So there’s this hole in my chest.
I like to go running on Mont Royal, a kind of large lump of nature in the center of the city only a few blocks from my place. I run up there every day for about five-ish miles. I’ve done it almost every day since moving here three years ago. And every day when I run up to that mountain, I run past the neurological hospital about halfway up. A few tired looking people with science all over their heads frequent the emergency entrance slash smoking area and when I run past, I’m reminded of my organs and the way they go without me really needing to do all that much about it. It’s none of my business, really.
Yesterday, a woman with a bicycle helmet fell out of her car door right by that entrance and no one helped her. Not the smokers, the doctors, the nurses, not even me. We all watched in silence as this woman in scrubs lay there shaking on the wet pavement. I didn’t tell any of my friends because they don’t understand that I don’t like to touch what I don’t know like I’m fumbling around in the dark surrounded by knives, but no they aren’t knives they’re just innocent ladies on the ground too close to death to ask for help.
So there’s this hole in my chest. I mean it, really. An unchecked smoking habit and a few too many beers and I’m that guy outside the bar telling you about the last time he fucked and how crazy it felt to be so cold in the summer. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt hunger. I feel horny in that I know I need to cum, but I’m mostly repulsed by the idea of sharing my bed with anyone but my stuffed tiger White Spot. I’m a child and I just turned 22. Diagnose it if you must.
I remember seeing a man get his head run over by a car on Ponce in Atlanta when I was sixteen. It exploded like a watermelon wrapped in a thousand rubber bands. The tire raised about a foot off the ground before his skull gave in and the car was brought back down onto the pavement totally untouched by the viscera. If we’re just brains, he’s all over the place.
I was back in Atlanta for a few weeks of August. My parents are 56 and 57 and somewhere between selling the house and burning it to the ground. Dad asked my brother and I to rake the mold and weeds off the astroturf putting green in the backyard, so we spent the day in the one hundred degrees feeling every digit, raking and raking. My back still hurts from all that and I can’t sleep without tossing and turning for a good thirty to forty-five minutes first. After about three hours of raking, my brother offered me a beer because he has a real heart. We drank and sweated some more and I thought about how my parents will inevitably sell this place, this sacred place, to some doctor, some lawyer, maybe someone who will actually use the putting green.
Dad read us a story about this man who puts ferrets down his pants. He still reads to us like we’re little boys. His glasses and crow’s feet are turning him into my grandfather, a real southern gentleman who says he found God laying on his back looking up at the stars on a golf course in Santa Fe. So that gives you an idea of where I come from.
The man in my phone stopped responding to my messages again. I guess it’s time to fuck up my life.
I’m thinking about all the photos I almost took. When I’m running on the mountain at night, the city lights come through the trees, all bleed together into paint strokes or smoke, and turn the trail into something spiritual. I’ll turn my music off and listen to the sound of my feet on the ground crunching pebbles and scattering twigs wondering, “where is this hole in my chest?” and then I get back, stretch, drink some water, run the tap, feel the steam from the shower and there it is again. Lucinda Williams sings out of my Bluetooth speaker about some long lost lover or something and I’m reminded then of that place I used to go at night, the place with the kudzu hanging off the streetlights, air so humid, so wet, your sweat feels like it has nothing to do with your body and is in fact part of the atmosphere itself, like your physiognomy doing its best to become one with the heat. I’m reminded then in that steam of the time I stood naked in my old apartment’s bathroom waiting for this Australian guy to go ahead and break my heart. And he did. And it hurt. And my friend Paddy on the Bluetooth speaker sung, “Do what you wanna / I know you’re waiting here for me / on the other side of this”. I got chills and looked through the steam at myself in the mirror, totally naked, totally crying, and wondering what it means to be a person who spills and spills and spills.
I’m not mad at Dennis Cooper for blowing me off anymore. I get it, I have this hole in my chest, yes, and it’s getting bigger. My friends tell me they love me and they pray for me and I tell them I’m busy, I’m busy, I’m busy, but I’m stroking myself, almost at climax, legs tensing up, toes curling, heart rate through the roof, scrolling through a list of faces in my head wondering who, what, whatever will make me cum and cry at the same time and then it happens and it’s just alright, it’s fine.
I’ve been reading this one girl’s blog from twenty years ago about how she wants so badly to amputate her arms below the elbows and use hook hands. She says her hands were never meant to be on her body. They feel like someone else’s. I look at my ass and I look at my hips, the way my skin kind of pools up around them like a mushroom and I think they must belong to someone else, to something else. They, at the very least, have no place on this body, this body I’ve made my own with permanent ink and scars from being a teenager with no real issues, only a brain rigged to self-destruct.
There was this kid we used to make fun of in middle school named Benny. He wasn’t real because he went to a different school, a poorer one outside the city limits and he spent a bunch of money on Instagram followers and talked like a little girl, so we called him a fag and laughed a bit and that was really it. Sometimes we’d see him staging amateur photoshoots at high school football games and perform the act of his de facto paparazzi, spamming him with flashes of light so we could see his face a thousand times on our phones and laugh at the weird fat gay kid and his stupid Instagram. When I was back in Atlanta earlier this month, out of an extended moment of true weakness, I downloaded Grindr. His face was plastered right there in the middle of that array of anonymous almost toned chests and men in suits and ties with their faces blurred. His username, “HIV POZ”. So Benny has HIV. I was crying at that point because this man, this boy had suffered so much. I can’t imagine what he felt when he received that diagnosis. I’d die right there because HIV is this thing in my mind that means something worse than death like brain cancer or something.
So there’s this hole in my chest. Around it, the flesh is tight like it knows what’s coming. Goodbye blue night. Goodbye goodnight. Goodbye Mont Royal. Goodbye Mount Eerie. I’ve been dreaming of bugs. I’ve been dreaming of a world with two moons and no sun, Dad reading stories about critters, dead grandpa, other dead grandpa, I need to call my grandma, she must be worried. I’m talking to a dead body again and I know I know I know it’s bad but maybe this time I’ll find the cure.