“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh shit. Come on, fatty. Let’s go into the bedroom.” It was obvious he’d changed his mind about this crazy whore, but it was also probably obvious to him that she wasn’t going to let him go. He followed her like a sheep going off to lose his testicles. He knows something is wrong, but not quite what. The rolling eyes.
“You’d like to be in there, wouldn’t you?” Anne asked.
“Paulette’s a bad lay.”
“You’re lying.”
I closed my eyes. “O.K. I’m lying. Be happy.” There was something wrong with her, as if jealousy might be around the corner. The uncertainty bothered me. She sat at the kitchen table taking quick, nervous puffs on her cigarette. Blowing smoke rings and spearing them. Tossing her head. She blew her nose, and I noticed that she was crying.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked. I tried to make my voice rough so it wouldn’t embarrass her.
“You wouldn’t understand.” She didn’t yell it; no, her voice was softer than I had ever heard it. Then I was really worried.
“Make me understand.”
“What you know about love is spelled in four letters.”
“LOVE! YOU WANT A VALENTINE, YOU DUMB PUSSY!” That really pissed me, like someone awakening you from a wet dream. That brought Paulette and her trick out of the bedroom. The trick still had his shirt on, and his drooping dick was smeared with shit. I closed my eyes again.
“I can’t get this schmuck to part with his precious come no matter what I do,” Paulette complained.
“Give me a chance at him,” Anne said. She walked over to the window, her bare feet shushing on the floor. All she had at the window were plants, one or two of them marijuana. I listened carefully as she walked slowly back to me, carrying something. Silence. Then light drops, like urine, on my body. I opened one eye. She was pouring dirt from the plants on me very slowly, burying me.
“Are you going to plant me?” I asked.
It was good to see her back at her old stand again. Her jaw muscles were clenched with the effort of carrying the pots, and her ears were red with embarrassment. Now she loved me, like in the fairy tales; but I was past that. Love isn’t expressed in kindness or fancy, meaningless gestures and words, I told her ears. Her pointed little ears that I loved to bite. That was it: love. I loved to bite her ears. I thought very hard about being planted, trying to put it into her mind, and get her out of the slump she was in.
The trick was still gawking. Paulette pulled out his handkerchief and got him to wash the shit off his dick.
“What are you doing to him?” he asked timidly.
“Getting my kicks,” I answered for her. “Mind your own.”
Paulette sneered, and then she went into the bedroom to get his wallet, which I saw her concealing under the mattress. When she came back I could see that she was really disgusted at him for being so dumb. They watched for a while as Anne finished pouring the earth from every pot in the house on me.
“Get down there, you freaky shit-dipper!” Paulette said after a while, and pushed him down on the floor. His chicken-white feet hit me in the chest.
“On him, too!” Paulette yelled, and they stripped the guy like piranha fish, inspiring to watch. The dirt was spread over him, too. I didn’t want to share it because I knew he couldn’t appreciate it, but I had to play the game.
When we both looked like plants, I dug my toes in the dirt and pulled him even nearer. Music started.
True melodies return. This one hit me the way a Mozart concerto would have, years before. I grabbed the trick’s foot and pulled it to my lips, smacking them hungrily in self-parody. I began at the tip of his toenails, chewing them and spitting the fragile shells, and tongued a path to his instep, where he kept his dirt concealed, like a bad housewife.
It wasn’t bad, especially considering the earth that covered us to our nostrils.
They weren’t content with the dirt, however, and I was just as happy about that: Anne stepped on my ankles, and then walked up my legs, ending her dance with a good jump on my crotch. It rallied me, despite the sick coldness that jerked up my spine. Paulette was performing the same operation on the trick, tenderizing him for later. I bit down on his big toe, and he started yelling, but it was a small protest. He also started giggling, so I took another bite, and he giggled a little more. It was ridiculous—I thought I even heard Paulette laughing.
Every jump Anne took caused me to “ouf,” my muscles and wind outraged—but it would trail off into a giggle. Anne and Paulette were also laughing hysterically at the sight of us in our graves on the floor; they sat down at the kitchen table and beat it with their fists. I turned to the trick, who was still giggling and whimpering, and asked him his name.
“Victor, man,” he answered.
“Where’d you get this ‘man’ stuff?”
“I know what’s hip.” He seemed proud of that. I wanted to hit him.
“You have a strange way of showing your good taste, then,” I said, and placed my hand on his thigh. It was smooth and fat. I decided to pack him full of dirt and ship him out on the next express, so I began to shove some dirt with my thumb between his buttocks. He squirmed.
“Stop tickling me,” he begged. When I had enough packed in there to make a good sandwich, I began to shove some of it up his asshole. He kicked, but I held his legs.
Anne and Paulette came over to watch. When he got too noisy, Anne sat on his chest, and Paulette kicked him a few times. I must have packed a few ounces of topsoil up his little hole. He had stopped resisting. I knew Anne wanted to do something cute to him, but she just sat there, pinning him down.
“Make the creep suck it,” I advised her. She turned and gave me a bad look, calculated to make me wither up and die. She was still hurt, and showing it. She got up off the trick, and Paulette took her place.
The next time I opened my eyes, she was straddled across my face, that little cunt descending on my mouth. Oh well, I thought, one mouth is the same as the next, and rose to spear my tongue into it. I bumped my nose on the grass of her mons veneris, and grabbed the cheeks of her hard little ass, which I began to rotate with my hands. I could hear Paulette panting next to us, in rhythm with Anne, so I knew Victor was getting a workout, too.
To the eye of the unbeliever, the tableau that presented itself would have looked this way: ghouls from two fresh graves straining upward to return to the wombs of their whore mothers.
When Anne came, I worked her up into such a frenzy with my anteater’s tongue that I thought she’d loose a flood of urine on me. She didn’t. She collapsed on top of me, and after resting on the dirt for a while, began scratching at it like a dog at his master’s grave. When she found my prick, it was already stiff; she dived on it and began using her tonsils on its tip. I was swallowed up, so I lay back and closed my eyes peacefully, a grave being sucked off by a skinny vampire.
I let her work with her throat, coaxing the semen out, but it was like a new form of torture instead of a relaxing blowjob, and after a few minutes I reached up and cracked her on the ear.
She softened up, just lapping it with her tongue, bouncing the rod around on that fat tongue I could never get enough of.
The trick was choking; I looked over to see Paulette stuffing dirt up his nostrils, holding his mouth shut with her hand. He kicked, jackknifed his knees, strained his belly, and then fell still. She finished stuffing the dirt in his nose, and then started packing his ears.
With her tongue Anne unwound my semen, pulled it up until it boiled over and slid down her throat. She coughed, spit some of it on me, and got up. She pulled Paulette off the trick, but it didn’t help.
That really turned out to be rather fortunate, however. I could see that they were both worried, but I relaxed. We would have something to play with, and summer was coming on. He would begin to stink, and then the cats would start chewing on him; we could use him for almost anything. He would be a great source of r
ecreation.
Chapter Eight
___________________ Highway Vipers
The Highway Vipers came into our lives, and even into that room with the planted man, through Paulette, who was spending a lot of her time in the far West Village, where the streets are wide as highways, and the saloons and other buildings remind you of a set for a western movie on the waterfront.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Deathhead and his fellow freaks weren’t around the next day when I stumbled into the shower and tried to scrape some of the dirt off from the night before. I had spent the night on the linoleum with the stuffed-up trick, and my back ached.
My beard was growing. In the mirror I no longer recognized myself, with all that crazy hair sprouting everywhere. I was a garden. Now I watered myself, enjoying the hot needles that cut into my skin and beneath, reviving it. When I stepped out, the nerve endings were tingling and alive again.
Anne gave me coffee and toast, stepping over the trick’s body as she served me, even making a joke of it.
“We oughta put up a sign for him, so people will know enough to look out.”
I laughed with her, mainly because she laughed so seldom. I wanted to hear it again. I suppose before I met her there would have been some feeling of pity in me for the dead trick, but now he was on his way to being just another smell. He replaced the plants that had been on the windowsill as the principal vegetation in our vicious little garden.
“You’re happy today. How is that?” I asked. For a change, she was willing to talk.
“I don’t know—I guess it was last night, you know? I got kind of weepy there for a while, but throwing that dirt around cheered me up.”
“Anytime,” I said, and studied my toenails, which had grown to an absurd length. I was a Chinese mandarin who no longer believed in art or wisdom.
“You know, it’s too bad you’re not a real bull.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean tough, daddy. You look a little on the weak side. I sometimes wonder how I got involved with such a faggy-looking guy.”
Nothing I could say to that, dropped from out of the sky. I knew it was a lead-in to something though. I waited for news of what was next, and when it didn’t come, I made for the bedroom, where Paulette was still sacked out.
I pulled the dirty sheet off her and rested my head on her softly pulsating belly, running my fingers through the fur between her legs. I got it unstuck, and opened the curtain to her cunt. It was like the inside of a mouth—dentists must get horny dealing with the pink, mucus-lined flesh of the mouth all day. She was pink, turning brown, just a little moist. Enough so that I could stroke her and pull on her clitoris without awakening her. My nails were long, and dirty, but they must not have bothered her. She probably thought it was a wet dream.
I rested my cheek on her thigh and began to fantasize. Since I didn’t have an erection, my interest had to be stimulated by fantasy. At first I thought of her cunt as a cave, so my index finger crawled in and looked around at the stalactites and stalagmites, and the underground streams that ran far below. There were blind fish in them, and they scared me, so I crawled back out very quickly. After a while, when she still didn’t wake up, I put two fingers together in a prayerful attitude and went back in through the doors—of a cathedral, this time. That worked much better. I liked the incense and the candles. I felt penitent, so I went to confession in a little nook near her womb. That made me feel so much better I moved around a little bit, upsetting some of the other devout who had gotten there before me. I prayed with all my might, wringing my hands, and lifting my eyes.
She opened her eyes. “What? What are you doing?” It was a sleepy, grumbled response. She sat up in bed and looked around for my keeper. “Anne? Anne?” she called.
“Don’t get excited. I was just praying.”
“You’ve flipped.” She tried to get farther away from me, but I grabbed her knees and spread them like the pages of a book.
“You’re hurting me,” she complained. I pulled them a little wider, until I heard something crack. Bending toward her, I spit into that second mouth, and still holding her legs apart, brought my foot into play.
“How do you feel this morning?” I asked conversationally.
“Well, I don’t feel like an acrobat,” she hissed through clenched teeth. For some reason she didn’t want me to know how badly I was hurting her. I heard talking in the other room. I would have assumed that it was one of Anne’s customers, but then I heard her calling for Paulette. I had to release her, without having broken any of her stained glass. I waited for a while, hoping she’d come back, watching a little brown cockroach climb the far wall after some jelly Anne had thrown at me one night.
The bedroom door opened. “Hey. There’s some lame in here with his mouth open.” I hid my face under the pillow, peeking out at the voice with one eye. A black young man with a thin goatee, round and built like a full wine barrel, was staring at me. One of his eyes was milky, as if a real eye had been replaced with a child’s marble. It was cloudy, but the other gleamed. He was wearing a black T-shirt with the word “Vipers” on the front, and a torn Levi’s jacket over it. Motorcycle boots. He was playing with a snake that was twisted around his arm.
“Man, you look like a bug. While I’m here you can sleep under the bed, or I’ll stomp on you. Fucking cockroach-looking guy.” He shook his head disgustedly, and pecked at the snake.
They were Paulette’s friends. I came out later, and three of them were sitting around the table drinking up the beer in the house. Anne was sitting on someone’s lap—a weird-looking guy built like an ape, with the face of a dead Valentino. His face was chalk-white, and his lips were unnaturally red. His hair was slicked down flat to his scalp with what looked like Vaseline. The spade was there playing with his snake, trying to feed it some beer. The other one was a girl, dressed in a tight white T-shirt and Levi’s. Her greasy bottle-blonde hair was done up in spit curls all around her forehead. Paulette was talking.
“This chick (she pointed to Anne) did it for me, turned me loose.”
“Yeah, baby. Hang loose,” the spade answered. What a yo-yo.
“I could do anything now. All I need is some hot cock in my pussy a couple of times a day, and I’m happy.” She sounded convinced.
“Are you witnessing?” I asked, referring to an exhibitionist practice of the fundamentalist churches of my childhood.
The dead Valentino (it was he who was called the Deathhead) looked at me and pointed a sharp finger.
“You shut your teeth.” I shut up. Paulette went over and bit him lightly on the ear, running her hand over his biceps, bulging under his T-shirt.
I wondered if the two of them would fight over him. Of course I saw them as two crows with a corpse, tearing out his eyes, ripping off his cock and hiding it in a dirty brassiere. I sat in the window and watched them, totally ignored except for occasional glances from Anne.
The first thing I learned about them was that they were imitation; boys from Brooklyn who putted around the West Village on little Hondas, instead of the authentic California iron cavalry. But imitations, if they fantasize enough, can overtake their originals in vital respects.
The girl, whose name was Lady Jane, talked through her nose, with a Bronx lilt: “I’m drug man. Let’s cut out of here.”
“Shut up, pussy,” the spade said. Someone had called him the Charmer, and it figured. He said it so desultorily that she kept on: “I don’t like it here. Especially with these two extra chicks hanging around.” I’m surprised that Anne didn’t come down on her, but she was on top anyway, wriggling her ass around on the Deathhead’s lap. Paulette was sitting on the floor, staring at the Charmer and his little snake. He would rub the reptile on its belly, let it crawl up his arm, and then take its head in his mouth. It made me want to chuck everything up right there, but Paulette was fascinated with the show.
“How do you do that?” she asked, like a ten-year-old at a circus. I knew her sche
ming little tubes had it all plotted out, that another one of his snakes would be in her mouth before long.
But by then most people, and especially Paulette, were so transparent I didn’t have to have a ruby in the middle of my forehead to see what would happen next in any given situation. For instance, with Anne’s action, I was surprised that the Deathhead hadn’t come in his pants yet.
Lady Jane finally gave it up, when she realized no one was listening, and went over to the radio. She turned it up to full volume and got a rock station. The Rolling Stones blasted out at her, and she grinned.
“You look like a bright girl,” I said to her, putting my hand on her ass. Now that action had been premeditated for at least three minutes—the first in a long time. I had seen enough to realize she was dragging both of her boyfriends, and that I’d be doing them a favor. It was like selecting a cow from the available herd. I still had a hard-on from going to church with Paulette.
“That don’t belong to you,” she said, moving away.
“Who does it belong to?” I asked.
“The Highway Vipers—who else?” she answered. It was a nasal catechism, like the rest of her answers.
“Well, they don’t want you tonight. And I like that little butt of yours.”
“Where you coming from, man?” she asked incredulously. I backed her into a corner very easily though—it was like herding sheep.
“I’m an old sheep-fucker, my little lamb,” I told her, trying to make a joke of it.
“You’re a creep. Get out of here before you get a knee in the nuts.” In order to prevent just that, I took her hands in mine and moved in closer, so she’d have no room to kick. I put my tongue in her ear and whispered, wetting the whorls there: “Look my pet, it’s just you and me left.” She looked over at the table, and sure enough, Paulette was kneeling comfortably between the Charmer’s knees giving him head, with his snake around her neck. The Deathhead and Anne were off in the bedroom.
I whispered again: “I want you to pretend you’re a sheep, and your fleece has gotten me all hot.” Her eyes leaped in alarm, and she started to scream, so I kneed her in the groin just enough to stop it. Apparently I pressed a button in her that had been pressed before, because she cut the crap, and just stood there leaning against the wall, her pelvis thrust out, waiting warily like an animal for what I would do next.
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