Chicken

by David Henry Sterry

‘Yeah, I’d really like to meet your folks.’ An actual note of sincerity, as excitement once again kisses terror.

  Now all I have to do is get through my date with the Judge. Apparently the Judge saw me at the orgy and asked for me. Sunny told me I wouldn’t have to have sex with him. I made my ‘Oh, yeah, right!’ face, but he swore there’d be no sex with the Judge. And it’s a five-hundred-dollar job. This stopped me dead. Five hundred dollars.

  ‘No sex? You swear?’ I lean into the question.

  ‘Ah swear on my dead pappy’s asshole! The Judge, he don’t go with no boys, but he likes to git hisseff roughed up a li’l bit. An’ he’s a big fan of yours.’

  Five hundred clams to rough up a judge? Big fan of mine? Sure, why not? Then I’ll quit all this shit and move in with Kristy.

  ‘’Night, Mom,’ I soprano as I toodle off to beddybyes when I’m thirteen.

  During the night my testicles drop like a couple of lodestones in a bowl of pea soup.

  ‘Good morning, Mother. Hope you slept well!’ booms out of me in a breakfast baritone the next morning, and suddenly I’m fevered with curiosity, mad as a hatter with a hard-on.

  Sex.

  What goes in where with whom and how?

  The Judge comes out of the bathroom in a judge’s robe. Sunny told me he was a judge, but I didn’t expect him to come out of the bathroom in his judge’s robe. I’d arrived at the Griffith Park apartment about ten minutes ago, found the key under a loose brick, and let myself in as instructed. There was no one there, and I had a mini-mal panic seizure. G-men in closets. SWAT team swooping down and busting my ass. I scanned the room. Elegant and simple. Antique table, two chairs, and a Frenchish desk on which sat a manila envelope. Just like Sunny said. I relaxed. A little. A white envelope was hiding inside. I scooped it out carefully and opened it slowly. Inside were five naked hundred-dollar bills that make me safe and warm. They fit so nice in my pocket. Five hundred dollars for an hour. I am hot.

  A typed note, folded in half, crouched in the envelope, containing explicit instructions involving me, the Judge (who referred to himself throughout as ‘The Judge’), and a metal-edged ruler.

  How far I’ve come in my career, I thought, from telling women how beautiful they are while I’m naked to telling a Judge how horrible he is while he’s naked.

  White goo oozes from the eyes of the clerk who lurks behind the counter of the Pink Pussycat when I’m thirteen. One rotten tooth sits like a black plank in the middle of his cankerous cavern of a mouth. His head is too small for his body.

  When I ask for change, hovering in the comfort of the Shadow, a deep wet eighteen-wheeler of a hack rumbles up the highway of the clerk’s lungs, and he hands me four droopy, drooling quarters.

  ‘Thank you,’ I chirp, cheery as a cherry popover.

  The Pink Pussycat teems with heaps of steaming mags and sweaty videotapes. Hot Pink Wet Virgin Slut Cheerleader Lesbo Nuns. Loads of lone wolves with cigarette breath and damaged skin play pocket pool, ogle the magazines, and fondle the Plastic Love Dolls.

  ‘Marilyn comes complete with silky hair. All organs are realistic in every detail. Heavy-duty vacuum bulb builds up amazing suction. Make her as skinny or as buxom as you want. Don’t be fooled by cheap breakable imitations. Be the stud you always wanted to be.’

  I was instructed to burn the instructions and put the ashes in the sink. I liked that part. Gave it a real Mission: Impossible feel. If I’m caught or killed the secretary will disavow any knowledge of my actions.

  The matches waited by the sink next to the old-fashioned metal-edged ruler. The Judge doesn’t miss a trick. Guess that’s why he’s the Judge. I lit a match and ignited the instructions. Puff of flame, smell of sulfur. I dropped it in the sink like a flaming dead Viking being floated out to sea.

  I picked up the ruler with the cold metal edge, and it made a nice loud whack sound when I smacked it into my palm.

  A muscle memory hit me, and wham! I was back in George Wallace Elementary School. My third-grade teacher, the ninety-seven-year-old Mrs Bronte, the dreaded brontosaurus, all three-foot-nine of her, was dragging out the old metal-edged ruler to thrash some poor sucker’s knuckles, the sixty-four eight-year-olds in my class smelling blood, silently wild with delight.

  Fluorescent-pink signs shine like flaming flamingos in the Pink Pussycat, describing in a child’s uneven scrawl the films being shown in each booth.

  2 SLUTS WIT A STUD.

  2 STUDS AND A SLUT

  A STUD, A SLUT, AND A SHEPLAN PONEE.

  But I don’t want all the bells and whistles. I’m thirteen, horny as a schoolgirl and nervous as a sailor, and I just want to see a normal guy and a normal gal doing what normal people do when they Do It. It never dawns on me that I might be in the wrong place to see anything like that.

  The Judge is gray on gray, in all his robed glory, skin hanging flaccid cheek by jowl, dangling waddle wobbling over his collar, ushering a sour graveyard smell in with him.

  As soon as I lay eyes on him I feel mean and hateful. I can see the Olde Bastard looking down from the bench with righteous condescension, telling me what a menace to society I am.

  I slap the ruler hard into my hand, a loud smack, and it hurts, which helps, like Bruce Lee tasting his own blood. The Judge jumps, and that feels good.

  ‘You’re a miserable piece of shit, aren’t you?’ I stride right over to him all revved up Clockwork Orange-style, and I punch him knuckle on nose.

  That’s what I want to do. What I really do is stop my fist inches from the Judge’s face, which registers high-voltage fright as he quivers in rapture and terror.

  ‘Yes,’ he whimpers, ‘I need—’

  ‘Shut up, bitch!’

  I push him back into the wall, and he slumps with a thump. I tear the robe off him and shove him down. Guess what the Judge has on under his robes?

  Diapers.

  * * *

  1 STUD, 1 SLUT, SOOPER HOT HOT HOT

  That’s about as normal as it’s gonna get. The inside of the Pink Pussycat booth smells like an old moldy sperm sandwich. I slip a quivering quarter into the slick slot, and when a small screen flickers to life, a woman’s face appears. She’s cockeyed. One eye goes east, one goes west, one flies over the cuckoo’s nest. She wears makeup buckwheat-pancake thick. A soundtrack of bad wackawacka guitar and synthesized drummachine wheezes under the sludgebucket basso profundo moan of a man loaded on testosterone.

  ‘Oh baby. Give it to me, you nasty little baby. You love it, don’t you, baby? Oh, baby, baby, baby.’

  She moans but no sound comes out. Then I hear a moan when her mouth isn’t moving. It’s out of kilter. Out of sync. Cockeyed.

  She glances off camera, and you can almost hear some dictator director shouting:

  ‘Act sexy!’

  One eye darts back to the camera, while the other drifts off somewhere as she licks her lips and rolls her eyes. She’s not sooper hot at all. She’s sad in one eye and gone in the other.

  Usually when an employer gets a bad haircut or wears an ugly tie, the employee doesn’t get the opportunity to humiliate him or her. But that’s what I’m getting paid for. I let loose a nice long sadistic laugh as I look at this sad gray Olde Bastard on his knees, with his flabby saggy tits, big pregnant cannonball gut, puddly thighs, and hunched shoulders grown wild with a nasty forest of white hairs.

  In his diapers.

  ‘Hey, wait a—’ the Judge starts indignantly.

  ‘Did I tell you to talk? No. You talk when I tell you to, you fat little prick—’

  ‘Yes, I am, I’m a fat little prick,’ he dribbles.

  ‘Shut the hell up, bitch!’ I hiss, pissed, whacking him with the flat part of the ruler across the middle of his back, a howl yowling out of him as he bellyflops on the floor.

  ‘Does your wife know you like to wear diapers? Do all the lawyers and judges know you like to cum in your diapers? Answer me!’

  ‘No,’ the Judge snivels.

 
‘No “sir,” bitch!’ I snarl.

  ‘No, sir …’ the Judge whines.

  His fear feeds me, and I gorge ravenously. But it’s like stuffing yourself with day-old birthday cake that you know is gonna make you sick later.

  ‘Put your hands out in front of you,’ I rumble.

  This command comes with a smack of the ruler on his fat belly, accompanied by a tremendous slapping sound. The Judge averts his eyes like I’m the pope, and sticks his gray spotted hands out in front of him. I’ve got this rich pillar-of-society prick right where I want him.

  In her left hand the cockeyed girl holds a plastic champagne glass, and in her right a veiny, blood-engorged wangdangdoodlehammer that she glances at sideways, like it might take a bite out of her cheek.

  Then the screen goes dark. I desperately need to know what happens to my distressed porno princess, so I ram in another quarter, and there she is, exactly where I left her, licking her lips again, rolling her eyes back in her head like a tropical fish about to plunge into a coma, and winkling the wangdangdoodlehammer into the plastic champagne glass.

  My femme fatale looks offscreen in a panic. ‘Do I have to?’ flashes across her face. Apparently she does, cuz then she looks back at the camera, does her pseudosexy face again, and chugs the whole thing down.

  Bottoms up!

  * * *

  ‘Shut your eyes!’ I bark to the diapered Judge kneeling with his hands held in front of him. He closes them instantly. I like that. He’s breathing hard and sweating like a fat old pig having sick sex.

  I silently slide behind him, rear back, and smack him hard with the ruler on the pink bottom of his soul, catching his foot flush with another tremendous thwack that tingles deliciously all the way through my central nervous system.

  The Judge tumbles like Humpty Dumpty off his wall, whimper-moaning in little rhythmic spasms. I plant my foot in the middle of his back and crush him into the beige carpet, where he quakes with the secret creepy excitement a Judge can only get from being trashed by a boy chicken he’s paying five hundred dollars.

  Who pumped their poison into this poor guy? I feel sorry for the Judge. One part of me wants to stop and try to make him feel better.

  But I can’t. This feels too good.

  Looking like a sick kid who just swallowed her medicine, my pornbaby cocks one eye into the camera while the other wanders away forlorn. The unheard offscreen commandant orders her to smile, and as she snaps back, the east eye smiles sicklysweet, while the west eye looks like it’s about to cry.

  Sex? That’s sex? Shocked and wobbly, I reel and teeter, jelly-kneed. I stumble into the supercool of the Pink Pussycat black light, lean against the booth to regroup, then stagger through the flaccid limp love beads, roll past the drooling troll behind the counter, and get ejaculated through the front door, where the blast of blinding white light brings reality rushing back like the four o’clock uptown express.

  When my life flashes before my eyes this is one of the things I’ll see: that beat-up cockeyed ghost of a girl flickering away.

  * * *

  The Judge moangroans loud now, bucking and thrashing, crying out somewhere between a wheeze and a sob. Watching this fat Olde Bastard busting his nut in his diapers makes my skin slink away in shame and my brain revolt. How did I end up doing this? That’s it for me. I gotta get out.

  The Judge finally stops and looks up at me. Seeing his ashen sicksad deathmask face makes my temperature drop thirty degrees, and I shiver the shiver of the damned. I grab my helmet, check my money, and mutter, ‘Later …’

  Whatever.

  16.

  WHERE ARE MY KEYS?

  You always hurt the one you love

  The one you shouldn’t hurt at all

  —FISHER & ROBERTS

  EASTER MORNING I wake up with my head full of chain saws and out-of-tune violins, while my dead brain cells are getting a twenty-one-gun salute. My hovel has never looked so squalid. I have no memory of Saturday night after a tequila-drinking contest with a red bloated ex-sailor who had a tattoo of Popeye on his forearm he could make dance by wiggling his muscles. The drunker we got, the funnier Popeye danced.

  Thank God my motorcycle helmet is on the floor near my bed. Thank God my head’s not in the helmet, rolling down an off-ramp of the Hollywood Freeway.

  I try to get up. Big mistake. Whole new levels of pain bells ring in my head, my chest, and all the way down to the balls of my feet. The effort overwhelms me, and I land back on the too-thin mattress that barely functions as my bed.

  I manage to drag myself into the all-fours position, and pause here for quite some time, although time is particularly relative now, agony extending seconds like dripping hungover stopwatches. I’m exhausted and I haven’t been awake five minutes.

  Easter. Kristy. What time is it? Shit. I look for my miserable little clock, but I can’t find it, and it hurts too much to keep looking.

  Ever since the orgy I’ve felt compelled to hang at Immaculate Heart College playing Frisbee and Ping-Pong with people I don’t even like just so I can be with other kids my age who aren’t sex technicians. So Easter with Kristy’s parents looms ahead like Mecca just past the Valley of Death, hope and longing lurking skittishly with the dread that they’ll see me for the whore I am. And I’ve already created a waking nightmare for myself by sheepdipping my head in cheap liquor last night.

  The phone rings. My first impulse is that it’s Kristy, and I’m late. I’m supposed to be at her house at noon, and God knows what time it is. I rush, or try to get somewhere near the speed of rush, through the cold oatmeal I seem to be stuck in, still fully dressed in last night’s alcohol-drenched nicotine-stenched clothing. Arid and parched, I cross the vast expense of livingroom desert and throbbingly grab the phone.

  ‘Hooo-ie, how you doin’, bay-bay?’

  It’s Sunny. Of course. Who else would it be?

  ‘I’m good, man, what time is it?’ Sour’s in my mouth, I need to pee and possibly shit. And shower. Soon.

  ‘“Leven,” Sunny coos.

  I breathe easier. Got a little time.

  ‘How you doin’?’ manages to mutter out of me.

  ‘Cool as a cucumber up a Eskimo’s asshole.’

  I chuckle. Big mistake, as a cranial ache pulsates.

  ‘Par-ty, bay-bay! Ah got me a new bonnet with awll the frills upon it, an’ Ah’ll be the finest fay-ree in the Easter Parade!’

  I hear the drums beating the call of the wild.

  My mom hurricanes around the house, fixing her huge bouffanty frosted helmethead, roasting beef, making tetties and Yorkshire puddings, preparing my brother and sister for presentation, straightening the house.

  As a four-year-old I remember thinking how strange that is. To straighten the house. I see our crooked, crippled house, and my mother desperately trying to straighten it.

  My mom’s all sweetness and light as my dad gets home from work and we sit down for dinner. We say the grace we always say:

  ‘God is great, God is good, and we thank him for our food.’

  I’m bothered by the fact that ‘good’ and ‘food’ don’t rhyme.

  * * *

  ‘Thanks, man, but I got a date.’ I’m firm in my hungover resolve to choose life.

  ‘Ohhhh, you gotchoo some nice coed pussy – well, ain’t that sweet? Bring ’er awn over.’ Sunny coos.

  Kristy, these are my wacky child-prostitute friends. Cruella, say hello to my lady.

  ‘Naw, I don’t think so.’ I’m firm.

  ‘Well, hell, cum awn by when you done gittin’ pussy-whupped, and you can have some of my chocolate aiggs.’ Sunny almost makes you believe life really is a cabaret.

  ‘In your dreams, baby.’

  ‘They’z gonna be some Easter bunnies with some tight li’l baskets for your ass,’ Sunny hisses hypnotically.

  Visions of 3-D overflowing with freaks and friends and a sweet baby for me dance like sugarplum fairies in the pin of my head.

&nb
sp; Now wait a minute, hold on one goddam second here, you are not jumping down that hole. Barbecue, watermelon, cornonthecob, Mom, Dad, Dog, Sis, Kristy’s Easter Sunday, end of discussion, case closed.

  This is your ticket out of all the shit, boy.

  ‘Thanks, man, but I, you know, got this thing I gotta do …’ That’s as firm as it gets for me right now.

  ‘Aw-ite, but just in case you change your mind, Ah’ll keep a bunny warm for ya. Oh, an’ Ah got a real nice job for you Mundee night – easy money, boy, five hunnert. An awll you gotta do is act natch-ally.’

  Sunny’s the master carrot dangler.

  I start to turn the job down. The words from in my brain and travel all the way to my mouth. I just can’t get them to come out.

  ‘You hear me, boy?’

  This is not the response Sunny wants.

  ‘Yeah, absolutely. My roommate was just talkin’ to me – Yeah, I’ll take care of that – uh, sure, job Monday, that’s cool, five hundred, yeah …’ I’m shaky, I can hear I am.

  ‘You aw-ite, boy? Somethin’ botherin’ you?’ Sunny sounds like a fight doctor whose prizefighter has just taken a shot to the head.

  ‘No, I’m cool,’ I lie. Ever since the Judge I’ve been snappish, brittled, fraying, ready to bite someone’s head off. Not cool at all.

  ‘An’ Ah almost forgot, that goil Jade’s gonna be here tonight, she told me she like to git together whichew.’ Sunny knows where every button is, and he’s pushing them all.

  Jade invades my brain and I feel her in my belly. Jade in a slinky kinky dress, with those sleepy almond eyes dancing to the music in her head.

  No. You’re going to Kristy’s parents’, you’re going to be the perfect boyfriend, and I don’t wanna hear one more word about it.