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Old Man's BluesTo Vincent Abbate's previous piece


Dixie's Story

"How come they did that to your hair?"

"Did what?"

"Cut it off."

The blood rushed out of Dixie's belly, taking arteries like elevators up to his neck and ears. Then he told me he'd shaved his head himself, weeks ago, and that was our problem exactly: if I'd been paying attention to him like I should have been nothing bad would have happened. Was my man sane?

Maybe, maybe not. He looked like he'd been awake for days, like he'd been roughed up by the toughs inside. Yet I knew this much: Dixie still had his hair the morning the police came for him.

I said sorry anyway.

"Don't say that. It's my goddamn fault."

"You know, they haven't proven a thing. The evidence is circumstantial."

"I was there. There are witnesses."

"So?"

He stared down shyly at his side of the enclosure. "How do I look?"

When your lover goes around for ten years with a thick, full head of hair you love putting your hands through, then one day it's off, and his scalp shows white like a cake of soap, his ears stick out, and all of him - his neck, shoulders, spine, everything you see - is collapsed and beaten down, you can only think of him as a victim. Though you've stopped believing in such things. I looked at Dixie and saw way back to the beginning. He was only twenty, a virgin with spiky hair he let grow after we started sleeping together. And now? His strength appeared lost, like Samson's, with the hair they'd cut off him.

I said what I thought he might like to hear - that he looked younger - and he giggled and he sighed.

"I never grew up."

"Don't get down, Dix. You gotta stay centered. I brought something to help."

I then passed Dixie the piece of polished quartz I'd brought along. The guard wasn't looking, so I pushed it through one of the holes in the plexiglass.

"What kind of talk is that?" Dix tucked the crystal into his pocket; this was a good sign. "Stay centered. Do you know how fucked up I am? Did they show you photos?"

"That's not true."

"You wanna believe in the good me, right?"

"I didn't say that. I'm saying, let's look at what all this means in the big picture. Nothing happens that doesn't happen for a reason, you know."

"God you're stupid. What drugs have you been taking?"

"None whatsoever."

There was a pause. Our guard stared over, excited by that forbidden word: DRUGS. I stared right back at the man, his badge, club and gun. Had I spoken, I would have told him, mister, you don't get to feel better in life by tormenting your fellow human beings. That was a point I would have loved for Dixie to see. Lock him up, fine. But there was no need for him to be bowing down to such neanderthal types.

"Listen, Dixie."

He raised an open hand toward me, then slammed it down flat on the tabletop as if he'd noticed an insect with a death wish.

"Would you please stop calling me that?"

"But I've always called you -"

"My name is Donald, okay?"

I took a breath and began again. "Whatever happened happened. Important now is this: why did it happen? Why were you there? And the girl? What message did she have for you, and you for her?"

Dixie raised his left hand again from the table, balled it and put it up close to his chin. As he flexed his forearm, scabs on two of his knuckles stretched, about to burst.

"This is the message I had for her, see?" He knocked the fist against his jaw three times, softly but with his mouth open so that his teeth sounded. "This is my message."

He was wrong. Nobody's essence is violence. Death is something bigger than all of us, something out in the cosmos playing a hand, as it was when Dixie met that girl. I had to get my lover to see that, to forgive himself, to accept events as destined and benign.

"You know you're making me crazy with this talk? Do you? I don't wanna discuss my essence, and I don't wanna hear about my destiny and for God's sake I don't wanna stay centered. I want you to shut up and listen. I wanna tell my story."

"Then tell it."

Dix shuffled in his chair. Did I really mean that? He dropped both elbows onto the table and exhaled hard, so close to the plexiglass that some of his warm breath came through the holes and tickled my nose.

"That Eros Center on Conwell Avenue," he began.

"Yes."

"I was a regular."

"Uh-huh."

"On Friday ... I wasn't looking for trouble. I paid for a video booth and watched parts of a couple of pornos. This was after work, you know? A shitty day. I was distracting myself. After a while in the booth I got kinda itchy. I spoke to Rob about girls. He runs the place. There were two available, he said, and I arranged it so I'd be with the newer one. Marcy. She ... I'd never been with her. So, uh, do you know how it works?"

"Not exactly."

"She's in one of the rooms in the back, upstairs. And there's a goon up there too - a big greasy Arab floorwalker. I go in, Marcy seems cool I think, but she's also kinda eyeing me strangely, not sure what about. A cute brunette, but ... I'm not sure. We get down to business. I want a hand job. Okay. She starts doing me. I'm fast as usual, I'm close real quick when ... she freezes, and I look at her, and she's got this frozen expression on her face, she's either disgusted or frightened. And she starts saying, "You're him, you're him," over and over. I don't know what she's talking about, but her work hand closes harder and harder on me and I'm suffering, I gotta whack her, I have to hit her hard to get her off me. See?"

Dixie demonstrated by pulling a punch at the level of my cheek.

"First, she's stunned, down on the floor. There's this pause like a baby makes, gathering breath to cry after hitting the sidewalk. The scream's about to come out of her, I feel it in my bones, and I know that if I let her scream the big Arab's gonna be on me a second later and my life is gonna be basically over. So? I whack her again. POP. She's unconscious. And then ... the strangling's easy. Easy. I put my hands around this young girl's neck and squeezed the life right out of her. I wasn't the guy - but now I was the guy. Understand? I killed her. Just like that."

The guard was checking his watch every thirty seconds now. I would hold him off if necessary, because Dixie needed this. He needed to get his story out and move on with his life.

"Seconds later I hear a knock at the door. Without opening I tell the Arab we're busy. I push the bedsprings up and down to fake it, and I leave through the window. That room doesn't have a window I'm nabbed right there, see. But no. I climb down to the alleyway and ..."

Dix leaned to the holes in the plexiglass, called me closer, and concluded in hushed tones, revealing his secret just for me.

"There's a dead black boy the cops don't know about. He saw me in the alley and could have fingered me." With that, my lover sat back in his chair.

His story was out and a weight had fallen from his soul with the telling. He scratched at the crown of his bare skull, smiled tenderly at me. He was better, lighter, a spirit reborn. I was certain of his sanity now, of his desire to be free and to move forward together, and certain that he loved me, like father sky loves mother earth. Earlier I'd lied, but now it was true: he did look younger. Except for a couple of new wrinkles, and the hair being shorter, Dixie - I'll call him Donald if he wants me to, though I prefer Dix - Dixie was the same beautiful virgin I knew way back when.

"We've got to get you out of here," I said. And blew him a kiss and left.


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