Walk on the Wild Side

Lacunae



They were resting, still joined together, in the redwood hot tub, water pushing in bubbling surges about their bodies. Elaine watched as the hot vortex caught up streamers of her semen, swirled it away like boiled confetti, dissipating it throughout the turbulence.

I’m disseminated, she thought.

Elaine said: “I feel reborn.”

Allen kissed the back of her neck and brushed her softening nipples with his fingertips. “Your breasts are getting so full. Are you stepping up the estrogens?”

His detumescent penis, still slick with Vaseline, tickled as it eased out of Elaine’s ass. Allen’s right hand moved down through the warm water, milked the last droplets of orgasm from Elaine’s flaccid cock. Gently he turned Elaine around, kissed her lovingly—probing his tongue deep into her mouth.

“Here,” said Allen, breaking their kiss. He pushed down on Elaine’s shoulders, urging her beneath the foaming surface. Elaine let her knees bend, ducked beneath the water that swirled about Allen’s hips. As Allen’s hands cupped her head, Elaine opened her mouth to accept Allen’s slippery cock. She tasted the sweet smear of her own shit as she sucked in its entire length. Suddenly swelling, the cock filled her mouth, hardening as it pushed deep into her throat.

Elaine gagged and tried to pull back, but Allen’s hands forced her head hard into his pubic hair. Water filled Elaine’s nostrils as she choked, bit down in an uncontrollable reflex. Allen’s severed cock, bitten free at the base, wriggled inward, sliding past the back of her throat and down into her windpipe.

Elaine wrenched free of Allen’s hands. Blood and come filled her lungs—spewed from her mouth in an obscene fountain as her head pushed toward the surface. But her head could not break through the surface, no matter how desperately she fought. There was a black resilient layer that separated her from the air above, closed like wax over her face, pushed the vomit back into her lungs.

A vortex of blood and semen sucked her soul into its warm depths.



The first thing she heard was a monotoned shit-shit-shit—like autumn leaves brushing the window. She became aware of an abrupt pressure against her abdomen, of vomit being expelled from her mouth. She was breathing in gasps.

She opened her eyes. The layer of clinging blackness was gone.

“Shit goddammit,” said Blacklight, wiping vomit from her face and nostrils. “Don’t ever try that alone again.”

Elaine stared at him dumbly, oxygen returning to her brain.

Beside her on the carpet lay the black leather bondage mask—its straps and laces cut. The attached phallus-shaped gag, almost bitten through, was covered with her vomit. A spiked leather belt, also slashed, was coiled about the mask.

“Jesus!” said Blacklight. “You OK now?”

He was wrapping a blanket around her, busily tucking it in. There was a buzzing somewhere, in her head or in her pelvis—she wasn’t sure. Memory was returning.

“I dreamed I was a man,” she said, forcing her throat to speak.

“F*ckin’ A. You nearly dreamed you were dead. I had a buddy from Nam who used to do this kinda shit. He’d been dead two days before they found him.”

Elaine looked upward at the chinning bar, mounted high across her entrance hall doorway. The leather mask with its padded blindfold and gag—sensory deprivation and sensual depravity—cutting out the world. The belt, looped around her neck, free end held in her hands as she kicked away the stool. The belt buckle should have slipped free when she fainted from lack of oxygen. Instead its buckle had become entangled with the complex buckles of the bondage mask, not releasing, nearly suffocating her. Friends who had shown her how to experience visions of inner realities through this method had warned her, but until now there had been no problems. No worse than with the inversion apparatus.

“I heard you banging about on the floor,” Blacklight explained, taking her pulse. He had been an army medic until he’d Section-Eighted—no future for a broad six-foot-eight medic in the paddies. “Thought maybe you were balling somebody, but it didn’t feel right. I busted in your door.”

Good job through two dead-bolts and a chain, but Blacklight could do it. Her neighbor in the duplex loft had split last week, and the pizzeria downstairs was being redone as a vegetarian restaurant. Elaine might have lain there dead on the floor until her cats polished her bones.

“I dreamed I had a cock,” she said, massaging her neck.

“Maybe you still do,” Blacklight told her. He looked at his hands and went into the bathroom to wash them.

Elaine wondered what he meant, then remembered. She reached down to flick off the vibrator switch on the grotesque dildo she had strapped around her pelvis. Gathering the blanket about herself, she made it to her feet and waited for Blacklight to come out of the bathroom.

When she had removed the rest of her costume and washed herself, she put on a Chinese silk kimono and went to look for Blacklight. She felt little embarrassment. Between cheap smack in Nam and killer acid in the Haight, Blacklight’s brain had been fried for most of his life. He was more reliable for deliveries than the Colombians, and old contacts supported him and his habit.

Blacklight was standing in the center of her studio—the loft was little more than one big room with a few shelves and counters to partition space—staring uncertainly at an unfinished canvas.

“You better look closer at your model, or else you got a freak.”

The canvas was wall-sized, originally commissioned and never paid for by a trendy leather bar, since closed. Blacklight pointed. “Balls don’t hang side by side like that. One dangles a little lower. Even a dyke ought to know that.”

“It’s not completed,” Elaine said. She was looking at the bag of white powder Blacklight had dropped onto her bar.

“You want to know why?”

“What?”

“It’s so they don’t bang together.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Your balls. One slides away from the other when you mash your legs together.”

“Terrific,” said Elaine, digging a fingernail into the powder.

“You like it?”

“The thing about balls.” Elaine tasted a smear of coke, licking her fingertip.

“Uncut Peruvian flake,” Blacklight promised, forgetting the earlier subject.

Elaine sampled a nail-full up each nostril.The ringing bitterness of the coke cut through the residues of vomit. Good shit.

“It’s like Yin and Yang,” Blacklight explained. “Good and Evil. Light and Dark.”

One doesn’t correct a large and crazed biker. He was wrestling his fists together. “Have you ever heard the story of Love and Hate?”

Across the knuckles of his right fist was tattooed LOVE; across those of his left: HATE.

Elaine had seen Night of the Hunter, and she was not impressed. “An ounce?”

“One humongous oh-zee.” Blacklight was finger-wrestling with himself. “They got to be kept apart, Love and Hate, but they can’t keep from coming together and trying to see which one’s stronger.” Elaine opened the drawer beneath her telephone and counted out the bills she had set aside earlier. Blacklight forgot his Robert Mitchum impersonation and accepted the money.

“I got five paintings to finish before my show opens in SoHo, OK? That’s next month. This is the end of this month. My ass is f*cked, and I’m stone out of inspiration. So give me a break and split now, right?”

“Just don’t try too much free-basing with that shit, OK?” Blacklight advised. He craned his thick neck to consider another unfinished canvas. It reminded him of someone, but then he forgot who before he could form the thought.

“Your brain is like your balls, did you know that?” He picked up the thread of the last conversation he could remember.

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Two hunks rolling around inside your skull,” Blacklight said, knotting his fists side by side. “They swim in your skull side by side, just like your balls swing around in your scrotum. Why are there two halves of your brain instead of just one big chunk—like, say, your heart?”

“I give up.”

Blacklight massaged his fists together. “So they don’t bang together, see. Got to keep them apart. Love and Hate. Yin and Yang.”

“Look. I got to work.” Elaine shook a gram’s worth of lines out of the baggie and onto the glass top of her coffee table.

“Sure. You sure you’re gonna be OK?”

“No more anoxic rushes with a mask on. And thanks.”

“You got a beer?”

“Try the fridge.”

Blacklight found a St Pauli and plinked the non-twist-off cap free with his thumb. Elaine thought he looked like a black-bearded Wookie.

“I had a buddy from Nam who offed himself trying that,” Blacklight suddenly remembered.

“You told me.”

“Like, whatever turns you on. Just don’t drop the hammer when you don’t mean to.”

“Want a line?”

“No. I’m off Charlie. F*cks up my brain.” Blacklight’s eyes glazed in an effort to concentrate. “Off the goddamn dinks,” he said. “Off ’em all.” There were old tracks fighting with the tattoos, as he raised his arm to kill the beer.

“Are you sure you’re gonna he OK?” He was pulling out a fresh beer from behind the tuna salad.

Elaine was a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, and aerobicise muscles weren’t enough to overawe Blacklight. “Look. I’m all right now. Thanks. Just let me get back to work. OK? I mean, deadline-wise, this is truly crunch city.”

“Want some crystal? Got a dynamite price.”

“Got some. Look, I think I’m going to throw up some more. Want to give me some privacy?”

Blacklight dropped the beer bottle into his shirt pocket. “Hang loose. He started for the door. The beer bottle seemed no larger than a pen in his pocket.

“Oh,” he said. “I can get you something better. A new one. Takes out the blank spots in your head. Just met a new contact who’s radically into designer drugs. Weird dude. Working on some new kind of speed.”

“I’ll take some,” said Elaine, opening the door. She really needed to sleep for a week.

“Catch you later,” promised Blacklight.

He paused halfway through the door, dug into his denim jacket pocket. “Superb blotter,” he said, handing her a dingy square of dolphin-patterned paper. “Very inspirational. Use it and grow. Are you sure you’re gonna be okay?”

Elaine shut the door.



Mr Fix-it promised to come by tomorrow, or the next morning after that, for sure.

Elaine replaced the chain with one from the bathroom door, hammered the torn-out and useless dead-bolts back into place for her own peace of mind, then propped a wooden chair against the doorknob. Feeling better, she pulled on a leotard, and tried a gram or so of this and that.

She was working rather hard, and the air brush was a bit loud, although her stereo would have drowned out most sounds of entry in any event.

“That blue,” said Kane from behind her. “Cerulean, to be sure—but why? It impresses me as antagonistic to the overdone flesh-tones you’ve so laboriously mulled and muddled to confuse the faces of the two lovers.”

Elaine did not scream. There would be no one to hear. She turned very cautiously. A friend had once told her how to react in these situations.

“Are you an art critic?” The chair was still propped beside her door. Perhaps it was a little askew.

“Merely a dilettante,” lied Kane. “An interested patron of the arts for many years. That is not a female escutcheon.”

“It shouldn’t be.”

“Possibly not.”

“I’m expecting my boyfriend at any minute. He’s bringing over some buyers. Are you waiting for them?”

“Blacklight contacted me. He thought you’d like something stronger to help you finish your gallery collection.”

Elaine decided to take a breath. He was big, very big. His belted trenchcoat could have held two of her and an umbrella. A biker friend of Blacklight’s was her first thought. They hadn’t quite decided whether to be hit-men for the Mafia or their replacements in the lucrative drug trade. He was a head shorter than Blacklight, probably weighed more. There was no fat. His movements reminded Elaine of her karate instructor. His face, although unscarred, called to mind an NFL lineman who’d flunked his advertising screentest. His hair and short beard were a shade darker than her hennaed Grace Jones flattop. She did not like his blue eyes—quickly looked away.

“Here,” said Kane.

She took from his spade-like hand a two-gram glass phial—corner headshop stuff, spoon attached by an aluminum chain.

“How much?” There was a can of Mace in the drawer beneath the telephone. She didn’t think it would help.

“New lot,” said Kane, sitting down on the arm of her largest chair. He balanced his weight, but she flinched. “Trying to recreate a lost drug from long ago. Perfectly legal.”

“How long ago?”

“Before you’d remember. It’s a sort of super-speed.”

“Super-speed?”

Kane dropped the rest of the way into the chair. It held his weight. He said: “Can you remember everything that has happened to you, or that you have done, for the past 48 hours?”

“Of course.”

“Tell me about 11:38 this morning.”

“All right.” Elaine was open to a dare. “I was in the shower. I’d been awake all night, working on the paintings for the show. I called my agent’s answering machine, then took a shower. I thought I’d try some TM afterward, before getting back to work.”

“But what were you thinking at 11:38 this morning?”

“About the showing.”

“No.”

Elaine decided it was too risky to jump for the phone. “I forget what I was thinking exactly,” she conceded. “Would you like some coffee?” Scalding coffee in the face might work.

“What was on your mind at 9:42 last night?”

“I was fixing coffee. Would you like some...?”

“At 9:42. Exactly then.”

“All right. I don’t remember. I was flipping around the cable dial, I think. Maybe I was daydreaming.”

“Lacunae,” said Kane.

“Say, what?”

“Gaps. Missing pieces. Missing moments of memory. Time lost from your consciousness, and thus from your life. Where? Why?” He rolled the phial about on his broad palm. “No one really remembers every instant of life. There are always forgotten moments, daydreams, musings—as you like. It’s lost time from your life. Where does it go? You can’t remember. You can’t even remember forgetting that moment. Part of your life is lost in vacant moments, in lapses of total consciousness. Where does your conscious mind go? And why?

“This,” and he tossed the glass phial toward her, “will remove those lost moments. No gaps in your memory—wondering where your car keys are, where you left your sunglasses, who called before lunch, what was foremost in your mind when you woke up. Better than speed or coke. Total awareness of your total consciousness. No more lacunae.”

“I don’t have any cash on hand.”

“There’s no charge. Think of it as a trial sample.”

“I know—the first one is free.”

“That’s meant to be a mirror, isn’t it.” Kane returned to the unfinished painting. “The blue made me think of water. It’s someone making love to a reflection.”

“Someone,” said Elaine.

“Narcissus?”

“I call it: Lick It Till It Bleeds.”

“I’ll make a point of attending the opening.”

“There won’t be one unless people leave me alone to work.”

“Then I’ll be getting along.” Kane seemed to be standing without ever having arisen from the chair. “By the way, I wouldn’t shove that. New lab equipment. Never know about impurities.”

“I don’t like needlework anyway,” Elaine told him, dipping into the phial with the attached spoon. She snorted cautiously, felt no burn. Clean enough. She heaped the spoon twice again.

She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. Already she could feel a buzz. Trust Blacklight to steer her onto something good.

She was trying another spoonful when it occurred to her that she was alone once again.



Blacklight secured the lid of the industrial chemical drum and finished his beer. The body of the designer drug lab’s former owner had folded inside nicely. Off to the illegal toxic waste dump with the others. Some suckers just can’t tell which way the wind blows.

“Did you really land in a flying saucer? he asked, rummaging in the cooler for another beer.

Kane was scowling over a chromatogram. “For sure. Looked just like a 1957 Chrysler 300C hubcap.”

Blacklight puzzled over it while he chugged his beer. The prettiest girl in his junior high—her family had had a white 300C convertible. Was there a connection?

“Then how come you speak English so good?”

“I was Tor Johnson’s stand-in in Plan 9 from Outer Space. Must have done a hundred retakes before we got it down right.”

Blacklight thought about it. “Did you know Bela Lugosi?”

Kane jabbed at the computer keyboard, watching the monitor intently. “I’ve got to get some better equipment. There’s a methyl group somewhere where it shouldn’t be.”

“Is that bad?”

“Might potentiate. Start thinking of another guinea pig.”



At first she became aware of her hands.

It was 1:01:36 am, said the digital clock beside her bed. She stepped back from the painting and considered her hands. They were tobacco-stained and paint-smeared, and her nails needed polish. How could she hope to create with hands such as these?

Elaine glared at her hands for 43 seconds, found no evidence of improvement. The back of her skull didn’t feel quite right either; it tingled, like when her Mohawk started to grow out last year. Maybe some wine.

There was an open bottle of Liebfraumilch in the refrigerator. She poured a glass, sipped, set it aside in distaste. Elaine thought about the wine for the next 86 seconds, reading the label twice. She made a mental note never to buy it again. Stirring through a canister of artificial sweetener packets, she found half a ’lude, washed it down with the wine.

She returned to Lick It Till It Bleeds and worked furiously, with total concentration and with mounting dissatisfaction, for the next one hour, 31 minutes and 18 seconds.

Her skin itched.

Elaine glowered at the painting for another 7 minutes 19 seconds.

She decided to phone Allen.

An insomniac recording answered her. The number she had dialed was no longer in service. Please...

Elaine tried to visualize Allen. How long had it been?

Her skin itched.

Had she left him, or had he driven her out? And did it really matter? She hated him. She had always hated him. She hated all that she had previously been.

Her body felt strange, like a stranger’s body. The leotard was binding her crotch. Stupid design.

Elaine stripped off her leotard and tights. Her skin still itched. Like a caterpillar’s transformation throes. Death throes of former life. Did the caterpillar hate the moth?

She thought about Allen.

She thought about herself.

Love and hate.

There was a full-length mirror on her closet door. Elaine stared at her reflection, caressing her breasts and crotch. She moved closer, pressed herself to the mirror, rubbing against her reflection. Making love to herself.

And hating.

Pressed against her reflection, Elaine could not ignore the finest of scars where the plastic surgeon had implanted silicone in her once-flat breasts. Fingering her surgically constructed vagina, Elaine could not repress the memories of her sex-change operation, repress the awareness of her former maleness.

Every instant remembered. Of joy. Of pain. Of longing. Of rage. Of hatred. Of self-loathing.

Of being Allen.

Her fists hammered her reflection, smashing it into a hundred brittle moments.

Blood trickled from her fists, streamed along her arms, made curling patterns across her breasts and belly.

She licked her blood, and found it good. It was shed for herself. Gripping splinter shards of mirror, Elaine crossed to her unfinished painting. She stood before the life-sized figures, loving and hating what she had created.

Her fists moved across the canvas, slashing it into mad patterns. Take. This is my body. Given for me.



Blacklight was finishing a cold anchovy and black-olive pizza. He considered his greasy sauce-stained hands, wiped them on his jeans. Stains were exchanged, with little disruption of status quo. He licked his tattooed knuckles clean.

It was raining somewhere, because the roof of the old warehouse leaked monotonously away from the light. He watched Kane. Maybe Lionel Atwill’s caged gorilla on the loose in the lab. Maybe Rondo Hatton as Mr Hyde.

“So what are lacunae?”

Kane was studying a biochemical supply catalogue. “Gaps. Cavities. Blank spaces.”

“Spaces are important,” Blacklight said. He knotted his pizza-stained fists and rolled their knuckles together.

“Do you know how atomic bombs work?”

“Used to build them,” Kane said. “They’re overrated.”

“You take two hunks of plutonium or something,” Blacklight informed him. “Big as your fist. Now then, keep space between them, and it’s on safety. But... ” and he knocked his fists against one another “.. .take away the spaces, slam ’em together. Critical mass. Kerblooie.”

He punctured the lecture with an explosive belch. “So that’s why there’s always got to be spaces in between,” Blacklight concluded. “Like the two halves of your brain. Id and Ego. Yin and Yang. Male and Female. Even in your thoughts you’ve got to have these gaps—moments to daydream, to forget, to be absent-minded. What happens when you fill in all the lacunae?”

“Critical mass,” said Kane.



The mirror was a doorway, clouded and slippery with the taste of blood. Clutching angry shards of glass, Allen and Elaine waited on opposite sides, waited each for the other to break through.