Are You Loathsome Tonight? (12 page)

America

The desert after midnight was an arid zone of silver and blue, the highway a glittering black ribbon into nowhere. The formations of rock and sand were incomprehensible to a Southern boy, wrong somehow, like the bones of the world showing through the desiccated flesh that was this land. Buttes. Dry lakes. Mesas. Who had ever heard of such things? Steve shook his head and took another hit off the sticky green bomber he was holding, and the desert went a shade weirder.

They had picked up a thirty-dollar quarter bag way back in Dallas, and it was so good it looked like it was going to last them through the next Lost Souls show in Flagstaff. When your two-man band was touring the country in a gas hog of a ‘72 T-bird, when your household consisted of a guitar, an amp, a couple of microphones, a cooler, two backpacks full of dirty laundry, and a blanket stolen from Holiday Inn, when you'd been on the road for upwards of a month, thirty-dollar quarter bags of excellent pot were a small but welcome manifestation of slack.

Steve cocked his elbow out the window and leaned into the wind. His dark hair whipped across his face, five days unwashed and one year uncut. He could put it in a ponytail now, but he left it loose when he drove because he liked the feel of it blowing. He had a fresh six-pack of Bud on ice. There was only one thing wrong with his world tonight.

Ghost, curled in the passenger seat with his sneakers propped up on the dash, kept singing a toneless snatch of song under his breath.
"Been through the desert on a horse with no name ... Felt good to get out of the rain ..."

Steve twisted the radio dial. FM, AM, it was all the same: dry scratchy static clear down the line, like the sound of the desert clearing its throat.

"Ain't no one for to give ya no pain ... Nuh, NUH, nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh—"

“Quit singing that fuckin' song!"

“Huh?” Ghost looked up. The moonlight turned his eyes and hair paler than ever, turned his skin translucent, made him seem a true thing of ectoplasm, subject to shimmer and disappear at any moment. The open can of beer in his hand spoiled the illusion a little.

“You're singing that America song again. Quit it. I
hate
that song."

“Oh. Sorry."

Ghost shut his mouth and returned to whatever reverie Steve had dragged him out of. For thirteen years they had spent long easy stretches of time in each other's company. They had passed the last part of their childhood together, had grown up together. During these weeks in the car, though, their friendship had reached a new equilibrium. They talked obsessively and often, but they understood one another's silences too. Sometimes they went for hours without saying a word.

But once in a while they got on each other's nerves. A few miles later, over the roar of the slipstream from his cranked-down window, Steve heard,
'Nuh, NUH, nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh ..."

He gritted his teeth. He knew Ghost wasn't even conscious of singing aloud. Being a singer, Ghost tended to give voice to whatever scrap of music flickered through his brain. Sometimes it was unique and brilliant. Sometimes it was a glob of dreck from the seventies. America was only the first in a turgid alphabet soup of bands Steve hated, horrible bands with stupid one-word names: Boston, Foreigner, Triumph, Journey, Bread...

“Nuh, NUH—"

“Guess you heard of the man-headed cat that lives around here,” Steve said.

Ghost stopped singing, looked again at Steve. His pale blue eyes shone silver in the light. “The what?"

“The man-headed cat. It lives out here in the desert, eats horned toads and rattlesnakes and roadkill, drinks liquor from cacti. About the size of a bobcat, but with the head of a man, shrunk down like."

“Really?"

That was the fun of telling tales to Ghost: he was always prepared to believe them. Born and partly raised in the mountains of North Carolina, he'd seen and touched things as weird as any Steve could come up with.

“Sure, man. Way I heard it, this guy got lost real late at night and his car broke down. Not on a main highway but way the fuck out on some desert track you can't find on the map. So he drank a bottle of whiskey he had with him and passed out on the hood of his car.

“When he woke up, the man-headed cat was sitting there watching him. There was a full moon shining off the sand and he could see it clear as day, the bald head and little wrinkled face. It had green eyes and the fur started at the neck, right at the collarbone. From there down it was all cat. But man-headed."

“Could it talk?"

“Shit, yeah! It could
cuss
! It opened its mouth and what came out was, ‘Goddamn-shit-ass-motherfuckin'-bitchofagoddamnfuckin'—'

“Then all of a sudden it lunged and took off chasing him. They ran and ran out across the desert, so far that the guy knew he couldn't ever find his car again, so he knew that either the man-headed cat would kill him or he'd thirst to death out there. He figured it'd be better to go quick, so he stopped to wait for the cat. He was out of breath, exhausted; he'd run as hard as he could for miles.

“But when he turned around, there was the man-headed cat grinning and cleaning the sand off its paws. ‘That was a
nice little run
we had,' said the man-headed cat.
'Motherfuckin'-piss-cunt-Jesus-lickin'—'
Then it crouched down, and its green eyes glowed in the moonlight, and the guy could see hundreds of tiny sharp teeth in its grin..."

Steve stopped.

Ghost waited about ten seconds, his eyes wide, his fingers scrunching the hem of his T-shirt. “What did it do to him?” he asked finally.

“Nothing,” said Steve. “A little pussy never hurt anybody."

Entertaining Mr. Orton

Bill, an anthologist, was editing a book of erotic ghost stories for gay men. He asked if he could reprint “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,” my irreverent homage to Lovecraft's “The Hound” and my most reprinted story ever. I said sure, forgetting that I had already agreed to let two
other
anthologists, Michael and Tom, reprint it in a book of gay
vampire
stories for the same publisher. (Evidently nobody could figure out
what
the hell this story was supposed to be about.)

Michael and Tom's book came out a few weeks before Bill's was due at the publisher, and Bill sent me a remarkably polite but obviously nervous e-mail: his editor had been into having me in the ghost book; she wasn't going to be happy about this; she wasn't going to be happy with Bill; and I was going to look like a double-crossing full-scale weasel. (Well, he didn't say that, but it was obvious to me.)

“Don't worry!” I e-mailed back. “It is all my fault and I will write you a story by the end of this week and it will be
even better
.” And I slammed this baby out. I don't know if “Entertaining Mr. Orton” is better than “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,” but I did invent marginally more of the plot.

Entertaining Mr. Orton

London, 1 August 1967

“Have you been reading my diary?"

Kenneth looks up from the baboon's head he is pasting onto the madonna's body. He is standing on the bed to reach the upper part of his collage, which covers most of the wall, and the top of his bald cranium nearly brushes the pink and yellow tiles of the flat's low ceiling. They have lived together in this tiny space in Islington for eight years.

“No, I have not been reading your diary,” Kenneth lies.

“Why not?"

“Because it would drive me to suicide."

“Right,” says Joe with an edge of impatience in his voice. He has heard this threat many times before, in one form or another, and Kenneth realizes dimly that his lover either doesn't believe it or just doesn't care. That doesn't mean Kenneth can make himself stop saying it, though.

“But if you won't read my diary and you won't talk to me,” Joe continues, “what's the point of remaining in this relationship? You're always telling everyone how I make your life miserable. What keeps you hanging about?"

Kenneth wipes glue from his fingers onto his pants, then turns and sits heavily on the bed. He took a number of Valiums earlier in the day, but something in Joe's voice pulls his brain out of its pleasant half-numb fog. They can still listen to each other, and even talk seriously when they really try.

Of course, most of the serious talk these days is about writing. Writing Joe's plays, to be precise. The very same brilliant and successful plays that have made Joe's name synonymous with decadence, black wit, and tawdry glamour as far as London is concerned. If the talk isn't about Joe's plays, it is about what they should do with all the money Joe's plays are making. Joe spends most of it on toys: clothes, Polaroid cameras, holidays in Morocco.

“What surprises me,” Joe continues, “is that you haven't killed me. I think you don't leave, or off yourself, because you can't stand the thought of anyone else having me."

“Rubbish. All sorts of people have you."

“Ah! You
have
been reading my diary."

Kenneth rises up suddenly in one of his outbursts. “When you come home reeking of cheap aftershave, I don't need your diary to tell me where you've been!"

Joe waves this away. “I mean, of anyone else having me permanently. And I can't conceive of it either, honestly. It's as if we've become inextricable."

Suspicion flares in Kenneth's mind. “Why are you talking about me killing you? Are you setting me up for something?"

Joe throws back his head and brays laughter, a sound which usually lessens Kenneth's tension but now induces a smoldering rage. “What did you have in mind? Me setting you up for murder and slipping back off to Tangier? My family gets your fat arse thrown in prison and you do your
Ballad of Reading Gaol
bit again? Oh, Ken...” Tears are spilling out of Joe's eyes now, tears of laughter, the kind he used to cry in bed after a joyous orgasm. Kenneth remembers how they tasted, salt and copper on his tongue like blood.

“I think I
could
kill you,” he says, but Joe doesn't hear him.

Tangier, 25 May 1967

Five English queens stoned on hash and Valium and Moroccan boy-flesh, sipping red wine on a café terrace against a blood-orange sky. Two American tourists, an older married couple, sitting nearby eavesdropping on the conversation and making their disapproval evident. Joe Orton lets his voice rise gradually until he is not so much shouting as
projecting
, trained Shakespearian actor that he is:

“He took me right up the arse, and afterward he thanked me for giving him such a good fucking. They're a most polite people. We've got a leopard-skin rug in the flat and he wanted me to fuck him on that, only I'm afraid of the spunk, you see, it might adversely affect the spots of the leopard."

“Those tourists can hear what you're saying,” one of the entourage advises. (Not Kenneth Halliwell; though he is present, he wouldn't bother trying to curb Joe even if he wanted to.)

“I mean for them to hear,” Joe booms. “They have no right to be occupying chairs reserved for decent sex perverts ... He might bite a hole in the rug. It's the writhing he does, you see, when my prick is up him, that might grievously damage the rug, and I can't ask him to control his excitement. It wouldn't be natural when you're six inches up the bum, would it?"

The Americans pay for their coffee and move away, looking as if they've had it considerably more than six inches up the bum—dry.

“You shouldn't drive people like that away,” says the sensitive queen. “The town needs tourists."

Joe sneers. He has practiced it in the mirror. “Not that kind, it doesn't. This is
our
country,
our
town,
our
civilization. I want nothing to do with the civilization they made. Fuck them! They'll sit and listen to buggers' talk from me and drink their coffee and piss off."

“It seems rather a strange joke,” offers another member of the entourage, timidly.

“It isn't a joke. There's no such thing as a joke,” says the author of the most successful comedy now playing in London's West End.

Leicester, 2 August 1967

Joe leaves his father's small threadbare house and walks two miles up the road to an abandoned barn, where a man he met in town earlier that day is waiting for him. He is in his hometown, which he mostly loathes, to see a production of his play
Entertaining Mr. Sloane
and fulfill family obligations. Just now he has some obligations of his own to fulfill.

Joe often likes to have one-off trysts with ugly men, men he finds physically appalling, but this one is a beauty: tall and smoothly muscled, with brown curly hair that tumbled into bright blue eyes, a thick Scottish accent, an exceedingly clever pair of hands, and a big-headed, heavily veined cock.

In the late afternoon shafts of sunlight that filter through the barn's patched roof, they take turns kneeling on the dusty floor and sucking each other to a fever pitch. Then Joe braces himself against the wall and lets that fat textured cock slide deep into his arse, opening himself to this stranger in a way that he never can to Kenneth—not any more, not ever again.

London, 8 August 1967

Conversation after the lights are out:

“Joe?"

“..."

“Joe?"

“What?"

“Why did you ask me if I'd kill you?"

“I don't know what you're on about."

“Do you want to die, Joe?"

“Do I...” A sudden bray of laughter. “Hell, no! You twit, why would I want to die?"

“Then why did you bring it up?"

“Hm...” Joe is already falling back asleep. “I suppose I just wondered whether you were that far gone."

His breathing deepens, slows. Joe is lying on his left side, his face to the wall. The collage spreads above him like a fungus, its components indistinguishable in the street-lit dark. Kenneth sits up, slips out of bed, maybe planning to take a Nembutal, maybe just going to have a pee.

But he freezes at the sight on the bedside table: Joe's open diary, and balanced atop it carelessly, as if flung there by accident, a claw hammer. Joe hung some pictures earlier in the day, so the hammer has every reason to be there. But the juxtaposition of objects hypnotizes Kenneth, draws him.