“You and your old man. What kind of guy was he?”
“There were three of them. My three dads. The first one was the kind of guy who told me ever since I can remember that a law degree was a license to steal.”
“Was he a lawyer too?”
“No, he worked in a factory. All day long he made nails.”
“There’s a need for that, I guess.”
“Or sometimes all night long. He worked swing shift for years; you never knew when he’d be home, or asleep, or at work. And even when he was home, it was like he wasn’t, know what I mean?”
“Was he the one that told you about the birds and bees?”
“Give me a break. He and my mother would have rather dropped dead than mention sex.”
“What was she like?”
“She was half demon,” I said. Kevin probably thought I was exaggerating. “You could say while he worked swing shift at the factory she worked mood swing shift at home.”
“So how’d you find out? About sex, that is.”
“Sex for me growing up was always a sneaking, hit and run kind of thing, especially after my real dad and my mother got divorced and she took up with another asshole from the same nail factory. Moved my dad out and him in. He was the one who always told me how back in the depression the only people making money were the lawyers, from all the bankruptcies. And when dad number two didn’t work out either, she did it again.”
“Another nail factory guy?”
“Figured third time’s the charm, I guess.”
“What’d he tell you about lawyers?”
“The subject never came up. All three of them were scared of her, and had reason to be. That experience alone taught me all I needed to know about the birds and the bees for real.”
“I hear you. Domineering mother, ineffectual or absent father. It’s a familiar story.”
“Are you trying to tell me I’m gay?”
“I don’t know; do you feel gay?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then I guess you aren’t.”
“But you think I’m like Stan, right?”
“Now that’s something I hadn’t even considered,” Kevin mused. “See, a guy like Stan, he’s not a true homosexual: he just likes dicks. Crazy as it sounds. Plus he needs the wall with the hole in it because, even though he craves the gay sex act itself, he’s terrified of any real intimacy. The wall between him and the other guy is supposed to protect Stan from any man-to-man physical contact, whether it’s kissing or hugging or the other guy playing with his nipples or whatever. It’s kind of like a mockery of the Cat Lick confessional booth.”
“Now there’s an interesting parallel.”
“Stan wants to suck cock, all right: he just doesn’t want to think about that cock being attached to another man. And he’s almost got himself fooled, but not quite.”
“That’s why we go to the meetings.”
“Let me ask you something, Ricky: if you had to pick out what was the best part for you, the one part out of the whole experience over the past few days that you enjoyed the most, which would it be? Most guys would probably say the orgasms, but think about it. What about the secrecy? The rush of jumping the fence at the home place, almost being caught knocking off a little wood on the side but then making a clean getaway? That feeling of being smarter than everybody else?”
“You’re getting close. I can’t put my finger on it.”
“Maybe like an exaggerated feeling of entitlement, like having a license to steal, sexually?”
“Bingo.”
“You gotta get that sick shit outta your head, home boy,” Kevin advised. “I seen your wife at the parade, remember?”
“She saw you, too.”
“My point being, it’s time you realized you got way better at home. C’mon, man: Kendra M? She’s been traveling hand-over-hand like Tarzan through darkest Africa with every swingin’ dick in the Metro East.”
“Point taken. Thanks, Kevin.” I extended a left-handed shake, favoring my injured shoulder.
“Biker–style,” he grunted, coming back with a thumb-clenching one of his own devising.
CHAPTER TEN - PUSSY CRICK
I was getting pretty good with the wheelchair. After the mental ward attendant had pulled his get-even security drill, making me wait at the door for close to twenty minutes while they did a bogus bed-count—I tried getting even by telling him, “Thanks, Padre” when he finally let me pass—I managed to make it back to my room spinning those wheels faster than walking, maneuvering in and out of elevators and down hallway ramps like a guy who’d been disabled for years, hoisting myself back into bed under my own power mere minutes before the neuro consult arrived.
The neuro consult turned out to be a tall man in his fifties with a gold ring in one ear nearly hidden by wisps of long grey hair that hung past his shoulders.
“I am Doctor Nancy,” he said by way of introduction.
“You’re kidding.”
“Doctor Keith Nancy,” he replied, perhaps a bit defensively. “Do you remember me? I didn’t think so. How are we feeling today?”
Without waiting for an answer, Doctor Nancy grabbed the clipboard from the foot of my bed and began studying my chart, flipping through pages as though they personally annoyed him. Finally he settled on one he seemed to like.
“Do you take Viagra?”
“No.” Actually mine was a truthful answer, if intentionally misleading. I didn’t take the name brand, although I had spent the past couple of years abusing the black-market equivalent: my little blue pills, supplied to me by my connection, Artie Tremayne. I didn’t think Doctor Nancy would buy it if I told him I thought they were vitamins.
“That’s surprising. Your blood work shows an inordinately high titrate of sildenalafil. So does your urine. How do you account for that?”
I shrugged. It hurt and I winced. “I’ve never been called upon to explain my own urine. You’re the doctor.”
“Your family practitioner indicates she never prescribed anything for erectile dysfunction.” He peered at me over the clipboard, eyebrows raised.
“That’s true.”
“So where are you getting it?”
I shrugged again. Ouch.
“Given your age and your state of health, your weight and blood pressure, not to mention your history of alcoholism and methamphetamine addiction, this particular medication represents a ticking time bomb for you, Mr. Galeer. Bear in mind I’ve reviewed the CT and MRI scans of your head as well as your chest. Your circulatory system looks like an old car radiator that hasn’t been flushed out in a decade. Heart attack, stroke—these are very real probabilities if you continue the Viagra abuse. Not to mention the fact that street drugs like these Viagra knock-offs are unreliable and dangerous to be fooling around with. Word to the wise.”
“I hear you.”
“Do you? I’m not standing here talking merely to move the air around, Mr. Galeer. I happen to believe in telling the truth to my patients. And as one of your treating physicians I am warning you that if you go back to taking sildenalafil after you leave this hospital, you are jeopardizing your life.”
I searched my memory whether I might ever have gone after Doctor Nancy or his medical group for malpractice.
“Let me be even more blunt,” he went on. “If you choose to ignore my advice and take sildenalafil—even once, mind you—it is my considered medical opinion that the drug will cause you a massive coronary or a crippling stroke if it doesn’t kill you on the spot. You’ve been very lucky thus far, Mr. Galeer.”
“That’s what everybody keeps telling me.”
“Then maybe you ought to start listening,” Dr. Nancy said. “Don’t let that luck run out by being stupid. You could wind up confined to a wheelchair like that TV detective from years ago. Or with half your face drooping and paralyzed by a cerebrovascular accident, except in your case it would be no accident, would it?”
“I guess not.”
“How
would you be able to practice your profession if your speech were impaired to the point of unintelligibility, your tongue thickened by a severe stroke? Or your concentration destroyed by organic brain syndrome post myocardial infarction?”
“Geez, Doc, you sure know how to lay it on.”
“I do, don’t I? Nevertheless I am not exaggerating, Mr. Galeer. Your days of taking performance enhancement drugs are over.”
Doctor Nancy asked me how many fingers he was holding up, what day it was and who was president. I must have gotten all three questions right, because he released me from the hospital, cautioning me once more about the little blue pills.
I had already gotten dressed in my street clothes except for my shirt before the discharge nurse arrived with his stack of forms. Slipping a shirt on proved to be a two-man job for a guy with a dislocated shoulder. The pain meds helped. I signed whatever he put in front of me, then said, “Can I ride the wheelchair out of here?”
“We’re going to insist on it,” he said. “You’re getting to be a regular Lionel Barrymore, aren’t you?”
“How does a guy your age know about Lionel Barrymore?”
“From that hairball movie they play on TV every Christmas. How else?”
We were at the front doors to the place before I realized I had not called ahead for a ride. Rather than embarrass myself and risk having the discharge nurse put a hold on my release, I rose from the wheelchair and walked a few uneasy steps toward the turnaround.
An unmarked car approached. I turned; too late to summon the discharge nurse. He was already gone.
Grimm said, “Get in, Ricky.” It was an order. I obeyed.
Grimm drove in silence until we reached a city park, then turned in. He drove fast, whipping around the curves and punishing my shoulder with each wrenching of the wheel. Finally he parked facing a public rest room and shut off the engine. We sat more than long enough to read the graffiti on the wall and listened to the hot oil dripping down into the pan before either one of us spoke a word.
“Got a call about six months ago,” he began. “DB, late sixties, probable heart attack. Old codger’s fly was unzipped with his cock still hanging out. Somebody’d went and pissed all over the floor and then tracked it around, but nobody thought much about it at the time. This place is a known rendezvous site for faggots so the coroner’s office tentatively attributed the guy’s death to having too much of a good time and let it go at that.”
“I’d love to trade war stories with you, Lieutenant, but—”
“That old codger was my father.”
“Oh, geez, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry don’t cut it. It was my mother found his body. My mother!”
“That’s terrible. What a shock, huh?”
He stared straight ahead. “It wasn’t until after that phony break-in you staged when I took the trouble to Google a few names—yours, your wife and secretary’s—and I ran across that website and that pissing video.”
“Pissing video?”
“You know the one I mean, asshole: the one of your secretary’s big-titted cunt of a sister and her pervert husband killing my Pap.”
“I don’t know what to say, Lieutenant.”
“Him and the old lady were a couple of these what you call park-walkers. Every day, rain or shine, early in the morning before breakfast they’d put in their two or three miles on the pedestrian paths in this very park. Always walked hand-in-hand just like high school sweethearts, which they were, as a matter of fact. Then along comes Beattie and Russell and their amateur porno bullshit and next thing you know Pap’s lyin’ there on the piss-stained concrete floor cold stone dead. I guess they musta thought it was funny.”
Grimm broke down and sobbed like a child. I wanted to throw open the door of the cruiser and run away out of shame and pity for him. On and on he wept, without restraint and without self-consciousness, uttering sounds like a barking dog in the distance. My greatest fear was that this blubbering ogre might already know or might somehow find out later that I represented Beattie.
Abruptly Grimm stopped crying. He snorted once, wiped his eyes on his sleeve and started the car. “You know,” he said, “it’s always a small handful of people that cause ninety-nine per cent of the misery in the world. People like this Russell and his whore of a wife. Or this Snug Robbins. Nobody’d miss him if he was put away. Think about it.”
He drove me home and deposited me on my own driveway, then backed out and pulled away without saying another word.
Not even two o’clock yet. The kids would still be in school. Opening the side door to the garage I discovered Diane’s van parked inside. Unusual for her; she ordinarily parked the van on the street because it leaked prodigious amounts of motor oil and every other automotive fluid.
I tiptoed up the two steps leading to the laundry room and silently closed the door, then slipped off my shoes. Ascending the stairs leading to our master bedroom I passed the grouping of icons of the saints. The less taciturn ones seemed to look at one another dismayed as if to say, “Uh oh; husband home early.”
Soft voices emanated from beyond our bedroom door which was open a crack. Pushing the door fully open I discovered that Grimm’s suspicions had been on target.
It was Heart who spoke first. “Oh jeezus peezus,” she gasped, scrambling without success to find a sheet or blanket to cover her nakedness. Diane, interrupting her labors, drew herself up on her elbows from where she lay prone, wedged between Heart’s legs, and glared at me over her shoulder with what looked like pure scorn.
“Well, Ricky, now you know,” she said, red-faced but not from shame. “So what do you have to say for yourself?”
“Don’t you have it a little backwards? I mean your attitude, not your sexual position.”
“Always the funny, funny man, aren’t you, Ricky? Always the funniest man in the room, with or without pants.”
“Notice I haven’t asked you how long this has been going on, Diane? I already know all about Arlene Kuhn, you know.”
“You know all about Arlene Kuhn,” Diane said, her voice lowered with contempt. “Did you know I was the one who seduced her? That I could tell she didn’t want to at first, but that I turned her out, making her think it was her own idea and then making her beg for it in her own bedroom? And that once she finally got it, she decided she’s never going back to her own husband, because I’m the best she’s ever had?”
“Diane—”
“No; you know all about me. Did you know that three different married women have offered to leave their husbands and run away with me? Guess that means I must be really, really good at what I do. What about it, Heart? Am I really, really good at what I do?”
“Boss, I am so, so sorry,” Heart offered.
“Don’t you apologize to him after what he did to you,” Diane scolded her. “Yeah, Ricky, I heard all about you using that pussy wedge thing of yours on Heart. That’s all I needed to hear. Back to your old tricks again, aren’t you, my dear husband? I know how your mind works, remember? After twenty-some years of putting up with your strange ideas of marital fidelity I ought to know by now. Well, two can play that little game.” She sat up and reached to put on her robe, which had been draped across the foot of the bed.
I asked myself how Nick Charles would have handled a situation like this. “Now Darling,” I said, “let’s not forget our bedroom manners. Remember we’re entertaining a guest. And what a lovely guest she is indeed.” I did everything but twirl my imaginary pencil mustache trying to sound like William Powell.
Looking at me curiously Diane said, “Yes she is, isn’t she?”
“Be a downright shame for only one of us to take pleasure in all that loveliness, wouldn’t it?”
“Uh, guys, maybe we should like, think this over?” Heart said.
“You see how it is, Heart? Ricky’s not jealous in the least. All Ricky can think about right now is how much he wants to join in. Asshole!” Diane reached to slap me but I dodged her.
&nbs
p; “Calm down, Diane. Look at it this way; we can struggle with it all we like, but let’s face it: our marriage has undergone a total metamorphosis this afternoon. The poles have shifted. We can either relax and enjoy this serendipitous revelation—treating it as an unexpected invitation to a delightful new beginning—or cling stubbornly to the past, thereby causing pain to each other and to everyone around us, especially the kids.” It was hard to get all that out, what with having to subdue Diane physically as she wrestled against my grip, trying to hit me. And me just out of the hospital.
“Do I get a vote in this? Hey!” Heart shouted. “Guys! Do I get a vote in this or not?”
Finally, whether won over by the cogency of my reasoning or simply fatigued, Diane quit resisting and said, “Shut up and listen to what she says, Ricky. Go ahead, Heart. Of course you have a vote. The tie-breaking vote.”
“Well then I vote the three of us go ahead and do this. You two have four kids together, so it’s obvious to me you both love sex. Especially you, Di Di.”
“Di Di?” I repeated, looking over at Diane for her reaction.
“I don’t hear anybody objecting to a three-way except for you, Di Di. C’mon, loosen up, it might be fun. I vote we do it.”
“Motion carried,” I said, loosening my belt.
But my little blue pills were still at the office. I hadn’t taken any in days. Try as I might, I couldn’t get any response at all from Little Ricky, even thrashing around in bed with two beautiful naked women.
I tried making excuses. “Must be all the medication,” I told Heart and Diane. “I just got out of the hospital this afternoon, remember?” Then I tried apologies. “Sorry,” I muttered, “this kind of thing’s never happened to me before.”
“What’s the deal with your party monster, Ricky?” Diane teased me, meanly I thought. “I’ve seen more life in a plate of sushi.”
“You’re not helping,” I said.
“Have you forgotten your manners, Darling?” Diane said, doing her best Myrna Loy impression. “We have a bedroom guest who’s offering us her favors. The least you could do is get hard for her, if not for me.”
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