Dastardly

by Lorraine Ray

The next day I and six friendly overly fine-ass Danish ales stroll Frontier Avenue (Pablo and I had demolished a fair number and I’m buying more) and I’m clutching these ales close in a complex, loving embrace. Fine-ass complex fucking ales. Sun feels great on my hide after a coupla cold mornings, near freezing and windy even in this desert, but now I can afford running my fucking heat when I have my rent paid ahead of time! I am still sleeping under loads of blankets, though, which I bought from the Salvation Army and that blanket that Marsha gave me for Christmas, God bless her bleeding heart, and it still bugged me to think that Rod had gone with her to buy me that. Maybe he’d been lying?

  These fancy ales are going to be mighty fine, say I to my fucking self. I do like a fine ale, instead of cheap-o swill. A busted car drives slowly by.

  Goddamn! Will you please look at that ratchet ass bitch over there? There is every kind of ugly on her. What do you call that hair style? Creepy comb-over crumble? I’ve never seen that before. I think she must have used chalk on all the zig-zag parts and teeny braids. Now it might be funny if a vampire refused to suck the blood of someone like her because of her bad taste in hairdos. That would make a comic vampire story, which I haven’t written, but I don’t think I want to do that, tempting though it is. That happens to be a crappy idea produced by a person with a mild hang-over.

  A hombre with beautiful tats all over his chest and arms, ones that make me jealous right away, bursts out of a door with an overflowing trash bin in his hands and a baby in a diaper follows him slowly down the steps as though the man is the most special thing in the world and this kid’s whole world is walking away with the trash, so he has to follow. Awwww. I get a weird pang. A baby-type pang. I think it might be fun to have one of those myself, tottering after me. Not a garbage can, but a baby. Cuteness rules the day of the detective. Detecting cuteness is, however, a stupid thing for a horror writer to do. How can I use that in a horror story? A horror baby? Somebody musta done it already. A horror vampire baby? A whole flock of baby vampires, flying in a team. Team titan vampire babies. I’m stretching too hard for a dumb idea. And it has been done before by some other dumb writer who was way ahead of me in the game of thinking up dumb-ass ideas.

  After I get the baby pang, I divert my thinking to my relationship with Marsha. Let Marsha struggle and suffer over the ridonkulous plots of her crappy romances and let her fail at it...wait, shazam! Ha, ha, ha. Get her to succeed! That’s it! Prop her up in this ridonkulous endeavor and have her make a mint selling this romance hokum to the plebes who will eat it up like pabulum. Make her work like the devil at it non-stop. Goad her on with stars in her eyes telling her she is going to be successful and make a load of dough. And who knows, maybe she will make a fortune off that crap of hers. She might be a millionaire from it and I will be better off as her oldest and dearest friend because of it, when she will let me live in the spare bedroom of her foothills mansion and occasionally clean her algae-ridden pool, mop up her messy parties, and live like a king in a small attic room of a giant modern desert castle. Sure, that would be the life. Let her believe crap about me and her. Damn, dude, I’m good. I am her friend. Not! Hoping I don’t have to play, because that isn’t there for me, truthfully. A fifty pound overweight girlfriend? Ack! Capeche? Adventures in Paradise, Lost. I wish I was fucking blind. Ho, ho.

  “Vig,” she’d said to me in her squeaky voice like chalk on a chalkboard, shit, when I asked her for the money, “you hardly have any friends, and if you want to know why, it’s because you can’t stop insulting everyone. Why do you think they call you Vile Vig?”

  “Cuz I’m so sweet natured?” I answered back at her in my mind, adding an insipid, fucking grin. I can’t remember what I said to her when she actually said that.

  “Viglietti!”

  “That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”

  “Vig, haven’t you got any family who can help you? It’s just that I feel sorry for you, you know. After all these years I’ve known you, to see you reduced to begging me for money. I thought you had more self-respect. And you know, Vig, I’m only doing this once, by the way. Don’t ever ask me again because I’m not giving you a plug nickel after this. It’s only for old time’s sake and I believe you are truly going to lose your apartment if I don’t help you. And you ended up in the hospital with pneumonia and didn’t even tell me anything about it and that breaks my heart. You could have died and no one would have known the difference!” That was when the tears showed. That was what she’d said when she cried. I remember all that perfectly. I remember it better than I ought to. I can remember dialog.

  Well, sure, the sickness story helped, but I still think she has a crush on me.

  So, she loves me, and nobody should get smart-assed about it the way Rodney had either. She fell for that lie about pneumonia without any proof! Fuck. And, and, I know that was not true about her not giving me another plug nickel. She had to have been bluffing, since I know I can read her better than she can herself. She’s a pushover. I can ask for anything, but later, not right now so soon after I’ve gotten money from her. If she fell for the stupid-ass pneumonia line, she’s gonna fall for any crap I tell her again. Maybe that’s a sign she loves me; I should ask somebody besides Rodney for an opinion, maybe Pablo. Does a person who falls for your shit qualify as ‘in love’ with you? Wouldn’t someone question my sickness story? Why didn’t she grill me? This isn’t going to be the last time she would give me money. Far from it. “I don’t have anyone who can help me out, Marsha. They’re all back in Wisc…and, you know, like I told you, they’re too poor to help me out.” Didn’t want to tell her I’m from Wisconsin, because it wouldn’t be too hard to find my family and they might tell her a thing or two about me which might change her opinion of me, though maybe it wouldn’t surprise her. But it would lead to things I don’t want her to know.

  Shit. No, my family won’t give me any money, Marsha, because I am permanently estranged from those fools after my sister-in-law and I hooked up (god help me, I didn’t see that one coming and my brother walked in on us, shazam of all shazams!). And I left Wisconsin for good on a Greyhound bus. My fucking parents won’t give me the time of day. My brother was a total jerk to me all my life and now he is super successful after he stole my girlfriend, Patty, and dumped her two months later so that she wouldn’t ever have anything to do with me again, and I think a lot of her. She was my best friend in town and now I’ve lost her, so I was fucking tired of hearing about what a great dairy farmer my brother was going to make after going to college and everything. My dad was fooled by my brother’s sorry ass! Dad never saw my brother for the manipulative creepy moron he truly is, and of course my parents still think I ruined my brother’s marriage when my brother had already cheated on his wife and she was only using me to get back at my brother and she even set it up so that my brother would walk in on us! Investigations into my past life should come with a warning: real life stupid soap opera plot lurking ahead!

  Mean bitch. That’s what my sister-in-law was. Thank god she and my brother didn’t have children. I heard from one of my aunts in Wisconsin that they are not even married anymore and he got some other woman pregnant recently. My parents aren’t even going to meet that grandchild because the mother wants nothing to do with my brother’s sorry ass and she moved away to Long Beach, California to become a movie star, according to my aunt who I have every reason to believe. I didn’t have a chance with my dad, and my mom wouldn’t take my side against my dad, so it was goodbye Wisconsin, hello Arizona. I applied to college myself and got enough grant money to make it on my own, at least while I was in school.

  “Welcome home. Here’s our conquering hero,” say the roaches and crickets when I walk into my abode with more brew. Nobody here today but fools. Shazam. Refrigerator runs loudly and I hope it isn’t about to take a crap, because I don’t want any more contact with my landlord. Two hours of Spinoza and Internet porn was enough for me. I’ve been thinking, if my refrigerator is about to break or my pi
pes about to leak that would be about fucking typical for me.

  I sit on my sofa, which is my bed, as I said, and review the day, especially how I am gonna hit up Marsha for dinero over and over and that isn’t no lie, or maybe it is. I realize I am lying to myself in order to descend about as far down as a human can go into the charnel house of evil madness. What an impossible situation. That is the ultimate disintegration, bro, I tell myself.

  “When you can’t be honest with yourself you are sinking into The Abyss of Piss,” I say solemnly aloud.

  Hey, I need to write that down; Abyss of Piss is kinda nice. Whadduya think, I ask myself? Okay, I’ll put it in as a small note in my notebook. I get up to find my notebook and a pencil.

  So Marsha has said I was calling people names? Little old him? Oh, I hadn’t called them half the names I have floating around in my head and I realize I ought to shock her by telling her that, so that I can drive her away and that would be the best thing for her. Those disloyal so-called friends of mine ought to be thankful for the fact I don’t hit them with all I have in my arsenal of incredible insults and I figure they ought to stop sniveling up to Marsha. Hey, I think angrily, she is mine to snivel up to! Get away from my Easy-Touch Marsha. Shazam. That is a joke I keep making to myself about the Easy-Bake Oven. That is a fucking funny line, which I must remember to use somewhere in a book, but I don’t see how it would fit into a vampire novel at the current momento.

  “Jot it down, though. Right, dude. To the notebook and jot that down, even before you figure it out. Right, crickets? They have been very quiet since late November and are probably dead or sleeping.” I jot down the Easy-Bake thing calmly and carefully.

  At that, I crack open a beautiful ale and it goes down my gullet.

  “Hey, this stuff is great.”

  I happen to be a failed writer, of course, like Marsha. She wants a career as a romance writer, and her unpublished books have the dumbest titles you can think of, except that you would never, ever, think of them seriously, because they would make you burst out laughing so hard you wouldn’t be able to go on thinking about anything else like how to make a dinner out of one can of refried beans. I believe she’s written one called Love in the Lost Canyon, Beyond and Between Tomorrow (wait, not that, but something equally as ridonkulous, I’m sure), and We, As Always. She churns them out at about the same pace I produce horror novels, that is, a steady stream of love, love, and love, for the love loving crowd; God, protect us. In the last three years, she’s emailed all of them to different agents like so much Bermuda chaff scattered in the wind—without effect. Not that she wasn’t certain of her own brilliance. Not that she had ever doubted her own eventual success, for she claimed the love story thirst of the public was practically unquenchable. They must have their cold, dominate males and poor, frightened virgins. I have the same opinion of my ability to sell horror; isn’t it funny we’re sort of symmetric people and all that symbolic crap-a-ron-i?

  “Vig, you are mocking everything your friends say and you know they always call you The Vile Vig behind your back? Why would you want your friends to do that? It isn’t right to deliberately provoke people that way so that they eventually have to drop your friendship. I see that’s what you’re doing,” Marsha complained a few weeks earlier. Oh, you detecting detective, you writer, you, Marsha. You see what I’m doing? Oh, that is only an illusion, baby, you don’t see half of what I’m doing. Sure, I get rid of friends, sometimes, even old, once-dear friends, like Rodney whose texts are currently being ignored since he seems to be making a move on you, Marsha. But not you, Marsha; you don’t mind me calling you names; to you, I’ll always be…Vig. Or Viglietti.

  We go back, like I said, back a coupla years when we attended fucking college together like a coupla dumb clucks wasting our time and money on the futile pursuit of an education that would make our writing go down better.

  Dumb old lame Marsha. Returning to finish her education when she was a ridonkulous twenty four, while I was barely turning 18, but I wouldn’t call myself baby-faced or fresh faced, and anybody would understand why in light of my sister-in-law and me, and that happened right before I moved to Arizona and turned eighteen. Well, Marsha had had a baby, Bailey, so maybe she isn’t so fresh-faced either, although she is six years older than me, come to think of it that way, which is a way I never thought of before until I robbed her. She had never talked about the baby’s father and I’d never asked. Sweet mystery of life and all that crap, I suppose. She said she came from Florida, so one would suppose the father was still there, but she never said Bailey had gone to visit her dad or that he had visited here. Well, as I said, Marsha and I found each other–no, that isn’t exactly the right way to say it, I don’t mean to imply I ever had any true love interest in Marsha or affection for her, so I should say we found ourselves taking several dumb-ass creative writing classes together. The class I remember best was the one when I first met her, Dumb-Ass Writing 225. It ran from 4 until 7 every Tuesday afternoon during the fall semester of our sophomore year, and for that class you had to write silently during most of those three fucking hours. In her case that meant scribbling in a yellow legal pad, because she couldn’t get inspired to write her crap on a computer—she was so fucking ridonkulous about her writing mood and all that crap, and in my case typing on a laptop. But both of us took the class seriously and worked at our respective salt mines without even glancing around the room much. I still remember most of what happened on the night I met her as I sat in my seat and worked away, deep into my first vampire western novel; I think that first one was called Blood on the Succubus Moon. That was the title at the time but I changed it about sixteen times afterward, or some such shit like that, and around six, while I sipped some coffee I had bought before class from a vending machine, I noticed it was already dark enough outside for me to see the reflection of the room in a narrow window near my desk. Marsha could see herself, and noticed all the ugly fat rolls she had gathered around her middle, what a terrible sight that was, and I noticed her noticing me looking at myself in the reflection. For a second our eyes met. She was having a time fitting herself into those silly desks in university classrooms, and she noticed the seat beside her, and she suddenly realized there was this Total Inked Heartthrob working there. Viglietti, me, the douchebag horror western writer extraordinaire who was about to become her one and only friend for life, BFFs, yeah. I think I might be exaggerating about the only friend. I now happened to know she is good friends with Rodney, the goddamn sucky douchebag, and she has made friends with a bunch of the writers we both know, also. None of them are making a move on her, though, to my knowledge. What had Rodney said?—he went with her when she bought everyone Pendleton blankets for Christmas? Crap.

  After Marsha saw me looking at her looking at me all those years ago, our teacher (I would have played her, if I could have, she was hot with a pretty face and little wonky breasts) said, “Break time, everybody.” That was when we usually walked out to the patio and glared over the railing into the dark at some shaggy palm trees and lumpy cactuses that were grouped together like they feared an imminent attack from a chainsaw-wielding yardman. A coupla nights that year it was rainy and everybody got so mesmerized by the water dripping off the eaves that the teacher had to come out and tell us to get back inside and write again, like we were super lame and didn’t know why we were taking a writing class which would be to fucking write. That lady was a slave-driver. I usually used the break to try to hook up with Little Miss Hot-Ass, a dumb bitch, with a tongue piercing and ripped neon shorts, who had my eye that semester. She was going out the door and I wanted to follow her all the way to Playsville, U.S.A. Meanwhile, Marsha was struggling to work her way outta her chair, when I strolled by and so I dropped this gem kinda casually: “Saw you checking me out in the reflection of the window. Sorry to break your heart, but I don’t date fat chicks.”

  Her hatred for me, a creepy douche bag who was implying that she admired him, was instant because I had call
ed her a fat chick. Truthfully she was only a little plumpish, but her hatred knew no bounds at that point, like her weight knew no bounds, and that was a bad joke. I already knew I would be reeling her in. Ha! Get the plump chicks mad at you first and reel em in when you let up on them. They’re so happy to be let up on that they think you like them and they have a chance with you, which isn’t happening.

  “I already know I’m overweight,” she reared up and said, in the best tradition of overweight chicks rearing up when you pick on them, “And I don’t need some douchebag like you reminding me of it and implying I was contemplating you as anything other than a total weirdo. With your bulgy eyes and your jaw hanging off of your face like a toad, you’re scary. And do you know you strawberry blonde guys have no eyebrows or eyelashes, either? That is so creepy to look at. You have no clue.”

  “Ahhhh, words of L-O-V-E.” I already knew she wrote these sappy-assed romance novel crap, so I was digging her in the ribs, so to speak. “Maybe we’ll find love after hate? What do you think?” I said this in a nasty fashion. She had some plot with that thing, love after hate like Pride and Prejudice or some such ridonkulous romance crap young ladies and flabby old men believe in and admire. Pablum for the masses, man. Sickening pablum.

  “Do you know what, dude? Your face looks like a two hundred year old adobe wall, and if you don’t know what that looks like I mean to say it’s fucking pitted,” Marsha added, as an extra-special topping to her prior insults.

  “Whatever,” I said. I ignored her at that point and went after the hot chick with the piercings. After some maneuvering along the rail, I cozied up to her in my best fashion of utter adoration of the Venus on a Half-Shell type, though she was not of that quality, uh, not even close. “Hey, baby,” I said to her in a way of introducing my awesome-self to her hotness-self however she was in the same kinda mood as Marsha and said: “Listen here, douchey, why don’t you put your best face forward? Oh, I know, that is your best face.” That was another dirty dig about my pimply face and bulgy eyes, as though I didn’t fucking already know about them and I didn’t care, because, despite the pimples and weird eyes, I was still handsome, and I knew it.

  I grunted, grinned, took a drag on my cigarette and chuckled. “Bravo. Now let’s play?” I replied confidently.

  “Listen up, Acne Al, I wouldn’t play with the likes of you.” She said this in a snotty, laughing voice with her ugly lips stuck up in the air (along with her nose) and she came back with this retort fast like a fierce slap upside the face. Whack. Dirty nasty bitch. I crossed her off his list for Christmas.

  After Little Miss Hot-Ass had insulted me, I smoked my cigarette in a burning rage and strolled back inside as big as you please and what should I discover but that Marsha chick was stupid enough to return to the same seat, beside me, that night. Reeling her in. That’s what I’d been doing.

  We continued typing and writing, ignoring each other. Later, when we knew each other at the Warehouse District Writing Workshop, I got the behind-the-scenes look at what she thought of me at the time. Yeah, she told me ridonkulous shit about what she’d thought of me after that night and for the next months. In her dumb mind from early on, after knowing little old me, she felt I should receive the same treatment I dealt out to my poor unsuspecting characters: by that she meant: branding with hot irons, stakes through the heart, violent dismemberment. None of that was too good for me and according to her, it suited me fine. If I put hot branding irons in fires of mesquite and branded a red-hot flaming V on the foreheads of certain corpses, she figured I deserved the same jammed onto the unhealthy skin of my “skinny white superior bottom.” Or Indian arrows protruding from every part of my ugly body like a voodoo doll, or to be scalped, or to be singed, or skinned in the delicate unmentionable parts! She thought that! Damn, she was better than I was at thinking of mean things to do to someone—me! When I read aloud about the vapid vampire harlots I created drowning in rushing arroyos which were gorged with rain water like a sea, full of mud and tires and dead dogs, and these harlots were battling the waves, flailing the water, tossing back their wicked heads to breathe, (but would a vampire harlot need to breathe, anyway, I’d better figure that one out sometime) she wished me the same fucking fate. Would that I should walk my stupid ass right into an arroyo in town during a raging monsoon rain and would that I should be swept away, buried deep under the mud of the Santa Cruz River so that all the searchers would find was one of my fancy black boots somewhere in a drainage canal way out on a ranch halfway to Utah and nothing else to ever show that Viglietti walked the earth. She wanted me wiped off the face of this planet!

  Why am I actually claiming that my insults don’t phase her? That must be something recent. Is that some kind of clue I should worry about?

  The next writing class that semester Marsha found another seat, which sort of blew my theory of me reeling her in and all that, but when I rolled in a few minutes late, as usual, and plopped in the chair beside her again, she was so fucking horrified that, I remembered, it was hysterically funny. Her face with its big baby-blue eyes had the most comical mix of horror, hatred, and indignation I’ve ever seen. Oh, it was lovely, lovely.

  She said later she should have gotten up at once and moved, but she sat right there. There must have been fifteen other empty seats he could have chosen from, but I knew the best thing was to flop myself beside her again and see what she would do. It was her head I wanted to mess with, that’s all. Why I was doing that, well, I have no idea, because I wanted to be near Little-Miss-Hotness again, except, come to think of it, she wasn’t even there that night at all. She was a terrible writing student with no dedication to the subject and a bad attitude. Not like Marsha.

  “How’s it going,” Marsha had said after the momentary shock.

  “Fine,” I said, sniggering.

  Insincerely, at the same instant, we both smiled at one another, and our eyes opened wide that the gesture was so perfectly mirrored, though there couldn’t have been two people less similar physically in the whole room. I was skinny, like Jack Spratt, and Marsha was like his wife—kinda fat, though we were both blonde. From then on, we spoke, occasionally. I made fun of her being a dumb-ass romance writer, of course. She mocked me for the horror writing obsession. We traded barbs and witticisms, back and forth for that semester. Reeling her in. That’s what I’d been doing.

  Yeah, maybe she was reeling me in. I would have strongly objected to that fucking vision of reality at the time, though.