Chapter Thirty-Four

The affair had been brief. All of my affairs were that: too short and too free of complications. I could whine and complain and tell you that no one ever really loved me. Aunt Helene loved something that wasn’t there, a dream boy she created in her warped North Shore spinster mind. David Long? I was a body, a hole to be used when he needed it. Love, or anything close, never entered into it.

Aunt Helene threw me out when she discovered the “affair” with David Long. I think that’s when my hatred for her truly took root. She never questioned him, never thought for a second that he might be the one to blame.

I wanted so much for her to hate him, to punish him for what he did to me. But that would have been asking too much; that would have called into question her judgment. She would have looked, in her own mind, like someone who couldn’t be trusted to care for a child.

I wanted her to pay for doubting me. I wanted her to understand what real grief felt like.

Aunt Helene had a weird relationship with Theodore. She cared for him like some secret pet. He always had the best of everything, the best clothes, the best food, and the best toys, in hopes that one day he would be able to muster enough intelligence to play with them. Their relationship was marked by guilt. Aunt Helene never forgave herself for how she felt about him, her repulsion at the drooling, the howling, the absolute lack of a clue as to how “normal” human beings behaved.

Yet in her own way, she loved him. Other than taking care of him, changing his shitty diapers, and seeing that he got some nourishment in him, he was no trouble.

Unlike me. Me, who could never get along with the neighborhood children. Me, with the genius IQ but the refusal to use it for pursuits that would have pleased Aunt Helene. Me, with the cruel streak. How I loved torturing small animals, watching them writhe under the tutelage of my pain, so freely given.

But I’m getting off course here. I started by saying the affair had been brief. This affair, though, was to a very specific end. And a stroke of luck brought it all about.

I met Andy Lockman just a few months after I moved out. I had yet to go online, and my sexual exploits were confined to anonymous encounters, mostly in public places, furtive and quick.

For some reason, Andy took a liking to me. We met at the park that runs along Lake Michigan from Hollywood Beach all the way down to Montrose Harbor, a distance of a little over a mile. There, on the strip of asphalt that separates grass from sand, men cruise. They’ve done so for years. It always seemed ill-suited for that purpose, since there are no woods or bushes or even a suitable outbuilding for these liaisons. Most of the activity there took place in parked cars. I discovered it one day while riding my bike. As I crested a hill, I noticed a parked red Mustang near an overpass. I happened to glance at the car and saw a young Asian guy sitting in the passenger seat.

A crew-cut head was bobbing up and down in his lap.

After that, I tried it myself. At first sitting in my car, waiting, waiting for someone to approach me. I didn’t possess the courage to go up to someone myself and didn’t even know if I could go through with it if someone did pull up alongside me. But, as with all hurdles, this one was eventually crossed, my hormones putting me on automatic pilot, removing my timidity.

And after the first time, as it goes with most things, it got easier.

It was probably a couple of months after my first time that I ran into Andy. I was sitting in my car. It was late summer and the radio was on. What was playing? I wish I could remember, to better set the scene. I had probably brought along the Tribune, but who has time to read in such a situation, when the sound of a car going by forces one to glance up, in an attempt to make contact with the driver?

Such complicated mating dances.

Andy came by just about when I was ready to give up. I had even fingered the keys dangling from the ignition.

He was riding his bike, a black ten-speed. He was just a scrawny kid, tall and lanky, with shoulder-length straight red hair. His face was covered with reddish-brown stubble, this before it was fashionable to have such a look. He wore a pair of cargo shorts and a Cubs T-shirt. He looked to be all of eighteen, just a little younger than I was at the time.

Andy fell for me immediately. Even though all we did in the front seat of my car was trade blowjobs, he insisted on giving me his phone number and somehow managed to coax me into giving him mine.

And then the phone calls started. Andy would call four or five times a day, just to see what I was “up to,” to tell me how much he “cared about” me. He begged me to see him.

And I did. I would come to his Evanston studio at least once a week. I had nothing but hatred and contempt for him. And each time I visited him, I pressed him further into humiliation and degradation. I would call him a pussy boy, a filthy queer and a cock-sucking faggot while he blew me. I raped him as David Long had raped me, savagely and without lubrication. I spanked him so hard, the red welts didn’t leave his ass for days, sometimes deepening into bruises. I dripped candle wax on him. Tied him up. Beat him with my belt. Spit on him. Fisted him while he bit his lip to keep from crying out.

Such dubious pleasures were akin to giving candy to a child. Each step farther down the road of pain and humiliation brought him closer to me.

I learned little about Andy. Conversation was not the kind of intercourse we engaged in, although I suspect Andy would have loved that. What I did learn was that he was an apprentice at a “memorial” company. He was learning the craft of engraving tombstones. He had artistic inclinations; this was an outlet for him. A dream job, if you will.

I carried this knowledge with me for weeks before I realized how I could use it to destroy my aunt. I still burned from her rejection, from her casting me from the only home I had ever known.

Wouldn’t she feel just awful if she discovered that her leaving Teddy in my care had resulted in disaster? Wouldn’t the guilt just eat her alive? Wouldn’t she finally see the error of her ways?

The plan was simple. All it took was some of Andy’s engraving tools and enough of his time to pound a date into a tombstone that already existed. Just four little numbers! I had to laugh at the beauty of the plan; it served the bitch right. I had always thought it morbid, her buying a tombstone for us when we were so young, and also wondered if it weren’t some tangible proof of her wish to be free of us.

Andy was reluctant. Doing such a thing was illegal, not to mention that it would remove him permanently from the track of a budding trade. But our relationship was such that I could have made him do anything, especially if I threatened to withdraw my companionship. Andy was still too green to realize he could have gotten what I gave him in any leather bar. Just drop by the Eagle… And so he did what I asked, under the cover of a cloudy, moonless night.

Theodore’s death was documented, there for Aunt Helene’s weeping eyes.

I loved it.

Little did I know how handy this act would come in later.

And what, you might ask, became of Andy, our budding craftsman?

Let’s just say he disappeared.

I so abhor loose ends. But you knew that, didn’t you?