The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction

by Dale Peck

  Momentarily, she acted as if she intended to really ravage me, but it was a phoney growl. She didn’t know how. I must fuck Robin. That was my job. She had the largest . . . cunt, vagina I have ever stuck my finger in. It was big red and needy. I stuck two three fingers in and fucked her and fucked her. I’ve always received complaints that I was rough but I felt like I could have been shoving a stick up this woman, a branch. Her ass was up in the air, it was April and the trees were still pretty bare and I looked through the black rusty cross-hatched window gates of my East Village apartment and I felt detached and I fucked and fucked her with my hand, and twisting her nipples. She moaned and growled with pleasure. Such a woman, I have never met such a horny animal nor have I ever so distinctly serviced a woman before. Do you want my fist inside you. Anything she shrieked, anything.

  So this is my late winter stolen landscape. Robin’s hungry butt bobbing in front of my window next to my desk where I write. I felt my home, myself, violated by this animal. I couldn’t stop. This must be what faggots do. The inside of her pussy was hot and warm, it did, it did feel like a live animal. I put my fingertip to her butt-hole but there didn’t seem to be any magic there. I was getting bored. Wanna come up on me. I wanted to be underneath—her pussy on my mouth. Sure, anything. I had no way of framing her true repertoire with these kind of replies. I suspected she had done everything in the past, or on the other hand maybe she was a liar.

  Here it comes, the salty hairy organ, the slippery wet thing with a hard pearly center, jammed in my face. I started licking and sucking like crazy. I am wild for the sensation of having my face covered and dominated, almost smothered by a cunt. She was happy. It all seemed one to her, then a great groan and buckets of wet acrid fluid flooded into my mouth, splashing down my cheeks and onto my pillow. Initially I surmised she had come in some new way, but it was pee and now I had drank it for the first time. I swallowed some, but then no I don’t really want to drink piss. I wiped the edges of my mouth and then kissed her. I think she said I’m sorry but grinned at me wiping my face. Do you have any music she said. Take a look—the tapes are on the refrigerator. I lay on the bed, fascinated by the acrid taste of piss, yet horrified at the inadequacies of my tape collection. Da, duh-duh, Da, duh-duh came the opening notes of “Kimberly” and Robin walked naked across the length of my apartment like she was the real Patti Smith.

  I think we tried to cram more into her pussy for a while after that and she gave my lips a quick swipe with her mouth, but I really suspected that was not her cup of tea. Because she was not a lesbian, nothing like that.

  Do you have a towel? Actually I didn’t. Or I didn’t have a clean towel and I didn’t want to give her mine, out of a desire not to insult one of us. Finally I gave her a facecloth. I guess a towel’s a towel. I didn’t know what was going on. I’ve got to meet my girlfriend she explained. Today she had a girlfriend. A blow to the stomach, received in silence of course. I’m going out too I said. Well then come on, come with me to meet her. I did something in the kitchen sink, brushed my teeth, but I was feeling demolished.

  Outside I unlocked my bike—“No, you know . . . I’m just going to ride off.” She gave me a giant devil grin. Thanks she jeered. What am I going to do I thought as I rode off. There were millions of other ways to get laid but I chose this one. She called me a couple of days later. I explained how rotten I felt. I would never want to cause you pain she assured me. I felt mildly cauterized but Ouch. Actually what kept running through my mind was that an alley cat had run in and pissed all over my apartment. I went to see her at work on Saturday. She wore a mustard colored shirt. She was beautiful. She resembled Donovan. She was sulking in the sunlight. She had to start cooking. Come back later she said as she went in. I bumped into her that night at a party. I ignored her. She looked angry and flipped out. Babe was there. I feel like committing suicide a friend of mine confided to Babe. I feel like committing homicide Babe replied. I left town, stayed with Mary, David’s sister at the beach.

  Robin started calling me a few weeks later. I didn’t return the calls and then I did. I felt strong. I was over her. She called me from work. Come see me she begged. I’m going to a memorial service I told her. But I haven’t eaten yet. Come here she said. She made me the most delicious burritos. Fabulous. I could taste them all through the service, a room full of old friends of a man I hardly knew. I knew his lover. I liked him a lot. I hugged Roberto and left. Outside the church I unlocked my bike thinking about Robin. I got home and the phone rang. I must be crazy she said but I’m working a double shift but I can’t stop thinking about you. Can I come over. She walked into my arms as she closed the door. It was the most delicious sex, her fingers jabbing inside of me so far up, I just felt I had grown so much larger inside just to accommodate her touch, just to take that woman inside of my stomach. I can’t believe I’m going back to work now. I went to an opening and just smirked and felt so well fucked and aching.

  It went like that, rattle-trap like a bad machine for many months. I told her I didn’t want to see her anymore. I told her I just wanted to see her for coffee. We fucked, and I regretted it. The sex seemed to get wilder and wilder and in the midst of it she’d say: hope you’ve gotten over your desire to call this a relationship. I hope you’ve gotten over your desire to publicize this.

  About a year later I’m watching leaves drop off the branches of some different trees and the leaves landing among the branches themselves. I can’t really remember exactly what she said or anything quite like it. I only know in the midst of passion she would always betray me like pleasure was a hook she used to throw me. I was just a poor fish. She didn’t want me, she didn’t want anyone to know about us, least of all Babe. She would invite me over to sleep in her home when Babe spent weekends on Fire Island and she’d call Babe and ask her if she was warm enough, and take her time and chuckle and have her relationship in front of me.

  Once I woke up in the middle of the morning, maybe five, after dawn, it was blue and Robin was asleep and I lay there looking at Babe’s painting. It got truer and truer to me, I thought it was pretty good. Two little fiery creatures, little crayons of color, one connected to something below the frame of the painting—really anchored and attached and the other, brighter, was floating in space. The anchored one, obviously Robin, was giving the other, Babe, a tongue lashing. Babe danced, immune, and yet it was a child’s painting, a defiant work. A slap against her Mom. The reality of lying in their bed in the middle of their life looking at their relationship was more than I could bear. I had to move on—there may have been a little more but not much.

  They lived in Soho. The first time I met Robin for sex we went to Rizzoli’s. Then we saw some art. Big dark paintings that looked like designer sheets. We picked up sandwiches—mine was tuna, and we carried them home. I guess I don’t regret not stopping at the sandwich. Once we did just have lunch and she told me about going all the way to Thailand to cop. And she snorted all the profits, her and Babe. Then someone passed the window of the restaurant that we both knew and she practically ducked. Later when I accused her of ducking she denied it. She carried drugs on the airplane up that massive pussy.

  Once after we stopped fucking we had a small honeymoon. I went to visit her and it was late afternoon and it started to rain. It got darker, naturally, and she showed me in great detail her room. She had an extensive postcard collection, mostly from Italy and the Far East. My therapist said she was probably a classic narcissist and she couldn’t love, not me anyhow but she collected people too. She was not an artist. This is one way I have of hurting her. She showed me an odd fan that looked like a globe. She knew where you could get hundreds of these at one time, they were intended for bankers—some place where you couldn’t rustle the papers too much. I guess it kept her room cool when she dealt. All the rest of these fans were destroyed and now there were only a few and she had one of them here in her room. The titles of her books in her shelves didn’t impress me. Y
ou could tell she still had her college books. I’m always shocked at what people haven’t lost. There were pictures on her bulletin board of her and Babe going to one of Babe’s gigs. Babe had weird makeup on and a cape, Robin just looked cool. She was. If I’ve ever met a cool woman in my life Robin was her.

  Later she led me out to a round table in her front room and she told me about her early religious training and she went to Hebrew school. She was showing me her favorite spiritual book in the world something by Martin Buber. She read it very slowly, the smallest bite at a time, sometimes just a sentence. She had her head bent over that book and she looked like the sweetest Jewish boy, head bent in prayer. I fell in love with her again. I like the smell and taste of women’s bodies. Sometimes I’m sure that’s what I’m living for. But as for Robin I would like to make her drink piss. I know a boy who did it in high school. Somebody offered him twenty bucks to drink it the story goes. Did he drink it? Yes. I was about fifteen when I heard that story. His name was Frosty, he was from Lexington, and was the lead singer from a band that played all the local dances doing covers of the Rolling Stones. His big song was “I’m Alright.” He would stoop down at the foot of the stage and his lip would curl up and it was heavenly. He was our Rolling Stone. I was amazed when I heard he drank piss. It was a new kind of spirituality I had begun to hear about. Humiliation. But this anger it has brought me makes me think I’ve done it wrong. She went to California for a week, rented a red car and discovered it was me she loved now. Not Babe. Too late. Now I sit in this incredible silence. I don’t know why.

  The Cat Who Loved La Traviata

  by Jaime Manrique

  Nothing seemed to have changed in Times Square, and I found the familiar squalor somehow reassuring. As usual at this time of day, shoeless Muslims knelt on green towels, praying to Mecca in front of subway posters for Broadway shows. Squatting on the stairs leading to the street, begging aggressively for quarters, was the same woman I had seen for months, with the same shrinking baby, wrapped in a bunch of grimy rags. Nearby, bored cops chatted idly, petting their police dogs.

  Forty-second Street was thick with a Sunday crowd of black and Latino teenagers looking for cheap thrills. Mormon-looking tourists with cameras strolled, sticking close together while taking in the scene. They were offered sex of all kinds, pot, Colombian coke, smack, hash, ecstasy, uppers and downers, designer drugs and, of course, crack.

  It was one of those rare, mild late afternoons at the end of July when the air was like silk and Manhattan felt like an island. The multicolored neon marquees of the movie theaters advertised life-sized photographs of seminude porno stars in sexy poses. A naked man, looking stoned out of his mind, wandered out of a peep show. Halfway down the block, a young woman dressed in Salvation Army uniform and armed with a megaphone, was stationed under the awning of a sex palace, preaching to the depraved and indifferent denizens of Times Square. Two preppies stopped in front of her, swayed, twirled, wobbled on their feet and collapsed, overdosing on the sidewalk.

  “You don’t have to get high on drugs,” the woman blared. “Jesus will get you high. You’ll be so high on Jesus you’ll never want to come down.”

  Waiting for the light to change at the corner of Forty-second and Eighth, I looked over my shoulder: the skyscrapers of midtown had bloomed. The Chrysler building caught the reflection of the setting sun; its silver top reminded me of a minaret crowned with a long, shimmering sword. Crossing Eighth, I saw the sky beyond the Hudson, which looked as if all the nuclear reactors from Hoboken to Key West had exploded, setting the air afire. Yet the color was not that of natural combustion, but synthetic, like the orange of a hot burner on an electric stove.

  I live on the west side of Eighth Avenue, above O’Donnell’s Bar, between Forty-third and Forty-fourth Streets, an address formerly nicknamed The Minnesota Strip. The good old days had ended when the famous Greek restaurant The Pantheon closed due to lease problems. Since that time the short block—which comprises a Citibank at the corner of Forty-third, O’Donnell’s Bar, the Pantheon building, a porno joint (Paradise Alley), a Gyro coffee shop, the Cameo (a beautiful old theater now turned XXX movie house), and a four-story building at the corner of Forty-fourth, formerly a whorehouse and now a shooting gallery—had been taken over by crack addicts, who conducted their business on the premises of Paradise Alley. Now I looked back with nostalgia to the days when young hookers (for all tastes) decorated the block around the clock . . . But wait a minute, not that young, I thought, standing on the east corner of Forty-third, as I spotted a tiny hooker standing in front of the door of my building. She looked about seven years old, maybe seven and a half. I had seen teenage hookers and hustlers, but this was a child. This was real depravity and decadence—no doubt a product of the crack epidemic. In spite of her spike heels, she barely reached the doorknob. She wore a vinyl miniskirt and red satin tank top. A pink plastic purse was strapped across her shoulder and her belly button was plugged with a blue stone. Her hair was streaked gold and punked-out. Long rhinestone earrings framed her cheeks and above the false eyelashes her eyelids were painted purple and sprinkled with gold glitter. Her tiny crimson lips were done in the shape of a heart. I stood in front of my door, open-mouthed, dangling the keys, waiting for her to move.

  In her childish voice she said, “Want a date?”

  I recoiled, aghast. Now she placed her baby hand on her hip and crossing one leg behind her knee she reclined lewdly against the wall. “Cheap blow job,” she offered. I noticed now that her voice, though squeaky and reedy, had a sultry timbre. She was not a child—she was a midget hooker. I breathed a sigh of relief, “No, thank you,” I said. “I live here.”

  She gave me a blank look, but made enough room for me to open the door. I ran up the stairs to my apartment on the fourth floor. I was worried about Mr. O’Donnell. The six months the vet had given him to live were over and even though Mr. O’Donnell seemed fine, I felt anxious when he was alone. Inside the apartment I set down my shopping bag and went to the closet to hang up my new suit. I was walking toward the living room calling Mr. O’Donnell’s name when the phone rang.

  “Santiago, is that you upstairs?” said Rebecca, my downstairs neighbor.

  I picked up. “Hi, Rebecca. I just got here but I can’t find Mr. O’Donnell.”

  “I’m so relieved it’s you. I thought it might be a burglar. Mr. O’Donnell is down here with me.”

  “I’m coming down to get him. Is that okay?”

  “Come on over. I’m so glad you’re back.”

  Rebecca met me at her door. Her eyes were wide open, as if she had just had a major fright. Locking the door after I came in, she said, “Can I offer you a beer, iced tea, a glass of lemonade?”

  “The lemonade sounds delish, but no thanks. Where’s Mr. O’Donnell?” I looked around the room for him.

  “I don’t know whether we ought to disturb him right now. He’s in my bedroom listening to side two of La Traviata.”

  Rebecca had discovered that Mr. O’Donnell would revive from his periodic bouts of listlessness by listening to Monserrat Caballe’s rendition of Violeta. He’d lie still, smiling, his ears pricked up until the opera was over.

  “Is he in bad shape?”

  “I didn’t want to call you at Lucy’s, but when I went upstairs Saturday morning to feed him, he was more dead than alive. He refused his Kal Kan, so naturally I was worried. I went to Barkin’ Fish for some catfish since he likes it so much. I practically had to force feed him, but he ate one fillet, a teensy bitty bit at a time.”

  “Should I take him to the hospital right now?” I said.

  “Goodness gracious, Santiago. You’re making me more nervous, and I’m already a shitty mess. I called the hospital and was told there’s nothing we can do except make sure he takes his medicine with his meals. Today he’s much better. He’s been listening to La Traviata all day. This morning he refused to eat fish, so I gave
him a container of pineapple yogurt. Wait till this side of the record is over and you can take him upstairs. He’s as good as new, thanks to my ingenuity.”

  “I shouldn’t have left him alone, but thank you so much, Rebecca.”

  “Will you stop feeling guilty about everything. I swear, Santiago, I’m going to start calling you the Honorary Jew. I took real good care of the kitty; Florence Nightingale couldn’t have nursed him better. So, how’s Lucy? Did you have a nice weekend?”

  I gave Rebecca a much abridged and sanitized version of what transpired in Jackson Heights.

  “Honey, it sounds like a Flannery O’Connor novel set in Queens,” she observed. “It’s the planets,” she added philosophically. “As long as Pluto is aligned with Scorpio it’s going to be bad.”

  Willing to blame it all on the stars, I said, “Oh yeah, and exactly how long is that going to last?”

  “Seven years.”

  “Rebecca, I couldn’t take seven years of this!”

  “That’s why I’m going away. I might as well enjoy myself while there’s a chance.”

  Thinking she meant her upcoming vacation, I said, “I’d love to get away from here, if I could.”

  “Santiago, darling, I’m beginning to doubt this area is ever going to get any better. All this time I bought your theory that it was just a matter of time before Donald Trump moved in to redevelop Times Square.”

  “I agree with you, Rebecca,” I said, conceding defeat. “Donald Trump can’t solve his own problems nowadays, much less ours. If only they closed Paradise Alley it would be okay. It wasn’t all that bad when it was just hookers.”