Monkeytown

by Chris Vola

  “Wow, that’s really coo-ol,” Sophia says.

  I realize I forgot my glasses in the Range Rover. The screen is a blur of swirling lights and primary colors. I try to focus on one corner of the monitor and finally see something that looks like a green monkey dancing on a pile of dinosaur bones.

  “Um, yeah,” I say, “sweet.”

  Davis starts talking again. I zone out. The phrases preliminary qualifications and appropriate analog reverb float freely over my head, meaningless. There’s a pause. All eyes on me.

  “…well,” Davis says, “what do you think?”

  “It’s a nice gig, man,” Rob says.

  “It would be good for you,” Sophia whispers, touches my hand.

  The stares surround me, nail me to the center of attention. A brief panic rumbles under my chest. “I’m…in?” I sputter. Everyone grins. What they wanted. Why not humor them?

  “Yay! We need to cel-e-brate!” Andrew shouts, runs out of the room.

  “You knew about this?” I ask Billy.

  “I’m just along for the ride,” he mumbles, takes a long swig, belches. “I listen to the radio. Sometimes that old iPod you gave me. I don’t even have a fucking computer.”

  Andrew hurdles back, cradling a fat bag of what looks like some very high-quality weed, strewn with white and crystals. “Anyone have any papers?” he asks.

  “Zig-zag double-wides,” Billy says, tosses an orange pack across the table. Rob goes over to the computer, turns off the ambient trance music that’s been playing the entire time, puts on a dubstep remix of Kanye West’s “I Wonder,” turns it up.

  The final twist and lick. Andrew hands me the joint and lighter, grins. “Guests first.” My stomach turns over – tequila murmurs.

  “Are you sure?” I ask, “It’s your weed, and I don’t think I should –”

  “Don’t disrespect me,” Andrew says, faux-serious. “It’s not like I’m asking you into the bathroom to –”

  “Yeah,” Billy cuts him off, breath reeking against my face, “don’t be a pussy, pussy.”

  “Fine,” I mumble. The tip of the joint’s fattest side is darker, dipped, a candy apple. Andrew’s uneven saliva deposit? I twirl it around.

  “Other people are trying to hit that, too,” Billy moans. Sophia chuckles.

  I flame up. Strong, acidic invasion. Deeper burn. I gag, spit up a little. After-school amateur hour. Billy laughs. I flip him off, hit the joint again.

  “What… kind of shit is this?” I sputter after exhaling a large cloud.

  “Really good shit, apparently,” Andrew says. “Canadian. Southwestern Canadian. Strawberry Cough I think was what the guy called it.”

  “Tastes fine to me,” Billy gasps, after his own phlegmy bout.

  The joint cycles around three or four more times, skipping Rob and Davis. The first wave is powerful, brain-bruising. Sophia sings along with the music, clinking her glass in no discernable rhythm. Andrew moves colonies of guacamole across his plate. He checks his phone.

  “OK guys,” he says, “we need to get out of here, like now. I’m thinking Lower East, something low-key, not too gross, maybe Painkiller or The Delancey.”

  “The Lower East Side is a cesspool of coke-zombie yuppies and unappealing trust-fund hipsters,” Rob snickers, satisfied at the accurate generalization.

  “Where do you want to go then, Mr. Yelp?” Andrew snarls. “West Village? Chelsea? East Village? TriBeCa? Murray Hill? There’s hipsters and yuppies everywhere. This is Manhattan. This is Disney World North. Get over yourself or move back to the Bronx, Papi. And speaking of blow…”

  Rob shudders, reaches into his pocket.

  “Let’s just figure it out in the cabs,” Sophia says, notices a speck of something on her blood-red nails.

  “Obviously,” Andrew mutters, horrified at something on his phone.

  I’M NAVIGATING THE front steps of the building when it hits me. It is something I don’t know and nothing is familiar. Everyone – Davis and Rob hailing cabs, Sophia texting on her BlackBerry, Andrew, Billy – begins to shrivel like shrinkwrap around a frozen slab of meat until they morph into scowling four-foot dwarfs. A rupturing roll of still-lifes behind fractured retinas. Cabs materialize. I blink. Clicksnap. Four-foot Sophia sliding into the black pleather interior. Clicksnap. The first cab screeching off. Clicksnap.

  “Hurry up, tardboy!” Billy’s tiny fist. Get inside!

  “I…don’t think I can,” I groan. “I don’t have my glasses, I need…”

  “What?” Billy the Incredulous Dwarf. His face liquefies, drips chin residue into a polychromatic pool. I gasp. “You can’t be that high, come on,” the words dribble, splash away. I manage to fold myself into the cab, focus on the driver’s raven-dwarf skull.

  “Does he normally get like this?” Rob asks. “Maybe I should bring him back upstairs and let –”

  “Don’t worry,” Billy assures him, “sometimes he just can’t hold his shit.”

  “OK,” Rob echoes. A cavern of space. Clicksnap.

  Central Park West to the left, black and seamless. Rows of erratic trees strain noiselessly to tap the piano-key buildings sprouting across the avenue. Rob’s cigarette mouth. Smoke exits with an incredible depth. Follow the snapshots as it rises. Clicksnap. I see Billy in the cloud. Camouflaged in darkness. Screaming. Bleeding.

  “You’re-going-to-die!” I grope Billy’s shirt, his face. Clicksnap. Clicksnap. “You’re going to die!”

  “No shit,” Billy grumbles. “The hell is wrong with you?” The driver frowns, slows down.

  “It’s fine,” Rob says, glaring down the shadow-face in the rear-view. “Drive.”

  The trees breathe from black lungs, twisting in their sinister dance of gravity. I spin into it. Clicksnap.

  Midtown boils over, electric cartoons that spiral until there is no longer pure black over white, but primary colors on the edges. Like out-of-focus background objects in photographs, pulsing. GOD BLESS AMERICA! LARGE SELECTION OF ADULT DVDS & VIDEOS! PRIVATE VIEWING BOOTHS! NOTHING! HI-TECH ELECTRONICS! PLASTIC! T-SHIRTS! TIMELESS TREASURES! ATM! SONY! IBM! PASSPORT PHOTOS! LINGERIE! HALLOWEEN COSTUMES! VISIT MY BASEMENT! 30 MIN. PHOTO! NOTHING! Sweat builds, eyes convulse. I keep sobbing. Billy ignores me.

  “Here’s good,” Rob says as he gouges the neon strip with his credit card.

  “Get out, freakshow!” Billy opens the door, pushes me onto the pavement. The cackle of traffic, the rank heat of Manhattan summer. A redbrick bar with a long awning. Vague figures flitting, gawking, follow the snapshots towards the door. Leering cat-eyes, the bouncer in black leather. Rob’s fist-bump. Clicksnap. Show IDs? No? Inside – bombastic dance beat, intermingled with old-school Nintendo samples. The room pulses with the rhythms, contracts. My hand turns into a baseball mitt.

  Billy and Rob vanish. I’m locked in, absorbing the music, sucking the carbon of vinegar-scented atoms. Billy returns hours later with a copper-colored drink. The cubes rubbing each other in their oblivious melting world. He presses it into my hand. “Look at the tail in here! Goddamn!” he yelps, disappears, limping after a pair of utterly fake breasts in a tee shirt that says Designated Smoking Area.

  The churning mass of indefinite bodies.

  I shake the glass, dazzled by the mysterious courtship of ice friction. The music stops. Then, suddenly, Marky Mark’s “Good Vibrations” – bullet-blast drum intro, euphoric frat-boy squeals. I gasp, terrified. Where’s Billy? The snapshots speed up, semi-automatic, dirty dark fingerprints. The back wall of the room, a row of circular tables. A cluster of depraved Smurfs at each one, snarling, hooting. What do Sophia and Rob look like?

  The snapshots tunnel around a head of long, chocolate-colored hair, baby-blue spaghetti-string top, a small but noticeable mole on the left shoulder blade. She tugs on a few strands of hair. Four-inch heels. Nooo… Talking to an orange-tanned giant in a charcoal-colored pinstriped suit, Wall Street’s Bluto. Is that John? His sausage fingers grip a Heineken. A holstered BlackBerry blin
ks neon green. Clicksnap.

  I creep along the wall, sniff her hair. Body Envy by Herbal Essences.

  “Lauren?” I whisper. She doesn’t hear me, or doesn’t want to. The giant does. He lets go of his beer. I try again, arch my neck sideways until my lips brush her hair. “Lauren?” She turns her head, but not before the giant’s steak-like palm crushes my skull, effortlessly acquaints me with the mold-scarred floor. Another pair of hands drag me like a human squeegee, while Boy George asks someone if they really want to hurt him over a remixed club beat.

  “Get the fuck-out-of-here,” a voice spits. I’m snapped onto the street, a blind ball of elastic non-energy. I stagger for blocks, retinas reconstructing themselves gradually. Clicksnap. I’m on a curb. The traffic is an immense coordinated structure, a double helix.

  For a second I want to jump, to disintegrate, revert to the molecules – yellow and red – that spin so carelessly in the fire. An SUV chugs to where I’m standing. Ford Explorer, windows down. The driver is clean-shaven, mobile headset in his left ear, black suit.

  “Hey!” he yells. I’m frozen. Again, “Hey! You need ride?”

  I open the door, crawl into the backseat, hug myself. The driver’s face in the rear-view, taut and empty. I realize something. “Oh!” I huff. Try to remember… “One-fifteenth street and, uh, Eighth?” I stammer. Before I finish, he’s blended back into the stream, steering us uptown, jabbering away. “Huh?” I grunt. He keeps talking into his headset.

  “Allo ? Oui ? Qu'est-ce que tu veux ? Non, j'ai un des singes... Donc, est-ce qu'il...Ce sera le première fois que…Non! Ce n'est pas necessaire...”

  I slump my face against the window, try to focus on the sad, compressed masses of gray and black squares. Are we getting closer or moving farther away? Then the gnarled rows of trees, morphing into other trees, shooting at me in still life.

  Follow the snapshots.

  THE DRIVER HITS the brakes, my head knocks against the passenger seat.

  “We are here.” I’m on the pavement, reaching into my wallet but the driver slams the gas, screeches into the blackness. I turn around. Rob and Andrew’s building, most of the windows barred and black. I squint to read the numbers on the buzzer.

  “Oo-eez-it?” a nasally voice squawks from the speaker. The same accent as the driver’s.

  I slump my face against the box. “Joshh…” The door buzzes me in. Formaldehyde smells on the stairs. The apartment door is open. Candle shadows flicker in the main room. A blonde girl whose body looks like Sophia’s is sprawled on the beanbag chair wearing lacy panties and a skin-tight tee shirt. Another specter, this one masculine, sits in the shadows by the back wall. The woman gets up.

  “Having fun?” she whispers.

  I try to make the sounds. “Y-y-yes?”

  “Good.” She walks up to me, strokes my belt buckle, rubs my crotch. “Good?” Her voice is an echo folded over itself. I try to pull away. She guides my hand over her panties. The outline of spongy lips, a growing moistness. I’m hard. She pushes me onto the beanbag chair.

  “Wait,” I mumble, “who are –”

  “Shut the fuck up,” she hisses, giggles. She straddles my lap, traces a path down my stomach with her tongue, unbuckles my belt with her teeth. An electric ripple from somewhere in the hall. She pulls my boxers off and licks the tip in a figure-eight pattern. I groan.

  The man in the chair – Rob? Andrew? Davis? – is watching us, calmly jerking off. The woman turns, says something to him, arches her ass. He gets up and kneels behind her, grins at me, takes off her panties. The woman chokes on my cock, spits up a little. The man grabs her hair, licks her sweaty cheek, whispers something in her ear. She pivots in slo-mo.

  “Suck me!” she grunts. I spread her cheeks open, my hands trembling, flick my tongue in and out then trace the line to her asshole. She moans, reaches around and guides me inside. The man walks off to another part of the room. I sense the oncoming eruption, moan.

  “Not yet,” she whispers over her shoulder. She grates her red nails across my hips. My brain twirls. Brief black-out then I’m pumping hard, missionary-style, harder, rabbit-speed, and she’s whimpering, and a wet finger is slipping into my asshole, then something much bigger, and I clench against the pressure, and she’s beating the beanbag chair with tiny balled fists, and everything is spinning, bright but undefined. The woman leaps away. I can’t hold back and I’m coming, bucking my hips, shaking, shivering, and everything shuts off.

  THE ROOM IS parched, vacant. The only light is a blinking spiral on the computer’s screensaver. I’m sunk into the folds of the beanbag chair, covered by a thin blanket, naked. I stand up. A flash of nausea latches onto my skull, shakes it hard. I lurch forward, grope for the wall. Follow it until the first door.

  It’s not the bathroom. In the far corner is a life-size department store dummy in a military uniform, bent over a coffee table. Two men in black sweat suits and ski masks are grabbing the dummy’s arms, pretending to hold it down even though both of its plaster wrists have been nailed onto the table. A third man in a ski mask crouches behind, fingering the blade of a rusty knife. The dummy’s eyes are forced shut, mouth open. Fake blood dribbles out, stains the front of its uniform, collects in an expanding puddle on the hardwood. The dummy’s pants are around its ankles, its flaccid rubber penis flopping in the gusts from the air conditioning vent. A tangled web of glistening spaghetti strings where the scrotum should be. Two tall, athletic men in dark suits – one of them holding a camcorder, filming, while the other smokes a cigarette.

  The man with the knife screams, raises the rusty blade over the dummy’s neck. It whines, crackles, digs through skin into the fleshy pink.

  The dummy – Andrew – opens his eyes and squeals.

  My stomach gives out and I retch. The men in suits jerk their heads. The one without the camcorder yells “Cut! Cut!” rushes over, pushes me back into the hallway.“Putain! Tu ne dois pas être ici! Vas-tu! Maintenant! Vas!”

  Something metal-solid whacks me from behind. Knee-cap fireworks and a sickening pop. I crumble. Everything spotty, then the fade.

  17

  Vola

  WE’RE SWOOPING DOWN into the hospital-light gloom of the Fort McHenry Tunnel, diving beneath Baltimore Harbor. Billy turns around in the passenger seat, Egg McMuffin crumbs collecting on his gut. He sees that I’m awake and hands me a McDonald’s wrapper.

  “Man,” he says, spewing bits of meat product, “you snore so loud! Doesn’t he?”

  “At least he got to sleep through Jersey,” Davis sighs.

  “Mmm, good call,” Billy says. “What a shithole.”

  I inspect a half-eaten, room temperature Sausage McBiscuit, cheese congealing into a wrapper that’s the same sallow color. Billy snickers. “I still can’t believe you walked in on the shoot. Freaking nuts.”

  The bedroom in Rob’s apartment I’d stumbled into last night had been carefully set up by Andrew to shoot a cover for the August issue of S.C.U.M.M. Magazine. The other actors were members of the Norwegian neo-thrashcore band Slaughterfuck, currently on a North American tour promoting their latest album, Reign of Slime, a big hit in most major Eastern European markets. The band had only scheduled one show in New York, in faraway Bushwick, so Andrew only had a couple hours to work before they got on a 9 a.m. flight to Wichita.

  When Davis pulled me off the bathroom floor, it was super early, a mist of air-conditioning condensation pooling at the edges of the windowless grates. Billy was already waiting in the Range Rover. The apartment was freezing, empty of any indications of human habitation, of the previous night’s squishy organic feast. I asked Davis why no one was around. “Because,” he muttered, “some people actually have to go to work on Tuesday mornings.”

  Tuesday, huh? I began to imagine Andrew sitting in an office chair gawking at the suited ass of an intern bending over to snatch a plastic cup for the water cooler, but my stomach gave out and Davis closed the door, snickering, covering his nose.

  BA
LTIMORE’S UNTIDY SPRAWL – the harbor’s brackish water reflecting acres of rotting shipyards, mostly vacant industrial lots, tangled spiderweb highway overpasses, steaming fuel refineries. Ravens Stadium spirals cheerily upward in a green and metallic recession-proof display. Binge drinking and football will never die!

  A sequence of billboards rises in the mid-morning haze. V-I-R-G-I-N in huge graffiti-style letters, and beneath, Teach your kids it’s not a dirty word. The next one says PREGNANT & SCARED? above a photograph of a quasi-goth teenager, her swelled belly and distended navel poking out under a white tee shirt. Eye-shadow flowing, staining her cheeks. Genuinely terrified, confused, physically ill.

  It was about nine months after my parents’ crash. Lauren had just accepted the job offer in Fairport and was staying with me until she found an apartment close by. The cottage was still a disaster, so for the next five weeks she helped me clean, get things in order. Those five weeks living together were probably the most quote-un-quote normal we’d had until three consecutive + signs appeared on the chemical indicators of three consecutive test strips. I didn’t know anything was wrong until the after what I assume was the third +, when I heard the crackle of sobs being stifled by a towel or a fist in my bathroom one drizzle-stained morning in what must have been November.

  When we were in college, Lauren used to half-joke about us moving in together after we’d graduated, mostly because she knew how uncomfortable it made me. We were still in love at that point, insofar as love is something binary, something that can be turned off and on like a faucet or an Audi. We’d both admittedly cheated – run-of-the-mill drunk exchanges, the affects of a few extra sips, one (or three) too many snorts, nothing out of the ordinary. We were in an environment that encouraged promiscuity, that valued those who could transcend the suffocating relationship bubble and become one of the oh-so-trendy semi-detached couples, those lucky pairs who had already dismissed the possibility of ever finding Prince or Princess Charming before they hit the sheets (or back seat). Commitment was a trap Lauren and I fell into quickly, something with which I was never completely comfortable. I mean, Christ, the first time I saw her she was dancing to an oh-so-shitty-but-retroactively-great George Michaels jam on top of a beer pong table at a Sigma Chi dorm party, her bra and short-shorts nearly ripped off, her skin and hair matted and sticky from a recent backyard Nutella wrestling match. She slid right into my arms.