The Last Bender Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

 

            I slept most the day as best I could. For supper I fried up ham and cheese on rye in margarine till the crust was brown and crunchy, and drank an orange pop. Then I met my best friend Linda and her husband Mac at The Glory Hole. Linda and I were war buddies. When my wife Corrie ran off, Linda stopped me from going bad. And before that she had kept me alive in the camps.

            After they signed the treaty, and we were returned, Linda became a homicide dick. She made Chief of Investigations. Mac was just some guy she had married with her beer goggles on. 

            They brought a friend, Helen Stark, who was new on the job. The three of them were wired pretty hard, coming down off a big murder. Linda and Mac drank themselves into the usual stupor, while I shot darts with Helen.

            Helen was tall. She smoked these long, thin, albino cigarettes, one after the other, and had a habit of laughing on her french inhales, so the smoke gushed from every hole in her face. After her fifth whiskey and soda with a twist she asked me if I wanted to see her tattoo.

            “Not if it’s on your ass I don’t.”

            “Nah, not my ass. Look.”   She pulled the front of her leopard lycras down past her navel to a rosy puff of pubic hair. There, intricately inked in green, red and blue, was a jeweled clown’s head, shaped like a dagger, pointing towards her cunt.

            “Nicer than a house plant,” I said.

            “That’s not all,” she said, backfiring more of her cigarette. “It has tentacles that go down through my hairs, over my thighs and then, like the man said, ‘in a pattern reminiscent of the Book of Kells’, it intertwines my gams and feet. Your shot.”

            Helen pulled her pants up and I took careful aim and threw with full Zen swing. It thwocked into the wooden backboard, wobbled and dropped to the ground like a bird flying into a window. I sat down and watched her toss a couple of bulls.

            “So where’d ya get the tattoo?”   I asked.

            She held the end of the swizzle stick above her mouth and let the drops fall on her tongue. “This bitch in the joint inked it for some meth.”

            “Meth in prison? Man. I’d gnaw my leg off.”

            “No one said fashion isn’t stupid. In drugs and everything else. But I did all right. When I got out, I stepped into a house, a car, a nice leather matched set, and a pair of silk stockings that cost more than that suit you got on. Plus I got my tattoo. No one bugs me.”

            “No one bugs me either,” I said.

            “I told you, now you tell me what you do for fun–horses, girls, what?”

            “Nothing much. I got tomatoes growing in the back. Three varieties. Ever have a yellow tomato? They’re low acid.”

            “Don’t crack me up like that,” she said in a dusky way.

            “What would it be like if we had to walk around with it hanging out of us like a dog?” I asked.

            “Like window shopping.”

            “So we’re snuffing butt now or what?”

            “People don’t do different from dogs….Look, I gotta take a shit. Watch my stuff.”

            It was torture looking at the ashtray full of bent, lipsticked butts, a crazy tumble of frosted pink, white and nicotined filters. I wanted to smoke them all. But no luck. Soon she was back to her glass, to rattle the ice and fixate on the lemony slush, morosely, or with impish need.

            “These days, I don’t feel like fucking much,” I said.

            Helen nodded her vigorous assent. “Me neither. I don’t mind gettin’ it but I won’t put out.”

            “I know. I was thinking of getting a blow job. Wanna come?”

            “I dunno….” Her voice trailed off and she looked in her wallet and wavered.

            “C’mon, you can get your snatch soaked.”

            “I’m kinda broke.”

            “Ah c’mon.”

            “O.K. Let’s go.”   She handed the darts to some old ladies who’d been lurking around the red velvet rope separating the dart boards from the bar. The biggest one looked at Helen like she was a No Parking sign. The littlest of the three grabbed Helen by the sleeve and hissed, until the big one called her off. They were old but not sharp. You could tell by the smudged lipstick and crushed sequined caps and clip-on earrings. One of them muttered “Bitch,” fadingly, and the last I saw of her she had popped open her dart case and tossed three deadly looking brass and silver arrows at the board. It must have been some sort of Curare Club.

            The way to the sex rooms was long and twisted. It passed the toilets, where people lined up three deep to snort MDA and mescaline. It dumped us onto the dance floor, to wriggle free of the glistening feathered muscles. Then through a door and into the sushi bar. Like a troupe of deranged insects we knocked into tables where the half-naked rich and their avant-sycophants sat imitating each other. Daintily they mopped and dabbed at their nostrils, turning the bloody napkins around their fingers. It all seemed so planned. First the lockeroom rush of dancing bodies, then the paranoid trade in put-downs.

            Finally we reached the glory holes.

            I greeted the gold lame curtains with indifference. Animals in my chest barked to be let out, but the prospect of masturbating or having sex with a human being made me sick to my stomach.

            The wall was made of weathered, roughhewn planks pillaged from upstate barns. Holes were cut into the wall alternating with bidets for the women, who sat down to be serviced from below. The glory holes on the wall came equipped with straps to hang onto, just like a subway.

            An old man with thick glasses and a runny nose took our money. “Together?”   he asked.

            I looked at Helen and she said, “Yeah.”   Then he asked us what we wanted–tongue costs more than hand or finger–and handed back a colored tag. You hang the tag through the hole. Then the people on the other side know what to do.

            She dropped her pants and sat down. I stuck my cock in the hole. “So why did you become a cop?” I asked. You always have to wait; it gets cold, cause the other side isn’t heated. They don’t want a frenzy. The people on the other side, they’re not pros. If someone wants to put out, all they do is go to what we called the fitting room, or the other side.

            Sometimes someone tries to fuck you through the hole. Sometimes it’s hard to guess exactly what’s happening. It’s just some weird shit happening in the fitting room, on the other side.

            “I started out in narcotics,” she said.

            “Dealing drugs in the slammer, you made cop connections.”

            “No, I got those in the war.” She stopped to heave around a bit. “When I got back, I kicked around, try to fuck the ugly pictures out but that don’t work. I hate men and do women but that sucks too. So then it’s drugs and men, more Tranzidene, morphine, acid, then women and drugs, fisting, pornography, AA, backpacking, anything but nothing. They burn me on some bullshit conspiracy charge, I mean, I go down because this boy I sometimes fuck sells my pussy out from under me. It’s a ten year minimum but after one in stir my C.O. tracks me down to do a private clip for her and the cops. After that I have the job. I’m like, drug cop. I’m on the take, I use, I deal, I fuck people over because they fucked me over, whatever the fuck goes down.

            “But Jack, I can’t do that anymore. I’m all fucking fed up. So now, I catch bad guys. People who kill and get paid to do it. That’s how I met Linda.”

            “Linda and I met in the camps.”

            “Ouch,” she said. A rough hand seized my cock, lips worked down the shaft. “So what’s Monozone Inc. I mean, I heard of it I guess.”      

            “Sure, everyone has. They make all those home health aides, like VagiVac, the home abortion device, and EmbryDoze, if your foetus is too active and it’s causing you discomfort on the job. What else.”

            “But you don’t make that stuff.”

            “No, I’m a security guy there. I didn’t want anything too exciting when I got back. Just, you know, a paycheck, doin’ what I know how to do. I investigate small time managerial chiselers. You know, office felons. I got a piddle sucker for a boss.” The mouth was really going at it now, it wouldn’t be long. Helen’s head dropped to her chest.

            She said, “Yeah, this case we’re on is a real mind fuck. All day long, we’re down in the meat packing district. Where you can’t get a donut on Sunday.”

            “The murder was inconvenient.”

            “Murders. We don’t know how many cause there aren’t any bodies. There’s just blood. Oh god, blood everywhere.”

            I felt a sudden revulsion in my gut, and lost my hard on. I must have turned pale.

            “Is something wrong?” she asked.

            “No, coming, that’s all.”

            “But you are o.k.”

            “Fine. Just fine. You say there was a lot of blood. Where was this?”   It was hopeless. I’d wasted twenty five bucks. 

            “Are you really done? Already?”

            I straightened my tie in the little mirror and headed for the sinks. “Yeah, I’m a short fuse. You know, a premature ejaculator. Always have been. Mine goes up and goes down faster than a flag in battle.”

            “Good for the other side, if you’re getting paid. It was like, four, maybe five gallons of blood.”  She joined me at the sink and sucked on her teeth in the mirror. “I’ve never seen anything like it. And it’s gonna make my name, cause I’m gonna catch the bitch that did this and hang ’em for it.”

            I didn’t know what to say. I started to stutter. I had to regain my self-control. “Where was this?”           

            “The Pechardine Building. It’s a warehouse. Read about it in the papers, Jack. My name is in the article. I heard them calling it Slaughterhouse 5. My lead woulda been BloodBath!”

            “Any clues? Witnesses?”

            She looked at me kinda funny. Helen was the kind of cop who was always on the job.

            I opened my wallet and checked for the piece of paper. We went back to Mac and Linda in the bar. Mac was calling Linda a whore, and Linda sat staring at her fingernails. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t. Mac was pathetic. He had a shiner on his left eye he got brawling after work. And he was about to get a twin, from Linda.