Like all writers, I have recurring obsessions – including, in my case, the divinity of sex, barnacles, and J. Edgar Hoover. I want to say, for the record, that I am not now and have never been, a columnist, though, thanks to M. Christian’s sweet offer, today I am a guest blogger.
Let me be clear. I’m not really as fascinated by the historical J. Edgar as I am by some of his image and the legends created around him. In popular culture, he assumes almost a mythical stature. This is the man of whom Lyndon Johnson, himself one of our larger-than-life Presidents, once said “I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” As America’s top cop for most of the 20th Century, Hoover affected public morality perhaps more than any other person, and all too often, not in a good way.
Since his death, Hoover’s cultural image has evolved from an arch-foe of super criminals like John Dillinger into a rumored cross-dressing pedophile who held the great and powerful in a grip of legal fear, the master of files that revealed public figures at their most human and vulnerable, the ultimate voyeur who was himself above the law.
Hoover plays an important off-stage role in my new short story, “Lawman”, in the Circlet Press anthology Like a Mask Removed Vol. 1, a collection of tales about sexy superheroes. I wrote “Lawman” in early 2009 when more realistic superheroes seemed to be everywhere. Curt Purcell at the Groovy Age of Horror was writing blog entries that I was following closely and he asked me if I had ever written an erotic superhero story. Right around that time, my partner Drake was reading Secret Identity, Craig Yoe’s wonderful book about Superman artist Joe Shuster’s fetish art, and The Watchmen movie was getting a lot of pre-release press.
“Lawman” is the story of Dean, a retired member of a force of superhuman law enforcement agents, and his quest for a little taste of the sin he has spent his life fighting. The premise I started with was similar to The Watchmen graphic novel, which I had read several years prior – what if superheroes had really come into existence in the late 30s, at about the time Superman was created by two Jewish boys in New York City? Drake, having come into a treasure trove of 1930s crime magazines, was constantly regaling me with tales of Hoover’s self-publicized triumphs over the crime lords of the time, and he introduced me to culture of the time via colorful print ads and over-the-top cover art. It didn’t take long for the ideas to coalesce and blend into what I consider one of my best stories.
It definitely helped that I love comics, even though I came onto them later than most fans. I hung on every panel and every word of some of the superheroic soap operas of the X-Men books and then later on the sexy adventures I discovered in Heavy Metal, in Witchblade, Lady Death, Shi, and similar fare. In recent years, Drake has guided me through some of the history of comics and I’ve discovered the joys of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, men who have authored true literature in graphic form. I’m interested in the way comics have evolved over time to reflect our culture, our fetishes, our fears, and our aspirations. One of my secret author wishes is to have one of my works adapted into a graphic story someday, and I have to admit, there are a few stories I’ve written that I see in my mind’s eye as wondrous adventures that break out of the panels in full, four color glory right before I turn them into black and white, 12 point Times Roman text on a screen…
But who knows? One day, one of those visions just might wear a skintight, red leather corset and a glossy blue cape.
I’d like to leave you with a short excerpt from Lawman and with a huge thank you to M. Christian for giving me some space here.
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“So,” she said, slowing her stroke along the length of his cock. “What do you want?”
“You got some place to go?” he asked her. “Some place safe?”
“You tell me when you see it,” she answered and worked on her drink. “You want to go there?”
“Yeah. In a minute.” He drank to match her, the amber rye lush on his tongue. A slow fire burned from his belly to his head. If he’d taken a drink four years ago, the other Lawmen would have smelled it, even a day later, or they would have seen the delicate pulse of his aura where the alcohol had changed his blood.
“Want to tell you a story first,” he said, his head pleasantly light from the rye. He studied Maggie’s beauty, the subtle curve of her small breasts in a white cotton blouse, the deep blue splendor of her eyes, her lips. “First week I was in the air, I flew out over Levittown 1122. One of the sector wardens called in a 4069, that’s a sodomy complaint, and dispatched me. I’ll never forget it. September…”
The air burned chill, scattering waves of heat as he cut through it, dropping in freefall then diminishing gravity to a slow glide, hearing the whisper of flesh on flesh, the board and stucco bungalow clear as glass when he filtered through the waves and pulses, finding the man and woman.
“She was beautiful,” he told Maggie. “She looked a little like you. And he was some kid no older than me. She had her mouth on him, on his … you know. His cock. I could smell their bodies, see the ... excitement between them. It’s hard to explain…”
White flash pulsing, then blue, white, blue. The taste of butter. Red heat between her legs as she sucked and pulled. The flood of blood through the veins of his member. The salty perfume of his seed and her saliva.
“I waited till she finished him before I busted them,” he said. “I got a fucking demerit for that. See, when you are a Lawman, there is always someone watching you. I never made that mistake again.” He killed the rye and waved the bartender away.
“Jesus,” Maggie barely whispered. “What happened to them? The kids you busted?”
He shrugged. “Rehab. Judge gave them a break because they were married. Not a peep out of them the next five years I was over Levittown 1122. That was a long time ago, a lot of years, but I think about it all the time. Can we go to your place now?”
Maggie watched him, the seconds dragging. Dean’s gut tightened. Maybe he’d said too much. She pushed the empty glass away. “Alright, but can I ask you something first? Didn’t you ever want to push back?”
Push back, he thought, as memory sliced him in places that still hurt.
Some days, in that interminable morning hour before the shot, with his head clear, he had wondered what would happen if enough of the Lawmen got together and said “no,” but the thought blew away on the winds of need. Saying “no” meant no more ACIP. To Dean’s knowledge, no one had ever even said, “maybe we should think about this.”
“Never,” he told Maggie. “But I’ll tell you what I do want. I want exactly what that dude got the night I busted him.” The devil danced in his words, and Dean’s heart beat a little faster.
“I want a blowjob.”
Angela Caperton writes eclectic erotica that breaks genre rules. She won the EPIC award for Best Erotica in 2008 with Woman of the Mountain, and is one of the authors in the 2010 EPIC award winner Coming Together: Against the Odds. Look for her stories published with Cleis, Circlet Press, Drollerie Press, eXtasy Books, and in the indie magazine Out of the Gutter. Visit Angela at http://blog.angelacaperton.com
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