la puta

La Puta

I know it is him before I pick up the phone.

"Bret," he says, "you cannot just take off like this, without me! You are part of my life!"

"Paul," I say. "Just a few days. I need a few days to myself! I've told you, over and over!"

"There's another!" he accuses.

"There's always another-another train, another Star Wars, another fucking Brewers season! Look it. I am worked to death here at UW. I have two papers about to be published. Two grad classes. A doctoral thesis to evaluate. You're whining like a bitch in heat. I just fucking need to get away. Be alone. Eat alone. Drink alone. Watch old Randolph Scott movies--alone! Snorkel. Eat pollo de mole. Read a Roan Barrow novel or two!"

"And you can't do that with me?" Paul yells.

"The key fucking word, Paul, is ALONE!" I slam the phone down, regret it, throw my hands up in a "fuck it" gesture. Call him back. No answer. Call him back again. No answer. How many different ways are there to say "fuck it" with your hands?

I make some calls and book a flight to Cabo San Lucas. Order the full deal. Me and the Yellow Tangs are just going to swim with our thoughts. Maybe I'll steal theirs. Probably better off that way.

At the airport, a security guard becomes curious that my only luggage is my briefcase, which, when she opens it, contains some CDs, a CD player, half a sandwich, some student papers, a container of AnalEaze, and anal beads. "Hemorrhoids?" she asks, looking at the jar. "They can be murder on a plane!" Holding up the beads, she inquires, "This some kind of rosary?" Yeah, the short version, I explain. I try tell her there was a sudden death in the family. "So, you have family in Baja, Mexico, Mr. Johnson?" I am asked. "Please come with me," the guard says, leading me into a room. I am told they want to strip search me. I don't think I am being offered a choice. The guard leaves and a male guard replaces her. This is humiliating. "Don't forget my ass," I say, in my best fem voice and wiggle. I get a nightstick halfway up my hole. "Was that supposed to hurt?" He's satisfied and lets me go.

In the air, I finally begin to relax. I avoid the airline's music and go for my own. Aerosmith or Smashing Pumpkins is too rocking for now; I want to relax. Yes, Bach's Chaconne transcribed by Segovia for guitar. If Bach had known a modern guitar, he would have written this piece for that perfect instrument, instead of violin! Angels enter my ears. When we land, I am jarred by the touchdown. The music is gone, but not the melody. It is grace, of which I have precious little.

Paul is fretting in Madison out of lust and jealousy, and I walk into light and heat poured from the sun. My sunglasses are useless. I hire a jitney cab and we weave through the town. I stop frequently and visit the market. I buy tropical pants, a straw hat, pajamas, colorful shirts, underwear, deodorant. I like foreign money. Different colors, different faces. Who the hell was Nezahualcoyote and how do you pronounce that! It is Monopoly money.

I nap peacefully in my room, the surf hypnotizing me. I awake refreshed. I suddenly no longer want to be alone. Before I head for dinner at El Pescador, I stand on the beach and watch the sun set, that flash of green igniting the sky as it just disappears below the earth's line.

"It never ceases to amaze me," a voice next to me says. "You don't always see it. I guess the amazement comes from the surprise!" I turn.

"Excusez-moi! My name is Phillipe! I hope I didn't startle you."

"Buenas noches, Phillipe. I'm Bret." We shake hands. He is a handsome black man from Trinidad, alone on holiday, he says. He comes for the snorkeling. "There are days, my friend, you can see up to thirty meters in the crystal water!" I want his snorkel in my mouth, suddenly lusting for him. We begin to walk the beach and talk about...whatever.

About 200 yards from where we met, Phillipe turns to me. "You want to suck me, Bret, don't you? I can tell. You want to drop on your knees right now and suck my cock." How the fuck does he know! "I would like that!" he says. "I would like to dump a load in you!"

I'm on my knees instantly. I feel his almost-hard cock through his flimsy muslin pants. I pull them down and can make out in the increasing dusk his large fucking python of a cock. Oh, Lord, I'll never get half of it down my throat! But I am going to try!

I suck him lightly for a few seconds, but he grabs my head and pumps deep into my mouth. I gag a little, but his isn't the first horsecock I've sucked! I let him pump a while and then move to his balls. They're fucking unripe coconuts! Smooth and heavy. I spend time with each one, giving them a good lick and suck. Phillipe moans. Backlit by the full moon, he throws his head back and groans loudly. Back on his cock, I bob my head, slurp his hood, pull his hips to get as much of his hot black meat down my throat as I can. I must breathe quickly through my nose, since none can enter my mouth.

"Bret, you are the first American cocksucker I've met who knows what the fuck to do with my cock! Yes, Bret, lick me like candy! Oooh, you get so much of me down your throat! I love getting deep-throat. My cock likes to pulse against your throat!"

He's pumping me hard and fast and I cannot wait to feel him cum. His balls tighten up. He thrusts hard and I hold him two-thirds of the way in, and he spurts cum, gushes cum, spurts harder and faster, gushes again...and again...I can barely keep swallowing fast enough. It is more cum, I think, than I have ever taken from one man. I try to catch my breath and swallow. I cough.

"I love you faggy queers! You love sucking on my big meat, don't you? You love taking it in your fuck-asses. You say I am splitting you in two and then you shove your asses back to take in more!" He laughs. This is starting to sound real fucking bad. "And then I cum in you, in your mouths and in your asses! I save up my seed to choke your throats and watch my jizz spill out of your assholes." He pauses. "And when I am done, I hate you faggy queers!" He slaps the side of my head hard and I fall to the sand. "Girly boys with the nice clothes and jewelry on their wrists and moussed hair. Looking for nigger and spick cocks to suck and get fucked with!" He kicks me above the stomach and I cannot breathe. I roll into a kneel and try to stand. "I wait for you bitches and you suck me. I fuck your hot asses." As I stand, I see bright metal. "Then, I fucking kill you!" I feel a sear of heat in my thigh and then another in my gut. Heat stabs at my arm and at my chest.

I fall and in the darkness surrounding me, all I feel is light and more flashes of heat. Bright light, the kind of light people who are dying say they see. I am sure I am dying. "Die the fucking cunt you want to be!" are the last words I think I shall ever hear.

***

I awake on my back in a hospital room. It is busy with white--nurses, curtains, doctors, sheets, gauze. It is busy with green machines taking my BP, pulse, cardiogram. It is busy with dripping-glass and rubber vials connect to my arm and drip and drip and drip. It is busy with healing and enfermeras giggling about last night's dates and the size of their boyfriends' cocks. Lust.

I can see with only one eye. Patches of gauze and tape cover me--arms, legs, torso. I am incredibly thirsty. An enfermera notices me stirring and comes to my bed. She is so dark in her white. Dark as a beach where I thought I had died.

"Agua" is all I can cough. She pours some into a plastic cup with a straw and places the straw to my lips. I suck on it eagerly and start to laugh. I flash on old cartoons and half expect the water to spurt out from the holes in my body, but the pain from raising my head erases my joke.

A doctor comes in and examines me, but he speaks no English. He unwraps bandages, looks, nods, moves to the next. He is gentle. He says "Bueno!" and leaves. A police officer replaces him. He needs to ask me questions. His English is good. I learn he lived in Chicago for a while. "Too fucking cold half the fucking year!" he grunts. "Loved watching Sammy Sosa hop at home plate at Wrigley! But too fucking cold!"

I have been stabbed or slashed 17 times. The worst is a punctured lung. Phillipe had used a pen knife. His attack itself was not meant to kill me. I was to bleed to death-like the others.

"Is this the man?" the officer asks, showing me a photograph.. I nod yes. Phillipe has already been arrested and charged with 3 murders. I am told the killer has been called the "Fairy Phantom." All his victims were gay, bleeding to death on various beaches, leaching blood into sand, drop by drop, creating crimson tidal pools of blood, because they like men, because they offered their bodies to another man so he could enjoy them, not knowing he would dream in his room about their red life soaking into the white beach. I thought I was giving head. I was sucking awake the anger in a sick-fuck mind. I was also sodomized. "Oh, one more thing, Mr. Johnson," the officer's face is grave. "Phillipe has AIDS.

I sleep.

I am in a room on a metal table. A woman, wearing a mask, gloves, and a head wrap, stands over me. She is speaking into a microphone. I see her breaths form little clouds of snow. She is removing organs from me. "Liver--hardened from lust. Kidneys-- failed from lust. Stomach--cancerous with semen from lust. Lungs-clogged with the ashy residue of lust." On and on.

I stand before Paul, wrapped in gauze like the undead in The Mummy. Semen seeps from my wounds. He is screaming at me, and weeping. I cannot hold him or tell him I am sorry. He takes my guitar and smashes it against the wall. "You're fucking alone as all hell now! Fuck you! You ain't got a fucking another!"

I am in my parents' living room, sitting on their sofa. I am covered with open sores. They ask what happened to my eyes. They want to embrace me but they know I am already dead. My father hands me flowers. "Here, Son, you know. For the wake," he says.

I lay atop Sherrie, my only wife. I am fucking her but she does not want me to. She asks me to stop and I pound all the harder into her. I pull out and spray cum on her face and breasts. I feel like a man.

I sit next to Scott in his bed. We're 14. "Wanna jack each other off?" I ask.

My mind shuts down. The god Morphine.

When I am released, some 5 days later, I walk the streets of Cabo San Lucas. I do not notice the men or the women. I am simply glad to walk, I think. The undead. I will fly back to Madison tomorrow. Everything is different, including the sun. The light defines more. The night defines more.

The puta are everywhere. I barely hear their offers. It is all peddling lust, quenched for so many pesos, only to return like a stab wound when the morphine wears off. I think I want to eat but I do not think too well lately. I thought I was sucking a nice cock a few days ago.

I am looking down and notice the leather boots on one puta. They are sexy but worn. Licked by too many men and the soles trodden upon the brick streets of San Lucas. I follow them up her body. She wears a leather trench coat, barely covering her half-nakedness. I sense she is my sister and my brother. I feel my wounds are visible; hers are not. I look into her eyes; she looks away. Not the way of a whore. I hate her. She is lust, as I was and can be. I want to berate her. Humiliate her. She is so pretty. Inwardly fragile. I come up to her and raise her head to look at me.

"I want you for the night," I say quietly. She says I cannot afford that. I say I can. She says a figure. I say I can. She says, "Si! Show me your money." I display a wad of pesos. "What will you want me to do?" she asks, as if it mattered. "Have dinner with me. Drink Rioja. Help me smile." She looks as though I just spoke to her in Mandarin. If I had asked her to dance on my back with her boots and urinate on me, shit her dinner on me, then she would have understood. It is what men ask a puta to do. I embrace her and smell her shampoo. I hug. She hugs back, a little. My wounds shoot flashes of light through me, but being in her arms is the best I have felt in weeks...months...years, maybe.

She is Elena. "Elena Garay Ramírez de Arroyo," the R's rolling from her mouth like sparks off a welder's torch. Something about her father is Garay, her mother is Ramirez, a husband way back Arroyo. "My apellido is as long as I am tall," she says with a smile. I laugh. It hurts good to laugh. The maitre d' comes to our table and asks us to please leave. "La mujer es una puta!" he says with urgency. I quietly tell him to fuck off and serve our vina, por favor, ass-fucking-hole! Elena's eyes glisten like black agate. I don't think I have ever found a woman more attractive.

She eats everything on her plate and orders two desserts. I notice whipped cream on her lips and lust reels up in me. I clench my fist and shout no to myself. Will it never leave? After espresso and cognac, she asks about my bandages. I tell her about Phillipe but leave out the part of sucking him off. Then I tell her the part about sucking him off. Why lie to a whore? Who would understand better? We walk back to my room, arm in arm. As soon as we enter, she kisses me and licks my neck, grabs at my crotch. I get hard and want to fuck her. I bought her dinner, showed her kindness, so now I can fuck her. "You are so nice and hard!" she says. "Let me slut-suck you! Drain your cum!"

The first day in the hospital, I could not drink enough water. The nurses answered my calls, but they were becoming irritated. "Agua, por favor!" I would yell. "Senor, there is no more room for water," a nurse at one point told me. "Look at your belly!" I looked down and my stomach was distended as though I were pregnant. My body had been satisfied, but my mind lusted for more water. Never enough. Swallow and thirst, swallow and thirst. "It is what you want but not what you need, Senor," she whispered. "Let go of your thirst. Give it to an angel and she will fly away with it!"

Elena kneels and unzips my pants and I feel her warm mouth suck me into her and she feels oh, so good and pretty, and I want to get hard and fuck her face and cum in it and on it, watch my jizz drip off her chin and onto her breasts, the breasts of Elena Garay Ramirez de Arroyo. "Elena," I say, "no. Maybe later. You look tired. I am tired. Take a bath. I just need to relax." I hand her pajamas and she seems totally confused. "You paid for the night," she says, uncomprehending. "Yes!" I shout at her. "I paid for the fucking night. You are mine for the night. To do whatever I say!" I am frightening her, this woman who offers her cunt and mouth and ass for pesos. "Take a bath. Soak. Then join me in bed." She understands the last sentence, walks into the bathroom, closes the door.

I fall face down onto the bed. I do not believe in angels, any of that shit. Crosses. Souls. Heaven. El Papa. People who pray on Sundays for fear of hell and fuck secretaries first thing Monday morning and cheat on their taxes because the images of hell from the day before are forgotten. It is all fucking lust. For money, power, sex. Never quenched. What they want but do not need. I ask an angel to fly away with my lust. "Do not ever return with it," I pray. It can't fucking hurt.

I sit up on the bed as Elena emerges from the bathroom, wearing only the pajama bottoms. I stand and walk to her, her breasts and lips and eyes pulling me to her. I touch her nipples, so firm and erect, her skin so olive-smooth and silky and warm. I say, "Put this on too" and hand her the top. Lust has left--or I am too fucking tired. She gets into bed, and I cover her. She is still confused and there is nothing I can explain. "Sueno, mi angel."

I take a bath. The soaking softens the scabs and they pull less when I move. I lie next to her atop the covers and sleep. I awaken to her kiss. "Fuck me," she says. "Why would you want me to do that to you?" I ask. "Because you paid for it and that is what a puta does."

I pull the covers off her. She is so stunningly beautiful I want to cry. I begin to kiss her body. Her smell is so clean and feminine. When I reach her breasts, she holds my head to them and moans. I suck them gently. I kiss her shoulders, moving to her neck, behind her ears, cupping her entire body to me. She moves my hand to her cunt, but I resist. I kiss her mouth and her lush lips cover mine. I kiss her nose and almond eyes, her forehead, her cheekbones, move past her shoulders and down each arm. I kiss each knuckle on each hand. Her skin flutters when I kiss her stomach, her throat groans as I kiss her hips, inside her thighs, down to her knees. I blow on the bottom of her feet and she giggles but does not move. I kiss her feet, each toe. I want to take the whoreness from her, from me, and give it to angels. Fly away.

I return to her head and kiss her lips again. She sighs, smiles, holds my head to her. "Are you an angel from God?" Elena asks. "Si, of course!" I say, smiling. "Did you not know that God sent me to you last night?"

I have lost my lust, for today. It is Sunday, and I am with Elena Garay Ramirez de Arroyo.