“Forgive me for I have sinned in word and deed, and against your decree and my faith have taken a lover . . .”
Her last three words are not lost on me or my dear friend and tormentor the Woodman. In fact, they bounce around my brain like they’re on “repeat.” “Taken a lover . . . taken a lover . . . taken a lover . . .” But as the door completes its path, the conversation is silenced. How come the front door to my apartment is made out of cardboard but the bathroom door is built like a safe? I briefly contemplate putting my ear to this door that Alice and her secrets are behind, but I stop myself. For once the big brain overrides the little brain. Thank Heaven for small favors—and the possible threat that L.V. might pound me into my shag carpeting for breaching Alice’s personal space.
Lexington Vargas and I regard each other. I think we’re both wearing the old “deer in the headlights” look. This is all so freaking unbelievable, yet part of me has begun to accept it as perfectly rational and routine.
The bathroom door finally opens and Alice, eyes red from crying, hands the phone to me as if it now were a priceless holy relic. Obviously she’s had a very different conversation than I did. She mutters, hoarsely, “Lexington,” before closing the door again and shutting us out. In the brief glimpse, I couldn’t miss the silver streak in her hair starting at her temple. God’s sense of humor at work, I assume.
I walk the phone over to Lexington Vargas, who takes it matter-of-factly and launches into Spanish. At one point there is a phrase I recognize.
“Realmente no entiendo el termino ‘yin y yang.’ ”
I know the term “yin and yang”—it’s a Chinese “balance” type of thing—but I don’t understand the context. Now I wish I’d paid more attention in Spanish class.
L.V. shuts my phone before I can say anything, and the call is over. Right now all I want to do is talk to that slightly crazy, weird, very real, powerful voice. It’s the father who never spoke to me, the mother whose decrees made no sense, and the only possible connection to my beloved, lost sister. As well as proof that I may not be the total dead-end kid I thought I was.
I hear the bathroom door open once again as Alice enters the living room. No one says anything. We square off, face each other, and just . . . stare. She brushes a hand through her hair where the new “Chuck Heston” stripe has appeared . . . she smiles . . . I smile . . . L.V. smiles. Then we all start to chuckle, and then laugh. And laugh. It’s a release, it’s gratitude, it’s amazement. And we are awestruck, dumbfounded—and united. It’s just the three of us. Four if you count Merikh, which I am hoping we don’t have to.
Horatio
My wife’s computer screen force-feeds me a shocking image as I stare at it in utter disbelief and stupefaction. It’s a photo. Of a guy. That I recognize. It’s fucking Ned!!! The chubby Lothario from my work at the audio/video dubbing House from Hell, who thought my future wife was “a damn fine chick.” And in this photo, he’s naked! With a boner! In his hand!! On my wife’s Twitter page!!! The caption reads: “Hey, Babe. Remember this big guy? He’s lonely and wants to pound your pee-hole again. Love and lust, Ned the Head.”
This mind-numbing self-portrait looks like it was taken with an iPhone in his bathroom mirror. I can even make out Ned’s fucking toothbrush on the sink in this unlovely photograph.
WHAT!! IS!!! THIS??!!
I’m trying to grasp the possibilities here, and they are scary and endless. First Ned, then the boner, then the words “pound your pee-hole AGAIN!” So this fairly unattractive human being has been sticking that misshapen pink mushroom into my faithless wife? Murray senses a change in my demeanor and whimpers, softly pressing his nose into my crotch. It is misdirected comfort, considering the awful image I am looking at right now.
“Murray. What’s been going on?” I whisper breathlessly to him as I pat his soft head in some kind of unconscious need for solace. I am cold with the realization that I have been cuckolded. And suddenly the Reverend’s tortured face leaps into my mind and I finally know exactly how the poor bastard felt. So THIS is karma!
It’s more than I can physically and mentally absorb.
In complete shock I click around the “direct message” section of her Twitter page and find more brain-bursting photos of more guys with more tumescent phalluses and more lewd comments to my dear Charlotte that make my hair curl and my stomach drop like an elevator cut loose from its moorings. As was the Reverend from my past lustful youth, I have been unwittingly cuckolded many times over. There’s Freddy from the dry cleaners; I recognize him even without his clothes on. And Gabriel, our fricking gardener!! And some young dude wearing an Enterprise Rent-a-Car shirt and nothing else—obviously work-related. Plus some guy named Henrik who lives in Finland. (??) And what’s with them all sending photos of their naked asses to a married woman? MY married woman! This time an image from the past of the Reverend’s strumpet launches into my fevered brain!! Oh, the calamity! Oh, the torment! What vile, unfettered retribution is this? Unkind fate, thou hast sent the hounds of hell to bang my wife and cause their balls to slap against her naked ass-cheeks, provoking them to send her pictures of their quite prodigious erections. And most of them look like “rough boys.” Obviously the slightly-nerdy-yet-funny, self-deprecating, bright-though-doofusy, warm, loving man I thought I was is NOT her cup of tea. These guys all look like they need a bath, a shave, and a good delousing. Has she been hopping into the sack with any guy who swings a dick her way? Holy faithless fornicator, Batman!!!
I walk like a mortally wounded namby-pamby (I was going to say “warrior,” but that would be a serious misnomer) into our bedroom, wondering if any of this wayward action ever happened in the bed I sleep in. I wake her up. She is groggy from the vodka and irritated to have been roused.
“So you’re screwing other guys?” is what I say.
“What?” is what she says.
“You left your Twitter page up,” is what I say.
“Twitter page?” is what she says.
“You’ve been fucking Ned, that fat idiot from my work?”
“Shit!” spits out the lovely Charlotte.
“And he’s not the only one? I just saw a bunch of photos of strange naked men all over your Twitter page.”
“You asshole!” she replies. Like it’s my fault. And maybe it is in the long run. I knew this union was broken the moment I realized we had nothing to say to each other post-nookie.
“Why am I the asshole?” and not for the first time it is the whiny little boy answering in my stead.
“What are you doing snooping around on my computer?”
“I wasn’t snooping around. You left your Twitter page open. I want you to get out of bed, because we need to talk about this,” is my stunningly lame, white-bread, and incredibly sensible rejoinder.
“Godamnit!” she yells as she throws the covers off and rises drunkenly and unsteadily to her feet.
“I need to deal with this now. I can’t just go to sleep having seen all . . . that!” I think it’s a fair response considering my other option is to go completely bat-shit and end up on a future episode of Cops.
We head to the kitchen with Murray inappropriately jumping for joy, excited beyond belief that we are both awake at this late hour. Sorry, Murray, but I don’t think there’ll be any snacks on this trip. Unless plates are thrown that still have old food stuck to them.
Charlotte slumps down into the bar stool by her computer, which has gone to sleep again. How it can sleep with all this shit going on I have no idea. “You’re having sex with Ned?” I say as I hit a “wake up” key and Ned’s unflattering physique appears on screen again, hard-on in hand. It’s a rough image to digest at this hour.
“I want a divorce,” is Charlotte’s somewhat evasive response. She is obviously no stranger to the concept that the best defense is a strong offense.
“Why? It looks like you’ve been acting as if we aren’t married anyway. How would a divorce change that?” I think in an odd way I am pleading for
our marriage.
“I should never have married you.” Another punch to the gut from my purported partner for life.
“Can we at least talk about this first?” I try.
“I’ll see you in court. And I want everything,” she says as she struggles to her feet, grabs her car keys, and walks out the front door wearing nothing but an over-sized T shirt. And you are correct, no underwear.
“Wait, Char!” I throw out a bone, but the only one ready to grab it is Murray.
“I’ll be sleeping at my boyfriend’s apartment. My lawyer (she has a boyfriend and a lawyer, too?) will call you.” And once again the door of my life slams shut, painfully catching the tip of my flaccid penis in it. Not literally, of course, but equally as traumatic and painful.
I suddenly remember the empty vodka bottle I saw in the trash.
“You’ve been drinking. Drive safely,” I squeak. “Drive safely?” Am I the moron of all morons? Drive safely on your way to Ned the Head’s house or Nick the Dick’s apartment or Cole the A-Hole’s place or Kirk the Jerk’s townhouse or Billy Bob the Knob Job’s double-wide. And thanks so much for the eight wasted years. Truly, what a simpleton I am.
I walk back into the kitchen and sit on the bar stool near her cheating, lying tramp of a computer. I want to smash it, like it’s somehow the computer’s fault. But I don’t. These things cost money. So instead I use it to dial up some free porn and whittle Woody so I can at least get a good night’s sleep. Images of Charlotte, legs akimbo, being driven to ecstasy by the naked ass and slapping ball-sack of some roughneck, randy dude keep flitting in and out of my mental vision along with the matching and unwanted sound effects. It’s a serious anger wank, to be sure! And I have Ned the Head to deal with tomorrow, which I am not looking forward to, such is my dislike for confrontation. But he has been bonking my wife, so I think I need to address it with him in person. What should a man do? What would my father do? No fucking idea.
In an act I will possibly regret later when the divorce kicks into full and legal gear, I send, to each and every guy, each and every OTHER guy’s naked photo and their inebriated messages, with the added note that they are all weenies and are hung like field mice. Such is the power of the Internet!
The good news is that we are almost up to speed with the present and will soon have no more of this backtracking, historically pertinent, yet extremely painful narrative shit.
The bad news is that other dudes have been shafting my significant other.
Cold-hearted karma! If only I’d known what I had sown in my salad days. And can we fast-forward to the present so I don’t have to relive this awful stuff AGAIN!!! . . . Thank you.
Bobby
The email begins:
Dear Miss Young,
In order to claim your inheritance as sole surviving heir to Mr. Ronan Bon Young’s bequeathed estate, we will respectfully require you to present yourself here for probate along with full and necessary documentation including birth certificate, passport, a bank account number in your name, and VAT identification number (or its U.S. equivalent). We regret the imposition and understand you do not live locally but it is part and parcel of our legal system that you must be physically present in order for us to execute the will of your uncle.
I remain
Your faithful servant
Clive McGivney
of
McGivney, McGivney, & McGivney Law Offices
41 Church Street, Inverness, Highlands, Scotland, IV1 1EH
Bobby
Three days into the world’s most bizarre sleep-over, Alice has received this response from the lawyers in Inverness on her antediluvian AOL server—“Thou hast a dispatch by electronic post, M’lady.” The containers of takeout food delivered from the Fook Hing Chinese Restaurant are piled a mile high in my kitchen and I’m sure we’re all getting a little sick of MSG and its headaches. It’s been like one of those high school “self-discovery” trips where the counselors take a bunch of kids away for a week and they all become sleep-deprived and end up revealing very personal stuff—fears, home-life issues, doubts about themselves—and then connect on a deeper level than they would have by just hanging out on the playground or going from class to class. Only we all think God—sorry, Arthur—is somehow on this sleep-over with us. This is about considerably more than just getting to know your fellow human being. The three of us understand that something big is afoot—something momentous. But what?
We have gotten very close in the intervening days and nights, even taken to reading some of the darker sections of our respective copies of Magnificent Vibration to one another. And, yes, I read the explicit account of my adulterous interlude with the Reverend’s wife to Alice and Lexington Vargas—all of it—the unvarnished, unflattering truth. And how I neglected my sweet girl Josie as a result of my relentlessly lustful horn-dogging.
Alice reads us the story of her tortuous journey through her adolescence. She cries as she reads the account of the car accident that killed both her drunken father and her much-loved mother when Alice was seventeen. And Lexington Vargas translates pieces of his journey in and out of the criminal justice system as a very young cholo while he was struggling to find his way. There’s nothing current from Alice’s readings that might shed some clarity on her mind-blowingly stimulating “taken a lover” remark, however. I am keeping Woody on serious lockdown for now while we work our way through this craziness. No sign of Merikh, although Doug’s sighting has me on edge. I’ve walked the apartment complex’s halls occasionally, looking for the beautiful bastard, but have seen no sign of his perfectly cleft chin nor his (damn him) exquisitely formed ears.
Alice may be on sabbatical and L.V. doesn’t appear to work every day at the high school, but I need to put in some face time at the dubbing house for monumentally mind-sucking movies if I have any hope of getting a little time off so I can try to understand where all this may be leading us. I’m already late.
Alice wants to be dropped off at her place so she can grab some clean clothes and take a little time to pray and meditate on all that’s happened, so that will make me even later but I’m cool with it. I haven’t told her or Lexington Vargas about Doug’s Merikh sighting and I don’t actually know if she’d be any safer at my place, since he’s apparently already cased it. L.V. is good with remaining at the apartment (and squeezing in and out of some of the more forgiving articles of my wardrobe), as the freeway plane-crash site is still cordoned off, seriously screwing up traffic throughout the greater Los Angeles area.
I drive Alice to the Oakwood Apartments (Really? Isn’t that place full of divorced guys, too?) and then aim the Oriental Batmobile for my office.
I enter the Whale’s den with misgivings and my videophone on “record” and peeking out of the top of my T-shirt pocket (yes, I wear T-shirts with pockets). I’m anticipating a megaton outburst the instant I ask for holiday leave—and I am not disappointed.
“You little sucking asswipe,” is his opening salvo after I apologize for showing up late for work, citing the snarled traffic. And then I ask for my due days off. Maybe I could have broached the subject a little more diplomatically, but I am highly stressed from the previous night’s crazy-assed goings-on, so I say, “I haven’t had a vacation since my honeymoon! I know you don’t like me, but I actually couldn’t care less. I would like some days off so I can deal with . . . ah . . . certain issues at home,” I improvise.
He tells me to close his door, and then he turns on me. I think I’m seeing weeks of paid vacation flying through the air every time he opens the biomass infecting his lips.
“I think you and your whore of a goddamn wife are the worst pieces of shit I have ever encountered. I fired her because she wouldn’t fuck me even though she fucked just about every other guy in this goddamned building. And YOU were totally clueless!! Hahaha! It was fuckin’ hilarious.”
He is definitely on a roll. This has obviously been building in him, and although it hurts, I bear it, keeping the Human Resourc
es folks in mind. And I have done my best to keep out of this guy’s way, but he has zeroed in on me like a heat-seeking missile on a camel fart in the desert.
I’m sure there is a cussword limit to what the human mind can comprehend and mine is certainly breached during his fifteen-minute tirade. All of which is being filmed from my handy-dandy top pocket. At the end of it, baleen spewing from his lactose-tolerant lips, I exit with my hat in my hand, bowing and apologizing, and then, as a parting shot (once I’ve switched the video off), I say, “Got it all on film. Really appreciate the award-winning performance, dickface.”
A dumbstruck look twists his features for a fraction of a second, and then he charges at me as if he means to crush my narrow frame in his gaping, curd-laced maw. I slam the door shut and run for the Human Resources office AFAP (as fast as possible), pretty sure he isn’t running after me. But he does call, as I am playing the video for the older and apparently very by-the-book HR lady who looks on in absolute horror, her mouth hanging open in disbelief. There are cuss phrases I’m sure neither of us has ever heard before, and I have to hand it to him, the guy has a gift. What the hell is a “twatwaffle”?
She answers the HR phone and I hear her say, “Yes, Mr. Cotton is sitting in my office right now.” And then in a delightful piece of theater, she holds the earpiece to my cell phone so the Right Whale can listen back to his own rant as he hits one of his many, many crescendos. His voice is tinny and thin coming through the minuscule phone speaker, but his words are crystal-clear:
“You, you fucking bumblefuck and your ball-gargling douche-canoe of a wife can kiss my Captain Craptastic and his Brown Dirt Butthairs if you think you’re getting any rat-fucking vacation time outta me so you can go holiday on Gayboy Island and suck the love-snot out of young boys’ blue-veined skin-monkeys all day long while your cum-sucking slut of a wife blows the local natives!” Obviously he hasn’t heard that my wife and I are no longer vacationing together.
Magnificent Vibration Page 17