Shuck (16 page)

I sent out a new short story to eleven literary magazines today.

Here's how it went down.

I was getting sick of two-faced editors who demand exclusive submissions but are quite content to reject the unpublished, hundreds at a time. Does that make sense? I decided to start playing by my own rules. I spent hours in Barnes and Noble, nosing out which magazines felt empty without my writing. Multiple submissions it was.

Since I don't believe in karma—a philosophy that says I deserve the life I've had—the worst that could happen would be to get two acceptance letters for the same story.

I'm doing my best to stay positive, but I have to tell you that trying to get published (a word I've grown to hate) feels like buying raffle tickets for a prize that's already been given out by a church that's already burned down. Eventually, you're going to stop trying.

Summer's starting to fizzle out and the nights are getting cool. There are only a couple of months left in 1999 for me to make my mark in the world of writing, before the millennium sweeps in and changes things forever. I don't want to think of what January 1 will be like if I'm in the same place I was the last time that date rolled
around: a writer with no readers.

Writing guides and the crappy advice they give don't work, so I don't buy or steal them anymore. This latest story comes from inside me. I threw myself into it and laced it with venom. It's probably the most mature thing I've written so far, and I think it reads reasonably well.

The story.

The kid wasn't adapting well to reform school. He was an outcast from the moment he got there, but it was all for the better. If he was going to survive a place like that, he needed the resourcefulness of a lone wolf.

The school designed lessons to destroy his soul, one wisp at a time.

In Morals class, they taught him about the importance of family. He sat through slideshows of mother, father, daughter, son, image after image of the same perfect unit, but with different actors every time. They said that the family was the institution that kept the world from falling apart. It was the epicenter of nurturing love, and the foundation that held up the pillars of society. The kid noticed that none of the slides depicted his own family.

In Morals class, they taught him that people “reap what they sow,” that people get what they deserve, that those who reject their family don't deserve to have one.

They taught him that murderers go to prison and the lazy get sentenced to the street.

In Morals class, the kid learned that America was a Christian country because even the outcasts were given a second chance.

The only moments when the kid could be himself—when he wasn't being brainwashed with ideas that gradually, against his will, started to seep in and make sense—was when he was in the bathroom.
His wolfishness took over. He discovered ways of angling himself at a urinal to arouse the curiosity of younger boys. Perhaps they missed their older brothers, or had never seen something so dark and wrinkly take a piss.

In Morals class, they never said anything about the body and how it was supposed to grow and feel. With wolfish style, the kid was able to teach the boys all they needed to know about feeling good. He awakened them. A young body awakens gracefully like a grenade, like a tiny match flame in a room filled with propane gas.

The kid was thrown out of reform school. His family wouldn't take him back, so he wound up on the street, where the real wolves got hold of him. They ripped him apart but the kid didn't lose hope, knowing that living in a Christian country, he would eventually be given a second chance.

Allow me to make some predictions about the end of the world:

At 12:00 a.m. EST on January 1, 2000, slot machines at a racetrack in Delaware will stop working as a result of the Y2K millennium bug. Approximately 150 slots will fizzle, causing panic among gamblers who'll claim that they were between five and ten quarters away from winning. Slot fiends from around the world will clamor to play these “unlucky” machines, creating a two-year waiting list.

If the world still exists, of course.

My latest food chain demotion was a trick at Broadway and twentythird,
a sex pig from Brazil who worked as a UN caterer. We did crystal together and he asked me to fuck him without a condom. He paid me first.

Like everything else, I said why not.

It's not that I didn't know it was dangerous, but I do plenty of other things that are just as dangerous. I stick my bare hands down garbage cans and hope nothing pricks me. I sleep standing on subway platforms, tottering at the edge. I suck cock in dim lighting and forget to bring my genital warts questionnaire. The point I'm making is that if you have
one
exception in your risk management system, it all breaks down. There's also something about the millennium that's making me care less and less about the things that are supposed to matter.

When I came in his gaping ass, he gave me a satisfied look over his shoulder, a look that said his life was now full and complete with my sperm swimming up into him.

We squatted on the floor, watching the sun rise over an unchangeable skyline, rubbing our sofa-creased kneecaps. Between cigarettes, I scarfed whatever he had in the mini-fridge, chewing and smoking as meaningfully as I thought I should after having unprotected sex.

At first there was small talk. I explained how my life was slowly going down the shitter. He told me about UN toga parties where diplomats got unhinged and drank champagne up the ass. I had the nagging feeling this wasn't the first time he'd barebacked, then by the third cigarette, the nag had grown into a suspicion that ate up conversation like a black hole. I felt really stupid.

“You should go get an HIV test,” he said.

“Yeah, why not,” I said.

Like everything else.

I try to ignore how hustling steals little pieces of your body and scatters them all over the city, and how you have to summon every last bit of energy to rematerialize into something whole again.

When you're flying by the seat of your bankable ass from photo shoot to photo shoot, it won't occur to you that you're a prostitute.

When you step out of a limo with a glass of champagne, and a bodyguard escorts you through a tweaked-up crowd, past the velvet rope, and into Manhattan's hottest night box, it doesn't occur to you that you're anything other than a celebrity.

When your likeness is enshrined on a gallery wall and the
New York Times
posits aesthetic arguments about your body, it doesn't occur to you that you're incidental, nevermind disposable.

The problem with prostitution is that no matter how high up in the food chain you get, there's no such thing as an upgrade. It's always prostitution, so long as your employer knows how desperate you are for cash.

The truth of whoredom only sinks in when someone pays you by shoving bills into your mouth. When they think a grubby, crumpledup hundred gives them the right to push you around, slap you, choke you, spit in your face, burn you with cigarettes, punch black eyes into you, fuck you till you bleed, cum in your eye, and piss in your wounds. When they make you lick your own shit off their middle finger.

But the truth of whoredom only
really
sets in when someone finds it unimaginable, inconceivable, and preposterous that you might have
anything to write about other than the best way to get dried lube out of your hair.

When your intelligence becomes a running gag.

When you become subhuman.

It dry-fucks the soul something bad.

A gay couple I know, Karanvir and Michael, asked me to move with them to a geodesic dome in the Arizona desert, one they had bought to prepare for the coming Y2K meltdown. They had maxed out eight credit cards between them. I refused, wished them good luck with the greenhouse farming and the life of debt, and told them never to call me again.

I was going to watch the world fizzle and burn from the best vantage
point: Times Square.