``Loosen up,'' Charlie Ray thought as the muscled thighs of his muse clamped his head. Blindly he slid his tongue into the flesh.
``Uh! Uh!'' Brunhilda moaned and clamped tighter.
Ray's eardrums were bursting. He tried pulling out but the skinhead Bruni was a Berlin body builder on 'roids and Ray a snake-thin new york punk with ribs poking through his black T-shirt--he didn't stand a chance.
``That how you wanna play?'' Ray zeroed on the rigid lump above the slit. His tongue flicked like a hooked eel. Froth poured from Bruni's lips and her ``Uh! Uhs!'' pulsed quicker. ``Ya, dachshund!'' Brunhilda wrenched her thighs and Ray's vertebrae crackled like beer bottles crushed by a tire. The black crucifix in his left ear dug bloody in his neck.
``Heil, I'm cuming!'' Bruni brutally pitched Ray's head from her thighs.
Gasping, Charlie Ray picked himself off the floor and groped to the bathroom. He yanked the string of the forty-watt bulb above the mirror and saw himself half-naked and shaking, his black hair matted to his forehead. He pulled off his T-shirt and watched his heart fibrillate just beneath the skin of his concave chest. His penis was small and shriveled. It scared him to see how scared he looked.
``Who is she?'' Ray asked the mirror. He'd met her that night at the Banal Club. He was at his usual stool and she'd offered to buy him a tequila. She looked all right in her black vinyl skirt and handcuff belt. ``Yeah!'' Ray'd thought when he checked her out. A baggy red blouse disguised her upper body; he found too late it was all pectorals and no breast.
Suddenly Brunhilda appeared in the bathroom doorway. ``You have good tongue. Now I give you pleasure. Come, boy,'' she commanded. An oversized dildo was strapped to her crotch. When she walked, the heavy rod slapped from hip to hip like the clapper of a tolling bell.
Charlie Ray half fell into the lidless toilet. ``Wait a minute,'' he was about to say when Brunhilda grabbed his hair and shoved him face forward into the mirror.
``You like this,'' the Teuton promised.
Ray's eyes were wide looking at themselves in the dirty mirror. They nearly popped sockets when Brunhilda plunged him with the unlubed dildo.
``Horses!'' Charlie Ray screamed as a flash of white horses snorting flames descended on him. He smashed his head against the mirror.
``Ya, dachshund!'' Bruni rode with slapping strokes.
When it was over Charlie Ray dropped to his knees and wretched into the toilet. Darkness covered his eyes like a death shroud and he fell onto the cold tile ... through the church doors and slowly by a woman douching in a basin of holy water. In the confessional, the profile of a grizzled priest on the far side of the grate. ``Father, can you get AIDS from a dildo?'' ``Not if its wearing a rubber.'' The sensation of falling and lunging for a handhold. ...
Charlie Ray jerked awake. He pulled his boiling guts onto the toilet and released a stream of blood. The pain tore him like a serrated blade and he lowered his head between his knees till he stopped shaking, a half hour later.
After crawling into the shower and scrubbing himself raw, Ray toweled dry and peeked into the other room. Brunhilda was gone, but her odor remained. He grabbed a container of bleach and soaked the foam rubber pallet he used as a bed. ``Hell!'' The pallet started to smoke and then dissolve.
Ray stepped into a pair of undershorts and stared through the chlorine fumes. He lit a cigarette, then went to a corner of the room where an untouched canvas sat on its easel. ``Shutup,'' he told the blank cloth. He opened the housepaints and uncapped the spray cans.
Charlie Ray didn't notice his sore sphincter, the weight of the brushes and spray cans, or the fumes searing his lungs. As the picture progressed, his mind worked effortless and detached. But his body sweated as if he were digging a grave. Flecks of red paint slowly covered his upper torso. His underwear became damp transparent and stuck to his flesh. At times he pulled at the bloodstained cotton or lit a Camel. When a cigarette was done he'd strategically smash the butt into the composition. He was at it till the sun pierced the torn tinfoil window shades. Ray stepped back from the painting, closed an eye and tilted his head. A slow chuckle sank down his throat. Smiling back from the canvas was an hermaphroditic Salome. She was huge- breasted and dancing among silk veils. Out of her groin sprang a bloody arm-sized phallus with the bearded head of John the Baptist impaled on the end. A cartoon bubble spoke from her mouth, ``They say that love hath a bitter taste Jokanaan.``
Charlie Ray took a long suck from his last Camel and smashed the butt in the Salome's lower right corner. ``Another fuckin' dream,'' he said and stumbled dead asleep onto the dissolved mattress.
Ray's snores ground through the room like an industrial saw cutting stainless. The skeleton key squeaking the lock didn't wake him, nor did the business-like tap of spike-heeled footsteps followed by the shuffling of a twin pair of Bally loafers. Erika stood a head taller than the Hiroshima brothers, who'd followed her into the room and crowded before the easel. She knelt by Charlie Ray and dragged a Gauloises through the long- stemmed cigarette holder between her incisors. The exhale accented her whip thin body; it was encased in black leather that clung to her pelvis and ribs like gloss enamel. Erika's hair was short, thick, and orange with black roots. She wore it pulled behind her ears and lopped off at the middle of her neck. ``Well, gentlemen, Here's a van Gogh for the fin de vengtieme siecle.
Charlie snorted like he was having a bad dream. The Hiroshima's came to his sleeping pallet.
``The boy's an anachronism.'' Erika said. ``He thinks he has to suffer for his art.``
The brothers looked at each other, sniffed, and grimaced. ``He's the real thing, gentlemen. What you've been looking for. A William Blake, Edvard Munch rolled into one. I've been nurturing him for months.``
One of the Hiroshima's took a small camera from his inside pocket and snapped some flash shots of the sleeping Ray.
``Don't worry. You won't bother him. I stop here each morning and he hasn't wakened once. If he's painted something, I take it and pay another week's rent at the desk downstairs. That was the agreement. Really, that's the only way to treat naifs like him. Give them any hard cash and they waste it on drugs, sex, or vacations in Eleuthera.``
``Fifteen thousand dollars,'' said the cameraless Hiroshima pointing at the wet Salome.
``Twenty thousand,'' countered the other.
``Twenty thousand!'' Erika was indignant. ``For the sweat and blood of an American genius? Look at him, gentlemen. How much longer do you think he'll live? Then what'll his paintings be worth?``
The Hiroshimas studied Ray; his nostrils were as black as a coal miner's and he was wheezing the chlorine gas seeping from his bed.
``I'd as soon destroy this painting, just to keep up the value of his others.``
``It not worth more than twenty,'' said the Hiroshima with the camera.
``It's worth what you pay for it,'' Erika explained.
The other brother nodded. ``Twenty-five thousand. Final offer.``
Erika sighed. ``For the sake of Art, gentlemen, the Salome is yours.``
Erika slipped on a pair of surgical gloves and took the painting from its easel. She replaced it with the blank canvas she'd brought. Shoving the Hiroshimas ahead of her and without looking back, Erika slammed the door to Ray's room behind her.
The artist jolted awake and found himself sitting upright in his disintegrated pallet. He saw the empty canvas (``The Salome was just another dream.'') and tried to build the inspiration to throw something on it. His arms ached like he'd been doing push ups for hours and his neck was kinked to one side. ``Fuck it!'' Ray fell back on the mattress and dreamed he was painting.
Ray woke that night strong and rested. He felt as alive as if he'd spent the previous night making love and painting. A healthy hunger drove him to the kitchenette where he ate a bowl of Cap'n Crunch drenched in water. He brushed his teeth, pulled on a fresh T-shirt and torn jeans, and slammed out the door.
It was raining. The streets had a fluorescent sheen and the smell of garbage wasn't high. Ray strode the seven blocks to the Banal Club wondering how long his luck would hold, how long Erika at Gallery Zed would pay his rent and bar tab without him producing for her.
There was a line outside the Banal. Ray walked past the tourists to the door. He half expected the bouncer to stand before him with folded arms, shaking his head. But the brute waved him into the percussion.
It hit Ray in the diaphragm; a group called Silent Scream was blasting on stage and the dance floor was crowded with the epileptic movement of bodies freed from the workaday. The Banal was not uptown or overpopulated with professional revelers. It was a hangout for the local lower-class tribes. Ray adjusted to the light-absorbing soot black that covered the walls and furniture and aimed for the bar.
``Tequila,'' Ray said to the mongolian bartender, whose social security number was scarified on his wrist, the same place concentration camp prisoners had their brand.
Ray drank the shot and did the salt and lime trick. When he opened his eyes she was sitting alongside him.
She was six-two with spiked green-blonde hair and slightly crazy eyes. ``Buy you a drink?'' she asked and waved at the bartender. ``I'm Sally. Sally May.''
Sally wore black--a tank top, jeans, and motorcycle boots. Ray studied her bicep, which flexed a tatoo of a black ax splitting a bloody anatomically-correct heart. ``I can tell.'' he said.
The mongolian came over. ``What'll it be?'' he inquired.
``Another round?'' Sally May asked Ray.
Smiling, Charlie Ray signalled the bartender.
R. C. lives in Washington, D.C., is currently trading his soul for a comfortable bourgeois existence, and listens to Diamanda Galas' ``plague mass'' to invoke lucid perceptions of reality. His fiction also turns up in Critique: Exposing Consensus Reality.
For more stories by Ron C., click here.
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