God damn, it was just like hot butter. I shivered, it felt so good. I could feel the hairy dude’s meat on the other side of the wall of flesh separating us, and it was like Marcy wasn’t there, that she was only a tool we were using to rub our big ones together. Close as we all were, though — she still had her hands and mouth full — we only touched through Marcy.
I moved back so I could watch her butt cheeks as I moved the big red one in and out, in and out. They were plump, white, and tattooed with just two words, one on each cheek: Pagan Goddess.
I put my hands over the words and pulled her hard back against me. The muscles of her asshole milked me and I couldn’t hold back anymore. I came like King Kong.
I was wiped out. She was still going. Guys were standing around with their dicks at half-mast sneaking peeks like after a football game. They were faggots, just like me. But I guess that’s what it was about: all men are faggots at a gang bang.
XXIII
Buddy in the Lion’s Den
When I went out for breakfast the next day the streets were crowded with buses. It was the faithful, come from all over Southern California to see Flood and show off their illnesses on the Evangelical Evening News.
Their lumpy bodies and hopeful faces and bright clothes made me sick, but I realised that if I wanted to get close to Flood I had to look like them. I’d have to behave like them. Just pretend I’m somebody else, and not Buddy Tate.
After breakfast (huevos rancheros for under $3.00, a bargain), I walked myself to a Salvation Army not far from my motel and bought some bright clothes that I looked like a stupid golfer in. A Spanish-American gentleman gave me a haircut so short I could feel the sun on my scalp burning it.
When I thought I could pass for a hypocrite, I walked over to the Parousia Foundation and joined hundreds of people in lines like ants waiting to get into the auditorium of the studio. While I waited, I kept my sunglasses on so people wouldn’t see what I was thinking about them. There was tons of security — suits watching the lines, cops in uniform, even a helicopter in the sky.
A favourite fantasy of mine is to shoot down helicopters — one of the favourite weapons of the Republicrat police state, Daddy says. I always laugh when one of them crashes. One less eye in the sky.
There was a metal detector and more guards but I walked right in. I was just another stupid golfer. I was early enough that I was able to get an aisle seat not too far from the stage. Sat down next to a pregnant woman wearing a blue maternity dress.
Sitting next to her was a face I wouldn’t forget. He was the dweeb from last night’s gang bang who went first. No wonder he’d been in a hurry to get his ticket punched, I thought. Seeing the size of his wife’s belly you could guess he hadn’t had anything more than a charity hand job in months.
Everybody keeps fucking secret, but then when it’s big belly time, they’re saying to the whole world: we’ve been fucking!
She had giant jugs sitting up there on top of her belly. She hadn’t noticed it, but one of them was leaking, and there was a wet spot below her left nipple. I imagined how hard they would be with milk in them. I wondered how I could touch them without her noticing.
They could make me a hypocrite on the outside, but inside my head, I was still Buddy Tate. I started to get stiff, so I looked at the stage, where the set of the Evangelical Evening News was big and bright and full of technicians getting things ready. It was like a rock show when they started. Loud music, hymns from a choir in white robes. Maybe the Rolling Old Bones would come on. People were getting excited and waving their Bibles in the air. It was a big auditorium. Thousands of people waiting for one man to come on stage. For a minute I felt depressed that it wasn’t me they were waiting for, then I felt a surge of power and it didn’t matter. Sooner or later I was going to shoot the man they were waiting for. Cancel him out — then they’d turn their attention to me.
Kill, my insides said. It was like there were headlines inside my head: Buddy Tate Shoots Thomas Flood! I was going to send the hypocrite from hell to his place in glory land with other great victims: George Wallace, J.F.K., John Lennon, Ronald Reagan, Bobby Kennedy. When the roll was called up yonder, he’d be there. Or maybe down yonder.
The whole place stood to sing a song that wasn’t a hymn. I stood up and moved my lips while I stared at the wet spot growing under the belly’s left tit. She caught me looking and looked down at herself and turned red as a beet. It was turning me on.
“In a sinful world swimming in pornography,
We stand up, O Christ, for common decency.
Stand up, stand up, for common decency!”
That’s what it sounded like, but they didn’t pass out the words. Everybody knew them by heart. The singing went on and on and the belly kept distracting me. I can’t be let out in polite company. If the fight song hadn’t ended when it did, I might have reached out to stroke that belly.
Saved by the Reverend Thomas Flood from my dirty mind.
He came out fast holding his arms up in the air and lifting his eyebrows. He started the show with a prayer, which is handy for getting your audience to see things your way. After the prayer he sat down with a sidekick and they yakked about gloom and doom in the news. Since I wasn’t in it, I didn’t care about the news. But then he started on pornography and I sat up straight and paid attention. He was talking about leading a crusade to San Francisco, and he sounded pretty excited.
I looked around me and the faces were mean and stupid. They’d follow him in their buses to what he called Sodom by the Sea and burn the Pussy Palaces and lynch the faggots. Punish the perverts.
The belly had put her hand over her breast to cover that wet spot. She looked like she was pledging allegiance to Flood. No matter how hard I stared at her, she wouldn’t look at me. I didn’t exist. I saw her husband checking me out and I winked at him and he sat back and watched the show. He remembered me, too.
I couldn’t stop myself. I moved my arm so that it brushed against her big full titty. Five points. She still didn’t look at me. I moved my arm up and down so that I could feel the full shape of it. I thought I should stop, but I couldn’t. I did pull my arm back and try to behave when she looked at me like she was begging me to stop. Pleading with her eyes.
I guess she knew she was trapped. Her husband wouldn’t defend her, and she was too self-conscious to stand up and be the centre of attention. I could molest her all I wanted.
Before I could put my hand on her leg I forced myself to pay attention to Flood. I had business to do. If I let myself be distracted I’d miss the right moment. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I wanted to be ready for it.
They made a general call for sick people in the audience to come up and let Flood lay his healing hands on them and I decided I should go up. I was sick, wasn’t I?
I walked down the aisle with a bunch of cripples and old people, hating every step but forcing myself. The lights up there were brighter than I expected, so I guess I looked stunned climbing the steps to the set. It was the right look — a stunned golfer — for the role I was playing. There was a very long line, and it was a big stage. I looked into the audience for the belly, but the lights were too bright. Tried to decide what to say to Flood if I actually got close to him. Should I tell him I had AIDS and that he had given it to me? Should I tell him I fucked his daughter and haven’t recovered?
It might be my only chance to get close to him. Maybe I could grab him and break his neck, but I doubted it. More than likely, I’d break mine.
I was close enough to watch him dealing with a black woman with breast cancer — a tough sell — by putting his hand on the top of her head and praying at the top of his voice over her. It was his phoney smile that made me want to puke: concerned, compassionate, we’re all members of the human family, I am a do-gooder, so eat my shit. It’s that kind of hypocritical smiley-face that is ruining America.
My eyes are easy to read. Call me paranoid, because I definitely am, but I thought a security g
uy sitting behind Flood caught a peek at what’s inside me when we stared at each other. He was looking at me really hard like, who is this assassin I’m going to have to deal with? His eyes were dead like a computer screen — all business, and not a Christian thought mixed in. He was suspicious.
But then Flood beckoned to me, smiling that big phoney smile. I walked up to him and everything left my head when I saw the camera pointed at me. All I could think was, television!
All I could think was, is Robin watching me? Is Daddy?
Flood pulled me down into a kneeling position. He’s very strong. When he touched my head I kind of resisted and he pushed it down with strong hard fingers — the same fingers that had hurt Robin. My face was practically in his fucking lap, on world television. Even in fucking Thailand they were watching me be submissive to this Nazi! There was nothing I could do! I had to eat it and swallow it and it was bitter.
I was a whore. I’d do anything to get blasted out via satellite to the whole world.
“My son,” he said over me. “Do you accept your saviour Jesus Christ?” All I could do was nod, with his hand pushing my head down.
“My son,” he asked, “your affliction is of what nature?”
“I’m...” But he stopped me before I could say it by starting to sing in a loud voice. The choir picked it up and I couldn’t say anything. I saw technicians scrambling and then the guy with the computer eyes was pushing me off the set and off the stage.
Backstage he hustled me into an empty dressing room and locked the door.
“Who’re you?” I asked him, afraid he’d kick my ass before we were even introduced.
“I’m Mr. Hopper, and you are trouble, pilgrim. My job is to get rid of trouble.”
He looked like he was getting ready to get rid of me in the next five seconds. I didn’t think I could convince him I was just a stupid golfer. He pushed me down into a chair and I stayed. I was no match for him.
“I’ve got you now, little pilgrim. I’m thinking about hurting you just because you’re trouble. But first, tell me your name.”
“It’s Buddy Tate.”
He was behind me, standing over me, and then he grabbed my right wrist and twisted my arm up against my shoulder-blade hard. It hurt like hell and I was reeling like I’d made a bad mistake. He was something scary. So strong that I couldn’t move my arm a fraction.
“You wanted something when you came here, little pilgrim, little rat face. What did you want from Reverend Flood?”
“I just wanted his blessing.”
I heard the little ‘swoosh’ of a lighter and he burned my hand with it for five seconds, stopped and asked me again. I wanted to tell him, but I’d bitten down on my tongue and couldn’t get anything more out than to beg him to let me breathe.
“Just for a minute. Don’t think it’s a permanent right.”
“Just be Christian with me.”
“You wouldn’t want that. This is easier than that, let me tell you, little rat face.”
He burned me again.
“The cross is a symbol you haven’t paid enough attention to,” he said. “We’re going to have to change that. We’re going to have to save your soul, little rat face.”
He made me scream for Jesus.
XXIV
“If thy Right Eye Offend Thee...”
Crosses.
Like everyone else here in the land of the duped and the home of the slave, I’ve stared at them all my life. In Christian America, crosses are everywhere you look. In churches, but also around the necks of pretty girls and beast bikers.
The crucifix rules, and it’s dipped in blood.
I could never understand that. Think about it. Jesus was not just killed on the fucking cross, he was tortured. Nailed and stretched! It’s sick, worshipping two pieces of wood used to torture people.
To me, wearing a cross around your neck on a gold chain is the same as wearing a miniature electric chair, or a noose. (Of course, if you’re a wage slave in a suit, you do wear a noose around your neck...)
So it scared me that after Mr. Hopper got through banging and burning me I didn’t see stars like in cartoons, I saw crosses. Dozens of little crosses wherever I looked.
My soul was saved.
When Mr. Hopper and his friends let me go I was barely able to stagger back to my motel room. Crosses everywhere. The management had put a sign on my door saying I could find my duffel in the office. I had to pay three days in advance if I wanted to stay. I was in no shape to argue with them. I needed to be somewhere it was dark.
I just hid in that room for days like a hurt dog. I slept a lot and tried to heal, but the crosses wouldn’t get out of my eyes. If I turned on the television I’d see it through a moving field of ‘+’. I couldn’t get rid of them. Even watching a porno channel, they were still there. I’d be watching a babe take it up the chocolate highway and tattooed all over that wonderful image would be crosses.
It was driving me crazy. After a few days I managed to get one eye clear, but a cross remained in my right eye, sometimes with a figure on it, sometimes not. I saw the world with a crucifix imprinted on it.
I tried to be calm. I needed some serious advice to see if I wasn’t going crazy, but who could I talk to? Maybe Anyguy could have said what to do. Maybe Robin, too — but what did she care? She wanted something from me I wasn’t able to do.
That left Daddy. I thought I could find him. But I didn’t have enough money to make the trip back to where he was probably holed up — some trailer camp up in the hills of Idaho — but I had K. Farouk’s most blessed piece.
I didn’t have to go to them, the suckers came to me.
I was feeling better, still blinking my right eye, when there came (as they say in horror movies, and this was a horror) a rapping on my motel door. I opened it reluctantly. Before me were victims from the word go. It was a guy and girl all dressed up and carrying briefcases. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“Can we ask you some questions?” said the girl. The guy looked like he’d never had a blowjob in his fucking life.
I smiled. “Come on in.”
She looked at him and he nodded. I stepped aside to let them into the room and closed the door behind me. Click lock.
“What do you want to ask me?”
“We wanted to ask you some questions about how you see the world situation today. You know, it’s a very frightening world in many ways...”
The girl talked. She was about my age, I guess, with plump cheeks and a smile like she’d caught you looking at her tits. She had a blouse full, so I looked at them and not at her mouth, which was saying crap that I wasn’t hearing because there was a cross on her tit. She wasn’t wearing one. My right eye was branding her tit with it.
“I think the world is coming to an end,” I said. I wasn’t joking.
That stopped her for a minute, but she picked up the thread again. “Then you agree that Armageddon is at hand?”
I pulled K. Farouk’s pistol out of my pocket and showed it to them. They both looked like they’d been goosed at the same time. “For sure the world is coming to an end for you both if you don’t give me your money. And your car keys.”
I thought he might do something, but he didn’t have the stones. She opened her briefcase and gave me her wallet. He reached inside his jacket and gave me his, along with the keys. He looked like he couldn’t believe this was happening to him.
I could have done anything then. The cross was like a gun sight, and it was good to have the power again. They were scared and I could do anything with them.
“If you hurt us, your soul will go to hell,” she said, like she was reading my mind.
“I’m not going to hurt you unless you make me,” I promised. No, I wasn’t going to blow them away. But I didn’t want them following me. I went over to the phone and yanked the cord out of the wall, then sat down on the bed I’d messed up.
“I want you both to get undressed,” I told them.
“What are y
ou going to do?” he asked.
“First your shoes, then your pants, then your shirt. It’s simple. You’ve done it a million times.”
He got to work while she stood there watching him.
“Now you,” I told her.
She took off her suit jacket without taking her eyes off me. She was nervous and it took a while to unbutton her blouse. She was wearing a lacy white brassiere and they were all that I hoped for when she took it off. Big and firm with pale pink nipples.
He had stripped down to white jockey shorts and he still had his socks on.
“Have you ever fucked her?”
“That’s private.”
“I bet she doesn’t give you any. You walk around all day knocking on doors because of her. And then she doesn’t give you any.”
“We’re not married yet,” she said. She had a long white skirt on.
“The skirt, too.”
“Please. Haven’t you embarrassed her enough?” he whined.
It made me ashamed to be a man, looking at this dickless wonder. “If she doesn’t take her skirt off, I’ll shoot you.”
“Please, Angela. He looks crazy enough to do it.”
Her eyes were wet, but she wouldn’t cry. She unzipped the skirt and pulled it off. White panties with a big bulge in them. The cross in my eye was tattooed on that bulge.
When she pulled them down I got hard for the first time since the gang bang. She had more hair on her snatch than most men have on their heads. It was lush and brown and unbelievably sexy just to look at it. This was a pussy I just had to pet.
“Come over here.” She edged over to me like she was walking on eggs. I had to see it up close, to smell it, and play with it. I made her put it in my face. She smelled like soap, not like juices, but I rubbed my face in that bush and licked it and got some souvenirs between my teeth.
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