ADRIAN + BEN

video still: Benjamin Carver

Adrian arrives at the door in uniform.

He always wore his uniform.

Faded black work boots produce white crew socks to mid-shin. Hunter shorts cease skin breathing, four fingers above the knee. A ribbed tank and Jeffrey Dahmer eyeglasses. On occasion, he tucked a red hanky into his right back pocket.

Ben follows Adrian, coming into the apartment complex. Ben didn’t want to be here. He’d rather spend the time on his couch, alone. Perhaps, he might watch The Great British Baking Show. Ben was vegan, but found no fault in the entertainment of dairy and pigeon pies. One evening, after three episodes and a stale joint, Ben’s dog walk pulled him to the all-night donut shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, where he filled his gut with Boston cream and chocolate glaze. Often, he’d wake at 3am, having slept through three episodes, warmed by the baking of bread.

Everything should fuck itself and die, Adrian says by the courtyard pool. Ben spits something about giardia and its associated cramps, also, that one time at the sex club, but falls on deaf ears as Adrian is already through the door at the other side. Ben thinks, another missed joke.

Beyond the sliding screen door, they smoke American Spirits. Ben palms a miniature, plastic bag from his pocket as Adrian confesses he’d gone to Narcotics Anonymous the night before. Ben asks if he shouldn’t, taking a large bump of coke off of his fist. Adrian shows Ben a circular chip he’d gotten from the meeting, his nose moving towards Ben’s fist.

If judgment visited their relationship, it quickly left without much notice. Ben had been in and out of rehabs and group meetings, never taking hold of sober living for more than a year. And that was one time, and one time only. He’d become good at not giving a fuck about his grievances with substances, managing a nasty, little bipolar disorder and frequently drinking wine before 10am. Ben had ten years on Adrian, and seemed equipped with reason, however much he did not succumb to its logic.

Four more bumps, the night becomes reckless. They talk at Olympic speed, quip witticisms and life lessons on tobacco air, caring nothing of tomorrow. They cannot remember when they stopped dreaming. Where once were dreams, now salt stains on cheap sheets.

They know little of living but remain transfixed on the idea that nothing could kill them, even if they, at times, wanted to kill themselves.

Ben speaks of the rash that boiled his skin three days earlier, a side effect from a new medication. Adrian spoke of the chlamydia he’d gotten from a client in Las Vegas, who fisted him for several hours. They sat, talking about everything and nothing at all, as the backyard party lights projected on to their eyes fossilized resin.   

A year ago, Ben picked up Adrian, a hooker he’d met in Portland, with whom he shared fairytales of a great escape from East to West. They believed their stories, packing not much more than a couple suitcases and Ben’s dog into the back seat of a sedan, chasing the sun through the southern most states, stopping here and there to fill up on gas, booze and whatever drugs they could find. They fucked their way through New Orleans, turned tricks in Austin for hotel money, and moved fast through the Hell fire of Phoenix, arriving in Los Angeles on September 11^th.

A year later, they were settled in place but not in spirit. They have each other. There is comfort there. They know each other intimately, though had never shared a bed, other than in Austin, where they’d slept on separate sides. Ben watched Adrian snore for an hour. He loved his breathing.

Five cigarettes later, they plan their deaths, how they would die and who would notice. Neither comes to a conclusion, but for now, the mystery of caring fixes them to a point, a place within each other’s small, magnetic worlds. This, a place they know they can be here for each other. More sniffing powder speeds forth language, imperceptible to human ears. Now, they speak dog language. With each intake and exhalation of air, their molecules fuse. Their hands touch, an accidental brush of the finger, to know that they are fine.

Adrian disappears through the screen door, leaving Ben behind. Ben stares without looking. He cannot see Adrian pull two beers from the fridge before returning, handing him a Miller Light. Ben scoffs. Adrian makes a comment about bitch something or other, but Ben chooses not to listen.

In two weeks, they will have spent an entire year in this city, the first several months spent couch surfing, subletting and relying on the kindness of faeries. Adrian reminds Ben. Ben could care less about a celebration. The idea of people makes him nervous. Instead, he plays the actor-self that’s navigated him through social circles and life, laughing along with Adrian’s insistence they mark their one year.

They smoke a joint, folding Ben’s eyes back into his doughy head, while Adrian tells of an aggressive client. A silver tear rolls from the corner of Adrian’s eye, tracing the red of his nose and then to his lip, where he flicks his fox tongue to catch it. Ben says he no longer makes tears while lifting his pant to his knee, pointing Adrian to the scar he got while falling from a mountain. Adrian bears down but doesn’t touch. They don’t touch. They aren’t there.

Night settles in. Ben yawns and Adrian disappears again, bringing from the apartment a hand mirror and a full bag of coke. Ben suggests it’s not the coke that can pull him from fatigue, but a week, even a lifetime of sleep. The thought of sleeping past 8am made him wince and filled with regret. Adrian can sleep until afternoon. Adrian doesn’t mind. Ben was good at chiding Adrian about sleeping his life away.

Ben fingers his last cigarette from his pack. Adrian’s scared he hasn’t felt shame in the past several weeks, pushing coke into four, uneven lines on the mirror.

As Ben drove away, he imagined Adrian getting fist-fucked. The image of an oil-slick beast, piercing Adrian’s asshole, destructing his insides until nothing remained. He crawled into his bed, pulling the duvet to his neck, grabbing at his cock. As he jerked, he wondered what it would feel like to live on the sun, or rather, what it might feel like for the earth to be on fire. Spitting on his hand, he strokes to destroy himself. In the dark, a vision of his boiling flesh, volcanic blisters beneath the hair on his chest, an army of ants gnawing at his feet, leave him with nowhere to go. Appearing, a population of burning bodies mount in ash piles upon the dark of the room, the blood stiffening his cock, pulling diamonds from closed mines.  

The dog barks. At the door, Adrian wears mezcal cologne. They sit for some time, watching silly YouTube videos, munching on pretzels and hummus, letting themselves be as close as they want to be. They’d known each other before, a time before this, but not here. At a time inaccessible by human memory, they were other people. Roaming nomads, their uniforms were silk shoes to walk on scolding sand, drinking water from tree bark, bathing in fossilized footprints, making maps from squid ink, taking it all in.

The night falls forward, street lamps firing the cracking flesh around their eyes, lighting them from the outside in. Adrian asks Ben how he should die. Ben thinks, a glorious death, a skipping from a European cliff to a sea grave. Adrian laughs. Ben feels proud. Adrian asks Ben of his own demise. Ben sits silently for several moments, thoughtful. Then, as he opens his mouth, a monarch butterfly appears on his tongue, flying forth, nestling against the window light. Adrian says, I see. He says, I see everything, more clearly.

The sun rides the sky from East to West, over and over, again. Days become weeks, months, turning to years and decades. They sit but do not touch. They aren’t those people.

They sit forever.

Eventually, the dog passes. The windows turn opaque. The cockroaches leave for livelier sites. Spiders come, spin them into crinoline hoops, and then, at some point, move on. The flesh of their faces, no longer firm, turning cheekbones to melting wax. They do not move when their marrow becomes visible, when the building itself is razed to the ground, plunging their webbed ash bodies deep down into earth.  Now, it can hardly be remembered when they began to watch each other watching the world around them.

Adrian met Ben who met Adrian in another life. Yet, they were here at one time. Bones made oil slicks on concrete slabs just under the surface, the places where they walked. They were here.  No imprints on a tree to mark their existence, but they were here. And they left, before they knew it.