Mmburr. Burrmmm. Mmburr. Burrmmm.
“For fuck’s sake,” I hear Syd from somewhere down the hall, which is no longer endless. “This fucking thing wouldn’t work for me right earlier, either. I’m sorry, it’ll just be a minute… but the wait will be worth it.”
And the hallway becomes a cacophony of broken cash machines, porn, sticky flesh, and what sounds like someone shoving their whole arm into a barrel of spaghetti and stirring. The lights flicker and I’ve got cotton mouth and I’m covered in vomit. I’m also cold. Very cold. And tired. Very tired. I just feel sick. I just feel so goddamned sick. And completely drained. I can’t even remember what day it is or how I got here, or where here even is. Something at the backs of my eyes flashes and blurs and then something in my chest switches off and I close my eyes and sleep.
I come to in mid-stumble, held up by someone much larger than me, and swaddled in a coat too big for me. Goose pimples form on my bare legs and it’s all I can do to keep them from going out from under me. My feet are bare also and I realize all I have on are this strange coat and my Fruit of the Looms.
“Just take it easy now, Luke. Just take it easy, buddy. That’s it,” the voice to my left says, and even though my balance returns, I lean into the source of that voice and find comfort in the large body there holding me up. We walk through the lobby of Tassels ‘N’ Tipples toward the glass doors that open out into the bustling day of North Beach lit up with morning.
The body to my left pulls away from me and opens the glass doors and gently guides me through them despite my feeble attempts to pull myself back to its side. I look back and it’s Derrick who’s helping me. He’s now standing in the doorway, holding the door open, and I’m out under the strip club’s marquee, cocooned in his jacket.
“I want to stay,” I tell him.
“You can’t, man. Come on now, you know that. You can’t stay forever. And I don’t know that you should ever come back. You really think this is good for you? Christ, man, this can’t keep happening. You expect me to drag your ass out of here week in, week out? You’re a mess. You need help.” His expression blends compassion with disgust.
“I want to stay!” I plead and he shakes his head and begins to retreat back inside but not before I block the door from shutting, thrusting his jacket at him, standing there desperate in my soiled underwear. “Derrick! Wait, wait, wait…. Your jacket! You need your jacket back, Derrick! It’s a very nice jacket and you shouldn’t lose it.”
“Christ, Luke. What in hell are you talking about? Keep the damn thing. Like I’d even want it back with all that shit all over it now anyway, damn,” he says, pushing my arm out of the doorway. Zombies stumble all about me under the marquee and giant crickets tickle my ears with their antennae while passing.
Holding my filthy, naked self, Derrick’s jacket gripped tightly in one hand, I plead once more in a near-whisper, “But, Derrick, I don’t want to go. Please… don’t make me go.”
“Would you quit with that Derrick shit, man? You’ve been coming here for an eternity. You know damn well my name’s Sam.” Then he shakes his head again and says “shit” likes it’s a piece of phlegm to spit out as moves back inside the club. He locks the glass doors, strolls away into the darkness.
With the sun excruciatingly close and rising slow and huge above me, I turn and, with the jacket stretched out behind me like a cape, smile wide and run like a superhero about to take flight, chasing down every pigeon I see, kicking at them and stomping them flat in the gutters, and laughing, laughing, laughing through rotting teeth. When not chasing pigeons or avoiding the lepers, I try to find my way back home, biting my nails to the quick and watching my bare feet the whole way to make sure I don’t step on anything sharp.
BLUE MONSTER
As she unfurls her slender, naked form and stands up from the bed, tired and slick with new sweat, the glow of the late night street lamp outside the window sets her right arm aflame. She’s burning, the flame licking up and down her arm like a blue and orange lizard’s tongue, though she doesn’t flinch or scream out, so I don’t worry.
“What the fuck is that?” I ask as the flame fizzles and goes out. A white fog pulls away from her body with a whispering whistle and dissipates. She bends over for a second as if punched in the gut, her hands on the bed, then looks up and smiles, embarrassed. I reach out to her from the bed then think better of it and pull back and touch myself, instead, stroking my dick while looking at her beautiful body to try and calm myself and bring myself back to reality. It doesn’t work.
“What?” she asks, pushing away from the bed, two handfuls of breasts and a hollow belly gone white.
I grab her right arm and point to where the flame had been, “That! What the fuck is that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, laughing in one short gasp that turns into a small grunt as I yank her arm, pull her back onto the bed and point at it.
“That. That, right fucking there. What the hell is that?” I ask with eyes wide, ignoring the beastly yelps and grunts eschewing from the filthy Tenderloin street below. I ignore the sounds of thrusting, the wet and dull sounds of meat slamming into meat, the jagged, Velcro-like tearing sounds of limbs ripped off and the screams of ecstasy it causes. The sounds of body parts dropping against asphalt. The sounds of rain that come after each thud to wash it all into the storm drains that are stopped up and full of thick black and red swirling puddles, twigs, used condoms, and wedding rings still on dismembered fingers.
“My tattoo? Jesus, Luke. My fucking tattoo? Is that what you’re going on about? Jesus. It’s just my blue bulldog. What’s gotten into you?” Her voice goes soft and scared. The light coming through the curtains continues to blow the room around in a dirty orange hue.
“That’s not a fucking bulldog. That’s a fucking monster, Cameron. That’s a monster,” I say, jabbing my finger at the blue monster, but not touching it.
“Um, OK, Luke,” she says, unnerved.
She tries to spill from the bed again, but I catch her arm once more and pull her back. An eruption of giggles. She falls into me and tries to stroke me with her right hand but I don’t want that thing anywhere near me so I push her arm away and give her a look that implies I’m in a serious mood.
“Cameron, it’s on the wrong fucking arm! Your fucking tattoo has always—always—been on your left arm. What the fuck are you trying to pull?”
“You’re losing it. You really are,” she says, grabbing her smokes from the nightstand and lighting a menthol cigarette. As she moves the cigarette back and forth from her lips, ribbons of mint-green smoke snake toward the browning ceiling. While she watches smoke rise, I watch that blue, sinewy monster crawl from her right arm across her body and slide like oil onto her pale stomach and position itself there on all fours, blood leaking from its teeth.
“There! There! You see?” I say, pointing at her stomach where the blue monster lies motionless.
“I’m losing patience. See what? What am I supposed to be seeing?” she asks, arms out, mocking me by looking all over herself and the room.
“It’s on your goddamned stomach now. Yesterday, and every day before that, that blue monster was on your left arm. Then suddenly it’s on your right? Now it’s on your stomach! What the fuck are you doing, Cameron? What are you trying to pull, goddammit?”
She guffaws, slips from the bed, puts the menthol out, and laughs again while standing bedside and petting her belly in slow, circular strokes.
“My little blue bulldog has always been on my stomach,” she says in a baby voice, pretend-petting the blue thing on her belly. “I think you’d have noticed that by now as it’s not too far away from the part you like best about me,” she says in an annoyed grown-up voice, giving me a look.
“No. No, Cameron. That’s not true. You’re trying to do something here, but I don’t know what. I don’t understand. Help me understand,” I say in a pleading voice, leaning on my side and looking up at her with eyes that
must be tearing up by now.
“You just need a drink,” she says with an exaggerated nod, mocking me still.
Returning from the adjacent kitchen, she hands me a glass of whiskey. “Take your medicine, big boy,” she says.
Outside, sirens scream out. Inside, red, blue, and white lights circle the room and block out the orange light of the street lamp. Outside, police bust windows of storefronts and tell everyone to get back while they wait for backup. The Orkin people soon arrive and the sound of a thousand crickets dying screeches throughout ten city blocks. After people clap their ears closed to muffle the terrible noise they clap and cheer and congratulate each other while the room Cameron and I are in clouds up with poison. Then everything quiets again and it’s just the dirty orange light of the street lamp filling the room through a window with billowing curtains. The only sound in the room is wind and breath.
I sit up in bed, back against the wall. Animal noises creep in from the street below again. There’s the scuffle of zombies crawling on hands and knees begging for a nickel while giving head to off-duty bartenders that sell drugs to supplement their meager incomes and have tentacles instead of arms and third eyes that leak a thick, syrupy black ink. That black eye-syrup is sold by gypsies from street carts around San Francisco as aphrodisiacs that increase sperm count so the world can fill itself with more zombies.
I take a sip of the whiskey. My stomach howls and unleashes belts of bile that whip up my esophagus to coat the roof of my mouth. I take another sip and wash it down. I take another sip to bring it all back. And repeat.
“I have to take a piss,” Cameron says, holding her hands up, palms out. “Calm yourself.”
I make eye contact with her as she stands there, tell her I love her and that I just want her to come back to bed—that I’m sorry for becoming irrational, insane, unreasonable, and confused. I say I must be mistaken, that if she says the tattoo of a blue bulldog—not a monster—has always been on her beautifully pale belly, then I believe her. That even if I’ve lapped at her belly button and wrapped my lips around her clit and sucked, that even though I did those things with eyes open many a night to witness her stomach muscles contract and release with each lubricated sound, that I must, despite those memories, be mistaken about the placement of her blue beast.
Then I notice the blue monster slither down her stomach, crawl over her pussy, and stop on her inner thigh, its sides heaving from the effort. The blood from its mouth drips down her leg, leaves a small puddle where she stands before she turns down the hallway for the bathroom.
In bed, I pull myself up straighter against the wall, take large gulps of the whiskey, light up a Winston Light, and try to relax. Two of my front teeth turn to ice, fall into the glass to keep it cold.
I drink it all down and nearly choke.
“Feeling better now?” she asks upon her return, crawling into bed and curling up against me as if she might purr.
“What the fuck?” I say, jumping from beneath her and out of bed. Leaning over, I push her onto her back and inspect her naked figure from top to bottom. She giggles. I flip her on her stomach.
“Oh, are we going there now?” she asks, laughing excitedly.
I roll her onto her back once more in the orange glow.
“Where’d it go?” I ask, almost furious now, but too frightened to be truly mad.
“Where’d what go?” she asks through half-moon eyelids, suddenly sleepy.
“Your tattoo. Your tattoo, for fuck’s sake!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, for fuck’s sake,” she says, mocking me.
“Don’t do this. It was there. It was right there!” I say, pointing a finger hard into her inner thigh.
“Ouch! Enough of the rough stuff. Fix me a drink if you want to play that way,” she says, slurring her speech, rolling over, and arching her back slightly so her ass sticks up in the air.
I put my Winston out in the ashtray on the nightstand. Grunts and snuffs come from the street below. I roll her onto her back and look her all over again. She laughs. There’s blood. There’s a blood trail. I see it coming in from the hallway. It follows her up onto the bed. It’s growing beneath her, soaking her sheets in darkness.
“You had a tattoo. You did,” I say, almost sobbing, defeated. “You had a tattoo of a blue monster. It’s been on your left arm for as long as I’ve known you. Then it was just on your right. Then your stomach. Then on the inside of your thigh. Now, it’s gone. It’s fucking gone. Where’d it go? Where the fuck could it have gone?” I ask, feeling sleepy, now, myself.
“You’re crazy. You’re just crazy, Luke. You always have been crazy. Come into bed. Come,” she says, her arms out and open to me.
“But… but you’re bleeding. Cameron, goddammit, you’re bleeding,” I say, suddenly exhausted from it all.
“No,” she says. “No. No I’m not, silly. Don’t be silly. Don’t be a dummy.” She keeps her arms held out for me.
Orange light pools in my eyeballs and everything I see is filtered through a hazy orange film. It’s as if I’m suddenly wearing fifty-pound weights around my head and neck and eyelids. Dragged down, I crawl into bed and into her arms and fall asleep immediately.
When I wake it’s still a filthy orange light that fills the room. The air is warm, now, though. And it’s quiet. The clock says it’s tomorrow. I’m covered in sheets of blood. She is, too. But she’s breathing. Soundly. Her narrow spine moves with each breath.
I go to the kitchen, clank some ice into my glass and drown it in whiskey, a few drops of the blood coating my skin plop into the golden liquid and give it a faint orange hue. Then I return to the room where Cameron sleeps, slick with blood in an orange room. All orange. The bed. The walls. The curtains. The nightstands. All painted a bright orange and dimly lit. And her red body in the middle of it.
I sit back on the orange bed with my orange whiskey and blow blue smoke for hours until she wakes.
“Morning, sunshine,” she says, rubbing her eyes with blood-caked hands to remove the blood that’s glued her eyelids shut. Eight a.m. light fills the room and dapples our sticky red bodies. Only then do I notice the room is no longer orange. It’s blue. Blue from floorboards to walls and ceiling. The curtains are blue. The light’s blue. The same shade of Cameron’s non-existent tattoo.
I don’t say anything. Light another Winston. Sip the remnants of long-melted ice and warm whiskey. Outside, everything has died and gone quiet. Everything that once had life, anyway. There’s still the sounds of people going to work and buses running them over, of course.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Oh, Luke. You don’t have to apologize. I know how you get sometimes. You’re what I call quirky—it’s what I like about you. You’re unpredictable. You have nothing to apologize for,” she says to me with sweet sincerity, completely caked in blood.
“No, I’m really sorry,” I say, still refusing to look at her.
“And, really, it’s not a big deal,” she says, pulling herself up in bed to sit against the blue wall beside me, our red bodies shoulder to shoulder.
“I’m so sorry, Cameron.”
“What are you sorry for, huh? What?” she asks and puts a hand on my upper thigh, all red and tacky. It’s a touch that would normally send powerful gushes of blood flooding into my cock, stiffening it and readying it for her red mouth or pussy, but nothing’s moving down there now. I feel like nothing ever will again.
I take a drag from my Winston, look toward the window, and I can’t feel the smoke enter or exit my lungs. I can’t even tell if I’m breathing. I can’t hear my breath or the wind.
“Luke, what are you sorry for?” she asks, real concern creeping into her voice.
“I’m sorry Toby died.”
“Luke, that’s just sick. That’s just—”
“I’m sorry he died. I know he was just a kid.”
“Please don’t make sick jokes about my goddamned son,” she says sternly, removing her sticky h
and from my sticky leg.
“I don’t understand it. I don’t know how it happened. I’m sorry, Cameron. I’m sorry he died that way. I’m so sorry. I am. I really am.” I still can’t look at her. I still can’t feel the smoke.
“If you’re going to continue saying fucked up shit, Luke, just—just get the hell out.”
“I’m sorry. There was nothing I could do,” I say. I smoke. I almost cry. But I don’t. I just don’t feel like it.
She gets out of bed, wraps herself in a robe and gives me a look before heading out into the hallway, leaving red bloody footprints in her wake all over the blue floors.
When she gets to Toby’s room down the hall she screams. She screams for hours. I imagine she also cries. I imagine she tears at her eyes and hair and pounds her chest and rips her own flesh. But I only know for sure that she screams.
I stay in that bed until the light changes back to burnt orange and the room changes back to orange and the blood dries and turns to dust and disintegrates. I stay there smoking until the pack empties while the room goes from orange to blue, back to orange again. Cameron never returns. I can’t decide if I miss her or not. I can’t decide what to do next. The room spins and keeps changing between the two colors. Time becomes a colored liquid. I stay in that bed for weeks—unaware of whose bed it actually is—with a scream crashing over and over again against the inside of my increasingly brittle skull. Then the room goes black.
GETTING THERE
I wake to an animal tearing out of my chest, and I grunt and push myself up and back on my elbows, kicking the sheets and covers off the bed as I focus my sleepy, blurry vision on the dark thing that scurries out of me and into the corner of the room, out of sight.
Lunging out of bed, I step on a beer can, yell out, kick the can aside, then carefully walk over to the corner where I thought I’d seen the thing run. I push the fake ficus in a wicker basket aside. There’s nothing there but lint, dust, hair.
Confused. And not sure if I had been dreaming. But this happens all the time. So, I try to breathe past the bruise in my chest.
Enjoy Me Page 7
