**********
In the spring she had a doctor’s appointment. She called him after, crying. Said she needed to come over. She had cancer, she said. There were going to be treatments but she probably wasn’t going to make it. We are going to beat this, he said. You are going to beat this. No, I’m not, and I need you to do something for me. She had no one. No family. If I get to the point where I might live but wouldn’t be me anymore, she said, I need you to have them pull the plug. He didn’t know how he would ever do it, but, how could he say no.
He would drive her to chemo, to radiation; she would tell him stories in the car. About her childhood. Things she’d never told anybody but had to tell someone now, otherwise it would be like they never happened. She had been through a lot, it turned out. Men passing her around since she was a baby. The life of a fucksleeve. The radiation burned her skin and the drugs made her throw up all the time and she started slipping away. He would sit with her under the IV bag and hold her hand. She was slipping but she was still her; she could still make him laugh.
The drugs didn’t work and she needed surgery. He was in the waiting room reading the hospital’s copy of Reptile magazine, for domestic reptile enthusiasts. The featured review was of the Tomato Frog. They may look drab when young, but don’t be fooled: they explode into a vivid red-orange in adulthood. Especially the somewhat larger female. An engaging and active amphibian. He wondered what it would take for Reptile to give a bad review. He moved on to The Hunt for the Dark Phase Everglades Corn Snake and noticed his hands were shaking.
A doctor came out. There had been a complication. One of the tumors was near an artery and they had nicked it. She was on blood thinners and was bleeding out. She might never wake up. If she did, her brain had been deprived of oxygen. She would not be herself. I understand that her wish was not to be resuscitated. We have some papers you’ll need to sign. They let him hold her hand while she died, with that stupid machine beeping like on TV.
She had been sick for a long time, skinny and gray with sunken eyes and no eyebrows and most days she could barely talk. But that wasn’t how he remembered her, driving home and trying not to break down and cry in traffic. He remembered the desert. The hot spring. Kissing her in the warm water, the wind whipping the bamboo back and forth. It would hurt him forever, the way she left him, but he wouldn’t trade it for the world.
In conclusion: five stars.
Coffee Shop Diary: The Smell of My Wang
I can’t stop fucking looking at this woman and I can’t stop being aware of what a fucking dork I must look like, resting my face awkwardly in my fingers. It is extremely uncomfortable but I can’t stop doing it. Because she’ll know I stopped doing it because I was afraid she would think I’m a dork. I can’t make eye contact but I can’t look away so instead I give her this squinty side-eye. And she knows, she knows, that I am supremely unworthy to ejaculate into her fertile young womb.
If I had a huge wang it wouldn’t be like this. I would just shoot her a glance that implied “hey, I have a huge wang.” I know I’m a jittery weirdo in a coffee shop at noon on a weekday but my member is unusually thick and lengthy. Therefore, nothing else matters. She could smell it on me. The smell of my wang. Her mind would try to resist but her loins would be inflamed by some pheromone and she would have to give me doe eyes. She would be forced to gesture that I follow her into the bathroom where she would “present” to me, bending over against the cardboard ass gasket dispenser upon which somebody has sharpied “Free Cowboy Hats.” Her cooch would pucker wetly in anticipation and I would slowly drive my impossibly thick fleshy snake into her hot meat tunnel and fill her with thick spurts of my manly seed. She would convulse, satisfied that I had given her a son who would also have a huge wang. We would shake hands, businesslike, and part company. Instead I look for something in my tea.
This Is All Your Fault Megan
I’m trying to masturbate to the redhead with the big titties from the Standard but the problem is, Julianne Moore has a movie coming out. So they interviewed her on NPR and I heard it and got her face stuck in my head. I get about three seconds of the redhead from the party before it becomes Julianne Moore’s pointy fucking Count Chocula face. Now you are cursed too. Go try to jerk off to a redhead and try not to think of Julianne Moore.
The redhead with the big titties wasn’t opening the door in room 413 and the party was winding down, so I admitted defeat and walked over to skid row to buy black tar heroin. The first guy I talked to just took my money and disappeared. He had handed me a garbage bag full of L.A. Kings T shirts as collateral, which I now own. Email me if you are extra large.
Eventually I found an old hooker who scored for me in exchange for two half pints of Kamchatka vodka from the convenience store. Got one for myself too. It’s actually not bad. I offered to get her high but she said no, I’m just a alcoholic.
You stupid, she said, comin around here with all that money. You a stupid motherfucker. Yeah, I’ve been briefed. I was wearing my tiny American Apparel swim trunks and one of those country western shirts with snaps. Black loafers. I was carrying a briefcase with my laptop in it. All around me were huge menacing black people. A man jumped off a kid’s Huffy bicycle to punch another man in the face. The origin of the dispute was unclear. No one paid attention. Cops would circle occasionally and they should have arrested me; there is no reason for me to be on that block except to buy black tar heroin.
This is your fault, Megan, with the red hair and big titties. Your cute dress over a bikini. If you had fucked me I could have let all my pent up energy out. I was drinking all day by a pool watching beautiful young pieces of ass saunter around in wispy wet bathing suits, grinding on girls on the dance floor with my half hard penis crammed in their ass cracks. I was wound up and it had to go somewhere; it was either gonna be pussy or hard drugs. If you had had unprotected sex with me on our first meeting like you should have, I’d have retired home quietly to a glass of chardonnay and a good book.
I can pinpoint the moment where I lost you. You were complaining to a bunch of dudes about how a guy who looked like Lenny Kravitz said he wanted to impregnate you. You started cuddling up to me and said you would rather have my baby. I went to get another drink, and saw Lenny. He actually looked more like a retarded black Robert Pattinson so I went back to tell you this. I should have stayed away. I had been playing it perfectly. Bumping into you around the party and saying a couple witty things and then taking off, leaving you wanting more. I lost it when I went back to make a lame joke about an old topic. You can never fuck up with women, not once. Meanwhile a gay guy invited me back to his room; I’m about 80 per cent certain I’ve seen him in black and white on a billboard with his shirt off. Maybe even Abercrombie and Fitch. So, I’m attractive apparently. Doesn’t matter. One lame joke and you’re done.
I have your number. Maybe I’ll call you. Take you out for a drink. I want to see your pink mouth around my cock and your bright red hair cascading over my hipbones.
The walk home was too long so I stopped to smoke my first balloon with a homeless guy, using foil from a discarded Philly cheese steak. Who else does this, I thought. Finds a down on his luck junkie and gives him free heroin. Dude better name his first child after me. I don’t remember feeling too high but it was three miles to get back in dress shoes and I couldn’t feel my feet hit the sidewalk. When I got home I called for the cat, I reached out to pick him up and I fell over into my neighbor’s rosemary patch. I fell pretty hard and it didn’t hurt. Now I smell like rosemary.
I got inside and smoked the second balloon and nodded off listening to Patrice O’Neal.
Shit Jobs: Telemarketing
You’re sitting there in a tiny cubicle in a moldy beige room with acoustical tile and you are separated from a bear sized homeless man with a loud booming voice by what is basically urinal divider. You have a headset on, an old one with one foam earphone and a curly wire going into a battered phone. You are listening to a cavernous hiss. And the
n it beeps and your back tenses and it’s showtime.
“…. Hello? HELLO!!???!!!”
The person on the other end of the line has been listening to silence and clicks for five seconds. They are tipped off to what you are. Because the autodialer waits for what it thinks is a human voice to connect you. The person is already pissed off. You have a dumb terminal in front of you. It’s the 21st century but you have a monitor with green block letters on black from the 70’s with what is putatively the person’s name and address, but a lot of times it’s empty or some guy who was about to get fired had put in “Harry Stiffey, 69 Cumshot Drive.”
“HELLO??!???” WHO IS THIS??!!??”
“Good evening sir, is this Mr. Sti– uh, are you the head of the household?”
“WHAT ARE YOU SELLING?”
“I’m not, I’m not selling anything sir, this is Cornelius calling on behalf of the Firefighter Charitable Organization, we’re asking for your support in helping the Fi-”
“PUT ME ON YOUR ‘DO NOT CALL’ LIST AND NEVER EVER CONTACT ME AGAIN” (slam.)
And then the hiss again. Select “DNC” on your dumb terminal. “Do Not Call.” As mandated by law we will mail a mimeograph of our “Do Not Call” Policy to what we think is his address and take him out of the system. Wait for the next beep. If you get five human beings in a row you’re doing all right. The dialer waits until it thinks it hears a person but a lot of the time it’ll give you that three tone disconnect sound ten times in a row. DOO DOO DEEEEHHHH and you have your headset turned all the way up because the fucking old ladies all gargle softly around fifty years worth of Pall Malls and they’re impossible to hear except at top volume. This means the “we’re sorry, the number you’re calling has been disconnected” sound is like sticking your head in one of those horns that a lighthouse blows in the fog. Mark that one as a “Telco.”
Or you get fifteen minutes of no English. We would call through San Francisco and some number exchanges are nothing but Chinese fresh off the boat, or Chinese who’d been here for years but never got off the boat in their minds, or Chinese who probably spoke English like they were hosting Masterpiece Theatre but had a handy excuse not to talk to us. “WEI? BING WA?” “Do you speak English, ma’am? Are you the head of household? “BING WA YA?”
But these things were still better than getting an actual English speaking human being who was head of household. Because they all hate you. Every single person you talk to hates you and thinks you’re a piece of shit and wishes you were dead and even when they’re polite you can feel it. “HELLO???!!!?? HELLO??!!?? “Good evening, this is Cornelius calling on behalf of the Firefighter Charitable Organization, may I speak with the head of household?”
“Do you know you called me DURING DINNER?”
Then don’t answer the phone, you fucking chump. Let the machine get it and savor your fish sticks in peace. “I’m awfully sorry to disturb you sir, but I’ll only need a minute of your time. Would it be better to call back another night?”
“Well, I don’t know. Let me ask you something– WHAT PER CENT OF MY DONATION GOES TO THE ACTUAL CHARITY??”
Stossel had fucked us, right before I got hired. Blown the lid off the whole operation. We called for police and firefighter charities, which sell boiler rooms the right to raise funds in their name. Basically the cops in your town get ten or fifteen grand to help schools or disabled kids or whatever and the company that I worked for gets eighty grand for the people who own it to buy small airplanes and strippers for wives. The cops know it works like this. But it’s still more money than they’d get sitting in front of Safeway selling cupcakes. And it’s good PR for everyone in town to get a call telling them your friendly police force is dedicated to keeping troubled teens active playing tennis in the Police Athletic League or whateverthefuck. The company puts on a variety show, or a rodeo, or a charity basketball game or something and what you’re selling is a pack of five tickets to this event for 35 bucks. You can go yourself, but, as the script says, most people opt to donate the tickets so local disadvantaged youth can attend. Lots of the word “youth” getting thrown around, so much that it becomes hard to say. Most people donate the tickets and keep the sticker they think will keep them from getting pulled over.
“Well, sir, after the costs of talent for the show, lighting, renting the venue, postage, phone bills, and paying the fine people such as myself who are out here every day making these calls, there’s a profit of about fifteen per cent left over that goes to the charity. We-”
“I THOUGHT AS MUCH. This is a SCAM. I would like to be put on your Do Not Call list, and have a copy of your Do Not Call policy sent to me–”
“Of course, sir, if you’ll let me confirm your address…”
“WHY ON EARTH WOULD I GIVE YOU MY ADDRESS?”
Stossel had fucked us, and congress had fucked us, because like the day before I started telemarketing they passed a law mandating a Do Not Call registry. You have the legal right to be removed from a telemarketer’s call list and to have proof of this mailed to you. And good old John “The Stache” Stossel had hammered this fact into the minds of every schlub in America in a series of hard hitting investigative pieces that also highlighted what a huge scam every single telemarketing charity is. We were already hated, so much so that a legislative body in America was moved to pass a law making life easier on individual human beings rather than businesses. Perhaps the only time this has ever happened. We were already somewhere between the Gestapo and NAMBLA in the national esteem and suddenly this Do Not Call law gave everyone magic words to name the demon and Make It Stop. The Do Not Call request was always colored with triumph, delivered like they’d finally tracked down the murderer of their kids and were finishing him off with a shovel to the head.
Select “DNC.” Wait for the beep.
Meanwhile all around you loud booming voices are making sales pitches. People who telemarket are not normal people. The guy next to me is homeless, by choice; he lives at a campsite by the train tracks. He spends his check on bourbon and then once a week goes over the hill to San Jose to buy hookers. He has been in San Quentin, in Santa Rita; he once saw a man get his innards cut out and his gut filled with toilet paper and his still warm corpse tossed off a high catwalk to create the effect of streamers. He tells me that a Mexican ain’t nothin but a high yella nigger with an accent, that you can cry all you want in jail but don’t take nothing from nobody, that the Woods shot caller in Rita ain’t too hard. But he has been doing this so long that he sounds like the Frontline narrator or Walter Cronkite. He has the booming gravelly baritone and perfect Ivy League diction you want the president to have. When he tells you the black streetwalkers are down to fifty bucks for an around the world you can almost hear an orchestra behind him. Later he’ll get arrested for shooting a man in the face with a pellet gun in a bar fight. He will be looking at life in prison due to his record, and his own mother will fly out from Georgia to testify against him. He is actually a sweet man and does not deserve this.
Down the row is a man who tells you he is an ordained Eastern Orthodox priest, who won’t shut the fuck up about what Alcoholics Anonymous has done for him. Like everyone whom Alcoholics Anonymous has done so much for he is thin skinned and the smallest slight sends him into slavering rage. He is of Serbian extraction, and will go into a long loud litany of every grievance against the Serbs, if anything even remotely germane to Serbia is mentioned during smoke break. The Muslims cut off our skins and used them as drums! He says. Later when Wikipedia is invented I learn that he was talking about the Field of Blackbirds, which happened in 1389. The Croats were Nazis! We learned to avoid discussing Serbia but you’d be amazed at the Kevin Bacon game of things that can be connected to Serbia. He was an aspiring standup comedian.
Behind him is a jockey-sized man with cystic acne in a purple velvet waistcoat. He moves like a muppet and his sales calls are long rambling off-script improvisations. You talk to him a couple times and he reveals that he was kidnapped
by the CIA as a baby, spent his childhood in a prison camp where they injected him directly in the spine every day with LSD. He says it gave him spinal meningitis. At some point two angels disguised as men came to him and told him he was the orphan prince of a galaxy called Lucifer 666 million light years away. He’d spent some time there vanquishing various evils on behalf of his subjects before returning to help the people of Earth. He felt he wouldn’t last long because the government was on to him. I visited his trailer once, was stunned to see that he had a beautiful nineteen year old wife. All you have to do is believe in yourself.
Everyone was fucked up, everyone had a drug problem or was in recovery or had a record too long and crazy for them to ever have hope of getting another job. So they had to come in night after night and listen to old people sneer that you’d called them during dinner, rack up three bucks a sale.
I got good at it. My voice got deeper. I started booming from the diaphragm, laughing off their perturbed “hello… hello’s” and connecting with them. Flirt with the old women. Joke with the men. You get on a roll and you get so much confidence going that the person who faithfully watches John Stossel and is ready to give you an earful of Do Not Call just gets hypnotized. You can’t fake this. You can go in with the same meter and the same pitch and the same words but there is something they can smell on you if you’re not confident, if you’re afraid. If you need the three bucks they’ll snarl at you and slam the phone down. But you get hypnotized yourself, when you get good. You are genuinely connecting with people and gliding seamlessly into the best way you can help is with our ten-pack for three hundred fifty dollars and your voice is saying I am so good at this I don’t need you to buy this, I don’t want you to, I am walking out of here into a gold Rolls Royce bought three dollars at a time and it’s just you and me talking on a lark here; it’s no big deal. If you need something, people will never give it to you. If you are weak, people will never want to help you. People are animals, they are evil, every single thing you ever learned about compassion is a lie and when the end of this filthy soulless sewer of a world comes I will stand outside and dance in the hellfire, the small part of me that was still human was thinking. I am a lying sack of shit selling you a scam but because I sound like I don’t want your money you will give it to me. When you are on that roll you could sell stickers that say “Fuck You Cop Pull Me Over” to the Chief of Police. The substance has nothing to do with it. It’s in your voice.
The Pussy Page 4