Jamaica Delila, how I want you; your smell a clean yeast, a high white yogurt of the soul. Raymond would be happy to tell me you set me up. He’d say somebody had to lay down, somebody had to sail by, somebody had to do lock-up in this cadillac of castles, and I was the shit-bred pigeon. But Raymond never made it with you in the bathtub (What? you said, Raymond, that moody hunch?), bubbles and wavelets slapping the porcelain sides, soap flowers white on your high mongolian cheeks, your wide-open lavender eyes shadowed with the pale green of a young bruise, your lips mouthing a heavenly O of surprise.

Late at night I think about hitting you. I double my fist and squeeze until the pain makes me tingle. When you fell back on the bed your hair spread out like feathers. I play you over and over in my head until you’re falling so slow the hours pass as your hands move up to shield your face, tips of your fingers rose-tinged and rounded. I read the lines of your palms that are lightened in the glow of the lamp. I kept the bedroom nearly dark for weeks so that when you walked toward me the tilted lampshade by the bed threw an ocher glow on your stomach. But before that I lay watching you; you sat in the chair, smoking and looking at the street. You wore those boy’s shirts, like the ones I wore to school when I was thirteen, button-downs with long tails and cuffed sleeves. Or those knit ones, red and green, open-necked, with the tiny alligator sewn on the chest. Golfer’s shirts. I think about your clothes, their detergent and hot water smell, about pulling them off in the dark. Your insides were muscular, pushing me; it felt like fighting underwater. You liked to be held for a long time with your clothes on, grappling slow and fast on the bed like teen-agers in a black park with the night to kill. You were skinny and you felt like a kid in boys’ clothes. In my head at night a figment of Raymond tells me you still wear those shirts. Does he know about the underpants too? boy’s briefs, thick white cotton. You said they felt good, like diapers, rubbed the sewn ridge in front and your flatness underneath. In bed you drew faces on our legs with a lipstick pencil; faces eating chomped cigarettes, thought bubbles with words above their heads—Harumph! Mmmmmmmmmm—and faces whose heavy earrings pulled their heads to their shoulders. Then you made them crawl like crabs across you, six legs, sideways scuttle.

During the day you sat in the ticket booth at Obelisk, bennied up and staring at a cardboard wheel, a layered look-alike procession of inch-long coupons that opened the magical doors of the oldest movie house in Philly. While the lady schlumpers walked their shopping bags and weasel-boned spics did musical slides past the window, you got fixed on tickets and watched them like TV, studied them with a dimestore magnifying glass. You drew them, perfect tickets, on your knees: Obelisk Theatre, C Street, Philadelphia, Murphey Enterprises Inc., set off by a wavery line and numbered: 028949, 028950, 028951 … bright orange, that watery bright of crab’s shells. And reversed: The management reserves the right to revoke the license granted by this ticket by refunding purchase price. Fuzzy emblem with a centered star, signed S-7, National Ticket Co., Shamaken, PA. You came home with chains of inked-on tickets across your thighs. Geezes, marks, numb doughboys came to the morning shows, dropped inside and pulled their puds to choruses of Nazi blonds while you sat outside behind the glass bubble devising your own tattoos. Like getting fed, you told me, sitting there catching coins as they slid cupped in a wooden curve through the half-moon hole in the bubble. At night there were lots of boys in hats, wop musicians out of gigs, winos looking for a chair. And a few women in boots, aging a bright platinum.

But days were best. Days were OK. I stood across the street watching you and waiting to make the drop. At first it was sideline stuff, Nembies and speed balls, a little white stuff for the joy bangers who came downtown to cop. I bought a ticket from you, threw the money in that cupped slot and saw your fingernails, blackish violet, catch the silver faces of the quarters. I went inside. Obelisk. The bathrooms were big, horsehair sofa and fan-man carpets worn through, then the white tile floors broken and chipped till the border mosaics were cracked to an ivory powder. We used to cut speed with that powder; all those silky Main Line debs reeling in their mommies’ sports cars, digesting the crumbling universe of Obelisk. Some enchanted evening I whistled old songs you may see a stranger and scooped up the finest particles across a crowded room by the long mirror. Friendly mirror, old art deco; a serious flamingo balanced on one straight leg, big sitting ball of sun going down behind. Urinals rust-stained and scenting out a poison sweet of piss. Obelisk: reduced by the Puerto Rican neighborhood to obligatory porn, cracked frontal filigree, and balcony boxes that could barely support the weight of the rats; cinematic rodents who dragged off whole boxes of discarded popcorn. In the dark you could see the white stripes of the boxes moving smoothly in the corners and along the walls: they had it down to a science. They came along later between shows, chirping, to clean up the flowered kernels they’d spilled in their labors. Ah, the Obelisk rats. How I miss those rangy fuckers. Raymond had fantasies of training them to make the drops, do our work for us. He said they weren’t ordinary rats; they were wise guys, street smart, city old, telepathic. And they were vain, living for generations in the midst of those flaky ornate mirrors and rotted plush seats. We could pay them in little red hats and silk vests scaled to size.

Raymond had time to hatch plots, sitting in the coffee shop across the street and waiting for me to appear with our hard-earned money. All I needed was a trench coat and a Luger, a banded felt hat to pull down over my eyes. I complained that it was all too elementary. Raymond said of course it was elementary, that’s why it worked. Perfectly. For months. And Jamaica was in good with old man Neinmann. Neinmann couldn’t back out; the dicks would never believe we did our biz there all this time and Neinmann didn’t know it. Besides, smiled Raymond, the old choke had a thing about going back to Germany before he croaked; he was saving his pennies. Raymond nodded, drumming his fingers and their rippled whitish nails on tabletops, ducking his head, his jacket humped like he had a sweatshirt wadded up in it. He said he was just a nice Jewish boy, doing his bit for reverse reparations. Reptilian Raymond, slow speech and cherub mouth, his head darting forward in those jerky chin-stretching movements like some tousle-headed turtle. Droopy blue eyes, movie star jaw, Raymond: Quasimodo with the head of an angel, walked with a hesitant lurch and dragged one foot. He said he was, obviously, conspicuous; I would make the drops, he would keep things clean. And Neinmann, that old storm trooper, slouched by the projection booth giving hell in his diluted German rotgut to the Filipino projectionist. Jamaica, you thin wonder in schoolboy clothes, I could crush them all into a burlap bag full of stones and watch them sink in a sewer named for you. Jamaica, like pieces of wood in my bloodstream; turning your head away from me on the street, walking ahead of me up the stairs with your straight shoulders, saying nothing, even your footsteps sounding arrogant, luxurious, secretive; slide of your shoes on worn rubber-treaded steps. I always listened, thought I would find something out and use it. You liked me to use what I knew. Sweet Jamaica, who was never innocent. Each time with you was one more chance to crash through.

Women and stomachs. Here we go nowhere. My cell door is identical to the rest of my wall-with-a-view, and to think my old man broke his ass to put a picture window in his suburban clap-trap house. Bungalow, my mother called it. Bungalow, deep in the forest green. Honeymoons and champagne. He rode the train in every day and sat at the fake-maple dinette at night. I wish I could say she diddled the grocery boy, but that was the woman next door. Our esteemed neighbor locked her kid out of the house when the delivery boys came around, and I sat, like a preschool obedience course graduate, with that rejected sniveling bimbo in the back by the scratchy hedges. Inside his mother was having her jollies and my mother did worse; she watched them with binoculars like the prize champ she was. A charming 3-D view. We bust our balls to start out small and keep moving. Numberless advancements. Jamaica: the last time I moved up I got to you, got inside and forgot the rules. Unpardonable infraction. Admit one, two. Admit where you got your information. Officer, I got it from the corner machine; multicolored pornography individually wrapped. A subtle gradation of desire at inflated prices. It’s obvious I’ve graduated. Three days here and the trustee speaks to me; I eat in the courthouse dining hall. The last time, a county jail in Florida, statutory rape, they let us out of eight cells into a hallway to eat. Then we lined up and scraped our leavings into the one toilet, flushed it, watched burbling chicken bones and mashed potatos engage with green peas in a smear and gush of water; reminding you of all your sick vomits in bathrooms of restaurants, theaters, gas stations, train depots—all of it coinciding in a rush; exactly how it felt, how it smelled, your head on the bowl, knees on hard floor, cold sweat of the porcelain, nothing to grab, bird’s-eye view, intimate stains of countless patrons, high whishy flow of the plumbing, eight running commodes, drip of the sinks, your feet sticking out of the stall, occasional footsteps of witnesses cutting a wide swath …

Jamaica, in sickness and in health. I was sick the day you found me, having hit Philly on the lam after paying off one greasy Floridian uncle and waving good-bye to underage cracker girls. I bought your drinks in that bar beside the tenement walk-up and followed you out, got you in the chipped green doorway of the building, wanted to beat or crush or fuck that two-day bus ride and week in the southern slam out of my swollen head. I touched your legs and felt for you through your clothes, thought from the way you looked, walked, that if I pressed myself against you and pushed, you’d come back at me. I knew you wouldn’t scream. You reached down and unzipped me, keys still in your hand, your warm surprising fingers on my balls, tight, and you touched me with the cold metal, pressing; how the breath went out of me and came back in one steely point. You said to step away and follow you upstairs. When you took those keys away to open the door I could have broken your face. Jamaica Delila. Later I forced the name out of you; hearing it like falling into jungle my mother only dreamed about with her bungalow stories pressed between her legs. Jamaica: not the usual dance. You were falling; I could slap you and push you, keep you moving, falling and falling; it was like you hit on your back with a snapping sound and water sprayed all around us. Then you went under; I didn’t feel you.

I wake up alone here at night and the guards are playing poker in the hall. I hear the money rolling, touch the ridged bricks of the wall I’m shoved against, have rolled close to like some newborn rattish creature longing for the nearest suckle. I can taste the skin of your arms; I hate you. And when I fall asleep again into the black, the slap of the cards follows me, constant, funereal: slapping engines of driver-less hearses long enough to carry the box of the body, and the slapping feet of the men that follow the box. They have no faces and they feel with the whiskers of dogs.

Animal churches, clutch and clutter. Tempo of the vertical beat danced in amyl dreams. Raymond wanted to cash in on the sex quiz; join the rest of them down there at the bottom of the gorge. Boxes of amyl packaged in a gross of drugstore inhalers or small perfume bottles with cork stoppers: items the hipsters long for. Added attractions, said Raymond, those little extras to close down the days and promote orgasmic endings: Gene Autry riding into coral skyline while the cacti stand up ancient and timeless as Lucifer. Legions of pretty boys loving each other up to the tune of the late show and spinning off like random pinballs in the flash of the nitrite wizard. Feel that grand connection coming on and you quick twist off the cap to inhale, the room goes out in a blue staccato and you’re hammered to the finish by yourself in a storm and a roller coaster. Jamaica, you loved it, taking the ride alone and seeing the sights in some neon hieroglyphic Persian while I held your hips and watched the X’s come up in your eyes. You wanted it every day, all night, you wanted me to get you to the starting gate, pump you up for the real trip and keep the house from falling when the floor moved: it was like fucking an electric zombie, a stiff-legged gazelle shuddering in northern catatonia. Like dying in the snowdrifts, Jamaica, moving on the floe of your body, white and cold for miles. And I could wonder about shaking you until the ice cracked and all the deep black poured out, textures of blacks: black of thick tar, black of satin, corduroy black, waxen and petaled black of death masks, orchid black, black of cashmere beds and the moonless impetigo night, cancer black and black of inheritor insects, black of wet rope and burns and black and black and black I saw in your icy throat. I pulled you up and shook you limp; Jamaica, you black doll, wobbling like a dead girl sewn of old socks. My hands were big enough to kill you. I threw you down and ran into the next room, clouded, coated with you; picked up that shoe box of delicates, amyl nitrite in old Fabergé, Coty, Arpège bottles, and threw it against the wall. The smell came up around us, liquefying air; for six blank seconds I felt you under me again, twisting your black stripes. Raymond stood up to hit me with a nightstick some cop had given him for bennies, and Neinmann rotated his skeletal head to watch the fray; but it was when you came in, wildhaired and wrapped in a sheet, that he rocked back and put up his translucent stick-fingered hands. Even then he knew more than I knew. Neinmann: now he knows all there is; the finish, the big bang.

I might have finished with my hands at your throat. Where would we all be if I had; Obelisk still a destitute fortress and Neinmann holding court a few thousand richer, rejoicing like a fascist Munchkin in his broken-down Aryan heart: witch, witch, the mean old witch, the wicked witch is dead. And Raymond, where would he take his services; where would he find a seer, a Mafioso Beatrice like yourself, a movie house scam the length and breadth of C Street? He watched me but you watched him. Watched him and touched him, kept him in your apartment like an accomplice court jester. And me Jamaica, I’d be in one of several Bolivias mourning your loss, bleeding my own menses of regret at blowing the tracks of the only train that could push me past a raunchy perfection; a save-my-soul rattle only the devil searches out. I love you the way I love nightmare, secrets coming up like smoke through a grid; the way I love mirrors shattered but still whole, reflecting the foolish image in a hundred lit-up fragments. No one else could take me; pay my way with what your skin knows.

What about your heart. You dreamed it stopped and woke up with it pounding in your head, scraping across your insides like the interminable drag of a foot toward some dead end. You gasped in your sleep then sat up swinging, like a man parting water for air. You wouldn’t let me touch you. You put on your clothes, went to the living room and sat down in a chair opposite the couch where Raymond slept. He would feel you in the room and wake up, sit across from you in his blankets, eyes trained on the wall past your face. You said he could help you because he wouldn’t look, just kept his eyes open until you could sleep again. Then, when you were quiet, he picked up your feet and held them in his hands. He put them in his lap and sat there, holding on. Finally he looked at the ceiling, stayed absolutely still. I know because I stood, prize son of my prize mother, and watched him from the dark hallway. I saw him turning on the axis of your legs. Once he bowed his face and put the clean ball of your foot to his forehead.

It was a ceremony I couldn’t duplicate. I went back to our room and lay on the white bed. It started rotating slowly; I pressed my hands on the flat sheets; they were soft and worn, smelling of you. It was me in that room, in your bed, not him. He could bring you around by not looking; you went away from me to let him; but it was me that saw you, and the games were not really games. Who sees you now Jamaica, how many of them ever did. I got close, inside, in the whirling. Or maybe you kept me out, crouched in your fetal hum, but I knew where you were and mapped a tonal geography no ear could name; found you with a sonar plugged into that music of dark feedback that shoves us. With you I’m blind as those flying rats with monkey faces whose ears are the one miraculous inversion that keep them feeding themselves. Jamaica, I fed you whatever you wanted; sometimes I wouldn’t stop.

Raymond was the icing on the cake. You kept the history vague; said you met him through friends who had grown up cracking meters together on North Broad Street. A few small deals later he was there and needed a place and didn’t ask for anything; you wanted someone alive in the rooms at night besides yourself and the roaches and the traffic sounds and the street yells floating up past the windows. Maybe he was some kind of brother; he didn’t talk too much, kept enough money around and knew how to get more. I moved in and you got the job at Obelisk; things picked up. I did the running; operations got smoother and bigger. Clockwork. I think about you out there walking on cement; the tick of your heels. Jamaica, whose clock was it?

You said Raymond was born to grow into that body, that hump like rhinoceros armor, his arms powerful and a little too short. He lifted weights every day and went to a welfare therapist twice a week, but he would end like a bug with its wings and lower thorax crushed, lurching in dwarfed circles on a sidewalk. He was arthritic; the disease crept up, would get worse and put him in a metal chair he could turn on with a switch.

He was gone most evenings, ate supper in a deli down the block and threw dice in a bar until late. We sat in our room with cold bottles of cheap Chablis and you told me he was usually in pain and got a lot of dope legally; that’s how it started, he lucked into a doc who was a writing fool and then pushed those scripts on C Street until he was famous. Maybe too famous. I was convenient; I eased that particular pain.

Sometimes he gave you the creeps; he always knew it and disappeared for a few days. You touched my back, my chest, pulled my legs around you. We were alone and the rooms seemed bigger, stretched. We stayed naked in the daytime and made it, no amyl, on the kitchen floor. But by the time he came back we were ready for the sounds of him making coffee on the stove in the mornings, sitting in the corner place at the table, big-chested, Lancelot hair uncombed and so black the shine was purple, bent over acrostics and newspaper crosswords. It was tempting to see him as the handsome Jewish jock he would have been and he killed that temptation with a glance.

Maybe in those dreams you saw him crumpled up like a stunted spider, his back having taken him over. I told you I didn’t know why he hung around for the slide, waited for that slow engagement to suck him in. You mentioned certain continual numbers, said I would wait too, anyone would, wait forever, because this was the only show in town.

Once we went walking by the junk stores and you bought a boy’s cap, an old woolen one with a snap brim and gold silk lining. Knickerbocker Superior Caps, said an oval inked label the size of an egg, and it showed a wigged colonial with a ruffled neck and a cane, ringing a bell. You tucked your hair inside it and strolled, casual, by the mirror, making faces at me and pretending to twirl a walking stick. You looked for a long time at the cigar holders and penknives in the glass cases, and finally I bought you a miniature switchblade with a pearl handle.

I was born in the West Indies, you told me, And when we got here my mother sold my ass right out from under me. She did it with all the girls, five of us, until we got into our teens and left home. She used to say our father left her because of us, and now we could take care of things. No one ever really hurt us, mostly playacting and harmless perv trips. I was the boy but she never let me cut my braids; I wore them up, like this, in hats.

We were supposed to meet Raymond and Neinmann in a bar close by. We sat down and I asked what happened to that queen of a mother. She aged fast, you said, Selling meat is hard work. Her standard of living went down considerably after we all left her. I hope she died in the gutter.

I asked if that tale about your father was a lie. Of course it was, you said, We all had different fathers.

I looked down the street, watching for our cohorts. It made me nervous to meet with them in public. Maybe they aren’t coming, I said, Maybe they’re all enjoying that same crowded gutter.

They’ll be here, you said. Raymond always shows, and Neinmann will be around as long as we want him.

You bent your face to light a cigarette, hard jaw and downy cheeks framed in the blousy cap. I forced your hand into the ashtray and crushed the lit tobacco. You think you’re moving us around like little girls, I said, What about me, Jamaica? Think I’ll always show?

You looked me in the face and smiled. No, you won’t show, you told me, But you’ll always be right where you need to be, whether I want you there or not.

One show is like another. In the exercise yard the men walk one of a dozen figure eights, trace their own dead tracks, wear a subtle trench the width of a beagle’s body. The far wall is covered with ivy and they head for that green color. On a quiet windy day I stand close and the small stiff leaves are flapping on the stone like hands that know one language. I work my fingers through the tangled viny stems and the wall is mossy, dumb, packed with cool soil in the cracks. Earthworms live in the dirt, eating their tunnels. I see them loop in the leaves, fat and pink, trail a lubricant smelling of ripe insides. Around their middles there is a swollen band that veiled and bluish tint of flushed skin. Press it and the worm rears a faceless end, delicate, smelling the air.

Inside is the clammy clank and slap of anywhere’s jails. In a few weeks I’m on my way to the pen, big-time gleam where I learn a new career and swim awhile in the underbelly of that metal whale. The whale eats what it’s thrown and hums like a city. During my wait the heat drops by every day, smooth heat from the DA’s office in expensive suits. No more street games; it’s big bucks, crooked rumba of the dodg’em politicians. They tell me the whole story again: Neinmann in the burned-down Obelisk, a four-alarm fire in the A.M., and the old man crouched like a pile of spindled ash in the office by stacks of used reels. How like Raymond to fry Neinmann in his own thick oil, and do it so they can’t prove arson. Or maybe Raymond didn’t set it at all. And maybe it wasn’t an intended deliverance I got handed the day the heat picked me up at that phone booth waiting for his call; maybe it wasn’t them who were supposed to find me. Who was I waiting for? Jamaica, I like to think you had at least devised something quick for me; just a flash, an imprint before the black came up. Sometimes, lately, I like to think you devised nothing at all; that the sacred goons I imagine came down on you cleanly; that you’re neck-deep in darkness yourself; then I turn off the light in my head and, like a fool, hope you’ll be around to settle up with. Tomorrow I’ll sing and sell you all; but, one way or another, you’re all gone aren’t you? and your names were only stories.

*  *  *  *  *

One, ten, twelve. Talk to me; go first. Games for two, trade sides and roll. Hold me; your back a broad olive blade that sharpens, slick with moisture, if we keep going. I could drink you up; lay down. I hold you like a baby, tell you I really love you, say words you like and then start dreaming on the downs, fading, passing through, big truck labeled with a bright red blur. You run the tub full of water before I’m too gone and walk me there in the fluid drunk of the pills. In the water you hold me under my arms, move the wet cloth on my skin and finally pull me over you, soapy and sleep-heavy. Water closes to our necks as you slide down under me; I keep my face on your skin to breathe and see your black body in silhouettes, a string of paper cutout dolls with joined hands who join hands around me, rumbling a thin white noise; and as they open their mouths I see their phosphorescent teeth glow a pale arpeggio. In the water obsidian beetles surface, doing their six-legged swims. I touch their hard shells and they crack, spill a silver mercury the thickness of fish eggs. It clouds the water slowly, furling and smoky; in the smoke I see your hands moving water to reach me. When you touch my flesh I slide out of it and wake up standing, propped by your arms, your knee, the cold tile wall. I feel the cloud still seeping from you and it dries on my hand, cracking to a pile of charcoal numbers; dim serial of odd and even, a catalog of fools.

At first, all the girls wore dresses. There was a checkered flag of separation and the race was nothing on a board laid out with paper money and plastic hotels for Park Place. There were metal hoops to make points in and the balls sectioned off like melons in orange and black. The rules were written down and smeared in a fruity juice on all our faces.

The morning before I never saw you again, I opened my eyes and your shorn hair was all over my naked front. You had cut it to a jagged bowl around dawn, standing over me with scissors and scattering the pieces.