Bruce Wagner - Still Holding

• • •

HE ASSIDUOUSLY LIFTS himself a few inches on the parallel bars. He grins madly, wily and rabid, flashing the erotically mischievous Kit Lightfoot of old. (A bad haircut ruins the effect. Fearful of “anecdotal” leaks to the press, his father shot down Kit’s stylist’s request to come give a trim.) His body glistens, the layer of posttraumatic fat belying its good bones; Portrait of a Bruce Weber almost-ran, with bad breath.

• • •

WITH MOUTH CLOSED, unspeaking, only the wobbly, jerky gait betrays him. After all, he was in perfect shape at the time of the assault; not so many months have passed. He never stopped moving — Burke forbade that — not even in coma. Therapists and sanghanistas threw his limbs around more than Christopher Reeve. Tyrone said, We the A-Team. Put Mr. Reeve to motherfuckin shame.

• • •

“HELLO, PIRATE!” said Tyrone.

Kit wore an eye patch because the left lid drooped. He no longer tried to tear it off. Burke arranged for surgery; the docs said it was a simple fix.

“Find any sunken treasure today, Captain Cook?”

• • •

VIV LEFT A MESSAGE on Becca’s pager that she needed her to pick up the Ambien refill at Horton & Converse.

When she got to the house, Becca punched in the ROCK *code at the gate. As she wound up the drive, the FooFighters blasted. The front door gaped open.

She set the pharmacy bag on the table and called out, “Viv?” She corrected herself: “V?” She thought she heard a response, muffled by music from upstairs. “V?”

Barely audible: “Come up!”

She went to the master bedroom. Viv was on her back, fucking. “Did you get the Ambien?” Becca had already shyly turned around. She said she brought it, and Viv said, “Where?” “Downstairs.” “What about the Norco?” Becca asked what was Norco and Viv said testily that they should have filled that along with the Ambien. Becca said she didn’t look inside the bag. Viv told her to go bring it. This time when Becca came back, Viv was on her stomach and the man fucking her faced the door instead of the headboard.

It was Alf Lanier.

Becca loved Alf Lanier.

(It looked exactly like Alf Lanier.)

Viv said to put the pills on the dresser and leave. Setting the Ambien down, she couldn’t help glancing over to see them sweat-coiled, and Alf caught her eye, either laughing or wincing, she wasn’t sure what. She thought that maybe the actors were making fun of her, “having sport” as Dixie used to say whenever Dad was being mean.

• • •

KIT WAS STONED — that was Burke’s idea. Pot helped with the pain and the muscle spasms. The staff looked the other way. Half of them were hemp-heads, anyway.

There was so much fear that he couldn’t verbalize, which terrified him even more. So much shame and embarrassment. What had happened to him, really? Got his head hit. What hospital was this and what was the one before? Sometimes he went monkey nuts, throwing food and masturbating in front of staff and guests. He was hungry all the time. Ate and ate and started to get doughy. Sometimes he got confused that he couldn’t dress himself. He had blinding headaches and threw up, and they gave him shots that made him dreamy all the next day. The Shaved-Head people visited, some in robes but different from the flimsy hospital gowns that he didn’t even wear anymore. (Burke liked his boy to be in real-world civvies.) They made him laugh. Things were funny, especially when he smoked the reefer. Things on TV, and things his caregivers would say or do. It was funny when they read from books or said their prayers. They taught him mantras, those were funny too, repeating words he couldn’t understand, strings of words, one after the other, going to the end then beginning again. The sounds were strange, and sometimes he panicked he should know what they meant. He would grimace and nervously try to ask if he should know their meaning, and wonder if he ever would or if that was beyond him now, but in his crowned and crowning agitation, in his disorder, could not get inquiring words to form, and the benevolent patience and solicitousness of the sangha only made his fear and panic grow.

• • •

STOPPED LOOKING in mirrors.

Not wishing to see his own visage or the purplish white fissures of his broken, thousand-petaled lotus.

• • •

HE FOUND OCCASIONAL respite in remedial Buddhist practice. The edifice had crumbled yet the foundation was there, rooted and unassailable. By his stalwart guests’ incessant cues, he slowly resurrected the meditative state, starry spangled night on mind-screen — disciplined sits over the course of a decade had stored in the body and served him well. The sanghanistas verbally guided him through: on days he couldn’t tie his shoes, he still crudely focused on the Shaved-Heads drum of Christ consciousness, seemingly lucid enough to laugh at his hallucinatory predicament. Words began to rearrange themselves like magnetized particles. A flurry of interchange, like a vast hangar filled with square-dancing phantoms, crepuscular and insolent, dysphotic, drowsy and spooked, orphans and changelings come to vellicated, marvelous life as the orchestra struck up its synaptic symphonics.

Sometimes being adrift was his only mooring.

• • •

ONE DAY RAM DASS came to see him. That was a great boon. Kit recognized him but couldn’t recall their meeting at the Gubers’. (Memory withheld its muddy welcome mat for the six months immediately prior to his insult.) Ram Dass floated over in his wheelchair and looked deep into his eyes. He laid hands on Kit’s shoulders and smiled, an electric clown.

Ram Dass said, “Surf the silence.”

He told Kit to think of his guru, Gil Weiskopf Roshi (whom Ram Dass reiterated he had known). “The guru will set you free.” He shared some rambunctious observations about his own recovery that were exorbitantly pertinent to Kit. He even got him laughing about the Hollywood game — Burke had steered everyone away from mentioning the Business, but Ram Dass cut through. “God,” said Ram Dass, “will always make more than you per picture!” He began to chant— Om Ram Ramaya Namaha —and Kit tried his best to follow (he’d been play-chanting with the sangha for the last month), swept up in its emphathenogenic energies. The others joined in while Ram Dass held Kit’s hand and wept ecstatically. They were all weeping now, even Kit, though water filled his smiling befuddled eyes as it would those of a sensitive child who had been moved not so much by others than by the joy-jangling vibrations of a great and noisy organ during mass.

• • •

SHE ASKED HIM to put it in her bottom, the way Kit did. Alf had never done that. Was that sodomy? He thought sodomy was the legal term for assfucking but wasn’t sure because every time he read about a sex crime in the paper they called it sodomy — there couldn’t be that much assfucking going around. (Could there?) Maybe the rapists and molesters knew a thing or two. He had tried before but had never been able to consummate. After amazing heroics, he would manage only to get the head in and the girl would say it hurt and to take it out. He didn’t really care all that much but felt it was his duty as a man at least to have the thing on his résumé. Other times, when the girl was seemingly OK with it, he lost his hard-on. Alf reasoned that he probably just didn’t get off enough on the deed. Wasn’t his kink. Or whatever. He thought maybe he was just lazy. By nature, he had a conservative streak — certain things had always creeped him out, like if a girl went down on him too wildly or tried to suck his nipple. Besides, assfucking was a control trip, and Alf prided himself on not having those kinds of issues with the ladies. Jailhouse issues, he thought. But now the tip of his cock was nudging its way inside the butt of his semiretarded best friend’s ex-fiancée. Viv worked it like a pro — kept urging him on, using her fingers to oil him with her juices while begging him to make it hurt, make it bleed — then suddenly he was in. It was a different pressure than pussy pressure for sure. 20,000 leagues under the sea. There was something metallic about it, mechanical, submariney. Das Boot . Das bootie. She slowly pushed against him, swallowing him up, and took the whole thing. Like watching a garter snake swallow a fuckin gopher. He asked if she was OK and Viv said uh huh and her shithole got wet, that’s how turned on she was. I didn’t even know a girl got wet that way. Once, he was with a stripper who shot a warm geyser from her puss when she came, but this was a first. He thought maybe he’d blundered onto the Secret of the Fags. Dark Tomb Raiders… Raiders of the Golden Sphinct —or maybe the hole was slick with shit. That would be fucked. He peered down in the half-light, and his cock looked clean on each outthrust. Wasn’t any stink. She probably prepared. Like when his mom went in for a colonoscopy and had to fast for twelve hours before. Sure knew what she was doing…. He began to ram her, devil-may-care, and she went crazy. The harder he rammed, the more she groaned and twisted and talked dirty. Maybe she was a pain freak — Fine with me. I mean, I don’t want to be inflicting it deliberately, but if I’m feelin good and whatever I’m doin happens to hurt as a sidebar but she gets off on it, then cool. Cool. Although he didn’t relish the idea of being back at Cedars signing autographs for the cops while Viv had her poop chute stitched by the same folks who’d tended Kit’s wounds. Then she told him to fuck her “up the ass the way your best friend liked to fuck me” and it wigged him but only for a second. All’s fair in loving and whoring. (That’s what Kit used to say.) Fuck me up the ass at the hospital, so he can watch.