Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “Dear God in heaven, he’s actually a homosexual! He’s interested in his own sex. You know, there’re not a lot of you fellows left. Once more: Cheers.” Bill settled back in the chair, and lifted his mug in both hands till it was just under his chin. “Aren’t you going to drink your chocolate? It’s Swiss.”

  “Oh.” Eric leaned forward to take up his own mug with one. “I’m sorry.” He glanced at his thick fingers. “Mike thinks I could be a welder, too. Like him.” He sipped, then put the mug down. “But he always says I should do whatever I want—Hey, it’s good.”

  “So much in life is, Eric.” Bill sighed. “You don’t have to drink it. I won’t be offended. But I still don’t see what this has to do with shitting where you eat. Or is that because you’re horny and I’m not? I’m not, incidentally, because I had a very nice night three miles from here with some guys I hope will be my friends, though for job-related reasons they had to bring me home early. But if it doesn’t work out…” Bill shrugged. “There’s always King Kong to climb to the top of the Empire State Building with and gaze out on the city sunrise. Have you ever thought that maybe our big black homeboy was giving Christine Daaé—or whatever her name was—some really good head, off-screen, with his wide, wet, expert tongue? I mean, think of all those native virgins he’d been practicing on…? That’s really why she loved him. One reason the first version is so good is because all the lovey-dovey stuff is left implied. Put it out there, and you can’t keep people’s minds off the sordid mechanics.”

  “Lickin’ out her pussy?” Eric grinned—then remembered himself. His expression grew serious. “I could get behind that. Especially if some guy was fucking her at the same time. Hey…when’s the last time you ate out a homeless nigger’s ass who hadn’t had no toilet paper for a week?” as, indeed, Frack had not, three days ago, when Eric had last messed with him. “I mean that nigger had a big ass, too, and his hole was so funky I didn’t think I was gonna get to the other side of all the shit caked in there.”

  “Not,” Bill said pensively, “so recently I can call it to mind.”

  “Well, I did, three days back.”

  “To be sure, the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, even when it takes you through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. Just watch out for parasites. You really wouldn’t suck off Peter Jackson’s gorilla—wouldn’t let it bone your butt? You don’t want it to lick your balls, or stick your pecker up its ass and hump it till you shoot? Did you know, King Kong, out in the morning sun, is called Hanuman in India and Sun-We Kung in China, not to mention any other signifyin’ silverback you can name? I bet you’d make him come all over himself. My, my, my…you are choosy about who you fuck!”

  “And I ate shit—my own off guys’ dicks. Lots of times. And…and drunk guys’ piss, too.” (More than a cup, in seven or eight dog-like spurts, all half dozen times he’d sucked off Pickle: That just means it feels good. It happens when I beat off, too. Come on, you wanna do it with me and see…?

  (Can I drink the rest?

  (No! You can’t! Why you always want to do that nasty stuff? Though his dark knuckles had already gone into his fly, Pickle looked uncomfortable. If you get some pictures of naked girls, I’ll pee on ’em with you. So asking had been a bad thing. You know, when I’m beatin’ off and one of them surprise squirts sneaks up on me and jumps out, most of the time it hits my chin. Or my nose—that’s if nobody’s suckin’ on it. The guys in the place where I come up always thought that was real funny. I’ll let you see that, if you want.) “So I…do eat shit or whatever the fuck you said. Right?” Eric was annoyed by the way Bottom turned aside all attempts to shock; at the same time, on some level, it reassured. “Anyway, that’s another reason why I don’t think I’m gay.”

  Holding up his mug, Bill looked at it, blew over the surface, then sipped. “Since I’m not going to take you inside and fuck you, I’ll tell you a story—instead.”

  “About what? King Kong?”

  “No. About me. Something you just reminded me of…that I did a long time ago. In New York, when I was in business school—at Fordham. I was nineteen—I think. You’re what? Eighteen, now?”

  “I’ll be seventeen in eight days—no, a week.”

  “Jesus!” Bill glanced up at cloud wisps. “Well, possibly I was twenty. I wasn’t as precocious as you. But it was about this time of the morning…probably earlier, because in summer the sun rises about an hour-and-a-half before it does down here. Anyway, I’d been up all night, walking around Central Park, trying to get laid in the worst way—and couldn’t to save myself. Lots of homeless guys sleep there, and it was pretty warm that September. It was in the Rambles, and I was coming up to where some rocks made this wall.

  “Beside it, a guy lay on some cardboard, asleep.

  “He was curled up, back to the stones, facing forward, this middle-aged black man, maybe in his late thirties. Mmmm…at least he seemed middle-aged to me, back then. He didn’t have any shoes or shirt—and no belt. Clearly he was homeless. He was real dark, a black guy, like I say—as dark as your dad. His pants were ripped completely apart in two places, waist to cuff, and his genitals were out, rough-skinned, uncut—and large. Not huge, mind you. Just large. They hung down over his thigh.

  “I walked around him awhile, went away, came back, went away, and came back again. Finally I sat cross-legged on the edge of his cardboard.

  “I could go on for an hour, telling you all the things speeding around in my brain over the next minute—would he wake up or not? Pull away or not, if he did? Hurt me or not? If he got mad, would it still be worth the pleasure and knowledge of the contact? Could I work up enough nerve to touch him? Then, somehow, I…I had him in my hand! (I still don’t know how I did that.) I was holding him. He was thick, fleshy, heavy…I slid my other hand under his testicles. They were wonderfully warm. My body felt electrified—the only way to describe that tingle. It was cool out, and I was quiveringly sensitive to how much warmer his nuts were than the air. Their heat worked all into me. I wanted to suck him so badly the side of my neck cramped up while I was trying not to bend down. The guy was really out of it, and I was getting up my nerve, when he began to pee.

  “This glimmering arc just…expanded, sparkling, one end fixed inside his foreskin’s nozzle that was sticking out my fist.

  “He wet one side of my shirt, the knee and thigh of my jeans, my cheek, my arm…

  “I thought about letting him go, only I didn’t—I wouldn’t! It was so warm, and, because it was getting all over me anyway, I leaned down and drank. I bent way down, and put the first three, then four spurting inches in my mouth—about half of it. It tasted salty, his skin was rough, and his urine was bitter and hot. A lot ran over my hand. When it was running out, he moved a little and said, ‘Da’s nice…nice.’ His hand came down to pat my head. I jumped a little. I’m surprised I didn’t bite him. The guy said, ‘Suck da nigga, white boy. Keep suckin’ on it, real deep, now. Ah’m gonna come in yo’ mouf. Jus’ like you wan’.’ I swear, that’s the way he talked.”

  “Mike’s got family who talk like that, in Texas—some of ’em. Like the niggers under the highway. We visited them—Mike’s brother; that’s my Uncle Omar. And Mike’s cousins. They were nice. But they call each other ‘nigger’ more than the hip-hop kids.”

  “Now you know where it comes from: this is the South.” Again Bill’s voice dropped into black burlesque: “‘So you keep suckin’, now, ya’ heah? Don’ spiddit out. You swaller dis nigga’s load, white boy. Just like you drunk dat piss.’”

  Eric asked: “He said that?”

  “Um-hum. ‘You go’n’ swaller it all down. Don’ spill none, now…’

  “I sucked.

  “He hardened—and came.

  “I swallowed.

  “‘Yeah, da’s good. Make dis nigger feel real good, boy. Okay. Ah’m goin’ back to sleep.’ Really, it’s what he sounded like. ‘You go on to sleep, too, if’n you want.’ Obviously he’d started out from somewhere ar
ound here. His hand was wood-rough and rubbed my face, and I stretched out, my cheek half on wet cardboard, half on the grass, that heavy penis still in my mouth, getting softer, shrinking.

  “No one had come by, and we were kind of behind some bushes…

  “Through my nose, I got in a breath, and hugged his thigh. He hugged my head back, I remember—with just one hand (but it was a hug. Not a press or a pat or a squeeze. It was a one-handed hug)—and, after maybe three breaths, clearly he’d gone back to sleep. So after eight, nine more—” Bill shrugged—“I did, too.

  “Another half-an-hour or so and I woke. His cock wasn’t in my mouth anymore. I thought he’d gone. So I looked up. Somebody was sitting next to me, hip right against my head. I raised up on an elbow.

  “His back was to the stone. From somewhere, he’d gotten a cardboard container of coffee, though—unless it had been delivered by some meals-on-wheels charity group, rolling through the park while I was asleep—it was hard to imagine him, in those pants, leaving the place, making it barefoot to a coffee stand, and getting back. When I sat up, he was looking into his cup.

  “I pushed up onto my knees, then I stood. With his kind of foggy eyes he blinked at me and held up the coffee. ‘You wan’ some?’

  “The thing I remember, he was one of those guys whose hands—like your dad’s—were completely black. I mean, his palms, the undersides of his fingers, his nails. To this day, I have no idea if that was weeks of dirt, or pigmentation, or if it was from being out in the sun for so long.”

  Eric said: “That’s from his work.”

  “Oh,” Bill said. “Well, I do know it was…incredibly beautiful.

  “He said, ‘I got some fren’s. Dey gonna like you. Dey love to fuck a lil’ redheaded white boy.’ My hair was redder then. ‘Dey love to have you suck on ’em. A couple of ’em is even white—like you. You get me some pants, an’ I could really make same money offa you, boy. I give you some, too. No bitch o’ mine ever complained I didn’t treat her right. I ain’t a rough daddy: I be a good daddy. I ain’t got time to be mean and nasty. You gonna like hangin’ out wid me—if you got some damned pants I can wear. An’ maybe some shoes or sneakers. I’d be real good at sellin’ yo’ ass. I got a lotta experience at it, too. An’ whenever you don’t be workin’ you can suck dis nigger till you can’ suck no mo’. You can drink my piss. Eat my cum. An’ I’ll make love to you too, lil’ boy. I like to lick my lil’ fellas’ noses out when I make love to ’em. You ever had anyone do dat to ya’?’” Bill chuckled.

  “He said that?” Eric felt himself swelling to half-hard, let his legs fall wide, then brought them together.

  “Um-hm,” Bill said. “I mean I have seen you from time to time, out my window here, when you were walking to or from the garage and didn’t think anyone was watching—”

  “Oh…” Eric glanced down and rejoined his hands, tightening them with an embarrassment that had hounded him since a playschool teacher in Baltimore had noticed him at, and yelled at him about, his habit. “That sounds—” since Bill had noticed it, he was surprised that, till now, he hadn’t mentioned it—“kinda complicated.”

  “But over the next five seconds, Eric, I went from thinking he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, with the most mouth-filling cock I’d ever sucked—and I’d sucked a pretty fair number, by then, too—to totally terrified. You have to understand, I had a walk-up fourth floor apartment on 112th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. My lowest dresser drawer was full of old jeans, some of which, yes, had holes in the crotch, but even they were better than what he had to clutch together, just to walk around. And he’s sitting there, saying, ‘Come on, now. Sit down wid’ me. Help me finish dis coffee.’

  “When I didn’t sit, he held it higher. ‘Go on. Have some. It’s good.’

  “So I took the cup, and tasted it—God, it was sweet! It must have been a quarter sugar! I gave it to him, stepped back, and said, ‘No. No, I’m sorry…!’ Then I turned and…ran through the park, the bushes, the trees, the paths, everything!

  “And, you know, Eric? I’ve often thought that was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life—or one of the stupidest. I figured that out by eleven o’clock the same morning, once I’d had a few hours of real sleep. When I got up, I put some jeans I thought might fit him and some old runners into a brown paper Bloomie’s bag and spent another fourteen hours walking in the park, looking for him. (Did I mention he was shorter than I was?) But New York is such a big city, people get lost from you—like that! Even in Atlanta, you have a better chance of finding somebody after you think you’ve misplaced them. I never saw him again. But regularly I think: Suppose I’d sat down with him and said, ‘Okay,’ and stayed.

  “Even taken him to my place, to get some clothes—or just to finish sleeping.

  “You know, I…might have been happy—for what? Half an hour? Ten hours? Until he brought the first guy to fuck me? Or the fifth? Or the fiftieth? Suppose I’d given him the pants that would have been nowhere near as difficult for me to get as it was for him to wander, half naked, to panhandle up some coffee and come back. Three days maybe? Or three weeks? Or even partnered around with him for a…couple of years? Dropped business school and done…a hundred and fifty—maybe a thousand of his ‘friends’? Of course, I could have gotten my head bashed in. But with the few thousand I’ve done on my own since then—” Bill frowned—“I don’t think so. Besides, that can happen in any situation. And like I ran away then, I could have run away in five hours, or five days, or five months. Or five years. But maybe that extra happiness—” and again he was smiling—“I might have had would have helped to make all the hours, when I was miserable over what, yes, this guy or that guy had done—like not even notice I was alive, mostly—a little more bearable. So, now we’re prepared for the cold, naked moral that ends the tale. You ready?”

  “Okay.” Eric shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Good. Because I’m going to tell it to you.

  “Eric, sometime in your life—it may be in twenty minutes, or two months, or six years, or twenty-five years—you are going to find yourself in a situation that, simply because of all the things you have done, you will realize holds the possibility of…happiness. Now it won’t be like mine. But it will be something lots fewer people could understand than could have understood…well, what I just told you about. But when it happens, don’t be like me, Eric. You say, ‘Yes.’ Because if you don’t, it gets all bottled up, and you end up smashing your rifle butt into the bellies of pregnant women, or strafing perfectly nice gorillas off the Empire State Building or changing the curtains every week or jamming the handles of toilet plungers up the assholes of prisoners and attaching generators to their scrotums with alligator clips—straight or gay, because someone doesn’t want you looking at anyone else; because you think, somehow, that will make you feel better; that will make you happy.”

  “Wow…!” Eric said. “You think it’s like…? Man! You think that’s how it works?”

  “And remember. If it doesn’t pan out, you can always change your mind. You can run away later. So when it happens, even though you’re scared, say, ‘Yes.’ Okay?”

  Eric frowned.

  “I’m serious, Eric.” Bill lifted his mug from the table and sipped.

  “Yeah.” Eric shrugged. “Maybe. Hey, I gotta catch a shower and get some breakfast. Look, don’t tell Mike about none of this after I’m gone, okay?”

  “Of course! Not only is the boy queer and a homosexual, but he’s totally closeted—as who wouldn’t have guessed. My lips, Eric, are sealed—”

  “I ain’t in no closet. At least not with Barbara—my mom, I mean.”

  Bill grinned. “You call your mom by her first name?” Quizzically he let his head fall to the side. “I knew some rich kids who used to do that in the private school I went to in New York.”

  Eric shrugged. “I started that when I was about seven, when me and Mike spent about three months with his folks in Texas. Believe me,
they weren’t rich. They were about as poor as you can get. They didn’t even have bathrooms. They still had out-houses. While we was there, we had to move from his brother’s into his cousin’s across the road, ’cause his brother’s electricity got cut off. But Mike’s mama and his stepdad and brothers and sisters liked Barbara a lot, ’cause whenever she’d visited them, she’d pitch in and really help out—cook, clean, wash windows, baby sit—like she was one of them, I guess. I think they liked her better than they liked Mike. And they really wanted them to get back together. When they talked about her, they all used to call her Barbara—or Barb, like Mike did. So I did, too. Then, once, when I went to Hugantown to stay with her, I called her that by accident—but she said she liked it, and I should keep it up. Later she said she knew some rich kids, too, who did that—when she was little. Maybe she thought it was elegant. Or somethin’. And I was only seven or eight. So I kept doin’ it. Anyway, that’s why I wanna get down to Diamond Harbor with her. ’Cause Barb knows I’m queer already.”

  “Eric?”

  “Huh—?”

  “A bit more advice from your gay Uncle Bill. Your mom—Barb—told you that you shouldn’t tell your dad, right?”

  “Yeah…?”

  “You know he has to find out, someday…”

  “I’m gonna tell him—someday.”

  “Good.” Bill nodded. “I’m glad you know that. Well, for much the same reasons, Uncle Bill suggests that you not tell Barbara about the piss and shit and homeless niggers and…” He waved a hand back and forth. “And any other stuff that goes with them. Just go down to Diamond Harbor and be a nice gay son who helps his single mother and keeps the details to himself. She’s not…black—like Mike? Is she?”

  “Naw. She’s my real mom…But that’s pretty much how I figured to do it.” Eric shrugged again. “I guess what I do ain’t too elegant, huh?”