2
The Pipe Cleaner (cont.)
“Ooh, yeah, bitch, yeah,” Kenny grunted, sweat oozing from his forehead as he sat on the john, jerking his dick without lube (it hurt more), while the other hand pressed a razor against his inner thigh. “That’s what Daddy wants, isn’t it?”
Oh, and I should probably also mention he wore pair of pink Lycra biker shorts.
Over his head.
Pulled down past the level of his nose but above his lips, so it sounded more like, “Ooh, yeah, bish, yeah. Das whadaddy was, iddit?”
This is your idea of “poetry”?
I looked up at Archelaeus, resting atop the shower rod. I swear that motherfucker would never sit up if he could avoid it.
Some people would pay seventy-five bucks a ticket to see this in the East Village.
“Mmmmmm,” moaned Kenny, as Archelaeus shook his amorphous head.
Uh-uh. Me? I’m seeing bathos.
The Hell you are! I exploded.
As did Kenny.
In more ways than one.
**
Kenny Stokes shot his wad onto the wall facing the toilet.
This was not unusual in any way, as this was normally the place Kenny Stokes shot his wad. Kenny Stokes’ wad had not been shot near anyone but Kenny Stokes for a very long while, as the shooting of said wad required such a prodigious amount of pain that most women felt uncomfortable dealing it out. Or so they said.
And which, by the way, was patently untrue.
Most only felt uncomfortable being witnessed dealing it out, even if that witness was a willing – nay, eager – lover.[1] You see, women have been taught – and we devils applaud the idea, naturally, contrary as it is to God’s design – that resisting their urge to violence is somehow “righteous.” In the balance of the universe, however, women are entitled to dole out as much physical pain as they endure in childbirth, as well as the physical equivalent of all their emotional wounds, since they suffer these in the same way men do their wounds of war.[2]
Seldom do women achieve this balanced violence, of course – necessitating their return as men in their next lives: men who invariably rebel against the residual female psychic oppression and overcompensate by getting into bar brawls or nuking Hiroshima or beating the crap out of their wives – or girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, or children – who then, in turn, repress their desire for retaliation, leading them to become violent in their next lives, the circle continues, ommm she-bop… and you get the idea.
(Even though It’s mostly a dick, sometimes you gotta love God.)
[1] Perhaps if these women could’ve inflicted this pain anonymously, Kenny Ray Stokes might never have committed the disgusting, heinous, and unforgivable crimes about which you’ll soon read. me? why Archelaeus, a compliment! so rare.
[2] Or at least the way men used to suffer their wounds of war, pre-c. 1970 anno Hippyhead. After the emergence of The Sensitive Man, I made it my personal policy to give raging hemorrhoids to every guy I met who bitched about a head cold for more than a day.
The point was, Kenny Stokes hadn’t found a woman willing to physically hurt him enough (sentimentally was an entirely other story about Becca) to get him off. And so it was customary that Kenny Stokes was alone when he shot his wad onto what he thought of, in his final heat, as his Wad-Shooting Wall, which was usually just enough to push Kenny over the edge into shooting his wad.
Onto the wall.
All of this, as I say, was ordinary.
For Kenny Stokes.
What separated this particular episode from all the similar ones before it was the depth to which the razor Kenny pressed against his inner right thigh penetrated his skin.
This was not Kenny’s fault. Kenny had been at the cutting game long enough to know exactly how deep he had to incise in order to stimulate his nerves at the point of orgasm. Perhaps contributing to his inability to find a mate willing to do this for him was the fact that Kenny Stokes, when naked, appeared to be wearing a bright white girdle and shorts, that upon closer inspection turned out to be a vast network of intersecting scar tissue.
He’d been cutting a long while, Kenny had, over many lifetimes – long enough that I thought he might have some intuitive feel for what it was like being a devil: trapped inside the same hopeless cycle for eternity empathy? you’re fucking joking, right? – so, no, it wasn’t Kenny’s fault that when he finally came, he sliced too deep, into his femoral artery, causing blood to explode from his groin, squirting and sizzling a hot red spray as if from a graffiti artist’s can all over the Wad-Shooting Wall, turning his semen into a dripping pink goop.
All that was Tia Alba’s fault.
**
They called her Tia Alba, but her true name was ———-.
what the fuck is that? i’m being censored now? i can’t even…
…and this from It, what wants such honesty. It’s enough to make you gag.
Tia Alba owned a small restaurant close to the border, on the corner of Platanos and Calle Dolorosa. Nothing fancy; fluorescent lights in the day, candles at night. Nine tables, usually no waiting. Tia Alba sat the customers herself, her heavy gray braid hanging down her back like the traditional peasant women of Chihuahua. She looked not a day under ninety, though — — —– —— —- oh now that’s just outright dogshit – her face was creased like old laundry from her decades in the maquiladoras, Javi’s cigar smoke, birthing eight babies, and raising six and a half, two of whom were even still alive.
After Javi had gone, Tia Alba took his death-insurance money and the money she’d hidden from him for fifty years in ever-growing denominations inside a Kotex box (even after el cambio, Javi had never asked about the box, considering those cosas de mujeres. Though sometimes in bed she would tease him, pulling on his earlobes, calling them her Kotex de mujeres), and she had eventually leased this small storefront for three years, turning it into a restaurant.
It was ambitious, yes, but Tia Alba knew she would succeed. And after the first three years had passed, she’d leased it for five more, and after those five years had withered and dried up, along with Tia Alba’s first and third children, she’d signed a ten year lease, porque… ¿porque no?
On average, the food was good at Tia Alba’s – which is to say, it was wildly inconsistent.
If Tia Alba sat on her short orange stool in the open doorway, menus on her lap, humming and half-blind staring into the street, the food was fantastic.
But if Tia Alba stayed in her “office” (a barely-converted mop closet just big enough for her and half a desk, which Tia Alba’s fourth son had dutifully sawn in half before shoving it in there, a stack of refried bean boxes holding up the side with no legs) – if she only scuttled out when the maracas banged and sh-sh-sh-shed against the closed front door – the food was bland and, weirdly, Taco Bell-ish, only more expensive.
The locals knew to look for Tia Alba on her squat orange stool, and if the hunched old lady wasn’t there, they ate elsewhere. Some nights this meant only three or four tourists for the entire dinner shift, which sucked for the cooks, since they often grew bored, and never did anything different night to night with their cooking. They’d long since conceded that the enjoyment of their food had very little to do with how it was prepared, and everything to do with the company in which it was consumed (i.e., Tia Alba).
Last night, Tia Alba hadn’t been in the doorway.
But that hadn’t stopped two sweaty gringos grossos from Minnesota from limping in on their blisters for dinner at sunset. After quesadillas and enchiladas cerdo, Bill Wollenhofer left heartily unimpressed with “authentic” Mexican cuisine, complaining to his wife that he could’ve gotten the same meal for $3.98 back in Granite Falls.
Barb Wollenhofer, sick to absolute death of listening to her sunburned husband bitch about everything from his aching feet to the “sketchy” locals to how everything was better back in Granite Falls, told Bill one other thing he could get. Then she walked off without climbing into the cab he held, promptly got lost since none of the street signs were in English, then got mugged by a sketchy local.
karma for our side! olé!
Until 8:30 that was it, though.
Tia Alba was secreted back in her “office” (really, withholding the quotes would insult offices everywhere), and cooks Tony and Tonio sat on overturned five-gallon buckets in the kitchen, throwing homemade bones – dominoes, not the interesting kind – on a flat piece of cardboard they held between their knees.
Tranquilo. Regalo. Seguro.
That is, until Kenny Stokes walked in.
Bang! sh-sh-sh-sh went the maracas against the storefront door.
Kenny scanned the deserted dining room while I watched through his eyes, admittedly a bit distracted. Being preoccupied with Theo, I’d given Kenny one of my lesser conscii. yes, yes, and if i’d been paying closer attention i might have noticed something. astonishing deduction, Archelaeus. where the fuck were you then?
Empty restaurant, Kenny thought. Not a good sign.
Still seated on his bucket in the kitchen, Tonio leaned back and pressed two fingers on the swinging door, inching it open a crack – then let go, rattling off some incomprehensible Chapultapec slang to Tony, mostly about poor sucker, looks hungry, and the food’s not even gonna be any good tonight.
Late, thought Kenny. Cooks already hate me. They’ll spit in my food. Two not good signs.
But then Tia Alba came out of her “office.” She shuffled past the tables up to Kenny, where with one hard, brown hand she swiped a menu from the stack lying on her orange stool and thrust it up at Kenny’s chest, which hovered somewhere above her head.
“Gracias,” Kenny mumbled, taking the menu.
Normally this would have been Tia Alba’s cue to lead him to a table, take his order, pass it on to the kitchen, then retreat back into her “office” – except this time she didn’t.
This time Tia Alba stared up at Kenny, her brown eyes glazed over near-blue with cataracts, as she contemplated him with such a disarmingly open gaze (Only ‘cause she’s blind, right? read Kenny’s thought scroll) that Kenny’s whole face got hot, he had to look away, and he felt very much like running out the door. In fact, the only thing that stopped him at the very last second was the thought that there could be closed-circuit cameras in the restaurant.
Kenny did that a lot, imagined the cameras.
Cameras to stop bad men and robbers, sure – but cameras that would also catch a 35 year-old six-foot-tall barrel-chested guy from El Paso running away from a harmless old lady like a freakboy sissy.
Those were the kinds of tapes that wound up on the Internet.
After an uncomfortable pause, in which Tia Alba continued to stare at him without a word, Kenny finally asked, “Kin… kin I help you, ma’am?” Though truth be told, he spoke more towards her shoulder, unable to bring himself to look in her blue-glazy eyes again.
Tia Alba paused, still taking in all that was Kenny Ray Stokes.
—- —- — — – —- —- —-.
well how the Hell am i supposed to tell this, then?
anus-lickers. every last one of you.
“Dios te bendigo,” Tia Alba said then, and like any grandmother, gently patted Kenny on his belly, on his girdle of scars.
As the old lady turned and made her way to the back of the restaurant, gesturing for him to follow, Kenny’s eyes welled up with tears, which made him angry. It made him want to go home and stick thumbtacks in himself to calm down. Then he imagined sticking thumbtacks in himself on camera. That would definitely show up on the Internet.
So instead he followed Tia Alba to the table nearest the kitchen, sat where she told him to sit, and agreed to order whatever she thought he might like to eat. Tia Alba poured him a glass of water, then in a voice that had birthed eight children and raised six and a half, Tia Alba hollered, “¡Tony, Tonio! ¡Uno carne asada con diez y ocho negros jacas y hágalo ahora!”
Tony was so jolted by the sudden volume of his great-great-aunt’s voice that he upset the makeshift table on his knees, sending a clatter of hand-painted dominoes to the floor. He looked up at Tonio. “Did she really say eighteen?”
Tonio looked down at the dominoes, then growled in Chapultapec, “If any of these is chipped, motherfucker – my mom made these—”
“Te dije ahora!” bellowed Tia Alba from the dining area, and instantly both men were on their feet, ingredients in their hands before they’d drawn their next breaths.
As Tony donned the dishwashing glove specially saved for this purpose, reaching into a glass container of dried chiles marked with a crudely-drawn death’s head, he triple-checked. “Eighteen? Who the Hell eats eighteen of these things?”
Still pissed, Tonio shrugged, “Don’t look at me. I just work here.”
He began to chop up the beef, all the while eyeing his mother’s handiwork strewn over the kitchen tiles.
