In My Beginning Is My End

Less then a month ago, an esteemed team of scientists, three or four of them Nobel winners, acting under the auspices of the United Nations, solemnly intoned into a surfeit of microphones that all humanity would perish in precisely 93 days when a meteor the size of a small planet would slap into the earth with the force of 100 million hydrogen bombs. All humanity, every man, woman and child would die, the entire human race, every biological organism riding this blue sphere abruptly made extinct. The date of October 31, the evening before All Hallows' Day celebrated in much of the western world as Halloween. It was to be my twenty-first birthday, now my ultimate birthday, since there would be no twenty second birthday for me.

Humanity was long familiar with the concept of death following life and accepted mortality from disease, from accidents as their natural due. Tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, other natural disasters were common place. Threats from terrorists, nuclear and biological weapons, flesh eating bacteria and serial killers were calculated into the cost of doing business in the twenty-first century.

World War III or disease pandemics killing millions or billions were always a possibility if not probability. But who figured--with the possible exception of those addicted to watching The Disaster Channel--on an unstoppable force of nature, a big rock capable of stamping out every form of life down to the smallest fish in the sea.

According to these heralded scientists, the meteor was unstoppable by any means known to men. Based on the most precise mathematical calculations of the meteor's trajectory, its speed, its mass, and its certain intersection with Earth's orbit, we were guaranteed annihilation.

Like everyone else, I was now a stranger in a strange land. Society started crumbling no sooner then the last words were uttered at the televised press conference broadcast worldwide. Each day as the meteor grew bigger in the sky more people gave up their jobs. More people became less willing to tow the line, keep up appearances, keep a stiff upper lip, stay true blue.

Kilroy was hereand the distinctive doodle of Kilroy peeking over a wall seen as graffiti was almost ubiquitous among U.S. residents who lived during World War II. Now, all over the country the same thing was seen with the wordsFuck It! and the doodle of an upraised middle finger. These two words, the drawing became the license for cutting loose in whatever manner one wished.

Civilized order, moral restraints, such things as harmony, hope, humor, the concept of the Golden Rule all began to dissipate and baser instincts were now the order of the day.Fuck it!

Murders went uninvestigated. People rioted; buildings burned down and sirens remained silent since so many cops, firemen and paramedics went absent without leave. Utilities were intermittent at best, and hospitals were bursting at the seams.Fuck it!

The army could do little, the Navy sunk by mutinies was no more effective then a fleet of rubber bathtub boats, the Air Force wanted to bomb something and the Marines were gung ho to make a frontal assault on the meteor.Fuck it!

By the time I left New Haven, Connecticut a week after the press conference bound for San Francisco, California, to spend my final days with my mother, a woman known to the world as Wanda Goodwill, all forms of commercial travel had degraded to the point where getting from point A to point B was iffy at best. Schedules were no longer sustained, maintenance was shoddy and so many bus drivers, pilots, air traffic controllers, flight attendants, railroad engineers, mechanics, baggage handlers had abandoned their jobs if you wished to go somewhere try going by car or walking. I opted for walking and crossed the country on foot after I scribbledFuck It! and a bad rendering of a hoisted middle finger on my apartment's front door.

With a dingy blue backpack on my shoulder, I wore out three pairs of boots moving east to west and seemed to have leaped back in time and traveled with all the dispatch of Chaucer's traveling band bearing toward Canterbury. Sometimes, I might luck out; catch a ride with someone fortunate enough to have gasoline for their car to travel a few miles or a horse drawn wagon going my way. Sometimes, if I was tired and cranky, I'd latch on to a merry band out to commit some form of mayhem before spaceship earth was knocked into the next galaxy.

I encountered lots of anxiety-ridden souls incapable of dealing with what was coming, lots of people with nasty dispositions and numerous children displeased about no costumes, masks or candy this Halloween.

I ended up sleeping in a dozen or so community libraries, in hay lofts, abandoned motels, numerous suburban homes, drain culverts, park tables, church pews and one or two empty tractor trailers sitting in roadside rest stops as relics of an already dead civilization.

A major plus in this impending holocaust, at least for me and many others, was the ripping away of sexual inhibitions or any worries about personal decorum. People everywhere fucked like proverbial bunny rabbits. The condemned raced to consume life feverishly and with no inhibition constraining them. Exhibitionism, public sexual encounters, men fucking women on lawns, women sucking men off in bus stops, women eating other women on roof tops and men banging other men wherever they happened to be at the moment.

I shared beds, meals and good times with women wanting fucking, women who indiscriminately sucked cock, enjoyed my inestimable skills in going down on them. They wished to go out with a bang. I encountered older women, young women, buxom farmer's daughters, hot-blooded wenches, one attractive parson's wife and a svelte nun I nuzzled and did more with in Nebraska. In one Indiana hamlet, with three other men, I fucked a woman named Gwen as her husband sat in a leather recliner stroking his cock egging us on. In Illinois, the town of Galesburg, I stumbled into a gang bang to end gang bangs. A night of such debauched overindulgence my seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of testosterone was running on nothing but fumes and my cock's boundless facility in pleasuring me and any and all partners was whimpering by morning.

In Colorado, a titian haired, doe-eyed bimbo named Bambi gave me incredible, toe curling head, and then served up some of the airiest pancakes I have eaten. As a coup d'grace, she poured warm maple syrup on my cock, sucked me off one final time. Her doughy husband, wearing a sailor's inverted white Dixie cup pitched back on his head, angry as hell, showed as I kissed petite, pug nosed Bambi on her hungry lips, came close to pumping me full of 12 gauge buckshot. Shaking, waving his shotgun, he climbed from his Ford pickup, stumbled, fired, missed. Me, one foot in the front yard, a patch of ground needing its grass cut and weeds yanked, the other on the oiled gravel road, ready to scoot west which I immediately did.

Every day moving farther west, I met more delicious and enticing women ready to be plucked and fucked. A goodly number of these single, married, divorced, widowed ladies wished to be sluts during these final days. Some ladies coveting me wanted nothing more then to experience a fattening meal of healthy, permanently erect, young cock. I did my best to please these sweet darlings, offer some small comfort before moving on a few more miles west, bedding down for another night. I was like Johnny Apple Seed merrily planting his sperm instead of apple seeds.

Passing through a small town in western Kansas, the sight of a Catholic Church, a Methodist house of worship, a Lutheran ministry shadowed by silos, I conjectured on how the Pope in Rome, and the local God Squad in this town and all the other little towns, were handling this end of the world brouhaha.

Not everyone was fucking and not much of anything else. People attended church, took advantage of what little time was available; made preparations to meet their Maker on the best possible terms. Humanity, its better half, marched forward to the ramparts, watched, waited for the end of the world, refused to give up hope for a last minute reprieve.

I imagined a stereotypical fair haired little boy

sitting next to his worried looking father, the two of them

looking into the night sky at the quickly closing meteor and the boy saying, "Daddy is Superman out there somewhere? He can save us can't he?"

Superman was nowhere to be seen and as time went by more people decided to do what they wanted to do. This did not include paying taxes, saving any money for a rainy day, punching a time clock, staying away from other men's wives or resisting other women's husbands. Rape and pillage became common.

This deadly meteor with its flaming tail seemed to mock us as it approached, make each and every man, woman and child feel no more significant then a colony of gnats. The specter of impending disaster transformed the world into one great Looney bin, a crazy monkey house. Roving bands of rowdies were everywhere. Inmates in insane asylums broke out in groups. The most dangerous criminals, too numerous to be controlled by too few guards, wondered out of maximum security prisons and lay waste to the land. Dead bodies lay bloated in ditches and alleys, in parks and playgrounds. Dead bodies were everywhere. You saw either a dead body or someone fucking.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode their steeds in every country. Right behind them the spirits of free love and every form of sexual gluttony followed.

Now, I was finally on Center Street in San Francisco. This being San Francisco, sexual excess was even more prevalent here then anywhere else. Not fifteen feet to my left, a white Ford van had stopped in the center of the street. Its roof swathed in satellite dishes and omni directional antennas, circled blackSEVENSimprinted on van's sides; all the doors flung open, headlight beams peering down the street, the motor running. No one cared about smog or greenhouse overheating anymore. In the back of the van, amidst the consoles and screens and buttons linking the vehicle to the world and beyond, a police officer fucked a highly respected blond news anchor acknowledged for her chiseled, Nordic beauty and celebrated for coltish long legs. Simultaneously, she sucked off her favorite cameraman, the one who helped her win the Peabody two years ago. A guy living rough on the streets, shuffling past on his way to a homeless shelter, gave her ass his under appreciated, infrequently used cock. Loud voices, the anchorwoman's creamy ass nearly out the doors and I saw the whole show from front row center since the van's rear end faced me and street lamps lit the absurd production in white glare.

To my right, a rent to own store with nothing in it left to rent, a new silver Mercedes coupe had stopped, its front wheels resting up on the sidewalk. The driver, gray haired, wild-eyed, an Episcopal minister in a white clerical collar, or hell maybe he was a Catholic priest, was out of the car, in a doorway butt fucking a young fellow wearing soiled argyle socks and a wafer thin wrist watch.

In the shadow of a doorway this side of the street a freaked out fleshy looking man in a tailored suit and buffed Florsheims pounded the pussy of a woman wearing an ugly red wig. Her spectacularly fleshy figure was too rotund and her elephantine legs too ghastly looking to effect any sexual titillation to her short tight black skirt and equally stretched out top. At least that was the effect on me.

"Give me some hot stuff," I heard the woman say.

I turned my head away and felt ashamed. Even the corpulent wanted and needed loving.

Just on this short stretch of street the sex, violence and hopelessness was a little more then in the other places I had passed through.

Yesterday, today, tomorrow in houses, apartments, condominiums, huts, villas, flats, high rises, and trailer parks all over the world people fucked. Who cared whether someone was married or not? Who cared about fidelity?Fuck it!

In the midst of all this frenzied coupling taking place across the world, babies were being made. Unfortunately such new life conceived in the heat of the moment or conditions nearer rape had no chance of coming to term, let alone being born.Fuck it!

If Mom had only remained in Ohio, not here on the lip of the Pacific, the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge in her backyard. Such precious time expended just getting here. Geography was working against me--us. During my long march crossing the plains, deserts and mountain ranges, referring to my worn map, it felt hopeless at times. She might as well be on Mars and I was no Martian. I kept going.

Love, lust, wickedness, peccadillo, gratifying my biological imperative, the need to get laid by the greatest pleasure giver in the world, my sexually astute mother, kept me motivated through my three thousand miles trek. All our moments together, every time I stuck my cock in one of her orifices, each time I sucked a nipple on one of huge breasts in the next sixty days would make every blister, every inconvenience, and every risk taken well worth their cost.

Painfully shy in childhood, awkward, a tinny falsetto voice and braces on my teeth plagued me no end. Mom spoiled me, gave me what I wanted and when I was old enough, took what she desired. In return, I gave her gifts of delicate, elaborately patterned white milk glass or cheap lilac perfume for Christmas, Mother's day, as a birthday tribute. Later, I was able to give her much more.

Milk glass, flowery perfume and the turmoil of childhood and adolescence marked my passage to maturity. I grew to be charming, a good natured chap, something of a rogue, a roué experienced in the tawdry ways of the world. The classic bad boy with the killer smile, too many tattoos and if truth is told, too much vanity and a surfeit of bravado, a feature common to my family.

I had reached Center Street shortly after dark on a Wednesday night. I needed a shave and a shower; my dogs yelped, ached across their length and breadth and my blisters layered on blisters hurt like hell. A black watch cap perched above my ears, I wore a faded blue denim shirt and blue jeans held in place with a gold studded black leather belt, its buckle 14 carat gold. Early on, a grateful blond seamstress in Pennsylvania coal country had given me the ribbon of tooled. With no gut to speak of on this lean, wiry frame of mine, the snazzy belt had plenty of holes for expansion. My leather bomber jacket, brown, glossy, supple and fleece lined, was zippered all the way up my chest to keep out the blustery wind barreling down the street.

Two stale jam filled, powder sugar coated donuts, a Hershey candy bar and a two Styrofoam cups of bitter black coffee for breakfast this morning and now well past lunch and dinner, I was famished; the odor of curry from an Indian restaurant, tangy barbecue from another greasy spoon tickled my fancy for spice and lean red meat laved with Smoke House BBQ sauce. Hunger registered as rolling thunder in my gut. I ignored this alimentary rumbling, too excited, so near Wanda, my buxom mother for the first time in months. Licentious memories of our indulgent days and dizzying nights engaging in the pleasures of the flesh surged through me as I waited for her to show across the street in front of the run down office building at 325 Center Street.

In a letter sent to me in New Haven, Mom wrote in explicit and erotic detail of her new avocation on Wednesdays evenings in this building.

In this derelict part of town, standing under an orange plastic awning, I watched the four-story, mullion-windowed office building. Silent as a tomb, it predated the 1906 earthquake and its pitted butter-yellow limestone was lost in murky shadows save for a brilliant ring of radiance on the fourth floor and harsh no-nonsense lighting focusing along the building's face.

I looked at my battered wrist watch. How long until Wanda Goodwill/Bethany Johnson/Mom was stood naked next to her bed on those Lucite stiletto heels I so dearly loved? Me, faithful son perched on the side of that selfsame bed already a muddled mess of sheets from our first rough, no holds barred, primal fucking, my hands touching her calloused knees, stroking her stocking clad thighs, caressing her firm breasts, her bodacious buns shining like alabaster and flaring from under the red thong. I'd intimate a finger into her gash and then soundly fuck her again, and again and again. Soon, very soon reality would displace fantasy in our home away from home.

I smiled, thinking of Mom and her randy expertise, how much she taught me, how much I wanted her.

"Let's get out of here and go home and fuck," she'd say when she strolled out of the building and saw me. It was quite possible when she did see me I'd be fending off someone trying to fuck me. No doubt, a gentleman would be escorting her down the steps. He'd suddenly look quite crest fallen seeing me. Wanda, my dear mother, releasing his hand with emotionless dispatch, he'd really go into a tailspin. To add insult to his injury she'd make no notice of him as he stumbled away in the dark saying," damn it to hell." Wanda concentrating on me, the prodigal son, no longer worried about this man, his need to get into her pants or her need to feel his cock inside her. Not with me standing there expressing my need in my pants.

Behind me the darkened pawn shop did not seem so utterly bleak nor did the street, the state, the nation, the world. Fear, anger at my slow pace getting here, gloomy thoughts about the world's end quickly dissipated. Erotic thoughts, the anticipation of physical release bedding Ava Goodwill, my mother, sent shivers of thrills through my 20 year old body.

This Momma's boy was home. Home to stay.

Long before the public learned of the meteor's human species killing effects on CNN, the BBC and Fox News, long before the firstFuck it! was written on the side of a barn, a subway car or a sidewalk, Wanda was coming here. Every Wednesday night for the past seven or eight months, a yellow cab, the driver, usually a lean Arab fellow, no doubt stupidly smiling behind his steering wheel, happily sated by Wanda's mouth in lieu of payment, dropped her in front of a flight of worn down steps flanked by lamp lit stone posts.

Ten minutes later a blue taxi not a yellow one weaved around the cars parked in the middle of the street and people fucking under a stop light, stopped near the office building and mother, the mother I craved so much was in the taxi. I could not see the driver, but I imagined he was a happy camper.

Wanda's burnt toffee and bright copper colored hair was cut short. She slid from the car; the front seat naturally, said something indistinct to the driver who no doubt was babbling happily. She wore cherry red five inch pumps. Something silvery glittered on her left ankle. Yes, it was the anklet Dad purchased at Tiffany's for her. From her black clutch bag, she removed a tissue, dabbed her red painted lips, walked away without a backward glance. Under the glare from the nearby street lamp, the lower third of her heaven sent boobs escaped confinement of a shimmering red silk top. Her pants looked so tight they might have been sprayed on. Her posture placed considerable front loading on her tits, her gait a street walker's seasoned one. Totally oblivious to the happenings on this crazy street, If she walked too far, she surely would be arrested for solicitation or gang raped there on the litter strewn sidewalk.

No, that was not to happen. Law and order were on vacation, crime and anarchy ruled. No one worried about solicitation charges and gang rape was de rigueur behavior.

The building she approached, the one I had been looking at so intently, clearly needed some good sand blasting, its windows professionally cleaned, and the pigeon shit crust removed from the roof's gargoyle sentinels. Earlier, I had looked inside the lobby. Four millennia of grime and yellow wax covered the floor's pitted parquet. The vestibule reeking of odors best left undetermined was decorated with potted plastic plants, seedy sofas and the ghostly remnants of a prehistoric news and tobacco stand closed since Lindy flew the Atlantic.