I could feel the ugly green demon of jealousy tugging at my guts as her face glowed in the reflection of the computer screen, like some creepy monster movie vampire.
A few minutes later, she grew impatient. Back to the sofa. Then, with the TV blaring, Narcisa passed out, wearing two pairs of pants as a makeshift chastity belt. With her grimy combat boots propped up on my pillow and the dirty pink motorcycle helmet still fastened to her head, she snored the rest of the day away.
Her emails sat open on the table, calling out to me like a glowing white loony ward. Like a man in a trance, I went over and stared at the screen.
Powerless to resist, I sat. My finger hesitated over the cursor.
Then I did it. I opened up Pandora’s Inbox and dove into a stinking nightmare swamp of outdated whore-correspondence, a grim archeological dig into a burnt-out, ruined netherworld of hooker-hustle. The Whore of Babylon’s mad realm.
My stomach froze as I dug like a soot-faced miner, burrowing down, down, deeper and deeper into that dark, uncharted tunnel; into the site, the tomb, the wound, into the land of a thousand johns, a thousand tricks, a thousand vics, a thousand tricks and a thousand swinging dicks. Unable to stop, I read on, one email at a time.
Hey little cutie, it’s me, Fabio, remember? You came over to my place over Carnaval, and we partied and you spent the night, and I really want to see you again. Here’s my number. Call me . . . Arrrggghhhhh! Delete!
Then, I hit pay dirt. An unread email from the estranged husband.
It was months old, asking if she was dead or alive, wanting to know where to send the divorce papers. I kept reading, digging down, down, into the wreckage of ashes and ghosts and demons, raping my mind, skull-fucking my bloody eyes out!
As I read the next one, my soul froze . . . What the fuck? Narcisa had been working on some other guy, some random gringo sex tourist, right before I took her in . . . Look at this one! It’s from the same day I found her in Copacabana!
I kept reading, dusting off the pieces, digging deeper. And it hurt. A smarmy spasm of jealousy reared its ancient reptilian head in my heart like the Loch Ness Monster, bubbling up from a stinking, maudlin swamp of dark, unhappy emotions. But I couldn’t stop digging. Down, down, down, down I went, like a diligent archeologist, an impartial scientist, a suicide kamikaze pilot to hell.
With a gut-chilling wave of disgust, I stared at the gringo’s words . . . “When you kissed me that night on the beach” . . . Arrggghh! What? When she kissed him?
What the fuck? This guy says he’d “never been kissed with such passion . . .” A gringo! Some shit-eating, pink-faced little foreign clerk! A goddamn fuck tourist! Some anonymous trick! Bitch! She never kissed me! But she was kissing some faceless, nameless gringo shit-fuck with “passion”?!?
Miserable, poisonous cow! Dirty, backstabbing whore!
I wondered if I would ever recover from loving Narcisa.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to gouge my eyes out with a fucking spoon. I didn’t. I just sat there, reading the rest of the email. And the one after that. And the one after that . . .
103. THE DEVIL’S KISS
“THERE’S A BAD ODOR ABOUT A MAN WHO’S BEEN BETRAYED.”
—Maureen Howard
As Narcisa snored the hours away, I went through the rest of her emails.
There were dozens of them, but I kept going back to that one stinging nightmare message, reeking of the tomb of ancient rejection and betrayal.
A gringo, another sucker, another trick, another savior, another hustle, another clit-twiddling wanker—another man! Some random ass-faced foreigner, Austrian, German, Swiss, whatever . . . Another White Knight from some nice, clean, logical, safe, milk-fed, well-governed, prosperous little European shithole, with photo attachments of the stupid mamaluke standing in the snow . . . Fucking pine trees jutting out of the white powder like demon fingers reaching up from hell . . . Grinning like a fat, overfed Cheshire cat in his well-bred, well-adjusted, wealthy little gringo Winter Wonderland, like fucking Santa Claus. Arrogant little beer-swilling piss-monkey, standing there in his pretty, pastel-colored, sporty gringo ski clothes, skiing the Swiss Alps or the Matterhorn or Mount fucking Everest!
Go shit up a fucking pine tree, ya goofy little ass-clown!
As I read on, picturing Narcisa and this gringo together, all of a sudden, I started laughing; the bitter death-grin cackle of a murdered little ghost.
Fuck! Some shit-brained gringo trick! Bitch! Fucking whore was hijacking another dumb bastard all along, and right under my clueless fucking nose! Another Magic Gringo to swoop down and rescue her and carry her off to his neat, civilized, law-abiding Swiss Army Knife-chocolate-factory-clockwork-yodeling Nazi-world of fairy tale dreams and twinkling Disneyland Happy Endings! Knockwurst-chomping Master Race prick, all dressed up in his fancy, state-of-the-art, hi-tech German ski gear!
Looking at the gringo’s pictures, I conjured an image of Narcisa out on the slopes, skiing in designer black leather German underwear, flying through the snowy pines at supersonic silver speed, a crack pipe dangling from her breathless blue lips and a Bible tucked under her arm, shouting, screaming, raving.
“Sinners! Sinners! Arrrggghhh! You all going to hell! Go go! Moooove, e’stupid!”
Hallucinating from sleep deprivation, the day was a long waking nightmare of betrayal. I kept going back to that email, again and again, seething at the realization that she’d spent her last days before me hustling, in the long whore tradition of her mother’s godforsaken race of whores, trying to reel in some other poor fool, just like her mother’s grandmother’s whoring mother’s man-murdering whore-ghost before her, and on down the line of snatch-peddling strumpets and floozies and good-time girls and backstabbing, blackhearted, sidewalk-slithering trollops, all the way back to when they were all whore cavewomen, bartering their beet-red whore-monkey asses for bunches of green bananas.
Suddenly, I heard a faint sound of dry, bloody bones, echoing in my ear.
The Dakini was coming!
I could hear her approaching, dancing into the long, dark hazy night of my soul, hypnotizing me, holding me riveted to the screen, getting closer and closer, rattling down the lonely road to nowhere, whirling and gyrating her wild, feverish Whore of Babylon Dakini dance, grabbing me, dragging me down, down, down, into the pulsing depths of a wound that never closes, never heals, never mends, never ends . . .
Hey little cutie, it’s Fabio, remember me? You came over to my place during Carnaval and we partied and you spent the night. I really want to see you again. Here’s my number. Call me . . . The Spirits increase . . . Vigor grows through a wound . . . You don’ wanna get involve with me, Cigano. If you go down these road together with me now, you can never go back . . . I no gonna e’stay all alone an’ wait for you come back . . . The spirits increase . . . I must say, I really miss being kissed kissed kissed by a girl, kissed kissed kissed by a girl with so much passion, so much passion, so much passion, passion, passion . . . I hope you’re well, little sweetie, little sweetie. Take care of yourself. Love, Hanz.
Take care of yourself. What? Take care of yourself? Why? How? Fuck! That would defeat the whole fucking purpose of being Narcisa, of being the Whore of Babylon, this heartless, merciless, stone-faced bitch of a pagan idol that I have worshipped and given my stinking, defeated lifeblood to feed and be fed to forever.
I looked up from the computer, to Narcisa’s crashed-out carcass littering my sofa, and the spirits increased, bringing me back to the beginning, back to when I’d first met her; back to when she was still the Charming Waif, the Beguiling Hostage-Taker, the enticing little Acid Queen, before her mask melted away to expose the stone-cold heart of an unsmiling succubus, a false idol to love that wasn’t love at all, but its psychotic, two-headed twin of domination and grabby, crabby, clinging dependency, that frigid, murderous, malevolent bitch of Addiction, drawing me closer and closer, till I’d put my throbbing, raw, bleeding red heart into her filthy, crack-blackened crab cla
w, again and again, until she really, finally had me. And then, she yanked open the gates of hell, releasing the demons, the spirits, the spooks and hobgoblins and ghouls to extract their fiendish retribution. Because that one who’d first drawn me in, the Smiling One, the Dancing One, the Homeless Waif with a Cosmic Fishbowl and a Need I thought I could fill with my tainted, crippled love, now she was gone! Now only Medusa remained, snarling, spitting, snakes hissing, spewing ashes from her tangled, lethal dreadlocks of hell-bent doom and eternal bondage of self-obsession and want . . . I must say, Narcisa, I really miss being kissed by a girl with so much passion passion passion. The girls here are all so cold. I hope you’re well. Take care of yourself, little sweetie. Love, Hanz. Love, Hanz. Love, Hanz. Hanz. Hanz . . . This Hanz’s words were stuck in my brain like a sticky strand of half-chewed bubble gum. As I sat reading the gringo’s email again and again, sinking deeper into that festering swamp of jealousy and betrayal and regret, I remembered a night in Copacabana, when some little whore had stuck her bubble gum in my hair while sitting behind me on the bike. Another girl on the ho-stroll had told me the only way to get rid of it was to cut out the gummy strands of hair, and that was what I’d done, with her help . . . What was her name, anyway? I screwed her twice and gave her a nice tip . . . She was a good egg, that one.
I read the email again . . . I really miss being kissed by a girl with so much passion . . . Love, Hanz . . . Hanz. Shit! Another poor, clueless bastard she tried to run off with, because, like me, Narcisa always tried to run from the pain of her existence; even if she couldn’t run because the pain was inside her, tattooed onto every rancid, corrupt cell of her being, the indelible portrait of an abandoned child; and if she couldn’t run to drugs or to Jesus or Ashtar or Mickey Mouse, Narcisa always ran to people. She could jump right into your soul and suck it dry as the desert sands of Alpha Centauri, trying to dodge the pain of being in her own inconvenient, miserable, tortured, passionate beggar’s psyche.
Passion passion passion passion . . . I couldn’t get the gringo’s haunting, taunting words out of my head. Kissed with passion? Was this fucker talking about the same Narcisa I knew? She never kissed me! Not since the first week we were together, back when she was still roping me in, fattening me up for this hellish slaughter; but after that, it was months before she ever let me kiss her again, always turning her face away, clamping her lips shut like a clam, like I was trying to shove a fucking poison dart into her mouth or something. Shit.
Only months later, after I’d marched through the gauntlet of clamoring demons in the torture chambers of a screaming medieval hell to get her back, after I’d proved myself a hundred times as a worthwhile hostage, an asset, a sucker, a chump, a doormat, a worthy adversary, only then had she finally kissed me again.
Ah, but when she did, it was as addictive as everything else about her, nibbling away at her soul in passionate little bites as I fucked her and we disintegrated into a lingering humid mist of lust; running my tongue long and slow across her teeth, her crazy pink gums and lips, drinking in her essence like a mad, sex-crazed vampire, inhaling her insane, fevered breath like a crackhead sucking in the lethal smoke.
Suddenly, I got it . . . Jesus fuck! That’s it! Kissed with passion! Fuck!
Maybe that tight-ass, beer-swilling Nazi Aryan fuckwit Hanz didn’t know it, but I knew what all that so-called passion was! I knew its smell and its taste and its effect, like I know the smell of boiling heroin in a bent, blackened spoon as I hold a trembling match under it, preparing the next crucial fix to jam into a screaming, yearning, hungry black-and-blue vein.
It’s the passion of Desperation!
Only another addict could ever be attracted to that shit. For guys like Hanz, when it’s time to go back home to Austria or Germany or Bulgaria or wherever, back to Stuttgart, back to Gringolândia, back to Lipshitz, back to the bank, it’s just time to go, and that’s that. Not for an addict like me. For me, that mirror-image desperation kiss was the Kiss of Death. The Devil’s Kiss. And it’s addictive as crack or heroin or chocolate or hang gliding. Doesn’t matter what it is. It’s all addictive! It’s the bloody, screaming, monkey-ass-banging human condition! Peanut butter milk shakes, miniature golf, television, computer games, work, sleep, sports, whatever. Anything, everything! Because the addiction isn’t in the substance, whatever it is. It’s in the mind. And that’s why Narcisa was so hard for me to ever put down. Because you can put down the crack, the booze, the milk shake, the girl, the boy, the billy goat, the vibrating dildo, the heroin, the fucking church bingo, whatever. You can put it all down, again and again and again, but you can never shut down the mind, even after the brain is dead, blown to wiggling, tormented, quivering smithereens! Because the mind lives on forever. You can kill the body, but the mind will never stop chattering away in the depths of your being, like some insane, blazing, blackhearted ringtailed monkey sitting in a screaming, bleeding tree whose poisonous roots reach all the way down to hell! That’s why people like Narcisa and I just keep running and running and running, jumping into other people’s souls, seeking relief where there can be no relief. Unsettled, restless and discontent, looking for that glow-in-the-dark Day-Glo plastic Jesus to save us. People like us just keep running and running, trying to outrun the eternal plague of ourselves.
The Curse.
And Narcisa would truly prefer to rule in hell than serve in heaven. She even told me that once, when I tried to tell her I couldn’t be with her twenty-four eye-bleeding hours a day, seven fucking days a week, that it just wasn’t possible, that I had to work at some point, get some sleep, go to the bathroom, whatever, that if I didn’t break away from our endless loop of sex and drugs and addiction to tend to some stupid mundane concerns, like paying a light bill or hustling up a little money, getting some food, going to the dentist, soon we’d both be out in the street, eating shit, picking through the garbage, sleeping under a fucking bridge.
That’s when she’d said it:
“I prefer go an’ live under de bridge together with somebody than e’stay all alone. If you don’ gonna take care of me, then I gonna get somebody else, got it?”
I got it. Now, I really, finally got it. Some body. Any old warm body would do. Not anyone in particular. Just whoever! Whatever. Any old human body . . . Bitch!
I got up and crept over to where Narcisa lay snoring on my sofa. I stood over her, looking down at her sleeping form, contemplating smothering her with the pillow and putting us both out of our misery for good.
Something stopped me.
Shutting down, exhausted, I limped back over and closed the glowing computer screen. Then I climbed up to bed and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
104. MOMENT OF TRUTH
“BECAUSE LOVE HAS BEEN SO PERVERTED, IT HAS IN MANY CASES COME TO INVOLVE A MEASURE OF HATRED.”
—Germaine Greer
Narcisa’s latest clean-and-sober kick didn’t survive the week, of course.
But she did. We did. And then, there we were again; right back where we’d started—two enemy prisoners-of-war, trudging through the muddy, bloody old trenches, lost on a raging battlefield of love and terror. It was as if we were bound to each other, handcuffed together in an angry rolling short-circuit flaming death-machine hamster-wheel ride through hell; living it all out again and again, day by day, hour by hour, in an exploding nightmare minefield of recurring troubles; struggling, fighting, pushing, pulling, shoving, hating, waiting for the inevitable bitter end, which never seemed to come.
But it would all be coming to a head soon, I knew. I could feel it. My heart bled and hurt, like a crown of thorns was squeezing the life from it, puncturing it, bleeding it like a leaky rubber on the devil’s throbbing, blinking red cock, as we battled through the days, struggling to get away from the madness of each other, away from ourselves; away from the stinking, bottomless pit of agony, rejection, betrayal, abandonment and suffering; away from our own unhappy karma and hellish addiction to each other. We split up again and again, so
metimes half a dozen times in a day. But we couldn’t get away.
Then, one dreary, rainy gray afternoon, it happened. I made the Big Decision.
I decided to leave Narcisa for good; to get out of town and stay away this time; just get on a big long-distance bus and go somewhere, anywhere, far, far away this time.
I’d been thinking of leaving for weeks already, formulating and sculpting the vague, fuzzy notion into a picture in the back of my brain. It had been sitting there, festering, growing like a poisonous seed of silent treachery planted deep in the foul-smelling, blood-soaked soil of hurt and abuse. Then, all of a sudden, boom, it all just snapped into focus.
We’d been sitting around the apartment during a momentary lull in the war. Things were even going fairly well, for once. I’d just unveiled my new tattoo for Narcisa: her name—NARCISA—emblazoned over my heart; an optimistic tribute to my princess; an inflamed, bloody symbol of my undying love and devotion.
Having learned to draw tattoos pretty well in prison, I’d finally worked up the elaborate design she’d been nagging me about for months—a purple butterfly for her forearm. The new tattoos would be our own indelible little rites of passage. I’d just told her I’d take her to the tattoo place downtown, where I knew a guy.
Out of nowhere, it came: the Backlash. She jumped up and started storming around the room, all agitated and crazy-eyed, shouting at me.
“Que tatuagem, hein? What focking tattoo, porra? Hah! Idiota! Otário! Babaca! Don’ you know it, Cigano? I never gonna love you! Don’ wan’ no focking tattoo from some e’stupid old sucker! Nunca! I only been using you all these time, e’stupid old trick! Soon I get better, I gonna go back with my husband again—only man I ever gonna love, got it?”
Narcisa Page 51