SoMa Literary Review - Fudgepacking

Fudgepacking

By Eugene Taitelbaum

In 1992, I biked alone across the southern United States. On that trip I faced wind, dehydration, illness, the stink of roadkill, the horror of mechanized humanity, and myself, my own person, for weeks at a stretch. I've almost lost the memory of some details that might actually mean a lot. For one: I almost got raped in New Orleans.

That's what this story is about.

It's hard to believe I could forget a night like that. But growing up, I learned how to make it in the world. You don't make it as a drama queen. You make it taking everything in stride, treating every trauma as just another day in the life. My father told me to "keep my head" when it came to sex, and I've followed that advice to a fault. So I made myself jaded by pretending I was already there.

Some evening in Mississippi, I wrote a journal entry:

Recent dogs: Spanner @Bike Mike's in NO. Walk, run, drag, play with water bottle. Real fun dog. Able to eat terrified Mexican Hairless pups in one snap. Buck in Call o' Wild. Two dogs by my sanitarium in Beauregard Parish - Scottie, MexHairless. Yap yap. Steven the fuckhead's poopie poodle. My hand in its shit. Smell stayed for hours. Big scary black dog here. I got its poop on my new sky-blue bag. Smell was memory of last night, my first fudgepacking. Louise in Austin at Zendik Arts joint.

These words are in black ball point ink on a 2 x 4-inch scrap of paper that I find while searching for a US savings bond through the chron file of my life, the series of plastic bags containing random floor schmutz from emergency cleanups ahead of family visits in 1993, 1995, 1996, 1998. The paper's tattered and wrinkled state can't hide what pad it's from. It's a pad I carried on the end of that bike trip. "This is gonna be good," I say, as I pull it out to read.

But reading it at first it makes no sense. I can't figure the time, or place. Buck? Spanner? Dogs? Until slowly I put it together. NO is New Orleans. Bike Mike's must be where I bought new panniers. A big dog must have lived there. Call o' Wild. Jack London. That's the sort of novel you can find in bookstores in Texas, or maybe in a ditch. I guess I reread it on that trip. That must have been when I belatedly figured out that London was a racist. "My sanitarium" must have been the ditch where I got sick and laid down to rest in western Louisiana. I stayed there a day longer than I was welcome, and faced police guns for the second time of the trip. But when they realized I posed no threat, they left me to the devices of the landowner, a young man who warned me of water moccasins and offered me a 2-foot-diameter tray of frozen meats. Louise in Austin must have been one of the punk rockers at the warehouse where I crashed for a night, and I guess she had a dog too. Trying to remember this I feel like Buck, whose dreams still brim with a childhood California home, even as he almost freezes to death in the Arctic winter. Names and dates are gone, but fleeting images remain.

So what are the fleeting images of the poopie poodle, the one who got so much ink, and who the fuck was Steven the fuckhead?

Looking at the paper, the memory gradually moistened and opened like a desert flower.

* * *

After two days trying to sleep off a fever in a pine lowlands ditch in Beauregard Parish, I gave up, hitchhiked to the Interstate, and then bused to New Orleans. I arrived around nine at night. A former roommate had referred me to a dozen close friends in New Orleans, and the first one I called was named Victory. The phone rang three times and I expected an answering machine. Instead, a voice answered, and said "This must be Steven." In one dime's phone call, Saint Victory offered me a place to stay and gave me loving reassurance of rest and relief. Minutes later, my bike was reassembled and burdened with crumbling panniers and I was cycling through the city with a pizza delivery boy. The streetlights twinkled, the buildings hummed quiet songs, and the night was a deep soaking nutrient bath infusion.

At Victory's well lit flat, with its 16-foot ceilings and flowing silk curtains throughout, I laid down my bicycle on the second floor landing and sank into the shower and sobbed. I laid down and let the water tickle the worn soles of my feet, and the heat of the water and the love all around were already breaking the fever. Seven weeks from home, I had made it to the moist Mississippi.

Over the next three days, the joyous civilization soaked deep, feeding all of the hidden dry parts that had withered in a thousand miles of desert. I stayed with Victory, a successful silk-painter, and his beautiful Italian guest and apprentice, Marilia. The two of them spent days painting great swaths of white silk into brilliant menageries, while I slept and took short walks in the thick architecture and thicker heat. We had daily breakfasts at a courtyard cafe, the three of us eating croissants slowly and watching the few people present, me feeling more fabulous than ever and wishing for more crowds than we found in the viney courtyard. The curlicued buildings delighted me, their elegance and stately age combining with playful details and haphazard collapses. I rode Victory's old bike to the cemeteries. He gave me a deep massage. I napped in the afternoon heat between Marilia's light Italian meals.

In New Orleans I found heat and rest and heat and bike repair and in my rested last day there, heat and sex. It was part of life at the time, nothing remarkable, or that's what I made myself believe. I was imagining myself as tough and jaded and cool, so a one-night stand was just background pattern like pedals rising and falling. Steven the fuckhead. I had forgotten his name. But now seeing it I remember more about him than about most things. It is hilarious that I called it fudgepacking. I remember the blue eye shadow and the false or mascaraed lashes. The African skin and short hair. The modern apartment in the orange of a modern streetlight.

Steven seduced me at a bar. I was there in pursuit of a beautiful girl. Earlier, in the just after sunset evening, I had gone for a walk to test my recovered strength. I walked past a stone building with a colonnade a half-story above street level. I looked up at a young beauty sitting on the stone balustrade, a coffee in front of her. Suddenly, she jumped down to me, staring at me, smiling a sad and knowing smile and asking, "Were you once bald?" I immediately took her for a psyche case, and didn't know if I wanted to get involved in whatever was haunting her. But I decided to make conversation so I could look at her a little longer. She was beautiful and it would have hurt to laugh in her face, even as she followed up with, "Bald men are smarter. That's sexy. What's your name?" I don't remember her name, just her skinny young face, her long brown hair, the nymphomaniac lust in her eyes that I took as residue of sexual abuse. It wasn't the sort of person I'd want to be with when I was sober. I can't always take the pain that seemed to be hiding a fingernail's depth below her skin.

But three hours later, I had put away a drink and a few games of pool and was out for another walk. I went into the bar where I met Steven because I had seen the girl for the second time in the night. Maybe I'm thankful that she was occupied. Instead of fucking her and regretting it, instead I met Steven the fuckhead.

Steven was lounging on a long couch in a bar lit only by a few bare red and blue bulbs, holding a beer in a red plastic party cup. A "go cup" as they say in New Orleans. His makeup was cheaply done, almost in a parody of drag, a sort of half-hearted or jaded effort at pretty, like an old whore. I don't think we talked about much. I sat next to him because it was more interesting than any other spot in the lonely crowded bar. Soon he was caressing my back through my T-shirt and I was massaging his strong calves. He was warm, radiating out through muscular, almost hairless legs. His fingers danced magic on my back, the first loving touch I had felt in six weeks and 2000 miles. My cock was embarrassingly hard, and I drank some of his beer and we went out of the bar and kissed in the street. His lips and tongue were in my mouth, a familiar taste of beer, familiar soft skin, unfamiliar grace and ability at kissing. I was more excited than before. I wanted him, I loved that he wanted me, and I was thrilled to be far enough from home to do what I wanted without any retribution from the jealous, angry, needy lover I had left in San Francisco.

In an alley next to the bar, I opened his pants and caressed his cock. I got down on my knees, but I didn't want his cockhead. A tiny drop of precum held all my hidden fears in its glistening pearl. Fear of AIDS was the rational part. From a decade's distance I dare remember the other fears: Fear of queerness. Fear of blackness. Fear of unfaithfulness. Fear of his transsexual gutsiness. Fear of his femininity. Fear of being caught, even drunk at 4 in the morning. I licked his cock, palmed his big balls, let the worry settle in my gut, figured that a condom would set me free from fear, and said, "later, at your place."

His apartment building was sad and sordid. It was near the Quarter, but in a poor area nearby, where the lighting was not the lovely twinkle of historic lamps but rather the orange glare of modern cobra-heads. The shoddy 1970s construction of the building betrayed its classical French neighborhood like a digital watch peeking in a film about ancient Egypt. We walked quietly up the outdoor staircase and entered, turning on only the bathroom light.

Steven promptly stripped, and did something I had never seen before. He gave himself an enema with a rinsed shampoo bottle. I found out later, from his angry roommate, that the shampoo had not belonged to Steven, but down it went down the thirsty shower drain. He squirted two bottlefuls of water up his open ass, draining them into the toilet with a sound like diarrhea, and just as seductive. His body was a sight. He said he practiced kung-fu, and I'll never know but I know he was strong and solid. He went to the kitchen; when he came out his strong ass and lower back were slick with canola. At that point I lurched from lust into the annoyance. "You're washing that off" I told him, explaining how condoms didn't work after touching oil. He didn't know about that. He told me, "I'm clean, I'm pure, I can tell. I have special powers." He looked in my eyes and told me as though he believed it himself, "I'm a voodoo priest. I can tell. I'm pure."

Remembering New Orleans from that little slip of paper, I find "Steven the fuckhead" opening into a dark living room and an anger rare in my life. I remember his smell, the sweet smell of butthole and the heat of the night. His living room was full of streetlight and maybe light from some other room. Shadows were sharp and confusing and we kissed, his lips overtaking my face as I melted. He paper toweled most of the oil off his ass but it didn't matter because he only had one rubber anyway. He told me to use it, to fuck him. I put on the rubber and got inside him for a minute. But soon enough I was scared, and lost any excitement I had felt. I still wanted to finish what I had started. Steven went to suck me and wanted me to suck him down. My AIDS-fear, unrelieved by a condom, became anger. He firmly pushed my head at his tempting, curving cock. He probably meant it in fun. But I said no, and he didn't stop. Moments later I said no as he forced his raw cock against my ass, rubbing it around. It was probably the safest sex he'd had all week but I was scared and I said no. We were rolling around on the carpet and his head had ended up between my legs. My anger exploded as he put one, two, three fingers in my butt, so fast, so dry, pain overtaking what was left of joy. Maybe it was the beginning of rape. It felt sort of good, but also a surprise of pain. I'll never know if I was just scared of him, or if he was really attacking me. I took no chances. I held his head hard between my knees and lied. "You're not the only one here who's studied kung fu. If you don't want me to break your neck you're going to get away from my ass." I was shaking.

A half hour later in the near-dawn heat, I was at the bar where we'd met. Steven had been detained at home. When I left he was apologizing to his roommate for waking him, apologizing for throwing out the shampoo, apologizing to me for making me feel threatened, apologizing for apologizing. I had figured out when the roommate woke up that Steven didn't really live there, he was couchsurfing and desperate. But my sympathy was muted. I was outside again, drunk with the hour, the liquor, a fading fever, night heat, and strangeness. I went on a short quest for my nymphomaniac. I wanted just to hold her and be held and not know rape, not of me, not of Steven, not of her.

I don't remember Steven's poodle at all. That's what got recorded, the stink of the poodle poop. I was Marco Polo in the land of incontinent canines. I love that I called it fudgepacking.

Eugene Taitelbaum writes and lives in San Francisco.