Totally Killer

by Greg Olear

  Okay, enough about me. No one gives a rolling doughnut about my doomed acting career, even Kevin Smith himself, and really, no one should. All I’m saying is, Taylor Schmidt was not my raison d’être. Not now, and certainly not then. She was just my roommate, my newest friend, and a chick I was working. That’s all.

  It was on her first day of work that I discovered Taylor’s diary.

  On the way home from my own job—I’d left after lunch for a dental appointment—I picked up our laundry at the East Village Launderette (we sent our clothes out together, in one big bag, like a married couple; I paid, natch, but it was worth every penny to have my tattered polka-dot boxer shorts pressed up against her silk panties). I’d just unpacked the bag, and was transferring her items to her futon—I’d put everything away for her until she confessed to being “creeped out” by me accessing her underwear drawer; as if I were sniffing her panties or something—when I noticed the notebook peeking out from under her pillow.

  There was nothing inherently special about it; your basic black-marble-covered composition book, wide-ruled, with a series of light blue horizontal lines and one dark pink one running perpendicular down the left margin. But I knew at once it was a diary.

  I realized it was wrong to snoop, but I was curious, maddeningly so, and it’s not like she didn’t trust me—I was handling her undergarments, wasn’t I? Plus, my spying had a specific purpose. What I wanted to know was what Taylor thought of Yours Truly. Did she have any sexual feelings at all for Todd Lander? Was she intrigued by my heroic restraint? Was my plan working? I had to know. My ego demanded it.

  I opened that composition book without hesitation.

  The first thing I noticed was her handwriting, all flowery and dainty, in flourish-filled cursive, with the occasional heart dotting the i. A child’s hand, a little girl’s. And what grown-up person uses pink ink? My second observation was that this was a relatively new journal—which meant that, in all likelihood, more black-marbled composition books were stowed somewhere in her room. No way she’d left them in Missouri with Darla and her hick half sisters.

  To my disappointment, I found precious little. I was only mentioned a few times, and then in passing: “Todd and I went to Phoebe’s,” “Todd lent me $20,” “Todd and I drank two bottles of wine,” that kind of thing. Just the facts, the straight dope. Nothing nay, but nothing yea either. Nothing subjective at all.

  Maybe that was Taylor’s style. Maybe she just wrote what happened, and nothing more. Maybe…

  But no. Because she managed to fill three fucking pages on Asher Krug: how he was such a bohunk, how he helped her out of such a precarious situation, how she wanted his body (those were her exact words: “I want his body”). So much paper, so much pink ink, for a guy Taylor didn’t know existed forty-eight hours ago. He got three pages, and I got “Todd lent me $20.” Who said life was fair?

  The Asher lovefest was followed by her musings on the Quid Pro Quo operation. Boring stuff, of no interest to me at the time. I skipped that part and jumped to the next mention of my name:

  Been seventeen days since last X. What to do, what to do. Must take action. Will go gaga soon. Might have to resort to Todd—my in-case-of-emergency-break-glass guy, ha ha ha.

  Ouch!

  Most guys would read that and figure all hope was lost. What she was saying, after all, was that she’d only fuck me as a last resort, if every other man on the face of the earth spontaneously combusted at the stroke of midnight. But I’m a glass-half-full type of guy, or I was in September of 1991. What I took from this was that she would consider sleeping with me—that the notion, however unpalatable, had crossed her mind. And this was good news. This was Gospel. Because one day, or so my logic went, there would be an emergency, and one day she would break the glass. (And, as it happened, I was right.)

  I found the rest of her journals in a box in her closet, under a pile of clothes, shoes, and old magazines. There were nineteen of them. I took them out of the box, and buried it back under the junk. She’d never miss them. Then I locked myself in my room and spent the rest of the afternoon reading.

  Taylor’s earliest childhood memory was of her mother screaming. She was two at the time—maybe even younger; she might not have been walking yet—but she remembered her mother screaming, and her father flying into a rage, brutal fists silencing the screams. A bottle of generic whiskey falling off the kitchen table, shattering on the linoleum floor. Cigarette butts everywhere. Her mother’s eye black and blue, swollen shut. Why were they fighting? Was she the source of their discontent? Yes, to the best of her recollection; from that moment on, in any event, Taylor was aware that the circumstances of her birth were accidental. She was an unwanted child, abortion was not yet an option, and Darla wasn’t giving up her baby regardless. She’d use the baby, like she used everything else at her disposal, to ensnare her man.

  The plan worked. Tommy Schmidt stuck around, for a few years at least. He was in and out of the clink—petty crimes, drunk-and-disorderlies, bar fights—but he stuck around. He had tattoos, and this was back when only sailors and truckers had tattoos. He smoked Luckies, no filter, and his teeth were the color of deli mustard. He routinely spanked Taylor, and worse, for a variety of infractions. He died when she was nine—single-car accident, enough alcohol in his system to KO Mickey Mantle—and no one exactly mourned his passing. He haunted her dreams ever afterwards, this brick shithouse of a man, fists flailing, chasing her down darkling streets in some Warrensburg from Hell…

  When Taylor was ten, her mother was hit by a Greyhound bus. She broke her hip, was in traction for months. That bus was the best thing that ever happened to Darla Jenkins. The state disability checks liberated her from a lifetime of minimum-wage jobs. It freed her from the shackles of work. Now she could buzz around the local bars, offering her wares to whatever men were sufficiently drunk and/or desperate. Eventually she fell in love with a forty-five-year-old lush who went by Popeye. Everyone called him that; Taylor didn’t even know his real name. Popeye moved into their prefab house, fathered Taylor’s two half sisters, collected unemployment, carved his initials into the kitchen table, shot his pistol at possum. It was a happy, healthy household.

  By then, Taylor was thirteen. She’d been an ungainly child, but now, as if by magic, some gift of the gods, awestriking hotness was bestowed upon her. Suddenly all the boys wanted her number, wanted to skate her round the roller rink. Suddenly all the girls didn’t like her anymore. Not that they liked her much to begin with; of all the white trash at her school, she was the trashiest, and no one let her forget it. Her sixth grade teacher, the wonderfully named Mrs. Mount, made a point of lecturing her on personal hygiene. “You have to shower, Taylor…every day, okay?” When she left the classroom, Taylor overheard Mrs. Mount telling one of the other teachers, “Not much hope for that one. The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

  Was this the moment when she vowed not to wind up like her mother, to renounce her white trash roots, to succeed where everyone expected her to fail? Only in the movies is motivation so contrived, but Mrs. Mount’s aside certainly added fuel to the proverbial fire.

  One afternoon, Darla took the two girls out for ice cream, leaving Taylor alone with Popeye (you can already see where this is heading, I’m sure, and it ain’t pretty). Popeye had a greasy NASCAR moustache and a limp. A real looker. This grown man named for a children’s cartoon accosted our young heroine in the kitchen.

  “You’ve bloomed into quite the young lady,” he said, his mouth full of Skoal.

  “Thanks.”

  “Pretty soon the boys will be lining up to have a crack at you.”

  Taylor didn’t say anything—they were already lining up, not that it was any of his business—just kept doing the dishes.

  “Maybe they already have. Have they?” He came right up behind her. “You still a virgin, Taylor?”

  She knew this was inappropriate, but Popeye was the only father figure she had, and she wanted to please him.
“Yes,” she said.

  “That’s good. That’s a good girl. These boys, they’re no good. They’re no good for you.” His fingers found her bare shoulders, caressed them gently, as gently as Popeye knew how. “What you need is a man, a good man, to show you the ropes.”

  One of the dishes slipped out of Taylor’s soapy hand, landed with a thwack on the bottom of the sink, but did not shatter.

  “When you’re ready to have sex, Taylor, you come to Popeye. You hear?”

  With his hips he pinned her against the sink, and Taylor felt the stirring against her tush. Her rude introduction to the male anatomy in its excited state.

  “You hear?”

  “Yeah, I hear.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  After spitting tobacco juice on the floor, he kissed her on the nape of her neck, a wet, saurian kiss that at once creeped her out and turned her on. Indeed, as he withdrew, she was plagued by these conflicting emotions. Popeye was gross, and way too old, and her mother’s live-in boyfriend, but he was also a man, and attracted to her, and had made her feel special. None of the boys at school were like him.

  She did not, thank the gods, take Popeye up on his chivalrous offer, and one day, not long after, he vanished. Really vanished. The police were called, missing persons reports filed, the whole nine yards. The guy was history, a poof. They never did find him. You might think Taylor’d be relieved when this happened, but no—she was broken up. That was the start of her battle with depression. The Popeye Era had, if nothing else, afforded some modicum of stability to the household. Now it was back to chaos…until Billy Ray rode in with his unemployment check to save the day.

  While the seminal male figures of Tommy Schmidt and Popeye are worth noting, most of Taylor’s early journals, the ones from before her sexual awakening, dealt almost exclusively with her selfish and abusive mother, who was constantly exposing her to unsafe situations—evictions from lousy apartments, sketchy tenants subletting spare rooms, secondhand cigarette smoke, lack of supervision and attention. The ink poor Taylor expended on that heinous witch! The tears shed!

  But her mother did teach Taylor something, though more as a case study or an object lesson than a role model. I don’t want to grow up like my mother was a favorite refrain. Make no mistake, the fecund seeds of her ambition were irrigated by Darla Jenkins.

  I mention Taylor’s childhood here because it is essential to understanding her alacrity in accepting her fate. At the time, however, I didn’t give a hoot about Taylor’s unhappy upbringing. I was after the good stuff, the Skinemax stuff. And boy, did I hit the mother lode.

  After the loss of her virginity—at the age of fifteen, to a sophomore Deadhead named Matt Harris—Taylor wrote voluminously about sex. Her tone was journalistic, almost clinical. She described every last detail about what happened, but without passion, like she was observing rather than participating in the activities. She must have been, when she worked at the school paper, a dynamite reporter.

  As for the activities, they were mostly drunken rolls in the hay—nothing to write home about, as the saying goes. But there were exceptions. And when there were exceptions, the exceptions were exceptional. I’ll relate one story, although there were plenty—such as the time she gave a hand job to a flabbergasted freshman in the men’s room of a dive bar for a dollar—that were of the same variety:

  Her junior year of college, when Kim Winter was studying in Prague, Taylor shared an off-campus apartment with a clueless coed named Jody, who was dating this Army ROTC guy, Brad. Jody and Brad were pretty serious; at twenty years old they were already engaged.

  One night, Brad and his friend Scott, another lughead, came to call on his girlfriend. Jody was at the library studying for her ethics final, but Taylor, who was halfway through Othello and therefore bored, let them in anyway. The three of them polished off a bottle of Southern Comfort, and then Brad started getting friendly. Rather than reject his prurient advances, she instead offered herself to both. “I’ve never had two guys at the same time before.”

  The ROTC guys had no qualms about sharing. They were used to showering and defecating in each other’s presence, because that’s what ROTC guys do, and had been through enough homoerotic ritual hazing not to mind seeing each other’s bony peckers. Once decided, the threesome set about realizing the full potential of a ménage à trois. At one point Taylor was fucking Brad and sucking Scott simultaneously, like a porn star, while the two lugheads slapped hands like they’d scored the winning touchdown at the Rose Bowl.

  Brad, her roommate’s fiancé.

  I don’t, unfortunately, have access to Taylor’s diaries any longer—they are as lost to me as Michael Jackson’s original nose—or I would transcribe a snippet, just to convey the blasé tone. The nonchalant play-by-play of this dalliance was devoid of color commentary. Taylor described the proceedings as if it were a late-September doubleheader between two cellar-dwelling ball clubs, or a way to make brownies. If she felt guilty, she did not say so. If she felt the weight of the betrayal, there was no mention of it. It may well have been that she wasn’t even aware that what she was doing was, at best, sleazy.

  Wherefore this nostalgie de la boue? Clearly something, something more powerful than her own force of will, lured her into the muck, time and again. Was she looking for love? Attention? Was she legitimately turned on? Or could it be that Taylor, after a childhood spent flailing around like a willow tree in a hurricane, at the mercy of the elements, was grasping for power in the only way she knew how?

  CHAPTER 7

  T

  o celebrate her first day of work, I took Taylor to dinner at Dojo, a hole-in-the-wall Japanese place on St. Mark’s, where a halfway decent meal cost about as much as two subway tokens. I would have rather taken her someplace where you didn’t need a key to open the bathroom door—and where the key in question was not chained to a sawed-off plunger handle—but my credit card was maxed out. Plus, Taylor dug the carrot dressing. The tables out front, clustered on the sidewalk beneath the green and black awning, were all taken, so we sat in the main dining room, which had all the aesthetic splendor of a soup kitchen. Over plates of salmon and brown rice (me) and soy burger and salad (her), we discussed her new job—she was already given a book to edit, a historical thriller by a first-time author named Roger Gale—my current job, and the topic du jour: her crush and my archenemy, Asher Krug.

  “I think maybe he likes me.”

  I would have rather heard my own diagnosis of syphilis than Taylor’s diagnosis of Asher’s affections. But arguing would’ve only made me look pathetic. Check that—more pathetic. I had no choice but to stick to my passive-aggressive plan, and that meant playing along.

  “Well of course he likes you, dummy. What’s not to like?”

  “You’re just saying that.” She bit into her soy burger. “Hey look, it’s Oxana.”

  Out on the street, an old Ukrainian lady was walking a three-legged dog. Her stout body was layered with sweaters and coats and scarves. A red babushka adorned her substantial head. She was a throwback to another era, a proud remnant of what was here before the hipster invasion, when what Realtors fairly recently dubbed the East Village was just the Ukrainian section of the Lower East Side. The two of them, the old lady and her dog—a Toto-like creature, but with matted hair and a missing hind leg—were a neighborhood fixture, as integral to the East Village as the Holiday Cocktail Lounge and Tower Records. Her real name wasn’t Oxana; we called her that as a joke—there was something ox-like about her gait.

  “She’s got the red babushka going today,” I said.

  “Second day in a row.”

  “Maybe she has more than one.”

  “Nah. How old you think that dog is?”

  “Old,” I said. “Maybe it was Peter Stuyvesant’s dog. He was missing a leg, too.” I picked a fish bone out of my mouth, a hazard of the Dojo salmon-dinner special. “But back to the matter at hand. Here’s what you do about Asher. You ask him out.”

&n
bsp; “I don’t know,” said Taylor, after a long sigh. She was still watching Oxana through the plate-glass window. “I’m, like, old-fashioned when it comes to that kind of stuff. I like when the guy makes the first move.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never initiated anything with a guy before.”

  “Usually they tip their hand, and I just kind of, like, go with the flow.”

  “That makes sense,” I stammered, although it didn’t. This revelation did not bode well for my passive-aggressive seduction plan, but never mind. “I’d like to think we’ve moved beyond that, as a society. Traditional gender roles, I mean. I’d like to think it’s okay for a woman to make the first move.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, “but it’s not my style.”

  “It’s not your style. I concede the point. But how the hell is he supposed to make a move when he never sees you?”

  “Oh, shit,” she said. A large dollop of carrot dressing had dropped on her pink sweater. While she dabbed her napkin in her glass of water and cleaned it up, I drank in the view of her chest. “I’ll see him in two weeks. At my follow-up.”

  “Two weeks? That’s an eternity. You’ll totally kill the momentum. And if he’s everything you say, he might be off the market in two weeks.”

  “There is that, yes. Holy shit.” She pointed to a baseboard on the wall behind me. “I just saw a mouse run into the kitchen.”

  Rodents were part of the ambience. She hadn’t lived in New York long enough to appreciate that. “Mice gotta eat, too. If I could take you to Le Cirque, believe me, I would.” Outside, Oxana had moved on. In her place were four punkers with spiked mohawks and torn outfits, smoking. “Men like to be pursued. People like to be pursued. It makes them feel wanted. As long as you don’t go overboard, I don’t think you’ll turn him off.”