Santana left as quickly as she came, taking off from this world toward new planes and strange liminal spaces. And, sooner rather than later, we ran out of Lunar Kisses.
That tiny taste of what hides beyond the veil of reality, beyond the mountains of madness, made us grateful for the blood pumping through our arteries. But without shrooms, we needed new alternatives...
Breathe in the smell of briefcase leather, machine rust, and monitor radiation, you everyday wage slave. You, the scholar or the misfit, taste the bliss of your nerves blooming on Ecstasy. Throw yourself into the K-Hole, as dark as Limbo itself. Set sail on a sea of lysergic acid under a downpour of angel dust falling from smiling clouds.
A beautiful chemical whirlwind. But we had to go further. Where else...? The flesh, Daniel proposed while vomiting a cocktail of Doritos and booze into the toilet. I held his hair back. When he finished, I flushed.
The night is our friend.
I threw on frayed pants and a white anorak I bought for next to nothing at a yard sale. Daniel wears tight jeans and a sleeveless shirt that exposes a tangled web of intertwined cuts crawling up from his wrists to crown the middle of his arms. Passing under a streetlamp, the light highlights those deep, intrinsic cobwebs carved by razor blades and box cutters, poorly healed by time.
"On special nights, I don't hide them," Daniel told me once. "People think the full moon brings out the worst in us. Bullshit. It just shows us who we really are."
And the round celestial body now rules the sky. It sends us a wink, celebrating all the rapes, overdoses, murders, betrayals, and suicides cradled in this pen called Earth. Oh, what naughty little things they are! Hopeless little devils. I can almost hear it mocking us.
Whores are the courtesans of the night. The game is simple, you pay and you get, like going to buy bread. They are all cold but they still come out scantily clad, and bathe in perfume to mask the stench to other men. It's a marketing thing.
I remember about the first one, Daniel gave me a condom, a pat on the back and wished me good luck before he saw me enter the motel. I had a fake ID in my pocket, but I didn't even have to show it, it was enough to pay for the room. Her pseudonym began with a "P" and ended with.... "A". I forgot the middle. What I do remember is the tattoo of a blue rose on her abdomen, next to the C-section scar, while she moved on me like a slug trying to eat me. It took me about ten minutes to ejaculate.
The next few sessions were longer, but just as tasteless, and I would even say embarrassing. Then Cherry appeared, hunched over by the trash cans like a battered stray cat, with her hand in her mouth and blood leaking through her fingers, the gift of a well-delivered blow from an annoying customer.
Daniel and I exchanged glances. Cherry almost crawled up to us and offered us fellatio in exchange for a handful of dollars. Tongue, saliva, tears, and blood made for a nice, warm, pleasurable, and playful combination that I recommend you all try at least once. She took the trouble to swallow without complaint.
Daniel paid her for the both of us, and he also wanted to cover the fee of the guy who had beaten her and bailed.
"That's not necessary, baby," she said.
"Come on, it's just money," Daniel insisted on the favor.
Cherry accepted the bills, never once uncrossing her arms to stop hugging herself.
I look her up and down; her arms and legs gleam like minefields of punctures, the desecration of countless needles fighting to find a vein. Something small and red drops from her. I leaned down and picked it up... It's hard, and white beneath the coat of blood. A tooth. I wiped it on my anorak and tried to hand it back to her. Cherry shakes her head.
"Keep it, honey. Maybe it'll bring you good luck."
She tells us her street name, in case we want a repeat performance another day, and wanders back into the concrete garden.
On the walk back to the apartment block, I asked Daniel:
"What if she gave us something? There are like twenty thousand STDs out there now, man. Each one worse than the last."
"Relax. It's not like we're gonna live to be a hundred anyway."
"That's true."
When I woke up, that hooker's battered face crept back into my mind. In the afternoon, too, superimposing itself over Tiara's face as she tried to talk me into checking into a rehab clinic. I couldn't call Cherry beautiful; her expression belonged more to a victim in a domestic homicide documentary than to a living, breathing being. Maybe that's exactly what drew us in. An asphalt flower ready to wither and rot, sugary femininity mixed with the bitterness of the grave.
I closed my eyes and pictured the beautiful, healthy young girl she must have been once, degenerating into the hollowed-out husk she is now.
We hired her for ten consecutive days. At first we took turns: First Daniel. Then me. Then both of us at the same time. Daniel preferred the tightness of her ass. I preferred the intimate and aphrodisiac juices of her vagina. The mouth remained on neutral ground, but I admit the girl was talented enough to graduate to giving great blowjobs. She loved the joke.
We'd talk after the sex, and it got to a point where I craved those chats more than the fucking. I found out we were the exact same age, but she looked a solid ten years older thanks to the drugs and the beatings from her pimp. I wasn't exactly aging like fine wine either; these months of THE SEARCH had taken their toll on me. I told her as much, and she replied that I didn't look too bad. Her laugh was beautiful—so beautiful it felt completely alien—and I felt a sudden urge to propose to her, to run away and start from scratch somewhere else.
We'd get clean, we'd be happy. A house in the suburbs, a couple of kids, and this whole fucked-up chapter of our lives would be left behind in the dust, I just knew it. A moderately happy life.
Then I caught myself.
Then, being so drunk and stoned that we were mistaken for demons, I tied Cherry on the bed and Daniel brought along a stray dog who, with his tongue, made her reach a wet and embarrassing climax. I watched it all from the doorway unclear what was true and what was a dream. Daniel couldn't see it, he passed out in a corner.
Three days later, they found Cherry's body in the very same alley where we met her. The papers and news reports described how every single tooth had been knocked out and her face was so swollen from the beatings that it was hard to recognize her.
Some cop held a press conference blaming the criminals from the neighboring county, and a cop from the neighboring county held a press conference blaming our criminals. The public swallowed both versions; it's easier to live with the fantasy of some distant evil than to think about dead hookers a few blocks from the church or the public school.
Just in case you're wondering, Daniel and I never hurt Cherry. We used her in many ways. We licked and touched the corners of her body that, even after years of prostitution, remained virginal (her regular clients lacked our imagination). But whoever plucked her from the garden was definitely her pimp, or one of those enraged creeps who later slap on the mask of a family man.
The beloved grandmother falls down the stairs and gets eaten by the cats. The straight-A kid trips on the highway and gets his head crushed by a truck. The cheating wife dies with a smile in bed next to her husband of decades, surrounded by a ring of children belonging to other men. What a tragedy. What a comedy.
And who is Cherry? Where did she come from? And who was the father of her unborn child? Nobody knows, and nobody seems to care. Life is a very long joke.
"Death visited our friend. It wasn't beautiful, or cathartic. She deserved better. We could have given her something better," Daniel says. He chucks a half-empty beer can into the current of the Mississippi.
"If life has no charm, why should death?" I asked, sitting on the damp sand with my arms wrapped around my knees.
"I don't know. But sooner or later, one way or another, we'll have to find out. Especially now that I'm starting to get bored of orgasms."
"Are we done with the flesh?"
"Not yet. Let's make a good, proper girl from a good family fall in love. A virgin, if such a thing still exists. I want to corrupt something beautiful."