Ladies' Man (32 page)

"Whew! Awright, lemme just cool off here so I don't get pneumonia, and we'll blow this popstand." He seemed calmer now.

"I go fucking berserk in this joint, Kenny, you know? I get everything out here. It's like a gym for me, you know what I mean? I walk around all week like I got bees in my head and I just blow it out here. You okay?" He was breathing like a six-day bike racer at halftime. "You know, Donny, I was just thinking; despite all the dead-end stuff I was talking between me and La Donna, I do feel that if I'm gonna change then La Donna is the person I have the most potential stuff going with and so I shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water."

"Oh yeah?" He ran his forearm across his face. "C'mon, let's split. I'm fuckin' exhausted."

We flagged a cab. He started nodding out, his head resting against the window.

"Fuckin' Kenny, man." His eyes were closed. "I had more fun tonight, man, than in the last five years, thousand years." Eyes still closed, he extended his hand for a slap. "Maybe we'll go to college together, man. Go back to college."

I felt like punching him in the face. Fun. What fun. That was like the descent of man in there. Dissociated jerk-off. But as the cab rolled on and Donny nodded out, his hand still extended limply for a slap, I flashed on doing amyl and laughing our asses off, grooving on
Straw Dogs
in the yom palace, our heads down heart to heart in the restaurant.

I didn't want to be alone. I needed company. The thought of going home, whacking off and going to sleep was unbearable. I felt like asking Donny if he wanted to snag something to eat in an all-night diner. Doing a recap of the night over coffeeand. Buddies. Forever buddies. No. Not tonight. Enough was enough. Suddenly I felt furious. I felt deep hate like an asthma. I felt like there was a con man in the cab. I couldn't turn my head in Denny's direction. I needed to get out, to get laid, to find some soft bitch and do it to death. I wanted to get off again in the worst way. Dump Donny and get some slash. A thought hit me and took my breath away like a suction pump in my lungs:

Go back! What? Go back! Suddenly my heart started pounding enough to make my eyes pop out of my head. I can go back to the Garrison! What? No! Yes! Go! You can't! I can do anything I want! I wanted to go back and have someone pop my nut. I wanted to stand against a damp brick wall and have an anonymous mouth suck my dick. Dear God, was thai the end or what? You can't do that! Whata you mean, I can't do that? Half the goddamn place was wearing kneepads!

"Stop the cab."

"Huh?" The driver craned his neck to the rear.

Donny blinked and rubbed his eyes.

"Stop the cab, right here. This is good."

"Kenny, what's happening?" Donny tried to shake the nap from his face.

"I know this chick in this neighborhood."

"Becker, it's four in the morning!"

"It's cool." I got out and leaned my head inside the window. "She's just getting off work." I extended my hand inside the cab. "Be good, Mr. Donny."

Donny gave me a tentative slap.

"I'll be in touch."

I staggered back to the Garrison. I couldn't see straight. I was totally torn. My heart was pumping Kool-Aid. My hard-on was going up and down every ten seconds. This was evil. This was bad. I was ripped between a terror and an excitement that I didn't understand. I didn't even know where I was. One block from the Garrison I grabbed a cab, gave the cabby directions. He looked at me like I was nuts.

"You wanna go one block?"

My face turned red with shame. I felt ugly and slimy. I was being the baddest bad boy in the world. But I was still turned on. Maybe that's what the turn-on was all about.

If Mommy only knew.

I was a dead man so I couldn't die, had nothing to lose. I could plunge in fire, make mudpies out of my shit and eat it. The kick was so intense I felt it rise like a tide past my teeth to my eyes. I was like the Invisible Man… invincible.

The cabby was staring at me over his shoulder. He threw the meter and, one arm across the top of the front seat, cruised to the Garrison. He turned to me, the look on his face one of amused contempt.

"Hey! I didn't say here! I said Eighteenth and Eleventh, but I didn't say here." I was covered with a sweat as thick as butter.

He smirked. "Okay, which corner you want?"

"By the gas station." I pointed to a deserted garage that had been closed a good six hours.

He sighed, drove fifty more feet and turned off the meter.

"Not everybody's a faggot, you know." I dropped a dollar and slammed the cab door.

I went into a phone booth by the blacked-out gas station and pretended to make a phone call until the cab was out of sight. My lust had died in seconds. I felt like a schmuck. Disgusted, heartsick, and exhausted. I didn't give two shits about a blowjob. I just wanted to get away from Donny. Buddies in a diner was scarier than solo in a snake pit. My life. My fuckin' life.

I moved toward the Garrison knowing I couldn't get it up now with shin splints. As I walked through the door the music was just as loud as before, the reflecting lights just as chaotic, but I felt immune to the barrage. Jujuba the Nuba was up on the stage again. Coated with a protective fluid, he was in flames. Nude, glistening, he passed two torches across his crotch, around his ass, his thighs—blue flames like ceremonial wings danced on his arms. Caps of fire wavered on his fingertips. I ordered a gin and tonic. It felt sweet and heavy in ray stomach. I walked out.

There were half a dozen cabs parked in front discharging and boarding passengers. I wanted to fall into one, but I was embarrassed to take one right there. I didn't want some guy checking me out in his rearview mirror. I walked east to Sixth Avenue and grabbed a Checker uptown.

When I crawled in it was sunup. I felt like a vampire beating it back to his coffin in a race with the daylight. I headed straight for the bathroom, dropped my pants to my shoes and started beating off. The weak sun filtered in through the heavy leaded snowflake patterns of the window, bathing the room with a strange illumination—like the lighting in a Rembrandt painting. I crouched over the bowl like a ghoul throttling my meat, my brains a speeded-up film of pussies, cocks, assholes, mouths, faces, places, music, hair and groans. My kneecaps were trembling like overworked generators, my elbows flaming with cramps. I lost my balance and almost fell face first into the wall. I caught myself on the sink, my feet trapped by my pants, and shoved myself upright.

My dick was throbbing, my lungs ballooning, my forearm charleyhorsed.

I pulled up my pants, sunk my hands into my front pockets and stared at the floor. "Oh man… Oh man."

My skin was crawling. I felt infected, filthy. I stepped out of my clothes, jumped into the shower, then jumped back out before bitting the faucets. It wasn't time for a shower. I felt like I needed to sweat more, to pump some of the shit to the surface. If I took a shower right then it wouldn't have felt like anything.

Grabbing my barbell, I slipped on my sneakers and lay out on the living room floor, my bare ass on a pillow, my feet jammed under the couch.

I hit fifty without even blinking, without even breathing. Kenny makes a move. Kenny makes a move. What a joke. All my moves were frauds, to get out of things, not
into
them, to disentangle, to clear the boards of whatever pathetically little there was for me. Cleaner. Neater.

One hundred came and went. I couldn't even feel my stomach tense. I could do it for hours, it was comforting. I started doing them faster, gripping the weight tighter.

I passed one twenty-five like a downhill train. The weight felt like a feather. Faster. Banging the iron on the floor with every downstroke, smacking my forehead into my kneecaps on the upstroke. Even anytime
I
wanted more, any time
I
wanted to get close, I was gone. I blew charge and retreat at the same time.

At one fifty my breath came out of my mout in soft chugs. My stomach knotted a little and there was the slightest clammy sprinkle of sweat on my back and chest. The pain was baby-sized, soothing.

At one seventy-five I tossed the weight aside to pick up speed. I started grunting.

What's the difference? I wasn't a kid anymore. I was a man. An adult. What was done was done.

Two hundred. My stomach was so tight it felt as if it were floating to my knees under its own power. Baby Mississippis rolled from my armpits. I held onto my hair, jerking my neck forward.

Bullshit. Hypocrite. Bullshit. Weakling. Bullshit. Mindfucker.

I started shouting "Huh! Huh!" with every sit-up. My lower back was red-hot.

Teacher! Teacher! Teach who! With what! I was a tucking ding-dong salesman circle-jerking pussy-chaser. Teacher.

La Donna. My mind clicked off. I rolled with the pain, my fist trembling in my hair, nausea jumping for the catch in my throat. Every sit-up took hours.

"Hunhnh" My teeth were grinding, my face a black pocket of blood, my thighs rippling, my gut stretched and wrenched.

Two hundred and fifty. Every time I dropped I banged my head on the floor. My prick was twitching
from the inside, that crazy unreachable itch that made me want to squeeze it like a tourniquet. I couldn't loosen my fingers from my hair. They knotted on me like rigor mortis.

Fifty more. Fifty more. I couldn't breathe in too deep. My diaphragm was surrounded by pulled and cramped muscles. I collapsed on my back, closed my eyes, grit my teeth and let it rip.

"One! Two! Three! Rrrr! Nnnn!" I was snarling like a lion, my eyes unfocused. "Bastad! Bastad!" Pumping hard. Ripping myself apart. I was crying. Banging my head on my knees and crying. I couldn't stop. "You bastad! Bitch bastad!"

"Twenty-one cunt! Twenty-two cock! Bastad!" Grinding my teeth, I couldn't breathe. I didn't have the wind to cry anymore. I froze at twenty-six, my head stuck between my knees, my fingers snarled in my soaking hair. I growled and retched, spitting on the floor between my trembling legs.

I was dead. I sat naked on a bench with other dead people in what seemed like a waiting room. I knew I was dead because my skin was the color of uncooked chicken—that and because a note was fastened to the skin on my chest with a long pin, and it didn't hurt. I couldn't read the note. Nobody talked. We were all dead.

My eyes snapped open. I was sweating. I felt lightheaded with terror. The digital read four-twenty-eight. Sunday afternoon. I started whimpering. Stop the clock. Eat the clock. The clock was eating me up. Eat the clock. I jerked my head and my neck flamed, my mid-section flamed. I couldn't get up. I was trapped. Paralyzed. I rocked my head to help myself breathe. I was alone. Dead. I wanted someone to help me.

Slowly I rolled out of bed. I couldn't stand up straight. The best I could manage was a hunched-over old man's walk. Dead man's walk. I was high on fear. I staggered out of the bedroom like the mummy going for a victim and headed for the living room phone. I had to call someone. Anyone. Emergency? Who? Who? Who. Madame one-and-only. La Donna. But I couldn't. She said… She needs… But I'd changed. This last forty-eight hours had come around the horn like forty-eight years. I'm changed. I'm patient- I'm wiser. I can give like a bastard. I collapsed on the couch and picked up the receiver.

"La Donna, this is Kenny. Don't hang up baby look I know what you said but I've been through the wringer and I've straightened out."

I dialed her number, listened to the crackling of the line before the first ring.

I've learned so many things, can share so many things, we're both on the move, both growing. The phone ran three times. Each ring sounded like a human voice. By the fourth ring the tension started to dilute. I cradled the receiver under my jaw and stared at the descending reflection of winter sun on my wall.

Hold on. Of course she's not home. She's at the showcase. Should I, shouldn't I. No contest.

Downstairs, the dying light had an unrealness to it that enhanced my weird, trancelike state. As the cab floated toward the East Side I kept touching my biceps as if to make sure I really existed.