The Night-Sucker

Originally published in Scott Watson's Stories (Talonbooks, 1974)

I am at Sandy and Brian’s in North Van. She isn’t depressed so there is little for me to do, because I usually cheer her up which makes me feel useful. I want to get drunk, so I phone Gina and arrange to meet her downtown at the Cecil. I leave Sandy and Brian watching some ghastly medical show about brain tumors on the television.

I’ve got all these books with me so I read on the bus, look at people, get that sense that it doesn’t quite make sense, of all the possible things that could be, or ways, I mean the people, they seem so interested in being human, the man in front of me is about forty, I didn’t see him come on, just the back of his head, hair cut so. A hat is an innate idea? What are hats doing in the universe anyway?, overcoat cut just so, if one were to describe him from the back in terms that everyone would understand but would remain meaningless outside a human context, he looks stuffy, and he has just farted and I am revolted. Perhaps I am unfair, but I imagine his imagination of himself to be completely absent of astonishment. And this horrifies me.

All within his limit he reads a newspaper, alternately roused to indignation, patriotism and a mild shock, which is perhaps all he can feel. This is why he carefully reads an account of an airplane disaster twice, something happens in him when he reads, he imagines the horror of being involved, and how that would be real life, only he doesn’t think this, he just reads it twice, it doesn't occur to him to wonder why. The other people on the bus are much like him, except the kids who laugh in the back, slouching and poking each other.

I get downtown and walk up Granville Street to the Cecil, the people on the street are different, they get more deranged and broken the farther up I walk, some are well-dressed, and pleased with themselves, others are wild and dishevelled looking. I think the well-dressed ones are angry at the broken ones, because they are blemishes, do not participate in the hardship they call a virtue, to work, in order to be well-dressed and going to restaurants, the broken ones suffer, can’t or won’t do it, and insist on making themselves visible, they are too raw, and the well-dressed ones are uncomfortable. The Cecil is full of smoke and I have to pee, I run into the john, notice they have taken out the sink and piss, a man says to me, “Can’t piss in the sink anymore.” I say, “Well we’ll just have to use the floor.” I go out and bump into Gina.

Gina and I look around, sit too close to a group of jerks who are bored with one another and wish to participate in our conversation. Gina and I have lots to say so it’s annoying, then Jim Caccioni comes up and asks us to join him. We do, thinking it would be better than where we are, but when we sit with him, there are others at the table who apparently dislike him, and we are forced to be silent or help him annoy these people, Gina sees an empty table so we leave and go talk by ourselves, about fame and fortune and love and each other. We get pretty drunk and we both see lots of people we know in the pub and do those five minute pub conversations with them. Jim finally comes to our table and admonishes us for deserting him, I can’t bring myself to dislike him, although I have an overwhelming urge to humiliate him.

When the pub closes I ask Gina if she would like to go to Faces, Jim says that he would too, although I didn’t ask him and feel uneasy don’t want to spend all my time with him there. We buy a case of beer and get into Jim's yellow Chevrolet and drive down Seymour Street, Jim doesn’t seem to know quite where it is although he claims to have been there before. We go in without paying, something Jim urges us to do, so I can’t check my coat and book-bag so I stuff them under a bench. We drink beer and eye all the people, Gina and I sharing our admiration of some of them. I get the feeling that Jim wants to be very flamboyant and cock-teasy but finds the thought a bit frightening in a den full of homosexuals.

There are two long-haired boys dancing with a convincing eroticism that turns Gina and me on. Jim asks me to dance, so I do, he doesn't dance very well and I don’t either because I don’t want to engage him in any cute stuff. Gina is dancing with some guy, a girl asks me to sell a beer ticket, I just turned one guy down who offered a dollar, but I give her one and this black-haired bearded boy from Boston she is with smiles at me and seems to say, “I’m yours.” A strangely beautiful boy is dancing with a scarf and smiling as though he were on the silver screen, exhorting an imaginary audience of perhaps thousands to join in the spirit of his dance, but not, of course to actually dance, but to imagine him as the archetypal eternal dancing image of the desired one. Jim thinks he’s wonderful, I can’t imagine what sleeping with, let alone what talking to such an overload of narcissism would be like, but the idea of glass passes through me.

He is a live wire though, thrashing about as are the others, like an artery ripped out of the breast of the world, spurting, in a frenzy that sucks smoothly in.

I dance with the black-haired boy from Boston, who is cute but I’m tired want to go home.

Gina goes home with this ‘bisexual.’ Whatever that means.

I go out into the damp winter night, walk to Granville, then to Georgia, taxis, cars, the hum of wires you don’t hear in the daytime. The corner of Georgia and Granville is ripped up, has been for years now, first one side and then another. Along Georgia to the corner of Burrard and stick out my thumb.

Right away a black man stops his Mustang. I get in, knowing he wants something “Thank you.” “Where are you going?” “I was just driving around looking for something to suck.”

“Oh.” I look out the window as the Art Gallery goes by and then, “You wanna get sucked off?” “Maybe.”

I’m looking out the window at the Bayshore Inn and the low clouds lit up by the city lights like the dome of a huge cavern.

Then this guy, who is plump, strong, about 30 starts talking me up. Saying how’s he’s from outa town, really horny, how it’ll be fun and on and on, he says it all with a great and cool assurance and his eyes flit to me quickly at intervals coldly appraising.

I say, “Yes, all right,” I feel utterly nothing, he is not handsome, the fact that he is black is not enough to turn me on, his Mustang revolts me. He says where, I say the park, he turns in by the yacht club, statue of Robert Burns, the zoo, the aquarium and right on the road out to Brockton Point, he parks the car in the dark, by a bank of cedars. He says, “You’re not scared are you,” I say “no” as if I am, and I am of him, maybe he will murder me. But really there’s no sense of that, although the possibility lurks around in my imagination like a television show.

He asks me to pull down my pants, I do, with some difficulty, there is so damn little room in a Mustang, he says I can push the seat back so I reach down, push some lever and push back.

He leans over and diddles me until I get hard and then puts his mouth on it, all the way, he must be a professional cock-sucker, it feels great. There is a lake in my body and his mouth is like the moon sucking the tide. I look wide-eyed out the windshield into the cedars and the cold grey sky. He asks me to feel his cock, I reach down struggle with his belt and hold his fat cock, it’s warm, hard, and ugly.

He is going to make me come, he goes down on me swallowing rhythm, every now and then there is a choke which is immediately crushed. The whole business has an edge of terror.

Then a tingling that rises and ebbs starts all over my body, I imagine pale blue veins of light curling around my nipples and my toes and flowing up and down on the surface of my skin to my cock where they eddy and swirl and splash up, recede and then lap up again until the light flows out into the night into his mouth.

He hasn’t come, I start to jerk him off with my hand, he lies back tensed, head tossed past the seat he is no longer sitting in. He asks me to “kiss it” I don’t want to, he asks again, says don’t be afraid it won’t hurt you, I kiss it on the stem lightly and draw back, he puts his hand behind my head and pushes down, I resist, and he says “kiss it” again. I don’t want him to come in my face, or to even see the stuff.

He comes, it oozes out. All over my hand, I ask for something to wipe my hand with he pulls out some toilet paper from the back seat. And says, “That wasn't so bad was it.”

“No,” I say. He tells me that he isn't from out of town at all, but from here, lives in West Van. His manner is relaxed now and confessional. I pull up my pants and we drive out by Lumberman’s Arch, the pool, the inlet is calm and black and carries the lights from the bridge and the what-ever it is across the North Shore. The other-worldly turquoise vats and metal tents that sometimes have huge mounds of sulphur in them. Two boats are docked in front of it. I think it is the most beautiful building in the city.

He tells me that he is going to get married and that once he does he will cut this out and that he was just horny, you know, and does it seem strange to me, no, and that anyway the way the world is now anything goes or people do all sorts of things now in our society.

I ask him what he does, I hope he is a football player on the Lions or something, but if he was he’d never tell me anyway, he says he is a diesel mechanic, we drive back through the forest of the park to the lagoon and Georgia Street, there are swans, and city lights.

He turns up Chilco does a U-turn and says he's going to West Van. I say that I am too because I live there. He turns onto the freeway through the park and speeds up to what seems to be at least 100 miles per hour and says, “Are you scared?”

I pause, I’m scared all right, but of him, is this part of it, the way he does it, suck ’em and scare ’em. I say, “A bit.”

He slows down and says it’s all right, “I used to be a racing car driver.” He speeds on though not as fast, through the harshness of the contrast of the mercury vapor lights and the black trees against the black sky. Down a small slope, meeting the lions guarding it we approach the bridge, which has a kind of beauty, and can see from it, the city, the inlet below full the city lights, on the North Shore, the sulphur warehouse, with its turquoise complex splendour. He asks me, as we look straight ahead at the snow-covered mountains, if I’ve ever done "that" before. I say that I haven’t. He wants to know if I want to again, I say, “No.”

“Well if you ever want to come and get sucked come and see me, I live on the hill, and I’ve got a swimming pool, and you can go swimming too.” I wonder about the poor girl he intends to marry, if, indeed, that wasn’t a lie. He’s really too much, this wandering night sucker, maybe he is a football player.