Kamikaze Lust Read online

  “Beginner’s luck,” he said. “I promise you, it won’t last.”

  “What does?”

  “Now you’re talking.” He pinched my cheek, then looked out his window.

  We were deep into nothingness. I could see the outline of a few black mountains surrounded by heavy clouds, inky air; space so empty I thought it counterfeit as a casino theme. It occurred to me then that I’d given up not only my notions of time and money, but any claim to place as well. For all I knew, RR and the chauffeur had made a pact to drag me into Death Valley and rape me or kill me or rough me up and sell me into the sex industry. It was almost anti-climatic when we pulled into the gravel driveway of his house in Boulder City, not too far from the Hoover Dam. He said you could hear the water crashing sometimes if you listened closely.

  Once inside, the track lighting revealed a split-level spaciousness and too much glass. One entire wall was made of sliding glass doors. The others, painted sparkling white, housed shadows of numerous large cactuses that sprung up from the carpet, a garden of spikes and shafts arranged in ithyphalic absurdity. Did he have any idea what his walls reflected? Or was it just me? My fear of the priapic in general, his world-famous piece in particular. I shifted my gaze from the wall to his furniture, which betrayed a penchant for clean slick surfaces and seemed more about function than comfort—a lot of leather and lacquer and chrome that reminded me of an upscale law firm. I’d never seen so much space with so little personality.

  He led me upstairs to a monstrous room, empty but for a platform bed with black sheets, a black Formica bureau, and a giant-screen television attached to a rack of VCRs and audio equipment. In the corners were two stereo speakers, each about my height. It was a teenage fantasy room, only without the rock-and-roll posters or magazine clippings of supermodels. The one photograph on the bureau was a framed picture of RR himself, a bit younger, in a suit and tie, shaking the hand of George Bush, the presidential seal and American flag behind them.

  He dropped my bag. The weight of it hitting the floor exhausted me. At the click of a remote music filled the room. Slow, melodious chanting that sounded like a troupe of monks I’d once heard in California. I sat down on the edge of the bed and felt my body sink into the deep swish of water. I burst out laughing. “You have a waterbed!”

  “There’s nothing more comfortable,” he said. Then he kissed me, and though I’d wanted to shower and brush my teeth and could barely steady myself on the bed, I kissed him back. Maybe it was the lure of the oscillating waves, the dreamy reverence of the music, or the lights that dimmed at his fingertips, but the room as much as my presence there suddenly made sense. I submerged myself further into the bed, giving over willingly as RR undressed me.

  He touched and probed and tongued as if it had been a while since he’d been this close to another human body, although I sensed him stirring as he came to the space where my pubes were beginning to bud again. “You’re shaved?”

  “Long story,” I said, again feeling Shade’s presence as much as I felt his.

  “Wait a minute, did you do something for Alexis? Did she put you in a scene?”

  “No.”

  “I’m serious, did she?” He gripped my arms tightly and sneered as if we were back in the smelly airplane bathroom.

  “No, I swear.” I curled my fists and pushed out against his hands, those beautifully manicured fingers I’d first noticed in the Korean restaurant, the night he drew Silver Ray out of her cloister into his dirty-blue mise en scene. His thumbs dug into my biceps, waves rippled beneath us. I conjured all the strength I had into my arms and pushed harder, grunting and sweating like a weightlifter until he let go, laughing. My entire body throbbed.

  Still on top of me, still goading me, he sighed. “I really like pussy hair.”

  You asshole, I thought, but for some reason I smiled. I reeled him in by his belt loops, feeling the disparity of my skin against his jeans. “Take these off,” I said.

  “Not yet.” He kissed me again, and it was fast and deliberate. I matched every shift of lip, tooth, and tongue so he’d feel it. Before Shade I’d never liked kissing so much, now I couldn’t get enough of it. My senses were on epileptic, and I was relieved that somebody else could do this to my body. Somebody so different from her.

  I felt a finger slip up inside of me and cried out. “Settle down,” he said.

  “I hope you have a condom this time.”

  “You need a new line, Silver.”

  “As far as I’m concerned that’s the only line, you’re a porn star.”

  He propped himself up on top of me. “Apparently, so are you.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Are you always this impatient?” He pulled out his finger so quickly it stung and left me wallowing in its absence. Leaning over me, he yanked open a drawer next to the bed. It was literally filled with condoms and jellies and oils and lubricants. I wanted to burst out laughing again but thought better of it. This was his idea of foreplay, perhaps: showing me how wellprepared he was. Like a Boy Scout. Or the proud man shaking the hand of a president. It was sort of endearing. He removed a few condoms, some oils, a small container of Astroglide, and set everything down on the night table.

  “There we go,” he said, grabbing the tube of oil or lube and squeezing the sticky liquid over my breasts and stomach. The smell of rainwater and lemon made me want to sneeze. RR slid on top of me, and we plunged further into the water. I felt like a slippery squid, an eel, a star-fucking starfish. He clamped a hand over my mouth and spoke into my ear. “Are we having fun yet?”

  Unable to speak, I nodded no.

  He moved his lips from my ear to my mouth and kept his hand there when we kissed. A finger from his other hand slid inside me. I bit his lip. He growled; I tasted blood.

  “So that’s what you want? To play porn star.” He added a finger, and the back of my neck tingled. I was sweating from my temples, terrified he might rip me to shreds before I got his cock in me, that is if I could ever get that cock in me. I squealed a few times at the pressure of his fingers, but the harder he pushed the more I craved. I kept opening for him, expanding. “Tell me, Silver,” he said, and it was a voice I hadn’t heard before, lower and more guttural. “Tell me how badly you want me to fuck your bald porn-star pussy.”

  Pain shot up my vagina, but I didn’t want him to take his hand away. He shoved me against the headboard, practically suspending me in the air with the weight of his arm. Looking down I saw the top of his palm inside me and said, “Oh fuck!”

  “That’s right, baby, fuck.” He twisted his hand and I felt a knife slice up my spine. I screamed, tried to steady myself against him but could only grab a few strands of his hair before falling forward. He caught me with his left hand and the two of us, miraculously, were sitting upright on a waterbed, with his hand buried in my vaginal canal. “Let’s go, I want to hear you say it.”

  “Fuck you!” I shouted. Lost with his wrist against my clit, his fingers ballooning inside me. I thought I might pass out from the pain, took a few quick breaths, then felt dizzy. He grabbed my neck with his free hand, tilting my head backwards. “Not you,” he said. “Me. Fuck me.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Me!”

  “You!”

  “Bitch!” I was stunned silent. That last word reverberated in the tones of the ancient monks. Our eyes met. He started to pull his hand away. I grabbed it and pushed it further into me, remembering how bad it felt before when he’d yanked out only one finger.

  “Oh, excuse me,” he said. “Do you want me to fuck you?”

  I nodded.

  “Then say it, and say it so I really hear it.”

  “Fuck me,” I said.

  “Not good enough.” He glared, and I liked his anger, his arrogance, the way his eyes shifted to slits, and I wanted him to fuck me hard and not stop fucking me until I felt trashier than he kept saying I was. This is where I belonged, where I could perform: Silver Ray with her porn-star ass in
the air. So I spoke this time as nasty as I could. “Fuck me, RR. Fuck me like I’m your porn star.”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said, pushing me down and carefully moving his fist inside of me. And there was pain, not the pain that comes from a paper cut or broken bone, but more like electroshocking surges of energy, the flicker of a light burning low, alluvial glow slamming into the bottom of the goddamn Hoover Dam. Damn. Robbie Rod made me a star. He of the polluted talk and snarling lips…made me feel strong in the sexiest Silver Ray way, made me want to scream so loud that Shade would hear me back in New York and know I was with somebody else. And know it was good because it wasn’t her, wasn’t anything but Robbie Rod deep-cunting Silver Ray deep into the Nevada night with the cameras rolling and the soundtrack pounding on and on and on.

  We woke up to daylight. Streams of sun filtered through metallic blinds, splattering a painful glow throughout the room. RR stepped out of bed, and the lake beneath me trembled. He was still in his jeans. I was naked and dehydrated. He walked around to my side of the bed and kissed my forehead. His lips were soothing. A palliative. But I was too shy to get up until he left the room to make breakfast.

  Downstairs, he whipped together an omelet out of an egg substitute—same kind they used on the space shuttle—and prepackaged vegetables. His food tasted delicious, the coffee stood strong as it should, and I wondered whether he’d drugged me or if, truly, I was starting to believe I might stay a while, here in the light of the desert sun, staring out of his dining room windows into mountains like milky-brown chocolate.

  We ate quickly, then lingered over coffee, laughing, teasing each other. We wore sunglasses inside. I felt his hands reach for me underneath the table, my head thrown back in the warmth of morning, my bare foot in his denim crotch.

  “Do something for me,” he said, and I said sure. He said he wanted to watch me come. I sighed, jerked my foot from his lap.

  “You want to know why I didn’t.”

  “No, I want you to.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “What do you mean, don’t?” He stared at me and I thought, here we go again. I was still sensitive about the Tina Macadam episode, not to mention the years I’d spent listening to little Einsteins theorize about why I was so bad in bed: coldhearted mother, hot-blooded father; late bloomer, early riser; repressed homosexual, hard-pressed in general. It was my fear of commitment, my need for control, something I’d eaten, too much caffeine, whatever.

  The way RR was staring I knew it was coming. “You don’t at all?” he said.

  “Not with people.”

  “What then, with animals?”

  “Yeah, me and Catherine the Great.” I pursed my lips. He looked perplexed. “She died fucking a horse.”

  “No, that was Queen Elizabeth.”

  “She’s not dead yet, moron.”

  “I think you’re wrong.”

  “And while we’re on the subject, I don’t remember you getting off. You’re still wearing your pants!”

  “What can I say, it’s not what interests me.”

  “Oh, bullshit.”

  “Seriously,” he nodded. “I’m leather dick. You can stroke me, scrape me, suck me, bang it up all you want, or kiss me gently, I’m totally resistant. Always have been.”

  “You don’t come?”

  “Of course I do, but at my discretion. I can hold out forever or shoot on command. You’re forgetting who I am.”

  “A real prototype.”

  He laughed. “So you don’t with other people, but you do alone, but what about by yourself with somebody watching?”

  “That’s sort of stupid.”

  “Okay, what if it wasn’t stupid? What if, actually, there was a reason, a wager so to speak?”

  “Go on.” I felt the insides of my rib cage warm, like photosynthesis, as if I were conducting a superhero transformation from frigid female to porn star. He took out a huge wad of cash. Hundreds.

  “Here’s the deal,” he said. “You start, you know…”

  “To masturbate.”

  “Yes, thank you. Every sound you make, moaning, screaming, whatever, I give you a hundred bucks, and then when you come…oh, I don’t know, let’s make it five hundred.”

  “Dollars? Five hundred dollars?”

  “Not enough?”

  “No, no, fine. But how do you know it’s real?”

  “I trust you.”

  I stretched the elastic band of my satin boxers, summoning Silver Ray. She’d gotten me through the long hours of the night, the scene that left the insides of my vagina raw. I was thankful he didn’t want to fuck me this morning, but this seemed an odd substitute. “Wait a minute,” I stopped myself. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “You’ve seen the money, everything I’ve got is out on the table.”

  “Everything?”

  He put a hundred dollar bill in front of me. “Everything. Now, let’s see your fingers.”

  “I thought you trusted me.” I pulled down my boxers with my left hand so he could see me touching myself with the other. He smiled, and I knew I didn’t trust him, but it had little to do with money. It was that somewhere back in New York he’d crept into my fantasies; somewhere between our first dinner and that day on the set with Wanda Lynne’s boots, he’d sussed out my burgeoning romance with the sex industry. He could tell I wanted to play porn star, only not for the camera.

  I let out an audible sigh. He dropped another hundred on the table. I tried to be in the moment, click on Silver Ray, but Shade stalked my memory. We were at the Tannon benefit, standing outside in the freezing cold: You don’t know what you want, Slivowitz. It’s like we’re all part of your big experiment.

  “Talk to me,” RR said, bringing me back to the mountains of Boulder City. I looked at him, confounded by his own part, why he was so eager to indulge me. “How old were you when you first did this?”

  “I don’t know, nineteen, twenty.”

  “So late?” he said, adding a bill to the pile.

  “It never occurred to me,” I lied. I wouldn’t set a finger to my body while Neil was still living at home. Once, I’d even gone a week without showering after he’d drilled the holes in the bathroom wall.

  Another hundred hit the table, and I was as rebellious as a horse-fucker, here in Neil’s city, but on my terms: Screw you big brother and the city you live in. I felt my cheeks flush, let out a sonorous oh. One more bill on the table. I looked at him, suddenly self-conscious. “I can’t believe this.”

  “Sure you can, you just want me to tell you it’s okay, you want my blessing. I’m like a priest.”

  “I’d prefer rabbi.”

  “Do rabbis hear confessions?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Do they make you feel slutty for touching yourself? You feeling slutty, Silver?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Silver Ray shouted.

  “Yeah, that’s it.” He put down another bill. “I love it when you say fuck. You sound like a filthy debutante.”

  “Fuck.”

  “That for me?”

  “All yours.”

  He smiled. The money pile multiplied, and we were back in the casino. Only it was his table, his rules. I was playing again, the stakes Silver-Ray high. I didn’t want to lose. I would fake it rather than lose.

  His words garbled; I was through with them entirely. Slipping in and out of real time. Through the window I caught the line of the burning sun. The shimmer of water. Me wearing sunglasses, double-exposed on the lenses of his sunglasses. On his face together: me and Silver Ray.

  “Come for me, Silver,” he said, and I thought, yes, I could, because it was tied to nothing but Monopoly money; yes, I would, because it was all an act anyway. There was no past, no future, no sweat, no strings, no goddamn desert shutdown. I could let it go, let myself slip from gibberish whispers to sweet, inescapable screams. I’m rich, I thought or might have shouted. So fucking rich! He started counting out loud: One-Two-Three…I scre
amed until my voice went hoarse, and I collapsed on top of the dining room table.

  “Silver,” he said. “You just made yourself twenty-one hundred dollars!”

  “Blackjack.” I could barely breathe.

  He leaned across the table, lifted my cheeks in between his hands. “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  I smiled, “Your turn, leather dick.”

  People have always accused me of being cheap. Personally, I view myself as more of a fiscal conservative; I don’t take many vacations or eat in fancy restaurants, unless of course it’s on someone else’s tab, and until recently, I used to calculate my expenses to number of hours worked, a habit I’d picked up during my waitressing days in college. So it was no surprise that at the end of our masturbatory interlude I was still up thirteen hundred dollars.

  But who cares about the money, I got his pants off. Then, upstairs, in the chalky light, I knelt down before him with a wooden ruler. (In my frenzy to leave New York it had somehow ended up in my bag.) He found this amusing. He said he’d never let anyone measure him before. He was erect. I held his penis against the ruler and its head hit the groove at two. He was only ten inches! And lean. Manageable, perhaps. I ran my fingertips up and down the silky shaft and my throat constricted. I wanted it inside me so badly, but wouldn’t let him know. I took a deep breath and sat back on my ankles. “The camera adds a few pounds,” he smiled, and two oval dimples chiseled into his unshaven cheeks. He had light purple rings underneath his eyes. He looked scruffy and attentive. I leaned over and kissed him.

  The kiss dissolved into a forty-eight hour game of truth or dare as money changed hands and gels squirted into orifices and showers were taken and food was carted in from the family restaurant in town. When I finally got him inside me it was almost anti-climactic, not nearly as dramatic as all the begging he made me do for it. And to fuck a porn star was an expensive scenario. He gave it to me at a steal for five hundred bucks. I felt like a contestant on an X-rated game show. I’d like to buy a blow job please…. Had he let me, I would have spent every last hundred watching him come. I loved how the moment made him tiny and beetlelike, reduced him to nothing but the stream of his semen. It was where he lived for me. But he had a similar vision. He paid absurd amounts of money to finger my asshole while I brought myself off, which I did with alarming ease. As if in those concupiscent hours I’d shed more than a few layers of skin.