Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Eric took a breath but moved around in front of Shit.

  “Well, that’s kinda the idea. Just a little advertising for the pleasures this place has to offer.” Shit grinned as Eric dropped to a squat and went in to the front of Shit’s loose jeans to pull out his cock. Shit moved from leg to leg, which he did when he was about piss. “Open your mouth, nigger…” His hard, thick fingers moved on Eric’s scalp. Warm yellow spurted from the collared head and Eric, mouth wide, caught it, feeling himself thrill to the familiar and reassuring taste and pressure and heat. He began swallowing.

  There was a faint fire in Eric’s own cock that was not enough to more than half harden it, even though it was a definite sign of pleasure. Which was pretty much how Shit described the pleasure he took of urinating in Eric’s suck hole.

  (And how the fire was always greater if somebody saw them.)

  Finally Eric mouthed Shit’s half hard member as its urine slowed and stopped. He swallowed again, coughed, and stood. And Shit’s arms went around him and his tongue invaded Eric’s mouth. Shit was holding him hard; Eric held him hard in return.

  Finally Eric mumbled over Shit’s busy tongue. “Yeah…anybody out there see us?”

  “Ugh…!” Grunting, Shit relaxed his arms. “Nobody even glanced in—I could’ve pulled your pants down and fucked you right here in the theater lobby if I’d wanted.” He thumbed with one hand out the door toward the customer line—now seven long—beyond the glass door and in front of the booth. Then Shit dropped both hands to refasten his jeans.

  Eric let a couple of syllables of laughter. Pulling from Shit, he started out, between the scrolled jambs, under the rococo lintels, carved with flowers and doves, the gilt on the molding worn away. “But you have to admit—” he called back over his shoulder and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist—“the way you like them white boy snot jockeys explains a little of what goes on in my life—in your life…in our lives, I mean.” He’d have the familiar, bitter salts of Shit’s piss in his mouth for the next ten or fifteen minutes—a pleasure to contemplate across the boring ticket sales. It was astonishing what some of these cocksuckers just never saw…

  “I don’t have to admit nothin’,” Shit said. “But you gotta sell some tickets. Maybe later, you can come in and encourage that white kid for me, so we can all get to know each other. And when the rush lets up, come on back in and hunt me up out of the shitter downstairs and we can sit down somewhere and watch the movie and you put your head in my lap and my dick in your mouth and hold it there for about a half an hour. I’ll finger fuck your ass. You don’t even half to suck me off—though if you wanna get a load or two, I ain’t gonna argue with you…!”

  * * *

  [75] IN THE APARTMENT above the Opera’s projection room, a conversation took place six or seven times. (Eric would have said it happened at least a dozen. Shit would have sworn it only happened twice. But the last time was the one both remembered.) Sitting on the edge of the couch, in minor frustration, Eric told Shit, who was standing by the window with its frayed yellow curtains, half looking out, “I know you can come standin’ on your damned head with six jackhammers goin’ at a construction site in the middle of a blizzard. But it’s hard for me to get off, if you got your hands folded back under your neck when I’m humpin’ you. At least you gotta put your arms around me and hold on.”

  To which Shit responded, “Oh. Okay. I don’t mind that.”

  “Damn, Shit! Why can’t you—”

  “Hey, look. Have I ever not done somethin’ sexual that you told me to do?”

  “What I don’t understand is why somebody who claims to be such a sexual stud like you has gotta be told everything!”

  “Well, I can’t read your mind!”

  “Why the fuck not? I spend enough time tryin’ to read yours! After all this time we been together, don’t you think you could do a little mind readin’? I always want the same thing, anyway—”

  Shit turned around, leaned his butt on the wall and pushed his hands into his pockets. There was always a hole in the bottom of the left one, that, whenever Eric got him new ones, he’d cut open for him—Shit was left handed—and, as usual (Eric could see the movement of his fingers and fist under the cloth), Shit would push through to hold his genitals, for security, or, sometimes, when he’d just take it out and work on it, standing in the back of the orchestra aisle, while five or six older guys sat around watching his, covert or not so covert, masturbation.

  Now, though, Shit said something different from the last time they’d had this talk: “Hey—I really like it when you tell me what to do. I mean—” he looked at the warped board floor they’d polyurethaned in their first week there—“once you tell me and I do it, it makes me feel all good and safe and…right—and I can’t make no mistake, ’cause I’m doin’ what I was told.” He swallowed, still looking at the ground. His voice got softer and…well, rougher. “Like I was…doin’ it…with my dad, I mean, back…when I was a little kid.”

  (Why, Eric wondered, do I still find the idea of a forty-six year-old man playing pocket pool a turn-on?)

  Eric looked at Shit then let his own head drop to the side. “Oh…” He took a breath. “Hey, you know…look, it ain’t really broken, so there ain’t no real reason to fix it. I mean, whenever I fuck around with Joady, downstairs—you seen him, the guy who sits on the side in the first balcony?—he does so much huggin’ and holdin’, it kind of drives me nuts. So, it’s not like I don’t get any at all.”

  “Joady?” Shit looked up. “That ol’ guy? You mean the one who always calls me Mr. Haskell when he comes in? Hey—would you please tell him my goddam name is Shit and that’s what he’s supposed to call me…at least if he wants to keep comin’ in the Opera for free.”

  “Well.” Eric chuckled. “He calls me Mr. Jeffers—he’s just tryin’ to be polite.”

  “Polite’s callin’ people how they wanna be called.” Without taking his hands loose, Shit pushed forward, then leaned back again. “We let ’im in for nothin’. He could at least say our names right.” Again he looked at the floor. “It’s a fuckin’ fuck-film theater, for God’s sake!”

  “Oh, he earns his entrance fee. For the people who like the older guys, he’s the most popular stud up there. I tried to send him downstairs to Gorgonzola Alley—that’s where he should be. You seen the skin he got hangin’ off ’im? But he says he don’t like the competition with the youngsters—and he’s kinda set in his ways, anyway. He calls everybody ‘Mister’—except Doc Greene. He calls him ‘Doctor.’”

  “Well, good for him.” Again Shit looked up, frowning. “But you can really come easier with him than you can with me?”

  “He just knows when to hold onto somebody—when he feels they’re gettin’ ready. Naw, I don’t have any problems there. With him, it’s gettin’ away later. He wants to hold on and cuddle with you the rest of the damned day.”

  “What you see in an ol’ white guy like that, anyway? I thought you was into the blacks, mostly. I had him the first time he come in here—he didn’t seem like nothin’ special…his dick is smaller’n mine.”

  “‘Mostly’ ain’t ‘completely.’ Like I say, he’s a hugger and a cuddler. And sometimes, that’s…nice.”

  “And you don’t have to tell him when to do it?”

  “It’s more like I have to tell him when to let go. Besides, every once in a while, he makes me think back and remember Dynamite.”

  “He do? He sure don’t look like my daddy to me!” Shit snorted. “He looks like every other fifty-year-old, snaggle-toothed cracker up and down the damned coast.”

  “Would you haul off and hit me if I said that wasn’t really so far from what your daddy was, anyway—I mean, you know I loved him as much as you and thought he was the best man in the world—”

  But Shit stepped from the wall, pulled his hands from his pocket, and strode across the room.

  Eric stiffened, wondering if he was going to get at least a push.

 
“Hey, that’s wigglin’ out of it, cocksucker! That’s fuckin’ cold, man.” Shit reached the couch, dropped down beside Eric, drew up a knee, and swung around to face Eric, one hand catching the back of Eric’s neck. “By the time you’d been with us a year, that man loved you as much as he loved me. He was the most special man in the world. And the most special daddy. He thought you was the greatest thing in the world and pretty special too, and don’t you forget it.” Shit grabbed Eric roughly, one hand in front on his chest and one hand behind him. Eric twisted, to accept the clumsy and intense hug. “Hey, scumbucket, how many of them other snaggle-toothed crackers up and down the coast would let you lie around in the same bed with ’em, grinnin’ at you suckin’ off their own son, and then ask you, ‘Hey, you wanna work on mine awhile?’ and love you like you was a gift right outta that nature-or-God you’re always talkin’ about from that book of yours?”

  “Not a whole lot of ’em.” Eric pulled in a breath. “I know that, Shit.”

  “Not a whole lot, huh? Maybe only one—at least that you ever knowed. And maybe the world would be better if there was a few more of ’em, and not guys punchin’ kids’ fuckin’ teeth out for suckin’ dogs, like Shad done with Jay.”

  “Yeah, Shit. I do know that.”

  “Well, don’t fuckin’ forget!”

  “Hey—I never forgot it. And I’m never gonna forget it—” He felt Shit breathing against him; he smelled the acidity of Shit’s hard, unwashed body.

  Like cables freezing into bars, Shit’s fingers stiffened on the side of Eric’s face. (Eric got his near arm free to hug Shit—as hard—back.) “Good.” The hug was awkward. But neither of them stopped it. Finally Shit said, softly, “Course, I’d be a lyin’ sack of shit if I said I didn’t know what you meant.” Shit took another big breath.

  Then he said:

  “I’m huggin’ you so hard, ’cause I…”

  Eric heard him sniff, and realized there was a near sob in his voice.

  “…don’t wanna hit ya’.”

  “Me too…”

  “Yeah?” Now Eric heard Shit chuckle. “Come on, then, nigger. Let’s fuck.”

  “You got it.” There was a quick release, a quick half pulling free of Shit’s shirt, one leg of Shit’s pants, Eric’s pants, and the unbuttoning of his shirt—but he didn’t get it off before Shit fingered loose his upper plate, put it on the table at the couch’s end, and turned back to grapple him.

  Later, on top of Eric, Shit pushed himself up on his elbow. “I know you said it ain’t broken, but it ain’t gonna hurt me none to fix it a little bit, now.”

  “You did.” And thought: why does the grin he has on his face now, completely toothless, knock me out?

  “After all, ain’t I supposed to be this super stud who knows how to make all his little fuckers happy—like you, there?”

  “Hey,” Eric said. “You make me happy. I wanna do the same for you—and the fact is, the rest of it can take a flyin’ fuck outta the window.”

  “No, it can’t,” Shit said. “’Cause that wouldn’t make me happy.” Then, later, when they had finished, Shit said, “Okay, now, I’m gonna put my ass in your lap, and you can hug me from the back, like Dynamite used to do. But that means you can’t fuck me—just rub, if you’re still horny. And you are.”

  “Sure, come on—that’s okay. You know, sometimes I think that man’s gonna be in bed with us for the rest of our lives…?”

  Shit chuckled. “Well…you gotta admit, it could be somebody a lot worse. You mind?”

  “No!” Eric protested. “It’s kinda nice, actually. But it’s…different.”

  A little later, when Eric had decided that Shit was asleep and was drifting off himself, suddenly Shit asked, “You wasn’t tryin’ to make me jealous, talkin’ about ol’ Joady, there—was you?”

  “A stud like you—gettin’ jealous? Naw. I don’t think so.”

  “A couple of times—I mean, years ago—I tried to make you jealous, by talkin’ about somebody I was screwin’. Just to see what would happen.”

  “You did?”

  “Only it didn’t work. It just got you horny. I guess it’s good it gets me horny, too…” Outside the window, the sky’s blue deepened toward night.

  * * *

  [76] IN THE OPERA’S broad basement corridor, at the bottom of the ramp, while Eric went through one key after another on Myron’s great ring of…a hundred-fifty? Two hundred-fifty keys, Myron said, “They ain’t gonna work. That’s what they told me, twenty-five years ago, when I first come. They don’t got the keys to these rooms down here no more. This is where they made the scenery, when they did the real operas and plays and stuff, back a hundred years ago. But nobody done had keys to these things in fifty, sixty years now.”

  On the hundred thirty-sixth or hundred thirty-seventh key, however, when Eric twisted, the brass barrel in the gray-brown wooden door turned.

  Eric pushed down the handle. The door squeaked forward, grinding over the grit scattering the inner floor’s cement. “Rip off a piece of that green tape,” Eric said to Shit.

  “Here you go,” Shit said, who was clearly impressed. Again, he squeezed his big hand through the roll of green gaffers tape.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Myron said. “They told me you couldn’t open these doors no way at all no more.”

  Once they stepped into the spacious room, all they smelled was century-old dust. Save three saw horses, a chair and two ladders against the wall—across the ceiling, half a dozen pulleys, ropes looped between, and a catwalk for hanging backdrops—it was a large, empty room.

  Someone had left a very old screwdriver on the chair.

  “We’re gonna put it together in here.” Eric pressed the small piece of green tape on the key’s head and rubbed it with his thumb. “Now don’t let this come loose. I don’t wanna have to go through all these damn keys every time I come in here.”

  “Why we gonna make it in here?” Shit wanted to know.

  “’Cause the hallway’s wide enough to get it out—once we’re finished. And because of the ramp, we can get it up easier.”

  “Is that what that thing’s for?”

  “I don’t know if that’s what it’s for. But that’s what we’re gonna use it for.”

  “God damn.” Bald Myron wore a kind of baggy white shirt under his vest. “They told me—years ’fore you guys ever come and took over the place—there was no way you could get in these rooms. They told me they was haunted. I didn’t believe that—’cause I don’t believe in no spirits. But I still figured these places were locked for good.”

  From the ceiling came a grumbling—all three looked up, where a grate was inserted between two of the beams across the yellow-white plaster.

  “Oh, shit—” Myron said. “That must go right up to the orchestra—backstage, there. I always thought that was for heatin’. They’re grumblin’ up there ’cause the movie just run out, and they don’t know what to do with their damned dicks.”

  “Ain’t very imaginative, huh?” Shit said.

  Myron said, “I gotta run. Just bring them keys back up to the projection room when you’re done with ’em.”

  “Okay,” Eric said. “We will.”

  “You know—” Shit looked around, rubbing the back of his head, stepping from one sneaker to the other—“since nobody been in here in fifty, a hundred years, don’t you think, we should probably break this place in. What do you say?”

  “What you mean—? Oh…Yeah. Maybe we should.”

  “We could even bring a mattress down here—and if we found somebody nice, we could use it like a fuck room. I mean, just for us.”

  “I knew you was gonna say that.” Eric laughed. “How do I know you so well?”

  “I don’t know. What you mean?”

  “I mean, if I suck you off a few times here—like startin’ right now, and help you get a mattress in here in the next week—you are gonna work your fuckin’ ass off to help me get this business done. And if I don’t
, you’re gonna lose interest and start driftin’ off an always bein’ somewhere else when I need you—”

  “I am?”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “Damn,” Shit said. “Well, in that case, I think you better start suckin’ my damned dick, nigger. I mean, like right now.” He shook the crotch of his jeans.

  “Come on, white boy.” Eric pushed the screwdriver off the chair. It clattered on the floor. He turned and sat on the chair. “Bring that meat over here and let this nigger show you how it’s done.”

  “Oh, man.” Shit grinned. “I’m gonna be a white boy today!”

  One chair leg actually cracked after about five minutes—it must have been a prop and not very well made. But Eric just went forward, on his knees to the floor, gripping Shit’s hips; while, in return, Shit gripped Eric’s head.

  * * *

  [77] THE COOKER ITSELF…?

  Its structure was very much from all of Eric’s—and Shit’s—life. The burner units of the fundamentally portable stove came from a demolished diner (whose history Shit rambled on about for fifteen minutes—he’d gone there a couple of times during his school years; Eric had never seen it before) they’d glimpsed through some pines when driving along the old garbage run, one day for old times’ sake, up near Hemmings.

  For the rollaway frame, Eric had called on the half dozen teen-aged lessons Mike had given him in welding, back in Atlanta—he was surprised how much he remembered. And even though he’d used a little portable welding torch, damned if the thing didn’t hold together, all hundred and thirty pounds of it—at least when the propane tanks were empty. When the two of them were full, it was heavier. Across the back of a flame-proof masonite board, calling on his time as a comics reader and an aspiring (well, amateur) artist, who’d filled a few secret notebooks back in Hugantown with drawings for a gay super-hero (one-third adventure, two-thirds clumsy pornography), called, not very creatively, The Cocksucker, a half dozen colored magic markers came out and with much guidance from Cassandra, Eric lettered above the three burners at the preparation-counter’s back: