Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,132
or else you got a freak.”
The canvas was wall-sized, originally commissioned and never paid for by a trendy leather bar, since closed. Blacklight pointed. “Balls don’t hang side by side like that. One dangles a little lower. Even a dyke ought to know that.”
“It’s not completed,” Elaine said. She was looking at the bag of white powder Blacklight had dropped onto her bar.
“You want to know why?”
“What?”
“It’s so they don’t bang together.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Your balls. One slides away from the other when you mash your legs together.”
“Terrific,” said Elaine, digging a fingernail into the powder.
“You like it?”
“The thing about balls.” Elaine tasted a smear of coke, licking her fingertip.
“Uncut Peruvian flake,” Blacklight promised, forgetting the earlier subject.
Elaine sampled a nail-full up each nostril.The ringing bitterness of the coke cut through the residues of vomit. Good shit.
“It’s like Yin and Yang,” Blacklight explained. “Good and Evil. Light and Dark.”
One doesn’t correct a large and crazed biker. He was wrestling his fists together. “Have you ever heard the story of Love and Hate?”
Across the knuckles of his right fist was tattooed LOVE; across those of his left: HATE.
Elaine had seen Night of the Hunter, and she was not impressed. “An ounce?”
“One humongous oh-zee.” Blacklight was finger-wrestling with himself. “They got to be kept apart, Love and Hate, but they can’t keep from coming together and trying to see which one’s stronger.” Elaine opened the drawer beneath her telephone and counted out the bills she had set aside earlier. Blacklight forgot his Robert Mitchum impersonation and accepted the money.
“I got five paintings to finish before my show opens in SoHo, OK? That’s next month. This is the end of this month. My ass is fucked, and I’m stone out of inspiration. So give me a break and split now, right?”
“Just don’t try too much free-basing with that shit, OK?” Blacklight advised. He craned his thick neck to consider another unfinished canvas. It reminded him of someone, but then he forgot who before he could form the thought.
“Your brain is like your balls, did you know that?” He picked up the thread of the last conversation he could remember.
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Two hunks rolling around inside your skull,” Blacklight said, knotting his fists side by side. “They swim in your skull side by side, just like your balls swing around in your scrotum. Why are there two halves of your brain instead of just one big chunk—like, say, your heart?”
“I give up.”
Blacklight massaged his fists together. “So they don’t bang together, see. Got to keep them apart. Love and Hate. Yin and Yang.”
“Look. I got to work.” Elaine shook a gram’s worth of lines out of the baggie and onto the glass top of her coffee table.
“Sure. You sure you’re gonna be OK?”
“No more anoxic rushes with a mask on. And thanks.”
“You got a beer?”
“Try the fridge.”
Blacklight found a St Pauli and plinked the non-twist-off cap free with his thumb. Elaine thought he looked like a black-bearded Wookie.
“I had a buddy from Nam who offed himself trying that,” Blacklight suddenly remembered.
“You told me.”
“Like, whatever turns you on. Just don’t drop the hammer when you don’t mean to.”
“Want a line?”
“No. I’m off Charlie. Fucks up my brain.” Blacklight’s eyes glazed in an effort to concentrate. “Off the goddamn dinks,” he said. “Off ’em all.” There were old tracks fighting with the tattoos, as he raised his arm to kill the beer.
“Are you sure you’re gonna he OK?” He was pulling out a fresh beer from behind the tuna salad.
Elaine was a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, and aerobicise muscles weren’t enough to overawe Blacklight. “Look. I’m all right now. Thanks. Just let me get back to work. OK? I mean, deadline-wise, this is truly crunch city.”
“Want some crystal? Got a dynamite price.”
“Got some. Look, I think I’m going to throw up some more. Want to give me some privacy?”
Blacklight dropped the beer bottle into his shirt pocket. “Hang loose. He started for the door. The beer bottle seemed no larger than a pen in his pocket.
“Oh,” he said. “I can get you something better. A new one. Takes out the blank spots in your head. Just met a new contact who’s radically into designer drugs. Weird dude. Working on some new kind of speed.”
“I’ll take some,” said Elaine, opening the door. She really needed to sleep for a week.
“Catch you later,” promised Blacklight.
He paused halfway through the door, dug into his denim jacket pocket. “Superb blotter,” he said, handing her a dingy square