Little Deaths, page 8
Zombie Tongue.
Vegas is like the Miss America pageant. It uses you, and you use it right back.
The building vibrated with the passing of trucks on the parkway overhead. Overhead gels of red and blue, beaded doorways. Flashing squares of soft light on the floor, alternating in chequerboard patterns. Maybe a discotheque in a different time. The décor reminded me of the Go-Go bars in Calumet City, back in Illinois.
The woman on stage was a burn victim; in the lights and nicotine haze you couldn’t tell unless you were looking up at her. She was devoting most of her time to a gaggle of skeletons at the other end of the bar.
Where we were sitting, a dwarfish woman with hair growing out of a mole in her cheek passed by with an empty potato chip can. Money for the jukebox. The current song was some oldie but goodie from the seventies. ‘Fool For The City’ by Foghat, maybe. Or ‘Toys In The Attic’. Aerosmith always drew their biggest crowds at strip bars. The mole was the size of a .38’s exit-wound. The woman blew away the long strands of hair from her mouth before trying to seduce us with a bloated, grey tongue.
It made me think about Celandine. And of myself. Time changes nothing but the contours of our bodies. (The burn victim on stage had no contours at all—we saw that when she moved our way; she was eternally young. A survivor of Vietnam, in fact. Her crotch smooth, like a Barbie doll.)
The hours passed and the drinks took their toll.
I had thought that the term ‘zombie tongue’ was some street phrase for whores, like meth-moxie was anywhere else for drugs. But I couldn’t leave. In the middle of a Widows of Whitechapel song—the burn victim grinding her smooth, gashless pelvis against the far wall—I tried loping over to the john. Green shag carpeting covered the walls and ceiling of the rooms down the hall. I was reminded of Elvis’s Jungle Room at Graceland, the plushness acting as soundproofing. I saw the sign marked ME off to the right.
Near the opposite door, painted black, a tall guy with a shirt that read I LOVE YUMA, ARIZONA came out of the room, nodding his head in a ‘your turn’ gesture. I noticed blood on his lip, purple in the thin track of lighting imbedded in the overhead carpeting. I was ready to go into the bathroom when my eye caught a glimpse of something beyond the still open black door.
A bookcase, and in the wedge of light, the unmistakable—to me, at least—yellow and red binding of a Happy Hollisters book. I thought, fuck, no. Squeezing every bit of emotion out of me, I pushed the door open. I saw Celandine.
She was naked and tied down spread-eagled on the bed. Her body was thinner than I might have expected. But I knew it was her, you see, because of the head. Celly’s bush had grown up in a thin straight line, like a fuzzy black worm. Her nipples were small and pink. Sure enough, with age, the fingers that had protruded from her stomach had decalcified back into her. Where the small leg had been was a pale nub above the pelvic bone. Maybe it had been sanded smooth.
Celandine looked drugged or weary from crying. I could not look at her. But I found the courage to walk into the room. I looked around the sparse rectangle of living area. Hell, it was a mansion compared to the Cal City titty bars where you fucked the women on the stairwell landings, against the walls like it was Victorian England. If you fucked them in the ass, they spent the few moments reading the new graffiti.
Tubes of salve and Ben-Gay were crafted into strange stick figures. Pill containers littered the vanity unit like perfume bottles. Tricyclic anti-depressants like Elavil, stronger shit like Denzatropline. All labelled with a post office box in Groom Lake, Nevada. The doctor’s name was unpronounceable. Blank postcards, her own mementoes. Deer feeding near Backbone State Park, Iowa. Thornton’s Truckstop Diner (Con Mucho Gusto!) Beaumont, Texas. The Big Chief Hotel in Gila Bend, Arizona. The sun setting over Roswell, New Mexico.
Other, more ‘grown-up’ books: Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm, and Frank Norris’s The Pit. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, the collected Sherwood Anderson reader. All Chicago authors; Celly never forgot her roots. I saw a small cassette recorder on a table and flipped through the tapes. Came across Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock soundtrack. Imagined him singing the title song, ‘You’re So Young And Beautiful’.
I heard a moan.
It was the head. Mouth open, like a dog begging for a biscuit. The tip of the tongue was bitten off. It recognized me. It was showing me.
Jailhouse Rock
I ran out the door and into the john, vomit already nearing my teeth. Sweating, numb. And there he was in the doorless stall nearest the entrance, my new friend. The man who had been in Celandine’s room before me.
The man with blood on his lip. He smiled then, said how the head felt no pain. He knew I knew what he was talking about. Said it was like raping a girl and then killing her after because she knows who you are.
Do the crime without doing the time.
When he smiled a bloody thin-lipped grin and compared it to having your cake and eating it too, hiking up his belt like a real man, I hit him. Caught him by surprise. I pummelled him until my knuckles were bloody. Left him face over the chipped porcelain bowl, hair hanging into the water like he had got a swirly.
I walked past the condom machines to the mirror. Took my Ray-Bans off and stared at my bulging face. Beat holy hell out of the mirror, out of my reflection.
But had the common sense to wash my hands and calm down.
Went back to the stage with my hands in my jacket pockets, told Norm I wanted to head back to the Plaza.
The girl dancing on stage as we walked out the door had two mastectomy scars.
That night, I dreamt horrible things, like a guy forced to sleep the night before he is to be strapped down into the electric chair.
I was back at Belladonna’s, sitting front centre stage. Celly was dancing, glassy-eyed. Cradling the head as Patsy Cline belted out ‘I’m Back In Baby’s Arms’. The crowd going nuts.
Celly snake-dancing to ‘The Stroll’, winnowing across the stage, the head dangling over the edge. Men stuffing dollar bills into its mouth. Celly standing and swinging her head back and forth, the cystic head below flopping like a colostomy bag. Celly oblivious to me, the head the only one recognizing me in the whole place, the whole city, the whole world.
Down on her hands and knees, shoving her ass in someone else’s face. Inching down the stage, flashing red, blue, red, orange. Her nipples tiny points. Celandine’s pussy seemingly enormous in the shadow of her body. The stage covered with wadded bills, spat out of the head’s mouth.
The head with a mind of its own, making Celly move towards me.
So that the zombie tongue could lick the dried blood from my knuckles.
I woke up to find it was almost two in the afternoon. Norm was watching CNN. He told me that it was about time I got up, he’d been awake when I got back.
I asked him what the hell he was talking about.
He told me that halfway back to the Plaza, I got out of the cab and said I wanted to go back to Belladonna’s. Then he told me to go do something about my breath.
We got back to Denver okay. Part of me wanted to go back to Vegas, to Celly. But I was embarrassed, shocked, even sickened at the depths I had lowered myself to. I took some spare Tegretol for my headaches. I tried for months to forget what I had seen at Belladonna’s.
I watched the WGN-superstation for Chicago news after the Cubs and Bulls games. Read about The Painkiller, killing wheelchair victims in the Loop back in Chicago in late ‘88, and of Richard Speck (still unrepentant) dying a day before his fiftieth birthday, bloated from a distended bowel, although the cause of death was listed as emphysema, in December 1991. Everyone felt cheated that the drifter who had mutilated eight nurses in 1966—around the time Celly and I were getting to know each other better—got off so easily.
Norm Brady and I hung around The Lion’s Lair in the evenings and I spent my days rereading old medical textbooks from the Denver Library on Seventeenth. I also read the Rocky Mountain News, my native city showing up increasingly as the civil war in the former nation of Yugoslavia continued unabated. My home town was indeed a melting pot, much of the coverage came from the Chicago wire services. Items about the Midwest in general, the Mississippi flooding from the Quad Cities to St Louis, a crazed gunman killing patrons at a Kenosha, Wisconsin restaurant. A skinhead shooting a plastic surgeon who ‘dared’ change someone’s Aryan features; what would the neo-Nazi think of myself or Celly?
I dreamt about hot neon the colour of clotted blood, of deformed faces that looked as if they had been squeezed between unrelenting elevator doors. Sometimes I would realize that I had been awake and staring into a mirror.
Occasionally, I would come across copies of The Chicago Tribune at the library. Usually they only carried West Coast papers like the Seattle Intelligencer or the Vallejo Vestry.
One day six months ago, I read of a scandal involving a prominent Chicago network newswoman. Rumours circulated of a lesbian affair with a woman with an acardiac twin. This particular shit was slung because the woman was up for a national news desk spot. But, still. I flew back on United to see if the Tomeis were back in town.
Josephine and Celandine had been back in Chicago since the summer of 1991. Someone besides me had seen her in Vegas and knew an even better way to use her. A local writer exploited her for shock value in one of his novels, saying that she had become one of the highest paid call girls in the city, and that the head under the ribcage was dead and often mutilated.
The guy in Vegas was right. The head feels no pain.
But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to fix it.
She is asleep.
I stare out the window, the one facing east. Josephine Tomei died this past Christmas. It is just me and Celandine. I called Norm and told him I had family matters to take care of here.
I left things open.
She is asleep because she still is taking the drugs that she started on in Vegas. The only reason she hasn’t lost all of her self-esteem. I swear I will get her straight. It is 5:30 and the sun is coming up.
I play the Elvis soundtrack to Jailhouse Rock. ‘I Wanna Be Free’; the title song. Finally, ‘Lover Doll’.
I listen to the younger, pre-bloat King of Rock ‘n Roll, singing about how he loves his lover doll madly.
I pull the sheets gently away from Celandine’s drugged form. The head is still watching me. Dawn’s light slashes a diagonal across Celly’s black pubic hair. I pull off my shorts.
I reach forward, kissing Celly’s closed mouth. It doesn’t open. 1 lick her breasts, the left one, then the right.
I reach into her cunt with my hand, one finger at a time. I can put three fingers in comfortably. She does not respond. My dick is still limp.
‘… let me be your lover boy …’
I take my fingers out of Celandine and stroke the head’s hair. Its mouth opens. The eyes have a certain curiosity.
I swear I will get Celly off the drugs, get our lives together. Take her back to Denver with me.
I move towards the head, my dick growing to half-mast. There is early morning traffic outside. In the real world. Our real world.
Straddling Celly’s sleeping body in a half-assed way, one foot on the ground, the other leg’s knee near her armpit. Positioning myself over the head. Guiding my dick into its mouth.
It is not hard to believe that it begins sucking.
(For Denise Szostak)
THE SWING
by
Nicholas Royle
Relationships are a balance of power. In good relationships that balance shifts regularly between the two participants. In his story ‘The Swing’, Royle takes this idea and gives it a tangible demonstration.
THE SWING
I’d just cleared the ball off my line and kicked it back up the park when I noticed this beautiful girl standing near to the goal. She was applauding my save and didn’t look away immediately when I grinned at her. While she was looking down I had a good look. She didn’t seem to have any holes as far as I could see. Her ears weren’t pierced and I couldn’t see any scars on her face or hands. Still, I thought, no harm in looking.
As the first half was quiet I stayed on the goal-line and talked to her. Even if there was no future in it, I was flattered by her attention. I talked about the game and the lads on the team, my job, how to avoid arrest for burglary if you’re carrying heavy bags stuffed with books and records; rubbish, in fact. I talked rubbish because I was scared of drying up. Also because it didn’t look like anything could happen between us and so it was hard to justify the desire to talk.
It was the middle of winter and although the sky was almost all grey, the sun shone for a short time and struck her face like it would a statue’s. She was wearing glasses with an attractive black frame and the lenses were coated with something that made them reflect strange colours. Her skin appeared perfect in the sideways light and she wore her hair casually flicked over the right side of her head. She had jeans on that looked warm and comfortable. I wanted to tell her how stunning she looked, but it might have confused her. I wished I had a camera with me, despite the obvious handicap of my goalkeeper’s gloves.
I asked the girl her name and she said it was Georgie. Her hair was long and dark. I told her my name. She said, ‘That’s a lovely name.’ I didn’t have any holes either so I couldn’t work out why she was being so nice to me.
There was an attack on my goal which came out of the blue and I fumbled the ball. It fell to an attacker but I blocked his shot. Georgie was clapping again, her breath freezing in front of her face like big white roses bursting into flower. Our midfield must have fallen asleep because suddenly the opposition were coming at me again. Their winger put in a cross and I jumped for the ball, along with three other men—two of their forwards and one of our defenders. Normally I would have been more cautious but, in spite of myself, I was showing off in front of Georgie. I got hit in the face. Someone’s elbow caught me in the cheek. It was a mighty blow and I felt instantly sick, as if I’d walked into a tree. I fell to the ground, too badly hurt to clutch my face, too shocked to know how to react. The pain was startling and I was terrified in case the damage was … what? … worse than I expected? A footballing injury. Surely it couldn’t be that bad, could it?
With players crowding round me I tried to feel with my tongue inside my mouth. The rich taste of blood was in my throat. My tongue found the point of impact, where the inside of my cheek had been pressed against my teeth. There was a hole. My tongue seemed to go on for ever as it felt for the end of the hole. What if it goes right through? I thought anxiously. What if I’ve got a hole through my cheek?
And when I looked up and saw the expressions on the faces of my teammates I realized that was exactly what I did have.
Gingerly I fingered my cheek. I felt the edge of the hole and drew back, like a tourist on the lip of a volcano. The only person who came forward instead of backing away was Georgie and she came so quickly I didn’t have time to react. Deftly she threaded a large silver ring through the hole, attached a strong-looking chain and snapped the ring shut. ‘I love you,’ she whispered unnecessarily.
The rest of the lads were watching, some exchanging knowing glances and nudges and winks. They didn’t seem to mind that they’d lost their keeper. A game’s a game but some things are more important, they would have been thinking. Even if they hadn’t scored, I had. Things like that. They would have all seen similar things before. I knew for a fact that Jon, the left-back, had seen a girl he fancied in a pub the week before and had slipped a thin wire through the hole in her pierced ear while she was waiting to be served. Since he’d wanted to go to the pub anyway they stayed for a while before going back to his flat on the outskirts of the city.
With Georgie it was love at first sight. So she said later, after she’d led me away from the field. We didn’t bother to go via the changing rooms and pick up my clothes. She made no concessions like that, and there was no reason why she should, obviously. My life had changed and I had to accept it. It wasn’t as if it had never happened before; just not on a football pitch in front of 21 blokes. It was a bit embarrassing.
We spent the next 36 hours at her flat, moving from the bed only to run a bath—which we let go cold—or to get more orange juice from the fridge. We got to know each other’s bodies to the most intimate degree and talked when there was an opportunity. She didn’t take the ring out of my mouth once. It was far too early for that degree of trust.
During those first few days I submitted myself to everything without question. It felt good to be with someone again, but I knew that before long I’d have to start looking for weaknesses. Realistically, the balance couldn’t stay the same for long.
Georgie took me to see her friends. In the car she took no chances, securing me to the door handle with a stout chain. I liked watching her drive. She didn’t wear a seatbelt and her lips never stopped moving as she mouthed abuse at any driver who either cut her up or proceeded too slowly. I liked to see them get out of her way fearfully, especially because if they didn’t, it tended to mean a violent jolt which jarred the ring in my mouth, reopening the wound and causing blood to flow. I put my hand on her leg at one point and she covered it tenderly with hers before taking hold of my little finger and applying a twist that threatened to break it. We both laughed at this.
On arrival at her friends’ house she led me into a chatter and appraisal and endless questions rattled at Georgie. Where did you find him? What does he do? Is it good? Better than the last one? ‘He looks good to me,’ one woman in a gold dress said as she ran her hand flirtatiously up my chain, stopping just before the ring so that I could feel her trembling with suppressed excitement.
The host emerged from the kitchen with a flourish and a black woman whom he kept in tow by means of a length of gold rope, the type you see in theatre foyers and outside posh hotels, which was plaited into her bleached hair. The black woman was carrying a tray of cocktails in outrageously tall glasses. I could only imagine the punishment she might receive for dropping one. In fact, as she passed me I noticed several barely healed welts on her cheek and up the back of her neck.
