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64 Cocksucker I thought it was a myth, tied with motherfucker for World’s Most Disgusting Thing. Just because some poor kid couldn’t throw a ball, or run, or talk without a lisp, didn’t make him a fairy, fruitcake, queen, queer, pansy, homo, flaming fag—didn’t mean he would do that. My opinion made some say I must be one, and let me practice the right cross–left hook Dad taught me. When Sammy Blevins, Taft High’s choir teacher, got the spirit and proclaimed he’d been “an evil sodomite till saved by Jesus’ love“ (Jesus Gonzales, jokers sneered)—I admitted cocksuckers must be real. Still, I had doubts until Del Delancey hired me to play guitar for The Delmations, and we caught rainbow trout and wrote neo-doowop and roomed together on the road, and I had girls stay over, but he never did, and when the band broke up, he said, “I love you, Chuck,“ and cried, certain I’d hate him. “It’s hell,“ he said— the hot iron boiling in his gut, the dark well where, like that unkillable giant in Grimm‘s Fairy Tales, he hid his heart. Remembering times I’d called some slow driver or loudmouth drunk a cocksucker, I said, “It’s no big deal, Del.“ But I edged away. “They do it up the Hershey highway like I like it,“ he wrote from Mexico—to punish me?—and he was gone, folded and packed into the chest where I keep painful things 65 safe and out of sight. But then today I heard a joke about a cork soaker, a Coke stocker, and a sock cutter. When I told my wife, she said, “A good cocksucker’s what I pray to be.“ Please, God, take care of Del. Lead him safely through the long valley of AIDS. Give him health, a hacienda, and a man who worships him and does everything he likes. Tell him for me—dream, telepathy, vision, it’s up to You— Del, my friend, you cocksucker, I loved you too. ...

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