Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  “You a cop?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “No way. I’m just a very desperate guy.”

  He told her he knew this place, an old apartment, not real pretty, but it was private and it got him off. When they reached Swan Street, she laughed. “I been in these apartments before. Christ, they look better now than I remember them.”

  He nodded. “Will you be impressed if I tell you I own them?”

  “Really? Wow. You must be loaded.”

  Paul shrugged. “They went for cheap. The city was going to tear them down, but I got that blocked, bought them up and fixed them up a bit.”

  “Look empty to me.”

  “Just started getting them ready for tenants,” he said.

  They went upstairs.

  Inside the apartment, he offered her a drink.

  “All right,” she said.

  “Need to use the bathroom?” he asked, opening the freezer door to pull out the ice tray.

  “If you don’t mind,” she said.

  “Go ahead. Take a shower if you feel like it.”

  “Well, you’re buying,” the woman said.

  When he heard the bathroom door close, Paul took the key from the dresser.

  Standing in front of the bathroom door, he waited until he heard the shower turn on.

  He checked his watch.

  It was two minutes to midnight.

  From the shower, she shouted, “Honey? You mind bringing my drink in and scrubbing my back?”

  He opened the bathroom door.

  Steam poured from under the shower curtain.

  Once inside, he turned and locked the door.

  He put the key in his breast pocket.

  “That you?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Paul said. “I’ll join you in just a few seconds.”

  He crouched down.

  Beneath the sink, a large wooden box.

  Opening it, he lifted the cloth within.

  He grabbed the hand-ax that lay there, and then closed the box.

  Paul set the small ax on top of the sink.

  He unbuttoned his shirt, and took it off. He hung it on the hook by the door.

  Then, he stepped out of his shoes. Undid his belt, and let his trousers fall to the floor.

  “Baby?” she asked.

  “In a minute,” he said. “We’ll have some fun.”

  He pulled off his socks and then his briefs.

  Grabbed the hand-ax.

  Looked at himself naked in the mirror, ax in fist.

  For a second, the glass flashed like lightning, and he saw Marie’s face there.

  A glimpse.

  Then, he pulled back the shower curtain and began opening the door to Heaven.

  The Night Before Alec Got Married

  1

  You can never be too sure or too stupid, but you can be too horny—Alec DelBanco, he was smart, but men are never very smart in that one area, and it got him right where you don’t want to be got, not if you’re twenty-four and on the run because something’s after you, only it doesn’t have a name and maybe it doesn’t even have a face but you can see it sometimes in their faces looking out at you like it’s some kind of tourist on a world cruise and you’re one of the Wonders of the World to It. You call it an It because you don’t know if It’s been noticed by anyone else, and you can’t really talk about It, because if you did, maybe that’s when It would get you.

  It got Alec that night, and he didn’t even have to say one word about it. Boy, was he smart, he was practically Phi-Fucking-Beta Kappa from Stanford, and then the job with Kelleher-Darden with an eighty-thousand-a-year salary for a twenty-two-year-old asshole you used to get drunk with—well, everybody figured Alec had just grabbed the golden ring and had not let go. And handsome! He’d been a stud since the age of twelve, if you remembered far back enough when every girl you’d ever had a crush on seemed to only want to get near you so they could get within breathing distance of your friend. Still, Alec DelBanco never forgot a friend, and you got some fringe benefits from knowing him all those years, beautiful girls who wouldn’t normally give you the time of day all around you—you couldn’t touch them, of course, not in the light of day, not with them in the room, that is, but, oh! when the lights were out and you were alone in bed with your hand and a little imagination—you had them all every which way but loose! You loved Alec, though, really loved him. Like a brother, I mean, because you’d practically grown up with him since you could remember. He was better than a brother, too, because your own brothers were kind of missing something in the compassion department. I wouldn’t fuck a guy, no way, but if I had to fuck a guy—I mean, like the Nazis had me in this torture rack and told me I’d have to fuck a guy or get it cut off, well, I couldn’t fuck just anyone—it would have to be Alec, and not just ’cause he was pretty, but because I have feelings for him—but not like you think. Once, in the showers after gym, he was leaning around to get his towel, and I swear to God this is true, I thought he was a girl, from the back, he’s all lean and muscular, but I thought he looked like, you know, one of those Olympic women swimmers, taut and strong but kind of attractive, too. So, yeah, if pressed into it, I guess you could say I’d do him.

  But this isn’t about me or what I would do if the Fourth Reich came along—and it just might if you read the papers—it’s about Alec and the night before he got married. His girl, Luce, was out with a whole gaggle down at the Marina getting toasted on margaritas and opening cute little presents, while you and me were over on Sunset trying to find just the right pro to come in and do a little dance over Alec’s face when he least suspected it. I didn’t like Luce too much—she was always kind of a bitch to me, almost like she thought I wanted Alec more than she did. I’ve got to be honest here, I would’ve preferred Alec to marry a hooker and at least be happy rather than wed Lucille C. St. Gerard, a fifth generation Californian from Sacramento who debuted at every second-rate cotillion north of Bakersfield.

  So we cruise Sunset, all the way from, say, La Cienega up to Raleigh Heights, and it’s getting close to nine—you’d think every working girl in the world would be out by that time—Saturday night, party night, but we only see a bunch of tired old dogs pounding the pavement. You and me, we’re doing St. Pauli Girl, but keeping the bottles low so the cops don’t notice, when I see what I think is just about the most beautiful piece of work this side of the Pacific and I slam on the brakes and cross a lane to park.

  “Look at her, holy mother of fuck, look at her,” I say, and barely remember to put on the parking brake. I leap out of the Mustang—it’s a convertible—and practically dive right over to her. She’s got everything, and packed tight: a nice rack of tits, thin waist, and child-bearing hips.

  “Hey, little boy,” she says, “you want some sugar in your coffee tonight?”

  I’ve never picked up a whore, so I feel real tongue-tied.

  “You want a date?” She’s got teeth all the way down her throat, it seems, big white flashy teeth with a couple of gold caps in the way back. She’s practically steaming there like an oyster out of the fish market, and I start to feel like a twelve-year-old of raging hormones and dripping wick.

  “Listen,” I say, “I got this friend. Alec.”

  She looks at you in the car. “That him? He’s cute.”

  “No, no, that’s not him. We’re throwing a bachelor party tonight. We need a stripper.”

  “I can do that. I can do all of you boys.”

  “Well, more than a stripper,” I say.

  She shrugs. “I can do that, too.”

  “We want you to get him alone and, you know…” I say.

  She smiles. “A dance and a fuck? It’ll cost you.”

  “Not just a dance and not just a fuck, okay? We want the Dance of Seven Veils, like Salome did, we want you to really get him to want you, and then it’s got to be more than fireworks, more than an explosion, it’s got to be the Big O.”

  “The Big O?”

  “You k
now, the Orgasm at the End of the Universe. The Big One. The kind that guys dream about in their sleep, the kind that most of us never get.”

  She looks at me sideways, like maybe I’m some kind of creep with diarrhea of the mouth. “You just talking, ain’t you? You don’t really want the Big O, nothin' like that, do you?”

  I shake my head. “Every trick you got. Think you can do it?”

  She has a look in her eyes like she’s thinking, but cagily—she has a few secrets, I guess, and she guards them. Her eyes are muddy brown, and when she looks back at me, they look like tiny little pebbles, hard and round. “Baby,” she says, “I think I can do anything. You pay, I’m gonna make sure it happens.” She glances down the street. There’s a big fat guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt—he looks less like a beach boy and more like a beached something else. “My manager,” she says. “You need to talk with him, I think. I ain’t too good at the business side of things.”

  Because I don’t want to talk to him, I get you to do it, and the whole thing’s arranged, even though it’s going to cost us four hundred bucks, plus whatever she makes in her dance, and if it goes over two hours, another four hundred. Two hundred in advance, so I pay the pimp, and we give him the address, to be there at eleven, and then we head on back to the party.

  Now, this is the part where I’m really stupid, I guess, but you can’t have a stripper come to the party without giving somebody an address. But I guess this pimp looks at the money and figures there’s more where that came from—so he must’ve gotten this idea—and I’m only assuming. You and me, we look like nice preppie kind of guys, shit, we practically have ties on from work, and I’m wearing five hundred dollar Italian shoes. So he decides that when he takes his girl over, he better pack something, because you never know how much cash you can get out of rich, scared, drunk guys at a bachelor party. I don’t know a thing about guns, but this pimp probably had the automatic kind, and I figure that’s how you got two of your fingers shot off before midnight.

  2

  But I’m getting ahead of myself—it’s easy to do when you’re spilling your guts and you can’t always remember the sequence of events; especially if you’re trying to second-guess everyone around you. The thing with your fingers, it didn’t happen until about eleven fifty-five, and the thing with Luce, that happened just before ten, after we’d gotten back, hoisted a few more St. Pauli Girls and watched Long Jean Silver and her amazing stump-screwing of another woman in one of the six videos you rented from that scuzzy video store down in Long Beach. But something happened before even that, and that was when we stopped for more beer at 7-Eleven and I bought a bunch of multicolored rubbers, all fancy, and then pricked them full of holes and you and I laughed our heads off thinking about Alec and Luce on their honeymoon, thinking they were doing some family planning by wearing the rubbers. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard.

  So I stuff the rubbers in my jacket pocket. As I’m pulling out of the 7-Eleven, a car almost hits the Mustang, then swerves and crashes into a wall; the front half is all crushed, but the driver seems okay. “Should we call for help?” you ask, and I say, “Oh, right, like the cops are gonna love the beer in the car and all.” So we pass this woman in the car, and she looks at us for a second, and I got to tell you, I will never, as long as I live, forget that look. Women are like this swamp or something, all dark and mysterious, but still you got to explore ’em, it’s a guy thing. You know, I always say that if you were to put some fur around a garbage disposal, we’d all still take turns at it, even if it was turned on. But women, they have this power, that woman in the car, it was like she’d cursed us, you and me both. But we drive on, get to the house, ring the doorbell like twenty times before you remember you’ve got a key, and we get up to the party just in time to hear one of Ben Winter’s dumb blonde jokes. Billy Bucknell had been throwing up since about eight o’clock, and the bastard is still drinking. MoJo keeps stuffing his fat face with snacks, every now and then burping or farting; three guys I don’t know are there, too, not that into the flicks, more into the poker game and cigars; Alec’s little brother Pasco is sneaking peeks at the TV screen, but pretending to be more into a bowl of pretzels. And Alec—where the hell is he? Back in the can, ralphing his guts out—he’s not too good at mixing the finer liquors with the baser variety, but our motto through college had always been that if you boot then you can keep on drinking. Alec was going to become a severe alcoholic, by the look of things, because within ten minutes of coming out of the bathroom, he’s already mixing Zombies with Todd Ramey (“from Wisconsin,” he keeps telling everybody who gives a fuck). So Alec is battered and sloshed from the twin bombs of imminent marriage and bad booze, but he still has the classic smile and his dark hair still parts perfectly to one floppy side. “Hey, you,” he flags me down with an overflowing plastic cup, “get it over here, man,” he says, putting his arm out for a big hug. “Dude, you should’ve seen the mud getting flung at dinner, her sister’s a major twat.”

  When I get close to him, his breath is like unto a toilet bowl; I pull back a little to let a breeze from the ocean beyond the open window protect me. You keep looking at your watch; you’re nervous, I guess, about the whore. I say. “So, Lec, I saw Pasco. Getting tall these days, that boy is.”

  This brings a tear to Alec’s eye. “My baby brother. Gettin’ older. Already he’s climbed into more panties than me. HEY!” shouting across the room, “PASQUALE!”

  His brother glances over, shakes his head, maybe even rolls his eyes, and looks away.

  “He’s pissed ‘cause he’s taking her side in this.” Alec makes some obscure but definitely obscene gesture toward his brother.

  “Whose side?”

  “Luce’s. She and that sister—Jesus, is all I can say. Just Jesus. Hey, you wanna get stoned? C’mon, please? Wanna get stoned?”

  I shake my head, but I can tell that you want to get stoned ‘cause you’re all shivering, and I’m afraid you’re about to blow it and tell him this whore’s coming from the city, the kind with a pimp. But you don’t blow it; you go over to get another drink, and I think that’s a good idea. “What’s up with Luce?”

  “Ah, that bitch. Thinks she owns me. God, this is a good party, all my friends.” Alec begins crying; he was always verging on the sentimental, ever since I’d first met him. It was some Italian thing, I guess (he always said it was), about not needing to keep a tight rein on emotions, all the stuff. I kind of liked him for it, because I’ve never been a good one with the tears and open with anger. So, anyway, he tells me all about this thing with Luce, how she heard some story from her sister about Alec and this girl at a party from about a week back and suddenly she’s claiming that he’s doing everything that walks the earth. “She has this trust thing, it’s something I don’t understand,” he says. “I mean, I trust her, hell, I’d trust her even if she was jawing some guy right in the backseat while I was driving, why the hell doesn’t she trust me? It’s not like I was unfaithful to her or anything, I was just, well, pursuing a little.”

  “Women.” I shake my head, amazed that yet another woman failed to understand a man so completely. “And it’s not like you were even married.”

  We both crack up at this, drunk as we are. “She even called me an asshole,” he says, and we laugh some more.

  “Of course,” I say, coming down from the laughing high just like those kids in Mary Poppins when they came down from Uncle Albert’s ceiling. “It’s true. I mean, we’re all assholes. Basically. All men are assholes.”

  “Basically,” he concurs, and we crack up again.

  As if this were the greatest cue in the world, the French doors open—we’re at your folks’ house at Redondo, with the cliff and the balcony and the moonswept Pacific just out there—out there—and it’s the door to the balcony, so whoever it is has to have climbed up the trellis or something to get to the second floor, and who do you think’s standing there with a tight green dress and a big old ribbon tied around her waist looki
ng like Malibu Barbie on a date, but Luce, more Nautilized and Jazzercised than when I’d last seen her, and she just keeps coming like a barracuda right toward Alec and spits in his face.

  He’s still laughing from the joke, too, so now he’s all shiny and laughing and hiccupping like he might start throwing up again.

  Luce looks at me. “When he sobers up, tell him there won’t be a wedding, tell him I know all about it, and tell him he can go to hell.”

  Then she turns and sort of flounces out of the room, down the hall stairs, presumably to go out the front door this time.

  “What,” Alec says, shaking his head, “she fly up here on her broom?”

  “Must’ve,” I say, “so, wedding’s off?”

  “Jesus, if I listened to her, the wedding would’ve been off for the past six months. Trust me, man, she’s gonna be there tomorrow, it’s costing her dad too much and her ego way too much—she’d rather wait and get divorced later on, I know her, I know my Luce.” And it was true about Luce—she’d rather worry about divorce in a couple of years than not get married at all. She attached a lot of status to Alec—his family was rich, he was rich, and they were going to live in Palos Fucking Verde Estates and have a house big enough for the two of them and any lovers that snuck in the back door.

  But with love, who knows? Could be once that ring was on his finger, he’d be the most faithful little lapdog the world has ever known. Could be she would be, too, and then they’d sink into the marriage trap where sex is an outmoded idea and lust gets swept between the rug and the floor.

  But not the night of his Bachelor Party.