ANYTHING AT ALL

You can do anything you want to me, I’d said as the whole world went wavy gravy and I slid into my first-ever GHB coma. Anything…Anything…anything at all.

I wake up naked on the floor in the hotel suite’s bathroom. Blood and orange juice puke splatter the sides of the toilet and the tile floor. My head rests on a bunched-up bloody shit towel. I pluck sticky syringes and half-empty enemas from my face, arms and body as I try to sit up against the tub, a steaming puddle of piss in it. “Fern?” I say, in a voice that sounds like a bullfrog having a pulmonary embolism. No response. I charley horse crawl out of the bathroom on my hands and knees, avoiding spent needles and smears of unknown fluids and substances as best I can.

Thump thump thump. “Housekeeping!”

“Oh, hell no,” I mutter. I crawl over to the door, grab ahold of the handle and pull myself up to the security latch, swinging it into position just as I hear the beepbeepbeep! of the maid’s keycard in the reader.

“Housekeeping!” the maid says again, rattling the door in the latch.

“Hold on,” I say. “Let me get dressed.”

I stumble around the room looking for my stuff. I’m the only one here. In the center of the carpet there’s two round, ragged scorch marks where something was burned, not circles but elliptical, like oblate spheroids flattened into burnt pancakes. We just learned that term in pre-calc, oblate spheroid. It means like a sphere but flattened at the poles. Earth is one. So’s Jupiter. Looks like both planets blew up on the carpet last night. Scattered around the black holes they left behind is all the detritus of a wasted galaxy, a star system of self-destructive tendencies, misery and group psychosis. Needles, pipes and makeup wipes. A stripped-down mattress soaked through with blood. Chewed-up gum stuck in the folds of cigarette-burned bedsheets. Upended Chinese food containers drizzling oily gravies. Snapple bottles. White cups. Fuck, I think. What was in those cups? I make a pile on the edge of the bed of all the mystery pills and dollar bills I find as I search through heaps of trash for my stuff, trying as best I can to avoid the blood pool at the center of the mattress. Did someone fucking die in here last night?

Thump thump thump! “We gonna call the police housekeeping!” She says it just like that, without pausing between any of the words. I wonder if she’s contractually obligated to tack on the word housekeeping at the beginning or end of every sentence.

“So call them!” I croak. The maid rattles the door in the latch again, says some curse words in Spanish. Having finally rounded up most of my belongings, I slip into my army green romper and my low-top Chuck Taylors, sling my pink Kipling bookbag over my shoulder and stuff my pockets with pills and cash from the pile on the bed. Then I search through the glass pipes on the floor, trying to find one with any smoke left in it. I need it bad. Finally I locate one with a bit of residue in the bulb. It looks pretty brown but maybe it’s salvageable. I twirl the stem in my fingers and hold the lighter down below, watching the bubble fill up with swirling vapor, then take a tiny sip, then another and another ‘till my lungs are nice and full. Whoever says T recrystallizes in your lungs is full of shit, the man had said. His voice comes flooding back to me as I hold in the hit. Thick Jersey accent. Gravel between his teeth. A glint of gold. Hold it in as long as you want, he’d said. You’ll get higher. I exhale. Now drink this. Fuck. What was in the cup? More importantly, where was Fern? Where was I for that matter?

Thump thump thump BANG BANG BANG! “Police, open up!”

“Not going to say housekeeping?” I mutter under my breath. I take one last hit, then slouch over to the window and peer behind its curtain, trying to ascertain how far off the ground I am. Looks like the surface I’m standing on is about three feet under ground. First floor, garden level. Facing out to the street. “Thank you Jesus,” I say. Gotta give props where they’re due. I slide the window open and wriggle out into the shrubbery in front of the hotel, then push myself up onto my feet, brushing off wood chips and clods of dirt. To my left is the hotel’s entrance, two cop cars parked on the street in front of it. I walk right past them. There’s one police officer standing there just looking at his phone, a black guy. Extremely hot. Nine point five, at least. I love guys in uniform. Black guys especially. Peach and Chrysanthemum always give me shit for it. They’re fucking oppressors, they would say. Like I give a fuck. You should see some of the guys those hookers date.

“Afternoon, officer,” I say as I stumble past. He looks up from his phone and his eyes widen. He licks his lips suggestively.

“Mmm, mmm, mm,” he says. I giggle even though I feel like all my organs are about to explode in my body and dribble out my asshole. “Where you off to in such a hurry, young lady?” he says. “You need a ride somewhere?”

I actually do, though I’m not entirely sure where I’m going, and I’m not really in the mood to be raped just then, which seems like a distinct possibility if I get in the cop car. I stop, turn halfway back around. He’s fingering his crotch through his trousers. It turns me on, just a little. “Okay,” I say. “You can give me a ride. But keep your fucking hands to yourself.”

He gives me a salute, mock-serious, then marches to the cruiser’s passenger-side door and pops it open. I hop in. Once we’re cruising the cop asks me where we’re going. “I don’t know yet,” I say, rummaging through my bag. “I guess I lost my phone. Fuck.” The cop hands me his iPhone and I use it to text Fern. Where the fuck are you? He writes back immediately. Partying with some old man. Come! followed by an address in Hell’s Kitchen. “Can you take me here?” I ask, handing the cop his phone back.

“Sure thing,” he says, fiddling with the GPS. “I’m Kareem, by the way.”

“Okay, yeah, whatever,” I say, lying back in the seat and closing my eyes. “I’m sleeping now.”

“Rough night?” he chuckles. “Anything you want to talk about?”

“No thank you, officer,” I say, without opening my eyes.

“Oh, come on now,” he says. “Don’t think of me as a cop. Just think of me as your good friend Kareem. You’re not in any trouble. Anything you need to get off your chest, we can make it unofficial. Forget the uniform. You can trust me, I promise. Safe space.”

I don’t know why. It’s probably just the meth. And the fact that I don’t have any idea what happened the previous night. I don’t trust my good friend Kareem. But I start talking anyway, trying to piece together some semblance of a timeline. Maybe just by talking it out I’ll start to remember some things.

*

It was October 5, 2017, the night before my seventeenth birthday. Harvey Weinstein had just that morning been exposed as a serial rapist and sexual predator in the New York Times online edition. Me and Fern spent the day in Central Park, smoking weed and wandering around the Ramble looking for the cruising spots. When we finally found the area where the guys hang out we practically ran the whole way down the path, our eyes glued to the forest floor. It seemed so awkward, with all the guys just standing around like that waiting for a fuck to appear and approach them. How do people cruise like that? I can barely make eye contact with my closest friends, let alone perfect strangers. I guess that’s part of why I like crystal so much. It takes away all those inhibitions. Makes me confident and free-feeling, like my true, feminine self. Weed does just the opposite. It makes me anxious and shy and uncomfortable in my body. But Fern loves it, and I want to be just like Fern. I want his spit and his cum, his diseases, the rot between his teeth and the meth-infested vapor in the pockets of his lungs. I want our compositions to match, chemically speaking. I want no line to separate us, no barrier to come between. I want to crawl inside his skin and see the fucked-up world anew from his pitiful place in it. I’m not sure he feels that way for me at all. I think he just wants someone to party with and fuck on the regular, and he prefers trans girls because, in his words, pussy’s way too much hassle. Guys are simple like that. I don’t hold it against him.

We emerged from the Ramble giggling and pushing into each other playfully.

“That was so awkward,” I laughed.

“Why was there only black guys?” Fern said.

“Don’t be racist,” I said.

“I’m not,” said Fern. “I just wondered.”

Peach texted me and said come over to Harvey’s, so I called an Uber to take us to Brooklyn. Chrysanthemum and Peach were already there. Chrys’s boyfriend Ralph was at the building’s entrance waiting to be buzzed in when we got there. And Harvey was there of course. It’s his condo. Harvey Cook, not Weinstein. He’s Peach’s boyfriend. Harvey owns a four-bedroom in Williamsburg, with an upstairs and a downstairs and a shared rooftop garden and a pool. He’s loaded but none of us know where he got all his money. Peach says he made it in the stock market when Tesla went public in 2010. Harvey does talk about Elon Musk all the time, but I still think he had a trust fund before that. He acts like he’s always been rich. I don’t trust him.

Harvey and Peach were making osso buco in the kitchen. Me and Fern sat on the living room couch and took out our phones. Chrysanthemum, rocking mom jeans and a cut-off flower top, was sitting on the carpet in front of the glass coffee table, cutting up lines of coke and smashing crystals of ketamine down into dust with her student ID card.

“I’ll finish doing that if you roll us a spliff,” Ralph said, handing Chrysanthemum a little jar with weed in it and a pouch of light blue American Spirit rolling tobacco. Chrys’s spliffs are legendary. She smokes them like cigarettes, one after the next after the next, tapping ash into any receptacle she sees. It’s best to watch your drinks around her for that reason.

“Poof,” I said, scrolling through the Times article on my phone. The one about Weinstein, I mean. “That’s the sound your dream of sucking your way to the Oscar podium makes as it goes up in smoke.”

“I know,” said Chrysanthemum dourly. “I’m pissed.” We all want to be actresses. Chrysanthemum wants to be a character actress. Peach wants to be the next Emma Stone. I just want people to look at me and do my makeup and give me free gift baskets and lotions and creams and DVD screeners of all the important films released that year. I don’t care how I get there. In fact, I’ve been thinking about going the influencer route. Start my own thing, instead of having to rely on pedophiles and rapists to hold doors open for me in the industry.

(“That sounds very wise,” interjects my good friend Kareem. “Okay, thanks,” I say. “Can you shut up now and let me talk?”)

“Darling, don’t be glum,” said Harvey, appearing from the kitchen and refilling Chrysanthemum’s champagne flute. “Why not win an Oscar the old fashioned way?” Harvey’s like twenty-eight or something. Chrysanthemum’s sixteen, and so is Peach. I was sixteen that night, too, like I said, but now I’m seventeen. (“Happy birthday!” says Kareem). I don’t know exactly how old Ralph is, but he goes to our school. I think he’s a senior. Fern is our age too but he got thrown out of his parents’ house in Rego Park when he was thirteen and never went back to school after that.

“Blowjobs are the old fashioned way to win an Oscar,” Chrysanthemum said, licking the spliff and twisting off the end. “Sybil, do you have my lighter?” I checked both romper pockets. No dice.

“Peach probably has it.”

“That bitch,” Chrys said. “Peach!”

“I don’t have it!” Peach’s voice floated in from the kitchen. “Oh wait! Yes I do. Here.”

Peach appeared in the doorway, a vision in scarlet, five foot ten, blonde hair down to her tight, juicy butt. Peach transitioned early. Puberty blockers at eight, estrogen by twelve. Her parents are big fucking deal plastic surgeons. They run one of the most successful and sought-after clinics in the city. TLC actually shot a pilot about their practice, but it didn’t get picked up because the male Dr. Willis (Peach’s dad) “lacked charisma,” which is code for he’s a fucking creep and there’s just no hiding it. The female Dr. Willis did Peach’s face, lovingly carving out her daughter’s perfect feminine chin, Kylie Jenner forehead and pert, pointy nose. Peach’s dad did her tits. Like I said, the man’s a creep. A close personal friend of the family inverted Peach’s cock into a pussy when she was fourteen. Now nobody knows she’s trans except the kids who grew up with her. Harvey sure as hell doesn’t know, though I doubt he would care either way. He might dig it, actually. I see the looks he gives me when no one else is in the room. He looks at Chrys that way, too. I don’t trust him at all.

“Here you go, love,” said Peach, handing Chrys the lighter. “Are you rolling a spliff?”

“Sybil,” said Ralph. “Have you seen Hannibal yet?”

“It’s already rolled,” Chrysanthemum said, handing the spliff and the lighter back to Peach. Peach lit the spliff. Ralph inhaled a line of ketamine or coke. Fern was on Grindr. I was staring at the coke on the table and, out of the corner of my eye, at Ralph. Harvey peered his head around the doorframe.

“Couldn’t we wait until after we’ve eaten to snort things?” he said, the ice in his whiskey glass tinkling. “Everything’s nearly done.”

“Okay dad,” said Chrys, rolling her eyes. Peach giggled. Harvey’s head disappeared back into the kitchen.

“It’s so good,” I said. “The episode where Dr. Katz gets sliced into sections? Ohmygod.” Ralph’s eyes lit up behind his round glasses. He handed me the coke straw and I slid off the couch and onto the rug next to him.

“You should do a line of each,” he said. “It feels really good mixed together.” I leaned over the table and snorted the two fat lines he pointed at. I could feel him smell the back of my head as I snorted. It made me so fucking hard. “I’ll be right back,” Ralph said, scrambling to his feet and racing to the bathroom. I wondered if he was going to rub one out into the toilet.

Chrysanthemum said, “Speaking of serial killers, Ralph’s been really creeping me out lately.”

“Why?” Peach said, sucking on the spliff. “What did he do?”

“He’s just creepy,” Chrys said. “I don’t know. I think he likes it when the plumbing malfunctions. He likes putting his hands in the dirty toilet water. The downstairs toilet overflowed at my mom’s the other day and he, like, raced in there. I swear I saw his hand close around a piece of shit, and he was, like, smiling.”

“No!” said Peach.

“I swear to God.”

“Was he wearing a glove?” I said.

“No glove.”

“Can I hit that weed?” Fern said without looking up from his phone.

“One sec,” said Peach, looking around for the lighter. She hates Fern because he’s poor, and never wants to share with him. “Maybe we should roll another one, it’s almost out. Wait, Syb, so what happened with Harvey Weinstein?”

“The article said he would invite women up to his hotel room,” I said, “then try to give them massages or get them to watch him take a shower.”

“Yeah, and then they all won Oscars,” said Chrysanthemum. “Hello! It’s the cost of doing business!”

“If he was skinny and had a big dick no one would care,” said Peach.

“He’s probably two inches.”

“He’s probably an innie.”

“He’s probably got a Hedwig.”

“Are you guys talking about Harvey?” said Fern.

“Not Harvey Harvey,” I said. “Harvey Weinstein. He’s a movie producer.”

“Not for long,” said Peach.

“Oh,” said Fern.

“Where’s Ralph?” said Chrys.

“Probably in the toilet,” said Peach, “grabbing our shit.”

“Dinner’s ready,” said Harvey.

After dinner we did the rest of the coke and the ketamine and went to some DJ night at Happyfun or Bossa Nova, and then we got more coke and champagne and went back to Harvey’s and did the coke and drank champagne and passed around spliffs until just before dawn, and then everybody passed out except for me. I can never sleep when I do uppers, even coke. I just laid there on the couch looking at my phone. Around six o’clock there came a whisper from the entrance to the living room.

“Psst.” It was Ralph.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hey,” said Ralph. “Are you sleeping?”

“No.”

“Happy birthday.”

“Thanks.”

“I have meth,” he said. Those beautiful, perfect, magic words. I scrambled to my feet. Ralph stood there in the entrance to the living room, blocking the light coming in from the kitchen. Ralph’s tall and skinny and Russian, with a shaved head and glasses. He was wearing a long-sleeved Incubus T-shirt and baggy cargo pants. In the dim light of dawn he looked like a wolf with all its fur stripped off.

“Let’s go up to the roof,” I said. So we did.

“Chrysanthemum thinks you’re a serial killer,” I said after we’d taken a few puffs. I felt incredible. The rooftop garden was carefully manicured, a rectangle of evenly spaced planters with curated rich people flowers and ornamental greens surrounding a smaller rectangle of handmade wooden lawn furniture, lounge chairs and upright chairs and little end tables for cocktails. The light in the sky was pink and orange, the top half of the sun exposed, beginning to burn the night’s dark clouds off the horizon.

“She does?” Ralph said, holding the torch as I twisted the pipe. “What do you think?”

“It wouldn’t change my opinion if you were,” I said.

“What is your opinion?”

“Nothing, I don’t have one. I mean, I like you. Not like, like you like you. I just think you’re cool. You’re different.”

He smiled.

“I really like you,” he said. “I want you to suck my dick so bad.”

I slid down onto my knees so fast it was like I’d been bewitched. I looked up at Ralph. Our eyes met. His pupils were huge, like faraway galaxies. I wanted to get lost in them and never be found. Just float there frozen stiff for all of eternity in the cold solitude of space.

“Let’s stay high forever,” I said.

He nodded and unzipped his pants.

*

“We’re here!” says Kareem. “Damn, and we were just getting to the good part!”

We pull up in front of a brownstone on 38th Street. He puts the cruiser in park and reaches across to pop open the door. He smells like Creed Viking, which is impossible. Not on a fucking police officer’s salary.

“Isn’t your partner going to be mad you just left him downtown?” I say.

“He’ll be fine,” Kareem says. “I’ll stop by Dunkin on the way back. Listen, I want you to promise me something. You get into any trouble, you call me on my personal. No cops, no 911. No bullshit. I’m worried about you, little girl. Please be safe.”

“God, you’re a creep,” I say. But I still take the piece of paper he hands me with his cell phone number on it. Then I hop out of the cruiser and go up the brownstone’s steps and ring the buzzer. Fern opens the door almost before my finger leaves the button. He’s naked and clearly hasn’t slept. He’s jitterier than a wind-up toy and sweatier than Kevin Garnett.

“Come on, Syb,” he says, squinting at the sun. “Come inside. Daddy’s waiting.” It’s a gorgeous house. Midcentury furniture, art on the walls. Even some little fancy sculptures on pedestals. Bookshelves lined with hardcovers and first editions. Turkish rugs. We climb some steps and turn down a short hallway. Just inside the door to the bedroom Fern hands me a torch and a bubbler. I heat the bowl and Fern drops a rock in. I take a huge, gasping, gulping hit, hold it in a few seconds. Then I grab Fern’s head and press my lips to his, blowing the vapor down his throat. Against my lips he feels like a plastic tube filled with wet, soft tissue.

“I love you, baby,” I say.

“Hit it again,” says Fern, exhaling clouds. “Then come meet daddy.”

In the bedroom there’s porn playing on a flatscreen opposite the big bed. In the corner of the bed up against the wall there’s a tiny lump, way too small to be a human being. Fern pushes me onto the bed and I start crawling towards the lump. It looks like a pillow, or a small heap of bunched-up blanket.

“Suck his dick,” says Fern. “Suck daddy’s dick.”

I feel around for legs, a torso, anything. I peel back layers of blankets and sheets until finally I feel something, a patch of flesh, freezing cold and scaly, a dead fish, maybe, but not a human being. I move my hand up, feel spindly, soft little hairs, and finally a tiny, moist flap, a stiff, small penis, ice-cold and dead. Absolutely, positively a dead old man’s little dead erection.

“Jesus Christ, Fern,” I say. “This guy’s fucking dead!”

Fern runs to the bathroom, retching.

I can barely explain what happens next. It’s like a spirit possesses me, some kind of incredible dark force far beyond my control, puppeteering me, moving my hands and feet and guiding my actions, even controlling my thoughts and emotions as I work. I grab the iPad from the foot of the bed where the old man sleeps his eternal slumber and turn off the porn, then switch over to YouTube and cue up Paranoid by Black Sabbath.

Fern’s phone is on the nightstand. It’s a burner I bought him a couple months ago. Twenty bucks at Kmart. I grab it and download TikTok, start a brand-new account. AvengingAngel666. I turn on all the lamps in the room, get the phone ready to record. Then I hit play on YouTube and start recording. The guitar lick kicks in, that classic, brutal, death hippie riff. Ozzy Osbourne screaming into the void. I zoom in on the old man’s face, then drag my sharp maroon nails across his cheek, digging in hard. There would have been blood, but I guess you don’t bleed much after you’re dead. The video ends. 15 seconds. I add a caption. Attention all rapists and pedophiles of New York City: YOU’RE NEXT, BITCH!!!!!!

I hit post.

“Come on,” I say, bursting into the bathroom. “Get dressed. We have to leave right now.” I flush the toilet and pull Fern to his feet, then help him into his clothes. We run down the brownstone steps and power walk to the avenue. “Be cool,” I say. “Just act normal.” I wave down a yellow cab. Fern jumps in. I drop his burner in the street and smash it with my foot a few times, then swipe the smashed pieces into the rain gutter.

“What the hell?” says Fern.

“I’ll buy you a new one,” I say.

In the car on the way to Peach’s in midtown Black Sabbath reverberates through my skull. Don’t get fucking paranoid, I think. I remember my good friend Kareem and swallow hard. By the time we get to Peach’s in midtown the video’s already been viewed eight million times on TikTok. It’s been deleted from the app but copied and reposted everywhere, over and over and over again. It’s unstoppable, growing and spreading like a fucking plague. Within the week we’ve got 300 million hits.

Don’t feel bad for the old man. Turns out he was a fucking pedophile, and worse. Cops found a treasure trove of contraband hidden in the bookshelves and tucked away in a safe in the wall behind one of his fancy-ass paintings. Really sick shit, too. Stuff I don’t even care to mention. And it’s me we’re talking about here, the queen of fucking hell.

As for me, I’ve finally found my true purpose. My art. The reason I’m here. Soon the whole world will know my name. Hope you’re ready. It’s going to be a riot.

I’m Sybil Fucking Rain, bitch.

Better get used to it.

* * *