I’m Losing You by Bruce Wagner

out a tiny tube of K-Y. Donny took it and greased Quinn’s cock. Donny asked if he’d tested and Quinn said, Every three months. Donny just wanted it inside him. They did some coke and the agent leaned back against the door, legs up in the air. The windows fogged and the Senior Veepee winced. Is this what his mother felt? This kind of cancer…A shape appeared through the misty glass. Bracing with his body, wet from the pool, Eric carefully opened the door, so the agent wouldn’t fall out. Donny arched, groaning as he rode up on Quinn. Eric braced Donny’s back and neck while Quinn scooted back like an insect, taking the stuck agent with him. Eric put his knees against the seat and his balls in Donny’s mouth. Donny twisted his head so that in his agony he could get at Eric’s prick. The agent was stoned enough that the twisting nearly made him black out.
    When his father first bought him the car, Donny took Serena for a ride. She sat in the back and he chauffeured her to Linney’s, the deli on south Beverly Drive. When they got back home, she sat and wept. “You’re all I have now, Donny.” It would be years before he learned what she meant.
    Eric watched like a naturalist as Quinn began fucking faster. The agent conjured his mother, sitting in back, staring past them; a coliseum-sized roar as Serena was torn from the prow, a whirligig Ursula taking her place, with Tiffany in tow—mascara of dirt and tears, firecracker eyes. Donny jacked himself, hand crushed by Quinn’s hard belly, Eric slowly pulling his own gummy head at the agent’s crown like a deep sea geiger; Bernie and Calliope before him, agent close to puking now, two-step funhouse vertigo, father’s B horror trailers—entrailers—blood hammering, hilarious vaudeville pneumatic sucking of Donny’s asshole; Katherine, love of his life. Donny beside her on the Laurel Canyon bed, Quinn fucking both like a piston, cold Thai on the counter, forgiving her beloved, forgiving him everything, never a bigger love, never bigger than theirs, never could be, staring at each other, Bonnie and Clyde just before the bullets but senses dead, no Pop poetics, Donny holding back the tears, awareness searching like a snail’s antennae for something to hold on to, something to hold him down, to ground him, he found it, the crazed wet smacking of the vinyl seat and the painful button at the small of his back kept him conscious. Then the beauty of the hood ornament glimpsed through mouth fog carried him over….
    As soon as it was done, he could join his mother—wasn’t he all that she had?—under the house.

    On weekends, Les put in time at the Venice free clinic. The Medical Board asked for two hundred hours; the six months he spent there revitalized him. He felt like a real doctor again.
    Obie remained paralyzed and there was no improvement in her speech. Still, he understood her better than anyone. He painstakingly assembled something of a secret language, until one day he gained fluent trespass to the sandcastle’s sodden, crumbly rooms. Visitors and nurses alike marveled, though sometimes Obie’s requests, as channeled through Dr. Trott, were filigreed enough to elicit unspoken derision. The day she asked him to kill her, he immediatelycalled Calliope. The psychiatrist warned of the consequences, legal and moral. Until he was able to separate Oberon from his mother, she said, his motives would be tainted. Luckily, Big Star pulled out of her depression—or seemed to, anyway. She stopped bringing it up.
    He had a week of vivid dreams.
    Most began at the Children with AIDS benefit but ended with the doctor on Sunset, standing over the familiar corpse. (The impingement of the carnival seemed to signal an end to the haunting of Les Trott.) At the pre-succubus open-air gala, the Duke of Dermis wandered through Big Star–manned booths, searching for Obie. The strange thing was, only