tattoo
(1,422 words)

I first had the whore on a hot tarmac night by the underpass. His breath was vermouth and old semen. Decaying, gentrified stink. I was all meat. He leaned against the concrete and bottlenecked his thighs. A deft pull-back and thrust, and I was in. Creeping jungle lust red crime. He had a small blue tattoo just above the bone. The image of an eye. Blue on white. The eye deformed with every movement. Came alive. Began to fuck me back. With the memory of a thousand bulgings in its head. I was trying to push the whore's spine into the concrete, and the tattoo was firing electric liquor up my cord. Too quick. I'd paid for more. Before he spat, I flicked him out like a burning match. Spun him round. He had the same tattoo on the flat of his back. I ignored it. He was just a thing. Had no soul. A heroin figment. Bagged on my trumpet and slid back in through tired lips. A million fake trumpets had been there before me. Retro-an-all. I didn't care. We all have to die some time, right? Condom, or no. I did it bareback. Always. No compromise. Die or live. Heaven or Hell. Dog'd him, fast. Pre-frontal-jissom. Out. Into arse. No warning. No finger. Strangle kiss. Pig grunt. No complaints. He was well-paid. Lots of green-backs. Rippling walls of animal muscle. A hymenless virgin. The best kind. Great arc. Electric monkey brace. The tattoo. Everywhere. Silver snake shot through his spine detritus. Curving, weaving, automatic. God power. A smack moment. A wave of self-disgust flooded back from his arse-hole into my veins. Bull-fucking bitch. Ignored it. Held on long enough. The wave broke. Pulled out, slower than before. Pig grunt. I left. But before I went, I turned him round, to look at the tattoo. It was gone.

I stayed away from the underpass for a week. Did other things. Got drunk on Marsala wine. Wanked fantasy men on hard, plastic videos. Sex-as-drug. Once in, you're sucked in deeper and darker, until it's all you crave for. It becomes life, until you wish for death. For the end of craving. At the end of the tunnel, a pair of red eyes. My dreams were filled with the tattoo. I would wake up, sweltering bitter in a mixture of sweat and smegma, and I could still see the tattoo, branded on the insides of my eyelids and in the still darkness of the summer night.

After seven days of this, I returned to the underpass. There he was, seventeen with eyes of seven hundred. Distant lapis. I looked closer. The skin proximity of a stranger is oddly attractive. And a whore is always a stranger. That remains their attraction. They never acquire the boredom of familiarity. Deep in the blue, the absinthe sapped and dripped, rotting to the core. I tore my gaze away. Bartered. Paid more than before. Didn't care. Needed the tattoo. The tiny eye. After that, I went back every night. Fucked five, six times. No words. Just animal sliding. A night congress of street beasts. It was a hard, urban lust, merciless in its intensity. He could've been a succubus; I, an incubus. The distant, disembodied cries of chemical gangs mingled with the constant, undulating thrum of the traffic far above. And when the first gray streaks of morning spat across the graffiti, we would part. He slunk back into the tarmac and concrete, an image in the gaping aluminium of half-empty cans; while I faded across the sunscrapers of uptown. Dissolved slowly into the coffee skies of morning. Eventually, it got so I was spending all I earned in the glass building on having his body. On the infusion of ecstasy which his many gashes gave to me. And in them all, at the centre of everything, the bulging, worm mouth tattoo. All day, I longed for the buttocks, spine, shoulders, thighs, the crumpled flower of his arse, the rich vermilion of his phallus, his toothless gums, squeezing, drawing, excruciating. He was the great god, the original soul which needed, no face. No being. Just the unending prompting of life's seed. We formed a circle with the day and the night, and the billowing overpass and the heaps of rubbish, the seeping heaths. The dead embryos. It was perfect, almost.

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One night, as the morning chill began to crack through the dark, I had the urge to follow him, to see just what sewer he dumped in, to feel his walls surround me in light as they had done so often in black. He wandered far across the city. I wondered if he knew I was following him. Knew, and liked it. Maybe he was trying to lose me. I went with him by the doors of transvestite blood clubs, their windows winking, broken, in the sunshine. And then down into the belly of the city, where once again we moved together in the dark. Subway stops gave way to suburban gardens and these in turn, to secluded mansions where all kinds of perversion went on, day and night, behind curtains of solid white net. I looked around, and saw we had left the city altogether. His legs were strong. I knew that already. He had the power of a goat in heat. And still the whore sped on, over hill and field, forest and lake, until, by the torn red haunch of a cliff, I lost sight of him in the noonday sun.

My shoulder hurt. I rolled away from the hurt. A jagged tin can had been pushing into the flesh. I was lying on the ground beneath the underpass. I was covered in clear jissom. It was the middle of the day, and yet here, it was still as deserted as ever. I got myself together and crawled away.

*****************

It was many weeks since I had been in to work. My money had almost dried up. I knew that when it ran out, I would no longer be able to buy the whore. To have his tattoo. For him, it was simply a business arrangement. The fantasy was all mine. Yet I needed the fantasy more than I needed life. I couldn't bear the thought of anyone else possessing the tattoo. I could not suffer him to lie outwith my dream. To be invulnerable. Invincible. I had to make him part of me. Him and his tattoo. The power of the eye.

That's when I dreamt up the leather collar.

That night, the very last of my notes crossed palms. His was white and soft, buffed by the sleek of sex. Over the months, my life had been slowly sucked into the seams of that deathly-white body. As I rutted him from behind, I slipped the leather thong around his pale neck and tightened. He struggled. Hard. I had bruises all over my body. The tattoos of his life. God, how he fought! That degraded existence of which I had partaken. I hated myself, but I hated him more. And most of all, I hated the eye. I loved the eye. I loved him. He was mine. Mine. He spasmed in oval. The eye glowed and bulged and filled my soul with its blue absinthe tears. The thing twitched, thrusting its loins against me with impossible force. The ecstasy of dying. The last orgasm. Paradise in his eyes.

As the lank corpse rictused into mine, my brain went blank.

An eternity later, when I looked again, the tattoo had vanished. With some difficulty, I heaved it over. It had gone from the front as well. Taking out a long silver knife, I sliced the meat into fragments. Every cut, a climax. A blood orgasm. After it was finished, I tossed the bits into the East River. I washed my body in the sewer. One with the whore, to the end.

As I hastened away through the near-dawn air, my body seemed to move differently. Even the lines of the sinews. Different. I felt a burning circle above my bone. I felt a space between my thighs. Eventually, when I could bear it no longer, I feverishly ripped off my clothes. Everything had changed. Then I looked into the blue eye, and I knew that I would be back at the underpass, by the pillar, that night.

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