Robin watches the street as if watching a movie. A homeless woman pushes a shopping cart full of precious bundles, stopping to pick up a cigarette tossed by a black man in a leather jacket. Two Mexican labourers in straw hats cross her viewpoint. An Indian waiter in a white jacket comes next, and after him an old man walking a little dog. A sleek police car rolls by, the evening officers inside blinking in the glare of the evening sun hitting their windshield. Three pigeons land on the sidewalk and begin pecking at a plastic bag with a few potato chips in it.
This parade of life recalls her vision of the variety of people in the Spiral Dance the night before.
“Star, what about witchcraft? Paganism? Where does that fit in your scheme of things?”
Star has a theory, often expounded and elaborated upon in long sessions, that everything fits into patterns very much like his tattoos. His own version of chaos theory. All you had to do was to find the key that unlocks perception and the world would show itself to you as the painting it was. Tattoos help you to see it.
“It’s just people with their need to make sense of things. And from what I know and the people I’ve seen, witchcraft makes more sense than a lot of things do. It seems to me that anything that increases the amount of awe in the world is good.”
“Awe? What do you mean? Like in awful?” She knows the word, of course, but seeks to draw him out.
“Like in a recognition of the sacredness of things. Pagans respect nature. Witches know that underlying all the bullshit of a consumerised world there is magic. I like that.”
“What about Christians?”
“What about them?”
“Did I ever tell you about my father?”
“No. But I’m afraid you’re going to tell me.”
“He’s a Christian.”
“So’s my old man. Doesn’t make him a bad dad. He let me do a cross on his arm....”
“No, I mean he’s big time. A professional Christian.”
“Like one of those crazy evangelists?”
“Did you ever hear of Thomas Flood?”
“You’re kidding. That guy on television who asks people to send in donations? He must rake it in.”
“Half a million dollars on a good day.”
“Good Lord, what a racket. What’s a good day?”
“When there’s trouble. The stock market drops, there’s a war starting, hurricanes... people send more on those days.”
“Well, there’s always disasters. Just look at the past six months: Nevada declared off-limits because it glows in the dark with toxic radiation. Earthquakes everywhere. Floods. Two major riots. I’d say your old man has a guaranteed cash flow for the foreseeable future. Is he a good guy?”
There is no hesitation in her voice. It is flat and hard when she answers: “He burned me, Star. I’ll kill him someday.”
Star whistled long and low. He shut off his needle and ran his fingertips over the ridges of scar tissue he had covered with his inks. “All this?”
“All of it.”
Robin feels the familiar rage in her throat and swallows hard, willing herself to choke it down, like a snake forced back into its hole. When would she be rid of this terrible anger? She was afraid that she would never be free until she could breathe the fire or rage out of her, like the dragon on her back.
Anger now distorts her vision. Star resumes work without further comment. Now when she looks out the window the people who hurry past are guilty of every crime. The slightest imperfection is distorted. A man with a limp seems like the most grotesque of cripples, maimed by flaws in his character, not the traffic or the world. The buildings across the street are shabby ruins, covered with dried black blood. The sunlight now fading from the street is somehow ominous as shadows fall.
It is in this state of mind that she first sees Buddy Tate. He stands before the mirror, tall and pale, with red hair tied in a pony tail. It looks like he is searching for something in the mirror, perhaps some speck of self that he’s lost, but to Robin it is as if he is looking straight into her eyes, drilling into her unconscious where the monsters lurk.
He is not ordinary looking, but he is not handsome except in the way some outlaws are when defiance moulds their features into masks that don’t come off. His nostrils are large, like great holes in the lower half or his face. His mouth is a slash. He is probably a few years younger than she is, but he might have been much older. There is something primitive about him, something she cannot name.
Why does he stand there, staring at himself? Could he see through the special glass?
“Do you see him, Star? What is he looking at?”
“Not us, baby.”
Then the strange young man does an extraordinary thing: he takes a lipstick from his pocket and as they watch, he draws a large red ‘X’ across the window with it.
It is only when he moves that he reveals himself. He is an alien. Star could probably find a place for him to fit in the scheme of things, but most people wouldn’t — not ever. It is as if she recognises herself in him, and she is sad when he goes.
Then the buzzer rings.
III
How I Began
I was really depressed yesterday, and maybe I’ll be depressed tomorrow, but I’m strong today and nothing’s going to stop me. Fuck everybody who gets in my way. I’ll run them down. I’ll smash them flat, I mean like road kill. I swear, nobody better mess with me today, because they just don’t know who they’re dealing with. They’ll never know what hit them.
Now hear this, world. Believe this. Buddy Tate is comin’ at you. Diss me again and I’ll seek you out and cut off your toy hands so you can’t beat off....
When I turned eighteen and was just beginning to wonder what I was going to do with my life outside of riding the sweaty bed, my old man gave me a shot of straight advice I’ve always kept in mind.
He said, “Be extravagant, boy, whatever you do. People don’t even see you unless you give them something to look at.”
It was just about the only advice he ever offered sober except to tell me when I started running around to keep my zipper up unless I wore a raincoat. AIDS was a nasty disease. I waited for him to say something more educational, but he just winked and asked me to fix him another drink and turned back to the TV. For a minute I was the focus of his attention, and then, you know, I wasn’t there. I always felt invisible around him, which I guess proved his point. He never gave a fuck about anything.
I decided then that I wasn’t going to be invisible the rest of my life, no matter what I had to do to get people’s attention.
He was the one who sent me out into the world to find my place. I almost never think of the hard time I served as a kid, but I remember him teaching me how to shoot. Daddy liked guns, so it didn’t surprise me when he joined the Militia and went up in the mountains with a bunch of other guys dressed in camouflage. I took to guns the way I took to pussy.
The other thing I remember is us watching television together. He used to say in that quality time period that even an asshole can be a somebody in America, shaking his head at the nobody of the moment on the tube. Fame is everything, he said. I’d be invisible until my face was on that screen, even if I was an asshole. Television was the goal, and there were many paths to it.
I know the way we lived was not normal. I guess I was lucky that way. My old man was not what anyone would call normal. Because they were afraid of him, most people just called him crazy. He didn’t give a shit and you never knew what he was going to do next. Could be anything, so I got used to surprises early.
We always lived on the edges of things. When Daddy got a new job we’d hit the road and end up on the slummiest street of some subdivision from hell. We’d be smack up against a sewage treatment plant or a gas station. Or we’d land in some trailer park next to a closed fast food place where you couldn’t bring a girl. Some bump in the asphalt on a road in the Ozarks. We covered a lot of territory but the landscape didn’t change much.
This kin
d of life kept me out of school a lot, but that was all right with me. I didn’t see any difference between a jail and a school until I discovered girls. Some times we’d come to a new place and the Old Block (the same one I’m a chip off, he reminded me) would drive me to the school and tell me to get in there and register.
I hated every minute of it until my fourteenth birthday. To celebrate, Daddy bought some doughnuts and gave me ten bucks. Then he went out and got tanked and brought a whore home. Not for me. They came in while I was watching a talk show and they were pretty happy with each other. She was leaning on him and he was doing a good imitation of a sleaze-ball. He took her right into the bedroom and the trailer started rocking. Daddy liked to enjoy himself in the bedroom, and he didn’t care if the whole world knew when he was getting his rocks off.
I knew what they were doing because I’d made a hole I could peep through. They’d be on his messed up bed and he’d have her pronged, I knew that, from the noises.
Christ, it was enough to take your breath away. She wasn’t built badly for a slag who’d been around the block a few dozen times. Face like a pony, but titties to drool over. Pointed and firm and fully suckable. She was on her knees on the bed with her ass in the air and Daddy was pumping it to her from behind. He’d push it all the way in and pull it all the way out. Daddy’s dick was a real poker and it shone in what light there was from the bed lamp. Once he pulled it all the way out of her and whacked her ass with it as hard as he could — just beat her ass with his dick. I got hard just watching that, thinking that what he had in his hands I came out of once, in a manner of speaking.
His other hand was playing with her boobs. Wouldn’t let them alone — squeezing them, pulling the nipples way out, bouncing them, pulling her long hair up so he could kiss her. She was going crazy with all this good treatment and gasping like she couldn’t breathe. My bone was stone.
“Give it to me, give it to me, give it to me you fucker, you son-of-a-bitch fucker!” she kept begging. Boy, he’d give it to her. Energy like a rabbit fucking a wall socket. He drove her flat on her face on the bed he was riding her so hard and then he collapsed on top of her. I couldn’t even see her, just heard her whimpering, and then he rolled off her and stood up beside the bed. She turned over and spread her legs wide, holding them up with her hands under her knees, inviting him, begging him, but he wanted some head. His big long john looked like an animal he was restraining with both hands.
“Suck me off, you cheap whore.”
“No, come and fuck me with that baloney. Come on baby, just fuck me some more. Just a little bit more.”
“I might, but first come and get it. Do me.”
Reluctantly she got up on her knees and moved close to him. I held my breath: it was my first sight of sucking, and it made a sweet impression on me.
She didn’t take her eyes off his cock. They got big and round like she was watching a snake approach her. She shook her head and tightened her lips like she wasn’t going to do it, but I could see that’s all she wanted to do in the whole world. She was happy thinking about what came next.
He grabbed her long dark hair and pulled her face to his dick. When she wouldn’t open up, he banged her cheek with it.
I saw it was a game they were playing.
“Come on, baby, open your mouth and later I’ll fuck you in the ass, I know you like that.”
Everything was magnified by lust, the dirty talk and the pleasure and the game of it. In a world full of bullshit, this was the real thing.
She laughed like she was growling and opened up, her wet red lipsticked lips stretching over his meat as she took him all the way down. She was a sword-swallower, her face pressed into his belly, his hands covering her ears as he fucked her throat, his ass muscles tightening and clenching as she took it all and then released, with this look in her eyes like she owned him.
When he pulled out to let her get some air she gasped and grabbed for it like Daddy might just walk out at that moment. There was a big hungry smile on her face and her lipstick was smeared and she growled again. Daddy had his dick in his hand but he was bent over and he was cursing her but not like he was angry: “You fuckin’ cunt, you sweet pussy, oh you goddamned fuckin’ whore you made me come, I’m coming now, just suck it, suck it....”
When he came it looped and spurted on her titties and chin until she got him back in her red mouth and sucked the rest out of him while he held onto her shoulders.
He grunted. She giggled like she was proud of herself.
Then Daddy did something that put paid to it. He slid down so he was kneeling in front of her and she kissed him and gave it all back to him.
I came in a pair of clean pants I had to wash out. Nothing was the same after that.
IV
Sex is Everything
After that I knew sex was everything, at least for me, and I set about getting my share. But I had to learn the rules of the game. The very first one I learned was about supply and demand. Vagina owners controlled the supply of sex, and the demand from men is always greater than the supply. The second was about access to the supply.
I went back to school with a different attitude because that’s where the girls were. I stalked them: I watched for the door to open to their bathroom for a quick peek. I watched them bending over to pick something up. One way you might get to look down their blouses, the other you might be able to make out the lines of their panties. In class, sometimes they were restless and they shifted their legs so you could see up their skirts. Cheap thrills, but what else was there to do in school?
My dick drove me. My hormones were running down the road screaming. Ask a girl for a date and she’d look at me like I was a werewolf.
Pornography saved my ass. My right hand became my best friend. I got my high school education looking at dirty books that didn’t lie about sex.
Everybody lied about it. Sometimes I used to think that everybody who wore clothes lied about it. People all wanted to dress the wild thing in fancy clothes. They talked shit like love, romance, wedding, family, commitment, values, and I thought, in and out, in and out, pole and hole, pole and hole. Sex was sex. I didn’t think it needed dressing up.
I mean, I wanted to wallow in it. Maybe sex was my calling, like they say preachers have a calling, because I’ve never felt bad about any dirty thought I had — they were just like other thoughts. Pictures on my own private screen.
I’d mope around the town where we were living or I’d mope around school. Dark nights would find me outside windows, looking for what I’d seen Daddy and the happy whore doing.
I saw things I can’t write down. People are really fucked up when it comes to this activity. Everybody did it a little bit differently. Sometimes I took my binoculars along for a closer inspection of the plumber with his wife, the postman and his girlfriend, the doctor and his daughter.
I knew other guys felt the same way I did, but they didn’t have the balls to admit it. Or a Daddy like mine.
But if it doesn’t come out one way it’ll come out another. I used to go shooting with a kid named Jeffrey. We’d go off to the dump and shoot rats with our .22s. I’d try to get Jeff to talk about girls, but it was hopeless. He was a very quiet, shy kind of guy, just the opposite of me. He was a swimmer, too. Maybe all that time by himself in the water was like sex for him, or maybe he’d got water on the brain.
“Jeffrey,” I’d say to him after he’d shot enough rats, “why don’t we go over to Miranda’s house and see if we can catch her with the shades up? There’s a tree that’s easy to climb, and you can see right into her bedroom. She’s got melons, man.”
But not Jeffrey. He’d go, “You’re a disgusting pervert, Tate. Miranda is on my swim team.”
A few weeks after that trip to the dump, Jeffrey was big news. Instead of shooting rats, he waited after school for his parents to arrive home and ambushed them as they walked through the front door. He used the .22 he shot rats with to put nine .22 LR slugs into his father, then a
nother four into his mother. Then he took off in their car and the cops didn’t find him for two days. But he’d left a note that sounded like his father had given him the same advice Daddy gave me about making people notice me. He said he wanted to go on national television to tell people why he killed them. I just wanted to get laid, but I took the lesson to heart about shooting people and getting famous.
Most of the time I felt like an animal in the zoo. I was in a cage looking out at people who were looking in on me. When I walked down the street I looked at people around me and they just seemed like pod people, or zombies. I wasn’t like them, despite the resemblance. I was something else. I could shoot one of them. Not a girl, but there were lots of pricks out there.
I couldn’t get laid even if I paid. There was an older girl in the trailer park who’d dropped out. She wore tight white shorts even in the winter time, and there was a steady traffic of cars most nights at her house. I watched her especially. I liked her face. Pouty. Big lips, usually wet. Boobs on her like spikes, they were so hard and pointed. I watched her from behind a little fence where I could stretch out on the grass and make myself comfortable for the evening.
LaDonna put on quite a show. She was an exhibitionist. She must have known I was watching her, and she got her kicks showing me her power over men. I was the watcher and she was the watched — a fair deal, I thought.
She had a screen porch she sat out on most nights when it was warm. Sometimes she would turn on a little lamp, and other times the only light came from inside the trailer. Most of the time I could only see her shadow. She had a chair and a cot on the porch, and she sat there like a spider in a web, waiting for the flies to come to her. They were mostly older men and LaDonna still looked young despite her work.
While I watched her with the dirty old men my bone was usually buried in a hole I dug in the ground with my knife. I remember thinking that the wet dirt wrapped around it was probably the closest I’d ever come to the real thing. I didn’t have the nerve to go up and knock on LaDonna’s door.
Dark Matter (Modern Erotic Classics) Page 3