When I moved into the building on Twentieth Street I was looking for answers. It was an old walk-up building near Seventh Avenue, and my apartment rented for under sixty dollars a month. I was on the second floor. My downstairs neighbors-Smith and his wife Myrtle-had a small back yard that contained one huge tree, stretching way up to the fourth floor, its lower branches resting protectively next to my window. Smith told me I could drop the fire escape ladder and use the yard anytime I wanted. I had another name then, and to avoid confusion, I'm going to use the new one-Jyros-as if I had it then. Lotus hipped me to names.
"Lotus is not my real name," she had said. "Names are important. I think everybody should pick their own. My real name was Monica, but after a while it didn't fit me anymore-like a dress I outgrew, or a pair of shoes."
Smith introduced me to Lotus, and Lotus introduced me to grass. I was sitting in Smith's apartment when she glided in. Dressed in a long flowing yellow gown. Her hair saffron yellow. Her eyes, tawny under the ceiling light, would, I thought, be golden brown in sunlight. She was young and shapely and pretty.
Lotus had a record album with her, but Smith's record player was broken. I told them mine worked and invited them up. Smith couldn't come. Lotus did. She had two joints of Mexican grass. At first, I didn't think I was high. But when I looked at the clock and fifteen minutes had passed in what seemed like an hour, I knew something was happening to me. More time passed. Guitar and flute music from the record player. Automobiles screeching to a halt outside my window, sounding like cats screwing in the alley. We lounged on my bed until the grass was finished. The record kept repeating.
"I'm the guitar," Lotus said, pointing at one of the speakers. "And you're the flute."
I listened attentively to the music. Sure enough, the sound of the flute coiled insinuatingly around my legs. Then, as I listened, the flute music seemed to come from inside me, deep in my body, from my groin. I glanced down, and saw that my cock was becoming erect, bulging my crotch like a teepee.
"You're the flute," Lotus moaned in my ear and squirmed onto me. She put her hands on my belly, opened my pants, and pulled me free. I reached under her dress to find bare skin, warm and smooth, then moved up between her legs until my fingers rested against the silken fuck of her pubis. Her lips settled on mine and her tongue explored my mouth.
I hoisted her skirt above her hips, had her bend toward me so I could pull it over her head. She wore no bra and her young breasts jounced like buoys as she settled back against the bed. Taking a breast in each hand, I kneaded and squeezed them gently, turning them outward and upward till the nipples looked like eyes and rolled with ecstasy. She was groaning softly. I bent my head and kissed her nipples, moved down and kissed her navel. I heard the sound of the guitar moan between the lips of her vagina, and I moved my cock to it.
I rocked forward, parting her moist cunt, feeling chills run from the head of my penis down to my scrotum. She twisted her hips and I entered full length, rested for a moment, then began to move in time to the music. We were a duet. Flute and guitar. I could feel the music IN her belly, and compressed those resonant strumming sounds with my cock, gave them momentum, drove them up her chest, out of her mouth. She arched her back with pleasure, rocked and swayed and twisted and moaned. The walls of her vagina convulsed around my cock, and our bodies wrenched together in a slow, intense series of chills. Then: seizure, tremor, orgasm.
Her passion had surprised me. Young girls, while energetic and enthusiastic and lots of fun, usually aren't good to ball. They gallop and prance like fillies, a quick athletic race. But Lotus had balled like a sultry mare, bucked with a woman's sensuous passion, not with a girl's. I reached over to caress her smooth buttocks. Her eyes were open and she smiled at me.
"Hey, man, that was groovy. You sure are a together cat. Most guys either beat the shit out of you or are in and out so fast you don't know what happened."
"You make it a lot?"
"Sure," she answered. "That's the only way to learn your shit. And that's what I've been doing. Living out on the street and learning my shit."
"How old are you?"
"I'm seventeen. How old are you?"
"Twenty-five."
"Wow. A quarter of a century. I dig that. I don't like adding by ones. You know, like fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Less hassle if you could say 'I'm in my first quarter, or my second quarter,' like that."
She took my hand and snuggled it between her legs, then closed her eyes. We both drifted off to sleep and woke at two-thirty in the morning. It was hot and sticky in the apartment.
"Let's go out on the fire escape," I suggested.
"Should I get dressed?"
"No, we don't have to. There's a big tree that covers everything. It's like looking out of a dark window into sunshine, you can see out but can't see in."
She followed me to the window. We ducked under and climbed onto the fire escape. The city was breathing quiet. Overhead, the quarter moon like a cow's horn. Lotus had her hands on the railing for support and was leaning her torso out into the , breeze; a breeze that wooed my scrotum and erupted tiny goose pimples of pleasure on my ass. My balls were hanging as loose as fruit on a vine. I hooked my arms around Lotus' waist, pressed my belly against her buttocks, and slipped my half-erect cock between her legs. She wriggled against me and coaxed it stiff. When I rubbed her breasts, she rocked forward onto the balls of her feet and spread her legs, allowing me to slip into her, snug as a cork in a bottle. We moved slow and desultory. She sighed as quiet as the leaves that umbrellaed us. I kissed the back of her neck and her ears, then backed out. The wind, like a cool tongue, lapped the juices on my erection and made me shiver. I alternated between the cool breeze and the warm silken moistness of her cunt. She answered my thrusts with half-circular gyrations of her torso.
While we were moving this way an automobile pulled up to the curb and parked. A man and a woman returning from a late date got out of the car. He was tall and pudgy and wore a rumpled seersucker sports jacket. She was plump, wore a sleeveless dress with a scooped neckline, and had a pile of wilted platinum hair. The man put his arm around the woman and tried to kiss her, but she leaned away.
I slowed my hips and we watched the man try to kiss the woman again, but she shrugged him away, saying, "Come on Donald, it's too hot."
Lotus twisted her ass and slammed back against me, then opened her mouth and allowed the sensations she was feeling to escape in a full-throated moan. The man jumped and looked behind him. But the woman giggled, involuntarily. Lotus' moan had kicked something over in her womb, a reflex from a time she had made a similar sound. I could see the man smile, and I knew that he now had information he hadn't had before: he knew that she made it, and she knew that he knew. They exchanged quick glances, then hurried, arms entwined, into the apartment building across from my own. Good, I thought. One more couple fucking. Two less frustrated people.
Lotus reached back for my hand and put my finger against the conflux of skin that covered her clitoris. She guided my finger over it, showing me how she liked it caressed, moving my fingers cryptically, tracing the letters of an ancient language to that sensitive spot. I heard the rustle of the tree, a car whizzing down Seventh Avenue, the obscure muffled cough of an invisible jet plane, the sough of our entwined breaths, the swell of our orgasm.
Afterwards, we held each other and let the breeze evaporate the moisture from our skin. I heard the downstairs door slam and a moment later Smith hobbled into view, turned south down Seventh Avenue and vanished behind the corner gas station.
"There goes Smith," Lotus pointed.
"Wonder where he's going this late?"
"Probably looking for Myrtle."
"Who's Myrtle," I asked. I had known Smith for a week, had been down to his apartment a dozen times, and I didn't know anything about Myrtle. I hadn't seen a trace of her. And Smith never mentioned her.
"Myrtle's his wife," Lotus said. "She doesn't sleep here much."
CHAPTER TWO
Lotus moved in with me. She took up less space than a box of matches, brought with her only two gowns, a pair of sandals, and two pair of panties. I was collecting unemployment at the time, and though I wouldn't have thought it possible, we lived very well on the fifty-five dollars a week I received. We got stoned every afternoon and every night, walked the streets and shared secret, conspiratorial smiles with other stoned citizens. Occasionally, for a special treat, we shoplifted a steak or box of frozen shrimp from the A & P.
Wednesday evenings I would go to the old Second Street Court House where a group of writers gathered for weekly ego duels, and I would yell and scream with them until one in the morning. Then we would all move to the R.O.K., a Polish bar on Second Avenue, and yell some more. Later, I'd walk across Fourteenth Street to Seventh Avenue, turn uptown, and sneer contemptuously as I passed Barney's Clothing Store, proud and liberated in a two dollar shirt and a four dollar pair of dungarees.
Summer turned into October, and October turned the leaves on Smith's tree the color of toast. I was sitting by the window one evening, watching those leaves drop to the ground, when Smith knocked on my door.
"How's it going, Smith?" I asked.
"Hello, Jyros," he said glumly, shrugging his thick shoulders, and frowning. Smith was dwarfish and ugly. He had a gimpy leg and wore a corrective shoe, thick and clumsy as an anvil, to keep himself from toppling over. His face was pitted and his nose was wide and flat. Smith's father was a famous television newscaster with a coast-to-coast program. Smith didn't look anything like his father. Smith didn't look anything like anybody.
"I want you to do me a favor, Jyros," he said.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"I'm looking for Myrtle. I think she's on a trip. Someone told me that she might be with the Bonzos. I want you to come with me. O.K.? "
Now of course you're not going to believe that Myrtle was as beautiful as Smith was ugly-but she was. She had fire-red hair and tropical sea-green eyes, and her body was better than any I had ever seen, anywhere-movies, paintings, dreams. She once told me why she had married Smith. At first T thought her explanation was a put-on. But now I think it was probably the truth.
"I married him," she had said, "because my mother hated the sight of him."
But they stayed married. They had been together for three years. So, whatever the original impulse had been, their marriage was still intact.
I finally met Myrtle one evening when I had been sitting in Smith's apartment. The room we were in was rectangular and contained a full-walled fireplace large enough to stand up in. Smith was placing a wooden board down in the fireplace, igniting some violet candles on it. The board had many layers of old melted wax and the new candles looked like turrets on a castle.
"Want to turn onto some dynamite hash?" he asked.
"Sure," I said. Smith produced a small-bowled Grecian water pipe, lit a match and sucked it alive, then passed it to me. The smoke tasted strange, tangy, and I asked what was in the bowl.
"Hard apple cider." Smith said, grinning a mouthful of the hash smoke back into the room. "It gives it a nice taste, doesn't it?"
"It's good hash," I complimented.
"Yeah, I know. Listen, come down anytime and smoke all you want. I don't like to get high alone."
When I was so stoned I couldn't lift a hand to scratch my ear, Myrtle made an appearance, dressed in a flowing ankle-length minty-green gown that buttoned down the front: twelve buttons of translucent abalone shell from bodice to hem. There was a chain of copper links around her neck, and six copper bracelets on each arm.
"This is my wife, Myrtle," Smith said. "This is Jyros--. "
Myrtle smiled at me and every sexual fantasy I ever had, like flocks of doves, fluttered in my mind. She sat on the couch next to Smith and turned on with us. I must have dozed. When I woke, I looked at the couch and saw that Myrtle was napping, her head resting against a pillow. While I watched, Smith began to unbutton her gown, starting at the hem, running stumpy fingers gingerly from button to button. He managed to open all twelve buttons without disturbing the copper necklace or the bracelets, pulled the dress apart, uncovered her breasts, and caressed them.
I could see Myrtle's nipples. Unbelievable: they looked like strawberries, size, shape, and texture, prickled now with excitement as Smith's palms coaxed them. My mouth watered. T wanted to put my lips around those nipples and suck their juice. I thought I had better go upstairs but Smith looked up at me, put a finger to his lips, and motioned me to stay in my place.
Her musk in the room was strong as the apple-cider and hash fumes. Smith stroked her from knee to hip. When her legs parted, he dragged two fingers stiff as rivets between them. Her mouth opened and she sighed. A look of triumphant accomplishment spread across his rough-grained face, and he pulled his shirt over his head in one swift motion, revealing a chest with muscles sturdy as a blacksmith's.
Candlelight was glinting from her bracelets, dancing like gypsies in her hair. He gathered her in his arms, and carried her to a mat in front of the fireplace, and put her down. I watched him massage her body and felt my mouth get cottony. I had never watched two people make it before and wasn't sure I wanted to observe passively. My own erection was jolting in my pants, protesting the restraint of fabric. Could it be possible, I wondered, that I would get some of that luscious woman for myself?
Smith was looming above Myrtle, his thick body framed in the outline of the fireplace. He had unzipped his trousers and extracted his penis. In the shadowy dimness of the room it appeared rough and heavy, a dark contrast to the orange-flamed crackling hair on Myrtle's head and cunt. Smith positioned his cock, then drove into her-the copper bracelets jingled like wind chimes and breath whooshed from her mouth.
He began to hammer into her, slow ramrod strokes, hard and steady. Flame reflections cascaded over their bodies, her copper bracelets clinging and tinkling. Her head lolled to one side, toward me, and I could see that her eyes were open, glazed with passion. Her teeth were clenched, lips in a cryptic snarl. Smith began to fuck faster, bolting like a steel spring into her malleable cunt. For a moment I felt myself slip into his body, felt my penis sizzle and oxidize as a white-hot core of rock began to melt somewhere in the well of her cervix.
Smith groaned, a hoarse cry of pleasure-accomplishment-despair, and he shot his fluid into her, stroked five, six, seven times: then Myrtle shuddered and climaxed, a boisterous and total orgasm that made my teeth ache with longing.
Some days later Smith explained to me his relationship with Myrtle. Either one could ball whoever they wanted. The only restriction: neither could ball the same person more than three times-that, they thought, would prevent emotional attachments.
But Smith wasn't really happy with the arrangement. He said that while a man could easily fuck a woman without getting emotionally hung up, a woman's nature was different. Sooner or later he feared she would get involved with one of the men, and that would be the end of their marriage.
That afternoon, when he asked me to go with him to find Myrtle, he was afraid. He thought she was on an acid trip with the Bonzos. The Bonzos were two brothers, Eddie and Dino-they were mean and evil, and you wouldn't want to be on a trip with them anywhere nearby.
I met the Bonzos through Smith. His apartment on Twentieth Street originally belonged to them. They had sublet it to Smith when they moved uptown.
Smith knew Dino Bonzo from the Charles School. Both had been teaching there. The Charles School is a private institution for rich families who have bad-assed uncontrollable brats. Instead of ending up in reform school or mental institutions, like poor delinquents, the rich delinquents found themselves enrolled at Charles. Dino Bonzo, who thought he was a playwright, was working there as a part-time drama instructor. Smith had a metal craft class.
Dino, Smith and I once had a discussion about teaching. Dino was always putting kids down and I asked him why he didn't quit. Teaching must be a drag, I said, if you have to lie to the kids and pretend you like them.
"I don't lie to them," Dino said, his wine-purple lips pulled back in a self-possessed smile. "I tell them the truth."
"What's the truth?" I wanted to know.
"The truth is that I hate them: that's what I tell them. Hate them because they sound just like their parents. Disgusting nasal Long Island voices. Fat little cunty Jews who are going to grow up just like their mothers with fat thighs, elephant asses, and varicose veins. Or pimple-faced boys who are fat bloated replicas of their fathers. I tell them they're going to get old and die. I tell them that the world is ugly and mean. I tell them to go out and get fucked, and get high, and get their rocks off any way they can."
Smith said that he agreed up to a point. "But don't you think you should balance it a little?" he added. "They're just kids. Too much pessimism and you'll turn them off life."
Dino leered. "Bullshit," he snapped. "Simple-minded bullshit. You should get yourself together a little more, Smith. Talking about balance like that. Look at yourself, a fuckin' little cripple. Look how you walk. Call that honest? You spend half your energy trying to hide your limp. Call that being in balance? You're never going to walk straight, no matter how much you try. You're fucked-up for life. Instead of trying to hide it you should use it, use it to get what you want. Guilt's negotiable. A cripple like you should know how fucked-up and wasted life is."
At the mention of his leg, Smith's body winced and his face clouded, a fusion of humiliation and shame. A savory taunting smile had curled over Dino's lips, and I knew that he had intentionally put Smith through those changes.
"See, Smith," he said. "If you weren't so hung-up on trying to keep your balance, on trying to walk with all that bullshitty grace-if you accentuated your limp instead of trying to overcome it, you could cash in on that leg. You wouldn't have to be working at this schmucky school. Your father's a big shot newscaster with plenty of money. He must feel guilty as hell about you ... why don't you take your family for what it's worth?"
Smith gave an abrupt angry grunt. "You're a fucking evil cat, Bonzo."
"I admit it, man. But that's where it's at. I'm a leopard, a panther. If the meat's unprotected, I pounce." And for proof he smiled a carnivorous row of greedy teeth.
If Dino was a panther then his brother, Eddie, was a rodent. Eddie had thin, pinched cheeks, a sharp nose, and hungry eyes. Dino and Eddie were half brothers. They had the same father but different mothers. Dino was tall and athletically built, had a swarthy complexion, a wide toothy mouth. Eddie was of medium height and broad-shouldered, but he wasn't muscular. His wrists were inordinately thin, his fingers long and sinewy.
Eddie was a hustler, a promoter in the music business. And he was becoming very successful. He lived on East Thirty-Second Street in a renovated brownstone. He rented the entire building, had a full-time maid, and three different telephone numbers. Eddie had started out in the early sixties with a coffee shop in the West Village. Folk music was in then: Peter, Paul and Mary, the Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte, those people. Dozens of hollow-eyed sad-faced kids would come to Eddie begging for a chance to sing their songs-for free, naturally. But Eddie was shrewd. He offered small salaries, ten or fifteen dollars a night, and whenever possible, he made the people he allowed to perform sign a contract-exclusive and long termed. When the rock wave broke, Eddie was ready. He had more than a dozen excellent musicians tied up like marionettes. I know some of the musicians who have dealt with Eddie Bonzo and they told me that there are more strings in Eddie's contracts than fingers and toes in a quartet. Eddie liked pulling strings, or, if the moon was out and he didn't like the way you looked, tying them into hard knots.
When Smith and I got to his place there was no sign of Myrtle. But Dino was there, and so was a girl named Rosemary, one of the Bonzos' groupies. Eddie waved us in. He was wearing an expensive suit in mod-English cut and a wide silk tie that was fastened to his shirt by a gold pin in the shape of a drawn bow and arrow. The room was brightly lit but Eddie's eyes didn't reflect any light, just absorbed, like shadows.
The girl, Rosemary, was thin and nervous. She wore magenta leotards and a bell-shaped dress that reached only an inch below her crotch. With each shift in the conversation, her head jerked back and forth like a chicken's. Suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, Dino glared at the girl and said in a voice harsh with accusation, "Rosemary, what the hell are you staring at Smith's leg for? You trying to get him self-conscious?"
Her eyes snapped quick as rubber bands from Dino to Smith back to Dino. "I wasn't looking at..." she started to complain, then her jaw slammed shut. Here we go again, I thought. They're up to more bullshit. So what if she had looked at Smith's leg. Everybody did. And most people quickly looked away, guilty or revolted. Smith knew that. He told me he had a lifetime of those reactions. Dino was the one who was calling attention to it, not the girl.
"What the fuck's the matter with you, Rosemary?" he intimidated her. She looked from Dino to Eddie, looked at me too, but refused to look at Smith, afraid that her eyes would fasten too long on
Smith's leg, and that would be it, they'd jump all over her.
"Hey Dino, hey Eddie, come on," she smiled. "I wouldn't do anything like that, I'm not that lame..."
The word lame broke in silence like a bottle on rocks, and the smile like chalk in rain washed from her face. She chewed her lip. Pleadingly, she looked at Dino, then Eddie. But she wouldn't look at Smith. I looked over at Smith and saw that he was about to say something, probably to forget it and leave her alone. But Eddie, who had been carefully watching Smith, put up an arresting hand, shook his head, warned Smith to remain silent.
I knew then that they were manipulating us-me, Smith, the girl. But I didn't know how to stop them. They stood on each side of her like hanging trees.
"Know what I think, Rosemary?" Eddie prodded. "I think you owe Smith some sort of apology."
"Right," Dino echoed. "If you're a sensitive human being like you always come on pretending you are then you should give Smith an apology. You should make it up to Smith. He's had a hard life. All kinds of shit from little cunts just like you. Always turning away from him. Or handing him that extra-phony solicitous shuck. All Smith wants is a little truth. Isn't that right, Smith?" Dino's eyes demanded Smith's assent. "Well, you want the truth, don't you Smith? That's what you want, right?"
Smith said "Yes" in a husky voice. He looked at Rosemary. She was huddled on an ottoman, hair hanging like a curtain over her face, fingers jumping nervously in her lap.
"What should I do?" she asked with a thin desperate voice. The sound reminded me of a bird I once heard that had been impaled on a high barbed-wire fence. The wind had blown it there. I had tried to climb after it but the fence was too high, too slippery with rain. Perhaps in a less violent wind I would have managed. I had watched the bird struggle itself to death and noticed in myself a cool, detached fascination. Now, watching Rosemary struggle with her imagined guilt, I recognized that same fascination and realized there was a powerful sexual element in it: my cock was stiffening.
The Bonzos continued their interrogation. Rosemary was trapped, helpless as the bird had been. She was sweating, a pungent smell, like cinnamon.
"No," Rosemary was whining. "I don't think he's any less a man because he's a ... because he has a bad leg..."
"Do you like to fuck, Rosemary?" Eddie asked, flat, matter-of-fact, cynical.
Rosemary gave her shoulders a "what does that have to do with anything" shrug, but answered, "Yes, sure I do, you know that."
"Well then, I think you should show Smith that you consider him a real man, not some freak, and fuck him."
She sat very quiet on the ottoman for a minute; then, as if she had known all along what was expected of her, why she was there with the Bonzos in the first place, she nodded her head in agreement.
"Take off your dress, Rosemary," Dino said.
She unhooked a clasp behind her neck then pulled the dress off. She wore no bra. Her breasts were small and flat, cinder-brown nipples and projected tips. Then she went down on her knees in front of
Smith and unzipped his pants. "I'm having my period," she said, barely loud enough for us to hear. Then, taking his penis in both hands, she rolled it between her palms, the way a child will lengthen a bar of clay. When Smith was hard, she bent her face to his erection and nibbled at it with her lips.
I tried to catch Smith's eye but he was staring over our heads at the ceiling. While Rosemary worked at Smith's erection, the Bonzos and I observed silently. There was a wide smug smile on Dino's face. "See," it seemed to say. "I told you Guilt's negotiable. You can get what you want if you negotiate." Eddie's face said nothing. Whatever was registering there was quickly absorbed and lost, like leaves in quicksand.
Rosemary had Smith half-swallowed. Her fingers were curled in the tufts of his pubis. I could see the ribs and bony shoulder blades poking from her skin. Her mouth, I thought, was probably the fleshiest part of her body. She made sucking noises, drew her lips along his flesh, caressed his testicles. But she wasn't receiving any pleasure. She was sucking for forgiveness. Gobbling away her imagined guilt. One good blow job for penance.
When Smith came in her mouth her body twitched as if a string between her shoulder blades had been jerked. Then she rose to her feet, smiling tight-lipped, and went to the bathroom. We could hear water running in the sink, and the sound of gargling.
Smith pretended that it was a real goof, one hell of a scene, and that he really dug it, really understood what Dino and Eddie were putting down. Then we left. When we got outside I could see he was shaking. He told me that he had wanted to stop her, but something told him not to, warned him to let it happen and get it over with.
"God," he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. "I'm glad Myrtle wasn't there with them."
CHAPTER THREE
Myrtle showed up a day later with a purse full of goodies-ten acid caps, four doses of mescaline, and a chunk of chocolate-colored hash.
Lotus and I took an acid trip Sunday. It was my first. I was nervous all that morning, afraid. But once I had swallowed the cap, and knew it was going to happen now no matter what, I relaxed. Everything worked out beautifully. That evening, coming down but still tripping, Smith took us out for a seafood dinner. Later, back in my apartment, Lotus and I removed our clothes and lay on the bed. Under me, the mattress felt as buoyant as the ocean, and I hallucinated, thought I was a ship.
"You O.K.? " Lotus asked.
"Sure. Just feels like I'm on the ocean."
"Do you like the ocean?"
"Sure. I'm a boat, taking a cruise."
I closed my eyes and could feel her hair trail over my chest like sea spray. Her fingers circled my cock, made it firm and perpendicular as a ship's mast. Then she rubbed her cheek against it. Phosphorescent colors swirled under my eyelids, began to burst and blossom like kaleidoscopic flowers. She sandwiched my penis between her breasts, then moved it down her belly, teasing her navel with it, then down to the moss of her pubis. She rocked the bed gently and when she was moist, she engulfed me, and I sailed inside her.
When you fuck on acid your penis becomes the center of the universe. Every sensory receptor, every nerve-ending, becomes super-sensitive. That first time, my nervous system wrenched as if a hand had reached inside my body, and when I came my ejaculation lasted for a small infinity.
Afterwards, Lotus told me of another time when she had balled on acid. She had been fifteen years old then, new on the scene, hanging out on MacDougal Street, sleeping in hallways or parked cars. There was an Italian grocery store on the street, and the owner, a husky man named Esposito, lived in the back. Lotus knew from the grapevine that this guy was always trying to make it with the young chicks who hung out on the street, girls not full grown. He would give them hero sandwiches, or other food, and sometimes let them sleep on a cot in his backroom. Lotus had been curious. She had only made it with boys her own age or a little older. Esposito was at least forty.
Late one rainy night he told her she could sleep in the back. He closed the store, and soon as he returned to the room asked her to take off her clothes.
"I took off my dress and sandals," she told me. "And I watched him undress. He had lots of hair all over his body, different colors, gray and red and brown. A real groove on acid. The window was open from the bottom about four inches and I could hear the rain splashing. I was glad I was inside."
Lotus was nervous, but she didn't want to seem uncool. She was worried that an older man would be too much for her to cope with, especially on acid. To hide her nervousness, she studied his penis. It hung loose and dormant, swayed as he stepped toward her like an elephant's trunk. She wanted to feel it, see if there was much difference between a man's penis and a boy's. Then too, there was a dry reluctance between her legs, not the usual warm, wet simmer, and she needed time to lubricate.
But Esposito was in a hurry, impatient. He took her hand and placed it on his prick. When it swelled to life, he brusquely pushed her back on the bed, stationed his knees between hers, and rudely shoved the head between her unprepared vaginal lips.
"Man, it took me too sudden. He was shoving and grunting, and I had to close my eyes and bite my teeth together. I could hear the rain outside, and the acid was still working on me. It would rush me every few minutes. I thought if I tried to listen to the water it would make me relax, make me get wet."
Esposito had anchored her shoulders with his arms. He was thrusting crudely, finally managing to penetrate two inches. It made Lotus moan with pain. She wanted him to go slow, give her time to relax and get her natural juices flowing. But she was afraid to say anything.
"Man, I didn't know what to say. It was weird. Something wouldn't let me speak. I felt inanimate, you know-like earth, or the ocean."
Esposito finally came, and Lotus said that his ejaculation was the only pleasant sensation he gave to her-the fluid soothing her inflamed tissues.
There are a lot of men who fuck like that-women too. They dig friction. The resistance incites them. They need to wear you down. It's like fucking sandpaper.
Monday morning Lotus and I went on a shopping excursion east to a spice store on First Avenue. We bought tea, honey, raisins, dried apricots. The sky was clear and the sunlight so bright that our shadows on the pavement were sharp as handwriting. We played a game, made giant shadow animals with our bodies: shadow elephants, shadow dragons, and once, a tree that walked and had fingers for fruit.
A friend of mine, Bill Amidon, an ex-actor-turned-writer from Cleveland, lived around the corner from the spice store, on Tenth Street, and we went to visit him. His building had a live-in cat lady on the first floor and a fog of cat spray and urine from her apartment puckered our noses and shriveled our throats. Amidon answered the door. I almost didn't recognize him. His beard and mustache were gone, and his hair was trimmed.
"Me and my old lady are going on a camping trip," he explained. "We don't want to be hassled by the cops."
His apartment was littered with camping equipment, lanterns, canteens, a portable freezer. Six-packs of beer lined the bookshelves. Magazines covered the chairs and the couch. Lotus and I cleared a space for ourselves and sat down.
"Where did you get a car?" I asked.
"Renting one. But they're really fucking me around. You have to have a credit card, or enough money in the bank to cover the entire rental. That's eight hundred bucks for a month. I have a Master
Charge, but I don't know if that's good. I'm waiting to hear from them now."
We sat around talking about the trip, then the conversation jumped to the word fuck.
"I wonder where the word comes from?" Lotus asked.
"It's an abbreviation," Amidon offered. "It stands for: For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. F.U.C.K. comes from the Middle Ages, or something. If you were an adulterer and they found you guilty, they would brand those letters on your forehead. They called them 'Fuckers!' "
"Wow," Lotus' eyes were wide with belief. "That's far out. Getting branded for making it."
"Maybe they branded them," I said, "but that's not where fuck comes from. It has older roots than that. Egyptian, or farther back than that. Nobody knows for sure. I looked it up once, in Partridge. They don't even spell it out. F**K."
"I don't like the word fuck," Lotus said. "It's all right for cursing, like: what the fuck do I care, or fuck you. But I don't like it to describe sex. It doesn't make it for me. I like balling."
We stayed until Amidon's old lady, Pearl, came home from work, then went back to Twentieth Street. Ursula, another one of the Bonzos' groupies, was sitting on the stoop, waiting for Myrtle. Smith wasn't home either, and she asked me if she could wait in my apartment. She sat on the edge of the bed, fidgeting with her owl-like spectacles, pushing them again and again against the bridge of her nose. She was a tall heavy-boned girl with brown kinky hair parted in the middle.
"I know where we can get some grass. For nothing," she said.
Thinking that she wanted to get high and had made her remark to get some grass from us, Lotus offered her a joint. But Ursula made an impatient face.
"I mean a couple of ounces, and for free. You interested?"
But Lotus was skeptical. "Someone's just about to lay a couple of ounces on us for free."
Ursula waved away the objection, leaned forward and spoke avidly. "There's a guy who lives in a loft over on Washington Street, his name is Red Jancana. Dino and me went over there last week, and he has a laundry bag full of gold, no-really. It's Mexican gold. We smoked some. Swear to God. A laundry bag full."
"What makes you think he's going to give us some?" Lotus asked.
"The guy is horny. You should've seen the way he looked at me ... would've fucked me right then if Dino wasn't there. Kept putting his big hands on me every chance he got. All we do is go over there. I'll let him come on like I dig him, let him feel my ass, get him worked up, then I'll hit him for some grass. Tell him it's the only way to get rid of you two-tell him I don't want Dino to find out. That's why I want to get rid of you two, see? Then I tell him I'll come back in a few minutes, soon as I ditch you, dig it. He's so horny, it's a sure thing. We might get a half-pound! Then we split!"
"Why can't one of us just ball him?" Lotus suggested. "That way he gets what he wants, and so do we."
"Well, Lotus, if you want to make it with him it's O.K. with me, but I don't want to. He's a big bastard, about a hundred feet high. It would be too much work just for a few ounces."
It was the craziest thing I ever heard. Lotus and I discussed it privately.
"Let's go," Lotus said. "I have a chunk of hash, and maybe he'll trade some grass for it. I like grass better than hash."
"Ursula doesn't want to trade for that grass," I said. "She wants to beat this guy. She doesn't care about the grass, she just wants to test her scheme. I don't want to con this guy, he might not like it."
"Well, let's go and see. We can ask him to trade. Maybe he'll give us some. Who knows? If he really has gold, he shouldn't be hoarding it. Grass should be smoked, not saved until the price is right."
We stopped at a liquor store at Ursula's suggestion and purchased a bottle of California wine. Red Jancana lived in a brick fireproof warehouse loft on Washington Street. When we reached it the sun was sinking behind a wedge of two-story buildings. A sorrowful bleat of tugboats rose from the nearby Hudson River. We entered the building. The walls were soot-stained, the stairs were wooden, un-painted, worn, splintery.
Jancana lived on the third floor. He was the only non-commercial tenant. We passed a paper bag manufacturer on the first floor, and a marine contractor on the second floor-their doors sealed, everybody gone for the day. At the third floor landing there were two potted trees in heavy cement bases on either side of Jancana's door. The trees and their containers weighed over three hundred pounds each.
One way, I thought, to keep the neighborhood bandits from stealing them.
The door to Jancana's loft was made of solid oak, prodigious, rounded at the top, and partially open. We stepped inside. A cavernous room. Full floor-through loft with fifteen foot ceiling. Over our heads, a series of five electric 150 watt unshielded bulbs yawned toward the distant walls-they did little to illuminate the place. Rusty steel fire shutters sealed the windows. Red Jancana wasn't home.
Ursula immediately began to snoop among a series of metal closets, old supply cabinets probably discarded by the former tenant. Jancana had packed them with canned goods: sardines, tuna fish, meat, vegetables-enough food to last a dozen men at least a year. Jancana was a hoarder, and I knew he wasn't going to give away anything. Perhaps, though, he would trade.
Ursula produced a dull olive army-issue laundry bag from one of the cabinets. She hadn't been exaggerating. It was packed with marijuana. She had the bag wound by its drawstring around her hand. Her eyeglasses, under the electric light, were opaque. "Let's take it," she said.
Lotus said no. "We can fill up that paper bag from the wine bottle, that's three or four ounces, and I'll leave him a piece of hash."
I was about to agree with Lotus; I wasn't going to lift a sack of grass from someone I didn't know. He might have been a member in good standing of the Mafia, and I didn't want any unexpected early morning visits. But I was saved a reply. We heard booming footsteps on the stairs. Ursula hurriedly shoved the laundry bag back into a closet.
Jancana strode into the room. He had a load of firewood on his shoulder. I felt my heart squeeze with dread. Jancana was gigantic. He had had to duck his head to pass under the doorway. Impossible, I heard my mind protest. The doorway was at least eight feet high. No one could be that big!
"Who are you and what are you doing here?" Jancana's voice rumbled like a collision of empty barrels. The firewood dropped from his shoulder, thundered to the floor. He peered down at us. His eyes were hard black obsidian chips of suspicion.
"Hey Red, don't you remember me?" Ursula was stepping to the table toward the bottle of wine. "I was here with Dino Bonzo last week, you remember..."
Jancana kicked the firewood against a wall. He had short rusty-red kinky hair. Shoulders massive as boulders. Skin the color and texture of granite. "Bonzo? Yeah, I remember you now," he said.
Ursula was unwrapping the foil from the wine bottle. "My friends and me were just passing, thought you might be home, brought you a bottle, how about some glasses?"
Jancana produced three tumblers. In his hand they had shrunk to the size of thimbles. He stood over Ursula as she poured. Her head was level with the thick iron buckle of his belt.
Ursula poured wine into three glasses and Jancana took the bottle. He threw his head back, poured the contents in his mouth. A single gulp and a swallow and it was consumed.
"How is Bonzo these days?" he asked after wiping his face with the back of his hand.
"Dino's fine," Ursula said.
"Still living over on First Avenue?"
"Right. Same place," Ursula said, running her tongue along the rim of her glass.
A laugh began to bubble from Jancana's chest, and a flinty smile appeared on his face. He strode to the door, slammed it shut, padlocked it. "You lying cunt-Bonzo don't live on First Avenue any more-I know-I looked for that cocksucking chiseler ... he cheated me out of two hundred dollars ... same day you were here..."
I looked for a way out. Nothing. We were trapped. No one else in the building, probably not until the morning. Walls too thick to yell. I searched for a weapon, saw nothing I could use against a man as large as Jancana.
Ursula seemed unconcerned. She had a serene smile on her face. "Hey, Red, honey, I don't know everything that Bonzo does. He's just a guy I know. I didn't beat you out of anything. I came here 'cause cats like you turn me on, you dig?"
Jancana was opening the metal cabinets one by one. When he reached the one that contained the bag of marijuana, he cursed. "Little bitches. That's what I thought. Trying to take me off for the grass."
Effortlessly, his hand flicked through space and Ursula went sprawling on the floor. "I moved here to get away from people like you," he boomed. He corraled me and Lotus and tied us with clothesline to a vertical water pipe.
We accepted the rough disregard of his hands without struggle. There was nothing to do but wait and see what happened. Jancana had returned his attention to Ursula. He lumbered toward her, looming over her like a volcano ready to explode. He reached a hand down and yanked her to her feet. She was still smiling.
Jancana ripped Ursula's blouse down the back, broke the brassiere clasps open and peeled the fragments from her. His enormous fingers twined in her hair and pulled her head back, causing her chest to jut forward. Two big fingers from his free hand reached toward a breast and pinched, like tongs. Ursula cried out. A mixture of pain and lust. She was enjoying it-her eyes turning oily with pleasure.
When Jancana took his fingers away there were huge bruises on her skin. She still had that dull, mindless smile on her face. Jancana ordered her to take off her other clothing, but he wouldn't let go of her hair. Ursula managed to work her skirt and underpants down her hips, and wiggled them off. A triangle of mossy brown hair glistened between her thighs. Jancana took one finger and pushed it between them. She made a noise that sounded part growl, part whine. Jancana laughed. "Think this is going to be easy, bitch? You're in for a surprise."
Jancana jammed his finger at the hairy triangle and Ursula pretended to struggle; she squeezed her legs together and twisted away from his finger. He let her momentum turn her, then smacked his palm against her ass; she howled like a baby. He slapped again and the howl turned carnal. Then she spread her toes and knees apart, and, like a hen on an egg, tried to squat on his finger, working her hips until she settled on it. It slipped in as far as the first joint.
I heard another huge laugh spill from Jancana's chest, and the hair on my neck quivered. With a sudden shoving motion he penetrated his finger to the knuckle and simultaneously lifted Ursula into the air. She rested there, impaled on his fist.
She was moaning, "Oh shit, oh shit." and twisting with pleasure. Next to me, Lotus shuddered. Something horrible was going to happen. I was afraid to think of it.
Jancana opened his fly. He put Ursula back on the floor. Then pulled out his organ. Because of the angle of his body, I couldn't see it. But I could see Ursula's face: it had turned white, like a boiled potato. Her eyes bulged, and her mouth fell open. Then he pivoted and I could see his penis.
It was big as an ordinary man's forearm; the head was thick as a doubled fist. It had a cone-shaped shank that was wider at the base than the neck.
With a strength born of horror, Ursula broke from him, took three blind steps back, and tripped over a chair. He was above her in a second, picked her up and slapped her face. Blood exploded from her nose. With his great fingers clamped behind the nape of her neck, he managed to push her face against the huge head of his penis.
Ursula tried to pull away, but his grip was vise-like. She gained some control of herself again, decided to try another tactic. Opening her jaw as wide as possible, she tried to get it in her mouth. Impossible. It wouldn't fit. The head of his penis was big as a cantaloupe. And if it wouldn't fit in her mouth, she knew she could never accommodate it in any other opening. Her only other course of action would be to jerk him off.
She began rubbing him with both hands, as you would rub a horse's neck. But it only excited him, made him more bellicose, and he threw her down on her back, took an ankle in each hand, and pulled her legs apart.
Ursula yelled for help. I yanked at the clothesline, tried to get free, but only made the knots tighter. I heard Lotus begin to sob.
Leaning his weight forward, Jancana was whacking his elephantine penis against the junction of Ursula's thighs. Her yells bounded off the walls, vanished in the deep room like pigeons swallowed by a whale. His palms were pressed down on her chest squeezing the breath from her body, his mammoth erection dashing against her vagina, making it swell with discomfort. There was a rage of frustration in each of his lunges. The harder he tried, the angrier he became. Ursula's tongue lolled out of her mouth, her lids fluttered shut, and she fainted. Her body relaxed. Muscles loosened.
Taking advantage of the flaccid body, Jancana carefully sighted his penis over the entrance to her womb and began to exert a steady pressure. At the same time, he took her limp hips in his hands and started twisting her like a man working a tight shoe onto his foot. Somehow he managed to get his bloated glans into her body. There was a trickle of blood running out of her mouth.
"You're going to kill her," I yelled at him.
"Shut the fuck up!" Jancana spat.
"Let her alone," Lotus pleaded. "I'll let you make it with me."
"That's a sure thing anyway," he leered and continued to twist Ursula's body against his.
Ursula's eyes reopened. For a moment her face was peaceful, waking from a nap. Then, a cruel pain ripped her torso. She cried out. Jancana corkscrewed her hips and she cried again. There was a pause of silence, and another howl. But it wasn't Ursula. It was Jancana.
Ursula had reached under her legs and managed to grab hold of his testicles-testicles the size of volley-balls. She had a death grip, dug her fingers deep into the fibrous glands.
Jancana tried to pull away but couldn't. Each time he tried, she twisted her fingers. He tried to break her grip, slapped at her breasts, but she wrenched viciously, and he yelled so loud I thought the light bulbs were going to crack.
It was a standoff. Jancana, elbows on the floor, glared with stupid hatred. Ursula had regained her smile. Imperceptibly, her hips began to gyrate. "Don't you do any moving," she hissed and began to swivel around the chunk of flesh between her legs. It must have been painful. Coarse whimpers dribbled out of her mouth. But I knew she was digging it.
After the first few minutes, Jancana began to experience chills and tremors. Once, he jerked with a spasm, and Ursula slammed her hands together. He held still after that. Closed his cavernous eyes. Loomed over her like a mindless prehistoric beast.
She took as much time as she could. Yanking Jancana whenever she felt like it. Letting screams and sighs translate what she was feeling. Finally her body functions took their own course and carried her into a wounded, insufferable orgasm. As soon as her body began to shake, Jancana flooded her with semen. Great waves of it streamed out. Viscous and dark as lava, it splashed down her legs in bucketfuls.
Soon after, Jancana rolled onto his back. His eyes fell closed and he went into a deep sleep. Ursula untied us. We took one of Jancana's shirts to replace her torn dress, then found the padlock key in his pocket. He never stirred. Slept like one drugged. We let ourselves out and headed for the stairs.
Halfway down Ursula halted and told us to wait a minute. Although we wanted to get out fast, we waited for her on the landing. Five minutes passed. Then a blood-curdling scream echoed from above. Ursula came charging down the stairs with the laundry bag. Her breath was heavy and her face was hot with success.
Jancana stumbled out the door. I could see him through the space between the staircase. He was clutching at his groin, bellowing curses. There was a horrible sound in his voice.
"What did you do?" I asked.
Ursula smirked. "I went back for the grass. There was a bottle of liquid oven-cleaner in the closet. I spilled it over the bastard's cock."
A huge potted tree came crashing down, smashed apart, barely missing us. Shards of cement showered our legs. We ran for it. The second tree crashed behind us. Jancana's howling voice followed us up the street.
Later that night, when I recovered my wits, I wanted to do something. Jancana must have been in a bad way. But I didn't know what to do, and I was afraid to go back. Lotus and I wouldn't take any of the grass. Ursula didn't force us to. She split uptown in a taxi, the laundry bag cradled in her lap like a baby.
CHAPTER FOUR
I took two more trips in October, one on Halloween where I laughed so much at the trick-or-treaters and their innocent imitations of witches and devils that my facial muscles were sore and cramped for two days. November was a crisp, exciting month for me, two more trips, both within forty-eight hours; I wrote a long story about a boy and his grandfather. I was happy. Lotus was happy. Smith wasn't.
Late one evening, about eleven o'clock, I went out to buy a newspaper and saw Smith arguing with two very straight, very tall, and very official looking men. Smith was angrily shaking his head, pointing his finger at the sidewalk, and cursing. The men were listening silently, impassive as street signs.
Smith spotted me, spat out one more quick sentence, then pushed by them and scampered over to me.
"Everything all right?" I asked nervously, thinking they were cops.
"They're private detectives," Smith clarified. "My father hired them to find me. He wants to talk to me. Which means he doesn't like the scene I'm in. Which means he's going to hassle my ass."
"How can he hassle you, you're over twenty-one," I said naively.
Smith twitched his shoulders and ran a hand through his hair. "He could have me killed," he said flatly. I laughed. Smith looked back over his shoulder. The detectives had disappeared. When he turned to me, there was a smile on his face. "Guess I'll have to go see him," he imitated Bogart, crumbling his face like aluminum foil, "and straighten things out."
I forgot about the incident until two or three weeks later when Smith asked me to accompany him to his family's home out on Long Island.
"I don't know, Smith." I tried to turn him down. "I don't dig those family scenes. Besides, we both look so beat to shit that they're bound to get uptight. Maybe it would be better if you went alone."
"C'mon, it'll be a goof. You can see the great old wizard of the media in his own home; maybe you'll get some information you can use in a story or something."
The Smiths lived in a split-level house, a large rambling home with a white western-style wooden fence around it. I had expected something more opulent, a mansion perhaps. Still, it was expensive-looking, had a tended lawn, and a three-car garage. They had a full-time cook, and a maid. She let us in, then told Smith that his mother had driven to the store and would return shortly. Smith showed me the "trophy" room.
There were twenty or thirty stuffed animal heads mounted on the walls. And there was a glass case with native tribal masks and spears. Imitation trees and foliage were spread here and there, an attempt at jungle authenticity. Smith told me that once, when he was a little boy, his father had locked him in this room to punish him for some infraction or other-he couldn't remember what it was he had done wrong. But he did remember how frightened he had been.
"I flipped out," he said. "All those shadows, glowering marble eyes from the stuffed heads, bared teeth. I ran looking for a way out and tripped over one of those stools. I twisted my ankle so bad that it swelled up three times normal-but that was before he got the globe. The globe really fucked up the mood. You couldn't be frightened in here now. It's too bright."
The globe he was talking about was suspended from the ceiling. It was ten feet in diameter, and turned a complete revolution once every hour. Oceans glowed 'model airplane' turquoise, and cities twinkled with miniature electric lights. Smith said that the globe had been delivered by truck a week after his father had produced and narrated a two-part documentary on the national space program-a gift from the president of the nation's largest aerospace company. Glowing from the geographic center of Cape Kennedy, its face a phosphorescent orange, was a special chronometer that indicated in years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds, the exact time elapsed since the United States had orbited its first satellite. The globe had no turn-off switch; it was wired directly into the main electrical circuits. The phosphorescent oceans, the chronometer, the twinkling lights, all kept turning, morning, noon and night.
Smith produced a thick joint. We finished it off.
Then we smoked another. He had turned on a stereo FM radio; we listened to music and watched the smoke haze from our cigarettes cling like swamp mist around the globe. I was really high, spaced out. I didn't hear Smith's mother enter the room until her voice blared in my ear: "WHY IS THE GODDAMN RADIO ALWAYS SO LOUD ... CAN'T HEAR MYSELF THINK AROUND HERE!"
I jumped with the noise, opened my eyes, saw his mother go to the radio. She twisted the sound down until it was nearly inaudible. Smith's mother was a seductive little bitch. She was dressed in a one-piece knitted outfit-I think they call it a party suit: like a jump suit with sleeves and pants legs. It had a turtle neck, and tapered elephant cuffs, and was form fitting. Her breasts and ass bulged provocatively from the knit fabric, and I thought, shit-Smith, the ugly little bastard, sure was surrounded with tough-looking women. His mother must have been fifty, but she looked thirty-five. Her hair was expensively set, and her make-up was subtle. A frosty glass of Scotch jiggled in her hand.
Smith introduced us and his mother gave me a warm smile. I was very stoned, and a little uncomfortable, and I tried hard to concentrate on their conversation to see how they reacted to each other. I received very little feedback. They were courteous, almost delicate in their responses to the usual "how are you" questions and answers. A car pulled up to the driveway. The front doorbell rang. A young, conservatively-dressed man entered and went to Mrs. Smith. He whispered a few words to her, then left.
"Your father is in his car outside," she told Smith.
"He has to catch a flight to Chicago. He wants you to go to the airport with him. Jergens will drive you back. I'll entertain your friend until you return."
Smith mumbled some apologies, asked me to wait, said he hoped I wasn't uptight about it. I told him it was O.K. I was so stoned, I would just groove on the animals and the globe. I heard the car pull away. Then Mrs. Smith was saying something about "a drink." She went into a long speech about a recent trip she had taken to Europe. I kept an attentive smile on my face, but my mind drifted. One of the stuffed animals, a big moose, had caught my eye. I wondered what it was like being a moose. What would it be like to fuck a female moose? All that energy, all that strength? A slight shiver quivered down my belly. What would it be like to fuck you, Miss Moose, I wondered silently.
I must have been really high because I heard the moose answer: "If I were whole you wouldn't have to imagine, you'd know quick enough." I listened carefully. Then I heard a black Alaskan she-bear on the far wall growl, "He wouldn't have to imagine if any of us were whole." It was a good retort, and a number of the other animals laughed. I grinned. There was a lion skin on the floor, and he wanted to know if it was true that intercourse was more exciting with marijuana. I nodded affirmatively. "Would you fuck me?" the lion asked.
"Are you a lion or a lioness?" I wondered.
"I don't remember," the lion said. "But at this point, does it really matter?"
I thought the lion was real funny, and I squeezed my legs together and chuckled with relish. It was a mistake. I had completely forgotten about Mrs.
Smith. She had been rambling on about her vacation, and she thought I was laughing at her. Her face turned red.
"Oh, so you think I'm funny? Think that you're so smart and hip? Well let me tell you, Dottie Smith knows just as much as you do, and a lot more. I know what's going on, don't think I don't. I'm no square. Just because I was born in the Midwest-I've been ALL over the WORLD!"
"Never saw her in my neighborhood," I heard the rhesus monkey gibber.
"Looks like someone I once chewed on," added the tiger.
I felt a wave of laughter start way down in the cave of my chest, and to divert it I concentrated on my body, felt how alert and sensitive it was. Grass sometimes does groovy things to you. I rubbed my side and smiled at the pleasurable tremors that eddied through my body.
"Don't smirk at me," Mrs. Smith challenged, misinterpreting the look on my face.
"I wasn't smirking," I tried to explain.
"Well Mr. Smartass, what were you doing then?"
But by that time I couldn't remember what had started the smile; it was swimming in the grass-murky past. So I picked the first thing that came to my mind.
"I was smiling at that necklace you're wearing," I said. It was kind of pretty too on grass. Light chips from it skipping tangentially like meteorites, off the globe, onto the walls. But Mrs. Smith's ears were waxed with paranoia. She thought I was putting her necklace down.
" ... My GODDAMN husband paid thirty thousand DOLLARS for this necklace; don't you laugh at it!"
I knew my best course of action would be to split, go back to the city, explain it to Smith when he came home. I couldn't deal with his mother when I was high. I pulled myself to a standing position, took two hesitant steps toward the door, but the blood rushed to my head and I had to pause by the couch to find my balance. There, by my hand, next to the couch, was the FM radio. Reflexively, I turned the volume back up.
Smith's mother twisted her lips to a snarl. "Listen you, I've come across boys like you before. Come across boys like you all over the world. Young snots who think they know it all! Well, Dottie Smith knows how to teach them who's who, don't think I don't!" And she swigged a hurried gulp of Scotch.
Music was rumbling out of the twin radio speakers. I hallucinated. What the hell had Smith given me to smoke, I wondered? It sure as hell wasn't normal grass. I cocked my head to one side and focused the radio music sharper. It was rolling out of the speakers in thin metallic ribbons. "Wow," I said and shook my head.
Mrs. Smith made an angry sound, threw her glass down on the rug. Ice cubes skipped across the floor and rested against the lion skin. Mrs. Smith growled with rage. She lunged at me, grabbed a fistful of my hair, and swung me in an arc toward the couch.
Whoosh. I fell on my back, down on the couch, as gentle as a leaf in a dream.
Mrs. Smith, licking nervously at the edge of her mouth, eyes glazed with anger, advanced toward me. "Wised them all up. Showed those smart European boys I was no jerk ... just because my jackass husband came from Iowa ... showed them I was no prude..."
My legs dangled from the edge of the couch. Smith's mother stepped between them, deftly opened my pants and dragged them down to my knees. She stroked a hand along my thigh. The hand was cold and damp from holding the glass of scotch. A swarth of goose bumps prickled my skin. "Christ," I wondered. "What's this all about?"
Mrs. Smith's fingers trailed down to my knees, then reversed and converged toward my pubis, nested there like birds in the curly damp nap. A sensation like ghost's breath fluttered over my skin. My cock was hard as wood.
"What should I do?" I asked the animals. "She is Smith's mother. He might not like it."
"How does it feel?" the lion questioned.
"It feels good-nice chills and making me excited-but that's not what I mean ... my head tells me this isn't the right thing to be doing ... it's making me feel real uneasy. Guys get more uptight about someone making it with their momma than get uptight about making it with their wife."
"I don't know about your head," the tiger told me. "But nothing is wrong with it far as I know."
"I fucked mothers, sisters, daughters, cousins, anything that moved," bragged the African bull.
"If it's your head that's hurting," advised the practical monkey from his branch of the tree, "then let your head float on up here with me."
Mrs. Smith had cupped my testicles with one hand, and was running the fingers of the other along the base of my cock. A shudder of pleasure shot up my abdomen. I turned my knees outward, stretched my shoulders back into the couch, let my mind float toward the ceiling.
From that height I could see much better, hear too. I watched as Smith's mother leaned forward, took a gob of saliva from her mouth, and sinuously rubbed it around my anus.
While her fingers moved from my anus to my scrotum, Mrs. Smith maintained a private dialogue with my genitals. "Yes, little pretties, Dottie just loves little boys who think they know it all. We'll see who knows what they should know, we'll see all right."
My skin was flushed. I smelled a combined odor of flower-sweet perfume and musk rise from her body, and almost bit my tongue when the tumble-weed stiffness of her lacquered hair brushed against my hipbone. Then her tongue flicked into sight, licked her lips moist. She had an exceptionally long tongue.
That tongue was teasing hairs on my crotch, describing an arc from the lower periphery of hair to the base of the penis. My belly was fluttering
On the wall, the tiger purred with memory: "My mother always did that to us ... and I did it to my cubs."
With long, wet strokes, Mrs. Smith brought her tongue under my testicles, slithered it along the hard wrinkled sack, brought it to the base of my cock. Slowly, steadily, she pestered the flesh with her tongue, working higher and higher toward the head.
Tension in my body, and my mouth open, I concentrated on the feel of the tongue. Rock music was beating from the radio and I realized that Smith's mother was stroking her tongue in tempo with the music. The same music she had just complained about-that music was guiding her tongue, giving it rhythm, deciphering the combination that would unlock, soon, an orgasm.
The tongue wheedled at my penis, worked under the pink rocket-shaped head, then slipped over the glans. I moaned. Around me, whipped to frenzy, the animals chanted primitive rhythms, songs to help me on my way.
I wriggled my buttocks, felt her hands crawl up my ribs, graze my nipples and pinch them, slide under my arms and pull at those tender hairs. Her mouth yawned open and closed around my erection, sucked the head, moved down the shaft, moved back to the head. The lips tightened with suction and her long tongue moved-one slow excruciating stroke against my glans without releasing the suction.
The animals were shrieking. I yelled to them, yelled to the globe, to Smith's mother, "I'm going to come now ... now! ... NOW!"
With a slow, eternal movement, her tongue arched, and spasms took my body. Colors-lights-energy-all exploded behind my eyes. And I came. And CAME. And still CAME. SHUDDERING.
Later, his mother staggered from the room. I didn't see her again. Smith returned, and he was pensively preoccupied with himself, so we didn't talk much on the trip back to the city.
CHAPTER FIVE
Christmas passed, so did January and February. My unemployment insurance was nearly expired, and Lotus and I dealt a little grass to sock away enough money to last until spring. Selling grass is a bad scene. Selling anything is a bad scene-but grass is illegal, you get sent to jail for it. When you carry any kind of weight, from a pound on up, every footfall on the stairway sounds loud and ominous as a base drum. You start checking out your friends: informer? undercover narco? accident prone?-more people get busted for stupidity than anything. Don't carry grass in an automobile unless it's so well hidden it takes you an hour to get to it. Don't let a cop in your home for any reason, unless he has a warrant and an ax heavy enough to chop down the door. Once a cop's in your place, he can snoop all he wants-or he can plant an ounce. Try convincing a judge that it wasn't your grass, that the police dropped it in your kitchen cabinet. Best advice of all: don't deal. Give it away. You start to haggle and scrimp and invariably get to dislike the people you're dealing with.
I was high for the entire month of March, not getting anything written, but learning a lot about my own head, learning to listen to sounds on the street, learning to listen to music. The music lessons started when I met old Linus Foxx in St. Adrian's, a bar next to the Broadway Central Hotel. Linus was a black musician. He played the flute, and had a quartet that was appearing at one of the local jazz clubs. Linus was one of the people who told me about Eddie Bonzo and his knotty contracts. I would meet Linus once or twice a week, in the early evening, and we would drink at the bar, watching the St. Adrian waitresses in their skimpy mercenary uniforms cavort between tables, their hands filled with platters, their breasts and asses and cunts the mystic property of late-night phantoms.
One weekday evening, a little after seven o'clock, I was sitting at the bar, near the window, watching rain wrinkle the pavement. A week of dull, chilly skies and soaked shoes. I was medium drunk, mellow, listening to Linus Foxx tell me about the old days, when he first started playing his flute, back in the 1940's.
"I didn't have no money, I was really broke, you know. I was paying nothin' but dues. That was out in California. When you're in California you pay nothin' but dues. But, man, was I anxious to play. My instrument came first."
Linus' black face was as creased as a folded umbrella, his hair white as flax. His teeth in bar light were phosphorescent. He turned that glowing grin on me, patted my wrist confidentially, and chuckled.
"In those days the money wasn't right-we wasn't making all the bread the cats make today you know. I was appearin' with this band, see, doin' a lot of one nighters, goin' and comin'. We was hittin' it back East, going through the South, and I remember this one date in particular. There was this sign over the door, said: check your guns and check your knives. That's what it was like in them days."
I saw Linus' image in the bar mirror shake its head. And my image too, eerie and distorted from reflected hues of light through multicolored whisky and wine bottles. I thought that the mirror must have been crooked because I seemed to float a foot higher than eye level. My mirror image had on its straw plantation hat, but I couldn't feel it on my head, and was afraid to reach up a hand to test its realness-what would I have done if it wasn't there? I realized I must have been drunker than I thought.
Linus was shaking his head with memory. "Heh, heh, heh," he was chortling, then playfully pinched my arm. "In those days I couldn't be sittin' and tal-kin' to a white boy like you, Jyros. Not in most bars, New York or anyplace, no sir. Don't let nobody tell you any different. Maybe uptown if you was a musician-a white musician come to Harlem-but not in any white folks' bar. A colored man sits in a white bar and next thing you know some fella pulls your coat. That's what it was like you know..."
Linus lived in a forty-five dollar basement apartment south of Houston Street. He had a fantastic collection of old 78 rpm records, and he played them on an ancient console phonograph, a gigantic jukebox-like machine. I would get wasted on grass or hash and curl up on the floor while he rapped about the personnel, those he knew and those he didn't want to know. Occasionally the other members of his quartet would drop in and they would jam for hours. I found out from one of them, Dude Herold, a piano player, that something was going on with Myrtle and Eddie Bonzo. Dude said that they were getting into all kinds of weird scenes, that she was at Eddie's house every night. "There's been some other shit going on there," He slapped his hand against his knee and gave a husky laugh. Poor Smith, I thought. The little bastard was getting it up and down.
Dude was a sturdy man, wide and strong as a heavyweight boxer. His skin was black as the ebony keys on the piano he played. He got the name "Dude" he said, because he "carried a fine set of threads." The night he convinced me to go and check out the action at Eddie Bonzo's house, Dude was wearing a gray tweed natural-shoulder, double-breasted, three-button coat with matching cuffless trousers. He wore black kid leather English boots and white spats. On his head, a dark gray bowler with a small white gull feather in the hat brim. He carried a imagine olive-wood walking stick with an ivory handle. I looked like a soiled locker room towel standing next to him.
On the taxi ride over to Eddie's brownstone, Dude Herold explained what had been happening there. Dino Bonzo was conducting a series of "happenings." Dino claimed he was improvising a new play, but in reality they were just simple orgies. I saw one of his plays once. It was all about the devil and masochism. It was boring.
When we arrived at Eddie's, Dino was standing on a couch with a yardstick in his hand, like some Bacchanalian maestro, pointing it at one or another of a group of undressed men and women, positioning them. Spread across a table in the middle of the room was Myrtle, the lush tangerine nap of her cunt glistening under a small portable spotlight. Her arms were thrown over her head, palms facing the ceiling, and her legs dangled off the table, the balls of her feet barely brushing the floor.
"It's a birth rite, dig it?" Dino was explaining. His brother, Eddie, stood in front of Myrtle, face contorted with lechery, prick dangling partially hard. His mouth was working, and I think he was silently repeating the word cunt, over and over, like a charm.
Dino, wearing a laurel-green lounging bathrobe belted at the waist, motioned Benny and Scottie to huddle beneath Myrtle's table. Benny and Scottie were Eddie's bodyguards, two ex-motorcycle creeps he had appropriated from one of the local fag gangs. They had Bulldog faces, and Doberman mentalities. Dino explained to them that they were to crawl between Eddie's and Myrtle's legs.
There were about twenty people in Eddie's apartment watching, and fourteen or fifteen others who were participating. The smell of grass was thick and pungent. Music from two KLH speakers drummed from separate corners. Dino began to clap his hands, indicating he wanted everyone to pick up the beat.
Eddie's prick had sprouted to its working length. He moved to Myrtle, parted her outer lips with his thumbs, then shoved into her cunt. His entrance was swift, sudden, and I think he intended to catch her off guard, to elicit a surprised gasp. But Myrtle was, as always, receptive. She exhaled a sigh and gave her breasts a contented jiggle. Eddie began to fuck with a slow, methodical, one-count stroke. Myrtle had an open-lipped smile on her face. Her hair surrounded her head like a halo of copper wires. She answered each stroke of Eddie's penis with a bump of her hips that made the table thump. We were clapping our hands to the same beat.
Watching people ball makes you want to ball. All those naked bodies shiny with concupiscence makes the blood pound in your groin. I wanted to grab a free girl and do my own improvisation. But the girls were disciplined. They sat in a naked semicircle at Dino's feet waiting for his direction. Dino had nicknamed these groupies: he called them the Shits. The groupies, perverse to begin with, had taken a liking to the title. They had purchased sweatshirts and, with bold purple letters, had hand printed across the shirtfronts: SHITS. Shit-shirts they called them, and wore them whenever they could. The Shits rarely fucked separately. They group-fucked, working as a team, like cheerleaders or show dancers.
I didn't see Smith enter, my eyes were on a dark-haired girl, a spectator. She was tall, as tall as I was, had shadow-black hair, and a wide full mouth. I didn't know Smith was there until I heard his hoarse voice shout, "Move and I'll smash the bastard."
Smith had hollered his warning at Eddie's bodyguards. Poised in Smith's hand, hovering above Eddie's head, was the base of a bronze floor lamp. Smith clutched it in his iron-strong fingers, and waved it threateningly. I glanced at Eddie and Myrtle on the table. They were covered by a net-like nylon drape that Smith had obviously pulled from the wall and tossed over them.
The clapping had stopped. Nobody moved. Smith's face was rusted with anger. His fingers around the lamp were tight as cables, white with strain.
Myrtle was the first to recover. In a turbulent voice full of storm she cursed Smith loudly. "What the fuck is wrong with you, Smith? You ass. Get this thing off me." Her tone was harsh, and it hit Smith in the face like a handful of sand. "Come on, dammit!" she berated him. "Take it off. You dumb ass."
The lamp clattered from Smith's grip, and he pulled the drape back, forlornly, like a magician uncovering a trick he knew had failed. Myrtle and Eddie were still wedged together. I could see that Eddie had been frightened, his lips were white, pressed nervously together.
Myrtle, her green eyes incandescent with vexation, continued her tirade. "Listen, Smith. We've been through this before. I like to fuck. I fuck when I want. Where I want. Who I want. And I want to fuck Eddie. I want to fuck Eddie now. What do you think this is, the 1950's? Fucking is my thing. And if you don't like it, then leave."
Smith left.
I thought about following him, but decided against it. He had to work out his thing with Myrtle on his own. Besides, I saw that Eddie's fear had soured into anger, and now was distilling into meanness, i tnought I better keep an eye on Myrtle, just in case. I was right. He didn't do anything overtly, but when he resumed his fucking, he was mean. He had his brother, Dino, bring him a silk scarf, and he blindfolded Myrtle with it.
He fucked her with the same slow piston beat. Dino started everyone clapping again. When Myrtle's hips began to respond to his, Eddie leaned forward, stretching his arms out until they were over Myrtle's head, then he slapped his hands down hard on the table alongside her ears: a loud noise, and Myrtle jumped. He whispered something to her, reassuring her, telling her that it was part of the "ritual," I assumed. Then, when she had relaxed, when her hips fell into their rhythm, he slammed the table again.
Myrtle's body jerked, the muscles in her arms and legs tensing, then she relaxed again. Eddie kept fucking, alternating quiet slaps with loud slaps, keeping her off balance, changing the length of time between each slap. At times he slammed the table twice for each stroke of his prick. Other times, he waited four, five, six cycles before crashing his palms against the table. After a while, Myrtle lost her own rhythms. Reflexively, her body reacted with fear symptoms. Noise will do that to you. Messages, like frantic schools of fish, sped from her brain to her central and autonomic nervous systems, colliding. Her heartbeat quickened. Adrenal glands dumped sugar into her bloodstream.
Around me, the ring of spectators breathed heavy winds of lust. The dark-haired girl with the wide mouth had appeared next to me. I felt her hip brush against me. But my eyes were firm on Eddie and Myrtle. He kept stroking his prick into her, palms continuing to bang the table. Myrtle was trembling. She was answering each noise with a painful whimper. Her coordination had been banished, and her body reacted tropistically to each noise-her head, torso, limbs, all jumping spasmodically.
Finally, the seizures of orgasm gripped her, and she trembled from head to toe, like a rag doll in a typhoon. As she came, Dino Bonzo yelled at the two men, Benny and Scottie. One at a time, they crawled on hands and knees between the bridge of legs. Both had erections. Dino pointed his yard stick at them and hysterically laughed. Benny and Scottie, chagrined, moved off to the side of the room, and when the collective gaze shifted from them, they groped each other.
Dude Herold appeared beside me, mopping his brow with a beige silk handkerchief. "Man," he said. "I'd sure like to get a piece of that redheaded bitch." I didn't answer him. I was thinking of jumping Myrtle myself. Dude nodded his head, confirming his desire. "I think I'll check with Bonzo and see if I can get into this gig," he said, then walked over to the couch and spoke to Dino. Dino bent his head attentively, listened, then pointed his stick across at an armchair loaded with discarded clothing. Dude went to it and started undressing. While he was unbuttoning his vest, Dino bounded from the couch to the table. Eddie was pulling his penis from Myrtle. The brothers gave each other a private glance, then Dino parted his laurel robe and exhibited an erection, knobby as an acorn. He jammed it into Myrtle's moist crevice and began to gyrate his ass like a burlesque dancer, bumping and grinding. Dino's prick was the only part of him that touched Myrtle: his green robe shielded his legs and hips from hers, and he kept his hands aloft.
A frail, small, fawn-like man with pink framed eyeglasses was standing behind the table. Dino told him to get under it. The man, a beaver-toothed grin on his shallow face, quickly shuffled under the table. Dino continued to fuck.
I could feel the bulge in my pants. I wanted to get a female under me; I looked for the dark-haired girl, but she had vanished. Dude Herold was almost undressed, watching Dino, waiting for his turn.
Would I really fuck Myrtle if I had the chance? I didn't have any hang-ups about making it with a married woman. Marriage is full of shit. Just another way for the State to keep you under its Informational Thumb. And if a woman wanted to ball, then she should ball. Just as a man should. But Smith was my friend. And no matter what Myrtle had worked out with Smith, I knew it hurt him when she made it with cats he knew. I didn't want to hurt Smith at all.
I watched Myrtle and Dino. She had recovered quick as the tide, back into her natural rhythm, thrusting her pelvis against the rough-headed penis inside her. You could see that Dino wasn't interested in Myrtle's pleasure-his machinations were only for his own satisfaction. He used Myrtle's womb like a back-scratcher, rubbing what itched.
When Dino was ready to climax, he called to the little man under the table: "Come on, Perry-puss, you little fucker, get through." And "Perry-puss" poked his head under their legs, a delightful toothy smile breaking across his features. As the little man struggled to get past, he inquisitively looked up, and Dino seized the opportunity to pull his prick from Myrtle and dump his semen onto Perry-puss's backside. Viscous puddles ran between the cheeks of the little man's ass. But he took it good-naturedly, shook his buttocks like a wet dog. When he stood up, two of the Shits gasped with amazement. For a little man, he had an inordinately large erection-one that seemed too big to be supported by his thin legs and frail pelvis.
"How would you like to get pruned by that little mother?" one of the girls remarked. Her friend giggled pleasurably at the thought.
Now, Dude Herold was standing between Myrtle's legs. He took his erection and slammed it for emphasis against the table, laughing at the solid little thump it made. Dude was the tallest of the three who had made it with Myrtle so far, and he had to bend his legs to keep her from slipping away from his prodding. Myrtle, who was tired of keeping her legs dangling off the table, brought her ankles to Dude's neck. He wrapped his arms around her knees tightly, looking like a farmer with his plow.
Myrtle was cooing. Dude dragged her forward until her buttocks were on a line with the table's edge. Then, with her back flat, he bent her legs toward her chest, compressing her body until her thighs crushed against her nipples. Dude worked himself in and out, picking up speed, making a froth of her juices.
Dude would come soon, and Dino, sensing it, positioned another participant under the table. I only caught a glance and couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman-hair of indiscriminate length, indiscriminate figure. As Dude discharged, Dino called the person under the table forward. I could see that the creature had an erect cock and testicles. It also had small, perfectly shaped breasts, the nipples pink and stiff. I couldn't see between its legs and didn't know if it also had a vagina.
The Shits surrounded it, laughing, poking, pinching.
Dino Bonzo threw off his robe and began to dance around the room. Eddie Bonzo turned up the music. It was a signal that precipitated a flurry of movement, soon ending in a heap of bodies on the floor. The fawn-faced little man with inordinate genitals grabbed one of the Shits and put his hand between her legs. She allowed him to fiddle there for a moment, but, seeing her cohorts on the floor with the boy-girl, she shook away from him to join them.
The five Shits were kneeling in a circle. The boy-girl was spread out, and one Shit was at each of its limbs, one at its head. All the Shits were licking: licking its palms, licking its toes, licking its face. Slowly, from the extremities, they worked toward the center. Toes to ankles to knees to thighs. Fingers to wrists to forearms to biceps. The girl at the creature's head moved down its throat to its shoulder blades to its breasts. When she reached one, she opened her mouth and sucked at it. The creature opened its mouth, and gave a sweet girlish sigh.
The two Shits who had been moving up the legs reached the testicles, opened their mouths and captured one each. The creature gave a deep masculine groan. The two remaining Shits, moving along the arms, lunged simultaneously at the stiff penis. Their heads knocked. One, less dazed than the other, slid her mouth over the erect flesh and began to suck.
The boy-girl alternated feminine sighs with masculine moans. Meanwhile, "Perry-puss" grabbed the dazed Shit and proceeded to jam his erection between her legs, dog fashion. Following his example, other members of the group, spectators, knelt behind the Shits and entered them from the rear. Others grabbed whatever was nearest, cunts, cocks, asses, mouths, armpits. The room was a pinwheel of sex, a cacophony of squeals, grunts, groans. The subway smell of bodies in heat at rush hour.
A hand reached around and grabbed the bulge of my cock. I turned. It was Myrtle.
"Fuck me, Jyros," she implored, the sea-mist green of her eyes an adventure I couldn't ignore. And I pulled my clothing from me, and waded into the mysterious swamp of her body. And fucked. And fucked.
And fucked.
CHAPTER SIX
I felt guilty about making it with Myrtle. More so, because I had gone through the moral changes, promising myself that I wouldn't, then doing it first chance I got. I didn't talk to Smith for two weeks, very stupid and uncool, a sure sign that I had done something. I had other worries then: my unemployment insurance expired in May. We had very little money in reserve, and to feed us, I started to boost from the A & P. They caught me one day with my pockets full of packaged ham, baloney, cheese, and a can of tuna fish. The manager came over, made me empty my pockets before a collective jury of mid-morning elderly housewives, riotously condemning "people like me who caused the food prices to be so high" and threatening to call the cops. I let him rant, then, when he let me go, went up the block to Key Food and, being extra cool, managed to get the same items.
But I needed rent money so I asked around for work. Clark Whelton, one of the guys I knew from the writers' project, told me he could get me a job putting down a sidewalk in front of an apartment building on Charles Street. Whelton worked for the landlord, a management company that rented furnished apartments at exorbitant prices in the Village area.
"It pays two dollars an hour," he explained. "This old Italian needs a helper. Just the two of you. It's not hard. Just pouring cement."
I never worked so hard in my life. First, we had to break up the old cement with a sledge hammer-some of the chunks were six, seven inches thick-and remove them. That wasn't so bad. Mixing the cement by hand, that's what did it. The sand and cement and water had to be mixed with a gardener's rake, a slow, time consuming, arduous undertaking. I have since put down an outdoor cement porch. We used an electric mixer for that. It only took eight or nine-hours' work for two men. But, on Charles Street, raking the cement with my own feeble muscle power, the old Italian and I only managed to put down eight squares of cement in two days.
I was so stiff those nights that I couldn't get in or out of the bathtub. I wasn't sure I could make it a third day. Luckily, we fell into some money. Lotus had a friend from California, a tall soft-spoken boy with kinky red hair named Bill, who drove up that evening in a rusty Jaguar and laid a kilo of dynamite Mexican grass on us. A year and a half before, Lotus had apparently given Bill sixty-five dollars for a deal that had fallen through, and now he was paying off with interest. We sold the kilo that night for two hundred and twenty-five dollars to some uptown people I knew, then we all went out to Chinatown for a big meal.
Bill also had some orange-colored acid that he gave us. Coming down from a trip on that acid two days later I met Mary.
I saw her on St. Mark's Place. It was a warm spring evening. About nine o'clock. I had taken a subway ride and returned downtown on the IRT, exiting on Cooper Square. As I walked up into the street, a breeze billowed my shirt like a sail. Turning, I saw there a massive black cube spinning on its edge. Fifteen or twenty feet high: an impossible sight. I blinked my eyes, but it didn't go away, so I crossed to it, examined it. It was real all right. A metal sculpture that could be rotated with some back bending. A half dozen high school hippies were slouched at its pedestal, hitting the passers-by for money: "Hey man, any spare change, a nickel or a dime?"
"Nothing to spare," I said-but two of them didn't believe me.
"Come on, man. You can afford it. Dig in your pocket. Don't want to be middle class, do you," and he sniggered like a supercilious magpie.
"You shouldn't be beggin' on the street," I told him. "It's a drag scene. Lame."
"Nothing wrong with asking your fellow man for a little help," the other kid said. He was sixteen or seventeen, wore a dusty raincoat too heavy for the spring heat, and had a studious expression on his face. "Begging is an ancient and honored profession. You're only uptight about it because you feel guilty-guilty because you probably have more money than you can use."
"Yeah," his magpie friend chirped. "You feel guilty because you're part of the fucked-up system. You look hip, look like one of us, but you're just as uptight as the suit and tie dingos that come down to gawk on the weekends."
The kids who beg on the streets usually turn sour on people after a while. I had talked to a couple of them about it once. Most of their handouts came from other kids, or people with not much more money than they had-people who couldn't really afford it. Middle class guys working for Con Edison or girls in the secretarial pool at First National City don't give handouts. The ones who really suffer the most from the hippie beggars are the bums and alcoholics. There is only so much money that will get passed in handouts: derelicts don't have mommas and poppas in reserve when the winter comes.
"If you're so down on the system," I told the kid with the magpie laugh, "go out and steal. Shoplift from Woolworth's or the Grand Union ... Robin Hood, dig it?"
They both made stale circles of their mouths and dismissed me for CIA or NYPD. I put my hand on the cubed sculpture, patted it, then crossed Third Avenue to St. Mark's Place. The usual crush of hippies, neighborhood people, sightseers, drunks, cops. A bizarre conglomeration of aromas from a corner restaurant assailed my nose: sausage, pizza, hamburger, frankfurter, frying fat. A thousand fuck-able girls walked past, and I wondered which one I could have, how to stop her.
I looked up and saw by the curb, astride a chalk-white motorcycle, a girl dressed all in black. She was tall as a man, had pale skin, and lips red as cranberries. She carried an ebony crash helmet under one arm, wore a black satin miniskirt, and a black knit blouse that revealed traces of naked breast.
She was looking at me and my body galvanized under her gaze like iron filings under a magnet: hair prickled at the base of my neck, at my pubis; my belly flopped like a fish in shallow water. I wanted to fuck her, right there if I could, on St. Mark's Place.
"Get on," she said, indicating the back of the motorcycle, then kicked the engine awake with a polished, tar-black boot.
My heart was palpitating, and I straddled the seat behind her. Away we roared, engine vibration tingling up my legs, my balls, my spine. We zoomed toward First Avenue and made a left turn uptown into traffic, darting ahead of trucks, between cabs and cars. When there was a long stretch of open road with nothing in front of us, she gave the white motorcycle more throttle, spurred it like a mad-assed jockey.
The girl was leaning forward into the wind, locks of her hair like black flame whipping from her helmet. Her skirt had ridden up her waist like a sash, and the cheeks of her ass were wedged provocatively apart on the saddle. I pressed against her, felt my cock harden, filling the space between us.
The girl reached back and found my hand, pulled it forward, placed it between her legs. I felt a shock of naked thigh, then the texture of pubis against my fingers, coarse and exciting. She wore no underpants-her ass was naked on the leather seat, her moist cunt open to my fingers and the wind.
Buildings whizzed past. A sea of pavement skimmed under our wheels. Off to the right, the
United Nations Building, and ahead, the looming mouth of a tunnel. The motorcycle rider wiggled her ass against me, spreading her legs further apart on the seat, inviting my fingers to a deeper probe. My cock was throbbing.
I looked up and saw the tunnel. It was lunging at us too fast. Fear, a big frantic bird, rose in my chest and flapped its wings in warning. An image of the motorcycle slamming into a wall fluttered behind my eyes. We were going too fast, faster than my need. I pulled my finger from her crotch, yelled in her ear to slow down.
The motorcycle rider, tossing her head like a mare, angry, defiant, refused to slow. We rammed into the tunnel at eighty miles an hour, wind and motor whine echoing the walls. I held onto her hips and hoped for the best. We zinged through the tunnel and she finally slowed and stopped for a red light.
Then she turned her head to me, gave me a derisive smile, and said, "What's the matter baby, afraid momma will hurt you?"
"I want to get laid, not killed," I answered, and counted an infinity of one-eyed streetlights up First Avenue, each one a possible future orgasm.
Her name was Mary-Mary Night-and she took me to an apartment on East Fourth Street. I went to the bathroom and when I came back into the single room that served as living room, kitchen, and bedroom, she was sitting wrapped in a bath towel, in an armchair. She sat very straight, regally, shoulders flush against the back of the chair, head tilted upward, ankles and knees together, hands serenely folded in her lap.
I stood there watching her. She opened the towel, flashing her body like a sheriff uncovering his badge.
She spread her legs apart until they were pressing against the arms of the chair, a gesture part invitation, part command. I dropped to my knees between her legs, planted a heavy kiss on her thigh, moved my hands over her body, brought them down to her pubis.
As I slowly ran my fingers in and out of her damp bush, she slid forward on the chair, moving her hips closer to my face. Then she sinuously massaged my neck, the base of my shoulders, my upper chest. I stood and undressed, then returned to the warmth of her lower body, felt heat radiate from between her legs, felt my own body steam with desire.
I stroked her legs with loving caresses until I heard her breath loud and deep. When her eyes had turned thick with need, I began to drag my thumb like a rudder between her vaginal lips, from bottom to top, until the moisture that had accumulated there oozed around my finger. From the junction of her thighs up to the prepuce, I repeated my thumb's journey a dozen times, the nub of her clitoris throbbing against my finger at the end of each run. The cushion under her buttocks was damp.
Mary put her hands on the back of my head and guided my face toward her vagina. She smelled like swampy tobacco, spicy, hot. I opened my mouth and with my wide, flat tongue, began to stroke along the lips-long, slow strokes, from bottom to top, one lip at a time. Mary's fingers were firmly informing me that she wanted my mouth on the upper portion of her vulva. I attentively complied, taking the rigid bud of her clitoris between my lips and sucking at it.
"Oh yes, lover. That's it. Oh yes!" she prompted, and arched her back. "Don't stop that, please, do it more! More!"
I blew on the wet nub of flesh until some of her moisture evaporated, and she shivered with the sensation. Sweat rolled down her body. Her lips glistened. I had a looming erection that was demanding its own attention, but I forced myself to wait a while longer, wanting to make her come close to orgasm with my lips, tongue, and teeth, then explode her with my cock.
With a pulling suction of my teeth, I gently chewed at the throbbing nub of flesh. She was rolling her head against the back of the chair, pulling her hair, near hysteria. "Please, make me come, please," she begged.
I pulled her to the floor, turned her on her back, jammed my flesh deep into her belly. I was ready to let my sperm fly into her, but she whispered in my ear, "Hold yourself back, baby. Make me come, but hold yourself back. Show me you can do it. Show me you can make me come without coming yourself."
I wanted to ejaculate. My body said "go," but I held off. If she wanted to be manipulated into an orgasm, wanted to come before I did, I would comply.
So I held myself back. Took control of my body by counting cracks in the floor, and gave her an orgasm.
I watched her come. Her eyes rolled back until only the whites showed. Her mouth opened, and wheezing gasps squeezed from her chest. Her body shook and rattled. The orgasm was so intense that for a moment I thought she was going to pass out.
Mary came twice more and I held back each time. After her third orgasm, I let it go-and it felt like I came for an hour-all my liquids escaping together in one flood.
Fifteen minutes later, after Mary had washed my genitals with a cool damp washcloth, she provoked my penis back to life with her fingers. She had me sit in the chair, then climbed onto my lap, her legs wrapped around my waist, and she registered two quick successive orgasms to my one.
Then we went to sleep. While I was sleeping, she fondled me until I regained my erection, then woke me to dream-like fucking, slithered onto me, and coaxed a cascade of semen that splashed into her like phosphorescent liquid ivory.
She woke me again at three in the morning to tell me we had to go.
"What the hell's the matter?" I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
"This isn't my apartment," Mary explained, yawning, stretching her long arms, then turning off the bed toward her clothes. "It belongs to a guy I know. He's a bartender. He gets off work soon and he won't dig it if we're here."
Down in the street, she offered to ride me home, but I refused. I didn't like the way she drove.
"Listen, man," she said, "I really like the way you fuck. I want to make it again. How about tomorrow?" And she shook her long black hair and lightly put a hand on my hip.
I told her O.K. although I don't know why. It had been a good ball, I agreed. But something about her scared me. That motorcycle ride, for one. I didn't want to get involved with a potential suicide, especially one who pulled you up on back for company. But I did agree, told her I would meet her on Seventh Avenue the next evening. Then I walked across town.
I went along Fourth Street toward Broadway, past moody warehouse buildings with corrugated garage doorways. Automobiles loomed from the dim streets, their headlights trapped in cobblestone. The embering eye of a cigarette burned from a doorway where two bums passed it between them, huddled like bookends against each other, an empty forty-nine cent bottle of wine cradled in one ass's arms. Crossing Broadway and Eighth, a trio of automobiles with Jersey license plates raced a red light, their passengers leaning out windows, yelling high school taunts at the derelicts, queers, and hippies.
On Fourteenth Street, in front of the Nedick's stand, a six foot five inch Marine picked up a wooden plank from a construction site and smashed in the back window of a Volvo. When I stopped to see what the noise was he threatened me: "You got something to say, mother-fucker?" and the plank dipped ominously. I didn't care if he smashed all the car windows in New York-combustion engine fucks up the air, the less cars in operation the better. I turned away from the Marine to continue my walk. "Chicken," he screamed at me, and I heard another car window implode. A police car backed up the street and two nervous cops got out, turned the Marine against a wall, and searched him. A dozen Saturday night rejects spilled out from their habitual bar stools to watch the bust. Two middle-aged fags in frayed shortie dungarees sashayed past the crowd and giggled. I continued walking home.
I found Smith in the hallway. His nose was broken, one eye was swollen shut, his lips were caked with blood. I couldn't find his key so I took him upstairs. Lotus and I cleaned his face, packed his nose with ice, then put him to bed. He told me he didn't know who they were or why. "Two Puerto Rican kids, about twenty-one, twenty-two years old. I walked into the hall and, bam bam bam. They didn't say a word."
CHAPTER SEVEN
If Smith did know who beat him up he kept it to himself. He woke the next day with a headache, eyes bloodshot and discolored, and his nose puffy as a poached egg. But he was in fairly good spirits. It was an overcast flat drizzly afternoon and we sat next to the window watching rain haze filter through the branches of the tree. Old ladies under their umbrellas minced home from the supermarkets weighted with shopping bags. Two sullen cops huddled under a laundromat awning, eyed the slick streets with dull contempt. The cops got Smith and me to talking about how illegal our activities were and I asked him what would happen if his parents found out that he used drugs.
"They know now," Smith answered. "That's what the big hassle was all about last time. The detectives gave my father a full report. When I went with him to the airport that time he was ranting and raving about his 'position' and what would happen if it ever leaked to the public that he, a noted, my god, an international newscaster had a son who used narcotics. Christ, all the kids I grew up with out there use drugs. And most of those kids have parents just as noted as my father-though, it's true, none are as prominently exhibited."
"Why don't you hip him to the truth about drugs," I suggested. "Tell him that it hasn't done you any harm. Someone's got to hip those people to it. Tell them the truth. A cat like your father, way at the top, maybe he could get the word out, tell it straight, make it easier for us."
Smith shook his head and laughed. "I did, man. But he really flipped out. He has a scrapbook full of articles putting down grass. He has all kinds of police and F.B.I, reports that say the country is going to fall apart if drug use isn't curbed. He's so sure it's wrong that he threatened to turn me in to the police unless I cooled it. But he wouldn't. That would make too much of a noise for him. I even tried to turn him on once. Offered to let him see first hand. No good. No good."
I went to meet Mary in the evening but she and her motorcycle never showed. I was happy about that and decided to go over to Max's Kansas City for some information. I found two people I knew sitting at the bar, M.G. Stephens and Donald Phelps. Phelps, looking like a soggy Humphrey Pennyworth in raincoat and rubbers, had a paper bag full of advance copies of his book of essays. I tried to wheedle a free copy from him, but he was too drunk to respond to my subtle hints, and I was feeling too good to pester him. Stephens was brooding. I ordered a bottle of beer and asked what was bothering him.
"My publishers, they're really fucking me up," he said resentfully. "They won't give me any more money until I rewrite the book. I guess I'll have to keep working at the bookstore."
"What happened to your advance?" I asked.
"I spent it all the first week getting drunk. Now I have a tab at St. Adrians that I can't pay. If I get a hundred dollars I'm getting out of the city. I can't write here. It's too hot. And I can't open my window because the Con Edison plant on Fourteenth Street is dumping all that shit into the air. If I leave the window open for ten minutes everything gets black. Only a hundred, and I can go upstate and finish my book there."
"Why don't you tell your agent that some junkie stole your typewriter and you need money for another one?" I suggested.
"Yeah, I could do that I guess," he mused, stroking his seedy beard. But we both knew no agent was going to fall for something as simpleminded as that.
We drank for an hour and a half, munching the sickening fried chicken wings Max's provides to assuage their guilt for all the money they make. I turned and saw a familiar face-a girl with shaggy wild brown hair. She was sitting across the room from us in a booth. "Hey, Stephens, who's that girl?" I shook his arm.
"Janis Joplin."
"No shit?" I said.
"Yeah, that's her." Stephens was sure. "I'm going to give her a present."
"What for."
"Because I like her."
The only thing I had detachable was a tiny bell on a key ring. It had a nice tone, and I was sure a singer would dig it. I fumbled open the ring and removed the keys then lumbered toward her and tucked it in her hand, mumbling something dumb about how I thought she was a good singer and feeling foolish for the gesture. I didn't wait for her to answer, quickly went back to the bar and grabbed Stephens. The two of us stumbled toward the door.
"Hey you. Hey you!" Somebody grabbed my arm. "What's this? I mean like what's this for?" She held out the bell.
I was too drunk to be coherent, told her it was to keep away newspaper reporters. I wanted to get outside. In the street, Stephens berated me.
"She wanted to fuck you. Why didn't you go with her? She dug you, you dope. Man, wait till I tell everyone you chickened out. You could have fucked her."
I told him I gave her the bell as a present, not as a come-on. It was a simple present. But he wouldn't let go, kept haranguing me all the way down Fourth Avenue. The streets were still wet from the afternoon rains, shiny as mercury, reflecting inverted images of apartment buildings. We turned up Tenth Street then ambled along Fifth Avenue where doormen scurried like uniformed penguins from canopied buildings, hailing cabs for overdressed matrons with veiled summer hats and plastic see-through raincoats.
The sidewalks, deserted during the rains, had begun to fill with people. There was a cordial sense of relaxation. Pedestrians didn't rush-they sauntered. Automobiles moved leisurely down the avenue. Window shoppers browsed.
Near the corner of Ninth Street, a young woman came out of an exclusive high-rent apartment building. She was tall and beautiful as a Vogue model. She looked up and down the street, and when she spotted me and Stephens, her face brightened. She had a soft, pouting mouth, shallow cheeks, large and widely spaced eyes, and a thin, straight nose.
Stephens, who prided himself on his knowledge of the rich, sort of a modern-day F. Scott Fitzgerald, said, "There's a chick who comes from a wealthy family, look at her outfit, Paraphernalia."
"Bonwit Teller," was my guess.
She had a white dress with red polka dots, a Y-shaped bodice with a fringe of lace outlining it. Her shoes were soft leather. She wore matching grape-like clusters of pearl rings and earrings. And in each hand like a crap shooter ready to cover all bets, she clutched a fistful of twenty dollar bills. I could see her appraise us; a long, thorough, vacumn-cleaner once over. When we came alongside her she spoke to us.
"I need your help. Would you be kind enough to follow me?"
I wasn't sure what she had in mind, but I was hoping. Stephens' face split into a grin. She didn't wait for us to answer, pivoted on her heel and reentered the building. What the hell, our sly smiles said to one another, and we followed her in the elevator to the twenty-first floor.
She preceded us into a spacious apartment where a very old man was sitting wrapped in a canvas blanket. Standing alongside him, obscured by a wash of daylight from two enormous bay windows, another woman waited.
The woman we had followed dipped her head toward the old man. "This is Mr. Hyrieus. He doesn't speak English. He's a Greek, and very old: seventy-seven years. He was a peasant farmer, a keeper of bees. I found him last time I visited his country, and promised to help him fulfill a dream he has had. Mr. Hyrieus would like to have a child before he dies..."
Stephens and I quizzically looked at each other, then back to the woman. Her expression was somber.
"I assure you this is serious," she said. "Mr. Hyrieus wants a child; a not extraordinary request for a man, and we are assisting him."
Stephens started a giggle that metamorphosed into a guffaw. "Maybe he can adopt one, baby, but at his age, he sure ain't gonna make one."
"Nonsense," the woman answered. "Men can have intercourse well into their eighties and nineties. A man Mr. Hyrieus' age can regularly perform once a week, easily. I've had several doctors examine him and they assure me he can father a child."
"Why did he wait so long?" I wanted to know.
"When Mr. Hyrieus was a boy, his village was suffering a crop failure. They are very superstitious and, to save the village from starvation, he took an oath not to procreate, to cast his seed only to the ground-a gesture to placate the earth and the local gods. The earth replenished soon after."
"Well," I wondered, "isn't he afraid the gods will mess up his friends back home if he breaks the oath now?"
The woman smiled and shook her head. "No, that's been taken care of. We spoke to the local priests, donated a new church steeple. And the priests then propitiated the gods ... you understand, don't you?"
The woman offered us money if we would help. Stephens scratched his beard. I shrugged my shoulders. We were willing in a manner of speaking, but still didn't know what she wanted us to do.
The woman told us her name was Anita, and that the other woman, the one standing by the chair, was to be the mother.
"Her name is Rhea. She's the most fertile woman I could find."
At the mention of her name Rhea stepped forward. She was undressed, a solid busty girl, lush and sensuous, earthy. Long rivers of hair flowed from her head, coiled down her breasts. Her skin was tan and moist. Her eyes were aquamarine.
I choked up with love at the sight of her. She's too beautiful for an old man, I thought. Anita, reading the look on my face, gently reprimanded me.
"An old man deserves beauty as much as a young man. She is to be the wife of Mr. Hyrieus. ... Neither one of you is to touch her. ... Is that agreed?"
"O.K. honey, I agree. Hands off Rhea," Stephens answered. "But where do we come in? If this old man can make it on his own, what do you want us to do?"
"Mr. Hyrieus is 'capable' of having intercourse, but he has to be helped somewhat. All those years of celibacy. ... He was forced to gratify his sexual needs other ways...."
Stephens flinched and, like a cop halting traffic, hoisted an arresting hand. "Forget it! We're no faggots!"
A tacit smile formed on Anita's face. "Yes, I realize that. I stopped you because you were both obviously masculine and virile. Mr. Hyrieus is not a homosexual. He is a voyeur ... nothing more. And because he had sacrificed his pleasures for the welfare of his village, the villagers in return permitted him this small satisfaction-windows were left open, beds were arranged so that he could see his neighbors indulge in their natural pleasures. You see, certain so-called "backward" peoples are really very civilized. Unfortunately, this manner of satisfying his needs became indelible, and in order to become aroused, he must receive a visual stimulation."
"And since we can't make it with Rhea..."
Anita nodded, a gesture signifying the end of discussion. Gracefully, like a swan roosting, she settled herself to her knees, then shimmied her dress over her head, bending her long neck forward gracefully, her hair separating around it, falling over her breasts into two tresses, like glossy wings. She rose naked from the chaos of her clothing, her body, except for two lustrous mahogany-colored coronas on her breasts and the dark downy nap of her pubis, immaculately white. She stood on the balls of her feet, melancholy as a harp, quiet as a cloud.
My body flushed with desire. Anita turned to us and beckoned. I was undressed first. My erection preceded me, throbbing like the electrode of a Geiger counter with pure sex impulses. She bent to me, caressed my genitals with her hair. When she straightened we embraced and I felt the shock of her flesh. I traced her body with my hands, the framework of her bones beneath her skin as delicate and pliable as a bird's.
Stephens had undressed and stood behind Anita.
She leaned her body backward against him, pressing his erection flat against his belly, reaching behind to grab his swollen flesh between her soft palms. He encircled her waist with his arms, hugged her and lifted her off the ground. Anita then separated her legs, and I stepped between them.
With my erection situated at the portal of her vagina, like a man entering a dark movie theatre, I tentatively edged forward, then, gaining confidence, boldly strode into her depths. Her internal fluids swirled and soaked my cock. I clutched enthusiastically at her breasts.
Mr. Hyrieus had been observing with zealous eyes. His body was old and withered. His arms were like dried branches. His fingers like stiff twigs. His breath like the rustle of fallen leaves. But in the core of his memory, a long unheard song whispered its lyrics-a song of greenness and growth. He was still alive-deep at the center of his being juices still circulated, sap still flowed.
While I was pushing my cock between Anita's lubricated walls, and she fondled and squeezed Stephens' penis, the old man was sensing the first quickenings within his own organ. He watched us intently. Saw hips vigorously dart and thrust. Heard love moans.
After I withdrew from Anita's body, Stephens lowered her to the floor and took his place between her legs. He went into her slowly, letting his penis explore her shape and size. Anita and Stephens moaned and hissed and groaned. With each lusty murmur to reach him, nerve messages scurried from Mr. Hyrieus' body to the base of his penis, constricting veins there, allowing the arteries to bring blood into his ancient appendage. His spongy tissue became engorged with blood, and his sex, like a tree growing a new branch, sprouted. When his penis had grown turgid, the old man proudly dropped his covering and exhibited his erection. Anita quickly separated herself from Stephens and went to the old man. She kissed him on the cheek affectionately. Then she motioned to Rhea.
There was a bull-hide mat on the floor alongside Mr. Hyrieus' chair and Rhea lay on it. The old man kneeled down beside her. Rhea spread her legs, and he took his wood-hard sex in hand and placed it between the lips of her vagina-and slowly sank into her. There he stayed, enjoying for the first time in his life the lush geography of a woman's body.
Then, with a tentative, almost bashful movement, the old man began to pull his penis back. When it was all but extracted, he slid it forward, repeating this action three times. But Anita put a hand on his back and spoke to Rhea. She didn't want Mr. Hyrieus to exhaust himself this first time: Rhea was to do the work.
I watched with wonder. Stephens watched with amazement. Anita watched with patient satisfaction. Rhea was undulating her hips, the walls of her vagina gently but persistently stimulating the atrophied nerves of Hyrieus' glans. Anita bent down beside them, maternally stroking Rhea's forehead, lovingly offering the old man encouragement.
As I watched Rhea and Mr. Hyrieus make love, affection for them swamped my body. But especially for the old man. An ocean of time, distance, and language separated our births, but we were both men. Mr. Hyrieus was seventy-seven and still could fuck. There was something noble about that, about a man seventy-seven having an erection, continuing to be a part of the natural cycle.
I had an irresistible urge to touch him. I went to him and placed my hand on his shoulder. Warmth emanated from the old man's skin, the heat of life, and it flowed through my fingers into the pith of my soul.
Mr. Hyrieus looked up at me and smiled. His face was lined and wrinkled but his eyes were clear. His skin was rough as bark, but his muscles were resilient.
I looked and saw that my own penis was perpendicular, erect, ready. I dropped between Anita's legs and separated her thighs. She hesitated for a moment, then threw herself back and welcomed me into her body.
Side by side, we two men coupled with our women. After a time, the universal tides flowed us toward orgasm. I heard the old man's breath quicken, and I hurried to catch up. We both came at the same time, waves of the same ocean splashing on different shores.
CHAPTER EIGHT
June came and sat on the city like a fat old lady, smothering the air and flattening my energy. Lotus disappeared for two weeks, leaving a note saying she and some friends had gone to "breathe fresh country air." Dude Herold called one day to tell me there was a party for the quartet in a West Village restaurant: they had signed a recording contract.
Smith, and Myrtle-who was home for a change-said they would like to go, and we called up everyone we knew who could use a free meal. The Bonzos were there at the restaurant, and Eddie, in a flamboyant gesture of forgiveness, gave Smith a big hug and a theatrical show of friendly teeth. Dino was prancing from group to group, promoting a new play of his that was due to open in a week.
I saw Duke within a triangle of blonde Sarah Lawrence girls, one of whom was taking notes for a column she wrote for the Village Voice. Dude waved at me to come and keep him company but I wanted to say hello to Linus Foxx first.
Linus was sitting at a corner table with Spike Alt-man, (his new business manager); Calvin Cannon, a skinny energetic drummer from New Orleans; and a jazz critic from the New York Times.
"How you doin'? " Calvin Cannon called, making room for me at the table.
"How you doin', Jyros? All right? O.K.? " Linus asked.
I told them I was fine and took the drink that was handed to me. The jazz critic was wavering drunkenly in his chair, familiarly patting Linus on the thigh, trying to drape his arm over Linus' shoulder. Linus kept dodging. Spike Altman had a novocained dreamy smile for the world which meant he was probably the drunkest one at the table.
"You'd have a tighter group with a better pianist," the man from the Times was saying-he was talking about Dude. "Dude's O.K. with his left hand, but his right hand figures don't make it for me."
Linus gave this bit of evaluation a limp smile. When Linus was interested in a conversation his eyes skipped on top of each sentence like a flat stone across water. Now, listening to the critic, his eyes were lazy, like moored rowboats, restrained.
"You really should think about replacing him. Music is a cut-throat business. Just like any other business. You have to have the personnel. There are fifty other piano players around who could cut him, waste him on their worst day."
"No, man. You miss what's happening with our music," Linus said with forced patience. "Dude's left hand has a lot of imagination, but his right hand is what really does it for us. His right hand is moody, sensitive..."
The critic wagged his head unbelievingly and said Dude hadn't worked his way out of the 1940's.
"He's still playing boogie woogie, that same repeated percussion, a couple of beats or a bar ... He sounds like a train, an old steam engine. That's not going to get you anywhere."
Linus laughed and shook his head and refused to discuss it any further. Calvin Cannon went to find another bottle of whiskey, stumbling into a waiter, knocking a platter of sliced ham and cheese to the floor. A jukebox was thumping four-year-old rock and roll, normal fare for the restaurant's clientele.
"Hello, baby," I heard a throaty voice at my ear, "come and dance with me." It was Mary Night looking tall and carnal in a see-through black lace dress. She smiled and took my hand. "I'm glad to see you; I was afraid you wouldn't come," she said as though we had had a date for this very afternoon. Her glossy black hair was scented and tied with a loose rawhide thong.
There were a number of couples dancing in the center of the room. Smoke curled lazily toward the ceiling. Laughter percolated from the tables. I led her to a dim corner and slipped my hands under her dress. She opened her mouth for my tongue and we kissed. There were two tables next to us, one on top of the other, that all but obscured us from the rest of the room. Using my body as a shield, I held her in the corner and worked her panties down to her knees, shoving my tongue down her throat. When she responded with a sucking moan, I pushed my middle finger into her cunt. She sucked in her breath, squeezed her thighs against my trapped finger, then shimmied her panties from her knees to the floor. Quickly, so no one noticed, she bent and picked the panties up and stuffed them into my pocket. Then she unzipped my pants and took out my cock.
In order to penetrate her cunt, I had to pick her off the ground with a hug-high enough to allow my cock to fit under the spread of her legs-and ease her down onto me. Mary moved her hips side to side. Soon we were breathing heavily in each other's faces, while the sounds of the party, like a musical boat, sailed away from our attention and the quivering feel of her vagina made me gasp with pleasure.
Mary began to groan and I had to smother her mouth with mine to stifle the sound. When the orgasm took her she began to whip her hips and almost sucked the tongue from my throat. I came right behind her. We held each other until my penis shrank enough to stuff back into my pants.
"What about your underwear?" I asked.
"Keep it. It's exciting this way-to know I'm open like this, to know you know."
I got drunk. There was unlimited whisky. Mary and I sat at a table. Every once in a while I would reach under her skirt and slip a finger into her. I was finding it difficult to see, everything was blurry. But I could hear well enough.
A little later I heard Linus' voice over a loudspeaker. The Quartet was going to play a couple of tunes. They did two numbers, then Linus introduced the members of the group.
"I'd like to introduce everybody so you know whom to blame," Linus began jokingly. "Now, I'm Linus Foxx..." a burst of applause, repeated with each introduction. "And over there on the drums is Cousin Calvin Cannon from down in New Orleans. ... And on guitar, that's Whitman Mayo...
And on piano, that's Dude Herold, old number 77, our locomotive, the steam engine who pulls our train. ... Now you might say that I'm the conductor of this train, callin' out the destinations, gettin' the passengers all on board. ... And Whitman, he's the fireman, shovelin' rich coal black fuel into the boiler. ... And Cousin Cannon, he's the engineer; those drums are his throttle, speedin' us up or slowing us down. ... But Dude, he's the locomotive, the steam engine; he keeps us movin' down the line. ... And without the train ... well, we'd all be walkin'...."
They picked up momentum after that. Listened to each other and opened up. Dude played better than ever. After the set was completed, Linus and Dude sat at the table with the critic. Eddie Bonzo came over bubbling with enthusiasm, patting everybody on the back, telling them how great they were. The critic nodded agreement, but soon excused himself and left.
More whiskey bottles were emptied and time got as viscous as jello. I heard a commotion near me. Myrtle was on a table, naked. Two waiters were yelling at Smith, and another man-probably the manager--was shouting at Calvin Cannon, the drummer, threatening to call the police. Cannon in turn was threatening to put a hex on the restaurant if the manager didn't get civil. We wrapped a table cloth over Myrtle and somehow managed to get her into a taxi. Myrtle and I were in the front seat with the driver, a flappy-eared wide-assed man who threw a fit when we all piled into his cab-Smith, Mary Night, and Dude were in the back seat.
"I'm not driving any half-naked broad around the city," the driver balked. "I'm not going to lose my license. Get her out of here."
I looked at the driver's name plate: Louie Levitt.
"Listen Louie, she's not undressed. She's wearing her native tribal costume-she's an American Indian."
Smith passed me a five dollar bill and I slipped it into Louie's shirt pocket. "We're only going over to Twentieth Street and Seventh Avenue."
The taxi tore down Eight Street and turned up University. Myrtle asked me to open the window for some air, and when I rolled it down, she pulled the table cloth from her body, dumping it out the window. The taxi driver's eyes swiveled like windshield wipers from Myrtle's strawberry nipples-to the road-back to her nipples. His taxi swerved and almost hit a fire hydrant.
"Watch the fucking hell where you're going," I yelled. "Didn't you ever see a redhead before?"
"Dude broke into a loud guffaw and slapped his meaty hand against the back of the driver's seat. We caught a traffic light trying to make a left turn on Fifteenth Street. A glossy maroon hard-top convertible pulled up alongside. There were four bulky adolescents, passing beer cans from the front seat to the rear: Vitalis-slick pompadours, V-neck sweaters, shirts buttoned at the throat. The driver aimlessly turned his head, saw Myrtle, and gave an astonished shout.
"Jesus! ... Angelo, Tony, look at the bitch. ... She ain't got no clothes on!"
The heads of the other three passengers jerked simultaneously, like clothespins on a line.
"Look-a-that," the one named Angelo pointed.
"Y'can see her pussy!" There was a jumble of movement as they all tried to lean out the driver's window for a better view. "Pussy-pussy-pussy," they were yelling, banging on Levitt's taxi, trying to reach through the window to get at Myrtle.
The taxi driver didn't wait, he jumped the light, made a turn up a one-way street. Luckily, no cars were coming. Finally, we made it home, but when Myrtle stepped out of the cab, she cut her toe on a chunk of broken Coke bottle that some semi-revolutionary juvenile delinquent had tossed in imitation of a Molotov cocktail, and the Department of Sanitation, with its usual lack of fastidiousness, had failed to sweep up. Myrtle, numb, didn't feel it. Smith carried her piggy-back into their apartment. Dude and Mary Night came upstairs with me. Dude fell asleep in the bathtub.
It rained all night and half the morning. Dude woke bent as a horseshoe. There wasn't any food in the house, and he treated us to breakfast. Then Mary split, all mysterious about her "home", a place she wanted to show me that night. Dude had something on his mind, something about Mary, and he asked me to walk with him.
"That Mary, she's a witch, a fucking witch," he told me.
"What are you talking about?"
"You're my man, Jyros. I wouldn't lie to you. She's a fuckin' witch. If you let her, she'll eat your ass down to the bone. I saw her at Eddie Bonzo's last year, and she left this portfolio, forgot it, see. She's some kind of sculptress-weird shit-pictures of them in the portfolio. So, her telephone was there too and I called her, told her I had the pictures.
That was in the winter. I won't forget that, bet your ass."
Dude had invited Mary to claim her portfolio at his apartment. Then he went down to the liquor store to buy a bottle of whiskey, to fortify himself against the cold-the heat in his apartment was sporadic. She knocked at his door soon after he came back, thanked him for returning the portfolio. He made them some tea, spiked it with whiskey. After a while he was feeling real good. They got to talking about fucking and Mary told him she had something that made orgasms extra-intense.
"I made it myself," she said proudly. "Do you want to try some? It's my own special mixture of Mexican Fly. I use beetles and bees and crushed sea-shells."
"I thought she was kidding," Dude continued his story. "But she kept at me, convinced me it would be a groove."
While she spoke, she unbraided her hair, opened the top three buttons of her blouse. Finally, Dude agreed to try it and she gave him a brown tablet to swallow. Then she undressed. Dude had a hard-on just watching her, and he unzipped his pants, danced toward her. Mary was sitting on the edge of the bed, her spread legs beckoning him. Dude didn't need an invitation; he found her vagina and lunged into it swiftly. They began to move.
"I was jamming her like a bitch, slamming into that big old juicy cunt. She was sort of stretching, lazy and slow, just digging it."
Dude came quickly but didn't exit and soon regained his erection. His penis was sensitive, nerves generating all kinds of sensations, and he came real fast a second time.
"I flopped the bitch over on her belly, propping up that can, and I tried to stick it in her ass."
But he couldn't penetrate her there-she tried to help him by lubricating the orifice with mucus and sperm. The pill was really working on him, goading him, so he settled for the vagina, slipped in from behind, feeling the spongy clefts of her ass grinding against his groin. He had another fast orgasm. But his cock didn't relax, remained stiff and swollen. He worked harder to come the next time, and while the sensations were thrilling and intense, his ejaculation was feeble.
They fucked two more times, and Dude wanted to stop.
"Man, let me tell you, it was hard on me. My mouth was dry. My cock itched. My eyelids itched. But the bitch wouldn't let loose."
There had been other times in Dude's life when he had made it for longer-times when his knees and elbows were raw from bed friction. But those times had been satisfying, and his body had relaxed afterward. This was different. Uncomfortable. Disagreeable. Mary's breasts, hips, and thighs weren't bringing him rest or comfort.
"Hey, baby, this is getting to be a drag," Dude told her. "You got something to bring me down?"
"What's wrong?" Mary chided him. "Little piggy have too much to handle? Well momma don't have anything to bring piggy down but her own body."
Dude rolled on his back and looked at the ceiling. He had a terrible urge to rub his cock, but that would only have made it worse, like rubbing a bee sting or a rash.
"I looked over at the bitch, and she was stroking her body, trying to provoke me, opening her knees and sticking her fingers up her snatch. And watching me with these cold eyes. What the fuck could I do? The itch was making me crazy."
Then Dude had an idea. Quickly, he scrambled from the bed and found the whiskey. He guzzled nearly the whole bottle. It worked, numbed him, salved the itch.
"My nigger instinct saved me, man. My nigger instinct bought me the bottle, and made me think of it. But Jyros, you be careful of that bitch. She's dangerous. Bitches like that been around for a thousand years. Witches and bitches been around a thousand years."
I knew he was right; Mary Night scared me. Something about her that came too close to something I didn't like in myself. But I also believed that there were certain woman you had to ball to really know what women were about.
"Women are islands," I told Dude. "Some ports are more dangerous than others. The more dangerous, the more you can learn."
He laughed and shook his head and told me again: "Watch your ass." Overhead the sky was elephant gray, moody. Slowly, we continued to walk down Seventh Avenue. The rain had ceased, and a gang of kids was sailing boats in the rain puddles. Ingeniously they had stuffed the sewers on both sides of the street with newspapers wrapped in plastic bags, and that had caused the rain water to back up to curb level.
The kids had improvised fantastic sailing boats from junk they found on the street. One kid, not more than eight years old, had built a raft from the slats of a wooden fruit box. It had a broken car antenna for a mast, and a torn handkerchief for a sail. A ten year old, with a more sophisticated sense of design, had wrapped a shoe box with aluminum foil and shaped a prow and rudder from it. He had a curtain rod mast and used his T-shirt for a sail.
"Out of sight, out of sight," Dude kept repeating, jumping along the curb, watching the boats drift with the breeze. The kids loomed from the puddles like mysterious ancient sea gods. I had an urge to kick off my shoes, roll up my pants, and wade in with them. Dude was grinning.
"People always inventing," he said. "Me too. When I was a kid I made me a guitar from a cigar box and the leg of an old chair. I used swamp reeds for a bridge and a piece of sheep gut for strings."
I was staring into the stream of trapped rain water. Because of the black macadam underneath, the water was dark and I couldn't see bottom. It gave the false appearance of being deep-deep enough to dive into.
An old derelict stumbled off the opposite curb and slushed through the dark water toward us. He had a pasty skin and albino-white hair. His clothes hung in tatters from him, and his right hand was clenched, held forward from his body in a fist, as if he were carrying on this gloomy afternoon an invisible lantern. He stood below us in the swirling water, shoved his clenched fist toward us, and mumbled something.
"What did you say?" Dude asked him.
Squinting, and with obvious effort, the old man managed to make himself understood. "Count it for me, will ya. Can't do it. Count it and tell me how much I got," and he loosened his fingers to reveal a handful of coins. I took the money, added it up, gave him the total: sixty-seven cents.
"Thanks, pal." He retrieved his money. "I couldn't do it. I swear I tried but couldn't do it." Then he turned and moved sluggishly back through the water, heading for a liquor store in the center of the street.
CHAPTER NINE
I went over to Mary Night's place that evening. She lived in an abandoned firehouse over on West Street, near the Morton Street pier. She had purchased the building from the City of New York at an auction, and then had it converted for her use. She used the bottom floor of the firehouse, where the engines used to wait, for an exhibition hall, the second floor as her working studio, and the top floor for living quarters.
The firehouse was separated from other buildings on the street by two vacant lots. When she met me at the door she was wearing a red knit mini-skirt and red high-heel shoes. I saw Mary's sculptures, and felt my groin squirm. They hung suspended on wires from the high ceiling: massive twenty-foot plaster of paris forms that swayed ponderously, turning with changes in air current. At first I thought her sculptures were abstracted forms, but a second look showed them to be gigantic male genitals--genitals in different states of erection or repose--genitals that had suffered violent mutilation: ganglia, twisted arteries, severed veins.
She led me upstairs to her bedroom. It was painted a waxy-yellow. Red and black fishing nets were draped from the ceiling, causing shadows like spider webs to fall over the floor, over the tables and chairs. Languorously she stretched back on the bed, kicked loose her shoes, propped a throw pillow under her hips, and drew up her skirt. She wore no underclothing and I had the luxury of an uninhibited view of her pubis. Then, with the most provocative gesture I have ever witnessed, she reached her hands under the skirt and separated the lips of her vagina with glossy, nail-polished fingers.
"I've got something that will give you a dynamite orgasm," she said. "Want to try it?"
"Sure," I answered, remembering what happened to Dude. She reached for a purse on a table alongside her bed and snapped it open, withdrawing a honey-colored tablet. I pretended to swallow it, a simple deception, then dropped it in my pocket.
"The maximum number of times I ever came with the same man was twelve," Mary said. "Twelve times. I want you to make me come thirteen times."
Now I didn't intend to give her thirteen orgasms-I didn't think it was possible. And looking at her smug face, I could see she didn't expect me to give her any. The medicine was intended to reduce me to a sediment of need. She was going to let me gush my fluids all over the place, but hold off her own orgasm, perverting the union, making an incontinent fool of me.
When we were both undressed, I went to her and put my hand on her leg-she was hot, hotter than any flesh I have ever felt, and I wondered whether she was sick, had a fever? I put my fingers to her vagina, spreading the lips like a curtain, revealing her inner flesh. Her labia were convoluted, pitted, like the inside of a bee hive. Using my fingers like clamps, I further spread the lips until the vaginal orifice was visible. While I watched it, the orifice spread open, by itself, dilated like an eye to reveal a cauldron of fluids, bubbling, simmering.
I gulped. Would that fluid dissolve my flesh? Was it a solvent? But I swallowed my fear and plunged into her feverish body, heard a slurp as the lips sucked in my flesh, felt the voluptuous sensuality of that heat radiate through every sensory receptor in my nervous system. Carefully, I began to move within her.
She watched me with haughty disdain, waiting for the medicine to take effect. I continued a steady, unaffected movement of my hips. When she finally realized her potion wasn't working, she became flustered, and her detachment evaporated. Angrily, she wiggled away and disengaged my cock.
"No more, that's all," she buzzed like an irate hornet.
I lunged at her, grabbed her hair, held tight and shoved back inside her cunt. Involuntarily, her vaginal muscles contracted and her legs wrapped themselves around my hips. But her mind stuttered like an IBM machine with a mutilated card, and she tried to pull away again, spilling her words nervously.
"Stop. I've changed my mind. Stop."
But I wouldn't stop. I hate to be manipulated. And that's what Mary Night had been up to since I first met her-manipulating me, putting me through changes. I pumped my hips. She tried to buck me off, like a bronco, like a wild nightmare-but I was low in the saddle, my balance better than hers. I continued to pump. She fought me all the way, tried to scratch my face, bite my arm, knee me. But her body began to react to the fucking. She fought up to the moment before orgasm, then took it, galloped with it, her body trembling from head to toe. When she was coming, there was on her face the dual expressions of hate and pleasure-as though she couldn't separate those emotions, an unsatisfying alloy, but durable, everlasting.
After the first orgasm, she zealously cooperated. Whereas I had fucked her like a ram this first orgasm-pugnaciously, expediently, obdurately-for the second orgasm I was a bull-slow, ponderous, weighty.
For the third orgasm, Mary lay on the floor in front of a mirror so she could see my penis as it slipped in and out of her body-my mirror image and I came at the same time.
The fourth orgasm took place in the bathtub, without water, and I scurried over her body-pinched her nipples like a wanton crab.
I wrapped myself in a fuck blanket for the fifth orgasm-a rough blanket that reminded me of the lion skin in Smith's father's den. I stalked the room on all fours, and roared in her ear as we came.
The sixth time she held her thighs together and pretended to be a virgin. Patiently, I worked my tool between her pressed legs and into her tightened vagina.
I thought the seventh orgasm was best. I sat in a rocking chair and Mary climbed onto my erection. We had to be careful not to tip the chair over, keep it in balance like a scale. All my faculties came together in perfect equipoise for this orgasm-vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell, body movement, and mental awareness-so that we came at the same time, with the same intensity.
Mary produced a hatpin before we started on the eighth orgasm and told me to sting her. Though she wanted me to break the skin, I would only scratch her with it, and she cursed at me until the orgasm extinguished her voice.
For her ninth orgasm Mary arched half her body off the bed-hips and legs anchored on the mattress by my body, head and spine bent toward the floor and curved tight as a drawn bow, breasts jutting at the ceiling like two fleshy arrows.
For the tenth orgasm she pulled one of the fishing nets from the ceiling and wrapped it around herself so that she was entirely covered from head to foot. I laid myself across her, our bodies in the shape of a plus sign, and I had to fuck her through the net. When I entered she bleated like a goat and butted her head back against the mattress.
I arranged four sturdy chairs in a square for the eleventh orgasm, and we each stood on two, legs spread apart, facing each other. We wrapped our arms like wrestlers about each other's shoulders, and were careful not to let the chairs slip apart. The orgasm was an intense one for Mary and, with her legs spread apart the way they were, all the fluids inside her-hers, and what I had deposited-came spilling out, puddling on the floor.
Mary filled the tub for the twelfth orgasm. She wanted to fuck submerged. When the tub was three-quarters full, she lowered herself in and I climbed on top. But I couldn't manage to penetrate until she lowered the water level below the mid-line of her pelvis. Even then I had to work hard. Though we were in water, she was dry inside. Finally, I managed to enter. When she came and I withdrew there was blood on my penis.
I wanted to stop.
"No!" Mary shouted. Her face had become pale, drained of color. Her lips were pinched, bloodless. "Once more. So close. Only once more. Please." And she threw herself down, clasped my knees, began to lick at my legs, using her tongue to make me hard again.
I entered her and she groaned ... I felt a warm stickiness between my legs and knew it was her blood. I attempted to abandon her body, tried to pull away, but her legs were locked around my waist.
"One more baby, love, hero. One more and we do it, one more."
But I didn't want to continue. I broke free of her grip. Mary fixed me with a hideous eye, pointed her finger at me.
"If you don't make me come again, if you don't break the spell of twelve, I'll put a curse on you that will shrivel your life like a dead leaf ... a curse to follow you wherever you go like a swarm of locusts."
I thought she was insane. Where did she think she was? This was New York City, not some primeval forest. Nevertheless my skin prickled with her words and I was scared. Still, I refused to fuck anymore-gave my head a negative twist.
"You've had enough," I said. "You're bleeding."
"It's my pain, what do you care? I enjoy this pain. It's releasing me, freeing me."
I thought a moment, then said, "Maybe you dig it, but it turns me off. Pain and blood turn me off. If I make it with you and there's pain, something sucks out of me. Something I don't want to lose."
Mary raised herself on her elbows and thoughtfully appraised me. "I'll make a bargain with you. If you give me another orgasm now, make me come a thirteenth time, I'll give you something very valuable, something that will last all your life-something magic-a talisman..." And before I could reply, she twisted to reach under the bed, withdrawing a tiny black-ivory box. It had two miniature silver hinges and a miniature clasp. It was no bigger than a pack of matches. There were words carved into it: a runic alphabet.
Automatically, I reached for it and Mary placed it on my palm. The box was heavier than it looked, heavy as a billiard ball. It was constructed of seven laminated layers of black ivory. And it was empty. I asked her what she kept in it.
"Secrets," she answered.
I stared into the box. My mind scurried like a cat on ice. I wanted it, but realized the danger in accepting it at Mary's terms. To earn it wasn't wrong, but to earn it with her pain ... I had to avoid that. I concentrated, let my thoughts seep into the box, and then I had an answer.
"If I make you come one more time," I questioned, "one more orgasm ... then I get this box, right?"
When Mary said yes I agreed to the deal. She sat back on the bed, settled her head down, and spread open her legs, waiting. But first I ripped a square from the bedsheet, soaked it in the sink, and wiped the blood, semen, and mucus from her vagina. Gently, I began to manipulate her clitoris with my index fingers, massaging it until it became taut. Then gently, moistly, I put my mouth to it, lapped it with my tongue.
I planned to give her the orgasm this way, without causing her any more pain. But Mary wasn't going to seal the covenant on those terms. She intended to make me earn the box with blood and pain-to culminate this night of sex with a gruesome thirteenth orgasm. Calling forth all her remaining strength, she made her body unresponsive. Then, she tried to coerce my sex alive with carnal flattery, entice me to consummate this final dance inside her body.
"Good baby," she crooned. "It feels so good. You fuck me better than any one ever did. I'll do anything you want me to. You're like a god. I'll do anything you want me to. Fuck me baby. Fuck me. Put it in me. Let me have it. If not in my cunt, then in my mouth. Let me hold you in my mouth. Let me suck you...."
But I wouldn't entrust my flesh in her mouth-I had seen those sculptures. I wondered then if they had been inspired by actual castrations-had she made men that crazy? I continued to lap methodically at her clitoris. A tremor rippled across her belly. Her nipples were hard, extended. Her buttocks were tense. A gasp worked its way up her chest and she tried to swallow it, but it escaped.
I persevered. Mary's hips began to gyrate. She tried to stop them, to break the rhythm by twisting away from my tongue. But it was too late. Her body had loosened its moorings, floated away from her mind's resolve. Slowly, like a landslide, she crumbled, dissolved under my tongue, came into her thirteenth orgasm, painlessly.
Mary was exhausted. She closed her eyes and fell soundly asleep. I dressed, collected my treasure, the carved ivory box-and went home.
CHAPTER TEN
When I returned to my apartment Lotus was back from her jaunt in the country. Smith was there too, looking glum as an old shoe.
"What's wrong?" I asked him.
"Myrtle's left me. She moved in with Eddie Bonzo."
You expect something to happen in your mind and it's still unreal until you see the pain. The fires had almost gone out of Smith's eyes. He was as limp as ash. We lit up some grass and morosely stared at the walls until Lotus brought us dinner. She had fresh corn, tomatoes, and cucumbers that she had picked herself. It was to have been a treat, a surprise. But we hardly tasted it.
The three of us smoked nearly half an ounce of grass but it didn't get us stoned.
"I have some acid," Lotus said. "One of the boys on the farm gave me some. It's tangerine-colored."
I didn't want to take a trip and I didn't think Smith should, not in the mood he was in. But Smith and Lotus both disagreed.
"Sadness is just as much a part of life as happiness," Lotus said. "Trips aren't only for happy merry-go-round times. You can get the sadness out of your head faster on acid. Get right to it. Deal with it. Then go on to something else."
Smith dropped his acid about three in the morning. He sat quietly on the couch for a long time, rocking back and forth like a religious Jew. Lotus and I let him alone, pretended to ignore him, but kept a watchful eye. Then I drifted off to sleep. He woke me an hour later, tears streaming down his face, but his voice was modulated, controlled.
"There's a lot of grief I can't handle," he told me.
"What do you want me to do?"
"Trip with me. Too lonely here alone. Need someone to come along."
I took the acid and waited for it to come on. It was my tenth or eleventh trip. I found that the more acid I took, the more my body could adapt itself. Whereas at first acid had immobilized me for the first few hours of a trip, I soon learned to walk, or run, even to ride a bicycle (although it was a lopsided spasmodic ride where the bicycle tires seemed to be football-shaped rather than round). My later trips were somehow not as adventurous, not so filled with discovery. Lotus claimed that the acid was different, not as pure as the stuff we originally used. She said she had heard that the Mafia was cutting it with amphetamine, trying to hook everyone on speed. But the trip I took with Smith was beautiful.
At first I was surrounded by the sound of a million hummingbirds. When I looked, I saw their transparent wings-the clearest cellophane; I could see through a thousand with only the slightest distortion. When the sun rose and the bright early morning light poured into the window, the transparent hummingbirds shimmered like sleek rainbow trout. I put my hand on Smith's shoulder and felt the sadness in him as real and physical as a jolt of electricity, and we sobbed together until the sunlight bathed all our shadows away.
Later. It was afternoon. Lotus made us tea and toast. We munched for a while but weren't really hungry. Smith started to carve a face in a bar of soap, and I tried to write a story on my electric typewriter. It was called "Words are Webs on the Potter's Wheel," but I never wrote more than four paragraphs because the typewriter jammed. You can get very paranoid on acid, and I was sure the CIA or the DAR had fucked with it. Neither Smith nor I wanted to come down, and Lotus divided another cap for us, dropping the last one herself.
We turned on the FM radio to WLIB. Later, there was a woodpecker rat-tat-tat at the door and I opened it. It was a young kid with a purple shirt. He had hair like electrocuted steel wool. I never saw him before in my life.
"My name's Kenny," he said. "I live across the street. I was walking outside and these energy arrows came out the door. Led me right here."
His eyes were wide and dilated. And he was on a trip too. Now things like that happened many times to me when I was on acid. Telepathic things that are easy to discount with statistical arguments. Fuck those arguments. I know what happened to me, especially that night.
Kenny walked into the room, smiled at Smith and Lotus, then sat down and was quiet for a while. We passed a joint around and listened to the radio. Then, some time later, Kenny got up and began to walk around the room, holding one hand in front of him, fingers open and wiggling. He swung his arm like a radar antenna along the walls, fingers oscillating, wiggling. He put an ear to the wall. His jaw was moving. Then, voices started to come out of his mouth, voices that didn't sound anything like his own.
"Lived here too long, Fred, and now we should take another place. After all you're making seventy dollars a week and we can afford a nicer apartment. And President Roosevelt said just yesterday on the radio that we don't have to worry about another depression..."
He was repeating old conversations, conversations that had been spoken years ago. Now it seems incredible. But on acid it all seemed very ordinary.
"Hey man, that's groovy," Lotus said to Kenny. "How do you do it?"
There was a bashful smile on Kenny's face. He didn't know how. He put his ear against another part of the wall and tried to discover how he was doing it. But all he could determine and explain was: "Conversations trapped between layers of paint. Words swarming, molecular bees. Ear is honey." Which made perfect sense to me then. On acid logic is a single fish in a vast ocean of other realities. I simply accepted his explanation. But Smith didn't.
"Let me try myself," he said, putting his ear against the wall and hearing nothing. But when Kenny placed his own ear against the wall again, he reached for Smith's hand. As soon as they touched, Smith started to giggle. "I can hear it, I can hear it," he said, and his voice turned high-pitched as he mimicked what he was hearing.
" ... God-a-mighty, Harry, that was good. You sure put it to a woman. Five years of marriage and my husband never comes near to making me feel that way ... God-a-mighty, Harry, I know we're sinning, but I need that..."
I still don't know how Kenny did it. He never repeated the talent again, and only vaguely remembered doing it that night. But Smith, Lotus, and I were all witnesses.
The next week Smith stayed in his apartment, getting his head together, coming to terms with himself. After that the two of us started to take daily walks around the city, down to Wall Street, uptown to Central Park. One afternoon we were in Washington Square watching the tourists watch us. We were sitting on a bench next to the children's playground. A trim young woman pushed a baby carriage up the path and sat down next to us. She was dressed in a cocoa-brown herringbone tweed skirt and matching jacket, a soft white cotton turtle neck sweater, and brown leather shoes. A typically well-dressed young Fifth Avenue mother. Her husband was probably a lawyer or a doctor. There was a large diamond wedding ring on her finger.
Smith poked his head into the carriage and told the woman how pretty her baby was. He chatted amiably with her for a while. I wasn't paying much attention. She was a pretty woman, but I didn't think she was a pick-up, so I watched the round provocative asses of young hippie chicks fuck past us, watched the flat girdled asses of the tourist ladies, watched the mean narrow glances of the cops.
"Come on," Smith nudged me. "Where? What?"
He leaned over and whispered in my ear, "She wants to fuck us, both of us, come on, don't waste time asking questions."
The woman rose and pushed her carriage, and Smith and I followed alongside. She lived in a huge apartment complex off Fifth Avenue on Tenth Street. A doorman in a purple and blue frock coat opened the door for us and helped the woman with her carriage. She smiled her thanks, and Smith smiled too. I pretended to look at a statuette on a pedestal by the elevator, feeling out of place in my scruffy shorts and sandals, afraid that the doorman would denounce us and call the woman's husband. But no one stopped or hindered us and we took the elevator up to her apartment. It was beautifully furnished. Expensive drapes covered an entire wall. There was a baby grand piano. A gigantic combination stereo-color television console. And a thick green carpet. The woman excused herself, wheeling the baby into another room. Smith was smirking. I just shook my head with wonder.
When the woman reappeared, she was wearing a skimpy pink nightgown. She beckoned us to follow. The bedroom was dim, curtains drawn, an exhaust fan whirring from a wall air conditioning unit. She lay back on the bed and waited. Smith was out of his pants first. I wasn't far behind. We both climbed onto the bed, one on each side of the woman. Smith began to run his fingers under the nightgown, to her hip. He bunched the material up to her belly, and when she bridged her back, I pulled it to her neck, and finally, over her head. In the dim light of the room, her nipples were purplish, and projected like small mushrooms from her breasts. I pressed them with my palms, and the woman sighed.
Smith slid down and parted her legs, stroked her bush, then dragged his fingers between the vaginal lips until she moistened. We both had erections. Smith took his and wheedled it into the woman's cunt. She opened her lips and gulped a mouthful of air.
Her eyes were open. They were deep eyes, intelligent eyes. I put my lips on her mouth and planted a wet kiss. Her fingers slithered up my leg, encircled my cock and squeezed.
Smith began to fuck. The woman rolled her hips in response. The mattress rose and fell under my ass. I watched as the woman took her free hand to her mouth, moistened her fingers, then placed them on my cock. The slippery fingers made me shiver. As Smith pumped into her the woman's fingers squeezed my cock. I was receiving an echo of Smith's fucking, the same rhythm, the same speed. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of our breaths, like three steam engines, huffing and puffing.
There was a tugging at my cock: the woman wanted me to lean closer. I straddled her head with my knees, lowered my organ to her lips. She engulfed it, sucked it, and I came, gushed my semen. Her body began to shake. I could feel the trembling in her mouth through my cock. She sucked and gobbled and licked her tongue over the still sensitive head of my sex. Smith had come too and was slumped across her, sweat glistening on his back.
Smith and I exchanged positions and repeated the same operation. This time it took longer for us to climax; the woman arriving first, then Smith, then me. We lay quietly side by side on the bed for ten minutes. Then the woman rolled onto me and worked her tongue into my mouth. Her hands found my sleeping penis and kneaded it awake. When it was hard, she bent to Smith and did the same for him. She used gobs of fluid from her moist vagina on our erections, and it felt so good I moaned my appreciation. We came within ten seconds of each other, our semen cascading into the air, splashing on her and on us. Soon after we came, the baby started to cry, and the woman went to tend her.
When she returned, she had the baby girl cradled in her arms, rocking her, cooing to her. She climbed back onto the bed with the child.
"Would you like me to make love to you while you hold your baby?" Smith asked.
The woman thought that would be nice. Smith was sitting on the bed, cross-legged. The woman straddled his legs, facing him, the baby between them. When Smith's prick was hard she dipped it between her opened legs and allowed it to slip up her cunt. She wriggled until it sank all the way into her. Then Smith arched his back and anchored his hands behind for leverage. The woman rocked back and forth. Smith used short, circular strokes, making as much friction with his shaft as he could, careful not to butt his chest against the infant. Soon the woman moaned a series of long, deep-throated cries that precipitated her orgasm. The baby was having a dream, little gobbles of happy sound running out of its mouth. After the orgasm the woman pulled herself up and put the baby down on the bed.
"I'm afraid that you'll both have to go now," she said. "It's getting late and my husband could come home early. I wouldn't want him to find you here. He doesn't understand this."
We dressed and went back down into the street. It was four-thirty. Long shadows were just starting to spill off the sidewalks into the roadway.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I got a job working as a projectionist at the Gate Theatre on Second Avenue. The Gate, supposed to be a showcase for experimental 16mm filmmakers, often as not showed simple-minded 42nd Street semi-pornography. That's how they stayed in business. Afternoons, the theatre was always filled with well-dressed middle-aged businessmen, watching the titty films.
The projection booth was hot and dirty, roaches swarming in the waste basket. I didn't know how to operate the projector but said I did, and didn't know how to splice the film, but said I did. I had no trouble the first time I worked, but the second night, a Thursday, the film split and I panicked. I couldn't get the reel off the projector. Then I couldn't find the splicer. Then I spliced the film backwards and it twisted on the reel and I had to stop the projector again. By then some customers were yelling, clapping their hands. So I put my head out the projection window and shouted, "Shut up you stupid bastards! It's part of the show."
Luckily, it was an experimental film that night, Mike Zukerman's Soul Trip Number Nine, and I guess the audience believed me because they were quiet after that.
One particularly boring night, when I worked two shifts-from two to seven, then seven to one-thirty-I was getting punchy. I had shown the same film for two weeks and was sick of it. It was about a young woman and a man who get an invitation to a town house in the city. Once they get there, they are held captive by a group of jaded sadomasochists, and go through a series of orgiastic scenes that wouldn't give a horny sailor a hard-on. Even more boring when you have to concentrate on switching from one projector to another, waiting for the same dumb cues night after night. So, I called Lotus on the phone and told her to come over.
She brought me a roast beef sandwich and a piece of hash. We got stoned and decided to make it in the projection booth. I was smart enough to wait until the second reel of the film had begun-that would give us at least thirty minutes before I had to cue another reel. Then I bundled up some pages of the New York Times to make a crinkly mattress.
I've balled on crumpled New York Times, and crumpled Daily News, and once a crumpled Village Voice. If you can keep the wads of paper from spreading it makes a nice comfortable bed. Balling on the Daily News was the best-like fucking in your parents' room, spicy and impertinent.
I turned up the volume on the amplifying system then took off my pants. Lotus pulled up her skirt and eased herself down on the papers. It was a long slow motion hash fuck, everything liquid and far away. We were balling for about twenty minutes when I noticed that there was film all over the floor.
One of the splices had opened and the film had spilled like spaghetti around the projector. I knew I could never untangle that mess, stoned as I was. It would take forty-five minutes under normal conditions. There was still another show to go. I did the only thing I could think of. Being careful not to step on the twisted pile of film, I gathered it up in a paper carton. Then, I plugged in every piece of equipment I could find: two tape recorders, an alternate projector, and an old radio, and turned them all on. The fuse blew.
It was dark as a closet and Lotus giggled. I stroked her, waiting for the intercom to buzz.
"What's the matter?" Chris, the ticket-taker, wanted to know.
"Don't know, something fucked up. I'll put in a new fuse."
Which I did, then blew it out again. When Chris called back I told him there was an equipment malfunction that couldn't be repaired; the equipment would have to go to the shop. He refunded everyone's money. I hid the tangled film in the carton, and carried it home. It took us all night to untangle it, but I got it back unnoticed the next day.
A few weeks after that, while I was closing up after the last show, the intercom buzzed. Some man wanted to know if I wanted to earn a hundred dollars.
"We need a projectionist, for a private showing this evening."
"And you'll pay a hundred?" I asked.
"Yes. It's a 16mm projector. The same film you're presenting here. We have a duplicate print.
This evening. You will be returned in three or four hours."
A hundred dollars for a couple of hours' work! I said I would be down as soon as I closed up. In the lobby I saw the man I had spoken to. He was conservatively dressed in a beige sports coat, a white shirt, and a solid green tie. He was about thirty-five. His right wrist was in a cast, and I assumed that was the reason I was getting a hundred dollars for my normally two dollar an hour job.
The man with the fractured wrist said his name was Mister Press, and he led me to a waiting chauffeured Cadillac limousine. Mr. Press nodded to the driver. We turned into the traffic.
"Take the East Side Drive, Melange," Mr. Press ordered, and the chauffeur gave a curt nod.
"Where we headed?" I asked, looking at Mr. Press' outline. He had a flat mechanical voice, educated, not at an Ivy League school: cocky, disdainful.
"Why don't you look at it as a game, a mystery trip?" he said snidely. "For a hundred dollars you shouldn't ask too many questions anyway. You'll be taken there and back."
"Fuck you," I told him, making sure my enunciation was as distinct as his. The car slowed for a red light on Tenth and Avenue A and I opened the door to get out. "You can imagine you have a mystery projectionist, schmuck," I said, stepping down from the car.
The chauffeur, Melange, gave a piercing giggle, that rose toward the tenement roofs like a flock of ruptured birds.
"Shut up," Press snapped at him, but the chauffeur snorted and giggled louder. I stood there and watched Press slide over the seat toward the door. He bent his head under the frame, saying, "The house is in New Jersey. Over the George Washington Bridge, forty minutes from here." He fumbled in his coat pocket, extracting some bills. "Here's your money in advance."
Puerto Rican kids were drumming their congas in Tompkin's Square Park. A Department of Sanitation truck grumbled past. Two cops peeled out of the shadow of a storefront on Avenue A and looked at us. I was carrying some joints in my shirt pocket and didn't want to take a chance getting busted so I climbed back into the limousine. Melange giggled again and eased the car past the two cops.
No one spoke for the rest of the ride. We sped along the East River Drive-the blinking all-night lights of the City on our left, the glum filthy water of the East River slick and stagnant on our right, onto the Harlem River Drive, up and over the George Washington Bridge, then past Fort Lee, New Jersey. Melange drove efficiently, and soon the houses thinned, the foliage thickened, and we were on a narrow road that ended at the gate of a sprawling estate.
Melange pressed a button on the dashboard. A caretaker soon appeared. The gate was opened. We cruised inside, along a pebbled roadway that hooked behind a sloping hill. Then the house was visible. It looked like a movie mansion, built in the thirties, boxy and ponderous, otiose, architecturally unfeasible. I expected to see the movie crew come rushing out of the shadows with lights and cameras and microphones.
The car crunched to a halt and Press and I got out. He led me quickly in at a side door, through a kitchen and down a short flight of stairs to a small room that had been converted into a movie theatre of a sort. There was a large screen on one wall, eight reclining chairs lined up in rows of two, and a Bell and Howell sound projector behind a partition near the rear of the room.
I was taken directly to the projection partition and told I was to show the film and not fraternize with the people there. I looked to see who the "people" were. Besides Press and myself I saw three heads. Sitting next to each other in the first row were two young women. I couldn't see their faces, only a partial profile. They both had dark blonde hair. One wore it long and loose and parted on the side; the other's was intricately piled with curls, swirls and pins. An old woman who looked like everyone's stereotype of the family cook sat behind them. Melange slipped into the room and took a seat. Press showed me the sound controls and the rheostat, and I loaded the projector.
The film was Bob Downey's No More Excuses, a funny collage, four or five different themes, including a documentary segment of interviews with East Sixties Singles Bar Swingers. It's a good film considering the budget it had. I didn't think it strange that these people had wanted to see it in their home instead of the simpler, more practical course of seeing it in the theatre. Americans squander more money and resources than any people since the Pharaohs built the pyramids.
What did surprise me was that one of the women wanted to see the film again, after I showed it once.
"Oh, come on, Wanda," the woman with the intricate hairdo complained. "Once was enough."
"I want to see it again, Trudy," Wanda answered stubbornly, and turned her head to find Press. "Ask if he will be kind enough to show it again, Press."
I rewound the reel and reloaded. Both women stayed for the second showing, and I wondered why the one who objected to seeing it twice, the one named Trudy, didn't leave. But she sat in her chair, watched it again. So did the white-haired old woman and so did Melange. When the film had ended, Press hustled me out the rear door. I caught a glimpse of Wanda and she smiled at me. I smiled back. Then I was on the stairs, out on the gravel roadway, and in the limousine.
Melange drove me to the city, chatting amiably and discussing the film, criticizing it like a six o'clock TV movie critic. He wouldn't answer any questions about the young women, who they were and why they didn't go into the city to see the films. All he would say was that one of the women, Wanda, had become interested in the film and was anxious to see what the new directors were up to.
"Who's Press?" I asked him.
"He's the old man's fair-haired hauncho, an ex-construction engineer. Now he takes care of the girls and runs the house. He'll tell you he was an architect but he was a plain old civil engineer. Doesn't have a bit of taste. Has the aesthetics of a professional soldier."
"How do you fit in," I asked, mustering what I thought was the proper amount of interest. "You don't seem like the chauffeur-type."
"I'm a poet," he answered, flourishing the title like a Cardinal conferring benediction.
"What kind of poetry you into?" I pursued. "The poetry of Man!"
"Oh yeah? Then why are you working for those rich bastards, driving this big motherfucking expensive car around like some trained lacky?"
He let that weird giggle of his loose in the car.
"I'm getting a book on them. A book on them; I'll let it all out one of these days. Soon as I get my prose sharpened up. Don't you worry about that. The things I could tell you..."
But he didn't tell me anything else. I kind of liked him, even with his prissy quips about some of the writers I thought were important, so I invited him in to meet Lotus and have a joint of grass. But he said he had to get back to New Jersey. "Some other time-all right?"
"Sure, anytime. Just come by whenever you're around." And the big automobile lumbered like a rhinoceros on wheels into the early morning.
Lotus and Smith and almost everyone else I told about the mansion and the girls thought they were the daughters of some Mafia family. I had glimpsed an Italian name on their mailbox: Lombardo.
My hundred dollars went for food, rent, a new orange and black dress for Lotus, and Smith's vacation. I loaned him sixty dollars.
"Do me a favor, Jyros. Don't tell anyone where I am. No one. I need some time away from here without any reminders."
"Sure, Smith, If you run out of bread, call me and I'll see what I can do."
"Thanks, Jyros. And listen, if you see Myrtle ... well, she might have lost her key. She has a lot of clothes in the closet. Let her in..."
"But don't tell her where you are, right?"
"Right," he said and gave me the keys to his apartment and his mailbox. He was going to a cabin way upstate, near the Canadian border. I could reach him by telegram in an emergency. With my sixty, I figured he had about three hundred dollars, enough to keep him out of Manhatten for a couple of months. Lotus gave him an ounce of grass. I gave him a new copy of the I Ching. He was into that then.
The next week, the same time and circumstances as before, Press called me from the theatre lobby and asked me to go to New Jersey again. This time they wanted to see three Kenneth Anger films. Everything was exactly as it had been-the two blonde women sitting in the same seats, the old white-haired lady, Melange, Press hovering at my elbow while I prepared the projector. The first two films were on one twelve-inch reel, but the last film was on a separate reel. In order to thread it, I had to turn up the lights. While I was fitting the film over the sound drum, I heard a clattering noise and looked up to see the screen winding up like a window shade-they have the same mechanisms.
Without thinking anything of it I quickly walked up to the screen and pulled it down. There was a gallop of footsteps behind. I turned to see Press and Melange converging on me, trying to block me from seeing the blonde girls. They weren't fast enough.
"Holy shit!" I was fractured with amazement. They were Siamese twins. They had separate heads, and separate arms, and separate chests to the waist. But from the waist down they shared a common body. Common hips, and common buttocks, and common legs-and, I guessed, a common cunt.
Press gave a vicious shove that sent me into a wall and my elbow went numb with the contact. But I didn't notice. My eyes were welded on them-it-what? Press was moving toward me. I picked up a heavy ashtray, ready to let him have it if he tried to push me again. But Wanda, the one with long hair, halted him with a shout.
"Press! Stop it! Leave him alone. What difference does it make now? He's seen us. Now let him alone so we can see the other film."
Her sister gave me a chilly glance then yawned and said, "Must we see it? It's so dumb. Really, Wanda. We could watch a Frank Sinatra musical, or a Paul Newman movie."
"Stop it, Trudy. We have a schedule. This is my time for films. I don't harp when it's your time. Let me enjoy it, will you?"
"Don't get all worked up," Trudy said condescendingly, moistening a polished fingernail and scraping something off it. Then she looked at me, and, with arrogant disdain, curtly ordered me back to the projector.
"Sure," I said. "Just one thing; I want to ask you something: can the two of you fuck?"
The old white-haired lady, who turned out to be a nurse and not a cook, gasped and put her hand to her mouth.
Press growled threateningly and took a half-step toward me.
Melange fought to swallow his giggle and almost choked on his tongue.
Trudy twisted her lips tighter than one of her imagine hair curls and made an indignant noise.
But Wanda smiled, letting out a warm honest throaty laugh. "Sometimes," she confided. "But it sure is a project."
Wanda-Trudy's father was a rich Italian businessman. He started out with a ravioli company that sold its products to Italian restaurants all over the East Coast. Then he went into construction, and the market. When Wanda-Trudy was born their mother almost died from shock. She was a Catholic and was sure God had punished her for one horrible sin: on the night of her first wedding anniversary, when she was two months pregnant, and warm and loving with good red wine, she had sucked off her husband. Once, only once. And this was her punishment.
Wanda-Trudy's father tried to bribe the doctor. He wanted to "Let the monster die." But the doctor, who wasn't averse to accepting a few bucks for one thing or another, knew Wanda-Trudy were a professional gold mine-if they lived. The doctor convinced their father to allow the "girls" to be placed in a special hospital, private and secluded. Then Wanda-Trudy's father made a religious visit to the local Mafia "Family," bearing proper gifts, and the "Family" made sure that the newspapers kept a respectful distance.
Wanda-Trudy grew to womanhood in the hospital, under the scrutiny of six nurses, two psychiatrists, and hundreds of visiting specialists with an interest in multiple births. They were as famous in medical circles as Johnny Carson is to late night television viewers, but their name and location stayed out of the papers.
Officially, Wanda-Trudy were one person, singular. They had a common birth certificate, were a single digit on the national census, a single deduction on their father's income tax. But Wanda-Trudy had separate personalities, separate tastes. Wanda liked orange juice for breakfast. Trudy liked tomato juice. Wanda liked the daytime. Trudy liked the nighttime. Wanda liked quiet, intense, gentle men. Trudy liked cold, tough, hard men, like Mr. Press.
After the film was over I stayed to talk with them-actually with Wanda. Trudy gave me a few nasty digs but I simply told her to eat shit.
"A real intellectual," she had taunted, but left me alone after that. She seemed to phase out, doze against the back of the chair-I could see now that it was specially constructed, a dual reclining chair. Melange and the nurse had gone to take care of some chores, and Press reluctantly left us alone.
"Do you really ball?" I wanted to know.
"Yes," Wanda answered and frowned. "We sleep with Press now, but I don't like him. I don't like what he does to us. But I have no choice. Sex was my idea. At first anyway. I wanted to try it when I was sixteen, but of course it was impossible. Trudy thought it was a sin. At least she said she thought that. It took me five years of talking and convincing. Years of inane discussion until Trudy finally agreed to try. We were living in the hospital then. It was the evening of our twenty-first birthday. The females in our family do strange things on birthdays and anniversaries..." And she told me about her mother, and her mother's sin. She also told me about the night they lost their virginity.
There had been a party for them. Wanda had decided on a particular intern. The intern was on late duty and they called him into their room after the party.
"We were both slightly drunk," Wanda remembered. "Trudy pretended to be unconscious. But we both have the same blood and I had just as much alcohol in me as she had in her. That's the way Trudy is. She wanted to absolve herself of any guilt and she faked being unconscious."
The intern's name was Seymour. He was a sad-faced hefty man who wore dark-framed eyeglasses and always needed a shave. He read a lot and had long periods of depression where he would re-read all of Norman Mailer's books, then shout obscenities in the washroom. But other times Wanda found him to be very nice, concerned about her problems, and willing to spend his time off hunting up special books for her to read.
"Seymour was pretty drunk too," Wanda related. "It was the first time I ever touched a man. But the sex was dulled by alcohol-and Trudy wouldn't help. I can't make the lower parts of our body operate unless she helps. So it was sort of a flop. But Trudy agreed to try again, first going through a big 'sinning' lecture. We slept with Seymour four times and at the end Trudy was really getting into it. After that, she tried to make every man we saw. She started to read all those silly women's magazines and put lipstick and makeup on her face. I went along with most of it, with the hairdos and the underarm deodorants. But when she started with the "feminine" deodorants and wanted to use a contraceptive foam, I refused..."
"Do you need a contraceptive?" I asked.
"The doctors think we can have children. They don't really know of course. We really are freaks and all they can do is guess. To be safe we started to take the pills. But they got us sick so now we have a coil."
"I'd like to make it with you," I said, really meaning it, wanting their arms and their breasts. Wanda reached her hand for me, drew me to her for a sweet full kiss. Trudy stirred and I felt Wanda's shoulders wrench, like someone yanking on your sleeve.
"Maybe next week," Wanda said hopefully. "Let me work on her for a while. Maybe next week."
On the ride back to the city Melange filled me in on more of their history. They had left the hospital and came to live in the big house after their mother died. That was three years before. Their mother never saw them again after they were born. The father still came to visit on Sundays, just as he did at the hospital all those years they were growing up. Press took care of all the daily details. The girls had a half million dollar trust fund.
When I went back the next week Wanda hadn't worked it out with her sister. But we had another long talk and she told me about the first time they had slept with Press.
"Press slapped our ass so hard that I cried. Trudy thought it was great. . . "
"It was great," Trudy piped in, waking from her pretended nap. "Press was just being masculine."
"It was a lousy thing to do. It hurt. He's sneaky and sadistic and I don't like him."
"Listen, Wanda, I put up with that intern for you, and I couldn't stand him. Press is my man, and you can't complain..."
"Seymour only lasted two weeks. Press has been beating me up for two years now..."
Trudy turned silent accusing eyes toward me. She was no fool. She could see what was coming. Wanda waited a moment then told her: "I want us to sleep with Jyros. If Press is your man, then I want Jyros to be my man, at least for a while."
Trudy didn't answer.
Later, when Trudy really did fall asleep (Wanda said she had a way to tell for sure) I heard more about Press.
"He really is a bastard. A sadistic bastard. But that's not what worries me. Trudy's getting to be more and more masochistic. The first time Press hit us on the ass I had a fit. I said I wouldn't let him sleep with us unless he promised not to hit us anymore. You should have seen the tantrum Trudy had. She said she had a right to have a good time and there was nothing wrong with a slap on the ass-it stimulated her. Well it didn't stimulate me. So, as usual, we had to compromise. He agreed not to hurt any parts of my body, or our common body. But he could do whatever Trudy would let him do to her body."
But Wanda told me that didn't work out either. Press would slap Trudy's breasts or cuff her cheek and Wanda would get sick. The screams and sound of flesh slapping flesh made her ill. Recently, one particularly violent session, Trudy begged Press to punch her in the mouth. And Press did punch her, split her lip, spurting blood over Wanda's breasts. Wanda cried hysterically. Press had only slept with them once since, and it had been relatively calm. But Wanda was afraid. She wanted to live a full life, maybe have a child some day. But if Trudy was getting masochistic, self-destructive, suicidal, then she too would perish. They needed each other. Neither could live without the other.
CHAPTER TWELVE
"I'm half American Indian," Tom Burdy, one of the bartenders at St. Adrian's, was telling me on a Saturday afternoon of dull skies and humid air. I hadn't been asked to show a film at the house in New Jersey that week and I assumed that Press, his cast removed, had sufficient reason to terminate my employment. I didn't know any way to contact Wanda-their phone was unlisted, and Press took care of the mail. I couldn't get past the gate either. It was too bad. I liked Wanda, and it would have been something else to make it with Siamese twins.
Tom refilled my stein from the tap. He bent his gaunt lanky frame over the bar top and, sliding the beer to me, continued to tell me about his last job.
"I was working as a steel cutter downtown for a while. A couple of my uncles are in the union, that's how I got into it. You make a lot of money-two hundred and eighty a week, maybe more. But the kind of people you have to work with-they put me uptight."
"I didn't know there were Indians in the construction union," I said.
"Sure. They came from Canada a long time ago.
There was a big accident up there, and this guy hired the Indians to replace the guys who got killed. They were good workers so he took them back to the States with him. That's how they started. Brought their brothers and cousins in. Now there's a couple of thousand of them living somewhere over in Brooklyn. But they're just as bad as the rest. There's this one Indian I know. I thought he was a groovy guy, had long hair, even wore a feather in it. He told me he's sending his kids to private school to keep them away from the 'niggers' and the 'spicks.' How are you going to work with people like that? It's not worth the money. So I'm working here now. It's better for my head."
A couple of beers and a dozen stories later Myrtle walked into the bar and kissed me on the cheek. She looked tired, strained. Her hair was shorter than I had ever seen it, clipped to an inch below her ears. There were two crease lines scarring her forehead, and her lips were dry. I bought her a glass of wine and she finally got around to asking me if I knew where Smith was.
"No," I lied. "He's off in the woods somewhere. That's all I know."
"Come on, Jyros, stop lying. He sent me a letter and said you could reach him. I need to see him about something. It's important. He said you would tell me..."
"Where was his letter postmarked? What state?"
"I don't remember. I looked at it, but casually, once, and I saw there wasn't a return address."
"I think Smith would have given you his address if he wanted you to have it. You let me see the letter and if it says he wants you to know where he is, I'll give you his address."
"I threw it away, really I did," she said so sadly that I was almost tempted to give it to her. What the hell difference did it make? But it did make a difference. He asked me not to tell anyone where he was. So, fuck it, I wouldn't. .
I expected her to blow up but she didn't. She sipped slowly at the wine until it was finished then she put her hand on my shoulder for a moment, and left.
Sunday morning there was a racket at my door. I had stayed out too late and drank too much and I was groggy. I stumbled to the door, opened it. There was Melange, smiling and dapper.
"There's a picnic. Wanda said to be sure and come. Said to tell you it's all arranged. I'll wait in the car for you. Bring a bathing suit."
"Can Lotus come with us?"
"As far as I'm concerned, you can bring a lotus or a lily or a rose."
"Lotus is a girl. She lives here. I'm going to bring her. I want Wanda to meet her."
"Well, I don't know. Press might not like it. You know how he is..." and he rolled his eyes heavenward.
"Fuck Press. I don't give a shit what he thinks. You shouldn't either."
"Oh I don't," Melange said defensively.
I woke Lotus. We packed our bathing suits in her sling pocketbook, took eight joints of dark brown Indian grass rolled in peach-colored paper, then bounced downstairs to the waiting limousine.
"Wow, far out, groovy," Lotus exclaimed with ingenuous wonder when she saw Wanda-Trudy. Wanda and Lotus dug each other from the start, Trudy remained aloof. Press sputtered with annoyance when he saw us: he hadn't been informed about the picnic. He made sure to come. Melange honked the horn and we all piled into the car. There were curtains on the window, and Press lowered them.
"I want to see," Wanda complained. "But I don't want you to be seen," Press answered.
"Why don't you throw a blanket over their legs," I said. "Like at a football game. They'll look ordinary enough."
Press sulked back into the house and returned with a red and green checkered cotton blanket, formally tucking it under Wanda-Trudy's legs.
"It's a good thing I reminded you about the blanket, Press," I jived him. "What's a picnic without a blanket."
"There are blankets and provisions at the house," he responded frostily.
So, another house, I thought. They weren't going to show themselves at any public place. Melange released the brake and we rolled down the gravel driveway. Lotus and Wanda got into a long rap about how they hated bras; Melange and I talked about Truman Capote; Press and Trudy exchanged quick superior glances but didn't speak.
"Truman is absolutely fantastic at what he does, but of course he's a bit much," Melange was saying.
"I don't like a suffocating bra on my chest, especially in the summer," Lotus was saying.
"I know a dozen revolutionaries who have Capote on the top of their 'first to go list,' " I was saying.
"Oh there are more dangerous people than Truman. I'm sure the politicians and the businessmen are the ones they would go for first."
"Not if you're a revolutionary poet," I said. "You go for the guy in your own league first. Besides, Capote lives better than most politicians, as well as most businessmen. Ever see the building he lives in? Try to tell some black poet or Puerto Rican writer whose family eats meat once a month that Capote is not doing any harm. You could probably feed a dozen families for the money he spends on clothing a year. Let him tell some hungry two hundred pound spade he needs a closetfull of suits."
"Why shouldn't your tits bounce around? like, I mean, it feels good when your nipples slide against your blouse."
The cottage was surrounded by a high electrified fence. An inner ring of trees blocked all view of the house, which was a hundred and fifty yards down a packed dirt road. The cottage had eight rooms and two bathrooms. There was an artificial lake down a grass path, and two rowboats tied to a stake.
Wanda-Trudy wore a three piece bathing suit: separate halters but the same trunks. Lotus had a skimpy bikini. I wore a five-year-old pair of khaki army surplus trunks that ballooned with air when I dived into the water.
Surprisingly, Wanda-Trudy swam very well. They used a backstroke, outside arms stroking, inside arms balancing and steering.
Press played lifeguard, or prison guard-watching us from the top of a mound of earth adjacent to the water. Melange checked the house for food, reporting later that the refrigerator was full. After we swam and toweled ourselves we sat under a willow tree, watching two birds flying over the cottage.
Lotus produced the marijuana and after the usual arguments were exhausted, and Wanda had already sucked in a drag, Trudy, with grudging disapproval, lit one.
The grass was plenty strong. Wanda got silent, watching things move-grass bending, leaves shimmering, two butterflies cascading over the lawn. Trudy got talkative: a high locust-whine of sentences, one after the other, embroidered with denials that she was high.
Melange came over and we turned him on.
"Haven't had shit this good since I was in Spain watching those El Grecos' move off the canvas." He grinned at the joint in his fingers appreciatively.
Evening. The moon blurred behind a heavy mist. Lotus and Melange were down by the lake watching reflections off the water.
"Let's go into the house." Wanda nudged Trudy then nodded at me to follow. They looked, sprouting from the stem of their legs, like leaves of a common flower. They swayed when they walked, cumbersome but graceful.
There was a large bed in one of the rooms, three pillows wide. Wanda slipped off the top of her bathing suit. Her breasts were large and full, the nipples dark and puckered. Trudy's breasts were smaller but the nipples were more pronounced, tilted.
"Remove your bathing suit," Trudy leered, then sucked at her thumb like a suggestive child.
"She's only trying to make you uncomfortable, Jyros," Wanda soothed. "She wants to make it with you. I can feel it when she's aroused. Don't let her intimidate you."
I wasn't intimidated, just slightly disoriented. How did I ball them? What was the procedure? Wanda saw my confusion. She opened her arms and said, "Come to me. I'll share all that's best in me, all that's womanly."
"Come to me," Trudy blared with a voice like a beggar's palm. "I'll show all that's wicked. Come and give me the worst that's in you. Let it all out. Do whatever you want."
I moved to them and put one hand on Wanda's breast, and the other hand on Trudy's breast. Wanda sighed. Trudy moaned. I slipped my hand down their chests, down their waist, down their hips to the rim of the bathing shorts, quickly removing them.
"Sit on the bed," I said.
They lowered themselves, and I bent between their legs. My fingers found the curly pubis and I parted the lips until I could see the dark nub of their clitoris. I rubbed it with my forefinger, massaged it until the lips of their cunt were slippery with fluid.
"Fuck me hard," Trudy said.
"Fuck me gentle," Wanda said.
I took my cock and snuggled it against their cunt, revolving my hips until I worked inside. Wanda was stroking my back, Trudy was clamping her fingers into my buttocks. My head was between their heads: I kissed a cheek, turned and kissed another. I reached for their breasts, squeezed one, then another, and another, and another. There were fingers in my hair, on my neck, searching for my balls, digging for my anus. I slammed my cock hard for three strokes, slid it easy and gentle for three strokes, alternated-fucking hard and soft, slow and fast.
Their respiration was synchronous, chests rising and falling together, hearts beating at the same speed. But the expressions on their faces were different. The sounds they made were different. The response of their hands was different. Wanda's face was relaxed. Trudy's face was twisted with concentration. Wanda's mouth was open, loose. Trudy's teeth were clenched. Wanda sighed like wind across a cave. Trudy rasped. Wanda stroked, kneaded, caressed. Trudy grabbed, pinched, scratched. When they came into their orgasm, Wanda sighed with contentment. Trudy sighed with relief.
I fucked them twice more. One time having them straddle me, the other time turning them on their chests with one of the pillows under their hips. I could see welt marks on Trudy's back.
We were hungry and I called Lotus and Melange into the house. Melange opened a large can of shrimp and made a salad. Lotus brewed a pot of coffee.
"Where's Press?" I asked. Nobody knew, and really didn't care. We passed around the last of the grass. Everyone was loose, easy, even Trudy.
"That swim was out of sight," Lotus said. "But I would really dig it to swim in the ocean."
"What's the ocean like?" Wanda asked.
"Haven't you ever been to the ocean?" I said.
Wanda-Trudy shook their heads negatively.
"Well, let's go. Come on."
"We couldn't do that," Wanda said. "Press wouldn't let us."
"Fuck Press. We just go. I don't see him around anyway. The ocean would be a groove this time of night."
"Someone might see us."
"So what. They can't hurt you just by looking. Come on."
We went to the car, a chain of silhouettes against the moon. Melange turned the key, stepped on the accelerator. We were on our way. A dark hulk came running out of the cottage, waving its arms, and yelling. It was Press. I gave him the finger out of the rear window.
We drove for a long time and then I could smell the ocean. We cruised along a stretch of beachfront until we found a long strip of beach with a fence marked: Private Property Keep Off.
Melange turned out the car lights, and we waited for our eyes to accustom themselves to the dark. When we were certain that the beach was deserted, Melange opened the trunk and, locating a pair of wire cutters, snipped the lock.
The waves were moderate. Wanda-Trudy navigated better than any of us. Their body was more suited to water than ours, torsos acting like pontoons, stabilizing them against the rush of water. A raft bobbed a hundred yards offshore.
"You want to swim out to it?" I asked Melange.
"I can't swim," he said, his eyelashes fluttering sadly.
I looked down the beach and saw an old dinghy turned like a turtle on its back. We went over to it and found the oars tucked underneath.
Melange kicked at it suspiciously with his toe. "It looks kind of dilapidated."
"Don't worry," I advised in my most seaworthy voice. We flipped it right side then dragged it to the edge of the surf. Melange hopped in and when the next wave broke I pulled the dinghy into the surf, jumped in, and rowed like mad.
I tied up to the raft. We climbed onto it and lay on our backs. Looked at the moon between cloud fragments. Later, we heard voices drifting across the water, calling us to return. Melange jumped down into the boat. I heard a loud crack, then a painful scream. The planks were rotten and Melange's foot had punctured the bottom. He was trapped at the calf. Carefully I climbed into the dinghy. Water was seeping in. I had to rip out another plank to free him. It looked like his ankle was in bad shape.
I helped him onto the raft. "What do you think?" he asked.
"Looks like it might be a sprain or a break. We could try and row back but the boat will sink before we get there. It'll be easier if I float you across."
Melange let loose one of his giggles, a sound like gas bubbling through oil, slick with fear.
"It's easy, Melange. Nothing to it. Don't worry. Just get in the water and relax. The trick is to relax, not struggle."
There was panic in his eyes. How deep is this water? he was wondering. Deeper than I can stand?
"Nothing sinks that doesn't want to," I said. "Trust the man in you. That's all-trust the man in you."
Melange forced himself into the water and I slipped in next to him. The dinghy was listing. I sliced it away to give us room. Then I grabbed a tight handful of his hair above the nape of the neck, shoved my other hand against his spine, bringing his body to a floating position. I scissored my legs and we pulled away from the raft. Small crests of water like the scales of a dragon lapped Melange's cheek. He took a giant lungful of air, held it as long as he could. I kept his head as high above water as possible and slowly he relaxed. Mist coiled above us. Luckily, we caught a gentle swell. It carried us to the beach.
I drove back to the mansion. A doctor came over to check Melange's ankle. Only a bad sprain. He couldn't drive and we stayed until morning when the caretaker shuttled us to the George Washington Bridge. We took a bus across.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Two letters came in the mail, one on Monday and one on Tuesday. The first was from Smith:
Returning Fri. Need keys to get in Apt.
Please, Jyros, DON'T tell anyone I'll be home. Smith
The second letter was from Wanda: Dear Jyros, I want to thank you, and especially Lotus, for turning us on. Not only to marijuana, although that was important to what else happened, but to life. Trudy and I are twenty-four years old and we've only been with three men. Lotus has been with dozens of men. Trudy and I have a total of forty-eight years when you add us up, but compared to Lotus our total experience is nearly zero. I don't mean to imply that we don't know anything. Our life has provided us with some unique experiences. And I don't mean that sex is everything either. But it is VERY important. All our lives doctors have been observing us. One thing we've always heard from them was the importance of "homeostasis"-the equilibrium of our body processes. Also our mental processes. Trudy was getting unbalanced. No doubt of it. She admits it now. The other day at the cottage when we were all high and you went to bed with us was the first time I can remember in a long time that Trudy was calm and relaxed. It was the sex more than the marijuana. While it's true that we have only one vagina, we still have two heads. Both of us think about sex and that affects our nervous systems, sort of builds up a nervous charge. The doctors told us that's what happens to all women. But with us it's double. And if you frustrate your body, the doctor said it unbalances the "homeostasis," and that can make your mind unbalanced too. That's what I think happened to Trudy. Maybe that's a little simplified, but I think it's true. I told her that all those years we were physically able to have a man (since we were twelve or thirteen years old) and didn't was like being in jail. "How would you like to be in jail now?" I asked her. And it must be worse for a boy, all that energy being frustrated like that.
Anyway, something else happened, with Press. He was mad as a hornet when we left him at the cottage. He was steaming when he got back to the house. Melange was sitting on the couch with his ankle bandaged, getting drunk on whiskey. Press said he was fired, and I said he wasn't. So Press tried to get Trudy on his side as usual. But she told him to shut up, just like that. I thought he was going to beat us up; Melange was laughing at him. Then I started to laugh too, and then Trudy. We couldn't stop laughing. Then Trudy told Press he was fired and I agreed. He said our father hired him and only our father could fire him.
To make a long story short, Trudy and I decided we were getting out, away from New Jersey. Melange had an idea how to do it, and it was a good idea. We bought a houseboat! But, you have to have some kind of license, so until Melange can get one we hired an old man, a pilot I think you call him. He almost fainted when he saw us, and then felt bad because he thought we were offended. So he carved us a present out of a piece of driftwood: two mermaids with a single tail, joined just like we are.
We're all packed and ready to go. We're going to sail up and down rivers all over the place. Lotus told me about a black boy she knew in New York who went back to his home in New Orleans. She said he had three testicles. Imagine that! Melange is going to locate him for us.
Thanks again for all the information you gave us. We'll send you some postcards. Maybe next time you can come with us. (I would have asked you to come this time but I think it's best that Trudy and I have this adventure on our own.)
Love, Wanda-Trudy Lombardo
"What black guy with three testicles?" I quizzed Lotus. She smiled with memory and told me all about him. In the afternoon Linus Foxx called to say there was a party at his house later that evening. When we got there the party was whirling, pinwheels of faces moving from one corner of the room to the other, arms and legs thatched around waists, hips, shoulders, everyone tightly packed into Linus' single large room.
Spike Altman, the business manager, was squeezed in a notch between the ancient phonograph and a wall. "What's this party all about?" I asked him.
"I don't know, Jyros. No reason as far as I know. Just a party."
"You look suspiciously happy, like you just outwitted Internal Revenue. What's up?"
"It's a funny story; want to hear it?"
"Is it true?"
"Does that matter?"
"No," I admitted. "It doesn't matter at all."
Spike Altman rocked forward on his heels, tangled his fingers together behind his back, then told me he had been walking down Second Avenue on his way to Ratner's Bakery for some almond cookies when a big fat girl with a tangle of beads around her neck grabbed his arm and said, "Hey, Murray baby, been looking f you."
"I could see she was drunk," Spike said. "Her eyes were slipping in and out of focus. I thought she was only pretending to know me, a prostitute making a pitch. Then I had what I think you call a rush, very unusual, strange. For a few seconds I wasn't Spike Altman-I was this Murray. She took my arm, saying we should hurry to her place, and I was sure she wasn't aware I wasn't Murray."
He decided to go with her, admitting a certain feeling of power knowing she thought he was someone else. He could probably get this "Murray" in all kinds of trouble, assuming the fat girl would remember anything that happened. She lived on Fifth Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue. Her apartment was on the fourth floor, a railroad flat. There were posters on the walls: W.C. Fields, Malcolm X, Che, Bogart. And shelves of books with magazines hanging over the edges. Three windows faced the street.
"Her bed was built on top of six fruit boxes, probably took them from one of the markets on First Avenue, and I tested it. It was surprisingly sturdy. The girl went into another room and I could hear the rattle of glasses. She came back and poured herself a drink, handed me the bottle and a glass. She wasn't a bad looking gal, good features, sort of kooky-looking."
They sat on the bed, not talking, watching sun reflections off passing cars run across the ceiling. The girl lay back, resting her glass on her stomach. "There's some grass in the drawer; roll us a stick, will you?" she asked. Spike found the grass in a plastic bag. Then he fumbled with the papers.
"I don't know why, but I can't roll a joint, Jyros. I was sure she would get wise when she saw the mess I made of it. But when I went back to the bed, she was snoring. I took the glass off her belly and tried to shove her awake but she didn't respond. I lit up the thing I had rolled-it looked like a crumpled gum wrapper-and took a few drags."
Spike decided to make it with her. There was something about that big immobile mountain of flesh that caused him to want to make it respond. He tried to take off her dress but it was anchored under her. She was too heavy to budge. He sat back down and watched her, took two more drags from the frazzled joint, then had an idea. Searching in the kitchen until he found a pair of shears, he went back to the bed and began to cut open the girl's dress. He cut from the hem to the neck then parted the material. Next he cut open her panties, starting at the elastic waistband and cutting first one leg, then the other. He pulled the severed material apart like a diaper. The girl had a heavy thatch of pubis, a large oval of thick hair that reached to her navel. Spike stepped back. Her pubis looked like a fur bikini, so thick and full was it. Spike then snipped open her bra, allowing the ponderous breasts to loll free. They were fleshy and blubbery but more resilient than he would have thought. Spike undressed, straddled her chest, then squeezed her breasts firmly against his penis. He could see her nipples begin to extend, pink nipples only slightly darker than the corona around them. There was a single short hair growing out of the left aureola and Spike licked at it with his tongue then chewed it until the hair came free in his mouth. When his penis was stiff, he slipped down her body and pried open her legs with his knee.
"Next to the mounds of her ass, and her thighs, and her belly, my prick looked small as a tree next to a mountain. I opened her vagina and got inside. Her eyelids were fluttering and her head moved, but I whispered 'you're dreaming, don't wake up' and her eyes stayed closed."
He began to fuck, surprised to find that her cunt was snug, not large and sloppy as he expected, but firm.
"I thought perhaps her tissues and muscles were fat in there, sort of filling up the space. At any rate, it was most pleasurable. When I came, her vagina reacted as if it had an orgasm, but she didn't wake. I covered her with a sheet, left her enough money to replace the things I had cut. Then I came here. Interesting, don't you think?"
"Yes," I agreed.
"Do you believe it?" Spike asked hesitatingly.
"Does it matter?" I winked.
"No," he laughed, "Not at all."
I felt a chill run down my neck and turned to see Dino Bonzo at my shoulder. He pulled me to one side claiming he had something to discuss.
"Listen, man, there's a special meeting of faculty this week at the Charles School. I need to have Smith's address so I can write him and let him know."
"What makes you think I know where he is?"
"Hey, don't give me any of that shit," Bonzo said coldly. "You know where he is. You don't want him to get fucked out of a job, do you?"
"I don't know where he is."
"Right, you don't know where he is; I'm hip. You let him know anyway. Write him and tell him to get back here. Tell him to call me soon as he does, so I can tell him what's happening."
"When is it?" I asked.
"When's what?"
"The meeting at that school that's so important."
"Monday. Next Monday. You tell him that."
Bonzo slinked back into the crowd. A girl handed me a ceramic hash pipe. She said her name was Riki and she made it herself.
"What," I asked, "the pipe or the hash?"
"The pipe. I'm a potter. See that girl over there?" She pointed to a pretty red-haired girl who looked a lot like Myrtle. I nodded that I saw her. Riki said the girl's name was Silvia, and that she was the best potter in New York. "She has this little pottery shop over on Sixth Street right off Third Avenue. You should come over and see the things she has in the kiln, really turn you on."
I said I would and sucked at the hash. Lotus drifted over with Dude Herold and I passed them the pipe. A little later I heard shouts and curses and a splatter of broken glass. Someone in the usual mid-party fracas, I assumed, focusing my eyes in the direction of the disturbance. It was Linus.
He was standing in the middle of a circle of young girls with painted tattoos all over their faces and bodies. Linus rocked unsteadily from one foot to the other, drunk I guessed. The girls were not more than sixteen or seventeen. All were bare to the waist, their nipples under the ceiling light gleaming wet and shiny, their painted tattoos shimmering.
The girls danced around Linus slowly, like Indians around a covered wagon, shaking tambourines, striking finger cymbals, stomping their feet against the hollow floor. Linus tried to stumble out of their circle but they pushed him back. I shook my head to clear away the hash haze and moved closer to the circle, thinking it must be some game. Most of the guests were clapping their hands, providing a base rhythm for the girls to dance to. Others were laughing at the perplexed expression on Linus' face.
I smiled through the hash at Linus' soulful expression. A game. He was drunk and these preposterous half-naked girls were teasing old Linus. One small mousy girl with rimless glasses standing across from me obviously didn't think it was funny. She chided the dancing girls, a social worker's reproach:
"Why don't you help him? He looks sick."
But the girls guarded their circle, blocked the mousy girl from penetrating, threatening her with mock growls and snarls.
"No one's hurtin' old Linus," a voice jovially sang out from the crowd. The mousy girl shrugged her shoulders and moved away. Right, I thought. Nobody's hurting old Linus. Just some razzing.
The dancing girls continued around and around, drawing their circle tighter and tighter, feet stomping persistently against the floor, tambourines clanging. Linus rocked unsteadily, his eyes dull and oblivious, fixed on some infinite distance over our heads.
One of the dancing girls broke from the circle and jumped in front of Linus. Her breasts were tattooed with snakes, her back with the roaring face of a tiger, coils of ivy twined in its jaw. The girl leaped up in the air, came down flat on her feet, shaking her tambourine, slamming it for emphasis against her hip, fucking her hair.
The other dancing girls beat their feet faster, clanged their finger cymbals louder. The girl in the circle reached under her skirt and, with a slow hypnotic movement, withdrew a handful of flax, the kind used for packing glass or china. She moved closer to Linus, then unzipped his trousers, stuffing her handful of flax into the opening. Another handful appeared and was stuffed into the zipper opening: he looked like a poor drunk black scarecrow unraveling.
A zippo cigarette lighter materialized in the girl's hand. No, my mind balked, she wouldn't ignite the flax, would she? I tried to make a judgment, but I was too high on hash.
She flicked the lighter with her thumb, quickly lit the flax. A tongue of flame exploded and crackled at Linus' trousers.
"No!" I shouted and tried to translate my thoughts into body movements but my mind and body refused to work-I was limp with horror. Dude Herold reached Linus first, beat at the flames with his hands. We had to take them both to the hospital. Dude couldn't play piano for a month, but it wasn't serious.
I was afraid to ask about Linus. He was in a semi-private room at Beth Israel Hospital. When I went to see him during visiting hours he was propped up against a pillow, a sheet up to his chest, arms and hands hidden underneath.
"How you doing, all right?" I tried to smile reassuringly, but my face was stiff as cardboard."
"I'm fine, jus' fine." he smiled weakly.
"Well, is everything O.K.? I mean can I do anything. You doing all right?"
I coughed, and grimly smiled again, and nodded to the other patient, a greenish old man with tubes running out of his arms. The old man gave me a toothless grin in return.
"Well, how you doing?" I repeated stupidly.
Linus called me to his side with a motion of his head. I leaned my ear down to him and he whispered, "Want to see it?"
My head snapped upright. I didn't know what to say.
"Go on, pull the covers down, go on."
I lifted the sheet. He wore a pair of hospital pajamas. There was a bandaged hump under the fabric. As I watched it, something long and silver slid from the fly-opening into view. I jumped.
"What the fuck...? " Then I laughed. Linus was laughing too. It was a flute. He had it hidden there.
"Don't need nothing else but this to satisfy a woman." He fingered the flute. "If I can't blow it, I can shove it, hee, hee, hee."
"What about the other thing between your legs, under all those bandages?"
"I got a little French fried, but doctor says it gonna be O.K. jus' be careful where I put it for sometime."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A crowd was gathered on the corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark's Place a few paces up from Gem's Spa. Four sour-faced cops were holding the people back from a seven foot wide gash in the ground. The sidewalk had buckled. It was twilight. Every other automobile had its headlights on. An eyelash of sunlight hovered momentarily above the high-rise apartments west of Sixth Avenue, turning their windows bronze and their brick walls orange. I worked my way between a gaggle of teeny-boppers to the lip of the hole. There, in the opening, among the cement and debris, was the body of a fish. It was four feet long, weighed thirty pounds or more, silver-blue like moonlight on water.
A girl next to me leaned over the hole. When she saw the fish she opened her mouth to emit a weird gurgling laugh. "How the fuck did that get there?" she asked no one in particular, her voice thick with incredulity.
"Is it real?" questioned a hulking black guy dressed in a brown tweed suit. "God damn if it don't remind me of a scene in one of those Thirties' novels where someone had a life-sized rubber horse in their swimming pool. Is it real?" he asked again.
A sunbaked little Puerto Rican man the color of pistachio nuts leaned over the hole, wrinkled his face with astonishment, cried "Madre mia" and crossed himself.
The cops were glancing narrow and suspicious at the gathering press of spectators. One of them, a beefy blue-eyed sergeant, cornered the patrolman nearest me and asked him if he saw who dumped the fish in the hole.
"Nobody dumped it there, Sarge. Me and my partner was standing right across the street there when the street caved in. It just busted open, just like that and the fish was there..."
A dark-skinned Mexican boy with shoulder length black hair and the word LUV printed with calamine lotion on his forehead corroborated the patrolman's account.
"Man, that's the way it was. That motherfucking fish was there."
But the Sergeant, suspecting some practical joke in the works, didn't buy it. He wagged his head in mock belief. "Oh, sure," he said. "It swam this far upstream all by itself."
Traffic was backed up to Third Avenue, cars slowing down to try to see what was happening. Six young gypsy kids passed among the spectators foisting fifty cent paper flowers, stuffing them in lapels, button holes, belt loops. An old wino dipped his hand into a brown paper bag and removed a three-quarters full bottle of wine which promptly slipped from his shaking fingers and broke on the sidewalk. He watched the wine spread under his battered Salvation Army shoes, then picked up all the glass fragments, wrapped them in what was left of the paper bag, and conscientiously threw it in a waste-basket.
The crowd was getting larger and the cops were having a difficult time keeping them on the sidewalk. A girl with long dark hair, earth-brown enigmatic eyes, and breasts that swam under her dress like playful dolphins, glided next to me. "Isn't it beautiful," she whispered, looking at the fish. I gave her my hand so she could lean over for a better view. "What kind of fish is it?" she asked. "Do you know?"
All the twilight colors swam in her eyes, all the mosaics of street and car lights glimmered there.
Her name was Cheryl. She lived nearby in a walk-up apartment, with two kittens, one named Bird and one named Voice. We made love on a lumpy double bed while the cats sniffed my feet. Her body was full and womanly, lush and warm, mysterious as a forest, satisfying as a green abundant valley. We made it three times, and then, because it was stuffy in the little apartment, we went outside and walked around.
"If we were in the country," she smiled, "we could make love under the stars."
"I bet we can make it under the stars right here in the city." And the idea excited me. Why not? Not only outside, but in other public places. Cheryl said we'd get arrested.
"Bet we could fuck in St. Mark's churchyard," I said. We scouted it and found there were areas of shade that would hide us from the street and from people in the nearby apartment buildings.
"If anyone catches us," I said, "they will probably be from the church, and hip. Want to try?"
She did. We waited until one a.m. then found an open gate on Eleventh Street. Inside, our feet padding on earth, we moved quickly to the shadow of a tree. The ground was dry and hard. She stepped out of her panties and lay down. I opened my pants, then dropped between her legs. Two automobiles swooped up the street, headlights carving away sections of our shadow, momentarily illuminating us. A window slammed shut. Somebody far away cursed: "Take the fuckin' paper and..."
My cock was thriving in the danger, stiffening. I burrowed it into her vagina, felt moist excitement waiting for it there. Her legs came around my hips and I lunged swiftly, deep as I could. I felt the chalky dirt under my palms, the smell of cut grass, heard a twisted radio dial spin a garble of music and voices. Cheryl's fingers buried in my hair, guided my face to her lips. We kissed, my tongue counterpointing her mouth with rhythms from my cock. A dull thud of footsteps sounded off to the right: a heavy-footed man walking his dog. Our breaths got louder, camouflaged by a long-distance van in second gear. My testicles tightened, chills tingled my spine. Her sweet sucking mouth groaned into mine. An explosion of sperm under pressure from my cock shot into the welter of her orgasm.
The next night, we wanted to make it in one of the doorways of Klein's department store, but the street was too busy, and Union Square Park was crowded with drunks and cops. So we walked down to Irving Place, which was quiet, until we found what I thought was an appropriate address: an office doorway-69 Irving Place. I had a jacket with me. I folded and placed it on the ground, sat on it. Cheryl bent beside me, extracted my cock and squeezed till it hardened. Then she climbed onto it, her cunt hot with expectation, pneumatically settling down. I could see our dark reflections in the twin glass doors alongside us, the veil of our shadows on the ground. I wriggled my ass side to side, twisting her hips with my hands, kissing her throat and her ear. We fucked for twelve minutes and nobody came but us.
One afternoon we fucked in the last car of an "A" Subway Train on the way up to the Cloisters, between Fifty-ninth and 125th Street, which is a six and a half minute nonstop ride. Cheryl held onto a pole, bending forward, and I flipped up her skirt and entered from behind. It was fun trying to keep our balance while the train rocked and jumped, watching the local stations blur past, occasional passengers on the platforms uncomprehendingly catching a glance of our jostling bodies.
Some places were real easy: the East River Drive and Riverside Drive areas; under the George Washington Bridge; the Cloisters and Central Park. Some places were impossible: the observation tower of the Empire State Building; United Nations Plaza; the Statue of Liberty. Once we fucked in a telephone booth in the arcade of the NBC Building while three people waited impatiently to make a call. My back was to them, blocking their view, and Cheryl pretended to carry on a conversation with an imaginary friend, the most unusual expressions imaginable on her face. Another time, an old Italian woman caught us fucking on the staircase of a tenement building on
Carmine Street. We were halfway up the stairs when we heard her footsteps above us. We froze, Cheryl's legs tied around my waist, and waited. "Scuse me," she said and noncommittally stepped over us, continuing on her way.
Lotus was living in my apartment on Twentieth Street but I was spending all my time in Cheryl's apartment on the East Side. It was luck that made me run into Smith only a day after he returned to the city. I saw him coming out of Sindouri's, a gift shop on Second Avenue. There was a tube of incense tucked under his arm. He looked tanned and anxious.
"What's the matter, Smith? You look rattled?"
"I've been having this same dream for a week, Jyros. A bad dream, and I thought I better come back and unravel it."
Smith's dream: He is on a narrow winding dirt road. Blocking his path is a burlesque Sphinx, a cartoon monster with three heads. The heads are caricatures. The first head is thin and flat, like a coin. On one side, his mother's profile; on the other side, his father's profile. The second head belongs to Eddie Bonzo. It has teeth like razor blades, and grins. Smith looks at the third head. It is a mirror that reflects nothing. He tries to run. But his crippled leg gets heavier and heavier, as if it's made of iron and there's a powerful magnet anchoring him to the earth. Smith strains and pulls, tries to get away. He's sweating, scared. Jaws lock across his waist. One of the heads, he can't see which, has him. He feels teeth in his spine. Next thing, he's alongside the road on his belly trying to pull himself under a clutch of bushes there. His legs won't work, paralyzed; he's pulling himself along with his hands. Flies swarm around him. He tries to brush them away.
Then he wakes up.
"The same dream, for a week, Jyros. Every night."
"It's only a dream," I soothed him. "Don't worry so much about it. Your breakup with Myrtle and the hassle with your family. Don't worry about it."
But Smith snapped his head, dismissing my penny interpretation. We had walked over to the Gramophone, a record store, and were half-heartedly flipping through a stack of LP's. A Dylan tune was booming from a speaker over our heads, and a fifteen-year-old girl with more bells than a fleet of Good Humor trucks was shimmying to the beat. Smith asked me a question but T couldn't hear him so we went outside.
"Did I ever tell you how my leg got fucked-up?" he repeated.
"No. I thought you were born that way."
"My mother did it to me. I was young, four years old. It was in the spring. I had taken out my electric trains and was playing with them. My mother tripped over them. I don't remember exactly what happened after that except, to punish me, or to scare me, she dangled me out the window, holding onto my wrists. I don't know if I slipped or she dropped me. All I remember is the eyes. Her eyes, getting larger instead of smaller as I fell away. I landed on the driveway and smashed my leg. It never healed right. And I dreamed it. . . "
"What do you mean you dreamed it?"
"A couple of days before it happened, I dreamed it. A dream where I was on a railroad train going over a trestle. The engineer was a woman and she pushed me out of the train. I woke up crying."
Hair prickled at the nape of my neck. We were crossing Broadway, walking west. On the other side of the street a girl was riding piggyback on the shoulders of her boyfriend. They both wore Indian beads and buckskin, and looked like a human to-tempole. The girl was challenging another couple to mount up for a joust. Two pigeons fluttered above our heads and swooped to rest on a building lintel. A jet plane chattered far away, invisible to our line of sight. I wanted somehow to reassure Smith, tell him again that it was only a dream and couldn't hurt him-but it would have sounded shallow and untrue. Dreams are eyes. Eyes that can see around corners. Eyes that can deceive you if you are not wise and honest.
"What are you going to do?" I asked him.
"I'm going to talk to Teresa."
Teresa was a blind girl Smith knew, a sensitive who could read palms by touch, and talk with spirits. Smith once took me to visit her and she knew what month I was born, how many in my family, the color of my eyes, and how much money I had in my pocket. Smith said she could have made a lot of money giving private readings, but she refused to accept gifts for prophecy, afraid the talent would be lost. Instead she had a married "friend" who took care of her expenses.
Smith went to see Teresa and I went to see Cheryl.
Cheryl had a present for me. It was a flamboyant cowboy hat with a large drooping violet plume in its brim. I snuggled the hat on my head: a perfect fit. I have a passion for hats. Hats are mystical, they can change your luck. We took a long walk over to Sheridan Square so I could see what vibrations I picked up walking under it. On the way back I spotted an old childhood friend I hadn't seen for five years. His name was Howard, and he seemed a little uneasy at my appearance.
He was dressed in a seersucker jacket, a rumpled dark blue tie, and light blue shirt. His shoes were polished. His hair was neatly parted on one side, the swirl of a pompadour flopping in pseudo-nonchalance down his forehead. I was glad to see him, and told him what I had been doing since I last saw him-about the book I was writing. I could see he was having difficulty concentrating on what I said. His eyes were jerkily zigzagging from my sandals to my hat, to Cheryl's braless chest. He had a petulant, insulted look on his face, as if our appearance was a personal affront directed at him.
When I finished describing why I had quit my job and what my life was like, how different from what it had been, I paused to wait for his reaction.
"So you turned into a ass, a beatnik, a hippie. Who would of thought it..."
I felt myself blush with embarrassment, not at being called a ass, but that he would interpret it that way. Cheryl frowned at him and made a sour mouth. He set his face in a stubborn scowl, stiffened his shoulders, and brusquely said goodbye, walked away.
Two days later I was trying to splice a new plug on my radio when Smith called me from the backyard. I went out on the fire escape and climbed down the ladder.
"We're leaving," he said.
"Who's leaving?"
"Me and Myrtle. I bought a used station wagon and we're going away. Come in and I'll tell you what happened."
Inside, Myrtle was packing things into suitcases. She looked terrible, worse than the last time, hollow as a shipwreck, bones poking through translucent skin, eyes like caves, lips chalky, bloodless.
"They want to put me away," Smith told me in a voice ragged as a jig saw.
"Who wants to put you away?"
"My father ... my mother too. Lock me up in an institution, a private sanitarium."
"What for? You're not sick or crazy. How could they do that?" But I knew how they could-I heard a similar story, a girl named Mary from Detroit whose father was a vice president of General Motors. Her mother had come to New York to convince her to come back to Detroit. But someone told the girl that her family was planning to commit her. had the papers all ready, and she got away from her mother, stayed away from her.
Smith received his information from Teresa.
"We got stoned on mescaline," he told me. "And Teresa had these ivory cubes, like dice, three of them. They had pictures on them, like Tarot pictures, and she threw them and felt with her fingers what each picture was. The dice told her my family was going to commit me. That they had our family doctor sign a statement that I'm disturbed. And my father's friend, Judge Karp, who's known me all my life, he's ready to validate the papers."
I didn't want to believe it. "Why would they do it?"
Smith rolled his shoulders and gave a melancholy smile. "He thinks I'm a junkie, a 'narcotics peddler.' And he's afraid I'll get arrested. He doesn't want that kind of publicity. He thinks a year or two in the nut-house will cure me. That's where his head is at. That's how he thinks."
"Listen, Smith, I don't want to sound skeptical, but you and Teresa were both on mescaline. Maybe your judgment was somewhere else."
Smith gave his head a negative jiggle. "No, no. There's more-proof. Teresa saw the name of the Sanitarium. I had her call up my mother and pretend she was the receptionist there, say she was checking to see if there were any changes or further instructions. My mother answered, no, everything was as planned and they would have me there this weekend."
"It's all true, Jyros," Myrtle said, pausing over a packed suitcase. "I saw the papers..."
"Yeah, but don't you have to sign them? You're his legal wife. Don't you have to sign them?"
"I did..." she said, "I did sign them."
I looked at Smith for confirmation. "They made her, Jyros." He anxiously squeezed his hands together. "The Bonzos did, those cocksuckers. See how she looks? They hooked her on scag ... When Eddie found out that my father wanted to put me away, he made Myrtle sign the papers ... Eddie wants to marry her. I don't know why, it's fucked up. But he has this thing about her."
"Yeah, some thing, shooting her full of heroin."
"That's why we have to get away, and quick. Before my family or the Bonzos find out."
"Where are you going to go?"
"Somewhere ... I don't know exactly. Out of the country, Mexico or Canada. My father has too many 'friends' coast to coast ... Somewhere they can't find me, and where Myrtle can get straight...."
There was a knock at the door. Smith and Myrtle jumped. It was only Lotus. She looked at the suitcases and asked if they were splitting. Smith nodded, and Lotus asked if they had room for her.
"The city's getting me uptight," she explained, looking more at Myrtle than at Smith.
"There's room," Myrtle said, snapping a buckle.
Lotus went upstairs, returning shortly with a small bundle of clothing-as little as she had when she moved in. Before I knew it, all three were waving goodbye and then the station wagon turned a corner, gone.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Do you believe in ghosts? Cheryl and I saw one. It was in September. We were walking together one evening, complaining about the chill in the air and the excessive noise from cars and trucks that tore at our sleep like wolves. We were on Second Street, in front of the old Courthouse. There was a cemetery across the way-The Marble Cemetery. Around it, a high metal fence. Inside, dark black shadows, and trees-alders, poplars, cypress. Hovering above it on three sides, apartment buildings. The gate was locked.
"Do you want to make it out of doors one more time before it gets too cold?" I asked Cheryl. "In the cemetery?"
"Sure, why not. It looks peaceful. I'm not afraid of ghosts, are you?"
"I don't know-I don't think so. How are we going to get in?"
The fence was eight feet high. There was a trio of garbage cans adjacent to one of the buildings and I made a two-step pyramid out of them, scrambled over the fence, and dropped inside. The ground was spongy under my feet. Cheryl, a tomboy at one time no doubt, swung easily over the fence and I helped her down.
Inside, under the trees, it was another world. The graveyard shadows absorbed sound as well as light, swallowed the city's noises. A bird rustled in the leaves above us, and we both startled, then laughed quietly at our nervousness. She took my arm and we crept deeper into the shadows. Gravestones loomed about us, like fingers reaching out of the ground.
"What are we looking for?" Cheryl whispered.
"Someplace flat and quiet ... there ... over there I think" I pointed toward a wide flat grave very close to an alder tree. We stopped at the gravestone but it was too dark to read the inscription.
Cheryl lay down on the grave and I climbed over her. I knew I shouldn't be, but I was a little afraid, tense, and I couldn't get an erection. But Cheryl hugged me, kissed me, stroked her hands under my shirt and into my pants. The warmth of her body relaxed me and soon I grew hard enough to enter her. We began to move together.
Suddenly a vortex of air swirled about us, and a form materialized-a woman, translucent, wavering like a heat mirage. It was a shock to see her and my cock began to droop. As it shrunk, the ghost began to dissolve.
"Keep yourself hard," Cheryl said. "I think that's what will keep her here ... the energy of your erection."
I thrust with my hips until my cock expanded again, and the ghost refocused. She was naked. I hadn't expected that. Every ghost I ever saw in movies or books had been clothed. Cheryl was squeezing her legs together kneading my cock. Both of us were watching the ghost. It took a tentative step towards us, but seemed to float rather than walk. I expected fear to engulf me, but I was calm: the situation was so improbable that my mind refused to fear it. I could see, through the ghost's face, the heavy sway of tree branches, the etched outline of leaves.
Cheryl wiggled her hips and I responded with a series of peppery lunges. The ghost lay down alongside us, her hand resting on my arm. I felt nothing, as if a motion picture image had been projected on me. Then the ghost began to pantomime our sex act, thrusting its hips, wriggling its breasts. It was provocative and I had to slow my hips to keep from coming. The ghost slowed too.
My palms were against the ground. I felt the planet like a buoy in the seas of space float under me. We are not on solid ground, I remember thinking. Space displaced the planet. And the planet displaced me. What did the ghost displace, and what displaced it? Was it a chain? I felt my groin tighten, and started to pick up speed for the orgasm. When my sperm shot into Cheryl's body, the ghost's vagina clouded, became opaque, like a cloud of milk in water. For a moment, her erogenous zones darkened like smoked glass, and I thought I heard a wispy sigh-or was it only the breeze?
The ghost floated above us. The stars began to appear through her, and slowly, like a soap bubble, she rose then disappeared.
The next week, late on a Saturday afternoon, I took an acid trip with a friend. His name was Lew; it was his first trip. We were in my apartment on Twentieth Street. Cheryl was in the kitchen finishing the dishes. I waited until I thought Lew's trip was going to be good, then I dropped my own tablet. Soon the table I was sitting at became translucent and the walls puckered like boiling pudding. We were listening to Donovan's Sunshine Superman-the acid anthem.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Footsteps on the stairs.
Blam. Blam. Blam.
Someone knocking at the door.
Don't be afraid, the helmsman of the ship that was my mind told the oarsmen. It's only someone at the door. A common phenomenon. Someone you know. Open up and let them in.
Fighting the sway of the floor, I walked my sea legs to the door, and opened it. A party of four. Eddie Bonzo, his face like polished stone. Behind him, in elongated perspective, Dino, and Mary Night, and a hulking pale-skinned thick-shouldered man who looked like a World War Two submarine captain-stiff, dutiful, competent.
The shadows tightened and twisted from the corners, and the candle flames stood straight as spear heads; a dead calm filled the room, as if all air currents had ceased.
They walked past me. My mind balked, and I don't know what happened for the first fifteen minutes. I was dizzy, disoriented, as if I was spinning around in a whirlpool. When I managed to regain my bearing, the gloomy impenetrable caves of Eddie's eyes were on me. My eyes were registering in sextuplet: Eddie had 12 feet and 6 necks. His voice was like the yelp of a rabid dog.
"I eat dolphins," I thought he said, and got very indignant, rising to my unsteady feet, shouting.
Dino gurgled at me, "Sit down, schmuck. You don't know what's going on. You're on a trip and don't know what you're hearing..." And I didn't know for sure.
But I felt. And I worried. They would try and mess my head up. I was sure of that. And Lew's head too. His first trip. Less able to cope than I.
"Learn your role here," Dino was saying to Cheryl. Was his voice threatening? I couldn't judge. There were splinters of anxiety in my spine.
Cheryl was sitting next to me on the sofa. "They're putting you on a bad trip," she whispered soothingly. "And Lew too. Why don't you tell them to go. If you want, I'll tell them to go."
But it wasn't that simple. On acid it can get abstruse. I was afraid to ask them to go. Afraid they would say no; afraid they would beat me up, beat up Cheryl, beat up Lew.
"I train German Shepherds," the submarine captain said, or did he?
"I wanted to fuck Eddie," Mary Night hissed in my ear, "but he would only fuck Myrtle."
"Pain is good for you," Dino was saying. "You have to learn how to overcome it. Turn pain into pleasure and you overcome it. That is the highest form of human achievement. Something mankind has searched for all its existence on this planet. Pain is good for you. You acquire a taste for it, slowly, like good wine..."
"Tell them to leave," Cheryl said again. "Do you want them to do this to you?"
Did I? Was I being masochistic? Double-triple-infinity-think. Waves of self-doubt swamped the decks. The helmsman got angry at her.
Help, don't drag our oars, he screamed. You're supposed to be on our side.
Yeah, but maybe she's right, the oarsmen yelled. Let's get the hell away before we all get drowned.
But I can't just run, the helmsman said.
You're outvoted, the oarsmen said. Take Cheryl and Lew with you and get out of here.
Just give them the apartment? They'll take everything and either break it up or steal it. My typewriter and my manuscripts ... Mary will probably take back the box.
What's more important, your sanity or your possessions?
"You're a stupid little cunt," someone said to Cheryl.
Go, go, go, go! the oarsmen were clamoring, threatening mutiny.
I have an idea, the helmsman said. It's a little complicated....
"That's crazy," Cheryl said after I told her.
"Please don't ask me any questions, just do it, I'm crazy all right, acid-crazy. Call him up, then we'll get out of here, me, you and Lew."
I had her call Spike Altman. It was a master plan, a mobile of logic. Spike didn't use drugs. He was a very straight-looking person, conservative and law abiding. That's the way he looked, and that was his reputation. Straight to offset freaky. Woman and children on board, and a Guardian to watch the castle. Acid-ego-chess. Cheryl got Spike on the phone and I don't know what she told him but twenty minutes later he knocked at the door. He was wearing a bright red sport shirt.
"It's the Canadian Mounties," I giggled hysterically, clasping him affectionately around the shoulders. I took him aside, and, as best I could, explained that I wanted him to guard my home.
At first, Spike gave me an angry scowling frown: he thought he was being put on, used, made to look silly. Cheryl told him I was on a trip, that it was important, and we would tell him all about it later. Then she gathered Lew from the sofa and we headed for the door.
"Hey, where are you going?" Eddie shouted after us.
"For a quick sail around the bay," I said over my shoulder.
Freedom, a taxi ride to Lew's place, Cheryl-fragile as an eggshell under my arm-and the rest of the night in relative safety. I was hung-over and worn out the next day. Cheryl and I had slept on the couch. Lew stayed up most of the night monitoring his favorite records. He enjoyed his trip, said he hardly was bothered by the people at my apartment.
"I didn't listen to them-I was too busy listening to my own inside voice."
I wasn't anxious to go back to Twentieth Street, afraid what I would find. But when I did, things weren't so bad. Spike was asleep on the couch. After a quick inventory all that I found missing were two record albums.
It was a long week before I got myself back together from the unpleasant after-effects of the trip. I was alternately nervous, then lethargic, and didn't get anything accomplished. I had been working on a story but felt no urge to finish it-almost threw it away.
The phone rang early on a Sunday morning. A collect long distance call from Los Angeles. It was Lotus.
"Jyros?"
"Yeah-what's wrong."
"Smith and Myrtle are dead..." Pause.
"What happened?"
"An automobile crash ... They went down to Mexico and left me here with some people in L.A. Smith had this telephone number in his pocket, and the American Embassy called up. They want to know where to ship the bodies..."
"You're sure? That it was them?"
"Yes. She described them, the lady from the Embassy."
"Jesus ... Tell me again, how did it happen?"
"Their car turned over. It was some narrow road in the country I think. She didn't tell me much after she found out I wasn't a relative ... They want to know where to ship the bodies."
I gave her Smith's family's address.
"Lotus ... Are you sure it was a car accident?"
"That's what the woman said; the car turned over."
I found a notice in the obituary column that week: Newscaster's son, and daughter-in-law, killed during camping trip.
I called up Smith's family to find out where and when the funeral was, but the maid wouldn't tell me, and she wouldn't let me speak to his parents. I don't think I would have attended it anyway, but I would have sent something, flowers or incense.
At first, Smith's death was so remote-long distance and unreal as a television death, separated from a gut reality by a veil of electrons, the continental tangle of cables, wires, transformers, relays-that I felt nothing. My mind knew it, but my nervous system didn't. It was a statistical death: one (I) former downstairs neighbor had permanently vacated his apartment; two (2) people who had shared a certain area of life-space with me were no longer alive; all future questions addressed to them would be in the past tense, a projection bounded by real experiences shared, and fantasy experiences imagined. Information minus emotion equals a death separation, an absence of the archetype, a communication vacuum.
That's how it was at first. I was sorrowless. I walked the streets searching for the subjective, the funereal-but the streets refused to become sepulchral. It's shock, I told myself, the numb protective shock that follows a hurt. But it wasn't shock, and there wasn't sorrow. There was only a free fall of the senses, an anxious drop between information-cerebral and information-visceral that terminated not in a crash of remorse, or sorrow, or melancholy, but a gentle zero-impact let-down. Smith had died and left only a vacuum, and I was uneasy, suspicious of the low emotional dues I was paying.
I tried to write a piece about him, write it out of my system, but I couldn't get anything together, only some self-conscious saccharin prose. Then I got hungry, sense hungry-I wanted to gorge spicy foods, and guzzle wine, and to fuck. Fuck most of all. Feel the vibrant fur of cunt against my cheek, the thick concupiscent taste of cunt mucus in my mouth. I wanted to rub my face in cunt, fill my nasal cavities with its tang, feel the pulse of a clitoris against the flat of my tongue, hear the reassuring moan of a passionate, cock-hungry woman. I wanted to banish my fragile mortality by shoving my cock so deep into the bellies of women that it would displace their tongues.
I was living at Cheryl's; after Lotus called to tell me about Smith I didn't want to stay at Twentieth Street anymore. I called Kenny, the guy who had heard conversations from the walls. He was looking for a cheaper apartment than the one he had, and I told him he could have mine. I met him at Max's to give him the key.
"I'll get the furniture and shit out soon as I find another place."
"You sure you want to give the apartment up?" he asked. "It's a groovy place. You shouldn't let Smith spook you. You didn't have anything to do with him dying."
"I know. I'm not spooked. Just that whatever scene I had there is over now. Time to move somewhere else. Get my ass in gear. I need new information. I think I'll live on the East Side for a while. On the other side of Tompkins Park, Avenue B or C."
"You're going to live over there? It gets me uptight visiting over there. Bad vibes. People getting stabbed, robbed. Why don't you look for something else near here. There are some nice places."
Kenny said he would hold onto my mail until I got a new address. Then he left. A woman and her daughter came into Max's and sat down in a booth next to me. They were tourists, dressed like tourists, sneaking quick tourist looks front and behind. The daughter looked like a high school senior. The mother was about thirty-six, wore demure pearl earrings, and a dress two inches divergent from the current New York hem line. They studied the menu, then studied the back of the waitress' skirt, leaning conspiratorially across the table to whisper something that made the daughter giggle into her hands.
In the booth behind them, three lacy fags were laughing at the tourists.
At the bar, four ex-football playing executives from First National City Bank were laughing at the fags who were laughing at the tourists who were laughing at the waitress. The waitress wasn't laughing. She was pissed-off because she had to work an extra station, because another waitress was home fucking an understudy in Hair.
I wasn't laughing either. I wanted to fuck, and Cheryl was away, and it was fall, whirlpools of litter and dry leaves spinning in doorways. Con Edison hyping gas heat in their ads instead of air conditioning. The slap of shoes on concrete, not the shuffle of sandals. Rapists surveying hallways instead of alleys, stalking sweaters and jackets, not shifts and tops. High school kids out of bushes and into cars for cramped fucking, or in the funky, rat-infested basements of tenement buildings, not sticky, antenna-twisted roofs.
The weather got chilly and a couple of people I knew caught colds.
I caught a touch of satyriasis.
I fucked faces one week, and bodies the next. Fucked the short ones standing and the tall ones squatting. I made it with two teenyboppers who swung from their shower fixture like monkeys.
"King Kong us, King Kong us," they shouted from the tub. We took showers together then went into the bedroom of their broken down mess of a place on Delancey Street, steel wool pads stuffed in mouse holes, plaster from the ceiling on the bed, cold rusty water in the sink, cracked glass in the windows. One of the girls sat her cunt on my face and the other sat her cunt on my cock-treating it as irreverently as a superfluous banana.
I fucked a woman named Barbara who neatly put her hair up in curlers then spread a jar of peanut butter over her breast, her belly, the lips of her cunt. I shoved my tongue into the peanut butter, wished she had preferred raspberry jelly. While we fucked, she took gobs of peanut butter and sucked it from her fingers, moaning more for the taste of it than the shimmy of my penis. It was a bitch to get the peanut butter off.
I fucked a girl named Jackie who reached for me with open arms from her sleep, groaning as I smothered her mouth with mine, moving her hips side to side, while John Wayne's voice on a Late Show Movie from an apartment down the hall growled orders to some mock platoon.
I fucked a girl named Ida who had hands larger than mine, palming the cheeks of my ass like basketballs. There was classical music on the record player and she tried to hold her orgasm until the final movement but I rushed her into it, then put on an Aretha Franklin album and fucked to that.
I was shopping on First Avenue, buying vegetables. A blonde girl next to me was daintly squeezing cucumbers. I bought one for fifteen cents, followed her to her building, then stopped her at the door.
"This cucumber is for you," I said. "I bought it for you."
She looked at me, sternly. "What do you mean."
"You know what I mean. You want it, and me, or not?"
I followed her into her apartment and she removed her dress. "Wash the cucumber in the sink," she instructed, and I did, washed it in warm water. Then she gave me a bottle of cold cream to lubricate the cucumber. It slipped in easy and she groaned. I had trouble holding onto it: her cunt swallowed most, and the cold cream made it difficult to grip. She hadn't bothered to take off her bra, so anxious was she to get that vegetable inside her, and I unhooked it to reveal her small breasts. She was twisting and turning, and cursing under her breath: "Fucking it good, goddamn bitch, fucking it good."
She rolled and twisted from one end of the bed to the other, squeezing her knees and thighs, glossy sweat covering her skin. I stuck a finger up her ass to hold her in one place long enough to get my cock in her mouth.
At the door, when I was ready to go, she said, "Next time get a knobbier cucumber."
I made it with a girl named Margie who was high on grass and told me my cock felt like a whale swimming inside her.
I made it with a girl named Mary Lou and had her wear gloves after the first orgasm because she kept scratching the skin from my back.
I picked up a twenty-two-year-old feminist, a short butch chick with big breasts who wanted to argue. That was in St. Adrians, a quarter of twelve, elbow to elbow at the bar. She pushed her way between me and a thirty-five-year-old black cat named Maurice who was a lab technician. We had been buying each other drinks, trading stories with the bartender when the girl shouldered her way between us.
"Beer," demanded a gravel-voiced feminine imitation of truck driver taciturnity.
The bartender grinned and heartily slammed a stein down in front of her. When she pushed a bill towards him he shook his head, saying: "First drink for chicks tonight is on me."
"Bullshit," the girl snapped. "Don't give me any of that masculine pseudo-generosity. I don't want presents, that's how you keep us under wraps, make us slaves to your image of us." She shoved the bill back at him. "Keep the change," she said smugly.
The bartender rang up sixty-five cents on the register and dropped the change in his "tip" bowl. I leaned around the girl and said to Maurice, "That's the fourth time tonight ... four times he offered a free beer to one of these Women's Liberation chicks, and four times they told him to keep the change. He's going to retire if the Movement continues."
The girl scowled and took a bigger gulp of beer than she could swallow, choking half a mouthful.
"Should of ordered a Pink Lady," Maurice kidded her.
"Or a Bloody Mary," I said. "Depending on what time of the month it is."
"Smart, oh so smart. Fucking male chauvinists, both of you. You wouldn't treat a man this way if he stepped up to the bar."
"Damn right," Maurice said. "A man walked up and pushed between two other men having a conversation without a 'sorry' or a 'beg-your-pardon,' I would kick his tail."
"And a man wouldn't refuse a friendly offer of a beer," I added. "Only some uptight dumb woman with a wooden cunt."
"Cunt, cunt. That's all you men have on your minds. Fucking. Well, that's not where it's at."
"Except for the idiom," the bartender said, handing me another bottle and wiping off the counter with a rag, "she sounds like my mother: all you men have on your minds is dirty things."
Later, Maurice was feeling bad for being so nasty to the girl and tried to be nice to her. But everything he said she countered, a reflex, like a punch-drunk pug. When she went to take a "piss" I told him he was making a mistake.
"You want to make this girl, Maurice? Well don't be nice to her. That's not what she wants. She wants you to step on her. To be a bastard. That way, you reinforce what she needs to believe: that men are rotten. She needs to believe that, otherwise she would have to blame herself for whatever's fucked up in her, and that's not what she wants to do."
"No, man. I think she overdoes it, comes on heavy cause she's afraid of getting stepped on. What you call it? Over-compensation?"
The bartender agreed with Maurice.
But I didn't think so. "She wouldn't stay here and provoke all this abuse unless she wants abuse."
We made a bet. I won ... or maybe I lost ... and ended up with her.
Her apartment: shades of brown and gray. A rough blanket on the bed, no spread. An unsteady metal kitchen table. Three cups, two large plates, one skillet and one sauce pan.
As soon as the door shut behind us and we were alone she nervously sat on a second-hand couch and fiddled with her hair. I moved to turn on the radio and she grabbed my arm.
"Let's get to it. Fuck me." she said.
I took out my cock and stood up. It was limp and I brushed it against her cheek, holding her hair and guiding her mouth towards it.
"Suck it," I ordered, and she complied, mechanically opening her mouth, closing her lips over it. I felt the excitement build, the blood throbbing in my cock. Her lips slackened and then tightened, slackened, tightened, drawing slowly up the shank towards the head, her tongue examining each ridge and swell, her breath heavy through dilated nostrils. I put my fingers against her face, felt the hollow indentation of her cheeks and the hard outline of my cock under them. Her hand was sliding up my legs, then undoing my belt.
"Undress," I told her.
She lay back on the couch and bridged her back to slip her dungarees and panties down. She had a narrow black brush, neat. She had big breasts, swollen aureolas and wide nipples.
"You sure have a woman's tits," I said, grabbing one. She put her hand over mine, pressing hard, grinding her chest into my palm, awkwardly leaning her head for my shaft, nipples growing hard against my hand, tongue playing briefly with the head of my cock. I pushed her back on the couch, hoisted her legs high in the air, held them in that position. My hands tightly gripped the backs of her thighs, one hand prodding between her cunt lips. Her eyes were slits of expectation, mouth half parted, the tip of her tongue moistly sliding across the lower lip.
I ran my fingers down toward her anus, spreading the cheeks of her buttocks; she tensed, chest muscles bunching, stomach tightening. I pushed my middle finger into the anus, then slipped my thumb into her cunt. My free hand found a breast and massaged it.
I withdrew the thumb from her cunt a half inch, and pushed the middle finger in her ass a half inch deeper. Then I pulled the middle finger back and pushed the thumb in it. Her hips picked up the rhythm, thrusting down then up, meeting the fingers, squeezing them.
Her body was still tense, waiting for a rough assault. I pulled my thumb out of her cunt, and, keeping the finger in her ass, I slipped my cock deep into her. She groaned like a creaking door, squeezing her thighs against my ribs.
Her breath was rip-sawing in my ear. She was on her way toward an orgasm. I put my lips alongside her ear:
"Women are beautiful when they fuck like this, when they spread open their legs their cunts and their ass-holes. You're beautiful baby ... and here is ... the only ... present ... I can give you ... in return ... Ah!" And I came, shooting hot sperm into her cunt, lovingly jamming my finger deep into her ass, sighing my contentment. She came too, loud gusty moans. But quickly disentangled herself from me and ran into the bathroom. When she came out, she was cool and abrupt.
"Yeah, well, I got to get some work finished so you'll have to go."
Next evening I saw Linus Foxx on the street, his flute case under his arm, a flayed smile on his face.
"It's true, Dude quit me, ain't playin' piano no more, workin' as a 'promoter' with Eddie Bonzo."
Dude had turned Western Cowboy, herding musicians into the Bonzo Corral, branding the talent and trail-driving them to RCA, Columbia and Electra for slaughter and packaging.
Linus sadly shook his head. "Why that fool nigger want to go and do that? He got to be crazy workin' with Bonzo like that."
Cheryl came back at the end of the week and we went apartment hunting. We found one on Sixth Street between Avenues B and C. It had five rooms, large enough for us to both have some privacy. We moved in on a Sunday, renting a panel truck. Kenny wasn't in the apartment at Twentieth Street. I took what furniture I wanted and left him a note, so he wouldn't think he had been robbed.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Living on the East Side you learn:
To keep away from doorways and alleys at night where hands snake toward your throat. To watch roofs for tossed bricks, cans, bottles. To wait on the stoop before entering your building so strangers can't follow behind and trap you on the stairs (the most common mugging procedure).
To stay away from drunks with .22 pistols tucked under their shirts.
To avoid kids with bicycle chains and automobile antennae in their hands.
To ignore narrow-eyed Union men with the Daily News under their arms and contemptuous sneers on their faces.
To tolerate greedy store keepers with larceny behind their eyes.
One evening near the end of October I took a walk over to Second Avenue. Cheryl came with me. We saw a crowd gathered on the sidewalk between Third and Fourth Streets. A sound truck was parked next to the curb. Standing on top of it was Dr. Bill.
He was speaking to the crowd through a loudspeaker.
"Trust in Jesus. Beware the sins of Vice, Lust, Covetousness."
From the sides of the sound truck two large photos of Dr. Bill glared sternly at all passersby. Assistants handed out leaflets that said:
Dr. Bill's Annual New York Crusade. Come
Join the Fight Against Corruption Madison Square Garden Tonight!
Hundreds of neighborhood residents formed a tight attentive semicircle around the truck, old time East Side middle-class people. But there were clusters of street kids-hippies, students, blacks, dropouts, speak-outs, and shout-outs. Cops were everywhere, watching for trouble.
Dr. Bill had a hypnotic gift for public speech. His amplified voice echoed off buildings, rolled up the avenue, and his finger swept in an arc that indicated us all:
"Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you know it, I know it, we all know it. The country's falling apart. There are riots on the campus, riots in the capitol, riots on the streets. Lawlessness everywhere. And you ask, why is this happening? And I say it's happening because we as a people have turned our backs on Jesus, because we are in a state of sin. Christ is our Fortress. Only by returning to God can we rid ourselves of the cancer that is eating away our country."
Dr. Bill stood straight and tall, an impressive man, well postured, energetic. When he spoke, his blue eyes flashed with certainty, and his hand, like a sword, emphatically sliced sinful dragons from the air.
"Yes. A cancer that is eating away the foundations of our country. A cancer that would have you believe LUST is not a sin. That FORNICATION is not a sin. That COVETOUSNESS is not a sin. These voices are sirens calling you to sail upon an ocean of sin, calling your soul to the rocks, to smash and drown..."
Images of twisted, choking, drowning sailors danced in the shadows of his tongue, their horrible cries echoing from the hollows of his mouth, and, like children at a ghost story marathon, the crowd collectively shuddered, drew tighter around the truck.
"Never in the history of the world has a society survived that allowed their flesh to govern their reason..."
A small dark man who looked like an accountant was standing a few feet from us. He cupped his hands to his lips and shouted back at Dr. Bill: "Not true, not true. Read your history." He had a thin reedy voice that carried surprisingly well and Dr. Bill turned his head in the direction of it.
"But it is true. Read your bible. Read of Sodom and Gomorrah."
"The bible is an unreliable document. Read your history, read your history."
And Dr. Bill smiled. He had his opening. "These, ladies and gentlemen, are the voices that would call us to our doom. We must not listen to these voices, we must not allow our children to listen to these voices. Better to stuff our ears with wax, better to bind shut our eyes than risk God's eternal damnation, than risk God's terrible thunder."
And his amplified voice rumbled with the fear of that thunder. The small dark man began to hop up and down and clap his hands. "Bravo, bravo!" he ridiculed. "God's thunder. That's it. God's thunder. And where does God's thunder come from?" he yelled. "Tell us, Dr. Bill. Where is heaven? Where is Heaven? Where is heaven?" he clapped his hands repeating his question with each clap, and I started to clap my hands too, then a few others, clapping until Dr. Bill answered:
"Heaven is located in our own solar system, probably near the North Star. It's 1660 miles square."
"Yeah?" the little man screamed. "Then how come none of our radio or optical telescopes have discovered it?"
"If God can create an entire universe," Dr. Bill countered, "and create all its complexities, he is certainly capable of obscuring heaven if he wishes ... And because of mankind's lack of faith and respect, probably has done just that..." Then, in an ardent vigorous voice: "Of course no one can scientifically prove the existence of God. But I've felt him, fek his presence in my heart. And I've heard his voice. Not an actual voice, like a radio or television voice, but a voice in my heart. And I trust that voice. I know God does exist. And his word is available to us all. All we have to do is read the Bible."
Someone had handed the little man a rolled up newspaper to use like a megaphone. "Suppose God were to send you another message. One that said that the Bible isn't accurate. That it has been perverted, and not the actual word of God. That the lessons in the Bible are no longer relevant. That God's word is to change, to adapt."
"If God spoke those words to me," Dr. Bill answered with firm certainty, "I would heed him. But God hasn't said that to me. God has continually repeated the same instructions to me. Instructions that demand I teach his philosophies as stated in the good book. And that's what I'll continue to do...."
He turned away from the little man, speaking forcefully into his microphone: "Lust is sinful desire. A form of carnal addiction. Addiction is evil. It turns men to beasts. Makes them slothful, useless. There are many forms of addiction, not only drugs ... Pornography is an addiction. It addicts men's minds to thoughts of lust. And addiction to lust will turn us into beasts. Leave us to the mercy of our enemies. Destroy this country. Enslave us."
"I'm an addict!" a feminine voice behind me floated like a sea gull over the traffic noise. "I'm addicted to happiness. And to air. And to love."
And then the little man's voice was there somewhere although I couldn't see him. "I'm an addict too. I'm addicted to orgasm. I'm an orgasm addict. Who else? Anybody else?"
"I am," a seventeen-year-old boy in a blue shirt answered. "I'm an orgasm addict too. Can't get enough of those orgasms. Hooked for life."
"Orgasm Addict. Orgasm Addict." A chant began to sound from the outer ring of spectators, young kids picking it up, passing it along, louder and louder. "Orgasm Addict. Orgasm Addict. I'm an Orgasm Addict."
Dr. Bill turned up the volume on his amplification system. His electrified voice overpowered the chanters.
"Don't listen to them, to these children of a permissive generation. They would have you believe in an anarchy of law ... God's law and man's law. Man is obliged to submit. There wouldn't be riots and crime in the streets if man submitted to God's law, if we heeded the Bible. The Bible teaches that the policeman is an agent of God. That his authority comes from God as well as from the city and state. And you..." he pointed at a knot of policemen..."You have a tremendous responsibility in this Hour of Anarchy, this Hour of Rebellion against all authority. God's word must be heeded. And I tell you God's word at this hour is..."
"FUCK!" The word, loud, disembodied, rumbled like mild thunder overhead. I looked up and saw the outline of a man. He seemed to be suspended six stories overhead, floating. A series of gasps like New Years' Eve balloons popped from the crowd. An old lady screamed and fainted.
"What is it?" Cheryl asked. "Ts that a man up there?"
I peered carefully, squinted my eyes to make sure. And it was crazy but there was a man walking on a tightrope above us. The rope was tied across the avenue, from roof to roof. He had a portable power megaphone in his hand. He was naked: it was the little man with the reedy voice.
All the undercover policemen in the crowd rushed forward and surrounded Dr. Bill. Some drew their service revolvers. Other policemen were busy speaking into two-way radios. Up on the tightrope, the naked man was keeping his balance, moving back and forth, waving to the crowd. Then he spoke again.
"I've been listening to Dr. Bill, and I'm here to tell you God's true message. The word of God is ... FUCK."
Sirens moaned in the distance and patrol cars appeared. Two hook and ladder fire engines roared around Third Street. A large police van drove up, disgorged twenty cops who immediately began to push us back, clearing a twenty-foot swarth on both sides of the tightrope walker. A number of policemen had climbed to the roofs on each side of the Avenue, and were shouting at the tightrope walker to come off. He ignored them.
A fireman was preparing to turn on the beam of a giant spotlight mounted on his engine, but a police lieutenant advised against it: "The light might blind him, make him fall." Then he conversed with a fire chief who reported it would take a half-hour to rig a net across the Avenue.
The Tightrope Walker was speaking again. "God sent me to give you the word, Dr. Bill. The word is FUCK. I know it sounds ugly to you-offends your ears. But the word is ugly because you made it ugly. Because you made it illegal in your heart. There are no nice words in your language for the sex act. God says that is wrong. God says to enjoy your body. God says to enjoy your body in any way that doesn't intimidate your neighbor's body. Your body is your own. God only wants your love. And that, Dr. Bill, is God's message to you."
Then the man on the tightrope took his free hand and placed it on the soft flower of his cock, squeezing it until it hardened.
Women in the street screamed. Fathers averted the heads of their children, covered their eyes with newspapers and coats. Windows slammed shut. A cop came running from his squad car. He carried a high-powered, infra-scoped rifle. Dropping to one knee, he aimed it at the tightrope walker. But the lieutenant yanked the rifle away.
"What are you doing, dammit!" he roared at the patrolman.
The patrolman's face was livid. His neck puffed. His eyes were bulging. "Sonofabitch, sonofabitch." he ranted. "My mother lives on this block. Sonofabitch. I'll kill the mother-fucker." And he reached for the rifle. But the lieutenant held it away, telling the patrolman they didn't have any legal right to shoot a crazy man just because he was jerking off in the street. The patrolman angrily clenched his fists and walked back to his patrol car.
On the wire, the tightrope walker's fingers nimbly moved over his penis. Cheryl and I were shoved behind a police barricade. Our heads were back, and we watched the ease and grace of his movements. He must have been a professional tightrope walker. I wondered where he got the power megaphone: he was raising it to his lips: "God says come. Come. Come." And he ejaculated. Pearly fluid sprayed out, separated on the breeze like pollen, drifted. A drop sprinkled on my upturned face.
Suddenly the livid patrolman whose mother lived on the block leaped onto the fire truck. He fiddled with a dial. The great searchlight blazed. A powerful concentrated beam of blue-white light speared through the air. For a moment, the tightrope walker was transfixed in the light. Then, as if the beam had body, like a wave of water or a blast of wind, it picked him up and threw him back. He fell, arms spread apart, legs riveted together, like a diver swooping from a platform, gracefully, calmly. And that's how he landed. Flat. Arms extended. Feet together.
Nobody had to be told. He was surely dead.
EPILOGUE
Kenny called to say he had letters for me; mail I had forgotten to collect. There were nine letters, most of them bills. One of them, no return address, had a California postmark. Smith had written it to me the day before he was killed. Jyros, Beautiful here, the ocean and the sky. Met some beautiful people. We left Lotus with them in L.A. and we are on our way down to Mexico. Probably stay there for some time: if I can find a way to earn bread, maybe for good. I took a trip but I couldn't groove on it. I've had enough acid far a while. I think it's a thing you have to go through, then stop. A ritual of some kind that you do, like the Indian kids who used to go out in the woods then get out of their minds with hunger and hallucinate. Also, this is a bad time to trip. A lot of bad vibrations polluting the psychic air, for me anyway. Myrtle too. That last trip we took we went to Disneyland, and what a weird place that is. Everything so controlled, so artificial. It reminded me of my father's Globe. You know the one. Too orderly. Too scientific. I think that globe has something to do with my bad dream...(I still have it). I know it sounds weird and freaky but I was wondering if you could go to my father's house and somehow turn the globe off. It won't be difficult as you think. My father doesn't come home during the week (he has an apartment in the city), and the maid is off on Thursday, she doesn't come back until Friday. And my mother sleeps upstairs. No one would hear you. I've sent you a key to the downstairs door. I know it sounds weird, but do it. O.K.? I'll write you from Mexico and tell you if the dream goes away.
Smith
The key was wrapped in aluminum foil, and there were two flattened sticks of grass with it.
Night. Watching the house from the road. There is a light in his mother's bedroom. I sneak into the house. I can hear his mother moving around upstairs. I go down into the den. The animals are silent. They watch me as I move to the globe. I put my hand on it, and the globe stalls. I can hear its gears slipping: it's that delicate, as easy as holding a record turntable. If I wedge a chair under it the gears will strip. As easy as that. Stop it for a long time.
I look to the animals and their eyes protest. It's their globe too. They don't want me to stop it. I give the globe a spin. Spin it again, faster, twice its original speed. The chronometer registers double time. Everything faster. Quicker. I step back from the globe and it continues at its new speed, doesn't slow down.
A wooden ranch-style fence surrounds the Smith house. I climb onto it, balance myself, try to walk along it-and fall off. But I manage to get up and to walk a little further before I fall again. I try it one more time, turning before I mount. The light in Smith's mother's bedroom goes off, blackening the window. Ahead of me, the waxing moon, silver and moody.
