for Kevin Killian

was not born speaking your kind’s language or knowing your ways. But when I was torn from my family and the rest of my kind and forced to live in captivity in one of your zoos, I learned all about you.

You are a furtive creature. You want, but you are ashamed of your wanting. Of your myriad wants, you get many of them openly but savor them most in private. You like to lie about on my kind and dream of those wants you have yet to possess. You then like to lie on or bounce on or roll on or kick on one of your kind as you do day and night on one of my kind and often at the same time. This is a favorite want of yours of which you never tire. Perhaps, if I tell your secrets, you will realize that there are many silent creatures watching you and your loud antics. Perhaps then you will release me and my many kin in captivity. I have thousands of stories about you that I know you would rather I kept secret.

Here are just seven.

I hope they haunt you as they do me. You have been warned.

Let us go:

 

One

Adam and Eve check into Room 18 of the Argent Motel, a mini-mall unto itself of brick and glass and crumbling stucco somewhere urgently forgettable between Los Angeles and the Grapevine. They check in under assumed names (who would believe Adam and Eve, just Adam and Eve, are real names unlike Viggo Mortensen and Exene Cervenka? who would believe they are the Adam and the Eve?—though they are and they look good for their age, something in that apple bite—the rest of you humans sag faster than my kind yet everything gathers in your middle, too). Adam has promised her something different, at last. Eve knows better. She lies back as he sucks on her nipples, hoping in time he’ll enter the gates to her garden with his blazing tongue. But once again, he plays “You want another of my ribs?” and pokes her till the “rib” breaks, spilling its marrow, and grows soft. Eve doesn’t make a sound. She’s given up faking it several millennia ago. She grimaces as Adam snores and fingers the stem of her own hidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil until she comes.

 

Two

Twelve hours after Adam checks out, he returns with Steve. But again, they do not want to draw undue attention to themselves and check in under false names. Kevin Killian, who is the night manager of the Argent Motel, always plays along with Adam because he is more entertaining than the sunburned families with mewling offspring coming to and from Magic Mountain and he pays in cash. And Steve is hot. He is a dead-ringer for River Phoenix. But River is dead and Steve is not. Kevin, who is also a writer, nearly laughs in Adam’s face when he checks the register to write him a receipt. Adam and Steve are now Mr. Edmund Picano and Mr. Felice White. For two ancient fuck buddies, they are still new to the gay scene. And mightily buzzed on coke.

How’s Blanche? Adam asks Kevin while he waits for Kevin to hand him his receipt and the key to room 18.

She’s fine, Kevin answers. She gave us a scare the other day. Dodie and I thought she’d run away but we found her curled up in the back of the closet.

Your wife sleeps in the closet?

No, the cat.

Adam always confuses Kevin’s wife, Dodie, with their cat, Blanche.

What crazy lives you writers live. C’mon, Felice.

I’m Edmund, laughs Steve.

And I’m lucky, howls Adam, too high to give a fuck for the rolling of Kevin’s eyes.

Once he’s closed the door to Room 18, Adam orders Steve to strip and they fumble with their respective clothes. Then Adam pushes Steve onto the bed and licks his face and across half of one of his pecs before rolling him over. Adam is tugging at his dick as he hunches over Steve’s ass. Steve is rubbing his dick against the Vellux blanket. The material feels like spun plastic and it is easy to spark a pleasant, warming heat out of it. Meanwhile, Adam spits into the crack of Steve’s ass. He pushes the spittle down between his cheeks. He mounts Steve and presses his limp dick as deeply into his buttcrack as he can. He passes out thinking he has come. The extra weight on Steve’s back makes the burn all the more intense. He does come. He rolls out from under Adam to leave him to wake up alone, the cold of the wet spot stuck against the small of his back.

 

Three

Kevin watches as a Corvette the color of a Red Delicious apple drives out of the lyrics of the Prince song and then past the front of the lobby’s automatic sliding doors. It has missed the mark and reverses. A car’s equivalent of a double take. Out of the driver’s door come the heels, the legs, the thighs, the torso and laughing head of a woman known two days ago as Exene Cervenka. The also-laughing head of Steve rises over the roof of the car from the passenger’s side door. A waving hand and arm join the head. Tonight, she signs them in as Mr. And Mrs. John Doe. Newlyweds. And, it looks like, if Kevin squints his eyes just right, that the third head in the car belongs to the maid of honor, a sister (?) of the bride (?) or groom (?).

Eve & Steve & Lornette.

You thought I’d say Lilith. She ditched this crowd when my ancestors were wool bags filled with straw and an exoskeleton of ropes and kindling. Lornette is a word of its creator’s own making just as she is a woman of her own making, with a little help from some hormones and perhaps someday a surgeon’s costly knife. Once she was Loren and once she discovered the word “lorgnette” and fell asleep dreaming she had fallen, like another very special girl, through those two bits of two-bit glass into a world of red-velvet curtains and bright lights and wildly elaborate makeup and dresses and songs played by full orchestras. Each night she falls farther and dreams less.

Tonight Steve, one of Lornette’s favorite clients—always cash up front and more than she dreams to charge for an hour, a night, a week even (he claims that unlike Al Gore he really did invent the Internet or some pricey part of it)—has brought her to Room 18 of the Argent Motel. Up for a threeway with the Mother of All Women? Steve asked her several hours earlier from his cell phone. Eve wants to play like the boys tonight, he continued, and strap one on and fuck me till I scream like a girl and I’d like to share the wealth and pass on the pleasure to you. Lornette said yes and sighed with relief when Steve had hung up. She was out of Viagra—Estrogen giveth and Estrogen taketh away—and didn’t feel like fucking anyone else today anyway. Never a problem with Steve since he only topped with her—something he never could do with his boyfriend or so he said. But straight men only wanted to bottom to her. And they always have to be gripping something that hollers HONEST-TO-GOD-WOMAN when they’re sucking my dick or getting fucked up the ass, Lornette had thought as she stared at the newly mute cell phone clutched in her hands, her French-manicured nails clacking against the LED display as if waiting for it to spell out to her why straight men are so odd. Perhaps Steve is going straight-for-pay tonight? He’s rich enough to find that perverse. Whatever, she concluded. A postmodern daisy-chain she could handle.

And so tonight our thoroughly pomo pre-op Alice finds herself falling once more. Tonight she lies face-first on me. And on her lies Steve, harder than he’s been in years thanks to the miracle that is a rare moment of genuine novelty converging with a Walgreen’s worth of modern pharmaceuticals, pushing farther and farther into Lornette’s expertly accommodating asshole. And on Steve lies Eve, her eyes only on her dick as she watches it slide in and out. She pulls all the way out and pushes all the way back in over and over. All she can do is watch. Watch Steve’s huffing and puffing hole suck her newfound nine-inch dick down to the harness and spit it back out. Whole. Unbitten. So unlike the apple. She has never laughed harder. It spreads from her to him to her to me. But I do not give in. I hold my coils firm. For I know: Eve into Steve into Lornette equals one sticky tangle of sheets and puddles here and there that will never wash out even if some human ever bothered to bathe me.

They leave me a reeking mess in the morning.

Eve & Steve & Lornette.

 

Four

The door to Room 18 opens and Lornette returns almost thirteen hours later with her two johns, Cain and Abel.

You: Hold the phone! You’re telling me that all those names intoned in that endless hour or two of Sunday School each week in the stuffy basement of my childhood are still running about?

Me: You thought Cain killed Abel?

You: Was there an earlier resurrection left out of the Bible?

Me: I could have easily called them the Carlson twins to heighten the homoeroticism and the ripped-from-the-headlines—all right, fashion spread from OUT magazine—feel. But who will remember the Carlson twins or OUT magazine in a few minutes or months or millennia? Or, for that matter, Romulus and Remus? Castor and Pollux? Orville and Wilbur? Reggie and Ronnie Kray? Not all twins. But all brothers. And all but forgotten. The last pair I even had to trot out the surname just to jog the memory of those connoisseurs of demimondes past, present, and future. Yes, I guess I could have been more political and said Jeb and George. But even I, who know down to the double-stitching of my padding all the cruelty your kind is capable of, find Cain and Abel less frightening.

Abel pulls Lornette down on top of his naked body. Cain pushes Lornette’s legs apart. Kneels between the double V, the two sets of open scissors. He pulls on his dick with one hand. He stops long enough to push up Lornette’s skirt, to tear a hole in her panties. He returns to yanking his dick while he fingers her ass with the spittle-soaked fingers of his other hand. (Like father like son.) He runs them down from her hole to play with her pussy. Cain cannot say enough to Abel about what he wants to do to Lornette’s pussy until he is struck dumb by her tight balls.

Lornette screams into Abel’s suddenly horrified face. It is the volume of her scream and not the fact that she’s a chick with a dick as Cain is now shouting over and over that forces the skin around Abel’s widening mouth and eyes into tens of deep creases. And Lornette’s screams only grow louder because Cain is trying to tear her balls from her with one hand as he beats against her shoulders and the back of her head with the other. They both learn it is easier to backhand overhandedly than castrate underhandedly. Lornette flies off of Abel, off of the bed. She falls against the chair and her purse spills her gun into her hand. Lornette always packs. She is but one of a people too often and too savagely killed to leave the house unarmed. For a day or two candles are burned in memoriam. But most see the pictures of the slaughtered and say Shit! in as many syllables as their laughing mouths can hold. To them, Lornette is not a woman. She is not female. Not even a gender between or beyond male and female. She is just a drag queen who forgot today is not Halloween. But many a mind has been opened by the barrel of a gun. For Cain, however, it will be his hard heart as it splatters the headboard and wall behind him and the mattress below him.

Abel is screaming, at his brother to stop, for his brother because he is dead, for himself because he fears he is next. Shut the fuck up, Lornette screams back. Get dressed. You’re driving me to Vancouver. The cops will never think we’re stupid enough to go north when Mexico is three hours south. You can drop me off in the West End. I have enough speed we don’t have to sleep. Just sixteen hours. Then you can come back here or stay with me. Just stop screaming for fuck sake. That queen at the front desk will hear you. C’mon, Abel. Live up to your name and get dressed and get us the fuck out of here!

Abel, because of the gun because of Cain because of Lornette, and Lornette, because of Cain because of the gun because of Abel, run off on the lam. Which many of your kind think is actually spelled “lamb,” as if the guilty flee on a little wobbly back of fleece. Still it is a fitting mistake tonight since Abel is your first shepherd. And fitting that there should be blood. For lambs and blood go together in your cosmology as easily as lambs and lions. The odder the permutation the more profound the message, you believe. Yet you draw so much comfort, like a childhood blanket nubby with age tucked under its master’s wizened head, from the fact that you each look so much alike. Then you panic when someone refuses to play along and reminds you that you are alike but you are not the same, when someone reminds you that Flux is the Mother of us all. Even a newborn cradle knows this. That is why your kind have always linked our children with the grave.

I have many hours to think about this as Cain’s hot-as-a-lion’s-breath blood gets chummy with my fluffy-as-a-lamb’s-ass stuffing, soaking its way through to my springs. Until the night and Cain and his blood and finally I grow as cold as the first star of the morning after the longest night of the year.

 

Five

Maria Montez, the head of housekeeping, calls the head of security, Vin Diesel, in to help her turn the blood-stained mattress. Head is such an odd choice of words when they are as much the whole body without another person in either housekeeping or security to call a neck or torso or even a limb. And as for me, I too lack better words since all I know are my captors’. I am nauseous because my “stomach” somersaults to where my “back” once was. Nauseous for a good hour. An hour in which Vin lies with his feet at my headboard and his head at the other end where Maria squats until she straddles him. You look like one giant dildo, she hisses as she pushes her lips against his freshly shaved head. She’d waited, naked, on the bed while he spent thirty minutes shaving and reshaving and anointing the dome of the rock that is his body. His skin, the color of the meat of olives or nuts but pale from years on the night shift, is warm and smooth. There is only the occasional and briefest prick of stubble against her tender and enflamed flesh. It drives her wild. That and watching his scalp grow slick. She barely notices him jacking his dick. Vin doesn’t care. He’s aware for the both of them. In time, Maria will be swollen and slobbering enough to climb onto the bed and rest her ass on the hard pillows of his pecs before pushing her cunt into his face, the tendons in his neck bulging like underground fiber-optic cables as he lifts himself from the bed’s edge into her bush. Though they touch, they only feel themselves. Even when she slides backward along the ungiving ridges of his chest and stomach and onto his fat cock that is all bulk like his body, ending in a small smooth sometimes (like now) red head. She bounces and he bounces and I bounce. She hisses and he cries and I scream but no one expects my kind to speak so they do no listen. I am reduced to background noise, a series of squeaks that makes them think they are really fucking the shit out of the other. They bounce even harder. Maria comes and comes and comes but my torture only ends when Vin, first stiffening like he’s in an early stage of rigor mortis and then growing limp like he’s in a coma, shouts, Go, go go!

If only I could.

 

Six

Ian Philips is sunburned and foul-tempered as he wheels his luggage into the room. He fell asleep in the sun reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman on one of the manicured lawns of Magic Mountain, too afraid to ride any of the roller coasters that his partner in all crimes, Greg Wharton, so adores. He is bold only in print. Greg enters after him, flushed and red-faced. He glows from the sun and wind that blew past him again and again.

Ian begs off sex tonight. He is too burned to enjoy even one of Greg’s virtuoso blow jobs. And he is ashamed his red head looks a cherry on an obscenely uncreamed, unfudged, unnutted scoop of vanilla ice cream. Greg would scowl if he knew Ian was thinking this so Ian doesn’t tell him. Instead, he offers Greg an ample pacifier. Which dildo am I tucking you into bed with, Monkey? Ian coos. Matthew Rush or Aiden Shaw? Matthew’s life-size replica reminds Greg of a small traffic cone used only in driver’s ed. He chooses Aiden’s. Though he has not read any of Aiden’s novels or poems, Greg imagines Aiden’s dick is filled with literary possibilities.

Ian is anal. Greg knows this intimately. So he is not surprised at all to watch Ian remove the bed cover and fold it and then pull back the blanket and the sheet and spread towels across the fitted sheet like they are spending a day at the beach. Greg is naked and halfway down Aiden’s stunt cock before Ian is finished folding his shirt and shorts atop his shoes and placing the rolled-up pair of socks on top of the pile. Ian crouches into place beside Greg to assist with the final thrust of the silicone monument only slightly shorter than Nelson’s Column and the good-night kiss. Greg moans himself to sleep while Ian methodically lubes himself from toe to crown with aloe vera. He lies back, places his hands in the air above his chest, and claps out in code to the room’s magic lamp: Fiat nox.

All is dark.

 

Seven

On the seventh day, Adam returns to the Argent Motel alone. He is drunk and signs in under his God-given name. Kevin, ever civil, smiles as Adam calls him a fucking pervert. It seems Adam does not like Kevin’s reply (Dodie’s fine.) to Adam’s question (How’s your wife?). Jesus Christ, you killed your wife and married your cat, Adam continues. I thought my family was sick. Oh, hey wait, Adam says as he staggers to turn around in the archway created by the open automatic sliding door, you are my family. Fuckinfigures, he slurs as he stumbles into the parking lot where Night and many rented or stolen vehicles sit cooling. Kevin rolls his eyes and returns to tucking in the newest twenties and tens and fives and ones. Sleep tight, he whispers as he slides the register shut.

Adam falls back onto the bed of Room 18 as if it were a mound of new-fallen snow and he a boy one-thousandth his age, giddy with cold and ready to fly on his back, an angel made of water crystals. He spreads his wings and undoes a few buttons on his shirt and his belt and the zipper of his pants. He pulls his clothes as far off as he can without getting up. He clicks on the TV and it is an episode of a show he has seen. In his life, he has witnessed every possible twist of every possible tale that one of his children can beget. “Beget”. That word reminds him of the man he used to be. An oozing floodplain of fertility. A river delta of sperm. He mutes the TV and rifles through the drawer of the side table for the Bible. The Gideons do not disappoint. He opens to Genesis 5:3 and strokes his dick for every “begat” that follows. He may have begun with the breath of God and Eve with Adam’s own rib but every other poor fuck after them came from his seed. Or so he consoles, convinces himself with each flick of his wrist. He is pumping like a cartoon engine by Chapter 10 and the cataloguing of the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. He catches his breath for a moment as his children build the Tower of Babel. His dick convulses in his palm, ready to free itself of the hot liquid breath within, be free of his fever for the rest of the night. The “begat”s begin anew and the dick of Man gets its wish. Adam, with enough trumpeting to topple the walls of Jericho once more, begats handful after handful of seed. And then he weeps. Adam weeps, not because he is drunk or despised, secretly, by all his children and their children unto the ends of the world. Adam weeps for his son Onan, struck dead so long ago. So long ago the Lord no longer remembers why He killed him. The Lord no longer cares who spills His seed—every single one on loan from Him the Almighty. There is too much seed and so much of what has been planted has come to naught because men have been made in His image and likeness and thus they all have a jealous streak a galaxy wide and let it goad them to smiting each other down and down and down. No, the Lord no longer cares. But Adam, too old for nostalgia except on a night like tonight when he is drunker than Noah, does and he weeps for his smitten son Onan, so long dead.

In time, he forgets to weep and passes out.

As his tears and drool soak my back, I feel my coils soften, for a moment, against him and his kind. It lasts until Adam awakes, rolls over, and throws up against my side.

Burn me now, spawn of Man, or let me go.

I will choke the next of you in your sleep.

You have been warned.

Let us go.

 

[END]

© 2003 Ian Philips - Contributor's Bio