“Get in,” Stacy said as soon as Vera was near. Vera complied. As soon as the teens wobbled up, Stacy took the boyfriend from them and pushed him into the cab; Vera helped maneuver the body from the inside. Then, while the four panting teens stood bent over, with their hands on their knees and sweat streaming down their faces, Stacy got into the cab, slammed the door shut and told the cabbie to drive. The teens did not even know what had happened until she was halfway down the block. Even then, they were too tired to do anything but watch the cab drive away. Stacy giggled to herself; on some level, Vera could not help admiring her.
The boyfriend was sandwiched between Vera and Stacy. His mouth was hanging open and his head was resting on Vera’s shoulder. His skin was still warm, but the reality that he was dead made Vera quiver inside. He was still wearing Vera’s movie starlet sunglasses, but Vera’s mind conjured the image of his eyes rolled back in their sockets: two eerie white orbs.
Stacy gave the driver instructions and told him there would be a “fat tip” if he made the trip in forty minutes. She was still in high spirits, whereas Vera retreated into herself. Now that she had time to sit and think, the most horrible thoughts passed through her mind. She shook her head, inadvertently bumping her head into the boyfriend’s. Stacy laughed again, and pushed the boyfriend’s head back, so that it rested on the back of the seat. She stared at Vera for a while, and then she frowned.
“What’s wrong?”
Vera looked up at her absentmindedly—as if lost: as if her mind had been a million miles away. She tried to smile, as to reassure Stacy, but her lips refused to comply.
“What’s wrong?” Stacy asked her again.
“I was just thinking,” she said obliquely.
“Thinking what?”
“About everything—what just happened…what I just did.”
“What is there to think about?” Stacy said in a bored voice.
Vera sensed Stacy’s disapproval; on some level, she feared that disapproval—was desperate to be on good terms with Stacy. Nevertheless, she pressed on. She looked at Stacy gravely. “…The other times you’ve killed him,” she whispered, leaning over to Stacy by way of the boyfriend’s body, “…did you ever find yourself thinking that maybe this time he won’t come back to life? Did you ever find yourself thinking that maybe you’ve really killed him this time?”
Stacy stared at her for a few seconds. “No.”
“It’s never crossed your mind? You never think that maybe the magic, or whatever it is, will run out and he’ll end up as a regular corpse?”
“No.”
Vera seemed distraught.
Stacy shook her head, disappointed. She looked out of the window for a few moments, at the passing traffic. And then, speaking while staring out at the street, “Like I said to you before, Vera, you have no faith.”
“It’s not faith that brings him back to life.” And then, looking at Stacy closely: “You still don’t care how and why all this happens?”
“No.”
When Vera seemed on the verge of losing her mind, Stacy smiled and made eye contact with her again: “Look, Vera, as I told you, all we can do at this point is acknowledge the basic facts. Fact number one is that when you kill him, he comes back to life.”
Vera shook her head: “But what if fact number two is that you can only kill him six times?”
“Then we’ll learn a new fact in forty-nine minutes,” Stacy said with a wry smile.
Vera still looked distraught.
“Relax, Vera,” Stacy implored her. “You did something great—don’t spoil it all with your petty doubts.”
“But I killed a man!” she said too loudly. She remembered the cabbie and lowered her voice: “I stabbed him, then I suffocated him. I held the bag down with,”—she held her trembling hands before her, staring at them, as if checking to see if they held some telltale sign of murder—“…with these hands.”
Stacy reached over the boyfriend and grabbed Vera’s right hand. “Don’t torture yourself with such thoughts. This will all be over in forty-eight minutes, and then you’ll see for yourself.”
Vera shook her head. “…Can you not do a countdown, please? It’ll drive me crazy.”
“If you wish.”
They drove along in silence for a while. They were now on the ramp to the 59th Street Bridge, headed to Queens. Vera found her mind drifting to more horrible things. She shuddered. “…Talk to me, Stacy,” she pleaded. “Tell me something, please—anything.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Anything. I just don’t want to think anymore…at least until he comes back and I know that I haven’t really…” She did not finish the sentence.
Stacy nodded her head. “You want to hear another story?”
“Yes—anything. Tell me a crazy one: the craziest one you have.”
Stacy smiled. “Okay, then sit back and let me tell me a story, my friend.”
Vera nodded and literally sat back in the seat this time, closing her eyes.
“It’s about a Navy sailor driven over the edge by his horniness.”
“Sounds like a good one,” Vera mumbled sleepily.
Stacy smiled. “Anyway, in order to protect the innocent, let’s give him a name—say, Nane Quartay. So, Quartay and his ship have been out to sea for six months, and he and the other five hundred eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old sailors are all horny as hell. After all that time at sea, they have finally docked at a port. All they can think about is getting ashore, so they pump their cocks into the first woman they see. A kind of madness infects the ship. Sailors are practically ready to riot to be let out; some of them have drool dripping from their mouths!
“Unfortunately, when they get ashore in this Eastern European country, it’s full of old, gypsy-looking women with missing teeth and scarves on their heads. Sailors are pissed as hell, but there are bars there, and the average man is content to substitute getting drunk with getting pussy—especially when he can’t have them both. So all these sailors flood into the bars in this town. Quartay drinks a few, but he’s thinking, ‘Damn, man, there has to be some pussy out there somewhere!’ So he leaves the others and starts walking the streets, hunting for pussy. Some old, toothless women give him the eye, but he’s like, ‘Hell nah, I’d need to drink a few kegs before I’d be willing to go that route!’ So, he walks for miles, until he leaves the city behind and comes upon farmland. Even then, all he sees are old women and some old geezers playing dominoes. Now that he’s out in the country, there’s nobody around at all. It’s all farmland and woods. Just when he’s ready to turn back, he sees this girl sitting under a tree. He can’t believe his eyes: she’s gorgeous! She has the entire package: luscious breasts, blond, flowing hair, a shapely figure, a cute face… She stares at him invitingly and he practically runs up to her. ‘I’m Quartay,’ he says. He begins babbling on, trying to loosen her up, but she only stares at him. Of course, she does not speak any English. He is about to scream in frustration when she says, ‘I want your cock!’ He can hardly believe his ears; and of course, her accent is so heavy that it sounds like, ‘Yie vant yar gok!’ Quartay is practically trembling with excitement now. He is ready to fling himself at her, but the girl looks so sweet and innocent sitting there that he begins to wonder if he has misheard her. He is just about to ask her to repeat herself when, ‘Yie vant yar gok!’ she screams louder. A huge, insane grin spreads over Quartay’s face now. ‘You want cock?’ he asks rhetorically, ‘—then you gonna get it then!’ he says, beginning to undress. He is going to pull that crazy gypsy bitch behind a bush and do her right then. She seems fine with it as she begins unbuttoning his clothes. He is like, ‘Hell yes!’ He is definitely going to have a story to tell the others when he gets back. Of course, none of them will believe him, but to hell with them. ‘Yie vant yar gok!’ the Gypsy is saying again. In fact, she keeps saying it over and over again, so that he is like, ‘Damn, just take it already!’ She pulls him behind the bush, and the next
thing he knows, the Gypsy has her dress over her head and he is screwing the hell out of her from the back. She starts screaming out this gibberish—or at least it seems like gibberish to him, since he cannot understand her language. By now, she is yelling out so loudly that he is afraid an old farmer will come by and find him screwing his daughter. It would be like an old Frankenstein movie, with angry villagers chasing him down with torches and hoes and whatever other farming tools they had handy. Of course, you can’t really have a good screwing session with such thoughts in your head; and by now, Quartay is like, ‘I’d better finish this quick and get the hell out of here!’ At that moment, the Gypsy woman screams, ‘Yess, yess, yie vant yar gok!’ and he thinks, ‘Hell yes! This crazy bitch is into this shit!’ He still has a huge grin on his face, so he doesn’t care if she screams or not. In fact, if villagers chased him down and this made the international news, at least everyone on his ship would know he was the pussy-getting master. That should be a title, he thinks, like Captain and Chief. Pussy-Getting Master: he likes the sound of that! He wishes some of those bastards from his ship could see him now, and hear the crazy Gypsy yelling out. …Soon, however, he feels himself on the verge of his pleasure. He feels his muscles tightening, and has to lean against the Gypsy’s behind to keep his balance. Everything is getting blurry; to his amazement, he feels giddy and high—as if he has just smoked a good sack of weed. He is like, ‘Shit, this Gypsy pussy ain’t half-bad!’ And then, the pleasure seizes him, and he convulses. He tries to remain standing, but his knees buckle and he finds himself sinking to the ground. ‘Goddamn!’ he whispers. It is as if someone has knocked him on the head, because the next thing he knows, everything goes black. He has a strange dream, where the Gypsy woman is laughing triumphantly, saying, ‘Yie got yar gok!’ He is still like, ‘Damn right, you got it!’ However, there is something about her laugh that makes him feel uneasy. It is the kind of laugh a used car salesman has after you have just signed the contract for a piece of shit car.
“Quartay wakes up about two hours later, with a serious headache—as if he has a hangover, or as if someone really had knocked him on the head. The Gypsy is gone. He feels his skull, but there are no telltale lumps. It occurrs to him that maybe it is some kind of Gypsy scheme: the girl gets men to come in the bushes, and her partner clubs them on the head, taking their money. He goes to check his pants pockets, but he realizes his pants are still around his ankles. When he looks down, some evil-looking insects are feasting on the dried semen on his penis. He screams out and brushes them off! He is on his feet now, panting and suddenly alert. Remembering the gypsy scheme, he pulls up his pants and checks the pockets. His wallet and money are still there, but he cannot help feeling that something is very wrong. He looks around the landscape now, searching for any sign of the Gypsy, but there is nobody there. He feels lonely, and decides to head back to the ship.
“On the walk back, Quartay feels strange—as if something has changed within him. Guiltily, he remembers that he did not use a condom. What if he had picked up some crazy disease? …But he does not want to think about that now. He feels melancholy for some reason. It occurrs to him that he does not feel like bragging to the others anymore. All he wants to do now is get back on the ship and go to sleep. That is what he does.
“In the morning, he still feels a little off. It is when he goes to the bathroom urinal to relieve himself that he notices two bumps on the head of his penis. They are huge, and red! He screams! When some of the other sailors look up to see what the problem is, he runs into a stall and locks it behind him, so he can check himself out. The bumps are huge. He squeezes one, to see if pus will come out, but the pain is so excruciating that he almost passes out. It is as if someone is clawing his guts out. He feels the pain in his teeth! He sits back on the commode, panting, wondering what new disease he has contracted. He tries to remember back to the film the Navy had shown them on sexually transmitted diseases: a montage of dripping, oozing and infected genitalia. He feels sick. …But then he remembers the evil-looking insects that had been feasting at his penis. Maybe they had bitten him. That makes him feel marginally better: an insect bite is better than the prospect of his penis rotting off…unless the insect bite has the side effect of making his cock rot.
“He is just leaning over to take another look at the bumps on his penis when something very bizarre happens: the bumps open, and Quartay finds himself staring at a pair of blue eyes! ‘Shit!’ he screams at the top of his voice, so that the words echo in the bathroom for seconds afterwards. All he can do is stare! ‘—You okay in there, man?’ some of the other sailors call, but Quartay can’t hear…can’t think! ‘What the hell…!’ he whispers. He is trembling all over now. Someone knocks on the door of his stall. ‘—You okay, sailor?’ From the man’s tone, Quartay can tell that he is a superior officer. Quartay knows that he isn’t okay, but what the hell is someone supposed to do about a pair of eyes growing on his cock overnight? He is pretty damn sure that penicillin doesn’t cure that! ‘—Sailor?’ the officer calls again, after the silence. Quartay speaks up quickly: ‘I’m okay, sir…too much to drink last night, that’s all.’ Yet, when he looks back down at his penis, he realizes that the eyes are following him—observing him. “Shit!” he whispers. The other sailors go about their business, and Quartay sits in the stall, wondering what the hell he is going to do. At last, he pulls his pants up, relieved that he can cover his deformity. He has to get some fresh air and think… He wanders about the ship in a trance. Sailors say hello to him, but he only walks past them like a zombie. He has to think, but nothing makes sense. After about an hour of wandering about, he returns to the stall and pulls down his pants again. By now, he has convinced himself that he has imagined the entire thing. Eyeballs don’t grow on cocks—that is just the way things are. If he thought he had seen eyeballs on his cock, he had only imagined things. When he bends forward to stare at his penis again, he sees that there are now three huge, red bumps! And then, as he sits bent over, staring at them, all three bumps open at once: the blue eyes look back at him, and the third bump, which is beneath the other two, smiles at him, and says, in the calmest, most self-content way, ‘Yie got yar gok!’”
When the story was finished, Stacy was leaning over the boyfriend, staring at Vera. Vera was still sitting back with her eyes closed. She opened her eyes and looked across at Stacy, and then at the boyfriend. In truth, her mind had not really been on Stacy’s story.
“What do you think about the story?” Stacy said, staring at Vera intently. “You think it’ll be a bestseller?”
“That’s how the story ends?” Vera asked, frowning. “His possessed penis talks to him?”
“Ah,” Stacy said with a chuckle, “you’re missing the deeper literary significance of the story.”
“You mean that the penis is a metaphor for something?”
“Penises are always good metaphors—that’s why they’re so useful.”
“I see,” Vera said, when she could think of nothing else to say. She looked at the boyfriend uneasily again; seeing him left her with another flashback of how she had killed him. Despite what she had said earlier about not wanting a countdown, she looked at Stacy anxiously: “How much time?” After she said it, she looked out of the window, to see if they were close to Stacy’s apartment, but the streets outside the cab were not familiar.
“Relax,” Stacy said, “we’re right on time. We’ll be home in ten minutes, and he’ll be back in about fifteen.”
“We’re really that close?” All of Vera’s anxieties began to come back. She almost asked Stacy to tell her another story, so that she could distract herself for a few more minutes. She could not stand any silence between now and whenever the boyfriend came back. She turned to Stacy again:
“Tell me something about yourself.”
“Like what?”
“Tell me about your parents.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything—who they were, what they did for
a living, if you loved them… anything.”
Stacy shook her head: “I didn’t really know them.”
“Why not?”
“They’re dead.”
Vera looked at her uneasily. Stacy smiled:
“No, I didn’t kill them.”
“I wasn’t thinking that!” she said with a laugh.
Stacy looked at her with a sarcastic smile: “Sure you weren’t.”
“You were an orphan?” Vera pressed her.
Stacy chuckled. “Nothing that dramatic. I was raised by a great aunt. She raised me since I was a year old.”
“How’d your parents die?”
“My mother killed my father—that’s what my aunt said, anyway.”
“Are you serious?” Vera whispered.
“Yeah.”
Vera joked: “Killing the man in your life seems to run in your family.” However, it was a bad joke and neither of them laughed. Stacy was staring ahead thoughtfully; Vera was about to apologize when Stacy continued.
“My father raped my mother. He was some kind of drifter who wandered into their town. She killed him afterwards.”
Vera gasped, speechless.
Stacy went on: “I was supposedly born from that—from that act. That’s the story anyway.”
Vera detected something in Stacy’s voice and mien. “You don’t believe the ‘story’?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? My aunt told me this on her deathbed. She died of cancer about two years ago. She was half out of her mind by then—pain killers and all that. I know she was keeping something from me all my life. She used to tell me that I was adopted; whenever I asked her about my parents, she would say she had no idea who they were—that my parents had died in a car accident or something, and that I had been put up for adoption when I was a baby. I knew she was lying because she couldn’t keep her story right: one day it would be a car accident, and the other it would be a fire…I just don’t know what to think.”
How to Kill Your Boyfriend (in 10 Easy Steps) Page 14