PARADOXIA (11 page)

C
HARLES MANSON IS IN MY HEART ALL WAYS …
was spray-painted in black two-foot-high letters that ran the length of the abandoned hallway. I was still sore from battling the pitted streets of Hackney on the back of his Harley. “Smiffy”—which sounds like a child's tattered teddy bear, but looked like a greasy grizzly outlaw biker—smirked, “Pritty, ain't it …” as he led me up to the third floor of a rancid squat.

Garbage littered the gangplank, stairwell, doorways, and even dangled from the banister and light sockets. Discarded filthy remnants once worn as clothes steamed in piles. Mountains of leftover Kentucky Fried Chicken bones mingled with fish-and-chip plastic takeaway plates which wrestled Curry to Go styrofoam and fought it out in the corners. The overall aroma, an intoxicating concoction of rotting flesh and excrement, escalated the nausea tap dancing up my esophagus. “Home sweet home,” the scruffy genius muttered. A man of few words. I coughed up a spittle of vomit.

Smiffy had been recommended to me as a trusted “collector.” If you were owed money, favors, or just wanted to fuck with someone's well-being/paranoia, HE was the man to call. I had no urgent business requiring his services, but at 6'2” and 263 pounds I felt him a necessary addition to my loose-knit stable.

We left the bar on his bike stupidly shit-faced and ended up at his place miles outside of the city. All I wanted was a quick, cheap, dirty fuck. And the possibility of employing his unique talents sometime in the future. My patience was already exhausted by the time he kicked open the door to his room. “It only locks from the inside” was little consolation. I was sobering up quick.

I asked where the toilet was. He pointed at the corner. Asked if I wanted to use a T-shirt to wipe myself, but drip-drying seemed more hygienic. I squatted facing him, slunk my tight black pants over my ass, around my knees, and pissed out the multiple vodkas I had consumed earlier. Right on the floor, a massive puddle swimming slowly toward his filthy mattress in the center of the room. A long sigh caresses my lips, a small shudder ripples my flesh, and Smiffy stumbles over, drops to all fours, and washes the last few trickles from my pussy. The smell of hot piss perfuming his pigsty. Alters the electricity in the atmosphere. The heat radiating outward warms the room by degrees. Charged particles perform an exotic ballet pirouetting off of dust motes.

His filthy tongue laps at my steamy mound like a hungry bear devouring a candy wrapper. He whips off his leather jacket, bathing huge hands and bulging biceps in the puddle of pissy liquor. Licking fingers and forearms, he offers me a taste. Dabbing my lips with two fat thumbs shoved roughly in my mouth. He sucks up a thick wad of mucus, phlegm, and bile, spitting it deep inside my throat. I swallow it halfway down, allowing his juices to mingle with mine. Spit it right back at him. He pulls his prick free. Begins slapping it against the rough rotten piss-soaked floorboards. Pounding it mercilessly against the wood. Strangling the beast in a meaty fist, punishing the head. Pumping in grand agitation. Attempting to screw a hole in the floor. I suppress the laughter ping-ponging inside my belly. In a drunken stupor it doesn't matter what you fuck. As long as you're fucking something.

His grotesque moaning, the squelching of his fevered sex, and the creaking wood sound a song of diseased lust. The alcohol races through my blood, causing the room to spin. The vomit fermenting in my empty stomach launches itself upward, exploding from my mouth and nose. A small thick hot wad lands on his foreskin. In drunken delirium he explodes. His come, the vomit, and piss forging unholy matrimony in a fetid puddle at my feet. I laugh out loud as he rolls over, blows me a kiss, and whispers, “Ged night, doll …” Passing out.

I clean myself up, walk to the corner, and wait forty minutes for a car service to arrive. The morning sun bleeding slowly through the night sky. A grin twists my lips. I'll never see him again. Unless I need “collecting.”

I had left Amsterdam a few days after my date with Styn. Took the night ferry to London. Called Murray, who I had met in Los Angeles. Offered if I ever needed a place to stay … I did.

He took me in. Hot road worker. As quiet as a cat burglar. Would leave for weeks at a time. Following the path of his own indiscretions. Kept our questions to ourselves. Open relationship. He loved torturing himself by sleeping on the couch, listening to me get fucked from the other room. Jerk off and dream. Leave early the next morning so as not to witness whatever it was I dragged out of bed. The only time I pissed him off was after an all-nighter with a punk junkie rock singer who scrawled his name in blood on the bedroom wall. Used a crusty syringe as magic marker. Told Murray if he didn't appreciate the autograph to go and scrub it off with bleach. That blew his cool. Furious, he stormed out. Didn't matter. I had a date that afternoon with J.G.

I had been seeing J.G. for a couple of weeks. Set out to steal his vows of celibacy. I was turned on by his thousand-yard stare, eyes that went on for miles. Reticence. His tortured genius wrestling libido. Decided to commit date rape. Fed him vodka and codeine to ease the pain. We soon became inseparable. Binge on Ecstasy. Trip over to his place on the fifteenth floor of a subsidized housing project in Brixton. Have hours of lushly orchestrated sex. A divine high, we'd cling to each other, fearful of slipping between the cracks in the floorboards. Dreamed we'd one day wake up to find ourselves melted like puddles, evaporated by the sun.

It was the first relationship I'd had where intimacy didn't equate with violation. I'm not sure J.G. felt the same way. I was still occasionally balling the road worker, a few of his friends, and our mutual acquaintances. Which in itself wasn't as awful as my insatiable need to reveal in revolting detail the every nuance of my many indiscretions. It forced him into the voyeur's peephole. Whose microscopic magnification played itself out like a recurring nightmare. I adored him, yet it was impossible for me to curb my voracious philandering, sexual misanthropy, or gruesome revelations encapsulating the horrors inflicted upon my latest plaything, used and discarded like a broken toy whose warranty had expired.

Where all of my previous affairs had used creative energy to stimulate drama, we would construct drama by stimulating our creative energies. Both consumed with the art of self-flagellant confessionals, melodramatic operettas, musical Grand Guignol. Obsessed with creating gargantuan bodies of work which we would inflict upon the paying public. A variety of grotesque performances, the scope of whose horrific beauty is better left to the textbooks. We would tour Europe, Japan, the States, no spectator safe from the multi-tentacled lacerations that sprung from the hotbed of our philosophical sadomasochism.

The mobility we were afforded benefited our longevity. Stagnation the death of every relationship. While we travelled, caroused, performed, we shared a blissful coexistence. He was reserved, sensitive, introspective. I was obnoxious, arrogant, an exhibitionist. Polar opposites attracted to a higher middle ground.

* * *

London was beat. Back to New York with J.G. I'd been gone for four years. Returned to a crumpled city crucified beyond repair. A giant electromagnetic force field feeding you false fuels. Agitates the nerve endings. Resulting in that chronic itch for more. And the more you get, the more you want. And more is never enough. Until it's too much. Until your life force feels like it's being continually sucked, milked, gnawed upon, ingested, digested, and spat back at you by an army of living ghosts endlessly haunting a city whose borders are stretched to the point of utter insanity. And try keeping your sanity in New York. I dare you. The air itself is a psychotropic narcotic that accelerates the pulse rate.

And like any drug, you do too much, you feel filthied. Dirty. Rotting from the inside out. Never clean enough. Never free from the microbiotic flesh-eating bacteria. Never free from the botulisms, the staphylococcus, the airborne viruses, the tuberculosis, the sickness. No matter what lengths you go to to keep yourself clean. There is no safe distance once you've already been infected. A carrier full of diseased shrapnel. Sick to death of what passes for life. Sick of the stench of the living dead. The stench of urine, yeast, and rotting corpses, both living and dead, which assault the olfactories. Contaminated by small pools of viscous liquid which puddle in doorways, subways, sidewalks. Overhead pipes which leak a puslike foul fluid tinged with toxic sludge and gasoline. Bathtubs, showers, sinks, rusted with the poisoned effort of a conduit no longer able to transport such noxious effluvium. I had already put in a five-year stint in New York. I grew to despise it.

New York is a city that fears, yet embraces its own reflection. A gruesome portrait of decay, mortality, failure, fraud, whose caricatures are trapped inside a negatively charged environment whose collective scream is drowned out by the next drink, the next drug, the next lousy fuck.

The Arab boy from a Midtown shoe shop.

The Puerto Rican drug dealer from Spanish Harlem.

The black crackhead from Brooklyn.

The Egyptian magician moonlighting as a cab driver.

The Nicaraguan poet from the Lower East Side.

Crappy rock bands and their roadies.

The cruel Hasidics who preferred pinching to pussy.

Teenage virgins from New Jersey.

The hot blond sailer from Montreal who fucked me straight into the hospital after a three-day Ecstasy binge, his huge prick irresistible, awesome. Damaging.

One-night stands that sometimes dragged on for weeks, months. I'd trip into someone else's daydreams, to suddenly wake up one morning and be done with them. Still living with J.G., who would listen patiently to a string of self-perpetuating obscenities, whose mounting horror he allowed me to catalog, as if his was the analyst's couch. By the end of our relationship, he needed therapy. A retreat from my sickness. Pathological intoxication set in. Alcoholism, insecurity complex, insanity. Addiction. And he still put up with me.

I knew I had to divorce myself from a city that offered up an endless influx of temporary distractions served like junk food. Had to detox myself from the convulsive miasma of mindless activity whose goal may indeed be to overstimulate, but whose resultant conclusion merely configures delusions of a grandeur that forever remains elusive. Bars, after-hours clubs, concerts, galleries, conversations which hoodwink your time and energy by convincing you of their urgency. The only pressing problem was waste removal. The need to cut out, cut off, all that conspires to distract.

Enter the Spanish Nazi.

H
e was born addicted to heroin on the nineteenth of March 1971 in the L.A. County Community Hospital. Conceived in hate, abuse began in the womb. Another unwanted, unwelcomed Latin loser. He came out screaming, contorted in pain. Twisted faces grimaced at the sight of another newborn junkie saddled with the sins of his father. Papa left Mama before the delivery hoping to score a dime-bag, to celebrate the arrival, celebrate that the baby wasn't born deformed or brain dead, after all of Mama's beatings. Just a little bit fucked up.

Papa never returned after busting up his bike on the way back from East L.A. where the local cholos insisted he join them in a toast to his first and only newborn son. Jack and smack didn't mix too well and Papa took a spill which wiped the shit-eating grin clear off his puss.

Mama didn't mind too much, blind to every need except the gnawing in her belly, the bruises between her skinny legs, and the unscratchable bitch of her addiction. She took the next shot on the delivery table twelve minutes after the prodigal son was shat out like a watermelon. Smuggled it in in the pocket of her housecoat.

His first meal was a weaning of methadone and morphine, a failed attempt to quell the spasms racking through his bloated little belly. He kicked and cried and tried to wish himself dead in the cradle of the nursery surrounded by other undeserving unfortunates. All victims of boozy blood fucks, lust, ritual gangbangs. None, however, was less wanted than him. None more tempered with a vengeance to destroy a world that dared to condemn him to a life sentence under a rule of pain and hate. And never was there destined to become a more hate-filled fucker than him.

Black is the color of my true love's hair. Creamy cocoa skin, the son of a devil's advocate grew up with a chip on his shoulder the size of Boulder Dam. At the age of four he was beaten into his first coma by Mommy's latest lover. Back in the L.A. County Community Hospital, he remained for three weeks as they traced the swelling and clotting. Hoping it wouldn't turn into permanent brain damage. The contusion suffered from the big black man's hand left a delicate scar on his right eyebrow. That he lived was a shining testimonial to his predestined mission. A lifelong tribunal littered with the scarring of the self-serving.

At six he played witness to the degenerate urges of a third-generation coven of practicing devil worshippers. Passed from mouth to crack to cock, his mother initiated him into the Church of Satan. One of the many fuck toys brought into the delirious circle of the chronically demented. He was taught to please others and enjoy the natural desires he was too young to deny himself of. He quickly became an insatiable suitor in pursuit of his own pleasures. At the world-weary age of ten he had already instigated an involvement with the next door neighbors, a family of eleven, who took turns unleashing their multiple frustrations on his tender hide. Mother, grandmother, father, sons, and daughters from six to sixty-two beat at his bound-and-gagged body, calling out the names of both saints and sinners. Like Christians at the altar of worship, they prodded, poked, and pronged themselves into his willing flesh; cursing in the name of Satan and Salvation, they cleansed themselves of evil influence using him as a receptacle of their perverted restitutions. The weekly beatings went on for two years.

Born into a circle of fated pain, he learned first how to turn his hatred against himself and then against everyone else. By the age of twelve he had moved in with three other delinquents, themselves no strangers to cruelty. The Whoresome Foursome, as they came to be known around Hollywood, began practicing and fine-honing their skills of verbal manipulations. Irresistible and charming, the teen terrors had the rules of the house spray-painted in DayGlo green near the front door.
ONE FOR ALL AND FUCK YOU TOO.
Filthy Swedish magazines littered the rancid squat, inspiring them on to new sexual horrors.

A string of teenage girls would wander in and out. The more-often-than-not intoxicated young bait was usually blindfolded, beaten, and raped by whoever was present at the time. Cigarettes seared inner thighs, bottles broke on kneecaps, fists and bricks did what they do best. Batter, bruise, bleed. Sex came as the final reward. The final insult. Here the young lords lacerated every opening with a vengeful deliverance. Tortures employed were waylaid upon the recipients who stood before them, reminiscent of the mothers they abhorred. They, like their fathers, harbored the disease of a sexual affliction whose credo was dominance.

After one particularly gruesome incident involving the genital scarification of a fifteen-year-old girl from the Valley, the police force were summoned, thus ending their two-year reign of terror at 452 Franklin Avenue. Since all the assailants were still underage, no charges could be pressed. The cops simply destroyed the squat, sealed the lot it sat on, and sent the Whoresome Foursome packing.

At fourteen he was forced to return to his mother. Who by now couldn't stand the sight of him. Or the way his presence seemed to interfere with the endless flow of two-bit fuck-ups and assholes through the family home. She had a thing for alcoholic pill-poppers, cast-offs from
Easy Rider
,
Dirty Harry, A Streetcar Named Desire
. Men who had suffered through long stretches at Sing Sing, Camarillo, San Quentin. The kind of men who didn't give a fuck how hard their lives had been as long as they could make someone else's life equally miserable. And that usually meant him.

He started shooting dope with a gang of strung-out transvestites he befriended in the alleys and back streets of downtown L.A. Pimping and prostituting right alongside them. Collected twenty percent off the girls' take for playing lookout. Sixty percent when pulling three-ways. Enough to keep up a $125-a-day habit. Which helped to deflect the pain from the endless beatings administered to him by the Peter Fonda lookalike who was shacked up with his mother. The third time “Peter” tried to break his nose, he turned around and stabbed him twice in the chest, screaming at the prick to “Hit me again and I'll fucking kill you …” It landed him in juvie for two years. The judge didn't buy the self-defense plea.

Once incarcerated he learned the joys of self-mutilation. How by hurting yourself more than anyone else would ever want to, he could earn the respect of the other inmates. Always the first to fight, the hammering blows that pounded into him when outnumbered three-to-one could never match the viciousness that he would later reap upon himself. Alone in his bunk, the head-bashing would begin. Smashing his skull into damp cement walls, he tried to disappear the pain. Tried replacing an indescribable pain, somewhere in the base of his brain, with a concentrated self-inflicted throbbing. It somehow made the burden of his hatred easier to deal with. It was the same with the broken glass and rusty knifetips. It brought relief waiting for the scabs and bruises to slowly heal, knowing they eventually would. The psychic scars might not.

His mother always told him, “Don't get mad … get even.” So on the afternoon of his release from juvenile detention he set her house on fire. Minor damage, she refused to press charges. Small admission of her own guilt.

He got strung out again. Hanging out at the sleazy bars near Hollywood and Vine. Picking up aging go-go girls, exstrippers, prostitutes. Women used to his kind of abuse, mistook it for attention. Victims themselves, years lost to opiates, alcohol, addiction. Hook them on him. His own addiction to bone-crushing power fucks. Twist them up inside until they'd love him just enough to support his various bad habits. Dust, speed, dope, coke cocktails.

Every sexual escapade became an act of unmitigated violence. Using any available icon, he punished ferociously the sins of his mother. Banging his full bodyweight into the willing receptors, blood would race from brain cells, fists become engorged. Pounding inside them, punching would follow. Black eyes, bruised lips, blood clots, teardrops. He took out on them what the rest of the world took out on him. His only satisfaction came through someone else's annihilation. To make them hurt as much as he did was the only way he knew how to relieve the pain he could no longer bear reliving.

It was a late autumn night after a serious session of titty torture and humiliation involving Patty, a burned-out thirty-three-year-old ex–Vegas showgirl fallen on hard times and bad luck, that he stumbled upon his mirror reflection. A beautiful teenage Latina girl sprawled out in the alley behind the showgirl's crash pad. Thinking her just drunk or fucked up, he stumbled over and kicked her in the ribs. Hard. No reply. Kicked her twice in the ass. Nothing. Cracked her head against the dumpster. No response. Slapped her soft velvety face. Again. Dead. Crumpled in a small wet heap. Steaming with piss and vomit. Stuck his hand in her pockets. Thirty bucks and an out-of-town ID. She was fifteen. He took the needle from her inner elbow, tasting the blood-crusted junk. Not bad. He lifted the tiny girl up over his shoulder, slipping her quietly into the trash receptacle. Making sure no one noticed. He travelled east, hoping to score a quick bag. Within minutes he was fixing a couple of alleys away, using the needle recovered from the human wreckage left rotting in the garbage. No sooner had the shit started rocketing into his bloodstream before the bile pushed upward, pulsing into his throat and out of his mouth. “Not bad …” he grumbled before dropping to his knees. Crying. Heartbroken. He picked up the filthy needle, began plunging the spike over and over again into his arms, wrists, hands, neck. Stabbing wildly, searching frantically for a valve that would unhinge, release, set free. Trying to find that black hole, somewhere deep inside, that once plundered would concentrate all the pain, horror, heartbreak into a solid-bodied center. Looking for a way into the void that would lovingly engulf, lovingly embrace, lovingly surround, lovingly erase. Looking for somewhere, somehow, someone who could help him to house the unending cycle of pain and hate.

Looking for someone like me, who'd believe him whether he made it all up or not. Looking for a sister, mother, lover, fucker, white witch, goddess, wench, someone drenched in loving sympathy who could comfort him with unconditional understanding. Someone who KNEW. Someone who had been there before. Someone who could explain to him that there were no easy answers. No easy way out. No escape. From yourself. You had to LEARN to DEAL with the cards you were dealt. Had to learn the hard way that the world doesn't OWE you a fucking thing. Not a reason, nor excuse. No apologies. Had to learn that some forms of insanity run in the family, pure genetics, polluted lifelines, full of disease. Profanity. Addiction. Co-addiction. Inability to deal with reality, what the fuck ever that's supposed to mean when you're born into an emotional ghetto of endless abuse. Where the only way out is in … deep, deep inside, so you poke holes in your skin, thinking that if you could just concentrate the pain it wouldn't remain an all-consuming surround which suffocates you from the first breath of day to your last dying day. Day in. Day out. Day in and out. I knew all about it.

He'd been clean for eight months. Met him at a small party. First reaction was to smack him in the fucking face. Something about him crawled under my skin. Immediately. He walked in with Jennifer, a friend of a friend. She took me aside and asked me to take him off her hands. Wanted to just unload him, couldn't deal with his bullshit anymore. He was beautiful but fucked up. Sober but full of shit. A pathological liar, petty thief, nonstop hustler. His smile could charm the panties off of you. She told me to beware, but thought I might be able to straighten him out. I was still trying to straighten myself out.

He bothered me so much it made me curious. You'd think I'd be able to recognize a soul-sucking predator. Being one myself. Maybe that was the attraction. The challenge. Like any charlatan he was charismatic. Magnetic. He glowed. His force field irresistible. His smile decimating. He seemed so incredibly happy. His hook.

I was warned about him by everyone who knew him. I ignored it. Thought I could make it different. Feed him the understanding, knowledge, wisdom to drop the victimturned-victimizer guise. Even though I was still working on it myself. Still working on it.

He followed me out to San Francisco. Unloaded his life story on the front porch of the local Acid Guru. A brilliant Argentinian professor who I was staying with. Specialized in collecting memorabilia from Leary, Kesey, Liddy, the Haight. Offered us his pad for the weekend. Took off for Big Sur. Asked politely that we not set the bed on fire. The quilt once belonged to Janis Joplin.

My latest flame's magnetic charm soured suddenly during foreplay. Once a junkie, always a junkie. Hooked on drama. Like myself. The sex was a brutal test of physical endurance. Both of us battering the other into submission, neither one of us wanting to be the first to throw in the bloody towel. We passed out for a few hours. Woke up and started right back in. The sex ugly, vicious, hot.

We spent the weekend in bed. His stint with the Church of Satan recollected through sex magic, hypnosis, past-life regression. Brought me back to a place in time I had frequented often in dreams, fantasy. Assumed his role of Spanish Nazi Dictator during the bloodthirsty Inquisition. I played arrogant Heretic chained to the master's chamber. A willing victim of murderous pathology. Blind. Bound. Gagged. Hogtied. Sliced up, strung out in a time zone past/present/future not wanting to return to the here and now, but be forever lost, trapped inside a haunted limbo, a sexual vertigo. Entombed in a self-obsessed sarcophagus of torture. His torture. My torture. Hundreds of years of endless collective torture role-played out again and again.

I should have known better. In truth I did. I had been warned. But I knew exactly what I was doing. I always knew what I was doing. I just didn't stop myself. I never stopped myself. Especially when I knew better.