Walking up behind Eric and Abigail I say, “Can I talk to you?”
“Sure, Luke. What’s up?” Eric asks.
“Not you, shitbreath.”
“Luke,” Abigail says, straining the Dom Pérignon 1966 from her hair. “It’s not a good time, obviously.”
“But we need to—”
“Luke, stop it.”
Abigail gets up from the bench, shakes the last of the champagne from her hair, pushes it off her clothes, from her exposed skin, and I just want to lick it from her, savor it and set her afire, watch her body turn to agony and ash.
Next I know, the sound of waves gets louder because we’re walking west through the dark thicket of the park and Bret Easton Ellis is ahead of me walking between Eric and Abigail, their hands in his, and I realize we’re strolling through the public golf course where I used to come with my college roommates, hauling a twelve-pack of Keystone Ice and two packs of Winston Lights and a few irons with which I used to smack the shit out of golf balls, get frustrated and beat my friends until they agreed to never challenge me again. And how they remained true to me, for a time, whether or not the blood washed off.
Just before we get to the Great Highway at the park’s western edge, Bret Easton Ellis, Eric, and Abigail, hand-in-hand, veer off into the trees and blackness. I continue on over through the trees and blackness and cross the Great Highway, nearly get hit by a silver car with its headlights off, and walk over to Ocean Beach, which is windy, cold, and full of rats sprinting out from beneath patches of thick crab grass.
The Pacific goes meek beneath cold air and moonlight lighting up its crests and whitewater, then just licks lamely at the shore and bores me. Bonfires show tongues of orange up and down the beach where college kids wipe the snot from their noses and drink some of the first beers they’ve ever had while feeling inclined to share their Bud Light with the mental patient that won’t leave their fireside who keeps laughing and saying “Up your asses!” after every drink.
I walk up to the edge of the water glimmering in a neon-blue that almost isn’t and feel a hand on my shoulder.
“I’m gonna go now,” Bret Easton Ellis says. He removes his hand from my shoulder to clear some blood and grey matter from his mouth.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I gotta go. I wish I could say this was fun. I wish….” He looks away from me down toward the Cliff House up the beach and wipes sand or tears from his eyes.
“Yeah, well, OK. No problem,” I say.
Bret Easton Ellis walks into the ocean, first taking off his suit jacket, then his shoes and pants, then everything else. Blue-lit and bare-assed, he walks all the way into the dark sea until I can see nothing left of him. And then it’s quiet around me except for a mild wind and the crackle of old wood giving up to the bonfires.
It’s not long before I hear “Hey, Luke!” as Abigail approaches, a comically large smile on her face as she pulls the shoulder of her sweater in place and adjusts her bra beneath it. I think I see Eric across the way trying to cross the highway while pulling his pants up. I pray to god that he trips and falls under the wheel of some expensive sports car, but he manages his way across, bumbling and fumbling, until he’s standing before us with a vacant look and dumb smile.
I pull Abigail aside by the elbow and say, “Listen, Abigail, I just watched Bret Easton Ellis walk himself, naked, into the ocean and disappear.”
“Luke?” she says, still smiling and adjusting her clothing. “What are you talking about?”
“Abigail—”
“Who’s Abigail?” Abigail asks, finally done getting her clothes all settled.
The ocean blushes for a split second as I picture her naked and tied to a Christmas tree, wrapped in a ribbon bearing my name, while she gives birth to our first child still tethered to her via a tinsel umbilical cord.
“You, Abigail. You’re Abigail.” I let go of her elbow and she drifts.
“Luke, are you still talking about that friend of yours that died?”
“What? Abigail, what are you—”
“I’m sorry,” she says, tears welling up. “But some of the things you say! I mean, I can’t even completely believe you about this friend of yours. Abigail was her name? Really? Are you sure? I mean, I just can’t. You’re so difficult. It wouldn’t be too unlike you to make something like that up, would it? Would it?”
“Abigail, why are you talking like this? I would never make shit like that up. Why would you—”
“No, Luke. Seriously, stop it. This is sick.”
“Abigail, your hair. It’s so red. It’s so red. I loved your hair first. It caught my eye before anything else. It’s like gilded blood continuously flowing from your pale—your beautifully pale scalp. It’s what first caught my eye before I realized that I loved you completely.”
“Luke, I just dyed my hair red, like, yesterday. This is too weird. I have to go. I have to get back to my kid.”
“Your kid?”
“Yeah, shit for brains. Toby. I have to get back to him. I don’t know why I let you drag me and Eric out here this late at night. The sitter’s gonna have a fit. I’m a bad mom.”
“Mom?”
“Yeah, I’m a shitty mom for hanging out with nutjobs like you.” She turns away from me. “Eric, can we just—can we just go now?” she asks, picking up a shoe she lost in the sand.
“Sure, honey. Yeah, no problem,” Eric says, putting his arm around Abigail’s middle and giving me a look of confusion. Like, he feels bad for me but can’t do anything to help.
They walk up to the sand-strewn parking lot and get into Eric’s red ’94 Mustang and pull away into the night.
The moon bobs above the distant ocean horizon like a child’s luminescent balloon, and the wind kicks sand in my face as bonfire after bonfire up and down the beach goes out, one by one, along with each and every star in the sky.
“Abigail? I ask,” I ask for effect, then turn my back on the Pacific and feel it nibble at my heels and continue its efforts to bore me.
MMBURR
PART I
Mmburr. Burrmmm. Mmburr. Burrmmm. Syd’s pushing the second of two twenties Wilson gave her into the little booth’s cash machine, which doesn’t seem to want his money. He handed those twenties off to her, told her it’s my birthday and that she should do something special for me. She said she would and brought me back here to a long hallway of little booths, each red-lit by moaning TVs.
As Syd continues her efforts to slip the twenty into the machine, I work at slipping the black latex condom that she handed me over my half-erect dick. I encircle the hard ring of the condom with my thumb and forefinger and try to slide it down, but I’m not hard enough and it doesn’t work. The suction sounds from my bare ass and thighs moving on the sticky red vinyl bench-seat keep distracting me as does Syd’s palpable impatience with the machine’s uncooperative behavior.
“Derrick will be in here telling you to get the fuck out before I can get this damned money into this piece of shit,” Syd says, looking back at me, exasperated, her dark hair falling in front of her eyes, which are already hidden behind the black-rimmed reading glasses she has worn all night, even while on stage.
As she kneels before that machine I finally notice she’s wearing a very revealing black bikini and can’t get the idea out of my mind that she’s about to shimmy up a palm tree for a coconut.
Syd’s skin illuminates from the screen above the cash machine that shows a brunette eating a blonde’s pussy while getting pounded relentlessly from behind by the same bear that modeled for the California state flag many years ago. She keeps yelling, “I’m coming! Oh, God, I’m coming!” The other woman, while pulling the brunette’s mouth back down onto her cunt, yells, “Get… his… autograph!”
“Um, who’s Derrick?” I ask, not looking away from the job at hand of getting this rubber onto my increasingly limp cock.
“Ugh…. The bodyguard. If anyone’s in here for more than eight minutes, he comes looking to make s
ure everything’s OK,” she says, then adds, “Finally!” as the bill slithers into the slim slot, quieting the machine.
“I only get eight minutes?” I ask, tongue now sticking out of the side of my mouth, concentrating real hard on getting hard and getting this black piece of latex securely sheathed around my pathetic excuse for manhood.
On her knees, she swivels away from the glowing screen and cash machine and shuffles toward me, placing her hands on my exposed thighs that shine like two thick pieces of Ivory soap in the light of porno.
“That’s all you’ll nee—” she says, stopping herself the second her hand wraps around my softened dick. “Jesus, you’re not even hard?” she asks, annoyed, then adjusts her attitude and purrs and moves her head down like a heavy wave over my dick, mouthing the black piece of rubber down my scared and nervous penis. In the undulating motion toward my flaccid appendage she also managed to expertly discard her bikini top. Her hard nipples now mock my cock as they sift and brush against my knees and give me goosebumps.
My heart pounds, but none of the blood it pumps goes to the right place. I turn my attention away from Syd’s black head of hair bobbing back and forth over my lap and watch the porno on the screen. By now the scene’s over but the camera hasn’t cut away and it shows the brown bear wiping his midsection briskly with a towel as the blonde and the brunette, now in robes, sit at a table laying out cards. After a thorough scrubbing, the brown bear drops his towel and sits and takes his cards. “Go Fish,” he says and the two women first study their own cards and look perplexed. One frowns. One smiles.
I grimace. The scene makes me nauseous for some reason and that doesn’t help my current situation.
“Derrick’s going to be in here any minute,” Syd says, pulling her face up off my plastic-covered cock, her mouth wet-rimmed with effort.
“It’s OK,” I say, touching her shoulder gently and pushing her away. “Just sit back there and let me look at you.”
“Do you want me to do anything?” she asks, kneeling back, pushing her hair away and back behind her pale shoulders before playing with her dark nipples and starring me in the eyes, the TV screen reflected in her glasses.
“Tell me again how much you love reading,” I say, stroking my completely limp cock. “Tell me how much you love Vonnegut,” I say, pretending to grunt and enjoy myself.
She had intrigued me earlier in the night (or was it a year ago?) after she straddled me and gyrated atop me to “Tonight, Tonight” by The Smashing Pumpkins. Afterward, she asked what I did and I told her I’m a writer. She said she was, too. She said she loved Vonnegut and was in school to be a writer, herself. I told her to leave school and marry me and she laughed. I told her I’d write poems about her and she laughed. I told her I’d make lots of money and take care of her and she laughed even harder.
I guessed she must be going to a better school than the one I had almost graduated from.
“Oh, wait,” she says, pulling her fingers away from plucking her nipples to reach inside her bikini bottom. She pretends that the mere touch is pleasurable, groaning just a bit as her fingers slip down around her pussy lips. “There was something else,” she continues, “that I was supposed to give you.”
Her hand withdraws from between her legs. She puts that hand in front of her face and licks it from palm to the tip of her fingers. Leaning forward, she grabs me behind the neck and pulls me toward her and kisses me deeply, her long, wet, strong tongue pushing the powdery pill into the back of my throat. I pull back, gagging, and she pulls back, again, laughing. The grunts and groans and damp slapping sounds from the porno act as the requisite laugh track.
“What the fuck was that?” I ask, leaning over as my sinuses suddenly open and the medicine-bitter flavor syrups down my esophagus.
“Just a little birthday gift,” Syd says and begins to mouth my half-erect dick again.
I lean back and hit my head against the cheap plasterboard of the red-lit booth. I can’t stop thinking about the way my legs are sticking to the vinyl seat and can’t stop wondering why that reminds me of my aunt’s station wagon with the wood paneling on the side. I can’t stop thinking of how me and my cousins, Tammy and Erin, would ride in that station wagon whenever they came down from Oregon to visit and how we’d make faces at the passing drivers and laugh whenever we distracted one of them enough to swerve off the road, crash into a barrier, and go careening through the windshield like a heavy-headed bird—that and how the light was soft and the freeway was a pale grey and felt like a place for getting somewhere. Somewhere like Hollywood or Winnipeg.
As Syd’s hard nipples grate across my kneecaps, I can’t help but wonder how everything used to be rounded on the edges. As a kid, and even through parts of your teenage years, you could bang your head right against anything and come away with only a tiny bruise. That bruise may stick around forever, it may even grow in size with time, but now if you go around and barely bump into something you lose a finger, an arm, a left nut. It used to be different, right? Not like this where you sink into the broken skin of a vinyl seat covered in weeks-old spunk and sweat and spit.
Then I feel the warmth of the pill blossoming in my stomach. The red room goes yellow around the edges, and soft.
For a second I just want to curl up and go to sleep, but my cock is finally hard now in Syd’s literate mouth and I’m sure she’s smiling through the mouthful. I smile, too, feeling loopy and happy for the first time in weeks, months. I lean a bit over Syd and reach into the pants-pocket of the jeans down around my ankles and palm a small pocket knife I’d forgotten to give back to a friend a long time ago. Leaning back I let Syd work my knob with expertise, then pop the small blade out with a click that gets lost in sounds of slurps and moans and a hallway of lonely orgasms.
With the knife next to her face, Syd finally removes her mouth with a smacking sound and looks up at me with big, confused eyes.
“Luke, what’s this about?” she asks, wiping her mouth with the back of her glowing forearm.
I twirl the pocket knife in my hand, still smiling like a dope, happy as shit and completely forgetful of what I’m doing.
“Derrick will rip your fucking head off in a second if I tell him to. All I have to do is scream…. And I can scream real loud, Luke.”
But she doesn’t seem scared at all. She knows me. Yeah, she knows me.
“What…? This?” I ask, now holding the knife before my own face, as if I’d never seen it before in my life. “Oh… no, no…. No, this isn’t for you, Syd. This is for me!”
“Huh?” she says, just confused.
“How much time do I have left?”
“Um,” she turns her gaze to the screen and for the first time I notice there’s a timer counting down in its bottom left-hand corner. It says I have ninety seconds.
“Here,” I tell Syd, grabbing her left hand and pushing the knife into her grasp. “Cut me.”
“Cut you? Are you crazy?”
“Do I look crazy to you?” I ask, grinning, and drooling, too, maybe.
Pulling her knife-hand toward me, I guide it to the inside of my thigh, just below my testicles.
I have sixty seconds left.
The drug in my system sent tiny little fireflies swarming beneath every skin cell. I just want to cut them out so they can be free and I can tell them how much I love them for loving me. For giving me that warm feeling within that never comes anymore unless they visit.
“Here. Syd. Cut me… cut me right here.” I take her right hand and get her to wrap her fingers round the base of my black-condom-covered shaft. “Just hold me there… and… and cut me.”
I have forty-five seconds left.
“Luke… I….” Syd says, but then pushes the knife into the hard, dehydrated muscle of my inner thigh and I convulse and yell and grab the back of her head just so I can feel the softness of her hair as I shoot my load into the condom’s reservoir tip with two, three, four, five blissfully painful squirts.
Immediately Syd st
ands up, grabs her robe and slips it on. The pocket knife drops to the floor.
“I… I shouldn’t have done that,” she says, shaking her head before gliding through the heavy curtains covering the booth’s slim entryway, leaving me alone with a bagful of come, a bleeding thigh, and an even stickier vinyl bench-seat.
I have fifteen seconds left.
For a time I just sit back, my cock limp, and listen to the sounds of bodies slamming together, the sound of warm, wet flesh.
Leatherface comes into focus on the TV screen and he’s sliding teenagers onto big, hanging meat hooks. I smile and think that’s weird but whatever floats your boat, I guess. Then I realize it isn’t Leatherface but my uncle who was never in the station wagon with the wood paneling on the side. And one of the bodies he’s hanging on hooks isn’t a teenager at all, but my five-year-old brother, Sammy. Sammy’s writhing on the hook, bawling and calling my name, screaming out for help. Shocked by the sight, I jump up and the black bag of come falls from me to the floor and leaks a pearly red fluid.
Shuffling toward the screen, my pants shackling my ankles, I place both hands on the slimy, tacky screen.
I have ten seconds left.
“Sammy… hey, hey, Sammy. It’s me, little pigeon. It’s Luke. I’m here, guy. I’m here. Tell me what to do.”
And it is Sammy, the little pigeon—a nickname I’d given him because he had small round eyes and a head the shape of a bird’s and he often walked around like a sick pigeon. In a blink, Sammy’s the only one on a hook surrounded by dozens of other weaving hooks on chains clinking a metallic music that sounds like winter. It sounds like the chain link fence in the backyard that was open and rattling back and forth in a January gale when Sammy went missing fifteen years ago. The backyard only lead to an alley lined with garages and dumpsters. Mom and dad weren’t too worried, but they always pretended Sammy’s mental and physical problems weren’t actual handicaps.
“He’ll be back,” Mom said. “He’s just off playing make-believe with his imaginary friends.” Then she would return to crocheting another three-armed sweater for the little guy. It was hours before dad was home from work and the after-work bar, and dad wasn’t worried either. “Sammy’s a wanderer,” dad said with lighter-fluid breath. “He just likes to wander. Like his old man,” and he winked at me and grabbed my mom’s knee and squeezed hard and winked at her and her face flushed for some reason and it all made me feel pretty sick. So I pretended to worry, since neither of them would, even though I was glad he was gone. I hoped he’d never come back and I’d never been gladder in my life. Sammy was a monster and an embarrassment. I never wanted a brother, anyway! I shouted that at them, but only in my head. I never wanted anything or anyone or anything! I would shout into my pillow later that night when Sammy still hadn’t returned and my parents refused to call the police. I never wanted a brother! I shouted again and again into my salty, wet pillow, the wind rattling that gate again and again out back because we were leaving it unlocked for Sammy. I never wanted a brother!
Enjoy Me Page 5