The Life and Times of Innis E. Coxman

by R. P. Lester

  Thank God for Fred! In the afternoons, he’d meet me by a makeshift hole in the fence for our walk home from school. He’d seen everything.

  My faithful friend hoofed it toward Trashley with hot daggers in his eyes and enough fumes in his ass to blow away an entire acre of evil! That little sorceress may have had a reptilian heart, but I had a fearless omnivore ready to eat her black spirit! He gnashed teeth at Trashley, halting her from another assault as I heaved in the background.

  Keeping that succubus at the fringe, Fred made attempts to look for my little raisins in the dirt so they wouldn’t get squashed, him being a goat and not realizing that it’s physically impossible to kick the testicles out of a scrotum. I think it is, anyway.

  Seeing futility in further attack, Trashley accepted defeat (that’ll teach her to fuck with my music!). She grew weary of the fat bastard writhing in pain and put her witch’s costume back on, straddling her broom like a Thoroughbred and clopping away to steal the leg braces from that handicapped kid with the asthmatic seeing eye dog whose mom was in jail.

  With good fortune held together by spit and prayer, I was able to take a knee, but getting up wasn’t in the cards. My loyal ally picked me up with his Herculean teeth and helped me right myself. We exited through the hole and I limped the six blocks home, Fred supporting me whenever I began to falter. I was a butterball, but my goat was tough and could prop me for hours if need be.

  And oh God, did I need be.

  My parents had gone out of town for a few days so I was spared the twenty questions. I collapsed on my bed where I slept for the rest of the night. Fred laid down on his blue quilt and chewed on a pair of Victoria’s Secret panties from the garbage can of the escort next door, prepared to alert me should Brunhilda return to finish the job. When I awoke the next morning, I discovered that he’d nudged my Wiffle Ball bat next to my unconscious body.

  Ride or Die Fred, my only friend in the world.

  ***

  It looked like a cow had chewed a pack of Juicy Fruit and slapped it under my dick.

  My pebbles reappeared the next day, though seemingly worse for wear. I probably should’ve gone to a doctor, but fuck that—that would’ve led to my parents’ involvement and I wasn’t telling them shit. I guess I could’ve gone by myself, but I was ten years old; what the hell was I going to use for payment, fucking Batman comics? After a few days my sack quit looking like a stressball in an abusive marriage so I knew it was cool.

  The fact that I didn’t tell my parents about Trashley’s testicular ambush didn’t carry weight at school. The principal found out but, despite there being dozens of witnesses, Trashley maintained innocence and ducked retribution of any sort (her mother being a teacher at the school had a lot to do with that shit). My parents were never notified. The furor eventually died down and it was not at fucking all forgotten about.

  ***

  Trashley and I parted ways after sixth grade. Through associates, I heard she’d gone on to become the leader of her coven through high school graduation, her employment options scarce once she realized black magic wasn’t a viable skill in the American workforce. I often heard of her struggles via third-parties, her main source of income being the other side of a gloryhole.

  I saw her once and we laughed about this childhood memory over drinks, the flakes from the Goldschlager lining her lips like she’d blown a Mardi Gras dancer. And my, how she’d changed; back then the girl was so skinny she could barely hold a thought. But she’d filled out quite nicely by the time of our encounter, and for a moment, I thought I was about to get laid. Wistfully, our reunion was cut short when her break ended and she had to get back on stage.

  As I bid Miss Sexneeder adieu, I couldn’t help but salivate, her colossal asscheeks devouring her red g-string as she wrapped her sizable thighs around the pole and shook her enormous belly and G-cup hooters for the last show of the evening.

  I’ve always loved the thick ones.

  Lifestyles of the Bitch and Shameless

  Many have heard the saying, “Don’t let one incident in your life define you.” It’s a simple statement with a humanitarian concept, but it’s easier to voice than it is to apply. Because for many years, I let a single, dispiriting circumstance do just that.

  In the course of one’s existence, an event can occur that changes the way they look at themselves, the world, and its inhabitants. One intervening half-second of fate can reshape their plans for the future, their self-esteem, and ultimately, their self-worth.

  So then.....

  In high school a rumor circulated that a chick made me cum on myself. It ruined any potential for that portion of my history and was a huge incitement for the plunge into drugs and alcohol that persisted for the better half of two decades.

  ***

  Picture the Rob Lowe of your high school. Or one of the rent-boys from Twilight, depending on your level of gay. That guy who made the women swoon with a flip of his locks and a flex of his crotch. The student whom teachers yearned to have in their class who was the poster boy for popularity: defined muscles, a rugged jawline, fashion sense straight from GQ, and a laugh so infectious it made STDs jealous.

  Now strip that asshole of his superficial bullshit and you have me: a timid, insecure, lonely ninth grade loser whose sole talent was encrusting the family towels.

  You may be asking yourself, “How in the hell could you jerk it so much, Coxman?” The answer’s simple: I was the clueless new guy who failed miserably at social interaction. How to Address Peers Without Appearing Stupid should’ve been a pamphlet issued in the first week of school, man. My aloneness left me all the time in the world to envision titties I couldn’t touch.

  The only people I knew were the two older kids from next door who I’m almost certain were bribed into showing me around. I had zero street cred, which can be worse than shitty cred, and I was as invisible as the bassist in a rock band. Dating wasn’t even feasible; the closest I ever got to the opposite sex was in my dreams. I didn’t get any action in reality, but in my mind I was Thor.

  (By the way, you ladies who would’ve rather walked over my dead body than said hello: you deserve to know that in my twisted bitch of a brain I fucked all of you a thousand times. You did things that would make back alley whores vomit and seek Christ. If those statements require refinement, just imagine yourselves in 2 Girls, 1 Cup. Starring as the cup.)

  If there was only some way to get noticed by a chick. A way for a girl to see the lesbian within me. A talent I could exploit to lay with one tarted harlot. Anything other than being unnoticed and alone.

  Enter a girl named Slobadong Misuchabitch.

  ***

  Slobadong had expressed an interest in me since the first day of school, or so I was told. She sat across the room from me in Biology and we’d never even spoken to one another. But the scarce number of people I associated with said that she’d asked about my availability.

  My loins flickered at the prospect of having a girlfriend, though Slobadong wasn’t the bar of gold I was mining for. She was rough to look at, so much so that I thought she was related to Hoam Li and Ug Li, two brash Mandarin sisters whose faces were known to uproot tree stumps.

  I decided that sexless beggars can’t be choosers. I’d always heard that Slobadong was abrasive, so if I was unhappy I’d drop her. When the opportunity presented itself, I’d give her my phone number and see where it led. There was only a skosh of apprehension coating my bones:

  Slobadong was such a whore that the only students seen in her company were the jocks who packed towels to wipe the semen off her back.

  ***

  Hailing from the Russian tundra, Slobadong did nothing to dispel the legacy of cruelty left over from Stalin’s Siberian prison camps. She came stocked with a full mustache, a face that could be used for a voodoo charm, and a personality so caustic it corroded hope. The only attributes going for her were breasts that passed for deflated medicine balls. If provoked, she could swing them and break a jaw. All
in all, she was a brutish Russkie with untameable facial hair who enjoyed fighting and turmoil.

  Since her family’s arrival in America, Slobadong had always confined her villainous tendencies to the streets—where she was never mowed down by a gang of drunken Shriners, goddammit—but when hurling Molotov cocktails at the homeless ceased to provide release, she set her sights on me, smearing my dignity like a Bulldog eating mayo.

  ***

  The principal had held a screening of Scorsese’s romantic 70s masterpiece Taxi Driver in the school auditorium. It was meant to show appreciation to the student body for attaining such high scores on a statewide standardized exam (forged permission slips were collected in homeroom). Those attending were dismissed from class at 9 o’clock to gather behind the school. I’d arrived on my lonesome and melded into the crowd as we were herded across the street to the facility.

  The building had been constructed during World War Two and was in a state of crumbling disrepair. It was a two-balcony venue, its interior made up of cinder blocks that were painted a sickly yellow. Streaks of paint were missing on a majority of the masonry, and chunks of grout had been gouged by those with prohibited weapons. The seats had once been a dazzling snow-white, but years of abuse and spilled whiskey had turned them tattered and dingy. Pushing the crash bar on one of the grey aluminum doors, I entered and inhaled the intoxicating scents of old cigarettes and Evan Williams, courtesy of teenagers who’d snuck in during lunch to fuck in the upstairs projector room and partake in all manner of worldly vices for the last fifty years. I snaked through a gaggle of Girbauds with too much makeup, tripped over a copy of Introduction to Physics: The Star Trek Theorems lying on the ragged brown carpet, and quickly procured a spot on the ground floor (damn, man—when I read all that back I see how much of a joke my high school really was).

  My popularity was such that I’d secured a row all to myself. I’d claimed an aisle seat and was digging the flick, when the pungent aroma of seafood suddenly filled my nostrils. Indeed, I had eaten catfish the previous evening and farted a minute before. I thought I’d shit my pants. I shuffled from side to side feeling for the squish. Wasn’t it, though. A quick check under my chair produced zero findings. Scanning the surrounding empty seats yielded similar results. So help me, I couldn’t locate the root of the funk. Unable to endure the stench any longer, I turned to find another seat only to look up at Slobadong standing in the aisle beside me. She was inhaling a can of Bumble Bee sardines like they were planning an escape.

  Surprised, I said, “Oh, hey, Slobadong,” in my best Dolph Lundgren voice, circa Rocky IV. I was trying to be suave but she didn’t say a word. She continued stuffing those abominable turds of the sea in her piehole, staring down at me intently.

  It was creepy as fuck.

  Legend had it that Slobadong’s stare once killed a shark and I was nervous. I steeled my balls and gazed in the direction of her dark, empty eyes. It was dim in the hazardous auditorium, but the movie projector gave me just enough light to view her features: her greasy black hair fell to the middle of her back with some ratty strands cast over the front of her linebacker’s shoulders; freckles dotted her face like an infectious case of chickenpox; her crooked nose told of the fights for toilet paper and cabbage back in Russia; a rash speckled her upper lip from the over-application of Nair; her right eyebrow held the scar from a lunchroom brawl over a deaf kid’s Nutter Butter; the reform school tattoo of Charles Manson on her neck pulsated with each tremor of her carotid artery; the knees of her jeans were wet from a blowjob in the bathroom; and her red plaid shirt screamed “lumberjack dyke” all the way to the Pacific Northwest.

  The decision to withhold my phone number came swift and ironclad.

  Without an invitation, she abruptly skirted by me to the next seat, shoving her ample ass in my face and dropping a sardine in my lap as she passed. She might as well have thrown a live grenade on my dick. I threw that motherfucker on the floor like it was a roach. I hate sardines, man.

  She plopped down next to me, her cheeks filling one seat as her fabled floaties threatened to engulf the next. We sat for a few minutes in silence, my eyes fixed on the movie. She all but poured the can of sardines down her throat. What yanked my sack the most was why she chose to sit there. With all the empty seats in the auditorium, her ass could’ve intruded anywhere it pleased. Didn’t matter—at that point, I was trying to cork the magnum of bile climbing its way up my esophagus.

  A sardine had touched me, man.

  She began speaking in a husky voice with a thick Russian dialect. Think Barry White from the Eastern Bloc.

  “What are you watching, Penis?”

  Any unease I’d felt about the situation quickly evaporated upon being called a male sex organ. I looked at her incredulously. “Excuse me? I’m watching Taxi Driver, Slobadong. I thought that would’ve been hard to miss. And what the fuck you mean by calling me ‘Penis’?”

  “Well, isn’t that your name?”

  “No. It’s Innis, not ‘Penis.’”

  “Oh. I’m sorry, Glynis.”

  “No, Innis.”

  “Tennis.”

  “Innis.”

  “Anus.”

  “No, goddammit—Innis!”

  She put her hands up, palms out and facing me like a mime trapped in a box. “Woe, woe, woe, Denise. Calm down. I just wanted to talk to you, that’s all. Look, would you like a sardine?”

  Is this pinko bitch serious?

  “No, Slobadong, I don’t want a sardine. Even if I did, you just ate them all when you tipped the entire can down your gullet. Thank you, though. Now, not to be rude, but was there something I could help you with?”

  “You don’t have to get so mad, Patrice. I was just wanting to get to know you a little bit. Hey, you want some vwodka? I soaked my sardines in the bottle all weekend so it would be extra strong, just like my papa showed me.”

  Sigh. “Look, Slobadong, I’m really into this movie. What’s up?”

  So began her encroachment on my cinematic enjoyment. While Jodie Foster engaged in gross and illegal child sex on the auditorium’s dirty silver screen, Slobadong gleefully yakked about nothing at all. I listened to her ramblings with the fakest of sincerity: her life in Russia before her family’s emigration; their escape from the motherland due to her father’s arrest for trafficking underage prostitutes; how the Russkaya Mafiya was after them because of his testimony in open court; her ability to suck a Tootsie Pop down to the center in two minutes.....

  Mindless trivialities that oozed from her lips like syphilitic backwash.

  As our feature wound down, she started rubbing my thigh and speaking of topics more sexual in nature, like the time it was her and four guys playing “Find a Fold and Fuck it” in the bathroom of some church in St. Petersburg. She trailed a painted fingernail up my leg, sending tingles to my nether region. My body was acting on pure instinct. Try as I did to think of something totally unsexy like your mom, my Levi’s became tighter in the crotch.

  The movie ended. As the credits rolled, Slobadong took the pint of vwodka she’d been sipping on and tucked it in a front pocket of her tight-fitting jeans. Bouncing her hefty cheeks out of the seat, she winked and said she’d see me around. Then she disappeared into the crowd.

  I felt like I’d been on a whirlwind. I was finally alone and didn’t know what to make of our get-together. When the lights came up, I looked down to see the empty can of sardines in the off-white seat cushion. Outlined by a large brown stain that wasn’t there before Slobadong sat down.

  I vomited all over the Doc Martens I’d gotten for my birthday.

  Cut to lunch time. I’m standing in the spacious lobby that doubled as a hangout watching a stoner roll one as teachers strolled by, blissfully unaware of his crime (that place had to be ripped out of a comic strip). Two burnouts named Michael Hegayla and Elmo Fagsund ran up to me grinning maniacally. They reeked of weed that’d been smoked in a Datsun and the Cool Water that was doing a poor job of masking it.
They finally quit giggling long enough to say that they’d something to ask me, but that immediately kickstarted their stoner’s laugh once again. Being as I didn’t really know either one of these vegetables, I had no clue as to what they were talking about.

  Hegayla finally pulled it together. “Hey, Innis, is it true? Hee, hee, hee.”

  “Is what true?”

  “Slobadong said you and her hung out during the movie. Hee, hee, hee.”

  I eyed them suspiciously. “Yeah, so what?”

  Chuckling like a first grader who can’t get through a fart joke, “She said you two were talking and.....tee-hee, hee, hee, hee.”

  I’d never smoked marijuana up to that point but I’d always heard it was next to impossible to tie your thoughts together under its influence. My patience was wearing thin at having to deal with two dumbasses who couldn’t complete a sentence.

  “Yeah, we did. So what’s your point, man?”

  Fagsund had been chomping at the bit and could stand it no more. “Dude—did you cum on yourself?!”

  I was as shocked as a Kardashian getting a clue.

  It wasn’t enough to make me miss a classic American tale of a New York City cab driver slipping into the abyss of delirium. No, Slobadong also broadcasted that she’d made me blast my boxer shorts without so much as touching my tubesteak. No lips, no graze of the teeth, not even a flick to the nuts. After the movie, she’d enlisted an introverted lackey named Finger Porkin to help spread this vicious lie. Finger was eager to please, for she hadn’t felt the burn of attention since her father had given her herpes in junior high. She was more than happy to assist with my destruction. The cherry atop this scoop of shit was that everyone believed them.

  My fate was sealed.

  Really, I should have seen it coming. I was the new guy who reeked of loneliness and hand lotion, and Heaven knows that setting homeless people ablaze can only keep the maladjusted focused for so long.