I Dig Girls

Jabbo saw himself as he had been, forty years before and more, a child, thumb and forefinger poised apart, breath bated, eyes wide with wonder and expectation, watching a butterfly dance and whirl through the air round a dandelion that sprouted between pavement and curb; watching, watching, waiting for the little white wings to still. He saw the powdery white on his fingertips, like magical traces left behind, when the wings, after his enchantment, were set fluttering free. And he saw himself as he was now, a man crossing a street with madness in his mind and a gun beneath his belt, transfixed by shining black in the black of night. He had seen one of those once, one of the big black-winged butterflies, and butter-winged monarchs too. What a sweet boy, the old ladies had said. He had run from them as they reached out to tousle his hair and pinch his cheeks. Or those legs. Those fucking legs. He could never makeup his mind, even in the old days, even back then. All that flesh, beckoning, maddening. Go wash your face, he told what’s-her-name, that rich bitch, that time, the two of them waking in the soft morning light, him seeing the white trace of himself caked and dried upon her face. It’s only you, sweetest, it’s only you, she said. How that had unnerved him and repelled him and pleased him so. It’s only you, sweetest, it’s only you. And Sally, the first time they made love, her words riding the suff of her heat, the deepening, hastening breath of her body’s rapt rhythmus. I want you to come in my mouth, she said, freed, if only for a moment, in that suff and that rhythmus, and he knew then that she was his, and together they could rob this world of what happiness it hid. But he threw it all away. He always threw it all away. For devotion worked wickedness in Jabbo. Without it, he was like a child in abandonment, insecure and vulnerable, and he craved it; but once he had it, it was as if he were compelled to destroy it, to turn away from or cast away the savioress that embraced him, as if it were not really devotion he craved, but his dismissal of it. For him, devotion was an expression of love to be treasured only in its absence, only in the longing for it. In his grasp, it became the scepter of his tyranny, a thyrsus to be wielded, to batter, to drive away, and finally to break across the broken back of love. It was that broken, butchered chine of love, and not the breathing thing, he savored, sacrificant and god unto himself, seeking and renouncing in turn, cherishing and killing, again and again, the answer to every prayer. Now the final, inevitable, unforeseen abandoning had come to pass. Amid the haunted wreckage of all that lay broken, neither prayer nor answer remained. Sam’s mouth. Dorothy’s mouth. Junie’s mouth. What’s-her-name’s mouth. The mouth of the world, open to him. The sigh of it in the wind now, the memory of it. That rising lea of nylon and Lycra and flesh, shimmering, shifting, rolling like a dune, the kid raising her hips toward Dorothy’s mouth. And Dorothy’s tongue, timid at first, as if over paten, then slaking. Yeah, he told her, eat it, bitch, eat it. And he knelt over them, and he stroked Junie’s face and turned her head toward him and eased open her mouth with his fingers. And long after the kid was dead, he had invoked the memory, the vision of that night, savoring it behind closed eyes, his hand on his flesh, his breath deep and harsh with the incantation of that memory’s spell. Yeah, he told her, commanding the ghost of her unquiet soul, which dwelt in his, eat it, bitch, eat it. The night after her mother foundher, the taut line of the rope leading from the knob of the closet door, over the toprail, to the crude noose round her neck; that very night, he had summoned her, commanded her. At times, behind his eyes, only the corpse would come forth, and his flesh would wither in his hand, shrinking from the cold, decayed mouth of her. But those times were rare, and the hips that rose rolling and perfumed from the tomb were ever sweet and ever warm and ever lush. Only now and again, as his breath afterward eased, did his incantation leave a strange resonance within him. Then, as if startled by the nuzzling of a cat whose approach and presence had not been sensed, he would shake away with a start the thought that he was fucking the dead. […]

Nick Tosches

Copyright Nick Tosches, Inc.

I Dig Girls, excerpt from Chaldea (CUZ Editions), 1999