Hatched (33 page)

The problem was, if Jude was going to make it to the beach during the heat of the day, then he had to pick up this guy’s stuff quickly, drive to the beach for some fun, and then quickly drive to the allotted Manhattan destination to drop off his load of furniture.

“Don’t think about the fucking beach, you idiot,” thought Jude as he maneuvered his legs up and down, in an effort to create a kind of Hans Brinker to the soft-tissue dyke in his groin. This motion caused him to press and release the gas pedal in regular waves, with the occasional violent thrust of the pedal towards the floor of the cab. The effect was to release huge puffs of smoke into the Long Island atmosphere, and small puffs of gas from his anus into the cab. These violent thrusts of anything in a vehicle this old was risky, and although an octogenarian accustomed to shoveling snow from the outside steps of his Boston apartment could probably do so right up to the very end, and another octogenarian accustomed to pulling quack grass in Tennessee can do the same thing, they’d likely suffer inordinately by having to change places. So, too, with old Crackerbox, for it was now being placed in an unusual position of emptying and then flooding its various working parts. And so when it was suddenly subjected to unusual pressures on its well-worn rubber tubes, it conked out and became a silent ghost of a machine, drifting down one of those lovely, tree-shaded, old highways of Long Island, un-propelled and undirected.

“Shit!” exerted Jude. Visions of glorious fantasies, like eating fried clams while staring into the eyes of beautiful mover-loving nymphets, were suddenly shattered. He steered his giant Crackerbox to a shoulder soft enough, and not in a good way, to dampen the vehicle, but hard enough, also not in a good way, to hold its weight. Jude’s moving world came to a standstill, abruptly, and he was low like a giant, plastic bag filled with urine and squeezed into the cockpit of the
Titanic
post-glacial incident.

He turned the now-impotent key, slid it into a space between his jeans pocket and his bladder, pushed open the seemingly 287-pound door, and eased himself down to the much-desired land of Long Island. There would likely be no move today, and so no clams to nourish and lubricate his innards, no visions of perky breasts to provide food for shower-time fantasies, and, moreover, questions of how he would negotiate his return home to the Raskolnikov-sized cubbyhole of a room that he rented in the West Village.

“Maybe I should just move here, tonight?” he asked himself, as though joking with a friend.

“Great idea, idiot. I’m sure that two or three million dollars should definitely secure a garage large enough to hold a bed and both of your skateboards!”

That conversation done, he looked around and tried to figure out the next best plan.

“Call for assistance?”

“That’ll be fucking expensive, and maybe it’s just something minor that I can figure out for myself. Hitchhike to the closest town, have a beer, and regroup? That has the advantage of . . .”

All of this internal metaphysical debate was sufficiently intense to deny him direct access to the physical world. But he was suddenly overwhelmed by the realization that if he didn’t pee, right then and there, that he’d have other calamities to address. He awkwardly waddled to the ditch side of the truck, undoing his belt buckle as he did so. He was trying to trick his bladder into thinking that he was doing the necessary preparations, so as to both forestall the explosion and promise his bladder that the explosion was imminent. It was a photo finish. He managed to free his penis just as the stream began to flow, and the grateful weeds below him were offered the gift of much-needed nourishment in the form of acrid, coffee-scented urine.

Chapter 2

It wouldn’t be exactly accurate to say that Jude was hitchhiking. After a remarkably long piss, he was in such a state of blissful delirium that he was standing on the side of the road, staring at the tall Long Island trees, and contemplating, pace Shelley’s ruminations on birds and mountains and glaciers, both the magnitude and the magnificence of nature. It was early afternoon on a Friday, and there was surprisingly light traffic, considering the wonderful destinations available to those in search of summertime-like experiences.

There was one car that did drive by Jude, causing considerable ruckus and a degree of consternation, since it seemed to swerve TOWARDS him as it approached. It was a bright-red, 1976 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, with its white, leather-like top down, revealing a group of four people in what appeared to Jude as joyful party mode.

His eyes followed its passage, and then watched it swerve towards the shoulder, where it abruptly stopped. The driver turned towards Jude, and then threw the car into reverse so as to head towards Jude’s broken-down truck. More curious than excited about this nature-shattering event, Jude walked towards the car. It contained one older gentlemen in the backseat, alongside of what seemed like a much younger boy—perhaps his son—and another rather mature-looking man in the driver’s seat, alongside a very young, or certainly much younger woman, perhaps his daughter? The front passenger side door burst open, and a small but insistent hand grabbed his own and urged him in beside her. There was lots of room, as her small body only occupied around half of the luxurious, white-leather bucket seats. He landed beside her, and she turned to greet him. It was Tina.

“You need a ride?” asked John, grinning sardonically. “Close the door!” he said, as he smoothed the Cadillac up to a cruising speed. Jude was in a state of shock as he grasped the enormity of the situation. Tina had cuddled up, and was by now all but sitting on him. It was like the scene in
Tristan and
Isolde
, when Tristan found himself between an excited Isolde and her sleeping husband, an intimate victim of treachery and lust. Tina reached around Jude’s neck to hold him closer to her. John looked over at them, all but allowing the car to drive itself as he took in the sight.

“Go ahead,” urged John-the-Watcher, smiling sardonically. Jude was frozen in his newfound role as objectified object of desire, and so didn’t obey, he just sat there, stunned.

Tina, by contrast, did, as it were, go ahead. Her right hand, always so punctual, so directed, so careful, so task-oriented, was now on Jude’s hands, arms, and thighs, in their quest downwards. Jude stared at John as he felt Tina’s gentle touch, and wondered, unconvincingly, where this was all heading. She tugged on his belt buckle, released it, and positioned herself over Jude, bending down towards his chest, and then lower, and lower, as she simultaneously lifted up his sweaty tee shirt.

John, apparently satisfied with the direction things were taking in the front seat, looked into the rearview mirror to check out how things were going in the back. As Tina’s surprisingly warm mouth engulfed Jude’s nipples, and then she lowered herself further, towards his hard-on, her warm mouth breathing soft plumes of desire. Uncertain as to who was about to witness this long-awaited event, Jude suddenly swung his head around, in the direction of the backseat.

There was one man directly behind Jude, a rather tough-looking character, greying, big head, sunglasses, around John’s age, perhaps a little younger, maybe early sixties. Beside him, directly behind John’s seat, was the guy that Tina once described as “the new guy.” Jude had last seen him in the slow-motion panic that ensued in the wake of Fabergé Restaurant’s collapse, rushing to help an equally young kitchen worker whose mouth was oozing blood. When his victim refused assistance, the new guy had set himself to cleaning up debris, as though to seek approval from those around him. Jude and Ted had commented upon his devotion, as they made their way to the harried world beyond Fabergé Restaurant, and now the new guy was doing something similar for his former employers.

The older man and the new guy cast a glance at Jude, and then turned back to one another for a long and sensual kiss. Jude watched in shock as they both moved their respective hands to their un-respective groins, and began to squeeze and caress, just as Tina’s mouth engulfed Jude’s anxious cock. The juxtaposition of what he was seeing and what he was feeling was too much, and Jude suddenly felt as though he needed to defend himself, rather than give in. He mounted resistance against his wet dream come true, partly because his wet dreams never included John-the-Once-Owner. He gently pushed Tina’s head away from him and squirmed away from her warm body.

Jude suddenly felt the need to speak.

“Um . . .,” he began.

It was very difficult to know exactly what to say at this point. He recalled some of the ghastly scenes in a French play he’d once seen in a high school class, in which three people, two women and one man, were condemned to stay for eternity in a room together. The man was repelled by one of the women, a lesbian, and attracted to the other, but the lesbian, as it turned out, went both ways, or seemed to. This version of hell was one in which characters couldn’t ever close their eyes, leave the room, sleep, or even go to the bathroom. They were compelled to live, to endure, to experience each moment without reprieve, even though each moment was filled with the possibility of pleasure and torture, the torture of unfulfillable pleasure and the pleasure of possible pleasure, impeded by the torture of another, or one of the others.

“Behind Closed Doors!” Jude thought to himself as the Cadillac roared down the highway in Long Island towards some unknown destination. He felt Tina’s tiny hand once again upon his sex that, despite all remonstrations, was still bursting for her touch. He hesitated, but then saw John’s sordid smile, and, by extension, the scene that was surely unfolding in the back seat.

There are only so many captains that can be guiding a single ship at any given moment, and even as Jude felt Tina’s warm breath moving downwards once again towards his begging midriff, and even as his hands almost inadvertently touched her soft hair as she moved downwards towards him, he felt a countervailing desire to take wing and fly from this open roof to the safety of his own sane solitude.

Always deferential towards John, the one-time owner of the illustrious Fabergé Restaurant, Jude cautiously asked John-the-Driver to stop the car. “Please, I need to get off.”

The pun was not lost on John.

“It’s okay,” said John. “She likes you.” It was a kind of command, of the type offered by bosses accustomed to giving, and not receiving, directions. “It’s okay.”

It was as though the ice-cold water that he was spraying upon his psyche was now leaking out and providing the requisite cold shower to forestall any further consequences to this dubious voyage. Indicating, but not necessarily acting upon, a desire to distance himself from soft, gentle, untouchable, and surprisingly warm Tina, Jude leaned toward the door and placed his hand upon the chrome handle.

“Please, can you slow down?”

John released the pressure on the gas, and even if it wasn’t quite clear whether he actually planned to stop the car, Jude tugged at the door handle, and the massive door opened up. Tina seemed uncertain as to which direction to go, and what to hold on to, as the imminent flight of Jude became manifest. In the end, she leaned forward, steadied her grip by grasping dials upon the dashboard, and, as Jude turned towards her for one last look into her hungry, black eyes, echoed in the distance by the piercing blue-grey gaze of John, he leaped out of the car.

Luckily, given the rather unsafe velocity of the vehicle he had just abandoned, Jude was able to benefit from a recent refusal on the part of Nassau County to give in to requests—mostly from maids, butlers, and chauffeurs, and not from taxpaying homeowners—that sidewalks be laid in the place of the grassy ditches that lined the streets of Long Island’s highway. For this reason, and probably this reason alone, Jude was able to leap from Tina’s tempting grasp and land, unscathed, upon the hard reality of undesired lust and yet another side of the road.

“Right,” thought Jude as he watched the Cadillac disappear. He also caught one final glance around from Tina, and what seemed unmistakably to be the eyes of John that from this distance filled the rearview mirror, as though the Cadillac quite literally had eyes in the back of its head.

Jude still felt vaguely aroused, but also in a state of pleasurable shock. “This,” he thought, “has to be part of my novel.” The American Dream, a beautiful convertible Cadillac, an even more beautiful woman, a powerful man who has more powerful weaknesses than he would ever show, a road trip towards, well, who knows what. Busted eggs. “Not to mention whatever it was that was going on in the back seat!” he mused with a grin.

Jude’s mind suddenly turned pragmatic, as he realized that he was even further from wherever it was that he’d left his truck, and, possibly worse still, he didn’t even have the work order for the apartment job for which he was now undoubtedly already late. This little job was supposed to be the coming days meal ticket, the transition as he tried to figure out how the fuck to get back to his soon-overdue egg manuscript. Ever since the Fabergé Restaurant collapsed, literally, and all of the aristocrats were cast out into the Manhattan nighttime, Jude had struggled to recover. He had at times wondered what happened to the cast of characters in the restaurant that he’d come to know so well; he had never imagined that the two pillars of Fabergé Restaurant were spending their days careening around in a Cadillac!

Suddenly struck by the enormity of his current situation, Jude grinned to himself, then stood up straight, stuck out his chin, filled his lungs with a large gulp of Long Island air, and shouted out to the entire world, with a massive grin on his face: “Christ, it’s still early afternoon, and I’ve had a world of woe already! What the hell do they do around here at night?”

Chapter 3

It’s probably not a bad idea to pay attention to signs. Had the Greeks heeded the many illfated omens that they themselves observed prior to and in the course of the Trojan War, we might all still be eating healthy Mediterranean diets. Instead, we’re treated to massive doses of hormone-infested animal products, taste-manipulated processed foods, and forcefed animals that have been shaped into vaguely recognizable delicacies. Instead of deriving our foods from picturesque Mediterranean-style gardens, we are encouraged to gorge ourselves on facsimiles of food, formed like Disney-inspired facsimiles of real products, and then manufactured inside of weird steel and glass buildings in the industrial suburbs of Cleveland.