Monkeytown
Page 9
“Huh?”
“She said your name was Kody, you talked like him, smelled like him, something like that?”
“Yeah, but –”
“Happens every time somebody new comes in,” he says. “I’m surprised she didn’t pick your friend, though, the drunk, the other white one. Seems like he’d be a better fit.”
“What’s up with Kody?”
“He left.”
Behind the bar, in between the stacks of plastic bottles, is a hollowed out rectangle, a crude altar. The dusty photograph of a kid who looks nothing like me is tacked to the back of the hollow, symmetrical nose and bone structure. Farm-fresh half-smirk. A gray tee shirt that says U.S.M.C. Under the photograph is a folded American flag covered in candle wax, hard droplets enveloping the stars and stripes. An index card that says 1981-2004 in sloppy handwriting is taped to the fabric.
“Don’t go thinking you’re special,” the cook says as he hands me the drinks. “Everybody gets to be a Kody. In here, out there, there’s no rules for it. It just happens. Even to him.” He nods at Abram, who sniffles, yells “Sunsucker!” at a NASA scientist silently explaining the budget cuts necessary to fund a solar probe that will lift off in 2024.
“I guess I’m the lucky one today,” I say.
He shrugs. “I’ll put the booze on your tab.”
Whose tab?
Davis grins when he sees the drinks. We clink glasses, Billy thrusts up his can. “So when is this thing with Titus going down?” I ask. “I’d like to maybe hit up an actual bar where we might find some real-life humans with warm vaginas.”
“You don’t like Shayna?” Billy asks.
“He isn’t exactly the most orthodox person,” Davis says. “You worry about your chicken, and this,” he says, taking another sip of the devil juice. “Damn!” he groans, wincing.
Kane walks in from the kitchen, comes over with a water pitcher. “I ain’t trying to push you out of here, but would you guys like the check soon?” he asks. Is Shayna gone? Did the cook sedate her?
“Yeah,” Davis says to him. “I got this one guys.”
“I don’t see anyone arguing with you,” Billy says, swigs the last dregs of his beer, crushes the can into a pancake and launches it like a Frisbee into a corner where it will probably stay for the remainder of our natural lives.
Kane heads back to the register. Davis and I finish our drinks. My head is warm, my belly at peace.
“Hey, if you guys want to wait in the car,” Davis says, “I have to take a piss.” He tosses me the keys.
“Shotgun!” Billy shouts as he hoists himself up.
Abram swivels around and leers at us, a thin stream of Sprite dribbling from each nostril.
“GOD I WISH I had some pot right now,” Billy moans, picks through his backpack for the fourth time, sighs.
“Oh boo hoo,” I say.
I watch Davis and Kane approach the Range Rover through the side-view mirror. Kane is carrying a backpack and a smaller canvas bag. Both of them laughing about something.
“What’s he doing?” I ask. Billy’s too consumed by his own drunk-ass misery to respond or care. Doors open. Kane hops in the back next to me, behind Billy, drops his bags between the seats.
As he starts the ignition, Davis notices me in the rearview mirror. “I wasn’t exactly sure how to get to where Titus lives,” he says. “The GPS has been sketchy since D.C. Kane’s place is on the way.”
I glance across the street. Kane grins. I give a dismissive nod, return my focus to the back of Davis’s head.
Davis pulls out onto the main drag. The battered and bejeweled signs float like the unclear story arc of an old relationship. A few turns later and the scenery changes to shoddy one-story houses on cinderblocks, tank-topped men and women sipping beers and liter Coke bottles in gravel driveways, shirtless children scouring the empty lots, finding treasures in the rubble. The played-out infomercial behind the sheen. Davis fiddles with his iPod, finds a throwback hip-hop mix from high school. Warren G’s “I Want It All” comes on, a smooth, funk-infused rhythmic contrast to the road’s jaggedness. I watch Kane for any signs of disapproval – this obstinate hillbilly confident on his own turf – but his blank expression doesn’t change. Davis lights a cigarette.
The houses-slash-trailers disappear and are replaced by dense, mostly conifer forest on either side of the road. My ears pop from the sudden change in elevation. We ride in silence, except for the continuous bass-riff bombast from the speakers. The treeline falls away, revealing endless green valleys, lighter rectangular patchwork patterns of farms and pastures, an indigo line of misty, rounded peaks devouring the setting sun.
Kane cracks his window. The steam-laden breeze wafts his thick body odor my way, a well-rotted foulness that seeps all the way beneath my taste buds and down through my esophagus. I lift the collar of my tee shirt. This has been enough.
“Hey Davis,” I yell over the music, “do you really think we should be going to this meeting now?” I hold up my arms, let him get a good look at the stains. He stares in the rear-view, lowers the volume. “I mean, maybe we do a dry run so we know how to get to the place, then we can always find a place to crash, make moves up here tomorrow after we’ve showered.”
“Meeting?” Kane snickers.
“Trust me,” Davis says, eyes on the road. “you’ll be perfect. Don’t freak out. We’re almost there.”
Fuck it. I lay back, yawn. If Davis wants to try to get money from some wacko Kurtz figure with me smelling like this, with Billy still more than half drunk and passed out, then that’s his problem. He can figure out how he’s going to pull it off. Wake me up when this is over. I lean my head against the top of the seat, close my eyes.
Another mile and the road descends, sharply. My ears pop again. A massive dip in the pavement knocks my head against the seatbelt strap holder. Davis slows down, mutes the speakers.
“Here’s good,” Kane says. He grabs his backpack. Davis navigates onto the dirt strip that’s supposed to be the breakdown lane.
“See y'all in a bit,” Kane says. He opens the door, leaps over a guardrail, hurdles down a sharp decline into a dense ravine of pines and underbrush. Davis and a newly awake Billy watch him disappear into the fog-strewn foliage. See y’all in a bit?
“Oh man,” Davis says, slapping the side of his head, “I almost forgot. Hand me that bag Josh?”
I give him the canvas bag that Kane left behind. He unzips the top, pulls out two pouches made of black leather. Tosses one to me, drops the other one in Billy’s lap. It’s a mask that’s been made to cover an entire human head, with the exception of the mouth and chin. Two small patches sewn over where the eye holes should be.
“Huh?” I grunt. I expect some kind of response from Billy, but he’s staring at the forest, fingering the mouth hole of his mask.
“Protocol,” Davis says, smiling. “You’re going to have to put this on.”
“Hold up, what’s the –”
“Josh!” Billy jerks his neck around. “You don’t understand. It’s not an –”
Davis clears his throat. “If both of you are finished, I’m going to ask you for the last time to shut your fucking mouths and put the masks on,” he says. He reaches into the bag, pulls out a pistol, cocks the hammer back.
17
Vola
“WELCOME FRIEND,” SOMEONE says as he pulls my hood off. The plastic ties binding my wrists together grate against skin, creating fresh burns each time I’m shoved forward by what I assume is a gun barrel. The smell of mildew rips through my sinuses. I choke, bend over. A hand grabs me by the hair. “Forward,” the voice says.
My eyes adjust a little to the darkness – A hallway, unpainted concrete walls, high-schoolesque, rows of doors on both sides, some with scrawls of words or pictures tacked to them. Nothing understandable without my glasses.
We pass a door that’s been propped open. A pale beam of light slices out. Stage-quality lighting, Rob and Andrew’s apartment. A man w
earing a ski mask rushes at me from out of the shadows, swings a large stick at me in slow-mo. Direct pelvic contact. I crumple, curl into a protective ball. Other men – are they men? – rush over, land a couple harder blows on my face, Jesus, don’t kill me, please, stop, stop…tooth fragments caked in bloody snot. The concrete floor glistens darkly. Everything too fast. Another shot to the kidneys and the total loss of control, a wet warmth soaks through, dribbles, mixes with the puddle.
Several pairs of hands lift me up. My legs are hollow shells. I trip, land on my shoulder and in the expanding piss and blood puddle. My wrists are shredded. Boots smack the concrete. More hands. Where is Davis? Billy?
“No talking,” the voice says. A few more yards until the end of the hallway, from what I can tell. An open steel door with a sign nailed above it, the letters crisp, even in the dim light:
IT IS A FRIGHTENING THING TO FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE LIVING GOD
THE SOOTHING LYRICS and introductory melody of The Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun,” a favorite LP of my mother’s – white lace and promises, a kiss for luck and we’re on our way, and yes we’ve just begun…
A dream. No. The ties cutting into me, the exposed nerve endings, remind me where I am.
Where am I?
I force my eyes open. The room is maybe twelve feet long and almost as wide. No windows. Bare concrete walls. A bathtub on a raised wooden deck in the center. The seatless frame of an aluminum chair positioned over a plastic pail. A portable refrigerator with an unplugged clock on top. The dim reddish light comes from a glowing EXIT sign overhead.
The music stops.
“I know that song might be a little corny,” Kane says from somewhere behind me, “but I don’t know, it just feels right. You like The Carpenters?”
I try to move my jaw but all that comes out is an empty gurgle, a half-eaten moan.
“It’s OK,” he says. “It don’t really matter, now does it?” He’s standing above me. “You probably think this is like a movie or something, don’t you?” He stomps down on my back. I’m blinded by shards of electricity. “You’re probably thinking right now, ‘O God, how did I get caught up in this hillbilly shit, locked in this basement place?’ You’re saying to yourself, ‘This crazy redneck that I just met today is going to make me suck his dick, do me in the ass, strap some bondage gear on me, lock me in a trunk, make me listen to him play the banjo!’ Is that what you think?”
Tears slip out, glide across the sores in my mouth. Kane’s scruffed once-white Reeboks are covered in blood and pine needles.
“Don’t cry,” he coos. “Ain’t gonna be like that, at least not all of it. I don’t know how to play the banjo.” He takes a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket, saws the plastic ties apart. He cuts through my pants and shirt, strips them off, leaves my boxers on. I try to crawl away but it’s more of a thought than any real movement. I can’t feel my legs.
“Let’s get you up,” he says. He rolls me onto my back. The same olive skin and green eyes, the idiot’s smirk, devil-faced in the EXIT light. Covered in pine needles. He half-drags, half-carries me to the tub, hoists me up and rolls me into the brown water. I scream at the intensity of feeling, the overwhelming taste of iron and plastic. Kane tosses me a bar of soap. “Wash your nasty ass,” he says. The bar splashes brown gunk onto my face, stinging.
He heads toward the door then stops, realizes something, turns around. He comes back over to the tub, his fists gnarled and vein-heavy, and punches me in the temple.
I ROLL ONTO the cold, damp floor. Heavy endless percussion in the back of my head. An assaulting numbness, frozen to the concrete.
A small compartment slides open above the ground next to the metallic door. Wrapped bundles on a plastic tray. The compartment door slams shut behind it. My head crumbles into black.
COLD SWEATS. How long has it been? Days? I search for a window that’s not there. Just the icy cinderblock box, the dripping tub, the buzz and pull of aching muscles. I’m starving.
The tray is in the same spot. I crawl to it, all elbows and weak knees, tear open the paper-bag bundles. A tee shirt, sweatpants. A bottle of Peruvian spring water, a bag of organic soy chips, a cup of yogurt. A prescription bottle with five pills of varying sizes, unrecognizable except for one 500 mg OxyContin.
Yes.
I throw the pills I don’t recognize across the room, listen to the scatter, until all that remains is the familiar whitish Oxy. Force it down my throat. My fingers are soapy, pruned by the tub water’s rotten tang. Next, the yogurt. I soften the chips with the spring water. Pieces break, slip into the sore, toothless crevices. Lines of reddish drool collect on the white tee shirt.
The pill is no placebo. Sweaty waves of elastic relaxation and nausea rinse through my brain, eliminate the concentration necessary to form rational ideas. Nothing except a thick layer of whitewashed fuzz, the smell of woodsmoke. Throbbing aches give way to alternating currents of warm and cold comfort surges, the room looping, bending pleasantly under the EXIT sign. Something in the sign flickers.
Before I slip into a numb sleep, the men in ski masks come running in.
TIME EXISTS ONLY in the steady red glow, in the trays sliding through the compartment. The pile of shit at the bottom of the pail grows. How long has it been? Weeks, longer.
The men in ski masks come in after I eat. My gums are infected, but I suck down the honey-wheat pretzels, peanut butter energy bars, and grape tomatoes, the other gifts on the tray. I hide the pills – except for the Oxys – inside a bin at the bottom of the otherwise empty refrigerator that says VEGETABLES.
Always at least three of them, always in the same black masks. One carries a yellow piece of writing paper and a Costco-size bag of sea salt, another with a bulky old camcorder slung over his shoulder. The third strolls in with a hefty burlap sack and the type of heavy chains used to lock up a high school gym at the end of basketball practice. I’m strapped securely onto the metallic box, my elbows locked, my toes barely touching the ground, my spine on the verge of dislocation. They press the RECORD button on the camcorder. The one with the paper unfolds it, moves behind me, speaks in a language that might be Arabic, maybe Eastern European. He starts softly, quickens the rhythm, the cadences. Then, in what sounds like it should be mid-sentence, he stops. The others lean in like they’re expecting me to say something. When I don’t, they snicker. They take turns pissing on me and keep filming while I’m unchained and while the one with the sack empties its contents on the floor.
*****
My mother helps me ladle out the shimmering fish in opaque gray nets.
‘Five hundred medium-sized Angelfish weigh thirteen pounds when you factor in the water,’ the Dominican storeowner says in his second language as he hands me an empty plastic bag. He’s explained this to me dozens of times. I don’t say anything, nod, keep ladling.
*****
They plug the Black & Decker steam iron into the electrical socket below the metal box where they hang me. The steam rises into a hissing red mist when it’s ready. The words that stream through my brain like headlines – tattered, pink, zebra skin.
*****
I fill the bag with squirming fins and tails, wrap its translucent mouth around the steel nozzle of the oxygen tank, press down on the handle. The bag inflates, an invisible skin pulled stiff. My mother ties it off with an elastic bag…a fish-filled balloon. I smile at her. Illegal immigrants, what are they doing? They take turns packing sheets of crushed ice between other balloons so they won’t overheat on the way to the distributor’s warehouse.
*****
The electric drill and grapefruit spoon are a favorite combination. They start by laying me out on my stomach, face pressed against the floor. One of them uses a Sharpie to draw a series of perpendicular lines on a large section of my back. They take turns making holes, the drill first. Burning through the top layer of flesh until the point barely kisses the softness underneath. The grapefruit spoon comes next. Its teeth dig in, until the s
udden – SPLORK! – the suction of a sloppy post-coital pull-out, removing a neat spoonful. The whirring and sucking continues, regardless of convulsions, until the two of them exchange words. One might shout happily while the other curses.
It takes three visits to realize that they’re playing tic-tac-toe.
*****
The storeowner shows me how to break up the sheets of semi-frozen Bloodworms with an aluminum rake. What is he saying? ‘They won’t strangle each other before we can sell them as dinner for the golden-stripe groupers and the blue-and-yellow sturgeonfish.’
His voice slides past…the flitting reflections in the bags, the darting tangerine fragments of life in the holding tanks.
He turns on the industrial fans that blow into the water where thousands of fish wait to be packed and shipped. But they keep swimming down to the bottom, huddling together in the corners, even though he says that they know they’ll eventually drown.
*****
They splash tub water or turd liquid from the pail onto my face. Then they reach into the bag of salt, rub handfuls of crystals into the fresh gashes, letting it dissolve.
*****
My mother and I exit the fish store, and …I’m alone in a still-seedy area of lower Manhattan. In my pocket…twelve scruffed-up Sacagawea dollars. A narrow lane slants diagonally down to the Hudson, emaciated cats lazing in store windows. Bums writhe on the slick pavement in garbage-bag parkas. A sinister child crouches on a metal crate, points at me, Sprite dribbling from his nostrils.
*****
They bring in a circuit board with four long cords attached, clamps on the ends, a device that might be used for jumpstarting a car battery. One of the men clamps two of them on my ears. My legs – split open. The enema – cherry-red. My rectum – hyper descended, rubbery and cold. Two clamps fastened around the hole. A man turns a knob on the box and a ripple, a harsh vibration rips through, wrenching me out of myself. Friction burns, chest palpitating in double-time.