Plainclothes Naked

by Jerry Stahl

  “Tony, you okay?” McCardle squeezed as much genuine concern as he could into his voice. If Tony even suspected he’d meant to shoot him, he knew it was over. On the off chance Carmella spared him, his partner would assassinate him without blinking.

  Mac McCardle died in the Pawnee Lodge, McCardle thought to himself, trying the sentence out. He imagined hearing the words in Dan Rather’s voice. When he was little, Auntie Big’n always liked to watch the CBS Evening News while he tamped her. She left the bathroom door open, so they could catch the TV in the full-length mirror. Thus reflected, Dan Rather had seen him through the most heinous moments of his tender young life. In the full flush of shame, McCardle used to hear Dan talking from the Motorola. “Now Little Tinky’s cleaning his auntie’s lady-place…. Now he’s patting her nice and dry….”

  Late at night, when Auntie Big’n was sawing logs in her nightie, Dan would talk some more to Little Tinky, which was his special name for him.

  “It’s okay, Little Tinky,” the newsman would reassure him. “You’re a fine young man! George Washington Carver had to tamp down his old auntie, too. Same with Bruce Lee and Morley Safer! You’re gonna be okay, Champ!”

  Hearing Dan’s voice in his head, repeating his kindly message, the young McCardle would doze off knowing the closest thing he’d ever known, in his little lifetime, to actual peace.

  “I said BEND OVER,” Carmella barked, bringing Mac violently back to the present. She waved the gun around, pointing first at one man, then the other, a vicious gleam in her eye.

  One side of his head sticky with blood, Zank cursed and leaned forward to plant his hands on the back of the desk chair. The bruise on his forehead had morphed to marbly purple, and his nostrils were scabbed. Mac knew Tony sometimes kept a shiv in his sock. But if he was packing now, he was being cagey about it.

  Carmella stepped forward and rubbed the .357 through McCardle’s chinos, up and down his butt-crack. “Now you, Gomer.”

  “Oh great,” he complained, “I’m Gomer again.” Though the truth was, he nearly swooned from her high-caliber caress.

  Carmella’s heavy face broke into a grin. “You giving me lip? You disrespecting me? Just for that I’m gonna ask you to do him.”

  “Do who?” Zank sounded worried.

  “Who you think?” Carmella blew them both a kiss and sat down on the bed, crossing her majestic legs. She sighed deeply and settled back on a pair of pillows against the wall, as though ready for a really good TV show. “You putos got a favorite movie? I do,” she announced. “My favorite movie in the whole world is Deliverance. Mmm! That Burt Reynolds is a real man. But you know what? That is not even the reason Carmella likes the film. Burt, he’s hot in every movie. Even Cannonball Run. It’s not really about Burt, it’s about that one scene. You know the one? Squeal like a peeg! Now you’re with me, right? Now you know what La Carmella is talking about….”

  She leaned forward, pressing the gun to her lips, as if speaking into a blue steel microphone.

  “You two pendejos have been muyo mean to Carmella! But Carmella is going to give you the chance to apologize. In a special way. Do you know what that means? Do you, little black man? Eh, chanate, what do you say?”

  Mac was panicky about giving the wrong answer. “Sq-squeal like a pig?” he stammered. “T-Tony, do you know that scene?”

  “Don’t talk to me,” Zank snapped. “Don’t nobody fucking talk to me.”

  Tony swiveled around, to say more, and Carmella fired again. This time the bullet tore into a wall, shattering plaster and sending the fake oil painting of a rowboat full of happy gypsies tumbling onto the desk.

  “Ho-kay, be that way?” Carmella shrieked. “You want to have attitude? You want to call Carmella a fat Spic bitch? You want to act like you got some kind of machismo, Mees-ter Zank? Thass right, I know your name. Your mama told me everything. And I got news for you, To-ny, the more macho you act, the more fun it is for Y-O-Me.”

  She snorted and turned on McCardle. “Now you, my little black stallion. I want you to cha-cha behind your big white poppa and pull down his pantalones.”

  Mac swallowed. “You want me to what? Hey, Carmella, this wasn’t my idea. I just came along to help out. I didn’t know nothin’, I swear.”

  “You, shut up!” Carmella slapped a hand off her prodigious thigh. “You should say ‘Gracias!’ You get to be the man. Now drop your fancy little trousers. Show Carmella what you got!”

  Keeping his eyes fixed on the fallen gypsy painting, McCardle told himself to be strong. Look at the little family, he thought to himself. They’re all alone in a great big ocean! The waves are huge! The sharks are everywhere, but they’re SMILING! They’re probably singing happy Gypsy songs! They’re—

  “NOW!” Carmella shouted. “When Mama wants her hot sauce, Mama doesn’t want to wait.”

  McCardle unbuckled his pants and Zank lashed at him over his shoulder. “You fucking think about it, you’re dead!”

  Mac cast a pleading look at Carmella, who pointed with the gun, indicating his manhood—still covered by his banana-yellow boxers. Why had he chosen those, today of all days? McCardle tried to will Dan Rather back into his head, to get him broadcasting. But the newsman was absent, in the field, tracking down another trouble-spot.

  “We don’t have all day, pasmado.”

  Trying to remember a prayer—Now I lay me down to sleep—McCardle slung his thumbs into the elastic and tugged south. He worked the shorts to his knees and shook them the rest of the way down.

  “Mm-hmmm.” Carmella cocked her head sideways, like a very large pigeon. “So it’s true what they say about you black men.”

  “What’s that?” said Mac, but only because he thought he had to.

  “You know,” she whispered, “they always lie about how big they are.”

  “Hey now,” McCardle started, then realized he had nothing to say.

  Carmella shrugged. “All men are the same, but you negritos have more to live up to. It has to be a very, very big disappointment to all the señoritas when you pull down your pants. They must think, ‘I was expecting King Kong, and instead I’m getting a chorizo like the Curious George.’”

  McCardle’s face burned in a way it hadn’t since his Little Tinky days. “I’m a grower, not a shower,” he said defensively.

  Zank turned around to see what Carmella was talking about, and turned back with the ghost of a smirk on his lips. Mac’s organ didn’t interest him, only the look on his face. Kind of glazed. Tony’d had doubts about his partner since he got wind of the shovel thing. Mac’s crime went down in a bar Zank knew catered to homoloids. Zank hated homos almost as much as he hated Boy Scouts. Your Boy Scouts, especially scoutmasters—those evil BASTARDS!—were the biggest homos of all….

  McCardle claimed he got blindsided in the Parakeet Lounge when he was in there mugging a guy. In the bathroom. But, the way Tony figured, there were plenty of other places to mug somebody. Why a gay men’s room? Nobody actually went there to pee, did they? Unless it was down some degenerate’s throat. Zank once held up a minister in the bathroom at Denny’s, but that was different. That was back in his crank days. He was so out of it he had to shade his eyes from the glare off the tile. The methedrine did that, made everything too bright. He thought he’d robbed the guy in an igloo, until he staggered out and saw all these zombies spooning in runny yellow eggs. Horrible! It was after that Tony decided to turn his life around, and switched to crack. But a gay bar! Any amateur could tell you, thump a chickenhawk and take his wallet, you won’t catch a robbery beef, you’ll go down for hate crime. There was a big world out there to plunder and rob. You didn’t need to hit a joint where slapping someone was a federal case. Unless, of course, you had other reasons for being there.

  Now look at him, Zank fumed, about to check my oil in underwear the color of lemon meringue pie….

  “You see,” Carmella snickered, “even your good friend Tony is disappointed. Even he is wanting more of a man.”


  “Shut up!” Zank sputtered, and she shifted the gun in his direction.

  “Believe me, I’d just as soon kill you as rub my clitty bump. And I love to rub my clitty bump.”

  Again, Mac had to struggle not to get aroused. Just the thought of the hearty Latina, flat on her back on the motel bedspread, legs spread as she pleasured herself with pudgy thumb and forefinger…. No, stop that! he muttered. To his horror, he found himself stiffening against the cleft of his partner’s behind.

  “Caramba,” Carmella cackled. “Looks like the little lawn jockey is getting ready to gallop.”

  Zank muttered something, shifting his buttocks, and their hostess bellowed. “No juking, Señor. I got a gun, remember? I got chor gun.”

  She smiled at McCardle and repositioned herself on the bedspread, legs wide apart in her stretch capris. “Now,” she purred, “you pull down his pants, and you do him.”

  “Ex…excuse me?”

  McCardle closed his eyes and tried not to breathe. Maybe he could make himself pass out. Maybe—

  “A señorita is waiting.”

  When Mac opened his eyes, Carmella was aiming a dildo at him. She wielded the plastic white missile in one hand, the .357 in other, like an old-time gunslinger. “Bang-bang,” she said, and McCardle nearly started to cry. Somewhere Dan Rather was shaking his head.

  Carmella winked at him. “You want to spit on your hands, get some lubrication, thass okay. But try anything funny and I shoot you both. I don’t care. When the policia see what you two tried to do to me, they won’t ask questions. They’ll send me roses. And hand me that big reward. Comprendes? You two are going to give Carmella a pretty little show, or you’re going to die. Señor Tony, los pants,” she added, blowing another full-lipped kiss as she shimmied her own skin-tight capris a few inches south on her enormous thighs, to the very top of her pubes. Or where her pubes would be if she had any.

  “Oh God…. Shaved,” McCardle gasped, his breath catching in his chest. Now he was helpless. The sight of the colossal beauty’s hairless treasure was just too much…. He was fully erect, and mortified. Feeling him, Zank’s face went deep red, then very pale.

  “Somebody’s ready to rumba,” said Carmella huskily. She dropped the gun to her pudendum, but kept the dildo raised to her face. She seemed to be clicking it. “You hombres want to die to keep your virtue, that’s fine by Carmella. Your mommas would be very proud.”

  “I’ll kill you,” Zank growled, though whether to his throbbing partner or his jolly audience wasn’t clear.

  No matter…. Carmella eased back on the headboard, smiling happily, and fished in her pocketbook for a Jenny Craig bar.

  “Deliverance, por favor.”

  TEN

  All the women Manny’d ever really dug had been hugely damaged. All except for his ex-wife, who was confident, adjusted, raised by adoring parents, and responsible for the three most hellish years of his adult life.

  Mayor Marge, whose face, in Tina’s photo, showed up in sniffing proximity to the commander in chief’s distended nates, was the kind of girl he once thought he should love. She attended law school while Manny slogged through the Police Academy. And she had ambitions for both of them. It was easy, young Manny’d thought at the time, to have ambitions when you’d never been within shouting distance of failure. But that bit of insight, steeped in resentment he was barely aware of, did not keep him from pursuing her.

  His in-laws’ living room—the memory still made his mouth dry—was dominated by a mahogany breakfront packed two-deep with trophies and plaques, inscribed silver plates and framed certificates, all won by the golden-haired Marge. Archery, debate, swim meets, spelling bees…the breakfront was a shrine to the victory. To winning. Something Manny had never done once in his entire life. The night of their first date, while her father the snack-cake mogul grilled him about his “career goalposts,” Manny could not stop staring at Marge’s triumphant booty. He found himself fixated on a big blue ribbon she’d snagged for a “safety slogan” she’d thought up for a contest in second grade. The winning entry was preserved and mounted, in eight-year-old Marge’s stellar penmanship. “Don’t put yourself in danger, never talk to a stranger!”

  All of this, to Manny, was as alien as a tray full of shrunken heads. There was absolutely nothing about Marge he could relate to, so of course he had to have her. His own father, by then a tumor-ridden depressive hunched in his den, bathed in blue TV light around the clock, had given him the one piece of advice he’d ever given after meeting Marge. The old man and the deb had chatted for a tense two minutes after Manny, under pressure from his sweetheart, had run out of excuses for not letting her meet his family.

  “Sonny boy, you watch out,” his father warned him a week later, speaking over applause for a genius Jeopardy guest. “To a girl like that, you’re nothing but an exotic dog.”

  “Meaning what?” Manny asked, all the more outraged because it sounded true.

  “Meaning,” said his father, fighting off the chemo-heaves, “she’ll parade you around for a couple of years to show she’s original, but sooner or later, she’s gonna want a blue blood. When that happens, kiddo, you’ll be lucky if she leaves you lickin’ the bowl.”

  Dad wasn’t completely right, Manny thought, pulling in to Marge’s mansion to have his little chat. But he wasn’t all that wrong, either. She hadn’t left him a bowl, she’d just left him. Though technically speaking, that wasn’t true, either, since Manny’d moved into the Tit-ville YMCA a month before the official split. Marge’s career as attorney-turned-real-estate-mogul was already launching her into the highest strata of Upper Marilyn society. And Manny’s status as lowly beat cop, someone she’d see rousting a bus bench drunk while lunching with men who owned office buildings, had become less and less acceptable.

  The kicker came at a dinner party Marge dragged him to, a lofty affair hosted by one Melton Heinz, heir to the ketchup throne and a prime mover in the drive to transform the industrially challenged blight they inhabited into a shining city on a hill. Or at least a high-end suburb.

  Melton, a thin-faced, silver-haired man with a braying laugh, wore the first ascot Manny’d ever seen outside of Thin Man movies. By dessert he was still staring at it, trying to figure out how the burgundy silk stayed puffed out of Melton’s collar, defying gravity, when there was a gigantic crash in the kitchen. Manny charged in with the rest of the guests to find the cook, a six-foot-six Swede named Lars, panting by the door with his hand around the neck of a scrawny black kid. The unlucky intruder could not have been more than twelve. He wore a Pirates T-shirt over corduroy pants two sizes too big. And the Mr. Clean–like cook had him hoisted off the ground by his throat.

  “I find him in garbage,” Lars announced. “Stealing.”

  As if this news gave him the license he needed, Heinz marched to the door where Lars stood strangling the terrified youth. Ordering his chef to drop him, the condiment heir stepped up and slapped the boy. Hard. Then he snatched a veal chop from a plate on the counter and began wagging it back and forth in the kid’s face, baiting him. “Hungry, are you? How about a taste of milk-fed veal? Well? How about it? You want a taste?”

  When it was clear the captive child was not going to do tricks, Heinz cocked his head of silver hair toward his dinner guests and smiled drolly before turning back to his victim. “We can’t have you eating out of my garbage can like an animal. I’m a liberal! I’ll let you eat off my kitchen floor. Better yet, why don’t I feed you myself!”

  Mister Heinz laughed his braying laugh. Then he stopped laughing and mashed the breaded veal into the boy’s mouth.

  The boy still didn’t react. Only this time, before Heinz could continue playing, Manny was across the room. He planted himself in front of the young man, jacket pulled back so Heinz could see his piece. “I could arrest you right now for assault and battery,” he told his startled host, “but it won’t stick unless the kid presses charges.”

  If anything, the twelve-year-old was more
alarmed than Heinz. Until something in Manny’s eyes let him know it was all right.

  “You could, of course, settle out of court,” Manny said, keeping it matter-of-fact. “That way you avoid all kinds of hassles.”

  By now Lars looked ready to shove Manny’s face in the grapefruit juicer, but Melton Heinz raised a manicured hand to still him. The guests stayed quiet, no doubt out of respect for all that ketchup money.

  “Officer Rubert, you have a point,” said Heinz, still trying for droll. Braying only slightly, he turned to his young guest. “Would fifty dollars keep you from siccing Jesse Jackson on me?”

  “Five hunnert,” the boy countered, without hesitation. His glance flicked from Heinz to Manny, who nodded to let him know it was okay by him.

  Heinz produced five bills. The youngster grabbed them, then made a show of counting them. Before he shoved the cash in his pocket, he looked up at the ascot-wearing Heinz and met his smirk with a dead-pan gaze. “I’se lettin’ you off easy, bitch.”

  That got a rise from the dinner guests. And when the newly flush boy from the hood sauntered out the kitchen door, there was no question that Officer Manny Rubert would be right behind him. No question, either, that he’d be sleeping at the YMCA from that night on.

  Manny stepped gingerly up the flagstone path from the street to the mayor’s residence. The mansion was a glandular Victorian which had been added to over the years. It seemed like every time he drove by, a new cupola had metastasized from the roof, another bay of windows erupted from some second-story balcony or tower. The house kept expanding, though no one officially lived there but Marge and her tiny staff.

  “All this could have been yours,” cooed a voice from the open front door, and Manny smiled to see Lipton, his ex’s GQ-handsome, platinum-blond British personal assistant. He was standing astride the welcome mat, arms outstretched. “I look at you, Manny, and I think Why? You’re such a smart, sexy bloke. All this could have been yours, darling!”