by J. Bengtsson
“Jake’s secrets have never been mine to tell,” I said.
“I know that.”
“And” – my voice was suddenly weary with exhaustion – “if you think I’m going to betray his trust, you don’t know me very well.”
“What I think is that Jake is lucky to have you… to talk to.”
“He doesn’t talk to me, Casey. Not like you think he does. When we were younger, there was an… incident, and I basically blackmailed him into talking. We’ve never discussed the kidnapping since. If you really want to know, bring the notebook to him and ask. But I’m warning you, be prepared for the answer.”
“I don’t think this is the right time to push him. Something spooked him into quitting therapy, and all I want is to get him back on track. That’s why I asked you to meet me today. I need your help – to help him. But for that to happen, you and I have to be friends… allies. We have to trust each other. So I’ll ask again. Why don’t you date, for real?”
My eyes narrowed in on my future sister-in-law. At this moment I both hated and admired her. She had me over a barrel because she knew I would do anything for my family, especially Jake, even if it meant revealing why I was determined to go through life a lonely old hag.
“Because, Casey…” I said, coldly, “If I meet a man and fall in love, he will want kids, and I refuse to bring a child into this world if I can’t protect it. There! Are you happy now?”
3
Finn: Head First
I was a toilet baby. You know the ones. You read about them in the news ever so often, those innocent little faces looking up at the camera in bewilderment as if to say, “Um, hello people… what the fuck just happened here?” If a picture had existed of me at that fateful moment, I’d like to think I displayed a little more attitude – maybe even flashing the middle finger salute or something equally as badass – but I’m sure I was just as confused as all the other newborn commode divers who’d come before me.
Logic would dictate that since I’d started my life dropping head first into the porcelain throne, there really would be nowhere to go but up… but then, you wouldn’t know my family. My mother, Shelby, who was sixteen years old at the time of my unconventional birth, had kept my existence a guarded secret until I accidentally tumbled out of her vagina on a quick pee break during her shift at Hot Dog on a Stick. The story I’d been told, over and over my whole entire life, was that after scooping me from the murky depths and cutting the cord on the edges of a sanitary napkin bin, my mother had then shoved my naked body into her tall, striped Hotdog on a Stick hat and gone back to work.
I wish. That would have been the mature thing to do, yet Shelby was anything but mature. Instead, my dear old ma wrapped me in a bunch of paper towels and ‘gently’ laid me in the trashcan. I loved how when she retold the story of disposing of me in the garbage bin she always emphasized the word gently… as if that were more than enough to make up for THROWING ME THE FUCK AWAY!
Moments after she’d pissed me out of her womb and shoved me into a waste receptacle, Shelby, thinking she was so sly and all, slipped out of the bathroom and resumed her shift in the mall’s food court. It took all of two minutes for someone to find me and another ten for the surveillance cameras to identify the young girl in a clown hat who’d walked into the women’s bathroom pleasantly plump and exited all shifty-eyed and pasty-faced, leaving a trail of blood in her wake.
I eased my aching body into the ice bath, performing the customary gasping for breath panic attack I always did when the frigid waters licked up my heated skin and encased my timid gooch. A volley of pornographic words tore from my mouth as I settled into my own personal arctic hell. The throbbing in my ribcage intensified for a few short, excruciating moments before mercifully going numb and giving me the first blessed relief of the day.
It was times like this that I wondered if my neonatal toilet plunge had just been a preview of things to come. Certainly I’d spent a fair share of time picking myself up off the bathroom floor; yet for whatever reason, I was constantly surprised when things didn’t go my way. I guess you could say I was a glass half-full kind of guy, and despite what my environment and upbringing might have dictated for the future, I’d always thought more of myself.
Even as a child, running around unattended in a virtual junkyard, I’d been an optimist. Sure, my outdoor playground was a giant pile of trash, but even garbage had its treasures… No way! Check out this broken chair! Take off the legs and it will be perfect for the fort or It’s still in the wrapper, so of course it’s edible.’ No matter that I’d get scrapes, bruises, and tetanus shots transforming the landfill pieces into riches or spend hours throwing up the ‘edible’ food item, the important thing was that I wasn’t afraid to try; and that positive outlook had followed me through the good times and the bad, and had afforded me the unique ability to find fun in all the craziness.
Admittedly, the last year had tested my fortitude, chipping away at my idealism. Being a nice guy didn’t always work to my advantage, especially when pessimists attached themselves and tried to drag me down with them. Alexis – the memory of her betrayal was still fresh in my mind. Flicking an ice cube off my nipple, I shook my head at the nasty memory. She’d forced me to reevaluate who I was and what I wanted out of life. One thing I knew for certain, it definitely wasn’t this: soaking in a tub of slushy, mind-numbing regret with an icy side of subzero balls.
Trying to distract my mind from the things I couldn’t control, I played back the events of the day, and was pissed at myself for not reacting sooner. It was mistakes like this that ended careers… and in my line of work, the ending sometimes proved fatal. Every day was a new bruise or ache or swelling. Some days I loved my job; others, like today, I thought maybe a nice, boring nine-to-five sounded pretty damn appealing.
The bathroom doorknob jiggled.
“I’m in here,” I called out.
“I gotta shit,” my roommate, Richie, said. The desperation in his voice was clear, but I was hardly in the position to vacate the premises quickly.
“I’m in the tub. I bruised my ribs today at work. Give me ten minutes.”
“No can do, Finn. I’ve been prairie-dogging it since Orange County.”
Oh, sweet Jesus! Panic consumed me. A shit-needy Richie was not something I ever messed with… at least, not since the Freeway Shart Debacle of 2014. I now clearly understood that when my roommate had to go, he had to go. We’d been driving down the freeway on our way back from San Diego when a simple, harmless fart went horribly awry. Before I even understood what was happening, Richie was sitting in a pile of crap, and I was hanging out the passenger side window trying to keep from passing out. With few options, Richie stepped on the gas and swerved through traffic to get us to safety. The lights and sirens of the motorcycle cop behind us could not have come at a more inopportune time.
“License and registration, please. Do you know how fast you were going back there?” The officer started in on his standard spiel before taking a whiff of the vehicle’s interior. His eyes immediately watered over as he covered his nose with his gloved hand. “Good lord, son, you need to eat more fiber.”
So amused was the officer at Richie’s predicament that he gave us a police escort to the nearest gas station and let us off with a warning, explaining through his uncontrolled laughter that we had bigger issues at hand.
The pounding on the bathroom door jarred me back to my present Richie-induced predicament.
“Okay, I’m getting out,” I said, gripping the sides of the tub and gritting my teeth with the effort it took to lift my battered body out of the water. “Just give me one second.”
“I can’t wait. I’m popping the lock.” Richie grunted like a sumo wrestler intimidating the competition.
“No, you aren’t!”
“Sorry, dude, I’ve crowned. You’re getting company, like it or not.”
Not! Naked and exposed, with my ice-shamed dick retracted up into my throat, the last thing I craved
was companionship of any kind, and especially not the foul-smelling kind Richie was offering. The lock rattled as I grabbed for my towel. My roommate, his face beet-red and sweaty, burst through the door, his pants already around his ankles. We wore matching horrified expressions.
“Do not!” I demanded, scrambling for safety.
He did.
Yes, it was days like this that optimism came in handy. While I could’ve chosen to beat my roommate to a bloody pulp, I decided that getting even with him when he’d least expect it – like, say, when he was sleeping – would bring me more pleasure. The monster mask I’d seen lying around work and the police siren app should do the trick.
“You wanna get some burritos?” Richie asked, all freshly showered and feeling good. His megawatt smile told me he’d completely marginalized our bathroom meet and greet, no matter that our dual nakedness in such a confined space had come dangerously close to crossing the gay line.
“Mexican food seems a bold choice for a man who’s just given birth to a ten-pound baby turd.”
“You’d think,” he said, slapping his hard abs. “But I’m as good as new.” Of course he was. Nothing fazed him. Whereas I had a tendency to fall flat on my face, Richie always made a graceful landing. “What do you say –my treat?”
Richie and I had been friends for seven years now, and had been roommates on and off for most of them. We’d met on the audition trail while still struggling young actors. Little had changed except the fact that we’d gotten older and the trail had become overgrown with weeds… at least for me. I’d all but given up on my starry-eyed delusions. Richie, having been only slightly more successful in his pursuit of stardom, was still plugging along and had just recently wrapped up a movie where he’d played a brutal gang thug. It wasn’t the first time he’d been cast in such a role, and it always made me laugh to watch him rough people up on camera when the closest he’d ever come to a fight in real life was when the middle-aged lady next door accused us of piggybacking off her Internet connection. Hey, we were between carriers.
Richard Cortez the third was no badass. The privileged son of a very successful businessman and his fashion designer wife, Richie hadn’t grown up on the mean streets of Compton but in the lap of luxury in a gated oceanfront community. Watching him so convincingly nail the role of a vicious Mexican drug lord hours after getting a salon pedicure attested to his exceptional acting skills. More impressive was the fact that he’d been typecast to play south of the border characters, presumably because of his Latino heritage, even though he spoke less Spanish than I did.
Still, I was happy my friend got any work at all. Being an unemployed actor was not for the faint of heart, and Richie pounded that pavement full time, never giving up hope that his moment to shine was waiting right around the bend. Of course it helped that he had the world’s most supportive and deep-pocketed parents. At least, they had been up until a month and a half ago, when their patience finally ran out. Eight years of financially supporting their son’s dream turned out to be the cut-off point. They’d been warning him for years before finally delivering the ultimatum: get a real job or find a different funding source. I was surprised it took them that long. He was, after all, a twenty-six-year-old man.
Even so, Richie had never actually believed his parents would follow through on their threats, even after they stopped paying his portion of the rent. It wasn’t until the eviction notice went up that he finally understood: his safety net was gone. Forced out of our pricy Hollywood duplex bungalow, a comfortable five-minute walk into the beating heart of the most eclectic, wild scene in Los Angeles, we now found ourselves in a cramped little apartment a few miles down the road. And those were significant miles, given that an evening stroll in this area could culminate in a violent death. Whether he liked it or not, Richie was finally getting the gangland training he portrayed so convincingly on television. And, let me tell you, he didn’t like it one bit.
As you might imagine, my spoiled roomie was taking the move pretty hard. I’d grown up in squalor, so this wasn’t a huge stretch for me. That being said, even I couldn’t wait for Richie to get his act together so we could get the hell out of here. Sure, I could have spotted him the money for a few months to stay in the other place, but I had visions of becoming my roommate’s new sugar daddy. Besides, I felt a sense of duty to do my part in supporting his maturation to adulthood. And what better way than to dump him into the middle of his own personal hell?
Richie and I drove out of the sketchy parking garage in his black, pimped-out Mercedes, one of the many gifts his parents had allowed him to keep. After all, you needed to wean these types of children off life support slowly and with the utmost care.
“Hey, did you see that redhead in apartment 675? She’s pretty hot for a crack whore, plus she offered to blow me for $10. Is that a good deal in these parts? I can’t tell.”
I tilted my head to the side, eyebrows tented in surprise. “It depends on whether she’s got any teeth or not.”
Richie winced and reached down to cup his nuts with one hand as he drove. “Well, thanks for that, Finn. You just blew that bucket list item for me.”
“You put ‘a blowjob from a toothless crack head’ on your bucket list? Dude, come on.”
“I didn’t specify the number of teeth.”
I snorted my amusement.
“Hey, it’s my bucket list.”
“Okay, whatever. Hey, wait – are you talking about that redhead with four kids who lives across the hall?” I asked, a smirk lurking on the edges of my lips.
Richie caught my condescending expression. “Look, you told me I needed to start thinking more positively, so, you know, all I’m saying is, for a meth addict who may or may not have teeth and who’s squeezed four humans out of her snatch, she’s not half bad.”
While my instinct was to laugh in his face, Richie was right – he was trying to be more optimistic, in his roundabout, offensive way, and he certainly deserved some recognition for that.
“There you go,” I complimented. “Way to look at the bright side of our new living situation. Next time I see the neighbor, I’ll be sure to take a closer look.”
“Thank you,” he grinned. “That’s all I’m asking.”
Richie pulled into the restaurant and made sure to park his car away from all the others. His upper-class vehicle was too good to sit side by side with the low to middle-class ones. It was the one snobby thing Richie could still control in his rapidly changing world, so I didn’t push him even though that meant a longer walk for me. I painstakingly eased my body out of the car and gingerly shuffled my way through the parking lot.
“Could you stand up straight?” Richie scolded. “You’re embarrassing me.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t parked in a different county, I wouldn’t be in this position. I mean, was that really necessary? At some point, your Mercedes is going to have to play nice with all the other automobiles.”
“Don’t push it, Finn, you know this is still hard for me.”
It wasn’t like he’d been sent to a fiery hell. Richie just needed a reality check… and a paying job. Those were two things I never left home without. Everything I was and would ever be came down to me and how hard I was willing to work for it. There was that optimism again… that ‘anything is possible’ attitude. I must have been born with it because certainly nothing in my childhood had afforded me the healthy self-esteem I enjoyed.
I watched in amusement as Richie pushed the alarm button on his car for the twelfth time. We were too far away for it to pick up the signal.
“Do you think I should run back and check?”
“It’s locked. Relax.”
But he didn’t. Richie’s eyes darted in every direction, attempting to ward off danger with every cautious step. Just because we weren’t in his neck of the woods didn’t mean everyone was out to get him. I’d tried to explain that to him, but my roommate was too paranoid to care. Growing up, I never would have predicted I’d be friends with a
guy like Richie. On paper he was an entitled, clueless elitist; but after years of friendship, I knew Richie was more than his exterior. I’d seen him run into a grocery store to buy food for a homeless man, and stop traffic on a busy street to help a mother duck and her ducklings get to the other side. Sure, Richie was spoiled, but he was not without his merits.
Hunched, fevered, and groaning, I finally made it over the threshold into the restaurant and had to grip the counter to steady myself. I realized I was being a giant pussy, but at that point, I really didn’t care. I was hurting, and I wanted the world to hurt with me.
“So what happened this time?” Richie asked, with an overly exaggerated sigh, as if he’d been actively avoiding the question because my pain was such a nuisance to him. Somehow I’d become the boy who cried wolf, and clearly I needed bigger and better injuries to impress him nowadays.
Today had just been another day at the office: car chases, fistfights, and fifty-foot falls. That was my job. If you hadn’t already guessed, I was a stuntman… and judging by injuries alone, not a very good one. My side career had started as a fluke while on set for a part in a horror movie. I was playing murder victim number four. And really, I was surprised to have made it that far. Typically I played the asshole boyfriend… and we all knew what happened to them in slasher flicks. But luck was on my side in this particular movie when the casting department unintentionally hired two jock guys. Lining us up side by side, they deemed me the less douchey of the two and slapped some glasses on my face, instantly transforming me into the nerdy best friend and effectively buying me a few more minutes of airtime before my inescapable death.
