Western Palaces, page 14
“What, trying to be a man?”
“Yeah. Pretty sure it made me dumber. You know… brain damage.”
“Yeah, that’s just kind of inevitable,” I tell him. “So that’s how you lost your eye?”
“Nah, man. I lost this eye in a poker game. Some seriously high stakes in that game, man, I tell ya.”
“You aren’t going to actually tell me how you lost that fucking eye, are you?”
“You should try asking me when I’m drunk, Luke. I don’t feel like going into it now.”
“I ask you all the time when we’re drinking and you never say!” I protest.
“Bullshit, man. You never ask me any questions when you’re drunk or high or whatever. You only talk about yourself,” he says, grabbing the blue eyeball out of its case again and smoothing it between his palms as if it was dough.
“I’m good subject matter,” I tell him and he nods as if he really means it.
“You’re worth a couple pages,” he says and strides off toward the back. The shop owner stops his chicken scratching to look up at Daniel with a generous smile.
“Finally made your mind up, have you?” the old man says.
“Yeah, you know, Chan… I don’t ever make snap decisions. Not anymore,” Daniel tells him, setting the glass eye atop the display counter on a square velvet pad.
“I know it, Daniel. You are much more wistful than most,” Chan says, his smile melting away as he locks eyes with me standing behind Daniel. “And I understand it’s not an easy decision to make,” he continues.
“Right. I want this one. It has a little scratch on it, though,” the cyclops says.
“It does? Would you like to select another?”
“No. This blue… this is the blue I want. The others aren’t the same blue. Do you have another of this one? This exact one?” Daniel asks, some desperation sneaking into his cool tone.
Chan places a jeweler’s eyepiece over his eye and inspects the glass peeper, rolling it over and over again in his right hand as he keeps the eyepiece in place with his left. “Ah, and yes, it’s just the right blue to contrast with your chestnut-colored eye—very striking. This will surely add even more character to your very handsome features.”
Daniel actually blushes at this. I can tell even as I stand behind him because the back of his neck reddens.
“Yeah, with that eye GQ will be breaking down his goddamn door with photo ops,” I say, laugh, and snort. But I’m still distracted. I’m mostly thinking about the next zombie I can pay to let me sort coke off their ass.
“Hmm…” Chan says, frowning at me as he places the glass eye down. “This one does have some imperfections, as you noted. I probably shouldn’t let the ruffians handle them,” he continues, giving me another look of disapproval. I shrug and turn my attention to the plastic and latex breasts. There are single breasts—left and right. You know the difference because of the direction the nipples point. There are pairs of breasts, too, and I’m about to ask the shop owner how much they are but he’s already gone behind the curtained doorway into the back of the store to look for a less damaged headlight for Daniel’s supposedly perfect visage.
That padiddle is staring straight ahead, spaced out and lost in his wistful thoughts. I step beside him and grab the imperfect glass eye off the velvet and rub it between my fingers like a worry stone. Eventually I say, “So, what gives? Why are you buying an eye, dude? I thought you said you couldn’t ever wear one.”
Daniel’s gaze isn’t shaken. He still stares straight ahead with his one good eye where the shop owner retreated to behind the dirty red curtain. He’s absent-mindedly rubbing at the scar tissue over his left eye socket. I swipe a hand in front of his face but since I’m standing to his left he doesn’t notice, so I give it another try and finally succeed.
“Huh?” he says, flinching. “What, man?”
“I said, Man of Much Pondering, why are you buying a fucking glass eye you can’t use? I mean, not to be contradictive or nothing, but have you thought this one out?” I ask, setting the imperfect glass eye back on the counter.
“Yeah, man. I thought it out. Don’t worry about it. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Here we are!” Chan says, bursting through the curtain, a dust cloud forming in the wake. He’s holding out another glass eye with a blue iris and it looks in the exact same condition as the one on the counter. I don’t get it. But, I guess I just wouldn’t understand. “An exact match. And my last one of this model. It’s your lucky day,” the old man adds.
“Hey, Mr. Chan—” I pipe in.
“It’s just Chan.”
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Hey, listen—if I ever lose these,” I say, rubbing the little bumps at the top of my forehead where those antennae have been attempting to sprout for years. “If I ever lose my antennas, can you replace them? Like, can you make me a pair—a realistic pair so that I can walk around and feel complete?”
“Your… what?” Chan asks, squinty eyed. He wraps the perfect glass eye in a swatch of velvet and places it in a little paper gift bag, hands it to the cyclops who misses grabbing at it a couple times before gaining purchase.
“My antennas, dummy. Or, I don’t know. Maybe they’re horns. I’m waiting to find out, still. It’s pretty exciting. I’m like an expectant father. Pretty sure they’re antennae, though,” I tell him, stepping in front of Daniel and placing my hands on the counter.
“I don’t… you don’t have any antennae, son,” Chan says, placing Daniel’s thirty-seven dollars in the cash register.
“I don’t?” I yell out, my face aglow.
“Um… no,” Chan answers.
“Daniel! Why didn’t you fucking tell me?” I ask, grabbing him by the shoulders and hopping all around, celebrating the news. “No antennae! No horns! Daniel! Daniel, it’s a miracle!”
As I’m hopping around the store, celebrating, dancing with that cyclops, I knock his gift bag from him without noticing. It fell beneath my feet, which I’ve apparently been stomping for more than a few seconds.
“Dammit, Luke!” Daniel yells, shoving me aside.
“What?” I ask.
He kneels, picks up the flattened paper bag and pulls out the folded swatch of velvet.
“See, it’s fine. It’s wrapped in velvet. It’s fine,” I say, watching Daniel unwrap the velvet to reveal the shattered and smashed glass eye with a blue iris.
“Goddammit, Luke,” Daniel says quietly, wrapping the thing up as if it was a bird with a broken wing and placing it back in the bag. He stands, stares me down with his one eye then looks to Chan.
“I’m sorry, Daniel. I would love to replace that for you, but all sales are final,” Chan tells him, the businessman surfacing.
“It’s not a problem,” Daniel says. “It’s fine. I don’t need a replacement.”
“How about this other one?” the old man says, gesturing to the imperfect eye staring at the ceiling from the countertop. “Ten-percent off.”
Daniel turns away from me and walks out of the store with his little gift bag full of glass shards, the bell over the door jingling as he does. Overhead, legs and arms sway from the breeze and clack together, sounding like driftwood.
“Listen, Mr. Chan,” I say, turning back to him at the counter and stealthily swiping the other glass eye from there, which I deposit into my pocket.
“It’s just Chan,” he says through gritted teeth.
“How much for the tits?” I ask.
NOT SYD
“I just want to have a family,” I tell Syd, who’s here, somehow, at Thongs ‘N’ Dongs, an equal-opportunity strip club in North Beach where big old neon signs blink and distract from the sperm-glazed sidewalks. “I just want a family… because… because they can’t leave you like friends leave you. They’re bonded to you. Fused by a network of veins and blood and ancestral history. You understand what I’m saying, Syd?”
“You’re stupid,” Syd says, yanking on my cock, which is sheathed in a purple condom that makes me wonder if my dick is even in there or if I’ve spontaneously sprouted a plastic knob from my crotch. “And quit calling me Syd. Listen, family can leave you any time. You think I’m close to my family? My father left when I was twelve and my mom remarried a couple thousand boxes of wine. My older brother used to set fire to my hair and tie me up in barbed wire and make me eat crickets and frogs. Yeah, family. Sure.”
“Go on,” I tell her, all seriousness. “You’re turning me on.”
“Hey, you started it, mister,” Syd says, licking her palm in order to get less friction on my plastic purple toy dick.
Outside, down the street, Dick Tracy and Humphrey Bogart are strangling ladies of the night and dropping those bodies in dumpsters behind City Lights Books before humping and reading Howl to each other in a dingy little residency hotel operated by a bearded lady. They’ll turn on each other and betray their love the second they’re questioned by the authorities.
“Syd, I know you want a family, too. I know you lost your baby. I know about the miscarriage. I know how the love of your life left you after that,” I tell her, trying to have an emotion or two.
“You don’t know nothin’, mister. And quit calling me Syd,” she says, concentrating hard on the handjob, her tongue absentmindedly peeking out the corner of her lips. She’s wearing reading glasses because I asked her to. Syd’s a reader. Often times after shooting my load into reservoir tip after reservoir tip she’d quote Vonnegut, PK Dick, Joyce Carol Oates, or Tom Clancy and we’d talk for hours about books, writing, dreams, and family. That was before Syd disappeared into a mirror. But, here she is. Here’s my Syd, back again, doing her best to make me feel something.
“Family is the last thing I want,” Syd says through a sigh that she attempts to turn into a sexy moan, but fails. “All my family’s left me.”
“Did you murder them?” I ask, feeling my plastic rod grow harder in her weak grip.
“What?” she asks, excited or something.
“When you cut them open did swarms of flies flood out? Did you eat any of the flies? Did they get in your mouth? Tell me they got into your mouth. All over your mouth,” I demand, breathless.
“Look,” Syd says, standing up in the little VIP booth we’re in at the back of the club. “I know it’s your birthday and all, but, I think I’m just going to give you your money back and go, OK?”
I tell her I’m just kidding. That all I am is lonely and it’s my birthday and all my friends forgot and I’ve got no family either so there’s no one to celebrate with and no cards or gifts or handshakes or hugs. I also tell her my ma, Pearl, recently passed. This seems to melt her gullible heart and she looks at me with pouting lips and a twinkle in her eye.
“You poor guy!” she says, getting back on her knees, returning to her duty of drawing blood from this stone in her hand.
Booming from the stage room on the other side of this booth’s flimsy wall I can hear Nitzer Ebb’s “Family Man” and I concentrate on the fat synth chords, hoping to feel something. A large flat-screen TV set in the wall behind Syd plays a Sasha Grey porn. She’s swallowing a twelve-inch cock while taking another twelve-incher up her ass, and, another woman—blonde, with enormous tits—stands above them, straddling ladders in order to piss a hot, thick yellow stream all over her face. After the four of them have all comed and pissed themselves into sweat-glistened exhaustion, they get dressed and make dinner and talk politics and seem really comfortable with their company and surroundings. “I’m thinking of voting republican this year,” Sasha says, tossing a popcorn shrimp into her mouth. The other three nod and flip through magazines or refresh their wine glasses. “Interesting,” one of the guys tells Sasha.
“How much for a fuck?” I ask Syd, feeling sorry for this girl that she’s so bad at her job. I wonder what that must feel like.
“Uh-uh. No, I don’t do that, mister. Not me. I’m not a whore,” she tells me, yanking harder on my knob, trying to hurt me now, which I like.
Reaching into the pocket of my pants around my ankles, I finger the pocket knife then pull out my wallet, which is flush with cash as it’s Sunday, which means Cameron had a large roll of tip money from the previous night that I helped myself to. She wasn’t around, of course. Never is anymore. But the money still magically appears from time to time, thankfully.
I pull two-hundred out and this version of my Syd looks ponderous for the first time in her life and all I want to do is pay for her city college tuition and edit her term papers for her.
“Come on, Syd, I’ve had so many goddamned handjobs and blowjobs from you… but never the whole of you. What’s the difference? Just once, Syd, I want to know what it’s like to be with you that way. It’s my birthday. And you’ve been gone for so long. Just a reflection of your former self. I’ve missed you,” I say, passionately.
She takes the money and turns back toward the TV, slipping the cash into some secret dark hole in the wall there. While her back’s turned, I grab something else from my pocket and concentrate on keeping the rock hard.
One time, maybe six years ago, I took Syd to look at all the Rembrandts at the Legion of Honor, which is situated atop a hill overlooking the fluorescent blue Pacific Ocean. I wanted to inspire her. Give her something to write about. We made out madly and she blew me in the parking lot, but refused to let me inside her—really inside her.
Wait.
Maybe that was Christy. Or Cleo. Or whoever.
“OK—I… I don’t usually do this… but, since it’s your birthday and all… and since I can tell you’re a really nice guy… and that you need this… I’ll—I’ll make an exception,” she says, slipping out of her thong and, thankfully, she’s dongless. Her pussy is shaved and dry as Steven Wright’s comedy. “Stop calling me Syd, though,” she tells me, spitting on her hand, rubbing her vagina.
“Syd—I… just…” and before I know it, she’s slipped her tight bald cunt over my purple toy cock and she’s working really hard to make me feel special, moaning up a storm, claiming she’s coming only a few thrusts in and shoving her handfuls of breasts into my face, letting me nibble on her nipples, tempting me to bite them off and slice open her stomach and eat her flies. While I know this is all an act, I can feel her get wetter and wetter and looser and it’s seeming impossible that I’ll ever be able to come. I’m enjoying the contact, though, and don’t want it to end. She smells like baby powder and strawberries. Her skin, it’s alive and flushed with blood. It’s warm and welcoming and it seems so unfamiliar. It makes me forget about Cameron—it makes me forget about Serena and Naomi. Even Abigail. It makes me forget I have no one. With each thrust of her pelvic bone, I grow closer, even, to forgetting I’m not actually a part of the real world.
Syd’s asking me to come now. She’s leaving little impressions of crescent moons in my biceps and back. She keeps asking me to come and it fills me with anxiety. She’s bucking and moaning and slamming her ass down all the way to my balls, grunting and spitting in my mouth and telling me she loves me she loves me she loves me and that nearly makes me come, nearly has me bursting all the way from my toes, but only when she slaps that wet pussy down my plastic toy shaft with one last passionate thrust and says “Happy birthday” do I go off like a fucking bottle rocket inside of her, rapid-fire like, my eyes rolling into the back of my head as she pushes her tits into my face and strokes the back of my head and calls me a “good boy,” which nearly has me going into an impossible second climax.
“OMG,” Syd says, panting. “That’s the first time I’ve done it with a customer.” She kisses me atop my head, gently.
“Syd, don’t say ‘OMG,’” I tell her, holding her tight. “It makes you sound uneducated and I know you’re a smart… girl.” Then, more quietly, “That’s why I’m putting you through college. You’re going to be a fine writer. We’ll critique each other’s work and we’ll have children and a family and we’ll be fused by blood and veins and babies and the law and a house and bills and bankruptcy and codependency and fear and hate and mistrust and inherent trust and photo albums and memories and your dead parents and my dead parents and cheating and makeup sex and hate and loneliness and sickness and all of the…”
With one of her nipples in my mouth and her still stroking my head and calling me a “good boy” I start weeping uncontrollably, so grateful. As I’m weeping and suckling at her teat, I slip some pills into her hand and tell her, in between sobs, that I want her to have them. I tell her how we always used to do ecstasy together and I want to do it just once more before I lose her again—forever. But, because of my PBA (PseudoBulbar Affect: unexpected and uncontrollable outbursts of crying or laughing), I can’t hold back the blubbering and I’m just crying and crying and crying, my purple toy cock crumpling up into near-nothingness. Syd tries to pull away but I yell NO and hold onto her tight and tell her we need to do this—we need to get E’d up one last time. One last time. These pills will make it that. One last time. Please. For me. It’s my birthday, and I’m wailing and wailing and her breasts are slick with my tears and she tells me to stop calling her Syd, to stop calling her mom, and to get the fuck out, and she’s wiggling and struggling to get out of my grasp but I’m so fucking lonely I can’t let her go and I want to feel something, I just want to feel something. Then I do. I feel a giant fist slam into the side of my head, knocking me away from Syd and to the floor inside the tiny booth. Then I feel even more. I feel heat and needles blossom in my jaw. I feel a pulse beneath my right eye as a fist like a brick pummels me in the glow of the porn on the TV, which, between punches, I notice is now just the show How I Met Your Mother. I feel even more as teeth in my mouth shatter and fall back into my throat and cut my pink tonsils and slice my uvula and make me choke and gag. When I’m not gagging I’m smiling and laughing and spitting blood—finally feeling something.
Syd pleads with the large James Gandolfini-looking bouncer to let me up and leave me be. She tells him she wasn’t really scared of me and wasn’t worried I would do anything bad. Good old Syd. He says, “Lorraine, I fucking told you to be careful,” and grabs me by the neck, my pants around my ankles, and drags me stumbling through the dark club and through the front doors, tossing me into the neon-lit night onto the sidewalk of Broadway at Columbus. Before walking back inside the establishment, the bouncer steps over me and takes a picture as I try to hide my face. Then I realize: Oh, he’s just another fan.
