Lethal Fetish

by Jeffrey Alan Lockwood

“Bang bimbettes—” Larry added.

  “Or steal shit,” Dennis finished, clearly pleased with their spontaneous poetry.

  “Agreed,” I said, “but we’ve been telling people since the Sixties that when it comes to sex, sin is for uptight suckers. So, the moral dumpster is overflowing and the deviants are having a feast.” While I wasn’t comfortable with society approving and prohibiting sexual positions and partners, there had to be a line. And at least on this soggy rooftop, the lines were regular and tight.

  ~||~

  Once the rain shifted from spitting to wetting to pissing, having skipped over rotten, we decided to call it a day and head to O’Donnell’s to get warm, dry, and merry—or maybe even gee-eyed, but not baloobas. The Irish have even more words for inebriation than for rain.

  I stopped by the office to check on messages and found nothing from Courtney. Knowing that Nina was planning to join us at the pub where the Goat Hill crew was likely to bring up Eunectes and his band of twisted men, I gave her a call to fill her in on developments without going into grisly details. By the time I made it to the pub, the gang had nearly emptied a pitcher of Guinness to acknowledge my long-standing contention that, other than whiskey, this was the best way to warm a bone-chilling day.

  Behind the bar, Brian greeted me with, “What’s the craic?” and another pitcher of the Irish stout. As I got to the table, Larry, Dennis and Carol lifted their glasses with “Slàinte!”—the traditional Irish toast to health. And given my mother’s conviction that hot food was the best way to stave off a cold, it was good to see them chowing down on a plate of blaa that Cynthia had turned into sandwiches. There’s nothing better than one of her tender flour-dusted rolls folded around a sausage sizzling off the grill.

  Buíochas le Dia (the Gaelic phrase for “thank God” and one of the few expressions from the Old Country that stuck with me from childhood), Brian and Cynthia had refused to serve those awful bread bowls that were all the rage. Spinach gunk in pumpernickel or clam chowder in sourdough are about as appetizing as Frito pie and Cheez Whiz.

  Having emptied a second pitcher while arguing whether the craze over Rubik’s cubes or CB radios was a surer harbinger of cultural collapse, we ordered another and started to debate who was the most important person to have died in the previous year. Such was the nature of hump days at O’Donnell’s—passionate disputes about probably irresolvable and undoubtedly inane issues, much like every day at the United Nations.

  Carol made a case for Edith Head, who she called the most famous and glamorous costume designer in the history of Hollywood. The lesbian diva held the record for the most Academy Awards by a woman and, according to Carol, when asked about the important men in her life, Head replied, “There were eight of them—they were all named Oscar.” Carol found this awfully damned funny and I was reluctantly amused. Meanwhile, Dennis was advocating for Bob Marley and Larry was pushing for Bill Haley, so reggae was battling rock-and-roll for cultural importance—neither of which seemed a great leap forward for music in my estimation.

  I was trying to decide between Bobby Sands, the Irish nationalist who led a hunger strike from prison during which he was elected Member of Parliament, or Joe Louis. I was explaining that the “Brown Bomber” was maybe the best heavyweight boxer of all time when my brilliant analysis was interrupted by Nina’s arrival.

  Brian greeted her with a virgin Irish coffee, a concoction he’d developed for her during the wintry months. His secret was very strong coffee (never instant), brown sugar (never white), heavy cream (never whipped), and a teaspoon of brandy flavoring that he kept behind the bar just for her special drink. Nina came over to our table and shed her overcoat. She was rain-soaked and gorgeous, with water dripping from the tip of her nose. The cold had worked its way into her body, from what I could discern beneath a tastefully tight sweater.

  She gave me a hug and whispered, “Keep your eyes above my chest, you dirty old man.”

  “My apologies,” I murmured while nibbling her earlobe, “but it’s been nearly a week since this aging fighter was in the ring.”

  She purred a wordless agreement, then wrapped her down vest around her body, while I figured that the next couple of days would extend my bout of celibacy. And if I couldn’t get the weirdness of Lane, Michelle, and Eunectes out of my head, my libido might be doomed for even longer.

  “So Riley, what’s your reason for nominating Joe Louis as the most important dead bro’ of last year?” asked Larry.

  “Or sister,” Carol corrected, taking a defiant slug of beer.

  “He destroyed the Nazi claim to Aryan superiority by putting away Max Schmeling in the most important fight of the century,” I said. “Two minutes into the first round, the German’s corner threw in the towel.”

  “That be a serious whoopin’ of a lame-ass honky by a brother,” said Dennis.

  “Gotta think the dude enjoyed giving the kraut a lesson in racial superiority,” Larry noted between bites of the stuffed blaa, which can’t be pronounced without sounding like a sheep. Very Irish.

  “Seems a good bet,” I said, “but boxing isn’t only about inflicting pain. Really, that’s not what a fighter is thinking. Sure, he wants to win and he does that by hurting his opponent—”

  “He or she does so,” Carol interjected, having amassed hours and earned a formidable, if unfeminine, reputation at Marty’s Gym. The old codger had told me that she’d sparred with some of the upstarts who initially pulled their punches, until she’d land a couple jab-cross combinations and then tag them with a jab-jab-cross. Marty waxed poetic about how she’d transition into a stick-and-move style, slipping punches and frustrating the studs who’d eventually land a hard shot or two, rocking Carol and forgetting about chivalry.

  Carol launched into a lecture on Cat Davis—who appeared on the cover of Ring Magazine a few years ago—and concluded by filling my glass and asking, “So Riley, you think a woman could put a hurt on you in the ring?”

  “Like I was saying, it’s not really about inflicting pain.”

  “Way to bob and weave, Riley,” Larry said.

  “What it be about if not messing up the other sucker?” asked Dennis.

  I thought hard about his question, then took a long draw on my Guinness.

  “Ah shit, Dennis. Now see what you’ve done,” said Larry. “When Riley gets that look, you hafta know we’re gonna get another of his stories. Time to cover up and take what’s coming.” He refilled everyone’s glass, except Nina’s. He gave her a wink and she smiled back.

  “I’ll keep it to a single round,” I said. “Back when I was in the fight game, there was this bruiser, Swede Nilsson. He was damned good in the ring if all you considered was winning, but not how.”

  “He cheated?” asked Nina.

  “Not really. Oh, he’d work in a kidney punch during a clinch, and he threw more than his fair share of low blows. But the sonofabitch was a master of the corkscrew punch.”

  “Marty’s not taught me that one,” said Carol.

  “And he won’t,” I said. “It’s an arching, overhand punch that twists on impact. The goal is to cut the other guy. Swede liked nothing better than working his opponent to the edge of a TKO and then drawing out the match—and drawing blood. Winning wasn’t as important to him as hurting the other fighter.”

  “So he was a sadist?” asked Nina.

  “I guess so, but maybe worse. When I saw his face after a fight where he’d really damaged the other guy, Swede looked more than just pleased. Almost, well, ecstatic or ...”

  “Say it, Riley. Orgasmic,” said Carol.

  “Yeah. It was disturbing. The ring is a place where a man—or woman,” I nodded to Carol, “is defined. Where a person’s character is revealed. At the end of a fight, most boxers feel a deep respect for their opponent, whatever the outcome. They hug because they’ve come through the pain and fear together. But for Swede, it was about domination.”

  “Crushing the other man,” Larry said.

  �
�You sayin’ some boxers and the freaks we be stopping are the same?” asked Dennis.

  “Maybe whether a guy gets off on giving or taking a beating doesn’t matter much.” Larry said.

  “Except that the satisfaction in the ring doesn’t come from humiliating your opponent. At least not if you’re a decent human being,” Carol said.

  “It’s what’s in a person’s heart that matters,” said Nina quietly. “But only that person knows what’s behind a punch—or a kiss.”

  “Really? A kiss?” challenged Larry.

  “Jesus was betrayed with a kiss,” she said, biting into one of Cynthia’s sandwiches.

  “Nina be a woman you don’ wanna go toe-to-toe with, m’man,” said Dennis, who then decided Nina would be the judge between Bob Marley and Bill Haley. The heavyweight conversation became a free-for-all that no courtroom would abide as the guys made their respective cases without decorum.

  Our gathering broke up when Nina declared they were both wrong and William Holden was the most handsome, if not the most important person, lost to world last year. I defended her judgment, noting that he was everything a guy could hope for in Golden Boy, a film in which he played a promising violinist who wanted to be a boxer—and ended up with Barbara Stanwyck. My assessment generated a round of eye rolling from the guys and distinctly unladylike raspberries from the women.

  ~||~

  Back at my house, I brewed a cup of Lyons tea and defrosted a container of treasured insects that Tommy and I had spent days hunting in the woodlands along the American River last summer, staying each night in a cheap motel outside of Sacramento. The valley elderberry longhorn beetle is a gorgeous creature with sweeping, inch-long antennae. The satiny black and vividly crimson body reminded me of a Flamenco dress.

  But my real excitement was because this beetle is slated to be listed as “threatened” which will put an end to collecting—not that insect nets are doing any harm compared to the real estate developers who are leveling the insect’s habitat to build houses. Even so, we kept only one female so our collection would have a matched pair. The rarity of the beetles meant the trade value of my extra, male specimens to fellow collectors would be fantastic.

  With the beetles pinned and labeled in fine form, I poured a shot of Jameson and put on a recording of Debussy’s solo piano works. Settling into my recliner, I turned on the television to a random channel without sound in a desperate effort to stop my mind from running circles around impaling organisms and labeling them with the name of who had delighted in their capture. Watching professional wrestling and listening to Debussy’s Nocturne left me spellbound with humanity’s potential for barbarism and beauty.

  CHAPTER 36

  “Pin him, goddammit!” The face of Mr. Rossetti, my high school PE teacher, was twisted in rage. A suffocating pressure squeezed around my chest. I fought to breathe, to escape from the grasp of my opponent. Cheerleaders chanted in their taunting cadence: “Hey, alright. Pin your man tonight.” I smelled the acrid stench and felt the hot moisture of a body pressing against me relentlessly.

  In a desperate effort, I arched my back, turned my opponent and reversed positions, now on top and inflicting my own punishment. “Your turn—that’s it, dominate him,” the teacher yelled, his face inches from my own. I tried to identify the other wrestler but perspiration stung my eyes and kept me from focusing. I wiped my face on his torn sweatshirt and saw that I was grappling with a skinny, blonde kid. For some reason, he was wearing worn out jeans and red sneakers. He looked scared.

  “You have control. Now humiliate the weak, putrid scum,” a voice commanded as I watched Mr. Rossetti’s face morph into Eunectes’s. When I looked back down at my opponent, he’d become a pale cockroach, his six legs flailing desperately at my body.

  I leapt up and he rose onto his hind legs, metamorphosing into a man. The antennae drooped and thickened over his face to become a white, biker moustache as my opponent transformed into Hulk Hogan. “I’m your master,” he sneered, circling me inside the ropes of a professional wrestling ring. He rushed forward and wrapped his arms around my chest and drove me onto my back.

  Eunectes had become the referee, wearing a striped shirt, and I was being crushed against the canvas. Somewhere in the darkness, a crowd was screaming. The referee looked at Hogan and smiled. “Humiliate the fucker, make him squirm like vermin,” he hissed, raising his hand as if to signal an end to the match, but refusing to slap the mat.

  I tried desperately to tap my submission, but Eunectes just smiled. I thrashed and writhed trying to escape, the pressure of my opponent’s massive body slowly, mercilessly bearing down on me.

  As I squirmed, my tormentor transmogrified into Birgit Nilsson, arguably the finest Wagnerian soprano in operatic history. As the hefty singer pressed on me, “The Ride of the Valkyries” drowned out the roar of the crowd and the insane, piercing battle cry of the female warriors punctuated my gasps for air.

  Nilsson straddled my chest, her thighs squeezing my rib cage. The fat lady’s voice rose toward a climax until she collapsed onto me. The diva engulfed me in a suffocating embrace as the crowd roared their approval, with thunderous applause and shouts of “Brava!”

  I turned and inched desperately to the edge of the mat, wriggled from beneath her, rolled under the ropes and fell into the darkness. Falling and falling, until I landed with a jolt.

  Suddenly awake, utterly disoriented, gasping for air, I looked around. What I first thought to be the wrestling ring rose above my prostrate body. In the silvery darkness, the corner post began to look a whole lot like the end of a headboard. With dawning relief, I realized that I was on the floor next to my bed, drenched in sweat with the sheets wrapped around me like a whole-body tourniquet.

  Disentangling myself, I decided that pinning insects, watching professional wrestling on late night television, listening to impassioned classical music, mixing Guinness and Jameson, and pondering sexual deviancy was a very, very bad combination. The alarm clock read 4:30 which I inferred to be AM, a deduction about which I took absurdly great pride, but any flash of rationality seemed worthy of celebration.

  The thought of returning to the jumbled, damp bed and lapsing back into a twisted dream was extremely unappealing. So I started a pot of coffee and then stood under a searing shower until the hot water ran out. I dressed and returned to the kitchen to find Mr. Coffee sputtering and coughing the last of his hot water into the grounds.

  I fried up a rasher of bacon and used the fat to fry some eggs over easy. A thick slice of Irish brown bread to sop up the runny yolk and a steaming mug of coffee made the early morning dampness outside seem almost refreshing after my disturbing night.

  While eating, I perused a recent copy of Pest Control Today and was drawn into an article about ecologists finding Burmese pythons in the Everglades and speculating that the snakes could become a serious problem for wildlife—and a major challenge for pest control operators if Fido and Fluffy started becoming snake snacks in Florida neighborhoods. I was pondering the legendary success of St. Patrick, the famed Irish exterminator of serpents, when my eye caught a photo of two enormous snakes with the caption: “The Burmese python (Python bivittatus) and the Green anaconda (Eunectes murinus).”

  Eunectes. I’d figured the exotic alias was an allusion to some Greek island or Roman god. But knowing that the name referred to a genus of snakes that crushes their prey made me loathe my twisted nemesis all the more for dragging another animal into his creepy world.

  ~||~

  Carol had me scheduled to spend the morning with her in the warehouse doing inventory. I found this task about as welcome as a bowl of soggy bran flakes for breakfast. But when Carol wheeled in a cart with her new computer and old radio, I could tell she was in heaven. This was a chance to play with her new toy while listening to pop music—and making me scurry among the rows of shelving to call out the names and amounts of products. Being stoically resigned to my fate as the alleged boss of Goat Hill Extermination while kno
wing Carol was the brains of the operation, I started enjoying the work. At least I managed to forget about Eunectes and the impending murder by focusing on the stockpile and the music.

  Between calling out the number of various sticky traps, I caught a singer plaintively repeating “just the two of us” enough times to almost root for the poor sucker, if not the cocktail lounge backup group. The Romeo’s appeals to raindrops, rainbows and castles didn’t seem to be wooing his Juliet, so I thought he might have better luck by working some unicorns and fairies into the song.

  “So, what do you think of Grover Washington’s voice?” Carol asked.

  “It’s unremarkable, although the lyrics are remarkably sappy. However, the music had some decent moments when Grover was drowned out by the saxophone at the end,” I said.

  “Riley, you can be such an ass. Can’t you appreciate anything other than classical music? Wait, don’t answer. Here comes the Pointer Sisters ...”

  The seductive voice of a woman serenaded my counting of snap traps. Grover might have been well advised to curtail his lyrical lament and listen to what amounted to a foreplay instruction manual put to music by the Pointer Sisters. The sultry plea for a man with “a slow hand and an easy touch” struck me as fine advice in a world where speed is an unconditional virtue and going faster is the unchallenged goal.

  “Okay Riley, now there’s a song a straight guy should find alluring. C’mon, tell me you weren’t thinking of being with Nina,” Carol teased. She was right, but I wasn’t going to confess.

  “The music wasn’t on par with Ravel’s Bolero. Of course, the lyrics were doing most of the work. And what they lacked in subtlety they made up for in sensuality. That’s better than the vapid drivel of most contemporary ballads.”

  “Nice dodge Riley, but we both know where your mind wandered during that song.” I didn’t reply, except to tell her that we needed to make sure Larry and Dennis didn’t mix the mouse and rat snap traps in a single bin because it made inventorying a pain. Carol’s station played a series of advertisements for car dealers, insurance agencies, and “friendly, neighborhood banks” while I worked my way down the shelves sorting mole and gopher traps.