Chicken (5 page)

 

‘T
HE MAYOR CAN
go straight to hell. I mean, who does he think he is? You don't just cancel on a dinner party that's been planned for six weeks! The whole reason for the goddam party in the first place was so the mayor could meet all those boring assholes. And my husband, that painintheassbastard, you know what he said to me? He said, “Handle it.” I'll give him something to handle, the miserable prick.'

Georgia paces and smokes like a nervous chimney. Mr Hartley told me to be here at four o'clock. I'm gonna get a hundred dollars. Plus a tip, of course. If I get the job done.

TV's on low, so you can barely hear excited people winning more money. A painting of a schooner that looks like it's from a starving-artist sale sails on the wall. An envelope on a dresser whispers my name.

Georgia lights a new cigarette off the cherry of the one she holds, while another smolders from the ashtray. I smell booze and see the tip of a bottle peeking its head out from a big hand-bag, like it doesn't want to miss a trick. Next to it a bit of stocking drips. A pair of neon-lime shoe twins sit side by side by the side of the bed. Georgia has ten pink piggies painted peach at the end of her fat little feet.

Okay. So she came in, took off her stockings, shoved them into the bag, then knocked back a few snorts to lube the engine, which is always smoking.

Georgia looks like she fell into a trash compactor when she was five-eight and didn't escape until she was five-foot-two. She's wearing a silky shiny neon-green knee-length skirt with a silky shiny brown blouse that's at least two sizes too big. The overall
effect of Georgia is fleshy, shiny, and smoky.

I'm on the edge of the Cliffs of Hyperventilation, my mind mile-a-minuting, pulse pounding, trying to focus on my breathing. I don't know it at the time, but this turns out to be a very smart move, and when I do manage to track down my breath and force it to get regular, I immediately feel power and control. And Lord, I need power and control right now.

Frannie the Coma Girl. She loves me. Sunny told me so. I see myself in her mirror: long, muscled, and woody. I'm the sixty-minute chicken, star of my own loverstudguy movie.

Georgia motions to the envelope on the dresser. A hundred-dollar bill lives in there. I casually make it mine. Just the act of making contact with the money is a great balmy calm to me and activates the voice in my head:

‘Oh, baby … you love it, don't you? Oh, baby, baby, baby.'

An adrenaline subway rushes up me, tingly little charges that fire inside, like an addict when the score is knocking on the door. I pose by the mirror. I pose in the chair. I pose by the dresser. I shoot her with a look that has no smile in it, and when I catch her eyeballing me, this big bossy brassy ballbusting babe blushes.

‘Would you mind … uh … taking off your … uh … clothes …'

The power in this room has shifted, and it's intoxicating. In real life I'm so small. Here I'm so big.

Georgia wants me to tell her how pretty she is. Apparently her painintheassbastard husband never does.

‘You know, as soon as I walked in, I said to myself, ‘She is really pretty.' And you really are. If you were at a party and I saw you I'd definitely hit on you.' I come from a long line of toads, and it flows out of me, easy as fur pie.

She eats it up with a silver spoon. Asks me to play with myself. Play. I'm struck by what an odd phrase that is. Play. Jungle gym. Teeter-totter. Barbie dolls.

So I lie on the bed, and I play. I like watching myself playing in the mirror. And I like the fact that she can't take her eyes off me,
but can't look right at me, either. The air's filled with sex, and I'm the bullgooseloony chicken.

I conclude, based upon my very limited database, that women in Hollywood like to watch naked young men masturbate.

My blood is coming to a rolling boil as I play, and if I squint hard enough I can imagine this crazy baby's the beautiful minx star of my loverstudguy movie.

Georgia shuffles over awkwardly, hikes up her skirt, and kneels on the bed next to my head, a bouquet of stale cigarette and nasty booze arriving with her.

Where exactly are we going with this?

Suddenly she has one knee on either side of my head. I disappear under the bigtop tent of her green neon skirt, and I'm swallowed up in her dark suffocating circus, where the clowns are scary and the lions unchained.

As her nether underworld zooms in slow motion toward my face, the heat of Georgia blasts me like a furnace, feminine fresh chemicals burning the hairs in my nostrils. It's like a scientist who never actually smelled a woman created an aroma of what female genitals would smell like in a germ-free world. But underneath lurks something dank humid and sordid, like her vagina's been hanging out in a seedy bar. I can't breathe. I'm drowning in all this alcohol-saturated smoke-drenched genitalia.

It's all I can do not to throw her off and fly away. But I can't. The son of an immigrant is here to get the job done. And if I can walk out of this room with a hundred dollars, then at least I'm worth that.

Georgia's planted herself unmoving on my face. A joke pops into my head. As long as I've got a face, you've got a place to sit. I make a mental note to laugh about this later.

I never went through that ‘I hate girls' phase so many men never outgrow. I've always been attracted to girls by a force I couldn't quite control.

My girlfriend's name is Sally. I'm five. She has pretty yellow curly hair and blue blue eyes. She wears little flower dresses, a different one every day.

I'm sure she didn't know she was my girlfriend. I showed my love and devotion for her by flying on my bicycle in front of her house over and over, back and forth like some crazed mechanical duck, because I thought I looked so grown up and tough with the wind in my hair whipping so damn fast past her house.

I sometimes feel like I've spent my whole life riding my bicycle very fast in front of girls' houses, trying to get them to love me.

Cause of death: asphyxiation by vagina. That's what my death certificate is gonna say, I think, as I suffocate under Georgia. My erection left the party long ago. She hasn't really had a sexual response of any kind, and she's just been using my face as a chair for what seems like months.

I find myself questioning my career choice.

Finally I pull her skirt away from my face so I can breathe, and when I do, I see Georgia's face. It's staring off with long sad eyes. I wonder how she got this way. Georgia looks down at me. With a mouthful of vagina I ask her if she would like me to stop.

‘Would you mind terribly?' she says in a soft little-girl voice I haven't heard coming out of her yet. Then I can see, for the first time, how once upon a time Georgia was beautiful. I tell her I really do think she's pretty. She smiles, sighs, climbs down off me, climbs down off the bed, and lights another cigarette.

‘I've never had an orgasm.'

Georgia smokes as she doesn't look at me.

I'm not quite sure what to do with this information. I've never been with someone who's paying me to discuss her orgasm issues. But I am enjoying this part of the work much better than being smothered by her toxic pillow of love.

Nakedly I stand in front of her. I put my hand on her hard stiff hair and hold it there. Reminds me of my mom's hair before she
got liberated. Georgia sighs and smiles. There's something familiar about this. Makes me want to bake cookies naked with Georgia.

I pull her into me and hold her there, feeling her cheek hot against me, smelling her smoky boozy perfume. She takes a deep pull on her fag and I feel the heat of her cherry on my belly. Hope she doesn't burn me with that thing, I think, as Georgia exhales, smoke escaping like prisoners of war from a concentration camp.

‘Do you want to have one?' I ask.

‘Yes, I do,' Georgia says.

‘I can help you with that,' I say.

Georgia stops smoking for a moment. She's rag limp and drained dry. I'm still naked.

‘Could you really?' Georgia asks, hope and desperation dancing the cancan in her eyes.

‘Sure,' I say. Even as I flow with compassion and goodwill, I watch myself calculate how much I can make off this Georgia, the American Dream unfolding right in front of me. I'm making money off other people's misery.

‘Maybe we could try this again next week,' she says.

‘Absolutely.' I smile.

She smiles back, her face smooth, loose, and soothed for the first time since I've known her, which is all of about forty-five minutes.

Then something snaps – I can hear it, like a tibia cracking – and a dark thundercloud surrounds Georgia from the inside out. She grabs a cigarette quick, fires her up, and the protective layer of smog covers Georgia again like a cone of silence.

‘Jesus, this day is just insane, and if my painintheassbastard husband thinks I'm gonna save his piece-of-shit dinner party, he can kiss my ass.'

And on and on.

Georgia slips her neon-green shoe twins on her fat little feet and grabs her big bag. She fishes in it for quite a while before reeling out some paper money that writhes around on the hook of her
hand. She forks it over midmonologue. Without looking at it, I say thank you, but I don't think she hears me. Then she shakes my hand and leaves.

After you sit on a boy's face, you shake his hand? Seems weird at first, but the more I think about it, the more I realize: That's it in a nutshell, isn't it?

I look at the bill. It's a hundred. A hundred! I open my envelope and extract my other hundred. Two hundred-dollar bills.

I stand there in this Hollywood hotel room, my mouth hanging open like a cartoon dog that's just seen Jesus turn water into a big juicy bone. Two hundred bucks for forty-five minutes of naked sex therapy, some faux cunnilingus, and a small cup of human kindness?

That's Real Money, friends.

I'm raised a little English schoolboy, please and thank you never far from my pretty little pink lips. I have an English accent until I go to first grade, at which point I drop it so fast I make my own head spin.

As a child I'm trained with ice cream. When my brother and sister and I are in the backseat of our faux-wood-paneled station wagon, creating mayhem and wreaking anarchy, after the ineffectual sweep of a hand from the front seat misses everyone, after ‘If you don't quit that bliddy racket I'll stop this bliddy car and you'll bliddy well walk home' has been exposed as the bluff it is, the trump card is always laid down:

‘If you don't quit this instant, no Dairy Queen!'

We clam and salivate.

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.

Standing alone with my sex money, I sink. I have a flash of my mom, and I vow that if I ever see her again I'll do something very bad to her. I fondle my two hundred, and that makes it better, like a
bandage on a kid's boo-boo. It's not nearly as bad as when Frannie was done with me. I'm already learning to store it away easier.

Afterward, when I'm back home, I can't figure out why I'm so horny and hungry. I call Kristy, but she's not home, and I crash down harder.

I can't stand still, so I get on my bike and the crank and rev roar up like loud growls. Suddenly I'm wandering the aisles of Hollywood Ralph's. I pick out a big day-old birthday cake with pink and blue roses growing in a snowy-white pond of sweet lard. Then I find myself grabbing an industrial-size tub of ice cream.

A spectacularly droopy fiftyish woman in an aggressive orange wig, a skintight leopard-print one-piece bodysuit covered in feline fur, accessorized by big rhinestone-festooned cat glasses – and a scab on her lip – checks me out at the checkout line. She licks her whiskers and hisses, ‘Go fetch me a pint of milk, I gotta bad hip. I was in
Valley of the Dolls
.'

I fetch her milk. The Doll scrutinizes it brutally, then screams right in my face, ‘Seventy-five cents? For goddam milk?
Ha!
I can get this for a quarter. I don't want this shit. What the hell is wrong with you?'

She slams the milk into my solar plexus. Then the Doll storms out and disappears back into the Valley, while the hole in my bucket gets a little bigger. I decide to buy the milk. What's cake and ice cream without a little milk to wash it down?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Is written in red across the face of my day-old cake, more like a warning than a greeting. It's not my birthday. I'm not happy. A pair of baleful pale plastic anorexic ballerinas on pointe stare at me from atop the field of snowy frosting. I feel an instant, intense attraction to those two beautiful stiff long-legged dancers pirouetting yet forever motionless on this iceberg of a cake. They have the look of Georgia sitting on my face.

When I get home to my hovel I steamshovel a mouthful of
day-old cake into my face; then I cram in a bucketful of ice cream; then I guzzle a gulp of milk. Cake, ice cream, milk; cake, ice cream, milk; cake, ice cream, milk. I'm my own little assembly line, processing milky sugary goo.

The ballerinas stare up at me dolefully and plead with big sad-sack plastic eyes: ‘Please sir, can I have some more?'

Halfway through the cake my taste buds go on a sit-down strike, but I can't stop eating.

And then suddenly there's no cake left. Even the ballerinas are gone. I don't think I ate them, but who knows?

Then I double up with a cramp of woolly-mammoth proportions, as my body screams: