Evil Companions

by D. M. Perkins

  Angel was his name, and I could put horns and hooves on him, I said to myself again and again as we went down the street. He seemed not to hesitate at all—as if he had done it before. That thought bothered me. I remembered the hungry-eyed ten-year-old who had tugged at my sleeve on 10th Street and offered a blowjob for a quarter.

  “Have you ever gone off with a stranger before?” He didn’t answer, perhaps not knowing what would satisfy me. “Have you?” I asked again.

  “Oh sure, for my sister.”

  “Your sister?”

  “Sure, Rosa. She’s fifteen. Man can she fuck like a rabbit.”

  “She’s a little young for that, isn’t she?”

  “No—she’s big. She’s going to have a baby.” He smiled up at me and took my hand. His was hot and sticky. He ran his forefinger across my palm, the age-old sign.

  “Cut that out,” I snarled.

  “Don’t get uptight, man. You got a cigarette for me?”

  Suddenly he disgusted me; I wanted innocence, and if I couldn’t have that, I didn’t want this sticky little boy. “I’d like to see your sister.”

  “She’s probably busy tonight with her old man.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Navarro—he’s sixteen. Got a cool head.”

  “Why don’t we try her anyway?”

  “Whatever you say. But you got to pay me.”

  I wanted to kick the mercenary little bastard’s teeth in, but I let him lead me to a large tenement building on Avenue D, past a group of P.R.s playing dominoes on the steps, and up six floors to his apartment. Before we entered, he yelled at the door: “Rosa! Somebody to see you!”

  We waited at the open door until she appeared. She had a dish in her hand, and was drying it. Her face was pretty, except for the acne that dotted her cheeks, and she wore a tight orange sweater that emphasized her watermelon-size titties, and hid nothing of the swollen curve of her belly. She was wearing a tight skirt with the zipper open at the side to accommodate her belly. I could see her skin through it, so she wasn’t wearing any panties. Her bobby socks delighted me; I didn’t think young girls wore them anymore.

  “Guy wants to see you, Rosa.” Angel introduced me.

  “So?” she said.

  “She gives boss head,” Angel recommended.

  “Shut up, Angie!” the young princess commanded, but there was no anger in her voice. “I’m doing the dishes,” she said to me. “You come in the kitchen if you want to see me.”

  Angel was about to follow us, but I took him aside and stuck two bucks in his pocket. “Why don’t you go back and find the gang?” I suggested, pushing him toward the door.

  “No man, they’re gone by now. I’ll watch television. I’ll stay out of your way.”

  The kitchen was a tiny place that smelled of hot seasoning and cheap food. She was bent over the sink, cleaning the drain. I watched the muscles tighten in her calves, and as her skirt hiked up, saw that her legs were almost perfect.

  “Where’s your mother and father?” I asked. I didn’t want any surprises in the next few hours.

  “Oh, they went back to P.R. My grandma is dying, so they went back, you know.”

  “Are you still in school?”

  “Are you kidding? I hate that mother-fucking place. All the time some stupid shit trying to tell you what to do.” I could sympathize with that feeling.

  “Where’s your boyfriend?”

  “Which one?”

  “Angel said his name was Navarro.”

  “Oh, that stupid shit. He was just too much fuckin’ shit. I put him out on the street. Man, was he pissed!”

  “You taking care of your brother?”

  “Him! He takes care of himself. But I got two little sisters in that bedroom over there, so don’t talk so loud.”

  She had kept her back to me all during this conversation, so I got up and went to put my arms around her at the sink. She whirled on me.

  “Don’t touch the goods, man. No free feels.”

  “O.K. But how about cutting that short?”

  “You’re in a hurry?” She sized me up, her lips curling at the sight of my hair and beard.

  “You’re a hairy bastard, ain’t you?”

  “That’s a stupid thing to say.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a beatnik, aren’t you?”

  “No—I’m worse.”

  “Yeah?” She was interested.

  “I’m a werewolf,” I said, and showed her my teeth.

  “You’ve got dirty teeth.”

  I sat down again, and she sat at the table across from me. “I want to see some money,” she said. I took out a ten and put it on the table.

  “Guys like you have to pay for it, don’t you?” she said, as if she were really curious.

  “Sometimes,” I told her. “Now you’re going to do your thing?”

  “Sure, O.K. But we have to stay in here. The kids are asleep in the bedroom, and Angel’s watching television.” But she just sat there. I reached out and took one of her large breasts in my hand. It was hard, and there was no brassiere covering it. Immediately, as I stroked her nipple, her eyes began to roll, and she opened her mouth.

  “You like that?” she asked, curious again.

  I wondered what made me such a phenomenon. “It’s all right.” The nipple was poking a hole in the tight fabric of her sweater. Next to Anne’s cheerless chest, this was nirvana. I went on stroking it, and she breathed more heavily.

  “Oh, let’s cut this shit. My legs are getting all wet.”

  I walked my chair around to face her, and took her ankles in my hands, putting her feet into my lap. Her toes pressed into my erection. I rolled up her skirt as far as it would go, and walked my fingers up the golden-brown of her inner thighs. Not far up, they encountered dampness. “You’re a bitch in heat,” I complimented her.

  “Don’t curse with me, man. I won’t stand for that fuckin’ shit.”

  Her bush was heavy and black. The hairs were matted and stuck together, but when I parted them, the lips of her cunt were cherry red. I suddenly understood Joe Turner’s Kansas City song, “Cherry Red.” Give my life for it, yeah.

  I sent two fingers up her hole to explore. Her hips began to grind down on the seat, and the juice flooded my fingers. I felt a conelike thing inside, way up there, and knew I had touched her living womb. Gently, my other hand rubbed her ripe belly. I didn’t want to hurt her, and if that sounds like a strange admission at this point, please don’t understand me too quickly.

  “Ohh, do it to me, you fuckin’ beatnik-whatever-you-are!” she moaned. Her hand went to my zipper and pulled out my cock, which was hard as a gold bar by this time. She rubbed it briskly, as if she were trying to start a fire the Girl Scout way.

  “Take it easy,” I said, and stabbed my fingers into the tip of her womb. She moaned. I wanted her to suck me off, but I didn’t want to have to ask for it, so I got down between her legs and rolled out my tongue. I was sure it was as long as an anteater’s, because she had excited me, perhaps with her belly, perhaps with her youth, as much as I had ever been excited.

  My tongue wrapped itself around her clitoris, and my hands began massaging her belly and tits. I yanked her sweater and brassiere up around her neck, and then sank my tongue in her hole as if I were drilling a well. She went wild.

  But let’s stop here and retrace the action. What I’ve said sounds so commonplace, but what actually happened wasn’t at all. Say it this way: The hard floor hurt my knees; her crotch stank—a faint trace of garlic; I was in another world down there, the flesh world, blood country. Her belly was hard and tight, and the foetus kicked against the pressure of my hand; her hole was so small it was difficult to get my tongue into it. The muscles in there grabbed my tongue and held it; meanwhile I hung onto those firm breasts as if they were handles, in case I might go under and sink like a stone in her Spanish flesh.

  I had to get off the floor because of the punishment my knees were taking. My face was covered with
her goo, and as soon as I stood up, I pressed my mouth down on hers, to favor her with her own essence. She tried to jerk her face away, but I held her still with my hands. When I had smeared her sufficiently, I led her by her hair to the tip of my cock. She screamed in Spanish something about biting my cojones off, so I jammed it into the back of her throat, and then moved her head back and forth in a milking motion. The queen bee and the aphid.

  Her chatter must have been overheard by Angel, because he was there, watching avidly, the next minute.

  “Beat it,” I told him, but he wouldn’t leave—he was entranced. I kicked out backward, and caught him in the shins, so he had to move back a little, but he still wouldn’t leave. I watched him as his eyes bugged at the sight of his sister getting it in the mouth. Finally, when he couldn’t stand it any longer, he took out his own little dick and started jerking off while he watched us. It was too much for me—the whole atmosphere was so wet with sex that it was difficult to breathe without getting semen in your lungs.

  I couldn’t hold it back much longer. I had to yank it out and let it rest, throbbing, in the air. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and spat on the floor. “You ought to shave,” she said, gasping. “Come on, man. Stick it in. Stick that thing in me.

  I pulled her up and turned her around, taking her by the buttocks, which protruded in the perfect, impudent way teenage asses do. “Bend over,” I commanded.

  “I ain’t no dog,” she said, but I pushed her head down and, squatting a little, followed the groove of her ass down to the essential hole, and came up fast. Continued fast, as if it were a candle, sticking my tongue out and panting like a dog, my hair flying as I tried to light the candle inside her. When it flashed it knocked her off her feet, I rammed it up so hard, using the last ounce of energy in me. “You’ll remember that,” I promised her as I pulled out and fell into a chair. I had made her into a creature—passed some of the demon in me over to her. Her hair, in strings, covered her face, and she panted and shuddered and slobbered like a bitch who’s been served well. I looked around for the boy, but the only trace of him was a pool of semen on the floor near my foot. I stepped in it and smeared it around the floor.

  “Don’t do that,” she objected. “Now I’ll have to mop again.” On my way out, I palmed the ten and ran down the narrow stairs of the building, chuckling under my breath.

  On the street I listened to my shoes click on the empty streets, going back to the apartment. Halfway there I passed a Polish bar and a young Polish kid on his way out. For a while he walked ahead of me, now and then looking back, over my shoulder, as if there were someone behind me. But there was only us. At the next cross street he hung behind, and then I heard him behind me. I started walking with a jerky lope, like an ape, to scare him, but he got closer. I watched his shadow get within a few feet of me, and then it was my building. A swerve, and I was in. He said something, so I turned to look at him. He said it again, a pitiful, lonely voice:

  “Do you want a blowjob?”

  Chapter Eleven

  ___________________ Saying I Love You

  “Saying ‘I love you’ is like getting your mouth caught in someone else’s zipper,” I would say later to Anne, after a lot of zippers. Doing other things, I would think of something to say to her, and wonder if that was the love she mentioned. She was the only person I would say anything to other than an obscenity, or a sexual command. Hell, it was too complicated, and no one could comprehend my head anyway.

  So it was, a couple of nights after werewolfing it, when Anne still hadn’t returned (that bitch Paulette could cram it, as far as I was concerned), that I went dancing down the Bowery. It was a cool night, smelling of rain. I had my cape on, and a bottle of rye in a brown paper bag. My head was humming with FM rock ear to ear, and my feet were tapping. “I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in,” it went, crossing East 6th Street, stepping over a puddle of second-time-around food in the gutter. I wanted to see what a quart of whisky could do—how much power that small amber bottle contained, since I believed that every object had its own radius of power, which I had to test. Ants take slaves, bottles make men jump off high planks.

  “Hey champ, you bring us a present?” Two old-timers holding each other up stumbled in front of me, eyeing the bag. I zipped around them and ran across the street, dodging the big trucks moving south. The other side was less crowded—more hotels and fewer dives—but I hadn’t gone a block when a familiar voice spoke:

  “Hey buddy, what you got there?” And a little snigger. It was Daniel, leaning against the front of the Ace Bar. A brown stain went down the side of his trouser leg where he had pissed himself, and dried vomit and blood covered the front of the thin Orlon jacket he wore. An ugly gash sprouted red hair in his blonde head. He grinned at me.

  “It’s me, all right. You didn’t kill me, you know, just crotch-shot me. I’ve taken many a blow there.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You’re asking me? Look at yourself, man. Need a leash, you’re so fucking hairy.” He laughed at my hairiness, and brought up blood. “Could I have a little snort?”

  I handed it to him, and he chugged about a quarter of the bottle before I could grab it away from him. He giggled as if he were playing keep-away.

  “You are a good old boy,” he said. By this time of course, the smell of sour mash had brought out about ten of the Ace Bar’s ambulatory patrons.

  “Don’t take his bottle away from him,” one of them yelled at me. “He’s a good friend of mine.” He reached for the bottle and someone else reached out to stop him. It was knocked from my hand, and it broke with a clink and splash on the sidewalk. They all stared in horror. Daniel tried to wet his dry lips with his tongue, and managed some last words:

  “Shit, man, you shouldn’t ought to have done that.” It was his southern accent. The rest of the onlookers filed back into the bar, more sober, and saddened. So that put a quick end to my experiment. My condition was worsening. I told Daniel that.

  “What’s going on with that bitch of yours?” he asked me.

  “She took off with the Vipers a little while ago.”

  “I saw her last night.” He looked at me, and I braced for what was coming. “Got a piece of that snapping-turtle pussy of hers. She’s great man. She rimmed me, too.” It was my kick in the crotch. I tried to grin.

  “How’d you get that notch in your head?” I asked, pointing to the gash in his hair.

  “That stiff with her gave it to me.”

  “The Deathhead.”

  “Yeah, I think that was his name.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I’ll show you. Let’s get out of here.” I took his arm and he led me around a corner and two blocks past Washington Square. It was a loft building, the kind around Astor Place, and in front of it, cluttering the sidewalk and curbs, were two dozen motorcycles, mostly small birds.

  “The goddamn Vipers,” I said to Daniel.

  “Yeah, they are some vile mothers,” he agreed. There was a red light winking at the top of the stairs as we went up. It was like climbing a pyramid, with a certain sacrifice at the top. There was plenty of noise up there, music, shouts, and a familiar noise over it all: the gunning of a cycle. Then eyes appeared at the top, moving quickly toward us—the lights of a cycle rolling down the stairs, riderless.

  “Move!” I shouted, and flattened myself against the wall. It caromed off a wall right above us, coming on fast like a giant bat with a gasoline motor buzzing, slamming my knee with its hot breath as it went on by and bucked down the steps.

  “Damn, they grow them big around here, don’t they?” Daniel cracked as we beat the stairs.

  It was the biggest collection of phonies, freaks, and fags I’d ever seen: the leather alone made it Gestapo heaven, but the chains, the helmets, the cut-up Levi’s and T-shirts and the beards added a horror-comic aspect to it that I felt an immediate affinity with. It was a ball being held just for me, a dissolute m
inuet danced in the blown cells of the midnight brain.

  “It’s my scene, man,” I said, hooking my thumbs into my belt and spreading my cape to fit my aura. Daniel pressed himself against the wall, especially as they started looking our way, but I held. One guy, in a black T-shirt and nothing else, came up to me and stuck his oil-blackened finger in my chest. He looked like an old-time Viking and smelled like what comes off on the toilet papers.

  “You lookin’ for trouble?” he asked, his eyes-squinting to see me.

  “Looking for the Deathhead,” I told him.

  “What for?”

  I spread my hands innocently, and grinned. “He’s an old buddy of mine.”

  “He don’t hang out with beatniks. Ain’t that the truth, Jean?” His woman was hiding behind him. He dragged her forward with his hand hooked in her panties. That’s all she was wearing, except some lipstick on her belly and a stocking tied around her neck. Jean wouldn’t speak. She stood there trembling like a young Tennessee doe, her small penny-tipped tits bitten and bloody. When she didn’t answer, her Viking half-turned and back-handed her across the teeth. Poor rabbit-teeth, she couldn’t even cry out, she was so frightened. That seemed to settle things for us, though; he dragged her away, and we were left by ourselves, having been challenged and found harmless.

  There were probably thirty or forty people spread out over the huge loft, most of them broken down into smaller groups. And each group presented its own tableau. I left Daniel leaning against the wall by the door and took a walk around. Over against the street wall, between two huge windows, a crucifixion was taking place. I wandered over and stood against the window, watching the ceremony. Carefully, two Vipers lifted up the limp body of a young bearded hippie; carefully three girls competed to wash his body with wine and decorate it with lipstick; carefully, they pounded the nails in.

  I asked a girl sitting next to me on the floor, who was staring vacantly at the ceremony, about the pain.

  “Ah, he’s on a trip anyway. This is his thing. He asked them to do that.”