Sadie

 

Sadie Morrow didn't give a shit that I was queer; she wouldn't have given a shit if I'd have had a third eye in the middle of my forehead as long as I'd make her feel desirable from time to time by fucking her and letting her buy the beer. She would bring me offerings of broken men in the same way that my cat would bring me a half-eaten horny toad if only I would pull her up against my naked, sweaty body and give her my finest sloppy sugar and then cover her face with the glaze that left her looking like a day-old Southern Maid doughnut. Sadie bestowed upon me the best that her feminine charms could offer. I was happy that she was so solicitous of my physical comfort, but I honestly felt rather put upon and objectified from time to time by that slut-in-the-headlights look she gave up at me from below my belt. Striving after the pleasures of the flesh was a way of life for me then, however, so I sucked it up and made the best of a dubious blessing. I've always been adaptable that way, I suppose. And she gave the most hateful, hot-bubblin' skull I ever got from a woman. That counts for a lot in my book.

I met Sadie in an AA meeting. I was killing time in the back row of one of those midnight candlelight gatherings where the unemployed and the unemployable sit about and try to outdo one another by speaking in hushed tones and secreting spiritual goo all over the room. I always felt as if self-support and right living were about the most spiritual things a man can do towards his fellows, no matter that I often fell a tad short of that mark, and I usually attended these funereal pow-wows to simply lord it over those who were somehow less aware of truths I considered to be axiomatic. Besides, once I'd been wired up past about day three, I tired of staying around the house once the sun had gone down. I knew that such a group of misfits and heathens weren't going to be too terribly discriminating about the company they kept.

I saw her sitting with her back to me and recognized her as a familiar face to whom I had never been introduced. As the group formed up at the close and was about the task of joining hands to ask for their Pat on the Head I slipped up behind her and whispered, "I can lick my eyebrows'n breathe through my ears, princess. Can I taste what you had fer lunch?"

She was trembling all through the Lord's Prayer trying to contain herself. I never considered that line terribly witty, but I suppose that it did come as a surprise under the circumstances. She turned and fell into my arms as the lights came up, and we had a little moment. She looked up at me biting her lower lip a bit and pressed her tits hard against my chest. I determined right then that conforming her to my will was a biological imperative in my life. I wanted to drag her outside and fuck her in the parking lot, and I found the awareness of that rather disconcerting to me. I am, after all, queer. There have been a few women in my life who have had that effect upon me, but they are so few and far between that I don't take them into account when it comes to assessing my orientation.

Sadie was not a fat girl by any stretch. But she had a comfortable fleshiness about her that I found very attractive. She was not any taller than I was. She also had that innocent look of a girl who blew her brother on his wedding day…but only because he guilted her into it. She had platinum-blonde hair, sky-blue eyes, fair-sized perky tits, and that look on her face that said the lights were on and anybody was home who happened to be passing through. She trembled a lot, it seemed, and I felt sometimes as if I were in the company of one of those little dogs who roll over and piss themselves when approached too quickly. She also had a giggly whimper that said she'd just been caught being naughty, and she knew what she had to do now to get a pat on the noggin.

 

I was well known among the creatures who took up residence in those smoke-filled rooms with the bad coffee and worse furniture. There had been times when I had honestly wanted to make the attempt and offer my base metal into that alchemical chamber to see what sort of gold issued forth at the other end. I had more often witnessed the effects in my life and the lives of others who tip-toed around the periphery of that process without ever giving themselves completely into it. For us it was a spiritual sausage grinder, combining all the more unpalatable elements into an inert puree that, while safe to eat, had none of that spice that makes life worth living. I'd just go to get the heat off periodically and spend my time auditing the course and hanging with other like-minded folk who were in and out of the doors and occasionally drunk in meetings, pitching pennies at speakers from the front rows and being escorted out when we were too disruptive.

 

Sadie wanted something better. But anything was better than the cold plate of circumstance she brought to the table when she arrived. She went through all the requisite motions in her own way. While I sat in the living room of my grandmother's house smoking speed off a piece of foil, she would scribble nervously at the kitchen table in a stenographer's pad, working on another of her moral inventories. She carried that process with her as she sought relief in the immediacy of one more anonymous coupling on my shag carpet.

 

I had somewhat of a crush on Brian, a guy who rented a room in the back of my house and sold coke on the strip in Dallas where he tended bar. Okay, so it wasn't exactly a crush; I just wanted to suck his dick and do his dope. His dope was pretty painful stuff. He was selling coke for Claudio, who owned a restaurant and bar over on Fitzhugh. The bar was called La Mariposa and was located next door to where the old Eighth Day had been just a few years previous. Brian and I would spend afternoons there doing shots of Grand Marnier and snorting eighty-cent lines off the bar. There was something not quite right about the coke. It felt like ground glass in my nose, though it was powerful enough. We had to continually use various nose sprays and other medicaments to alleviate our suffering. Brian would send me across the street to get hot dogs with mayonnaise, a taste I acquired at the time but to which I never fully adjusted, and then we would chase them with shots of "Grandmar" and a thick line of coke that almost brought the entire mix right back up. Then we would stand around for a few minutes holding our noses and wincing and trying to swallow.

 

Brian held forth in such a way that he wasn't really queer. I mean, he was queer, but the boys he was attracted to were either illegally young or so effeminate that he might as well have been straight. And I knew he was good to go if I had a girl that was worth fucking. I was a bit of a chicken-hawk and always had been, but I wasn't in the same category as he was and wasn't willing to venture down that road for any reason no matter how skewed my perceptions became. Sadie provided an easy avenue of compromise for my tastes, since I was willing to fuck her in any case if nothing else was available.

 

It was a hot time and memorable, and it only happened once. I reckon it's appropriately unfortunate that my principle visual memory of Sadie is the three of us scooting along my living room floor, Brian's pelvic thrusts the engine of our progress and Sadie's blissful grin upon my cock affixed until her head was bent near double against that old console television that used to blare out Soul Train on Saturday afternoons while my grandfather sat a few feet away rolling cigarettes and running the electric shaver over his face and laughing as the sun streamed in through the big picture window.