by J. R. Helton
James presented himself as this incredibly cool person as well, and maybe he was. He seemed intelligent, composed, and ran down people with style. He smiled often, but it was a mean smile. I could tell we had to be reserved with these people, let them call the shots, stun us with their coolness, and we’d have all the great coke we ever wanted.
Around three a.m., I was rambling on about something when Mercedes suddenly asked if I didn’t have something to take care of, cutting me off in mid-sentence. I took the not-so-subtle cue and asked James if I could pick something up, maybe a gram or two . . .
“Sure,” he said, “but I’d prefer to sell you a heavy eightball for three hundred dollars. That way you’ll get almost a gram for free.”
“That’s fine with me.”
He got off the couch and I stood up.
“Uh, I’ll be right back,” he said and walked down a long hallway.
Mercedes made out two long lines. “For your trip home . . .”
“Thank you,” Susan said.
We did the lines, James came back in, and I gave him three 100 dollar bills. They quickly stood up and shooed us toward the door and we said goodbye. Mercedes gave Susan and me both kisses and told us to come back over soon.
“We’ve got to talk,” she whispered to Susan.
They shut the steel door. We climbed into the windowless LTD and drove home. Susan cuddled up next to me.
“They certainly were nice,” she said.
“Yeah, sort of.”
“Mercedes is too much. I think she overdid it a little.”
“Yeah, James is too cool for everything. Except Julio Iglesias.”
Susan laughed. “Right. I think they’re going to be fun though. Mercedes was very chummy. She said she had a lot to tell me.”
“Yeah, I could tell James was holding back his tongue.”
“I don’t know; he licked his lips enough.”
“That was annoying—”
“He’s kind of chubby, too.”
“They do a lot of coke.”
“I know. It could be fun.”
We arrived late at night. James opened the steel-lined door after making us wait for a few minutes. We stood in the foyer waiting for Mercedes. Julio Iglesias blared in the background. Mercedes came out practically naked in a tiny pair of shorts and a tight, ripped T-shirt that stopped just below her breasts. She gave us both kisses and showered us with compliments. James stood there quietly, licking his lips.
“Come back in the bedroom,” Mercedes said.
We hadn’t been allowed in their bedroom before. We followed them down the long hallway into a large back room, and Mercedes lay down on a king-sized, unmade bed. The room around her was a mess. There was a dresser drawer, a large TV and video, and a couple of nightstands with dirty clothes and empty fast-food packages piled on top of everything. There were also many hardcore porn magazines and videos scattered over the floor and stacked on the nightstands and bed. It was quite a contrast to the rest of the immaculate house. Mercedes pulled a small black rectangle of glass from under the bed and handed it to James.
“Now you boys leave us alone. This is girl’s talk.” Mercedes patted the bed and said to Susan, “Sit down darling.”
Susan smiled and sat down next to her.
“Come with me,” James said.
I stared at Mercedes and Susan reclining next to each other on the bed and didn’t move. Mercedes stood up and laughed and pushed me toward the door. “Go on, go on.” She shut it behind me.
I went down the hall and found James sitting on the couch, licking his lips. There was a large white rock on the mirror. He cut some coke off and chopped it into long parallel lines. “So, tell me,” he said, the razor blade clicking on the glass, “what do you do?”
“Nothing much.”
“Nothing?”
“I work construction, off and on. I write. I go to the movies a lot, read the paper, books, watch TV. That’s about it. What do you do?”
He raised his eyebrows and offered me the glass. “What do I do?”
“Yeah.” I snorted a line. It was excellent coke, the best I’d ever done.
“You know channel 26? You should since you’re a TV watcher.”
“Yeah.”
“I produce their news show.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“I hate to say this James, but that’s a pretty flimsy news show.”
“Oh, it’s probably the worst. You’re not telling me anything. But it’s close to the other three stations in this little chickenshit city. You have to conform. There’s no reason not to really.”
“You’re either Eyewitness 5, or Big 2, or Newswatch 26.”
“We’re Eyewitness 26.”
“Right.”
“Do you like to watch the news?”
“I do. I can’t help it. I stay up all night watching CNN, the same cycles, over and over.”
“They’re all full of shit. You see my new car out there?”
I had. It was an ugly, maroon, Chrysler LeBaron convertible. “Yeah, it’s nice.”
“I have an easy schedule,” James said. “Everything’s worked out.”
“Great.”
James did a line, made out a few smaller ones and left the mirror on the table. He sat back and looked at me appraisingly. “Tell me,” he said, “where are you from?”
“I’m from Cypress. It’s a little town out in the hill country.”
“Oh, I know Cypress. It’s beautiful out there. Where’s Susan from? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“She’s from Cypress, too. We met in high school.”
“A high school romance. That’s sweet.”
“Thanks.”
“I met Mercedes in Washington, D.C. You know her father was once the ambassador from Bolivia.”
“Was?”
“Yes.”
We sat there. James kept looking at me. “Mercedes is a very special woman,” he said.
“She seems very nice.”
“She can be, she can be.” He did a line quickly. “So you guys in college around here or—”
“No. We’re not.”
“I just got out of Yale myself.”
“Oh really?”
“Yes, really. Do I look like a Yale man?”
“I don’t know. What’s a Yale man look like?”
“William F. Buckley went to Yale.”
“He seems a little taller than you.”
James smiled, mildly amused. He was starting to get on my nerves. “So,” I said, “what are you doing in Austin producing a news show on prison overcrowding, murders and car wrecks?”
“I like it here. Mercedes and I have everything we need. The climate is wonderful, the people are nice, lots of good music in town. We’ve got a good set-up. You might have noticed that this coke is the best, the very best. She’s the second, the second stop. Florida, then here.”
“Hmm.” I did a line off the mirror. I could feel James staring at me. I looked up at him and he raised his eyebrows and licked his lips.
“I’m from the country, too, you know.”
“Really?”
“I’m originally from West Virginia. I come from a very wealthy family.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I was raised on a farm, a very large farm. I was raised by three women, my aunt, my grandmother, and my mother. It was those three intelligent, focused women, and me. I was very spoiled and did whatever I wanted. I remember playing alone a lot, in the barn, jumping on the hay bales. We had a large red barn full of horses and hay. Sometimes, I would hide in it and my aunty would call me for hours and I’d never answer.” He stared at me intensely. “I’m glad I was raised
by those three women, with no men in sight. Grandma wouldn’t have stood for it.”
He looked as though he wanted a response. “Right.”
“How do you feel about women?”
“Women?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I like them—”
“I’m not talking about that crap,” James said curtly. “I mean, how do you feel about women?”
“In general?”
“Yes.”
“Hell, I don’t know.”
James was perturbed and moved to the edge of the couch. “I do know. In fact I have a little theory. Actually, it’s a big theory. It encompasses the entire world. It involves the entire world. Listen to me: women are much smarter than men. As a young man, that’s probably the most important thing for you to realize. Women are a higher step up the evolutionary scale. Power lies in intelligence and women have the brains. They also have suffered. They’ve been squashed, stepped on, kicked into a bloody mess for centuries and listen to me now: they never forget.”
“Like elephants?”
He ignored me, speaking rapidly, white spittle forming at the corners of his mouth. “There’s a growing movement of them, the new women, and it’s a silent movement, one that will penetrate every corner of the planet someday. Because one day, women are going to realize their power completely and act upon it without hesitation or mercy and men, well, they’re stronger physically, for the most part, but who needs physical strength anymore? Who needs big muscles when you have a weapon and a willingness to act, to act now, with a weapon, a small silver pistol, automatic weapons, missiles, poisonous gases, nuclear weapons; who needs muscles when you can kill by using your superior intellect to deceive and put one little finger on a trigger? Women are the superior race because they are more compassionate, because they can see all sides, and thus, their empathy is enabling, and what it can bring to fruition is a true and thorough cruelty, or what could be considered cruelty, for us, for their victims, for they will, I promise you, they will be cruel, and torture us beyond our worst nightmares and kick mankind in the collective nuts like we’ve been kicking them in the head for all these years and all they need to take over is make that one tiny step . . .”
He stared intently.
“And what’s that?”
“They have to decide to. Once they’ve made the decision, it’s all over man. You think I’m fucking joking. I can tell by the look on your face. Well, it’s no joke. It’s starting to happen right now, all over the planet. I know. I know how the female mind works. I’ve been around them all my life and they’ve taken me into their confidence. It’s going to happen, it’s coming, and you better be prepared.”
“Okay, thanks.”
He did out a few more lines. I noticed his hands were shaking. He handed me the mirror and smiled. “Here you go.”
The doorbell rang and he got up to answer it. A tall, clean-cut, well-dressed man with very dark skin walked in and I immediately recognized him as the sportscaster for Channel 26. James introduced him to me as Mike and we shook hands. “Nice to meet you,” Mike said and sat down on the couch. James handed him the mirror and he did two lines. “Yes,” he said, “yes.”
“Mike is Mercedes’s husband,” James said, watching me for the effect.
“For some reason, I thought you were her husband, James.”
“Everybody thinks that,” Mike said. “We have an arrangement.”
“Oh yeah?”
Mike laughed. “Yeah, I don’t have to live here and James does.”
James smiled and said nothing. Mike started telling me about himself. He’d gone to UT so we gabbed about that and then he got onto sports. Basketball season was in progress so he assessed the teams, talked about the players. Mike seemed like an incredibly normal, boring guy. I wondered what he was doing with James and Mercedes. He started talking about how he wanted to get out of sports broadcasting and become an anchor. James joined in the conversation then and they talked about work and news production, every last detail at the TV station, the coke fueling both of their mouths with no end in sight.
Mercedes and Susan were in the bedroom for over two hours. When they came out they were laughing and seemed like they’d been friends for life. Mercedes walked up to Mike and kissed him on the lips lightly.
“How are you doing, darling?” she asked.
“Much better now,” Mike said, and gave her a long kiss.
Mercedes broke away and started rubbing James’s neck and asking Mike questions about work. Susan gave me a fuzzy smile and listened to them talk, both of us doing more lines whenever it seemed appropriate. Mike started telling a long boring story about how a charm on his large gold necklace had fallen off in the sink and how this was some sort of magical event, that it was impossible for his Playboy bunny charm to fall off the necklace and that it had to have some significance which he was now going to explain. Susan stood up, sat down next to Mike, put her hand on his thigh and listened to him intently along with Mercedes. I motioned to James and he and I went into the back bedroom. He pulled open a dresser drawer and I saw several packets of coke scattered across a stack of porn magazines. He handed me two eightballs and I gave him 600 dollars.
When I walked into the living room, Susan was standing up and ready to go. We said goodbye to Mercedes and she gave us both kisses. I shook Mike’s hand and then James’s. He raised his eyebrows and licked his lips. “Remember what I told you. Think about it and we’ll talk more later.”
“Okay James, thanks for the info.”
“Come back soon.”
Susan sat close to me in the car on the way home. She rubbed my erection through my pants and kissed my ear and neck all the way back to the apartment. In the parking lot, she took out my dick and sucked on it. We went up to 301, took off our clothes, and lay on the mattress. Susan immediately sat on top of me and we slowly started fucking. She started whispering in my ear. “I love this hard cock. Fuck me with it.”
“You wanted to fuck Mike tonight, didn’t you?”
“I wanted his big, black cock in my mouth.”
I asked her: “Did you fuck Mercedes.”
“Maybe,” she whispered.
“Tell me about it.”
“You want to know about her shaved pussy? How I licked her hard little nipples?”
“Everything. But go slow.”
“Real slow.”
The next day, we woke up around five p.m. and went to have a big dinner at a nice restaurant. Susan told me what Mercedes had said.
“They wanted to separate us.”
“That was obvious.”
“Mercedes told me all of this very personal stuff. I don’t even know if it’s true. But it could be . . .”
“And?”
“Well, her father was the ambassador from Bolivia.”
“I’ve heard that so many times now.”
“Did James tell you?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s he like?”
“A paranoid pseudo-intellectual. I think he hates women. He said they’re going to take over the world with nuclear weapons and kill all the men.”
“Sounds fun. Where’s he from?”
“Up north. He went to Yale. He says he’s from a wealthy family, grew up on a farm, but anyway . . .”
“Anyway, Mercedes has had this terrible life.”
“Really?”
“Yes, her father abused her from when she was seven until she was sixteen.”
“Abused her?”
“Had sex with her for years. And her mother died in a car wreck when she was six. When she turned seven, he started having sex with her.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Yeah, she ran away when she was sixteen. They lived in Washington. Which is where she m
et Mike.”
“Mike the sportscaster.”
“Who’s her husband.”
“Hard to believe.”
“It really is,” Susan said and had a sip of her chardonnay and glanced around the restaurant. “He seems like a real nice guy.”
“I noticed you felt that way.”
“Please, gimme a break.”
“Anyway . . .”
“Anyway, her father hates black people and he found out she ran off with Mike and threatened to have both of them killed. So Mercedes married him and her father disowned her.”
“Good riddance.”
“Yeah, but he was rich. Mike was very nice to her and she got pregnant and he paid for an abortion. They moved to Florida where he went to junior college and then she moved to Austin with him when he came to UT on a football scholarship. I think she met James in Florida.”
“What’s the deal with James?”
“I don’t know. I can’t figure him out.”
“Is she married to him now?”
“No, she’s still married to Mike.”
“Why would she live with that chubby jerk? Does he get the coke?”
“No, I think she’s the connection.”
“That’s what James said.”
“Straight from Peru,” Susan said. “I’d love to go there.”
“Peru? I heard Bolivia.”
“She mentioned Bolivia a lot and kept talking about the politics there. She talked about the Shining Path in Peru and the poor and said she had to be a communist.”
“Because of her conservative father.”
“I guess, or a conscience.”
“But what’s James doing there? Does she fuck him?”
“I don’t think so. Keep your voice down. I did feel sorry for her. She seems very fragile and sad. She was crying when she told me all of this.”
“James said he met her in Washington.”
“I could’ve gotten the story wrong.”
“Or . . .”
“Or it’s a bunch of crap. Are you going to have dessert?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Can I have half?”
“Sure.”
We went over there every three or four days which made for difficult mornings going into work. We all sat in the bedroom together now, watched TV, did coke, and talked. The big room smelled like sex. If James hadn’t been hanging around I could tell that Susan and Mercedes and I would fuck. But the slob wouldn’t leave. So we sat on the bed, did their coke, and listened to James tell us everything he knew in extensive detail or we passively watched Mercedes flirt with us making one sexual allusion after another. When we got tired of it, we’d buy some more coke and go home.
