by Chris Vola
Vola
Monkeytown:
A Novel
By
Chris Vola
Monkeytown
Copyright © 2012
Cover illustration by Mike at Custom Fan Art
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes.
Editor: Douglas Rhodes
ISBN: 978-0615719641
S A M Publishing
SAMPublishing.net
Printed in the United States of America
Vola
Vola
THIS IS THE fear.
The fear that builds slowly, that grips the underlining of your skin, shakes guts, won’t let go.
The fear of waking up in the oncoming lane, a second before the truck hits, of knowing that your seatbelt won’t protect you from those big headlights, the screaming horn, the crush of metal that will send you unraveling into the fire.
The fear that makes you want to swallow a fist of Xanax and float away, far away, anything but this.
Because you see Harry tied down to a stainless steel surgical table, spread-eagled, naked. Titus, wearing a ski mask, crouches, holding a camcorder a foot in front of Harry’s face. His red shirt provides an intense contrast to the white and metalic surgical glare. “You actually thought we were doing a live feed, Harold,” he says. “You really thought I’d pull an amateur move like that.”
Kane appears from the dark surrounding the floodlights. Wearing surgical gloves and a white smock, carrying a bottle of Vaseline and a two- or three-foot long bicycle chain. “We ready?” he asks.
“That all depends on Harold, who finds it amusing to waste our time,” Titus says. “Are you w-w-w-weady Harold?” he asks.
“Fuck off,” Harry mutters. Another trick. But he wanted it.
Your legs buckle as you start to back away from the set. An invisible hand shoves you into the front row, next to the men in ski masks. A preview of coming attractions?
Titus nods. Kane unscrews the bottle, spreads KY down the chain until it glistens in the floodlights.
“A client,” Titus says, “was a little upset by your performance. I’ve had several requests to have you slowly decapitated with a rusty blade, to force-feed you glass shards until your stomach lining ruptures, to bathe your testicles in a vat of corrosive acid — nice things like that.”
The men in ski masks hoot in agreement. Someone rubs your shoulder, gently. You cringe.
“You know why, Harold? Because you’re a huge asshole. And that, I can’t tolerate.”
While Titus is speaking, Kane moves behind Harry, straightens the chain. It crackles, faintly.
This is when you start to sweat. When you wish more than anything that you were still being forced to take the drugs that made you feel so lukewarm, so disconnected, like the scenes in front of you were nothing more than the nearly forgotten projections of a bad childhood memory tucked into the dark recycle bin of your consciousness. Then your own sphincter clenches, because this is happening in real-time. You gag from the Vaseline smell.
Still crouching, Titus nods. Kane inserts the chain into Harry with one hand, spreading his ass cheeks with the other. Harry bucks forward, his face and neck muscles pulse.
“We’re going to do something different,” Titus says. “What I’m asking is that you – Hey! Look at me when I’m talking! – is that you answer a few easy questions, give me the answers you know I want, man, and we can forget about this.”
For a second you think Harry's about to laugh. But his lips aren’t twisting into a smile – it’s a horrible clown grimace, a rupture. He’s straining against the ties, grinding his teeth, a pile of frothy drool congealing on the rug under the table. The chain has almost disappeared. Titus stands up, makes one final 360-degree sweep around the table, zooms in, stopping to focus on Harry’s face. He turns the RECORD light off, lowers the camcorder, makes the cut-it sign. Kane stops pushing. His gloves and smock are covered in cherry-color. Harry’s neck muscles relax. He looks up.
“Good,” Titus says. “Now let’s find your motivation. You’re sorry about this afternoon. You’ve had a series of metaphysical revelations. You accept Allah immediately and unequivocally. You’re ready to answer my questions as honestly as possible. Begging me for forgiveness would also be a nice touch, You think to yourself; whoa, man, it’s that easy! You want to put all of this behind us. Got it?”
Harry gurgles, groans, mumbles something. Titus leans over, Harry repeats.
“No,” Titus says, “no I don’t think that’s going to be possible.”
Harry mumbles again.
“Well, I don’t know if I…Yes, yes he’ll be taken care of after this is…Yes, yes, fine, fine,” Titus says in between Harry’s groans. Who is he?
Harry says a last word and his red, balding dome drops.
“Great.” Titus smiles, picks up the camera. Kane steps out of the scene, comes back onto the set wearing a ski mask. Titus presses RECORD. You feel a lump rising up from the acid-bottom of your stomach.
“Harold Blunderthal,” Titus shouts in a funky but passable Middle Eastern accent, “are you not a wretched, squirming sinner, an Infidel scum?”
Harry’s head stays down. Kane wiggles the chain in slow, concentric circles. Harry grunts, spits foam.
“Are you not a sinner?”
More wiggles.
“Yes!” Harry screams. “Yessss!” Kane stops. Harry’s legs relax a little, his thighs and knees glistening with fresh friction burns.
“Have you found that your sin is truly an abomination? Do you seek forgiveness from the almighty prophet?”
“I do,” Harry moans.
“For us to accept this,” Titus says, “you must shake off the stench of your false god, honestly, here and now.”
A pause. “My…g-g-god?” Harry stutters. Kane grips the chain. Harry shudders. You fight the urge to run. The lump that’s been rising doesn’t have much room.
“Yes!” Titus shrieks. “Your god! The god of Rome, the god of oil, the god of greed!”
“I…” Harry trails off. On the rug below his outstretched legs, a dark expanding puddle.
“Your god!” Titus shrieks. “This path, Harold Blunderthal, will lead you straight into the hellfire set aside specifically for your pathetic race!”
Kane wiggles the chain. Harry’s neck twists at a sickening angle. He forces his head erect. “Your hell, Titus,” Harry says, “has never really frightened me.”
Titus lurches a little at his real name, almost drops the camera. The acid works its way to the back of your throat.
“This ignorance, man,” Titus says. Turns off the RECORD button. “Are you really going waste this footage just to pull some martyr shit on me, Harold?”
Harry mutters something.
“What?” Titus asks, moves closer.
“The camera’s digital, you jackass,” Harry says.
Titus steps back, motions at Kane.
The chain rips free from Harry with surprising speed. Cherry spray-marks across Kane’s smock. Three feet of torn snakeskin, off-white and green.
Your stomach gives out and you retch hard, projectile, some of it spraying out onto the set, caking Titus’ jeans. He swivels around, pulls his ski mask off.
This is the fear.
17
Vola
2009
BILLY PUTS HIS Budweiser on the tackle box, scrunches his eyebrows together hard. Like two sandworms wrestling.
“Josh,” he says, “I read this shit the other day by some assfuck professor from Yale or somewhere.”
“And?”
“And I’m wondering,” he says, “what the fu
ck you make of these, whatdoyoucallit, this lobster conspiracy?”
“Lobster conspiracy.”
“Yeah, Caribbean lobsters. These d-bags from Florida bringing illegally harvested spiny Caribbean lobsters up north, here, Rhode Island, Jersey, Maine, everywhere there’s regular northern lobsters. They dump them in the water near commercial traps and these spiny lobsters, they’ve got this, ah, neuro-toxin or something that makes it impossible for the northern lobsters to breed. Like dudes from England bringing smallpox over and fucking the Indians, right? Explains the small lobster catch this year. So anyway, this professor was saying that the spiny lobsters are more evolved so that the toxin doesn’t really affect their…”
We’re out fishing the incoming tide for flounder out by Long Spear Reef. I don’t have any idea what computer he was sitting on that may have had access to articles written by Ivy League professors (probably mine), or which half-ass conspiracy blogs those articles were linked to. I don’t care. “Hmn,” I mumble.
“I mean, there has to be a reason the northern lobsters stopped, right?” he asks.
“What stopped?”
“What did I just fucking say? Evolution. Why did they stop evolving?”
Time to tune out.
“I’m pretty sure they’re both basically giant bugs with shells that live in the water,” I say. “One just doesn’t go with the other.” I re-bait the hook that had been lying naked on the deck, flick the line into the Sound.
Billy picks at a crud-colored stain on his tee shirt below where it says EAST FAIRPORT BASEBALL – 2001 STATE CHAMPIONS. His face changes. He finishes his cigarette, a gross Newport Non-Menthol, tosses the butt into the water. The sandworms square off for Round Two.
“Well,” he grunts, “I don’t really care about evolution. All I’m asking is how these lobsters can be such dicks. A simple question.”
My BlackBerry vibrates in my pocket.
Billy has a lovable shithole for a mouth. Before he was discharged honorably, he did three tours – one in Kabul and two in the mountains outside Fallujah. In the desert and in the bombed-out desert-flavored cities. He wore a kind of body armor called an Interceptor. One morning, during a routine patrol around a village occupied by Sunnis, a synchronized mine explosion destroyed the convoy in front of him and sent pieces of metal, glass, and his friends through his windshield and into his own legs and arms. The Interceptor protected the rest of him, mostly.
THE SUN’S SUNK behind the row of trees and clapboard cottages on the shore, past the reef and its traffic – fishermen and jetskiers head back to houses and bars – past where the Connecticut River dumps its brackish load into Long Island Sound. Verizon and AT&T towers blink. The lights go on in downtown Fairport, a cold hospital-light brightness in the gathering haze.
We reel in. Billy tosses another cigarette overboard. A seagull tries to eat it.
I watch the white foamy tail of the boat’s wake, churning up the distance when Billy cranks the throttle. Waves lose their translucence, become a million jagged snowcaps that bob and creak, weave and thrash on a suicide mission southwards, the North Fork of Long Island, a blue and brown dash in the distance. A big, yellow moon twists the horizon purple.
I reach into my pocket, find a loose Klonopin.
I GUT THE first one on a plastic tray, pull out its brown and blue insides. Billy hoists his flaccid body over another – still-wiggling – his filet-knife gleaming in the cabin’s halogen-light gloom.
The sky is a pale black, soft and serious. Gnats and mosquitoes take turns tasting our naked backs and legs. We throw the meatless carcasses in the buckets.
We drop the bluefish and flounder filets in the bed of Billy’s pick-up.
A tiny kid is walking up the gravel road toward the marina, carrying a flashlight and a net, to try and catch the pairs of mating blue crabs that latch onto the wooden dock pilings at night. He stops. “What’ve you got in there?” he asks, re-clenching his tiny fist around the net.
Billy smiles. “Five-day-old infant shit that a bum jizzed on, ate, and threw back up.”
“Huh?” the kid mumbles, blushes.
“Dirty placenta-chum freeze-dried in your mom’s ass hairs,” I say.
The kid gasps but tries to keep his tough-guy-out-alone-at-night routine. Cute. “No it’s not,” he says. “You’re lying. What is it really?”
Billy nods. “No fooling this one,” he says. “Do you really, really want to know?”
“Duh,” the kid says, frowns.
Billy reaches into one of the buckets. “Well, since you really, really, really want to know, it’s…this!”
Before the kid can ask what this! is, Billy’s already chucked the gaping head, spinal cord and assorted internal organs of the biggest bluefish in his direction. It hits near the kids feet, splatters blood, scales and digestive junk all over his bare feet and shins. The kid drops his gear, screams, runs onto the dock and into the orange-tinted darkness.
“You, my man, are a real douche.”
“Never said I wasn’t,” Billy shrugs. He lights a small joint laced with Hydrocodone, limps to the driver’s side and pulls himself into the truck.
FAIRPORT IS ONE of a handful of small, nearly identical cities that sprinkle the Connecticut coastline. The polluted White-Flight skeletons of a previous century’s industrial boom and subsequent implosion, miles of concrete and iron scar tissue.
We drive through the city on I-95. The highway expands, rises over row houses, duplexes, dollar stores. Manufacturing plants spew out the requisite byproducts from immense towers. A train speeds Southwest on the Metro-North. Lovely.
Brightly lit video billboards – WINDORPHINS ARE LIKE A TICKER TAPE PARADE FOR YOUR SOUL. Bouncing around the LCD display, dozens of pink and yellow cartoon blobs, the same bugged-out eyes and fiendish grin. What are windorphins? Are they on eBay? Then, suddenly, REAL MEN LOVE JESUS flashes – white letters on a black background. Billy tosses his joint out the window, heads towards a spiraling off-ramp.
My BlackBerry vibrates in my pocket.
PUERTO RICAN NEIGHBORHOOD – chain-linked, an asphalt jumble, besmirched housing projects, bodegas.
I give Billy twenty dollars for a thirty-rack and forty more for party favors. We’ve been valued customers here since we were in high school, creeping with balled fists, surfing the awkwardness of oily pubescence. Billy gets out and I pretend not to stare at the three borinquens leaning on plastic crates, sipping out of paper bags.
My BlackBerry vibrates in my pocket.
Billy limps out a minute later, carrying the beer. He hands Arturo two twenties. The Zip-Lock appears in a less-than-discrete exchange. Ten years ago he would have bugged out, stashed the supply and ran, but now the transaction is third nature. Arturo knows twelve American words and most of them are cusses he learned from Billy or las drogas. I unlock the truck.
Arturo’s shouting – “Fuck that shit-ass! Si, Bee-lly?” He winks at Billy, who laughs, drops the case of beer and the Zip-Lock on my lap. Before he hoists himself into his seat, he pauses to salute a very fat, very black transsexual prostitute named KiKi Deez Nuts, flaunting his (or her) trade across the street.
WE DRIVE IN SILENCE, the stars only faintly visible over the dull city glow. The near total blackness of Fairport Harbor – a water-mirror reflecting red and green fishing boat signals. And farther out, the tiny yellow lights that transform Long Island into a giant, pulsating Lite-Brite screen. The endless digital billboards – hundreds of floodlights blaring under the LCD screens. The last one I see before we get off the highway advertises a company that sells identity theft insurance. In gaping, broad letters – HOW MUCH IS YOUR GOOD NAME WORTH?
BILLY’S STREET – MY Audi parked next to the curb. We pull into the driveway of the clapboard bungalow he shares with his old man. TV noises and shocks of light whisper from the screened-in porch. The baritone voice of a man trying to sell a home-study, self-help program for recovery from agoraphobia, anxiety, panic attacks, depression. A popu
lar infomercial. “…that what you’re about to experience…the development as a result of my own personal recovery!”
Billy swings open the front door, carrying the filets like a day-after-Thanksgiving turkey or a trophy they give all the kids. “Hey Pops,” he shouts, “wake the fuck up!”
Until his knee gave out last fall, Billy’s old man worked the third shift at a factory in Norwalk that makes paper into useful, modern things like stationery and notepads with butterflies and unicorns and other lame creatures on them. Stacks of these, along with piles of computer paper, envelopes, and blank newsprint fill the floor space, emasculate the fake leather couch and dining table. The mantle above the fireplace is lined with several dust-choked photographs – Billy in Little League, pudgy and smiling; Billy’s parents at their wedding surrounded by anonymous relatives; Billy and his parents posing in front of a nameless ocean; a copy of Billy’s mother’s obituary.
Billy’s old man is asleep on a scarred recliner. His snoring gut strains under a crud-stained tee shirt that says YOU HOPE YOU LOOK THIS GOOD AT 50. Billy shakes one of his shoulders hard and his old man jolts up, eyes bugged-out, blood-sore.
“Dinner time,” Billy snarls. He disappears into the kitchen.
Billy’s old man reaches for a beer that isn"t there. “What’d you get?” he asks. His voice – the crunch of wood chips being fed into grinders that produce the sticky pulp they use at the paper factory.
“Some bluefish,” Billy shouts from the kitchen, “couple skates for the lobster pots.”
His old man notices me, grins jaggedly. “How’re you, Josh?” he grunts. “How’re your par–” He stops, wipes crumbs from his shirt, embarrassed.
