My cellphone’s glow illuminates the hall, and my free hand drags along a stucco wall whose Braille crumbles under my fingers. The light dies, a flick the volume button re-ignites the torch. Industrial debris crunches underfoot. My fingers lose contact with the wall when it terminates at an intersection, and I’m a kid in a crowd reaching for his mom’s hand that’s no longer there. I grope the wall out of the darkness once again, and follow its new direction down another hallway.
Ahead, voices echo, then a ice blue glow of another lithium-powered torch blazes. It bounces toward me. When our lights get to within conversation distance of each other, we stop. The voices say something to me in Japanese.
My light cuts out, then theirs. Black. We flick our buttons.
With a scrap of Japanese remembered from a long forgotten girl, I say, “Watashiwa Tyler. Genki desu-ka.”
Their expressions twist into Jack o’ lantern smiles, and they escort me through the corridors. They open a door for me, gesture me inside, then disappear down the hall.
My eyes adjust to a cinderblock walled room with a greasy lightbulb swinging from the ceiling.
A stale mildew scent. Windows, to high to see out of, with glass either broken or missing. The last shafts of daylight filter through, exciting the dust on a current of warm air. Couple of folding chairs. On one chair, a pizza box with heels and coagulating cheese. On the other chair sits a kid mangling the remains of a slice. He tosses the crust on the floor where it skips into a corner, and introduces himself as the translator. I fill out the forms, then he takes the paperwork and leaves.
I sit and wait.
#
After a contortion act I find a sleeping position in a metal chair. I’ve slept on worse. As I close my eyes my phone chirps an incoming text message. My brother…He’s accepted into medical school…his first choice. A glimpse of life shaped by different decisions. We began at the same start line…similar IQs and other raw materials. He took his ore and forged himself a scalpel. I made a straight razor.
The reality is, either can kill you. My last day working in a investment banking firm, Frank Garrison, a stock trader who’s been in the market since Nixon took us off the gold standard, went down to his car, came back with a baseball bat, and played t-ball with my skull as I laughed and cackled my last vestige of sanity away. Rewind five minutes earlier: he complained that he couldn’t read my handwriting on a trade ticket so I told him to ass-fuck his mother. Old people can be so pissy. When they pulled Frank off of me, I tossed my wallet and keys on my desk and walked around Beverly Hills with the clothes on my back: an Ermenegildo Zegna suit and a paper Burger King Crown. I spent that night sleeping in La Cienega Park…and the next night, and the next, and…
I text a congratulatory reply to my brother…no signal.
#
Through the windows, night replaced light. During winter in the high desert the temperature plummets with the sun, and I dressed for daytime. Wind whistles through the gap-toothed glass and the lightbulb sways. The hairs on my arms stand up so I pull my arms into my thrift shop t-shirt.
#
My breath plumes from my mouth and evaporates. No clock. I check my cellphone. It’s now tomorrow. I search this storage room. Racks of boxes filled with doorknobs…a jar of nails, screws and washers…a box of showerheads…nothing to seal up the windows.
I start some Silat djurus (think katas or forms) to keep warm until that evolves into all-out shadowboxing, which I regret because I’m sweating and when it evaporates it will steal my bodyheat.
A yawn pushes past my lips so I sit again, propping my feet on the second chair. The wind whistles a lullaby…
The door scrapes open and the translator tells me it’s time. I follow him into the bowels of the building.
#
A white dot of light beckons from end of the hallway. When we get to the end, the hall opens up to a vast, sprawling warehouse space. In the center, an island of light blazing in the sea of black. The set. It’s dressed to look like a hi-tech clean room or something you’d expect to see in Area 51. All that’s missing are engineers in clean suits reverse engineering a crashed spaceship, and a dissected alien on a gurney. The mildew scent of the storage room has been replaced with the tart citrus of industrial cleanser, which tears my eyes a bit. The all Japanese crew scurries about, scrubbing the set and working their chores. All of them in beanies and hoodies.
Am I going to be dressed in an alien costume? Japanese are big on tentacle porn. A tattoo-sleeved man, wearing surf shorts and a wife beater, jogs up to me. The translator introduces him as the director. We shake hands and exchange deep bows. By the time I rise from my bow the director is bouncing around the set from prop to prop like a sub atomic particle on meth, spiting out Japanese sentences Kalashnikov style while the translator struggles to keep up. Schroedinger’s Jap wants me to play a patient. Someone hands me a hospital gown, which I change into. I’m commando style with my bare ass open in the back. The translator tells me to hop up on a stainless steel gurney. It’s polished to a mirror finish. No paper. I think, thank God I’m not wet or my buttocks would stick to the metal. I curse to myself as I lie back. I’ll warm up when we get into the sex.
My co-star, a girl who’d get carded for ordering apple cider, enters wearing a candy striper’s uniform. The director yells, Action!, tears a rift in space-time, and steps through it. Sayonara.
Nurse recites her exposition in Japanese then switches to English phrases she must have practiced all day to get right. We talk (sort of) about the horrors of war (what war would have a black guy in a Japanese hospital?).
She helps me to sit up, unties my gown, and rubs my chest with frozen steaks she passes for hands.
Then, she asks, “Are you ready for, giggle, sponge bath?”
Her words hit me jagged and crisp like a bucket of chipped ice flung in my face.
I fight the urge to say, Go fuck yourself! Last time I said that to a co-worker, I dodged hickory wood.
“Hai. Domo-arigato,” I say.
#
Over and over, she squeezes the sponge over my body. Over and over, sheets of ice water crash onto my skin–the water cascades off my body and onto the metal, taking with it a piece of my spirit like a Bering Sea wave eroding an Aleutian shoreline.
When the shivering comes, it comes with violence.
Fuck this. Enough! I rip the sponge away her, rub her hands between mine, then and place one on my crotch. She gasps and squeals words I don’t understand. Could be genuine exasperation, could be her playing coy for the scene. The fuck if I care.
I rummage under her skirt and grab a fistful of muff. Her eyes are punctuated by dime-sized pupils. I smash my mouth onto hers. When we separate, she pants, spraying a mist of breath in the crisp air.
It’s on.
Men of various job descriptions orbit the gurney, filming, lighting, and snapping stills. I fall onto my back as naughty little AZN girl wrestles the hentai cock.
My legs quiver…I place my hands on them to stay them…The director phases back into existence, makes the universal sign for blow-job-to-pop shot, then returns to his state of everywhere and nowhere at the same time…The girl obeys and attacks my tentacle…The crew seems transfixed by this little girl in mortal combat, hell-bent on sending the Kraken to the watery abyss from which it came…Fuck the crew, focus! Control your breathing…Breathe in…hold…exhale…Breathe in…hold…exhale…You’re in a sauna…with some girl sucking your cock…
It’sss nnnot working…Goddamnit, I’m ccconvulsing….No way the camera doesn’t sssee this…Okay, draw your limbs as close to your core as pppossible…biology is working against you. Lose wood, it’s gone for good…kkkeep the blood flowing where you need it…there’s a girl sucking your cock…sucking your cccock…sucking your cock…it’s Amanda…lips…tongue…sucking your cock…sucking on your motherfucking cock…
Pop shot.
I blink; the director is there.
His lips fly, then he bows.
The translator translates, “You’re a jungle beast!”
I say, “Yes, I know,” and return the bow.
Directorsan counts out a crisp stack of Benjamins into my trembling palm.
I say, “Oats Caress Ha-ma.” (Nice working with you).
I come down hard from the rush. I yawn.
#
Outside, wind slaps at my face. Stars everywhere. When I fire up the Mustang, I’m greeted with the sound of a lawnmower wheezing with asthma.
YOU FUCKING WHORE! START!
I pop the hood with my cell phone clinched in my teeth to illuminate…corroded ports on my battery. I scrape the smegma with my keys, and fire the V8 up. She roars to life. Clicking through gears with my short- throw shifter, I assault the freeway. Outside the window the desert mountains surrender the fight as they no longer hold back the grey of dawn. Clouds, underlit pink. I yawn. My eyes want to close…and I don’t remember how to get home…The car knows the way.
Gotta stay awake…I lower the windows….Wind blasts through, whipping up a vortex in the cockpit. Normally, this the part where I contemplate what all this shit means. Not today. I crank the radio full blast as the rising sun warms my face…and sing.
“Every time I look in the mirror
All these lines on my face getting clearer
The past is gone
It went by, like dusk to dawn
Isn’t that the way
Everybody’s got their dues in life to pay…”