Three Kings of the Orient

Chapter 13 – Three Kings of the Orient

Carson relieved himself against one of the support columns beneath the bridge. As he shook himself clean he heard laughter coming from the direction of the river. It was an amoral sound. There was no warmth in it. No assurance that it cared whether a man lived or died. It frightened Carson with its indifference. It was the second time that day he felt afraid. He had few resources to protect himself anymore, to insulate him from a level of meanness in the world that money had always allowed him to keep away. All the usual mechanisms he’d ever employed for harboring his life from peril were lost to him. Now everything rested upon gutter wiliness or brute physical strength. Until he found his way out of this wretched place he had to decipher the source of his fear and wrestle with it to see what it contained or revealed. He knew he would perish if he ran.

He moved deeper in toward the river. He followed the sound as though it promised something unexceptional but was nonetheless necessary to confront, if only to penetrate to the absurd core of a false and inflated terror. Ahead of him he could see the tunnel that led down to the flood channel that was the L.A. River, or what constituted that alleged body of water. The liquid in the dribbly tributary measured several inches deep, as though it might have seeped through a fissure in its concrete bottom, as though it were trying to make a statement, a feeble one, that it really was a river, not a cement culvert constructed to protect property in the event of heavy rains, a trough for over-stressed storm drains choked with the effluvium of petroleum byproducts, spitting the coagulant mass of crud and slop out to a force-fed sea, which offered back its gagging protest in the form of saltwater fish sparkling with mercury and PCB’s, ailing fish caught by the poor Mexicans on the Santa Monica pier and served hot and radioactive to the entire familia, garnished with the assurance of the federal government that toxic levels were well under the threshold of x parts per million, quite safe to eat, certainly so for illegal immigrants. Pass the mole, brother, and dig in.

Approaching Carson from the other direction, appearing suddenly from behind one of the massive columns that supported the bridge, was a young Asian male in platform high heels. He was tall and skinny and snug tight in white Spandex hip huggers and a matching white midriff tee shirt. His outfit clung to him like a thin filament binding the sweet meat of a ripe peach, his genitals straining in a puffed up heap between his thighs, and his nipples pressing out hard against the light synthetic fabric. The hair on the youth’s head was styled in a Beatle mop cut and died a yellow maize. His eyebrows were cleanly plucked and penciled in with long dark strokes. His lips were colored a highly glossed pink. He was an apparition, a shade, a lean and distraught walking phallus. The signifying aspects of his form declared him to be all testosterone and anal lube, a lost boy who looked trapped and unhappy in his predilection, a figure from a Hollywood version of the Inferno, whose crime was his belief in personal freedom, his punishment an unrelieved and torturous concupiscence. When they passed one another, Carson experienced an uncomfortable sensation of desire and repugnance. The boy’s wantonness was almost feminine in nature, as though his desire to have his orifices filled was biologically necessary. The phallus-boy eyed him, but with passive detachment, coy yet indifferent, as though Carson could fuck him or not, what difference did it make? He continued past Carson, swaying his hips in an exaggerated sexual motion.

Up ahead, where the tunnel made its descent to the river, Carson could see three elderly black men seated in a circle. One was plunked down in an upholstered seat from an old Chevy Camaro. The second was lying on cushions and blankets piled on the inside of a discarded baby’s playpen. The third had situated himself in a large shipping crate, which enfolded him like an uninspired, jerry-rigged sarcophagus fitted out with tattered bedding and old crumpled newspapers. The tires from the cars on the bridge overhead keep up a steady buzz from their motion across the grooves of the pavement, filling the shadowy cavern below with an insistent, zip-pulsing drone.

The men were laughing at some inscrutable joke. Their faces were dark and cracked like black walnuts, ancient, too, but the eyes shone lively. European blood had made no inroads in this circle, their genes neither colonized nor distilled. They looked at Carson with amusement, as though it was highly entertaining to observe a white man dressed in khakis and a polo shirt and tasseled loafers wandering around amongst the garbage beneath the 6^th Street bridge. They whispered to one another and laughed again at something comical meant only for themselves. Carson looked a long time at their faces. He found in them none of the malice and acrimony he’d been accustomed to encountering from African Americans. But neither was there any easy comfort. But they didn’t turn in among themselves as a way of ignoring Carson. Their bemused expressions told him he was an odd sight, but no more peculiar than some life form that had lost its way heading to a shopping mall or an all-you-can-eat buffet.  One white man was not a special object of interest. As foragers, these men necessarily had strange lives. They saw the extremes mostly, not the fat middle of things that generally burped its way by, settling into a gummy inertia. By choice or not, the strange was what they’d come to accept. Carson was strange, and way out of his usual orbit, and that’s exactly how they were taking him, like an animal strayed from its pasture.

“Oh, look,” said the one in the Camaro seat, “man got lost on his way to the golf course. Jis up there on the next block, sir. You can’t miss it. It right next to the Office for General Relief. Fact, you probably get yourself a cheap caddy there on your swing by.”

“Long as you pay in crack, you find plenty of caddies, man,” laughed the man in the plywood coffin.

“What’s he got do with a caddy, man,” said the one who sat in the playpen. “He got no clubs to play wid. What’s that, invisible golf? Man must be high hisself. Careful where you step. You wanna trade for them shoes, man? I got some real fine specimens ‘o vintage polyestuh slacks. Yo’ size, too. Only been worn by five other people, so’s they broken in real nice. C’mon now, I know’s you down here for a bargain.”

The three men laughed together. The sound rose up like a fountain, splashing off the underside of the bridge and hanging there above them all as a kind of light, liquid shield over their heads, under which they could take some cover. The laughter bound them up together while the tires and the machines gorged the road on top, clamping down and poking the laughter with its intransigence.

“Gentlemen,” Carson started, in an upbeat manner, trying to make himself coincide with what he read as the general disposition of the ones assembled. “I’m wonderin’ if you can help me out.”

“Sorry, I gave at the office,” said the first man, adjusting himself in the driver’s seat before strapping the seat belt around him.

“I reached my quota, son,” answered the one in the crate. “Each day I start out with five dollars worth of quarters in my pocket, and I gives one of dem quarters to any man who ask. You just got here ‘bout ten minutes too late. I gave the last one to a funny lookin’ man with a peg leg, said his ship went down and he’s all washed up. But you come on by tomorrow, little bit earlier, and I’ll give you two quarters, jus’ as soon as I get back from the bank.”

“Damn, that’s generous ‘o you Ten Brawl,” said the playpen squatter. “Ain’t like you to be so generous.”

“It’s cuz the way my man here is dressed,” answered Ten Brawl. “I appreciates a man of refinement and impeccables. I know that he gonna take my four bits and spend it wisely, too; ain’t gonna waste it on vice and corruption.”

“How you know that?”

“Cuz man got an honest face.”

“Hah!,” said the man in the driver’s seat. “If a face could tell a man’s fortune, what the hell am I doin’ sittin’ here with you fools.”

“Cuz you an ugly son of bitch,” shouted the man in the playpen.

“Only one thing you can rely on less than a man’s opinion of his own self,” said Ten Brawl.

“What’s that?”

“Gimme a dollar, Tatuh Pie, an’ I’ll tell you.”

“I’ll owe it to you.”

“Fuck you will. ‘Sides, e’en you had all the money in the world, Tatuh Pie, you couldn’t buy yo’self a lick of sense no how.”

“What good is sense when you ain’t got the money to put it in motion,” the driver asked. “First come instinct. If you don’t got de dough then you gotta go on instinct. Man survivin’ got no luxury time for good sense. You don’t need it to get outta the rain or the cold. When you hungry, yo’ belly tell you that. Don’t need no good sense to eat. Dis ain’t Africa. Food here is everywhere. Can’t give it away fast enough. Dumpster at McDonald’s feed an army. Myself, I live on Chicken McNuggets. What sense you need when yo’ nose tell you it right der in that dumpster, only a few hours old?”

“Sense tell you that shit gonna kill yo’ fat ass one day, Bison Butt,” laughed Ten Brawl.

“O’ kill us, one o’ the other, with them stanky grease farts you be layin’ on us all day,” added Tatuh Pie.

“Ha, ha,” laughed Bison Butt, shifting himself in the car seat. “That there’s my natural defense mechanism, my chemical weapon, keep you from rollin’ me in my sleep. Try and shake me down and I’ll bust you with a big ol’ mushroom cloud o’ eau de dead chicken.”

“Roll you in yo’ sleep?” Ten Brawl shook his head in disbelief. “Ain’t no goddamn crowbar big enough to do the job. ‘Sides, what you got that me an’ Tatuh Pie e’en want? Sure ain’t yo’ good looks, on account yo’ mamma sold dem to the devil so’s yo big ass wouldn’t bust  ‘er open when she pushed yo’ ugly self out in the world.”

“Leave my mamma outta this,” grinned Bison Butt, looking slightly awkward at the mention of his mother, “she taken enough abuse in life ‘thout you two lump heads pourin’ scorn down on the poor woman, rest her soul.”

“No offense meant, brother,” said Tatuh Pie.

“That’s right,” said Ten Brawl. “You know we’s just ridin’ you.”

“None taken, none taken,” said Bison Butt, looking wistful.

The three men became quiet for a moment, gazing at the ground in the center of their circle. They seemed to have forgotten Carson was still there until he spoke up again.

“I’m not asking for money,” he said, then stopped.

The three men looked at Carson, waiting for him to continue, to state his business. Something inside Carson caught him up, arrested his voice. He was taken over by a deep and immense sadness. It disarmed him, overpowering his normal defense against cheap emotion, against any emotion not necessary for maintaining the constant equilibrium required to keep the world from defeating him, for persevering in his vigilance against all the threats and pitfalls of existence that wished to take him down, to crush him and take away everything he’d hunted down, killed or gathered, in the sense of the accomplishments or objects he arrayed around himself and supported his concept of the man Carson. And that was all gone. Whom was he kidding? He was awash in this sudden sadness because he was realizing for the first time that the old concept, the old, familiar idea of Carson the man had been killed, and for him to continue acting as though he were still alive was a grand deceit. To pretend that this was just a minor setback, was a dire exercise in delusion. Here he was in a toxic dumping ground strewn with garbage, face to face with three homeless black men who looked at him in his obsolete costume of success and, just by the looks on their faces, he knew they were thinking, ‘who the fuck are you? Where the fuck do you think you are, man? Look around you. Look where you are. Do you get it? You are shit. Don’t try to dress up your shit. You are an impostor. You are a clown. You make us laugh.’

But the old concept was all he’d ever had, all he could ever remember having. Without that he was nothing, and he could not cope with that; there was nowhere to go with that. It was zero. A man had to subscribe to something, to call himself something, to rely on what had carried him. The recognition that he had failed, that the old way of being had failed, was the source of the sadness. In his mind, the logical outcome to letting in the sadness was total surrender, a complete letting go, and his character would not allow that. That was like walking off a cliff in a dream and knowing he would land safely. Carson couldn’t trust like that. Trust in what? In whom? Who was there to catch him? There was a wide selection to choose from, from God, religion of some kind, some other philosophy of living, another construct through which a human could find some meaning. One was as a good as another. None of them vouchsafed a life free from pain or loss. It was enough to be sad, it was his human moment, but too indulge it by surrendering, by admitting his helplessness, Carson couldn’t permit that. It meant opening himself up to influences that, in his opinion, were no more trustworthy or safe than the manner in which he had lived until now. Yes, he’d fucked up. And now his sadness sickened him. It was self-pity. To indulge in that was true defeat. He was letting his emotions take control. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing but chaos there. No clear thinking. He couldn’t live that way. He was letting himself become doubtful. The sadness was a ruse, a connivance of the weak and the defeated. It was his moment of weakness, of recognizing himself in peril, admitting he was in a perilous condition, and hating himself for putting himself in that situation, and wanting to kill that self, to blame it, to not take responsibility for it, to fall down in exhaustion from the prospect of all the hard work that he needed to do to extricate himself from his circumstances. It was the response of a child wanting to fall into the lap of its mother to be soothed and reassured. This is what religion did for people when good mothers were no longer around to provide that service. To give them pat answers for the reasons things go wrong and to tell them that all will be made better if they follow plan XY and Z. He realized that his sadness came from desperation. It was desperation that caused people to let go, to drop off that cliff, to annihilate the self that was suffering, and to resurrect a new self with a new blueprint provided by religion or philosophy or psychoanalysis. It was to give oneself over to an authority, a parental figure, who would chastise a person for his human foibles and then forgive him and direct him how to redeem his mistakes. People wanted to be forgiven for being human and to find a system, a feelgood system to help them avoid making the mistakes that brought them so much pain. But it was all a crapshoot. Carson knew there was no escaping suffering and pain. That was certain. Everything beyond that was pure conjecture. A man had to set goals and know at the outset that he was going to take hits in getting there. Carson knew this truth instinctively; he’d been an athlete. Accept the pain as part of the game and try to avoid it as much as possible, but don’t let it deter you from the goal. If necessary, take a painkiller. He needed to remind himself that, at this time and place in his life, Giambone was to be his painkiller.

“I’m trying to locate someone,” Carson went on after pausing. “A friend. I heard he was downtown living on the street and in various shelters. I just thought you might have seen him at one time or another. Here’s his picture.” Carson showed them the old photo of him and Giambone.

“This you in the picture, too,” asked the man Bison Butt sitting in the Camaro seat.

“That’s me.” said Carson. “A few years back.”

“Damn, son; hardly recognize yo’ ass. What the fuck you done?”

“Lemme see that,” said Tatuh Pie. Bison Butt handed him the photo. Tatuh Pie and Ten Brawl studied it together.

“The good ol’ days,” said Ten Brawl, “before you got yo’ ass whupped. Let me see now, what is it? Gamblin’ or women?”

“Them’s the only two choices,” asked Tatuh Pie. “They’s the same thing in my book.”

“The man look beat up good but not down for the count, so I know it ain’t been drugs or alcohol,” said Ten Brawl. “It’s the schemin’ life, ain’t it, friend? Cooked over and well done. Too many brain cells firin’. Am I right? Chasin’ women and that big pot o’ cash that jes’ keep slippin’ through his fingers. Next time I’ll get it, he say, next time. Always tomorrow. Long line of tomorrows add up to nothin’, add up to one more day of sayin’ better luck next time ‘til all’s left to say is ‘better luck next life,’ and the next o’ kin gotta foot the bill to pay the preacher man, who, don’t you know it, never saw the man ‘til they brought ‘em in cold.”

“Ah, yes,” said Bison Butt, “the sportin’ life.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about it,” said Carson laughing. “What makes you such experts on character? You look at one little photo like it’s some kind of crystal ball.”

“No, sir,” said Ten Brawl. “We has got the before and the after. Don’t take no genius to draw the line between the two dots. We been sittin’ here under this bridge for a long time. We seen a lot of debris blow by.”

“And what would I say if I saw a picture of you twenty years ago,” Carson asked. “What kind of conclusions would I draw?”

“Me?” interrupted Tatuh Pie. “Why, handsome then, e’en handsomer now, that’s what.”

“Aged like fine wine,” said Bison Butt.

“You mean cured like a pork rind ‘s what you mean,” said Ten Brawl.

“Say what you want, Ten Brawl; say a lot o’ things, whate’r you like. Know more than one thing, though, an’ erectile dysfunction ain’t one of ‘em.”

Tatuh Pie broke up at that. Bison Butt smiled knowin’ he scored big. Ten Brawl shook his head and said, “Hah. Don’t see you sittin’ with no honey on yo’ lap, Big Daddy; you can take yo magic wand and wave it in the air cuz that’s about as much friction you gonna get outside o’ yo’ shabby pants. Talkin’ like he some kind o’ player o’ somethin’. You a fool, man.”

“Truth hurts, truth hurts, I know,” said Bison Butt, before letting out a loud robust laugh that was infectious. Ten Brawl laughed along this time. Carson, too, but somewhat uncomfortably.

“What the hell you laughin’ at, son,” said Ten Brawl, growing serious. “You think you’s a big man with a big pecker now. Yo’ turn’ll come. You’ll be sittin’ with that hot piece of ass actin’ like you’s some big fuckin’ stud, and she be spreadin’ her legs tellin’ you ‘do it, Daddy, do it now; what you waitin’ for, it sure is hot and juicy, what you waitin’ for,’ and there you be lookin’ like a fool with nothin’ but a noodle for a dick and that hot pussy’ll be lookin’ at you like ‘what you waitin’ for, fuck me now,’ and there you’ll be with yo’ sick noodle and ready to run and hide from that big juicy pussy like it was comin’ to get you and make you bare yo’ soul to the whole world, make you feel like you standin’ in front of the pope o’ the Queen o’ England with no clothes on and nothin’ but a teeny little pimple ‘tween yo’ legs to show for it.”

Everyone laughed then, except Carson, who smirked a little while shaking his head.

“Never had a problem like that,” said Carson defensively, “not even with my wife.”

“Not even with his wife, the man say,” said Tatuh Pie. “When was the last time you fucked yo’ wife, if you don’t mind me getting’ personal?”

Carson was forced to think about his wife and he resisted that.

“I could tell you anything,” he replied. “You’d only have my word. I can say anything I like. Besides, I do mind you getting personal. But just between you and me,” he added, “she never went hungry.”

“Oh,” said Ten Brawl, “so you the one that brought home the bacon then, uh huh? She didn’t have to do her shoppin’ at the butcher’s?”

“One thing to bring it home,” said Tatuh Pie, “but did you fry it in the skillet? Did you peel it off and let it simmer in the pan for a while so the whole house smelled up with the flavuh o’ it?”

“Ain’t no woman no how not gonna pay a visit to the butcher now and again to get herself a fresh cut,” said Bison Butt. “I don’t care what kind o’ chops you got, a woman gonna dine out on occasion, ‘less she got religion. E’en then she gonna think about it on those hot days in the church when the preacher hisself lookin’ less godlike and mo’ like a man who need a reason to redeem his po’ ass time to time. Know what I’m sayin’?”

“Ones that’s gots religion is the ones you gotta watch out for,” said Ten Brawl. “Them’s the ones runnin’ from temptation. More religious they is, the more juice they got locked up inside ‘em, and the longer they keep it locked up there the crazier they get with the Lord and the halleluiahs and amens til one day that juice is gonna start leakin’ out and ‘fore you know it they got to sin, just got to, cuz the pressure gone built up so goddamn much there’s nothin’ else to do. And that’s when they man come home early from work one day and find they Mrs. Holy Joe in bed gettin’ de-leaked by Mr.’s next door neighbor and good time fishin’ buddy. That’s how it go.”

“You soun’ like a man who done some de-leakin’ hisself,” laughed Tatuh Pie.

“If I do then I lived to tell ‘bout it.”

“Probably still fishin’ with the next do’ neighbor, too, you dawg.”

“It’s the service economy. I believe in the service economy. You know, it’s all about re-toolin’. You find yo’self a niche market, well you bettuh fill it brother befo’ someone else do. Can’t leave a po’ lady in distress, ‘specially one who’s confused about what she really need. Wouldn’t be gentlemanly of me, now would it?”

Carson wondered who was fucking Beth, now that he was out of the picture. He hadn’t wanted her for a long time, but the thought of someone else taking his theoretical place made him insecure, an illogical emotion, he thought, since he was powerless to affect anything in that realm. How to break free through the thicket of unresolved accusations, counter accusations, the old wounds, the accumulated misunderstandings, the misrepresentations and false depictions of character, the guilt, the defensive posturing to combat the guilt, all the words and acrid volleys of contempt, the sincere expressions of shock and grief, the howlings of fear and loneliness, the expressions of reactive autonomy and declarations of independence and abandonment, the rare glimpses of unconscious motivations that tumbled ungainly from the morass of conflicted thoughts and raw, bald, anger, and the unrelenting experience of an unjust and embattled existence tied to the horrifying apprehension of another human’s pathetic scrambling for love and understanding? The hardest thing was to live in the knowledge that he had taken considerable time to be with Beth in their marriage, only to come away from that alliance involuntarily saddled with ideas and opinions about himself that were entirely at odds with the image he carried around in his head. The picture that Beth was fond of painting of Carson was one that he could never identify, much to his consternation, and her frustration. And she resisted just as strongly the truths he was certain he had discovered about her, truths that to him were so apparent and so unquestionable. The tensions between them had always been there from the very start. Each of them was argumentative and defensive and insecure in their own ways, and those traits pummeled them both in a perfect symmetry of contempt when they were aroused. It was just that over the years they had become better at camouflaging their instincts for revenge, and choosing deliberately not to take offense at a remark when there was cause. Those decisions to abjure only postponed the inevitable and augmented the force by which the furies eventually were released. The results were debilitating, as though each of them had had to take the stand and suffer an ad hominem cross examination from a sweat-plagued, mean and narrow-minded district attorney out of Jim Crow Mississippi, then stepping next into a boxing ring for twelve rounds with a feral heavyweight armed with a room temperature I.Q. and permission to bite.

Maculate Conception

Chapter 12 – Maculate Conception

They were a tiny clump of pustules. Giambone saw them on the head of his penis one morning as he combed the hairs of his pubic region, a personal grooming ritual he conducted after his daily shower. Had he been 13 years old, the translucent bubbles would have been sure proof of God’s wrath for drawing water from his fledgling testicles and making a gift of it to his young and randy stepmother. But with age God’s role had mellowed and become more nebulous. These sores had a more mundane genesis and it wasn’t poison oak. The viral colony at the tip of his genitals fit the description of a sex wound. No sooner had he given himself over to love than it seemed he was infected with the seeds of its disintegration.

After months of badgering by Giambone, Delilah admitted to a possibility – that she may have given him the genital warts. It was difficult for them to recover from this admission. For her part, she had grown resentful over Giambone’s persistent accusation that she had infected him, and that she had done so with reckless and selfish disregard. It seemed he introduced the subject whenever they argued. Behind the anger and his railing against her cruelty, she saw an implication lodged deeper in his grievance. It was that she possessed an ambiguous moral nature.

When they fought he made her feel that having a past, any kind of past, was a stain upon her, simply because that past was independent of his control.

“There’s no need to go out anymore,” he told her, “all the love in the world is right here.”

“That’s nice, Sweetie,” she told him, “but the rent’s due on our love shack next month.”

“Yeah, but now when someone says “I love you, baby,’ it’s not just because you’re in high heels and a thong.”

Whenever he reminded Delilah of her life before she met him, she knew it was his way of exercising control over those events, forcing each of them into untenable positions, where she must ask and he might grant forgiveness. In this way he could assume a morally superior advantage. There was little ground he could safely occupy on which the resources he possessed – his knowledge, skill and expertise in the world, such as they were – might hold sway over another’s. If he wasn’t working, paying rent, or contributing money toward food and other household expenses, his pride compelled him to claim some territory where he could exercise jurisdiction.

He believed he had special knowledge about the nature of reality. From this knowledge he acquired a piety that was a form of self-aggrandizement. This piety was a source of consolation, an inner region of comfort where he could retreat to gain control in his life, and a sense of self-respect. But for most people this came across as an aggressive form of sanctimony, no matter how couched it was in the language of popularized spirituality, or Jungian individuation and the hero’s journey.

“The world is a picture, man,” he was fond of saying. “It’s an analogue not of what it seems, which is like a physical organism. It’s a representation of emotions, of psychic buildups, and these have all become paralyzed, and we don’t understand it because it’s too deep in the subconscious mind and it causes the world to act in ways it can’t interpret, just like a child can’t analyze its own impulses. That’s the world man. You gotta give up striving before you can get in touch with the real meaning. You gotta get real humble. But your ego is in the way; ego and desire. Same thing. Asking forgiveness is the first step in humility.”

It was the kind of pronouncement that never went over big at dinner parties. Yet it was what Giambone wanted from Delilah, yet couldn’t ask for – profound Christian repentance. At a fundamental level Giambone was a neo-Christian. He believed in the concept of a redeemer – not necessarily Christ, but a Christ-like figure – and he believed in personal salvation through suffering. To forgive and to ask forgiveness from another were the two components of true action in his or any life. They were as rudimentary and necessary as inhalation/exhalation, force and motion or, as he thought, the yin and yang of a fully deliberate consciousness.

Giambone loved Delilah. He loved her and held her in contempt. Each emotion was required for him to be in relationship with any woman. He needed to feel both – to desire her and revile her. He got life from the tension between these polarities. He needed to revile her to bolster his self-worth. He could feel stronger knowing that he had the power to absolve her sins. The more she resisted his incursions into the territory of her soul, the more engaged he was, the more attached he became to her, the more desperate was his love and the more dependent on her he became. He was aroused mentally, spiritually and sexually by the inherent tension in her resistance. Her resistance inflamed and excited him. The more she pulled away, the more voluble were his cries against her and the more compulsively he sought relief from their unsettled affairs through whiskey indulgences.

Yet it would be inaccurate to say that there was a constant state of duress between them. Even when it became clear to Giambone that Delilah had infected him, he was not a Scottish Presbyterian. He laughed easily at the absurdities and ironies in life.

“It’s fucking amazing,” he would often shout in the backyard at 2:00 AM after an exhilarating night of drinking or a kinky and satisfying sex romp with Delilah.

His laughter rose up from his bowels, sputtering at first like a two-stroke combustion engine until it finally kicks over, issuing in a deep baritone timbre and eventually trailing off in a high-pitched giggle. His sensual mouth grinned wide and his eyes reddened, forming tears behind his rimless spectacles that reflected the stars of the hazy nighttime sky.

He was confident everything could be repaired between him and Delilah. What he wanted most was a family. That’s why he clung to Delilah as much as he blamed her for infecting him with the emblem of her former promiscuity. He was sentimental about family, nostalgic for a past that may have occasionally existed, but which had been distilled over time into an essential ideal. He pined for this ideal, and was no more capable of bringing it about than a maker of dolls or the child who bends them into wishful tableaux. The gnawing hunger to be immersed in a loving environment is what drove his endeavors. It was the prime mover behind all his calculations.

“It’s the symbol of insuperable bonds,” he told Delilah.

She laughed. “You’re so full of shit sometimes, you know. It’s the symbol of fractured dreams.”

“You’re nothing but a cynic,” he countered.

“No,” she told him, “I’m a survivor of the fact, just like you.”

Ironically, it was toward this ideal he strove when the ties of his childhood family began to naturally loosen, as siblings grew up, departed, and sought lives apart and the freedom to be tempted and to taste. It’s what drove him to the Plutoids, and toward every system of metaphysics he ever investigated. He longed for certainties in a world where he found them wanting. In a family the roles could be defined, just as the laws of religion, theories of the cosmos, or innumerable reasons for the behavior of men on earth. While his life increasingly gravitated into more and more confusion, his belief in family as the lodestar, the cynosure and salvation of existence, became more acute and more desperate. He placed too heavy an expectation on the ones who he believed could deliver him into the embrace of the unity of souls; who could love him unconditionally; who would respect him as the father he yearned to be, and upon whom he could place his troubles without fear of their abandonment.

Delilah breathed form into his dream. It was her dream, too, in spite of her natural skepticism.

In her late thirties, Delilah was tired of the life she had been living – the loneliness, the fleeting relationships, the struggle alone to survive in a fickle town of fickle people who said they would call and never did. She was not close to her parents. They were older and lived on the central coast. Their meetings were rare. Delilah had passed her youth and her twenties with little desire for children of her own. It was no life for her. But now she struggled each day to assemble the beauty that used to be hers without effort, and as it faded she began to understand how fleeting her life was. She wanted to wake up each day knowing there was love waiting for her, and that it didn’t depend on her physical beauty. She ached for permanence and continuity, and she came to believe that only a child could help her sustain such an illusion, what she indeed knew to be an illusion, yet which might last until she died.

There was an innocence about Giambone that made Delilah, and many women who encountered him, wish to protect him, shelter him and more generously concede his pronounced male swelling. The masculine side of him was attractive because it was reassuring – she knew she could get what she wanted when it came to sex. The boyish reservation and deference he exhibited when he became socially ungraceful and conscious of the fact, persuaded her that he was not a brute, and that she had a chance to manipulate him without fearing the harm of physical retaliation. Knowing little about his true character, yet emboldened by his blood connection to great wealth, she found herself for the first time seriously giving thought to becoming a mother. And she decided she would let it happen. If he objected, she would give it up for now; and if he didn’t, then they would begin making a life together, always secure in the knowledge that she was about to become part of the larger Giambone family. With that positioning came the solid assurance that her child would never want, no matter what happened; for there would be guaranteed resources upon which she could always rely.

Without his knowledge, she stopped taking her birth control pills. Then one night, with little trouble, their lust still new and strung taut for each other, she pulled his seed inside and he left it deep and clinging. He had had several whiskeys that evening. She took a Vicodin, something she did when she was too tired to meditate. In their mellow numbness together the fusion took place, like a bolt of lightning in a dark and tumescent cloud. They sank into their ritual. He watched from a chair while she stood on her king size bed. In this way he could feel like a desert potentate settling in for his convivial aperitif with a favorite concubine. She, situated above him, at a distance where his responses could be measured, a place from which real intimacy and its loss of distinctions could be safely avoided, from here she danced, expertly removing her clothes, touching herself and offering him a taunting encouragement.

“Do you want these tits,” she asked him testily. “Do you want to slide that big, fat dick between these smooth, voluptuous tits, you horny bastard? C’mon and fuck these creamy titties,” she snarled, as though she scorned his sex.

Strangely, he forgot for the moment that she had done this for a living. She was too compelling. The arguments in his head ceased when he saw her like this and he let himself become piggish. He cast out any doubts about the murkiness of human desire. He let himself sin, believing that man had to sin, to constantly sin because redemption was never complete. There could never be the pleasure that comes from acknowledging sins if there are none to admit. He wanted to fuck her with everything. To fuck every hole. To fuck every part of her body, her feet, her armpits, the side of her face, the back of her knees. He wanted to see her dripping.

“You fucking cunt,” he shouted, surprising himself with the easy venom of his lust.

He could not take his eyes away from her. She was vivid and burning. Her flame colored hair was pulled tightly back, held in a pony tail that fell between her shoulder blades. Her face glowed like porcelain beneath the incandescent light that was cast from the bronze ceiling fixture above her head. The pale skin of her oval English face was pulled tight over the underlying bone and showed vague lines of fatigue and determination. Her ears were a light roseate color at the tops, arching like Romanesque spandrels that spread gracefully down into smooth delicate organs with the translucency of bone china and the exquisite folds and channels of a soft luminous shell. They were sensitive, too, like the petals of columbine to light. When she heard him say cunt it warmed her. She smiled at what was to come, and her narrow mouth opened, separating her lips in a sleek elongation around the mild projection of her upper teeth. The lips were a pale scarlet and slightly swollen, as though they held a tiny quantity of liquid and might welcome the pollen from a bee drawn to them by their luscious faint pulsing. She let out her unusually long tongue, using it to moisten her lips in a languorous ellipsis, around and around her mouth. Like a deep hue of spiderwort covered in dew, it glistened with the bubbling sheen of her saliva. She let it collect in the middle seam of the purple gland, then, pointing the tip out and down, wanly slack, she let the liquid fall off its fleshy surface onto the nipple of her breast.

“You dirty bitch,” she said to herself out loud.

She turned her back to Giambone and slapped her ass. She had a big bag of tricks. Giambone fell for most of them. Delilah knew what it took to make a man pant and quiver. Giambone hadn’t known many lewd women before. At first he was uncomfortable with the sex talk that came out of her mouth. But he quickly grew to like it. She encouraged him, too, to speak with raunchy insouciance.

“That’s right, slut,” he exhorted her; “show me that tight asshole. I’m gonna fuck you in the ass, bitch.”

He trembled when he said it. She sneered at him, reached back with her hands and parted the cheeks of her arse. She gave him license to be lecherous, and the power of the words both frightened and excited him. He knew she had danced for many men, but now she was dancing for him alone. Then he would fuck her. It seemed to him he didn’t have to pay like the others.

He moved his chair closer to the bed. Delilah danced toward the edge, slow and rhythmic. Her motions were suggestive and sensual. She was long and slim. Her belly was firm. The muscles in her thighs and knees were pronounced from the years she’d spent on stage. The curvature of her spine was like a clean and smooth furrow between the two sloping bundles of interconnected muscles that made up her strong and well-defined back. Her ass was slender and not ample, but she moved it like tantalizing quarry in front of Giambone’s face. He took a deep draught of her body odors there, a mingling of scents, of urine, vaginal secretions, feces and sweat. His cock was made extra firm, a noteworthy emblem of his proud virility. He squeezed it, exhaled and breathed her in again. She moved away and turned around to face him. She lowered her hand to her cunt and inserted two fingers. They slid in easily.

She had done what she’d done for the money, and because she had just plain liked it. She liked getting wet.

She swished the fingers around inside her in a wide circle, and jabbed them several times more in a vigorous pumping motion. She extracted them and raised them to her mouth. She sucked the clear trace of liquid coating them. Giambone saw the wetness on her fingers glisten in the warm yellow light of the room. He watched her eyes as she licked the secretions from her fingertips.  Delilah’s eyes were crowned by dark and profuse brows. They were plucked to keep their growth in check. Her body hair was prolific – Norman/Gallic/Anglo/Teutonic – and had to be restrained. Her eyes were dark brown but shining and quite large. They were demure and trusting, disguising well the mettle behind them that living brought. But her nature, her basic nature, was as her eyes expressed. And they sat atop prominent cheeks that conveyed health and jocularity and the mirth of pleasure, despite the struggles she’d encountered. Giambone looked at those eyes and they inflamed him with a crazy, rutting lust, and she knew it. Her eyes taunted him archly, hinting at the depravity she harbored between her legs and coaxing his own.

Giambone stood up, signaling his intention to become more than a passive observer. He had smelled her, and along with her lascivious movements and masturbatory penetrations, he was inflamed and was compelled to touch and be touched, to drink and eat. He stroked his cock in front of her.

“C’mon, you little whore. C’mon down here. Get on your hands and knees and suck Daddy’s big fuckin’ cock.”

Delilah loved cock. She loved Giambone’s cock. One of the rewards she had reaped upon meeting Giambone, aside from being the brother of Jack Giambone, was that he had a large penis. One of the largest she had ever seen. And Giambone, in his charming way, never tired of reminding both men and women friends just how profoundly gifted in size he was.

“When I was in high school,” he liked to reminisce, “the entire locker room burst into applause when I came out of the shower. Now that’s respect. That’s power.”

It was one accomplishment that came to him naturally and with little effort and about which he could justifiably brag. It was genuinely big and a great source of pride. Delilah asked him once how, with such a big cock, he had kept from masturbating it until he was 21. He lied at first and said he didn’t know. It was an interesting question. That such a monumental piece of anatomy had lain dormant for so many years seemed to her a tragedy, a wasted natural resource. But now it was hers to exploit and she loved feasting on it like a pig at a trough.

She took it in her hand and spit at it. She spit again and again until it was coated and dripping with her saliva. With one hand she lifted the heavy sack of his testicles and let them bounce on her palm; with the other she gripped his dick, pulling up the length of it and past the wide flared head, releasing it, and gripping it again, sliding back down to the base where it met his hairy belly. She lowered her face to it and took the head in her mouth, sucking it loudly while pumping the rest of his dick with her fist. Giambone put one hand on the top of her head. With the other he grabbed her ponytail and roped it around his fist. He began fucking her face like it was the cunt of the world. He took himself in deep until she felt her mouth would to split. She loved it when he forced it in her, fed it to her. She let the liquid in her mouth run out liberally over her chin and his cock, as though she were a child with no table manners, gorging herself on her favorite candy, slobbering over herself. All she could think about was how good it would feel to have him stuff it in her cunt. She egged him on.

“Fuck my cunt mouth, you piece of shit, you fucking bastard.”

She dropped his hairy balls and frigged her wet cunt while continuing to grip his meat in the other. Giambone’s cock was fully engorged. He removed Delilah’s hand from his pecker. She reached around his ass and used her index finger to play with his rectum, then slid it inside him past her second knuckle. He groaned as soon as she penetrated him. He gripped both sides of her face with his hands and pumped his hips back and forth, driving his big organ into her wet mouth. Saliva spilled from the corners and dripped to the bed.

“Feast on that big meat,” he exhorted her; “worship that fuckin’ cock, you nasty little whore.”

She sucked faster, gulping for air as he pushed himself into her throat. The corneas of her eyes rose up behind the eyelids, exposing the whites. Giambone gripped his cock and pulled it out of her mouth. He slapped the heavy, stiff meat against both sides of her face. Her tongue hung slackly from her mouth like a panting dog. She had four fingers buried deep in her cunt. She pulled her finger from Giambone’s asshole and inserted it in her own, smiling as she slid it in. Giambone sat back in his chair. He used both of his hands, one hand over the other, to masturbate himself. The purple head of his cock was plainly visible from the top. He spit in his hands and continued working them up and down along his thick penis.

“You hungry little bitch,” he said to her. “Is this what you want?”

“Yes,” she said timidly. One knee of hers was pressed against the top of the mattress. The foot of her other leg pressed down on the bed to support her weight. Her torso was in an upright position. She worked her fingers in and out of her pussy and asshole. She bent forward slightly to let her curved breasts hang loose. She spit at each one, aiming the saliva at her nipples. The spit clung from the nipples and slowly dripped from each of them. She looked at Giambone desperately. The upper part of her body was flushed pink. Her eyes were beseeching him to fuck her. She looked at his hands working themselves over his long dick. She licked her lips and let out a tiny sound from her mouth. She had aroused him and now she had made herself pathetic with longing for the erection she incited, while Giambone felt bestial, longing to defile her and penetrate all her orifices with savagery.

“Lie on your back and spread your legs,” he ordered her.

She did as he told her.

“Are you going to fuck me with that big cock, you bastard? Huh? Are you going to ram it in me hard?”

She spread her cunt lips open with both hands. A light beige-colored pool of liquid had formed at the opening of her vulva and trickled down and coated her anus. With one hand she pulled open the inner lip of her vagina. She inserted three fingers from the other hand and began fucking herself vigorously. She pressed a thumb hard against her clitoris, a fat thing like a nut and grown as rigid as a serpent’s fang. A squishing sound spilled from her hole and filled the room. A sardonic smile spread grotesquely across Delilah’s mouth when she heard the sound, contorting her features, making her appear wild and demented. When Giambone saw that smile, he wanted to pound her with his cock until her mouth frothed and her tongue fell out slack. When she smiled like that she was not someone, but rather a taunting force that stirred him into a madness, goading him to consume her into oblivion. She became meat. A vehicle for his release, like a lion is released from hunger by the taste of blood from the throat of a zebra. Satiety is the only consideration. First he would taste, then he would subjugate her with the force of his bursting cock.

He gripped her ankles, pulling her legs apart and pushing them far back toward her shoulders. Then he bent over and pressed his face hard against her cunt, moving it in a circular motion, letting its copious liquids coat his cheeks, nose, forehead and chin. He drenched himself in her fluid. He inhaled the acidic odor of her bald pussy. He pulled his face back a few inches, let a gob of saliva fall from his mouth onto her pink center, and then pushed his face back into her juice rich cauldron of cunt meat. He sucked her swollen clitoris into his mouth and simultaneously stuck three fingers through the goop trickling from her vaginal hole. She let out a gasp and reached for her nipples and squeezed them while Giambone sucked and finger fucked her at the same time. Her hole was wide open. It visibly contracted and dilated like the gullet of a small bird stretching its throat to be fed. He would feed it. He would feed himself to it, introducing his vessel through the portal to her center, unreeling the filament of himself into the soft marrow of a velvet field, variegated and flecked with millions of round scallops of glittering brilliance, like the repetitive pattern of scales along the cool reflective skin of the coral snake or the spectral inscriptions on the ultra light wing of a butterfly suffused by the sun’s rays. He was home. He was at home now. With his face at the gate he was one with the gate. He could give up all control. He could lie suspended in her font, floating, letting her life flow over him, buoying him. He let go. He had no desire to control, just to become an organism that drinks from a reflective pool, breathing in, breathing out, no responsibility, no agitation, no walls, no separation, no judgments, no fear, only the wet tide from the source, his source, soothing him, coating him, relieving him from action, no action but the automatic response of his drinking, breathing. He wished to linger there a long time, sloshing in her thickly churned waters, listening to her low purring, the coarse and provocative growling that traveled from her throat to her belly through the canal of her cunt. He wished to push his face deeper in. He wished to be saturated then absorbed, to remember then forget, to dissolve and disperse into her, and remain. To remain. Not be pushed out again. Never to be expelled.

Giambone alternated his fingers between her pussy, scooping up its secretions, and rubbing them around her asshole, lubricating it in preparation for his cock. Delilah insisted on getting fucked well in her butt hole before letting Giambone drain his balls in her cunt. She moaned and jerked as he inserted first one and then two fingers in her rectum. They slid through without resistance. She had no inhibitions about her asshole. She eagerly accepted almost any size implement Giambone might push in. Fingers in her ass were as slight to her as a tongue in her mouth. Giambone only had to be careful about one thing. With his mouth sucking her clitoris and two fingers in her butt, Delilah could easily orgasm. Then she would be through. He wanted her to come all over his dick surrounded by the walls of her vagina, pulling on his dick, drawing his sperm like suction cup milkers on the teat of a cow.

“I’m a little slut, aren’t I, Daddy,” she said to him softly.

“Yes, baby, you are a horny slut. Why?”

“Because I need it up my asshole, don’t I? I need you to fill my hairy ass, don’t I?”

Delilah was a hairy woman. Hair grew from her like shoots on a seed farm. But she shaved and waxed it off regularly. That’s the way Giambone liked it, except for her asshole. He demanded she let that hair alone. And she complied, letting it thrive, a dark, thick and silky corona of straight long hair radiating from the edge of her rectum. Giambone liked to moisten these with his tongue. He used his finger to play with the strands of hair, working the saliva on them into a creamy lather, before prying his fingers into the dark hole of her shapely and muscular arse and pressing out with his finger tips from the inside. He liked to watch the skin between her cunt and asshole pulse outwards when he pressed on it with his fingers from the inside. This pleased Delilah very much. She encouraged any kind of play having to do with her asshole. It was very gratifying. She often preferred being fucked there in lieu of, or as a prelude to, her pussy. Getting fucked in both holes at the same time was best. The larger the objects inserted in them, the more pleasure she derived.

Giambone stood up. He stroked his big cock in front of her. She looked at it and let her tongue wag slowly from one side of her mouth to the other, massaging her tits and the puffy knob of her clitoris with her hands while doing so. Giambone squeezed his balls with his left hand while his right worked itself over the broad brim of his cock, pulling on it from the top side with his palm down. He squeezed the head between his fingers and a gob of clear fluid was pushed out from the hole of his urethra, growing into a long, slender thread that hung almost to his knees. Delilah touched it with her toes then used them to smear the liquid over his pendulous balls. The room was warm and his nuts hung loose and ripe between his thighs. Giambone’s stiffened cock stuck out in front of him, straight as a yardarm, before flaring up slightly at the head like a graceful bow. Delilah watched it bounce from side to side as he walked to the bureau and opened the drawer, withdrawing from it a large black vibrator molded into the replica of a penis with a network of rigid veins. He walked back to the bed and gave it to her.

“Here,” he said, “suck on this and get it wet before I fuck you with it.”

She did what he said. She put the long rubber dildo in her slack mouth and sucked it. She lifted it out of her mouth and let it dangle above her face. Saliva dripped down off the scarlet head onto her face. She inserted it once more into her mouth, sucking it slowly, deliberately, even lovingly, punctuating the pumping motion with the sound of air being forced into her mouth and mixing liberally with the liquid there. Her other hand continued plying her cunt in anticipation of Giambone’s rigid boner. He bent over her at the edge of the bed and reached down and squeezed her nipples. He pinched them hard, until she gasped. Then he released. She relaxed her back, and sucked the dildo with an increased tempo, in and out of her mouth, almost frenzied. Giambone smiled. He knew she was ready to take him. He knelt down on the floor until his face was level with her ass at the edge of the bed. He took hold of the backs of her thighs and pushed them up and back towards her belly, until her asshole pointed straight up at the ceiling. He kissed the dark hole in her ass and let a large measure of saliva spill out of his mouth and fill the basin of her anus. He used his fingers to open her up and let the liquid seep in, massaging the membrane and inner walls of her sphincter until it was sufficiently lubricated. Giambone stood up. He stroked his cock slowly, then raised his hand to his mouth and spit into it. He brought it back down again and worked the saliva along the vein-ridged skin of his cock. Delilah watched him. She knew it was time. She kept the dildo in her mouth. She raised her head off the bed and used her arms to pull her legs back, pressing them against her tits. She wanted to watch him go in. She wanted to see the fat head of his hefty dick slide in her ass. She tightened and then pushed out on the muscle controlling her rectum, as a kind of enticement for Giambone, continuing to suck on the dildo, slurping her spit back in her mouth, her eyes looking wanton. She pushed in and out on her asshole, controlling it as though it were a machine, a separate organism, a flower yearning to be fed.

“Get ready, baby,” he said; “I’m gonna fuck your tight bitch ass hard.”

She made a little crying noise when he said this. It sounded like a child whose wound needs to be soothed.

Giambone pushed firmly yet slowly against her hole. The hairs around Delilah’s anus clung to the head of his cock like sweeping cilia gathering in nutrients. He slipped through easily past the sphincter and glided in deep. They both groaned.

Giambone never felt as strong, or as virile, as he did while fucking a woman in the ass. Here he felt most like a man. Here he could exercise some semblance of power – there were few other opportunities he could exploit that gave him the assurance that he was leaving a mark, as a man hopes he can. Here he was having an effect. He knew he was alive. He was causing a response in another. She welcomed him. She encouraged him to act. She allowed him to act, where others hadn’t, where others stood in his way, and didn’t recognize his unique self. The results here were immediate. Every man had a penis, but none like his. None could employ it as deftly. He had the acclaim of one individual. It was enough and it was resounding. She was prone and overwhelmed by the immensity of his gift, his masculine gift. And he had chosen her to receive it, to be awed by this singular faculty in his possession.  She was down. What better measure of a man’s sense of self than the submission of another. Here Giambone could claim some personal hegemony, some lordship. Nothing stifled him now. He was master of the domain. His penis’ heated turgidity was a tribute to his place. He inhabited the world. He influenced something in the world. By her cries, by her moist outpourings, he measured himself and it was something. He was something. Somebody. With his penis deep in the hole of another human, he was alive and essential. So long as he was desired he could go on. So long as he could desire, he could hope. Without desire there was no hope. No one had come up to him and said, “make your mark, here, Giambone; here’s your opportunity for creating something lasting by which you will always be remembered through the generations.” No one told him, “your creative instincts have led to the discovery of a great work of art, a spectacular building, a monumental symphony, a lasting work of profound literature, a cure for debilitating affliction, an unparalleled contribution to world diplomacy, a victory in a decisive battle against an evil nation, a superhuman feat of athletic prowess, the solution to an ancient riddle of Western philosophy. For any and all of these accomplishments, we, the world, bow down before you in gratitude and awe. You are unique.”

Most often Giambone did not feel unique, unless he was drunk or his penis was deeply rooted in the orifice of a comely female. He barely had the wherewithal to pay his yearly income taxes, or even the stamina to obtain a telephone number from directory assistance. He had some mechanical facility. He could work on the brake system of his old car. He could put together the frame for a wall of a room in a house. When he did these things, he liked to boast that he had. But he did not seek out these activities voluntarily. They were done out of a necessity, they were a default mechanism by which he could stay alive or have transportation. They did not set him apart. In some sense he knew this. By boasting about them, he was striving to overcome his deep sense of his own inadequacy in almost every area of human existence. What he thought he excelled at, and which he cared about – religion and metaphysics, and theories surrounding the age-old question of why humans exist – no one else in Hollywood seemed concerned about. Or if they did, they didn’t want to hear about it from Giambone. They just wanted to meet his brother. In the realm of religion and metaphysics, people are not inclined to listen to others unless the other is a star of some magnitude. Giambone was no star. Even being the brother of one didn’t do much for him in acquiring the clout necessary for respect in the overcrowded field of spirituality and personal growth industries. With little ambition but with the deep need for respect, fucking a woman in the ass was a soul affirming activity.

He felt complete mastery over her now, but not in any way which depended on meanness, or some manner which has as its intention the permanent surrender of her power or will, or which seeks to harm another. In his mind it was about how supremely good he made her feel. She was deriving pleasure because he was supplying it, and it was his role in providing her the ecstasy she now felt which was the source of his pride and the reason he could revel in his manhood. She didn’t need him. But because he was acting upon her he could and did choose to view her as a passive body, one whose experience of sensation was, at this moment in time, dependent upon him, upon what he was doing to her. His cock in her ass made her happy. Thus, he made her happy. His being had consequence. He was alive. She told him he was alive. He needed her to feel as though he was dominating space and time. But he didn’t understand that. He believed it was his magnetism that had created the scene. This was partially true but not entirely. Giambone didn’t understand how he needed Delilah. Delilah genuinely enjoyed having his penis in her butt, yet it was also a means to another end. By pulling his ejaculate toward her, she was nurturing his dependence. That dependence would make her essential to his life, and promote her own.

She took him all the way. If he had more to give her, she would have taken that as well. Giambone pulled out almost to the head of his cock, before thrusting himself deep inside her again, over and over. With one hand he played with her tits, going from one to the other. He also kept steady pressure on her clitoris, using his thumb against it, rubbing it across the hood and flicking it from side to side. She continued to suck on the dildo, stopping occasionally to look at him, her face twisted into a kind of snarl of intense animal hunger. She exhorted him to, “fuck it deep, yeah,” and “slap those balls against my ass, you horny butt fucker!”

Her lewdness incited him to fuck her with a reckless fury. He was a beast with a terrific erection and she ceased to be anything for him but a warm demented hole challenging him to bang her into delirious and blissful state of incapacity, a fuck doll, a tool for his pleasure, a bitch whose sole purpose was to be fucked. She became nothing for him but a body of cooze, a slave to his lust, a whore, a cunt. Nothing but a huge, nasty, wet cunt. He would drown her with his cum until she became cum, was cum, dissolved in his liquid. God said fuck. Giambone obeyed. Everything else was obliterated, subjugated to this one imperative: shoot cum. She was nothing but holes.

  He pulled his long cock from her butthole. It came out cleanly.

“Let me suck it,” she shouted with some urgency, as though he might walk away without giving her the opportunity, the pleasure, of tasting herself on his dick.

She was so dirty and Giambone loved her for it. She made him believe she would do anything. Nothing was too raunchy. He feared that her desire far exceeded his ability to imagine enough ways to satisfy it. She made him feel omnipotent. There were no rules in fucking her. She let him become an animal and he felt more free than at any time in his life. She let him believe that he had total control over another human being. Giambone reveled in his power to fuck another as thought she were made only for that; like she were as insensate as the hand he was fucking now, gripping his cock, using it to wag and wave in the air, stiffened and primed for her face. He took her by the hair and pushed her face toward his cock. She took it in her wet mouth and he fucked her hole like it was his right. Her eyes were open wide. She stared up at him in supplication. Her eyes flickered with a rapacious ferocity. He watched the head of his cock poke her cheeks. She brought her hand up to pump the cock that she had just taken up her ass. Giambone pushed her face over it faster. He felt the sperm collect at the base. He let go of her hair. Delilah removed her mouth from his organ. She used her hand to stroke it a few times. She knew he was ready to put it in her cunt. She turned away from him on the bed and got on all fours. She lowered her head to the bed and raised her ass up in the air to meet him. Giambone picked up the dildo from where it lay next to Delilah. He stationed himself at the foot of the bed. He stood there massaging his long, seething cock meat. He looked in the mirror on the wall above the head of the bed. She was looking at his reflection, waiting for him to enter her. She had one hand between her legs spreading apart the lips of her cunt for him. He rubbed the dildo along the wet crack of her cunt.

“Where does this go, bitch,” he snapped at her. “Where am I going to shove this fucking dildo?”

“Up my ass, please. Please fuck me in the ass with it. And stick your fat cock in my cunt and empty your balls. Squirt your cum in my horny twat, you fucking bastard. Fuck me like a whore.”

Giambone positioned the dildo at the hairy opening of her rectum. She was working the muscles there so that the hole opened and closed like an exotic carnivorous plant. He inserted it gently and pushed it all the way in. He turned the knob at the end and the batteries began to power the vibration. Delilah moaned and began rubbing her clitoris with her hand in a vigorous side-to-side motion. Giambone pushed his cock over her clit and let the juice from her cunt wet the length of his dick.

“Fuck me,” she moaned. “Shove it in. Gimme that meat now.”

He let himself in. She sighed. Giambone watched her liquids build up into a thick gel on his cock as he pushed and pulled out. He drew a finger across the top of his dick and scraped off the sticky residue like it was cake frosting from a mixing bowl. He brought his finger forward to Delilah’s mouth.

“Taste it baby; taste your cunt.”

She took his finger in her mouth and cleaned it off with her lips. Giambone watched her eat it in the mirror. Her eyes were closed. She was far away. The skin on her face hung loosely, as though care had departed and a solemn rapture had taken its place, as though she were a medium for a spirit cultivated from soil, clay and roots, from the loam and silt and humus of the earth rather than a deific insubstantiality. She was earthbound, on all fours, bestial, primal, propagating flesh, cells, and producing sound and heat and liquid and knowing, a great tactile knowing, the profound sensation of limbs and nerves and muscle. She was open, fully open and flooding with the great profanity of rutting human gratification and production, base, rudimentary, fundamental, necessary and profane production of crawling, seething, steaming, belching, fuming, cunning, slithering life, and she was resplendent, and dull, and heavy, and beating alive and wet and fecund. God was missing. God was forgotten. God was nothing but the act. There was no place for any idea beyond the inherent goodness of fucking, deep, filling, brimming fucking, of cock filling cunt and both spilling over in resounding joy. This was joy and there was no place for God. God was demolished in the joy of her fucking a large and potent man cock.

 Giambone moved his penis in her in smooth rhythmic glides, alternating his thrusts with the slick, swift penetration of her asshole with the black dildo. Stroking in with his dick, out with the rubber phallus. She took both of them deep into each enlarged hole.

“Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, you horny bastard,” she said over and over again. “I love it up my ass. Fuck me hard. I’m such a fucking slut.”

Where Delilah became more verbal, more obscene in her litany of imperatives, Giambone grew quieter as his erection expanded inside her, and with each smacking, suction sound of the rubber dildo sliding in and out of her hairy anus. With his free hand he reached forward and took the end of Delilah’s hair and pulled on it, jerking her head. She gasped and then thrust her ass back at him hard, as if encouraged by his rough gesture. He let go of the dildo. It stayed buried in her asshole. With his other hand he began to slap the cheeks of her butt, until they grew pink and the color spread out with each slap of his hand. He was reaching a culminating point, a threshold he’d been past before, where he wanted to destroy her in direct proportion to the ecstasy that gripped him. The more his pleasure mounted the greater was his desire to extinguish her. The greater the intensity of his transcendence, his separation from responsibility, his hunger for consummation, the greater his longing to debase this woman, to render her into something unrecognizable, into some form that was not human but which continued to exert its influence on the level of his pleasure. She was not Delilah. She was Cunt. Her humanity was losing perspective, the temptation to thoroughly possess her as an instrument of ecstasy was luring him toward violence, toward an act harm. He struggled to enjoy her to the greatest degree without doing harm. It was as though his sex act was an act of consumption; that the inexorable outcome of the supreme experience of pleasure was consumption of the very thing that gave pleasure. To let himself go, to abandon himself entirely to bliss would mean having to beat her into an inanimate mass, some fleshy warm pulp, before eating her. Then he would know true satisfaction. Before Delilah, Giambone had never understood this. He knew anger, but he had never been prone to fantasies of violence. Nor did he consider her effect on him as a violent one. There was no question of inflicting pain or harm from malice or hatred. It was simply a matter of consumption. Of a powerful impulse to take the power of her and possess her to the point where she had no will, no volition, no freedom. To control her selfishly for the sole purpose of satisfying the piggish desires she inspired in him. She was Cunt and he must have all of it.

He gripped her shoulder with one hand. With the other he resumed the action of plumbing her bowels with the phallic vibrator. He pushed it in to the hilt and kept it there, but for a slight pressure he applied to the end with his thumb, as though it were a cork resisting insertion from internal pressure. With every jab of his dick into the far reaches of her womb, Delilah grunted with pleasure, reaching below and giving Giambone’s balls a light squeeze as they slammed against her clit. She was stiffening, holding her breath, her skin reddening around her shoulders and arms. She was close.

“Pump me, Daddy. I’m gonna soak that fuckin’ dick. I’m ready to wet your big prick. Get ready for my juice.”

“Get on your back. I’m gonna pump it in you deep. Turn over and spread that cunt wide.”

He pulled out of her. Her cunt leaked onto the bedspread. Giambone stroked his wet dick. Now he would fuck her good, on top, deep, his swollen head buried deep in her hole. He slowly loosened the dildo from her asshole, leaving a gap there the size of a quarter, as though it expected to be filled again. He loved how she could take it there.

She rolled over and stared up, not at him, but his cock. She kept her eyes locked on it as he worked his hand back and forth along the length of it. Giambone watched himself in the mirror and liked what he saw. His reflection was proof of his vitality. He was assured by the taut insurgency of himself.

Delilah shot her legs up toward the ceiling and then gradually parted them out to the sides in a kind of balletic fan motion. Then she bent her knees and brought them down until the backs of her feet touched her thighs. She rested her hands on the inside of her thighs and extended her fingers across the lips of her cunt, inserting three from her right and three from her left and pulling her lips apart and revealing her hole for him. It was a beautiful light pink hole with fat fleshy dark lips and prominent clitoris at the apex. It was full of juice, like a ripe mango, dripping and soft. Giambone stood masturbating in front of her, licking his lips. He knelt on the bed in front of her. With one hand busy on his cock, he took the dildo and raised it to his mouth and began sucking the residue of Delilah’s asshole from the surface. Then he lowered it, reached behind him and plunged it in his own asshole.

“Yeah, baby,” she encouraged him. “Fuck your ass. Fuck it good and fuck me. C’mon! What are you waiting for? Fuck me. Fuck my cunt. I wanna cum now. I gotta cum.”

Giambone’s head dropped as the dildo went up his ass. A smile crept across his face. He looked at her below him. He would give her all his cum now. He would drain all the liquid from his balls into her. She was waiting. She was ready. Her cunt was hungry. He aimed his cock for her center and fell in.

“Fuck my ass,” he shouted, and she reached around him and took hold of the dildo, keeping it in place for him while he pounded against her, going so deep and hard inside her that she thought she would dissolve. He planted his mouth on hers and pushed his tongue in deep. He could feel her tightening, could feel her back arching up, feel her cunt hungrily groping for all of him. She stopped breathing and he knew she was there. She let out a long woeful cry, as though she were mourning some loss, echoing the sound in shorter and shorter durations until he felt her body relax beneath him. As she drifted back, his hips began pumping her faster. He felt the head of his cock against her cervix. Short bursts of air shot from her mouth with each deep pounding thrust of him inside her. She let go of the dildo. Giambone felt it slowly slide out of his asshole, massaging his prostate as it came out of his rectum. The semen jerked up from his testicles and spurt in long bucking spasms from the head of his cock. He hugged Delilah, enfolded her body up into the arch of his body while his penis spilled itself out into the basin of her heated cunt. He collapsed on her and let his cock soften in the soupy mixture of their secretions, in that dark fermenting place between her thighs, torrid and needy and conspiratorial.