On Archimedes Street

Copyright

Published by

Dreamspinner Press

5032 Capital Circle SW
Suite 2, PMB# 279
Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886

USA

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

On Archimedes Street

© 2013 Jefferson Parrish.

Cover Art

© 2013 Leah Kaye Suttle.

www.leahsuttle.com

Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/.

ISBN: 978-1-62798-224-5

Digital ISBN: 978-1-62798-223-8

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

November 2013

For Thelma

Author’s Note

A
BAKERY
in New Orleans is justly famous for its dobash, a precariously tall, many-tiered confection of Hungarian origin. To promote its acceptance, the owners gallicized the name to
doberge
decades ago. A hand-lettered sign by the cash register gives some advice to customers taking the doberge cakes home.

Ride your cake on the floor! Don’t ride your cake on the seat.

While the out-of-towner may ponder this admonition dubiously, it is perfectly understandable to the native. It means “If you’re driving home, put the cake on the floorboard of the car rather than on the car seat. Or else you’ll have a toppled mess.” That sign, to this writer, distills the essence of Yat, the local dialect.

To displaced New Orleanians who return to their old stamping grounds—called
stomping grounds
by the locals—nothing recalls their time spent there more strongly than the native speech. It assaults the ear, affronts the grammarian, and nourishes the soul. The syntax, cadence, and pronunciation tell the prodigal, “I’m home.”

Because
On Archimedes Street
is all about its setting, this writer has attempted to approximate in words what the ear hears in New Orleans. This enterprise is fraught with risks, not the least of which is leaving one’s readers in the dark. Will they know that “ersters” means “oysters”?

An editor suggested they may not. So here’s a little cheat sheet on Yat.

Glossary

ax
: To ask.

banquette
: A sidewalk. Sadly, only old-timers remember this word.

berl
: To boil. In this “fambly”: erl (oil), erster (oyster), and so on.

bid’ness
: Business.

boin
: To burn. In this “fambly”: retoin (return), coise (curse), desoive (deserve), rehoise (rehearse), goil (girl), and so on.

capichon
: Either of the two butt ends of a loaf of french bread.

cayoodle
: A mixed-breed dog; a mutt.

dat
: That. In this “fambly”: dese (these), dose (those), dem (them).

ebber
: Ever. In this “fambly”: nebber (never).

eben
: Even.

eeder
: Either. In this “fambly”: needer (neither).

fack
: A fact.

fambly
: A family.

fedder
: A feather.

hawt
: Heart. In this “fambly”: cawd (card), pawt (part), hawd (hard), and so on.

nootral groun’
: The median strip dividing a broad avenue. Fortunately, unlike
sidewalk
and
recipe
,
median
is not yet a blip on the linguistic radar screen of Yat. Everyone still says “nootral groun’.”

receipt
: A recipe. Sadly, like
banquette
, understood only by old-timers.

ruint
: Ruined.

sallet
: A salad.

silver paper
: Aluminum foil.

swimps
: Shrimp.

vocative case
: Like Latin, Yat has a vocative, a case reserved for the person being addressed. It is achieved by transferring the stress to last syllable of the name. Thus, in nominative: “DOM-i-nic couldn’t find his ass with two hands.” But when the person is addressed directly, the stress shifts: “Dom-i-NIC! Get your lazy ass in here, boy!” Hen-RY, Ro-BERT, and Ke-VIN are all in the vocative. When the person being addressed has a monosyllabic name, a syllable is added: Pa-AUL, Jo-OHN, Ba-ABS.

wunst
: Once.

yat
: A middle-class New Orleanian. Derived from “where y’at,” which means “hello” or “how are you?”

yout’
: A young person, a youth.

zinc
: A sink, as in the kitchen sink.

Prologue

A
LTHOUGH
THE
Marine on top was blond and fair, his tightly curled hair and feline, green eyes slanting upward toward the ears gave him a menacing look. The brown-haired man below him, receiving a properly rigorous Marine pounding, somehow managed to be well muscled and well upholstered at the same time, taut but voluptuously rounded. The brown-haired Leatherneck was on his knees, forearms flat on the bed, forehead on the mattress, bottom proffered high. He mouthed moans into the sheet. The ferocious top used his own knees to spread the bottom’s knees a little farther apart and angled his long torso to get better purchase for the next thrust. He put his right hand on the bottom’s right shoulder blade and his left on the left ass cheek and splayed him like a hardback book that falls open to a favorite passage. He withdrew, circled the cockhead slowly around the reddened entrance, and plunged in with a guttural roar.

The brown-haired man grunted, shuddered, and then whispered, “Oh, shiiiit.” Seemingly intoxicated by lust, he turned his head to look back at his ravager.

“Don’t mark me,” he rasped. Then, under half-lidded eyes: “My girlfriend….”

“Fuck your girlfriend, Gyrene!” roared the blond tiger as he brought his flattened palm down with a loud slap on the creamy buttocks. The solid muscle quivered and pinked, rebounding like rubber under the thwack.

“Again,” breathed a voice. The men froze, as did the hand on the buttocks. Then the hand withdrew and came up, the cock was unplunged, and the scene played itself out in reverse.

Releasing Rewind and pressing Play, Honoria Abbott, a well-preserved fifty-one, acceded to the request of her guest. Ogorita Simmons, sixty-six-year-old professor emerita of Anglo-Saxon literature, watched with pleasure as the blond Marine thrust once again and heaped verbal abuse on his partner’s girlfriend.

Honoria pressed Pause.

“Most gratifying,” said Rita. “Fuck your girlfriend!” she marveled. “A properly robust sentiment for such an… erm… athletic undertaking. And every word in it has an Anglo root. None of your namby-pamby Latinate roots for these forthright fellows.”

Honoria smiled at her guest.
You can take the professor out of the university, but you can’t take the university out of the professor.
Honoria, full professor of physiology, had hardly registered the shouted oath. Unlike Rita, Honoria watched these movies with a keen anatomical eye, having dissected and inspected under the microscope every part currently on freeze-frame display. Fine specimens, these.

Rita fingered the case of the paused DVD. The cover of
Ray’s Fine Meats
showcased the delights to be encountered therein. The two Marines didn’t figure prominently, but they grinned salaciously among the small army of men crowding the cover. “Pfft!” sniffed Rita. “Another Ray Gagliani overproduced extravaganza with nothing but gym-buffed zombies and a legion of fluffers in the wings. The ‘fuck-your-girlfriend’ part
was
good, though.”

“Fluffers?”

“Backstage help—they keep the principals working if… well, if things start going south,” Rita said, “what with the production crew looking on, performance pressure, and the lights and all. They apply some private first aid to get things pointing north.”

Honoria smiled again. Who in the world, ignorant of Rita’s “predilections,” could have summoned the courage to tell her about—what was it?—fluffers? Really, Rita was…
irrepressible
.

Honoria’s mind went back ten years, reliving the beginning of their shared history with male-on-male films. It played out like a movie in her mind.

H
ONORIA
WAS
in the video store renting
Bitter Rice
. She saw Ogorita, spine ramrod straight, stalk directly to the porno corner at the back. Rita scowled intently at the titles on offer, plucked one with a satisfied grimace, and queued up directly behind her. Honoria glanced furtively at Rita’s choice—
Under the Big Top
, which featured a drawing of a perfectly toned and leering circus ringmaster holding a whip.

“I have great hopes for this one,” said Rita happily, seemingly to no one. She thrust the VHS tape at Honoria. “Look at the cover. Obviously made on a shoestring budget. Unknown producer. Probably a shaky handheld camera and no production values to speak of. And actors with real
defects
—not plastic people, otherwise they would have used a photo for the sleeve. Poorly delivered lines and wooden acting, it is to be hoped. It makes the sex seem so much more
real
, somehow. And
muskier
. Yes,
very
promising.”

“Muskier?” repeated Honoria, enthralled yet appalled. Rita’s voice had a piercing quality that projected all too well. Already they were the objects of arch, interested glances.

“Yes. Muskier. A fine Anglo-Saxon word.”

Honoria could think of nothing to say.

A comfortable silence—at least comfortable for Rita—ensued. Honoria hesitated as she paid for the rental and turned to say good-bye.

“It’s been… er… illuminating,” she stammered.

“It’s time we women got some eye candy,” said Rita as she wrapped up her transaction. The clerk struggled to contain his laughter. “No use letting the men have all the fun,” she added, apropos, in Honoria’s view, of nothing.

“The men?”

“Yes. Who else do you think watches blue movies with purported lesbians? Men, of course.”

She glared at Honoria, as if daring her to refute the statement. “Certainly no self-respecting lesbian would watch such a thing.” She gave a snort of derision and sailed out of the shop, leaving a nonplussed Honoria in her wake. Honoria looked sheepishly at the now frankly staring customers and gave a little shrug, palms up, as if to say, “What was
that
?”

T
ODAY
,
OF
course, Rita was as comfortable to Honoria as an overwashed old T-shirt. They played Schubert—badly—together at the piano. Both had a large collection of music, and they took turns listening to Honoria’s R&B and blues and Rita’s classical. For Rita’s sixty-fifth, Honoria had located a scratchy, jerky copy of the now out-of-print
Under the Big Top
. It had proved as bad as Rita had hoped. Vaguely sexy in parts, it sank, or perhaps soared, to farce in others. She had it copied so they could forever preserve their favorite scene: a distinctly ill-at-ease lion tamer wearing a jacket, boots, and nothing else, seemingly more exposed because of his clothes than because of his lack of them. The frogged and braided jacket more evocative of bellhop than of lion tamer. The tamer glancing nervously between where the camera obviously stood and the man he straddled, writhing exaggeratedly beneath him. The tamer’s apprentice looking bored as he moaned and spread his buttocks with his hands. The nervous licking of lips before the delivery of the sublime, unspeakable line. “Now, boy,” said the tamer, “you seen what I can do with those big pussy cats.” A glance at the camera, as if for approval. Then, slowly dragging the frayed end of the whip across the exposed entrance: “Let me show you what I can do with this kinda cat.”