Angel Lust

Chapter One For a moment, the dead of the night just stopped. Silent. Tense. The laughter jammed back into my throat. It was decision time that second, know what I mean? I looked at him, then turned around. Then looked back at him. He still had that funny, funky, unshaved, hunky-goofy, what’s-next, “I don’t get it” look on his face. I looked at his wide shoulders, his strong neck, the tar-black wavy hair, his eyes so deep and inky they glittered. I got a bit shaken. (Do I laugh; throw up some beer; or just show him what I want?) A storm began to whip up around us, as the sky belched up clouds like a load of wet laundry soaked in charcoal. After leaving Casa Julio—a couple of neons and 25-watt light bulbs, smelling of boiled hot dogs, beer, and pee on the Brooklyn waterfront—we had pushed out into Niko’s beat up yellow Mustang. Niko Stamos was drunk from beer and a line of schnappes I had bought him. “Where you wanna go?” he asked. The ripped back seat was decorated with McDonald’s wrappers, cracked little plastic ketchups, dirty newspapers, and Happy Meal toys. I didn’t hesitate when I told him his house. “Skata—s**t!” He shook his head. “It’s too late.” I told him we’d be quiet and he smiled, and I grabbed his crotch, something I had not done before. We pretended to be even drunker than we were; always good. He unzipped his jeans and his c**k flopped out. It was half hard and dark and silky and I touched the fat swelling head as it emerged from the soft pod of his foreskin. He was juicy with precum. I started to really shake. I wanted to suck him right there. He laughed to knock a hole in the car’s quiet. “Fun,” he said. “This is gonna be fun.” It began to rain and for a moment all we were was the dirty inside of his car that smelled of motor lube oil, Mickey D’s ketchup, and him, that wild d**k and ass, guy-smell gushing straight out of him. Uncontrollable s*x, sure, it can be inevitable. Why fight it? You want your mouth where you want your mouth: It was happening. Lightening flashed like a slice of mirror over the black East River—a wriggling snake now swallowing all of New York. I was happy. The snake could have it, this city without any eyes that only looked at you. I had him. I pulled his jeans down, hard to do since he was behind the wheel and he let me. The rain unleashed itself outside: coming down in climactic sheets and falls. He got up slightly and I squeezed in under his funky bare ass and start to suck at his balls, getting his own savage, distinct, young working man’s asshole smell in my nostrils—it shot straight down into my lungs, until there was nothing left of me but that smell and his balls, soft and furry with black hairs slick from his sweat and the salt left over from early morning piss stains. I squeezed around more and licked the whole fat length of his d**k. The entire sweet tube of it. “That’s real nice, man,” he said. “Nice. We done started this magic and I’m readin’ it!” He rubbed his hands through my dark blond hair, so dark and thick that sometimes at night it appeared like glowing steel, cool, metallic, pricked with light. I could feel his big fingers raking their way through it, then he lowered them down towards my mouth and jerked himself while I managed to suck him and still lick several of his stained salty fingers, wrapped around his c**k like a school of Mediterranean sea horses. “I can’t last like this,” he said and told me to stop. Satisfied for a minute, I got back up and he left his warm meat flopping out, while he started the car. He put it into reverse then turned it around in the small lot next to the bar. Debris all around, left over after a too-late banquet of the human mess: more McDonald’s crap, cut-up tires, car fenders, rusting oil barrels, soggy bits of old magazines, the color shredded like fallen confetti. Everything. Then more rain. More lightning. Suddenly I could see his face—totally now, nothing to hide—in the lightning’s quicksilver strobe: some deep pits from kidhood acne, the large, handsome Greek nose (I wanted to gently suck that, too), his lips, softly chiseled, fine and warm. We pushed out the tight lot. Brooklyn started to roll behind us in the rain saying good-bye to us in an eerie quiet, except for a few Land Rovers loaded with stadium-boom stereos. YO MUTHA IS A MUTHA-FUKKER, EAT THAT KILL THAT EAT THAT blasted away in the distance, reverbing into itself, echo into echo, finally disappearing beyond the last lingering rim of my hearing. The final whisper of this roar started to sound strangely holy as it rolled back with the storm into some distant, long ago speck of me (which was, see, where I was going: I can’t stop, I’m afraid . . . the story of who I am) and we rode across a steel bridge in the slashing rain into Queens, where he lived; into Astoria, a Greek city-state out of the Peloponnisus. Store signs in Greek. Bakeries, cafes. Stores gated up on Broadway, then over to Thirtieth Avenue, more of the same. Then off to a side street of little houses like tin soldiers on guard, painted in Greek colors. Pink, orange, green, red. I could see this even in the darkness. It was close to two in the morning. Way too late; things were just happening. “We’ll be there in a minute,” he said. “I better buckle myself up again before we get out.” I told him I wished he could just walk out like that, buck naked. “Not in Astoria,” he said. Then he looked at me and asked, “How’d you know this about me?” “What d’ you mean?” I asked, dumb blond all. “You know? About me. Skata! I can’t even talk about it. I was kinda lost. I was gonna kill myself once, you know?” His face dropped. “How’d you know?” I just looked at him. “You got some kinda funny brain in your head, like you knew me already? But you didn’t . . . did you?” “It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to know everything. Right?” He smiled at me. It was a smile with a kind of dumb smart in it. A bit of that genius wordless (worldless?) people have when they know they don’t have to talk anymore, even when all the smart people keep on yakking. “Besides,” I said. “Like you told me, you got people to take care of. I understand that, taking care. But sometimes we all feel like we’re on the edge, don’t we, just looking down?” “When there’s nothing down there?” “Yeah,” I said. “Man, am I drunk. How’d I ever do this fuckin drive?” I smiled. “I wouldn’t let anything bad happen.” Then I added (seriously): “Niko, I knew you the first moment I looked at you.” “Je-zus, Tommy! You’re a buddy. You’re younger than me, but you know a lot.” He grinned. His face looked silly, positively, greedily, silly with this soft vulnerable animal warmth in it: a sad, lost beauty . . . from way out, past anything you ever see in the “sell-it-buy-it” world. I wanted to eat him right there. Just suck his sweet lips till they. . . . “You ever do crack?” he asked me. “No,” I said, dropping back to earth. “You?” “Yeah. I dunnit. I’m not proud of it, but it can be real good s**t. I wish I could go out some place, and do crack with you.” “Why?” “Cause then you forget about everything but s*x. You could suck a wolf on crack.” “It sounds”—I wanted to say, too far out. Farther out then even I came from. Of course that was impossible. I—I didn’t need drugs. I was the drug . More potent, more mysterious even than this night, turning too quick into morning. Sometimes I had to forget some of it, just to appear normal. “Sounds nutty.” He nodded his head. “I was lucky. I ain’t got hooked. I got friends who’re hooked. Nice guys. Their lives become skata. Sad s**t. Some in jail. A few dead.” He stopped the car and his mouth hit mine. He belched right into my throat, then apologized. “Hurts talking about it,” he explained. Then started the car again. “Why’d they get into it?” He shrugged his shoulders. “You know.” I guess I did. We found his street. Nice residential homes, all sleeping soundly under glowing yellow street lights. The rain had stopped. He parked the car. Put himself completely back together in his jeans. “It’s all work,” he said. “And your family. And nobody knows you. Just a couple of your buddies. And they don’t know you none either. But they do. Or they think they do. Know what I mean?” I nodded my head, and we got out the car, and he locked it, and we headed up the stairs to his house. He put his forefinger to my lips. We’d be very quiet. He lived with his parents—they had the front bedroom—and his son who was three. He had told me about him. “Joy of my life. Why else go on?” I agreed. He worked in a factory that made upholstered daybeds. Roll out sofa-sleepers. It was the world to him, the men he worked with, from every country. They all had a story: it was like being on a boat, except the boat never went anywhere. We took our shoes off on the mustard-colored nylon carpet in the hallway. The house was immaculate. It smelled of pine cleaner and lemon oil and cloves, with a whiff of garlic, rosemary, and mint. There was something, I didn’t know—maybe medieval about it. Certainly not of this time; I was in heaven. Bingo! The c**k works, especially when you don’t ask it questions. I glanced at the pictures on the walls: cracked family photos from the old country, newer ones of holiday gatherings. Pictures of little girls. Little boys. Always separate. A faint light in the big aqua Formica kitchen burned all night; another dim night-light from the hall bath across from his parents’ closed bedroom, did the same thing. We held our breath on tiptoe. He motioned for me to follow him down the narrow hall into a side room. Its door had been closed, but left slightly ajar. He opened it carefully. “Paul,” he whispered to me. The little boy was sleeping in a kid’s cot, with just a blue sheet and a thin blanket over him. On a plastic side table a small lamp glowed, its shade a brightly painted circus-parade. The dark shadows of a lion, two elephants, and a trio of cha-cha bears on hind legs loomed across the room, cast by this single dreamy eye of light. I felt suddenly guilty; a bit of an intruder. The boy’s room was so still and peaceful, after blowing full-scale out from Casa Julio. I looked around at his toys and kid things, while the circus eye watchfully guarded him. Little outfits, games, stuffed bears and fluffy beanies. “He likes animals,” Niko explained, a smile flushing his face. It was a different smile: possessive, settled, but still in awe. The boy was beautiful, soft, carved out of innocence, darkly handsome, a lick of mustache already blooming above his tiny plum lips. He was fast asleep. “Look,” Niko whispered. “Lemme show you how Greek papas sometimes kiss their little boys.” Caught up in the quiet, I looked on as Niko carefully picked up the little boy and held him to him. “See,” he said. Then slowly he retracted Paul’s tiny white undershorts and briefly kissed the swelling tip of the boy’s p***s. It was small and pale, like a frosted glass Christmas tree ornament, ending in a rosy furled tip. I began to tremble: this was something so completely medieval and real; I just did not expect it right there. He kissed it again, then handed Paul, still in the distant land of tiny circuses, to me. “You want to kiss?” All I could hear was the sleeping child’s breath, the clean soft hollowness of it, and then Niko, breathing, next to me. “It’s okay,” Niko said. “Just kiss. Don’t suck just kiss it. It’s like a ritual; it’s secret.” I put my lips to the little d**k. I could feel it getting harder, as Paul’s sleeping hand went down to it. I knew children did that; they’re always m**********g, till they hear that it’s wrong. Then their hands get slapped, and they’re sent off to confession. “He can do that,” Niko whispered. “I let him play with himself all he wants. Jesus, I do.” I smiled dumbly, then briefly licked the shining tip of the child’s p***s, allowing it’s pink sweet saltiness to scurry up my tongue. It tickled like little air bubbles. A rush of swishing nerve endings (kind of like soft little brooms sweeping down my gut) chased through me. Then with Niko nodding knowingly at me, I took the whole, sleepy little thing lusciously into my mouth, to feel it getting very hard there.