King of the Perverts

by Steve Lowe

  King of the Perverts

  Steve Lowe

  Finalist for the 2012 Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel

  Poor Dennis. He’s a regular sort of guy who’s recently been dealt a shitty hand by life: he lost his job, his wife hates him and wants a divorce, and it turns out she was also cheating on him as well. Now he’s living on his brother’s couch. Holy fuck, that sucks. Dennis can’t imagine things could get much worse, and that’s why he jumped at the opportunity to take part in a new reality game show: a “sexcathlon” where the first person to achieve 10 increasingly difficult and perverted sexual challenges wins a million dollars and is crowned King of the Perverts. Dennis doesn’t care about the title, he just wants the money, but now he’s not sure he can make it to the end. Enduring a golden shower and following through with an Abe Lincoln are hard enough, but he’s losing his nerve and fears what act of perversion will come next. He’d like to drop out, but his Russian bear of a cameraman, Mongo, has other plans for him and that million dollar prize, and Dennis has to decide which is worse: winning the King of the Perverts, or losing it.

  Steve Lowe

  KING OF THE PERVERTS

  From Michele Lowe, the author’s wife: I would like to make it abundantly clear that none of the acts or situations contained herein are based on real-life scenarios, and that no spouse(s) were hurt, either physically, mentally, or emotionally in the writing of this “book”.

  From the author: Well, almost none of them…

  The Golden Shower

  Hearing the words coming out of my own mouth confirms that I have slipped into some alternate reality.

  Up is down. Black is white. Peter Venkman’s voice echoes in my head. Cats and dogs and mass hysteria, all that jazz.

  Before me stands, quite possibly, the hottest chick I have ever been in the same room with. She is five-alarm. Tall, dark hair, voluptuously rounded, and best of all, wearing nothing but a sheer lace thong. You really can’t classify them as underwear, more like the rumor of underwear. Like the eerie outline left on the ground following a nuclear blast. Saran wrap covers more skin than these babies.

  And I am asking this woman to pee on me.

  Her head jerks back like I had connected with a right hook to her jaw. “You want me to do what?”

  Fuck me. Do I really have to say it again? Somewhere in the bathroom, my Albanian cretin cohort Mongo has planted at least one camera and quite possibly two or three to get different angles of this big moment. I swear I can hear him in the next room, on the other side of the paper-thin wall of this shithole motel he has found, stifling his laughter. I say a quick prayer, asking that he might choke on that laughter and die, slowly, and in agonizing pain.

  I lower my head and concentrate on the scarred, faded bathroom tile under my knees. I wonder how many such acts have taken place in this very spot before I came along. I also wonder how often it has been cleaned after such acts have concluded. By the looks of it, quite a few, and not very often. I say another quick prayer of thanks for the heady decision to keep my pants on.

  “Um… I said I want you to… pee on me.”

  I can’t bring myself to look up at her and instead fixate on her lovely navel, which is quite lovely indeed. She stumbles back a bit and wavers, trying to balance through the fog of four appletinis. I was hoping that would have been a sufficient number of appletinis to keep her from running, horrified and disgusted, out of the room the second I told her exactly what I was hoping she would do to me, but now I fear she isn’t drunk enough just yet. Curse you, shitty Applebee’s bartender and your watered down, suburban-housewife-strength mixing skills!

  I’m about to lose my nerve for good. This is it for me. If this doesn’t go down right here and now, there is no way in hell I can start over. It’s a small miracle I’ve made it this far. At this point in my life, I can hardly ask any woman out on a date and never a woman this incredibly attractive. Yet here I am wasting a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get it on with a bonafide hottie by asking her to shower me with urine.

  Asking her to pee on me would go over better than asking if I could pee on her. As far as I understand the rules of the game, a golden shower is a golden shower, regardless of the recipient. So, better me than her.

  But I can’t honestly claim chivalry here. There’s a performance anxiety element to this, like trying to piss at one of those cattle troughs in a football stadium, where you’re shoulder to shoulder with dozens of guys, staring at the wall in front of you, forcing your eyes to remain locked straight ahead and not wonder if you had the guy next to you beat in the meat packing department. Nothing was worse than holding up the shuffling, drunken queue behind you because you couldn’t make wee-wee when the moment of truth arrived. There was this one time –

  “Well,” the girl slurs, snapping me out of my little daydream. “I guess so. If that’s what you want, baby.”

  What I want?

  No, this is not what I want.

  But at the same time, it is.

  Do I want a smoking hot babe to piss on my head? In the abstract, that answer is no, not at all. In relation to what I’m currently trying to accomplish, that answer is yes, that’s exactly what I desire.

  I want to shout for joy and scream at her to stop all at the same time.

  She tugs at her panties, fumbling to hook her thumbs into the dental floss-thin waistband. She wobbles again, falling sideways into the sink. I reach up to steady her and help guide the underwear down. She really is gorgeous, every inch of her, including her magnificently landscaped pussy. I can’t take my eyes off it. It’s like looking into the sun — glorious in its magnificence but dangerous to stare for too long, lest you go blind.

  Which is exactly what happens. I fail to heed that sage piece of advice, and now I’m blind.

  She does as I have requested. She pees on me.

  It burns my eyes, shoots up into my nose. My mouth is slightly open, too. For a second , I’m drowning a little, coughing and spluttering on piss.

  Waterboarded by a babe.

  She had to wizz like crazy, too; it just doesn’t stop coming. It sprays like a fire hose and knocks me back on my ass. The stream goes down the front of my shirt, onto my pants, spatters a little on my shoes before slowing to a light trickle dripping from her short pubic hairs and running down her gorgeous, gnawable thighs.

  I cough and blow urine from my sinuses, gagging on the bitter burning in the back of my throat. When I can see again, I look up at her. She’s dry heaving, holding her bucking guts with both hands, preparing to add an appletini chaser to my golden shower. I scramble, slipping on the soiled slick tile flooring, spinning my tires in the puddle of piss beneath me. I almost get away in time.

  Almost.

  There’s no sense in staying after that, so I don’t. In fact, I can’t get out of that room fast enough. And now I’m standing outside, here at this shitty roadside motel in Muncie, Indiana, still within view of the very Applebee’s from whence this awful experience began –my front saturated in some hot chick’s piss, my back coated in same hot chick’s vomit — waiting for my personal cameraman, a hulking beast from some backwards mountainous region in the Urals or some shit who I’ve nicknamed ‘Mongo’, to open the fucking door so I can dive into the shower and try to wash off the filth and shame of this evening.

  I’m wet, soaked through with a beautiful stranger’s bodily fluids, stinking something awful, but I’m also strangely satisfied. I proved something to myself tonight. I proved that I could actually go through with this stupid game. I’m not the pussy I thought I was.

  I can confidently debase myself as thoroughly as anyone else.

  I am pervert, hear me roar.

  This is a strangely good feeling and I�
�m sure I will properly reflect on it at some point in the evening — I’m in the game, baby! But that shall come later, perhaps over a cocktail. Right now, I have to get cleaned up before I go completely apeshit.

  “Mongo, open the fucking door!”

  I hear the faint sounds of retching from the room next door, number 26, and feel sad for my poor, drunk, sick, hot babe. I pound on the door to Room 27 again until the lock finally clicks. Mongo opens it only as far as the chain will allow.

  “Goddammit, Mongo, I’m covered in piss and puke and if you don’t let me in right now, I’m going to kick this fucking door into your face.”

  Mongo grins and says nothing. That’s all Mongo has done since I met him at the airport two days ago.

  Grin. Mumble. Chuckle. Silence. Vacant stares. Creepy fucker.

  I’m still not sure if he even speaks English because I haven’t heard him utter a sound classifiable as anything other than a grunt. He’s not cowed by my idle threats, either. He knows I won’t kick the door in and, even if I did, I would not be able to inflict any appreciable damage on him. Mainly because he outweighs me by at least a hundred pounds, all of which is almost certainly steroid-inflated muscle.

  He closes the door, fiddles with the chain, and opens it again. I step forward to go in, but his meaty fist blocks my way, a bucket filled with water dangling from his hairy knuckles.

  “You wash up outside,” he garbles in a deep, thick Russian-ish accent. Definitely Soviet Bloc in origin. “You are nasty motherfucker.”

  He smiles at his little joke and closes the door. The lock clicks back in place and I can hear him laughing on the other side — a deep, guttural sound like a growling animal. As I peel off my sopping shirt and lift the bucket above my head, I make a silent vow to get even with that shithead at some point. But that will come after.

  First, I have to win this contest.

  Interlude 1

  The Divorce

  You may ask yourself, how am I in this situation?

  Why am I holed up in a shitty motel with drunk college chicks, asking to them to pee on me? Sharing a squalid room with a cameraman who is borderline gorilla? Standing on the second floor walkway of a shitty motel, washing bodily fluids off myself with a bucket of water?

  Am I some sort of sick fuck who gets off on weirdo sex shit like that?

  I want to say no to that, but it’s really complicated. Like life is complicated. Like marriage is complicated. Nothing is cut and dry, black and white, even if I wish it to be so. Everything is shades of brown like a shit the morning after a drinking binge. It all depends on what you consumed the night before that determines what color of shit you’ll be cleaning up the next day.

  So this really starts much earlier, as all stories like this tend to. Mine really begins about seven years ago, when I got married.

  It goes like this:

  Dennis was your pretty regular, average kind of guy. Not real tall, but not real short either. Decent looking, but in a somewhat non-descript way. He would actually have made a pretty good criminal because he was the kind of guy that, if witnesses were asked to describe him to the police sketch artist, they’d furrow their brow and chew their lower lip and struggle to describe him with any specificity. Dennis was just there, in a very non-threatening sort of way, like discount store corn chips. They weren’t Fritos, but they were sort of like Fritos, just lacking in things like, you know, flavor and texture. That was Dennis, the human equivalent of dollar store snack foods.

  Mr. Average.

  Dennis was not particularly smart, but he was smart enough. He graduated high school. He attempted college. He tried for a little while. He probably could have been something more if he ever applied himself like his dad had tried to convince him to do, whatever the fuck applying oneself really means. Dennis guessed the definition depended on the person uttering such a vague phrase. It wasn’t that Dennis didn’t want to learn, he just never really cared to do more than was absolutely necessary. He lacked ambition. He had no goals, aside from trying not to embarrass himself or his parents by flunking out or getting in trouble or standing apart from the crowd in any way whatsoever.

  Once he got to college, he didn’t really know what he was going to do next. No surprise he didn’t last very long.

  Enter Carrie. Dennis liked Carrie right away and it turned out she liked the hell out of him, too. They went from first date to moving in together pretty quickly, within a few months. Dennis stopped going to class and got a job because now, all of a sudden, he had things like bills. That sucked. Dennis hated bills. He never really had many of them until he moved in with Carrie.

  But Dennis didn’t look at it that way. He was happy. He fell in love with her. He even admitted he had fallen in love with her from the first night they were together. He was never much for fairytale romance shit but I guess you could look at it like that. Carrie always did. That’s probably why it went so bad so fast.

  Because, as Dennis liked to try and explain to his naïve bride, “real fucking life” was most definitely not a fairytale. He did his best not to term it in such a way. At least, not at first. Once the shit began rolling downhill, though, it changed.

  Dennis supposed he was as much to blame for it going bad as Carrie was. He tried to tell himself that. But no matter the amount of self-loathing, regardless of how hard he tried to convince the reflection in the mirror that holding onto hate was not healthy, he simply couldn’t get past the facts:

  Carrie changed, not him.

  Carrie wasn’t living in reality, he was.

  Carrie fucked him over, and good.

  They didn’t just fall out of love, they plunged headlong into hate, with a capital fucking H.

  Dennis had dropped out of college to support them. Carrie never even bothered to get a job.

  Dennis worked a second part-time job to keep up with the mounting debts. Carrie excelled at adding to that mountain.

  Sex became a thing of the past, which only added to Dennis’s spiraling attitude toward his wife and their relationship. The only thing he could be thankful for was they had managed to avoid conception.

  That’s the short and dirty version of things. Maybe I’ll get into it a little more in-depth later, but really, that’s all you need to know leading up to D-Day.

  D-Day hit seven months ago, and it went something like this:

  “Dennis, we need to talk.”

  “Wow, what’s the special occasion?”

  “Shut up and sit down.”

  “I’d rather stand.”

  “Why do you have to be such an asshole?”

  “What do you want to talk about? I’m going to be late for work.”

  “Screw work, we have more important things to discuss.”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury to just say, ‘Screw work.’ Someone has to make sure the repo men don’t come for the car again like they did last month. At some point you might understand the concept of work leading to money, which you use to pay your bills, and the more you spend the money on things that aren’t bills, the more you have to work to make more money to cover what you pissed away on — ”

  “I want a divorce.”

  Silence.

  Shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it still came as a slap in the face. I didn’t know why at first, but the more I thought about it later when I had nothing but the cold hand of loneliness to cuddle with on my brother’s couch, the more I figured it had to do with failure. I sure as hell didn’t want to be married anymore, but getting divorced made me feel like a failure. Quitting college didn’t because that was my choice. I controlled that decision. This, I had no control over. I should have brought it up first, but I didn’t. I was determined that at some point we would figure it out. We would get better at being adults and spouses. At being mature people. But we weren’t and we didn’t. We were just a couple of spoiled kids playing grown-ups. And now she was controlling what happened next and that just didn’t sit well with me.

  “Fuck y
ou, a divorce.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “Fuck me? You better watch the words that come out of your mouth right now.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “You bet your ass I am.”

  “You can shove your threats up your ass. And we’re not getting divorced.”

  Yes, I realize now how stupid that sounds. What can I say? I don’t handle change and upheaval well.

  “You tell me to fuck off and shove it up my ass and then insist that we’re not getting a divorce? Are you shitting me?”

  I didn’t respond only because I couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t include words like fuck and shit and cunt. If I had responded, it would have been something equally stupid. But who speaks eloquently when their wife says she wants a divorce? I believe I deserve a little slack.

  Unfortunately, we talked some more. As expected, I eventually said more dumb shit, but she was still in charge of the exchange, which just pissed me off even more. She had come ready, too. She slid the divorce papers across the table to me. Yes, I was still standing, and no, I did not take them. She even had little sticky arrows pointing to all the spots I was supposed to sign, like I couldn’t have figured it out myself.

  I didn’t sign them. I left and went to work.

  I got there late. I picked a bad day to show up late.

  I got fired.

  This was a bad time for me.

  I didn’t see or talk to Carrie for a week. I went to stay at my brother’s house in Muncie, about two hours north of home. Changed my cell phone number. Hid from the world in a cocoon of self-pity. One day, my divorce papers showed up in my brother’s mailbox. I thought about burning them and then pissing on the ashes and sending them back to her, but I didn’t do that.

  I signed them. I let them sit for almost a month, but eventually I did sign them. Once I had initialed the final spot and scribbled my autograph on the last line, I immediately wished I wouldn’t have waited so long. Putting pen to those papers and signing off on the failure of my marriage turned out to be the most liberating experience of my life. I instantly felt free. I felt like I could smile again. I didn’t smile, but at least I felt like I could, and that was big for me.