Playing With Monsters

by Layla Wolfe

  “I don’t think so, chica.” His sweaty, hot hand was now under my shirt, inching up toward my bra. He kept smiling in that sleazy, disgusting way that nauseated me. “You do for me, I do for you. This is how things work.”

  “Yes, but Armando, you’re my mother’s boyfriend!” I hissed. The hand was mauling my tit now, scrabbling to yank the cup down, to reveal the coveted boob over the U-line of my tank top. He was, like, humping my leg with his tiny little cholo pecker while I kept pushing against him with all my might. Men will always be stronger than women, so all that resulted was I gave him more room to catch an eyeful of my heaving breasts. I became desperate. “My mother will kick you out if she sees you doing this!”

  “Ah, chica! Hyna! Pechos bonitos!” Beautiful tits! And Armando sank his face between my bared boobs. Like a snarling feral dog he was, drooling, lapping, sucking, even biting painfully. I’d seen this many times before, before marrying Vince. Men were dogs obsessed with boobs. They were two fucking appendages on a woman’s chest, yet men would move heaven and earth to get their face between them.

  Men were sick dogs. I’d hated them all before Vince, and I hated them all even more now. Vince was the only man who’d ever treated me with respect, and I hated God that he’d taken him.

  I think I was in such shock, though, that I didn’t push as hard as I could have, at first. I had nothing solid behind me, and I was halfway tripping over the bathtub as it was.

  Armando was knitting with only one needle, absolutely over the top with lust. I watched, sort of detached, as his claw-like hands bared my nipples. When he bit down on one of them, that’s when I had my reality slap. And it was a bitch.

  “Pendejo!” I shoved so hard that I went tumbling back into the tub, cracking my skull on the fucking soap dish. One of my clogs even went flying, hitting a medicine cabinet mirror. More in shock than anything—although of course a sudden lance of pain speared up my right leg—I raised myself on my hands, mouth open in bewilderment.

  Mando looked equally as surprised. His stupid caveman mouth was twisted in a snarl, his rage was like a mist in the room. It was evident. I had blown it. I wasn’t going to get a single painkiller out of this pendejo.

  “Mando!” called Valentina, more insistent now.

  I could have used a fucking hand, but Mando squeaked out of the room so furiously he practically left a trail of smoke. I don’t remember when I started sobbing. Sometime between yanking my bra back up, my shirt back down, and trying to unhitch my bad leg from its crook over the tub’s edge. Mando was going to sleaze his way back into Valentina’s good graces. He was going to go low riding with some homies and blast some Knightowl and Big Oso Loc and spend all of his drug profits on hookers. He was the lowest sort of slime, and I sobbed because I hadn’t thought to grab that long back washer, a sponge on a stick, and stab him with it.

  It was a dry sort of sob, just a gut-wrenching panic-stricken, existential sort of howl. I had to get out of there, and now. I threw some things into my purse then went into my mother’s bedroom. I tried to never go in there. It made me ill thinking of them sleeping in the same bed. But she was my mother—I had to show respect and couldn’t badmouth her choice of men, not even my father, long may he rot in hell.

  But here I might find some coin. I was limping like a cripple by this time after the run-in with the bathtub. Sobbing soundlessly, I wasn’t even squeamish when I went through Mando’s pants pockets looking for something, anything. When my leg and hip acted up like this I was supposed to use a mortifying cane, but I fucking refused. I’d become weaker if I became dependent on a cane for support, that was my reasoning. So I cripped along dragging my bad leg, rifling through pockets until I came up with a grand total of forty-two dollars and two joints. I left the joints and took the money, staggering back through the house, slamming the front door.

  I was going through that early adult stage of blaming my parents for everything. Because my father was such a shadowy, thin figure in my memory—a figure confined to never-viewed photo albums and my mother’s derogatory remarks—I reserved most of my hatred for him. In Latin cultures it’s abhorrent to dislike your mother, to rebel, ignore, or be derogatory toward her.

  My mother had been a sweetbutt and slut for biker gangs and cartels for as long as I could remember. My dad, Aaron “Slushy” McGill, still sent money to my mother all the years he was incognito, so I can’t fault him for completely abandoning us. But when he popped back up, he was married to some other slut in Tucson—he didn’t even try to make another go with Valentina. Despite his weedy, weaselly looks, I guess my dad was something of a lothario, believe it or not. He liked to say he had bad luck with women, but I like to say he just didn’t pay enough attention to them.

  Marijuana would’ve been the easiest “drug” for me to get, ironically. Doctors would prescribe that even if they thought you were malingering, faking it. Problem was, I was highly allergic to marijuana. It had the opposite effect on me. My heart ran wild, my paranoia went unleashed, and let’s just say I had the opposite time I believe you were supposed to have. Wasn’t it supposed to be fun? For me, it was as much fun as being locked in solitary confinement for forty-eight hours. Hell on earth.

  I should’ve taken the joints anyway, I realized too late. My friends liked weed. And we were going back to The Whipping Post, the edgy slightly BDSM-themed electronic dance music spot.

  I didn’t seriously cry until I was halfway down the street in my battered Toyota. Maybe my pride wouldn’t let me. It was bad enough I’d been mauled by my mother’s boyfriend for no reason—since he hadn’t even given me any painkillers. If he’d of given me painkillers, my agony-addled brain could have made some sort of justification. Well, I did what I had to do. The end justifies the means. But now? I couldn’t even feel slightly vindicated in my mind. I just felt cheap, used, and dirty.

  That’s when I really sobbed. The sort of lung-wrenching, deep, hollow sobs that sound like a person dying of pneumonia. The sunny street blurred like a distant memory of a happier time. I drove the second half of the way to Tracy’s in almost total blindness.

  CHAPTER THREE

  GUDRUN

  My life was spiraling out of control, and I didn’t care.

  “What do you think about him?” Tracy asked me. “Do you trust him?

  I cocked one hip and squinted at the guy who called himself Alcatraz standing maybe twenty feet off, watching us. Between the brain-numbing flashes of the strobe lights in the club, I could make out a rugged, gritty guy. He didn’t look like he’d combed his hair in weeks, as though small creatures might live in the nest on his head. He was the type to have his wallet on a chain around his waist, and his leather jacket was studded. Much older than our twenties, Alcatraz was maybe as much as fifty. Old enough to be our dad, but gritty enough to know where the drugs were. In my current distressed mood, drugs trumped dad.

  Tracy should know better than to ask me my opinion. She knows I’m getting more desperate for my fix. “Sure,” I said breezily. “He said he’s got party favors—he even showed me some packs of it, and he said he’s got some Belushis too, back at his house.”

  “Oo, Belushis,” said Shannon.

  Shannon probably didn’t know that a Belushi was a mix of heroin and cocaine, usually known as a speedball. I thought I had accidentally done one once, after one of these raves. I hated being kept up all night with a racing heart. Who the hell wanted to feel the pain even more intensely, and be unable to blot it out? No, I was all about blotting. Blot the pain. Blot the pain.

  “Well, Molly’s my game,” I said coolly. Molly is what they used to call Ecstasy. I’d only taken it three, four times, enough to know that the surge in serotonin would make me feel blissful, empathetic with the plight of the entire world, for several hours. I needed that damned bliss, damn it all to hell.

  Tracy had helped me dress for this party. My tight leggings showed off my generous ass, and it stoked my ego when many men eyebanged me appreciatively. Part of the
cups of my underwire bra were visible, as was fashionable, in the giant armholes of a tank Tracy had loaned me. “I am an intelligent, classy, well-educated woman who says fuck a lot,” declared the grey tank. Luckily the tank didn’t have a scoop neck, but my tits were always difficult to tame. I always had to decide whether I’d play up my rack to get what I wanted. Tracy and Shannon just wanted fun, drugs, a few laughs, maybe some sex. Me? If I could have fun, drugs, and laughs without any of those other things, believe you me, I would’ve. The men and sex were just what I might have to do to achieve my pain-numbing goal.

  “If anyone gets lucky, try to score enough Molly for a few days, ’kay?” I asked my friends. They were more than aware of my predicament. Tracy had broken up with her husband around the same time mine had died, so we were in similar places. Similar, not identical. Unlike me, this was Tracy’s first foray into the murky midnight world of partying. She was like a kid in a candy factory sampling all the wares. I was tough. I’d been in this lifestyle for years before getting married, finally playing it safe with Vince. Tracy hadn’t. She was my co-worker at the assisted living place, a sheltered girl who still believed she made the seniors’ lives better. I was a bit worried she might bite off more than she could chew. I carried a pocket rocket in a small holster strapped around my waist. Tracy probably didn’t even carry a blade. She was just a nurse’s assistant, whereas I knew I was so, so much more.

  “All right,” said Shannon. “He says he’s got more friends over at his house? I’m in. But I’m not riding with him. We can follow him in my car.”

  “That’s good, because he’s got a motorcycle,” I said.

  Tracy sneered at Alcatraz. He was starting to look a bit antsy, raring to go, shifting back and forth from one engineer boot to the other. “That figures. Oo, I wonder if he’s got other biker friends? Let’s go ride a biker.”

  Mainly to shut up Tracy and her corny comments, I raised a hand at Alcatraz. He looked like he breathed a giant sigh of relief, shaping his arm into a “come here” arc.

  “You ready?” I asked my girlfriends.

  “Yeah!” cried Tracy.

  “We’re taking my car,” repeated Shannon.

  I sighed and began slogging toward Alcatraz. With deadbeats like Shannon I’d never find any painkillers. I noted the usual flicker of consternation in the biker’s eyes when he saw me dragging the bad leg. I don’t say “concern,” because men on the make never actually give a shit what had happened to me. They could care less what had caused my limp. They just worried that my bum leg would reflect badly on them in front of their friends—as though they couldn’t get anyone better than a cripple. I hoped that my shiny, brand new, perfectly healthy friends made up for my leg. Each man I met who looked alarmed at my limp added another brick in the wall to my dislike for men. I knew I’d have to find a more legitimate, or faster, safer, more expedient way of getting painkillers. I just couldn’t think of what that might be. I’d heard you could get prescription drugs in Mexico…

  So we followed Alcatraz to his house in a dodgy area of town. The bars on the windows, the surveillance cameras bolted to the roof, the lowrider cars and Harleys in the driveway, all this should’ve been a tip-off for me. This was a trap house, a place where guns and drugs went out one door, people the other. But if you wanted drugs, you had to roll with the druggie crowd. I wasn’t going to find what I wanted by following some guy with an alligator on his shirt.

  “Excellent!” cried Tracy, springing out of Shannon’s car.

  Shannon hung back, taking forever to rummage in her purse for a nonexistent cigarette or lipstick. A couple of spotters stood conspicuously in the driveway, hands sunk deep in their pockets, looking up and down the street for suspicious activity. “Let’s stick together. I have to go to work early tomorrow. I don’t feel like getting too fucked up.”

  But everything was a blur from the moment I walked in the door. Alcatraz handed me the capsule of Molly, which I washed down with a warm beer. I sat back with my friends on a filthy couch and waited for the tension to pass. The pounding heart, the paranoia, the hypervigilance would give way to a mellow love for my fellow man, I knew.

  The closer I inspected Alcatraz, the more I questioned my judgment in coming here. He had what looked at first sight like a doctor’s pen light sticking out of the top pocket of his leather jacket. But when the Molly started kicking in and I felt a bit silly, I reached for it. I was a medical professional.

  “Ah, I don’t think you want to do that,” he said, although he allowed me to take it.

  I tried clicking the ball at the end of the tapered, stainless steel tube while Alcatraz and three or five of his friends laughed. All of them exuded the stale, smoky stench of not having left the house in days, weeks maybe. A couple of fiends smoked marijuana from a pipe, and I didn’t like how the contact high was making me feel. No one even seemed to think of cracking a window open. The battered room was simply decorated with the college décor of cinderblocks and apple crates. Of course not a single picture hung on the wall other than a spot where someone had drawn with a Sharpie around a bullet hole, making me wonder. If they made so much money in drugs, where did it all go?

  That was when it hit me. Listening to the men’s laughter. It started sounding like some kind of underwater school of fish, all filled with bubbles and water. Had Molly made me feel this way before? I looked at my friends, and their eyes were all watery, their faces relaxed. They seemed to know why they were laughing. Why didn’t I know?

  “Here,” said Alcatraz, reaching for the pen light. “Let me show you how this works.”

  Standing, he reached a hand down to me. Tracy was giggling up a storm with a Mexican who was wider than he was tall. He looked like he should be playing in a horn section with his bandana wrapped around his fade haircut, his gold chains, his black shades indoors at night.

  For some reason I can’t recall, all of this gave me an overwhelming sense of security, and I went with Alcatraz. Suddenly a motion as simple as a man reaching a hand for me made me go all soft and emotional inside, my gooey center melting. Looking back, of course, it was like What the fuck? But at the moment—as far as I can recall—everything seemed to make divine sense. Suddenly Alcatraz even looked halfway good to me. It was like I was being swept along in a vortex from which there was no escape. There seemed to be no reason to want to escape. It all seemed inexorable, destined.

  To my credit, I did keep asking him for painkillers. So I did maintain a sense of purpose. But you know, at that phase in my life, I didn’t have much reason to stay out of trouble. What did I have to live for, really? The husband I had been planning to have children with was gone. There one day, absolutely, gut-wrenchingly gone the next. And no one mentioned him anymore, as if to do so would cause me to fall into a puddle of goo on the floor. A mention would’ve been nice, because it would’ve kept his memory alive. Now I wasn’t even sure I could have children, not with all the internal damage that had been done in the wreck, the damage to my pelvis. Not to mention, who would I have them with? Men were pigs.

  “Painkillers?” asked Alcatraz, shutting the bedroom door. “Sure, I got painkillers. I got some roxy. Let me look over here.”

  There was one desk in the room with a fluorescent lamp. It lit up all the paraphernalia with a sickly glow. The brick of white powder had been in the process of being “stepped on,” re-rocked, cut with other product to increase the volume. A bulletproof vest hung from the back of the chair, and Alcatraz shoved aside a semiautomatic pistol in order to rifle through a Tupperware on the desktop.

  “That’d be good if you could give me more than a day’s supply,” I slurred.

  “Sure, sure,” Alcatraz said, distractedly. Finding what he sought, he shook some pills in his hand as he regarded me, sitting on the single twin bed, a striped mattress only halfway covered with a sleeping bag. “Hey, your friends.”

  “Tracy and Shannon.”

  “Sure, sure. They got big families?”

  At t
he moment, that didn’t strike me as an odd question. I eyeballed his closed fist with bulging, greedy eyes. My leg and hip were already fairly numb. But I think it’s human nature that when one thing seems to be working, you just keep wanting more of it. That’s why one drink, one cigarette, one hit is never enough. If it feels good, more must be better. “Families? Shannon, I’ve never heard her talk about any family. I think she moved here from Indianapolis after nursing school. Tracy has a sister over in Campbell Estates Mobile Home Park.”

  “Mobile home park, eh? Doesn’t sound like she’s got a very fancy upbringing.”

  “Oh, god, no,” I agreed cheerfully. “Her and her sister came here for nursing school too but had to drop out because they had to work. Tracy got a husband for a while, but he recently…left.”

  “Ah, that’s too bad.” Alcatraz was putting on that fake voice of concern that men use when they want something from you. That something is always the same thing. “Such a tragedy when couples split up.”

  I shrugged. “I guess. Are those the roxies?” Roxy was the street name for oxycodone.

  Alcatraz cheered up. “Sure are. Here. Swallow this with your beer. I’ll give you another one after I show you what this is for.”

  Unconcerned, I gulped the one pill, taking careful note that he dropped the other several pills back into a compartment of the Tupperware box. Fuck it. I was going to have to work harder for those.

  Alcatraz took the doctor’s pen light from his top pocket. “You look like the sort of girl who’d appreciate a device like this. Is your family nearby?”

  I shook my head to get rid of my sudden confusion. Had he been asking a lot of questions about families lately? What was the big obsession? “Ah, my brother and sister left for school…hey, could I get those other pills, please?”