Grandly I stepped down a long, red hall filled with mirrors and tinflowers, into a space I knew was hell. In "Fairyland" I saw two of my best friends, little people--one still eager, the other aloof and scared. They perched on the bones of an elk, a long curve of bone they took for some amusement ride. "No," I said, "you are riding on death." "Oh shit," said my one little elf. "But still--even though our lives pass in the realms of hell, we try to have some fun."

I had no answer to this. In three mirrors I saw my face, me, Pinocchio--first a little snub nose, then a fullsize regulation rod; then this big misshapen root I could hurt you with--if I didn't like you--so watch it! I used to look at myself in a mirror hoping something would change. At the mirror's edge my vision fractured into realms of spray--a token of my own love of myself, a gesture toward Walt Whitman. "Who's the fairest," I demanded, with full confidence the reply would be "You, Kevin." In this case the reply appears as an image--my own image, big dick and all. Well fuck that.

I'm like this little fairy in a big hellish world I never dreamed of. There are these two foxy guys in Robin Hood jerkins. According to them I've got a few days to live. Don't want them to think bad about me! Layers of vertical stripes of paint top us, and the light here is spooky, maybe--but you know how it is. We've been damaged, but Aesop or Malory or Grimm or Perreault is still writing about us. Fable's got the strength of a rumor; or a virus, mais non?

I guess.

When I was a kid I thought there was poetry inside the frame, a cage, a capture, a bar set. I'm mooning over him, I'm a wax figurine. He's so flexed and haughty--he makes my jaw weak. I'm in this club, and what we do, is, we go to bars and try to pick up guys? It's funny when they come home with us and we can't even understand each other except you know, the universal language of love.

Then when I came to S.F. the gates clanged shut, once, twice, three times. This archetypal number that was--that was AIDS. Remember in Bambi when Bambi's mother died in the fire? Well, that was nothing. Here are these big old fawns, hooves of cast-iron, trotting above me in this forest glade; but as I look closer the blue butterfly's a stick of carved wood, Ladybug's red shell's brittle like Faberge, spotted and dotted. I'm about to get hoofed right in the midsection or balls if I had any.

--We were not really boys or anywhere near it; but crafted animulcae, fetiches from world culture. Our old-time outfits came not from The Gap but from the imagination of 19th century illustrators, Disney animators, all that is false we were dressed in and smiled through. I can't even remember did we ever have sex or if so with what as I haven't seen myself naked. A smell of resin and pinewood comes out of my body as it would from an empty coffin. We're adorable, sure.

I went up to Brett Reichman in his painter's studio, a colorful place like my workshop in the North Pole. His pale face, his bangs, his glasses. He acted a bit defensive, but not overly so considering he had put me in Hell, into this hell of not-belonging or being. "Cut me some slack," I pleaded, "don't be such a mensch, night and day, you are the one."

Impassive he looked at me as if to say, suffer. Tonight, some of us elves and imps and pixies--we held a demo outside the studio but failed to attract KGO and the other networks, I don't know, maybe we should have used bullhorns instead of faery pipes.

"We never belonged to ourselves, but now we are his," we chanted in these fey high-pitched voices, all in unison, practically, except for Squeeker--the lamb whose wool was replaced by plastic, white and pink, long ago, before we came to this red room and met all these incredible guys! "Now we are his," we repeated over and over, raising our fists into the night air beyond which beckoned the branches of these cruel, half-human trees that wanted to eat us? Well, eat this.

Spreadeagle

When he invited me into his trailer I thought it was a big deal. He was so distant, so hard to get to know.

Outside the sky was turning over along the horizon, as though a rolling pin were flattening it out into gray clouds and brown mud. The tall pines that broke up the field around the trailer leaned into the wind. I kept hearing this whistling but not really. More like a body thing--the way you always can hear your brain clicking but most of the time who cares? It's there, you're walking around, so you're not paying attention to it.

His screen door was full of holes. Long notches in the thick denier of wire. "Bullet holes?" I said to him.

Like it was a joke.

He hummed that music from "Jaws" and said moths. Man-eating moths. And he let me in, over my shoulder he was staring out at the pines as though all his enemies were amassing behind them. Even for a guy like me his behavior was somewhat spooky.

"In your honor I'm playing this special song," he said after awhile. "What is it?" said I. He turned his dark eyes to me and they widened into a gape. "Jethro Tull, Aqualung," said he, with this reverence that didn't fit him. "Oh that's great," I said swallowing fast.

I forget what he was wearing but it was red and black like the kit of a hunter. And warm. Inside the trailer it was cold, and his little speakers were going apeshit with this hoarse old man and this thudding bass. But I was so pleased to be there I could have listened to it all night. Like Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady jumping up and down in those featherbeds and the maids trying to restrain her. I guess I'm more like Audrey than I want to think. It's not that I don't like her it's just that she's such a femme.

My mother always used to tell me you will never get anywhere if you always act like Audrey Hepburn.

What does she know about getting anywhere, she's dead! Farthest she ever got was the cemetery! I sat down on this tiny built-in couch with a table built into it that came up over my knees like a comforter. A lamp trained down. Across the dirty surface of the table, a variety of powders lay arranged in piles and stripes. A large knife, its handle a heavy chunk of wood, rested next to a rolled up copy of Fortune magazine. Then I unrolled it and saw no, it was Soldier of Fortune magazine. Silly me.

Silly me to make that mistake about this one man.

He smelled like a mixture of hair tonic and sewage and velvet. Ever since he came to town I wanted to get to know him. I guess he'd been in jail several times. We sniffed some of that coke. Then he says it wasn't really coke, but some other harder thing. I don't know what.

Our town's a dull one and a dark stranger makes all the difference. It's not that we don't have our share of problems, but we don't have much danger. The way I make my living is my own mail order business--I buy and sell rare documents and autographs. Guaranteed authentic to the trade. A lot of my business comes from the ads I insert into Hollywood magazines of all descriptions. Pretty safe.

"Want a drink?" he said.

"I'd like a Ramos fizz," I said. It was chilly and my sweater was starting to feel too thin; and a Ramos fizz can warm you up on a cold October night better than anything.

I should have known this was one outpost of civilization where I wouldn't get me Ramos. Instead he plopped down this bottle of Irish whiskey onto the counter and got a glass from the sink. It looked dirty, the glass, but hell, I was in this for the adventure of the thing. The black hair on his forearms. Ever since Gary Parker Radley came to town his dark spectral stare and his muscle-bound body had inspired me to new lows of abjection. Still I don't think I'd have gotten to first base if I hadn't indicated an interest in joining his cult.

Above the bed he had nailed this piece of cloth, is it cloth? I said to myself, looked like a face. Looked like a face sewn out of a brown loose weave, flattened out like a pine against the north wind, so that the eye holes and the nostrils and the mouth were loose flaps of cicatrix that dangled here, jutted there. Below the face part was a throat and a pair of shoulders, then a chest as far down as the nipples which looked like dried up old acorns from Mother Nature's inexhaustible well, all strung together in this loose brown cloth weave, not very appetizing.

You couldn't tell what it was. It was the kind of thing your eyes just glaze over and miss. Especially when you're horny or getting so. Thus it was only after we fucked that Radley told me it was human skin from this guy he'd offed in Bakersfield.

"Right," I said. HA HA HA HA like the cops say in LA when they destroy this Negro.

Actually when he said "offed" I didn't know that meant "killed." The particular way Radley fucks it's like this new process for me. That itself might have been "offing" for all I know: although I'm intimate with Hollywood dish there's a lot of the seamy side of life I've been spared. I mean here's this megadeath metal monster trying to poke me a new asshole. Later he said offing means killing. Casually, like Audrey in Breakfast at Tiffany's when she lets her cat, "Cat," lick at her Martini. And that this souvenir of death was supposed to be one of the hallmarks of his new cult. Naturally I'm curious.

Bakersfield of all places! Where Marilyn Monroe was born. It's about an hour's ride from here if your car's got any juice at all. Radley knelt down, eyes closed, and I standing before him took my hard dick in my hands and touched it to his eyelid, then to his other eyelid, anointing them both with my pre-cum so they shone and glistened in the cold moonlight. His mouth was open like he wanted to take me all in with that deep throat thing he must have learned in state prison or boys town. His eyelids wet, and the light and dark falling on his nose and chin.

"Is it gonna be like--" oh, I couldn't think of his name-- "like the cult of Mr. Bret Easton ELLIS!" He poked my ribs so it hurt. Then he told me about Blue Oyster Cult and how they worshipped Satan and cut up roosters and smeared their entrails all over Long Island and that's how they got a record contract and became stars. I don't know, back in the 70's or some time. I lay on my back, sort of, sort of on one side and he guided in his big cock and my entrails swelled around it, meanwhile he explained about his vision and his trailer hitch and this other boy he used to know. Well, hon, I know stars. And Blue Oyster Cult I never heard of. I can forge Audrey Hepburn's signature 100 different ways, all of them accurate, like when Audrey was having her period she made her letter R's a little giggly, like they must have given her happy pills up the wazoo and Blue fucking Oyster Cult is not a star!

You can take that from the horse's mouth. Anyhow I live in this dull town and Gary Parker Radley came to us from out of the night, in his silver trailer that rolled up out of nowhere. The first few days he kept to himself and then townspeople reported they'd seen him buying some foodstuffs, mayo and ham and V-8, one afternoon totally pale and muscle-bound at the 711. My ears pricked up. "Horsemeat." So I stake him out. And I watch the trailer from beyond the clump of Christmas pine till I get to see him through his screen door once, his head cocked into his elbow looking sideways, glum, into the sun. "Is he a vampire!" say I, excited. I'm wearing my oversized Givenchy shades like Audrey had at the beginning of Charade with Cary Grant. I feel like a spy trying to get forbidden data, the cold blades of red grass frosty at my ankles. The screen door moves sharply and I see my man's white legs and his muscles are not to be believed. He's wearing this pair of orange undershorts I could lick off of him like a dreamsicle.

He's far from being a bad-looking son of a bitch.

Somehow I'll get to know him thought I. There's a click in the universe when two worlds collide.

Before I came to his trailer door I sat in my office writing letters from Audrey. "Mr. Cukor introduced me to a charming man," I wrote, all in the up-and-down bumpy hand characteristic of Audrey on vacation in Spain, "whose Marine uniform looked snappy outside the corrida. If I weren't happily married to Mel it might have been an occasion of sin, Eileen." I had invented a bubbly girlfriend for Audrey who always seems so forlorn and demure. These letters, aged with soot and metal oil and scented with Je Voudrais, will sell for $$$ to a besotted queen in San Antonio. Then I went to the trailer with my heart on my sleeve, I guess. Just asking for an opportunity to turn myself into San Quentin quail.

"You come here just to get laid?" he said.

He'd been quiet a long time, looking up at his face mask and the rest of the mounted scaly skin.

"Ah, no," I told him. "I wanted to get to know you."

"As a person," he supplied.

"Well, in a way," said I. And finally I gave in. "Do you ever go out and do stuff? Like--get into Satan?"

He punched a fist into his open palm. "That's not it, it's not about Satan or any of that other high school bullshit, grow up, will ya?" When he got angry the tiny ridge of fat above his breast muscles quivered in a white long line. All of a sudden, up on his feet, his balls bouncing. He slapped my butt and told me to lie spreadeagle. Not easy in a trailer for Christ sake, this trailer has got to go. But somehow I accomplish this by cheating a little, like my elbows bend up. I keep thinking I'm hearing this whistling? This strange Moon River sound, the wind or some other force of nature. I'm like totally transfixed by it. Reminds me of this joke--this guy goes into this paper goods store and asks the girl, "Pardon me, but do you keep stationery?"

"Yes," she says, "at least right up until the very last minute."