Evil Companions Page 5

  Stripped to her black pelt, Tina was an apparition. On the slave ships coming over, Tina had taken on the whole human cargo, her feet straight up in the air, braced against a bulkhead. She hadn’t gotten one splinter in her ass, and she’d survived. Her breasts were huge, sloping down toward her belly like water-filled balloons, with black spikes at the tips. Her arms were covered with blue-black tattoos, like carvings on her ebony trunk. The only white was between her legs—an old fashioned sanitary pad that she wore, I imagined, because nothing else would absorb her capacious flow. She stood looking down at me. I waited for her first order.

  “Get between my pretty legs, buddy.” It was a caress the way she said it, a filthy promise of delight. On my knees, I removed the napkin. I went at it so timidly, however, the she kneed me down. My tongue went out like an antenna or a periscope, in strange country, and lost itself immediately in a giant hole.

  Down, down it fell, until my teeth, in order to find some kind of anchor, settled around her clitoris. I thought of the song: “I got tears in my ears from lying on my back as I cry every night over you.” Then she grabbed my scalp and yanked me up before I could bring her home. The fresh air was good. I looked around for Anne; she was kneeling on the floor tending the wastebasket fire, her skirt around her waist. She was playing with herself.

  “You look like an idiot, little Jack Horner,” I called. Tina shook me for that, and I shut my mouth. Anne’s eyes glazed over and she was running her tongue quickly ’round her dry lips.

  “Hold it, little thing!” Tina said to her. Anne stopped. She hadn’t even heard my comment, but Tina could not be disregarded. “Save it for when we put him on to boil.” Christ! These cannibal loves of mine were going to make a fine stew this night.

  So they made a go of it right quick, before I could do any more thinking. Tina picked me up so easily I began to wonder what living with Anne had done to me. Anne grabbed my feet, and saying “one, two, three,” they let me fall on the warm springs. The simple shock of being dropped was enough to distract my nerve endings from the pain for a moment, but then it hit: I began rolling around and gasping like a man being fried in the electric chair. I bucked up with one part of my body only to press another part deeper into the pain.

  Then Tina grasped my ankles and yanked me off. My head bounced when I hit the floor, but I didn’t even notice it in the midst of the feeling of freedom that relief gave me. They both waited, hands on hips like Maillol women, grossly distorted from my point of view, while I shivered and panted on the floor beneath them. I didn’t even want to look at them, afraid of what they would think of next, but I noticed that with the relief came a feeling of ecstasy. I avoided realizing it, but I felt good. The kind of good that a six-year-old feels after a spanking, when the tears have dried, and he knows that no one is mad at him anymore, that the slate has been wiped clean. But I wasn’t going to tell them that.

  Tina went off to the bathroom, and I was left with Anne.

  “You looked like an idiot on that bed.”

  “Go finger-fuck yourself.”

  “Just tell me though: How come you like this kind of shit? I’d never let you knock me around.”

  “It’ll happen someday, Anne. Don’t lock yourself off from anything.” It wasn’t what I wanted to say—not exactly—but that’s why I don’t talk very much. Nothing comes out as precisely as I want it to. If everyone thought that way there’d be a lot more words you could sink your teeth into. If you can’t trust words you end up where I’ve been—or where I’m going.

  Tina came back. She was indignant. “You folks don’t have any toilet paper! Live like niggers. Get up here, little pork chop.” She got down on her knees and leaned against a chair, rubbing herself between the legs. “Come on, clean me up.” I did.

  When she was on her feet again, she looked at me with pitying eyes. “I’ve sorta got attached to this little white boy. Like a dog I used to have lick hot butter off my cunt. He liked to be kicked too.” She kicked me in the side; I grabbed her foot and tried to kiss it, determined to beat her at her own game. The meat gets beaten and boiled and eaten, but it always get the best treatment all the way through, the most love and attention, because everyone wants it to taste good. I closed my eyes and waited. It wasn’t just the only thing I could do, it was the only thing I wanted to do.

  When they threw me on the bed again, I tried not to squirm or make any noise. That was easier to do because the springs had cooled off quite a bit. Then Anne landed on top of me, her magnetic cunt scooping up my burned prick with a toss of her hips. I felt like she was jacking me off with her cunt, a delicious feeling against the background of pain. When Tina’s hand closed over my balls and began squeezing, I speeded up so that when she crushed them, I came, spurting with little screams I muffled by biting into Anne’s thin shoulder.

  Chapter Five

  ___________________ Mother, May I?

  The dosage increased after that. Anne kept raising her skirt to show me some new part of the world. Her thighs were a cosmographer’s delight, covered with fine hairs that I licked into whorls against her skin, and then clapped my ear to. Each whorl hummed with a new invitation to walk the wire between disaster and delight. She wouldn’t apologize to me for the scene with Tina, but I knew she was secretly ashamed of its crudeness. I never saw Tina again.

  For days afterward I wouldn’t speak to her, and she let me alone. I listened to the radio, twisting the dial every hour or so to find a new sound, keeping it loud. It wasn’t that I was angry with her; I was tasting what I’d learned.

  Three or four days later, when I got tired of the female stinks of the apartment, and the constant stream of hustlers, junkies, and queers that paraded through the door, the cats, and Anne’s temper, which was sullen at best, I went out for some air.

  It was acrid, wafted down from Con Edison’s candy-stripe smokestacks. It colored everything in my vision, making wet stars of my eyes.

  I was slugging down gin and tonics in a bar on Avenue B, talking to a house painter named Tony I used to score from, when Paulette walked in. She came in to use the phone, and I watched her fish for a coin, dial, and yell at somebody for about five minutes. I ordered another drink and separated myself from Tony, who was having troubles with a new girlfriend and wanted to tell me all about it. I slid into a booth next to the phone.

  “Hey Paulette,” I said when she hung up. She looked around as if she couldn’t believe anyone would address her so casually. Startled, ready to run or stomp, she came over and stood next to the booth, trying to see me through her prescription sunglasses, sticking her leg out provocatively, an invitation and a threat.

  She decided to overdo it. “You’re just the man I wanted to see. I was talking to—”

  “Oh shit, Paulette.” It was a slap in the face, and she showed it in a quiver that went all the way down her body. No one else would have noticed it, but I put up with her for three months once, and I knew every ligament and muscle and nerve ending in her fine-boned body.

  “You haven’t changed. You look like the same sex-crazed bastard you were when I picked you up.” I had to grin a little. It was the thought of bringing her back to Anne as a prize. I grabbed her wrist and pulled and pushed her into the seat opposite me.

  “Paulette, you’re a lovely trouser treat, but if you don’t lower your voice I’m going to tear your tit off.” I hoped that was theatrical enough to shake her up, but she stood to leave. With my feet around her ankles I pulled her back down.

  “Let me go; I’ve got to meet somebody.”

  “The guy you were yelling at on the phone?”

  “None of your business.” I reached under the table and grabbed a piece of thigh and twisted. She made as if to yowl, but she was too tight-assed for that.

  “You’re going to sit right here with me until I finish my drink. And then we’re going someplace together.” It had taken three drinks to make my voice husky enough to carry it off, but she had read L’Histoire d’O, and the threat a
long with the pain shut her up. She began to look interested.

  “The worm turning?” was her last comment before I turned her in a way she had never been turned before. My fingers inched across the wooden tabletop, knocking over my drink on the way to the front of her dress. I ripped it down to her waist. Her face became as white as her brassiere. The alcohol dripped down in her lap, and she sat stone still, absorbing the shock of the cold liquid like a statue. I became a pigeon, and flew off.

  “I’m going to the john. When I get back you’re going to suck me off.”

  In the john I locked the door and took out a needle, an ordinary sewing needle I had stolen from my mother and carried with me for years. I stretched my cock with my hand, pissing on the floor and all over the wash basin. When it was finished, I pulled the brown foreskin that fringed the tip all the way up and stuck the needle through, tying off the slit. There was no blood. I squeezed it, but nothing came.

  Two safety pins were holding her dress together when I got back, and she had gotten a drink for herself. A Bloody Mary. She made a feeble protest, but her voice was weak.

  “Put on some lipstick. Your mouth is as dry as a stuffed fish.” The dialogue was great. I was ashamed of it.

  She didn’t make any comment as she did it. In fact, she made it as shiny and wet as possible. Then she looked at me. For a minute her eyes looked like she was ready to wisecrack, but I beat her to it.

  “You can’t do it there. Get under the table.” She looked around anxiously, obviously hungry for it, even though the tight-assedness was still there. But she slid down, and then vanished under the table. And the television above the bar was on, a Giants game.

  Hands on my knees, I sipped her drink and waited. She unzipped me as if it were a game she played every night, and dug into my shorts. I pictured her down on the floor on her haunches, and made the damn thing spring out at her, watching the Polacks at the bar squirt beer between their teeth at each other.

  She hesitated at the pin, the way I knew she would, but not for long. Not her. She blew on it, and then hoisted it in with her tongue, spike and all. Right away she started grinding it with her teeth. I kept from jumping by biting down on an ice cube. She was a saw, chewing off my prick. My eyes twitched, even with the ice cube. Maybe that was why the big Polack came over and sat down with me.

  “I want to talk with you.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, you were winking at me, weren’t you?” His was the direct approach. I put my fingers under the table and into Paulette’s ears to guide her, because something was starting in my spinal cord.

  “Weren’t you?” He was insistent, pressing his accent on my ears and his feculent breath in my nostrils until I felt like gagging, and dug my fingernails deeper into Paulette’s ears.

  “No! You beer-barrel queer!” I shouted as I came into that churny, jagged-edged mouth between my legs. The pressure had ripped the needle out, increasing the pain monumentally.

  The Polack slugged me in the mouth just as he saw my eyes bulge. It split my lip, but I was ready to thank him for distracting my nerves from the head of my cock.

  “Call me a queer? I’ll kill you,” he muttered, but I just ignored him, waiting for the reappearance of my Venus. She waited until he had lumbered off to polka heaven and then came up, hair stringing down her face. She was looking at herself in a compact mirror, assessing the damage with new eyes. She accepted my messy handkerchief, dabbed the blood away, and began combing her hair. No one in the bar was paying any attention to us. The game was still on.

  “Drink that shit down,” I told her. She drank the red liquid without stopping, and licked her lips until they glistened.

  “You like the taste of blood, don’t you?” I said.

  “I’d like to use a razor blade on you.” It was said without feeling, as if she knew I wouldn’t take offense. We were simply discussing the business of pleasure.

  “I’d like to rim your ass with my tongue, and then bite one of your balls off.”

  “I’d like to beat those tits of yours till they ached.”

  We went on like that until we got bored with the game, and began laughing together. I never thought the two of us would be laughing together at anything; my relationship with her had been as solemn as a dirge, as closed as a crypt. Any laughing had been done at my expense.

  When we left the bar we were hand in hand, smiling at everyone, having shared something so intense we were like twins.

  At the apartment I introduced Paulette to Anne and went and got a beer. I watched them sniff each other like bitches.

  “Where’d that pimp find you?” Anne asked sweetly, letting her nails out.

  “Oh, we’re old friends, aren’t we?” Paulette looked at me for reassurance but I ignored her. It didn’t upset her. Paulette seldom loses her cool, especially with a woman.

  “What’d he bring you around for?”

  “He wanted to show me his whore.”

  “Really? Is that true?” She directed the question at me, but she was merely fencing until she could make a jab. I grabbed the cat, Wino, and began rubbing his fur backward. He hissed and bit me, and jumped away. I went into the bedroom to lie down, covering my face with a pillow. It smelled like Anne—we put it under her hips last night so I could get at her ass better—so I bunched it between my legs, against my sore cock, and went off to sleep.

  It was dark when I woke up. I was sweating; the dream had been unpleasant, as they usually were. A roach walked across my throat; I grabbed it, sat up in bed, and incinerated it when I lit the first cigarette of the evening. I didn’t want to smoke, because it killed the sense of smell, and my mouth always got to feeling like an ashtray, but I couldn’t stop. What willpower I had once possessed had vanished with my pretensions about acting, and most of my vanity. I savored waking up, for the feeling of emptiness, of being a husk that had to be filled with sensation in order to live.

  Anne and Paulette were doing the dishes together in the kitchen when I came out of the bedroom. They had cleaned the whole apartment. Wino was banished to the fire escape, where he sat scratching at the window.

  I asked for coffee, but they paid no attention to me. It was obvious that they had formed some kind of alliance, and that it probably excluded me.

  “What’s the matter with you two?” I asked.

  “Wrong, buddy? Nothing’s wrong, at all, buddy,” Anne finally answered.

  “Indeed.”

  “Yes. This little girlfriend of yours sucks like an angel,” Paulette volunteered.

  “True love?” Two queer females were all I needed. When they finished with the dishes, looking for all the world like two housewives, they went off into the bedroom, leaving me to sit by myself. I gave them enough time to get heated up and sticky, and went in after them.

  “You don’t think you’re going to keep this private, do you?” I asked. Paulette was down on her knees between Anne’s spread thighs, sucking and licking.

  “Keep out of this,” Anne warned. But I turned off the lights they had left on and unzipped my fly. I moved forward in the cool dark, my cock stirring like a dousing wand that led me to the sucking, animal noises of them together. I knelt beside them in the dark, massaging my cock with one hand and feeling their bodies with the other. Anne still had her blouse on, but nothing else. Her small breasts were cool and hard under it. I pinched the nipples gently, pulling them stiff. Anne came, closing her legs around Paulette’s bobbing head. “Oh stop ... stop ... stop!”

  We sat in the dark a while until we got used to it. They hadn’t cleaned the bedroom, and in the dark it was like a big cell. I thought about that for a time: being trapped in the same room with those tigresses. I fancied I could tame them, but I had no desire to do so. That wasn’t the direction I was traveling in any longer; domination was only for the purposes of pleasure, and masochism was the other side of the coin, one I spent daily. In sex, it shouldn’t matter who’s on top.

  “You know,” Anne said to me, “we can
use this girl. You don’t want to work, I never have, but she can. We can put her to work.”

  “Her? You’re crazy.”

  Paulette didn’t take part in this conversation. Anne would have raked her fingernails down her face had she tried. We didn’t mention it again, but it was settled; we had a new means of livelihood. Of course she would need a good kicking now and again, but with the sharp-toed shoes I could buy with her earnings I wouldn’t mind.

  “Go brush your teeth, both of you,” I said. We were going to play Mother May I. I wanted their teeth clean, for some reason.

  In the bathroom they both bent over the sink like girls in a dormitory and brushed in unison. I was careful of them, knowing that their obedience depended on their good humor. While they brushed, I rummaged in Anne’s capacious medicine cabinet. It was my first trip there, and it turned out to be very exciting. There were rows and rows of new drugs, fresh from the pharmacy, toothpaste, rusty razor blades coloring the glass shelving, mouthwash: “You’re well-stocked, Anne.”

  I decided to make them taste a little of everything from it, but they wouldn’t unless I joined in. I finally agreed, just to see what new high we could achieve.

  “First, the Vaseline,” Anne said. I stripped down, and we used two jars of Vaseline to completely coat each other. Then, prepared with glasses of water, we began opening the bottles, and taking one each of the pills inside, regardless of what they were. Green, pink, blue, especially white, they all went down without a second thought. When we were finished, and our stomachs bloated with the water we had used to get them down, we went into the bedroom to lie down. Somehow, the floor seemed the most comfortable place. We lay down and rolled around a little, but soon felt too uncomfortable to do anything but lie on our backs.

  I put my hand on Paulette’s thigh, and skidded it listlessly back and forth in the grease. Anne had my testicles in her hand, but it was more of an automatic gesture than anything else. Then she squeezed them, and I jumped. She was pumping out her insides, making awful sounds. My stomach burned, and then my head started bouncing on the floor. I couldn’t control it, despite the pain. Waves of nausea swept over us all: I could see them coming through the dark. For me, it was what I had imagined an epileptic fit to be—I was soon jerking uncontrollably, like a man being electrically tormented. Paulette was the only one of us who seemed unaffected.