Page 37 of A Long Con

His eyebrow twitched. “No. And I stay da fuck away from all religion. His Catholicism was the hypocritical straw that broke the camel’s back. He’s so fucking self-righteous and everybody else is a fucking criminal.”

“Rajah dat.” I was still aglow with the stimulus of the prior night. Cuffing this big, bouncing boy and rendering him helpless. He had risen to the spur of the moment, so to speak, when I’d spanked him so lovingly.

Yet even my rough slaps were full of love. My chest burst with feelings for this hulk. His story about the shower boy gulping his load had me aroused eight ways from Sunday—that’s what had goaded me to spank his heavy, thick cock. As he grunted out the story, his erotic body signals gave him away. He was enjoying the fuck out of the abuse, and he was longing to have something shoved inside his sweet ass. I could’ve easily barebacked him then and there—the signs told me he would not protest the roughest manhandling possible—but I wanted to hold out, to entice him, to elevate his craving for me to the highest hormonal level.

I found that I could slap another man with authority. I did it with love, not the vicious, out-of-control hatred that my father exhibited. My father tortured me because his father before him had done it, not because of anything wrong or evil I’d done. By slapping Royal’s penis, by smacking his burgeoning ballsac, by tickling his prostate with my fingertip, I was making love to another man. And Royal begged for it.

So now I added, “You can bet that you can choose your friends and lovers, but not your family. There’s no rule that says you have to talk to these people, Royal. Don’t beat yourself up. You have every reason in the world not to talk to your father. He might’ve sent you to that place out of ignorance because, like, that’s what Catholic people do. Why do we feel guilt when he was the one who caused the intentional hurt?”

Royal waved around a piece of tortilla. “But see, brah, we thought I was the one causing intentional hurt by craving other boys.”

I spit out tiny pieces of something white when I spoke with force. “Tell me then, how did you feel after the shower incident? Had you maimed that Chris kid? Had you hurt him in the slightest?”

Royal shrugged, looking down at his plate. “Who knows? I never spoke to him again. He sort of hid from me.”

“He was probably just as embarrassed as you were. But you’d found your path without injuring anyone. People who sow division and needless pain, like our fathers, find themselves in Dante’s hell sundered in half. They inherit the chaos and discord they embraced. Then the people who followed a safe path without either good or evil discovered they were in a crowd. They would never find hell, but couldn’t hope for heaven.”

Royal sipped his coffee. “Oh yeah? And how does anyone get to heaven—according to Dante?”

I tried like fuck to remember. “Well, the state of sin isn’t a static place we live in. It’s a disharmony that we feel. It’s nothing more than our soul rebelling against a state foreign to its true nature. We’ve become out of whack with ourselves and God.”

There was that arched eyebrow again. “You’re saying if we deny our own true natures we’re out of step with God?”

“Exactly. We experience this as guilt. We can live with guilt like other emotional hassles, pings we feel now and then, until we become dead to the pain. Or we can behave as if it’s a spiritual call to action, a pain in need of a cure. We have to get back into the cosmic river and swim.”

“Yeah, but—”

Our eyes turned into big round orbs at the same time. The tortilla triangle fell from Royal’s fingers.

It sounded like a guy was kicking our hotel room door. The doorknob rattled, and at least two people spoke in rapid-fire Spanish.

Royal leaped first to his feet, yanking his piece from the waistband of his jeans and facing the door.

I was a bit more fearful. I didn’t even swallow my mouth of white stuff before jumping to the other couch to grab my black and white T-shirt. Like, you know, I wanted to leave a beautiful corpse.

Now it sounded like someone was picking the lock. I elbowed Royal. “Stash the gun. We’re supposed to be friendly. Let’s just open the door like normal people.”

We proceeded shoulder to shoulder in lockstep to the door. Again, we glanced at each other, maybe wondering who has the most authoritative voice? Obviously Royal, so he boomed out cheerfully,

“Hey! Who’s there?”

There was a pause in the lock picking scratches, then a few Spanish murmurs.

Someone blared back, “Who are you? We are friend of Dennis O’Bell.”

“In that case,” I said, eager to get to the bottom of this. While Royal was the fearless one, I opened the door. Having had weed deals with some Latino guys in East Harlem, I thought I was prepared. But these guys took the cake.

The guy who’d been picking the lock stood up straight. He wore a hairnet over his bald head. A black and white spiderweb tattoo spread over his neck, indicating a long prison sentence. His lumberjack shirt only had the top button buttoned, and he gripped his pick as though prepared to stab us.

But the guy who’d spoken fairly fluent English nudged him out of the way. A five-pointed crown emblazoned over his thyroid marked him as part of the famous Latin Kings gang. His too-small wifebeater didn’t do a good job of covering up a bulging gut, but he didn’t seem to care. A life-sized black hand spread out over a pec with a white “M” in the center. I had no idea what that meant. He, too, wore the typical sagging pants, made even more dangerous with the addition of a key ring with a hundred keys.

He held out a hand for us to shake. “Hello. I am Oyster.”

A dyed blond guy behind him intoned, “Not because he is quiet. Because his father owned a seafood stand.”

Oyster looked perturbed at the guy. I reached out to shake his hand.

“I am Berkeley, like the town near Oakland. This here is The Samoan Slammer, famous wrestler.” For some reason I didn’t give his real name.