Cupcakes

How bright it was. Like laying nude, on a rooftop, at noon. 

But we were inside, at night, with everyone standing. Of all people, only Joey still dressed. Lars’s biggest star.

 As Lars and another guy fucked with the lights, I caught Joey’s eye. His half-smile calmed me. 

“It’s cold,” I whispered, shivering. He tried not to laugh.

My first time on camera. And with Joey! What a switch: me nude, and him in clothes. Tight jeans and a torn tee that showed his stiff nipples. Soon, all would come off. 

With my teeth? I hadn’t checked the script, short as it was. . . .

All I knew was, I wanted this. Me and Joey, one-on-one. Even under blinding lights, with everyone watching. Even for just one scene. 

He was gorgeous, with that great body and rock star hair. And sweet. Not what you’d expect in this porn world. “It’s OK, Val,” he said, each time Lars made me cry. Wiping my tears with his finger. He had huge, dark eyes. Like an “old soul.” Eyes that I felt watched over me.

Like he read my mind, Joey smiled again, then looked away. 

Did he know? How much I was falling for him? 

Wanting to fuck him blind?

Me, and . . . 

Who else was in this one? 

There were never just two.

I looked around. Same cheap motel, but a different room this time. Packed with equipment and familiar bodies. Sad, I thought, I knew so few by face. 

Like Tabitha, who wasn’t here. Good, I thought. Bitch. Out to sneak Lars out from under me. 

And Carlos, who was bi. And who was here, primping in front of a mirror. 

The rich fuck Lars catered to paid top dollar for guy-on-guy. 

Three months I’d been trapped here. But I bet I could leave. 

Lars had conned me, then trained me, with his fists, and cock. His insatiable cock, like a Tasmanian devil/parasitic twin that tore up everything it saw. Girls. Guys. 

Glory holes.

He made me bleed. In so many ways. “See what you make me do?” he said. “’Cos you can’t follow directions!” And sometimes, “That’s the thanks I get. For bringing you out here. To make you a star!” 

Like Linda Lovelace, I thought, bitterly. Back in the ‘70s. 

But lately, Lars so busy . . . Between booking, and filming, these customized shoots. Recruiting new “stars.” Exploring newer, and even more bizarre fetishes . . .

He had no clue how I felt about Joey . . .

Or did he?

“Places!” he said, from behind the camera.  

Still without looking at it, I tossed the script.

Joey crawled onto the bed. The bright lights made the bedspread look dingier, threadbare. I used to be terrified of bedbugs. But tonight they could eat me alive. That’s how bad I wanted him. 

“Action!” But I was already there. 

As he lowered his jeans, I crept up his legs. I’d seen his cock so many times, but never this close. Always raging, I could’ve swallowed it whole. He gasped with my first mouthful. Almost lost it.

“Slower!” Lars yelled. ‘Cos he sucked cock the best of anybody.

A slight wink from Joey. Smiling, I slowed down, enjoying this, wishing I could stay down on him forever. He grabbed handfuls of my hair, seemed to be guiding me . . . away! But why? This was “our scene”: me sucking his cock. 

“Now!” Lars said, and I finally got it.

Carlos slid right in, taking my place.

As he took Joey in his mouth, my heart sunk. The script! Why hadn’t I read it? I turned away, feeling so exposed, so rejected.

Joey’s moans angered me. Without looking, I knew he liked this. Carlos or me, it didn’t matter. It felt good in anybody’s mouth. 

Hey, this was Joey’s job.  

As Lars zoomed in for the cum shot, I stared over at the door. The old-fashioned chain lock to keep out thieves, and killers.

“Nice,” Lars whispered. “Nice.” Enjoying it as much as Joey. 

***

It got so late, we all stayed in the room for the night. Naked bodies crashing, all over. Lars on the bed, snoring like mad. Across the highway was a cemetery. I pictured the dead sitting up, wondering what that noise was. 

“You mad, Mami?” Carlos had asked me, after the shoot. Now he was on the floor, somewhere, dead asleep.

Against the closet door, Joey and me sat, huddled. Dressed, I was still shivering. And yeah, mad. But still wanting to feel close to him. His tee and chest were soaked from the shoot. I smelled sweaty hair, among other stuff. If I were alone, I would’ve cried.

Instead, I shared his cupcakes. The golden kind, with the marshmallow-y swirls. And an orange soda. He let me sip first from the bottle. 

“I love chicks,” he said, into my hair. “But sometimes . . . I want cock.” 

So did Lars. But I’d stopped loving Lars.  

“OK.” I took back the bottle, sipped again. 

“Tonight,” he said, even softer. “I wanted it to be just us. Me and you.”

My heart swelled. “It wasn’t in the script.”

As he took the bottle, his fingers brushed mine. “So, let’s write our own.” 

Lars was still snoring, but softer now.

As quiet as we were, I hope it haunted his dreams.

Will, the Writer

Things will never be the same. Will carved his initials into a tree-trunk somewhere in the middle of nowhere. And all these fucking cliches seeped out of his brain. He put on Beethoven’s 7th and started thinking about the time he and his friends were lollygagging in a big open field, high on mushrooms.

He used to return at night from the bars and go down into his parent’s basement and type little stupid poems on a computer. It was better than jacking off.

“If you’ve got a home at night, then I guess you’re doing all right.” His dad used to say that. Fucking wanker.

Will never got laid, but eventually he did have a place to flop. And through his depressions because of the world making him sick in his heart, balls, tongue, and gums, he managed to do what his destiny told him he should: Write.

He didn’t care about capital letters or slogans or marketing gimmicks. He just wanted to do the damn thing he was born to do. But that was just what the world wanted to steal from him: His soul.

So I guess it would’ve been better to jackoff and sleep or whatever writers did at night, budding like toadstools under Dorothy’s skip-to-my-lou bullshit. Eventually, those toadstools would sink. Too many burgers after midnight, the bitch.

Will howled with laughter as the years passed him by, and there remained a sort of sublime nature to his own undoing. At this point in his life, he wasn’t Shakespeare, and he most certainly wasn’t Alexander the Great. But he was still able to aim his piss into the toilet without any help, and having a place to sleep at night sure beat the couch of a fuck-up friend who toiled in drug abuse, alcoholism, and the eternal splendor of hearing their own voices: Will hated everybody secretly.

Soon, it wouldn’t be such a secret. And isn’t that a damn shame? Writers are annoying, especially when they aren’t writing. That’s when they’re at their worst.

Oh well, Will thought, and he skipped like a rock across a dirty pond with lots of elk surrounding it, pissing and shitting into the wind. “The Wind Cries Mary,” Jimi Hendrix sang. And then he died from choking on his own vomit.

Will kept going, and the worst part about that was that he did so even when he didn’t feel like it. That always felt like climbing a ladder that somebody moved whenever you tried to get some shut-eye. It was probably best and better for his innate madness if he could just get laid. But how?

Will found himself looking in the mirror. Maybe I should cut my hair, he thought. Nah. That realization, though, always came too late. Heh, heh.

One day he was in Austin, Texas. Having a shitfit total mental breakdown. He met some girl from Dubai. And he said, yes, I am a writer. I drink wine. One day I am going to smoke a cigarette without a care in the world, and I will write about you, oh sweet dearie. But don’t you worry a thing about it. Because I won’t use your real name, and let’s be honest. You’ll forget me anyway.

Will found himself atop the girl on a Monday afternoon in a motel in the dark, trying to suck her teat. Tit. Oh Christ. He didn’t even know what to call it. Try again, you sappy little schmuck.

The girl abandoned him, and that became a theme in the life of a writer. Look at Hemingway. He had five wives. And he must’ve had a beer-can of a cock.

Speaking of second base, the words started to come. Heh, heh.

And that felt good. But the memories of his life at this point would ultimately dwell upon the kindness of strangers and friends. He was becoming himself while simultaneously becoming a total pain in the ass. What would Bruce Springsteen have done? He would’ve written a song about it. He would have changed up the tenses, past and present. He would’ve developed a southern draw or maybe a midwestern twang. He would’ve grown out his hair and started drinking like James Dean or Waylon Jennings, and he would’ve lived along a lake and got shitfaced drunk, almost to the point of tears because his woman wouldn’t take him back. Why were writers, why were men, why were little lost boys always so dumb?

It was going to take a lot of words for Will to finally find his balls. Almost like Balzac. Heh, heh. He’d have to write volumes without signing his name. However, and this was most unfortunate, he did not have the wherewithal to understand that important point: If you’re going to pour your guts and heart out to strangers, don’t expect them to foot the bill.

So Will got up from the floors and couches and found a job. It would’ve been a great career choice to find a cushy position at an Amazon warehouse. He could piss in a bottle and make lots of friends.

Will did do one important thing, though. He kept one crucial element to his spasmodic foreboding, under the rug, beneath his collar, by reading lots of books. And listening to lots and lots of music.

The pages came like waterfalls of ceremonious guilt, and throughout his late 20s and early 30s, he turned himself (secretly) into an F. Scott Fitzgerald wannabe. Finally, he found his Zelda.

She popped lots of pills. But they were prescribed. So that was okay. It was her condition. And what was his? Just hide your belongings behind the couch, you son of a bitch. Sooner or later, she’ll leave the room, and you can sneak her pill bottles by the handful and eat ‘em like Captain Crunch.

Will wrote his first novel. And then he wrote another one. And when they (she) finally saw his words, she thought he was a madman. “The bitch,” he thought, “she’s never read Celine. She doesn’t know Knut Hamsun. Otto Frank. She doesn’t even know that the Western world is in decline. Nope. She’ll have a kid, and that kid will become a Muslim. And they will all pray to god that the world will get better. And since I’m such an advocate of religious freedom, such a tolerant bird, I will let them go, and I will feel almost nothing. Because after so many years of my own rosy crucifixion, like Henry Miller wrote into a trilogy, I will write mine too.” Nobody cared.

It was like poop on a stick. Or in the undies. It was like the eyes of a crocodile. Writing. It was totally heartless and yet it meant everything to him. The heart was actually there. The soul was there too. A walking contradiction. Where the fuck was the money? And how was he going to make it?

Women.

They took him in.

They fondled him, metaphorically and metaphysically and economically and all of the above. There was something about a beautiful woman in a goose-stepping world that made him want to live again.

The look in the eyes. The fever of love. The muse. The art. The longing for something better at the end of a rainbow shooting out of his eyes and gonads.

Somewhere, somebody was waiting for him. Well, not him, per se.

But his words.

Yeah. That truly meant something.

Fast forward about a decade or so. And there he was.

“Your words are so warm,” she said on Google Translate. She didn’t even speak English, far away in a romantic foreign country.

“Yeah, baby. You’re one of the most beautiful women in the world.”

Yeah.

Will, the writer.

He drank another beer and then got the fuck outta there.

If only to live another day.