156 pages
Horror Sleaze Trash

A veteran entertainer approaches the final stages of a dubious career with his dignity intact. How long will he be able to keep up the act? North Hollywood Blue pokes an aweless lens between the folds of a voracious industry’s pink curtains.

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The One With the Eyes That Can Seize Your Soul

We had pizza, and it was hot. Banana peppers and jalapeños. First bite burned the roof of my mouth. And my date was smoking. Off the fucking charts.

At her place, a tiny cold home in Seward, Minneapolis, she pulled down my Wranglers and gave me an ultimatum:

“I’m gonna give you a handjob,” she told me. So far, so good! “But you have to look into my eyes, and you can’t look away.”

“Okay…”

“If you look away,” she added, “It’s over. That’s as far as we go. I leave you high and dry. I’ll kick your ass out.”

“Can I blink?”

“Yeah, you can blink. You can even cum—cum right into my open eyes. I don’t care. But if you look away, it’s over. And that’s that. You won’t be seeing me again.”

I was so hard I could almost cry, and I didn’t think I’d last long, so it seemed like an easy game. A few minutes. Five at the absolute most. No problem. Just don’t look away.

But when she wiggled in close, taking hold of my cock, I realized, already, that my eyes had strayed away. I was looking at her hands, each elegant finger. I was transfixed by her predator touch. She had  rune tattoos below each knuckle and, as I puzzled over their meaning, I privately wondered Is this girl a witch? I admired her silver rings, her outrageous press-on nails. I zeroed in on her possessive strokes.

She took hold of me with grace, thumbing away the precum. Her handwork was deft. Her fingers, balletic. My eyes lingered as long as I dared, hoping to move them before she took notice, before the game began. I savored her artistic flare, her sexy panache; her Komodo dragon acrylics as loud as a Tokyo skyline.

I met her eyes just in time.

“Okay, big boy.” Big boy! That almost made me cum. “Don’t you dare look away.”

I was determined that I would not.

It was more intimate than I could have imagined; staring into the eyes of god (for that is who this woman became in this game of discipline and pleasure). “Don’t look away,” she threatened. “Don’t look at my tits,” she teased, working away at me with one hand, unbuttoning her shirt with the other. As the lumberjack flannel parted to her navel, I was truly put to the test. But I didn’t look away. “Good boy.” I passed the test.

Behind her head, a nest of serpentine dreadlocks, a Netflix menu cycled stills of featured shows and films. It was hard not to look, despite my disinterest. In my peripherals, I noticed Will Smith, Matt Damon, Emma Stone. It was like being watched. Being judged. Being tested.

“Do you like my eyes?” She asked, and picked up the rhythm, her silver rings cold on my dick.

I nodded, moving my head, but my eyes remained fixed. “The most beautiful eyes I have ever seen.” It wasn’t a lie. Hey eyes were remarkable. Blue-green. Speckled with gold.

“They are contacts,” she told me.

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t care. Beauty is beauty, and I told her so.

“You are sweet.” She massaged my balls in one hand, tickled my shaft with those gaudy, sorceress talons in the other.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Do you want to look at my tits?”

“Yes, please.”

“Well you can’t.” It was a test. “If you look away, it’s over. And so are we.”

Again I nodded. I blinked, but didn’t dare look away.

“Tell me about my eyes,” she demanded.

“They are beautiful.”

She eased her grip on my cock. She slowed her stroke to a standstill. “You can do better than that.”

She wasn’t wrong, and deserved better, besides. So I did my best to tap into my poetic depths. To do so, I had to ignore the mounting pleasure, the teasing fluctuation of her rewards and punishment. And, of course, I could not look away, or break her stare. I was forced to avoid my tendency to look up and to the right, which is what I do when amassing deep thoughts. It was difficult, but I managed. I told her about her eyes.

“Your eyes are starlight on azurite. Two foreign moons that hover in a far-off blessed galaxy. Your eyes are fire, blue flames and comet tails. Precious gems. Baubles I want to worship, want to drown in.”

Like before, she massaged my balls.

“Your eyes are inhuman. They are the eyes of god. I am now religious. Entirely devout.”

Two hands on my shaft, and the rhythmic expertise of delicately wringing it dry.

“If I never breathe again, I want to die looking into your eyes.”

She rewarded me with a smile, which I dared not look at, but I could see her frenulum piercing shining from the fringe of my field of vision. Then she popped the last buttons on her flannel, letting the shirt slide off her shoulders, down her arms. For a moment, it hung like laundry on my penis. Then she tossed it to the floor.

“Tell me more about my eyes,” she said. “Tell me how much they mean to you. How much you love them.”

At this point, I was close to cumming, astounded that I hadn’t yet. I took a breath, ready to offer my sermon about her eyes. “Your eyes are forbidden treasure, each one its own Cave of Wonders. In them, I see sun-glinting doubloons, a genie lamp, and three wishes: your left eye, your right eye, and the perfect gap between them. Your eyes are…” I had more to say on the subject, but that’s where my sermon ended. I did well while I lasted, but it ended prematurely, if you take my meaning.

But it wasn’t my fault. No really, hear me out:

I wasn’t looking at the screen —I was being good, looking straight into her blue-green eyes, and nothing else— but I couldn’t help noticing something surface in the background; a Netflix still of one of their featured films, Clash of the Titans. It popped up on the television, a monster made of clay, a mythical woman with snakes instead of hair. It was a masterpiece made by Ray Harryhausen, special effects guru of his time. It was a frightening, iconic, image of the 1981 adventure of my youth. It was the unforgettable Gorgon bitch, the beautiful but deadly Medusa.

You weren’t supposed to look into her eyes. If you did, you turned to stone—forever. This crossed my mind while I stared into a god-like woman’s eyes. Her beauty was mythical, and it had me asking: Is she a Gorgon?

Then I broke the stare between us, and not just a blink. I looked away, down at her tits.

I couldn’t see it before, what with my eyes locked on hers, but I had noticed a dark shape nestled between her breasts. I figured it was a tattoo, and, sure enough, I was right. Looking at it now, I clearly deciphered its image. Lifelike and intricate, staring right at me with blue-green eyes so realistic that I swear they may have blinked —I shit you not— it was Medusa’s fang-baring grimace and snake-laden locks.

The handjob stopped, and my dick, which had been turned to stone, heroic and statuesque, quickly went limp, and small. But I came anyway. I blew my top the moment I saw Medusa on the screen, and blew my load on Medusa inked between those perfect tits.

And it’s just like she told me. I broke the stare, so I broke the spell. I looked away, and that was that. Her flannel went back and she shrouded its open flaps with her serpentine dreads. “Get the fuck out of here,” she commanded. 

I tried to apologize.

“No, don’t even look at me!”

That’s rich, I had thought, coming from her! Misses Don’t Look Away. But I left, just as she asked me to.

But before I turned away to walk out the door, the screen behind her blinked and shifted. And just like that, Medusa was gone, like an ancient myth, almost forgotten. It was Squid Game or Stranger Things. Something like that. Something altogether forgettable.

Thinking about it now, I can’t recall her name, but I’ll never forget her face. I couldn’t forget her eyes even if I tried.

But what do I call her? No fucking clue. How might I look her up? I’m afraid I cannot (all homes look the same in Seward, and I never did mark the address).

No matter how hard I try, I just can’t remember. Was it Marisa? Melissa? I guess I’ll never know for sure. But she’s the one with the eyes that can seize your soul, so I give her a moniker as mighty as myth. She’s the portrait of ink between her precious tits. She’s Medusa, who turned me (a small part of me) into stone.

Cross My Heart and Hope to Die, Stick a Needle in My Cock

There is a video online of my mom pouring a pint of Guiness into my mouth at the pub in the late 70’s. I was two years old. The comment section was relentless.  

I was born in Dallas, Texas. Assassination City. Where Kennedy simultaneously waved hello and goodbye to a crowd. I waved goodbye to that town at fifteen years old and moved up to Jefferson Park, Chicago with my family. I lost what accent I had but claimed to get it back when I was drunk. Some girls thought that was endearing when they’d bum cigarettes from me at the bar. Then their other friends would come and scoop them away from me. Like I was some sort of degenerate. 

I had just finished snorting some heroin on the park bench the other day when my buddy Allen came back from the paletero with a Sonic the Hedgehog ice cream pop for me. I took a few bites of it and felt the cold jolt up my cavities. I nodded out for a bit and when I woke up Sonic’s face was smudged and his gumball eyes had rolled off onto the grass.

Two Mormon missionaries were biking by in white collared shirts, blue ties, black slacks. Both thin blond boys. One pedaled fast, hunched over, made a gravelly noise with his throat and hacked a loogy onto the black top like he didn’t give a fuck about Jesus. The other had his back up straight, no hands on the bars. You could tell he was glancing around to see if anyone noticed that he could do that.

“Howdy y’all…Y’all got a dollar?” I asked them.

“Fuck you!” grunted the kid who had spit on the ground.

“Nuts…” I muttered, “Buy, sell, crack…” I laughed a little, nodding in and out, reciting words from signs on roadside stands last time I moved some bud from Illinois down through Arkansas for an old friend of mine, now deceased. 

“I’m gonna go get the papers, get the papers,” Allen said to me. He liked quoting Goodfellas when he had to take a shit. “Finish your fucking ice cream. Droopy motherfuckah.”

“You know Johnny Two-Times had OCD.”

“And you have Maury’s hairline.”

By 1PM the benches were full of us. Scabs and sores, track marks, and deviated septum. Some travelers with packs strapped to their back even as they slept. Others who rode the redline back and forth all night. Or some post-high school burnouts who romanticized this shit because they don’t know how to process their emotions. Or the concept of their future. Sort of like me.

Howdy, y’all. I’m Nate.

When summer comes, there is a rise in both ice cream sales and gun violence throughout the city. I always thought that was funny. I know one didn’t cause the other, but I like to imagine a world where they do.

Cumulonimbus clouds sailed the sky shaded gray like warships. A light drizzle fell upon us; God shaking his dick after pissing in heaven. Like my mom used to say when it thundered back when I was young, that’s the angels bowling up there! 

There’s this flaw in religious thought over the years that heaven is always on the same technological level as the current state of man. If Lucifer fell from the war in heaven, they certainly weren’t wielding swords. If they sky swarmed puke green with thunder, I don’t think they were in a beer league. Unless maybe the angels were from Milwaukee or something.

People do that with the human brain too. In the days of typewriters, it was compared to the functions of a human mind. Now the same is said for computers. Humans and Gods are something else entirely separate from their creations. They shouldn’t be defined by them if you ask me. If I was God, I wouldn’t want to put my name on this shit. 

My buddy Cracker Jack had this stupefied look on his face. His head was resting back on the park bench, mouth agape towards the sky, swallowing the rain.

“How’d you get to be like this, Cracker?” I asked.

“What you mean?”

“I mean why are you the way you are?”

“Well…for starters…I came up real nice actually. Went to U-Chicago. I was an anthropologist in the 80’s, studying the crack cocaine epidemic within the city. Got a little too caught up in my own work. Flash forward some years and my wife and kids are gone, as well as half my teeth.”

“No shit…a motherfucking anthropologist up in this bitch…”

“Hey spare some change for beer?” Cracker called towards a passing guy.

A young man, probably freshly twenty-one with a shitty hair cut swoop dyed black like the singer of The Misfits put a cigarette out on his leather belt and flicked it in our direction cooly. 

“Yeah I gotchu. Let’s hit up Theresa’s.”

“You buyin’?” I asked.

“I’m buyin’. C’mon.”

We followed the guy down the block towards Theresa’s, a hole in the wall Polish restaurant smorgasbord that also had a little bar inside. Me and Cracker Jack trailed behind not saying much. 

“I’m Bill by the way. Buffalo Bill.”

“Buffalo Bill?”

“Never worked, never will…”

“You sure you got the dough to cover us?” Cracker asked.

“Shut your bitch ass up,” I muttered.

We went in. The bar was dead. A little old polish lady stood behind the counter. We said our hellos and she nodded back. We felt her eyes on us the whole time we filled up our plates at the buffet. Bill ordered us tall glasses of Okocim off the tap and bought us each a shot of vodka. 

“So you don’t work?” Cracker asked Bill.

“Yeah neither do you, asshole.”

“Then what do you do for a livin’?”

“I cum.”

“Right on…” I laughed, “Somebodies got to do it around here.”

The news show on TV switched to a breaking segment. On the west side of the city a Union-Pacific freight train had been stopped, bum-rushed, and robbed by like a hundred residents of the neighborhood. They had all parked their cars on a side street and were carrying boxes of shipments off into SUVs and driving away. What little CPD officers were there were running around like a bunch of rodeo clowns trying to arrest them to no avail. The sunset in the rain behind the busted-up train and the decaying factory buildings was like a renaissance painting. Like a fresco Michaelangelo would paint on the ceiling of Union Station if he grew up hustling on the streets of Chicago.

“That’s where we need to be!” Cracker Jack laughed and smacked his fist down on the counter. The old lady grimaced behind the bar.

“That’s fuckin’ gangland, dipshit,” I punched my friend’s shoulder, “Your cracker ass ain’t getting involved in that. And you’ll be the first arrested. Every cop knows the only reason a strung-out white boy goes to this West Side is to score.”

“Aw screw that shit anyway,” Bill dismissed us, “You guys want to come to a party with me at Labagh Woods? Gonna be beer and dope.”

“Sign me up!” Cracker Jack smiled.

“Yeah, I’m in.”

“Hey Baba Yaga! The tab please!” Buffalo Bill whistled with his fingers to his teeth.

“Pay and get out!” the old lady slammed down the handwritten check in front of us. “Kurwa! You no talk to me this way! No junkie cocksuckers in my bar!”

“Much obliged, m’am,” I nodded, leaning into the Texas accent. She couldn’t look me in the eye. Her fists were clenched and arms shaking.

“C’mon let’s go to my place,” said Bill, “I need to grab some stuff before we go.”

We followed Buffalo Bill down the block. This time we were more buddy-buddy. We shot the shit and he told us how his friends throw this massive party every year out in the woods. He assured us there would be a ton of chicks. He would set us up with some of them.

Bill lived in one of those million-dollar condo buildings that pop up when they destroy historical architecture in a working-class neighborhood. You know what they look like. Straight up soulless. We climbed the stairs to his door. He had left it unlocked and we walked in to a mostly empty loft, painted white on every wall. No art was up. The marble kitchen counter was empty save some loose tools. In the corner there was a mattress with stained grey sheets straight on the ground. Across from that on a little nightstand was one of those crappy 2000’s TV’s that had a built in DVD player, and under it a loose pile of DVD’s in blank cases.

“You live here?” I asked.

“Somebody will someday,” he shrugged. “One of my buddies at this party is the property manager. They aren’t ready for tenants yet so he’s letting me crash here while I’m between jobs.”

“I thought you didn’t have a job?” asked Cracker Jack. I took that brief moment of distractions to slip a screwdriver off the countertop and slip it in my back pocket.

“Yeah. I cum,” Bill said matter of fact, “Here, I’ll show you.”

“Nah, nah, nah! We good!” I waved my hands and backed up. Buffalo Bill was cracking up.

“Nah, man. My DVD’s.” He picked a random DVD from the assortment of cases, and turned the TV on and popped it in. 

The first scene was him and some chick with bolt-on implants on like some sort of pontoon boat out on Lake Michigan. She was suntanning naked and turned onto her stomach. That’s when Buffalo Bill tried to get up, and tripped and fell on top of her. They looked at each other in shock, with typical over the top acting, and then they started tugging at each other then banging.

“Pretty dope, right?” Bill asked. 

“Yeah it’s all right…” I mumbled, eyes glued to the screen.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Cracker Jack asked me. I shrugged.

“Just let me change my clothes and I’ll be ready,” Bill said, entering a walk-in closet. Jack and I kept on watching while we listened to him fuck in front of us, and ruffle through boxes behind us. I reached into my pocket to grab the screwdriver, when I felt Bill’s hand tug it out first.

“Not so fast jackass.” We turned around and Buffalo Bill. He had a leather glove on his right hand in which he held a .45 pointed right at us. 

“Shit..” whined Cracker.

“Aw, c’mon man…”

“This is my sex glove,” Bill grinned. “And this is my sex gun. C’mon, my buddy is waiting outside. We’re going to Labagh Woods.”

He led us back out of the apartment, not locking the door behind him. I noticed more during the walk down the stairs that there were no sounds or voices to be heard throughout the building. We got outside and a black SUV with tinted windows was parked on the side of the street. A driver sat up front. Me and Cracker Jack sat in the middle row. And Buffalo Bill sat behind us, with the gun pressed up against the back of my neck.

“Hey pricks, check this out,” Buffalo Bill ruffled through his pant pockets and pulled out some leathery looking strap type thing. “See that?” He asked, smacking it against my cheek, “That’s one hundred percent pure snakeskin condom. Had to have it imported from Bogotá. They don’t make it in the states!”

“Nice man,” offered Cracker Jack. Bill whipped him in the jaw with his gun.

“You speak, when I say speak motherfucker!”

The rest of the ride was spent listening to the car radio. The driver never once spoke to us. Tears for Fears came on.

“Turn this bullshit off! I wanna hear cocaine music!”

The driver said nothing but turned the dial to “I Ran (So Far Away)” by Flock of Seagulls. Buffalo Bill tapped along on the back of my seat with the front of his gun.

We got to LaBagh woods and the sun had gone down. Through the tree line we could see glimpses of flames. We veered off the path to a clearing filled with people in red cloaks. Some wore antlers or horns or animal pelts. Other’s faces were shrouded in deep hoods. People were fucking, or smoking drugs, or fanning the fire, or kneeling to pray. 

Buffalo Bill handed us each an Old Style and brought us to his friend who was wearing the skull of a goat.

“Hey whatsup, playboy?” I asked him.

“Memento Mori…” he growled in an otherworldly guttural tone.

“Mele Kalikimaka!” Cracker Jack laughed, “What the fuck?” 

Bill pushed us forward and the goat man brought us towards the bonfire to an altar riddled with mutilated squirrels. He knocked us onto our knees. With the help of two assistants the goat man pulled a curved dagger from a sheath and began praying over our heads. 

“Well, this is it Cracker,” I shrugged. “We gone.”

“Oh shit!” Cracker Jack shouted. As the goat man readied the dagger in both hands to plunge down into our necks, my buddy Allen came out of nowhere, screaming.

“I got the papers! Got the papers!” As he yelled this, he pulled out a used needle and stabbed it straight into the goat man’s eye. He shoved him forward and he tripped over us, right into the raging fire. 

“Let’s go!” I bolted. And my two friends followed.

Buffalo Bill was after us with his sex gun. He fired in our direction.

“Stupid junkies!” he called after us.

“Stupid?” questioned Cracker Jack, “I was a motherfucking anthropologist!!!!”

Around the corner of the next path, the two Mormon boys from earlier sat sodomizing each other. When one saw Buffalo Bill, he tapped his partner on the shoulder. The Mormon raised his head off his cock, pivoted and pulled out a pistol which he fired into Bill’s leg.

Bill crumpled on the ground, moaning.

“Hold it right there!” the one Mormon shouted.

“FBI!” added the other.

“What the fuck?” cried Bill, gripping at his calf.

“That’s right. We’ve been following you all afternoon. We merely posed as two Mormon boys with repressed homosexuality to throw you off our track. In reality we are both two very hairy Italian men!” They ripped off their white collared shirts to reveal tufts of curly black chest hair and chain necklaces with golden horns.

“C’mon!” I pulled my buddies forward.

We made it out of the woods onto the city block. We ran together all the way to the Jefferson Park Blue Line.

“Where to?” asked Allen.

“Feeling lucky?” Cracker Jack quipped.

We got on the blue line to O’Hare and took it to Rosemont. At the Rosemont stop we got on the free shuttle bus to the Rivers Casino. Surprisingly enough, they let us in in our disheveled, fucked up state. We pooled what money we had together and walked up to the roulette table. 

“All on black!” I palmed the dollar bills and quarters on the table. The dealer spun the table and the winning ball landed on red.

“Sorry sir. Today is not your day,” the dealer grinned.

“Fuck,” Cracker Jack frowned.

“I’m gonna go blow my brains out, blow my brains out,” Allen shook in withdrawal.

***

“So that’s why we need five bucks,” I told the teenagers chewing chaw outside of the Taco Bell Drive Thru by the convention center.

“Five bucks, huh?” repeated the smallest one of them, wearing a backwards tennis visor around his frosted tip spiked hair.

“We need to get back to the city, but we don’t have any money,” pleaded Allen.

One of the other kids smashed a bottle on the curb and pulled out his phone camera, and grinned.

“I’ll give you five each if you chew on this broken glass.”

The Reluctant Zombie

As Norman stumbled through the dank Haitian swamp, he groaned, “Willard, it feels so unnatural walking around with my arms outstretched, but I can’t seem to put them down. I have an image to uphold, and this posture doesn’t fit it.”

Willard, who was shuffling along next to Norman, shook his head and sighed, “Of course it’s unnatural, you’re a zombie, damn it. And your image is history.”

Norman complained, “I didn’t ask to be a zombie.” With some difficulty, he swiveled his neck and surveyed the Haitian countryside.

Norman took in the landscape surrounding him. He was walking through a village. It was nothing more than a few huts of mud and straw along a dusty road. Chickens pecked in the brush along the roadside. Chickens!  For some reason their presence made him uncomfortable. “I really don’t want to be a zombie,” Norman muttered. He was a forty-year-old college professor, a dark-haired trim man who always dressed well. Now he was walking around covered in grime and dressed in rags.

Willard said, “If you didn’t want to become a zombie, you shouldn’t have run over the old voodoo woman’s chickens with your jeep. Was she ever pissed? Killing her chickens is the reason you’re a zombie. She’s also the one that converted me into a zombie, but that’s another story.”

Norman looked at Willard and could not guess what he once looked like. Willard was pale, gaunt and dressed in rags. His age was made undeterminable by his zombie state.

“As soon as you angered her, she began making one of her little dolls. She cackled while she worked. That is never a good sign. The doll is where your soul now resides.”

“I can’t believe this is happening to me, Willard. I came to Haiti to do research on Haitian religions. I am, or was, a respected and well-published anthropologist. Now look at me. I’m wearing rags and walking around like a…, like a …”

“Zombie?” asked Willard.

“Just because I ran over a few chickens?”

“Um, Norman, they looked like chickens, but they weren’t. Nothing around the voodoo woman’s house is what it appears to be. They were once her enemies. She changed them into chickens, and you freed them from pecking for insects along the road for the rest of their lives. You ended their suffering. So naturally, in her anger, she turned you into a zombie. I am assigned to train all novice zombies. To instruct them on how to attack people, teach them what are the best parts to eat.”

Norman made a face at this remark.

“Now what?” asked Willard.

Norman sighed, “I’m a vegetarian. But I will eat dairy.”

Willard said with disgust, “There are no vegetarian zombies. And attacking the dairy section of a store is not going to do much for the zombie image.”

Norman grumbled, “Oh, I wouldn’t want to do anything to detract from the zombie image. Give me a break.”

As the two zombies were arguing, Willard happened to glance over at the voodoo woman’s house. She stood in the doorway. Willard could tell she was still angry.

She hobbled toward Willard and Norman, a waddling mass adorned with bones and beads. A crown of thick dreadlocks, which made her appear as if some multi-legged beast was sitting on her head.

The old voodoo woman shouted at Norman, “I knew you be a troublemaker, with your fancy jeep and running over people’s property.”

Norman mumbled, “Sorry about the chickens.”

“You sorry all right. You be good and sorry real soon.”

The old woman produced her Norman doll, lifted the doll skyward, and began chanting in a low rumbling voice.

Norman’s soul returned to his body. He felt like his old self. He laughed with relief, then looked around. Willard stumbled toward him; arms raised.

“Willard old buddy, we’re friends – right?”

Willard only growled and roared.

Norman looked desperately for an escape. On either side of him, zombies with ash-gray complexions staggered in his direction. He was surrounded.

The old voodoo woman said, “Here be my ‘children’, and they be hungry.” She cackled as the circle of zombies grew smaller and smaller around Norman.

From beyond the wall of the living dead, Norman pleaded, “Please, make me a chicken!”