1
I had my first real orgasm while thinking about Rocco Ponti.
Not unusual, I guess. Rocco’s picture hangs pride of place in enough teenage bedrooms for him to have been the recipient of hundreds, if not thousands, of such tributes. Especially if it’s that one shot from the early days, the one where all the others are posing like their lives depend on it, but Rocco is looking off to the side as if something has caught his attention. So easy to pretend that you were the person at the side of the photograph. Even in those days I think he knew the price of fame, that people were going to scrawl their fantasies all over him in a way that had nothing to do with the real Rocco. And he wasn’t completely averse to taking advantage of that. “Talent is one thing,” he said, after Matt laughed at him for turning into a gym bunny. “But you’re kidding yourself if you don’t recognize that a lot of this game is also about selling your ass.”
“Right. The whole package,” said my brother, and stuck a flashlight down his pants to make the point. He’d been a fun drunk, back in the day.
I can remember the exact moment when it stopped being fun. It was the Christmas just gone, with Matt mixing his customary Christmas morning Bloody Marys. Only this time there was barely enough tomato juice to color the spirit, let alone flavor it. It’s too much vodka, I said, and he laughed and called me a pussy. Then he downed two of the things over breakfast and added a good slug of amaretto to his coffee.
He’d brought a case of champagne for lunch, because he could, and then afterwards – as a digestive, he said – he cracked open a bottle of Dad’s favorite, a twelve year old Tullamore Dew.
“Slow down,” I said, for the fifth time that day, but Matt hooked an arm around my neck, planted a whiskied kiss on my ear and slurred that if an Irishman couldn’t get a little bit lit on Christmas then when could he?
That Christmas Rocco had been in New Mexico, sitting around talking about his feelings and hoping the crisp night desert skies would lend their same perfect clarity to his mind. The poisons had seeped out of his system by then, but the thought of him made me realize that we were heading for a repeat of the same chapter. Only this time it would be Matt’s turn.
It’s April, and I’m waiting for Rocco in the rain, praying he makes it off the plane alone. When I spot him from a distance my heart flips over. His head is down, but bare. He’s had enough years of this to know that baseball cap and shades at an airport are for Real Housewives and peripheral Kardashians. People who are trying to attract the paparazzo’s attention while pretending they aren’t. Real stars put their heads down and walk fast.
He’s wearing a navy peacoat and a thick beige scarf, which cover all his trademark tattoos, the Joshua trees and desert roads and the tumbleweed on his shoulder. Can’t do much about the hair, but even from twenty feet away I can see that the last six months have widened the white streaks that stand out so bright against the black. His mother was bone white by her early forties, and he was finding silver hairs before he’d even left his teens.
He makes it to the barrier unmolested. Perhaps there was bigger game for the paparazzi back in LA. Some teenage pop star in the throes of a public meltdown, or another studio mogul accused of being a huge, handsy creep. Or maybe it’s just because a clean and sober Rocco Ponti isn’t interesting in the way he was when he was falling out of nightclubs and spitting up blood over the sidewalk. The tabloids love a trainwreck.
When he hugs me his coat still smells of cabin pressure, of artificial atmosphere. Hard, macho kisses on both cheeks. “Hey,” he says. “How are you?”
“Oh, you know,” I say, but there’s no time to get into details. I need to get him out of here and into the car before someone recognizes him. “I’m parked over here. Let’s go.”
It’s a short walk in the rain, just enough to bead the shoulders of his coat and his hair. He tosses himself into the passenger seat and loosens the scarf around his neck, baring the burning fingertips of the hand of glory tattooed – palm down – over his heart. “Have you heard from Matt?” I ask.
“He texted to say he was definitely coming, but who knows?”
“Did you call him?”
Rocco shakes his head. “I’ll level with you, Daniel.” His voice is a cracked baritone growl. “It’s not great between us right now.”
“Why? What happened?”
“The usual thing that happens,” he says. “When you get clean and your friends don’t.”
“Shit.”
“It’s okay,” he says, as I pull out of the parking spot. “It’s not like I didn’t see this coming. It’s just the price of sobriety, but don’t worry about that right now. The main priority has got to be Matt.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
I must look as worried as I feel, because he reaches over and touches my shoulder. “I know it seems like it’s impossible right now, but trust me, it’s not.”
“I know,” I say, and I’m insanely glad of him right now, and not just for the usual reason. He’s the miracle, the proof that this particular rock n’ roll story doesn’t have to end face down in a swimming pool, or dead on the toilet, or nodded out with a lungful of vomit. Rocco is alive and well – really well. His skin no longer looks like cold potatoes and his deep blue eyes are bright and clear.
“You look good,” I say.
“Thanks, although I think the whole experience put some new gray hairs on my head. I look even more like a skunk than I did before.”
“Stop it. You look great.”
He smiles. “I feel great,” he says. “That’s the main thing. I feel…alive. Liberated.”
“Liberated?” I never imagined rehab that way. I thought it would be the opposite – a series of Thou Shalt Nots. “Really?”
“God, yeah,” says Rocco. “They tell kids all the wrong things about heroin. They tell them about the ruined veins and the ulcers and the risks of sharing needles, but what they should really tell them – if they want to scare them straight – is about how completely that rotten shit eats your life. It’s a tyrant. It wants all of you, all the time, and when you try to quit? It screams. It roars. It throws an almighty fucking tantrum, like some monster child that refuses to be ignored. For the first few weeks that’s all you hear, like a constant screaming along every nerve in your body.”
“Jesus.”
“It gets better,” he says. “Slowly and painfully, but it gets better. And it fades, until one day you wake up and realize you’ve gone a whole morning without thinking about heroin. That’s when you start to realize that not only can you live without this screeching nuisance, but that one day you might be totally free of it. When I first found myself thinking ‘I might never have to think about this shit ever again’ it felt like I was filled with helium. I felt so light, like I could float clean off the surface of the earth.”
He looks out of the window at the rain, offering me a glimpse of his profile. Roman nose, impossible eyelashes, the slight underbite that lends him his famous pout. The fresh threads of silver in his hair hurt my heart. “I’m so glad you’re here,” I say.
Rocco turns back and gives me a reassuring smile. “You’re Matt’s little brother,” he says. “That practically makes you mine, too. We’re family.”
Sure. Family
*
“I’m starting a band,” Matt said, when he was seventeen. He bought a second hand electric guitar and took up residence in the garage.
Megan was fifteen and drifted in and out of the house with the usual superb contempt common to girls of her age, but I was twelve and didn’t have the luxury of a later curfew. My room had a small deck that overhung the garage, so I heard every note. I heard every audition, every experiment with punk, with folk rock and old school prog. I developed migraines over my math homework and one time marched down there and threatened to empty a full pint of yoghurt into the Marshall if I had to hear one more bar of Stairway To Heaven.
It wasn’t fair, I complained to my parents. I shouldn’t have to listen to it. They should soundproof the garage, or he should hire somewhere else to ‘rehearse’ – which was a bullshit term anyway, since a rehearsal implied that there was more than one band member, and there wasn’t. Matt couldn’t seem to find anyone to play with him, other than that Greg kid who came around now and again, and Greg’s entire repertoire was basically a Johnny Rotten impersonation. The only other really notable thing he did – according to Meg – was smell a whole lot like overcooked Brussels sprouts, and after she pointed that out there was no way you could not smell it.
“How am I supposed to do anything?” I whined. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Why do you let him give me headaches?”
Finally Mom snapped and roared, “You know why,” at me, although I didn’t. Although I didn’t. Not really. All I really knew was that Matt had been ‘sick’, and that was why he was allowed to do what the hell he liked. He didn’t look sick to me, except for the time he had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night and came back with black smudges around his lips. “Charcoal,” he’d said, and I – only eleven at the time – made as much sense of that as I could. “Like you draw with?” I said, and got no answer. He just carried on up the stairs, a hollow eyed, black-lipped wraith wrapped in a patchwork quilt. Figures he’s sick, I thought, if he’s eating art supplies.
I know now what was going on, but at the time I had no idea. I carried on in my oblivious child-orbit, until one afternoon I heard the amp being plugged in and braced myself to get really fucking pissed off. I had a history project to finish for the next day and could seriously do without hearing House Of The Rising Sun all afternoon. I was almost thirteen by then, just a bucket of rage and hormones threatening to boil over.
That’s when I heard it.
This tune. I’d never heard it before and it nearly knocked the breath out of me. Astoundingly beautiful, the notes building and then tumbling. I didn’t know Bach at the time, and I had no idea of his powers, how he could create such astonishing passion out of the tightest precision. The tune – which I later learned was Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring – floated up to me on the deck. I was burningly curious, but at the same time I was afraid to go downstairs because I was already trembling like a plucked string at the sheer beauty of that music, and I was afraid that if I burst into tears over it I’d never hear the end of it.
I was almost afraid of the power it had over me, which is maybe why I went down the steps to the garage. I wanted to see that there was no mystery to it, or maybe because I didn’t believe that Matt had finally learned a new tune, least of all one so haunting and lovely.
That was the first time I saw Rocco.
He was sitting on an upturned milk crate, head bent over his guitar, his flop of midnight hair falling into his eyes. His fingers were tan and tapered, their hard tips working on the fretboard as he played. I think I was half in love before he even looked up, but then he did, squinting a little in a beam of sunlight streaming from one of the small windows like bunker slits in the garage wall. He was seventeen, and like all teenagers he reserved his worst fits of sullenness for his own parents, while being nothing but sweetness whenever he was around someone else’s family.
I got the full blast of that sweetness in one smile. He still had a mouthful of orthodontic metal at the time, but it didn’t matter. Under the heavy shade of his Italian eyelashes his dark blue eyes were that legendary Liz Taylor violet, and then I was all the way in love. In that second I understood why they called it a crush, because it felt as though a giant hand had taken hold of my heart and squeezed.
“Get out of here, Danny,” said Matt, coming up behind me. “We’re trying to rehearse.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” said Rocco. “He’s just a kid.”
I remembered how to breathe and said, “I’m nearly thirteen,” which I immediately realized made me sound like even more of an infant than I was.
“Do you play anything?” asked Rocco. “Drums? Bass?”
“Dude,” said my brother. “We may be desperate, but we’re not that desperate. Danny, get out already. You’re making me self-conscious.”
Rocco laughed. “You want to play Rock In Rio but you can’t sing in front of your own brother?” he said, and smiled at me. “Yeah, that’ll work. Come on. Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Let’s do this thing.”
That afternoon was the first time when I realized that my brother could be a rock star. Rocco could not only play, but he had an energy and a charisma that made things fall into place. By the end of the year they had a drummer and a bass player, and in eighteen months they were playing little gigs around town. By that time Rocco was almost one of the family. He and Matt were inseparable and he always came camping with us at Lost Lake, a name he loved on first hearing because it reminded him of one of his favorite William Burroughs books – The Place of Dead Roads. I remember him standing in the water, bared to my infatuated gaze, a brand new tattoo still raw above his hip.
The same one he’s flashing now as he reaches to lift plates down from a high shelf. His shirt rides up and I can see the old ink – tangled now in a mass of thorny black vines, but still just legible. Giulia.
“Here,” he says, setting down the plates on the counter for my Mom, who has been shrinking lately and was never more than five foot four in the first place. “Are you sure there’s nothing else I can help you with? Want me to chop some things for the salad?”
“Oh, no. Go sit down. Make yourself at home.”
“If I was at home I’d be in the kitchen,” says Rocco. “Come on, Suze. Let me help out. It does me good to keep busy.”
She sighs but points the way to the salad vegetables. “You poor lovely boy,” she says, tiptoeing up to kiss him. “Thank you so much for being here.”
“It’s nothing. He would have done the same for me if he’d had to.”
“But he didn’t. You had the sense to give it up.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t call it sense as such…” says Rocco, and as he turns his head I see the pucker of the trach scar just above the middle finger of the hand of glory. A brush with death is the same as a brush with sense in some situations.
Mom adores him, but all women do. He was married once, to a waifish and inscrutable French runway model named Mona, but she ran off with another woman and Rocco wound up making the usual rounds of starlets and pop stars. As far as I know there have never been any men in his life.
“Is there ice?” he asks, as he takes up a small knife and sets to work on the radishes for the salad. I immediately guess what he’s up to and fill a bowl with ice water. Rocco makes precise little cuts and I try not to look at how the pale inside of his wrist is uneven with similar deliberate slices. Perhaps that was how he became friends with my brother in the first place, two teenagers bonding over their shared appetite for self-destruction.
I take up my own knife and start cutting zigzags into the tomatoes. If he’s going to be fancy then so am I. “So,” he says, as he drops the first radish into the bowl with a small splash. “How are you?”
“Why do you keep asking me that?”
“Because I didn’t get a straight answer the first time,” he says. “And it’s been too long. These days I only hear your voice on a podcast.”
I laugh, embarrassed. “Oh my God. You listen to my podcast?” I thought it was strictly for nerds only, history geeks like me, people fascinated by great tales of exploration. It’s not for people who have anything better to do, like actual rock stars.
“I love your podcast,” says Rocco, introducing me to the bizarre – and not unpleasant – experience of being fanboyed by my own idol. “The Mawson expedition episodes kept me sane, I swear. Talk about putting things into perspective. You can’t really carry on feeling sorry for yourself in a luxury rehab facility in New Mexico while you’re listening to the story of a guy who found that the entire sole of his foot had come away in one piece–”
“–and strapped it back into place and kept walking.” I say. The crowning gory detail of the whole Antarctic survival story. “I know, right? How big do you estimate Douglas Mawson’s balls were?”
“Huge,” he says, dropping another radish into the bowl. “Like a couple of cast iron pumpkins clanking between his thighs. Sure as hell made me shape the fuck up.”
“I’m glad.”
“No, seriously – thank you. I’m really pleased it’s taking off for you. You deserve it.”
“I’m getting there,” I say. “Mostly amazed that I’m starting to make an actual living from it. Even thinking of buying a house, actually.”
Rocco raises an eyebrow. “That sounds adult.”
“I’m thirty.”
“I know. But do you feel it?”
“Not remotely.”
“There you are then,” he says, and swirls the water around in the bowl. His radish roses have started to open their petals. “So, are you seeing anyone?”
“What? Romantically? No. I was kind of on-off with this guy in San Francisco but he was altogether too techbro for me. Everything was about streamlining his life so that he had more time to code. It got to the point where he was switching out food for that Soylent shit.”
“Wait, Soylent?” says Rocco. “As in Soylent Green?”
“Not exactly. It’s not people. At least, I hope it’s not people, but some guy – without a flicker of irony, mind you – invented these meal replacement shakes and named it Soylent. It’s so that coders don’t have to trouble their advanced brains with trifling things like flavor or texture.”
Rocco – being Italian – looks at me like I’m describing a nightmare. “Well, that’s just upsetting,” he says. “You were right to run screaming. I could never date anyone who didn’t like eating.”
“That was my thought, too.”
He shakes his head and lowers his voice a little. “Reminds me of my wife. Three years of marriage and the only thing I saw that woman eat with any kind of gusto was pussy.”
I laugh. “Yeah. What the hell happened with that? I only got the edited highlights from Matt.”
“Short version,” says Rocco. “I’m a man, and men are stupid. She wanted to have a threeway with her hot friend Sasha and I was like…” He makes enraptured saucer eyes at me. “I couldn’t believe my luck. It was like the Hallelujah Chorus was playing in my head. That was before I realized that they didn’t really need me, as such.”
“Oh?”
“A man is no match for a woman in bed,” he says. “They have no refractory period, they can come more or less continually and they can do the most insane things with their hands. To the wrist – not even kidding.”
“Um, wow.”
“Yeah. Hot as hell at first, obviously, but there’s no way to watch two women banging each other like that without feeling a little…redundant. And it turned out I was.” He dropped another radish into the bowl and sighed. “You’ve got it good, Daniel. I imagine with a man you’ve got like a cut-off period, you know. You both come, you smoke a cigarette and you go to sleep. You’re not going back at it thirty seconds after an orgasm and cramming your fists…” He trails off and laughs. “Well, I mean, you might, I don’t know…”
“I wouldn’t, no. I’ve never…”
We’re both laughing now, quietly, in case my mother comes over and asks us what’s so funny. “Jesus,” he says. “I’m so sorry. I haven’t seen you in over a year and I’m more or less asking you if you’ve ever had a fist in your ass before. It’s just as well I’m not supposed to start dating yet: I shouldn’t be allowed out in public, never mind anything else.”
“Wait, you’re not supposed to date?”
He shakes his head. “Uh uh. Rehab rules. They usually say to give it a year before you even think about it. The trouble with addicts is we tend to go hard at anything that gives us pleasure, and you always run the risk of using love as a substitute for drugs or booze. Getting into a romantic relationship in the first year is like playing with fire.”
“Hey.” Someone taps me on the shoulder and I turn from the tomatoes to see Megan standing there. I quickly dry my hands and hug her.
“When did you get in?” I ask, my face half buried in her blonde hair, which is much longer than I remember.
“About an hour ago. I don’t know. Traffic was hell. What were you two giggling about over here?”
“Vaginal fisting,” says Rocco, accepting his own hug. “How are you doing?”
Meg blinks. “Fine. What about you?” She looks him up and down and whistles. “Sober living agrees with you.”
“I know, right? Everyone keeps saying that and it’s weird. I’m used to being a terrible warning, not a good example.”
“It’s a hell of a thing,” she says. “Do you get chips and everything?”
Rocco reaches into an inside pocket and whips it out, a red plastic coin that certifies him six months sober. “To Thine Own Self Be True,” Meg reads. “What’s that from? The Bible?”
“No. Shakespeare, I think.”
“Hamlet,” I say. “It’s a line from Polonius’s farewell to Laertes.”
Meg and Rocco exchange looks, and I laugh, embarrassed at my own nerdery. “How do you remember everything, Daniel?” says Meg. “It cannot be healthy, having such perfect recall.”
“I don’t remember everything. Just…mostly useless information.”
“Yeah, well. I hope you can bring that clarity tomorrow, when we’re going through the list of shitty things our brother did while drinking.”
Tomorrow. There’s a terrible thought. Today there’s an odd festive air to the proceedings, stories swapped, salads made, everyone gathered together for a purpose bigger than themselves. It could be Christmas or Thanksgiving, if you didn’t look twice and realize there was no wine on the table. No whisky after dinner either. We’re all drinking water and grape juice like Puritans, because it would be insensitive to do anything else so close to the zero hour.
Assuming he even shows up.
I don’t sleep so well. I lie awake in my old childhood bedroom, my feet itching with the desire to be up and about. Rocco is sleeping across the hall, and I’m almost tempted to get up and ask him if he has a cigarette, even though I haven’t smoked in over five years. Anything to be in his presence.
Maybe Meg is right. Maybe I do remember everything too clearly. Maybe that’s why I still haven’t got Rocco out of my system, because just a glimpse of that old tattoo can send me spiraling back through the years to the days when I would have kissed the ground he walked on. Him, with the eyes that made me look up the word ‘aquamarine’, only to find it was too green a shade. Indigo. That was better, because there was no green in his eyes, and I grew to love the sound of it. Indigo. Sounded like nothing but ‘wendigo’, a word that belonged in the campfire stories we told one another when we were little more than kids. Even before he started collecting spooky tattoos, Rocco had an affinity for the occult. He drew skulls on the backs of his arms in ballpoint pen, and told creepy stories about evil fairies who would sew your lips shut with invisible thread, so that you couldn’t eat and you got so hungry that you would be unable to resist when they bought you fairy food – fat blond grapes shining like agates, cakes dripping with sugar syrup and sweet rum. You’d be helpless to resist, and if you ate so much as a mouthful they would own your soul.
When we went to Lost Lake he smoked secret cigarettes, rounding his lips to blow smoke rings, batting his eyelashes into the clouds. He carried a dog-eared copy of The Naked Lunch around with him and I read several parts with my dick pounding in my pants, already half certain that I was gay and totally certain that I was in love with Rocco. He used to joke that one night we’d sneak out and go midnight skinny-dipping, but I always fell asleep and he never – as he promised – woke me up so I could join in the fun.
Still I remember that summer when he was almost eighteen, when he came back from Italy burnt to a glorious brown, and with the name Giulia inked above his hip. If Matt had come home with a tattoo my parents would have hit the roof, but with Rocco they just clicked their tongues and shook their heads.
“You should never get a girl’s name tattooed on your body,” said Dad. “You don’t know that it will last.”
“Oh, I know it won’t,” Rocco said. “In fact I’m pretty sure she’s already forgotten me, but this way I won’t forget her.”
My brother was a whole lot more direct. “Did you fuck her?” he asked, that night when the two of them were tucked up in the tent they’d pitched just outside the cabin. I was indoors, but with the window open I could hear them talking. I wanted more than anything to be in the tent with them, but Mom wouldn’t have it. “They’re older boys now,” she said. “They talk about things you shouldn’t hear yet.”
I guess Giulia fell into the category of things I shouldn’t hear, because my dick stood up hard almost the second I realized they were talking about sex. I’d just turned thirteen and was sprouting hair, about to burst into the full emergency of adolescence. My cock had recently developed a life of its own, and I was on the verge of understanding why my brother had used to spend so much time in the bathroom.
“That chick,” Matt said, in response to Rocco’s half-asleep ‘hmm?’ “Giulia. Did you fuck her?”
“Oh. That. Yes,” said Rocco, with magnificent vagueness.
“Are you serious?”
“Of course.”
“What did you do? Like, all of it? Everything?”
Rocco hesitated. My heart thrummed so loud in my ears that I was afraid I wouldn’t hear what he was going to say next. “I guess,” he said. “It was like, five times or something. And she taught me how to eat her pussy. That was fucking hot. I made her come and everything; it was really cool.”
I was seething, jealous as all hell, but so, so horny. I reached down to tug myself to one of my hard, dry climaxes, biting my lip to keep quiet. They were talking quieter now and I couldn’t make out what they said, but the soft rumble of Rocco’s voice was like a caress. I pictured him standing in the lake with the water lapping just where his tan stopped, and then he turned slowly, smiling.
There he was, the tip of his erect cock just breaking the surface of the water. I couldn’t stop, and that’s when I felt it, a new and unfamiliar heat somewhere deep in the root of me. I came hard, and for the very first time I felt something hot and wet land on my belly.
I was so startled I turned on the light to get a look at it. It wasn’t the thick, white stuff of dirty jokes. Just a blob of clear fluid. I inspected my dickhole and felt a weird flicker of pride as I realized it really had come from there.
“Daniel? Are you okay?” Matt said. He must have seen the light from the window through the tent flap.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine. Just going to the bathroom.”
I didn’t. I lay there for a long while, watching the clear fluid dry into a crust on my belly. I was a child, but I’d just had my first taste of what it would feel like to be a man. My first real, messy, adult orgasm, courtesy of Rocco Ponti.