The writer owns an original Goya painting.
The writer enjoys eating red pears.
The writer is wanted in four states.
The writer is current on his debt obligations.
The writer cooks with tarragon.
The writer is endowed.
The writer is not endowed.
The writer is a wombat.
The writer has fangs.
The writer is his alter-ego.
The writer is a mud-fish.
The writer is writing.
The writer is not writing.
The writer leaps from oblivion to oblivion.
The writer writes.
Mom said she liked my new poem
the link posted on Facebook
she scanned the room
then her smile disappeared
I need to talk to you
said in a pained whisper
her head nods toward the empty kitchen
away from the rest of the family
She pulls in close and whispers
almost a cry
I scrolled down and clicked on something
Did you know?
a dramatic pause
she’s searching for the bravery
to say the vile word
P O R N!!!!!!!!!!!!
just saying it weakens her knees
I can’t help it I laugh
This was the wrong reaction
Her: (In her best whisper-yell)
I’m serious!
Me:
I don’t know you must’ve clicked
on something you shouldn’t have
I think of the poem she’s talking about
a little slice of life moment
published on a respectable site
not like the trash I’ve published at HST
my nonchalance has her concerned
You don’t understand
I saw their vaginas
their butts were in the air!
I don’t how she expects me to react
with anything other than knee buckling laughter
What if your kids saw it?!
my youngest being 16
I have to assume
they’ve seen some porn by now
as my mom storms off
huffing as she goes
I ask
So, where exactly were their butts?
on the warner bros backlots, bukowski gives slurred and blurry directions. left here, right there, wait back up, never mind keep going. they linger to hoot and gawk at a group of chorus girls, then back to the task at hand.
hulk hogan takes out his hog to examine his wounds. the necrosis is spreading rapidly. he has a half-dead dick, and it smells like old meat.
bukowski: there it is.
there’s a large machine that says ‘wind machine’ in an unassuming font. they stop the car and get out. there is a slight breeze.
hulk hogan, elvis, ronald mcdonald, and bukowski get out their respective guns and shoot down the wind machine with all their power.
a man, who is really me, the devil, in disguise, runs up and yells at them to stop.
man: what are you doing?!
hulk: we’re ending the wind, brother!
man: why?!
elvis (to the boys): why were we doing this again, man?
ronald mcdonald: so we can shoot stuff.
hulk: but we shot stuff anyway, brother.
bukowski: this seems kind of dumb.
they lower their guns. there isn’t a breeze anymore. it feels warmer.
man (who is really me, the devil, in disguise): it’s going to take me weeks to get more parts for this here wind machine! i hope you boys are happy with yourselves.
the 4 assailants look down in shame.
***commercial break***
a noid sits in a darkened warehouse that is empty, save for a twin mattress, a folding chair and a table. on the table are a glass, a bottle, an ashtray, a pack of marlboros, and some photos of a pizza. in the back of the warehouse is a large plastic curtain on a runner, beyond which, who knows. the noid looks at the photos and takes a long drag off his cigarette. he knows what he has to do. he gets in his car and drives off. he swerves as he drives. he’s still a little drunk, but he has to do the job. he parks his car directly in the path of the delivery driver. the driver stops, and that’s when the noid jumps out of the bushes with a gun and shoots the driver between the eyes. he drags the pizza crying to his car. the pizza is bound, gagged, and drugged, and thrown in the trunk. the pizza struggles against it all but there’s no point. it soon succumbs to the drug and passes out. the pizza wakes up strapped to a chair. the noid says, go ahead and scream. i like it when they scream.
***
hulk hogan, the perfect american, stands on hollywood boulevard, watching the parade of war dead; dozens of caskets, draped in american flags, carried by soldiers, making their way past the filth and flourish of tinseltown.
hulk is moved by the sight and a single tear forms. a 12 year old kid sees this. it’s chunk from the goonies.
chunk: fag.
hulk: fuck you kid.
a flurry of shutters clacking and flash bulbs bursting capture hulk extending his middle finger at a kid.
hulk, elvis, ronald mcdonald and bukowski go their separate ways.
there should be rain to atmospherically punctuate the scene, but there’s still no wind.
credits roll.
***
“Forgive me, Trollkins love, I feel ever so sleepy.”
Princess Cherrypop, 19, stretched, yawned and placed a dainty hand over her luscious, nubile lips.
Her Troll attendant, whose name was Hermione Plunger, started.
“No no no no, young miss, that will not do,” she said.
“And why ever not?”
“Because you must be vigilant. We must ever. Be. Vigilant. We must take the potions and the remedies, maintain our lookout at all times. She is awake now, and dark upon the land. She. Nair. Cuntingham.”
“To be honest,” said Cherrypop, depositing a kiss upon her beloved handmaiden that was ever-so-innocent even as she inserted a sly, experimental bit of tongue, “I am dead tired of the constant wakefulness, and I see nothing wrong with bedding down…I mean, we could, you know, separately…or…together. In an innocent, experimental way, of course.”
Hermione gently fingered the Princess, who sighed and oozed moisture from the Pussy of the Realm.
“Thank the goddess Twatzapooner for investing the hereditary pussy power in these mine nether lips,” sighed Cherrypop as Herrmione’s firm, nimble fingers played with her. “That feels so good, and better than good. Indeed, I feel a royal explosion coming on.”
“No, no, no, you mustn’t,” said Hermione. “For is it not foretold that the release of such power would cause great destruction and devastation throughout the Land of Euphoria, and your father, Herbert Longwood the XI, will lose of his wood, and the Queen Griselda will lapse and become a slushycorpse once more, and then…deadfucking will be the rule rather than the exception, as the peasantry always follow our example, be it good or bad.”
“I’ve never felt that was quite healthy,” sighed Cherrypop. “But then again, I am young in years and, aside from reams of experimentation, innocent of man.”
“It is what it is,” conceded Hermione. “At least it keeps him from plunging the royal fleshscepter willy-nilly amongst the entombed like Count Edward of Geine.”
The Princess shuddered.
“Could you help me out of mine royal costume?” asked Cherrpop? She was beginning to feel that odd itch and wished to engage in such activity as corresponded to it, which generally resulted in her suspension from the ceiling with a gag harness over her head.
“Nay, Princess, I dare not and will not. You must attempt to dial back the sensations. Think of that awful toad, Crust Pellotone, who made his advances upon the royal pussy but recently. Think of what occurred to his body after Twatzapooner’s wrath.”
Cherrypop shuddered again with a mixture of delicious dread and outright horniness. “Oh my goodness yes. He was stripped of his clothes, stuffed into a leather sling, pinioned and punctured in every major artery. We watched that sling leak for days while he bled out, but due to the magic of the court sorcerer, Fuzzlewick, he never truly died. He’s still around somewhere,” she said. She frowned. “I’m glad he suffered. I know my father the king always admonished me to think kindly of all creatures, even the horrid, but Pellotone truly was the worst of the worst. His open and obvious slaverings! And him a peasant!”
“And him an ill-bred yob,” said Hermione. Without thinking, Cherrypop’s servant had gone knuckle-deep. Suddenly realizing what she had done, Hermione retrieved her fingers, then caressed the Princess’s cheek. Cherrypop sucked her slick fingers and licked her lips.
“I love to taste myself,” she said. “Could we play that lovely game now, the one with numbers?”
“We cannot,” said Hermione.
The Princess pouted. “You go from hot to ice cold. Which is it to be?”
***
High above Euphoria, nestled in a pink cloud, the goddess Twatzapooner was vexed. Her hereditary nexus with the royal pussy made her feel every sensation Princess Cherrypop did. And this ridiculous Hermione person was not only deliberately lying to the bearer of the Pussy of Power, she was blocking Cherrypop’s release, which caused her great frustration.
She heard the familiar whinnying of the Baroness Cuntingham, Queen of Nair, in the far distance. Nair craved the pussy power for herself, and took every opportunity to try and ambush the Princess in an attempt to carve the pussy from between her legs and extract its puissance.
“Can you believe Mistress Hermione’s boldness?” said Cuntingham partially to herself, but knowing Twatzapooner could read her thoughts.
“Yes, I can,” said Twatzapooner. “You know what, we both deserve relief. Let’s first edge the Princess, then allow her release, whereupon I will grant you what you have long desired.”
“Oh goddess, that would be…so very fucking great. Seriously though. I would do anything for you.”
“Are you mental?” asked Twatzapooner, infuriated. “I was just this close to granting your wish of obtaining the Quim Chalice, and then you pull this toadying shit.”
Twatzapooner grew angry, and angrier still, at the general impertinence.
The heavens began to boil and teem. A horrible stench filled every nostril in the kingdom, the smell of rotten meat lying in the sun for days stirred together with the guts of a fishmire and the piss of a Nocturnicorn.
Then the meat rain began.
Chunks of bloody flesh descended. They splattered rooftops and patios and yards and hedges and trees and the Dark and Light forests. Bits and pieces of blood slime smeared across cheeks and splashed down faces, making no distinction between royal and commoner.
“Oh no, the goddess is PIIIIISSED,” cried Hermione. “We need to give her discharge now.”
So saying, she tied the Princess to an x-cross, muffled the royal lips with a bit gag and proceeded to lash her until she bled. The Princess screamed through the gag, tears welling. She felt a convulsive sensation begin in her toes, then spreading up her body in violent waves.
Till it reached the pussy of power.
And detonated.
On her pink cloud, the goddess Twatzapooner experienced the Law of Unintended Consequences. Linked as her pussy was with that of the Princess, her discharge was even greater.
The meat rain increased, gathering clouds and turbulence until it became a meat storm.
The stinking flesh gobbets began to whirl in the sky, causing sucking columns to form. Houses were wrenched from their foundations, trailing bricks and sod. Horses were smashed against rocks as they screamed and screamed again. Many peasants were battered with clubs of meatcurrent until they expired.
Looking at the scene through her Mirrorcast, Hermione’s eyes widened.
“Royal shitmix,” she said. “The goddess is displeased!” She rapidly undid the Princess from her bonds. “You need to use the royal pussy power now!”
“What?” said the princess, a tad dizzy from the bondage and blood coursing towards and away from the pussy of power. “Come again?”
“Yes, Mistress, cum again. You must cum again, and restore the balance.”
“Very well then, Hermione. Eat me in that special way, and I will partake as well of the sweet game of numbers curled inside themselves.”
After a furious bout of Ye SixtyNine, both the Princess and Hermione exploded with hot, frothing orgasms. A column of Pussy Power ™ ascended through the heavens, spearing Twatzapooner’s ethereal body.
The heavens sucked up the meat rain the way one might use the heel from a loaf of bread to mop up extra shpegoootiin sauce. The storm collapsed in upon itself, rested, relaxed and smoked a cigarette.
In their respective places, the goddess Twatzapooner, the Princess Cherrypop and her servant Hermione dozed off to sleep, quite sated.
The only one who remained unsatisfied by this arrangement was the Baroness Cuntingham, Queen of Nair.
“Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me, Twatazapooner. Seriously?”
And with that, she stalked off to her Eggsucking Hut.
The ten people, five men and five women were meditating as usual at their Wednesday night session. They were all nude because they followed the rules of their prophet Lee James. According to James, a lack of clothing ensured their innocence as they spent an hour in a seventy degree Fahrenheit room with candle lighting. The men and women were required to be in separate rows approximately five feet apart facing each other. They believed their position and all of the other conditions of their meditation – silence, no devices, no food or drink – would improve their physical and mental condition.
Five minutes into the session two naked creatures interrupted them. One was obviously male, and one female but they weren’t exactly human. They were larger than typical humans and had hair in unusual places. Their bodies resembled those seen on old space opera books.
After a stunned silence lasting more than three minutes Joy spoke up “What the hell. Who are you and how did you get in?”
The male responded “Before I answer those questions, let us introduce ourselves. I go by Night Monster, and she as Night Angel. We are night demons, but good ones. Our mission is to spread sexual pleasure or healing. We came in earlier today, but you couldn’t see us because we are only visible at night. We can better your lives by offering you extreme pleasure.”
Dan said “What a load of crap. Are you escapees from a freak show?”
Night Angel answered “A freak show escapee who knows what you have fantasized doing with Janice?”
Dan face flushed and he opened his mouth to speak, but slowly reconsidered. Janice also blushed.
Monster said “Listen, all of you can go into denial about your desires, or what we are, or we can help all of you. What do you say?”
Jake said “Whatever those two have on their minds, how about we let them talk.”
There was some mumbling, but no objections, so agreement was assumed.
Angel took the lead “As we said we have been here for a while, and examined your thinking. This is a singles organization, and despite the asexual meditations, we know that most of you are here for romance as well as enlightenment. You all studiously ignored Bill’s erection during the meditation and Carol’s admiration thereof. Your meditations are valuable, but we have suggestions for augmenting the experience either before or after with earthly delights. If there is one or more disinterested, you could wait in another room while we work with the rest of the group.”
Joy and Jay left.
“I don’t want to belittle anyone here, but none of you are in satisfactory relationships now, and everyone in the meditation group is a friend to everyone else here. You are all in good health and flexible. Monster and I suggest the following couples: Janice and Amir, Carol and Sam, Suzette and Bill, Helen and Dan.”
There was some surprise from the group because the combination mixed both size and race. Pale Janice and dark Amir, big Suzette and little Bill, but no one objected and some were very pleased.
“We think that we have good matches based on your conscious and unconscious thoughts. So if there are no objections, we suggest that couples get on your meditation mats and begin to explore. If anyone needs help Monster and I are excellent fluffers. No one here needs to go home without an orgasm or several.”
The couples went to their mats as instructed. Most of them began erotic massages on their partners. Janice used mouth while Amir let his fingers do the walking. The couples, with one exception, were thoroughly aroused. They did some bargaining, including do it my way first, then I’ll do it your way next. Suzette blushed and pointed at her rear portal. Bill smiled and started drilling. After they all agreed on how to proceed they went into various versions of cowgirl, missionary, and things only available to Kama Sutra students. An interesting mixture of groans, yelps, chirps, and purrs followed.
Carol and Sam were the exception. Their mutual inspection didn’t lead to arousal. Carol cried for help. Monster positioned Carol for sixty-nine, and Angel used her foot long tongue on Sam’s penis. Within a couple of minutes Carol and Sam were thoroughly fluffed and eagerly started on each other.
An hour later several thoroughly satisfied couples were ready to leave. They bid farewell and gave thanks to Monster and Angel for giving them an addition to their meditation. On their way out they stopped in to tell Joy and Jay goodbye. To their surprise Joy and Jay were vigorously pursuing missionary sex. Joy told the group “We weren’t against the sex; we just wanted to have a little privacy. We didn’t tell the group that we have been a couple for weeks. Nothing new here for us.”
Amir, Jay, and Janice told some of their friends and those friends told their friends. Soon, Sexual Healing named after an appropriate Marvin Gaye song moved to a large room at the Portland State University campus, and hence to the more liberal colleges.
Lee James contacted the original Portland Oregon group to propose a modification of his book on meditation to include Sexual Healing. A year later James and the group had a best seller “Healing Though Sex And Meditation”.
As this is being written, peace groups are suggesting Sexual Healing between different racial, ethnic, national, and religious groups as a way out of conflict. Various sexual orientations are copying the original straight groups. The future is bright.
Once, you bought some rope
and tied a 22 year old beauty
from Bulgaria to your bed—
butt naked and flushed
and showed her perversions
she will never shake off
or find somewhere else
now, your red eyes
search the ceiling
for a place to hook
that same rope
and tie it around
your scrawny neck
now, midday, drunk and desperate
you visit an AA meeting at a church
and everybody looks so clean
and content and absolved
and they’re so nice to you
it almost embarrasses you
in its unfamiliarity
some in suits even—
so well shaved and pure faced—
there’s an envious relief in their faces
as they tell stories of old
painfully familiar to your present
decades of sobriety
in display
if my mother could see me now
you think to yourself
with a broken right hand
and a bruised up face
and a toe broken too
from when you kicked
a barstool at someone’s face
as if it was a soccer ball
now, at the cigarette break
of the AA meeting
you wonder off outside
and far from the group
feeling like you’re going to
burst into a weeping fit
because of the kindness
of these once broken souls
offering you coffee and cookies
with a soft tone to their voice
as if talking to a mad man—
voices like the Indian flutes
calming down the cobras—
offering you a chair amongst
the circle of them
now, if my mother could see me now
with my busted wing
and my plastered up face
nourishing scars that will remain
for the rest of my life
but it’s always about that higher power
that’s helped them
which makes you feel lonely
because you don’t believe in God—
you don’t believe in people either
you are tethered by nothing
to nothing
you can barely wait
for the meeting to end
so that you can limp away
from them, chasing that drink
the imposter, the liar
the bad son, the bad brother
the bad friend and the even
worse lover
now, you drink at the pub
betting your rent money
at a football match—
watching the game at a screen
as it all goes downhill
as your loss is as impending
as a liver failure
sitting now at a barstool
waiting for that next beer
a fella next to you
looking at you
waiting for the same thing
You look like you been to war
he says to you
some battles
you respond
but the war is still ongoing
he laughs
You don’t happen
to have any jobs for me
do you
you ask
he glances at your casted hand—
I was about to ask you
the same thing
he says
and we both laugh
a hollow laugh.
Nobody’s really laughing here,
we’re just waiting for the add-on
to the pause, we’re just waiting on
the reprieve
from the mounting bills
the grief of spouses
the increasing silent desperation
so quiet in our need of help
too cowardly to give love
a third chance
I decline romantic offers—
last one took me by the hand
like a child
and led me to a ketamine hole
and a well of alcohol
swimming from one addiction
to the next
and truly wondering
how come you don’t
drown yet
a steep decline
steepening by the day
to a free fall
some people have to hit
rock bottom to bounce back
and others
and most
expire there in that lonesome darkness
all eyes glued to the screen
gamblers with downwards faces
in a dour looking dive bar
Lord almighty
and all the angels above
you think
standing up to leave
if only our mothers
could see us now.
in l.a. the sun is a flash bulb in the camera of the sky that never relents. roy mcroy eats his whole lunch in a laborious, trodding fashion. only two more days of this job. when he was young he met greta garbo at a screening of which film he couldn’t remember. since then he wanted to be near greatness. he got a job 35 years prior at the w.b. lot as a security guard, straight out of high school. it was a union job with a pension so he stuck around. he married his high school sweetheart and they had two children. when they got a tv at the security booth, the channel was always set to fox news. he left it on there because he wanted some noise while he had down time. the conservative programming made him more suspicious of immigrants, and black people who weren’t famous seemed to be hoodlums. for years he let his brain simmer on the conservative hotplate, until it was dry and hard. this was a point of contention at home, as his wife and kids were not cooking their brains on trash tv. instead, his kids became bay area anarchists, and his wife ran off with a woman; all of whom stopped talking to him. he started drinking and was mad at nights. he broke down crying at walmart and bought a gun. now with two more days on the job, he has two more days of purpose. two more days of slog and agony. then he could end it. roy mcroy watches as a cadillac convertible drives up to the security booth at w.b. studios. he sees elvis and hulk hogan, an old drunk and ronald mcdonald in the car. ronald mcdonald takes out a shotgun and blasts him in the face.
***commercial break***
a very white upper middle class family rides in their cadillac escalade. ‘in this fast paced digital world, it’s important to take into account the quiet of a well made car.’ the escalade plows through a herd of deer without losing speed. blood splatters the windshield. the kids in the back say yay! the dad turns on the windshield wipers.
***
panama’s ‘destroyer’ plays in bullet-time as the hammer strikes the shell. there is a rapid expanse of gasses and flame, propelling the buckshot down the smoothbore barrel, each bb of shot trying to outrun the last, until they meet the true forms of light and death outside the barrel. this is plato’s shotgun, and in this moment, when the shot traverses from gun to face, everyone surrounding understands the true forms of the mortal moment. as the music swells, roy mcroy has a reverie from sometime ago, when men were men and the goddamn antifa wasn’t trying to take his job. it was a simpler time, some decades before this one. and he thought of an office building in the middle of a field that he saw as a kid. he didn’t know what was in the office building, nor why he was there, but he knew that there was something beautiful about that building and that field, that it had the american promise of taming the wilderness for business, that all frontiers would soon be mapped. there should’ve been a picture taken of that building, in all its dull imposition. this is what roy mcroy thinks of in his last milliseconds, as the buckshot pierces meat and crushes bone… as the metal snakes through the skull and out the back. the body of roy mcroy slumps back and air escapes his lungs like a sigh.
credits roll.
***
The first day of Fall always makes me think of John Milton
baking cupcakes in Baphomet stilettos, real cockroach killers
from the school of entomology. Black lace like naughty place settings
poisoning the well with a contortionist’s deceptive haste. Dipping Sauce
is a terrible name for a porn star, don’t you think? Even if such appellations
are anatomically correct. And the Live, Laugh, Love crowd is a dunk tank full of piss
and piranhas. I watch them get torn apart in reverse collage while the
giant Ikea clock on the wall fakes another end times orgasm with pumpkin
spice napalm over everything. Amish house skeletons growing erect
in fields along the highway. Tailgaters and sodomites rushing up from behind.
Looking to pass on the double line with power steering and unsavoury gestures.
I throw on my indicator to intimate a great turning to nowhere. Robert Johnson’s
cigarette breath while the devil plays all his records backwards looking
for command-and-control centers with “missiles like sausages.”
A straight carnivore in vegetarian times, as the swipe right Clantons
get cleaned out faster than a bank vault full of expired hand sanitizer.
Maybe it’s me, but I find the mundanity of living, rife with its routines and needs –work, sleep, defecation, taxes– offset by the frequent, savage longing that seems to pounce upon me at every turn and corner.
How do I mean? Well, take the drive-thru at McDonald’s. It starts with golden arches, and the seduction only grows from there. There is the inviting glow of combo meals with their Homeric calories, temptations for cheap. Yet more alluring, by far, than any burgers or treats, is the effeminate voice, servile and oh-so-promising, through the intercom. Two minutes later, there she is, a greasy bag in her hand, a weak coffee extending out the narrow window to my car.
An exchange of meat and fluids for a few dollar bills makes it difficult to avoid drawing certain filthy comparisons. I reach through the window to accept my Number 4 while deeply entrenched in the salacious narratives playing in my mind. Eye contact is sparing between us, but we indulge in a modicum of discourse: Enjoy your meal. Thank you so much, have a wonderful day.
But before that: the plump hand with its faded heart tattoo and many silver rings. The tacky, dragon-like talons that curve, purple and bejewelled, impractical press-ons that I cannot look at without immediately daydreaming about a handjob. The oversized lips, endowed with plush extravagance. How they glisten, wet and dark, like cherry-cola. How they part to reveal an empty smile that I actively delude myself is flirtatious, an overt invitation to sex. The mangle of teeth she tries (and fails) to hide –such disarray, but so very white. The brush of her dimpled knuckles over mine.
I drive away from McDonald’s burdened with a cheap meal and a good chance of late afternoon diarrhea. But more than that, I leave McDonald’s with a half-strength erection, a dab of pre-cum on the inside fabric of my boxer-briefs, and two or three days of imaginative fuel for my five or six indulgences of self gratification. At the bottom of the bag, the underside of my paper cup, I am sure to find her number scrawled in pen. But all I find are far too many packets of ketchup. No napkins whatsoever.
***
I often find myself pulling into the Petco parking lot, drawn in by its friendly logo and what I know awaits inside. I enter the store with its familiar aroma of rodent piss and straw bedding, scan the brightly lit room with the bogus intention of locating more food for Fluffer, my tuxedo tomcat. I have a four-month supply at home, ever expanding, soon to eclipse five months of surplus, and undoubtedly, eventually, half a year of dried kibble will encumber the small capacity of my kitchen pantry. Am I preparing for the apocalypse? Certainly not.
Then why so much cat food? What gives?
This: I require the excuse to visit Petco, yet again, for the third time this week, the eighth time in the past fortnight, the umpteenth time this month, so I can determine if she is working. Who? The chubby blonde with the puffy blue eyes and the androgynous, pixie haircut. Her name tag has cordially introduced her to me. Haley. Sweet Haley.
My cravings demand that I drink her in, commit her dumpy physique and robust limbs to my memory, safeguard her pouty lips in the library of my longings and devotions. And so I haul the ten-pound bag of kibble onto the counter as I watch the perfect eroticism of her scanning the barcode with the laser gun. She asks for my number (for my frequent shopper discount). I give it to her, slow and deliberate.
“Should I write it down for you?” I ask.
“No need,” she lets me know. “It’s in the system.”
I chuck the cat food in the backseat and drive to the nearest semi-secluded spot before my arousal curbs from its towering peak. I unzip my denim shorts and wonder how much it would cost me to invest in tinted windows. I grip the old McDonald’s bag on the floor beneath the passenger’s seat to grease up my palms. I touch myself and whisper/whimper her name. Haley! I erupt, exhale, and search for napkins. There is nothing but an endless supply of ketchup packets, an enormity of cat food.
***
This is what I mean. These sudden, ambushing longings. These savage, torturous cravings that infuse an otherwise dull life with a certain –albeit painful– exuberant hue.
Am I alone? Can you relate? Am I a freak, or am I just being indecorous in my blatant honesty? Is this the typical male existence? A boner for each woman I encounter? A masturbation fantasy for anyone vaguely human-shaped and probably female?
It’s true, sometimes I chafe my dick raw thinking about the demure lady who works at the drugstore, my dentist with her platinum bouffant and monstrous tits –I won’t deny it. I can’t begin to guess how many times I’ve fantasized about my boss, her severe fringe and subtle underbite, her wet sex pervading the cramped office in my mind. She can be a real bitch, and on days when she treats me like scum I lube myself up the moment I get home from work. I recall her cruel remarks, the demeaning names she showered upon me. It takes two seconds to get hard, then I’m lost in a lovely fairy tale, pretty pictures in my head, our backs and assess up against a pile of paperwork, her threats or incentives that echo in forceful ultimatum. I make noises. Grunts and oaths. “I’ll behave. I promise to behave!” And then it’s cleanup time.
On my hands and knees, a little wash of shame accompanies my sudden sobriety. When I see my boss the next morning, I feel dirty, and that feels good. So I often do it all again.
It’s all a bit exhausting, being aroused all the time, left, right, and center. The prompts are everywhere, the desire is endless. But really, these episodes of need in the aftermath of my many quotidian encounters with so-and-so or whosiewhatsit are like little glimpses into Shangri-La. The soulless security guard who elects to frisk me in LAX? This episode is filed away, used later, and becomes an idyllic jaunt to Nirvana. The chirpy, septuagenarian who takes my picture at the DMV? I remember the tally of her crows feet, her lazy, open mouth as she assessed the washed photos of my mugshot, and voilà! I enter another realm. I dip into a volcanic thermal pool in Valhalla. In my cheerful, vile mind, the excess of golden bracelets that jangle on her bony wrists make music as they take me, knead me, mold me into an animal, and ultimately cause me to explode.
Excessively poetic? Perhaps. But what I frankly mean to say is this: while they come with a certain frustration, I wouldn’t discard my primal urges for a million dollars. Okay, maybe a million dollars. But for real, I openly accept my troubled and ravenous ways.
***
On rare and magnificent occasions, fantasy transcends to affair. The hands that wave to say hello, to take my money, to offer me change, to prod at my cavities with a sinister tool; these same hands, on merciful and remarkable instances, unbutton my shirt, pull at the elastic of my boxer-briefs, take up my sex in their clammy grip, guide me into their mouths, between their legs. It’s these mythical moments I discover my own personal religion. I look to the heavens (often the ceiling of a motel bedroom) and consider the real possibility that yes, there might be a god after all.
My most recent love affair was certainly divine, although it ended, as they all do, in emotional turmoil, with a deep sense of loss and a lingering bitterness that will never fully fade. But that came later. Much later. After all the savage, carnal lust. The foodstuffs and spreads that we licked off human plates, from navel soup bowls, and deep, briney crevices.
It spawned from peanut butter, believe it or not. Our love, our lust, our passion; it resulted from a chance encounter prompted by a defect label on an extra crunchy Jif jar. I didn’t notice when I plucked it from the shelf. And if I had, I would not have cared. After all, I’m not going to eat the label, you know? It’s the contents that will cover my toast, satiate that morning pang for a bite to accompany my coffee. But in retrospect, how glad I am that I took the jar with the faulty label. Random chance can be a bitch, but today, she is a saint, an angel of mercy.
I dropped the Jif into my basket. There is no way I could have foreseen it: how the spread would never see the golden side of rough toasted bread, but cover a canvas of flesh, both hers and mine.
***
There she was at the checkout. Hannah. She worked almost every day, it seemed. Every day that I shopped, anyhow, and as always, I was glad to see her, to watch her finger my groceries and tell me how much I owed her for the pleasure. Sometimes I’d opt to wait in a much longer queue, sacrifice three to five minutes so I could share that flicker of eye contact with Hannah, stare at her bored, sad face as she mindlessly shuffled my shopping to beep against the square of laser projections.
She was soft, and getting softer all the time, with a doughy neck and thick forearms, pale and round as a wood grub. She wasn’t fat, but transitioning that way, and her unspectacular features were elevated only by her youth. She wasn’t particularly beautiful, but she was very particularly her, which, for whatever reason, made her particularly beautiful to me. When the spark ignites –often surprising who plucks at my heartstrings, tweaks my loins– the subject becomes a goddess, no matter how society may judge her physical faults. Haley, Hannah, whoever; when the cherub makes his mark, the peon becomes a princess. She outshines the model, the movie star, the pinup girl. She is the center of the world, and the gravity of her sexual appeal makes a circling moon out of me.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Hannah scans my can of peaches, my shrink-wrapped sausage, my frozen pizza. She handles each item with soulless automation. Her rhythm is slowed by the weighted items, the unpackaged fruits and vegetables that require a code. But her pace is regular, never truly halting, until she handles the peanut butter with its defunct label.
I watch as she struggles, tilts the jar, unable to induce the familiar, expectant beep that allows her to move on to the next item, and the next, and the next, until eight hours pass and she becomes the real Hannah, a myth and mystery that no doubt blooms beyond the muted professionalism required of her in the cold, halogen landscape of the supermarket. I zero in on her hands, her pale flesh taut with grocery store chill, and as they work on the peanut butter puzzle, I note their black talons, those ridiculous, monitor lizard daggers that make any task graceless. It’s amazing it took it this long, but there it is: the handjob daydream playing out in my one-track mind.
“Sorry,” Hannah says, and rewards my patience with a nanosecond of direct eye contact. “It’s the label,” she tells me. “It’s folded over. Can’t get to the barcode.” She stops trying to make the thing beep, uses her Godzilla claws to pinch and peel back the label which has stuck inward upon itself.
I watch in utter delight. I am in no rush, even if the sour lady behind me is rolling her eyes and shuffling her feet, sighing heavily every ten seconds, anything to communicate the words “Hurry up” without actually speaking them.
“Should I run and grab another one?” I offer.
“No, no. I’m almost there.” Then, finally smiling, she scans the amended peanut butter label and waggles one of her sorceress fingers at the jar. “Bad jar,” she jokes. “Bad, bad jar.”
We share a mild chuckle, and then I take my chance, employ a playground flirtation. “Well, I knew you were working today,” I tell her. “So I made sure to grab the one that was messed up.” My words didn’t come with a physical wink, but they carried one, unseen, in spirit.
Once again, I am rewarded with her brown eyes, and in them I see clear communication. Through the exasperated sighs and shuffling from the irritated woman behind me in the queue, I decipher an unspoken message in the doe-brown gaze that sparkles across the conveyor belt. Maybe I am deluded, but I swear it was an open invitation to love. In any case, when I laid bare my soul, ignored the throat-clearing of the demon grunting behind me, I was gifted with Hannah’s coy smile suppressed by a bitten lower lip, and finally, audible affirmation: Yes, here is my number.
***
I didn’t wait long. I texted her that evening, and she didn’t wait long, either, to text me back. She was as eager and forward as I, it seemed, and so I agreed to her suggestion: dinner at my place. I gave her my address and paced by the window until I saw her emerge from a lousy little car. I opened the front door before she got the chance to knock, and before I had the chance to see Hannah in her street clothes, they were on the floor, and so were mine. We stumbled, blinded by our smothering embraces, our limbs and mouths frantic and occupied, but eventually made it to the bedroom. In the other room, dinner got cold, and neither one of us cared.
We had sex many times, which is something I didn’t know I was capable of. Not in one night, one session. But really, it was easy. My body behaved, responded, performed. And though I owe my surprising ineptitude mostly to Hannah, to her radiant, soft body and doughy upper arms, her luminous small breasts and devout hunger for me, in truth, I may owe it all to the peanut butter, the freak catalyst to this glorious debauchery and fiery passion.
We applied the spread in the most creative and filthy of ways. Hannah smeared the condiment in dark corners and crevices I didn’t know I had, and in hidden valleys I was happy to discover on her own body. We explored our frisky palate, tasting, sampling, eating, indulging, feasting off of one another. After a time, we moved on from the Jif, wiping free our lips and chins and making love again, longer, harder, faster. And we didn’t stop when the peanut butter jar was down to a thin residue lining the glass. Next, it was pizza sauce, pesto, and coconut cream. It was cold on our flesh, but soon became warm, wedged between our slick, snaking bodies. In the end, my bed sheets were a write-off, totally unsalvageable. Hannah and I tossed them to the floor, let our bodies warm each other during the night, and awoke in the morning, shrouded in a disgusting, artful crust of congealed juices.
This went on for a while. Many months, I am happy to report. Sex with Hannah was always ferocious, never clean. Honestly, I could’ve done without all that food –Hannah was tasty enough on her own– but she was totally into it, and so I yielded to her desire, which became my own. My grocery bill skyrocketed, which added a measure of reluctance about the edible nature of our affair. But really, once you place pineapple rings to frame the nipples of your lover’s snow-white tits, there is no going back. Tropical fruit has never been so sweet.
“Shall we wine and dine?” Hannah would ask, bright and bawdy over the phone. It was our private joke, code for sitophilia, or as the layman might say, “fucking with food.”
“How about a movie?” I’d sometimes suggest. “Or I take you out to dinner, for real. You know, a nice restaurant?” After all the sex, I was desperate to become closer to her. Not physically –the only way to get closer would be to shrink and crawl up inside of her– but emotionally, romantically. I wanted to treat her like a princess, not a buffet.
“Or, I could get another jar of Jif?” If nothing else, Hannah was persistent. With her, it was always raunchy, edible sex.
“Really?” I’d ask, almost implore, using only my tone to communicate a desperate need to go beyond our sandwich spread fetish. “How about a walk on the beach?” Too cliché? Was I too old, too boring for Hannah, who maybe, just maybe, only appreciated me for my complimentary coupling with cream cheese or Greek yogurt, the fund to supply them to her. “Let’s try something different,” I’d say.
“We could go with Skippy,” Hannah offered. “There’s a sale on.”
“How about the zoo?”
There was a long pause on the other line. Eventually I heard something. A Sigh? “Hannah? You there?”
“Actually, I’m feeling a little tired,” she told me. “Maybe I’ll sit this one out.”
This felt like the beginning of the end. I didn’t want to lose her. “Skippy is on sale?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she brightened up. “Big time sale. Two for one!”
This time I sighed. “I’ll swing by the supermarket before I come pick you up.”
“I’m looking forward to wining and dining, baby.”
“Yeah. It’ll be great…”
***
And really, truly, it was great, even if I did feel that our relationship was stuck in the mud, unable to pass beyond the claggy mire of so much peanut butter. But here’s the thing: Hannah was beautiful, desirable, and smooth, even when we went with crunchy. It was fun for a while, but I wish we could skip the spreads. Don’t’ mistake me, I don’t mean to complain. I like peanut butter and cream cheese, I really do, but it’s the creamy flesh of the young supermarket attendant that really filled me up. Besides, all that rich spread, I was starting to get soft.
It was inevitable that we would fizzle out. Or, rather, it was inevitable that her passion for me would fizzle out, that I would beg for her to allow me, just allow me, please, to buy more peanut butter, anything, caviar if she desired some, if it would bring her back to my bed, to my arms, where I may embrace her cetacean-smooth body and feel her heartbeat against my own. I longed to fall asleep with her, encrusted and filthy, as we had so many times before, my face embedded in her mustard-hardened hair as she snored, her soft body rising, falling in perfect rhythm.
How was it that I ever had cause to complain?
***
And now, as things have developed, after Hannah met Pete, a boy her own age who skateboards past my house on the way to his work, the supermarket, where he and Hannah share sly winks across their respective serving counters, it becomes clear: I have been ousted, outdueled, beaten. My own relationship with Hannah has been reduced to shopper and cashier, the way it began. And although we cannot undo all the gorgeous, filthy things that we have done to each other, neither can we celebrate them, honor them with retellings of the past, or hope to reenact them. Not now, perhaps not ever. As her boyfriend, Pete does not allow Hannah to take my calls or text me back, or even talk to me outside of what he calls “modest professional discourse.”
When I shop for groceries, when Pete’s queue is virtually empty, I opt for Hannah’s, even as it winds, long and serpentine, deep into the aisles. From far away, I project a pretense of patience. I wait and study the products that hem me in, the many jars of peanut butter. In this state of hopeful expectation, I bide my time and will my erection to remain at bay. I listen to the scanner-gun beeps that tally the long seconds of my brimming anticipation, and as I approach, nearer to Hannah, I savor each one of her monotone greetings, sterile and polite.
I wait. I endure. I suffer throughout, until I get my chance, my own moment with Hannah, where maybe, just maybe, fortune will fall upon me once again.
Dr. Grue Pansky cleared his throat and scratched at his earlobe, covertly extracting a glob of wax. He rolled the sebum between his fingers, thinking of the word “semen” and pun-rolling it with “not believing.” He was suddenly reminded of his patient, later revealed to run a child sex trafficking ring, Shtuffin Jensen Glurba, fond of sex magick practices involving whacking off in his victim’s face.
The world really didn’t think much of him, and Dr. Pansky would never quite be comfortable with his lowered status ever since he left his staff position at Los De Abajo Hospital in San Bernardo, California under a cloud. Known as “Doctor Doom” to many of his patients for the record number of people, including major celebrities, who had died after appearing on his show RockStar Rehab on HBO, he no longer felt that he could afford to be associated with the sprawling, beautiful campus, a whited sepulcher plump to bursting with awful unclean bones and worse.
“I am not Doctor Doom,” he’d told reporters at the time. “I am a human being.” You could have heard crickets, even the sound of tumbleweed families rolling down avenues of sin.
“That is to say…those patients were going to die…anyway.”
“Ahem.” The small bear cleared his throat. Dr. Pansky looked up from his laptop. He’d nodded off. Too many late nights with Dr. Brownstone and Dr. J.
“I heard all about your patient, Eyelish Kiernan. She went all aggro on her boss, right?”
“Wasn’t me,” said Pansky irritably.
“Of course not,” said Reynaldo, the World’s Smallest Circus Bear.
An endless unquiet pause ensued.
Then: “Have you ever considered yoga and meditation?” asked Reynaldo, raising a thoughtful paw.
“Anyway,” said Pansky, slapping himself awake like Satan’s own bitch, “this is not and has never been about me. It’s about you. It’s about Reynaldo, literally the World’s Smallest Circus Bear. It’s about your childhood trauma, the death of your parents in a fire that you started when you fired up your first joint and casually tossed it to the forest floor. It’s about your journey through being a CIA asset to realizing your grandiose ambition to become the Bear Messiah, bringer of the Secret Wisdom and Sexy Shmexiness. It’s about your collaboration with the author of THE DEATH JAZZ, Alex S. Johnson, and the way Johnson has used me as a recurrent character in stories such as ‘Vitonic: For Your Life!,’ ‘Looker,’ and even referenced me and Los De Abajo Hospital under a different name between the pages of Morbid Curiosity Magazine, edited by Loren Rhoads.”
“That Johnson dude? Never trust him,” said the bear, shedding a single, tiny tear.
“Oh yeah? I thought as much. He sent me quite the nasty barbed memo when I…”
“When you…”
“When I…harrrumph…Satan’s Jeweled Cock…I must protest…”
“Look into my eyes, see who I am,” said Reynaldo, smiling. Twin flames danced in his cheeky chocolate brown eyes.
“The…the Devil!!!” cried Dr. Pansky.
“No. A thousand times no. I must protest,” said the bear with an air of injured innocence. “The Devil would be someone who trades his good name to become a shill for Big Pharma, pushing bullshit psych medications whilst condemning a substance that is legal in many states, including this one, California, where you practice…I’m talking about the sticky Black Sabbath wrote a song about…it will free your mind muh friend…”
“No…” shrieked Pansky. “That way lies chaos and schizophrenia!” He cleared his throat. “I and my colleague Dr. Thomas Hermuzti have declared that delta nine THC, otherwise known as murrrrrr…eeee….wa…”
“Go on, say it. I see you shiver in antici…”
“No.”
“You know why you’re such an awful person and went on mixed martial arts expert and lame-ass comedian Shmoe Rogaine’s show to spread anti-vax disinformation on behalf of your Big Pharma handlers is…”
“Nooooo…”
“You’re a fraud and you want to dress in a bra and panties and suck me off, doncha…that’s your shameful secret. But you’re too much of a fucking narcissist to admit it…let me tell you what, the rock stars you condemn because they check in under what you call a ‘phony name’ to this bish up in here are actually pretty fucking cool, whereas you yourself are a disappointment to your patients, everybody who trusted you, yourself, your long-suffering parents, your wife…”
“Have you no decency? Have you no ethics? Have you no morality? Fortunately nobody will ever have the unmitigated umbrage to publish a story with a scenario such as you’ve just lain out for me….”
“Are you 100% sure about that? What about HORROR SLEAZE TRASH?”
Pansky gulped, then smiled. “Not even HST.”
The bear smiled too. Very wide.
“Ok,so I do have quite the yen for forced feminization and crawling on muh hands n’ knees like a little bitch…”
“There you go muh goodman, my Young Goodman Brownstone,…”
“Why do you insist on making up awful nicknames for me? I do NOT have an addiction. I am not an addict. I TREAT addicts like…”
“Like?” Reynaldo made a signature gesture, the one he used when he was about to juggle chainsaws while negotiating a unicycle across a flaming tightrope?”
“Like…”
“Admitting you have a problem is literally the first step…”
Dr Pansky rose from his chair and kicked it over, sporting an enormous erection. He unzipped and began to furiously masturbate. The bear dove for cover just in time to avoid being caught in the eye with a geyser of hot jissom.
“You’ve gone and spoilt it! Damn you!!! I was going to save that one for muh spank bank for all time!!!”
“Seriously?” Reynaldo said in a tone of pained dignity. “But you know what? I think we’ve both been played.”
“How so?” said Dr. Pansky. The infamous host of RockStar Rehab attempted to seize a clutch of fur to wipe his still-spurting cock off on. The bear tucked and rolled, rolled and tucked, and kept rocking and rolling, rolling, rolling out into the long shock corridor of Los De Abajo Hospital. He could hear the LAPD choppers overhead. He knew he was in trouble once again. And he revelled in it.
He adored it.
It made his day.
Alex S. Johnson proof-read the story one more time, then typed:
THE END?
Horror Sleaze Trash 