Loaded

  I leave the edges of the dancing and move to the back of the club. Faces stare at me and I ignore them, content to be an object of admiration, feeling a surge of power. A hand brushes across my crotch and I glare at the man who touches me. He offers a short, insipid laugh. I want to smash his face in but I move on, searching for a connection, wanting to find some drugs for Sasha so she will admire me. Her beauty is tantalising; her admiration I would treasure. A young boy wearing a football beanie and an Indian cotton jacket is sitting cross-legged on a table. I walk up, offer him my hand and he takes it, punches me lightly on the shoulder and asks how I am.

  –Cool, I reply, doing fine. Rat is beautiful, handsome, child of a wild, hard-drinking Italian whore. His father was a Maori who Rat has never met; two more adult fuckups but their brief union produced a glorious boy whom I always ache to touch. But we hesitate in our physical communions. Testing each other, not wanting to be the first to admit desire. The first to be the faggot.

  –I’m looking for quick, Rat, got any? He nods and I sit beside him on the table. Look at that queen, he says, pointing to a bald old man in a tuxedo, sweating from the manic dancing. He begins to drum his fists on the table. I hate this fucking music, he tells me. It’s shit.

  –That queen with the Dali moustache is DJ tonight, he continues. Go up and request something, he’ll play it for you. He snickers. He likes you, likes the Greek boys. I laugh and put my arm around Rat. He lifts his arm, takes my hand and I slip him the money. What do you want to hear? I ask him. I’ll request something for you but the prick probably won’t play it.

  –Ask for some rap, acid-metal, hardcore techno. Anything with fucking guts. Rat spits out the words. I’m tired of this faggoty high-energy shit. He leans over and whispers to me, the shit is in my jacket pocket. I put my hand in the pocket closest to me and I touch the warm sleeping body of a large mouse. Dewey, Rat’s pet, is taken everywhere. I put my arm around him again and search his other pocket. My fingers touch a plastic packet and I pull it out the pocket and slip it into my jeans. Thanks mate, I say and get up to leave.

  –I’ll request something for you but they aren’t going to play any hardcore nigger shit here. Just pansy nigger shit. Rat smiles and punches me lightly again on the shoulder. Black and proud, he says. I walk away, and he yells after me: Sister Sledge, Lost in Music. I give him the thumbs up and walk through the dancers, brushing against bodies, pushing myself against young Asian boys lost in a frenzy of dancing; singing along to the trite pop lyrics. I throw my head back and give off a number of loud screams. Add my voice to the music.

  The door to the DJ’s booth is closed but I open it and walk in. A middle-aged lesbian is smoking a joint and frowns at me. Get out, she warns. It’s alright, I say to her, I know him. The DJ winks at me and the woman relaxes and offers me the joint. The DJ is mixing in a new song and ignores me for a moment. I sit back and enjoy the cocoon of peace inside the booth. He finishes, takes off the headphones and sits down with us, taking the joint.

  –What you want? he asks. Thrash, rap, something loud I ask him. He shakes his head. Not on a Saturday night, Ari, he tells me, the queens are not going to get off on that straight shit. The woman starts to argue with him.

  –Why is it straight? She points at me. This wog here is right, play something tough you fucking old poof. The DJ ignores her and asks me if I want to hear anything else.

  –Lost in Music. Sure, he shrugs, we’ll play that. But later, stick around. Fine, I say, and get up, thanking the dyke for the joint. And play Temptation if you’ve got it. Heaven 17. He nods again. Sure, later.

  Every time I look at a gay man, even if I think he’s attractive, I can’t forget he’s a faggot. I get off on real men, masculinity is what causes my cock to get hard, makes me feel the sweet frenzy and danger of sex. No matter how many hours spent at the gym, no matter the clothes he wears, the way he cuts his hair, the way he talks, a gay man always reveals himself as a faggot. I’m not talking about queens. Queens are cool. Bitchy but cool. They are not hung up on being a man, they are quite happy to act like schoolgirls. I don’t sleep with queens. They don’t do anything for me.

  I sleep with faggots but they always disappoint me. The desperate effort to hide his effeminacy always betrays him. I can see it in myself. But I do a good job of talking-like, walking-like, being a man. I’ve got the build, the swagger, the look. More, I’ve got the fuck-ya-I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude perfected to an art form. Faggots love sleeping with me, they think they’ve scored a real man. Being a wog is a plus as well. I hate the Greek macho shit, I hate the Latin macho shit, I hate the macho shit, period, but the truth is that the faggot scene is a meat market and the tougher the meat the bigger the sale. It’s vanity, I know it’s nothing more, but I get a buzz out of faggots thinking I’m straight. The pleasure is not all mine. The faggot sucking on my cock is getting a thrill as well, he is thinking to himself; I’ve scored myself a one hundred percent genuine wog boy.

  But mostly I come to gay bars to dance. For the real sex that gets me off, the sex that makes me shudder in ecstasy, I do the beats. That’s where I find my real men.

  I got it. I tap my pocket. I got the speed. Sasha throws her arms around me and I touch her lithe, her so thin body. She’s skin and bone but still she feels softer than a man. Johnny applauds me. We’re proud of Ari, he tells Sasha, he can draw the men and the drugs. Johnny winks at me and I slip my arms off Sasha, put my hands in my pocket and smile. One hundred percent Greek stud. Sasha introduces me to the woman she likes, her name is Angie. A drag joins our circle, a tall black man with a blonde wig. He throws his arms around Johnny and screams in a loud American accent; Toula, Toula you bitch, where have you been? I turn away from the squeals and order another whisky from the bar. The barman, looking exhausted, flashes me a weak smile. Bad night, mate? I ask.

  –Fucking awful. He pours a double serve of alcohol for me and offers me the drink with a wink. Is she your girlfriend? he asks, pointing at Johnny. Johnny, still exchanging conversation with the drag, hears and turns around. He waves a finger at the barman. We’re family, sugar. And anyway, Ari here, he only has real men, don’t you? The drag stops his conversation and stares at me. He runs his tongue over his bottom lip. My boyfriend’s Greek, he tells me, you Greeks love the black girls, don’t you? I don’t answer, give the barman some money and take a sip of my drink. Should we have some of the speed? I ask Sasha, and she nods and takes Angie’s hand. See you later, I say to Johnny. The drag moves aside to let me pass and I kiss him lightly on the cheek. He runs a hand down the front of my T-shirt and tells me his name is Crystal. He whispers it in my ear and I shiver as his warm breath hits my eardrum. I don’t move away till he’s close to touching my balls. Then I leave and follow Sasha and Angie into the women’s toilets.

  The three of us crowd into a cubicle and I squat and wipe the black toilet lid with paper and pour half the speed. Let’s have it all, Angie says, but Sasha wants a quarter for afterwards. I pour out a little more. While I cut it up, the two women start kissing. Angie is pressing Sasha against the door and moving her hands into Sasha’s tight shorts. I snort a line and leave them two big lines each. Sasha has her go first, taking small snorts and Angie rests her hand on my shoulder. So, what are you, she asks, gay, straight or bi? Sasha looks up. This hurts, she complains, rubbing her nose. Angie starts rubbing my crotch and I get a hard-on. She stops and crouches next to Sasha and snorts the speed vociferously. Two short intakes of air, one in each nostril, and the speed is gone. She stands up and faces me. Her tone is aggressive. So what are you, Ari, she asks again, gay, straight or bi? Sasha gets up and grabs my hand. A slut aren’t you, Ari, she says.

  –A slut, I agree. Let’s go, Sasha says, let’s dance. I’ll join you in a minute I tell them, and Sasha kisses me on the mouth and says thanks for the speed. Pleasure, I answer. They walk out, holding hands, and Angie pinches me hard on the balls. Too hard, it hurts. Pleasure, she mimics and they close the cubicle door behind them.


  I sit on the toilet seat, hang my head low, and sweat gathers on my brow. The toilet seems to shake along to the music. I close my eyes and a red light appears inside my head. A shifting, quivering ray of scarlet which draws me into its trail. I open my eyes and the red light is still there, in front of me. I move my hands towards it and it disintegrates into a shattering of minute crystals. Fucking hell, man, I groan to myself, you’re tripping. I get up, take a piss, splashing a spray of urine onto the toilet floor. The smell is pungent. I’m slightly nauseous. I take a deep breath and the nausea leaves, to be replaced by a sensation of joy which starts at my gut and envelops my body. The sound of the music from the club crashes into the cubicle and a soulful woman’s voice rides the patterns of the drum machine. Her voice, her delight in making music, making noise connects with the pleasure emanating from my gut and I flush the toilet, and rush out onto the dance floor.

  The sea of dancers are jubilant. I run straight into the middle of the crowd and throw my head back and begin to dance, jumping, swaying, following the patterns of the singer’s voice. I slide up close to Angie and Sasha who are rubbing their crotches together and we dance in a small circle. The LSD, the ecstasy, the speed, the dope, the alcohol rush around my body and I feel one with the pulsating crowd. Underneath the song a new track forms, and I hear Nile Rogers’ guitar. I yell loudly and punch the air with my fist as Lost in Music thunders out of the speakers and drenches the club with its thundering hot current.

  A tap on my shoulder and Rat is in front of me, his head hung low, dancing intently. I move close to him, and he takes out a bottle of amyl from his pocket and takes a sniff. He passes it to me, I inhale some and pass it on to Sasha. The fumes eat into my brain and I feel the sweet joy of chemical death; I fix my eyes on the image of Jimi Hendrix on Rat’s T-shirt. My mouth is moving, I feel it moving, and I’m singing along to the song, as are the other dancers in the club. We’re lost in music. The song takes me higher and higher, the crescendo of bass beats lifts me into the stratosphere. I turn away from the Hendrix T-shirt and confront a quartet of Filipino boys who are dancing. They move along to the music in small, elegant little dance steps, not throwing themselves into the dance as is the crowd around them. One of them notices me looking and looks down, giggling. I turn away and am enmeshed in the music again. The song tails off to be replaced by a thudding high-energy beat and I weave away from the dance floor. The Filipino boy smiles at me and I ignore him. His slim body does not attract me.

  My throat is dry and I head back to the bar. I rest my head on Johnny’s shoulder and ask him if he could buy me a drink. He’s still talking to Crystal and they’ve drawn a crowd around them. Johnny strokes my chin and buys me a drink. Too much dancing, sugar.

  –Too much speed, I mutter and I pour the whisky down my dry throat. The barman has gone, replaced by an older man with a moustache. Crystal puts his arm around my shoulder and shakes his head at me. Speed is a dirty drug, he tells me. So is alcohol, I reply and finish off the whisky.

  –Maybe I should take you home, Johnny says.

  –That sounds like fun, Crystal giggles. A high, feminine squeal. I turn away from him and order another drink. I hear Crystal giggle again. He’s anyone’s tonight, I hear him say to Johnny. Not yours, you fucking Yank bitch. I don’t say the words. They explode in my head. The barman slams the drink down in front of me and asks if we are going to crowd the bar all night. I take the drink.

  A thin, tall man with long hair in curls comes up to us and grabs Crystal from behind. He bites his ear softly. Crystal thrusts his arse against the man’s groin and introduces him to the rest of us.

  –This is Con, Costa really. Crystal giggles again. My Greek boyfriend, he adds putting on a wog accent. Con is dressed in a dirty black bomber jacket, faded jeans and cheap, department store runners. His pupils are tiny little holes. Crystal’s sweet Greek boyfriend is another junkie wog. He keeps kissing Crystal on the ears, on the neck, but keeps looking up, straight at me. I take slow sips from the glass, not saying anything. Con and me let the drags do most of the talking.

  I’m introduced to him and I shake his hand firmly. He calls me mate. Johnny is introduced as Toula. Con starts laughing at the name. Not a very original name, he says. Johnny scowls. That was my mother’s name, he says.

  –Apologise to Toula, Crystal tells his boyfriend. Con says sorry in Greek, but he still has a smirk on his face. I have a smile on my face as well. Toula is a stupid name. Johnny notices my smile and turns around to Con again. Maybe you’d prefer Ari’s stage name, he says. My stomach becomes a tight fist. Shut the fuck up, Johnny. But Johnny ignores me. We call him Persephone. You know the story don’t you, she spends half her time in hell, the other half in the real world. Johnny glares at me. Tonight our sweet little Persephone is slumming it in hell. Crystal starts giggling again. I want to smash his pockmarked painted face in. Johnny puts an arm around me and I pull it off violently. He ignores me and keeps talking. The trouble is our little Persephone is beginning to enjoy her time in hell. Aren’t you, sugar? You don’t know what’s real any more, do you?

  –Fuck off, Johnny. I start to walk away. Fuck off you cunt, I yell at him. Crystal starts giggling but Con tells her to shut up. He doesn’t look at me either. Fuck off Johnny, I yell, and walk into the crowd.

  –It’s Toula, he yells after me, it’s Toula, sugar. Johnny’s not here tonight. It’s the girls night out tonight. I don’t answer. I walk towards the video games, brushing past people and glaring at the men looking at me. Fuck you, Johnny, I mutter under my breath, I’m no girl. I murmur the words softly so the men around me won’t hear.

  Johnny is Johnny to me, he can be Toula to everybody else. I put some coins in the machine and start playing Galaga, shooting away at the little spaceships, the trip intensifying my concentration. I’m scoring high. Johnny and I became friends playing Galaga after school, player one and player two. In dirty coffee shops with old Greek men playing cards on stained tables. Johnny shooting better than me, better than Joe, telling us dirty jokes his father had passed on to him. I shoot spaceships and think of Johnny. Smoking joints under a poster of Molly Ringwald, listening to the soundtrack of Pretty in Pink. Getting drunk with his father, listening to the old man abuse his son, Johnny holding my hand under the table.

  The game is over and my anger towards Johnny subsides. Johnny’s mother died when he was a young child. He carries her photo around with him all the time, a photo of a young, scared woman. A black and white photo of a young girl just having landed on foreign soil which she was to detest and in which she was to be buried. Johnny grew up with an alcoholic father who had no idea of how to look after a child, who gave him over to aunts and neighbourhood women to raise, women who had their own kids and their own husbands and their own work and houses to look after.

  Johnny grew up into a shy boy, happiest watching old black and white movies on television, playing video games at arcades. He dragged me off to revivals of Bette Davis movies, I went with him to Pretty in Pink four times so he could wallow in Molly’s presence. The fourth time he turned to me at the end of the movie, grabbed my hand and told me he wanted to be just like Molly. Except I would have gone with Duckie, he told me, I would have ditched that wimp Andrew McCarthy. I didn’t answer, I had figured out that my friend was a faggot. I couldn’t answer. I was trying to figure out what I was myself, attacked at night by dreams and fantasies which disturbed me. Spurting out semen in bucketloads, wanking in toilet blocks in Richmond, in Collingwood, in East Melbourne. I never said anything to Johnny. I kept the nightmares to myself but Johnny knew, he smelt the come on me, smelt where my desires were taking me.

  Johnny taught me about movies. We watched A Streetcar Named Desire, eating chips, drinking ouzo, under his bedsheets, getting erections over Marlon Brando. Of course we fucked. We fucked each other, and we sucked each other, and we wanked each other. We were two horny Greek boys under the bedsheets together. Of course we fucked.

  Johnny t
aught me about music. While our friends and cousins were listening to heavy metal and the top forty, Johnny would scrounge op-shops in Smith Street and Greville Street searching for old disco twelve-inches. He and my brother Peter would make compilation tapes for me, mixing in punk, rap, house, old funk, new funk. Johnny gave me attitude, a sense of style, an arrogance to take on the world. We wagged school often. I had Johnny, I didn’t need history, geography, mathematics. I didn’t want to learn how to be a conscientious clerk, an effective part of the assembly line. I didn’t want to be a good lawyer, a good doctor, a good accountant. How many accountants does the fucking Greek community need? Johnny would yell at his father. What do you want to be, what the fuck are you going to become? you lousy poofter, his father would scream back at him. A movie star, Johnny would answer, smiling at me. I wouldn’t answer. I’d sneak another ouzo from his father’s bottle.

  Johnny dropped out of school early, first chance he got. We got drunk together at the back of the high school, celebrating his decision, throwing our beer cans into the river. He told me that his father had started sleeping with him, getting drunk, coming home smelling of cheap spirits and getting into bed with Johnny. I listened and said nothing. Johnny didn’t go into details, he just wanted to tell someone. We got very drunk that night and smashed a few windows of the school. I’m fucking out of here, fucking out of here, Johnny screamed into the night air. I gave him a round of applause and took Johnny home. His father had fallen asleep, drunk in his own bed. That night I went home to bed and masturbated thinking of my best friend’s father fucking my best friend.