Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll

by Todd Robinson

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  “What I do is, I take their little heads and stick them between these two hairy beasts”—Cujo nodded to his tree-trunk legs—“and I give them the scissors.”

  “We need to establish some ground rules here.”

  He laughed. “The pig scare you?”

  “Cujo, I don’t want you stealing from my neighbors.”

  He gave me the serious eyes. “This ain’t stealing. It’s just a matter of survival of the fittest, and no one gets that.” He nodded to his loot and puffed out his chest. “I take what I want because I’m the fittest.”

  “I don’t care who’s the fittest. It’s not yours.”

  “No.” His eyebrows turned in, and he pointed at me. “In the beginning, it wasn’t mine. Now it’s mine. It’s right there.”

  I pulled my hair back and closed my eyes. “You’re going to get me arrested.”

  “Chill, dude. We’ll be gone soon enough. We got a gig tonight. Remember?”

  And then that cackle.

  When I reached the front doors of Café Popona that night, the show had already begun. Angel had just hog-tied a young man and was now dragging him behind the counter, drawing a loud round of applause from an audience of espresso-sipping patrons.

  Fuck.

  “Pardon.” An older man slid past me and proceeded to the counter, at which point, Angel came from behind and whacked him on the head with a coffeehouse thermos. He crumpled to the floor, and a collective gasp came from the audience, followed by murmuring. A woman whispered, “Was that real? That looked real.”

  Angel sat on the floor, lodged the ball of her foot into his armpit, and yanked on his wedding band, gritting as she worked on the ring.

  I came up and kicked Angel lightly in the boots. “Okay, fun’s over.”

  Angel looked up and squinted. “You?” She stood up, grabbed a spool of twine off the counter, and began to hog-tie her victim. “This is art, dickwad. Take a look. You see anyone freaking out?” She finished with the twine, and the audience applauded.

  I pointed at her. “You will give everything back.”

  “Like hell.” Angel fingered through the man’s wallet, stuffed three twenties down her front pocket, and threw the billfold at the audience, nailing a frail, goateed man in the face. “They love me.”

  A pretty woman with long brown hair and a purple peasant skirt glided towards me, her hands out like she was trying to prevent a stampede. “Stop right there,” she snapped. “We don’t need you.”

  “Believe me,” I said, “you don’t want this.”

  She still had her hands up. “If you can’t comprehend what we’re doing, don’t intervene.”

  I was flabbergasted. “You really don’t want Angel here,” I said. “Seriously.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Either you stop it with the censorship bullshit, or get out.”

  “No,” I pleaded. “You don’t understa—”

  “No, you don’t understand. This woman here is an arrrrtist.” She leaned in for emphasis. “That’s a person who creates with style and expression.” She motioned to a lean, well-kept man exchanging observations with a young couple at a nearby table. “Ever since Tom and I moved up here from the city, this café has become an important venue for developing artists.” Then she glanced at my old high-tops. “You people need to have your little rural-suburban worlds shaken up.”

  Angel stuffed a wad of napkins into her victim’s mouth, sparking applause.

  “Cujo and Angel aren’t artists,” I said. “They’re—”

  “Listen, John Boy.” Her eyes popped and her face reddened. “If you can’t handle art that is out of the box, if you think art is the Kmart oil painting in your daddy’s farmhouse, this isn’t the place for you. Just go back to your ‘basic cable’ and let the rest of us enjoy the performance.”

  Basic cable? I stared down at her for a long second. Suit yourself, honey.

  Leaning against the side brick wall of the café, I started to rethink everything.

  Shit, maybe it was possible. Maybe it was possible that Cujo and Angel had been expressing their artistic sides all their lives. Maybe, instead of embracing clay or watercolors or scrap metal, they’d simply chosen the timeless media of aggravated assault, armed robbery, forced entry, and so forth. Maybe they liked to make crime beautiful, or ugly, or something beyond mundane, something not banal. What the fuck did I know?

  A large athletic guy walked through the doors, approached the counter, and was blindsided by Angel. Elbow hitting the jaw, making an awful noise. Audience clapping. Guy looking completely dumbfounded as he lost balance and crashed backwards into a tangle of chairs. People booing and hissing as he fought her off, made a run for the doors, and darted into the dark. A man fingering a cappuccino, snarling, “White trash.”

  A patron in a goatee and black-rimmed glasses looked up at me, his blue eyes giant behind the lenses. “This is marvelous.” He looked away and threw a hand into the air. “It’s aggressive, it’s delinquent, it’s full of mischief.” He turned back to me. “I think what we’re witnessing here is the birth of something so primal, so base, and yet so graceful and compelling that the only term coming to mind right now is Criminal Performance Art.”

  Someone in the audience yelled, “A second artist, a second artist,” and all eyes turned to a large, dark figure dance-walking at the back of the café, near the milk steamers. Decked out in his Black Hole clothes, Cujo stretched a furry arm over the granite countertop and bulldozed the poppy seed cake wedges, lemon bars, glass platters, and tea packets—all of it crashing to the cement floor in a deafening spectacle.

  The crowd gasped. The café owners winced.

  Most of the patrons suddenly got it and began to scatter. Some made a mad dash for the front door as Cujo tripped a horrified man, bent over, and relieved him of his wallet. “All right, ladies,” he roared. “It’s time to quit your bitching. You pencil necks wanted performance art, you got it. Who’s first?”

  Someone shrieked.

  I took a step forward and scratched my head.

  Angel began to empty the cash register.

  Purple Peasant Skirt squeaked from under a table, “I trust this is art.”

  Cujo turned, squatted, and peeked under the table. “You call something art, I call it making money.” He took her hand, yanked hard, and rolled her into a headlock right there on the floor, making it look effortless. She squirmed and clawed at his arms as Tom stood ten feet away, in shock, frozen. “I can take a dump on you right now, and if some pinner says it’s art, that’s what it is. If no one’s moaning about art, it’s just a matter of me pinching a loaf on your back. The word art don’t mean shit, do it?”

  Finally, the distant echo of sirens.

  Cujo tightened his lock on Peasant Skirt. “When the pigs ask, what are you gonna tell ’em?”

  She gurgled and gasped.

  The hairy arms tightened. “You’re gonna tell ’em this was art.”

  She gasped. Tom touched his chin and took a step closer.

  Sirens getting louder.

  “Aren’t ya?”

  She moaned yes.

  “Because that’s what it is, sweetie—crazy-ass art. Art that fucks you up.”

  She tugged at his arms.

  “And when they ask about tonight, you’re gonna say it was all a big misunderstanding. You’re gonna say some people just didn’t ‘get it,’ just didn’t understand what we were doing here, what kind of performance art we were creating here tonight.”

  Sirens closer.

  Angel threw a Glad bag of loot over her shoulder. “It’s getting late, honey.” She tugged at Cujo. “We should thank our hosts and say goodnight.”

  Cujo released Peasant Skirt, who scampered on all fours to the front of the café. Tom chased after her with an open mouth and outstretched hands.

  Sirens approaching.

  Cujo looked around the ravaged café. “The party poopers are almost here,” he said, and
followed Angel to the back door, “which means it’s time to make haste.”

  I stood there a moment, then ran after them. There was no way I was going to be the one answering all the cops’ questions tonight. I just wanted to go home and forget the whole thing. I just wanted to sit on the couch, nurse a beer, and enjoy the silence with the comfortable knowledge that Cujo and Angel were speeding out of town, away from here, away from the cops, away from my home, away from me.

  Cujo was waiting in the alley.

  He looked down and smiled, his lids heavy. “Go fetch old Cujo a bucket of KFC and bring it back to your place.” He glanced at Angel with a hungry moan, and she leered back. “We’ll take it in the kiddie pool.”

  Violated

  Mike Sheeter

  Bill Gurevich’s first parolee of the day was a tier-one mope named Sheldon. Sheldon was fifty-seven, a weepy ex–middle school band teacher and statutory rapist.

  Gurevich was forty-nine, a retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy. He ran the sex offender detail at the California Board of Pardon and Parole’s Van Nuys office, where he presided over eighty or ninety of these court-mandated interviews every week.

  The ex-felons he supervised had been locked down for offenses ranging in severity from weenie wagging in the park to tossing a ten-month-old infant out of the window of a municipal bus.

  Gurevich checked Sheldon’s pay stubs to make sure he was showing up regularly for his new job at the car wash.

  Sheldon was afraid of the other parolees, so Gurevich walked him out through a waiting room full of fidgeting excons, and down the hall to the elevators.

  On the way back, he stopped at the check-in counter and rapped his knuckles on the bulletproof partition. Tasha the receptionist looked up from her magazine.

  “I’ve got a citizen coming to see me today, a Mrs. Sheila Halpert,” Gurevich said. “Be extra nice to her and call me the second she gets here, okay?”

  Tasha shrugged, disengaging the electronic security door. Gurevich returned to his cubicle, got his electric razor out of his desk, and gave himself a quick once-over. He wasn’t looking forward to sitting across a desk from Sheila Halpert. One of his new parolees had abducted and raped her daughter.

  Gurevich accessed the Department of Corrections database, calling up Richard Lencheski’s prison records and psychiatric reports.

  Lencheski was a tier-two offender, released after doing a dime, first at Camarillo, then at San Luis Obispo.

  He was six weeks out of the halfway house, still under full electronic surveillance. A vocational training course behind the walls had earned Lencheski his current, real world job as a baker’s helper. The parolee had been fully compliant since his release date, at least on paper.

  Ten years ago, Lencheski had accosted the Halpert girl at a Panorama City playground, feeding her a crushed ice drink laced with codeine cough syrup before he abducted her in his camper truck. Several hours later, when he dropped her off at a bus stop, his nine-year-old victim was catatonic, with deep fingernail scratches and bite marks.

  Gurevich looked at Lencheski’s prison ID photo. The guy was one of the rare sex offenders who looked the part, with fish-belly white jailhouse skin and scraggly, untrimmed eyebrows that reminded Gurevich of ticking oozing out of a flophouse mattress.

  Gurevich glanced up from his computer monitor, startled, as the security lock buzzed someone through.

  Thanks a bunch for the heads-up, Tasha, he thought.

  He slipped on his jacket and stepped out into the corridor. Sheila Halpert strode towards him, hand extended.

  Her pleasant expression caught him off guard.

  Mrs. Halpert had been a fixture on the evening news since Lencheski’s release. When she agitated to abolish the parole system on the state house steps, or picketed Lencheski’s home with her supporters, all four local news stations ran with it.

  On the tube she wore a boonie hat covered with campaign buttons and a trademark T-shirt—a yellow one—with an iron-on picture of her daughter on the front. Today, though, she was going low-key and professional in a designer suit.

  Lauren Halpert would be a young adult by now. As Gurevich shook hands with her mother, he wondered how Lauren was getting along these days. He decided not to ask.

  He ushered Mrs. Halpert into his cubicle. She sidestepped the stacks of file folders surrounding his desk and took a seat, checking out the wanted fliers for parole absconders covering his walls.

  Gurevich offered coffee and she shook her head.

  He said, “You look different in person.”

  “That’s because I’m wearing my work clothes,” she said. “If you want any media coverage in this town you have to turn yourself into a cartoon character. When the camera crews show up, I pop into a phone booth and change into in my Vigilante Mom outfit.”

  Gurevich was still trying to think of a tactful way to say what he needed to when she beat him to the punch.

  “I know why you asked me to come in,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “Sure,” she said, “you want me to lay off Lencheski. That’s not going to happen.”

  Well, there it was.

  Gurevich made his voice flat and official.

  “Mrs. Halpert, let me caution you. If you and your supporters get somebody worked up enough to take Lencheski off the count, you’ll be subject to prosecution.”

  “Call me Sheila,” she said. “I’m a paralegal, Mr. Gurevich. If I need any legal advice I’ll ask one of the lawyers I work with.”

  “How about meeting me halfway?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “You want to raise public awareness or campaign for new legislation? Great, I’ll sign your petition. But stop surrounding the man’s house. And call off those shock-jock buddies of yours.”

  “Shortstack and Poppa Pete?” Sheila said, looking amused. “I don’t control those wild men.”

  “C’mon, Sheila. They’re practically offering a bounty on Lencheski’s scalp. Somebody’s liable to take them seriously and kill him.”

  “What a tragic loss to humanity that would be, huh?”

  Gurevich shook his head. “I’m a parent too. I don’t condone or excuse anything Lencheski has done,” he said. “But the man’s under the protection and supervision of this office. So I’m asking you…I’m begging you, disband the lynch mob before everything spins out of control.”

  “The system’s out of control, not me,” she said.

  She picked up the framed photograph of Gurevich’s wife and daughter on his desk and examined it.

  He had taken the photograph last spring, in the front yard of his heavily mortgaged ranch house in Mar Vista.

  It showed Kay and Annie, his two redheads, side by side in golden late afternoon light, planting a rosebush. They wore matching straw sun hats. Annie, his little girl, looked like a solemn porcelain miniature of her mom.

  “Precious,” Sheila said. “How old is she?”

  “She just turned nine.”

  “And you keep her picture right out here on your desk, where your parolees can see it?”

  “It hasn’t been a problem,” Gurevich said.

  He was lying. During Lencheski’s first visit to the office Gurevich had noticed the parolee’s gaze keep returning to his wife and daughter’s image. It had taken every scrap of his professionalism not to bat Lencheski out of the chair with a telephone book.

  “Tell me something. God forbid, but what would you do if it was your little girl that animal assaulted?”

  “I’m not going to answer that,” Gurevich said.

  Richard Lencheski lived in the Hollywood wastelands near Yucca and Wilcox, in one of the last bungalow courts from the ’30s. The bungalows were crisscrossed with earthquake cracks and patched with battleship-gray driveway sealant. The eight-unit court stood on a cul-de-sac lined with smog-blackened royal palms and twenty-year-old cars.

  Lencheski began his day kneeling in the box of gravel at the side of hi
s bed, petitioning the Holy Ghost to turn away the wrath of his enemies.

  Sheila Halpert was outside with her electric bullhorn, exhorting her followers against him.

  His windows rattled in time with the vibrations of her voice. Their hateful call-and-response chants were the first sounds Richard heard every morning. They had been for three weeks now. He wondered if she had any TV trucks out there with her today. Or maybe a gun.

  Before he stepped into the shower, he wound plastic cling wrap around his electronic ankle bracelet. He stood under the pinpoint spray, scrubbing his genitals with a loofah until they were raw. After five minutes under the icy water his teeth started chattering. He toweled off and went into his bedroom to dress for work.

  He swallowed a couple of Excedrin with his coffee, lingering over it until he couldn’t ignore the blinking clock on his microwave any longer.

  Crowd or no crowd, he needed to be at work soon. Janet, his boss, had a thing about punctuality. Janet was an ex-con too, had hung some bad paper back in the day. She knew about his registered sex offender status, but she never mentioned it.

  All he did at work was clean up, watch the timers, and measure out ingredients from recipe cards. The bakery was his refuge. But first he had to get there in one piece. He went into his living room, leaned the detached front wheel of his ten-speed bike against the sofa, and peered through the venetian blinds at the demonstrators waiting for him to come outside.

  One of them saw him looking and shied an egg at him. Lencheski jumped back as it smashed against the pane. The protesters jeered and whistled.

  There must have been thirty people milling around on the narrow strip of grass between his place and the street. Most of them carried homemade picket signs. There were even some children out there.

  He thought, Jesus, why aren’t those kids in school? What are they supposed to be anyway, bait?

  He dug out his parole officer’s card and dialed.

  “Sexual offender detail, Bill Gurevich.”

  Lencheski said, “Mr. Gurevich, they’re demonstrating in front of my house again. I need help getting to work.”