by Steve Vernon
BAD
VALENTINES
Three
Twisted
Love Stories
By
Steve Vernon
Stark Raven Press
BAD VALENTINES
By Steve Vernon
Cover Art: David Dodd
ISBN-13: 978-1-927765-18-0
First Kindle Printing from Stark Raven Press – January 11, 2015
(originally published by Crossroad Press)
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Real Love
Ought
To Hit You
Like
A
Kick in the Teeth
To my wife, Belinda, who puts up with me
and
To my readers, who help give me a reason to breathe.
Change of Pace
Forty year old white men just shouldn’t try to rap.
It was a crying shame that nobody told the house band that before they slid into their third attempt of the evening.
Malcolm hated rap. It was always the same damn beat and the same damn lyrics. How many times could you find a rhyme with “pussy”?
The band didn’t help matters. A quartet of three fat balding country crooners along with a lead singer that they’d undoubtedly found in the wreckage of a condemned piano bar. The four of them stood there in their spandex and pink lame dusters, vainly struggling to morph themselves into the twenty-first century.
Malcolm tried his best to get used to it, willing his ears to close up. It didn’t help or matter. The band was the least of Malcolm’s problems.
The problem was Maria.
“Women change,” Malcolm said. “That’s the hell of it. You think you’ve got things figured out and they go and change on you.”
“The old missionary isn’t working for you any more, eh?” Seymour said.
“It isn’t that. It’s her. She’s changed. What worked before just isn’t working now. No sir, it isn’t that at all.”
Seymour shrugged and grinned.
“I dunno, Malcolm,” he said. “It sounds like that to me. Have you tried ginseng?”
Malcolm had expected this. Seymour was a holistic healer this year, or at least that’s what he called himself. Last year he’d been a cab driver. The year before he had worked in a 1-900 porno call center.
Seymour liked change.
“I’ve tried ginseng, vitamin E, pheremonal antiperspirant and spider web tea. I’ve tried it all and nothing works.”
The band eased into Margaritaville. It didn’t sound much better than the rap, but at least Malcolm knew most of the words.
It was a damn shame the band didn’t.
“Maybe it isn’t physical,” Seymour suggested. “Maybe all you need is a little change up. Have you thought about another woman?”
Malcolm shook his head.
“If I was to get myself another woman,” he said. “I’d have to get myself another man to keep her satisfied.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Seymour, I’m tiptoeing up to the fifty year mark. I don’t need or want another woman. I’m just trying to keep the woman I want happy.”
“Well okay, maybe not another woman. But maybe you just need a little change of pace.”
Malcolm stared at his beer, wondering if it was possible to read your future in the beer foam. He peered as hard as he could, but all he could see was a cluster of tasty bubbles clinging to the side and bottom of the glass.
Seymour kept on talking.
“You need to loosen up,” he suggested. “Maybe iInvite another woman over for a threesome. Or go to a key party. Try new positions.”
“Change your tune,” Malcolm said. “You’re starting to sound like a damned macrobiotic fortune cookie.”
“Well damn it, Malcolm, you can’t just ignore it and hope it’ll all go away. You’ve got to try something.”
“Try something?” Malcolm snorted. “Seymour I’ve tried everything. Last June I surprised her with a romantic bedside banquet of oysters. I flew the clammy fuckers right in from Florida.”
“Oysters are good,” Seymour allowed. “High in zinc and long on libido. It sounds like just the thing to poke the ashes of a dying fuck-fire.”
Malcolm snorted, even louder.
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” he said, pouring another beer. “How the fuck was I supposed to know she was allergic to shellfish. What a catastrophe. Hell, I can’t even spell anaphylactic.”
Seymour sat there, stone cold silent, but Malcolm could see he was fighting hard not to let the laughter slip out. Truth to tell, Malcolm didn’t blame him. It was funny, except he wasn’t laughing.
“Then you know what she said? Right after the slurred speech and vomiting let up? Honey, she said, stop trying to build a relationship with a ball peen hammer.”
“Damn,” Seymour swore. “That’s cold.”
“So then I tried green M&M’s. Everybody knows they make you horny, right? I bought a whole carton of jumbo bags and damned near turned myself color blind sorting the green one’s out of the assortment. Then I blended all of the green M&M’s together in my food processor. Shoot, there must have been nearly a thousand. I blended them up into a giant chocolate smoothy. Chocolate is sexy, isn’t it?”
“You can’t go wrong with chocolate,” Seymour agreed. “Did you know the Mayans invented it?”
Malcolm couldn’t resist.
“Google?”
Seymour shrugged.
“Survivor: Guatemala,” he confessed. “So what happened? Did the M&M’s work?”
“What happened? It turned out that when she isn’t being allergic to shellfish she’s busy developing an allergy to green food dye. Her hives swelled up like orgasmic puffballs and she spent the whole night in the emergency ward, damn near choking to death. I keep this up she’s going to run away with an intern.”
“Maybe you need to try some different positions,” Seymour suggested. “There’s lots of varied techniques, can add a whole lot of jungle to your loving.”
“Kama Sutra, you mean? I tried that last spring. I found a how-to video at a yard sale. I talked the guy down from five bucks to two.”
“So what happened?”
“I’ll tell you what happened. Halfway through positions one through six, with Maria’s right leg hooked somewhere around my left ear, and her right elbow jammed deeply into an erogenous area of my inner knee cap, I discovered my fucking lumbago. Damn it, I still limp when it rains.”
&nbs
p; Seymour just shook his head, but Malcolm was on a roll.
“Last month I hooked up a set of speakers in the bedroom and tried piping in Bolero, like in that Bo Derek movie? All it done for Maria was bring on one of her migraine attacks.”
“Shit, sounds like you’ve tried everything.”
“You ain’t just whistling William Tell’s overture. Last week I tried voodoo. I sacrificed an entire bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken to Damballah, the god of bad ideas. Then I stripped myself naked and danced a quick one-man-tango of desire about Maria while chanting out the only chant I know.”
“What chant was that?” Seymour asked.
“Ooo eee, ooo ah ah – ting tang, walla walla bing bang.”
“Walla walla bing bang?”
Malcolm shrugged. “It was the best I could come up with.”
“Did it work?”
Malcolm laughed.
“Oh it worked all right,” he said. “It worked so well Maria had a panic attack thinking I’d gone and developed a shivering case of jumped-up St. Vitus jitterbug fever.”
Malcolm tipped back the glass of beer and drained it.
Seymour worked up enough nerve to talk.
“Well hell, Malcolm. It sounds as if you’ve got the right idea.”
“What, that I need to scare my wife to death? Or maybe poison her with shellfish and green M&M’s?”
“Hell, no. The trying-new-things part. That’s just what you need to be doing. The only problem is you haven’t found the right thing to try.”
Seymour pushed on. He was visibly excited. Once he’d latched his problem-solving muscles onto a situation it was harder than juggling fresh scrambled eggs to get him to let go.
“It’s like baseball, you know?” Seymour said, grinning like a skinny, buck toothed Socrates.
Oh hell.
A sports metaphor.
Malcolm should have known better. Seymour always turned everything into sports - ever since he’d joined the high school football team.
You’d think he’d have grown out of it by now.
People never change.
“All of the best batters know how to change-up. Otherwise, you get predictable. Even Babe Ruth knew how to bunt. What d’ya think?”
Malcolm did his best to look like he was considering Seymour’s explanation.
“What do I think?” he asked, tilting the beer to get the last few drops of barley from the bottom of the glass. “I think it’s your round. Ante up, big boy.”
Seymour flagged down a waiter.
“Look,” Malcolm said. “I don’t want another woman. I want Maria. I just want things to jazz up a little. I’m not talking sex toys. I don’t need any blow-up dolls or his-and-her vibrators. I just want a tune-up, do you hear what I’m saying?”
Seymour nodded, thinking about what Malcolm had said. The waiter showed up with another pitcher.
Christ.
Maria was going to kill him.
“Well maybe it is physical. I think I know just what you need,” Seymour said. “I think I know how to fix things up. What you need is a little dose of Spanish Fly.”
Malcolm laughed.
“That’s just an urban legend, isn’t it?”
“It’s no legend,” Seymour said. “I know where to get some. It’ll get you laid faster than pruned-up shit.”
“I don’t want to break it to you, Seymour, but most of the shit I’ve ever known doesn’t move that fast or get laid at all. It mostly just lays there and grows maggots, until somebody flushes it away.”
“Look,” Seymour said. “I’m trying to tell you this stuff is freaking legendary. I’m talking the real deal. I can get it for you.”
“Sure,” Malcolm said. “I’ve seen that stuff in the sex shops. Spanish Fly. Quicker Pecker Upper. Fire In The Hole. You know what all of that stuff is? Just a little sugar, a little food coloring, and a big old price tag. The only kind of hole you’ll get is the ones that grow in your teeth.”
Seymour shook his head hard.
“I’m not talking about anything store bought,” he said. “I’ve got a guy who can get you the real thing. He brings it in from South America or something like that.”
“Something like that?”
“I don’t know. He makes it special, you know? He makes it out of certain ingredients.”
“Are you going to hook me up with a pusher, Seymour? Man, you’ve been watching too many Miami Vice reruns.”
“What do you have to lose, Malcolm?”
Malcolm thought about it.
Seymour was right.
“You’ve got to try something,” Seymour said. “If you don’t use it you surely will lose her.”
Seymour was dead right.
Malcolm was scared he was going to lose Maria. There was no way he wanted that to happen. As corny as it sounded, Maria was the single best thing that had ever happened to his fucked up life.
“What do you say, Malcolm? It’s the bottom of the ninth.”
Why the hell not? Maybe it was just what he’d needed. He just needed to change his swing.
He just needed a good pop fly.
Yeah, that was it.
He just needed to pop Maria a little Spanish fly.
♥♥♥
They climbed into Seymour’s primered over ’83 Thunderbird, right after they’d finished off their second pitcher of beer just as the house band hip-hopped over from rap and began disembowelling an old MC Hammer tune.
They couldn’t touch it.
“You see,” Seymour said, swinging the big car around an overturned garbage can and a snoozing wino. “Spanish fly isn’t really made out of houseflies.”
“So what’s it made out of? Zippers?”
Seymour wasn’t bothered by Malcolm’s sarcasm. He was in full oration mode, showing off his holistic healing skills. Seymour was proud of his job, and a good friend besides, so Malcolm did his best not to let on that he knew full well that Seymour learned most of his skills and technique from reading the labels at Sister Marriedwell’s Holistic Health Food Emporium and a stack of Mother Jones magazines that he’d picked up in a paper drive.
“The actual drug is made up of dried and crushed carcasses of green blister beetles.”
“So let me get this straight. You’re advising me to feed my wife bugs?”
“It couldn’t do any worse than the green M&M’s.”
Seymour had a point, but Malcolm couldn’t help wondering just what a blister beetle might look like. He kept getting this vision of funky slime green beetles crawling out of the blisters and bunions of Juan Valdez’s dirty sandaled feet.
♥♥♥
Ten minutes later Malcolm and Seymour were standing in a sleazy bodega in the sleaziest corner of the worst side of town.
A fat Puerto Rican clerk with a long greasy moustache stood behind a counter stuffed full of a ransack of unnamable cuts of meat. Long ribbons of yellow fly paper dangled down like streamers on a prom night from hell. There were flies of all shapes and sizes hung and stuck on every inch of the paper, like a treasure trove of fat buzzing crystal.
Seymour spoke to the clerk in a language that sounded a little like Spanish. Malcolm had never known that Seymour knew Spanish. Come to think of it he didn’t know that much about Seymour at all. He was just some guy he’d known since high school. He threw a good football, he’d been divorced twice, and the two of them called each other best friend.
That was all he knew about the guy. For all he knew Seymour could have been a double agent from Alpha Centauri, sent to infiltrate the simmering ranks of lower class trailer trash.
The clerk pointed.
Malcolm reached for a package, resting between a bin of habanero peppers and a basketful of bootleg porno DVD’s.
“This is Spanish Fly? The real stuff?” he asked.
“I make it myself, “The clerk confided in a voice that sounded like it was bubbling up from the bottom of quarry. “The real thing. Very special,”
Malcolm paid him.
Then Seymour drove Malcolm on home to Maria.
♥♥♥
In the morning Malcolm crawled out of bed. His head felt like it was stuffed with cobwebs, crepe paper, and deep creamed Crisco.
“Oh shit,” he whispered.
He’d gone to sleep in his jeans. He hadn’t even bothered changing into his pajamas. Out in the kitchen Maria banged a couple of pots together, in fire alarm fashion. She was clearly enjoying herself, but it wasn’t doing much for Malcolm’s skull. It sounded horrible, way worse than last night’s rap music.
He stumbled out into the kitchen and glared at her backside, watching it jiggle as she made like Buddy Rich with a ladle and a pasta pot. She was having fun – the fucking bitch. He’d like to give her a banging.
Then he grinned. It was funny. He wasn’t really angry. He was just displacing his feelings of frustration and hangover with anger. It was like turning one emotion into another in an alchemy of feeling. He’d learned all about that shit from Dr. Phil.
No, he wasn’t really angry, but he still wanted to bang her.
He thought about it for just about ten seconds. Just go for it, grab her and throw her down on the kitchen table and let her have it.
To hell with that. She’d either turn him down, or go dutifully through with it to be nice. One was as bad as the other. Besides, they only had three more months of payments to go on the table.
His smile turned rueful.
Time was she would have welcomed it.
Right now she was mad, and he just couldn’t blame her. He knew he’d be in trouble. He knew he shouldn’t be out that late, drinking on a work night.
Fuck it.
He and Seymour had been getting shit-faced together since high school. Why the hell should he change now?
Yeah, Maria would understand that. Shit. He didn’t have a leg to stand on.
What the hell. He might as well go to work. A change was as good as a rest, wasn’t it?
She’d cool off by the time he got home.
He took one last look at her before closing the front door behind him, as if he wanted to fix her image in his memory.
“Goodbye honey.”
That damn Spanish Fly had better work.
♥♥♥
He clicked the television off at nine pm, sharp.
