Boys Of Life by Paul Russell
Date of Publication: March 8, 2016
Country boy Tony is seduced by a smooth talking pornographer, who brings the young man to New York to star in a violent sex film. An escape, a marriage and a murder follow the story's cinematic arc of innocence, betrayal, redemption and revenge.
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Excerpt:
Excerpt:
Even
if their adventures were sometimes so cruel as to be revolting by our
standards, if they were obscene in such a grand and total way as to become
innocent again, yet beyond their ferocity, their eroticism, they embody the
eternal myth; man standing alone before the fascinating mystery of life, all
its terror, its beauty and its passion.
—FEDERICO FELLINI
The first time I met
Carlos Reichart I was standing in the Nu-Way Laundromat folding up a bed sheet,
which is probably a strange way to meet the one person who’s going to ruin your
life.
It was September, and
there was this light drizzle coming down past the windows of the laundromat.
The fluorescent lights made everything look even more depressing than
usual—concrete block walls painted yellow, these blue and green palm trees
painted over the yellow. The concrete floor and the stale heat smell that comes
from dryers.
The Nu-Way was the only
laundromat in Owen, Kentucky, and doing laundry there was one of the things I
hated most. The clothes in the washers went round and round, and in the dryers
too. In two weeks there you’d be back again, washing the same clothes over and
over. That was exactly what your life was.
I remember hearing on the
radio, years later, about some tropical depression out in the Atlantic that was
being upgraded into a storm. We were making a movie on this estate in the
Hudson River Valley, and Seth Rosenheim, Carlos’s cameraman, made the joke,
“That’s what happened to Carlos—a tropical depression upgraded into a storm.”
What it suddenly made me remember, though—those words tropical depression—was the
Nu-Way Laundromat: maybe the clothes spinning in the dryers, and those green
and blue painted palm trees that were supposed to cheer the place up but only
made it more depressing. Or maybe because I met Carlos on a day when it was
raining and somewhere, some ocean, it really was the season for tropical
depressions and storms.
I was tugging bed sheets
out of the dryer, stuffing them back in the plastic garbage bags I’d brought.
When I looked up, this man was staring at me. He was sitting on the wooden
bench that ran along the windows in the front of the place, and he had a little
spiral notebook in his lap, the kind you buy for school. He must’ve been
writing something down, only he’d stopped and was looking around. I guess he’d
seen me because he was staring, and when I glanced up we were looking right at
each other.
I expected him to look
away, but he didn’t, and for some reason I didn’t either. But then I did, I
went on folding those sheets. I had this feeling he was staring at me the whole
time, and when I looked back at him it was true, he hadn’t moved. It was this
questioning look, like you give somebody when you think you might’ve seen them
before, or you might know them but can’t remember from where. Only he looked
like he knew exactly who I was. That’s what I felt—here was somebody saying,
Oh, I know exactly who you are even though I’ve never seen you before. Like
he’d been waiting to meet me for a long time and he’d known he would—he just
didn’t know when or where it would happen and now here it was.
Maybe I’m making all that
up, but I don’t think so.
About Paul Russell
Paul Russell is the accomplished author of various works of both fiction and nonfiction, including several award-winning novels, anthologies, poems, short stories, essay, and book reviews. He is a Professor of English at Vassar College. He lives in upstate New York.
Find Paul Russell Online
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