And we tried so hard
And we looked so good
And we lived our lives in black
But something about you felt like pain
Look at me enjoying something
That feels like feels like pain
To my brain
- Jesus and the Mary Chain, Happy When it Rains
1983
"It's up here."
The beam from Shorter's flashlight bounced off the walls of the subway tunnel. Behind him followed the careful footsteps of Ash, quiet despite the stale puddles of water littering the tracks.
It had been ages since he last made his way down here, the tunnels beneath Canal Street. Probably had been with Lao, fucking around with a Walkman, a fresh stash of skunk weed and that old, well-loved nudie mag he had stolen years before (it was the one with that centerfold Lao was obsessed with, Shorter thinks; that girl with the tight lips and the just right amount of hips), talking crap under the flashlight-lit gallery of graffiti. That was before juvie. Before Ash.
Ash.
Shorter's flashlight flickered right before they reached their destination. He grumbled, promptly smacked it, then listened to Ash tease him about being too stupid to bring those extra batteries. Normally such teasing would have bothered him, but coming from Ash it was almost a compliment; recieving almost anything other than ambivalence from Ash was.
Shorter stopped. Ash seemed to realize that they had reached their intended spot, as he threw his backpack against the far wall then stretched with a yawn. He didn't seem too impressed. Shorter gave his friend a pleased look and approached him.
Ash wrinkled his nose. The exaggerated movement looked so foreign on his thin face that it made Shorter smile. "It smells down here."
"It smells up there too," Shorter countered with a laugh.
Shorter knew almost nothing about how things used to or currently did work in the NYC transit system, but he figured this space must have once been used for repairs. Today however it was a graveyard of artifacts from both new and ye olde New York; the debris of newspapers, who exhibited deadlines from the 50s, mingling with the litter of bored teenagers, whom only hours ago had left behind the faint smell of stale weed and cigarette smoke.
Together with the thick layers of graffiti and the laughably outdated signs unused by the MTA for decades, it was pratically a museum. And while Shorter might admit that he did not know much, he did know that Ash liked museums.
"Nadia packed us some of her bao and coleslaw before we left." Ash's hands were now going through the pockets of Shorter's jacket, which moments ago had been tossed on top of his bag. His hands reemerged with a pack of cigarettes. Before Ash could once again wrinkle his face in distaste at the menthols in his hand, he began to laugh.
"You're so strange, Shorter Wong." A click of a lighter, green eyes glowing red under the flame, then darkness and the faint glow of a cigarette.
Shorter looked down at his friend before grabbing the cigarettes and the bag containing their lunches. "You're calling me strange?"
"Yeah," Ash replied. His voice was husky with puberty, but still smooth and enticing. Shorter wondered if he would ever not be fascinated by this kid. "You have your sister pack picnic lunches to eat in some abandoned, filthy subway?"
"Sure," Shorter said with a grin.
The lunches came out, but weren't eaten. In the clouds of cigarette smoke the two boys began to lay claim to the spot, just as Shorter had done countless times before under a thick haze of weed and drinks with friends. This looked and smelled very familiar, but with Ash everything was new.
They let themselves be modern cavemen; got out the paint, relieved themselves in the corner, got to work.
Shorter's paint marker had been filled the night before and so was drippy with black ink. It got all over his and Ash's hands and dyed them black, spotting their fingers like little sores.
Ash was a terrible artist and seemed almost confused about what to do with the instrument in his hand, but within minutes both boys were giggling over a menagerie of badly drawn dicks and animals dripping with paint.
Shorter watched as the younger boy drew a cat on the wall in the darkness, thick and simple black lines contrasting against the backlit white of his arms. Even like this, covered in ink and scrawling crude drawings on a grungy wall a mile beneath Canal Street, he was beautiful.
It wasn't like this was the first time that they had done something like this. Ash often followed Shorter around the city, watching with a thin smile as he would tag an assortment of apparently deserving victims ("I went to that church as a kid. Trust me, the pastor is a dick."), but he had never seen his friend like this before.
Ash was now like a tiger released from a cage he had become much too accustomed with; curious and exploring, exposing himself in giggles and paint, claws dripping with black ink instead of red blood.
If it were not for the wornly taped handle of a gun sticking out from the back of his jeans, the boy who was not quite a child would have finally looked like one.
When they sat for their lunch and more cigarettes, the smell of pork and leeks mixing with the musk of aged grime, there was a roar. Shorter pushed his back up against the cold brick and looked up, motioning for Ash to do the same. The station that they currently occupied might have been filled with the silence of death, but the one above them was not.
The room shook as the train above howled. Blips of light filtered into the abandoned station, dancing on the walls. The graffiti sparkled like stained glass around them, unreal and magical, truly isolating the world they shared together from the one above. The Northern Lights of New York's underground.
When Shorter glanced at Ash, he saw that he was smiling. Green eyes flashing with the glow of the train, staring in wonder, alive. The light left with the train and covered them in darkness; their flashlight had burned out awhile ago.
In the darkness Shorter could sense his friend moving closer, until there was hot breath on his face. The smell of leeks and cigarettes, of Ash. This wasn't the first time Ash had kissed him, but it was the first time it had been this gentle. There was something strange and unnerving about it, but Shorter knew that he was recieving something special. His pants tightened uncomfortably and he squirmed; predictably, Ash laughed.
"Thank you for taking me here, Shorter." Ash's eyes glowed with his cigarette.
1982
Ash was many things, but most of all he was a juxtaposition.
It was a chill October morning when Ash had shown up at the Chang Dai, wet like a drowned rat and clutching a meager amount of plastic-wrapped posessions to his chest. Apparently the day before he had been released from Juvie and had somehow managed to walk there from New Jersey.
Nadia gave him ointment and bandages for his blistering feet, then sent him upstairs with a steaming bowl of wonton soup. As he ate, Shorter tried to imagine the boy walking down the highway by himself for countless hours, clutching his belongings and bleeding through his shoes. When Shorter asked why he hadn't just hitched a ride, Ash had gone silent.
Shorter wondered many things. Among them was how this kid had ended up in New Jersey in the first place, or why he had chosen to walk from there to the Chang Dai. Eventually he would know the answers to all of these questions, but for now he was allowed tiny glimpses into Ash's life by way of the meager posessions that he had taken with him.
A rosary, an old beaten up vinyl record ('Harvest' by Neil Young), two worn Fishbone-brand t-shirts and a pair of thin-wired frames. The glasses were Gucci.
Yeah, Ash was a juxtaposition. He came to his door covered in dirt, wearing a $3 thrift store denim jacket and pocketing a pair of thousand dollar glasses. Another day it would be other small things, unassuming pieces of jewlery or expensive sneakers, paired with knee-torn jeans and t-shirts drawn over in marker. Shorter wondered where these gifts had come from, but decided not to think too hard about it. The answer was probably obvious, but this solution was not one that Shorter was yet comfortable with exploring further.
Ash asked if he could keep his belongings there, which Shorter agreed to with a shrug. The record and the rosary went into a box under his bed.
"I had no idea that you were religious," Shorter told him. They were both sitting on his mattress now, worn and hard against their asses. It felt surreal, being here in the real world with Ash. He had only ever known him to exist in that small cell, in that uniform, in the florescent lights of the library or under the oak tree in the yard. The Ash back then had owned nothing but a glare and a battered old book.
"I'm not," Ash responded with a look. There was an edge to his voice, almost as if he was daring Shorter to ask more about it.
"Well, the rosary. You took it with you."
"It's not mine." Ash's words were careful, but loaded. Once Shorter realized that Ash knew almost nothing about music, let alone Neil Young, he began to wonder if maybe these items had once belonged to somebody Ash had cared deeply about.
The idea was a curious one. It was hard to imagine this being the same boy who in juvie had, only months ago, nearly crushed another kid's heart like a paper cup. It was strangely terrifying yet humanizing, this beautiful boy who had laughed after nearly killing a man clutching a record and rosary to his heart as if they were the most precious items in the world. It would be years until Shorter realized that these items must have belonged to his brother.
"These pants are riding up my ass."
"They look good on you," Shorter smirked. Ash was decked out in Shorter's old clothes, staples from before his growth spurt at 16. Tight faux-leather pants, a tee which had cleanly shown Shorter's muscles, but now draped over Ash's small frame until he had shoved the hems into the pants. The tshirt had a roaring tiger on it. Shorter fondly remembered getting high on St. Marks Place before stealing it from a shop manned by an old punk with a green mohawk.
It was the day after Ash had shown up on their doorstep, and Shorter had insisted on going up to Chelsea to party. Afterall, Ash had gone through so much trouble keeping that record safe, he would probably enjoy celebrating his new freedom with a drink and an earful of music. This was before Shorter realized that Ash knew fuck-all about music.
"Are you serious when you say that this place is in a church?" Ash was looking in the mirror now, turning his blonde eyelashes black. Shorter meanwhile was cleaning up his hair, it had finally started to grow back in, thin and whispy.
"Why? You scared of committing sin in the house of God?"
"Shorter, you're the last person who should be saying anything about sin."
Shorter felt his cheeks burn. Was he really still going on about that damn Christmas card angel? He had been thirteen, maybe jacked to it four times at most, and had been so horny back then that his dick would have been happy to say hello to almost anything.
"Hey, come here for a second." Ash looked up from the mirror and glanced at him curiously with a slight frown. He approached him cautiously, body tense. His shoulders only relaxed when he saw Shorter held a palette of colorful makeup in his hands. Shorter continued, "Stay still, okay?"
Shorter dipped a brush in a dark pink color then began to paint his friend's face, applying streaks of bold color from his eyelid up to his brow. His strokes were careful but clumsy, and he grinned when Ash laughed nervously at not only the ridiculousness of what they were doing but the fine bristles tickling his face.
Pink makeup shone brilliantly over Ash's porcelain-white skin, the black eyelashes and pink hues made his green eyes glow even more brilliantly. He looked back into the mirror and took in his new reflection, touching the painted skin that now made him a part of Shorter's world. One of glam makeup and purple mohawks, piercings and leather pants. The paint was sloppy and messy over his right eye, but he liked it.
"Let me do you next."
"Sure," Shorter agreed.
Ash took an eyebrow pencil and began to draw little shapes onto Shorter's face. Two tiny stars, a little heart. His friend gave him a sly smirk when Shorter looked in the mirror, capping the pencil.
That was the closest that they had ever been, and Ash obviously had noticed before Shorter had. But it made Shorter's heart happy that Ash did not seem to mind.
They took the 1 train uptown.
It was 1983 and The Limelight was new. And just like Ash, it was a juxtaposition.
Rows of stained glass windows that once gazed at the worshippers of a Christian God now looked upon the worshippers of music and drugs. Just like a Sunday mass, the room was full of pulsating bodies.
The club was hot and loud and Shorter was covered in sweat. He and Ash had arrived an hour earlier, and Ash learned that Shorter was a friend of the bouncer working the door that night. At the bar they were given a cap'n and coke alongside two tabs of ecstasy each. Shorter seemed to be friends with everybody.
Escstasy had a metamorphic effect on Ash. He had given Shorter a small smile before he had swallowed the pill, but once the chemicals hit his system his smile was wide and genuine.
When they entered the club Ash had seemed lost. At first Shorter thought that this might be due to his age, overwhelmed by the unfamiliar, but as the escstasy kicked in and Ash started to awkwardly move his body with the music, silly and unsure enough to make even the whitest of dancers embarrassed, he realized that this wasn't the case.
Ash's thin wrists and arms moved sloppily yet somehow delicately in the air. New Order's Blue Monday pulsated through the bodies and walls of the church, going straight into Shorter's bones.
"I can touch the notes," Ash proclaimed before moving his awkward dance closer to his friend. Shorter had barely heard him over the music, but soon they were facing each other and moving to the same rhythm.
Ash's ghostly skin absorbed the flashing lights in the room as he moved, pale white turning from red to blue to green to purple.
This dangerous boy, the one who was said to have the eyes of a demon, was dancing stupidly in a church of sin. He was changing colors like a chameleon.
It was then that Shorter began to realize that Ash had probably never been able to do anything like this in his life. Never had he been able to reach through the air to touch the notes of a song or move his body freely like a bird. It was beautiful to watch, another juxtaposition.
Thin arms wrapped around his own and smiling green eyes looked up at him. That was the first time Ash had kissed him, even though it had just been on the corner of his mouth.
"I like you, Shorter." Ash's voice was heavy with the escstasy, and his hands were rubbing Shorter's arm. It felt good.
"No you don't," Shorter laughed and pushed him away. "You know that stuff won't work on me."
Ash gave him a pout and a view of his tongue, playful yet daring. "I do. You're kind to me."
It was strange, seeing the wild lynx reduced to a purring house cat. More than ever he wondered what had happened to this kid.
"Dance with me," Ash demanded. He had lit a cigarette and danced a little with it, taking a drag before seductively offering it to Shorter. Shorter took it, but raised an eyebrow at him.
"What do you think we have been doing?" He breathes in smoke.
An hour passed and Shorter has had his eye on a girl. She reminded him of a girl he had dated once.
Ear-length black hair, chocolate skin and deep brown eyes intoxicated with dance, beer and drugs. Patterns of color painted her face, making those eyes even more pronounced. Her clothes were simple, but stylish. Shorter liked it.
He and the ex had never gotten very far in their relationship, but those few months had been full of good memories. He had taken her home to his family, where his parents had cooked a large traditional meal and his sister had teased him all night. Shorter felt pride when his parents had said that they liked her. Two months later his parents were dead and the girlfriend became the ex.
Ash had noticed him staring. He looked neither upset nor encouraging, simply distant. His body was moving less now.
"Are you going to talk to her?" He asks.
"Probably." He took another drag of the cigarette to give him courage, then shot Ash two thumbs up. "Wish me luck!"
"You're gonna need it," Ash scoffed. The pink makeup around his eye was beginning to smear. "I've already danced with you and I can say that you reek of B.O."
Shorter laughed. He had no idea if Ash was serious or even a little jealous. Either way he parted ways with his friend, moving instead towards the girl with those soft brown eyes.
He buys her a drink, they chat, they dance, and they discover that they have nothing in common. But she's nice to dance with and Shorter enjoys the feeling of a woman's legs grinding against his own. Her dress is thin and Shorter moans into her mouth, she's not a bad kisser.
This is nice until it isn't, and then he needs to take a piss.
The bathroom is a gallery of trash, graffiti and sex. Shorter stood at the urinal to relieve himself when he heard the clatter of bodies against a stall and stifled moans. He finished and stuffed his dick back into his pants. His mother always did tell him that he was too curious.
They hadn't bothered to close the stall. Inside was an older punk, maybe mid-20s, arched against the toilet seat, hair completely shaved other than a tuft of unnaturally orange hair smack dab in the middle of his bald head. His denim vest heaved with his chest and his plaid pants and skull buckle were around his ankles on the tile floor. In front of him, on his knees, was Ash.
He knew what his friend got up to in and out of juvie. They had even talked about it. But seeing it was different.
The man on the toilet remained oblivious, letting out long moans as he continued to fuck Ash's mouth. Ash noticed him however, the kid was perceptive and sharp. He didn't stop what he was doing, simply glanced back at Shorter with his eyes.
Shorter remembered the first time that he had ever seen Ash seduce a man; the look in his eyes when he had realized that his bunkmate was watching. It had screamed, almost mockingly, "Look at what I can do." Shorter had been startled then, seeing how effortlessly this boy could bend and mold men like putty with his body or a knife.
This was different. His eyes looked sad, almost humiliated. Some of the pink makeup had smeared over the tiger on his shirt. He was a child.
Shorter felt sick.
When Ash emerged from the bathroom, he found Shorter at the bar. The escstasy had worn off, as had the energy given to them by the music. Ash kept wiping his mouth on his sleeve and Shorter dragged on his cigarette so that he could taste mint instead of the creeping bile in his throat. The strobe lights stilled, painting both of their bodies red.
"Let's get out of here," Shorter finally says, and they left the club. The city air was much less suffocating.
Juxtapositions, juxtapositions...
1985
From the very beginning Shorter had known whatever it was that he and Ash had, whatever that was, would not last.
He did not know when or how it would end, just that it would be unavoidable.
Shorter thinks that it happened when he found out about Ash's brother. Or, no. It was that time, when they were in Cape Cod. When he had come to the realization just how little he actually knew about his friend. How he had no idea that Ash had been born in Massachusetts, how he had never actually thought about Ash being from anywhere at all.
Ash had a living father and an older brother who had loved folk music, Oscar Wilde and filling books with poetry. And despite what Ash had told him and the others on the porch of that house, the house where Ash had spent his childhood, he also had a mother who was quite easy to find in a cemetery outside of Boston. Her chart claimed that she had succumbed to an eightball of coke (or Kaposi's sarcoma. Griffin had once told Max that the hospital was not sure which had actually killed her first).
But most of all, it was when Max and that Ibe guy had been trying to repair the truck. Max had asked for Shorter to retrieve something from the glovebox and to grab some blankets from the truck bed.
It had been a beautiful night. There were crickets and the chatter of gulls, a deep black sky poked full of holes, and a roll of ocean waves that equaled the steady tempo of the wind as it blew through a sea of grass.
And then there was the night before. The three of them (yes, there were three of them now... ) lay in the tall grass; they were still wet with sea water, skin rough with sand and smelling thickly of salt. The grass was soft beneath their bodies and the stars were bright. Ash shocked the both of them by telling stories about the stars. He never quite said, but Shorter gathered that these must have been stories his brother had once told him.
Eiji followed with a tale of a rabbit who pounded rice into mochi on the moon. Shorter smiled when Eiji's fingers traced over the shape of a rabbit in the sky and Ash finally saw it. There was something wonderful about Ash when he was a child again, and Shorter felt happy that he could finally share this side of his friend.
Eiji brought it out of him, and Ash smiled more these days.
Shorter wasn't sure if he was jealous or simply frustrated. He wanted to help Ash with the ease that Eiji could. And despite all of Shorter's efforts, the only thing Eiji ever needed to do for Ash was smile.
That's why when the moment finally came, it wasn't a shock.
As he made his way to the truck bed, Shorter heard voices. He couldn't see their faces, but the two shadows moved together behind the tarp. Ash was laughing and they were close. Then, Eiji tried a name on his tongue: Aslan Jade Callenreese.
That was the moment Shorter began to realize that the boy known as Ash Lynx had never existed. For years he had wondered about his history, about what had "made" Ash Lynx.
And the answers had been so shockingly mundane.
The answers he had been given seemed so inappropriate for the boy that he knew, like pulling back a curtain to reveal an uncomfortable truth. But the evidence was all there; in Ash's conversations with his father, in the pictures of a smiling little boy with bright green eyes and ashy blonde hair.
No matter how otherworldly Ash could seem at times, he was still a person. A young boy with a hippie mother, an asshole drunk of a father, and a brother who had been fucked-up by the jungles of Vietnam.
Shorter considered how the guys back home would greatly prefer the mythical origin of Ash Lynx over the story of a boy named Aslan Callenreese from Cape Cod. The truth was much too real, much too sad.
Ash and Eiji's feet were hanging off the end of the truck bed now. Dirty red hi-top Converses and a polished pair of leather loafers, side by side, as different from one another as the men who wore them.
Shorter knew that he had lost something to Eiji that night.
Realistically, Shorter knew why Ash had kept secrets from him. Telling anybody, even Shorter, about his brother was a risk. And revealing to Shorter the truth behind Ash Lynx was another risk entirely.
On one hand, Shorter had never seen Ash look so flustered and frustrated than when he jokingly dubbed him with the moniker "JL," or "Jesus Lion." It was hilarious, seeing this hard and dangerous man turn beet red with frustration.
On the other hand, Aslan Callenreese was the little boy who Ash did not want people to see, a vulnerability that he was not yet ready to deal with. Shorter understood, there was a part of him who could only exist around Nadia, around his family. It was comforting to know that Ash was the same.
Yeah, he understood Ash quite a bit. After all, Shorter had his own alias to hide behind.
In the end, Shorter decided that he was happy for Ash.
He greeted his friends warmly and hopped into the bed of truck. It was still hard and cold on his ass, but his arm was pressing against Eiji, who had to have been the warmest man Shorter had ever met.
Ash smiled and passed him a cigarette.
1983
They had left the subway after their lunch was gone. Ash decided that he wanted to throw rocks, so both boys made their way to the junk yard near the Chelsea Pier. On the walk there the Hudson shimmered under the yawning sun, there were maybe only a few hours of daylight left.
The junkyard was packed with old cars, appliances, a school bus and even a subway car completely covered with graffiti. Ash and Shorter wrote their names on the metal body, pleased that they were immortalized here just as they had been in the tunnels beneath New York.
They wordlessly explored the hollowed out beast. Shorter lept up and grabbed the handrail, exaggeratedly swinging his body before showing off with a few full-motion pull-ups. Ash was visibly impressed and Shorter wagged his eyebrows at him. He laughed and left the car.
Outside they settled for the bus as their target. Shorter found a crowbar, suggesting that they could smash cars with it later. Meanwhile, Ash had gathered a series of stones in his shirt. He let them roll to the ground at Shorter's feet.
He had started to chew a piece of gum, the faint pop and whiff of strawberry joining the chorus of waves and gulls and barking dogs. The traffic here was strangely quiet.
"Aim for the windows?"
"First who breaks one buys the other lunch."
Ash rolled his eyes, "I don't have any money." He threw the rock. It bounced off the bus door with a pleasant clank.
Shorter knew that this wasn't quite true.
"That... guy you live with. He's loaded, ain't he?"
Shorter never knew how to classify 'that guy.' Father, guardian, sugardaddy? ...boyfriend?
Ash was always hesitant to answer almost anything when it came to Dino.
Shorter threw his own rock. It bounced off a window and disappeared into the brush. Damn.
"I don't want to owe him anything," Ash's response had been careful, it always was.
Shorter now knew Ash well enough to know that most of the time he lived in this fancy house in New Jersey. That was where he had come from when he had shown up at the Chang Dai a year ago, clutching his meager posessions as blood leaked through his sneakers.
Nobody who was in a good position had ever walked that many miles in order to crash with their two-month bunkbuddy from prison.
Ash's brows were furrowed now. He gripped the rock tight in his hands then let it fly. It sparkled briefly in the sun before it hit a window, managing only a crack. The boy stomped his foot frustrated, impatient and angry. Shorter should have never brought up Dino.
"This is stupid," Ash decided. "I want to actually destroy something." Shorter shrugged and followed him down the path. The sky darkened with clouds and Shorter casually commented that it might rain. Ash, true to his mission, wasn't listening.
The punk laughed when his friend came back with two glass bottles topped with a tad of crude oil. The paint on Ash's hands were mixed with oil now.
They filled the bottles with vodka. Ash gave an anecdote about being happy that the drink had gone untouched during lunch, as this was way more fun.
Both boys climbed up a throne made of trash and cars. They were satisfied with the view.
"Which one are you gonna aim for?" Shorter found an old t-shirt and had torn it into strips, one was then shoved into the neck of the first bottle.
"That one," Ash pointed to an old black car. Shorter wasn't too familiar with cars or what make and model this one was, but he could guess that back in the day it had probably been pretty nice.
A click of their lighter and the wick caught flame. Both boys hollered in joy at the hungry fire, and Shorter egged Ash on as the younger boy took the bottle into his hands.
But Ash didn't throw it right away. Instead, he watched as the wick became hungrily devoured by the fire. Shorter suddenly stepped back, unsure. He hadn't been frightened of Ash since juvie, but there was a strange look in his eyes. It made him uneasy.
Just as Shorter was about to yell at Ash to throw the damn thing, the boy let out a blood curling scream. And with it, the bottle flew. The black car exploded into happy, hungry flames. Cars in the vicinity blared their alarms, screaming in unison with the boy high above them.
At times Ash was so otherworldly, that Shorter would not have been surprised if he had begun to glow and levitated off the ground right then and there. Watching this small boy with the slender neck and puny wrists raise his arms up to the sky as he continued to scream (the wrists of a killer, a genius, and Shorter's best friend), Shorter was mesmerized. His figure was backlit by fire and his silhouette was shining. He was so beautiful.
There was truly nobody like Ash Lynx.
The fire had not survived as long as they had thought it would, and the rain started soon after. Ash stared at his handiwork, black with tar and soot as a tiny flame licked at the skeletal remains of the car. It fought against the rain, struggling to survive. A police car hummed in the distance.
Shorter was getting soaked and so was Ash. His blonde hair was now stuck to his face with rain and a sad smile peaked at his lips.
Ash turned that smile onto Shorter, brushed his hand with his fingertips, then stared up at the sky. Rain pelted his face, dripping into his mouth and nose.
Shorter smiled back and watched this kid get soaked in the rain. He felt privileged to be the one who got to observe this tiny flame fighting in a rain storm, slowly becoming aware that he was alive.