A Moment of Doubt Read online

  A Moment of Doubt

  Jim Nisbet

  © Jim Nisbet

  This edition © PM Press 2010. All rights reserved. No

  part of this book may be transmitted by any means

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-307-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010927771

  Cover art by Gent Sturgeon

  Cover layout by John Yates

  Interior design by briandesign

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PM Press

  PO Box 23912

  Oakland, CA 94623

  www.pmpress.org

  The Green Arcade

  1680 Market Street

  San Francisco, CA 94102-5949

  www.thegreenarcade.com

  Printed in the USA on recycled paper.

  ONE

  . . . some kind of ultimate solipsism, big words and a hopeless attitude holding a needle gleaming with pre-ejaculatory fluid over the bent elbow bulging with circulation-deprived veins beyond the greasy thick hand-tooled leather belt with rising-sun-of-optimism belt buckle and the rolled sleeve. Black, too. Black sleeve. But needle work gives chickenshits like me the hyperventilations. The sweat come out cold already on your face. The point shivers above a weak flesh that’s screaming no to the rest of its system, its so-called friends, No, no, can’t you see what it’s trying to do to me? To you? To us? But the system doesn’t listen, at least the listening part of it doesn’t listen. Certain nerves duck into a bar for a quick shot. Others prepare some of that precipitate sociology folk like to come up with at times like this. Like, just imagine, if you can get your mind off that pre-ejaculatory fluid gleaming at the tip of the quivering needle, just imagine the pressure on this poor slob if he’s driven himself to this, the extreme of puncturing his own skin with a steel sliver, let alone the injection that follows, of a thick, mean fluid worse than any come that was ever shot, and purer, too, I’m straying, by man or beast or poly-dicked alien whoremonger, such extremes deep in the thick, bullshit encrusted sociological palimpsest labeled “Facial Distortions Encountered on Street Shitheads Due to the Tremendous Societal G-Forces Exerted Over the Mauled Extrapyramidal Features by His Scumbag Peer Group,” by One Who Knows.

  It’s hard, here, not to quote chapter and verse. Bob Dylan and Faulkner cornered the Bible. Fitzgerald bled Keats completely dry—although he never named one of his books Alien Corn , though he should have; Hemingway sacked Donne; Shakespeare did Shakespeare. Although nobody, until now, has utilized Toys of Desperation . Since this is the computer generation, I’m going to rename this book, called SCRAM , rename it Toys of Desperation , using the simple REN utility supplied with every copy of CP/M. Ready?

  REN B:

  (since we’re on the A: drive)

  REN B:TOYSDESP=SCRAM

  Kapow! Bet you didn’t even feel it. Check the cover. Different? You betcha. Check this one out.

  REN B:SCRAM=TOYSDESP

  Now what’s it say? A Moment of Doubt? Imagine that. Hold on. Which do you prefer?

  If SCRAM enter 0:

  If TOYS OF DESPERATION enter 1:

  Now check the cover. Like it? Yes? Good. No trace of either? Tricky. Tricky, that is, unless you got what it takes to use a disassembler, a debugging utility, a reassembler, etc., etc., to alter this program, this book you’re holding, by yourself. I’ll even give you a hint, dear reader: right now, right this very moment, as you’re buying, holding, reading, thinking about this text, you’re deep, deep within a SUBMIT routine, conceived, written, and implemented a long, long time ago, by me. Your dear chickenshit author. And as of now, because you found out about all this too late, you’re lucky I’m benevolent. Consider.

  Tiny’s pants split along the length of his member, the buttons popped loose like rivets exploding out of a submarine lost in the Mariana Trench. His dick looked like a road map wrapped around a blackjack drawn by S. Clay Wilson. XYX chromosomes, jaundiced corpuscles, cocaine and heroin coursed through thick veins the size of garden hoses up and around it like multilevel twinight freeways pulsing light around a skyscraper in a future megalopolis, like molten hydrogen in transparent conduits up and down a launchable, scum-charged rocket. Tiny encircled this inter-disciplinary vehicle with a thick thumb and forefinger and milked its root with a violent twist. A pearl of pre-ejaculatory fluid described a path through the foetid air of the dimly lit room like a sparkler flung off a bridge into a septic canal in some nameless, hopeless European city on a dark night full of murdered whores, to the wine-stained, cat-spattered ‘carpet’ below.

  “Indeed,” the voice of the third man only added to the darkness, “that marvelous prick’s not unlike a ray of hope in an otherwise hopeless city of doom.” He paused in order to exhale the pungent smoke of his perennial, unfiltered Gitane into the dank air between them. “Wouldn’t you say, Mr. Windrow?”

  Windrow said nothing.

  The slim hoodlum aimed the point of one of his impeccable lovely Italian shoes at the pit of Windrow’s stomach, betraying his taste for melodrama. But he missed. A little high. Windrow heard the rib, one well known to him, the ‘floater’, so-called because, unlike the ones above it, the floater is not attached to the sternum, crack. He felt it, too. Both sensations were duly reported to that cortical emissary in charge of such things, who sent a ‘groan’ message through channels. Windrow groaned. Then he drooled on himself, as the so-called ‘black wing’ passed momentarily before his eyes. Tiny made the sort of sound in his throat most people associate with pleasure, and slid his fist slowly up the entire length of his immense cock.

  Feel safe? Wet? Erect? Yeah. Yeah! And why? What do you know of these people? What’s their motivation, there are three of them, for Chrissakes! Where is this room, with come on the walls? Why don’t we all have a key to it, if they ever lock it? But why would they lock it? Who the hell would want to get in here? Youse do?

  “Tiny, here, has AIDS, Mr. Windrow.” The man known as Thimbelina viciously grabbed a handful of Windrow’s hair and yanked the groaning detective’s head up. Why can’t you let him alone, the cortical emissary frowned, he’s given himself up to the moans already, they’re good for him, and they’re what you want, aren’t they? But Thimbelina was adamant, he had something else on his mind. “Can you hear me? Are you listening, Mr. Windrow?” Someone beyond the window and three stories down on a busy street stood on their horn impatiently. Thimbelina threw Windrow’s head aside as if it were the wadded up brown paper bag the second six pack had arrived in. “Gleam of sapience,” Th imbelina muttered, staring out the window to Eddy Street below.

  ‘Gleam of sapience.’ That’s a good one. How could anyone allow my dimwitted detective to be compared to an amber bead of pitch on a board?

  He exhaled smoke against the glass. Whores, beggars, a couple of socialites getting out of a black limousine, lots of traffic including the cab blaring its horn backed up behind it, two cops talking to two hookers in a doorway, the hookers smoking and smiling nervously, these guys wanta chat or fuck or pop or what, the cops smiling in their moment of power for the evening, and Thimbelina puts out his butt against the glass between them and him, grinds the cinders slowly against the transparency, the dead ashes sift onto the sill below, he doesn’t like cops.

  “Tiny’s very horny, Mr. Windrow,” says he, absently, “very horny indeed.” The thin man turned from the window and considered the dark room. Windrow was trussed to a chair, leaning away from the electrical cords torn from the overturned television set, that bound him to the chair, leaning away from his bonds and into his pain. Tiny stood very near Windrow, not close enough to touch the detective, but close enough to excite himself, against the wall beyond the foot of the
bed.

  “I, personally,” continued Thimbelina, crossing the room, “would love to oblige him—have, in fact, done so, in the past,” he added wistfully, “but, alas, no longer can we indulge our . . . passion.” Saying this, Thimbelina stroked Tiny’s immense engine with the long, carefully manicured nail of his delicate forefinger. “Oh,” Thimbelina said breathlessly, “we continue to tease one another, that doesn’t matter.” He turned his back on the hulking Tiny and faced Windrow, who regarded this soliloquy obliquely with one eye, squinting through his pain. “It’s the so-called blood contact that does you in.” He crossed back to the window and considered the world through it. Rain had begun to fall against the pane. Thimbelina made as if to touch one of the raindrops though the glass. “Diseased come in your ass is what they’re talking about when they say that,” he murmured, following the raindrop with his fingernail as it progressed down the glass, toward the cheap aluminum frame below. But the nail’s pace accelerated, leaving the drop behind, until the cuticle suddenly screeched down to the sill and halfway back up. The sharp, jagged sound penetrated even Windrow’s pain and made his spine shiver. Tiny, three hundred pounds if he was an ounce, groaned deep in his throat, stood up on his toes, arched his pelvis in the air before him, and extended his fist along the length of his penis until the clubbed head of it disappeared beneath the fold between his chubby thumb and fore-finger. These digits then tested the fluid squeezed thus out of the tip of his urethra as if it were a precious liquor possessing a fantastic index of viscosity, which it is and does, then slid it all back down the length of his cock and smeared his balls and crotch with it, his pants meanwhile dropping to his knees.

  “Epic, isn’t it, Mr. Windrow?” Thimbelina had turned to appraise the scenario of his own creation again. “A beautiful thing, wasted now, soon to be . . .” He turned again to the window. Tiny, staring at Windrow, began to use his free hand to play with his own ass.

  I can’t take it anymore, either, and pace out to the mailbox. Several of my subscriptions have expired. A check, overdue for six months, arrives miraculously. This will allow me to survive for another week, if I don’t pay the rent, which has been due for three weeks. I hate to do this to my landlady. She’s a doll and would probably allow me to fuck her for a discount, perhaps for the whole thing. She doesn’t even need the money. But she owns my home, what can I do but put up with her conditions? A catalog for gardening tools, and a flyer inquiring after a lost child. Actually, she’d love to throw me out because she’s read my last couple of detective novels, but she’s afraid to do so for the same reason. Someone stupidly gave them to her as ‘light’ entertainment during one of her periodic trips to Club Med. About a week later she remembered where she’d seen the name before. All those checks! Month after month, for years! She’d no idea she’s harboring an artist, she thought I was just a bum. Wait till she realizes the difference. She’s begun to get the idea already, by getting me to autograph certain pages of So Long, Pockface , detailing in some detail a rather arcane codex to the Kama Sutra made up entirely out of my imagination. She thought she knew that book backwards and forwards, as it were, the Kama Sutra I mean. She has taken, it seems, the trouble to know my books backwards and forwards, at least it would seem so by the way she quotes them to me and makes coy little references to events and remarks in them, but most of these naturally go right over my head, since she obviously knows the books very well, much better than I, at least, know them. She could let on to me about the page numbers of purple-assed baboons in bondage, coyly, and I’d be none the wiser. I try to make the books interesting, to a certain cut of mind, but I can’t be expected to remember how or why I have done so in the past. It’s hit or miss anyway, so far as I’m concerned. Usually I just try to write dreamy, with lots of knives and forks and trains and assholes and stuff, so that it seems a certain kind of inevitability is involved, an inexorable kind of plant life is growing up between the words as you read them, or as you leave them in the dark, folded against one another, behind you as you go, so that, even as you refer backwards to a passage you’ve already read, to clarify the one you’re reading now, the older one seems unrecognizable as you reread it, and you can’t reconcile what’s on the page in front of you with your own until now very clear memory of it, which after all was just installed there moments or at the most a few days before, while you were on the A train ignoring the fat lady, blind, with a stick and a cup in one hand, groping the air in front of her with the other, making her way up the car singing “Over the Rainbow,” in the most plaintive voice you’ve ever heard, the crustiest New Yorkers dropping coins in her cup. It’s like the first time you ever heard Judy Garland sing the tune, knowing she was fucked up on pills already and slated to die a horrible death in between the recording and your audition of it, while you were still suckling papaya juice in a childhood island paradise, hopelessly ignorant of the ways and steel teeth and leafy humid dick-shaped tendrils of the world. Vagina dentata , let’s don’t forget all that, too, Kama Sutra, while we’re at it. That’s the kind of writing I try to do.

  Of course, the simpler you keep it, the better off you are. But no matter how you feel about it, you always want to emend, amend, interlineate, stipulate, regrind, make corollaries, footnote, restart, delete, and generally inflate your original train of thought.

  “It’s not unlike having a giant turbine carefully wrapped in your colon, Mr. Windrow, with all of the Hoover Dam coping with all of the snowmelt of the springtime Sierra Nevada coursing through it, and your prostate lights up like the city of Las Vegas, and your balls tingle like Tijuana next to it, and you recreate the river, plunging through the tubes, into the gorge below . . .”

  You can’t imagine how many times I’ve slaved over that passage. Tweaking it, stuffing it, charging it with emotion, meaning, sex . . . I type almost as fast as I lie, about 90 words a minute . . . . It’s hard, it’s a bitch concentrating on this stuff, especially the first time through, especially with the landlady breezing in and out all the time in her diaphanous kimono, buttonless, sashless, undergarmentless, her hair just so, lips wet and slightly parted, you can’t miss them, especially when you’re on the john in the little closet at the end of the hall, reading a computer magazine, and in she comes, there’s only one way to get from the hallway to the bathtub in the next room, and that’s through the john. So she’s always, it seems, just going in to have a bath, and you somehow forgot to shoot the bolt in the door, or just stepping out of the bath, wet and fresh, hair up in a towel, another wrapped around her. The second towel always covers her breasts very well, she’s shy about them, though I personally think they’re magnificent . . . Restif de la Bretonne declared a woman’s breasts as proof for the existence of God and I believe him . . . But the bottom of the towel never quite does the job. It stops midway along the cheeks of her ass, even when she’s standing in front of me and leaning back, trying to pull the hem down over her buns, excusing herself to me for interrupting me in the ‘library’, as she calls it, seeing as how every time she does this I’m trying to get some reading done, and squeezing past me toward the hall door. This is no easy feat. She has to step over me, sitting on the john with my pants around my ankles, over my knees to get in between me and the hall door, which of course opens inward, awkward. Naturally, she’s tall. And always, always she gets wedged between the door and my face, so that, the eighth or ninth time this happened, instead of excusing myself and blushing and absentmindedly standing up and leaning back against the toilet tank, knocking all the old copies of Reader’s Digest stacked on top of it to the floor, so that she could see damn well I had this immense hardon, the eighth or ninth time I say, I just sat there, just sat there, and stared at this clean, damp, silken bush not one inch from my nose. I could smell her, I could practically taste her. She’s dragging the towel down to cover her ass and making all these flustered excuses, so that the front of the towel actually picks up and droops down onto the top of my head, I’m surrounded by her smells and her textil
es, so that, still reading the computer magazine in my left hand, I put my right finger up her slippery, tight cunt, and thumb her clitoris. Isaac Newton discovered gravity, right?

  Her breath hisses past her teeth. It sounds like a case of whiskey sliding across the countertop at the liquor store, New Year’s Eve, paid for. Good whiskey. Noting my place in the article on CP/M utilities, I manipulate her labia. She moves her hips elliptically, suggestive. The penis, throwing off its downcast attitude, leaps up past the rim of the toilet, almost tearing off the prepuce on the bottom edge of the seat. It stands there, lurid, colorful and erect. It looks like Coit Tower at Christmastime, or most other municipally festive monuments, for that matter, at that time of the year. Think of the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower, the Washington Monument, Le Tour Eiffel, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, think of the Master Builder high atop the scaffold dropping the wreath over the tip of his spire and try not to laugh, go ahead, this is the twentieth century, go ahead. I’m busy. Marlene—you might as well know her name, she frequently has rooms to let—right away Marlene has her tongue rimming the lips of her open mouth and her breath coming and going like a beautiful apoplectic executive’s, jogging up the Kearney steps with a hangover, one hand gripping the doorknob and the other buried in a fistful of my hair. She clutches my mouth to her cunt and begs me to suck. Lick, suck, please, she said. The towel opens along an inverted V up her side and falls off as she places one of her large, highly arched, beautifully veined, perfectly formed feet on the toilet tank behind me, to facilitate the advantage I already have of being slightly beneath her, so that, looking up, I have this vision of a purplish-pink, steaming, smoking, dripping, paradisical garden, hung all round by dusky damp tendrils of mercy and passion, which is what any good optimist should see when he looks up, to heaven, but rarely does.

  She clutches my face to her cunt and it’s time to go to work. Rain begins to fall on the roof. Marlene screams for no apparent reason. I play a game, like mumble-de-peg or backgammon or any of those stupid frolics kids waste their time on, with pegs and holes, or parking attendants with slots and cars. The finger goes in her asshole, the thumb in her cunt, and my tongue finds her clitoris. The latter is presented to the teeth for little nips. She hisses and howls. My hand and face are soaked. A telephone rings down the hall. The doorbell chimes simultaneously. The rain increases. Now she has both her hands full of my hair, and rubs my skull against her crotch like she’s grating cheese. I roll the folded computer magazine into the kerf of her ass and tilt it in and out of the juices now so copiously flooding my hand, my face, her thighs. I riffle the pages like a deck of cards against her anus. With a shout she stumbles against the door and the frosted glass rattles in its sash, her foot slips off the toilet tank and hits the handle. The john flushes with a roar, and her screams announce her orgasm over the sound of the rushing waters with the combined terror and adrenaline of all the assholes who ever threw themselves over Niagara Falls in barrels. I am wrested off the toilet and into the wall with a crash, my head and shoulders jammed in between the bowl and the paper roll, down to the floor, still gnawing away, all my knuckles buried in her streaming orifices, her ass clutched to my face, gasping for air, for life, for meaning itself, where there is little or none, but more than most places.