The Acid Burn No Face Man

by Jenni Fagan

I’ve stopped feeling strange about the artist watching me through the keyhole of his bedroom door.  The keyhole is huge, an old victorian thing.  He watches all the time now.  He doesn’t even paint anymore.  Last week I woke and he was stood at the crack of his door, writing something down. 

 

            ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I murmur.

 

            ‘You say things,’ he hisses ‘in your sleep.’

 

            ‘Like what?’ I demand, suddenly wondering what else he has been doing, standing over me like a fat fucking slug while I dream.

 

            ‘I have to leave, you keep saying you have to leave,’ he leers, scratches at his boxers absentmindedly. I can see his flaccid like a sorry half grin under his huge white sprouting gut. I stare at him in the dim.

 

            I have to leave. 

 

            I did leave and that’s how I got here. I got two planes, then another.  I sat playing stare out with a ginger kid for six hours on the last plane.  Eventually ginger beat me three times in a row so I mouthed the little bastard a clear ‘fuck you.’  I should have took it as a sign. I should have taken ten more planes. But I didn’t so I am here, still on 72nd street, playing drums for a garage band. Three months now of living on sub sandwiches and still trying to leave with no fucking idea of where too. Flaccid leans over me.

 

            ‘Are you comfy there?’

 

            I look at him. I am on the kitchen floor, like I am every night on a bed made out of two blankets. Jon turns around on his side of the kitchen floor.

 

 

He is wearing suspenders and a Charlie’s Angels t-shirt, it has pictures of four of the girls massacred by Manson on it.

 

            ‘Touch her an’ I’ll kick your fucking cunt in,’ Jon says with his eyes still closed. The artist licks his big fat lips, retreats. I lay there dozing. The artist takes up his usual post, re-manning the keyhole. He is like some fucked lighthouse keeper with a key shaped telescope.

 

            I go back to sleep.

 

            When the artist goes out for milk in the morning, I sneak into his room. I hover by his stinky spunk stained shit-pit. I can see right across the kitchen through that keyhole. I knew it. Pervy cunt. His shite paintings are all leaning up against the walls. I gob on one as I walk by. It doesn’t look any different.

 

            I sit down in the kitchen to play the drums. My stool is an old olive oil can. I need to practise for the gig. Jon is out with some chicken he met, a straight acting chicken from Akron. The artist walks in. He’s holding milk.

 

            ‘You’re like a living installation,’ he says, shuffling around the kitchen, opening some milk he’s bought. I take the joint out my mouth and feel my head spin. I look away and don’t say anything. I am wearing Jon’s silicones under my top, they are fucking gargantuan. I look deformed in them. I keep hitting the old dinner matts I’ve put on the drum skins to dull the sound, the thud is soothingly repetitive. The artist looks at my fishnets and my five inch high fuck me’s. I tuck a blonde lock behind my ear. I’m wearing the wig Jon wore last night, tonight he’s going more Vivien Leigh.

 

            The artist slams the milk down abruptly and goes into his room. I keep drumming. I don’t care anymore. I can see his silhouette, jerking like a fucking spastic under a strobe light. It’s fascinating in a grim kind of a way. I never met anyone who wanked more then me. I’m compulsive, in everything and wanking keeps my skin good. It stops me killing people.  But this guy can’t stop. He’s gone beyond compulsive. It’s chronic. The only possible outcome is death.

 

            Jon comes in and goes straight to his makeshift bed. He pulls off his jeans. No boxers. Lays down and goes to sleep straight away. He usually sleeps naked but his headscarves never come off. One of his balls hangs lower than the other usually but when he gets a hard on it looks like one big ball with a line down the middle.  His head is covered in scars from a fag bashing in a redneck wood in Ohio.  They did him over so bad half his skull had to be sewn back on in a big old fucked skin jigsaw.   His Mum went upstairs when she found out what had happened.  She came back down with the gun, loaded, in her cardigan pocket, told them all to get in the car.  I think she found the guys too, though his Dad won’t let any of them speak about it.  I can hear the artist turn in his bed, the frame’s long slow creak, his little shallow breaths.  Jon begins to snore loudly. He told me he thinks the artist is a potential serial killer.  Definite sex pest.  Probably a serial rapist. He say’s I’ll probably be his first kill, seeing as he’s wanking over me so much.  I need to leave.  I need to leave so this never was and never will be, will stop trying to pass for Pollock whenever I’m around. Flouncing about throwing paint at a canvas once a month. I don’t think he has the balls for murder though. I think he’s just lonely and shit, a pallid pukey beige vanilla masquerading as golden brown. 

 

 

I climb out the window onto the fire escape, light a cigarette and watch leaves fall into the empty lido across the way.  I can see homeless Aldo hassling Joe at the calzone store. It always goes the same.

 

            ‘I am Jesus, I need a calzone, extra chilli, double cheese.’

 

            I watch him gesture, arms flung out on some invisible cross and Joe shaking his head and Aldo shaking his fist and making to lunge at the counter and Joe picking up the machete like he always does. Aldo shuffles backwards out the shop. He waves his arms like stringy featherless wings and flaps his way up the street. The river is grey today. I stir tea with three sugars and reach for a cigarette but the box is empty. Fuck. I take off the silicones. My t-shirt settles baggily back on my own tits. I try to flatten it down and amble slowly down the stairwell. I always sing in here. I sing to the echo. The stair has a great old faded wrought iron banister.  Crumbly cornices wind round like the ever-decreasing spirals I was hoping to escape by coming here.   I thought this would make me well, or something.  I needed something.   I sing Sonic Youth covering The Carpenters to the echo, until the street fades me out and the wind begins to bite. 

 

I watch the walk, stop sign and wait for it to change.  I love the walk, stop sign.  Yellow cabs trail back to back; they’re all playing ‘Buckle Up’ sound bites by chat show stars when you climb in and find no room for your knees.  An old lady with paper skin, china bones and Chanel red lips crosses by feeding her handbag dog a chocolate.  She still holds herself like she did forty years ago on Broadway.  I look at her and a huge longing washes over me, I wish she’d take me home. Feed me apple pie and gin, tell me tales of the good old days.

 

I walk by a poster for the mayor who’s banning sex shops and shit. Jon’s mate sucked him off in a bush last week. The same day Jon bumped into Iggy Pop and Patti Smith in central park. I get two twenty decks of Marlboro lights from the Jewish man on the corner and run back up the stairs. Everyone is asleep when I get in. I take a pillow out to the fire escape and settle down. I light a cigarette and double drag it as a greyhound to Mississippi trundles by. I took that one. Overnight. When I first came here.

 

 

The first time I see Manhattan in all her glitter ball glory I am mesmerised. As I stare from the greyhound, through the dark at this stunning sparkling skyline, the guy in front of me flicks his reading light on. Reflected perfectly in the black window is his face. Long creamy, plastic, veiny layers of acid burn all over his face. Round his black eye sockets. Snaking over right angel cheekbones on an otherwise featureless face.  The scarring is stark and as he turns I see glimpses of what looks to me like bone. 

 

He is the Acid Burn No Face Man. 

 

I try not to stare. 

 

I doze and wake.  At a truck stop six hours later chicks dripping in cheap gold eye me up and down whilst they hit on truckers with mullets.  I’m the only white face on the bus.  I can’t speak Scottish here, these cunts don’t even speak fucking English.  I pigeon some yank together and they nod dumbly at me, wonder where the fuck I’ve landed from.  It’s redneck country.  I am clearly not from round these parts.  I get back on the bus, doze and wake, eat crisps, itch my wrist, take two Lorazapam, a valium, a beta blocker, inhale and exhale. The Greyhound rides through the night and all I see of Pennsylvania is a bus window where I stare endlessly at the Acid Burn No Face Man and he reads and reads and reads.

 

I meet Jon in Ohio after twenty-six hours of weird. At his mates gaff I sleep straightaway. I awake in the falling place and the whir of the air conditioner is intermittently punctuated by gunshot. 

 

Jon makes me Sloppy Joe’s for breakfast. 

 

We sit with his bi-polar Britney horny dad and watch the news story about the woman who stole the baby out the other woman’s womb by kidnapping her and cutting it out. I decide to read instead. Jon doesn’t have many books. I pick up one and it has stories about tribal sexuality, which includes tales of mothers masturbating their children to sleep. 

 

I need a cup of tea. 

 

We have five days rehearsing before New York. I relish being behind a kit instead of in front. I hang out with Jon’s mate Sarky who’ s trying halfheartedly to get off crack. We share panic attack anecdotes. We get high. We get bored. We drive to the mausoleum in his hearse at five am, shoot the bazooka over the massive crypt, light up the night. On the other side of the cemetery a group of junkies respond with a collective ‘ooooh!’ We go to score in some shack that seems to me like the one that fell on the witches head. I get the feeling while we’re sitting there that a whirlwind will come soon and spin us all the fuck away forever.

 

We get high. I shoot a 45. I shoot good. I like it. I want to carry one. There are mullets all over Ohio. Entire families of them. Whenever Jon see’s a mullet baby he says loudly ‘that’s child abuse!’ I feel skinny as fuck in Ohio. In the car park a guy called Oscar asks me to join his cult, I shake my head and he looks sad. The only cult I’d ever be in would be my own. Later we go to Babylon, the only gay bar in Canton where three guys dance by a ghetto blaster and two old ladies in check shirts called Hattie and Mo sit at the bar.  Their chairs creak approval as they soak up my smooth skin and not yet fully broken dreams.  Jon says they don’t get fresh tuna round these parts much.  We have to drive to New York via Toronto. Jon has a basement full of buds we need to drop. He rents this fucking fancy car so they don’t question us on the border. Jon says they don’t hassle the rich over here. He smuggles me in as his mute wife. We do a brief stop at a campus in Toronto to meet some hick he met in Edinburgh. As we drive onto campus there is a poster of a campus rapist on the loose who looks just like the hick.

 

‘No he doesn’t,’

 

‘Yes he does’

 

‘No he doesn’t’

 

‘He fucking does, would you sleep with a rapist?’ I ask

 

Jon doesn’t answer and later I find myself in the hicks bed

 

I try and sleep there while him and Jon are out. His room is on the fourteenth floor of the student halls. I lay, holding my paper bag as the building sways.  I try and not hyperventilate and think inhale, one two three four, exhale.  I will probably never stop feeling this way. 

 

            The next day we leave the hick and do a night in a honeymoon suite as Mr & Mrs at a motel in Montreal where the banister is held together with sellotape. I watch an action hero movie in French whilst Jon snores like a strangled cat and I wonder what you they give you for murder in Montreal.  We drive David Lynch roads through the Catskill Mountains too Woodstock where the green is lush and the lakes sparkle.  We eat in a diner by a car park full of huge trucks.  When we get vexed we fight about shit and then we feel okay.  We nearly got married once.  Jon sent me brochures for Vegas and I thought he should go as Jabba the Hut and I could be Princess Leah.  It’s a shame it never happened, it would have been a beautiful day.  Some idiot band I was in stopped it with fears of law breaking and other such tedium.  And now here I am. Playing drums for his lot. Watching the crowd lap it up when a six foot five Vivienne Leigh forgets her lines, unzips her mini, takes out nine good inches and plays the bass with her cock. Girls are always trying to fuck me after the show. The guys want me to play in there bands. They’re too taken with Jon dragged up, even the straight ones, Jon’s pretty fucking hypnotic. I only did one of the girls so far. After, in Don Hills toilets. She’d been dancing on the bar top, long seamed stockings, asian looking, beautiful tits. Some girls in a forties costumes selling lollipops came in to the loos half way through, I was up against the cistern, legs spread, holding a thick mane of glossy hair in my hand. The forties girl just smiled, fixed her lipstick, watching us in the mirror. She left me a lollipop on the sink, left with a wink. That was the night I ended up go go dancing in IC Guys with Jon and the barman, just the three of us having a lock in, watching Nosferatu, the original, black and white. Every night in IC Guys the guys come out from behind the bar, do their moves on the podium, strip naked and make a bomb.  The cute barman, who both Jon and I are all over, his finale is to run out into the street naked and spin on a chair between two lines of traffic honking like crazy.  The barman tells us he came to New York as a chicken and had the best time of his life. He said he had the whole of Manhattan by the balls. We got in about 6am. I was slipping off five-inch high wedges when the crack-head upstairs started going psycho on the fire escape and I shit myself.  Jon, A la Sluttina for the night, launched out the window, wig squint, tits bouncing, six foot five of dragged up psycho screaming like a fucking banshee and instantly the crackhead disappears. I made us a cup of tea like I always do when we get back from gigs.  Jon washed his face and we went out onto the fire escape.  We lit cigarettes and sat in silence as the sun came up over Manhattan until Jon whispered in my ear, ‘Life is full of beauty and illusion’ kissed my cheek and went to bed. 

 

The fire escape creaks. 

 

I shift on my cushion. 

 

Inside I can hear Jon snore.  The artist is silent.  Maybe that last wank was the one that finished him. I watch a dog walker being hauled down the street by seven assorted mutts.  The river is still grey.  Assorted skyscrapers down the street glint in the sun and on top of them fully grown trees shed there leaves. I watch one yellow golden leaf drift down into the outdoor lido pool full of yellow and gold and ochre.  Maybe I shouldn’t leave. Maybe I should try staying somewhere. The sun glints off the leaf as it spirals in slow motion. I exhale, blow three neat smoke rings and think how this minute, is beautiful. It is not a cure all. It is not all that will ever be. But it is mine and it is something, it’s something I need.

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~ This piece was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 and was filed under Short Story, Writing. You can make comments on it below. ~