SECTION FOUR

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COLUMN SIXTY-SIX, DECEMBER 1, 2001
(Copyright © 2001 Al Aronowitz)

END-OF-THE-WORLD SEX

WARNING!  FOR ADULTS ONLY!  PERSONS UNDER 18 YEARS OF AGE ARE NOT ALLOWED TO READ THIS STORY.

[Tsaurah Litzky is a poet and writer of fiction, non fiction and erotica. Her work has appeared in Best American Erotica 95, 97, 99, 2001 and will be included in BAE 2002. She has also been published in Penthouse, LONGSHOT, The Unbearables, Crimes of the Beats, Appearances, Downtown Poets, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Pink Pages, Beet and many other books and periodicals. Her poetry books include Kamikaze Lover (Appearances 1999) and the just published Good Bye Beautiful Mother (Low Tech Press 2001). Formerly a columnist for the now defunct New York arts weekly Downtown, she now teaches erotic writing and literature at the New School University. ]

My friend Carri tells me that since the disaster her Dom won't let her out of bed.  The minute he gets home from work he grabs her.  It was like a second honeymoon at first, she says, but now she is exhausted, worn out, her Jezebel always sore and aching.  I tell her she is free to experiment with my collection of lubes.  Lately I hadn't had much use for them.  She says thanks but she had better get her own.

I am yearning for some end-of-the-world sex but so far I have had no luck.  The art dealer I picked up at the New Museum a week after the disaster had slim, agile toreador hips.  He looked like he could maneuver well in tight places but when we went back to his apartment he only wanted to do sixty-nine.

I was bloated, swollen with sorrow and rage, all my juices bottled up inside me and what I wanted was to be pierced, penetrated and drained.  I told him I have some wonderful lube with me, I got it in Amsterdam on the Street of Earthly Sorrows last spring. 

He looked at me as if I had just told him I had an acrylic womb.

""No way!"' he says, ""I know all about those lubes, they are full of estrogens, I've heard they can give a man breasts."

I'm astounded at his ignorance.

"You must be kidding," I say.  "Very funny, ha, ha, ha.'

I didn't tell him that I think hermaphrodites are hot.  If he had breasts it would make him really exciting to me, a lover for the new millennium.  Instead I put my jacket back on and went out the door.

When I got home, I stripped, fell into bed and slept.  I dreamed of men with breasts and hermaphrodite sex.  I mated with a hermaphrodite with many sets of arms like a Hindu God and two cocks, one between his legs and one growing from the center of his


She sees a homeless man
stroking his prick.
Everyone pretends not to notice


forehead.  Eight, ten, twelve sets of hands caressed me while I hold his two purple cocks in my hands and pulled at them rhythmically as if they were teats 

There is a homeless man who lives in a three-sided packing crate house underneath the BQE overpass.  I always see him when I am coming and going to the "A" train.  He is heavy set and beneath his tattered sweaters it looks like he has breasts.  He seems to have breasts.  Maybe he is a hermaphrodite.  He often has his prick out and is stroking it with filthy hands.  Everyone passes by, pretending not to notice.

Since the bombing I can't stop myself from glancing over.  His tool is uncut, huge, the size of my forearm, he could spawn dynasties, propagate thousands.  When I look over at his terrible, fleshy baton, I become excited.  A warm, liquid lava bubbles between my legs.  I wonder if this is my end of the world sex.

The headlines become more bizarre, more sensational.  Mayor Giuliani announces they have not found any bodies for five days but they are finding more and more body parts. Scam artists try to sell families of the victims dirt from the site, Taliban are infiltrating our colleges, gas mask sales soar.

The Mayor says we should get back to normal, eat in our restaurants, take in movies, Broadway shows.  When I go to teach my evening classes at a university in Greenwich Village, despite his urging, the restaurants are empty.  The once bustling streets nearly deserted.

At night I keep having hermaphrodite dreams.  One night there are two hermaphrodites in the dream.  They both have long blond hair, obese, fleshy tits and gray, squiggly cocks like silver corkscrews.  One lies beneath me, one on top.  I writhe frenzied, sandwiched between breasts and cocks.  I come again and again and when I wake up in the morning the sheets are wet, soaking.

First I wonder if this means I will meet hermaphrodite twins, then I wonder if this new obsession is a kind of hysterical reaction to the bombing, some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder.  I have a dreadful compulsion to read all about the bombings.  In the mornings I pull on some clothes right after waking and go out and get the newspapers.

When I open the downstairs door and step out into the streets, there is that now familiar burnt charcoal smell in the air.  Across the river the fire is still burning.

My nocturnal yearnings for a hermaphrodite continue to baffle me.  I find myself undressing for bed earlier and earlier.  Last night I was under the covers at a quarter past nine.  This time I imagine a hermaphrodite who is little more than a boy, a delicate cocoa boy with moccachino skin, golden nappy hair and eyes the color of honey, his tiny cock, not much bigger than a praline in my mouth, tastes of cinnamon.

I had three fingers in the slit between his caramel bon-bons.  He was suckling gently at one nipple while with his nimble, wee fingers he pulled playfully at my snatch.  The phone rang.. I didn't want to leave him so I let the machine take it.  The voice of Steve Nicholson, a painter and my one of my dearest friends, floats out in to the room.  He has decided to move back to his family farm in Northern California.

"My hands are always trembling," he said, I'm too nervous to paint anymore, I sold my loft to Tony Bambini."

I'm shocked, how will I cope without him?  Now I jump up and grab the phone.

"Don't go" I say, "Who will I complain to?"

"I have to get out of here," he says, "I'm terrified of more suicide bombers, toxic chemicals in the water supply, poison gas in the subway, anthrax.  We can talk on the phone, e-mail."

He wants to come over and bring me a small lamp I have always admired.  He has painted a purple moose and an orange pine tree on the lampshade.

"I just don't want you to leave," I say.  "And I'm already in bed, but why don't we meet at the Right Bank Bar tomorrow night, I'll buy you a farewell drink, if you change your mind I'll buy you two drinks."

"I won't change my mind but I'll meet you at nine o'clock," he says.

I say OK and when I go back to bed I find my little friend is still there waiting for me.

Steve is already sitting at the bar when I arrive.  He looks like a lumberjack, a big guy who always wears plaid shirts and jeans.  The exquisite miniature landscapes he paints are a surprise.  There is a brown box wrapped and tied with handles under his barstool that must be the lamp.  His face just lights up when he sees me, there is a halo around his head, the air in the bar seems to be charged with electricity.  I can hear it whiz around my head to the beat of Jumping Jack Flash on the jukebox.

The bottles behind the bar are covered with precious gems, rubies, emeralds, sapphires.  The mirror is one solid sheet of diamonds.  The sudden sense of heightened awareness, this pseudo LSD glow is what Virginia the bartender calls Twin Towers delirium tremens.  Everyone is getting them, they come and go.

"Well if it's not Miss Dirty Stories of 2001." Steve calls out, his halo doubling in size.  I sit down on the bar stool next to his.

"Miss Dirty Stories doesn't have anything to write about, she's a fraud," I tell him.  I met Steve, ten years ago here at the bar.  We got drunk on Wild Turkey and went off to his place to write a dirty story of our own.  The geometry of his six foot five, 300-pound frame and my five feet tall frame did not compute.  Skewered on his huge tool I felt like a tiny


A lot of people
are leaving
the city


cock ring.  I could not encompass him and kept sliding off.  In the middle of what might have eventually been the act, we both started to laugh and couldn't stop.  Then we decided to dress and go to Chinatown for a very, very, early breakfast.  Now we are great friends.  We commiserate about the vicissitudes of our careers and our love affairs.

He pokes the box below his bar stool with his size fourteen foot.

"Every time you turn on this lamp, I hope you'll remember me," he says.

"Yeah, I'll remember that when the going got tough, you ran away."

The light goes out of his face and he looks sad.

"Come on, he says, ""Give me a break.  A lot of people are leaving.  They don't want to raise their kids in the city."

"But you don't have kids,"' I interject.

"I am a kid," he answers, "Anyway weren't you going to buy me a farewell drink?"

"Yes, I say and motion over to Virgina, the bartender.  She is wearing a low-cut, red leotard top to show off the tattoo of a butterfly on her chest.

"Our usual, two Cuervo Gold Margaritas, straight up, no salt.  And make them extra strong, I have the tower tremens.'

"Who doesn't," she answers, and then I say:

"Can you believe this big oaf is leaving us?"

"Yeah, I know, he told me," she answers.  When she brings our drinks and makes change from the twenty I put on the bar. She says, "The next one's on me."

Steve raises his glass and clinks it against mine.

"To a better life," he says.

"I hope so," I reply.

"Besides it's gonzo crazy here," he adds.  Then he tells me about a big loft party he went to on Saturday night.  It was mobbed, everyone was making out.  People couldn't keep their hands off one another.

"It was like one big, extended daisy chain,"" he says.  "People were screwing on the couches, in the bathtub.  There was a woman on her knees in one corner giving men blowjobs.  Can you imagine?  There was a long line in front of her."

I ask him, "Did you go stand on the line?"

He doesn't answer.  He hangs his head, maybe hoping I don't see that he is blushing.  He changes the subject.

"There was probably Viagra in the punch," he says.

"Fear is a more powerful aphrodisiac," I state pompously, as if I'm an aphrodisiac expert.

"You must be right," he says.  "It's the end of the world, what else is there to do but have sex."

Then I tell him about my hermaphrodite dreams and we finish our drinks.  Steve motions Virginia to bring us another.

"Maybe you should go to the Eulenspiegel Club," he says. "Make your dreams become a reality.  I'll be in town till the end of next week.  I'll go with you"

"You look like a CIA agent or an ubermensch cop," I tell him, "No one will come near us."

"You're wrong," he says, "I'd be a big attraction, they'll be on me like flies on sugar, but right now, I have to see a princess about a frog, excuse me."

He gets up and makes his way to the back of the room and the stairs that lead down to the bathrooms.  I think about how I will miss him and suddenly feel like I'm going to cry.  I pick up my drink and finish it in a great gulp.  I make myself smile.  I despise looking forlorn in public.

There are more people in the bar now.  The tape is playing Tumbling Tumbleweed.  The couple on the other side of me gets up and leaves as a little crowd of five or six people come in.  They occupy the newly vacated seats next to me and the others stand behind them.  It is a group of Virginia's friends.  They are all tattooed and pierced.  They have shaved heads or long dreadlocks, blue hair or Mohawks, many visible piercings.

One of the guys has silver studs shaped into a question mark on his cheek.  They look like they are in some future world punk band.  Actually they go to school with Virginia at the Columbia University School of Economics. The guy sitting right next to me is slim and rangy.  His sleeveless, leather vest shows off his lean, muscular arms, covered with blue tribal tattoos.  He has a clean-cut handsome face, a young Henry Fonda in Grapes of Wrath.  His dark hair is shaved close to his skull, and there is a Coptic cross tattooed in the center of his forehead.

Virginia once introduced us.  His name is Hook and we talked about how he is putting himself through school working for a silkscreen company.  I wonder where Steve is and I look around.  I see him at the back of the bar.  A tall, elongated Giacometti woman with red hair to her waist is holding him by the arm and talking up at him.  He looks over her head and catches my eye and smiles.

I turn my head and find Hook looking right at me.

"Hi, aren't you the writer," he says.

"Yeah," I answer, ""Guilty!"

""Virginia showed me your poetry book," he said, "It's great, not gender based, not that usual snobby feminist glob that goes on and on about the glory of pussy and ranks men. You're way beyond that."

He is obviously a very smart guy.  He wants to know when my next poetry book is coming out.  I tell him I've been working on a book of erotic stories for a year, that the only poem I have written in the last year was about the bombing.

"How does it go?" he asks.  I tell him the first line, it's all I can remember.

"Bitter ashes of sunset float down through the sky like dots in a comic. . ."

"That's great.  When do I get to hear the rest?" he says, and I realize that he's coming on to me.  At least he hasn't given me that terrible line, the one that will make me reject him.  He hasn't asked me if I like younger men.  He offers to buy me another drink.  I look back and see that Steve and the elongated redhead are kissing passionately in one of the booths.  I accept the drink and start to flirt with him.  We flirt through two more drinks and when he asks me to come home with him. I say yes.

Hook helps me on with my coat, I try to appear cool, nonchalant.  I am breaking one of my own rules, one I have broken many times before; never go home with someone the first time they invite you.  We walk down Bedford Avenue through a starless, cloudy night to Hook's apartment a few blocks away.  I have forgotten the lamp but I don't care.  Hook lives right above The Buzzard's Nest Bar, a notorious hangout for the local cops.

"At least the building is safe," he says grinning at me as he unlocks the door.

The music from downstairs is so loud it's deafening.  Strains of Frank Sinatra singing, New York, New York float up though the floor.

"That's all they play ever since it happened," he says. "It's driving me nuts."

He ushers me in before him, shuts the door and switches on the light.  In the stark light of the single bulb, I see how thin he is, supple like a boy.  His kitchen consists of an old stove and a table made out of a door and packing crates.  On the wall above the table is a large blowup news photo of the second plane hitting the south tower.  Underneath the image, the words END OF THE WORLD OR BEGINNING OF A NEW WORLD are printed on


'He puts his hands
inside the waistbands
of my skirt. . .'


the photo in red magic marker in large block letters.

Hook sees me looking at it.

"I'm working on a silkscreen of that," he says.

Everywhere, there are stacks of packing crates filled with books. 

"My castle," he says deprecatingly but I tell him I like it.

We just fall onto each other, start to kiss.  Hungry, ravenous, we suck each other in.  Still kissing me, he walks me backwards through the open door of his other room towards the bed.  He puts his hands inside the waistbands of my skirt and tights and pulls them down to my ankles.  I step out of them and out of my clogs.  He unbuttons my cardigan sweater and slips it off down my arms.  His lips keep me occupied, his mouth is a loving cup that I am drinking from.  The bedroom window is open.  I shiver in my bra and panties even though there is a fire building inside me.  With one arm he shuts the window, with the other he pushes me down almost roughly on the bed.  I watch him take off his boots, his jeans, and his vest.

I love his exotic markings, the blue wings on his back and on the top of his chest, the many tribal bracelets he wears burned into his arms. . . He is not wearing any underwear.  His cock is very long and thin, not pink at all, a startling white.  I notice that he has beautiful, large pink nipples.  They look soft, fleshy, like the nipples on a woman's breast.  I want to nurse there.

He steps back, mumbles something I can barely hear, then I make it out.

'This is going to be good, I know this is going to be good," is what he seems to be repeating like a mantra.

In an attempt to calm him and reach out to him, I ask him if he likes my underwear.  I am wearing my favorite matched set, black satin covered with red roses.

"Yeah, he says barely glancing down.  ""What kind of flowers are those, Carnations?" he asks.

"Sure, right, Carnations," I say and I just grab his hand and pull him down on top of me.

His body is so light on mine.  The last time I found myself in bed with a man, he had a big belly like a sumo wrestler.  Hook and I begin to kiss again but now he is more hesitant.  We kiss for a long time.  I'm getting wet, wetter, juice running down my legs, but I don't feel his steel pressing into my belly.  I wonder if it's the extra ten pounds I'm wearing on my thighs but he pulls his head up and says:

"You're so beautiful.  I didn't think you would be so beautiful."

I realize he is terrified.  I want him to ram his tongue so deep and hard into my mouth that my cervix opens up before it and he is tonguing my labia from the topside but instead he pulls away.  He seems to be weeping.

"I'm very sorry," he says.  'I can't do this.  Usually I'm hard right away."

"OK, don't feel bad, it's ok," I say.

I put my arm around his shoulders.  I pull him closer to me.  He nuzzles my neck then rolls off of me onto his back.  We lie there besides each other like two beached fish at Coney Island.  I wonder if this has happened because we are strangers or because we don't love each other.  I wonder if the disaster has rendered him impotent or if it was the three beers he drank as he sat with me at the bar.  I wonder if it's my old nemesis, tried and true, the luck of the draw.

I glance over at him.  His eyes are closed, the wing tattoos on his chest start just above his sternum.  It looks as if he is wearing a dainty scarf, a mantilla of blue lace.  His large nipples are bubble gum pink.  I want to touch them, chew them, suck all the sugar out.  First I lean over and kiss him briefly, sweetly on the lips.  I stroke his limp cock, cradle it in my hands for a while.  I learn the shape of it, stretching it in my hands, then I tuck it between his legs, He starts to mumble something, perhaps a protest, but I shut him up by putting my mouth right over his.

I push my tongue deep inside then I pull it out.  I push in again, fucking him with it.  Then I take his wonderful nipples between my fingers and I tug at them until the tip of each nipple pops out and hardens like a little clit.  Finally I put my mouth on his clit-nipple.  The surrounding skin is soft and smooth like the skin inside my pussy.  Hook must like what I'm doing because he is moving his body beneath me, rocking from side to side.

I move my hands down below his hips squeezing his legs shut tight.  He is pinned under me now, pinned with my mouth at his breast, pinned by my two hands below his hips.  I take my hands off the sides of his legs and put them together in a V. I press down on his new vulva.  I rub it, press it, caress it just the way I like to have my crotch rubbed before I spread my legs wide.  Hook is moving under me with such frenetic force that he throws me off but I'm not angry, I have moved into my dreams.  He is my hermaphrodite and he puts hand out and touches my face.  I kiss his wrist, his palm, the tops of his fingers and then he opens his thighs.  There it is, in all its splendor, pointing straight up to heaven, white, solid as marble.

As I rise and straddle him, I feel very happy.  He is still touching my face.  He prick fills me up to the top, hooks me into the center of life.  I'm so hot I think I must be burning him but he does not flinch.  He moves, thrusting higher and higher into me as I open wider and wider until we are at ground zero.  From my position astride him I can see through the bedroom door the picture of the jet hitting the second tower.  I hear a distant sound, a great explosion, like worlds colliding.  The walls of the room are shaking, the edges of the ceiling beginning to break apart.  

Just as I am coming, he comes too, exploding into me in a ball of fire and we are both propelled up though the crumbling roof, up, up into the black skies, our bodies disintegrating, mixing with the clouds like ashes. ##

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