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A fancy silver car slides into the curb right where Phoenix stands in the circular white glow of the streetlamp. The car glitters before Phoenix’s tired eyes. It could be his salvation.
He needs some fucking money.
And here it is. Silver. A light in the dark.
He’d thought of being an actor once, under a spotlight, giving his Mr. Mistoffelees or his Willy Lowman to a crowd of fellow students. Funny how nothing works out how you expect.
The car: fancy, silver. And that is the end of Phoenix’s thoughts on it. He knows cars have names. He doesn’t know what they are. Why do cars have names?
Hold that thought. It's time to go to work. He plasters on a smile and saunters towards the car. Well. Then.
Showtime.
Tonight the costume is a cropped white t-shirt with a yellow neon mesh vest over it. Black PVC shorts. Makes him look younger than he is. Makes him more money. And his back doesn’t hurt but that’s down to the weed he smoked before he came out. Is he still high? He’s probably still high.
Why do cars have names?
Tooth still hurts though. Back molar. Fucking tooth. He pokes it with his tongue as the car window rolls down and…
…Oh.
That’s an odd… that’s odd. Phoenix blinks. Shouldn’t you be in prison?
Did he say that out loud? No. Good.
“You just gonna stand there, boy?” says Manfred Von Karma.
“No, sir,” Phoenix says, pulling open the car door, thinking, boy, yeah, that’s good. Boy. Thanks, costume. Thanks, dark street. He wonders if he could double the price for this one.
Von Karma money, after all.
Von Karma looks at him. Christ, he looks terrible. He looks like shit. Did he look like this before? No. No. He can’t have. They’d never have put him on the stand. His sunken face is yellowish grey. He looks dead. Jesus.
He’d better not die with his dick inside me.
“I’m taking you to my home,” Von Karma says as he steers the car away from the kerb.
“Sure,” says Phoenix, brightly. Not slurring.
Not. Slurring.
“I can pay.”
“Er, yeah, good.”
“Manfred Von Karma,” Von Karma says, clearly in the mood for real names. Stupid old fucker.
“Nicky,” says Phoenix.
Phoenix blinks. He’s probably still high. It occurs to him, a distant afterthought, that as soon as he was sure the driver of the car was Manfred Von Karma, he shouldn’t have got in.
A fucking murderer. Good move, Nicky.
But what’s he gonna do? Old fucker looks practically dead. When they pull up on a paved driveway, Phoenix has to help him out of the car. He walks slow, with the help of a cane.
Inside the house -- up several steps that take Von Karma an age to climb, through a door with wrought iron decorating the windows and a tiled entrance hall -- is a wide, spacious lounge. Two couches face each other by a dead, cold fireplace. In the curve of an uncurtained bay window is a grand piano. Phoenix wanders over to it while he waits for Von Karma to wheeze his way into the room. The top of the piano is covered in dust and littered with silver-framed photos,
Phoenix looks at them. Most are stern-faced strangers.
But he recognises one. And then another.
He touches Miles’s frozen face. He’s young in the photo. But older than when Phoenix knew him as a boy. This is teenage Miles. A Miles Phoenix never knew. His face is so pale he looks like a ghost.
“Those are my children, mostly,” Von Karma says behind him.
Phoenix turns. “Where are they now?”
“Oh, they are all very successful. Off in the world living busy full lives.” Von Karma is still wheezing like a broken engine.
“How kind of them to leave you all for me,” Phoenix says with a bright seductive smile as he twirls into Von Karma’s arms.
Von Karma kisses him. His lips feel like old paper. He tastes sour, faintly rancid, rotting. He has tremors up close.
Phoenix pulls back from the kiss as soon as is polite, with a showy, breathless gasp and says, “Can I suck your dick, Sir.” Best get it over with.
Von Karma smiles. “Oh really, Nicky? Here by the piano. Such a whore.”
“That’s right,” Phoenix leans in, putting his lips against Von Karma’s cheek. “Could I? Please? I love to choke on your cock. I like it when it's so far down my throat I can’t breathe. I’d like to die like that.”
“People have certainly died in worse ways.” Von Karma says as his big hand strokes over Phoenix’s ass.
Phoenix turns, pressing closer so his body is tight against Von Karma’s.“Or do you want more than that? You want to be inside me, Mr Von Karma?”
Von Karma chuckles. “I do not think I have the energy for that these days. I am, I’m dying.”
“Aren’t we all?” Phoenix grins.
“Go on then you slut, get on your knees. Let’s see it. Just let me…” Von Karma sits down heavily on the piano stool.
So Phoenix slides to his knees. The floor is hard, dark wood in some kind of geometric pattern. His knees don’t like it.
Von Karma shakes as he tries to open his pants. Phoenix pushes his big knobbly hands out of the way and takes over. Opening buttons and then easing out the old man’s dick. It’s half hard. Phoenix opens his mouth.
Von Karma’s dick tastes sour. But a lot of dicks do. Phoenix swallows it down in a well practiced action designed to make this seem like something special, something worth playing a professional for, and also something that does not take too long.
He sucks as his lips slide down the length of Von Karma’s dick, trying to rouse it to full hardness. Teasing the head with the tip of his tongue. When his nose comes to rest against Von Karma’s crotch his senses fill with a distinctive old man smell, that is cloying and sweet, like decay. As he tries with another slide of his mouth up and down to rouse Von Karma to a full erection, Phoenix wonders if this is what it is like to try and suck the dick of a corpse.
Phoenix keeps at it for some time. Von Karma makes some sounds of arousal, but his dick gets no harder. When, despite Phoenix’s best efforts, it starts to grow soft again, Von Karma touches Phoenix’s shoulder.
“Ah,” he says, “enough, I think.”
Phoenix pulls his mouth free and looks up. His jaw aches but he doesn’t want to give up. He’s never failed before. He is, he knows, quite skilled with his mouth.
Von Karma says, “Truly, I wanted the company of a young man more than anything. Why don’t you take me to bed. It’s just at the top of the stairs.”
“If you want.” Phoenix says, feeling a little ashamed as he gets to his feet.
Von Karma stands too. His legs seem to wobble a little and Phoenix slides an arm around his waist to steady him. “Ah,” Von Karma says, “yes, thank you. If you wouldn’t mind.”
“Not a problem,” Phoenix says, supporting Von Karma’s weight as they walk towards the door.
In the hallway, Phoenix says, “It’s usually me who can’t walk afterwards.”
Von Karma chuckles softly.“Take me to bed and I will see what I can do.”
Von Karma has one of those lift things that take him up the stairs. Phoenix helps him into it then meets him at the top. Together they make their way into the bedroom. It’s large and dark with curtains drawn. Von Karma turns on a light beside the bed. It’s the type of bed you’d find in a hospital. High and narrow with rails along each side.
Von Karma sits down on it.
Phoenix hovers a short distance away. “Do you need any help or anything.” he wonders if he’s going to have to wash him or put on his diaper.
“No, no,” says Von Karma. “My nurse will be here in the morning. Why don’t you take your clothes off.” He picks up a plastic pill container, tips something out of it and swallows it.
Phoenix shrugs. It feels a bit gross but he is getting paid for this so he pulls off his vest and t-shirt in one go bundled together. Then unfastens the PVC shorts and pushes them down his legs, pulling off his sneakers with them and straightening up.
Luckily, his dick is reasonably hard. He pulls his shoulders back.
Von Karma smiles appreciatively. “Nice body. Bring it here.”
Phoenix walks towards the bed until he’s within reach and Von Karma puts a hand on his ass again. It feels good, being touched possessively on his bare skin. His breath hitches and Von Karma strokes him, moving his hand in small circles.
Von Karma’s hand is moving closer to Phoenix’s hole. Phoenix leans forward, over the bed, over Von Karma’s legs, to give him easier access and Von Karma chuckles a now familiar chuckle as he circles Phoenix’s hole with a finger tip before slipping it inside.
Phoenix groans. It’s surprising how good Von Karma’s big fingers feel. As he presses it in, the thick bumps of his knuckles makes Phoenix groan.
Von Karma slides his finger in and out of Phoenix’s hole. Phoenix cannot help grinding down on Von Karma’s legs beneath him. It’s strange. He does not think he has ever been paid to drape himself over a man’s lap so that man can finger his hole.
It’s bizarrely filthy. Phoenix moans, and when he does, Von Kama slides a second finger in alongside the first.
Von Karma is a large man, is still a large man. He’s lost weight but his fingers are still thick. Two of them, inside Phoenix, without lubrication is a lot to take, the stretch is painful. Phoenix grinds harder on Von Karma. It’s painful and demeaning and Phoenix is shockingly hard.
Von Karma moves his fingers, pumping in and out, punishingly fast. Phoenix makes a sobbing sound. It’s painful enough that he wants it to stop, but the pleasure is a deep wave, building along with the pain until Phoenix suddenly finds himself coming, jolting over Von Karma’s lap, thick and warm.
Von Karma takes his fingers from Phoenix’s ass with a soft sound of satisfaction. He reaches under Phoenix and scoops up some of the mess, bringing it up to Phoenix’s mouth and poking between Phoenix’s lips to clean off.
When he’s done, he strokes Phoenix’s face and says affectionately. “You stupid fucking whore. You know…” Von Karma’s voice is slurry. “Trash like you should be in jail getting raped nightly.”
Then he pauses, before he says, “Sorry. You took me a little by surprise, soiling yourself like that.”
“It’s alright, Mr Von Karma,” Phoenix says, standing up. “You’re not wrong. But I should go now. Unless you want me here all night.”
“No, no, you go. I’m sure you have a whole life to lead out there. A handsome young man like you. There’s some money for you on the side table in the hall downstairs.”
Phoenix dresses in silence and goes to leave, but as he reaches the doorway, Von Karma says, “Would you come back, Nicky?”
Phoenix turns. “I suppose. Sure.”
“I’d pay,” Von Karma says, lying back on the bed. “But really I just want the company. The door has a code. It’s on the fridge. People need to be able to come and go.”
Phoenix nods and heads down the stairs of the big silent house. He wonders if people really do come and go, or if Von Karma just doesn’t want to seem like a lonely old man.
The money left for him is generous. He walks home. It’s late but the noodle stand in the park is open 24 hours at the weekend. He buys a bowl, eats half of it before his aching tooth gets too painful, throws the remains in the trash and heads down a dark path. Because money fixes everything.
Baz is on his usual bench and Phoenix makes his usual deal. A few foil wraps of brown powder and a baggie of pills with half off for a rough fuck.
It hurts more than usual because Phoenix’s hole is still sore from Von Karma. But as Baz takes him with only spit, in the dirt, behind some bushes -- Phoenix finds himself grunting, “Do it hard. Hurt me. Make it hurt.” And Baz seems happy to oblige.
He arrives home with his PVC shorts torn, Baz’s semen still leaking out of him and his head and tooth aching. His one room apartment is a mess of dirty clothes and overflowing ashtrays. The power was cut off three days ago. He only remembers when the light switch does nothing. The AC packed up a month before that, so it hasn’t made much difference apart from the lights.
He chases the horse with vodka and passes out on the couch.
Wakes up late in the afternoon. He lies on the couch and his belly growls. He doesn’t have any food, really. And anything in his fridge will have gone bad anyway.
There’s not much money left despite Von Karma’s generosity. Most of it gone on drugs and vodka and smokes. But Von Karma has a fridge full of food. He opened it out of curiosity when he went to note down the number of the door code.
Now, here’s a plan.
Phoenix wanders through the big silent house eating a sandwich. There’s no one about. He’s already discovered Von Karma asleep in a chair in the conservatory.
He’s quite shocked when he hears the front door opening. But he walks out into the hallway. He’s an invited guest.
A short stout woman in a white nurse’s uniform cries out in surprise when she sees him. She takes a moment to gather herself before her eyes rove up and down Phoenix. She looks at him like he’s filth.
He’s wearing the cropped t-shirt from yesterday and a pair of bleached jeans. He wonders if she can tell what he is. Nevertheless, he has as much right to be here as she does.
“Who are you?” She’s carrying a big black bag, shiny leather. Phoenix can’t help wondering what’s inside it.
“Friend of the family.”
The nurse looks at the sandwich. “And your name?”
“Nicky.”
“Nicky?” the nurse says, inviting Phoenix to give her more information.
“That’s right.”
“I should tell Mr Von Karma’s son I saw you here.”
Phoenix takes a bite of his sandwich. “Should you?” Phoenix says with his mouth full. “Would he care?”
Would he
“I am going to wake Mr Von Karma and take him upstairs for his bath. You should be gone when I return,” the nurse says, turning and walking out of the entrance hall.
Phoenix does not leave. He wanders around until he finds a big empty room that mostly seems to be used for doing laundry. He lies down on a pile of sheets hidden from view, necks a handful pills he got from Baz and lights one of his smokes.
He waits until he hears the nurse leave before he emerges. He goes upstairs and finds Von Karma reading in bed.
“Ah,” Von Karma says, “there you are Nicky. Come closer. Do you have a bruise on your face?”
Phoenix walks over to Von Karma’s bed and sits down in a stiff chair beside it.
“Oh yes,” says Von Karma, reaching out with one shaking hand to touch the bruise Baz left on Phoenix’s cheek when he hit him, punching Phoenix in the face as he fucked him, hard and savage enough to spur Phoenix to ejaculate on himself. Baz had growled at this, wrapping a big hand around Phoenix’s throat so tight that Phoenix was barely conscious when Baz shot inside him.
Von Karma presses the bruised skin hard enough to make Phoenix hiss, before he says, “You know when I was a younger man I had quite the taste for inflicting pain.”
Phoenix smiles. “Did you really, Mr Von Karma?”
“You liked this, didn’t you? A whore like you.”
“I liked it, yeah.”
“Tell me about the brute who did it.”
“He was a drug dealer. I buy smack and pills from him. He gives me a discount if he can fuck me. He likes to hit me. I like when he does.”
“How delightful you are, Nicky.” Von Karma shudders with pleasure. “I have pills. When you’re dying they let you have anything.’
Phoenix is surprised, when he hears this, to think that it had not occurred to him to check through Von Karma’s medication. But perhaps this is a better arrangement. He says, “I like pain killers. And I like pain.”
“The duality of man,” Von Karma says. “But I fear my days of inflicting pain are behind me.”
Phoenix reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a cheap disposable lighter and a battered packet of smokes. He holds them up with a raised eyebrow. “Are they?”
Von Karma uses the lighter on Phoenix’s arms. The bedroom fills with the scent of singed hair, Phoenix’s moans, Von Karma’s soft sounds of pleasure.
Von Karma takes particular delight in burning Phoenix’s fingers and the tender webs of skin between them. The pain is blinding. Von Karma inflicts it with precision and delight.
When Phoenix takes off his shirt, they get through almost the entire pack of smokes, each one ground out on Phoenix’s chest, as Phoenix strokes himself, crying out, delirious with the sensation.
Later, Phoenix’s lap is sticky and Von Karma is breathless, wheezing against his pillows, insisting any more of this would put him in his grave. Phoenix stands and redresses himself, wincing as fabric brushes fresh burns.
Von Karma looks at him with filmy eyes, half closed in exhaustion. “You look familiar, Nicky,” he says in a soft, dreamy tone.
“Maybe I look like someone you knew once.”
“Ah, perhaps. I have lived a long life. There have been so many faces.” Von Karma sighs and rolls his shoulders against the pillows. “And yet, here I am at the end and the only one I see is a stranger. What happened to everyone else, Nicky?”
“Maybe someone will come visit you soon.”
“I think, sadly, the people I most wish to see have no love left for me. I have made a lot of mistakes. But you don’t mind, do you Nicky? You don’t care what I’ve done.”
“Of course I don’t, darling,” Phoenix says, leaning close to kiss the top of Von Karma’s head.
Phoenix goes out and buys some more vodka with the last of his money. He drinks it on Von Karma’s couch until he falls asleep.
He wakes in the early dawn with his tooth hurting again. He still has half the baggie of pills he got from Baz, but he remembers Von Karma’s offer of painkillers. When he opens the cabinet in the bathroom, he finds a huge selection of bottles. He reads the labels. There are a lot of different opiates, and things he has never heard off.
He slips two of the most promising bottles into his pocket, empties out another and fills it with a selection of different pills, all shapes and colours, popping several at random into his mouth like candies.
The cabinet is still very full. Perhaps he could sell some of these, he thinks, as he staggers back to the couch, barely reaching it before he passes out again.
He is woken up by the screeching of a landline. He searches for it. Head thumping, before he finds the old fashioned, bone-coloured device on a side table. Lifting the phone makes the burns on his fingertips scream. He necks a quick slug of the remains of last night's vodka and more random pills as he answers, slurring, “Yeah. Von Karma residence.”
“And who, the fuck, are you?” The voice shoots him back in time.
Phoenix swallows. “I’m a friend of Mr Von Karma.”
“He doesn’t have any fucking friends. So who the fuck am I talking to?”
“I’m a hooker he picked up in the street. Guess he’s lonely.”
“I suggest you leave immediately.” The line goes dead.
It’s still quiet in the house. No sign of life upstairs. Phoenix makes himself another sandwich and sits at the piano to eat it. He looks at the silver-framed photo of Miles. Wondering where he is now, where he was calling from.
He’s still sitting at the piano when the cops arrive with the nurse from the previous day.
***
After a night in the cells, Phoenix waits a week before he goes back.
A week of scraping money together for Baz from suck jobs on his knees in back alleys and shuffling back to his slowly decaying apartment to shoot up. And his fucking aching tooth.
He misses those pills he took from Von Karma, whatever they were. Of course the cops hadn’t given them back. “They’re my meds,” he’d said. But the cop had pointed out that the name on the bottle wasn’t his and suggested he shut up about them.
Eventually his tooth hurts so much he can’t sleep and the burns on his chest and arms and hands are almost healed so he decides he should go back and get more pills. And maybe something else.
The silver car isn’t outside when he arrives at the house. He tries to open the door with the code and it doesn’t work. Flashing red. Access Denied.
Not wanting to give up easily, Phoenix walks around the house. He finds the big window with the piano. The room inside looks dark and empty. No one home. Perhaps Miles decided to visit and take his father out for the day.
Phoenix takes off his sneaker and smashes one of the big window panels with the heel. He waits to see if there is any reaction to the sound. When there isn’t, he taps out the rest of the glass and slips inside.
The house is empty. He walks from room to room. There’s no sign of Von Karma in the bedroom or the conservatory or anywhere. He even checks his old hiding place in the laundry room.
He’s taken a random handful of pills and is filling a plastic bag with bottles when the phone rings. He finds himself trotting down the stairs with his rattling bag before he asks himself why.
“Yeah?” he says into the receiver.
“Phoenix?”
Phoenix almost drops the phone like it burned him. But he doesn’t. He slurs back, “Who?”
“There’s a fucking doorbell cam, Phoenix. I fucking saw you. It was you before, wasn’t it. What the fuck are you doing?”
“Visiting your dad, Miles. Someone ought to.”
“Visiting? Really?” Miles’s voice is cold as ice. It hadn’t been once.
Precisely once.
“Yeah,” Phoenix says back, feeling suddenly quite small and dirty. One of the burns between his fingers hasn’t healed like the rest. It smells weird. Might be infected.
“And is that what you’re doing now? Visiting my father?”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“He’s in residential care. He doesn’t live there anymore and I’m going to hang up and call the police.”
“Well, you would, wouldn’t you?”
“You’re trespassing.”
“They roughed me up in the cell last time,” Phoenix says, voice growing louder with anger. “You tell them to do that. Get off in it?”
“Of course I fucking didn’t. My father’s nurse told me there was a strange man in the house. I told her to call the police. Naturally. I didn’t know it was you.”
“What if I said they raped me? What if I said they called me street trash and said if I didn’t want to be charged I had to give them a free ride like a good whore?”
“Did they? Are you okay? Do you want me to look into it?” Miles’s voice is softer when he says that. Like he means it. He can sound like he means it when he wants to.
“Visit you’re fucking dad,” Phoenix shouts into the receiver. “Visit your dad you selfish piece of shit. You can’t just run away from anything that inconveniences you.”
The line is dead.
***
This time Phoenix leaves before the cops arrive. He takes his bag of pills home and after he’s swallowed enough of them that he can’t feel anything he tries to pull out his rotten tooth himself. It breaks in his mouth but he digs out all the pieces from his bleeding gums and it doesn’t hurt much.
He sits down on his couch and looks at the infected burn between his fingers.
He takes more of the pills.
He thinks about Miles saying: "Phoenix?“, "Did they? Are you okay? Do you want me to look into it?”
He pulls down his jeans and tries to jerk off, but after a long time of trying his dick is still soft so he takes some more of the pills. A different bottle this time.
He really ought to keep some of them and try to sell them.
But he doesn’t.
Three weeks pass before they find his body. Manfred Von Karma outlives him by seven months.