God of the Game (Dreamstate) (22 page)

    I wasn’t sorry. Why should I? He raped me. He’d done it before,
nonstop, for ages. I just didn’t have the guts then to retaliate. Since I was young, before my breasts developed, even more so after they did; I guess he thought it was now all right that I’m sexually matured. He needn’t be drowned in guilt. I am a woman already. No more just a mere girl.       

    He’d come expecting the usual. Thinking he’s a regular at a diner
. No words spoken, he just sits at his table, and the waitress brings his favourite. No dialogue, the script committed to memory. Memorized…mesmerized. It’s the same anyway; it’d been the same forever. The actors know their role. 

    I strip, he
sits. He likes my little tease dance, his bowed legs shaking. And when I’m near, he groans. Oily palms paw me. My mind is shut. Now he does his thing; things I don’t want to remember. Things I can’t forget. Things I banish beneath my mind. I live in denial. I fantasize concerning cheesecakes. I like the taste, they’re my fave. But I don’t get to eat any; he never lets me. Say’s I’ll be fat. He likes me skinny but generous across the chest. …
And he continues to touch me.

    No! I want my liberty. I want my cheesecake. I don’t want that filthy man telling me what’s right o
r wrong, preaching his sermon on morality, but keeping me in thrall. If only his congregation knew the truth, the monstrous pervert underneath, the hypocrite on the surface. He uses me as test subject, an experiment of his faith against sin, he says. I am the
sin,
and he must consecrate me with his pee. 

    He runs his lecture notes through me. Asks me what I think. But he only wants one answer.
That he’s good. That he’s damn good. That he’s the best! Otherwise, I’m spanked.

    Cheesecakes. I just want some. In fact, I want all. The whole bloody pie. I sneaked
into the kitchen when I was nine, stole into the fridge, which was beckoning me like salvation’s call. Scooped a pinch with my little finger…the most delicious substance to ever touch my tongue; unlike his semen, his yucky semen. He forces me. Forces me to swallow.

    Now swallow this! That
dirty old man, now he knows how it feels to be eating the end of a shaft. The gun was below my pillow. My boyfriend Jimmy gave it to me. He creeps in at night, he’s a genius. He picks locks. Promises me we’ll elope...after I do this. I love him. I’ll do anything.

    David Bowie blared Outside.
It was definitely murder
, David said,
but was it art?
My voyeur boyfriend, standing at the door, was determined it was, and suddenly I’m sucking the dick of a headless corpse. Amazing it could still erect; amazing it could still cum. Proves nothing but sex on a man’s mind, even when technically he doesn’t have a mind. Giving head. Old habit, I guess. Always done it when he was alive, only natural I continue even though he’d died. A punishment maybe, for removing his head. I cut it off afterward. Emasculated that dead bastard.

    And I started to cry. Now I can eat all the cheesecakes I want. He caught me the last time…my only time, as I stuck the finger to my mouth. He was behind when I closed the frid
ge door. That was the first, the first he explored my secret place, my tiny attic, my little corner…my forbidden garden. How I miss him, how I cried; Daddy, see you in another life.  

43

    Do you believe in reincarnation? Jimmy says death is the most beautiful thing. He’s an expert. Been there, done that. Jimmy says, when you die, you don’t die. Yer still aware of your surroundings. You just can’t respond. 

    Dead with your eyes wide
open, you see everything till they rot away. And since you can’t close your ears, well too bad, all the awful things people say behind your dead body after those same mouths word the most eloquent eulogies, makes you wish maggots would just quickly eat through the eardrums so that your world can be a silent movie.  

    Oh, and don’t mention about smelling your own decay. Or how uncontrolled bowels stream to the delight of famished flies.

    According to Jimmy, the cadaver feels, that’s why
that
pervert,
my
father, suffers from premature rigor of the genitalia during the administration of fellatio. Necrofellatio. I know, my bad. Habit that bastard cock had imprinted onto my mouth a thousand lives. Now I always give willingly, just ask Jimmy. He gets a lot of it. It’s like it’s my duty, boyfriends don’t have to ask, I feel if I love him, I gotta blow him.  

    Sorry, I’m young and I get distracted easily. Jimmy’s talking death and I’m not really listening. We’re on the run. Wanted for murder. Jimmy says it sucks no one appreciates the art part. He was so beautiful, sitting serene on a toilet bowl with trousers round the ankles. Uncoordinated socks, the only tiny detail out of place in the symmetry. Behind, on the wall, a Rorschach inkblot made of caked blood, brain pulp, flesh matter and bone shrapnel.

    Jimmy says red is such a bore. He doesn’t comprehend the morbid fascination with serial killers. Blood splatter, the insides of man, or beast, all one colour. How dull is that? What if, instead of just uninteresting red, creatures are composed of other hues as well? Even if it’s just adding in cyan, yellow or magenta, based colours to the natural key of blood, this would already provide a pantone of fun.

    Elementary murderers could do like kindergarten art. Hand prints and incomprehensible montages of messy shapes. I mean, most crime scenes are plain muddy anyway. And all in that same bloody red! More colours w
ould brighten up any detective’s day. Police can’t wait to arrive at another homicide. Especially the artistic ones.

    Jimmy, his art is black belt. He can put a gun in the mouth, and what comes out at the other end when he pulls
the trigger is a masterpiece; more captivating than Mona Lisa’s smile, more abstract than Picasso, more mind-bending than Dali. 

    Bang! And you get farm scenery. Bang! Or modern art, those you can read anything
in to. Of course Jimmy can also do one shade. Red, if must. Bang! Sketch of a nude replacing what used to be a head. 

    But Jimmy, he prefers pictures. He’s old school. Says, these blobs of random patterns, neo-art, supposedly possessing d
eep insightful meanings behind, bullshit! All bullshit. Any novice can do that, any monkey. Try doing a sunflower field, or the Eiffel tower. Try doing it with one shot. Only one shot. Now that’s what I call art, he says, recoiling to get some sleep in a dingy motel we’re hiding in.

    Jimmy, he snores like a rattlesnake. He says you’re god. He’s talking in my dreams.

    Every artist is god. In his hand, it’s just paint. Till he decides what to do, it’s all the same thing. Bought from the same shop, made by the same manufacturer. Twelve colours or more in a pack. Blue can be the sea or the sky, or even a teapot, but till then, it’s just blue.

    Same then, till he pulls the trigger. Before that, the same pulp, the same blood, the same brain. After that, after Jimmy’s decided, a
fter the bullet’s done its job...wild horses running in the wind! In the beginning god created the heavens and the earth. Before that... Before that he was deciding. Contemplating. Before that, it was all the same matter. In the beginning god could have created just a metal block with nothing inside. He could have made robots instead of man. Circuitry instead of artery. Male, female and,
or
, something else. Something else altogether. You imagine. You can. You’re god.

44

    Search warrant in hand, cops finds Jimmy’s place packed with mannequins and sex dolls. He’d been honing his craft. Headless dummies stand or sit in front of gorgeous artworks. There’re his watercolour paintings in picture frames propped against walls. Canvases, splayed wide along the high-ceilinged warehouse, depict the road to Golgotha. Random designs scattered on cement ground.       

    Jimmy’s art is evolving. Experimenting, he’s got cans of paint
exposed, fabric dyes, food colouring. The abode’s a vomit cocktail mix of glue sniffers’ paradise. He’s pumping up those live-sized dolls in rainbow, a blood carnival of vibrant shades. The police discover dummies in doggy positions, firearms stuffed up homemade polymer rectums, and necks opening up to clovers of nothingness. No faces. But in turn, intricate, precisely detailed portraits of lonely men’s ‘lady friends,’ projected onto a sheet of white linen. The shroud of Turin plasticized.

    Some dolls have it backwards. Sucking some revolver, the ass has disappeared. According to Jimmy, that’s what you do for wide-lens panoramic effect. The ex
ploding butt-cheeks provide width. This is especially useful when your topic is landscapes.    

    Guys, they just wanna get into your panties. Most guys, that is; they’re more interested with what’s inside. This too is true of daddy, but he prefers first to squeeze into my underwear. That potbelly sliced by the elastic band of cotton knickers, leaving marks across his waist. How I wished the inner garments had carved him in two. Roast beef or Thanksgiving turkey. That bulging crotch constricted under silky intimate wear, reminds me of a suffocating snake.

    If you ask me, he got what he deserved. Alwa
ys perverting truth to suit lust. I know there is guilt and the fear of being caught somewhere, but he turns the table and says I’m the evil instead. He must save me, he must consecrate me.

    How fucked up is that?

    What more, church minister of a god of grace engaged in such deplorable acts? Doesn’t matter what a man is, doesn’t matter his respectable social standing, once obsessed in some kinky behaviour of the flesh, he will quote and twist Holy Scripture to his justification.  

    Jimmy say
s I have my rights. But he ain’t talking about the court of law.

    Well, Jimmy’s differe
nt. He’s something else. Unique; a special case. Unlike most guys who are after just one thing, Jimmy just wants to fuck my mind.

    He lets me blow him as a favour. Sorry, I can’t help m
yself. Swimmer’s shoulders make my ovaries itch. Six-pack commands my vagina to cry. Moves my Skene’s glands to tears.

    What to do, Jimmy makes me horny.

    But that boy’s not interested in sex. He fucks to indulge me. Makes love like it’s the end of the world, like the last thing he’ll ever do; Jimmy turns me on with all his bleeding heart.

    But I know he’s not satisfied. Can’t be bothered
, actually. A total lack of interest.

    Does he even enjoy coupling me?

    What a liar. Maybe I’ll shoot him too.

    He’d want me to.

    I know.

    I admit, he makes me insecure. Perhaps I’m not good enou
gh for him. My lips don’t wrap round his dog the way it’s supposed to. A girlfriend once told me chicks that blow the flute are superb cock suckers. It’s the same technique. Something to do with the shape of the lips, and perhaps what the tongue does underneath. I never played an instrument. Not good with my mouth, or my hands. 

    But
the other boys never complained. Daddy never complained. From his grunts, I knew he’d touched seventh heaven.

    I’m good. I’m damn good...

    So...

    So I’m bloody confused
, that’s so.

45

    God’s created in our own image.

    Right now it’s dawn and we’d left the cockroach infested motel. Just in time, before our mug shots are proclaimed throughout the country in the morning news edition. Jimmy’s hand is on the wheel. With the other, he’s toying with a classic Smith & Wesson Model 3, favoured by the likes of Wyatt Earp, reputable and notorious US lawman of the Wild West. Loaded or not, I’m not sure.

    The radio’s on about us.

    Cut to commercials. And what I really hear on the FM is that we’re a nation of masturbators searching substandard instant gratification. Our art are replicas. Recycled. Regurgitated copies of an earlier bestseller. Cheap thrills infiltrate the flesh, expires beyond the pores of sin, but never reaching the soul, and leaving the spirit void as usual. Our emotions, parched in a scorched earth. This degradation of desire is worse than selling your birthright for a bowl of stew. The tragedy of Esau; if ever he stands next to us in a police identification line, he’s a saint!

    Jimmy complains.

    No one’s looking for real art anymore. We only want what the neighbours want. No deep shit, just eye candy to appeal to our carnal and superficial senses. Spiritually brain-drained, Mercedes Benz and a suburban bungalow are the new symbols of our salvation. That’s why god’s disappeared. Swallowed up by rock concert praises, the deity dies, and only loud pop music draped in disco lights remain. 

    God’s created in our own image.

    He’s just what we want him to be. And what we want him to be is to look pretty, or be our sugar daddy.