by J. C. Allen
And to whom I had given them to…
“I started thinking about Maggie,” I confessed, shrugging again as though it didn’t mean anything despite it obviously meaning everything. I didn’t know why I couldn’t stop bullshitting myself, even if I had to keep bullshitting Roost and the rest of the Savage Saviors. “I started thinking about Maggie, and just like that, fucking this Stephanie chick…”
I was getting too callous even for my standards.
“Sex with Stephanie didn’t seem so graded. I almost forgot that she was…”
I stopped to clear my throat and made like I heard something to the left, turning my head that way and squinting for a second so that I could have an excuse to wipe my face as I turned back. I didn’t know if I’d get through the rest of it, but at least Roost had dropped the mocking, teasing facade. He knew when it was too much.
“I almost forgot everything. And I guess I forgot enough to get me over whatever was keeping me from… ya know.”
But that was just a small part of it. It was enough to get me over whatever was preventing me from coming.
But it wasn’t enough to get me over whatever was preventing me from coming over the mental blocks of my mind. The darkness in my soul. The depression and horror that haunted my life.
The silence that stretched on from that was nearly enough to make me crazy. I had visions of me, wrapped up in straitjacket and sporting a pair of crazed eyes that darted about the room to follow the pacings of a pregnant ghost who’d never birth her baby, danced about in my head.
“… sends his condolences… sends his condolences… sends his condolences…”
By the time I made it back from the thought, I was worried that I might’ve actually begun speaking the words. Matty’s neutral face gave me confidence that I hadn’t.
But that did little to assuage the concerns that I was losing my goddamn mind bit by bit, and I needed to get my shit together at least for the cohesion of the Savage Saviors, if not for my own life.
“Least she was nice,” Roost finally said.
That should have been the point that ended the conversation, a point we could agree upon. And the fucked up part was, I did agree with that. Stephanie was nice. She was very nice. She was too nice for me.
But I was just too goddamn emotional to feel anything but frayed, seeing the worst in anything anyone said to me.
“You keep coming back to that,” I said. “Have you been listening? Did you hear anything else I said about her? About the experience?”
Matty shrugged.
“Ya said she was nice. Figured it meant something. Hell, Derek—”
“I also said she farted like a Clydesdale,” I countered. “But that detail hasn’t made any relevant come-backs since I said it.”
Stop, Derek. Stop it!
Another shrug.
“Didn’t think anything of it,” he said. “I fart after sex, too.”
I rolled my eyes. This was spiraling horribly for me, and none of it was Roost’s fault.
“That’s because you take it up the ass, Rooster.”
“How’m I supposed to know she didn’t take it up the ass?”
“Oh my God, Roost! What the fuck?”
Now I’d lost all thought. I was running on emotion. My good day had turned sour really fucking fast. I could’ve used another moron driving a Taurus to get my mind onto something that wasn’t so self-defeating.
“What?” Matty demanded, perplexed. “Why’s that such an unfair assumption? Suddenly ya got a problem puttin’ it in a girl’s—”
“Stop! Just… just stop!” I demanded.
It was official. I had broken.
“I didn’t have a problem putting it anywhere. That’s the point, Rooster! Don’t you get that? I was up for all of that—was! But ever since… fucking shit, Matty! The girl being nice wasn’t a high-point—it wasn’t something that made it better or made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside! Fuck! Can’t you get that through your thick, stupid fucking skull! Maybe wash all the cum and fairytale bullshit out of your brain and… and…”
It finally all caught up to me.
The truth of the prior night.
We hadn’t had sweaty, hot, drunken sex. I was hammered, yes, but I never lost control. I had too much experience being hammered to not know what was happening.
I had thought of Maggie the whole time during sex. My body was thinking of nothing but Maggie’s. Everything that Stephanie did, I imagined Maggie.
And that’s why I hated Stephanie in the morning before realizing she was a normal person. Not because she was a little overweight, not because she farted, not because she was someone who “took advantage” of me.
No. I hated her because she wasn’t Maggie, my wife and the mother of our never-to-be-born child.
And no one ever would be.
My knees gave out and I started to drop. Matty caught me before my jellied knees could hit the shop’s concrete floor.
“S-sorry…” I sputtered up at him. “Fuck, Roost, I’m so goddam sorry.”
I had to give all the credit in the world to Roost. He had every goddamn reason to just dump my ass, throw a coup, and lead the Savage Saviors. He would’ve done a tenfold better job than I could ever have done.
It was a true testament to his relationship to my father that he did none of that.
Not like Rock.
He only shook his head and hoisted me like I weighed nothing back to my feet. After a moment, waiting to be sure I could hold myself upright, he let me go and dusted me off. I had never felt so… worthless, but so grateful.
“No harm, no foul,” he said in a painfully forced and cheery voice. “I told ya that ya could take a shot at me if it made ya feel better. Just figured ya’d prefer to do it with yer fists.”
He stopped and looked me in the face.
“Ya feel better?” he asked.
Now, for real, we’re not lying. I shook my head. No, I didn’t.
“Sorry to hear that,” he said with absolute sincerity as he finished dusting me off. “Least ya got to bust that nut.”
“Made me feel like an asshole that I did,” I muttered, my voice needing more time than I expected to recover my strength. “Everything she was doing to impress me, and I had to think about Maggie just to give her what she wanted.”
“A gold medal?” Matty joked.
His grin faded when I didn’t so much as giggle. It had fallen flat, but even the world’s funniest joke would have not even drawn my lips up half a centimeter on the sides in that moment.
“It felt fake, Roost,” I told him. “If you’re in bed with a person, you should be in bed with that person, you know what I mean? You shouldn’t have to think about somebody else to finish—otherwise what’s the point of taking them into the bedroom in the first place? And that it was Maggie that I…”
I sighed.
“Only in the morning did I manage to see her as the person I had slept with last night, and by then, she had enough sense to know better. She was polite enough to not be a bitch to me, but if she had been, I would have more than deserved it.”
Matty nodded.
“It wasn’t fair to Stephanie, and it’s not going to be fair to anyone else I wind up with,” I said. “She didn’t deserve to be used like medicine.”
I straightened and looked Matty in the face; the flinch I saw there made me realize how cold my expression must have been. But he was smart enough to know how true what I was saying was.
“Especially when there’s no curing what’s wrong with me. So just… Just don’t suggest anything like that again, okay? It doesn’t work, and I don’t want to wake up to any more failed experiments looking at me with sad, pitying eyes.”
Amusingly enough, the first person I thought of waking up to my fucked up state was that girl I’d seen on the street corner.
“Got to keep the mind going somehow.”
You’re more right than you know, whatever your name is.
Matty, speechless
from all of that, only nodded.
I couldn’t fuck my way past my feelings. I wasn’t saying I was going to be a priest for the rest of my life.
But I was saying that this notion that the optimistic side of Roost had? The one that said with just a few good dates I could get back out there, problem solved?
No, that wasn’t happening. It wasn’t getting fixed.
I was Derek Knight, the leader of the Savage Saviors, but a broken man all the same.
8
Eve
My short peace had come to an end.
I’d gotten lucky. I didn’t have a restful sleep, which means I didn’t have to deal with the nightmares of my mind. For at least a short spell, I dodged the worst of my life.
But now, the battle had come back to the forefront, because 4 p.m. had come. Which meant that another night had arrived.
Which meant that I remembered the girl getting murdered that morning.
Which meant that I knew one wrong slip would mean I’d be the one getting dragged to the “mystery door,” soon to find out the answer to the mystery of an afterlife.
Just like the night before, I stared into the mirror, looking at the girl who stared back. My ability to use defense mechanisms to believe I was pretty was fading. Every time I smelled the mysterious odor, every time I sucked a cock for cash, every time I put on clothing that no “good girl” would ever be caught dead in…
The walls crumbled just a little bit more.
I capped my lipstick, thought about my sore asshole—no amount of Crystal’s tools had worked—set my foundation aside, and, without trying, remembered the analytical stare of the father as he watched his son working to piston inside of me.
I began to brush.
The sound of slapping around my thighs punctuated his commands, the background chorus of the boy’s grunts. Faster, faster, faster!
I brushed faster, remembering the moment I realized that the boy’s grunts sounded more like whimpers, more like the early precursors to crying.
That wasn’t how he wanted it to be. It wasn’t how I wanted it to be. Faster, faster, faster! It wasn’t how anyone wanted it to be.
Except the sicko father.
“You want her to feel it, don’t you, son?”
“Oh don’t you worry, you son of a bitch!” I muttered back at my reflection. “I felt it. I felt it where it mattered. You bet your ass I did.”
I didn’t mean my asshole, although I certainly did feel it there. I also didn’t mean my pussy, although that had some feeling the day after too.
No, I was referring to my heart. I knew what it was I was feeling the moment that poor boy’s heart broke. I’d had it happen to myself far too often—and from people far too close to me—not to put myself in his shoes with disturbing ease.
I imagined he had a girl he liked back at his school; maybe a pretty little thing just a few years into her development—perhaps a pair of mounds that weren’t quite breasts; two things that were more punctuated by her nipples than vice-versa—and just beginning to feel a variety of itches in her panties, just as I’d had boys that were just beginning to show signs of chest hair or, for the more mature ones, facial hair.
I thought of this maybe-girl—this not-quite-real fantasy of the one who had caught that boy’s eye—and how it was her that he’d been hoping would occupy the moment I’d been paid to rob from him the prior night. How many nights had he comforted himself to the thought of her and the night they might someday share?
God knows how many nights as a youth, back in those blissful days when I had the luxury and, I daresay, the privilege of fantasizing about such things, I’d spent more nights than I ever cared about thinking about boys whose names now eluded me.
But now? Now, just the thought of fantasizing about a man seemed laughable, if not outright dangerous. Men weren’t the opposite gender—they were my customers; no, not even. They were Rock’s customers; I was the product that had their grubby, dirty, chubby hands all over me. They were just objects in the world, having to be interacted with so I wouldn’t die.
God knew it wasn’t you he was imagining when he fantasized about that moment, I thought angrily. What man in the world fantasizes about losing their virginity to a fucking whore? It’s the act of a man so desperate he believes that no one will ever love him. It’s the act of a man down to his last option if he doesn’t want to be celibate.
You gave him some money back. Big whoop.
He’ll never get his first time back.
“It shouldn’t have been you,” I chastised myself, replaying those not-grunts that had resounded behind me. “It wasn’t yours to take!”
My head was beginning to hurt where the teeth of the brush dragged across my scalp.
“It wasn’t—” I began again, but then another voice joined the awful song in my head, and I repeated its horrible truth. Unlike before, I let the words fall out of my mouth, as much an acknowledgment of their horribleness as my resignation to the reality of them.
“You a whore or not?”
I was too embarrassed to answer myself. I remembered the nightmare that had woken me up earlier that day. I nodded, and the girl staring back at me mirrored the gesture.
“You got me,” I whispered to myself.
Because what could I say? I’m not a whore, I’m a woman who enjoys sex and gets paid to do it.
Yeah, and the guy at McDonald’s is a high-end provider of nourishment who enjoys bringing beef and potatoes to his comrades. Jesus fucking Christ, Eve. If you’re going to lie to yourself, at least lie convincingly.
At least—
“BY ALL THE QUEEFING CUNTS OF AMERICA, EVE!” Crystal bellowed, banging on the bathroom door. “WHAT! IS! TAKING YOU! SO GODDAM LONG?”
What’s taking me so long? What’s taking me so long? Do you have all evening?
No. You don’t. It’s your story or your life.
I sighed, fighting back tears in the mirror.
A billion apologies, Crystal, I thought. I was just ripping my skull raw under the command of a skeevy father who I’m pretty sure whacked off to the sight of his crying son’s stolen virginity! Just let me powder my pussy like you showed me and we’ll be off down the yellow brick road, just you, Scarecrow, and Lion, and me, the Tin-Whore—just aching for a heart that’s NOT glued together with tears and semen!
And surely… surely… maybe we can…
“You a whore or not?”
A single tear fell down my face.
“Just powdering my pussy like you showed me.”
Whoever said the CliffNotes version of fine literature was cheating never had to face the wrath of an angry hooker.
Or, I thought of Rock with a shudder, an angry pimp. A deadly pimp.
“Well give the meat-wallet a good slap for me, okay?” she called back, her voice a great deal calmer than a moment earlier, “Remind her who’s boss!”
I wish I had Crystal’s spirit. I wish I had her ability to stare down another night of horror with a fake smile. Even if it was fake, some part of my mind… surely, some part had to be fooled, no?
No.
Because no matter what, Rock’s still around.
“If it’s the boss who’s supposed to be slapping my pussy,” I muttered, not caring if she heard or not, “then I’d do best to keep my hands off myself.”
I didn’t need to do any more powdering. I hurriedly stored my stuff and let Crystal into the bathroom to prep herself. As I saw both of our reflections in the mirror, I couldn’t help but wonder what she saw when she looked herself in the mirror.
Could she bullshit herself like I could not?
I didn’t think about the question too much, because Crystal didn’t give me time to. She had mastered the art of moving quickly and swiftly to get a job done. By the time I had gone back from thinking she hated herself to thinking she had formed a good shell, she had emerged, looking as put-together as two whores under Rock could.
We moved in silence on this night, a bit of a
contrast from the previous night. I think both of us were beginning to crack—not that we’d reached a breaking point.
I had no idea why. We didn’t have a good rational reason for this. We should have wanted death in comparison to what Rock had in store for us.
But… regardless, I at least let myself feel good when the bus showed up early, meaning our risk of not making it on time had diminished significantly. It wasn’t like I felt great—my feeling great today was what a bad day would have been just a few short years ago…
And when I thought of it like that, it put a real damper on things.
Your life has reached a point of such absolute and complete shit that when the smallest, simplest things go right—in this case: having public transportation successfully dump you off at the corner where you’ll be selling more blowjobs, robbed virginities, and rough anal poundings—your dumb ass actually celebrates it.
What’s next, Eve? You gonna think it’s your birthday when a John’s condom doesn’t break and knock you up? You gonna play the lottery when a hundred-dollar fuck doesn’t rip up your insides?
“You a whore or not?”
You really are just a stupid, stupid whore, aren’t you?
Yes, yes you are!
And, what’s more, that’s all you’ll ever be!
Now off with you, stupid whore, because there’s plenty more shitty ‘rights’ to celebrate…
And there’s Rock… the real Rock…
If today had any potential, any hope for a miracle, it all vanished at the sight of Rock.
In the few months I’d been working with Crystal on that corner, Rock had only shown up five times in person. It was a rare and justifiably cringe-worthy event, because he only did so for one of two reasons:
He felt that one, if not both, of us were holding out on him. In cases of the first, there was guaranteed beatings and the very high likelihood of a rape—to “remind us,” as he put it, what it was we were made for.
In the second, he had what he called a “special” job for one, if not both, of us—and, in such cases, we got to look forward to playing the role of party favors to some prospective clients.