Chicken

by David Henry Sterry

  My mom strokes Gwenyvere’s head, talking soft and sweet to her while I pet her rump, wet helpless bulldog confusion swelling in Gwenyvere’s red-blood eyes. She’s begging me to help her. I want to help her. I just don’t know how.

  Then Gwenyvere goes into hard labor, straining painfully panting and pushing, thick muscles taut tight.

  But the pups will not come.

  The pups will not come.

  The pups will not come.

  There are three populations at the Big Ball.

  The Olde Bastards: puffy, gray, and rich.

  The Middle Men: Fagins making quick, slick bucks.

  The Freaks, Chickens, and Chickadees: leering leather and young flesh, bruised bodybuilders and cheerleaders, cool schoolgirls and hot haunted jocks.

  The Olde Bastards clearly have a personal relationship with Death, who sits in their living room waiting. We’re their Fountain of Youth, and they want to drain us dry.

  I watch myself watching them watching us, wrapped in the womb of my scar tissue.

  Sunny leads me into the reddest room I’ve ever seen, where a long wooden table leans against the wall like a Noah’s Ark of liquor, and two bartenders wearing nothing but hockey masks, cock rings, and black leather gloves wordlessly serve.

  A cornucopia of mind-bending brain-numbers are laid out attractively in antique crystal mint dishes: buttons of peyote, magic mushrooms and mda/x, Maui Zaui Hurricane Swirl, Afghani Moses Bull Rush, and Moroccan Fez Blower.

  Sunny gives me a silver spoonful of mda/x, and a jolt explodes in my head, as if someone has gently inserted a lit fire-cracker into my cranium. Then a warm tingly itsy-bitsy spider creeps up my waterspout. I want to soak in a giant vat of spumoni, and swim in the river and feel the waterfall spray in my face.

  Into the long thick night, my mother and I try to pull puppies out of poor dear Gwenyvere, as she shudders shoving moaning groaning growling howling desperate to deliver.

  But the pups will not come.

  My mom frantically leaves the vet emergency messages, while Gwenyvere collapses whimpering, head bowed, breath gone.

  I lie down with her, nose to smashed-in nose, and when she looks into my eyes I see resignation has moved in. Gwenyvere’s eyes shut now with a huge heaving sigh, like her heart lung machine was just unplugged.

  For the first time I think she will die.

  Peter Pan’s wearing green stiletto hump-me pumps, green silk stockings and garter, green satin opera-length gloves, plunging green velvet strapless gown, slit to the hilt, and she’s packed in puffy tight, flesh hanging out here there and everywhere.

  In one hand she grips a whip with a phallic handle, in the other a leash attached to a small young woman in a white wig wearing nothing but a sparkling light on her head.

  Tinkerbell.

  Sunny jumps in, all Southern smooth, and dishes out the introductions.

  ‘This here is Peter Pan, and … Tinkerbell …’

  ‘Hello.’ She’s stiff as flint.

  ‘Hi.’ Tinkerbell smiles shy with high-beam eyes. ‘I’m from Never-Never Land.’

  ‘Hi,’ says I, ‘I’ll never grow up.’

  Tinkerbell is so naked.

  Ms. Pan whispers into Sunny, and he leans back laughing.

  ‘Boy, why dohncha dance with Tinkerbell?’ Sunny gives me the nod.

  With the mda/x, the buzz from the desperate wanting of the Olde Bastards, the adrenaline racehorsing through me, and the soundtrack pounding, I’m mad to go Tinkerbelling.

  Peter Pan unhooks her leash, and the girl wearing nothing but the light over her white wig sways with the music. She’s small all over. Little-girl hands and feet. Little freckles. And, like all my poultry peers, sometimes she’s twelve, sometimes she’s forty.

  Then she looks at me with big crooning baby blues, and we’re rhythmically in sync, in utero, bump for bump, grind for grind, tribal shaking, lust loose in a loin lock, lost in each other’s music.

  Tinkerbell digs herself into my shoulders. I yowl and thump her into me so our chests hit hard. My teeth rip into her neck with nothing but sheer instinct, and Tinkerbell screams in blood pleasure.

  I suck hard on a mouthful of her neck. Pulling my hair hard, she rips my head from her flesh, where a red welt blossoms. I growl and smack a loud slap on her ass. Tinkerbell’s on fire with desire, high and higher, and lashes her tongue out yelping, piercing her nails into my back. I shout cuz it feels good while it hurts, heavy lovesweat flying off us as the crowd oozes and ahs, and all that juice fills me and thrills me – damn this is the most fun I have ever had in my life.

  Me and Tink could move to the Smoky Mountains, build a cabin in the woods, raise cornonthecob, and have little freak babies.

  I can see it so clearly.

  Suddenly, in the thick hard dark of the cold black night, a huge white baby bulldog head appears from between Gwenyvere’s hind legs. Eyes closed, it hangs half in the world and half in the womb. Then shoulders ribs hindquarters and feet plop out with great gobs of goo, and a perfect baby dog slides onto the blanket in a puddle of blood and guts and Godknowswhat.

  Lord, it’s a big ol’ pup. Enormous. Doesn’t seem anatomically possible that this huge thing could come out of her, and I just watched it happen.

  Gwenyvere, the proud new mother, is relieved beyond belief, and pops out two much smaller pups, half as big, easy as you please, then happily starts slurping off the thin clear sausage shrink-wrap covering them.

  My mom and I dance like punch-drunk midwives as the pups squirm when she laps them with that huge wet tongue. Watching those new pups vibrating with life, there’s no way around it: This is a miracle.

  The strobe light turns everything into stop-action kinetic Picasso orgy snapshots. Slender arms pendulum breasts thigh cheese lip meat calves dangling bloodbank eyes and shaved coochies stick together in impossible angles.

  Tinkerbell’s giving me more pleasure than seems humanly possible, vaporlocked on me, dancing the mouth mambo.

  Osweetbabyjesusmothermaryandjoseph.

  I look down at Tinkerbell, who looks up at me at the exact same instant, like we’ve rehearsed the move many times, and we smile dreamy creamy smiles at each other. I could rescue her from this Peter Pan asshole. We could start our own chicken business, Marx style, from each according to ability, to each according to need. We could make a shitload of money, then go live on an island somewhere. Make beautiful babies that get brown in the sun. I wish I knew her name.

  The crowd crowds round, leaning in so they won’t miss a trick, the heat of the spotlight even hotter as Peter Pan flicks Tinkerbell with her whip and Tink wraps herself around me. The crowd sucks a gasp. I close my eyes and the rapture flows through Tinkerbell and into me in an endless sensuous Mõbius strip.

  With careful orchestration, split-second timing, and shrewd momentum management, Sunny has turned me, the simple son of immigrants, into the catalyst for a take-no-prisoners, lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous, old-fashioned newfangled orgy.

  That’s why I love America.

  Eyes shut tiny tight, the puppies wiggle and wriggle and squiggle on the blanket, getting the life licked into them by Gwenyvere, who’s mama-bulldog proud.

  My mother and I shake hands, shake our heads, and make many happy sounds while those teeny-tiny puppies twist and fidget, trying to figure out what the hell’s going on in this big old world.

  Then I notice the first, too-huge baby. It’s not moving. Gwenyvere won’t touch the still giant. She pushes the other two away from it hard with her smushed-in face, then licks them like baby bulldog Popsicles.

  My mom looks at me. Gwenyvere seems too busy loving the alive pups to care that her firstborn is lying lifeless in after-birth. My mother puts the huge not-moving one next to Gwenyvere, but she shoves it with her muzzle all the way off the blanket. Then she goes back to mothering her other pups.

  Oh, my. That big baby bulldog is dead.

  * * *

  Tinkerbell showers me with
snowflake kisses, a mad hunger flowing between us as we ride around on each other in the middle of this love zoo at the height of mating season.

  Yeah, an island somewhere in the South Pacific. We’ll rent a hut on the beach for fifty cents a day. Catch fish, eat mangoes, roll around in the sunset.

  Then I hit a spot in Tinkerbell and she pours, soaring into me, roaring a Jungle scream.

  The orgy comes to a full stop, and we’re once again right in the center of America, all eyes upon us and oh, it’s good in there, one big writhing amoeba feeding me, feeding her.

  Peter Pan eyeballs me mean and hard. She grabs Tinkerbell and with a loud popping sound drags her away.

  Tink looks back sadly at me. She doesn’t want to go. I don’t want her to go. Then she disappears through the Sea of Freaks back to Never-Never Land.

  Deadweight of giant pup in hands, thick and dumbfounded in my parka as the hard day is born, it’s my job to bury the huge lifeless baby bulldog.

  It’s cold as death this morning. I brush snow from the ground and put the still life down, his eyes locked shut forever.

  I try to dig a grave, but the shovel bounces off the stone ground, and Mother Earth will not open herself and accept this little dead baby.

  The deceased white pup’s the same color as the snow.

  Finally I manage to chisel the shallowest of graves, and into the dark hard hole I put the baby giant. I cover it up with dirt and snow, then look up and try to pray. But I have nothing to say, and it seems like no one is up there.

  * * *

  I’m in Hump Time Zone for I know not how long, in and out of more holes than a hungry gopher. A tattoo of a shark swims across a Botticelli bottom. A Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard has his white bottom paddled by a man Aunt Jemima. The three-hundred-pound behemoth is forced into positions of humiliation by the ninety-pound Madame Butterfly, who whips him until welts sprout like fleshflowers, then whispers sweet nothings in his ear.

  Suddenly I come to, like a caterpillar awakening from a butterfly dream. I look over at Sunny and he nods at me, opening a side door.

  Then we’re floating home in our Moby Dick pumpkin chariot through the alabaster night, a black crow hanging high in front of a big fat moon.

  ‘Ya done good, boy,’ Sunny says.

  ‘Thanks, Sunny,’ comes up out of me.

  I finally feel good.

  For about ten seconds. Then I want someone to suffer like I do.

  14.

  HOOP RAGE

  Anger is a short madness.

  —HORACE

  BELOW IMMACULATE HEART College, halfway down the hill, lives the basketball court. There’s not alotta sports action at IHC, it being a nun school and all, but this afternoon there’s a nice three-on-three situation working as the sun continues its perpetual Hollywood shine. My fellow hoopsters are out for a little lite hoops, looking to break a mini-sweat, knock down some Js, go hard to the hole, do some minor white-boy smacking.

  Me, I’m having one of those days. Layups roll around the rim before dribbling off miserably. Passes clang off my frying-pan hands. Jumpers thud hard off iron. I’m throwing up enough bricks to build a house with my three little piggie friends, and I can just see the Big Bad Wolf hiding behind a tree waiting to eat my grandmother.

  I’m swearing loud now. I’m a very good swearer. It’s a kind of speaking-in-tongues, ecstatic religious release for me.

  ‘Cocksuckingpigbastardscumsuckingpissboy!’

  Everyone’s looking at me funny, like there might be something wrong with me. Whatever. There’s nothing in my universe now but this silly little pickup game, and the rage bubbling up in deep wells, where I’ve stored it away for just this kind of occasion.

  My dad is recruited when I’m thirteen by an explosives start-up in Useless, Texas, to be the executive in charge of getting shit done, so the next stop on our All-American Dream Tour is Dallas, thirty miles from Useless. Actually it’s Euless, but everybody calls it Useless.

  You’ll know why if you ever go to Useless.

  My mom doesn’t see my dad for days at a time, and when he is around he eats, sleeps, and attacks the yard with power tools at the same furious pace.

  But now he’s an Executive. The milk and the honey are here at last. The coal miner’s son is striking gold.

  Bumping, grinding, and shoving on my guy, I’m digging the hitting, goading him to retaliate. And the madder I get the worser I play. The ball’s bouncing off my knee, fumbling through my hands, and sliding through my butterfingers.

  I’m D-ing up on my guy now. He tries to drive past me, only I slide over and hip-check him, flashing one of my Minnesota hockey moves in Tinsel Town. I knock him off balance, and he loses the ball out-of-bounds.

  He calls a foul.

  ‘Foul? Bullshit! That’s no foul. You think that’s a foul? That’s just good D making you look bad, baby!’

  My guy looks around sheeplike, seeking support from his teammates, who shuffle around like they’re looking for spare change, not wanting to get dragged into my theater of cruelty.

  Finally a guy on my team sighs. ‘Yeah, man, I thought you fouled him.’

  And this guy’s on my team.

  ‘That’s a foul? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we were playing pussyball. I wish someone had told me.’

  I grab the ball and put it right in my guy’s face. ‘Okay,’ I say, ‘let’s play some pussyball.’

  My guy looks at me like I’m a genetic engineering project gone horribly wrong.

  I can barely focus on the game now, just waiting for the opportunity to pound the shit out of my guy, who’s getting rid of the ball too quick, watching me out the corner of his eye, giving me too much room when I have the ball.

  I bide my time, crouched low in the tall grass while the angrypsycho talks on the audio track in my brain: You wanna see a foul, I’ll show you a foul, ya pieceoshitmotherbastardcumburpingbitch.

  Then suddenly my golden moment unfolds in slow motion as my guy turns the corner dribble-driving around the foul line. He’s lost track of me, thinks he beat me to the spot, but I’m one step ahead of him, playing hide-and-seek behind his teammate.

  And now he’s mine.

  As my guy leaves his feet to go up for the layup, he’s slightly off balance, concentrating on the rim, while I line him up in the crosshairs, coiling, poised, spring-loaded with stored-up venom.

  My body is all growed up when I’m fifteen. I play soccer with my dad’s team in Dallas, and they’re a very good team, league champs, mostly expatriate Brits. Playing against a brutish team, a burly stocky defender viciously hacks me. I crumble, howling, clutching my Achilles’ heel where I’ve been violated. I get up tough, so all my dad’s teammates know what a cold-blooded bastard I am, and tell the hard man who hit me to piss off. My old man busts over and, after he makes sure I’m okay, points at my attacker, and marks him with the evil eye.

  About ten minutes later the marked man gets the ball, and out of nowhere my old man materializes and eviscerates him like a knight slaying the Jabberwocky. The other team goes mad, and the ref threatens to expel my dad from the game. But he stands tall over my fallen attacker and tosses me a little wink that no one else can see.

  My dad has punished mine enemy.

  I fly at my guy, high on bile, and slam the sharp blade of my shoulder into his sternum, OH MY GOD it feels good, that deep-down bodycrunch, me solid mass, him off-kilter bantam-weight, the visceral inflicting thrill pulsing through my pleasure centers.

  His body jackknifes backward, torso slingshotting away, while his bottom half stays where it is for a moment, then follows the top half, knees and elbows akimbo.

  He hits the asphalt with his left elbow and the side of his left knee, scraping layers of skin onto the asphalt, and grinding to a halt with shocked pain spreading across his face.

  ‘Is that a foul? Cuz where I come from, that’s what we call a foul!’ I roar, towering over him like a false god.

  My guy touc
hes the open wound on his knee, and his hand comes back with blood. He touches his elbow. More blood. He looks from the blood to me. Back to the blood. Then back to me.

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ The hurt of a child who’s been punished for no reason at all.

  I could’ve broken his ribs. We could be scraping his brain off the blacktop. What the hell is wrong with me?

  Everyone stares at me like I’m unfit for human company. I shrink instinctively and trot out the apologia.

  ‘Sorry, man. I’m so sorry. I guess I’m a little…’

  A little what? Psycho? Homicidal?

  I reach out my hand to help him up. He turns it down.

  ‘You got a problem, man.’

  Everyone agrees. They help him up.

  ‘Hey, I’m sorry man, that’s just the way we play where I come from.’ Where’s that, Sing Sing? ‘Your ball, man, sorry.’ I’m trying to pretend everything’s normal, but nobody’s playing along.

  ‘No, I’m done,’ my guy mumbles, hobbling away like a war hero after a senseless bombing.

  Then I’m alone, the hole in my bucket a little bigger.

  15.

  HERE CUM DE JUDGE

  Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

  —LORD ACTON

  ‘WE’RE HAVING a big bash at my parents’ house on Easter, and I was wondering if you wanted to come.’

  And there it is. Kristy has invited me to her mommy and daddy’s house, with Suicidal Sis and Marty, the German shepherd.