Group Dynamics

“Huh?” Joey said. “What’s that?”

“An industrial sociologist,” I tried to explain, “studies how somebody’s job, and where they work, affects them. Like mentally, and physically.”

We both looked around and laughed.

The usual room, in the same budget motel. Still reeking of sex from last night’s shoot.

Tonight we’d pick it back up, with a different script. Or maybe work from the same one.

“Group dynamics,” I said. “You know.”

“Wow,” Joey said. “Val, you’re even smarter than I thought.” 

I stiffened. “Me?” 

I sat up in bed, blew on my too-hot coffee. If I was smart, Lars would never have conned me. Instead of being “personal assistant to the Fetish Porn King of Shangri-La Productions,” I’d be analyzing workplace dynamics somewhere.

“You are.” Joey set down his coffee. “Usually. But this time, you let your heart . . .”

I knew what was coming.

“Ass-fuck you.”

Out of nowhere, tears came. Rapes. Beatings so bad, I could only be filmed from the chest down. Choking. Lars doing it, for fun. It made him cum harder, seeing panic in my eyes. Last night, I froze up, praying . . . that he wouldn’t stop . . . until . . . until . . .

Joey nuzzled me, careful of my bruises. We hadn’t fucked this time. Just held each other, nude, enjoying the comfort of skin. His chest and head hair, both curly, were like a security blanket. Usually, he smelled like nobody else. Today, like sweat, ‘cos we hadn’t showered yet, but Joey-sweat smelled good to me. And cum from last night. But this time, it wasn’t just his. 

When his phone pinged, my heart raced. Lars! We were here, “after hours,” without him. We’d never snuck in here before. 

Would he hurt us?

As Joey reached behind for his phone, I clung tightly to him, as much as it hurt.

“Carlos.” His body felt tense. He set the phone down on the bed and turned over.

“I . . . gotta see him later.”

“Why?”

He shook his head.

Joey and Carlos: Lars’s biggest bi stars. It was Carlos who I smelled on Joey. And maybe not just from the shoot. 

Maybe more than I wanted to believe. Smart as I was.

But Joey loved me, didn’t he?

I loved him: Beautiful, perceptive Joey, who wrote songs he wouldn’t show me. Who’d stood up to Lars for me and literally got kicked in the stomach. Doubling over in pain, Joey’s eyes were twice their size. “Let’s run away,” hoarsely, he’d whispered in my ear, that night.

Carlos, too? I wondered now. 

Group dynamics, we’d call it. No fancy degrees or turned-up noses. Just a cheap motel workplace stinking of pleasure. Sometimes against our will. 

But not always.

I got dressed, slowly.

Foot Monster

She was a goddess with her stilettos on, a devil with them off.

Marcus Malley sat at the edge of his coffee table as he watched the girl take off her high heels in seductive fashion. But when the first one came off, disgust surged in his chest.

“What’s wrong, Marc?” she asked as she stripped off the other heel. “Don’t like what you see?”

How could he? They were massive, jointed things, simian, with as much hair and articulation, too. They moved with an alert intelligence, crawling up his jeans and laying on his crotch, the toes like knobby fingers. As for the nails—ugh—they were black-and-yellow, warped with fungus, and a few of them jostled like loose teeth, showing the bleeding skin beneath.

Marcus almost vomited—the stench of those dogs was apocalyptic—and made to get up but the woman moved down on the couch and caught him around his neck…with her feet!

“Getoffmeyou—” but Marcus’ windpipe was shut by the vice grip of her talons. He tried to undo them, but the musculature running through her arches, her soles, felt like a hemp rope.

She raised herself up, and in doing so, caused Marcus to trip on his coffee table and fall onto the ground.

“You said you love feet, you said you’d suckle on my little piggies.” Her hair fell down along her face in long, seaweed drapes. Her big toe stretched out and played with the corner of his tightened mouth, trying to gain entry. Marcus tried to say something, but she shushed him good

by forcing the toe into his mouth, breaking a few of his teeth in the process, her toenail breaking off like a shorn trapdoor. “Suck, Marcus, suck it good—be a man!”

But Marcus bit. Bit like a man with the teeth he still had.

The succubus howled, trying to get free, but Marcus held fast to that bleeding, hairy toe, even as his jaw felt like it was being dislodged. Her other foot finally released from his neck, reared backward, formed into an impossible fist, and cruised into his nose, shattering it. Marcus opened his mouth in pain, and the bitch went stage right onto the floor, inspecting her wounded foot.

“Get the fuck outta here!” screamed Marcus.

“You aren’t man enough, anyways,” she said, getting up and grabbing her heels. She forced her hideous feet into them and then turned with an attitude toward Marcus’ front door. She scuttled away and disappeared into the night.

Marcus lay there, hand moving to his face to inspect the damage. His mind roved through the events that led to that moment.

Back in the club, he admitted to her his foot fetish—he always laid his cards out beforehand.

“Cute,” she said, over the thumping music. “Well, I’m a foot monster.”

He had laughed at that, seeing nothing wrong. But hindsight’s a real motherfucker, isn’t it?

He crawled to the couch, got on his phone, and dialed 911.

Been Down So Long

“Weeeellll… I been down so god-damn long!” Jim Morrison sang via the 8-track player via the speaker into the small glassed-in room, into the shell-shaped young ears of Polonia Melody a.k.a. Judy Right a.k.a. Jean Summers, or whatever name you wished to call her, most preferring bitch, as in “Suck it, bitch” or some, slut, as in “Harder, slut.”

Polonia watched beyond the waistline before her, watched the young princes, the elderstatesmen, the senators, an occasional wife, even a jester, all come to the court of the head-queen, gaping in homage, stealing secrets, taking techniques home to try. She was glad for the music to drown their shouts.

“That it looks like up to me,” Morrison sang.

It was time to turn the chair. The owner, Henry Miller (who knew not his namesake, nor could probably read him anyway), thought himself clever to tease the audience so, to keep the chair-back to their front, to give them time to gather saliva, to begin drooling even before they could see the lusty scene played out in the open.

No one took notice of the man’s face as he stood and turned, Polonia, on her knees, repositioning the wooden chair behind him. She cat-crawled Madonna-video-style around to the front of the chair as the man sat with his legs spread wide. The next scene in Henry’s play: Polonia, with her back to the court, pumping her head-well up and down over an unseen shaft.

The tile was cold on her bare feet, on her bare knees.

“Yeah, I been down so very damn long!” Morrison sang.

The man in the chair put his huge hot hard hands on either side of her head, covering her ears, and pushing her skull up and down faster and faster.

“Fool around and come too fast,” Henry had warned, “and you’ll both be out of a job — in more ways than one.”

The man in the chair seemed not to care.

Morrison sang, “Thaaaat it looks like up to me!”

And in truth, Polonia’s dizzied senses had lost their direction, her eyes and ears squeezed shut as they were.

Then the ride stopped.

But the man in the chair wouldn’t get off.

Polonia lost her balance, falling back and catching herself, palms bracing the unsterile, non-white tile. Her hearing came back, and over the disgruntled shouts of the got-him-up-now-get-him-off-and-let-us-see customers, she heard Morrison intone, “Now, why don’t one a’ youuu peo-ple / C’mon and set me free!”

The ceiling stared down at Polonia. Then the man in the chair, saving his own ass, rose out of the chair and sat down on Polonia’s form. His legs straddled either side of her chest as he leaned forward and pried her mouth open with his huge hard hot fingers.

“A job for a job,” the man-out-of-the-chair demanded. He pointed to the video camera up in the corner opposite the speaker.

“War-den! War-den! War-den!” Morrison shouted. Then the music went off, replaced by Henry Miller’s anxious voice — “C’mon, you two. Give these people what they came for.”

The man-out-of-the-chair jammed his organ into Polonia’s mouth, throat-deep. She bit down as hard as she could, feeling a warm rush of waves crashing against her epiglottis. The man yelped and drew back, tripping over her outstretched legs. He looked down at the teeth marks, looked to Polonia’s mouth, the drizzle of blood in the corners — an erection-vampire!

Polonia swallowed the blood in one thirsty gulp.

The man-out-of-the-chair stumbled back against the chair and toppled it.

The young princes, the senators, even the jester, banged on the glass wall. Some thought it was part of the show, others applauded the action whether it was a show or not. The senators’ wives stuck their noses to the glass, wet already at this rarest of sights, this most envied of creatures!

Polonia got to her knees and crawled slowly toward the wounded man-out-of-the-chair. “Sssuck it, bitch,” she slurred the “sss” sound and dragged it with her.

The wounded man bled into his cupped hands. His erection fled like air from a pricked balloon. Polonia crawled closer.

Desperate for an idea, the wounded man threw his cupped hands at her. The small pool of blood splashed her face, highlighting her ash-blonde mane. Polonia licked her lips, a mask of red dripping off her face, over her intricately-structured high cheekbones, and down her V-shaped jaw.

The glass-banging in the background formed a primal rhythm of sorts. Polonia timed her crawl to the beat, and, feeling slightly replenished, even swayed her behind a bit.

The man-out-of-the-chair suddenly remembered the chair and reached back with one hand for the wooden weapon. He hurled it as hard as his state would allow at the naked figure advancing on his position.

Polonia half-caught the chair with one outstretched arm. “Harder ssslut,” she mocked him. Then she leaned almost within his reach, frowning at his bloody mess of a waistline, and said, “Out of a job? Guess we both are.”

The man-out-of-the-chair saw the chair speeding down at his head (the one on his shoulders) and then he saw no more.

Polonia’s mouth sped down over his other head, and she sucked him dry in all of thirty seconds.

Fully nourished, her strength returned, her jail term early — paroled, Polonia lifted the huge hard hot dead man over her own head and threw him at the weakened glass wall. The senators’ wives ducked in time. Everyone else, even the jester, caught either the body itself, or shards of slicing glass from the explosion.

Henry Miller burst through the door at the rear of the room and Polonia flattened him with the chair, shattering it into splintered fragments.

Polonia stared down at Henry’s crotch. No, he couldn’t get it up if his life depended on it. No feast there. Not even a snack.

Groaning from various injuries, the audience drew Polonia’s attention away from Henry. The senators’ wives stepped through the glass and over the bodies and began to rub their thighs together. In the same room with one! They literally dripped with excitement.

With Polonia’s naked back facing him, Henry spied with blurry eyes one broken off leg of the chair. He grasped the jagged-edged weapon and rose up behind her.

The senators’ wives screamed as one.

Polonia turned, caught Henry’s arm in mid-thrust, and re-directed his aim, piercing the chair leg through his heart, and pinning him to the cold tile wall.

“Is this what they came for?” she said.

Henry spontaneously ejaculated and died. His blood ran in a thick stream over the unsterile, non-white tile.

The senators’ wives maneuvered themselves to Polonia’s side, afraid to touch the living goddess, until Polonia took their hands in hers and pressed them between her breasts.

The threesome moved toward the exit, but one of the wives stopped, her expression dismayed, her finger pointing to the video camera. “Did they capture it all on tape?” she said.

Polonia’s delicate lips stretched into a wide grin, baring her fangs, blood-streaked and pinpoint fine. “All but me,” the erection-vampire said.

Then she led her new disciples out of the whorehouse prison.

The Family Curse

Kennedy sits at the bar, mildly distracted by the rolling news on the TV screen and the young, good-looking barmaid, whilst outside the rest of the world loses their minds in the usual carnage of their regular bouts of consumerist madness.

“I’ll have another round of these” he finally tells the girl as he sits with nothing to do but drink and wait.  Sometimes it feels like this is all he ever does, sits waiting on his god-damn brother.  His no-good god-damn brother who, as usual, couldn’t bring himself to name a specific time just a vague reference to ‘afternoon’ which could literally mean anything up until about 9 and as Kennedy looks up at the clock he spies it slowly ticking around to half-past-2 and he knows he could be in for a long wait, a very long wait maybe.

“God-damn him!” he spits as the barmaid brings his latest round of a double Jack and ice and a cold half-pint beer ignoring his obvious annoyance about something but as a ravishing beauty walks through the door Kennedy no longer cares.  He no longer cares about the time, he no longer cares about his brother all that matters is walking right towards him as his eyes devour her enticing body.  Standing tall and slim her attitude is of someone who’s been there and done more stuff than some squeeze into a lifetime but somehow her beauty has remained intact.  

“Hi there beautiful,” Kennedy says as she sweeps his boredom away as she struts right past him before leaning into the bar.

“So how about you let me buy you that drink if you like?” he offers.

“What?  Do I look like I can’t afford a drink of my own?” she responds, her voice an angry buzz of words whilst a grinning smirk spreads across her face.

“Oh no, I didn’t mean it like that…I just saw you walk in alone and, well… I’m alone and I thought, maybe, we could keep each other company if you like?”

“Well, as long as you don’t expect anything beyond the talk… I’m not that kind of girl I’ll let you know and trust me you wouldn’t want to make me angry” she retorts before turning to the barmaid and asking for a large glass of the best red wine they have.  As she slides onto the stool next to Kennedy her long green dress parts at her leg and Kennedy can’t help but soak in the view of her beautiful slim legs.

“Well, how’s it going today?  I’m Kennedy Monroe by the way,” he says by way of introduction as the barmaid brings over the huge glass of wine and Kennedy, desperate to not have any interruptions, passes her a note of some description.  

“You can just call me Becca, alright?” she responds.

“Sure,” Kennedy says allowing a quiet moment to fall between them and, for the next hour, the quiet is all consuming.  Any question he might ask she knocks away with a one or two word response until, finally, and Kennedy isn’t sure he’s ever been happier to see his god-damn brother, Kaufman walks into the bar.  A brief nod of the head is all he gets as his brother disappears off to the toilet and Kennedy knows that means just one thing; the old Bolivian marching powder is back and Kaufman is going to be nothing but a god-damn pain in the arse to his younger brother.  

“Hey there little bro,” Kaufman shouts across the bar as soon as he leaves the toilet, “how’s it going?” he asks as he slides in between Kennedy and Becca.

“Well it was going just fine,” Kennedy responds already knowing just where this afternoon is going to go and, sure enough, over the next couple of hours Kaufman will dazzle Becca with his American Express Gold Card, his knowledge of fine wines and his burgeoning cocaine-fuelled confidence.  For Kennedy though time just struggled on as Kaufman moves in for the kill as his inevitable crash slowly comes to consume him.  

“So, how about we take this little party back to mine?” Kaufman asks but Kennedy has other ideas.

“Why does it always have to be your place?” he retorts.

“Well little brother, I think we should ask sweet little Becca here where she wants to go from here don’t you?” as both sets of eyes turn to her.  As she finally turns her head towards them a smile beaming across her face she teases them both.

“Enie, Meanie, Minni, Moo, tonight we’re going to go to this one’s home!” she says with her finger pointing right back at herself.

“Well I’m sorry guys it looks like you’re both losers!” she says unsteadily climbing down from her stool in her wine-addled state laughing all the way.

“Say what now?” Kaufman responds.

“You heard me loser,” she taunts doing a L shape on his forehead to confirm her feelings.

“But, but…” is all he can say.

“But nothing loser,” she says suddenly seeming to sober up in the blink of an eye before moving off towards the door of the bar but today something seems to have caught Kaufman in a rare mood.

“Hey beautiful, you can’t just walk out on us like this,” he says climbing off his stool and walking towards her by the door.

“Why can’t I?” she retorts, “I told your brother exactly what the deal was, no funny business I said didn’t I?” she asks turning to Kennedy who simply nods his head in agreement.

“But, but… But that was him, this is different…” Kaufman responds.

“Why is it any different?” she asks before he desperately lunges for her arm.  “What the fuck are you doing?” she demands.

“I want you…” Kaufman slobbers feeling the rare sensation of rejection hitting hard.

“Well you can’t have me!” Becca responds but as Kaufman makes one last feeble grab for her dress something miraculous happens, something beyond belief, something that no one would believe unless they saw it with their own eyes and even then they would struggle to comprehend.

Becca starts growing inexplicably, bigger, higher and taller than anyone has ever seen before and as her head busts through the roof of the bar the brothers can barely believe their eyes.  Like a gigantic feminine Hulk she majestically sweeps her green dress causing a gale to sweep through the bar and send all the customers running for the door.  As they run screaming from the bar she lifts her foot up and Kennedy knows just what is coming and he’s sure it ain’t going to be good for him, for his brother, hell for anyone within stomping distance and sure enough as he turns on the street corner she wails like a banshee before stomping her god-knows what size boots down flattening the bar in one swoop. 

“What the fuck now big brother?” Kennedy asks as Kaufman joins him on the corner.

“Don’t ask me!” Kaufman responds before running as if his life depends on it which he soon discovers it very well might.

“Where’s that bastard!?” the giants voice demands and as Kaufman ducks into an alleyway he struggles to comprehend what the hell is going on; less than a few minutes before he’d been quite happily doing his usual routine on the latest woman to have stumbled into his path and now, well now, he’s hiding from a giant beast whose just flattened the bar they’d been sat in.

“I see you fucker!” she hisses as one of her giant hands disappears up Kaufman’s alleyway desperate to grab his puny little body to be her plaything but they both know it’s inevitable and as Becca picks him up Kaufman can do nothing but scream.

“Help!!” he pleads but no one can do anything to stop the attack of the two-hundred foot tall woman and as she pulls him up to her eye-level he’s convinced that not even cocaine has got him as high before.

“I told you didn’t I?” she booms covering little Kaufman in spittle, “I ain’t that kind of girl, I told your brother that and we got along fine but you… well… What you got to say for yourself?”

“I’m sorry, I’m really, really sorry!” he responds whilst balling his eyes out.

“I don’t believe you!” she hisses in response as suddenly the area is flooded with emergency vehicles; the cops, a number of ambulances, a fire engine and finally an army battalion appear on the scene with their sirens wailing but even the fire engine’s longest ladder barely makes it to the giants’ knee and the army’s bullets merely bounce off her.  

“She’s got my brother!” Kennedy tells the lead cop who is still looking up stunned at the giant beast of a woman now working her way down the narrow tree-lined street and towards the towns’ ancient old pier.

“We’re trying everything we can sir,” the cop responds but as the bullets keep bouncing off her he knows they’re running out of ideas and quickly and if the army battalion can’t come up with something, well to put it bluntly, everyone is going to get fucked and not in the good sexy kind of way.

An army helicopter flies into the scene and suddenly a huge net descends onto Becca and covers her back and head and suddenly she slips and falls crashing down onto the towns’ Aquarium.  Even more chaos ensues as sharks ride the waves right up onto Marine Parade and as day-trippers and street-dwellers are devoured the chaos grows ever more wild.  Water is flooding the streets all around the pier and is returning a large part of the beach to the sea with a whole load of very exotic and in some cases very dangerous additions.  

Kennedy turns onto Marine Parade as the army helicopter drops its net and as he spies its manouvres he knows as soon as he sees Becca falling that somehow he’s got to get in there and save his god-damn brother.  Running full-tilt like he hasn’t in years, hell decades even, he is on the scene in a matter of seconds and as he witnesses the carnage the sharks are bringing to the party he spies his brother flapping around in a deluge of water.  Arriving on the scene a fleet of ambulances pull up to the disaster zone and a horde of paramedics come piling out desperate to get on with their job of saving some lives.

“Can one of you help my brother?” he asks as he walks on through and straight up to Kaufman.  “How’s it going big brother?” he asks as a paramedic appears at his side.

“It, it ain’t good…” Kaufman responds struggling for breath as the medic diagnosis at least two broken ribs.

“We’ll need to get him to the hospital to help with his breathing,” the medic tells Kennedy as they pile Kaufman into the back of the ambulance.

“Can I get a ride?” Kennedy asks before the medic nods his head holding the door open for him.  As the ambulance hurtles the short distance from pier to hospital the quiet is a blessed relief after the carnage especially as Kennedy knows his brother is going to be fine.

Wheeling him into the hospital in a wheelchair and down a passage straight pass the dreaded A&E Kennedy follows until finally he is told to wait as his brother is wheeled into a private room.  As Kennedy sits back he notices a tiny TV in the corner and as soon as his eyes focus he can see they’re talking about the incident he’s just escaped and the scene ain’t pretty, it ain’t pretty at all. The pier pounded to pulp, hundreds of homes and at least a dozen bars destroyed, flattened, including the one they’d originally all met in. The beast, and Kennedy still can’t believe it is Becca, is currently doing more damage to the ravaged beating heart of West Street than any Saturday night crowd, going off like a bomb and bringing nothing but destruction in her wake.

“Kaufman!” her voice booms through the tiny TV set in the corner of the room, “I know you’re out there somewhere watching this and I want you to know I’ll find you and I’ll crush you yet!” she booms before suddenly lowering her voice to a whisper, “And if I don’t I’ll put a curse on you and your whole bastard evil family, in fact anyone named Monroe!”

“Sir,” a nurse says arriving at Kennedy’s side, “sir, I’m afraid…”

“Oh no,” Kennedy says recognising the tone, “he’s gone hasn’t he?”

“Yes sir, we just couldn’t save him!” she confirms as a call comes in from the front office.

“A telephone call for me?” Kennedy asks as he walks on in, to which the admin clerk confirms holding the reciever out for him.

“Yes, yes this is Kennedy Monroe, yes… my parents…” he says as news is delivered before the inevitable comes again and he drops the phone and falls to his knees.

“Oh no!” he sobs suddenly more alone than he’s ever been in his life and as the clerk leans in all Kennedy can hear, in the distance, is the ominous thud of the biggest feet in the world.

“I know you’re in there!” she booms a few seconds later and Kennedy knows, he just knows, the only way out of this mess is to confront the situation.

“Here I am!” he declares walking out the exit a few minutes later, “Now you don’t have to kill or injure anyone inside, you’ve got me!  Your damn curse has killed my entire family you bitch and let me tell you, right now I ain’t got much to live for so if you want to finish the job go right ahead!”

“Oh no Kennedy, it’s always been you that I liked!” she whispers for only half the town to hear and suddenly, just like that, she shrinks right back down to her normal size. A lone policeman suddenly appears from nowhere and arrests her, placing her in hand-cuffs and walking her the short distance to the police station and all Kennedy can do is try and forget it all. As he walks off in the direction of his home he spies a bar and walks on in as he realises the madness of the day finally needs drowning in an ocean of booze.

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.