Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale

by Chuck Kinder

  I’ll say. Been lonesome for me.

  You bet. So how have you been amusing yourself besides rubbing up against that old fart?

  That’s about the long and short of it, darlin’, Mary said, and cocked her head cutely. —Here’s the problem, sugar, I haven’t been a real bad little girl much this past week hardly at all. I hardly have any juicy stories for you at all. Oh, let’s see. I fucked Spain on Tuesday, but I wasn’t much in the mood and we didn’t do anything real dirty. I fucked Clay last night. I ran into him down on 24th at the Celtic Tavern and one thing led to another and I really hadn’t fucked Clay in a month of Sundays and he was peeved. Oh, and we did do a little trick that might tickle your fancy. You ever heard of a snowjob? I hadn’t, which is pretty hard to believe. What Clay did was put a line of coke on his boner, which I did just before I gave him head. That’s what Clay called a snowjob. That just about cracked me up! I could hardly suck him off I was giggling so bad. Anyway, that’s about all she wrote in the old suckin’ and fuckin’ department this week. So what will that add up to, anyhow? About five or six little spanks is all, I bet. My little bottom will hardly get rosy with five or six little spanks. Sugar, will that snowjob get me a few extra little spanks when we get back over to my place?

  A couple, I reckon, Jim said, and patted Mary’s ass.

  Shootfire, boy, is that all?

  Let me guess, Jim said, and cupped Mary’s hips in his hands. —You got your heart set on doing that old fart?

  What’s a girl to do? Mary said, and pressed her pelvis against Jim’s leg. —I mean, I have never made it with a one-armed man before. Hey, and he tells me he’s got a dick that needs a dashboard! I won’t do it if you tell me not to, sugar.

  Do what you want to do.

  Okeydokey. I just plan on giving him some head, so it won’t take too long, I betcha. Do you want to watch?

  Not today.

  Okeydokey, babe. When I lick my lips and come up smilin’, I’ll be thinking of you down in my heart, and only you. And I’ll commit every single little juicy thing to memory, and when we get back over to my place, I’ll drive you plum nuts with the dirty details, sugar. It’ll be my little goodbye gift to you, okay? Mary said, smiling up at Jim like a choirgirl. —Jim, you may have my heart in your back pocket, baby, but I have your number good.

  When the old fart of a biker returned from the restroom, Mary was waiting for him by the front door. As he opened the door for her, Mary slipped a hand into one of the old biker’s back pockets. Mary gave Jim a last look over her shoulder and a big smile, and Jim tipped his fedora toward her just as the heavy door swung shut behind the happy couple.

  2

  As soon as Jim saw the old biker stagger back in the door maybe twenty minutes later, looking palsied and dazed, Jim polished off his shot of tequila and headed out. At which moment, as that farcical cosmic gravy called fate would have it, he ran right into S. Clay Wilson coming in the door. Clay was leading his usual entourage of sleazy, shanghaied strumpets, thundering dummies, and cave-life cretins, all of whom, Clay informed Jim grandly, had spent a typical morning touring the low-rent bars to hunt and gather and collect offerings of any sort for the Higher Echelon Fallen Angels Beer Blast, Barbecue and Swimming Party Fund, of which Clay was the master of last rites.

  Gah’damn, sumbitch, it’s my old pal Jimmy, Clay had yelled at the short, muscular woman with a mustache, whose name was Femme Fatale and who was Clay’s main squeeze for the morning. It’s fucken farcical cosmic gravy, Clay yelled into Femme’s ear, for he had been thinking about his old pal Jim ever since that morning when he took this monster dump and that giant two-toned turd laying there grinning up at him had looked just like his old pal Jimmy.

  Jim begged off, had to almost wrestle Clay to get loose, saying some shit was hitting the fan elsewhere, one of his and Shorty’s deals gone sour, a situation he had to attend to pronto, but he’d call Clay tonight and they’d tie up. Clay hovered at the door, however, and watched as Jim made his way across the rain- slick Great Highway to the parking area, where Clay spotted that chopped-top, lowered, midnight-blue ’52 Hudson classic, a car Clay recognized even before Jim reached it and hopped in. Whereupon the Hudson peeled out, leaving rubber even on the wet pavement, and Clay knew the name of that song. Whereupon Clay did what seemed sensible and rewarding. He joined his scumbag entourage at the bar and began downing double shots of Sausa Commemorative tequila with warm Dutch beers back.

  For a few forlorn minutes, S. Clay considered the possibility of swearing off women and the pain they caused as routinely as taking a shit. Returning perhaps to that fag bar in the Castro he and his thundering thug buddies had terrorized earlier in the morning, the Mildred Pierce Annex, where he had harassed a covey of cute cabin boys off a Swedish liner anchored in the bay until all the sweet things swore they would never disembark in America again. Perhaps Clay could make things up to them, those cute cabin boys, convince them to take him in, care for him, be gentle and understanding and patient with him as he learned their secret ways. Then Clay felt Femme Fatale, who could read him like a book, cozy up beside him. Whereupon, cooing the soft sounds of sympathy, she took things in hand, rubbing his horn of honey beneath the bar. As he tried to focus his wet, crossed eyes upon the thick, muscular form of this angel of masturbation, who was also one of a hell of a professional wrestler, Clay suddenly perceived the wondrous light emanating from her lonely but lovely inner self. What Clay had come to understand was the wisdom of loving a selfless, ugly woman, who was also perfectly capable of kicking some ass.

  3

  Mary Mississippi and Jim drove across town from the Great Highway to Mary’s loft south of Market Street at the edge of the Mission. Jim placed his hands on Mary’s softly swaying hips as in the drizzly air they climbed the rickety outside stairs to her loft, which took up the entire top floor of an old three-story brewery building. As Mary fiddled with the lock of the big sliding iron door, Jim took in deep breaths of air rich with the smell of freshly baked bread from the bakery down the alley, and he gazed out over seeming acres of wet warehouse rooftops that stretched all the way to the waters of the Bay, where he spotted the dim outline of a ship making its way to the docks in Oakland.

  Mary undressed slowly as she walked across the big room toward the brass bed along the far wall. Her skin glowed pink in the pearly light that streamed though the huge skylight. Mary lay back on the wide bed and opened her arms and legs toward Jim, smiling that cute, crooked smile, the red hair around her labia outlining an impossibly pink core. She bit her lower lip as she watched Jim walk across the room toward her, tossing his own clothes as he came.

  As it turned out, Mary’s old biker had had a dick that could put to good use not only a dashboard but fender skirts and the grille of a Cadillac car. Hence Mary truly got what she craved from Jim as she related all the low-down, blow-by-blow details of the various dirty deeds she had done to that old coot with a great cock and Jim spanked her bare ass black and blue for her. What Jim reflected upon as he whacked away at Mary’s cutely dimpled behind was that the one thing they had always really shared was the craving of that fruit called pain. In a nutshell, they were both fools for pain, Jim and Mary. They were pure pain simple.

  Jim flopped back on the bed breathless, sweaty, his arms a ton of bricks. Mary crawled up onto him. She licked the damp hair on his chest and sucked on his left nipple. She buried her face in his chest hair and inhaled deeply. —Boy, you have got to be the best- smellin’ man I have ever personally had the extreme pleasure of smellin’. Sugar, what I can’t figure out is if you’re this boy who may really love me like he claims he does or if you’re just some sort of intrepid nooky hound who fooled me good. Sugar, the time has come for you to shit or get off the pot. Are you gonna move back to New York with me or what?

  I told you I’d be back in a few weeks.

  I’m not talkin’ about some little bitty visit, boy. You know just what I’m talkin’ about.

  I know what you’
re talking about.

  How the fuck did I ever get on the lonely side of love, anyhow? I know all about the crazy road I’m on. I’ve been down it before. I figured I’d learned a long time ago not to try to hold on to something I never had in the first place. But I guess you never learn when it comes to nasty old love. I don’t know how I got to be a goner over you. You are so extreme is what I think it is. I’ve never met a man as hard and as soft at the same time as you. You’re just so weird and extreme, and also, I love how you smell. So what have I been to you, then, sweetie, some kind of six-week stand? You still love her, don’t ya?

  You know I care for you. She loves somebody else.

  Fuckin’ care for me! You asshole! You’re just one of those kinds of old boys who like to fuck fantasy. I knew that about you right off. Well, I didn’t do half the low-down, dick-suckin’ shit I told you. I just told you a whole bunch of that shit for the pure sake of your boner. So who does she love, anyhow?

  Oh, really? You made stuff up?

  That’s the long and short of it, you asshole. So who is he?

  Just somebody, that’s who. What wasn’t true?

  Oh, a whole lot of it wasn’t true.

  What about the stuff with Clay, for instance? The snowjob. That time he had you tickle his asshole with his own toothbrush.

  Well, yeah, that stuff was true, I guess. Hey, you’re trying to turn the tables. I’m the one with the big questions around here. You’re stalling on me, aren’t you, boy?

  I just can’t move back to New York with you right now.

  I know the score. I just want you to know there were real, true feelings involved here on my part, anyhow. All this wasn’t just some big fat joke to me. I meant things and I’m real sad right now ’cause I know you’ll never leave her. Not for me, anyhow. I’m real disappointed in how things turned out, and most of all I’m real disappointed in you, Jim, I’ve really liked being in love with you. Being in love makes me feel like a million bucks. I believe in love. True love, too. I’m a sucker for it. There’s a whole sea of love, and I’m just a little boat on it. I was, anyhow. Now I’m gonna have to stop being in love, and I could just cry my eyes out on account of it. I’m a real unhappy girl right now, Jim, thanks to you. Jim, just don’t go making a joke out of my true feelings. Don’t play this for laughs in some old story. Please don’t do it. Give me that much anyhow, all right? Show me that much consideration, will you, huh? Well, let’s go ahead and fuck anyhow. I’ll fuck your brains out of your ears and you just remember what you’ll be missing, boy. I just hope she breaks your fucking heart. You got it coming, boy, big time.

  The Lights of Buenos Aires

  Ralph knew it was time to get out on his own. He could no longer endure the endless accusations and pain and potential violence, nor one more night of Alice Ann’s efforts to raise the dead from this and a hundred earlier lifetimes of turmoil. Ralph had had enough of Alice Ann sitting at what had once been their diningroom table with her space-cadet friends, talking in tongues, the room ablaze from skull-shaped candles and musky incense smelling morbidly like overripe roses and worms.

  More than this even were the criminal kids, who were finally totally out of hand. His daughter had gotten that tattoo of a skull and crossbones above her right breast, after all. Paco was back to weighing drugs on the kitchen table, and Killer roamed the house freely. Ever since that night when the boy had in a drunken delirium apparently cut off great strands of his own long blond hair, he had taken to shaving his head, except for a Mohawk strip down the center, much in the mode of his latest hero and role model, that crazy character Robert De Niro had played in Taxi Driver, full of hatred, sexual hang-ups, and an affection for violence and revenge, after whom Ralph’s son had decided to pattern his life. Most of all, though, Ralph had to demonstrate to Lindsay that he was now a free agent.

  He needed to be alone for a few days is what Ralph wrote in the note he left Alice Ann. He needed to get body and soul back together. He'd be in touch, Ralph wrote in the note. Ralph took a room in a cheap East Palo Alto hotel which had two narrow windows overlooking the Bayshore Freeway. As he sat on his bed at night, smoking and watching the endless traffic of people with places to go, Ralph could sometimes glimpse an airplane descending from the dark western sky toward the San Francisco airport. It would sink softly in the night as though through liquid, its lights blinking in languid sequence, and Ralph would fill with both an unspecified remorse for the past and longing for the future.

  Ralph had to use a pay phone in the hallway for calls. Time after time he tried to get a call in to Lindsay, but Jim always answered, and Ralph hung up. Ralph called his old home a dozen times a day at least, let the phone ring off the wall, simply to see who would finally answer, and when somebody did, he would hang up. What Ralph liked best about his little room was the small refrigerator which stood next to the bed. When he woke up in the middle of the night confused and dying of thirst, all he had to do was reach out, even with his eyes closed, blindly, and open the door, and there was that cold bottle of vodka.

  One afternoon Ralph parked his car down the street from the house and sat there smoking and sipping vodka for over an hour, looking for the least sign of life. When he was reasonably sure nobody was home, Ralph entered the house and poked around. He examined the dirty dishes piled precariously on the sink and reflected upon what their stains revealed about the eating habits of a household to which he no longer belonged. Ralph felt like some sort of archaeologist sifting through the debris of a vanished people. He checked out the little pyramid of butts in the ashtray on the kitchen table for evidence, such as unfamiliar brands. He checked out the contents of the refrigerator to see what they would reveal about the life of these lost people. He drank directly from a half-gallon bottle of milk and then poured the rest down the drain. He poured a bottle of orange juice down the drain. He ate several bitefuls of leftover Chinese food from cartons, and then threw the remainder in the garbage disposal. He dumped half a dozen eggs down the garbage disposal. He crammed lunchmeat and cheese, half a loaf of bread, and a jar of Alice Ann’s favorite pickles down the garbage disposal and turned it on and lingered there listening to that satisfying grind.

  The bedroom was as straightened up as Ralph had ever seen it, the bed made, no piles of dirty clothes. Ralph noticed that Alice Ann had bought new sheets and pillowcases. In a sudden fit he tore the bed apart, left the bedcovers in a pile on the floor. Ralph checked the medicine cabinet in his and Alice Ann’s bathroom for evidence. Ralph dumped all the toothpaste and toilet paper he could find in the house into a pillowcase, and on top of that piled all the canned goods he could carry, and forsook that place.

  One night when the house was closed up and dark, Ralph spotted a strange car parked at the end of the driveway, a battered old Mercedes. When Ralph skulked over to check it out, he saw that it had a flat tire. That could only mean that Alice Ann and somebody, God only knew who, were off together somewhere in her own rattletrap. Even he, Ralph Crawford, was handy enough to change a flat, for God’s sake, Ralph reflected with disdain. He listened with great pleasure to the hiss of freed air as he deflated the Mercedes’ other three tires. He bent its antenna into a question mark. He stood there in the dark driveway breathless and looked up and down the street. A dog barked in the distance and he could hear the faint hum of traffic from the freeway. Ralph leaned against the car and smoked another cigarette. He flicked the butt out into the driveway, its glowing ember like the tracer of a bullet spinning through the dark. Ralph looked up and down the street once more and then unzipped his pants. He began urinating on the driver’s-side door handle, then raised his aim and sent his golden arc streaming through the open window.

  And then one morning Ralph found a for sale sign in the front yard. When he tried the front door he found it was locked, something of a first. Ralph tried his key, and every other key on his key chain, to no avail. He circled the house, pounding on the locked doors and windows, and calling out for Alice Ann, to no ava
il. Ralph’s next-door neighbor, that nosy old goat, came out onto his porch and stood there with his hands on his hips glaring at Ralph. Ralph ignored him, lit a cigarette, and flopped down heavily on his front stoop. After a time the neighbor went back into his house shaking his head, and Ralph pulled out the pint he had in his coat pocket and took a pull. What came to Ralph’s mind was that John Cheever story where this poor fellow gets unstuck in time, where somehow in the course of strange events one day the poor fellow in the story arrives in the future only to find that he has no place in it. The poor fellow arrives at his house after a day of terrible misadventures only to find it locked against him, and apparendy long empty, and his lovely wife and children apparently long gone. It was as though that poor fellow’s future had vanished without a trace.