Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz Page B

splashes of red and green neon sliding across the wet pavements. A skinny bum with red bare feet—once somebody’s little baby—crawled into a box that once contained a refrigerator nestled in the weeds of an empty parking lot. A small black dog hurtles through the wet evening air amid a squeal of tires and thumping of glass and all civilization is at the wheel.
    I pushed through the heavy glass doors and entered the place as a thin pale teenager seated at the elevated desk was yelling at the men in the back to put quarters into the machines or leave. I gave him a couple of dollars and he pumped out eight quarters from a chrome gadget on the desk. I passed through a room of enormous rubber dicks and fuck magazines and entered a moist and dark hallway. A couple of black drag queens with too much lipstick hovered in the shadows of a malfuntioning pinball machine, its flippers clacking and thrumming endlessly while the score-board revolved and whirred. A fat man with skin the color of liver sat in a booth with the door open, his mouth gaping and his tiny, perfect white hands fluttering around his open zipper.
    He was the kind of guy I’d rob banks for, leaning against a stone wall, everyone else in the crowded street disappeared. He leaned in front of me rubbed my chest and belly like he’d known me for years—some distant relative—and I left reason behind in one of those moments where all sense of living takes a slow quiet dive into mystery and possibilities. I needed to be shook. I’d forgotten who I was and anything was welcome including the rough tight line of his neck turning in a warm shirt collar. He gave a drunken half smile and stepped inside the alleyway and began climbing the fifteen-foot-high mountain of spare tires. This was next to some gas station. I was fifteen and hungry.
    I saw a guy in an old black leather jacket and a fishing cap half standing in the doorway of an open booth. The orange interior walls were illuminated by the metallic blue of a video monitor; over his shoulder, a sadist on a motorcycle was shoving his boots into the belly of an obviously drugged adolescent who lay naked on the gravel road. Halfway up the right wall of the booth was a large dick pushed through a hole, suspended and throbbing; it looked like it’d been hung up there like an unwanted gift.
    I got to the top of the mountain, both of us in the cool evening wind, each footstep more like a bounce on top of all that rubber. Sounds of faraway voices and traffic circling into the alley, his cold hands started with my shirt buttons, my tongue starting with his neck and then sliding up to his mouth. Next to his left ear an enormous and luminous white ship plowed through the waters of the river.
    A couple of quarters fished from his pockets turned on the video monitor and he flicked the stations until there was a blue image of a man’s head floating across the screen. It was a forest at night and the video was badly transferred so that everything in it was translated into different shades of cobalt. An overly sensitive microphone was being used so the entire soundtrack was crickets. A blue cowboy removing his blue plaid shirt with muscled blue arms, leaning down in a blue naked haze to lick the belly of a blue shirtless bunkmate. Crickets. A close-up of an amazing blue eye floating in a blue field cut to a blue tongue coasting along the endless surface of rough blue flesh. Crickets. Blue trees at night with a luminous blue haze of light casting about their leaves. Crickets. A blue dick floating across dark blue shadows and burying itself into a waiting blue mouth. Crickets.
    The sound of car wheels sluicing through puddles on the highway: Ah man he says as he is lowering himself onto my back one of his arms muscled and furry wrapping itself under my jaw and against the side of my face yer my babe ohh yer my babe whispering in my ear lips brushing lightly each sound a warm burst of breath ah man