1

I let his cum settle on my tongue, but all I could taste was ash.

“Come on Chip,” I thought. “You’re a sommelier. Savor this.”

I let the jism congeal a bit, and then I brought up a little spit to loosen it and swished it around inside my mouth, moving it across the surface of my tongue. I remembered one of my grade school teachers, a thin white man—why even say white? Of course they were all white, like the other students, and unlike myself—who was uncomfortably, suspiciously eager to educate his first negro, and who, in retrospect, was almost certainly a fairy himself, instructing the class (in a soft, ineffectual, needy tone) about how taste buds existed so that we could enjoy different flavors. Sweetness was up front, near the tip, and saltiness was behind, while sourness held the sides, and so on. But tonight it was all bitter, bitter, bitter.

What did I expect? The smoke was so thick. I couldn’t even see his face up there, somewhere well above the hand, my hand, that grasped his undone belt buckle. I didn’t even know if he had enjoyed it. Half the city was burning; he better have fucking enjoyed it. It’s certainly the last time anyone was going to suck his dick tonight. Hell, it might be the last time he got his dick sucked ever; it was a good night to kill a black faggot with impunity, and with the cops and the military out in force, there were more than a few good (white) men eager to do the job. (Not that there weren’t also a few black feet in black cotton socks in black leather shoes that would have happily shattered his skull on the curb in the name of Allah and his prophet [Elijah] Muhammad.)

I closed my eyes, and tried again to separate the flavor of the semen from the smell of burning corner stores and tenement houses. It was no use. I got up and spit it into an open trash can at the edge of the alley, on top of a copy of The Washington Post. It landed right in the middle of his forehead, atop that noble brow, between those eternally thoughtful eyes, and it seemed, in the dark, like it was the drop of regurgitated sperm—and not the hopeful/hopeless future of his race (my race)—that he was contemplating. And above the disgrace, the blasphemy, the headline: King Assassinated in Memphis.

I heard him zipping up behind me. “Leaving already man?” he asked. “You don’t want me to, you know, pay you back for your trouble?” I knew what he was insinuating.

“I don’t give anal,” I said “And I don’t take it either.”

I didn’t bother to look back to gauge his disappointment. I left him in the alley, with his ejaculate and my saliva, and that god damned newspaper, and I walked into the street.

2

I was lost, completely and unequivocally. It was not that I had become disoriented by the heavy smoke that billowed from at least half the buildings on 14th Street (residential, commercial, it didn’t matter) like some doomed Victorian child devoured by a fogbank while exploring some isolated, pederest-haunted moor alone. I would have been as lost without the smoke, without the night and its mostly shattered streetlamps, without the rioters and the looters and the pigs and the privates freshly back from Vietnam who had been given strict orders not to shoot but who you could see wanted to, badly.

I was lost for a much simpler, more pedestrian (please reader, do not try to force the pun) reason: I had never been to DC before. The city was as alien to me as one of the half-realized, fabricated worlds that filled the pulp magazines (all of them Amazing but mostly unexceptional) where I had gotten my start, eight novels and two Nebulas ago. (Please don’t think I’m bragging, though that kind of posturing is a staple of erotic fiction, and this story is erotic in content, if not in tone.) I was here to attend a publisher-mandated reading/signing event that I considered a real professional risk (and I told my agent as much), since it would reveal to the audience the color of my skin, a confession that was likely to make the obligatory fifteen minute Q&A session irrelevant. I wasn’t interested in being the nigger who writes science fiction, the statistically inevitable monkey at his recently desegregated typewriter. (And, ladies and gentlemen and the white liberals of the press, this monkey’s a queer to boot.)

If the city were burning down for any other reason, I would have felt relief, but as it stood I felt nothing. Or, rather, I felt the aftermath of nothing. The prickly hangover that follows a full twenty-four hours of numbness and a ten minute blowjob in an unfamiliar alley (a blowjob that you gave and that was not reciprocated).

I turned down a side street, instinctually withdrawing from the sound of the mob. They were on their way back down 14th, in full retreat, pursued by soldiers with bayonets. “Christ,” I thought. “They still use bayonets.” I imagined a line of Redcoats descending on Lexington: neat, orderly, professional soldiers who did not know that the rebellion was already a revolution and that every revolution, by definition, succeeds. I did not stay to watch. I knew what would happen when they reached Concord.

The side street was short and nameless. The signs at both intersections had been stolen. It consisted of a single block of small businesses, all empty now, all looted, most owned and operated (I guessed) by blacks. The sidewalks were covered in beads of broken glass. An unopened, orphaned can of corn, abducted from its bodega home in the dead of night and abandoned here, rolled anxiously down the street, gutterbound.

I didn’t hear the moaning right away. It was soft, much softer than the cries from 14th Street, though also much closer, emanating from a storefront no more than a quarter block away. I imagined a storekeeper, face half smashed in, pinned beneath an overturned shelf, groping for the receiver of a phone that he did not know was no longer connected to its jack and, even if it were plugged it, would connect him only to an overloaded switchboard and never to the hospital that would have been reluctant to send an ambulance to this neighborhood, even if it were not an active warzone.

I walked over to the storefront. The display window had been smashed, of course. The sign above the door had been stolen. Inside, the shelves were bare. There was a light fixture hanging loose inside the door; someone had even taken the bulb. I tried the doorknob. It was locked. I would have to enter through the window, the same way the looters had.

I noticed the clothes almost as soon as I was inside: one large white men’s t-shirt, one short-sleeved button-up shirt with a wide collar, two pairs of jeans, four black socks, two pairs of white briefs, the clean, unpretentious clothing of young adults. College activists. There were also two black and white SNCC pins that had been carefully placed on one of the empty shelves, unlike the rest of their clothes, which were strewn thoughtlessly across the glass-covered floor.

The SNCC logo, printed on both pins, is a black hand grasping a white one, an immediately recognizable (if obvious) symbol of racial harmony, but it was two black fists that I saw clutching each other when I found them behind the counter. They were intertwined, heads between thighs, face-to-crotch, face-to-crotch, lying on their sides in a bed of shattered glass. I could say that they looked like one long, looped, endlessly repeating creature, a sexual ouroboros, except that there was no need for this snake to eat his own tail.

The back that faced me (if you must have the tired adjectives: yes, it was firm; yes, it was muscular) was dripping blood from the base of its neck to its tailbone. They had been more than lying in the glass; they had been rolling in it, rutting in it, holding each other down atop it, until it had penetrated them and lacerated them; there would be scabs tomorrow, and in a month perhaps scars.

My eyes met a pair of eyes, framed by his partner’s calves, held between a pair of thighs that would close briefly with each convulsion of pleasure, covering them like eyelids; opening and closing in a coital blink. The eyes offered me an invitation (without assistance from his lips, which were otherwise occupied), and I began to undress.

Soon I was sitting on the floor with them, naked, pellets of glass digging into the skin of my legs. It was a soft, burning pain, and I thought of the sensation of holding your hand just beyond the edge of the flame from a zippo lighter, or the sting that you feel not when the lash of the whip strikes you but two or three seconds later, the tenderness that follows the pang. One of them buried his head in my lap, the other stood in front of me, waist-to-face, erect-and-erect, and pressed lightly with his hand on the back of my head. I complied.

His dick was in my mouth when I heard the bell ring. It was the bell above the door, the subtle, pavlovian cue that primes the clerk for the arriving customer; it must have been the one thing the looters did not take. I heard the jingling as the interloper withdrew the keys from the door. He closed the door behind him, and I could hear him turning the lock and closing the deadbolt, as if the window were still there, as if there were anything left to steal.

We stopped, but we didn’t move. The one standing in front of me even left his cock in place, hanging down my throat. I could feel it going flaccid. What could we have done? Run past him to the window, cutting open our feet on the glass, leaving our clothes behind, to wander nude and vulnerable through a burning city full of predators of all imaginable varieties? I don’t think the possibility even occurred to us, so we waited there, frozen, three sodomites transformed into pillars of salt.

He was a black man in late middle age, neat but cheaply dressed (dress shirt, checkered sweater, slacks high over striped socks), bespectacled, respectable (stress the re when you say it to yourself), the kind of man you think of when you hear the word “negro,” the kind of man that even the most progressive black activist would still want to call a negro, years later, after the term was officially verboten, strictly to be used by white racists, the kind of man the word negro must have first been coined to describe.

He stepped behind the counter and he saw us. He must have seen us. Three young black men, stark naked, dicks in each others mouths. He must have seen us. But his eyes registered nothing: no shock, no acknowledgment, no interest. He even reached directly behind us, without saying anything, and retrieved a warped wooden stool that had been lying, overturned, against the wall. He set the stool upright and sat on it, facing us, looking directly at us, and he did nothing else.

I wondered if we should pick up where we left off. It’s not as if I had never had an audience before. This would still be less awkward, less painful, than reading in front of an all-white group of admirers, knowing that the questions they will ask after you finish are not the same questions that they had in mind when they entered, and certainly less awkward and less painful than testifying before an all-white jury, knowing the verdict will be exactly what they had in mind before you spoke. I tightened my lips, and I felt his penis begin to harden again. I sought the tip with my tongue—and that’s when the crying started.

The man on the stool, the neat, respectable negro, as deeply middle class as he was deep in middle age, still looking straight at us and still not seeing us, was sobbing. He was balling. He did not even lower his head into his hands. He just sat there with his tear-filled, unknowing eyes fixed on us—not on the ruins of his livelihood, but on us—and cried like a toddler cries: a tantrum of choking and wheezing and snot.

I slid the dick out of my mouth, pushed the head off of my crotch, and went to gather up my clothes. I said nothing to the man on the stool as I passed him, and nothing to him as I climbed back out through the window (I did not even consider unlocking the door) and fled down the street, pursued for half a block by the homeless can of corn.

3

“Tell me, Uncle Tom, how does it feel to be a traitor to your race?”

“Does the master let you sleep on the end of his bed, or did he set up a cot for you in the chicken coop?”

“On Sunday afternoons, does he give you a whole slice of watermelon, or does he just let you chew on the rind?”

The black cop was surrounded, trapped in his own personal Masada, completely flanked by Roman legionnaires uniformed in black wide lapel suits and bowties. Even from the opposite side of the street (and I didn’t dare to cross) I could tell he was terrified; his fruit of the looms ruined courtesy of the Fruit of Islam. There were five of them and by this point a little less than one of him. They were unarmed, but so was he. I had rounded the corner just in time to watch them corner him and pull the handgun from his unbuckled holster. They didn’t even bother to menace him with it; their confidence was enough. Their unblinking ideological certainty was more than enough to win this game of chicken, even though they had arrived at dead man’s curve with no car to face down the town’s favorite son, the varsity idol, in his dad’s Thunderbird with the top down. One of them (god damn me for saying this, but they all looked the same to me) threw the pistol down a storm drain. Another took the cop’s billy club and rolled it under the burned-out shell of a Volkswagen that was smoldering in front of a deserted porno theater.

They drew in closer to him, tightening the anaconda coil that had already left him breathless, and I took shelter in the doorway of the theater. I didn’t want to be seen, and I felt instinctively comfortable there. I had a natural affection for porno theaters, for the aura of mutual discretion and the security you can only find in places that are as dark and dirty as your own apartment on a Wednesday night, after nine hours spent writing, when you know that it’s too late to expect even the most inconsiderate company, and the only thing on your mind besides sleep is when to masturbate and for how long. Even though I was still outside, with only the shadow of the marquee as concealment, I felt safe, hidden.

I had no love for the police, but I couldn’t help but pity him. Even a cartoon dog only has two “X”s in its eyes when it’s dead meat, and here he was staring down five.

“Take off your badge, house nigger.” X1 was in his face now, teeth bared, but calm in tone, all force, no anger. “And throw it in the gutter.”

The cop complied. His hand was shaking, but but he sunk it on the first throw, no need for a rebound. “So much,” I thought “for the Spartan motto.” Someone else would have to carry his shield home, if it didn’t end up lining a rat’s nest below a metro platform.

“You know, I grew up on a farm. My daddy was a sharecropper,” X2 was behind him now, hands on his shoulders, fingers crawling up his neck. “But I’ve never seen a pig wear a helmet before.” Before the cop could respond, the helmet was rolling down the street. I barely saw the slap myself, only heard the crack as the air broke, saw X2’s hand dropping back to his side, as if it were being holstered. He must have been a motherfucker with an axe on butchering day back on daddy’s four acre (certainly not forty) farm. I bet the hogs never saw it coming.

“Pigs don’t need boots either, nor socks.” Whether he was aware of it or not, X3 had passed the point of no return, said the decisive words. Now they were not going to stop until they had stripped this man nude. I’m sure it had not been on any of their minds (devout as they were, straight as they were) when they started, but once you’ve ordered a man to take off his socks and shoes (with glass and debris and probably shit everywhere), once you’ve told him that he must go barefoot, and once you’ve watched him untie and remove two boots and roll down and pull off two socks without resisting, without even pausing to ask why, you will not stop until you have him bare ass.

“And when have you ever seen a pig rolling in slop with a shirt buttoned up to his adam’s apple?” X4 spoke, and the shirt came off. Button by button it undid itself, aided by hands that might have belonged to the shirt itself or to the voice that spoke, but that certainly did not belong to the cop, even if they might have been attached to him. If the coroner performing his autopsy (I wondered if it would go that far) had slit those wrists open with a scalpel and traced the nerves from them through his body to his brain and told me definitely that they were still hooked up, that all the connections were still in good working order, I would not have believed that any neuron of his had given the order to unbutton that shirt, to take it off, one sleeve at a time, and even, for a moment, to start to fold it—as if he were going to wear it again, unwashed, tomorrow and he did not want his sergeant to notice the wrinkles—before letting it fall on the asphalt. And all that time those enchanted hands, animated by some force that did not come from inside him, never hesitated, never paused to form a fist.

I must have suffered from some enchantment as well, must have lost my own (albeit already tenuous) hold on the real, been transported into some antebellum fantasy, because as his shirt dropped, as he revealed his back to me, I expected it to be covered in scars, to carry the visible impression of the overseer’s whip. Of course it did not. Instead I saw two tight rows of muscles with their pectoral compliment (and, yes, fantastic abs) on the opposite side, evidence of a man who had left the academy recently enough that his body had not had any opportunity to decay, had not been eroded by neglectful hours spent in a squad car or (alright, alright) a donut shop. He was beautiful, dangerous. Maybe he could have fought the five of them off, crushed their fists between his shoulderblades, shattered their jaws on his torso. He could have resisted, but he did not. Every one of those immaculate muscles, back and chest, were shaking.

“Take your pants off.” X5 was a minimalist. Unlike your author, he knew that there was power in concision. Every spell requires only a few magic words. Abra Kadabra. Bippity boppity boo. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah. Separate but equal. The magician spoke, and the pants came off.

Now he wore only his underwear. I was wrong when I suggested that he had soiled them; they were unstained, pristine, whiter than his commanding officer. And they were bulging. He was erect and not half-staff either but rather 100% fully aroused. He was getting off on this. The whole time that he had been standing there, quaking in mortal terror, his cock had been getting harder and harder, and now hidden below his cotton undies there was a tremendous creature, born of oppression and resentment, perhaps older than him, maybe even older than the plantation shed where his grandmother had to kneel on the dirt floor, on the cotton seeds and chicken feed, with her master’s member between her lips, a creature that was superficially his, that was from him, of him, but that he only imagined he could control. I thought of the Hebrew golem, avenging pogroms long after its creator had died (maybe even, depending on the legend, by its clay hands). And he had been blushing with embarrassment through the whole ordeal. I had no idea that there was enough blood in a man’s body to make his face so red and his dick so hard at the same time. His heart must have barely been beating.

No one told him to take off his briefs. He performed that last act unbidden. He needed no instruction. Here, then, was the sorcerer, the will that had commandeered his hands, that was stronger than his brain, or the muscles of his back, or his captors, the preternatural intelligence that had contrived to turn a lynching into a striptease. The cock was out.

I am a believer in parallel universes (it’s my professional responsibility to be), and I know there must be better and worse realities than our own. In one of those realities, I am sure he took them, all five of them, with that fierce, merciless dick in full command, tearing apart those thrift store suits, rending those Sunday (correction: Friday) slacks, and consuming them, one by one, gagged with their own bow ties (red now for more reason than one). And I suppose in some crueler, uglier universe that erection was the excuse, the permission slip (signed by Allah, but call him daddy), they needed to beat that cop to death on the spot, to make him the martyr of a sexuality that he probably did not know he had, the child that stands for the first time and falls from its chair onto the fireplace slate.

But this universe is not ruled by triumph or tragedy so much as awkwardness. Our gods prefer schadenfreude to destiny. So the cop stood there for a moment, watching them watching him, his fully-inflated penis bobbing up and down like a rescue buoy in the hands of a drowning man, like a skyscraper during an earthquake. They hesitated, as we all do when faced with the unexpected, particularly when the unexpected is a massive black hardon, and that moment of hesitation was his liberator. He broke through their ranks (or maybe they parted before him, afraid to be touched by it) and ran for freedom. They did not try to catch him.

He ran past me on his flight, his erection fully intact, dick flapping much more intensely now, almost invisible, more wave than matter, the lines a cartoonist draws to indicate a body in motion. He ran past me, and he was gone. He was gone, and there, without him, in the shadow of the porno marquee, in the shadow of what I had watched and what I hadn’t done, I felt (suddenly, senselessly) regret. I felt lonely. I sat down in the doorway. I didn’t cry, but I wanted to.

4

“Hey Sambo, don’t you know public masturbation is against the law?”

I felt the bayonet press into the small of my back, and I quickly tucked my penis (not quite flaccid yet, but fading fast) back into my pants. I didn’t think to zip up.

“God damn it, Chip,” I thought. “How could you be so fucking stupid?”

It had been the very definition of a moment of weakness. I had been sad and tired, not to mention lost (certainly physically, I’ll leave the rest up to your better judgment, reader). I could not have found my way to the hotel where my agent had rented a room, even if I had the energy to walk there (no buses were running, and I hadn’t seen a taxi since the night before that wasn’t overturned and/or burning). So I concluded that I had no choice but to sleep in the doorway of the porno theater. I would have slept inside on one of the butter-and-jizz stained seats (a personal comfort on par with a child’s security blanket) or behind the ticket counter, where I at least would not have been visible from the street. But through some accident (or because the rioters had approached the theater with the same cautious restraint afforded to all places widely considered to be sacred or haunted) the doors were home to the only two unbroken panes of glass on the street and their handles had been chained together and padlocked from the inside, dispelling any fantasy I might have had about forcing them open.

Once you have decided you are the kind of man who will sleep on a public street, in the doorway of a pornographic theater, you do not have far to travel before you realize you might also be the kind of man who would masturbate in the doorway of a pornographic theater, public street or not. Don’t get me wrong; I am not a “broken windows” sort of guy, not a prophet of the slippery slope, but there is a sort of gradual deterioration of modesty and principle that can occur in a human heart, particularly if you are disoriented and sleep deprived in a foreign land in the midst of the widespread breakdown of civil society and grieving the murder of your generation’s (and your race’s) greatest humanitarian. Within that context, in the wake of catastrophe, surrounded by the smoking ruins of the apocalypse, jacking off on the sidewalk seemed like small potatoes.

But it was in vain. Even if I had not been interrupted, I never would have climaxed; ejaculation was another empty promise, the catharsis that was never coming, regardless of how loudly we yelled and how hot the fires (here and in the life after) burned. My muse, normally so resourceful when crafting imagined sexual encounters out of even the sparsest of raw materials, was plagued by performance anxiety, and started improvising wildly, using anything and everything at her disposal, with no consideration for tone, theme, or the desires of her audience.

Stokely Carmichael was seated in the back of a big blue Cadillac, and I was seated on his lap. I tore his shirt open, exposing his bare muscular chest, and let the airborne buttons (pop, pop, pop) fall on the red leather upholstery. Pop. I heard the sound of distant gunfire, saw the concrete floor of the hotel balcony turning red. I didn’t unbuckle his pants, instead I reached inside, my hand wriggling under the tight belt, searching, my fingers closing around the shaft … and I pulled out the assassin’s rifle. I held it, cocked it, the barrel under my own chin, inside my own mouth (Stokely’s eyes were wide now, his breathing heavy), depressed the trigger and it jammed. I kept cocking it and uncocking it, but the jam wouldn’t clear. Men were surrounding me now, formally dressed, pointing, pointing and staring, white shirts under open jackets, every one of them pointing at me, aghast. I looked to Stokely, but instead of his face, I saw the face of Emmett Till, not the face his mother kissed goodbye before he boarded the southbound Greyhound, but the face he had in his coffin, the face from the cover of Jet magazine, the face he had after three days in that swamp. And the men were still pointing at me. I cocked and uncocked the rifle, cocked and uncocked, cocked and uncocked, again and again.

“Are you going to zip up, nigger, or do you expect me to do it for you?”

He pressed the blade of the bayonet closer to my skin. It hadn’t drawn blood, yet. I closed my fly. Instinctively, thoughtlessly, I tried to turn to face him, whoever he was, the man behind the bayonet, but he grabbed my shoulder, hard, and forced me against the glass doors. The handles caught me under my rib cage, and for a moment I could not breath. I could feel his hands running up and down my sides, frisking me.

“Whoa now, where do you think you’re going? You’re a sex criminal now, a certified pervert. You don’t think I’m going to let you slink off to finish your fun under some white girl’s windowsill, do you? Only a matter of time before some innocent Georgetown undergrad comes back to her dorm at night to find you on her bed, trying on her panties. No sah, Bojangles, you’re coming with me.”

His hand drew me away from the glass. He lead me into the street, guiding me with the hand on my shoulder while he prodded me with the bayonet, always staying behind me, out of sight. Sometimes he would lift the hand from my shoulder and bring it close to my face, so that I could see the tips of his fingers at the edge of my peripheral vision. I do not know if it an unconscious habit, the way our hands sometimes anticipate our words, or if it was intentional, a taunt or a threat, a reminder that he was there and in control, even if he was otherwise invisible, the voice of the plowman holding the blindered horse in check.

“You nigros don’t have any shame about where you whip it out, do you? On my daddy’s farm we had a dozen or so sharecroppers. Hell, maybe it was two dozen. They were like flies, fucking and dying faster than you could count them, and you couldn’t keep them away from an open bag of sugar either. You can’t expect me to remember every black fly, can you? But I’ll tell you what I do remember: there was this one pickaninny boy, eight, nine years old, and all he would do, all day, every day, was sit outside on the porch of his little clapboard shack, no shirt, no pants, no undies, and play with his little dick. I swear to Christ, sunup, sundown, if I walked by that shack he was out there, going to town on his pecker. Tugging at it, twisting it every which way. He was focused too. I could’ve walked right up to him and dumped a jar of molasses on his head, and he wouldn’t have looked up. I could’ve caught his mama off guard while she was bent over the washboard and unloaded a barrel full of buckshot in her big round behind and the boy would not have blinked. Was like he was in heaven, far, far away from this world. Or, fuck, maybe he was a retard. What do I know? That boy sure loved his dick though.”

I did not know where he was leading me, and I said nothing. The street was empty now, deserted save for me and my abductor (to me nothing but a composite of bayonet, hand, and voice, held together by an invisible body and an unknowable will). We walked past the burned out husks of buildings. I wondered if there were corpses inside, men and women, killed by smoke inhalation in their beds while they slept, or murdered on the streets and dragged inside where they would not be found until all of the fires were out, until the riot was over and peace was restored, if such a time ever came. I imagined my body among them. What would the coroner think? Did a bayonet leave a different sort of wound than a switchblade? Certainly a bullet hole was a bullet hole, whether the rifle had been fired by a shopkeeper in defense of his merchandise, an authentic Southern cracker in fatigues overstepping his martial duty, or an assassin with his sights trained on a Memphis balcony. Death, unlike justice, was unambiguous.

We reached an alley and the hand let me know that I was supposed to turn, even as the voice remained fixated on that black child’s cock. I wondered how old that boy was now. Old enough to be loaded into the hull of a cargo plane in a wooden crate (supine in pine) with a full compliment of posthumous medals and a few surviving syphilis spirochetes? Old enough to have taken his father’s place as a sharecropper on Capital-D Daddy’s plantation? Old enough to hear the news this morning, on a hand-me-down radio with a broken antenna and greasy dials, syphon a tank of gasoline from a rusted tractor, walk barefoot to that antebellum mansion where he had never been allowed to set foot any more than his father or his grandfather or his grandfather’s father (where only some distant female ancestor had been allowed inside to empty the chamber pots) and to burn that motherfucker to the ground. I obeyed the hand and entered the alley, bracing myself for a gunshot that perhaps I would never hear (or even feel), for the darkness that isn’t darkness at all, but rather an absence of both light and darkness, an absence of sound and silence, an absence of thought and of peace. An army jeep was parked there. He opened the tailgate and the hand urged me to climb inside.

“Well, how about that. You’re a lucky nigger, Jim. Kick your feet up. I’ll drive. How many black men can say they have a white chauffeur? Probably just you and Sammy Davis, Jr.”

The darkness beneath the jeep’s canvas roof was absolute. There was no rear seat, only an unupholstered metal bed that was already nearly full of wooden crates—containing what? Rations? Ammunition? Iron shackles? I could barely find the room to sit upright. I was cargo. I heard him open and close the driver’s side door, though I could see nothing. The engine turned over and we were moving: out of the alley, into the street, into the city that had been reduced to sound (the sirens, the screams, the broken hydrants, the policemen’s orders to stop, drop, and, nigger, don’t you dare move) and smell (smoke, ash, exhaust, smoke). There were tastes too, of course, but they were limited to the sweat gathering around my lips and the bile rising in the back of my throat.

Sometimes the jeep would take a turn, always without coming to a complete stop, and without any regard for the black man in the back, surrounded by shifting crates that were perhaps not eager to crush him, but certainly indifferent to the possibility. There were enough turns that I (who was already thoroughly lost, remember) had no idea if we were heading north or south, if we were driving downtown or to a deserted tupelo grove in a Mississippi bog. We drove until the odor of smoke gave way to the fragrance of cherry blossoms. Then I felt the car stop, and heard the tailgate drop. And I saw light.

The streetlamps were still lit here, and I could see grass, not the long, desperate, unwatered grass of vacant lots and and inner city parks, but the lush, privileged, carefully manicured grass of a public green: tourist grass. We were on the National Mall. He offered me his hand (whether it was the hand that held the bayonet, or the one that led me, the conduit for his silent commands, I do not know), and he helped me out of the back of the jeep.

“You didn’t blow your load back there, did you Frederick Douglass? If you did, I’m going to make you lick it up on the ride home. And don’t you complain. It’s a better meal than they served on the slave ships. Come on, get walking.”

He shoved me in front of him again, and the bayonet reappeared at my back, though I hadn’t seen the rifle. I had barely seen him at all. He was a silhouette, backlit by an overhead streetlight. The hand returned to guide me forward. We walked together across the green, two men, prisoner and jailer, slave and overseer. Before us was the Parthenon, or, at least, that’s what I initially imagined. There were so many of these faux-greek temples on the mall, an entire knock-off acropolis, a fully-functional city state of tacky imitation; this was America: a nation of tasteless imitation and vulgarian pretense, the Harlem Rolex of empires.

I climbed the wide marble steps leading to the shrine, still under the influence of the hand. I passed through the columns that flanked the door, still the servant of the bayonet. And then I stopped. I chose to stop. Neither the hand nor the bayonet had any say in the matter. I chose to stop when I saw the statue, which was not Athena but rather a man, twenty feet tall seated, on a throne, a king in a rumpled overcoat, a monarch in courtroom slacks, a conqueror with a Shenandoah beard. The hand spun me towards my captor. I saw his eyes for the first time, and then I saw his pants and his underwear, which were already around his ankles.

“Don’t look so shocked. Put away those big googly eyes, boy. I figured, since you liked jerking off so much, maybe you could do me a kindness.” He took his hand off my shoulder and shook his dick; his other hand still held his service rifle. He pressed the barrel of the rifle against my neck; the bayonet cut my cheek. “What I’m telling you is that you are going to give me a handjob. And I want Abe to watch.”

I could see him clearly now. I would say that he was smaller than I had imagined, but in my imagination he had been formless, a shapeless phantasm of racial enmity that had the power to manifest the illusion of a hand, a rifle, or a silhouette, that could grab you or cut you in the dark (as any poltergeist can), but that nevertheless was not a concrete thing, not a real person like I was (much as he surely did not consider me to be a real person like he was). Still, he was small, and he was young. The ink on his draft card must have still been wet when they pulled it. He was a skinny kid, younger than me, shorter than me, thinner than me. He had the freckles of a comic strip scamp, and, even erect, I could barely see his penis under the hem of his shirt. I knocked the rifle out of his hand, and I unbuttoned my pants.

However extensive his military training might have been, he was flanked easily. It was no challenge for me to get behind him; no evasive maneuvers were attempted. He just stood there—ineffectual, jaw slack, every muscle limp but one—while I wrapped one hand around the back of his neck and the other around the shaft of his cock. I tightened my grip, just below both of his heads, and felt a spasm run from one end of his body to the other, the kind of involutionary convulsion you would get if you ran a high voltage current through a corpse. He ejaculated almost immediately, spraying his load on the base of the monument.

I put my palm to the back of his head, at the base of his skull, and thrust his face forward, rubbing it in the cum. I heard his nose break.

“Motherfucker,” he moaned.

“Come on now, peckerwood,” I put my lips close to his ear. “If I fucked your mother, they’d lynch me for sure.” I bit his earlobe, hard, and tasted his blood.

I withdrew my dick from my underwear, letting my pants fall to my hips. His shirttail was hanging over his ass, so I picked up the rifle and cut the back of his shirt open with the bayonet, leaving a gash from his left shoulder blade to his right ass cheek, and tore the shirt off. His cuffs were still buttoned, so one half of the bisected shirt hung from each of his wrists, covering his hands, which might have been in fists but could just as easily have been gripping the stone in anticipation.

I pushed my dick inside him. No foreplay, no gentle hesitation, no easing it in; I tore his white asshole open. I brutalized him. I pressed against his back, putting all my weight on him, forcing him against the marble platform, leaving him no space to move, no room to breathe. I went deep inside him, almost as far as I could, and then I pulled out some, but not all the way, before plunging back in, going the distance this time, burying myself inside his from tip to balls. His anus was wet with blood. He pissed himself, and the stream ran down his naked leg and puddled at our feet. I looked up and saw Lincoln looking down. He had the expression of a disinterested voyeur, of an experienced pervert who had seen everything, even this, before; he had the face of God.

And then the catharsis came. I was senseless: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, they all abandoned me. I was free from thought, free from memory, free from history. I felt wonder like a child feels wonder, with no present except their own imagination and no future except the still untarnished gates of heaven. I felt bliss. I withdrew my penis, leaving my semen inside him.

I released the soldier and he fell, sliding down the base of the statue, leaving a smear of blood and ejaculate from the sole of the Great Emancipator’s shoe to the floor, where he lay prostrate. He might have been unconscious. He might have been dead. I didn’t care. (I know now that I could not possibly have killed him. A member of the United States Armed Forces found naked and dead at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, blood leaking from his recently annihilated asshole; that certainly would have made the evening news.) I pulled up my pants and left him there. This time I didn’t forget to zip up.

On my way back across the mall, I stopped to live out a childhood fantasy, one that I think is common to all boys, a primordial desire that transcends race, class, and sexual orientation: I took a piss in the reflecting pool. The relief was immediate; there is no more soothing sound than that of running water, and no more soothing act than urinating after sex (or after you’ve raped the living shit out of a racist white boy). I looked across the pool to the obelisk, General Washington’s imperious erection, still stiff after all these years, the world’s most acute case of angel lust, and I thought of a joke, an enduring classic, perhaps the only joke ever to truly capture the American experience.

I heard it for the first time from a Greenwich Village mulatto, highest of the high yellows, what the cracker lying at Lincoln’s feet would have probably called an “octoroon,” who loved to give ingratiating, servile blowjobs to the biggest, darkest coons he could find and who always swallowed. He had just finished, and he rose, suddenly, to look me in the eyes. “I need to tell you something,” he said, and my stomach knotted, I dreaded these moments, these revelations that were supposed to cultivate intimacy, the illusion that we would ever have (ever be allowed to have) anything more than a series of quick fucks in public restrooms and empty parking lots.

“Did you know that I have niggers in my family tree?” He kissed me, playfully, and I could taste the cum on his lips, and then he laughed. “They’re still hanging there.”

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