Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica (7 page)

She arched way back and pulled her hand out of her panties when she came, and there were beads of sweat on her forehead

and nose. She reminded me of Egon Schiele’s
Reclining Woman with Legs Apart
, her body contorted in libidinous repose.

SERGEANT SAVINE

Esmeralda petted Cash’s head as we entered the room. He said over and over, I’ll kill the motherfucker. Professor went into the bathroom and puked again while Mathis, Boner, and Preacher Boy looked at Cash with flat amazed faces. Preacher Boy ran down to the basement to look for a corpsman, and we left Esmeralda with Cash. We had to find the Ether Bandit. Bad shit would soon be go- ing down, and we were going to be the arbiters of the bad shit and the world should stand the fuck by.

PFC BROCKNER

Simon started getting uppity, uppity little whore, I called him. He swung at me one night when I wouldn’t stop. He said, Please stop. You have to be fucking stupid to use the words
Please stop,
so I kept fucking, and harder, and I am a big man, so it was not hard to continue. He swung again and hit me in the jaw, which I barely felt, and I beat him severely, but not his ugly face. I pummeled his kidneys and chest and the back of his head until he cried and my knuckles and fingers were swollen and stuck in a fist, and he continued to cry and I left him there in the lounge, moaning like a little bitch.

The first time I used the ether in the desert was at a USO show out in the mining areas near Ash Shama. It was an amusing show, Brooke Shields singing and playing off the Muslim-censored jokes of Steve Martin and Bob Hope. Amusing but not funny. Hope

told a joke about going blind from masturbation, and that’s the only one I remember. Marines were dropping from heat exhaus- tion, some of the units having hiked fifteen or more miles for the morale boost, guys trying to stand on tip-toes and locking their knees, and that’s when they’d drop. The corpsmen had a heat ex- haustion tent set up, thirty cots with IV drips, and half a dozen exam rooms. I always carried my jar of ether and a skivvy shirt in my ass-pack, and I hadn’t planned it, but in all the mess of bodies and the sweaty movement of troops out of the area after the show, I slipped into the medical tent and one of the exam rooms where a young marine lay dizzy and confused on a cot, maybe hallucinat- ing. I rubbed his shoulder and told him he’d be okay, in a few hours he’d be up and around, and I covered his pretty face with the ether rag and he was out quickly. I could hear from the other side of the curtain corpsmen and doctors shouting orders and marines on cots moaning and bitching. I turned him on his side, still hooked up to his IV, and pulled myself out. I pulled his trousers down past his knees. I spit on the end of my dick and started slowly in. I wanted to spank him, I wanted to make noise, but I couldn’t. I en- tered him slowly and the blood began and that helped with getting in and then I was in all the way. When I finished I wiped myself off with the ether shirt and I left the young, pretty marine’s trousers down at his knees and a bloody mess covering his ass and the olive drab cot. I kissed his hip. Let them have their guns.

SERGEANT SAVINE

We assumed the Ether Bandit had left the building. But we broke up into teams and searched every room on every floor, looking for a clue. I went down to the basement. The pogues and line grunts

had broken up their party, and Thomas and his girls cleaned the mess of broken bottles and cigarette butts and used condoms. It struck me as funny how no matter where we were in the world, the Marine Corps handed out condoms. Always cheap condoms, Shank usually, or sometimes Splendor, but they handed them out even in the middle of the desert, which meant to me they knew the whorehouse existed. Thomas had to be kicking down to someone, either whores or money or both. Probably he was dealing drugs as well, but he never brought us in on that. He must’ve figured not to with the snipers, we were all hard motherfuckers, hard, crazy motherfuckers with the cinema of war going on in our eyes, and he must’ve known we wouldn’t touch his shit. In Vietnam the fight- ers were all fucked up on dope, and they did very little good for the battle plan. Sure, it’s glamorous, shooting smack or smoking stick before going into the shit, it’s all glamour in those bullshit movies, but let me see a sniper put a bullet in an enemy officer’s skull from a grand out while he’s high as fuck on any kind of dope. Won’t fucking happen. Sure, before we joined The Suck we all daydreamed of getting high in the bush and taking out an entire enemy patrol, but the fighter doesn’t need movies. The civilian and the pogue need movies.

Professor screamed, I found something, I found a skivvy shirt! He ran down the third-floor corridor with an olive drab skivvy shirt balled up in his right fist. He shoved it in my face, and I smelled the faint sweet scent of ether, and also the muddy stench of blood and shit and come. We had the same thought at the same time—look in the neckband for a name neatly stamped in black, half-inch block letters. BROCKNER BF. No one we knew. A pogue of course, a fucking pogue running around ass-raping for fun.

Esmeralda went home to her husband. A corpsman stitched Cash up and gave him some pills for the pain. Nothing could be done for the mind fucking he’d received, worse than a boot camp mind fuck, worse than all of the fuck fuck games ever thrown his way. A damn good thing it happened at Thomas’s. With medical supplies and a corpsman nearby, the word wouldn’t spread. And with the word not getting out, we could complete our reconnaissance.

PFC BROCKNER

I started taking chances. After the USO show seeming so easy, and so nice to be in that young marine’s ass, I couldn’t help myself.

Very early one morning, I raped a jarhead at the port. I couldn’t sleep and went down to the head for a shit-shower-shave. I wore flip-flops and shorts and nothing else, with my war belt over my shoulders and my shower gear in my ass-pack. The Saudi morn- ings were pleasant, ripe cool floating in from the coast, taste of salt and sky before the blistering heat came down to blur the world. The heads at the port weren’t plush like in the tower, but they were kept clean. I heard water running when I walked in, and whistling coming over the shower wall. A young marine, I imagined, who finally got a call patched through to his girlfriend, the girlfriend he needed assurance from that she hadn’t fucked his best friend or brother. He whistled away, I don’t know what tune, but he sounded happy. I stripped down and walked into the steamy shower, and we gave the obligatory hello nod that straight men give each other in public showers. Yes I am naked and so are you and maybe we will take quick appraising glances, but that’s all.

He kept whistling, which at first bothered me. Then I ad- mired the boldness of it—I am so happy over my girlfriend I will

whistle in this shower at 3:00
A
.
M
. in Saudi Arabia, here I am gearing up for war, but I will whistle even with this stranger near me in the shower. I took more than appraising glances and started getting hard—blue veins—his solid fine ass, the thin, fine flow of water snaking down his back and onto his ass, down his muscular legs, across the back of his knees, down his Achilles’ tendon and slithering onto the concrete deck, into the drain.

I dried off and set up for a shave and prepared the ether shirt. He continued to whistle as he exited the shower and worked his way toward a sink behind me. My face lathered, I looked at him and asked him his unit. He mumbled off an air wing squadron, something about electronics. I told him I was a grunt with the 3rd Marines. Once he lathered his face, hot water steaming from the sink and obscuring the mirror, I covered his mouth and nose with the ether shirt. He fought. He caught me in the ribs with an elbow and he pulled on my right ear, yanking so hard I thought he’d rip it off, but I held the shirt close and hard to his face, and he went under. Too much ether could cause death, not enough would give the person a good buzz—a good buzz they could easily snap out of. I dragged him into the shower. I had trouble opening him up, and I came quickly, just barely inside. I pointed a cold shower at him and cleaned myself, washing the shaving cream from my face, washing my crotch, his blood and the foamy shaving cream mixing together and trickling off of me and down into the drain.

SERGEANT SAVINE

A few weeks after Cash’s rape, Johnson, at Division ConAd, tracked Brockner down for us. He was a pogue, 6th CSSB, a god- damn mechanic.

PFC BROCKNER

And then I really fucked up. I went out to the whorehouse that Simon’s friend Thomas ran, thinking it would be good cover. I’d drink some drinks and listen to music and party, probably not even take a whore upstairs, just buy her a few drinks and let her sit on my lap for a dance or two. But the same old whore- house scene bored me, just like in Oki or the PI, so I walked around the hospital thinking I might be able to break into a med locker and find some painkillers that I could sell or trade for guard shifts. On the fourth floor I heard a whore scream- ing and hollering and a jarhead fucking her rough. I leaned against the wall opposite their room and watched through the open door. The jarhead fucked her from behind, and he had a pretty body and so did she. She had long dark Flip hair that was flying all over the place, stuck in his mouth and hers too, the both of them sweating, the both of them soaking wet with sweat and sex. After he came, she got up quickly, scurrying around the floor for her clothes. He was angry, asking why she always leaves so soon, why she goes back to the basement to fuck other jarheads, why doesn’t she stay the night? She cussed at him in a mixture of English and Tagalog, telling him he was just a boy and that she had a life to live, that she had children and a husband in the Philippines she had to support, and what the fuck did he have to do every day but wake up and shit? He didn’t respond, and really, what could he have said? She rushed out of the room as I backed into the opposite doorway. I heard another jarhead coming up the stairwell with a woman, and they entered a room at the other end of the hall.

My jarhead was on the bed, belly down, crying, wadding up the corner of the pillow with his fist. He screamed
whore
and
fuck
. I covered his face with the ether shirt and he fought, but not much, not like the guy at the port.

And here is how I fucked myself: I rushed out of the room, knowing that any minute another jarhead would be heading up with a girl, and I didn’t close my ass-pack. As I ran down the hall or a stairwell, my ether shirt fell out, my ether shirt with my name stamped in the neckline, just like they teach at boot camp, cen- tered above the tag. I didn’t notice this until I made it back to the port. And then I had only to wait.

SERGEANT SAVINE

We decided to make it real simple. We’d abduct him and take him out to the middle of the desert and make up a little hell for him, let Cash work on him, work the kind of evil we’d been trained to practice on the enemy, but so little going on with the enemy, still not the real shit going down, just minor missions across the border, so why not let this pogue rapist catch a bit of our fury?

We hung around the tower at the port where Brockner per- formed guard duty and watched him for a few days. He rarely left. His platoon members brought him hot chow. He only exited the tower for morning and afternoon company formation.

One afternoon when one of his platoon mates headed in with a plate of hot chow, Cash gave the guy a note for Brock- ner. We found out from ConAd Johnson that Brockner grew up in Winnemuca, Nevada, and he’d joined the corps on the Buddy Pro- gram with a Corporal Jennings. We forged a note from Jennings:

Hey, fucker, I’m here now, too. Far ways from Winnemuca. Come down and let’s shoot the shit.

It was a chance, because maybe he still knew Jennings, maybe they’d butt-fucked in high school or they kept in touch, and he knew Jennings was on nuclear duty in Juneau, Alaska. But we had to try. Plus, all the guys we knew who joined on the Buddy Program hated their buddy and blamed their buddy for royally fucking them and had lost touch with their buddy. But if the buddy shows up in your area, you can’t just say fuck you.

Brockner walked out ten minutes later. Cash head-butted him, knocked him out cold. We threw him in the back of the Hummer, tied and gagged him, and diddy’d out to the middle of the des- ert, out to the long-distance range, ready for a little show-and-tell, some live fire.

PFC BROCKNER

Of course Jennings wasn’t in the desert. But the writing on the note looked like his. I walked out the door and the guy took me down. I came to in the back of a Hummer, facedown, hands and feet tied, mouth gagged. I was burning up, the drive train spinning below me, the bed of the Hummer at least 150 degrees. I knew who they were. Thomas told Simon that the Ether Bandit had hit a sniper at his whorehouse and that the snipers were pissed off and ready to take someone out.