Early evening by the time we wrap. A crease of sunset lines the horizon, interrupted by the high rises of downtown: buildings I'd once travailed in, wheeled and dealed, buildings I'm now effectively banned from. Bright pinprick spires burn in foothills beyond the city, derricks venting sour gas, flames frayed by a south-blowing wind. A pale crescent moon sits like a toy boat in the gap between two dark mountains. Across the road an empty lot hosts abandoned shopping carts, old tires and castoff watertanks rusting in the nettles, a junked car with garbage bags taped over its shattered windows. A huge scavenger bird with a raw, boiledlooking head perches on the car's spavined roof: a buzzard, though to the best of my knowledge such creatures are not native to this part of the planet.
    Take a Phillips screwdriver from my glovebox, remove the license plates from Wayne's Buick Century, screw them to my Chevy Cavalier. A dastardly deed but Wayne won't catch any heat: got to figure he'll be laid up for a week. Ironclad alibi. Settle behind the driver's seat, doff my trousers, arrange a layer of Kleenex between my spread legs. Rev the engine, pull out of the lot.
    This old Western movie crystallized it for me. Black-and-white, which generally I cannot abide. There was this cowboy and his horse, a Palomino. The cowboy doted on his mount — fed it apples and sugar cubes, brushed cockleburs out of its mane with a wire comb. Towards the end they're on a wagontrain trekking through the Sierra Madres when the horse is slowed by a split hoof. The cowboy jams his pistol to the horse's eye and pulls the trigger. Why'd you do that? The wagonmaster says. Thought you loved that horse. The cowboy spits and says, Nossir, but I do love horses. That is to say, I cherish the nature of horses — hardworking, reliable, docile. But alla them is that way. Can always find y'self another horse.
    Now, it's conceivable to cherish the nature of women, right? They're beauteous and supple, willing to accommodate the man who knows how best to stroke them. But that's on a whole: you might feel nothing on a case-by-base basis. A sex addict's relationship is with sex, not people. For addicts it's crucial to break any object of desire down to its base elements: tits, asses, lips, cocks, cunts. The process of dehumanization is like a moral imperative.
    I dearly cherish the nature of women.
    Cruise streets in the gray twilight, past decrepit rowhouses and shops with gated windows, homeless persons and lean winter dogs hunched at the mouths of go-nowhere alleys, a boarded church cloaked in the shadowy overhang of tall maples, through cones of lamplight casting their blue nocturnal glow, on over a swing bridge spanning the blighted waterway. Mammoth construction cranes stand still as obelisks against the quilted sky. Difficult to shift gears with my pants rucked around my ankles.
    Scan the sidewalks but fail to spot a suitable candidate: here a bagwoman, less human being than agglomeration of filthy ponchos trundling a shopping cart with a frozen wheel; there a chick resembling an ambulatory fire hydrant, bull-dyke by the looks of it, hieing a chowdog on a length of heavy-gauge chain. Real slim pickens. Call my pal Danny Dewson; we co-sponsor one another through Sexaholics Anonymous.
    "Hey. It's me."
    "It's you," says Danny. "How goes the battle?"
    "Gotta be honest with you . . . "
    "Honesty's the best policy, Samuel."
    "So here it is: I'm cruising. Right now, cruising."
    Silence on his end. "Are you, like, past the point of no return? Stripped and ready to rip?"
    "Cocked, locked, ready to rock," I tell him.
    "Oh, man." Danny clicks his tongue. "Oh, man-oh-man. Where are you?"
     "Corner of Bonita and Empress. Between the peepshow theater and that rub-n-tug joint."
    "Sure, near that bar with the room in the back." Danny's fingers drum the wall beside his phone. "Listen, you probably ought to just let yourself go on this one, okay? You can fall off the wagon every once in a while, so long as you hop right back on."
    This is exactly what I need to hear. "Everyone cheats a little now and then, isn't that so? I mean, it's not the end of the world, is it?"
    "Of course it isn't," says Danny. "Of course not."
    "And hey, not like I'm committing a mortal sin or anything."
    "Well I'm really not up on all that, Samuel."

    "But you think it's okay? This one time?"
    "I'm gonna greenlight you, here."
    "Bless you, Danny. Bless your heart."
    "Stay strong, brother."
    The moment I hang up she's walking down the sidewalk — we're talking on cue. Materializing out of thinned mist like an apparition, some vaporous half-glimpsed angel, not entirely real. Wearing tight blue jeans ripped at the knee and some sort of fur-trimmed coat. Too far to make out exact features but that's not critical.
    Pull alongside her, roll down the window. "Excuse me? Excuse me, miss?"
    She checks up and hunkers down on the sidewalk. At this unforgiving range her face does not hold up: teeth shot to hell and this oddshaped growth, a carbuncle I guess you'd say, growing out the side of her nose.
    "Lookin' for somethin'?"
    "Well, you see, I'm sort of lost." It's a struggle to keep my body still, I'm masturbating so furiously. "Do you know the way . . . to the highway?"
    She leans forward, resting her wrists on the windowframe. "That what you're really after, cowboy?" Her eyelashes are clotted with pebbles of mascara and the furred collar of her coat smells like a drowned rodent — Christ, she's not making this easy. "Let's not pussyfoot around."
    "Well, maybe we can work something out. If you could just . . . lean a bit closer . . . "
    She thrusts her head through the window, face inches from mine as if this forced intimacy might somehow seal the deal and I surrender control with a moan, splashing the steering column as a feeling of absolute peace floods through me, ecstatic well-being of a sort experienced only by Buddhist monks and perhaps tiny infants — enlightening peace. I'm beset by these heartwarming thoughts towards this woman, dreams of a good life and healthy future, happiness and love but this mini-satori is fleeting and I'm overtaken by a sense of futility known to few on earth, brought about by the inconceivability of these dreams for this woman or myself or anyone really, staring through the windshield at a night sky spread with stars, the conceivable worlds couched in those dark sprawling spaces between the light host to alien lifeforms possessed of such nobility and decency as I will never even fathom, and this sense of incalculable desolation draws about me, I who remain so trivial, insignificant, tenuous and specklike.
    Among addicts, the act of release frequently triggers feelings of ecstatic euphoria followed by periods of profound remorse, paranoia and depression.
    "Well," the woman assumes a pragmatic tone, "you're not a cop." Her eyes narrow to feline slits. "Really should charge you for that."
    "Thanks." Slip the gearshift into first, work a crumpled twenty out of my pants pocket, toss it on the street and pull away. "Sorry about that."
    "Hey, anytime..."
    There are over three trillion nerve receptors in the human body. Fully seventy percent are located in erogenous zones. This is what you're fighting. Every minute of every day. It's an uphill battle.

The house is an awkward duplex with swayback roof, mullioned windows, a single-car drive. We used to live in a big house on the ritzy side of town back in the Days of Yore, epoch of the Steady Job and Frequent Promotions and Healthy Bank Balance, also the Weekly Business Junkets and Late Nights at the Office and Dirty Dark Secret.
    Lisa answers my knock in a housecoat, hair wet from a bath. In the darkened family room the TV casts flickering luminescence on the walls.
    "Hi there. Hoping maybe I could see Ellie for a bit."
    "What are you doing here?" My ex-wife crosses her arms over her breasts. "You get Ellie every other weekend, you know that."
    "Well, yeah, of course, but I was hoping maybe a few minutes . . . "
    "You stink, Sam."
    "Do I?" It's genuinely upsetting I failed to recognize this. "Oh, jeez. Could I wash up?"

    Lisa purses her lips. I consider the single worst act I'd committed during our marriage. Probably the time I returned from a whorefilled weekender, gave her the clap, then halfheartedly argued she'd given it to me. Yeah, that's the one.
    "I wouldn't ask but I'd really like to see her. Half an hour and I'm out of your hair."
    She steps aside. "Okay, for a little while. But clean yourself up."
    In the bathroom scrub at a stiff patch on my jeans then dry off with Lisa's Conair. Unzip my fly and push the blowdryer into my pants until the heat becomes unbearable and switch it off. In the medicine cabinet find a bottle of perfume and give myself a liberal spritzing.
    My daughter sits on the sofa watching a kids' show. In the room's muted light she appears somehow insubstantial, a flickering hologram of herself.
    "Hey, kiddo."
    When she smiles I see she's lost a baby tooth, upper left canine. "What're you doing here, Daddy?"
    "Seemed like the thing to do at the time." Sitting beside her, the cushions compress in such a way that Ellie's body tilts into the soft crook beneath my arm. "What ya watching?"
    "The animals talk." Her body shrugs against mine. "The live on a river. The guinea pig's funny."
    On the TV screen a mob of industrious creatures — hamster and mouse, turtle, a duck — cavort in a drift of popcorn. The guinea pig's voice reminds me of Jimmy Cagney: Youuu doity raaat! Youuu kilt my bruddah!
    "You smell like a girl," Ellie says and for a moment I'm filled with a dark and predatory dread until I realize she's talking about the perfume.
    "Spilled some of your mom's smelly stuff on me. Don't you like it?"
    Another shrug. "Okay, I guess."
    I settle my arm around her shoulders and squeeze. Feel the movement of her chest and try to match my breathing to hers, our lungs expanding and contracting in perfect synchronism until I fear hyperventilation. We watch in silence; I'm content to simply be near her, drinking in her warmth and calm as a camel does water for a long desert trek.
    Lisa comes in with a tray of milk and Fig Newtons. When she hands me a glass our fingers brush and she pulls away as though burned. Ellie finishes one cookie and reaches for another.
    "No more," Lisa says. "Too much sugar before bed gives you nightmares."
    "I like nightmares," my daughter reasons.
    The program reaches a heartwarming conclusion, riverbank denizens throwing a party. The hamster's zipping around in a miniature motorboat, shiny black eyes bugged out in abject terror. Sitting with my daughter's head rested in the crook of my arm watching the rodents frolic all I can think about is female genitalia, a sheer wall of vaginas like some sort of cliff, furred

pussies, shaved pussies, blond and black and ginger-haired pussies, and I'm standing at the base of this forbidding structure stark naked wearing a pair of blue-tinted ski goggles and then I'm climbing, grabbing onto labias for purchase, searching for sure handholds in the loosest ones, jamming toes and fingers into moist slits wishing for crampons or a bag of talc. Ellie shifts against me and I'm desperately trying to think of anything else, marigolds — seahorses — merry-go-rounds but nothing works, I'm stuck with the pussy cliff, scaling its slick alien veneer like an intrepid mountaineer tackling the perilous northface ascent on K2.
    What kind of person harbors such thoughts? I mean, really, what kind?
    Addicts are frequently beset by bitter self-loathing in response to erotic fantasies over which they exercise no control.
    "Well," I say, "about time I hit the dusty trail."
    "Stay," Ellie says. "VeggieTales is on next."
    Giant talking cucumbers. Yes, just what the doctor ordered.
    "I'd better not, honey. Got to get to my meeting. See you this weekend, 'kay?"
    Give her a big hug. Crumbs on her top lip, breath smelling of milk. Lisa follows me to the door.
    "You're good with her Sam, I'll give you that."
    "What can I say. I love her, I guess."
    She smiles in a way that makes me sad. Perhaps intuiting something she asks, "What are you thinking about?"
    Scaling a cliff of vaginas.
    "Oh, nothing."
    "C'mon."
    "Well, okay . . . I was reading this book the other day. There was a character who . . . well, he screwed watermelons. At night he'd cross into his neighbor's melon patch, cut a hole in a watermelon with a penknife. The Moonlight Melonhumper. And I guess I got to thinking it wouldn't be so bad, would it — balling melons? Grow some in your backyard or just, y'know, keep a few on hand. Whenever the urge struck you could slip away and take care of business. What I'm saying is, it'd be possible to lead a normal life." A brittle laugh.
    "Is this something they advocate in your group?" she says. "This kind of . . . frankness?"
    "Sort of. I'm not certain."
    "Well," she says stiffly, "goodnight. I'll drop Ellie off Saturday morning."

"Mr. Chancey." The addiction counselor is maybe twenty-five, recent college grad with this high breathy voice like he's got a pennywhistle lodged in his throat. "If you could save your conversation for the break. Bette, please go on."
    Bette O'Neal is a large woman: I believe the euphemism is Rubenesque. She's a dual addict: an overeating nymphomaniac.
    "Well, okay, so I'm at my son's high-school basketball game, alright? He's seventeen, a senior. The ah, the point guard or something. So they're playing and it's a close game, five points, around that and I'm in the stands which're crowded but not too crowded — not a playoff game or anything like that." Bette sips from the liter bottle of Pepsi she's brought. "There's this guy on the other team — boy I guess I should say, but who knows? What's the legal age, nowadays?"
    "Eighteen." The counselor's name is Joey. "The legal age of adulthood is eighteen."
    "Oh. So okay, maybe legally he's a boy, but a lot of it depends on maturity and . . . like, upbringing, doesn't it? Not like I actually did anything — I mean, physically speaking. Anyway, this guy, boy, whatever, he's tall and lanky and . . . lithe, I guess, which I know'd usually describe a girl or like a cat but this boy, he really was lithe. I'm sitting there in the stands totally consumed — I can't take my eyes off him, the way he's running up and down the court. The gym's got that smell you get when guys or gals or people, just any old people, find themselves in close contact. Like sweat but I don't know, deeper than sweat. Know what I'm talking about?" A few people nod and Bette says, "So I'm staring at this boy and touching myself. Brought a coat on account of the chill and lay it across my lap. Strange but I didn't imagine fucking, his hands on my tits, my mouth on his cock, any of that — just watching him run and jump was enough. The biggest turn on was his youth: he was young and clean and probably disease-free, which, even though I wasn't fucking him I still felt was, y'know, a plus. Orgasmed five times real quick, like a string of firecrackers going off." Sip of Pepsi. "That was my week."
    "Thank you for sharing, Bette." Joey'd winced every time Bette used the words fucking, cock, or tits. "While it's commendable you didn't act on your urges, you must admit such behavior is not socially acceptable."
    "Ah, lay offa her," says Baney Jones, a sixty-three-year-old serial exposer.
    "I'm not on her, Mr. Jones," says Joey. "We're trying to create a supportive environment. That means critical appraisal of — "
    "Ah, your mother wears army boots!" Baney slaps a liverspotted palm on the table. "You're giving her the gears! Reading her the riot act!"
    "It's okay," Bette says. "I'm a big girl, sweetheart; I can handle it."

Streets aglitter with frost. My eyes follow the yellow dash-dash-dash of the median strip running along dark tarmac. Roads forlorn and devoid of human life. A sickle moon cuts through a bank of threadbare nightclouds to grace shops and offices with a washed-out pall. Beatrice in the passenger's seat fiddling with the radio; every so often she says, "Left here," or "Hang a right at the doughnut shop," leading me through the city grid to an unknown destination. A lamplit billboard towers over the shipyard, the tanned blow-dried visage of some local paragon I should recognize but do not staring down benevolently and I'm left feeling ashamed, the way you feel bumping into a person who knows your name when you cannot recall theirs — ashamed for being unable to remember what it was you'd shared together, however meaningless. Beatrice twists the radio knob and the speakers come to life: a string of garbled syllables devolving into a scream or howl, low and mournful and ongoing, the signal weak, crackling with static and I imagine a ghostly deep-space transmission, some doomed cosmonaut shrieking into an intercom, fishbowl helmet starred with cracks and the steamwhistle screech of pressure hammering his eardrums, a dead man's voice traveling through the empty vacuum of space like a message in a bottle washed ashore on the far reaches of the AM dial.
    "Weird," Beatrice says.
    "Yeah. Freaky."
    "Swing left up at the side street. Almost there."
    The building is a deteriorating five-story in the packing district. Faded scorchmarks rise, black tongues against the gouged masonry, scars of some long-ago fire. The intermittent signature of a strobelight flashes across high casement windows. Adjacent parking lot uncommonly packed: BMWs and Mercedes rowed alongside pickup trucks and rust-eaten Dodges.
    "What is this place? Looks like it should be foreclosed."
    "Most likely is. This is a one-night-only sort of deal."
    Trail her to a green-painted door set between a pair of dumpsters. Her knock is answered by a black man with the rough dimensions of a Morgan Fort gun safe. Beatrice whispers something: apparently the safeword because the man steps aside, allowing just enough room for her to squeeze past. The man is easing his planetary bulk back into position when Beatrice informs him I'm her escort; with a world-weary sigh, he steps aside once more.
    "What's the story?" Follow Beatrice up a narrow staircase. Walls graffiti tagged, holes punched through plaster to reveal corroded wires and sodden pink insulation. "Are you leading me into ruin? A snuff film crew? Black-market organ farmers?"
    "It's a traveling showcase." She stops, glancing back at me. "Different cities, different participants. I've done it a few times." A wink. "Surprised you don't know it."
    At the top of the stairs a girl with a pierced bellybutton stands beneath a sign reading Coat Check. Doff my jacket and hand it over. She taps the sign with a hot-pink fingernail and I notice it in fact reads Clothes Check. Beatrice and I strip, turning our shirts and jeans over to the girl. She hands me a claim chit but I've no idea where to stow it. Beatrice slips hers under her tongue. I do the same.
    The girl positions herself before a sliding metal door. Spraypainted on the door in pink letters matching her fingernails is the word GOMORRAH.
    "Pitter-patter," says Beatrice, hopping lightly from one foot to the other, "let's get at 'er."
    The first thing to hit you is the heat: this warmth closing around your body. The second is smell: sweet and bitter at once, the scent of bodies in close contact. The way Bette said: like sweat, but deeper. As my eyes adjust I see we're in a warehouse. Steel girders row the vaulted ceiling; small creatures, birds or mice, scuttle across rusted A-beams. Strobelights set on telescopic tripods throw kinetic pinwheels on the walls and floor. A DJ spins trance music on a pair of portable turntables.
    "Welcome to the viper's nest." Beatrice's lips next to my ear. "Or is it viper's pit?"
    She leads me to the clutch of naked bodies. Thirty or forty people sprawled on swaths of thick velvet. Arms and elbows, calves and knees; occasionally a head will crest, person taking a deep breath as though they've been trapped underwater. No one speaks; no voices at all save the sporadic sigh or shuddering exhale. Beatrice is gone, her body twined with a dozen others, amalgamate now, indistinguishable.
    Wade in slowly, as a swimmer immerses himself in a cold surf. A hand reaches out, grabbing my calf, pulling me down; I'll go willingly enough. Bodies press against mine, limbs hairy and smooth; breasts push against my face, a perfumed arm wrapped around my head urging me on; someone's hand, cold and brittle as a talon, clamps onto my leg and delivers a nasty pinch; my lips on thighs and asses, in vaginas and mouths, the crooks of elbows, the undersides of knees; a hard cock crosses the underside of my throat, across lips, gone. A faceless stranger with a dextrous tongue, woman or man I cannot tell, performs fellatio with such wanton bravado I'm left on the verge of weeping. Men and women congregate in well-dressed groups in the warehouse shadows, silent observers. A man stands amidst the teeming surge and emits a high gibbering shriek like some jungle creature and in the plated moonlight falling through the casement windows he appears skinless and I'm thinking about my daughter standing in a green summer field, Ellie's smiling face lit by the July sun. Peace and serenity I'm thinking. Wayne's mangled cock I'm thinking. Pussy tits ass I'm thinking. Admit the existence of a higher power I'm thinking. Flesh I'm thinking. Flesh flesh flesh flesh . . .  n°

Reprinted from Rust and Bone by Craig Davidson with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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