by Nick Tosches
“I’d like to see you do that. Whip yourself with that crop. I’d like to sit there and jerk off and watch you do that.”
“Not tonight. I’m beat.”
“Do you come when you do this? I couldn’t tell.”
“I don’t know if I’ve ever come in my life. The nuns told us that women didn’t have orgasms, only men had orgasms. I know that’s not true. But I still don’t know if I’ve ever had one.”
“You had something going on there when those juices were flowing.”
“I had something going on there when you pulled up the raincoat and cracked me. I had something going on there when I felt you sucking the blood from where you cracked me.”
“I couldn’t resist. This morning, when you were talking, saying you knew what I wanted—then tonight I just, I don’t know, I—”
“It was perfect.”
“What you were talking about, breaking through, getting rid of that haunting, that curse you were talking about, I was afraid I might be doing more harm than good.”
“No,” she said, slowly, ruminatively. “I’m pretty sure you did more good than harm. We’ll see. I feel great now, but I don’t know how I’ll feel later, how I’ll feel tomorrow night, or the night after. We’ll see. Right now it’s better not to think about it.”
“I’m sorry about the marks.”
“It’s nothing. It already looks like just a couple of nasty scratches. And I’ve got so much vitamin E on them that I’m stuck to the seat of my pj’s. But, no, I really don’t like scars. If we ever end up fooling around again, we’ve got to keep that in mind and figure something out.”
We ate awhile in silence. It was amazing. It was like the Eucharistic croissant raised to the realm of golden heavens.
“What does it feel like?”
“Whipping you?”
“Drinking blood.”
“It feels like I’m closer to the beauty and fresh-blossoming life force that I crave than I could ever otherwise be. It feels like I’m one with it, drawing it into me; drinking everything beautiful about it and being transformed and renewed by it. Like a miracle. Like a sweet, delicious, transporting miracle. Lust, love, and life all at once, with an intensity that’s almost ecstatic. It’s great.”
“And what about those eyes?”
“What about those eyes? Like you said: molecules. The blood is regenerating me. I feel younger, stronger. That intensity, that ecstasy. I have your blood—you—in me now. There’s bound to be some kind of molecular change. And it all feels good. It all feels great.
“The most renowned scientists alive don’t even know how many trillions of cells there are in their own bodies, in any body; and every single one of those unknown trillions of cells, every one of them, has hundreds or thousands or millions of molecules. You’ve got almost three hundred million molecules of hemoglobin in one single red blood cell alone. Platelets, plasma, this, that, the other thing. Nobody really knows what the hell’s going on in there. These scientists can talk about molecules all they want, but they don’t know shit. At least I know that whatever’s going on with the molecules in me is good. It’s better than good. It’s great. I can feel it.”
“The way you describe it, you make me want to do it,” she said.
“But that’s the thing. You’ve already got it. You don’t need it. The essence of that young flesh and soul, that blue sky, that spirit of illimitable youth. You would just be drinking from yourself. Maybe you don’t feel it now. Maybe you need to break through and let the light out, like you say. But it’s there. It’s in you. It’s you.”
“I sure don’t feel it.”
“You will. That stuff you do in there. You’re not punishing yourself. You’re trying to drive something out of yourself. And it’s the dark, not the light, that you’re trying to expel. Some people cling to their misery. You’re not one of those. Believe me, you gave me more of you tonight than you give yourself. One of these days, you’ll feel the magic that’s in you, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. You’ll know the gift in you.”
“Does it feel like—I mean to you, what you’re talking about—does it feel like anything I might’ve ever felt?”
“Well, it sure ain’t like booze, I can tell you that much.” I ate and I thought if there was anything to which I could compare it, even remotely. “Love, maybe. But a kind of love you can’t imagine.” This sounded stupid. It sounded vague and senselessly airy. We ate a little more, saying nothing. Maybe it was the ethereal play of the food on my senses that brought me to say what I said next.
“I used to think that opium was the greatest thing in the world. It turns the world and every breath of this finite life to a poetry so pure it’s wordless and soundless. There’s nothing like it. Nothing comes close. Yeah. I used to think opium was the greatest thing in the world. In fact, I’d love to be able to smoke it again. The real stuff. I hate to travel these days. The only way I want to travel is internally. The only places I want to go don’t involve crowds or security checks. None of that. If I never saw the inside of another airport or airplane, that’d be good by me. But if I ever do travel again, it’s going to be to smoke opium.”
“You make me want to do that too, the way you talk about it.”
“Well, maybe you will. Maybe we’ll do it together one of these days.”
“So, that’s what drinking blood is like?”
“No. I said I used to think it was the best thing in the world. I used to think it was la chiave d’oro, the key of gold. Now I know that blood is. The right blood. Blood like yours. Smoking opium can let you dream of youth and love and the magic and poetry in the air. Drinking blood can give it to you. For real.”
“But those eyes,” she said. “They’re otherworldly. They’re beautiful, amazing; but they’re so otherworldly.”
She had said that morning that she had seen in her father’s eyes what she saw in mine. I did not want her mind to be drawn back to the ruinous darkness into which her father had long ago cast her. So I said nothing. I offered her some of the pork that I had just begun to eat. Her senses would not discern the subtleties of flavor or experience the synesthetic evocations mine did, but it was downright delicious enough to thrill any palate. An antidote for any wayward ramblings through the dark. She loved it. She was letting out light every time she opened her mouth, and she didn’t even know it.
At home, blissfully sleepy, I brought to bed with me a book I had purchased some time ago but, as much as I looked forward to reading it, had not got around to it: the first volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Although Beckett was one of my favorite writers, I was not as interested in these early letters, from 1929 through 1940, as I was in those of his later years. But still I was sure that there would be much here of interest and illumination; and it was always better, or so it seemed, to start at the beginning. Besides, when you got right down to it, I had no choice. Cambridge University Press had not yet published the second volume in this daunting undertaking.
It was the wrong book to bring to bed. I don’t know how much this hard-bound book of almost nine hundred pages weighed, but it made for highly unwieldy reading abed. I laid it aside, shut the light, and let myself drift off. While drifting, I encountered good old Keith. At first I wondered what he was doing in the passway through which I drifted. Then I remembered that I had been listening earlier to “Let It Bleed”:
Yeah, we all need someone we can bleed on,
Yeah, and if you want it, baby, well, you can bleed on me.
Then I remembered the day’s reveries and talk about opium and eyes, and how on the night we met, at a dinner one spring night about a dozen years ago at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris, he politely asked someone sitting between us to tell me that I had “the most beautiful opiated eyes” he’d ever seen. I may have been directly back from Asia at the time. I don’t recall. What I do recall is that when I left Keith’s suite at the Plaza Athénée at dawn, I had met one of the most remarkable gentlemen I have ever encoun
tered, and this esteem for him, and my fondness for him, grew steadily over the ensuing years as we grew closer.
Though he had spent much of his adult life seeing the world through hotel room windows, albeit the windows of very nice hotel rooms, he did not accept the fate of a prisoner of fame. To the extent that he could get away with it, he did and went as he pleased, wherever and whenever. There was a good deal of common ground in our far-rambling conversation, but there was little doubt that fortune and circumstance had afforded him a greater worldliness and ability to indulge it than me, though he never flaunted it or seemed even to look upon it as having much value. I liked the fact that he considered the library in his Connecticut estate to be one of the very special comforts and chambers of his home and life.
I thought of those old tales, though I knew they were not true, of his having full blood transfusions in Switzerland to renew and detoxify himself. I also thought of an article I had seen in a popular health magazine a few years ago titled “Why Is Keith Richards Still Alive?” I did not bring it to his attention, feeling it to be a reprehensibly vulgar and mean-spirited question to put forth about anyone but a detested personal enemy or a politician.
As these thoughts merged with my slow, soft descent into slumber, I felt that I should talk with someone about this sublime but strange matter of new life and the blood of blossoming young beauty. Someone who was not judgmental. Someone who had been around, who had done, seen, and learned of things that most were unaware of.
That person would be Keith, I told myself as I slipped into the sweet untroubled sleep of the debtless, wantless, and sinless.
There was no telling how long I slept in this deep and dreamless state. When I woke, the morning light was rising full and the telephone was ringing. It was Melissa. She wanted to know if I felt like getting together tonight. There was nothing I should like more, I told her. She said she had to put in an hour or so at the library, then run a few errands, and could be down here by half past six or so. That would be great, I told her. She lingered on the telephone awhile, as people often do, without having anything of consequence to say. She spoke of the weather, of how it was now spring but it still felt like winter. She spoke of a documentary film she had seen the night before at the Film Forum. She asked me what I had done last night.
“Nothing,” I told her, seeing in my mind that dim red light and that Saint Andrew’s cross, tasting in my mind the feast of that Chinese food, tasting in my mouth and throat the residue of Lorna’s blood. “I started to read the collected letters of Samuel Beckett, but the book was too damned heavy to read in bed.”
“I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said. “Something I think you’ll like.”
“And what might that surprise be?”
“You’ll see. If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise, then, would it?”
“So you’ll be keeping me in a state of anticipation all day.”
“It’s nothing really. It’s something that has to do with my legs. Something I think you’ll like.”
“Ah, now you’ll be keeping me in a state of excitement all day.”
“I read Beckett’s Stories and Texts for Nothing last year.”
“Great stuff. ‘The Calmative.’ What’s the other one? ‘The End.’ Yeah, ‘The End.’ Great stuff. Unbelievable stuff.”
“Did you ever see Waiting for Godot, or did you ever read it?”
“I hate that shit. His plays suck. All of them except for Krapp’s Last Tape.”
“Why does writers’ worst stuff become their best-known stuff?”
“Because people are fucking idiots. The stupider it is, the more they eat it up. With the highfalutin idiots, the more they’re told it’s art, the more they eat it up. Stupid shit, stupid people. The secret to success.”
“So I’ll see you later on.”
“Have you noticed anything weird about my eyes lately?”
“You have great eyes.”
“I mean the way they change colors.”
“Yeah, it’s really something. Isn’t that what they call pers in French? Pers eyes. Eyes that keep changing colors.”
She was as good with that one as she was with Hesse’s name. She didn’t pronounce the s at the end. But she didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Pers eyes change between brown and green, or like the colors of the sea, or something like that. You haven’t noticed anything weird about the way my eyes change colors?”
“Are you stoned?”
“No.” I laughed. “Weird guy, weird eyes, I guess.”
“Who was that saint that carried around that plate with his eyeballs on it?”
“Oh, man, I forget. Those guys were always carrying around platters with some part of them on it. The broads too. Come to think of it, the only one I remember is Saint Agnes. I read this book once, some sort of sex manual from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Revealed. Something like that. And the guy who wrote it started talking about women afflicted with Saint Agnes syndrome or something like that, and I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was talking about. Then years later I found out that Saint Agnes carried around a platter with a pair of tits on it, because that was the way she was supposed to have been martyred, by having her tits cut off. All this just to say a woman was flat-chested.”
I thought of Lorna, my beautiful virgin flat-chested leopardess and her cross of Saint Andrew’s martyrdom. Then I realized I had the wrong saint.
“No,” I said, “not Saint Agnes. It was Saint Agatha. She was the one with the tits on the platter. Saint Agatha of Sicily, not Saint Agnes.”
“And oh yeah, the eyeballs, that was a female saint too,” Melissa said. “Saint Lucy. She was the one with the eyeballs on a golden plate.”
“Who came up with this shit? Who were these sick fucks who concocted these stories? It’s like some fat kike Hollywood mogul or something: ‘All this martyrdom shit is getting tired. These martyrs are getting to be a fucking dime a dozen. We need some pizzazz. We need to sell some popcorn. That blonde. Let’s cut off her tits before we kill her. And that other one, what’s her name, that bitch with the bedroom peepers. Let’s rip out her eyeballs before she gets it.’ Is there some kind of art historian at school you could ask? I really want to know. The first Christian blue plate special. I want to know which saint and what was on his or her platter.”
“You’re on a roll. What did you have for breakfast?”
“I just woke up. Slept like a baby. I’ll probably just go with a Mexican breakfast, cup of coffee and a cigarette. What about you?”
“A bagel.”
“We’re livin’, kid. So before you run off to find that tits-on-a-plate professor, tell me more about this surprise.”
“No.”
“Come on, just a hint.”
“It’s something you can sink your teeth into. Something you can sink your teeth through.”
“Oh, man,” I said, then gave up.
She was in a sprightly mood, and I was feeling great. That cup of coffee was just a few minutes away.
“Did you ever think of killing yourself?” I said. The words just came out.
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.”
“No. Have you?”
“Never?”
“Maybe once when I made a cake for a school bake sale in the fourth grade and it fell apart and I tried to put it back together again with toothpicks and it came apart again even worse than before and everybody laughed at me. That may have been my suicide moment. I was saved by the intervention of my mom and dad buying me a cake with buttercream frosting at the corner bakery, which I palmed off as my own, blaming my previous failure on a faulty oven knob. I didn’t really think of killing myself. I just cried to my mom that I wanted to die. Which was pure schoolgirl melodrama. I was no good in the school play, either.”
I made a sound between a grunt and a laugh.
“Why do you ask?”
“I was wond
ering what you were doing with that suicide thing in your bag the other night.”
“What suicide thing?”
“That brochure. That what-a-difference-a-day-makes thing?”
“A friend of mine at school. She’s getting pretty spooky. She doesn’t talk it, not directly. But it’s getting to where it seems like just a matter of when and how. I really like her. She’s a really good kid. But as it turned out, that brochure was just a plug for an overnight walk to help prevent suicide. Something like that. Don’t ask me how a bunch of people marching down a street at three o’clock in the morning is supposed to help somebody a mile away not commit suicide. But there was also something in there about an informational meeting, but you had to register, your address and phone number and everything, which means they’ll probably drive you to suicide by bugging you for donations. I did learn that, according to that brochure anyway, suicide is the third biggest cause of death among teenagers and the second biggest cause of death among college students.”
“What’s the first?”
“They didn’t say. That’s probably a different brochure.”
“A lot of broken cakes out there, I guess.”
“You’d like her. She likes cutting herself a lot.”
“Bring her down sometime. I’ve never made a cocktail of two bloods. Is she pretty?”
“Shut up.”
I was smiling, enjoying the fact that she couldn’t see it over the telephone as I hung up. Actually it was an idea not without appeal. Two girls, four thighs. A nip from one, a sip from the other, long drinks in the dark from soft young legs entwined.
This brought to mind the fifty-milliliter sample vials, decanted from bottles of rare liquor, I had ordered from Oxygénée in England. A pre-ban Absinthe de Ville Chabrolle. A pre-ban Absinthe Gempp Pernod. And the one I really wanted, an extinct tea liqueur that was older by far than the century-old absinthes: a pre-1850 Crème de Thé from the cellars of Badminton House.