The anger in Evil Companions is always and unremittingly directed at the “self”—as a necessary stimulus to pleasure. Perkins—and his narrator’s mentor, Anne—never forgets that love is a sensation.
Others of them include hunger, pain, and fear.
One of the secondary messages of Evil Companions is that we may learn far more, far more clear-sightedly, about love by looking closely at these others. For it is to these that Perkins’ spare, sharp prose always turns for its models and metaphors.
Perkins would go on to write many more erotic novels. The invention in them is constant. Their insights are many. All are shot through with sexual understanding and littered with brilliant passages. And in 1976 Perkins would turn his many reviews and articles about contemporary American erotic writing into that extraordinary survey and critique, The Secret Record: Modern Erotic Literature, reprinted by Rhinoceros Books (1992). But there is a coherence and intensity to the first of them—Evil Companions—that makes its combination of observation and outrage (if the word existed, “inrage” would be the better term) a particularly powerful amalgam.
Evil Companions is a dark jewel on the erotic landscape, that has continually drawn attention back on itself for twenty-five years now—and back to the astonishing and dangerous moments of its making. It is a book that again and again throws into question the boundary between fantasy and reality. (“ ... imitations,” writes Perkins in Chapter Eight, about a pair of would-be bikers, “if they fantasize enough, can overtake their originals in vital aspects.”) A quarter of a century after the book’s initial publication (for this edition, the “very few emendations” have been put back), I don’t doubt that this generation can still learn something from it—of the limits of pleasure, of fantasy, and the inextricable interweaving of both with human pain.
It may not be a pleasant lesson.
But it is a powerful one.
And throughout, that lesson is strangely, insistently, and vividly close to something we—now and again—must call the beautiful.
New York, August 1992
From the dawn of time he had modestly believed that he was filled with goodness mingled with only a minute quantity of evil. By dragging out his heart and his life-thread into the light of day I taught him the rude lesson, that, on the contrary, he is made up of evil mingled with only a minute quantity of good which the lawmakers have been hard put to it to conserve.
—Lautréamont, Maldoror
What was unutterable, I wrote down.
—Rimbaud
Chapter One
___________________ Anne in Wonderland
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 my 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 he
r 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.
Chapter Two
___________________ The Party
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 roo
m 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.
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