Chicken

by Lynn Crosbie

  “A character she thinks is sexy. Who made her climax during the rape,” she says.

  “How could you possibly know that?” I say angrily.

  “How do you think?” she says, and laughs at me.

  Enough is enough.

  I reach for her as she smiles lazily and leans back in her chair.

  My hands fall to my sides, defeated, and I turn to leave.

  “Don’t go away angry,” she says.

  I run off and stand by her door, breathing hard.

  It’s all coming undone, I think, as my heart rumbles dangerously.

  At home, Annabel kisses me hello.

  “Did my son make you hot?” I ask.

  She slaps me so hard my head hits the door.

  “Well, did he?” I call after her as she runs up the stairs.

  I do not follow.

  Instead I stand in a scalding shower swatting at images of my girlfriend conjoined with my son, of her jerking off later, her head filled with him.

  When I have dried off and am smoking, wrapped in a towel, in the kitchen, Annabel comes in and hands me a book.

  “It’s a journal,” she says, named Signs. “I wrote about this,” she says, pointing to the table of contents and to her article, “Reverse Cowgirl.”

  “It’s about rape and anatomical politics,” she says, nervously twisting the hideous puce cover until it tears. “And about — ”

  “I can read,” I say mildly.

  “The pleasure is involuntary,” she says, so quietly I can barely hear her.

  I pretend I can’t, and say everything is fine; shoo her away so I can change.

  She leaves and I flick Signs away. It was different when it was rape. I could only imagine tears and pain. Not pleasure.

  She makes me sick.

  It is the beginning of the end.

  O heart, lose not thy nature, let me be cruel.

  * * *

  I used to think that I was afraid everyone would laugh at me. Then everyone did, and it was bad, but not unbearable.

  Annabel, I know what I am afraid of.

  * * *

  Crispin writes to me: he is back at work, and I will “dig” what he is doing.

  “Sid meets a woman, this martial artist–slash–neuro-surgeon, drop-dead gorgeous,” he says when we talk. “He falls in love for the first time. But the chick dies.”

  “Why?” I say.

  “Because it’s a revenge tragedy. No happy endings.”

  I see myself holding Annabel’s dead body, racked with remorse, breaking open the sky with my grief.

  Then I remember that I can change the script — or can I?

  “Keep writing,” I say, and get out of the car.

  I am the new face of Fendi, and have some ads to shoot.

  * * *

  “Why don’t you model anymore?”

  “I didn’t like it. Neither did you. You told me it made you sick to think of all these guys jerking off to me in their wives’ magazines.”

  “You were so pretty,” I say.

  “Were?”

  She still is, but I miss seeing her in priceless dresses, laced in jewels and posing in magical gardens, held aloft by Green Berets at the center of a bloody riot.

  And I was jealous.

  I wanted her to make me beautiful.

  Sensing this, she tells me how good I look in my pale-pink shirt and red jeans, how rich and shiny my hair is.

  Then, how deep I am inside of her, that it hurts, but don’t stop, she pleads.

  Did she feel like this with Alex?

  When I left the fortune teller’s apartment, I went to the call girl’s place and fucked her for the first time. Hard, over a table, and she said the same stuff about my cock, and moaned the same, and came just as hard as Annabel does.

  “Why can’t she be you?” I say to Annabel that night, Annabel whose face I have buried in a pillow.

  She can’t hear me.

  I shudder to a stop and feel sick. All I can think about is my son as Sid, making her pussy wet for the first time —

  Taking her first.

  * * *

  I’m a monster.

  I can’t look at Annabel anymore, or talk to her.

  I hate her cowlike confusion and sadness.

  Late that night, blistering drunk, I call a distress center while she sleeps and tell a volunteer named Miss Pringle the whole story.

  “The body is a dumb slab of meat,” she says. “Pound it, and it feels pain. Tweak it, and it feels pleasure.”

  “She has a brain,” I say.

  “Do you?” says Miss Pringle, and I am stumped.

  “Your girlfriend’s reactions just happened, pantywaist.”

  “Pantywaist?” I am lying on the floor, numb.

  “Your virility is threatened by the violence your bastard son committed.”

  “I’m in distress!”

  At least I thought I was. I stand up, slowly.

  “She’s in distress.”

  I let the phone fall out of my hand and go lie down beside Annabel. She sits up and her face is a mask of fury.

  “I heard you,” she says, flicking my face steadily and sharply.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and start to panic.

  “No, don’t be. It’s a legitimate concern. Your son was gorgeous.”

  I stand and start to back away.

  “And you know how it is, right? Didn’t you feel good when Kray fucked you?”

  “What are you talking about?” I say. Looking down, I see I am gray.

  “You know what I’m talking about, you old twink.”

  She is magnificent, really. Kneeling on the bed nude, pointing at me with her long red talons.

  “Not true,” I bleat, reaching wildly for something to hold on to.

  There is nothing. I fall down, and the ambulance ride is the same as the last one except she declines to join me, or to visit throughout the many lonely nights in my empty room.

  * * *

  I break down and call Rabi. I ask him to bring me a contraband wet bar and he does, along with a bouquet of daisies.

  He and I watch Oz, Dr. Phil, then Ellen. Three days in a row.

  “Ellen is so happy. It’s infectious,” he says, and I cannot agree more.

  “I hope that glass addict moves out of her mother’s house,” he says. “What did Phil say?”

  “He said that we make our own happiness in life.”

  “Yes, that’s it. Phil!”

  My machines beep and hum. We are careful not to mention Annabel.

  I concentrate on forgetting what she said, the crazy bitch.

  * * *

  She takes everything: her clothes and cosmetics, her books, music, pictures, pillows, kitchen stuff, sheets, drapes, chair, desk, and all of the animals.

  Except the psycho Komodo dragon, who is clearly desperate to kill me. I have a comfortable muzzle designed and sleep with the beast, I am that lonely.

  All that she leaves is the real diary, next to a bottle of good Scotch and a carton of American Spirits.

  “Enjoy your suicide,” a notecard says.

  It is taped to one of those awful Moleskine notebooks.

  It is full. I don’t open it.

  I pour a drink and start screaming.

  * * *

  When I was still on the streets, Kray talked to the admissions board at RADA and to Welthorpe, the director of my first film, as well.

  At that time, he was in a closeted relationship with Simon, his very pretty thirteen-year-old boyfriend, a jealous little queen who forbade him from so much as looking at anyone else.

  And Kray never did. He was in love with Simon, and tortured by his heroin overdose. Simon died on Kray’s property, and two of his men dumped the body on the street
corner where they met. This was shortly before Lola left me, and Kray invited me to stay with him while we shot Ultraviolence.

  At the back of Kray’s palatial property, I have my own little cottage — still filled with Simon’s S/M accessories, perfume bottles, and movie magazines. I feel cautiously hopeful about a new life.

  I start looking for my own place, and dating, occasionally.

  And then Kray has his first small stroke. It changes him: his cruelty, usually seen only in glimmers, has mushroomed.

  The night he returns from the hospital he wakes me with a slap.

  “Who loves me?” he says, and rapes me, with extreme force.

  It doesn’t occur to me to fight. I close my eyes tight until all I can see is a hazy white zero floating in black space.

  My cock gets hard and my prostate twitches. My body disgusts me.

  He rapes me again, and when I protest, feebly, he uses a metal bar while pounding my face.

  When I won’t wake up, he drags me to his car and to a clinic known to him.

  I fall in and out of consciousness.

  In the car, he says, “I thought you were tough. Stop crying.” He asks for a particular doctor, who is on call, and curses when Dr. Kalita emerges.

  Kray decides to bluff: “The faggot is hemorrhaging on my good bedding,” he says. “I don’t care what he and his little friends do, but now he’s gone too far.”

  Dr. Kalita must see the misery in my eyes. He brings me into one of the curtained rooms — “Alone, sir” — and conducts a lengthy, very careful examination.

  “This must stop,” he says, and sends me out, after kindly pressing my shoulder.

  I don’t know what he says to Kray. I hear shouting, and he emerges, wide-eyed with: what? Is he afraid?

  I am transferred to a hospital to heal. I have deep fissures and broken bones, and my teeth are gone — these are replaced with expensive, pearlier ones.

  Kray never touches me again. He says things, but even then — having developed a tic — he looks around for the surveillance equipment he tells the crew is everywhere.

  “You’re on in five, princess,” Kray says, and we shoot the last scene of Ultraviolence, which J. Hoberman will say is “like discovering Jacobean theater for the first time: vile, lofty, harrowing, exultantly London-based, as ‘No clime breeds better matter for your whore.’”

  In this scene, Sid avenges himself. He shoots all of his enemies in Whitechapel after lining them up in an alley and firing a machine gun into the night sky.

  They fall slowly as he slide-steps back into the street, dropping his gun.

  He crouches, then leaps for joy.

  The cast and crew burst into applause: a heavy rain had blown in out of the blue, and I acted through it. The scene is perfect.

  Kray makes me do it sixteen more times, using the first take in the end.

  At the wrap party, he puts his arm around me and says, “Why do you think your little friend didn’t call the cops?”

  I don’t answer. Shrug him off.

  “Because he has eyes on me!” he says. “He’s in deep with the filth, that bastard.”

  He smells cops, and wants me out. I am a serious liability. In my haste to get away, I don’t even pack a bag.

  I know the doctor has scared the mercifully paranoid Kray, and I thank him and I thank him still.

  I find a room downtown and entertain in it like Caligula, and you know the rest: Kray’s renewed interest in working with me, my move to California, his role in my ruin.

  My retrograde amnesia, cured all right, by Annabel’s departure

  And whenever I speak of Kray, I say, “The man saved my life.”

  It is what I told Annabel, early on.

  “Cut the shit,” she said, and tenderly kissed me, moving me to cry out, hurting, happy, maybe.

  * * *

  I stay in bed, not moving, eating, or drinking.

  I remember everything: every sound, texture, and smell.

  I fish a receipt from my pocket and read the writing on the back of it: “Rape is retardation, the cessation of growth that posits violence as a membranous sac of seeds, tiny lashings.”

  The receipt lists

  Two whiskey sours, neat, with Bing cherries

  Three bottles of Tsingtao

  Plain white side dish. Customer has decorated it, and insists the plate is his (no charge)

  Shot: Jägermeister

  Shot: B-52

  Irish Car Bomb

  Large curly fries

  Four (bald) hamburger buns

  Dry martini

  Potato: customer is moved by its “dear face” (no charge)

  Three pepper shakers: customer has named them “Dear Friend,” “My Sweetheart,” and “Annabel” (no charge)

  Glass of champagne

  Jar of customer’s tears, labelled by customer: “Love’s Marinade”

  $70.00

  Thanks!

  Heather J

  Having misplaced my wallet, I hitchhiked to the bar with a teenage girl, who cried the whole way and kept asking me if she was fat until I said, “You are so thin I cannot see you. Are you a ghost?”

  “Thin,” she said, and cried harder.

  Through her grateful tears, I heard her say “the first time” and when she dropped me off and drove away, I thought, “Where have I heard that before?”

  Oh yes, Annabel’s sexy triumph. It is so painful even to recall the caption of this memory.

  I concentrate on the jacaranda blossoms framing the doorway, then I see an entire street in Santa Ana, where she and I once spent a weekend, filled with masses of the bluish-purple blooms. There were so many the sky appeared limp from elbowing its way through.

  And the sweetness of the smell! We filled our hands and lay in them later, a little unwisely: they are a sticky collision of honey and egesta.

  When their seeds let loose they floated upward; they looked like what a plaintive Annabel called — I don’t want to remember. In miniature —

  Dead babies.

  Annabel in the middle of the night, carrying a tiny, ornate box; the sound of a shovel ringing against stone, dirt on her hands —

  Singing of young hearts; standing still before the night bird’s song.

  Resting my cheek on the stucco wall by the entrance, I call Jerry for some money.

  “You sound strange. Are you all right?”

  I pull the pocket watch Annabel gave me from my vest; it is inscribed Sweet Daddy, after the Hank Williams song I like to yodel in the shower.

  Lord I love to hear her when she calls me sweet —

  I tell him I am fine, just late, very late, and return to the hotel bar, where I keep drinking steadily.

  Jerry arrives with one of his sturdy colleagues and they settle the bill as I jump into his car and peel out.

  They try to stop me but I am like a frantic greased pig in search of a tiny corner of the world where I might rest unmolested.

  * * *

  Pudge and Charles are in Spain on a bus tour. She has left me casseroles, clean towels and sheets, and a number where they can always be reached.

  I ignore everything, push the furniture against the locked door, and manage to have belated birthday flowers delivered to Annabel’s apartment.

  She will rip the heads off the roses and throw them out the window, giving passersby tender premonitions and vivid new Ascot hats.

  * * *

  I dial her number and hang up, every few minutes.

  Finally she answers and I say, “How did you know what Kray did?”

  “First tell me you liked it,” she says, and I find a clean razor and cut words into my wrists in her beautiful Spanish.

  I write DIRTY and WHORE and PLEASE until the blood pours out like a tide and drowns thes
e sorrows.

  As I cut, I ask, “How can you be so cruel?”

  “You started it,” she says, the fucking infant, and I drop the phone into the forest of burning trees, into the bloody maw of a Bengal tiger —

  When I awake, feverish from my floor nap, I use an old hotel sewing kit to stitch myself together, splashing rubbing alcohol on the cuts.

  I am sorry to wrap my skillfully iterated truth in bandages, but the thread keeps coming loose, and beneath my request — please know that I attacked you because I could not face myself — is a chilling glitter of bone.

  Later, she writes to say she is sorry, and that she knew because we are the same person. “The same, but post-mitosis now. Good luck,” and this is goodbye.

  The dragon stares at me, furious, and drops dead.

  I bury him in the backyard in a matte-black shoebox his mistress left behind and recite from ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.

  Soranzo: Did you but see my heart, then would you swear —

  Annabella: That you were dead.

  Giovanni: That’s true, or somewhat near it.

  My eyes moisten. He was a brave little man, who never got over Annabel. He has my complete sympathy. I scatter the sun roses he liked to chew on and spike the ground with a cross I have painted with cool red flames over his name, Tommy.

  Her idea, as with all the small, lovely things.

  * * *

  After three days of blinding pain, with no medicine or food, just handfuls of warm tap water, I change my bandages, put on my jeans and boots, layer a sweatshirt over a flannel and T-shirt, and head out after wrestling with the furniture jammed against the door.

  I bring nothing but a plastic 7-Eleven bag containing my envelope of treasures, which now includes tiny nail clippings and a flower from the dragon’s grave.

  As I leave, I take a look around.

  Annabel has left a few little things: tortoiseshell hairpins that I smell and reverently slide into the envelope, a hot-pink thong and white camisole I stuff in my pocket, and an almost empty bottle of Mitsouko whose contents I pour into the hollow of my throat.