Neil Smith

Sustenance


Terrell Maguire, a true sage in the Indiana sex trade industry, was the tall, fat, sweating owner of the Zebra Palace, a languishing ‘adult entertainment’ store in the mid-sized city of Buckner, Indiana, population 25,000, a blue-collar town perched along the trucker’s route to Chicago, about an hour outside of Indianapolis. The Zebra Palace used to be Happy Taylor Music once, and when ‘Tee’ bought the place from an old churchy guy who couldn’t make a living selling flute reeds and oboe lessons anymore, he gutted the place and replaced the records and song books with hardcore porno videos and magazines. Tee never said why he called it the Zebra Palace and no one thought to ask, but the innocuous title came to mean taboo among the hoosier gentry.

There are four booths at the back of the Zebra Palace, each containing a large selection of shorts – butt, suck, lesbo, gay, scat, etc., but booth number three is where some men-folk cautiously like to go. In booth number three there is a dish rag about waist high that can be lifted up and attached to a clumsily nailed-on Velcro strip. This covers a five-inch hole, what’s known as a Glory Hole or a Trucker’s Paradise. The edges have cotton padding duct-taped around them to avoid splinters and chafing, and on lucky occasions (via a knock on the wall and subsequent reply) there will be a mouth on the other side. There’s no charge to use the hole (according to Tee) but it’s ‘considered’ (by Tee) common courtesy to offer a fiver before putting the privates through, to keep the video machine running with quarters while occupying the booth, and for the designated cocksucker to tip Tee with a percentage of the take on his way out. Because of this ‘custom’ Tee was commonly referred to as a ‘cheap bastard’ and a ‘pimp.’ Tee retorted that he wasn’t in the business of ‘getting your stupid dicks sucked.’ When the complaining escalated, Tee calmly boarded up the hole (‘Go to Indianapolis then.’). Consequently, five bucks was considered pretty reasonable, and consequently the receiving end of the hole has bought a lot of bus tickets for transients, a lot of booze for drunks, a lot of burgers for the hungry, and a lot of satisfaction for the penis-obsessed.

Nathan Collier owned the hole for a while. Nathan was discovered by Tee in the basement of Coondie’s Grocery, a minimal little store where a peculiar crew gathered almost every night. Coondie, an old pervert (‘when you live in a small town you can’t be gay, so you gotta be a pervert’), told Tee about Nathan (‘He’ll do anything, and he’ll do it allll night’), and Tee curled his beard with his finger in fortuitous thought. Coondie always closed shop at ten o’clock sharp, and at that time certain friends would come through the back door, let the screen door whack, and walk down the narrow unlighted stairs to the basement, Coondie’s pad, which was cluttered with ratty furniture and stacks and stacks of musty and frayed detective magazines. Coondie had mentioned Nathan to Tee before, but Tee had never given much consideration to an unwashed, cretinous imbecile who could not stop sucking cock, until he put two and two together (The Zebra Palace and its glory hole, plus five dollars a head and Nathan’s mouth) and realized he could make money doing nothing, and money was becoming a scarce commodity at the Zebra Palace. So Tee went over to Coondie’s one summer night. He went around back and descended the dark concrete steps into Coondie’s stuffy basement. In the haze of pungent marijuana smoke he saw fat Ed Munsen from the textile plant; the creepy, monkey-like Taylor Samms grinning like the Cheshire Cat in a John Deer cap; old JD who complained about everything and was always hitching his pants up over his enormous belly; the timorous, twig-like Aubrey Chiestiwitz who let everyone know he had a degree in engineering (Associates) but lived with his aging parents; the lanky, looming, gray-haired Coondie; and a short and quite skinny guy with a pimply face and hollow eyes framed by stringy brown hair and a perpetually blank, idiotic smile. This, of course, was Nathan. When Tee glanced at Nathan, Nathan’s eyes went big and glassy. He leaned towards Tee and his eyes drifted down and fixed on Tee’s crotch as if they were screwing into it, and his moistened, purpley lips slightly parted in anticipation.

"Grab a beer,” said Coondie, and Tee shook off Nathan’s initial weirdness and popped open a Schlitz. Nathan stood there watching Tee until JD stood up and loosened his pants unceremoniously, his belly suddenly spilling out like a water-balloon. The sound of the belt unbuckling caught Nathan’s attention and he went over to JD and immediately began sucking on him. Tee watched as Nathan’s eyes rolled up into his head like he was kissing the girl of his dreams at the junior prom as he slurped hungrily on JD. Tee recognized instantly the almost desperate and pathological prurience; he’d seen it before in his day. Coondie leaned into Tee and asked if he wanted to see someone piss or shit in Nathan’s mouth, and Tee slowly shook his head. He preferred his sex more traditional; a couple hookers and a few grams of coke on a Friday night in Indy. But he also knew money when he saw it, and there on his knees devouring JD was simple, easy money. For years, the glory hole in booth number three was only occupied every so often, and the money generated was uneven. Now, if there were always a mouth behind it… Tee knew he could tap Nathan’s obsession like a spigot until it ran out.

Nathan came into Tee’s store the next morning around 10:00 wearing an old and faded yellow tee-shirt that said ‘Camden Carnivals’ on the front and ‘Collier’ on the back, and old disco-flared jeans that had been taken up a few times and then let down a few more times, the cuffs revealing eras like the rings in a tree trunk. The Zebra Palace didn’t open until eleven, but Tee always got there an hour early to smoke a cigar, play George Jones, maybe The Allman Brothers, and go over business in his meticulous, worrisome way. Tee nodded as Nathan wandered tentatively around in a semi-circle. He didn’t go far before he quickly walked over to Tee and quietly said, “H-hey”. Tee waited.

“Hey,” Nathan continued, “y-you want me to suck you off now? Wanna fuck my ass,” in a strange garbled voice while gripping his crotch as if he had to pee. Tee shook his head slowly and chuckled.

“Nathan, know this; you and I will never have sex of any kind whatsoever, but I have a proposition for you. We’re gonna try an experiment, c’mere,” he said, and led Nathan to booth number three. He pulled back the curtain.

“You see this,’ he said, lifting the flap, ‘this is a glory hole. It’s where men come day and night to get their dicks sucked, all shapes and sizes. C’mere.” They walked out of the booth and over to a door and Tee opened it.

“This is my storeroom, there’s the bathroom, and if you walk over here, you’ll see the chair where the guy sits who sucks dicks. Nathan, I’m wondering if you’d like to sit in that chair and suck all the dicks that come through that hole, and make some cash in the process.” Nathan squinted confusedly at Tee as if Tee were fading from his view. Tee registered the confusion and moved on;
“All you have to do is sit there and wait: The customers will typically drop five dollars or so through the hole before they start, house rules. Don’t do anything until they give you something. Whatever you make, save it up and give it to me at the end of the day, and I’ll give you a good chunk of change, say twenty-five percent.”

“Uh huh,” Nathan said. Tee frowned.

“Do you get what I’m saying to you?” Nathan said, “Okay, sir,” and smiled. Tee sighed, but decided to keep going.

“One thing: Don’t ever, ever tell anyone what you do, and don’t ever, ever bring anyone here, got it? People figure out where to go on their own, they always do. We get a lot of truckers come by here.”

Tee tweaked his chin in thought. “I guess that’s about it. Whaddya say, are you interested?”

Nathan looked at him, and said “I-I don’t need lunch, and y-you don’t need no toilet neither,’” and grinned sheepishly.

Tee blinked. “S’cuse me?”

“You don’t need a toilet, sir. You can shit and pee in my dirty l-little mouth,” Nathan said, and started rubbing his crotch furiously and fumbling with his belt buckle. Tee backed up slightly and calmly regarded him as Nathan tried to take off his pants, but the button and zipper combination seemed to befuddle him.

“Stop,’ Tee said, almost chuckling. “Stop. Son, I don’t care what you do when you leave here. You can scoop turds out of the toilet at McDonalds for all I care; but no, no, no. If I catch you doing any of that scat shit here, I’ll kick your scrawny ass all over the store and throw you out forever, got it?” Nathan stopped working on his pants.

“Play this right and I promise you’ll be sucking so much cock you’ll think you’re in penis heaven. Do me wrong, and you’ll never get another opportunity like this again, it’s that easy.” Nathan nodded.

“Okay, let’s give this a shot. Remember, ask for the money first, understand,” he said and left. Nathan sat down, dug in his pants and pulled out his scabby, abused penis. He began squeezing it, grimacing in ecstasy at the pain as he twisted it like a dishrag and the watery scabs began to slip around on their roots.

Tee didn’t hear much from Nathan that first day, but he knew he was getting some action because Tee was sending it his way. The regulars were drifting in and Tee would tilt his head knowingly toward the booths with his ‘there’s somebody back there today,’ look. Later in the afternoon, Ben Fitch in his dirty white tee-shirt, plumbers butt, and stumpy legs came ambling in and went straight back toward booth number three without so much as a hello to Tee, as if Tee cared. But in a moment, Tee began to smell something. He put his cigar in the ashtray and walked swiftly back to the booth just as Ben Fitch came out the storeroom door hitching up his pants. Ben looked at him and Tee registered his severe displeasure. Ben shrugged uncomfortably and quickly left. Tee went through the open storeroom door and turned to see Nathan sitting on the floor with his head leaned back, making a slight gurgling sound and touching his lips softly, his eyes half open, the stench sickening.

”Nathan,” Tee barked, and Nathan turned to him, relaxed and glassy-eyed. Tee clapped his hands to snap Nathan out of his sexual reverie.

“Goddammit Nathan, I don’t care what sick crap you do on your own time, but we don’t do that stupid, disgusting – stupid, dumb, crap here, you understand? Now my store smells like fat-ass Ben Fitch shit!” Nathan swallowed hard, rolled his tongue around the inside of his mouth and swallowed again.

“I got a serious urge to fuck you up, asshole! I do-not-need this!” He went into the bathroom and threw Nathan a trailing roll of toilet paper.

“Wipe off your goddamn face, for shit’s fucking sake.” He noticed that Nathan’s pants were wet.

“Goddammit man, did you piss your fucking pants, too?” Nathan nodded, and started opening and closing his legs like a trained seal. Tee stepped threateningly closer to Nathan and balled his fists in anger: “Do you not want to be here, fuckhead? Pee in the fucking toilet, understand? Understand? You’re stinking up my place like Coondie’s. Is that where you’d rather be, with those faggoty old cunt-heads? That can easily be arranged.” This was an idle threat and Tee knew it; the truth was a guy like Nathan is cash money, period, and guys like him are not easy to find. He had to make a valiant effort to make this work, and he knew Nathan was not a normal person, subject to normal reasoning. Tee heard the bell over the front door tinkle and was glad he’d left his cigar up there.

He fixed Nathan a look: “Are we clear, or are you just gonna be another stupid dipshit wasting my time?” Nathan nodded and smiled tentatively. Tee shook his head in exasperation and left, punctuating the lecture by slamming the storeroom door shut.

Nathan left the Zebra Palace around 11:00 that night. He had a residue of dried flaky cum on his chin and the tart smell of dick all over, which made him feel super-sexy. The back of his neck hurt but that was all right, the day was incredible - he may have sucked off fifteen men, maybe more; he got paid, with real money. He walked around the corner to Marmolada Avenue and strolled by Coondie’s. He wouldn’t go there tonight, he was too tired, and he didn’t need the money. He turned down Sylvester Street and headed to his house, the one at the end of the cul-de-sac with the tattered, flapping visqueen on the windows to keep out the cold. The lawn was yellow and high and the various shrubs unruly and shapeless, a rusty shopping cart sat near the overgrown path leading up to the front door. He opened the door and went in. The television was on and his mom was in her chair, staring blankly at the screen, fat and dirty in her faded flower-print smock, her stringy black hair hanging in her face. Her eyes met Nathan’s and Nathan lifted the half-eaten bologna sandwich off her lap and put it in the refrigerator. He walked into the bathroom and turned on the light: Nathan Collier, twenty-four years old, with twenty-five dollars in his pocket. He opened his mouth and looked at all the budding white papilloma covering the insides of his cheeks and tongue like an infestation of little cauliflowers. He ran his tongue over their numb, bumpy ridges, then grabbed the Listerine off the shelf and swished a bit around in his mouth. The mouthwash stabbed deep at his cavities, making them throb intensely, and he spit it out and grinned a quick, toothy grin at himself, and retreated to his room where he tipped over onto his mattress and fell into a deep sleep. Then things changed, and there was his mother sitting, watching TV with a gooey, smiling baby dangling half-way out of her womb. ‘Kiss your daddy, Nathan,’ the baby said, and Nathan felt himself trying to wake up and rolled over in his sleep.

Nathan awoke to the sunlight streaming through his window. He got up, peed, went to the refrigerator and took out the bologna sandwich. His mother was slumped in front of the TV, eyes half open. Nathan placed the sandwich on her lap as a man on TV said, “You’d think it can’t be done, and you’d be wrong.” Another voice said “whoa!” impressively. Nathan’s mother opened her eyes and regarded her son from some inconceivable distance. She used to yell all the time, about the cats, about the stupid car, about the crap they had to eat, about some man, but one day she just stopped. Nathan returned her expressionless gaze with his own that, in the timeless instant their eyes met, simply folded up the relationship like a matchbook and put it quietly away forever. Nathan left – he was hungry and wanted to get to work. However, Nathan’s hunger was different: The strange textures and freakish intensities of food had always startled and repulsed him ever since he was little, but food was never very plentiful anyway, with the exception of candy – for a while when he was little, he’d always eaten candy; sometimes it came with a shadowy figure ‘straight from the Big Show,’ and they snuck into his bed and warmed him, spooned with him and fed him like a secret friend, making up for the dinner slop that was inedible. The candy in bed however, didn’t last; the source went away and the missing space was soon replaced by the consumption of sex. As he got older, filling up all day on the contents and orifices of various men - in alleys, at their houses, in their cars - had a wonderfully fulfilling combination; there was the sating solidity and warmth in his stomach like food, but there was also the warmth of a man carried inside him, and it had a nasty bonus; a feeling like being naked in a circus, dancing and waggling his penis in front of a tent full of warily attentive school children. The men gradually became less shadowy and were assuming a sort of singlular presence, filling more spaces than food ever could, and Nathan made room for them by keeping his eating scarce. He remembered being an older kid, late at night, getting on a CB radio he’d found in a dumpster (with a glittery bumper-sticker on it that said ‘Check yer Handle’) and boldly calling into the mic.

“Breaker, breaker; are there any Chicken Hawks out tonight,” and the thrill of hearing a deep, husky voice query back, and then arranging a pre-dawn meeting, drawing them in with his child’s voice like a magical temptress from far away. Nothing he missed in school could have compared to that. Nathan’s prick was trying to stiffen in its crooked, cramped way as he walked to the Zebra Palace, and since no one was about he unzipped his pants and walked down the street with his sickly half-boner coolly bouncing in the sunshine, feeling stupidly satisfied.

Two months into Nathan’s tenure at the Zebra Palace and Tee was feeling optimistic. The place had some life to it, albiet of a scummy, sad and pathetic nature. Still, money was coming in. Nathan started wearing a baseball cap, the Baltimore Orioles. He brought in boxes of candy and Slim Jims, and a radio that played ‘your soft favorites from yesterday, and today: GLOW 97.5’ in the back room. One day he came walking in wearing a stiff and new, light-green, button-down-collar shirt.

“Nathan, my man, you been to K-mart,” Tee mocked incredulously, but he knew that Nathan was feeling good. Word was making its way through the usual channels – here’s a place you can go. There were new men coming in almost every day – truckers mostly, the odd turnpiker, and the usual pimply waifs and loners. Sometimes Tee heard the brakes of a semi release right outside his door, and then the crunch of gravel as a boot stepped down from the cab, and he thought ‘what is it about truckers that they can sniff out a cock-sucker wherever they go?’ Sometimes there’d be two or three men milling about the store and Tee knew they were waiting their turn for booth number three to come open. The word going around was that Nathan gave head with an almost sublime and devoted intensity no nymphomaniac in her parents bedroom, or street-wise whore parked in the church parking lot, or toothless pederast in a highway rest stop, could hope to match. All in all, things were half-way looking up for the Zebra Palace. In any case, gone were the days when Nathan did ‘hot lunches’ and licked the dicks of confused dogs for the spare change of insatiable old perverts in the basement of Coondie’s cheap little grocery. Now he went over there because he wanted to, Tee supposed. ‘He might still be eating shit out of people’s asses,’ Tee thought, ‘but he’s doing all right.’

* * *

After six months of hanging out at the Zebra Palace however, things weren’t so ‘all right:’ A subtle change began to manifest itself in Nathan. He was beginning to look thin and pale, his skin was splotchy, his manner sluggish; more so than usual. Tee figured that he was sucking a lot of different dicks, and probably eating too much shit and piss at Coondie’s and worried that he might have AIDS.
“Hey Nathan,” Tee asked, “you got AIDS?” Nathan shook his head and shuffled off to his glory hole. ‘How the fuck would he know,’ Tee thought. Days went by and Nathan was gradually coming in later, and spending more time in the bathroom.

“I got diarrhea,” Nathan answered listlessly when Tee asked him if anything was wrong.

“Well, you shouldn’t eat so much freakin’ junk food, it ain’t good for your digestive system,” Tee said, without irony. But he started finding Nathan asleep on the toilet and asleep on the stool. One day he just didn’t show. Tee was worried; worried about his moneymaker, the fate of his shitty little store, and his Friday nights with the whores, and called Coondie: “Maybe your time with him is up,” Coondie said, matter-of-factly.

“Why should it be, he’s got nowhere else to go,” Tee retorted.

“What’s his deal with you guys?’ Coondie paused: “There’s no deal; he isn’t coming around as much,” he said.

“I heard he’s been paying money to the neighborhood kids to blow them; they’re all running around with shiny new toys.” Tee wasn’t listening: “He don’t eat shit. I mean he does, but nothing else, except gobs of candy.”

“Maybe he’s got some sort of eating disorder,” Coondie said, and added. “You know, I have to wonder if he’s kind of retarded,” as if this might explain things.

“Perhaps he should go see a doctor,” Coondie suggested.

“No way,” Tee shot back, “I’d get fucking arrested, and he’d probably be put away or something.”

“Yeah,” Coondie said, “yeah, I agree. We don’t want that.”

The next day Tee closed up his shop around three in the afternnon and drove the five blocks to Nathan’s house. The house was decrepit and looked abandoned. On the roof, an old rusty weathervane was canting, some sort of long-ago ill-conceived charm. There was a shopping cart in the yard. ‘That’ll come in handy later,’ Tee thought and laughed to himself, imagining a gray-haired Nathan pushing it around downtown Indianapolis with his pants down around his ankles. Tee knocked, noticing the door was ajar. He heard the murmer of a television and pushed the door open; there was a large, unkempt woman sitting there and he stepped in.

Immediately Tee noticed how filthy the house was; there was no rhyme or reason in the arrangement of the furniture, and an odor like rotten fruit instantly assaulted his senses.

“Excuse me,” he said, “is Nathan here?” The woman looked at him for a moment with a slightly confused expression and looked back at the TV. Tee moved forward and she looked at him again as if he’d just suddenly appeared. Her eyes darted back to the TV and Tee took another step. She looked at him again, and Tee said “fuck it,” and went looking for Nathan. He poked his head into the kitchen and noticed it had been turned into some sort of crude storage space, filled with dusty boxes and rusting junk. There was a radio playing somewhere, and Tee followed the sound. The song ‘Delta Dawn,’ was coming from a room with a crinkly centerfold on the door of a sweaty and buff naked man wearing a cowboy hat and twirling a lasso. The caption below read, ‘Ride ‘em, Cowboy.’
“My god, it stinks like hell in here,” Tee said aloud. He turned on the light and the sight startled him; the room was completely plastered wall-to-wall, floor to ceiling with naked men, some from gay magazines and some from mainstream underwear ads. There wasn’t an inch of wall space wasted, and the floor was littered with all kinds of colorful junk food wrappers. The air in the room was tart and almost moist, like a seedy locker room, and Tee could barely keep from bolting out of there and throwing up. He cupped his hands over his nose and mouth. Nathan was curled up in the bed and shaking, the ratty blankets pulled up to his chin. His skin was pasty and glistening with sweat. Tee leaned down.

“Nathan, what the fuckin’ hell is up,” he asked.

“I’m sick,” Nathan answered in his strange mealy-mouthed voice.

“My god,” Tee exclaimed, “it’s no wonder you’re sick, this whole place is fucking rancid.” Tee thought for a moment, and remembered his conversation with Coondie. “What are you, bulimic, or anorexic, or something?” Nathan shrugged, and Tee wondered what to do. The simple stupidity of someone like Nathan was far too complicated for someone like Tee. There was a noise at the window and Tee noticed some kids peeking through and he lunged at them. They scattered. This is not a good place to be, Tee thought. He returned to Nathan: “C’mon, get dressed. We’re gonna go to my place and eat, and you’re gonna come back to the Zebra Palace tomorrow because it’s what you do and it’s who you are. You’ve got money now, so you got no excuse to starve. You gotta eat, better stuff, get your health back.” Nathan sobbed. He took a breath and changed his tact. “The guys at Coondie’s are wondering where you are, man. We’re missing out on a lot of money you and me, but you gotta learn how to handle things better. You need substanceness to survive, and the things you eat aren’t substancenesses. They ain’t even close. Way too much artificial crap.” Tee knew Nathan’s problem may be far beyond his horrible diet, but could not conceive of any other way to handle the situation. He threw Nathan his jeans and his green button-down shirt.

“Now please, get dressed, I’ll be right back,” he said, and went into Nathan’s bathroom to wash his hands. The first thing he noticed was that it was particularly squalid, more dirty junk haphazardly stacked, and the stench was so oppressive he could almost feel it like a film laying on his skin, though the toilet was empty and dry and obviously unused for some time. There were other things that caught the corner of his eye, incongruous things, things that seemed wildly out of place. And the bathtub…

“Fuck,” he said, and hurriedly ran his hands under the tap and wiped them on his pants. “Nathan,” Tee called out almost in panic, “we’re getting the fuck outta here, now!”

Later that day, Tee attempted to feed Nathan but Nathan either threw it back up or excreted it back out almost immediately. He thought about threatening to beat him up if he didn’t eat, he thought about drugging him and forcing food down his throat, but in the end he settled for patience. Tee did get him to drink water and swallow a multi-vitamin and part of a carrot and an apple, and eventually he made a crude bed for Nathan in the back seat of his car. The next day Nathan seemed a bit better, and he went to the Zebra Palace with Tee for a few hours. Early evening Nathan left to go with Coondie, and Tee gave Coondie twenty dollars to make sure Nathan ate something besides Coondie’s shit. The next day Coondie reported back that Nathan tentatively ate half a bologna sandwich. Tee started paying Coondie twenty dollars out of Nathan’s daily take (‘Stick food up your asses and shit in his mouth, I don’t care, but I’m paying you, so do something’) and gradually Nathan seemed to recover.

Coondie came in to the Zebra Palace one day, and brought Tee a cheap cigar from his store, a Swisher Sweet. Tee, who normally wouldn’t smoke such a cigar, did so because it was free.

“You want some bud,” Coondie asked.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Coondie rolled his cigar around in his mouth obscenely, slathering the end with his spittle.

“So,” Tee began, “is Nathan eating any real food at your place,” he asked, in what Coondie felt was a confrontational tone.

“A bit, yeah. I can’t make him, but he does eat a little.”

“Hot lunches?” Coondie regarded Tee.

“Sometimes, yeah. That’s dessert,” he joked, in an attempt to engage Tee.

Tee wasn’t biting: “I’m paying you to make sure he eats good, you’re gonna make him sick again.”

“He does eat some Tee, but he’s also living the way he wants to live, and we can’t do anything about that. A guy like that doesn’t think about living forever, or even the next day. A guy like that is gonna use all of himself getting what he wants until he’s completely spent. Food is not gonna help. There’s no future; there’s nothing else but his obsessions.” Tee grumbled.

“Why do you guys like that sort of bizarre crap anyway?” Coondie tapped his ash.

“I never thought I did until Nathan came around,” he said. “The first time I bent down and shat in his mouth, and he sucked on my ass like it was the healing fountain at Lourdes, well, you just had to be there, Tee.” He took a drag on his cigar. Tee thought he noticed an imperceptible shake as Coondie brought it to his mouth.

“He just came to the back door one night. You know us, doing our thing. How he knew about us I don’t know, but he knocked. He asked if he could suck our cocks right there, stuttering you know, like he does, with that shy, kinda crazy look he has. Well, I bid him ‘entrée’ just like a princess, and he kinda knocked our socks off that night, wanting to consume all of us and everything we had in us. I think we were all quite blown away.” Tee puffed on his cigar and flicked the ash.

“He’s a true geek, Tee, a true geek. Very rare.” He gazed out across the store. “A person like that only comes around once in a life-time, Tee, if you’re lucky.”

“Shit,” Tee sniggered knowingly, “there’s one in every goddamn town, and there always has been.” Coondie didn’t answer. Then:
“You can’t know what it’s like.” He paused: “We’re ugly, smelly old men, I’m not stupid, but we don’t feel we’re taking advantage of him. On the contrary, we - to a man I know this – in his, I don’t know, madness, he makes us feel incredibly desirable. He desires us! It’s almost like a strange kind of gift; a gift, if you will, from God.” Tee let out a hardy, stabbing guffaw.

“I told you you wouldn’t understand,” Coondie said and stood to leave as Tee continued chuckling.

“Come around closing time and I’ll have your ounce for you,” he said curtly. Tee nodded and Coondie left. Tee shook his head in amusement and went back to piss. Nathan was asleep, his head leaning against the wall. His little radio was playing ‘The Power of Love,’ by Celine Dion. He wondered about Nathan, about what happened in his life to have a need for such intense and constant personal degradation. Tee formed an image of a young Nathan hopping about in his yard picking up dried dog turds in the sunshine and popping them into his mouth like candy, and he shuddered.

The next day began uneventfully; Nathan came shuffling in like a strange, purposeful zombie and went to the back with barely a nod to Tee. As long as he was showing up, things were good. Later in the afternoon, while Tee was reading the paper, a squat, little toothless guy in a Cat Diesel cap came up to the counter.

“Hey, I don’t think your boy is doing too good back there,” he said and blinked. “He uh, sorta bit me and then kinda made a sound like ‘bluh,’ you know? I didn’t do anything,” he continued, looking anxious to leave. Tee folded his paper and walked back to the booth and the man dashed out.

“Nathan, you all right?” There was no answer, so he pulled back the curtain and went inside. Nathan’s open mouth was pushing through from the back of the glory hole. There was cum running down the edges and dripping from Nathan’s tongue, which was blue and protruding through the hole.

“Oh shit,” Tee said and ran around to the back, but he already knew; Nathan’s face was leaning into the hole, which was holding him up somehow. There was an eerie stillness to the scene and Tee let out one gasping sob. He then gripped Nathan by the armpits and hurriedly dragged him over to the corner. He sat, caught his breath, and wondered what to do; he didn’t need any trouble with the law, that’s for sure, and there was something else; a vague feeling of… what, responsibility? As things stood, it would be best for Tee if Nathan was never found. Tee gripped himself in thought and played out the scenarios; if he reported this to the police he feared they would accuse him of murder somehow (what if he was retarded), so he resolved to wait. Nathan was slumped in the corner, the incongruity of his boys’ soft mussed hair hanging in his eyes, and the hard, skeletal features of his cheekbones made Tee shiver with fright. Nathan had obviously crapped his pants, but this was Nathan; he might have done that two hours ago. Somebody’s son, thought Tee. On Nathan’s radio Perry Cuomo was crooning, ‘Maaagic Mooments,’ and Tee turned it off. That too, would have to go.

Tee waited and left the Zebra Palace around three a.m. that morning and coasted through the alley behind Nathan’s house. He put on gloves and quietly pulled Nathan out from the back seat and placed him in his yard, behind a large tree that shielded him from the alley. Then he got out a shovel and began to dig, slowly, making sure to square off turf first. He’d tell people that Nathan just didn’t show up one day, that he’d got into a fight with his mother and talked about getting away, so that’s what he probably did. As long as everybody thought that, only Tee would know where Nathan was. No one would go looking for him. If they found him in his yard, well, there was his mother…

By four the hole was dug about three feet deep and Tee gently lowered Nathan down into it and placed the radio in his lap, which he turned on low with the idea that it would somehow keep Nathan company until the batteries ran out. By the time he’d finished the equally laborious process of covering Nathan with dirt and trying to be quiet about it, the scene was so grotesque that Tee quietly wretched for ten minutes. He then left the shovel leaning by the back door of Nathan’s house, nearly tripped over an old tricycle wheel in the wet grass, and put his car in neutral, allowing it to roll through the alley before he jumped in, turned on the ignition, and headed back to his apartment. Tee showered, broke the seal on a fifth of Old Crow and gradually worked on it until the sun started coming up, and in his drunken haze the rising swell of Buckner people starting their day made it seem as though the regular folk were all working to cover his tracks. He convinced himself that people like Nathan usually end up getting murdered anyway, and took consolation that, in a sense, this was a very natural death, and perhaps the best days of his life were spent at the Zebra Palace.

Maybe Coondie was right – maybe he just got used up.

The next night some raucous dogs knocked over a few trash cans in the alley and dug up Nathan’s body. It was found half-protruding out of the ground when the police came upon it, one half-chewed dirty arm reaching to the sky in a rigormortis-influenced posture as if in death he’d finally spied that thing which had always eluded him. He’d been buried with a radio that was still playing when unearthed (‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers’). Nathan’s mother was initially arrested for murder but the charges were soon dropped when doctors pointed out that her bed sores, her catatonic state and seriously dehydrated condition indicated that she’d not gotten out of her chair for months, at least. In the refrigerator were eleven plates of half-eaten bologna sandwiches in various degrees of staleness and putrefaction.

The Marion County coroner determined that Nathan died of natural causes and that he was seriously malnourished to the point where his heart just gave out. In the subsequent investigation, the life-style of Nathan Collier was brought to life, and all the principles, including Tee were interviewed. Neighborhood kids were interviewed, as were clients of the Zebra Palace. It was learned that Nathan suffered from a psychosis called Coprophagia (the compulsive eating of stool), Urophilia (the compulsive drinking of urine), general Paraphilia (abnormal sexual arousal disorder), herpes simplex one and two, chlamydia, HPV, gonorrhea, and advanced syphilis, all of which certainly contributed to his physical deterioration. It was surmised he may have also been mentally retarded, or psychotic, or both. There wasn’t much family to speak of; those they could track down were aware that Nathan’s mother had been married briefly to a wayward carny, but they weren’t aware of Nathan. After a thorough investigation the police finally agreed with the coroner and acknowledged officially that Nathan died of natural causes, but they kept the file open: Illegal disposal of a corpse.

Tee closed up the glory hole permanently and concentrated more on selling his inventory, including spending money for a used, neon sign that said ‘magazines and videos,’ in glowing purple. He learned that Coondie had been selling Nathan’s proclivities to various peoples after he’d leave the Zebra Palace at nights, and at first he tried to get mad (‘Jesus-fucking-Christ you greedy bastard, you finished him off,’), but found he couldn’t really muster any retaliation and just resigned himself to never again speak to Coondie and his ilk. Still, he directed all truckers and lost souls with a flippant dismissal to Coondie’s Grocery (‘You can get a blow job and a can of chaw there,’ he’d say). But working at the Zebra Palace soon became oppressive, and Tee began to despise and lose patience with the sexually forlorn. Eventually, he sold the building and moved to Indianapolis where he bought into a 7 – 11 franchise. A lot of the clientele were the same but they left their passions and their heartbreaks outside the store. Here, they just grabbed beer and chips, and after a while Tee imagined he couldn’t hear Nathan’s radio anymore.