Chicago Noir

Death mouth by Amy Sayre-Roberts

Roscoe & Broadway

Turn at Cornelia. Follow the scent of fresh bread and sidewalk heat, the stale belly breath of the city. It raises a slight glow on the upper lip, a contagion like an unseasonably warm September. It will lead you to Dahlia’s. I like having espresso here at the end of the day. There’s always someone to meet at Dahlia’s; you never know what you’ll discover. I met Matthew on a night like that, a humid, Ciabatta-scented evening. Geographically, it’s easy for a straight boy faking his way around Wrigleyville to get “lost” and end up on Halstead or Broadway. He will say something like, “This is Boystown?” A beat. “I didn’t realize.” Sure.

I sat a few tables in from the door to observe the comings and goings unnoticed; like a praying mantis, I court stillness and wait for an innocent to walk into my grasp. Sebastian, my favorite waiter, sidled by with drinks for another table, “Cover girl, 12 o’clock high.” Matt stood in the door, a young blond woman clutching his arm. The creative ones like to bring along a girl, someone to hold their hand. The boys want to check it out on the down low. They might as well be holding a Kewpie doll.

Let me just say, in terms of the market, Matt and his little doll were prime real estate located conveniently near the intersection of virginity and Vine. They wanted the same thing — someone to be gentle with them. He was looking for a door, and what can I say? I’m a gentleman. I held it wide open.

We made eye contact several times. I was RKO classic in a black cashmere turtleneck and chinos. Absolutely turned out. I get a color every four weeks, r4 with a touch of 3 to set my eyes. Armani Fatale. I wrote StephenLaFraise@hotmail. com on a hundred dollar bill and waited for him to pay. I bumped into him at the counter and let the bill fall from my pocket. He picked it up and held it forth like a daisy.

“I think this is yours.”

I looked at his eyes.

“No, I think it’s yours. If you want it.”

Reading the bill from his palm, his mouth puckered a red oval.

Ciao, bella. I turned on heel and walked away. Really, I only speak Italian in coffee shops and where otherwise appropriate. French is my native come-on language.

I handled him like silk. He emailed me three days after the hundred-dollar night. We played around — friends, not for long, but at first. It took about a month. I love slow seduction, the foreplay, the gradual building of an orgasm. He was such a baby, a kitten learning about claws.

Matt’s foster parents were a loving Christian family who could not even comprehend the idea he might be gay. Denial. He became depressed. Denial. He considered killing himself. Denial. Blah. Blah. Blah. The first night we made love, he gave me a suicide note he wrote. A note he kept, anticipating opportunity.

“It helps me, you know, relieve the pressure just to keep it around, like I have an escape.”

I used to buy that bathos bullshit. I thought I was everything to him. I told him he didn’t need it anymore. He gave it to me. The ultimate submission, admitting I was his father, his lover, a conqueror on a stolen horse. I held onto it, like a relic to Matt’s innocence. Proof apparent on the bride’s bloody bedsheet.

Problem is, you can’t count on virgin loyalty. At first it’s all doe-eyed devotion, but then he got confident and curious. A month ago he broke up with me.

I was trifolding the new logo Ts when my lost boy sashayed into the store and dropped bullshit all over me like it was a shower. He knew I hate distraction when I’m arranging displays.

“He’s punk,” he said. The second thing Matt told me about Eduardo, his new boy off the boat from São Paulo.

Matt has balls. We’ve only been apart one month and he’s regaling me with tales of his new lover like the wounds are licked and clean. Curiosity again, why does no one learn from the cat?

I said, “What does that even mean?”

“I mean he’s Sex Pistol, old-school punk. Jesus, he has a bi-hawk.”

Trés chic. If there’s anything better than a mo-hawk, it surely must be two. “You’re joking. He sounds like a walking hygiene issue.”

“You know, Stephen, this is exactly why we broke up. You are so judgmental. I mean, get an edge already. You are so limited in what you find interesting.”

“What are you now, the minister of high culture? I’ve known Labrador Retrievers more discerning than you, Matthew.”

He pulled a pout, the one I used to find irresistible. The pout that used to signal make-up sex. Now used for effect, could it have been less effective? But I’m not even sure to what end.

“So when’s he coming in?”

“To the store?” Matt laughed out loud. “Eduardo would not be caught dead in here, he’s totally anti—”

“Anti-what?”

“Exactly. Anti-everything that relates to consumerism. He makes his own clothes, with all these patches and stitching, you really can’t imagine.”

True statement: I really can’t. I once orchestrated a series of Italian silk suits with fishing line and mobile footlights that became a pilgrimage, a Via Dolorosa to couture devotees. Working at a clothier does not equate to being a fabric waiter; Dress Accordingly is the hottest clothier in Boystown. I’m twenty-eight and still going strong, ageless really, born on the tide of my talent for tailoring. I can take you from gruel to cool in less time than it takes to steam milk. Show me the derrière I can’t make smaller, the thighs I can’t camouflage, the legs I can’t lengthen. They don’t exist. I feel like Warhol.

“Stephen, I so want you to meet him,” Matt says. “I mean, come on, we’ve not been together for almost two months. We’re friends. Aren’t we?”

I sigh. One month, but who’s counting?

“You really should know him, he has something. It’s intangible.”

“How strange, considering you do such a good job describing it.”

The purpose of the pout was soon to be revealed. He couldn’t actually think I would meet his Neanderthal lover. I don’t play children’s games, not even when I was a child. Matt Burton didn’t know which way his dick was pointing until he met me. I made him in this community and here he is, a born-again fag sporting his red Italian tennis shoes and instructing me as to the finer points of his new lover. All that improvement and the best thing he could catch was a Mad Max wannabe with Portuguese subtitles? Where did I go wrong? After all, I had shown him a way out.

It was a door we all sought at one time or another. I remember finding my own. Mr. Gautreux, my high school French teacher. It might have been the easiest coming out in history. Born in French Guiana, he was a sleek panther moving about in a man’s body. Married with two children. For me, it was evolution, a shadow seeking skin. I had nothing to admit, merely to accept. We spoke a new language and parented a new race. Our own silent society, one eye watching for a signal and swollen lips needy to speak.

Matt’s voice is a buzz in my ear.

“Stephen, are you listening to me?”

Yes, back to now. Was he always this petulant?

“I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

“Scars are becoming art, Stephen. Eduardo is so beyond the tattoo. I mean, some of his friends were talking the other day. They say the most heinous righteous things. Anyway, one guy, Martin, he’s from London and wicked smart, he says, ‘The gunshot wound is the new tattoo.’”

“Jesus, what kind of barbarians are you involved with?” I flubbed a fold and had to start over.

“Seriously, Stephen, I have not been able to get that idea off my mind.”

“Well, get it off, that is fucking insane. Not to mention illegal, dangerous, and plain stupid. There is no bliss in your apparent ignorance.”

“He’s a Brit. They have a radical different perspective. Scars are art.”

“Even worse. Is there a culture more consumed with their own grandeur and absolutely no evidence to prove them correct?”

“Stephen, please, there’s a couple bands playing at the Underground. Eduardo sings lead in Johnny Come Lately? They are amazing. Will you come? You can meet him after.”

I see the pout give way to wide-eyed “please me.” I couldn’t believe it. He actually wanted me to enter the lair of this bi-hawked creature. He wanted Mr. Macho to meet moi. He wanted his brute to set his oversized brow on me. Allowing his hip quotient to skyrocket by teasing his new lover with the old. Now I was a sexual resume? Touché and no thank you, cheri.

I didn’t intend to take Matt up on meeting his nouvel amor. I completely forgot it for the entire week. Even that night, I don’t think I subconsciously ordered the parsley penne instead of the garlic pesto for social reasons — I wasn’t planning on getting closer than arm’s length to anyone. Well. I went, but didn’t wear my best. I had an image of sweaty young Goths pressing their black-clad bodies upon me by mistake or purpose; as arousing as that might be in some scenarios, it was turning my stomach and I had no desire to wear it home on my sleeves.

I stood at the stairs descending to the Underground Pub thinking, why do the rebellious always embrace filth?

I was doing my best to move toward Matt through the crowd without spilling my drink or touching anyone. The lights went down. Nothing to do but stand still and hope for a short set. The entire room grew silent as the thick darkness settled over us and our pupils expanded into black holes devouring light. Eduardo took the stage like a newborn deity. Strobes flashed and he stood bathed in purple footlights. He had surgeon’s hands, long, tapering fingers that curved around the microphone. The guitar strapped to his back like a warrior’s sword. Looking at his face, I remember Matt saying, “He’s half-Brazilian. Exotic.” For once, Matt had not overstated. Eduardo. Juxtaposed, I see Matt’s simplicity like a cashmere cotton blend that you thought worked when you bought it off the rack, but didn’t wear well after all. A knobby knit peeled off and discarded at my feet.

Eduardo leaned into the mic. “September is dead and the October bacchanalia is upon us. Feel this one in your blood.”

I did. I felt an unused chamber surge and flash brilliant, a spectra behind my left eye. The blue-white burn of startling truth seared me. I longed to bite down.

I didn’t move through the entire set. Matt introduced us when the next band went on. Eduardo wasn’t like Matt had described. He’d been worshipped in a previous life. I knew right away, Matt had no idea what he’d discovered. Eduardo, idealistic and lordly at the same time — his words were a dizzy aphrodisiac tingling the arch of my foot and waking my bellybutton to connect a new cord, to rebirth.

“Do you dream, Eduardo?” I said. His name cream-coated my tongue and I anticipated the swallow.

“Sonhos. I live by them.”

I’ve found an equal, I thought. Nothing is going to separate me from him. “He’s one of us,” said a jeweled whisper.

I watched him stroke Matt’s face, but when the boy leaned in with lips close to his ear, Eduardo’s eyes found me. Unspoken agreement. We knew, as easily as one tiger recognizes another. It’s not the first time a blood sacrifice was made in his honor. I’m sure the scent of such allegiance was as familiar to him as it was to me. We are not like other people, we’re an unknown matter born of divine illumination and escaped velocity. Matt’s presence is a sudden impurity on my new found love. Eduardo and I are capable of heights Matt cannot conceive. Like a fingerprint on fine crystal, everything filthy may be polished away.

Death is beautiful and it need not be difficult. After the first night with Eduardo, I dreamed the whole production in great bruised sky colors. For Matt, I thought, it should come softly, a fragile sigh in his sleep.

I’m a devil for details. Matt’s departure from my life needed to be as tendered in hypocrisy as his entrance. I planned to wear a new pair of dark adobe leather pants that night. So it had to be clean. Clean and quiet. Easy enough, I thought, to get him drunk and go about the X method. Drugs and suffocation. Good night, sweet queen. I took my time shopping and found the perfect poison. HPNOTIQ liquor, product of France. It was Smurf-blue and bottled as to confuse the consumer whether it was bath gel or liquor. I bought two bottles.

We met at the Pepper Lounge. I used to blow the bartender and now he lets me bring in special bottles of choice. Matt proceeded to get drunk while we discussed everything from Johnny Depp to Mandarin collars; we never were at a loss for words with each other. Sleeping pills go down as easy as speed.

“Matthew, Eduardo’s incredible.”

“This is so different than I thought it would be.”

“Really, I kind of always figured we’d be here, sooner or later.”

Matt, the pathetic little peasant that he was, ate it all up. I thought for a second he was going to offer me a goodbye fuck in return for my tenderness. But then he started to feel the blue liquid settle in and I helped him to the bathroom. “Look, let’s get you cleaned up. Want to come back to my place?”

“Oh yeah. Okay. I’m so sorry. I feel like shit. I just need a shower and some coffee.”

“It’s early yet, we have plenty of time.”

“Stephen, I’m so happy.”

“Me too, mon ami, me too.”

He passed out on my bed. I lay down close, propped myself on an elbow, and studied his profile. “They all look like angels when they sleep.” I pulled on my kitchen gloves and couldn’t resist one last goodbye. I bit down hard on his bottom lip before slipping the plastic bag over his head, secured it around his neck, and poured a subtle Bordeaux. Never underestimate how the right wine enhances an experience. His slow breathing against the bag crackled like dry kindling. “Burn. Escape and burn, little soul. You are no longer inseparable from skin.”

I cranked Never Mind the Bollocks up to ten and took a deep breath to find my center. You should never rush moments like these; they simply do not come knocking all that often. I put the gun in his hand and, cupping mine over his, pointed it at his left shoulder. The sleeping pills did their work, and he barely twitched when I pulled the trigger. The scar, a death mouth tattoo, was going to be gorgeous. Now we all have what we want. I’m so happy.

Later, people will tell the cops they saw me leave the bar with him. People will say they saw me leave the apartment without him, maybe. I don’t care. I’d tell them too. It’s just some fag with a fetish committing suicide. The city gives and the city takes away. The cops think we’re a freak show anyway. No matter, the police don’t care and his Christian foster parents sure as sin don’t care. I got tickled thinking about that. And so we part. I left the note he gave me, the one he wrote, for just such an occasion, under his left hand. He was right to leave it without a date and his thoughtfulness made me smile.

I lay one finger on his wrist. The throb was mine.

“Eduardo is full-on.” The phrase made me laugh and it echoed a howl in the quiet room.

“He’s full-on.”

It was the first thing Matt had said to me about Eduardo.

And the last thing I said to Matt.

Eduardo was just coming off stage when I walked back in the club. He watched without moving as I covered the last distance between us.

“Well.”

“Like smothering a baby.”

“You are a wicked, wicked boy, Stephen.”

“I’m your wicked boy now. Any complaints?”

“Not from me. Come on, I want you to meet some people.”

He took my hand and drew me across the room behind him. The crowd gave way, then closed quickly over the wake of the new king.