Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  She looks up at Norman. He is transfixed by the sight… absorbed, consumed… leaning forward… His smile curls from amusement to hunger… Hungry he is! He wants some—

  “Oh, shit!” It sounded like something he meant to say under his breath… It was an Oh, shit of excitement. Excitement had so overcome him, this choked croak had become an exclamation forced through a husk of a throat. He certainly was not talking to her… His smile had turned into a pulse… amusement arousal amusement arousal amusement arousal… His eyes were pinned on a couple barely three feet from them—this americano, tall, sandy haired, with an athletic build—this americano was behind a girl BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung THRUST hump THRUST hump THRUST hump hump humping BEHIND her HUMP thung THRUST the turgid crotch of his trunks in her buttocks RUT rut rut rut… so hard, the front of his trunks all but disappeared into that ripe gulley… She was leaning forward to make the gulley wider, causing her bare breasts to hang down… with each THRUST they swung forward THRUST hump THRUST thong thong thong thong they lurched forward and swung back—

  The americanos! Not that Cuban boys are so—but the americanos are… dogs in the park! The thought of a whole deck full of young men and women doing what was so close to the real thing BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung THRUST hump THRUST hump THRUST hump THRUST hump dogs in the park THRUST hump THRUST grind grind grind grinding their distended cocks albeit held down by their trunks into the girls’ crotches GRIND GRIND GRIND… these gringas might as well have been totally naked!… bikinis? Breasts rampant GRINDING. All you can see is the band of the thong bottom BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung barely visible at the hips… otherwise naked girls with guys thrusting humping GRINDING them BEAT thong BEAT thong…

  Getting darker… but light still glowed on the edges of the western horizon—a band of purple backlit by a fading gold. She could barely see any light to the north where Miami was… somewhere… or east and the ocean beyond… but still enough light to make Magdalena think this motley corona of—what?—a thousand boats?—was in the world… enough to make her believe Miami actually was… up there… and the ocean was actually out there… and they really were near a known piece of geography, Elliott Key… even though there was such a jam-up of boats. She had only barely laid eyes on it by looking between boats… and this was Biscayne Bay they were on… She was still able to gaze out over the bay, although the light was getting dimmer and dimmer. There was a party on every boat…

  Great whoops. People were hurrying. People dancing suddenly began hurrying to the rear deck.

  Norman pulled her in that direction.

  “What’s going on?” By now you had to shout to be heard even at close range.

  “I don’t know!” shouted Norman. “But we’ve gotta go see!”

  Magdalena found herself stumbling behind Norman, who held tight to her hand and pulled her along.

  Much excitement on the aft deck. Cell phones were going off. Two of them were programmed with LMFAO’s “I’m Sexy and I Know It” and Pitbull’s “Hey Baby.” The beep beep be-beeps of incoming text messages were going off all over the place.

  A young americano cried out above the general hubbub, “You won’t believe this!”

  BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung—yet now Magdalena could hear it… From down that way, cheers, shouts, two-fingers-in-the-mouth whistles, whoops and woo-woo-woooos—always mockery, the woo-woo-wooo, but this time so very loud. The ruckus was heading toward them like a tide… finally so close, it beat back the sound system… the ruckus and the sound of the speedboats… bearing down—

  The crowd against the rail was so thick, Magdalena couldn’t see a thing. Without a word, Norman clamped his hands on either side of her waist, just below her rib cage, and lifted her straight up until she could put her legs around his neck and dangle them down over his chest like a child… Grumbling from behind, “Hey, you’re rumble rumble rumble rumble!” Norman ignored it. In the next instant—

  —the speedboats… Behind the first, three water-skiers on long towlines… three girls… three girls towed at a furious rate by one speedboat… all three stark naked… three girls without a stitch on, two blondes, one brunette… tall americana bodies! Starved to near perfection!… Reaching the lineup of thirteen tethered boats turned them on… All three took one hand off the towline, turned their upper bodies almost forty-five degrees, and threw their free arms up in the air in a gesture of abandon… tremendous cheering and laughing from every boat in the line… mocking woo-woo-wooooos—but even the mockery was exultant—and deliriously happy—Another speedboat. This one towing—

  —Christ Jesus!—a young man naked as the day he was born—presenting the Columbus Day Regatta… a huge erection… so gorged with blood, it curved upward at a fifteen-degree angle… three naked maidens, with tits rampant!… the god Priapus, the gorged cock of Youth rampant!… all of it lit by the brief domed glow of dusk.

  The cheering from the tethered boats rose up in a primal scream not from the heart but from the groin, feral whoooops, woo-woo-wooooos, hoot hoot hooooots, arrrrghs, ah haaahhs arrrghhHHHock hock hock—that last rut rut roar unmistakably Norman’s…

  “Did you see that? Did you see it, kid? That guy broke every known rule of the central nervous system! No man can endure the taxation water-skiing weighs on his legs, the quadriceps, the hamstrings, the latissimi dorsi, the brachialis—and maintain an erection like that… it can’t happen—but it just did!”

  ::::::Ah, the scientist, the scholarly research analyst, keeps his eyes fixed upon the very outer boundaries of the human animal’s existence.:::::: Magdalena wondered if Norman himself was aware of how often he tried to hide his own sexual excitement behind these thick walls of theory… while even now he scans the bay for one last receding glimpse of the nice young cloven bottoms of the water-ski girls in the sexual water show.

  The show was over, but the americanos, like Norman, were inflamed by lust. Their hands trembled and they had serious trouble trying to text on their smart phones’ tiny keys. Their phones were ringing in a dysphony of “Hips Don’t Lie,” “On the Floor,” “Wild Ones,” Rihanna, Madonna, Shakira, Flo Rida, recorded laughing jags, whistled Brazilian salsas, all of them riddled by the abrupt beep beep beeps and alert alert alerts of incoming TEXTS thung TEXTS thung BEAT thung HUMP thung THRUST thung BEAT thung DANCING thung AGAIN thung the DECK thung DECK thung INFLAMED thung LUST thung LUST WHOOP WHOOP! WOO-WOO!—and all at once todo el mundo is mad to reach another deck… down that way! Norman grabs Magdalena by the forearm and is pulling her, dragging her, into the stampede. Such commotion—

  “Norman! What’s—”

  He didn’t wait for her to complete the question. “I don’t know! Let’s find out!”

  “What earthly good—”

  “We have to see!” said Norman. He said it as if that were the only rational choice, given the surge of the crowd.

  “No, Norman—you’re crazy!”

  She tries to pull back and go the other way, turns —¡ALAVAO! A horde of them are climbing and vaulting over the railing onto this deck and WHOOP WHOOP! WOO-WOOOO! charging past her and clambering from this boat to the next and from the next to the next—going that way, HORDES of them! Magdalena gave up and rushed with the rest and ravenous Norman, struggling up over railings and dropping onto the next deck and struggling up and dropping down and stampeding across deck after deck until at last they could see a crowd in slices that was gathering, sliced and diced by lights streaming over them, in the very last boat in the row, the only sailboat, the schooner with the two towering masts. But why?

  Magdalena didn’t want to think of Nestor, but Nestor intruded. ::::::God, that first mast is so tall… the height of an office building… and Nestor climbed to the top hand over hand.::::::

  “I think I know what this is all abouuuut hock hock hock!” said Norman. In a very jolly way, too. So jolly, he just naturally put his arm around Magdalena’s shoulders and drew her close to him. “Ohhohoho,
yes, I think… I… do… know,” he said. Obviously, he wanted her to say, “What?—my all-knowing one.” But she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. She hadn’t forgotten their swelling contretemps before they boarded the boat.

  Some mock cheering broke out among the boys and girls crowded onto the schooner’s foredeck. The boat’s huge mainsail had suddenly lit up like a lamp shade—no, like a screen. The sail had been swung about ninety degrees until it was like a screen facing the people on the foredeck, and the lights, Magdalena now realized, came from a beam projected from the prow. An image appeared on the sail—a slice of part of a person?—but a little gust of wind rippled across, and Magdalena couldn’t make it out. In the next instant, the wind calmed down, and a huge image appeared—an erect penis six or seven feet long on the huge schooner sail and nearly two feet thick. But where was the end, the glans penis? It had disappeared into a cave—but that couldn’t be the entrance to a cave, because it kept expanding and contracting around the glans and moving down and up and down and up… ¡Dios mío! It was a woman’s lips! Projected onto the mainsail! Her head was twelve feet from brow to chin.

  Magdalena’s heart took a nosedive… porn!… a porn movie projected at gigantic scale onto a gigantic sail… turning these hundreds of americanos into pigs, stampeding pigs squealing eeeee uh eeeee uh thanks to what? Porn.

  And one of those americano pigs was Dr. Norman Lewis. He was right beside her, on this mobbed deck… trying to resist the drooling adoration that wants to creep across his face… eyes pinned on a schooner sail that reaches from here… to way up there… as porcine body parts pop up, drift, and invade one another, oozing and sliding and drooling and sucking and lapping… a woman’s legs the size of office towers, spread open… wide open… the labia majorae are three times as big as the entrance to the Miami Convention Center… the porn doctor Lewis is transfixed… he wants to enter that portal or is it he wants his eyes to enter… transfixed by the alternate galaxy of pornography?

  “I don’t know about you, Norman, but I’ve had enough!”

  He doesn’t even hear her. He’s drooling in his own world.

  She grabs his elbow and shakes it… hard. Norman is startled… but more than that, bewildered. “How could anybody—”

  “Let’s go, Norman.”

  “Go…”

  “Back. I wanna go back to Miami.”

  Bewildered. “Back? When?”

  “Right now, Norman.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” says Magdalena. “Because you look like a drooling three-year-old standing here… a slobbering porn addict—”

  “Slobbering porn addict”—but he’s not really absorbing the words. He’s so far gone, his eyes wander back to the sail… the twelve-foot-high head of a woman trying to nibble the foot-long clitoris of another woman with her yard-wide lips.

  “Norman!”

  “Uhhh, what?”

  “We’re going! And that’s that!”

  “Going? The night is just beginning! This is part of the experience!”

  “They”—Magdalena swung her head about to indicate the rest of the crowd—“are going to have this awesome—pathetic—experience… without you. You’re leaving!”

  “And going where?”—but he obviously had no real comprehension of what the two of them were saying… His eyes floated back to the sail—

  “WE’RE LEAVING, NORMAN, AND I MEAN IT!”

  Norman’s expression granted her marginally more attention, but not a lot. “We can’t,” he said. “We can’t take the boat back in the dark. It’s too dangerous.”

  Magdalena stood there with an I can’t believe this expression, staring at Norman. Norman’s eyes were already back on the magnified body parts. An immense… cleft buttocks… was on the screen. A giant’s hands were spreading the cheeks apart. The anus itself filled the vast screen. It was deep as a gorge in the mountains of Peru.

  “Norman, if you want me,” she said in a tense, clipped voice, “I’ll be in the boat, trying to get some sleep.”

  “Sleep?” said Norman in the voice that said, “How can you even think of such a thing?” Nevertheless, he was at last focusing upon her. He spoke sternly. “Now, listen to me. Tonight is an obligatory all-nighter. All night is what this experience is all about! If you keep your eyes open, you will witness things you never thought possible. You will have a picture of mankind with all the rules removed. You will see Man’s behavior at the level of bonobos and baboons. And that’s where Man is headed! You will see the future out here in the middle of nowhere! You will have an extraordinary preview of the looming un-human, thoroughly animal, fate of Man! Believe me, treating porn addicts is not a narrow psychiatric specialty. It’s essential to any society’s bulwark against degeneracy and self-destruction. And to me, it’s not enough to gather data by listening to patients describe their lives. These people are weak and not very analytical. Otherwise they wouldn’t let these things happen to themselves. We have to see with our own eyes. And that’s why I’m willing to stay up all night—to get to know these wretched souls from the inside out.”

  Jesu Cristo… this was the thickest wall of theory she had ever heard Norman concoct! An impenetrable fort!… and an inimitable pulling the rug out from under any critic.

  She gave up. What use was it to argue with him? There was nothing to be done about it.

  But giving up on the war brought her no peace. In the darkness she looked in every direction. Before the sun went down… Miami had been up there, to the north, even though all you saw on the horizon from here was something the size of a scrap of your little fingernail. You couldn’t see Key Biscayne from here, but you knew where it was in the northeast. Florida City was way over there to the west… and all around, the immense sea was black as night… no, blacker… invisible… the most famous expanse of ocean in the country… vanished. She hadn’t the faintest idea where north was, where west was, no sense at all of where she was. There was no rest of the world—only this flotilla of depraved lunatics. And she was a prisoner here, forced to watch the rot, the pustular oozing of complete freedom. Even the sky consisted of complete darkness and a single beam of light on an immense stretch of canvas upon which filthy body parts oozed and slithered… all that was left of life on Earth, boiled down. Magdalena felt more than depressed. Something about it made her afraid.

  9

  South Beach Outreach

  Nestor was nine years old all over again when he used these German binoculars the Crime Suppression Unit provided, the JenaStrahls. Oh, the childlike wonder this great gadget engendered! The comemierdas he had under surveillance at this moment were on the porch of an Overtown ghetto hovel a good two blocks away. With the JenaStrahls he could count the rhinestones on the rims of their ears all the way from here. The smaller one, the one with the lighter skin, the one sitting down on an old wooden chair, had one… two… three… four… five… six… seven rhinestones on one ear… so close to one another, they touched… two inches of ear pierced seven times… a perforated tear-here line on one tiny ear, it looked like. The other man, a real bull, 250 pounds at least, maybe a lot more, was leaning back against the front wall next to a set of bars over a window… arms folded, making his entwined forearms look the size of a pig in a Hialeah pig roast… he had three rhinestones on the rim of each ear. Both men wore fitted baseball caps—no any-size belt buckles in back!—with the brims still flat as the day they bought them and still bearing the New Era stickers they came with on top. Both wore virgin-white NuKill sneakers untouched by so much as a speck of grime or slime from the streets of Miami. Both the hats and the shoes cried out to all who knew of and would envy such details, “Brand-new! I’m cool!—and I can afford New—every day!”

  Hmmmmm… wonder if those little twinkly stones could be the real thing, diamonds… Nahhhhh… This didn’t look even close to being that big an operation. All that jewelry riveted into the flaps of their ears. They might as well have had signs around their necks reading: YO,
COPS! STOP AND FRISK ME! This surveillance was the result of a tip from a low-life informer who was fingering every dope dealer in Overtown he had ever heard of in a desperate bid to avoid his third conviction as a dealer himself, which could send him to prison for twenty years.

  Without removing his eyes from the two men on the porch, Nestor said, “Sarge, did you notice all the blingbling they got stuck in their ears?”

  “Oh, sure,” said the Sergeant. “I was reading about that once. All natives love that shit. It don’t matter if it’s Uganda, Yoruba, Ubangi, or Overtown. What they can tattoo, they tattoo. What they can’t tattoo, they stick all that glitter shit on it.”

  Nestor winced… for the Sergeant’s sake. The Sergeant wouldn’t dare say anything like that to anybody but another Cuban cop. The Department had a whole campaign going, insusurro, aimed at improving relations with American blacks. In slums like this one, Overtown, and Liberty City, black people looked upon Cuban cops as foreign invaders who one day dropped from the sky like paratroopers and took over the Police Department and started shoving black people around… black people who had lived in Miami forever. They spoke a foreign language, these invaders. They would do anything to avoid paperwork, since the forms were printed in English. Instead of going to all that trouble, they would just take a black suspect out back of the building and beat him in the kidneys until he was urinating blood and admitting to whatever the invaders wanted him to admit to. Or thus spake Overtown street lore.