Are You Loathsome Tonight?

by Poppy Z. Brite

  Nothing else had ever mattered. There was only this moment, this unique point in space and time. There was only this boy he had met perhaps half an hour ago, and given ten crisp twenty-dollar bills. There was only the sweet ass inches from his face, glistening with Vaseline, accepting his love. There was only the gun, an extension of his body, of his very being.

  “Do you love me?” Billy whispered.

  Jesus twisted his head to look at Billy. His lips still encircled the head of Billy's cock, pale pink petals half-concealing livid purple fruit. His eyes were very wide, very clear. “Yes,” he mouthed, and swallowed Billy deep again.

  Billy felt a burst of light fill his skull, travel down his spine, go blazing through his balls and down the shaft of his penis. Then it was spilling into Jesus’ mouth, and there was the answer to the hateful scrawl in the Port Authority men's room: yes, yes, absolute and indelible yes.

  And in the final moment of orgasm, all Billy's muscles cranked tight. The long muscles of his buttocks and groin and the virgin bud of his sphincter. The muscles of his face and throat and scalp. The muscles of his hands.

  The muscle of his trigger finger, squeezing slow and gentle.

  He didn't hear the shot so much as feel it, a muffled shock like a fist punching raw meat. He felt Jesus’ body jerk against his, felt a rending pain in his crotch as the jaws surrounding him clamped reflexively shut. A spray of blood and tissue blinded him.

  Billy managed to get his hands to his face, scraped gouts of gore out of his eyes. He reached down and worked a finger between Jesus’ teeth, pried his lacerated penis out of Jesus’ mouth. Then he sat up and looked at his work.

  Jesus wasn't dead. His eyes were bright with brutal awareness in his shock-pale face. His narrow chest heaved for breath. His abdomen was an impossible carnage pulsing with the efforts of failing organs. It was like some enormous steaming bowl of stew, full of glistening meat, splintered bone, great handfuls of tubes torn loose from their moorings, and everywhere the rich coppery sauce of blood. The sewer smell of ruptured bowel rose in shimmering waves from his body. Billy saw a gleam of metal: the spent casing of the shell, nestled in a dark purple loop of intestine. He had wondered whether exploding ammo would blow a body wide open like a watermelon. Now he knew.

  Those bright knowing eyes sought Billy's. Billy wanted to look away, but could not.

  “ ... you said..."

  Billy leaned closer. He could smell his own come on Jesus’ breath, a sharp clean smell that always reminded him the traces of detergent in freshly washed clothes.

  “ ... said it wasn't..."

  A black gout of blood shot through with pearly threads of jism welled from Jesus’ mouth, spilled over his chest. A long slow shudder ran through him, and the hectic light went out of his eyes.

  You said it wasn't loaded.

  Billy hadn't meant to kill the boy. He hadn't meant to shoot him at all.

  Anger rose in him, immediate and caustic. Now this was gone too, whatever he might have had with this boy, another possibility stolen from him. It wasn't fair. It was never fair. He pulled the Luger out of Jesus’ asshole, raised it and shot him in the face. The fine smooth features unraveled like a ball of yarn, painting the wall behind the bed with a thick chiaroscuro of gray and crimson.

  He hadn't meant to shoot him at all.

  Billy put two shells in Jesus’ chest, watched it crack open and fly apart.

  He hadn't.

  He fired into the ruined stew of guts, then fired again and again. A spent casing landed on his thigh and left a long weal of burned flesh, but he did not feel it, did not notice. The body on the bed was little more than a series of smears now, like a canvas painted by a bad artist in a hurry.

  Someone pounded on the door.

  Billy pushed himself off the bed and backed across the room, away from the gun and the swampy mattress, his hands outstretched in unconscious denial. It wasn't fair. Nothing had ever been fair for him. He hadn't meant to shoot the boy, he hadn't, he had only tightened his finger on the trigger a little...

  “What the hell's going on in there?” An ugly voice sinister as a slowed-down record, not kind to the ear like Jesus’ soft monotone. And more pounding.

  Only the tiniest bit...

  “This is security. Open the fucking door."

  Billy's right index finger curled convulsively against his palm, scraping up blood. He caught sight of himself in the flyspecked mirror, his face and bare chest splashed with blood, speckled with bone and tissue and the fragrant contents of Jesus’ intestines. Then he was at the window, leaving smeary red fingerprints on the filthy glass, staring five flights down at cars passing oblivious, at a Greyhound bus pulling out of the station across the street. Useless. He would never get out of this room.

  Billy picked up the Luger again and lay down beside Jesus, in Jesus. There was one shell left in the eight-shot clip. He bit down on the barrel, tasted gore and Vaseline and the faintly spicy musk of Jesus’ asshole. He closed his eyes and imagined himself asleep in a long wooden box, spinning in a void without weight, without care.

  The pain, when it came, was a white-hot supernova filling the vault of his skull, then bursting it wide open. But it felt so much cleaner than the pain he'd had all his life. And it only lasted for a second.

  ***

  Two bodies came into the city morgue early Saturday morning: a Caucasian male in his twenties, underweight, head all but shot off; and a male perhaps eighteen, maybe Asian, subjected to gross trauma by firearm. Both were unidentified, the faces gone to pulp and bone meal. The antique Luger was pried out of the white boy's rigid hand, bagged, and spirited off to the police station. The cop who stole it a few months later would have no way of knowing where it had been; he would simply wipe the sticky patina of Vaseline off the barrel and reload it with ordinary hollow-point bullets.

  The bodies were tagged and photographed and scraped into adjacent cold drawers. The attending policemen forgot the white boy as soon as his drawer slammed shut, but they stood gazing at the Asian for a moment, fixing his picture in their minds. The morgue workers had been awed at the corpse's condition, and even the cops had seldom seen a body so thoroughly ruined.

  “Looks like this piece of shit pissed off the wrong guy,” observed one.

  “Loved the earrings,” remarked the other, with the air of one sharing a choice witticism. He had picked a number of small silver hoops out of the wreckage of the head before the guy from the M.E.'s office told him to stop. Not until he saw a fragment of ear cartilage with something similar dangling from it had he realized what they were.

  “Maybe we can get disinfected back at the station."

  “Don't scratch your ass, whatever you do."

  The cops left the morgue, bantering, and drove back into the clear blue canyons of the dawning city.

  King of the Cats

  My best friend, David Ferguson, lived with me in the summer of 1995 while assisting with the research of my Courtney Love biography. David is first and foremost a singer, a skinny gay white boy with a big black woman inside him; formerly of Athens, Georgia, band the Go Figures, he recently recorded a solo album, Extra Clean. That summer, though, his band had just broken up and he didn't want to sing. Instead, he wrote his ass off. He wrote short stories and bits of erotica to amuse me. As always, he kept a voluminous journal. He started what would become his first novel.

  Meanwhile, mired in Courtneyland, I'd been asked to contribute to a volume of erotic fairy tales for gay men. I desperately wanted to do it but couldn't find the time to produce a draft. Since David was handy in my spare room, I asked if he would script an erotic version of any fairy tale he chose, which I would then revise and color. Appropriately, since we'd both been raised by Siamese, he chose “The Poor Miller's Apprentice and the Cat.” And we all lived happily ever after.

  King of the Cats

  by Poppy Z. Brite and David Ferguson

  There once lived a young miller's apprentice named Nick. He was one
of three hired boys who had worked most of their lives for a rich old miller. The miller had neither wife nor children, and the other two apprentices, Simon and Oliver, argued constantly about who would inherit the mill. Nick cared little for this argument. Though he worked as hard as the other two, the mill's hypnotic motions—the golden stream of grain pouring out of the coffer, the inexorable grinding of the great stone wheels—had always secretly wearied him.

  One day the miller summoned Simon, Oliver, and Nick. “Boys, I grow old. When I die, who will take over the mill?"

  Simon and Oliver interrupted, talking over each other. The miller held up a hand to silence them. “I have decided it will be whichever one of you brings me the finest horse, for I wish to prance around the countryside in my old age."

  This was great sport! Simon and Oliver thought of themselves as quick-witted young rakes with taste and connections, sly dabblers among the social elite. They would raise and spend oceans of gold between them trying to outdo each other bidding on steeds.

  Neither of them gave a thought to Nick. He was too quiet to be clever. Tall for his seventeen years, with fine features and eyes like violet moons, he never exhibited any signs of wit and had no connections at all. He spent most of his wages on ink and drawing paper, upon which he sketched endless cats: grinning greymalkins before their hearths, leopards rippling vivid along branches, lions on the hot veldt.

  But when Simon and Oliver mounted an expedition with a train of coaches and servants, Nick packed his rucksack and accompanied them; better that than stay and be fired by the miller. Oliver drugged his wine the first night, and Nick awoke to find that the camp had packed and gone on without him. Also, he had an appalling hangover.

  Nick wandered until he found himself at the edge of a city. He followed a road that looked promising, but soon narrowed to lure him down a series of small twisting alleys to a stinking dead end. He turned to retrace his steps—and beheld a splendid black cat sitting in the path.

  It showed no sign of fear at his presence, so he bent to stroke its head. The thick fur glittered like a puddle of oil, so black it seemed to absorb light. “Hello, handsome,” said Nick, for it was clearly a male. “What's a fine one like you doing in this nasty place?"

  “Hello, Nick,” said the cat. “I came to meet you, for I knew you would lose your way. Stroke my back.” He offered his sleek, muscular spine to Nick's hand.

  Nick had never heard a cat speak before, but perhaps in other towns it was common. The thought excited him as the creatures themselves had always done. He stroked the cat, who threaded his tail around Nick's wrist and purred.

  “I know what you're after,” said the cat. “You want a horse, don't you? I can help you get a horse."

  “How's that?” Nick asked, reaching up to scratch the velvety tufted ears, more interested in cat than horse.

  “Oh, that's lovely,” said the cat, arching his neck against Nick's knuckles. “You see, I am King of the Cats. All you have to do is come and be my faithful servant for seven years. At the end of that time I will give you your pick of my fine stable."

  “That's it, is it?” Nick was amused: surely every feline on earth believed itself King or Queen of the Cats. But he had nothing better to do than follow this exquisite creature, and so he did.

  He followed the cat through labyrinthine passageways and dripping, twisting corridors. At times it seemed they had left the city and now walked through a forest, though Nick could never quite make out the trees; at times he smelled city scents, the perfume of spices or the reek of a slaughterhouse. At last they came into an open area something like a plaza or a clearing, and Nick gasped at the sight before him.

  A great onyx castle with a golden door, and waiting at the door a pair of slender Siamese, their cream-colored fur tinged at the legs, tail, face, and ears with a deep silver-blue. Their eyes were the clear blue of sapphires, slightly crossed but alight with fervid intelligence.

  At once the pair began to talk, their loud, hoarse voices interrupting one another.

  “O King, O King!"

  “How we missed you—what have you brought us?"

  “Who's that boy?"

  “What's his name?"

  “What's his breed?"

  “Tell us, naaaaow!"

  “In time you shall know all,” murmured the king, rubbing past them, briefly entwining his bushy black tail with their long whiplike ones. Nick followed, and the pair parted to let him through.

  “Nao and Rao, my watchmen,” explained the king. “Busybodies, but they are loyal and good-hearted, and they can frighten off any intruder with their racket."

  That evening a great feast was set before Nick: tender meat, oily fish, saucers of sweet cream, tiny fried birds whose bones crunched bewitchingly between the teeth. There were no people in the castle, only cats and kittens everywhere, all sleek and proud. After the feast, they performed in the king's great dining room, juggling and doing acrobatic leaps, singing, racing nimbly across a series of tightropes strung near the gilded ceiling. Together with the quantities of food and wine, it all made Nick dizzy.

  At last the revelers began to leave in straggling groups and pairs. The black king fixed Nick with his luminous golden eyes and gestured at the near-empty hall, dim now that the torches had burned down.

  “Dance with me, boy,” he said.

  “I can't dance with a cat,” said Nick heavily, for his belly was full of meat and wine. “I've never done anything like that."

  “Very well, then,” said the king. “Take him off to bed."

  Nao and Rao materialized out of nowhere, their sinuous forms steadying Nick. They led him to a small quiet chamber deep in the castle. A set of deft paws removed his shoes, another his shirt and trousers. Rough tongues washed him from head to foot. A velvety tail caressed his face. Then they slipped away, and Nick was fast asleep.

  In his dream, something had him by the back of the neck. A great coal-black cat-man had Nick in its jaws and was ripping at him with razor claws. Nick tried to cry out, but he could not. Calmness washed over him. There was no pain, only a brilliant, tearing ecstasy as he broke and bled.

  Then the man-cat was thrusting against his ass, tunneling into him with something that felt like a handful of greased knives. The creature's muscles were bands of iron beneath the rippling black coat. Nick was pierced, impaled. He would die bleeding and struggling in the grip of something inhuman. Why did it feel so good?

  He awoke with streaks of his own semen cooling on his belly and thighs. He must have scratched and bitten himself in his sleep, for he was covered with lurid marks, even in places it didn't seem he could reach. Nick shuddered, half in horror, half in a shuddering pleasure that curled deep in his gut, and fell asleep again.

  Life in the castle of the cats was a jolly affair. The days were spent in mutual bathing, languorous stretching, exploration of high shelves, and the staking out of windowsills. The nights were reserved for the more serious business of hunting and eating. Every so often, all the cats and kittens would drop what they were doing to run from the end of the castle gardens all the way to the highest bell tower and back again. The king was always first.

  Nick performed the few useful chores that the cats found difficult or tedious. There was no evidence of horses or a stable, but he had no intention of holding the king to his promise; this was far more interesting than running a mill. The dream came again and again, sometimes more violently, sometimes less. Nick never mentioned it to the king, but he began to look forward to going to bed in hopes that the dream-cat would visit him.

  One winter night when the snow lay in milky moonlit drifts outside, Nick dreamed that the great man-cat was curled asleep around him, its purr a soul-deep rumble. The next morning, the king said to him, “It has been seven years since you came here."

  Nick could scarcely believe it, for the time had passed as quickly as four seasons. But he could not question the king's word.

  “Do you still wish to return to your mill with one of my
fine horses?"

  Nick knew that he did not. He had never cared anything for the mill. But if he had already enjoyed the cats’ charity for seven years, he ought to do so no longer. “I will do as you wish,” he said.

  “Good. Then there is one more thing you must do for me before you go. Build me a cottage beside the castle. I have provided you with wood and tools. This is your last duty to me."

  Nick set about building the cottage, though he could not imagine why the king wanted it done. Perhaps to house his next guest? he thought, and felt a twinge of jealousy. Nevertheless, he fell into the sheer enjoyment of the work, hammering and carving as if he had been born to woodcraft. Soon he had built a cunning little house with feline gargoyles in the eaves, arching cat-shapes cut into the scrollwork, and a hundred windows with wide sills for sunbathing.

  “You have done a splendid job,” said the king. “Now we will go to my stables and you may choose your horse."

  Nick followed the big black cat to a part of the castle he had never seen before. A stocky Himalayan stood guard at the stable doors, long thick coat impeccably groomed, round ice-blue eyes stern at their approach. The cat did not speak, but bowed to the king as he swept by, then suffered Nick to enter.

  The royal stables housed the finest horses Nick had ever seen, shining steeds fit for any king. After much thought, he selected a massive chestnut stallion, in whose mane and tail scarlet highlights seemed to ripple.

  “An excellent choice,” said the king. “I call him Hell. Now return on foot to the miller's house and wait there. Tell no one of how you spent your time away. The horse will come to you in three days."