Will Work for Drugs (8 page)

His paranoia battered my resolve. The end whimpered in like a small sick breeze one spring night. We were laying on the couch softly purring into each other's mouth. So worked up and wet, the cushions were sticky. He was on top of me, his beautiful face inches away from mine, eyes half closed, lips parted just enough for the tip of his tongue to taste my breath. I blew in his mouth. He inhaled a whisper of moist heat. Blew it back at me. Light kiss. Bliss. Dreamscape. Dissolve. And the sound of small claws scampering up on the roof. Raccoons in heat. Such was the season. Johnny bolted off of me, wild-eyed, panicked. Pulling at his hair, his eyebrows and lips, muttering, “I knew those fuckers would come back! Bastards. Where's the knife? Where's the fucking buck knife? Hurry up get the knife!”

“What bastards? Who's come back?” Bewildered. Drained.

“The assholes who've been taping me! I know they're taping our conversations. I saw them in a black van last week. Cameras, tape recorders. Parked out front. They're back! And now they're on the roof … Shit!”

“They are not on the goddamn roof. Get a fucking grip on yourself! It's probably just a squirrel. A fucking raccoon.”

We had been through this before. A week earlier.

Four in the morning. I had forced him out of bed and led him by the hand to stand across the street from my apartment, arguing for two and a half hours about the construction of the roof. Unable to assure him that it was slanted to such a degree that no human being had the dexterity to dance, walk, run, or climb upon its slanted gables. He was not convinced.

“Yeah … well, raccoons don't sit in vans shoving a microphone out the side window, do they? DO THEY?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“SHHHH! Can't you hear that?”

“Yeah, I do … and if it was human, and it heard us making a fricking racket, don't you think he'd split?”

“I'm calling the cops!”

“No you're not! Are you nuts? There's drugs all over this house. They'll take one look at you and call for an ambulance.”

“Where's the phone? Where's the goddamn phone?” Johnny flipped the pillows off the couch, turned the chairs over, knocked the TV off the shelf, checked his back pocket and my purse in search of the phone. Finding it finally, where it always was—on the kitchen counter—and stupidly dialing 911. I snatched the phone away to hang it up, calling him a fucking idiot. It rings in my hand. He grabs it back, conspiratorially whispering to the operator, who by law will respect penal code section 13730 and dispatch a squad car, “It's you, isn't it? The guy in the black van? I knew it was you … I knew it!”

“Johnny behind the Deuce” was originally conceived as a film treatment which was generously financed by Gregg Hale, best known as producer of
The Blair Witch Project
.

DEAR JOHNNY, JIMMY, JOEY, FRANKIE, MARTY, TONY, TOMMY …

B
eautiful liar. Blood-sucking junkie. Baby-faced killer. Serial rapist. Lecherous pedophile. Thief, con, crook, cunt. Derelict bastard cock-sucking cunt slut.

Fuck you, death-defying mortifier. Night-stalking my graveyard. I opened the casket of my tomb, and with my last dying breath I spent myself of all perfume, my night-blooming jasmine, my gardenia, the magnolia of my youth, pulled up by the roots, tender shoots … pissed upon. Again. By you.

How fucking dare you …

Bottomless vacuum, endless gully, empty black soul hole. The center of a parasitic universe. You have leeched me of all sensation. All emotion. Sucking on my life force in a cannibalistic feeding frenzy that has bled the color from my skin, the blood from my bones.

I endlessly allowed you to be the virulent pig you always were, but you resented my generosity when you were drowning in gluttony. I offered up not only my body, which you ravished as disposable playpen, but my very essence, which you were unable to kill with your contagions, but have nonetheless polluted and forever stained with your filthy bloodshed.

Overwhelmingly virulent, you suffocate in a nostalgic surround gagging on ancient wounds whose fumes have now become your poisoned succulent. You feared my elemental magic, mistaking it for bad voodoo which you turned against yourself. Lacerated by beauty, you accused mine of being a covert sabotage that has accelerated your downfall.

I would rather be crushed into mortar, under rock and volcanic ash, pounded into quarry and reduced to sandstone, broken glass, tiny bones like the beaks of small birds, than to be once more swept away, seduced by your brilliant bullshit. You have cast me out, cut me off, and corrupted everything I offered up to you. I am left floating on a sea of toxic magnetic resonance. The by-product of your diseased runoff.

Desperate and destitute, you have dumped my remains in the valley of unrest, unreason. That is where you have taken me. Stranded me. You swore to never leave me, but you left me long ago, night after bitter night while still standing in front of me drunk. Demented with rage, your fear turned to loathing. Accusing me of perpetrating the crimes you only wish you had committed. Dredging through the dregs of my ancient history like an inquisitorial archeologist sifting the sand drifts of all eternity for evidence of my corruption, which in turn you claim has corrupted you. But you came to me contaminated, and I admit it has perverted your ability to reason.

You force an instant replay of the gruesome details of my own life which I can no longer even recall. The high court of your false morality condemns me to the spiral Tourette's of your self-righteous judgment, where I stand forever convicted as the deviant criminal you secretly wish you were.

You insisted my passion was self-serving and hedonistic. My power fascist in nature. My fluidity a ruse to infiltrate. My beauty a curse I used against others to bend them to my will, using my sex to manipulate addiction. My strength was alien. My ability to live outside the disappointing constraints of the world's corrosive stranglehold, fraudulently utopian. My belief in the ability to overcome trauma, proof I was ignorant of your immense and catastrophic pain. The burden of which saints you as martyr, paints me as sinner, and worships at the foot of a false god whose cruelty I can no longer play victim to.

You forced me to play witness to your madness, pounding on temples, smashing in cheekbones, pummeling your beautiful face into a vile monstrosity, until I could no longer look at you. Claiming it retaliation against the living ghosts that haunt you. But you are only haunting yourself. Stalking yourself. Murdering your self. And your death cannot come quick enough. Your protracted slow-motion suicide plays itself out in an endless loop of predictable repetition, a low-budget circus side show steeped in horror which feeds on an audience of one who can no longer afford the admission.

Your death will be more satisfying, more complete, more honest and right than the torture your chronic demise forces me to suffer through. You shat on everything I am, everything I offered you. You have insulted my gifts with a barbarism of unparalleled brutality from which I have now become immune. I extended to you a refuge, a stay of execution, respite. You bombarded my safe haven with chaos, confusion, and a grandiose self-pity which bordered on megalomania, robbing me of everything I once held sacred.

And I can't wait for you to tighten the noose, to pull the fucking trigger, shove the knife far enough inside you that not only do you sever the artery connecting your life to mine, but you snuff out your own life once and for all. Because if you don't kill yourself, I will be forced to kill you.

Beautiful liar. Blood-sucking junkie. Baby-faced killer. Serial rapist. Lecherous pedophile. Thief, con, crook, cunt. Derelict bastard cock-sucking cunt slut. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. You fuck.

DEAD MAN

T
he Dead Man slowly rises from the sand pit crawling on all fours out from under forty feet of dry rust. He musters the strength of dead men everywhere who supply him with just enough false energy to pick himself up, dust himself off, and collapse against me. His dead weight crushes me, obliterating all feeling. Squashing sensation. Deadening the senses. Dulling reason. My breath slows. Breathing barely enough to supply oxygen to the brain. Pulse slows, skids, stops. I am paralyzed. I flatline. Time dies. I disappear. Reappear.

I stand directly before him whitewashed by steam heat rippling in off the desert floor. I am merely a mirage, his mirage, which he sees through yet refuses to acknowledge. He fills my body forcing expansion. Occupies every inch of skin and sinew as if I have swallowed an inflatable Death doll. Toxic pressure expands my flesh. He slurs, a sandy murmur, indecipherable and droll. Rocks his head just enough to draw his eyes down. His vision, like a desert rat, doesn't serve much purpose in the blistering mid-afternoon sun whose glorious golden patina cruelly kisses and blisters even that which it does not touch. But his night vision penetrates great distances, piercing the heart of dead stars and black holes. His viridian eyes are cloudy pools of viscous liquid. I am no longer alone here. In my skin. No longer in control.

I move my lips in protest but my breath has turned to dust. My bones are hollow husks. It's all up to him now. Deadpan joker. Pokerfaced. A cheap practitioner of gruesome parlor tricks. Slight of hand. Geomancy. Games of chance. Baccarat. His specialty—a seance of senseless violence. His favorite—Russian Roulette. Using my head for target practice.

I have a soft spot for him. Though the feeling is not mutual. He hates my fucking guts. But he hates everyone and everything even more than he despises me. He merely uses me as puppet vehicle, a truck of flesh to drive his crimes.

Dry whispers. Dead kisses. Lips as thin as paper cuts. Mouthing instructions which I will fight with all my will not to follow: Throw myself under a school bus. A tractor trailer. Into the river. Off the roof of the post office. Into a speeding car. Fall asleep on the train tracks, moonlight leaking through dead leaves. Pick up the snub-nosed .38 Special and blow my left cheek off. Hang from the rafters, dangling on a dirty clothesline used as umbilical cord connecting me to Death.

A cool evening breeze kisses dirty feet, my tongue swollen, preventing argument against his hypnotic pull. His words choke in my throat, a seductive wheezing of parched breath. A lesser mortal would be made weak by his black magic mantra. One less rebellious might acquiesce, overcome by the need to please the person who seems to need nothing. Need no one. Need not even exist in clock time.

For the gravedigger of crushed dreams and false promises, that caretaker of the endless obsidian spiral has a penchant to materialize at random, to disappear for years on end and to reappear when and where you least expect him. His ability to cut a woman in half, in quarters, to watch her splinter, shatter, and dissolve into the dust from whence he comes, only to resuscitate her so she may live and die and live again as her mouth fills with his strangled breath, is testament enough to the dominion he holds over the hoax known as Death's Other Kingdom. For Death must surely be a hoax, a trick, a labyrinth, a secret passage with a hidden switchboard, separated from Life only by our mortal perception of it. For if you believe like I do in the invisibile, the inanimate, the inaudible, the impossible, then no doubt the Dead Man will one day also call your name. I know him well. He is my better half.

THE DEVIL'S RACETRACK: RAY TRAILER

P
risoner #32578 is shitting himself to death in the next cell. Every twenty minutes another round of bowel-splitting explosions rack his body. He coughs, cries out, pounds his head on the cinder block walls, and wails. The smell is awful. As thick as oatmeal. His impending death from dehydration signals small relief as its horrendous aroma wafts down the hall walloping the senses. Mingling with the already heady fragrance of thousands of spent bladders pissing into eternity since the turn of the century. The smell of old men's fecal remains, their sour and rancid flesh rotting from the inside out, reeks until it stains the interior of your own nasal cavity, forcing you to become one with the smell. A seething odorama contaminated by the decay of hundreds of lost men whose very souls have started to stink.

Pickled feet and dirty fingernails. Silent pleas have been scratched into every surface, deep grooves in the floors, walls, bunks, sinks. An homage to endless days ill spent. Locked inside this human warehouse of disease and petty disasters. Where wasted lives count the days until release, relief, return, or death.

Another notch on the wall to keep you sane … keep you insane …

On my back in my bunk. A waiting game. Poisoned stalactites hang heavy with a toxic runoff steeped in decades of disappointment. Years of nervous, bored sweat cling to the ceiling and walls. Threatening to drown me. Drip by drip. In the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears. Browning like nicotine stains forming a Rorschach test in every corner. Sticky to the touch, foul to behold its ceaseless descent. I pull my T-shirt over my head. At least the smell is my own. Smells like sorrow. Like spoiled meat. Like a beaten man, tricked by his own gullibility. Tricked into believing … tricked into someone else's beliefs …

I close my eyes and meditate. Fooling myself, with all of my will, into summoning Her smell. I breathe slowly, deeply, inhaling my own aroma, a bittersweet stench whose undercurrents with much torque of the imagination are magically transformed into Hers. Into what I remember of Her. I will never forget Her. The scent that emanates from the small of Her back. The smell of butter. Clove. Coffee. Cayenne. A spicy, pungent fragrance whose mysterious depths sting with intrigue. Rebellion. Deception. A perfume so steeped in magic that a mere mortal's most strident resolve disintegrates once intoxicated by the ether of its undertones. A perfumed poison whose fragrance scrambles the synapses. Turns men into obedient little puppies whose only wish is to please the Bitch Goddess. The witch whose wanton desires manifest themselves in a catalog of criminal behaviors whose essence in turn fuels Her need for domination. And it's Her smell that casts dominion.

I pull my T-shirt tight, forming a snug noose around my neck. A tourniquet which I twist just enough to cut off my breath. To thicken the pulse, causing dizziness. A dream state of asphyxia is where I find Her. Lurking in the corner of my impending death. A bewitching pariah summoned only when everything else has been blotted out, chased away, erased, when nothing else remains but Her. And the mind is free to roam the inner recess of my imagination. The imagination She stained with Her scent. The images saturated with Her effervescence. The fantasies and recollections with which I shall remain forever trapped …

A downtown alley in the back of a theater once glorious, now in ruins … a sleazy European soft-porn skin flick milks what little life is left in the six or seven scummy patrons who scrounged up the two dollars and fifty cent admission fee. The cheesy soundtrack of
'70s synth is offset by overdubs whose grunts and groans simulate real passion. It bleeds through the brick. I'm leaning against the wall slippery with greasy rain. Her right hand is cocked around my throat. Her left unbuckles my jeans. She pulls me out, half hard, shiny with heat. I can smell myself. She begins squeezing. Tugging. Jerking. Whispering,
I'll suck you until you cry like a little girl
… I pull Her into me, my lips touch Her neck. The pungent musk, my eventual downfall … She shoves my hands away, slaps my mouth, insists I do not move.
Stay still. Don't speak. Don't breathe
. I hold my breath.

She slides down my body into a squat, legs spread wide, exposing her pink. Tells me to not even dream of peeking. I'm not allowed
to look. Insists I turn my head left, no right, to keep an eye on the entrance to the alley. To keep a look out, make sure no porn patrons decide they need a piss, no cops come nosing around, no teenagers or gangbangers. No dogs or dopers.

She puts me in her mouth. Her soft fat lips encircle the purple
tip. Nip on it. Bite it. A little too hard. Enough to make me wince. Nestling teeth inside the foreskin. She coos on it making sarcastic sucking sounds, loud enough to startle. Then swallows. The whole
of my cock. Lips flush to pubis. I fear She will somehow disgorge the meat from my body. Suck it off. Spit it out. Step on it. She holds my cock undulating in her throat.

Squeezing. Forcing me to spasm, flinch, thrash. Come. Her mouth slowly subsides, leaving me limp. She slaps at my prick, insisting I put it away … get it out of Her face, that filthy thing, a discarded toy no longer of interest. I scramble to stuff it back inside my pants. My belt buckle chimes against the brick wall. The jingle of silver and stone is transformed into wood against steel.

My daydream fades as Holtzer and O'Leary begin their afternoon shift. Rattling the cages with nightsticks. With bullshit and intimidation. Dirty jokes and catcalls. The stink of their aftershave. Body count begins. I don't know why they bother. No one has ever mastered a successful break. The last man who tried was riddled with fifty-two bullets. Back in '73, or so I've heard. I've only been inside for six months, twelve days, seven hours, and forty-one minutes. I'll be released in twenty-four some-odd years. If I can make it. I can't believe I have for this long. Don't know how anyone does. Surprised the suicide rate isn't higher. That there's not more man-slaughter. Homicide's not on the rise. The smell alone makes you pray for murder, for only in death will there be the freedom of relief, that portal of escape from which release will breathe new air. An air devoid of ghosted scents whose putrefaction stains the brain stem.

Second only to the smells are the sounds. The moronic chattering, nonstop bantering, petty squabbles, chronic bickering, inflated bragging. The ceaseless tedium of being forced to endure countless conversations full of run-on sentences whose main objective is to overflow every second with a hideous din which murders silence … The cruelest of all punishments … The caterwauling of stupid men in love with the sound of their own voices … The endless boredom and monotonous routine occasionally eclipsed by the static sounds of shitty reruns sputtering from a broken-down black-and-white TV propped at the far end of the corridor, featuring only the finest in adult entertainment—

AMERICA'S MOST WANTED, HOLLYWOOD CONFIDENTIAL, THE PEOPLE'S COURT, TEXAS JUSTICE, LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT, CSI: LAS VEGAS/MIAMI/NEW YORK, EXTREME EVIDENCE, FORENSIC FILES, PSYCHIC DETECTIVES, COPS, AMERICAN JUSTICE … Now that's ripe.

I am surrounded by petty hustlers, two-bit thieves, pathological liars, serial killers, and pedophiles all obsessed with the crimes of their brothers. Surrounded by men who have murdered their wives, stalked their girlfriends, killed their boyfriends, kidnapped the kids who should have been aborted. Hardcore criminals who gleam a perverse solace in the nightly repetition of slick reenactments of crimes so complex it takes a team of half a dozen well-paid television writers to concoct the plot.

Still, no distraction is ever great enough to allow you to forget where you are, what you did, what went wrong. How easily a stupid mistake—which could have been avoided, should never have happened, was not intended and was not my fault, for which I am forever fucked—can ruin your life.

* * *

We never went to Her place. She never even mentioned it. Not in the three weeks that I knew Her. I don't even know if She had one. She couldn't stand to have sex in enclosed spaces. She said it made Her feel trapped, domesticated. Depressed. It was boring. Dull. Too damn rote. It always had to be outside, in plain sight, in public view. The threat of being caught, possibly arrested for indecent exposure, turned Her on. Made Her rabid. She claimed it was one of Her many personal attacks against the ridiculous and outdated regulations fostered on society by Government Issue. Viewed public indecency, lewd behavior, and exhibitionism as a personal vendetta against the abolition of the individual. If we lived in a truly free society, pleasure would be rewarded, not punished …

I know, I know, I should have known better …

A Korean late-night mini-mart. We went in for cigarettes, two cups
of rank coffee, something sweet. Last aisle near the frozen food. Between the baby diapers and the dish-washing detergent. We were babbling like schoolkids, giggling like idiots. Spewing convoluted utopian rhetoric like college freshmen. She pulled me close. Stuck Her tongue in my mouth. Started sucking it. Instant arousal. And my hand between Her legs. Petting sweetly. “Pinch it,” She insisted. Biting my lower lip, Her eyes trained on the mirror above us, the view it afforded the cashier. Making Her twitch. Wiggle. She un-buttoned my shirt, eyes glued to our reflection. Began sucking my nipples. Licking them, slurping loudly. Her slippery little tongue, a rattler, darting back and forth across my chest. Chewing, a hungry little orphan eating a gumdrop.

The small things are what you miss most. The inconsequential. A warm breeze on the back of your neck. A fresh pack of cigarettes. The smell of wet leaves. Mud. Music. The Sunday paper. Silence. Try keeping your mouth shut when Holtzer, impeccable in his freshly starched uniform, lightning-bolt tattoos barely concealed under his black armband, poster boy for the Aryan Brotherhood, makes his afternoon rounds … interrupts my reverie … I could almost scream at the bastard to just back off, shut the fuck up, drop dead.

Big man. Bigger mouth. Feels it his duty to comment on every guy in the ward. “Make up that bunk!” “You pussies look a little pallid today … What's the matter, meatloaf no good?” “Another beautiful day in paradise.” “Greet the day, you low-life shits!” Thinks it improves morale, his useless drivel. Please … Pretends to befriend all the white cons. I get his trip. Sieg heil and all that bullshit. I try to keep to myself. Toe the line. Not talk. An almost Zen existence where days, weeks, and soon years will disappear in meditation, daydreams. Memories.

A light rain … quarter past midnight, bus stop. Downtown. All but deserted. Only the truly desperate out on a night like this. A wino or two drenched in cardboard, stooped down low in the corner of a faraway building … A crack whore waiting to roll an unsuspecting mark, the rustling of tin cans as they scamper up the sidewalk. I'm with Her again … She straddles me on the bench. Climbs over my lap.

Long black raincoat, short black dress. Not a word is spoken. She's devouring my face. Biting cheeks, forehead, ears, neck. I thrash my head from side to side, trying to avoid those pointy incisors. A manic dingo, ferocious, feral. She keeps up the attack. It's all I can stand. I stuff a musty leather glove in Her mouth, damp from rain, smelling of cigarettes and mildew. She clamps down, glowering. Not much time before Her next attack.

I grab Her hands behind Her back, holding Her small wrists in one meaty fist. Hard. I tweak them a little. Until I hear Her gasp. Quiver. I rip Her panties aside.

I want to hurt Her as She hurt me, my face still throbbing full
of love bites from this petite piranha. She struggles against the force, pinned in place, but there's nowhere for Her to turn. The other musty glove grabs at Her pouty puss. Her musky smell mingles with the stench of wet streets ringed with garbage. Inflames me beyond belief. I stuff my fingers inside, two at a time, poking viciously at Her tender pink.

Now She's the one who thrashes. Left and right, a slow gurgle of excitement slips past Her mushy gag. Both mouths now stuffed with the stink of moldy leather. I force another finger inside and then another. All but my thumb. Which rests against Her swell, that niblet
of pleasure. Mashed against the pressure. Causing Her to buck, a wild little bitch, sent into heat. I begin a steady pummel. Punching
at that little hole, pounding, forcing a grand expansion, explosion, expulsion. She comes spraying all over the glove, my coat and jeans, the bench.

An abstract portrait rendered in spunk.

She set me up. But I was stupid enough to take the fall. She slipped into my life like a low-grade fever. A bacterial infection, which quickly poisons every reasonable cell in the body until you're defenseless against the virulent blows of Her night sickness. My whole being tainted by Her toxic succulence, a psychic pollution so potent that the only recourse was acquiescence as She leeched at my life force. Devouring small pieces of myself which fell away like dust, dry bones, dead skin, desert wind.

Now time keeps me. With slow dissolve every hour dribbles away, every second stretched to eternity, the minutes mere interludes with which I count my heart-beats. Leaking life from my caged existence like sand in an endless hourglass whose bottomless pit mocks without mercy … stealing from me the most precious commodity. The choice to decide just how I'll waste the day. Do not take this lightly. It is the finest of luxuries. Now my days are wasted for me. Locked up and lost in thoughts whose instant replay is my only salvation.

I calibrate time by plucking hairs. Off my arms, my legs, my pubis, and my eyebrows. Glued to the four-by-eight-by-nine-foot walls with spittle. Prehistoric as a miniature cave painting. My private museum. Filled floor to ceiling with masterpieces I create in invisible ink, sketched by fingernail into the canvas of my flesh. Projected through the filter of my brainpan onto the gallery walls whose seething funk I erase with my gluey iris and replace with much eye strain and a headache-inducing squint with pristine white plasterboard filled with a nonstop rotating film loop replicating Rubens, Brueghel, Bosch, Bellini, Bernini, Goya, Caravaggio.