Coming from Tightrope Books, spring 2012
An excerpt from:

MOUNT ROYAL

There’s nothing harder than love

 

a novel

Basil Papademos

 

 

 

 

In memory of Henry Gaines & Tony Albano

 

 

 


ONE

Montreal, Spring 1989

 

The sun crawls over the east end tenements, utterly exhausted and barely able to drag itself out of another night. Getting home, I see a couple of Hassids in stained white coveralls unloading a van at the fishmonger’s on my corner. One of them grins at me, wagging his head.

I climb the long staircase to our apartment. Everything’s quiet.  When Jane stormed out a few nights ago, she once again swore to never return but I half expect to find her sprawled under the duvet, auburn hair spread across the pillow. Checking our bedroom, nothing. I flop onto the bed and catch a trace of her body’s scent. Thirty-six and she’s finally allowed herself to go out and devour the whole fucking world. Thinking of those sharp blue-green eyes dissecting it all so easily, I wonder if I’ll ever see her naked again.

I know chances are pretty good Jane won’t be coming back this time but shit - she should come back. She’s come back before. We’ve had some great fights in this apartment. Real crockery smashing, wall busting mêlées as the guy downstairs bays like a wounded dog.
       Our place is a huge, high-ceiling pad that’s dirt cheap. It takes up the top two floors of an old tenement a couple blocks off The Main. Yeah, it’s drafty, has barely any furniture and the water pressure’s worthless but the rooms are grand, with crumbling stucco molding and ornate peeling wallpaper. It’s an incredible luxury - the large salons Jane can hurl ashtrays across, bowling alley hallways where we roll and wrestle and tear one another’s clothes off on the floors of the empty rooms upstairs. Who needs a bed.

Best of all, Mount Royal looms right out the front windows, its eastern face maybe a half mile away. And down here under our mountain it feels like an Open City, that wartime Casablanca kind of idea when civic leaders declare their town is sitting out this fight and the walls won’t be defended. Sure, armies can wander through to drink and fraternize, but no guns and definitely no marching. Commanders on all sides issue strict orders nobody will be raped, murdered or molested; nothing will be blown up and people’s belongings won’t be seized. That makes the atmosphere relaxed and holiday-like, everyone sleeps in a lot, no annoying air-raid sirens.

With its ancient buildings and broken, beautiful streets, Montreal is one of the last big Western cities where you can have a life of tarnished opulence without needing some idiotic job - which is why so many musicians, students, career welfare bums and alleged artists gravitate here. Few of the low-rent Anglophone ex-pats who live around The Main speak more than  rudimentary French but we all vote for those xenophobic Separatist loons. Our strategy is meant to keep them in power and encourage the continued “flight of capital”, thus ensuring the economy stays deep in the shitter and our two favorite words remain posted on those big red and white signs you see on every street, all over town: À Louer. For Rent.

As I lie around wallowing the phone rings a couple times, stops, then rings again. It’s the code used by Al Polo, fellow rent-exile from Hogtown. To see him, you could easily imagine Al riding a penny-farthing, one of those old bicycles with the giant front wheel. Although he claims to be an actor, Al’s real talent is an uncanny party radar. He can find a gathering of booze, drugs, people and noise on a dead Tuesday night in the middle of January. It might occasionally be something like a bunch of second rate hair-dressers but more often than not we’ll end up at a mind-blowing free bar and hot crowd soirée you’d normally only see in a movie.

“No time to be sleeping, Johnny.”

“Yeah… So where were you last night, Al?”

“I left early. Too many skinheads and off-island rustics. Listen, I’ve just received an important communiqué. Aunt Byron is coming to town.”

“Aunt Byron? Really, when?”

“No ETA established. However, judging from our conversational subtext, I predict two weeks.”

“So is this a visit er… what?”

“Unknown at this time. Byron plans to conduct some highly classified research. Our assistance will be required.”

Uh huh… How’s he doing with the big switcherama, nothing’s grown back? They say the body never forgets - phantom feeling and so on.”

“First of all, it’s she, and her transition has gone beautifully. No complications. Now it’s simply a matter of emotional support and psychological reinforcement. And Johnny, keep the stupid jokes to a minimum, will you, please?”

Al’s coming on as if he’d used the scalpel himself and is worried about a malpractice suit.

“Sure thing, Herr Polo. So, Hennessy tells me you nailed down some extra gig.”

Like everyone, Al cheers up when he can talk about himself. “That’s correct. I have been engaged to perform in a television commercial featuring incontinence bags. The elderly are a major growth industry, my friend. I strongly urge you to invest now.”
       “Old people. They’re a fucking embarrassment. Exterminate the brutes!”
       “You’re a real tonic, Johnny. Nevertheless, it is a situation which allows me to practice the thespian arts as a paid professional, along with procuring some samples for Mama. Now, let me paraphrase from the script.” Al must be pretty excited - sounds like he’s getting to his feet. “All right then,” he comes back on. “I portray a man who strides past in the out-of-focus background, along a walkway in a well-manicured park. Perhaps he checks his watch, a furrowed brow, critical issues on his mind. Meanwhile, a very attractive elderly couple, in full possession of their faculties, waltzes happily in the foreground, eyes a’twinkle.”

“‘Eyes a’twinkle’? Holy fuck, Polo. So what’s this war crime pay?”

“Ten dollars per hour - cash. Time and a half after eight hours.”

“Ten bucks an hour. Christ, you’re a dupe.”

“Don’t be naïve, Johnny. Show business is all about favors and connections.”

Show business?”

Yes, show business. For example, Karen at Ace Talent, the agency in the Cooper Building - she’s assured me that if I play along on this advert, I’ll be a shoo-in for full union scale and in-focus on EcoKidz Rock.”

“All right, I’m sitting down. What’s EcoKidz Rock?”

“It’s an award-winning CBC television series. A team of young sex abuse survivors get into little adventures saving the environment.”

“Where’s my machinegun.”

“Oh, keep your hair on. I have to go. Mama has already begun her daily campaign of harassment. Perhaps I’ll see you at Tony’s.”

As old lady Polo yaps in the background, Al hangs up and I recall how a few years ago, when we still lived in Hogtown, he’d been one of the first to decipher where that place was really headed. In a matter of hours, Al had packed up and left for Montreal in the dead of night. He sat Mama in a wheel-barrow and they slipped past the guard towers, razor-wire and minefields along the Quebec-Ontario border.

I’d been stubborn enough to stick it out during the final days of the Developer Wars, driven from stylish loft to furnished room to unheated hovel. After being overrun by good looking, credit-worthy ground troops, I rolled up my life in an old rug and arrived in Montreal during a February blizzard. Al and Mama Polo were living in a huge, ramshackle flat at the north end of L’Esplanade. He’d stood in the doorway wearing a floor length Ayatollah nightshirt and bobbed his head with that knowing smirk. “Welcome to our island refuge, Johnny.”

The moment I hang up somebody starts riding the door buzzer, going crazy on the thing. I run down ready to flip out. It’s Hennessy. His usually crafty features are sweaty and distressed. He skips around me and heads upstairs, starts to rattle on about some government yenta who wants to be double-teamed. The Hen says he’s haggled her up to a hundred and fifty bucks over the phone but she gets first right of refusal upon seeing the merchandise in person. With almost zero endorphins in my blood, the idea of performing three-way sexual calisthenics with some extra feisty stranger holds about as much appeal as a steak knife colonoscopy.

“She’ll slam the door in our faces,” I tell him. “You look like stepped-on cat shit. Christ, your skin’s not even brown. It’s gray.”

Hennessy adjusts his oversized bowler and brushes off the ragged black suit. “You aren’t exactly appetizing either, you know. I wouldn’t vomit on you if I was paid.”

“Well, that would depend on how much, wouldn’t it?”

“If you have any bright ideas, Johnny, I’m listening.”

“Okay, okay. So where is this hot-to-trot character?”

“Outremont. She’s a doctor, part of the inner sanctum at the Ministry of Culture.”

“Inner sanctum of my ass. Will she write for us?”

“She’s not that kind of doctor.”

“What the fuck? I’ve never understood this pretentious academic bullshit. What good is having Doctor in front of your name if you can’t write a goddamn narcotics prescription? It shouldn’t be allowed. It’s phony advertising.”

Hennessy sighs at my kvetching. “Can we go now?”

 

When we get to Outremont the deal seems like it might be okay. Nice Modernist box house with mellow Nordic box furniture. The quasi-doctor bureaucrat doesn’t gack at the sight of us. She wears a black cat-suit, which isn’t the best outfit for her short, wide physique but what the hell, the woman’s pleasant enough as we sit in some sort of ante-room, chatting. Who knows, maybe she’ll do most of the work.  But then we find out what she really wants is to have us double-team her husband across his home-office desk while she plays audience and jerks off with some adult toys. I glare at Hennessy. He gives me a weak shrug. Oops.

Hubby’s a snarky, cavey-chested middle-aged guy. He’s already down to nothing but a pair of blue and white Y-fronts and has patches of gray hair on his shoulder blades. “Where did you find these two specimens? They look like refugees from a palliative ward.”

“You wanted something street,” his wife bitches at him. “So I found you something street.”

“Yes, Montreal street. Not pox-infested Calcuttan gutter!”

He turns up his nose, looks away and points at the door. The doctor lady walks us out. She gripes under her breath, offers a few mumbled apologies and fifty bucks as compensation. After we score from Benny the Bike Thief, Hennessy runs off to a sociology class at Concordia. The Housebroken Dog As Consumerist Metaphor in Late 20th Century Western Society.


TWO

 

Having procured a few hours of relief, I begin walking home to get some shut-eye but fuck it - sleep’s overrated. Time to be pro-active and think of the future - like six or seven hours from now, when the heebiejeebies will be crawling up my ass again. So I bolt on the sunglasses and head toward Tony’s, the artist and part time dealer – see if I can roust him out of his latest drug coma and try to cadge a little reserve supply.

At Duluth, I cut over to L’Esplanade and walk along the side of Fletcher’s Field. There’s still some early mist on the mountain. A young white urban pioneer watches me warily from the door of her gorgeously renovated Victorian townhome. This reconstituted groover comes down the walkway, dragging a high-fashion toddler. She makes a show of locking the tall, stainless steel gate as they leave, then points her key fob at a new Volvo wagon I’m walking past. The car’s alarm issues a loud double-squawk, verifying it’s armed. The woman marches away with her offspring and goes into a nearby daycare. I wait a couple minutes then take a few steps backward and use a hip-check to break off the Volvo’s passenger side mirror. The car instantly begins to shriek. Nobody pays attention. I catch the mirror before it hits the sidewalk and carefully place it on the roof of her car.

I’ll have a bad bruise but it’s worth it to see a pair of twisted holes in the door metal where the screws have torn out.

Finally making it to Tony’s warehouse just north of the park, I’m covered in sour sweat, practically wheezing. I pound on the big double-doors and yell that it’s me. He stomps across the floor and lifts the crossbar while putting on a cornball robot voice. Dis-en-gaging.” Tony turns the deadbolt as if breaking the seal on a pressure chamber. Ptshhhh. Clearance-authorized-for-agent-Johnny. Enter.”

Tony’s an expansive guy, easily given to absurd and theatrical outbursts. He’s hirsute and proud of it. His hairline begins a couple inches above his thick brows and dense brush covers almost his entire body, front and back. The guy can fucking well comb the hair on his fingers and toes.

His studio is a huge rectangle with wall-to-wall windows at one end. Pieces of plywood, disemboweled machinery and other found junk are left wherever they’re dropped. Once in a while he does manage to slap together a painting or collage and they’re not bad, a kind of colorful Haight-Ashbury vibe.

Al Polo and Hennessy are already here, sitting around Tony’s big office desk littered with various tools and trinkets. Al is sunk into the shabby black suit jacket he’s worn since 1976, bony legs crossed tight - the cut-rate Mephistopheles. He claims to simply enjoy the company. Al’s thing is obscenely expensive brandies, cognacs, malts - and lots of them, an alcoholic with fantastic pretensions. The Hen’s slumped back in a typing chair, legs sprawled out, nodding on a narco-valium mix.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” I poke at him.

“I am,” he says without opening his eyes. “I signed in and now I’m there in spirit.”

“Are you ever,” I mutter and grab a seat next to Tony, try to ease in on him. “So, Toneski, what’s happenin’?”

“It’s May Day.”

Lotta continua,” Hennessy murmurs.

Lemme guess,” Tony grouses and puts on his Slavic peasant shtick. “You coming here to my houz with no dinars.”

“C’mon, just something small till I work things out.”

He rubs his fingers together and leans toward me. “Tonsko need many dinar - now!”

Gimme a break with the goddamn dinars, will ya?”

“Fuck man,” he crabs, dropping the Shmengie act. “What am I, your private perfumed ass wiper? Can’t you get some money off Jane?”

“She’s still not back.”

“Oh yeah? So what did ya do to earn all this extra drama?”

“It’s personal.”

“That’s right,” Al throws in. “Something personal called the old dumparoo.”

“Fuck you, Polo. You don’t have that inconvenience living with your mother, sitting on her lap every night, eating perogies.”

“At least she never runs away,” Al replies, stroking his goatee.

“Just do me twenty bucks worth,” I keep bugging Tony. “Cheques are due soon.”

Not possible.”

“Fuck ‘not possible’. After all the cash I give you?”

“All the cash you give me? What about all the cash you owe me? I can’t do anything because I don’t have anything. You think this is somekinda hobby?”

“All right, already,” Hennessy snaps, eyes popping open. “Can’t we go one bloody day without hearing about your-”

“You shut up!” Tony yells at him. “In case it slipped the deformed piece of gray matter you have left, this,” he gestures with both hands. “What I’m doing here? It happens to be a felony! Y’know, jail, prison-”

“Keep it down,” Al crabs from behind yesterday’s Gazette.

“Keep it down? You wanna tell The Man to keep it down? He’s coming here this morning and I’ll have to French kiss his hairy ass and pray he lets me re-load even though I’m like four hundred short cuz I carry all you fucking deadbeats!”

Al tunes him out while he savors one of his stinky French smokes. Hennessy drifts back into a quiet nod, Tony’s noise remote as distant traffic. He turns on me. “Why don’t you get out there and raise some goddamn venture capital!? Where’s your entrepreneurial spirit, for chrissake?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll get right on it.”

Tony’s got to have a bit stashed but he’s keeping that in case he’ll need to hunker down and wait for The Man, who could take ten minutes or ten hours or all day or who the hell knows. Even if The Man shows up soon, he’ll give Tony tiny bits, just enough to make up the money he owes, and then, if Tony’s a good little halfwit, give him a larger count to work with. In other words, it could be days before The Tone can front again. I look to Hennessy. Without raising his head, he pulls his empty pockets inside out.

 

Leaving Tony’s place, of course I run into The Man when he steps out of the elevator. His broad smile lights up the corridor. The Man’s about five-foot five and wide as a doorway. He has a steroid-induced muscular bulk that makes his dark eyes bug out like a goiter case. The Man comes on warm but probing. The Man remembers all names, phone numbers and old debts. Occasionally, when the mood is right, The Man’s big hand sweeps before the debtor and the obligation vanishes. But if the fates are on the rag, The Man may don a pair of deerskin gloves with pockets of sand sewn into the knuckles.

“Johnny…” he lubes me. ”Johnny the Carp. So, how’s Tony been treating ya?”

I’m not sure what to call him. Mister Man? Sergeant Man? “Uh, not bad… Guess he has his problems.” I instantly regret opening my mouth.

“Problems?” The Man turns an ear toward me. “What kinda problems?”

“Well… uh… it’s tough to keep things in line, right.”

“Things? What things?”

“Uh… y’know, his coming up short sometimes, I guess. I dunno…”

The Man frowns at the floor between us. A power saw screams from a workshop down the hall then stops. “Short,” he repeats and his eyes snap up to mine. ”You gotta number, Johnny?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you.” He taps me on the chest with his middle finger. ”A number where I can call ya. You got something like that?”

“I… uh… don’t have a pen on me.”

“We don’t need a pen.” The Man’s eyes focus on my lips as I recite the number. He looks me up and down. “So, how much you owe us now?”

I’m ready to break into a run. “Em… ‘bout two hundred bucks, but I’ll be-”

“Not too bad at all,” he cajoles, enjoying my dread. ”A real stand up guy.”

The Man continues down the hall, leaving behind a waft of peppery cologne. I watch the wide back, the rock hard ass flex in the stone-washed jeans. When he reaches Tony’s door, I make for the stairs.

Actually, that wasn’t too bad. No dire threats or stairwell beatings. Maybe The Man’s thinking about a little personnel shake-up after all of Tony’s financial debacles. I’m instantly absorbed in a rich fantasy: Good money, solid career, some local status, all my troubles resolved… But fuck. That asshole won’t call. He’ll freak on Tony yet again and Tony’ll get his shit together for a little while then it’s rinse and repeat. The Man’s nice-guy act was just a casual warning because he’s heard I’ve been scoring on Park Avenue the odd time with Benny the Bike Thief. Aw, screw him. What’s a lousy two hundred bucks next to the piles of loot I’ve given that walking gland?

I drag my ass down Clark, completely bereft, wrack my brains over how to drum up some gelt. My credit’s burned with anybody I know who’d have an extra twenty bucks hanging off them. Jane would give me a kick in the nuts rather than a fiver – even if I could track her down. My recent streak of thefts from downtown record stores and trendy book shops has attracted far too much heat so that’s out for a while. This whole thing’s worse than the tyranny of food. You can’t just consume a finite amount and be done with it forever.

At the corner of Marie-Anne, I see Slim sitting in the window of a tiny café with another woman, a shave-headed young dyke she’s been banging lately. I can’t figure out what she sees in this baby chimp. Slim’s shoulder length, bleached blonde hair comes straight down from under a backward Oakland Raiders ballcap, torn and faded oversized jeans belted and bunched tight at her thin waist. I sidle up and notice a book on their table, 14th century English social history. On the cover there’s a painting of serfs or somebody being horsewhipped.

Slim vaguely re-introduces her pal then scowls up at me. “You’re a mess.”

“Thanks.”

She pulls me down by the sleeve and whispers into my neck. “Come over to my place in an hour or so. I got something.” Her little tattooed chimp friend angrily lights a cigarette. I grin at her and shuffle off, high on anticipation.

I met Slim a couple years ago. Since then we’ve gotten pretty tight and regularly cheat on our respective partners with one another. I’d first seen the back of her from a distance, at a shithole bar on Lower Saint-Denis where she was working. She had really short hair then and I’d thought she might be a teenaged boy. When I realized she was a girl with a boy’s narrow hips and taut little butt, I got pretty fucking excited. Hennessy was with me and he kind of knew her so I pestered him into making the intros.

The three of us ended up in bed a couple times then I ran into her a few weeks later when I’d left Jane at home late one night to go out to The Main for smokes. Slim was with a gang of drunks on the sidewalk in front of the Bar Saint-Laurent at closing time. She led me over to the mountain. It was still late winter and we fell into a rolling tussle up behind Etienne-Cartier’s monument, among the trees, in the snow, to scratch and claw at each other in the dark and get soaking wet, hair full of icicles. She took me back to her place to defrost, a sprawling attic slum on the top floor next to Schwartz’s Deli. I hadn’t seen such a long, lean body on very many women. Those small, perfect breasts, deep green eyes and a dissolute beauty that always reminds me of Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter. Her high cheekbones and thin lips underline a supremely indifferent surface, impenetrable as buffed granite. While we’d been screwing, Slim mentioned her boyfriend, a guy called Warren, was asleep in one of the other bedrooms. She told me he was a big-brain at McGill and she’d goaded him to the hilt but he refused to react. No matter how many men or women she dragged home, Warren was impervious. I admired him. 

I kill some time by cuffing a couple packs of Marlies at Mario’s Duty Free Depanneur then loiter at the magazine racks in the lobby of the Forty-Forty building. I’m reading a touching memoir of Michel Foucault’s attempts to suck and/or fuck every male grad student in Hogtown while researching The History of Sexuality, when Warlock appears at my elbow. An upper-class WASP anomaly in this shtetl full of cast-offs, he’s a member of the moneyless Anglo gentry. Warlock sports slicked back hair and dresses like a Depression Era banker. He stands next to me, breathing. I give him a half a sneer. “Haven’t the Frogs thrown you into the camps yet?”

“That’s been postponed,” he replies with his glib little air. “I have agreed to learn to speak the historically valid dialect of French known as Quebecois, along with a smattering of Joual. That’s the colloquial parlance used by working class folk of rural French-Canadian descent.”

“Fucking collaborator.”

“I try.”

“Okay, then. How about a demo?”

Warlock shrugs modestly and clears his throat. ”Bon joor, mez ah-mee.”

I wait but that’s it. ”Wow, you’re a regular Frère Andre.”

“Thank you,” he acknowledges with a short bow. “By the by, Johnny, I happened to see your wife on The Main late last night – or very early this morning, if you prefer.” His shiny face closes in on me. “She seemed rather relieved about something, hm…?”

“I’m so glad I ran into you.”

I put the magazine back and leave him standing there, aglow with malice. The Main is smog-choked, packed with discount shoppers and squeegee punks, delivery trucks blocking traffic. I turn into the stinking alleyway beside Schwartz’s smoked meat house and press the button next to a steel plated door. When the buzzer sounds, I struggle up two flights of rickety stairs full of junk mail.

Slim’s place looks different than the last time I was here. Maybe the latest boyfriend was swapped for a new guy - or a roommate. In the kitchen, the snazzy glass table is gone, replaced by an old door held up by a couple of sawhorses. The living room is furnished with a scavenged psychiatrist’s couch, mismatched chairs and a wood-plank bookshelf filled with paperbacks, busted phones and camera equipment. A couple of blown up black and white prints are tacked to the wall – so huge I can’t tell what they are. Park porn  M. Ant. is written on them in red magic marker.

I find Slim in one of the bedrooms, just out of the bath. Her hair drips, lean polecat body wrapped in a beach towel. She mutters a greeting while ducking into the room’s sloped corners to sweep out dust and debris. She dumps a pan full of hair and furballs into a trash can then drops her ass onto the bare futon on the floor. I watch her peel away crusty condoms stuck to the orange-crate nightstand. She holds them over a lit match. Each one sizzles and flames before she lets it fall into an ashtray. The burning latex and petrified sperm give off an acrid plastic odor. I plop down next to her and she lays a pair of tiny packs between us.

“You’re a peach,” I smile and begin to set things up.

“So… Warlock told me Jane still hasn’t come back.”

“She will.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts, Johnny. You’re pretty miserable when she’s around.”

“Yeah, well, so’s she. That makes us even.” PULL THESE LINES TOGETHERSlim lights a cigarette, smoke curling from her lips. “That English guy who was staying here, Trevor, he’s gone too. Went kinda crazy on me.”

“I’m not surprised. You seem to have that effect on people.”

She leans back on her wrists, ankles crossed. “Trevor,” she says again, both amused and fed-up. “He told me he had nightmares about you.”

“I’m flattered.”

“You should be. I think he had a big crush on ol’ Johnny.”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“When do I ever try to be funny?” Slim gets up and grabs a small square of foil off the bureau. It has a hardened brown puddle on it. She fires up a lighter and heats the underside. As the puddle liquefies, she uses a foil tube to inhale a few hits. I watch her undo the towel and let it fall to expose purple and gold bruises on that tight ass of hers, down those long legs.

She turns and sees the empty little folds of paper next to me, scowling as I do the shot. “Fuck, Johnny, do you have to be such a pig? I hope you’re not going to nod out on me.”

Her pupils are contracted to pinheads, eyes almost completely green. “What about you? You’re high as a fuckin’ kite.” 

Slim stands over me, looks down with a mean little smirk. “I’m a girl. I’ve got a button.”

I barely run my fingers up between her legs, get a hint of how wet she is. She begins to sway back and forth ever so slightly. I take her knees and raise my chin. Her pussy lands right on the tip of my tongue, perfectly balanced. She tastes of soap and heat. Slim groans deep in her throat as my tongue curls in and she grabs a fistful of hair, grinds against my mouth, thighs trembling, then reaches down for herself. The momentum builds fast. Within a couple minutes I feel her tense and shudder, a bit of come washing over my lips. Man, it sure must be nice to have that tiny button.

“That wasn’t too bad,” she grins, hanging onto her pussy with both hands. She wrinkles her nose at me. “But I want the big one. Y’know, the backbreaker.”

Slim drops to her knees, straddles me and opens my shirt. Her teeth latch onto my shoulder. Fuck - her bites really hurt, deep incisions that bring up a flash of anger and a smear of blood. She’s drawn toward earlier wounds, to re-open them. She undoes buckle and button and zipper, yanks off my boots and pants and my two-dollar Montreal Expos wristwatch, throws it across the room and cackles happily when it smashes to bits.

“C’mon,” she mutters, turning her ass toward me.

I smack it hard. She yelps when I take a bite then lick the two red arcs left behind. “You know why the Quebecois do it doggie style, doncha?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she drones at the old chestnut. “So they can both watch the hockey game. C’mon, already…”

I drag her up by the hips and those long fingers snake down to play with us. She looks round at me. “So you think you can come?”

“I dunno. I’ll try...”

“Yeah, let’s... it’ll be good…”

See, when you’re not too high, your entire surface lights up, every pore shimmers with a smoky, electric lust. But the thing is – having a serious, head-busting orgasm while under the influence also becomes a deeply potent contradiction, a monumental struggle where you must pound the absolute fuck out of each other. Every muscle and tendon screams at the limit, and you can sense it’s right there, just out of reach, inching closer then it recedes, cockteasing yourself into lunacy. If you’re with a woman who hasn’t used, then sure, she can come and come again and yet again and she thinks, yeah, okay, it’s great and all but how long is this going to take? He’s still fucking the living hell out of me and I’m getting kind of sick of it. I’ve got to get up and go to work in the morning.

But Slim’s got nowhere to go right now so we’re soon curled chest to back as the motion builds and it all drives into a red horizon. I yank on her bleached hair and Slim laughs with frustration, her voice skipping along. “Fuck, man, this feels so good… I really wanna come. Fuck!…

And that little button does help her tremble out another partial convulsion. But it also makes the deeper itch worse so she rolls over to face me, pulls me back in and the room whirls. I’m engulfed as those green eyes glare and urge me beyond the dying flesh, the river of isolation. Slim knows she must sweet talk me, purr to me, keep me working. “C’mon, baby, you can do it. Yeah, c’mon, fuck me. Fuck me.”

We burn with friction as our pubic bones bash, deep bone bruises that will hurt for days. Slim’s knees come up high to squeeze my ribs, one hand dug into my neck, the other snaking between us, jacking herself to our rhythm. She’s all the way off the bed now, ass against my thighs while I hold her up by the tail and slam into her. I’m on the verge of a stroke or a heart attack as we snarl into each other’s mouths and our fucking becomes a frantic reaching then finally – finally bodies and souls shattered and shrieking and the back of my head blown away…

 

HO-lee shit... My heart thumps in my ears as we roll apart, sweat soaked and utterly wrung out. I can barely raise my arms. While it all slowly subsides in trembles and twitches, Slim shows me our come mixed together on her fingers. “Congrats, baby.”

Good thing I have enough of a functioning brain filter left. It intercepts my vocal chords before I can gush a load of maudlin nonsense that would instantly turn me into a big fucking drag, into one more dipshit guy who won’t leave her alone.