We Live Inside You (24 page)

Including a six thousand word second person crime story set in your hometown—and quite overtly displaying your James Ellroy obsession—takes some moxy in the first place. And putting it early in your collection where anti-second person readers are likely to be popped right out, that’s pushing your luck.

But real hubris would be to include a twelve thousand word “Director’s Cut” version of the same story, right?

Well, yeah.

But, for the folks who dug the first version, these are two different creatures. The first is pure STORY, trimmed as lean as I could take it, gunning for that Ellroy telegraphic prose style (and a length that would serve novella-shy readers). This latter takes a slightly more leisurely approach, including more character development, Portland flavor, Shaun Hutson references, a vagina dentata nightmare, and a smattering of prostitutes.

You know, the good stuff.

Don’t act surprised. Now is not the time for you to shake your bloody fists at the night sky.

You’re the one who chased this down. Take a look at yourself. Figure out how this happened.

Help is coming—maybe a little reality check can keep you seething until it gets here. It’s better than slipping into shock.

Face the facts.

You’re laying there in the evening chill, broken and breathless and cold on the dewy suburban grass because of a basic truth:

You’ve always been a sucker for love.

And while you’ve also always been alert enough to know that about yourself, you’ve never quite been smart enough to do a goddamn thing about it.

Since day one, you little punk, you’ve had it in your genes.

Age seven: All Mary Ashford had to do was smile at you. You kicked over your chocolate milk. She skipped away and shared it with that red-headed oaf Mikey Vinson. They laughed. Held hands, even.

You rube.

Age fourteen: Sarah Miller actually asked you to the last dance of the year. Like a date, she said.

Why wouldn’t you help her with her algebra homework? It was an easy down-payment on a guaranteed post-dance make-out session behind the modular buildings to the south of the school grounds. Maybe you’d finally have a reason to sniff your fingers on the ride home, in the back of Scotty’s mom’s mini-van.

You even gave Sarah your final exam answers, since she took the class later in the day. You were a huge help.

Sarah passed algebra.

Sarah passed on attending the dance.

Stomach flu—very sad. She even cried on the phone.

Two weeks later you hear she went to the final dance at a rival school across town. With Mikey Fucking Vinson. And the rumor mill pegs them as crossing the legendary fourth base in a hot tub.

You cursed Mikey Vinson, prayed to God for wolves to tear the lecherous bastard to pieces. You pictured it. The wolves always ate his cock first, then his face. It was important that his face went second, so he could watch, and you could see his agony. Sometimes the wolves disemboweled him in the hot tub—a steaming red bowl of rotten Vinson soup.

The revenge fantasies waned though. You knew the truth, even then. This was on you. Later you cried yourself to sleep, thinking Sarah Miller would probably be the last girl you’d ever truly fall for.

You chump.

Age fifteen: Love got blown right off the radar. And not because of some steely world-weary resolve on your part. No, you were still a mess of hormones and need and zero savvy charging headlong into the bayonets of the beauties that walked the school halls.

Love caught the boot that year because your parents burned to death on their eighteenth anniversary.

Each November, every anniversary weekend since you were born, your parents shipped you off to your Uncle Joshua’s house in South East Portland.

This was fine by you since it got you the hell out of Salem—AKA Solame, Boregon—a city cursed by strip malls, bleach-toxic waterways, and virtues so minimal that to mention them as a counter-point to the city’s greasiness actually made living there more painful.

Portland felt big and electric and Uncle Joshua had a cozy little bungalow just off Powell on 58
^th
. At the back of this house you had your own appointed guest room. Your Uncle even put a wicker basket on your bed with towels and a washcloth and a tin-foil wrapped chocolate in it. He told you, “I knew you’d like that, you tidy little bastard” and then he laughed.

He liked to call you a bastard and a scallywag and a roustabout, and you liked it too. It kicked off your visits and let you know that things would be different, if only for a weekend.

Uncle Joshua did freelance cover design for a batch of different publishers, and his favorites adorned the single hallway that bisected his house. Most of these involved gorgeous, buxom women whose significant breasts had never known gravity. Inevitably these women were in peril, typically ape or tentacle or goblin-based.

“I’ll never be Vallejo,” he told you, “but I just love painting this shit.”

It was great when he swore. You tried it on for size now and then but it sounded like you were pushing out the words, while your Uncle’s profanity ran fluid.

There were other benefits to the Portland visits. Uncle Joshua didn’t keep his Hustler mags that well hidden, so you found yourself in possession of glorious new jerk-off materials, finally getting a peek at what you’d so far been denied. The first time you saw a vagina spread wide open—“This is my sexy wife Roxy and she’s been begging me to shoot her pic for Beaver Hunt!”—it was all pink and slick and deeper looking than you expected.

That night you dreamed you were having sex on your Uncle’s couch and the woman’s hole was gaping for a moment, a jet black maw, and then her snatch shot out like a sheath of wet intestine and wrapped around your penis and tried to swallow it whole.

It was not the last night you’d wake up sticky and scared at the same time. It was always the creepy dreams—the ones that skewed towards morally bereft or damnably weird or both—that guaranteed you’d lose your load.

You tried, on occasion, to talk to Uncle Joshua about girls, but it seemed a sore subject. He’d shift the conversation to what you’d been studying in school or reading about. His interest felt genuine, and when he said that something you were doing was cool it usually made you feel like your life was right on track and that maybe girls weren’t ultimately a necessity for happiness.

Sure, your Uncle had women in his life, but you seldom saw them. They knocked at late hours and usually walked straight to his bedroom, sometimes leaving a trail of perfume in the foyer and living room that you secretly snorted up, like a horny little pig tracking hooker truffles.

You knew who these women were. You’d recognized one from her photo in the back of a Portland weekly paper that your Uncle kept on the laundry basket in the bathroom. The photo popped out because your Uncle had circled it in red Sharpie and jotted the word “TITS!” and a smiley face next to the phone number.

You pretended these women were the muses for his paintings, but you never saw him take brushes into his bedroom. And sometimes the noises coming from his visitors became a smidge too Discovery Channel, all animal grunts and squeals conveying feats of exertion that you couldn’t even properly visualize, despite your Larry Flynt primers. On these nights you turned up your Walkman to eight and buried your nose in whatever book was on the bed-stand.

Your Uncle gave you great pulpy novels—mostly swag from the publishers he worked for—about rough-and-tumble detectives and man-eating slugs and serial killers. You were allowed to read them in bed, by flashlight, till any hour of the morning

The catch on the late nights was that you had to promise him you’d still wake up to go jogging with him every morning at seven sharp.

Conversation was part of that morning routine. Your Uncle liked to start running at a gradual “talking pace” and then accelerate through the rest of the run. And since initially his “talking pace” was your “Holy shit, I need more air pace” you mostly listened.

“The morning run blows the morning prayer out of the water, so far as I’m concerned,” he told you. “Clears out the toxins. Gets you breathing. Gets you thinking, and thinking straight. And unlike prayer it really clears out transgressions. Mile one makes up for the greasy burger I slammed between lunch and dinner. Mile three makes up for that time I started shooting bourbon and then passed out on the couch. I still made my deadline for the painting, but...”

He’d use a word like “transgressions” with you and just assumed you got what he was talking about. And you did, though only in context at the time.

Half the time you were just trying to maintain speed with him as he spoke. Though each block of the city had its own set of sensory distractions, you always stayed tuned in to his voice.

“Don’t get me wrong, kiddo. I’m not saying I consider running some kind of penance. God, that would be hideous. It’s so far from a punishment. I’m just saying that it cleans everything out. The worry, the garbage, all of it. Now pick it up a little bit after this block.”

He was always trying to get you to go a little faster.

Truthfully, you
were
a shit runner until after the weekend when you lost your parents, when it became all you wanted to do.

That was when running—as hard and fast and for as long as you were capable of—was all you
could
do, really. Any other scenario meant leaving a space open in your brain. Time to think and reflect.

Then you would have to picture your Uncle collapsed on the kitchen floor with the phone in his lap, saying, “I think this call was real. I think it was. Shit. Jesus. C’mere, kid.” He reached out for you, hands shaking. You’d never seen him cry before.

You would have to remember the way your house in Salem looked when only a charred support post remained upright amid the ashes.

You would have to think about your parents in their bedroom, holding each other in slumber just moments before a combination of spilled champagne and dried rose petals and faulty electric blanket wiring caused the flash fire that consumed them before they even had a chance to escape their bed.

So you kept running. Your Uncle’s house in Portland became your new home, the place where your morning prayer was the sound of left/right footfalls and your evening prayer was that you would not dream again of your parents trying to scream with smoke-filled lungs, like broken bellows that refused, at last, to compress.