SOME OF WHAT happened to us, what we did to each other, might have been prevented. But we had gotten aboard a roller coaster, and it was a race for our lives, on a one-way track. Circumstances, the mood of the time, made our explorations seem natural, forecast in all our stars.
Most of them I haven’t seen in years, and wouldn’t care to – except for Anne, that is. I’ve waited for her to come back, to finish the story. Maybe she won’t because it doesn’t have an end, or because neither of us wants it to end.
Our life together was a story we told each other at night, and we were always careful to consider the obligations of plot and character. Anne, especially, watched the dialogue and considered speech patterns, having decided that the nuances of conversation and sound often tell the listener more than a character would ordinarily want to tell. I had the same feeling about faces. We did more than tell each other stories at night, though; we lived our whole lives then, like – vampires. History is made at night, said Frank Borzage.
We met during rehearsals of a play I was doing in a café theater on the East Side. She sat at a table on the side sipping coffee through a straw, and she looked ready to scream. She was with friends, some people I knew slightly and hated. It was obvious she was with them, but not of them. They ignored each other. The play was dingy and amateurish, and I became quite loud in my objections to it; I had the lead, but I had taken it in desperation, looking for anything to rouse me from my lethargy. The actress I was working with missed her cue for the third time and I exploded, cursing her, the director, and the script, which I felt no affinity with.
Something hit me in the middle of the back – the girl at the table had thrown her coffee at me. I stood frozen, feeling the hot liquid run down my back.
“You fucking faggot son-of-a-bitch! You actor! If you weren’t so goddamned illiterate, you could handle that script!” Everyone just looked at her. As quickly as she had flared up, she calmed down, and sank back into her seat. She looked so embarrassed she might have sunk into the floor.
I didn’t say anything; I went to the men’s room and cleaned myself off as well as I could. Then I sat on the toilet and smoked a cigarette. When I got up, I went straight to her table. She got up to join me without a word.
“Come on, let’s take a walk,” I said. It was already dark outside. I hadn’t realized I had been working so long. She had a peculiar gait, like a sailor’s; we walked along, pretending indifference, until we came to an avenue.
“Did I hurt you?” she asked me. “Let me see.” She pushed me in a doorway and slipped her hand around so she could feel my back. Her hand slipped up under my coat and over my buttocks with a man’s urgent touch. “You’re still wet. Come home with me and you can get dried off.” It was practically a command. She took my hand as if it were already a part of her, ready to pull me along if I hesitated.
The building she lived in was one part tenement and two parts gingerbread house. I went galumphing up the stairs behind her, noticing the runs in her stockings. She wore stocking with seams down the back, those clay-colored things my mother used to wear.
Her apartment had its own particular smell, an aromatic combination I have never been able to forget: a hideous incense called Dhoop, marijuana, and an exciting odor of pure, raw sex, mixed with the smell of her cats. She had five of them; the leader was an old gray tom she called Wino, who was missing one eye and any sense of decorum. I learned that it wasn’t unusual for him to leap on guests with his claws out, or to urinate in the middle of the floor and stand there proudly, daring you to rebuke him. I wanted to call him Jean Genet.
She still had my hand. She pulled me in the bedroom, but it was occupied by a young Puerto Rican who was rolling his eyes at the ceiling. As soon as he saw us, he rolled off and staggered out into the other room.
“Sit down and take off your pants.” I sat on the bed and watched her move around. She seemed unconscious of my presence as she took off her clothes. When she was naked in the red light she sat down beside me and, without a word, unbuckled mm belt and pulled my trousers off.
“Don’t be uptight. You’re an actor, aren’t you? Here’s a situation you can play your heart out in.”
“Meaning you?”
“Oh man, don’t be muley! You act like a thickhead. It’s hot in here, take off those damn clothes. I don’t trust anybody in clothes.” I did what she asked. My scrotum was tight and wrinkled, and I felt like washing my feet. I noticed that hers were black. Her breasts were small and sharp, the nipples bloodred. She noticed me looking at them.
“Touch. Go on. Then maybe you’ll feel better,” she said dispassionately. I dragged my underwear over my crotch and sat back, away from her. “What’s the matter? Is my hostility showing?” she asked.
“Turn it off,” I said.
“Turn what off?”
“Whatever the fuck this game is. What’s your name, anyway?”
“Anne, sometimes.”
“Well, Anne, what’s the game? I thought you hated me. It was a bad script.”
“If you thought that, you wouldn’t have come home with me. You’re out in the cold. I could tell that when I first saw you.”
“Shit,” I said, but I was getting hot. She sat cross-legged on the bed in front of me, little-girlish and wise. She was eighteen then.
“You want to touch me, but you’re uptight. Look at this.” She put her finger in her mouth and moistened it, and then rubbed it between her legs, spreading them wide before me. It was a house of love, red and dark, meaty even in that position. She took my hand again, and put it on her. My finger went up her like a hook, squishing the wet lips that sucked on it. She moved, and groaned.
“That’s it. That’s it. Keep going.”
When my finger was tired, I pulled it out; there was a faint wet pop, and she grabbed my hand, trying to put it back in. “Don’t stop now, I’ll turn over. Maybe you’ll like that better.” She turned over, presenting her boy’s buttocks to my hand. “Go ahead, man, do it.”
I ran my fingers along her crack until I came to that tight, smooth hole. It felt rubbery, and when I cautiously put the tip of my finger in, it was like being bitten.
“All the way,” she breathed. I pushed it farther in and tried to move it in and out, like a prick. She was so tight that when I pulled it out, part of her flesh came out with it. I worked on her until she came. I was hard as hot iron. She touched the head of my prick with hot fingers, putting her fingernail into the slit, and I came all over the sheets – pain mixed with relief. I shuddered.
When I was done, she ran her fingers through it. She told me it was like syrup.
We lay down beside each other, exhausted. I saw her smile, and then she reached out and drew the corners of my mouth up. We talked about the night, pulling up the shade beside the bed. If I looked up at the right angle, I could make out the moon, which was full.
“We’re okay, aren’t we?” she asked, meaning us together. I spit into the air shaft, and came back to earth. I wanted to hurt her when I thought about the coffee and her lousy play. What we think never comes entirely to the top. “It was a lousy play,” was all I said. I felt nervous; my skin began to crawl, and I rubbed my back against the sheet. I turned over on my stomach and let her scratch my back, softly, with her ragged fingernails.
She began to hum in my ear, a soft, purring music that made my hair curl.
“I’m going to dress you up, and tie strings to you, and let you be my actor, when I don’t feel like doing anything. And at night, when I want to play with you, I’ll blow you up and make you pop.” It was a lascivious promise, and I groaned. She brought out marijuana and we shared one joint, sprinkled with hashish, smoking like assassins. I drifted in and out of her monologue: “I want to see your insides. I think I’ll have to do that sometimes, just so I’ll feel safe it’s not metal and machinery you’ve got in there. I want to drink you like milk, suck your blood through a straw.”
It had gone too far, or it hadn’t gone far enough; I had to hurt her or she would begin to hurt me. Like Jessie in Memphis, and Arabella in Berkeley, she was capable of that. Jessie and Arabella. I jerked away from her and landed a smack on her ear. She made noises, and I kicked her in the belly with my naked foot a couple of times. She shut up and lay back gasping, regarding me with shining eyes. I explained to her about Jessie and Arabella as quietly as I could. She promised to understand.
We slept a good night through, and I woke up with a hot belly because the sun, bouncing off the other windows in the air shaft, was hitting my navel. She was still asleep, and her feet stank anyway, so I got up to go off to the toilet. My urethra was stopped up with dried semen, and the piss went all over the seat, in rainbow patterns. I tore off some toilet paper and tried to dry it off, and when I was done, I dipped my fingers in the cold water in the bowl to get rid of the paper. I had an urge to plunge my arm in up to the elbow but thought better of the idea.
She was awake when I got back. I wanted to hit her again, but I thought I’d give her a chance to wake up first, so I kissed her neck and blew in her ear until she began to hum. She asked if I was hungry and announced she was going to fix breakfast. I realized I was hungry. I’d have to postpone things for a while, but I did manage to step on her bare foot with my boot as she was getting out of bed. She grabbed it and hopped around the room, yelling her head off. She took it as an accident though, and even smiled at my feigned embarrassment.
After breakfast we lazed around in the living room, listening to Jimmy Reed and Otis Redding. The knocking on the door started at about eleven, and kept shaking the wood all day, until about eight. I felt like the invisible man, watching Anne dole out the little bags to the faithful. I figured she had about two hundred bucks on her by the time she closed up shop. I aimed to have some of it to spend on myself. There was still plenty of the merchandise around. I sat in a big overstuffed chair she had found on the street, while she sat at the kitchen table. She had a lot of old news magazines around, and there was a television set in the corner, covered with a bamboo screen.
“You have a lot of friends,” I said to her when the knocking at the door had stopped. She just smiled and went into the bedroom. She put on a pair of blue jeans and a turtleneck sweater.
“I want some of that,” I told her, sitting on the bed beside her. Without a word she handed over the whole roll of bills to me.
“Let’s go out and spend it on the party tonight,” she said.
Her customers were at the party. She had written out the script for them, she told me. They played their parts well, I thought. She stayed at my side from the beginning, shoving me into one person’s face after another, showing off her prize catch. A guy I didn’t like right away was Lionel. We toed off as soon as she introduced us. With some people, things are just that way. He was a grizzly bear, with an almost bald head, but he dressed in velvet and carried a cane with a sword in it.
Anne introduced me as her lover. Everyone applauded and went back to their roles. I guess they liked my looks, because every now and then one of them would come and try me out. It was a case of discussing Uccello, or of flexing my biceps. Some of the women wanted to dance, and Anne waited, sullenly, I thought, while we danced. The third dance a black man dressed in a white turtleneck took my arm. I thought, what the hell, and began moving him around the floor. His body was hard, but light, and he followed as well as a woman, without draping himself all over me. I found myself enjoying the sensation of having his hardness against me, of letting go and imagining myself a woman. It had a physical correspondence; my face began to sag into a smile, all the hard lines softened, and I even think I was blushing. I felt my cock growing hard. I looked at his face, but it revealed nothing. He was completely cool. I would not conceal what had happened, and even pressed into him a little. There was no answering response.
The room was already dark. Couples sat in the shade to bullshit each other, while others danced, in all kinds of arrangements. I looked for Anne – why, I can’t imagine. Approval? But I didn’t see her. “Don’t forget me, baby,” my partner said, finally making a move. We pressed together again, and began to talk:
“What’s your name?” I asked, playing a game.
“Scott,” he answered.
“Well, Scott, you’re a pretty boy.”
“Oh no, I’m a pretty black boy,” he lisped. I could feel the muscles in his arms tensing as he talked to me. Was he about to knee me? Or haul me into the bathroom? I found myself thinking the way a woman must: What if he does this, or that – how will I respond? (What if his black hand brushes my buttocks, what if he starts ramming his tool into me?)
I was beginning to think I wanted him to do something when I heard Anne calling for me. He grabbed my hand, but I left him in the middle of a dance and went off to her. She wanted me to meet someone, another actor, she explained. His name was Daniel; he stood over six feet tall and had the long, carved face of a character actor playing a depraved Jesuit. A sheaf of blond hair fell over his collar. It was obvious she liked him, because she had her hand in his big garrison belt, holding him to her. He was giggling through his nose.
“Anne’s been talking about you. Says you came all over the sheets. They’re stiff now.” Soon after this ridiculous exchange they went off into the bathroom together. The bedroom was already occupied. From across the room Scott was fixing me with an appealing eye, but I looked around for a woman. They all looked like mannequins in their patterned hose and short skirts, hard as polished nails on a hand.
Before I could make a predatory move at the least of them, a skinny blonde sitting by herself and snapping her fingers to the music, Anne called to me from the bathroom. She was on the toilet, her skirt bunched around her waist, her panties around her knees. Daniel was fingering her as she peed. I sat on the edge of the bathtub as she crinkled up her face, trying to come.
“Do something, too,” she ordered. Reaching out, she unzipped me and pulled out my prick, working at it until it had a will of its own and jerked back.
I thought it was going to bite her hand, the way it started jumping at her. It seemed to have even less self-control that I had exhibited, because it went straight for her face, banging against her cheek. With an eager hand, she guided it into her mouth. The sensation the soft wet paps of her mouth made on its sensitive head caused it to tremble even more violently, until her tongue brought things under control. I stood there watching it slide in and out, stained red from her lipstick, swelling with each caress of her fat tongue. I had to lean on her for support, our intercourse grew so violent. Grasping one of her breasts, I squeezed and played. Daniel merely stood, half-crouched, working his hand between her legs, grinning at me like a satyr. His eyes dared me to say something, but it was impossible for me to speak, my pleasure was so great. Finally she started making little yipping sounds, and tossed her shoulders back and forth; her hand worked at the base of my prick, massaging, pulling the skin, until I exploded in her mouth: literally, exploded. I screamed as she milked the last drop.
After our threesome in the bathroom, a kinship was established. We all sat on a sofa near the front windows while Daniel rolled a joint. The others stayed away from us. I noticed that Scott had found a friend, a little black girl whose head came up to his chest. Already, his hands were in her pants as they danced.
“Isn’t this a nice party?” Anne asked.
A voice started making a speech in my head. It turned out that I wanted to lay claim to Anne.
“Anne,” I said timidly, “it’s a nice party, but I’d rather have you all to myself.” She looked at me and smiled, licking her lips like a cat. “You liked that, didn’t you? But I like Daniel, too. I want him to stay with us.” Daniel looked over at me, taking a stiff drag on the joint in his hand. He winked. We both waited for him to open his mouth.
“You can do what you like, Anne. You can screw yourself, buddy, oh buddy. Me, I’ve got my smoke, I’ll go right along with whatever you want to do. Anything’s cool.” His head went back and he closed his eyes. Anne gave me a look which meant that the subject was closed.
The noise level of the party had reached the ceiling. Some were dancing, others were in the bedroom; Scott had the blonde’s hand in his lap, jerking him off. It was really a peaceful scene. For the first time since I met Anne, I felt bored. Not with her, but with her party.
I thought it best to hint at first: “I think I’ll need a nap pretty soon,” I said, poking a finger into her arm to get her attention.
“Oh, don’t be such a drag. The party is just beginning. Give it a chance, man.” She took my hand, which I thought of as a piece of limp meat, and aroused it by holding it between her knees while she took a puff. Everyone, now, was smoking – there was a big brick of marijuana on a coffee table in the middle of the room from which everyone was drawing. “You haven’t heard about the game, have you?” she asked.
The “game” seemed to be familiar to most of them, because when Anne stood up and clapped her hands, saying, “All right, you freeloaders, it’s time for our little game. You know what to do. Get in line,” everyone lined up in a daisy chain formation – for the most part, men behind women, although there were a few variations. This was called the Magic Dragon. The lights were turned out, and Anne took her place at the head of the Dragon, putting me behind her. She left Daniel on the couch, dozing. With Anne leading the way, my hands on her hips, the line began to snake around the small apartment. As it moved, there were giggles and muttered instructions, but most of all, the sound of clothes being removed, and of sexual contact. Anne shoved her buttocks back against my front, encouraging me to take part. My hands dug into her firm ass, trying to get a good grip, and as they fiddled with her pants, felt them slip away, and then her cool flesh. Behind us, people were slipping to the floor, and shadows were being cast on the ceiling. Anne knelt on the floor and waggled her ass at me. She wanted it dog fashion. So I became Rin Tin Tin. I woofed, took it out, gave it a few encouraging jerks, and mounted her. Her hole was already greasy, but she didn’t want it there; she wriggled and it fell out. Then she placed it against her asshole, and hammered with her behind at my crotch until it began to go in. She was far too tight, so she had to take her hand away, spit on it, and wet me down before I could push in. It felt like claws pinching – the same little animal of the first night – and I started to pound on her back. Her hair waving in my face tickled my nose.
I was beginning to feel like a bareback rider in the circus when someone turned the lights on. I stood up immediately, leaving my mount on the floor, still moving her pelvis up and down. I didn’t mind sopping. I was getting bored with debauchery – anything taken in too large a dose is boring for me. I felt the dry need for conversation. All around me people were fucking, but far from feeling voyeuristic, I stifled a yawn. The only person in the room who didn’t have his genitals exposed was Daniel, so I decided to have a heart-to-heart with him. Making friends of enemies is always challenging. I put my hand on his knee and moved it, trying to make him open his eyes. He cursed, and knocked my hand away:
“Don’t touch me. I can’t stand to be touched, and besides, it’s not sanitary.”
“Give me some of your smoke and we can sit here and laugh at this crew. Look at them down there – they look like dogs in the rosebushes, or cats behind the sofa.”
“So what are you doing up here? You shouldn’t have to be told where your place is.”
“I’m fucking bored, and that’s the truth.”
“But look at Anne. Man, you’ve got a responsibility. She picked you out, you can’t just leave her dry like that. You’ve got to pump it to her.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to, huh?” He moved off the couch and sank it in her almost immediately. I noticed that he tried not to touch her as he did. Some merciful soul turned off the lights again, and I was left sitting in the dark with myself.
I began to feel warm in a very short time, as if the room were fur-lined. My head began to swell, full of helium gas, my ears grew red, and then my eyes began to bug out on long stalks. The room, full of the noise of mating, opened out, telescoping itself into a series of rooms growling and sucking with the same noises. From a long distance, a mouth settled itself on my foot, like stepping into quicksand, and teeth began to grate around my ankles. I pulled them up, but it followed me, a long tongue licking now at my knee. My skin was so sensitized that it hurt – almost. An exquisite irritation that I wanted to continue until I screamed. But I didn’t want to scream and break the spell the bodies in the rooms had created for me. I wanted to hit the mouth, but how to cause the same exquisite pain it was causing me? The problem of reciprocity has always troubled me. I could feel the tongue on my thighs, rough, like a cat’s, warm, and experienced. My genitals, cold, little, used-up utensils, began to expand before the threat of a hot moistness I’d never felt before. I felt myself urging my hips toward the mouth, trying to push my stiff aching flesh against the surface of the tongue, but just as I did that, it withdrew, as if active participation automatically broke the spell.
I lay back sweating, angry at myself, pulling my knees up to my chin to avoid contact with the breathing floor.
I thought about mother in that position. It seems to be about the only position I can stand to think of her in: knees drawn up, sweating, angry (frustrated). I remember her bending over the stove, cleaning it, in one of those long, fairly tight skirts of the forties. Her ass (I’m no longer afraid to say it – mothers have asses that someone has lusted after) was outlined against the skirt – two thin hillocks, like cheap bread, wriggling as she worked. Why did she have two of them? I remember being sure that I had only one, with a hole in it, like a doughnut. So naturally I thought about the crack between the hillocks. In my mind I associated it with the drain in the bathtub. I’m aware now that this is a pretty sophisticated notion, but I never thought of myself as innocent in any religious sense when I was a child. Those were the stinkfinger days, playing around with each other’s behinds, paying little girls to show you their “pussies” (a word we always sniggered at, thinking ourselves incredibly nasty), watching dogs do it, etc. Halcyon days.
After watching her ass, which I was always fascinated with, I would usually go into the bathroom, and sitting on the toilet, stick my finger up my asshole, manipulating it with great delight, until I felt the overwhelming pleasure of feeling my shit, something I had made, start creeping down my own drainage system. How like we are to sewers, and all things that smell . . .
Mother flashed away. Cigarettes were being lighted in the room. In a minute they would all dress and be the same again – I could no longer touch them, or trust them.
A hand grabbed my foot, which I had put back on the floor after my excursion into sensation. It felt dry and prosaic, and I jiggled my leg against it, hoping for the return of sensation. There was a snigger – not a guffaw, but a choked snigger that I recognized as Daniel’s. I froze, waiting for him to make some comment on my reaction.
“What’ve you been doing?” he asked. “Playing it cool all by yourself?” I had decided not to talk with him for a while, so it was easiest just to move away.
“You little pussy, I’m not going to chase you very long. Better come and get it now.” Listening closely, I could hear him rise to his feet, muffling a grunt. I felt like a schoolboy whose most intimate thoughts have been guessed; my cheeks burned, my earlobes were on fire. The sonofabitch, I thought. I waited for him to do something else, wondering what my reaction would be. It occurred to me to play everything by ear (as I had desperately determined to do, because I couldn’t believe in hard-and-fast rules, for every situation was more trouble than it was worth at times.)
He moved in closer. From his breathing and the odor of sweat and sex on his body, I could tell that he had pushed his front very close to my face. I wondered if Anne had put him up to it.
“C’mon, grab it,” he said.
I longed for a knife, but I had to use my hands. My fist hit him in the soft white vegetable of his genitals, and he made a sick sound like air escaping from a balloon. I wish I could have seen the shock in his eyes – the pupils pinpointing, the lids tightly closing. He fell to the floor, gasping for air, whining with pain.
When that happened, the lights came on. They all stood looking at me, staring actually, as if I had interrupted a seance. Daniel was rolling on the ground, soundlessly, so deep was he in his pain. He was probably enjoying it. The rest of them were suffering with him, except for Anne, who came over and sat down next to me. She began to pat me, as if I were the one who had been injured. She smiled; she seemed proud of me.
“All right, the party’s over. Take Daniel home, would you, Scott?”
The play was over. The tired actors began to pack up their makeup and costumes, to rearrange themselves for the trip home. There was that exhausted feeling that hits the company backstage after a particularly trying performance. Some of them came to say good night to Anne. Daniel, helped to his feet by Scott and his new girlfriend, didn’t even look at me.
When they were all gone, Anne said to me: “Daniel once chopped off a man’s hand with a meat cleaver.” She said it without much expression in her voice, but her hand dug into my arm, as if somehow I had struck back at all the forces in the world that plagued her.
When they were gone, when her rooms were empty of everyone but us, she turned off the big lights and we went into her bedroom. There was a red light – amber really – she turned on in a lamp sitting on the floor. When we were lying in bed, she began to pat me, to stroke me like a teddy bear. After she had done that for a long time, she rose to get some baby oil. I stretched out on my belly, stripped down, and she rubbed me all over with cool oil. Relaxation moved in on me in waves. For the first time since I’d met her I felt secure and warm. She wasn’t doing any talking, and I enjoyed that, too. Her hands walked over me, like communicating insects. I felt like voiding my bladder and my bowels, I became so loose.
“What do you feel like doing?” she breathed, when she finally lay beside me, tired.
Crawling up into your belly,” I said.
“You’d never make it; the road is too crooked.” She began to diddle with my ass, puckering the flesh, making holes in it. “Relax. Loosen up.” I did what she said. As soon as I did, she insinuated her finger in my asshole. She had oiled it, too. She began to stir up my bowels, moving her hips beside me excitedly.
That night I lay awake for hours while she slept soundly beside me. I couldn’t make out the moon this time. The curtains rustled because of a slight wind, making an odd shape. I froze in the bed, a cold sweat running down my ribs. When I was five, I had experienced the same unbearable terror.
The events of the past two days and nights had cast a pall over my dull life, a pall like a thin fog. I was sure when I woke up my sight would be even more obscured.