The Children of Hamelin
Page 24
Reached out for her shoulders, tipped her over onto her back, clutched at her ankles and hoisted her legs high in the air, then back in an arc so that the tips of her toes nearly touched the floor alongside her ears. I plunged love’s burning spear deep, deep, deep down into her, thrusting down, down, down, seeking to burn myself into the core of her being and set it aflame....
“Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!” she screamed and screamed and screamed as I thrust deeper and deeper and deeper, spreading her legs wider and wider and wider, splitting her essence and filling it with my own, and when her body exploded a half-beat ahead of me, her teeth sunk into my shoulder like red-hot fangs and my lungs-cock-being whited out in a huge pleasure-pain scream...
And she buried her head against my chest as I collapsed onto her and we panted wordlessly into each other’s ears as my mind went blank, totally, incredibly, wonderfully blank for ten million years...
“...cold....” I could feel her lips murmuring against my chest. Cold? Chick must be crazy: I felt ten thousand degrees of tropical night warmth, felt like a huge featherbed drifting off on a bloodheat cloud of sweet immobility secure in the proper center of the universe her moist flesh warm against me breathing the sighs of equatorial seas. Cold?
“...cold... so cold....”
Oh what a drag... possible that the sweet warmth that enveloped me was leached from her body by mine? I didn’t want to budge from the delicious floor; my every muscle seemed set in maximum pleasure position so that any shift, the least move, would destroy perfection. Over on the edge of the table was my coat.... If I could reach it without moving....
I stretched my right arm out to full length—a pain in my shoulder protested and every muscle said what the fuck you doing—but I was six inches short. I leaned the mass of my body into my arm-extension-bones creaking, pleasure-receptors disturbed from the optimum they had reached—got my fingers on the coat, pulled it off the table and across the floor, draped it over Arlene’s bare back and let my muscles sink back into maximum repose beneath her weight.
“...cold—” Her body stirred against me, the motion like a thousand tiny charleyhorses. Damn! Wish we had done it in bed so we could lay like sleeping logs together for about ten years. But the bed was a million miles of motion away. Shit!
“...ooooooh—” Now she was groaning an awful hangover-groan. The outside universe was slowly seeping back into my consciousness: I was still stoned, but laying on a hard floor with Arlene writhing most unsexually against my chest. Memory of what we had done about a century ago drifted through my head in fragments like someone else’s dream. Jesus! It had been incredible: a fuck so pure and totally mindless it was beyond memory’s recall. Images of memory, film-perfect, flashed on a screen in my head, but I couldn’t imagine us as the actors in the film or what I had felt except that it had been totally, amorally delicious, like places inside us that never existed before had taken command as if it had been hash loving hash.
Arlene lifted her face from my chest. Her eyes met mine and seemed to shrivel to prunes; she shifted her head so that her ear rested on my chest and her eyes looked off into the far corner of the room, not meeting mine. “Oh God,” she moaned. “Oh God... I’m sorry... I’m so sorry—”
“Sorry?” What was she raving about?
“Oh how you must hate me! Oooh... disgusting animal....” I felt her body spasm against me, drawing up into a fetal ball under the coat. What’s going on?
I reached up, cupped her chin in both hands, lifted her face towards me. Her eyes were drawn inward, defended by a deep frown, her lips puckered in a grimace of disgust.
“What’s the matter, baby? Why on Earth should I hate you?”
“What I did... oh God what I did....” She touched the bloody bruise at the back of my neck and cringed. “I hurt you... I didn’t know what I was doing... oh... how could I be such an animal...? Oooh...”
Jesus, was she going to freak out now? What was the matter with her? I wished I wasn’t so damned stoned so I could figure out what strange worms were wriggling behind her fish-cold eyes.
I tightened my grip on her chin, shook her. Her flesh felt dead in my hands. “Snap out of it!” I said as sharply as I could manage. “What’s the matter, baby?”
Her eyes seemed to come back into focus, but they were like two chips of cold green glass. “Oh Tom,” she whispered, “how can you stand to look at me?”
“Why not? You’re beautiful.” I tried to kiss her on the lips; her flesh seemed to crawl under mine and she pulled her face away. I let go her chin. She let her head fall to my chest propped up on the point of her chin and looked at me as if she were trying to frighten off private demons with the vision of my face.
THE CHILDREN OF HAMELIN
1 - Junk
2 - The Girl In The Rain
3 - “Do Me Like You Did the Night Before...”
4 - “Take Me On A Trip Upon Your Magic Swirling Ship...”
5 - The Big Game
6 - Belly to Belly
7 - Room 101
8 - “Have a Whiff, Have a Whiff, Have a Whiff On Me—”
9 - The Unmoved Mover
10 - Naked To My Friends
11 - Mano a Mano
12 - “...and Trust Your Fate to the Hand of God—”
13 - The Man in Black
14 - The Cuckoo-clock Revisited
15 - “...but I Would Not Feel So All Alone...”
16 - “...You May Take Two Giant Steps...”
17 - A Meeting of the Brotherhood
18 - Into the Briar Patch
19 - Which Side Are You On?
20 - Dues
21 - “Break on Through to the Other Side...”
22 - The Path to Consciousness
23 - The Emperor’s Tailors
24 - Hadj
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“You never went down on anyone before?”
“No... no... oooh... like an animal....”
Oh Christ, why did she have to ruin something beautiful with all this goddamn stupid thinking? Maybe it was just because she was stoned...? Yeah, yeah, thing to do was to get her to sleep it off; maybe in the morning I could make some sense to her, but it was hopeless now.
“Let’s get some sleep and forget about it,” I said. “Things’ll look different in the morning, I promise—”
“Sleep...?”
“Yeah, you know, sleep. When you wake up, the world’ll look different.”
“Yes... sleep... I want to sleep... forget... oooh....”
And she wrapped the coat around her and refused to look at my naked body and we got in bed together in the dark. Under the covers, she curled up into a ball and was almost instantly asleep, with her back turned to me.
It wasn’t easy, but we managed not to say a word to each other until we were sitting at the table in the living room over coffee—the alarm had rung and she had bolted out of bed before I could even get my eyes open; and by the time I had got out of bed she was dressed and through in the bathroom, avoiding me as she fussed with the coffee-pot; and by the time I had shaved and gotten my work suit on, my coffee was waiting on the living room table and she was sipping hers, staring deep down into its muddy depths as I sat down beside her. I tried to kid myself that she had just been doing a groovy domestic number—but I didn’t get very far. The poor chick just couldn’t face me, is all.
“You okay?” were the first words I was able to say to her.
She stared down into the coffee. “I’m all right,” she said coldly. “My God, what you must think of me after last night....”
“I really don’t understand any of this. What in blazes do you think I think?”
She finally looked up at me. Her eyes were points of fear hiding behind her glasses, her face seemed to cringe. She looked like someone waiting to be hit. I took a long drink of coffee and started to feel almost human.
“I acted like a filthy animal,” she said. “I don’t see how you can stand to look at me.”
Her mouth puckered, as if the coffee had suddenly turned to semen in her mouth. She shuddered. “It... it... it’s not what I did,” she muttered, “it’s... the way I did it. I was out of my mind... I feel so....”
“Maybe just different?” I suggested.
Her face relaxed just a little. “Yes,” she said. “I... I don’t feel like the me I was before last night.”
“Is that really so terrible?”
She stared at me with huge eyes that seemed on the verge of tears. “I... You mean you don’t...? I don’t...?”
“Disgust me? Why should you? I enjoyed it. You enjoyed it. What’s the problem?”
She looked down into the coffee again. “But the way I was... I’ve never been like that before... I felt like... sucking you up... like... like....”
“You were just turned on all the way for the first time.”
“Like an animal...”
“We’re not carrots, you know.”
Still not daring to look at me again, she said: “I really don’t disgust you now? You’re not just trying to be a gentlemen?”
I touched my hand to her cold, dry cheek. “Baby,” I said, “I love you for last night. You were really you, and it was groovy.”
“But the hashish—”
“Is just a chemical! Arlene stoned is still Arlene.”
She looked up at me, started to move her hand towards mine, dropped it back in her lap. “I feel so different,” she said. “Like there are things inside of me I didn’t know were there, maybe things that shouldn’t be there... things that would make you hate me if you saw them...”
“Just the other way around. We opened up to each other. We shared something very private. Dig: you’re not going to discuss last night in group, are you?”
A horrified grimace.
“Well, see? Last night isn’t something bad, between us it’s something good, something only the two of us can share. That’s what sex should be between two people who care for each other.”
Her hand came up and touched my hand touching her cheek. “You make me feel so strange,” she said. Then she looked at me, smiled hesitantly, then kissed me very lightly on the lips.
“Not so bad, is it?” I said.
She smiled shyly at me. “No.... I’m all confused... But... you really don’t...?”
I fished in my pocket and brought out my key. I dangled it in front of her face.
“You don’t really expect me to accept that now,” she said. It was just short of being a question.
“No. But I want you to know it’s still there for the taking, dig?”
She smiled a real wide smile, and her eyes seemed to soften.
“You’re really a good person,” she said. “You know, I just might be falling in love with you.” And she kissed me again, harder this time, with a flick of her tongue and the homey taste of coffee.
Eyes to eyes, smile to open smile, she said: “I woke up thinking last night had killed everything between us. Now I think... things may just be starting—”
Once more she kissed me, a kiss that was hot and languid, and her tongue started to move in my mouth like something we had no time to finish was starting.
I pulled away with a little laugh. “Better cool it,” I said, “or you’ll never get to class and I’ll never get to work.”
She laughed back. I felt five years younger, felt I could contemplate the word “love” without snickering.
“I’m a little scared,” she said. “It feels so different... Let’s take our time... yes?”
I felt that uncertain hollow tingling too. “Slow and easy,” I said. “We’ve got all the time in the world....”
16 - “...You May Take Two Giant Steps...”
“...comes as close to being the big breakthrough for you, Mr. Feinblatt, as anything of yours I’ve ever seen. In fact, Silent Cat is the kind of novel that gives a conscientious agent fits...”
Gah! Fits is right! What kind of jerk would spend two years on and off writing a novelization of the life of Calvin Coolidge? A 100,000 word eight-pointer yet! Which was its only saving grace—here it was Thursday afternoon and here I was with only 32 points and a Foundation meeting tonight so I couldn’t catch up at home. So an eight-pointer that would bring me even should’ve been a godsend.
Only how the fuck was I going to write six pages on this thing? It was the ultimate horror—a good novelization of the life of Calvin Coolidge; every one of those hundred thousand words well-chosen, well-typed, well-punctuated and stupefyingly dull. Paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, this Feinblatt freak could really write. Only trouble was he had made one small mistake at the outset—he had chosen a subject for his masterpiece that was dull dull dull. I mean—Calvin Coolidge?
Moaning softly, I returned to the salt mines:
“...Structurally, the novel is flawless. The prose is clean, well-chosen, and carries what action there is smoothly along in a most professional manner...”
Well, it was that kind of week. After Monday night, I had pissed Tuesday away on a lousy seven points worth of one pointers, unable to get my mind off Arlene. Wednesday, I made like a Stahkanovite and tore off twelve points, but after dinner with Arlene and a quick one that wasn’t a thing like Monday and soothing her for about three hours afterward because it wasn’t and having to convince her it didn’t matter, I had started today in a nice rotten mood and goofed the morning away on one short and reading this mess and now I had damn well better rip off six pages before five somehow, or Friday would be a nightmare...
“...however, to paraphrase something Herman Melville once said about the impossibility of writing a great work about a flea...”
“Come take a piss with me, Tom, old man.”
Dickie Lee had appeared before me like the Cheshire Cat, replete with shit-eating grin.
“What?”
“I am inviting you to the executive’s pissoir,” Dickie said grandly. Bruce and Berkowitz barely looked up; too busy typing away to even bother making the required cracks about faggotry. That kind of week for them too, I guess.
“There is no executive’s john, Dickie,” I pointed out.
“I,” huffed Dickie regally, “am an executive. Therefore, wherever I piss is the executive’s john.”
“Your logic is irrefutable, Dickie. Besides, anything to get away from Calvin Coolidge.”
“Who?”
“The latest candidate for fame and fortune,” I said, thumping the giant manuscript of Silent Cal. “A novelization of the life of Calvin Coolidge. Nice piece of work. I’m thinking of—”
Dickie winced. “If you pass that thing on to me even in jest,” he said, “you will become the executive’s pissoir because this executive will piss all over you.”
As we stood side by side at the reeking urinals, Dickie letting loose a healthy piss and me faking it, Dickie glanced around the large, dirty-tiled men’s room that served our whole floor of the building, saw that we were alone except for a pair of feet peeking out from the bottom of one of the crapper stalls, said: “I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve gathered you here tonight?”
“A company that goes to the head together makes bread together?” I suggested.
“I am trying to be serious.”
“I guess you just haven’t had too much practice, Dickie.”
“Look, Tom old man,” Dickie said, now really serious, “I’m trying to do you a favor. I’m gonna reveal a deep, dark secret. Dirk offered you the Slick slush-pile job, right?”
“Dirk did seem to be hinting at something.”
“Ah!” said Dickie. He flashed me a conspiratorial smile. “Well... Slick is a small operation itself. Mort Clarke is the editor and Harold Berg is the assistant editor and there’s the usual fag photography editor and that’s it.”
“So?”
Dickie beamed at me. “However, me lad,”
he said, “Slick is owned by a big West Coat stiffener outfit that publishes about a dozen of the things.”
“Come on Dickie, what are you getting at?”
“I am trying to show some class, but I see that a peasant such as yourself understands nought but crudity. Harold Berg is approximately three hundred years old and far too senile to take over the editor’s job. And good old Mort is starting to fuck up.”
“So?”
Dickie frowned, shook his head at my denseness. “So,” he said, “Mort has blown several similar jobs in the Big Town, which, in fact, is why he fled to L.A. Old Mort is—shall we say?—a lush. Dirk knows him well and such is Our Leader’s wisdom that by the length of time Mort is taking to read stories from the pros and the growing incoherence of his correspondence, Dirk has concluded that Mort will drink himself out of the Slick editorial seat and under the proverbial table ere the year is out. And if not, New Year’s Eve is certain to finish the job. So... since Harold is ready for St. Petersburg, whoever gets the slush-pile job will probably be editor of Slick before February. Comprende?”
“Comprendo,” I said as we walked toward the door. In fact, I comprehended a bit more than Dickie thought I did, namely that Dirk had put him up to this. “If I wanted to be editor of Slick, that would be very interesting. However—”
“Fame and fortune await in the Golden West, me boy!” Dickie chided. “Don’t be an ingrate, old man.”
“I won’t be an ingrate, Dickie,” I said. “You told me your big secret and now I’ll let you in on an even more important piece of information.”
“Oh? And what might that be, old man?”
“Your fly is open,” I said.
“What’s this meeting supposed to be about, baby?” I asked Arlene as Harvey threaded his way through the crowd on the floor to his folding chair on the dais. We were sitting on folding chairs too—in the row of chairs at the back of the room. After getting my suit good and mungy from the floor last time, I had made it my business to get there early enough to cop a chair and save one for Arlene too.
“I don’t know,” Arlene said. “You know that meetings aren’t usually called for any fixed purpose.”