ink and acrylic on canvas ‘pretty little reaper’
All is dust
‘Hey. Remember that pedo we met in New York?’
He remembered.
‘He was sucking your dick, and you tried to ignore the kiddy porn he had pinned to the walls… then out of the blue, you wrapped the phone cord around his neck and throttled him to within an inch of his life. Then we took all his money’
He remembered looking down his arms into the monster’s eyes. Bloodshot. Bulging in their sockets. The shock-turned-terror as he struggled to breath, tearing at the cord, ripping at his own throat. He remembered how right it felt as he pushed him to the floor and tightened the cord until the old man’s eyes rolled up. When Jack let go I was disappointed.
He lived. Lived because Jack let him live, but it would always remain Jack’s one regret. He was on the floor still gasping like a fish out of water when Jack pulled up his jeans and buckled his belt. Beautiful Jack Junior with his perfect face and form, and his dark seraphinite gaze.
Jack got a job as a dog walker after that, for an affluent New York lady, walking her Shih-tzus and Toy Poodles in Central Park, getting big tips for a flirt and a social visit. God, the stories he told made me laugh and he wasn’t kind about it. She used to get him to bend her over the couch for some extra income. He’d close his eyes and think of something else to finish the job. It paid the rent.
Maybe it’s tragic, is it though? We came to accept it. Our lives entangled like fine gold chains forgotten in a drawer. We’d hook up for a while until we reached a cold hard moment that threatened to shatter our secret places and scatter the contents for all to see.
We surrendered to fate with grace,
‘Ok. See you later’
‘Ok. Love you’
‘Love you too’ I hated it but always felt relief. The beast in my head rattling at the bars would settle, until a thin etheric thread held us in place somewhere in the back of my mind, and anchored him to my heart.
What I like to remember is the way we sat around naked without a hint of lust, eating apples and grapes, listening to music and telling scary stories. How we dreamed each other’s dreams and spoke without speaking. We were more like siblings than lovers. He’d bring me vintage trinkets to watch my eyes light up. He had no interest in them himself but always had them there for me. I lost them all.
I remember a pair of little copper crowns with red velvet backing. I sewed them on to a coat that someone stole. All is dust. He was devastated when I gave birth to someone else’s baby. I didn’t know it would do that, I didn’t realise. I missed all the signs, and though my heart reached out for him, I protected my child from something intangible, not a physical danger but a psychic influence. Danger by osmosis.
Jack wasn’t someone you could fuck with. If he didn’t get you on the spot he’d wait. He’d plan his revenge in secret and in great detail, they never saw it coming. I’d hear about it later. I’d hear about an unfortunate accident that befell an enemy, or of a terrible beating by an unknown assailant in black and a balaclava. Shit, I hope he doesn’t recognise himself in this story.
We were masters of secrecy. We left no trails.
A photo album
I was staying at Jack’s place one weekend when he left for a job. We’d been back from New York for two years by then. I’d just done an all-day house call with a corporate lawyer in Darling Point, a strange little man who did offshore deals with China over the phone, wearing rubber undies and a silk kimono. It was a Friday afternoon and I was bored so I thought I’d surprise him and clean the place. I played some music, smoked a few joints and started cleaning the kitchen, it was a mess. His bedroom was neat, he was very fussy about his bedroom, but I ran the vacuum cleaner through it anyway. I hit something under his bed, a metal toolbox with a padlock. It was one of those old red enamelled types. I remembered seeing keys in the kitchen drawer. I felt bad but the curiosity was overwhelming and one of the keys fit. When I jiggled the lock I felt slight remorse and probably should’ve closed it right there but I didn’t. What I found was an album full of Polaroids, of naked men in complex pornographic poses. I laughed at first. Why would he lock it away? It wasn’t like I cared about his sexual exploits. Then I looked closer.
‘Oh shit. Are they fucking dead?’ I turned page after page after page and looked real close for ligature marks or visible injuries. There was no blood, they weren’t blue, but then I couldn’t see their throats because of the weird angles. Some of them were tied into place. My heart was pounding by then, beating like a drum in my ears. Was JJ a fucking serial killer?
A mournful siren wailed in the distance like a dead boy’s mother. I slapped the book shut, put it back in the box and locked it. I wiped off my fingerprints with a Kleenex and pushed it back under, deep into the dark place. He’d be home soon.
*
‘Babe…’ he says, ‘You’ve cleaned the place.’ He hid his shock with a twitch and a kiss on my forehead. He was almost believable, ‘Find anything interesting?’
‘Interesting? I said with a puzzled tone, then followed quickly with, ‘You hungry?’ I was convincing, oh yeah I’m good. He looked into my eyes and I didn’t flinch. Satisfied, he took a shower. I called out I was ordering takeaway,
‘What do you feel like babe?’
‘Whatever sweetie, whatever, there’s a menu on the fridge from that Italian place.’
He went to his room and closed the door. I heard the faint click of the lock, unusual for Jack. I heard him shuffling stuff around so I went up to the door and listened until the doorbell rang. When I answered the door I got deja vu. The delivery guy looked familiar. I wondered if he was in Jack’s album as I passed the money, then he says,
‘Bon appetit! Say hi to Jack for me.’
It was a question I would come to ask about a lot of people. I imagined him with his legs up in the air, and with something up his arse,
‘Ok!’ I said. I wanted to believe he was in that album. I wanted to believe those men were alive, that it was a kinky consensual game, that their eyes were closed because they were enjoying themselves. But I just couldn’t get the possibility they were dead out of my mind.
*
We ate our lasagna with a bottle of 1982 Bordeaux Merlot, a gift from a client. He had a whole case of the stuff. I remember there wasn’t much conversation but Jack was silent and secretive by nature, even on coke. After dinner, we smoked weed and went for a ride on his green Kawasaki GPZ Ninja 900. We went to La Perouse where he rode too fast and blew everything out of my mind. He loved that bike. The rest of the night was cosy. We cuddled, watched videos, and smoked so much weed that my jaw hurt laughing at my own stories. But there was a vibe – I think he suspected something. I wasn’t sure because Jack was as good at pretending as me.
We got up early Saturday and went for a ride down the south coast stopping for lunch and a game of pool at a pub in Scarborough. He was in a great mood, enjoying the attention he attracted for a change. He was so striking that people either stared from a distance or hovered around him like moths. Some people couldn’t get past his appearance and he tortured them for it. I was on my best behaviour but my obsession with the album made it hard to focus on our scant conversations. I wondered if he noticed. On the way back from Scarborough, we made a quick stop to our local dealer. Jack was more affectionate than usual. Smack always did that with us. We didn’t do sex much. I think we found it psychically painful, unbearable at times – we avoided it. There was an intensity that bordered on rage and it scared me. It was something we never understood. We’d fuck on hammer though, swaddled in the warmth, slowing to a stop in the middle of it, living statues in space, the act impossibly frozen in time, only to start up again an hour later as if we hadn’t stopped at all. But it was a drug we’d use only occasionally, when Jack’s vanity allowed. People look so fucking ugly on that shit.
It was a luxurious high punctuated by trips to the toilet bowl for projectile vomits. Lucky we weren’t shooting it. He passed out after a few more pipes, fell still with his arms around me, one hooked around my neck and the other around my waist. It took some maneuvering to extricate myself so I could go sleep in the spare room.
We spent most of Sunday floating around his apartment like a couple of broken butterflies. I woke up around 11 am because Jack was practicing Ain’t No Sunshine on his saxophone in the bathroom. He liked the acoustics in there. He was getting better at it but the flat notes were a killer.
I remember when he got that saxophone. We were kids hanging out at a nameless nightclub on Kellet Street Kings Cross. I think we all called it Kellet Street. Everyone knew where you meant. It’s a place few admit existed, frequented entirely by pedophiles, hebephiles and under-aged hookers because it was free entry for anyone under 18. Hazel, God rest his sleazy soul, managed the place – though not a kiddy-fiddler himself. He was just a shady old businessman who was kind to us sometimes. He gave Jack his saxophone and he hasn’t stopped playing it since.
You wouldn’t believe who went to that club. Important men. Judges, detectives, celebrities, a priest, all kinds. They had their private entrance and the cops were paid to turn a blind eye. Most of the kids had histories plagued by despair, abuse and neglect. Not Jack Junior though, he came from a good Christian rural family. I suppose he was naturally drawn to the dark side. He was born that way, as people sometimes are. And Jack explored his sexuality with gusto, figuring out if he was gay or straight while making a living too. I think we bonded over that. We’d been led to believe we had to be one or the other. Our pursuit for self-discovery was an adventure, but the need to survive took us to dark places. Ok. Horrific places. Bad things happen to people and we weren’t angels. I’ve lost count of the dirty old men left beaten in laneways, bedrooms and on lounge room floors by broken forgotten children, and I know something awful happened to Jack back then.
One summer, just before dawn, he crawled into bed shaking. We rented an apartment above a laundry in Kings Cross, using fake ID’s to make us legal. He fell asleep with his teeth chattering and clung so tightly it was suffocating. I uncoiled him like a snake. I woke up later alone and found blood on the sheets. He was in the bath off his face, with a split lip and blue-black bruises on his wrists and ankles. The irony of my working name, the name Jack chose, wasn’t lost on me. Whenever Jack fell down and broke his crown, I came tumbling after.
‘What the fuck happened?’ No answer. ‘Jack?’
He blew a long stream of smoke and popped a few smoke rings, his dark eyes looking straight through me.
‘Jack? Talk to me.’ The hint of a sneer rose in the corner of his mouth. He didn’t want to talk about it and I never asked again.
A bottle of wine and some pills
By Sunday night we were still pretty smashed. Jack was called out on a job and he cruised out the door without a care in the world. I went straight to the kitchen to grab the keys but they weren’t in the drawer. I needed a second look at that album. I wanted to figure things out. How I felt. How I was supposed to feel. I made a strong black tea just the way I like it but we’d run out of honey so I rummaged through the cupboards looking for something sweet, some sugar, anything. I found a sugar bowl with a lid but it was filled with pills not sugar. They were Rohypnol, a tasteless, wickedly effective sedative. We called them Rowies, pronounced ‘roh-eez’.
Why did Jack keep loose Rohypnol in a sugar bowl? It was right at the back of the pantry up high, where he thought I couldn’t reach. I pocketed a couple. I also found a gun, a pistol, wrapped in a tea towel and a loaded magazine. It was a semi-automatic, not unlike a Beretta but with Arabic lettering on the side. I was careful to make sure it was wrapped exactly as I found it and put back in the same spot. I didn’t know what it all meant or why he had a gun, but one thing was certain, I didn’t know Jack as well as I thought. I wondered about the delivery guy again. I wasn’t sure he was one the guys in the album, but I needed to know. I had to have another look.
*
I waited for Jack to get back and reheated leftover lasagna. I looked into his dark green eyes across the table and wondered what the fuck he’d become. He caught me staring, and just then he smiled and brushed the hair out of my face like I was a child.
‘Lasagna ok?’
He said it was good … did I like it? Yeah I said, it was good but needed some cheese and got up to get the Parmesan.
‘I’ll grab the wine too babe’
In the kitchen, I crushed a Rohypnol and put it in his wine. It was a spontaneous thing. I refilled his glass twice before it reached the bottom to conceal any sediment. I wondered how fast it would take to knock Jack out. He was a little wonky by the end of dinner. I asked if he was ok, told him he looked tired. He said he was going to lie down on the couch for a bit and almost tripped over the coffee table.
*
‘Jack? Jack?’ No answer. Just deep slow breathing. I shook him gently. Still nothing. I went to his room and reached under the bed. The toolbox was gone… and his closet was locked.
I’m watched him sleep. Listened to the rise and fall of his breath and played with his hair, twirling his earring. I positioned his arms behind his head and played with him like a doll – never seen him so vulnerable. He was dead weight but I pulled his t-shirt off and repositioned his arms. He grumbled, groaned a bit and tried to open one eye, which was really fucking funny. When I tried to pull off his jeans, they could have been glued on. I had to work my hand into his front pocket to get the key. Elated, I unlocked his closet and used a stool to search up high for the box. It was pushed right back behind his camping gear next to a clear plastic zip-locked bag of trinkets and his Kodak Polaroid camera. When I pulled them down, the toolbox hit the carpet with a huge clang. I froze for a second then opened the box and took out the album, but it was strange, because by then I wasn’t interested in it anymore. I put it aside. Instead, I played with the bag of mysterious shiny interesting things, which took on a dark new meaning for me.
*
I lit a joint and put it in the corner of JJ’s mouth for safekeeping. After I arranged the knick-knacks on his head, his chest, his legs, everywhere, I took a photo. I positioned the album under his right hand, which was resting on his cock, and took another photo. I tried to take more but the camera ran out of film, so I brushed the trinkets back into the bag but kept a tiny gold heart locket. I locked the album back in the box and put everything back in its place in the closet. Then I pushed the keys back into his pocket, slipped the polaroids I took of him under the couch and climbed on top of him. It was so romantic. Jack unconscious, warm and helpless beneath me.
Rozee Cutrone ©
Benighted © 
Leave a comment