Page 9 of A Long Con

This massive Hawaiian athlete distracted the fuck out of me.

Royal was huge, shredded, a musclehead with a brain. When he practically took me in his arms on that bench, I felt protected, safe. I had never realized how much I needed that feeling. Back home in Queens, Ash was my sub, a slender pup who agreed with my every word and did my bidding. Why did I have the feeling that Royal Palakiko would push back, switch up our roles, maybe even—my cock and balls tingled to imagine it—try a little domination?

“I can’t believe I’m letting you see this disgusting mess,” I said. The metal music and joyous laughter from the party dimmed as we reached smelling distance of Elaine’s house. Already I had gigantic misgivings about having invited Royal to see my artwork. I suppose it was desperation for an income that did it. If Royal could actually sell some of my paintings, well . . . I could just create new ones under a different moniker.

“No need, brah. I’ve seen them all in my time. And you’re dealing with it, that’s the important thing. I hope your mother gets better.”

I snorted as I opened the front door. “She’s dying,” I said point-blank. “She’s dying because of this fucking house. I can’t wait to sell it.”

“Ah, that’s a shame. And go where?” asked Royal, stepping into the foyer. “You said you can’t go back to New York.”

That was fucking true. Normal guys would’ve just cleaned their mother’s house and lived in it. It’d been paid for decades ago. No rent, no mortgage. Not a bad scene. “Step carefully,” I said, ignoring his question. The only light was the ceiling globe in the kitchen, so I flicked the switch on the hallway light. It would be best to bypass that whole kitchen family room scenario. My old bedroom was the only halfway clean room, so far.

Royal held onto the plywood walls as he negotiated the terrain. “Why’d you paint on your walls? Mom wouldn’t buy you paper?”

“Nobody knew I could paint pictures until I fell off the roof and hit my head. Wait here.”

I went inside the room first. I felt for the bedside lamp. Luckily when I was a self-conscious eleven-year-old, I’d swapped the childish Star Wars lamp for a mature manly Star Trek lamp from my father’s old study. The sixty-watt bulb illuminated what I hoped wasn’t my ultimate embarrassment. I examined the room, trying to see it from Royal’s point of view.

“Come on in.”

The cat urine-soaked mattress was probably the worst part now. I’d even pulled my old dresser away from the wall so I could view the mural, dumping all my moldy boy’s clothes and pretty much everything that was in the drawers. I’d painted around and over a pressed board bookshelf that had recently held boxes of model planes, video games, and some Power Rangers. It still had the art books Elaine had bought for me at Goodwill—a book on Picasso, Modigliani, and one on postimpressionism. They looked good on top of my painting of a bookshelf.

When I spoke, I sounded almost apologetic. “I started hearing and seeing a river of associations I couldn’t stop. It was like my brain showed me endless corridors and I’d travel down each one. Each image here is a photo of a tiny second in my brain. These cubes?” I pointed to a section of the wall where I’d painted some cubes like frames, microchips, or shuttered windows. “I’ll do four or eight pictures at the same time because I see those numbers in my head. While I painted these squares, I also painted this couple, this lion, and this man in a hat. Painting sort of relieved the mess in my head.”

When I glanced at Royal, he had a look of enlightenment on his face. He held out his hands to frame part of my wall. “These are brilliant! This one is really Picassoesque.” He indicated the man in the hat.

“Yes!” I agreed. “You see that! It was really something for a twelve-year-old who had barely even heard of Picasso.”

“Incredible! You said you hit your head before all this started?”

I’d told this story so many times, but today it felt fresh. Instead of reciting the story like I was reeling off a Top Ten list, I was animated, excited. “Yeah! I was smoking weed on this very roof with my best friend, John Cloud Jacobs. I was laughing like a goon at something he said, some impression he was doing of a pool cleaning guy. Which is kind of ironic, since he now is a pool cleaning guy. Anyway, the next thing I knew, I was coming to on my cement patio out back. Cloud was saying he’d call 911. There was no blood anywhere, but a week later in the hospital, when I came out of a coma, I found out that the left side of my brain decided to go dark, while the right side was given free rein to express itself.”

Why was Royal gaping at me like that? He seemed stunned by something. “Which part of your brain was injured?”

I pointed to my head. “The left anterior temporal lobe. So, I saw these images flying at me like the opening credits of The Twilight Zone. A door, a lion, a bookshelf, a hallway, a skull, a vortex. If you show me a mountain, I’ll turn it into a person’s profile. Show me a bare tree, I’ll alter it so when it’s spring, the leaves will make up the face, the lips, the mouth. All this without hurting the tree, because I can’t bear to hurt anything.”

Royal frowned, managing to look concerned and elated at the same time. He held his chin between his fingers like a guy examining a museum painting. “Yeah, but—a brain injury caused all this? Were there, like, any downsides to it? Because usually such genius comes at a price.”

How did he know? “Yeah. You’re right. I lost the ability to write, although I can still read, thank God. And I have this condition called synesthesia. That’s when you experience some senses together that are normally separate. Like you can taste a pepper when you hear someone hammering or see purple when you think of a number.”

“Thus all the thousands of colors in your paintings. Which two senses of yours are joined?”

“Well, it’s not exact. But I see colors when I look at people.”

“You mean when you see a crowd of people, they all look yellow?”

“No, individual people. Everyone has their own distinctive color. Like I saw a pink aura around Hobie. Pothole was a navy blue.”

“Seriously? And what does that tell you about the person? Like, what does pink mean?”

“Well, it’ll give me the main attributes of the person. Their name, voice, the way I feel toward them.”

Royal seemed to ponder. “So you feel . . . pink toward Hobie?”

“It’s hard to describe. Pink, in Hobie’s case, tells me that he’s gentle. He wouldn’t hurt a spider, like me.” I chuckled. “That’s one reason it’s gonna be difficult to clean this house. I’d like someone else to get rid of all the insects for me.”

Royal put his hands on his hips. “Does it tell you that Hobie is gay?”