So we cruise Sunset, all the way from, say, La Cienega up to Raleigh Heights, and it’s getting close to nine—you’d think every working girl in the world would be out by that time—Saturday night, party night, but we only see a bunch of tired old dogs pounding the pavement. You and me, we’re doing St. Pauli Girl, but keeping the bottles low so the cops don’t notice, when I see what I think is just about the most beautiful piece of work this side of the Pacific and I slam on the brakes and cross a lane to park.
“Look at her, holy mother of fuck, look at her,” I say, and barely remember to put on the parking brake. I leap out of the Mustang—it’s a convertible—and practically dive right over to her. She’s got everything, and packed tight: a nice rack of tits, thin waist, and child-bearing hips.
“Hey, little boy,” she says, “you want some sugar in your coffee tonight?”
I’ve never picked up a whore, so I feel real tongue-tied.
“You want a date?” She’s got teeth all the way down her throat, it seems, big white flashy teeth with a couple of gold caps in the way back. She’s practically steaming there like an oyster out of the fish market, and I start to feel like a twelve-year-old of rage hormones and dripping wick.
“Listen,” I say, “I got this friend. Alec.”
She looks at you in the car. “That him? He’s cute.”
“No, no, that’s not him. We’re throwing a bachelor party tonight. We need a stripper.”
“I can do that. I can do all of you boys.”
“Well, more than a stripper,” I say.
She shrugs. “I can do that, too.”
“We want you to get him alone and, you know…” I say.
She smiles. “A dance and a fuck? It’ll cost you.”
“Not just a dance and not just a fuck, okay? We want the Dance of Seven Veils, like Salome did, we want you to really get him to want you, and then it’s got to be more than fireworks, more than an explosion, it’s got to be the Big O.”
“The Big O?”
“You know, the Orgasm at the End of the Universe. The Big One. The kind that guys dream about in their sleep, the kind that most of us never get.”
She looks at me sideways, like maybe I’m some kind of creep with diarrhea of the mouth. “You just talking, ain’t you? You don’t really want the Big O, nothin' like that, do you?”
I shake my head. “Every trick you got. Think you can do it?”
She has a look in her eyes like she’s thinking, but cagily—she has a few secrets, I guess, and she guards them. Her eyes are muddy brown, and when she looks back at me, they look like tiny little pebbles, hard and round.
“Baby,” she says, “I think I can do anything. You pay, I’m gonna make sure it happens.” She glances down the street. There’s a big fat guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt. “My manager,” she says. “You need to talk with him, I think. I ain’t too good at the business side of things.”
Because I don’t want to talk to him, I get you to do it, and the whole thing’s arranged, even though it’s going to cost us four hundred bucks, plus whatever she makes in her dance and if it goes over two hours, another four hundred. Two hundred in advance, so I pay the pimp and we give him the address, tell him to be there at eleven and then we head on back to the party.
Now, this is the part where I’m really stupid, I guess, but you can’t have a stripper come to the party without giving somebody an address.
But I guess this pimp looks at the money and figures there’s more where that came from—so he must’ve gotten this idea—and I’m only assuming.
You and me, we look like nice preppie kind of guys, shit, we practically have ties on from work, and I’m wearing five hundred dollar Italian shoes.
So he decides that when he takes his girl over, he better pack something, because you never know how much cash you can get out of rich, scared, drunk guys at a bachelor party. I don’t know a thing about guns, but this pimp probably had the automatic kind, and I figure that’s how you got two of your fingers shot off before midnight.
2
But I’m getting ahead of myself—it’s easy to do when you’re spilling your guts and you can’t always remember the sequence of events; especially if you’re trying to second-guess everyone around you. The thing with your fingers, it didn’t happen until about eleven fifty-five, and the thing with Luce, that happened just before ten, after we’d gotten back, hoisted a few more St. Pauli Girls and watched Long Jean Silver and her amazing stump-screwing of another woman in one of the six videos you rented from that scuzzy video store down in Long Beach. But something happened before even that, and that was when we stopped for more beer at 7-Eleven and I bought a bunch of multicolored rubbers, all fancy, and then pricked them full of holes and you and I laughed our heads off thinking about Alec and Luce on their honeymoon, thinking they were doing some family planning by wearing the rubbers. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard.
So I stuff the rubbers in my jacket pocket. As I’m pulling out of the 7-Eleven, a car almost hits the Mustang, then swerves and crashes into a wall; the front half is all crushed, but the driver seems okay. “Should we call for help?” you ask, and I say, “Oh, right, like the cops are gonna love the beer in the car and all.” So we pass this woman in the car, and she looks at us for a second, and I got to tell you, I will never, as long as I live, forget that look. Women are like this swamp or something, all dark and mysterious, but still you got to explore ’em, it’s a guy thing. You know, I always say that if you were to put some fur around a garbage disposal, we’d all still take turns at it, even if it was turned on. But women, they have this power, that woman in the car, it was like she’d cursed us, you and me both. But we drive on, get to the house, ring the doorbell like twenty times before you remember you’ve got a key, and we get up to the party just in time to hear one of Ben Winter’s dumb blonde jokes. Billy Bucknell had been throwing up since about eight o’clock, and the bastard is still drinking. MoJo keeps stuffing his fat face with Cheetos, every now and then burping or farting; three guys I don’t know are there, too, not that into the flicks, more into the poker game and cigars; Alec’s little brother Pasco is sneaking peeks at the TV screen, but pretending to be more into a bowl of pretzels. And Alec—where the hell is he? Back in the can, ralphing his guts out—he’s not too good at mixing the finer liquors with the baser variety, but our motto through college had always been that if you boot then you can keep on drinking. Alec was going to become a severe alcoholic, by the look of things, because within ten minutes of coming out of the bathroom, he’s already mixing Zombies with Todd Ramey (“from Wisconsin,” he kept telling everybody who gave a fuck). So Alec is battered and sloshed from the twin bombs of imminent marriage and bad booze, but he still has the classic smile and his dark hair still parts perfectly to one floppy side. “Hey, you,” he flags me down with an overflowing plastic cup, “get it over here, man,” he says, putting his arm out for a big hug. “Dude, you should’ve seen the mud getting flung at dinner, her sister’s a major twat.”
When I get close to him, his breath is like unto a toilet bowl; I pull back a little to let a breeze from the ocean beyond the open window protect me. You keep looking at your watch; you’re nervous, I guess, about the whore. I say. “So, Lec, I saw Pasco. Getting tall these days, that boy is.”
This brings a tear to Alec’s eye. “My baby brother. Gettin’ older. Already he’s climbed into more panties than me. HEY!” shouting across the room, “PASQUALE!”
His brother glances over, shakes his head, maybe even rolls his eyes, and looks away.
“He’s pissed ‘cause he’s taking her side in this.” Alec makes some obscure but definitely obscene gesture toward his brother.
“Whose side?”
“Luce’s. She and that sister—Jesus, is all I can say. Just Jesus. Hey, you wanna get stoned? C’mon, please? Wanna get stoned?”
I shake my head, but I can tell that you want to get stoned ‘cause you’re all shivering, and I’m afraid
you’re about to blow it and tell him this whore’s coming from the city, the kind with a pimp. But you don’t blow it; you go over to get another drink, and I think that’s a good idea. “What’s up with Luce?”
“Ah, that bitch. Thinks she owns me. God, this is a good party, all my friends.” Alec begins crying; he was always verging on the sentimental, ever since I’d first met him. It was some Italian thing, I guess (he always said it was), about not needing to keep a tight rein on emotions, all the stuff. I kind of liked him for it, because I’ve never been a good one with the tears and open with anger. So, anyway, he tells me all about this thing with Luce, how she heard some story from her sister about Alec and this girl at a party from about a week back and suddenly she’s claiming that he’s doing everything that walks the earth. “She has this trust thing, it’s something I don’t understand,” he says. “I mean, I trust her, hell, I’d trust her even if she was jawing some guy right in the backseat while I was driving, why the hell doesn’t she trust me? It’s not like I was unfaithful to her or anything, I was just, well, pursuing a little.”
“Women.” I shake my head, amazed that yet another woman failed to understand a man so completely. “And it’s not like you were even married.”
We both crack up at this, drunk as we are. “She even called me an asshole,” he says, and we laugh some more.
“Of course,” I say, coming down from the laughing high just like those kids in Mary Poppins when they came down from Uncle Albert’s ceiling. “It’s true. I mean, we’re all assholes. Basically. All men are assholes.”
“Basically,” he concurs, and we crack up again.
As if this were the greatest cue in the world, the French doors open—we’re at your folks’ house at Redondo, with the cliff and the balcony and the moonswept Pacific just out there—out there—and it’s the door to the balcony, so whoever it is has to have climbed up the trellis or something to get to the second floor, and who do you think’s standing there with a tight green dress and a big old ribbon tied around her waist looking like Malibu Barbie on a date, but Luce, more Nautilized and Jazzercised than when I’d last seen her, and she just keeps coming like a barracuda right toward Alec and spits in his face.
He’s still laughing from the joke, too, so now he’s all shiny and laughing and hiccupping like he might start throwing up again.
Luce looks at me. “When he sobers up, tell him there won’t be a wedding, tell him I know all about it, and tell him he can go to hell.”
Then she turns and sort of flounces out of the room, down the hall stairs, presumably to go out the front door now.
“What,” Alec says, shaking his head, “she fly up here on her broom?”
“Must’ve,” I say, “so, wedding’s off?”
“Jesus, if I listened to her, the wedding would’ve been off for the past six months. Trust me, man, she’s gonna be there tomorrow, it’s costing her dad too much and her ego way too much—she’d rather wait and get divorced later on, I know her, I know my Luce.” And it was true about Luce—she’d rather worry about divorce in a couple of years than NOT GETTING MARRIED. She attached a lot of status to Alec—his family was rich, he was rich, and they were going to live in Palos Fucking Verde Estates and have a house big enough for the two of them and any lovers that snuck in the back door.
But with love, who knows? Could be once that ring was on his finger, he’d be the most faithful little lapdog the world has ever known. Could be she would be, too, and then they’d sink into the marriage trap where sex is an outmoded idea, and lust gets swept between the rug and the floor.
But not the night of his Bachelor Party.
You keep drinking those Zombies, and I say to Alec, my arm around him, his arm around me, “We got this girl, Alec, oh, Christ is she a girl. She’s got a nice rack of tits.”
He giggles, and then dissolves into weeping again. “You’re my best friend, you know that? You are my fucking-A best friend in the whole snatch-eating world.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, and the doorbell rings—I don’t quite hear it, but you do, and you go to the door downstairs—I see you bounding down the stairs like a kid on Christmas. I decide to check out the poker game, but I can tell Alec’s all hot for this stripper, and he watches the stairs expectantly.
You come up a few minutes later, the pimp and stripper in tow, and there’s like dead silence—even the music stops, like the Bruce Springsteen CD knew when to end.
The stripper’s changed clothes—she’s in a kind of party outfit, something that Luce herself would wear, in fact, at a casual, by-the-sea kind of affair: it says glitz and glamour, but it also says throw me in the pool. Alec calls that kind of dress a French maid’s outfit, a short skirt to show off legs, and lots of poofy ruffles, and those, kind of fluffy short sleeves like the Good Witch had in The Wizard of Oz—in fact, she looks a little like the Good Witch, but with a very short dress and a nice rack of tits. But she’s changed more than her clothes. I could swear her eyes had been brown when I’d spoken with her on the street, only now, they’re blue, and her skin seems sort of peaches and creamy, instead of the tanned and beat look she had before. But I know a good contact lens can do a lot, and maybe with makeup—I mean, women are so into changing their faces with paints and brushes, like they’re all afraid we won’t want to see their true faces (and I’ve seen a couple of chicks without their mascara and gloss and stuff, and let me tell you, it gets pretty scary when you’re prettier than your date at four a.m.). Alec, he looked more fetching than Luce when she didn’t wear a lot of makeup—I don’t think I’m more into guys or anything, but give me Luce without makeup or Alee, and I’d rather see Alec’s baby face down on my bone any day.
So the whore looks almost completely different than she had on the street. She looks like she could fit right in with the house and all of us, and I was thinking, boy, you did this right, you got the right girl.
I look over at you, and you wink at me, because we know that even if this girl costs us a thousand bucks or more, it’s all worth it for Alec’s last night before his doom.
Her pimp, who’s still dressed like one of the Beach Boys on acid, is casing the place in a fairly obvious way, and I realize at this point that you and I have made a colossal mistake. We should’ve just got a stripper out of the phone book, but stupid me, I wanted a girl who would, for a little extra, take Alec into one of the empty bedrooms and sit on his face. The pimp sees me, comes over, grabs my drink out of my hand, and drinks it. Fairly turns my stomach. “Nice place,” he says, his voice half gravel and half belch. “Name’s Lucky. You boys gonna have a good time tonight?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, wishing we’d wiped him off on the doormat out front.
Then he whispered, “You be careful with her, now, boy, ‘cause she’s one of a kind, and I don’t want nothing funny to happen to her. If there’s gonna be sex, it’s got to only be head or hand, no tail, you got me? It ain’t safe for my girl to do tail, not with everything going around.”
It dawns on me, drunk as I’m getting, that in some sewer rat way, he cares for this girl. “We will, don’t worry, man. Get yourself a drink, sit down, enjoy!”
“Naw,” he says, “it’s time to let the games begin.”
I notice he’s packing something under his flappy shirt—just the glimpse of some kind of revolver. I think, well, he’s in a rough business, but I know he’s got to protect himself. He sees me see the gun, and we stare at each other, but he says nothing. He’s got eyes like a snake, all perverted looking and squinty—sometimes I think people with squinty eyes have squinty brains, and this pimp, if anyone has one, hell, he’s got the most squinty-ass brain on the planet. I’m thinking of maybe turning the revolver into a joke, by saying, “So’s that a gun in your pants or are you just happy to see me,” but I know people with squinty brains aren’t going to chuckle at that old standby. I keep my mouth shut.
And then the girl punches up a CD of Rod Stewart’s song “Hot Legs” or whatever it’s call
ed, and she started a routine.
But you don’t want to hear about how she writhed and spun, how she took everything imaginable off, lifted one leg above her head, how Alec played the Golden Shower game with her, drinking Molson Golden Ale from her pubes; how she squatted on my face and took a rolled-up fifty from between my lips just using her snatch—those are all the basics of a good party stripper.
What you want to hear about is how your fingers got on the floor in the bathroom, with you screaming bloody murder, and how she screamed even louder, right?
That’s what you want to hear.
3
I guess I’m going to digress a little here, but only for clarity’s sake—the night before Alec got married was one of those nights where you have to piece a few things together later on. Like Pasco, Alec’s little bro, giggling and blushing when the girl sat on his lap naked and beat his pretty face silly with her tits; or when MoJo got pissed off because she wouldn’t sit on his face for a lousy ten bucks; he said, whining, “Doesn’t she know any cheaper games?”—see, the girl was so hot and we were so loaded, that we were dropping hundreds and fifties on her like she was a bank. Cigar smoke was the only veil she had around her, in the end, just that stagnant smoke that stinks and sits in the air like it doesn’t have anywhere to go, and all of us, through its mist, looking like ghosts. That’s what I thought at the time: we were enshrouded by the gray smoke, and we looked like ghosts, or maybe old men with wrinkly skin, testicular skin, pale and blurry of feature. Horny bastards all, MoJo licking his lips like he was trying to taste her from three feet away, and Billy Bucknell grabbing his crotch without even knowing he was doing it. She really had us going, that girl did. You even kept trying to get your hand up her, and she kept pushing you away, until her pimp had to come over and tell you to knock it off, that nobody, but nobody touches her kitty. That’s what he called it, her kitty. Might as well have called it her flesh purse, since she was making so much money out of opening it up. The pimp and I had a nice convo about how prostitution was a victimless crime and all that; his name was Lucky Murphy, a nice Irish boy as it turned out, from Boston, who had once been a fisherman off Dana Point, and as he spoke I could practically hear someone’s Irish mother singing “Danny Boy,” until I looked him in the eye and knew he was a fucking liar through and through, that he was Hollywood scum and if he could, he would’ve been peddling all our preppie asses for the twenty bucks per corn hole he could make.
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 42