Dead Europe Page 18

  His apartment was on the top floor. Two plain white double doors opened up to a room that looked over the river and city. Evening was falling and I gasped at the sight of the castle on the hill opposite silhouetted against the smoky orange sky. Sal Mineo’s bed, his stereo, his television and his bookcases were crammed tight against the window. A small kitchen area was on the right. He had turned half of it into a darkroom. The bathroom extended beyond it. To our right was a small room, a cavity, in which I spied a single mattress on the floor. I walked towards it.

  Sal Mineo stopped me and pointed to the double bed flush against the long scenic window.

  —No, mate. You sleep here.

  That was Sal Mineo. Generous. I shook my head.

  —Nah, I’ll sleep in there.

  —Fuck you, Isaac. Sal Mineo put a cigarette to his mouth. I have this bloody view every night. You’re sleeping here. He threw my pack on the double bed, clicked on a switch to the stereo and Run DMC’s ‘It’s Tricky’ came thundering out of the speakers. Shower, Sal Mineo yelled at me. Then I’ll show you Praga.

  He took me to a small pub on the other side of the King Charles Bridge, a basement club filled with assorted punks, hippies and ravers, and he ordered me absinthe. By the second swig I was high. At some point he shoved a small vial of white powder under my nose.

  —Slowly, slowly, he urged me, the shit they put in their speed in the Eastern Bloc can fry your brains.

  I took a small dash of powder and sniffed. Not the Eastern Bloc, I called out to him, the Eastern Bloc doesn’t exist anymore. This is all Europe. I stretched out my hands.

  Yeah, yeah, nodded Sal Mineo, pocketing the vial and watching a young woman twist her body to the slushy music that sounded frighteningly close to Supertramp.

  —Is that Supertramp?

  —What I tell you? It’s still the fucking Eastern Bloc.

  The music segued into techno. I sat back, relieved. That’s better, I said. Sal Mineo was laughing. You reckon? I watched him make his way to the bar, pushing aside bodies, and ordering us another round of the luscious jade liquid.

  Sal Mineo was approaching forty and it showed. He had a belly now. When he was a young man, I used to laugh at his fastidious waxing: now thick swells of black hair poked out from beneath the yellow singlet covering his back. The stubble on his face was shaded with grey. I was thankful that he had not once asked me whether I was hungry; he’d just assumed that all I needed was grog and drugs. I had not been able to eat for what seemed like days. There was hunger—a roaring, voracious hunger that screamed through my body—but it seemed no food could satisfy it and I could hardly keep anything down. I wanted to be with Sal Mineo, out of it, in a city of my dreams. He thrust another absinthe on me and I gulped it down gratefully. Maybe drugs and alcohol could kill my insistent hunger. Let’s go, he motioned, and finished his drink.

  I remember little of the night. The stars in the dense sky seemed to be close to my face as we stumbled across the bridge. We walked in and out of basement clubs. I remember laughing hysterically, sitting lengthwise across a pink plastic sofa in a club decked out in futuristic geometric shapes. The lithe waitress at the bar was enclosed in a silver space suit. Sal Mineo looked over at her and groaned. You have no fucking idea, do you? he yelled out in the basement club. You’re all rank amateurs. The bored adolescents, sipping champagne from tall thin flutes, ignored him. Sal Mineo took a seat across from me, on a small stool covered in aluminium foil. He looked bored and uncomfortable. Above him hung a small painting of three cubist men, staring out at the club below. I remember I crawled to the painting and stared up at it. A small white sticker beneath the painting gave the title. 3 Cizinec.

  I pointed to it and turned to Sal Mineo.

  —What’s that mean?

  The three men were rotund and surly, as if they had been forced against their will to sit for the artist. Sal Mineo looked up at it.

  —What’s it mean?

  He shook his head.

  —I’ve got no fucking idea.

  —Come on, I insisted, you’ve been here for five years. You must know.

  —I don’t speak fucking Czech.

  I was appalled. He did not notice. Instead he sat upright on the stool and was looking out into the space. I fell across a young man and spilt his champagne. He cursed me. I grabbed his arm and pointed at the painting. What’s it mean? He shook himself off me and turned away. I grabbed his arm again. What’s it mean?

  He turned his eyes to me for the first time. I was an insect. I let go of his hand.

  —Three Niggers, he said calmly, his English perfect. It is a painting of three niggers.

  Sal Mineo came up beside me, and pulled me up. We walked out of the club. The morning air was cold and I was shivering. That was the last thing I remembered and then I awoke in a bed, with the sun streaming through the window and slamming into my eyes, and a kettle whistling on the stove. A young boy, naked except for his tight white briefs, was standing over me.

  —Café?

  I nodded.

  The boy brought a tray over to the bed, on it a small cup of thick black coffee, two dry biscuits and a large mug filled with pulpy orange juice. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked up and down my exposed body. I slid the sheet to my chest.

  Sal Mineo roared from the next room.

  —Milos, where’s my bloody coffee?

  The boy raised his eyebrows, smiled at me, and went back to the alcove. I looked into the spare room and caught a glimpse of Sal Mineo’s big hairy arse rising to greet the morning. The boy’s own pert, pimply arse wobbled as he crossed the room, and even with a hangover I felt my cock make an involuntary jump. Sal Mineo stumbled into the room, pulling on a pair of boxer shorts. Lenin’s profile stretched across the bumpy contours of his crotch. The boy followed, a coffee mug in his hand.

  —How are you?

  I closed my eyes and did not answer my friend. Sal Mineo headed to the kitchen, started banging plates and cutlery, and I swigged at my orange juice. It tasted poisonous but I forced myself to drink. Milos had sat down next to me again, his legs crossed. Sal Mineo brought two tumblers filled with whisky to the bed. He tipped one into the mug the boy was holding and he handed the second one to me. I groaned.

  —I can’t.

  —Bullshit. Best thing for a hangover. Anyway, you fuck, you’re on holiday. I have to work. Sal Mineo placed the mug on the window sill and got into bed next to me. He pulled my arm under his neck and sank his head into my chest. We lay in silence for a moment and then Milos switched on the radio.

  —Turn that fucking Eurotrash shit off. Milos scowled but obeyed. He dropped back on the bed and smiled at me. His shaggy mop of dirty blond hair, mussed up and stiff from sleep, half-hid his round blue eyes. He was short, not pretty—his features were awkward, his eyes too large, his mouth too small—but I wanted to reach out and touch his slender neck, softly pinch the layers of pubescent fat that creased around his belly. Beside me, Sal Mineo had started snoring. On hearing him, Milos pushed me over, jumped under the sheet and lay down next to me.

  —Good café? His accent was rough and hesitant.

  —Very good, thank you.

  —You no sugar? You should sugar. No good when no sugar.

  —I prefer it like this.

  Sal Mineo had stopped snoring. I could tell he was listening. Milos’ hand had found my thigh. I sipped on my whisky and pushed his hand away.

  —You look very nice.

  Sal Mineo laughed. He rose on his elbow and looked across at the boy. His hooded eyes were half-awake and his breath stank of alcohol, his body of dry sweat and sex.

  —Milos, the dirty little fag, he wants to have sex with you.

  —You make me shamed, scowled the boy, and he turned his back to both of us. I too was embarrassed. All I wished to do was slip into the shower but I did not want Milos to see my nakedness. I was furious at Sal Mineo.

  —I have to shower. I stumbled across Milos, fell off the bed, and hea
ded for the kitchen. I could feel both pairs of eyes bore into my backside.

  —No hot water.

  —Well, turn on the thermostat for him, ordered Sal Mineo.

  —Where is it? I can do it myself. But Milos had obediently risen and was making his way to the bathroom. I stood in the middle of the room, naked, my hands covering my crotch as Milos slid past me.

  —It’ll take a while to heat up, yawned Sal Mineo. He threw me my underwear and t-shirt.

  —Who is he?

  —Milos?

  —Yes. Who is he?

  —Don’t you like him?

  —How old is he?

  Sal Mineo grimaced, got up from bed, sat on the sill and lit himself a cigarette. He took a swig of whisky and looked down at Prague below.

  —Relax, he said, turning back to me, he’s seventeen.

  —Is that legal?

  —Fuck off. Sal Mineo threw the cigarette packet at me. I lit one and the first rush of smoke banged harshly against my forehead.

  —And for your information, yes it is legal. He turned back to look at the city on the river. They like whoring them young here in the Czech Republic. It’s another of their hard-won freedoms.

  I sat down next to him.

  —Are you lovers?

  —For Christ’s sake, Isaac, he’s seventeen. I’m as old as his fucking father. We’ve fucked. Don’t you remember, we met up with him in the city last night? His boyfriend chucked him out. He needed a place to stay.

  I shook my head.

  —You remember you fucked him, don’t you?

  I stared into Sal Mineo’s cold green eyes. He burst out laughing.

  —Relax, Tiger. You were too far gone to fuck anyone or anything last night. He slapped my shoulder and jumped off the sill. Don’t worry about little Milos, that cunt knows how to look after himself.

  He found his jeans, which had been thrown over the books and camera equipment on the floor, and he pulled a card from the trouser pocket. He handed it to me.

  —That’s where I’m working. Meet me at three, alright? I’ll show you where my art has taken me.

  —Do you want the first shower?

  Sal Mineo shook his head.

  —That’s right, you’re from the rich New World. No, mate, we don’t shower every day here in the Wild East.

  The barb stung.

  —I’ve just come from Greece, remember.

  —Sure, agreed Sal Mineo, pulling a t-shirt over his belly, kicking into his jeans. But you’re not Greek, are you, you’re a fucking Aussie. Go and have your precious shower.

  On leaving for Prague, Sal Mineo had bought himself a cowboy hat. I’m off to the Wild East, he had claimed. I was too much my father’s son not to have been dismayed at his merciless enthusiasm to exploit the newly created capitalist states. He laughed at my concerns, and one evening he and Colin had almost come to blows. It was not that Sal Mineo was in any way a propagandist for the free market: he had an unrelenting cynicism about the rhetoric of global democratic peace. But he was keen to mine the opportunity of the collapse of communism, an opportunity he believed was sanctioned by the Eastern Europeans themselves. He had given up fulltime work to pursue his passion for photography and it had cost him the savings of seven years to put himself through college. At the end of the course he found himself working late shifts in a bar and spending the days touting his folio from gallery to gallery.

  His work was the one thing Sal Mineo was not cynical about. His work was, I believed, sublime. He photographed the men with whom he had worked, the men with whom he had gone to school, the men he had known all his life. His large black and white prints of working men were distinguished by the unforced freedom of his camera to witness intimate moments of tenderness, whether it be a man laughing at a friend’s joke, a youth calling out to his mate through the passenger window to pick up a packet of fags at a servo, or a young boy watching his uncle clean the rusty bumper of a grand 1968 Valiant charger. Colin and I had one of Sal Mineo’s photographs hanging above our bed. A group of men watching the final moments of a tense amateur football game. Sal Mineo had waited patiently for light to fall gracefully across a man’s rough pockmarked face; he searched out the contrast between the rough creases and the stiff smooth planes of the overalls covering a tight chest.

  But no gallery wanted his work. Too prosaic, he was told. They disliked his naturalism, they wanted him to make a fetish of his subjects. This was precisely what Sal Mineo refused to do. His subject was friendship, not sexuality, and his passion was for recording beauty, not defining it. Five months after his move overseas, a much-celebrated exhibition travelled to Australia from Britain, the centrepiece of it being a series of massively enlarged polaroids which portrayed men living on a Manchester council estate. I thought the British photographer’s work was good, but not anywhere as beautiful—by which I also mean honest—as Sal Mineo’s. For the next year after the British exhibition, the Melbourne galleries went mad for realism. By then Sal Mineo was already in Prague.

  I barely put my head under the shower. I switched off the thermostat and dried myself and dressed in the darkroom. I looked over the photographs that Sal Mineo was working on. He had been taking pictures of surly young men with cracked teeth, broken noses and pallid, acned skin. The framing of each photo was simple and identical. The subject would face the camera, the shot would be a close-up from the neck up, the lighting of such a harshness that every blemish and tone was visible. As was every aspect of their beauty. A skinny boy’s dark long lashes, the glint of mischief in a young man’s sleepy eyes. I recognised Milos, the too-big ears, the crooked nose. But Sal Mineo had also captured a feature I had failed to notice: the boy’s firm taut neck, a man’s neck. I got dressed and fought off envy.

  I was also fighting off my hunger. It was as if the hangover from last night’s debauchery had settled not in my head but in my stomach. I was scared that my bowels would loosen, but my attempts to shit out the pain had no effect. There was nothing inside me. I was ravenous, but I could not even contemplate food. The thought brought bile to my throat.

  Milos was lying on the bed, the sheet covering the lower part of his body. He was masturbating. He looked over at me, his hidden hand vigorously jerking the sheet. With his free hand he pulled away the coverings. He gestured for me to join him. In the bright morning light I could see the sweat sparkling on the golden down of his belly. I turned, my cock hard against denim, and noisily began brewing more coffee. Liquid. If I couldn’t have food, I’d have liquid. Drugs I could keep down. I heard him orgasm.

  —You not like Milos?

  I handed him a coffee.

  —I like you.

  He had not bothered to wipe the semen that had fallen on his stomach, his chest and neck. Instead he kept clenching and unclenching his fist.

  —You’re very young, I continued, offering what I assumed was a valid explanation for my reticence. But on hearing me answer Milos poked out his tongue angrily. He got dressed without looking at me. I was relieved. I wanted him out of the apartment, I was craving to be alone. I was sure that if he stayed for much longer I would turn him on his stomach, grab his boyish shoulders, and fuck him. I badly wanted to fuck him. He left and slammed the door.

  I lay on the bed, I unzipped, my cock was rock hard. When I closed my eyes I saw myself ripping into his taut, sweet buttocks, jamming into him. I could hear his pained squeals and groans. I worked mechanically at my cock, thinking it had been so long since I had experienced sensual pleasure that I would come instantly. But I could not climax. I thought of the boy and I pushed my nose into the pillowcase. I smelt his youthful pungent sweat, the bitterness of semen. I closed my eyes and now I was fucking him harder, he was bleeding. And as I imagined blood I felt waves of excitement and my thrashings became delirious as I imagined his face, bloodied and bruised. I could lick the blood, taste the blood, eat the blood, and as I imagined this, I roared out my orgasm. I shuddered and a thought sprang to mind, just a thought but it had the sur
ety and inevitability of truth. Milos was soon to die.

  I walked as fast and as far as I could to escape the tourists, to escape Milos. The smell of him, the flesh of him, the future of him. I thought of Colin, and I was ashamed. I thought of Colin and I pictured him smiling his rueful shaggy grin, smiling at my attempt to put distance between myself and the American college students with their perfect teeth, their inviolate enthusiasm, their insistent loud voices and gawky movements which seemed to say to all of us, myself included, all of us who were not American, that they could take up space, they could walk these streets freely, for they were freedom, were they not? The Stars and Stripes were all over Prague. They flew from backpacks and from the fast-food cafeterias that fed the tourist hordes. The ubiquity of the Stars and Stripes was a dare, a defiant fuck-you to the rest of the world. I trekked and trekked, fast and confident, like an American. I walked past the casinos and porn shops, past the fast food stalls and the old men selling sausages. I trekked past the gothic bulk of the museum. I walked until the beautiful medieval buildings gave way to draughty, corroded apartment buildings. Czech graffiti was sprayed against the crumbling walls. A three-word English phrase in bold, black letters: Yankee Go Home. A cool wind blew garbage through the bleak streets where street peddlers were selling lottery tickets. I came to a bend in the river, I took a deep breath, wiped sweat from my forehead and stopped.

  The river water was turd-brown. Across on the other bank grey laundry fluttered on the narrow balconies. Swastikas, the Anarchist symbol, the peace symbol and the moon and crescent were scrawled across the buildings in bold black or red strokes. Hip-hop tags exploded across the walls in glorious colour. A young woman in a hijab wheeled a pram down a gravel track and disappeared around the bend. A young dark-skinned man passed something into the palm of a thin blond boy and I thought I saw money exchanged. They glanced towards me but I did not exist. I was only a tourist. I walked further towards the bank. Plastic bags and broken toys swirled in the water. Further downriver I saw the woman kneeling at the pram’s side. She was carefully arranging the long black sleeve of her dress to fall away from her exposed arm. She shook, stirred, then carefully lifted herself to her feet and continued wheeling her child. She threw an object into the dark waters. I walked alongside the river and saw a syringe float past.