Unter

977

What happens when you go too deep?

 

This is NOT a death story. However, it can be read that way if you so wish. Caveat emptor.

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“Lie down.”

The words are brief and clipped, shaped by an accent he can’t quite place, though if he had a gun to his head, he might guess a bastardization of some northeast dialect tamed by years lived in the city of sunshine and sin.

He gives into the command—for it is a command—without a fight, crossing over to lie on the lumpy mattress. The bedsprings sigh like an old woman spooning up porridge she doesn’t want to eat. He shifts a little to get comfortable, and clasps his hands upon his chest, staring up at the cracked and pitted ceiling like a corpse lying in state, too stupid to know it’s already dead.

With his glasses gone—lost somewhere in the stinking morass of days long past and unmourned—the face above him is fuzzy. He has the impression of a penumbra—a pale face surrounded by a dark halo of hair, lush curls, wild and free, like the ones in his dreams. The dreams that won’t let him rest, and haven’t, for going on two lifetimes or more.

He likes the whores, the back-alley hustlers, the ones he can shake and who won’t shatter into tiny shards filled with noxious green poison bursting like abscesses leaking stinking sludge to blacken everything it touches.

The whores, the hustlers, have seen it all, have done it all. They won’t turn away, not even from him, a leper among his own kind, a pariah to be shunned, to be feared, and pitied for the shell of a man he’s become. And that by his very own hand.

He used to be the best of the best; the golden one, the one they all flocked to when they needed answers to questions they didn’t even know how to formulate. And he would dispense those answers like candy, like drugs, and they would fawn and offer obeisance, and their tight, lush, ripe bodies as his for the plucking.

And pluck them he did, every chance he got, for along with his brains had come a set of looks that were shaped by the hands of the Almighty Himself. To look upon him then was to burn, to desire, to lust, to go ripe and wet with incredible passion and primal, base need.

But that was then, when it all meant something to him. Now is nothing. Days pass as dead leaves rotting in the gutters, unacknowledged.

Bottles of liquor are his friends now, each one promising oblivion, and failing spectacularly in that promise. And yet he stays with them if only because he knows it’s the closest he’s ever going to get. And when his own lust rears its ugly head, threatening to swamp him with the memories of how life used to be, he heads out for the darkest part of the city, where the whores and hustlers ply their trade in the secret, stinking shadows of trash-filled alleys and it is there that he slakes his thirst.

The hustler moves closer and he sees finely wrought hands reach for his neck. He should be scared, but instead all he feels is a vast well of relief. Make it over, he thinks. Let me rest. Grant me surcease from all this pain and poison. Swing thy sickle. Be my death.

But those long, thin fingers—musician’s hands, he thinks, or a sculptor’s—only move to open the sweat stiff collar of his once white shirt, moving steadily downward, baring his body to a dark, impersonal gaze.

There used to be a time when one glimpse at his body would have cracked the veneer of even the most hardened hustler, but that was in a time far, far away.

Warm fingers brush distantly over the scar in the middle of his chest. He once joked that it came from a bullet fired by a young girl who thought she was the baddest of all badasses. In reality, it was the end result of too much hard living finally catching up to him. All that boozing, all those late night fucks, all that stress conspiring against him to let loose a tiny speck of plaque—no bigger than a cockroach turd, his doctor had said—which floated down his bloodstream and into one of the arteries of his heart. As the other four had already been blocked, it should have spelled the end for him, but he’d had the luck of the Angels to collapse in the emergency room of the local hospital while visiting a friend, and after sixteen hours on the table, he came out relatively whole, and with a scar that could scare away even the staunchest of the willowy high-society types he liked to court in those days.

The cloth is finally freed and swept away, bearing his fishbelly white flesh to the world and the eyes of his watcher. He darts his own eyes away, unwilling to see the contempt, or, worse, the pity, over the man he’s become, drawn in stark lines by the yellowish tinge to his skin, the loose hanging flesh, and the round protuberance of a belly that was once as flat and as hard as a granite slab.

His belt is manipulated with expert, almost contemptuous, ease. The missing button isn’t even commented upon as those fingers go straight for the tab of his zipper and pull it down slowly, if not especially gently.

Those hands leave him for a moment to mourn their loss as he feels his boots being removed, one by one, to thunk hard on the warped wooden flooring by the side of the bed. The noise reminds him of endings; of prison doors being shut and locked; of handfuls of dirt thrown atop a lowered coffin, and he shivers.

The hands, with their lifegiving warmth, return then, grasping the waistband of his slacks and shorts and, with an economy of motion, the last of his cloth armor is stripped from him, leaving him exposed and chilly and alone, so alone.

Though his face is still turned away, he can feel eyes traversing a course down his body, cataloguing every line, every fault, every imperfection. He knows when that gaze stops at his leg, near his knee, with its roadmap of twisted scars, thinned by age into silvery traces that lead nowhere and signify nothing.

As with the scar on his chest, he used to joke that those scars came from a time when he was run off the road by a gangster out to get him, and he spent three days and nights pinned under his car in the dark depths of a lonely canyon, kept company by a looney tune who thought the war was still raging and that he, with his blond good looks, was a German spy. And that finally, he was rescued (Starsky—oh god Starsk, where are you?) and lived to fight another day.

The facts of his injury are a little more mundane. He’d been racing across some farmer’s back field, hot on the trail of some piece of evidence that time has caused him to forget, and he’d managed to get himself right and properly tangled up in a barbed wire fence that left him shaken and bleeding for hours until the farmer came out to see what all the ruckus was about and clipped him loose. And charged him for the repair of the fence.

The story of his life, living in dreams what his reality cannot provide. And even in those dreams, there is loss; loss that can rend a soul in half, if he had one to begin with.

He feels his cock taken into a warm hand; cuddled there as if it was a sleepy kitten; stroked with the very tip of one slightly callused finger; petted slowly, back and forth, back and forth.

His cock. His prick. His dick. His legacy. His pride and joy. The one thing in all this mess that he could still count on. The envy of every locker room from junior high on up, an object of awe in every urinal, of reverence and lust by any woman or man he’d ever taken home to share in the delight of its perfection.

Until the booze and the stress and the life he didn’t want to lead anymore rendered it a sterile, limp, impotent thing, just another soft tag of flesh left to hang down from his deteriorating body, growing more useless by the day.

“Relax,” the voice above him commands, and he does, not realizing how tense he’s become, his fists white as the sheets balled up in them.

“It won’t work,” he croaks, shame breaking his tone as hot wetness stings at his eyes like nettles.

“Trust me.”

Those words. That voice. His gaze snaps up to the face before him, freezing there like a lock that refuses to turn. “Star,” he clears his throat, “Starsky?”

No recognition in the eyes, but the little twitch of the lips sends one battered old heart flying for the moon. “For a hundred bucks, I’ll be anybody ya want me to be, old man.”

The swift return to reality is a boulder crushing his chest, splintering him into a thousand glass shards tossed carelessly, like trumpery diamonds, across a dusty, forgotten floor.

“Relax.”

He tries, god how he tries, but the pain is so immense that the best he can do is to stay as still as possible, the pounding of his laboring heart like jungle drums in his ears.

His cock is released briefly, and then the hand returns, slick and warm and wet, encircling his flaccid girth, squeezing and releasing, squeezing and releasing as if his dick was nothing more than one of those rubber stress balls they give to stroke patients.

He knows all about those balls. In his dreams, he watches, helpless, as someone he loves (Starsky! God, Starsk, where are you? I’m sorry! Please…please!) is trapped in a wheelchair, his once strong left hand transformed into nothing more than a stiffened claw with a ball trapped against a palm too weak to move, let alone squeeze.

A second hand, equally warm and wet, cradles his balls and squeezes them in counterpoint to his shaft. It’s a soothing feeling, comforting almost, like lying in a hammock on a warm summer day, listening to the somnolent hum of the bees.

It shows how far down he’s fallen that his cock and balls in a man’s hands makes him sleepy.

“Trust me,” the voice, dark and deep, whispers again, sending a thrill of electricity down his spine and legs and out his toes.

He nods.

“Close your eyes.”

He’s sleepy anyway, so that part’s easy. The fuzziness disappears as he falls into the familiar well of dark loneliness that’s been his constant companion for more years than he cares to remember. Even when he was at the very top of his game, that loneliness perched on his shoulder like the proverbial little devil poking with his pitchfork a conscience he doesn’t possess.

The squeezing turns into a slow, up and down stroke, bringing to mind warm mornings in his grandmother’s kitchen, watching her kneading out the dough for the morning’s bread. The scents of that time, yeasty, maternal, earthy and warm envelop him and his lips curve into a smile too long absent from his face. The muscles in his cheeks hurt, but he hangs onto the smile the way a drowning man will hang on to a ring tossed to him in a stormy ocean.

The hands leave him yet again, and his throat births a low, broken sound which transforms into a hissing yelp as his entire cock is engulfed, down to the very root, by a searing wetness that is heaven and hell and things turning, wheeling overhead and inside his skin, like the stars on a clear, winter night, or a flock of birds over the ocean.

Lips, hot and oh so very wet shape and mold him as a strong, agile tongue maps him by touch, lingering, fluttering in places that make him feel as if champagne has replaced the blood in his veins.

He feels himself lengthening and thickening, turning to iron, to stone in the heated wetness of a hustler’s mouth; his first erection in months, maybe years, and it’s so good, so damned good.

His hands come down of their own volition to sink into cool, thick curls, guiding, forcing, as his hips begin to hump into that living furnace burning him alive from the inside out.

“God,” he growls deep and low, his hands again tightening to fists of fury, jerking the hustler’s head down over and over, impaling that hot, tight throat. “God, God, oh motherfucking god!”

A sly hand slithers like a snake beneath his body, grasping his balls and giving them a good, sharp tweak. That breaks the dam, and every bitter thought, every bitter action, every bitter accusation and consultation and obfuscation comes pouring out of him in ribbons of white sea-foam to disappear down a willing, rippling throat that pulls every last shred from him until he has nothing more left to give.

He collapses back on the bed, completely spent, his mind, for once, a merciful blank void that he would give his last breath to rest within forever.

The world intrudes and he lies there as the void dispels like mist at sunrise. He should feel cleansed, but he doesn’t. All the bitterness, the rage, the loneliness and the lack of self-worth rush back all the more cutting for their brief absence.

It is then that he realizes his mistake.

Expecting a quick fuck to cure him is like expecting a dam not to burst by sipping the raging torrent through a straw.

He opens his eyes to find his hustler sitting beside him on the bed, almost close enough to touch. Those eyes, so deep, such a dark, intense blue, crawl around unchecked inside his brain, insisting he give up all his secrets, let go of all the bitterness and anger that are the rocks upon which he’s built his life.

With a savage shake of his head, he turns away, then rolls from the bed, hunting with just his hands for his pants. Tugging them on, he reaches into the back pocket for his wallet and pulls out the first bill his fingers land upon.

It’s the hundred he promised, so he plucks out another, and then another, until he finally gives up and pulls out the entire wad and slaps it on the rickety dresser, every bit the guilty, shamed man trying to pay off what was lost long ago.

Grabbing his shirt, he thrusts his arms through the holes, all the while feeling that dark, intense gaze burning holes in his spine. He does his best to ignore what cannot be ignored and slips into his shoes, tucking his now empty wallet back into his slacks.

He makes it to the door, but stops and turns, just a bit, so he is looking at a barren, water-stained wall. “What’s your name,” he growls.

“David,” comes the quiet response.

Stunned, he turns a little more, the very corner of the sagging bed caught in the periphery of his vision.

“David Starsky.”

Under the control of some invisible puppet-master, his motions are herky-jerky as he turns and faces the man still sitting on the bed. “St—”

“It’s time to come home, Hutch. You’ve been under too long. It’s okay to let go. I’m here. I’ll catch you when you fall.”

His strings are cut, and he begins to collapse, only to be borne up against a hard, warm chest, his body encircled by bands of velvet-covered steel, his head resting in the hollow of a neck whose scent has chased him into dreams long past the remembering of them.

A small, weary sigh, and he goes completely limp.

Blackness descends, and then, there is nothing at all.

FIN