by Kirk Alex
Cecil’s screaming had gone on for quite some time afterwards, the son unwilling to give his mother up, unwilling to accept what he saw happen to her with his own eyes.
He stood there sobbing, until absolutely spent, and collapsed in the mound of dirt at the overturned MEN WORKING sign and barricades.
Initially unaware that the spattered workman, his member back inside his pants and no longer visible or a threat, had dropped the J-hammer and picked up a sledge. Advanced with it toward him. Cecil realized what was about to happen to him quickly enough. Rose. Taking several, awkward, backward steps away from the mound, backed into John Joseph, his stepfather, standing there in his worn army jacket that had no stripes because he’d been given the boot years before for doing things with and to recruits—in the middle of the night while they slept soundly in their bunks. Heard his mother bring it up enough times during their fights.
J.J. had the jacket on, but no trousers, instead was still in those green army boxers with the urine and blood stains, mismatched socks. Had his large hands clamped down on his shoulders. Held him in place. Prevented him from going anywhere. Wouldn’t let him go, no matter how desperately Cecil struggled to free himself. That’s when the workman, no longer bearing the death’s head skull, instead had returned to normal, whatever “normal” was—and began swinging the sledge.
It was here that Cecil O. Biggs, adult version, became aware that he was trapped in a not unfamiliar nasty flashback and that it was spiraling out of control, taking him places that he did not wish to be taken. Enough was enough.
He did his best to scream out, beg for help, freaking at all of it, at what had been done to his mother, screaming to be saved himself, given a hand, rescued from the ugliness of everything; had his mouth wide open, head shaking violently—only not a sound seemed to be emerging.
He’d fought with this for ages, going on for the past thirty-seven years: nightmares and flashbacks, that refused to go away and would not stop reminding him at the way his mother, the unhappy broad, had cashed-in her chips.
The only possible respite he could hope to look forward to, from the onslaught that the dream had deteriorated into, was to yank himself out of it through sheer will and determination and snap awake. Always far easier said than done, no matter how often in the past he’d managed it.
The nightmare was clinging and would not let him be.
You have to fight it. Resist. With everything you have in you. Refuse to go any further. The battle was on. As a result of the effort, he was in and out of it presently, the struggle yielding dividends, yet he was unable to free himself entirely (in one clean break, which was always the desired objective) even though, way off in the distance, there was what vaguely/faintly sounded like the ringing of a telephone.
Fuck this shit. I’ve had enough. I want out. I NEED OUT. I WANT OUT. NOW. Do it. Pull yourself away from it.
Eventually, gradually, the ringing sound could not be mistaken for anything other than a phone, his phone. In his bedroom. Telephone bleating. That’s when the adult version of Cecil Omar Biggs broke through at last, jerking himself—if not wide-awake—at least awake.
CHAPTER 6
He sat up. Was in a cold sweat. Back stiff due to the Kevlar vest he rarely slept without.
Didn’t have to squeeze his groin to know he was hard down there. Squeezed just the same. Like iron. These flashbacks/nightmares, as bothersome as they were, as heavy as their toll was on his psyche, seldom failed to leave him in a state of arousal. Still, it was some price to pay.
Biggs was forty-five years old these days and just as disorientated as ever. The indentation above the right brow was far more pronounced and resembled a misshapen oval that overlapped into and was part of his hairline. The dark eyes, his mother’s eyes, pain-wracked and tear-filled.
He dabbed at his face with a corner of the bed sheet that reeked of something he not only was used to, but found a type of undeniable comfort in: BO. His own. Body odor was acceptable, so long as it was not someone else’s.
He wiped his neck and armpits. Something like a cockroach, dropping out of nowhere, landed on his chin and ran up toward a corner of his mouth. He slapped at it on instinct, killing it, whatever it was, and just as instinctively spat it out.
Cockroaches wouldn’t let you be—like the phone, that phone, that wouldn’t stop ringing. Seemed it would go on forever if he didn’t pick up.
Did what he was able to collect himself. Turned the volume down on the police scanner that he preferred to leave on around the clock, just as he liked to leave the all-talk and/or all-news AM radio station on while he slept.
He turned down the radio. Hit the record button on the answering machine next to the phone, and lifted the receiver.
“Church.”
“You’re a bitch.”
It was the redneck next door: one Martin Thurman Roscoe, known to one and all as Marty, speaking in a deeper tone than was normal for him (in a feeble attempt to disguise his voice). He was also drunk.
“What was that?”
“You heard. You and that fruit Marvin. Couple of fags. Tutti and Fruity. Coupla bitches.”
“You’re wrong, crevice wipe.”
“I know what I’m talking about. Nigger-lovin’ faggot is what you are.”
“Your mama must have been gang-banged by a pack of rabid mongrels to have engendered a white trash imbecile like you.”
Biggs had been able to get it out without losing his composure for a change. He hung up the phone. The bullshit never ended. Redneck asshole.
Faggot? He was no faggot, not by nature. Didn’t suck dick, didn’t fuck men in the ass, and vice-versa. He was about bitches. Tits and cunt. Where did the redneck get the idea he was homo? Because he ran with Marvin? Marvin wasn’t queer. So what gives?
CHAPTER 7
It bothered him a little more than it should have. He needed to keep calm, the nerves steady. He shut the recording device off. Turned the volume up on the news station.
According to the digital clock radio it was only 10:30 in the a.m. Way too early for him to be up. Might as well stay up now. Besides, you got that 2:00 p.m. appointment at the Westwood VA. Can’t miss that. Shouldn’t. Took you long enough to make up your mind to set it up.
Stay awake. Check the mail.
Even though his primary mailing address was a P.O. Box that he rented on a yearly basis at the North Hollywood post office, and where he received correspondence that mattered, the rest of his mail, usually advertisements and junk of that ilk (that he never sent for) was being sent to this address here.
Check it all the same. Take a look at the cars. Check to see that they’re still there and haven’t been vandalized overnight.
Where was the Elavil? He reached for the Elavil container on the night stand on his left (knowing full well that it was empty), had been empty for nearly two weeks now, or was it three?
Lack of medication had to be the cause behind his most recent depression attack. The blues were much worse than was usual for him.
Then he noticed the pile of empty Preparation H boxes in the waste basket by the dresser; the last tube he’d squeezed all the balm out of on top of it all. The sight was a needless reminder, as all he’d had to do to be aware of the pain in his burning rectum was move an inch, or not move at all; the ache was always there. Goddamned hemorrhoids. Against his better judgement, he released a fart, and it felt like being jabbed with steel bristles down there. Asshole was on fire. What it felt like.
A second fart wanted out and he suppressed it, held it back. He wiped his face some more with the sweat-stained bed sheet having forgotten that he had the clown makeup on. Ruined the sheet now for sure. Not that it hadn’t needed washing to begin with. Some Man of the Cloth you turned out to be.
He thought he might like to die right now, maybe go out like his mother. Why not? What was the point in getting out of bed? You’ve got to make that interview today—if you’re interested in getting the prescription refilled and upda
ted.
How do you get away from yourself? How do you escape your existence? How do you ditch hell? How do you do it? You’re wasting your time, he finally concluded, asking questions like that. You’re stuck with it, stuck with who you are.
He looked at his surroundings: bulletproof blanket, the cluttered bedroom; stuck with it all. Chained to the nightmare.
The bed was a mess and so was the room. Stacks of the Wall Street Journal about on the floor, pictures of hardcore starlets he’d cut out from underground smut rags and slick porn publications adorned the walls. Cunts being drilled by massive cocks. If they weren’t being fucked, their faces were in the process of being drenched in cum.
There were also autographed glossies, eight-by-tens, of various strippers and hardcore cunts who worked various LA, Nevada and Arizona clubs. The local peelers he’d gotten to know well enough: Pearleen Bell went by Peaches LaBelle; Lana “Da Bottom” Sepulveda’s stage name was Lady Likkerish; Stella Martel took her clothes off as Stunning Stella Storm; and there were others.
This is what kept him going. That need for pussy; that deep, inexplicable craving for cunt. He hated being a slave to it as much as he despised the bitches themselves for it. Still, it made him want to hang around. Kept him from blowing his brains out. Couldn’t tell if that was good or bad.
But the bitches came and they went. At least these three, and a couple of others, lived in the Valley and were house dancers, regulars at the Casbah Hideaway – Cabaret & Nightclub—and they’d gotten acquainted.
He’d spent enough bucks for the privilege. Hated to. Only there was no other way. Money talked, bullshit walked. It was the oldest cliche around, but true. Money was honey—and it drew gold diggers like flies to dog crap. On the other hand, they weren’t all dancers and porn starlets.
He had a series of color photos taped to his dresser mirror and on the wall surrounding it that he had taken with a telephoto lens of a gorgeous high school cheerleader, photos taken from a distance, without the subject’s awareness, an undeniably attractive Latina named Olivia Candida Duarte who lived with her family in a part of the neighborhood that was not as rundown and seedy as the block his own place was on.
He also had stills from some of his favorite slasher flicks up there on his walls and door: freaked out sluts drenched in their own blood on the run from some mask-wearing, machete- or ax-wielding psycho determined to take them out.
He had a poster on the ceiling of a fat retard fuck about to carve up a helpless cunt in pain hanging on a meat hook, another of some dorky male having his melon bashed in by the same psycho with a sledge.
There were slick bondage mags on his floor as well as publications on flicks with ultra violent content, at least what the so-called mainstream considered “ultra violent.”
Quite a few of these VHS horror movies that these magazines featured were about in stacks on the worn carpet. There was plenty of hardcore porn in there as well, with titles like Cuckoo for Culo, Beach Blanket Bunghole, Cunt Blanche, Assholes Anonymous, Cornhole Confidential, Double-D Nymphos Triple-Teamed, et al.
Some of these strippers that he favored, namely Lana Sepulveda, Stella Martel, others, had appeared in a hardcore porn video or two. On the other hand, Peaches LaBelle, quite possibly the hottest of the exotic dancers, didn’t do triple-X on film—that he knew of. Then again there was no way to be sure; these sluts had more aliases and stage names than you could keep track of, although the soft-X type titles she had appeared in (that he was aware of) he had copies of.
LaBelle pumped dumbbells in the buff, hosed down a Porsche in the skimpiest pair of cutoff jeans and tiniest of Ts.
In one of the videos shot at some seaside resort somewhere south of the border, they had her showering in her birthday suit, spreading soap suds all over those impressive hangers and running a washcloth between her ass cheeks; got the twat, too. There was the post-shower masturbation finale on the bed with a vibrator in hand being inserted into the moist and glistening cooter, the licking off of said moistness by her very own ruby-red lips and tongue, and the subsequent further sliding in-and-out of her cunt with that vibrator until the bogus climax. In fact, all of it was bogus. One major con.
It was: Give us your hard-won cash, and we’ll give you sleight of hand. He knew it. And it pained him to spend good money on this crap, but when you were obsessed with cunt, you paid. It was clearly an addiction. There was no denying it. Porn and splatter.
Had additional stacks of these videos on either side of the eyeless, decades old teddy bear perched atop the combo tee-vee/VCR on the dresser, as well as additional videos on makeshift shelves to the right of the banged up dresser. Sucking and fucking. Butchering and mayhem. It was there. True crime paperbacks. Books on pop psychology and scholarly texts. Man couldn’t exist on smut and bloodshed alone. Well, he might try—and get along well enough—but for him something would be missing.
His eyes shifted back to the teddy bear. Tired. No eyes. A childhood memento. There was nothing remotely sentimental attached. He’d held on to it as a perpetual reminder of what he’d lived through as a youngster, stainless-steel-proof what useless/worthless cretins humans were. Bottom line. People were shit. All he’d had to do was take a look at the teddy bear—whose eyes had been gouged by John Joseph, and real eyes from a live pup inserted in their stead—to be sobered up about society. Biggs didn’t need to keep staring at it to remember what had been done to him, what he’d survived.
CHAPTER 8
You need to get out of bed. Get out of bed. Act required motivation that wasn’t there.
What he did next he did so with hesitation, as always; great trepidation. Paused to stare at a couple of faded photos, taped to the top of the mirror, of the only love he’d experienced as a youngster; the only friends he’d ever known, the only ones who’d shown him genuine kindness and affection: Mr. Turnbull, Truly Turnbull and his pet hog Parfrey. Long gone. Taken out by John Joseph and his druggie street freaks. It pained him. Even now. Lo these many years later. Hurt went deep.
He stared at the photo: Mr. Turnbull in his sinister clown makeup as Trusty Lusty; then to the right of his friends: Cecil, in his pre-teen years, smiling with his arm lovingly around the hog’s neck. Parfrey, black and ugly and repulsive, not unlike a wild boar—and yet, this had been the appeal; why he had been drawn to the pig. It was easy to relate; there were unspoken things in common. Biggs had felt ugly and unappealing enough himself. Inside and out. Unworthy, unwanted—unloved. The dented forehead and scars and welts were equal to Parfrey’s horribly frightening slobbering jaw and fangs; bulky skull and huge, ragged ears. But to Cecil, this was what had made him so appealing and handsome. Lovable, even. They were drawn to one another. It had been love at first embrace. And this is what had made him so unique and special to the hog’s tender-hearted owners, Mr. and Mrs. Turnbull. Friends. Caring. Genuine. Long gone presently. Flora Turnbull’s heart had given out. And Truly? Deep-sixed by the alkie bigot. Beaten senseless and robbed of his precious coin and stamp collection and anything else of value that he had and his house summarily torched. His pet hog had been butchered by J.J. and his psycho crew and afterwards eaten.
Made him sick to his belly to think about it. So why do it? Because it belongs to me. It’s mine. They live on inside of me—until the very end. This was his way of honoring them: by thinking of them, reminding himself of the kindness he had been shown. If they hadn’t mattered to anyone else, they mattered to him. If he, as a child, hadn’t mattered to the abusive creeps who had raised him, by keeping his friends’ memories alive he was reminding himself that there had been a time when someone had actually given a damn; someone had provided him with sanctuary and a caring word; had fed him when he was hungry, and most often he was; had provided him with not only clean clothing and footwear, but clothing meant for a boy, as opposed to the dress and other girly attire his mother and her homo boyfriend had forced on him that they had filched from the lowliest thrift stores.
This was exactl
y why he made the effort on a daily basis to address/pay his respects/give a nod to the images that represented the two people and their pet hog who had been there for him in his times of great need. The other reason, of course—prior to leaving the domicile on his way to the haunted house (the times he did the makeup here as opposed to at the Bordello of Fear)—was to see if his version of Trusty Lusty’s makeup compared to what Mr. Turnbull wore in the picture. Some days he was closer than he was on other days. This current incarnation that covered his face was not bad at all, if you considered he’d slept with it on, and then had to whack at the roach that had resulted in further smearing near chin and mouth. He reminded himself that he’d also unintentionally wiped quite a bit of it off with the bed sheet a moment ago. Got to expect it to be off and smudgy.
He did one last thing in their honor: Stared and studied the two Parfrey masks that he had hanging from the coat rack in the corner, full head masks that he’d fashioned himself with needle and thread a while back. Actual skin masks he’d peeled off of pig heads he purchased on a regular basis from a meat market in Pacoima. It troubled him that they appeared worn, shabby. Steady use at the haunted house had been the cause. He’d have to stop by the same butcher shop pretty soon to pick up a few more heads and sew enough masks for future use. His haunted house business was about to be shut down indefinitely by the DA’s office because Greta Otto—one of the crazier and more unpredictable members of his church board—had lost her cool and gone after a customer, as well as a couple of his own Mex employees, with an axe handle. The customer he’d been able to pay off, now the former employees, janitors, in the country illegally, were threatening to sue. After money. Trying to shake him down for a substantial amount of cash. They wanted to take away what took a lifetime to build up. It was envy. Those who were able were always envied by those who were never capable of anything. The Roscoes next door were a perfect example. So were chronic trouble-makers Glassy and his low IQ, mentally-challenged punk buddy Felix. Out to grab what was his, instead of going out and working for it.
