A Matter of Love in da Bronx (35 page)

--Oh! Sam! I'm coming...! I'm coming! ...Oh! ...Oh! How exquisite...

Feel her shake! Shivering. Straining. Urging so forcefully against me! God! She's having an orgasm! She's coming! Right now! How it excites me! How it incites me. Uncontrollably rough he grabs at her love bump.

Oh! More! More! Don't stop, Sam! I wish I could feel you inside me. Oh! God! Is that ever good! I think...I think I'm going to pass out...

If she so much as brushes against my hard-on I'm going to come, too. I can feel her shaking all over. She's pulling me down to her lips again. I know I'll come...I know it! How sweet those lips. How pleasurable to kiss them. I can feel the orgasm draining her. What cruel and miserable bastard of a god would keep such pleasure from us for so long a time? Perhaps to better enjoy the road remaining.

Frozen, as if the world pushed a pause button, they remained holding each other, feeling only the others' heartbeat, sensing her ebbing ecstasy.

--Sam, you know I love you. How you did that so suddenly to me.

--I love you, Mary. I don't know what we're going to do, but when we do it, it's going to be terrific.

--Don't argue! We don't have much time. Turn toward the door.

--I could never get it out of my pants the way it is now. It would kill me. Some other time. People passing by. And she lives right near by! You can't expose her to that. But Christ! Do I need it. Feels like they've turned into bocce balls! Besides, I've got something vital, very important to tell you about our parents. Your parents, my parents. About their business arrangement. I just found out about it last night. There wasn't a second to tell you about it this afternoon, but we must make time for you to hear it all, all of it.

--Tell me! What's it about?

--We don't have time now, unless we can meet later...?

--After last night? ...my father. He won't let me out of his sight.

--When do we see each other again?

--We must be careful. Louisa's coming to the house tonight. I'll arrange with her to tell you. ...are you sure you don't want me to...you know...do something...? Oh! God! Seems that's all I'm saying, but there! My mother! On the other corner! Looking for me! I must leave!

--Here! I want you to have this!

--What is it?

--From me to you. A token. I love you, Mary Dolorosso.

Little box. Wrapped, violets covered paper. Lavender ribbon. Sam! How sweet! How wonderful! How marvelous! No one! Ever! Before! In! My! Whole! World! --I love you, Sam Scopia.

She left. Sam gradually became aware he was the proud transporter of an excruciating case of lover's nuts. If the condition could be measured, he would bet the sack he could set a world record. He could barely walk six steps, stiff and wide-legged, without stopping. He rested for long moments on the benches on Morris Park Avenue, reaching down now and then to cradle tenderly the lovejuice overfilled orbs, then forced himself to march to the shop to meet Lou, which he really didn't want to do because he knew he couldn't hide his condition, and Lou would razz him about it for years to come. Oh! That word: Come. No doubt, a painful undertaking. Love's double-edged sword at work.

NIGHT: ULIGINOUS, VISCOUS blackness frothed Sam's perceptions as he approached the funeral parlor, which actually was an abandoned grocery store that served otherwise as a social club for the nearby community. But, at times as these, it was pressed into needful service where the family was huge and resources small, such as Lincoln Jackson's. Yards of loose-folded crepe covered the windows, and a small-watted blue bulb in a nubby shade was all that signaled the use to which the space was put. The partially open front door let out a slip of a shaft of valiant, orangey candle flame light which made pathetic yardage, but not before it was noticed by Sam who was directed to it by a reticent cab driver.

--The Jackson Family, he said to the black unseen against the black as Sam made his approach, my friend's son is laid out.

The voice, only the voice it was, came guttural and deep, worn bare and hollow from centuries of vengeful, angered screams but tempered still by reason: --Best you be not as you be doing. A white, unbloodied face be not welcome two years close.

--I'm sorry. Lincoln Jackson has all. His family, his relatives, his friends. I need him as much as he needs me. He has his son now forever. Grief sees grief, all else unseeing. Grief knows grief, naught else is my call. Grief beats grief; I bring him mine the sooner to fall it. I'll go, if you say.

--Come, deeper but mellower the reverberating boom of the barrel-chested black, I can get you to the mother. Silent, wordless, as if Sam closed his eyes and walked he took the path that sensed to him to be correct, though he was honing on the short, heavy anguished breath and scuff of the rolling, heaving bark of a black man up ahead that took him through a door, up a short flight of stairs, into a candlelit room, complete with bier and lavendered black, and slickrun tearmarked faces, some sad, and some sadder than life.

--Pizzazz Jackson? Guideblack underlined in reverence and turned himself into crepe.

--Yes? Casting up her gaze, it caught at the white specter of a face hovering untethered before her.

--Your husband's been special to me, Ms. Jackson. I'm Sam Scopia, and I'm terribly sorry for your troubles. Low, sad he swallowed his words even as he felt the prickling caterpillar at his neck calling attention to the thick and rabid air of menacement infused by dozens of sparking eyeball whites plastered on his ghostly, whitewashed face.

--Sam, look what they did to my boy. She reached up to take his hand in both of hers. Her movement did little to dispel the thickened atmosphere, but there brought with it the sadness soaked in centuries of stunning ignorance for the inability of human wisdom to surmount the inhuman instinct of predators. Life, to a man, was a fast jab with no price to pay for the pleasure, and a fare-thee-well so what values a soul, or a generation of them? Nothing. But not so the generator; the producer; the eat-for, sleep-for, heat-for womanmother. Life to her is not come cheap, no mere landlord she. Yet the vision remains to reverse the infinitely impossible reversal of letting the value be set by the maker of the value. It to be and be, her gesture affirmed.

His tears acknowledged that. Overwhelmed by the mountainrange of pain he felt in the room, he understood slightly what had compelled him to do the chance: That the rank emotion brought on by his easy definition as the causal object redirected some small portion of the ache to hate. Ah! How the agonies of St. Anthony must have started this way.

--Sam, speak to them. See they don't see my other children in the same light. I glad you come. The boy's father needs to see you much more. She held his hand still with one of hers, the other drifting up to wipe one tearrun cheek with her fingertips, and the other with the back of them, the mothershand skillfully guiding him back to the usher.

No eye upon him to watch him go as he came; but led down and around and up and through and into sick and dampair of a cellar to a door; then a room flooded with the crippled zebralight of a flopping blackribboned screen. A laundrybag of a human form claimed the embrace of a crotchety throne, a pile of cotton atop his crown.

--A high, muckey-muk Mooslim majestic Arab you look like, Lincoln Jackson. I came to pay my respects.

Long fingers dangled down dead from limp wrists overhanging the arms. One finger moving, finally. --Told of your flowers. Thank you. That enough for my son. Give your respects to me. I need them. First, I curse you, Sam.

A tiny gasp, unheard he hoped. What had he done? To deserve such judgment?

--For their being only one of you, and none before ever. And what when we're gone? Do you understand?

--No.

--Tell me, Sam Scopia, is compassion a weakness?

--No.

--See? Only you know that. I double swear at you. If you didn't know that, and let me know you knew that, I would never have known any different about this world in my heart. But when I see that bit of hope in you it takes away the completeness, the perfection of the virulence of my hate, and swears there should have been more of it to go around in my lifetime for all of us. Like a drop of color stains an ocean of water, I understand that essence in you could change the world, that it could have been different. Look at me now. Lincoln Jackson unwrapped lanolined towel after towel from about his head and face and neck, the action caught in the strobelight of the television. Don't come to my funeral, Sam, I don't want you there.

As if the black man reached up to pull him closer until he was a hand away from his face, Sam was drawn toward the corruption clapped on his face, head, neck. Patches of festering, red, boiling vesiculars. --The fuck happened to you!

The incongruous grin: born of a subtle understanding; worn as an incorrigible's punishment. --Doan matta. He waved away the indictment.

The flush of it hit Sam. He was responsible. But how? Surmiseability. You fucking, no-good Do-Gooder! The money you gave him! If you let him work for the money, perhaps he would've felt obligated if only because of his own invested time to contributing to the family tragedy. As it must have been, the forty dollars was a lit fuse to the keg of dynamite. --You bought booze.

As a black-plagued, unmoving mummy would speak, Lincoln Jackson made quick work of it. He had done in barely a pint, but it was enough. His wife, Cleopatra, in the midst of making funeral arrangements, and tending a houseful of children and chores, and singlehandedly scrounging for cash to pay for the funeral in the midst of ponderous grieving had to stop all her doings while he assaulted her body sexually for nearly an hour. When he was through with her, he allowed her to leave. Whereupon, he fell asleep, and she went into the kitchen, brought a pan of water to a boil, added all the sugar it wouldtake, and addressed him with the supersaturated solution which would stick and burn like molten lava: first his face, then his genitals. Naturally, his fingers and hands got it when he tried to wipe off the scorificating impiastro. In between his blasting screams of agony, she lectured: Even though in his condition he might not give up pissing, he would think very hard on fucking.

--Sam, I doan blame no one but me; is be ma fault; but doan you think someone who be dat close for all the years be knowin how bad the hurt got to me? Ma pecker be ma hurtstation all ma life. And he explained as a youngster, when the tension of the world got to him: anxiety, fear, frustration; he would jerk off, and feel better. Sex his refuge, surpassed only by a drunken stupor.

When Sam mentioned hospital, Lincoln Jackson told him to get back to where he belonged, to stop trying to be so fucking white.

--Like to be your counselor, Sam, but it cost you everything I owe you so I quits this place square with you, leastways. And didn't Sam understand for all the misery he suffered for all his years, he had more of a life in one day than Sam has had in all of his? He was going to die; he didn't give a shit; he would tell him--Sam! Go fuck the devil and grab life by the balls ...jes one time, for me. No additional charge for the secret of life. Ready? Sam?

--I'm ready. What shall we call this secret you're about to reveal? The Lincoln Jackson Theorum?

--The Lincoln Jackson Theorum put a fancy title on a simple 'splenation on the mystery of life. It be: Happy fucking!

--Happy fucking? Is there any other kind?

--Oh! Sure! Only other kind is the kind when you be doing it, and you be wishing you was not. Anything else be happy fucking. My idea go like this: If you be into happy fucking then whenever you run into life's miseries, they be just plain life's miseries, nothing more. But, if you not into some happy fucking, then everything else you run into--miseries or not--in this world be just so much shit. Remember, there be nothing more, that be the whole and entire secret of life: Happy fucking.

Wow! What a world! if it were a Happy Fucking World! Sam considered raising a resolution requiring Happy Fucking before anyone considered anything of any consequence: Congress, the United Nations, World Peace Organization, the Parent Teachers Organization, the Syrian Terrorist Amalgamation.

Lincoln Jackson started rewrapping himself, stopped, nodded his head in a way that was fraught with wisdom, eyed the white man, and said:--Take one last look at what you get with unhappy fucking.

Sam. Homebound. Seconds later. --Shit! He had been taken in. He heard what he expected from a man in black skin. Gallmouthed, he turned his attention to Lou and Louisa.

Marriage. That was the subject.

A surprise.

Not in general. In particular.

Lou in particular.

Lou walked into the shop earlier that evening needing a shave. Needing a shower, fresh clothes. Needing to talk.

Which he did, in long, rambling dissertations on politics, the environment, television, fate, lasers, hunger, automobiles. Doing the length of the shop, he changed his pace from long, purposeful strides, to stomping, to sidestepping, to trudging until he arrived at the subject of his destination.

Fucking.

Not just fucking, but fucking Louisa.

With his legs spread apart, he anchored himself in front of Sam who had perched atop the cutting table, legs dangling, hands gripping the edge, hunching forward.

--Now! Now! I understand why a man would give up the world's riches for a woman. For some men it may be her charm, her manner, her look, her personality...whatever...and for others, like me, her lovemaking. Sam, I have never felt more like a man in my life than when Louisa and I are together. I reach such heights of ecstasy; there has never been anything that can describe it if I combined every bit of literature ever written on the subject. I don't know how it happens, but it does, right from the instant I know I'm going to be with her. The sensation starts in my balls, and spreads out from there. The moment I see her, and I know we're going to have sex; I lose contact with the earth. The way she looks at me, the way she walks, the way she reaches out to touch me. I have a hundred orgasms even before we're in bed. Then! Then! Blow my mind a million times a minute! Sam, she has me develop such a hard-on it seems made of stress-tested molybdenum. My cock gets so rigid it's painful, couldn't drive a nail in it. I look at it, and don't recognize it. The veins pop out; it's neon red, and enormous. It strains even more hurtfully so when she touches me, when she kisses me, when she breathes on me. God! She urges me to take her, time stops somewhere in all this, and I sink into her tight, muculent slip with my cornified messenger, and the magic begins. To really explain all of this, I must tell you I've been fucking for a long time. Pussy. That was the be-all, end-all of my waking day. Do whatever had to be done during the day or night, but be certain only of one thing: That somewhere, somehow before the next dawn I had at least a good shot at a piece of ass. So, I've greeted a lot of comings. If I could join all the juice I've ejaculated it would overflow a three-acre pond. I'd trade it all for just one spurt with Louisa. See what I mean about confronting overwhelming desire? But, to go on. I have never been embraced as I have been in Louisa's incomparable arms. What specifically? You ask. I can tell you specifically. It's a lot of things. The way we know things between us. The way we warm up to what we're about. The way we're sensitive to each other's heat. I can't speak for Louisa, but I can tell you in a rather offhand fashion what happens to me. As I feel myself burrow deeper and deeper into her; I can feel every atom in my body wake up; and respond in a sort of sympathetic vibration that's like the chord I use to climb a cliff of love, and it takes me three times to fulfill and complete our lovemaking. Do you know, last night, we were asked to leave our motel room because we were disturbing the neighborhood? And that was just the first step. The first time is so unbelievable; it's hard to think anything could be better. But, it comes. Mind you, we're all set for this: physically, psychologically, emotionally; but, it's more than that: It's what Louisa does. I can't describe it. It's not one part of her. It's all of her. The way she breathes, the way she looks when her eyes are closed, her fingertips raking my skin, her toes pulling me in tighter, and then, that place! There is no other like it. Somehow, her little love bump pushes down against mine, hard onto my penis which really makes it thrust and strain upwards and inwards into her palace of pleasure. What happens next is of such extreme ecstasy I find I'm completely unable to control these cries of delight. She says they sound like someone laughing and crying at the same time. I believe her because the pleasure is so excruciating as I drive to push the harder and deeper into her when suddenly it feels as if she has a penis inside her--don't laugh, really--which is fucking in the hole in the end of my engorged cock! At the same time, she has managed to clamp a band around the base of my penis which she forces tighter and tighter, at the same time milking my near-exploding hard-on higher and higher when suddenly, this hot...no!...this blazing hot spear seems to rocket down into my penis as her suction stretches out my inflamed organ, and before I know it, I'm ramming the holy, bejesus shit out of her vagina; my balls pound her ass as I come, and come, and come, and come with gushing spurts and explosions! I die! I just die! I never felt anything like it before--no coke, no smack, no freebasing; and each time it gets better and better! That takes about a century and a half to complete; and, then, we're right back at it because I don't remember any in and out! No fucking movement! Just her pussy at play! So, although psychologically the orgasm is magnificent, there is no satisfaction! I miss the humping! Do you get it? A male misses the motion! An orgasm alone is not enough! So, the second time, we do it slow and easy. There is a lot of feeling, sensation, know what I mean? I register every fraction of an inch my cock rides in or out, and my mind scoots from the head of my penis to her lips kissing me, her heels kicking hard into my ass; her fingernails anchored in my skin slowing me down; as I search again for penis inside to electrocute me again which it does but now only now and then. When I know I can't hold back any more, I let her know, and she cranks herself up, Ka-BOOM! Total release and we gush and scream and writhe for minute after minute. ...but that's not the end. We look for a subtler contentment. So, before long and I don't know how she does it, I've got another monster hard-on, and we begin again. But this time, there's nothing more than plain venality. The crashing, bumping, humping fucking for fucking's sake; no holds barred; no waiting; just the physical rodeo; hard, deep-driving thrusts; pure selfishness is the theme; the focus of our brains never leaving the head of the cock; the clit. I understand the last time we got to that state, Louisa had been coming for my last six or seven thrusts when I screamed, --I'm coming! Darling, I'm coming! Oh! My God! Am I coming! And then I think I passed out. You know what I regret? That I didn't make a tape of that so when I become an old man unable to concentrate on the routine of fucking, I can play it and remember what it was all about. Never thought I'd need any such thing. But, Ole Pal, you know what's going to ruin all this wonderful romance? Bet you'll never guess. Let me tell you--marriage. Can you believe? Marriage has reared its ugliness. It wants to convert two uncontrollable lovers into two responsible adults. So ends making love, so enters fucking. The moment spontaneity exits, so enters duty. --Instead, can I give you a handjob tonight, darling? Love takes its place on the agenda along with mowing the lawn, fixing the car, grocery shopping, dishes and douches. Sam, my friend, I just don't know what to do. Tell me. You tell me what I should do, and I'll do it.