The breakup made me do it; either that breakup or so many before it. The snap inside may have been coming for a while but the day it popped I knew there was no going back.
It started with rearranging my apartment. Lace curtains, sensible furniture and an entire Mariah Cary CD collection made its way to my curb with a “Take me – I’m yours!” sign attached.
I replaced it all with heavy satin quilted drapes, mood lamps and Jim Morrison. Soon I had velveteen beanbags, Henry Lawson’s ice-cream-moon-bellied women on the walls side by side with Freda Kahlo and her skeletal cosmic misery. I burned incense called “fire” and an oil called “sensual times”.
I bought dark bottle green silk bed linen with heavy tassels hanging off crisp corners. I drank red wine, kept my fridge stocked with strawberries and painted my nails blood red in front of internet porn.
I listened to Hope Sandoval, Cat Power and slow heated come-hither jazz. I watched Bitter Moon, Henry and June, and The Secretary. I kept my front door locked and my back door open where cats gathered to peer into my long blue tinted hallway. I wrote in my journal and offered myself to vampires over lit candles inscribed with my name.
As I grew more accustomed to the hidden me that had erupted to my surface, I made my way to grimy porn stores, buying the worst, most degrading pornography. I rubbed my throbbing clit to orgasm over and over till my taste took on some sophistication and oversized breasts on tiny teens teased me no more. I turned to burlesque, bisexual and gay love, large soft fleshed women whose loose roundness taunted me to long slow lingering orgasms.
I accepted an invitation from a woman who had wanted me for many years even though she was straight.
“Come to the burlesque. It is for art purposes.”
I’d shied away before. But this time I went.
I sat in a smoke filled room with men and a few women watching Goths and blue mooners dance with erotic irony while women whose white skin sat dome like over the top of their elastic skeletons posed mannequin-still for the charcoal flurries around them. They stared out, lifeless, naked unblemished and unashamed in a room filled with repressed sniggers, sideways glances and the inevitable shifting in ones seat.
I had to tease the erotic out of this place. It was full of giggling girls and boys pretending to be adults.
“We need more wine.” She whispered in my ear.
I let her lips caress my cartilage and allowed the wetness to pool between my thighs. But I didn’t turn my head.
“You live at the edge of life.” She rasped. “You fear the taste for abnormal pleasures will kill the desire for the safe.”
I continued to watch a chocolate woman in white feathers caress her naked breasts with hot oil and pretended I didn’t hear.
Later that night, when the machine between my legs purred softly against my clit I found my mind didn’t wander to my friend, nor to the dancers, but to the mannequins. I imagined their rigid digits in sensual pose unmoving as I pressed my liquid entrance against them. Their motionless detached acquiescence as I brought myself to orgasm on outstretched fingers, pointed toes and open frozen mouths. I knew desire lay in the unnatural; in the creative soul, the experimental self. I saw the need for courage and for the open mind.
My sleep was filled with dreams of women, one woman and men all caressing me, but refusing me satisfaction.
I woke fevered, a dark green pool of perspiration on my sheets.
I got out of bed and immediately arranged my hair. I wore maroon sandals with vicious spikes for heels. I walked about my apartment, my high shoes pushing my naked ass into a beckoning curve, my hair arranged in a coiffeur high on my head.
By candlelight I painted my eyes with kohl, allowing the black film to run across the liquid orbs till it rimmed perfectly, accentuating the cats jade of my stare. I painted the lids heavy black then shadowed them in thick dark smoky purple. The look was a fifties ingénue, a stylised pouting Brigitte Bardot. I frosted my lips with light pink and dabbed a dark brown beauty spot high on my right cheek.
I dragged my sheer black wisp of panties up my legs and draped my dark red velveteen cape around my shoulders. It swished suggestively around my lower calves, giving away nothing of my nakedness underneath. I stood at my backdoor, and breathed in the air heavy with moonlit night. I opened it, and ventured out.
I meandered without direction, purpose or plan happy to be led by desire; by the aching cleft between my legs. I gave little thought to preparation, working only off instinct. I walked up a street that bustled heavy with smoggy cars in the day but lay like a dry barren creek bed at night.
The damp night air licked at my lower arms, face and calves. The tingle of it on my skin, the feel of my bare cunt lips sliding against each other as I walked sent thick cobwebby strands of arousal to the tops of my thighs. A woven mat of longing spread across my entrance, an external hymen ready to be broken in.
My large extended nipples stood firm, aching against the thick satin lining of the dark red of my cape. I walked on, past houses, their lightless windows like shut lids of indifference to my foolishness.
Then I knew where I was going.
I turned left into a darker street; less light to guide my way, more potential for danger, and more adrenalin in my veins. My heels click clacked against the uneven cement path. A faint squelch from my fluid centre broke the noiseless piercing dark.
I reached the end of the road; a cul- de-sac with a large vacant lot. A place where teenagers come to shed their virginity and closet gays to indulge in forbidden pleasures; It lay quiet tonight, for the circus was in town.
The big top tent stood, faded stripped and used in the middle of the clearing, with five or so battered caravans parked either side of its dying splendour. Many years past its prime, even in the dark, tears and repairs marred its smooth candy coloured facade. To the right a small carnival lay dormant. Abandoned bumper cars, a three-boothed sideshow alley and a two-story Ferris wheel lay still. A deflated jumping castle, closed hot dog stand and chipped carousel stood an eerie and silent watch in the moons shadowy light.
The carnival inspired standing hairs and knotted bellies, not laughing children and happy times.
It was perfect.
I left the firm support of the cement path to find my way to the soft fertile earth, recently dampened by the nights rising mists. Fog worked its way in already, laying low so the rides, vans and trees appeared to rise out of a white swamp. The dewy grass and its rich black sodden soil beneath smelled like a leg spread thrusting woman.
The warm earth sucked in the cruel spike of each heel as I took larger than average steps across the grass, trying to stay on my tip toes to protect my beloved shoes. Soon, however, the moisture licked its way onto my covered skin, the dirt in places now mud oiling its way into my costume.
A noise to my left, a movement, the rustle of a bush stopped me in my track. I waited breathless. I heard the rapid movement of a startled animal. As my eyes adjusted, I saw a pair of almost black eyes staring at me only a few feet away from a thick furred face. The creature took three clumsy steps back, clearly as scared by my sudden arrival as I was by my discovery. Turning toward a tree I recognised a one humped camel, wearing a large leather dominant strap about its neck holding it to the tree.
My stillness must have satisfied it. It went back to licking the leaves, its fat muscled tongue lapping pale in the moonlight, slithering its way along a branch.
I continued toward the caravans, the camel and I now co-conspirators in a park neither of us belonged in.
For a fleeting moment, as I neared the broken screen doors of the vans, I thought of running. Although in the secret place of my soul I’d wanted this, I knew there was still time to escape. The camel brought me back to reality. I hadn’t thought of tomorrow, of who I’d be or how I would be able to live my life. I just went when it was time to go. I could run now, let the grey mist absorb me, toss my shoes into the woods and never come back here again.
Even as I had these thoughts I moved forward, not pausing once in my stride.
“We’ve been waiting for you.” The voice came from the darkest shadow behind the first van.
I stood still. I teetered on my heels. My heart raced and thumped, causing a faint quiver in my left breast. I didn’t know what to expect. I wondered how many women came here, how many ran from their shell like lives and took refuge in the strange erotic world of the carnival.
“Sssssss.....” a voice hissed in my ear. I felt a body, distinctly male, behind me. I took a deep breath, and held myself in the one place, ignoring my overwhelming desire to run. I closed my eyes, as hands came from the rear and clasped my head, as if the mind behind them wanted to crush my skull under his power.
The hands didn’t crush me. Instead they ran, calloused and heavy down the side of my face, dragging my white skin into a grotesque mask, pulling my lips lopsided and askew. I felt lipstick smear across a cheek, and tasted salt and oil as a finger pulled briefly at my open mouth.
The hands continued down. They joined around my throat. My heart raced to a panic as the hands pushed inward almost blocking off my air pipes, before they travelled down and across my shoulders.
In a brief and sudden move, my cape was pulled from my shoulders, and dropped on the ground before me. I stood naked, but for my heels and black lace panties, my eyes closed, the heady night air wrapping its tendrils around me, too late for protection, too thin for me to hide behind.
A chorus of male voices groaned and mumbled. No coherence to the cries and grunts, they resembled rather gorilla like noises. Grunts and snorts and cries of approval as my nipples gave away my arousal, standing tall, firm and erect, willing ugly forbidden mouths to suck them.
The hands, now extended with thick hairy arms off them, wrapped around me, holding me in place. As if I could ever run, as if I would run from this moment. I let the arms take me. They were huge, tree trunk thick, and long so that they reached down over my shoulders to the top do my thighs. With a grasp and a twist they folded into the material of my panties and ripped them off with a jerk.
What monster, what side show alley freak held me, I did not know. Nor did I know what creature’s beheld my body in the faint light. The cool night air whipped around my exposed pussy slipping into my sweaty folds enticing further bouts of eroticism through me; as my clit swelled it signalled my mind to flood my tunnel with lubrication.
The creature that held me was covered in the hair of an animal, a large monkey, or a man with the thickest blackest wiry animal hair.
The man lifted me as if I were a small child with his hands placed under my thighs, seating me back onto his palms so that as he held me aloft, he could control my direction and my legs. As if to demonstrate this, he spread my legs wide, so that my sex, hot and stringy with its slithery desperation, unfolded red and panting, wanting anything and everything to take me and pleasure me there.
Soon a dishevelled clown stepped out from the shadow. In his full red suit, large yellowed pompoms ran down the full length of his costume to a tented bulge between his legs. His face remained fully made up, and his hair was a red wiggy mass of matted curls and debris. He sported a large red grin that smeared across his face from cheek to cheek. He leered at me, such untamed lust in his eyes, I averted my gaze, for fear my heart would explode in my chest.
He walked slowly toward me. The man behind held me low, my legs spread wide, my arms pulled back, my breasts and their long pointed nipples thrusting forward. As soon as the clown reached us, he dropped to his knees.
I turned to look at him. I saw the devil himself in the crazed eye. I gasped, as he plunged his face forward, thrusting a long tongue deep into my body.
“Oh!” I cried out.
Male sneers and laughter, echoes out from the dark behind the trailer reverberated around me. But none of it turned the clown from his ministrations. He made the noises of a man hungrily devouring a meal he’d staggered through a desert to obtain. He gulped and slurped and made chewing and swallowing noises so loud and obscene as he fed, that each hefty grunt echoed out over the misty field.
With the noise making, the clowns eating habits were born of a skill that can only come from experience. I was swept into delirium. His tongue snaked its way through the aching folds of my dripping cunt, pausing only to form the kind of suction on my clit that brought me almost to orgasm each time. He would pause and pull away, saying nothing, waiting for me to pull back from the cliffs edge, before he would plunge in with more enthusiasm, whipping me into a frenzy with his masterful organ.
Soon I had no more restraint. As the man behind tilted my pelvis forward, the clown swept a flat fat tongue from my ass to my clit then pointed it and fucked me so hard I came with a scream thrusting my sex into his face over and over again trying to suck the tongue out of his head and draw it entirely into my body. With large slurping noises he drank my offering down, gulping the river that flowed from my well.
As soon as I’d spent, he stood. All the makeup now smeared off his lower face, but his crazed eye still held the expression that raised fear in my heart. In a moment he was gone.
And another, just as crazed, took his place.
Four clowns sucked on my body that night; taking me to heights of delirium I had neve known. Soon I had my own hands looped under my legs, helping the monster behind me to hold my legs apart as I tried to spin and squirm on the face of each clown as he drowned in my floods. All of them ate from me noisily, hungrily, like animals; Wild, fetid, selfish.
When the last completed his meal, the giant placed me in the grass, and draped my cloak over my body. I lay spent, the glorious numbness of a thousand orgasms exhausting me, making me sleep the sounded sleep of all.
I woke to the sound of a bird.
Dawn crept into the world, and the dew had fallen unashamed over my body as I lay in the grass. My sex throbbed and my shoulder joints ached. I sat up, a delirium taking me over as I looked around and tried to gain my bearings.
I remembered where I was, and grasping for my cape, I pushed off my heels and clasped them to my breast.
I ran through the streets to my home, ran up the stairs to my apartment, ran into my house and slammed the door behind me. What now, after all that, I was afraid of, I cannot say.
I fell to the floor of my apartment, my hand between my legs and masturbated myself to another orgasm, remembering the happenings of the night before.
I had now known pleasure.
I now understood.
- Barbra Novac
