The Taming of Frankie Carrozza

Tempus Fugit

David Cotter - artwork
Benjamin Barnes - mainstream pornography
Oliver Jenkins - alcohol
Bradley Valentine - importation
Kingsley Cole - counterculture pornography
Michael Veress - marijuana
Johnny Covaci - illicit stimulants
Sidney Lane - information
George December - banned products
Ciarán Quinn - the best whiskey about

The columns went on and on, pages upon pages of names and assets, but Frankie snatched the hardback out of his hand before he could skim through the rest.
'Are you ... are you blushing? Good gracious, are you ... embarrassed?' Charlie demanded, but the boy only rubbed the back of his head and stared back at him inquisitively. 'So, the rumours are true.'
Feigning obliviousness, Frankie grinned and looked elsewhere, then said, 'I haven't a clue what you're talking about, so I'm pleading the fifth.'
'That you do fight merciless mercenaries, I mean!' Charlie gasped jokily. He reached across to point out the faint white-pink scar sliced on the flesh beneath the inner joint of his elbow that was in the shape of a crucifix, his finger trailing down his forearm to touch the matching cicatrix of a wing branding his wrist. 'And how you have created all sorts of avenues to all your strange tastes, of course.'
Stoic by nature, Frankie didn't say a thing and only lit up a cigarette, unabashed.
'The legendary ledger of lists that is Frankie Carrozza's fabled playbook: his little black book. Mind you, it isn't exactly little by any means, is it?' Charlie refrained from mentioning the means that Frankie may have carried out to procure such a cobwebbed network—be that by haggling, gambling, blackmailing, exchanging, or manipulating. He believed that was best left unmentioned, perhaps.
'Did you really think that omnipotence didn't come with a price, Chance?' he replied finally, taking the cigarette from his mouth and handing it to Charlie. As he lit another, he added, 'All spells have their curses.'
'I saw Sidney Lane's name in there,' he replied, pointing to the book. 'The budding journalist and editor of the newsletter, the same boy who wants to become a private investigator.'
'The very one,' Carrozza answered, hiding behind a cloud of smoke. He shook the book. 'An old present from Trevor Hamilton.'
'Is it your favourite?' Charlie asked. 'It's certainly the one you're most guarded about. Curious, you even have the names of some of your friends in there. Is mine yet?'
'My favourite?' Frankie laughed incredulously, then threw the book into the swimming pool with his cigarette. The black book of spoils sunk to the bottom of the watery depths, along with the secrets and unsavoury lives of their surrounding peers.
When he'd removed his socks and shoes and trousers, the entrepreneur jumped in after it—not to retrieve it, but to swim. Without needing to be coaxed, Charlie stripped to his underwear and jumper to dive in after him. Kicking up from the bottom, his head broke the surface to wade the waters and laugh aloud. Once he'd wiped excess water and hair from his face, Frankie waded forward until they were close enough to kiss, arms and legs stirring the depths.
Charlie spat a mouthful of bitter water at him, then breathlessly asked, 'Can I ask you something? You said you knew my name even before you knew me. What did you think of me when we first met?'
'You're exactly how I imagined you would be,' he said. After he spurted a jet of water into the other boy's mouth from his own, he asked, 'And me?'
Charlie's chest felt buoyant as he fell backward to float on his back. And because friends tell each other the truth, he confessed: 'Everything and more.'
Weighed down by his jumper and simper, he took a deep breath and sunk underwater to cool his enflamed cheeks. The world immediately fell silent, the blue abyss gurgling in his ears like thunderclouds rumbling in the distance. Frankie followed him under. Waterlogged, they began to circle one another, twirling through the unnatural blue with their eyes fixated on each other. Then, moving in slow motion, knees up near the chest of his mustard-coloured jumper that had ridden up to expose his bony bronze ribcage, the black of his underwear the only distinct colour down here, Frankie gradually propelled towards Charlie and kissed him on the mouth as gently as the bubbles that slipped from it. Grabbing fistfuls of mustard so as to respond somehow to the surreal mixture of both fact and fantasy, he felt Frankie's leg graze against the insides of both of his.
Here, dangling between land and sky, they were safe from rule and realm.
Their heads broke the surface to pop out breathlessly, sucking in great lungfuls of air. Bewildered, Charlie eyeballed the other boy until he started to laugh hysterically. Carrozza mimicked him. Before the spell ended, Chance swam the distance to quell the longing of his hunger. Sweeping hair from the other boy's eyes, Frankie kissed him again and Charlie's mouth opened willingly, his lips warm and wet against his as he drained the Holy Grail, drinking him in to the bottom of the chalice to taste his scent mixed with chlorine and smoke, to feel the hum of his heart against his own. He melted in Frankie's hands, bleeding into him like two threads sewn together. Charlie was elsewhere: through a portal to a magical realm. He soared into an otherworld, where the breeze on the seashore smelled of vanilla and Carrozza was the warmth of the sand between his toes, arms encompassing him to wash over him like a salty surf.
    When Frankie gripped the sides of his head and leant his body downwards so that his shoulders hunched up in the backdrop like two knobby wings, the kiss heating Charlie's squirming insides like a bowl of porridge, their souls moved beyond the confinements of their entwined bodies. Both demon and man might watch on, but Charlie did not care; all the horrors elsewhere in the world were elsewhere and worse, and so on their worries went, soaring back out of edging along the paradise they'd bloomed between them together. Dusk and autumn were settling all around them, and as all things prepared to die for the season, they were resolved to live. When Charlie jumped up to sit on the edge of the pool, Frankie slid the cool heat of himself between his knees and placed his hands on them, countering the other boy with equally mustered zealous ardour. The possession of passion consumed Charlie, tempted by an act beyond his control; he could not—or, rather, would not—contain himself. Perhaps this was his cure, maybe this gesture was to be his exorcism of fervour. He pressed his mouth as hard as he could against Carrozza's, his top lip slipping between his two like smooth legs writhing together underneath silk sheets, both cursing the distance between. The kiss ended when the two boys stopped to smile and laugh against each other's mouth, teeth nipping and grazing the skin of their lips. He pried Carrozza's face from his own and cradled it in his hands. Frankie looked to his eyes and lips as a wolf would prey, his own mouth kissed swollen and red, but Charlie held him still to scrutinise his face; there was a bittersweetness to his expression in the seconds after their mouths disengaged, and he wondered if this was how he looked when he roused in mornings: puzzled and dreamy with childlike curiosity. It was Frankie Carrozza epitomised, in a sense: it was the performance of all the right moves in a wonderful heist. The theory of evolution proclaimed that atoms had forged Frankie Carrozza from a star that had shattered a long, long time ago, but he blazed like one now shooting tonight. A smoky, starry universe embodied inside a mustard-coloured jumper, dripping with galaxies and nebulas.
Wiping his mouth on his forearm like a boy removing an auntie's lipstick-smeared kiss, Carrozza hopped up to sit beside him, swishing his legs through the water.
Gripping the rim of the pool with both hands, Charlie asked, 'Aside from last words, untranslatable words, and trinkets, you collect people, too, don't you?'
'Mmm. I collect sensational facts, too,' Frankie murmured into his shoulder. 'For instance, Jean Lafitte, a French-American pirate, heard that the governor had offered a $500 bounty for his capture, and so he offered a $5000 reward for the detainment of the governor in turn. Feeling that this sounds like a withered, old past life belonging to this even older soul of mine, I pulled this stunt hundreds of times before since. Would you like to hear whispers of another Rose?' Frankie lit a cigarette, and Charlie nodded. 'The Naval Investigative Service began investigating homosexuality in the Chicago area once agents overheard a few queer folk—you know, musical men—often referring to themselves as "friends of Dorothy", a term monikered after Judy Garland's performance as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, which many seemed to find resonation in—in the tragic life of poor Judy, the songs, or leaving the land of bland black and weak white for a magical one full of vivacious technicolour, perhaps. My interpretation is that each and every one of them will have met a variation of Tin Woodman, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion at least once. The agents of the NIS were unfamiliar with the historical meaning behind the term and misinterpreted the code. Rather than realising that it was a safe way to expose prohibited natures, they wrongfully believed that this was actually referring to some woman named Dorothy, who was at the centre of some sort of massive ring of poofy personnel. They launched an enormous and futile hunt for the ever so elusive Dorthy, hoping that when they found her that they might convince her to reveal the names of her limp-wristed service members before they could revolt.'
'Dare I ask what time it is?' Charlie smiled, envisioning Seraphina Rose as a ferocious version of Dorothy—all guns and garters.
'Can't say I know,' Frankie remarked. 'I don't wear a watch. Who would want to hear every second of their lives tick passed as a sorry reminder? It's about eight o'clock or so, I'd say, but that's me judging time by the position of the sun in the sky earlier in the day.'
Charlie grinned an incredulous grin, a smile only meant for Carrozza and his ponderous company. Another cigarette, he thought. Another cigarette, and then we'll call it a day. And what a day it was. He asked, 'How do you plan to get out of this one, anyhow?'
'Do you mean the scooter?' Frankie shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly and scrunched up his nose as though what he'd committed was nothing short of juvenile. 'I'll say it was an emergency.'
'Do you have no fear or shame?'
The boy frowned as though the question posed was a rather silly one, and replied, 'Shame and fear and regrets over such silly little matters are for the dead to amuse themselves with. You purr ... in your sleep, like a cat, did you know?' Frankie brushed his lips along his forearm as he rotated his head. 'A struggling little moan that buzzes in the back of your throat and sort of ... purrs. Don't be so bashful, as it has come to be one of my favourite sounds. You remind me of a faun from folklore when you doze, a rosebud mouth with winter-rouge cheeks. Such a pretty mouth.'
Charlie looked to the heavy book that had sunk to the bottom of the pool, pages scattered by their feet. The question fluttered curiously in his mind like a bird trapped in an attic, and so he breathed life into it: 'In that little black book of yours, what do I fall under? I can't seem to think of anything I have that is worth possessing like all the other boys and girls listed in there, so what could I offer you that you can't get elsewhere?'
'I'm in search of my soul; I fear I lost mine some time ago.' His defeated reply sighed against the back of Charlie's hand. 'I consider you my second chance. So, gun to my head, I suspect I'd jot you down under humanity.'
Charlie didn't want to doubt those words, his belief and the other boy's conviction strong enough to punch his own out his lips and lungs. Truthfully, he didn't understand his meaning or quest, but he didn't care. It was enough just to hear it. His heart began to pound and pulse throughout his entire body, but the organ did not wish to leave him to such sensational sensations this time.
'You had your reservations last night,' Chance stated, looking to his forehead. 'Why now? Why not last night?'
'I could ask you the same thing.' Frankie cleared his throat against his fist. 'They say my kiss is a curse. They say it causes downfalls and damnations. But just then, when we were underwater, it felt free from fault. Like we could be anyone else but ourselves, like we could be anywhere else but here. Down there, this could be our little secret. It felt ... safe. Now you, why did you?'
'When I was in bed last night, I thought about it long and hard—shut up,' Charlie warned. 'I thought about those tales you told of old Etonians gone before us. I understand now that it's the littlest things you cherish the most in youth once you lose grasp of it. For instance, for how long does sharing a locker or a changing cubicle in the local swimming pool with a sexless chum remain sheer innocence? What is held dearest is found in the adventures had wandering through fields and trees, collecting treasure troves of conkers, acorns, unique stones, seashells, pinecones, and winged seeds, knowing all their names and how they look in the breast of each season. It is the adoration of the lost freedom from blame, when the frame is young and hairless, stripping material brazenly from the flesh to brace the waters of a river like a babe to baptism—careless, unconcerned, and sinless, long before shame or pride claims the worth of baring the body. I think we're still in that period, so anything collected now is but a unique treasure.' Charlie scratched his nose with the back of his hand and looked across the glowing water, his voice skipping it like a stone to resound against the black glass windows. 'For a time will come in which we shall stand and look to all that we know and have known around us, only to find that we now walk its realm a stranger to it. A virus has infected this world, an old and ancient cancer that has always been, determined to oust its rustic spirit, an unforgiving entity in the form of three brothers: time, change, and civilisation. One day, I fear I'll be cursed with a crippling, melancholic nostalgia: to know I can never return. From time to time, bittersweet memory will remain to allow me to revisit what once was with a fraction of how it once felt—but as faint as an echo, a petal left behind as a reminder of the rose. A lonely affliction to adore that it happened, living on, untouchable, within your mind like the memory of a loved one lamented, and to know what shall never be due to come around again—when we've become too old to see the gateway of the magical portal to somewhere special.'
'Go on,' Frankie urged softly.
'I'll spend my life weaving memories into the loop of time, like throwing dust in the wind, until I wake lost and late in the middle of the night, trying desperately to recall the sensation of feeling how it was to laugh from the very soul with a very young heart, and how it was to be fifteen-years-old with such farraginous thoughts, a time where I roamed the days whilst hearing the night calling, unaware that it was upon me until, suddenly, sunshine bleeds into moonlight.' Charlie took the lit cigarette, nodding his appreciation. 'As I look with yellowed eyes to unfamiliar hands, withered and wrinkled and no longer aglow with the pinkness of youth, I'll wonder when it was I realised that I was getting older, and when it was that I stopped screaming from the top of my lungs through the streets after dancing on the tables. A tie sits slung like a noose over the doorknob; a suit hangs freshly ironed in the wardrobe; leather black shoes gleam much too pristinely like the lakes I once splashed in on the floor, tucked together and needing scuffed. I wonder will I wonder if I'll wear them to my funeral? For where once was life now lays lifeless once utilised for wear like animals bred for the abattoir. Haunted, I'll fall back to sleep again trying to call to mind the ghosts of all those left behind in my past—the surge of their spirits, the tones of their voices, the tempos of their hearts that once sung like car radios, and the laughs and smiles that graced their joyful and triumphant faces. I imagine it'll be the minute moments and unapparent phenomenons that I'm fated to remember whilst I stand upon an open road with a rucksack slung over one shoulder, perhaps, an unending thoroughfare stretching ahead, surrounded by different friends and new faces belonging to those who will not understand anything else but their own burdens, regrets, and wistfulness due to be felt.'
'But wouldn't that be some sort of Hell to only know those you've known and never those who grow you til you're grown?' Carrozza asked.
'Maybe so. Perhaps without such memories, I would come to know some sort of peace; but deprived of them, that would mean that they'd never existed, and that is much too great a penance to suffer in exchange for looking back fondly and remembering the little things missed with glum gladness. After all, death is only worthy of your best memory.' Charlie inhaled deep, held, and then released. 'I looked religion in the face and I said to Hell with Christian Heaven. And that is my answer to why I was resolved to have you.'
'I think that you're both blessed and cursed with knowing about things that you know nothing about just yet.'
'You have me woven into your fingertips. I'm in your hands now, Carrozza, and you're free to do with that whatever you please. To obliterate or nurture with whatever whim that comes upon you—be that accidental or intentional.'
Frankie rose to leave. 'There's quite a lot going on in that little head of yours, isn't there?'
    When he offered his hand out, Charlie took it to stand.