Yes Sir, a Man Can Have a Baby

I sat beside Esther on our sofa and said, “I should have been on birth control. I just peed on a stick and came up pregnant.”

“Oh, George,” she said, “you always see the dark side of things. It’s probably something you ate.” 

“I don’t know, babe. I think these stick results are pretty specific.”

“Well,” said Esther, “it’s possible, because I’ve been shooting you full of lady-fluid for a while now. You know, squirting from my womb and stuff the way a lot of women do.”

“I think I shot a wad into myself, maybe last week when we drank all those beers and tried that new position,” I said. “I don’t know what I was pointing at, and I think somehow my own bugs knocked me up. It’s complicated.” 

“It sure is. I’ve been avoiding pregnancy like the plague. I’m sorry it’s happened to you. I guess you should have taken birth control and worn a condom, too.”

“I kind of suspected I was preggers. I feel bloated and sick, my feet are swollen, and my ta-tas are tender.” 

“Tender ta-tas is one of the worst parts, I hear,” said Esther. 

“Also I’m beginning to show. My sack is swollen along with my feet. I think the fetus is in my sack, or somewhere down below my belt. Probably not in my feet, though.”

“No, not your feet,” said Esther. “A foot-baby would be really strange. Tell you what, I’ll give you the number of my gynecologist and you can have her examine you. Then you’ll know for sure what’s going on.”

The gyno doctor put me in stirrups and told me I was about three months gone. I asked her if my situation, a man being pregnant, was unusual. “Not so much these days,” she said. “It’s amazing what the human body is capable of.”  

“A man like me can handle it, huh?” I said.

“Yes, a man like you,” she agreed. “One thing to keep in mind, though, is that you’ll need a Cesarean delivery. Although you managed to get pregnant, there’s no natural way for the baby to leave your body when you give birth. So we’ll plan accordingly. Meanwhile the nurse will give you some pamphlets on diet and exercising and what to expect from the surgery.”

“I guess this will ruin my figure, won’t it? Still, I’m so excited!”

Esther didn’t go with me to the first sonogram. In fact she took a funny attitude. “Tell me it’s mine and not some other woman’s or man’s,” she said, “or I’m not going through with this.”

“Of course it’s yours,” I said. “I haven’t been with anyone else.” 

She knew that was a lie, and so the tech oiled up my nads or whatever without Esther being present. “Do you want to know the sex?” the tech asked me, rubbing the wand over my expectant parts.

“Let me tell you something,” I said, chuckling. “When I go to the store to buy corn, I never buy the exposed kind where I can see what the kernels look like, but I always buy unshucked ears still wrapped up in their green husks. That’s because I like surprises. So no, don’t tell me the sex.” 

“I won’t,” she said, “but you’ll need to decide about a circumcision.”

Esther didn’t show for the C-section either, when the time rolled around. By then I hadn’t seen or heard from her in six months, and it had occurred to me that parenting wasn’t her style. But I knew I could do this myself. After all, I was the mother and father both, as I saw things.   

I was still in the recovery room when the lactation tech came by to show me how to use the electric breast pump. My nips got a workout but it wasn’t too painful, and I was glad to see how much I gushed. Even though my leakage looked purplish like Grape Nehi, the tech assured me it was loaded with nutrients. That made me proud. 

Before long I filled several bottles, so no formula for Little Buster. We were going natural, yay! That Esther didn’t know what she was missing.

Who You Gonna Believe?

Catfished!

Us Bobby Glam fans. Lovesick, rabid chicks. A whole mob from all over the world. Some older, some younger than me. Holly, who wasn’t even born yet at the height of Glam’s fame, got his signature tattooed on her chest. At the “catfish’s” request.

Now here we both were, in his lair.

“He” was laughing. Deepfakes did that. Not just Glam’s irresistible giggle. They made him look exactly like he did back in the 80s, in MTV videos. Lustrous black curls, bedroom eyes, pouty mouth. As lean and muscular as when Reagan was prez. But holding a cell phone! “I got your numbers,” Glam’s younger voice told us. “All of you’z.” Same Jersey accent. Trashy, but we loved him. Would die for him. We’d . . . 

Kill for him. 

“It’s not me!” The real Bobby Glam swore. “I would never . . . trick my fans! If it wasn’t for my fans . . .” He sounded all choked-up. “I wouldn’t be who I am today.”

That latest video, with the actual rock god begging for validation . . . was dark, with an older guy who looked vaguely like Glam would now. But you couldn’t see him clearly. And was that really his voice? Had it gone raspy?

“Ya’ ask me,” Holly said, “That’s the catfish.” Reverently, she touched her new tatt. “Not our guy.”

Catfish, or not, we had to share our guy. What choice did we have? We all wanted to fuck him. If one of us fucked him, it was like we all got to. 

Sort of. 

Young, beautiful Holly. Like one of those video bimbos. Long, shapely legs strolled toward him, as he lay in a heart-shaped bed, singing his band’s most heart-wrenching ballad. 

I eyed Holly with hate. 

Like she really was that chick, crawling across the bed. 

In the middle of the song, he said, “Who’s next?” Looking right at me! Again, with the cell phone. “Maybe . . .” Scrolling down what must’ve been a call log. “You!”

When my cell rang, Holly and I squealed. 

Suddenly, the video shimmered and changed. “I would never . . .” That older guy again! 

“What the fuck?” Holly said.

Slightly clearer, the picture was, but it couldn’t be Bobby Glam! He looked like a politician, in a tasteful suit, with a tasteful chick with him. “Never,” he repeated, “Reach out to any of you personally. Deceive you!”

“Who you gonna believe?” Our guy was back. “Him . . .” Alone now, sprawled on that bed, he patted the empty space next to him. “Or me?”

Leaving Holly behind, I walked toward the screen. 

Just inches away, and he looked so real! Was this a dream? As he sat up and reached for me, his hand actually came through the screen! A hologram? I didn’t care.

When I took his hand, it transformed, got gnarly, squeezed mine like he wanted to break it. “Trust me . . .” the guy said, through clenched teeth, maybe dentures. “I am Robert Gallucci. There is no Bobby Glam!” 

As I struggled to get free, Holly screamed. 

“It’s all AI!” the guy said. “Don’t let him . . . don’t let . . . it . . . win!”

Then, a flash of something like lightning, and the screen tore itself in half.

Holly and I clung to each other, trembling. Waiting. Unsure what was real, and what wasn’t.

“Who are you,” a dreamy voice asked, “gonna believe?”

Stroke Of Genius

I wanted to perch at the bar so I could more clearly drag my eyes over gorgeous Annie, the newish bartender, but it was infested with a lot of the usual late-afternoon drinkers rattling on about internal medical conditions, mythical/epic children and grandchildren, and deflated golf scores, so I hovered past them, took a sharp right to the front empty area of the bar, and ensconced myself into the dingy corner overlooking the street.

Annie brought me a beer, spilling (accidentally, or maybe not) some in my lap. She said, “Did you think about me today?”

Odd question, I thought, and while I struggled to discern the meaning, Annie said, “Well, did you?

I was confused although I inkled.

She stood there, strangely too long in my opinion, but I’m not the most reliable narrator of my own life. She said, “So, what I said… Did you think about me today?”

“Well, uh…”

“About 10:30.”

Damn. She’d nailed it. I’d jerked off thinking about Annie, but… what the fuck? The best I could come up with was another “Uh…”

“Coz,” she continued, “I had an orgasm behind the bar at 10:30, nothing I was doing, and your face popped into my brain. You were wanking, thinking about me, right?”

I was more than slightly confused. The universe seemed to be opening up to me.

Annie said, “How do you do that?”

“Uh, uh, uh, I don’t know… I had no idea I could do that.”

“It’s OK,” she said. “Just don’t do it all the time. Especially not when I’m working.”

Annie left, and I started to get hard just thinking about my morning…

OK. This wouldn’t do. I had to distract myself, and soon. Decay. Death. Mutilation. Suffering animals. Abattoir. Slaughterhouse. Slaughterhouse-Five. Movie. Valerie Perrine, half-naked, smiling, gorgeous, sexy. Damn. I was back in the same place, my jeans tightening.

I took a slug of beer, looked out the window, and concentrated on the traffic fumes, the street garbage, the ugly humanity. All was back to normal.

And then… And then… A young woman passed by and stopped in front of my window, her back turned toward me. She took her phone out of her purse and stared at it. She had long brown slightly curly hair that waved in the breeze, hair that flowed over her swimmer’s shoulders, ending at her hourglass waist, just above the most beautiful shorts-covering ass I’d ever seen. Black t-shirt. White shorts. A stark contrast in color, a perfect complement in beauty. And I…

And then… And then… She turned around. She stared at her phone as intently as I was staring at her. Jesus. Her front put her beautiful back to shame. Her eyes were a brown-black that looked like eternity. The smile that emerged from crimson lips that seemed to pulsate sparkled and exploded into a supernova of the whitest light not seen ever. Her cheekbones ascended to the sky. Her chin quivered slightly, her neck throbbed, the skin above the t-shirt line flushed. Jesus.

And then… There were her breasts. Jesus again. Not huge, not small, but absolutely perfect. She wasn’t wearing a bra but that made no difference to their solidity. I thought I saw one of her nipples rising. I looked up at her face. Her eyes were rolling, and her mouth hung open, and she seemed to be panting.

I realized I was completely hard and had been stroking myself for a while.

I looked over at the bar, and saw Annie nowhere, and the day drinkers had moved on to discussing bowel movements. I unzipped.

I slowed my motion, and looked back at my sidewalk woman. She put out a hand to steady herself against the window and I heard her moans. She rocked back and forth, and I delayed as long as I could.

There were no napkins at my table, only coasters and a discarded receipt from the night before, so I made do with those.

I was startled by the woman outside banging her hand on the window a few times, turned to the increasingly loud sounds, and caught her eye.

She smiled at me, and then a look of confusion crossed her face. And then I read her lips. She said, “That was you! I saw your face!”

All I could do was attempt the universal indication of bafflement: I shrugged my shoulders, extended my arms palms up, and turned my face into bemused befuddlement. I mouthed the words, “I don’t know how I do that.”

I had no idea if she knew what I said or meant because she went away forever.

I leaned back on the decaying pseudo-leather sticky bench as Annie brought me another beer. She said, “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing at all,” I said.

“Oh, man,” said Annie, you didn’t…”, looking at the wadded-up paper in my hand. She was being ironic; of course I did. She shook her head and backed away carefully.

As I sipped my beer languidly, my mind wandered back and forth until it settled on an incident from five years previously. I was living in Vancouver at the time, waiting for a bus. There was a woman waiting there as well. The bus never came. We looked at each other, said nothing, then moved together as one into the park next to the bus stop. We carefully removed each other’s clothes and fucked at least three times. By the time we dressed, and I got back to the street, she was gone.

I wonder how she feels having multiple orgasms every day for the past five years.

Pickup Bar

For a time, I spent most evenings at a pickup bar in West Hollywood. I got started on that because I’d broken up with a woman I’d been living with, and a friend from work decided that I needed some hair of the dog. If the problem was that I’d been getting laid, then obviously the thing to solve it would be to get screwed some more.

I was almost certainly working at cross-purposes with myself. Another guy from work – a different job, and a couple of years after I’d started going – went with me one night. “Here’s what I don’t understand,” he told me. “You’re a really interesting guy to talk to. So what do you do? You spend your time at a place where the music is so loud that nobody can talk.” This guy was no dummy, either. He understood pickups like Einstein understood physics. He was a bald, fat, middle-aged guy who could get a woman into a motel room in maybe a minute. He’d be on the road, spot some lady in a Denny’s, and they’d be off and running in no time. 

Some guys have that knack. I didn’t. My friend from work – that is, the first guy, the one who put me onto that whole parh in the first place – laid it all out to me. You had to work out a corny pickup line, something like “I love your smile,” or “Gee, heaven must be missing an angel tonight,” and if you used it on 50 women, maybe one of them would start a conversation, and you’d take it from there. That sounded like a really bad idea to me. I tried it a couple of times. The look they gave was pretty much, “Thanks, and sorry for the form rejection, but I get so many hits in a week that I can’t answer them personally.” My second friend, the pickup Einstein, certainly didn’t work that way. But I could never quite figure out what he did. In fact, I’m sure that if he understood it himself, he’d have been happy to explain it to me.

And in fact my pickup Einstein friend was wrong on one point: if people wanted to talk to me, they could. And often they did. We shouted in each other’s ears. One night a real babe was sitting next to me at the bar and started telling me, right out of the blue, about a nude photo shoot she’d done. 

I gave her the once-over, and it sounded credible. She had an obvious nose job, though, and it was like having a hole in the middle of her face: where some sort of character should have been, there was just a gap. I couldn’t get facial expression. And she was telling me all about this because it was the kind of thing you wouldn’t tell someone you went to bed with. You talked with people at a place like that, which is maybe to say you talked with them a certain way, or you went to bed with them. Not both. The babe who told me about the nude photo shoot understood that perfectly, and she knew that I understood it, too, or she wouldn’t have started talking about it. 

In fact, I met several people there who became friends. They weren’t the best possible friends you could have – I’d met them in a pickup bar, after all. But I did things with them outside the bar, and the friendships lasted several years, longer than many people keep cars or computers, so I can’t complain. The loud music, in other words, wasn’t necessarily an obstacle to getting to know people if they wanted you to know them. Most, of course, didn’t.

Mike Hadley was one of the friends I made there. The first thing you should know about him is that he had a knack much like my fat, bald friend from work. He didn’t have any more insight into how he did it than my other friend; like him, he had no need for cheesy opening lines, but since unlike my other friend he’d just gotten out of the Marine Corps, no other explanation for his success was needed. 

Mike kept a running tally of his conquests. He re-initialized the total each New Year’s Day, and every now and then he’d volunteer how he was doing. “I’m at 73 or 67, depending on how you look at it,” he’d say. How you looked at it depended on whether you factored in repeat business: the total number of dalliances for the year to date would be 73, but if you wanted the number of unique women with whom he’d dallied, that number would be 67. Clearly the object of the game was to maximize the number of unique women.

We spent many days and nights together; as friends, we knew each other about as well as friends could, yet I never actually saw him meet a woman at the bar and leave with her. We might spend four or five hours there on a particular Saturday night knocking back beer after beer, talking only to each other, but maybe 20 minutes before closing time he’d disappear, and I wouldn’t see him again until the next night, when the total would have incremented to 74. As it was with my pickup Einstein friend, the transaction was that fast, easy, and unobtrusive.

He had little to say about his experiences. Once he told me, though, of going home with a woman who had a large parrot, which she allowed to fly around her apartment and shit where it chose. She didn’t clean up the shit, either, so there was a layer of guano over everything. Even so, that didn’t interfere with the business at hand. When Mike was getting ready to leave, she asked him, “Will I see you again?” Mike saw the poignancy in that, but he in fact had no desire to see her again, which I thought was entirely understandable. “I just had to mumble something,” he said, and in any case she avoided embarrassment by never showing up there again. 

When Mike got out of the Marine Corps, he had a wad of cash saved up, and he’d come to LA because he wanted to be a writer, or a standup comic, or a comedy writer, or maybe it was something else that just sounded like that.  Somehow I suspended disbelief, but I tended to suspend disbelief there with almost anyone. Maybe that’s why people wanted to talk to me. I told Mike that if he wanted to be a writer, he needed to read a lot of good writing. At that point I was going through Raymond Chandler, all of it, for maybe the third time, and the next night I brought in The Long Goodbye, which I’d just finished. He took it home. 

He came back the next night bringing the book with him; he’d finished it. And he’d memorized parts. I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it.

Nothing like that happened there. The place was hot and dirty from the time it opened, the bartenders didn’t wear ties, their hair wasn’t smooth, and the glasses weren’t lovely. But Mike liked the book. He should have, I guess: it’s about friendship and how friends can make you a chump. Since he wanted to be a writer, I lent him my Chandlers as soon as I finished each one. He took good care of the books, finished them usually in a day, and brought them right back. He memorized lots of passages. At some point, I’m not sure why, we traded phone numbers.

Not long after that, I was home with the flu, in bed asleep with a head full of cold medicine. The phone rang. I picked it up, but I wasn’t awake, still struggling to get out of the fever-dreams. 

”Jim?” said the voice at the other end.

I said something like “Yuh?”

”It’s Mike! Wondering where you are!”

I was still trying to figure out where I was myself, and I didn’t say anything for a moment.

”You know? Mike?
”Uh?” I said.

”OK,” he said, his tone suddenly changing. “Never mind. . .” What he meant was that he’d taken my incoherence as an unwillingness to acknowledge a relationship at a pickup bar, which of course was a completely reasonable conclusion.

”Hold on,” I said. “I was asleep. I’ve got the flu. I was just trying to get my head together.”

”Oh. OK. I was just wondering why you hadn’t shown up tonight!”

I didn’t think that much about the call when it happened, but since then I’ve come to realize how much it said about the different expectations that existed. You didn’t call people you picked up there. Moira Snell, who was another friend I talked to at Anderson’s (and thus not someone I went to bed with), told me one night about how shocked, and indeed frightened, she’d been when a former pickup called her. Apparently he’d copied her number off her phone when she wasn’t looking – she likely hadn’t given him her full name in any case, and maybe not her right name at that. And then he called her – he wanted to borrow money. The whole situation was unheard of.

Mike was living in an old brick apartment house at Third and New Hampshire, the neighborhood where Walter Neff, the insurance salesman in Double Indemnity, lived. Mike was in a one-room with a kitchenette and a Murphy bed. It should have been in a museum, except that it was too seedy for that.

The first job I’d had when I came out to LA was delivering phone books, and I’d delivered them to that building. It was rundown and roach-infested then, too. But it was what Mike could afford on the money he’d saved up. We got a routine going on Saturdays: I’d pick up some burgers and drive over to his place late in the afternoon. Then we’d walk over to the supermarket on the other side of Vermont Avenue and buy a fifth of 100-proof bourbon. The cheapest they had was something called Stonewood, and it was so bad that when you mixed it with water, it formed a scum on the top. Looking at the scum and wondering what caused it was part of our routine.

We’d watch TV on the old black-and-white set in his room and play cards and kill the bottle of Stonewood between us before we left for the bars. Once we got there, we switched to beer, which was much cheaper. 

A lot of the guys we talked to there – the ones who fit into the “friends” category, in other words – also wanted to be writers. At least, they said that was what they had in mind, though the clock was ticking, as it was ticking on everyone, and none did much reading. Nor did any do real writing. Mike was a little bit different. He at least was writing standup material and trying it out on amateur nights at the Hollywood comedy clubs. I’d go with him and sit in the audience for moral support. He wasn’t going to be famous anytime soon, and after a while, his grubstake ran out.

Mike was able to use the standup material he’d written to get a job back home writing gag lines for one of the big greeting card companies. But just as I never saw him actually pick up a lady at Anderson’s, he never showed me any of the gag lines, even though he must have written a lot of them. He could write that stuff more easily in Kansas City than he could in LA, and he did it for about a year before he got enough saved up to move back to LA. 

I didn’t lack for company while he was gone, which brings me again to Moira Snell. I met her the same way I met my other friends: one night she simply began talking to me. She was going to start a new job on Monday, she told me. She was very happy about it. That was great, I said, and it was about all we exchanged that first night. I saw her again a week later. “How’s the new job?” I asked her. She shrugged her shoulders and moved away from me. A few minutes later, she came back again, but she was hesitant to say anything. “So did you start your new job?” I asked her again, as cheerfully as I could.

”It fell through,” she said. 

”That’s bad. Do you have work? Would your old job take you back?”

”That’s no problem,” she answered. “I work in the family business. They had to take me back.”

It took me a while to piece together what had happened from the fragmentary explanations she gave me. “This guy was really enthusiastic about having me come to work for him,” was how she started it, and then she changed the subject. Then, a couple of nights later, she let on that she’d been to bed with the guy, too. And some time after that, she gave a hint about the chronology: the guy had been saying lots of stuff about giving her a job, and then she’d gone to bed with him, and after that the job fell through.

There was no sense in being judgmental about it: if someone had caught her before that chain of events, it might have been possible to say, “Moira, first you start the job, then you sleep with the guy,” but it seems nobody’d been available to give that particular bit of advice. And even if someone had actually told her that, there wasn’t any guarantee she’d listen. Moira, you understand, was a graduate of Bennington or Reed or Antioch or someplace like that, which means she knew everything, or at least everything that was important to know.

By this time, since she’d confided all this information, I knew I was beyond any chance of scoring with this chick. I’d become a friend, while she was determined to take her chances with the assorted pickups, grifters, and BS artists who really turned her crank. One night I saw some really bad bruises on her upper arm. They were in a pattern that made it look like someone had grabbed her and held her much too tightly there. I couldn’t help but notice them.

”What the heck happened?” I asked her, looking at the bruises.

”Nothing,” she said. “It was just the cat.” Subject closed. 

Moira has already mentioned the family business. Her brief apostasy notwithstanding, the family looked on her as the one to run the business in the next generation, except that they knew enough about her taste in male companionship to have worries about her judgment. That was where she gradually began to realize that I might play a role. Here I was, unattached, straight,  with at least a verifiable work history and acceptable manners in polite company – the sort of person her family might see as a mensch. 

I became her beard. She began to invite me to various family functions and let the family conclude whatever it might from my presence. I’m not completely sure why I tolerated this. Certainly I ate and drank well, and I met new people. But it was plain to me that Moira had no intention of actually changing her preference for unreliable, flaky, even dangerous guys. If I wanted to go along with that whole charade, it was my business, as far as she was concerned. She was also happy enough to have my ear to bend, as long as I made no demands otherwise.

Meanwhile, Mike had been plugging away at writing greeting card gag lines – he specialized in the ones about turning 40. The card company loved him, in fact. They loved him so much that they let him take a leave to go back to LA. He gave me a call: could he stay at my place for a few days while he looked for a place of his own? I was happy to have him come, of course. 

Mike came back out to LA, but I gradually began to realize that things had changed. Although he started out staying at my place based on the promise to get his own apartment right away, he kept putting that business off. I didn’t mind it that much; we were friends, after all. 

But he’d become satisfied with what he was, a writer of birthday gags on greeting cards. In the time he’d been away, he’d lost even the ambition to be a standup comic. And he’d come out to LA as a glorified tourist, with money saved up. He was going to party in partytown for as long as he could make it last. I lived here full time and held jobs to pay the rent. When you’re around someone all the time, little differences like that start to create friction.

The scene at the bar was something I could leave behind at closing time. Having Mike sleep on my couch with no sign of moving out was different – as was Moira’s idea that whenever she needed a respectable escort who wouldn’t make demands, she could call on me. I finally got so fed up with Moira that I began to avoid her, or maybe I should say I began to try to avoid her, since she showed up as often as Mike and I did, and she felt entitled to join us. But I slowly cut back on our interaction, to the point that she finally began to see that I didn’t want to talk to her. Once she got the message, it made things a lot easier. She stopped coming over to Mike and me as soon as she got a drink, and I began to think I was accomplishing what I wanted to. 

But then one night she did come over again. She batted her eyelashes at me, touched my arm with a “you dog, you!” expression, and said “panties.”

”Panties?” I asked.

”Only you would say ‘panties’.”

I shook my head, not understanding. “Panties?” I asked again.

All of a sudden her expression changed. “Oh my god,” she said. “I thought it was you.”

”What?” I asked.

”My phone rang, and it sounded just like you. I thought it was you.  I thought it was your way of making up.”

But I had no intention of making up.  And with a fair amount of effort, I was also able to shoo Mike off the couch in my living room, and not long after that, I went cold turkey on the bar. That was easier than I expected.  As human relationships went there, I was beginning to see that Mike and Moira were going to be about as good as it got.  And I was starting to get just a little old to hang out in that place.  To my credit, at least I recognized it.

Beyond Freedom and Dignity

By Christmas Eve I had been awake for over 48 hours and things were starting to get a little blurred around the edges. We were at Little Anthony’s room at the Princess Motel. Me, Carl, Billy T., and Ricky were working our way through a batch of Anthony’s bathtub crank while he showed off his latest acquisition, a young runaway from Fontana named Justina. Justina was wandering around the room aimlessly wearing only filthy, loose-fitting bikini bottoms, her long hair tangled in greasy fuck-knots from being repeatedly violated by Ricky and Billy T. while Little Anthony taped the festivities with a stolen camcorder. Little Anthony claimed to have found her hustling outside the Friendly Tavern, and over the course of a week broken down her personality and brainwashed her using a particularly potent strain of LSD (“approaching CIA quality,” he had gloated) and mind control tactics he learned at the School of the Americas. The room was littered with various types of restraints and sex manuals, several books by B.F. Skinner, an assortment of dildos, rubber masks, and a large tank of nitrous oxide from a dentist office we had burglarized.  I never stopped to consider why Anthony had all this shit in his room to begin with. I stopped trying to figure people out a long time ago. 

“Watch this,” he had said earlier that evening, stepping naked from the jacuzzi tub and leaving us there with Justina, passing her roughly back and forth among us. When he returned he was wearing a rubber Hillary Clinton Halloween mask and holding a small tape recorder. He switched the tape player on and “Turkey in the Straw” began to play, and Justina immediately started to shriek and thrash around the tub uncontrollably. Little Anthony did a little jig around the edge of the jacuzzi, his limp cock bouncing and slapping against his thigh in rhythm with his palsied movements. Justina began to scream louder, clawing at her eyes with her dirty fingernails and hyperventilating in terror. 

“Okay, we get the idea,” Ricky said, obviously impressed. “Now make her shut the fuck up!”

  Little Anthony shouted “Justina! Platz!” and she sprinted out of the tub and crawled under a table in the other room, shaking and breathing heavily. I was less than impressed with Little Anthony’s display of mind control over Justina. I explained to Ricky that Little Anthony hadn’t actually brainwashed her at all, only traumatized her into a dissociative state of shock. Conditioning and shaping an individual’s behavior is a slow and meticulous process that requires and ongoing regiment of reinforcement and punishment to have any significant and lasting effect.  It’s not something you can pull off in a week with a few hits of acid and a bag of dildos. Naturally she will suffer for years from her painful ordeal at his hands, something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder, but she would definitely recover and she was definitely not brainwashed. 

Ricky rose slowly from the tub and leveled an accusing finger at Little Anthony. “Is that what you did? Are you practicing pseudo-science here?” 

Before he could answer Ricky picked up a cattle prod from the bathroom sink and chased Little Anthony across the room. He cornered him near the door and repeatedly shocked him, bellowing “What did you do? Tell me! What did you do?” Little Anthony collapsed on the floor, covering his genitals with his hands and screaming incoherently through the Hillary mask. Billy T. grabbed him by the legs and dragged him to the other side of the room and handcuffed him to the bedpost, and we took turns beating and torturing him for a while, violating him with the same sex toys he had used on Justina. 

By early Christmas morning the novelty of having a new slave to play with had worn off and we had become bored of tormenting Little Anthony. Ricky dressed Justina and gently led her to where he lay on the bed, trembling and pissing himself in terror. “I want you to finish him off, “he said, handing her his belt. She dropped the belt at her feet and stared blankly ahead, tears welling in her eyes. Ricky picked up the belt and placed it back in her hand, then produced his switchblade and held it to the side of her throat. 

“I said… Beat… Him… Now!” 

Justina hit Little Anthony slowly at first, sobbing loudly as the belt bit into his flesh, but as we yelled encouragement to her she soon quickened her pace, the large brass Harley Davidson belt buckle striking his back and tearing off large strips of skin. We had to step in and stop her when she began beating him in the head with it, afraid she might actually kill him. 

We left Little Anthony tied up in the room and walked across the street to have breakfast at Dennys. No one was very hungry because of the massive amounts of speed we’d been ingesting over the past few days, and we sat there pushing our food around on our plates with our forks, no one saying anything. Justina began to scream again when Ricky threw a ketchup bottle at a waitress, and we were quickly asked to leave the restaurant. 

Out in the parking lot Ricky hot-wired a car, some nondescript Japanese model that wouldn’t draw any attention. He placed Justina in the driver’s seat, buckling her seatbelt and selecting a radio station he thought she might like. He set a pile of bills on the dashboard in front of her, then cupped her face softly in his hands and tilted it up to meet his eyes. 

“Today is your lucky day. Drive away from here and don’t come back, ever. You’re going to forget everything that happened here and tell no one about it. Not the cops, not your family, not your priest, no one. Do you understand?” 

Justina nodded her head to show that she understood, but whether or not she really got it was anyone’s guess.  

“Oh yeah. Have a Merry Christmas,” Ricky said, thrusting his hands in his jeans and turning away from the car window. We watched Justina weave the car slowly out of the parking lot and head toward the highway. When she had disappeared from sight we turned and slowly walked back to the motel.  Back to our friend Little Anthony.

Doable

So, you’re the guy, huh?

I am ‘the guy’, yes. And you are …?

I mean, you are the … what I mean is, you are the guy I have been in contact with about this thing?

I believe that’s correct. And you are …?

You can call me ‘Jeffrey’. You’re the one—

Oh, Jeffrey’, huh? So you are like, the ‘Jeffrey’ that the phone spammers always ask for, is that it? Won’t you step inside please, ‘Jeffrey’?

Un-uh. No, out here is good for now.

Step inside. Now. Nothing gets done out here. 

Holy shit. Well, just call me ‘Jeffrey’, okay? So this thing is doable, right?

I’d say that the project you mentioned when you contacted me was ‘doable’, yes.

So, this thing I contacted you about … are you the, um, the actual … I mean, when it gets done, you will be the actual, um, facilitator, am I right?

“Facilitator” … I like that. Like I work at a facility that does this kind of work, right?

This is making me nervous for obvious reasons. Can we just …

No kidding. You should be nervous. Tell you what, let’s take care of a couple of things. Thing One: give me your phone.

Bullshit! What? Why?

Oh, I dunno, call me suspicious. Ever since phones became cameras and recording devices, I only trust them if I know where they are at all times. Your phone. Give it to me.

I don’t know about this.

Well, here’s what I know about this: I get your phone, or I will do no ‘facilitating’ for you. Capisce?

Here. Here’s my phone. And where’s your phone, may I ask?

Oh, very good! ‘Jeffrey’ is suspicious, too. As well you should be. Okay, here is my phone, and for the rest of our meeting, I am going to put both of them in the microwave and close the door, alright? But I promise I won’t press POPCORN, okay?

I guess that’s a good idea.

Okay. Thing Two: I will need to have the agreed amount placed in my hand.

Yeah, I want to talk about that. Now –

You want to talk about the money? Why do you want to talk about the money? I was pretty clear about what my expectations were when we first discussed this matter, right? Is there something else about the money you would like to discuss? Like, perhaps that you don’t have that money to give me right now?

No, no, not what I meant. No. It’s just that, see, before I give you the money, I need to ask about how this is going to be done.

The ‘done’ part is the only part you need to know about. Right? The ‘done’ part gets your problem taken care of. The ‘how’ part is up to me as your ‘facilitator’. Now, payment up front is how we proceed to the next step in this matter.

If I’m paying the fiddler, I get to call the tune, right?

Tell you what; you do an internet search and see if you can find a fiddle player who will do this thing that you want to have done.

Take it easy, holy Christ! Here. Here’s the money. You can count it. But I need to know what happens if, you know ….

What is it that I know? Are you asking what happens if the work doesn’t get done for some reason?

Well, yeah.

Well, that would be unfortunate, wouldn’t it? You would have placed your trust in the hands of someone who does this kind of work, and not gotten your money’s worth. Is there a trust issue here?

I just wanna know what happens if, say, you get there and like, she’s not there, or they’re not there ….

Whoa, whoa, whoa, ‘Jeffrey’. ‘She’ is one person; ‘they’ indicates more than one, maybe several persons. Do I understand you correctly that I may find myself having to ‘facilitate’ multiple persons?

Just … I don’t know, I’m just saying that he could be there, too. That is, when you get there.

And then I get there and do what, ‘Jeffrey’? Do I ask him to step out of the room while I ‘facilitate’? Or perhaps you were thinking that I would maybe give you a two-for-one deal? Because the money you just put in my hand is not nearly enough to accomplish that. I’m sure you understand.

No, he won’t be there. I’ll take care of that. He’s going to be busy, I promise.

Very good, I’m glad that you promise. He will be busy in some other place, I take it. Some place far away from where I will expect to find her at the appointed time, right?

Yeah, yeah, don’t worry. But, like, what if she’s not there for some reason? Like, I don’t know, what if something comes up where she doesn’t come right home after the bar closes, or something? Is that a problem?

That would be a problem. Yes, that would be a problem, alright. Because, you see, I have other things to do with my time, and if she wasn’t there when I arrived to conduct my business, well, I would then leave and do the other things that I have to do.

Aw, Jeezuz, man, this is … I don’t know, man, I don’t like the smell of all this. I mean, I’m putting myself in a bad situation here, I’m nervous as hell and you’re … I mean, Christ!

Well, it sounds like you might be having second thoughts about your plan, ‘Jeffrey’. Is that the message I’m getting?

You know what? I don’t think I want to do this. No, this is f*cked up, I’m getting out of here. How about just give me back my money and we forget this?

What money is that?

The money I just gave you! Twenty thousand. It’s right in your pocket!

Now why would you give me twenty thousand dollars?

Look, you sonofabitch, the deal’s off. Gimme my money back and forget the whole goddam thing!

Well, the price of me forgetting the whole goddam thing is forty thousand dollars. The twenty you agreed you would give me tonight, and the twenty thousand you would owe me when your wife was taken care of – so to speak.

What! You can’t be serious! Forget it, I’m not asking you to kill her now, never mind, just gimme back my money!

Well, I will be happy to forego the killing part. But you have already involved me in a crime. Conspiracy to commit murder. Yes, I believe that’s how it is referred to in a court of law. To a judge and jury, it’s like you and I actually killed your wife, even though you have now decided maybe it’s not such a good idea. So, for the legal jeopardy I have allowed myself to be placed in by talking to you about this matter, I will require you to bring me the remaining twenty thousand by Monday. Monday, with the balance of my charge for services, then you and I both can forget this conversation ever happened.

Oh, Christ, you can’t do this! I’m not paying you for not doing anything! Forget it!

Well, it seems I can do this. I will do this. I will be right here at this same place on Monday, to receive the outstanding balance from you. Do you know why I say that this will happen?

Screw it, I’m getting out of here! I’m calling the cops, you bastard!

That’s your plan now, you’re going to call the police? I can’t imagine what you might tell them.

You’re not getting any more money out of me. What are you gonna do if I don’t show up on Monday, are YOU gonna call the cops?

No, I don’t see a role for the police in this problem you and I are having. I recommend you show up here on Monday with the rest of the money. Not with a gun, not with a gang of your buddies. You need to keep in mind what I do for a living. If you do not show up here on Monday with money in hand, things will get pretty dark for you.

What … what do you mean?

Here’s what I mean: Tuesday, if I have not been paid, your wife will receive a call. When she answers, she will hear a recording. She will recognize one of the voices as your own.

How did you record us? Your phone is in the microwave with mine. 

One of my phones is in the microwave with yours. This is my other phone. It’s what is called a “burner” phone. Would you like to hear the recorded conversation that your wife will hear? In addition, she will receive instructions as to how to record and use this message to have you arrested for attempted murder. So, it’s real important that when Monday comes, I open my door and find you with money in hand. Then, your wife never gets a phone call. You don’t go to prison. And we all live happily ever after. Capisce?

Good-bye now, see you on Monday. And don’t forget your phone in the microwave.

Cupcakes

How bright it was. Like laying nude, on a rooftop, at noon. 

But we were inside, at night, with everyone standing. Of all people, only Joey still dressed. Lars’s biggest star.

 As Lars and another guy fucked with the lights, I caught Joey’s eye. His half-smile calmed me. 

“It’s cold,” I whispered, shivering. He tried not to laugh.

My first time on camera. And with Joey! What a switch: me nude, and him in clothes. Tight jeans and a torn tee that showed his stiff nipples. Soon, all would come off. 

With my teeth? I hadn’t checked the script, short as it was. . . .

All I knew was, I wanted this. Me and Joey, one-on-one. Even under blinding lights, with everyone watching. Even for just one scene. 

He was gorgeous, with that great body and rock star hair. And sweet. Not what you’d expect in this porn world. “It’s OK, Val,” he said, each time Lars made me cry. Wiping my tears with his finger. He had huge, dark eyes. Like an “old soul.” Eyes that I felt watched over me.

Like he read my mind, Joey smiled again, then looked away. 

Did he know? How much I was falling for him? 

Wanting to fuck him blind?

Me, and . . . 

Who else was in this one? 

There were never just two.

I looked around. Same cheap motel, but a different room this time. Packed with equipment and familiar bodies. Sad, I thought, I knew so few by face. 

Like Tabitha, who wasn’t here. Good, I thought. Bitch. Out to sneak Lars out from under me. 

And Carlos, who was bi. And who was here, primping in front of a mirror. 

The rich fuck Lars catered to paid top dollar for guy-on-guy. 

Three months I’d been trapped here. But I bet I could leave. 

Lars had conned me, then trained me, with his fists, and cock. His insatiable cock, like a Tasmanian devil/parasitic twin that tore up everything it saw. Girls. Guys. 

Glory holes.

He made me bleed. In so many ways. “See what you make me do?” he said. “’Cos you can’t follow directions!” And sometimes, “That’s the thanks I get. For bringing you out here. To make you a star!” 

Like Linda Lovelace, I thought, bitterly. Back in the ‘70s. 

But lately, Lars so busy . . . Between booking, and filming, these customized shoots. Recruiting new “stars.” Exploring newer, and even more bizarre fetishes . . .

He had no clue how I felt about Joey . . .

Or did he?

“Places!” he said, from behind the camera.  

Still without looking at it, I tossed the script.

Joey crawled onto the bed. The bright lights made the bedspread look dingier, threadbare. I used to be terrified of bedbugs. But tonight they could eat me alive. That’s how bad I wanted him. 

“Action!” But I was already there. 

As he lowered his jeans, I crept up his legs. I’d seen his cock so many times, but never this close. Always raging, I could’ve swallowed it whole. He gasped with my first mouthful. Almost lost it.

“Slower!” Lars yelled. ‘Cos he sucked cock the best of anybody.

A slight wink from Joey. Smiling, I slowed down, enjoying this, wishing I could stay down on him forever. He grabbed handfuls of my hair, seemed to be guiding me . . . away! But why? This was “our scene”: me sucking his cock. 

“Now!” Lars said, and I finally got it.

Carlos slid right in, taking my place.

As he took Joey in his mouth, my heart sunk. The script! Why hadn’t I read it? I turned away, feeling so exposed, so rejected.

Joey’s moans angered me. Without looking, I knew he liked this. Carlos or me, it didn’t matter. It felt good in anybody’s mouth. 

Hey, this was Joey’s job.  

As Lars zoomed in for the cum shot, I stared over at the door. The old-fashioned chain lock to keep out thieves, and killers.

“Nice,” Lars whispered. “Nice.” Enjoying it as much as Joey. 

***

It got so late, we all stayed in the room for the night. Naked bodies crashing, all over. Lars on the bed, snoring like mad. Across the highway was a cemetery. I pictured the dead sitting up, wondering what that noise was. 

“You mad, Mami?” Carlos had asked me, after the shoot. Now he was on the floor, somewhere, dead asleep.

Against the closet door, Joey and me sat, huddled. Dressed, I was still shivering. And yeah, mad. But still wanting to feel close to him. His tee and chest were soaked from the shoot. I smelled sweaty hair, among other stuff. If I were alone, I would’ve cried.

Instead, I shared his cupcakes. The golden kind, with the marshmallow-y swirls. And an orange soda. He let me sip first from the bottle. 

“I love chicks,” he said, into my hair. “But sometimes . . . I want cock.” 

So did Lars. But I’d stopped loving Lars.  

“OK.” I took back the bottle, sipped again. 

“Tonight,” he said, even softer. “I wanted it to be just us. Me and you.”

My heart swelled. “It wasn’t in the script.”

As he took the bottle, his fingers brushed mine. “So, let’s write our own.” 

Lars was still snoring, but softer now.

As quiet as we were, I hope it haunted his dreams.

Will, the Writer

Things will never be the same. Will carved his initials into a tree-trunk somewhere in the middle of nowhere. And all these fucking cliches seeped out of his brain. He put on Beethoven’s 7th and started thinking about the time he and his friends were lollygagging in a big open field, high on mushrooms.

He used to return at night from the bars and go down into his parent’s basement and type little stupid poems on a computer. It was better than jacking off.

“If you’ve got a home at night, then I guess you’re doing all right.” His dad used to say that. Fucking wanker.

Will never got laid, but eventually he did have a place to flop. And through his depressions because of the world making him sick in his heart, balls, tongue, and gums, he managed to do what his destiny told him he should: Write.

He didn’t care about capital letters or slogans or marketing gimmicks. He just wanted to do the damn thing he was born to do. But that was just what the world wanted to steal from him: His soul.

So I guess it would’ve been better to jackoff and sleep or whatever writers did at night, budding like toadstools under Dorothy’s skip-to-my-lou bullshit. Eventually, those toadstools would sink. Too many burgers after midnight, the bitch.

Will howled with laughter as the years passed him by, and there remained a sort of sublime nature to his own undoing. At this point in his life, he wasn’t Shakespeare, and he most certainly wasn’t Alexander the Great. But he was still able to aim his piss into the toilet without any help, and having a place to sleep at night sure beat the couch of a fuck-up friend who toiled in drug abuse, alcoholism, and the eternal splendor of hearing their own voices: Will hated everybody secretly.

Soon, it wouldn’t be such a secret. And isn’t that a damn shame? Writers are annoying, especially when they aren’t writing. That’s when they’re at their worst.

Oh well, Will thought, and he skipped like a rock across a dirty pond with lots of elk surrounding it, pissing and shitting into the wind. “The Wind Cries Mary,” Jimi Hendrix sang. And then he died from choking on his own vomit.

Will kept going, and the worst part about that was that he did so even when he didn’t feel like it. That always felt like climbing a ladder that somebody moved whenever you tried to get some shut-eye. It was probably best and better for his innate madness if he could just get laid. But how?

Will found himself looking in the mirror. Maybe I should cut my hair, he thought. Nah. That realization, though, always came too late. Heh, heh.

One day he was in Austin, Texas. Having a shitfit total mental breakdown. He met some girl from Dubai. And he said, yes, I am a writer. I drink wine. One day I am going to smoke a cigarette without a care in the world, and I will write about you, oh sweet dearie. But don’t you worry a thing about it. Because I won’t use your real name, and let’s be honest. You’ll forget me anyway.

Will found himself atop the girl on a Monday afternoon in a motel in the dark, trying to suck her teat. Tit. Oh Christ. He didn’t even know what to call it. Try again, you sappy little schmuck.

The girl abandoned him, and that became a theme in the life of a writer. Look at Hemingway. He had five wives. And he must’ve had a beer-can of a cock.

Speaking of second base, the words started to come. Heh, heh.

And that felt good. But the memories of his life at this point would ultimately dwell upon the kindness of strangers and friends. He was becoming himself while simultaneously becoming a total pain in the ass. What would Bruce Springsteen have done? He would’ve written a song about it. He would have changed up the tenses, past and present. He would’ve developed a southern draw or maybe a midwestern twang. He would’ve grown out his hair and started drinking like James Dean or Waylon Jennings, and he would’ve lived along a lake and got shitfaced drunk, almost to the point of tears because his woman wouldn’t take him back. Why were writers, why were men, why were little lost boys always so dumb?

It was going to take a lot of words for Will to finally find his balls. Almost like Balzac. Heh, heh. He’d have to write volumes without signing his name. However, and this was most unfortunate, he did not have the wherewithal to understand that important point: If you’re going to pour your guts and heart out to strangers, don’t expect them to foot the bill.

So Will got up from the floors and couches and found a job. It would’ve been a great career choice to find a cushy position at an Amazon warehouse. He could piss in a bottle and make lots of friends.

Will did do one important thing, though. He kept one crucial element to his spasmodic foreboding, under the rug, beneath his collar, by reading lots of books. And listening to lots and lots of music.

The pages came like waterfalls of ceremonious guilt, and throughout his late 20s and early 30s, he turned himself (secretly) into an F. Scott Fitzgerald wannabe. Finally, he found his Zelda.

She popped lots of pills. But they were prescribed. So that was okay. It was her condition. And what was his? Just hide your belongings behind the couch, you son of a bitch. Sooner or later, she’ll leave the room, and you can sneak her pill bottles by the handful and eat ‘em like Captain Crunch.

Will wrote his first novel. And then he wrote another one. And when they (she) finally saw his words, she thought he was a madman. “The bitch,” he thought, “she’s never read Celine. She doesn’t know Knut Hamsun. Otto Frank. She doesn’t even know that the Western world is in decline. Nope. She’ll have a kid, and that kid will become a Muslim. And they will all pray to god that the world will get better. And since I’m such an advocate of religious freedom, such a tolerant bird, I will let them go, and I will feel almost nothing. Because after so many years of my own rosy crucifixion, like Henry Miller wrote into a trilogy, I will write mine too.” Nobody cared.

It was like poop on a stick. Or in the undies. It was like the eyes of a crocodile. Writing. It was totally heartless and yet it meant everything to him. The heart was actually there. The soul was there too. A walking contradiction. Where the fuck was the money? And how was he going to make it?

Women.

They took him in.

They fondled him, metaphorically and metaphysically and economically and all of the above. There was something about a beautiful woman in a goose-stepping world that made him want to live again.

The look in the eyes. The fever of love. The muse. The art. The longing for something better at the end of a rainbow shooting out of his eyes and gonads.

Somewhere, somebody was waiting for him. Well, not him, per se.

But his words.

Yeah. That truly meant something.

Fast forward about a decade or so. And there he was.

“Your words are so warm,” she said on Google Translate. She didn’t even speak English, far away in a romantic foreign country.

“Yeah, baby. You’re one of the most beautiful women in the world.”

Yeah.

Will, the writer.

He drank another beer and then got the fuck outta there.

If only to live another day.

Bangkok Gunfighter Without Pointless Huck Finn

Of all the trifling and useless monikers fobbed on Larry Dumpkins in the past, “Bangkok Gunfighter” was perhaps the most serviceable. After all, he had been to Bangkok–once, on vacation, where he narrowly escaped evisceration by Buddhist demons and adjacents–and although his gunfighting days proper were over, his steady hand remained fit to squeeze off a shot or six, should such a thing be called for. Larry’s life in retirement might have been perfect, managing a comic book store in the hip downtown area of Bone City known as SoNoe (pronounced “So No Way”), had he not been saddled with Pointless Huck Finn.

Pointless announced his presence one slow Friday afternoon…the store air was saturated with strawberry flavored bubble gum incense, and Larry was about to close the shop, fire up his dragon bong and curate his collection of circus punks featuring characters from Vampirella and Tank Girl.

Larry loved to set the circus punks on top of his broken black and white TV set–it had belonged to a favorite female cousin with enormous breasts who died in a bizarre club fire, and he saved it to savor her memory in what he hoped was not but knew was an unspeakably morbid and necrophiliac manner. Then he’d topple the figurines with a slingshot–he hated especially Vampie herself, and could imagine her screams and hisses of outrage when she flew off the TV…over and over.

Larry was checking the day’s take against cash register receipts when Pointless Huck Finn charged through the door, demanding to see Larry’s infamous trove of “Dirty Little Eight Pagers,” early porno comics from the Depression era.

“Seriously?” said Larry, taking his time with the receipts.

Pointless Huck Finn poked him in the chest with a yellowish, nicotine-stained forefinger. “Do you have them or not, muh dude? My buddy Today’s Tom Sawyer tells me you’ve got a choice stash in the back room and I’m not leaving until I see them. Your sign says ‘Open till 10:00 pm.’ I hope you’re not thinking of closing early.”

“Wow,” said Larry. “Just wow. Okay, I can show you the books, but lighten up…it is my store after all.” Salve to his irritation at Pointless’ manners, the certain and sure knowledge that should his customer grow tiresome, he could easily blow the man-child’s brains out of the back of his head straight into the promised land…he felt the police .357 warm in its shoulder holster, where he kept it for just such an occasion.

“Follow me,” said Larry. He led Pointless through a door marked “Private” to a storeroom crammed floor to ceiling with boxes, neatly labeled with a pink felt tip pen by genre, age and price range. 

“Third from the bottom.” He pointed to a stack mashed against the west-facing wall. “Knock yourself out. I’ve even got some prime Betty Boops in there.”

Ah, Betty.

Pointless Huck Finn with an incredulous air: “I’ve got a bad back.”

“And?”

“And those boxes look heavy, man.”

“I’ve got some nugs of Blueberry waiting for my dragon bong, I showed you the box, I’m literally keeping the store open just for you, and now you want me to pull out my back dragging your 30s porno comics for you?”

“Okay fine. Today’s Tom Sawyer said you were kind of a dick.”

“Wait…who the fuck is Today’s Tom Sawyer…isn’t that a Rush song…and how do I know him again?”

“Well he knows you.” 

Pointless fished a cell phone out of his pocket, punched redial. “Yeah, hi, it’s me. Pointless. You were right about the Eight Pagers, and you were also right about the manager…dick!!! Can you come down and help a white man out? Oh now come on, you’re still stuck on that little prick-tease Becky Thatcher? Dude, we have got to get you over that ass and into some new…oh, all right. You had me worried there for a second. Uh-huh, yeah, I need some, uh, assistance with the merchandise.”

Larry fingered the grip on his .357 and imagined fingering the clit on Becky.  “What was that all about?”

Without answering, Pointless sank to the floor and began listlessly thumbing through a copy of The Hulk which had oozed through a rip in a nearby box. Five minutes passed in uncomfortable silence. Then the doorbell rang.

“You should probably get that.”

“Ya think?” said Larry. he returned to the front of the store and opened the door, visions of hits from the dragon dancing in his head. A tall, gangly man in his early 20’s flew past him, trailing the odor of burnt corn silk.

“Whoa, not so fast there pal.” But Today’s Tom Sawyer had already joined Pointless in the storeroom where, with many grunts and sighs, he commenced removing the boxes that sagged over “1930s–eight pagers, one handers.” 

“If it’s not too much to ask, do you think you might re-stack those boxes once you’ve finished?”

The two ignored him. Finally, Today’s Tom Sawyer lugged the box with the Depression-era porn comics across the floor, and he and Pointless began rooting through it, tossing books until they came to “Betty Boop, Ming the Merciless and the Strap-On Kid.”

“Sweet!” said Huck, whistling through his teeth. “Oh Betty, you naughty, dirty minx you…” He pressed the book to his lips. “And your tiny, tiny friend…”

“You going to buy that?” hissed Larry. “Fifty bucks. And I’m taking a loss here.”

Today’s Tom Sawyer suddenly rose from the floor, pulled Larry to his chest and began relentlessly sniffing him. “Huck has his pleasures,” said Tom. “I have mine. Oh yeah, that’s tha primo bio-snuff.”

“Get a good hit?”

“Muh dude…” Tom relinquished his death-grip on Larry, who fell to the floor, vitiated. He felt as though his life essence had been sucked like someone had taken an assembly of mechanized soda straws to his arteries…

“What the fuck did you just do to me?” He could barely articulate the question. The ceiling swam before his eyes. Betty Boop lowered her panties and he sniffed comic book pooner.

“Today’s Tom Sawyer, he gets high on you,” said Pointless. “Ok, I’ll take the book.” He pulled a wad of cash from his jeans pocket, placed it in Larry’s limp, twitching paws.

Pointless exited the store, whistling. Today’s Tom Sawyer slid to the floor beside him, a blissful grin blooming on his face. “Since I started doing bio-snuff, my sex drive has been commuted…” he said. “I cum internally.” And then…

“Listen, I’m really sorry about Pointless. Huck hasn’t been the same since he tried to light out for the territories and instead lit up some killer kush that turned out to be laced with angel dust or some shit…when he returned, he had this faraway look and all he could talk about was vintage comics featuring strap-ons worn by miniature folx…me, I’ve been a happy camper ever since I learned how to get hoi af on people…it’s better than sex, better than any fucking cock in the world, mate. Hey, you look a little green in the onions…don’t you worry though, you recharge fully. I’m not a vampire or nothing. At least…”

“It’s all good.” Thoroughly drained, Larry was long past caring. “You know what? You’re all right. Fuck yeah. Definitely all right.”

“Thanks! And here you are, my new friend…The Bangkok Gunfighter without Pointless Huck Finn. You want a hit off me now, man?”

“Why the fuck not…why fucking not?”

The Night is Friendly

Tommy Keys pulled the black knit sailor’s cap over his ears and eyebrows, checking himself in the mirror. Frigid glacier blue eyes stared stonily from above a neatly trimmed mustache. Lucy was in bed in a lacy bra and panties, painting her toenails with toilet paper stuck between each toe. Her chosen color matched her barely concealed cherry red nipples. Tommy checked her out and whistled, she was a well-constructed woman. Except when she got a case of the ass, then it was like pissing on a wasp’s nest.

“Did Joey get a hold of you?” she asked.

“Yea,” he replied, checking his toolkit. Tempered surgical steel lockpicks, shims, a prybar, alligator clipped wires, a miniature electronic circuit interrupter, minuscule listening devises, and all the gadgets of a master thief. Everything fit on his belt, that could be gotten rid at the touch of a quick release button.

From a black case, Tommy took out his nine-millimeter semi-automatic. He took it apart, cleaned and reassembled it, slipping it into a holster. He pushed the red button to safety, showing the cannon to Lucy.

“You never work with guns.”

“It’s for you, baby. Just in case something heavy goes down,” Tommy replied. “I’ve got some cash for you to take care of.” He slid open the bottom two drawers of his dresser. Hundred-dollar bundles filled both drawers to the top.

Tommy covered the pistol with a towel. “Just push the red button and start blasting. But only if you feel threatened. You are worth much more than any amount of money.”

“You’re scaring me Tommy. Where did you get all the money? Why are you talking crazy, about something maybe going wrong?”

“Remember that call from Joey?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we had this caper going down that went sweet then sour. You know I usually work alone, but I felt sorry for him. Joey, being almost family and all. He hasn’t been able to put anything together since doing that nickel in Folsom. Hell, Joey didn’t even get to enjoy the fruits of his labor. The cops were on him, like stink on shit.”

“Since when is the ex-old man of your wayward slut cousin, family? Besides anyone dumb enough to hijack a semi-truck of disposable diapers, with no one lined up to buy them, deserves jail. Just because all babies shit, does not mean, sales are immediate and guaranteed. Then he stops off at a café for a plate of spaghetti, with cops on his trail. Then he stiffs the waiter on the bill and tries to trade him diapers for his food and tip, as the cops surround him in the parking lot.”

“Anybody can have a run of bad luck. Babies deserve clean bottoms. What goes in, must come out.”

“So what’s happening now?” Lucy asked.

“Something I heard Apache Nick and some dudes at the snooker hall discussing. You know I usually go for jobs with finesse and I rely only on myself. I needed a partner on the job I heard about. Even Joey can handle this job and he’ll get a fat slice of the pie. There isn’t much risk, we had to steal a big sedan and a truck with a hydraulic lift gate and stash it until the gig. We mounted police scanners in both vehicles. Then we followed armored cars to get their routes and times, when they filled ATM machines. We figured twenty thousand in each.”

“The night of the job everything seemed quiet. I sat in a Buick at the edge of a parking lot, monitoring all the police frequencies. I give Joey the signal and he put the truck in reverse with the tailgate lowered to just above ground level. You should’ve seen it, it worked beautifully. Plate glass flying all over. The tailgate slices the ATM’s foor bolts and shears all the wires clean. Joey jumps from the truck cab, wearing a ski mask and gloves. He has the entire machine on the gate, raises it into the truck, latches the gate hook, and is driving out, all in forty-two seconds. Smoother than vanilla ice cream.”

“That’s when the shit hit the fan. Up drives Apache Nick with two cronies in a truck almost identical to ours and it has an ATM machine loaded in the back. It seems we grabbed the cheese right out of the rat’s mouth. I gunned the Buick and speared and bent their right front wheel out of commission. Apache pulls a hog leg and starts blasting. Shotgun pellets peppering the back of the sedan. Joey is long gone in the clear. Sirens are screaming big time, as I dodge bullets and cops and burn rubber out of there. I lost Joey. I headed to our garage hideout. I waited for a few hours, getting more worried by the minute. I finally decided to call you and blow town. Guess what happened?”

“You know I hate guessing games, Tommy.”

“Joey decided the frst caper went so easy and as long as he had the truck, he’d knock over a few more machines. Joey listened to the police radio, about the big bust of Apache Nick. He fgured most of the heat was on them.”

“Damn, it seems we underestimated Joey,” Lucy said.

“Yes, he could tell where the cops were and where they were not. Luckily it paid off big. I cracked open all fve ATM’s like Houdini with dime store handcuffs. Joey and I under calculated the payout on each machine. We scored almost eight hundred thousand.”

“Let’s take that vacation, we always talked about Tommy. Head south of the border, drink lots of tequila, and smoke sticky buds, and watch dudes dive off high cliffs into the ocean. Why are you wearing your work clothes? With a score that big, why tempt fate? Let’s go now, please.”

“Remember the saying, there’s no honor among thieves? It’s not true. I have to help Apache Nick and his crew with an early release. I might be the only thief to break in instead of out of jail. Get us all packed up, pretty woman.”

“As soon as my nails dry, my love.”

Tommy winked and said, “The night is friendly.” He opened the door and melted into the darkness.

***

From Double Scorpion Mezcalito