Peter Maravelis - San Francisco Noir

Behind door number 2: walk-in closet. Outfits hang on rods. All black. Hump-me pumps, kick-yer-ass boots, gouge-yer-eye-out stiletto heels, thin Chinese slippers, and one pair of spiffy spats. One dresser. Three drawers. Bras. Panties. Stockings. One pair of black panties. I picked them up. Wrapped them around my face like a gas mask and breathed in the secret scent of the Snow Leopard. Pavlov was laughing in his grave as that smell invaded my central nervous system and zapped my boys while blood pumped automatically toward them. I considered stealing them, but I didn’t want to piss the Goddess off. I’ll ask the Snow Leopard for them after I re-sex her, I thought.

Snap your fingers. Do it now.

The time it takes you to think about snapping your fingers is how long it took for her to have the muzzle of her petite little pistol in my earhole as I left her walk-in closet.

My first thought was: How did she do that? That’s my thing. Nobody gets the drop on me.

And yet there it was, her cold metal stub at the tip of my earhole.

The next thing was smell. That in-heat scent, that aural-sense memory that made my thing sing as the breath drained out of me in a long warm sigh.

And suddenly her face was in mine. Those burning-coal eyes sucked me into the sunspots in the middle and I remember thinking: How did I get to be the deer in the headlights? The monkey in the middle?

She just stared. Looked like a smile was hiding under her quicksilver face, but there wasn’t enough light in the room to tell, just little flashes of moon through the skylights. I kept waiting for her to ask: What are you doing here? Or: How did you get in so easy? Or: What is wrong with you? But nothing. While freakydeaky cracklyscary estrogen-testosterone-saturated atoms careened around her huge empty cat cave.

She leaned in sooooo slow. Just kept leaning. Closer and closer. A picture popped into my head: She’d bitten my lower lip off and it was hanging out of her bloody mouth and she slurped it in between her teeth with a hungry happy growl.

Her lips were right at the tip of my lips and the heat of her breath made it feel like there was a furnace inside her pumping vaporized sex into my mouth and down my throat, filling my lungs and pulsating into my chest, then spreading all the way down to my hips, which began humpdancing unconsciously into her, and the chemicals were changing in my brain, synapses firing, my heart rate erupting through the roof of my mouth, the flow of blood altered, redirected by the Snow Leopard.

I wanted to say: How the hell did you sneak up on me like that? Or: Are you mad that I’m here? Or: Who are you, anyway? But the cat got my tongue. The tense intense anticipation was killing me, and all the while I was madly aware of her metal rod flirting with my earhole. I simply cannot emphasize enough how this added to the life-n-death of the whole thing, knowing I was one itchy trigger finger away from having my brains turned into wallpaper.

The tip of my lip got the softest lick from her rough cat tongue as her other hand grabbed my package hard, knocking the air right out of me, while she shoved me back into the wall with a thud , her claws digging into my boys.

And then I understood. This is her thing: Getting guys by the balls. Literally. Her grind finding mine, she dug in, yes it did hurt, but at the same time, pleasure shot to all my centers, all at the same time. Pleasure. Pain. Pain. Pleasure. I couldn’t tell anymore where one ended and the other began. She dragged me back and forth fiercely, and I had never felt more alive in my entire life. She squeezeboxed me like a rhythm queen working overtime, working me over but good.

I was now waiting to wake up overheated and covered in cold sweat from this dream.

But no.

She pushed me hard, my back literally up against the wall. She shoved me down onto the floor, and plopped down on me, she had me pinned, straddling one boot on either side of my thighs, black skirt up over her hips, sucking on my tongue so it shivered me with freezing heat, and that little prick of a gun was always there, hard and cold in my earhole, my death at her whim a whisper away.

The Snow Leopard started making crazy growly hissing sounds, I could feel the pull of the moon from inside her, and I knew I never wanted to leave there.

She maneuvered herself open, pulled back her head and looked into my eyes, inviting me inside to ride her Ferris wheel to the stars. She took a deep breath, and a sweetness came over her face, it filled me up, everything softened and she melted me in places I didn’t even know I had places.

Then she grabbed me behind the neck with her free hand and gathered herself like a hurricane off the coast.

And then BOOM! she shoved down with all her might, with all those muscles, with all that leverage, all that wet and that swell, sliding down deepdeepdeep into the depth of her holiness, all the way to the bottom of the well, splitting her open like an atom, an explosion of heat blowing my mushroom-cloud heart all the way up.

More crazy roar big cat scratch fever screams as she rocked slowly, flexing in rhythm with the tide, tugging and grinding, pressing flesh on flesh, sweat beading out now, the sound of squishing liquid wet, ecstasy crawling from pleasure center to pleasure center up and down my tingling spine as she pulled me up higher and higher, while ripping into my skin. Is that sweat or blood trickling down my neck? my brain asked. Yes, it is , my body answered.

She was back in my face again, the Snow Leopard. I could finally see her, as a strip of moon filtered through her skylights, and she poured herself through my windows, and this is what took me to the edge of Lover’s Leap.

She nodded at me ever so tiny, she wanted to know if I was ready to jump off with her, to take the great plunge, and into her eyes I nodded, Yes, I’m ready, jump off and I’ll jump with you .

Funny what a person can get used to. When the muzzle of her petite little pistol first nuzzled my earhole, everything else in the entire world faded away, and there was nothing but the cold steel feel of that gun, death at the tip of her finger.

But by the time I heard the click of the trigger, I had quite forgotten, in all the excitement, that her petite little pistol was there at all. It took me a moment to realize what that sound was, to remember that her gun was indeed in my earhole.

How long was it between the time I heard that click and the time that bullet ripped down the tiny barrel of her pistol, barreled through the hole of my ear and into the fishy tissue of my brain? Couldn’t be more than a flicker of a blink, right? A heartbeat? At what point during its passage through my skull did the bullet take me from orgasm to death? I cannot accurately answer that question.

But as a sex maniac, I couldn’t have asked for a better death: coming and going in the same moment, at the hands of the Snow Leopard.

The editor wishes to thank the following for their encouragement and support: Andy Bellows, Sona Avakian, Jennifer Joseph, Paul Yamazaki, Miriam Hodgman, The Matlock Brothers, Ashish & Janaki Ranpura, Daphne Gottlieb, Alan Goldstein, Tasha Keppler, Daniel Mandel, Jane Ganahl, Cheryll Eddy, Jeffrey Chan, Justin Chin, Mattilda, Johnny Strike, Nichelle Tramble, Michael Disend, Alan Black, Jill Tracy, Charles Gatewood, Marta Koehne, Stacey Lewis, Melissa Wagner, Jon Bradford, John Hurtado, Richard Poccia, Sherry Olsen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nancy J. Peters, Elaine Katzenberger, the gang at City Lights, and to Chris &Alex for logistical support; past, present, and future.

R OBERT M AILER A NDERSONwas born in San Francisco in 1968. He finished his first novel, Boonville , in a hotel room in North Beach while jocking coffee at Caffe Trieste. He now lives with his wife and three children in Pacific Heights above a robot, and is a board member of SFJAZZ and the S.F. Opera Association.