Chicken

by David Henry Sterry

  At first the guy seems old. Hard to say how old really. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. Sixty. They’re all the same age to me. The only other age I’m aware of is Really Old, and that’s anyone who’s about to keel over dead. But as I study him out of the corner of my eye, I realize he’s not old. He’s actually about my age. His oldness is coming from the inside.

  ‘Mr. Hartley will see you now,’ the secretary says to him. She does not smile. He does not smile. I must stop smiling.

  I watch myself studying this manchild, who must certainly be a black boy prostitute. When he stands up I’m aware for the first time that this old young fellow is at least a head taller than me. It may be my imagination, but I swear I can see his knob outlined through the too-tight pants, and I’m simultaneously filled with shock and envy.

  As I watch him smooth past me with that beautiful Superfly strut, I realize I need to be like him. So easy and so hard, so hungry and so full, so hot and so cool.

  I see now that my former strut was wholly inadequate. So as I walk out of the Hollywood Employment Agency, I strut a whole new strut, a pumped-up teenboy with a rocket in my pocket and a lump of coal in my chickenheart.

  I’m three, and much excitement grips our house, because Guests are coming over tonight. My little brother and I are dressed up in our white starchy collary shirts, blue suspenders, clip-on ties, short knee pants, wee white kneesocks. Our hairs are combed, our faces washed, and our shoes nice and neat. My mom’s hair is bigger than usual, psoriasis torching on her elbows like roadside flares at an accident. My dad’s joking a mile a minute, smoke roaring from his crew cut like the factory in his head’s working overtime.

  I’ve memorized The Music Man. I don’t know why, I just have. And now it’s my turn to get up and sing it for the Guests, their big faces flooding me with warm wet heat as I sing and dance.

  ‘Ya got trouble, folks, right here in River City with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool—’

  Word for word, note for note, just like on the record, all three-year-old Yankee Doodle Dandy, while the enormous Guests cheer, laugh, and clap, and my mom and dad shine at me in the hot spotlight of America.

  I sit in Existentialism class trying to listen to Sister Tiffany explain how we’re free to make our lives whatever we want them to be. She’s schooling us on the myth of Sisyphus. Apparently Sisyphus did some heinous shit to the gods, so he got sentenced to pushing a big huge rock up a big huge mountain, every day for the rest of his life. Only when Sisyphus embraces the rock, becomes the rock, does this futile, pointless, punishing task become his joy.

  At seventeen, I love thinking about all this. I’m bound and determined to find the joy inside my misery. But today I’m having real trouble focusing. All I can feel is that pager in my pocket, big as a garage-door opener, resting on my thigh like an invitation to hell. I want it to buzz. I hope it never buzzes.

  Sister Tiffany brings me back. Incredible mind this nunbabe has: deep honest funny. No wonder the Catholic church gave her the heave-ho.

  Am I free to make my life whatever I want it to be? I feel trapped between my cock and a hard place, waiting for a date that I desperately need and feverishly fear.

  Then I stare at Kristy. It helps to stare at Kristy. Kristy’s small, with a little nose slotted between two big blue eyes blazing under waving brown hair. When I look at her I think, ‘Hey, maybe I am free after all.’ I tail her out of Existentialism class. She smiled at me once during class in a way I was sure meant she wanted to have sex with me. Then again, I’m beginning to think everyone wants to have sex with me.

  She sits on the green lawn, throws her head back, and basks in the Hollywood sun like she’s in an Impressionist painting. Maybe I can make her fall in love with me. Maybe I can move in with her. She can introduce me to her folks. I can help her have a woman’s orgasm.

  I stop. Breathe. If I can do this maybe I can plug up some of the holes, stop the bleeding, right the ship. As much as I needed that bucket of chicken in the Dumpster, that’s how hungry I am for Kristy.

  Next thing I know I’m standing over her, trying to look like a loverstudguy and not some scared-to-death dink. I smile inside my mind. Here I am, a professional sex muffin, terrified by this girl Kristy.

  Suddenly she realizes someone’s standing over her, staring, and when she opens her eyes she recognizes me.

  A huge long instant follows in which it’s unclear whether Kristy wants me, or wants me to piss off. And she seems to be enjoying it.

  ‘Hi …’

  Kristy finally smiles.

  ‘Hi …’

  I smile.

  ‘How’s it goin’?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m feeling incredibly existential.’ This is the first interaction I’ve had with a woman in a while that didn’t involve a nun or a money-for-sex exchange.

  ‘Yeah, those nuns’ll kick yer ass.’ She grins.

  ‘Well, if I have to get my ass kicked, I want it kicked by a nun,’ I say as I sit. This feels natural. I’m not thinking about my ass. Or my pager. Or my mom.

  ‘I’m just waiting for one of ’em to actually fly into class. I’d convert right then and there, I swear to God.’ Kristy’s definitely putting some flirty spin on the ball.

  ‘I don’t think they can actually fly without the whole wimple thing,’ I spin right back.

  ‘Yeah, I think it’s an aerodynamic hand-of-God situation.’ Kristy’s so adorable. So normal. So not a freak like me.

  I now move directly into the minefield in my mind. What do I do? Ask her if she wants a date? Tell her I’ll give her a student discount? Suddenly this fun, sun-filled meeting of a boy and a girl becomes a war zone, and I’m staring into the barrel of my own gun. I’m stuck, struck dumb. I feel the pager cold and hard, and hear its call of the wild. I want to move into Kristy’s life and bury myself there. I try to smile. It doesn’t work. Then I remember I’m trying not to smile.

  ‘I gotta … you know … go …’

  Even as it comes out of my mouth, I know it sounds weird and evasive and not at all the sort of thing that makes a girl fall in love with a boy. I want to buy her a hot chocolate, get her a puppy, tell her who I am. I want to do anything except what I’m about to do, which is run away from this nice normal smart funny loving American girl. I finger my pager, turn my back, and walk away from Kristy.

  5.

  INDUSTRIAL NEW JERSEY & GEORGIA

  The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

  —ANAÏS NIN

  ‘THE MAYOR CAN go straight to hell. I mean, who does he think he is? You don’t just cancel on a dinner party that’s been planned for six weeks! The whole reason for the goddam party in the first place was so the mayor could meet all those boring assholes. And my husband, that painintheassbastard, you know what he said to me? He said, “Handle it.” I’ll give him something to handle, the miserable prick.’

  Georgia paces and smokes like a nervous chimney. Mr Hartley told me to be here at four o’clock. I’m gonna get a hundred dollars. Plus a tip, of course. If I get the job done.

  TV’s on low, so you can barely hear excited people winning more money. A painting of a schooner that looks like it’s from a starving-artist sale sails on the wall. An envelope on a dresser whispers my name.

  Georgia lights a new cigarette off the cherry of the one she holds, while another smolders from the ashtray. I smell booze and see the tip of a bottle peeking its head out from a big hand-bag, like it doesn’t want to miss a trick. Next to it a bit of stocking drips. A pair of neon-lime shoe twins sit side by side by the side of the bed. Georgia has ten pink piggies painted peach at the end of her fat little feet.

  Okay. So she came in, took off her stockings, shoved them into the bag, then knocked back a few snorts to lube the engine, which is always smoking.

  Georgia looks like she fell into a trash compactor when she was five-eight and didn’t escape until she was five-foot-two. She’s wearing a silky shiny neon-green knee-length skirt wit
h a silky shiny brown blouse that’s at least two sizes too big. The overall effect of Georgia is fleshy, shiny, and smoky.

  I’m on the edge of the Cliffs of Hyperventilation, my mind mile-a-minuting, pulse pounding, trying to focus on my breathing. I don’t know it at the time, but this turns out to be a very smart move, and when I do manage to track down my breath and force it to get regular, I immediately feel power and control. And Lord, I need power and control right now.

  Frannie the Coma Girl. She loves me. Sunny told me so. I see myself in her mirror: long, muscled, and woody. I’m the sixty-minute chicken, star of my own loverstudguy movie.

  Georgia motions to the envelope on the dresser. A hundred-dollar bill lives in there. I casually make it mine. Just the act of making contact with the money is a great balmy calm to me and activates the voice in my head:

  ‘Oh, baby … you love it, don’t you? Oh, baby, baby, baby.’

  An adrenaline subway rushes up me, tingly little charges that fire inside, like an addict when the score is knocking on the door. I pose by the mirror. I pose in the chair. I pose by the dresser. I shoot her with a look that has no smile in it, and when I catch her eyeballing me, this big bossy brassy ballbusting babe blushes.

  ‘Would you mind … uh … taking off your … uh … clothes …’

  The power in this room has shifted, and it’s intoxicating. In real life I’m so small. Here I’m so big.

  Georgia wants me to tell her how pretty she is. Apparently her painintheassbastard husband never does.

  ‘You know, as soon as I walked in, I said to myself, ‘She is really pretty.’ And you really are. If you were at a party and I saw you I’d definitely hit on you.’ I come from a long line of toads, and it flows out of me, easy as fur pie.

  She eats it up with a silver spoon. Asks me to play with myself. Play. I’m struck by what an odd phrase that is. Play. Jungle gym. Teeter-totter. Barbie dolls.

  So I lie on the bed, and I play. I like watching myself playing in the mirror. And I like the fact that she can’t take her eyes off me, but can’t look right at me, either. The air’s filled with sex, and I’m the bullgooseloony chicken.

  I conclude, based upon my very limited database, that women in Hollywood like to watch naked young men masturbate.

  My blood is coming to a rolling boil as I play, and if I squint hard enough I can imagine this crazy baby’s the beautiful minx star of my loverstudguy movie.

  Georgia shuffles over awkwardly, hikes up her skirt, and kneels on the bed next to my head, a bouquet of stale cigarette and nasty booze arriving with her.

  Where exactly are we going with this?

  Suddenly she has one knee on either side of my head. I disappear under the bigtop tent of her green neon skirt, and I’m swallowed up in her dark suffocating circus, where the clowns are scary and the lions unchained.

  As her nether underworld zooms in slow motion toward my face, the heat of Georgia blasts me like a furnace, feminine fresh chemicals burning the hairs in my nostrils. It’s like a scientist who never actually smelled a woman created an aroma of what female genitals would smell like in a germ-free world. But underneath lurks something dank humid and sordid, like her vagina’s been hanging out in a seedy bar. I can’t breathe. I’m drowning in all this alcohol-saturated smoke-drenched genitalia.

  It’s all I can do not to throw her off and fly away. But I can’t. The son of an immigrant is here to get the job done. And if I can walk out of this room with a hundred dollars, then at least I’m worth that.

  Georgia’s planted herself unmoving on my face. A joke pops into my head. As long as I’ve got a face, you’ve got a place to sit. I make a mental note to laugh about this later.

  I never went through that ‘I hate girls’ phase so many men never outgrow. I’ve always been attracted to girls by a force I couldn’t quite control.

  My girlfriend’s name is Sally. I’m five. She has pretty yellow curly hair and blue blue eyes. She wears little flower dresses, a different one every day.

  I’m sure she didn’t know she was my girlfriend. I showed my love and devotion for her by flying on my bicycle in front of her house over and over, back and forth like some crazed mechanical duck, because I thought I looked so grown up and tough with the wind in my hair whipping so damn fast past her house.

  I sometimes feel like I’ve spent my whole life riding my bicycle very fast in front of girls’ houses, trying to get them to love me.

  Cause of death: asphyxiation by vagina. That’s what my death certificate is gonna say, I think, as I suffocate under Georgia. My erection left the party long ago. She hasn’t really had a sexual response of any kind, and she’s just been using my face as a chair for what seems like months.

  I find myself questioning my career choice.

  Finally I pull her skirt away from my face so I can breathe, and when I do, I see Georgia’s face. It’s staring off with long sad eyes. I wonder how she got this way. Georgia looks down at me. With a mouthful of vagina I ask her if she would like me to stop.

  ‘Would you mind terribly?’ she says in a soft little-girl voice I haven’t heard coming out of her yet. Then I can see, for the first time, how once upon a time Georgia was beautiful. I tell her I really do think she’s pretty. She smiles, sighs, climbs down off me, climbs down off the bed, and lights another cigarette.

  ‘I’ve never had an orgasm.’

  Georgia smokes as she doesn’t look at me.

  I’m not quite sure what to do with this information. I’ve never been with someone who’s paying me to discuss her orgasm issues. But I am enjoying this part of the work much better than being smothered by her toxic pillow of love.

  Nakedly I stand in front of her. I put my hand on her hard stiff hair and hold it there. Reminds me of my mom’s hair before she got liberated. Georgia sighs and smiles. There’s something familiar about this. Makes me want to bake cookies naked with Georgia.

  I pull her into me and hold her there, feeling her cheek hot against me, smelling her smoky boozy perfume. She takes a deep pull on her fag and I feel the heat of her cherry on my belly. Hope she doesn’t burn me with that thing, I think, as Georgia exhales, smoke escaping like prisoners of war from a concentration camp.

  ‘Do you want to have one?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Georgia says.

  ‘I can help you with that,’ I say.

  Georgia stops smoking for a moment. She’s rag limp and drained dry. I’m still naked.

  ‘Could you really?’ Georgia asks, hope and desperation dancing the cancan in her eyes.

  ‘Sure,’ I say. Even as I flow with compassion and goodwill, I watch myself calculate how much I can make off this Georgia, the American Dream unfolding right in front of me. I’m making money off other people’s misery.

  ‘Maybe we could try this again next week,’ she says.

  ‘Absolutely.’ I smile.

  She smiles back, her face smooth, loose, and soothed for the first time since I’ve known her, which is all of about forty-five minutes.

  Then something snaps – I can hear it, like a tibia cracking – and a dark thundercloud surrounds Georgia from the inside out. She grabs a cigarette quick, fires her up, and the protective layer of smog covers Georgia again like a cone of silence.

  ‘Jesus, this day is just insane, and if my painintheassbastard husband thinks I’m gonna save his piece-of-shit dinner party, he can kiss my ass.’

  And on and on.

  Georgia slips her neon-green shoe twins on her fat little feet and grabs her big bag. She fishes in it for quite a while before reeling out some paper money that writhes around on the hook of her hand. She forks it over midmonologue. Without looking at it, I say thank you, but I don’t think she hears me. Then she shakes my hand and leaves.

  After you sit on a boy’s face, you shake his hand? Seems weird at first, but the more I think about it, the more I realize: That’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it?

  I look at the bill. It’s a hundred. A hundred! I ope
n my envelope and extract my other hundred. Two hundred-dollar bills.

  I stand there in this Hollywood hotel room, my mouth hanging open like a cartoon dog that’s just seen Jesus turn water into a big juicy bone. Two hundred bucks for forty-five minutes of naked sex therapy, some faux cunnilingus, and a small cup of human kindness?

  That’s Real Money, friends.

  I’m raised a little English schoolboy, please and thank you never far from my pretty little pink lips. I have an English accent until I go to first grade, at which point I drop it so fast I make my own head spin.

  As a child I’m trained with ice cream. When my brother and sister and I are in the backseat of our faux-wood-paneled station wagon, creating mayhem and wreaking anarchy, after the ineffectual sweep of a hand from the front seat misses everyone, after ‘If you don’t quit that bliddy racket I’ll stop this bliddy car and you’ll bliddy well walk home’ has been exposed as the bluff it is, the trump card is always laid down:

  ‘If you don’t quit this instant, no Dairy Queen!’

  We clam and salivate.

  I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.

  Standing alone with my sex money, I sink. I have a flash of my mom, and I vow that if I ever see her again I’ll do something very bad to her. I fondle my two hundred, and that makes it better, like a bandage on a kid’s boo-boo. It’s not nearly as bad as when Frannie was done with me. I’m already learning to store it away easier.

  Afterward, when I’m back home, I can’t figure out why I’m so horny and hungry. I call Kristy, but she’s not home, and I crash down harder.

  I can’t stand still, so I get on my bike and the crank and rev roar up like loud growls. Suddenly I’m wandering the aisles of Hollywood Ralph’s. I pick out a big day-old birthday cake with pink and blue roses growing in a snowy-white pond of sweet lard. Then I find myself grabbing an industrial-size tub of ice cream.