Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

The director was getting wilder and wilder, screaming out instructions, some in English, some not, and the room was boiling with all the lights like it was a sauna. The director called Mickey a useless junkie whore and I could tell Mickey was about to lose it.

So from the corner of the room, the lights so bright that they seemed as big as the sun — it was a really trippy E — I yelled out, ‘Close your eyes, Mickey!’

Dick Cheese Saunders turned around at me and then he started yelling, telling me to fucking shut my mouth or I’d be thrown out.

I said, really scared, ‘But he’s got to close his eyes and think of girls, otherwise he can’t get it up.’

At that, Dick Cheese Saunders just started running towards me, like some wild animal in a television documentary, and it looked slow motion except for his voice, which was screaming, Didn’t I tell you to shut it, didn’t I tell you to say nothing, you ugly cross-eyed cunt , and when he reached me his boot flew up and kicked me right in the gut. My head hit the wall, and I hated myself for it but I started crying. I saw Mickey tense up but he and the others did nothing. There was nothing anyone could do. There was no one who could beat Dick Cheese Saunders in a fight. He bent down, grabbed my hair. ‘Not a word, right, not one fucking word.’ Then he turned and walked back. I wiped his spit and my tears off my face.

Later, in our flat, watching The X-Files , Mickey told me what I said wrong. ‘Poofters don’t want to hear that straight guys have to think of girls to get off. They want to believe that straight guys can get off on faggot sex.’

‘But I was right. Once you closed your eyes, you were fine.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘You were right, but you shouldn’t have said it in front of Saunders. I’m not angry, I’m just trying to explain why the fag got mad at you.’ He stood over me. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow, I won’t be around to look after you. Don’t forget any of what I taught you.’

‘I won’t.’

He slapped me playfully on the back of the head and smiled.

I will not get into a car without first chalking the rego on a street pole.

I will ring Mum at Christmas and on her birthday.

I will not allow mugs to fuck me up the arse without a condom and I’ll keep my eyes shut real tight when they come on my face.

I won’t jack up heroin on my own.

I will go back to school one day.

And one day, I will move away from here. Like Angie going up to Cairns or Mickey going to Adelaide. He got me to promise that one day I would move away, to somewhere smaller, further away from the world. Sydney, he always says to me, is a city of dead souls.

Mickey knows I am in love with him and he says he doesn’t mind. In fact, he jokes that he’s honoured. He’s the second guy I’ve been in love with. The first was my father’s friend Roman, who was a big loud Polish guy who lived in the same street we grew up in. Roman had been married and had two kids but he had murdered his wife when their youngest kid was still a baby. His wife had been fucking someone else. He had been locked away for thirteen years. He lived across the street from us and only Dad and my mum would talk to him. He was fifty-five when we got together. Dad would chuck me out of the house every second day, for giving lip, or refusing to speak Greek to my giagia , or just because he had drunk too much, and I’d go across to Roman’s house. At first we just watched TV together and then we started watching it in his bedroom. Then one day he kissed me and jerked me off. I wanted him to do other things to me but he said no, that it wasn’t right. Then when I was thirteen I got pubes and he told me that it was not a problem now, if I wanted to, it was alright for him to fuck me. We did, for two years, until I busted my giagia ’s jaw and kicked my dad almost to death and had to run. From home, from Melbourne. I knew I had to run as far away as I could. So I ran to Sydney.

It was Roman who taught me about Jesus. Above his bed he had a huge picture of Jesus holding a bleeding heart. In the picture Jesus was crying. If the room was dark, the bleeding heart glowed orange, and Jesus’s eyes would shimmer. I’d fall asleep looking at His eyes. Roman taught me the Lord’s Prayer and told me how if I prayed and looked down at the ground, Jesus would listen to me.

Roman told me how back in his village one day the Germans had come to take all the boys and men, and he had looked down at the ground and prayed, and the Germans completely overlooked him. He said he heard the Virgin speak to him, tell him, ‘Shh, it will all be fine. You will go live and travel far away and you will find a beautiful wife but she will betray you and you will suffer but I will never leave you.’ Roman would sometimes cry when he told me this; he would tell me how lovely his wife had been. But there were no pictures of her in the house and the pictures of his children were all hidden from me. He wouldn’t tell me their names because what he and I did was wrong and shameful and he didn’t want someone like me to know who they were because he said people who had fallen under the sway of Satan were granted evil powers while they were on earth. He said that I could make someone die by just wishing it. But I had to have a vision of them in my mind before I could curse them. That was why I was going to burn in hell for eternity.

That’s wrong, Alex says. Jesus forgives all sins. That’s the promise. Jesus is not going to cast me into the fires of hell, even though I am a sinner and a junkie and a pervert, because he loves me, and when I am reborn in heaven I will not feel the urge to sin anymore. I will be as one with the angels.

Like Mickey. He’s an angel already and that’s why Jesus is inside him.

Mickey had to fuck the redhead. The room was so damn hot that his body was all wet with his sweat. They kept having to stop the shoot and wipe him down, his face and arse and shoulders. It was really slow and made me think being an actor would be boring. With all the stopping and starting, Mickey was taking ages to come and the redhead started whinging that he was getting sore. Dick Cheese Saunders made a sudden move and the kid shut up immediately.

I was watching the ceiling turn blue and grey, then green and pink. I was so warm in the light that I fell asleep.

Mickey woke me, and asked me if I wanted a bite to eat. He had his clothes back on. Dick Cheese Saunders gave us ten bucks and we went outside and my body expanded. I could breathe clean air again.

I walked behind Mickey, who was shivering a little from the chill.

‘Is it finished?’

‘Nah. I’ve got some more to do in the afternoon.’

‘What was it like?’

‘Okay. But it’s not like having sex with a mug. It’s different because the kid I’m fucking is being paid as well. Do you remember Show and Tell at school?’

I nodded.

‘It’s like that. I was really nervous. Until I closed my eyes. And then I didn’t think of sex. I thought of how much I like the beaches in Adelaide and I thought of being on that bus and how happy Mum will be to see me. Then it was fine. Then I just did it.’

‘I wish you weren’t going.’

He was silent. He hadn’t given me a phone number of anyone in Adelaide. I knew Mickey liked me. But I was part of what he wanted to leave behind. All the dead souls of Sydney. I wasn’t going to take it personally. He was leaving behind four million people and I happened to be one of them.

•

Last summer I saw the body of a young girl in Potts Point. She was sitting against a wall on Macleay Street with her head down. Everyone was walking past her. I stopped and looked more closely at her. The syringe was still clutched in one hand and her skin had turned the colour of ash. I checked that no one was around and then I touched her skin. I jumped back: it was freezing and felt like leather. Eventually one of the drag queens noticed her and called over a cop, who lifted her arm, dropped it, and called through for an ambulance.