Guises Read online

  It was an odd looking place. Low door, high flat roof, no neon. I must admit that I have never seen stained glass windows in a tarpaper shack before. There was no asphalt parking lot, just a crunchy drive of crushed red brick. With the illumination from various headlights and from the colored windows it looked like a choppy sea of chum, awaiting a shark frenzy.

  I entered, self-consciously fingering the pearl buttons on my white silk cuffs. Nasty stuff, silk. It glides like grease, as every surreptitious animal that is to be mistrusted. It tickled over my arms and I rubbed them until static popped. But I had compromised. I wore leather pants. And an icy tank beneath of hoary chain metal. It scratched and chafed over my nipples, clanked over my heart. I’d made it myself, and it had taken a lot of pinch-fingered hours.

  The bouncer at the door glanced at me, cursory over the duds. He smiled thinly at the shirt he knew I hated. His own looked more ridiculous on him. It was open-throated, actually open all the way down across his huge gut. Coquette smooth over a sumo wrestler.

  Men sat at thrift store tables in an assortment of mismatched chairs. Some sat in groups, few were solitary, all wore white silk. The groups conversed in low tones.

  I looked about for David, curious at to whether he would shed tears when he saw me. I remembered how hoarse he’d sounded over the phone, had not even recognized who it was until he told me. It was as if his throat hurt or he had a cold or had been gargling with ground glass.

  He wasn’t there.

  Then he came up to me. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t noticed this one when I first looked over the place. He was the only man not in white. He wore instead tight gold trousers and no shirt. The bulge in gilt was outlined to every nuance of testicular ellipse and curvilineal bulb. It wasn’t intended as subtle. The pants might as well have been a single coating of paint.

  His chest was slender to a fault, oiled until each belly ripple and sinuous bend of barely rounded muscle gleamed. His dark hair fell well past his shoulders in curls so symmetrical they might have been chains. Around his head he wore a wreath of intertwining vines.

  Through the gold…the hair there also pressed with the taut heads of precise ringlets.

  I smiled. How bacchanalian. Well, it wasn’t so uncommon to find people costumed in public these days. But I found it too theatrical unless it is of leather, chain and needles. And I have never been interested in the caprices of my lovers which ran contrary to my own. I might have turned away from him completely had he not been literally the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.

  (Now, the chainmail tapped against my chest as my heart beat faster. It caught and ticked the weave of the silk. Let it ruin, I decided. I’d never wear it again.)

  “This is your first time,” he said, and I assumed that he meant your first time here.

  I nodded curtly.

  “Are you Fig?” I asked, feeling the accentuated snarl on the ‘F’. Meaning, of course, are you the Fig?

  “I am the host here.” He smiled, revealing even teeth so white and strong that they might have been carved from Italian marble. “Will you join me?”

  He gestured to a table under one of the windows. The wood was roughhewn, stained in broad dark patches.

  I looked up at the scene depicted in the window above me. It was mythological, shepherds in Greek skirts sitting drunkenly among a flock of grazing sheep, toasting one another with earthenware jugs. Was this where Dionysis had taken the inspiration for his outfit?

  “I’m Michael,” I grunted as I sat opposite him.

  I tried to sound gruff but I couldn’t take my eyes from him. If ever there was the original pure model of artistic androgeny, he was it. His lips were full, a plum bow between which one earnest arrow might be placed for firing. My arrow, held there, moved along the strings, primed by the friction.

  I twitched, aware that the others in the room were frowning at me. Some with petulant wist, some with unabashed jealousy.

  He must be a popular guy, I thought. And he’d chosen me.

  Was his flesh the butter it seemed to be?

  A waiter—all in flowing white silk—brought us the curious menu.

  I arched an eyebrow after reading it. “Is this for real?”

  “Quite,” the host assured me.

  I laughed. “So, what’s good?”

  “Everything,” he said seriously. “I have had them all. There is no part of the flower that isn’t rich in flavor and worth the taking.”

  It didn’t take a Rhodes scholar to see what he was leading to. At least he wasn’t crude. I didn’t appreciate crudity at first. Lovers should possess finesse, sensibilities, until they were properly unleashed.

  “Suggest one for me.” I nodded, handing the menu to him, giving him permission to do so.

  “Oh, no. You must always select that for yourself. It has no meaning otherwise.” He pushed it back. He shook his head until his curls swayed, rolling across his bare and rather narrow shoulders.

  Not really a disobedience. More of a taunt. Vixenish. I would permit this for the moment.

  “Okay, I’ll have the Blossom Of Becoming,” I said, shrugging, and returned the menu to the waiter. I didn’t pause to see if my host approved or disapproved. What did it matter when soon all that would be relevant were my desires?

  He was very young. Eighteen at the most, I guessed, appraising him. Was his temple still tight? Did his sphincter muscles tighten, glide, convulse, yield? Did his marble teeth just graze the skin of the head, teasing down the length no marks no bites all meekness?

  The waiter returned with a single crystal goblet in which was a flower I couldn’t identify, yet it must have been in the family of the rose. The blossom’s sepals parted from a dewy central shadow, out in ever-blackening petals. The cap beneath it was black also, snipped levelly from what must have been a gray twig. A fraction of this showed at the base, going down into the hollow tube of the goblet’s stem.

  “It’s really a flower?” I stared. I’d assumed the menu lingo was merely poetic.

  “A drug. If knowledge comes from a forbidden fruit, then surely passion comes from a forbidden flower,” my host explained as he gently lifted it from the glass. “We share it in a kiss.”

  He opened his generous mouth and placed it half between his lips. He stood to lean across the table toward me. On his breath I smelled dark anise and hot vineyards. I met his mouth with mine, and we bit down through the black rose until it tore.

  It was like lettuce which has slimed at the curly edges, lemon that has gone from its fresh sourness to overripe sickly sweetness presaging its rot, homemade berries in a jar that molded in crusts across the sugar instead of fermenting into liquor. But I didn’t spit it out. If this graceful, tender boy could chew and swallow such a foulness, so could I.

  I looked up again at the window. I hadn’t noticed before that in the background one of the shepherds was rutting into an animal from the flock.

  (No one else in the place had anything on their tables. No shadowy produce in stemware, no beer, not even Evian. They spoke together so low that I couldn’t hear them. I only detected the subtle rasp of their voices, not dissimilar to the gruff prattle of background machinery. Air conditioners, ceiling fans, radios stuck on the static between stations made such noises.)

  “It requires a few minutes to take effect. This place has scant charm. Would you care to walk with me into the trees? It is a nice night and the air will be cleaner,” he suggested.

  As he stood up and turned, I noticed his buttocks. The only place on his slim body that seemed to possess any true muscle. They defied his slender hips. The chain mail rasped across my skin in response.

  It was stifling in the place. I stood up as well, taking one more look at the window above our table. The shepherd was not only screwing the sheep, he was also cutting its throat.

  Then I saw David, sitting on the far side of the room. His white satin sleeves ended in intricate eighteenth century lace, a romantic and archaic touch I would have expec
ted of him. He was smiling, grimly.

  ««—»»

  “The drinkers of absinthe and poppy teas, the sippers of wormwood champagne, those drunk on new wine or who prefer the orgy cups of vestal tears are but dilettantes compared with those who consume the flower,” he said very softly. His resonant voice was slightly accented alien/foreign, enticing as we walked over the gory perimeter of Fig’s—all red stained light, red brick—and then into the woods.

  Where there were no lights he took my hand to lead me. I tripped once over a root and fell, cursing. He caught me just before I hit the ground and literally lifted me back to my feet. For so slender and girlish a youth, he was unusually strong. It unnerved me. It angered me to feel the roll reverse, having me turn into a clumsy child.

  I was always the stronger one. I could never abide a second class status.

  I snarled and jerked out of his solicitous grasp.

  “I’m okay!” I shouted, then shoved in the darkness.

  I felt nothing. Saw nothing.

  If I’d been embarrassed before, now I became a bit frightened.

  I hated being afraid.

  “Kid?” I whispered. The chain mail seemed suddenly too tight, as if it had woven into the follicles of my flesh.

  I reached out, turned, windmilled my arms into space. Yet there was nothing. No trees, no partner, not even the rustle of grass at my feet.

  The moon must have broken through clouds then for it abruptly flooded the ground, layered through the trees, touching in turn each of dozens of candles set in a circle of bald earth. Each wick flared as the moonlight graced it.

  He stood in the center. He had removed the gold trousers and now stood naked except for the wreath.

  His skin was even paler in the candlelight and moonlight, a flawless snow of a youth who might have been any age, might have been newborn. He was quite unmarred, so untouched that he could have been the pure boy set astride the white horse to ride through the cemetery seeking a vampire’s grave.

  I had been a vampire in my life. Would this vision of virtue refuse to touch the grave that had been the guilt of my past?

  I pictured him strung, spread-eagled. Lacerated with a cat until his unmarred body was finally baptized in real passion’s maps. How much could I sip? Licked from the seeping creases of the chessboard squares and diamond diagonal stripes before he would faint? Before he would die?

  No, no. Never kill. Always let them just live. They were demonstrably grateful for it.

  This wasn’t an angel, I told myself. This was a venal bitch with a birchrod penis and elastic buttocks. He wasn’t seeking love. (No, David sought love.) This one hunted for depravity. It was why he had this circle of candles out here, to help him fulfill some fantasy of a wild bacchanalian rite.

  But tonight he would discover a different ritual. I would convert him to my religion as an unwashed medieval crusader charging into the pagan east.

  The drug must be working, I decided. The moonlight only seemed to have lighted the wicks.

  His hand extended to me to join him in the circle, only appearing to end in fingers which trailed fog like a child’s frosted paints.

  I stripped off the snaky silk, the leather trousers. I kept on the mail tank because it glittered well in the moonlight. I liked how tight it felt, how cold it stuck as ice to a tongue. My heart pounded beneath it. Clank. Chink. Rattle.

  Then I did take his hand. I cruelly squeezed it in my own, much harder than I needed to. Hard enough to feel the gentle knuckle bones slightly corkscrew. His eyes flickered but his smile widened. An indication that he would like to discover the limits of my severity.

  I grinned back, opening my jaws enough that he could see the points of my dentally-altered incisors. I was so proud of them. It was an expression of jaded threat that it took practice to make look right. Otherwise I would be just a silly caricature—atrocious instead of vicious.

  I felt the light glint from them, as bitter hooks of fashioned metal. I actually tasted it in dangerously poison quicksilver beads and in scalding droplets of scented wax.

  The drug.

  My muscles were molten metal. Wolves and panthers raced through my veins to swell the feral heart. Jaguars and jackals loped from it in the arteries to make me the beast incarnate, peering with threatening eyes through the chain tank cage, jangling the iron there with their anxious claws.

  The drug, yes.

  He sensed this and he rose to it, came fully erect as I stepped within the circle.

  Tonight I would reach beyond all the restraints of this sordid mortality to discover that I had become, become, blossom of becoming the immortal I had always wanted to be.

  The drug, was it not so?

  His giant fig, engorged until it was blue in the scant light, purple in the candles… I imagined it bursting like a ripe plum, juices poisonous and intoxicating, trickling over my lips, escaping down my throat in swallow’s automatic contraction.

  I almost stepped back out of the circle. Almost leapt out, wrenching my fingers away from his. I had never sucked a man before nor even dreamt of it. The sweet cream notion gagged.

  “Do you not desire me, Michael?” he said simply, almost with casual duplicity. Nearly mocking me. His erection bobbed, summoned. My mouth watered unconsciously.

  I turned and spat out the hunger. The idea was absurd. Was like white spotless silk on a sweating minotaur, posies around a wolf’s balls—oily with sebaceous fluids.

  He pursed his lips. “I understand, Michael. It is your first time. Do not be shy.”

  I was furious. I’d show him who was superior. The creatures in the blood were howling, throwing themselves against the chain mail cage, wanting release. Let us out…we’ll take care of him!

  The drug the drug the drug the drug and I found I couldn’t pull away or strike him. I could merely sense the black coils of his hair, the full ardent sacs, the heavy animal member thick with foreskin.

  Then I saw the purple semen froth at the blunt end of it. Wisteria blossoms and fennel seed soaked in vintage dark wine. As if dribbled from a flask not quite ready to pour.

  I smelled it and desire overwhelmed me. What was that? Plague? Venereal disease? What do you really know about him?

  That he is a shining boy so splendid that wickedness chimes and lust sings psalms for him. All evils vie to play him a nocturne.

  The sight and the smell so perfumed and brandied were only the effects of the drug again. Again.

  And again.

  Can you not taste it? See it in a drunkard’s visions, the flask to fit a drunkard’s lips?

  No! My stomach flopped. The mail was so hot. I clutched the tank and heard links explode as I ripped it off me. The metal bit in trenchant tips, bringing me back to my blood senses. And his blood. Yes, that would be muscat nectar.

  I reached out to grab him, spin him around, force my way into his rare and downy rectum. I would bite down on the back of his neck, my jaws holding him, tasting blood that must be claret. Deeper. Burgundy and pepper plasma. Perhaps it was what he wanted after all. Rape. I would teach him SHY.

  He slapped me away, full lips curved into a taunting arc of a smile.

  I wrapped the ripped banner of mail around my fist and swung. It connected wetly, skull crumbling as he staggered only two steps. His head reared back with the blow, blood all of purple flew, sparkling indigo fireflies. I laughed with satisfaction; his beauty wasn’t so flawless now. Lover’s scars: the marks which showed that one had left false heaven to enter the world.

  His head snapped back up. He shook, bellowing. Horns coiled in callous bone from his skull, and he had the face of a bull.

  It’s that damned drug, I thought. Psychotropic rose, hallucination’s fly agaric.

  His hands came down firmly to my shoulders, landed in mallets. He forced me to squat on my knees.

  “Come to paradise and the woods of Thrace, the stones at Delphi,” he said. The voice was deeper, sonorous, a bull’s snort of well water sound.

  On
e hand kept me on my knees while the other curled mist fingers through my hair to bring my head forward. The body was still that of a youth’s despite the face that boomed above me.

  Sweet. Hot vineyards. Darkest groves. The precious drops to the flavor of madness. My jaws worked to open with thirst, with gladness.

  “No! Damn it! Damn you!” I roared, thrashed, tried to bite him, to wound that insolent member too harsh, too ancient. I smelled the dust mixed with musk. Boy Bull God. Made no difference. I would never submit.

  But finally his strength pushed me under. I had to take him into my mouth. Oh! golden starlight in spirit’s wine. All-conquering are the shafts made from the Vine.

  He moved slowly and where was I? Elsewhere. For that compliant whore could never have been me. I heard steel tink. The mail beneath my legs? On the bare earth where I crouched?

  The erection swelled, elongated. It bristled with needles, whirred with hidden blades smaller than warts. The pain shook me back from sacred rites, from profane sacraments. The iron taste of my own blood made me gag. I choked, blood spilling from my mouth. My own was sour for I was an eater of meats. I clawed at him, raked my nails down his thighs and across his backside. I struck him, trying in vain to break free. I attempted to clamp down my jaws to tear him loose at the hairy base.

  But it grew as he held me fast, his moans of pleasure inhuman: the shrieks of mistral wind, roars from summer thunder. His deep purple seed finally exploded, igniting in my mouth as the moon had the candles. It burned acid down my throat all the way—it seemed—to my heart where his cock buried itself. I passed out from the fire, fainted like some whipped child. I blacked out with mice and kittens in my veins, rabbits and sheep in my arteries.

  I couldn’t speak for months. Not only from the sheer agony of the attempt but because my vocal chords were badly damaged from his caustic semen. My tongue was almost ruined by whatever mechanisms sprung from the flesh of his root, as were my gums. I lost numerous teeth.

  I learned to talk again, slowly, painfully, articulating with great care. But I was never able to rise above a gravelly hiss.