Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
Eric said, “You gonna get some beer and take it in with you?”
“You want me to?”
“Yup.” Eric felt between Dynamite’s legs. “’Cause you piss more.”
“Okay. I’ll pick up a six pack.” Slanting along his thigh, Dynamite’s cock was steel hard. “We’ll make a day of it. You gonna come with me down to the front row, squat between my knees, sit on the floor there, while I open my pants up, push ’em down, and you can stick a few fingers as far as you can up my asshole. Then you gonna suck on your dad’s dick for a real long time, while I drink my beer and watch the movie…?”
“Yeah,” Eric said. “Sure, that’s fine…Dad.”
“You’re a real nasty nigger, son. A Georgia white man like me would be proud to have a nasty nigger boy like you for a kid, suckin’ on his fuckin’ dick.” He glanced at Eric, then looked back at the dusty glass. “You like that?”
Again, Eric nodded.
“Hey, you know, there’s another nigger kid—a good friend of mine. Real good friend. I known him all his life. I think you’ve known ’im too for a year or so, now. I told you, he’s already at the Opera, fuckin’ his brains out with some friends. But he probably gonna come by and sit with us. That nigger’s as nasty as you, son. He likes to play with my balls and watch stuff like that and jerk off while he’s watchin’ it. Maybe when he gets there, I’ll stand up and take a piss in your mouth, while he’s sittin’ there and ticklin’ my nuts. You gonna let me stand there and piss in your mouth like that, son? He really loves to watch that—he’ll jerk off all over you if I do that. And it was his birthday already this month.”
“Sure, Dad,” Eric said. “I know. Yeah.” Under his own hand, Eric could feel Dynamite’s heart beating in his hard dick. Dynamite’s leg moved on the clutch. “I’d really like it if Shit did that, too, Dad.”
“Shit loves to see that.” Dynamite nodded. “Well, son, I suppose I can understand it. We’re just lucky I got a good friend like that goddam nasty nigger kid, Shit—right?”
“Un-huh,” Eric said. “And I wouldn’t be embarrassed, ’cause I like that stuff.”
“I guess we all three do,” Dynamite said. “Now, when he comes, he’s probably gonna stick his dick up my butthole and look down at me pissin’ in your mouth.” Dynamite frowned. “But then, you already know how he likes to watch me do that to a little nigger like you. You ain’t gonna take your fingers out my ass, just ’cause he sticks his dick up it, are you?”
“Un-un,” Eric grinned. “Naw, Dad. I ain’t. I like feelin’ his dick up there, rubbing up against my fingers. And you got a big butthole. I like fuckin’ it as much as he does, almost.”
“I know you do.” Dynamite laughed again. “The more stuff I got shoved up there, the easier it is for me to piss.”
Nodding, Eric started to chuckle. “You know, Dad, you’re gonna make yourself shoot in your pants—or me, one—before we even get there, you keep talkin’ like this.”
“So?” Dynamite shrugged. “If I do, you can nose on in there and lick it clean for me.” He took a long, deep breath. “Then you’ll just have to suck a little longer in the Opera, till I work up a second load. But right now, why don’t you hold my dick—like you’re doin’—and I’ll hold yours—like I’m doin’…And both of us can shut the fuck up till we get in there and find Shit.” Dynamite laughed and kept driving with his left hand on the wheel.
Soon they crossed the wooden bridge covering the rocky stream marking the edge of Runcible Township.
*
New Runcible was three stretches of tourist cabins with a canal through two of them, running in from the sea. Dynamite and Eric drove by some smaller houses through a city center. Many of the places had been servants’ quarters or out buildings to bigger houses. They had survived Sherman’s invasion, while other townships forty miles to the north had not—so went the lore—to become gift shops, clothing stores, eating places, and all of them far enough from the Hemmings Mall to keep the area from being as popular as half a dozen places north and south of it (Jay had once explained), at least in the summer (Mex had added, with his heavy, rough fingers). Some of the bigger houses had gone to ruin and fallen down or been pulled down. Four six-story office buildings had been built in the early-eighties, around a place called Johnston Square. Two were still half empty. Ron had his business in one of the full ones—and lived in the ground floor of a two-family house three streets away, downstairs from a Mrs. Emory, a black woman as old as Miss Louise, who survived frugally and whose source of income, above and beyond social security, was a mystery. (Probably she’s just another friend of Bob Kyle’s, Dynamite had speculated, when Eric asked him about it.) Apparently, Barbara made her uncomfortable.
(Well, Ron had said, the old bat’s just gonna have to get used to havin’ a pretty woman livin’ downstairs from her. Barbara had not actually moved in. But she spent a lot of time there. You’re about as nice and helpful to her as you can be, honey. I don’t know what else we could do.
(Barbara, who wasn’t happy not being liked, had sighed.)
Old Runcible was, on the other hand, practically a graveyard—a wide, abandoned Main Street and a derelict cross street (Clarringdon Road)—with a number of falling apart warehouses around its dock end. A resurgence of fishing in the nineteen seventies had not worked, though it had left a few bars, a few boarded-up buildings (a tackle shop, a boat shop, both with nothing behind their glass windows today), and, across from what had once been a fancy restaurant as late as 1971, the Hanging Gardens (also boarded up), and the Opera House.
Regularly hippies and Mexicans and coastal drifters squatted on this floor or that of one condemned loft building or another. Still functioning were:
Two head shops…
Tank and Cassandra’s tattoo parlor, Cave et Aude…
(Beneath, in English, it said “Look Out and Listen Up!” which, only recently, Eric had learned was a translation.)
The clinic…
A coffee shop that, at least this month, was shut again, though, along with the rest, it had been generously subsidized by the Chamber of Commerce, intent on bringing some life to the moribund neighborhood.
Three blocks up from the water, stood a four-story rectangular wedding cake, with its molding, its corner statuary, and its ornate marquee: The Runcible Opera House.
A home to real operas both before and after the Civil War, then a vaudeville palace through the Great War, and eventually a film theater, in the seventies, it had actually made modest monies by showing film classics, which, because Georgia was a driving state, people would actually come a hundred, a hundred-fifty miles to see. When, in the seventies, the classics finally changed over into hardcore porn, first on the weekends, and by the end of the eighties, all through the week—it was still doing enough business to keep going.
In the mid-nineties, when the country took its radical swerve into sexual conservatism, under the excuse of the AIDS epidemic, some gay voices in the Kyle-dominated Chamber of Commerce declared the site historic, and drenched what southern gay press there was with articles on the sort of activities that went on there, claiming it was necessary to preserve them! Finally—after closing for (only!) eighteen months—it reopened as an historic site…still showing straight porn. Along with social experiments such as the Dump (and Turpens), running twenty-four hours a day, the Runcible Opera thrived.
As was chuckled over, inside and outside the Dump, it was astonishing what a few million dollars could do—six was the sum of Robert Kyle’s investment in the area—fifty thousand there, a hundred-fifty thousand there—wrote one Chamber of Commerce Newsletter, reprinted in gay bar throw-aways all over Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Georgia (with fuller articles in the gay press back when Eric was nine: so he’d never seen them)—in a county where no one was making enough money to care. Tourism—and Kyle’s money, as well as educational programs—had undermined much of the religious fanaticism once endemic to the area.
*
Dynamite stopped the pickup beside the theater building’s rear wall—red brick—with a black metal ladder slanting toward a covered metal porch—also painted black—jutting from the second floor.
“That’s the back door—” a street level fire exit, pretty firmly closed—“You may have to wait five, ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. But it shouldn’t be no longer. Someone’ll let you in. If some other guys come by, just…well, wait around with ’em. They’ll be good fellas. Probably. They’re all here for the same thing.” He pulled the paper sack with the beer closer to his hip. “Go on, now. If I’m not the one to open it, once you get in, like I said, you can find me in the front row in the orchestra—that’s the ground floor, my regular stompin’ grounds.”
“Okay,” Eric opened the cab and jumped down. In the last months they’d been over how this worked—how Dynamite had been getting Shit in the place before he was of age, for, well, sometimes it was six years and sometimes it was ten—so many times, Eric felt like he’d done it already.
The pavement was broken. Beyond the alley’s end he could see the ocean behind some seaward shacks, some pilings.
Fifteen feet away, along the upper cornice of the deserted building letters spelled out “Western Union.” It too was abandoned.
Dynamite’s pickup growled backwards, pulled out of the alley, and disappeared.
Eric looked at the solid door—the theater’s emergency exit. Five minutes later, he was remembering a story Shit had told about once having stood here for an hour and forty minutes, in a drizzle, because whoever had brought him over—Mex, Black Bull, Red, somebody when he was fifteen or sixteen—had gone inside, sat down, and gone to sleep without letting him in…
A thrash and clunk of metal bolts against metal came from inside.
Then one of the double portals swung in, and an older man with a fringe of hair around a bald head leaned out. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, glasses, and jeans. “Hello, young feller,” he said. “So, you want to spend a day here at the Opera. That right?”
Eric nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Pushing the door open further, the old fellow looked Eric up and down. “Okay.”
As light fell into the dark space, Eric was glad to see, a step behind the man’s shoulder, Dynamite, smiling.
“Yeah, you should be okay,” the old man reiterated. “I guess your friend Dynamite has done told you here what you can expect—and what we expect of you.”
“Yes, sir,” Eric repeated.
“Now, we keep a friendly place. People are real friendly here—that’s how we like it. I don’t mean you got to say yes to everybody who grabs after your nuts.” The man nodded down toward Eric’s crotch. “But I don’t wanna hear no reports that you’re barkin’ at our customers and tellin’ them to get the get the fuck outta your face, either. Understand what I’m sayin’?”
“Yes, sir,” Eric said for the third time.
“Good. You can always say no if you want to—but you say it polite. And since you ain’t payin’ to get in, I expect you to say ‘Yes’ a few more times than you might ordinarily—and to some guys you might not ordinarily say ‘Yes’ to. See, it ain’t all about you—understand? It’s about everybody havin’ a little fun.” (Now Dynamite moved up beside him.) “I’m Mr. Hammond. I run this place, and what I say goes. You got a problem, you come to me. Or Dusty. You’ll see him around, sweepin’ up. But just remember, if somebody has a problem with you, they’re gonna come to me. And if I have to put you out, I’ll do it in a minute.” Now he looked back at Dynamite—and nodded. “He’s a nice lookin’ kid. Strong, too—I hope that’s from workin’ out—not fightin’.”
“No, sir,” Eric said, surprised.
“Good. I hope it goes okay. Hey—” Hammond frowned at Eric. “You got an eleven inch dick?”
Eric swallowed. “No, sir.” He swallowed again.
“Well, remember,” Mr. Hammond said, “we got some in here who do—but there ain’t nobody who’s got so much we won’t kick ’em out if they make a nuisance of themselves, whether they got three or thirteen. Understand?”
Eric recovered. “I got seven—but I know what to do with it.” It hung in the air like a punchline fallen at the wrong place, to the wrong joke.
Hammond took in a long breath—and Eric realized that Hammond had his speech and wasn’t interested in comebacks, snappy or not. “I don’t wanna hear about you askin’ nobody for money, either. If somebody tells me that’s what you’re doin’—and they will tell me—I’m gonna ask you for some. I’m gonna get it, too, or get it outta your hide. Hear me?”
This time Eric only nodded.
“This is a place where people come to have fun. And you can have as much fun as you want—from the moment you come in here, you can whip that sucker out and beat on it till the damned thing falls off, for all I care. You can fuck, you can suck, anyway till Sunday. There’s a basket of condoms down in the lounge, outside the men’s room door—and upstairs in the back of Nigger Heaven—that’s the top balcony. Now, we don’t get a lot of ladies in here. But when we do, show a little respect in how you carry yourself. You can sit with a seat between you and them and jerk off all you want, especially if she’s makin’ out with a boyfriend—that’s what usually happens. This is a public place. So as long as you got a seat between you, nobody can complain, unless you’re makin’ noise. But don’t let me hear you been pawin’ and pettin’ at somebody who don’t wanna be pawed and petted at, male or female. That’s the rule. This is a big place. There’re always plenty of seats. So if somebody moves away from you, say, three times, don’t go runnin’ after ’em for a fourth. And that’s whether you start out with a seat between you or not. Got it?”
Dynamite said, “He understands all that, Hammond. We told him all about this place. He ain’t stupid.”
Hammond lingered at the door. “You know, me and Dusty had to kick a kid outta here a couple of days back.” He was speaking to Dynamite. “Nice kid—white kid, too. Big strong, good lookin’—probably wasn’t more than half a dozen years older’n this one here. Had a good eight-inch dick on him, too. Local boy—the kind I like to help out. Only I think he’d got in trouble in his family, and they didn’t want him around no more. So we let ’im live here at the theater for three, three-and-a-half weeks, doin’ his push ups and chin ups in the back balcony every mornin’, sleepin’ on some blankets down in the john. After the third day, I don’t think he had a shirt no more. At least I never seen it on him in here. And everybody likes to see a strong young feller like that show a little skin. He had his dick outside his jeans more than in, and he wasn’t too particular about who came up and gave it a tug or a suck—only for anything too much more complicated than that, truth was, he was only interested in the black guys. Now there ain’t nothin’ wrong with havin’ a preference. Everybody does.”
“Didn’t you tell me once the ones you make sleep down in the john—” Eric could hear the smile in Dynamite’s voice—“is the drunks what pee all over themselves every night?”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t a drunk. But if you told ’im somethin’, he was always obligin’ about it. Unless he was takin’ a quick run down to the bathroom, though—or comin’ down at night to catch a few winks—you didn’t see him anywhere but the top two balconies.” Hammond turned to Eric. “Probably Dynamite done told you, the higher up you go in the Opera, the blacker our clientele tends to be. So up there is where the kid stayed pretty much. And ’cause he was a good lookin’ and friendly enough, he could always find somebody to go out and spring for some pizza or a hamburger or a sandwich to bring back into the theater for ’im. He was even kind of a health food nut, and had a couple of his regulars bringin’ ’im apples and fruit and salads and things. At the same time, yeah, he was goin’ through two, three, even four six-packs a day…which is why we put ’im down in the bathroom at night. The tile’s easier to hose off. And with a lot of our guys, you know, that’s par for the course. Danny Turpens—born and bred around here, so y
ou could have even run into him.”
“The beer sounds like it’s par for a goddam Turpens.” Dynamite grunted. “One of them Turpenses? Hammond, you know they’re bad news. Why’s it a surprise you had to get rid of him?”
“I don’t know. But it was—a surprise, I mean. He was such a nice, strong, good lookin’ friendly fella, polite and helpful, if you asked him to do somethin’, or move his stuff. Yes, it surprised me—’course he had been in jail.”
“You are a fuckin’ romantic asshole, Hammond.” Dynamite laughed. “A drunk Turpens jailbird—and you’re surprised he was trouble?”
Eric said, “Turpens? Does that have anything to do with the truck stop?”
“Maybe fifty years ago it did,” Dynamite said. “But all them Turpens fellas today is too drunk, or too retarded, or just too ornery and restless to hold onto a business and keep it goin’.”
“Over the years,” Hammond said, “we had three or four of his cousins—and maybe some Wilsons—in here who just wanted to hustle a ten or a twenty out of the older guys. And, yes, we had to eject ’em. But that didn’t seem to be what he was into. At least nobody reported it.”
Eric asked, “What did he do that you had to put him out?”
“Well, pretty soon, people started comin’ to me with these funny stories. After his second king-sized six pack, up there in Nigger Heaven, he’d start rilin’ up the black fellas, tellin’ ’em since they were only animals anyway, why didn’t they get together and do somethin’ that’ll…well, I don’t know what he told ’em the reason was. But he wanted a gang of ’em to hang out and catch one of the white guys who comes in regular with a prostitute, grab her, and rape her ass right there in the theater. Or beat up this man or rob that one—this is the white people, see, he wants the black guys—along with him—to savage. Now you know, all our boys, black or white, are pretty laid back. That kind of thing don’t go on here. This is a public place and a historic institution with a tradition to maintain. He wanted to catch one white boy and have all the niggers stand around and drown ’im in a washtub full of piss. You’re sittin up in the balcony with a good-lookin’ stud, jerkin’ each other off, doin a little suckin’ and asshole fingerin’, and he starts tellin’ you that you ain’t really a human being, you’re just some kind of animal, and so, ’cause you can’t have no morals or ethics, you should fuck up somebody else with ’im or beat ’em up or rip ’em off and that’s okay. Half of them I guess thought he was a crazy drunk and that it was just the beer talkin’ funny. The other half told ’im to shut up and leave ’em alone. But he’d start in again, how, ’cause they just animals, it don’t really matter what the fuck they do. Animals don’t have no ethics or morals, and neither should they, ’cause they’re niggers. The ones he’s havin’ sex with maybe took it in stride, most of ’em—laughed it off, I guess. People’ll put up with a lot for some good nookie or some good dick, and I gather he was okay in both departments. But some of the others was getting’ tired of it. He told one black feller up there that, though he would do it, he didn’t really like to have sex with real human beings—other white guys. He only liked doin’ it with sheep, goats, dogs, pigs, cows, and niggers.”