Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (24 page)

GET THEE BEHIND ME, SATAN

Ernie Conrick

M
RS.
P
EGGY
M
ORGANTHALER
was in the middle of explaining the value of the senator’s universal health-care plan to her husband, Nick, over a dinner of brown rice and bean curd when he looked her straight in the eye and said in a loud voice, “Instead of expressing your opinions about politics, why don’t you just open your mouth and I’ll shove my cock down your throat?”

This was highly unusual for Mr. Morganthaler, who, in eleven years of marriage, had never made a similar request. The Morganthalers’ sex lives were remarkably polite; lovemaking usually consisted of a few kisses, a perfunctory squeeze of her breast, followed by three to thirteen minutes of intercourse in the missionary position, culminating in ejaculation and sleep.

They never laughed or talked during sex. The only sound was the slapping of his body against hers, a repeated, hollow splat as his middle-aged gut walloped the pasty white flesh of her thighs like the sound of a baker slamming wet bread dough onto a floury cutting board. Nick hated this sound; it was an embarrassing, auditory encapsulation of everything that was wrong with their marriage.

As he sat at dinner this night, he imagined what would happen afterward in bed, Peggy with her eyes closed waiting for it to end, Nick imagining being somewhere else with a different lover, that slapping sound ticking out the seconds until the charade was over. Unable to bear the thought, Nick tried to express exactly what he wanted. He didn’t want to hear about the upcoming presidential election or the necessity of a single-payer system. Instead, he wanted to forgo their usual dinnertime rituals and have a sudden, impolite sexual encounter that ended with the fertilization of Mrs. Morganthaler’s esophagus.

Nick’s forthrightness went unappreciated. Peggy met his suggestion with baffled silence; her facial expression turned stony before she arose from the table, retreated to the bedroom, and locked the door. Realizing that something had gone horribly wrong, Nick followed behind her expressing his apologies. He stood at the door, knocking softly and asking for her forgiveness.

He could hear her sobbing softly from the other side of the door. As he stood there knocking, he remembered a verse he had once seen on the wall of a Manhattan diner.

As you ramble on through life, brother,

Wherever be your goal,

Keep your eye upon the doughnut,

And not upon the hole.

Too many people spent far too much of their life thinking about the doughnut hole, mused Nick. They thought too much about what did not exist, rather than the actualities. If only they would spend their time considering what the world really held for them, what they could see and touch and change—the doughnut—they would all be happier. Nick feared he had become a pathetic dreamer, a sexual pervert obsessed with strange bedroom maneuvers that no woman in her right mind would engage in. He was focused on the hole, on her hole, on his own hole, on hole qua hole, on hole in the abstract. He thought constantly about what was beyond his grasp, on holes with giant poles and holes with holes and poles with poles. But was a life of vanilla sex in the missionary position really that bad? They had a good marriage in other ways. Why couldn’t he live with that?

Feeling utterly defeated, Nick put on his coat and walked up the west side of Manhattan. He liked this part of the city, with its patches of cobblestone peeking out from under the asphalt and nineteenth-century warehouses-turned-condos, some still professing their original utilitarian purposes between the second- and third-floor windows in large white letters. C
OFFEE
and T
EA
read one building; W
HALEBONE
said another.

He crossed Canal and Houston and found himself on the corner of Christopher Street and Westside Highway, by Badlands 24-Hour Video Palace. He watched a patron with a hood pulled over his face open the door and duck inside. The man’s shame was oddly exciting, like catching an eleven-year-old in the bathroom with his pubescent fist in his hand. Nick walked quickly up the street away from the store and even managed to reach little West 12th Street before he turned around.

When he returned to Badlands again he stopped. He thought about what he would find inside, the rows of video booths in the backroom, the wide-screen TVs with hundreds of channels, the hollow-eyed men lurking in the gloom. Next he imagined Peggy, the closed door, the doughnut, the hole, her hole, his hole, and the Badlands glory holes.

The issue decided, he stalked quickly across the street and through the door. The interior flickered in the uneven glow of cheap fluorescent bulbs set in a water-stained drop ceiling. Badlands always had an incredible smell; it was as if an Indian village—walls covered in drying cow dung, coal dust, rivers of human excrement—had somehow inflicted its odor on this corner of Greenwich Village. At the far end of Badlands was a darkened door marked by a pink and aqua-blue neon sign reading Peepshow. Beyond the sign’s unsteady light, Nick could see a dim corridor and he could hear a female shriek—the soundtrack to a porn film—sounding at even intervals like an echo in a dark wood.

Behind the counter a short Mexican man sold a massive dong to a red-faced customer. The Mexican removed it from the package and turned it on its end, giving the molded plastic scrotum a playful tug.

“What a monster, eh?” said the Mexican. “Your wife like this one, right, boss?”

Nick bought a bottle of Iron Horse poppers and scanned the magazine rack. Until the last minute, he always imagined he would come to his senses and walk away. This overconfidence in his self-restraint never ceased, even as he wandered closer to the dark door, the neon sign, and the blaring shrieks, even as the shadows in the backroom turned their featureless faces toward him in a silent welcome. The devil knows his own.

The dark door swallowed him. Nick settled into an empty booth, feeding a twenty-dollar bill into the slot, sitting back in the plastic chair and unbuttoning his coat.

In the world of cheap thrills, video booths are a bargain. You don’t need to buy a ten-dollar beer and a forty-dollar lap dance—as at most New York strip clubs—or cruise the streets for a working girl. The Badlands Video Palace, like all places of its kind, has a row of phone-booth-sized cubicles equipped with video monitors showing a countless progression of X-rated fanfare. Each booth has a glory hole or two leading to adjacent booths from which patrons can flail their excited organs for their neighbors to service. A patron may even open a window between booths by pressing a button, providing a view of the next booth’s occupant.

Each time the screen dropped, Nick found a portrait of desperation, a masterpiece of loneliness, spitefulness, and arrogance. He remembered each of their faces and could recall them at will. He’d invented their histories, his gallery of perverts. One was a handsome junkie with faraway eyes, his scarred forearms hidden under a waffle-iron shirt. He lived in East New York, Nick thought, at his mother’s place; they lacked hot water for six months because he spent the heating bill on his fix. Nick imagined another round, solid face belonged to a family man who once loved his wife before the children arrived with their flus and mumps. Now he only removed the shackles of his family responsibility momentarily in the Badlands.

Then there was the haunted look of a man Nick took to be a teacher in love with the golden-haired boy in the third row of his grammar school class. The man’s visage was haunted by a sense of ethics that would not leave him alone. He would live out his life in a state of frustrated self-control, never transgressing the rules of the school, never touching his beautiful student inappropriately at any time. He would hide his lust until he was numb and dead inside, until the machinery of his own desire no longer functioned, until even a passing sexual thought elicited an almost unbearable fit of self-loathing. The world would never appreciate the tortures of these pervert-saints, and Nick wanted to offer their lost souls momentary succor.

Nick watched a pair of junkie-thin girls sucking off a hairy, fat man on his private screen. He pressed the small brown vial of Iron Horse to his nose and inhaled the pungent fumes. A popper rush set his heart pounding, and the sight of the elephantine cock and peroxide blondes on the screen before him—oral and anal penetrations in close-up, semen seeping from painted lips—took on an indescribable beauty, as if nothing were more profound than the sliding of oiled organs to the accompaniment of looped instrumental samples. With enough poppers and porn, Nick entered a timeless space where he had no wife, no deadlines, no bills, no health problems—just cocks and cum and holes.

A circumcised four-inch dick, with a head that curved arrogantly toward the ceiling, popped forcefully through Nick’s glory hole. The little guy seemed unaware of his diminutive size. He was confident beyond his abilities and surviving on pure aggression. How could he resist such a sociopath, Nick wondered, as he knelt down to offer his mouth to this thrusting Napoleon. Feeling Nick’s lips on its shaft, the hyper prick thrust in and out for about thirty seconds, then receded into its hole. A few seconds later, its head reappeared and threw a half-dozen drops of cum toward Nick, who watched the semen fall to the floor in the unsteady light of the video monitor.

Pearls before swine, he mused, as he bent his face to the floor to lick the cum off the ground. The popper rush dissipated while Nick was thus engaged, and he propped himself up against the wall and tried to catch his breath. He noticed that his pants and shirt were stained with white streaks. How would he sneak this past Peggy? With that thought, the illusion shattered and he felt a pang of self-hatred. That he had ended up on the floor of the Badlands Video Palace with his face in a pool of ejaculate was bad enough. Now he had to go back home.

I, he declared to himself, would sell my soul to the devil if Peggy could be the filthy whore I crave.

A new cock, fat, black, and uncircumcised—like a humpback whale mid-dive—arced through the glory hole. Nick had never seen such a creature, a massive, glistening purple organ lolling from side to side. As he watched, the tapered tip curled upward, rising forty-five degrees and pointing directly at Nick, as if its one tiny black eye could perceive him.

Nick raised himself up so that he was eye to eye with the noble beast. He closed his eyes and took it deep down his throat. As it filled his mouth and stretched his epiglottis, he felt his gut warm, as if he had just sat next to a fireplace on a cold winter day. A roaring sounded in his ears, and vertigo washed over him until he could no longer feel the floor beneath him.

He gagged and tried to pull away, but the cock pressed him, growing so large, so quickly, that it threw his head backward and forced its way into his esophagus. Even then, it didn’t slow down but filled his throat and chest as it reached toward his stomach, then coursing through his large and small intestine, at each turn causing Nick excruciating pain. After following the maze of Nick’s gastrointestinal tract, the cock protruded from his anus, curled around his lap, and came to rest on his left anklebone.

Nick was soaked in sweat. He was no longer in the Badlands Video Palace, but somewhere outside where a warm, stale wind blew. The cock that impaled him was attached to a strange-looking man, naked and chubby with an ample gut that bulged like a massive mound of earth before Nick’s face. Above this lay two large brown nipples and a broad, powerful chest. The man’s expression was chiseled as if made from stone; his black hair sprang away from his head in tight kinks. At the center of his deep-set eyes two rusty-red points burned like twin bonfires viewed from a great distance. Beyond his face, Nick saw the nighttime sky, the Milky Way, tiny spots of matter burning in a glittering and twinkling void.

The strange man considered him for a moment, his heavy, bushy brows knitting in concentration. Then, his thick lips parted and he spoke in a high-pitched, almost squeaky voice. Nick could not make out the words—they seemed to be in a language that he did not know— but they had a cadence and rhythm that suggested poetry. The baffling recitation continued for a minute or two, and then the strange man curled the corners of his mouth upward in what might have been a smile or a snarl and spoke softly in English:

Moloch answers for the Hole,

Without which doughnut has no soul,

While all-that-is is missing there,

Do not mistake the hole for air,

Hole is all we hope to be,

Each man’s possibility.

As he spoke, Nick felt the man’s cock receding through his body, up his anus, through his intestines and stomach, his esophagus, and his mouth. The sensation gagged him, and he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he was back in the Badlands Video Palace alone and fully clothed. His entire body, inside and out, was burning with a raw, itching sensation, as if the cock that had impaled him had scraped his innards and left them scratched and bruised.

The video monitor in front of him was blinking a warning light, indicating that he had only a few more seconds before his credit ran out. On the screen before him a busty woman took three massive Nubian cocks in her pussy, ass, and mouth. She sat atop one lover, a second sat on top of her, and a third crouched by her head offering his organ to her open mouth. Despite all of her lovers’ proddings, she looked straight at the camera with utmost confidence and a hint of disdain; she looked like an odalisque surrendering to the embrace of an ebony octopus.

As Nick watched the girl’s cheeks pucker inward, he remembered that Peggy’s face underwent similar contortions on the rare occasions she gave him head. The camera angle changed to show her heart-shaped ass and pussy stuffed with thick black pipe, panning to a close-up until all that appeared on the screen were the points of penetration. The woman’s pale white body was reduced to two small patches connected by her perineum—the flesh between the anus and the vagina— and she looked like a Caucasian bowtie, pinched in the center by descending and ascending dark rods. Around the points of penetration the men’s legs, testicles, and buttocks jiggled in an endless swirl of chocolate brown and plum black.