Don Dimaio of La Plata

by Robert Arellano

  I take off the toupee to give the cranium a breather, lay out a few lines on top of the glass coffee table, and settle in on the living room sofa for a little video.

  Once upon a time a guy gets rid of his wife. Or she gets rid of him. It doesn’t matter. He has girlfriends. She has boyfriends. The guy and his wife are sick of each other. The divorce is expensive and drags on a long time. The guy doesn’t want her anymore but that doesn’t stop him from feeling like throwing up when he finds out his old business partner is balling her. The guy thinks maybe he wants her back just to keep the prick from riding her ass, so he decides to try being nice to his wife. He brings her favorite dish to the house where they used to live together.

  “When we get there, Sanchez, I want you to run up and ring the bell, and when she comes to the door, say real nice, ‘This is from your old man.’ You don’t have to mention I’m in the car. She’ll know.” The divorce was final, but I knew she was going to appreciate this. Putanesca from Crapuloso. I was going to make a joke about how my puta days were over. I had a resolve. But when we got to the house I saw she wasn’t alone. She had DiFelix, the prick, in there with her. He was getting ready to ride my wife’s ass. It was like a mime act in a department-store window the way she touched his shoulder in front of the fireplace. There was smoke billowing out of the chimney. DiFelix had stoked a fire! That’s what enraged me. DiFelix had stoked a fucking fire in my fucking fireplace (restraining order, sure; but I still paid the rent) and he was acting like he was going to fucking try and fuck my fucking wife. He was going to fucking try and fuck my fucking wife! “Sanchez, you thick spic, turn off the fucking headlights!”

  “I dough like dis, jorona.” Sanchez knew it stunk. He knew it was no good, sitting outside the house we were sitting outside of. “Wha I do wid de food?”

  “Give it to your fucking dog.”

  “Wha eef he no Juan?”

  “You got leather gloves, don’t you? Shove it down his fucking throat. Where do they get you people for the academy these days?”

  “Jorona, joo sure joo no Juan me drive joo home now?”

  “No! You’ve got this shift ’til I’m finished for the night and you’ve got to stick with it, so shut the fuck up and collect your triple overtime, greaseball!” It lasted forever, the laying in wait. “You’re not a cop, Sanchez. You know what you are? You’re just a fucking donkey pulling a cart.” Sweat beaded on the back of his neck. “Look at me when I talk to you! I’m sick of staring at the back of that hairy spic neck all fucking day!”

  When they were finally finished fucking I followed DiFelix to make sure he went home and had Sanchez drive me back to my place, then I called the prick and invited him over for a little business meeting. Sanchez greeted DiFelix at the door and ushered him into my study. I had stoked a fire. DiFelix looked at me like he knew what was going to happen here. He did know what was going to happen here. Everybody knew. They just didn’t know they knew. It was part of the fucking collective unconscious. They were waiting to know they knew. They were waiting until the rumor leaked and then a report showed up in the La Plata Gazette and then the charge got filed and the investigation began and the trial and testimony and boom! everyone knew they knew like they knew it all along, even all the stuff that didn’t necessarily get said or done. “Really? The fireplace log?” “Yup. Had to piss on him to put him out!” “And the cop?” “Held the guy’s arms for the cigarette treatment.” They talked about it over seven-dollar cocktails at Two Belfry Street and fifty-cent drafts at Boob’s on the Shady Side. “Out on his eyeball?” Out on his eyeball. They talked about it.

  I’m getting into the beginning of one of my favorite flicks when I hear the front doorbell ring and Oprah calls from the kitchen, “Y’all home, Mayo?”

  “Hell no!”

  “Daddy, it’s me!” My daughter Leah bounces into the room. I zip up, don the wig, kick the paper to cover up the coke, and hit the remote, zapping Troop Sex into La Plata, a sappy show about a lady lawyer who can’t or won’t get laid. Should be called Frigid in the City. There goes my hard-earned hard-on!

  “How are you, princess?”

  Leah is sassy and sexy and looks a lot like her mother at twenty-one except with bigger tits. She lives with her little brat in an apartment nearby. “I need money, Pop.” Cut to commercial: A gardener sprays the meanest weed-killer and a dandelion shrinks and shrivels in rapid time-lapse.

  Catching my breath, I adjust the toupee. “You ought to go on public assistance, Leah. You’re old enough, you know.”

  Leah loves her dad. Here’s how she shows it: She plops down in my lap, puts her arms around my neck, and simpers, “You know I’m daddy’s widdle grrrl.”

  I hand Leah a hundred. “You’re turning out just like your whore of a mother, Leah.”

  “She’s the whore you married, Daddy.”

  “Most expensive whore I never fucked.”

  “Can’t Daddy gimme a widdle mooor?” I fork over my last hundred and Leah gets up. I slap her ass and she scampers off to the kitchen where Oprah is cooking something for her to soak up a little of whatever Leah does to get high on a Saturday night in La Plata.

  THIS ’GINA man of ours was close on to fifty, of a rotund constitution and with no little flesh on his bones and a face that was fat and droopy. He was noted for his late carousing, being very fond of the cunt.

  SOUTH MEAN STREET, SATURDAY, 10:45 PM

  I go back outside to the car. “Antwerp’s, Sanchez.” No time for lines. I tap two little piles of powder onto the back of my hand and snuff them up. Sanchez opens the door and I check the mirror and climb out. The bar is packed, but you goddamn better believe they saved me my table in back. The owner has been very accommodating since a new waiter tried handing me a tab last month and as a result the fire marshal started making unannounced visits.

  A nightcap turns into four or five snifters of cognac, a steak, and a couple of appetizer platters for some friends who stop by my table. Around closing time I have the bartender refill my flask with B&D and I stumble out to the car.

  THEY WILL try to tell you his surname was Domino or D’amato—there is some difference of opinion among those who have written on the subject—but according to the most likely conjectures we are to understand that it was really Dimaio. But all this means very little so far as our story is concerned, providing that in the telling of it we do not depart one iota from the truth.

  WONCHASUCKIT RIVER, SUNDAY, 2:30 AM

  Sanchez, pull over so I can piss in the river.” “Why no joo go een de resaran, jorona?” “Why do you give a shit where I pee, Pancho? You want to unzip me too? Pull over at the goddamn river, you limp-dick spic!”

  Sanchez pulls up to the curb near the mouth of the Wonchasuckit. I climb out of the car and stagger to the rail where the river spills into the bay. Hooking the neck of the flask with one finger, I fumble with my fly and whip out Rock Sinatra. He hits the air streaming and my piss splits the river with a splat-sizzle. Steam rises from the surface.

  I thought maybe I could shut DiFelix up, not by bribing him but by demanding a bribe not to kill him. “You’re fucking my wife. You’re going to give me a hundred-thousand bucks.” DiFelix pressed charges anyway. There was an investigation and naturally I left some dents in his flesh. I pleaded no contest, gave up the office, and got a suspended sentence. In some ways I’m glad for what happened with DiFelix and my wife. Bottom line is I was in my prime: thirty-nine (for the fourth or fifth time), single again, a couple of reliable connections to coke, not to mention a few close doctor friends, which means a steady supply of Valiums and other yums. There were three things I wanted. I wanted to be drunk, I wanted to be fucking a lot of hot women, and I wanted to be snorting a ton of cocaine. Where better to do all of the above than at any of the several gentlemen’s clubs run by some of my highest campaign contributors? Drinks were free, naturally, and so was snatch. Coke came with the ho’s. By day I did the radio thing, gassing on about whatever was on people’s mind
s, while by night I made the most of my time out of the spotlight. For five years, all I did was eat, drink, and fuck for free, then sleep, wake up, and coke up in time for the afternoon talk show. Broadcast was pretty much the same idea as politics: braggery and bullying. But it wasn’t as much fun sitting in a studio as putting my body into it all over the city. I missed being mayor. As soon as the statute against felons running for office was up, I was back in the race. My campaign slogan: “I’m gonna make love to La Plata again!” ‘

  The fog here doesn’t drop or roll in. It emerges from the water, a thick mist with a low-down tidal whiff. It’s a fishy dip, all right, the kind that creeps right up on the continental lip after a long, lurching journey straight from the black depths, the Odor Out of Time old boys like William Rogers and Abraham Beige smelled on this very road back when it was cobblestone. I glance over my shoulder. Sanchez has left the park lights on, but those yellow splotches are blotted out as I watch. The banks in my little cityscape compose a skyline that from two hundred yards you can fit in a fist. One by one their lights are extinguished, first the flickering lantern atop venerable old Armada Bank, then the crown of patriotic lamps around Monarch’s head. Finally, the only things left shining are the three beaming boobs at the corners of Proletarian Trust.

  “Sanchez?” No answer. Standing there raising the level of the Wonchasuckit a few inches—I must have drunk a barrel of B&D!—I take a long pull from the flask. A whiff of fish interrupts my piss, stemming the stream. That little switch that keeps piss from getting mixed up with jiz goes flick! That’s what happens when I get a sniff of fish. The vapor in the air makes my nose tingle, activating crystals caked deep in my nostrils, and those tits on top of Proletarian Bank start reduplicating. Boobs are bouncing all over the sky while I ride Rock Sinatra.

  YOU MAY know, then, that the aforesaid ’gina man, on those occasions when he was at leisure, which was most of the night around, was in the habit of viewing flicks of ribaldry with such pleasure and devotion it led him almost wholly to forget the life of a mayor and even the administration of his estate. So great was his curiosity and infatuation in this regard that he even skipped many payments of alimony in order to be able to rent and view as many of the flicks that he loved, and he would carry home with him as many of them as he could on tape.

  Of all the flicks that he thus devoured, none pleased him so well as the ones that had been performed by the famous Dolly Dellabutta, whose juicy pose style and revolving seat were as luscious to him as pearls; especially when he came to beat those tails of love and amorous phalanges that are to be met with in many places, such asses of the boweling, for example: “The creaming of the reaming that affects my rear, in such a manner weakens my reaming that I with creaming laminate your cumliness.” And he was similarly infected when his thighs fell upon such asses as these: “…the high heaving of your rigidity rigidly fortifies you with the ass and renders you perverting of that pervert your greatness doth perve.”

  POTENCY STREET, SUNDAY, 3:00 AM

  Leah has picked up the kid and Oprah has gone home. It’s now, in the middle of the night, when there’s nobody to call, nothing to busy myself with, that I wouldn’t mind having a wife. Someone to rub against. Someone in the morning to take care of the breakfast and dry cleaning, make sure there’s no stains on my jacket. This is when I almost miss married life and I know I’m some kind of lonely troll living in a tree all alone.

  For five terrific years between my first and second terms, it was a-stripper-a-day-keeps-the-cocktease-away, but something happened to me around the time I started running for mayor again. I had just turned forty (five times over) and the five-year fantasy was finished. I discovered I couldn’t get lead with a regular lady around anymore. She could be a slut I take out to eat every now and then or the kind of whore paid for in cash, but either way Rock Sinatra was a flop. Callgirls and girlfriends worked ol’ Rock with the loosest larynxes. Some tried stuffing him right up in the clam, but Sinatra wouldn’t firm up or spit up until he and I were all alone. The little blue pill just left us blue-balled. It got Rock stiff but it was more like rigor mortis than a hard-on. It was no picnic. It hurt. I wanted to get off, but no chance.

  A friend of mine who owns Arousing Superstore brought me a thick brown envelope. “For your return to the public eye,” he said.

  “Jesus, Joe! Give it to Hank. You know to bring all thankyous to Cantare!”

  “Don’t worry, Pally. It’s not that kind of donation. Take a look.”

  Inside the envelope was a porn video. “What the fuck?”

  “Check it out. The first Dolly Dellabutta. If you like it, I’ve got more. She churns out a new one every week.”

  At first I was like, Fuck this, Donald Dimaio does not do stroke flicks, but when I popped it in the VCR it didn’t take long for me to get hooked on that ass. That ass that ass that ass. Dolly is a butt-man’s fantasy and the reverse-angle camera is a main feature of her movies. Half the actors ball her in her opera box. With most porn it takes me long and vigorous manipulation to achieve even a chubber, but Dellabutta’s flicks are another story. Now Dolly, shot from behind, is the only way to get Rock hard. When a tits-and-ass woman’s around I’m out of service, but alone with my Dolly Dellabutta collection I can break the sperm bank.

  I’m wired and the house is goddamn quiet. Not just no-traffic-outside quiet, but there’s-nothing-else-living-inside-this-brick-box quiet. I’m in bed in my mansion, alone with the video harem, when tits turn into stiff pricks.

  THE POOR fellow used to lie awake nights in an effort to dingle-dangle the reaming and make sex out of asses such as these, although Casanova himself would not have been able to underhand them, even if he had been red-erected for that hole, purse-posed. He was not at ease in his hind over those wands that Long Dong gave and relieved; for no matter how great the virgins who treated him, the poor fellow must have been left with their fascia and their entire booty covered with marks and scars. Nevertheless, he was grateful to the flogger for coozing the flick with the promise of an internal indenture to come; many a time he was tempted to take up his penis and literally finish the tail as had been prodded, and he redoubtably would have done so, and would have sucked seed very well, if his tauts had not been constantly occupied with other slings of greater tomentum.

  POTENCY STREET, SUNDAY, 10:00 AM

  I wake up with an animal appetite and want some eggs but Oprah is nowhere to be found. I put on my robe and open the front door. “Where’d you go, O? Out to straddle the old Sambo lamppost?” No mail in the box and the Sunday La Plata Gazette on the step. Oh yeah, it’s Oprah’s day off.

  Cantare shows up, surgical tape on his face and a box of donuts under his arm.

  “Nice touch for your wedding day, Hank. Good luck convincing your guests it wasn’t the bride.”

  “I won’t even try. I figure she’s my best alibi. Did you read the editorial yet?”

  I turn to the opinions page and see the headline: “Corruption at City Hall? Business As Usual.”

  “That fuckface Sukoff! When I take over the PlaGa I’m going to have that prick publisher bring me coffee in his gartered, bare butt!”

  Cantare drops the box on the kitchen table and flips up the top. Nestled among the nuts and crullers is a thick-stuffed envelope. “From a friend at the tow association.”

  “Which one?”

  “Ricky Zitirello.”

  “How much?”

  “Three Gs.”

  “All right. Keep Three Zs on the list.”

  Three Zs is Ricky Zitirello’s garage. All the shop owners in La Plata know the golden rule Police Captain Umberto Umbilico teaches his cadets from day one: If it moves, ticket it; if it don’t, tow it. Towing is a ten-million-a-year business in this city. You got a garage and want your trucks to be on the call list? First you pay Cantare your annual fee. Never less than five grand. Ten if you want to stay in good graces. Cantare keeps his delivery fee and the rest goes to a good cause: me.

&nbs
p; I take the eight-ball and throw it on the table for Cantare to chop us a few breakfast toots. “Get to work.”

  “Hey! Pretty quick on the rebound, boss!” He pours out a little pile and starts drawing lines.

  “Sit down, why don’t you, Hank?”

  “Can’t. Goddamn tetanus shot.”

  While we take turns over the glass tabletop, Cantare tries to convince me of what a great girl he’s about to shackle up with.

  “Wait’ll you get a load of Stella, boss. Tits, ass, and sass! I knew I had to marry her from the first fuck.”

  “You can have it. I’m happier being a bachelor. I’ve got this one girl Dolly who’s got a tail like a Chevy. She lets me ride it whenever I want, and when I’m done she doesn’t need any of that goddman attention. No ‘take me out’ or ‘talk to me’ or anything. It’s just fuck and sleep.”

  “Sounds pretty good. Maybe you should make her your full-time old lady.”

  “No way, Hank. Fucking the same whore every night gets so fucking monotonous. Do you have any idea how much free pussy I get as mayor? Marriage, on the other hand…”

  “Oh, no.” Cantare has heard this rap.

  “It’s like the chefs put a banquet with food from every part of the world in front of you, but day after day after day you can only eat the same thing.”