Repo Men (5 page)

When I asked him why he was signing up, he just shrugged and said, “Free food. A man’s gotta eat.” It was easily the best reason any of us had.

The first time I met Jake Freivald, he kicked my ass. Third grade, Mrs. Tone’s class, and we’d each been called upon to write a poem about our favorite time of year. I chose fall, partially because I liked the cool, crisp air of the season, but mostly because it was the first thing that came to mind and I didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about it.

When the time came to read my poem, I approached the front of the class and read my words aloud. It went something like:

Before I could get to the next line, I was interrupted by a voice ringing out from the open doorway leading to the hall. “That’s not a rhyme, idiot.”

The kid was bigger than me by at least a foot, and the heavy ridge of bone and flesh above his eyes gave him a distinctly Neolithic scowl, but there was something so plain about the way he’d said it that I thought at first he was joking. I continued with my poem, moving on to the next line:

“It’s not even close to a rhyme. I’m gonna kick your ass.”

He walked down the hall, my teacher’s only response a resigned sigh. “Go on,” she told me. “Finish it up and sit down.”

Three hours later, Jake caught me out by the bike racks and proceeded to lay down an ass-whomping of serious proportions. I got in a few blows here and there, and toward the end, I’m not proud to admit, I scored a glancing kick to the groin, but it only served to spur him on.

At some point, we were both grabbed by the lapels of our shirts and dragged down to the principal’s office, where we were forced to wait for hours, side by side, wondering what our punishment was going to be. After a while, we got bored of waiting and started shooting spitballs at the school secretaries, aiming mainly for the ones with big hair. After that, there was nothing to do but laugh and realize we weren’t all that different. By the time the administrator got to us, we were best friends for life.

I imagine if Jake hadn’t been walking by my classroom that day, or if the door to the hallway hadn’t been open, or if I’d chosen two words that actually rhymed, I wouldn’t be where I am today, and Jake wouldn’t be where he is. But he was and it was and I did, and our fates have been intertwined ever since. Beginning to end. One way or another.

Mother and Father threw me a going-away party the day before I was to report to Camp Pendleton for basic training, and it was a shindig for the record books. Not so much for the streamers and confetti and goofy party hats, but for the sheer number of girls who wanted to sleep with me before I went off to fight the enemy. There was something about my impending passage between civilian and military life that threw a flush into every girl’s heart and drew a blush on every girl’s breast. I didn’t encourage it. I didn’t resist it, either.

Father made a toast midway through the party, just as Sharon Cosgrove and I were emerging from the spare bedroom. “To my son,” he said, glass of vodka-spiked bug juice held high above his head, “who will learn what it is to be a man.” I smiled wanly, noticing with horror that the buttons on Sharon’s dress were misaligned, a slipup made in haste by my faltering fingers. The party-goers cheered, and Father continued. “May he fight valiantly for his country, may he bring distinction upon himself and his family, and may he rid us of the scourge of evil.” Drinks were tossed back, sucked down. Glasses were smashed in the fireplace. Father was always melodramatic when he drank.

But it was Mother who thought to add, in a soft, near whisper, “And may he come back to us in one piece.” She really knew how to bring down a party.

Basic training was basic training. No need to go into it, just a lot of yelling and grunting and yessir-ing and nosir-ing and push-up-ing and pull-up-ing and running and stumbling and panting and wheezing and falling and crying and getting back up and doing it all again the next day and the next and the next. It was a chore, a strain on the muscles, but it wasn’t earth-shattering. Not to me, and not in any meaningful sense.

Jake, perhaps predictably, was the star of the show. He had an indefatigable energy in whatever he did, whether it was playing sports or scoring chicks or staying up all night to talk about video games. I never heard him complain during basic, even when the rest of us grunts would carry on like housewives about our various aches and pains, and I only saw him flinch once, when a rifle misfired and he took a metal shard through-and-through to the flesh between his pinkie and ring fingers.

The fellow who slept on the bunk above mine was an affable guy from somewhere in Brooklyn named Harold Hennenson. For Harold, basic training was the be-all and end-all of the military experience. “You see how hard my muscles are getting?” he’d ask me. “Here, feel my triceps.”

What the hell, I felt his triceps. “Hard,” I said.

“As a rock.”

“As a rock.”

He’d drop and give the platoon fifty push-ups when no one asked him to. He’d clean the latrines. He’d take on extra KP duty. He was the gungiest of gung-ho, and he took the heat off the rest of us knobs who were just trying to make it through another day of backbreaking effort.

“See what I can do with my stomach muscles?” he asked me once, rippling his midsection in a tidal wave of abdominal strength. “See how strong they are?”

“They’re strong,” I told him, quite honestly.

“As a rock.”

“As a rock.”

Harold Hennenson would be killed when the tank he was riding in fell off the edge of the highest sand dune in Africa and burst into a fireball. He would represent another of those bizarre accidents that befell our servicemen during the War. He would receive a ten-gun salute. His ashes would be sent back home to his parents’ crumbling brownstone somewhere in Brooklyn.

What Harold didn’t know back then—what Harold couldn’t have known—was that solid stomach muscles—even those as hard as rocks—don’t do you a whiff of good when the tank you’re riding in falls off a sand dune and explodes.

Had a repo job back about ten years ago with the Kenton supply house—direct contract, not through the Union. Outside gig, a little moonlighting, not uncommon among those in my profession. Frank, our Union shop manager, didn’t care if we took on extra work, so long as it didn’t affect the pink sheets we’d been assigned by the Union. Frank was a straight shooter, a fair guy—I once saw him knock off 3 percent for a low-credit applicant, completely on a whim—and I still feel a bit bad about going dark on him the way I did.

Not that bad, though.

I’d signed on with Kenton on a limited basis to bring in three artiforgs that had gone past their in-house grace period by a good ninety days because their in-house Bio-Repo men were all busy on other high-profile jobs. Kenton’s been known to finance their own products outside of the Credit Union guidelines, and it’s well known that they’re more lenient with their clients. In fact, I’ve even heard of them requiring that the client be transported to a hospital, of all things, for some major extracts. That’s above and beyond federal regulations, and shows a real sense of empathy for their clients’ needs. Of course, you’ve got to have some serious equity in your home to even get into the Kenton credit office in the first place, but that’s neither here nor there. Ninety days is grace beyond grace, and I didn’t hold pity for anyone who welshed on a loan with straight arrows like Kenton.

The first two extractions were both livers, and they went smooth as, well, livers. The work was quick, cleanup unnecessary. But the third one was a stomach extraction, and I knew how messy they could get, so I brought along a few extra buckets, just in case: Two for the blood, one for the food remnants that were sure to be stuck inside the machine. The last thing I wanted was to muck up my nice repo apron with partially-digested cauliflower.

According to the pink sheet given to me a day before the extraction, the guy had opted for a new Kenton ES/19, a moderate-size stomach artiforg with an expansion/contraction option which would regulate the food intake and, in so doing, the overall obesity of the client. The device could be easily recalibrated to a new volume setting by means of an external remote control which the ES/19 owner’s manual suggests be kept out of the reach of children and small pets at all times. It’s a swell little machine, top-notch all the way, and worth every penny. Still, it’s a lot of pennies.

Pink sheet didn’t say whether or not the client’s natural stomach gave out or if it was an elective upgrade—usually it’s cancer with a stomach job, but the rumor mill is always abuzz with new tales of organ expiration, everything from solar radiation to overgrown Szechwan ulcers. Whatever the case, this guy had the Kenton ES/19 installed in January of the previous year, and then settled into a predictable pattern: Regular payment for one, maybe two months, dropping soon into sporadic bi-monthly cycles, quickly degenerating into check’s-in-the-mail promises. Calls were made, calls were not answered. Letters were sent, letters were returned unopened. Kenton gave him four months past grace ’cause he was some big muckety-muck over at the Tourism Ministry, but enough finally became enough and they called me in.

“You do stomachs?” asked the field rep, a slim blonde with a slight body who had dressed down to make her repo calls. She had obviously done her work, and knew how the average Bio-Repo man liked his women: Tight shirt, flared pants, hair teased to the sky. “We got you on our liver sheets, but there’s one outstanding stomach job, might be tricky. I mean, if you do that sort of thing.”

I gave my usual answer: “Everything but Ghost work. If the pay’s right.”

The pay was right.

Job started out as usual—scoped it, mapped it, gassed down the house, prepped the client—but here’s the thing: My scalpel wouldn’t dig. I planted, I swiped, I ripped into that flesh, but I couldn’t get much further than a centimeter or two down before I scraped against what felt like a solid plate of steel protecting his midsection. Impossible. I cut some more, taking no heed of the blood that had already soaked through the mattress beneath the client.

After fifteen minutes, I had worked that body like a side of beef, flaying away nearly every ounce of flesh on that man’s torso, and still I couldn’t figure out how to reach that mechanical belly of his. Time was running out. But as my portable suction pump cleared away the pooling blood, I saw that my first guess, improbable as it was, had been correct: A metal plate barred my way, bolted into his body via attachments to his lower ribs and pelvis.

Now, why would a man go through the hassle of having a lead sheet implanted across his torso? To protect his precious artiforg from repossession, I suppose. But, try as I may, I can’t see the purpose in this—the artiforg prolongs life, plain and simple. When your friendly neighborhood Bio-Repo man shows up on a doorstep to take an artiforg back to the supply house and suddenly finds himself stymied by a metal plate, he’s not going to put Humpty Dumpty back together again once he’s found he can’t get what he’s come for. He’s going to leave the donor dead or dying, with nary a look over the shoulder. Heck, we’re only trained in very basic paramedic techniques, and most of us play dice in the back row during the mandatory seminars.

Even if I’d known how to resuscitate the guy and sew him back together, I sure as hell wouldn’t have done it. The bastard could drown in his own blood for all I cared. He made me waste two pints of ether.

I broke his ribs, his hips, and his sternum, tossed the metal plate out an open window, and walked out of that bloody bedroom with his precious Kenton ES/19 artificial stomach tucked beneath my arm. Appalling.

Harold Hennenson never would have accepted a lead plate in lieu of strong, natural stomach muscles. And even if he had, it wouldn’t have helped him to be any less dead.

We went out on forty-eight hours’ leave one Labor Day weekend, me and Jake and Harold Hennenson, and had ourselves one rip-roaring hell of a good time. San Diego was the nearest big city, and we lit it up with the fervor of religious missionaries, intent on bringing our message of inebriation to all of the unsullied masses. I knew of two bars with closing hours well past the city curfews, and through conversations with regular patrons we found some after-after-hours clubs as well.

Sometime during that blurry bender, I up and got myself a tattoo on my right biceps, as anyone who is good and properly drunk must at some point do. It says W
HEN THE
B
OUGH
B
REAKS
in bright blue letters, and I still have it to this day, even though removal would take only ten minutes and twenty-five bucks at the nearest chop-doc shop. I don’t know what
When the Bough Breaks
means exactly, or why I would choose to have it indelibly inscribed upon my flesh, and I doubt I knew it even back in the tattoo parlor. But it scares small children and entices large women. I like it. It has style.

I have another tattoo now, of course—my Bio-Repo insignia, a small circle of black shot through by five golden arrows inscribed upon the left side of my neck. That one will never come off, no matter how many times a doctor takes his lasers to my skin. Long after I die and my flesh and bones have crumbled into dust, I imagine that it will remain, floating ethereally above my ashes, a message to future generations that I was a member of the most feared profession on the planet.

Plus, chicks dig it.

I
met my first wife, Beth, on that trip into San Diego. She was a prostitute, and she was incredibly beautiful. She would divorce me six months later while I was sweating it out in the steaming heat of a desert tank. Our marriage had put a strain on her career.

“I know a place,” said Jake, leering at me and Harold through his half-empty beer glass. We had been in the bar for more hours than I could count on the blurry wall clock.

“We got a place,” I drawled. “Look around, good as any.” Our waitress came over, a pleasant college student who had been pushed too far that night by three soldiers with alcohol running wild laps through their addled brains.

She asked, “Anything else?” and amid some sloppy compliments and mishandled passes, we managed to order up yet another round of beers for ourselves. The waitress trotted away from us as quickly as she could, and we resumed our present business of moving from stone drunk to dead drunk.

After a few minutes, Harold remembered where the conversation had left off. “Jake said he knows a place,” he mumbled.

“You said that already. You’re repeating yourself.”

“No,” he insisted, building his voice into a whine, “a place. You know, a
place
.”

Jake winked as best he could. “That’s right. A
place
.”

“Oh, a
place
.”

“Yeah, a
place
.”

I shook my head. The room spun. I resolved to speak to the manager about that. “We don’t need a place. We got willing girls right here.”

Right on cue, the waitress appeared with our drinks, plopping the mugs onto our table with practiced ease. Before she could read off our tab, I grabbed at her hand and somehow connected. Holding her delicate fingers between my meaty paws, I turned my bloodshot eyes up into her baby blues and asked, “Darling, sugar, honey—would you sleep with me?”

“Only if you were the last guy on earth,” she said.

“But then you would?”

“Of course,” she said. “A girl’s got to have sex, too.”

Given the right situation, I think I could have loved that woman.

I have only loved six women in my life, including my mother, and I married five of them, excluding my mother. But I could have loved many more. The cashier at the Downtown Deli, that co-ed who walks her Saint Bernard past the building every morning at 9
A.M.
, that sexy anchor-woman on channel 18 with the bob hairdo and pouty lips. I have a great capacity for love. I know this because that’s what my therapist told me the two times I agreed to attend marriage counseling with my fourth wife, Carol.

“We got your tests back from the lab,” said the man with a degree on his wall and the
cojones
to charge me three hundred dollars an hour for butting in on me and my wife as we fought and bickered, “and I would say that you have a great capacity for love.”

I beamed. “So that’s the end of it? Are we done here?” I had work to do, organs to remove.

“No, we’re not done here,” said Carol, agitated.

“Then what’s the problem? You heard the man—I have a great capacity for love.”

“The problem,” Carol answered, “is that you’re not living up to your potential.”

By the time we found the “place” in downtown San Diego, we were sober, a real bummer. Dawn was fast approaching, and sex with strangers for money didn’t seem so exciting without the rush of alcohol to smooth over the moral potholes. We searched in vain for a liquor store, but the squares had all closed up hours earlier; we were unfortunately under our own control for the rest of the morning.

Harold went first. I was nervous, I guess, for my first time with a professional. I mean, I’d done it all over the state of New York—even some in Pennsylvania and Jersey—even some while in a moving vehicle—but never with anyone older than me and never with someone as…knowledgeable as a prostitute was sure to be. What if my technique was wrong? What if I’d been doing it backwards all these years?

So I waited outside and read a
Vanity Fair
someone had left in the lobby. The operation was set up as a massage parlor, an old trick that I thought had lived out its usefulness long ago. Seemed odd to me that they’d still have a front like this inside the city limits, as San Diego had just instituted their Red Light District less than a year before—all bets off, sexually speaking—but I guess old habits die hard. The décor was strictly economy-class: fluorescent lighting, pressed wood, quarter-inch-depth industrial carpet.

The johns were streaming in and out of the place like horny worker ants coming to visit their queen. Doors opened and closed every few minutes, muffled moans echoing down the halls and about the small waiting room. This was a place for soldiers, from what I gathered, mostly Navy boys, but not exclusively—the clientele obviously ranged all over the armed services. I even caught a glimpse of a few familiar holographic insignias, but didn’t say anything for fear that the Marine Corps soldiers would make me do push-ups or lick their boots right there in the lobby. A whorehouse is not the ideal location for emasculation.

Harold wobbled out through a sliding door twenty-five minutes after he went in, and I congratulated him on his stamina. “Didn’t happen,” he said, a little frown creasing his lips.

“She didn’t go for you?” I asked.

“I didn’t go for me.”

Harold had encountered his first experience with the world of “sexual non-performance” long before I ever would, and I couldn’t help thinking him less of a man for it. I know now that was foolish, but to the hormone-ravaged brain of a boy in his late teens, it seemed there was nothing in the world that could deter a real man from a toss in the sack once it was offered to him.

“You can try again,” I offered. “Take my turn.”

He told me to forget it, that he was done, and slumped into a nearby chair. “I’ve got fifty bucks,” I said.

“It’s not the money. Just…go on. Have a good time for me.”

What could I do? I went inside.

Years after Beth divorced me—it was during my marriage to Carol, I believe—I received a particularly acerbic letter from her which read, in part, that I was a no-goodnik, a welsher on my debts and obligations, and that I should look into evolution classes in the hopes that it would help me to rejoin the dominant species. But tucked away inside the squiggles of vitriol was one sentiment which I’m sure it pained her to admit:

Understand that from Beth, this miserable sentence was the equivalent of the most lovelorn Shakespearean sonnet. An admission, practically, that she might have cared for me at some point in her life.

So I wrote her back:

Nyah nyah nyah.

The sliding door led to a small foyer abutting the main “massage room,” which lay just beyond a cheap bedsheet hung up to act as a curtain. A small Mister Coffee dripped a steady stream into its glass pot, and I helped myself to a cup. A little caffeine never hurt. I had another cup. And another. Minutes ticked by. I found to my surprise that I was still grasping the
Vanity Fair
magazine—I wasn’t able to let it go. My fingers had clenched tightly around the spine.

A sugary voice called to me from behind the curtain—“You there, lover?”

No control—my hands trembled. I spilled the coffee. It stained my slacks. I suppressed a scream, dabbed at the stain with a nearby napkin, and held the
Vanity Fair
in front of my groin as I pressed myself through the opening in the gauzy curtains.

The prostitute—Beth—was naked. Just like that, splayed out atop the mattress. Blonde hair spread out across the pillows, breasts heading toward the ceiling, nipples pointing the way. She barely turned her head as I walked in.

“You’re naked,” I said. My mouth moved by itself.

Beth sat upright, her breasts drooping only slightly, dropping to either side. Natural, full, but still firm. “You new at this?”

“No, no,” I answered hastily, fumbling with my own zipper. “I just—I didn’t expect—I thought maybe you’d be wearing a nightie, and…”

“And you could take it off me,” she finished. I nodded. Beth rose to her knees, yawned, tucked a seductive finger into her seductive mouth. She bounced playfully on the bed. “Weekends are tough for me, what with all the military bases nearby. And Labor Day—forget about it. I’m swamped. Dressing and undressing tends to clog up the line.”

I told her that I understood, and we spent a few minutes chatting about the weather, the weekend, as I nervously removed my own clothing. The months of basic training had hardened my muscles, firmed up the contours of my body—perhaps not as much as Harold Hennenson, but I still felt myself to be an impressive specimen of manhood. This was not the first time that Beth had seen a young man flush with pride in his own body, but at the time I was bull-moose confident in my physique.

“Very impressive,” she said, and I thanked her. To this day I don’t know if she was humoring me.

“You want to lie down over here?” she asked, pulling the bedsheet to one side. There was a recent stain just below the pillows, and I tried to look away.

Her hands were all over me the second I sat on the bed, and I began to harden instantly. I wanted this to last. I
needed
this to last—my money was running low, and I couldn’t afford another shot. “Shouldn’t we talk first?”

“Oh Christ,” she sighed. “You’re one of those psych students, aren’t you?”

I didn’t understand. “The psych group from UCSD,” she explained. “They come down, pay their money, and all they do is ask questions. How does it feel to do this, to do that, what do I think about the Red Light, that sort of thing. Am I demoralized? Am I victimized? Jesus…Tell you the truth, I’d rather screw than talk.”

So we did. Screw, I mean. And then some. And as a member of the U.S. Marine Corps, I felt an obligation to prove myself more of a man than any psych student could ever be, so I made sure to keep damn silent during the act.

Peter—my son—went in for a few psych classes in school. I paid for that tuition—thought it would be a good way to screw his head on tight without having to fork over a wad of dough to the local shrink. But all it ever got me was six hundred dinner-table questions, a disapproving eye, and one full-scale intervention.

“Do you understand how your career is hurting this family?” the designated counselor asked me, hands folded, tone calm. Asshole was sitting on
my
couch.

“My career puts food in their mouths,” I explained. “Puts this roof over their heads. That couch under your rear end.”

“But do you know how much it
hurts
them?”

I didn’t know if he was looking for something quantifiable or not, but Bio-Repo men don’t deal with the abstract. It’s here and it’s physical or it’s not our concern. “No,” I said finally. “No, I don’t. You wanna give me a number?”

That shut him up nice and quick. Man mighta had a doctorate in head shrinking, but he’s shit outta luck when it comes to higher math.

After Beth and I came to a satisfactory end of our business transaction, we talked. I couldn’t help it. “Was that good?” I asked, searching more for a grade than anything else.

“Mmmm…it was wonderful. You didn’t have to—”

“I wanted to.”

Beth smiled, held me closer. “Johns don’t usually go for that sort of thing. Most of the time they just want in and out and then they’re gone.”

“’Cause my name’s not John,” I said, and she was kind enough to giggle. “You spend time with most of your clients afterwards?”

“Only the cute ones,” she replied, and my chest puffed a little farther. The fact that she was being paid for her time had left my mind, and I took everything she said as the unvarnished words of a casual lover.

“I’m in the Marines,” I said. I thought she should know.

Beth shrugged. “I probably coulda guessed,” she admitted, “but I was a little wrapped up.” Suddenly, she grabbed my hand—held it—squeezed it tightly—

“Aftershock,” she whimpered, and rolled into my arms, grinding her groin into my leg as she moaned softly. It was easily one of the most entrancing things I’d seen in my young life. I could have watched it go on for days.

An hour later we had made love two more times, and the waiting room was quickly filling with paying customers. Beth gave me these last two sessions as a gift, and I couldn’t believe my good luck—I’d been planning to lay some heavy bets in the weekly crap game back at the base in order to cover the expense of my weekend rendezvous, but now I’d be able to save my cash for another time.

“Maybe next weekend…” I began, and Beth, who had begun to prepare the bed for her next client, shook her head.

“Next weekend’s no good—there’s a convention in town, and I’ll be working the hotels.”

“Oh,” I said dejectedly, surprised to find myself put out at the idea of Beth sleeping with other men. Sometime during our sexual congress, it seemed that a jealousy virus had infected me and planted its tendrils in my brain. Forget about your AIDS and Molié—already I could feel this new deadly disease throbbing away. This should have been a tip-off to drop any notion of a future relationship then and there, that my concerns, however prudish they might be, would ruin any chance we had at anything meaningful. But my intuition only whispers at me—it never shouts when it should.