by Brian Hodge
“Yeah, we got a customer coming in at 3:00 for a prospectus,” Guy replied, glancing at his watch. “Then we got the Douche King coming over tonight for dinner.”
Bobby cringed. “Ouch.”
“Yeah, well… anyway… good job today, Bobby. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Seeya, Guy.”
Guy walked the rest of the way to his car marveling at how fast a good mood can evaporate when his dad’s name is invoked.
Guy’s dad was indeed the Douche King.
In fact, no less an authority than Fortune Magazine dubbed the elder Fox exactly that in a cover story in the late eighties.
When Guy was adopted in 1961 — a former ward of the Department of Children and Family Services who would turn out to be his parents’ only child — his father was in senior management at Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals, working on new feminine hygiene products and being groomed for a top slot in the organization. But his masterpiece was the Daisy-Fresh. The world’s first pre-mixed, pre-measured, non-allergenic disposable douche. The product was a blockbuster, bumping up the parent company’s stock by a hundred and seventy-five bucks per share the first fiscal quarter alone, and alleviating women around the world of that not-so-fresh feeling.
Guy was only seven years old at the time this windfall came, and a seven year old former orphan with self-esteem problems is not exactly cognizant of all the financial implications of such success. Little Guy Junior only noticed three things: He saw less of his father; the family started eating out more often; and people at school started making fun of Guy. Maybe the experience hardened him. Looking back on it, he wasn’t sure. But one thing was certain: It made him awkward with women. Hindered by the terrible knowledge that his dad—the man Guy saw each evening trimming his nose hairs and excavating toe jam — was in fact spending each day pondering vaginal odors, Guy was a complete disaster with girls.
He fared a little better in college—perhaps because of the widened proximity from his father — but still couldn’t shake the Douche King curse. “Oh my God, that’s where I heard your name before,” they would intone as soon as Guy got them into bed. “Your dad’s the douche guy. I’m wearing him right now. As we speak! I’ve got your dad inside me! Isn’t that amazing? Your dad is in my vagina right at this moment! He’s down there! Right now! He’s there! Unbelievable.”
Thank God Guy finally met Karen.
Karen was his savior—in a literal and religious sense. She was his Goddess. An English Lit geek at U of M, she was one of those girls with the skinny horn-rims and tattooed ankles who always seem like they’re in on something that you aren’t. Karen was the perfect girl friend because she had an aversion to toiletries of any kind. A hirsute girl, she let her armpits and legs go untrimmed, and eschewed all feminine hygiene products.
Guy and Karen were married a month after graduation, and moved to Chicago to look for actual jobs. Karen was the one with credentials that meant anything — a BA in English and a BS in Special Education—and she landed a job right out of the gate at a prestigious private school on the north shore called Blessed Virgin Mother Mary of the Universal Immaculate Conception. In her spare time, she crafted elaborate and morbid collages with the pictures of missing children cut from the sides of milk cartons. As for Guy: Let’s just say his BA in 19th Century Icelandic Literature was not going to serve him in good stead at the Polo Club… unless he wanted to use his diploma to scrape smegma from the ponys’ genitals. No, Guy Fox was destined for something much more… shall we say… entrepreneurial.
Which was as good a way as any to describe the kind of work he was doing at this very moment in his modest little office on Sheridan Road.
“Tell me how it works,” the gentleman was saying, sitting across the desk from Guy.
“Of course,” Guy said, then pushed himself away from his battered veneer desk and walked around to the flip chart next to the window. The office was nothing special. Three hundred square feet of carpeted space in the rear of a two-bit ambulance chasing firm just north of Chicago. An outer room with a sofa and a few magazines. A couple of landscapes on the wall. Nothing too flamboyant. Nothing to make the customer uncomfortable. After all, The Porno Pal System was all about comfort. “It’s really very simple,” Guy explained, pointing to a color-coded flow chart emblazoned with big symbols such as $$$ and XXX and COD. “The first payment is an initial (non-refundable) one-time fee of $1500, plus a deposit of $5000. The deposit is contractually kept in escrow until you pass away or decide to cancel the contract for any reason.”
The man in the armchair, a gentleman named Herbert Cooley, was nervously nodding his head. Tall and gaunt and fidgety, with dishwater grey hair and skin so pale and wrinkled it looked almost translucent, he was obviously uneasy with this whole process. He looked to be in his 60’s, although it was hard to tell for sure. He wore a short-sleeve shirt buttoned up to his shriveled Adam’s apple, polyester slacks, and huge wingtips. He had dark circles under his eyes “How do you… know… the… um… location?” Cooley wanted to know.
“That’s an excellent question,” Guy remarked with an amiable smile, trying to put the elder man at ease. Guy had seen all types coming through this door—everybody from clergy to rap singers—and there was always this initial mixture of nervous tension and shame. “Along with the deposit, you submit floor plans of your house, along with a house key and the location of all the hiding places where the… uh… material is kept.”
“I see,” said Herb Cooley.
“These items are kept in a safe deposit box,” Guy went on, pointing at a little illustration in the flow chart of a bank vault. “At your expense, of course, with explicit directions that the box should be opened only upon your death, and only by myself or my associate.”
“Very good then,” Cooley said with weird Anglo-style diction, wringing his gnarled hands, staring at Guy.
At that moment, with the abruptness of a synapse firing in the back of Guy’s brain, he became certain of one thing: There’s something wrong with this guy.
“Additionally, an addendum letter will be filed with your estate attorney,” Guy was saying now, distracted by the gooseflesh rashing the back of his arms, “stating that my associate and I are from an historic preservation foundation, and we should be allowed to enter your domicile upon your death in order to collect some of the your — quote-unquote — important papers.” Guy tried to smile and couldn’t. “It’s really just a formality. All of it completely legal.”
Now it was Herbert Cooley’s turn to approximate a smile, and the result was something that would haunt Guy’s dreams from this day forward. The corners of Cooley’s thin, liver-colored lips twitched, and his red-rimmed eyes widened, and his slack face pulled away from crooked yellow teeth as though a puppeteer’s string were tugging at his deeply lined temples. “Where do I sign?” he softly intoned.
Guy’s hands were shaking as he pulled open the drawer to fetch a contract.
An entire week passed before Guy finally acted on his suspicions. During that week, Guy went about his business in an orderly fashion, never letting on to anyone that he was being haunted by a major creep of a client. And the strangest part was, Guy had no proof of any irregularities. Cooley’s deposit check had cleared, and his papers seemed to be in pristine order. There was no reason to believe that Cooley was anything other than a decent, red-blooded American user of pornography. The only thing that was eating at Guy was that one face-to-face. The incredible feeling during that meeting that Herbert G. Cooley was just… wrong.
But Guy kept this feeling to himself. Didn’t even tell Bobby about it. Just kept it in the back of his brain where it festered like an abscess. This was a first for Guy. In the five years since he had founded The Porno Pal System — advertising mostly in the back pages of skin magazines as well as The Christian Science Monitor — he had taken on just about every client imaginable. Rabbi’s with foot fetishes. Rich WASPy CEO’s who keep pictures of pregnant, lactating black women. High school gym
teachers with extensive collections of S&M tableaus. You name it. And Guy had never once felt the compulsion to check up on anybody. But this guy Cooley had him spooked. This doughy white face was infesting Guy’s dreams. What in God’s name could this jerk be hiding in the bowels of his home?
For an entire week, moving through his daily routine with zombie-like complacency, Guy got up every morning, had breakfast with Karen, and went to work (for years, Karen Fox had been operating under the false impression that her husband had been running a small research firm, and Guy had seen no reason to correct her). It was a relatively uneventful week, too, with only a few new clients and one death/retrieval scenario (a straight-forward job removing hardcore gay porn from the nooks and crannies of a Catholic rectory). Every night, Guy would come home exhausted. Not from the work but rather from the rumination. The image of Cooley’s red-rimmed eyes and yellow smile was just too creepy for Guy to shake.
On the last evening before Guy finally did something about his suspicions, his parents were visiting. The Douche King rarely graced Guy and Karen with personal visits, but this week had been different. Guy’s parents had been over a few days earlier to show slides from their trip to Branson, Missouri, and now, tonight, they had returned with paint swaths from Sherman Williams in order to help Karen choose a color for the spare room. For some reason, Guy’s mother was harboring the delusion that this room might become a nursery. Little did the older woman know the longing, the misery, the ongoing angst between Guy and Karen about having children. Notwithstanding his mysterious impotence, Guy dreaded the prospect of having kids. He adored children — as did Karen — but he was also terrified of bringing one into this world. With all the shit, all the lies and secrets, metastasizing in the dark like a cancer.
“Now explain to me again the meaning of this piece,” the Douche King was saying in his patented smug style, standing in Guy’s living room, staring at the missing children collage on the wall, while Karen chattered away out in the kitchen with Guy’s mother. The Douche King was a tall, lanky man with a head full of lustrous silver waves. He had a long patrician nose down which he would view most of the world, considering the bulk of it beneath him. He never really “got” Karen’s art.
“I guess it’s a statement on all the injustices meted out to kids in this world,” Guy surmised, standing behind his dad with his hands in his pockets. The “piece” that they were referring to was titled Lost Visage Number 13, and was basically a 4-by-4 foot piece of foam core plastered with a matrix of missing children. Blurry faces of kids from milk cartons all chockablock across a grey field.
The Douche King pointed his aquiline beak at Guy. “I don’t get it.”
Guy shrugged. “I guess it’s not for everybody.”
“Thank God for that,” the older man mused, giving the art work one last glance.
That night, Guy jerked awake from a vague and troubling nightmare. In the dream he had been scratching a hole in himself with a rolled up porn magazine, the wound opening like a vulva, dripping a white, viscous fluid. Heart thumping, flabby body filmed with sweat, Guy shook off the disorienting dread and climbed out of bed.
He got dressed quietly, careful not to awaken Karen, then slipped out the side door. The interior of his car was as cold as a meat locker.
It was dawn by the time he arrived at Fifth Third Bank, the pale light glowing on the edges of the horizon, the air redolent with that sweet, dewy smell familiar only to fishermen, civil servants and methedrine addicts. He waited for forty-five minutes for the morning watchman to arrive and open the doors.
It took some talking to convince the safe deposit manager that there had been a mistake with Cooley’s document package and Guy was merely “straightening out the paperwork.” The manager finally let Guy into the box room, where Guy stood in the blazing fluorescent light, slipping the map of Cooley’s house and the front door key into his briefcase.
Over the entire history of Guy’s modest little enterprise, he had never attempted to get into a client’s house prior to their death. This was wrong on so many levels. But Guy didn’t care. He had never been so completely repulsed by the mere presence of a client.
Cooley’s house was in an elite white-collar enclave on the north shore called Indian Hills: Miles of labyrinthine lanes bordered by stately mansions, manicured lawns, and cobblestone driveways dripping with money.
Guy waited a half a block away from Cooley’s gorgeous three-story until the entire Cooley clan gradually drifted out the front door for their day’s activities. Cooley came first—his cadaverous face in shadow, his lanky body clad in a suit and tie—hauling a briefcase off to some innocuous middle-management job. Then came mom and the kids. Squeaky-clean and freshly-scrubbed all. Like an ad for Martha Stewart’s Living.
When the house was empty, Guy calmly strode up the walk and gained entrance.
At first Guy was stricken by the positively average quality of the place. He wasn’t sure what he had expected… but certainly not this. The rooms were neat and well furnished, but nothing ostentatious. Tidy Scandinavian design furniture and signs of happy children all over the place. Toy boxes, and finger paintings on the refrigerator. Aquariums bubbling cheerfully. The air smelled of soap and cookies and floor wax. This was not the home of a monster.
Guy went downstairs. The basement was a cozy, finished playroom, toys neatly stowed in cabinets, tasteful, burnt umber wall-to-wall. Guy looked at the map again—a Xerox reduction of an architectural floor plan—which notated the stash in the basement. But something was wrong. The pornography was supposed to be in a shelving unit right here.
Pausing, Guy looked at the northeast corner of the room. There was a big screen TV and a book case filled with kid videos such as Shrek and The Lion King. But no stash. Not even the possibility of a stash.
A muffled click.
Guy jerked around, looking for the source of the sound, the faint clicking noise. He was jumpy now. He heard the noise again, and this time it seemed to be coming from underneath the floor. Guy blinked. He looked at the map again. Then he looked down at the floor. The realization struck him like an ice pick to the back of his neck. The stash was in a sub level. A crawlspace perhaps. A sub-basement.
He started nosing around the heating ducts, along the baseboard and behind the furniture. He consulted the map and extrapolated from Cooley’s notations. Finally he found a loose panel in the southwest corner. He was about to push it inward when he heard the clicking noise again, closer, more pronounced, almost like a match-tip being struck.
Whirling toward the noise, Guy saw nothing. The room was empty. But something was wrong. There was something different about the room. Guy looked down at the carpet. In the middle of the room, on the floor, there lay a single Polaroid photograph. Had Guy missed it before? Not likely. Gooseflesh rashing up his back, he went over to the Polaroid, picked it up, and looked at it.
His throat went dry.
It was still developing, still milky and faded, but slowly coming into focus: A photograph of Guy, crouching down in the corner of the basement, fiddling with the loose panel, preparing to push it in.
It was a photograph taken only moments ago.
“Very good then!”
The voice blurted from somewhere behind him, and Guy spun around reflexively —
— and what he saw standing there at the base of the stairs fifteen feet away was for some reason almost beyond his powers of comprehension: A pale, wrinkled figure in a pink marbled spandex suit holding an old fashioned Polaroid Land camera.
Click-whirrrrrrr! A flash in Guy’s eyes, momentarily blinding him.
Then things were happening all at once, very quickly, in the silver blur of Guy’s compromised vision: another photo oozing from the camera, and Guy jerking backward as he realized that this man wasn’t wearing spandex at all, in fact, this man wasn’t wearing anything. Cooley’s pale nude body was spattered with blood, and he was holding a Taser gun in his other hand — the same kind of small electric cattle
prod that police use nowadays to control unruly mobs.
“No wait no — !” Guy slammed backward into the flimsy wall at the precise moment a tendril of blue voltage arced out of the muzzle of the Taser.
The wall cracked under Guy’s weight as electricity pierced him, making his fingers curl into claws. The wall opened with a sudden groan, the cheap panel snapping, and Guy tumbled backward into the dark, flailing his rigid arms. All he could see was a silver vein of light across his eyes as he plunged into the rotting shadows.
He landed with a thud on cold stone, literally gasping with shock.
There are so many flavors of pain, from the sharp, sudden sensation of a splinter under a nail to the dull, throbbing agonies of major surgery. But landing hard on the spur of one’s tailbone on a surface such as stone elicits all these sensations all at once.
Guy lay there in the darkness writhing in a tidal wave of pain. In fact, it took him several seconds — very long seconds — to even draw a breath. Capillaries of light seethed across his eyeballs, the high voltage shock still strangling him as he finally gulped a lungful of air. He curled into a fetal position and let out a spontaneous mewl, holding his lower back. The pain was a tympani drum in his head now. He swallowed and tried to sit up but could only manage to get up on one elbow. The feeling was gradually coming back into his hands and feet.
In the shifting, yellow light of a swinging bare bulb, Guy tried to focus on something. Anything. And it took several moments for his eyes to register the images.
Cooley’s gallery was taped and pasted and thumb-tacked across every available inch of the moldy, unfinished walls. Many more of the photographs were neatly boxed and stacked on rusted metal shelves. Here was the stash, which Guy had been contracted to retrieve. But these were more than mere pornographic pictures. These were trophies of some sort. Documentation of Cooley’s lifelong perversions.
