Cajun Rick

 

That mop-headed boy, dumb as a post, on his knees in my living room praying in tongues, or looking up at me with my cock poised on his lips and wet with his spit asking, "Where's my petro?" – I mean what the fuck does "where's my petro" mean, anyway? You'll know it when I bust a nut – or coming into the study naked and drunk and spreading a newspaper on the floor and begging me to fuck him while I was trying to read for a change. He was bucking his ass up and down in the air just off to my left with the classifieds spread beneath for some reason only he could fathom. And God, he had a fine ass. It was really hard for me to believe that shit came out of something that fine. "Please! Dry-fuck me! Just do it right here on the paper, sweetie! I gotta have some!"

 

He wasn't the brightest bulb, but he thought I hung the moon for some reason. And he reckoned his one purpose in life while he was with me was to make me happy. That is a bit two-dimensional, but there is a certain depth of character to someone who can put as much personality out as he did with what little he had to work with. And that was only when he was sober. So he joins the ranks of the dead or missing or locked up or married guys who have come through my life and for whose well being I am still solicitous. Besides, it's irrelevant now, and the memories of the fucking are just a diversion.

 

I never had what you'd exactly call relationships. It was closer to hostage situations than anything, I guess. They'd happen into my life and then just stick, until some moment a month or three months – or sometimes a day or so, or when their dope ran out – down the line when I would look up and ask, "Where'd I pick you up again?"

 

I was mowing my lawn one afternoon in the middle of summer in Dallas, and I saw two guys walking my way down the street. I recognized one of them as Joseph, a neighborhood kid. He was about nineteen or twenty and was about half-a-bubble off level by my estimation. I knew he was queer, but I never found him attractive at all. But walking next to Joseph was this short, fuzzy boy with poorly bleached hair and a blank look that told me immediately the lights were on and anybody was home who spoke up first.

I asked Joseph, "Who's yer friend?"

"This is Rick. He just got here from Shreveport. This is his first day in Dallas County, and he's never seen a city this big before."

I turned to the cute little cartoon steak with the large baby-blues hovering next to him and drooled out, "Puddin, I would eat you alive. Why don't you come on in the house, and I'll get you a beer."

 

"You too, Joseph," I added as an afterthought.

I was four months getting shed of that boy. But it had its moments.

 

Rick was a Coonass from the some trailer house in the swamps south of Shreveport. He had apparently not had the best of childhoods and had ended up in some religious home in Shreveport itself, which was the largest city he could imagine at the time. He had been beaten, belittled, used and largely ignored by most of the people in his life. In some respects I was just another that procession of misfits who had come in and out of his experience. In others, I was a bigger idea than he could get his head around, but he figured he had tapped some stream of delicious wickedness; he was compelled by it but felt my sincere attentions to be above his station. For my part, I was smitten to a great degree and adored his precocious nature and childlike exuberance for fellatio. But the entire arrangement was an exercise in futility. That being said, this one lasted longer than most and is more fondly remembered that many.

I returned from work one day to find in my driveway a rather boring mid-size sedan that fairly screamed probation officer or church lady at me with the little fish on the trunk. I walked in the door and there were two women in my den talking to Rick and smiling. Rick was smiling. I floated in the room on a huge platter with a bright red apple wedged in my mouth. They smiled at me pleasantly; their claws were retractable.

Rick introduced the women as the people he had lived with in the Home in Shreveport. They smiled at me again and introduced themselves. We exchanged pleasantries and visited about Jesus and the communion of saints and gifts of the Spirit until I thought my skin would burn with conviction. Of course, it never does.

I got the feeling that they had made this trip specifically to see Rick and adjudge his situation as being wholesome or not with particular preconceptions in mind before their arrival. They didn't know quite what to think of me, I believe. I remained pleasant and felt no particular animus towards these good Christian soldiers. They stayed all of half an hour and then made their excuses and prepared to leave for Louisiana.

 

Before they left, they opened all the doors, trunk and hood on their car and set to praying in tongues loudly and aggressively in order to dispel whatever demons of perversion and personal tyranny might have slipped in from my house and stowed away. I'm not sure why any self-respecting demon of oppression would leave the fertile fields of my life in favor of a bunch of holy rollers, though I've held truck with enough of them to pause before posing that rhetorical question. There must be some special otherworldly prayer unintelligible to the Texas heathen tongue that works to prevent demons of sodomy from adhering to automotive surfaces. At least, they seemed satisfied with its efficacy, because they left in good spirits. It may have never happened at all.

 

It was my habit to sit on Sunday mornings drinking coffee and watching the talk shows. This was during a time of a great wave of Cubans landing in Florida, as they are prone to do. David Brinkley talked at length about the Cuban "migration" taking place. I was sitting on the floor with my back to the boy when I felt him perk up behind me.

"Migration! Whadathey mean migration?! Don't them dumbasses know that migration is what ya do when ya takes water from one place and puts it in another place?! Why the fuck do you watch these people, baby? They don't even know English!"

 

"Rick, baby, let's get naked. I'm sick of TV this mornin', and I think I need to fill you fulla cum, puddinhead."

"Okay, baby," he said with a grin laid bare for my seed.

 

Rick never let sobriety stand in the way of anything worth doing, because anything worth doing is worth doing drunk. Rick could cook. If the meal was to be eaten sufficiently early in the day, chances were good that he could pull it off blindfolded. Were the folks to gather any time towards dark, there'd be no guarantee of what got served up. Once when friends were over for supper, he had fried up a perfect, crisp and delicious pile of chicken as only some people can do – he had the gift, and the biscuits were hot. All we needed was cream gravy and we could set to the task. It was about this time that Rick was struck drunk. I looked over his shoulder and spied the skillet full almost to the brim with a mixture akin to wet cement. He kept stirring lazily with his torso gyrating contrapuntally to the motions of the wooden spoon. I told him we'd do without the gravy that night and got him back to the table with us to eat before he changed form on me.

 

I lost Rick to the bright lights of the Gayborhood and one of the seedier bars on the strip – and none too soon. However, I'd have rather he hadn't run with the bunch he hooked up with over there. He was taken in by Jay Patterson, a local interior designer of some sort and the owner of two or three of the more wide-open joints on Cedar Springs in Dallas. His clubs were coated in that re-circulated mixture stale smoke and piss and spilt beer mixed with funk-riddled exhalations of hustlers and dealers and drag queens. Added to this soup were the host organisms, the men drawn by the neon glow on the surface of the muck and then sucked inside where a little of their spirit is drained, the remainder stained, tainted with the mark and no telling what else until they come back to make another deposit and keep the whole circus going.

 

I was simply part of the reef; Rick immediately fell into the school of feeders and followed his bliss about the place. He caught the eye of Patterson, and I maneuvered him right into the old man's hands. Shame on me. I feel the sore of that lack of propriety fresh today any time I choose to pick at the scab. It wasn't right the way I treated that boy.

 

I hooked up with a roommate, Brian, who moved in with his lover and stayed three months in the back room. Once he broke up with that kid, Brian and I would do three ways with the women from an AA group down the street from my house. I'd get bored and go to their weekend, late-night séance meetings. That's where they light candles and talk softly and secrete all this goo around the room until everything is really sticky. Then they try to find something to fuck so they won't feel quite as gross and sticky any more. I use to go to the meetings and carry the message of hope to some poor unfortunate man or woman, whichever caught my eye and looked ripe. For a while there was a woman from the group who developed quite an attachment to me. She would bring guys over on her own thinking that I'd fuck her if she had some male company to fill out the occasion for me. I was impressed with her resourcefulness, if not her taste in men, and I usually dicked her for the effort at least, even if Billy Joe Bubba Earl had to whack it in the corner. I digress.

A knock on the front door early Sunday morning brought me up from the den where Brian and I were snorting coke and watching cartoons and wishing we had a beer. I opened the door to find Rick in tears clutching a case of Budweiser to his chest. He had walked miles like that, I imagine. He sobbed, wet-cheeked and lip aquiver, "Can I come in?!"

 

His mouth remained wide like a child about to holler out, so I slipped my arm around him and motioned the case of beer into Brian's waiting arms ready to convey the precious lode into Angel, my magic chirping refrigerator. I closed the door and picked Rick up in my arms and carried him into the bedroom. He normally didn't like me to fuck him in the daylight; it was just a quirk of his that I had always tolerated. But he was in a rather contrite mood that morning. He moaned and cried about how much he missed living in the Big House and wished aloud he could return. I held him for a bit and talked in reassuring tones, and then used him and left him spent and glazed to clean himself up while I drank his beer with Brian.

Rick came out rather resigned and gave me twenty dollars; I hadn't asked him for money, and I really didn't need any at the time. I put the money in my pocket. I pulled him hard against my body in an attempt to force the knowledge into his skin, the reason why things had to work the way they do – the reason that I can never articulate. Then I pushed that little boy out my door. I did it because I could. I had to be cold. There is no other way.

He came by once more after that. He spent an entire night with Sweet William in my den being the good time that was had by all of a dozen and a half guys at one time or another that long night. I didn't encourage or discourage it. I had my mind elsewhere. I pushed him out again in the morning and kept his tequila. The party he and William had was drawing to a close and friends were going to be coming by. William made love to him out of spite at me, because William didn't understand the hateful way I treated Rick.

 

Afterwards I lost track of the boy. I knew he'd been strung out on crack at the hands of Patterson and passed around the dying and diseased among that man's entourage. If Patterson were run over in the street in front of me, I wouldn't budge to help him. But he is just another version of myself in some ways.

Last I heard of Rick he was living with a guy who managed a fast food place near the beach in Florida. That was a few years ago at least. I talked to the guy briefly on the phone. He said that he wouldn't stop me if I was set on taking Rick away from him, but he wished I wouldn't. He was afraid to tell Rick who it was on the phone. I told him not to worry. I just wanted to know if the boy was okay. He said that Rick had HIV and liver trouble from the drinking, but that he was on some experimental drugs that had good prospects of increasing his life-expectancy. However, he was frustrated with Rick, because all he did was sit on the beach and drink his days away.

I thanked him. I told him it wasn't necessary to let Rick know I'd called if he didn't want to. That was at least five or six years ago at this telling.