In Extremis

by John Shirley

  “Hey, Butch,” Buddy says, coming up to Ray on the corner.

  “Don’t call me that unless you mean it,” Ray says, “and you don’t.” Ray’s only a quarter Latino, but he’s got the rolled-up headband around his head, trying to get the action that wants a Latin Lover.

  Buddy’s from Texas, long and muscular, tan starting to fade, tattoos, really tight buns; he dances sometimes at the Polk Street Theatre San Francisco’s Finest All Male Dancers, but he gets fired every so often for picking up tricks there. They rehire him. And fire him again . . . He was in some porn, too. Ray keeps trying to get into some porn, but generally he smells a little too ripe; he likes to get loaded and tends to end up sleeping on floors and in places with no showers. “I got somethin’ for us,” Buddy says. “There’s this guy that saw me in one of those Marines movies, I was fucking some real butch Marine guy, he thinks I’m totally tough, but he wants to watch me with somebody else . . . you know, him watching and shit . . .”

  All of this is, maybe, twenty-four hours before I came on the scene.

  Turns out this guy, the trick buddy found, is some kind of computer nerd, into the black-market hacker stuff, too—and he’s got a head iron. Buddy knew what a head iron was, and even though his cousin went ill behind one of those things, he still wanted to try one.

  The dude’s place is one of those real nice Noe Valley flats, restored Victorian building, shiny hardwood floors, antiques, modern art paintings, home-theater flat screen TV, expensive PC with one of those screen-saver things wiggling around in tastefully iridescent fractal dancing . . . first editions of Oscar Wilde . . .

  Trick’s name is Charlie; Buddy never could stand a Charlie . . . anybody who went by Charlie when they could be Charles or even Chuck . . . Trick’s about sixty pounds overweight, hair real short in the arty, almost bald thing, walks kind of pigeon-toed, real nice clothes, good material, gold lambda earlobe ring . . . WHOA, IS THAT A ROLEX WATCH? Yes, it is, and no, it’s not counterfeit. This is looking like potential.

  They drink red wine and Ray asks the guy if he’s got any cocaine. Charlie sort of leers and says cocaine makes you impotent, don’t want you impotent. And some quote from Shakespeare about swords being blunted.

  “Take off your pants so I know you’re not a cop,” Ray says to Charlie.

  Buddy gives Ray a look. Oh, yeah, sure, like this lisping, pigeonfooted, Noe Valley fag is a cop. You fucking bet.

  But later Buddy figures out that Ray doesn’t think the guy is a cop at all; he’s just taking over. Telling the guy what to do. Laying it down.

  The guy has dated some hustlers, knows the laws, knows that an undercover cop is not allowed to take off his pants—so he doesn’t argue; he takes off his pants to show he’s not Vice, folding the trousers and the underwear neatly on the arm of the antique velvet sofa.

  His dick, hiding under his round white belly, looks like a snail under a boulder that got scared and it’s going back into the shell.

  Buddy asks for the money once the pants are off, and Charlie has it all ready, a hundred cash, more later if everything is good. Fine for starts.

  Ray is loading up on the wine. Get what he can while he’s here. He’s looking around a little too much at all the carefully dusted objecks-dee-art—there’s a lot of carved jade stuff that looks like it might be worth money—and Buddy says, “So what’re you into?”

  First, Charlie suggests, just make yourselves at home. Perhaps you two would like to take a shower . . . together.

  He makes it sound like it’s partying for them to take a shower and him to watch, but probably it’s mostly because they stink.

  So they take a shower, soap each other’s dicks and asses for Charlie to watch, Charlie’s fat little fingers working that snail, coaxing it halfway out of its shell.

  Ray and Buddy never did sex together before, they’ve been mostly, like, friends on the corner, but they’re pros by now and Buddy doesn’t let his embarrassment show. He kind of likes playing with Ray after a while. Takes him back to a circle jerk when he was eleven.

  Half hour later, they’re wearing only towels, still a little damp, Charlie’s aftershave burning-cold in their pits. Charlie has opened a second bottle of this expensive wine. C’est très cher, mai . . . he says, showing off. Like he’s the only one who ever took a French class.

  Charlie looks expectant, so Ray and Buddy drop the towels and start full-on going at it. The scene is bothering Buddy a little, so he’s not really keeping it up very well. But it’s enough for Charlie, who’s standing by the bed watching like a dog at a dinner table, grinning conspiratorially, really getting into the fantasy

  Buddy starts to think, We’re this trick’s video game. It’s more than live porn, it’s not Ray in control after all, it’s Charlie, taking them through levels in one of those games where you go down and down into some cavern hole, and ol’ Charlie’s going to win when he spurts his little dinger . . . then they can get the fuck out of here, go to Mary’s and get a burger or something and laugh at this fat fuck.

  And then Charlie starts getting into the game himself. Moving them around like dolls, stroking their asses while they go at it, putting Ray’s hand on his snail—that’s when Ray says, “You like to do B&D, anything like that?”

  Charlie’s eyes shine, but he’s a little nervous about letting Ray tie him up, but Ray says, “We’ll tie you down to the bed and we’ll get busy on top of you like you’re the mattress . . .” And this gets Charlie so excited he’s shaking . . .

  . . . but he gets jumpy when Ray starts to tie his hands to the bedposts with the old silk neckties, so Ray says, ”I’ll just tie it with a butterfly loop, not really tied, and you can pull it off when you want, Charlie.”

  He does tie the guy’s left hand just like that, and Charlie’s not looking as close when Ray ties the right hand—Ray puts an extra knot in it—and Buddy does the ankles, and then Charlie says, “Go to my dresser drawer, there’s an instrument behind the socks . . .”

  Ray and Buddy figure the “instrument” is a vibrator or a whip, but when they find it, it turns out to be the head iron. It looks just like an old-fashioned barber’s electric razor, the kind they use to shave the nape of your neck, and it probably is the shell of one, but it was taken apart and they put, like, gizmos inside it, and it’s got duct tape holding it together now, and a little glass cone at the shaving end instead of the cutting pieces.

  “This goes on your head, right?” Ray asks. “Like on the back of your skull?”

  He plugs the head iron in and starts to try it on Charlie, but Charlie pulls back real quick, says, “No, no, wait, it must go to a precise spot, or it can have very nasty side effects . . . one loses control of one’s bowels”—he’s the kind of guy who says ‘one’ instead of ‘my’, right ?—“or one may have a seizure . . .”

  So Charlie has Ray hold a hand mirror over him. Then he has Ray put a piece of tape on a certain spot on the back of his head, stuck in that short hair. That’s the spot where the head iron goes. Then he tells Ray to go ahead.

  Charlie licking his lips, breathing shallow, kind of scared and kind of excited . . .

  Ray puts the glass cone of the iron on the tape over the fat guy’s spot—forty-five-degree angle—and pushes the on switch, and there’s a little hum and then the guy’s eyes instantly dilate and he moans and he goes rigid and then limp and then rigid and then limp . . . getting hard and soft, hard and soft, like when somebody mainlines cocaine . . .

  Well, of course, naturally, Ray has to try this. Ray, understand, is the kind of guy who used to be into glue and huffing fumes and just any fucking thing.

  “Now,” Charlie is saying, “now, fuck on top of me . . . I’m your mattress, do it, the two of you on top of me . . .”

  But Ray is ignoring him; he’s finding the spot on his own head. A couple of near misses—one time he starts choking for a second—and then, boom, he hits the spot. He gets it. Big ecstasy.

  And under the influence of the head iron,
Ray starts trying to fuck Buddy just because he wants to.

  Buddy pushes him off at first, but then Ray finds the spot on Buddy’s head—he gets just the right spot on the first try and he pushes the button and it’s like a big wet explosion of GOOD, just plain GOOD pouring out of him. Like you shot him in the head and what came out wasn’t blood, it was GOOD.

  “Oh fuuuu-uuuuuuck!”

  And now it feels good when Ray shoves into him—in this stoned-out place Buddy’s in, it’d feel good if you shoved a claw hammer up him claw first. They go at it and they’re tripping, they’re into some other place, some place that’s all penetration and skin-flavored pleasure and waves of maleness that metamorphose into femaleness—

  But then it starts to fall apart, kind of fizzing into decay, like an Alka-Seltzer tablet in water; like a flare on the street, bright red—and then going black.

  Buddy starts to imagine what it would be like if his old man could see him with this guy’s dick in his butt. His guts crinkle up at the thought . . .

  Then Charlie starts yelling he wants another hit, he wants them to do what they said, and Ray gets up off Buddy and suddenly both Ray and Buddy are feeling all wasted and hollow, like they might collapse into themselves, like a cigarette ash that’s perfectly shaped till you touch it.

  And Buddy feels a kind of icy, gushing rage he never felt before, and he looks at Ray and he can see the same thing in Ray’s face. Ray’s saying, “Buddy, all the stuff in this place could be our stuff.”

  Charlie really starts yelling when he hears that, but he can’t get free from that extra knot on his wrist and then Ray is standing over him, making it louder and worse. “You want another hit, here’s another motherfuckin’ hit!” And he starts whacking Charlie around the face with the head iron, making scallop-shaped wounds in him, Charlie screaming and Buddy saying something about the neighbors calling the cops, so Ray stuffs several pairs of dirty socks and underwear in Charlie’s mouth—Ray’s and Buddy’s socks and underwear—and Charlie’s screams are muffled and Ray gets up on the bed yelling, “You want us on top of you?” And he starts jumping onto Charlie, coming down on him with his knees, so Buddy can actually hear Charlie’s ribs cracking under Ray’s kneecaps.

  Buddy’s been doing all this to Charlie in his mind same time as Ray does it, it’s just like he’s doing it when Ray does it, so his rage comes in that way and froths over and after a moment he can think a little and he says, “You kill him, we don’t get his ATM number, bro . . .”

  Ray gets so distracted using the corkscrew on Charlie to get the ATM PIN that he almost forgets about the head iron, and Buddy puts some big willpower on the line and hides the thing. He really wants to wreck it, because it scares him, it scares him to feel that high and scares him even worse to feel that down afterward, but he can’t quite get himself to wreck it. So he finds a trapdoor in a ceiling, puts the head iron in the attic.

  The attic entrance is in the same closet they put Charlie in. Charlie’s still alive. They figure they’re gonna need him. They make Charlie crap a few times in the bathroom first, set up a bicycler’s sipping bottle he could suck some water out of and they tie him into a corner of the closet, really tie him good so he can’t bang on the wall to get attention. He looks like he’s in the middle of a spider web afterward, with that soft white rope they found under the bed, tying him to the hinges and the clothes-hanger pole. Ray wants to pee on the guy, but Buddy won’t let him, saying he doesn’t want the smell.

  Then Ray asks about the head iron, but Buddy puts him off, says let’s wait on that till the drugs run out.

  “What fuckin’ drugs?”

  “Let’s go to the ATM. See what we can get. Charlie ain’t doing shit, tied up like one of those guys in a cannibal pot.”

  “I got your back, man.”

  First Ray and Buddy do some of Charlie’s expensive mail-order crystallized vitamins—they know about rushes and crashes and how to deal with that—and they eat a steak from Charlie’s fridge, so they feel some better. The head-iron crash eases out.

  And what do they find in Charlie’s bedside table? Three guesses. Right, a piece! A .38 revolver that looks like it’s never been fired. One box of shells. This is just getting better and better.

  Ray stays with Charlie—watching MTV3 and drinking—while Buddy goes to a check-cashing place with a check from Charlie for a grand. The place calls up for confirmation, and Ray has the portable phone jammed up against one of Charlie’s ears and the pistol up against the other. Charlie approves that fuckin’ check, pronto.

  Then Ray meets Buddy on the street, by the check-cash place. They divvy a thousand from the check and three hundred from the ATM, and they go on a mission. After midnight, they can get another three hundred dollars from the ATM, and it’s almost midnight.

  “I still feel kind of weird from that head-iron shit,” Ray says. “But, man, that was a fuckin’ rush!”

  “That thing, I don’t trust that shit, we gotta forget that, at least for now, dude. Let’s get some good rock, some good ronnie, maybe some pussy . . .”

  “Pussy, yeah, now the man’s got an idea,” Ray says, but Buddy doesn’t quite believe it.

  About half an hour after midnight, Buddy and Ray come to me. That’s right, me.

  All they could find was street hubba, it seems, which is pretty much shit cocaine.

  “You know Miss Dragon, right?” Ray says. “We got the money. You could get us the good stuff.”

  I correct him. “That’s Dragon Miss, they call her.”

  Me, I’m terrified of cocaine. Turns me into a hit-sucking bug faster’n a vice cop takes a bag. Then I’m gone for a couple of days and I run the wheels off that fucker and then I turn paranoid, which is maybe how . . .

  Well, it’s one way people get killed.

  So I stick to hashish—which I get from the Dragon Miss—maybe sometimes opium, always some cognac or Johnnie Walker Red. Speed if I need it. And so many vitamins I smell like ’em.

  Maybe what I most get off on is the second-story work. One time I popped into this guy’s apartment, he’s sleeping in the same room, snoring like a chainsaw, and there’s a wallet on the nightstand, and I snag the wallet and flip it open in the light by the window and see there’s a fucking badge in the wallet—the guy is a cop. I look over at him and he’s still sawing logs, but now I see on the other nightstand there’s a fucking .44 lying there like a chunk of pure silver. This is a cop’s bedroom and he’s got a loaded .44 next to him and I’ve got his fucking wallet in my hand! Now, that’s a rush!

  I took the .44 and the wallet and I took a beer from his fridge too.

  I used to be a writer, one time, plays and journalism. I even did a feature for Esquire once. I used to do those slam readings at coffeehouses that are so chic now, everybody playing beatnik. But then I got into the coke binges. Louisa . . .

  Well, they found Louisa dead.

  And after that, I had to live different. I don’t know how to explain better than that. I couldn’t go back to writing, but I couldn’t be a basehead neither. I had lost Louisa, and maybe I could’ve saved her, if I wasn’t on the shit.

  But I understand Buddy pretty well. I’ve known him a shitload of years. On Tenderloin time, anyway. Four years is a long time to know somebody in the Tenderloin.

  So I get Buddy talking about what he and Ray did: he’s like a free-association machine after he takes a hit on the shitty hubba. During the story Buddy’s telling me, Ray is in the bathroom, jerking off by the sound of it. Whuppawhuppawhuppa. Some people when they do cocaine, they can’t keep their hands off their dicks, which is funny because their dicks don’t usually perform for them anymore.

  Then Ray comes out of my bathroom looking uglies at Buddy, and Buddy takes the hint and shuts up, and to defuse the situation and just to follow this street and see where it comes out, I tell them, “Let’s go see if the Dragon Miss wants your money.”

  Like I thought: turns out Dragon Miss wants to see this apartment full
of antiques and art tchotchkes, and the guy tied up in the closet. “It sounds like just the best party, girls . . . if we can keep the Big Tummies out.” She thinks it’s cute to call the local cops Big Tummies.

  “Neighbors are off on vacation or somethin’, nobody gonna call the cops,” Ray tells her. “What about the rock?”

  She pauses in the doorway of her Japanese-decorated place, framed by the silk hangings, an ancient kendo sword mounted over her head. She’s got a long face and eyes like a husky’s, and cushy lips. Of course, she’s got the big hands and the Adam’s apple. One more thing about her eyes, they look startled all the time, like she’s surprised by everything, even when she plans it down to dotting the i. She talks in that cute, surprised way while she puts a 9mm round in the back of your head.

  Now she lets her green-and-gold dragon-figured kimono hang open so we can see both her big silicon tits and her surprisingly large dick. The joint effect, so to speak, always gives me a woodie.

  She’s got this rich Japanese houseboy, president of a major airline corp by day, could hire five servants to do the housework—but when he gets out of that limo, his whole style changes on the flight up those carpeted stairs and he comes in with his eyes down and begs to be allowed to clean Dragon Missy’s toilet; to lovingly arrange her shoes in her closet; to deliver her female hormone pills and cocaine on an antique ivory salver in the morning; to bring her the Xanax and Halcion at night. Waits on her hand and foot, and for his reward she beats his ass. One time I was visiting at the condo he gave her, and since he was going into the kitchen I asked him to take my glass for me and refill it and he said, big outrage, “What, you think I’m homosexual?”

  Some phone calls and a cab and bang, we’re over at this trick Charlie’s house.

  “My goodness,” Dragon Miss says, hanging up her coat, “there’s a man in the closet!” For a moment there’s a flicker of hope in Charlie’s eyes (and a flicker of feeling for him in me . . . just a flicker), but then Dragon Miss closes the closet door.