Memories That Smell Like Gasoline (3 page)

He followed me across the street into the sixth avenue subway, down two flights of stairs, nobody around but one passenger running for a train down a faraway staircase in the gloom. I slowed up and was in between station platforms when he grabbed me and pulled me close. There was something silly about it but I didn't resist because it was hot too. He pulled open his pants revealing more scrapes on his muscular legs and his prick was growing hard and he formed the soundless words: I like you. His enormous hands pulled apart my shirt and slid around my chest and under my arms and pulled my shirt back over my shoulders, his grizzled face burrowing into my neck. The earth has a volume, my brain has a volume, and I can't turn it down; I can't shut it off, but it's moments like this that I sure know how to swim inside it. He's going into a slow motion crouch, his hands moving around rapidly like animated birds. As my dick is beginning to slide into his mouth I realize he's trying to pick my back pocket. I pulled his hands away and lifted them to my mouth where I sucked on his fingers. He looked up still blowing me trying to read my eyes like a bulletin. My eyes were blank. He slowly pulled his hands away from my mouth and eased them back towards my pockets. We both understood each other. I locked onto his hands again and threaded my fingers through his and made fists and started fucking his face more violently. I didn't know if he was armed and I was trying to figure out my exit. On the platform below I could hear my train approaching from the distance. It was almost painful the way he twisted his fingers till I let go and his hands insistently went to my pockets; he was starting to get rough. I leaned over and kissed the top of his head and thrust my knee forward sudden and sharp catching him in the chest, sending him backwards down a couple of stairs, that startled mouth gaping and those eyes opening wide, enough time to pull my pants closed and rush down the steps three at a time to the train whose doors had just begun to open. I hopped on with him behind me bellowing and the train doors shut with him on the other side, fingers trying to press between to pull them apart, rage coloring his face. He never got in and I turned and slumped into a seat and realized the car was filled with sleeping winos. Christmas eve and I'm on a train full of drunks heading toward another future*

SPIRAL

1

Back near the monitor the blazing light of the hand jerking the hardened dick is creating a blind spot to the right of it in the room and I can just about make out some silhouetted shape of a guy in shorts and shirt opened, knowing this because as he moves from dick to dick his shirt floats like a curtain billowing into light and disappearing again and he's got a baseball cap on. I'm moving into this blind spot to watch and he's on his knees sucking some kid's prick. There's an old man In the darkest shadows his flesh is a bland color just a dead white, emptied of blood and he seems afraid of the light keeps shifting weight from one foot to the other in a squatting position at some point the sucking guy has his back to the old man and he's leaning over the ledge to get another guy's prick in his mouth and the old man takes a large hand and peels the guy's shorts down in a slow motion insistence and soon has his tongue planted firmly between the guy's cheeks. The guy starts rolling his ass in the air in circular motions and continues sucking the prick of the stranger before him. The old guy is lapping away like a puppy with a bowl of milk and I'm standing there in the darkness and there's a stream of water or something snaking across the floor and the pale glow of faces staring towards us at the monitor that I can only see sideways and on the angled screen is a pair of eyes looking dreamily up at the owner of a fat dick that's slowly sinking down his throat. A man enters the basement and walks over in my general direction momentarily blinded by the monitor and he runs into me before his eyes adjust, instead of backing up he reaches out and pulls me into a hug his arms muscled and hard and his embrace is squeezing air from my lungs. I rub my hands over the surface of his body his clothes and an almost indiscernible dampness to his shirt his body hard as wood his lips grazing my neck his hand pulling my head down so that he can softly bite the nape of my neck dragging his tongue around to my ear up and down the lines of my throat and my fingers are loosening his belt and my hands slip through his open zipper into all that warmth inside his underwear and down under his balls and his hand is on the back of my neck on my shoulders and he's pushing and I'm sinking down slow into a crouching position and from there slipping my hands beneath the edge of his white t-shirt and the t-shirt is tight and he's beginning to sweat his body generating intense heat and my mouth is opening and I'm licking under his balls the length and head of his dick is falling across the bridge of my nose resting against my eyelids and one of my hands swings up to wipe across my mouth to collect spit and then falls to my cock and I'm slicking it up with spit creating a random rhythm while licking at the base of his dick his hands are in my hair moving around cradling the base of my skull. As I stand back up I'm losing myself in the pale cool color of his flesh in the shadows and he takes my head in his hands and pulls my face close to his gaze and I realize he's one of those guys that you know absolutely that if you'd met him twenty years earlier you both could have gone straight to heaven but now mortality has finally marked his face. He was really sexy though; he was like a vast swimming pool I wanted to dive right into.

2

All I can remember was the beautiful view and my overwhelming urge to puke. I was visiting my friend in the hospital and realizing he was lucky. Even though he was possibly going blind he did get the only bed in the room that had a window and a view. Sixteen floors up overlooking the southern skies as all the world spins into late evening. It was a beautiful distance to drift in but I still wanted to throw up. There among the red and yellow clouds drifting behind the silhouettes of the skyline was the overwhelming smell of human shit. It was the guy in the next bed; all afternoon he'd been making honking sounds like a suffocating goose. He was about ninety years old and I only got a glimpse of him and saw that they'd strapped an oxygen mask over his leathered face and when he screamed it sounded like a voice you'd hear over a contraption made of two tin cans and a piece of wire. Calling long distance trying to get the operator. Someone in charge. Someone in authority. Someone who could make it all stop with a pill, a knife, a needle, a word, a kiss, a smack, an embrace. Someone to step in and erase the sliding world of fact.

3

This kid walks into my sleep he's maybe seventeen years old stretches out on a table says he's not feeling well. He may be naked or else wearing no shirt his hands behind his head. I can see a swollen lump pushing under the skin of his arm pit. I place my hands on his stomach and chest and try to explain to him that he needs to be looked at by a doctor. In the shadows of this room in the cool blue light the kid, a very beautiful boy, looks sad and shocked and closes his eyes like he doesn't want to know or like somehow he can shut it all out.

Later some guy appears in the place. He has an odd look about his face. He tries to make it known that he knows me or someone close to me. He leans in close has flat dull eyes like blue silvery coins behind his irises. I think it is the face of death. I get agitated and disturbed and want to be left alone with the kid. Try to steer him away to some other location. He disappears for a moment and then reappears in the distance but far away isn't far enough. I turn and look at the kid on the table he looks about ten years old and water is pouring from his face.