—Christopher Poindexter
One afternoon, I woke up alone in the loft bed, startled by some noisy commotion going on down below.
Curious, I peered down from my pillowy perch.
The apartment was covered in tiny white Styrofoam balls, all flying around like snowflakes in the wind of the ceiling fan.
Still half asleep, I rubbed my eyes, dumbfounded.
The whole place was awash with jumping, dancing, giddy little balls.
What the fuck? Was I dreaming?
Narcisa was chasing around below with a broom, trying to curb the weird synthetic flurry, wearing nothing but my red cotton underwear and a pair of socks she’d pulled up to her pale, knobby knees.
“What’s all this, ya little maniac?” I mumbled, climbing down the ladder.
She looked up with a startled expression as I stood staring at her.
“Don’ be anger to me, Cigano!” Her big, expressive eyes darted around like a crazed little jungle cat.
It was impossible to be mad at the cute kitten who’d licked up all the butter. With a sigh, I plunked down on the sofa, smiling at her in fuzzy bewilderment.
“I just open it up these e’stupid thing . . .” She pointed to my leather beanbag chair. “I only wanna look it an’ see what inside there! I open these zip, an’ boo! De millions little e’sheets fly up on my face an’ then, boo! Is e’snowing in you house!”
“Snowing, huh?” I sighed.
Her eyes widened. “Is no my fault, Cigano! How I suppose to know bout all these e’stupid little e’sheets inside, hein?”
Rolling my eyes, I shrugged and smiled.
“E’stupid!” She kicked the beanbag like a pissed-off five year old, and a new avalanche of dancing balls exploded into the whirlwind.
“Hah! Lookit . . . Poxa! Is e’snow in de Rio, Cigano!” She squealed in delight as I scrambled over to zip the thing shut.
I stumbled into the bathroom and threw some water on my face. As I stood brushing my teeth at the sink, she slid up beside me, like a horny ghost.
In the mirror, I could see Narcisa was suddenly all dressed for business, in her denim miniskirt and a skimpy tube top. A pair of big round purple shades completed the surreal vision. Lolita Meets Burning Man on acid.
She rubbed up against me like an alley cat in heat. “I am de goo-od gee-rool, Cigano.”
Her hot breath tickled my ear . . . Meow. Meow . . . Staring into space, I could see the little balls dancing around behind her, like shattered thought balloons from her crazed, crack-toasted brain.
Narcisa glided back into the room, silent as a cat. Sitting down on the edge of the sofa, she raised her impossibly long leg, like a freak show contortionist, peeling the stocking off her big white foot, giving me a dick-tingling peek at the oversized red underwear loosely covering her bald, smiling crotch.
Then she started biting at her toenail like a big retarded child.
I watched her going about her demented business. Then, like a zombie, I moved in for the timeless, screaming fuck-feast. I fit it right in where it belonged, holding on to her like a log going over a waterfall. Time stopped, and then I was coming forever into her mad, magnetic essence, with a high-voltage electric jolt that left me twitching and panting, screaming and yearning for more . . . Fuck! Fuck! More more more! I could taste the blood pumping into my heart, my dick, my nose, my mouth . . . Eyes popping . . . Ready to explode . . . Fuck fuck fuck . . . as we both came, screaming like flaming, howling fireworks tigers, again and again . . . Fuck fuck fuck fuck . . . More more more!
It was powerful, plentiful, crucial sex with Narcisa. Sex for crack money. A force of nature. Need! Want! Desperation! That passionate, hungry, savage animal lust was a drug. Amazing! Compelling! Addictive! Raw! Nothing like ever before.
This was sex with the Crack Monster.
Afterward, we sat back, lounging naked on the sofa together, glowing in the aftermath of that mad thrill ride that seemed to have taken us both by surprise.
Narcisa pulled her long, elegant fingers through her dirty brown hair. Preening, like a cat cleaning its claws after torturing and eating a small animal.
Classy. A hundred thousand years of practice.
Finally, she looked over, regarding my vanquished member like a fish on a market slab. “Now, these e’sheet de real dick, brother! No too much e’skinny, an’ no too fat . . . An’ is big, you dick, Cigano. Long too. But no too much long. No de Kidney-Killer Dick of Death. Is perfect, Max! Congratulation! They give it to you de good one when they distribute de dicks.”
I raised my eyebrows and looked at her. I could swear she was purring.
She gave it a playful nudge. “An’ you know how to operate these e’sheet too, bro, de good way, e’start out nice an’ e’slow an’ easy, an’ then go go go hard when you e’suppose to go hard. Good feeling you got, amigo! De intuition, these e’sheet important. For de geer-ool is very much important.” She blinked like a cat. “You know how to fock, Cigano! These almost never happen, belief me, is de very rare thing. I know.”
I looked at her in fascination as the Crack Monster weaved its crooked spell.
“I oughta know it, hein? You know, I always understand what I talking bout! Before I was fourteen year old, Cigano, I already been inside every big hotel in Copacabana, together with de trick from all over de world. Every country, bro. Hah! Even one time I go with a guy from de Transylvania. I thinking maybe he some kinda vampiro, hein? Hah! Crowwn crowwwn crowwwwn, ha ha!”
Narcisa chattered on with gay abandon, grinning, bearing her pointy little teeth at me like a baby wildcat. “All de mans always e’same e’sheet. Bum! Finish! Thank you come again! Next? But you different, Cigano. Hah! An’ is first time ever I really can enjoy it de sexo with any mans, got it?”
I got it. Sort of. I half suspected she was just feeding my ego. Stroking me. Setting me up for a fall. She was doing it so expertly, though, so sincerely, I didn’t care. Who knows? Maybe she even meant it, at least for that one little moment as she sat spinning her web of seduction, reeling me in.
Then she surprised me again.
“If de mans can all fock de e’same like you, Cigano, maybe then de Narcisa don’ wan’ be lesbica, maybe just, how do you e’say it, part-time, hein?” She blinked again. “An’ you wanna know something more, Cigano?” She reached over and lit a cigarette. “De young mans, they don’ got it e’same energia like you. What I gonna do with some e’stupid young guy, hein? No money, no e’sperience. Useless! Hah! Next? Fock like de little rabbit, bum bum bum! Stick it in de poo’sy an’ bum, finish! Thank you come again! Is big focking crime! But no with you! Porra! You can go for hours, bro. I tire out even before you finish! An’ you so sick, you always wan’ go again! Porra, cara! I got more time fock with you in only de few week together than de whole two year I e’stay marry with de gringo!”
I looked at her, speechless.
Narcisa reached over and shook my hand. “Is truth! Papo serio! Congratulation, mano! You gonna make de pretty young girl de very happy gee-rool one day.”
“What about you, Narcisa?” I was falling in the trap, caught like a mouse in that alien starlight shining in her lunatic feline eyes. “Couldn’t I make you happy?”
She laughed. A bitter little guffaw. I’d said something absurd.
“Eu? Hah! Sem chance, mermão! For me is finish these e’stupid life, brother! Too late for de Narcisa! I am already, how do you e’say it, de damage good. You don’ wanna get youself involve with nobody like me, mano, no focking way! I am de crazy Crack Monster who-oore. Big problem. Bad brains. Hah! Forget about me, amigo, belief me.”
But it was too late, I knew.
Deep inside, we both knew it.
Around midnight, Narcisa started for the door, cash in hand, on her way out on another mission. Then, without a word, she halted in the doorway, turned around and gave me a heart-wrenching, hopeless look.
I went over and hugged her to me, hard. She tried to pull away, as if she
was afraid of losing her own sense of worthlessness. Love and compassion seemed to hurt her somehow. Giving Narcisa a hug was like throwing water on the Wicked Witch.
That’s when I really got it.
It wasn’t just the drugs that were killing Narcisa. It went far deeper; it was the Curse; the Demon Seed; that invisible pith of self-loathing; something hateful, planted deep in her core inner matrix. Like a dark offering on an altar of doom; a monstrous, insidious booby-trap; a remote-control killer, preprogrammed to self-destruct on command from sinister forces way beyond her control.
Tears welled up in my eyes as she stood by the door, looking at me with that compelling air of sorrow. All the abuse and trauma she’d ever heaped on me just melted away.
I pulled her toward me and hugged her again. This time she let me. Burying my face in her dirty brown hair, I breathed deep of her smell, luxuriating in her mad, feral essence. I could have stayed like that forever.
Narcisa began to fidget, like a cat you hold too long.
I let her go.
She hung her poor, tragic head in shame and slinked toward the door again, mumbling. “I gonna be better, Cigano . . . I promise.”
“Not as long as ya keep smoking that shit, princesa.” I shook my head.
She shrugged and turned away, muttering to herself.
I stood in the doorway, watching her mope off down the hall, like a sorry old condemned man trudging the final mile. As she vanished into the stairwell, I shut the door, limped over to the window and looked down at the damp, steamy streets below.
Tears clouded my vision. Nothing moved out there in the dismal depths of foggy night. Only the Crack Monster and its shivering minions.
A minute later, I saw the frail, solitary, feline figure of Narcisa emerging from the building. I watched her dart across the street; a stealthy, furtive little shadow puppet disappearing around a corner and fading into the bowels of darkness. A frightened, lonesome old alley cat.
After what seemed like a very long time, I turned away from the window and fell onto the sofa. Laying my head down on the little pillow, still reeking of our desperate, compulsive sex, I passed out.
After a couple of hours of troubled sleep, I heard Narcisa scratching at my door, like a cat begging to be let in from a driving rain.
I got up and held the door open for her.
Without a word, she breezed right past me, shaking her poor, troubled head in mute, listless despair, an injured stray cat’s ghost.
She collapsed onto the floor in the corner by the bathroom door and sat there, staring off into a dark, forlorn space I was unable to decipher.
I just stood there, looking at her, feeling powerless and sad, watching poor Narcisa sinking down into the deep, dark ash-gray sea of her own private hell.
No one spoke.
34. TV HONEYMOON
“LOVE IS THE INFINITE PLACED WITHIN THE REACH OF POODLES.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The weeks slithered by like a surreal, humid, prehistoric fever-dream. The world took on a dreamlike quality. Reality became obsessive, single-minded, defined only by random explosions of pristine, savage lust. Narcisa and I were too shell-shocked to even talk anymore; sex had become our only common language.
Whenever she stumbled through my door, I’d take Narcisa in and feed her. I’d clean her up, then take her into my arms and get to work, trying to breathe some life back into her bone-clacking, emaciated death-camp skeleton.
I fucked her like a day laborer, fucking her long and hard and good; fucking her so she’d stay fucked. I sweated over her like a bricklayer in the sun, a sweating, laboring peon, working like the damned to make her come, to make her pant and cry and groan and feel; pumping the numbness out of her, willing her to live . . . Live, goddammit . . . Live . . . C’mon, baby, just one more day . . . Another hour!
Forcing Narcisa back to life through those screaming, primal animal jolts, I slapped her awake, again and again, in crazed, furious, passionate sexual first-aid infusions of life. Dirty, sweaty, bloody, greasy, gritty, critical life.
And, like me, Narcisa had nothing to lose. Nothing to do but follow another wayward soldier shadow with nowhere else to go. And I followed her too, wherever the road of our common desperation led. Because I had finally found between Narcisa’s legs that crucial Something that makes men quit their jobs and go running out into the night, naked, screaming, insane. We were bound together in a perfect limbo of haunting new experiences, sensations and addictions; a freakish, unholy, overwhelming life force that neither of us understood or wanted—or had the slightest power to avoid. And in that lusty, hungry swirl of strange days and nights, I was freed at last of all cares, constraints and social obligations to the rest of humanity; liberated from the bondage of self, oblivious to the gluey stares of curious neighbors, glassy-eyed television-watchers and cops.
There was nothing but me and Narcisa, running hand in hand through sweaty doomsday streets of careless desires, propelled like ghosts over rain-slick pavements where the spindly fingers of trees beckoned like lopsided phantoms. And in that frenzied, fevered whirlpool of passions, we ran and ran and ran together, running from death and despair, running, running; damnation, devastation and ruin always waiting around the next trembling corner.
Times to remember. Long, crazy, jingle-jangle days and nights of lusty delirium. I didn’t care about anything else. Only Narcisa. Because she was the time of my life, her pulsing, magic crab-claw cunt the only home my corrupted old soul had ever known.
I’ve been sleeping . . . The window is closed, shut tight, a thin barricade against another burning sunny day outside.
Late afternoon . . . Hot summer Sunday . . . Been up all night again . . . Too beat to face the sun-damaged, heat-maddened, beer-drunk crowds of a cut-rate Dante’s Inferno at the beach, I’ve locked myself in here, resting like a vampire, waiting for the night, sleeping away another long, blazing hot day in the dark, musty shelter of my room, hibernating under the fan’s steady, monotonous hum.
Narcisa? Disappeared again, off on another long, lost weekend in hell . . . Three days off the radar . . . Missing in action on another mission.
Dead? Jail? Nuthouse? Ran off with another gringo? Who knows? Tired of worrying, too distraught to pray anymore, I console my latest loss with others . . . But it’s like trying to embrace a shadow . . . The whore I was with all night just left . . . I can still smell her sickly-sweet perfume on the pillow . . . Can’t sleep . . . Shit.
Drifting in and out of a foggy stupor, floating between sleep and fuzzy-tongued, blurry-eyed dementia, the shutters pulled tight against the murderous tropical sunlight outside, I am safe, sheltered from the pounding terror machine of another stupid, senseless Sunday.
Wait! What’s that? A frantic little knocking at the door . . . tap tap tap . . . like a child . . . Who’s out there? . . . tap tap tap . . . Soft and insistent . . . tap tap tap . . .
God, I hope the chick didn’t forget an earring or some shit! How many earrings are wedged between the mattress and the wall here? My bed’s a fucking earring cemetery, haunted by the slippery ghosts of every whore in town . . . . tap tap tap . . . What’s going on?
I stumble down from the loft in my striped briefs . . . Same cheap underpants I bought downtown the other day with Narcisa . . . All cotton . . . Six for a fiver . . . Narcisa disappeared with most of ’em . . . God knows where they ended up . . . Whatever . . . These are the last ones . . . I don’t care . . . I like that she’s the only bitch around here who’s got the balls to wear boy’s underwear . . . I long for the perfection of her wonderful, hard white ass, in my underwear or anything else.
The tapping grows in intensity . . . tap tap tap taptaptaptaptap . . . Like a rat scrambling around in a cage . . . Fuck! I move toward the door in a dreamlike trance, thinking of Narcisa’s perky young tail, wondering what’s going on.
Taptaptaptaptap taptaptaptaptap taptaptaptaptap
I pull the door open and . . . poof! The Genie
in the Bottle. Narcisa!
There she was, standing in the hall, grinning, bug-eyed, shouting, holding a television set in her arms! Like some fucked-up overgrown robotic Cyclops baby she was about to tell me was mine . . . What’s going on?
“Hurry up! Go-oo! Porra, cara, anda logo, vaiii-iiiii! Help me with it, porra! Take it these e’stupid thing, go! Take it, Cigano, go go!”
“What’s this, princesa?” I stood there, looking at her with a groggy smile.
She dropped the heavy plastic box into my arms, rolling her eyes like a pair of crooked dice. “Is tel’vision, seu idíota! For us! To look it! Plug it in! Go!”
Pushing in past me, a child dodging around an annoying obstacle, she tore into the kitchen and started rooting around in my refrigerator like a giant foraging white rodent. I stood there in awe, holding the television, watching as scraps of food fell to the floor, a present for the mice and roaches. An invitation to tell their friends.
Fuck it! Who cares? She’s back! Thank God! Narcisa, making her path of blessed destruction through my life again!
She rattled on nonstop, battling through a mouthful of leftovers, chewing, mumbling, grunting like a deranged monkey, chattering in a mad flurry of excitement. “ . . . An’ then, mmmh, mmh, I go to these e’stupid rich guy big penthouse in Ipanema, hein?”
“Where’d ya get th’ TV?” I stared at her in wonder.
“Wha’ you think? I go, how do you e’say it, mmmh, I making de tricks . . .”
I winced, feeling my stomach drop . . . Turning a trick . . . Whatever . . . How you gonna be jealous of a fucking whore, man? Thank God she’s alive!
“ . . . De e’stupid guy finish, mmmh, an’ then he go to e’sleep an’ he forget to pay me! Babaca! Maybe he think I gonna e’stay there an’ e’sleep together with him all de focking night. Hah! Maybe I e’suppose to wake up an’ go eat de strawberry an’ cream together with some focking trick in de morning now, hein? Hah! Fala serio! E’stupid old fock-monkey! Mmmmh, yum nyum, nyamm . . .”
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