Jay Passer

Halloween

She was a monster. I was not attracted to her in the least, but she was there, at the bar, drinking. It had been a while since I’d slept with anybody. She was, allegedly, a friend of a friend, so likely the enemy. A rather heavy goth chick. I was into petite women. Asian women. Clean women. This woman was very heavy, very white and had sloppy tattoos, intentionally torn clothing and broken-down, oversized Doc Marten boots. Glasses with lenses so thick I could barely tell she had eyes, which, when I squinted, appeared tiny, like bug-bites. Pasty-faced with unevenly cropped black hair that looked unnatural. Vampiric. Maybe there were flies circling her head. Probably just tracers. Since I was high on something somebody had given me to snort, likely from a trade-off, an eighth of weed for a bindle of something or other; I could’ve been seeing anything. Ghosts. I was dealing weed, but I was a shit dealer. I barely maintained enough of a margin to smoke out my friends. The real friends anyway. I’d had the bogus friends surgically removed in Mexico since my nonexistent insurance didn’t cover pest removal. I ordered a beer with a double shot of Stolichnaya. I had indulged in a short chat with the Goth but now she’s glued to her cell phone, checking texts, checking her pulse, probably Googling my ass. It was a new thing, to Google. Got any doubts? Google it. Anything. Anybody. Anywhere. Why bother with education when the answer is instantly available at your fingertips? Shit. I actually was published, I actually did have work appear side by side with Burroughs and Wanda Coleman and Antler. But modern folk need hand-held, digital verification. I must have passed the screening, since the Goth was now sidling up closer, our barstools practically entwined. I snuck another look. She was fucking hideous. I was in the weeds for sure. Hours seemed to pass. The place was busy and loud with the TVs tuned to a spastic basketball game, with fat-ass Elvira-slash-Morticia Addams jabbering away drunkenly, punctuating points by poking my forearm with a pudgy finger. Annoying as fuck. My guess? It was about time. I didn’t want it to be. Then she mentioned that she had a car. It was drizzling and the wind was picking up threateningly. My motto? It always rains on assholes. This night, heading towards definitive proof. My room was across town. In the house of the Brown Man, who doubled as my supplier. Ballard. Not too shabby, but a helluva long bus ride, and taxis cost a mint. I earned my pittance on meager tips and dime bags. We scurried to her foreign subcompact, which sported a huge dent in the front right fender. Red flags waved across my vision. My instincts urged me to flee but too late, we were rolling. It was quite a way from Eastlake to Ballard; one must traverse the University Bridge to Roosevelt, take a left on 45th, cruise through Wallingford, but where 45th merges into 46th, we had some trouble. Directly under the 1-5 overpass the car suddenly began to fishtail. The Goth had lost control. Out of control in the pouring rain. The vehicle made a gnarly hard right and lurched head-on into the retaining wall of the underpass. Fucking shit… I looked around. I checked myself, patting my chest, my legs, my head. Everything seemed to be in order, or, at least, the same as before. I looked over at the Goth. Her head was hanging low over her heaving breasts, her hands clutching the steering wheel, fingers gripping the vinyl in senseless chubby fury. Was she sobbing? I couldn’t quite say. Then she let out a piercing scream. Where was Google now? The shock of the collision seemed to have activated something inside her to take action. With an impressive display of nimble agility for a person of her bovine physiognomy, she exited the vehicle, to assess the damage. I tentatively followed. It wasn’t that bad, just slightly more damage to the already-smashed front fender. The left rear tire was blown. You got a flat, I pointed out, ridiculously. No shit, Sherlock, she bemoaned. Do you have triple A? She shot me an acid look that said of course I don’t have triple fucking A you heartless bastard. I shrugged. We stood there for a minute as cars shot past through the slick. Then she got back in the car and started it up. I looked in through the passenger door quizzically. Just get in, she mouthed. I shrugged again. Shrugging came second nature to me. I got back in and we took off, the injured, protesting wheel dragging along, alternating between thuds and screeches. I could feel it getting more and more mutilated and misshapen as we navigated the next 30 blocks to the Brown Man’s house. I had to hand it to Morticia; her dogged determination was noteworthy. We arrived and she parked the car. I found my key and in we went. She saw the fridge and gestured defeatedly. You got any beer? I took a number of beers out of the fridge, trendy microbrews that somebody else had bought. We trudged up the staircase to my room, dripping and beat. I’d recently moved in and occupied the smallest extra “furnished” bedroom. There was a cheap Ikea dresser and a thrift-store mattress and box spring set on a rickety wood frame and headboard. We sat side by side on the bed and drank the beer in silence. Then she took off her clothes, slowly, as if undressing for the gas chambers. I shuddered. I finished my beer, removed my clothes and got into bed with her. She was everywhere. There was so much of her, I thought she might spill over onto the floor. I didn’t care. I somehow found the target and started humping. I wasn’t panting with exertion or sweating at all. It was all very robotic. She made small, whimpering noises. The bed was really moving. All of a sudden, with a harsh creak and snap, the side rails collapsed, jettisoning us to the floor in a heap. Good fucking grief, I thought, what a fucking travesty. The Goth was on her knees, crawling unsteadily, crying. I laid there for a while, then got up and dragged the wreckage of the bed frame into a corner. I kneeled to where she was now squatting, offered my hand. I led her to the mattress where she collapsed in surrender. I flopped down on the mattress as close to the edge as I could manage and went to sleep. In the morning, she was gone. I wandered around the house. No trace. I went outside where the streets were still wet, but the rain had stopped. She had driven away in the wrecked car with the flat tire. I didn’t hear from her all that day, or that night, or the day after. A week or so passed. I was relieved. The night of depravity in question seemed like a particularly repugnant dream that had diminished with time, leaving only an embarrassing memory. Until one afternoon at the restaurant I got a call on the phone in the office. It was The Goth. You gave me chlamydia, she accused. Your dick gave me a STD, asshole! That’s impossible, I said, my dick is perfectly antiseptic. You must have caught it from the next guy. Or the one after that. Are you certain it’s chlamydia? Perhaps you ought to Google it. And please, refrain from dialing this number again. This is a business line. I hung up. She didn’t call back. I never saw her again. Maybe she moved out of town. That kind of thing happens a lot.