One night after an extensive, loud, indoor/outdoor, even physical altercation with my boyfriend, a misguided actor and casualty of that old familiar downward spiral into the abyss of substance abuse, I found myself knocking on Pride’s door seeking refuge and a bit of peace and quiet. Pride’s apartment was an illegal sister-in-law apartment or red-headed-step-child-apartment, as I liked to call it, located down a long weird hall beside a garage and behind an opulent house near Alamo Square. It had a relatively hidden entrance, and I felt safe and protected there. When I arrived that morning he saw that I had been in a scuffle with the boyfriend. “Did he hit you?” he asked with his eyes narrowing, and he made a very heroic and touching promise that the boyfriend was never allowed there again and if he came there he would kick his ass. Sweet.
Pride was obviously fresh from a bath and getting ready to go somewhere, so I offered to leave. He said, “No way girl. You’re coming with me on an adventure.”
“Okay,” I said. I could use an adventure to take my mind off of things.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
He was extra effervescent this morning I noticed and wondered why.
“Did you get fucked really hard by some mean guy last night or something?”
“Yeah, by an old ugly guy with a weird ugly dick,” he said proudly, “And I loved it! Now do that big line on the coffee table because the cab is on the way.” I rolled up a bill, anxious for that familiar burning sensation, followed by the sense that any form of fat clogging my veins and arteries was instantly melted away, allowing my blood to freely flow through at a new velocity, giving me a rush like that feeling you get when the roller coaster plummets from its highest point or there’s just been an earthquake. “Breakfast of idiots” I said aloud.
“No thanks, I’m not hungry.” The doorbell sounded. “Let’s go girl,” he said, swishing out the door in a most effeminate way. “Aren’t I Nellie?” he asked as he shook his hips down the hall. “But I can be butch, too, if I want.”
“Butch enough to kick my loser shithead boyfriend’s ass, right?” I interjected.
“Damn straight!”
We piled in the cab and it took us barely four blocks away. “We’re here,” he said, paying and tipping the driver extravagantly as we got out in front of a big apartment building. “Who lives here?”
“Some tore up fucking bag-chasing spunout fucking bitch,” he said smiling. “Not really. Just a big drug dealer who needs me to shoot him up because he can’t do it himself anymore. C’mon, he lives on the third floor,” he said, starting to ascend the stairs.
“Well, aren’t you just the little Florence Nightingale of the drug underworld,” I said.
“Oh yeah, butch it up will ya? Like this,” he said in a deep, low, macho voice as he applied his most manly gait to the first staircase. I was cracking up but followed his instructions. Upon hitting the next floors landing he squealed, “Okay now, Nellie!” and exploded in a flurry of effeminate gesture in his ladylike ascent. He was slaying me. “Okay now, butch,” he said in a low voice. He was way ahead of me.
We entered the apartment and the tone was much more somber in there than we were. I quickly stifled my giggly mood as I let Pride do all the talking. There was not just the one dealer present but also another even bigger and more notorious one in need of the same service. This puzzled me, how people who were most definitely experienced in their drug use for years eventually reach a point of helplessness in being able to administer their own hits.
I didn’t ask any questions about it and actually averted my eyes while nurse Pride did his duty, as such things have made me actually faint in the past. I heard cough number one and cough number two and knew it was safe to return my gaze in their direction. In the not-too-distant future, one of those men would die suddenly from HIV/AIDS complications, the other would be found bludgeoned to death and rolled up in a carpet at a place he just acquired to open a small business. Since the two men didn’t immediately rip off their clothes and initiate sex with us but rather prepared a package for Pride and handed it to him and called another cab, I knew this wasn’t the only stop we’d be making.
We exited then entered a waiting cab and headed to our next destination, a long cab ride to a weird place in the shadow of the freeway and SF General Hospital. It was a little red house with a fence and a very scary rottweiler guarding the place. a very handsome blond stocky guy in leather pants and a wife-beater had to subdue the dog before we could enter the gate. Pride had informed me prior that he was stopping here to do his service yet again to the boyfriend of another big drug dealer.
Once safely inside I took in the surroundings in this oddly out of place little cottage under the freeway. Just off the front room in a smaller room with no door lay the sleeping drug dealer, a gun in his hand on the bed next to his head. He was snoring loudly. I was immediately frightened and glanced at Pride with widening eyes that said, “Lets get out of here.” He just smiled. The blond guy said, “Oh don’t worry about him – he’s been up for five days and just fell out a bit ago. He’s down for the count. Come on back here,” and led us to a large back room. The cottage was kind of placed on a slope so the windows in this back room were high on the wall but right at ground level on the outside of the house, and I kept seeing the gigantic paws of the rottweiler bounding by each window again and again as if on patrol. Pride prepared the hit for the blond while I took in the room in all its sex dungeon glory, a big X-shaped wooden structure with a variety of belts and cuffs attached to it for restraint purposes, a leather sling attached to the low ceiling, a weird sort of combination gynecological exam/bondage platform, a video camera, video sputtering on the screen some indiscernible fleshy homemade blur, and from where I stood I could just barely see the gun in the sleeping lover’s hand.
Nurse Nightingale apparently ran into a bit of trouble giving Mrs. Dealer her injection, as I noticed that they had quickly found it necessary to wrap his arm in saran wrap and say a prayer to the patron saint of abscess. His first attempt had “missed,” and while I was curious about what that meant, whenever I looked over at them dealing with this complication I started feeling weak. I turned away and looked at the gun and the sleeping man’s hand laying on it and thought about things like, what if he decided to itch his nose in his sleep or something? What if he awoke slowly to the sounds of strangers talking in his house like for instance me and Pride or maybe just me? I started feeling more uneasy about being there, and turned to see the process of getting the blond high had reached another even less sightly complication. I turned to the video screen and finally realized it was something the happy couple had filmed of themselves. Boy, the sleeping one, certainly had a huge cock, probably ten inches at least.
Then it hit me. He was the same guy who relieved us of top duties that morning with the Italian guy who had all the taxidermed animals and assault-with-a-deadly-weapon charges to face as soon as he hopped out of the sling and headed for his sentencing that morning. “It’s a small, small world,” I thought to myself to the tune of the song featured in the popular ride at Disneyland with mechanized dolls representing every country of the world singing and being happy together. I started envisioning the same ride populated by different dolls, like knife-wielding ex-cons, leather clad gay men in slings getting fisted, skinny tweakers fan-dancing, Sylvester, animated syringes smiling and beckoning, bleachman running to the rescue, AIDS activists demonstrating loudly, bathhouses flourishing then closing, Harvey Milk, bottles of poppers, AZT tablets raining down from the sky, vicious drag queens. Ward 86, bareback parties, gay teen runaways, all bathed in the colors of the omnipresent rainbow flag. “It’s a gay-ass world.”
Finally I heard the familiar cough that means the hit worked and the toiling around with it had ended, and I could confidently look towards them again without getting lightheaded or nauseous. Pride lit a cigarette and smiled like an emergency intern who had just saved a life. The handsome blond ripped off his clothes and approached me, dropped to his knees and started undoing my pants. Pride said, “I’ll wait in the living room. Don’t take all day, alright.” He rolled his eyes.
I quickly found myself fucking the blond mercilessly hard against the wall, which I noticed had bullet holes in it, likely from the gun the jealous drug dealer boyfriend was sleeping with in his hand, the same guy who was slapping his ten inch cock across the blonde’s face on the video screen, the one who snored from the adjacent bedroom with no door, just over my shoulder, where I glanced nervously.
“Don’t worry about him; he won’t wake up. Just keep fucking me… harder… fuck me hard, man,” he panted and hissed far too loud for comfort, as if he wanted his mate to wake up and kill us both. “Fuck me like a bitch – make me your bitch, fucker.” I could see from the video that the blond seemed to like things a bit rougher than most, so I reached up and grabbed his hair and pulled his head back next to mine, my dumb mouth to his deaf ear and whispered harshly, “Make one more sound and I’m gone you little bitch,” and shoved my fingers in his mouth. At the window by our heads the rottweiler suddenly lunged at us snarling and butting at the glass so hard I thought it would certainly break. I thrust my hips so hard I heard bruises and shot my load into the condom , which I removed and threw down beside the blond and said, “Yeah, real safe.” I pulled my clothes back on quickly and headed out of the room, sneering at the sleeping guy. Pride looked up at me from the couch and smiled. “You ready?”
“Yep,” I said, sounding more like an ex-con or a cowboy than usual.
We both hit the front door at the same time and looked directly at each other, smiled and simultaneously screamed, “Okay, Nellie!” swishing our way to a waiting cab.