The school wasn’t all bad. The books of scoffers had slithered into the library, the Film Society showed depraved movies, and the Student Lounge had television to corrupt our souls.
Joe, who had a knack for whoppers, told Mommy and Daddy he was studying the Apocryphal Book of Maryjane. His intensive research into that work brought on his sophomore breakdown, which was really just a screwup, but his advisor called it a breakdown and steered him to a psychologist.
Insomnia, depression—the therapist made a lightning diagnosis of sexual abuse. My brother picked it up and ran with it. He would tell me the yarns he spun to please his shrink until we rolled on the floor, shrieking, “Hail, Satan!” Silly as the therapy was, it sure perked him up.
It was silly until the detectives appeared and asked me if our parents had molested us. It was like a switch inside me snapped—memories of the parties I never went to, the dates I never had, the prom gown I never wore, reduced me to tears. I couldn’t have given a better answer if I’d rehearsed it.
Ever since we discovered that twins aren’t alike in every respect, we had played a game called Honeymoon. I sometimes used a cucumber to play the part of the Groom, so even Joe was able to pass the physical they gave us, and we altered our genuine memories to include our parents. “If we asked for candy, they would put chocolate syrup on their pee-pees and make us lick it off.”
Mommy and Daddy were history, we were rich, but I wasn’t happy. All I wanted was my childhood back, a real childhood, the only thing I couldn’t buy. I consoled myself with a red sports-car and made a beeline for Florida to show off my new collection of string bikinis.
But I sure as hell wouldn’t be showing them off here. I had thought it impossible to make a wrong turn in a state with one highway down the middle, but I did it. After an hour of pines and bogs and dirt roads that became alligator-paths, I admitted I was lost. The only place I’d seen for miles made homelessness seem like a step up in the world, but I pulled over and mounted the swaybacked porch.
A scrawny boy burst out the door and shocked me by whispering, “Get outta here, lady! Run!” A fat man emerged and cracked him across the face with a casual brutality I’d never even imagined, and then said to me with the sweetest smile, “Never you mind Asaph, honey, he’s having one of his spells. Right, Asaph?”
“Right, Paw,” the boy snuffled.
“I bet you want to use our telephone. Why else would a fancy Yankee lady come callin’ on us? Come on in.”
“No, really, I just need directions....”
“Well, that’s good, ’cause we ain’t got no phone!” he laughed when I was inside.
“But Japheth will give you all the direction you’ll ever need,” said a mountainous bulk in the corner, the man’s even fatter wife. “Have some water, missy. You ain’t used to our kinda heat.”
I took it gratefully, noticing as I drank that the place was full of kids lurking in dark corners—all of them dirty, malnourished, and bruised. They stared at me with sad longing, like wise old monkeys in cages.
But I had my own problem: racking pains in my limbs, blinding dizziness. Had they actually poisoned me?
“ ... only Ponce de Leon never did find it, the dumb-ass peckerwood,” the woman was saying. And to her husband: “She’ll need new clothes.”
“Not for a while yet, she won’t.” Looming over me, he unzipped his fly.
I uncoiled like a spring and dived at the door. It seemed like a slick move, but I crashed flat. My shorts were tangling my legs. I must have passed out for a moment, and those perverts had pulled them down! I hiked them up and got through the door one step ahead of Japheth.
I had never much cared for God, but I thanked Him fervently for the cop who was examining my car.
“Help me! These people are crazy! They drugged me!” I screamed in a voice that came out weird and thin.
The cop was big, an actual giant. I backed away nervously when he bent over with a false grin to say, “Playing dress-up, little girl? You one of the Smith kids?”
“The hell I am! That’s my car, that’s my registration in there, these rednecks—”
“Your kids, Japheth,” the cop said, shaking his head. “Which one started this crazy story?”
“Damned if I know, sheriff.” Far huger than I remembered, the man swept me up under his arm as if I weighed nothing. “But this one’ll forget about tellin’ lies, soon’s I put the rod to her bottom.”
The cop listened to me for a moment, shaking his head sadly. “You want to wash out her mouth with soap, too.”
“I sure plan to swab it out real good with somethin’. Better get that car towed, sheriff. Some gangsters from Miami must’ve stole it up north and dumped it here.”
“Yeah, they do that a lot lately. You learn that little sewer-mouth the fear of the Lord, y’hear?”
UNDYING LOVE
I just surface from the IRT into Times Square when I see my old pal Markie. He doesn’t need to tell me where he has been. A flea-pit down the way is showing Topless Teenage Groupies of the Living Dead.
Markie says, “The acting isn’t wooden enough.”
Just then the gates of heaven open up in the sea of slime and an angel struts toward us. Never mind how she looks, I could spend a week telling you how she walks. In her ass there must be a computer to work all that slithery stuff in her long, long legs.
I’m about to step forward and ask her—in a polite way, of course—can I fuck her till she shits, when Markie says, “I hope to Christ she gets creamed by a bus.”
I should have been prepared. Markie always says things like that, but this chick made me forget I am with a nut. I’m in Times Square, remember, with maybe the widest assortment of perverts and lunatics the world has ever seen drooling on my vicuna topcoat and gibbering in my ear. But any shrink who could have taken a peek inside this bobbing sea of short-circuited skulls would have leaped on Markie and picked him for Grand Marshal of the passing parade.
Nothing can squelch a hard-on quicker than the urgent need to puke. I recover only in time to see her computerized buns vanishing into a taxi.
* * * *
It’s not that Markie doesn’t like girls. Back in sixth grade at St. Dominick’s, he owned the world’s largest collection of skin magazines. Going to Markie’s to jerk off was the thing to do. He charged a quarter, and he would bar you permanently for coming on the pictures.
He wanted to be a pimp when he grew up, and with such a running start, I didn’t see how he could miss. But when he tried his luck with real, live girls, his dream went up in smoke. He discovered that he could not look them in the eye.
When we were about sixteen, me and some other alumni of his One-Hand Library took pity on him and brought Darlene Zelko to his house. She had long blond hair and tits like balloons, and she would rip down her drawers if a hunchbacked leper with a leaky colostomy bag said “Good morning” to her. Or even if he didn’t.
Markie had told me what he thought his problem was. When he got close to a girl he liked, all he could think about was the mysterious world of bumps and curves and holes hiding under her clothes. He would blush and stutter and try to hide his boner with his hands in his pockets, and the girl would get bored and leave before he could spit out, “Hello.”
He figured if he could cut through that “hello” bullshit and get down to business, he would be cured. It sounded reasonable to me, and nobody could cut through the bullshit like Darlene.
Markie lived with his aunts who ran a grocery store, so he had the house to himself until ten-thirty. Anybody but him would have been working in the store at night, but his aunts thought he was going to be another Enrico Fermi and wanted him to stay home and study.
Their hopes were misplaced. Markie thought the French Revolution was what Linda Lovelace started, and what he studied, of course, were his magazines. His aunts weren’t long off the boat, and they would have boiled his balls in holy water if they ever saw his collection, so he had torn the house apart and put it
together again to make hiding places behind the walls and under the floorboards. I could see the house collapsing under the weight one day, and Brooklyn buried in a snowstorm of tits and ass.
Me and two other guys got Darlene over to his house about eight-thirty. It would have been sooner, but she was in rare form. We had intended Markie should get first crack at her, it being his party, but on the way she dragged us into a vacant lot, tore our pants down, and forced us to take turns.
Markie could have sold us tickets to see him answer the door. He had been watching too many old movies on TV, and he was wearing a bathrobe and a silk scarf. He didn’t smoke, but he had a cigarette with a holder in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other. If he hadn’t used a pint of Vaseline on his hair, and if his glass hadn’t had a picture of Ronald McDonald on it, you would have thought he was David Niven making plans to jump Doris Day.
Unlike Doris Day, Darlene pulled her skirt off before we could get her inside and said, “Let’s fuck.”
Her timing was perfect, because he had turned red when he saw her, and when he opened his mouth to ask her if she “would care for a glass of claret, my dear,” or some such crap, all he could do with it was his goldfish-impression.
Darlene was already working on the knot of his bathrobe with her teeth when he finally spoke, although he kept his eyes off her. “We’ll go upstairs, okay?” he said. “Just you and me, I mean.” That was a disappointment, because we all wanted to watch and make sure he did it right, but we consoled ourselves with his cigarettes and his jug of homemade wine.
As they went upstairs, he told her, “Pretend you’re asleep while we’re doing it.” Fat chance. Screwing Darlene Zelko was like being dragged through a swamp by an alligator with a siren tied to your head. But the last thing I heard before they closed the bedroom door was her saying, “Let’s fuck,” so I figured they would get it together somehow.
Five minutes later the siren went off, but she wasn’t coming, she was giving Markie hell: “Get outta here, you goddamn faggot! Somebody come up here who can do it!”
None of us could resist that cry of maidenly distress, and we were trying to fight our way past one another at the foot of the stairs when Darlene came flying down.
“Get that cunt outta here!” Markie shouted, flapping down in his bathrobe and patent-leather hair like a low-rent Dracula to shove us out the door. “Take her away!”
“Let’s fuck,” Darlene said.
We only noticed when we were outside that she had left her clothes in the house. I knocked, but Markie had turned off the lights and wouldn’t answer. Darlene didn’t care, she was already humping one guy on the lawn, with the other one and a couple of passersby lined up. I fought my way to the head of the line.
We stayed friends, me and Markie, but he clammed up about that evening. It was hard to get the story from Darlene, what with her limited vocabulary and her one-track mind, but I pieced it together. She tried hard to do what he said, to lay still and keep her mouth shut, and he managed to figure out what went inside of what. But as soon as it was inside, she couldn’t help flogging the mattress like a spastic chimpanzee. Immediately Markie went limp, and that shocked some sense into her. She tried to quiet, and he got hard again, but as soon as he did she went berserk a second time, and he was finished for good. I think Markie’s aunts, Millie and Angie, were most of his problem. When they weren’t praying to Our Lady to keep his mind off Irish whores, they were telling him about his Uncle Nunzio, whose dick fell off and who used to jitter around in circles, unless someone pushed him in a straight line, all because he once sat on a toilet seat that a hooker had used three days before.
So when the two of them got blown away in their store, I was curious to see if Markie would at last cut loose. I hadn’t seen him in a while, since he was going to college and I had moved across the bridge, but I went to the wake. It was held at home, with the stiffs laid out in the parlor. I showed up late, but since these things went on all night, I was surprised to get no answer right away. I kept knocking until Markie peered through the peep-hole and opened the door on a chain.
“I come to pay my respects, fachrissakes!”
“Yeah, well, I’ve gone to bed. Come to the funeral tomorrow.”
Before I could use one of the many words and gestures that came to mind, he shut the door in my face. It was weird. He was wearing his bathrobe—a new one: he’d grown, mostly wider—and he might have just gotten out of bed, but his eyes were bright and his face was flushed. I got this flash of him celebrating his liberation by digging out his magazines and partying with them all over the house.
But he looked too guilty.
* * * *
A couple weeks later he called to say how sorry he was He explained that the cops had grilled him all the night before. Since his aunts’ friends and relatives had all died or moved away, and since nobody in his right mind would come out in that neighborhood after dark anymore, he’d turned in early, which is why he wasn’t the perfect host.
I still didn’t believe that he’d been asleep, but I believed the part about the cops, who had jumped at every chance to hassle us in the old days. Markie offing his aunts, that was bullshit, but it’s easier for cops to lean on relatives than chase mulls. So I accepted his apology and agreed to come around for dinner.
You wouldn’t have believed his house. He had dug out his hidden collection and papered the walls with pussy, the parlor, the dining room, the bathroom—it was far too much of a good thing, everywhere you looked. I felt like I had fallen into a pit full of wild animals who had neglected to brush after every meal, and who were itching to gum me to death.
But Markie looked so lousy, he distracted me from the decor. I hadn’t seen much of him through the chain, but I saw now that he was getting to look like Richard Nixon: as if somebody had taken Nixon and tried to make him up like a young guy, but still dumpy and jowly and losing his hair. Like a heap of ricotta with a day-old beard.
“Jesus Christ, Markie, you gotta get some fresh air and sunshine, go down to the shore for a week, and—” I waved my fork at the walls of this imaginary whorehouse—“get some real pussy. I got connections in Atlantic City, and—”
“I got more cunt than I can handle.”
I wanted to hear more about that, but he excitedly changed the subject, or so I thought. He’d quit school, and in the process of planting his aunts he got the inspiration for a career: he wanted to be an undertaker. I never saw it before, but I realized he had always acted like one, solemn and oily. It was a long way down from pimp, but I guess the poor guy was doing the best he could.
I was taking a piss later when I noticed some Polaroids half-hidden behind the sink. They were snaps of a naked chick of eighteen or so, not bad. She was posed just like the models plastered on the walls, except that her eyes were closed and she didn’t project much personality. The photography was bad enough to be Markie’s, and I figured this was a good sign, that he had overcome his hangups since his aunts died.
I brought the pictures out with me and said, “Is this your chick, Markie?”
He looked for a minute like he had mixed up the light-cord with the spaghetti he was still packing down his gullet, but he recovered quickly and told me she was dead.
“Shit, I am sorry.”
He laughed in my face. “I meant, she was dead when I posed her,” he said, and he went on to tell me, in more detail than I wanted to hear, what I should have known: that he had gotten his new job so he could screw corpses. He got to mind the funeral parlor all night while he went to embalming school in the daytime, and when a young and pretty—or even old and halfway decent—chick was brought in, he would ball her till his shift was over, taking pictures as mementoes of the dear departed.
“The only problem is, I gotta use rubbers so I don’t mess them up, but when I get my own place—”
“Don’t tell me, Markie,” I said loudly, trying not to hear his scheme for warming them with melted butter.
Within a
year or so he did have his own place. It wasn’t that he was such a hotshot undertaker, but his aunts had been stuffing money in jelly jars and burying them in the back yard for years, and he finally found them all. Shit, he had enough so he could have paid off the mob and the cops and opened a massage parlor like a normal person, and I tried to talk him into that, with me as manager, but he just laughed. Stone cold dead, that was the only way he liked them.
I didn’t have to imagine what went on at Markie’s funeral home. He told me, and he kept on telling me for years. I don’t know which he liked more, slipping his pork between the cold-cuts or talking about it, but these were not yarns he could swap in your average locker-room. He knew me as a stand-up guy, and he also knew I was a collection agent for certain connected parties, and if jerks like Markie were dumb enough to believe that I was a hit-man, I didn’t discourage them, it made my work easier. So he figured I would be the last person to talk about him.
No matter how clearly I called him a pervert and told him not to dump his sick shit on me, in a couple of weeks he would be back on the phone to say what a stacked blond he had on ice, and why didn’t I come over to Brooklyn and tear off a piece? When one of his descriptions got to me—and I have to admit, some of them did—I wondered if he knew something about me that I didn’t. I never slept well after one of those calls. Every time I dropped off, I would wake up screaming from nightmares about banging a skeleton with pus leaking out of its eyeholes and all. I tried to tell this all in Confession, but it was my luck to get Father Finnerty, who wanted to hear far more details than a normal man would.
This I didn’t need. Outside of Markie, the biggest problem in my life was trying to decide whether to file my Little Richard tapes under L or R. I figured the only way to restore my peace of mind would be to cure him by fixing him up with a live one; not too live, of course, for he often told me that the thought of screwing a girl while she was breathing gave him the creeps.
I rejected dozens of possibilities before I found one who was just right. She was a Columbia grad student named Phyllis, pals with a girl named Sheryl I was currently seeing, and she was the closest thing to a stiff I have seen that could still walk around. She had all the right equipment, but she never cracked a smile or said a word. Maybe I could have drawn her out by asking about her specialty, mine-engineering in the Middle Ages, but somehow I never thought of mentioning it. Sheryl told me that Phyllis would put out for anybody who bought her dinner, though, even an undertaker from Brooklyn who looked like Richard Nixon.
Nasty Stories Page 9
