Author: Mugtoe

I just this moment learned that Google made its debut on my 35th birthday {September 4, 1998}. I built my first computer and got on the internet two months after that. So, I’m 35 years older than Google.

This also marked the end of what had been a brutal and debilitating depression that lasted for five long years and broke me down completely. I did and experienced things during that time that I wrote and laughed about in later years, but which at the time led me to believe I was beyond redemption. The summer of 97 marked the end for me of years of IV drug use, mostly cocaine and methamphetamine, and the long, slow recovery from that – not only the chemicals but the attendant ritual nature of that life – probably also abetted somewhat my escape from that interminable journey through perdition.

It was something of a watershed moment in my life, I suppose, though more of a process than an event, certainly. And even that process, the breaking free, the escape from Hell, was itself inextricably tied to everything that came before it, just like any journey, I suppose. However, with each step, each segment of what became my life story, there were significant moments, memories, and people. Some belong more to what came before, some were markers of change, and yet others, especially people, existed throughout but perhaps represented various characters, principles, or psychic elements manifested by me which drew them to my story. It was in this way I experienced the power of metaphor in my life, something which til then I only grasped intellectually. I had read Campbell and watched his lectures on the Transformation of Myth more than a decade earlier. But it wasn’t a part of my own experience in a way I could transmit, until I had gone into my own wilderness, my own dark forest and returned. And that wasn’t something I actually realized and understood until some years afterward. In many ways those realizations continue into the present.

I believe this was originally written around 02 or 03 in Minneapolis

I went down to the lower acreage to pick up my pump and some other clutter, and I thought I’d document what has been a beautiful day as seen from the dam of the last and lowest pond,

Yesterday evening as I was deepening an overflow channel up near the house at the irrigation pond, I had also decided to capture that moment and my state of aesthetic arrest through photographs.

I guess I just always had a hard time making life seem normal for appearance sake.

I moved into my grandmother’s old house when she left to spend her remaining days with Dad out at the farm, and things just sort of headed south from there on out.

There was one time when I picked up this dick dancer from the Blue Parrot – I called it the Dead Bird – over on Cedar Springs in Dallas and brought him back to the house to do a little coke. He was one of those guys who seemed a bit repressed, in spite of his occupation. But once we’d done about half a gram, the clothes started coming off and he imprinted on my dick like a baby duck. Now I’ve never been one to shy away from expanding the boundaries of acceptable behavior in others. I see it as my outreach in some sense, but I always had trouble reining them in during the process. I was up for some fun, and I’ve never been particularly shy or easily shocked. But there comes a time when I can only shove stuff up a guy’s ass for so long before it just gets old. And why is it that every swingin’ dick I ever met turned into a class A freak the moment I get them naked and apply the right chemical combination. You don’t see me hikin’ my leg up in the air and hollerin’ for a lamp just cause I did a little too much cocaine. Now do ya?

I brought this guy home and gave him a beer and laid out a few lines while we watched some art film or something, and before you know it he had his face buried in my lap amid protestations of how this is not the way he normally acts. I allowed as how he was welcome to continue, and I didn’t judge him either way, and no, this doesn’t mean he’s gay at all. He had some hateful hot-bubblin’ skull for someone who claimed to have so little experience, and he insisted on running the gamut of homosexual endeavor and hikin’ his ass up in the air for me to plough in true yeoman fashion. I was intent on denying him nothing in this little “boy’s night out”, so I put selfish considerations aside and applied myself diligently to my efforts for no short period of time. Lord, he was inexhaustible. After I’d nutted numerous times and was beginning to weary of the whole ordeal, he asked if I had any toys of any kind. He was not ready just yet for a denouement to our activities. I stumbled off to the bathroom and found a shampoo bottle that didn’t look to menacing and slipped a rubber over it and began working him that way, periodically letting him take over on his own while I dished us up more coke. It’s really hard to maintain your manual dexterity with a razor and straw when you have fingers covered with lotion or cocoa butter.

We had quite a bit of trouble with the bottle after a while, because it was too slippery. I feared that we might lose it inside the boy, so I cast about for something more suitable. Just the thing! Across the living room on an end table I spied my roommate’s carpenter’s hammer. He was spending the night at his girlfriend’s and wasn’t expected back, though it was a work night. I snatched the tool and slipped another rubber over the handle, presenting it to him with a grin. He had that blank look on his face that signals raw desire in someone as coked up as he was. He hunkered down on his elbows and raised his rump in the air to signal utter compliance with my very worst intentions. I pressed the latex-covered rubber-gripped handle against his little rosebud and watched with dull fascination as this implement normally hefted by my good friend Dave in the practice of his craft served double duty in mine.

I was surprised at how little complaint I heard as more and more of the solid American steel engaged his soft tissues and pressed homeward. I was mindful not to continue too far; I didn’t want to go on a fishing expedition for a slightly used condom in someone’s colon, and I didn’t want to be cleaning his afterbirth off of the Dave’s hammer either. I got to where I could saw back and forth with one hand and smoke and do lines without missing a beat more or less. But I was tiring of the whole process as he was gaining steam. We worked out an arrangement where he would lie on the sofa on his back with his heels together and his legs bent so that the head of the hammer found support in his feet and he could simply slide back and forth. This freed me up to do nothing once again, which suited my taste. I had to offer him cock periodically, but he would zone out for long enough periods of time that I was relieved of that necessity as well for the most part.

I had hardly noticed the graying light around the blinds when a car door slammed outside in the driveway. With little time to spare, I grabbed one of the quilts my grandmother had painstakingly crafted for me and threw it over my companion just as my roommate came in the door. The groans and gasps and cheesy music of the art film gave way to cartoons just as the door opened, and Dave strolled in.

“Hey, Mugtoe, you seen my tools?”

I nonchalantly pointed over at the end table, “I think that’s them over there, Dave.”

He walked past the sofa and through the hall to his bedroom to change for work, reappearing moments later and advancing to the place where his tool belt lay. My friend the dancer was keeping his movement to a minimum and barely acknowledged Dave’s presence. My roommate hardly glanced his way, but he did give me a slight smirk.

“You seen my hammer? It oughta be here with this stuff.”

“No, Dave, I don’t have a clue. I just noticed that pile a while ago.”

He shrugged, “Well, I gotta git. It’ll turn up.”

He opened the door and stepped out into the dawn air and turned toward me again. “Jesus, Mug, it smells like a tanning salon in here, dude.”

He shut the door. Moments later the car left the driveway and the quilt flew off the other side of the sofa. The hammer began pumping rhythmically again like a west Texas oil well. It took me forever to get shed of that guy. My assistant from the office came by the house, and I talked to her through the door, telling her I was deathly ill and apologizing for not calling in from my sickbed. Just short of noon my trick d’jour finally wore himself out and cleaned up and got dressed. I took him to the bar and bought him a beer and never saw him again. I washed Dave’s hammer as well as I could and set it behind the end table where he found it later that evening.

It was at least a week or two before I did anything like that again. I was just that tired of the whole business.

“…shorter of breath, and one day closer to death.”

I’ve never experienced boredom in a way that I would consider problematic. I’ve never had much patience with people who announce that they are bored to anyone, online or in proximity. What I hear them saying is, “Attention: I lack imagination and have no interior life of substance with which I can engage.”

The corollary which naturally follows in my mind is, “You are the hostage of my intellectual paucity,”

I have, I think, throughout much of my life misjudged such people in some measure. In fact, it may be that my skill-set is so heavily weighted to negotiating the alternate routes in my own cognitive neighborhood, my false pride holding up the banners of my interior castles behind which I construct the myriad details no others can see that render my mental scenery less and less permeable to me, that I have been the victim of an incredible feat of self-deception and mis-direction.

There are now moments in which those people I discounted in the past appear as if upon a distant shoreline, still plainly visible but too far for me to reach, I shout and wave my arms, I bellow into megaphones all along my parapets. I even fire my cannons. I look through the glass that magnifies their forms, and I can at times even make out their features. They periodically stop and gaze across the water in my direction, the gulf ever widening between us, and from time to time I might even discerrn what amounts to recognition in the expressions they offer. But it is always in the nature of, “Is that Frank? Is he still working on that world he was building for so long? What’s he on about, then? You know, it always sounded interesting, and from, what we could tell, parts of it were even quite nice, even beautiful. But nothing of any real substance ever issued from it that would have given the rest of us an opportunity to set down our self-absorption and see what he sees, to know how we correspond, to enlarge our own, and his experience of life.”

“Perhaps, he is going to trot something out before he checks out for good, You know, I’d be interested in knowing what he’s been holding back all this time. It’s really a bit selfish on his part.”

“Well,yes, but that’s his schtick, you know. He whittled little baubles and trinkets from time to time and tossed them out to passers by. He even lured some individuals in intermittently, curious to see what great works he might be constructing, what ornate fixtures might exist in his Great Halls and cathedrals. It’s plain for anyone to see that with a skyline like that, and with the intricacies visible in the small carvings and unfinished sketches he left outside the gates for public view, even if unintentionally, that he possessed the necessary skills and talents to accomplish much.”

“What a shame it would be if after what amounted to a life lived long enough to be a manufactory of masterpieces he remained the boy afraid to dance or improvise, the man so ashamed of what he perceived to be his own lack of authenticity that he mumbled when he could have spoken in tongues sufficient to command a cohort of angels…”

“Let’s not get carried away, dear.”

“Well, we did always think it would be nice to see what he was capable of and to know what he’d been building all that time. If he passes off the scene without leaving a pathway open, then he’s nothing but another Potemkin.”

“Well. don’t you see though? Let’s assume for the sake of argument fhat he is, in fact, a Potemkin. It’s all a sham, The entire creation of his life’s efforts a facade. He perhaps doesn’t recognize that all those props, and the characters who jump from place to place to present new city-scapes at each stop are the bones of an entirely new creation with lives of their own that tell their own stories if he would but step aside and simply let them. The whittling and sketching that drove the speculation was the natural product of his failure to recognize that he did not have to see the results of creation complete in his mind in order to begin the works. He was supposed to open the gates and let the myriad inhabitants of his worlds come out into the light and show themselves and tell their own stories. He only needs to write it down. Let them jam and dance…”

“oh, not dance. His self-centered fears would never allow him to risk such an awkward display.”

“That’s irrelevant.”

“Well, how so.”

“Consider our own conversation. How many of us are there to begin with? Who is saying what?”

“It doesn’t really matter. I am the voice of God.”

“Oh, shut up, Robert. You’re the voice of Frank, who thinks he is the voice of God. Which, he may be, but only in some vague sense that has no direct bearing on a moment that for our scribe is epiphanatic.”

“That’s not even a word, Charles.”

“It certainly is! This is my Mother Tongue, Linda. I know it inside and out. And all you need as evidence are the tears and snot being flung everywhere as he struggles with the compressed nature of a laptop keyboard and the lack of sensation in his fingers. He knows he waited too long to give us voice, because he was afraid of looking ridiculous,”

:”But who are we really, Charlie?”

“It doesn’t matter. You know how in dreams you are certain you are imagining your mother, but when you check it with some text on interpretation you discover that it’s usually someone else who informs those characters in your unconscious mind?”

“Mind blown…”

“Can it, Cecil. Go have another hit.”

“But there is none. It’s been weeks”

“Well, go wish you had another hit. You knew if you laid off it long enough that this would all wake up and begin to give itself voice(s).”

“Yes, but I’m never prepared. I can’t manage the flow, and I can’t make sense of any of it. I don’t know what story we’re even trying to tell, and I’m worried that I won’t be able to wow anyone with a clever turn of phrase or some descriptive acrobatics.”

“Cecil, your Frank is showing too clearly.”

“I know, but I think we’re done here for the moment. We should maybe retreat from this littoral and once more fade into the milling crowd and become indistinct figures in that blinding light.”

“Cecil, could you BE more pretentious?”

“Apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree!” Cecil retorted.

“That was actually a quince, Cecil.” Robert interjected.

“It was a medlar, Robert.” said Linda, “And there were five of you in a row once. I don’t even think you’re a legit character. Frank! Please take over here. We have to wrap this up, and you have to call your attorney. You get a pass to return to the grinding dailiness of life.”

And so they return to the crowd of Millers.

When I met Mac, I told him that I approved of van life, because it seemed “self-contained”. He countered that this was not an end to be desired in itself, but I forget his exact line of argument. However, I think I have arrived at the same point in my own way.

George once told me that my interests were by their very nature lonesome and solitary. However, he didn’t say it in a way to discourage the pursuit of my goals, so much as to prepare me in some fashion so that I could remember it whenever I might look up and be tempted to imagine I was unmoored and drifting away from human company. I miss George. I miss Mac. I am a little anxious about talking to my attorney, but only because it represents an acknowledgment that I will be embracing more of that institutional dailiness which has punctuated my entire adult life at fairly regular intervals.

I don’t feel like I’m dying today, but I think I am. And I believe perversely that I should be evincing an identifiable decline to match the narrative I’m selling to the world and to myself. I vaguely sense that by doing this I am missing the mark and dooming myself unnecessarily, but such is the nature of my limited imagination.

Dean Boggs. “Boy On Good-Good Shit,” he called it, pointing to the jailhouse tat on his arm that said just that – B.O.G.G.S. – in a childlike lettering. I didn’t care. I had been wired and drunk for days and had picked him up at the ten p.m. candlelight AA meeting to see if he wanted to have a three-way with me and Sadie. I knew he was up for getting wired and was probably only at the meeting for one of four things: free meal and some coffee, the chance at some pussy, a signature for his PO, or the off chance that somebody else was there for the same purposes and had some dope. Any combination of those would do, and I could offer them all, so we hooked up and headed to my house before the meeting ended. I knew Sadie was coming over shortly, and I wanted to hang with him first and get acquainted.

I gave him a beer and asked him if he wanted to get high. He looked down like he was deep in thought and giggled a bit and said sure. He giggled like that a lot. It wasn’t particularly annoying; it was low and quick, like a kick-start for his speech. Once that flywheel engaged, he’d rattle off his words quickly and abruptly fall silent. I was quite charmed, really. I asked him if he wanted some pussy, and he got this childlike grin on his face and looked at me like I’d offered him a shiny new toy.

“She good lookin?”

“It’s Sadie from the meetin. The blonde gir…”

“Oh yeah. You bet I’ll fuck her.”

“Well, it’ll be you and me both fuckin her.”

“Suits me. Hell, ere’s more’n one way at it.” The pace of his words had quickened a bit. I reached under my armchair and pulled out the little tray with the dope on it and offered him a line. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on this boy, and he was fine as frog hair with a mop of brown hair and brown eyes and big pretty lips. He did a healthy line, and I prepared him another, which he dispatched just as quickly. I did one myself and took a long pull off my beer before speaking.

“It don’t bother you that I’m queer, does it?”

“Long as you ain’t tryin to fuck me, is all the same. You ain’t gonna be tryin to get me to do anything too funny are ya?” His giggle trailed off on that one a bit.

“Nah. It ain’t like that. Sadie’ll wanna have us both fuck her’n she’ll wanna watch me suck yer dick, I reckon. But you don’t have to do nothin to me. I’m teachin her a few things, she says.” I pushed the tray his way across the little table. I noticed his hands tremble a bit, and I couldn’t help giggling a bit myself.

“Don’t sweat it, boy. I ain’t lookin to hook up with you like that. I’m just a heathen’n this bitch thinks she needs another guy here to get me to fuck her. I’d fuck her anyway, for that matter. Yer just gravy. More the merrier, I guess. ‘sides, I’m harder’n Chinese arithmetic’n I’d eat you up, Dean.”

“I c’n handle that,” he stumbled out, looking at the floor. “You sure that’s all you wanna do?”

“I guarantee you’ll have a good time once Sadie gets here, boy. We’ll get our heads right. She’ll be pullin up in a few. Show me yer dick.”

He jumped a bit, “Damn, you don’t waste much time.”

“We’re all gonna be fuckin in a bit, anyway. Ain’t nobody here but you’n me, Dean. Chill out’n lemme see it. If you wanna fuck Sadie, yer gonna have to let her watch me eat you up, anyway. You might as well get used to that. Those are her rules, not mine.”

This is where I got to play the reasonable guy just trying to help out a friend and get him laid. I’ve always lived a life of service. Dean hesitated a moment, only a moment, and then undid his pants and pulled them down passed his knees to reveal a passable instrument that I instantly devoured, much to his initial bewilderment and growing encouragement. I had my arms around behind his ass in no time and was working him over pretty well. He was no real chore, and I was pretty wired up in any case.

“Lord, goddamn, Mug.”

He was beginning to writhe and buck a bit when the door shuddered and Sadie burst in carrying a twelve-pack of some generic looking swill and pushing those high-beams through her t-shirt. I raised up as Dean frantically tried to pull up his pants; I stiff-armed him back into the chair.

“Lock the door, hon. Put that nasty beer down and get undressed and get over here’n help me prime the pump on this heathen.”

I had barely gotten started on a good rhythm again when she appeared at my side, nudging me aside at the trough to get to the goodies. Dean had obviously adjusted quite nicely to the situation by this time and shook himself out of his shoes and pants without ever once displacing Sadie or me in our alternating attentions. We got him on the floor, and I was up turning off lights and throwing off clothes as I went, locking doors and drawing blinds.

I returned to find them doing that kissing bit that I find so objectionable between men and women – I’m really old fashioned in my thinking about people sticking to their own kind when it comes to that kind of intimacy. I bodily lifted Sadie and scooted her around so that her snatch was where my cock was aching to be, poised over those thick, full lips of his with that baby-soft dark moustache lining the upper rim around that warm, wet satin that fairly cried out for a shafting.

There is a special place in Hell for guys like me, I’m sure, but I’ve never held a gun to anyone’s head in my life when it came to gettin naked with this fatboy and gettin it on. I just seem to corrupt them to their natural essence, and then they tend to blossom in it on their own. Some of them really surprise me in their blossoming. I almost feel guilty sometimes – not very often though. It ain’t like I really ever turned out any of those straight guys. I just invited them along for the ride. Most of them jumped at and only had issues later. Well, that’s between them and their therapist. Anyway, dope makes a freak out of anybody. Don’t tell me otherwise, or you ain’t never done that much dope.

Sadie and I kept tag-teaming that boy’s lap for about ten minutes while he lapped away at that big monkey of hers. I wondered how he was breathing back there, and asked him as much. He commenced with the giggling again, and Sadie got this instant look on her face of something like shock.

“Oh, my God,” she exhaled in a breathless whisper.

I rubbed my whiskers on Dean’s thigh, forcing another violent spasm out of him, and consequently in her as well. I left her to work on his dick with that skill she was growing in by the day under my tutelage and crawled around to her business end.
I was on my knees straddling the top of Dean’s head and rubbing the head of my dick against the trailing edge of her cunt while he licked and slurped away only barely cognizant of my presence. I eased my cock into her, my balls resting on his forehead. I could see her head moving in an easy rhythm up and down on him. Good girl, I thought. I pushed my cock into her and felt the warmth of Dean’s tongue on the base of my shaft. He began to explore my balls and was attempting to take on more and more of me with each stroke, working for a hold on the end of my cock to maneuver with. He managed it, and I was suddenly sliding in and out of his mouth and then alternately into her with every third or fourth stroke. Eventually I was pushing in and out of those beautiful full lips of his and keeping it there for him to gorge himself on for a bit. Never interrupt someone who is following his bliss. Feng shui’n all that Campbell shit. Trust me, I’ve read up on it.

Suffice to say that boy was a good, good cocksucker, and he’d of never had the foggiest notion a that had we not hooked up that fine night in the fellowship of a neighborhood twelve-step meeting. They’re good for something, at least, and everyone serves in some way, be it making coffee, or helping to round out the experiences of others prior to their complete and abject surrender to some sort of orderly direction in their lives. I am a catalyst for change in the lives of many, an agent of Chaos, and a trickster with a willin dick, by God. And I was gonna have this boy’s ass before the night was out; that was a certitude in my mind.

I returned from my momentary reflection and pushed Sadie away, red-cheeked and winded, from her labors and attacked that boy’s business with a purpose. I pushed Sadie upright, so that her koochie flattened out over his face and bore down on his gigglin tongue while she shook and flailed about with her arms to keep from swooning, causing him to giggle more. She was a women possessed by the best muff dive of her life, and that all an unintended consequence of my skilled playing of the strings of his body. I knew she was in for a good one momentarily.

I worked my way down between his legs, burrowing in with fiendish purpose, this dog was huntin up some booger. I raised his legs and made for the sweet spot and heard Sadie shriek as Dean bucked with my whiskered face buried off in his booty. That sweet boy smelled like soap tinged with sweat, God bless him. His mama earned points from me, I’ll tell you that much. The fact that I like nothing more than to dive on a boy, don’t mean that I’m some sort of potty freak. Far from it. If your ass smells like, well, ass, forget it. I don’t care if you’re too pretty for Calvin Klein, you need to wash up your pie before you come lookin to me for a ride on this blessed mug.

I came up after a few minutes of steady buttmunching and, wiping the sweat from my face, asked, “Like that, boy?”
“Lord!” I think was the muffled response, and Sadie giggled, “Mug, I like this one!” Her tits bounced and reverberated the tremor passing through the rest of her body and beginning between her legs.

“That’s nice, hon. Get down here on this for a second.”

I reached up to the table and got the little vial with the coke in it and unscrewed the lid. I dawbed a miniscule little onto my finger and spread his cheek with the other hand and patted the powder onto his little rosebud. I could tell Sadie was grinning, and she missed a stroke and almost choked. I looked at her in stern reproach. I repeated the application of the coke and then dove in once more, briefly, to tenderize my objective and just enjoy myself. My God, but that boy had a fine ass, smooth and firm and hairless with a pink little pooter that now made my tongue numb from the addition of the topical analgesic powder as I dove. He was ripe, and by God, I’ll strike while the iron’s hot.

I was oiled up and driving in with his legs in the air before he snapped to what was actually happening. He seemed inordinately accommodating, so I don’t think there was a tremendous amount of pain on his end. That boy had good pussy; I’ll tell you what. All these observations took place in the span of one-half stroke of my cock as he bucked up and into the back of Sadie’s throat, causing her to gag violently and spit up some kind of goo all over his nuts as she ground down with her pussy on his face, muffling his sudden cry, “Loo-oooo-oooo-rrrrd!”

“Oh yeah,” I soothed, remaining tenuously in the saddle and gripping his thighs, “that feels good, boy, and you know it. Yer gonna choke this girl. Eat that pussy and let us work on you. There ya go. Ease down on that some more and tell me that don’t feel good inside you. Goddamn, but it feels damn good on this end. We can do this all night, boy.”

I was steady stroking, and he was steady moving his ass like a newfound bottom boy with a mission to realize the mastery of his craft in as short a time as possible. He and Sadie were both moaning low and sliding back and forth. I dripped sweat onto their shining bodies and watched my cock sliding in and out of that boy’s hole while his legs tensed in rhythm with his ass and gripped me, pulling me into him greedily. I began to move more mechanically, slapping home with each thrust and forcing a hiccupped moan breathed into Sadie’s cunt as it lathered his face. I could hear him taking his breath in gasps. Sadie’s face was red, eyes shut and mouth working hungry at his cock. His crotch was dripping wet beneath the two of us, and my exertions met with a moist smacking noise with each new thrust.

“Feels good, don’t it?” I grunted, panting a bit now.

His moans were low and steady, his legs tensing as he made ready to blow the back of Sadie’s skull off with a good quart of jizz.

I’ll admit. I lost any cool I had. I was carryin on and coachin and hollerin to beat hell. I was talking him through this like a bad landing, and he was buckin and rollin like he’d gone feral when I introduced him to anal sex. We were all grinding it up to a steady pitch, and I was the first to blow. I gripped his legs and plowed in as hard as I could and felt his whole ass clamp down on me like a fist while my cock exploded a well-earned bucket of cream gravy on his gizzard. I know he was out of his mind about this time. Sadie was moaning really loud, which was always her signal that she was about to open the floodgates. All I can say is, one of the reasons I liked three-ways with Sadie so much was that didn’t have to be on the receiving end of those facials of hers. She knew that and thought it was a grand joke, but she was oblivious to anything at the moment. I was still pressed hard into Dean’s ass while she let loose on those lips of his – those lips, my God. She raised up for only a moment to stretch her jaw and take a good long breath, and then returned to his cock in a determined and accomplished effort. Within a few seconds I noticed his nuts contracting and his feet pointing out past my head towards the stars above.

“OoooooOooooooooOoooooohhhhhh!” he gurgled in spasms from beneath her tropical bush, and suddenly, I pushed Sadie’s head down as far as it would go and held it there for a good four seconds. I know that boy was in heaven. I know for a fact that he’d been cut loose from a realm of experience in which he had remained trapped his entire life. He was set free into a completely new dimension of existence for that brief time, and I’ll cheerfully and dutifully take full credit for that fact. Glad I could help, dammit.

Sadie wasn’t quite as enraptured with me at just that moment. Rising up from his sopping wet cock and choking for air, she reached over quickly and squeezed my balls into a space about one fourth the size of their normal volume, and released them, grinning up at me. I fell to one side and decided to rest for a few minutes curled up like that. No need to move just yet. I think Dean was still off somewhere. He’d crossed over and been handed the tablets about the time he came into Sadie’s diaphragm while my cock was jammed up somewhere in his pancreas filling him with my Milk of Human Kindness. By God, a good healthy exchange of my bodily fluids is a spiritual thing when you really look at it right. Is for me, in any case.

I ran around with Dean quite a bit after that, but I never fucked him again. Didn’t really try to. We fooled around a couple of time when we were tripping, but he had started going with this pre-op tranny down at the bar who was one of the biggest coke suppliers in Oak Lawn. He ended up one of her kept boys and did a couple of years in the penitentiary behind that relationship. Still, he was one of the better pieces of ass I ever had, for someone with so little experience; he was somewhat of a natural, I think. I don’t know what he’s doing nowadays. It’s been eight or nine years since I last saw his ass, but he’ll likely look that good until he’s near fifty. He’s just one of those timeless ones. I’ll look him up someday and have another go at it. I always thought I did a good thing by turnin that boy out, but he went down a bad road when he started hanging out with those Mexican drag queens over in Oak Lawn. Nothing good could ever come of that.

Sadie Morrow didn’t give a shit that I was queer. She wouldn’t have given a shit if I’d have had a third eye in the middle of my forehead as long as I’d make her feel desirable from time to time by fucking her and letting her buy the beer. She would bring me offerings of broken men in the same way that my cat would bring me a half-eaten horny toad if only I would pull her up against my naked, sweaty body and give her my finest sloppy sugar and then cover her face with the glaze that left her looking like a day-old Southern Maid doughnut. Sadie bestowed upon me the best that her feminine charms could offer. I was happy that she was so solicitous of my physical comfort, but I honestly felt rather put upon and objectified from time to time by that slut-in-the-headlights look she gave up at me from below my belt. Striving after the pleasures of the flesh was a way of life for me then, however, so I sucked it up and made the best of a dubious blessing. I’ve always been adaptable that way, I suppose. And she gave the most hateful, hot-bubblin’ skull I ever got from a woman. That counts for a lot in my book.

I met Sadie in an AA meeting. I was killing time in the back row of one of those midnight candlelight gatherings where the unemployed and the unemployable sit about and try to outdo one another by speaking in hushed tones and secreting spiritual goo all over the room. I always felt as if self-support and right living were about the most spiritual things a man can do towards his fellows, no matter that I often fell a tad short of that mark, and I usually attended these funereal pow-wows to simply lord it over those who were somehow less aware of truths I considered to be axiomatic. Besides, once I’d been wired up past about day three, I tired of staying around the house once the sun had gone down. I knew that such a group of misfits and heathens weren’t going to be too terribly discriminating about the company they kept.

I saw her sitting with her back to me and recognized her as a familiar face to whom I had never been introduced. As the group formed up at the close and was about the task of joining hands to ask for their Pat on the Head I slipped up behind her and whispered, “I can lick my eyebrows’n breathe through my ears, princess. Can I taste what you had fer lunch?”

She was trembling all through the Lord’s Prayer trying to contain herself. I never considered that line terribly witty, but I suppose that it did come as a surprise under the circumstances. She turned and fell into my arms as the lights came up, and we had a little moment. She looked up at me biting her lower lip a bit and pressed her tits hard against my chest. I determined right then that conforming her to my will was a biological imperative in my life. I wanted to drag her outside and fuck her in the parking lot, and I found the awareness of that rather disconcerting to me. I am, after all, queer. There have been a few women in my life who have had that effect upon me, but they are so few and far between that I don’t take them into account when it comes to assessing my orientation.

Sadie was not a fat girl by any stretch. But she had a comfortable fleshiness about her that I found very attractive. She was not any taller than I was. She also had that innocent look of a girl who blew her brother on his wedding day…but only because he guilted her into it. She had platinum-blonde hair, sky-blue eyes, fair-sized perky tits, and that look on her face that said the lights were on and anybody was home who happened to be passing through. She trembled a lot, it seemed, and I felt sometimes as if I were in the company of one of those little dogs who roll over and piss themselves when approached too quickly. She also had a giggly whimper that said she’d just been caught being naughty, and she knew what she had to do now to get a pat on the noggin.

I was well known among the creatures who took up residence in those smoke-filled rooms with the bad coffee and worse furniture. There had been times when I had honestly wanted to make the attempt and offer my base metal into that alchemical chamber to see what sort of gold issued forth at the other end. I had more often witnessed the effects in my life and the lives of others who tip-toed around the periphery of that process without ever giving themselves completely into it. For us it was a spiritual sausage grinder, combining all the more unpalatable elements into an inert puree that, while safe to eat, had none of that spice that makes life worth living. I’d just go to get the heat off periodically and spend my time auditing the course and hanging with other like-minded folk who were in and out of the doors and occasionally drunk in meetings, pitching pennies at speakers from the front rows and being escorted out when we were too disruptive.

Sadie wanted something better. But anything was better than the cold plate of circumstance she brought to the table when she arrived. She went through all the requisite motions in her own way. While I sat in the living room of my grandmother’s house smoking speed off a piece of foil, she would scribble nervously at the kitchen table in a stenographer’s pad, working on another of her moral inventories. She carried that process with her as she sought relief in the immediacy of one more anonymous coupling on my shag carpet.

I had somewhat of a crush on Brian, a guy who rented a room in the back of my house and sold coke on the strip in Dallas where he tended bar. Okay, so it wasn’t exactly a crush; I just wanted to suck his dick and do his dope. His dope was pretty painful stuff. He was selling coke for Claudio, who owned a restaurant and bar over on Fitzhugh. The bar was called La Mariposa and was located next door to where the old Eighth Day had been just a few years previous. Brian and I would spend afternoons there doing shots of Grand Marnier and snorting eighty-cent lines off the bar. There was something not quite right about the coke. It felt like ground glass in my nose, though it was powerful enough. We had to continually use various nose sprays and other medicaments to alleviate our suffering. Brian would send me across the street to get hot dogs with mayonnaise, a taste I acquired at the time but to which I never fully adjusted, and then we would chase them with shots of “Grandmar” and a thick line of coke that almost brought the entire mix right back up. Then we would stand around for a few minutes holding our noses and wincing and trying to swallow.

Brian held forth in such a way that he wasn’t really queer. I mean, he was queer, but the boys he was attracted to were either illegally young or so effeminate that he might as well have been straight. And I knew he was good to go if I had a girl that was worth fucking. I was a bit of a chicken-hawk and always had been, but I wasn’t in the same category as he was and wasn’t willing to venture down that road for any reason no matter how skewed my perceptions became. Sadie provided an easy avenue of compromise for my tastes, since I was willing to fuck her in any case if nothing else was available.

It was a hot time and memorable, and it only happened once. I reckon it’s appropriately unfortunate that my principle visual memory of Sadie is the three of us scooting along my living room floor, Brian’s pelvic thrusts the engine of our progress and Sadie’s blissful grin upon my cock affixed until her head was bent near double against that old console television that used to blare out Soul Train on Saturday afternoons while my grandfather sat a few feet away rolling cigarettes and running the electric shaver over his face and laughing as the sun streamed in through the big picture window.

Late start today, but I got my mowing done and raked aquatic weeds out of the pond sufficient to mulch my little corn patch. I will continue with that effort over the weekend. I’ll add some pictures come daylight. There’s nothing quite so appetizing as the aroma of aquatic weeds covered in duck shit. And every third time or so when I flip the rake over the wagon, I’ll get spattered. Duckshit bukake.

I left the office Saturday morning around eleven o’clock heading to the stop two blocks away to catch the bus home with the transfer from my trip down earlier. The skies were leaden, pregnant. The buildings, calcified accretions – a barren reef rising from a seafloor of flint – otiose in the absence of life’s green and volatile engines. The weathermen divined that snow would arrive that afternoon, but as yet the sharp edges on creation remained an indictment of summer’s retreat. I left my gloves in my pack and read with numbed hands as I walked, drawing warmth from Welty’s southern landscapes against the rising wind from the north.

A woman sat at the bus stop outside McDonald’s. I passed her and turned to the window of the restaurant. A line of Ojibwe faces peered back at me munching little machine-flattened bricks of fried potatoes and sipping orange soda. They looked past me indifferently as they looked past the woman on the bench and the theater across the street and the village just beyond named for a Christian king and saint and the woods and plains and rivers beyond that. Their pockmarked cheeks moved up and down in andante rhythms under deep black eyes that stretched back eons. I turned and faced the street, aping their nonchalance.

“This must be my day for men with beards! All I see is men with beards today!”

I nodded slightly and tried to smile in a way that was not engaging.

“I haven’t seen my friend Alvin in ages, and he came up to me today with a big beard on his face! What is it with all these beards today? You don’t think men are really wearing beards much these days, do ya?”

I tried to give a benign shrug and a smirk, as if to say, “I’m a foreigner. Please forgive me; I do not understand a word you’re saying.”

The woman had the voice of a well-trained parrot that rose and fell in dramatic fashion irrespective of where natural inflection should lie and the face of my maternal grandmother smiling up at me as she fumbled for a cigarette with gloved hands – little turquoise knitted mittens that hinged back to reveal tattered fabric on her fingers. Her hands trembled a bit.

I inclined my head at her again and tried to give her a pleasant look. I didn’t want to perpetuate the conversation, but I also didn’t want to be too brusque in my retreat and risk offending. I turned back to my book and drew my shoulders in as another gust of wind circled my neck and ran down my spine. Each blow from the north drained another increment of warmth from the reserves I carried and left me that much less to meet the next assault. I folded the book back and tucked it under my arm and buried both fists hard in my pockets. The bus should’ve arrived by now.

I turned back to the window. The panel of faces chewing their cuds and doing their best to maintain a stern countenance gave an almost imperceptible nod back in my direction. I turned back around and faced the theater across the street and noticed a coyote on the sidewalk under the marquis. He was staring back at me. He gave what sounded like a little barking laugh and danced in a quick circle before disappearing around the corner where the tobacco shop had recently moved out next to the cinema. The rest of the street was vacant, save for the woman and me. She noticed her cigarette had gone out. She reached again for the little leather holster that held her pack and returned the remainder into it.

The snow began falling as the bus rounded the corner. I stepped back enough to show her the right of way as it pulled up in front of us, but she merely sat and stared into the side of the bus and said nothing. The flakes were falling heavily already. I stepped up into the bus and sat by the window with the damaged and the penurious overlooking the woman on the bench. She continued to stare just below me at the side of the bus, or through it. She was accumulating puffy little cobwebs of snowflakes all over her head. I looked back at the window of McDonald’s, but my faces were gone. I returned to Eudora Welty. The bus churned me homeward through a thickening white rind that dulled the sharp edges.

Out of the ocean called peaceful

El Niño rises hot and bratty

bringing rain like Noah’s flood

till the cliffs of California

slide soggy into the sea.

Drought like Deuteronomy

heaven of brass, earth of iron

blows Guatemalan forests

all the way to Rushmore

like Birnam Wood

come up to Dunsinane.

Now the sun’s a glinty nickel

the moon a copper penny

small change in the half-light

of a doomsday sky.

El Niño, Holy Infant, the Second Coming?

 Barbara Fryrear 2000

miss you, mom

“Golden Circles”