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Back Vanishing Rooms
Chapters (29)
  1. Title Page
  2. BOOKS BY MELVIN DIXON
  3. Dedication
  4. Epigraph
  5. PART ONE
  6. Jesse
  7. Ruella
  8. Lonny
  9. Jesse
  10. Ruella
  11. Lonny
  12. PART TWO
  13. Ruella
  14. Jesse
  15. Lonny
  16. PART THREE
  17. Ruella
  18. Lonny
  19. Jesse
  20. PART FOUR
  21. Ruella
  22. Lonny
  23. Ruella
  24. Jesse
  25. Lonny
  26. Ruella
  27. Lonny
  28. Jesse
  29. Copyright Page

I woke up in the prison hospital. My legs were tight and spread apart in metal clamps like I was some bitch about to have a baby. I must have been a bitch. They got their pussy, didn’t they? Faggot pussy. They didn’t care: Pussy is pussy, a nut’s a nut. They would find any way to crack it. I tried to move. One foot, then another. Fine. But not the whole sliced through me like a knife tearing up from my thighs and ass and something warm and smelly oozed out of me like I was having a period or something. But the blood smelled like shit and I couldn’t move to see how bad it was. My ass was swimming in it. My stomach queasy. There was blood on me like those red hands in October, those red leaves with a voice. I couldn’t gather them in now or hold in anything. I was open from the inside, couldn’t cover myself no more. I tried to hold things in again. I couldn’t. Shit and blood again. Red September lips, red October leaves. Hands with knives of November like old copper. You know why they call him Metro? He was under, like I was. And I told him, if he could even hear me from somewhere else, “You think you got me now, huh? Metro, you think I’m the pussy now?” Shit. Christ Jesus! I never had a chance.

Jesse

Jesse

What was Ruella pulling me into but more commitment? The prison was gruesome. It was stooreal.Phielliphada weight on him that showed through his eyes. And he probably saw too well what I was and what I was carrying. In prison he had to know how men could need each other.

The ride back to the city was long. First a crowded bus leaving Rikers and then a subway to midtown. I told Ruella I had to be alone. Just for a while. I’d go back to West 4th Street and face the bare white walls. No dance posters. No calendars. Maybe this time I wouldn’t hear Metro’s voice or the soft gurgles of our lovemaking there. But the memory that seizes you and wrings all the sweat from your nightmare is never the one you expect. All the guilt in your life creeps back as if you never fully explained the stolen cookie or the loose change taken from your father’s desk top, and there’s no one to blame but yourself.