Me and the Devil: A Novel

by Nick Tosches

  I could see the faint markings on one of her buttocks and the back of one of her thighs where I had opened her skin on my prior night in this room. How wonderful it would be, how wonderful for both of us, I thought, if I could reopen those very same lash lines. I exposed her bare flesh as I previously had done, raising the little raincoat and bunching it above her hips. I aimed carefully, but the tip of the whip struck wide of those marks, slashing instead her other upper thigh. I fixed my eyes on the slash, which was like a thin crescent of color on her pale, pure flesh; and in an instant I saw the blood begin to flow.

  Approaching her with my cock hard in my hand and my heart beating hard in my chest, I found myself wondering for the merest moment what type of blood it was that ran down the back of her thigh. Damn, the shit these croakers put in your head. Kneeling, I placed my tongue to the back of her knee, that bend so lovely and so soft where the blood was about to reach. I felt it meet my tongue, and I slowly raised my head, licking the ever-increasing flow of her blood, feeling the quivering of her hamstring muscles, until, as I clutched her other leg, my tongue came to the seeping crescent high on her thigh. With my mouth wide, I sucked and I drank and I closed my eyes and reveled until I could feel the blood descending in a thin stream to my chin. I braced myself, rose, and lay hard against the slight incline of her back. I thought of deflowering her like this, as she remained bound and defenseless on the cross beneath my weight. It could be beautiful. It could also destroy her. Beauty and destruction were often one in nature. The vast towering ocean waves of onrushing cataclysm, the wild rising flames of conflagration, the earth-shaking cracking open of the earth. The eye of the leopard. I stuck the fingers of one hand into her cunt, and with my other hand I greased my cock with her running blood. I brought the swollen blood-greased head of my cock to her ass, and I shoved myself into her, feeling the sudden severe spasm of her body and pulling back on the abrasive rope at the nape of her neck as I did so.

  Just months before, my cock would have been too limp to slam and fill that cranny. But I was young again. More than that, I was an ithyphallic god, a force of flesh and of deeds, a bringer of fates. It felt great. I exploded inside her almost instantly.

  We showered together. There was surprisingly little blood, but we lathered and rinsed each other slowly and luxuriously. I saw that there were tiny spots of blood on her lips, mostly at the corners of her lips, where the rough bristlings of the rope bit into her. She said little, and in an untelling voice. But then she hugged me closely as the warm water fell upon us. The lingering human weakness within me had brought me unease and doubt about what I had done to her. The tender clinging closeness of her hug showed me that my lingering human weakness must be left behind. A god can do no wrong, no matter what he does. I had not done anything to her. I had done something for her.

  We shampooed each other. The back of her neck, beneath where her hair fell, looked sore and raw, and there were a few tiny spots of red there as well. We dried each other with the same plush towel. I wished I had pajamas to get into. It was not warm enough for just my skivvies, and I did not want to dress again, though I did. I had not slept at the home of another for more than fifteen years, but I would have slept there on that night. The blessed serene drowsiness was coming upon me. When she emerged in her robe, with vitamin E on her lips, I took her mobile telephone from the couch, placed it in her hand, and had her order enough Chinese food for a small family of wolves.

  In my blissful, becalmed state, I tasted and delighted in what I ate as others could not. To prolong and deepen my pleasure, I used chopsticks instead of a fork. We spoke comfortably, with slow ease, as we ate likewise and randomly from the various containers we shared. She said that she felt like hearing music that was very tranquil and very lovely, more so than anything she could think of. Arvo Pärt’s Alina came to my mind, and I told myself that I must have her hear it when she spent the night at my place, and I knew that she would come, soon, to spend the night. There was no cross, but it was so very close to where she worked; and I wanted so very much to have her there, in my living room and in my bed.

  She spoke a little about what was going on at her job these days, the stupidity of drawing up a detailed budget for a project that did not and never would have the money to remotely bring any meaning to it.

  “Sounds like the government,” I said.

  “Sort of like working for the government, too,” she said. “Especially these days. Imagine doing bookkeeping for dreams and lies. They don’t teach that at business school.” She chewed awhile, made a very satisfied little sound. “Though these days they probably should.”

  “Why didn’t you become a model? You know you’ve got the looks for it.”

  “Too short a career span. Plus, regardless of looks, it’s a long shot. There are a lot of models out there walking around broke and desperate for work who look just as good or better than the ones pulling down big money.” She paused, and then spoke again as if sharing a secret. “Besides, to tell you the truth, I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to be a movie star. I went for an audition once, and I never went for another. I think what I really wanted was to escape from my life into a dreamland. It didn’t work. It couldn’t ever have worked. I didn’t have it in me. Business school I had in me. Barely. And that just got me deeper into what I wanted to escape from.”

  I had heard her speak honestly before. Very honestly. But not with such nonchalance.

  “It’s like that obsession with the scars. It’s like wanting an unblemished outside to hide the damage that’s inside. Like hiding it might make it go away, like the one might cancel out the other. That’s the thing about escaping into a fake world, the thing about keeping the poison in a pretty little cloisonné box. All the same thing.” She looked at me. “If that makes any sense.”

  “It makes a lot of sense, what you’re saying. It makes even more sense that you’re seeing it,” I said. “You have to know the prison before you can break out of it.”

  “That all I want to do. I mean, not know the prison. That hurts. What I mean is break out of it. Blow it up behind me. Be free.”

  “You will, baby. The way you’re talking, the way you’re doing. You will.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she said. “Sometimes I think I like to suffer.”

  “Well,” I said, as lightly as I could, “there aren’t too many girls I know who have their own crosses.”

  “Oh, that,” she said, dismissing my words as if they had been said out of innocence or ignorance or both. “That’s not what I’m talking about. That’s not suffering to me. That’s pleasure. It gets me off. We’re all fucking perverts, if not in our own eyes, then in the eyes of the person next to us. So I’m a fucking pervert. What’s that old Grateful Dead song? ‘I’m a thief and I dig it.’ Yeah, well, I’m a pervert and I dig it. We don’t burn witches anymore. We burn perverts.”

  “I think that was the Band, ‘I’m a thief and I dig it.’ I forget what song.”

  “Remember that guy a few years ago? That guy who covered British royalty for CNN? That guy with the breathless gay, gay royal grin? He got busted one night at four in the morning in Central Park with a noose around his neck tied to his balls, a dildo in his trunk, and a bag of meth in his pocket? Remember him? I can’t remember his name. Richard something, I think. But remember that?”

  I did remember something like that a few years back. The guy she was talking about was back, covering royal gossip again for that stupid so-called news network. I had seen that oh-so-happy face of his the other day on one of the televisions behind the bar on Reade Street.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I remember that.”

  “He’s my hero,” she said.

  “Why not?” I shrugged and smiled. “If you’re going to have a hero, why not him? Better him than a bunch of asshole cops. Yeah, better him than the cops who busted him.”

  My words, which were sincere, seemed to make her happy, and she dug with glee into a container of lobster. It was good to
see her like this.

  “I still want to see you whip yourself,” I said. “With that crop, like you told me about. I still want to see that.”

  “I’m feeling pretty mellow and blissed-out right now,” she said. “Maybe next time.”

  “That’s what you said last time.”

  “You’ve got to remember before we start getting it on, before you take the whip.”

  “But then I’d come and wouldn’t feel like whipping you.”

  “You’d like to see it that much?”

  “Yeah, I would.”

  Still chewing her lobster, she stood and went into the dim-glowing red of the other room. She came out with the crop. She removed her robe and placed it on a chair. She faced the wall opposite me, and, supporting herself against it with her left arm and outstretched hand, she reached round the shoulder of that supporting arm with the crop that was held by her right hand, caressing the area beneath her shoulder blade with the little leather loop at the tip of the crop. These caresses were slow and seductive.

  As quietly as I intently unzippered my pants and drew out my cock, she must have heard it, for she then immediately stopped the caressing movements and struck herself hard with a strong fast flex of her wrist. There was a startling snapping sound, and I then knew why that little leather loop at the rat-tail end of the whip was called a popper. She did it again. Then again. I watched her back flush as she thrashed. She turned her head as far as she could over her right shoulder to watch the self-lashing, the cracking of the whip on her own back.

  “You’re naked,” I said. My cock was in my hand, which I began to move faster. “What about the scars?”

  “Fuck the scars,” she said. It was a sort of low, loud whisper that emerged from heavy, quickening breath.

  I saw the scar on her thigh where I had opened her. I looked at all of her. I watched and heard the raising and striking of the crop, faster and faster, harder and harder, as her breathing likewise grew faster and faster, harder and harder. I went into the other room, got the biggest of the whips. I approached her from the right, out of range of the cropping. My cock was still hard, and I took it in my hand again as I worked the thick leather handle of the big whip into her cunt. There was a gasp, a final violent snap of the crop, and she loosened and seemed as if about to fall just as the whip handle fell from her unclenched cunt and my semen struck the salved scar on her thigh. Moving my hand back and forth, I spread the semen with the softening head of my cock over the scar and the surrounding area of her thigh, feeling the smooth oiled flesh, the smooth and warmer bare flesh. There was a single drop of blood beading on her back. I sucked it into my mouth. An even smaller droplet followed. I placed two semen-smeared fingers to it, then placed the fingers to her lips, which opened to take the fingers into it and suck them clean.

  I washed and dried my hands, rubbed lotion on her back. She wanted to kiss me. My semen, her blood, her saliva. Fuck it, why not? She moved her tongue on mine, slowly withdrew it, and our lips met gently. As she put on her robe, I kissed the slight rise of her sweet small breast.

  She looked to me like a tall, thin sylvan deity. A hamadryad, a wood nymph, a beautiful maiden and indwelling spirit of the trees. I thought of the frail tawny oak leaf that had appeared to me with the last breath of winter, the first breath of spring, the oak leaf I had imagined drifting over the sea waves of time, thousands of years, from ancient grove to the here and now of my windowsill. Balanos. Yes, maybe Balanos, hamadryad of the oak. Daughter, one of eight, of Hamadryas, the holy mother whose name was given to the hamadryas baboon of Asia Minor. The spirits of the wood nymphs were said by many to inhabit individual trees, and when a tree died or was killed, so was the nymph-spirit that lived in it. I thought of the mystical exquisiteness of the petrified blue handle of the big knife.

  Dead monkeys. Dead oaks. Dead virgin nymphs.

  But now was a time for life, a time for life ever new. I helped her on with her robe. We returned to the Chinese food, as if to a movable feast that awaited us at every pause for rest on an enchanted journey. My lassitude was wondrous. Every bite of food, though no longer hot, was sublime with orchestrally nuanced satisfaction, and the presence and soft sleepy voice of Lorna beside me enwrapped that sublimity in pure and peaceful happiness.

  I was falling asleep. She invited me to spend the night. But I needed to fall full into this alluring sleep in my own bed, in the smoky air of the endless breath, my own breath, where for so long I had lived as if dead and where I now lived as if entering true life for the first time. Words passed through my mind as I held her and kissed her good-bye: “We are the breakers of our own hearts.” But I was too tired to say them, and they probably needed not to be said, for I felt that she was very near to knowing this herself. Words did come from my mouth, but they were only three and whispered: “I love you.”

  I whispered those words again as sleep overtook me in my bed, but I did not know to whom or to what I whispered them.

  THE CROAKER WHO RELUCTANTLY GAVE ME THE BACLOFEN had given me a prescription for forty-five ten-milligram pills. The prescription, which could be refilled only twice, stated that I was to take half a tablet three times a day for thirty days. And that is what I had been doing.

  Dr. Ameisen had called from Paris some days ago and left a message for me saying that he was calling only to see how I was doing with the baclofen. His compassion impressed me greatly. I knew how busy he was, and while there was not a penny to be made from me, he showed more concern for me than the doctors who were shaking me down without barely bothering to know me. I had meant to call him back, but it was always too late in the day when I thought of doing so, and with the six-hour time difference, I didn’t want to bother him at night. It was early afternoon when I dialed his number, and I heard his voice.

  “I’ve been taking the baclofen for about two weeks now, maybe a little longer,” I told him.

  “And how do you feel?”

  I told him that I felt no different.

  “You still experience desires to drink? You don’t feel less anxiety?”

  “I feel no difference,” I repeated. I was not about to tell him of the increasing sense of well-being that my new life was bringing me. I was not about to talk about this with any doctor. Though I knew of no reason not to, I felt that there might be a reason of which I was not aware, or that a reason for regretting my honesty might arise in the future. So I remained guarded. I answered Olivier’s questions only so far as they related to my alcoholism and my yearning to be rid of it.

  “How much are you taking?”

  “Five milligrams three times a day. Fifteen milligrams a day.”

  “No, no, no,” he said. “That is what you’re supposed to take for only the first day or so. Fifteen milligrams a day can have no effect on anyone. As I explained in my book, you should have increased the dose to thirty milligrams a day after the first day or so. And if thirty doesn’t work, you increase again.”

  He went on to express exasperated disappointment that my doctor had not read or prescribed according to the case studies, medical papers, and abstracts reproduced in his book’s appendix.

  I told him that I would immediately stop splitting pills and increase the dosage from five to ten milligrams three times a day, but each of the two refills of forty-five tablets would then last me only fifteen days, or altogether only a month, even if I did not need to increase the dosage again; and I had doubts that the doctor would give me more plentiful prescriptions with more plentiful refills.

  “Ask him to cite one single incidence of reported side effects from baclofen at higher dosages. He will not be able to do so, because there is none.”

  “But what if he refuses to increase the prescription? How will I get what I need without going through a lot of trouble?”

  “If you were in Paris, I could treat you. A lot of doctors here could. The amount of baclofen being prescribed has risen greatly in Europe and it continues to rise. But in America there is ignorance and resistance
.”

  The hydra of addiction was big business, big money. Baclofen was not.

  “I’ll start taking the ten milligrams three times a day,” I said. “If this doctor won’t give me what I need, I’ll get new doctors.”

  “Increase the dosage,” he said, “then in a few days let me know how you feel.”

  Again he impressed me. If other doctors even bothered to ask you about the effects of a medication that you had recently begun taking, they waited until your next paying visit.

  I made up my mind to visit the nearby storefront Hindoo croaker, let him stick his finger up my ass, and see how he sat with giving me the sort of baclofen prescription I needed, as well as the Valium. And I would take a stroll through Chinatown to see how I fared with the doctors there.

  And, yeah, I would schedule that colonoscopy with my internist. That would be a good opportunity to get things settled with him, one way or the other.

  What, really, was this thing with the Valium anyway? The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. I was convinced that I felt no different, no better and no worse, with it or without it, before or after taking it. Wouldn’t the glass of cold milk, without the Valium, suffice as ritual enough?

  My friend Peter Wolf had pulled into town from Boston for a few days, and we rendezvoused at the bar on Reade Street. I had my container of coffee, he had a cup of tea. It struck me that, though neither of us was drinking, our talk was no different than if we had swilled so much jive-ass small-batch whiskey that we could no longer tell the difference between it and Old Crow and were still at it hard and heavy.