I can’t really say when my romance with the underworld began. The lack of a time, a place, a beginning and end; it seemed common among the people I met. Our sex lives were dark labyrinths filled with even darker corners and partners we didn’t even recognize chained to the walls. No one went there much less trace his path all the way back to the cellar door. I’d had an urge to fuck anything within spitting distance since I was four years old, so perhaps that’s when it all began. I would’ve fucked my teddy bear if they made him with holes, and why don’t they anyway? Then there was that crud-flung night fifteen years later with two sleazy rocker guys in a smoke-choked bathroom on the Sunset Strip and a hot night cap with a teen runaway. Game on.

I came to believe that sex itself meant nothing. It was a cheap thrill half of which was more imagined than real. In Hollywood, when the lights go out and the rich and famous start screwing, there’s a cumslide in the hills and all of tinsel town bathes in the afterglow. Junkies and prostitutes slurp celebrity jizz from the gutter impregnating themselves with stillborn fame while star fucker fans scrape leftovers from cracks in the street. Dreams discarded like shitty diapers line the flophouse and when the guys and girls aren’t fucking each other, they’re fucking cars and money and still can’t get close to any of it.

Sex addiction is like any other—you need more the deeper you get. The hard stuff. Fucking some AIDS queen in a West Hollywood alley doesn’t cut it anymore. The wolf-like hunger demands more of you. The instinct mutates. I took to roaming the streets of Skid Row at 3 am, stalking shadows as they turned corners and disappeared under street lamps, eavesdropping on mumbled voices stuffed with wine bottles, shuffling down Fifth Street past box homes and stalking my prey.

One night in an alley behind the liquor store, I happened upon a drunk, early forties maybe, holding himself up with a wall. His eyes were glassy and couldn’t focus and didn’t care anyway or maybe they would’ve mustered the strength to see. I hoped he reeked of liquor and trash. I wanted to smother myself with the stench. Suffocate in it. Die in it. “Hey,” I called out. His gaze was estranged from everything. “You and me, partner.” His hair was longish and greasy and I wanted to pull it, tear it out, rip it out in bunches while I came inside him.

He staggered over to me. “It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?” I said. Since he felt anything. Since his pulse had quickened. Since something mattered. The guy didn’t say anything. Maybe he’s mute, I thought. I grabbed his shirt, spun him around and roughly shoved him against a dumpster. I held a switchblade to his throat. His pants were already loose on his waist and I tugged them down. Skinny, white ass; aren’t you going to say anything? He didn’t stop me. I slid right in, burying my dick to the hilt. Resist fucker! Resist!! I rammed him against the dumpster a few times, shook him, but he didn’t say anything, didn’t moan either. I wasn’t sure why I even bothered with the knife. Half of them were prostitutes when they had the looks. Taking a fat dick outside their beauty school prime was the best thing that happened to them in years. I couldn’t come so I pulled out. He looked disappointed. “Fuck off,” I said. “Fuck off!” He looked confused, wandered away.

A ball of fire rose inside me. The heat. Scalding me. I was filled with dread. Like a junkie fixing with lethal doses who always manages to live. There was nowhere left to go. No greater high. There was no fight left in the ghosts on Skid Row. I had already tried self-imposed sex detox on more than one occasion; lying on my filthy kitchen floor with a pillow over my throbbing prick like some kind of animal. It never worked. I had to go out. To hunt. The air wafting through the window was always thick with the odor of trash and hot dogs; there were no street vendors on my block and I often wondered if the pork smell wasn’t a Pavlovian lure by enterprising pimps. It called to me. Get dressed—the underwear with the stretched fuck hole so you can get in and out—fuck that, ditch the underwear and grab the new tennis shoes so you can run if you have to.

Getting into my car, my puny gay Geo, I drove southwest through Koreatown, clenching my teeth and feeling small and insignificant. My blade lay in the passenger seat next to me. It wasn’t completely useless. There was that guy from San Francisco who asked me to circumcise him since he was convinced cut queers got more action. Nothing surprises a true sex addict. Even though the foreskin made a great souvenir for a devoted sadist, the blade still craved a real fight. My mind made a random association to a documentary I’d seen about jaguars: solitary creatures, except when it came time to fuck. The male jaguar’s penis was covered in sharp backwards-facing spines that ripped into the female and forced her to ovulate. Both sexes had multiple partners. I was fascinated by sex among beasts. Violent, spontaneous boning. Predator on predator. I fantasized about Russian mobsters splashing Vodka on my back, striking a match and gutting me with the bottle. A gangbang with Sudanese rebels. Osama Bin Laden shoving an AK-47 up my ass. Grinning at the far-out images of militant sex, I spun my steering wheel to the left and drove down Vermont Avenue. I didn’t need to fly to Afghanistan. I lived a half an hour from a war zone.

Cops were always mistaking me for a thug. I certainly didn’t have a very thuggish name in Marvin. I guess I looked the part though, and I lived in a thug’s world. You either packed heat or you felt it. My neighbors in South Central were thieves and killers. Not me. My mama didn’t raise no gangsta. But my outsider status didn’t end there. I’d never dated a girl. So I wasn’t just a good boy but a fag too. Not that anyone knew. I kept it a secret. It was hard sometimes especially around my friend Dvonne who also came from a good family. He had silken, brown skin like a boy king raised in the shadow of the pyramids. Pharaoh’s blood; I was sure of it. Long eyelashes and a laid back style that never faltered.

We used to split the block late at night in my tan Corolla and go surfing: yet another thing thugs didn’t do. If we’d gone in the afternoon, folks would’ve thought homies hangin’ ten was a gag. Either that or we would’ve been beaten to death by skinhead punks. But that was our bond. Salty midnight runs on surfboards we kept hidden under my porch. It wasn’t about the waves. We spent most of our time bobbing in the surf under a full moon talking shit about fantasy futures somewhere else and what we do if we had a million dollars and when exactly did the Pharcyde stop making good records. The beach was always empty. It was ours.

“You wanna have kids some day?” he’d ask.

“Nah. You?”

“Lotsa work, man.”

I’d agree, “No doubt,” then chuckle and look away as the tide washed us clear of the subtext that jutted from the surface like sharp rocks.

On weekends we barbecued. Say what you want about the hood, but you can’t front on ribs and chicken on a clear Spring day with tendrils of smoke snaking into the air from every yard on the block. My family was tight with Dvonne’s. His sister Tamara was the female equivalent of her big brother and his mother was always trying to hook us up. We laughed and joked and no one suspected the battle raging inside of me. It wasn’t just I against I, but a war with the macho culture I came up in. In another life, raised in a white suburb, I would’ve come out of the closet and a minority of friends and supporters would’ve rallied around me, but that minority didn’t exist on the street where I lived. That didn’t mean there were no gays; it just wasn’t talked about. My world was an inferno where tolerance was like ashes in the wind. I dated girls like I was supposed to, but they could tell I was different even if my family couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

I loved Dvonne. I was in love with him. I’m fairly certain of that. But I never did anything about it. What I needed was something to release the pressure. Getting fucked was a hurdle to self-acceptance. I wouldn’t be allowed to deny myself after that. It would be real. My sexuality would be irrevocable. No one could take it away from me once I allowed it to happen. And maybe then I could be more frank about my feelings for Dvonne. West Hollywood was the obvious place to make it happen, but I wasn’t ready for that. It was too public. It was too done before. And besides that, it wasn’t my style. So I trolled the alleyways by the late-night hot spots in my own neighborhood. I was sure there was a cruising scene I’d never witnessed before. A ritualistic underworld pining for a sacrificial lamb.

The night’s new possibilities made me excited. Penetrating the ghetto, my cock was so hard I could’ve steered my ride with it. Pitbulls strained against leashes in the front yards of skeletal homes canvassed with clotheslines and low hanging wires as my dick pressed against the inside of jeans drizzling pre-cum like slobber from the mutts’ jowls. The only way to do it was to get out and walk. It felt too safe otherwise. Too much like some pedophile casing a schoolyard. I wasn’t crazy enough to go after one of the tattooed chulos that roamed the streets in packs. I would have to get one alone.

I parked around the corner from a bar called “The Lair.” The air outside was stiff and combustible. There was an alley between the bar and a wooden fence with homes in various stages of decay on the other side. That’s where I went, to the alley, to wait and listen to voices speaking in Spanish, near or far, I couldn’t tell, just background noise along with the dull thud of bass from a passing car. A couple stumbled out the back door of the bar, black guy, Latino girl, drunk and kissing and fondling each other. They didn’t notice me and walked off. I stood outside for almost an hour and there was no one else around, always voices, but no faces to go with them.

I moved on, cutting across the street to the next block and standing behind a pool hall where the crack of billiard balls colliding was the only sound. Then I heard footfalls nearby. It bordered on the absurd how perfectly this guy fit my thug stereotype; black in a wife-beater top with baggy jeans and even the Timberland boots. Clutching the switchblade in my pocket with a sweaty palm, I wondered if he had a weapon of his own; a Glock nine millimeter, isn’t that what they carried in the hood? The thought made my pulse race. I walked casually in his direction and he sank away. The pursuit led us deeper into the labyrinth of alleys that sliced through the neighborhood. Jaguars with razor dicks bolted through a tripwire jungle in my head.

I rounded a corner and there he was just standing there with his back to me, breathing heavily, almost panting. Moonlight bounced off his chiseled triceps. I remember thinking this guy could hurt me bad if he wanted to. I moved in, holding my blade to his neck with one hand and jamming the other down his pants to grab his hard dick. He grunted a little but didn’t fight even though I wished he would have. I unbuckled my pants with a sense of urgency; if anyone saw us we’d both end up shot execution-style right there. There was still no struggle as I ripped his pants down and plowed into him. He was tight as hell. Like a virgin with a vice grip. “You like this?” I sprayed in his ear; “You like getting fucked?” He bent over a little and I went deeper…tight, tight, tight…the friction made me come. I slapped his ass, smothering it in, and then I shoved him. He didn’t say anything. Not a word. But the panting had become something else, nasal, like he was choking. “Wazzup, homie? You don’t like the fag steez??” I wanted to fight, a bare-knuckles brawl, then I wanted to fuck some more. As I grabbed his arm and jerked him around to face me, a tear streamed down his face. “Are you fucking crying?” He looked ashamed or relieved, I couldn’t tell which. His face was more like a child’s than a man, resplendent with emotion as errant light from a streetlamp made ghetto rainbows of his tears. I was shocked. It was the most unnatural thing I’d ever seen. Terribly unnatural.

I waved the knife in his face, poking the air with the tip. I craved his fear. But he wasn’t scared, far from it, like he’d seen a hundred knives and taken a thousand bullets. Only then did I start wishing a low-riding posse of territorial gangsters might discover us so I could once and for all get some fucking action. When he finally spoke I could barely make out the words as he whispered, “Thank you. Thank you,” as if I’d done him the greatest favor in the world.

I turned and ran, back through the labyrinth of alleys. Knife clutched in my hand, forgotten. Panting, slowing to catch my breath, the sweat rolling down my back. Nothing surprises a true sex addict. Or so I thought.

 

© 2005 Eddie Beverage - Contributor's Bio