Jay Passer

Ashley

Situated on the leather bucket seats in the back of Tom Rong’s black ’70 Camaro which he’d bought from some shady customer who’d long since fled the scene. Short-to-midlife-crisis car. The vehicle was basically a teenage boy’s high school wet dream. Truth is Tom Rong never developed past his 17-year-old self he was stuck there in perpetuity unless by the grace of the almighty or perhaps a natural disaster he could transcend his manic state of material attachment. Yeah right. So we’d been drinking. Ashley was crammed in there with me and several other liquored-up bodies, mostly young vixens handpicked by Tom Rong to represent the baby-brothel coke-addled entertainment troupe for our nightly sojourns into depravity and debauch. Ashley was the head cheerleader type grown up into an office girl who still had a figure and wasn’t yet too sloppy but was fairly verging on it. Like I said we were crammed in together thigh to thigh passing around a pipe smoking laughing poking around in the shadowy dark with only the single light pole in the parking lot which was on a sloping hill down to the alley where a rotting fence just managed to support scores of blooming passion flowers. I’d never felt much for Ashley or her bumptious posse the more snide and sneering of us offhandedly referred to as the Spice Girls, a popular girl band from the UK at the time who had a hit single that was played relentlessly for about a month or so before settling forever into obscurity except for the random b-movie soundtrack appearance resurrecting that particular month or so of that particular year ad infinitum concerning one-hit wonders of that stripe. Ashley had big tits that’s how Tom Rong liked ’em. I was more a leg and ass man, to me legs and ass represented motivation, tits were fun to fondle and suck on but they had little purpose for the career bachelor, fertility not being a required option. Ashley’s face musta been quite pudgy as a child but she banked on it. Just another secretary whose office romance appeal was waning before us like the onset of a particularly dull apparition. I’m pretty sure Ashley hated me as well since I generally thumbed my nose at her amateur seductions, yet strangely that night we were getting along fine, wedged in there, juiced and lubricated and hot and electric like it gets in close proximity, but like animals in a cage of different species at a certain point one’s bound to prey on the other. There she was, stinking like a chunk of sexual meat. Her eyes widened as I suddenly kissed her. Ashley didn’t resist and I felt her hands sort of fluttering, but she was basically a cold fish with little to zero lip response, submissive to the point of I’d just as soon osculate with a rubberized mannequin. I didn’t feel even the slightest twinge in my nether regions, so there was that and that wasn’t much. It ended nearly as soon as it started but not before all the other little tramps in the vehicle noticed what had transpired short-lived as it’d been and uneventful in the grand scope of things. I thought nothing of it until the following day arriving at work to prepare pizza for the clamoring tide of a fool’s paradise. Tom Rong glowered at me and wouldn’t speak and from the peripherals of my vision I’d catch him whispering to bar clientele cronies I had no clue as to what and could care less but Tom Rong was not just the bartender but the boss. The night wore on and my usual coveted shift shots of Jägermeister were alarmingly lacking. Tom Rong was looking meaner stony-faced resolute drinking no doubt my shots as well as his own. WTF? We’d always been chummy in a men’s locker-room sort of way. Fuck this noise I said to myself and took a break to hustle across the street to the Greek’s for a couple quick shots. After shift I perched at the bar but Tom Rong’s ignorance of my presence was so obvious it verged on comical. Staring at NBA highlights oblivious to the empty space on the bar before me. Well shit. Amy the waitress another objectified princess of Tom Rong’s priapic selection nudged me. Tom told me not to serve you. Fuck sakes, I said, need I ask why? Did his dog die? Amy slitted her slant cat-eyes and strutted away. You’d need a trowel to remove the make-up she’d caked on her face. Just how Tom Rong liked ’em. Busty strippers-in-training. Get ’em coked up and drunk and stick a wet finger in their ears. Tom Rong white male wiry and tall with a goofy kid’s face and big nose smiling like a silly idiot with his hand caught in the cookie jar. But I underestimated his dormant fury and though he was married with two kids his envy had reached nuclear accident levels and suddenly I was on the floor of the bar being dragged by the coat collar. Unprecedented behavior from the boss, but I was not compliant, in fact I didn’t give a fucking shit, and even outweighed by a good fifty pounds I had Tom Rong down on the floor beside me in seconds, applying the ol’ pressure-point disarmament technique I picked up from a Shiatsu monk several lives previous. Tom Rong, incapacitated. I took the opportunity to slam his head against the floor once, twice, and was holding it up by the hair to slam it again, since three’s a charm, when Tom Rong tapped out. Sweet surrender, is what it was. That Ashley, I hissed, can’t even kiss properly, motherfucker. The next day Tom Rong had a shiner for each eye like some kinda mutant raccoon. Get out! he yelled and pointed to the front door but was forced to relent knowing there was nobody else to throw dough that night or for that matter the entire weekend to come. But Tom Rong never really recovered from this phantom betrayal and the animosity grew to a rather persistently uncomfortable nadir until one sunless day I simply didn’t show up for work and thus never returned. Luckily right around that time my mother died leaving me to inherit tens of thousands of dollars which I managed to pay rent, buy food and get drunk on for nearly a decade. That tart Ashley. She didn’t even offer me her tongue. Maybe she had herpes.