Warlock
A Novel of Possession
by
Perry Brass
Warlock, A Novel of Possession
Perry Brass
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2009 Perry Brass
Discover other titles by Perry Brass
at his Smashwords Homepage.
Electronic mail address: belhuepress@earthlink.net
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
The following is a work of fiction. All the characters, specific settings, and events in it are purely fictitious and have no relationship to actual specific personages, living or dead, or business entities except when described as part of a fictional narrative.
Cover and overall design by M. Fitzhugh.
Cover photo by Gilberto Prioste.
ISBN (electronic version): 978-1-892149-07-7
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUE CARD NUMBER: 2001088277
“And the sudden, sexual laughter of the man, so strange a sound of pain and desire, obstinate reluctance and helpless passion, a noise as if something was tearing at his breast, was a sound to remember.”
D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent
With great thanks to Hugh, and to Robert and Peter, and to Patrick Merla. And to all of my readers beginning this journey with me.
Other books by Perry Brass:
Sex-charge (poetry)
Mirage, a science fiction novel.
Works and Other ‘Smoky George’ Stories
Circles, the sequel to Mirage.
Out There: Stories of Private Desires. Horror. And the Afterlife.
Albert or The Book of Man, the third book in the Mirage series.
Works and Other ‘Smoky George’ Stories, Expanded Edition.
The Harvest, a “science/politico” novel
The Lover of My Soul, A Search for Ecstasy and Wisdom (poetry and other collected writings)
How to Survive Your Own Gay Life, An Adult Guide to Love, Sex, and Relationships
Angel Lust, An Erotic Novel of Time Travel
The Substance of God, A Spiritual Thriller
Carnal Sacraments, A Historical Novel of the Future
The Manly Art of Seduction, How to Meet, Talk to, and Become Intimate with Anyone
Chapter One
My shame, my shame; my bitter, punching, screaming shame—my God, he’d be so incensed if he knew I were telling you this. But what else can I do? I’m torn up with grief. He’s gone. I get up at three o’ clock in the dark and pace back and forth through these big empty rooms waiting for him. This luxurious place, that he’s given to me to live in near Central Park, is a prison. I have never been in such splendor, luxury, style and pain. My insides crawl for him. I feel a loss inside that resembles tumbling down a yawning elevator shaft. Down, down, down to the bare hell of my existence. This is stark love. I know it. I rage sometimes. I get up angry. Why did this have to happen to me? What is so unique about me to feel such twisting, frantic helplessness? I can’t control it. Is it organic? A part of my very self that he recognized and pulled out of me, as it waited stupidly, mutely, for him?
I had waited. Without even knowing that I had waited.
And now I know.
I can only humiliate myself to him. Did you know that the words “humility” and “humiliate” come from the same root, humus? Dirt. It means to make dirt of oneself, yet isn’t dirt what we all come from? The products of dirt. The grain. The fruit. The solid, life-sucking, bitter roots. The animals that feed on them. And then, finally, feed us. So to be humiliated is only to go back to the source from which we came—the dirt, the mud—returning to our own . . . oblivion. That’s what I sought from him: my oblivion.
That dreamless rest from my own burdens of being. Of knowing.
And, even worse, of not knowing.
He’s hairy. He has this wondrous, dense covering of the finest body hair I’ve ever seen on a human being. In bright daylight, if you saw him naked—and, in daylight, it would be rare to do that—the hair appears so intensely pale that light shines directly through it. Then he seems unworldly; fetal, like some primitive, just-gestated mammal; some burrower of the underground of your own dark existence, that you don’t expect to see at the surface, in the path of light. But what I’ve said does no justice to him because he is . . . the word is . . . gorgeous. He’s startling. Though, truthfully (let me be truthful, now, with you), he’s a bit paunchy.
He’s no centerfold beauty with the “six-pack” roll of ab muscles, though he is so strong that he can pick me up with one arm. Literally. He has a middleweight prizefighter’s ox-strong shoulders and a garbageman’s upper arms that can knock the wind out of you. But the most amazing, most delicious, most arresting article about him is his mouth. It’s not quite human. It’s close to being a demon’s, like an anteater’s rippling, muscular, delicate tide of lips. Powerful, generous, caressive. They draw you in, tie themselves in a lavish concentration around you, and pull your very soul from you.
The way he talks, the way he utilizes that mouth, sends shivers through me. He can kiss me and threaten me at the same time and I know that I’ll obey him, as I’ve never obeyed anyone before. I can hear his voice; that plaintive, slightly husky sound tattooed now to my organs; that voice that I can taste inside my mouth like I can taste his own tongue. Nubby, large and fleshy. Coarse, okay, he’s coarse. Definitely vulgar.
Disgustingly real.
A voice from the back streets and the gutters; with no deception in him, yet there are moments when we want to deceive ourselves—truly. When we’ll pay to do that, and we know we’ll pay. “I got you,” he told me. “You belong with me. You’re a piece of shit and a piece of heaven. I swear I need you.” His lips were all over me. Male, beefy; like exploring, lubricated little fingers surrounding a fluttering tongue. All over me. Everyplace. “You ain’t goin’ no place,” he warned me. I started crying from sheer, exhausted, uncontainable relief.
He was right . . . the shame, the wanting, the loathing, too, of it! I gave up my pointless job in the low-paying back tunnels of a bank. In a “financial institution” that was like a mental institution: really, I swear. No lie. Just “with benefits.” And my daily routines, I relinquished those, too. And my apartment, yes—all those nice little New York things. The merciful, pointless friends. The little possessions that you hoard away carefully, so no one can rob them from you—almost twenty years worth, sitting there, looking at me. I just walked out.
He said, “Come with me,” and I did. His big car was waiting. I had spent enough time with him in that towering space of an apartment that took up a high floor of a wing of an old West Side building. Views. Clouds. Distant boats, chugga-chugging up the river, then chugging down. Almost the whole, transparent glittering island of Manhattan. And those endless big closets and storage areas; in New York storage becomes important. And locked rooms.
He had his own locked rooms.
And carpets, he collected carpets. Soft Persians and lustrous Chinese silks and old muted Indians, like faded madras shirts. Those colors, when the light hit, they dazzled your eyes. But there were few lights. Bad for the colors, he said, of his beautiful things. He would take his shoes off a lot. Or even, for that matter—when we were totally alone, just the two of us—all his clothes off. Then he was free to be himself, and he wanted me naked, too, he said.
Sometimes he wore just a dressing gown, but there were still closets and closets of his clothes. Dark suits. English, French, Italian. Some American from the pissy-rich stores on Madison Avenue. And then sports jackets in warm toffee-brown shades or clear marine hues; some in brilliant Irish tweeds, some in cashmere. I wish I could show them all to you, but, even now, I can barely touch his clothes.
I do wear the things that he bought me. A really beautiful, impressive suit. A pair of coal-black jeans that feel almost like suede. Some brilliant white shirts. He gave me a buttery leather jacket and I wrap myself in it, so that the thick, creamy shearling inside hugs me. The way he did. The soft silkiness of the hair on his body. Even his strange dark large toes, with the thick, grayed, nacreous toenails, were hairy; hair crept from his wrists all the way to the first joints of his fingers. I’ve sucked the hairs on his hands, licked them, wet them with my own explosive tears.
I have to tell you this. I have to warn you. I’m in love with him, and I am dirt. I would kill you if you came between us, but I need you. I can no longer face this alone. He has taken so much from me that at the moment my own suicide would mean nothing to me, and probably—the way everything’s been so miserably left—less to him. What can I say? Time can reverse itself . . . sometimes. This is blank despair talking, but can’t you still detect the danger? I am falling down that open elevator shaft. Down, down . . .
I had no idea it would be like this. Not when we met.
That was different.
It was, I’ve got to tell you, in New York, at the baths, that flashy, noisy sexual pinball machine on the West Side. I’d just arrived, and, as usual, was all anxious, nervous anxiety. I’m not a great looker (understatement), someone to whom other men are immediately attracted. I am short, slightly built, mid-winter pale. I have a small penis. My “endowment” has always been my Achilles’ Heel . . . or hell. Men are for the most part disappointed by it. It’s a small boy’s dick. It never grew up and became a real, honest-to-God man’s dick. One of those down-on-your-knees, “Yes, sir!,” hot ‘n’ ready, big ol’ swingin’ acres of cock-flesh you see fully-charged in slick magazines and glistening wet dreams.
I’m aware of that.
You learn either to live with it, or not. Okay, maybe I can’t. I’ve been in situations like this before: hot, exciting, totally pumped. And men have walked into my room and two minutes later, after inspecting the sad state of my genital packaging, simply walked out.
To make matters worse: I am, perhaps from fear or nerves, or maybe even a cruel trick of heredity . . . prone to impotence. Or, in TV lingo, “erectile dysfunction.” I can get “junior” up, nudging him cautiously awake, then with no warning, he stops paying attention. He (okay, it) goes limp. Numb even. Like it’s only an extra piece of flesh down there where my stomach ends. I have hated the crap out of my little dick for years. It’s like a three-day-old dead minnow.
So why was I there that night?
I kept wondering that myself—you always do in situations like this. Why was I there: just to embarrass myself? Did I ask for it? Who wouldn’t ask that; but who wouldn’t hope, either?
What I really wanted was . . . (okay, I admit it) someone to hold me. I mean . . . really hold me, and make me feel like a man does with another man. Warmer; larger; full: that feeling of rising so very far above yourself that you can barely hold on to the earth. Yeah, true, it’s like joining something way, way beyond your own paltry limits.
(Or, as the club boys would say, just swinging ‘round and ‘round on a wonderful piece o’ cock.)
O great hammer, lightning thunder-dick itself: the gonadal, full-lipped god with his star-hot, veiny arm deep, deep inside us.
Strength, throbbing excitement. Lust swimming, pushing its way all the way up to the very brow of power. I wanted that. Waited, like a singer who has forgotten his song, but knows that he must, at the very least, bring himself to sing it. You get out there on the stage, the band’s all ready, you open your mouth and . . . I stayed alone in my dark little room, shaking. Like I was pursued by rejection already. Slapped by it. Kicked in the nuts. Savage sex noises exploding around me. Uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh. The grunting. The jackhammer breathing. Ear-splitting sound system. Big naked feet beating the floor as men marched by, peeped in, disappeared. I tried to relax. I wanted to. I needed to force myself to separate from where I was.
I started to drift off . . . the sound system finally began to click down, taking with it the hard breathing, even those feet beating down the industrial carpeting on the floor.
The edges of my brain, so tense, began to ease up and move away from my dumb work at the bank, and my expectations—the truth being that I’d probably leave as untouched as I had walked in. My brain left that; and, for a moment, I felt myself rising into that glorious ether of sex itself. Of celestial abandon; beauty; escape. I was there, back in some tiny innocence before I had learned to be afraid, back where we were all the children of the true Spirit, all-numerous in its Oneness, in that Paradise that accepts each of us exactly for what we are.
I floated, drifting in my head, as the loud, thumping music died off . . . so that I was no longer aware that it’s piercing volume had been designed specifically to get anxious, designer-drugged customers in and out of these Halls of Empty Promises as quickly as possible, without ever really touching, except on the most fleeting level. I was relaxed enough so that I was no longer a part of that. I could touch, really: now . . . as I was trailing through a heaven of my own delight, pulsing, alive with my own spirit, imagining myself out there, naked, free, with my equipment no longer a disappointment to anyone; that is, if it were really, at that moment, truly mine.
Who knows? Perhaps we can remake ourselves more than we think. Perhaps you can go through a once-locked door, and then . . . the door, which I’d left slightly ajar, mysteriously opened. With the strong, outside light behind him, I saw almost nothing of him: just that crystalline fine hair, lifted like a glowing field of airborne dandelion puffs on top of the high, silhouetted landscape of his broad, beefy shoulders and his arms. In that sharp, sudden, dazing yellow light from the hallway that he grabbed with him, he strode in. My eyes, forced into immediacy, swallowed him whole.
There was this single, instant glance between us—like a flare fired above a dark ocean—point-blank, intense, disarming; then he dropped the white towel that he wore and snapped the door closed. He dove on to me, his mouth finding mine, his hands kneading my neck. That mouth, the mouth I told you about: I thought it would pull my whole soul from me. I became all goose pimples, shot with this freezing breeze that traveled down to my toes, as his hands followed it, warming me, stroking, caressing and holding me. He licked my shoulders and chest, my tiny erect nipples; my stomach. Then his hands reached for my small organ. Just pulled it gently to him and I found myself completely, unrecognizably . . . yes, hard . . . as nails.
I know that’s totally porn magazine crappo, but how else can I put it? Some ready-to-be-disentangled, captive animal in me had been awakened, and now it responded to him more fully than I had known myself capable of doing: Was I really this? He began to lavish me with his strong tongue, his supple lips, the whole intoxicating seduction of his warm eager mouth, his unannounced being. I was drawn into him as if I were entering the densest forest, that manhood in full leaf that I had waited for without hope on my side or warning on his. “Who,” I wondered, “is this?”
His arms pulled me up over him, lifted me, so that he was now under me, supporting me with his strength. I felt as if I were floating in some amniotic sac, attached to this deep, spreading hairiness around me, like the bubble-rich stems that hold the white faces of water lilies to the thick muck below. And I was just drifting among these deep stems; with this thing sucking me, pleasuring me, as babies are given to pleasure, without thought, or boundary, or, even, self.
He stopped. I was trembling. My own “stem” was shot with heat. He started to stroke me. I was big now. I knew it. BIG.
It was impossible.
I must have been going crazy; but I knew it: it, I, was big. About as big as I was ever going to get.
I held his head and pushed my fingers through his thick hair, as he clutched them, gratefully, I could tell—but how could such a thing be, that he really wanted to suck tiny me that way? Then I felt this odd, sudden, painful pinch, very instant, like a fine tooth, on my scrotum. It was no more than a pin prick, really—like an alcohol sting on a cut—but it hit my left testicle with the precision of a stereo phono needle on an old black 33-rpm record. Maybe the record was jazz, because after the pain subsided (and it was gone quickly, really fast), it was like Ella Fitzgerald was serenading with Billie Holiday; they were doing it for me. Suddenly I felt so calm that all I could do was stroke his curly head at my crotch. I was at peace. A peace I had only dreamed about before, but which was now floating purely, instinctually, over me.
Then the old bath noises, from a hazy, mental distance of about a mile away, started to resume. I did not want to listen to them, but tried to drift in that oblivion that he had brought me to. I have no idea how long that paradise lasted, but afterwards I felt as if I had gone through the most intense, explosive orgasm—a full battalion of release—without coming. I had not, as they used to say, “delivered myself.” I knew that. And I was now soft again: I could do nothing about it; the thing started to shrivel back up. It might disappear virtually—my worst fear; and he’d get bored and leave, as so many others had.
I opened my eyes. He was now lying next to me. His body seemed so much larger than mine and the vast, downy-soft hairiness of it, a glowing, late-sunset pink in that dim, dim light, made me sigh with its luxuriant power. I reached out and pulled the back of his hand to me, and kissed it.
“You’re kinda good looking,” he said to me. “You just don’t know it.”
I sighed. “Think so?”
“Yeah. I have a thing for pale men. Funny, ain’t it? And I gotta tell you, I like your dick. It’s like a seashell. Small and really pretty. I bet you don’t know that either. Lemme tell you, I could suck on you for an hour. You got perfection in you; you just don’t know it. You’re not stuck on yourself, like so many queers in New York are.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know about being stuck on anything.” I reached down and felt this residue of shock in my balls. They had drawn up. They felt, I can only say, vulnerable and tender, in their sensitive sac. “What did you do to me?” I whispered. I only wanted to know; I wasn’t trying to challenge him.
“Lemme see. Sometimes I get carried away a bit.”
He pulled me to him, lifted my legs, then my scrotum up. He switched on the small, low-watted wall light that came with the room, and examined me like a surgeon. “No problem. Maybe I pulled a hair or two, that’s all.”
“It felt like you bit me.”
He lowered me gently, turned off the light, and then kissed me with that incredibly warm, pliant mouth. “Would y’be mad if I did?”
What could I say? “No, I wouldn’t.”
“Good. I don’t want you mad at me. I want you to like me. I gotta tell you something.” He paused and smiled. This genuine wry glow came to him. How could I not like him? I wondered. “You’re gonna think I’m a crazy shit. But you’re the seventh guy I been with tonight. I been horny as a spring ram. But none of ‘em gave me any satisfaction. Except you. You know that?”
I shrugged my shoulders and smiled. How could I know? Seven? A sexual athlete; a male nympho. I was hoping, beyond even my dumbest hopes, for one encounter; I could never keep up with anything like that. “Seven?” I asked. The man was all eros certainly. He drew his knees up to his hairy chest and began to talk.
“The first had a real, super-size schlong, and those big-guy, kinda gym muscles, too. He had a chrome cockring on so tight, I’m surprised it didn’t kill him. I don’t know why people are like that, like just dick machines. He thought he was God’s gift to faggolas, and tried to shove his cock into my mouth, then up my ass. I let him think he could do it, then slapped the crap out of him. You should have seen his face. He was one of those big pretty boys with salon-tanned skin and the right face. A magazine face. Nothing behind it, see? I grabbed his head, and ended up making him suck me off. I shot right down his cute throat. You should have seen him—kind of shocked, I think—but happy. I slapped him on his ass some more, then left.
“The second was in the steam room. He was a fat blond with glasses that got fogged up. He sat on my dick and asked me back to his room. He had rubbers there, and I fucked him like a horse. He was a sweet kisser. I took the rubber off and threw it into the garbage and left. The third and fourth was a threesome, an older black man and a young white guy. They were good. I came with them, too. The black man had a nice tool, but they often do. I liked his attitude. It was totally cool. Neither of them was something I would want to keep with me, but then why should I? Sometimes I get lost in the moment. Know what I mean?”
If only I did, I thought. I was so deliberate. So fearful.
“Number five was this nervous guy with bad breath and a funny long cock, kind of twisty, like a piece of spiral macaroni. Sorry, not for me. Nice bod, but . . . number six—”
“Why are you telling me this? I didn’t really need to know it. Do you want me to feel you’re—” I hesitated, then said: “Cheap?”
He smiled. His teeth glowed slightly bluish in the light. He had a kind of “urban skin,” slightly pitted in places on his cheeks. The mouth, that mouth that rippled and could do such amazing things, lifted up slightly at each corner. It was like the insistent curl of a wave coming on to a beach. I liked his grin. “Cheap I’m not, you’ll learn that. On the other hand, sexually, satiation is something I really don’t understand. Perhaps because of my age—”
“How old are you?”
He smiled. I liked him. I could not help it. “We don’t know each other enough for me to answer that.” He leaned over and kissed me. “You don’t kiss like other guys. The last one I popped into wouldn’t kiss me at all. I walked into his room. At first he had his head hidden by his sheet. He looked like a big whale, with a whale-sized dick standing up under there, waiting.”
“Did you bite his balls, too?” I asked.
“Huh?” His neck stiffened, his smile dropped and he bolted away from me. The air in the small room got colder, and the noise so loud it hurt. I tried to grab a handful of his soft body hair, but could not keep him close to me. He reached up and switched off the small light. His body darkened instantly within the small room. “You think you can just ask me anything?”
He stood up on his large bare feet, then moved a step away from me. I felt riveted to the bed. I was sure he was going to grab his towel and rush out, furious, looking for number eight. There was a silence between us, made worse by the thumping noise outside. I couldn’t keep my eyes from him, but felt totally at a loss of what to say.
He looked away from me. I had been too stupid; what could I say to him? I was sure he was going to leave. My head fell in embarrassment, then I heard him say, very slowly, in command: “If you want me to pay attention to you, you must kneel. Right now.”
At first—because of the loudness from outside; the shock of it—I wasn’t sure what he had said. Then he repeated his command, in exactly the same, measured way. I hated the dumb, mechanical noise from outside. I felt as if he had given me no alternative. It was either the canned bar music and everything around it that rejected me; or doing exactly what he wanted me to do.
I got off the bed, feeling very tiny—very pointless—then prostrated myself before him, with my forehead at his ankles. He leaned down, patting my head, giving me hope, some immediate recognition, perhaps; perhaps some direction towards my surrender to his world. My fingers cautiously stroked his feet. I ran my lips from his ankles, up through his hairy, muscular calves, then to his knees. I rose up slightly to his cock, which flopped down and reminded me of something from a horse or a statue. Not that it was extreme in length, but it was imposing. He shielded its weight from me, pushing me gently, really gently, aside. “Not yet,” he whispered. “I gotta get dressed. The truth is, I want you to come home with me.”
Without showering, I met him just outside the lobby, where men were lining up—it was now Sunday morning at two. He was dressed beautifully. An expensive, nicely pressed white shirt; pleated, gray flannel slacks; loafers. A beautiful tweed sports jacket, perfectly tailored, made him look even more commanding. It was fall, and not cold yet. The earth was starting to go to sleep, but not the city. I asked him where he lived and he told me. I was impressed. We left the baths.
“I gave my driver the night off,” he said casually. “He shouldn’t have to wait out here for me. It’s not right, know what I mean?”
Frankly, I didn’t, but we were close to Sixth Avenue and he got us a cab immediately. He told the driver, who looked Bengali, to step on it. There was very little traffic. I rolled my window down a bit, and breathed in the air: it felt wonderfully fresh for New York. I got to look at his face now; the passing stream of lights outside slid over the contours of his features as he turned to me and then turned away, giving me both his full face and profile. His nose was just a little too large, his neck too big, his cheeks sunken slightly. His eyes were deep in his face. They had a hard, glittering surface; I could not tell their color. Maybe it changed with the surroundings. I wasn’t sure.
There was little, truthfully, “photo handsome” about him. But his mouth, even at rest, had this commanding presence. It looked like it might say something at any moment that could change my life, if I let it.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“What does it matter?”
“My name is Alwyn. Alwyn Barrow. But it’s easier if you just call me Allen. That’s what my friends do.”
He looked over at me. “They were Irish trying to be English?”
I smiled. “Close.”
“It’s okay. We all try to be something we aren’t. So if you aren’t anything to begin with, it’s easier. Nobody knows who I really am. I like it that way. Why’d you decide to come with me, do I seem trustable to you?”
I shrugged. “Maybe it was just destined.”
“Good answer. I wanna drink. I can’t wait to get home and have a scotch. Do you do scotch?”
I could, I told him. I asked him what he did, if he would not tell me his name.
“I make deals, and, lemme tell you, lotsa money. There’s a lotta flashy, grabby money out now. Total greed—it wants to know others like it. It’s like at the baths, all the big dicks want more big dick. I find it kinda revolting. Vulgar, y’know? But it’s easy to work with. They think I’m a stooge. I love it. Men who have so much money that they crap dollars, feel good about dealing with me. I used to wonder why; now I don’t.”
The driver asked him which entrance he wanted. The building had two. He told him, and we got out and he paid him. The doormen—there were two, even then—looked at us and smiled at him. One of them took us up in the elevator to his floor. There was no door. We walked directly into his apartment. There were soft lights and that infinity of carpets, and then a series of windows that looked out onto the city and the Park, and, then, with a turn, even the distant deep silver of the Hudson River. I had never been in anything like it.
“How long have you lived here?” I asked.
“A while, but not too long. Maybe five years. You like ice in your scotch?”
I told him sure. He went out into the kitchen and left me there. My heart started to beat hard. I felt so outclassed—I’d always had diddly-shit jobs that went nowhere, but then so many New Yorkers do. We can’t all be infinite money people. Why would he want to have anything to do with me? This was probably just another amusement for him—a one-nighter. Suddenly I felt bad. Really bummed out. He came back in with the two scotches, having dropped his clothes in the kitchen. “I like being naked when I’m by myself,” he said. He handed me the scotch, and I sipped it.
It was very good. I had never tasted scotch like that: how could I? This was that eighteen-dollar-a-glass scotch that I had read about in the Times. It came from little estates in Scotland where you brought special clothes to go trout fishing, and you pretended to be just a normal person who liked to fish in funny clothes. Not totally rich. The scotch had that quality of having almost no scotchy “taste,” or bite, just a golden hint of subtle, nutlike sweetness. It was cold and warm at the same time. It went icily down your throat and then lingered just at the top of your chest, warming you. It reminded me of being out on the beach. In the spring. At night. Wearing a sweater, how good that felt.
“You’re thinking about a beach, aren’t you?”
I nodded. He put his drink down on a marble coaster on a table, and then began to strip me of my clothes. He did this very softly and sweetly, kissing me every time he released a button. I thought I was going to collapse from the sheer loveliness of him, all that power and softness. “I wish you’d tell me your name,” I said.
“Why?” he asked, kissing me on my cheeks and then my throat. He licked my throat, back and forth, sucking at the Adam’s apple.
“So I could”—I wanted to say, “not feel like such a poor relation here,” but all I could say was—“say it. We like to hear our own names, don’t we? Isn’t that why we have them, the Bible and all?”
“If you know my name, you’ll have leverage over me. I know about leverage, believe me. I work with these leverage shits all the time, so I don’t want you to have that yet.” He kissed me again; I forgot about his name—or wanting to know any more.
We were now both completely naked. He lifted me up and carried me into his bedroom, like I was a bride or a girl. With his powerful arms and legs, it was easy for him. There were a lot of rooms in the apartment and I was not sure if the bedroom he took me into was his room or not. But it was beautiful and softly lit, richly furnished with a big bed upholstered in studded, bronzy, dark leather. The bed was tall and I had to lift myself onto it. He jumped right on it, and then gave me a hand up. I felt really small now, and in a different world, like a child in an adult’s room. I looked around in the dim light, trying to figure out what sort of person would live there, and what type of person my mysterious host was.
Suddenly he appeared over me, smiling. “Do you like it here?” he asked.
I did not want to offend him, but I was frankly intimidated. I nodded shyly and he smiled at me openly. Everything that I saw in the apartment, its richness, its size, made me uneasy. Sure, he was wealthy but . . . unpolished. Despite his beautiful clothing, there was something raw and noticeably ugly about him, as if his torn edges had never been smoothed back and the loose threads carefully snipped. I noticed that his fingernails were jagged and his feet really callused, like he went barefoot too much in the wrong places. His feet were clunky, “peasant” feet, not handsome at all. The toes were too big and gnarled. They looked like potatoes just dug out of the ground. The nails were thickly ridged, gray as graphite, and dull like beach glass. They were almost like hooves.
But, strangely enough, this excited me. In my inconsequential world of polite little gay men with polite little jobs, who went out to lunch and split the check with a razor blade, he would not have fit in at all. They would have found him ungainly, nouveau, someone to titter at; someone they could immediately allow themselves to feel—no matter how insecurely—superior to. He got on top of me, and started nuzzling me, licking me; I forgot about his repulsive feet, except for my desire to kneel at them again. I forgot all of my qualms. It was easy to do that—he left me defenseless, just his amazing mouth, his big hands, the way he reached suddenly again for my small, tender testicles. I felt warm, or perhaps it was just the wonderful scotch.
He touched my forehead gently, and started to stroke it so that I became truly relaxed. His mouth explored my smooth, hairless stomach until it reached my penis. He then performed what he had done at the baths, but slower, much slower, and with more care and tenderness. I felt suddenly—how else can I say it?—taken care of by him; loved even, if you can use such a word in such a context. But why not? Can’t love emerge at any moment, just as violence can and does? Both seemed to be flip sides of the same archaic coin, one whose origins we can never totally trace.
So now I felt as if he were simply hovering, weightlessly, over me, perhaps because I was so relaxed. His weight did seem like nothing at all. Maybe in some ingenious trick of strength, he was hanging over me; or, perhaps, I was just imagining him doing that, in real space, suspended like a distant, gray planet. But there he was: all warmth, softness, duck’s down hairiness, in that deep weediness of my own brain. I relaxed now, except for my own small organ, which was about to “cream,” like the kids say. It was totally blooming. It felt like a fresh bouquet of daisies, or the young, fleshy, snow-white buds of the magnolias I remembered from my childhood, in the spring when all was fertile, newly wet, and rushing to the surface after so much winter’s sleep. With his lips down at my testicles once more, I felt as if I were also rushing, pouring myself out to him.
Gingerly, he took both delicate balls into his mouth, then pushed one out with the tip of his tongue. He was so expert. So loving. Still I tensed up: I could remember that zing of past pain, even if I were sure nothing would happen now. I was safe; he liked me. I was sure. I could not really see what he was doing, but just closed my eyes. Then, I felt it once more—that instant electrical zap, like some wavering, probing hypodermic needle, extracting some precise fluid tissue from me . . . with, I admit, only a passable element of finesse.
The pain, I admit, was more from surprise than actual harm—it was like a wasp sting felt through a gauzy layer of cotton. It shot all the way through me, up my spine to some waiting point in my brain. There the sensation, like an arc of lightening, doubled back and whipped down again until it hit my crotch. My penis pulsed, throbbed, became deliciously heated with a desire to release its raw, new energies in orgasm.
But it did not.
Something had happened; I knew it, but could not take myself away from it. He had brought me there for a purpose and I had allowed it. I was desperate for him. Weak. Empty. I assented. I softly stroked his curly head with my hand, then ran my fingers to the pits of his cheeks, and held his face to my scrotum.
I did not know how long I could take this; I wanted him to take me, to suck me dry with that mouth that was so good at what it could do. But he was really doing nothing to my cock. Nothing. He seemed to have lost interest in it. Then it was over. The stinging; the mysteriously painful, strange act. My penis became thin, hopelessly small again; it sank like the bloom of a white summer flower, after the first frost.
Flaccid, dead, impotent: I was. And he sat on the side of the bed, away from me. For a moment, I thought he was disgusted with me. All I could see was the back of his head, but his spine and shoulders were straight up, squared; like a military man.
“My name is Destry,” he announced. “Destry Powars. It’s spelled P-O-W-A-R-S, but pronounced ‘Powers.’ Would you like to sleep here with me?”
I could barely catch my breath. I closed my eyes. There were warm tears in them.
“Yes,” I answered.
Chapter Two
The next morning, a middle-aged Swiss man named Karl, dressed in a dark, pin-striped suit, served breakfast formally to us at the end of a long, polished dining room table. We had shirred eggs, small pork sausages, home-made muffins, English tea. Not what I usually had for breakfast, which was more in the lines of a Post cereal, but it was a nice treat for me. No one ever made breakfast for me—unless of course I went out with some friends and we talked about work and split the check, like I said, with a razor blade. Karl was unobtrusive, hardly said a word, like he was not there. Occasionally, he asked me if I wanted something else. “More tea, sir?” he asked. “More muffins, or toast perhaps?”
My host ignored him, sometimes waved or pointed at something—he did little talking to him. Karl had a perfect, precise, North Atlantic way of speaking English. I had worked for a Swiss banker once who had had a university education in Bern and he spoke like that. Mr. Powars, or Destry (it was hard now for me to feel very close to him, I felt so removed) did not speak that way. At all. He leafed through half a dozen newspapers—I counted the Times, the Post, the Daily News, the pink Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal—and drank a cup of coffee and several cups of tea, while wearing a freshly pressed dressing gown of puckered blue cotton. I was given a similar robe, and felt well-taken care of, distantly happy. And ready to leave.
I needed to go back to my small apartment downtown, the one in a nowhere neighborhood, near several gas stations where taxi drivers hung out and where there were diners and coffee shops and places to eat greasy and cheap. That had been my life. I did not argue about it. I was happy. Like most queer men I had escaped my parents and that itself had been one of the central successes of my life: that I had survived my own childhood and had come to the city, had been a part of the “gay diaspora,” had seen things happen. A liberation movement we had made, or some of us had made; a disease that had been thrust on us, that no one could talk about for almost a decade. Now, here I was, in this amazing luxury that some people took for granted, like life were merely a shopping mall and they could go through it with no limit on their credit.
“I should be getting back,” I said to my host.
He nodded at me. “Makes sense.” He went back to one of his papers. He laughed at a joke in the second section of the Times. One of New York’s richest old women was now marrying a much younger man. Likewise, one of New York’s richest men was marrying a younger woman, for the fifth time.
He smiled, excused himself, then went into his bedroom. I heard a bath door close. I looked up at Karl. Despite his formality, our eyes engaged for a moment; then, quickly, he averted them from me. He asked me if breakfast were all right. I told him it was.
He nodded, then turned slightly towards me. “Mr. Powars is happy you are here,” he let out, his voice barely breaking a whisper. “So am I.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Does he have,” I hesitated, then said it, “other guests, who stay for breakfast?”
He did not answer me, but only said, “He usually has breakfast alone. May I take your plate?” I told him he could. As he took it, he said, “He is smiling, that is what’s important.” Karl smiled, too. He had a long, bony face, all tense dimples and ridges, like the hard skull beneath begrudged the flesh stretched over it. He nodded at me, then Powars came back in again.
“Nothing like coffee and tea in the morning,” he announced. “It’s like getting a bunch of those Israeli movers working inside you. Ever seen those guys at it? Everything with them is like the Six Day War. I got them to move me in here—mostly what I had was books and clothes. The rest came straight from the store; you know how it is in a new place? You want new stuff. I decided I want you to come back here and have dinner with me. Tell Karl where you live. I’ll have the driver come by and pick you up at eight.”
He smiled briefly at me, then got up and went to the bedroom. I felt now like I’d really been stung—and it hurt very badly; then heard a shower going. I felt dismissed, like an employee who’s been asked to come back at a time when it’s convenient for his employer. Karl looked at me patiently, then went into the kitchen. He came back with a small notepad. “Your address, sir?”
“Don’t bother,” I said crisply. “I don’t want to come back here.”
He lowered his eyes. “You really need to,” he said quietly. “I know you don’t think I know it. But you want to come back; I can see it on your face. In my work, one learns to read faces. He’s tired, and he has much business to do. I know it.”
I gave him my address, then went into the bedroom where my clothes were ready. At some point, mysteriously enough, Karl had folded them neatly and placed them on a polished side table. Powars came out of the shower, wearing a terry robe now. “If you want to shower, Allen, do it in the guest bath. I don’t like others to use my bathroom. Sorry. It’s a funny thing. We all got quirks, right?”
I decided I did not want a shower, especially in his guest bathroom. I barely had a bathroom, much less a guest one. I put my underwear on, and then the rest of my clothes. I stood up and looked at him, while he sat at a small writing table, turned away from me. “Who are you?” I asked. “And why do you act like such a jerk?”
He turned to me. “That’s real nice. I brought you back here, and you already think you’re better than me, don’t you?” His eyes left me, they followed the parquet floor away from me, all the way up to the doorway and then into the hall. “I had to earn all this, Allen. I had to wipe the floor with people. That’s what jerks do, isn’t it?”
He was so strange, the hairy body, the ugly feet. What was he?
“You won’t have to wipe the floor with me,” I told him. “Because I won’t be on your floor again. I want Karl to tear up my address. Thanks for breakfast, and the lift.”
He suddenly stood up. He made me feel very small now. A dark shadow crossed his brow, and I realized for the first time that his eyes were actually brown. This rich chocolate brown, flecked with the most amazing gold; like amber. He walked over to me. I was shaking. I hated him the way a child would.
He took my hand and impulsively kissed it. He was trembling. I had not expected anything like this. “I have had to relearn everything,” he said, releasing a huge sigh. “I’ve had to relearn and relearn and relearn. I would like very much for you to have dinner with me, Allen. I would be very pleased if you did. We’ll go anywhere you want to go.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. I was hurt. I walked out. I passed Karl in the hallway. He was in a white workman’s apron, dusting and polishing the furniture. He looked up at me. If he could read faces, as he said he could, he could easily read all the tension and anger and confusion in mine. “One day that man will die alone,” he said. “His heart will turn to ice. He will be made so small, and he doesn’t want to—you must come back for him.”
He put aside his polishing cloth, then rang for the elevator and it was brought up. The elevator man, dressed in a dark uniform, discreetly ignored me, and I went down into the street. Everything there was so chaotic, so real and alive. I felt as if I had been swept up into an obscene, immoral world and now I was in love. I knew it. I got the subway at the narrow station at Seventy-Second Street and Broadway. Everything around me seemed silent. I was inside myself, locked tight, bewildered. I knew I shouldn’t see him again: he would hurt me, belittle me—and completely make me his own. I had to find out the secret of Destry Powars, but how would I do it unless I met him for dinner?
Chapter Three
Back at my small place downtown, I felt like one of those little escargot snails that had been removed from its shell and was now stuffed back into it. The place was familiar, but suddenly it seemed too tiny and too jumbled. Pictures of me and my friends covered the walls and lay about on my desk, which was also where I ate a lot of my meals alone. The pictures retold the story of my life—leaving the South, coming to the city when I was young; getting my first jobs, always underpaid but comfortable jobs. I was always somebody’s assistant, somebody’s do-this/make-that-right person. I guess that has been the position of multitudes of queer men for the last thousand years. We were the assistants, the consorts, the escorts, the “walkers.” We did not call the shots, we just made the reservations for other people to have power dinners.
I felt suddenly small and a bit frightened. My life was now laid out to me, in all of its tawdry smallness. My apartment was so real, so familiar—such a part of my own limitations—and the huge spaces I’d been in only an hour earlier were not. I went into my bedroom, hardly as big as one of Destry Powars’s bathrooms, and saw my clothes neatly lined up. There were work clothes, cheap sports jackets I had got at various men’s discount places, polyester ties, and, of course, shirts, the kind that came in plastic packages, that you did not have to iron. I did not have a Karl working for me to iron things. Even Powars’s table napkins had been beautifully hand-ironed. I could tell that.
I started to take my clothes off, they still smelled of the baths, of me, of the night before, but not of Destry Powars; no, he had a different smell. I could feel in it my nose, the memory of it. I could even hear that smell, as you might hear a distant song or just remember it. The scent had a slightly tangy, cool spiciness to it: clove, musk, some grated lemon rind and even a note of gin in it. Juniper. It drifted through all the fine silky hair on his big body. The strong legs. The kind of horsy chest. The cock. I was naked now. He had an animal cock. Horse; that was what it was. It was not human. I realized that. The head of it. Big. Fleshy. Dark. I shivered. I felt slightly nauseated from the rush of memory that hit me. I got into the shower—my shower, never ever hotel clean; mold at the rusted metal stall corners—and turned it on. I used plain Ivory soap and lathered my hands with it, and then rubbed the lather over me. My hands went to my genitals. My dick felt pathetic—I was under-endowed. I was a kid, who just passed as a man, a little pisser; a piss ant, that’s what I was.
I remembered boys sizing me up at school. “Wee-wee wienie!” one kid joked. “You gotta toy peeshooter. Next time get a real one!” I felt so tiny. I remembered the public showers at gym, feeling pitiful, scared as hell to look at the equipment of other boys. I started to have theories. I noticed that boys with small asses seemed to have big dicks. I wondered, was my ass too big? Then I saw Ralph Sweeney, this huge oomph of a guy, butt like a dump truck, who was equipped with a bazooka. Bazooka, that’s what a big one was like. No wonder they named a popular bubble gum for it. All kids wanted to have a big one in their mouths. It was the absolute fear, mixing with the total desire. The forbidden; the disgusting. The thing you wanted so much it that made you throw up with desire. Made you sick with desire. Next theory: Feet. Boys with mountain-sized feet had way-big meat. So I started noticing the boys with big feet all over the place. In the hallways, in the boys’ room, waiting in line to catch the school bus. It became a fun game.
Then, in the locker room, again, I’d stare down at the feet. Feet are wonderful. I was a prodigy of feet. Smooth, young, big, excellent feet. The kind that led up to large calves with pubescent hair already on them, then on to thighs, pale, dripping sweat sometimes, dripping shower water, then the edges of that fresh young meadow of pubic hair. The kind that eager diligent rabbits might munch on had the body become the true landscape of desire that it was for me. Then the test: yes, big feet often did mean big equipment . . . but not always. Sometimes there were these prancing little creatures, who had dainties to walk on and what dangled between their legs truly surprised you. Fat, long, luscious tubes that just hung there. Casually. Cool as . . . shit, maybe. (How do you like that for one of those contradictions that make no sense at all?) And you were supposed to pretend that it wasn’t there, just waiting for you to examine it; to want more than anything else to suck it. Yeah, man: it don’t exist. Dicks among boys are like God: you pray to the Deity silently.
The big dick in front of you was supposed to be fuzzied out. Like TV computer editing. Your eyes were supposed to do it, and if not your eyes, certainly your brain. You were supposed to talk in the locker room about—shit!—baseball, while they stood there. Just dangling. Playing with it, maybe; but not knowing they were playing with it maybe, too.
No one wonder people went nuts.
Normally, you were supposed to do all that funny fuzzying business: the mental act that made the cock unseeable. But Nature had already done that for me. My short-changed equipment was pre-edited. No one had to fuzzy up the old brain screen. I was already fuzzied, minimized, censored. When you have almost nothing to start off with, who’s going to stare at it? Even worse, it had taken me a long time to grow pubic hair, so for a long time my little wienie was bare. It was small, and right out there, and still unseeable, like a six-year-old kid’s. I started crying in my shower. Just sobbing. I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself, just frightened of my own smallness. What did Powars ever see in me? This man, this weird bigness: I felt trapped in my own inadequacy.
Stupid. I was stupid. I had this teeny, dumb-ass, kiddy twiggy between my legs, with two petite acorns for testicles. What the hell did Powers see in me? And what did he want? I soaped up my groin and felt almost nothing there. I pushed the white soap around the small, tapering head of my cock—if I can call it a cock; it was a pee-pee, that’s what it was—and then, past the dumb numb, bashful little void that was my kid dick, to my little balls. They shrank in pain. Just RANG all over me. The pain made a noise, like a scream in my ear. I slid to the floor of the stall, the water drifting over my back now as I curled up, fetally, to hold on to myself.
I cupped my scrotum in my hands as delicately as I could. What had been done to me? Was it maybe just the bristle on his cheek, or the way he went about sucking me? He was coarse, okay, I knew that. He was not like the forever boyish men that I associated with, men who in another era would have been selling ribbons to ladies in elegant department stores with pneumatic tubes. Sure, that all sounds like paleontology to most people. But I had read that in the olden days, queers worked in department stores, where they politely waited on well-dressed ladies. They were not allowed to handle “filthy” money. It was always sent up and down these air-driven tubes to the top office where the “real” men counted it. The queers worked with “girls,” a.k.a. spinsters. I felt like a throw-back to that—me and my friends. We were all so pleasant. Dinner in the Village, at safe little reasonable restaurants, while the “real” world of “real” men ate at those steak palaces on Park Avenue, lined with the type of big cars that I was sure Destry Powars rode in.