Precious Machines

I honestly don’t know what he does when he leaves me like this, alone in his decaying apartment, waiting for the walls to just cave in on me, crush me, eat me alive like the bone and formaldehyde corpse that I wish I was, but somehow I think that he probably does out there exactly what he does here- the boys, the drugs, the endless sketchbooks filled with tortured scrawls, the vodka, whiskey, beer, whatever. No matter how hard I try, I can’t picture Gerard Way having any semblance of a normal life. No job; obviously no legitimate job… The fucking utility bills are piling up on top of the leaning bookcase, and they already shut the lights off last month, when we crawled and fucked in the dark like nocturnal animals for three weeks, just as a warning. Friends… can a man like him have friends? Maybe the other perverts claw and worm and claw their slimy way out of the city for goddamn fucking coffees. Maybe there are other bastards just like him. Other boys- caught. Just like me.

Whores, toys, mannequins, stapled to dirty mattresses, drowning in the overpowering smell of stale sex and sweat just like I am; like all the boys before me…

All his precious little machines.

The ratty comforter, stained with blood and vomit, that’s lying over my bare legs is trapping me; winding me into this awful, sinful bed like spider thread, and I kick my feet uselessly a couple times, trying to disentangle them from the fabric of the dirty sheets, before giving up. Letting my head slump to one side, my blurry eyes slowly focusing on the objects resting along the edge of the small night table shoved up on one side of the mattress. There’s a broken alarm clock, incorrectly blinking 12:00 A.M. in dim red letters like the detonation warning on a bomb, the smashed fragments of a grey ceramic vase, and what looks like a yellowing pill bottle, the label long worn off.

Instantly gripped by exhilaration and fear, I stare for one awful moment, heart twitching anxiously in my throat as I try to picture his cold eyes and pale face twisting with angry shock when he finally decides to come back; when he walks in, tossing his shit on the floor, and finds Frank Iero, his latest lay, lying naked and motionless on the bed with his still heart lodged immovably in his trachea, eye sockets rotting and dead, writhing white maggots eating a gaping hole in his hollow chest; the whole room whispering This is what you did.

And I know I’ve found the way out of his fucking Black Widow web.

Clenching my teeth tightly, lips peeling back until I’m grinning like a bleached skeleton already, I raise one aching arm above my head, hand hitting the headboard of the bed with a muted thud that makes the skin tingle, and let it flop sideways onto the night table. Melodramatically, I moan out loud, the sound making even the venomous walls shiver in familiar disgust, and curl my stiff fingers around the pill bottle, pulling it back towards me with painfully slow motions.

The cap is already missing, and I tilt the mouth of the container towards me, the pace of my heartbeat beginning to quicken further.

I don’t recognize the contents; a whole fucking rainbow of lividly-colored pills; blue oblongs, round white saucers, bright shiny-coated red buttons that could be plastic or candy as they glint in the dim room.

But I take them all anyway.

Suddenly filled with uncontrolled urgency, I just shovel the contents of the bottle into my dry mouth in messy handfuls, scattering pills across the sex-laced sheets as I struggle to force down as many as I can, barely aware of what I’m doing any longer. I know I’m swallowing some, retching and choking as they hit the back of my throat and stick uncomfortably in my trachea, and I’m chewing too, letting my molars grind the pills into chalky white dust that mixes with my saliva and coats my teeth with bitter, corrosive paste; chemicals and medicine and mothballs and the taste of his deceitful lips on mine all in one.

Coughing miserably, tears burning behind my dead eyes as sticky spit trickles down my chin, I throw the empty pill bottle as hard as I can across the room, watching it impact the opposite wall and leave a patch of stony grey in the flaking yellow paint, then drop like a rock, like the bottom of my stomach falling out, hit the hardwood, and roll to rest on its side on the cluttered floor.

Finally, inches away from escape, I wait just to choke and die.

The lights from cars passing outside dance dully across the ceiling, and after a while, as the condors gather above me and start to circle with bloodstained beaks hanging open wide, the room begins to spin, very slowly at first, then almost imperceptibly beginning to pick up speed like a rusty carnival carousel ride. The venomous walls streak by in a blur of sickening sewer yellow, hissing like cobras, and my breathing quickens a little with fright. Fingers wound into the material of the filthy sheets, I let my eyelids start to slip closed, swallowing hard against the bitter taste of crushed pills that is still rising up into my throat, squeezing past the struggling muscle of my heart and coating my tongue.

Bella fucking Muerte.

Death rides a fucking horse.

And then without warning, the whole hideous carousel grinds to a sudden, screeching halt, whiplashing my heart and a wave of hot acidic vomit all the way up into my mouth again, and as my hands start to shake violently against the stained sheets, I know that now, I’m fucked.

Because Gerard Way is back, too soon, for his precious fucking Frankie.

He walks into the polluted room, all liquor and cigarette smoke, without even looking at me, boots making ominous, muffled thuds on the floor as he crosses past the bookshelf, kicking aside a crumpled pair of jeans and dropping a battered grey backpack in their place. He’s dressed all in black like usual, and his eyes are burning holes in his equally colorless face as he finally turns his head in my direction.

“Frank?”

I don’t move; I don’t even fucking twitch, and his nightmare eyes narrow.

“You give me the fucking creeps, Frank,” he says harshly, and I just watch numbly through flickering, half-closed eyes as he takes his t-shirt off, revealing familiar smooth skin that glints unnaturally pale in the yellowish light of the bedroom, as though it’s been replaced by a full, porcelain moon.

Sweet fucking vampirous.

I can’t answer his sneering observation, throat coated painfully with cotton balls and steel wool, and I just stare fixatedly at his hands, which are unfastening his silver-buckled belt so fast that my increasingly lethargic eyes can barely follow all of his motions.

And as I’m sinking in deeper with every hoarse breath, he suddenly bares his pointy, wolfish teeth and throws himself at the mattress so fast that for a minute I think he’s going for the exposed flesh of my throat. I recoil instinctively backwards, pounding skull slamming into the headboard, but belatedly.

“God; fucking relax,” he snaps, already climbing onto my twitching skeleton, leaving only two layers separating our bodies- the thin sheet, and his pants.

I’m not fucking relaxing; shaking uncontrollably with surprise and fear while he efficiently straddles my thighs, the rough black denim of his jeans pressing into the sheet so that it scrapes painfully against my bare skin as he rocks slightly back and forth, exhaling, waiting for me to do something. So, reacting one-hundred-fucking-percent robotically, like the perfect little sex machine I am, I wait until he leans forward and press my trembling lips to his in a toothy, raw kiss, wondering if he’ll even taste the pills through the vinegar-and-vodka sting of his own mouth. His cold hands run up my sides, making me moan thickly and start to bring my own hands to his strong shoulders, but just as a spark of pleasure shoots up my spine from the friction that the movement of his lower body is creating, sudden chills paralyze me from the inside out and I start choking loudly, raucously like the cawing of a crow, bitter white vomit shooting into my throat and spilling instantly over my lips.

Cursing, Gerard jerks back, his eyes suddenly pitiless and hard with cruel disgust. It’s not like he hasn’t fucked me weak and sick and puking before, but I think that this time, he knows something is different.

Something is wrong.

“What the fuck is with you?” he spits angrily. “For fuck’s sake-” And then he stops. Vaguely, I watch his bony fingers slowly uncurl from the fabric of the sheets before he jerks them back sharply, sending all of the pills I spilled earlier flying off the mattress; skittering across the wood of the floor with a noisy rattling sound, like hail or scattering gravel.

He stares, and I gasp helplessly because I can’t sit up with his crushing weight on my hips, squirming feverishly underneath him as I try desperately to remember how to breathe, drowning in my own vomit and imagining that this is it, this is fucking anaphylactic shock and I’m going under for good.

“Holy shit,” he swears loudly, staring wide-eyed at me as he pushes himself off my shuddering body and gets unsteadily up from the bed to take two shaky steps back. His foot hits the empty pill bottle, and he looks down, face going so still I think he might not be breathing either. After a static moment, he bends and picks it up, straightening; slowly raising his head to look at me again.

“Frank?” he snarls, just one questioning tremor in his rough voice, shaking the container stupidly in the air. “Frank, you fucking didn’t.”