DONNIE

If I stop to think about it, Donnie’s face was very much like a ferret’s: a tiny mouth, a prominent and sloping nose, close-set eyes under a single bushy brow, hardly any chin at all. You could see his Adam’s apple bobbing when he started to lie, which he did a lot. He had to...he was a speed freak.

Saturday afternoon, I'm still waiting for him to show. Typical, nothing new. He's in town on a layover, that’s what he calls it, but he's up in Harlem to get shot up, bam, instant oblivion, totally insatiable, which, of course, is the problem, you can imagine, right, some big black buck ties him off, has his way with him, get the picture?... long before he manages to find his way to me, ya know, all the way down here in Chelsea. I put up with it, mother fucker, I put up with it because, well, you guessed it, he’s such a great lay.

The first half hour, I pace — then, I give in and curl up with a book, that's why the long, shrill sound of the door bell startles me. I walk across the room to buzz him in. Sharp light filters through the blinds across the front of the tiny bedroom, striping everything except the double bed which is crammed into a dark alcove next to an air shaft. A makeshift set of stairs, more like a ladder, leads upwards to my stylish living room, a barely converted tenement. The clomp of Donnie's boots precedes his knock.

I fling the door open. “Fuck me,” he screams, grinning maniacly, and jumps into my arms.
And fuck him I did, with gusto known only to a man in his 20s. Against the rough-hewn lumber of the stairs, I fucked him. Bending over the ancient chipped porcelein sink in the middle of the room, I fucked him. Even on the scratchy polyester sheets, a Canal Street bargain now covered with greasy handprints, I fucked him. Over and again, which is why I was willing to pace and wait, and eat my pride, every time.

Flashing turquoise spurts/ Mast of a tottering catamaran/ bondage blue cheese Sound around cheap rope, potato chipping/ sun bursting/ face-slapping/ sand in my butt crack ing/ moving now/ drying tomato/pure eh?

On the surface, Donnie lived an iconic American story, a shadow left from centuries past, don’t you see? an orphan who becomes a railway signalman, out of Baltimore, Charm City, stepping off the train with a guitar and a grin, singing unto the skies of a multitude of lives that pass him by on the rails, singing of the lives of other people, not his own.

It's only on the surface, though, this gypsy whimsy, not way down deep where the moral rot is found, where the degradation and the filth, the darkness and the death, the ever-present death reside, wages of hate of a self-directed kind -- not so much sin, just hate.

Hurt me, he would say it right out, and I would.
Hurt me, he would yell, up on stage, a second-rate punk in a third-rate band.
Hurt me, he would taunt, and even his sweat would smell like hate when he walked into a room.

It was never love on my part, though repeated applications of repetitous lust may sow confusion -- energy passes from loins to heart and back again, enough said. I was young and hungry, and just as self-obsessed then as I would later become, when I was a speed freak myself, it's how I knew the signs of the walking death, don't you see?

We came to our final sorry ending, Donnie and I, on a beach, out near the tip, tip tippy end of the south fork of the blessed Longest Island, a date when he was late by more than just a little, a day he finally came with one too many lame excuses and his eager puppy smile was not enough. I let it wash into the sea, I kicked the surf, I walked away, I let it all go that day, into the sea.