The Howls from the Tunnel

In the morning, after the moon had set, I woke with the strange feeling that, perhaps, the horror of the night before had not been a horror at all and that somehow the feeling that came out of my belly had been instituted through other means, a spoon, maybe, filled with the utmost deliciousness that one could find on the streets and in the gutters of Los Angeles.

I stared down at my brood, my little artful dodgers, their small faces angelically designed by God; it had to have been God, and wondered about the vacations that they were going to send me on, the goodies that they had stolen for daddy.

Angela, little Angie, always brought the best beggars food from the most luscious of dumpster gardens. At times, little Angie trudged all the way to Koreatown and came back with ripe, pickled, cabbage and bits of beef tongue and spleen. Good stuff for the homeless, gold to the homeless, and I was happy to have her be a part of my family. She slept alone, snoring peacefully, a sign that disease had not made its way to her small lungs.

But, it was Eddie that I was most curious about. He was new to the family, had never lived in the tunnels which kept the valley tied to Hollywood, and he always appeared hungry, never tired of eating, that Eddie, always like a ghost during the day and sneaking off at night, only returning after I had gone to sleep. Eddie's strange behavior had been going on for a couple of weeks now, maybe close to a month, and that morning, that morning he had worried me.

He, like little Angie, slept alone but he wasn't alone. He had between his slight arms, close to his chest, a dog carcass. I believe it was a dog carcass, but I couldn't tell. Something, or someone, had eaten out most of the inside of the dog, leaving part of its entrails appearing to slosh across the pavement, appearing to have movement of the most disgusting kind.

He was six years old, Eddie, and I wondered exactly what had happened to him to have caused him to make his way into the tunnels. His parents were, no doubt, addicts, the worse kind of homeless, because if they had been any sort of real beggars, they would have started teaching Eddie the trade at a young age and not waited until he had turned six.

Or, at all, really. Eddie had no clue about how to beg. But, he was good at taking. Taking everything he wanted; everything and anything he saw. He was the most astute pick-pocket I knew. He was very good at finding the marks that had the fattest wallets. Eddie could steal ice cream off the top of a cone from an adult six feet tall.

The thought brought me back to the dog carcass. I stepped closer and studied Eddie's face, more angelic than little Angie's, and noticed the blood over his mouth, dried to an almost apple crust and I suddenly realized that it was Eddie who had eaten some of the dog.

The thought angered me terribly. What disgusting, trampy, tourist had decided to make the young boy eat the dog and then to send the young boy home with the carcass? The most obvious conspiracy theories abounded. Was it a rival group of homeless, real, true beggars? From the East Coast, perhaps? Unaware of the fact that me, the King, ruled the dusty speed-filled streets of the City of Angels?

I kicked Eddie in the groin and then angrily lifted the carcass from him and hurled it against the back wall of our hovel. The other children woke, startled, their faces turned downward. Some covered their heads with the blankets they had stolen from the nursery home on Melrose. Some just sat and stared. Eddie didn't even move.

Little Angie, whom had always been the closest to me, lifted herself onto her small knees and smiled. Her tang-top fell off her right shoulder and I wondered at its beauty. Momentarily, then, there came something else to me, a different kind of horror and I had to shake my head to return to another evil, the evil of true sexlessness and true loneliness.

"Angie," I asked, smiling, "what's going on here? When did Eddie return? And, did he return with that dog?"

Little Angie sighed. She walked to my special corner and grabbed the spoon and began the morning ritual which inevitably would lift me into a day of private leisure near my own small, concrete, beach. She burned the drugs effortlessly; the heat under the spoon warming me by being just a thought, and soon the syringe was in my hand.

"Now, highness," she said, "you take your morning coffee and I will explain everything to you."

One of the other children, but not Eddie, lifted my arm and then tied the hose around it and Little Angie tapped the vein and soon I was off into my own dream and suddenly the darkness didn't seem so dark any more. The real evil, the one that stewed inside of me and manifested itself in my loins; the one that reached out to Little Angie's small, pre-pubescent breasts, and slightly off-putting white skin - - that one never came to me when Little Angie lifted me into my morning heaven.

She was a different sort of beauty. Motherly, I think. I brushed her hair with my hand and Little Angie giggled. "Tell me," I asked, "did someone force Eddie to eat the dog?"

"Oh, yes," Little Angie said.

"Really? Was it a tourist? Was it a rival, perhaps? The prince from the South? From the land of yuppieness? Or, from the North? A gay sponging buffoon? Is my rule in jeopardy?"

"Oh, yes," Little Angie said, "you're rule is in jeopardy, your highness. But, not from them. They could care nothing about this city."

"No," I said. "I suppose not."

Little Angie grabbed a handkerchief and wiped the saliva that had fallen from both sides of my mouth. I was on the floor at that point, my head close to Eddie and, even though I smelled the rot, I thought it was coming from the dog, but, then, Little Angie laughed and I wondered exactly why and I turned my head and I saw that Eddie was undone as well, like the dog, undone from the inside out. Eddie wasn't breathing at all. His own entrails appeared to be moving, moving more than the dog's, because of the morning coffee, I believe, the medicine, and I wanted to rise, but the morning coffee kept me there, my face close to Eddie's stomach, eaten away by something, the blood all ready putrid and so dark and red against the white of the intestines. His face, though, Eddie's face gave the sign of life and I wanted to kiss him but the organs, almost all half-eaten, that seemed to compliment the rest of his insides, well, my mouth watered. When I saw Eddie's half-munched organs, my mouth watered.

Eddie's face left me. Meat. The thought came to me and it was stronger than the morning medicine. I fought it.

"Tell me," I asked Angie, "what has happened to Eddie?"

Little Angie began to sing. A song like no other I had ever heard. "Eddie ate the dog! Eddie ate the dog! And, then, you! Oh, highness! You! You ate Eddie!"

I would have been taken aback but the medicine, the coffee, my sweet Little Angie warmed it so perfectly every time, kept me where I was, staring into the red, red hole that had become Eddie's stomach. I would have thrown up but the smell was sweet enough to me that I thought of cinnamon rolls and pancakes and I was hungry, quite hungry, really for the first time in a long time. Oh, the new sweets that little Angie had shown me would make me fat! That bitch! Little Angie, the bitch! Did she not understand that a fat daddy was a bad daddy! That the King, the tunnel King, deserved better then to melt into a block of cheese like a monster in his private hovel, groveling on the flesh that was thrown at him as if he were a dog--a filthy dog.

Ah, the morning coffee said to me, ah the dog. What was that dog all about?

"Angie, sweet Angie," I whispered and Angie, little Angie, smiled, "what is the dog?"

"Oh, King! The dog was the new King!"

"Really?"

"Yes," little Angie said.

"And, what happened to it?"

"Oh, King!" little Angie said. "Eddie killed the new King for you and then you ate Eddie!"

I looked to Eddie again. His cheeks were plump, yes, that was it. Not at all like the thought before, not at all like sweet, little Angie's cheeks. No, Eddie's cheeks were plump. Ready to bite, juicy in fact.

As if reading my coffee mind, little Angie took a small bite out of Eddie's cheek and then crawled over to me and the shoulder showed, but there was no sign of the evil in my loins, and her face was white with the gravy of bliss, but again, no sign of evil in my loins, and she kissed me but instead of feeling the evil again, the sweet evil that came from sweet, little Angie, I felt a different kind of bliss. Little Angie kissed me and deposited a succulent piece of Eddie's sweet cheek and slowly, because no matter how excited one might be the morning coffee prevents true excitement, I began to chew and the chewing led to me closing my eyes and I fell asleep to the taste of Eddie's flesh.

When I woke, Angie was gone and so were the other children and I stumbled out and into the tunnel. My movement frightened the tourists because it was Saturday and the tourists loved to use the tunnels during the day on Saturday. I must have smelled horrible, not at all like a young man should smell, worse than ever perhaps because of the dog carcass that had slid off the wall and Eddie's now rotting corpse. The thought of the tourists, never having smelled rotting flesh before, finding the smells from our hovel so "L.A.", made me laugh. Ah, death is not death when death comes like a rose and all smells in the land of angels is of roses.

I stumbled into the sunshine and wandered past the great house of concert and concerts, the Hollywood Bowl, and wound up on that bastion of true L.A. gloriousness that is Sunset Blvd. From there, I played the freak, or, at least, felt the freak, crying out for my beloved little Angie. "Angie! Oh, Angie!" I cried and I believe that some fool or another made a reference to the Rolling Stones. I might have looked like Mick Jagger with my hair so pleasantly pasted on my head and my mouth watering at the taste of all around me.

But, the sun. The sun appeared white to me although it was easy to see. White like the fluorescent bulbs hanging from the free hospital beds that little Angie arranged for me to stay at some times. And, the stares from the tourists weren't stares at all. They were cries for help and screams of terror. They had surrounded me as if---as if I were some dog.

I felt close to the ground and hot and I couldn't stop my mouth from panting and I saw that I was a dog. Oh, that bitch! That horrible little bitch, Angie! My hope was to do things to her, to let the evil from my loins become one with the evil in her small, tight, pussy. She deserved no less! Let the evil of all evils fall upon the bitch after what she had done to me! What concoction she had boiled in that deathly spoon in the hovel? What rancid spell she had befallen on me to cause such hunger?

I hated her and wished her dead and my hate turned into something else because I felt the taste again in my mouth and I wondered how it all had come to be. I was eating but the hunger wouldn't stop. I was eating and I was a wolf and the tourists screamed. They screamed so loud that I ran, my feet gliding me up the sides of buildings and across roof-tops, the blood in my mouth becoming something no more than a memory and the light of the moon dancing off my fur, it was fur I think, as if I had worn this coat, this incredibly warm coat, all my life.

I stopped on top of one of the buildings and I stared ahead and it was little Angie again. She appeared to be the same, as always, and because of that I didn't think again of her small, tight, pussy, but instead thought of how she was so beautiful near me with her silent, smiling face.

"What has happened, little Angie?" I asked. "What has happened to me?"

"Nothing." Angie said.

"Then, where are the children?"

"Eaten," Angie said.

"And me?" I asked. "Where am I?"

"Alone," Angie said.

"Then, where are you, Angie?" I asked. "If I am alone, where are you?"

"I have been eaten as well!" Angie sang. "By you, your highness! You have eaten me!"

When I woke again, this time knowing that it was the morning because a morning bird, singing like little Angie had found its way into my hovel in the tunnel, I was surrounded by more putrid, rotting flesh than ever before. Not only was there the dog carcass, and Eddie, and the other children, but there was Angie as well. Nothing more than a small head and hands and feet. I had ripped out her little torso and had eaten it, had slavered myself onto it, and then I suddenly realized that the evil from the loins was all gone.

I felt guilty about having the evil to begin with and then I worried because I began to believe that having that sort of evil, that wanting to fuck small girls, had turned into a worse evil. Then, I thought how stupid of me. Wanting to stick my thing into little children, wanting to stick my thing into little Angie's thing, had nothing to do with becoming a wolf.

But, it didn't matter. Nothing mattered because little Angie was gone. I lifted my head and howled, not like a filthy dog, but like a human being. I howled and howled and then I crawled to the special corner and was happy that I had hands because it was easy to make the largest amount of morning coffee that I could ever make and I fixed the hose myself and tapped my own vein and inserted the needle and let the bliss follow my blood to every part of my body.

I hoped, I prayed, that this time the bliss would do its job for sure. This time I might find a new sort of beach. A forever sort of beach where I would never come back from - - where my little Angie might be waiting for me.