A Moment of Doubt

A Moment of Doubt
Jim Nisbet
© Jim Nisbet

This edition © PM Press 2010. All rights reserved. No
part of this book may be transmitted by any means
without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-60486-307-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010927771

Cover art by Gent Sturgeon
Cover layout by John Yates
Interior design by briandesign

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

PM Press
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Oakland, CA 94623
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Printed in the USA on recycled paper.

. . . some kind of ultimate solipsism, big words and a hopeless attitude holding a needle gleaming with pre-ejaculatory fluid over the bent elbow bulging with circulation-deprived veins beyond the greasy thick hand-tooled leather belt with rising-sun-of-optimism belt buckle and the rolled sleeve. Black, too. Black sleeve. But needle work gives chickenshits like me the hyperventilations. The sweat come out cold already on your face. The point shivers above a weak flesh that's screaming no to the rest of its system, its so-called friends, No, no, can't you see what it's trying to do to me? To you? To us? But the system doesn't listen, at least the listening part of it doesn't listen. Certain nerves duck into a bar for a quick shot. Others prepare some of that precipitate sociology folk like to come up with at times like this. Like, just imagine, if you can get your mind off that pre-ejaculatory fluid gleaming at the tip of the quivering needle, just imagine the pressure on this poor slob if he's driven himself to this, the extreme of puncturing his own skin with a steel sliver, let alone the injection that follows, of a thick, mean fluid worse than any come that was ever shot, and purer, too, I'm straying, by man or beast or poly-dicked alien whoremonger, such extremes deep in the thick, bullshit encrusted sociological palimpsest labeled “Facial Distortions Encountered on Street Shitheads Due to the Tremendous Societal G-Forces Exerted Over the Mauled Extrapyramidal Features by His Scumbag Peer Group,” by One Who Knows.

It's hard, here, not to quote chapter and verse. Bob Dylan and Faulkner cornered the Bible. Fitzgerald bled Keats completely dry—although he never named one of his books
Alien Corn
, though he should have; Hemingway sacked Donne; Shakespeare did Shakespeare. Although nobody, until now, has utilized
Toys of Desperation
. Since this is the computer generation, I'm going to rename this book, called
SCRAM
, rename it
Toys of Desperation
, using the simple REN utility supplied with every copy of CP/M. Ready?

REN B:

(since we're on the A: drive)

REN B:TOYSDESP=SCRAM

Kapow! Bet you didn't even feel it. Check the cover. Different? You betcha. Check this one out.

REN B:SCRAM=TOYSDESP

Now what's it say?
A Moment of Doubt
? Imagine that. Hold on. Which do you prefer?

If SCRAM enter 0:

If TOYS OF DESPERATION enter 1:

Now check the cover. Like it? Yes? Good. No trace of either? Tricky. Tricky, that is, unless you got what it takes to use a disassembler, a debugging utility, a reassembler, etc., etc., to alter this program, this book you're holding, by yourself. I'll even give you a hint, dear reader: right now, right this very moment, as you're buying, holding, reading, thinking about this text, you're deep, deep within a SUBMIT routine, conceived, written, and implemented a long, long time ago, by me. Your dear chickenshit author. And as of now, because you found out about all this too late, you're lucky I'm benevolent. Consider.

Tiny's pants split along the length of his member, the buttons popped loose like rivets exploding out of a submarine lost in the Mariana Trench. His dick looked like a road map wrapped around a blackjack drawn by S. Clay Wilson. XYX chromosomes, jaundiced corpuscles, cocaine and heroin coursed through thick veins the size of garden hoses up and around it like multilevel twinight freeways pulsing light around a skyscraper in a future megalopolis, like molten hydrogen in transparent conduits up and down a launchable, scum-charged rocket. Tiny encircled this inter-disciplinary vehicle with a thick thumb and forefinger and milked its root with a violent twist. A pearl of pre-ejaculatory fluid described a path through the foetid air of the dimly lit room like a sparkler flung off a bridge into a septic canal in some nameless, hopeless European city on a dark night full of murdered whores, to the wine-stained, cat-spattered ‘carpet' below.

“Indeed,” the voice of the third man only added to the darkness, “that marvelous prick's not unlike a ray of hope in an otherwise hopeless city of doom.” He paused in order to exhale the pungent smoke of his perennial, unfiltered Gitane into the dank air between them. “Wouldn't you say, Mr. Windrow?”

Windrow said nothing.

The slim hoodlum aimed the point of one of his impeccable lovely Italian shoes at the pit of Windrow's stomach, betraying his taste for melodrama. But he missed. A little high. Windrow heard the rib, one well known to him, the ‘floater', so-called because, unlike the ones above it, the floater is not attached to the sternum, crack. He felt it, too. Both sensations were duly reported to that cortical emissary in charge of such things, who sent a ‘groan' message through channels. Windrow groaned. Then he drooled on himself, as the so-called ‘black wing' passed momentarily before his eyes. Tiny made the sort of sound in his throat most people associate with pleasure, and slid his fist slowly up the entire length of his immense cock.

Feel safe? Wet? Erect? Yeah. Yeah! And why? What do you know of these people? What's their motivation, there are three of them, for Chrissakes! Where is this room, with come on the walls? Why don't we all have a key to it, if they ever lock it? But why would they lock it? Who the hell would want to get in here?
Youse do
?

“Tiny, here, has AIDS, Mr. Windrow.” The man known as Thimbelina viciously grabbed a handful of Windrow's hair and yanked the groaning detective's head up. Why can't you let him alone, the cortical emissary frowned, he's given himself up to the moans already, they're good for him, and they're what you want, aren't they? But Thimbelina was adamant, he had something else on his mind. “Can you hear me? Are you listening, Mr. Windrow?” Someone beyond the window and three stories down on a busy street stood on their horn impatiently. Thimbelina threw Windrow's head aside as if it were the wadded up brown paper bag the second six pack had arrived in. “Gleam of sapience,” Th imbelina muttered, staring out the window to Eddy Street below.

‘Gleam of sapience.' That's a good one. How could anyone allow my dimwitted detective to be compared to an amber bead of pitch on a board?

He exhaled smoke against the glass. Whores, beggars, a couple of socialites getting out of a black limousine, lots of traffic including the cab blaring its horn backed up behind it, two cops talking to two hookers in a doorway, the hookers smoking and smiling nervously, these guys wanta chat or fuck or pop or what, the cops smiling in their moment of power for the evening, and Thimbelina puts out his butt against the glass between them and him, grinds the cinders slowly against the transparency, the dead ashes sift onto the sill below, he doesn't like cops.

“Tiny's very horny, Mr. Windrow,” says he, absently, “very horny indeed.” The thin man turned from the window and considered the dark room. Windrow was trussed to a chair, leaning away from the electrical cords torn from the overturned television set, that bound him to the chair, leaning away from his bonds and into his pain. Tiny stood very near Windrow, not close enough to touch the detective, but close enough to excite himself, against the wall beyond the foot of the bed.

“I, personally,” continued Thimbelina, crossing the room, “would love to oblige him—have, in fact, done so, in the past,” he added wistfully, “but, alas, no longer can we indulge our . . . passion.” Saying this, Thimbelina stroked Tiny's immense engine with the long, carefully manicured nail of his delicate forefinger. “Oh,” Thimbelina said breathlessly, “we continue to tease one another, that doesn't matter.” He turned his back on the hulking Tiny and faced Windrow, who regarded this soliloquy obliquely with one eye, squinting through his pain. “It's the so-called blood contact that does you in.” He crossed back to the window and considered the world through it. Rain had begun to fall against the pane. Thimbelina made as if to touch one of the raindrops though the glass. “Diseased come in your ass is what they're talking about when they say that,” he murmured, following the raindrop with his fingernail as it progressed down the glass, toward the cheap aluminum frame below. But the nail's pace accelerated, leaving the drop behind, until the cuticle suddenly screeched down to the sill and halfway back up. The sharp, jagged sound penetrated even Windrow's pain and made his spine shiver. Tiny, three hundred pounds if he was an ounce, groaned deep in his throat, stood up on his toes, arched his pelvis in the air before him, and extended his fist along the length of his penis until the clubbed head of it disappeared beneath the fold between his chubby thumb and fore-finger. These digits then tested the fluid squeezed thus out of the tip of his urethra as if it were a precious liquor possessing a fantastic index of viscosity, which it is and does, then slid it all back down the length of his cock and smeared his balls and crotch with it, his pants meanwhile dropping to his knees.