Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  [E] WHEN IT SAID five-forty-two, Eric woke up, sat up, stood up—

  Because of the street light outside, through the high window he could see none of the blue behind the leaves, nudging Atlanta toward its six-twenty sunrise. On the bench Eric moved the porn magazine, cover uppermost: CHICKS (in case Mike came in) WHO LOVE ’EM BIG & BLACK!

  Picking up the KY tube under it, he went into the tiny bathroom, foreknuckled up the switch, then, beneath the unfrosted bulb dangling from the overhead plasterboard, sat on the wooden ring. (Sitting to urinate, he did only at home.) Below an unframed three-foot mirror, his knees brushed the board wall. While pissing, he didn’t push—just relaxed, growled out lots of gas, and dropped a firm one. It splashed loudly.

  The first turd always made you feel less groggy.

  Pulling paper from the roll on the upright dowel he’d screwed—at Mike’s suggestion—to the shelf, while his naked image turned away to do the same, Eric jackknifed his knee to get a bare foot on the ring, lifted his butt, reached under, and wiped.

  Eric (and his image) sat up again and checked. The paper was clean. He glanced at the glass. With his knee still up, in the streaky reflection he could see the spaces among his broad toes—and yesterday’s jam.

  Behind a thick, heavy shoulder, with its clear cuts, over the paint-peeled wall a two-inch pipe rose to the overhead flushbox.

  When he leaned to push the paper into the water, his knuckles got wet. He fingered clean one foot—but not the other.

  Lifting the lubricant tube from the shelf, Eric flipped the KY’s top back and, with one hand, squeezed a clear worm across three fingers, left to right and back, three, four, five times. Putting the tube down, again he stuck his hand under his buttocks. Taking a breath, he relaxed, as if for another big one—then, at once, slid three, then four fingers, as fast and as far as possible into his rectum. (In the spotty mirror, he watched his mouth open a little, his blue eyes widen.) Turning his hand left and right, while the sting subsided, he spread them, thumbing up into himself as much jelly as he could, tightening and expanding his butt muscles, pressing his fingers together, releasing them…

  Since last summer, above and below his navel’s sunken half-hooded knot, beside his shin and, behind it, his thigh, you could count Eric’s abs, which was the Bowflex and something Mike said he should be proud of. From the team’s horsing around in the school shower, Eric knew nine-tenths of the guys had no such definition, no matter how many squats, push-ups, or laps, at Mr. Doubrey’s barked commands, they endured through Saturday or after-school practice. Nor such arms, upper or lower.

  Eric’s cock rose heavily, catching under the wooden ring.

  I could stay here and do it. (A dozen times through the summer he had.) Because this was his last morning in Atlanta, though, after a minute he pulled his fingers free, lifted his hand, and looked at it.

  His fingers glistened.

  On more toilet paper, he wiped them till the shine was gone, then—the friendly smell of his own crap reassuring him as he raised them—he dug in his nose with a forefinger, hooking out as much as possible, while, in the mirror, his narrow nostril bulged and bent. He pulled loose, then, as he sucked the yellow-green crust from his forefinger, watched his cheeks cave. He did the same with his middle.

  It didn’t look funny or stupid.

  (In Florida, with a coupling of excitement and discomfort, three or four times over his visit he’d watched a dog, after much sniffing and circling, eat its own shit from the grass behind Barbara’s trailer. It hadn’t hurt the dog…and, finally, made Eric feel more comfortable about a couple of things he’d recently been doing.)

  It tasted salty and…good.

  For the last two years, except in the boys’ room, Eric had been trying not to do it in school or at home or where people knew him—and had mostly succeeded. But on his own, biking or walking around the city, he’d developed his strategies for doing it whether strangers were looking or not. Pick it out, keep it in your hand for a full thirty seconds, then eat it when new people were passing. Or transfer it surreptitiously to a finger on the other hand. You could put that one in your mouth and nobody would know what you were doing…In his bravest moments, he’d do it wherever he was (if he wasn’t too close to home or school) and fuck ’em! So what if I gross out someone I’ll never see again? Thinking that, though, was like running over lines from a school play. A couple of times, too, it had backfired—but only a couple.

  Why did people get so twisted out of shape by it, anyway?

  It was good that, during his childhood, before the divorce, his parents had moved around as much as they had. At nine, in West Virginia, news of his habit had gotten out at school and made life hell—for three months. Then they’d gone to another state, where he’d been more careful about hiding it.

  On the wall, about a third over the mirror bottom and two thirds on the grayish paint below, a stain spread just larger than a dinner plate. Many of its older drops and splats had turned yellow-orange—with a sweetish smell Eric liked—from the one-out-of-three times he didn’t eat the stuff after he shot. He was proud of the size and thought of it as something to be added to a couple of times a day. Mike had never mentioned it. Of course, the last time Mike had been in, it had been a lot smaller. Maybe he hadn’t known what it was. In Eric’s first couple of months in the room, Mr. Condotti had come in three or four times to check the place out. But he’d never gone into the pillbox john.

  A six-to-nine-time-a-day shooter, for the last eight or ten months—it went along with his snot eating—Eric had been doing it as many places as he could. Somehow beating off there made the sun speckled bench at the back of the park, or the top-floor school john, where, on the inner door of the stall to the right, some other guy (or guys) was making his (or their) own cum medallion—he’d added his own layer a few times but had never met the initial architect—or the truck loading port or the alley or the back of the empty bus parked on the corner or the deserted pinball room at the bus station better to revisit, now they’d been marked as somehow his own by what fell on the tile or splashed the grass or drooled the maroon cushion, dark boards, or bricks.

  Should he run the electric over his face? Maybe when he came back.

  Eric stood, pulled the wooden handle at the end of the flat-linked chain, and went into his room. Behind him the toilet gurgled, roared, then hummed. Sitting on his bed he tugged on some jeans, toed the runners from under his bed (one was upside down), sat on the sagging rim, and pulled them on. Twisting around, he found a short-sleeved shirt wedged behind the bed frame.

  At six-oh-one, Eric left the garage. The KY tube was in his hip pocket.

  In the light beyond the board fence, from the porch next door, Eric could make out Mr. Condotti’s lawn chairs in the dark turned up against the table for a rain that hadn’t come in two weeks. Picking at his nose, he could still feel some good stuff up there. Eric crossed the concrete of the tenants’ half of the yard to crunch along the driveway’s gravel by the building.

  Mr. Condotti’s was a one-time private house—with eight bay windows—now divided into eight apartments, two on each floor and two in the basement.

  Eric looked at Bill Bottom’s black windows in the foundation, then down the cement steps at the maroon Dutch doors, brick walls either side. A year ago, after Eric’s return from a three-week visit to Barbara’s in the Florida trailer park where she’d been living, Bottom had bought a bunch of inch-high brass letters, and, though he was not Jewish, with brads of the sort you’d use for your house number, nailed up the Hebrew words (in English transliteration) “emet yeshalom yasood ha’ollam” across the upper door and the Latin “in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni” across the lower. Bill had explained to him that the Hebrew meant “peace and truth are the foundation of the world,” and that they had something to do with seventeenth-century Amsterdam and a man named Spinoza—though Spinoza had written neither. By now Eric had forgotten what Bill had said the Latin meant, other than tha
t it read the same backward and forward. Once, in his yellow Bermudas, white sunhat, and broad cataract glasses that did odd things to the sunlight, while Eric was in the yard, Mr. Condotti had told Bill, “No, I don’t mind. But I must be sure it offends no one who speaks the language. That’s all.” The cracks across the maroon paint and the six little panes over the metal letters made the door look old, so that Eric was repeatedly surprised that, next to himself, Bill was the youngest tenant at Mr. Condotti’s. At the beginning of summer, Eric had asked Bill to explain the Latin again. Bill laughed and told him to Google it. But Eric had never written it down to take up to the computer in Mike’s bedroom, which, unlike the ones in school, was still dial-up—and so fuckin’ slow.

  In moonless black, on the second floor of the building’s far side, were Mike’s kitchen and two rooms. Eric glanced up, walking beside the zombie gray the neighborhood’s nightlights had rendered Mr. Condotti’s pale green aluminum siding. (Behind him the garage was dark olive.) He came out under the street’s wide maples, its tall hickories.

  Among telephone wires at the block’s end, crows cawed.

  Between the houses east, Eric saw faint orange, with violet above it and black above that. Half the houses on Montoya were green. The other half were gray or blue. In the west, beyond the trestle, three stars still tacked up the dark. Heading toward the next streetlight, as he’d done every second or third morning all summer (often five or six days in a row), Eric turned toward the Verizon sign, back under the highway, behind which various homeless guys camped out among the saplings.

  As he neared the corner, a breeze moved over the trees, so that, under the corner lamp, a branch swung down and up, down and up, putting the street sign’s white letters on the green panel in and out of the light: Montoya…Montoya…Montoya…

  Eric started across to the elevated causeway.

  You could pretend it was the middle of the night. The street was empty. (He dug. He sucked.) Christ, Eric thought, I hope I get something quick.

  Helped with some spit, the KY in him would get Eric through three homeless hillbilly fucks (Okay—I’m done. Now, get on, son) if they were seven inches or under. Men with significant meat—eight, nine, ten—used the stuff up faster. The tube in his pocket was in case things got complicated.

  Eric preferred it complicated.

  For the last ten days, “complicated” had been two homeless black guys, one of whom, Big Frack, was well into his forties and had the largest cock Eric had ever seen or, until Frack had turned up sleeping on the old mattress back there, imagined. Scott had told him that super big men had trouble getting hard. Not Frack. Soft, it was clearly more than—and hard, it was easily four inches over—a foot! His own cock was pretty much all Frack talked about, to the point where, after four times with it, Eric had wondered if Frack’s obsession with what this nigger bitch or that white cocksucker had done for him back in Frisco or down in Houston or up in Denver to get a hold of it hadn’t caused his homelessness. After half an hour, as a topic of conversation (monologue…?), it was…well, boring. When Frack sat cross-legged on the mattress, shirt and pants gaping, jerking at it absently and rambling on, the hooded head before his sunken chest rose higher than his teats’ black knobs—which, either side of his in-sloped breast bone, practically faced one another, like crossed eyes, or the decayed nodules on fruit.

  Besides his cock, Frack had no other prepossessing features. He was not smart. With his caved-in chest, he was built like a six-foot-seven bowling pin, with no incisors, upper or lower, the teeth either side long, stained, and slanted inward. Fortunately those barrel thighs were hard. But that’s not what you saw first: Frack shambled about like a towering black Shmoo. Still, it was fun to watch him play with himself inside his pocket—Frack had ripped out the bottom and could make it stick four inches from the frayed pocket rim; he would walk around like that because, he explained, with the skin forward, people didn’t know what it was and thought it was a piece of black pipe; displaying it like that kept it hard—or rubbing on it through the outside of his threadbare jeans, which he did nonstop: I’m ’bout half-hard all da time—an’ I’m pretty much jerkin’ off on it—at least half ways—all da time, too. An’ you love to watch dis mule-dicked nigger play wid it, doncha, white boy? And so do da ol’ fart. The “ol’ fart” was Joe. On the far side of fifty, Frack’s partner Joe had a good seven incher—the same as Eric’s—and was able to put up with Frack’s phallocentric filibuster. The two took turns fucking Eric a couple of times in tandem, each morning he showed up, or letting Eric see how far he could take them down his throat.

  Come on, Frack. Sometime there you gotta let da cocksucker breathe!

  Eric was getting good at relaxing his neck muscles and killing his gag reflex.

  Don’t worry. I’ll back off if I see ’im ’bout to pass out.

  Joe would smile, having heard it before—Eric figured.

  Frack had no trouble coming in Eric’s mouth or ass, even when Eric only got in the first ten or so inches. Joe had to work up a sweat to get off in Eric’s mouth. (In Eric’s butt he did better.) And he always had a pocket full of condoms.

  When Eric suggested Frack use one too, Frack chuckled. Where? On mah li’l finger? Frack’s hands were big. Don’t worry—ain’t nothin’ been up mah hole this month ’ceptin’ your mother fuckin’ white boy tongue.

  Both men were really into “tongue-wrastlin’ wid dis fine white bitch,” which Eric had gotten used to and even liked, teeth or no teeth.

  For Eric, the Fourth’s real fireworks had come mostly before seven in the morning.

  Over the last week-and-a-half a bow-legged black kid, twenty-two or twenty-three, kind of simple and good natured, called Pickle, who’d told them all how he’d started out in a Wyoming orphanage, would turn up every other day and hang around to watch, then get a blowjob from Eric when he’d finished with Joe and Frack.

  When Pickle got excited about anything or even laughed hard, he peed his pants.

  He didn’t mind Eric feeling it, though, through the sopping denim. He was nice looking in a kind of goofy way. He’d got his name because someone had said he smelled like the inside of an old pickle barrel. Actually, the smell was old piss: he only changed his pants, he said, when someone, sorry for him, gave him new ones. At the beginning Eric had brought him a pair of his own and gotten a grateful grin, as Pickle put them on right there, then vigorously tore apart the discarded one’s he’d been wearing and threw them out on the sidewalk; but when, two days later, Pickle was back and Eric smelled him, he realized replacing Pickle’s jeans would be an endless job.

  If Joe had a coffee, he’d let Eric—even Pickle—have a swallow or two, though Frack would say, Don’t let dem drink out dat cup, nigger! Day gonna give us some damned diseases or somethin’. If my ol’ gift o’ God start’ dribblin’ dat gonorrhea shit an’ I gotta get my black ass stuck full o’ needles again, or I come down wid dat HIV, I’m go’n’ bus’ some white an’ black ass both wid sumpin’ ’sides my dick!

  Joe would chuckle and say, If de scumbags got diseases, Frack, we’re a little late for dat now, and pass Pickle or Eric the blue cardboard container, printed with white columns, which smelled so good and tasted so bitter under the sweetness—while Frack humphed.

  Often Pickle would rub his groin—already soaked after only an hour—then suck his blunt, thick fingers. When Pickle saw Eric looking, he’d say, The salt taste’ good.

  Once, a hopeful Eric said: Like eatin’ your…He dug a forefinger in one nostril, pulled it out, put it in his mouth. Huh?

  Pickle frowned. Why you doin’ dat? Dat’s nasty. Pee’s better, ain’t it?

  Which, as the other two bums there finally ambled off to panhandle outside the package store down by Ford’s Little Five Points Market, is when Frack—ready to go again—bawled: Hey! Get yo’ scrawny white ass ova’ heah, cocksucker!

  A train whistle ripped apart the morning.

  Under the highway, Eric pushed into high grass and
sumac to giant-step through, arms to the side, over crackling Styrofoam and mushy cardboard and Mylar condom wrappers, till, behind the Verizon sign’s struts, the growth got shorter. On either side of the overhead roadway, the sky was now dark blue.

  The men under the highway had changed all summer. Back in March during his spring break, one morning Eric had found a bearded German in a sleeping bag, who’d sat up naked in the grass, green canvas rucked down around a hirsute belly, pulled out a knife and, in a heavy accent, told Eric to get his faggot ass out of there. Eric had stayed away three days. When he chanced coming back, six hillbillies and a couple of niggers were lounging about or sleeping in the grass or sharing their Night Train, their Gypsy Rose. Finally two—a nigger and one of the hillbillies—took him behind the highway stanchion and let Eric blow them. Then the nigger brought him back to the others and announced he wanted to suck off all the guys there, and did—including Eric. It was one of the times when Eric was most surprised, because, complete to the gold wedding ring on his thick, cracked hand, the black guy was so muscular and masculine. What each of the others had to call him to get off was instructive:

  Two called him a nigger cocksucker.

  One called him a nigger bitch.

  One of the black guys, without even closing his eyes, kept calling him his pretty blond baby.

  Eric thought about all the cum in the black guy’s mouth already, around his dick, which made him shoot his own load.

  With all the various comments and jokes—Eric, the other black guy, and two of the white guys went twice—that March Friday had been the most fun Eric had had under there, if not the most sexually exciting.

  In general, the guys who used the place were pretty friendly. By summer vacation, Eric had decided the friendly ones—which, because of Joe and his coffee, he stretched to include Frack—trumped the unfriendly ones.

  And the knife puller.

  The German notwithstanding, apparently among the homeless the place had a reputation.