Brad's Diary
The spurt of memory gain Jeff had been enjoying, since the start of his therapy, spilled over this week. Tristan and Matthew reported days when his memory would drift from subject to subject and from theme to theme with rapid periodicity. But those memories would flash along lines of emotional ramification, putting his emotions on a kind of wave tossed ship.
An example was last week. The dented fender on my Catera had excited in him some recollection of how he first met me, that it might have something to do with an accident, and he had believed that Tristan's therapy was something of an oblation whose results were testimony to its potency.
On the other hand, his recollection of school and Ms. Hathaway, his old teacher, though testaments of our belief that his regular recovery process was a medical miracle, had driven his emotions swinging through inconceivable arcs of oscillation. For three days after that, it had lent the air around him a fricative semblance of dejection.
Tristan had described his mood as a temporal form of depression and I shouldn't worry too much about it. But I did worry; the depression had been like a tapeworm, consuming all his strength and attention, driving him away from his therapy and into a paralysis of sleep.
"He's just using sleep to try to deal with this gestation period," Tristan concluded.
By the fourth day, I was impatient to find out whether his disposition would have improved after his long nap. It had. I surmised that the ogres of his memory had been dissipated. He'd wrested himself from his sleep and found Tristan and me washing up after supper. He looked a trifle disoriented.
"You hungry, darling?" I asked him.
He asked if there was any food left. Well, I thought happily, at least, his need for food was manifestly not destroyed. I brought out his plate from the microwave oven. Tristan opted for an early night, leaving me with him.
He made short work of cleaning out his plate and, after that, I suggested we read together in the drawing room. We warmed at the fireplace, reading the new books we'd recently acquired from Varneys. He seemed under immense stress and bother. I thought to do something for him I hadn't done since his abduction. I faced him, took his feet, put them on my folded legs, and removed his socks. At first he looked to be embarrassed. But I went on with my mission, massaging and kneading his toes and the balls of his soles. He was noticeably more relaxed by bedtime.
On Friday, he was himself again. I took him to a hair salon. His lush locks had grown to shoulder length, letting down his youthful beauty. I had told him that bunching his hair up in a ponytail, as he did frequently, was making it fall. People had turned to look at him when we entered the salon, not least to revel in pulchritude, as well as to size him up for eligibility and market values. I believe I made a nuisance of myself that afternoon, a little too in earnest to supervise my boy's haircut. Three hours later, I brought him home sporting a new bob, his mop shorn to ear level.
His spirit continued to be high the next day. I believe the on-the-spur-of-the-moment-decision barbecue on the roof terrace had something to do with it. He was chatting and giggling with the rest – Tristan and his lover, Sean, Matthew and his wife, Gerri, Steve and Keith, and two other old friends he was reacquainting himself with, Todd and Dylan. Bathed with the light of the moon, our pool terrace had been turned into an enclave of aesthetes.
Jeff had been a joy to behold that night, even while engaged in the mundane matter of basting chicken wings. He looked great in his shorts cut high in the legs and a thick cotton sweater.
Our cookout proceeded merrily till the clock struck ten. By this time, my party dilettantes had run the gamut of conversation and food, and a jeroboam of wine, so were now very quiet. Listlessness had set in from overfeeding and not a soul was stirring.
Someone, suddenly, turned the music on the CD deck up to a royal-octavo volume. Looked like this person didn't want the party to be over yet.
Todd and Dylan, the doyen of all _c_o_c_k_-getters (I say this affectionately) were first to rock. It didn't take long for them to go wild with passion and suggestive _s_e_x_ual abandon. They were openly hustling for the party to swing into an orgy.
A little to my east, a subtler kind of hustling was going on. Steve was nudging at Jeff. "C'mon," he said, "let's show these two how it should be done."
Jeff was surprisingly game. He crawled under the La-Z-Boy recliner, found his flip flops and slipped his feet into them. My boy could always make me smile.
He had a tentative start but by the next song in the CD, he was thumping and stomping his feet with Steve. They were determined that their predecessors did not outdo them in the tribal aesthetics. Jiving and performing groin-grabbing gyrations while they grooved to the beat and rhythm, they were stirring up a cloud of dust around them. I felt the reverberations below my feet while their heels drummed the floor tiles. My beloved was gorgeous and those shorts hiking up his thighs were accentuating his long legs, putting him in the limelight. I found myself laughing and humming along to harmonize with the sound of the symphonic beats.
His own muse fueled, Keith abandoned his station at the barbecue pit to form an urbane threesome at the carnivorous circle. At this time, I felt a nudge from Tristan. "Why don't you claim your precious one?" he suggested. "We'll take care of this."
I was handing the marinade to Tristan and Sean when I realized the music, diminuendo, was no longer assailing the air but simply traveling back through it. I felt an arrest of all motion. I searched for Jeff. He had withdrawn from the dancing circle. I knew instantly that a storm was about to hit; it was a primitive instinct aroused in the way Keith was looking at me.
I reached him. I held him. His body shook in my hands, not the kind of shaking when you felt cold enter your bones, but the kind when you felt afraid. I wiped at the perspiration that was glistening along his hairline but he pulled away. He fled from me.
We took off after him, Tristan and I. We found him in the makeshift clinic where his therapy was being conducted twice a week.
"Is this a joke, Tristan?" he asked, his voice trembling and his face contorting with anger. He was on the verge of crying. He pointed at the cardboard box on a chair while in his right palm he held a gold ankle chain. "You said these were gifts from Brad."
His voice was imparted with an ironic tone. And then he showed his wrath, waving the chain at us. "This is no gift." he whispered. He slammed the anklet on the table and was gone from the room.
When we found him again, he was in the bedroom, prone on the bed, his arms crossed over his eyes. The way his chest rose and fell so rapidly suggested he was sobbing. Quietly. Sometimes, during moments when he was remembering something and was not telling, we found ourselves in delicate situations to make educated deductions about what it was he was recalling and how reliable it was. Such as now.
"It's not what you think," Tristan said on nothing more than a hunch. "You didn't get the chain from the club where you'd worked before. It was a gift, as I've told you, a gift from Brad."
His emotions-laden response put paid to Tristan's hunch. "No," he cried. He lifted his arms from his eyes for a while but suddenly he started reeling. "God, oh God...."
"It's the truth, Jeff," I said, almost as a plea to his common sense.
"What do you mean? What are you saying?" he asked. "Did we meet at the club? Where I danced for money? Were you one of my customers? How much did you pay me to take my pants off for you? Or was this gift for that reason? You bought _s_e_x_ from me?"
He rolled over, averting his face from us. I heard no cries but I felt his wounds.
"No, Jeff," I answered, climbing onto the bed with him, "that's not how it happened. You've got the chains confused. I did give you this after we met. After you left the club and disposed of the one they forced you to wear. This chain was my gift. It was token of your trust in me. It was very early in our relationship. You had left the club on my insistence and in spite of the threats they made to you. It was very dangerous for you to quit but you did it. It was on account of your belief in me that you quit the club.
"Yes, we did meet at the club but that wasn't our first meeting. And I wasn't your customer, if at all you had any. Our first meeting was in NYU; I was taking part in a public seminar and you were a participant. You were at that time 16 years old and you came as a representative of your school. We had a brief friendship after the seminar, for almost three months, but eventually we drifted apart. A year later, I met up with you again at that club. You were working there. It was a chance meeting, but one which I welcomed. All right, so it wasn't the swankiest of clubs but I had found you again and that was all that mattered to me. And you didn't take your pants off for me. Or for anyone else, for that matter. That wasn't what you were about. You hated what the club stood for. You refused to conform and you got punished for it."
He nodded. "I remember."
He eyeballed me and continued: "They beat me and .... there was someone else .... a cute Chinese boy, Shan, yes, that was his name; they beat him almost every night."
I nodded, encouraging him to carry on. However, he had started weeping again. His eyes were like great valves for discharging his scant tears. He threw his arms over them, furiously, as if he was trying to silence his mind from poking at an old wound.
"Look, don't worry about it," I started to say. "You don't have to right now."
He removed his arms. "It's okay," he whispered. "I'm all right. I want to talk about it. I want to remember. I need to."
He sat up. A crushing uneasiness appeared to take possession of him as he impelled his memory to regale his tale.
"I see a club," he said, his voice hinted of ritual murders, "and it's filled with an ever shifting population of transients and other visitors and tourists. They seemed to spend their evenings there as a form of discreet claque for the bar dancers. The liberty-takers created columns of tobacco smoke every night, smoldering and choking the dancers while they stripped off their clothes in the camphorated darkness. I was a bar dancer. I had been sentenced to work thus.
"Prior to that, I had first chair in the regular chorus. One evening, I had denied my favors to a patron who had wanted anal _s_e_x_. The bosses had threatened me with harsh words, but I refused to be screamed into contrition. Consequently, Joe, one of the bosses, informed me that he had the means to hacker my stubbornness unless I cooperated willfully. I didn't, and he relegated me to bar work.
"There was an infernal romanticism about stripping off our clothes publicly that no amount of uprightness of conscience could stale. I remembered that, from a broader bulbous base, a number of us used to enjoy the metaphysical idea of exhibiting our nudity and teasing those who knew they could never attain our degree of adulation. However, we were not omitted from performing _s_e_x_ual acts with anyone who demanded them. It was exchanging anal _s_e_x_ for money that I found abominable.
"The new dancers, including Shan and me, were subjected to rigorous training for a month. We had to learn fast. The discipline was as grueling as the routine denigrating. Whether the fee was right or not, we must peel off our clothes in accordance with the stage director's requirements.
"Shan's attitude had the assured obstinacy of a rebel. He was 16 years old and extremely naïve. He was also very scared. Of course, the director had designed measures to deal with his rebellion. He used a blackjack. In fact, he made liberal use of it. Sluggish and slack performances were whipped into shape. At almost every rehearsal, Shan found himself hoisted up front and his clothes removed. We'd witness his underwear yanked down to his ankles and his bared bottom tyrannized by the blackjack. Mick – I think that was the director's name – tried to pummel his bottom into submission but he had little success.
"We'd be ordered to continue practicing without Shan. While we did, Shan was displayed bent over the edge of the stage, his spanked backside exposed to us on the floorboard. Mick paraded his punished bottom as a kind of cruel model of the consequences of engaging in unacceptable behavior. It was especially unbearable for me because Shan was my partner in some routines.
"The end of the night's practice was only the beginning of Shan's punishment. His clothes were ripped into shreds and afterward, at closing time, they pushed him out into the street, so he was often left to find his own way home in the nude.
"I don't know what became of him after I began work at the bar. We used to dance naked on the top of the bar while hideously gauche-mannered men and women ogled below us. Others in the far perimeters of the bar had an equal eye-load of our genitals and buttocks. The walls were glass mirrors and, wherever we stood, we were multiplied to infinity in the facing mirrors. The patrons always asked to touch our private parts and we always obliged them.
"One night, I spotted you among the crowd. I had stripped to my g-thong to go up but I'd suddenly felt ashamed you'd see me. Despite the haze of cigarette smoke wrapped around your head, I couldn't go up the bar. So I didn't and, consequently, I got punished that night. You found me backstage in the midst of my punishment. I was hollering from the crippling shock of Mick's blackjack on my bottom when you found me. You put a stop to that and got me the hell out of there.
"You took me to your house and hid me there. But something went terribly wrong that night, didn't it? I get the sense that I suffered a kind of emotional breakdown. I can't put my finger on it, though."
I nodded. "You had needed therapy," I explained. "Some people from the club came after you and caused you grave harm."
"What did they do?" he asked.
"Perhaps you should try to remember," I persuaded.
His brows knitted together while he explored his memory like a wandering pilgrim. At last, he said: "They knocked you out cold. They found me. God ...."
"What do you remember?" I asked.
"They cast me off the second floor balcony," he whispered.
I nodded. "Your body was broken in so many places, you needed six months to recover. After that you needed another six months of therapy. That was when you met Tristan for the first time. You were in a bad shape. You were always so afraid after that. For a long time you continued to be hounded by nightmares about being thrown from a high building. You had always been afraid of heights since you were a boy. But that fall really messed up your head: that anyone would want to harm you in that way almost destroyed your own amour-propre. If it hadn't been for Tristan's therapy, I'd have been in quite a mess, too."
"I remember. You never left my side. You were with me every day until I recovered. I seem to be quite trouble prone."
"Well, you had your insecurities, as many people do. But there was also something innocent about you that drew others to take advantage of your boyish vulnerability. Anyway, that certainly was a scary time for everyone."
"But what were you doing there, I mean at the club? And why did I have to work in that joint?"
He lifted his face to me. "Please, Brad," he continued, "please, tell me. This part is such an unintelligible muddle. My mind's a vacant patch now. Tell me the rest, sir, please."
He had taken my arms, his fingers digging into my flesh. I winced. I also felt compelled by his frayed spirit to oblige his plea. Once more, he'd been able to weaken any impervious stance I might have taken concerning telling him his past.
"All right, baby," I said. "What I know is that your family ran into financial difficulty some time in your final year in high school. You had applied to college and NYU accepted you for medicine. But your family had no way of paying for tuition or board. Your mother had run up a huge debt and to help pay it off, had you contracted to work for her creditors. She had no idea they owned the club until you were informed to commence work there. The club was never advertised as a strip joint, and your mother was certainly not aware of the nature of your work. To protect her, you kept the truth from her. As for why I was there: it was my first visit with some people from the firm. We were unwinding after work. We bar hopped a fair bit in those days.
"Anyway, you finished with the club for good, recovered from your near fatal fall, and a year later, began your course in NYU. I knew some people at the university and had persuaded them to let you register although you had missed the deadline."
"But if we couldn't afford to put me through college, how....?" he asked.
I broke him off. "That's another story, sweetie. This isn't the time."
He let me know he was displeased. "So those men who had assaulted us were prosecuted and put away?" he asked sulkily.
"Mm-hmm."
"So I guess I owe you, sir. Is this how I became your boy?"
"No, how you became my boy, I'll let you read about in my diary some day. And you don't owe me. In fact, you did me a favor. I liked you from that time, almost three years ago, when we met for the very first time. I wanted you even then. That you eventually agreed to live with me was something of a late labial confession. But it was something I openly pursued for half a year."
Some time in our lengthy and honest-to-a-fault interchange, Tristan had passed the gold anklet to me and left the room. I now passed it back to Jeff.
"I gave this to you because I loved you," I resumed, "and I was proud of you for quitting the club. You've been wearing it since. Until the night you were abducted. This was found at the scene of your disappearance near the telephone booth. It must have come undone and slipped off."
He caressed the chain, feeling the links with his elegant fingers.
"How did we meet, Brad?" he asked, without looking at me.
Alas, it always came back to this question. He'd asked it so many times. And for the hundredth time, I must tell him that this was something he'd have to remember on his own.
Very gently, so he wouldn't lose it again, I said, "I've told you a lot already. You're very close to recalling that event by yourself. I've a good feeling about it. I'd be spoiling the moment for you if I told you, depriving you of the opportunity of finding it out for yourself. You wouldn't want that, would you?"
"No," he replied, slipping under the quilt. He put the anklet between his lips to taste the gilt. "I guess I wouldn't."
By the time he was ready for bed, he was clenching the anklet as though it was a talisman from an important time in his life.
© 1998, 2001, JRK & BWK.
(Next: Past Imperfect 10)