“Uh, no, uh, Bubba. Uh, what else?” Needless to say, I was quickly losing my appetite for catfish. I managed to get a couple of bites and a few french fries down and decided it was time to find Patty, but Bubba wasn’t quite finished.
“You know why the fucking fire ants are here? You know why? Palm trees, that’s why! PALM TREES! People want to fix up their fucking yards with palm trees and ferns and shit from South America and when they get them, they come with fire ants! Fire ants come in palm trees from South America! Who needs fucking palm trees! HUH? CAN YOU TELL ME THAT MISTER! CAN YOU? FUCK NO, YOU CAN’T! FUCK NO… fuck no…” At that Bubba flopped back down on the little stool that lived behind the counter and just sat there, sobbing.
I felt sorry for the guy, but Jesus, was everybody around here nuts? In thirty seconds I had gone from eating some of the most amazing food I ever put in my mouth to listening to a guy blubbering about his dead stepmother covered with blisters. I had to boogie. “Hey, Bubba, I’m, uh, really sorry to hear about Katie and the fire ants and the palm trees and all, but, uh, I’ve gotta go. Catch ya later, okay?” The fry cook never looked up as I got in my rental car and left.
I remembered Patty showing up at the hospital around 4:00 in the afternoon, so I hurried on over there and didn’t have long to wait. As I watched, the young blonde pulled into the parking lot, got out of her ten-year-old Jeep, and walked toward the main entrance to the building. My irrational impulse to create some kind of romantic connection between us had mostly faded; nevertheless, It had been a couple of days since I had seen Patty and she was even more babistic than I remembered. And shit, it had been AT LEAST two weeks since I had gotten laid, but hey, I REALLY needed to focus on the “business” aspects of this trip and not the distractions. Totally. Absolutely.
Walking in her direction, I shouted, “Patty! Patty, it’s Franklin… Frank… wait up.”
She stopped, looked back in my direction and gave me a big smile. “Frank! It’s good to see you. I was afraid you had gone back to L.A. What’s going on? You look great!”
“Uh, yeah, it’s nice to see you again. I’ve been checking out some leads on the Wilmer Graves story and some pretty interesting stuff has come up. I’d like to talk to you about it, uh, when you’re free.” Being around her again was making me a little nervous.
“Of course! I’d love to hear what you found out, but I have to go up and see my mom, right now. You can come along if you want.”
I can’t say I was thrilled with the idea of hanging out with Patty and her turnip mom, but I needed to talk to her and she was TOTALLY convincing about being happy to see me—hey, life is funny… who knows? So I opted to hang with her and the boring old biscuit bag in the hospital room, at least for a little while. I mean, it was either that or go back to the motel and stare at the tube.
We got in the elevator and headed up to the room. “So how is your mom, Patty? Is she recovering from her surgery okay?” I was feeling kind of stiff and awkward.
“She’s a lot better… thanks. They said she might be going home in a few days. Oh yeah, Mom is definitely getting back to her old self. You’ll see. So where did you go?”
“It’s kind of a long story… I can’t get into it right now, but I drove over to Kansas City. I’m not sure how much you know about the Graves situation, but they think he was involved in a string of robberies… mostly convenience stores and formal wear rental places. The cops are fairly certain it was him, but the thing is Graves had an accomplice for those stickups, a young guy who drove the car, and I’m pretty sure he’s the one who phoned in the tip about Graves’ body. I looked him up in KC and talked to him… I’m convinced he’s the guy. But that’s just the start, the story gets weirder and weirder. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
The elevator door opened and we headed toward Patty’s mom’s room. “Wow! It sounds like you’ve done some great work, Frank. I’ll bet you could even become a deputy if you wanted to. I really want to hear more, but I have to go in and see Mom now.”
As Patty opened the door, I entered with her and checked out the scene. It was exactly the same as when I left two days earlier. As her daughter sat in a chair beside the bed, Patty’s mom meat was as lifeless as a week-old Thanksgiving turkey. Exuberant as ever, the young woman greeted her mother, “Hi, Mom! You look great! The doctors say you should be going home any day now!” A small globule of drool, caught in a crevice at the corner of Mom’s mouth, broke free and ran down her chin in response. Not missing a beat, Patty grabbed a kleenex and wiped it away. The kid was devoted, no doubt about it.
“This is Frank, Mom. You remember Frank, don’t you? He’s the one who brought you the nice corypantha.” No reaction. To say she was corpse-like would be an insult to the dead, but maybe I’m being too negative. I had despised hospital rooms since I spent several nights sleeping in a chair next to my mom after her gallbladder surgery when I was a kid. Only she never recovered. The memory of my mother laying there with tubes running in and out of every opening in her body totally terrified me. Hospitals were places where people went to die. Okay, all right, I know I had a shitty attitude. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea that I came along. Feeling guilty, I pointed a weak smile in the direction of Patty’s mother, politely excused myself and went to the bathroom.
Even going to the toilet in a hospital room is depressing. As I stood there pissing, I found myself fixated on a bedpan lying on the floor. You know what a bedpan means? It means you’re so fucking weak and debilitated you can’t even get into the goddam bathroom. It takes all your effort to somehow maneuver your carcass over a weird bowl-shaped thing in order to piss and shit. And then the feces and urine collector takes it away, and you wait… and wait… to die. Okay… all right… I told myself I needed to lighten up, if only because of Patty. Hey—no way she lets herself get hosed by a Gloomy Gus.
As I came back into the room, Patty was telling her mom about her little brother. She talked about how well he was doing in school and how much he loved being on the basketball team and how cute his girlfriend was and all that typical kind of mother-daughter family crap. Finally after about an hour that seemed like forty-two eternities with your dick in a George Foreman grill, Patty told her mom that we had to go. Propped up in her bed, with her eyes staring into the ultimate void, the old bag looked exactly the same as the moment we entered the room. Upbeat to a fault, the cute young blonde stood up, leaned over and kissed her mom on the cheek. “I love you… I love you, Mom… with all my heart and soul.” It was really kind of touching. No shit—it was.
As we headed back to the elevator, I saw her wipe a tear away. Whatever else, the kid hung in there like a trooper. I tried to make some conversation… something, anything that would get Patty’s mind off her pathetic and broken-down mother. I said, “I didn’t know you had a brother. He sounds like he’s doing okay.”
“No, not really, Frank. I just didn’t want Mom to worry. Tommy Joe just got suspended from school. They caught him smoking pot on campus, the little shit. I keep telling him, ‘Smoke it at home! Smoke it at a friend’s house if you have to, but don’t smoke it at school!’ It almost seemed like he wanted to be caught. He’s running with the wrong crowd, Frank. I don’t know what to do.”
“Gosh, I’m sorry to hear it, Patty.” Hell, I didn’t know what to do either. Wherever you went around here you stepped in another pile of poop. I found myself missing L. A. and the company of people who only worried about the availability of their personal trainers and whether or not their arugula was actually organic.
We finished the elevator ride in silence, then walked back out into the parking lot. I really needed Patty’s help dealing with Ted Hendricks and this whole explosion weirdness. I reached over and grabbed her arm. “Patty, I have something I need to talk about. Have you got a minute?” I felt like the only way to register the proper impact and scale of this whole incident was to take her out to the site of the explosion. Nothing would make the point like standing in th
e center of that crater.
“Sure, yeah… go ahead. I’m sorry I got so wrapped up with my mom. I’m sure you can see how much better she is, but she still has a long way to go before she’s well again. You could see she’s better, right?”
“Uh, yeah, sure, a lot better… but, uh, well, here’s the deal, Patty. It seems like Wilmer Graves and his accomplice were involved in some really weird shit. If I tried to explain you’d never believe it, but there’s something you need to see that will spell it out in big, bold, and bone-chilling letters. Are you free now?” The sun was going down and it was getting dark. It was also starting to get cold. If we were going to head out to the crater, we had to hurry.
“Gosh, Frank, it sounds amazing, but I promised Bernie, uh, Deputy Bodie, that I would come back to and catch up on some paperwork. I’ve been taking so much time off to visit my mom that I’ve gotten kind of behind, but tomorrow’s Saturday and I don’t have to work. I could go with you in the morning. How about that?”
“Yeah, okay… it can wait until tomorrow. And thanks, I appreciate your support. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“No problem, Frank. I look forward to it.” At that point she threw her arms around me and gave me a huge hug, then planted a massive wet smacker right on my lips. Okay, there was no tongue action or anything, but I got the message and it was clear as a freight train in a baby’s bedroom. The words of the late great Frank Zappa echoed in my brain, “There’s no way to delay that trouble comin’ every day.”
An hour or so later I was back at the Roadside Inn. Looking around I rethought my position on the woe-inducing nature of hospital rooms. I mean, really, compared to my motel room, complete with instant coffee, styrofoam cups, mildewed tile and a toilet flaunting a distinctly flawed flushing technique, the hospital was a fucking Shangri-La. Regardless, the nearness of Patty, the aroma of her soft and inviting femininity, the memory of her eager arms and wet lips, were all having a strong and compelling effect. At this point there was really only one thing to do—jerk off.
In previous times, the solution to a problem like this would have meant a trip to some crummy 7-11 to check out the Hustler and Club magazines while some swarthy-looking guy that barely spoke English eyeballed you suspiciously. But hey… this was modern times. We now have the INTERNET, a vast cornucopia of erotic entertainment. As any red-blooded guy knows, the latest innovation in this particular arena of joy is tube sites. Tube sites are to porn as YouTube is to NBC—an unlimited supply of teasing, titillation and toe-sucking, or whatever your twisted cravings command.
I had picked up a fifth of Jack Daniels in KC and still had a little over half of it left. After a quick visit to the ice machine, I poured myself a couple of fingers of Jack, unzipped my pants and settled down in front of my laptop. Now, one of the great things about cheap motels these days is free Internet access. Conversely, if you stay in the so-called nice joints, they fucking charge you fifteen to twenty bucks a day to log on; meanwhile every Motel 8, TraveLodge, Choice Inn, etc., is giving it to you gratis. But, while your connection may come sans fee, it is absolutely the worst Internet service imaginable. Okay, beggars and choosers and all that crap, but when it comes to carnal relief, if the poison of your choice is streaming video, a 28K connection won’t cut it. But who knows, maybe I’d get lucky.
All right, to put us on firm ground here, I have to confess that my evil of interest is spanking. Okay, I know it’s a little kinky and not exactly PC, but hey, depravity is depravity, you grab it where you can, if you get my drift. But sometimes I like to warm up with a little milder stuff—you know, a couple of cute teens doing the old in-and-out before settling down with the whips and heart-shaped paddles.
So I logged on to xHamster.com. Like most tube sites, it contains a fairly massive variety from ho-hum vanilla to bondage, gang-bangs and rape fantasies, but I was easing in so I played it straight. Fairly quickly, I came upon a video featuring the lovely Iona (a.k.a. Merriweather, a.k.a. Katherine, etc.). I doubt that most people are aware of the major boost Internet porn has given to the economies of eastern Europe, and the delightful Iona, with literally hundreds of videos scattered across the web, has certainly been a prime beneficiary. Fresh-faced and eager, one would never expect the pure and innocent features of Iona/Merriweather/Katherine to warp into a mask of unadulterated lust the instant a penis entered her rectum, but the babe has talent.
I clicked on the preview window and the video sprang into action. There was the angelic “teen,” lying on a bed wearing a tube top, tight shorts and knee socks, smiling as she thumbed through a copy of Teen Vogue. No more than thirty seconds passed before her “boyfriend” entered the room, playfully grabbing her buttocks as Iona squealed with glee. Another thirty or forty-five seconds found him passionately kissing her open mouth and forcefully grabbing her breasts. In approximately two-and-a-half minutes, the young cutie was topless, zealously unzipping the guy’s pants and I was experiencing a sharp stirring in my loins. Twenty seconds later, the video froze. I restarted and ten seconds later, it froze again… and again.
You don’t have to know much about streaming video to understand my feeling at that point. Whenever a fuck film sucks you in, then suddenly stops, freezing the action, it’s frustrating, but if your best friend is rising to the occasion, it’s mean and nasty. This can happen for different reasons—the resolution of the video is too high, it’s poorly compressed, the connection speed is too slow—so the thing to do is click on another one and hope for the best, which I did. The next video actually made it somewhere between five and six minutes before it stopped, just enough time to reach full erection plus a few solid strokes. The next time it was three-and-a-half minutes, then two, then five-and-a-quarter. To say I was frustrated at this point is similar to saying sharks like mammal meat.
Hey!—no surprise. The “free” Internet basically wasn’t worth a shit, at least not for my current needs, but I wasn’t without options, the first one being a refill of bourbon, which I hastily knocked back. Next in line was my cell phone. My Samsung Galaxy S4 was a couple of years old, so I couldn’t get LTE service, not that they would have 4G coverage in Clinton, but 3G should be okay. I logged on again, this time to tube8. com, another favorite. Okay, I was going from a decent-sized laptop screen down to a fucking postage stamp, but sex primarily happens in your head anyway. I would have to work a little harder, so to speak, but I was up for it… way up.
By now my frustration level was at a point where I needed to just go ahead and get it over with, so I went for the Nacho. Nacho Vidal is this ugly, well-hung dude who absolutely drives them crazy. A babe hooked up with Nacho will be abused, humiliated and slapped around like a baby bunny with a German Shepherd. She will also come about a dozen times. Determined, I clicked on a sordid encounter between Nacho and the inappropriately named Kristina Rose. Kristina is to Iona as Mommy Dearest is to Shirley Temple. If innocence is your thing, don’t bother with Kristina Rose, but if full-on debauchery, punctuated by SPANK ME! SLAP ME! PULL MY HAIR! does it for you, then Kristina is the one.
I won’t go into all the sordid details, but after fifteen or twenty minutes of Nacho and Kristina on a couch, on the floor, in her ass as he choked her, spanked her, rammed his fingers down her throat, etc., etc., I finally came to a satisfying conclusion. Exhaling a massive sigh of relief, I wiped myself off, knocked down the rest of my Jack and went to bed. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow… or so said Shakey, the great.
Arriving into Terry’s I met Patty for breakfast at ten the next morning. She was not only as cute as ever, but appeared to have spent the whole morning putting herself together, which seemed a little odd since our destination was a crater in the middle of the woods. We ordered our food and chatted, mainly small talk about the weather, her mom and brother, and what it was like growing up in a place like Clinton. Only twenty-three and radiating innocence, Patty dreamed of seeing the world, but my impression was more that of a young woman deeply mired in the gravity of small-town America
.
After a few minutes, I noticed a guy in a state trooper’s uniform staring from a table across the room. The guy’s look was so intense, I quickly found myself becoming apprehensive. Finally, in a low voice, I whispered to Patty. “Don’t look, but there’s a state cop on the other side of the room staring at us.”
Despite my caution, she glanced over at the guy’s table. “Oh, him… that’s just Duane. Don’t pay any attention to him. Duane thinks he’s my boyfriend. We hang out some, but we’re just friends. I told him about you and I think he’s a little jealous, but it’s no big deal.”
I had a feeling that life was about to become complicated. We finished our breakfast and as I walked up to the cash register, I noticed Duane pushing his chair back and slowly rising to his feet. The guy was fucking huge. He was at least 6’5” and probably went 240. Gradually ambling over in our direction, the big trooper looked like John Wayne sizing up some lily-livered cattle rustler.
Standing next to me, Patty greeted Duane with a distinct chill in her voice. “Hi, Duane. What do you want?”
“Just thought I’d come over and say hi, Patty. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”
Not bothering to disguise her irritation, Patty sighed. “No, Duane. There’s nothing wrong with that. Now go away, okay? Frank and I have some business to take care of.”
The Brickeaters Page 6