Chicken (13 page)

Suddenly I come to, like a caterpillar awakening from a butterfly dream. I look over at Sunny and he nods at me, opening a side door.

Then we're floating home in our Moby Dick pumpkin chariot through the alabaster night, a black crow hanging high in front of a big fat moon.

‘Ya done good, boy,' Sunny says.

‘Thanks, Sunny,' comes up out of me.

I finally feel good.

For about ten seconds. Then I want someone to suffer like I do.

 

B
ELOW
I
MMACULATE
H
EART
College, halfway down the hill, lives the basketball court. There's not alotta sports action at IHC, it being a nun school and all, but this afternoon there's a nice three-on-three situation working as the sun continues its perpetual Hollywood shine. My fellow hoopsters are out for a little lite hoops, looking to break a mini-sweat, knock down some Js, go hard to the hole, do some minor white-boy smacking.

Me, I'm having one of those days. Layups roll around the rim before dribbling off miserably. Passes clang off my frying-pan hands. Jumpers thud hard off iron. I'm throwing up enough bricks to build a house with my three little piggie friends, and I can just see the Big Bad Wolf hiding behind a tree waiting to eat my grandmother.

I'm swearing loud now. I'm a very good swearer. It's a kind of speaking-in-tongues, ecstatic religious release for me.

‘Cocksuckingpigbastardscumsuckingpissboy!'

Everyone's looking at me funny, like there might be something wrong with me. Whatever. There's nothing in my universe now but this silly little pickup game, and the rage bubbling up in deep wells, where I've stored it away for just this kind of occasion.

My dad is recruited when I'm thirteen by an explosives start-up in Useless, Texas, to be the executive in charge of getting shit done, so the next stop on our All-American Dream Tour is Dallas, thirty miles from Useless. Actually it's Euless, but everybody calls it Useless.

You'll know why if you ever go to Useless.

My mom doesn't see my dad for days at a time, and when he is around he eats, sleeps, and attacks the yard with power tools at the same furious pace.

But now he's an Executive. The milk and the honey are here at last. The coal miner's son is striking gold.

Bumping, grinding, and shoving on my guy, I'm digging the hitting, goading him to retaliate. And the madder I get the worser I play. The ball's bouncing off my knee, fumbling through my hands, and sliding through my butterfingers.

I'm D-ing up on my guy now. He tries to drive past me, only I slide over and hip-check him, flashing one of my Minnesota hockey moves in Tinsel Town. I knock him off balance, and he loses the ball out-of-bounds.

He calls a foul.

‘Foul? Bullshit! That's no foul. You think that's a foul? That's just good D making you look bad, baby!'

My guy looks around sheeplike, seeking support from his teammates, who shuffle around like they're looking for spare change, not wanting to get dragged into my theater of cruelty.

Finally a guy on my team sighs. ‘Yeah, man, I thought you fouled him.'

And this guy's on
my
team.

‘That's a foul? Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize we were playing pussyball. I wish someone had told me.'

I grab the ball and put it right in my guy's face. ‘Okay,' I say, ‘let's play some pussyball.'

My guy looks at me like I'm a genetic engineering project gone horribly wrong.

I can barely focus on the game now, just waiting for the opportunity to pound the shit out of my guy, who's getting rid of the ball too quick, watching me out the corner of his eye, giving me too much room when I have the ball.

I bide my time, crouched low in the tall grass while the
angrypsycho talks on the audio track in my brain: You wanna see a foul, I'll show you a foul, ya pieceoshitmotherbastardcumburpingbitch.

Then suddenly my golden moment unfolds in slow motion as my guy turns the corner dribble-driving around the foul line. He's lost track of me, thinks he beat me to the spot, but I'm one step ahead of him, playing hide-and-seek behind his teammate.

And now he's mine.

As my guy leaves his feet to go up for the layup, he's slightly off balance, concentrating on the rim, while I line him up in the crosshairs, coiling, poised, spring-loaded with stored-up venom.

My body is all growed up when I'm fifteen. I play soccer with my dad's team in Dallas, and they're a very good team, league champs, mostly expatriate Brits. Playing against a brutish team, a burly stocky defender viciously hacks me. I crumble, howling, clutching my Achilles' heel where I've been violated. I get up tough, so all my dad's teammates know what a cold-blooded bastard I am, and tell the hard man who hit me to piss off. My old man busts over and, after he makes sure I'm okay, points at my attacker, and marks him with the evil eye.

About ten minutes later the marked man gets the ball, and out of nowhere my old man materializes and eviscerates him like a knight slaying the Jabberwocky. The other team goes mad, and the ref threatens to expel my dad from the game. But he stands tall over my fallen attacker and tosses me a little wink that no one else can see.

My dad has punished mine enemy.

I fly at my guy, high on bile, and slam the sharp blade of my shoulder into his sternum, OH MY GOD it feels good, that deep-down bodycrunch, me solid mass, him off-kilter bantam-weight, the visceral inflicting thrill pulsing through my pleasure centers.

His body jackknifes backward, torso slingshotting away, while his bottom half stays where it is for a moment, then follows the top half, knees and elbows akimbo.

He hits the asphalt with his left elbow and the side of his left knee, scraping layers of skin onto the asphalt, and grinding to a halt with shocked pain spreading across his face.

‘Is that a foul? Cuz where I come from, that's what we call a foul!' I roar, towering over him like a false god.

My guy touches the open wound on his knee, and his hand comes back with blood. He touches his elbow. More blood. He looks from the blood to me. Back to the blood. Then back to me.

‘What the hell is wrong with you?' The hurt of a child who's been punished for no reason at all.

I could've broken his ribs. We could be scraping his brain off the blacktop. What the hell
is
wrong with me?

Everyone stares at me like I'm unfit for human company. I shrink instinctively and trot out the apologia.

‘Sorry, man. I'm so sorry. I guess I'm a little…'

A little what? Psycho? Homicidal?

I reach out my hand to help him up. He turns it down.

‘You got a problem, man.'

Everyone agrees. They help him up.

‘Hey, I'm sorry man, that's just the way we play where I come from.' Where's that, Sing Sing? ‘Your ball, man, sorry.' I'm trying to pretend everything's normal, but nobody's playing along.

‘No, I'm done,' my guy mumbles, hobbling away like a war hero after a senseless bombing.

Then I'm alone, the hole in my bucket a little bigger.

 

‘W
E'RE HAVING
a big bash at my parents' house on Easter, and I was wondering if you wanted to come.'

And there it is. Kristy has invited me to her mommy and daddy's house, with Suicidal Sis and Marty, the German shepherd.

‘Yeah, I'd really like to meet your folks.' An actual note of sincerity, as excitement once again kisses terror.

Now all I have to do is get through my date with the Judge. Apparently the Judge saw me at the orgy and asked for me. Sunny told me I wouldn't have to have sex with him. I made my ‘Oh, yeah, right!' face, but he swore there'd be no sex with the Judge. And it's a five-hundred-dollar job. This stopped me dead. Five hundred dollars.

‘No sex? You swear?' I lean into the question.

‘Ah swear on my dead pappy's asshole! The Judge, he don't go with no boys, but he likes to git hisseff roughed up a li'l bit. An' he's a big fan of yours.'

Five hundred clams to rough up a judge? Big fan of mine? Sure, why not? Then I'll quit all this shit and move in with Kristy.

‘'Night, Mom,' I soprano as I toodle off to beddybyes when I'm thirteen.

During the night my testicles drop like a couple of lodestones in a bowl of pea soup.

‘Good morning, Mother. Hope you slept well!' booms out of me in a breakfast baritone the next morning, and suddenly I'm fevered with curiosity, mad as a hatter with a hard-on.

Sex.

What goes in where with whom and how?

The Judge comes out of the bathroom in a judge's robe. Sunny told me he was a judge, but I didn't expect him to come out of the bathroom in his judge's robe. I'd arrived at the Griffith Park apartment about ten minutes ago, found the key under a loose brick, and let myself in as instructed. There was no one there, and I had a mini-mal panic seizure. G-men in closets. SWAT team swooping down and busting my ass. I scanned the room. Elegant and simple. Antique table, two chairs, and a Frenchish desk on which sat a manila envelope. Just like Sunny said. I relaxed. A little. A white envelope was hiding inside. I scooped it out carefully and opened it slowly. Inside were five naked hundred-dollar bills that make me safe and warm. They fit so nice in my pocket. Five hundred dollars for an hour. I
am
hot.

A typed note, folded in half, crouched in the envelope, containing explicit instructions involving me, the Judge (who referred to himself throughout as ‘The Judge'), and a metal-edged ruler.

How far I've come in my career, I thought, from telling women how beautiful they are while I'm naked to telling a Judge how horrible he is while he's naked.

White goo oozes from the eyes of the clerk who lurks behind the counter of the Pink Pussycat when I'm thirteen. One rotten tooth sits like a black plank in the middle of his cankerous cavern of a mouth. His head is too small for his body.

When I ask for change, hovering in the comfort of the Shadow, a deep wet eighteen-wheeler of a hack rumbles up the highway of the clerk's lungs, and he hands me four droopy, drooling quarters.

‘Thank you,' I chirp, cheery as a cherry popover.

The Pink Pussycat teems with heaps of steaming mags and sweaty videotapes.
Hot Pink Wet Virgin Slut Cheerleader Lesbo
Nuns
. Loads of lone wolves with cigarette breath and damaged skin play pocket pool, ogle the magazines, and fondle the Plastic Love Dolls.

‘Marilyn comes complete with silky hair. All organs are realistic in every detail. Heavy-duty vacuum bulb builds up amazing suction. Make her as skinny or as buxom as you want. Don't be fooled by cheap breakable imitations. Be the stud you always wanted to be.'

I was instructed to burn the instructions and put the ashes in the sink. I liked that part. Gave it a real
Mission:
Impossible feel. If I'm caught or killed the secretary will disavow any knowledge of my actions.

The matches waited by the sink next to the old-fashioned metal-edged ruler. The Judge doesn't miss a trick. Guess that's why he's the Judge. I lit a match and ignited the instructions. Puff of flame, smell of sulfur. I dropped it in the sink like a flaming dead Viking being floated out to sea.

I picked up the ruler with the cold metal edge, and it made a nice loud whack sound when I smacked it into my palm.

A muscle memory hit me, and
wham!
I was back in George Wallace Elementary School. My third-grade teacher, the ninety-seven-year-old Mrs Bronte, the dreaded brontosaurus, all three-foot-nine of her, was dragging out the old metal-edged ruler to thrash some poor sucker's knuckles, the sixty-four eight-year-olds in my class smelling blood, silently wild with delight.

Fluorescent-pink signs shine like flaming flamingos in the Pink Pussycat, describing in a child's uneven scrawl the films being shown in each booth.

But I don't want all the bells and whistles. I'm thirteen, horny as a schoolgirl and nervous as a sailor, and I just want to see a normal guy and a normal gal doing what normal people do when they Do It. It never dawns on me that I might be in the wrong place to see anything like that.

The Judge is gray on gray, in all his robed glory, skin hanging flaccid cheek by jowl, dangling waddle wobbling over his collar, ushering a sour graveyard smell in with him.

As soon as I lay eyes on him I feel mean and hateful. I can see the Olde Bastard looking down from the bench with righteous condescension, telling me what a menace to society I am.

I slap the ruler hard into my hand, a loud
smack
, and it hurts, which helps, like Bruce Lee tasting his own blood. The Judge jumps, and that feels good.

‘You're a miserable piece of shit, aren't you?' I stride right over to him all revved up
Clockwork Orange-
style, and I punch him knuckle on nose.

That's what I
want
to do. What I really do is stop my fist inches from the Judge's face, which registers high-voltage fright as he quivers in rapture and terror.

‘Yes,' he whimpers, ‘I need—'

‘Shut up, bitch!'

I push him back into the wall, and he slumps with a thump. I tear the robe off him and shove him down. Guess what the Judge has on under his robes?

Diapers.

1 STUD, 1 SLUT, SOOPER HOT HOT HOT

That's about as normal as it's gonna get. The inside of the Pink Pussycat booth smells like an old moldy sperm sandwich. I slip a quivering quarter into the slick slot, and when a small screen flickers to life, a woman's face appears. She's cockeyed. One eye goes east, one goes west, one flies over the cuckoo's nest. She wears makeup buckwheat-pancake thick. A soundtrack of bad wackawacka guitar and synthesized drummachine wheezes under the sludgebucket basso profundo moan of a man loaded on testosterone.

‘Oh baby. Give it to me, you nasty little baby. You love it, don't you, baby? Oh, baby, baby, baby.'

She moans but no sound comes out. Then I hear a moan when her mouth isn't moving. It's out of kilter. Out of sync. Cockeyed.

She glances off camera, and you can almost hear some dictator director shouting:

‘
Act sexy!
'

One eye darts back to the camera, while the other drifts off somewhere as she licks her lips and rolls her eyes. She's not sooper hot at all. She's sad in one eye and gone in the other.

Usually when an employer gets a bad haircut or wears an ugly tie, the employee doesn't get the opportunity to humiliate him or her. But that's what I'm getting paid for. I let loose a nice long sadistic laugh as I look at this sad gray Olde Bastard on his knees, with his flabby saggy tits, big pregnant cannonball gut, puddly thighs, and hunched shoulders grown wild with a nasty forest of white hairs.

In his diapers.

‘Hey, wait a—' the Judge starts indignantly.

‘Did I tell you to talk? No. You talk when I tell you to, you fat little prick—'

‘Yes, I am, I'm a fat little prick,' he dribbles.

‘Shut the hell up, bitch!' I hiss, pissed, whacking him with the flat part of the ruler across the middle of his back, a howl yowling out of him as he bellyflops on the floor.

‘Does your wife know you like to wear diapers? Do all the lawyers and judges know you like to cum in your diapers? Answer me!'

‘No,' the Judge snivels.

‘No “sir,” bitch!' I snarl.

‘No, sir …' the Judge whines.

His fear feeds me, and I gorge ravenously. But it's like stuffing yourself with day-old birthday cake that you know is gonna make you sick later.

‘Put your hands out in front of you,' I rumble.

This command comes with a smack of the ruler on his fat belly, accompanied by a tremendous slapping sound. The Judge averts his eyes like I'm the pope, and sticks his gray spotted hands out in front of him. I've got this rich pillar-of-society prick right where I want him.

In her left hand the cockeyed girl holds a plastic champagne glass, and in her right a veiny, blood-engorged wangdangdoodlehammer that she glances at sideways, like it might take a bite out of her cheek.

Then the screen goes dark. I desperately need to know what happens to my distressed porno princess, so I ram in another quarter, and there she is, exactly where I left her, licking her lips again, rolling her eyes back in her head like a tropical fish about to plunge into a coma, and winkling the wangdangdoodlehammer into the plastic champagne glass.

My femme fatale looks offscreen in a panic. ‘Do I have to?' flashes across her face. Apparently she does, cuz then she looks back at the camera, does her pseudosexy face again, and chugs the whole thing down.

Bottoms up!

‘Shut your eyes!' I bark to the diapered Judge kneeling with his hands held in front of him. He closes them instantly. I like that. He's breathing hard and sweating like a fat old pig having sick sex.

I silently slide behind him, rear back, and smack him hard with the ruler on the pink bottom of his soul, catching his foot flush with another tremendous thwack that tingles deliciously all the way through my central nervous system.

The Judge tumbles like Humpty Dumpty off his wall, whimper-moaning in little rhythmic spasms. I plant my foot in the middle of his back and crush him into the beige carpet, where he quakes with the secret creepy excitement a Judge can only get from being trashed by a boy chicken he's paying five hundred dollars.

Who pumped their poison into this poor guy? I feel sorry for the Judge. One part of me wants to stop and try to make him feel better.

But I can't. This feels too good.

Looking like a sick kid who just swallowed her medicine, my pornbaby cocks one eye into the camera while the other wanders away forlorn. The unheard offscreen commandant orders her to smile, and as she snaps back, the east eye smiles sicklysweet, while the west eye looks like it's about to cry.

Sex? That's sex? Shocked and wobbly, I reel and teeter, jelly-kneed. I stumble into the supercool of the Pink Pussycat black light, lean against the booth to regroup, then stagger through the flaccid limp love beads, roll past the drooling troll behind the counter, and get ejaculated through the front door, where the blast of blinding white light brings reality rushing back like the four o'clock uptown express.

When my life flashes before my eyes this is one of the things I'll see: that beat-up cockeyed ghost of a girl flickering away.

The Judge moangroans loud now, bucking and thrashing, crying out somewhere between a wheeze and a sob. Watching this fat Olde Bastard busting his nut in his diapers makes my skin slink away in shame and my brain revolt. How did I end up doing this? That's it for me. I gotta get out.

The Judge finally stops and looks up at me. Seeing his ashen sicksad deathmask face makes my temperature drop thirty degrees, and I shiver the shiver of the damned. I grab my helmet, check my money, and mutter, ‘Later …'

Whatever.