The Petting Zoo

BFPt?

— Ficiuwt ftg

THE CULT AUTHOR MADE A CAREER OF BEING A CATHOLIC JUNKIE POET. WHO BETTER TO DESCRIBE A BOY'S RITE OF PASSAGE CONE TRAGICALLY WRONG? PUfBOY SECURES THE LAST WORD OF ONE OF AMERICA'S GREATEST SUBVERSIVES

e could remember every detail of that day's color and tex­ture. It was cool in late fall and the playground was filled with twisted, crunchy leaves, brown like grocery bags. He had a particularly vivid recollection of a truck delivering coal to his building as he came home that day. He had to duck under the metal chute from the truck as he entered the courtyard to the lobby doors. The chute was filled with quickly sliding layers of coal being transferred from the huge truck through a base­ment window into the bin room. The coal glittered in the chute, and as it landed in the basement, a black cloud of filth rose from the window and settled on young Billy, from hair to sneakers. As he opened the door of liis apartment, he looked like some kid from a Kentucky coal town after bringing his dad a pail of lunch at the mine.

He thought of this day so often that the memory of it had taken on a

ghostly presence. Now, once again, in the forced isolation of the psych

ward it encroached itself upon him, kicking down the door to liis mind

with all its trivial fears. Lying there on the hospital bed, he began losing

all sense of time and place. lie felt smaller, and the ceiling seemed higher.

The painting on the wall reminded him (if those paint-by-number kits his

mother worked on at night, watching detective shows on TV and smoking

too much for her frail Irish lungs. She convinced herself it was all right lie-

cause she had switched to a filtered menthol brand. lie remembered her

period of religious paintings .— best: Christ standing in a

fishing boat, calming the sea t '^^. ^V (continuedIon page 106)

bes

PETTING ZOO

{continued from, page 67) or...praying against a dim gray rock in the garden of Gethsemane.

On that afternoon more than 25 years ago, after washing the coal dust off his face and hands, Billy was lying on the couch in the living room of his mother's apart­ment, uneasily wishing he'd succeeded in stealing a porno magazine. His mother was out working at the church rectory up the street—shopping first, then cooking lunch for the priests. She'd be gone for the rest of the afternoon. lie realized this was a providential opportunity to try fol­lowing Marco's masturbation instructions again and achieve his mythic first climax, the virgin spurt.

Marco was a 16-year-old greaser who—to hear him tell it—had gotten more female ass than a toilet seat. lie acted as self-appointed consultant regarding all matters sexual to his younger brother, Cosmo, and his school­mates Denny and Billy. Marco was "on the dark side of beyond," as he used to say. He did paintings on his fingernails of the nuns who taught and often punished him in Cath­olic school. Therefore, he believed he was desecrating these nuns' images every time he finger fucked one of his girls. Some of this seemed so blasphemous to Billy's adoles­cent sensitivity that he tried, unsuccessfully, to turn a deaf ear to it.

From a technical standpoint, however, he admired these miniature portraits. Marco possessed stunning abilities as a draftsman. He showed Billy the brush that he used on his debauched-digits series. It was the first time Billy had seen a real paintbrush. The tip was so thin, consist­ing of six strands of camel hair wound tightly together. Marco was proud of his tiny portraits. Above all, he was proud of the multitude of girls into whom he had inserted those bedecked fingers.

As Denny and Billy sat listening to Marco's sexual instruction and escapades, he made them feel that they were being initiated into

a cult of supreme righteousness, marching off to do battle in the Holy Land.

"The first tiling you need is a porno rag to get your tiny imaginations going. Then, once it gets hard—and if it don't get hard within due time, there is nothing I can do for you; just wait a year or so and try again—you've got to start pulling. Now, listen good, Ix-cause the biggest mistake that most of you tykes make is assuming that it only takes 10 tugs or so and you're ready to spurt. That is bidkhil. Mas­turbation takes a lot of work, especially the iirst time. Depending on the hotness of your porno material, you may have to yank your little chubbies for as long as hall'an hour or more. If you're not up to tiie task, please leave now. I promise that no one here will think the less of you. It's hard work, and don't let anyone tell you different. The treasures to be found when you reach the end, however, are priceless. So, let me get into the exotic specif­ics. Who can tell me the best way to fake the feeling of a woman's vag wliile jerking off?" liiis was a snatch, so to speak, of a typical exe­gesis by Marco, delivered to a horny, attentive young audience. These* secret seminars were usually held in the boiler rm of the build­ing where Marco's father was superintendent. The heat was unlx-arable in that basement. One was literally taught by fire.

Billy and Denny decided to raid the tobacco and newspaper store on Broadway to get some decent erotic material for the endeavor. The two thieves had a pathetically inept plan, however. Stuffing their baggy pants beyond capacity with serious skin magazines, Billy and Denny tried to use the rush-hour commut­ers, buying their Times and Wall. Street Journah, as interference, blending in behind them and calmly sliding out the door. Unfortunately, they walked like pregnant teenage girls. And at the exit, the old Jew who owned the place was waiting to snag them, retrieving the bonanza of porno they'd overloaded down their pants.

The debacle was made even worse by the fact that Augie, the owner, with a half-finished cigar perpetually hanging from Iris mouth,

had known Billy and his mother since Billy was about four years old. Mrs. Wolfram, with her youngest child clutching her hand, would enter the shop each afternoon to buy her pack of Pall Malls, the evening paper and some lic­orice twisters for Billy and his brother, Brian. Surely, Billy thought, she would hear all about her son's pornographic pilfering.

Embarrassed and without visual aid, Billy gave up on the idea of getting stirred up by pictures of naked women on glossy paper, but his determination had not completely waned. He hunted around liis living rixini, figuring there must tx- sometliing—perhaps an old Sears catalog with a section on the latest in baigain-piieed undei"wear. That would do; they must have smnething in black. He reached over to the stack of magazines piled on the footstool and tx'gan flipping through issues. A recent one caught Billy's eye: the cover stoiy about the new luminary of Broadway theater, Barbra Streisand. I Ie had seen her picture before: the counterpoint of conventional beauty with her pouty large* lips, which lay desirous beneath that prominent nose. Large noses turned Billy on. There was sometliing comforting about them, as well as a sense of defiance. Also, large noses, for some perverse reason, which he could neither explain nor understand, con­noted outright sluttiness to him. It was his first youthful fetish. He liked the idea of having a fetish; it seemed a veiy adult thing.

As he thumbed through the magazine, he was hit by the youthful equivalent of irony in the fact that the best jerk-oil material he could find was in a national newsmagazine, lie couldn't believe his fortune. Within the educative, glossy pages was a picture—a small insert, really—of Barbra in a terrify­ing bikini, her hair up in a regal bun, the eyes surrounded in black kohl, the mascara as thick as an Egyptian goddess's.

She was emerging from the water, perched on the shoulders of her husband, Elliott Gould, her thighs wrapped with dripping wet secu­rity around his neck. Her breasts, also covered by droplets, were just mind-numbingly vast in the spai'se beaded top. And the expression on those large lips...she seemed to be speaking the exact words that Billy wanted to hear. Yes, she was talking on and on and Billy was just lying there listening, shifting the angle of the picture. As far as Billy was concerned, Elliott Ck)uld had disappeared. In painterly terms, he'd been relegated to negative space. Bar-bra's legs could tx1 wrapped around anyone's shoulders now.

"A g(xxl porno snap is like a battery," Marco had told him. "It gets the tiling started, then keeps it up and running." With tliis in mind, Billy t(X)k the magazine and went into the bath-rm. It would be at least another two hours before his mom was supposed to be home, but there was no sense in taking any chances. I Ie wanted to feel totally safe from intrusion.

Then, in a flash, came the finishing touch. In another of the sex-ed lessons in liis base­ment homeroom, Marco had theorized that the closest tiling to the feeling of real pussy was a fillet of veal wrapped around the cock, preferably warmed, though rm tempera­ture was acceptable. Billy tossed the magazine on the tile floor and roamed into the kitchen. The perfect picture, the perfect time. As Billy opened the refrigerator, he could only hope that his luck would hold.

It held, all right; he could barely believe his eyes. There in the meat bin was a pack of veal fillets from the A&P, tightly wrapped in white butcher paper and sealed with tape. It really wasn't as much of a coincidence as it might have seemed. Billy knew that veal parmigiana was one of his mother's favorite dishes to pre­pare, and it was usually on the menu about one night a week. There were four thin cutlets inside, and now the problem was removing one, performing the wraparound ceremony and leaving it in decent enough shape so it could be replaced without arousing suspicion to the casual glance. The key was unwrapping the package deftly, sans any detectable rips or creases. lie peeled the tape slowly and with patience. The problem was his hands, which were shaking with the anticipation of the Streisand image. They were twitching with­out control, much like the wholesomely rigid organ in his pants, which had, for the first time, taken total command of his body. He t<x)k deep breaths to slow liis nerves, hands and motor functions.

In time, the package was unwrapped, sat­isfactorily undamaged, and he slipped out one of the slimy raw cutlets. He threw it on a plate, letting it settle to rm temperature (following Marco's advice to the letter, though heating it slightly in boiling water was simply out of the question). Less than a minute later, Billy decided the meat was as dose to rm temperature as his crotch was willing to wait. He picked up the plate and carried it into the bathroom with the care of a master chef per­sonally delivering an elaborate entree. I Ie laid it on the ilr of the bathtub and folded the magazine on the page with the bikini shot, his starter baitery. G<xl, the expression on her face: the plump lips, the please-give-me-all-of-it expression in the lash-laden eyes. 'Ihcn there were those breasts, which he respected so fully that liis inner voice could not debase them with cheap euphemisms like titties or krwekers. What was the nature of his nose fetish? This was something Billy would have pondered if he were capable of it, but at the moment his brain was functioning only in conjunction with the dire dictates of his penis. I Ie took a peek at it in his jockey shorts. It was an urgent shade of blue that he had never witnessed before. It gave him a bit of a fright. This fright and an innate pulse of necessity told him it was time to get clown to business.

Billy eased oil'his underwear. It did seem as if his penis was truly battery-enriched. Unleashed from the harnessing eflect of the jockey shorts, it tx'gan to twitch randomly. He wrapped the veal around it and, for a moment, slowly slid it up and down. It felt wet...lubricant wet, and inhuman. Billy couldn't imagine it possible, but the feel of the veal made his cock glow even longer. The head slid out of the meat wrap. The cutlet couldn't contain it (and there was enough veal there to feed two people.. .if one factored in the cheese and breading).

He looked at the picture of Barbra, the magazine leaning now, precariously, on the porcelain edge of the bathtub beside the toilet seat.

Just as his body's biological functions were reaching uncharted territory, Billy heard the front dr l<x:ks turning. It was liis mother, returning home horn's earlier than she usually did. I Ie could tell by the dragging of her heavy

footsteps across the carpet that she was loaded down with bags of groceries. The priests must have sent her out shopping for their food and allowed her to leave a couple of hours early. She always had the delivery boys drive the fathers' huge amount of f<xxl directly to the rectory and carried a couple of bags for Billy and herself while she was at it. He could hear oranges spilling out of their red net bag onto the kitchen floor and rolling across it. I Ie knew the sound, oranges on linoleum.

"Billy dear, where are yon? I got home early, dear. I low are you?" his mother shouted barely loud enough to break his trancelike state, but he heard her and had to reply.

"I'm in the bathroom, Mother," he snapped back, almost too quickly, he realized the moment the words left his mouth. He pur­posely made his voice quiver weakly. "I'm feeling a little sick."

"Do you want some Pepto?" she asked.

"No, nothing. Really. I'll be great in a while. Give me some time is all," he continued, "[list relax and watch your shows. I'll be fine." All through the giblxrish that he was spewing, his eyes remained locked on Barbra and his hand was sliding the veal. His mind was split in two directions. He was not going to be denied. He had crossed a line.

There was a tingling in his spine and a fluttering from inside his asshole—the anxi­ety of his prostate, an organ that Billy did not even know existed, but it felt like a moth with sticky wings. lie had never reached this point before. Hearing the faint sounds of the TV swept away any iears that his mom would be pestering him with chitchat through the bathroom door. lie knew she would be con­sumed by a soap opera or, more likely, a game show. She was much more partial to game shows than afternoon dramas, which she thought rather vulgar. She actually seemed to get a vicarious thrill for the winners on game shows. The Price Is Right was her favor­ite. She had even submitted an answer to a home-viewers contest.

She would be cheering on some housewife spinning a wheel for a new dishwasher, and meanwhile, he could concentrate on his task at hand, so to speak, without care. The sheer concentration was bringing on a more righ­teous sweat, and it was bearing fruit. I Ie could feel the changes witliin him stirring from a previously untapped source. The knees in his brain were beginning to buckle, and there was a Frankenstein movie-like arc of blue electric­ity running from his crotch, up his spine and out the top of his head. The feeling was so intense that he didn't know if it was something

g<xxl or bad, if it was sexual or a prelude to death. It was a sensation that went beyond his brain and directly into his spine. This was it, he thought...this was what he felt: a snake, a small beautiful snake wrapped tightly around his spine and slowly ascending. lie didn't care whether the snake was poisonous or not. He was beyond that, beyond the meaning. A tran­sition was taking place within his body and his being. The pleasure of one stroke to the next now multiplied in implausible increments. He couldn't imagine that the actual climax could be better than this moment...wait...there's Barbra, Arabia painted around her eyes. "Ten measures of lust were given unto the world; one went to the other nations, and nine went to Arabia." Where had he read that? He didn't care. It was true. Arabia, land of lust, mystery, the three magi and heavy eye makeup.

The veal-encased hard-on in his hand was taking on its own analogies. It was like a rigid cornered reptile, baring its teeth and ready to strike. Every peek down at the Barbra photo as his hand quickened its pace brought a bluer shade to the head, which was reaching pro­portions hitherto unknown. The blood-blue head was taking on a scary darker shade, like the fingers of a guy Billy once saw dead from a drug overdose. Oh, Barbra...oh, beautiful Barbra, drenched in tiny droplets.. .it was just a matter of time now. Just hold that pose. Please. Please. Please.

Billy's head filled with an intractable desire to ravage anything female. Dark and vio­lent sexual fantasies cascaded from his brain throughout his entire body. Weird things that he had never read of or seen in the most out­rageous porno he had gotten liis hands on. He kept one hand beating in the established, steady rhythm to his c<x:k, but with liis free hand he pinched onto his tiny pink nipple and squeezed it to a point of phenomenal pain. Then, guided by nothing but an instinct that seemed part of the smell's intoxication, he wet his forefingers generously with his tongue and lan circles around it, now still", harsh red and almost unbearable with pleasure. His eyes returned to Barbra, and she was returning the stare with an effectively contrived aloofness.

Billy realized that Marco was right about one thing: The first time was harder work than he'd ever expected. The veal was becoming frayed from the punishment. lie thought a moment about whether his mother would notice the difference when he stuck it back into the pack with the other fillets. At this point, however, Billy didn't care. Damn the veal. Let it be shredded for lust's sake! He could always blame the butcher at the A&P for pawning off shoddy meat.

Billy was in a zone with the nasty angels. It was just a matter of time until the sticky globs of lust spurted out. Then he heard a strange glottal sound from the living room, and the volume of the television suddenly shot up. Heavy ftsteps and other unfath­omable sounds. They appeared to be coming from his mother, but he'd never heard her produce anything close to these noises. They were like honking gasps. He wrote it off to some exciting game show and kept on slid­ing the veal. It was so close now. The snake he had fell before in his spine was now at his navel, nipping to get out.

He was too far along, too near the big first time to allow his mother's unexpected

presence to abort the mission. lie could hear her footsteps retreat and the sound of the television return to normal, and that was a comfort. It meant she would tx1 settling in and relaxing, watching the tube with her legs raised on the footstool, her support stockings pulled down to her ankles.

I Ie had managed to split his consciousness: 10 percent on Iris mother's movements and the other 90 on the virgin breakthrough soon to conic. A bead of sweat fell on the magazine, landing on Klliott CJoukl's swimsuit. He was so close. His wrist was cramping. He tried it with his other hand, but it was flailing, way oil'the beat. He had to switch back to his niojo hand.

He recalled Marco repeatedly advocat­ing the importance of holding it in as long as possible before one let go. "The decisive squeeze," he called it. "Suppress it...you got to suppress it." No matter what the urges of the body dictated, the secret was to continue hanging on once that point of no return had passed. It was like holding back a tidal wave. Actually, holding it in was the better choice of prepositions.

There was a second snake now, curling into the lower back brain. He could feel the wid­ened fangs release something forceful, milky and tingling. That's when he heard his moth­er's sudden loud gasp from the living room, followed by her shouting to an otherwise empty room, "My Lord in heaven...no...no!"

He knew something was wrong. lie had never heard his mother speak with anywhere near that volume and urgency. His brain and instincts, however, were currently ovei"whelmed by an inexorable sensation and expectation. In short, his cock, straining fait her and fait her out of the wrapper, had taken charge. Noth­ing short of gunshots would snap him out of it. Notliing would unkxk liis gaze from Barbra, nothing would undermine the timing of liis stroke. More milk from the snake's fangs blast­ing against liis frontal lobe, and there was now a clear, sticky substance dinging to the opening of his cock. It was the precursor of the abundant load to follow. He had almost forgotten Marco mentioning it in his discourse. I Ie had reached pre-come. The time was near.

He heard footsteps in the hallway, and they were heading toward him. The steps sounded veiy quick, like someone running. His mother never ran. Never had Billy wen his mother run. Still, he could tell it was her.. .not only by the simple fact that there was no one else in the apartment but by the clomping of her house-worn iniikliiks. In any other state of mind, Billy would have done sonietliing about liis presdent feelings, but he just froze in place. A blue haze enveloped his mind, the violent, niaroon shade of blue like the sky before a typhoon.

The bathnxmi door flew open. The frail hook-and-eye lock offered no resistance what­soever against her mounting acceleration.

With wild eyes, Billy's mother proclaimed in a breathless rasping voice, "The president was shot. John Kennedy is dead. I Ie was riding in a

car in " She broke oil'the bulletin there and

finally focused on her son, sitting illicitly on the toilet. All Billy could think at that moment was why he didn't let the veal drop into the water Mow. Instead, the milk-fed meat remained where it was, as did eveiytliing else. Frozen, with parted lips, the veal around his tumescent adolescent cock, liis hand still gripping lx>th and the magazine opened to the bikini shot of the new darling of the Broadway stage.

Mis mother leaned all her weight on her right hand against the porcelain sink, breath­ing loudly and with difficulty. Billy had genuine fears that she was about to have a heart attack. Her mouth was still open from the last words reporting tiie president's death. "My G<xi in heaven," she softly exclaimed, "what kind of sick...perversion...what are you doing? Lord, what is that there...right there in your hand, young man? Is that my veal for tomorrow night's parmigiana?" Billy momentarily broke l<x)sc from his altered state and let the cutlet drop into the toilet, followed by a quick Hush.

He had to sit in humiliation until she con­cluded what she had to say. She signaled that she was finished by lowering her head. He just walked out past her in a trance into his room. He was sitting on the edge of his mattress,

squeezing the pillow in his amis. I Ie knew she'd be back to finish her diatribe. Waiting for her, he tried to come up with a reasonable expla­nation. He could always go with science...the biological imperatives of puberty and all that crap. lie just wanted to get it over with.

She finally came in and gave Billy a longer look than he could ever remember coming from her.

"You know, son"—she spoke in a voice about three octaves higher than normal— "God, our father in heaven, looks down over eveiyone and protects us all. That is because He is omnipresent and omnipotent. lixlay, however, I cannot help but think that the Almighty was so utterly sh<xked by the out­right perversion of your sin that His attention was momentarily halted. Ihus, in the moment that the Lord should have been protecting our president from that insane hoodlum in Dal­las, I believe He was so ovei^whelmed by your demon-induced act that, just for a moment, He took His all-encompassing eye off of that motorcade. Do you understand what I am telling you? I want you to contemplate that in your room tonight. You shall have no dinner, and I implore you to fortify yourself against any more sordid acts."

Billy sat on the bed perplexed. Of course he had dismissed—at least in his precocious, con­scious mind—all of his mother's ranting about sin and the connection with the president's death. Still, he felt base...tainted. All the tin­gling sensations of sex were gone, and the only thing he felt down there, rubbing against his jockey shorts, was the pain of raw flesh from friction burn, like a skinned elbow after a fall. For Billy, the consequences of sex were assassi­nated heads of state, the loss of filial piety and a penis that felt as though it had been whacked for horn's with one of those dimpled meat ten-derizers. Sex was ruin; the kx:ks that keep it safe are cheap and never hold.

He tried to reason that the circumstances had to be totally aberrant to anyone else's first onanistic undertaking, but that didn't bring any solace. What were the odds, he reasoned, that the president of the United States—a par­ticularly beloved and charismatic president, at that—would be assassinated in the midst of his first full-on masturbatoiy experience? Not to mention the fact that his mother would return home hours earlier than expected and happen to catch it on the television set, causing her to actually run for the first time in Billy's mem­ory, gathering enough force to break open the flimsy door lock. What were the odds?

So, in coffee shops and at cocktail parties, when people asked one another where they were the day that JFK was shot, Billy had always had to slink away and remember the fact that he was caught by his mother jerk­ing off for the first time, with a piece of veal wrapped around his penis and staling at a picture of a bikini-clad Barbra Streisand. If it was the loss of innocence for America that day, then it was certainly a more personal, yet no less powerful, loss of iniKxx'iiee for Billy. He had never been able to perform a sexual act, either by himself or with another, since that deeply inscribed day.

The feeling was so intense that he didn't know if it was some­thing good or bad, if it was sexual or a prelude to death. A small beautiful snake wrapped tightly around his spine.

Ftom The Petting Zoo l>y Jim Carroll, available jntm Viking in November.