by Steve Lowe
Mongo doesn’t say anything. He just watches me. His rapey grin is gone, but I almost prefer that to the look he’s giving me now. After I’m completely creeped out, he finally speaks. “Game is not about what you are comfortable with. Is about how far you go to win money.”
“Well, I’m not willing to go much farther. I’m not cool with this anymore. Money be damned.”
Mongo is in my face before I realize he’s moving. It’s scary how fast he’s there, looming over me.
“You don’t get picture, homo man. You don’t have option to quit. According to updated scoreboard, you are now in third place behind Baton Rouge and Athens, Georgia. Not quitting now. Got it?”
I can’t answer, just nod.
Mongo stands straight and reaches behind his back. He pulls out a long, black, comically large hunting knife, which he uses to pick dirt from beneath his fingernails. He says, “Oh, almost forgot to mention. After you win, you will be splitting money with me. Fifty-fifty. I think is only fair considering how hard I work to help you win game. Don’t you agree?”
I nod again. He flips the knife over, catches it by the blade and rears back. I don’t even see the thing move through the air. It seems to just transfer from his hand to the mattress a few inches from my nose, buried to the hilt. This time, I can’t help but make a little pee-pee in my pants. Mongo leans over and removes the blade from the bed, hovering close enough that I can smell his breath, an odd mixture of vodka and pancake syrup.
“Good. Glad to know we see eye to eye. Is very important for us to be on same team. Very important.”
•
It takes a while, but I finally sleep. When I wake up, the sun is getting low in the sky.
“Time to rise, Sleeping Beauty.” Mongo stands at the end of my bed, holding the laptop. “Time to learn about next challenge. It is doozy.”
We watch the video.
This keeps getting worse.
Peter Oh’Tool demonstrates the proper way to execute something called a donkey punch. The girl in the video is wearing a fake smile, pretending to enjoy and even get off on this particular example of what I suppose you could term as sadism, but I can see the pain in her face.
Fuck. I’m going to have to be drunk to pull this off.
•
After a meal, we hit the local bars, as we’ve done the past five nights. I recognize several of the college-age women from previous excursions, and they seem to recognize me, which really spooks me. What if Danielle or one of her friends sees me? What if they’ve gotten the word out about me?
The bartenders are starting to recognize us as well, which spooks Mongo. We’ve tried to stay close to the motel room since all of the equipment is already set up there and it’s easier to convince a chick to walk across the street to my room rather than take a cab or hop in our rented Festiva and drive across town. But we seem to have hit a saturation point.
“We need new place,” Mongo says. I have to agree with him.
We head a few miles down the road, away from the Ball State hotspots, and find a dive filled with older, more pathetic folks. The music is slower and not as loud, the lounge lizards deliberately making their way around the room in the languid motions of the drunk and the hopeless and the tragically out of touch with today’s popular culture. Mongo finds a quiet spot in the back of the bar, leaving me to my task of procuring a victim for the donkey punch.
I sit at the bar and nurse a beer. I have no desire whatsoever to go forward. Mongo has kept his distance so far, but that won’t last long. He’ll be on my ass soon and then I’ll have to figure something out. But I have every intention of waiting until the last minute, hoping I can think of a way out of this challenge. I have no motivation, and it shows in the few poor interactions I have with women that come and go. I can’t help it. They all seem too nice to consider doing to them what I’m required by this goddamn challenge.
By ten, the bar is packed with a slightly more diverse cross-section of society, probably aided by an influx of wannabes who couldn’t get into a more hip spot. People are streaming all over, talking, smoking, laughing, arguing, and all of them completely ignoring me. The bartender would probably have kicked my pathetic ass from my spot at the bar by now for driving away business, but he seems too busy at the moment to notice, either. I’m like a black hole on a barstool, and he’ll eventually get back to me and tell me to piss off.
Despite my presumed invisibility, I notice a guy down the bar watching me. I realize he’s been there for quite some time, I just hadn’t really caught on that he was staring at me until just now. When he sees me watching him back, he raises his glass and nods in my direction. I look down at my glass. This would be just my luck. The only person in the entire place interested in getting naked with me is going to be this squirrelly-looking middle-aged weirdo with huge, tinted pedophile glasses. I steal a quick glance to see if he’s still watching me, but he’s not. He’s gone.
And then he’s there again, right next to me. I look around for an escape but I’m boxed in. People are crowding the bar to place their orders or retrieve their drinks. There are five people positioned behind me in a semi-circle, their backs to me, jabbering away with each other, oblivious of the fact they’ve hemmed me in. Somehow, Mr. Pedo angles around them and squeezes right next to me.
“Hi,” he says.
I consider ignoring him, but that will probably just anger him. He’s got the look of your typical suburban serial killer, just waiting for someone to rudely snub him and set him off. I don’t really want to end up in pieces, stuffed in this guy’s chest freezer, so I respond with a very stiff-sounding, “Hey.”
“My name is Jack Mehoff.”
Shit. Of course it is. “Hi, Jack.”
“I’m your biggest fan.”
I turn to look at the guy. “What?”
He repeats, in the exact same tone, like his response is a prerecorded message, “I’m your biggest fan.”
I’m not sure how to respond. That’s not a problem because he doesn’t bother to wait for one anyway.
“I picked you from the beginning. I think you have the perfect blend of charm, desperation, and compromised morals to be the King.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Jack looks around, but no one is listening to us. “The show.”
How the hell can he know about that? The show won’t even begin to air for weeks, well after the game is over. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. King of the Perverts? A reality-based game show built around the idea of a sexcathlon pitting ten contestants against each other in increasingly difficult –”
I cut him off. “Yeah, OK, just stop.” I eyeball the guy a little closer. He talks with a strange inflection and I’m reminded of a robot. There’s no emotion in his words, very monotone. “How do you know about that?”
“I was in the audience for the taping of the show’s first episode. But it’s not really a secret at this point. The Dixar website has begun posting short teaser trailers. Just brief bytes pumping a new game show. You’re prominently featured in the latest one. Nice alligator fuckhouse, by the way.”
“I am?”
“Yeah, though you can’t really see your face. They made sure not to reveal what any of the contestants look like. But I knew it was you.”
I look around for Mongo but he’s lost in a sea of drinkers. “You realize the game isn’t over yet, right? I’m not supposed to talk to anyone about it.”
“I know. But I couldn’t help myself. I want to see you win.”
“Well, thanks for the support, but –”
“You look like you could use a little assistance tonight.”
“Thanks, but I’m doing just fine on my own.”
“No you’re not. At this rate, you’ll never get the donkey punch in.”
I can’t help it and gape at the guy. “How the hell do you know about that?”
“It’s my hobby.” He pushes his glasses h
igher on the bridge of his nose and takes a deep breath. “You can probably tell by my voice that I’m different. I have something called Asperger’s. It’s a form of high-functioning autism. I tend to get very focused on things and obsess over them. It can seem to be weird to other people.”
Again, he sounds like he’s reading a cue card, or reciting something he’s memorized and uttered many times before. I feel bad for thinking he was a weirdo now. “No, I didn’t notice anything.”
“It’s OK. I’m used to it. And it’s pretty much true. To most people, the way I act seems very much out of the ordinary, but I rarely realize it until it’s too late. The hard part is not being weird. The hard part is the realization that you are weird and there really isn’t much you can do about it.”
I don’t feel bad anymore. Now I’m feeling uncomfortable. “Yeah…” What the hell do I say next?
“And now you’re probably uncomfortable with how open and candid I’m being because until five minutes ago you didn’t know me, but now you know me more than some people you’ve known for five years, and that’s pretty strange as well, having a complete stranger come up to you and unload all of their deficiencies on you, though I don’t look at my Asperger’s as a deficiency. It’s more of a quirk, and sometimes it’s a gift because of my ability to hyper-focus on problems and ideas and figure out complex issues rapidly. I think it has something to do with the fact that I use about forty-three percent more of my brain than most people do.”
OK, fuck, now I’m scared again. It’s creepy the way this dude is reading my mind.
“And now you’re probably getting freaked out because I can tell exactly what you’re thinking like I can read your mind, but really it comes down to prior experience with similar social situations, as well as my uncanny ability to predict what people will do in –”
“OK, fuck, just stop doing that!”
Jack Mehoff pushes his glasses up his nose. It’s such a cliché nerd thing to do. I wonder if he’s doing it on purpose just to fuck with me. He opens his mouth to speak again and I cut him off quick before he can repeat my thoughts back to me one more time.
“Look, I’m sorry for yelling at you. I didn’t mean to do it because I was mad, you were just starting to … well, you were starting to creep me out a little bit.”
“I know. I have that effect on people. I’ll try to stop doing that, but I won’t notice when you’re getting uncomfortable so you’ll have to tell me. Don’t worry about offending me. I actually prefer when people tell me things like that, because I can’t process it on my own.”
“OK, Jack. I will make sure to tell you from now on when you’re creeping me the fuck out. Jack? Right now, you’re sort of creeping me the fuck out.”
“OK.” Jack faces the bar and sips his drink. It looks like a glass of Coke. I have a feeling there’s nothing other than that in the glass. He says, “I’ll leave you alone now, but I actually came over here to point out the lady at the far end of the bar.”
I look, searching the far end and I spot her right away. Forty-ish looking cougar with bad hair, worse skin, and a scowl pointed in my direction. She’s sipping her drinks through a black straw, drawing hard enough that her cheeks collapse. She looks like she could suck a golf ball through a garden hose and find such a thing enjoyable. She releases her straw and licks her upper lip, all the while boring a hole right through me with her stare.
“Oh, yeah. I see her.”
Jack says, “She’s probably your best bet at this point. I even dropped your name to her. That’s probably why she’s watching you and doing odd things with her straw that she evidently thinks are attractive to the opposite sex. She’s been married four times, had three abortions and a miscarriage, been to jail, and suffers from an acute addiction to methamphetamines in its gaseous form.”
“Damn, you learned all that about her already?”
“Yes. It’s not hard to get desperate women talking, as long as it’s about themselves. It’s part of their self-destructive nature to try to transfer their problems onto those around them.”
“OK, understood, Jack. I don’t need the psych lesson here.”
“Ten-four. Like I said, she has your name, likes your appearance, and would make a very viable candidate for receiving the donkey punch. There’s even a decent chance she might enjoy such rough handling. But I would strongly suggest using a very reliable form of protection from sexually transmitted diseases, because there is a high probability that her vagina is teeming with them.”
I turn away from the walking spirochete at the end of the bar to look at Jack. Once you get past the pedophile spectacles and the unsettling cadence of his voice, he’s really not a bad guy. I extend my hand and say, “Good thinking. Thanks Jack, it was a pleasure meeting you and I appreciate the assist.”
Jack turns away from my hand. He says, “Sorry, but I don’t do well with physical contact. And you’re welcome. Go get her, Your Highness.”
The Donkey Punch
“Hi sugar, I’m Pauline.”
I didn’t even have to move. She came to me. I had just drained my glass and was working myself up for a trip to the pisser before stumbling over to her spot at the bar, but I guess as soon as Jack left, she zeroed in.
I stick out a hand and say, “Hi Pauline, name’s Dennis.” Then I sit there and wonder why the fuck I’m talking like Roy Rogers all of a sudden.
She grabs my hand and I immediately regret having offered it. She sits next to me in a grand display of clanging, over-sized jewelry, and I resist the urge to wipe her hepatitis handshake on my pants. Pauline smells of cheap drugstore perfume, a lot of it, and she doesn’t look too healthy up close. From the other end of the bar she didn’t exactly appear to be fit as a fiddle, but sitting right next to me, my skin is crawling. Poor girl has clearly seen some rough times over the years, as evidenced by the half-moon shaped scar under her right eye.
“So, I heard a rumor about you.”
Uh-oh.
“Oh yeah? What kind of rumor.”
Pauline leans closer and says in a cigarette-and-gin infused fog, “Word is you’re a TV star.”
I laugh and look around for Jack Mehoff, but he seems to have disappeared. “Well, I’m not sure what people have been saying, but that’s not entirely accurate.”
Pauline sidles right up next to me and places her lips against my left ear. “Don’t worry,” she whispers. “I won’t say nothing about the show. I know it will get you disqualified.”
I pull back and look at her. She’s got a wild, excited look in her eyes. I don’t know what all Jack told her, but it must have been enough.
She pulls me close again and says, “I want on the show. And you don’t have to worry about a thing. I like the rough stuff.”
So much for small talk. Ten minutes later, we’re in her pickup truck, heading for the motel.
•
Life is filled with many questions.
Why is the sky blue?
Is there an afterlife?
Why am I here?
And of course: Is it possible to wear three condoms at once?
I don’t know the answers to any of those yet, but I’ll be fucked if I leave this bathroom before I come to a definitive conclusion on that last one.
•
I’m thankful for many things. You might not think it based on what you’ve read so far, but I promise, I am truly appreciative for certain little things.
Viagra is one of those things. Vodka is another.
Without those two beauties, I would not be where I am right now. And where I am right now is coupled to the anus of a very bony, very loose, very frightening woman who I have come to learn quite a bit about.
The following is true of fair Pauline:
– She has been to prison. More than once. And not as a visitor.
– She has quite probably committed murder, or at the very least a form of extremely aggravated manslaughter. I gather this is the reason she was in prison, and I very much hope it�
�s not the reason she was in prison more than once.
– She actually prefers anal sex to vaginal sex. Says it feels better, she does. While she talks about the difference between her rectum and her vagina, I can’t stop imagining a long, wide, cold, dusty hallway.
– The last man to lay a fist on her is now collecting disability checks from the government and goes by the new nickname of “Lefty”. And he might also be her uncle.
These are things Pauline has related to me while I’ve spent the past twenty minutes pounding her bottom with what she calls my ‘flesh hammer’. It confuses me to learn that the woman who claims to enjoy the rough stuff, in her words, is also the same woman who allegedly severed the hand of a relative after he struck her.
And I have to donkey punch this woman in the kidney.
What will she do? Get pissed and cut off my dick? Or will she like it? Will the punch be considered the ‘rough stuff’ and lead to a positive response? Why did she hack off her uncle’s hand? Was it because he punched her outside the sexual arena? Has she ever had sex with her uncle? OK, probably a dumb question. More like, how often did she have sex with her uncle? From what I’ve learned of her so far, that seems to be the more apt query.
She’s still talking. I’m having sex with her butt and she’s talking like we’re sitting at breakfast having a cup of coffee and trying to decide if we want to go to Home Depot or Menards to pick up wallpaper. Only in this case, Home Depot is more like ‘my cocksucker of a second husband’ and picking up wallpaper is ‘impaled his ball sac with a Phillip’s head screwdriver’. The matter-of-fact tone she uses when discussing things I’ve only ever heard about on an episode of Dateline is rather disconcerting.
And in the back of my mind, I can hear Mongo. He’s certainly getting antsy in the other room, spitting Slovakian cuss words at me to hurry the hell up and get this over with. And I have to agree with him here. I need to just grow some balls and take care of business. I don’t know how much more of Pauline I can take, and even Viagra wears off at some point.
But I can’t pull the trigger just yet. I have doubts. Fears about the well being of my appendages. She already told me she likes it rough, right? Isn’t that basically a free pass to attempt a simple donkey punch?