I'M ON E!

HARRY VAN DER VELT



And so in the middle of a romperstompering longest time way down in the repeated low bass sounds of the late late engine room of the night’s music the DJ Greg Churchill starts dropping in hints way way tantalizing hints of harmony coming in after all that time when my body was just repeating the stamp of the beat the force of it all the pistons of god the every heavy stomp that ever was compressed and pushed into another and layered over and suddenly in the midst of all this when it had got all dark and repeated and mechanical there is this brief grab of melody this tiny little bit that I just heard.

And somehow I looked at Jon who was really focused on dancing lost in it and then the hint comes again and I’m waiting for it still wanting more and then I’m waiting for it and I’m waiting for it and then finally it comes a bigger sample burst this time and I recognize it and with the recognition of that dopey radio track I laugh because in the late 5:00am in the morning feel of the whole club it’s a bit of Call on Me by Eric Prydz and Jon and I always thought the idiot chorus went I’m On E before we found out the real track name.

Jon looks up from his dancing and meets my eyes and rolls his because he too has recognized the track and Greg's ironic playing of it and I get that surge of Ecstasy that takes you right up there into the smeariness of bliss or whatever is happening and reaching out with Jon now moving with me still chewing gum dancing together sweaty both shirtless his small nipples the laser green light grid-effect all overhead fanning through the humid air shutter shutter shutter and the lowdecibelled woofing and the grunt of the beat is back and further volumed up now.

But we’re all waiting we’re all waiting we are waiting Jon and I slowly dancing together moving in synch with each other and we are waiting in anticipation for that dumbest chorus of the Eric Prydz track to finally come when we can let go with our delight and laugh and marvel at the glorious bigness of the emotion and the gorgeousness that will be rolling up to its crest this great wave of thisness and thatness and sheer total stupid joy and here it is here it comes here it really really really really really really is right here.

I’m hanging around for Jon to come back from pissing. He’s told me to stay and wait for him here in the foyer where he can find me again in the chaos of the crowd so I’m just standing. I’m holding my bottle of water and I’m chewing another pellet of Juicy Fruit gum. I have got my T-shirt on again. In this foyer there is lots of confusing movement. It’s going all directions. I lean with relief against the wall.

Hi, says the guy next to me. He’s got spiky hair and his eyes are as wide as mine must be. I recognize the clamp of his jaw. Hi, I go. Cool night, he goes, head nodding. Yeah, good people, I say. He looks at me and our eyes meet and somehow I end up hugging him. I can smell his neck. I nuzzle his ear. He is pressed against me all the way down my body. He rubs his cheek against mine.

It’s almost too much and it could go either way but we both have been here before and we know the strange rules. We pull apart, acknowledging each other with that politeness that is required, eyes gleaming, the mischievousness of possibility recognized, the effects of drugs taken into account, everything complete. Hey, he says. Cool, I say. We nod again and go back to leaning on the wall companionably, sort of closer to each other now, but no meaning to this really except for being.

Stupid cigarettes the fat round essence of them sticking one in your mouth Jon laughing because he somehow knows the essential numbnutsness of the whole process as I’m doing it both of us standing together there his clumsiness with the red lighter me unable to quite see where cigarette and flame can meet then both of us finally dragging on our smokes like we really need them and laughing because we probably do.

The green dazzle the thick moist dark air the heat the intermittent blocks of sound from the soundsystem marking out space and time and occupying our bodies the umph the uh the big big places and the stuff between the chunks of music the too dizzy intervals and it’s so loud so loud it fills up everything and even yelling into his ear can I have some water baby does not work so it’s back to point and mime and he passes me the bottle with a thumbs-up.

Flip the lid and take a flash of my phone screen. I can see the time through all the drugsmear. It is 5:29am. I offer him some gum.

People pushing by. I don’t know whether I want to stay. I’m mashed. Too much chatter. Everything is blurring. Music unifies things on the dancefloor but here in the lounge it’s different. I’m going to go through go to the bar. I’m going to have a drink. I’m going to have a Heineken.

But there’s Jon. He’s sitting on a couch. Where did you go? I turned around and you weren’t there. He shrugs as if my question doesn’t need a response or just irritates him. He shrugs. Sometimes he makes things complicated. He shrugs. Sometimes he makes it all harder. He shrugs.

I still can’t hear but I’m used to faking it. I nod and laugh. She says something else. Jon has his hand down in the small of my back, pressing it there, just little rubs. She says something else flipping back her hair. Her eyes are all pupil. I nod and look vague like I’m distracted. It seems an appropriate response. The couch is comfortable. It’s a relief. I sink back against Jon’s hand, against the cushions. My eyes are heavy momentarily. She laughs. I’m not sure what she is laughing at. I laugh too.

Kissing Jon sort of discreet here the red couch cushions the low lights the feel of his underlip the sweet and the salt of his taste his moist mouth I sometimes like kissing better than sex he said once early on when we didn’t really know each other not like now the ease the cruise the rove the slip the move of lips on lips or over cheek the sheer rub the mouthed moments focused on this narrowed down to here the instant poised on pouts and saliva shining every slide you ok yes I am you I am fine yes real fine and if and and and but and oh and everything I can I am I do with you.

HARRY VAN DER VELT is 25 and works in IT. ‘I write about that whole club scene because it is nostalgic,’ he says. Since returning to New Zealand from the UK, he’s been focusing on website development. ‘It’s a new world. We need new styles.’

Copyright ©David Herkt 2007. All Rights Reserved.

IRAQ IRAQ IRAQ IRAQ

CAMERON BURTON

Iraq. Iraq. Iraq. Iraq. Say it over and over and just before the word stops making sense, just before it no longer holds any meaning for your mind, it’ll start sounding like the bursts of an automatic rifle from a firefight on Haifa Street, Baghdad, or from an ambush of a Halliburton convoy of 16-wheeler trucks on a narrow road overhung with date-palms outside Mosul. Then say it again. It sounds like the quadruple cracks of an AK-47 across some dun-coloured, litter-strewn waste ground on the edge of Ramadi, the reports coming out of nowhere, no shooter to be seen, no target, and just the echo of that gunburst being absorbed back into the dense afternoon air.

------------------------------

‘Yow, baby.’

‘Fuck’

1/5 Marines. Echo Company. Al Ramadi. Bleached-out yellows. Dusty concrete. Dry mustard tones. Faded pink. The dark lancelet-green of palms. Digital camo.

It’s a T-intersection. There is a broad two-lane avenue flanked by rows of two or three-floored houses and shops. There is another narrower road extending off the avenue, straight ahead. On the corner is an open shop with a canvas awning. There is fruit in angled boxes displayed outside. The rest of the shops on the row have their steel shutters down and are closed off, just like storage lockers somewhere. Sudden and erratic bursts of AK-47 fire are coming from the upper floor windows of the house just beyond the store, behind it, overlooking the intersection. The Marines, on the rooftops of the houses on the other side of the broad avenue are returning the fire. The sounds of the M16A4s and M4s are interwoven with the long deep chattering of the M240 Bravo machine-gun.

Tat-tat-tat.

Pock-pock-pock.

Pow-ping.

Pucka-pucka-pucka-pucka-pucka-pucka.

‘Yo, Buetz, get that fucker up,’ Campbell shouts urgently to Buetz, back behind on the flat terracotta-tiled rooftop terrace. Buetz has the AT4 and is removing the transport safety pin.

‘Alright,’ says Buetz, distant, abstracted by his task.

‘Stand by. Stand-by,’ Doc is calling.

‘Get over and let that fucker off,’ Campbell shouts to Buetz, ‘Get that bitch up.’

‘Get up on-line with me,’ calls Moore from the stucco balustrade.

Tat-tat-tat.

Holding the tube of the AT4, crouching low, Buetz runs across the rooftop, past the toppled-over white plastic outside-chair, just like the ones you’d get in Walmart, to huddle up to the balustrade.

‘Oh shit.’

Down on the wide avenue there are suddenly two white cars, driving into the cross-fire.

‘What the fuck?’

The rate of three-round bursts and the automatic pulse of the M240 Bravo increases. There is the spit of an AK-47 on single-shot.

One white car, some Japanese model, turns off the avenue, the other, a cream-coloured Citroen, slews off-road right in front of the shop, with maybe its driver hit, the car hood popping up as it slams into the back of the parked Mercedes.

‘Hey, watch it,’ Moore says as a sniper round hits the balustrade.

Down on the avenue men run from open car doors towards the shadows and shelter of the awninged store.

More blat-blat-blat of the M16s.

‘Yeah, bitch, you bet you are fucking gone.’

‘Who are they?’ Moore asks, voices overlapping.

‘Hey, get up on-line. I want to know where we are at.’

Doc looks up to see Buetz with the AT4, right next to him, just inches away, the AT4 resting on the iron railing top, the clicks of the cocking and forward safety clearly audible.

‘Hey, don’t…’ Doc manages to call.

BLAM!

‘Oh my fucking ears,’ Doc gasps, deafened. ‘Dude, you’ve fucked my ears.’

A cloud of grey smoke rises in the air from behind the store, Buetz having got the AT4 rocket right through a second-floor window.

‘Ceasefire. Hey, ceasefire,’ everyone is shouting., the call taken up from rooftop to rooftop.

‘Ceasefire. Ceasefire.’

The smoke is hangs unmoving above the store across the street in the still air.

For the first time there is no insurgent fire.

‘Whooo-ey. Whoo-ah.’

‘Ha Ha Ha,’ Buetz is laughing.

‘Whee-hoo. You bet.’

‘Hey, man , he still could be out there,’ cautions Campbell, but no-one is listening.

‘Hey, dude,’ Moore is saying triumphant, ‘see how we fucked all those people, all that shit down there.’

‘Dude, those two people…’ Buetz exclaims.

‘Those two people in the white car,’ Moore continues, ‘who ran into that fucking building. I shot that dude who got out of the white car and ran into the fucking building.’

By the Japanese car, stalled now in the middle of the road, there is one body, wearing a white shirt and black pants.

‘Stay low, stay low,’ Campbell orders.

‘Hey, Doc, that fucking sniper-round hit just where you are standing.’

‘I can’t hear a fucking thing,’ Doc says. ‘Can’t hear shit. Buetz, you blew up my fucking ear-drum, dude.’

------------------------------

Mosque spires. Lush green reeds on the Tigris edge. Dirty froth on polluted waters. Concrete overpass on the wide Sadaam-constructed freeways with ‘Fuck USA’ graffitti’d onto it in black spraypaint. The OH-58 Kiowa and AH-64A Apache helicopters against the yellow sandy haze of the northern sky like darting wasps. Amplified muezzin calls for prayer. Low-slung 8-wheeled General Dynamics Styrkers in convoy. The sounds of thrash-metal on an Ipod. An IED has blown a crater on the roadside and vicous black-green sewerage leaks from the burst concrete drain. Saudi plastic water bottles. Marlboro ads in Arabic. A 7 or 8 year old Iraqi boy aims an imitation gun cut from Styrofoam at an armoured Humvee.

------------------------------

John Vickers is an embedded journalist. He’s with the 1/5 Marines. He knows his Echo Company team well now. They call him Kiwi because he is a New Zealander. He hates the name. It makes him feel like a mascot but he has never argued. He tolerates it because it means that they have accepted him, even if only partially. They too have their nicknames. Moore is sometimes Slammer. Doc is only ever Doc, never Ramos. Campbell is Snake occasionally. Buetz is often Trash.

‘Hey, Kiwi, you get all that? You see that? Those cars came from nowhere, dude.’

‘Fucking crazy mothers. Deathwish, had to be Deathwish.’

Vickers is in Iraq for Reuters. He is to write troops-eye views of the Insurgency. He has already filed two features. His assignment ends in 7 days.

There is a clothesline strung out across the balcony. There is a small satellite dish. Buetz kicks the white plastic chair out of his way across the tiles.

In the exhilaration of combat aftermath Buetz is gleeful.

‘We fucked them, dude.’

Vickers is 29. He is 5 years older than Campbell who is the oldest member of the team. He is 10 years older than Buetz who is the youngest. Iraq is Vickers’ fourth conflict as a journalist. He has also seen combat in Afghanistan, the West Bank, and Somalia. Buetz had never left the Midwest until he joined the Marines. He’s sure that he’s in Iraq just to protect the interests of the Texan oil companies but it doesn’t stop him doing his duty. His sense of global geography is hazy. He’d never heard of New Zealand and so Vickers had to explain. Buetz has appointed himself as Vickers minder. Somehow he’s always there. They spend time together.

Vickers is gay. This is a private sexual identity he has confided to no-one in Iraq. He is also divorced which means he can talk about women with authenticity. To his own mind, he’s become dangerously preoccupied with Buetz who is a wiry blonde with an ADHD energy that is barely contained within the regimentation of the Marines. Vickers has found himself thinking about Buetz when he masturbates before he goes to sleep at night. Buetz is also obsessed with masturbation, mainly his own, but so is the rest of the company. They’ve been in Iraq for 96 days.

Vickers has his own room in one of the air-conditioned CHU units at the FOB that are modified CONEX shipping containers. Usually they’re accommodation for between two or four men. As a journalist, Vickers has one on his own. Buetz has started visiting in the airless heat of the evenings. He sprawls on the spare bed. He talks about girls although he does not have a girlfriend. He sometimes hitches his crotch suggestively as he describes encounters with women that seem to be extensively elaborated. He asks Vickers if he has any porn on his laptop. Vickers says he doesn’t.

‘Yo, Buetz, Trash, get over here, you crazy little fucker.’

------------------------------

On a visit last month to Combat Outpost, an edgy exposed Marine base under frequent RPG and sniper attack, the head of the 1^st Marine Division, Maj. Gen. James Mathis delivered a terse message: ‘Ramadi must hold’.

------------------------------

The sandstorm had hit the Al Asad Air Base at 6.45pm of the day after Vickers arrival in Iraq. The wall of airborne dust and sand was spawned near the Jordanian border. Forward Operating Base Korean Village had been hit by downdraft tornados earlier in the afternoon.

‘Look at it, look at it,’ said one of the pilots Vickers was standing with. ‘You seen the movie ‘The Mummy’? You seen it? It’s like that.’

The tumbling wall of dust was at least a kilometer high. It was a churning mass of brown and orange. It rolled over the desert towards the air-base.

‘Please make your way to shelter. Walk. Do not run. Only Emergency vehicles, over.’

‘Let’s have you down. Let’s have you down.’

‘You closed your windows, Martelli? You better have fucking closed your windows or you are going to be cleaning for a week.’

The dust-storm loomed relentlessly.

‘There are no flies. There’s no flies anymore.’

‘Little fuckers taken cover.’

Streaks of finer grained black dust moved above them eerily, in advance of the main dust-cloud.

Winds began tugging at them.

Vickers felt overwhelmed in front of the cloud that was filling his sight above the sandbagged temporary tents and the rows of shipping containers.

‘You getting this on vid?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

The light dimmed.

‘Storm has crossed the perimeter. Emergency crews on stand-by, over.’

Standing before that force, Vickers felt powerless. The winds increased, tugging at his clothes. He felt dry-mouthed.

‘Oh man, I’m going in, fuck this.’

‘It’s like fucking God, dude. It’s like fucking God.’

The light darkened and the dust and sand struck.

------------------------------

‘Well there’s Burger King, Subway, and Pizza Hut, yeah they got all of them here now. There are forty of them franchises in bases. I wouldn’t bullshit you, Kiwi. Camp Freedom, Camp Sather… They got them. It’s for the fat asses who’d rather eat that shit instead of the DFAC stuff. Can you believe our motherfucking military risks our motherfucking lives to deliver that shit to those franchises? Dude, we guard those fucking convoys, escort them all the way from Kuwait.’

------------------------------

Slang from Operation Iraqi Freedom

GWOT : global war on terrorism.

Haji : 1: Arabic word for someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca; 2: used by the American military for an Iraqi, anyone of Arab decent, or of a brownish skin colour; 3: the word many soldiers use derogatorily for the enemy.

Haji mart : every base has at least one small store operated by Iraqis to sell items to Americans. Frequently near the PX, the ‘Haji mart’ or ‘Haji’ sells everything from cigarettes to knockoff sunglasses and pirated DVDs.

------------------------------

Buetz sprawled on Vicker’s spare bed. He’d made himself at home again. He wasn’t shy there like he’d been in the beginning. He had a two liter plastic bottle of Coke and he was chainsmoking Marlboros, flicking the ash into a plastic cup. He still smoked, though, like he wasn’t a smoker. Cigarettes didn’t look like they belonged to him. The air-conditioner was fighting the heat.

Vickers was talking about hookers in Bucharest, Romania. He’d spent 2 weeks there on assignment, 6 months before, staying in the Best Western Parc Hotel. He’d had plenty of free time and he’d drunk too much in bars.

‘Before you know it,’ Vickers was saying, ‘you’ve got 6 girls sitting at your table all competing for you.’

‘6’ Buetz exclaimed. ‘What I could do with 6 girls, dude.’

Buetz’s hand adjusted his groin.

Under his camos, he was combat, Vickers knew. It was another thing Buetz had explained with the standard bored Marine’s obsessive interest in minutiae.

‘You chafe. You get heat-rash. You get crotch-rot. Funguses. May as well be ventilated. Free as a bird. Me, I ditched my issue the moment we arrived. Now Moore, he still wears them. And I got to tell you, you can smell the fucker when he gets them off. Snake stinks too but it’s just some special anti-fungal pecker powder his wife sends him that makes him smell like a faggot.’

Vickers knew he was playing with fire. His mind buzzed with the consequences.

‘6 girls,’ Buetz repeated. ‘6 girls.’

He gripped his crotch and thrust it upwards again.

‘I got no big cock though,’ he confided.

Vickers was used now to Buetz’s sudden intimacies. It was as if Buetz had no sense of self-censorship, even if Vickers did sometimes think there were deeper boundaries and something dangerous down there inside Buetz waiting to be let out.

‘All depends on how you use it,’ Vickers said automatically.

‘It’s not small though,’ Buetz added. ‘It’s just A-1, average American. Right on the nail. Standard fucking issue.’

‘You got a hard-on?’ Buetz asked him. ‘You can’t tell me you are sitting there thinking about 6 girls with wet pussies and you’re ain’t got no hardon.’

Vickers knew then that everything was being taken out of his control by someone who probably had no conscious idea of what he was doing.

‘Always remember that they’re all state-trained killers, primed and ready to go off,’ Tony Dunsheath, his Reuters editor, had told him before he left London. Dunsheath had spent Desert Storm in 1991 with the Marines. ‘You’re not one of them. You’ll never be one of them. You don’t want to be one of them’

Buetz smoothed down his camos and clearly outlined his erection.

‘It’s just like this all the time. I get a hardon for chow. I get a hardon for my M-16. I get a hardon for clean laundry. I get a hardon for Cherry Ripes. I get a hardon for Red Bull. I get a hardon for our Humvee, even if it is a useless heap of shit.’

Buetz unzipped himself and eased his cock free from his camos.

‘It’s not so bad, is it? You think it’s big enough?’

Vickers, invited now, looked.

Buetz was admiring himself.

It was one of those straight cocks and it was ivory coloured. Buetz was circumcised, like most Americans in Vickers’ experience.

He could feel his heart pounding now in his chest and a rising tightness in his own groin.

Buetz stroked his cock then he looked over at Vickers.

‘What’s your cock like,’ he asked. ‘I’ve never seen a Kiwi cock before.’

------------------------------

Cameron plays the Star Wars Imperial March on the speakers he’s rigged inside the Humvee when they leave the FOB. He’s got a whole burned CD labeled Mission Mix. The second track is a live version of ‘Angel of Death’ by Slayer then there is a sequence of tracks by Metallica, Megadeath and Anthrax. It’s the sound of George Bush’s War against Global Terror. If it was permitted Cameron would have exterior speakers, just like that command chopper in Apocalypse Now, and he’d be blasting the very real sounds of the American Imperium out into Al Anbar province, the south-west corner of the Sunni Triangle, while leading a convoy into Ramadi.

------------------------------

‘There’s some fucker down there, there’s some fucker down there,’ yelled Moore.

‘What? How do you know?’

‘I heard something.’

‘Oh dude, you’re hearing things.’

But everyone is wary.

Blat-blat-blat.

A long burst of fire suddenly comes up the stairwell, deafening in the confines of the house, blasting into the ceiling, plaster chips and fragments and ricochets going everywhere.

‘Get down, get down.’

‘Shit.’

‘Fucking fucker.’

Buetz strides to the stairwell head, puts his M-16 over and gives a sustained burst back.

Blam-blam-blam-blam-blam-blam.

‘You fucking fucker,’ he yells.

His jaw is clenched.

He fires another burst downstairs and struts back from the stairhead.

Buetz is amped.

‘Doc, you OK?’ Campbell calls.

‘Yeah,’ Doc answers abruptly, pulling himself up from where he has dropped onto the dusty tiles.

The house had been one of many suspected poinst of origin for the RPG fire that had hit a Humvee. They’d burst the doors and entered, checking every room. There was no furniture. The floors were littered with broken glass from shattered windows. They’d reached the third floor which was one big area, dim, the shutters closed, bars of sunlight striping the tiles.

‘Get a flashbang down there. Moore?’

‘Roger, I got one.’

‘Buetz?’

‘Yo’

‘You and Moore go down after the flashbang.’

Moore frowns.

‘Fucking Kiwi, you just stay out of the way,’ Buetz says. ‘You’re a fucking non-combantant, dude. Can’t believe they let you out with us.’

‘Buetz,’ Campbell orders.

‘Yo’

Moore puts the stun-grenade over the stairwell edge, angling his throw to get it into the room below.

BLAM.

The blast vibrates the floor and there is a searing light flash on the stairhead. Buetz and Moore edge down the rubble-strewn stairs, weapons at ready, movements robotic, working as a tight pair. Everyone is silent. There is just the slow crunch of Buetz and Moore’s boots on the broken glass. Buetz leads. They reach the point of the stairs where there they will be fully visible to anyone downstairs.

Everyone is holding their breath.

‘Arggh,’ yells Buetz opening up simultaneously with his M-16 on full automatic.

Blat-blat-blat-blat.

The burst stops.

‘I got him. I got him. I got the fucker.’

Then he laughs.

‘Whoo-hoo. Hoo-ay.’

‘See that, Moore. See the fucker.’

Buetz’s triumphant voice is muffled on the floor below.

‘Fucking no-brain fucker now. Must have got him right in the head. Oh dude, what a fucking mess. Shit-for-brains Haji raghead. I spit on your grave, sucker.’

------------------------------

Slang From Operation Iraqi Freedom

Death Blossom : the tendency of Iraqi security forces, in response to receiving a little fire from the enemy, to either run away or do the ‘death blossom’, spraying fire indiscriminately in all directions. A term of cynical and disparaging amusement amongst the US Military. The term originated in the 1984 movie ‘The Last Starfighter’ as a maneuver in which a single starfighter can single handedly wipe out an entire armada.

Embrace The Suck: ‘The situation is bad, but deal with it.’

Combat Jack or Combat Jerk: masturbating in a combat situation, traditionally used to ease tension or relieve boredom

Marineland: Iraq's Al Anbar province, which is largely patrolled by U.S. Marines.

------------------------------

They’re all stopped on Michigan, right on the edge of Al Ramadi, everyone out of the Humvees just standing around waiting. Campbell talks on the radio.

Vickers is pissing on the roadside dust of Iraq.

Buetz, bulky in full battle-rattle, joins him, unzipping himself, and pissing noisily.

Vickers glances at him. Buetz’s chin-guarded face is dusty under his Kevlar helmet.

Buetz turns to him with slow deliberation and winks at him. Then he bursts into a peal of laughter.

‘Dude, you should have seen your fucking face,’ he laughs.

‘Hey Moore, Kiwi thinks I’m fucking gay,’ Buetz calls.

‘Well you fucking are, Buetz, you’re my boyfriend,’ Moore replies. ‘He’s just a regular mobile Minnesota Pride Parade, Kiwi.’

Buetz frowns.

------------------------------

Continuing an aggressive approach to Iraqi terrorism, Marines of the 1^st Battalion, 5^th Marine Regiment, launched and completed Operation Weston, in a suburb of Ramadi notorious for attacks on the main supply route into the city.

------------------------------

Hollow explosion to the north. ‘O.P. 1, Roger,’ the west side of O.P. Hotel overwatching the MSR and Al Saddam Mosque. Smoke above date-palms. Lemon-coloured sky. ‘More white smoke coming from the rear, you see that, see the smoke?’ A burned out Mercedes. Insect hives of Iraqi houses. Cnr Canal & Michigan. Suspected IED. RPG from a mosque. An airstrike called in.’ ‘Ho, see that. Bad ass. Oh that was sweet.’ ‘Hell, yeah, that was awesome.’ ‘I saw that motherfucker too, in the air.’ M-60 fire from a Humvee, the dull deep plug of the heavy machine-gun stitching Insurgents in a roadside palm grove. Brass shells clinking at the machine-gunner’s boots. Oil burns blackly.

------------------------------

It is Vicker’s second last night in Al Ramadi. Buetz knocks on his door. Vickers is surprised. He’d thought that Buetz wouldn’t put himself in a one-to-one situation with him again, after the last time. Buetz is clean, fresh from a shower. For a second it seems he is nervous.

‘Here,’ he says, opening his pockets and pulling out two 24 oz cans. ‘Have a Miller High Life, the champagne of beers.’

In deference to local sensibilities, the US military has decreed that Iraq is dry.

‘My sister sent them in a package. Can you believe they got through all those x-rays and scanners? I’ve been keeping them for something special. Open it.’

Buetz cracks his own cold can and takes a sip.

‘Fucking Kiwi,’ he says, ‘that is one fine beer.’

Vickers sips his. They are both standing in the centre of the room almost awkwardly. Then Buetz drops to the bed he usually sprawls on.

‘Play some music?’ he asks and so Vickers goes to his laptop with its speakers and chooses something he thinks Buetz will like. He chooses Three Doors Down. Buetz has previously called Three Doors Down ‘chilling music’. He keeps the volume low so it fills in the possible spaces of conversation but does not dominate it. Vickers sips his beer again. It’s good. He can feel that rich foam in his mouth. He savours it.

‘Dude, two days and you be saying ‘Heeere’s Johnny’ to all those wet pussies, know that?’

Vickers wants to laugh at Buetz’s audacious beginning. Everything is clear. Vickers now knows where they are both going, where Buetz is going to take them. He is observing the twists of Buetz’s sly strategy as something pleasurable. Vickers sits on the other bed as Buetz lights one of his Marlboros. He can already feel a sexual tension in his groin.

Then later, by the blue light of the laptop screen, they are both naked on the bed that Vickers is now thinking of as Buetz’s own bed. It is more urgent than that first time. Buetz needs to be back in the CHU he shares with Moore, but more than that, Vickers thinks, is the fact that they need to sate themselves upon each other, that they have to dissolve things somehow in the act. They don’t kiss which makes everything else seem more necessary. It is somehow more directed. Vickers can smell Buetz’s soap-fresh skin, overlaid with a sweet sweat.

And their encounter this time, Vickers notes somewhere in his thoughts, is more about power.

As they move on the bed it is a jostle for position but it isn’t simply a one-on-one battle for supremacy because there are undercurrents and plays here where one or other of them will feign surrender and submit to dominance.

‘You can buttfuck me if you do a reach-around and give me a hand when you do,’ Buetz murmurs in the midst of everything, looking towards the roof, his face profiled in Microsoft blue, his voice sounding distant as if what he was proposing was something ordinary and expected. He looks younger than he is.

Vickers pauses.

‘You’ve done it before?’ Buetz asks, still sounding far away, as if his question comes through remote and disinterested light-years.

‘Yeah,’ says Vickers eventually.

‘Some bitch wanting it doggie-style?’ Buetz speculates, his tone still abstract. ‘You got a condom?’

Buetz rolls on his side to face the CONEX wall.

I’m going to fuck a Marine, Vickers finds himself thinking, oddly, even to him, but his desire is heightened by the thought. He is overwhelmed by it. It is like a tense triumphant roar in his ears.

He runs his hand down Buetz’s back, down farther, over Buetz’s hard muscled buttocks, pale in the laptop light.

Buetz faces the wall, his eyes open.

‘Yeah,’ Vickers says, ‘I’ve got a condom’.

In the act, Buetz makes few sounds, taking Vickers softly, receiving him, letting Vickers work himself off, with only a small final moan that is almost lost in everything else.

------------------------------

In the end, there is no time for goodbyes. Echo Company is out on a MOUT. Vickers is told that there will be a change of schedule. He is to leave at 12 hundred, a day early. He will chopper out with the Division Commander, Maj. Gen. James Mathis, to Baghdad. There will be time for an interview. Vickers writes a formal thank-you e-mail to Echo Company’s commander, Capt Douglas Ingram. He writes a less formal note, which he prints out, to Campbell and his team, explaining the circumstances of his departure and thanking them. He burns a CD of music for Buetz, tracks he thinks Buetz might like, and writes ‘Thanks for the company’ on the back of one of his Reuters cards. He pauses before he signs it ‘Kiwi’.

------------------------------

‘hey kiwi, we were talking about you last night. i thought id send an email. you might be gone back to the land of pussy but you arent forgotten here in the sandpit. i bet you just want to come back to your friends in 1/5 echo company. lol. we had some good times. buetz.

------------------------------

‘Go, Go, Go, Go.’ Ragged palm fronds churning in the downdraft of a Kiowa. The sound of a Humvee’s 6.5L Turbodiesel overriding everything else. ‘Somebody’s shooting,’ Buetz exclaims. Alert faces. NVDs on helmets. The tracks of an M1A2 Abrams squeaking as it performs a 3-point turn on a deserted avenue. ‘High speed, low drag,’ Campbell says. Tangle of power lines above the street. ‘See them? See there, that balcony?’ Moore indicates. Dust-pocks where the M2 and M240 hammer into mudbrick walls. ‘Yo, global strategies in personal arenas,’ Doc comments, with humour. 8 Humvees in a column along Michigan. ‘O.P 1, Roger,’ Buetz responds. Radio voices. Faraway eyes.

CAMERON BURTON is 33 and is a freelance researcher for television production companies. He has recently written several stories with gay themes involving men in combat. ‘I guess I’m fascinated by masculinity and its manifestations under these circumstances,’ he says. He is a keen squash player ‘because it’s more interesting than going to the gym.’

Copyright ©David Herkt 2007. All Rights Reserved.

TONIGHT'S SUGGESTED TELEVISION VIEWING

D.A.F. SUTHERLAND

‘Anorexic Cow!’ exclaimed Ricki.

‘Bitch!’ Ricki interjected.

‘See! See! She does look like a duck!’ Ricki observed.

‘Quack-Quack-Quack,’ Ricki shouted at the screen, delighted.

‘We could always change the channel,’ Kiely suggested.

‘No, no, no,’ said Ricki, not taking her eyes from the TV. ‘I like watching it. I know what the little cow is thinking. I know exactly what she thinks she’s doing.’

‘Yes, Missy, I know what you’re up to,’ Ricki spoke to the TV.

Kiely sighed.

The telephone rang.

‘Kiely, here. Oh, hello Hoot. Yes, she’s in. No, she’s not doing anything. I’ll just get her for you.’

‘It’s for you,’ Kiely said, muffling the phone. ‘It’s Hoot…’

‘From Rainbow Labour,’ she added unnecessarily and with emphasis.

‘I’m watching the TV,’ Ricki grumbled, but took the call.

‘Hello,’ Ricki said. ‘No, No. I was just watching that ex-girlfriend of mine on ‘Celebrity Sings’. No, no, she’s not singing. Bitch can’t hold a note. She’s doing the backstage links. You know when they cross backstage to see what April or Lana or Don Brash are doing. She interviews them. It’s garbage.’

Kiely took that as her signal, picked up the remote and changed the channel.

‘I was watching that,’ said Ricki.

Kiely, annoyed, changed the channel back.

‘Two years,’ Ricki grumbled into the phone, ‘and then she decides a penis will help her career. And after all that I’d done for her.’

The word ‘penis’ hung on the air.

‘Some little rat in the media, some rodent she picked up,’ Ricki exclaimed.

‘Now what’s it with the what’s-it, the Community Hall? Mmm. Mmm. No. You can’t? She can’t? They won’t? Well, there’s Tessa, phone Tessa, Tessa used to live with Rosalind, sorry, Rory, nothing between them of course, no, no, no, just convenience, not cohabitation, well cohabitation but not concupiscence. What? Concupiscence? It means, Hoots, I don’t know how you missed out on it, ‘lustfully’, you know, ‘with desire’, all that rot! So Rosalind, sorry, Rory, knows Lucia Browning, you know Lucia Browning, that’s right, her, and Lucia’ll sort it. Not for nothing is she an HR Head. That one could get the very law of the land altered in her favor. She’s got channels so deep into Wellington Lesbiana that she’s practically got a hot-line to the 9^th floor of the Beehive.’

Kiely changed the channel again, just a flick, to see.

‘I’m still watching that, Kiels,’ Ricki snapped warningly.

‘She wasn’t on.’

‘But she’ll be on again in a moment. It’s their format. See there’s the silly bitch again. Oh to think I was head over heels with that one. What? What? No, no, Hoots. Just Tori on the TV again. Whoever dressed her should be shot. They don’t choose their own clothes, you know. Silly cow couldn’t dress her way out of a frock shop.’

Kiely refreshed her wine from the box of Long Flat Red on the top of the fridge.

‘Kiels,’ called Ricki , gesticulating.

Kiely took the box over to her and slopped some wine ungraciously into Ricki’s empty glass.

Ricki frowned at the slopping, but managed.

‘Of course I’m not in love with her still! Why on earth would you think? Hoots! Hoots! Listen to me! Out of sight, out of mind for that one. One of life’s users. Now the keys, you will tell Andrea that we need them early so Carol can set up her stall, no picking the key up just before we start, Carol needs to get her stall organised, not that the Lesbians of Grey Lynn and points further West have ever been known to be great spenders on impulse. No, they need time to think. Weeks of it. But Carol likes to get in early. She lives in hope. Kiels, where’s my smokes?’

Kiely found Ricki’s Holidays beneath the near-completed Listener crossword and handed them over brusquely without looking at Ricki.

‘Oh no!’ Ricki exclaimed, fiddling with the cigarette packet, her lighter and the phone.

‘Are you watching TVOne? Hoots? You should. You should. Flick over now. See! The silly little cow is trying to use her breasts to impress. Look at her. Kiels! Kiels! Look at her! Those little bumps. It’s a wonder she hasn’t talked The Penis into buying her a new set.’

Kiely took a large mouthful of her wine and made a face because of its sourness.

‘Mm. Mm. Mm,’ murmured Ricki. ‘Ngahuia? Ngahuia? Which one? Oh, that Ngahuia. What’s Ngahuia? Ngahuia’s what? She isn’t? She is? Oh you mean Ngahuia’s Famous Rainbow Labour Fundraising Barbeques that always cost more than they raise? Another one? No, it’s a big No from me. Not that I’m anyone. It’s a no-no-no. Look at last time. A hundred dollars in the red…’

Kiely lit a cigarette for herself.

‘What? No, I can’t see the TV. Kiels has just moved. Too young. Too restless. Kiels, I can’t… That’s better. I see what you mean. In profile. Underbite. You know she was always looking for which side of the bread had been buttered. You were there that night that what’s-her-face from the modeling, that model agency woman, that’s right, Rebecca Rawthorne. She said that Tori had thrown herself at her, at Rebecca Rawthorne, at the ALBA thing I couldn’t go to because my back. Thrown herself. Little tart. Probably thought she’d end up on the cover of the Woman’s Weekly. And she had her bread buttered here, I can tell you. Well and truly. Waited on hand and foot. She had her cake and ate it too. Kiels, the ashtray?’

Kiely passed over the glass ashtray with a thump.

‘Really,’ said Ricki. ‘Really. I never knew that! What! Hmm. Mmm. Really. And then she? What a little tramp. Yes, you’ve told me that before. Of course I don’t dwell on her. Don’t think about her at all! It’s only when the flaming, the bloody, the TV puts her in front of my face. Ricki Phillipson doesn’t cry over spilt milk, Hoots. No, she doesn’t. At fifty-six I think I have learned a lesson or two. Number One is no crying over little gallivanting tarts. Kiels! Kiels! You’re in my way again. Honestly! I can’t see the TV when you do that.’

Kiely stood up abruptly.

‘Kiels, that isn’t helping. I still can’t see…. Kiels? Kiels? What are you doing? Where are you going? Kiels! Kiels! Oh Kiels! Oh nothing, Hoot, hang on. Kiels! Kiels! Oh the blame girl has gone off in a snit. Kiels! Kiels! Can you hear me? Are you there, Kiels? Kiels! Are you in a snit, Kiels?’

D. A. F. SUTHERLAND was born in Nairobi and has lived in the USA, France, India and South Africa. ‘I think I’m really a citizen of the world,’ she says, ‘which is probably why I find the characteristics of New Zealand lesbian life so fascinating.’ She lives with her partner of 11 years, three cats and a flock of bantam hens in Hamilton, where she teaches.

Copyright ©David Herkt 2007. All Rights Reserved.

DREAM LOVER

RHYS PAGE

1.

When independent record producer Johnny Duder, 34, was arrested for importuning for immoral purposes in the Madras Place Gents Lavatory in North London, on April 16^th 1965, tried, found guilty, and fined, he still thought he’d be able to brave it out.

‘Oh, the Cunt-stable,’ Johnny exclaimed sourly over a gin and tonic, after his appearance in the dock, ‘that Cunt-stable. Wasn’t he a right little sod? What an effing liar. Said that he saw me persistently eyeing up this old man. Old man! I wasn’t there to pick up no effing old man.’

However once the news was out, things changed. He may have only been five paragraphs on page four of the Daily Mirror but it was enough.

The Satellites decided that having a convicted homosexual for a producer wasn’t going to further their musical career, despite the fact that Johnny had produced their only number one single ‘Sputnik’. EMI weren’t taking his calls anymore. Vernon Fox had finally murmured the words ‘moral turpitude clause’ when Johnny had cornered him in Le Coc D’Or about his contract. And it seemed like there were any number of young men turning up at the studio asking for small loans with the implication that, if one wasn’t forthcoming, there was a lot more information that could be made public.

‘At least they remember me,’ Johnny commented to Patrick Gower-Lambeth, known as Patricia in places as diverse as the Elephant and Castle and the Colony Club, ‘which is more than I could say for a few of them.’

Then the release of Brenda St Clair’s single ‘Love is Right’ was inexplicable delayed by Decca. American interest in Paul Flynn dried up. New Musical Express referred to Johnny’s ‘eccentric productions’ one week and ‘last year’s musical moment, Johnny Duder’ the next. Half the queens at Le Duce or the Apollo were avoiding him like he was catching. And even Stas, the Polish drummer in Dave Merrick and the Hi-Stars, who’d been more than happy to drop by once or twice a week for a bit of manual stimulation and a few quid pressed into his hand suddenly became otherwise engaged.

So, nine weeks later, the idea of temporarily locking up the studio and booking a voyage to New Zealand on the P&O vessel, the Arcadia, seemed logical.

At least it did when he made the decision.

Johnny may have been down but he wasn’t out. A year, he thought, in the Colonies, and then a triumphant return to ring in the changes.

‘Well, some people have the Riviera or Tangier or Brazil as a dream-destination, me, I’ve somehow ended up with New Zealand,’ Johnny said, deadpan.

It was a long-held ambition, New Zealand was. He’d always wanted to go there. Mountains, he’d heard, white tropic beaches, milk-fed young men. When he was sixteen his mother had a longish affair with Ed, a New Zealand born commercial traveler, and Johnny, too, had fallen in love.

‘Can’t you just imagine it,’ Johnny commented, ‘every time he’d drop by he’d have this thirty-six year old tart and this sixteen year old nancy-boy both on heat, both making goo-goo eyes at him. Very competitive my mum was too. Oh, she knew. She knew. Nothing got past her.’

But along with his unrequited passion, Johnny had taken on board a rosy picture of a picture-perfect country at the ends of the earth and while Ed, the commercial traveler, was long vanished, his country of origin was still alive and well in the depths of Johnny’s mind.

‘Holiday, ducks, time off,’ he explained in the studio office at 403 Bayswater Road, knowing that his words were going to go down like a cup of cold sick. He’d paid out Mavis, then dealt with Heywood, who was a whole different kettle of fish, threatening legals until Johnny had threatened him right back.

‘It’s all going into mothballs,’ he said later, strangely satisfied, looking around the rambling studio warren with its mixing consoles, magnetic tape-decks, his hand-assembled compressor, the acoustic baffles, the trails of wiring, the mics, and the tape racks.

‘Mothballs,’ he repeated.

‘Temporarily,’ he added.

2.

Sometime in early 1960, Johnny had come to the realization that musicians were nothing. They just made sounds. With Johnny’s increasing skill using double-track tapes, with splicing, overdubs, replaying and over-recording, Johnny could do anything. He’d drop chains in metal buckets, tape the sound, and use it as a drum-beat. He’d speed up or slow-down voices and lay on his favorite echo-effect. He’d compile and multi-track, compress, close-mic, and flick on the reverb. It was new. It was inventive. It was all about him. It was all about those long nights in the studio alone, just him and a few Benzedrine to keep him going, another pill for 2am, another at 4am. Johnny’d made reputations. He’d created sounds. He’d made hits.

Johnny knew that whatever Johnny found, Johnny could make great.

Which partially explained the fact that two weeks after his arrival in Auckland, New Zealand, Johnny ‘The Sound of Swinging London’ Duder was conducting and judging the ‘Stars of Tomorrow’ Talent Night at the Spotlight Club, just off Queen Street.

He’d phoned selected reporters. He’d done interviews. He’d handed round his best publicity shots. He’d contacted clubs. He’d placed advertisements. He was back to being a man on the move and news of his Madras Place indiscretion hadn’t appeared on any local horizon to interrupt things, so far as he could tell.

‘Hi, I’m Johnny Duder,’ he said unscrewing the mic from its stand, staring out into the crowded New Zealand club, ‘and my life is all about talent. It’s all about finding the sound of now.’

By the end of the night, he’d sorted two drummers, one bass-guitarist, one acoustic guitarist, one trumpeter, a piano-player of medium quality, three girls more than up for backing vocals, and he’d fallen in love with Steve Alltab, the vocalist for The Phoenixes.

The Phoenixes, as a group, were a shocker. They’d probably rehearsed once. The song was a dog. But Steve wasn’t. Steve could sing. Steve was five foot eight. Steve had black crew-cut hair. Steve had blue eyes. Steve had clear skin. Steve would photograph well. Steve was marketable.

‘You, now you, if it had been just you, you could have won tonight,’ Johnny said, ‘like that,’ and he clicked his fingers.

Steve studied him.

‘How much are you married to them?’ Johnny asked, indicating the other members of the Phoenixes on the other side of the room.

Steve struggled to answer.

‘Good,’ continued Johnny, ‘because you I can do something with. Them? Nuh. So I give you my card, you phone, come and see me sometime next week. I’ve got a song for you. I can put together a band. I’ve got time booked at Zephyr Recording Studios. Now, this is between you and me, right? No blabbing. Now get the rest of them over here and I’ll buy them a Coke.’

3.

‘I have-a heart that loves-you

I have-a soul that needs-you

You have-a place in-my-life…

Johnny chanted the lyrics, with rhythmic emphasis.

‘Don’t you worry what you sound like, you sound fine. You just hit those words hard this time, just like I showed you,’ Johnny said to Steve.

He nodded at Dion and Pete, brothers, lead guitar and bass guitar. He flicked a glance at Des, the drummer.

‘Why don’t you boys go out and have a smoke,’ he said, ‘and we’ll try him on playback.’

No-one understood Johnny’s recording methods.

‘But don’t we do it all together?’ they’d ask.

‘No,’ Johnny always wanted to reply, ‘we don’t.’

So Johnny had got used to doing it his way with minimal fuss. Make it easy for them, tell them nothing and if they asked, blind them with the mysteries of acoustical science.

Walking into the control room, and pausing in front of the double-glazed glass, Johnny watched Steve put on his headphones.

Their eyes met through the glass.

‘You got me?’ Johnny asked, flicking on his mike over the console.

‘Yeah,’ said Steve, his voice coming crisply over the speakers.

Johnny was all business now, Mr Efficiency.

‘Right, I’ll run the backing, now give me your best.’

Johnny flicked on the Studer four-track.

‘Romeo Pop, solo vocal, take 1,’ Johnny said.

Johnny turned on the playback tape and watched the reels turn, but in the control room he was only listening to Steve’s husky voice, without backing.

‘I have a heart that loves you…’

It was good.

‘I have a soul that needs you…’

Johnny liked it.

And Steve, alone out there in the studio, was pulling it off. He was even flicking his hand on his thigh in time with the beat.

‘Yes,’ Johnny thought, ‘you, I can make a star.’

4.

‘When they’ve come back to your place and they’re sitting there and they say ‘I’m really drunk’. It’s just their way of saying ‘yes’,’ Johnny had once told Jake Epstein, who had a real letch for young East End boxers, but who was obviously in need of some pointers.

Jake hadn’t looked convinced. It was the difference between them, Johnny thought. Johnny’d take any opportunity and use it as an opening, where Jake would just sit there thinking about what it all meant.

‘I’m really drunk,’ Steve said.

He was sprawled on the sofa beside Johnny in Johnny’s rented apartment in Courtville, on the corner of Waterloo Quadrant and Parliament Street. They’d been to a Constellation Records party in Cook Street with Tony Magellan and the Huntsmen, Terry Finlay, the Pacifics, and Alison Browning. Johnny was beginning to get a feel for the city. He’d found out where it was happening and he was there in the thick of it.

Johnny had Miles Davis ‘Kind of Blue’ playing on the new Phillips Hi-Fi. The lighting from a parchment shaded lamp was dim. The night was warmish.

Johnny didn’t bother saying anything. There wasn’t much need. The way Steve was sitting, his legs wide apart, his lips damp, his eyes half-lidded, meant that Steve was up for things, Johnny knew.

But to Johnny’s surprise, Steve wasn’t the expected bit of straight trade who’d sit there, trousers down, eyes closed, apparently thinking of something else while Johnny did all the work. Johnny thought he’d might get a look-see and a bit of a wank, but no, Steve wanted to get his kit off. Steve wanted to be nude and admired. Steve had needs and wants of his own. Steve wanted to kiss. Steve was surprisingly expert.

‘You done this before then,’ Johnny asked.

Steve nodded, sucking his underlip, while Johnny stroked his silky behind.

‘Right,’ said Johnny, ‘well, that makes things different.’

5.

It felt unnatural, all of this, Johnny thought. It was awkward. He wasn’t sure he liked it. They’d caught the ferry across the Harbour and they were lying on Cheltenham Beach in the summer sun. Johnny was in a new pair of black swimming trunks. He’d never been half-naked on a beach in his life.

‘I’m an effing Londoner,’ he’d said to Steve. ‘and me mum wasn’t exactly one to go to the sea-shore. I wouldn’t even know what to do.’

He and Steve were wearing identical sunglasses. Steve who’d never worn them before had borrowed a pair at Johnny’s urging.

‘Gives you anonymity,’ Johnny had said.

Steve was already beginning to be recognized. ‘Romeo Pop’ had proved to be a creeper. It started off slow but now it was getting good radio-play. It had been nominated for the Mobil Song Quest. Its bouncy production and soulful values had got comment. Steve had been featured in the Auckland Star – ‘Husky-voiced, Boy-Next-Door, Steve Alltab’. They had ‘Colour Of Blue’ to the final mix stage and ‘Look Out’ in the pipeline. Johnny had taken Steve to Derek Lester and done a management deal.

It was hot. They lay together on the sand. There was the island, Rangitoto in front of them, though Johnny still couldn’t get his mouth around its name, at least not seriously. The sky was blue. The sun was hot. Waves ran up the beach. Johnny smoked. Steve lay on his stomach reading a copy of Melody Maker.

While Johnny couldn’t have begun to number the quickies he’d had in the varied course of his life, he could say officially that he’d never had a boyfriend, not a proper one.

‘Not exactly domestic, my habits,’ Johnny had once observed, late one night, to a group of drunken members of the Colony Club whose domestic habits didn’t look exactly conducive to romance either.

Johnny had got used to the adventure and the efficiency of casual sex, but this was something completely different. He’d feared he was going to get bored with Steve but boredom hadn’t happened. He’d always wondered what you’d do with a boyfriend but now he found that he didn’t have to think about it because it just happened.

He was self-contained, was Steve. He didn’t require maintenance. He had a day job in an electrical store in Dominion Rd. He had his new after-hours career. Steve was curious about everything but he didn’t have to blab on all the time like some Johnny knew. He was content, somewhere inside of himself, Johnny recognized. Steve also liked the security that Johnny gave him or at least that was what Johnny figured.

Steve was staying over now a couple of nights in the week as well as all weekend. He had his own toothbrush in the bathroom. He had his side of the bed.

Looking at Steve on his towel next to him, Johnny admired the line of his back and the curve of his bum. Steve’s body was inexhaustible. He was just the right size. He was energetic in sex. He liked new things. He was a tryer. And Johnny had found himself in a seemingly endless quest to reach the heart of Steve through his body.

Johnny liked it when Steve bit his lip, his eyes closed to better experience whatever sensation Johnny was rousing. Johnny liked Steve’s wriggle against him in the humid nights and the feel of his hot skin. Johnny liked Steve’s many and various little noises.

‘Do you want to come in for a swim?’ Steve asked, taking off his sunglasses and putting down the copy of Melody Maker.

‘In that?’ Johnny asked, shocked, glancing towards the sea. ‘I’ve never even been in a bloody swimming-pool. What am I going to do in there?’

‘Come on,’ Steve said, standing up, his blue swimming togs bunched nicely in the front.

6.

‘There’s something we’ve got to do, my baby.

There’s nothing to stop us now.

There’s a great new world that is opening,

And we can’t let it go…’

‘Little bleeder manages OK, doesn’t he?’ Johnny commented to Eric Webbing, Zephyr Studios and Constellation Records owner, as they both stood in the control booth.

‘He’s just giving it a run-through but listen to him.’

Johnny upped the volume.

Steve was in the studio, belting it out, just him out there by himself while Johnny’s carefully mixed backing tape played.

Eric nodded.

‘Hear that,’ Johnny said to Eric, ‘that beat? That the sound of the stairway in your loading dock. Got that drummer to stomp up and down on it, speeded it up a bit, compressed it, pitch-shifted it down, and there you’ve got it. Sounds better than any effing kick-drum.’

‘There’s something we gotta do, my ba-by,’ Johnny sung, hopelessly tunelessly, emphasizing the thick beat.

‘I’ve got that girl, Alison Browning, she’s doing nothing at the moment,’ said Eric, casually. ‘She might have a song or two.’

Johnny studied Eric.

‘When do you think you’re going back to London?’ Eric asked him.

Johnny shrugged.

‘Hadn’t really scheduled it,’ Johnny said calmly.

Eric was looking at Steve out there in the studio, eyes closed, singing into the mic.

‘We’re young and we’re in love, my baby,

We’ve got a chance to make it…’

Eric probably had a fair idea what was going on, Johnny thought, but he’d never said anything about it.

‘If you want to, we could make a more formal arrangement, in-house producer here in Zephyr, and then Constellation Records will put out everything you do, put you on salary if you like…. While you are here, that is.’

Eric paused meaningfully.

‘There’s Diana Kay, and that little Marie York, and the Cavaliers and then there’s those boys from Whangarei, those ones I played you, the now they’ve got something you could get down on tape and do things with, work your magic…’

‘Let me think,’ Johnny said, but they both knew he’d say yes.

7.

Through the windows that opened up on the Courtville balcony Johnny could see the tall spindly palms that rose up behind Government House, wavering a bit in the Saturday afternoon heat.

Steve was wearing nothing except his underwear.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Steve asked, dropping onto the sofa beside him.

‘What are you doing?’ Johnny responded.

‘Nothing,’ Steve said, guiltily, widening his thighs a little.

Steve liked his power to arouse, Johnny knew. They all did at his age.

Johnny stroked Steve’s thigh with a finger, then got bolder.

‘And what’s this here, then?’ he asked.

‘My todger,’ Steve replied informatively.

‘Was thinking about cashing my P&O ticket in,’ Johnny said while his fingers ran back and forward across the tightening white cotton of Steve’s Y-fronts.

‘Stay on for a bit. Get your career going. Work with Eric. Make a difference. Create the sound of 1966.’

‘You like it here?’

‘Some places,’ Johnny said, pulling down the band of Steve’s underwear a little, just to get a tempting glimpse of things to come.

At first he thought New Zealand was a bit like permanently living in some quiet night in Hull or Brighton in the off-season, but Johnny was nothing if not irrepressible. He’d got things up and going. He’d put himself in the centre of action. Johnny had found out he could change things easily.

‘There’s not so much inertia to move here,’ Johnny had announced one night, over a warm beer in Eric’s office, ‘between you and getting things done your way.’

Steve suddenly laid his head on Johnny’s shoulder.

‘There’s something we’ve got to do, my baby.

There’s nothing to stop us now…’

He breathed the song, more butch, more huskier, more dirtier, than he’d ever recorded it, and then he burst out laughing at Johnny’s expression.

‘Don’t you mock those lyrics,’ Johnny said, as Steve kept laughing. ‘Blood, sweat and tears, those lyrics cost me. Anyway, you’ll be looking for someone else soon enough. I’m just on the way to someone better.’

‘No, I won’t,’ murmured Steve, again in Johnny’s ear.

‘No, you’re not,’ he added, more persuasively.

‘Might have some of my equipment packed up and shipped over, my equalizer, the U-47 mics, they’re beauties, those ones, some of the pre-amps, the reverb unit, one of my mixers… Some of those bits are irreplaceable, nothing like a few home modifications to get the job done proper. Let’s get those knickers off then.’

Steve hitched up his bum a little and let Johnny pull down his underwear.

‘So you’re going to stay?’ Steve asked, showing everything, lifting up legs so his underwear dropped to the floor.

‘Temporarily,’ said Johnny, looking at him with mock-suspicion, narrow-eyed.

‘And maybe we’ll see after that.’

RHYS PAGE is an Auckland communications director, specializing in in-house publications. ‘I have a whole collection of gay historical fiction and most of my recent stories are set in the past,’ Rhys says. He believes in happy endings.

Copyright ©David Herkt 2007. All Rights Reserved.

A SEMI-IDYLLIC LANDSCAPE

D. C. BROWNING

I was kissing him on a grassy roadside verge that looked like it was somewhere in an Australian National Park because the eucalypts hung over the road and there was some orange rocky-cliffed mountain in the background. My mouth was moving over his and I could taste him. He was lying on top of me. We were having fun kissing there in the bright sunshine when I opened my eyes and I could see his father standing there, looking down at us with a scowl on his face.

‘Tristan,’ his father said, ‘I want a word with you.’

It turned out that he didn’t say anything about us kissing and he just wanted to remind Tristan about coming to a family gathering, which I thought was strange.

So later we were at his father’s house in Rawene, eating an outdoor lunch with all their relatives. We were sitting outside at white-painted wooden tables with red-chequered tablecloths. I could see down a slope which was grassy and there were trees and two horses at the bottom by the creek. It was idyllic. Then Tristan’s relatives all turned into kangaroos. So we had all these kangaroos around us with their big dark-lashed eyes and soft noses. I was giggling because their noses were damp when they pushed them at you and nuzzled at your thighs

‘We’ve got to let them out,’ said Tristan, and so we went and opened one of the five-bar gates and the kangaroos all jumped out while Tristan and I both stood on the gate’s lowest bar, swinging a little on it, laughing.

There was this bare patch of dust at the back of the house and Tristan was catching doves and pigeons. He’d hold one in his hands and he’d run at me and I’d be on the ground saying ‘No, no, no,’ and be trying to get away from him. He would straddle me, sitting on the lower part of my body, and he’d insert the dove’s beak into my ear and when it went plu-plu-plu it would tickle, a sensation at once delicious and unbearable.

Then Tristan and I went to our flying lesson that took place in the assembly hall of my old High School in Hamilton. First of all we’d have to bounce on our feet and then we’d soon find that we were bouncing higher and higher until we were weightless. Both of us were expert at it now. When we lifted off, it was always a wonderful feeling. At first we’d just float and then we’d get control again and then we could really do things. I really liked being able to lie in the middle of the air like I was on an invisible hammock, and just roll over and rotate longways, while singing.

Afterwards we went to Tristan’s friend Anton’s place. Tristan was jealous of Anton because I once said that I thought he was attractive. However Anton was anxious. Dead things from his past had started arriving in his messy dining room, just appearing.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you can hear them behind the skirting boards.’

I listened but I wasn’t sure I could hear anything.

Then a white cat appeared. It was all blurry but you could see that its fur was messy and stuck out. It ran crazily around the edge of the room and leapt up on table and leapt down again. Anton was disturbed.

‘That’s our cat,’ Tristan cried, ‘and if it’s here it means that it’s dead and you killed it.’

Tristan seemed to quickly recover from this upset and when we got home, he took off all his clothes. We started kissing again. His body felt really solid and I was touching his chest. Then I discovered that I could put my hands inside of him. It felt really nice and Tristan gasped. He wasn’t disturbed or anything. He said it felt good. I discovered I could hold his heart as it pulsed. It was soft and hot in my hand. It wasn’t messy or wet, like you’d expect. Then I went lower and Tristan really liked that. He wanted me to make him cum from the inside, so I moved my hands down and found that by touching things inside of him, the strange little cords and small bulging things, I could play his body like an instrument, taking him closer to pleasure and back from it.

When I finally brought him off, his semen was filled with sparkles.

‘They’re alive,’ Tristan said, ‘and we should keep them warm.’

He wrapped them in his handkerchief and put it in his pocket.

Afterwards we went outside for a walk. Even though it was dark, the moon was out and the moonlight looked just like daylight except it was sharper. There was a glossy-leaved mandarin tree on a flat-mown green lawn and there were lots of fallen bright-orange mandarins around it. It was very beautiful. Tristan sat down on the lawn and took his shirt off again. I took mine off and lay beside him on the short grass which felt tickly on my back.

‘I think I’m getting a suntan by moonlight,’ I said to Tristan and we both laughed.

Then Tristan said we had to wait there because the burning giraffes would come soon, and so we waited and they did.

D.C.BROWNING lives in Wellington where he is a 26 year old graphic designer and a painter. ‘Words don’t come easily to me,’ he says. When he writes it is usually after midnight. ‘I like quiet houses at that time,’ he comments.

Copyright ©David Herkt 2007. All Rights Reserved.

THE DOG, SHE IS STOPPERED

LIAM STARKEY



Adam was the least of Vladi’s problems.

‘What for the eyes-roll?’ exclaimed Vladi to Adam. ‘What is it? A hundred-fifty dollar for no-touch just-watch wank? In-call as well. You roll eyes? Starving peoples in India queue up to do the goddamned job, bro. What-for you don’t want to work? Look at me! I spend all day in this goddamned motherfuck escort agency, phones always ring-ring-ring, too many goddamned motherfuck boys, not enough jobs, and Xiu-Xiu she hasn’t done her thing for two days now.’

Xiu-Xiu was Vladi’s pedigreed Pekinese.

‘That is Big Problem,’ Vladi said, scowling.‘I feed her special food. She won’t eat. I give her pizza. She won’t eat. She die if she don’t shit.’

‘Xiu-Xiu! Xiu-Xiu!’ Vladi called.

Adam, standing in the laundry dressed only in a tight white T-shirt and blue satin pair of boxers, pulled his jeans from the drier and tested them with his fingers.

‘You need to depilatory yourself again,’ said Vladi, disapprovingly, studying Adam’s legs. ‘How can I say you are smooth to clients on the goddamned phone, if you are hairy like some shit-hole Italian. Smooth, smooth, smooth, they all want mother-fucking smooth nowdays. Where is my Xiu-Xiu?’

Vladi walked out into the kitchen.

‘Xiu-Xiu!’

Xiu-Xiu lay curled up in a wicker basket by the agency’s back door. She raised her head and looked at Vladi with moist black eyes, but didn’t move.

‘My Xiu-Xiu,’ said Vladi, kneeling down and stroking her. ‘Poor Xiu-Xiu. You are not well. You’ve got to do your thing, Xiu-Xiu, you are stoppered. I get Raphael to take you for a walk after he gets back. You like Raphael. Nice walk, Xiu-Xiu, to get your digestives moving.’

Vladi played with his hair and suddenly remembered something.

‘Conrad, Conrad, where is Conrad? ’

He opened the door of the TV room. Conrad was sprawled on the sofa watching America’s Next Top Model.

‘Conrad, you want to do booking? Motherfuck Jesus, I forget. Sorry, man, I get no memory sometimes. Thomas, Mr Thomas, very American, sounds old fuck but classy, you know, at Rydges. Just wants sucky-sucky. Have I the right boy for you, I say, good-looking, 18 years old, retro-style, hard-core, eight inches, uncut, just like big lollipop, I say, make his goddamned mouth water. He pay cash. I quote him one-seven-five for hour but good boy like you make it two hours easy-peasey.’

Conrad stretched out on the couch, easing his long legs.

‘When?’ he asked, bored.

‘Nine o’clock, when Rafi gets back I get him to drive you there, get cab back, what it cost, ten dollars?’

The phone started to ring in the office.

‘Who the motherfuck now?’ Vladi said in exasperation. ‘Goddamn Wednesday, only goddamn Wednesday, how come last Friday, no-one, three fucking shithole jobs all the motherfuck night and now Wednesday everything break loose, every fucking one in the world wants business.’

Vladi walked into the office and picked up the phone.

‘Good Evening, Boys-R-Us, how can we assist?’ he answered formally.

‘Hi, hi, hi,’ he said, relaxing, ‘long-time, no-see, what for you don’t love me? I missed you. We all missed you. Even Xiu-Xiu she missed you. You have been out of the country? Wow, lucky you, just the right time of year, wow, cool….’

He paused to listen.

‘No,’ Vladi murmured, pulling at his hair, ‘Jason is not available tonight, tomorrow night I can let you have Jason, but you don’t want to wait. Tonight for you I have Dylan, medium height, dark-hair, olive-complexioned, smooth swimmer’s build, 19, 7 inches uncut, versatile, very nice, very hunky in medium sort of way. Very good, clients always call back. ‘Can I have Dylan?’ they say. I tell you, just between us, very hot, very active bottom. With him it isn’t just work, you know what I mean? Take him, what, hour thirty minutes, to get there? You still at old place? Give me address? That’s right. Cool. Yes, still the same price. I think this inflation got to put the prices up someday, maybe, not yet, still the same. What is your preferred payment option? Mastercard, cool, wow, if you could provide me with details…’

‘Hey, Adam,’ Vladi said, wandering out to the back again, ‘I have another job for you.’

Adam was looking at himself in profile in the full-length mirror by the dryer, lifting his T-shirt to expose his flat stomach and adjusting the height of the boxers he could see above his jeans.

‘Another job?’ Adam said, frowning.

‘Two?’ he added.

‘Yeah, cool,’ Vladi said, ignoring Adam’s tone, ‘after the little wank thing with Mr What’s-It you go to a friend of mine, big lawyer, just got back from Europe, Herne Bay, cool guy.’

‘What do I have to do?’ asked Adam, narrowing his eyes.

‘Just a little ass-fuck, very quick, too goddamned quick, average dick, not too big, and he tips, always the tipper. Hey, maybe he like you so much he want you to move in, think of that, man, wow, cool, swimming-pool, movie-stars, corporate parties, all the business. Going out for dinner every night. You have new clothes, plasma TV maybe. Think of the shopping, bro. Wow, maybe I do job myself.’

Vladi’s mobile began its Bohemian Rhapsody ring-tone.

‘What the dumb-fuck,’ exclaimed Vladi, trying to extract it from his back pocket. ‘Who calls me now?’

‘Hello there,’ he said

‘Oliver, hey man, how are you?’

‘What?’ he said.

He pulled a Dunhill packet from his shirt pocket, extracted a cigarette with his teeth, pulled out his gold Ronson lighter, and lit the cigarette, all one handed.

‘You too?’ he said.

He glanced at Adam balefully.

‘I too am over this country,’ Vladi said darkly. ‘This shithole goddamn motherfuck arsehole country. Why do I come here, I think, to make new life? What for I work 24 hours in every day? Can’t even take Xiu-Xiu for a walkies. That dog, she is stoppered, cannot do the poop. She suffers. What for I work? To make dog unhappy? Then goddamned motherfuck landlord wants to put up rent. $1200 a week. My boys will wear their arses out and still I cannot pay. Then last week, bad week. Friday everyone sit around. Saturday everyone sit around. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, all sit round. Since when have arses been for sitting on? I say. Big Joke. Not funny when you look at credit-card balance. Now Wednesday, now every motherfuck gay person phones up wanting their business taken care off. I have not enough boys in the day. And, hey man, it is winter too. Freeze your balls off. We go, you and I to Fiji maybe. Holiday.’

The door-chimes sounded.

‘Hey bro,’ said Vladi, ‘hey, bro, bro, business calls. You come around later, huh? We love to see you. Yeah, you drop in.’

Vladi snapped shut his phone.

‘It’s him, at the door, your client,’ he said to Adam. ‘Now he don’t want to touch you. He look like he want to but he don’t. Just likes little performance. Slow, slow, slow. Slow with the strip-tease. Slow, slow, slow. Then wank. Slow, slow. Show him all the bits. He like that. Get close but not too close. You smart boy, you know how to handle him, huh?’

Vladi moved to the door.

‘You ready? What for you fix your hair? Looks cool. Wow.’

Adam turned profile to the mirror again.

Vladi sighed.

‘Hey, bro, it’s not going to get no better,’ he drawled.

The door-chimes sounded again.

‘Vladi?’ called Conrad from the TV room, in enquiry.

‘Coming, coming,’ replied Vladi.

Then he sniffed.

‘What is that smell?’ he asked, coming to a halt.

‘Jesus Motherfuck. Xiu-Xiu comes unstoppered. Xiu-Xiu, where you are? Where you poo-poo? This is not-cool. Wow, what a fucking stink. Place smells of dog-shit. Jesus motherfuck, close the fucking door.’

Adam closed the kitchen door.

‘Wow, man, how unerotic,’ Vladi said. ‘This don’t work at all. No clients want agency that stinks of dog-poop.’

He fanned the air uselessly with his hand.

‘Just one moment please,’ Vladi announced formally into the intercom which linked to the small agency foyer outside.

‘Now what for, wow, that dog sure stink the place. We must find dog do-do. Fuck, no time.’

Vladi pulled at his hair.

‘Fuck, it smell worse than fucking toilet in Thailand. Freshener. Jesus, man, no freshener. We run out. Incense too slow. Where is my goddamned colognes?’

Vladi darted into his office.

‘What the motherfuck we have? Jean-Paul Gaultier? Not quite right. Issey Miyake? Too goddamn light. Versace? Yes, we have it. Versace Eai Fraiche.’

Vladi ground out his cigarette in the marble ashtray and took the blue bottle of Versace, held it in the air above his head, and wandered down the passageway, squirting it in the air

‘Jesus Christ, this dog-crap cost me a fortune. First special food, now fucking hundred dollars in cologne.’

Adam leaned against a door-frame, watching Vladi.

‘I don’t know whether I like the fucking dog being stoppered all together better, ‘ Vladi added, frowning blackly as he squirted the Versace bottle one last time.

‘How can I run an agency like this, huh? Boys don’t want to work. Fucking clients unpredictable as all hell. Dog won’t poop then poops too much. Goddamned motherfuck shithole of country at bottom of the world. Where is the glamour? Where is all the sophisticated peoples, huh? Now remember just a little wank. He don’t wanna touch you. He just likes to look. Then you go to Herne Bay for the assfuck. Now into the lounge and look pretty. I bring Mr What’s-It into see you. He likes his boys straight-acting. You do that? Course you can, you are a good boy.’

Vladi put the blue glass bottle of Versace back on his desk, stood at the agency’s front door, sniffed the air a few times to check, flicked back his hair, tossed his head, tugged down his body-shirt and composed himself.

Then he opened the security door to the foyer.

‘Hi there, welcome, sorry about the wait, come in, too cold out there, come in, nice to see you, wow, good to have you back,’ said Vladi, smiling as only he could, triumphant now in the face of adversity overcome.

LIAM STARKEY is a prolific writer of internet fiction under a variety of names. He has been a finalist in the ‘Best Erotic Fiction Without A Paranormal Element’ Category in the annual EPIC Internet Publishing Awards. Invercargill-born, he now lives in Northland.

Copyright ©David Herkt 2007. All Rights Reserved.

CHERRY BOMB

EVE RAVLICH

‘I’m such a stereotype,’ Aimi giggled, holding her Lady Danger lipstick in her hand.

‘I couldn’t live without my MAC lipsticks. They go on so smooth, last for hours, and feel so good on my lips. And of course MAC have a huge colour range.’

Aimi capped the lipstick and pouted in the mirror. The red lipstick was perfectly applied and very glossy.

‘OK, I’m Japanese. I come from Setagaya, which is in Tokyo. I am eighteen years old. I am in New Zealand on a student visa. I speak perfect English as a consequence of much international travel when I was a child, but I can talk Japlish if you think it’s cuter.’

‘My father is in banking. My mother is a pediatrician. My father is a typically distant Japanese father. My mother is caring but firm. I am an only child.’

She swung her long black shag-cut hair which lashed around her face. Then she shook it back into perfect place.

‘Uh,’ she laughed, ‘and I’m a lesbian. No, really. It’s true. Don’t look at me like that. I have a complete set of Buffy The Vampire Slayer DVDs. It must be the facts.’

‘What else can I say? How can I prove it? I slept with my friend Yumi when I was sixteen. She would come over to study except she would try on my clothes and we’d play with makeup. We’d practice kissing and sometimes I would pretend be the boy and say things like ‘You are really hot, Yumi. I have needs. They must be exercised.’ One day we just went all the way. No, I’m not going to tell you anymore. The screens are drawn.’

‘Do I like New Zealand girls? They smell different. They are not made the same. They are bigger. I have had sexual encounters many times with Kelly. She is very forward. I do not mind being the object of her desires. I am not in love with her. I have preferences for other Japanese girls but I am not exclusive. I do not like the lesbian underworld here.’

Aimi bent over the vanity unit to check her eyes, turning her head slightly.

‘It’s Maybelline Great Lash. It improves on nature. You love it? So do I. It is cheap and it has cult-status.’

‘I like going out with my friends Junko and Kaedi. I met them at college here. Like me they are bad girls their parents send away to be educated. No, I haven’t slept with them. You have a really muddy mind, you know that? Real bad. Well maybe I’d like to do things with Junko. They call us the Short Skirt Girls. It sounds better in Japanese.’

She stands up again smoothing down her pleated tartan skirt which descends only a few centimeters below her crotch.

‘We all wear short skirts. Junko doesn’t mind kissing me for boys when we are out at clubs. Boys like it if girls kiss, ever notice that? Makes them horny. Junko likes boys being horny and I like kissing Junko so all is very happy in Disneyworld. When Junko and I are kissing sometimes we are shameless. I can feel the boys’ eyes. I kiss her and they watch. They can’t help it. She kisses back. We do tongue. They have little erections, I am sure. But you know what? The thing I like the best?’

Aimi opens her dark eyes wide.

‘No? You cannot guess?’

She turns back to the mirror and flicks beneath her underlip with her little finger, grimaces in the glass to make sure she still has no lipstick on her teeth, and then tosses her hair again with a firm shake.

‘The thing I like the best,’ she explains slowly and very precisely, while closely rechecking her Maybellined lashes in the mirror, ‘is that they will never, ever have me. Not even if the skies freeze over, you know?’

Eve Ravlich aims her writing at younger people. ‘I think the things that you read when you are a teenager can open up or close off the rest of your life. I’d like to think that I could open up the world a little bit.’ Eve is 24 and is a childcare worker.

Copyright ©David Herkt 2007. All Rights Reserved.

GAY TEENAGE VAMPIRE

SAM HENDERSON

I’m a gay teenage vampire. My name is Nichol Stillman. I’m seventeen years old. I live with Darklady and Slayer. Darklady says I’ll have to choose a vampire name seeing as how my new teeth have grown but I haven’t picked one out yet. Slayer sometimes calls me The Fangster when he’s being an asshole. Other times he calls me Babylove.

Here is a photo of me that Slayer took last night. He was making me practice.

We live in Hensman Rd, Queenstown, in Death Metal House. At least that’s what I’ve called it ever since I walked past it on my way home from my McDonald’s job one night and I could hear someone playing Dismember’s ‘Indecent & Obscene’ up loud. Otherwise it was just an ordinary house.

This is a photo of the Death Metal House, except in daylight.

I stood at the gate and listened and I wanted to go in and say ‘Hi’ to whoever it was that was playing the music, obviously being one of the few people in Queenstown with killer taste, but I didn’t. The next Saturday night, when I was going home up Hensman Rd, I stopped outside again just to see what was happening. I didn’t know what band was playing this time. It sounded like Cannibal Corpse. I stood at the gate listening to the really evil music and then a voice said ‘You may as well come in instead of standing out there in the cold.’ It was an American voice, drawling and lazy. I could only see him as a shadow by the garage door with the red glow of a cigarette.

They’d come south for the winter. Darklady wanted snow and mountains and mountain lakes. Slayer liked the nightlife and casual sex of ski-resorts. Darklady was working on her ‘History of The Light And The Dark’, which told the story of the whole thing, for her website www.darklady.net. Slayer was just fucking around waiting for Ski Week and the season starting and everything going off. In the morning just before dawn, they’d scull Jack Daniels and Coke together, and pull the curtains closed and argue about things that happened in Denver or Warsaw or Bangkok in 1890 and 1919 and 1947 and explain shit to each other, just like they’d been doing forever. Then I arrived.

Cannibal Corpse’s first CD ‘Eaten Back To Life’ is grim. Fans, like me, rank the band’s debut as an all-round winner. Featuring songs like Shredded Humans, Edible Autopsy, Rotting Head, Undead Will Feast, Bloody Chunks, Skull Full of Maggots, and Buried in the Backyard, the album is a Death Metal legend.

The remastered version of ‘Eaten Back to Life’ also includes a video of ‘Born In A Casket’ which is live.

It was Slayer and I’s three week anniversary and to celebrate he’d got me into his room, onto the bed and, while he was still dressed, got me totally naked like he liked. He’d unzipped his black old jeans and he had my legs up and everything was going to plan as if he was going to do it like normal when suddenly he said ‘I can really take you into the Dark. I’ll give you Black and Grim I can give you Eternal Life, at least as close as you are ever going to get to it. I can give you Supernatural Insight and Vision, Superhuman Physical Strength and Faster Reactions. I can give you Ecstasies and Emotions you will never experience otherwise. The downside is that you’ll feel sick for a few weeks, your teeth will fall out before you’ll grow fangs, and you’ll never feel comfortable in the daylight ever again. You’ll gain strange appetites that will send you to the fridge in the middle of the night for a raw steak or give you the occasional desire to kill someone by ripping open their necks and drinking their blood, and then you’ll additionally be forever divorced from allegedly normal human beings who will hate you based on gut-instinct and some feeling deep in their bowels and who will hunt you down and attempt to destroy you in the cruelest way they can imagine, even tearing out your heart out while it still pumps given half the opportunity. Are you interested?’ It was a heavy, brutal, fucking evil text. ‘Uh,’ I said, ‘I guess.’ Slayer whipped the condom off and went straight in giving me no time for further consideration of things until finally, with some hard heaving of his hips, he came for the first time freely inside of me, and I came too, simultaneously or near enough so that it didn’t matter. ‘Fucking wow,’ I said. ‘Better believe it,’ he grunted back.

Darklady was pissed. ‘He’s too young to consent,’ she snarled at Slayer and quicker than I could see raked his face with her fingernails, drawing instant blood, leaving Slayer staring at her without speaking, red raw stripes beading on his cheeks. They stared at each other for the longest time. ‘Well he better move in then, hadn’t he?’ she said, finally, pulling out one of her menthol cigarettes and lighting it, still fucked off.

The day I moved in my teeth were bothering me. They were a hot itch. ‘Just pull them out,’ said Darklady, ‘you’ll really love it. And they’ve got to come out so your new ones will grow.’ I gave one of them a tug, but I couldn’t. ‘I’ll do it,’ said Slayer and I opened my mouth and he put his motorbike-oil tasting fingers in and pulled at one of my back teeth and then wrenched it out. I nearly came, it was so hot and horny. My head was one bolt of white master-blasting cum. And then he did it twenty-seven more times.

This is a photo of Queenstown at night that I took with Slayer’s camera the first night we started going out again after I transitioned.

My new teeth were still buds and I was wearing his big Spyder ski-jacket. I wanted to get out of the house now that I was beginning to feel better. I was still getting used to seeing things differently. There was a chrome colour throbbing inside all the other colours now. Everything had it, sometimes bright, sometimes dull. It was heat. Dark Lady had told me I’d be able to see heat, then eventually I’d be able to see life energy. When I asked what that was she said it would be like trying to explain sight to a blind person and I’d know what it was when I could see it. Slayer had his arm around my shoulders as we walked. He didn’t give a shit if anyone saw us. We passed McDonalds in Camp St and I wondered about the old crew there, how they were getting on. Then we went up the Skyline Gondala and stopped at the top, looking out over the town, Lake Wakatipu and the Remarkables. ‘How many others have you made?’ I asked Slayer. ‘A few,’ he said. ‘How many?’ I insisted. ‘Fifty maybe,’ he eventually answered. He was 236 years old so that was around one every two years. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he said. ‘Are they all still around? I asked’ He shrugged. ‘Most of them, I guess,’ he said. ‘It’s not like we all still see each other,’ he drawled. I didn’t say anything. ‘I see some of them,’ he finally admitted, ‘but don’t get pissed. It’s not like what you think. Anyway, this is your night.’ He pulled me to him and held me in the cold air. He kissed me on the lips, gently still because my teeth hurt even though they were growing fast.

Vampirism is mainly a guy-thing. ‘It’s just a virus,’ Slayer said. Guys can transmit it by their cum. Female vampires have to do blood-to-blood which is more complicated. ‘Ask Dark Lady, she knows all the facts,’ Slayer suggested, like he wasn’t real interested in that side of things. ‘Most male vampires are gay,’ he said, ‘it comes with the territory. Once in bed I asked him how he was made. It was in America not long after the War of Independence. He thought it was around 1790 but he said that he couldn’t even read then and they didn’t keep track of years in those times like we do now. He said he was raped in a ditch late one night after he had been drinking. This was somewhere just outside Boston. He said the vampire that did it was insane and would have killed him afterwards except for the fact that he was chased off by a pack of village dogs. Dogs hate our kind. ‘Vampires often were insane then because a lot of them didn’t know what had happened to them. Now it’s different.’ He said he had gone crazy, too, for a long time, roaming the dark, sleeping wild, killing for blood, but then Darklady had found him and sorted him out.

‘Harmony Corruption’ was Napalm Death’s 1990 album release. It took their earlier Grindcore style and merged it with Death Metal influences. It was only a temporary change in the band’s musical direction but for me it is still their most wicked album and it was seminal in the creation of modern Death Metal. The track-listing also contains all the material from their EP ‘Mentally Murdered’. Full of heavy blasting, it’s a raw choice for any hardcore Death Metal fiend.

I found an old Polaroid photograph in the back of Slayer’s address book. It is an ancient book, you can tell by the way it’s made. They don’t make things like that now. The paper is really thick and creamy. There were appointments written in old faded ink, all these crossing outs so you couldn’t read things, doodles of skulls and crossbones, stuff in other languages, lists of motorbike parts, and lots of hotmail and gmail e-mail addresses towards the end. The photo was inside the back cover with an unused 25 August 1962 PanAm airline ticket from New York to London.

It is Slayer standing there in that bathroom but I do not know what is happening in the photograph. I really want to ask him but I don’t think he’d like me nosing around his stuff. I also really wonder who took it. It makes me horny just looking at it.

Darklady made some really good investments in the 1880s and then Slayer said she’d got in early on Microsoft a few years back. She gives me an allowance of $500 a week. I’ve been paying for mega downloads from itunes. I now have complete mp3s of every album by Carcass, Morbid Angel, Entombed, Obituary, Sepultura and Pestilence to add to my collection. Deathlady has a top of the range broadband connection that I use too. She needs it for her website. Slayer calls www.darklady.net Vampire Central. ‘Even fucking really old vampires are online now,’ Slayer says, ‘you should checkout the member chatrooms if you’re into older guys.’

Slayer didn’t come home one night. He said he was just going out to get cigarettes and he didn’t come back. ‘He’s got appetites,’ Darklady said around 4am, studying me to see my reaction, ‘and you’ve got to let him satisfy them. It’s got nothing to do with his relationship with you.’ I wanted to ask her what he did but I knew she wouldn’t tell me. They both were good at keeping each other’s secrets. When Slayer came in at 6am, I pretended nothing unusual had happened. Then we had the best sex we’ve ever had. Being a vampire makes it better. It’s like lions mating. You can smell and feel and somehow you want things more. Everything seems bigger and harder and more focused. Slayer’s mouth tasted metallic and warm with blood which excited me more. I could smell it. My head roared.

Slayer has two motorbikes. His favorite is a Bonneville T100. It’s got an 865 cc engine. This is a photo of it we took in the driveway.

Most nights now we’ll go for a ride. I like sitting behind him pressed up close to Slayer’s body in his leathers. In the cold, snowy air these night rides on the high roads around Wakatipu are exhilarating, especially with my new senses, the tussock and rock and darkness whipping past, the black starry sky humming with energy, and all the fang-sharpening feel of everything.

Darklady tells old stories when we’re all winding down with a Jack and Coke just before dawn. I’ve learned about the old Vampire tribes that lived in the European and Russian forests, the evil blood-lusting Vampires who create human wars so they can surf those great red waves of battle, the last days of the Hapsburgs when the Austro-Hungarian nobility was filled our kind, and all about New York in the 1970s when gay vampires flaunted themselves in the discos and the sex clubs. Slayer paces up and down looking at the night through the big windows and smoking his Lucky Strikes. ‘Tell him about Berlin in 1945,’ he says. ‘Tell him about Von Reichenburg’s Vampire Hunters and what he did.’ ‘What about Killjack? Tell him about Killjack and Jagged and the Great Fire of London.’ Later, when we’re in bed, the curtains closed against the day, Slayer will tell me about other things because he was already going to Black Sabbath and Deep Purple concerts in the 1970s, right at the birth of Heavy Metal, and somehow he’d accidentally dropped in to the Metal Grinder in L.A. in 1987 when Death were recording ‘Bloody Scream Gore’ there and he actually met Chuck Schuldiner and talked to him. He knows I love all that shit.

Death’s ‘Bloody Scream Gore’ is the rawest of Death’s albums with the heaviest lyrics. It has a killer track listing including Infernal Death, Mutilation, and Zombie Ritual which has the album’s greatest intro riff. It is a really vicious compilation from the dawn of Death Metal and any true Death Metal Head needs to own and treasure a copy.

‘Sharper,’ I said to Slayer, ‘What about Sharper?’ I’m still trying to find my vampire name. Sharper is an evil name, I think. I like it. I look in the mirror and I even look like a Sharper, especially if I show my new fangs. ‘And Slayer and Sharper sounds grim together,’ I say, ‘Sharper and Slayer. Slayer and Sharper.’ ‘I’ll blood you soon enough,’ Slayer had said earlier on, ‘when it’s time. Don’t be hassling.’ He told me that we’ll hunt and do it together and just thinking about it, and how he is going to be there with me when we do it, makes me hot. It makes me want to strip off my clothes right there and then and let him have me. I undo my belt buckle with its big silver Goth buckle. He watches me. I snarl at him, just a low growl like he likes. I slowly unzip. His lips draw back from his teeth a little. They are wet and shining with saliva. We’re going to make a wicked team.

SAM HENDERSON is 27 and lives in Queenstown with his partner. ‘I’ve written a number of gay vampire stories set in the Wakatipu Basin and I’m currently working on a novel featuring the characters introduced in Gay Teenage Vampire.’ Sam believes that every gay man intrinsically understands the Vampire genre ‘because it is almost an exact metaphor for our lives.’

Copyright ©David Herkt 2007. All Rights Reserved.