shirt.

  They were perched on the couch by this point.

  “Isn’t this great?” Robin asked in the space between songs. He flopped back.

  “Yeah,” Ken said.

  Then the man made his face say, Stop stalling.

  Another song cranked up and shut the kid’s eyes.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Ken yelled, sensing wariness. “It’s great!”

  The man’s hand, elevated on fingertip, walked down the chest of the kid’s T-shirt.

  Robin’s T-shirt was black with the word Slayer printed in red and gold gothic-style letters. Ken tugged it up past the naval. An innie. White skin. Really hard not to bury one’s lips in it.

  “Hey,” the kid said, batted Ken’s hand away. He laughed.

  The man raised the shirt past dime nipples.

  “Man.” Robin laughed.

  The kid’s stomach bunched up, which looked great.

  Robin was Slayer’s head-banging disciple again, lips moving roughly along with the lyrics, which talked about Satan, damnation, human sacrifice, etc.

  Dark pink eyelids penciled once above the lashes with liner then brushed very lightly above and below with a cobalt blue powder that looked prostitutey, not fierce, assuming that’s what the kid had intended.

  Slayer: Body that rest before me, with every dying breath . . .

  A quarter inch maybe of licorice black roots in Robin’s long, yellow, frazzly hair.

  Skin that never saw daylight or wouldn’t let daylight soak in.

  “So I have this idea,” said Ken.

  Robin snorted. Something . . . the tension made head banging tough, so he quit and flopped back in the cushions again.

  “The video,” Ken added. He was gathering hand-fuls of Robin’s black jeans, which he yanked to get a look at the hips, butt, thighs. Feeble little things.

  Robin’s too-made-up eyes looked a third scared and two-thirds too confident.

  “You don’t mind, right?” Ken asked, yanked.

  Glancing away with a slight smile . . . “Barry told me about you,” said Robin.

  “About the payment too?” Ken yanked.

  The kid nodded, then something in Slayer took over his eyes, lips, and he mouthed the line Stained glass windows black.

  Tick, tick, tick . . .

  Robin head-banged awhile.

  “Barry’s gorgeous,” Ken said, just to say something.

  When the heroin filters into Calhoun’s bones or wherever, he reaches out, almost too gracefully, thanks to the high, and picks up a videocassette on his TV, which, like most things in the room, is an arm’s length away from the desk where he does his shot several times daily. The tape’s a homemade porno Ziggy lent him last night. Ziggy wants Calhoun’s “brilliant” opinion. So he inserts the cassette in his crap VCR, lighting a Marlboro Light. No credits, obviously. Dead white smoke seeps from Calhoun’s open mouth, drifting into his contracted eyes, blink, blink, which are in their unkempt, vaguely coming-down phase. There’s a ton going on in them. Rubbing his nose with the back of one hand, he sits up, blinks himself to attention. Okay. There’s Ziggy suddenly, for sure, as a kid, naked, flat on his back on a bed somewhere, masturbating a teensy dick. Calhoun cringes and grins at the same time. Tick, tick, tick . . . Hours of someone he’ll eventually know having lopsided sex with obese Uncle What’s-his-name. No sound. To Calhoun, the video’s little more than this ludicrous joke for a while. Then he either gets bored or outraged, he can’t decide. Fatso endlessly does shit to Ziggy. It’s hard to watch, being so foreign. Plus it has no momentum, at least to an outsider. And then there’s the issue of Ziggy right there in the thick, looking off into space or sometimes at the lens with an early version of that please-love-me squint Calhoun knows very well and deflects all the time. “Jesus, man.” Calhoun gives a little poke to his crotch, which is as gushy and lifeless as ever. Then, reassured, he spaces out on, oh nothing . . . the TV. The porno dissolves into Calhoun’s low opinion of the conventional world. “Phew.” People are viruses, he thinks. Blink, blink. Now he can manage a wan smile. Click. Ziggy’s video rewinds in the distance. Jesus, heroin helps keep things so . . .

  Ziggy looks carefully at the pale blue his stomach, hips, and widespread legs suggest under the top sheet. Then he pinches a bit of the sheet between thumb and forefinger, yanking same to the side. “Presto,” he whispers. A skinny beige body, six chest hairs, extremely faint tan line, cock and balls symmetrical in a reddish brown bush. If I was absolutely gay, he thinks, or a woman, ha ha, I’d fuck this body. Okay, well, not fuck in the latter case because that’s impossible, but . . . what? Hold, kiss, blow, uh . . . Oh, shit. Ziggy cringes. I just, like, agreed to fucking move to New York with Roger! Shit, shit, shit . . . He jumps out of bed, rummages through a desk drawer until he finds the envelope from his less scary dad. He hops back in bed and pulls the sheet up to his waist, letter out, already reading. My Dear Ziggy, The sky is a malted milk gray out . . . Blah, blah, blah . . . blah, blah . . . Here. “This part,” Ziggy thinks aloud, gripping the pages. First Roger’s supposedly more than a little embarrassed to detail my mildly pedophilic interests to you, a young person yourself blah, blah, blah . . . Then, let’s see . . . Teenaged boys are my weakness, particularly the slim, depressed, cute, intelligent, haunted ones who feel askew in some w
ay from their peers. My interest seems to reinforce these boys’ secret if fragile belief in themselves . . . Spooked, Ziggy lets the letter drop on his chest. It folds up into this . . . “Hm.” Well, it looks like a drainpipe. Collapsed. Starting nowhere, leading nowhere. Actually, it reminds him even more of those cardboard box lean-tos some homeless adults have built under the freeway off ramp near their place. Ziggy stares off, imagining himself all curled up in a gross-smelling ball inside one of them. Why aren’t there homeless dollhouses? he wonders. Blink, blink . . . Someone could get megarich manufacturing and selling them. Maybe Calhoun and him. He can see it. But the excitement, like, wilts once he grabs and reopens the letter. This part. . . his eyes narrow, focus a bit. . . because you’re probably wondering what my exact tastes entail. Ahem. First of all, understand that my heightened, nitpicky perceptions of popular music extend to human beings. Thus I choose friends selectively, and bed partners even more selectively still. To me teenaged boys of the sort I have indicated are an example of human beings at their most fiercely alive, most . . . evolved, let me say. Ziggy’s crotch feels like it’s falling asleep, bzzz . . . Bad sign, bad sign. As for what I like to do with them, rimming’s the technical term for it. “Eating ass” is a lowlier synonym. Do you know that many, many gay men are more interested in asses than they are in big cocks, despite all the hype to the contrary? “Sometimes, yeah,” Ziggy whispers. I love to spend quality time with a beautiful teenaged boy’s ass, massaging, mapping, recording its factual data, putting my tongue in the hole (this is a common gay sex act), finger fucking it (ditto), and so forth. Don’t think for a moment that this brand of sex has any relationship at all to the “sex” Brice imposes on you. It’s far more like worship, if anything. Then the letter apologizes for being so crass for about half a page. Ziggy skims. He’s already picturing that ass stuff. Tossing the letter away, he sidelines the sheet, grabs his knees, folds himself up, card table–style, simultaneously doing a semi–back flip, such that his ass leaves the mattress and sort of flies open. Now he strains his green eyes in that basic direction. But bodies are too crude or sneaky or something. So he settles back, feeling around as intricately in his asscrack as possible, as if the few hairs and puckered hole were an insignia or braille. And if they were braille, they’d probably say, “Bye,” he thinks, ha ha ha ha. Ziggy shuts his eyes, daydreaming, fingering, but every time he forms a picture of Roger’s pale, big-featured face smashed to dreck in his crack, that reasonably sexy portrait starts mutating . . . or, uh, shape-shifting. Like it’s been infected, or . . . as if its eyes are eyeholes and Brice is spying on him or . . . what? “Shit . . . shit, shit . . .” Ziggy slugs his mattress with both fists. “I hate you,” he says, meaning Brice, and maybe Roger a little. Squeak, squeak. Ziggy stands, fumes for a second, then plows into his cramped, cluttered bedroom, tearing precious Hüsker Dü posters right off the walls, chucking books, sketch pads, papers, cassettes every which way. He topples a chest of drawers, hopping onto its thin plywood back. One foot crashes through, plunging practically up to the knee in a tangle of lukewarm underwear and stray socks. That feels . . . sad for some reason. “Fuck!” Crash. His other foot stomps through the wood, and is immersed in some T-shirts, handkerchiefs, etc. They swim around that calf and ankle like . . . jellyfish or whatever. “Oh, no,” he says, noticing the first dim, dim pulse of an idiotic emotion bomb. Dropping into a crouch, he bear-hugs his thighs, wedges a chunk of his face into the narrow formed by his knobbed, parallel knees, and breathes as asthmatically as possible, trying to sober himself on the lemony stench of his unshowered crotch. Sometimes that works. “Shit.” He tries berating himself incoherently. But the blubbering’s already started. “Shi-i-i-it . . .” Ziggy’s lost in the scarily complex if amateurish feedback of his feelings. “Shi-i-i-it.” Crunch. The bedroom door flies open, smacking a wall. Brice, nude, red hair gone volcanic, face a purple and bellowing splat, sort of careens at him. Ziggy’s greasy brown hair is yanked hard in two spots, and he levitates—rips, actually—straight up and out of the dresser. “Stop!” The jagged wood’s cutting his ankles to shit, he can tell. “Dad, please.” Ziggy’s dragged away, pinned against one wall, pushpins gouging his back. Blurry Brice knees him once, twice in the groin, lets his hair go, steps out of the way. Ziggy can’t breathe, gags, gasps, hits the rug, his legs practically vibrating. He crawls, gently cupping his balls, helped along by some kicks that smash his flesh into the crags of his skeleton. The seventh kick lands him across the dresser. Using one arm, he hugs the piece of furniture. The other arm, hand swing around his back, trying to cover his blunt little asscrack. Kick. “I’ve seen your can before,” Brice yells, kicks Ziggy’s hand. It snaps so loudly that something’s probably broken inside. Now there’s a relative silence apart from Ziggy’s sobbing, obviously, not to mention the Hüsker Dü album, thank God. Then Brice snorts and says, “Well, you’re the one who has to live in it,” which Ziggy initially thinks means his body. But Brice probably meant, like, what’s left of his bedroom. Slam. Ziggy’s alone again. . . . All these crazy mixed-up lies floating all around, making these assumptions brings me down . . . He can’t seem to move. “Shit.” Down the hall, another door slams. What if I’m paralyzed? he thinks. Concentrating, he manages to move a thigh, calf very slightly. Phew. The Hüsker Dü tape’s reached his favorite song, “I Apologize,” a raucous, fierce, kind of confused, pretty rant against the way the world works that’s so appropriate to his current situation it’s almost hilarious. That’s why he borrowed the name for his magazine. But every Hüsker Dü song is relevant to Ziggy’s life every second. That’s why they mean tons to him now. Along with Calhoun, probably Nicole, maybe Roger, but nobody else . . . well, apart from Annie, who’s so generous with her drug supply. Then there’s Uncle Ken, ugh, whom he really should phone. “Shit.” Raising up, twisting his body around, Ziggy grimaces through the room’s ruins at a way tilted digital clock. 3:17 A.M.

  Click.

  “Ken,” announces a whiny male voice, followed by the sound of air whistling in and out of lungs buried underneath at least two hundred eighty pounds of skin, fat, bones. His uncle’s definitely more frightening on the phone. In person, obesity suits him somehow. Or Ziggy’s used to it. Weird.

  “It’s me,” Ziggy says, sniffling. “Brice just beat me up. Can I . . . come over?” He cringes hopefully.

  “We-e-ell,” Ken answers, voice all wavery, rocked by . . . alcohol? Duh. “I’ve . . . let me catch my breath . . . got this kid over here. And we’re . . . you know. So you can come, hang out, crash. But you may see some shit that’ll haunt you a little.”

  Before replying, Ziggy listens to the music blasting distortedly in Ken’s background. It’s sinister, but dumb. “That sounds interesting, Uncle Ken,” he says. “But I’m probably too freaked tonight.”

  “So what else is new.”

  “Yeah, right.” Ziggy snickers. Then he remembers how Uncle Ken stared at Calhoun the time they stopped by together, and his fingertips start to pulse rapidly. He crosses a couple. “So, who’s the kid? Do I know him or her?”

  “According to Robin here, he’s the world’s biggest Slayer fan. Hear music? That’s Slayer. Ever heard of them? What else . . . He’s about, oh . . . twelve, thirteen. You know those Glam Heavy Metal types? Dyed blond hair, headband, a little eyeshadow, lipstick?”

  “God, I hate those kinds of guys.” Ziggy’s smeary eyes narrow and flit to the garbage-strewn floor, specifically a shred of Bob Mould’s honest, middle-aged-before-its-time face.

  “Yeah, it’s great,” Ken whines, to the boy in his . . . living room, probably. “I’ll be off in a second, okay? Well, if you hate them, Ziggy,” he adds, lowering his voice. “You should pop by.”

  “Tomorrow maybe.” Ziggy’s picked up the poster scrap. “After school. Will the kid still be there?” Looking into Bob Mould’s enlarged, tinted eye, the situation kind of dissolves into a general okayness.

  “Yeah, yeah . . . Look, he’s getting antsy. Gotta go. No, s
it there, Robin. Sit back down.”

  Click.

  The kid tried to stand, but the strange combination of beer and sleeping pills wouldn’t let him. So, flop, he fell back on the couch.

  “What’s the problem?” Ken asked.

  Robin slurred.

  “What?” Ken repeated, standing over the kid.

  On second hearing, the kid said, “Who was that?”

  “My nephew,” Ken answered, kneeling down by the couch. “The boy’s insane.” Ken grabbed the waistband of Robin’s jeans, yanking them and the underwear all the way off.

  “Insane.” The kid giggled. He jerked his hips around wildly.

  “Ziggy’s a closeted homo,” said Ken, soaking in Robin’s finery.

  Then the kid sat head-banging a bit, not that well, he could tell, but . . .

  “Get up for a second,” the man said.

  Robin tried to stand, fell backwards. Again. Forget it. So the man helped him down to the rug, where he knelt, teetering, long blond hairs glued to his cute, sweaty face.

  Ken unfolded the couch bed, then watched the kid teeter awhile.

  “Heave ho,” announced the man, clutching a thin wrist.

  Robin landed face down on the bed and sort of squirmed while Ken French-kissed his not-that-clean buttcrack. Sometimes he sang along with Tom Araya, Slayer’s vocalist, who was yelling about how Christianity’s a lie and Satanism’s perfection.

  “Let’s make that video,” Ken said. He could taste Robin’s shit kind of generally. “Up, up,” he added, and slapped the flushed butt.