Are You Loathsome Tonight? (6 page)

“Jesus."

Hispanic, then, maybe; not Asian. But the boy pronounced the name as they had done at the Baptist church Billy's grandmother had dragged him to, in the sermons he'd hated except when the preacher detailed the agony of the wounded man on the cross, as it had been intoned over Granddad's coffin in the parlor that day. Not Hay-SEUSS but JEE-zus.

Billy pictured a sacred heart pierced with thorns, limned in scarlet flame, dripping lurid blood. No Baptist icon this, but Roman Catholic by way of a Georgia tattoo parlor. He imagined jamming the Luger's barrel up against it and blowing it into a million chunks of useless twitching muscle. He thought again of that figure on the cross, pale and thin and pierced: a true submissive, a submissive for all humanity. He remembered a line of graffiti he'd seen scrawled in the men's room at Port Authority once:
Sure Jesus loves you, but will he swallow
?

He realized he had not lost his hard-on.

“Okay,” he said, a little cautious but still eager. It wasn't as if he'd ever been with anyone at all; he didn't
know
what he liked. Maybe it could still be good. Boy, girl, what did it matter? Inside the fragile envelope of skin, they were much the same. Jesus' body was a mirror image of Billy's own; bleach the raven tuft of his pubic hair, yank the genital hardware, and from the neck down they would be twins.

He slid the gun's barrel under the flaccid shaft and pulled up. Jesus moaned, shifted his bony hips on the mattress. Billy wanted it to hurt, and it looked as if it did, but the ring popped open just before flesh tore. Jesus' penis sprang free, already beginning to harden.

Take, eat; this is my body
.

Billy realized the torn lace panties were still dangling from his left hand. He crumpled them into a silky ball and dabbed at the blood on Jesus' mouth. The fabric began to stain deep red. Jesus' lips felt slick and tender against his fingers, and those Oriental eyes glittered with—what? Desire, fear, pain? Or some exotic blend of all three, some new emotion brewed just for Billy?

He knelt at the foot of the bed, pressed his lips against the velvet concavity of the boy's stomach. “Don't move,” he murmured. “Be still. Be quiet. Be cold..."

His tongue flicked into the cup of the navel, around the curve of a hipbone. The gun moved lower, nudging Jesus' thighs apart, kissing the dark sweet cleft of his buttocks.

“ ... wait..."

Billy's head jerked up. His hand flashed out and smacked the boy's face hard enough to make his palm sting.
"Don't talk!"

Helplessly, Jesus gestured at the nightstand by the bed. Billy saw a large jar of Vaseline half-hidden in drifts of tattered Kleenex.

“Oh...” He blinked, sheepish. “Okay.” He grabbed the Vaseline, popped the top off and stuck the Luger's barrel deep into the opaque snot-colored whorls of petroleum jelly. It came up glistening with grease, its notched sight nearly hidden in a thick coat of the stuff, the tip of its bore clogged. None of this mattered.

He eased the barrel back between the cheeks of Jesus' ass and found the tender hole, hesitated only for an instant, and sank six inches of greased steel deep into the boy. Jesus' eyes went wide. He sucked in a harsh breath, then let out a long shaky one; his penis gave a little jump and wept a single crystal tear.

As Billy struggled to free his own hard-on from the tangle of jeans and underwear, then kick his legs free of confining fabric, he felt the rest of his life peeling away. There had never been anything but this, no stuffy parlor where his grandfather slept in a long wooden box, no pretty mother who disappeared forever into the Summer of Love, no brittle bleached skull shipped home in a cardboard box, no withered years or husked dreams. There was only the giddy throb of his cock in his hand, only this boy's willing pain that flowed over him and into him, burning like napalm.

Billy felt orgasm stalking him, moving fast and close, then drawing away again. It had eluded him this way on so many lonely nights when his own hand was not warm enough, was not slick enough, was too obviously his own unsundered flesh. But all at once Jesus was tugging him up on the bed, nearly making him lose his sweaty grip on the gun. All at once Jesus was wrapping skinny arms around Billy's hips, sliding a mouth hot as an open wound around Billy's cock.

It was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him. It was a feeling he wanted to last a thousand years, to last forever. It eclipsed his feeling of moments ago.
This
was all there was. This was all there had ever been. He and Jesus, their wet flesh melting into one another, the linkage of their bodies by orifice and cold metal, the mingled smells of sweat and Vaseline. The mattress beneath them was insubstantial, a cradling hand of mist; the tawdry hotel room shimmered and began to dissolve at the corners of Billy's eyes. He was dimly aware of Jesus thrusting his hips against the Luger, letting the barrel slide in and out of his ass.

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.