The Illustrious Fake

Actual Color arrived in New York City like most other poor Detroit boys come to stay with auntie. On the bus. Mama was bunged up with pills. No hospital would touch her and she died quickly.

Actual often imagined that everyone had purposely let him get wealthy after his mother died. Because he was half-smart, the art patrons maybe thought the regret he felt about not being able to have saved her before he became rich might somehow stimulate his creativity. This paranoia was as irrationally apt as the strange events that his bad reactions forced him to experience.

Actual Color was the perfect example, in his own mind, and even among the community to which his consummate initial prodigiousness had attached itself with a lushly parasitic intensity of getting on and fighting about the requisite trivialities. Like sucking for foundation monies and selling the "standard work" -- a production line thing recognizable to everyone as his own.

No money-making painter could allow worldly concerns to disturb the petty provincial strife making vanity blossom in a town bred on small desires bought with big dollars. So shallow were the egresses of their pathetically fashionable psyches, that none of them were conscious of how stupidifying and dull they had made the milieu in New York become.

None would admit, argue or even suggest the notion that the advent of popular and abstract art had spelt the loss of true skill, annihilating all ability for telling a human theme with a hand and eye not automated by photography.

So much craft and precisely skillful talent had been diluted by the various cults of abstraction that Actual's vision was seen as a reflection of the despair inspired by being aware of the denuded forms. His attempts to retrieve the original human complexity, using subjects humanly ugly, aesthetically jolted. By means of paradox the portraits show what had been forgotten and swindled away through depicting what was still left over to recall the loss. A thoroughly post-modern insight.

Consequently, the abstract aesthete purist snobs called Actual's work infantile while the entrenched, kitschy liberals, adoring the fastly famous black, accused the conservative knobs of racist condescension. Even from afar, the idiocy of each detail of Actual's situation -- so inevitable a devolution of creativity, hype, propaganda and reaction -- as usual in such scenarios, was most obvious to the artist himself.

But these are global considerations. Actual Color was at his best while staring for a long time at a layering of wallish clouds hurdling over to Jersey in twenty different and delicate gradations of gray.

Actual hung around with the same kind of crew who grew up sharing the same crippling poverty and sexual terror he had known in his teenage days as the blow job boy for the local flak and crack-sack act -- the dealer's do-it-all gopher or else the gun goes snugly up the bum. From the perspective of success, the world of his childhood appeared insane. He had left the street world behind, but had brought some of its denizens to join him in his success. So he could feel good about saving some friends.

The pedestrian human creature was a meagre blemish festering on top of the earth, an earth much more greatly beautiful than anything like a city disguising it, or a painting showing it. This healthy instinct for the primeval sensibility explained the wise smile the slim-skinned black was happy to balance upon his prominent mouth. He showed this identical look while studying a subtly distant Turner or a flaming Cezanne. Nevertheless, he did not need to know -- did not want to know -- about why and what formed a turn-of-the-century art camp opposed to Whistler, and how a Rothenstein could disabuse himself more easily than everyone else of blind prejudice. Pasts like that meant nothing because of his wonderfully living now of sensual intuition. A glorious self-possession guided his artful hand, fructifying contact between world and canvas. Sight and aesthetic communication with wet acrylic was the single whole confidence Actual Color had. His talent was real. He knew it, and therefore it did not need to be discussed, explained, compared or critiqued.

His character was defined by an active creative desire.

Perhaps this recapitulation belongs earlier, at the climax of his too brief career, even as his inspiration was poised before the hesitant junction separating renewable originality from repeated fakery that each artist, fine or minor, must face. The poor boy fell into the latter, lesser condition, for no reason other than being subject to the delusion of a late technical perpetuation of marketable forms. That is, he thought he knew what he wanted to do without actually doing what he could have done -- a perennial short-coming which has plagued great artists of the classical world too; acknowledging supreme technical proficiency as their sole forté the ancients appeared to be worse repeaters than the fickle moderns who based all their work on disengaging themselves from traditional ruts through trying to make innovation a fresher, more godly goal than formal integrity...

Today, however, our Lady of the Lowly Plot finds Actual Color as he searches for the appropriate allusion to decide slyly how to handle the subtly wrought mood of a morning erection induced by not getting out of bed as soon as he woke up. You can see his face in all the blankness of its maturing dispassion.

The cheerful voices of his lackey pals, in the lower level of the loft, work at painting by rote and numbers as per Actual's sketches of last evening.

Cocaine can be smoked, inhaled or injected. But he can save his spunk by getting high instead of wanking, then going out to look for brunch.

Actual Color measures the slightest glaze upon the glass, snorts up some and licks off the rest. He lies back to let his blood deliver the euphoria to his brain's courage center. Dirty, loud streets live six stories under his lower east side loft. Walking on them is the job of a gregarious astronaut. The part of the quickly monied attaches to the immeasurable allure of shaven silk stuck on some impoverished whore's underfed legs.

Actual forgets his genitals and the absolute horror of a city too big to run out of. And he slips on a pair of finely wrinkled gray wool slacks and a metallic red rayon shirt. His dreadlocks need not combing, but only pulling out from under the shirt's neck. His face washed, he traipses down the stair. He has time to say nothing to his home boys' demands for pizza money. They are more seriously concerned about earning their bread while Actual makes it with magical automatism.

Manhattan, for all its life and the variety of its folk, is an ugly city. There are a few gorgeous antique streets, one or two patches of greenery, but not much else to relieve the overwhelming suffocation of its redundantly over-crowded architecture. Most of the streets are like Actual's -- dark, the buildings too tall to permit open sunlight to brighten the scrunched up strips of pavement. The edifices are plain gray and decrepitly soiled with carbon. On such streets many people live, but no children play, except in nondescript nightclubs late at night, enacting private vices aptly hidden from public view.

But it was not a night of erect discomania. For Actual, it is around one forty-five P. M. The sun is putting out the sharp shadows shed by the buildings as the street comes into line with the fleet phosphorescence. All is evenly bright. Not a particle of uncertainty impedes the lad's steady progress to the side street leading to the square and his favorite afternoon feeder.

Traffic rush is over and it looks to be an avenue world of yellow taxis. He thought for a moment of yellow circles pressed between two dour washes of black night. That painting would make a nice change from the death grin.

The newspaper reminds that life goes on beyond the phony frenetic world of drug-induced timelessness or a flurry of adrenal painting. Not much seems to dazzle at this corner of the street, so he pays thirty-five cents for a headline reading, President Orders Midnight Missile Salvo. Actual clicks disgust and titters bemusement. The paper vendor snuffles and says something unpleasant to him about, " Beatin' Iraq. " But was Actual to think of it, the president's orders were the same as the last president's, and probably taken because all the presidents knew that the attacks were better for keeping the red necks nodding in a bliss of clean and greedy vote-getting racial/industrial superiority than for winning any real war.

The taciturn Actual is already around the corner and he forgets the helpless cynicism of political insight. His fav spot is a trough called "Wire". The place fronts as a deli, backs as a billiard room, tops as a twenty-four hour dance bar and basements as a massage/sex parlour.

Actual wants some of the front, and maybe a listen to a touch of top. The place knows him by sight and his sickening silence. The discocafe is the sort of intersection in which a guy could develop a rep among the sleeks for expensive sex.

The place is near empty except for the masha behind the counter making his sandwich. Actual Color likes to give girls money. For food or sex, same dif. It is the purest way he can get them to do anything he wants. You pay for each performance.

He has a good physique and a long, thin penis. He believes the girls trade stories about his cash and strange tastes. He shows up for them. They wait for him to come and get them. The world advertises the definitions of ready-made joy, a spectrum of freedom through fantasy some few are lucky enough to realize. Actual wants a girl to have lots of clothes and spending money. She can buy her mother dinner now and then.

Actual eats a sandwich and feels a humble pang at himself, suspecting that the girls hate having to use him. But do they make the connection? Because he has loot, they will do stuff that they would never do otherwise?

Two women slink into the cafe dressed for undress. Bumhuggy skirts show the flawless amoral tone of their thighs and buttocks. Bikini tops are young pointy cones. They go upstairs to the music.

He follows. Then he sits on a stool to stare at their pink paint lips and sulphur-lined eyes. Actual only loves too young, do anything girls. Having to say something, he wonders, " Why are you here so early on a Friday? "

They tell him about just finishing a shoot and needing to unwind with music. Then these two girls of primary body color and pastel tolerance dance together before Actual. Maybe they know who he is.

" I've got to do something new, " he explains during the next drink. " I'm not a realist, but I've been seeing the shape of women and I need to get you on canvas, even if its only your breast. "

After some gin swills and counter-top coke slurps, the three leave on foot for Actual's place, giggling.

The lackeys are gone for the weekend. The loft is dark and echoes each stepping foot. The two girls sit on the settee and begin unrolling stockings and slipping off their skirts. Actual puts a sketch pad on the floor in front of Nancy and Stryanda.

" I like the way you are sitting together. "

He snaps a shot with an instamatic then unfolds a sachet of fresh coke. He serves the coke as graciously as an expensive waiter.

Actual speaks as they suck up the powder, calling them his angels of inspiration and perfect performance. Drivel, but it makes them titter like sleepless geese.

Then he puts the plate glass aside and looks fully at his new acquisitions.

" Neck. "

They smile sillily.

" Come on, just you guys neck together for me. "

Watching the two girls trade tongues makes Actual take out his erection and rub it on their cheeks between their kissing mouths. The elder one immediately engulfs it and Actual thinks how powerful he feels to know that with just a touch of coke and a pocketful of cash, he can make a girl blow on him even before he has kissed her lips.

" I'm hard because I'm full of money, " he wisps at Stryanda, touching her billowing cheeks with his cool, popular artist's fingers.

Many things happen during the next twelve hours. Usually, innocent young women become experienced through a change that fixes their personalities between wanting to find some way of fulfilling desire and the disillusion made by patterns of male power. The lack of control men have over their sex is the most maddening thing.

But Actual Color is doing the atypical. The change he inflicts does not always rise to the woman's surface. It appears as a knowing streak, easily missed by friends and lovers. Perverse lust is permeated by the unforgettable bitterness betraying a hard experience.

Later, they will tell each other the things girls gone bad tell each other... That every woman who really lives must eventually "go bad", and that it was the wildest thing to do at the time.

They do more coke. Their voices become gummy. Words slide over ears, lubricated with consciousness. Actual lays out a sheet of 3 mil plastic. Then he pours olive oil on the girls and makes them do things with the cucumbers while shooting pictures.

He decides to torture them. He ties their hands behind their backs and makes them kneel on the floor. It is weird to listen to Nancy giggle as Actual urinates into Stryanda's gaping mouth. Actual makes her suck on him with her pissy wet mouth.

When dawn comes through the dusty panes, the girls' bent red bottoms show the ice cream swirl of tender purple that the slapping leather paddle smudges into their buttocks. Jack-knifed over the back of settee, tied side by side, Nancy and Stryanda listen to one another's gasps and cries. Sometimes they plead together for mercy. But Actual knows none. He sits cross-legged on the floor, carefully brushing a solution of cocaine and glycerine jelly into each rectum.

He sodomized first Nancy, then Stryanda -- each one three times for half an hour each time. His ebony member is tied off with a thick rubber band under the balls. He loves to tell himself how good it feels to get pleasure from their agony. It is this knowledge of sensation which he most craves. Actual wants to know that his orgasm comes inside a sore girl's hole.

Actual becomes all the harder as Nancy says that it hurts and she starts to weep, her body shaking a deeply wrongful thrill into him. On the other hand, Stryanda is really a big girl, and she enjoys taking the man into her bowel, and she pushes against the bonds towards him.

Halfway through the ram session, Actual pauses to mount two video-eight cameras, aiming them on the girls. Then he sticks at them for about thirty seconds each. That stopping and starting causes a faint blue bruise to rim each anus. He finally lets himself come inside Nancy. Bawling her head off, she squirms in pain.

He unties the girls and massages all their stiff limbs in succession. They shower and are ready to be set free.

At the door, he pulls up Nancy's skirt and turns her round to kiss her anus. Then, he crushes two thousand dollar bills into the girl's vagina. Quietly he asks that they, " Please forgive me."

Saying nothing, the girls exit quick as a choke.

Eggs, bacon and bread. Vitamin E. Multi-vitamins. Water and no coffee.

Actual Color lays back and rolls the eight mm tape on his big screen and masturbates, watching his own dick plunge in and out of teenage Nancy's button.

The butter he is using on himself makes it a messy thing to reach for the phone as it rings, but he does. He must clamp the phone between his head and shoulder.

Bradley is coming over after lunch. Bradley with a list of demands to be met or things will start running out -- eggs, coke and cash.

Every consumer artist needs a good manager to remind him that work is the actual source of income, and not the self, which is only a grossly distracting fiction.

Bradley will be dolled up in his creamy mohair.

The Hoosier freak keeps a silver toothpick plying the eons between his picket fence teeth. He talks and walks daintily through the burning fields of Actual's illusions. Actual must endure the blah blah. Needing Bradley is one of the only things in life Actual cannot control.

So he washes the seed and butter from between his fingers and off his wrist.

Bradley is as promptly punctual as the carnation is pinned neatly to his lapel. Actual does not know whether or not he will get along with his manager. Sometimes the meeting depends on the second and third things Bradley says.

The obdurate expression on his client makes the older Bradley wait at length for Actual to say something he can use as putty.

" Well you know I've got all day if you want it, Bradley, " and Actual sticks his finger up his nose.

" You don't have to do that to me, you know, " says Bradley, exasperation stretching his slow airs.

" Just explain to me what you want, and I'll tell you what my head thinks about it. " Actual steadies his golf balls with their well read capillaries on his boss's uninterested slot machine apples. Maybe the boy wants to take a bite.

" It is nothing you have not heard from me before, " says Bradley.

" Exactly. What. "

" You are to appear at Francine Bretagne's fine evening of food, drink and conversation Friday next because she has six friends who want to ask you for canvasses for which they want to pay you know how much. "

" How much? "

" Twenty-eight thousand for four by eights, and ten thousand for two by threes. "

" I wonder where she found them. "

" Flying them in from Paris, just for you. "

" Fresh for clipping at the poodle farm, huh? " Actual ends his attempt at worldly sarcasm with a crackle as hard as the bars on the windows of Detroit's Seven Elevens.

" Be there, will you? " Bradley plays tolerance all over his wrinkly features.

" What time will the bags be expecting me? "

" No later than eight. "

" I'll be benign if you let me be there by nine. "

" Don't be a rainbow trout with me, Actual. "

" What if I get there at six? "

" You'll be talking to the maitre d', I suppose. "

" You old farts and your shit about time. "

" Eight is not so difficult, is it? It isn't that much different than nine, or seven. "

" Do you think I could get Francine to pump a couple of extra thousand out of them? " whined Actual.

" Maybe if you slept with one of the ladies, you'd double your take. "

" Yeah, maybe greed is the only answer for an old bag's lechery, huh? "

" The afternoon is haunted by your deepening wisdom, " smiles Bradley with an oriental bow, " Be there by eight. "

" Okay, but just don't forget I'm coming because I expect to get lots more cash, all right? "

" Yes, my fine artist. "

Actual paints the weekend away while his lackeys disco into the sexy legal secretaries' bachelor suites.

As each weekday ticks by, Actual paints a bit less. His mind is anguished with thoughts about women and men. He walks around, fingers gripping his dreadlocks. Tears make his cheeks shine like varnished teak. Yet his ever stiff rabbit hops up and after the cliché carrot.

Thoughts are many in the minds of the confused. Actual has been thinking, since abusing the teenage models, that maybe he really is nothing but gay. But insecurity cannot live with the idea. He does not want to be homosexual. Daily, he repeats to himself how much he lusts the physical beauty, the wet feel of a woman's body. Just because he likes ass does not mean anything. He would call himself sick before gay. Maybe it's real bad to enjoy hurting a woman.

He did thrill to see the girl weep and beg for mercy. But he did have a more intensely satisfying orgasm, knowing that he was hurting her. Nothing could explain the experience because it seemed so simple. Deep guilt and self-hate bubbled even as he knew this reaction to weird lust as the effulgence of a degradation he truly craved.

A negative desire for fulfillment destroys all one's peace of mind. As Actual plays the torture tape once again, it is a feeling high above ordinary depression that snatches at his conscience. It is a simple intellectual question... How could he himself actually like doing something wrong? What was the inevitable conclusion he refused to face? It stares at him. The face he paints. His own visage stares back at him from beyond his own death. He knows that all his work arose directly from what no man was able to admit. That he himself had become personally evil.

The thought is a mere tingle upon his ruinous mood. The idea makes him feel stupid. Nobody could be evil without knowing it. But to know it is not necessarily the same thing as admitting it. Only somebody who did not know what he knew calls a knowledge of evil insane.

The tape. Actual makes sure he starts with a limp member. Each time he sees himself inside the girls' holes, he grows solid and feels a keen conflict. The girl is a fragile, delicate thing. The video shows him destroying that fragility with something bluntly hurtful. Living through that, she only becomes harder, and somehow less sensitive. In the extreme, she would become as twisted as himself, and as fraught and traumatized and utterly numb with self-loathing for lusting sexual pain.

Actual has known twenty women or more whom love to be abused, who demand the whip and lust at the change from normal to primal sexuality. Sharing the lust was not the problem.

The one continual anxiety at the root of his anguish is the paradox of sensation his evil lust gives to him. A luminous energy -- either entirely lunatic, or completely luciferific -- sparks at the core of his bad pleasure. Maybe Actual does not understand how it is possible not to be afraid of himself, if he is really evil.

Actual Color does coke hour after hour until Friday morning. He orders Chinese food to replenish his dwindling caloric stock. He eats on the floor, gazing upon the three new canvases he has painted. The same motif, the knowledge of evil -- himself staring back at himself from beyond his narcissism -- reiterates three times. The ugly death grin. One in yellow, another in blue and the last in red.

Some might feel Actual's first emotion ought to be self-disgust, or a wry cynicism at repetition for the sake of fashion's narrow dictums. In truth, by guaranteeing sales, the consumer artist feels a mastery, a quiet sense of having made things complete. It is good to know his paintings will sell, sight unseen, to their purchasers.

Not for an instant does Actual think that he is perpetrating some kind of scam. The art system is a system is a system. If he was to be ironical about anything, then Actual would let it be the attitude he held towards his own sense of talent. Claiming a clever aptitude is better than pretending to have the stroke of genius. Quick success is supposed to be destabilizing, so modesty is vanity's vaccine. The same principle is at play behind the lost murderer who gets comfort by praying.

He calms himself with a torrent of reassurances about the uses he could make of women. Women give him a reason to live outside of himself. While women are the most important things in his life, he does not know how to portray them. The voice of art calls women the ultimate goal exactly because Actual does not feel deft enough to picture them.

The little romance still twitching in his heart tells him that, when he finds a dream girl, he will achieve the living side of his talent. After so much success, how could anyone know that he is unhappy with the content, if not the execution and style, of his own work?

Women bask under the naturally endowed halo of species. Only the wealthy user can make a differentiation between the male and female. Women are a sexual tool, an elaborate series of parts made for action. Women are also a steady source of income. Or at least, their husbands are. Actual could not see any of the money without it coming from wifey women.

Single girls are usually poor and that keeps them safely, and mainly, physical. Actual enjoys simply sexing them. Fun is a universal ideal shot into the bedrock of Actual's technarcotic experience.

Woman equal life. Actual wants to respect them. But some stubborn quirk makes him disgusted at all women. He perceives himself to be uniquely opposed to women through having no choice except to use them. Even as this unevicted emotion lives in the tenement of his sorrow, Actual wishes again and again for the simplest, most natural love. So he fantasizes about the ideal love he wants to feel for a woman while not anticipating ever meeting her.

Actual finally selects a white shirt, presses it, then matches it with a white gold silk jacket. He could not wear a tie, though he should have. The face must be shaved. A splash of cologne completes this rare act of toilet.

The cab drops him in front of a typical fifth avenue palace. Up twenty floors and Actual walks into a foyer replete with marble stair arcing up to the bedroom suites.

The effect is as if someone had rebuilt a southern mansion inside the huge three story condo. A footman dressed in black and white leads Actual to the ballroom. Francine is not among the twenty people present. The guests are about fifteen women and five fellows. Female satin and male formals.

Actual is the only black man in the room. The thought makes him smile at the strange world suddenly surrounding him. The women come forward at him as one flock. Yet it is a man who makes his way, cutting through the ladies. Bradley.

" May I introduce my wonderful friend, Mr. Actual Color, " he says.

Actual politely shakes the hands of all present, repeating the names of each lady. The women immediately start asking him questions about his art. Actual is interrupted by a man wearing a smooth blue suit etched with fine yellow lines. He wears an elegant waxy moustache. His face is alive, mostly to his own humor. He speaks iconoclastic cogs that grab at the peaceful mood, " My wife has looked forward to meeting the illustrious fake of New York. "

Actual ignores the silencing effect these words have on the kind, curious others. The moustache does not remove his smirk but blinks at Actual's reply, " Is that an insult or what? "

" Just as you take it, " returns moustache. " A critic friend of mine -- "

" The critics are never fair. A work that causes controversy often sells itself. "

" You can't make me believe that what you are doing shows some strong talent or elevated aesthetic sense. It may be original, but that's all. "

Actual drinks his drink and mutters, " Guys like you, " then he tries an amused tone, " What do you want? I'm just being me. I'm real. I paint what I feel about the world. You don't paint a thing. I don't understand how a guy criticizes anything without doing it. "

" But I have a brain. I can see how easy your work is to produce. "

" Easy? That's a first for me. Want a shiny prize? You don't know what you're saying. "

" In a world of fashion, some even sell copies of other artists' famous paintings, no? Is your graffiti any different? "

" You go talk to them about it. If you don't know I'm not stupid by now, you may as well just keep watching your television. I don't care about snotty guys like you. "

Turning on his heel, Actual would hector some more, but chooses only to home on the bar.

Bradley holds out a drink and talks like a ventriloquist, his smile unmoving, " Talk to the ladies. Make the sale. Ignore the wretch. Be nice. Remember, I don't have to tell you that if you sleep with one of the ladies, they'll pay you twice your rate. "

" You still want me to sleep with one of those bags? "

" Well, do you want to make us more money or not? It's up to you, boy. "

Actual tries to slip into automatic, but keeps getting a grinding noise telling him that the scene is not laid back, not young, not relaxed and cool, not the kind of party he likes to inhabit.

" Can we please please visit your studio? " ask the ladies. " Please. Please. " Okay, next week, but only Madame Riveau because she has the youngest flesh and best tits.

Then Actual spots the mustachioed monster, sunken into the back wall like wood stain, grinning and negatively shaking his fig head. With a bow, Actual promises everyone he must make coffee early in the morning to begin painting their wonderful commissions.

A talent blessed with artistic authenticity, wedded to a libidinous moral depravity, is an unruly formula that makes a mess of creative innocence. Like a heavy element in nature, or a toxic chemical, the man defined by such a character is a living danger to be teased and tried by the staid, unthinking world of vulgar insensibility. Ultimately, a boy like Actual must be kept firmly at bay by lazy society.

Actual makes himself forget the critic with hard alcohol in a young village bar. Maybe one of the curious lovers, so free in the world, would again be drawn to his hazardous eyes blinking amber wounds of whiskey reflections.

He is more than a self feeding on self-love and worldly hatred. It is mere market -- the foolish and stupid people -- who make talent level out and dwindle. Not he himself. He hates the grim plastic world of lying purposeless criteria and empty, soulless euphemism.

Actual warms his belly with the booze. The ice cubes, as if spaded into his mouth, are identical to the frigid quarry of his regretful mind. But the feeling is of the most hopeless kind, a regret without knowing why. What has happened, has happened to him... Success.

And success demands a regular pattern of creativity. So weak it leaves him, to think about how the world controls all his efforts. The money scene foists a ready-made schematic from which diverging means disaster, loss and failure. Who else but another with the same experience could understand? What was so major, and what was so minor, about a Sargeant or a horny teenager?

Absorbed, Actual sees little light in his glass. His place at the corner of the hip hop house is blank of others. Actual relaxes the sweaty grip on his mug and tries to inhale some longer air, enough to notice the shape who sits beside him.

A black woman with wet eyes and a red pvc dress. She wears no make-up. Her sallow sad skin looks as if the flesh beneath it ought to be fuller.

She looks at him too, with a hungry curiosity, either sexual or uncouth. Her expression shows more depth when she opens her mouth to say something. But she lets her herring tongue touch her upper lip into an ask-me-anything smile.

" We've never met sister, if you're thinking that. And I'm not your uncle's best friend, " mumbles Actual, his eyes flick down to his empty glass.

" Ah, come on. We don't have to know each other to fuck. "

Actual's pain is swept aside by his own giggle. He could even become shy. The girl is the type of direct slut who can make him feel vulnerable. She could maybe make him forget his ugly identity. The way she slips her buttocks to and fro, rubbing her red rubber bottom across the bar stool.

Actual briefly tells his neuroses that she has him marked for a big cash fuck. But a black man, to a black woman, is always poor before rich. Perhaps Actual's silk knit jacket makes him look the obvious exception.

" You don't have AIDS, do you? " Actual nods his eyes at her ass.

" I'm clean as a country virgin, " the slut answers.

" You look sick. Are you eating enough, girl? "

" Sure. Come on now. You look like you're a good lay. I need it, only with you tonight. "

Actual knows she is running her hard drive, and wants a safe trip home. Afraid of being alone, she has done it a hundred times like this.

" Okay, let's go honey, " Actual is up on his feet.

" All right, baby, " and she takes his arm.

They core at it. Between beers and coke, Actual was just hard enough to keep splutzing her for a few hours. She sucks on him violently like a raunchy porn whore. Actual likes it though, a relief from the lustless prudes hanging around the coffee shops. He figures this girl is way out of her territory, probably a grubby Bronx disco, if the tinny twang in her voice is any sign.

He gets her so hot, is working her ass with a thumb as he humps her, that she asks him to stick her. The girl is actually asking him for it. She is so lovely loose. Actual comes in her butt and then she sucks him hard again. He is sure she will demand money.

Actual is baffled because it is the first time he has made it with a girl who gets off on bad ass sex. She is asking him to belt her. All the rest submitted to it unwillingly, for the money.

The emotion is different now. With the pained victim he had felt big and ugly. But this slimy sugar slut loves doing it all, and she makes him feel equal. Somehow, he is conquered by her base appetite.

Maybe he has found her at last. Her skin is not so sunken when her sex is enflamed. Then Actual gets tired. The last thing he sees before sleep is that she is with a dildo, legs open, the television on.

A sharp prick in the arm wakes Actual. The slut is cranking him up.

" Ooo ow, you shouldn't be doing that girl. "

She keeps injecting him until the syringe is empty.

" Just relax and let it fill you with morning joy. "

The slut undoes the rubber on his arm, sits back and cooks a spoon for herself.

A euphoria centers into his head. Actual trembles and his hot body sweats cooly.

" God, god, my life, " he groans.

" Better than better than, " she chants.

" What's happening to me? Oh, my life. "

" Let it fill you. "

" God, no, sister. "

" Yes, yes. Much too much, " says the slut, become a water spot of junk dying beside him in the hot spoon.

Actual's heart palpitates. His fingers flex springs, but only hook empty space. His skin beads with perfectly round droplets. His face turns from brown to beige. His breathing is too rapid.

Actual is afraid before the black wall of darkness. A helpless moan wishing for more life worries the room. The answering silence lets him go on dying.

Mouth open, no gasp moves it. Eyes are wide full of nothing. Actual Color's last rigid terror sags, as quickly limp and still as death is.

5809 words

Copyright © 26 07 1993 by David Antoniuk