I wore Anthony in the morning. He had curly black hair, always looked wet. Brown eyes, loose definition between the iris and the pupil. Pale skin that glowed olive in bright sun. 5’11, a football player’s frame withering delicately into a dadbod. 27 years of age was delicious inside his shape. With his thick fingers I picked up pomegranates, and with his lips I blew kisses at girls he may have known. They looked at me like a creature when I did so. I was home in those glances. 

With Anthony I threw on a graphic tee with a loud color blooming out of black cotton, jeans, a flat brim baseball cap, and one of the pairs of sneakers I found in his apartment when I was done. He stepped onto the sidewalk and off of 2014. Anthony was easy to walk with, he had a good ass and big thighs and they made my famous long strides supple, even pleasurable. Other bodies stared the most when I walked in him, especially men. Men who would not otherwise look at me so openly, men crafting curbside ruses to distract their girlfriends so they could spy me wearing his legs. In the warmer months, I-as-him always donned shorts. 

I took Anthony with me when I needed to buy things from men that they did not want to sell. Drugs but also jewels, rare vinyls, cars sometimes. He had a deep and quick voice, pounding out syllables fast enough to blend in the right number of cracks as to make the vendor loose with me, comfortable. If I was really lucky, they would be the type of man who locked eyes with his legs. Usually, though, it was simply the man of him that swooned these assorted dealers. Anthony’s form and tongue reminded them of a time when they were an authority apart from their age. When their cocks were welcomed by women for reasons other than money or vows. Anthony was good at treading that line between inspiring masculine nostalgia without summoning its useless twin, jealousy. These men saw this body as a useful son, the one they would pass everything down into when they died. The son that they made them feel OK with one day dying because he and his shoulders and thighs and hammering throat would ensure their name remained a currency. 

I did not use Anthony for women. He was the DJ who played all their requests and hated each song. When I tried to get a deal through with a woman with Anthony, the police become a card on the table. I didn’t know him very well, at least in terms of how he fucked girls, but I could surmise as much by the angle of his smile in proportion to that of their frowns. Sometimes even tears, but only if that was their disgust response. I figured that Anthony must have been a false promise: handsome but bad in bed, or he led with a sweetness that carried a threat underneath it. But he wasn’t good at threats. I remember the second and last time I was with him, how he had rattled off a list of entities and institutions that he would bring down upon my head: police, mother (wouldn’t she hate to find this out?), landlord, employer (do you think they’ll keep you around after they find out about this?), money, etc. He never appealed to my morals or principles or his own, he never included in his defense a description of his character. That meant that either Anthony’s soul was so lacking that it would hurt his case to mention it, or that he did not consider such aspects of a person to be meaningful reasons not to fuck them over. I lean towards the latter conclusion. 

Anthony was good for wearing to get things from people that really had no business giving them to you. This meant that you couldn’t be in Anthony for too long, or some of the other notorieties started noticing you-as-him around town. People who feared him sure, but also those who were owed to by him. I gladly assumed the benefits of his skin, but shirked the deficits wherever I could. At the end of the day, pulling Anthony off brought to my mind images of those wretched ducks drenched in oil that you saw in Dawn commercials, before the blue soap liberated them from our fuel. I took the longest showers when I peeled him off my self, scrubbing the edges of me until I bled a little.