THE MADNESS TRIP by B. A. Oard: Chapters Three and Four of a Work-in-Progress

(Here are two more chapters from my 2010 manuscript of The Madness Trip: A Surrealistic Pornobiographical Phantasmagoria)



CHAPTER THREE

“You see this picture?” Mr. Smith asks his eleventh-grade American History class. He stands and holds up for our observation a 1982 issue of TIME magazine with a Soviet child in military uniform on the cover. “This is a thirteen year-old Russian kid with a machine gun.” Mr. Smith surveys our blank reactions with a look of utter contempt. “I bet if somebody gave any of you a machine gun, you wouldn’t know what to do with it.” He slams the magazine angrily onto his desk with a loud slap that snaps some of us to attention in our seats. “It’s because you’re weak.” Here it comes, I think. In addition to teaching history, Stanley Smith directs the weight training program at Booth High, so it seems almost logical that he should reduce all historical conflict to a simple dialectic of weakness and strength–not political or economic or military strength, but physical bodily strength, the matter of muscles. Mr. Smith is a man who sincerely believes that Harry Truman won the 1948 election because he could benchpress 100 pounds more than Thomas E. Dewey. “You’re weak, people!” he shouts at us, emphasizing his favorite word. “Weak. You’ve been spoonfed all your lives and had everything handed to you on a silver platter. You have your GI Joes and Malibu Barbies and boomboxes and designer jeans. Russian kids have nothing. That’s why they’re strong.” As if to illustrate this last point, he flexes his weight-trained biceps and sucks in his beer-bulged belly. Mr. Smith is a short, fat, middle-aged alcoholic, but in the mirror of his mind he sees a young, trim, rippled olympian. “When you got nothing, you have to be strong. Because you have to fight for what you’ve got. You understand me, people?” At least a few of us understand that Smith has casually shuffled off the coil of logic as he shifts into full harangue mode. “When you’ve got nothing you want everything. So you make yourself strong so you can take it. And then you take it, people! You take everything. That’s the Russian theory. That’s why their women look like men. ‘Cause they lift weights and take steroids. You saw Rocky IV, didn’t you? That Russian was on drugs. Drugs, people, drugs!” Smith is screaming insanely at us now. “Just say no! Just say no! Just say no, people, because drugs will make you weak. And that’s what the Russians want. And that’s–” He hesitates for a second, as though silently considering the tangled thicket of his discourse, and then valiantly soldiers on. “–that’s why you like the Russians, people. I know. I know. You love the Russians. You can’t get enough of them. Because they’re just like you: weak.” He stomps back to his desk and picks up the magazine again, inadvertently showing us the Marlboro Man on the back cover. In a voice that has magically modulated from howling hysteria to tear-choked sincerity, he continues: “When I see a picture like this, it makes me so sad. So sad I could almost cry. Because I love America. Yes, I love America. And these Russians want to take what I love. They want to take it away from me.” The magazine slips from his fingers, fans open in the air, and falls on the front edge of the desk, its overhanging page showing us an upside down supermodel lying seductively across the hood of an upside down 1983 Lincoln Continental. “I love this country, and I hate to see it destroyed by Russians. You have to see the movie Red Dawn, people. That’ll teach you the truth about Russians. And Rambo. Remember what they did to him. They kept that man in a bed of leeches. Leeches, people! Russians will stick leeches on your face to make you talk. There’s nothing those animals won’t do. Mark my words: Every war in human history was started by Russians. Hitler was a Russian. That’s why he called it National Socialism, ‘cause all socialists are Russians. Napoleon was a Russian, too. His real name was Napolovski. Now, the liberal media won’t tell you this stuff, but I think the truth needs to be put out there. Don’t believe any of this Gorbymania bullcrap. It’s a trick. Gorbachoff with his Glass Nose and his Paris Troika. That’s all a trick.” His voice rises with anger now as he paces back and forth in front of the class. “A trick, people! That’s what it is. The Russians want to lull us into a false sense of security so they can spring the big Surprise Attack. Just like they did at Pearl Harbor. Mark my words, people: It’s coming. And who’s gonna defend America then? Huh? You gonna do it, Potter? Naw, you might chip a nail. How about you, Parker? You gonna defend America in your Motley Crue t-shirt? No, I didn’t think so. Because you kids are weak! The only thing that stands between you and the barrel of a Russian gun is that man!” Smith extends his arm in a histrionic gesture and points to the framed portrait of Ronald Reagan that grins grandfatherly on the classroom wall. “That man is the only thing that saved you. When the Russians wanted to drop atomic bombs on you from their base in Grenada, that man kicked them out. And he didn’t stop there, either. Right now, at this very moment, he is saving you from Russians who want to break into your house and cut your throat while you’re asleep. Right now, people! The only thing that man asks himself day and night is, How can I save the America I love from the Russians? That’s the only thing. And do you know why he can save us? It’s because he’s strong. You ever seen Reagan’s biceps? The next time King’s Row’s on TV, watch closely and check out his upper body. This is a man who could’ve crushed Walter Mondale’s head like a raw egg with one hand. One hand, people!” Smith’s clenched fist illustrates his contention. “Reagan is saving you because he has the kind of strength you need if you’re going to fight the Russians. D’You know what kind of strength that is? Do you? Well, I’ll show you what kind it is.” From his desk drawer he produces an ordinary-looking wooden-handled hammer which he holds up for our inspection. “This is a Russian hammer, people. Right here on the handle it says ‘Made in USSR.’ This is Russian technology. Douglas, come up here.”

With surprisingly little trepidation, I walk up to the hammer-wielding Smith. “Douglas, I want you to take this Russian hammer and hit me with it. Right here. Right in the middle of my forehead. You think you can handle that, Douglas? Then do it. Do it. What’re you waitin’ for? Christmas? Do it. Hit me as hard as you can.”

I grip the hammer with both hands and, putting all of my weight into the motion, land a spectacular home run swing just slightly off the center of Smith’s high, domelike forehead. He staggers back and catches himself against the blackboard. “Whoa Bessie!” he cries out, repeatedly smacking his forehead with both hands as though extinguishing a small fire. “Whoa! ...Wow!...Yeee-oww! ... Whoa!...Yah! ...Help me Reagan, help me Reagan!...Wow!” He finally straightens, shakes himself like a drenched dog, and yells at us, “That’s the kinda strength none a you little assholes have!...None a you pussy wimp faggots can take a Russian hammer!”

The force of the hammer’s impact is still palpable in my hands later that day as I smear a white streak of soap across my chest in the showers after gym class. Turning to let the water fall over my shoulders and back, I surreptitiously scan the room. The walls are lined with the backs and sides of thirteen other teenage boys, some fat, some thin, some short, some tall, all disappointingly lilywhite like the rest of the student bodies at my suburban ‘white flight’ high school. Each boy stands beneath his own cone of water, either lathering up or rinsing down, and thin idealizing clouds of steam rise from the floor to cast their bodies into a pleasingly soft focus. I glimpse a few of their cocks– depressingly diminutive danglers drooping from drowned pubic beards–and the sight, however unappetizing, vaguely stirs me. Careful not to stare too obviously or long (“I saw you in there, faggot,” were the words whispered threateningly in my ear by a redneck-voiced upperclassman outside the showers a year earlier. Not the first time the word had been applied to me, but the first time it carried such a freight of barely concealed violence. “Faggot,” pronounced in such a tone in such a place, signified a target of recreational Saturday night brutality. Or as my classmate Donald Harmon once breathlessly recounted, “See, ya go down to Franklin Park about one in the morning and go down Franklin Drive, but keep your lights off, just cruise slow-like, an’ when ya see a faggot walkin’ on the sidewalk ‘cause only fags walk there ya know ya hit your lights twice like ON...OFF...ON...OFF an’ the faggot comes around an’ he gets into your car an’ then he’ll talka buncha shit an’ everything but that’s not important the real thing is when he asks to see your dick or you see his dick or whatever that’s when ya haul off an’ just punch the motherfucker right in the face break his faggot nose if ya can an’ hit your horn twice like BEEEEP–BEEEEP an’ your friends run outta the car behind you an’ pull the faggot outta your car an’ you all just kick him around on the ground for a while an’ if ya got a tire iron well that’s even better ‘cause a faggot just wants to turn you into a faggot an’ that’s all a faggot understands.”), I look at their swinging, dripping genitals until my own dick begins to lengthen and thicken, and I imagine myself on my knees in the middle of the room, kneeling over the central drain while the other lucky thirteen boys stand in a circle around me, their dicks at attention, my hands and mouth working every one. I suck a fat boy’s thin dick while stroking a tall kid’s shorter one and reaching behind me to pump the thick cock of a blonde Antinous whose thighs rub against my shoulder blades. I turn and give Hadrian’s lover my mouth, circling my tongue three times around the tip of his macrocephalic cock and tasting the tang of urine at his urethra before I swallow him. Mouthfilling stiffness rubs against the back of my palate while my nose brushes his wet pubic hair. I pull my head back with a forceful suck, then take him down again, repeating this until he groans deeply and I move on to his neighbor. I suck them all and they all ejaculate at once, covering me in come. And as I stand in the shower now, my cock hardening at the fantasy, the water streaming over me becomes a heavy rain of semen. It descends in creamy strings from the showerhead, covering my hair like shampoo, sliding like soapy lather down my face, pouring over my chest and belly, dripping thickly from my cock and balls, falling in white runnels down my legs. Daring to look around, I notice that all the boys are now joyfully showering in semen, rubbing it into their bodies, flinging soppy handfuls across the room at friends, and all the showerheads have been transformed to giant fleshy cocks, permanently erect and coming perpetually. I throw back my head, let the come pour into my mouth and know that I am swallowing the semen of every cock in the world. I close my eyes and all those millions of cocks blur together, fuse to a single image, a photograph in a book that lies open before me on a table in the silent library of Booth High School.

It is a photo of Michelangelo’s David, the young king displaying himself, the sunken Christ of the Vatican Pietà inflated to godlike size. The downward turning torso and upward sweeping legs collide and culminate in a cock and balls that stare directly at the viewer while David turns his marble eyes away. I meet the cock’s unblinking gaze, stare back at it lying there, pillowed on the polished scrotum, protruding from a pubic bush so stylized it resembles surging water or a meadow run riot with windswept weeds. I tilt the book upward, bring the page closer to my eyes, and feel myself enveloped by an overpowering desire to suck that cock. The desire is familiar, but its strength before this object is unprecedented. I want to fly immediately to Florence, find the Accademia somewhere among its narrow twisting streets, enter the large Baroque room where David stands in his niche like the ultimate Graven Image, elbow through the crowds of tourists, elude the clutching arms of security men, leap onto the rocky pedestal, pull myself up his powerful legs, and wrap my lips around that marble cock. I want to hold its polished hardness in my tongue, feel it pushing against my cheek, give him a blowjob like the one Jehovah gave his men of clay. The marble turns to flesh in my mouth. A patch of color radiates outward from the base of his cock, tans the whiteness of chest and arms, darkens his legs to a living hue. His great head turns downward to look at me and I look up to meet the eyes of a muscular, dark-skinned, Palestinian youth, brother of those throwing rocks at Israeli tanks on every evening’s nightly news. His gigantic hand grips the back of my head and guides me back and forth along an enormous cock that trusts bruisingly into my throat. I gasp for breath as he slams my face into his rocky hips, again and again, unendingly, and here in the library my cock strains painfully for freedom against the biting teeth of my zipper.

I lower the book, tent it over my bulging lap, and look carefully around the room. The other three boys at my table are absorbed in trigonometry, calculus and chemistry. At the other tables, other students lean into open textbooks and scratch pencils against paper. A supposedly studious silence is rigidly enforced by the bun-haired banshee-bitch of a librarian who at the provocation of a discreet whisper or escaped giggle will rise from her desk and swoop down upon the offender with an ear-splitting, table-rattling rendition of her favorite aria, “DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT THE WORD ‘QUIET’ MEANS!?”as though she intends to teach the definition via this negative example. When all is quiet she sits at a high desk from which she can easily surveil the entire library while guarding the four pathetic rows of bookshelves behind her, a purely euphemistic set of ‘stacks’ that she has systematically contaminated with the printed spew of her beloved John Birch Society and other even nuttier American fascist organizations. Pressed between old dusty legitimate volumes of history and biography acquired by her predecessors are cheaply mimeographed pamphlets with such unintentionally Dadaist titles as Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles and Eisenhower: American Hero or Soviet Agent? (The author favored the latter hypothesis). Her second act upon assuming the librarianship–her first was to save our souls by razoring the definition of ‘fuck’ out of Webster’s Ninth–was to purge the Russian literature shelf of its weighty, leather-bound volumes, replacing them with more easily portable works like Fr. Paul O’Brien’s deathless pamphlet Tolstoy Was A Dirty Red. Today she sits engrossed in her customary daily activity, clipping stories from the local right-wing newspaper so they can be filed alphabetically in the forbidding ranks of long, gray filing cabinets that dominate half the room.

Silently, slowly, tooth by tooth, I ease my zipper down. When I draw my jockey shorts aside, my cock flops up into the darkness of the art book’s tent. I scan the room. No one has noticed, so I begin to surreptitiously stroke my penis, keeping my arm rigid and moving only my wrist, occasionally employing my free hand to increase the height of the structure atop my lap, a church expanding to accommodate its enlarging congregation. If the librarian flies on harpy wings to my table and snatches away the book, I suppose I could plead the mitigating circumstance of having been hypnotized by The Beatles, having listened to “She Loves You” so many times that the lyrics transformed themselves into “I wanked it, yeah yeah yeah, / In an art book, yeah yeah yeah, / In the library, yeah yeah yeah... And with a dick like this / I’ll be the next John Holmes...”

But no such stratagem is necessary. The librarian is preoccupied with the problem of where to file a story cut from the Booth Daily Christer about the potentially eternal effects of backwards Satanic messages in heavy metal music. Should ‘Stairway to Heaven or Highway to Hell?’ go under C for Current Events, M for Music or O for Our Lord? She fails to notice the now-visible pumping motion of my arm and the curiously localized earthquake now shaking the Michelangelo-book-cum-cathedral-of-dick in my lap. She doesn’t even raise her head when the book tumbles to the floor with a loud smack. This is strange indeed, but no stranger than the fact that my friend Paul, sitting beside me, has now taken out his cock and is stroking it in full view of anyone who would glance in our direction. Richie and Stu, sitting across from us, raise unfazed faces and unzip themselves, and the four of us announce in stentorian chorus: “Circle jerk!”

The librarian gives us little trouble. Her unprecedentedly speechless mouth is gagged with a wad of newsclippings, her hands are bound with bookbinder’s tape, and she’s stuffed into a filing cabinet under B for Bitch. Table and chair legs whine gratingly as a competition space is cleared in the center of the floor. Donald Trump strides into the room, looking just like the cover photo on The Art of the Deal. He grabs a microphone that descends from the ceiling and begins, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I’m Donald Trump (sustained applause, cheers, whistles)–yes, thank you....thank you...no, no, thank you...please...thank you–I am here this evening to welcome you to the Seventeenth Annual Trump North American Circle Jerk Classic (applause, cheers, barking). Thank you, thank you. This competition is brought to you by the Trump Masculine Enhancement Pump. Remember: When you want to hump, pump it with Trump. (uncomfortable silence) So then...Let’s get on with the show! (cheers, whistles, coyote-like howls; when the uproar fades, Trump reads from an index card palmed in his hand) This will be a Standard Euro-American Circle Jerk observing the Marquis of Queensberry Rules as revised by his son Alfred. To wit: Six contestants beginning from a state of flac-, flac-, flac-cidity–whatever that is–will man-, man-, man-ip-u-late themselves to a state of erection and e-jac-u-lation. The first competitor to e-jac-u-late wins the entrance fees of all other competitors. The entrance fee for this event is five dollars. Gentlemen, take your positions!” Six of us, naked and soft now, kneel in a circle illuminated by a hot white spotlight. Our six five-dollar bills are carefully stacked at the circle’s center. Around us, in the darkness outside the cone of light, we can sense a vast crowd of spectators gathered in concentric circles, like angels and saints around God in medieval paintings of heaven. “Gentlemen, grab your genitals!” We take ourselves in hand. My cock begins to harden as soon as I touch it. “Ready!... Set!... Stroke!” And we’re off. A pandemonium of encouraging shouts and screams explodes from the audience as we furiously pull and pound our growing dongs. Paul springs to hardness first; Stu is close behind; Richie’s off to a slow start but quickly recovers, squeezing his balls to come up on the outside; Ronald’s working solidly in fourth place; Danny in fifth; Tommy’s still trying to break out of the flaccid gate; and now Danny makes his move, cruising up the inside with his trademark turbo-wrist technique. Danny passes Ronald, says bye-bye to Richie, comes up behind Stu, passes him; and now its just Paul and Danny, cock and cock in the lead...

My hand passes blurringly up and down my dick; the white noise of crowdroar fills my ears. Hardening toward climax, I close my eyes and think of my first time with Nina, pushing into her pussy in the big double bed of the Ramada Inn by the highway. The gaudy pink alarm clock on the nightstand flashes 12:00, Nina lets out a soft moan, and after three or four strokes I’m a goner, shooting 17 years of pent-up virginal energy into the condom’s sterile tip. She chuckles softly to herself as I roll the spent rubber off my softening cock. “Zat vas probably more exciting for you zan it vas for me, ja?” Nina, my German exchange student girlfriend, had lost her virginity almost three years earlier to her long-term boyfriend in Hamburg, the nefarious Jurgen, unreachable object of my highly motivated malignancy. (Many nights during that junior year I lay awake imagining a long-distance call to Hamburg during which I would Iago honest Jurgen into Othelloesque paroxysms of jealous rage. But these conversations never kicked their way out of fantasy’s womb. Jurgen was too far away and his girlfriend too deliciously close for my mental enterprises to ever earn the name of action.) So although we’re the same age, Nina speaks with an adult’s experience of sex while I’m still a horny teenager with an interior monologue that might be transcribed “...pussy pussy pussy titties pussy pussy...”

“Ze first time is alvaze very rapid, you know. Ve’ll do it again in a vhile und it vill be better. Ze night is Jung.”

“I don’t wanna do it in a vial, I wanna do it in your pussy.”

She laughs. “Not vial, dumkopf, vhile, in a vhile.”

“Oh, while, I see.”

“Ja.” She pushes up to a sitting position and leans against the padded headboard. “Vhy don’t you give me ze oral sex now? Eat my pussy. Here, I vill show you.”

And she does, guiding my head between her thighs and beginning my true sexual education. Down there among the Gothic arches and Rococo folds of Nina’s pussy I learn to love the sexual scent that will become my madeleine, every other woman’s pussy transporting me immediately upon the first breath of its perfume back to Nina’s on that rented bed. I learn to love the taste and texture, to lick upward teasingly toward the clitoris hiding under its fold of flesh, and then to flick it with the tip of my tongue, and finally to roll my tongue and mouthfuck it, bringing on a bodyshaking orgasm. When I press apart her inner labia the first time, I’m initially taken aback to find the entrance to her vagina blocked by a staring vertical eye, identical sister of her facial pair. “Ja, I vant to see everyting,” Nina explains, noticing my reaction. I’m surprised the eye wasn’t punctured by my few blind, amateurish thrusts. The blue iris flicks up to the corner of the eye and moves slowly back down across bulging glassy whiteness, studying my face minutely from sweaty hair to pimpled chin. “Vhy don’t you lick it?” “Won’t that hurt?” “Nein, lick it vit ze tip of your tongue, like zis.” Her demonstration is devastatingly sexy, and I feel my spent dick beginning to harden again as I stick my tongue between her wavy labia and carefully touch the eye with its tip. To my surprise the tongue meets not a quivering jelly but a surface hard and smooth as glass. Nina’s breath catches in her throat and she gasps with sudden urgency, “Oh suck it! Suck it out! Suck it hard!” I fasten my lips around the vaginal eye and apply Hooverish suction. The hard object leaps into my mouth with a barely audible pop, and I immediately spit it into my hand. It’s a transparent glass sphere about the size of a ping-pong ball. The eye takes up half of its interior; the other half is filled with a clear liquid in which thin red veins growing from the eye’s back toss and coil like aquatic plants moving in a strong current. Tiny schools of infinitesimal black fish swim among the waving veins. Nina takes the eye between her thumb and forefinger, raises it to her lips, kisses it. “You like my eye? I love it. I bought it from an old voman in ze East.” She pops it into her mouth and swallows hard. It travels down her throat like an Adam’s apple. I press a finger into her pussy and feel the eye’s glassy hardness already there. “It looks like you are ready to fuck me again now, ja?”she says, touching the top of my cock. “Fuck me for real zis time, okay?”

Fuck me for real zis time. As my orgasm approaches, I force my eyes open and note that the site of our circle jerk has changed from a massive darkened arena to the perpetually daylight gaming floor of a Vegas casino. While we six boys kneel naked on the floor, pumping and panting for the pile of fivers at our circle’s center, the other gamblers work grimly on, slamming chips onto the roulette table, angrily calling out numbers to the craps shooter, daring the blackjack dealers to hit them again. Beyond them, silver slot machines stand in rows like soldiers ranked for inspection. In front of each machine an overweight white woman dressed for a day of golf stares at rolling cherries and caresses a metallic arm. One of the machines suddenly sirens and flashes like a police cruiser while disgorging a load of quarters. The woman before it leaps up and down and cries out orgasmically. All six of us come at once, semen pouring and spurting from our cocks to join the palimpsest of questionably legal stains already inscribed on the casino floor. One of my spurts flies off at an odd angle, turns a cartwheel in midair, and deposits itself atop the stack of money. “Fuckin’ Douglas jizzed on the pot!” Paul calls out after catching his breath. The others follow his pointing finger to a line of semen dribbling down the side of the pile, gluing the bills together. Paul starts to laugh, then Stu, and soon they all collapse into side-grabbing, floor-rolling hysteria, their gasping laughter accompanied by delirious cries of “Right on the money!” The sunglassed pitboss observes these actions expressionlessly, and the blackglassed Eye In The Sky, a malignant tumor hanging from the ceiling, sees it all.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

The Strawberry Alarm Clock stops singing about incense and peppermints, and in the space between songs I lie back in the bathtub. The snake’s body coils loosely around my left arm; its head hovers like a helicopter above my chest. Swooping down, it flicks its tongue at my right nipple, brushing back the black encircling hairs and sending a tickling tremor around the ribcage to my knobby spine. The head sweeps upward, moving as gracefully as a fish in water, and descends to my other nipple. Leathery snakethroat rubbing against bumpy skin reminds me of the texture of Nina’s nipples, smoother than mine, when I reach down to gently squeeze them as I sit on the edge of the bed and she kneels on a pillow between my legs, giving me head. I hear her throaty moan, feel her hot breath on the tip of my cock, and pinch her nipples harder (exactly as she taught me to do it). In the tall mirror that doubles my bedroom on the door, I see her bobbing blonde head and taut, muscular back moving between my scratchy, winter-pale legs and bony, calloused knees. Her long smooth adolescent legs curl under her, the backs of her feet propping up the twin hemispheres of an ass that looks surprisingly vulnerable and innocent. I release her nipples and pinch them again. Her lips move faster along my cock. Her fingers play arpeggios on my balls. I stare at her ass in the mirror and desire to pass through the glass and prostrate myself Islamically on the carpet behind her, kiss that soft, cushiony, blemishless ass, lick it, rub my face against it, part its cheeks and the pink, puckered folds of its anus and stick my tongue deep into that hot, black hole. And even more than this, more than wanting Nina, I want to be Nina. I want to pass into her body like Zeus into the swan, to feel my cock in my mouth, my balls in my hands, my blonde hair falling like a curtain around my face as I suck myself to orgasm. These thoughts set me off, and when I gush into Nina’s mouth I feel that I’m shooting my self into her–my being, my soul–and in the emptied cinema of my mind a close-up of Nina’s face is frozen on the screen. She pushes herself up along my body, kissing my belly, chest and throat, pushes me back on the bed and opens our mouths with a kiss, letting gravity drip the jism slowly from her mouth to mine.

“Vhat do you tink it tastes like?”

“A mouthful of tears.”

The sound of airplane engines rises to an insistent whine, the voice on the PA announces, “Lufthansa flight 67 nonstop to Frankfurt is now boarding all passengers at Gate 21A,” and Nina and I press ourselves against each other in an alcove near the restrooms. This is goodbye. I back her against the wall and thrust my tongue roughly into her mouth. Her tongue slides caressingly into mine. She lifts a leg and wraps it around my thigh; my hand travels under her skirt and unexpectedly encounters bare pussy, no silk or cotton offering flimsy resistance. (I loved her even more for this–for about two hours. When I returned home and replayed the incident in my mind, it occurred to me that Nina had left off her panties not to facilitate my final blind grope but to erotically greet her beloved Jurgen when he met her connecting flight at the Hamburg airport. She probably intended to say hello with a J. G. Ballard-style fuck in the airport parking lot. What a bitch.) I slip two fingers into her vagina and touch the hard surface of her third eye. With our mouths and tongues still locked in a kiss and Nina’s arms clamped powerfully around my back, I slowly extract the eye from her pussy and slip it surreptitiously into my pocket. (But this isn’t the beginning of some 19^th-century Gogolian tale of Nina and her Wandering Eye. No, this particular ‘Story of an Eye’ comes to a rapid and decidedly naturalistic conclusion: Sitting alone in the back seat on the drive home, watching the landscape of our earlier journey rewind outside my window, I took the eye out of my pocket and raised it to my nose, smelling the heavy perfume of Nina’s pussy that clung like an atmosphere to its spherical surface. Wanting to taste her again, I placed the sphere in my mouth, and after a few minutes of licking and sucking it like a carnival jawbreaker, I raised my tongue and sent it rolling towards my throat. I immediately began to gag. A flu-like wave of nausea rose from my stomach. I thrust my choking head out the window, heimliched myself against the inside door handle, and expelled Nina’s eye into the 80mph wind of our motion. When I recovered and looked back, I could no longer see the smashed eye lying in the gravel of the highwayside like a blue egg dropped from a robin’s nest.) “This is the last call for Lufthansa flight 67 to Frankfurt. All passengers should now be boarding at Gate 21A.” Our tongues slide snakelike back to their mouths, our lips part, and I hold between my hands not Nina’s lovely northern face, shining like sunlight on snow, but the darker, cuter, rounder face of Jennifer, Jenn with two Ns, my freshman year girlfriend and fellow Chemical Engineering student at the University of Cincinnati.

It’s the summer before our sophomore year at UC, two years after Nina flew and one before I licked the snake. (Inspector Time in his Columbo trenchcoat is quickly catching up with me.) Jenn’s eyes flutter closed and I kiss her again, running the tips of my fingers through her soft, brown hair. We are standing naked, having just risen from bed, in the sparsely furnished second-floor bedroom of the house we’ve rented on Lyon Street, a typically quiet street near the top of the residential hillside that separates the university on its summit from the slum district of Over The Rhine at its base. Our house is a three-story, high-ceilinged Victorian survivor, its gloomy Carpenter’s Gothic exterior both a sly disguise for and an accurate reflection of the forbidden delights occurring within. For Jenn and I have devoted this summer to exploring each other’s bodies.

We have classes, of course–organic chemistry, calculus IV, thermodynamics–but our most important homework is done in the creaking brass bed, along the dusty floors and against the dingy walls of this old house–and once, uncomfortably, on its backbreaking, kneebruising stairs.

Jenn breaks our kiss, turns away from me with the mysterious smile that has so often this summer signaled an impending erotic surprise, and runs across the room to the hallway, her rounded ass and small, athletic body beckoning me to follow. When I pass through the door, her figure is already the merest outline in the darkness at the far end of the hall. I hurry after her, but I’m brought to a halt about halfway down the corridor when I notice a bar of bright light under one of the doors. Trying the knob but finding it locked, and hearing movement inside, I kneel down and peer into the keyhole. Through its rounded aperture I see my father sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair and wearing an obviously artificial Priapus-sized cock that protrudes at an upward angle from his groin. He is attempting without apparent success to introduce this member into the theoretically receptive orifice of a life-size, fully-articulated wooden sex doll that he holds upon his lap. A black-and-white photograph of my mother’s face is scotch-taped across the flatly planed front of the doll’s head. Abruptly tiring of the doll, Father throws it to the floor. It is transformed upon impact into a cloudy pile of yellow sawdust. Tears streaming down his cheeks now, he unscrews the giant cock, detaches it, and places it carefully on the floor beside his feet. Its plastic urethra dilates like a birthing vulva, and the brown furry head of a large rat squeezes out. The rat sniffs at the air, pushes the rest of its body through, and falls to the floor. It is followed by another identical rat, then another, then three more. A horde of dark, sharp-toothed rats pours from my father’s dildo, more rats than it could possibly have contained. While father sits and sobs, his face in his hands, the rats cover the floor like flooding water. I hear their claws scrabbling up the other side of the door, and my view is suddenly and darkly blocked by the obscenely pink eye of a rat looking back at me through the keyhole. I feel something moving at my feet and take off running, nearly colliding with the bathroom door before turning to follow Jenn down the back stairs.

Looking down through the web of bannisters, I see her step off the bottom flight and open the basement door. I call to her and quicken my pace, taking the steps two and three at a time. On the kitchen landing I hear the oven door pulled open with its rusty-hinged goose-like honk. The kitchen door is locked, of course, so I again lower myself to the keyhole and see my mother similarly bending over as she pulls from the oven my father’s broiled and steaming body. Exhibiting superhuman strength, she lifts the body, lying stretched out like Mantegna’s Christ on an impossibly long cooking tray, and lays it on the kitchen table to cool. I smell its strangely familiar odor of charcoal and barbecued pork–the scent of summer Sunday afternoons–and watch as the smoke rising from burned flesh fills the upper kitchen and sends the alarm into a fit of obnoxious beeping. I feel no desire to do anything but watch when I see Mother stick a fork into Father’s seared cock and sever it at the base. She slips it into a hot dog bun and casually eats it while leaning tiredly against the refrigerator. Hearing Jenn’s voice from below, I remove my eye from the keyhole and follow her down.

The lights in the basement are lurid: hot pink, neon green, bright purple and every other hue in the Expressionist rainbow. In the middle of the blood-red first room stands a rusted-out Model T Ford, its windshield a spiderweb of cracks, the driver’s seat mostly chewed away and crawling with white mice dyed red by the room. Strewn across the backseat is a large collection of Life magazines, some dating from several decades ago. I thumb through one with Doris Day on the cover and find that it consists entirely of pornographic photos of world leaders: Churchill and Stalin in missionary position (Uncle Joe on top, of course); Lyndon Johnson sitting at his Oval Office desk jerking off into a beagle’s open mouth; Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower fucking doggystyle in the White House Rose Garden while a seated audience consisting entirely of Buster Keaton lookalikes gazes on impassively. Tossing back the magazine, I notice that the front passenger seat is occupied by an antique victrola with a large metal soundhorn. I lift the needle, place it with a pop on the small, spinning record, and through a century of scratches and static I hear Jenn’s voice chanting “Come in to the fire...The flames are beautiful...The fire is beautiful...” over and over. Letting it play, I walk across the red room to inspect a WWI-era biplane parked against the far wall. Nailed to its wings are scores of putrefying arms and legs that produce an intoxicatingly pleasant perfume, an odor of lilacs in bloom. Beside the plane, an old white refrigerator stands in a puddle of water, blue arcs of electric current traveling sparkingly up its sides. A sign on the door reads DANGER / HIGH VOLTAGE. I hear someone trapped inside pounding on the door with the steady thumping beat of a bass drum in a heavy metal band. “Come in to the fire...” A TV monitor flickering nearby shows a grainy video of someone playing an older version of myself conversing with an Elvis Presley impersonator in the middle of a derelict drive-in theater. On the opposite wall an ornate Rococo frame hangs hollow and pictureless, the silver nymphs hammered into it sides coiling around glowing pink seashells while curving dolphins leap from stylized waves. As I walk closer its emptiness becomes an ancient mirror, a glass so clouded by time that it reflects nothing but a room filled with billowing white smoke.

The pink lights of the next room hang from a large airplane propeller that spins slowly on the ceiling. Atop one of its blades, the severed head of Ernest Hemingway sits upright, eyes open, mouth tight and grim. A few stringy veins dangling down from its neck drip blood in abstract spiral patterns on the floor. One wall of this room is covered with wooden gun racks, and in the spinning light I discern a comprehensive collection of firearms, from the stubby blunderbusses of the earliest imperialists to the automatic rifles used by Americans to separate Asians from their bodies. Displayed nearby in a glass-covered case are Lee Harvey Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano and Hemingway’s brain-spattered double-barreled Boss. Across the room stands a dressmaker’s dummy covered in a Ku Klux Klan sheet and hood fashioned from an American flag. A pool of urine shines around the dummy’s base, and near it on the floor sits a spiked German helmet upturned and filled with blackened turds.

I flee into a room illuminated by strobing purple light. “The flames are beautiful...” Two facing walls of this room are lined with books. On the other two, a giant Russian icon with Stalin’s face stares implacably across the room at an equally enormous swastika constructed from the twisted bodies of human beings and somehow affixed to the wall. When I touch one of the bodies, its flesh quivers like jello and leaves a purple-flashing fatty residue on the tips of my fingers. “Come in to the fire...” Now I notice that the farther I walk from the first room, the clearer Jenn’s recorded voice becomes. “The fire is beautiful...” I wipe my hand across a row of books, all identically leather-bound with blank spines. Taking one of them from the shelf, I blow a cloud of dust off its top edge and flip it open. All of the pages are blank. I replace it and take down another. It is equally blank. I select a third volume at random from another shelf and thumb through its predictably blank pages. A sudden vibration of the floor causes me to look up and notice that the Stalinist and Nazi walls have begun moving toward one another and are quickly closing in on me. I drop the blank book and leap like Indiana Jones through the narrowing doorway just before Stalin kisses the swastika.

I roll onto the floor of the next room, colored bile-green, and find myself at the feet of a white-haired man in a wheelchair whose identity is concealed behind the insectoid face of a military gasmask. He wheels himself back and forth a few inches in a slow, rocking motion, and after a moment he raises one hand to point behind me. Turning around I see against the other wall an open casket, white but greened by the light. Lying inside it is an almost convincing replica of Jenn. Her hair is a shade too dark, the molded plastic face is missing the tiny colorless mole at the corner of her mouth, but otherwise it’s a fine likeness. Muffled laughter emerges from the wheelchair man’s gasmask, and I look back across the room to see him still rocking, staring at me through big round plastic eyes. I lift the lower half of the coffin’s lid and climb atop the false Jennifer. While the masked man chuckles and the voice on the record clearly repeats “The fire is beautiful,” I push her white skirt up to her waist and pull her panties down over plastic legs. Unlike the face, the legs are a flawless reproduction, from the uneven red-painted toenails to the faint brown birthmark under her right thigh. I slip between them and ease my hardened dick into a surprisingly warm and slick vagina. There must be a sensor somewhere in the vaginal wall, for when I’m completely inside her, this Jennifer comes alive with a whirring of internal gears like a large clock setting itself into motion. Her eyes pop open and her mouth, ever so slightly out of sync with its voice, speaks in the bored monotone of a flight attendant informing me that my seatback can be used as a flotation device: “Welcome. I am the Jennifer 4000 Mark V, a product of Automata Incorporated. Fuck me fuck me fuck me please oh you big stud fuck me fuck me--” I place my hand over its face, holding the mouth closed, and fuck the robot harder and rougher than I’ve ever fucked Jenn, muttering “Take it, take it you bitch, take it.” One of her arms pops out of the shoulder joint and rattles to the floor. Her head repeatedly strikes the side of the casket so hard that her eyes begin to move independently of each other, and a wisp of smoke curls out of one ear as if from the barrel of a film noir revolver. “Fuck you to death, bitch,” I gasp just before I come with a loud “hnnnh!..hnnnnh!” from deep in my throat. “Come in to the fire...” At the exact second of climax, I feel a cold, biting pain at the base of my cock and let out a high-pitched girlish scream as I rip myself from her vagina. My penis emerges cut in several places along the shaft and streaked with blood. Inside her pussy, a set of sharp steel teeth gnash powerfully and repeatedly with a series of metallic clicks. “Welcome. I am the Jennifer 4000 Mark V,” says the inflectionless voice. “Defensive measures have been initiated.” I slam my fist into its face, punching through the plastic and bloodying my hand in a scratchy darkness of wires and circuit boards. Its voicebox says “I am the Jennnnnnnn--” and falls silent. As I crouch there in the casket, holding my bloodied cock and straddling the body of a one-armed fuckdoll with a hole in its face, I hear footsteps close behind and turn to see my father filming the action with his old Super 8 camera. “Hold still!” he barks, moving in for a close-up of the vagina dentata. “This is great stuff! Don’t blur it!” I push him out of the way, leaving a bloody handprint on the lapel of his leisure suit, and jump unsteadily down from the coffin, one hand protecting my cock. As I stagger sideways through the next doorway, my father calls after me in Jenn’s voice, “The fire is beautiful!” I stumble over something and fall hard, hitting my head and passing out on the floor of the next room.

I awake to whiteness. Before anything else, I check my cock and find it miraculously healed, sleeping uninjured on its scrotal pillow. More relieved than puzzled, I rise on unsteady legs to examine the room. It is a small, white cube, about ten feet across and perfectly empty. It is so quiet I can hear the air rushing through my nostrils at every breath. White light provides a bright, even, shadowless illumination; the light seems to come from all directions, radiating equally from paneled ceiling, whitewashed walls and tiled floor. Only after several minutes do I realize the room has no doors. I walk the perimeter with my hands against the walls, pushing for a concealed opening, but nothing gives. The walls are solid, likewise the floor, and the ceiling hovers three feet above my reach. (I try jumping, but gravity’s asymptote halts my ascent.) This room is a simply perfect trap, as blank and bleak as the books in that Stalinazi library. The only thing out of place here–I notice after an hour of sitting on the floor and bemoaning my fate–is the uneven floor tile that sent me sprawling when I entered. This tile is larger than the others, about two feet square, and one of its edges rises half an inch above the level of the floor. I dig with my fingernails around the raised edge, trying to loosen it, but end with eight raw fingertips and a tile unmoved. In frustration I bring my fist down on the tile. Its report resounds in a faint echo, an encouragingly hollow sound. I stand and stomp on the tile, leap on it with both feet and all my scrawny 130 pounds. On my twelfth or thirteenth attempt, it finally shatters. My left leg falls into the space below, dragging my body to the floor and almost smashing my genitals against a neighboring tile. When I clear away the broken pieces, I see a series of steep steps carved out of the earth and leading downward into darkness. A rank odor rises from the hole, an aroma of rotten eggs and runner’s armpits. But I have no other option. Breathing shallowly to cut the smell, I descend.

As the room’s light fades behind me and I feel my way down in enveloping darkness, the walls of the narrow stairwell grow damp to my touch and the steps soften to suck muddily at my feet. Soon the stairs melt away entirely, and I’m forced to inch my way down the sticky, shit-stinking chute on my bare ass, the hairy ends of hard, protruding roots ripping at my flesh. The channel turns sharply and narrows, its muddy walls pressing me on all sides. And then it begins to undulate. A constant wavelike motion forces me downward. When I gasp for air in the overpowering stench, the convulsing wall forces a mouthful of bitter fecal mud between my lips. I try to spit it out, but another violent contraction forces my mouth closed and pulls my head upward as it drags my body down. When I’m certain I can survive this no longer, that the tube’s continued contractions will crush my ribcage or break my pelvis, I am shot unexpectedly through a blindingly bright orifice and crash onto the ragged, stained carpet of our second-floor bedroom.

I look for the opening from which I fell, but at its approximate spot on the wall I see only the poster of Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror that we bought two days ago at the funky art shop on Calhoun Street run by a pair of Social Security hippies. Those fuckers must’ve doused it in some seriously nasty time-release acid. When I lie back on the floor to catch my breath and rid it of the tunnel’s reek, I feel on my body the warmth of a fire roaring in the bedroom fireplace. It’s a comforting, purifying sensation, so pleasant that it takes a few minutes for the anomaly to hit me: Who heats a room in the middle of a sweltering summer? I sit up and stare at the bright orange flames that dance around three heavy logs. A bead of sweat trickles down my forehead. “Did she clean the chimney?” I wonder aloud.

“It’s been reamed out,” answers an authoritative voice behind me. After a brief pause the same voice, harsher now, says: “Stand up, bitch.”

I rise nervously to my feet, unsteady atop unfamiliar heels. My legs are sheathed in black stockings, a black skirt flows around my hips, and a dark blue silk blouse bulges over my breasts and hugs my belly. When I turn my head toward the voice, long blonde ringlets brush against my cheeks. I am only slightly less surprised to find that the other occupant of the room is Jenn. She wears the uniform of a Red Army colonel and has grown a foot taller to tower over me. She undoes her fly, draws from it a large, naturalistic dildo that’s clearly harnessed to her hips, and orders, “Suck me, bitch.” My knees strike the hard floor with military precision. I take the stiff ribber dildo into my mouth and suck it, my head moving rapidly back and forth like a piece of clockwork, my lips warming with the friction of its rough texture. After a few minutes, Jenn places a halting hand against my forehead and says, “That’s enough. Stand up...Now bend over and brace yourself against the wall.” Obeying, I feel her lift up the back of my skirt, feel her hands on my ass, pulling my cheeks apart. I feel the spit-slickened head of the dildo against my anus, and then with a single powerful thrust she forces its entire length inside me. I scream like a virgin torn. “Shut up, bitch.” Jenn pulls halfway out, thrusts in again, and establishes the ever-quickening rhythm of a brutal, painful buttfuck. Each thrust hits me harder than the last, until I’m standing with my face pressed against the wall, and Jenn is pounding me into it, rattling the plaster. And alongside the passing pain, I feel an increasingly intense pleasure, a delight in my utter powerlessness. As Jenn pounds my ass, I notice an erection bulging the front of my skirt. I reach for it, but it eludes my grasp, slipping always just beyond my fingertips. I hike up my skirt and see between my garter straps the thick twin lips of a pussy. When I reach down to part them and finger my clit, the pussy slides off in my hands. It’s as artificial as Jenn’s dick, and its absence leaves my crotch Barbie-smooth. My whole body is being slammed into the wall with every thrust now. When I try to say “Jenn...please...stop” she thrusts into me with so much force that the wall gives way and we both tumble in a slapstick plaster cloud into the next room. Lying prone on the floor, Jenn on my back still fucking me, I peer through slowly lifting dust and see my parents sitting calmly at a nearby cardtable. Wearing evening dress and playing gin, they appear unaware of any disturbance. While a representative of the Evil Empire violently nails his only son’s ass to the floor not ten feet away, my father calmly lays his cards on the table and announces in a triumphant voice, “My game. Shall we play another?”