Chicken

by David Henry Sterry

  I shut it down, pack it up, and store it away.

  ‘No, I’m cool. It’s sad, but like you said, she was a messed-up girl. Hey, five hundred bucks is five hundred bucks, right?’

  ‘Yeah, aw-ite, well … come by when you done.’

  And then Sunny is gone.

  Jade was probably junked up, did something stupid, got herself whacked or jacked or smacked.

  Not my fault. Not my problem.

  Whatever.

  * * *

  In the backyard my father calls Juliette, and she bounds over happily, ready to love and be loved. She’s French and very refined, by far the most functional member of our family unit.

  As she gets to the picnic table, she makes eye contact with my dad, and her blood runs cold, tail snapping up hard between her legs, everything shrinking up as she tries to slink away unnoticed.

  But there’s no escape for Juliette.

  My dad grabs her, one hand on the collar, one under the belly, plops her down on the picnic table covered with a stained sheet, fires up the old sheep shearer, and begins scalping the defenseless Juliette, who looks around with the biggest, saddest, how-much-is-that-doggy-in-the-window eyes, like some captured French freedom fighter pleading, ‘’Elp me, s’il vous plaît!’

  We can’t help ourselves, how can we help her?

  My old man shaves and shaves the whimpering Juliette until there’s five pounds of curly black pubes on the old stained sheet, and she’s barebuttbald.

  Juliette spends the next weeks hiding under tables, chairs, and beds, ashamed to face the humiliating heckling of the neighborhood dogs.

  I’ll soon know how she feels.

  Old, stuffy, and puffing a pipe with a mustache, he looks like a walrus in a bloodred smoking jacket. He wears no slippers, and his long narrow feet are covered by skin so translucent you can see pale blue rivers running under it. He sits too erect, trying to suck in his gut, like he’s posing for a portrait with an invisible javelin stuck up his ass. His pad’s neat as a pin with a cleaning disorder, and lavishly appointed with rich rugs, gaudy goblets, and kitschy knickknacks. A scratchy 78 of Judy Garland doing ‘Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe’ plays on an old-time Victrola. He looks like he’s constructed his life so he’s the star of his own Noël Coward play.

  I can’t wait to wipe that thin grin off his smug mug.

  No instructions have been given. He did hand me five hundred dollars, but when I took it he held on to it too long, so I had to yank it out of his hand. That made me mad. I gotta tell Sunny. From now on, I want an envelope, on the table, no questions asked.

  I’m gunslinger calm, but my blood is bubbling, and a brain-fever so severe I can barely see straight rages within.

  And I’m focusing my beam right at this old rich stuck-up queen with a walrus mustache.

  It’s a week after my dad scalped Juliette the dog, and the night before our family’s going on vacation with my cousins. My dad lines us all up: me, my brother, and my two cousins, while Juliette sneaks furtive glances from around the corner, reliving her horror, wondering if she’ll be next.

  My father grabs my nine-year-old head with one hand, thumb and forefinger squeezing temples, the sheepshearer buzz surround-sounding me, loud and louder, scraping like nails across the blackboard of my jangling nerves till I’m vibrating with the exact same frequency, as my dad buzzcuts his way across the quivering egg of my head.

  I see Jade with a bullet hole in her head.

  Change the record.

  I look around the Walrus’s room for some life jacket to jack into, and I spot a cheesy figurine of Peter Pan, all in green, head to toe, with those pointy little green shoes, and that Puck grin.

  Tinkerbell. Is she dead, too?

  Change the record.

  The Walrus drones on about how he saw me at the orgy, and how he knew he had to have me. Have me? A wolverine snarl curls inside me. I think you’re confused. It’s me who’s gonna have you.

  He wants to know if I remember him from the orgy. He was dressed as a satyr, the mythological half man half beast who embodies raw sexuality and is hung like a horse.

  He wants me to remember him, so I pretend I remember him. Tell him what a great costume he had, how I believe we’ve lost sight of our animal selves as we get more civilized, and that I wasn’t surprised he was hung like a horse.

  He likes it. Which is why I say it. But it’s getting warm in here. This trick seems to be under the mistaken impression that some kind of sexysex is about to happen here. We’ll have to disabuse him of that notion quickly. And he’s always playing with that mustache. Twirling it, stroking it, massaging it. Makes me want to slap it right off his face, and watch the red rose of a bruise bloom on his cheek.

  Almost like he’s reading my mind, he shoots me a look like he thinks he’s a real naughty boy. I give him back some cold hard steel.

  Let the games begin.

  The heavymetal sheapshearer is hot on my skull, I smell the warm oily machineness, and I hear my hairs scream out as they’re shorn short, shocked, trickling prickly and itchy, shivering down my back.

  As my dad mows the yard of my head, the grip of his vise tightens around my temples, and I absorb it into me like a new computer with an empty hard drive, his fingers plugged into the skuzzy ports on either side of my head, filling me with an angry silent virus.

  And then we’re barebuttbald, just like Juliette.

  Everyone’s extra quiet at bedtime, none of the jocularity and staying-up-late behavior that characterizes our group dynamic, no teasing about how ugly we look, cuz we all look ugly, little Sampsons sapped of our strength.

  * * *

  The Walrus wants me to come over to him. I still don’t know what he wants. I don’t like that. I don’t like him.

  Jade impaled on a junkspike.

  I want to plant my fist in the garden of his face. I walk over to him hard with my fist closed tight, and I move to smack him, just a little move, but full of all the violence that’s hiding under my kitchen table.

  He cringes and gets hard at the same time.

  ‘Wait a second, sonny, I’ve gotta get in the mood,’ the Walrus whines.

  I ain’t your sonny, and I don’t give a damn about your mood. I’m ready to go right here, right now.

  The Walrus slowly opens up his smoking jacket, with an ‘aren’t I a naughty boy?’ look.

  Under his smoking blood-colored jacket is a black leather bustier with a bulletbra.

  The Walrus doesn’t look like a naughty boy to me. He seems like somebody I want to watch double up in agony. But he wants me to tell him what a naughty boy he is, I know that, so I swallow my self again and add another bone to the cauldron bubbling inside me.

  ‘Wow,’ I say, ‘that is some crazy shit.’

  He pats a spot on the love seat. He wants me to sit down next to him. Against every impulse in my being, I sit, getting more queased with the lingering suspicion that this nasty Olde Bastard is expecting some kind of sex. A thin line of sweat heads south from under my arm.

  ‘Hey, man, let’s get one thing straight here. We’re not doing any … sex thing here, you understand that, right?’

  He smiles like a community theater player trying to portray a suave gadabouttown, and the sheer smarm of him almost knocks me off the chair.

  ‘Yes, I guess we need to get it … “straight.”’ He’s thrilled with himself for being so damn witty. ‘No, I have a wonderful itinerary planned for us, but you will not be required to do any… “sex things.”’

  The mocking nags at my guts. He thinks he’s smarter than me. He thinks he’s better than me. Not for long, my friend.

  The Walrus wants me to threaten to have my way with him with brute force.

  ‘But first, I want to get in the mood.’ The Walrus leers like a loungelizard in a bulletbra.

  He puts his hand on my head, which makes the junk jump in my stomach, and shrivels my balls. He pulls my head toward him and rests it on the cold leather of the
chest of the bulletbra.

  The thin sheet of ice is cracking all around me.

  Barebuttbald and nine, I finally arrive with my family for our vacation on the Florida shore. We spend our first day cavorting on the beach under the torrent of tropical sun. I keep feeling like my head’s too hot. I try to tell a grown-up, but I’m shushed. That night, all the boys complain about how hot their heads are.

  Sun poisoning of the scalp. That’s what we got. Painful puffing pussing and peeling follow. Worst of all, we have to wear these dumbass floppy golf hats like doddering codgers.

  After that I have a special relationship with Juliette. She shoots me meaningful glances from time to time. I nod knowingly. We’re members of the Barebuttbald Club.

  I smell the leather. I see the Walrus manipulating himself under his silky pajama bottom.

  Change the record.

  Jade with empty eyes, not dancing anymore.

  I feel a rhythmic tug on my head as my long hair hangs in my face, prickly on my cheek, and I hear a sucking sound that matches the pulls on my head. I strain to see what’s being sucked on my skull. From the extreme corner of my sight line I spot the Walrus’s face, tilted back, eyes rolled up so only the runny egg whites of his raptured eyes are showing.

  The Walrus has my hair in his mouth.

  And he’s sucking on it.

  The Walrus is sucking on my head.

  Something all the way inside of me pops, and a beast is unleashed from my belly, rocketing me to my feet, my hair clumped and wet with Walrus spittle.

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you, asshole?!’ I roar like a pre-historic monster.

  ‘Now, wait a minute! I’m not—’

  ‘No, you wait a minute, bitch!’

  I slap him across the cheek. Whack! Loud. Skin on skin. That’s good.

  ‘Please!’

  Worry wades across the face of the Walrus as he pleads and bleeds from the corner of his mouth. At this moment he realizes he’s made a dangerous mistake inviting me into his parlor to play his little reindeer games.

  The scare coming out of him makes me high.

  ‘Shut up, punk!’

  I pick up his Cowardly Lion statuette and throw it as hard as I can against the wall, where it shatters into a galaxy of tiny little scared lion pieces. Then I throw a fancy painted rock egg thing through his glass cabinet. He screams, and I reward him with a knuckled backhanded rap upside his head, which whips backward as he’s jettisoned off the love seat to the plushy rug, while I feel more alive than I have in a long time. This one’s for Jade, bastard! I rear my foot back and let fly, making solid contact with his stomach, his guts rocking backward as his breath disappears. The Walrus shakes on the floor, wheezing, fetal, looking up at me with a silent plea for sanity.

  I pick up a Mae West-shaped lamp with two bulbs for breasts and fling it into a mirror, tit bulbs and shiny shattered platinum hair shooting everywhere.

  There’s a long lamp by a chair, six feet and skinny, with a heavymetal bottom base. I see myself raising it over my head and bringing it down on Walrus skull. I raise it high and it’s heavy, perfectly weighted, the ideal tool for the job of cracking this Walrus like a coconut and watching the brainmilk drain out. I stalk toward him, fury blasting out of me like a fire-and-brimstone preacher.

  The Walrus has wet his silk pajamas. I feel kind of bad for the guy. He just wanted a little slap and tickle. Not this hurricane of pain.

  But I can’t stop myself.

  I bring that metalheaded pole flinging down with all my might, but instead of Walrus head I smash glass table, shards shooting and spitting.

  TV. Yes. Next I swing that lampclub like it’s a Big Bertha and I’m bombing the screen straight down the fairway. Smoke and sparks zip around like an electrical storm in a lighted globe.

  I’m hot sweaty and breathy, having violence orgasms as I shatter my way through the Walrus’s life.

  I stalk back over to the Walrus, who’s muttering, ‘Please, please, please …’

  ‘Wanna suck on my hair again, you piece of shit?’ The hate flows from me as I dance with the devil’s snake, leading hordes of Huns over the horizon to splay women and eat children.

  Jade gagged with a plastic bag over her head.

  I reach down slow, grab his rug, rip it off his head, and shove it into his mouth.

  ‘How’s that taste? Isn’t that sexy?’

  Then I rear back and pop him right in the nose. I always wanted to do that. You see it so much in the movies and it looks so cool. But in real life it’s not nearly that good. It hurts the hell out of my knuckles. It does make a nice sound, though, that thwack of bone hard on bone.

  Walrus’s head drives back into the wall behind it with a thick thud.

  I stormtrooper all over his pad, smashing thrashing and trashing, then I move back in, jazzed with madness. I squat on my haunches, and lean down like his face is the camera and I’m going in for my extreme close-up.

  ‘If you tell Sunny or anybody else about this I’m gonna come back and finish you off, you understand me?’

  No response.

  The Walrus isn’t moving. I shake him. Nothing.

  ‘Hey, you all right?’

  No response.

  Now I’m scared. I see crime-scene photos of the fallen Walrus, his pristine apartment looking like Dresden after the bombing. Oh, shit, what have I done? I put my hand in front of his mouth. The Walrus is still breathing.

  Walking away as fast as I can, I raise my defense shields to stop the raw rank fear that’s trying to pin me on the bed and slam its way inside me.

  I’m playing ball with the older neighborhood boys when I’m five. Somebody throws the ball over my head and it rolls into the yard next door, where there’s an old mean German shepherd who’s been chained to a pole for about a hundred years.

  I see the white ball sitting in the green grass. When I crawl through the opening in the fence and reach down to grab the ball, I hear a metallic snap of a chain breaking. I look up and the German shepherd is flying at me, giant teeth bared, hungry for my flesh. I move at the last second, and the dog’s mouth chomps onto my thigh, inches from my little penis.

  I scream, and the whole neighborhood comes rushing.

  I speedwalk to my bike, fingering my pager, my busted-up knuckle hurting like hell. I see cops swarming the Walrus pad with dogs, dusting for fingerprints, scouring every inch of the place for proof that it was me. Front page of the L.A. Times with a big picture of me being dragged away in handcuffs: BOY HOOKER BUSTED. My mom and dad in court, disgraced, my head bowed in shame, condemned by the Judge I abused as a symbol of everything that’s wrong with America. Kristy and her parents in the back shaking their head. Waking up in prison with a tall SEXY man all over me.

  Change the record nownownow!

  A plan. I need a plan. I could keep driving until I get to an Indian reservation and live there. Go to Alaska and work on the pipeline. Lots of good work for a handy guy on the pipeline. Go to Mexico. Got enough money to live like a king on the beach, get a little señorita who cooks my meals and keeps me happy.

  I drive past my street, but I don’t go down it. Hordes of feds and G-men are probably going through my stuff, searching for the piece of evidence that’s gonna send me to the stripy hole where I shall suffer the rest of my days.

  Oh, shit, what’s Sunny gonna think? I’ve been avoiding this thought, but now it bores full force into me. To hell with that bastard pimp. I’ll turn him in. Hey, if I’m going down, I’m taking everybody down with me. What am I thinking? Those Hollywood Employment Agency bastards are killers. They will seriously kill you.

  Hold everything. In my rearview mirror is a cop. He’s giving me the hardcore five-oh eyeball. Or am I just feeling the eye-ball? No idea. I turn down Vine. He follows me. Oh shit, I gotta hot copper on my tail. I come within a whisper on a whisker of gunning it, and making that bastard eat my dust as I high-speed-chase away from the LAPD on the six o’clock news.

  But
I stick steady, turn off onto a side street, take another fast turn, and lose him. I say ‘lose,’ but I guess technically you can’t lose somebody who’s not actually following you.

  A plan, a plan, I need a plan.

  Suddenly I have a true mystic vision.

  Kristy.

  I’ll come clean, I’ll make it up to her, and this time I’ll be really good.

  Then I feel my pager, hard cold and black in my pocket. This is the source of all the evil in my life. I slam on my brakes. I hop off my bike. I take the pager from my pocket, and slowly I raise it over my head.

  The pager is hard cold and black in my hand as a righteous rush floods me.

  I will break the curse of the chicken.

  I slam my arm down as fast as I can.

  Smash!

  When the pager hits the pavement it bursts into a million cold hard black pieces, flying all over Hollywood Boulevard.

  Free at last. Free at last.

  Staring at the guts of my pager spread out all over the stars, I feel like a hero who’s just killed the Jabberwocky and freed his people.

  I am a chicken no more.

  18.

  ASK

  When the end comes I know they’ll say just a gigolo, life goes on without me.

  —JULIUS BRAMMER, TRANSLATED BY IRVING CAESAR

  MY BUSTED-UP KNUCKLE hurts like hell, but I have no pager to finger as I park my bike and pull it up onto its stand quiet. It’s dark and I’m animal aware of every sound on this little Hollywood side street. So this is what it feels like to be on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list. Someone’s lurking behind every tree, about to slam around every corner, bounce out of every fake utility truck to bust my shit. Breathe. I wish I had a gun. I wonder where I can get a gun. Sunny’ll know. Oh, shit, Sunny. He’s gonna hate me now. After everything he did for me, I jacked him right where he lives. Hey, he deserves it.