JC. i've just vanished without a trace
There's something dangerous and broken about the way pills spill into your hand when you tilt the bottle at too sharp an angle. You just wanted one or maybe two because your back is killing you from dancing all day, and then there's a palmful, twenty or thirty little white moons and this is why you don't get tattoos. It's not about needles, it's about finishing what you start.
You hate quitting halfway through and somehow that's easier to remember when you could but you don't. If you swallowed them all right now you'd have to throw up right away or it would be too late. Once you let them put a spot of ink on your shoulder, they'd have to do the whole drawing or everyone would know with one glance what kind of a quitter you are.
No matter what Chris says when he's being drunk and ugly and insecure, you're not a quitter. You're not going to quit on him or the group or life or any of it. Sometimes, though.
You swallow two pills, and then a third. You're not quitting. Sometimes you just need to take a break.
Eminem. we just met, but i think i'm in love with you
You drop another, because six hits can't even get you high no more. Bass in your ears echoes like rhymes off concrete in an old drain pipe where you'd hide out when your ma was low, low, high, sky high, my my oh my mama I'm coming home. Dre's got you listening to old Eric Clapton for some new song and it's still looped around your frontal lobe, wasted and I can't find my way home and that's why you have your crew, man. To find your way home.
You're not home. You're at an awards show. You think you are, anyway. Pretty girls and pretty boys and that's the X talking, X and your faggot father and when you first heard about leeches and bloodletting you said let this be a lesson to you all, slit here and slut there and get him out of your system once and for fucking all.
You shoulda known you wouldn't be that fucking lucky. You never are.
Pretty boy with a sharp face like Kim, like Kim like him like Slim like whim, on a whim you grab him by the hair and stumble down the hallway. One hand on the wall and one on his shoulder and he goes down like you broke his leg but you can't even clench your fingers, can't even yank his head back when he scrapes his teeth.
It doesn't feel like a threat. He isn't a threat, he's just as fucked up as you, you're both fucked up and you can't find your way home. Not home, not yet, not until you're done, you're close, you're close, you're closed, open, closed, a neon sign flickering in a bar window and shh baby no one has to know what you like, what you're like.
But you still know. You fucking know.
Chris. tomorrow you'll be boys again
He's always been as sick as he is beautiful. You watch him swallow, swallow and kneel back and he never looks scared. It's maybe what saves him.
You aren't good-looking enough to pull off both brave and honorable, and that fact eats at your liver more viciously than anything you could shoot or snort. You know. You tried for a while and all you got for your well-intentioned free-fall was a broken hand and a boyfriend who's never learned to say no.
He's alone now, sitting on the carpet, and you haul him up. You're rougher than you mean to be.
Then again, you never said you weren't a good liar.
You kiss his neck, his jaw, his ears, everywhere where you don't have to taste what came before, and he pulses against your thigh like blood screaming in your veins. He says your name, whimpers it, and you twist sleek curls, pulling them just as tightly as you mean to.
"You always come back hard." You squeeze enough to make your point.
He nods, mouth open like a bird, back arching away from the wall, panting, preening.
"They don't know," you say, breaking the clasp on his pants, jerking fast and mean. He doesn't try to touch you. Even like this, whatever he's on tonight, he knows better.
He cries, though, desire and contrition running in sleek waterfalls down his cheeks as he comes all over himself. Forehead on your shoulder, lashes full of tears and he says, breathes, "Only you."
You kiss him on the mouth, deep and slow, and he says it again. "Only you know. Only you."
END
Credits: For Ray. Owes a great debt to Sylvia's And the Rest is Silence and, in its own way, Wax's Dry-Cleaning. Lise, Younger and Nikitasan should not be held responsible for having encouraged me.
Soundtrack: Eminem/Drug Ballad. Eric Clapton/Can't Find My Way Home. Artificial Joy Club/Sick & Beautiful. This was one long, eclectic exercise in exorcism.