I, Globerapist

It was at this time that I resolved to act. I walked around the block and approached the front door from the opposite direction taken by the gang of noisy stoop-sittters, who were lolling all over the place as if each were unable to support his weight unaided. They didn’t seem to have noticed me at all. Acting inconspicuous, I dragged a garbage-can under the first window and clambered upon it. The blinds were pulled down and I could see nothing, although I could make out a murmuring and the glow of a TV. The next window over looked into a pitch –black room. There might have been anything at all going on in there-or nothing. I moved the garbage-can over a ways and tried again. Now I was looking into a room where an aged crone sat in a wheelchair under a picture of the Virgin Mary, one of those vocoder devices they give people with tracheotomies pressed against her thoat like an electric razor, saying Ave Marias in a mechanical monotone, like a robot replica of an old woman alone. She looked me right in the eye and didn’t seem at all surprised or scared, but kept supplicating the virgin, as if the apparition of shades was commonplace during the telling of her rosary. I sunk down and out her sight and she held my gaze until the window-ledge seperated us.

The next window contained the scenario I was looking for. Through a gap in the venetian blinds, I could see a bedroom with a big frilly white bed. A large TV was playing a game show. Jenny was lying face down, wearing nothing but a man’s T-shirt, watching TV, painting her fingernails and talking on her cell phone. The fat cousin was sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing some kind of cream into her bare ass cheeks, which filled the room like a ball in a box. Occasionally he’d bend over and actually kiss them like a supplicant, and she’d wave an annoyed hand at him behind her back. I clung to the edge of the ledge, entranced. Peeper’s revenge. I pulled my penis out of my fly with a gritty palm, and grimacing, began to jerk it furiously and silently, with my toes curled in my shoes and my teeth set. It was the most malevolent masturbation of my career. Boldly taking what others paid for every day. I could practically feel an ectoplasmic extension of spiteful force reaching through the window from me to her, to coil invisible tendrils around her ass and then to constrict, to bite her like a viper, to puncture and deflate. It was a fast and purposeful jack: bold, commanding, direct, competent and pro-active. An executive jack if you will. As I set off down the slippery slope towards conclusion, I had a momentary vision of myself mounted on her rear, pounding it frantically, and I knew that in a second or two, as I ejaculated, that her ass would finally pop like a balloon beneath me, with a “bang” I’d never even been able to dream, and I’d sink to the comforter with the tattered fabric beneath me hissing out the last of its inflation and sleep as if cradled in a cloudbank. Please don’t let fat Jose look up and see my ecstatic gargoyle’s face at this crucial moment! I threw my head back, every muscle in my body starting to go rigid and….

BANG!!!

But not the right bang. The bang of my garbage can being kicked from beneath me, leaving me on my back on the sidewalk with my erection straining at the night air for all to see. One second on the wrong side of release and sweet relief and blessed vengeance. I was circled by a ring of stupid, evil faces-the elderly good-for-nothings who’d been on the stoop just a few yards away, forgotten by me in my desperation.

Beaten By Outcasts

The shock of slamming into the ground brought me out of my tense sexual reverie and I realized that they weren’t “elderly” at all…they were all junkies. I had once lived next to a methadone clinic and I knew the type anywhere. There was that weird remblance to Viet Nam veterans-the faded tattoos, the outdated styles…. long ponytails, bandannas, cast-off clothes, piratical jewelry, about 10 teeth between the lot of them. Some of them were possibily women, or of some indeterminate sex found only amongst the damned. The same Viet Nam Vet combination of a shell of macho menace and an exhausted infirmity. Every man jack had a cane, a crutch or a hospital bracelet. They were so skinny and worn-out looking that even I, one of the city’s least physically imposing specimens, could have given the whole pack of them a drubbing had I been of sound mind and body and compos mentis. They were gathered around my erection, mouths agape, like fiends around a Maypole. One of them was disentangling a wheelchair from the garbage can. He yanked it free and pushed his way into the circle, the wheelchair empty in front of him. It was obviously he who had knocked me down; he was the only one of them who appeared to have even a vestige of physical force remaining. He looked like a Fidel Castro fallen on desperate times, with a blue tiger tattooed on his forearm and a matted beard. This flashed through my mind in a moment and then all hell broke loose. With screams of “Pervert!” “Fucking pervert!” “Peeping Tom!” “Call the cops!” “Kill the fucker!”, the posse attacked as one man. I took a blow across the noggin with an aluminum crutch that would have dropped a wild boar, had it not been dealt by a toothless 90-lb wraith with noodle arms, wearing a complete baseball uniform six sizes too large. Beaten by a mob twice in one day. All I could think about was getting my penis back in my pants before they delivered the coup de grace. Always wear clean underwear, you never know when you may be taken by surprise while masturbating in public and stoned to death by the dregs of society. Fidel Castro kept running his wheelchair, which he apparently used as a walker, back and forth across my lower extremities, all the while snarling curses, some of which were addressed to me and others of which appeared to be meant for the ears of a ghostly invalid riding there. It was a complete rout, and as the window banged open and I saw Jenny’s face I finally got my legs under me and fled the scene, crying in shame and rage.

The Golf Course and what Happened There

Into the park I ran, seeking the cover of darkness. Briars and branches tore at my limbs as I blundered full-tilt along a pathway. Finally I emerged into a moonlit clearing. A well-mowed lawn stretched away, with pleasing hills and dales dotted with copses of shrubbery. I was on a golf course, alone under the starry skies. Gasping for breath, I sunk to my knees and saw that my penis was still hanging out of my fly, semi-hard despite trial, tribulation, humiliation, insult and injury. The whole debacle had taken no more time than it takes to recite the preamble to the Gettysburg Address.

Not far ahead, a tall slender wand arose, at the top of which a fairy pennant fluttered in the night wind. It bore the numeral “18”. At its base was a socket in the close-shaven grass.

“This must be the Eighteenth Hole”, I thought to myself.

The golf course was quiet and empty-just the place for a man to hit bottom. Far away, a garbage truck was digesting a washing machine or engine block, but I could hear crickets and toads calling each other in the underbrush and a calming wind dried my sweat. Who’d have believed it--an 18-hole golf course in the middle of a Dominican ghetto. A soundless jet airliner lowered itself to the crowded skyline far away like a fat and swagging shadow dissappearing against the dark sky, its multicolored running lights like the heads of flaming children chasing a leader along the rooftops. I knelt stock-still, as one who has figured out how to negotiate the dimension of time, but not that of space, then toppled over on my side and slowly sprawled face up on the grass, staring up at the celestial vault like a stunned animal trapped in the headlights of the oncoming stars.

Remembering other nights beneath skies, like once during teenaged years when my brother and I lay drunk on the beach, out of reach of the orange glow from the fishing pier, watching for the first meteorite of summer. One minute—nothing, and the next, a shooting star drifted lazily past, from horizon to horizon in the blink of an eye. A drunken cheer had gone up from the dark where other sky-watchers lay, as if we were seeing the Grand Finale of a smalltown fireworks display, or a Little League homerun. Over the fence. Going, going, gone. I felt the gigantic swoop of the globe rolling beneath my back, vaster than vast, insensate, asleep, containing all things. Nothing could be larger than it-save the void in which it swam-and nothing smaller than I. And yet within me I felt a spark of vicious life, which could never be extinguished, but rather only fuelled by misfortune, disaster and my inescapable ridiculousness. I looked down along the length of my body to see that my penis was pointing straight up at the Pole Star like an axis mundi. A stiff, flexible, murderous erection. Well, who is to say that all life did not begin with an angry microbe, intent on inseminating eternity? To my feet, like Frankenstein’s Monster, I arose. Took three stiff steps towards the 18th Hole, like a dowser on the trail of an aquifer, and stood swaying a moment, looking into that smooth and shaded socket in the earth. Then I threw myself face down upon the greensward, arms and legs splayed wide in all directions of the compass, effected entrance with a grunt, and fell to with a will, humping as furiously as a hobgoblin.

It didn’t take long. As my belated orgasm shook me and I stretched my outspread limbs even wider as if in a rigor mortis, trying to hold down the entire world and pump it full of poisonous venom, I seemed to recede from the back of my own head and spiral slowly outwards, while my body, still spasming, rotated and faded into insignificance in the distance below like a starfish revolving on a turntable.

“The philomaths and advisors have measured with infinite care the waist of the world and found it to be exactly thirty-two and a half faces of the pharoah in circumference-an increase of over sixteen faces since the last full moon. Many goats and sheep are to be killed and eaten by the gods; and slaves given a day of rest; and all free folk also shall rest in their labors and feast and rejoice, for this means that Our Mother is newly pregnant with a monstrous child-or a baby god.”

This was written by a nameless scribe in 3000 BC. I am also such a scribe. Now I move about from place to place, staying in cheap hotels under sundry aliases, my days of confusion and misery behind me. The news I bring is not especially good, but pay me no mind. I’m just a visitor here, as are we all.

Epilog

…. you know, Wilson, I wasn’t going to mention this, but you are one of my oldest friends and this story is just too bizzarre for me to keep it to myself. There actually WERE some other things in that oilcloth packet of papers he gave me. Polaroid photographs. These photos I had to burn, my friend, I’m sorry but they disgusted me and I destroyed them as soon as I saw them. God knows what the wife would have thought if she’d found them. I’d never have heard the end of it.