-Yes, yes, yes, my morphine moppet!
Churl whispers the echo of Anisette’s cheekbone. His long, adventurous, hellraiser tongue a wicked tickle over her earlobe.
On the bridged walkway behind, observant schoolgirls file giggling past. Their chaperones shush, unamused by such public displays of affection. There’ll be time enough ahead for the soiling of their charges.
Seagulls drop from beneath the bridge, wheeling, squawking, greedy fleet of half-stewed belligerents. The rain has washed the clouds from pearl to oyster.
-Tell me, Churl flushes, hot-voiced.
-tell me about the others …
Anisette, po-faced and rigor mortis stunning. Anisette talks dirty to Churl.
Their sperm, she says, leaked from her like an exodus of gorged maggots. If she were to open her veins, she’d pump out spunk instead of blood. Churl grins and begs for more. She describes in detail the telltale, offwhite stains, when she wiped her fawnlet bottom. How she sucked their tongues as they took turns riding her back, switching from one passage to the other before choking up her slippery backstreet.
-Robbing Peter to pay Paul?
Churl’s expertise in euphemism is a point of modest pride.
Anisette, damp with narrative control.
-Robbing pussy to play me like a rent boy.
-And did you hate it?
-Yes. Every minute. Every second. But I never stopped dreaming of you.
The bridge sways beneath their embrace. It is a tender sealing off, the closest thing to marital ritual the two have yet devised.
-Reassure me, Anisette says.
Churl hugs her closer, brushes his lips against her forehead.
-I see it all in peep-show black and white. My pale, more than four-fifths naked sister, garters and stockings crusted with white corruption. Surrounded by a battalion of well-fed users. I hear you, I see you balling them and I feel no pain.
Oyster fringed with salmon silhouettes the perfection of his sister’s head.
-Churl, dearest, I need to know. For the first and the last time. How many Janes and Sallys did you bounce in my absence?
Churl coughs, no hesitation.
-47 … and you, Anisette? All told, how many susiboys kept you company these past years?
-Oh, I lost count after 500 or so, Anisette says shyly.
Churl cups her pale face in his palms.
They have achieved inviolability.
No one can touch them now.
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Emma likes driving.
And, while he might quibble at the notion that he likes being driven, Jocko admits to passive enjoyment as right-hand navigator. Not that Emma deigns to ask his readings of Prince Henry’s stars. His advice on the setting of their course of no apparent interest to her. Jocko’s mood is one of ebullience, lightness, devil-may-care and la-di-nazi-da. Within the borders of acute gastritis, it should be noted. He looks neither to the left nor to the right. He muses upon a still point, the universal pellucid flea that puts all in perspective. Sorrow grapples with joy …… dust soaks up rosewater. There is a sudden brilliance to Jocko’s cobwebbed intuition. If only he can hold onto it. A premonition of … And slipping away. Emma’s brazen ambition has him by the fever-tender oofs. Her stranglehold leaves him with nothing left to lose. I think, therefore I’m flayed. Ever clever, schoolboy.
Ah, Emma!
Would that thou wert less Helena, the more tatianaed should your graces seem! Thy chamberpot would I daily empty, with heart as glad as May gone maniac. Thy waste dainties would I feast upon, my thirsty lips made moist in the torrent of your luscious venom. Mock my scars and I will not defend myself. Betray my darkest privacies and I will praise thee as a darling of pure loyalty. In short, my edible Sergeant, you may wreck me, ruin me, do your precocious worst. Just see if I care.
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-Watch out! Jocko shouts, slamming on his imaginary brakes.
Emma slams on the gas, end-runs the crosswalk, narrowly misses the toddler on his tricycle and sails through the intersection with enviable velocity.
-Jeez, Emma, Jocko mutters.
Two more blocks in stony silence, before Emma pulls over, in front of an herbalist’s advertising cures for blindness, depression, impotence, and paranoia.
And these just the side effects.
-Is there a problem, officer? Emma asks.
Anger and sarcasm elbow one another for ascendancy.
-You tell me, Jocko fights feebly back.
-you almost hit that kid back there. In my book that’s a problem. Could be I’m just old-fashioned.
-Oh come off it. Do you always take things at face value, Lieutenant? Is that how you made the grade? Is it?
-Please calm down. Do you mind telling me precisely what you’re on about?
-I smell a set-up.
-Set-up? What set-up?
-How do we know that kid wasn’t some dwarf-for-hire, flounced up in that daffy sailor suit and planted back there by Internal Affairs?
Jocko’s supposition of his partner as zone of bitchy sanity begins its soft evaporation. He pauses grimly before bursting out laughing. Neither reassurance nor some nifty comeback seem in the mood to come out and play right now.
A poster in the storefront window catches his evil eye.
Badly drawn, depicting a queerly-tailored geezer cowering beneath a halo of leering, demonic faces.
p . a . r . a . n . o . i . a
But Emma’s, or Jocko’s?
-Anyway, he eases, why Internal Affairs? I’d have thought that was my singular bete noir.
Her slim fingers drum the steering wheel. If he hadn’t given up smoking that morning he’d offer her a cigarette.
-Do you want to hear my theory? Emma asks, switching themes with no concern for subtlety.
-Sure.
-I mean it. My theory about the killings?
-I’d love to hear your theory about the killings. I just said so.
-Then …. let bygones be bygones.
Wee hope diddles a flasher’s daylight.
-Agreed.
-Good. Now, let’s find a motel where we can talk.
-But what about Adelaide of the fathomless opinions?
-She’ll wait. Or she won’t. It’s not like she has anything better to do with her time.
A motel room. Well, well. By the singed digits of Dido, the universal flea grows
fat on mortal blood.
The key unlocks a room he’s been in before.
Less than a week ago.
Stark naked and enthralled to Centipede’s meticulous chastisement.
Jocko’s stomach pain exits stage left, farewells drowned in the backwash of something Baroque, something ersatz and chancy.
Kitty-corner to the motel, at the bar of Tattler’s Tavern, Adelaide Querelle orders a second banana daiquiri and relives a moment of distant glory.
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In the stifled abortion of the confessional booth Gwendolyn combs the raindrops from her hair. Modulating her breathing she preps for performance.
She’s in luck. It’s not the old guy this time. Old Stars and Stripes, drenched in stale Burma Shave. Whose profile fortnightly constellates. As through a grill darkly.
Instead, her absolution (expiration date neatly included) will be delivered this rainy p.m. by youngish Father Isherwood. Gwendolyn wrings the last droplet down her cheek. She soothes herself in the young priest’s awkward Latin and pirouettes on cue.
-Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was three days ago.
The rhythm of the ancient etcetera never ceases to excite her. For a variety of less-than-complicated reasons she has yet to trouble the confessors at St. Julian’s with any rosaried account of sensuality fantasized or realized. Her acts of copulatory tourism beyond the walls of grace are subject to the tsk-tskings of Cecilia and Lucy and Anne and Elizabeth and Catherine and Barbara and Berenice. Not to mention the prime VM herself.
For Pere Isherwood and the others she reserves the crepuscular.
-Father, I spoke with someone on the telephone ……
No sin that, but it’s the unbearable drama of the moment she can’t resist.
-…..Father, I’ve taken communion with the dead.
A damp cough plays pretty upon the dark trestling.
-Oh dear, the young priest mumbles.
Sounding less shaken than merely weary.
So many sick souls, so few the virtuous hours.
Beneath the transept of the morning doves, airy chamber blown loud with innocent echo.
Belinda floats.
Five foot six and weightless. A hovering trompe d’oeil in bloodstained nightdress. She weeps for her burgled virginity. Eyes black with unconsummated revenge.
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Peter debates the matter of this mad love. It isn’t easy. There are times when he would gladly have done with it. Sinking sober, lonely, into dignified eternal silence. But these are in his moments of weakness.
Thus, they pass. And she returns. To flirt and cauterize his cannibal passion.
He wants to eat her alive. To lick the pale parchment of her skin with a cat’s-tongue of sandpapered fury. To suck her bones to a shocking, blinding white.
And now, at last, he knows her name. All happily unhooked, for no deviousness, no cunning brought those moaning syllables to his ear. The mention of a mutual friend. That foolish thing, that Puss. Mimi’s jabbermouth fed the shark’s maw well.
Fi.
O.
Na.
(pr.)
Fee.
Oh.
Na.
The train careens down the metro tunnel. The damp walls lit at uncertain intervals by the sickly green neon of timid flashing bulbs. Survivors of some ghastly Christmas past. Peter dwells on his new found talisman.
Fipple: flute // a sharp flat lip // productive
of sound waves within the body
FIOriturA : to bloom
// when blown upon?
FirmAmeNt : see, where Christ’s
blood streams in the
FjOrd : alphabets & booze, blotted
among the crystalline bluebells, high above Reykjavik
FIOciNe : grapeskin // teeth sink in plush, almost
fleshlike give
FIOciNA : harpoon
FIONdA : a sling, a
catapult
FIOccare : to snow, to shower (rain)
FIOrAia
: lions? // lavender? // ah … flower-girl
le coup de
FION : the final touch
They are the last two passengers on the train.
Punkette lays down the earphones in her lap, fiddles for another tape. Her eyes go wide at the sound of Peter’s soft, approaching words.
-A hand moves over the water
a hand moves over the sea
it leaves me untouched and unbroken
but utterly ravishes thee.
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Simon dips a shrimp in lime juice and tequila. Feeling the mandible winch of wasted time. Pink, pale, translucent as sex. His self-pity an overweight leech. But still, in all its glorious bloodsucking grossness, still with an eye for the girls. Oh hideous, the metaphors which drunkenness concocts.
His resolve hides its face. As from the sun’s riviera rudeness.
He’ll devote himself henceforth to only the best of good causes. Getting drunk, getting laid, getting got.
He dabs Melissa’s taste with a shrimpwet index. His palate roars approval. He’d wanted more of a scene. The chance to play at love. To hear in her voice a wistful pause. Some germinal doubt. A lime juice and tequila lamentation. Beginning ‘…if only, if only, only …’ She wanted none of it. No words. No gestures. No violet sunglasses. Not even his money. The last time, she said, the last time’s for free.
She stands nude in the doorway to her little room. One arm lifted high above her head, braced on the edge of the open door. Standing, waiting, listening in the hallway, Simon’s heart sinks.
Her final words. And a half-smile. Even as the door is slowly closing.
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-No goodbyes. Long or short. Just go. And don’t look back.
Melissa Castellanos is what Giacomo Casanova
(not Don Juan ; hardly
shallow Pepys)
would call ‘an honest whore’.
Casanova of the limitless knowledge. The straitlaced, limited understanding. (Begging the question, but what man has the right to use that word?)
(‘Whore’)
Melissa shrugs, too bored to laugh.
The question droops with the twee pain of a newly-jotted social conscience. An honest harlot tells no lies. And keeps her secrets close to heart.
The list of Melissa’s other, not-so-secret names would fatten the index of any self-respecting christening book. A score apiece for the yobs, the punters, the musclemen, the schoolboys, the lilies, the creeps. From the ones that want to tie her up at the initial twitch of eye contact. To the silent ones, too shy to ask for the menu before the scopophilic plunge.
And for Simon? A pretty postcard. Purchased at a train station. Between invented, unvisited, hometowns. Telling him ‘how’ she’s doing. Not ‘what’ she’s doing.
…. remember me to
penelope street, dear,
as I ride
sidesaddle
out of town …
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O come, all ye faithful!
Welcome to the neverending orgy.
Priscilla Graciela Judith Di Giovanni O Tunnel und Stern, former Mother Superior of the Convent of the Fleecy Saddle, ushers the envoys in, offers them straight-backed chairs to sit in, a small card table of delectables from which to eat and drink, and takes her place on the raised platform before them. Aged somewhere between eighty and one hundred, still beautiful (look as closely as you please, her skin is more cream than parchment, her breath a cool cascade of alpine mint and Andean clove). Not an ounce over ninety pounds even with ankle bracelet, earrings, and blindfold left on. For now she is whipsnapping business, her coal-black dress buttoned up over her throat, long sleeves buttoned to her wrists, hem hanging to her pointy dollcatcher shoes (purchased at Settembrini’s in Buenos Aires one fine spring day in 1909).
Pastellito, Opioid, and Peladan stuff their gobs, slurp vermouth straight from the exquisite bottle, bits of sardine and pastry shining like mucilage on their chins.
-Let us see, Priscilla begins, half-glasses perched on the end of her nose, the very double of Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie’s, the sight of which alone was sufficient for Napoleon to seize up his campaign maps to fan-dance the fact that he was coming in his breeches. In Priscilla’s case, the trouser-soakers have included everyone from Lavrenty Beria to Giacomo della Chiesa (His Holiness Pope Benedict XV), from Haj Amin el-Husseini (Mufti of Jerusalem) to H. G. Wells, from Martin Fierro to William Randolph Hearst, from Aleister Crowley to Professor James Moriarty.
The envoys know nothing of this, see her through the red filters of their eyes as a snack between mayhems, though Boss said behave, she’s a Lady, an Old Friend, no one We wish to offend.
Priscilla reads through to the end of the two-page letter, lifts it to her nostrils for the scent of her old acquaintance, returns to the first page as though to cherish this or that individual phrase and then folds it and tucks it away in her sleeve. She removes her glasses and stares at the trio before her.
-It’s been seven years since I received a visit from the Baron. And fifteen since He requested an orgy of this magnitude. Now, which one of you is Peladan?
-Guilty, says Peladan, scratching his groin with one paw and raising the other to Priscilla.
-The Baron says I am to send you back with an estimate.
Peladan grins, cack-tongued, broken-mouthed, agreeable.
-Tell me, Priscilla continues, how many men can a woman take at the same time?
Pastellito closes his eyes in concentration.
Opioid lifts his hand to his face, slowly begins to count his fingers, lips moving.
-That’s easy, says Peladan.
-the answer is three.
Priscilla smiles.
-That, Mr. Peladan, is incorrect.
-Uh, three? grunts Pastellito.
Priscilla looks at him, and a slow smile begins to transform her face. Her expression freezes, as though she’s thought better of it.
-Who is good at math?
Opioid points at Peladan, Peladan points at Pastellito, Pastellito points at Opioid.
-Very well, Priscilla sighs, I believe we’ll need some assistance. Maria! Maria del Pilar!
A door opens and a young woman enters. Dark eyes, inquisitive, curious, dark hair, jet sluiced with flame, oval face, lips naturally red, acquisitively rosebud, wearing a white chemise bordered at the rounded neck with yellow, flouncy trousers of the same color, both of which, chemise and trousers, cling and billow over a body of compact voluptuousness.
The trio sit up in their chairs.
Pastellito wipes a line of drool from his lower lip.
-She’s pretty, Opioid mumbles, I want to fu…
-Behave, brother! Peladan snaps, although he himself wishes he’d worn his kilt so as to more easily maneuver his enormous erection from where it is presently strangling.
-Maria, fetch me the green calculator from the china cabinet.
-Calculator? the young woman says, the pigeon toes of her little slippers crossing and recrossing, her eyes, dark, deep, on the squirming trio of envoys.
-The modern abacus I showed you last week, Priscilla says.
-Oh … kay …
She turns back to the door and the close cling of her trousers to her backside reveals a curving paradise.
-O happy ass, mumbles Opioid, I want to li….
-Behave! Peladan snarls and hits Opioid on the side of the head with his open palm, using the blow to conceal his quick rearrangement of his massive erection into a more comfortable nesting place.
-Now, Priscilla says, would any of you gentle … men … like to reconsider your answer? No? As you wish. The correct answer is ten.
The trio scratch their heads in tandem.
-Ten? they unison.
-Yes, my dears. Any woman, if she so desires, if the opportunity presents itself, can polish off ten of yourselves in a single go. I shall illustrate, if you like. You, fetch me that basket.
Pastellito rises awkwardly and turns round.
-Ah! he exclaims happily, seeing a basket of vegetables resting on a buffet table against the back wall.
He lugs it to the front and sets it carefully down on the table behind her.
Priscilla picks through it, discarding all but four carrots, five cucumbers, and a single tubular and misshapen potato.
-Imagine that these are cocks.
Opioid giggles and Peladan, himself mid-guffaw, raises his hand as if to strike him again. Pastellito, for his part, is sitting on the edge of his chair, open-mouthed, a look of innocent expectation on his face.
Priscilla ignores the outbursts and continues.
-For the sake of delicacy I will not illustrate but simply ask you to imagine a woman on her back with a single man beneath her, but opened and receptive to the magic three which Mr. Peladan originally indicated.
She holds up a carrot, makes a flourish below her waist, another carrot and a second flourish over her buttocks, a third carrot and a flourish before her opened mouth.
-The others, she says, setting down the three carrots, would be employed as follows.
She holds the final carrot in her left hand, pumps it three times in the air for illustration, sets it down, takes up a cucumber in her right hand, jiggles it, sets it down, places a cucumber under her left armpit, sliding it forward and back, repeats the procedure with the third cucumber in her right armpit, removes one of her shoes and wriggles her toes over the fourth cucumber in a caress of such delicacy and sensuality that Pastellito sticks his fist into his mouth and gnaws to keep from groaning, while Priscilla, continuing her demonstration, removes her other shoe and wriggles her toes over the fifth cucumber, before lifting the hideous potato and placing it between her breasts, where she frots it against her dress and gives them a triumphant, beatific smile.
-There! she says.
-like so! One woman, ten cocks, problem solved.
While Priscilla puts her little shoes back on, Pastellito carries the now re-laden basket away, hunching and clumsy in his movements, impeded by the upright shadow between his legs, visibly plumping his trousers.
The young woman returns and hands a small green calculator to Priscilla and then stands staring at the envoys, shifting her weight from one well-sculpted leg to the other, absentmindedly chewing her fingernails and sucking her thumb.
-O delightful mouth! mumbles Opioid, I want to ….
-We all do, brother, growls Peladan, this time keeping his hands firmly in his lap.
Priscilla looks pensive as she hands the calculator back to the young woman.
-You, my dear, shall do the honors. Remember your lessons?
-Yes, Mother Superior.
-Now, Priscilla goes on, turning back to the gawking threesome.
-the Baron wishes me to supply him with both venue and performers or, shall we say, facilitators, for an event to take place between midnight and the witching hour, a few days from now. He intends to consign the souls of some five thousand men to …
She makes a vague gesture towards the floor and the trio break into knowing grins.
-Thus, turning back to the young woman, who is bending above the calculator, looking back over her shoulder and lightly swaying her peach-perfect bottom.
-we will need an estimate based on the stamina of the average male. And what would you say that might be, Duchess?
The young woman pouts, furrows her brow.
-Um, I’ve had fast ones who were finished in less than a minute.
-Yes, yes, we all have, more’s the pity, although it can be a blessing as well, but never mind, think of something a bit longer.
-Leonardo, Master of the Stables in Cadiz, he used to go for an hour or more!
Duchess blushes and smiles at the memory, catches the hot eyes of the envoys and creases her pretty forehead again.
-Why don’t we ask them? she whispers.
Priscilla glances at the Baron’s men thoughtfully.
-Perhaps not. We want an average, dear. A-ve-rage. The girls we hope to provide will be seasoned professionals, even the adolescent ones, so let’s settle on a time of say, ten minutes from full erection to total emission.
Duchess nods, looks down, taps the machine.
Priscilla rattles off figures while Duchess’s fingers chitter and thrumble, the calculator letting off little bursts of noise like a toy machine gun.
Pastellito and Peladan exchange looks, shrugs, utterly lost. Opioid, eyes on the Duchess’s backside, where it humps the air absentmindedly as she bends over her calculations, massages the curving lump in his trousers, wheezing open-mouthed.
Priscilla’s voice has a bouncy schoolmistress ring to it. Of the three hours from midnight to witching, broken into six half-hour segments, each girl enabling the previously-demonstrated cock times ten, three times in a row, six girls per column, what’s that make it? twenty-nine columns, round up to thirty and …
The machine whirrs and dies.
Duchess straightens up, arches her back as Opioid’s chair rattles, and sing-songs:
-One hundred and sixty-eight girls.
-Hmm, Priscilla stares at the ceiling, tapered fingertips tip-tapping her lips.
-it’s a dilemma of quality versus quantity, isn’t it?
Duchess looks blank, slowly scratches an itch below her left breast, pulls a strand of thick hair between her teeth, as Opioid goes gahhhh! and clutches both hands to his yeasting groin.
Priscilla names off the brothels in which she has an interest, numbers off the women whom she can trust to bring this off, finds herself short.
-But wait!
Her finger thrusts towards the ceiling.
-if each girl performs a half-hour shift, takes an hour break and performs another half-hour, then we can make do with eighty-four girls. And …
She turns her gaze on Peladan.
-As to the matter of payment …
Peladan has shifted his seat a few feet away from Opioid’s spreading puddle.
-The Boss says you are to imagine ten coffins.
Duchess looks frightened, staring from Peladan to Priscilla and back again. Priscilla looks inquisitive and no more.
-Yes …….. ?
-One coffin filled with pearls. The next with emeralds. The next with rubies. The next with sapphires. The next with amethyst. The next with silver coins. The next with gold coins. The next with topaz. The next with opal. And the last …
-Understood, Priscilla interrupts, that will be excellent, particularly as I will be offering my own … services …
-Mother Superior? the Duchess asks.
-Eighty-four girls provided everything goes exactly as planned. And nothing, as we know, ever goes exactly as planned. Therefore, I, along with the brothel madams will serve in a special capacity, roaming ambassadresses, if you will, to coax love’s milk from anyone who might find themselves suddenly made shy and who might therefore require ministrations of a more private nature.
-Ah! Duchess smiles.
-Although, Priscilla adds, my experience tells me we shall have less to fear from cases of flaccidity than cases of overexcited prematurity. And now, gentlemen, I will have a contract drawn up for deliverance to the Baron. Feel free to help yourselves to food and beverage. And, by the way, Duchess here will accompany you on your return trip.
-I will?
-Oh yes. I have mentioned your presence here to His Excellency, and He is quite Eager. To. Meet. You.
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(Postcard VI)
November 6th, 1914.
Photographed by Casasola, ‘el ojo de la Revolucion’.
The Centaur of the North, ebullient in the presidential chair, grins.
Eyes glittering with boozy good humor, glancing off camera.
Beside him, dark eyes dead into Casasola’s lens, el Charro entre Charros, with a look signifying full awareness of history’s gilded shroud, body language a preparation for dignified exit.
Chihuahua and Morelos, north and south together for a fleeting hour of febrile hope.
Doroteo (Pancho Villa) Arango and Emiliano Zapata, side by side, in the 2nd most famous photograph either will sit still for.
The others are crowded in.
Beneath the roof of an empty room, the size of a cathedral, cathedral where Christ never wept nor gloried nor even sat back cornered on his heels, drawing conclusions in the dust with a deceptively idle finger.
Beautiful flotsam of the fields, beautiful jetsam of the sweetened, airy boulevards, crowded in, soon enough to be crowded back out, with the memory of that moment’s reception the more certain barrier against return, stronger by far than walls of four-foot thickness or tarantula intervals of machine-gun nests.
Salud! O Womb of Mantequilla con Anchos,
my dictionary bores my siesta.
Item: rum tum ditty, also, rum tum tiddy = (origin unknown)
How’s that for delphic pricklash?
Lazy Susan