by Julia Kent
“Mansplained? You can’t even be humansplained to,” she cackled. “No guts, no glory.” She made a clucking sound with her tongue.
“If you already know how to bet, what are you waiting for?” Bill said in an encouraging tone. “A lucky streak like yours doesn’t come along often.”
“Often? Try never,” I mumbled. The only downside to an outside bet was the small – like, a few percent – chance the ball would land on green double zero or zero, in which case I would lose.
“Then I’ve got a ninety-five, ninety-seven percent chance of winning,” I marveled aloud. When in the hell does life hand you them odds? And a man who reminds you of your daddy?
This was fate.
“Hedge your bets,” Bill said. “Or you can take your winnings and go home, always wondering what if.”
“Pfft, Bill. She’s the type who will always wonder. Look at her, drinking whatever the waitress brings, settling for whatever’s offered instead of asking for whatever she really wants.”
I stood there, slack jawed and gape mouthed, my skin turned to fire, eyes two red-hot pokers aimed at her.
“Whatever,” she said snidely.
Here’s the hard part: she was right.
So was Trevor.
Joe? Joe was dead wrong, though.
“Fine,” I said, shoving ten grand on black and red each, placing the maximum outside bet I was allowed. People gasped. The dealer glared. Tension rose up to tighten the air until it was indistinguishable from Victoria’s butthole.
It’s a guaranteed win, right? As close as I’ll ever get.
And then everyone got real quiet. Preternaturally quiet.
Too quiet.
The dealer spun. The ball bounced. I hit the pause button on the world, everyone swimming in a sea of excitement, awe, and phenomenal luck.
I was about to be a star.
Even better, I was about to prove Joe wrong.
Pop! Pop pop pop went the ball as it bounced, slowing down, my eyes and brain calculating the rate of change, the arcs of the bounce, the ricochet and the –
Fuuuuuuuuuucccccckkkkkkkk, noooooooooooooooooooo
It teetered. It did, for one ghastly second, and then it fell into green zero.
Bill let out a shrill whistle and turned to leave, snaking his arm around Victoria’s waist as she toasted me.
Toasted.
“To taking risks!” she burst out, her giggle a cackle that rattled my bones as all my chips disappeared.
All of them.
Every last one.
So.
That happened.
In slow motion, microsecond by microsecond, my world imploded. The roulette dealer pulled out his tool and slid my pile of chips toward him. My pile. Our pile.
Twenty thousand dollars in one big pile, all of it the band’s money.
“But!” It was all I could say, my words gone. Long gone. Gone with the chips. Gone with my not-quite-daddy Bill, who took off the moment it all went downhill.
Two big, strong men moved closer to me, casual but on guard. I got it. I understood. The flood of hormones coursing through my body, mingling with neurotransmitters and a little bit of alcohol – okay, a lot of alcohol – made me reckless.
But it didn’t make me suicidal. One wrong move and I’d be picked up, carried out, thrown to the curb, and left to rot.
Or worse, tied to a chair in a back room of the casino and pistol whipped.
My limited television and movie viewing of gambling made it hard to imagine beyond that.
“You’re done,” one of the big guys said, eyes hidden by black reflective lenses.
You’re done.
Yep. I was.
Next thing I knew, I was outside, the whoosh of transition from air conditioning to desert heat one that didn’t even register. I remember walking like I was in a dark, spinning tunnel, my feet slow but steady, working hard to maintain balance and not go rolling on my ass.
I inhaled. I exhaled. I lifted one foot and put it down. I lifted the other foot and put it down, a few feet ahead of where I just was. My fingertips brushed against the sides of my thighs. I stopped when the crosswalk said stop and walked when it told me to walk.
I was pretty much a robot. By the time I looked up and realized all the buildings were no more than two stories tall and I was long past the Vegas Strip, I was numb.
Not hot. Not cold.
Numb.
Eight thousand dollars of the band’s cash advance money. We had about that much in the business account right now. It was all the money sitting in the band’s account, some of it meant to be paid out to the guys, some of it waiting for bills and invoices to come in and be paid. It was our financial world.
And I blew it all on a ball.
A ball.
“Balls are nothing but trouble,” I muttered, feeling closer to the homeless guy offering hand jobs for casino chips than I did to the twenty-somethings hooting and hollering as they walked along the sidewalk, eating ice cream and smelling like weed.
Forget about my personal eight hundred dollars in retirement money. Forget the other twelve grand in profits I let slip through my fingers. I’d gone fucking nuts, using an ATM machine to take out all that band money. I felt like someone put a pod inside my neck and made me do it against my will.
That would have been so much better.
What kind of colossal mistake had I just made?
People poor as me can’t afford to make the same mistakes middle- and upper-class people can make, you know? That’s the gist of it. We aren’t just poor. Not simply unlucky. We are pretty damned near convinced we’re more than a little bit cursed.
But the difference between me and Trevor wasn’t poor and rich, scarcity and abundance mentality, female and male, Midwest and East Coast.
It was that he could make a mistake and I couldn’t.
Not the mistakes you make when you’ve decided you just don’t care no more. Those are easy to make without even thinking about it. I am a world-class expert in making those mistakes.
It’s when you have a future you’re trying to secure, something to work toward, that you can’t fuck up. Can’t take one wrong step.
Trevor can, though. He’s got safety nets.
Me?
I fall once, I’m dead.
That may not have been true right then. I had some money in the bank for a brief time, until the bills all came due. Mama had a husband now who helped her. My level of external financial cushion was definitely stronger than ever before.
And I had Trevor and Joe as emotional safety nets, sure.
You’d have had to tell that to the part of me that didn’t see it. Didn’t want to see it.
The part that was convinced that the minute I let my guard down, the world would fall apart.
Like, you know, fucking right then.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DARLA
The mind can swirl.
You don’t see it from the outside. You don’t feel it when you touch a person, but it can happen. It’s an emotional blender, except I swear by turning it all the way on high, you end up exceeding the boundaries of the laws of physics, because emotional chaos that turns into an F5 tornado has an actual, palpable vibration.
It cannot be contained by the psyche alone. It leaks out, pouring into the veins and arteries, pulsing through the bloodstream into the heart, finding the soul and shaking, hard.
Shaking until all that’s left is the tremor, an aftershock with no core.
You inhale.
You exhale.
You hold your breath.
You let it out.
At some point, you start to realize you’re not breathing right, so then paranoia kicks in and you think you might actually die, right here and now, because you cannot remember how to breathe. It’s a mindfuck, for sure, because the act of thinking you don’t know how to do an autonomic process means you suddenly can’t. Anxiety rushes in to fill the void where rational thought should be, but isn’t, an
d then you’re a buzzing mass of cells that has no purpose.
And that’s even worse.
So what do you do when you’ve shattered your own world to the point where all the sharp edges of the pieces are hovering a centimeter above your skin, waiting to act?
You walk for a few hours, alone, in Vegas in the middle of the night, coming back only when the sun proved that it actually does rise even if your world ends.
You walk past the giant sign on the side of a hotel with Donny’s pearly whites gleaming at you like an interrogation lamp, Marie grinning as if to say, “You could’ve come watch us at a concert if you hadn’t screwed up!”
You observe homeless people missing a leg, cradling sick dogs in their laps, and you toss a quarter in their cups because you need to feel like you’re still capable of doing something good.
You step around puke, take a tract from everyone handing them out to make them feel productive, and watch buskers on the street and wonder how much money they make.
You look at the painted, topless Vegas showgirl pretenders charging ten bucks for a picture (and probably a grope), and you calculate how many pictures you’d need to take to erase your mistake.
Eight hundred.
You give your titties a long look. They’re good. Real good. Are they eight-hundred-pictures-in-a-day good?
You watch burly men unloading boxes at the resort’s rear entrance for the convention. Some of them are labeled “cat tongue vibrators” and you know you’re depressed when your entire reaction is, Huh.
You notice that more people are on the road, chattering happily, carrying takeout coffee and looking refreshed, animated, eager for the day of fun to begin.
You find yourself in front of your hotel and you stop.
You imagine the look on your boyfriends’ faces when you try to explain what you just did.
And then you go to an animal fetish convention in Vegas to hide.
There’s a lot of internal reorganization a person has to go through in order to walk into an exhibit hall where every single booth – more than three hundred of them, in total – is devoted to animal fetishism.
And yet it was my asylum in that very moment.
I needed something – anything – to distract me from my own looping unreality at what I’d just done. Make no mistake – I’d done it. I’d gambled and lost.
Lost other people’s money.
Being surrounded by animal kink brought small comfort, but I’d take what I could get.
While I wasn’t judging (okay, I couldn’t help it – I was totally judging), the level of visual, auditory, and olfactory exposure to paradigm-shifting concepts left the mind struggling to integrate it all, especially the animal sounds.
Human beings love homeostasis. We’re biologically primed for it.
We’re biologically primed for something else, too.
Connection.
And kink provides a kind of connection without parallel. I mean, sure, we’ve got tons of ways for humans to connect to each other in society that don’t involve sexual kinks. You can be connected by neighborhood. By religion. By schools. By shared hobbies. By online activities. Music. Art. Exercise. Sports.
All those are important. Of course they are. I wouldn’t be where I am if not for online music and fandom, where I was a slobbering filesharing fangirl who loved the band Random Acts of Crazy from six hundred miles away.
(For the record, I no longer fileshare. I understand piracy now. When you manage a band, you see the damage it causes when the artist doesn’t get paid for his or her work. Worst of all, it makes me a hypocrite, and that’s worse than being a pirate.)
All of this ruminating was good for about three seconds of distraction as I composed myself, trying to make my internal shakes slow down. I’d gambled away every penny of the band’s money in a moment of sheer drunken stupidity. I was no better than Aunt Marlene at Bunco Night at the American Legion Hall back home in Peters.
Well, I was slightly better. I wasn’t sucking off some Korean War vet to get a pack of smokes.
Not yet, anyway.
Charlotte’s free pass to the exhibit hall was a godsend. I had it in my back pocket, along with my buzzing phone, which I steadfastly ignored. I could hide from the band in the exhibition hall and not worry about being found. She only had one, and nobody else had a morbid fascination with this animal fetish con like I did. Without question, she’d slipped me the pass on the plane and declared it no big deal.
It felt like being given asylum.
How on God’s green earth was I going to come up with eight thousand dollars? That was every cent the band had, and our credit cards were now bursting. Payment for gigs wouldn’t come in for a while, and even paying minimums on the credit cards wouldn’t work for more than a few months.
The room reeled. Forcing myself to take a deep breath through my nose, I closed my eyes, widened my nostrils, and –
Smelled shit.
Horse shit, to be specific.
Then the tangy ammonia scent of chickens.
We’ve turned Mavis into a joke, the kind of insider story that evolves over the years among a group of good friends. Trevor was super weird about her – and by her, I mean the icon of Mavis. We didn’t have an actual chicken who was Mavis, but we had plenty of incarnations.
No one has ever actually fucked Mavis, mind you, so imagine my convoluted feelings when I turned and found an entire display booth devoted to chicken diapers.
For adults.
Fetishes and kink are funny things. People don’t have control over them. Sure, you can manage how you behave, but you cannot – absolutely cannot, ever – control how you feel. Sexuality is nuanced, complex, and rooted in nature and nurture. I should know. I spent twenty-two years thinking I was a hetero woman who was drawn to one man at a time, in serial.
Not parallel.
Being in a permanent threesome is not normal, if our standard for normal is monogamy between two people. Until a few years ago, I’da said a man and a woman, but we’ve evolved as a society.
Ain’t evolved far enough to make chicken love ‘normal,’ though. Not even close. In fact, I’m pretty damn sure there aren’t words for people who are sexually aroused by chickens.
In fact I’m sure of it, because as I looked at the chicken fetish booth, I was rendered speechless, and if I couldn’t find a single word to say about something, it was bad.
“BAWK!” said a grown man wearing rimless eyeglasses and a thick, bushy, red beard like a squirrel’s tail. He slipped one (thankfully) clothed leg into the diaper, and I turned away.
Laughing at a fetish convention seemed pretty much like farting loudly at a funeral.
The impulse to giggle felt good for a split second, until I remembered why I was here at this convention.
I was hiding. Hiding from Joe and Trevor, from the band, from me.
Maybe that was it. Maybe people with fetishes were just trying to escape who they were for awhile. I eyed the chicken diaper, the one not currently on the hipster dude, who looked a lot like someone who works at the Genius Bar at an Apple Store.
It would take a lot to get me to turn into a sexually-charged chicken to escape my life.
But not much more, at the rate I was going.
I wandered, checking out the Kegal-powered joystick you could sync with your gaming system. Not literally checking it out, mind you, but fascinated by it. Anyone who says Millennials are ruining this country hasn’t seen a demo of that device.
Just then, I saw them staring at me, nudging each other with little smiles and smirks long before they realized I saw them. One of them pulled out a phone, tapped rapidly, and the two of ’em looked up and down over and over, obviously comparing me in real life to something on that phone screen.
They looked like pecking chickens.
Not just because their heads went down then up abruptly. That alone wouldn’t have made them look like fowl.
It was the full-on chicken costumes that did it.
What the cluck?
One was a Rhode Island Red, just like Mavis. Rust-colored feathers, a large barrel-chested breast, and a bright red rubber head with a large multi-colored beak. He wore tights the color of chicken legs and bigass feet like Big Bird’s, from Sesame Street.
The other was your plain old white chicken. Just white, with a red top and a yellow beak. Nothing fancy. Something about her simplicity set me the fuck off.
Sick, tired, shaky, horrified, and so humiliated I felt like my tongue was going to flee my body out my ass, I stormed up to the couple and shouted, “Take a picture! It lasts longer!”
Not original, I know, but I was basically a furious four-year-old who felt responsible for her daddy dying. No, losing all that money wasn’t the same, but when you’re coming off being drunk, acting against every instinct inside you, and losing eight thousand dollars of someone else’s money, you don’t exactly possess a sparkling vocabulary. Or insight.
“Can we?” Rhode Island Red asked with surprise. “We wouldn’t want to invade your privacy.”
“What do you call gawking at me?”
Their heads huddled, the necks moving in jerks and fits like they were pecking and scratching ticks out of thin air.
“What the fuck are all of you?”
“I’m Rooster, actually,” the tall one said, his beard poking through the costume’s beak, making him look like he had a hairy tongue. Chickens don’t have tongues, or if they do, I ain’t seen one. The cognitive dissonance made me want to point that out, but the rest of my brain was focused on the ridiculous fact he’d just spouted.
“And I’m Mavis,” the white chicken said.
“Mavis?” I squeaked. I looked her up and down. Trevor had a thing for Mavis, but if Trevor ever wanted to move that into real-life sexual play, Rooster was the shit. He was allllllll bear. He was a bear dressed up as a chicken, and my brain cracked like the fragile shell of a fresh egg, all the insides oozing out in a disappointing display of weakness.
“I know,” Mavis said sheepishly. “He should be Mavis, because Mavis is a Rhode Island Red, but…” She shrugged, as if that explained everything.