Koko

‘Fenwick Throng?’ Pumo asked. ‘Is that a real name?’

The next day was Wednesday, and after getting Vinh off to the markets and Helen to school, Tina set out to buy a copy of the Village Voice at the newsstand on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. Many newsstands were closer, but Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue was only a few blocks from La Groceria, a cafe where Pumo could sit in pale sunlight streaming in through long windows, sip two cups of cappuccino while pretty waitresses with white morning faces yawned and stretched like ballerinas, and read every word of the VOICE BULLETIN BOARD.

He found a message from Maggie right above the drawing in the center of the page: Namcat. Try again same place, same time? Bruises and tattoos. You should fly East with the others, taking Type A with. Her brother must have heard about their trip from Harry and then told her.

He thought of what it would be like to go to Singapore with Poole, Linklater, Harry Beevers, and Maggie Lah. Instantly his stomach tightened up and the cappuccino tasted like brass. She would bring too much carry-on luggage, half of it paper bags. Out of principle, she’d insist on changing hotels at least twice. She’d flirt with Poole, pick fights with Beevers, and virtually adopt Conor. Pumo began to sweat. He signaled for the check, paid and left.

Several times during the day he dialed Fenwick Throng’s telephone number, but the agent’s line was always busy.

At eleven o’clock he gave unnecessary instructions about closing the restaurant, then showered and changed clothes and hurried off to the Palladium’s back entrance. For fifteen minutes he stood and froze with half a dozen other people in an area like a dog pound enclosed by a wire fence, and then someone finally recognized him and let him in.

If it hadn’t been for that New York article, he thought, I wouldn’t even be able to get in here.

This time he was dressed in a Giorgio Armani jacket that looked vaguely like chain mail, voluminously pleated black trousers, a grey silk shirt, and a narrow black tie. They might mistake him for a pimp, he thought, but not for a narc.

Clutching a beer bottle, Pumo walked twice up and down the entire length of the bar before he admitted to himself that Maggie had stood him up twice in a row. He wound his way through the mob to the tables. Extravagantly dressed young people, none of them Maggie, leaned toward one another in pools of candlelight.

All of a sudden, everything’s falling apart, Pumo thought. Somewhere along the line, my life stopped making sense.

Young people swirled around him. Synthesizer rock blared from invisible speakers. For a moment Pumo wished he were back home, wearing blue jeans and listening to the Rolling Stones. Maggie was never going to show up, tonight or any other night. One of these days, some hulking new boyfriend would show up at his door to collect the plastic radio, the little yellow Pony Pro hairdryer, and the Bow Wow Wow records she had left behind.

Pumo fought his way up to the bar and ordered a double vodka martini on the rocks. Hold the olives, hold the vermouth, hold the rocks, he remembered Michael Poole saying in Manly’s little club, where there had been no olives, vermouth, or ice, only a jug of suspicious yellow-tinged ‘vodka’ Manly claimed to have obtained from a colonel in the First Air Cav.

‘That’s the happiest you’ve looked all night,’ said a low voice beside him.

Pumo turned and saw a tall, ambiguously sexed apparition in camouflage fatigues beaming at him. Bare shaven skin gleamed above its ears. Aggressive, shiny black hair swept across the top of the apparition’s head and hung down its back. Then Pumo noticed the apparition’s breasts bulging beneath the fatigue shirt. Her hips flared beneath a wide belt. He wondered what it would be like to go to bed with somebody with white sidewalls.

Fifteen minutes later the girl was squeezing herself up against him in the back of a taxi. ‘Bite my ear,’ she said.

‘Here?’

She tilted her head toward him. Pumo put one arm around her shoulder and took her earlobe between his teeth. Fine black stubble covered the side of her head.

‘Harder.’

She squirmed when he bit down on the gristly lobe.

‘You didn’t tell me your name,’ he said.

She slid her hand over his crotch. Her breasts nuzzled his upper arm. He felt pleasantly engulfed. ‘My friends call me Dracula,’ she said. ‘But not because I suck blood.’

She wouldn’t let him turn on the lights in his loft, and he groped his way to the bedroom in the dark. Giggling, she pushed him down on the bed. ‘Just lie there,’ she said, and undid his belt, got rid of his boots, and pulled down his trousers. He got out of the chain-mail jacket and wrenched off his tie. ‘Pretty Tina,’ Dracula said. She bent over and licked his erect cock. ‘I always feel like I’m in church when I do this.’

‘Wow,’ Tina said. ‘Where have you been all my life?’

‘You don’t want to know where I’ve been.’ She lightly scratched his scrotum with a long fingernail. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t have any nasty diseases. I practically live at the doctor’s office.’

‘Why?’

‘I guess I just enjoy being a girl.’

Exhausted, dulled by alcohol, Pumo let her proceed. When she sat up, straddling him, she looked like an Apache warrior with plucked eyebrows. ‘Do you like Dracula?’

‘I think I’ll marry Dracula,’ he said.

She unbuttoned the camouflage shirt and tore it off, exposing firm conical breasts. ‘Bite me,’ she said, pushing them into his face. ‘Hard. Until I tell you to stop.’

He gently bit one of her nipples, and she ground her knuckles into the side of his head. ‘Harder.’ She dug her nails into his cock. Pumo bit down.

‘Harder.’

He increased the pressure.

When he tasted blood, she screamed and moaned and gripped his head in her arms. ‘Good good.’ Her hand left his head and found his cock again. ‘Still hard? Good Tina.’

Finally she let him raise his head. A thin line of blood oozed from the bottom of her breast down her ribcage. ‘Now little Drac goes back to church.’

Pumo laughed and fell back on the pillow. He wondered if Vinh or Helen had heard her scream and decided they probably hadn’t – they were two floors below.

After a long delirious time Pumo’s orgasm sent looping ribbons of semen over her cheeks, into her eyebrows, into the air. She moaned and hitched herself onto his body so that his arms were pinned beneath her legs and astonished him by rubbing his semen into her face with both hands.

‘I haven’t come like that since I was about twenty,’ he said. ‘But you’re sort of hurting my arms.’

‘Poor baby.’ She patted his cheek.

‘I’d really appreciate it if you got off my arms,’ he said.

She looked down at him triumphantly and hit him hard in the temple.

Pumo struggled to get up, but Dracula struck him again. He found himself unable to move for a second. She grinned down at him, her teeth and eyes flashing in the murk, and slammed her fist against the side of his head.

He yelled for help. She struck him again.

‘Murder!’ he yelled, but no one heard.

Just before the twentieth blow to his temples, Pumo’s eyes cleared and he saw Dracula peering impersonally down at him, her mouth pursed and her lipstick smeared.

2

Pumo came to in darkness, he knew not how much later. His lips throbbed and felt the size of steaks. He tasted blood. His whole body ached, the pain radiating out from the twin centers of his head and groin. In sudden panic, he put his hand on his penis, and found it intact. His eyes opened. He held up his hands before his face – they were dark with blood.

Pumo lifted his head to look down his body, and a white-hot band of pain jumped from temple to temple. He fell back on the wet pillow and breathed heavily. Then he lifted his head more cautiously. He was very cold. He saw his naked body sprawled on dark wet sheets. Working its way from ache to ache, a thin hot wire of agony snaked through the middle of his head. Now his lips felt like rough red bricks. He touched his face with wet fingers.

He considered getting out of bed. Then he wondered what time it was. Pumo raised his right arm and looked at his wrist, which no longer wore a watch.

He turned his head sideways. The radio with its digital clock was gone from the bedside table.

He slid himself off the side of the bed, finding the floor first with one foot, then with both his knees. His chest slid across the sheets, and he swallowed a bitter mouthful of vomit. When he stood up, his head swam and his vision darkened. He propped himself up on the headboard with aching arms. A cut on the side of his head beat and beat.