“The games,” he continued, “are the only reason I don‘t drive a knife into my belly."
“Oh God,” Inga moaned. “I can feel him even when he‘s not inside me."
The red-eyed black god grinned at me, and my mind wandered back to Mel. Was I in for the same treatment?
I was slightly worried that I might have taken the same wrong turn as Mel, but I was more concerned that I had made that turn on purpose. Maybe Sisypha was right. Maybe I was looking for punishment the same way Jo had done with Johnny Fry.
Once again, silently, I committed myself to killing Johnny Fry.
The block-square warehouse that Wan brought us to was in the middle of a whole district of warehouses. Now and then you saw a homeless man walking his shopping cart down a vacant street, but otherwise the area was dead.
The green metal front door opened as we approached it. Two women—one white, the other brown, neither one wearing a stitch—smiled at Sisypha and hugged her.
We all walked down a long, dusty hall to a rickety old platform elevator that had an uneven floor made from planks of wood. Wan worked the lift while the naked young women chattered at Sisypha.
I didn‘t listen because I was trying to control my breathing.
I was petrified. All the tranquility and calm I‘d gained from the decision to kill Johnny Fry was gone. People were touching each other and looking frankly at me. The man next to me had red, red eyes and counted his relations all the way back to Imperial Rome.
The lift came to a stop, and Wan rolled the door open.
The huge room we came into was filled with light of every color. There were at least three hundred people in there, either sitting in the twelve-row-high collapsible bleachers or milling around the circular platform at the center of the room.
Almost everyone was scantily clad, even the older and fatter among them. In one corner, I saw a man and a woman having slow, serious sex on the floor. Just beyond them, a man was on his knees giving another man oral sex.
The smell of the room was strong with the odor of sweat and a cloying sweetness too.
I began sweating. All the sex and stories I had experienced before that moment were mere fairy tales at kindergarten recess. This was more serious than I believed I could take.
“Here,” Sisypha said to me. She was handing me a little pink pill.
“What is it?"
“Something that will keep that paleness out of your face.” She smiled and made a kissing gesture.
When she moved away, I saw the young man yanking on his partner‘s cock. The standing man began to ejaculate, and three women standing around them applauded and cheered.
I swallowed the pill and asked, “Where are we sitting?"
“This way,” Sisypha said.
She led me to a table near the platform. After I was seated, I put my head down into folded arms, waiting for the drug to do something, anything.
Amid the milling throng, I heard sporadic moans and grunts. There was the scent of sex in the air.
I didn‘t raise my head for a very long time.
I could tell that more and more people were coming in by the sound of footsteps and the rustle of clothes. But the louder sounds were subsiding. By this I assumed that people were getting seated in the bleachers.
Not only was my head buried in my hands, but my eyes were also shut tightly. Everything I had experienced since seeing Jo and Johnny Fry together came down on me. I couldn‘t see the light for the darkness in my mind.
“Come on,” Sisypha said, her cool voice like a tender hand at the back of my neck. “You‘ll be okay now."
I raised my head, realizing that though the fear was still in me, it had somehow been muted.
The seats were all filled with men and women ready for a show.
“What‘s it gonna be?” I asked.
“It‘s like the Olympics,” Sisypha told me. “They come here to find out who‘s the best."
“The best at sex?"
“Kind of,” she said turning to me, her café-au-lait face as beautiful as the memory of childhood.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Sex is all kinds of things. For some men, it‘s their mothers, and for a lot of women, the father is the ideal. I know men who won‘t even look at a woman unless she‘s got tremendous boobs. She might not have brushed her teeth in a year, but if he can put his head between her tits, she‘s got him for the night.
“There‘s all kinds of obsessions and perversions, and this series of contests is how we say what is the best among them.
“For instance, this morning we had to choose who had the biggest cock among all the contestants. That‘s a hard call."
“Why?” I asked. The drug had hold of me by then. “All you need is a ruler."
“Some guys have long ones but they aren‘t very thick,” she explained. “Others have big ones that never get really hard. A guy could have a two-pound salami, but if it can‘t stand up, it loses points."
“I see,” I said.
I put out my fingers to touch her cheek lightly.
Her face hardened, and she said, “Don‘t touch me unless I invite it..“
I pulled my hand away and put it under the table.
“What is the next contest?” I asked to cover my embarrassment.
“Cock fight,” she said.
“What does that mean?"
“You‘ll see."
The lights went down, and a spotlight hit the back end of the slightly elevated platform. The six blocks of seating stood in arcs of three—one arc before and the other behind the raised dais.
The man who stood in the beam of light was the same man who bound Mel in The Myth of Sisypha. He was wearing purple hot pants and a red velvet shirt that had generous sleeves longer than his arms. His red hair was cut into a Mohawk that looked like wind-tossed wheat at the tips.
He raised his arms, and the red sleeves fell down to his elbows. You could see that he wore a ring on every finger.
“Sluts and pimps,” he cried. The crowd cheered. “Harlots and masochists, molesters and molested, fuckers and fucked, welcome, welcome, welcome . . . welcome to the main event."
He bowed so low that his forehead nearly touched the ground. His crop of hair actually did brush the floor. People jumped to their feet and hollered. They threw flowers and kisses. They bared their breasts and cocks and asses to him. They danced in place. There were flaming cigarette lighters held high in praise.
One woman was actually weeping. Many were laughing.
The sex clown waited for the cheers to subside. The derision in his scornful gaze somehow transformed into praise. I thought about Sasha looking at her brother‘s blubbering sorrow. That, I realized then, was her love for him.
“This is it,” the sex clown cried. “This is the main event. . . the cock fight."
Another round of exuberant cheering followed this claim.
Again the clown waited.
“For the past three days, heterosexual men have been competing in Greco-Roman wrestling to see which two were the best. Sixty brawny, brawling, bulldozing, bullying men have struggled to make it to the top of this competition."
Two more spots came on; one on the left and the other on the right of the dais. These lights illuminated two men, one black and the other white, both of them swaddled in luxurious robes. The black man (he was really black, not brown) wore a creamy white robe, while the white man wore a forest-green cloth that sparkled in the hot light.
The audience was yelling now.
“I‘m sorry,” Sisypha whispered into my ear.
When I turned to her, she kissed me, pressing her tongue into my mouth and holding the back of my neck with the tips of her fingers.
It was that kiss you yearned for as an early adolescent. The kiss that women gave on movie screens and in magazine stories about love. It was a soulful and resounding call to my manhood. The crowd‘s yells receded. The vestiges of fear evaporated.
Sisypha leaned back an
d regarded me.
“I‘m sorry I told you not to touch me without an invitation,” she said. “I‘m an icon in certain circles, and men reach out for me without regard for my dignity or my independence. They want to pull me out of my life and into their fantasies."
“I didn‘t mean that."
“I know,” she said, and then turned her attention back to the dais.
“ . . . these men have been tested for STDs,” the sex clown was saying. “They were all kept in isolation for a week before the event. As I said—they are all straight men. But even a straight man can get his blood boiling over battle . . . “ The crowd‘s cheer was deafening. “Even a straight man can get it up when Dr. Themo-polis gives him his magic injection."
The nude young women who greeted us came up then, and pulled the fine robes from the contestants‘ shoulders.
Both men were naked, powerful, and muscular. Their chests were heaving with anticipation for their competition. They were oiled and shining. And both of them had large and upstanding erections with cock rings to help keep them hard.
Men and women hooted and hollered their approval.
I turned to Sisypha to ask her a question, but she put her finger to her lips. At that same moment, the sex clown raised his hands to the sky, and the audience went silent. It was to me as if Sisypha‘s small gesture had hushed them.
“Let the contest begin,” the sex clown said, bowing low as he backed off the dais.
Without further ceremony, the men ran at each other, their bodies slamming together with an audible impact. They struggled and grabbed, but the oil they were covered in made it hard to hold on. The white warrior struck the black man with his fist, knocking him down. The crowd cheered. The white man jumped on the black one‘s back, but was shrugged off when the darker man stood. They were breathing hard and harder, thrashing against each other, trying to get and keep a hold.
At one point, the white man again got the black one down on his belly. People behind me rose to get a better look. The audience was mostly silent, but there was great anxiety among them.
The white man was thrown off, and people regained their seats.
Four times the white man struck the black one with his fists. But the black man never struck back. In my confused excitement I thought that maybe this was a political rule—giving the advantage to the white man as he had in the world.
But this was not the case.
The fight went on without a break for twelve minutes by my watch. The sound of the wrestlers‘ ragged breath filled the large room. Now and then they would back away from physical contact, circling one another and breathing hard. But whenever they came together, great force was exerted. The black man was bleeding from his left nostril. The white fighter limped slightly.
And then, shockingly, the black man backed away from a hold and struck out with his fists, hitting the white one three times in the abdomen.
Most of the audience leaped to their feet. The white man crumpled to his knees, where the black man slapped him, knocking him down on his belly. Then the black man got on top of the white one, holding him in an armlock. He positioned his still-hard cock over the prone man‘s clenched buttocks, then he looked up at the audience.
“One!” they cried in unison, and the black man drove his engorged member all the way into his defeated opponent.
The white man cried out in agony.
As soon as the black man pulled fully out, the audience screamed, “Two!"
Down again the black man went. Now his opponent was struggling hard to get away and yowling.
My fists were tight, and all I could do was hope that it would soon be over.
The black man pulled out and swiveled his grinning face to see the standing crowd.
“Three!!” was hollered out, and he went down for the final time and then jumped to his feet, his hands in the air. The white man had rolled into a ball and seemed to be crying.
With a roar, the crowd rushed the stage.
“We better get out of here,” Sisypha shouted in my ear. “Everybody‘s fair game now."
It was true. People were rushing the stage, ripping off the few clothes they wore as they ran. They were cheering, kissing, even fucking already. Two men were fighting. The sex clown (later I found out that his name was Oscar) was jumping back and forth, shouting and slapping people as if he were anointing them.
The winner of the cock fight was fending off male and female admirers. They wanted him to have sex with them, it seemed. But he was still feeling the ecstasy of having won the contest, shouting unintelligible words and raising his fists high.
I couldn‘t see the white wrestler.
“Come on, quickly,” Sisypha said, pulling me by the arm.
Ahead of us were the naked girls who had ushered us through the doors. They led us to a corridor behind the far stand of bleachers and slammed a door behind us before any other revelers could follow. We went down the long hall and into a large room that was connected to a broad wooden stairway.
“It was so fast,” the Hispanic girl said as we went. “I thought Mike Dour would have had more in ‘im than that."
“Yeah,” the white girl agreed. “He just doubled over like a pussy."
“Peanut hit him hard,” Sisypha told the girls, neither of whom could have been older than nineteen.
“He really fucked him good,” the brown girl said with a grin. “Fucked him up."
We went down flight after flight on the wide wooden stairwell. We were at least twenty floors up.
When we finally got to the bottom, the girls threw the doors open and led us into the dark street. Wan‘s white limousine was waiting there for us.
“Good-bye, Miss Landfall,” the white girl said.
“You girls should come with us,” she said.
The expressions on the nude beauties were of honor.
“That would be wonderful,” they both said.
“Wan,” Sisypha said. “Get them something to wear out of the trunk."
The expressionless chauffeur opened the doors for us and then rummaged around the back until he returned with simple white smocks for the girls.
“What are your names?” Sisypha asked them as the car took off “
I ‘m Krista Blue,” the white girl said.
“And I‘m Freefall,” the Hispanic child responded. “Freefall La Vida."
“And your ages?"
Krista was eighteen; Freefall nineteen.
They had both worked for a guy named Andy in the sex worker business up and down the East Coast, sometimes as models, sometimes as nude waitresses. And of course they were prostitutes now and again.
“People never want to understand when you try to explain it,” Freefall said to me as we were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge.
“They think if you fuck for a living that that‘s all you are. But people can be all kinds of things. A woman can be a mother and a doctor and a dancer and a prostitute. A prostitute could paint a good picture, she could have a smart little girl that she loves and cares for."
“Yes,” I said, and she smiled brightly for me. “ I ‘m sure that most people are much less than that, and because they are less, they think that they‘re better."
“I like this one, Miss Landfall,” Freefall said. Her sparkling eyes, slightly intoxicated, shone on me. “Is he yours?"
“I don‘t know,” Sisypha said, speculation in her tone. She and Krista were leaning against each other, back to back, in the seat across from us. “Are you mine, Cordell?"
“Heart and soul,” I said. “Gut and butt."
“Oooo,” Sisypha crooned. “I like the way that sounds."
Freefall leaned way over and kissed me.
“Where do you girls want to go?” Sisypha asked them.
“We have a place in Newark,” Krista said. “But if you wanted to party, we‘d be happy to."
We drove to a private club on East 33rd Street. The only thing to mark the nightclub‘s existence was a small, removable brass plaque,
no more than six inches square. The plaque was attached to the wall next to a very ordinary-looking door. The Wilding Club had been three apartment buildings that were now connected.
It was inconspicuous and thriving.
The entrance was a small foyer of dark wood and blue velvet manned by a sixty-something white gentleman in coat and tails. He wore white gloves and had white sideburns. His eyes were at once grandfatherly and foreboding.
“Miss Landfall,” he said, staring at me.
“It‘s okay, Winter,” she said. “Krista, Freefall, and Mr. Cordell are with me."
“I know the ladies,” the tall sentry said.
“He‘s from the other world,” Sisypha said. “But he‘s okay."
“Raise your hands, sir,” Winter requested quite respectfully.
Still under the effect of the drug I‘d taken, I put my hands in the air, like a criminal in an old-time TV melodrama.
When the sentry took out the pistol and ammunition from inside my coat, I was mildly surprised. I wasn‘t wholly unaware of the weapons, but they seemed out of place somehow, like I was out of place in that posh club in the early hours of a weekday morning.
“Did you know about these, ma‘am?” Winter asked Sisypha.
“He often carries a small weapon,” she said. “Yes, I knew, but I didn‘t remember to ask him to leave it in the car. He‘s never been here before."
“I see,” said the guardian, who seemed to grow taller by the moment.
I got the feeling that he was more than just some hired hand. Sisypha, who Usually maintained a superior air without a trace of haughtiness, showed him great deference.
“I will have to ask you to check your weapons until you leave, Mr. Cordell,” he said holding the devices as an appraiser might.
“That‘s fine by me, Mr. Winter."
“Just Winter,” he said.
He put my stolen goods in a drawer in a cloak closet and handed me a card, the eight of clubs, for my chit.
While this transaction was going on, Krista and Freefall were taking off their borrowed smocks. These they handed to Winter. He stamped their hands with number and suit so that they could claim their belongings without having to carry a playing card.
Killing Johnny Fry Page 19
