The peach was so past being ripe that the peel was covered with sugary bruises, pressed there by Joe's fingers as the peach traveled downtown with him, shifting from hand to hand. Each spot released syrup fragrance that Joe drank in through his nose. Joe might have been a thirsty man drinking water for all the relish he brought to inhaling the peach. Joe might have been trying to suck the flesh of the peach up with his nostrils. The heel of his pointed black boot was wedged into the brick wall that supported his tall, frail body. He lowered the peach and stared at his prop's twin. Joe's mouth hung open a little. He lifted his other hand which held a huge magnolia blossom, nearly six inches across. The flower went to his nose and stayed there while his nostrils distilled the tart lemony scent and drew it in. Joe smiled. Everything was just right.
A man trudged by the alley - a muttering city gnome bent beneath a stuffed plastic garbage bag.
"I put her there," the man said. "Now you got to get her out!"
The man glanced over as he walked by, stopped, turned to face Joe and stared. Then, he moved off again, silent now, out of the frame of the alley and out of Joe's sight. Joe's left eyelid twitched the way it always did when he felt annoyed with himself. He knew that he looked strange, swathed from chin to wrist to toe in black when it was eighty-seven degrees outside, but he was cold. He always felt cold these days. He was 5' 11" and he weighed 120 lbs. His skin had developed a blue tint lately that made him look like he'd spent the night in a bucket of ice and Joe was certain that if P-Bone didn't come soon, he would freeze and his body would crumble into dozens of small pieces like a cartoon animal. There were more comfortable ways of doing business, of course. P-Bone had wanted to know why he couldn't just bring the stuff by Joe's apartment.
"But hey," P-Bone said when Joe insisted on meeting downtown. "I'm a businessman, not an artist like you."
P-Bone understood these things. That's why Joe trusted him. P-Bone knew that Joe wouldn't ask him to come downtown unless there was a special reason and the alley, this particular alley, was special. Business could take place anywhere. Joe had selected the alley for its significant qualities just as the flower and the fruit that Joe held were chosen because each contained and communicated the most emphatic essence of itself. The sweet scent pushing up through the peach's skin from its wrinkled heart entered Joe's nose like a bubble of sugar water and forced the papillae on his tongue to stand at attention. The peach was eight days old but the magnolia blossom was fresh, plucked from a warm and waxy-leaved tree only twenty minutes before. Already, the large white flower was browning at the edges as though an invisible flame was eating slowly from the outside petals to the center. The magnolia's odor was as heavy as that of the peach but the acid tang hidden inside the gaudy, soapy smell bit at Joe and made him dizzy. Both scents were so dramatic. "So dramatic!" Joe cried. True, Joe had decided on a template for his posture before coming downtown - pale, bluish youth draped across a brick wall lifting his treasures with trembling hands - but now fragrance saturated him, surprising his pattern. He remembered the eighteenth-century aristocrats who had employed a vast battery of perfumed handkerchiefs to make walks through seas of plague and unwashed bodies. But Joe didn't use his props to disguise anything. The overripe sweetness of the peach and the powdery citrus of the magnolia drifted up from his hands solely because of the power they held to contrast with the alley's peculiar aura, intensifying it to an ornate level that Joe found irresistible. There was a special smell that Joe wanted. He craved it when he was separate from it for too long and he sought it everywhere like a beast trained to sniff blood.
Stale piss wasn't the only smell that Joe loved. He loved the smell of his piss in the morning when it was fresh. Its heaviness seemed bursting with dreams and the night's impurities. Joe loved the anonymous smell of urinals - sharp and lurid like the territory of roaming tigers. And it wasn't only the smell of piss that Joe loved. Urine looked beautiful to him. Its clear yellow color reminded him of wine. He had pissed into a wine glass one night at a party and had talked for an hour about the magical properties of urine. He'd said that there was an angel living in the glass that would become a part of him forever if he drank the glass down. Confronted by the beery hilarity of his friends shouting "Do it, Joe! Do it!", he'd decided that it would be a sacrilege and he emptied the glass over a hedge outside. Joe liked the sound of piss too and even something so familiar as the impact of his own piss hitting the toilet bowl and echoing in the empty bathroom made him smile to know that his happiness was so close to him. He constructed more elaborate pleasures. He loved the sound of piss splashing down on him as he, kneeling beneath a plastic bag or rubber tarpaulin, surrendered himself to a dreaming space that gripped him like breath. More than anything he knew, Joe loved to feel warm piss running over his naked skin. He'd crouch, shivering, inside the white nest of a porcelain tub - squatting there until he felt the world's cold death inside of him, inside his balls and behind his blindfolded eyes. Then someone, or sometimes more than one, would come into the room and piss all over him until, covered with fluid, he felt warm and embraced.
Joe attended school near the alley where he waited for P-Bone. He had passed the alley often on his way to class and the rich scent, varying in strength and bouquet from season to season, lured even when it was out of his way. The place was a natural for the business he hoped to transact. Joe had bought stuff from P-Bone before - some acid a few times - mostly pot. P-Bone thought he was okay...for a white guy, at least that's what he said. He hadn't asked any questions when Joe had called and asked if he could get him what he wanted...if he could help him out. P-Bone had just said, "Yeah man, no problem." Joe set his foot on the ground and pressed his bony buttocks to the wall. His teeth hurt. His skin was turning goosey beneath his clothes. Empty minutes sapped the peach and the magnolia of their essences leaving the alley raw, leaving Joe to fidget inside of it unassisted. Every moment contained the spoor of memory and lust - a trail that demanded he follow. Joe felt dizzy. He thought about his immaculate apartment where there were no surprises and no waiting.
"Come on, P-Bone," Joe said. His teeth were making music. "Come on, man."
And there P-Bone was, his head popping into the alley frame like a squirrel. He was wearing sunglasses, a three day beard and lips that pointed south at each corner.
"Hey man. I'm sorry I'm late. They kept us past five at the lab again." P-Bone worked two jobs.
He held out a plastic lunch box with a picture of the Terminator on the top. Joe reached out to take it with the hand that still held the magnolia. He dropped the flower and pulled the lunch-box to him as though it contained the donated organ he'd been waiting to rush to the hospital. P-Bone looked down at the dirt where the magnolia petals curled up like fingers.
"Hey! Why you holding a dead flower?"
"This too." Joe lifted his other hand.
"A rotten peach??!! Man! You are a strange motherfucker!"
"I guess."
"I guess?" P-Bone's chuckle accordioned out becoming a guffaw that ricocheted down the street. "I GUESS ???!!! Man, you crack me UP!"
Joe handed P-Bone the peach and started unlatching the top of the lunch-box.
"Hey. Your skin don't look too good. Looks kind of blue. You okay, man? You eating right? Cause, you know, vitamin C gets flushed out of you if you don't eat right. Now you ought to be eating a lot of tomatoes and not canned ones, but raw ones and...."
"Hunnh? Oh, yeah." Joe didn't look up. He just waved at the air in front of his face as though it was full of gnats. Twenty small bottles stood like soldiers inside the lunch-box. Each one wore a foil cap and a label marked in red with the date.
"Took me two days to get all those."
"Looks great, P-Bone." Joe's face swiveled up and beamed. "Hey, I'm sorry. I mean, thanks, man."
P-Bone tumbled the peach in his hand studying it as though looking for something inside the fragrant bruises.
"Glad to be of service." He dropped the peach and stood, hands on his hips. "I think we said fifty dollars."
"Oh yeah." Joe squatted, setting the lunch-box on the dirt and rose plucking from his shirt pocket the neatly folded money - two twenties and a ten - looking starched and as pristine as his heart felt at that moment. He handed the bills to P-Bone.
"Thanks."
"Thanks."
"Did you see what any of them looked like?" Joe's question surprised him and P-Bone's eyebrows leapt like trout above the frame of his sunglasses.
"Man," P-Bone said. "I sit on the other side of that little door and I take out the samples that come through. I had it hard enough getting all that together for you. I didn't have time to see where it came from!"
"Sorry. I know that."
"Why should you care what they look like?"
"Yeah man. I know. I'm sorry. I guess I was just wondering."
"It's okay man. I'm tired is all and I got a lot more deliveries to make." P-Bone sighed and tugged the bill of his baseball cap down over the tiny dreads decorating his skull like fledgling tentacles. "Say man, what you gonna do with that? There ain't enough in any one of them bottle to make more than a splash on the sidewalk."
"It's enough."
It was. Joe got home with his bottles and went immediately to the bathroom where he turned on the hot water tap and filled the tub. He took a bath and then, wrapped in a flannel robe, went to the kitchen where he took a brandy snifter from the cabinet. The contents of the twenty tiny bottles filled the snifter leaving about two inches at the top. Joe lit a candle and held the glass to the flame, letting the fire warm the liquid while he examined the color. It was perfect. He held the snifter to his nose and inhaled the fragrance, savoring every particle.
"Vintage... June, twelve-thirteen," he declared to the silent friendly air of his apartment. "Vineyards unknown." He inhaled again and felt warmth traveling through the glass and into the grateful skin that clothed his hand. He lifted the glass, then sipped, then drank.
"Extraordinary," he said. He laughed because the word sounded funny in the small, quiet space. He held up his hand and saw that the skin clothing the bones had turned rosy. His body felt like it was coming back to life and he drank again - deliberately spilling some of it down his chin.