98 Wounds (2 page)

She says she's okay, but she is not. The cancer has spread. She is in pain even with the morphine drip, she hurts like nothing I can imagine, even as my own body is aching like I've been torqued in some sadistic gym machine.

Mom is lying there without her make-up on and the lines in her face are showing. Mom and make-up were always a twin deal. “There are no ugly girls, just lazy ones,” her pearl of wisdom she imparted to my sisters and girl cousins, extolling the virtues of lipsticks, blushes, eyeshadows and eyeliners, all to a wave of rolled eyeballs. Mom's idea of perfect make-up is the panstick of Mary Kay and Avon ladies. Merle Norman was her goddess. But here she is, lying in pain and make-up-less; frankly I always thought she looked better without all that make-up on. But her face shows such exhaustion. And in the reflection in the stainless steel implements in the room, I can see how tired I look too.

I pull up a chair and sit beside her, and I make my excuses: I had a project due. I had an out-of-town work assignment. I keep missing the window of visiting hours. Can she see the lies? They say parents always know. My siblings have all been in and out all week, on a schedule, a rotation that nobody even bothered to include me in or inform me of. I put my hand over hers. I'm not sure which of ours is colder or clammier. “You look tired,” she says. “You look so tired and so thin.”

“I'm okay. I'm not. Don't start to nag now.” I can hear myself getting slightly irritated and try to tamp it down a notch, try to sound good-natured and jokey. What the hell is wrong with me?

“Okay,” she says. She senses that kernel of irritation, she's seen it bloom and explode into such ugliness so many times in our life, she's jousted against it so many times in the past but not now. Her tone turns apologetic. “It's just that I worry about you a lot.”

“Mom! We're can all take care of ourselves. You don't need to worry.”
Don't sound pissy. Be a normal fucking child for once, you shit. Be good. Be nice.

“Mothers will always worry.” I have heard her say this so many times, even as I know that soon I'll never hear it said ever again. “When you all were small, when you were younger, Dad and I, sometimes….”

I put my head down on the side of the bed to rest my head. I am tired, so fucking tired, and I don't want to see Mom like this. I want to see her in the kitchen roasting a chicken, sewing new curtains, working the salad shooter, going to church, arguing with Dad and me and my brother, gardening, plotting a trip to Australia and coming home with tacky souvenirs. She puts her hand on my head and strokes my head. My grandma lived with us when I was in preschool and during afternoon nap-time she would lie beside me and stroke my head and tickle my ear until I fell asleep. With Mom stoking my head, I feel like a little kid again.

I wake with a start. I must have fallen asleep. Mom is sleeping quietly. It is late afternoon. I walk out of the hospital and head home, fingering the lighter in my pocket. It is a cigar lighter, a name brand no less, a heavy chrome thing that fires a fierce blue flame. It's great for pipes since it burns cleaner and hotter. I go home, dig my pipe out of the bedside drawer, fire the lighter up, and smoke what's left in the pipe until the glass bulb is clean. The smoke burns exquisitely into my cheeks and into my lungs, and the familiar bile-like taste fills my mouth and throat, and I can feel my energy returning. I wipe the lighter clean, it was something a trick left behind. I scrape together a couple of watches, some useless electronics. I head over to the pawn shop and bargain with the proprietor. In the end, he gives me a decent price. I head on past all the junkies, whores, and dealers on the street until I reach Church Street where I pop into the flower store. I buy a spray of flowers. Orchids, tulips, lilies, irises, a twig or two of cherry blossoms or was it pussy willows? The fey guy behind the counter graciously wraps the whole thing with greens and binds it beautifully with a rattan twine. I pop into the deli nearby and buy a small bag of the pineapple jam tarts that Mom likes so much, and head on back to the hospital. She is still sleeping when I return. I want her to wake to her favorite snack and a big colorful living vibrant thing in her room. To awaken to a loveliness and a treat, the way her life should have been, and not the haggard reminder of disappointment and worry that I've heaped on her for so long.

I look at Mom in the yellow setting sunlight that is peeking through the blinds. Her face is pale, and it really has been a long time since I have seen her without her make-up. The thing about her face are her eyebrows. She had them tattooed on years ago – “now I don't ever have to worry about penciling or plucking anymore,” she announced – and now she is lying here, her face is truly drawn and tired and I see how sick she really is, sicker than ever, and she is all eyebrows, eyebrows, thick dark painted-on sharp-edged eyebrows.

Somedays, I want to just disappear, escape to somewhere. Get in the car and drive, live out that Bruce Springsteen song and every other Springsteen song about driving on the heck outta there. I have two months back-rent to pay, the bills are piling up, the highs are higher, and the lows are no worse than they have ever been, my health is shorting out. I want to have a normal life, whatever that may be, and whether I'm even capable of that or not is questionable. I want to be a good man, a good man to more than one man. I want to know how to do this.

We are still in mad love. We are in the truck headed for Pismo Beach, inspired by the Bugs Bunny cartoon. He is sleeping, breathing roughly, slumped against the car door, the seat-belt cutting into his cheek. My brain is telling me to stay awake, that I will be all right. My body is telling me that it is shutting down fast. My arm is twitching, my elbow hurts. I am afraid that I'm driving blind, about to fall asleep at the wheel. I look at the dashboard. There's half a tank of gas; it's enough to get us there.

You have the kind of cum that I like, thick yet fluid without the strange lumps that plague some ejaculates, a nice fine blend. Mine, on the other hand, has the consistency of the unnamed white stuff that you might find on tables in vegetarian restaurants. Walking down the street with you, people assume that I'm your little boy. Would they be surprised to know you let me put you on a leash and take you to public restrooms where men suck each other at urinals and masturbate each other under partitions leaving their jism in careless splatters on the tiled floors? You obediently go down on all fours and lap up the spatter, some turned liquid, some grey with shoeprint tracks, left by men whose urges have long subsided and gone.

I call you on the phone and you rush to a designated restroom in a quiet office building where I have procured a decent puddle of cum for you. I place the collar on your fleshy neck with the spikes turned inward, attach the heavy chain to it, both pieces picked out by you, and take you to sex clubs and adult bookstores where you dash about like a naughty puppy, vigorously licking at every spot of cum you find. Often I have to jerk on the chain to calm you down. I take my task with some amount of gravity and would like to take you on a good methodical sweep of the premises, you would prefer to dash at every glob that you spy in any corner.

No, people would not assume anything of that sort when they see how you rush to buy me drinks at bars, how dapper you look in your expensive clothes, how you fawn over me and hold my hand at the symphony. Your slowly receding hairline, your slightly paunchy belly, the lines in your face starting to show, your homosexual cravings sure. You look like a kindly uncle, an older professor indulging in some non-academic fancies.

You are a connoisseur of your craving; you approach each spot of cum as if you were a zoologist in search of some elusive animal: this one was spat out, this was flicked from a hand, this one tried to dash to the safe place to prevent a mess, this was in a rush, this hadn't cum in days. How much of this is fancy I do not question. This one went to the market, this one cried wee-wee-wee all the way home.

Once I told you my theory of Mormons and how their cum would taste somehow different because Mormons were the human equivalents of range-free chicken. All that clean living and loose underwear must have some effect on those testicles, and you promised me that you would find out the truth about Mormon cum.

Once, just once, we stumbled upon a rare find, something you never found again: a mid-sized puddle of cum with a spot of blood in it, perhaps the poor bloke had a bladder or urethral nick, perhaps there were bleeding gums. You put your face so close to the pool and instead of your usual vigor you very slowly dipped the tip of your tongue into the spooge. You took more than five minutes to finish lapping that small puddle. After that, you developed a deep fear of your craving and you wrote fifteen letters to sex advice columnists in several magazines and newspapers asking for some counsel. For weeks, you scanned the columns trying to find your letter, but the letters were always the same: small dicks, large dicks, burst condoms, fear of intimacy, can't find small enough dicks, can't find large enough dicks, regrettable sex, want to do something the other doesn't and vice versa. You took this as a sign that all was well and your deviance was well within the range of normal deviances and in celebration of this epiphany I took you on another feeding.

Once, in a private moment, I asked you what those puddles of jism tasted like, if each was in some way better than the other, if I should lead you to fresh splotches and forgo the ones sitting for so long till they become indistinguishable from snot. Your answer surprised me, you said they all tasted the same. It tasted of all the men you never had, you said. The urgency in your voice scared me, and I told you I had a dream about nachos.

You tell me I am a faggot piece of shit and that I do not deserve your dick. You snap your finger and point to your boot. I go down and lick the tip of your shoe, allow you to step on my face, to cram the tip of your boot down my mouth. You reward me by spitting into my mouth and fucking my mouth in slow, sharp thrusts. On my knees when I look up at you, you purse your lips and a gleam of spit forms on your mouth that I take willingly into my mine. Sucking your dick, my mouth fills with the sour sting of your piss that I choke down. I let you pinch my nipples until they hurt for days.

I adore your large-balled fists as they smack across my head, each blow a token of your affection and my worthlessness. I teach you how to cut into my flesh with a sharp knife like so many words. You say that I am your dog and I say
less than that
. You wrap your big hands around my neck, I have seen how you snap barbequed beef ribs into two at dinner tables, a messy display of strength to split a piece of yummy treat for us to share. You close your hands around my small neck, my face turns red, I cum hard and you eat the jism off my hands, off my thighs, and off the floor like a gentle goat at the petting zoo.

With my hand up your arse, I can feel the strange squish of your colon in my gloved hand insulating me from your body temperature. The rubber glove, cool against my palm, not long enough to shield my forearm from your warm sphincter and the blood and juices staining my arm a medicinal pink, the color of fresh kill. I uncurl my fist and snap it close again like a sea anemone inside of you; I run my arm in and out of you as if I were digging crab traps on a soft, low tide beach.

You wince when I grab the nub in your pelvis where your spinal cord ends, a hard lump that hides bundles of nerves and arteries, the stuff that tragic car accidents and snapped bungee cords are made of. With my free hand I caress the front of your body, fingering the nipples embedded in your hairy chest, running my hand down the bristly extent of your body, I say hoarse,
Breathe, relax. Take a deep breath.
But whatever you have punching your heart through your bloodstream doesn't even allow you that comfort and I refuse to take my hand out of you even as you plead with me to. I lean over to place your cock in my mouth and you say
Bite my dick
. I clench my teeth down in the middle of your shaft, I draw your foreskin under my teeth and nip into the elastic flaps, you flinch and bear down on my fist sweaty from the heat of your body and the tight non-porous constraints of the rubber glove. I pull my hand out, turn the glove inside out, and hold it up to you. The insides of the glove now filled with traces of your shit and anal slime stained by your internal ruptures. You slip your hand into the glove, retrieve your fluid insides and devour it like a stupid dog that would slurp at anything in front of it. I wipe off the bloodied mucus from my forearms on your back and go home to my cat, my computer, my books.

You put on your clothes, clean up, and return to your lover, your ex-wife and kids and job and politics and upper income life, you call to make plans to meet again, you drop everything when I call you, you do everything I tell you, you buy me gifts and take me to places I cannot afford to go, you tell me your problems with life, work, and love, I listen and make no judgments nor comment, I feed you my cum on occasion though you never ask for it and I seldom offer, and with each tender caress, each deeply done kiss, we slowly become the objects of our hate so much that we wish for nothing more than to see the other dead.

The path is different for everyone… Drugs will take some
people directly to Heaven, others to Hell. Some, to both
over time. Your body is your temple and how you choose to
worship amongst your own congregation is entirely up to you.

—Neal Drinnan,
Izzy and Eve

The diarrhea had gotten so bad that fucking his ass was like poking at an overfilled water-balloon with the jagged-edged finger of a chronic nail-biter. He knew this would happen, it always does. He needed help and he needed help fast. No bulking agents for this boy. He wanted something hard, something that would score his ass. He ended up at his dealer's. At any point of your life, you might have to have sex with your dealer, so it helps to have a dealer you wouldn't mind having sex with.

He is in a dingy residential hotel. Sitting in his underwear on the edge of the scant mattress. He feels the fleas or mites, something, biting him underneath his thighs, he thinks he can feel them burrowing into the elastic band, setting their nests. His dealer is arranging and measuring the baggies. Scattered on the bed is an assortment of dildos and buttplugs. Sticky half-used bottles of lube – some with dust balls and lint, matted twines of fur and stringy hairs stuck to them – litter the bed, too. His dealer lets him take a small hit from the glass pipe. But there are no small hits really, only ravenous gulps of air, and whatever might be in it. He wants more. He can feel his bowels solidifying. This is good, he thinks.

“You see this dildo?” the dealer says, pointing to one of the large fleshy disembodied cocks on the bed.

“Yeah,” he says. He swallows another hit.

“It's big, huh? You think you can take it in your ass?”

“It is a little too big for me,” he says.

“Well, if you want anything at all, if you want me to give you anything at all, you will let me put it in you. Fuck you with it.”

He thinks for a while. He takes another hit. He takes his prepared shot. He agrees.

He lies on his back with his legs spread apart. The hit is prickling right through his body. He can feel it spread through him as if every capillary was trying to go neon. This must be what it feels like to be pickled, what a beetroot or an onion or a cucumber undergoes, he thinks this funny.

The dealer is lubing the dildo. He grabs a bottle of lube and squirts some of the tacky fluid onto his fingers, smears it onto the ass. He runs a finger or two into the ass to loosen it up.

He can feel the warm slush of his shit still there.

The dealer pokes at the butthole with the head of the dildo. The butthole puckers up. The dealer pokes at it with a bit more force.

He tries to loosen up, and the hits he has taken is helping. Poppers, he thinks. That will open everything up. White Rabbits would fall through. Rosebud would not be the name of his sled.

The dealer mercifully changes tactics and proceeds with a smaller training butt-plug. The dealer pushes the butt-plug into the ass.

He breathes in the right moment and motion, and the cruel projectile slips in but not without some sharp pain.

The dealer lets him have another hit, a good big beautiful deep one while twisting the butt-plug around.

His hole feels looser, but he's not sure. He's sure he's had much bigger things up there before but he also knows that one shouldn't live in the past.

The dealer pulls the butt-plug out. And again, he breathes at the right moment and the pain is assuaged in that breath. He can feel some liquid seeping out of his hole. He decides that he will describe it as
glacially oozing
if he ever tells anyone of this night. But it is the middle of the afternoon. Or early morning. Or daylight savings.
Oh, what is the time, Mr. Wolf?

The dealer doesn't seem to mind the shit, nor does he seem to care; he will leave that room in that residential hotel that night and move to another room somewhere else. The dealer is wielding the evil dildo again, and trying to work it into the ass.

He is torn between wanting to have that huge dildo, huger than any he has ever seen (though he is not in full possession of any senses of perception or perspective), inside of him, fulfill the bargain, get his stuff, and wanting to hold all that shit inside of him, not let it go. He thinks of the bathroom shared by the floor's residents, outside and way across the building. He thinks newspaper might work, too, like how puppies are paper-trained.

He is thankful that the dealer's boyfriend is not present, lurking around in his y-fronts. He hopes the boyfriend doesn't show up unexpectedly; he doesn't need, can't stand, the drama. Those two have a relationship that is best described as “brokeback,” in that one's a needy bottom and the other's a selfish top.

The dealer pushes absent-mindedly and the head of the dildo enters him. He is trying not to flinch too much, trying not to stop the deal. The dealer is working more and more of the dildo into his hole. He can feel more shit
glacially oozing
out of his hole, or maybe it is not coming out of his hole but being stopped up by that rubber plug. His guts hurt. His heart is pounding like mad.

The dealer is still working the dildo, corkscrewing it in.

He takes a good swallow of air and his hole loosens so that the pain eases a little.

The dealer is working the dildo in and out of the ass.

He can feel even more shit coming out of the sides now. He know he is shitting. He can plainly smell it, see the earthy streaks.

The dealer doesn't seem to mind nor care, instead he is working the dildo with even brutal strokes, pushing deeper and harder, jabbing and digging as if it was a clam hunt at Pismo Beach. His face is one of concentration, single-mindedly focused on the task. The dealer lets him take another long hard hit on the pipe.

He is thankful. It helps.

Now he has stopped shitting; instead, he is bleeding. He can see the smear of blood on the thin white poly-cotton sheet. He knows it is blood because its viscosity against his bare skin is so different, unlike that of shit, or piss, or spit, or cum, or sweat, or bile, or mucus. He feels his blood flowing like his shit was flowing a moment ago.

He is surprised by how unaffected he is by all the smells in the room and the viscosity pooled under him. This is what life smells like, he thinks. Even before birth, you spend all those months in the womb shoved up beside the bowels, and then you're born mere inches away from the poophole. And when you die, your bowel is the last thing that releases its hold on your life. And in the middle, in the middle. He once, with a few friends watched a video on the internet that was reputed to be so hideously gross that it spawned millions of reaction videos of people watching the clip. “2 Girls, 1 Cup” showed two young attractive women indulging in some scat play while watched by some men. At one point in the clip, the two women crap into a plastic cup and then proceed to eat and feed the contents of the cup to each other. His friends were howling and shrieking in disbelief, one was even nauseated to the point of dry heaving. At that time, he was merely bemused by the action on screen, and all he remembered thinking was: in our lives, who among us hasn't had to eat the shit out of someone else's cup?

The dealer pulls the dildo out.

He almost passes out from the pain when the head of the dildo pops out of his ass.
How could relief feel so painful?
he might wonder, if he could even think. He is quivering, trying to quell the racking spasms. The dealer takes his forefinger and dips it into a baggie, coating his finger up to the first joint with the powder white crystals; crushed chunks and shards stick to the finger like fake snow frosting on shopping mall Christmas trees. Like coconut frosting, he thinks. The dealer puts his finger right into the open hole.

He feels his hole close on that finger like a Venus Flytrap. The finger feels strangely cold. Everything else feels magnificently hot. Soon, very soon. Everything will burn.

“Do you want a line? Here…” He takes the small packet and taps out a neat line on his belly. The sweat mats the fine powder. He gives me the McDonald's straw that has been cut into a manageable inch-and-a-half length and I sniff up what's not stuck to the sweat and the fine hairs, those I lick up, savoring the bitter taste of the powder and the salt of his sweat. I lie back down. He takes my dick and flops it onto my belly.

“Don't move,” he says, and he taps out a line on the underside of my dick. The tweakered dick plumps up as he does this. He sniffs that up noisily. He takes my dick into his mouth to suck up the leftover powder. His tongue starts to go numb.

“Like Novacaine,” he says.

“Like sucking spermicide,” I say. I should know, and I do.

The deal was that I would collect a small vial of my cum and he would do likewise. Then we would pack it in blue-ice and FedEx it to each other.
What would you do with my cum?
he had asked. I said I would eat some of it, dribble some of it on my chest, and use some of it to jack off. And what would you do with mine? He said he would drink most of it. That's what he did with all the cum he got from all those men all over the country. But he never e-mailed me back his address and so the small bottle that once contained Body Shop Elderflower Eye Gel sat in my fridge, tightly capped and covered with aluminum foil, filled with a week-and-a-half 's worth of daily (twice, thrice even) jacking off.

One day, a trick came over. A real cum pig. He wanted to drink my cum, he wanted to feel my juice on his face, dripping into his mouth. I have something better, I said. I got the bottle from the fridge. I opened the bottle and the smell of cum hit us. He was excited. I held the bottle out to him and he stuck his tongue into it. You want it? I asked. Oh yes, he begged rather all too convincingly. I let him lap at the bottle like a dog. The smell of that cum was mesmerizingly clinical, so medicinal. As he was lapping at the cum in the bottle, I noticed that a layer of mold had grown on the inside of the lid, and then I noticed a spindle of mold floating in the bottle. I held his head back, pried his mouth open with my fingers, emptied the bottle down, and shut his mouth and held it, made him swallow it all, like how you make dogs and cats take their pills.

John has put Joe in a smart pair of white y-fronts and a dog collar, and chained him to a pole. Joe's hands are bound a little too tightly and he can feel his fingers getting tingly. John is sitting in an armchair chain-smoking Camels and watching Joe. Joe is expecting something to happen. He is expecting John to give him some orders, maybe spank him, maybe some cock-and-ball torture, titclamps, clothes pegs on the nipples and scrotum, butt torture with a series of dildos, each one more menacing than the next, the dirty balled-up gym socks in his mouth as John rapes his butt; maybe John will stuff those filthy socks up his butt, or use them as a condom to fuck him. Joe's dick is getting stiff thinking of what John would do to him. But John is sitting in the armchair smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring at Joe. John doesn't look at Joe with any discernable emotion, no sense of meanness or malevolence, no desire, no disdain, no amusement, no boredom, nothing. John is not even touching himself. He is sitting there in his black jeans and green tank top smoking cigarette after cigarette. Joe thinks he can see John's eyes tearing up, but it's difficult to tell in the haze of cigarette smoke and Joe's allergies are beginning to act up, his eyes are watering, he cannot breathe easily. John is still sitting and looking at Joe, his gaze unflinching, unerring. Joe is not bored, he is not turned-on, he is not scared. He is chained to a pole, in a dog collar, in a pair of y-fronts, his hands bound a little too tight.

A few lines of good coke in the restroom at last call, then we are at his place. He sets up the rim seat in the middle of the living room. There is an alarming pile of dope carelessly and showily dumped on the coffee table. “Want to watch a video?” he asks, popping a tape into the VCR. The box is plain black and says “Russian River Weekend.” The screen flickers to life and it is a scene where a hunky guy is shitting on a pudgy guy. They are in a motel room somewhere, presumably Russian River. The pudgy guys is smearing the shit all over himself as if he were icing a cake. You almost want him to start making little rosettes around the neckline.

I am seated on the rim seat, not the kind you find in medical supply stores—those are always too high—but a makeshift thing made up of a toilet seat attached to four sturdy stool legs. “Made it myself,” he declares proudly. He lies on the floor and crawls under me so that his face is under my ass, and the rest of his body is sticking out from between my legs. The scene on the television has now moved on to two guys squirting their enemas out onto a third person. The third person takes the stream of brownish fluid all over his body and in his mouth. All this in the motel room somewhere in Russian River. The clean-up must be hell. I always thought a Russian River weekend would entail some river rafting, a barbecue, going for the really good fried chicken at that one restaurant, and perhaps a leisurely walk in the woods with the dogs, but obviously, I was mistaken. Or we have very different travel agents.

He starts kissing, licking, and with gusto poking at my puckered hole with his tongue. The narcotics in my bloodstream make my head torque in strange pleasurable sensations. It does what the poor choice of porn doesn't do.

Someone is in the hallway. I can see the vague shadows swaying back and forth in the dark passageway. The person is watching us from behind the stairs. “Who's that?” I ask. “Roommate?”

He replies between slobbers. “It's my mother.” His iguana tongue, lick, prod, lick, suckle. I'm not sure how to react, what to say. “It's okay,” he reassures me. Lick, poke, circle, lick, prod, suckle, suckle. “She has Alzheimer's, she doesn't know what happening. She's not seeing a damn thing.” He continues eating my ass out, sticking his tongue as far in as he can go, lapping and slurping boisterously.

His mother sways a bit more and comes shuffling out from behind the stairs. I try to make eye contact with her. I think she sees us, I could have sworn she looked me in the eye. I'm almost certain that she smirked. But she sways and shuffles off into the kitchen in her bedroom slippers.

I can hear a familiar rustling sound coming from the kitchen. I can see his mother standing unsteadily at the kitchen counter. She has emptied the bowl of sugar packets onto the counter and is picking them up one by one, shaking them to tamp the sugar down the packet. With great difficulty, she tears open the packet and with shaky hands, she pours the contents of the packet into her mouth. A good portion of the sugar misses her open, gaping, wound-like mouth and sprinkles the front of her gray housedress, printed with little apples and oranges, with white crystals that sparkle in the yellow lights of the gas cooker. She takes another packet, shakes it, tears it open, and pours the sugar into her mouth, or tries as best as her deteriorating motor skills allow, dusting her dress with more sparkle. And another packet. And another. More sugar. I can hear her crunching the sugar; I can hear her grinding the crystals between the molars of her dentures. Soon there is a pile of empty sugar packets on the kitchen counter. The front of her housedress is dusted with so many sugar crystals that it looks as if it is a frumpy sequined gown made for some low-rent suburban drag queen.