Evil Companions Read online

  After our threesome in the bathroom, a kinship was established. We all sat on a sofa near the front windows while Daniel rolled a joint. The others stayed away from us. I noticed that Scott had found a friend, a little black girl whose head came up to his chest. Already, his hands were in her pants as they danced.

  “Isn’t this a nice party?” Anne asked.

  A voice started making a speech in my head. It turned out that I wanted to lay claim to Anne.

  “Anne,” I said timidly, “it’s a nice party, but I’d rather have you all to myself.” She looked at me and smiled, licking her lips like a cat. “You liked that, didn’t you? But I like Daniel, too. I want him to stay with us.” Daniel looked over at me, taking a stiff drag on the joint in his hand. He winked. We both waited for him to open his mouth.

  “You can do what you like, Anne. You can screw yourself, buddy, oh buddy. Me, I’ve got my smoke, I’ll go right along with whatever you want to do. Anything’s cool.” His head went back and he closed his eyes. Anne gave me a look which meant that the subject was closed.

  The noise level of the party had reached the ceiling. Some were dancing, others were in the bedroom; Scott had the blonde’s hand in his lap, jerking him off. It was really a peaceful scene. For the first time since I met Anne, I felt bored. Not with her, but with her party.

  I thought it best to hint at first: “I think I’ll need a nap pretty soon,” I said, poking a finger into her arm to get her attention.

  “Oh, don’t be such a drag. The party is just beginning. Give it a chance, man.” She took my hand, which I thought of as a piece of limp meat, and aroused it by holding it between her knees while she took a puff. Everyone, now, was smoking—there was a big brick of marijuana on a coffee table in the middle of the room from which everyone was drawing. “You haven’t heard about the game, have you?” she asked.

  The “game” seemed to be familiar to most of them, because when Anne stood up and clapped her hands, saying, “All right, you freeloaders, it’s time for our little game. You know what to do. Get in line,” everyone lined up in a daisy chain formation—for the most part, men behind women, although there were a few variations. This was called the Magic Dragon. The lights were turned out, and Anne took her place at the head of the Dragon, putting me behind her. She left Daniel on the couch, dozing. With Anne leading the way, my hands on her hips, the line began to snake around the small apartment. As it moved, there were giggles and muttered instructions, but most of all, the sound of clothes being removed, and of sexual contact. Anne shoved her buttocks back against my front, encouraging me to take part. My hands dug into her firm ass, trying to get a good grip, and as they fiddled with her pants, felt them slip away, and then her cool flesh. Behind us, people were slipping to the floor, and shadows were being cast on the ceiling. Anne knelt on the floor and waggled her ass at me. She wanted it dog fashion. So I became Rin Tin Tin. I woofed, took it out, gave it a few encouraging jerks, and mounted her. Her hole was already greasy, but she didn’t want it there; she wriggled and it fell out. Then she placed it against her asshole, and hammered with her behind at my crotch until it began to go in. She was far too tight, so she had to take her hand away, spit on it, and wet me down before I could push in. It felt like claws pinching—the same little animal of the first night—and I started to pound on her back. Her hair waving in my face tickled my nose.

  I was beginning to feel like a bareback rider in the circus when someone turned the lights on. I stood up immediately, leaving my mount on the floor, still moving her pelvis up and down. I didn’t mind sopping. I was getting bored with debauchery—anything taken in too large a dose is boring for me. I felt the dry need for conversation. All around me people were fucking, but far from feeling voyeuristic, I stifled a yawn. The only person in the room who didn’t have his genitals exposed was Daniel, so I decided to have a heart-to-heart with him. Making friends of enemies is always challenging. I put my hand on his knee and moved it, trying to make him open his eyes. He cursed, and knocked my hand away:

  “Don’t touch me. I can’t stand to be touched, and besides, it’s not sanitary.”

  “Give me some of your smoke and we can sit here and laugh at this crew. Look at them down there—they look like dogs in the rosebushes, or cats behind the sofa.”

  “So what are you doing up here? You shouldn’t have to be told where your place is.”

  “I’m fucking bored, and that’s the truth.”

  “But look at Anne. Man, you’ve got a responsibility. She picked you out, you can’t just leave her dry like that. You’ve got to pump it to her.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Then I guess I’ll have to, huh?” He moved off the couch and sank it in her almost immediately. I noticed that he tried not to touch her as he did. Some merciful soul turned off the lights again, and I was left sitting in the dark with myself.

  I began to feel warm in a very short time, as if the room were fur-lined. My head began to swell, full of helium gas, my ears grew red, and then my eyes began to bug out on long stalks. The room, full of the noise of mating, opened out, telescoping itself into a series of rooms growling and sucking with the same noises. From a long distance, a mouth settled itself on my foot, like stepping into quicksand, and teeth began to grate around my ankles. I pulled them up, but it followed me, a long tongue licking now at my knee. My skin was so sensitized that it hurt—almost. An exquisite irritation that I wanted to continue until I screamed. But I didn’t want to scream and break the spell the bodies in the rooms had created for me. I wanted to hit the mouth, but how to cause the same exquisite pain it was causing me? The problem of reciprocity has always troubled me. I could feel the tongue on my thighs, rough, like a cat’s, warm, and experienced. My genitals, cold, little, used-up utensils, began to expand before the threat of a hot moistness I’d never felt before. I felt myself urging my hips toward the mouth, trying to push my stiff aching flesh against the surface of the tongue, but just as I did that, it withdrew, as if active participation automatically broke the spell.

  I lay back sweating, angry at myself, pulling my knees up to my chin to avoid contact with the breathing floor.

  I thought about mother in that position. It seems to be about the only position I can stand to think of her in: knees drawn up, sweating, angry (frustrated). I remember her bending over the stove, cleaning it, in one of those long, fairly tight skirts of the forties. Her ass (I’m no longer afraid to say it—mothers have asses that someone has lusted after) was outlined against the skirt—two thin hillocks, like cheap bread, wriggling as she worked. Why did she have two of them? I remember being sure that I had only one, with a hole in it, like a doughnut. So naturally I thought about the crack between the hillocks. In my mind I associated it with the drain in the bathtub. I’m aware now that this is a pretty sophisticated notion, but I never thought of myself as innocent in any religious sense when I was a child. Those were the stinkfinger days, playing around with each other’s behinds, paying little girls to show you their “pussies” (a word we always sniggered at, thinking ourselves incredibly nasty), watching dogs do it, etc. Halcyon days.

  After watching her ass, which I was always fascinated with, I would usually go into the bathroom, and sitting on the toilet, stick my finger up my asshole, manipulating it with great delight, until I felt the overwhelming pleasure of feeling my shit, something I had made, start creeping down my own drainage system. How like we are to sewers, and all things that smell....

  Mother flashed away. Cigarettes were being lighted in the room. In a minute they would all dress and be the same again—I could no longer touch them, or trust them.

  A hand grabbed my foot, which I had put back on the floor after my excursion into sensation. It felt dry and prosaic, and I jiggled my leg against it, hoping for the return of sensation. There was a snigger—not a guffaw, but a choked snigger that I recognized as Daniel’s. I froze, waiting for him to make some comment on my reaction.

  “What’ve y
ou been doing?” he asked. “Playing it cool all by yourself?” I had decided not to talk with him for a while, so it was easiest just to move away.

  “You little pussy, I’m not going to chase you very long. Better come and get it now.” Listening closely, I could hear him rise to his feet, muffling a grunt. I felt like a schoolboy whose most intimate thoughts have been guessed; my cheeks burned, my earlobes were on fire. The sonofabitch, I thought. I waited for him to do something else, wondering what my reaction would be. It occurred to me to play everything by ear (as I had desperately determined to do, because I couldn’t believe in hard-and-fast rules, for every situation was more trouble than it was worth at times.)

  He moved in closer. From his breathing and the odor of sweat and sex on his body, I could tell that he had pushed his front very close to my face. I wondered if Anne had put him up to it.

  “C’mon, grab it,” he said.

  I longed for a knife, but I had to use my hands. My fist hit him in the soft white vegetable of his genitals, and he made a sick sound like air escaping from a balloon. I wish I could have seen the shock in his eyes—the pupils pinpointing, the lids tightly closing. He fell to the floor, gasping for air, whining with pain.

  When that happened, the lights came on. They all stood looking at me, staring actually, as if I had interrupted a seance. Daniel was rolling on the ground, soundlessly, so deep was he in his pain. He was probably enjoying it. The rest of them were suffering with him, except for Anne, who came over and sat down next to me. She began to pat me, as if I were the one who had been injured. She smiled; she seemed proud of me.

  “All right, the party’s over. Take Daniel home, would you, Scott?”

  The play was over. The tired actors began to pack up their makeup and costumes, to rearrange themselves for the trip home. There was that exhausted feeling that hits the company backstage after a particularly trying performance. Some of them came to say good night to Anne. Daniel, helped to his feet by Scott and his new girlfriend, didn’t even look at me.

  When they were all gone, Anne said to me: “Daniel once chopped off a man’s hand with a meat cleaver.” She said it without much expression in her voice, but her hand dug into my arm, as if somehow I had struck back at all the forces in the world that plagued her.

  When they were gone, when her rooms were empty of everyone but us, she turned off the big lights and we went into her bedroom. There was a red light—amber really—she turned on in a lamp sitting on the floor. When we were lying in bed, she began to pat me, to stroke me like a teddy bear. After she had done that for a long time, she rose to get some baby oil. I stretched out on my belly, stripped down, and she rubbed me all over with cool oil. Relaxation moved in on me in waves. For the first time since I’d met her, I felt secure and warm. She wasn’t doing any talking, and I enjoyed that, too. Her hands walked over me, like communicating insects. I felt like voiding my bladder and my bowels, I became so loose.

  “What do you feel like doing?” she breathed, when she finally lay beside me, tired.

  “Crawling up into your belly,” I said.

  “You’d never make it; the road is too crooked.” She began to diddle with my ass, puckering the flesh, making holes in it. “Relax. Loosen up.” I did what she said. As soon as I did, she insinuated her finger in my asshole. She had oiled it, too. She began to stir up my bowels, moving her hips beside me excitedly.

  That night I lay awake for hours while she slept soundly beside me. I couldn’t make out the moon this time. The curtains rustled because of a slight wind, making an odd shape. I froze in the bed, a cold sweat running down my ribs. When I was five, I had experienced the same unbearable terror.

  The events of the past two days and nights had cast a pall over my dull life, a pall like a thin fog. I was sure when I woke up my sight would be even more obscured.

  Chapter Three

  ___________________ Mudpies

  I was quite sane in the morning. Anne was amazed. Of course it was more like afternoon when we got out of bed and opened the blinds. I sang in the shower, and puzzled Anne by finding a Mozart concerto on the radio and turning it up as loud as it would go. She was hung over, and grim. She fried some eggs and bacon for us and slapped it on the table like a waitress at a truck stop. I told her that, and the look she gave me soured my stomach.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I asked. “It’s a beautiful morning.”

  “It’s afternoon,” she said, impatiently putting me straight.

  I get in moods when all I want to do is irritate people, especially when it seems dangerous. “How did you meet Daniel?” I asked.

  “None of your fucking business.”

  “Why do you like him?”

  “Because he’s got balls.” She slurped her coffee, a tepid mixture of grounds and hot tap water.

  “Balls? What does that mean?” That kind of feminine vulgarity always sets my teeth on edge. Immediately it brings up images of bullfighters facing the horns, and some bloodthirsty passion-flower in the stands coming in her pants. She didn’t answer me, anyway.

  We spent the afternoon reading and watching television. There was a cartoon show on that she watched while munching popcorn in a position so typical I wanted to take a photo. She sat on the sofa with her legs crossed, back straight, in her underwear because the apartment was so warm. She didn’t allow any talking while it was on. I was reading one of Ronald Firbank’s coy novels, and laughing to myself every once in a while. When it ended, and she had finished her popcorn, she came over to see what I was reading.

  “What’s that?”

  “A book by Firbank.”

  “Who’s that? Let me see.” She grabbed it away from me and started reading. “Ugh. He’s queer, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t know. He’s just different. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Different. I’m different from you, you’re different from me. What do I need with different?” She threw the book down as if that settled the matter. “Let’s go out. I want to see Lionel.”

  Lionel’s place was on the top floor of a building across Second Avenue, near the Bowery. He had a huge loft where he turned out metal sculpture, working with a blowtorch, in goggles and an asbestos apron. He was happy to see Anne. He ignored me. He was having dinner with a few other people before a big fireplace.

  Lionel looked like a gangster to me. I told Anne that before we went to his place and she sneered: “Don’t worry, darling. I won’t let him hurt you.”

  He took us aside to give Anne the hideous lowdown on his guests: “They’re creeps. I’m trying to think of a way to get rid of them. They’ve been here for hours. Marie fixed some stew, and they’re making it disappear. You want some?” His voice was harsh and grainy, and his offer sounded like a threat.

  The people sitting before the fire eating their bowls of stew seemed innocuous enough, even interesting—if you’re the sort who goes to the East Village for the artists. A filmmaker, a couple of poets, a dancer. The dancer was a girl with muscular legs and lots of black, coarse hair who gave her recitals in the nude. I nodded politely to them and sat down. They didn’t deign to notice me. Anne was standing with Lionel, surveying the scene.

  I tried to talk to the dancer: “Aren’t you...?” She sniffed and buried her head in her bowl. These were hungry people. I decided to look at the fire. The person I really wanted to start a conversation with was the filmmaker, who made movies of the most incredible Technicolor voluptuousness. He seemed to be out on his own cloud, though.

  Suddenly the filmmaker spoke: “If you’d just let me have two hundred bucks, then I could get that film out of hock. I’d make lovely pictures.” I trusted his voice right away. It was high and faggy, but obsessed with something like urgency. It was a while before I realized he was speaking to me. When he said that, he hadn’t been looking at me.

  “You mean me?”

  “Yes, why not you?”

  “Sure, why not me?” I grinned, like a Carnegie. I’ve always wanted to fe
el like a philanthropist. “Maybe you’ll need more. How much do you really need?” I smiled my idiot’s smile. This time when he spoke, he looked at me. There was new interest in his eyes. I kept my own demurely lowered while he looked me up and down, taking in my shabby suit, my uncut hair, my unshaved jaw.

  “Hey, you’re not a cop, are you?”

  “Why no, I’m not a cop. An admirer of your work. I’m really an actor.” I felt suave, self-assured. A real asshole ...

  “You don’t look like one. Those crazy faggots ...” He shook his head in disgust. He scooted across so he could sit closer to me.

  “Ever put on a drag costume before?”

  “No.”

  “I think you’d look pretty good in one. You could have the lead in my next film.” Just then, when we were getting on so well, we heard Lionel’s booming laugh above us.

  I didn’t want our conversation to end so soon, but I knew that Lionel would give it away. I wasn’t at all shy about the thought of being a film star. So I touched his wrist, and offered: “Well, look, I’m broke right now, but it’s only temporary. I’d love to do something like that.” It was a foregone conclusion what his reaction would be. I can’t blame him. His face screwed up as if he couldn’t decide whether to shit or cry. Just then Anne came over and took my arm. “Lionel has a friend who’s going to visit in a little bit. He’s very rich, and he’s looking for sex partners. That’s why they’re all here. Lionel says if we want to make some money, he’s sure the guy would go for doubles.”

  She seemed very offhand about it; the idea didn’t rub me one way or another, except that I was getting tired of all the sex. I knew I could use the money, not knowing how long Anne would go on supporting me.