The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 (46 page)

“It’s your birthday today?” she exclaimed in wonder.

“Yes, yes, it is.” I couldn’t help smiling at this delightful girl.

“Oh, God, I had no idea. Why, then you must keep this. It should be yours.” She pushed the box back at me.

“No, no, no. It’s yours. I tried it on. That was amazing enough for me. It’s your outfit. It belongs to you.”

There was a pause while we both thought about what to say next.

“Please. I’d like you to have it.”

I couldn’t stop staring at her lips. “No, no, thank you, it’s not really me, anyway. I like my underwear to be brighter than the clothes I wear on top . . .”

She laughed again, this time the shyness almost gone, the brown eyes bigger and browner than before, and I began to notice little hints of gold inside them.

“You know,” she leaned over to me and said, in a soft whisper, “they have corsets in red and pink and blue . . .”

My first thought was that her lips were only inches from mine. My second thought was that I’d never kissed a girl. My third thought was that a pink corset might be the best thing I could ever buy.

“Will you take me to the shop? I want to go.”

“Of course!” she exclaimed. “If you won’t let me give you mine as a birthday present, perhaps you can let me buy you another?”

“Only if you let me buy you a drink after?”

I couldn’t believe it. I was flirting with a girl. I was flirting with a girl named Rachael. I was sitting at my desk, flirting with a girl with my name, and all I could think about was how her lips would feel between my teeth.

“I would love it,” she said as she stood up. “Shall I stop by your desk at six?”

“That sounds great.” I couldn’t stop smiling at this creature.

She leaned over again, her lips inches from my face, and my breath stopped. What was she doing? Was she going to press her lips against mine, her tongue in my mouth, running against my teeth, her breath mixing with mine? Was she going to kiss me at my desk?

“You can keep the collar,” she purred, and then turned to walk away.

I closed my eyes, waiting for my heart to return to normal. Two more hours until six.

Jasmine died two years ago. She showed up three weeks ago. Should have expected it, knowing Jasmine as well as I did.

I didn’t know she was back, not really, for almost a week. Stomping around my little Long Beach bungalow, the one she had called my shell, I caught glimpses of faint reds, gold, of the hazy glow of sunlight through baggy tie-dyes, and of God’s Eyes turning in the windows. They were just there enough so you knew you saw something, but was always a part, always a fragment of something. Same with smells: incense, patchouli oil, pot, cheap wine, and that simple lemon perfume. Same with sounds, walking from the little kitchenette into the living room you would catch the slap of leather sandals on the hardwood floors, the opening clap of
Stairway,
and that tiny sound, that special sound that would always mean bells on toes. Jasmine.

She had outlasted the ghost of the sixties by a few years, Jasmine had. Even though she’d been born in ’71, she was a spirit of the Merry Pranksters, of Airplane, of the Summer of Love, acid, pot, Fat Freddy’s Cat, the Stones, and tie-dyes.

It wasn’t easy being a flower child in the age of the World Wide Web, ecstasy, coke, NIN, Courtney Love, Belly, and body piercings, but Jasmine pulled it off. She drifted with a smile on her face, and those fucking bells on her toes, through life – hitching rides with only good people, taking only the best drugs, being friends with only good people. She was a ghost of the sixties, a spirit of the Haight and the Diggers.

Now she was just a spirit.

I never could figure out how she could exist. She was fascinating in the same way a Mary Keene painting (admit it, you’ve seen them – big eyed children) can be: innocence distilled to the point of being surreal. Jasmine could hitchhike with Jeffrey Dahmer and get out alive, and with some money to help her on her way.

If there was a sin in Jasmine, in her perfect fortune, this unblinking good luck, it was that it didn’t leave much room for depth or brains. Jasmine was a spirit who walked slowly through life, letting it bump her this way and that. Never ask her to meet you anywhere, never make plans around her, Jasmine was pot and incense and a soft, warm body that fit so comfortably in your arms, but she wasn’t someone you could count on. No one who knew her said it, but we all knew it was true – and having her turn up two years after we all put her to rest in the Long Beach Municipal Cemetery proved it. She was late for her own funeral.

I can’t really remember the first time I met Jasmine. Maybe it was that party to celebrate Rosie getting her first gig at the Red Room. Maybe it was that picnic that Robert and Steve threw down at the remains of the old Pike. Maybe she had just shown up on my doorstep like she always seemed to, jingling her tiny silver bells and lazily sweeping her tie-dye skirt back and forth. No place to sleep that night and Roger Corn was always up, awake, and willing to take her in.

God knew what we had in common, save we . . . fit somehow. We didn’t talk music (Airplane! NIN! Joplin! Love!) or books (Kesey! Coupland!) or anything else for that matter (You’re always so damned happy! What do you have to feel sad about?), we just fucked and played and took our respective drugs (Coffee & weed! H and Pot!). The spirit of the 60s and one hack writer, making his bread and butter writing porn,
True Detective Stories,
and articles on how to get your cat to use the toilet. We just seemed to go together somehow. We tolerated each other because we liked to fuck and kiss each other. Relationships can be based on worse things.

When I got that call, Rosie so calm and collected, I was sort of ready for it. Jasmine wasn’t someone who collected a lot of uniqueness. She did kind of what you expected her to, so when the phone rang and Rosie said that Jasmine had “passed on” I knew almost exactly how, where and why.

The funeral was sparse and sad for such a little spirit. The four of us in the cemetery. We had all pitched in to get the coffin. It was a colorful affair, you had to give it that: Rosie in a gaudy color-blast of a red sequined gown and boa, Robert in his own retro seventies platforms and polyester, Steve in his sixties with his beads and (where the fuck did he score that?) Nehru jacket. I wore something aside from black. It was hard to find, but I managed to score a brilliant red shirt from a friend of mine. In many cultures – my shitty education not enough to tell me exactly where and who – red is the color for the dead.

Two years later she was paying me a visit.

The first time I realized that something was going on I was scared shitless. I was washing my coffee cup out (my only lucky one), high just a wee bit from this shitty Mexican that Rosie had scored for me, and I felt someone behind me. Thinking it was Montezuma’s revenge acting through the weed I shrugged it off. Then the someone put their arms around my waist and hugged my little pot belly. I screamed, dropped my cup (
Java is the Spirit of Creativity
) into shards of ceramic, jumped into my Docs and ran over to Steve and Robert’s.

You’d think that ODing on H in Rosie’s apartment would be enough to keep a girlfriend down.

After a day or so Rosie had convinced me that it had just been lack of sleep, too many sips from my favorite mug, and a sudden flash of missing Jasmine. Rose said she felt her own late ex touch her sometimes – when she was in just the right mood. Of course there are differences between a dyke who’d gone off a bridge on her Harley and Jasmine the flower child overdoing the nostalgia just a bit.

Back in my place I kept seeing those flashes of Jasmine’s colors, smelling her smell, and hearing her bells. And sometimes, just before drifting off at three A.M. I’d feel her body warmth – just the heat of her at first, you understand, slip into bed with me.

Then, about two weeks after that first touch in the kitchen, I was coming from the living room into the kitchen, new mug in hand (
Coffee is the Last Refuge of the Sleepy
), straight for my Saint Coffee machine and there she was: sandals, tie-dyed drawstring pants, simple white cotton shirt, scarf tied over her head. She was just there – as I’d seen her a million times: joint burning in one hand, twirling a few strands of her blond hair in the other, chewing her lips at some newspaper headline or another and – while she’d never actually said it – you could still hear her thoughts clear and distinct:
Why don’t people get along
? Like she had on many mornings, as she had countless times.

And there she was again, after two years cold in the ground.

Then she wasn’t. She was there for about as much time as it takes to blink and think, for a panicked second,
is that really her
?

That was the first time. There were quickly others.

Jasmine liked to get in the bath tub with me when I was practicing my Death Trance Meditations. I like to sit in warm water with the lights off and think about myself in terms of flesh, blood, bone, hair and where all those pieces could end up, say, in a million years. You can get into some profound thoughts, lying in the dark, in the water, like that. And it can really mess with your head when the door would crash open and this demented hippie chick, all bounce and giggle, would come storming in jingling her tiny silver bells to pull off her balloon pants and squat herself down on the john to take a piss. We used to fight about it, especially when she and I didn’t even know she was in the house. You can imagine the shock she made after she was dead.

Mornings were Jasmine’s favorite time of day. If I’d let her she would go on and on about the opening of the day, with the accompaniment of birds singing and the soft applause of butterflies. She would wax cliché about the possibilities “dawning” (and giggling at the pun) with the new day and wonder how many adventures she’d have by sunset.

I am a Creature of the Night. I run from the burning rays of the sun and seek solstice in the cool darkness of my shell. But, still, I would always get up on a cheery blast furnace of a morning and be happy as a clam – especially when Jasmine treated me to one of her early bird special blowjobs. She liked that word, “Blowjob” – said it sounded so cute. And, boy, was Jasmine skilled in its performance. Just the right amount of tongue, suction, lips, wet, dry, hands. She used to wake me up with soft kisses along my leg to let me know she was there and what she was up to. Then the kisses would run up to my stomach. A hand carefully placed over my cock and balls would warm them and add some sensation. When her mouth did finally touch my cock, it was after those soft, soft hands had stoked, teased, tickled and coaxed me into a painfully intense hard-on. Then the mouth. Then the real ride.

Mornings haven’t been the same since she died. The sun must be a little brighter, stronger now. But then that one morning came. I was sleeping off my usual late-night writing stint (with a celebration of a new one finished:
I was a Teenage Trailer Park Slut
) when I got this amazing hard-on. I was so zonked that I really can’t tell you if it was because of Jasmine or just because I was remembering my past with her, but there it was: long (no brag, but seven inches), strong and mighty. It was a mechanic’s cock, a soldier’s cock, a fuckin’ basketball player’s cock (okay, one of the white ones). I was proud of my cock, pleased with it that morning. With a hard-on like that, even hack writers can go out and become president (if you know the right people).

Then Jasmine started to work on it. Dear dead Jasmine. Maybe because of my half-zonked condition, maybe because I just missed those lips, that throat, but I didn’t do what I should have done: run screaming into that intense morning. But I didn’t and dear dead Jasmine started to really get down and suck at my cock.

Death did not diminish her knowledge of blow-jobs, it seemed. She was all of Jasmine rolled into that one cocksucking. I could, in fact, just squint enough and see her as I had seen her on all those mornings: her firm, slightly heavy body folded over, her face concentrating at my cock, with her right hand between her legs as she humped herself along with her sucking.

God, I could feel every inch of Jasmine – even if I couldn’t see her. I could feel her tongue playing with the ridges and corona of my head, I could feel her lips play over my skin and veins, I could feel her throat – hot and firm – as I grazed it during her sucking. When I came, it was so good it hurt real bad, and my come shot into an invisible mouth and vanished into ectoplasmic nothingness just as real, live Jasmine had liked to swallow it.

Other people would have run – to their pastors, to the cops (why?), to some science guy with a gizmo to exorcise the latent spectral energies, to their priest (who would rattle their beads and speak some Latin). But most folks don’t consider themselves a Child of the Night, groove on gloom, or hate any color save pitch black. Besides, Jasmine had been a sweet girl (tinkle, tinkle) and one motherfuckin’ hot lay.

The fact that she was dead and haunting me didn’t really seem to bother me at the time.

Jasmine was great for surprises. She liked to catch you unawares and get caught unawares herself. I can’t remember how many times I’d “caught” Jasmine in the living room, or on the toilet, in my bed, rubbing one of her little, soft fingers up and down on her little moist slit. She was like a little kid in that, her body and other people’s used to give her so much pleasure. Death didn’t even slow her down.

Listening to the newest Lycia, all moan, cemeteries, statues, clouds, rain, and mourners, I would get the strong impression of flowers, macramé, pot and the distinct sound of the tiny silver bells on toes jingling merrily away and look next to me to see Jasmine, half there and half not, not quite developed, not quite visible, legs spread wide, fingers gently rubbing up and down on her gumdrop-sized clit.

She became, over those weeks, to be more and more in my life. More so than she had when she was alive. Flesh and blood, Jasmine used to come over maybe, tops, three times a week. Then I wouldn’t see her for months. Once a year passed before I walked in to see her dancing, naked, with headphones on in my living room, the air thick with Mexican greenbud. But now that she had passed on, time seemed different to her. I would expect to feel or feel this spirit of Morrison, of Cream, of Sergeant Pepper at least once a day. Dancing in the living room, reading the Sunday paper in the kitchen, masturbating on the toilet, spooning with me in bed.