The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 (53 page)

It took me a minute to realize that Pepito was still pretty much out there and waving to folks. I’d dozed off before zipping myself back up. I didn’t know if anybody had seen or cared, but since I wasn’t already in handcuffs I figured nobody had spotted me or had minded if they did.

Actually, he was sort of cute, I noticed, as I slipped him back home. And he remained my one and true friend in a world of quandary, and was always along for the ride no matter how many miles we covered or where the bizarre journey took us.

I’d been on the bus for nearly three days and we’d pulled into more dustchoked towns and cities of smoke and steel than I’d imagined existed between the coasts. I was so tired, constipated, and restless most of the time that I just sat there in an opened-eye coma, fantasizing that I was trapped in hell. For my sins, St Peter had stuck me on a bus for all eternity. Whenever we stopped I gave a wide berth to the driver and tried hard not to call him “Pete”. I imagined him with the Book of Judgment in his hands.

If there was anyone from LA still on the bus with me, I didn’t know who it might be. Their faces shifted and altered from city to city. Their sighs and snores were the same, the tinny songs in their headsets and the covers of their paperbacks interchangeable. I considered setting my hair on fire just to see if anybody would notice. I was so bored that it was the only time in my life when I thought I might actually be able to stomach watching a mime. I might even join in. Walk against the wind. Pull the rope. Any damn thing.

I kept looking around, hoping to make eye contact with somebody, start up a conversation, but everyone was content in their seats, letting the miles flow over them, one after the other. I began feeling as if my skeleton was trying to make a beeline out of my body – every muscle commenced to ache, and my temples pounded with blood. I really didn’t want my obituary to read that I’d died of monotony aboard a New York-bound bus. Monty would use my death as a springboard to fame and sell my scripts for millions. He’d retire to Beverly Hills and I’d only be remembered for the softcore alien brain juice-sucking scene from
Zypho II: Zyphomania.

The twilight slowly withered to black and the smell of pine erupted. I had absolutely no idea where I was. I wondered if Steinbeck, Agee, or Kerouac had ever felt such an overwhelming loathing for cars, towns, and people in denim. The only road I wanted to write about was West 4th Street in the Village. I had the sense that once I hit Manhattan I’d never leave again.

I didn’t think I was lucky enough to have another woman peel herself from a section of night and come give me head. I wasn’t horny but the only survival instinct I had left was the will to procreate. I felt very much the way I imagined a fruit fly might feel during it’s twenty-four hour life span. Do the deed and call it a day.

I scanned the sleeping passengers and spotted a blur of movement a few seats ahead.

All I could see of her in the dark was the nimbus of her blonde hair, softly glowing, and the indistinct smear of motion circling before her. I stared and studied her for five minutes before I picked up on the fact that she was masturbating in the shadows.

It got to me, but damn near anything would’ve.

I stood and glided up the aisle to stand over her.

You could get in trouble for doing a thing like this, but the tedium had given me an ounce of assertion. I lightly fondled her hair, then the side of her face, and stroked her neck for a moment. I held my hand out and when she took it, with her wet fingers, I draw her from her seat and ushered her back to my own.

Okay, so now we were getting someplace. At least she let me touch her.

She slid past me and actually said, “Excuse me” as she passed, loosening her skirt as she took the inside spot. She slipped out of her panties and leaned against the window, reached back and clutched at my shirt, pulling me to her.

I wanted to know her name but didn’t want to ask. Maybe St Pete had stuck me in an eternal rolling orgy without intimate conversation.

She kneeled on the seat, opened her legs slightly and wriggled her ass in the dim light. Moonlight swam down and banked across her face, showing me the silver-lit silhouette.

I ground against her thigh, pressing myself tightly to her. I leaned forward and she turned and whispered into my ear, “My ass.”

“Yeah?”

“Butt-fuck me.”

All right, so maybe that could be considered intimate conversation. Maybe not. Sweat bloomed across my forehead and that fetid three-day old stink of my body assailed me.

I eased my index finger into her ass and crouched so that I could lick her from behind. She was wet and streaming, and I used my tongue to scoop her own juices up to her anus.

You could get funky when you had to. I slipped my finger in and worked her ass, listening to her quietly sigh, breathing soft as the sleeping passengers, the silver leaking down her back, her legs, the lovely blunt curve of her buttock. I rose and angled myself behind her, placed the head of my cock against her anus and pushed.

The air surged out of her and she made no other sound. I slid into her tightness and looked past her out the window at all the strange miles that lay behind and still lay ahead. The bus hit a bump in the road and jostled us together even more firmly, painfully, binding, as we grunted in unison.

I prodded forward into her completely, then slowly pulled out, reveling in the sense that I was making, then breaking, then remaking the circuit between us. I became transparent and kind of floated out of my shoes. I thought that this is how schizophrenics must feel all the time, unanchored from the world, lost in their own misfiring neurons and too tired to care. She bucked roughly against me, spiking herself on my cock as she picked up the pace.

“That’s it,” she said. “Harder! Harder!”

“Jesus, be quiet. . . .!” I hissed.

I pressed her into the window even more roughly and she climaxed and let out a titter. It took a second to realize she wasn’t really getting off on what I was doing – it was the glass window.

She was kissing it, licking, even biting at it. Staring into it with love and wanting. She did not care much for me or Pepito at all.

It stopped me, watching her like that. I’d gotten the vapid look in the middle of sex before – the disappointed frown, the girl calling out somebody else’s name – but I’d never been thrown over for a pane of glass before.

This was the kind of thing that could shoot your self-worth to hell.

I tried to bull my way through, but I was hard pressed, slamming my cock into her from behind while the faint ghostly image of her reflection stared back at me. It was new to me, fucking a glass-licker. I suppose there’d been precedent, there always was precedent, but I’d never heard about it before.

She jammed herself backwards and I shoved into her. She moaned and ground her ass against me, thumping, even as she spread herself wider over the glass. It’s amazing what can happen to you, how your guts can be plucked and knotted, but there I was butt-fucking her and growing jealous of the goddamn window.

As I thrust she reached down and fingered herself, her juice dripping between her thighs and splashing me each time I dug in. I tried to help, but she kept tilting the wrong way, angling as if she might dive headlong out of the bus. I think she climaxed but I couldn’t be certain. We lived in a puzzling age. My nuts tightened and I felt no need to slow myself down and let the act linger. I’d lost her before we’d even begun, and the glass was covered with dried smears of her spit, the outline of her lips.

She murmured to the window and told it how much she loved it, shoved herself back onto me and held herself there, letting me hammer away until I came. I didn’t even need to bite down on her shoulder to stifle my grunts. I had no sound to make.

She told the window, “That was wonderful. Oh God, I needed that. You were terrific.”

I tried not to sigh. She dropped her skirt and passed me again saying, “Excuse me,” and returned to her seat. I was a mess and didn’t much care. I zipped up, sat back down, looked out on the American night and made an attempt to curb my paranoia. The glass looked on.

As soon as I caught my breath I’d head to the lavatory and get some wet tissues and wipe clean the signs of an affair I had only a minor part in. I wondered what the Book of Judgment would have penciled in about this particular incident. Pete would not be happy. My reflection stared at me until the face of the moon grew obscured with clouds and I was thankfully left in darkness.

But the glass kept looking down at me – arrogant, vain, and somehow sated.

We pulled into the Port Authority bus terminal on West 42nd Street in Manhattan, about nine a.m., and while I was scrounging up my belongings the driver came back and grabbed me by the collar.

“That’s unsanitary, what you been doin’ right there, buddy!”

I realized then that, of course, he’d known all along what had happened, or thought had happened. “Look, Pete, nothing like this has—”

“My name ain’t Pete!”

“I’m sorry, really, but—”

“Why don’t you and that damn Pepito of yours get the hell off my bus before I call the cops!”

“But Pete!”

“I told you, my name ain’t Pete!”

I took my satchel, my wavering self-esteem, and my damn Pepito and dragged myself into the terminal feeling like I had detached from humanity and might not ever get back into it.

I was so heavy with fatigue I could barely move as I lumbered among the crowd. I threw myself down in a seat and listened to the roaring bus engines outside, the thrum of the people, and tried to breathe in all the open space. Normally I’d be tracking folks all over the place, my head buzzing with dialogue and camera directions. But now I could barely remember my own name. I got up and pulled my luggage along after me like an angry child, and headed to the men’s room.

It had been a hell of a trip so far, but that doomed feeling you get when serious grief is waiting around the corner hadn’t left me yet. I’d had it since I was about fifteen but that didn’t change matters much.

I used the urinal and spent ten minutes at the sink washing up, staring in the mirror, trying to remember what I was doing on this side of the country again. Hollywood had somehow faded off my back after five days. I felt stripped of most of the things that had kept me going day to day: ambition, desperation, fear. I was aching and exhausted but felt somehow cleansed. I was having a Zen moment of tranquility.

I saw her in the mirror and thought, okay, so this is the capper. I’d been waiting, and afterwards, I could get back on the right rail.

She came up out of the stall like the ghost of all my sins given form, and she swept behind me in one fluid motion as if she’d been meant for this and only for this. I didn’t turn but stared at her reflection, trying to make eye contact. She barely acknowledged me although now she was brushing against my back. I’d described women like her in my scripts before as innocent, virginal, snow white, and the girl next door. Her bobbed blonde hair smelled of daisies. I’d never smelled a daisy before, but there it was. She was a homespun beauty that made you think of every Norman Rockwell painting, fireside family moment, Christmas morning, and endearing image that didn’t actually exist in the world and probably never had.

“Spank me,” she said.

I blinked a few times. I tried not to go, “uyh,” but I did it anyway. I kept wondering if I was ever going to visit the good ole missionary position again with somebody I cared about.

I turned around and reached out to touch her hair. I suddenly had an overwhelming need to draw my fingers through a lovely woman’s hair, to make a little contact. She dodged me without hardly even moving, as if she’d been trained for it.

“Look, lady, I’m not really feeling frisky at the moment.”

Her face fell in on itself and her mouth opened and her eyes spun with pain and rejection. It took some effort for me to quell my curiosity and not suddenly rip into asking her a hundred questions on why a gold-laced girl would spend her time hiding in the Port Authority Men’s Room for someone to redden her ass.

“I want you to spank me!”

“No,” I told her and started to walk out.

She slid in front of me, blocked my way, tore open her shirt and pressed her tits into my face. “Bite them.”

“They’re very nice.”

“Come on. Bite them! Chew my nipples!”

“No.”

“Do it! I need to feel you.”

And yet she’d eluded my touch. I’d forgotten how pushy New Yorkers could be, though I had to admit nobody’d ever quite bossed me around like this. It was a situation that locker room chest-beatings were made of. The kind of porn letters I’d send in to the low-end men’s magazines for twenty-five bucks a pop.

But I’d never had to live through it before. The reality of ludicrous circumstances, plus my fatigue, was starting to make me feel drunk and dangerous. The trouble with Zen moments is they vanish the moment you remember who you are.

“I’m going to kiss you,” I told her.

“What?” She drew back, her frown etched in fear.

“You heard me. I’m going to make out with you. We’re going to neck.”

“No, that’s not what I want.”

“Yes, I’m taking you on a date. To the movies. And we’re going to sit in the back row and feed each other popcorn!”

“No!”

There was a sudden mad rush of energy and anger that knotted between my shoulders. “I’m going to kiss you and tell you how much I love you!”

“Oh God! No!”

“Bow down before Pepito, baby!”

“You’re fuckin’ nuts!”

“Tremble before my damn Pepito!”

“Help!”

Of course I was out of my head, but I didn’t feel bad about it anymore. Sometimes your confusion made more sense than all the logic you’d build up for yourself. I leaned in to kiss her with visions of a house in the suburbs and three flaxen-haired children writhing through my heated mind. My lips brushed hers and she hauled back her fist and clobbered me.

“Get away, you freak!”

She ran out of the men’s john and I stood there with my back against the stall, tasting blood against my teeth. It was just the way of things. I didn’t feel relaxed or inspired. I didn’t have half the great American novel written. I checked my watch. I had just enough time to get where I was going. I made it out onto 42nd street and headed for the five-star hotel.