Seattle’s a slimy old town, slick with the self-satisfied excrescences of those who stole the indigenous land and remade it in the service of money. Brooding in the rank strata beneath the veneer of biotech and skyscraper townhouses is the ectoplasm of bone gamers and basket weavers, box-house hostesses and linotype operators, parchment-faced stewbums and chain-smoking cafeteria waitresses, wrung-out old queens and cops on the take. A reticent residue, but as old Chief Sealth once cautioned, not entirely powerless.
At any time of the day or night in the shimmering summer of ’75 you could walk into the Green Parrot Theater at First and Pike and see an enormous cock thrusting into a vagina like a steam piston. Nebulous music accompanied the cock and shadowy figures moved in and out of the little theater, hoping they would not be spotted by a friend or a business associate, or worse, encounter someone they knew inside the auditorium.
Holy crap, Entriken thought when he first saw the thrusting cock. Guess we won’t be bringing the folks down for a freebie. He had been on his way to the Pike Place Market one afternoon when he noticed the Help Wanted sign at the box office. He was sick of driving cab so he entered, saw the thrusting cock, overcame his initial revulsion, and went to work two nights later running the projector, selling tickets, and keeping the place tolerably clean. When he wasn’t busy inside (which was seldom), Entriken stood in the doorway smoking cigarettes and absorbing the night. He was a tall, willowy man in his mid-twenties, with shoulder-length blond hair and a dark mustache, who favored Levis shirts and slim jeans inside brown harness boots. His lanky good looks invited advances from pouch-faced men and epicene striplings, which he brushed aside with easy good humor.
Who, he wondered, would pay five bucks to see a cock moving in and out of a vagina? Was there a doctor in the house? Someone’s lawyer, professor, boss? Minister? Entriken considered throwing the house lights on and watching the reaction, but he resisted the temptation. Customers were customers and entitled to what they had paid for. His was a sacred trust.
Some days later Entriken sat in his parents’ living room. His mother smiled, his father crunched an ice cube from the evening’s first highball. “Movie theater, eh? Which one?”
“Green Parrot.”
“That old place? I must’ve seen a film or two there way back when.” His father looked narrowly at him. “What do they show these days?”
Cocks and cunts. “Oh—mostly foreign films. Obscure things.”
“Sounds interesting. Pay you much?”
Shit no. “Reasonable.” At his age his father had been a junior bookkeeper at a big accounting firm. Over the years he moved steadily up the ladder, and recently retired as a senior partner.
“Well.” His father crunched another ice cube. “I’m sure it’ll do until something better comes along.”
Entriken (who always wore a sport jacket and slacks when he saw his parents) nodded and stared off into the forsythia bushes. He loved his father for being good enough not to press him, and his mother for saying “I’m glad you’re happy in your new job, dear.” He could not tell his parents, who only wanted good things for him, that the idea of putting on a suit and tie and reporting to some goddamn office every morning terrified him.
He also knew they would have been shocked shitless if they had been in the locker room at Roosevelt High the day an older kid waved his erect member at him and three other guys and dared them to feel it. “Come on, you pussies need to feel a real cock.”
The looks on his mates’ faces ranged from horrified to thinly-veiled fascination. “Buncha fuckin’ pussies,” the boy sneered. Entriken was unimpressed. A cock was a cock. No more, no less. “Big deal,” he sneered back. “You think yours is big?” The match was declared a draw.
Entriken snorted softly at the memory, lit a smoke, crushed it out. He had promised his parents he’d quit. Yeah, well, he’d promised he’d go to college, too. After midnight, First Avenue was a street of silent yesterdays. A Graytop cab cruised by; the driver, a familiar face, nodded. On the opposite corner, junkies and hustlers flitted in and out of the glaring Donut House. Entriken liked donuts, but unless truly desperate for a glazed he shunned the place because the deep fryer made his clothes stink and too many creeps hung out there. Still, it was fun to watch the action, guys hustling drugs, guys hustling girls, guys hustling guys, sleaze central. Now and then a Mercedes or Cadillac would pause and let someone in or out, and it occurred to Entriken that the fancy rides would be at home in the rarified environs of Broadmoor or Laurelhurst. At such moments he smiled tightly and whispered—Gotcha. He thought ruefully that a more enterprising mind than his would discretely photograph the assignations and mail prints to the license-holders along with request for compensation. There was one way to “something better,” a route taken by many a “successful” man. But Entriken was a live-and let-live guy.
Two-thirty and no one in the theater. The pit of night. Entriken snorted softly and slid the curtain aside to reveal the thrusting screen-cock in full view from the street. The mayor, driving by, could look in and see. A visiting President Ford could look in and see. His parents could look in and see. He imagined a teeming First Avenue in 1900, himself with a striped jacket and megaphone—Step right up! Cocks! Cunts! Every indecent act known to man! But the black-clad Victorian hordes were long-gone and the blinking yellow lights around the marquee clack-clack-clacked over an empty sidewalk. Entriken thought of his high school typing class, clacking away in rigid solidarity, for what? To screen hard porn? Those bulbs—like big yellow stars, stars for city folk who never got to see the real thing. Truly a marvel, electricity. Would have been considered witchcraft not too long ago. What did Edison do for sex? Something of his own invention, perhaps. What cryptic messages of destiny lurked in the bulbs’ electrical impulses? Maybe he could invent something. A man walked up and purchased a ticket. Entriken closed the curtain, lit another cigarette, and stood splay-legged in the middle of the sidewalk, staring into space.
Some days later he walked into the Frederick and Nelson store and downstairs to the Paul Bunyan Room. The bright cafeteria hummed and he wondered if he would see anybody he knew. Anymore, it seemed like wherever he went he saw only strangers. What the hell had happened? He was deep into his Frango mint shake when a body rustled onto the next stool. A young woman. Auburn hair, Streisand-looking, sort of. A scent. His heart jumped. Shit! They had dated a couple of times in school, now here she was, older, more beautiful than he remembered.
“Lindy?”
“Hey!” A dazzling smile.
“Remember me?”
“Yes, of course! I didn’t want to intrude.”
“Nah, it’s good to see you.”
“Frango shake? I die for those.” It came too soon: “So, what have you been up to?”
“I’m in movies.”
“Really?” Her eyebrows raised. “Acting?”
“I’m a projectionist.” More or less.
“Oh yeah?” Her features fell almost imperceptibly. “What theater?”
He felt himself blush. “Green Parrot.”
A cannonball of silence dropped between them. She pulled her hair, looked him in the eye. “Isn’t that kind of a…?”
“Porn house.” He nodded. “Yep, porn house.”
She laughed sweetly. “Do you like working there?”
Sure. Until something better comes along. “It’s all right. It’s a job. I’m not planning on making a career of it.”
“Mmm. I’m still looking, myself. God, now I gotta have a shake!”
On his next night off he rang her bell and she embraced him. Within a week they had made each other breakfast, strolled the Pike Place Market arm-in-arm, and seen Jaws.
“So,” she said on Saturday morning, “maybe I should drop by the theater tonight.”
“Not a good idea. I mean, it’s kind of disgusting, the stuff we show.”
“You mean like cocks and vaginas?”
“Oh, you’ve been?”
She shrieked gleefully and punched his arm. “So, how’s that any more disgusting than this? She pulled the sheet back and swallowed him. Her hot, wet lips drove him to white-hot combustion and he thrust into her with ravenous fury, his thoughts turning to the screen, the lone figures in the darkened theater, the lone figure on the empty sidewalk under the flashing bulbs, suddenly not alone.
Next morning over waffles he said, “The other night I pulled the curtain to the auditorium back and let the ‘action’ show out on the street.”
“Nasty man!”
“Naaah, I like to think I’m providing an educational service.”
“Yeah? So, educate me.”
His next Saturday off he took her to dinner in Pioneer Square, and afterward they sat thigh-to-thigh in the Washington Street pergola staring into the velveteen void of Elliott Bay. He nodded toward the lights of Bainbridge Island glowing dimly through the murk. “Spirits are watching us,” he said. “One day, all this will slide into the Sound, and we’ll all be together with our ancestors.”
“Spooky guy,” she murmured, snuggling close. “They do look like eyes out there, don’t they.”
“Many eyes out there, watching. There’s a whole other world down there, a dream world, waiting for us. I can sense them.”
Lately he had been sensing a dream world of his own, where a spiral stairway descended to a small room, a sofa, a young school custodian with raven hair and an easy, slouching way. Jamie. “Smoke a joint?” Jamie smiled.
“Sure.” The weed made him cough, made Jamie laugh. White teeth. In less than five minutes, a new thought, of force, possession. Where did that come from? Smoking joints, laughing, short minutes at a time. Then, a hand, hotness, kissing…
“Do you have a dream world?” she asked.
“Mm.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Can’t.”
“Why.”
“Bad luck to tell your dreams.”
“Who told you that?”
“Everybody knows that. Besides, I never remember them, anyway.”
“I’ll tell you one of mine if you tell me one of yours.”
“Okay, next time I have one I’ll write it down. If I can remember it that long.” He failed to remember his basement dream, she said nothing about her mild crush on him at Roosevelt High, about suddenly seeing him walking down Pine Street and following him, heart pounding, into Frederick and Nelson and downstairs, and how it felt seeing the empty stool beside him.
She threw her legs over his and kissed him. Music floated over from a bar on the corner. “Shelly’s Leg,” she said. “Ever been?”
“Once or twice.”
“Oooh,” she purred, “once or twice.” Shelly’s Leg was Seattle’s premier gay disco.
“Don’t mean nothin’,” he drawled, giving her the half-lid and stroking her leg.
She ran her knee along his thigh. “Not saying it did.”
“Uh-huh.” He put his hands on her denim-covered butt and pulled her to him. After a long, deep kiss, he said “So, let’s go.” Arms around each other, they crossed Alaskan Way and the railroad tracks, his cock rock-hard. He knew with proper amazement that it would stay rock-hard for the rest of the evening. Anyone want to screen this? He stifled a laugh. They went to the end of the line trailing off into the gloom beneath the viaduct, checking out clothes and hair and bone structures, holding each other close, smelling their hair and drinking in each other’s eyes and kissing, in waves of agony and ecstasy. After fifteen minutes they entered a maelstrom of wisps, wastrels, and striplings sipping drinks and doing the Bump to pounding music.
I got to know where, you got the notion
Lindy looked around and grabbed his arm. “Come meet a friend of mine.” She pulled him over to an extravagantly handsome young man with mahogany skin and thick black shagged hair.
“Zanky, meet my boyfriend.”
Boyfriend. God, that sounded good.
Green tiger eyes met his. A Bengal tiger. “Lindy’s boyfriend, huh? Lucky Lindy.” He held Entriken’s hand longer than expected. A strip of brown skin showed between shirt and skinny belt.
“Lucky me,” Entriken smiled. But for a strange twist of fate, he would be at the Green Parrot hanging out with the giant cocks.
“Let’s dance,” Lindy cried. Zanky cocked his head at Entriken and the sudden trio joined the squirming horde on the floor. Get down tonight.
More songs, drinks. Lindy went to pee, Zanky’s eyes bored into Entriken’s. “So, Lindy’s boyfriend, what are you into?”
“I’m into Lindy.” He stared back, thrust his pelvis forward.
Zanky’s eyes flicked down, up. His lip curled. “Anything else?”
“Just feelin’ things out.”
Sipsip, bumpbump. “You and me both, brother, you and me both.” Zanky put his hand on Entriken’s butt, Entriken smiled into Zanky’s glowing face.
Do the hustle
In her metallic blue Mustang he asked, “So how do you know Zanky?”
“Sociology 101.He always had something interesting to say. You like him?”
“Don’t know him.”
“But you’d like to.”
He gazed at her. “Why do you say that?”
“Everybody wants to know Zanky.”
“Not thinking about him right now. Thinking about you.”
She gave him a pursed smile. “You’re very sweet. But Zanky’s a hard one to ignore.”
“By you?”
“Yeah, but…”
“But.”
“But he’s a mystery. I think he likes to cultivate mystery around him, not let anyone get too close.”
“Did you try to get close?”
“Oh, for a second.”
“Ahh. Well.”
And so they danced and flirted with Zanky at Shelly’s and boogied to Upepo at the Bombay Bicycle Shop and kissed in Volunteer Park and ate late night suppers at Tai Tung and 13 Coins, and lay in bed Sundays dreaming of everything and nothing. Walking downtown to work, Entriken began lingering at jewelry shop windows looking at rings.
Thirteen years earlier the television chattered, cars swished down the boulevard in the rain, and ten-year-old Entriken sat with his mother at the kitchen table gluing pieces of cardboard together. Across the street, the lights in the school burned bright and he wondered what was going on in there. Probably the “custodian,” as the teachers called him. Poor old guy in gray, mopping, cleaning, all alone. People on TV all doing things, people in cars all going places. What would he be doing in just a few years—mopping deserted school corridors at night? The question roared out of the darkness and threw him into desolation.
He turned back to his model, a blocky little skyscraper. “Say, that’s not bad,” said his father when it was finished. “You ought to think about going into architecture.” More buildings followed, inspired by the futurism of the Century 21 World’s Fair. Then he saw The Absent-Minded Professor, with scientists in white coats and a box with blinking lights and a screen. A “computer.” Two evenings later he assembled a cardboard computer of his own. He took it to school, then a few days later took it apart to make another model, watched more television, turned fifteen, and started hanging out after school. He overhead his father say “He seems rather aimless…” and the empty feeling hit him again, but any fledgling ambitions foundered in the raging torrent of classes and kid shit, faggot pussy snatch dickweed zitface suck me. He hung out, he made out, his bed got damp and sticky.
He wondered what his mother would think, but she said nothing and only ever smiled and cooked him hamburgers on Saturday, sat with him at the table in the evening and talked about school and kids and life while his father remained in the den with his highballs and his train books. Entriken wondered why his dad liked trains and wondered why he himself had no hobby. It was a long time since he built cardboard models, he went to rock concerts and almost thought about taking up the guitar, but school ended and everything fell away. A friend started driving cab and said it was easy, so Entriken followed. He didn’t know what else to do.
Now, the Donut House hustled, the electric bulbs clacked, the nebulous music muttered, the cock thrust. Maybe leaving the curtain open would draw more customers. Maybe not. A man walked out and was swallowed by the night. Down the hill a willowy figure appeared. Lindy? His heart raced. No. The idea that she thought of him when she was alone filled him with warmth and strange unease. How could it last? What could he give her, what would he have to talk about when she took him home to meet her parents? “So, Lindy says you work in theater….” He lit a cigarette and pushed the smoke into the darkness.
A tall man strode up. “Hey, Boots, you got a light?” Broad shoulders, nice face.
Entriken lit the man’s cigarette, he smiled at Entriken and put his hand on his mound and squeezed. “Mmm,” he murmured, “that’s nice.” Entriken kept his face neutral and thrust his crotch into the man’s. He held it there as the two men puffed smoke.
“You good, Boots. Now I can go home to my old lady.”
“Lucky old lady.”
“Hah!”
A day later she buzzed him in. At five o’clock in the afternoon the windows glowed with the promise of evening. It was his day off, they would have dinner, go out, come home…Her kiss was short. “Have a seat,” she said. Entriken felt his mouth go dry.
She took his hand. “You’re a very desirable man,” she said in a small voice. “Smart. Sexy. I really like you.” Her eyes went to the floor. `
The room tilted, his gut heaved.
“It’s so hard to say this, but—I feel like we’re not going anywhere.”
Words died in his throat. He wanted a cigarette. “Uh-huh…” His eyes searched desperately, refused to focus.
“I feel like I need to be with somebody with maybe a little more drive.”
“Drive.”
“I don’t mean to make it sound like a negative thing. But it seems like you’re more—I don’t know—deliberate. Drifting.”
“Jeez—Lindy, I’m not going to be doing what I’m doing forever.”
“I know…I just…I can’t be with somebody as slow as me.”
“Am I slow?”
She patted his thigh affectionately then pulled her hand away. Its sudden absence was a roaring vortex. “I wouldn’t say that. I think it’s just that I’m starting to expect more. A professional life, a home, kids, maybe. I like to get dressed up…I guess I’m just more conventional middle-class.”
Entriken tasted cold panic. He was who he was. He thought that was enough. “So,” he whispered, “things you don’t like about me…”
“Oh, sweetie—” Her face twisted strangely, like it was getting older by the second. “Nothing. Really! You’re fine, a great guy! I just think we’re a little too different.”
The sinking sun slotted through the blinds and lit up a dust bunny in the corner. He realized that it would see her when she went to bed that night and woke up next morning. But he would not. He stared at the floor feeling like his insides were melting. The dust bunny sat there, mocking him. “Mm…Okay…I…”. He was not the man she wanted. No. No, no.
She looked at him sadly. “I’m sorry.”
One less bell to answer
It was twenty minutes after five.
He zombie-walked into the newly-hostile evening, lay down on his bed, and curled into a ball. Morning was a desolate desert beneath a mocking sun. He got up to pee, went back to bed, got up just in time to go to work, ghosted into night, chain-smoking, numb. He wished her into presence before him, wished her at his feet, begging him to take her back, but there was only the sticky miasma from the bay pricking and plucking at his skin, skin she had caressed less than a day before. A gull glided overhead, saw him, and laughed. He saw her everywhere and nowhere, erased by loathsome faces materializing from the filth of existence. A man bought a ticket. Hating him, Entriken changed a reel, shuffled into the office, and cried, softly, louder.
He asked for the next Saturday off, went to Shelly’s, and found Zanky. “Hey.”
“Hey. Lindy not with you?”
“Not tonight.”
A slanty smile, a hand on his butt. Zanky jerked his head toward the pool table. “Shoot?”
“I’m lousy.”
The tiger eyes, the breathtaking face. “I’ll teach you.” A warm voice. Lindy who?
Get down tonight.
Zanky ran the table, “Told you I’d teach you,” Entriken laughed, cupped Zanky’s butt, and led him to the dance floor. At last call they ran into the street holding hands, jumped into Zanky’s pumpkin orange Fiat Spider. Top down, hair blowing, blasting up First Avenue, cigarettes glowing, Zanky’s arm on the shifter, muscles rippling, flexing, roaring, exulting. Entriken thumbed the Green Parrot: “I work there.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah, shit.”
“Damn!” A laugh like angels. Zanky nodded at someone outside the Donut House, and again at someone outside Giorgio’s Pizza, and Entriken knew he was only a nod away from more hell. But not now. Now, they went into Zanky’s cool, dark nest on Capitol Hill. They did not emerge until the next afternoon.
Forty years later, the body and mind still sometimes shivered at five in the afternoon, the vision blurred around the edges as if daring life to prove its reality. Life proved it, all right, but did not forget the rest.
Entriken had done his bit. Good bit, too. Best part was, he still had plenty left over, even now. Most of his hair, most of everything that mattered. Forty years made it bearable. Even so, in the bosom of success memory knows no limit, and he still sometimes hated its persistence.
The soft (puke) green apartment walls
The light (daggers) slotting through the blinds, the light of loneliness
The hateful sun of morning
The hateful weekends of emptiness
The last clack of her apartment door
The last clack of his apartment door
Eyes alert everywhere, heart racing, steeled for the sudden approach, the look of barely disguised annoyance. If they should see him, his head would be high, his stride proud. He hung out at Pier 70 but could never get it up to ask someone to dance, he went to bars and scored a couple of times, and in the small hours one morning locked tight with a body in a pissy restroom when shoes scuffled and hands seized him and voices yelled cocksuckin’ faggot! Knuckles pounded his head but he and the other guy fought back hard and the shoes ran and it was all too weird because he slept through the whole thing and woke up next morning in the bathtub of his apartment, blood on his face, clothes muddy, mind blank except for the smell of urinal cake.
He went to work, he sold tickets, he mopped the cum-sticky floor, he stood under the marquee one night and watched the pumpkin-orange Fiat growl by. It slowed at the Donut House, let someone in, and sped away, leaving behind a roaring emptiness. He shit-canned Shelly’s and some weeks later he was out to lunch with his father (“Still at the theater?”) when they passed a used-car lot. Front and center as if newly abandoned sat the pumpkin-orange Fiat. Poor Zanky. Yeah, Pop, still at the theater. Still pinin’ for her, still walking late at night (asleep, once!), still looking for the good stuff in all the wrong places. Down the dusty aisles of August into September, the light softened, rain fell, Entriken began scanning the classifieds and prowling the Market for possibilities. Some small shop might be nice. Enough of sleaze. Drifting. If he should meet her again, he would be a different man.
Near two a.m. Bar rush, wind-blown figures staggered past and disappeared into nothingness. He sold a ticket, lit a smoke, stomped it out, looked up, saw stars. Real stars. How long had they been there? Clack-clack went the bulbs, ordered, regular, mechanical. No, electrical. A pattern, heartbeats and hoof beats, boot heals, high heels, typewriters,
Clack-clack,
Flashes of light from zero to infinity,
Clack-clack,
Two people,
Clack-clack,
Apartment doors,
Clack-clack,
IBM.
Huh?
Computers.
Didn’t he make one once, in fifth grade or something?
A cardboard computer.
Shit, yeah! Busing downtown to Lowman and Hanford to buy plastic sheeting for the screen, cutting the opening for the screen, getting the pieces to hold together, Elmer’s glue stink, tricky damn job but it held up. Took it to school next day and set in on his desk. The screen shimmered with reflected light like it was really on, the colored paper dials or whatever looked almost real.
The kids crowded around and asked what it was.
“A computer.”
“A computer!”
The small fetid bodies hovered close, close around him, Can it tell the future? Can it do homework?
Yes.
The bell rang, the teacher in bouffant hair and sheath dress said “You can put your computer away now.” He slid it under his desk and a few weeks later dismantled it and used the cardboard to make a locomotive.
Only thirteen years—why couldn’t he be that creative now? Elmer’s glue…bouffant hair, sheath dress…Put your computer away…put your computer…your computer. The street, the theater, the cock, the Donut House, the clacking lights swirled together. Holy shit!
Entriken threw his cigarette down, walked into the office, back out onto the street, lit another cigarette, turned circles, shook his head, laughed. A man came out of the theater, a short man wearing a charcoal suit and hat, carrying an attache case. He stopped abruptly and smiled at Entriken. “Thinking?”
“Yep, thinking!”
“Good night for it.” The man smiled primly and walked away. Entriken peered after him, wondering idly what was in the case. He did not remember selling him a ticket.
Next morning he walked to Seattle Central and enrolled in fall classes in computer science. The numbers were mind-numbing at first, but slowly then more and more quickly began to line up like good little soldiers and he felt like he did when he made his cardboard computer only now his hands wrote hard and his cock got hard and his mind held on for dear life, please, please. He finished one job, now he would finish another, with a screen that really lit up.
They thought he was cool, a nice contrast with code development and algorithm interfaces.
“So, this was, like, hard porn.”
“Hard enough, so to speak.”
“A cardboard computer?”
“Oh my God, you should tell Bill, he’d love it.”
But it was Janice who loved it, who laughed and brought the sun back. Sweet, sunny Janice.
And so: retirement at fifty, a nice house, travel. Proud parents. And sex, blessed sex, unimaginably otherworldly starry-night sex.
For it was a drug, the most pervasive, powerful drug in human history. They had opened a new dimension, one transcending space and time, a computer for every desk, small, warm, intuitive. And his special pet: Have everyone connected by computer networks, just like TV.
It was a grind, Bill could be a pill at times, he slept on sofas, his diet went to hell.
But it was fun. God, it was fun.
Put your computer away.
Hah!
Slow. He would show her slow. Yeah, Baby, I’ll slow you, see now, there ain’t no hurry. Forty years later, I slowed into good health. Ever hear of Microsoft? Yeah, you have. Lips, lips all over him, and her. Slow. Yeah, okay, I’m slow. Why would I want you any other way? Why couldn’t that be enough? Even now, he remembered. Only now it didn’t hurt so much. “I wouldn’t give you up for anything,” Jan said, after he had turned the rank and fetid strata and admitted her to dreamland. “I love you. That’s all.”
A cool wind blew, a gull shrieked, she sat in the car and watched him walk slowly up the street. Across the street from his old spot people milled in the light of the Showbox marquee, sniffing for glamor’s residue. In the alcove he nursed a cold cigarette and thought once more of Lindy…the crotch-squeezer…two dudes in a pumpkin-orange Fiat…the man with the attache case. Him! Funny little guy, looked like a spy, carrying a case full of secrets to be discovered, unlocked. “Thinking?” Good night for it, as it turned out. One part stops where the other begins.
Entriken lit his cigarette and stood splay-legged burning a tiny hole into the darkness. A shadowy figure passed behind him and away down the hill, carrying an attache case filled with a million starry nights.