Unloaded

by Eric Beetner

  His response was universal. A strong hand shot out of the dark, grabbed a handful of her hair, and forced her to her knees. She was a little unnerved by this, but not because it had never happened before. On the contrary, she knew that sometimes they enjoyed a little danger or wanted to play out some long held masturbation fantasy. She had once doubled her fee for letting a Saudi prince watch one of his wives go down on her in a private box at the Met. He said it was a wife, but for all she knew, the woman might’ve been another escort. Probably was because she was awfully good at it and Picassa hadn’t had to fake her orgasm.

  No, there was something else about this client. His hands were too big and powerful, his palm too rough and calloused. But maybe not. His pants were expensively made and when she reached for him through the open zipper, she felt that his boxers were silken. From that point on it was automatic. She made the proper coos and sighs and placed him in her mouth. Then she showed off by taking him all the way, deeply into the back of her throat, keeping him there for quite some time. They all liked that and it usually earned her extra gratuities. Many of them would ask her to spend the night afterwards, no matter the expense, so that she might reprise the performance over and over again. Men were such uncomplicated animals.

  It was only when her client’s thighs stiffened and his back arched that the unease fell over her again. It was too late now. He yanked on her hair so hard her eyes teared up. It was done. Again, she made the proper ego building coos and sighs. But as she tried to stand, he held her down, pulling her hair harder, tugging her head back. Then in a flash, it came to her.

  “Show me your room key!” she said, even as some of her hair pulled away from her scalp.

  He showed it to her and laughed. Although the Carillion Park West was a grand old hotel, it had gone keyless last year.

  Her eyes got wide with fear, her heart pounding so hard she might have been able to see her chest vibrate had there been enough light. He pulled her up off her knees, keeping her head tilted back. She opened her mouth to scream, tried to scream, but she felt a slight breeze, heard a swishing sound, felt a pinch in her neck. She gasped for air. She grabbed for her throat. Her heaving chest was warm and soaking wet, yet she was desperately cold inside. She was losing consciousness when he finally let go of her hair. She pitched forward, gravity and inertia pulling her body down. There was a dull thud when her near-lifeless body smacked onto the concrete landing below. Outside the door, in the hallway, she heard a man bitching to his wife about a grown man having to go see a silly play about Peter Pan. If she wasn’t already dead, Picassa might’ve laughed.

  After his new friend, Bobby—he said his name was Bobby—had showed Tommy where there was a working bathroom, they’d sat together for the remainder of the ride to Central Islip. Bobby was a helluva guy. He was from Gravesend, too, the old neighborhood in Brooklyn. Tommy was relieved to find out where he recognized Bobby from.

  “I’m a few years older,” Bobby said, “but we used to see each other around like on Avenue X sometimes or by Spumoni Gardens.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure,” Tommy said, still feeling the buzz from all the beers.

  “Hey, Tommy, let’s you and me go have a drink for old times’ sake and maybe get something to eat. On me, of course.”

  Tommy Dushane was a fuckup, but he wasn’t a stupid one. He was also a poor one because even though he had a good paying job, he was into every guy who put money on the street. He bet on everything that was bet-able and lost on everything you could lose on. He owed so much vig that he would never live long enough to see the light of day. That’s why he lived all the fuck the way out here and in a shitbox the size of a half bathroom.

  “Free meal. Free booze. Hell, yeah.”

  Now Tommy was a fucked up fuckup, maybe drunker than he had ever been and still been semi-conscious. He didn’t really recognize where Bobby had taken him, though he figured it was somewhere near the railroad tracks. He didn’t guess he would recognize much of anything in the state he was in, but so what? Bobby was cool. He’d treated him all night, brought him to a bar, bought him a few Jack Daniels, a cheeseburger and fries, and another JD for dessert. After that he’d given Tommy cash to go buy them a bottle of whatever he wanted at a liquor store on Suffolk Avenue.

  They’d polished off the bottle of JD, sitting together on the grounds of the old college, north of the new minor league baseball stadium. They’d talked a lot about Gravesend and some of the people they knew in common. Talked about the girls they had fucked. Tommy had gone on about one in particular: Pattie Petrocelli. Talked about how she was the hottest girl in the neighborhood even when she was young.

  “Man, I was fucking her since she was twelve. Taught her how to suck cock so that no one ever did it no better. Wasn’t nothing I didn’t teach her,” Tommy bragged. “I taught her how to do it all, man. And I mean all.”

  “Come on, Tommy,” Bobby said after Tommy had described a particularly interesting encounter with Pattie P. in the boys’ bathroom at Lafayette High School. “Let’s walk some of this shit off.”

  That was before. They had walked for what seemed like forever and Bobby had been really quiet. Tommy just figured that the booze had finally gotten to Bobby. Shit, they’d had enough to drown a freakin’ elephant.

  “This is good here,” Bobby said, stopping in place.

  “Good for what, huh?” Tommy slurred.

  Bobby didn’t answer. He just kind of smiled like he had on the train. Then he said, “I thought you woulda remembered me by now, Tommy Douchebag.”

  “Hey, man, there’s no need to—”

  He didn’t finish the sentence because Bobby’s left fist connected with Tommy’s gut so hard he puked. When Tommy was done puking, Bobby grabbed Tommy by the hair, stood him up and broke his jaw with another left. Bobby was writhing in pain at Bobby’s feet, making tortured squeals and screams. Bobby checked his watch and yanked Tommy by his jacket collar past some bushes, up some stairs, and onto an overpass.

  “Still don’t remember me?” Bobby asked again, putting his fist into Tommy’s rib cage so hard that many of his ribs snapped. “You should. You sure remember a lot about my sister, Pattie.”

  Tommy’s eyes got wide as he remembered Bobby. But Pattie’s big brother was named Nick and he had been in prison when…Oh shit!

  Bobby saw the look in Tommy’s eyes and knew Tommy knew. A train whistle blew in the distance, maybe a mile or two away from the overpass.

  “That’s right, Tommy Douchebag.”

  Bobby stopped talking while he proceeded to beat Tommy into unconsciousness. Then he lifted Tommy up over the railing and dropped him right in front of the oncoming train. Bobby, Nick actually, watched as the train shredded Tommy Dushane into little pieces of fuck up beneath its wheels.

  As he made his way down the steps, he noticed a bunch of sleeping pigeons on a horizontal metal beam on the underside of the overpass. He shook his head and wondered why you never saw baby pigeons, ever.

  Back to TOC

  SWAN SONG

  Hilary Davidson

  It wasn’t quite noon but Celina was on her third mimosa. I’d made them weaker than I would’ve for other guests, but that only made her gulp them down faster. “Alice,” she stared at me intently. “If you were a man, would you want to fuck me?”

  I glanced at the sunroom. My three-year-old twins, Aimee and Ava, were busy finger-painting something—hopefully paper—on the floor. They gave each other a curious little glance and went back to pretending to ignore us.

  “You can’t talk like that in front of the children,” I whispered.

  Celina took another drink, running one hand through her long platinum hair. She heaved a sigh, but her awe-inspiring chest barely deflated. When we were in our twenties, Celina’s breasts had made her a favorite with Maxim magazine and earned her walk-on parts usually described in the script only as “the babe.” Her agent had mined that hoary old trick, insuring her pneumatic assets wit
h Lloyd’s of London. A decade later, her chest was larger than ever, but no one in Hollywood seemed to care anymore. That didn’t stop Celina from trying. On a quiet Sunday morning in New York, she had her extreme hourglass figure squeezed into a low-cut gold lame confection.

  “Why are you asking?” I added, my voice still hushed. “You’re not thinking of more surgery, are you?”

  “Maybe I need to. It’s not like I’m getting work. You know what I was offered on Thursday? Playing a mother on some lousy sitcom. I’m thirty-six and I’m not up for leading roles anymore.” Her voice was getting louder. “The juicy, sexy parts are going to twenty-two-year-old airheads who are screwing anything with a fat wallet. No wonder Marilyn Monroe killed herself when she was thirty-six. Can you picture her playing someone’s mother?”

  “Mommy, we don’t have orange.” Aimee looked over. “We need orange.”

  “Daddy’s going to bring orange paint with him when he comes home,” I promised. “He said he’d pick it up.” My husband was a specialist in rehabilitative medicine at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Sunday mornings were a busy time for him.

  “We need it now,” Ava yelled. “We need orange!” Turning three hadn’t done away with the Terrible Twos. The twins were worse than ever.

  “Why don’t you mix red and yellow?” I said. That earned me glares from the twins.

  “Ugh, rug rats, you’re giving Auntie Celina a headache.” Celina’s voice seeped through the room like poisonous gas. The twins settled back onto the floor, murmuring between themselves and casting furtive glances at Celina. They were fascinated by her, but never spoke to her directly.

  I stood and walked into the sunroom, annoyed at Celina but unable to say so. She was so bitter these days that I could only take her presence in tiny draughts.

  “Alice, where’s that pitcher of mimosas?” called Celina.

  “On the table,” I answered, but as I glanced over, I saw that it was empty. Had Celina guzzled it down the second I’d moved away from my chair? I backtracked into the living room, picked up the pitcher, and went to the kitchen. Celina followed.

  “It’s so frustrating. I don’t know what to do anymore,” she whined. I wasn’t about to press more oranges for fresh juice, so I extracted the ready-made kind from the fridge. “I’m no saint. I’ve slept with plenty of producers. But now, it’s like I have to get on my knees just to get an audition for a shitty part I don’t even want, you know?”

  I poured champagne into the pitcher and stirred. “Mmm-hmm.”

  “I know I’ve got what it takes,” Celina went on, pacing. “My acting coach says that she hasn’t seen anyone since Cate Blanchett with talent like mine. She says the depths I can get to, the emotional honesty in my performances is just overwhelming. But how do I get to show that off? I don’t have much time left if I’m going to be famous.”

  “It’s getting harder out there all the time for actresses.” I reached for the Grand Marnier. The mimosas needed just a splash. Maybe two.

  “Easy for you to be smug. Not all of us can marry rich doctors and sit around all day doing nothing.” Celina poured champagne directly into her glass. “Of course, I’m not saying you have it easy,” she added slyly. “My grandmother always said that people who marry for money have to work hard to keep it. I wouldn’t take on your life for anything.”

  “There’s nothing I miss about Hollywood.”

  “You would’ve been a star if you stayed. But you threw it all away. For what? To be a house-mouse? This is your prize.” Celina turned in a circle, lifting her hands at the stupidity of it all. My children, my husband, my Brooklyn brownstone, there was not one thing she could imagine wanting.

  Sometimes it was hard to remember why Celina and I were still friends. I was fond of her when she was at her home in Los Angeles, but when she visited me, she grated on my nerves. She was my only connection to my former life as an actress. I’d met her when I’d first come to New York, a starry-eyed eighteen-year-old who’d just taken her first plane ride. We’d been classmates at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute and roommates at the Parkside Evangeline, the Gramercy Park residence for young single ladies that the Salvation Army used to run, before it sold the building for condos. Back then, Celina had awed me. She was just two years older, but I was from Battle Creek, Michigan, and she was the granddaughter of a Russian countess. “My family died in the Russian Revolution,” she announced the day we met, speaking as dramatically as if her mother and father had just been shot by the Red Army, not four generations back. That it took me several years to even question her claim was perhaps a tribute to Celina’s acting talent, or proof of what a rube I was.

  “The problem with you, Alice, is you’re a quitter,” Celina said at lunch a week after our mimosa-fest. She’d disappeared for a few days, without telling me where, and now she was crackling with energy. “You could’ve been the next Naomi Watts. You could’ve had an Oscar! Instead you gave it all up to change diapers.”

  I took a bite of sea bass and tried not to grimace. Back in the day, I’d starred in a few plays so far off Broadway the cast risked falling into the Hudson. I remembered years of auditioning when I was always hungry, partly because I had no money, but usually because I was starving myself for a role. Then I’d gone to Hollywood, and all I wanted to do was forget what happened there. I forced my brain away from that unwelcome memory. It was a terrible time I’d never visit again.

  “It’s not like acting was the be-all of my existence. I was ready for a change,” I said. “I was exhausted by trying to make it happen. Not the acting, but all the…other things.” That was quite the euphemism, but I hoped Celina would pick up on what I was inferring.

  “You didn’t have what it takes to bask in the limelight. That’s the bottom line.” Celina signaled to the waiter to bring her another glass of wine. I shook my head to indicate the round was only for her. “If you did, the desire would burn through you like a thousand stars. It would be the only thing that mattered.”

  “There are a lot of things that matter to me. That’s no one of them.”

  “Well, I have news,” Celina said. She stared at me, waiting for me to drag it out of her. “Because I have finally made it.”

  “Really?”

  “You can’t tell anyone this,” she whispered. “But Edgar Ravovitch is casting me in his next film.”

  “The Hippopotamus?” My mouth went dry suddenly. Celina was smiling and nodding at me. The waiter put a fresh glass of white wine down in front of her and I turned my eyes toward him. “Actually, I’ll have one of those, too, please.”

  “I knew I’d break you out of your little house-mouse rut,” Celina said. “Cheers, sweetie.”

  Edgar Ravovitch had been making movies for thirty years. There were two rooms in his Hollywood Hills mansion devoted to the countless awards he’d won for writing, directing and producing. But there was another, more twisted accolade he’d earned over that time. He didn’t just sexually exploit women, as so many film executives did; he humiliated and degraded them, and then he sometimes destroyed them.

  “Celina, you can’t be serious.”

  “I know, he’s repulsive in every way. I don’t think he’s taken a shower in the past decade. He’s so ginormous now he has to use one of those motorized scooters to get around. Imagine having your ass grabbed by that.”

  The waiter put a glass of wine in front of me and I drank half of it down in one gulp. It was clear that Celina had completely forgotten what had happened to me when I’d tangled with Edgar Ravovitch. That, or my friend was actually a far better actress than I’d ever realized.

  “He’s a dangerous man,” I said.

  “He’s incredibly disgusting, but he makes stars. Look at his track record! This is the project that could put me over the top.” She took another drink and shuddered. “And, Alice baby, I will have earned it. You have no idea.”

  “Please don’t tell me you spent the past few days with h
im.”

  “He took me to Paris. Which I never really got to see, because those cobblestone streets are a bitch with a scooter.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re going to say that every girl sleeps with him for a part,” Celina said. “That’s true. That’s how some of the most famous actresses in the world started out. He makes them famous. It’s a trade.” Celina finished the rest of her wine. “It’s just business, after all. And that’s how you do business with Edgar.”

  “There’s no guarantee he’ll do anything for you,” I said.

  “Of course he will.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Didn’t he come through for you after your little interlude with him?”

  I could feel my heart beating in my throat. She remembered, after all.

  “Only somehow, you didn’t have the nerve to go through with it. He offered you a starring role in that nineteenth-century hospital drama he made. You would’ve won an Oscar for sure.” She peered at me with her fierce, feline eyes. “Maybe you were a little house-mouse then and just didn’t realize it?”

  Celina was, in many ways, the same woman I’d met at eighteen, only sharper around the edges, a diamond cut and faceted, smaller but undiminished, revealing more of the fire within. It was entirely possible that I was wrong to fear for her. She was stronger than I was, more determined. Bitterness had made her ruthless. It was quite possible she could deal with Edgar and win. I couldn’t talk about what Edgar Ravovitch had done to me, so returned to her favorite subject.

  “What’s the film you’ll be in?” My voice cracked on the question.

  “It’s a ghost story. You know that guy they’re calling the new Brad Pitt? He’s starring in it.”

  “And you are?”

  “The ghost. The movie is going to start with the scene where I get murdered. I’m an eighteenth century English Duchess. The costumes are going to be so beautiful!” Celina hugged herself quickly. “I know it’s not a big part, but it’s a prominent part, if you know what I mean. I have the weirdest feeling, like it’s going to change my life. My psychic says it will. It’s finally going to happen for me, Alice! I’m going to be famous, at last.”