YOUR GRANDFATHER HAD A SCANDAL INVOLVING INHALERS. He got caught soaking Benzedrine cotton inhalers in coffee and drinking it with the other degenerates in Times Square. Before he moved back to Cleveland, missing his teeth, Gramps had his pocket picked by Herbert Huncke, also high on Bennies. Each time you share this, which you forget that you made up, you bust your buttons. But all your stories are from long ago. Even the true ones.
You are normal. It’s the speed that made you a freak.
JERRY STAHL is the author of six books, including the memoir Permanent Midnight (made into a movie with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson) and the novels I, Fatty and Pain Killers. Formerly “culture” columnist for Details, Stahl’s fiction and journalism has appeared in Esquire, the New York Times, and The Believer, among other places. Most recently, he wrote Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, for HBO. Currently, he is completing a novel, Jumping from the H, and working on a remake of The Thin Man with Johnny Depp.
labiodental fricative
by scott phillips
torie
So you want to know something weird about Jerry?” I ask. Glen stops licking for a second and I immediately regret it. “Huh?”
“Get your face back down there, big boy.” He starts up again, not the best head I’ve ever had but better than Jerry anyway. Better than none. “He has a tooth fetish.”
He stops licking again and starts laughing.
“Get back to it,” I tell him, “I’m just about ready.” We’re in the backseat of Glen’s Lexus, which is pretty fucking sweet, even if he is living in it. When he first told me he was driving one I thought he was full of shit, because he looked like a guy who lived in a dumpster or maybe just a grove of trees down by the river. Or beneath an underpass or in a refrigerator box.
And while I can hardly believe I’m letting him go down on me like this, I also can’t believe he’s doing it so enthusiastically, because to be perfectly honest, I left Jerry’s in kind of a rush this morning and I don’t know exactly what it’s like down there, but I’m experiencing that not-so-fresh feeling, if you know what I mean. I get the feeling he just wants to fuck me so bad he’s willing to go through a lot for it, which is kind of romantic when you think of it, and he knows perfectly well why I’m doing it: because I know he’s holding and right now Jerry isn’t and inside Glen was hinting that he had a lead on a whole bunch of it and that was why he was trying to sell Jerry that penis back at the bar.
I’m getting tired of listening to the little animal noises he’s making, like he thinks there’s something sexy about being gone down on by a big old slobbery bear, and anyway I’m never going to come so I make some reasonably convincing orgasm noises and pull him up and in, and thank Christ it only takes him about fifteen seconds to come, which is when it occurs to me that I should have made him wear a condom and probably a dental dam too, because Christ only knows what a guy like him has swimming around on his tongue.
So anyway, he’s pulling his pants back up, at which point I become aware of a pretty gamy odor that I realize is coming from his crotch, and I have to hold my breath until he gets buckled back up again, and even then it lingers like foreign cheese in the back of the Lexus, which has real leather seats, probably standard equipment, and he says, “What was that about a fetish?”
“Tooth fetish. I’m a dental hygienist.”
“I thought you managed Furry’s.”
“I do. I used to be a hygienist, is what I should have said, and the first time Jerry met me he said what a beautiful big mouth I had, and I almost hit him because I’m sensitive about the size of my teeth, but I could see he was totally serious so I took it as sweet instead of, you know, insulting. So how’d you get hold of Dean Martin’s penis anyway?”
jerry
The first time I saw Torie I was a lost cause. Big, round eyes, incisors prominent enough that her lips are slightly parted when her face is at rest, like she’s just about to say something. Thick, wavy black hair, a long, aquiline nose, and perfect olive skin. I knew right then I’d follow her anywhere. Which is how Torie ended up managing the bar instead of cleaning other people’s less attractive teeth, and living in my condo instead of at home with her husband and three kids. As well as snorting me out of house and home, which is a hard thing for me to complain about since I was the one got her started on crank when we first started partying together.
She used to come in with her friends and fellow hygienists after work. A couple of times when she stayed late, long after the other girls went home, we had deep discussions about life—hers, mostly—and its attendant disappointments—again, mainly hers. One night her husband came by to get her, and he made it clear that he didn’t consider this the kind of place where a decent Christian wife and mother ought to be spending her evenings.
But the band was playing, and she’d been dancing and having a good time, and she had no intention of leaving. We had the Jake Hornor Blues Band playing every second Friday and Saturday of the month back then, best draw I ever had, and this was the third time I’d let her sample a little bit of what Larry the dishwasher had been selling me (and a good portion of my staff and clientele) for the last couple years. When hubby grabbed her upper arm on the dance floor to drag her out to her car, she swung at him with the other fist and the whole thing ended up with Kurt—that’s the husband—eighty-sixed and thinking he was lucky I didn’t bring the cops in on his ass. (I make it a rule never to call the cops unless we’ve been robbed, but he didn’t know that.)
She lost her hygienist job a couple of months after, over chronic lateness and absenteeism. I hired her on as a waitress, and when she turned out not to have that in her, I just made her a manager and let her earn a living being hot.
And then a year and a half had gone by, and I’d gotten into the business of distribution myself, with Larry the dishwasher promoted to ID checker/procurer, and Torie had gotten herself seriously skinny. She was never a big girl, but by the time my old buddy Glen came in after two or three years’ absence, she was getting, to these old eyes, a wee bit cadaverous.
Apart from his eyes being so bulbous, red, and wet, Glen might himself have passed for a corpse of a couple weeks’ standing as he leaned on the bar and lectured me about how badly the place had gone downhill since the last time he was in. “Who you got playing this weekend?” he asked. “Heard Hornor won’t play here anymore; says you stiffed him.”
“He’s a fucking liar. I won’t book him anymore—he showed up drunk three times in a row and I fired his ass.” This was true, though he played just fine when he was drunk. I had stiffed him twice, though I still had every intention of paying him what I owed. “Got the Jimmie Kralik Trio coming in.”
“Fuck that, those guys couldn’t draw a crowd to a public hanging,” Glen said. He couldn’t quit looking at Torie, who in turn was pretending he wasn’t there.
Watching someone else ogle your girl ought to make you see her afresh, it seems to me, maybe renew your ardor, but whatever Glen was seeing wasn’t there for me anymore. All I saw right then was how sunken her cheeks were looking, how stringy and lank her hair had gotten (she was way past due for a perm), how she didn’t braid it up anymore. That beautiful olive complexion was veering toward the greenish and she was breaking out with zits that I had to keep pointing out because she didn’t notice them herself. I’d been thinking about scaring up a little weed in hopes of getting her appetite up, maybe just enough to keep the weight she had on if not gain some of it back. Right about then I wouldn’t have minded that husband of hers showing up and taking her back to the house and kids, which he’d quit trying to do about six months after she bailed on the whole failing enterprise.
“Got a business proposition for you,” Glen said. He was a lawyer, or had been at any rate, and he’d presented me with opportunities in the past that hadn’t turned out too badly, as well as a few others I knew enough to steer clear of. This was the first time I’d seen him since he’d headed up to Portland, Oregon,
to help his brother run a rehabilitation facility for the blind and speechless or some such charity scam.
Torie snorted and turned away. I could understand, seeing Glen the way he looked now and never having experienced Glen the prosperous attorney: glad-hander Glen, buyer of rounds, purveyor of free legal advice to the indigent, ladies’ man, bon vivant. This Glen looked like he could use a hot meal and a good night’s sleep somewhere besides the backseat of his car. I poured him a shot and slid it in front of him; since he hadn’t asked for one I assumed he didn’t have the money to pay for it.
“On me,” I said. “Welcome home.”
“Much appreciated.” He slammed it and set the glass back down on the table, then extracted from his inside jacket pocket a cardboard box. “Behold,” he said, opening it to reveal what looked like a piece of beef jerky resting on a bed of cotton.
“Nice,” I said.
“You know what I have here?”
“Looks like a dried-up turd,” Torie said, her voice now raspy as any grizzled barfly’s.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Glen announced in what I imagine was a weak echo of his erstwhile courtroom vocal style, “for your amusement and edification, the johnson of the Chairman of the Board.”
“His what, now?”
“This is the mummified penis of Mr. Francis Albert Sinatra.”
torie
I’m starting to get nervous because I’m all of a sudden conscious of the parking lot lights shining into the back of the Lexus.
“Jesus, who’d want to buy Dean Martin’s cock?”
“Frank Sinatra’s, get it straight.”
“Whatever,” I shrug, thinking it’s no wonder Glen’s not married, he hasn’t said anything sweet to me since he came, the kind of things a lady likes to hear after intercourse, like You have really pretty lashes or Your hair smells terrific or God, your boobs look good in the moonlight, things like that. Anyway, I press the matter, thinking it has something to do with the meth. “Okay, Sinatra’s junk, then, where’d you get it?”
“Guy sold it to me in the bar of a Mexican restaurant in Palm Desert. Said they’d had to disinter him for some kind of maintenance—the concrete seal was broken on the vault or some such thing—and while he was above ground they were storing the remains inside the mortuary. So this guy broke Frank’s dick off and kept it for a couple years as a lucky charm.”
“Huh.”
“And as a lucky charm it didn’t do him much good, because when I met him he was really hurting for some crank and I happened to be holding, so I traded him, and afterward it occurs to me that this might be worth some change. And when I hit town today, just by coincidence, I run into my old friend Chuck who wants to know do I know anybody who’s got five hundred dollars, ’cause he’s got himself several cases of store-brand cold medicine that just fell off a loading dock.”
I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a coincidence and I tell him that I think Frank Sinatra’s leaky vault and Chuck’s case of cold medicine and Glen’s and my meeting and Jerry being out of crank all coming together at once are a plan of the cosmos, which is the kind of thing I never would have said a few years ago but which I truly believe now, having experienced too many weird juxtapositions of reality over the last couple of years to take any of these signs and wonders for granted.
“Does that mean you’ve got five hundred?” he asks.
The truth is, I have about seventy-five bucks in my checking, because I have to pay child support, if you can believe that, to my ex-husband Kurt, who has an $80,000-a-year job in franchise relations at Pizza Hut, while I’m making $23,000 and change working for my cheapskate boyfriend, which Kurt knows perfectly well and so does his lawyer and so does the judge, but they’re all about making me pay for being a runaway mom. Believe me, if the situation was reversed there’d be divorced dads support groups all over the case, but believe me too when I say nobody likes a runaway mom, especially when the youngest one wasn’t even talking yet when I left and Kurt has trained her to call me Torie instead of Mommy, and Kurt’s new wife Perfect Stacia gets called Mommy. Stacia who totally had her sights set on Kurt way, way before I split, who was licking her chops like a Doberman eyeing a three-legged kitten when she heard I’d blown. Like I give a shit anyway.
“We could get it,” I tell him.
glen
My first thought was: kill Jerry and make it look like a stickup, take the money and the woman both. Jerry’s always treated me like a schmuck, even when I’ve helped him out of a couple of legal scrapes, including one serious count of selling liquor to a minor. That one was no walk in the park, and all he did when it was over was piss and moan about the bribe money he’d had to lay out. And then there was the question of Frank Sinatra’s desiccated organ. I was tweaking when I got hold of it, and I’d been tweaking ever since, and Jerry’s dismissive attitude slammed home the obvious fact that I had no way to prove whose junk I was carrying, short of calling up Frank Jr. and asking for a DNA sample. The fantasy mountain of pure crystal and pussy and cash created by the tectonic activity of my overstimulated cerebral cortex collapsed instantaneously into a crevasse of despair and cheap-ass street meth. I had hit the wall, and just as I was running out of crank.
Yeah, I could have killed Jerry with no compunctions.
chuck
It is easy enough, I suppose, to underestimate the intelligence of a man who sells pot next to a dumpster behind the Choose’n’Save, especially for someone like Glen, who thinks himself a sharpy in the vein of a Hugh Hefner or a Warren Beatty or a Gary Hart. You know the kind I mean. When he sees a woman that pleases his eye he sets that eye on her until his filthy ends are met, then he loses interest in that particular lady who no doubt is or was the most precious flower of another. He did this to my own precious flower six years ago, when my girlfriend Gretchen was facing a charge of possession with intent to distribute.
Marijuana. Cannabis sativa. I was a slave to it as much as to her at that time; the fact that she had an ounce and a half of it on her person upon her arrest was strictly due to my own baleful influence. Enter, in the outward guise of savior, my friend (I thought) Glen, hotshot attorney and drinking buddy, occasional purchaser of my wares. He worked the case without recompense, for which I was grateful.
Then, six months later, Gretchen and I were going at it hammer and tongs over her little dachshund Tami’s tendency to shit in my loafers—I did hate that awful farting bitch something fierce—when she pulled out the big rhetorical guns and announced that yes, in fact, Glen had charged a fee, and that it had involved her mouth and his organs of regeneration. I threw her and Tami out. Ever since I have been waiting for the moment (never really believing it would come) when I might pay Glen back for his perfidy.
torie
Jerry keeps a couple of grand in cash taped to the underside of his sock drawer, which is stupid. Right? Isn’t that stupid? That’s the kind of guy Jerry is. Smart and stupid both, sometimes in the same sentence.
glen
The woman was a mess and she smelled like chicken soup and swamp water, but she was the first human female in close to a year who’d consented to lay with me free of charge and I wasn’t about to fuck that up, especially when she looked ready to fly the coop on Jerry. It cost me the last of my meager stash to get her out to the Lexus, where I explained to her about the five hundred dollars and the cold medicine. She didn’t have it, she told me, and she pointed out that if we borrowed the money from Jerry unawares we wouldn’t owe anything, either in terms of cash or product.
“I like the way you think,” I told her, although what I saw in her was less thought than a kind of low animal cunning, a hillbilly slyness that made the betrayal of her boss and lover as natural and uncomplicated as switching brands of toothpaste.
We were driving out on Hydraulic headed for a supermarket. It was closed at that hour but the security guard let Chuck do some business out behind the dumpsters in return for modest monetary and pharmaceutical compensation.
I’d known Chuck for twenty years, and despite a reckless and fearless way of doing business, he’d never been in any major trouble. A lack of guile and considerable personal charm had gotten him out of many a scrape, and a lack of ambition had kept him out of the bigger leagues where he probably would have gotten himself killed.
The female was talking about teeth, a subject she probably should have avoided. First of all, hers were huge and starting to get meth gray, despite her claims that she still brushed and flossed thrice daily. Second, nobody wants to hear about that kind of shit from a dental hygienist even when they’re a captive audience in the chair, let alone when they’ve got an ongoing criminal enterprise they’re trying to concentrate on.
“You ever hear of meth mouth?” I asked her, hoping she’d get the picture and shut the fuck up. No such luck. She went into lecture mode, expounding at length about her personal theory that meth mouth was a result of tweakers neglecting their flossing because they were too distracted by the getting and consuming of their drug of choice and not because of the drug’s unorthodox chemical manufacturing process itself.
“Look at me,” she said. “I’ve been doing this for like a year or more and my teeth are as beautiful and straight as they’ve ever been.”
I agreed, but just because I thought I might want more access to her person later.
“So where are we going to sell this cold medicine once we get it?” she asked.
I had an idea, I told her, a friend of a friend up in Topeka went by the name of Crumdog, sergeant-at-arms for a bikers’ organization.
“So how come this Chuck guy wants to sell it to you?” she asked. “Wouldn’t he make better money selling it to some cook? Doesn’t he know anybody?”
“You sure do ask a lot of questions,” I said, trying not to sound like I was thinking about backhanding her.
jerry
God, I hated seeing what had become of Glen. I ignored the maybe-penis in the box and glanced back at Torie, who was still looking down her nose at him.
The Speed Chronicles Page 5
