by Rob Bliss
During the whole time, I was fed more drinks and coke and pills and weed, and who knows what else. I sucked Jell-O shooters from many pairs of amazing breasts and out of vaginas. Girls, some wearing leather bondage gear, sat on the table in front of me with their legs spread, a tiny plastic cup with green gelatin nestled between their labia. A gathering crowd watched me and cheered, and I had no idea who anyone was, not even the girls.
I didn’t remember moving from the booth for much of the night, except twice. I have vague memories of being in two other places that night, though I didn’t know how I got to either one. And one of the places, I think, I left and returned to.
The first was a bedroom with walls made of mirror, in the middle of which sat a retro ’60s circular bed, draped in red satin sheets, that revolved as I lay on it. Me and three girls, that is. A white girl, a black girl (not the same previous one), and an Asian girl. We were all naked. Girls with me, girls with each other.
In that place, my penis rose and never went down. In fact, oddly, it felt at least twelve inches long. That couldn’t be real. I remember fucking all three girls for hours, shooting my load, then kept fucking them and I was never tired. Nor were they.
Then the next scene I remember had the four of us outside in the swamp. The girls were dressed in bikinis, each holding a shotgun, and I had a four-foot-long machete in my hand.
A skinny man in a suit and tie, collar open, with a pencil-thin moustache and a black eye, was pinned against a tree, lengths of rope tied around his waist, sweating and crying and begging for his life. The girls held their guns on him, screaming at him not to make a move, to hold still while I killed him. Then the girls—all who were calling me Daddy—told me to give it to the man, torture him, hack him to pieces, do anything I wanted. He was a present for me. He wept and pleaded for mercy.
I swung the machete. He put up his arms instinctively to block the blow, and both of his arms flew off, between wrists and elbows. The Asian girl caught a piece of one arm in mid-air and used it as a club to smack the man in his face. He didn’t react to the blow, too busy screaming as blood gushed from his arm stumps. The girl then rubbed his dead hands between her legs.
While he stared in horror at his life pouring out, I stuck the tip of the machete against his trachea, pushed and twisted, reached fingers in, and pulled out a piece of his throat. I was going for his voicebox to shut him up. His screams turned to gurgles and whistles. The girls hooted and laughed, and I stared at the wedge of bloody flesh and the little bones I held in my hand. Then I put a two-handed grip on the blade and swung it like a baseball bat. His screams cut off as his head flew into the white girl’s arms.
The girls all howled with laughter, and each took turns kissing the dead man’s lips while fury consumed me, and I hacked and hacked at his lifeless body on the ground.
We all cheered, hearts pumping adrenaline, sweat covering my face, blood on us all. The Asian girl threw the arm on the corpse, looked deeply into my eyes, and whispered, “My husband.” I smiled and nodded.
The victim’s head stayed with us as we headed out of the woods.
The next scene was back in the bedroom. The girls and I naked again, the severed head propped up on a pillow. I was as hard as iron again, so we all fucked.
Each girl used the head obscenely, putting its mouth between their legs, then the black girl lined the thing up with its mouth open. She grabbed a heavy glass ashtray filled with old joints and smashed it against the head’s mouth, and all its teeth dribbling down the chin.
I fucked the toothless mouth of the decapitated head as the girls urged me on, two of them caressing my body as the Asian girl held the head stable to bear the brunt of my thrusts.
I shot semen across its tongue to the back of its throat. Then the girls all sucked my cream from the dead mouth and caressed me with their hands and lips as I rested from the greatest orgasm of my life.
They then plucked out the dead man’s eyes and told me they were delicacies, as sweet as grapes. I believed them and ate the eyes.
I recalled one of them saying, “Welcome to the family” before the rest of the night erased itself from memory.
— | — | —
Chapter 6
I woke on Gord’s couch, clothes on but stained with lipstick, alcohol, blood, cocaine, not remembering all that had happened the night before, or how I got back to the apartment. My head felt fine, no migraine, but my muscles were burning sore. I sat up on the couch and saw the slit sandbag of coke still on the coffee table. Part of me wanted to start a coke high again, but I knew that wouldn’t be a good idea.
I headed to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. Peeked into Gord’s room, hearing his snores. He was sprawled on his bed naked, the sheet covering his crotch, thankfully. I closed his door quietly and stepped outside to get some fresh air.
I was in a small town, so I walked the main street, going nowhere, just needing to move my muscles and let the scenes of the night come back to me. Took me a while to piece things together, wondering what was true and what false, doubting everything—the girls, the man, the machete in my hand. It had to have been a drug-induced hallucination. How many drugs had I been given? It was how I explained it to myself, so I didn’t worry about it anymore.
As I strolled, feeling the sun on my face, people passed, smiled and waved at me, saying hello, very friendly. They all seemed to know me, but I knew none of them.
Then a short, old man with a cane and straw hat stopped and said, with a smile and a wink, “That was a helluva party last night.”
My eyebrows wrinkled as I peered down at him, stooped over, a bit of a hunchback. “You were there?”
“Oh sure, wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
I may have hallucinated, but I was pretty sure there were no old men at the roadhouse. He was about to keep walking, but I stopped him. “Did you see me?”
He chuckled and false teeth rattled in his mouth. “Of course. You’re Chris, the best man, and one of the star attractions.”
“Uh…no offense, but I don’t remember seeing anyone over the age of, let’s say, fifty or sixty. And you don’t look like a motorcycle gang member.”
He snorted and rested a shaky, liver-spotted hand on my shoulder, patting me as if I was his grandson. “Looks can be deceiving. You’re in Red Wood now.”
A weak smile formed on my lips as I stared into his rheumatic eyes. He patted me a few more times, then kept walking, cane tip tapping the sidewalk as his feet shuffled him away.
I turned, stuffed hands into my pockets, then I heard the old man call at my back, “Cut that fucker’s head off good.”
I spun to see him stopped, looking at me. He winked and tipped his hat, kept walking. I stood frozen for a while, before I turned and continued down the sidewalk.
I passed through the center of town, a gas station on either side of the main intersection, but no one seemed to work at either of them or were stopped for gas. A small town, I guessed, looked deserted, not due to anything strange, but because the handful of people who lived there were all elsewhere, probably at home, asleep, watching TV or movies, feeding livestock or cooking pies to cool on the windowsill.
I came to a small bridge which spanned a creek. To either side, lining the water, was a park. I strolled away from the street across the grass. Feeling calmed by the sound of the trickling water, I watched minnows in the shallows, the water pristine and clear, straight from some distant mountain in the Rockies, colored pebbles on the banks. I walked and plopped stones into the water, glancing around the small parklands for a place to sit. I needed to get my head straight from the nightmare flashes of the night, and from what I thought I heard the old man say. There was no way he could’ve been at the roadhouse—the noise, the lights, the naked skin, the smoke in the air alone would’ve killed him.
He must’ve been joking—hazing the new guy. Of course, he would know who I was—it was a small town and Gord was popular. And Gord was popular because Venus was popular.
I wondered what she and her bridesmaids did the night before. If there was an all-girl roadhouse with male strippers. And was she sleeping off her exhaustion too?
Would that day still be the day of the wedding, or would it have to be cancelled due to excessive…excess.
I rounded a bend in the stream and rose over a small hill. A gazebo was just ahead, standing near the stream. My legs were still aching, so I hoped the gazebo had benches lining the interior.
(Had I run a marathon last night? No. I had fucked three hot girls multiple times. The ache centered above my legs, met at my pelvis—definitely an ache from vigorous sex.)
As I approached the gazebo, I saw that at least one person, maybe two, were already in it. The locals were friendly enough, so I figured I wouldn’t be a snob. Before I could climb the stairs up into the structure, I saw the faces of three sweet old ladies smiling back at me. They sat around a wrought iron circular table on wrought iron chairs, sipping tea, with a teapot steaming in the center of the table.
One lady was white, one was black, and the third was Asian.
“Hello, Chris,” they said in unison. “Thanks for the good hard fuck.”
««—»»
I awoke on Gord’s sofa—again—squeezed into a ball, with Gord sitting by my feet in his underwear, white powder rimming his nostrils and a razor blade in his hand hovering over a mirror.
“Want some?” he offered.
I shook my head, cleared my eyes from the latest dream (one of the most vivid dreams I’d ever had), and sat up. Saw that I was dressed in the clothes I had worn in the dream and began wondering again if it was real or not.
“How can you do that so early?” I asked Gord as he rubbed residue coke off his fingers onto his gums.
“I told you, buddy, I’m staying high for the whole wedding…probably the honeymoon too.”
I yawned and rubbed the heels of my palms into my eyes. “I never asked—where are you going for your honeymoon?”
“Haven’t decided.”
“Haven’t decided? It starts tomorrow, doesn’t it?”
“What I mean is, we might hold off for a month or two.”
“Oh, okay.”
“One day at a time, my friend.” Gord slapped my foot, smiled. “You look like hell—I guess I did my job.” He laughed.
Groaning, I said, “That was a good party, I’ll give you that. I can barely remember half of it.”
“Well, don’t go to sleep on me yet, we gotta try on tuxedos today.”
A shot of fear went through me. “Oh God, isn’t it a little late? We should’ve done that when I arrived. God, where’s my head, I totally forgot we gotta dress for a wedding—you especially.”
He laughed. “Well then move, son—get in the shower. Hose yourself down.”
I did, and an hour later he and I went to a small shop above a closed-down toy store facing the main street. Gord had stuffed himself with coke and a few strange pills before we left. In the truck, there were three bags of coke under our seats, but the rest of it had vanished from the back, presumably removed to be delivered to the wedding—not stolen, or so he said. He nestled one bag beside his thigh as he drove, poked a hole in it, snorted it off his finger. I said I had had enough, thanks.
“You’ll want some later, don’t worry. Help yourself, you don’t need my permission to have fun. Plenty for everybody,” he said as we drove slowly down main street.
I squinted at the sunlight coming through the hole he had shot through his roof, then looked away, feeling a pain in my temples. “I had no idea you’d become such a coke addict,” I said bluntly.
“Oh hell, it’s no big deal. We’re in the boonies—gotta have fun. You only live so long.”
He clicked his tongue with that last line, sounded like he expected to die at any moment. That was when I thought that maybe he had an incurable disease which he was keeping secret. Things started making sense. He was dying and he wanted to get a rush marriage before he was gone, and he wanted to go out with a bang. Why not do as many drugs as possible—he’ll be dead soon anyway?
It made sense and was horrible. I said nothing. I felt sad as we got out of the truck. The ground-floor store front was a boarded-up door with a rusted lock, peeling green paint, and two large windows fogged by mildew and grime from many decades. Wooden soldiers, a hobby horse, building blocks for the kids, all bearing price tags from fifty years ago, were covered in dust, dead flies and spiders.
We entered through a door inset beside the locked door. Climbed worn wooden steps to an upper floor, a heavy smell of wood dust and mildew in the air of the narrow staircase. At the top of the stairs was a single door down a short hardwood hall.
Gord knocked and twisted a creaking glass doorknob. We were in a tailor’s shop. Open closets of suits and costumes, mannequins standing naked, wooden heads hearing wigs and old hats. Looked like it belonged to the London of Dickens. Heavy black drapes on the windows blocked out the view of the street, a few antique lamps scattered around illuminated the room with dull yellow and orange light. In one corner stood a full-length oval mirror on a wooden stand.
A thin old man in a black suit emerged from a doorway of black crystal beads, and greeted Gord morosely. “Hello, my friend. Congratulations on your approaching nuptials.”
He looked more like a coroner than a tailor, though a measuring tape hung around his neck. His hands were skeletons covered in skin, fingers long and narrow, knuckles like vertebrae, fingernails pointed and yellow. He smelled old.
“Thanks, Gorman,” Gord said, then patted my shoulder. “This is Chris, my best man. We’re here to look pretty.”
A flicker of a smile twitched on Gorman’s lipless grey mouth. “Pretty. Interesting choice of words. I have your uniforms already prepared.”
He disappeared back through the beads, and I whispered to Gord, “Uniforms?”
He whispered back, with a dismissive wave of his hand, “That’s just what he calls our tuxes.”
I could hear Gorman’s slow shoes tap as he stepped and creaked the wood of whatever back room he was wandering around in. The sound faded, became distant, as though the backroom was immense, stretching far behind the limits of the small store on main street.
Then the sound of steel wheels creaked, rolling across floorboards, until the tailor pushed out two half-mannequins on rolling stands, each dressed in shirts and vests and jackets that looked from the court of Louis XIV.
I thought it was a joke, but Gord smiled proudly and headed to one of the mannequins.
“Oh, they’re beauts, Gor!”
The tailor helped Gord change from his modern wardrobe into an ancient one. Gord did up the hook and eye clasps of the vest while looking at himself in the oval mirror.
“Goddamn! Whaddaya think, Chris?”
“Of course, there is an appropriate shirt to accompany the outer wear,” Gorman added as he adjusted the vest on Gord’s shoulders, then retrieved the jacket off the mannequin.
You never know what you’re going to be asked to wear when you’re in someone’s wedding. I tried to be nice.
“Incredible,” I said, looking at my ‘uniform’ still hanging on its mannequin. “Like something out of a movie.”
Gorman caught my eye—the man did not smile.
“Shall I help you get dressed, sir?”
“Oh…uh, yeah, I guess so,” I stammered as I stood, arms limp at my sides to let the tailor do what he did best. “I wouldn’t know the first thing about putting one of these things on.”
As the tailor slipped the vest on me, I wondered two things: where were the pants and shoes that went with this uniform, and how could Gorman know what size I was? Well, maybe he had an expert tailor’s eye and could accurately guess from just a photograph. That must’ve been it.
Gord and I were soon dressed as though we were about to hear Bach in person play a harpsicord. The vest and jacket were woven with golden thread on a black background, depicting strange mosaics of animals and people and monsters i
n the ornate tapestry. The fabric was a little stiff, but I could move my arms easily. Didn’t feel like I was wearing cardboard, but I assumed that both pieces could stand up on their own if I stood them on the floor. They must’ve been old, but didn’t smell of dust and age, and the cloth was pristine. The gold and black both shined.
Gorman brushed us off and adjusted the jackets across our shoulders and the vests around our midsections.
“Whaddaya think?” Gord asked me again.
I remained polite. “Yeah, wow, this is wild—I guess this is going to be one fancy wedding.”
Gord laughed. “Fancy’s not the word for it. Right, Gor?”
The tailor gave his Mona Lisa smile again as his dark eyes looked at me. “Your best man is skilled in his choice of words.”
Gorman gave me the creeps—up my spine and down the backs of my legs. I expected to hear funeral music play from the depths of the room through the beads.
I swallowed a lump of fear and asked Gord, “Are there pants that go with this?”
Felt Gorman’s eyes on me, saw his smile, knew he was, again, thinking about my choice of words. Maybe there were no pants that went with the uniform. Then I recalled a few books I had read and period-piece movies I’d seen. I was pretty sure that nylons and buckle shoes went with this type of costume (a better word).
Shit. Nylons? I could not see Gord wearing those. I hoped to hell Venus wasn’t behind this bizarre costume for her fiancé and his best man. Gord was too pussy-whipped to argue. It was getting harder and harder to figure out my old friend. Coke? Nylons? Five years and new scenery can really change a man.
“Not to worry,” Gord said, “those come later.” He started taking off his jacket, Gorman helping. “These will be delivered?”
