Bronx Noir

Isn’t it fascinating how certain women create whole careers from men wanting to have sex with them? Tré-Sean asked. As a kid he had questioned his horny older brother on why he was so transfixed by Elvira’s Movie Macabre when he knew the pasty, buxom Goth girl would never actually show her breasts. For Tré-Sean this was the same disappointing tease performed at stripclubs with all the incredible-looking naked women (like Lacey) who one could never really fuck. Madonna in Penthouse made an impression on his young mind, but when he saw Pamela Anderson blowing her husband on a homemade tape, his philosophy all came together.

Tré-Sean told Lacey that Paris Hilton giving head, having sex for all the world to see on the web, and then becoming even more popular, made perfect sense. The only reason Paris and Pam Anderson had celebrity in the first place was because men fantasized about how they’d be sexually. Tré-Sean recently met a friend of a friend of a friend in the adult film industry who rationalized that the relation between seductive music videos and hardcore pornography was identical to the relation between a funny joke and an explanation of what’s funny about the joke. Lacey thought she understood.

Tré-Sean finally laid out his scheme. He was given tickets to the Adult Video News Film Awards from this same new acquaintance. He proposed they go to Las Vegas for the ceremony and network. So much more money could be made in porn for so much less work than dancing, Tré-Sean reasoned, and they’d already made some private sex tapes of their own. Celebrity in this field might lead to celebrity in another, he said. (And if not, it’s the same thing underneath it all anyway, he thought privately). His contact guaranteed him a meeting with a producer, Max Hardcore.

Lacey held the line silently. Kingston’s decision bothered Lacey up until the point she accepted that she didn’t mean enough to him for an extended invitation to the bayou. That Monday Lacey lost the number, but the numbers man lost Lacey; she had called her ex the same night.

“So whassup?” Tré-Sean asked.

In the service, another grunt who’d been a bartender in New Orleans taught Kingston and Gussy how to mix a Tom Collins: gin, tonic, lemon juice, sugar, and a maraschino cherry. In his friend’s honor, Kingston entered their spacious backyard carrying glasses of the poison from the cottage’s indoor bar. Sweltering Southern sunrays beamed through his loose T-shirt and bright Bermuda shorts. Gussy reclined on the powder-blue deck chair by their concrete pool dressed in a gold one-piece swimsuit and Onassis-style shades, rubbing sunblock over her toned legs. Kingston seated himself and passed her the drink; he sipped his own and fired up a cigar.

The two celebrated the impulse purchase of a quicksilver Cadillac that morning, Gussy’s choice. Kingston drove it straight out of the dealership. Like the sensation of a phantom limb, they both considered playing the new GNU-556 license plate for that Friday and had to stop themselves from phoning it in to Hillside. BellSouth had just connected their phone service the day before. Cousin Dot left a message from Baton Rouge about an issued hurricane watch for a nearby tropical storm, Katrina. The tempest had just touched Florida, with a seventeen-percent possibility of hitting New Orleans. Kingston, puffing a Havana, couldn’t imagine it being worse than the storm he’d just weathered.

THE BIG FIVE

BY JOSEPH WALLACE

Bronx Zoo

It was like the punch line to a stupid joke.

Q: How cold is it?

A: So cold that the dogs are sticking to the fire hydrants.

Only, in this case:

Q: How cold is it?

A: So cold that even the polar bears are shivering.

And it was that cold, eight degrees above zero and headed down. So frigid that clots of ice bobbed and clattered down the stripped-bare Bronx River, that the bison he’d passed on the way in, their shaggy humps edged with frost, breathed out huge gouts of steam like irritable snow-capped volcanoes.

But Akeley didn’t mind. In fact, the plummeting temperatures made what he’d come here to do easier.

Though not too easy. No point if it was too easy.

He stood beside the ice-skimmed pool, between the concrete wall and the jumble of manmade rocks that were supposed to remind visitors of the Arctic. If there was anyone there to be reminded on this gray, deep-winter day, when the zoo was open but no one came, when this patch of the Bronx was the least populated two hundred-plus acres in the city.

The only place, the only time of year, when you didn’t feel like an ant, one among eight million scurrying along predetermined pathways, carrying food back to the giant rectangular mound you called home.