Angelo Fellini

Disclaimer: the following story is a purely fictional account. Any relationship to any real person living or dead is coincidental. The narrative contains gay sexual themes and a non-consensual death by hanging. It is intended for mature readers who wish to view such material, and for whom it is legal to do so. The author in no way condones or promotes such acts in real life.

Copyright © 2009 by POW. For spam prevention, an animal name has been added to the author’s e-mail address. Remove the animal name to get the actual address: POWauthor zebra at yahoo dot com. This story may be freely copied and distributed so long as it is copied in its entirety, unchanged, including the author credit information and disclaimer. Other POW stories are available at https://powauthor.wordpress.com. The author welcomes feedback.

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I love my brother. I know that doesn’t sound like much – everyone loves their family. But we were always different. We had a special bond with each other, closer than most brothers, closer even than most twins. Closer than lovers. Our love was something beyond the ordinary. Something precious. Something… unique.

I could not let that love die.

You may have heard of us, though probably not by our real names. Our real names were a joke played on us by our mother. Seventeen years old and pregnant, she thought it was a hoot and a half to name her twin boys “Huey” and “Dewey”. With a last name of “Lewis”. Her inspiration, as she told anyone who would listen, was a combination of a then-current pop singer and Donald Duck. It was a cruel thing to saddle a couple of kids with, and once we got old enough to go to the bully-filled purgatory called “school”, we learned to never use our full names, going by “H” and “D” instead.

Our names were just one of the things we left behind when we finally got the hell out of that benighted little Wisconsin town. The name you might have heard would be “Angelo Fellini”. That was our stage name once we finally got our lives on track. “Angelo” for the angels, “Fellini” because it was based on a word I found in a book once, “fellatio”, only made smooth and Italian-sounding and different enough from the original that you would only recognize it if you were looking for it. Angelo Fellini. Angelic cock-sucker.

Perhaps I flatter myself that you might recognize us. After all, we were never big-name stars. True, we had a regular show at the Casino La Reina in Las Vegas, but that’s a modest little place, nothing at all like Caesar’s or the Sands. We did eight shows a week, twice on Friday and Saturday, Mondays off. We were illusionists. Magicians, to use the general public’s term. Good at what we did, but not A-listers like James Randi or the Davids, Blaine and Copperfield.

We were comfortable at the bottom of the B-list. We did our shows, soaked up the applause of the audience, and then slid off the stage, out of our costumes, and back into obscurity. Sometimes, wandering the casino floor, we would meet some of the people who twenty minutes earlier had been cheering us and marveling at our illusions and they showed no sign of recognizing us. It was comforting, in a way, to be safe from the hassles that fame can bring – autograph hounds, paparazzi, even stalkers. But another part of me always thirsted for someone to point and say “Hey, there’s Angelo Fellini!” so I could smile and blush and generously accept the accolades. Someday, perhaps.

Being twins was a great asset in our line of work. The truly great illusionists, of course, don’t need two of themselves to do what they do. But for us, it worked. We looked identical, we sounded identical, and we cultivated the same mannerisms. If we dressed in the same costume and never went out before the audience at the same time, it was absolutely impossible to know which of us was onstage.

We also carefully hid the fact that “Angelo Fellini” was really two people. Only our production crew and the management of the casino were in on the secret. That let us do tricks that would otherwise be more difficult, things like having the costume get destroyed in some way, maybe by fire or by soaking in water or allowing someone from the audience to squirt us with ink. We contrived to disappear, only to reappear seconds later with the costume miraculously intact.

The trick that usually drew the best response involved one of us suspended from a high bar over the stage. Sometimes it was me, sometimes D, but whichever it was hung by his knees, making it clear that it was a lone man up there, no props, no gimmicks. Just a heat-resistant suit under the flashy outfit and some fire-retardant paste rubbed into the exposed areas of skin, but that didn’t show with all the makeup. Cannons on either side of the stage would begin to shoot great gouts of flame, far away at first but quickly growing perilously nearer while the tension mounted. At last, they would score a direct hit. The music pounded. The very flammable costume lit up like a torch and I (when it was my turn) held the position for a second or two, then dropped, a living fireball, falling into a tank of water below.

Mere seconds later, D walked out from behind the tank, dry and unburnt, and showed the audience the “empty” tank, where I would be hiding out of sight, holding my breath. Thirty seconds later, the tank is wheeled offstage, where I could emerge from the water unnoticed and get some fresh air into my lungs.

Like all illusionists, virtually all of what we did was misdirection, drawing the audience’s attention toward one thing so they don’t notice us doing something else. It was an easy career choice for us to decide on. After all, we had lots of practice at misdirection…

If you’re looking to start your life with the best possible chances, I don’t recommend being born to an unmarried teenager in a small town in the Midwest. Such towns are full of people who go to church every Sunday to hear about how we are all made equally in the image of God, then spend the rest of the week making sure those of us who are less equal than others know our place. I suppose it could have been worse: we could have been Hispanic. Or black.

Our mother was an inconstant presence, always eager to trot us out when we were cute, adorable babies that she could be so proud of, but not very interested in tending to the messy needs of the two lives she was supposed to be responsible for. We were a huge drag on her social life. Her mother cared for us a lot when we were very young, but as we got older, she backed away, trying to force her daughter to grow up and do the right thing, which never happened. Various extended family members offered some help in taking care of us, but none of them grew very close. It’s not too unusual a story, I guess, one that’s perpetuated over and over down through generations.

School was unpleasant, of course. Teachers who had our mother in their classes two decades earlier were predisposed to think that we were as brainless as she. Kids teased us, stole what few things we had, even beat us up until we learned to fight back. The system assumed we were doomed to fail and therefore did its best to bring about its own prediction.

Doing magic was one of our bully-deflection techniques. Pulling quarters out of ears, making pencils disappear, and doing card tricks were ways to turn the other kids into, if not exactly friends, then at least not enemies.

I don’t mean to describe all of this as if I want pity, or as if it was any worse that what many kids have to endure growing up. I offer it only because it explains to a large degree why we turned out the way we did. We had so little permanence in our lives that the only thing either of us really had to rely on was each other. It was only natural that as we grew older, our bond grew all the stronger.

When puberty arrived and the other boys began seeing girls as something other than possessors of pullable pigtails, another difference between us and the rest of the world became clear. It only took a few experiments with other boys to teach us to keep our sexual explorations private. We learned to talk big and swagger like the rest of them. There was no shortage of interest from the girls – we may not have been the best athletes or the most popular guys, but the idea of making out with twins apparently was novel enough to attract their attention to us. We dated, and got into some heavy petting on a couple of occasions, but we both knew that it was all for show. Our real desires could only be satisfied back in our own bedroom. Just the two of us.

We turned seventeen one cold, grey April day, the same age as our mother had been when we were born. We hadn’t seen her since last Christmas – she was living in Chicago, waitressing and doing “Lord only knows what else”, as Aunt Ellen put it. We had been staying with Aunt Ellen for three months, a good long stretch for us. She had a spare bedroom because our cousin Rick had gone off to college, the first in the family ever to do so. But she had made it clear that when Rick got home in May, we had to find somewhere else to sleep because he needed his room back.

“Somewhere else to sleep” turned out to be a truck stop out by interstate 90, then the cab of a rig heading for Seattle. We got out in Montana and worked our way south to Reno. That, according to our plan, was where we would get our start, turning our aptitude for doing magic into a way to make a better life for ourselves than Green Pond, Wisconsin, could ever have offered us.

It was not an easy go. I won’t share the details of the difficulties we encountered, only to say that over and over again, life proved to us that we were meant for each other. Every betrayal, whether in the business we were trying to break into or the swirlingly exotic but dangerous world of gay dating, hammered home the truth that we could trust no one but ourselves. Even D, though he was enchanted by the idea of an unending variety of other men, had to admit that we were out of our depth with them. After several mediocre experiences and one very scary one, I convinced him to stop his explorations, and we belonged once again to each other the way we were meant to.

It took four years working nightclubs and dinner theaters to get the experience we needed. At that point, we decided it was time to make the move to Vegas. A few phone calls, a few resumes sent out, and “Angelo Fellini” was born.

Six years passed at the Casino La Reina. It could not have been a happier time for me. All our work had paid off, it seemed, and our future looked secure. We had settled into a comfortable, familiar routine, with the show and with each other.

Then another April arrived, this one hot and dusty instead of cold and grey. On the eve of our twenty-seventh birthday, I arrived in our dressing room to find D bent over the back of a young Latino guy who I’d seen around but had never learned the name of. The punk was leaning on the dressing table where I put my show makeup on, his eyes screwed shut and his head thrown back while H’s dick drilled into his ass.

I stared, slack-jawed, for a long while before the little twerp opened his eyes and saw me. He nudged D and pointed at me.

“Hey, H,” D drawled. “Come join us?” He beckoned over, inviting me to do… what, exactly? Suck the young guy’s cock? Kiss him? Take over for sloppy seconds? I closed the door behind me and left.

Hours later, after the show, D tried to explain. The argument was nothing we hadn’t had a thousand times before, but it had always been about something abstract, theoretical, off in the nebulous future. I had always been able to convince him that, for now at least, we had everything we needed in each other, that maybe, possibly, some far-off day we might want to explore other possibilities, but the time wasn’t yet right. After what I had seen, though, it was clear that he felt otherwise. In his mind, the future had arrived.

“This wasn’t the first time, was it?” I sulked.

“Look, you know I love you and I always will,” he replied. “And sex with you is amazing, really amazing. But you… we both really need to expand our horizons, you know? This isn’t Green Pond. The attitude here is a lot more relaxed. It’s OK to be gay. We don’t have to cower in the closet any more.”

As always, he was missing the point. I tried to clarify. “It’s not the gay thing. It’s us. It’s… we’re supposed to be a team.”

“We are a team. Look at this career we’ve got going! We’ve arrived, H, we really have! Why not enjoy some of the fruits of our labors, right? It’s not healthy for the two of us to only sleep with each other, you know that. We need to get out and meet other people..”

Why could he not see? “We’ve always been enough for each other! We don’t need anyone else!”

The look of pity in his eyes was devastating. “No, H, we do. I do. And even if you don’t admit it to yourself, you do, too. What we have is… beautiful, it’s precious and special, but we both know it’s not healthy, it’s not right. You keep looking at it as an all-or-none thing, that we have to be either completely together or completely apart. But it doesn’t have to be like that, we can be together AND include other people.”

“I get it,” I said mournfully. “I’m not enough to make you happy.” I could feel tears forming at the corners of my eyes but vowed not to let them show.

“H. H, please look at me.” I turned my face toward his. He spoke slowly and deliberately. “That’s not it at all. I will always love you, more than anyone else in the world. I’m not suggesting that we split up. I would never want to do that. I just want to… explore a little. And not just me, we can do it together. Pedro really wants…”

“Oh, that’s his name? Pay-drow?” I sniffled.

“Yes. Pedro thinks it would be really hot to get it on with a pair of twins. He was really disappointed you walked out earlier. He wanted to get to know you.”

“Yeah? Well Pay-drow can go fuck himself! Oh, wait, he’s got you do that for him. D, please, please, don’t do this!”

We talked for another half an hour. I begged. I pleaded. But he was unmovable. It was clear that I was no longer enough for him. I was devastated.

Later that night, while he snored softly on the other side of the bed, I lay awake in the darkness contemplating life without D. I had had these thoughts before – what if he got hit by a truck and died, what would I do without him? How could I go on? He was my other half. How could I survive with half of me missing?

But that night my thoughts ranged to new, even darker territories that I had never contemplated before. What if D left me, not by accident, but on purpose? For now it was just exploration, some sexual adventures, but clearly that was just the beginning. How long would it be before occasional trysts in the dressing room turned into dates? Dinner, dancing, a hotel room afterward? Or worse, him dragging his toy back to our home and expecting me to join in.

I could only take so much of that before I would begin to shut him out emotionally, and then it would be a steady progression of him turning to other men because I wasn’t meeting his needs, me growing colder and more distant with each betrayal, until at last our shining love, the only love I would ever have, was turned to rust. There was no doubt in my mind that my projection was accurate. Of the two of us, I was always the one who thought of the future, while he lived more in the moment. Could he really be blind to the fact that it would be his betrayal that would create and widen a rift between us? Did he really think his one-night stands would not lead to emotional connections that could only weaken our bond? Could he not see the hurt he was causing me? Or did he see it and did he just not care?

All night long, I thought: What if he died and left me? But what If he lived and left me all the same? I couldn’t decide which prospect was worse.

It was a long, dark night. I remember staying awake until the first hint of grey light began to peek through the window shade, only then surrendering to sleep. The despair I felt during that long restless time could have killed me, I think, if I had been any less strong. Strength was never something I had in abundance; D was always the one who possessed that quality But that night, I learned how to be strong. And by the time I woke up, I knew what I had to do.

It took weeks to prepare myself mentally. D kept trying to convince me to join him and Pedro and, later, Kyle and Matt and others whose names I forget. I always declined, politely but firmly, but that didn’t stop him. At home, D and I stopped having sex, though we continued to share an increasingly cold bed. Exactly as I had predicted.

Then, one Saturday morning, I did one small extra task while preparing for that afternoon’s performance. The finale for that show was an escape. D would be locked up in a set of elaborately heavy chains, his hands cuffed behind his back. A noose would be placed around his neck, then he would step into a box the size and shape of a phone booth, but opaque. Explosive charges would be placed on the edges of the box. The box would be lifted into the air to hover over the stage, dramatic music playing and strobe lights flashing. The music would crescendo, reach a climax and then…

… the charges would detonate, a huge spectacle of flash and noise but little actual explosive force. The box would crumble apart at the seams, chunks of it falling away. The now-empty chains would drop down as well, leaving behind only a brightly-lit noose, swinging empty high overhead.

The secret, of course, was that D would have the key to the handcuffs hidden in his sleeve. With it, he could get out of the cuffs and the chains ­and, when the box blew, ride a dark rope backward to the rear of the stage while I magically appeared from a trapdoor underneath to accept the applause. It was all very splashy, very high-drama, and utterly banal once you knew how we did it. We’d been doing it for so long that it was routine.

We primped and fussed in the dressing room. It was our Elvis show, so we were each wearing the giant pompadour hair, the sideburns, the flashy, sparkly shirts, pants, and jackets. Neither one of us can sing worth beans, but it was enough that we gyrate on the stage while recorded music played over the loudspeakers.

The show went smoothly. Conjuring tricks, illusions, sleight of hand. The audience was lively. We went through our paces, put on the show they had come for, and they responded.

The time came for the finale. D allowed two of our curvaceous bimbos to secure the chains around his body and the cuffs upon his wrists, making sure the key was tucked safely in his sleeve. I waited, invisible, beneath the stage, mere inches below my twin’s feet.

The bimbos finished their work. The box rose up into the air. The lights all followed it, leaving my part of the stage in a darkness to match my heart.

Up overhead, my cheating, betraying brother was discovering a small problem with the key. I pictured him turning it in the lock and feeling a tiny snap as the tip sheared off. Without the tip, there was no way to engage the locking mechanism to release the cuffs. I pictured him turning the smooth round shaft uselessly in the lock, trying in vain to open it and free himself before time ran out. I wondered if he would panic, or whether he would keep his cool. What would be the last thoughts that went through his mind?

Would he think of the love we had shared? The good years we might have had together? Or would it be Pedro and Kyle and Matt who flashed before his eyes? Perhaps his imagination would be drawn instead to what loomed ahead only seconds away. The quick moment of free-fall, the sudden upward jerk, the abrupt cessation of breath, the suffocating pressure, the dancing feet, the clawing fingers…

I thought I heard him shout something, but it was hard to be sure with the music blasting its incessant beat. It might have been my name. Or maybe he was just calling for help. I slipped out through the trap door onto the darkened stage.

The lights flashed. The music roared. The box blew apart, but no chains dropped to the floor, no hidden figure slid silently to the rear of the stage. Instead of an empty noose swinging brightly in the spotlight, there hung my twin, pompadour still perched jauntily atop his tilted head, sequins sparkling and twinkling merrily. He had dropped only a couple of feet before the noose caught him. It probably wouldn’t have been enough to break his neck, except that he was wearing about fifty extra pounds of steel locked around his body, and all of that weight plus his own was suspended by nothing but the noose. He bounced once at the end of the rope, then didn’t move at all except for the slow spin of his body.

The crowd roared, but it was a noise no different than their usual “oohs” and “aahs”. They thought it was part of the show.

At first.

Then I shouted from underneath “D! No! Get him down, get him down!” The production crew lowered him down as quickly as they could, but it was still agonizingly slow to watch. Someone shut off the soaring music, and the people in the audience began to clue in that something had gone badly wrong. Not all of them: many were still unsure whether it was part of the act, and a few even began to clap and whistle before the sound petered to a stop.

D reached the stage and sagged limply to the side as the noose continued to drop. I gently, tenderly lowered his body to the floor and wrangled the noose off. Even with the rope gone, his head remained tilted at that awkward, uncomfortable angle. His throat was a ghastly red, with a few spots of blood seeping out from where the friction had rubbed holes in his skin. His face was blotchy and purple, his eyes were swollen almost, but not entirely, shut. I shouted his name and tried to wake him, but it was no use. I began to cry then, real tears, and one of the staff led me away, shielding me from the sight as someone with CPR training began to go to work on him and the paramedics were called.

It was no use. The fall had snapped his neck like a twig. There was nothing the EMTs or, later, the doctors could do to bring him back. My twin brother, my one shining light in an otherwise dreary life, was gone forever.

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I no longer perform. The insurance settlement after the terrible accident was not enough to allow me to live lavishly, but it was enough to sustain me in modest comfort. I invested it conservatively and live only off the proceeds, not touching the principal, so I can expect to sustain my low-key lifestyle indefinitely.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think of my brother. Sometimes the memories are happy ones, of better times in our youth or of how hard work and good luck made our dreams come true. Other times I think of the betrayal, the pain, the loss, the rejection.

Still other times I think of what he must have felt in his last few moments. Did he suspect that the key had been doctored, that I had been the one to do it? If so, did he understand why? He had only a few short seconds to think through the implications of an impossible situation. I had long hours to realize that, no matter what I did, our perfect love was doomed.

D could never be satisfied by what satisfied me: the love we had for each other. He would constantly be unhappy, always looking for more, and in the process of seeking his happiness, he would destroy the happiness we already had. The best I could do was find an imperfect solution, one that would leave only the memory of our love. But it would be the memory of a love whole and intact, not marred by the harm his betrayal would inevitably have caused. Could he have been able to retrace my thoughts, to see that my only choice was to end it before the damage was done?

That’s not exactly true. There was always another possibility, that I be the one to go. I had ruled that out at first. He had, after all, been the betrayer; he should be the one to pay the penalty.

But as time goes by and the rest of my life stretches out before me, empty of the one thing that made it worth living, I begin to wonder if maybe I made the wrong choice. I’m only 27. I could have another fifty or sixty years of this hollow emptiness to look forward to. D could have had fifty or sixty years of hookups with the hot young guys he craved, without me holding him back. Now it’s too late for that.

It’s not too late for me, though. There’s a good, strong rope in the kitchen drawer if I ever decide I need it.