Evil Companions Page 13

  Three cars were all I could make before everyone was yelping and trying to get their hands on me; so at the next stop I leaped off, avoiding the clutches of outraged, neutered males, and ran up the stairs into the park.

  Where was I going to bury this bomb between my legs? If I had seen the Virgin Mary walking down the street, I would have buried it somewhere in her body, and if she had no harbor, I would have dug one....

  As it happened, the next best thing came along: a gaggle of nuns like black geese, in high spirits out for a Sunday stroll, walking along a park path. The sun was just coming up. I ran straight toward them, bent over, with my rod in my hand, and ran around them, barking when I reached them, rounding them up. They stood paralyzed as I made my circle, and one of them—probably the mother superior—began fiddling with her beads. I selected the oldest one, cutting her out of the herd and chasing her toward some nearby bushes.

  “Help, O Lord God, help me!” she begged, and began mumbling in Latin, sending her aging black words up like smoke signals. I ripped off her habit with one hand, and banged her on the ear with the other, trying to make her shut up. All the time I was sucking on the sugary remnants of the eye. Then she begged, in a different voice:

  “Please don’t tear my things. I won’t fight you.” She was wearing, under the black habit, black lace underwear, and black mesh stockings. Her fingers busied themselves, and in a minute she had bared her skinny loins. Surprise: She had the body of a model; it was obvious Christ wasn’t lacking in companionship in the Garden of Delights.

  She said just one thing to me: “You’re an animal, aren’t you?”

  “Be a sheep,” I said. She understood what I meant immediately, and got on her hands and knees, offering her bony bottom to me. As I butted her, I watched the trees around us and the insects crawling over the grass, and envied them. She took my first charge without a sound, despite the rough treatment I had given her. When we were resting, I told her about the eye, and passed it to her by a simple kiss. I removed the rest of my clothes, and after we had rested, rolled on the fresh grass with her.

  I told her about Anne, and the operation, and she didn’t seem surprised, as if she knew something, some part of it all, naturally. We lay in the sun the rest of the day, petting each other and taking care of my aching cock when the need arose. I didn’t have to hurt her, because she knew, and her knowledge was the key. We were fellow-animals. She was willing to treat my prick as part of her body—to give it pleasure was the same as giving herself pleasure.

  Toward evening, as the sun was going down, she began to develop hair.... Her teeth lengthened, and her nails became hard and sharp. When her belly was a forest of rough hair, I touched it, and she growled: She was tired of sex. It was time for hunting.

  I looked down at myself and saw the same thing happening. My prick rested, soft and sated, in its burrow of hair. I was sane, and as the moon came up bloodred, a hunter’s moon, we went out into the park and frolicked together. And the tall pyramids that surrounded us knew nothing at all.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ___________________ Afterwards

  All that remains to speak of is Anne, my tortured, demonic Anne. It was seeing her again, after so long, that impelled me to write all this down.

  She was on a train to Long Island. I remember staggering down the aisle of the moving train, looking for a seat mext tp someone who wouldn’t bother me with attempts at conversation, and seeing her sitting pressed against a window by a fat lady who was eating her lunch from a paper bag. She was staring listlessly out the window, quite properly dressed in matron’s weeds. I thought at first that it was a game, that she was in disguise; but I took the first available seat and watched her from behind an opened newspaper.

  Of course she was different; it had been years since I had seen her in the house of surgeons. She had filled out, and her face was rounded, and sporting makeup. But there was no mistake: It was Anne. I had given up on her so long ago that her very presence revived in me all the old rhythms of our short time together.

  Let me explain my presence on that train though: I was on my way to a party on Fire Island, which promised some relief—some dynamite—from the pressures and sameness of a dull job. I had come to the straight path by a series of unmarked doors and moonless nights. I shaved regularly and showered twice a day. I hadn’t been laid in three months and felt no urges in that direction. My prick lay in my lap like a peaceful infant, cooing at me every once in a while, but seldom making the demands of the past. I felt very civilized, and my only suit, a proper three-button affair, was dry-cleaned once a week, regularly. How we cling to normality!

  Two news items broke through the silence and the rumbling of the train, via a portable radio in the fat lady’s lap:

  “Ramu, the wolf-boy of India, died today at the age of twenty-four. He had been raised by wolves from birth and had developed a unique ability to smell fresh meat at great distances.”

  “An eighteen-year-old janitor was arrested today on charges of murdering four children in a park in Charlotte, Virginia. He was caught with a lunch pail full of human parts....”

  There was no way to stop them. A stiff prick is never compassionate—but sharp as a caveman’s primitive knife.

  I glanced at the citizen next to me. Raincoat in his lap, he was rubbing himself with his hand and doodling on the steamed-up window. I was sure he was doing it absent-mindedly, while thinking of a business deal, or how to get the wife into bed. I wondered if he had heard the newscast. If anyone in the country heard what was going on. Well, if they didn’t, they’d be washed away in a flood of semen and blood....

  Speculations about Anne: that she had married a stockbroker and entered the hall of mirrors; that she was only more sophisticated—a call girl on her way to an assignment; that she was visiting a grave, in some anonymous Long Island cemetery full of everyone’s relatives.

  When the train reached Suffolk, I made my move. The fat lady left, and I took her place. Anne didn’t look around. I didn’t want our first contact to be verbal, but I had forgotten all the signs. Like a beginner, my hand moved across the seat and onto her thigh. She looked around but didn’t see me; she grimaced and removed the hand. The train started up, and again we watched the cracker boxes of suburbia blur by through the fogged-over windows.

  My hand moved again, this time more boldly: up her thigh under the proper skirt, remembering the touch of her flesh. She moved quickly: Her hand cracked against my cheek, and it was like being at that bar where we first met again.

  “Don’t do that!” she said quietly, so as not to attract the attention of the other passengers. Then she looked at me for the first time. Her eyes dilated, and her nose flared.

  “Cross the world; you’re still around!”

  “Did you cross the world?”

  “Practically. You see me in my traveling suit.”

  “It must have been a small room you traveled.”

  “They’re all small rooms. You must have learned that, even dumb as you are.”

  “What is it?”

  “He’s a lawyer. One kid, but I’m pregnant again.”

  “Nice house?”

  She turned away, as if I were mocking her. “The best, buddy.”

  “What about what you used to tell me?”

  “That was for you. I wasn’t talking about myself. I was never there.”

  “How do you feel?” Looking at me, she took a book of matches from her purse and lighted one. She held it under her palm and let it cook.

  “That’s how I feel,” she said, blowing it out.

  “It’s been a long time.”

  “I never look back.”

  “Well ... yes.” What could I say? I reached out for her again, and this time she didn’t stop me. I put my arm around her, and found her breast under her jacket. Her nipple hardened immediately.

  “What happened—about the operation, I mean?” I asked.

  “I’ve still got them, if you mean the men’s furnis
hings.”

  All I could think of to say was a weak: “I don’t want to hear about it.” At that, she brightened.

  “What’s the matter? Afraid to look at twentieth-century pussy? Take a look.” And with that she pulled up her skirt and put my reluctant hand between her legs. I jerked my hand away and moved down the seat from her.

  “Give it up, Anne. Take off the mask.”

  “You’re crazy. You always were. If you don’t know what happened, I can’t tell you ... not now, at least.”

  And that’s all she said.

  ___________________ Postscript

  When I wrote Evil Companions I was twenty-five-years old and living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and I thought I had been through a lot. I had seen death by cold and fire and needle and knife. The Sexual Revolution was at the barricades. The great dark obscenity of the Vietnam War flickered in every living room, and every month new assassination redefined American politics.

  In writing Evil Companions I wanted to create a work of literary imagination that would sizzled with the full angry intensity of one young writer’s extreme alienation from American society in the mid-1960s. I wanted to grab readers by their collars and shake them into a new way of looking at things. I wanted to scare the hell out of them.

  I believe I succeeded. (Perhaps too well, for the novel has been out of print for twenty-four years.) In its first edition in 1968, Evil Companions attracted the notice of perceptive writers and readers who understood the book’s defiant use of obscenity and its subversive intent. I had written a hard-boiled oevre noire that depended on the violation of taboos. As Alexander Trocchi has written, “Sometimes obscenity is a form of purity.... In certain situations that modern writer lacks integrity who shies away from the obscene.”

  Because I decided to write Evil Companions in the first person, some have been naive enough to think it autobiographical. It is not, except in the sense that every truly intended book is a passionate record of the soul’s progress. A book such as this is also a palimpsest of literary influences, many of them unfamiliar to Americans: Sade, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Malaparte, Céline, Jim Thompson, and 1950s E.C. horror comics.

  I was ambitious when I sat down to my typewriter, but not to write the kind of novel that might be studied in universities or appear on bestseller lists; I wanted above all to create a novel that was equal to my anger—to hold nothing back; I wanted to speak with an authentic voice about the unspeakable.

  I meant what I said in Evil Companions. I still do.

  Michael Perkins

  August, 1992