Full Frontal Fiction (9 page)

He laughed. It was all I could do not to laugh with him. Maybe he was on crack right then, for all I know, because he kept all that hidden from me. In fact, maybe the crack was buried when he saw me. Put away in the chest of drawers in his head, and this was love, without crack and without any lies and without his petty-assed, trashy ways.

Maybe, maybe not.

I see them back there in the rearview. Tom A. and Tom B. Looking straight ahead.

“Tanks, you guys,” Tom B. says.

Dad awaits. So do Raquel's two friends, drag queens who go to her AA meetings. They are dressed conservatively, like ladies who go out to lunch but who also might have some mental health issues. Big, big hair, and they sit on my dad's couch, my dad offering them punch or something stronger.

“Punch. That sounds so innocent and sweet,” one drag queen says. Right when we came in, Raquel introduced us. This one is Mimi. The other's name is Salsa.

“This whole thing is sweet,” Salsa says.

I smile, and Dad goes to get the punch, and on his way he stops by and pats both Toms on the back. They are standing near a little table of gifts. As Dad pats them, though, his face goes white as a sheet. He almost falls down and has to go over to a dinette chair, panting real bad. The Toms and Raquel all look scared, but I focus on my dad, as Mimi and Salsa march over, Mimi saying she used to work in a hospital and knows CPR.

But Dad is not having a heart attack, I don't think. His face is pale but not pained.

“Wow,” he whispers to me.

“What?”

“When I touched those two,” he says.

“Tom and Tom?”

“Yeah.” He laughs. People are leaning into us, and I kind of nicely push them back.

“What?” I say.

“I saw this airplane hangar. You know. Great big corrugated metal, big as hell, and it had this red, well, this pink and red light. And I was at one end of it,” Dad says, and he sits up, and I back away and all the others stand, listening. It's suddenly quiet as hell.

“I was in this hangar, at one end, it was empty, and just that pink and red light. Like you know there was a fire somewhere. Then I heard this stampede coming from the other side. I swear to God. That was strong, people. Wow.” He laughs some more, and Mimi goes, “You psychic, honey?”

“Yes, I am,” Dad says. He looks up proudly, his bottom lip shaking like he might start crying. He's always been emotional.

“He's got a license,” I say, to back him up.

“Wow,” Mimi says, looking over at Raquel, like thank you for bringing us here. “Well, kiss my hand and tell me what I want for Christmas!” Mimi and Salsa laugh real loud, but Dad just stands up and walks over to the podium.

“Bring them over now. It's time,” he tells Raquel, and Raquel brings Tom and Tom over in front of the podium. I run over to the lights and flick switches to make it more intimate, turn on low music.

“This big hangar building,” Dad says, from the podium. Tom and Tom are right there in front of him. “Pink light, like exploding roses. The red-light district. Ha ha. No. A stampede. You gotta hear it. A thousand-plus feet. I am on the other side and I look up and all these shaved-headed people are running right at me in the red light. It's like they just got freed, you know? Like the concentration camp just opened its doors and they got out and they're running. They don't know where they're going or nothing. They're coming right at me. And I want that to happen. I want them to run me over.”

My dad is smiling with glassy eyes.

“I want them to run me over,” he says, looking right at Tom A. and Tom B. “And they do. They stomp all over me. They gotta get somewhere, don't they?”

He's asking the Toms, and Tom B. goes, “Yes.”

“They gotta get somewhere,” my dad says, and he closes his eyes. Then he opens them real quick.

“That's love,” he says.

After taking a sip from her punch, which she had to go get herself, Mimi says, “Amen, brother.”

It goes easier after that.

“Do you, Tom, take Tom here to be your husband?”

Tom A. nods his head, silent-movie sincere.

“What about you, Tom?”

“Yes, I do.” He kind of knows this is a joke, doesn't he? Tom B.'s pretty smart. He knows that life is filled with little jokes you have to take serious so that something means something.

“Well, okay then.”

My dad's face is plush and full of pride. I can see all those people coming at him, then at me. That big airport hangar or whatever, the red light. In my version, they are all smiling the way Tom A. does during a blow-job session. The light is blossoming from all of that, that red light is blood light. Love light. Lava-lamp light. Archie has a lava lamp in his bedroom, or used to. He would turn it on in the dark while we made love. “Real cheesy,” he would say. “Just call me your lava-lamp porn stud.” The ceiling would get translucent blisters, like jellyfish were splattering into themselves.

When they kiss, Tom and Tom in my dad's living room, it's embarrassing, sure. They kiss long and hard, two retarded guys kissing really wet. Dad just has to look away.

“That is so sweet,” Mimi says.

Salsa says, “Look at those two go at it.”

Raquel gets up, goes over and whispers to the two Toms, and they stop, both out of breath, standing back.

“I now pronounce them Tom and Tom,” Dad says.

Raquel comes over.

“I called Motel 6. They have adjoining rooms. I was gonna take them over and stay in the next room,” Raquel says. “But Mimi wants me to go with her. She's in some drag show. You think you could stay with them till I get done?”

Mimi's right next to her, begging me in high style, both long-nailed hands pressed together.

“Sure,” I say.

Raquel comes over to me then and hugs me tight, “We are so silly,” she whispers. “Ain't we?”

I look at her as we pull apart. She's in her forties but looks about sixty. Her hair is dyed. She's about to go bald. Those eyes though. I see us at some bar next week laughing about all this.

“We are,” I say.

Mimi and Salsa and Raquel go. Dad comes over, holding his head. “Migraine,” he whispers. “Tell both Toms goodbye for me. I can't. I'm gonna go to bed.”

“ 'Night,” I say.

I don't know what else to do but tell them to get into the car. I drive them over to the Motel 6.

Tom B. looks at me in the mirror as I drive.

“We didn't have rings, Anita,” he says, like he's just realizing it.

“You know, you're right. We'll have to get you rings tomorrow. We can go over to Kmart and get rings.” I try to smile.

They start kissing deep again in the backseat.

As soon as I pull into the Motel 6 lot, I tell them to break it up. I check us in. Our rooms are ready. It's doomed, I know, Tom and Tom. Or maybe Tom B. will escape and go and rescue Tom A. from the other group home. Maybe they'll walk across America and find themselves in paradise.

Tonight is paradise, isn't it? The Motel 6's rooms are beige with orange bedspreads. Yellow carpet. They march into their room, and Tom A., in his leisure suit, sits down and grins. Tom B. closes the door to the adjoining room, smiling.

I sit down on my bed and right then is when I see him, standing in the window. Out on the patio.

He starts tapping on the glass.

I can't help it. If he had a crack pipe I would let him stick it in my mouth, but instead I just let him into the room. He's shivering, he's jailhouse thin. He is in a long cowboy coat and jeans and a cowboy shirt. His eyes look hurt and happy and they seem to glow. My heart feels like all those shaved-headed freaks are marching over it. Love has to happen at the end of every night or you don't know yourself.

“I'm working,” Archie tells me, standing in front of the TV.

I nod my head. “You are, huh?”

“Who the hell are they anyway?” Archie asks, and he comes over and sits down on the bed next to me. “Are they those retarded people you work with? Why'd you bring them here?”

“I just did,” I say. “For the hell of it.”

Archie laughs. It's wheezy and warm. I want to crawl into his laugh like an orphaned baby onto a luxury liner. Go across the ocean to Europe where some kind lady wants me.

“I love you so much,” Archie says. “I should have told you and you could have helped me get off the stuff, but I was just ashamed. I'm sorry for what I did. I lied so much. I was sick, babe. It was like the drug took over, you know?”

I want to tell him to shut up. Want to kick his ass out. That's the next instinct, right after being overjoyed at seeing him, happy at being stalked. I remember when I first met him. It was at a bar in Hamilton, skanky redneck place me and a girlfriend used to go to shoot darts and get drunk. He was standing by the dartboard drinking and smoking, still in his work clothes, and I threw a dart and it almost got him. But he wasn't pissed.

“Cupid's arrow,” he said.

Then Archie and me hear them. Screaming. Silly crazy sex music. There's bumps and thumps against the thin walls. There's laughter.

“Good God,” says Archie.

But he isn't disgusted. He isn't even perturbed. He doesn't understand, but he's here with me, and that's next door.

“Are they having a good time or what?” he asks. He smells of cigarettes and beer and Brut and old pizza and sweat and love.

I guess I love him. I kiss him. That's all I can do.

Perverts.com

BY LAURIE STONE

WHEN YOU GO on the Internet and check out the pervert sites, it refreshes your respect for range. It's a rainbow world out there, and depending on where you stand on the pervert spectrum, it can make you feel small-time or pretty pleased with yourself. Take
Aboveaveragedicks.com
. It's modestly named. The dicks are substantially above average. The dicks of my acquaintance that are anatomically attached to people do not look like the cocks of stud racing horses or the limbs of 300-year-old trees. The “above average dicks” do. One was photographed from a worm's-eye view and curled up toward its host's ripped abs like an elephant's trunk. I wouldn't be surprised if it could pick up peanuts. Recently, my friend Bruce offered to show me a video of a guy pissing into his own mouth. I was eating dinner at the time and asked if I could take a rain check. Mr. Elephant Dick could certainly accomplish that feat.

The sites endeavor to protect the young. “Leave now if it is illegal for you to see naked women,” they entreat grade-schoolers who may not have boned up on the law. Even if they have, they're free to view pictures of naked men employing their orifices in imaginative ways. There is no evangelizing, unless, of course, you're into that. It is a come as you are environment. Although many of the menu choices strike me as ingenious, they are presented as if you, yourself, have already thought them up.
Fuckmeharder.com
and
oneblondefingeringanother.com
are unlikely to surprise as options, but I was impressed by the novelty of
pregnantandlactatingsluts.com
and
sodatbitchruinedyourlife.com
. Domain names can be a mouthful.

Exxxtremegermanmovies.com
doesn't offer Nazi porn, as might be expected, but rather hetero couples blasély performing vanilla sex while speaking German. It's a spin on tongue perversion. Some people just want you to talk German to them.
Clitcritic.com
is an orgasm-friendly site, with a soupçon of gynecological-exam perversion.
Facials.com
is for those who enjoy watching semen ejaculated on women's faces and for women who like to use jism for pore-reducing masks.
Puckerup.com
heralds the joys of anal penetration with objects attached to strings. And the homepage of
spanking.com
sports a businessman in shirt and tie with a naked woman across his lap, her butt high and her face near the floor. As his hand beats a regular tattoo, her rump turns bright pink.

While some perverts prefer other people's fantasies, an alternative group (among whom I number myself ) enjoys inventing their own. For us, there are such sites as
newbiepornsters.com
, for beginners,
mentalspycams.com
, for erotica themed around surveillance and paranoia, and
poetsandfilth.com
, about which I can speak from personal experience. We assemble in chat rooms and arouse each other either during real-time conversations, on which others may eavesdrop, or in emails sent to individuals or posted to the group. The rooms tend to be genre specific. The members of “Futuristic Switch Hitters” write about people who have multiple sets of genitalia and are therefore not, strictly speaking, either male or female, though butch and femme role-playing is still big in this world. “Fabio's Secret” hosts bodice-ripping pornographers. “Prufrock Sent Me” attracts mongers of sleaze with a bent toward pantoons and villanelles. I gravitate toward “Fetishes R Us.”

In general, we are a permissive community, and my chat room of choice is open to fetishists of all stripes. Recently, two newcomers entered with the screen names: scratchandsniff and everydayfiend. They arrived at nearly the same time, though I don't know if they had prior knowledge of each other, and I don't know either's sex. People can declare whatever they like, or refrain from declarations, without fear of detection. Sometimes, members of our group collaborate on a chain story, leaving off at a cliffhanger and passing it to the next writer. Some of the tales are more comical than lubricious, though they can be both. A chubby chaser might begin about removing the underpants of a 400-pound virgin—“They flapped like the sail of my childhood Sunfish.” A voyeur might shift the point of view to a neighbor with a peephole. And next might come an installment about wet suits, or one about toe sucking.

Scratchandsniff and everydayfiend didn't collaborate. Rather, each presented installments of two separate erotic diaries. Scratchandsniff wrote as Peg, everydayfiend as Alex. Peg was a nineteen-year-old ex– street punk, who was bartending at a club on Avenue B and writing poetry and music reviews for the online zine
Bristle.
Alex, a former heroin addict in his mid-thirties, lived in Tribeca and composed electronic music. I became captivated by these characters and felt irritable if, for some reason, their authors failed to post an update.

In her first entry, Peg wrote:

Dear Cyberpals,

Rolled out of bed around eleven. The sun was like a disgusting eyeball. Everything hurt. I stumbled into the bathroom and checked myself
for damage. Face okay. There was a man-in-the-moon-shaped bruise on
the top of my left thigh. Have no idea how it got there. I didn't do any
shit last night, though one of the regulars was handing out Ecstasy as if
he'd sold all his shares of AOL. I wasn't going to go home with anyone,
because I wanted to kick living like a vampire, but around three, Goldie
comes in looking hot. She's got this blond pageboy wig on. She looks
fucking like she could eat the world and suck on the pit. She knows I
like a little pain but not in public. I really want to go home so I can
write the next day. That review of the Pu f Adder concert is due. But she
says, “Come in the bathroom. I wanna show you something.” I wipe my
hands on a towel and follow her like a dog. Tra fic at the bar is thinning. It's almost time to close. We're in the dark hallway near the
phone. It stinks from cigarettes and spilled beer, and I get a whi f of piss
that's overshot the toilet. What she has to show me is a pair of lace
undies she is going to give me after she takes her knife and slices off the
ones I'm wearing.

She pushes open the bathroom door. She tells me to bend over, with
my hands on the sink, and put my ass in the air. Real romantic. I hear
her flip open her switchblade, and now I wish we weren't in a toilet and
having to be quick but were back at my place, sipping beer and talking
about what we were gonna do before we did it.

Gotta split.

Love,

Peg

Alex wrote,

Dear Friends,

Lila and I are in the kitchen when I ask what I could do that would
scare her. There is no irony in my voice. I can't maintain a sense of the
absurd and an erection at the same time. She's leaning against the
fridge. There's a shopping list attached to it with a magnet. “Semolina
bread with raisins and fennel.” Lila likes it. I forgot to shop. She doesn't
laugh, doesn't even crack a smile. She's wearing the bustier with the
laces in the back, the nice fetishy thing she bought for two hundred and
fifty dollars earned by proofreading legal briefs, so I would get a woody
when I saw her.

Lila has on a trancy look. Her eyes are at half-mast, and she licks her
bottom lip. A part of me wishes that, in bed, she would reach underneath
it and retrieve not the riding crop I keep there but a seltzer bottle. If she
did, I would probably look for another girlfriend. She says, “Tying me up
and leaving the apartment.” It sounds like she's saying, “Sweetie, I
made that chocolate mousse you like,” or “You'll win a Guggenheim
with that piece you just finished.” She asks what would scare me to do,
and I think: Nothing. Do I have limits? Well, yes, eating dead people.
Not that I wouldn't if I were in the Andes and my plane crashed...

I make up something I would actually do, so we can look forward to
someday doing it. “Piercing your navel.” I don't want to do this now,
even though I still have a sweet spot in my heart for needles. I want to
spank her a little and watch her squirm. I want to put my hand inside
her while I give her whacks, spacing them out, making her wait for me
to give her more. Tonight, we don't do anything for a while, except kiss.
Lila knows how to swirl her tongue. She's taking acting classes. When
you role-play with an actress, it makes you wonder whether she's acting
the role-playing or really into it. If I think about this too much, I can
get that “do not resuscitate” look on my face, but Lila knows how to lure
me back. She doesn't attract me apart from sex, which is a relief,
because that way I'm not liable to fall in love and make the usual mess
of things that causes women to hate me.

Over and out,

Alex

These letters were different from the postings I was used to finding in my mailbox. In the mornings, after preparing a double espresso and playing with my cat, I check my email. Typically the porn goes like this: “Late last night, thinking of you, I made myself come. I came hard. Hit my face. I imagined you tied, very tightly, so you could scarcely move. My come was on your nipples. You looked up at me as I rubbed and pinched my come into your nipples until it was gone. I studied your eyes, your sounds, your odors, and your wetness. I used my fingers, hands, teeth, lips, tongue, nipples, hair, cock, and toys on you. I played with your anticipation. After prolonged teasing, my fingers pushed deeply into you, and my tongue made you come—long and hard. I like to orchestrate and control my lover's arousal. I'd like to fuck and dom you. What are your thoughts on this? I think of you as attractive. You need to know my looks, and perhaps you will. You will be pleased.”

Variant letters propose that I do the “orchestrating” and use my body and toys for stimulation. Given my screen handle, “privateparts,” my correspondents can't be sure of my sex or erotic preferences, though most assume they are writing to someone who has them. One writer addressed me as “mischiefdujour.” Sometimes the scenarios I receive are long and detailed, with several sessions of sex, the inclusion of voyeurs, and the possibility of being discovered. Women write, men write—at least people identifying themselves as men and women. I hear from tops, bottoms, leather freaks, rubber devotees, whip masters, etc. The letters are intended as lines to inhale or substances to roll up and smoke. Throwaway intoxicants. Something to make me come or to make the writer come. New ones arrive as regularly as pigeons on the sill and
The New York Times
at the door.

The letters from Peg and Alex hardly ever culminated in coming, didn't even get that far into sex.

“Dear Cyberfreaks,” Peg signed on again,

I was nursing a bagel at Limbo and feeling majorly pleased with
myself for not being hungover. Like my mind could see all the way
across the Hudson to New Jersey, to the fucking Palisades Parkway,
where I think there are picnic tables my dad once pulled over to. I
picked up a copy of
NY Press
and saw an ad for a writer's workshop. I
don't have the bucks, but it got me thinking I should try and save. I've
never been able to do that without tricking, and I can't look at another
dick and pretend to be happy to see it. Then I think: Why the hell not?
A lot of stu f people have to do is gross. Like cleaning bedpans.

I'm wondering why I am making a case for myself as a hooker or as
someone who cleans up other people's shit, when Goldie comes in. She
seems surprised to see me and goes to the bar to get a co fee, giving me
a little wave. She takes forever adding milk and sugar, then decides she
wants a scone and waits at the bar again. I'm thinking of leaving, so I
don't have to see her deciding whether or not to sit with me, but I don't
want to go. I want to think about the rest of my life. Goldie places a
packet of jam next to the scone. Her co fee is in an aquamarine cup.
The saucer is salmon, and the plate with the scone is lilac. Festive. She
turns and walks in my direction, still not making eye contact. I look at
my bagel. It's cold and hard. After what seems forever, Goldie stands in
front of me, places her co fee on the Formica table, and pulls out a chair
with her free hand.

“Hi,” she says, with a lopsided grin that works on me like a hot knife
in butter. She's not even pretty when you look closely. There are little
lines around her eyes that are way premature. Maybe from the sawdust
she kicks up building people's lofts. She asks what I've been up to. I
want to tell her about my writing, but when I do she looks like she'd
rather be waiting at the dentist's. She likes to hear about my turning
tricks. She likes to imagine me working over guys, having the upper
hand, which I never have.

She tells me she is building a set at a theater on Franklin Street. It's
a challenge, because the stage slopes down toward the audience and,
because the play is about a dream, the walls have weird angles, too. I
ask if she's read it. She says no, then breaks off apiece of her scone, puts
jam on it, and o fers it to me without saying anything, expecting me to
tilt back my chin and open my mouth. I do. She places the morsel on
my tongue like a communion wafer. I lick the tips of her fingers, which
taste salty and sweet, and now I don't care about saving money or the
writing workshop. I can't see to New Jersey, can't see to the next block.
I want Goldie to invite me back to her place. If she does, I will go knowing that, when I leave, she won't say when we will meet again. I will tell
myself it doesn't matter, even though it does.