Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  You keep drinking those Zombies, and I say to Alec, my arm around him, his arm around me, “We got this girl, Alec, oh, Christ is she a girl. She’s got a nice rack of tits.”

  He giggles, and then dissolves into weeping again. “You’re my best friend, you know that? You are my fucking-A best friend in the whole snatch-eating world.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say, and the doorbell rings—I don’t quite hear it, but you do, and you go to the door downstairs—I see you bounding down the stairs like a kid on Christmas. I decide to check out the poker game, but I can tell Alec’s all hot for this stripper, and he watches the stairs expectantly.

  You come up a few minutes later, the pimp and stripper in tow, and there’s like dead silence—even the music stops, like it knew when to end.

  The stripper’s changed clothes—she’s in a kind of party outfit, something that Luce herself would wear, in fact, at a casual, by-the-sea kind of affair: it says glitz and glamour, but it also says throw me in the pool. Alec calls that kind of dress a French maid’s outfit, a short skirt to show off legs, and lots of poofy ruffles, and those, kind of fluffy short sleeves like the Good Witch had in The Wizard of Oz—in fact, she looks a little like the Good Witch, but with a very short dress and a nice rack of tits. But she’s changed more than her clothes. I could swear her eyes had been brown when I’d spoken with her on the street, only now, they’re blue, and her skin seems sort of peaches and creamy, instead of the tanned and beat look she had before. But I know a good contact lens can do a lot, and maybe with makeup—I mean, women are so into changing their faces with paints and brushes, like they’re all afraid we won’t want to see their true faces (and I’ve seen a couple of chicks without their mascara and gloss and stuff, and let me tell you, it gets pretty scary when you’re prettier than your date at four a.m.). Alec, he looked more fetching than Luce when she didn’t wear a lot of makeup—I don’t think I’m more into guys or anything, but give me Luce without makeup or Alec, and I’d rather see Alec’s baby face down on my bone any day.

  So the whore looks almost completely different than she had on the street. She looks like she could fit right in with the house and all of us, and I was thinking, boy, you did this right, you got the right girl.

  I look over at you, and you wink at me, because we know that even if this girl costs us a thousand bucks or more, it’s all worth it for Alec’s last night before his doom.

  Her pimp, who’s still dressed like one of the Beach Boys on acid, is casing the place in a fairly obvious way, and I realize at this point that you and I have made a colossal mistake. We should’ve just got a stripper out of the phone book, but stupid me, I wanted a girl who would, for a little extra, take Alec into one of the empty bedrooms and sit on his face. The pimp sees me, comes over, grabs the drink out of my hand, and sucks it down. Fairly turns my stomach. “Nice place,” he says, his voice half-gravel and half-belch. “Name’s Lucky. You boys gonna have a good time tonight?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say, wishing we’d wiped him off on the doormat out front.

  Then he whispers, “You be careful with her, now, boy, ‘cause she’s one of a kind, and I don’t want nothing funny to happen to her. If there’s gonna be sex, it’s got to only be head or hand, no tail, you got me? It ain’t safe for my girl to do tail, not with everything going around.”

  It dawns on me, drunk as I’m getting, that in some sewer rat way, he cares for this girl. “We will, don’t worry, man. Get yourself a drink, sit down, enjoy!”

  “Naw,” he says, “it’s time to let the games begin.”

  I notice he’s packing something under his flappy shirt—just the glimpse of some kind of revolver. I think, well, he’s in a rough business and he’s got to protect himself. He sees me see the gun, and we stare at each other, but he says nothing. He’s got eyes like a snake, all perverted-looking and squinty—sometimes I think people with squinty eyes have squinty brains, and this pimp, if anyone has one, hell, he’s got the most squinty-ass brain on the planet. I’m thinking of maybe turning the revolver into a joke, by saying, “So’s that a gun in your pants or you just happy to see me,” but I know people with squinty brains aren’t going to chuckle at that old standby. I keep my mouth shut.

  And then the girl punches up some wild music, and starts a routine.

  But you don’t want to hear about how she writhed and spun, how she took everything imaginable off, lifted one leg above her head, how Alec played the Golden Shower game with her, drinking half a bottle of golden ale from her pubes; how she squatted on my face and took a rolled-up fifty from between my lips just using her snatch—those are all the basics of a good party stripper.

  What you want to hear about is how your fingers got on the floor in the bathroom, with you screaming bloody murder, and how she screamed even louder, right?

  That’s what you want to hear.

  3

  I guess I’m going to digress a little here, but only for clarity’s sake—the night before Alec got married was one of those nights where you have to piece a few things together later on. Like Pasco, Alec’s little bro, giggling and blushing when the girl sat on his lap naked and beat his pretty face silly with her tits; or when MoJo got pissed off because she wouldn’t sit on his face for a lousy ten bucks; he said, whining, “Doesn’t she know any cheaper games?”—see, the girl was so hot and we were so loaded, that we were dropping hundreds and fifties on her like she was a bank. Cigar smoke was the only veil she had around her, in the end, just that stagnant smoke that stinks and sits in the air like it doesn’t have anywhere to go, and all of us, through its mist, looking like ghosts. That’s what I thought at the time: we were enshrouded by the gray smoke, and we looked like ghosts, or maybe old men with wrinkly, testicular skin, pale and blurry of feature. Horny bastards all, MoJo licking his lips like he was trying to taste her from three feet away, and Billy Bucknell grabbing his crotch without even knowing he was doing it. She really had us going, that girl did. You even kept trying to get your hand up her, and she kept pushing you away until her pimp had to come over and tell you to knock it off, that nobody, but nobody touches her kitty. That’s what he called it, her kitty. Might as well have called it her flesh purse, since she was making so much money out of opening it up. The pimp and I had a nice convo about how prostitution was a victimless crime and all that; his name was Lucky Murphy, a nice Irish boy, as it turned out, from Boston, who had once been a fisherman off Dana Point, and as he spoke I could practically hear someone’s Irish mother singing “Danny Boy,” until I looked him in the eye and knew he was a fucking liar through and through, that he was Hollywood scum and if he could, he would’ve been peddling all our preppie asses for the twenty bucks per corn hole he could make.

  And we keep looking at her kitty, too, all our eyes drawn back to the unholy of unholies. You were pretty adamant about getting your fingers up there, weren’t you, you horny son of a bitch?

  And finally, when it was over, all her dances, she took the party boy into the bedroom, and all I can say is, he didn’t come out for over an hour.

  In fact, by eleven-fifteen, he hadn’t come out at all, and that’s when you and I decided to storm the room.

  4

  Now, I had seen this room once before—it was your folks’ master bedroom, and it was a good size, with kind of a fluffy bed, lots of silk and brass; a nightstand that looked like it was out of Versailles; green-gold wallpaper, shiny and clean like they’d just had it put up the day before; a wall that was nothing but mirrors; and two walk-in closets, the sizes of my apartment in Westwood; a bathroom, all gold-plated fixtures, something I always thought was tacky about your folks—and I told you this a few times, too—with a big round Jacuzzi bath and a window so you could take a bath and watch your neighbors at the same time.

  The door is locked, of course, but you know how to take a dime and very simply unlock it. So we get in, and the bed is perfectly made; no sign of hooker or trick. You go into the bathroom to look for them, giggling as a
lways, because we think we’re going to find the two of them with her ass bent over a sink and his schlong pumping in like an oil drill; I check out the walk-in closets, but there’s nothing but tons of Armani and Valentino and the smell of Red and L’Air du Temps.

  As I’m about to go into the second closet, the pimp comes running in, out of breath because it’s quite a hike up those stairs in your folks’ house. “What you boys doin’?”

  I cackle—sometimes, when I’m really bombed and in a party mood, I do this laugh that’s like “snort-cackle-pop,” and it sounds like I hurt myself or something.

  Then I notice he’s got his revolver out.

  Oh, shit, I’m thinking. I sober up real fast. “Looking for the party boy.”

  He just stares at me with the gun drawn, and that’s when I hear the girl in the bathroom, kind of moaning, and you, too, still giggling, and that wet sound like rubber and lubricant.

  And another sound, while the Irish pimp from hell is staring at me, a sound in the walk-in closet.

  My hand is on the door.

  But someone else’s hand is on the other side of the door.

  “Alec?” I ask the door.

  The sound that comes back isn’t entirely human, but it’s human enough. It sounds like the noises Alec used to make when he was doing like a feeb imitation: like his tongue got cut out and his lips are shredded. So I think maybe it’s some kind of setup and joke on me, so I give the door a good pull, and it opens.

  Dresses and coats, hanging, rustling, in a dark closet.

  The sound of slow dripping.

  I can smell the pimp’s breath: He’s real close to me.

  I can tell he’s a little scared, too, and he still has the gun out.

  He’s pointing it at the dresses, hanging.

  Something clear and dripping from the corner of a full length mink coat.

  I switch on the closet light, but the pimp very quickly switches it off again.

  But in that one second of light, I see something in the corner.

  Something that left a trail of slime and human waste in its path.

  Its ribs quivering.

  Open, and quivering, like the skeleton of a boat, a slaughterhouse boat with the flesh and innards of animals dripping from its deck.

  It’s always through the eyes that you know someone. I once took care of a friend’s dog when I was eight; and then, when I was nineteen, and had long before moved away from that friend, I was in New York, in Central Park, and I saw in the eyes of a dog an old friend, and sure enough, it was the dog I had known when I was eight, and in Orange County. It’s always there in the eyes, the person, the animal, the creature, not in the skin or voice or the movements: It’s in the eyes.

  So I had seen in the brief light, his eyes, Alec’s eyes, left in their sockets long after the skin had been torn from bone and skull to make the rest of him resemble a skinned possum.

  And when it registers on my brain that it’s Alec, that this girl did something to Alec, something inhuman, I hear your scream from the bathroom, and I turn and the pimp turns, and the girl screams, too, and there's the sound of breaking glass.

  The pimp gets to the bathroom first, before me, and I hear him fire two shots; I’m just behind him, and when I see you clutching your hand with all that blood coming out, I figure the pimp shot your fingers off. For just a second, I see her, too, not as she was, pretty and tall and sexy, but some small tentacled thing, like a fucked-up sea urchin, dropped from between her legs, released from its empty and ragged socket, with a cut umbilical cord attached, loping on its wormlike feelers across the bathtub rim, out the broken window, into the night.

  The pimp yells, “Goddamn it, that fucking bitch,” then drops his gun, grabs me by the collar, “You bastards, you asked for it, you ain’t supposed to get her down there, that’s what she wants, you sons of bitches, you’re supposed to get head or a hand job, didn’t she tell you? She tricked you, and she was the best, you sons of whores!” He’s weeping, and I’m thinking, Christ, he’s in love with … that thing.

  “Is that a fucking alien?” I’m screaming. “You brought some fucking outer space—”

  But he cuts me off, spitting a wad of slime on my face. “I fished her out of the sea, asshole, down at Santa Monica pier, she got caught on my hook and she does things to you, she gets boys like you, but not like this, it’s up to you, your buddies wanting to put it there, but I told you that ain’t allowed! She’s the best, but you can’t touch her there, it’s so hard to trap her, and now, look what you done!”

  But you, you start screaming again and turning blue, so the pimp lets me go and he runs out of there in search of his escaped sea creature.

  That’s when I figure it’s time to call an ambulance.

  5

  So now I know the pimp wasn't shooting at you, but at that thing, that thing that you stuck your fingers up into. It was hell cleaning up the mess in the bathroom, getting rid of her skin. Funny thing about her skin and guts—they looked like they’d been spun with a fine silk, but they were all sticky. You were lucky to lose only your fingers. Think of what Alec lost, the night before he got married—not that he ever did get married. He’s sort of a vegetable now, living off of machines at his folks’ house, and Luce got married to Billy Bucknell last year, that scheming son of a gun.

  You and me, we’re rooming together these days. My new nickname for you is Fingers, and in the morning, when you bring me coffee, it’s kind of nice, just the two of us. We get by. I tried to do it with a girl again, after that, but what if she’s up inside there, what if that girl's just spun out of her silk, what if she’s waiting to take me to the Big O and rip the skin right off my back and end up like Alec with wires and tubes all over him and his eyes, so weird and sad, like he had it, that orgasm at the end of the universe, like maybe it was worth it, what she did to him, but I got to tell you, Fingers, I got to tell you, I’m never getting close to one of those things again as long as we both shall live.

  I keep seeing it in their faces, their eyes, the It that was the whore’s core, the creature in the flesh purse, and I feel like It’s coming for both of us, maybe to finish off the job. Alec, too, maybe even Billy Bucknell, and MoJo, and Pasco, and Ben Winter. Sometimes at night, when I can’t sleep, I hear Its sloppy wiping at the windows, and I pull the covers up over the two of us just to feel safe. You and me, we’ll take care of each other, we don’t have to go out much, at least not till we get evicted, and then we can hide under the sewers or in the alleys, and if we see her, if we still got legs, we can run, you and me. I will not abandon you to It, and I promise, for better or worse, good buddy.

  In sickness and in health.

  Ice Palace

  1

  I once helped murder a boy, when I was nineteen, only we didn’t think of ourselves as boys back then.

  It was in college, at a university in the mountains of Virginia, when the snow had piled up and the parties were in full swing. I lived with my brothers—we weren’t blood relations except through the college fraternity system. It was February, and certain aspects of fraternity hazing were not yet complete. It was always in the harshest part of the season that the sadistic rituals took place on campus, from paddling to raiding to a particularly cruel torture called Ice Palace.

  I was just buttoning up my shirt, about to start shaving, when Nate Wick, known as the Wicked Wick or the Flaccid Wick, grabbed me by the collar and slammed me against the wall; the whole world shook and I cussed him out something fierce; his face was all scrunched up like he was about to cry. He had hair growing from his ears even at twenty-one, and fat cheeks like a cherub gone to seed. I socked him in the jaw, ‘cause he could be crazy sometimes, even if he was my fraternity brother. He took the blow pretty good, and my fist ached like a son of a bitch, and he dropped on my bed, right on the wet towel, so it made a smack kind of sound, and if he hadn’t been naked I’d have grabbed him by his collar and heave-hoed him right onto the balcony, where it was twenty below an
d iced smooth.

  “Damn it, Wick,” I said, “you drive me, you know that? You drive me, Christ.”

  “Drive you what? Nuts?”

  “You just drive me, that’s all,” I said, finally catching my breath.

  Nate said, slyly, “I know what you want, Underdog. I know what you want.” I felt my face going red. Something disturbed me about his comment.

  “What the jizz you shittin’?” Stan, ever the poet, said from the doorway to my room. Stan was naked, too, which was pretty much how the guys went around on a Saturday morning in February when the nearest open road to the girls’ college was ten miles away. It was funny, being as generally modest as I was, how I’d got used to all this flaunted nakedness in the ice-cold mornings. Myself, I never got out of the showers except with a big blue towel around my waist, and never left my room except with a shirt and khakis on.

  Nate began laughing, and I figured given his jugface that I hadn’t even caused him a moment’s pain; but I was still mad ‘cause I hated being surprised like that. Everything in that frat house was a surprise attack, especially on Big Weekends. Nate was on edge on account of his girl might not be making it down for Fancy Dress, so there was a chance he might be the dateless wonder.

  Nate said, “Look, Underdog, we got the pledges coming over for Ice Palace, and you look like a queer from Lynchburg.”

  “If that’s what you think, jerk-off, then you better not lie naked on my bed too long with that come-hither look on your face,” I said. I went back to shaving in the bowl I’d put beneath the mirror in my room for privacy; it saved me from running to the communal and much-pissed-upon bathroom every time I needed to shave or wash.

  Stan said, “Fuck the fuck it very.” It was a line he said often, sober or drunk, and I couldn’t figure it out for the life of me. He had patches of hair up and down his body, armpits to knees, like he had some ape pattern baldness problem. “I can’t wait for tonight, girls, I’m gonna get me some fine pussy, fine pussy.”