Dark Matter (Modern Erotic Classics)

by Michael Perkins

  That was all. I’m not a rapist. Buddy Tate can find willing pussy any time. He doesn’t have to force anybody. I just wanted a taste. Is that a crime?

  “Now you,” I told the dickless wonder. “Put your face in her bush. Do it.”

  He was scared of me and scared of her, so the way he did it was half-assed, but he did it.

  “Now show her your dick.” He pulled it out through the front of his jockeys, looking ashamed he had an erection.

  “Look at it,” I ordered her. “Now you two are going to get better acquainted. Touch it like you mean it.”

  Her face was all scrunched up like she was looking at a big dead rat rather than the penis of the man she was going to marry and have babies with. She started praying, “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name...”

  I got up off the bed and motioned for both of them to sit on it.

  “Put your hand on his dick, goddamn it.” She did it. “Now — move it up and down.” She handled it like it was a rattlesnake.

  “You never learned how to be a girl, did you?”

  I was disgusted with her, but the scene was turning me on. Watching does it for me. He didn’t seem to be enjoying himself — it was like he was watching her wash his feet — but maybe he didn’t know what to expect. Probably never jerked off in his whole wasted life peddling Watch Towers. Well, I’d show them another kind of watchtower.

  They were both looking at me and not at what they were doing. I unzipped and let the big boy out of the corral. Put both hands around it and waved it in their faces.

  “This is how you give a hand job,” I told them. When she saw how big I was she couldn’t help herself. I could tell something clicked down between her legs. Maybe it was like getting saved. I had her attention now. She was fascinated with the way my right hand moved up and down, how I played with my balls, then went up to the head for a squeeze. He watched her like she was turning into somebody he didn’t know.

  I gave it my best and it wasn’t more than three minutes before I came in my hand. She had stopped touching him and was just staring. I could see the lust in her eyes replace the fright.

  I was feeling crazed, and the cross in my right eye seemed to be getting bigger. But before I left them to sort it out I wanted to show them something.

  I held out my hand to them. My hand filled with my own come running between my fingers and dripping on the floor.

  “This is what it’s all about. It makes babies. It’s life.”

  I wanted them to remember this lesson. I brought my hand up to my face and licked up my own come. It was saltier than usual. I wiped my hand on the bedspread, zipped up, gathered up their clothes in one arm, picked up my duffel, and said good-bye, locking the door behind me.

  Maybe, if I was lucky, I had saved two souls.

  XXV

  “...And Cast it From Thee...”

  Driving is torture enough without seeing every truck coming at you with a crucifix printed on its grill. I thought I knew where Daddy had drifted to by this time of year, I just had to get there. It was a good little Japanese car the Jehovah’s had loaned me, so I made good time.

  I cut through the Restricted Zone of Nevada and headed north into Idaho through Boise and the Sawtooths up to the Bitterroots. Daddy liked to go where he could get away from people who want to tell you what to do.

  Where the highway ends and there’s just a couple of dirt roads and a convenience store and big-assed mountains all around, Daddy had found a place to hide. The guy in the store said there was a little trailer camp up the road, and I knew I was home.

  It was a plain old beige trailer with some dead flowers in front of it, away from the other trailers. I didn’t see Daddy’s pickup, but I knew I had the right trailer because of the bumper sticker on the screen door: Live Free or Die. It was Daddy’s motto.

  I knocked on the screen door but the only sound was flies buzzing, so I stepped inside. It was basic bachelor: a couch and a television and an unmade bed, chairs and a table with beer bottles on it. It smelled like Daddy: sex, booze, cigarettes, guns. But the old block wasn’t in his cave.

  I looked in the refrigerator and found two bottles of Bud, three eggs, horse radish, a jar of mayo, bread, and a pint of vodka. In the coils under the refrigerator was the usual stash of home-grown bo-bo. All the comforts of home sweet home. I was hungry, so I fried up some eggs, made sandwiches and drank a beer. Rolled a nail and kicked back like a king, stiff and achey from the long drive.

  I wondered what Daddy would say when I told him the adventures I’d had in California. He’d probably call me crazy when I told him about the crucifix in my eye.

  I must have dozed off on the couch. When I woke up it was dark out. Maybe he’d gone off on what he called “manoeuvres” with his camouflage buddies up in the mountains.

  There was no beer left, so I poured myself a vodka, and turned on the television for company.

  A big mistake.

  Thomas Flood was praying on the screen. A close-up of his folded hands, while his voice prayed hard about pornography. How the souls of pornographers would burn in hell. I wondered if Markus Bloom worried about hell.

  “Certain well-intentioned people have asked, why am I striking so hard at pornography? Doesn’t the world have bigger problems? Many, even some who call themselves Christians, say that it doesn’t hurt anybody, that pornography is a so-called ‘victimless crime’. But, my friends, the victim is Christ Himself! Saying that pornography is a victimless crime is like saying the filth will not soil your garments. Pornography has the curse of Onan on it.”

  I don’t know why I didn’t shut the bastard off. When I looked at him the cross in my eye was a gunsight pointed at his head. Someday I’d have a real chance at him, and there would be blood in his eye, blood covering his head. And I’d cut off his holy pecker and stuff it in his mouth.

  I poured another vodka and imagined that. It made me feel good.

  “Lord, the power of prayer is enormous, as we witness here every day on our show. We have used the power of prayer to heal the afflicted and lift up the godly. But now we must use the power of our prayer as a weapon — a shining sword — against the ungodly.

  “Who is the pornographer? Who is he? We know he’s a man, because the women in that filthy business are just like kidnap victims. They don’t know what they’re doing. Some man with his mind in the gutter led them down the garden path. Let me draw you a portrait of the pornographer: he’s a fat man puffing on a cigar — and yes, many of these fat men with cigars are Jews! Surely I will not be accused of anti-Semitism if I point out to you that Jews — and Italians of course — run the pornography trade. The pornographer, friends, stands for everything that has gone wrong in America, and his home is San Francisco. We must march to that Sodom by the sea and establish our Crusade there. Armageddon...”

  I tuned in and out of his rap, getting a depressing feeling that my punishment in life for my sins was to have to listen to Flood whenever I turned on the television. With him taking up so much TV time, there’d never be any room for me!

  If I kept listening to him, I’d go crazy, but I couldn’t turn off the set. It was like I was hypnotised. Like he’d put a curse on me by putting his goddamned cross in my eye. I finished the rest of the pint. I was beginning to feel it, because I don’t drink much. I’m not a lush, I’m a lover.

  “People often say, wouldn’t it be more charitable, even more Christian, to forgive the pornographer? Or the Devil worshipper? Or the homosexual? To forgive the sinner? But we must stand firm when the ungodly can corrupt a whole nation! I think good Christians have a duty for righteous anger. My response to corruption is not to turn the other cheek. As it says in Matthew, ‘If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee!’”

  Something clicked. My right eye did offend me. The cross in it was getting bigger. It separated Flood’s face into four parts. It vibrated.

  He was inside my head. Mr. Hopper and his friends had put him inside
me.

  I fumbled for the zapper and pressed ‘off’ but Flood was still there on the screen, praying, his face divided into four squares. Once when I was six a big fat tick got in my ear when I was sleeping. When I felt it in there sucking my blood it made me crazy. I ran around the house screaming that I couldn’t get it out. Daddy put some lighter fluid on it and pulled it out with tweezers, each of its legs like a hook tearing my ear so it bled. But it was out, and I owned myself again.

  I stood up because I felt sick and the trailer was tilting.

  I made it to the bathroom just in time to chuck up my fried eggs into the toilet. When I could breathe again I pulled myself up to the sink, opened the medicine chest and found Daddy’s straight razor, the one he’d taught me to sharpen for him.

  I didn’t want to do it, but I had to. With three fingers I pulled my right eye out of its socket, so determined to do it that I didn’t feel the pain. I picked up the straight razor and cut through the muscles and tendons holding it in, and held my bloody right eyeball in my hand. It was slippery, and harder than I expected.

  Then I cast the offending eye into the eggs in the toilet, and flushed it away.

  Daddy found me in the bathroom passed out, face covered with blood, toilet paper stuck in the empty eye socket.

  “You’ve done yourself some serious bodily harm, Buddy, that you will regret. It may be that you’re not compos mentis.”

  I told him about the crucifix, about Robin, and about Flood.

  “That son-of-a-bitch hypocrite Flood is going to take over the country. He needs to have his mail delivered to him by groundhogs.”

  “Well Daddy, stay tuned, because it will be me who gets the job done. It may take a while, but I’ll do it.”

  “I believe you will. You turned out to be an ambitious boy after all. The world might hear from you yet.”

  XXVI

  Bad Little Girl

  When she was a little girl, before her mother died, Robin Flood dreamed that she was not only a little girl, but an animal, too. She liked animals, of course, as lonely children often do. Her favourite outing with her parents was a trip to the zoo. But her dream was recurrent: one night she was an ocelot, the next she was a fox. She was okapi, but she was also jaguarundi, otter, panda and racoon. She wore her little girl clothes in these dreams, but her face was furry, her nose tipped black. She was herself, but she was also something wild.

  One day her parents, seeing her love for animals, decided that she was old enough to care for a pet. Robin asked for a monkey — but not just any monkey. She was very particular: she wanted a Japanese macaque, a small, delicate monkey with a pink face and sober, soulful eyes.

  Robin named her new friend Emily and spent nearly all of her free time when she was not in school talking to her. Emily listened; her parents didn’t. Emily was unusually intelligent and loving, but nevertheless there were times when Emily lapsed — when she was more wild animal than good little girl. One Saturday when Robin was eight, Emily wandered into a prayer breakfast father was giving and bit a few important fingers. Father was very angry.

  When Robin came home from school, her father was waiting. He took her into the basement, where Emily was to be disciplined for being a monkey, and not a good little girl. It would be a lesson for Robin.

  The basement was dark and scary. Robin liked to play down there with Emily around the great furnace and in the laundry room. It was a scary place but that was part of its appeal to them. It offered a taste of adventure.

  Poor Emily! She was tied by her tiny wrists to a big clothes drying rack. She was chattering her teeth and making the high pitched sounds of alarm macaques make when they are frightened. She bared her white teeth in distress, her wet saucer eyes begged Robin to help her, but Robin couldn’t.

  Father was father, so he had to punish.

  You made me watch, father. It was a belt you used, and you hit poor Emily with it and when she howled, you looked at me. I knew that you could turn your anger on me. It didn’t last very long, but my heart was broken. Then you made us kneel and pray that Emily wouldn’t be bad again. When I went to untie her and pick her up she bit me on the chin and I didn’t make a sound. I knew you would come back and beat her again.

  I saw that cruelty was the worst sin. Deliberate cruelty. That cruelty made Emily run into the street a few days later, and she was killed.

  After that happened I went into a little room inside myself and shut the door. I was eight, but I have always had a very strong will. I decided I would let no one in my room. I would pretend to be the dutiful Robin Flood, Thomas Flood’s daughter, but in that little room I remained an animal. Emily lived inside me.

  I watched you at my mother’s funeral, father. I saw that you were posing. She lay encased in that rich wood and you postured, one hand on her casket, for the television cameras. She looked up at you with sightless eyes from the open casket, and you didn’t say good-bye to her, you said prayers. Prayers!

  I knew that you did not love her, that women frightened and disgusted you. I knew that you had been cruel to her because she was a woman and you did not know what that meant.

  I hated you when I saw your cruelty, and it dried up my heart.

  You killed her. You knew that she was stronger than you, and you feared that she would devour you with her womanhood. So you killed her. But it was her sex you really wanted to kill. Her powers as a woman. Maybe as a goddess, if Laura’s right.

  I am the daughter of Aphrodite. We are all goddesses and gods, and your church says we are devils.

  Your pathetic, cruel church.

  I am an animal. I am a goddess. I am my mother’s daughter. I am not your daughter. I am not a good little girl any longer. When you killed my mother, when you burned me, you made me bad.

  Buddy Tate is an animal like me. His smell pleased me — it was hard winters in little towns, smoky sex and sudden violence. His willingness when I fucked him pleased me. The size of his cock pleased me. What he said and how he said it.

  I have trouble with passion. It’s too big an emotion to remain stuffed in my little room. If I let it grow there would be a meltdown.

  And yet, I think I feel passion for Buddy Tate — and I’m afraid of it. Afraid that it will burn us both up.

  You will chase me, father, and I will run, and that will be our history until the end. One day I will stop running and fight you. Or Buddy Tate will kill you for me.

  I like to think that we’ll cut your heart out and eat it.

  Don’t you understand that you have to die so I can live? Don’t you understand that, until I see your mortal blood, I will never be whole?

  The last time I saw you, father, was the last time you hurt me. You’d sent me away to good schools, and for that I thank you, if for nothing else. I learned how not to be your daughter at them. I was in Paris pretending to attend classes at the Sorbonne but actually fucking my brains out when you called me home. You threatened to cut off my allowance if I didn’t come. I was to make an appearance to demonstrate that you’re a ‘family man’. It was a big event — a convention of religious broadcasters, I think. Bible-thumping babblers.

  I dressed in black, with pearls, but I left a small gold ring in my nose to signal my defiance of you. I knew I shouldn’t, but I was a bad little girl. You wanted me to make an appearance as the Parousia Foundation’s poster girl: the dutiful daughter who went to the best schools but was still a good Christian — so what were those liberals talking about when they said fundamentalists are uneducated?

  But that little nose ring, symbol of my defiance, made you nervous. Your noble brow crunched up with scorn and distaste when you saw it. You reached out and took my nose between your strong fingers and you pulled my head down, forcing me to bow to you. When you let go, I was crying.

  Those are the last tears I will ever shed for you.

  I prayed to the snake gods, do not let this evil man my father hurt me with his powerful serpent. Its head spat venom and its body was a muscle that coul
d choke my heart.

  I swore that I would never see you again, but my dreams betray me. My nightmares will deliver me into your hands.

  I must go to you one last time because there is a question I have to ask you: if my mother was bad, like me, how do you know that I am your daughter?

  XXVII

  The Prodigal Daughter

  It wasn’t home that she returned to, but an evangelical empire. The Parousia Foundation campus had multiplied like cancer cells beneath the ozone hole that had opened above Southern California.

  The gatekeeper who led her through a maze of corridors and gardens into Thomas Flood’s presence remembered her as a child with braces on her teeth. To play the prodigal daughter she’d removed her earrings and nose ring and dressed in simple, modest outfit of black silk. Her tattoo and the ring in her clit hood would protect her back and front.

  The decision to come was her own. There was no one she could discuss it with. Dollar was still missing: hadn’t been seen at the Pussy Palace in days. She called the Hotel Napa, but its number had been changed to a lawyer’s answering machine — there’d been a fire. Laura and Baron were on a retreat in Big Sur and could not be reached.

  Thomas Flood greeted her on the steps of the picture-perfect white chapel he’d had built to use for exterior shots to open the Evangelical Evening News. He held open his arms and she screwed up her courage and stepped into the strong circle they made.

  She thought that he looked different than she remembered, as if television had somehow magnified the impression made by his good looks and erect, athletic body. She noticed that he was wearing makeup.

  “How are you, father?”

  He smiled, his eyes crinkling with the crow’s feet of satisfaction. “We have prospered, Robin, as I prophesied we would when you were a child, and I started this ministry.”