Paying the Rent

"Yeah, but does it pay the rent?"

By Patrick Patterson-Carroll

Got beat up a couple of times for her. Yeah. We’d hang out. Drink a little, maybe sex for the nightcap and then, bam. She wants money. All women want money. Whether you’re dating them or plain fuckin’ ‘em or you’re married. My mother always used to say that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. Fuckin’ A.

So I never had the money. Not once. First time just springed it on me, “Yeah honey, you owe me.” Then the pimp comes over. Big black guy. Punches me a couple of times and says, “You’re lucky she’s not top shelf.” Well, I tell him that I think I’m in love. He laughs and says that I’ve been watching too many movies. Fuck him.

Next time, she asks me at the beginning. I’m broke. I just want to talk, but unfortunately, that would cost me as well. I beg of her to have her pimp beat me up in lieu of payment. She shakes her head and starts to head for the door. But something made her look back to me. Puppy dog eyes I was giving her. Couldn’t resist.

Pimp beats me up, she says, “You got twenty minutes, whatcha want?”

“I want this to be over,” she says, sighing.

Over? I’m not even a page in on this story and she’s already bored. Cindy, my ex-girlfriend. If you could only look at her. Elbow on table, hand crumpled against cheek, cigarette burning away. “You always write like that,” she observes, ashing her cig.

“Like what?” I ask.
“Like that. Colloquial. Casual. Seamy underbelly and such. But you’re from Plano, so who the fuck are you kidding?”
“It’s just a story. They’re all just stories, Cindy.”
“Who was that that said... ‘write what you know’?”
“I don’t know.”

So what? My mother never says “prostitution is the world’s oldest profession” either. I heard it in a movie or saw it on the internet. I don't know. I just like the way it sounds. That’s what I like about modern literature and that whole “anything goes” kind of attitude. You can throw all this pop cultural shit in, and it only adds to the cadence, the euphonious blah blah of it all, as my professor would say. And sure, I don’t know shit about shit, and I graduated from the University of Wikipedia, but if I can slop a few sentences together with some pizzazz, no one cares.
I’ve written four stories in my creative writing class, and I’m just trying to find a style. Maybe Bukowski meets Palahniuk. That seems all the rage these days. Nihilism. Debauchery. Mainly, I’m trying to find a way to make a living as a scribe.

“Maybe you just hate the way I read,” I offer, handing her the stapled together pages upon which the story is typed.
“Maybe,” she says, “But it’s more like I think you try way too hard, writing about things that have very little to do with the life you lead and have led. You know?”
"Fiction has its own reality."
"Who told you that shit?"
"Mr. Memphis."
"Well, he's full of it. Fiction is informed by reality."

She always does this. Anything to contradict me. I wanted to get married. She says, "let's call it quits." I told her she was breaking my heart, she tells me that it’s irresponsible to lay my emotional responses on her doorstep. I say she doesn’t get it. She says she gets it well enough. I suggest that we never see each other again. She counters with an offer for friendship.

And here we are. Six in the morning at a diner. I think I've had twenty cups of coffee. She says I'm in love with hyperbole. I say she's in love with pointing out the flaws of my character. She says "hey, we're both right about that fiction thing." What? Out of nowhere. We're both right? Didn't even need to come from an unbiased third party! How nice of her to extend her understanding hand. We're both right. Great.

She smiles because she knows the truth. See, we still live together. My parents have cut me off (long story), and the rent's due. Of course, she can cover it. But she won't because we're split. Obviously. So she's been playing this game with me for the last couple of days. Extreme criticism. Merciless mocking. "You're wasting your time," she says. "Sometimes you have to defer those dreams and live 'in the now.'"

This is me. Living in the now. Professor Memphis says I've got something. Last class he told me that I should "push the envelope more," "explore the edge," and a whole lot of other platitudes that lent kitsch to his persona. Sometimes he reads his own writings aloud in class and I sit there, like everyone else, and think, "there's a reason this guy is teaching."

So we all sit around watching him. Listening to him read another bitter piece of misogyny. He has a lot of those. A lot of the girls in class cringe. Another guy laughs a lot. Not a big surprise, though. He's already made some ridiculous comments about god and the bible and the "way things are." Had all the ladies in the room in an uproar. I noticed Mr. Memphis grin. Like, "yeah, I stirred up some shit."

When he finishes his story, he asks for comments. Says it's a "piece" from the novel he's working on and that we should "be thoughtful in both criticism and compliment." There's lots of silence. I can hear some asses shift uncomfortably in their seats. I say, "I think it's an interesting piece of writing. Though I must say that it suffers from a lack of context. We don't even know where this is coming from and why."

He grabs his chin and rubs the stubble. "Hmm," he intones. Then he charges out of the gate. He says that context is for modernist purists too attached to strict convention. That context defeats the purpose of stream of consciousness. That context is a tool of the uncreative. That context should be as much of a consideration when we set out to write as not offending our readers. I start thinking about Cindy. She'd laugh her ass off. I cough. There's no "bullshit!" furtively lurking in its confines, though. It's not that clever. At least I guess that's what he'd say.

Next I read my piece. After two laughter riddled false starts, I get into the story. I'm emoting, projecting, acting it out! I feel so alive in front of the class. Their dropped jaws are a mirror reflecting back to me my personality. I'm starting to feel, as I approach the conclusion of the story, like I'm getting somewhere. That maybe he'll tell me that I'm finally publishable.

I finish. Just as with the professor's story, I am confronted with silence. Only this time it's pale-faced with something that perhaps best resembles disgust. "Comments?" Memphis asks the class. When nothing is offered, he looks at me and claps slowly. "It's brilliant," he says. The best thing he's heard in awhile and it's made even more amazing by the fact that he had two excellent writers the semester before.

"He's full of shit, you know," Cindy says.

Yeah. He is. He went through this very gushy song and dance about how my story reminded him of something that "met at the crossroads" somewhere between William T. Vollmann and Elmore Leonard. Then, because he quickly realized Leonard is perceived as more of a genre writer, he amended his position. Irvine Welsh and Vollmann! Yeah. That's much more of a canonical combination!

Cindy laughs over her French Toast. She says that the first sign of bullshit smoke blowing into certain bodily crevices is overwrought comparison to established writers.
"But doesn't everyone do that?"
"I've never compared you to anyone."
"You hate my writing!"
"Not true. I just haven't seen a whole lot of it."

Tonight I sit in the living room, tapping away at Cindy’s laptop. Nothing feels mine anymore. I’ve got to get my own place, but more than that, I have to start my novel now if I’m ever going to start one. Cindy laughs at me, occasionally poking her nose over my shoulder, reminding me that it’s better I write something I know about. Like being a spoiled fuck-up whose parents have disowned him. Very supportive.

Half a page and I’m ready to quit. It’s so much easier to just write what sounds good. I am not interested in doing the memoir thing because writing about parents is cliché. Although guys like Augusten Burroughs and Dave Eggers have made the convention marketably viable, and most importantly, they have given it a legitimacy amongst the kinds of people I want to impress.

I step outside into the dark, warm night. I need to think. Figure something out. I've got two paragraphs and the ends are wide open. Some writers can function like this. I cannot. And to make matters worse, I am sans cigarette because I quit a couple of weeks ago. Cindy joins me, smiling as she wraps her lips around an unfiltered clove. She blows some smoke out past the tree that reaches out to the balcony.

"You're disgusting," I say, lashing out.
"Hey asshole, you can sleep out here tonight if you want. It's up to you. No one told you to quit. No one told you to fuck up your whole deal with your parentals. I bust my ass. You write bullshit, and because some moronic teacher thinks you're on to something, you're making yourself even more of a basketcase."

Memphis tells me to meet him after class. So I'm thinking that he's got some ideas, some options. Like, maybe I can get some of these stories published or entered into contests. After all, cash prizes are always good. The very possibility of them gives me something of a hard-on. Especially since Cindy isn't fucking me.

Instead, after an hour of lecture and a discussion on a reading assignment which will lead to our fifth writing assignment, he looks me in the eyes and says nothing. Deep in thought. A familiar uncomfortable silence. "What are you doing tonight?" he asks. I stammer some, knowing that I don't really have any plans.

"You ever heard of 'The Safari'?" he asks me as he closes his briefcase, which I've always jokingly imagined was filled with shredded paper, a la Lionel Hutz.

"The Safari? Can't say I have." He explains that "The Safari" is something that a group of his students turned him on to a couple of semesters ago. This, coming at the height of his failing marriage, was a view of the city he'd never seen before. It "opened his eyes" to the realities, and by extension, the possibilities of living in the big city.

This explanation does little to describe exactly what "The Safari" is, but he promises that if I follow him to his car, all will be revealed in due time. Normally, I'd never agree to such a cryptically veiled proposition, but curiosity getting the better of me, I walk alongside him while he whistles "Rule Britania" for no particular reason.

Outside the sun bears down on the parking lot. Ninety + degree weather forces him to loosen his tie. We get to his car. It's a Volvo with a child safety seat in the back. Let's go for a ride, he suggests. I stare at the back seat. He laughs. "Fucking bitch," he mutters.

Inside it's hotter than outside, such is the nature of dark colored vehicles in Texas. Both windows are rolled down. He looks at me and smiles. He asks me if I'm ready to live like all the greats. Sure, whatever that means, I say.

We sip lager from dirty pint glasses at a hole in the wall down the street from the school. The perfect place, Memphis insists, to reveal to me what exactly "The Safari" is and what it entails. "Brace yourself," he begins in earnest, "because I realize that though your subject matter leans toward the transgressive, what this means, and what I will subsequently be requesting of you might be a bit too much."

An "uh-huh" escapes my lips as I swallow the last drop of the lager, and my annoyance threatens to take root. He grabs my arm. "The Safari," he says, "is a nightly drive through prostition heavy areas of town... particularly through the gay parts. In other words, we look for trannies, and... if the surroundings appear amenable, we might... you know... engage."
"Engage?"
"Engage."
"As in... proposition?"
"Yes."

He's smirking at me. This guy is something else. But still, I have to consider it. I mean, I'm not going to have sex with guys; freaks with artificial hormone enhanced tits and soft faces, but it might be interesting. I say to Memphis that I might need some time to mull it over. He motions the bartender for a couple more and asks me what I mean.

"What I mean is that I'm not just going to jump into something without all the proper mental checks. Is it logical? Is it safe?"
"Come on, kid! Think of it like this. You got potential. Potential. But that only gets you so far. Your stories could be so much better if you experience your chosen subject matter. Think Hunter Thompson. Gonzo, man. Delve into the lifestyle."
"Maybe this isn't all I want to write about..."
"Okay, but what have you been writing about?"
"Prostitution. Not fucking trannies!"

He's not very convincing. He's just name-dropping. It's starting to annoy me a little. My annoyance, my reluctance is annoying him, and the air around us is becomming quite smothered in the beer soaked breath of tension.

"If you don't want this kind of confrontation," he suggests, "perhaps you should just write what you know. You wanna be William T. Vollmann or Tucker Max? Because believe me, there is a great, wide valley of difference between the two. You can straddle that fault in the middle or you can hop to one side or another."

Write what you know. Ha! Yeah, I've never heard that one before. It's been the chorus in the shadows since Cindy dumped me. Speaking of. She's texted me. The message is:

Hey, rents due on the 5th. Just a friendly reminder.

Bitch. I realize that the rent is due on the 5th of every month. She's just adding iodine to the wound. No. Wrong. That would be a step toward healing. What she's doing is rubbing dirt in it and spitting on top for effect.

Memphis and I get back into his Volvo. The setting sun has allowed the interior to cool. This is good. He says the two-mile radius around the freeway is a good place to start. There are strips of nightclubs and flop houses, all seemingly pointing in the direction of the freeway. That's what he calls it. Just: the freeway. As if this city isn't littered with them. The man needs a map. He's been speaking in code ever since we left the school.

He reaches into the glove compartment and pulls out a notebook and a wad of cash. The man takes notes! "How long have you done this?" Couple years, he says. Caught his wife cheating, the whore, and since then he's been staking and partaking.

He starts the car and we begin south. We're quiet, but the car's tires banging over potholes is loud enough to cover the both of us. I glance down at the notebook in my lap. I'm somewhat afraid of what I'll find between its covers. I sigh, knowing that it's better to go into things sans preconceived notions. Memphis, sneaking peeks at me between mirror checks, pushes his glasses up to the bridge of his nose and grunts at me.

"Hey," he says. "Look, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, this guy is not only insane, but he might be gay. Yeah, might be. Hole's a hole. You know?"
"I don't care about that," I respond.
"I don't care what you care about man, what I care about is exposing you to the experiences that you ignorantly write of. That's all. This is real. Don't fucking judge me. If you're going to be that way, you can get out, because once I cross this next intersection, we are on the side of town governed by depravity. In city council, this district is represented by people who are much like characters out of a de Sade novel. Or de Sade himself.”
“Oh. Well. I do want to write.”

More silence. I open the notebook. The inconsistent bars of street light that bounce over us make reading any of the words difficult, but if I squint, I notice sketches of “women” in compromising positions, dangling off curbs, leaning into car windows, and guiding men into dilapidated “trick-pads” by hand. Yeah, I did read Vollmann. Once. Very bizarre.

Besides pinpointing the man’s fetish, these images serve to cultivate suspicion that Memphis is better at drawing than he is at writing.

We pull up to a STOP sign. Unlike most, he makes a complete stop, but instead of continuing across the street, he unbuckles his belt and looks around. His attention quickly becomes fixed on a lanky silhouette of a figure about twenty feet down the sidewalk, disappearing and reappearing in the battle between street light and shadow.

My cell rings. He whips his head around to meet me eye to eye. I pull the phone from my pocket. The display says Cindy. Fuck. I turn it off.

Memphis rolls down the window and whistles at the figure. As it steps off the curb, I recognize it as a dark, tall "woman" with makeup rolling off her face in beads. Long jet black hair. Can't tell the color of her eyes. She seems to recognize him, asking if it is indeed "Kev." “Indeed,” he answers. She leans into the window.

“How goes the night?” Memphis asks.
“Yeah, had to punch this drunk asshole’s lights out. Fucker was too grabby, and he just didn’t pay for that,“ she says with speed, voice cracking. Unsteady. She motioned to me. “Who’s your friend?”
“A pupil. He’s a writer. Doing research. I’m taking him on the Safari.”
“Oh?”
“Yep. Anything good going on tonight?”
“There’s some gloryhole action down the street at Fred’s. Got a cig?”

He tells her that he doesn’t smoke, but for a kiss he’ll give her the money to buy a whole carton of them “smoky, smelly shits.” She laughs and says, “Well, Carma is not a bitch, honey.” She grabs the back of his head and they share a prolonged kiss. Some seconds later, his spectacles foggy, mouth recovering oxygen in gasps, he hands her $70. A fifty and a twenty.

He looks at me. I smile, jot down what I just witnessed, and he says, “We’re going to Fred’s.”

Fred’s is not an abbreviation or some clever diminution of a longer name. It’s not a bar or a club. It’s not even a dive. It’s someone’s fucking house. There’s no alcohol unless you’ve brought your own. Depending on who you speak to or who’s around on any given night, you can purchase crack, pot, heroin, and really bad coke. The main draw of the place, apparently, is that seven days a week you can buy women, men, men dressed as women, and women dressed as men (a real oddity), all with the sole purpose of, well, doing whatever you want for the right price short of killing them, which has happened before.

A knot is forming in my throat, but a tickle in my pocket distracts me. It’s my phone. The battery signal is blinking red. It’s dying. I have a missed call and two unread texts; all from Cindy, no doubt. This place is dirty, redolent of the vilest of human bodily excretions, and frankly, fucking scary.

Moving on quivering knees, I can hear workmen-like grunts, women moaning without any indication of ecstasy, and cries of possible agony. Depressing enough. Fear and regret have taken residence in my gut and are letting their ridiculously dysfunctional in-laws move in as well! And they are not on the fucking lease! And it's dawning on me that oh shit (!) she really does expect me to put in on the rent. The hairs on the back of my neck are tingling and I'm feeling queasy.

I bump into a guy carrying a can of beer. He's drunk. He says it's okay, but who sent me. I say "Carma" as if it's a question. He pats me and tells me I'm funny, but he might have to lock me in the closet if I don't stop fucking around. Carma. Carma? Carma! “The fucking chick on the co...” Vomit. Puke! Shit’s all over my shoes. He backs up and laughs.
“You’re okay, kid.”

Except, I’m not. And I’ve lost Memphis. “Where is he?” I ask a woman on a couch. Who? “The guy I came in with,” I say, wiping bits of god knows what from my chin. “He’s tall, white and wears glasses.”

Her eyes glaze over. Great description. And I call myself a writer. If depression is an ocean, I’m floating on the corpse of a gay poet who threw himself overboard a ferry, and things are not looking good. I lay myself on the dirty couch situated at the ingress of the hall and rest my head against the cushion-less back. People have probably been raped on this thing.

Before I can doze off to sleep, Memphis grabs my arm and shakes me. Yeah, I’m awake man. I sit up and he’s just smiling, his teeth shiny and off-white. “Guess what I just did?” Yeah, just tell me because at this point I’d rather be spooning apple sauce into my terminal great aunt’s mouth. I’m pretty sure she won’t, you know, beat me or mouth rape me. Of course, I say none of this and blurt out an exhausted “what.”

“Glory hole, baby! Look, you gotta do this. I paid. My treat. Just remember, a hole’s a hole, and if the idea of a possible guy sucking you off makes you squeamish, I find that picturing Evan Rachel Wood or some other famous, nubile sweetie works.”
“Hell no!”
“Why not? This is experience, man!”
“Can’t I just smoke crack instead?” I plead somewhat seriously.

He lifts me up from the couch and tells me that yeah, I can’t possibly mean that because crack is overrated, addictive, and generally leads to doing the exact inverse of the glory hole. We move quickly, slipping through my barf en route. “Man, I came in like a minute. She was good.”

“Sure it was a girl?”
“Shut the fuck up, man. You’re testing my goddamned patience.”

He’d never been as stern with me before. We get to a door. He knocks and it opens. A guy waves us in. It stinks in here worse than in the rest of the house; dark save for the emissions of light from a small fluorescent light above. A guy is up against the wall. His pants are around his ankles, his ass checks are flexing; he occasionally thrusts into a small hole which his dick and balls are in, presumably being serviced on the other side. He moans. He spasms. He pounds his fist against the wall and grunts, ostensibly the universal signal that he’s about to cum or is cumming (?).

Two guys are ahead of me, bouncing in place on tip-toes. Memphis starts rubbing my shoulders. He tells me that what’s about to happen will do wonders for all the tension. Yes, I realize that; who wouldn’t? But given the circumstances, I would rather not indulge. I like beds, privacy, knowing who is performing the act on me, and most importantly, I prefer that said performer is female.

The next guy is gasping and gesticulating animatedly like he’d never been blown before. I start to think that maybe this won’t be so bad. I wonder if they’d let me wear a condom. It wouldn’t feel good at all, but this way I can avoid herpes and whatever else is being passed around in this place. Hell, it’s probably too late. Just laying on that couch probably infected me with body lice or something. I am feeling kind of itchy. Jesus. These guys are cumming fast and loud. Now the guy in front of me is filling the hole with his dick.

Oh man. Memphis has disappeared. Again. The guy pulls his dick out of the opening, cum dripping from the tip, quiet. I told Memphis that crack would be better. The guy in the corner quietly throws him a towel. It’s my turn. I step up to the hole, exhale deeply and unzip and unbutton my jeans. Surprisingly I’m half hard. I turn to the guy in the corner and jokingly ask for a condom. No response. A rough hand is eagerly feeling around the uneven curve of the cut hole seemingly done with a butter knife, it was so poorly done.

I insert my half rigid, half floppy cock and put both palms on the wall. I hear a voice on the other end exclaim somewhat disappointedly. Now, my penis is probably in some man’s hand. Feels like a man hand. At least compared to Cindy. Oh man, Cindy. How am I going to get that money? The hand is jerking my cock. I’m getting a little harder, and I’m thinking, yeah, it’s long and thinner than normal. I have no girth. I know that. The two girls I’ve fucked know that, they’re just kind enough not to say anything.

Okay. I’m still being stroked. And I’m starting to feel it. Fuck it. I’m going to get hard, and this woman-- probably a man-- is going to suck me to fruition. Good. Whatever. I’ll have something to write about. I feel a tongue on the tip of my dick, but I also feel-- a hand in my hair? Yep. A hand. In my hair. Yanking my head back.

“You’re the motherfucker who puked on my floor and didn’t clean the shit up, aren’t ya? You son of a bitch. You’re going to clean it up! With your fucking tongue!”

And so I’m yanked away, hard dick erect from my jeans, in pain, and hoping that I still have a head of hair after this. Hell, I hope I’m still alive to recall this. He throws me onto the wooden floor face first, sits on my back, and rubs my face in my own vile regurgitation.

It’s all awful. The taste, the smell, the cold, soggy, slippery wetness of it all. I begin to vomit more, mixing the warm with the cold. The guy is yelling and telling me that he doesn’t give a shit if I Jimi Hendrix on his floor, he’s not going to stop until I have lapped every bit of the disgusting shit up.

***

I wake up sore in a hospital room. Cindy is sitting in a wooden chair, flipping through a book. I ask her what the hell happened to me. She tells me that I was attacked. Left in a dumpster. No shit. I can feel the swell of my face. I can detect, through a battered nose, even, the faint whiff of garbage. “All I can remember,” I choke, “is that I was made to ingest my own vomit. My own fucking vomit, Cindy.”

She slams down the book and looks at me. Somehow I don’t think she’s going to offer me anything in the way of sympathy. She picks her purse up from the floor and pulls out some printed paper. It has marks and notes on it. She says that she really thinks I can make it as a writer, but I have to stop being so stubborn and myopic.

“I can’t support you if you don’t support yourself. Get a real job. Write in your spare time. All I ask is that you contribute something. And you have no business going back to that class.”

Part of me wants to argue the point. To say that writing is a real job, and that one of the reasons why I’m so frustrated with her is that she refuses to see that. But the hurting part of me is a little more insistent and dependent on having her sympathy. Yeah, I’ll continue to write, but I’ll also quest to get back on her good side. If that means waiting tables or, I don’t know, selling drugs, fine. More than anything, I just want her to give me a nice bath, rub all my aches, and maybe, just maybe, give me a blowjob I’ll never forget.

© Patrick Patterson-Carroll

(2009)