“No chance,” I said.
“Uh, uh, uh! Here it comes, Jayden. I’m exploding, imagining you…”
I slammed the door, leaving Barbie alone and grunting like a pig.
I headed straight for the men’s bathroom to hide. My hands were shaking. She had no proof about Ronni and me.
I waited five minutes and then peeked into the examining room. Barbie must have been so hot and bothered by her own fingers that she left behind the gun. I slipped some gloves on because touching anything Barbie had touched sickened me. I then dropped the gun in a plastic bag.
Before driving to lunch, I hid the gun in the glove compartment of the Mercedes.
I ordered at the restaurant, waiting for my meal.
My phone pinged with a text. I snorted in disgust. Barbie texted me a video of her lying naked on the examination table and poking herself. She then put a finger in her mouth and winked.
I hit delete and then dialed the phone, punching the numbers so hard that my fingertip was bruised.
The call went straight to voicemail.
“Brad, this is Jayden. Call me when you get a chance. It is important. Got that?” I was cut off after the word ‘It’.
The phone warbled because my eyes were having a hard time focusing.
I punched in the number again, clenching my fists and trying to calm down.
Again, I got his voice mail. I yelled into the phone, “Call off your mistress, Brad. Barbie knows about our masquerade. You promised not to tell anyone!”
I hit the end button and then tried once more. Three times was usually the charm.
There was heavy breathing at the other end of the line.
“Did you hear Brad? Answer me! What are you doing about Vanessa?”
“What’s going on, goddamnit? Brad? Are you there?”
A high-pitched voice answered, chuckling into the phone, “If you would like to leave a message, please insert a quarter into your butthole.”
Click.
The phone went dead.
July 23, 2015
BRAD
A KIND GESTURE IS TO SUPPORT THE LOCAL CANADIAN ECONOMY—I FIND A DRUG DEALER. Our neighbor north of us is the Breaking Bad drugstore, just ask seniors on a fixed income. I up my usage of Ecstasy as a cure for cluster headaches, which I never had until Jayden.
I stumble from the bathroom of his condominium feeling lovey-dovey. Ecstasy is known as the love pill and my eyes are red like a glassy Valentine’s card. Ecstasy can make you crazy.
Ecstasy may cause hallucinations but this is a first for me.
My brother is standing by the bed, smiling.
I rip out my heart and hand it to him in a champagne glass.
The heart is pumping, the glass overflowing with blood like a fountain.
Jayden drinks my blood and then stomps on the glass like in a Jewish wedding. Mazel tov! Who knows, maybe out mother was Jewish. He then slices his wrist with a shard of champagne glass.
“Drink,” he says. “Drink of my blood, your blood.”
I suck on his wrist, draining the life of my brother.
Okay, I am thinking about a vampire themed wedding with my brother’s girlfriend in Vegas, but settle on Elvis, my favorite ghost.
* * *
Part Four: A Wedding in Vegas
Chapter 42
BRAD
My twin’s credit card purchases a 3.71-carat wedding set costing $40,000, only the best for my brother’s bride. He will never sue me because we would both lose our medical licenses since most of our shenanigans have been illegal. For instance, we have been using each other’s medical licenses to practice in countries we have no license for and impersonating a different doctor. Then there are the airline flights where we flew as each other using passports, which do not belong to us. Just the passport fraud would earn us about a dozen years in prison.
Bigamy, however, is not an issue. I will never go to prison in either Canada or the U.S. for having two wives since Vanessa believes she married Jayden, not me.
His credit card pays for the ceremony, the Canadian mailing fee to send the wedding video to him, and ditto for our ride in a replica of Elvis’ 1955 pink Cadillac Fleetwood. I stand on the back seat with Elvis shades wiggling on my nose. We sing Viva Las Vegas while waving like royalty as the car slowly drives up the Vegas Strip. Everyone on the strip is cheering at the Just Married sign.
There is enough credit still left on Jayden’s card to charge the honeymoon penthouse suite at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino where the driver drops us.
Vanessa, being Canadian, is not used to such a strong sun and her skin has blistered. Her white wedding dress has sweatbands under the arms. “I need a drink,” she slurs from parched lips. “Come on, honey, let’s go up to our honeymoon suite.” She has a coughing fit and dust clouds puff from her mouth.
I stare over the top of my sunglasses and shake my hips and legs as though a tarantula is biting my balls. Okay, so in order to play a part I have to get into the role and become Elvis, a young handsome Elvis before he ate his way through Graceland. “Amazing grace, oh how good the steak.” My Elvis wig falls crooked on my head. My glazed eyes reflect cocaine and ecstasy, the best illegal drugs to calm a groom’s nerves, especially in an alligators-biting-my-ass situation.
Vanessa pulls at my arm as if she is yanking my chain. “Wasn’t our wedding romantic? Next time we go out wear the Elvis black shirt I bought you.”
“Quit nagging me,” I hiss and punch her in the stomach in a private corner of the casino. “Your voice is like boulders banging inside my skull and knocking off pieces of my brain. And that’s about the best compliment you’re ever going to get about your singing.”
My bride, Jayden’s bride that is, crumples to the floor.
I spin my head around the casino and no one is paying attention to us in a sea of flushed faces with glittering eyes hoping to win the big jackpot. Gimme. Gimme.
Gimme peace.
“There, there now honey, see what happens when you nag Elvis?” Good. One squeak and fart after punching her and Vanessa is quiet.
A cola cures her hiccups and I order her to, “stay put while I gamble, hear?”
“How come you sound like a Texan instead of Elvis?” Vanessa is stupid cute so can be fun, but this is not one of those times. “I want to go to our room,” she moans.
“Later we’ll check in. Just sip your drink and be a good little girl. Stay out of Daddy’s way.” I shift my shoulder in an Elvis groove mood.
“Hit me again,” I say in my best Elvis voice and gamble with Jayden’s credit card at the casino, the card that is not maxed out. My brother would want to have a good time on his honeymoon and $13,000 blown at the crap tables and playing black jack is about right for a Vegas groom.
Jayden’s bride recovers and hangs by my side at the black jack table, peering over my shoulder, playing with my hair. “Oh, Jayden,” she coos, “you are so romantic, to actually get down on your knees and beg me to marry you. Are you as deliriously happy as I am?”
She is drunk and glows like kryptonite. How do I know what glowy kryptonite looks like? Because I am Superman and can see through women’s clothes. “I’m happier,” I say, and my bladder about bursts from laughter, imagining the look of horror on my brother’s face when he finds out that this silly dumb broad is his wife. We have only been married a few hours and I feel like choking the life out of her. I must not be sick to death of Ronni yet, but then she does not whine at a man. Ronni never sings, cries, or talks my block off. She stays out of my way, unlike Vanessa.
I pull my bride up by her underarms and wiggle the room key at her.
In the honeymoon suite, we lift glasses of champagne.
“To us,” Vanessa gushes.
To my brother. I lift the champagne glass and guzzle the sparkling wine. I then throw the glass at the wall, kapow!
I grab another champagne glass and fill it to the top while Vanessa breaks out in song. “Tiny bubbles...”
&nb
sp; The champagne glass in my hand shatters, cutting my fingers.
I leap off the bed as if it is a tall building.
“Where are you going, Jayden?”
None of your damn business! I nearly yell at her but instead answer through gritted teeth, “I’m going to the bathroom to bend some steel with my bare hands.”
I huddle on the toilet while Vanessa bangs on the door.
“What are you doing in there, Jayden? Number one or number two?”
If I break Vanessa’s legs, she might quit following me. She did not need to walk down the aisle. We could have had a drive-thru wedding in Vegas.
I will take a cheeseburger with fries and marry this bride for dessert; I mean bury this bride in the desert. ‘Til death do we part, I do.
I march out of the bathroom with Vanessa nipping at my heels. “Oh,” she squeals, “I napped while you did your business and am now rested to begin our honey…”
“Shush now while I call my true love. Do you know what quiet is, sweetheart?”
“Your true love?”
Who knew that Vanessa could have such a tiny voice? I punch in some numbers on a cell phone and place my fingers on Vanessa’s lips to silence her.
“Uh…,” she says.
I snap my teeth and she mews.
“Hey, it’s me.” My voice always goes husky sexy when talking to Barbie. “Are you alone, my darling?”
I wink at Vanessa and mouth the words, “Don’t cry.”
“How about a little phone sex, Barbie? Give me a minute, okay?”
I cover the speaker of the phone and whisper in Vanessa’s ear, “Get out, and do not come back to our room until you hear from me or I’ll blacken your eye.”
I uncover the phone. “How can I forget you, Barbie? You know how much I love you.”
Vanessa blows her nose on her wedding veil, wiping the mascara from her cheeks. “What happened to the man I married, the man I should be honeymooning with, instead of you having phone sex with some other woman? If you really cared about me, you’d get me some frickin’ sunscreen.”
I grab my brother’s bride by her hair and fling her from the room, locking the door.
“Well, when you gonna leave Bubba, huh?” I yell into the phone.
We begin arguing like always.
The more heated our argument, the hotter I become. I am about to bust my Elvis pants.
Barbie is moaning and groaning on the phone. With all the Viagra Bubba has stocked up, there is still no way that old man will ever satisfy my woman. I might just go insane with lust for the hottie who pants on the other end of the line, about 1800 miles away. No woman can do phone sex like Barbie. She could make a killing as a 1-900-Icangetyouoff.
Barbie sounds like a banshee when she cums and ends her dirty phone session by asking, “Have you heard from Jayden lately?”
Oh, no, there I go shriveling up again. “The battery on my cell phone is dying,” I scream and hang up on her.
Vanessa enters the suite, waving a room key she must have gotten from the front desk. “Ah, why did you have to break the lamp?” she whines and then starts singing, “Your cheating heart will make you weep...” blah, blah, blah. “Are you getting the hint, Jayden?”
With my Superman strength, I could break my brother’s wife in two. The quiet, more useful bottom half would belong to me. Jayden could have the upper half, including her tonsils and lungs.
Chapter 43
BRAD
Married life is spectacular if you are not really a husband. I lean back on my brother’s office chair, clink my shoes on his desk and grin at the I Want to Marry Elvis Wedding Chapel eight-by-ten photo of the happy bride Vanessa with her groom. The smiling couple stands on each side of the Elvis Presley minister who has an arm around each. The photo brightens up the gloomy decor of Jayden’s boring office.
“You need some more family photos, brother.” Talking to pictures of Jayden, makes me feel closer to my brother. Okay, so I am really talking to myself because the one photo of Jayden in his office is of me assisting in the operation of one of his patients. I took my mask off to smile at the camera and streaked my cheek with blood. Other than my lovely photo, there are just boring medical certificates and medical books. Jayden’s office is blah decor with nothing personal of the man to mark his office, until now—a photo with wedding bells sketched into the glass frame. I push a UPS tracking receipt of the wedding video that I mailed to my brother into the frame corner.
Jayden ruins my good mood by calling and screaming like a fishwife. “You married her! You married Vanessa, the woman you promised to break up with!”
“But...”
“You dirty bigamist!”
“It wasn’t me who married Vanessa, Jayden. It was you.”
“Quit confusing us! I was right here in Austin. I was not the one who dressed up as Elvis and married her, Brad!”
“Really, neither of us married her, Jayden. Elvis did. Elvis is her husband.”
“You can go to prison in Canada for having two wives, Brad!”
“Let’s get one thing straight, Jayden; I am not going to jail because you are not really married to Vanessa. I did not sign the marriage certificate so the marriage is illegal, thus, there is no marriage. Vanessa is too dumb to realize we should have signed. The Vegas wedding is simply a joke on her.” I sang my last sentence to the Wedding Bell Blues tune, mimicking Vanessa.
“Quit laughing, jackass! How can you play such a cruel joke on a woman?”
“Hey, the minister thought it was a funny jest. I did you a favor, brother. Once Vanessa finds out the wedding was fake, she will break up with you.”
“End this, Brad, and soon. You are twisted, you know that?”
“Well, thank ya. Thank ya very much,” I say in my best Elvis impersonation.
Kazam! Jayden must have used a hammer on the End Call button. He did not even give me a chance to announce that his office staff threw a party to celebrate his wedding.
I whisper to his wedding photo, “I haven’t even opened any of your wedding gifts, brother. I figure you want the honors. I never bought you anything in Philly except a Whiskey Sour and an AMF. Remember how many AMFs we drank and each time, toasted our biological mother. We lifted our glasses of AMF and yelled out, Adios Mother Fucker! Well, at least I did. You are always the good boy, even to a mother who gave us away.”
I throw back my head and chuckle. I definitely want to go home so Jayden can fly back to Canada and open his wedding gifts.
Then my brother ruins my joyous mood again by calling back.
“And tell your Barbie doll to leave me the hell alone. She keeps calling,” he hollers.
“Now you are the one mixed up, Jayden. Barbie is calling my cell phone, which you have, and believes she is talking to me.”
“Yeah, then why does she say in a breathy voice, ‘Jayden, I’m free tonight. Let’s get together for a drink or two.’”
“And have you?”
“What?”
“Gotten together with my doll?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Brad. I’m just cooling my heels here in Austin waiting for you to keep your promise.”
“I’ll call when there’s any news.” Boom! I hang up on him and then urinate in a corner of Jayden’s office, the walls with the best view of Victoria. Having marked my territory, I milk the leftover drops from Big Sam and zip up my pants. My brother’s office is mine now.
Screw his practice, I am leaving the office early.
At a hardware store, I purchase a shovel using Jayden’s credit card.
I drive down the express lane with my carpool buddy beside me. The shovel is leaning against the front passenger seat wearing a black Vancouver Canucks hat with a silver visor that matches its mean silver spade face. The Canucks is a hockey team with a killer for a logo, an orca whale.
Jayden wants to end this farce. Well, I am sick to death of Vanessa and seriously thinking about going home myself, just hopping on a plane and surprising Jay
den. The Canadian teenager I hired after firing Irene, Jayden’s old-bag receptionist, is incompetent.
I have become disenchanted about living mi vida loca. Really, I picked up some Spanish north of the border in Canada.
“Si,” I tell the shovel, “you and I, Señor Grave Lover, will play a prank on Monsieur Jayden.” Okay, so I mix up my Spanish with French, but then English is my second language since I am from Krypton.
My brother will have more than one shock waiting for him when he returns to Canada.
I flick on my turn signal and make a right onto the long driveway of the Jayden family farm.
July 31, 2015
BRAD
GRAVES ARE TOUGH TO DIG even with the most expensive shovel a brother’s credit can buy. No one appreciates what I do, especially Jayden. I imagine my selfish brother lying in the shallow grave but the image freaks me out because we are identical. Believe me, it is no picnic being Brad O’Boyle and Jayden Tremblay.
It would be so much easier on my tired arms if it would only rain.
Do bones float?
Does anyone know about the flotation properties of skeletons?
Anybody?
Huh?
Because, really, this grave-digging shovel may be wearing a dapper hockey baseball hat but the spade is not talking. Why is it that all sports have baseball hats in like 21 colors, as if that makes any sense.
A plus about a shovel—the blunt tool does not have a big mouth like a dead woman.
Okay, now I am imagining Barbie in the grave staring up at the dark sky with doll eyes, glassy and unmoving.
The grave next to me is just the right size for Vanessa.
Seriously, 5500 pounds of dirt stuffed in her mouth would make Jayden’s wife quit singing.
* * *
Part Five: Obscene Attraction
Chapter 44
JAYDEN
Brad phoned telling me he finally dumped Vanessa. I asked him for one more day, leaving out the fact that I was taking his wife to the Texas Doctors’ Ball.
Dishonor Thy Wife Page 15