Read The Indifference League Online
Authors: Richard Scarsbrook
The Indifference League (4 page)
The Drifter gave a short, awkward speech about how Jake was out there right now riding his motorcycle, but instead of just this small, silly world, he now had the whole great big beautiful universe to explore, and he could ride just as fast as he damn well wanted to.
Hippie Avenger tried to read a poem she'd written about Jake, but she couldn't finish it for sobbing. Everyone else joined her.
Mr. Nice Guy couldn't think of anything to say that would make anyone feel any better, so he just sat there frowning at his funeral shoes, feeling guilty about wondering if Jake had also had a
thing
with Hippie Avenger.
It was The Statistician who tiptoed into the little room in the funeral home where the PA system was hidden, and put on a CD with the song “Psycho Superstar,” by Ron Hawkins and the Rusty Nails.
In the end, the lyrics didn't have much to do with Jake at all. But it was still a damn good song.
MISS
DEMEANOR
“I'm Catwoman. Hear me roar.”
â Catwoman, from the movie
Batman Returns
, 1992
M
iss Demeanor is the first to reply to Mr. Nice Guy's email.
To:
mr_niceguy
Subject: re: The Brat Signal⢠is ON!!!!!!!!
Hey, Buddy,
A collective thirtieth-birthday gathering of the tribe this long weekend sounds like fun. I'll be there for sure â but not until very late on Saturday night or early Sunday morning
â
I've got a running commitment on Saturday nights.
But maybe before we all get together, you and I could meet in person first. There is something I want to talk to you about â just you â and it's probably best that we do it face to face, without any of the others around.
You name the date and I'll pick the place.
Love,
Miss Demeanor
Mr. Nice Guy's heart races.
Just me. Without any of the others around.
Face to face.
Love, Miss Demeanor
Love.
He emails back immediately and tells her that he's available any night between now and the long weekend.
*
At first, Mr. Nice Guy wonders if he has the right place when Miss Demeanor's typically sketchy directions bring him to an alley off the farthest alien reaches of Queen West. He descends the rusted iron stairs to the basement of the windowless building. The poster on the metal door reads:
This has to be the place. Miss Demeanor is into such offbeat stuff. It's one of the reasons that she still fascinates Mr. Nice Guy; every moment with her is charged with adrenaline, sexuality, and the potential for disaster.
Smoke, pulsing purple light, and chest-compressing bass notes slam against Mr. Nice Guy as he pushes through the door.
A tall, slender man with anemic-white skin stands behind a lectern with a sticker-covered cash box on top. His thick black eyeshadow and wide-lapelled brown suit make him look like a bulimic Count Chocula. He says, “You sure you got the right place, cowboy?”
“Um, pretty sure, yeah,” says Mr. Nice Guy.
Count Chocula extends an open palm and says, “Then it's a ten-dollar cover, Mr. Breeder.”
Mr. Breeder? Does he think he knows me from somewhere? Maybe I look like one of the regulars.
Mr. Nice Guy hands over two fives and finds a seat near the stage. He glances at his Super G Digital Athletic Chronometer. 11:11 p.m.
Why do they have to start these things so late?
he wonders. Normally, he would be in bed by now.
The atmosphere reminds him of the armpit-and-cheap-cigar-scented strip clubs that Psycho Superstar used to drag him into, but there is also something very different about this place. For one thing, everyone looks like they're attending a Halloween party with prizes for the weirdest and most revealing costumes.
The woman sitting beside him is dressed in a black latex Wendy O. Williams catsuit, with her Betty-and-Veronica-sized silicone breasts rammed into a pair of transparent plastic cones. Her companion is completely naked, save for a pair of tight satin short shorts and red electrical tape
X
s over the nipples of her tiny breasts.
With his orange T-shirt, Levi's jeans, and wide-open mouth, Mr. Nice Guy stands out in this crowd like a nuclear detonation; he only knows about Wendy O. Williams because Miss Demeanor once gave a book report in English class about a volume called
The Wild
Women of Punk Rock
. Or something like that.
I do NOT look like one of the regulars.
Both of the strange women frown at Mr. Nice Guy as if the world's biggest zit has just burst in the centre of his forehead.
“Buy a magazine, dude!” the Wendy O. Williams clone barks in a husky voice.
“Or get a hooker!” Electrical-Tape-Nipples grunts.
“Sorry,” he says. He didn't mean to stare.
Count Chocula strides out onto the elevated, half-circle stage, and brays, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Butches and Bitches, Pitchers and Catchers and Naughty Children of All Ages, PLEEEEEEeeeeeEEEASE put your HANDS TOGETHER, forRRR ⦠PUSSY ⦠PURRRrrrrRRRRR-FECTION!”
He steps aside, and the noise from the costumed crowd is thunderous as a woman in a cat outfit springs onto the stage on all fours. As she rises to her feet, spiralling like a ballerina to the throbbing music, Mr. Nice Guy realizes that she's not
dressed
as a cat, but her naked body is
painted
like one. His penis extends into the right leg of his Levi's.
Pussy Purr-fection has the sort of long, sinewy legs that Mr. Nice Guy has always admired, and the brown body paint and white leopard spots just accentuate her tapered thighs and angular calf muscles. A burlap tail swings back and forth from her hard round behind, and more cat-spots run along her spine and speckle her muscular back. Triangular cat ears are pinned into her long black hair.
When she spins around, Mr. Nice Guy's eyes fixate on the large white spot painted over her pubic mound, then on the splotches of white over the nipples of her undulating breasts. It takes a moment for him to realize that the face behind the eyeliner-penciled cat whiskers is Miss Demeanor's.
Despite his shock at seeing her onstage, her catlike stretching and clawing causes his shaft to grow even larger, to throb like the pulsing dance music that rattles the room.
She retreats behind the black curtains to wild cheering and applause.
Soon after Count Chocula has returned to announce the next act, Miss Demeanor appears beside Mr. Nice Guy's table. He can see the goosebumps on her skin beneath the brown paint and white spots. Against the cool, smoky air, her whitewashed nipples stick out like .22 calibre bullets, the areolas wrinkled and contracted.
“Hey, buddy,” she says. “Thanks for coming.”
He glances down at the bulge in the right leg of his jeans. He didn't come, but it was pretty close.
“I half-expected you to bolt before the show even started,” she says.
Don't look shocked
,
he tells himself.
Miss Demeanor loves to shock. Play it cool. Play it cool.
“Um, nice show, yeah,” says Mr. Nice Guy. “Um, the little ears and the tail are nice touches.”
“Thanks!” she says. “You should see the flapper outfit I wear for Nostalgia Nights. The hem stops three inches above Hello Kitty.”
Hello Kitty is Miss Demeanor's nickname for her genitals. The first and only time that Mr. Nice Guy got a look at Hello Kitty, it was covered over by a triangle of thick, curly pubic hair. It was that one and only glimpse that established Mr. Nice Guy's continuing preference for untrimmed pubes. Now Hello Kitty is as bald as a Mexican Hairless.
“Listen,” she says, wrinking her nose, causing her painted-on whiskers twitch, “It's freezing in here. My nipples are about to freakin'
shatter
.”
He would like to offer to warm them with his hands, but Mr. Nice Guy would never say something like that. That's the sort of thing that Jake would do, not him. He just nods in an understanding way.
“I'm just going to pop into the back and change into my street clothes, okay? I won't be long. Enjoy the show in the meantime.”
*
Mr. Nice Guy's penis stands down from Red Alert Mode during Dame Edna Leathertongue's performance; there is something disturbing to him about the aggression in her military-themed burlesque, although Electrical-Tape-Nipples and Wendy O. Williams seem to enjoy it.
Mr. Nice Guy's blood flows south once again, though, when Marilinn Munrow strides onto the stage. She steps over a fan mounted on the floor, and his jaw drops as her skirt blows up to reveal a thick brown bush.
Right
, thinks Mr. Nice Guy,
Marilyn Monroe was really a brunette. Now
that's
attention to detail.
Unlike the real Marilyn, though, Ms. Munrow is in no hurry to push the fluttering skirt back down again. Mr. Nice Guy applauds enthusiastically.
The Wendy O. Williams clone rolls her eyes at him and says, “Don't get too excited, buddy. It's a merkin.”
“What?” Mr. Nice Guy shouts over the pounding music. “American?”
Jeez
,
I know that Marilyn Monroe was American. And her name was really Norma Jean.
“A
merkin
,” Wendy O. says slowly. “A. Mer. Kin.”
“Um, ahh ⦠okay. Yeah. Thanks.”
Wendy O. rolls her eyes again, and elbows Electrical-Tape-Nipples, who shakes her head.
Mr. Nice Guy worries that maybe he's been staring at Ms. Munrow's hirsute crotch for an impolite amount of time when a bouncer with a dyed-blue Mowhawk appears from behind the stage and strides directly toward him. His eyes fixate on the lean biceps flexing beneath the blue-green tattoos, and only when the bouncer is a few paces from Mr. Nice Guy's table does he notice the breasts swaying beneath the black muscle shirt.
“Hey, thanks for waiting,” Miss Demeanor says as she pulls up a chair beside him. “That body paint takes forever to wash off.”
The flash of a stage strobe reveals that there are still traces of eyeliner-pencil whiskers on her cheeks. Faint streaks of white makeup remain overtop the tattoos on her arms. She didn't have any tattoos the last time he saw her, except for the little Chinese symbol on her wrist, an over-publicized high-school graduation gift from Psycho Superstar. Now her shoulders and arms are covered in rose vines and barbed wire, which wind their way past a pink triangle, a yin-yang symbol, an Irish rose, a Wiccan pentacle, portraits of Betty Boop and Bettie Page.
“So,” she says, running her fingers through the strip of spiked blue hair that divides her otherwise bald skull, “I guess you've pieced everything together, huh?”
“Umm, yeah,” he says. “Yeah. For sure.”
“Good. I'm glad you're not freaking out about it. I'll tell the others at your cottage on the long weekend, when the right moment presents itself. But I wanted you to know first.” She draws circles on the tabletop with her fingernail. “I was worried that maybe you wouldn't understand. But you're cool? Everything's cool?”
“So, um, you're an exotic dancer. Um, sure, yeah. That's totally cool with me. I can totally live with that. Yeah.”
“That's not exactly what I mean, pal.”
“Oh, you mean the tattoos. The haircut? Um, well, sure. The new look suits you. Very daring, yeah.”
Miss Demeanor sighs. “You see Marilinn Munrow up there, buddy? She's gay. She's a lesbian.”
“I don't mind,” Mr. Nice Guy says, grinning.
“Dame Edna Leathertongue? She's a butch.”
“Yeah, I agree,” Mr. Nice Guy confides. “Her show was a bit, um, aggressive for my tastes. It was a bit of a turn-off.”
Miss Demeanor sighs again. This is going to be more difficult than she thought. She tilts her head toward Wendy O. Williams and Electrical-Tape-Nipples.
“See those two women? They aren't women, buddy. They're men. Men who
want
to be women.”
Mr. Nice Guy's mouth opens slowly, wide enough that Miss Demeanor can see his tonsils.
“Like me,” she says, “only vice-versa.”
Miss Demeanor can see Mr. Nice Guy's tonsils now.
“Understand?”
Mr. Nice Guy blinks. “You,
umm
⦠you ⦠are you saying that you â¦
ummmm
. . . want to be a
man
?”
She laughs. “No, buddy, no. I like my lady bits just the way they are. I
love
'em, as a matter of fact. They bring me lots of pleasure. And I love other ladies' lady bits, too, if you know what I mean.”
Mr. Nice Guy just blinks. “I'm attracted to women, dude. Just as much as you are. Maybe more so.” Miss Demeanor punches him lightly on the shoulder. “Just kidding, sport.”
Mr. Nice Guy blinks again. Is he missing the point
intentionally?
