Well, it turned out to be a good day today.  I woke up a little sleep deprived, and got a message from my agent in that my novel has been rejected by another publisher, this time Simon and Schuster.  I got so angry.  I was really pissed off, stomping around the house swearing and carrying on, and I could feel myself getting sucked down into the vortex of blacklness, darkness, where it seems like a the whole world is against me, the universe is conspiring to fuck up my life, and the gods hate me with a fiery passion.  It happened a couple of weeks ago too, and I didn’t stop it, I ended up having to take to the bed with a migraine headache.  I was determined not to let that happen today.  I don’t want my own happiness to be tied up with anything external in the world.  At least something as iconsequentialist as getting rejected by some wanker at Simon & Schuster.  I made a very conscious decision to appreciate the good things in my life.  I really do feel so blessed, when I stop and think about it.  I live in a beautiful place, I have so many great friends,and an amazing partner who loves me so much,and who I love so much.  My job is writing books.  I love my job.  I don’t have to go work at a some jobs that sucks the life out of me, like so many people do.  So I rollerbladed to my acupuncturist.  How fucking California is that?  I have a great acupuncturist.  Her name is Stephanie Lum.  She’s such a lovely, kind, caring person, and she’ very good at her job.  She really knows exactly where to stick those needles.  For a couple of years now I’ve been having pain in my hands.  You see, I have abused the privilege of opposable thumbs.  I typed and typed and typed and typed  and typed and typed and typed, for hours and hours and hours and years and years and years, all slumped over in front of my computer, and that’s why I am having pain in my hands.  It is a physical manifestation of what an extreme person I am, and how I abuse myself.  So that’s why was having acupuncture today.  as soon as Stephany stuck those needles in me so expertly, I went into such a deep trance, I guess you’d call it.  State of utter relaxation.  I had an amazing visualization.  I was with my future baby cavorting on the beach, a beautiful beach, on a gorgeous sunny blue sky day, we were cavorting in in the waves, me and my future child, he was about three years old, and I had such a feeling of deep peace as he laughed and while the waves lapped all around us.  We were in a cove, and the water was so warm, and there were wild horses lounging in the hills watching us quite contentedly.  I had such an amazing feeling of well-being, all was right with the world, and I was connected to the life force that flows through all living things.  I came out of the visualization feeling so amazingly great.  And it has stayed with me the rest of the day.  I think I found a wonderful artist for my graphic novel.  I wrote an outline of a new novel I’m starting with one of the Bay areas leading yoga teachers, a man named Rusty Wells, or Johnson, I can’t remember which last name he’s using now. We met last week with Rusty to discuss to brainstorm with him about this book, it’s a murder mystery set in the world of yoga.  So I had all these ideas floating around in my head, but it took me awhile to get started when I sat down at the computer.  But once I got the ball rolling, the whole thing just flowed out of me so nicely.  Again I felt this wonderful sense of being connected to the life force that flows through all living things, who all the words just fit together so easily, the ideas came so fast I could hardly keep up with him.  It was so much fun.  A yoga murder mystery.  I think it will be really fun to write.  And then, as an added bonus, the office and 30 rock or really really funny tonight.  So yes, it turned out to be a really good day today

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This is a story I was asked to write for a book called SF Noir.This is a picture of some of the people whowrote story for the book,this was taken at an event at the Edinburgh Castle, where many of us read our stories. I think there are some really good stories in this anthology.  And I am particularly proud of the story, it was really fun to write, and it was nominated for a Henry Miller award.  So I thought I’ll put it up on the site.   

 Confessions of a Sex Maniac

11 o’clock Monday night I was standing in the nasty skank stink of a body-fluid-scented room trying not to pant as I basked in the glow of the Snow Leopard. She was decked out in black jacket and sleek black boots, the long of her straight black hair leading directly to the short of her barely-there black skirt that hid little of the loveliest legs I’d had the pleasure to gander in God knows how long. Coal eyes with glowing embers in the center made my breath synchopate, and I could almost feel her long red claws at the end of her paws digging into the small of my back.
I couldn’t quite pin down exactly what she was. Asian? African? Mexican? Italian? Spanish? She seemed to shapeshift as she sized me up from the lone chair in room 211 of Felipe’s Massage Parlor. There was no Felipe. No one was there for a massage. Behind her the wall was stained with what looked like splattered brain, and if you listened hard enough, you could hear the ghosts of ho’s past screaming.
My eyes enjoyed their tour of the Snow Leopard. The race-car curve of her neck. The flesh bulging out of her bra under the tight black shirt under the black leather jacket. The cocoa-butter brown of all that smooth silk skin. The smile that was so tiny I couldn’t even tell if it was really a smile.
I was falling under the Snow Leopard’s spell, I could feel her Black Magic working on me, and I couldn’t stop seeing her straddling me, those thick red lips contorted with mad passion as she ravaged me like a crazy jungle cat.
Being a sex maniac has a way of clouding a man’s judgment. The doctor said I was a problematic hypersexualist. I said, “Doc, that takes all the romance out of it. Can’t I be a sex maniac?” He told me I needed to see him three times a week. I never went back.
People have many misconceptions about what it’s really like to be a sex maniac. They think just because you’ll rut with any old skunkhumper when the hunger’s upon you, that you don’t crave the crème de la crème. I was the junky who was after the finest China white high. Only, of course, I was a junky of love. And at 11 o’clock on Monday night, the Snow Leopard looked like the greatest score in a lifetime of scores.
Keep your mind on the job, my mind reminded me. I was a distribution specialist in the illegal goods and services industry. A master courier. A bagman. Not to be confused with a baglady, who keeps all her possessions in a shopping cart, and screams about how the aliens won’t stop probing her. There are, in fact, female bagmen. Being a post-modern sexualist myself, I don’t have a problem with the gender blurring. I was basically a high-end black market messenger boy. I picked shit up. I dropped shit off.
People often assume that just because you’re a sex maniac, you can’t have a life. Wrong again. As with anything, there are all levels of function among sex addicts. I was never one of those grab-a-kid-from-the-schoolyard-and-keep-her–in-my-basement sex maniacs. I was a very high functioning sex maniac. An ethical sex maniac. I was all about consent. I had rules. I didn’t mix business with pleasure. I took pride in my work. Being the best distribution specialist I could be. That’s just how Mother raised me. So when I was on the job, I showed up on time, I got my package and I was on my merry way.
That night was supposed to be no different. Show up, get package, deliver. My boss, Chinese Willy, had made a big point of saying that he was giving this job special attention, like: If you don’t mook this job up, you just might get invited into the club to play some of our little reindeer games. All I had to do was get the package back to Willie’s by midnight. Cake.
That was before the Snow Leopard. When Shiva Shiv said the name, I laughed out loud. I stopped laughing when Shiva Shiv said, “What the fuck you laughin’ at?” in a voice dripping of curry and murder. The name rattled around in my brain the whole day. Naturally, that night the Snow Leopard invaded my dreams. She was 1/2-cat 1/2-woman. I could smell the inheat, as she kept changing back and forth, from cat to woman and back: whiskers and lips, fangs and fur, that rough tongue, claws and paws, breasts and wet flesh, all hungry jungle feline inheat heat. She was tearing me to shreds, guts ripped open, and blood, my God, she was pounding me, eating my flesh and taking me right to the corner of Ecstasy and Death. I woke up in a cold sweat with a curtain rod for a johnson. I should have known right then and there. Dreams never lie.
So there I was, staring at the Snow Leopard, sitting there with her incredible flesh, and her sex-red lips, and I could smell that smell from my dream. That inheat smell. Or was that just in my head? Being a sex maniac has a way of blurring the fine line between reality and what you’d like reality to be.
Shut up! I scolded myself. Get your package, take care of your business, and be on yer merry way. I fondled the 50 Large screaming in my secret jacket pocket. Why doesn’t she say something? my mind asked me. She got up and paced like, well, like a big dangerous hungry cat. And I could hear the beat of the jungle drum. Or maybe it was just Busta Rhymes booming from the next room. Money, danger, and the distinct whiff of Snow Leopard shivered me from eyeballs to nut-balls to foot-balls: adrenaline pumping furiously, I was jacked to the max and stone cold sober.
I loved my job. I used to try to explain to people who’d never been in the illegal goods and services industry why it’s such a fun and rewarding line of work. Often when I was on the job I got what I can only describe as an evangelical feeling. Like this is what God wanted me to do. And on the last Monday of my life, I felt like He, or She (I’m not gender restrictive when it comes to my deities) has brought me to the Snow Leopard to change my life. I can’t explain it really, except to say I’m sitting there thinking that this job feels like one of those jobs where you look back from the future and you say, “Wow, that was the greatest job in the history of jobs!” But then I’m thinking, No, maybe this is one of those jobs you look back on and say, “I let myself drift, and that’s how I got this scar.”
The more we didn’t talk, the more electromagnetic the air got, like two saturated clouds bumping and rubbing, the rumbling building as the lightning gathers. I wanted to get a good look at her, fix the constellation of her features in my head so at least I could have her star in my fantasies later. I reached for the light. This is what prompted the first word she ever spoke to me. Naturally, inevitably that word was:
“No.”
Spoken in the chilled voice of a seasoned predator.
It hung there in the air:
“No.”
I did not turn the light on. So we stood there in the dark.
“Are you in, or out?” she purred.
This was not in the script. When Chinese Willy is expecting delivery of his package at midnight, and it’s 11:13 pm, and 50 G’s are flaming in your secret jacket pocket, you need to keep your priorities straight. My dance card was full. Or was this the call of the wild? That’s the problem with being a sex maniac. You can never really be sure.
“I like to know what I’m getting into before I get into something-”
“Look,” she shot back, those coal eyes glowing. “any minute now two big guys with automatic weapons are gonna bust through that door, and if you’re not in, you should get out.”
“I like to know what the stakes are before I go all in,” I said.
“You play yer cards right, I’ll make sure lady luck blows on your dice,” she licked her whiskers.
“What’s the game?” I asked.
“Look, all I need is an ace in the hole,” she hissed, “and if you’re it, I guarantee the pot’ll be very sweet. But Tick Tock, we’re on the clock.”
“How do I know you’re not bluffing?” I asked, ready to crawl through broken glass for her, but trying not to show it. “trying to set me up for a big fall?”
“Tic toc, tic toc,” she blazed those cat eyes at me.
I folded with a sigh:
“I’m all in.”
“I just hope you got enough hand-”
Before she could even get through the sentence, two very big guys with very automatic weapons busted through the door. She dropped straight down, behind the bed frame, while pulling out a petite little pistol. I unholstered, and ducknrolled under the bed, firing as fast as my fingers’ll fly, taking down the very big guy on the left. First shot: right shoulder. Second shot: belly-blast. Third shot: left kneecap. As he fell he fired his Glock, bullets spraying around the room like his gun was prematurely ejaculating. When he hit the floor, eye level with me, I got off the shot I’m truly proud of, as I plugged a slug right over the mug’s noseholes. That’s when the big guy’s lights went out.
The Snow Leopard fired one quiet dainty shot from her petite little pistol. It slid with the greatest of ease through the left eyeball of the very big guy on the right. And that was all she wrote for him.
In the calm-after-the-storm aftermath, all I could hear was her cool kitty breath, hot on my neck, as we huddled under the bed, two very big guys sprawled dead on the floor in front of us in spatters of assassin-red blood.
Panicked screams from fleeing Felipe freaks now careened into the room. In a flash I turned, my gun at her temple, and I was face-to-face with the Snow Leopard, eye-to-eye with all that coal eyes and fire, breathing her, that in-heat dream smell making me swell, and I knew I was losing myself in the Snow Leopard.
Something hard poking into my ribs brought me back. Lo and behold it was her little pistol. Suddenly I was love-drunk no more, smackdab in the middle of an old-fashioned Mexican stand-off.
Maybe it was being under the bed. Maybe it was the red on the floor like a blood Rorshauch. Maybe it was the thrill of the kill. Maybe it was just the Snow Leopard paying her debt. All I know is that those ecstasy-red lips were moving into mine, and suddenly hands were under the shirt and the skirt, skin scorching under fingers. Before I knew what was what, she had me in hand, as cold metal pressed into my testicles. Made my nuts do the bunnyhop. As she worked me over, she dug those long sharp red claws into my chest, opening my flesh. Yes, there was pain, but it was good, as an animal-wild growl rose from way deep inside her throat, and there was much bumping the grinding.
I reached down to reciprocate. Surprise, surprise. There was something down there. A package between her legs. Wait a minute, it’s my package, my mind said in surprise. I slipped it out and into my pocket. I pulled the cash out of my secret jacket pocket, and as I slid the money into her hand, I moved her scanties aside with my gun and gave her the tiniest taste of all of me.
Right away she wanted more. Tried to shove me further in. But I wouldn’t let her have any more. I wanted to make her to work for it. Which she did: teeth into my neck, claws into my back, this krazy kat was actually drawing blood, she quickly got me pinned on my back, and started have me for a late night supper. Then she put her pistol tip on my lip and she sucked on both at the same time.
I confess, as a sex addict, the most gratifying aspect of the whole Snow Leopard experience was how she kept maneuvering me around so she can get at me better, bucking and howling, growling and grunting, groaning and moaning, fast cuz she knew that bigger and larger trouble was most certainly going to walk right through that door at any second.
This is religious, I was thinking, it’s superhuman, interstellar, transcendental. Time was no more. The mind was no more. There was nothing else in the world, even as the universe rushed through me and into her, then back again. Estrogen shockwaved through my central nervous system and my johnson was transformed into a lightning rod that shot bolts as we skydived together off the top of the Golden Gate Bridge and floated shaking and speaking in tongues together, landing back under the bed at Felipe’s, panting and radioactive in the afterrapture.
Like a stop-action movie she:
Stood
Re-arranged
Cat-stretched
Walked towards the door to leave.
I struggled up and stood paralyzed, like a life-sized action-figure of myself, watched each event transpire, but somehow missed all the connecting moves, how she got from point A to B to C to D.
“Hey wait a minute,” spurted out of my mouth with a disturbing level of desperation, which I tried to reign in but-quick. “How can I get ahold of you?”
“You can’t,” she purred just loud enough for me to hear, as she approached the door.
“Hold on a second, I wanna-” I didn’t say that I wanted to have her again, right away, and for the rest of my life.
“Yeah, I know,” she gave me this devastating, bored-on-jaded cheshire half-grin, and I knew she was going to just disappear any second as her hand fingered the knob of the door and she was inches away from being gone.
“Hey, look, I just saved your life here,” I hated how limp and lame and tame my voice sounded. “I was your ace in the hole.”
“Why do you think I blew on your dice?” she nodded ever-so-slightly, the door was opening now and she’d almost slipped all the way through it.
“I thought it was my boyish good looks and my winning personality,” I cracked back, hoping a laugh would buy me another minute.
“That’s why I didn’t kill you,”
The Snow Leopard’s grin spread, and after she left, it lingered for several moments before it slowly faded away.
Suddenly everything went back to regular speed, and the sounds of all the freaked out Felipe habitues had a new sound added to them. Cop sounds. Sirens and intercoms and heavy steps headed hard down the hall, it’s capital T trouble, and I was out the window, escaping down the fire escape, and Boom! walking up Geary, breathing the cool yet fetid air of Polk Gulch, the taste of Snow Leopard wet on my lips.
I tucked in. Took a breath. Checked the time. 11:38. How can that be? I was Biblical with the Snow Leopard for all of 8 minutes. Why did it feel like 8 lifetimes?
Chinese Willie’s was five minutes away, and walking up Geary towards Van Ness, the deep peace of a job well done, combined with the high of scoring all that pure Snow Leopard, caused a highly satisfied sigh to slide out of me. In front of Frenchy’s Adult Emporium, where they’re always HIRING, Rasta Hat Man was taking a wee late night nap on his sidewalk bed. I admire a man who can just curl up right there on Geary and catch a few winks. No pillow, no blankets: that’s discipline. An old blind brother in a ratty tatty shabby old overcoat held a blindman cane, only it was all duct taped together. I couldn’t help it, when I saw the old blind brother with his old, busted, taped-up cane, it really got to me. So I went over to the guy and I slipped him a sawbuck.
“It’s a tenspot,” I said low, and the guy came over all humble and happy:
“Thank ya, sir, God bless ya, thank ya, sir, God bless ya.”
I like that in a bum. Gratitude. I hate these bums, you give ‘em coin, and they look at you like they’re doing you a big favor by taking your money. No, I want some genuine thank-you from my bum.
By the way, bum is the word of choice down here. One day I was talking to one of these superindustrious bums, you know the type, always hustling around a hundred miles an hour, busting their bony butts, they have a whole circuit worked out, cashing in hundreds of bottles a day, I love this guy, he’s always got a line of bottle-loaded shopping carts all tied together like he’s riding herd over a bum wagon train. I called him James Brown, seeings how he’s the hardest working man in show business. He got a kick out of that. So one time I was talking to James Brown about homeless-this and homeless-that, and the brother went off:
“Don’t call me no homeless, mutherfucker! I’m a bum! I don’t work but when I wanna work, I don’t kiss no bawsman’s ass, I take my own vacation, I make my own rules, I’m a bum, mutherfucker, and I’m proud. Hallelujah I’m a bum!”
Okay, you’re a bum, Hallelujah. And every time I saw James Brown, there was some shoeless loser, some lower class riffraff bum railing on this superindustrious brother from another mother, sticking a raw, puffy-bum hand out, screaming:
“Why you don’t you give me some love? You owe me, you sell-out mutherfucker!”
It happens all the way from the outhouse to the penthouse. Some citizens work their noses to the bone, and some jealous leaching ne’erdowells are always there to knock them down a peg. Sweet misery loves her company, from Nob Hill to Polk Gulch.
People diss the Gulch, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s the only neighborhood if you’re really serious about being a sex maniac. The Haight’s too full of gentrified Gap-heads, gone-to-seed hippy hopheads, and runaway urchin thieves. The Richmond is a great place to go if you’re lookin’ for the slowest most boring death imaginable. SoMa? Please! Those dotcon pseudo-hipsters deserve every scrap of misery they’ve heaped on themselves. I do enjoy North Beach on a sunny afternoon, but in the end there’s too many clueless tourists clogging up the arteries. Nob Hill is a travesty, teaming with all those vaginally-challenged fashion victims. Hell even the poodles get botoxed there. And there’s nothing tender in the Tenderloin. T he only loin in the TL is crawling with nasty maggots. I once saw some gap-toothed loon cap his running mate over a Q-tip. Hey I like Q-tips as much as the next guy, but only in the TL can you get terminated over one.
Because of its equidistant location between the Tenderloin and Nob Hill, you will hear the sisters sometimes call Polk Gulch the Tender Knob, which I quite enjoy. Here’s a little known fact: the word gulch comes from an Anglicization of gulchen, which means to gulp. When you consider how much has been guzzled and gulped in the Gulch over the years, it seems a perfect fit, doesn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, the Gulch is not for the feeble-minded or the weak-willed. The Gulch will chew you up and spit you out if you let it. But if you have Game, you can get anything anytime in the Gulch. And you can get it for cheap.
The Gulch is where rough trade goes for a vacation. So you can bag a nasty little bit of fluff like this girly I walked past outside Koko’s, with the hiphuggers revealing pretty pink panties, and FOXY plastered in cheap lettering across the seat of her jeans stuffed full of all that fine white flesh, she’s positively spilling out her too-small pleather jacket, and for $25 and unlimited meth, chances are, she’ll let you have an unlimited all-access pass to her hidden treasures until she’s not high anymore. And with the restaurant-quality meth I kept on hand for specifically this purpose, that could last days at a stretch. Yes, she was rough, but sometimes I liked it rough.
But the true glory of the Gulch is that the very next second you’ll spot two touristy girlies shivering in shorts walked by with beautiful pale goosebumping gams, swathed in big I  SF sweatshirts they had to buy cuz nobody told them how freezing it was in SF. You’d be shocked how easy it is to sidle up to these cornfed beauties, who are most of them looking to take a walk on the wild side in Baghdad-by-the-Bay, by the way, and take them for some paella at the Spanish joint on the corner, then end up back at my lovepad for some wine and some weed if they’re into it, which they almost always are, and all of a sudden they’re on my big round bed begging for one more to make it an even ten so they can go back and tell their cheesehead friends about how they  SF.
Across the street heading towards Polk, three of the loud brothers congregated around a lost-looking white man in a too-expensive jacket, they were waving DVDs in his face, screaming about how they could get any title he wants. Then suddenly eight or nine of the loud brothers crawled out of Godknowswhere, surrounded the lost-looking jacket like a giant black widow spider, and swallowed it and its owner whole.
A tattooed post-teen with a hunk of metal through her lip and one stuck through her eyebrow clunked by next. I found myself wondering where else she was pierced. Sometimes those tattooed pierced freaky females enjoy a bit of punishment with their pain and that can be fun, riding that line between angel and devil.
More local color, Gulch-style, sashe´d past in a ridiculous micro-mini and huge balloon breasts. She was one of these tiny passable Thai trannies. Very tidy. Truthfully, as a sex addict, I enjoy a passable trannie. Take it for one who knows, a hotty tranny’ll rattle your bones and make yer cahones dance like a couple of Mexican jumping beans. Because she wants to be a she more than any female. But I could only go to Trannie Land if she stayed a she. That’s just me. Maybe I was just not evolved enough to be comfortable with man-love. I wish I could’ve. I tried, believe me. My life would have been so much easier if I could’ve gotten off on men, cuz you can have man 25/8. Shake a tree in the Gulch and a ton of love-ready man falls out. Woman, even faux woman, even bad woman, even the nastiest skagmeister skunkkunt, is often so hard to come by. I mean obviously there are women everywhere, but it takes so much effort just getting in most of the really exceptional woman, it’s exhausting.
Next up on the Gulch hit parade was a disaffected arty sweet-sixteeny, all gangly angles and long colt legs, hoody ripped so her bra strap showed over the softness of all that untouched skin underneath, with all that attitude heaped on top. I just loved going up to one of these flouncing clomping angry grrrrls and saying, Hey I know how it is, your parents suck, your school sucks, your teacher sucks, your friends suck, the whole world sucks, but I can show you how to escape into ecstasy, lose yourself to the pleasures of the flesh, primal scream all that bopper angst right out. You have all the equipment you need, but you have no clue how to use it, I can show you the whole thing in a couple of hours. Plus, you cannot believe how jealous your stupid sucking friends’ll be, and just how much this will piss your parents off.
Oh, I love this guy: he never wears a shirt even in the freezing rain, he’s so wired and wiry, you can see every bone in his body, he’s like a skeleton wearing a skin tarp stretched too tight. He loves to run right in front of speeding cars. That’s his thing. And he never gets hit. I saw him cause three separate accidents, one of them a 3-car fiasco. But he never gets so much as a scratch. Course he is lean and lithe and wiry as hell, like I said, so he’s very hard to hit. But as I walked past and watched him, I wondered what he might’ve been, like maybe an Olympic hurdler, or a NFL scatback, or a Hollywood stuntman, instead of a death-defying crack casualty.
As I turned down Chinese Willy’s alley, the animal cried out inside me: I need more Snow Leopard! The pictures flashed back: those throat moans, cold steel on my boys, her squirming so she could have all of me. My open chest skin was stinging in the chill of the night, and I could still feel her digging into me.
It’s so gratifying when reality actually turns out better than fantasy. Chinese Willy, who’s actually Mexican but really looks, I kid you not, Chinese, was even fatter and happier than I’d imagined he’d be. If there’s one thing he likes more than getting his money, it’s getting his money early. So he was practically jovial as he counted all those potatoes at 11:52, instead of midnight. As I watched him touching and fondling his cabbage, suddenly I understood: this is his thing. The man is a cash addict.
Chinese Willy is an old school gangster, which has its ups and downs. On the one hand, he’s hooked up with everybody and nobody can touch him, which meant nobody could touch me. On the other hand, he’s prone to irrational outbursts of mega-violence that can really wreak havoc on a person’s skull. He loves all that vendetta malarkey, and he’s very big on LOYALTY and RESPECT. And he loves to break balls. His whole social hierarchy is based on the breaking of other people’s balls. It’s his way of saying he likes you. When Chinese Willy stops break your balls, that’s when it’s time to watch your back.
One of the odder things about Chinese Willy is that even though he’s actually Mexican, he surrounds himself with Chinamen, and he’s always bankrolling these high-end Chinese honeys so they’ll hang with him, and he even kind of talks like one of those oldtimey Chinamen. It’s like somehow because he looks Chinese, he’s become a Chinaman.
“So,” he mumbled through a huge mouthful of egg salad, “how you like Snow Leopard?” He glanced sideways at Crack Harry, Shiva Shiv and Knuckles, and when he did that insinuating vulgar guttural chuckle, that was their cue to do the same. Like they were all in on some secret that I wasn’t, the object being to make me feel like a big steaming heap of shit. But the beauty of being a sex maniac is that you could just not care less about any of this. It was just so much water off the back of my duck, while I maneuvered my way towards my next fix.
“Yeah, she was a real piece of work-”
“You say mouthful there,” assorted grunts and belches and chortles erupted from Crack Harry and Shiva Shiv and Knuckles.
“Yeah, I was just wondering if I could get her digits, cuz I gotta proposition I wanna- ”
Chinese Willy shut me down like I was the clap and he was penicillin:
“No! You thank me for this. I tell now, you listen: You not wanna make fuckeefuck wit’ this clazy bitch! Right, boys?”
They nodded and grunted like the chunks of muscle they are.
“Naw, you don’t understand,” I plodded on, “I have an unresolved situation on my hands visa vie-”
“Now you watch my lip: ‘No!’” egg salad sprayed from the Mexican lips of Chinese Willy. “Stay fuck away from this clazy bitch!”
“With all due respect,” Willy loves all that all-due-respect business, you could feel his sphincter unpinch, “I’ve been working for you for five years, I’m always straight 25/8, I bring you a steady stream of new business, and I have never asked you for one single thing. This is all I ask. I need to talk to the Snow Leopard. With all due respect-”
I couldn’t even get the last due respects out, on account of the veins that were popping up on that huge Chinese-looking head, as: “NO! FUCK DAMN YOU!” thundered from Chinese Willy, along with another fusillade of egg salad, a small particle of which flew all the way over the desk and landed on my vintage Warriors warm-up.
This always signals the end of any dispute involving Chinese Willy. It is a well-known fact that after the third “No!” from Chinese Willy, you continue a dispute at your own risk, as an irrational outburst will most likely result. As I did not wish to have my cheek pierced by a staple gun, or my nose broken with Chinese Willy’s Ugly Billy (his billyclub of choice, a slender 24 inches of hardened metal, conventionally used for bashing fish in the head until they’re dead after you’ve reeled them in) I dropped the topic.
But just when I was ready to write Chinese Willy off as a classless thug, he peeled off 5 Large and handed it to me, even though he only owes me a G, and with great pomp and ceremony, he proclaimed:
“Okay, maybe you right. You don’t never fuckup. Not never. So maybe Chinese Willy take you for granted. But I do you favor here. Snow Leopard, she take no prisoner. This for you own good. You understand I no want to see this clazy bitch fuck you shit up?”
“Thank you for taking the time to help me, and I thank you for your generosity, which I am not even deserving of, but what the hell I’ll take it,” I pocketed the 5 G’s with a flourish, and they ate it up, loved that I was giving a tiny little shot to the man himself, as he laughed:
“He got brass monkey balls, don’t he?”
Everybody made little grunty snorty sounds, and Chinese Harry continued:
“I got pick-up for you, noon tomorrow, Sophia’s, Butterball, he got thing for you, you take to Sweetmeat, he got thing for you, I need back here by one.”
“You got it, bawss,” I smiled wide, and as I sidled out, Chinese Willy shoved a huge hunk of egg salad into his fat, happy Mexican face.
I practically skipped down the alley to Polk: it was barely midnight, I had 4 free G’s itching to be scratched in my secret jacket pocket, I didn’t have to work again for twelve hours, I was still throbbing from the Snow Leopard work-over, I could feel the cool air soothing the open love-wounds inflicted by the saucy minx I wanted to have every day for the rest of my life, and as I smelled her again, she jolted me to the bone.
Next stop: Eyeball. The queerest of queer ducks. He’s as tall as he is wide, somewhere between 30 and 600 years old. Possibly the hairiest man on the planet, he’s got one of these Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers ‘dos, slate-colored hair flying everywhere, flowing over the shoulders, burying the ears, drooping in front of the eyes, and avalanching uncontrollably down the front and the back. At a certain point the head hair meets and joins the beard hair, and it looks thick enough to contain entire meals. Which, at times, it does. Thicket of brambled monobrow. Hair sprouting out of knuckles, pouring out of shirt collar and sleeve, pant leg bottom. You could make braids out of the hair coming out of his nose. I’ve never seen Eyeball’s eyes. I don’t know that he actually has eyes. Here’s the weird thing: Eyeball’s the guy you go to in the Gulch when you want to know where to find somebody, and he never travels more than the 50 feet between his flophouse hellhole on Larkin, and Hung Wang’s, the filthy greazy spoon Dim Sum joint he frequents on O’Farrell. It’s one of the great mysteries of life how this human hairball who can barely see, hardly walk, and never goes anywhere, knows everything there is to know about everyone in the Gulch. If you didn’t see it with your own eyes you wouldn’t believe it. But this is how Eyeball makes bank. People pay him to tell them where to find what they’re looking for. It makes you think about miracles, how they’re everywhere, only nobody’s paying attention.
The thing about Eyeball is, he’s a cantankerous troll, and whimsical in the worst sense of the word. For example, one time you’ll come to him with the simplest piece of information, and he’ll charge you a grand for it. Another time he’ll give you the Governator’s cel digits for a buck. So I was a tad apprehensive about what he was going to charge me, but at the same time I had 4 free G’s pulsating in my secret pocket, and with 4 Large I was confident I could find anybody.
So sure enough, there he was, as advertised, Eyeball, buried somewhere under all that hair, stuffing his piehole with vile dim sum. Before him sat three plates pregnant with rancid rolls and skuzzy buns, grizzly gray meat and dumplings that laid there like stillborn dog fetuses, and rice with little things that looked like dead insects sprinkled in it. Crumbs spread out in a half-moon on the floor around him, his hair/beard was layered deep with little bits of chow from meals present to years-gone-by. I loved to watch the man attack and subdue his dim sum. As I watched him ravage his food with his mouth, it became clear: This is Eyeball’s thing. This is what he lives for.
So I didn’t want to interrupt him when he was in the middle of a big feed, he can be cranky as a mother bear when you threaten her cubs, he’ll take your head clean off if you’re not careful. I waited til he came up for air, then moved in, gentle but firm:
“Hello, Eyeball, how’s life treating ya?”
“I got gout. Ain’t that sump’n’? Gout.” Eyeball shook his head, which made his hair shake in waves of frayed gray.
Eyeball’s a mumbler. I always forget that. Actually, it’s not that he mumbles so much as that the food that’s constantly being stuffed into his mouth serves as a natural muffler, making it difficult to watch more than about 40% of what he says.
“Sorry to hear that,” I said, as I tried to figure out exactly what he had. Bout? Doubt? Gout?
“Gout!” Eyeball shouted, dim sum flying as if from a volcano. “Ain’t that a kick in the ass?”
Ah, gout! I didn’t even know what gout was. But it sounded like one of those things you definitely don’t want, like you never hear anyone say: Hey, everybody, congratulate me, I got gout!
I leaned as close as I could without invading his personal space, as my ears adjusted to his volume.
“Do you even know what gout is?” Eyeball snapped cranky.
I wanted to chill his wig as quickly as possible, so I jumped right in:
“No, I don’t, but it sounds bad. Can I get you anything for it?”
Yes, I did want to soften him, but I was sincere about getting him some meds if he needed them. That’s just how Mother raised me.
“Thank you, very kind of you to offer,” came out from under Eyeball’s hair. “Either my liver is producing more uric acid than I can excrete urinarily, or I have more uric acid into my bloodstream than my kidneys can filter. Apparently, the uric acid has crystallized in my feet, and it feels like Satan is punishing me for my sins by shoving white hot knitting needles into my big toes.”
“Sorry to hear that,” I empathized with my feminine side.
“How’s Chinese Willy?” Eyeball grunted as he stuffed an entire dumpling into his mouth and swallowed it whole like a snake sucking down an egg.
“He’s fat and happy. So, listen, I’m looking for someone, she’s-”
“The Snow Leopard,” he said without missing a beat.
“Eyeball, you never cease to amaze me, how did you know that?” I was actually flabbergasted, although in retrospect I should’ve seen it coming.
“There was some nastiness at Felipe’s, no? Several brutes bought the farm at the hands of a coupla very talented individuals, one of whom is the Snow Leopard. The police are quite interested, by the way, so if you know anyone who might’ve been involved, I would advise them to lay low.” Insinuation oozed out from under that hair so hard you’d’ve had to be in a coma not to get it.
“Thanks, Eyeball, I appreciate your concern. If I run into any such individuals, I’ll pass on that valuable information. So, where do I find her?” I tried not be betray too much of the ill and all-consuming lust madness that burned in me. I’m afraid I was not quite successful.
“You don’t,” he snorted matter-of-fact.
“No, you don’t understand, I have some unfinished business with her, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and-”
“This is not a person you want to find,” Eyeball said it like he was telling me without question that the earth is round and revolves around the sun.
“No, I do, I really do, see-”
“I don’t feel comfortable dispensing this particular information,” he said as he wiped his mouth with his stain-besotted sleeve, “as I’m quite sure it will be extremely hazardous to your health.”
“Do you know where she is?” I asked.
“What kinda question is that?” Eyeball came over all insulted, “Of course I know where she is. I know where everyone is. What I’m saying is that I do not want to be responsible for the shitstorm that will rain down on you.”
I got very serious now, and tried to find Eyeball’s eyes in all that hairy chaos:
“Look, I appreciate what you’re saying, I really do, but I don’t care what a dangerous psychopath she is, I have got to get ahold of her. I’ll be responsible for the consequences. Trust me, I need this.”
Nothing came out of him. More dim sum went in.
“How much?” I persisted.
“Not for sale,” he insisted.
“Everything’s for sale,” I was the dog with a bone that wouldn’t let go.
“You can’t afford it,” Eyeball mumbled.
“How much Eyeball, seriously,” I said.
“5 grand,” he said, knowing I’ll never come across.
I felt like the star of my own movie as I reached inside my secret pocket, extracted the 5 Large, and handed them to the stunned Eyeball, who had no choice but to say:
“Over the tarot joint on O’Farrell, she owns the building, lives on the top floor.”
With a 5 Grand spring in my step I headed happily to the Snow Leopard’s pad. I was really looking forward to breaking into her place. I was born blessed. Ever since I was a kid, there was no place I couldn’t break into when I put my mind to it. As a child I was always sneaking into people’s houses when they weren’t home. I loved being inside their lives. Snooping through their drawers. Rifling around in the back of their closet where they hide everything they don’t want anyone to find. I was always drawn to the unmentionables. And I loved seeing one of these pillar-of-society types walking around town like they’re the head of the Committee for Moral Decency, and knowing that they have dirty magazines full of schoolgirls and Great Danes at home just waiting in their closets.
So when I walked up to the tarot joint on O’Farrell, I was thinking: Cake. It was almost one in the morning, so there was still quite a bit of street action. Stumpy Charlie and Tripod, his 3-legged dog, teetered by. That chick I saw before with the tattoos stumbled by, she’d clearly found a fix and was happily self-medicated. Well, maybe not happily. A behemoth with a 3 foot orange mohawk and chains connecting various parts of his anatomy like they’re holding him together stopped in front of me, looked me right in the eye and said with malicious intent:
“What the fuck are you starin’ at?”
I love these guys that get themselves decked out in some outrageous Halloween-looking costume so everybody has to stare at them, and then when you stare at them, they want to re-arrange your face. The begging-for-a-fight boys.
But me, I just could not have cared less, particularly not tonight. So I smiled easy-as-you-please and say:
“I was just admiring your hair, my man.”
Because I was so easy with it, all the piss and vinegar drained right out of him, and he said:
“Oh, uh… thanks…”
Then he clomped off to find someone weaker and more feeble to smack around.
There was a door next to the tarot joint that lead into her building. Too obvious. The building next door was clearly the way to go, so I skeleton-keyed in lickety spilt, shot up 2 flights of stairs, out the back window at the landing, and grabbing drainpipe, I swung around so I landed on the Snow Leopard’s roof, quiet as a love monkey making a house call. I hopped down onto the fire escape, and leaned way out so I could see inside the window of the Snow Leopard, Sadly, drawn drapes stopped me from staring in her lair.
A nobody’s-home vibe radiated through the walls and I could barely stand it, so close to being inside her cave, sniffing around her unmentionables, uncovering her underbelly, unearthing the sweet secrets that make the Snow Leopard tick. One foot on the fire escape railing, the other on her sill, I jimmied my handmade fenestrator in, guided the lock to the disengaged position, slid the window up and slithered in like an oiled snake.
Surveying the place with my penlight I couldn’t quite wrap my eyes around it. It was as elusive as she was. One huge room, the whole floor of the building. I could see what was probably the front door, probably 150 feet away. Only the moon through two skylights provided light, and that came and went as nightclouds drifted by. Another door on the west wall. Closed. One more door on the east wall. Closed. In the back corner one giant bed with 4 posts was covered in carved cats chasing each other up and down. Fur blankets piled high. No chairs. No table. No kitchen. No garbage can. No TV. No computer. No, wait. Next to the bed growing up the wall was a 10-foot bookcase with a ladder next to it. And what, pray tell, does the Snow Leopard read? My mind wondered to itself. You can tell everything about a person by their library. Or lack thereof. The Jungle Book. The Cat in the Hat. How the Leopard Got His Spots. Why Cats Paint. Taming the Tiger Within. How Large Cats Kill. The Leopard Hunts in Darkness. I smiled.
Inside one door: bathroom. Or rather a shell of a bathroom. A toilet. A standing sink. A claw foot tub. A bar of soap. No beauty products. No medicine cabinet. No medicine. It’s like she was not quite human.
Behind door number 2: walk-in closet. Outfits hang on rods. All black. Humpme pumps, kick-yer-ass boots, gouge-yer-out stiletto heels, thin Chinese slippers, and one pair of spiffy spats. One dresser. Three drawers. Bras. Panties. Stockings. One pair of black panties. I picked them up. Wrapped them around my face like a gas mask and breathed in the secret scent of the Snow Leopard. Pavlov was laughing in his grave as that smell invaded my central nervous system and zapped my boys while blood pumped automatically towards them. I considered stealing them, but I didn’t want to piss the Goddess off. I’ll ask the Snow Leopard for them after I re-sex her, I thought.
Snap your fingers. Do it now.
The time it took you to think about snapping your fingers is how long it took for her to have the muzzle of her petite little pistol in my earhole as I left her walk-in closet.
My first thought was: How did she do that? That’s my thing. Nobody gets the drop on me.
And yet there it was, her cold metal stub at the tip of my earhole.
The next thing was smell. That in-heat scent, that aural sense memory that made my thing sing as the breath drained out of me in a long warm sigh.
And suddenly her face was in mine. Those burning coals eyes sucked me into the sunspots in the middle and I remember thinking: How did I get to be the deer in the headlights? The monkey in the middle?
She just stared. Looked like a smile was hiding under her quicksilver face, but there wasn’t enough light in the room to tell, just little flashes of moon through the skylights. I kept waiting for her to ask: What are you doing here? Or: How did you get in so easy? Or: What is wrong with you? But nothing. While freakydeaky cracklyscary estrogen-testosterone-saturated atoms careened around her huge empty cat cave.
She leaned in sooooo slow. Just kept leaning. Closer and closer. A picture popped into my head: she’d bitten my lower lip off and it was hanging out of her bloody mouth and she slurped it into her mouth with a hungry happy growl.
Her lips were right at the tip of my lips and the heat of her breath made it feel like therewas a furnace inside her that was pumping vaporized sex into my mouth and down my throat, filling my lungs and pulsating into my chest, then spreading all the way down to my hips, which began humpdancing unconsciously into her, and the chemicals were changing in my brain, synapses firing, my heartrate erupting through the roof of my mouth, the flow of blood altered, redirected by the Snow Leopard.
I wanted to say: How the hell did you sneak up on me like that? Or: Are you mad that I’m here? Or: Who are you anyway? But the cat got my tongue. The tense intense anticipation was killing me, and all the while I was madly aware of her metal rod flirting with my earhole. I simply cannot emphasize enough how this added to the lifendeath of the whole thing, knowing I was one itchy trigger finger away from having my brains turned into wallpaper.
The tip of my lip got the softest lick from her rough cat tongue as her other hand grabbed my package hard, knocking the air right out of me, while she shoved me back into the wall with a thud, her claws digging into my boys.
And then I understood. This is her thing. Getting guys by the balls. Literally. Her grind finding mine, she dug in, yes it did hurt, but at the same time, pleasure shot to all my centers, all at the same time. Pleasure. Pain. Pain. Pleasure, I couldn’t tell anymore where one ended and the other began. She drags me back and forth fiercely, and I have never felt more alive in my entire life. She squeezeboxed me like a rhythm queen working overtime, working me over but good.
I was now waiting to wake up overheated and covered in cold sweat from this dream.
But no.
She pushed me hard, my back literally up against the wall. She shoved me down onto the floor, and sat down hard on me, she had me pinned, straddling one boot on either side of my thighs, black skirt up over her hips, sucking on my tongue so it shivered me with freezing heat, and that little prick of a gun was always there, hard and cold in my earhole, my death at her whim a whisper away.
The Snow Leopard started making crazy growly hissing sounds, I could feel the pull of the moon from inside her, and I knew I never wanted to leave there.
She maneuvered herself open, pulled back her head and looked into my eyes, inviting me inside to ride her ferris wheel to the stars. She took a deep breath, and a sweetness came over her face, it filled me up, everything softened and she melted me in places I didn’t even know I had places.
Then she grabbed me behind the neck with her free hand and gathered herself like a hurricane off the coast.
And then BOOM! she shoved down with all her might, with all those muscles, with all that leverage, all that wet and that swell, sliding down deepdeepdeep into the depth of her holiness, all the way to the bottom of the well, splitting her open like an atom an explosion of heat blowing my mushroom cloud heart all the way up.
More crazy roar big cat scratch fever screams as she rocked slowly, flexing in rhythm with the tide, tugging and grinding, pressing flesh on flesh, sweat beading out now, the sound of squishing liquid wet, ecstasy crawling from pleasure center to pleasure center up and down my tingling spine as she pulled me up higher and higher, while ripping into my skin. Is that sweat or blood trickling down my neck? My brain asks. Yes, it is, my body answers.
She was back in my face again, the Snow Leopard, I could finally see her as a strip of moon filtered through her skylights, and she poured herself through my windows, and this is what takes me to the edge of Lover’s Leap.
She nodded at me ever so tiny, she wanted to know if I was ready to jump off with her, to take the great plunge, and into her eyes I nodded, Yes I’m ready, jump off and I’ll jump with you.
Funny what a person can get used to. When the muzzle of her petite little pistol first nuzzled my earhole, everything else in the entire world faded away, and there was nothing but the cold steel feel of that gun, death at the tip of her finger.
But by the time I heard the click of the trigger, I had quite forgotten, in all the excitement, that her petite little pistol was there at all. It took me a moment to realize what that sound was, to remember that her gun was indeed in my earhole.
How long was it between the time I heard that click, and the time that bullet ripped down the tiny barrel of her pistol, barreled through the hole of my ear and into the fishy tissue of my brain? Couldn’t be more than a flicker of a blink, right? A heartbeat? At what point during its passage though my skull did the bullet take me from orgasm to death? I cannot accurately answer that question.
But as a sex maniac, I couldn’t have asked for a better death: coming and going in the same moment, at the hands of the Snow Leopard.

…..