Cheshire Grins

With his Cheshire Cheshire grin he’d smile. And his pixie bones he’d dance. And his velvet lips he’d kiss. And his quiet eyes he’d talk. With his loose clothes and looser lips and the jacket I’d wrap around his shivering shoulders he’d walk and talk; the angel I was so fond of. With his witty witty mind and his cunning fashion he’d waltz his way into hotels for movie stars and restaurants for the rich and famous. Sunglasses hung over fading cheekbones and degrading skin, methane lacing kerosene veins, Travertine skin pulling tight over glass bones and paper tendons he’d laugh and live and love like the angel he could never be.

“Hey, Gee,” he smiled. “Almost done?” His alabaster fingers drummed the rail. tap. tap. tap. tap. tap. tap. Cognac blood ran rampant though an organ that almost refused to beat, he kept time with the steady heart beneath his ribs. I could see the ebb and flow beneath the slippery slippery skin. It was the picture perfect skin, splashed on bruises so vivid they made the mind whirl. Zorba grey and Temptress red in a pattern so dizzying, Old Rose pink and Mulberry purple so tastefully blended.

Inhale. Exhale. Nicotine clogged pleasure sensors, smoke in wreaths faded quickly into a silent sky. “Ready,” I said and flicked the smoldering cigarette into the puddled street. He hooked an arm through mine, teased that toothy toothy grin back on to that angel face and pulled me up.

“It’s all fun and games from here,” he said in an acid acid voice. Acid grating on chords. Acid probing muscles. Acid surrounding the brain in a most perfect pool. How can I believe the words seeping from those thin thin lips, teeth like piano keys? Like smoke spreading, numb crept though my limbs, my fingers. Façade break breaking, “Smile, my love.” I forced a heroine smile onto lips of ice and headed for the door. Revolving door, neon light, staining my eyes with their incandescence. His charming smile, doped up eyes behind tinted glasses. We approached the desk, asked for a room. They asked for a name. “Cheshire,” he gave them. Gave them his smile, his seductive smirk as they gave him a room key. Exchange of words I didn’t catch, his low low voice making decisions I was incapable of deciphering.

Posh posh carpets of chocolate and silk silk sheets of gold. Felt so good against a fevered body. Cocaine eyes danced around the room, caught the glint of skin as Frank shed my jacket. Eyes caught on the scars. The alabaster alabaster scars. Scars that had fixed wounds. Scars that had healed memories. The scars that held his angelic frame together. A painting with a background of cream skin, an intricate pattern of bone colored scars, and flourished with bruises in every color. And his ribs could be counted if one dared, and his hips traced if you found a way to get near the sweating body. The pulse beneath broken broken skin and the lungs of a dream inhaling the fumes of a monster. Cigarette hung from between thin lips of rose, bent into a smile so familiar. His fingers went to drumming again, his wrist to pounding on the armrest, his muddy eyes lingering on my glisten glistening skin.

The beat of his wrist and the tattoo of his heart tugged at my strings and I ached to have him near me, his phencyclidine skin pressed to mine in the weak embrace only a devil and his angel could create. “Why the scars, Frank?” I asked. His smile turned to stone, his lips shaded ashen as his angel face fell from heaven. “I know the stories, but why don’t the scars fade away?” Heart beat beat faster, the pulse of blood in the veins of his neck echoed for miles, the sweat on his skin grew heavier. His perfect brow furrowed, his angry angry rohypnol eyes narrowed to slits like the marks on his thin skin. Blood from his mouth poured as he retched words into the air, “Fade? You want my life to fade away?” came his angry, biting response. Air turned maroon maroon red with danger signs flashing. Opium anger beat through flesh, bones bit through skin as he tensed and stood. So seductive as he yelled, as his yellowed fingers scratched at my clothes, my neck.

Pant panting he forced his weakened body upon mine and sank his stained teeth into my pallid skin. My heart shattered under his feather light weight, veins tore under nails like claws from a monster. And hatred seeped out his pores and his mouth and his fingers as he screamed at me and tore at me and collapsed against me. And the blood from my skin mixed with the crimson crimson blood from his eyes as he cried tears from the heart. And my sweat mixed with his. The artificial light from the fan flashed on the walls and the horns of the cars on the street blared up the twenty-two floors and the rain on the window drummed into his heart until the heart almost stopped beating and the blood almost stopped flowing.

And the bones, God the bones. I could feel everyone of them. The myriad of birdlike bones that threatened a breaking point was looming. So thin his skin, so inchoately formed. Bones so loosely held together, yet so savagely holding me away. Couldn’t break my dear, couldn’t restrain him for risk of crushing a bone, of breaking a heart. His bones were acerbic acerbic as hand met heavy heart and seething fingers met sunken eyes. He was tearing tearing, trying so hard, so hard. And I let him. Let him wreak his havoc on my body, my ravaged body. It was easy to let his weight fall on me like the physical weight of the world and his dreams and my dreams and my memories and his and ours. It was easy to just sit and listen to the unsaid words, the thoughts that never made it past lips so dry, up a throat so weak. But I could hear them bouncing in his head, vibrating through the limbs, invading the bones, filling the lungs with screams he was too weak to keep inside but too strong to let out.

Lungs filled with hate. Eyes with charcoal charcoal sadness. Muscles with the heat of anger. Mind filled with madness as definite as something in a storybook. Cells filled with watery clarity, obeying without hesitation but holding on so as to not let go. And his mouth filled with my skin was hurting. And his skin was blazing. And his body aching. And his heart filled with love, but locked. Drink me, drink me, it called, but the brain, the lungs, the mouth, the eyes, the limbs couldn’t see it. Like tubes disconnected. Like a tree without roots. Or a bird without a head Crazed crazed madness. But I was free, held down only by his body. Bound down on by his weight, his weighty pain.

There was a hiccough in his breathing, a ragged pause on the inhale that sounded so familiar in my ear I’d have sworn his feverish body and mine were one. His eyes shuddered and rolled, his grip weakened and failed, his body set in on itself with a mission of destruction. Morphine cells waged war inside his body and the temperature raced and the brain quit and he fainted but his pulse rocketed and his breathing stopped. His body was weight in my arms that I couldn’t handle and the scars on his skin were so ugly in their perfect perfection that I couldn’t look. When I heard the rattle of a heart in a ribcage so fatal, eyes squeezed shut. Convulsions were coming, they always did at this point in the game. His eyes rolled back into his head and his body was sent to shivers and tremors that shook every fiber from his toe to the sweat-plastered hair on his head.

I watched the clock. Counted the ticking as the hands swept the face. Ten past. Twenty and he hadn’t stopped. Ten more and I’d have to call them. Count it down, pray it’ll stop. Down to nine. Sweat intensified, a medical mystery before my very eyes. Seven more minutes, hold him closer and maybe you’ll ease the pain. Five minutes until the fingers of a broken hand will call the people no one wants to see. Three minutes and the men in white coats will bust down the door and pry him from your arms.

Two.

One.

Fingers slipping over a plastic plastic phone. Trying hard to pull the numbers from somewhere inside. Come on, it’s only three numbers. His time was up, when the clock hit zero he’d been shaking too long and fevered too high. Mumble words, hope they understand. Give them his number, the number on the silver on his wrist. Don’t even need to look anymore, the numbers so elegantly engraved in a mind so horrifyingly willing. Pin his wrists down so he can’t hurt himself, not that he hasn’t already. Pressed against thin thin skin. Someone’s arms on mine, someone’s voice in my ear asking questions without answers. Someone else phoning for a room to be readied. Another searching the bags we didn’t have for the meds we never carried.

They used a systematic and oh so familiar fashion of getting him onto the gurney, white sheets pulled tight. Mask against his face, chain his arms to the bed. Someone led me by the hand down the hall after the team of paramedics, out the front doors, blistering winds biting at heated cheeks. Into the back of an ambulance; I almost knew the routine by heart. They’d ask vital questions that I didn’t know the answer to, even if their words could penetrate the fog over my brain. My eyes trained on his face, his fluttering pale pale eyelids, his shuddering yellow yellow skin, heaving with the effort it took to draw breath into his lungs.

Every bump made him shake, every noise sent ripples through his body as they administered meds through holes in his veins. Time slowed, almost stopped, sirens grew louder, almost deafening, feelings heightened, almost unbearable, until they were rushing his stretcher down a long hallway out of view. I crumpled to the hard hard ground, face in hands, the newest wave of tears leaking out. And it was my fault. Maybe I waited too long this time, maybe that was the last embrace we’d share. I’d miss his Cheshire Cheshire grin and pixie bones, velvet lips and quiet eyes. I’d miss the way he’d smile and talk and grin from ear to ear just from looking at me. I’d miss the way he was always tapping on something, calming the erratic rhythm of his throb throbbing heart. Fuck, I’d even miss the scars that held his angel life together, the tears that meant he was healing on the inside.

The minutes twisted and ran together in a mess of blood and fury and pulling at my hair. The nurses behind the desk checked on me periodically, told me words meant to comfort me as I transmuted into my angel’s monster on the floor of their hospital lobby. The energy seeped from my cells until I lay sprawled across the floor, looking for patterns in the dimples of the tiled ceiling. The swinging doors opened and the dark haired, good natured doctor of my nightmares came to greet me, complete with stethoscope and clipboard. He looked over his glasses at me, pen tapping rapidly at his side, so reminiscent of my lover. I looked up at him, a perfect halo of light framing his head as he looked down at me. He extended a hand which I grabbed, my dirty fingernails scraping his skin as I struggled to stand on cocaine cocaine imbalanced feet.

“Mr. Way,” he started. I wanted to shake him, tear that perfectly stone face to shreds, rip at that hair until he felt the pain I did. “Frank’s okay. He’s asking to see you.” His thin lips parted as he looked at me, concerned, perhaps, for my mental health. He reached out to steady me with a calm calm arm on my shoulder. And suddenly I didn’t want to hurt him. But I didn’t want to see my angel, either. How could that perfect little kid want me, the monster, the devil, who fed him the lies he absorbed like a sponge? I told myself to breathe, told my exhausted lungs to open and close. “Room 402.”

I don’t remember getting there, but I ended up at his door, my steel steel fingers paused on the silver knob. I pushed open the door, saw my angel sitting on the side of the bed, head down, hands gripping the sheets. I couldn’t see his face, and he couldn’t see the way my lips were twisted into a sick sick grimace. “Love,” I tried to find words and failed. I walked around the bed, let the door sweep shut behind me. Without sharing a glance, I sat next to him on the bed. The mattress dipped under my weight as I clasped my hands together and rested my elbows on my knees.

He raised his head, his empty empty gaze resting on the wall in front of us. My head followed until we were both staring at the gray plaster. I felt the quiver of his body as his heart beat under diseased skin, as his lungs drew in and blew out in shallow breaths.

“Doctor says it’s spreading.” His cashmere cashmere voice rasped from between parched lips and a pinched tongue. “He needs to take immediate action, says it’s gonna take surgery and fast if I’m gonna…” He drew in a deep breath, I could hear the tears threading his voice. “If I’m going to make it.”

I couldn’t form words; one would think I was the sick one here, not him. Not my angel. Not my lover and sinner. Not the saint I held closest to my heart. And he was the strong one, but always holding on to his devil, his monster, the very soul who destroyed him from the inside out. The light above our heads flickered and died, leaving us in shadows staring at a wall that might as well have been staring back.

“Are you scared?”

Uncomfortable pause.

“Are you?” He countered.

Collapsing against me as dry coughs tore at his lungs, wet tears cleaned the dirt and sweat from his face. For the first time, he let his guard down, let the monster in. I held him, cradled his weak weak body and rocked him. I held his ravaged body closer than ever before, in an embrace that meant more than ever before. In that moment, I knew my angel was figuring out wings aren’t always mean for flying, tears aren’t always meant for crying, blood’s not always meant for bleeding, and life is only meant for loving. But it was okay, because my angel was human. And I knew it. And he knew it. Because Cheshire Cheshire grins and godly godly sins never fade.