Part II
Everything was wheeling, reeling, around my head.
My companion was shifting out of focus only to careen sharply into my line of vision, the imperfections of his white face illuminated harshly by the strobe lights. His eyeliner was drawn drunkenly, encompassing his bloodshot eyes, pupils narrow with hallucination and anticipation. His red hair was like a blood bag he was dragging after himself. It seemed all his blood had surged from his emaciated limbs, speckled with the bites of needles, to come to the tips of his hair.
We were caught in a tangle of limbs, stumbling along the corridor towards the loo.
We lurched into the door which gave way with a jolt, hurtling us into the room. We fell on the filthy, chipped tile and I stared upward at the blinking, swaying light overhead, drawn to it like a moth. The room reeked of urine, vomit, semen, and smoke. The room was teeming with limp, sweaty bodies, writhing in drug-heightened pleasure, wedged in the narrow stalls, ravenously licking semen from their lips.
I glanced upward at my companion who, standing, was slithering out of his garish gold pants, beckoning me toward him with a crook of his spindly finger. Was this where I belonged, performing cheap tricks like a trained seal to sate someone else's crude sexual appetite? I didn't even know this man's name, was acquainting only with his sickly, yearning exterior. I knew hardened, pierced nipples, the sunken belly, and the erection but not his last name, his address, or how he liked to eat his eggs.
"Who are you? What's your name?" I asked urgently as he wrapped his needle punctured arms around me. I gazed at his cadaverous body, arching in anxious lust, and my stomach pitched suddenly and violently towards my throat.
"Bambi," he said.
It was so grotesque, so nauseating. A man, blood streaming with heroin yet belly empty of all food, the polarity of innocence, who has given himself the name of a guileless deer. It was as if this Bambi was rupturing innocence, a gloatingly fat and happy balloon of ingenue sailor collars and baby dolls. He was living off the helium of burst innocence. That was his drug. He had intruded into a whimsical childhood tale, drunk and naked, to snatch the name from a character, to dub himself Bambi in a sick contradiction.
"How do you like your eggs?" I asked, crouching on the bathroom floor of a filthy club, poised to take this man into my mouth.
"Scrambled," he said, itching irritably at his crotch.
"Sirius doesn't like eggs."
The music in the club subsided to static choked noise with a deranged beat. In the light, quavering on and off, I saw the hideous underbelly of the leather clad monster. They were intoxicated. They were painted like comic, obscene clowns. They leered lewdly at me from all angles They quaked with withdrawal and thrashed with highs. They were infected with pox on their genitals and lice festered in their hair. They were toying coquettishly with death. And death was winning, leaving them emaciated, sustained only by heroin and the helium of burst innocence.
It wasn't glamorous. It was garish, ghoulishly surreal and brutally real. These people weren't beautiful. They were spot riddled, putrid-breathed wraiths, masquerading for a night in one immense hallucination. But it won't last and the hangover would be bitter. When their money ran out they would wallow in the gutter and claw at their eyes and tear at their flesh, unable to gets their highs.
Life's just a drunken tease to them. But they're the ones that are being tricked, conned, fooled.
I wanted to be caught up in Sirius' arms, slender but not gaunt and skeletal, to lie with him in a web of intertwined limbs, sheets, and lives. I yearned for him to stand behind me, chin cradled on my shoulder, fingers prodding playfully at my navel and meandering down to trace an erotic line down my arousal, as I tried to make eggs in the kitchen of our flat. He would wrinkle up his arched, high bred nose, as I fried them, distracting me by nipping at my ear and sucking at the flesh of my neck. Sirius has never liked eggs.
I wheeled around, reeled around, looking for him. But Sirius was nowhere to be found.
The random gay man's name was initially a joke but it amused me so greatly I couldn't change it... even though it does invoke images of a deer crying for his mother. I am a whore to my muse, alas... (and so obviously influenced by Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain in the description of the stench of the rank bathroom)
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