The Tar Pit (7 of 9)

There’s no quicker route to my hair-trigger fuck-it than the opportunity to be consumed by the temporary insanity of lust for a beautiful, half-trashy woman that’s all-class, with intelligence surpassing the seduction of her perfectly round ass… especially if she wants to get high and go back to my place.

“Fuck it,” I said. “I guess we are.”

Benzo’s place is just as good. We got to his two-story house on the Southside, only a few blocks from the Wanderer Inn. “We’ve got the house to ourselves,” he said, as he unlocked the front door. “Both my roommates work midnights.”

“Perfect,” said the woman in the black dress, with heels that could pierce my palms like nine-inch nails.

In Benzo’s living room, a long sectional couch takes up the whole back wall of the room. We all sit on it, and the woman taps the whitest powder I’d ever seen onto the glass top of the coffee table in front of the couch. She unzipped her bag slightly and reached in. A pang of adrenaline shot through my stomach as she pulled out two clean, individually wrapped syringes. She reached into her bag again and pulled out a handful of condoms and tossed them on the table.

“If you’re going to shoot up, you’re going to suit up.”

“I’m fine with that,” I said.

She gave us both a bag of dope and zipped her gym-bag closed, then stood up and walked it over to the corner and set it down. She unbuttoned her blazer and slid her tanned shoulders out of it, then laid the jacket neatly over the arm of an easy chair. Sitting back on the couch between Benzo and I, she spread her pile of heroin into a line that would take Toucan Sam two snorts to pull up. Holding a rolled up twenty-dollar bill to her nose, she sniffed along the whole white line until it was gone.

“Wow, just like that?” I sat still a second, watching her.

“Just like that.” She nodded.

“Hey, what’s your name?” Benzo asked, as he pierced his vein.

“Oh, no… none of that,” she shook her head, and gently brushed her nose with a knuckle.

That might be the last thing I remember anyone saying.

I do remember poising the point over the vein in the crux of my arm. I remember the new needle sliding under the skin like a hot knife through butter. I remember the familiar red swirl of blood as it shot into the chamber and mixed with the junk. I remember the rush, the heat, the flood, the dreams. The dreams of sex, of her body, the power of the vacuum. Her open mouth, she’s biting her lip. I remember flashes of her stomach, her thighs, her fleshy catcher’s mitt. Her knuckles and teeth white are now my knuckles and teeth, and I’m biting my lip. And the tear is running down my cheek, and the fear, and the pain in the end… and I wake up and open my eyes… and they close, slowly, and my chin drops down to my chest.

I remember waking up at one point and looking around and seeing the woman in the black dress passed out next to me, and Benzo nodding peacefully next to her, with all the weight of his body thrown over the arm of the couch in an anatomically incorrect position, like he’d fallen over slowly upon injection and remained in that slump ever since. I had sense enough to watch their chests to make sure they were both breathing, but that’s all I remember… until I heard her screaming, swearing at us in Russian or Latvian.

Something hit me. I think it was her. I opened my eyes and she was towering above us both on the couch, yelling, “What happened? You were supposed to keep me up. You were supposed to keep me awake, and now it’s four fucking thirty and I’m late.”

“Late for what?” Benzo’s head came back around from the fog he was in. He’d said it like he was annoyed at the inconvenience of having to shield his eyes from the lamp light she’d turned on.

“I told you… I had to stay up… and you two both nodded off the instant you hit.

“Well so did you,” I said, turning away from the light with my hand shielding my eyes.

“You’re lucky.” She turned and said it like she’d bitten my words right out of the air, her face resting into a look I couldn’t define. It scared me.

She turned to Benzo and gave him what I presumed was the same look.

“Hey, that shit was way strong,” Benzo threw his hands up and laughed. “It knocked me the fuck down.”

You’re lucky … What the hell did she mean by that?

“Both of you, get your asses moving. My car’s at the bar. You have to take me there now.”

I looked for a clock on the wall, above the bookshelf, above the television set, and noticed a pile of children’s toys near a folded-up playpen in a corner of the room that I hadn’t paid any attention to earlier. There was no clock.

Time must be irrelevant, I thought.

Tell that to her… The thought came at me, and I smiled.

I was still gathering my wits about me while she stood with a finger in the back strap of her high heeled shoe, shouldering her cellphone against her ear. A girl answered, and the room was quiet enough that we could clearly hear what was being said.

“Janet,”

“Yes, Miss Steele.”

“Listen to me.”

I noticed Benzo’s head jerk up at the same time mine did in response to both the authority this woman displayed, and the tone of respect and servitude whoever was on the other end of that phone call was showing her.

“I ran into a problem. I’m one hour behind. Aright, the schedule will be the same I will just be exactly one hour late.”

“Yes, ma’am. What should I tell Mr. Alki?”

“You can tell Jack I had a tire blow out on the way in this morning, and I called and let you know I will be one… hour… late. No more… do you understand me?”

“Yes, Miss Steele.”

“Call and tell him that now… tell him I said not to start without me. Do you understand me? There are many interests at work here,” she said, slipping the strap of her other shoe on with a finger. “This needs to go smoothly and without incident… alright, Janet, thank you.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Janet hung up before the previously unnamed Miss Steele had a chance to,”

“Miss Steele?” Benzo teased the woman who I now knew I knew nothing about.”

“You better know how to change a tire,” she said. “That’s all I have to say to you.” She pointed at Benzo. There was no play in her voice, no give for discussion. I felt Benzo tense up with purpose. I was deep within the couch. As he turned, his finger continuing her point across the room to me, the look on my face said, ‘is it cool if I stay here and pass out?’

But the look on his face already said ‘no,’ before he’d even finished facing me. “That means you too.” Benzo shook his head. “My roommates will be home soon, and you can’t be here alone. You have to come with.”

I gathered my mind and body in a cyclone that began with me standing up and ended in a whirlwind of motion as I scooped up cigarettes, keys and my cellphone and pocketed them. I bent down and put my rig in my sock. Goddammit, I thought. Don’t put that in your sock. Break the tip off and throw it away right now.

But I didn’t… and it was at that point that I must have decided, though below the audibility of conscious thought or intent, that my escape from the tar pits was of little priority to me. I was pushing it out of my mind when the woman bent down and unzipped her gym-bag and my eyes went wide. In this heroine’s bag was a massive black, thick and veiny, strap-on rubber cock that was bigger than my whole forearm. My stomach leapt into my throat and I clenched my asshole in terror. I looked away just before she turned around. I could feel her watching me out of the corner of my eye. She wondered if I’d seen. I felt her wonder it… and I knew at a level deeper than any I could name, that she’d intended to use that big black dick on me. She zipped her bag closed and stood up, and I acted like I hadn’t seen what unseen horrors lie inside the bag of the woman in the black dress. 

“‘Miss Steele’ … she’s a mistress.” The thought washed over me the way panic spreads through a crowd.

That thick strap-on cock was the same pitch black as the tar pit, the same black a blindman sees in the vacancy of sight. It was the absence of sight, as the drug washes away the belief that there was ever a need for sight in the first place. The mental image of that tar-black dick plagues me, as I’ve flailed in addiction all summer, the way my arms and legs would have flailed had I woken up from her medicine haze to find this fine dime of a woman railing me up the ass with a footlong rubber dildo strapped to her waist. Funny how even though I could clearly see the needle in my arm, I couldn’t see the road I was on. She had certainly intended to run the train on both of us. I could clearly see that much.

I looked around for anything I didn’t want to leave behind and fell in line behind Benzo. The woman that emerged from his horrible plaid couch was a completely different animal than the throbbing pleasure vacuum that came out of the public restroom at the Wanderer Inn. There was a fire behind her eyes and clarity of resolve in her voice. Where before, I saw a woman whose release is to submit, now I saw a release that will surely fuck me in the end if I continue on with it. She pointed her finger and all movement in the house was headed out Benzo’s front door. She could have been Julius Caesar, pointing his troops across the Rubicon, as we crossed the threshold of Benzo’s two-story home that’s been split into a Northside duplex. The Die is Cast, there’s no going back. Usually that one is all it takes.