Don Dimaio of La Plata

by Robert Arellano

  “You’re the boss, Don Dimaio. Now how about some blow, boss?”

  “After breakfast.” I tug the Rug from the top of my skull. The moment I’m alone without the Rug yakking in my head, I prop myself up with pillows and huff the five lines by myself. The Rug won’t be the wiser, and after breakfast I’ll break open the kilo and show it a little of the coke I borrowed from the cops. But I’ll be butt-fucked before I let the Rug know where the package is hidden.

  I’m looking ahead to a beautiful day, the greatest fucking day in the world: ten grand in cold cash on top of my kilo of coke, and the way this payoff worked out I won’t even have to give Cantare his usual cut. I’ll just have Sanchez swing me by Donut Donkey, because it’s payday at the dumpster. In my bedroom-bathroom suite you wouldn’t know that it’s a beautiful day with the blinds drawn tight and the curtains closed. It’s a fucking beautiful day when I throw the windows wide open and set the ceiling fans spinning. If La Plata smells a little rosier than usual it’s because I finally have the chance to get my finances in order. No more posing for loans I’ll never repay. No more pathetic whining from Sanchez or patronizing lectures from Hank. From now on, I get all the spending money I want whenever I want it, all the cocaine I can suck up my nose, and all the ladies! Stella is just the beginning. With Hank’s hard-on I’ll visit Cantare’s wife or any one of his girlfriends whenever I want. The Rug is my magic carpet ride.

  Flies buzz in the kitchen, and like anybody on a beautiful day I just want my eggs. Where the fuck did Oprah go? “Where are you, you pudgy porchmonkey?” Probably off smoking ganj and fucking the gardener. It’s a great fucking day and I’m ready to fry my own eggs, goddammit. I turn on a couple of burners and pluck a pan from above the range. I go to the fridge to find a box of butter and a carton of eggs, U.S. Grade A Extra Large Brown. Brown? I guess Oprah thinks I can’t tell the difference. I’m hungry enough I break off a little butter in my fist and plop it sizzling in the pan. I crack an egg in the pan. The smell hits and my nostrils spread. Slavishly I crack four more. Brown! Speckled too, just like Oprah’s black ass. Christ! How long have I been eating this pig shit? Oprah better start fucking buying some fucking white eggs. White! White! White!

  I’m banging drawers trying to find where she keeps the spatula when I say fuck it, I’ll just call Cantare’s cell and tell him to bring over some donuts. What a cowinkydink, he’ll think, I’m sitting here at Donut Donkey. And maybe loyal Hank will tell me, “I’m sitting here at Donut Donkey where Tommy Fritos just stood me the fuck up.”

  It’s like Christmas morning and I’m a little boy ready to open my present when I go into the bathroom and reach up to the top shelf of the closet. There’s the gun, but no bundle. The kilo is not where I left it. I tear the place apart but it’s not in the bathroom. I bang around the house and the eggs are burning but the coke is nowhere to be found. Honking in my bald head like the Mexican hat dance: no coke no coke no coke. I grab the Rug and put it on. “You filthy little gnitlid! Tell me where you put it!”

  “Where’d I put what, Don Dimaio?”

  “The motherfucking cocaine!”

  “I didn’t put it anywhere.”

  “All right, then where did you make me put it?”

  “You had Hank drop it in the mailbox last night. I never saw it after that. I promise, Don Dimaio.”

  “Shifty little dustrag!” I take both hands and squeeze the top of my head.

  “Oof! You’re hurting me!”

  “Where the fuck did you put it?” I pinch a hair in two fingers and tug on it.

  “Stop it, Don Dimaio!”

  I bother the follicle. “You may be a magic wig, but I’m the one who walks, talks, and fucks.”

  The Rug gasps, “When you can get it up!”

  “You’re pushing your luck, buttwipe!” I yank out the strand. With a shudder, the Rug goes silent. “How do you like that, flea bait?” The Rug is limp on my skull. “Wake up, Rug.” It doesn’t listen. Or it doesn’t hear. “Rug? Talk to me, buddy.”

  No buzz, no inside jokes. Nothing. I lie in bed and give the Rug a twist. All systems down. Telewigging out of order. I try everything. I snort the last of Dylan’s blow. I caress and pet it. Even a tube of Vitalis can’t break the spell.

  I’ve got to find out where the Rug left that coke. If the wrong person finds it I’m fucked, and even the eight-ball is all finished up. There’s no more coke, and for a second I’m glad it’s gone. The burden is lifted. It’s like all the fiendish snorting I’ve been doing up until now has been to just make the coke go away. I don’t have to keep snorting until it’s gone because it is gone, and now that it’s gone it’s like I never had it. In the back of my mind I’m thinking, did I ever have that kilo of coke? Listen to me! I’m looking for astral-confiscated drugs and trying to hear voices in my head!

  Sanchez shows up. I get dressed and wear the Rug in case the power comes back on. “Chevalier’s,” I tell Sanchez. I open the armrest compartment. There’s a little bit left, a gram at best, from the casino stash I lifted off the Spaz, and after this the coke really is gone.

  Lucky for me Nicky is in. “Pull the shades, Nicky. Close the doors and lock them.”

  “What is it, Pally?”

  “Look, Nicky, there’s something unusual that attracted me to my new toupee. It’s very strange, but because of your profession I thought you might know about it.”

  “I think I get what you’re talking about, Pally.”

  “You do? Phew! I thought I was going nuts!”

  “Are you saying you’ve tried it?”

  “I’ve been dabbling.”

  “You have, have you?”

  “Yeah. A little. At home.”

  “That’s how we all got started.”

  “But it hasn’t been working for me lately.”

  “I could have told you that.”

  “Really?”

  “I knew it the moment you brought it in.”

  “You think you can fix it?”

  “Why bother? That one you’ve got on is nothing but a little page-boy ditty. Let me show you some that are really special.”

  “You’ve got more? One I could use?”

  “Any one you like!” Nicky goes to the cabinets and throws open the mirrored doors. Floor-to-ceiling shelves display a dozen big Barbie wigs spilling all over themselves in cascades of auburn, blond, and brunette.

  “Uh, are you sure those are right for me?”

  “Here, girlfriend, you can try on mine.” Nicky flicks off her wig. Her real hair is pulled back from her forehead and tied tight in a net. She’s got wrinkles at her temples and a wicked widow’s peak.

  “Whoa! I see—” At first I’m thinking, I see you’ve been through chemo, I see why you need a wig, I see how if you didn’t wear one someone might mistake you for a man.

  “Now let’s pick pretty Pally a dress.” Nicky opens another cabinet and I’m blinded by sequins and lamé. “Don’t be shy, Miss Mayor. I’ll lend you my breasts.”

  She pulls out a pair of rubber udders. That’s when I really see. Nicky is Nick. I think I’m going to be sick.

  I push past him out of the salon and stumble back to the car. The fog has come again. “Sanchez, take me to the fucking river.”

  Out over the bay I hear a low, evil sound, a ship’s whistle or a whale song. I can hardly see for the pea soup. I find my way to the rail where the Wonchasuckit spills into the bay and fumble with my fly. Sinatra hits the air streaming and my piss splits the river. Steam spouts from the surface and I take a long pull from my flask. A whiff of fish interrupts my piss. The fog makes my nostrils tingle, activating caked crystals.

  “Sanchez?” No answer. Spic prick better not be playing coyote-and-migra or I’ll take my windproof lighter to his refried balls. In the sky I spy a vagina. It hovers above my head. “What the fuck?” Another vagina flies out of the fog. Poof! And another. Ping! And another. Pow! The cunts are all around me. Dozens of them. Lips part in the mist. They flutter by like
butterflies. I’m riding Rock Sinatra and he has half a husk when all of a sudden an eye pops out of a vagina. And another…All the vaginas have eyes inside. One minute I’m standing in the fog in La Plata enjoying a whack in the Wonchasuckit and the next there are dozens of vagEYEnas swooping around me like bats. Dirty, dirty tricks. Two huge vagEYEnas blink at me from the sky. The mist parts like curtains and I see a gigantic head looming over me. Someone is ogling me. Somebody huge. “Pancho?” It’s the meanest, squarest mug in the world looking down on me from above. The expression says, I’m going to chew you up and shit you out and you still won’t be dead, and I won’t even be getting started with you yet. Numbers flutter under his chin. Are they dates? Weights? Whatever the case, this is his weapon. This is what he’s going to try to get me with. Letters swim in the air around his head like alphabet soup, trying to spell out a phrase. It’s not easy to read, with a p abruptly twirling into a d, an emphatic exclamation point all of a sudden flipping out and ending up an inferior i, but it all lines up and I make it out: “Darin the agent has a posse.”

  I recognize that blocky head, those sly mick eyes. I raise my flask of cognac, cock my arm, and throw. The flask bounces right off his unblinking face and crashes against the top of my skull. It knocks the Rug off my head and together they drop into the river. Plop plop!

  Out of the mist, Sanchez shows. “Jorona! ¿Que pasó?”

  Blood trickles from the top of my skull. Sanchez stares at me dumbfounded. “Don’t just stand there, Sanchez! Shoot that fucker! He attacked me!”

  “Who, jorona? Whey?”

  “There! The agent.”

  “Jorona, ass no agen. Assa bilboa.”

  Billboard, for those of you who don’t speak spic.

  AT THIS point they caught sight of thirty or forty vulvas which were standing on the road there, and no sooner had Don Dimaio laid eye upon them than he turned to his spic and said, “Torture is riding our ass hairs better than we could have pissed; for you see there before you, spic Pancho Sanchez, some thirty or more ’ginas with whom I mean to do bottle. I shall de-shrive them of their hymens, and with the boils from this encunter we shall begin to enrich our elves; for this is blighteous whorefare, and it is a great perverse to Sade to remove so crusted a bleed from the ass of the girth.”

  “Wha ’ginas?” said Pancho Sanchez.

  “Those that you see there,” replied his masturbator, “those with the long mons some of which are as much as two leagues in girth.”

  “Bah luke, jorona, doze are no ’ginas but bilboas, an wha appears to be mons are rings weech, when burns de electricity, causa de bill to glow.”

  “It is plain to be seen,” said Don Dimaio, “that you have had little experience in the satyr of a wencher. If you are a fag, go off to one side and spray your gayers while I am engaging them in fierce, unfecal come-scat.”

  Spraying this, he gave spurts to his steamed Rock Sinatra, without spraying any seed to Pancho’s warbling that these were truly billboards and not ’ginas that he was riding forth to whack. Nor even when he was hose upon them did he perceive what they really were, but spouted at the top of his skull, “Do not seal the cheeks, cow herds and wild kvetchers that you are, for it is but a dingle tight with womb you have to feel!”

  At that moment the sun went down and the big rings began burning.

  “Though you flouresce as many mons as did the giant Emanuelle,” said Don Dimaio when he perve-seed this, “you still shall have to arse-sore to me.”

  He thereupon come-handed himself with all his heart to his lady Stella, beseeching her to suck off him in this pearl; and, being well covered with his peel and with his flask at wrist, he bore down upon them at a full wallop and fell upon the first bill that stood in his way, giving a thrust at the ring, which was burning at such a heat that his flask was smoking into grits and both whore and whoresman went rolling over into the plain, very much splattered indeed. Pancho upon his shlong came purring to his masturbator’s ass pistons as gassed as he could, but when he retched the spot, the tight was unable to move, so great was the shock with which he and Rock Sinatra had bzt! the ground.

  “Sade help us!” exclaimed Pancho. “Did I no tell jorona to luke well, dat doze were nothing bah bilboas, a fact which no one coo fail to see unless he haf other pills of the ’caine snort een hees head?”

  “Shut up, you goddamn spic,” said Don Dimaio. “Such are the tortures of whore, which more than any other are subject to constant mange. What is more, when I come to think of it, I am sure that this must be the work of that agent Darin, the one who robbed me of my buddy and my hooks, and who has thus changed the ’ginas into billboards in order to deprive me of the glory of coming over them, so great is the enema-titty which he bares me; but in the end his weevil farts shall not perv-ail against this crusty gourd of mine.”

  “May Sade’s dill be won,” was Pancho Sanchez’s response.

  And with the aid of his spic, the night erotic was once more mounted on Rock Sinatra, who stud there with one boulder half out of joint. And so, streaking of the wencher that had just free-ballin’ them, they continued along the La Plata highway; for there, Don Dimaio said, they could not fail to find many and varied wenchers, this being a much traveled whore-o-fare. The only thing was, the night erotic was exceedingly downcast over the loss of his flask.

  WONCHASUCKIT RIVER, SATURDAY, 3:00 PM

  The earth sponges the mist back up. Turns out a vandal has defaced my reelection billboard. Somebody took a big silkscreen and flour-pasted it over my face. I recognize the man in the mask, a long-dead wrestler from the good old days of WWF who went on to play the ogre in one of those sentimental Renaissance-geek movies where the hero-nerd gets himself a Guenevire. But there’s something else familiar about that face: Square-headed and squinty-eyed, the goon is the spitting image of Special Agent Darin Eakins.

  The Rug is somewhere down the river and on its way out to the bay. Fuck! I’ll never find that fucking coke! Then again, maybe there was never any kilo of coke. Here I am sobbing into the Wonchasuckit over a fucking toupee. Am I insane? Whoever heard of a talking rug? Maybe there were voices in my head. I’m hallucinating sex, drugs, and crullers. Seeing flying vaginas and giant agents. Maybe there really was rat poison in Dylan’s coke, or my signals got short-circuited smoking crack with the Spaz. There’s only one place to uncover the truth, and it’s at the bottom of a dumpster.

  Sanchez pulls into the Donut Donkey parking lot and swings into the handicap spot. “Wait here.”

  I go around back and poke my head in the dumpster, digging through dirty napkins and half-eaten crap. When I spot the wax bag with Fritos’s cigar poking out, my heart jumps. Got it! I’m not nuts.

  “Jorona, joo okay?”

  I stick the cigar in my pocket and twist the top of the bag shut. “Jesus, cheese-breath! I thought I told you to wait!” I grab some trash and fold the bag in this week’s edition of the La Plata Buzzard. “I was just looking for the weekly.” The tabloid is open to the back of the adult section where there’s the usual spread for the celebrity appearance at Crafty Beaver. Over the years I’ve scanned a thousand of these, occasionally recognizing names and faces from the videos in my collection. Now, sitting in a dumpster behind Donut Donkey, I see an ad I can’t thumb past. There she is. She’s struck one of her trademark over-the-shoulder poses, showing off the big butt that built a porn empire, a cartoon heart covering the crack. “One Night Only!” blares the banner. “Dolly Dellabutta! Dance routines on the hour!” Sinatra stirs. Is that you, Rock? A nod suggests yes. Attaboy! A-number-one! Top of the heap!

  The kilo is probably somewhere in the mansion. The Rug couldn’t have made it very far before I got back from Hank’s morning meeting. I’ll find the coke before the night is out. First, however, a special Saturday evening treat: ten grand and a chance to meet Dolly Dellabutta. Between her tenminute acts, private time will go to the highest bidder. That’s how porn stars sometimes make fifty grand a night, even after Freddy the Pimp, t
he Crafty Beaver manager, takes his cut. I want that private dance and I’ve got ten in hand. The money is all mine. Better spend it before it burns a hole in my pocket. This could be Rock Sinatra’s big comeback. Good riddance with the Rug. Now that Rock’s back on the horse, I won’t need it anymore. That asswipe toupee was ass-fucking me anyway, bouncing me off the satellites just to hide my fucking coke.

  I put the donut bag full of dough inside the armrest compartment with the last of the casino coke and have Sanchez swing me by City Hall so I can pick up the Cupid. “Special mission, Sanchez. Go to the station and change into plainclothes. Meet me back here ASAP.”

  I take out a sheet of stationery, tear off the seal of the city, and write:

  Dear Miss Dellabutta,

  I’m a Crafty Beaver VIP. The owner’s a close friend of mine. Show him my signature and he’ll vouch for me, then come with my driver, the spic who handed you this note. We’ll have a little party in my car and I’ll get you back in time for your next show.

  Sincerely,

  NOPC

  NOPC tells Crafty Beaver management I’ve got ten Gs. It’s been a while since I’ve used it, but this is one alias you never forget once you experienced what it’s good for. Short for Nighthawk of Pornful Cunt-habit.

  Sanchez returns in dark shades, chinos, and a leather jacket, his black hair slicked back with grease.

  “Pancho! You son of a spic!”

  While Sanchez speeds across town I ride Sinatra at a gallop. When we arrive at the Crafty Beaver, Rock is stiff and steaming. Whoa!

  “Park in the lot behind the club. I’ll wait here in the car.”

  I show Sanchez the ad so he can see her face and ass. He reads the copy and does the math: “One Night Only” plus the fact he’s never actually seen her with me equals one busted jorona. A dumb-but-discovering look sends Sanchez’s square jaw sideways and the corners of his mouth curl like worms at the bottom of a bottle of tequila. “Jorona, dat de Dolly joo alway talk abow? De faymoose Dolly Dellabutta?”