“You’ll like it,” she whispered in my ear. “Just get down and do what you’re told.” There was a crazy power in her voice.
Now I felt fear. Since she put it that way, I got down like a dog. A live dog.
“Pray, baby, pray,” Robin crooned above me in a husky voice choked up with lust thick as honey. “Pray I don’t fuck you to death.”
I looked up and saw that she had a big rubber dingus almost as big as mine sticking out from her crotch, attached to straps around her waist and thighs. Above, her tits were like dark spikes pointed at me. I thought of all the times girls had cried and made noises like I was hurting them when I drove John Henry deep inside them. I didn’t know if I could take it the way they had. But then, I thought, they always came back for more, so I guess getting fucked just takes some getting used to. Besides, they’re made for taking it, men aren’t.
Miss Pearl Dollar was standing above my head, the pistol loose in her hand. I could have taken it from her maybe, but they were both crazy. What if she fired?
“I think we require some lubrication, Dollar.”
Dollar fell to her knees before Robin and began slurping on that black dingus like she had on me. I turned my head to watch. Just as I remembered, she had a wonderful talent for sword-swallowing. The rubber was wet when Robin pulled away from Dollar. Her face was stern and intent, those ice-blue eyes shooting sparks. She moved to mount me.
“You ready for a ride, cowboy?”
If girls could take it, then I should be able to, I told myself. The cold rubber of the dingus moved along my crack and poked at my virgin asshole. She smacked my ass and grabbed my waist to get some leverage. Her hand brushed my balls, but that was a tease. Then she forced it inside me. Yow!
I wasn’t expecting how the pain would make me yell and growl, how it would take over. I didn’t think I could stand it, but of course I did. It was like being split open to a new way of looking at things. The sweat popped out on my forehead and I bit my tongue not to give her any satisfaction, wanting to pass this test. Blood in my mouth.
I was filled up to my belly and my guts were being poked while she beat my ass and back with her little hands as hard as she could. She was saying something over and over:
“I’m fucking you Daddy, I’m fucking you so good.... ”
It sounded like that, but my ears by then were buzzing with the pleasure that was riding through my body in choppy waves, making me press my face into the carpet. The rough fibre’s burned my cheek, but pain no longer mattered. I had gotten through pain to the other side. I was happy.
I was being initiated into a new world and I liked it.
I mark that as our anniversary: I’d met my match.
I was praying after that — maybe for the first time in my life — that Robin wouldn’t stop. She went on and on until she got tired moving her hips, and pulled out. The dingus was so big it seemed to take forever before it came out. My asshole wanted to keep it inside. Then I collapsed, drooling from my mouth and bleeding from my asshole, a delicious, luxurious feeling like my insides were letting go. I had a boner that ached, and — it took me by surprise — I felt myself coming, helpless as a baby, into the carpet.
I could hear Robin breathing hard above me.
“You liked it too much for a first time.”
“Now he knows what it feels like to be a girl on the bottom,” Dollar said.
“Get up, Buddy Tate. You’ve been baptised. Wipe your ass.”
Dollar threw a towel at me and I got to my knees, sore from being ground into the carpet. It was obvious from Dollar’s sour look that she was having a jealousy problem. She was pouting as she looked at Robin, who was sprawled in a chair still wearing the dingus. She lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings.
“That got you hot, didn’t it?” she said to Robin.
“What if it did?”
“Well, I want some of it.”
“Some of what?”
“Some of the same.”
“Don’t bother me now, Dollar. Let me get my breath.”
“Fuck me, Robin, please fuck me like you fucked him.”
“All right, but in bed this time.”
“What about him?”
“What about him?”
“We’re not through with him yet.”
They went into the bedroom and I cleaned up, wondering what I should do — join them, or let them sort it out first. I looked out the dirty window onto the street. The night life people were standing in doorways and waiting on street corners for pigeons to come along for fucking and plucking. We were up four stories doing our weird shit and the people down on the street were going about their business, doing their equally weird shit. And none of us knew what we were doing.
No way to make sense of it, I told myself. Just enjoy yourself. My asshole hurt, but I felt calm, like I never had in my life before. I waited out there just looking at the sky getting dark until I heard noises in the bedroom and went to take a peek. I like to watch, and Robin was doing to Miss Pearl Dollar what she’d done to me, so it was like instant replay, only Miss Pearl was a lot noisier than I had been.
I didn’t feel left out. I knew my turn was next.
Much later we were all in the bed, which was littered with the dirty dingus and plates of Chinese take-out, just getting acquainted. It was around midnight. We were all naked and at last feeling comfortable in our skins, and Robin was a woman again. She was turned on her side, and her tattooed back was bleeding a little bit, dark drops running down the jungle into the serpent’s open mouth.
“It’s dark out,” she said, like she was surprised.
“It’s late. Normal people are in bed.”
“Nobody’s normal.”
“Well, I’m not, and you’re not, and Dollar’s not for sure. But there are normal people. I’ve met them, I’m sorry to say. Didn’t you come from a normal family?”
She snorted like she was crying or laughing and pulled the covers up over our heads. The world disappeared and we were three kids under the blankets, telling stories and secrets. With my cherry popped I was one of the girls now.
“How’d you get to be so weird, Buddy Tate?” Dollar asked.
“Weird? I just do what I want, pretty much when I want to. And I don’t believe bullshit. If that makes me weird, I guess I am.”
I like to let girls do the talking. It saves my energy for more exciting things with them. But I was feeling pretty loose, I had to admit. My butt was sore and things were so wet between my legs it was like I had a pussy there, like my dick had disappeared... There were things I could talk about with them. We were relaxed, with Dollar turned to face me and Robin turned away, but touching, all touching. Their soft flesh was like what I imagined people meant when they talked about love.
And the smells under those covers!
Blood and shit from my ass. Great gobs of come drying. Sweat. Girl juices. Drool. Food. Perfume. Sweet aroma of fucking and sucking. It was intoxicating.
I took a deep whiff when it was my turn to tell them a few things about myself.
“I’m bound for glory. Everybody’s going to know my story.”
“What is your story, anyway?” Robin said, and we all laughed. But they wanted to know. They kept saying they’d tell me their stories if I told them, so I made something up that sounded true.
“Kansas. Oklahoma. East Texas. Up north again, Colorado, Idaho. That’s where I grew up. Daddy liked to keep moving. He said if you didn’t, they’d catch up with you. My mother liked to sit at home, so she got left behind. He had a trailer, and we’d go where he could find work. Or I’d get chased out of town.”
“What’d you do to get chased out of town?” Dollar asked. Robin’s back was moving like it was listening, like everything in that jungle was listening. Beneath the skin, her heart and lungs were listening. But she didn’t turn.
“Well, I got in trouble over girls, mostly. I mean, the first time I saw a titty, I wanted to suck it. The first time I slid my finger int
o pussy, I knew I had to have that feeling every day, twice on Sunday. I got bigger, and bigger, and every girl I met was willing. I had a gift.”
“You sure do, Buddy,” Dollar giggled.
“But you can’t just go around seducing every girl you see. They have parents, and boyfriends, and sooner or later I’d get in trouble with them. It got so bad they put me in a clinic for perverts....”
I stopped, I knew they were listening, but I didn’t want to go on like we were on some stupid talk show. They were the first girls I really wanted to explain myself to. They should be the first to know about Buddy Tate.
Robin turned. “I’ve never heard of a father like yours.”
“My Daddy taught me a lot just by leaving me alone. Other times he’d talk a little when he drinking. I guess the best thing he told me was about sex. Never to let anyone try to tell you it was bad, and to get as much as you can.”
“Subversive big time. No wonder you’re so weird.”
“Everybody’s weird about fucking, even the people who think they’re normal.”
“He’s right, there,” Dollar agreed. “All these guys I see at the Pussy Palace, they all think there’s something shameful about having to come to the Pussy Palace, or they’re ashamed of their dicks. Poor dumb assholes.”
I thought I should shut up because I was talking too much, so I asked Dollar: “How come you don’t feel embarrassed working in the Pussy Palace?”
“It turns me on, that’s why. You saw what a wicked woman I am. And being a sex worker sure beats the alternative.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“Well, there’s religion. My brother always be tryin’ to save my ass. He’s a preacher, and an uptight asshole. Or there’s workin’ on a job. What a joke. Booth girls have fun. We jerk guys around like they was on strings, honey. Makes Dollar feel very powerful.”
“Oh, shut up, Miss Pearl,” Robin said. “I want to go to sleep.”
I wasn’t going to let her get away with that. “You didn’t say anything about yourself.”
“Just say I had a depraved childhood. I’ll tell you all about it one of these days. You’ll be sorry you asked.”
Eventually I drifted off, sandwiched in between them, their hot bodies like electric blankets, but in the middle of the night I crawled out of bed to take a piss and turned on the little television the hotel management had allowed the room. There was a dumb porno movie on cable I watched that gave me half a hard-on, but what the bodies on screen did to each other was pretty tame next to what had just happened. So I channel surfed until I hit a real con man, the Reverend Thomas Flood. He was in the centre of the screen and three female heads were bobbing up and down as they knelt before him like he was some kind of God instead of the con man I knew all these guys are. I turned up the sound so I could hear the bullshit from his lips.
“...followers of Christ, you will be anointed and rise into the heavens on that terrible final day, and it’s coming soon,” he was saying. “I pray that the Lord of Hosts will give these good church women relief from their symptoms. Friends, pray for them. These good women need your prayers.”
I turned off the sound and watched the picture, feeling more turned on than I had with the porno film. You can see a porno film anytime, but to see a master hypocrite at work was a treat for me. I’d studied them for a long time.
I liked the way this one used his eyes. I studied them to see if I could do that little squint that spoke sincerity to the suckers. The wetness in the eyes, and the crinkles of caring concern around them. He probably wanted to be President.
I didn’t hear Robin get out of bed. She came to me naked and caught me squeezing the weasel watching a television minister. Well, I’d warned her about me. It must have struck her as pretty strange, because she started to laugh hysterically when she saw what I was watching.
She laughed and I felt myself go soft, and she kept on laughing and pointing at the screen until she was peeing down her leg and rolling on the floor. I crawled over to her and licked the drops from her leg and waited for her to tell me the joke.
“That’s my father. That is my Daddy,” she said. I thought she was trying to tell me she was a Christian or something and he was the guy she prayed to, but it turned out she meant that his name was on her birth certificate. I shut off the tube and sat down on the floor again, pulling some cushions off the sofa for us to lean against.
“I’m Robin Flood. His baby, washed in the Blood of the Lamb.”
I laughed. I looked deep into those blue eyes and laughed. She was hiding somewhere in there, and I hoped my laughing at her would flush her out.
“I guess you don’t see much of him.”
“I ran as soon as I could. But not before he got to me.”
The way she said it was like throwing matches at the memory.
“What did he do?”
“Anything he could, any time he could.”
“Do you ever see him?”
“Not in years. I get some of his money every month to stay away from him and keep my mouth shut.”
“Tough.”
“I didn’t think you’d understand.”
“I believe you, whatever you say.”
Neither of us said anything after that for a while, and all the noise of the Tenderloin below the window came in to fill up the silence with 3am noise. Cars honked, bottles broke, a woman screamed, drunk. Sirens. When she opened her mouth again she was sitting erect with the cushions bunched up around her and her arms wrapped around her knees like she was trying to protect herself. She spoke in a voice so low I had to strain to catch it. Her head was down and knees aren’t microphones.
“Buddy, have you ever killed anybody?”
“No.” I was chilled. I thought about Daddy teaching me to shoot.
She let the question hang there and I waited for more. Finally, she raised her head and looked me up and down like I was applying for a job.
“Could you?” It was a whisper that pricked up the hairs on my wrists. I thought about it.
“I guess I could.”
“What about my father? Could you kill him?”
“You’re a Christian. Christians aren’t supposed to think this way.”
“It’s not easy. Could you?”
“Maybe.”
“I see it in you. I know you could. You’re... special. I knew that when I first saw you standing on the street in front of Star’s window.”
“Why do you want to kill him? Just stay away from the bastard.”
She turned over on her belly, knocking aside her nest of pillows. I could hear Dollar snoring in bed. There was Robin’s fine ass and I wondered for a minute if she wanted me to flip her the big boy, but it wasn’t that. It was the tattoo that covered her back. She moved her shoulders so that it moved.
“The tattoo is to cover the scars. He poured scalding water on me when I was thirteen because I refused to say my prayers on television. Said I was wicked, that he was going to cleanse me. They kept me in the Burn Unit for six months and it was the only time I felt safe as a kid.”
“What about your mother? Didn’t she protect you?”
“He killed my mother. Said she was evil, a slut, and that I would be just like her. So as soon as I could, I tried to be just like her. He wants to be bigger than God. He wants to run the country.” She was shivering.
It made me sick. I got up and went to the bed for a blanket to cover her with. I thought she was crying, but she wasn’t.
“Kill him for me, Buddy. You want to be famous? Kill Thomas Flood!”
XI
Evangelical Evening News
Thomas Flood’s educated, well-modulated baritone rose in earnest supplication. Staring into the camera’s tiny magnifying eye, he began to pray. When he prayed, people listened, and bowed their heads with him in millions of homes tuned to the Evangelical Evening News.
“My friends, recall Isaiah 5:14: ‘Hell hath enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without measure; and their
glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth, shall descend into it....”’
He paused to let them imagine all that they hated and feared falling into the fiery stinking pit. They shuddered inside, feeling the triumph of righteousness spread into their cells. When Flood quoted scripture his voice illuminated a spiritual darkness so profound that many at home peeked through their fingers as if expecting the Devil himself — old Beelzebub — to appear to do battle with the popular Christian prophet.
Thomas Flood talked to God, and God answered him.
Surely their fears were justified: was he not announcing the end of the world? This was the revelation, the Apocalypse, Thomas Flood had promised them. It was the moment his Parousia Crusades had been leading up to. They stared enraptured at his leading man features, his aquiline nose, long upper lip and jutting black eyebrows, and opened their hearts. They listened intently to his instructions for their survival. It had come to this, as he had prophesied: a war to the death between the powers of heaven and the awful armies of hell. He reminded them that hell was a crowded place. They telephoned in their pledges.
Flood’s powerful voice rose another carefully calibrated notch. He was no longer praying, he was preaching, his stern gaze conducting autopsies on their souls.
“Friends, let me be clear here: I am talking about Judgement Day. We have been preparing for it during our Parousia Crusades, and now the time, the most awful time, is just about at hand. It is coming, I promise you! We are taking our Lord’s Crusade to that Babylon, that Sodom and Gomorrah, of homosexuality and devil worship and Jewish pornographers — yes sister, yes brother — to the smut capital of sin, San Francisco! It is there that we will make our stand for Christ. Yes! We will assemble our Christian Armies there for the great and final battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil as the Lord instructed us. Remember old Isaiah and prepare yourselves, my friends, for as it says in Isaiah, ‘Behold the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and with fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners out of it.’”
He paused, and the camera switched to a clean-cut band of women who played a selection of Christian rock. It gave the flock at home an opportunity to admire the brightly coloured set, and to see the hope in the eyes of the giant studio audience.
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