Nuisance
Call
by Tom Bradley
"Take away the prostitutes from human
affairs,
and you'll throw everything into a chaos of lusts."
--Saint Augustine, De Ordine ii, 4
Chica wondered
why she'd never gotten around to painting her vast
elbow man--aside from the prohibitive cost of the
several gallons of cirrhosis-yellow pigment it would
take. But it was never too late, as long as Biffy's
face hadn't relaxed to the point of sliding off his
skull altogether.
Maybe she could arrange for him to sit
for a formal portrait. What a nice idea!
* * * *
Biff was too irritated to be astonished
when he found himself making gestures in the direction
of the phone several seconds before it began to ring.
The only thing that persuaded him to get vertical
at all, it being three a.m., was that his sleeping
wife must never, under any circumstances, be exposed
to the person who was, without a doubt, on the other
end of the line.
* * * *
Only three rings. Yes, the old Bifferoonie
was still cultivating that fetch-it boy style--if
"cultivate" was the word. It had probably started
out as an act, or sheepish overcompensation for taking
up so much of other people's space. But what a wimp
it finally turned him into. Biffy was a moved and
a shook. Shook right out of the marriage bed.
Chica remembered when she used to get
screwed, and the more or less precise moment when
she'd decided to start doing the same unto others
instead of letting it be done unto her. She'd been
inspired by watching the old sperm whale in those
days, Mr. Premature Personality Disintegration himself,
in the flower of his young manhood. Biffy was already
so charbroiled that he could barely lift his feet,
one after the other. You could hear him coming down
the beach at Galveston during a hurricane alert, for
God's sake.
* * * *
Even after twelve years, he had only
to hear the voice. The caller didn't need to identify
herself to achieve the desired effect.
This soul-chewer was always going to
turn up, for as long as they both should live, during
those times when his moral immune system was in a
weakened condition. Chica would crop up simultaneously
with thoughts of mortality, regardless of the remoteness
of the backwater he'd hidden himself in. Whenever
he was in a lightless mood, her voice would sound
in an electronic hiss only millimeters away from the
skin of his brain, summoning him, at three a.m., to
join her in yet another bout of antisocial behavior.
She never had the courtesy to inform
him of what that behavior might be until it was two-thirds
accomplished. So it wasn't surprising to hear her
hang up in his ear after supplying a stripped-down
skeleton of details, only what he absolutely needed
to know.
* * * *
Chatting up sleepy Biffy, listening
to him whisper so as not to roust the old ball and
chain--this was like a slap in the face with chilled
astringent. It was clear to Chica now that she was
in the full fervor of a reaction against his sort
of laxity. By her own garter straps, as it were, she'd
lifted herself up, and turned herself into a--what?
Surely something more than just a dope-peddling rim-job
queen.
What was she now? If she were male,
"a man" would carry many of the connotations she was
striving for. "A woman," even at this late date in
the movement, was not quite adequate, unfortunately.
Just put it this way: Chica had turned herself into
an adult, a grownup, an individuated somebody-or-other.
And a painter of some skill: the Paintrix.
* * * *
The earth had bumbled a dozen times
around the sun since Biff's last bout of swinishness,
before he'd met his wife and settled down--precipitated
was a better term, like 350 pounds of coarse sediment.
Roughly four-thirteenths of his life had drained off
since he'd taken leave of the dominatrix who just
jangled him out of bed.
Back when he ran with her, the gay community
gazettes in major population centers had just been
starting to mutter about a strange, seemingly communicable
form of cancer appearing on the soles of the feet
of the readership. But nobody had thought to warn
the heteros who just liked snickering over the personal
ads. And right about now, a mini-lifetime later, a
certain unpleasant physical disorder--a whole potential
syndrome of them, in fact--should be coming into a
certain faithful husband's life, if it were coming
at all. The purple splotches were about due.
Like a good middle-ager, he should be
getting his gout pills and eating them three a day.
But he was afraid that the family doctor, perhaps
leery of all convicted felons (even one so manifestly
unpopular), might sneak an HIV test into the routine
blood workup; and Biff was the kind of guy who would
rather not know. So he stayed away from the clinic
and failed to get his Xyloprim replenished.
* * * *
Was he still worried about his dick
falling off, or whatever?
Chica and Biffy had a mutual acquaintance
from the old days, a magnificent cock queen, who'd
gotten an ambiguous lab result and had to wait six
months for the follow-up that would uphold or commute
the death sentence. This guy's face had grown wrinkles
in that half year, and he was a brave man. The old
Bifferoonie would've fretted himself deep into the
grave by that time, even without the virus' help,
and he'd have gotten religion in the meanwhile and
been a big pain in the butt about the whole deal.
Blame would be assigned, guilt apportioned-a
blood test was not a good idea in Biffy's sick enough
case.
* * * *
Rather than getting examined and putting
this implausible fear behind him, Biff had called
in sick a week ago, and sat all day in an excessively
hot bathtub, trying to purge his person of former
misdeeds through hypothermia. Excavating deep into
the moldiest closets of his memory, he'd worked out
a to-the-hour timetable of when he might last have
been exposed. He'd systematically placed square in
his consciousness the prospect of death--his own deserved
and his wife's undeserved; his every previous notion
and bit of behavior rendered retroactively meaningless;
all his coldest suspicions about the grim nature of
things grounded firmly, once and for all.
He was, he feared, something beyond
a borderline solipsist. And that meant his croaking
would be the equivalent of the end of the universe,
including all the seemingly death-resistant things--such
as his love for his wife--that had come into existence
before a certain very late, and extremely atypical,
morning in Oklahoma City, when he'd been so flabbergasted
by his own luck that he neglected to dress Thumbelina
in her slicker.
Meanwhile his gouty kidneys languished
for want of medication, and plumped with deposits
of razor-edged golden gravel that conglomerated into
serrated boulders that avalanched, in turn, through
his innards and cannoned out the end of his member,
until not only peeing, but something so psychologically
significant as orgasms felt different now, as they
squirted past the scar tissue ever heaping in his
urinary meatus. Soon Thumbelina's craw would be obstructed
as badly as if she had contracted one of the more
venerable forms of social disease for the eighth time
and needed scooping out.
Part of Biff couldn't imagine his own
non-being. The trouble was that part of him could,
and did, several times an hour lately, in each dark,
disordered detail. However, there was yet a third
part of Biff (the part named Thumbelina), which considered
death and universal dissolution a fair price to pay
for that one unprotected Oklahoma morning.
* * * *
Yes, Biffy all scrubbed and barbered,
his ping-pong table-sized face wearing the pensive
expression of a goon no longer young. Biffy, posing
to be painted by the Pintrix. It was definitely a
nice idea.
Until this moment, she'd never known
just how much of an artist she was. She was a maker
of images to the very core of her imagination. She
had to picture her former elbow man on canvas, pack
him between the four edges of a Sears Roebuck frame,
before the sheer enormousness of his anomaly hit her.
For the first time, and more than a decade too late,
Chica understood what should have been obvious all
along, plain as a tertiary syphilis chancre exploding
on the tip of your nose: Biffy had not been the ideal
choice for the coveted position of elbow man.
* * * *
She was a bad memory from the late stages
of his brief criminal career, the sinsemilla-hazy
years, when the fourth decade of his ever-dwindling
existence had started stalking him through the underbrush
like a saggy and bloodshot puma. Possessing little
else then but the uncanny ability to drive several
days on end non-stop with neither a Dexamil nor a
wink of the eye, he'd chauffeured her through the
desert in an old death trap which a jelly-bellied
client of hers had invited them to steal and send
over a cliff for insurance purposes: naked interstate
sprints with the top cranked down, Chica getting browner
and blonder by the mile like a degenerating photo
negative. This was before the ozone got officially
depleted, but redheaded Biff had still blistered.
Carcinomas were about due.
Biff had always been inclined to subscribe
to the Leninist view of the happy hooker as a fantasy
of the declining bourgeoisie. Prostitutes were just
a class of oppressed workers like any other, needing
reeducation. But Chica gave the lie to that wholesome
conceit each time she told him to stop outside any
old high-rise condo in a strange town, and she disappeared
into the elevator and came back out forty-five minutes
later with a couple hundred dollars cash and a beaming
grin of professional pride in herself. She never was
disheveled on exit, though sometimes her curls did
appear damp, and were redolent of the gentlemanly
brands of hair conditioner that Biff could never afford.
* * * *
After jettisoning her pimp, as so many
of her sisters in the profession did during that heady
era, Chica decided to hit the highway. Just to keep
the mega-oaf around as a (barely) breathing reminder
of the dire pitfalls of emotional, physical and financial
slughood, she cleaned him up and pressed him into
service as her elbow man.
Bachelor Biffy needed neither weapons
nor phony martial artistry to chaperon her in the
Ramada Inns of the sedate, low-competition towns they
trolled--Boise, Ogden, Phoenix, El Paso, Oklahoma
City, and so on. His surreal bulk was more than adequate,
especially accompanied by his everyday facial expression,
which murmured, "Would you give me a break? I would
seriously advise you to do so."
His job was to loom and brood and burp
outside the room where she had a "date." Staring down
hotel security with that unsocialized mug of his,
he was supposed to knock more frequently than the
agreed-upon thirty or sixty minutes, in an effort
to bleed timorous johns.
In the elevator on the way up she was
always forced to just about splinter his yard-long
shinbone with kicks, regular field goal attempts,
and other subtle sorts of signals, to let him know
which johns could be intimidated by the thump of his
gorilla knuckle on the door, and which were absolutely
not to be fucked with, except in the literal sense,
by her, unassisted, in straightforward business transactions
terminated efficiently and calmly as possible. There
were more of those scary types each year that American
history dragged on; and to Chica, whose ass was literally
on the line, the difference was always immediately
apparent. But Biffy saw them all the same: just the
tops of the heads of guys uniformly lucky to get into
the boss' dainty drawers.
Then, unable to leave well enough alone,
like a couple of dick-faced morons, they widened their
professional horizons. Chica had no idea what kind
of hell they were eventually going to get themselves
into.
* * * *
Even in tranquil recollection he couldn't
nail down the precise epoch when the two of them had
branched out businesswise, and they'd begun stopping
at times other than when they were absolutely broke,
and the tall condos no longer seemed randomly selected,
and the stacks of cash she extracted began to get
unreasonably tall themselves, and her look of pride
de-intensified and became a matter of sheer business
rather than performance art. It was only after they'd
gone all the way from Dumbass to Wacko, so to speak,
that she troubled to inform him of the illicit nature
of what, besides her ass, he was suddenly helping
to transport across state lines.
* * * *
The other business was fairly homespun
in those innocent days, just before the market boomed
and heads of state took over, and the regional distributors
were able to equip themselves with Lear jets and G-3's.
Unarmed small-timers with bad cars and marginal attitudes
could make themselves useful back then, especially
in the remote Rockies and the deserts of the Southwest,
where the towns of any significance whose citizenry
knew how to have a good time were few and far between,
where even the pimps had names like "Road Runner."
This was before a certain form of contraband got all
concentrated, compact, cheap, easy to administer,
and vicious, and seeped down into the hands of the
Great Unwashed. It was still being passed off as an
idle pursuit, a mere affectation of the leisured-
or at least middle class, who had access to support
groups and aversion therapy and other weaning methods
when it came time to dry out and rejoin society. On
the entrepreneurial end of things, guilt was minimal
and death remained the exceptional occurrence.
Things were literally down-to-earth.
She only had to put Biffy on one airplane, and was
forced to fuss and linger with him at the security
checkpoint, holding his hand and listening to his
last will and testament--fortunately short, for he
owned nothing. She'd dressed him in a raincoat that
balmy Arizona day, weighed down with (he was surprised
six months later to be told, having asked no questions
at the time, as usual) several hundred thousand dog-eared
and sweat-soggy dollars sewn into the lining.
At first, when she still assumed that
a normal adult amount of gumption must be hidden somewhere
underneath his vaporous stupor, she made the near-fatal
mistake of allowing Biffy a little franchise of his
own. Predictably enough, he sat on his butt and let
the supply degenerate, as organic substances are prone
to do (she kept trying to drive that wisdom through
his degenerating skull), until it had to be reconstituted,
at a loss of thirty to forty percent of its retail
value, and she almost got killed at a monthly meet--was
compelled to hit her knees and make like a Hoover
as she'd never done before or since.
He couldn't be bothered to drop by the
junior highs and peddle an occasional oh-zee, so there
was always a serious shake problem with his share
of the weed as well. Chica could remember excavating
among the knee-deep Quarter-Pounder-with-Cheese wrappers
in his hovel, and finding Hefty can liners, the kind
Jonathan Winters hawked so humorously on television,
chock-full of what had been, at one time, ultra-primo
hydroponic hothouse red-haired sinsemilla buds. When
you touched these bags with the tip of your toe they
exploded like overripe seed pods, releasing ten-thousand-dollar
clouds of flour-fine powder, with nothing left behind
but undergrowths of no-longer supple twigs.
Biffy was virginal of the entrepreneurial
spirit, to put it politely. He was a congenital three-toed,
matty-haired tree sloth when it came to just about
everything in earthly life. He stuck with Chica not
for mutual fun and profit, but because, as he moaned
into her scoffing face whenever they got drunk on
Thunder Chicken, he "saw something worth saving" in
her. (She should have known he'd wind up in the Land
of Zen, with air-head notions like that.)
Needless to say, the two of them didn't
hit their stride, businesswise, until Chica wised
up, took over altogether, and quit letting the dumb
ox know anything besides what to lift and the general
direction to lug it in. Not much of a business partner,
to say the least. But he always proved extremely dependable
behind the wheel, where his moony mind had only to
concentrate on the next hundred yards or so, and was
free to wander beyond that in whatever morose direction
it chose.
* * * *
Biff flinched as he recalled once getting
automotively disoriented in a Tucson barrio, a certain
fearless and resourceful woman alighting from the
death seat and telling him, as usual, to stay put
with the engine running. Chica had gone among a dark
knot of youths who were eager to exchange directions
for a few "toots" of something which, in those days,
in that town, they'd only heard about.
What might, he supposed, be considered
the sad thing about all this was that, like so many
American women of her generation and socioeconomic
class, she claimed to feel the presence of another
more legitimate type of artist inside her, itching
and bitching to undergo parturition.
"In another life," she said, one time
only, when he'd closed his eyes for a moment, "I might
have been a painter of people."
Once or twice while she slept and he
didn't (the usual case), he sneaked a glimpse at her
ultra-secret sketchbooks--miniature and cramped--and
saw endless arrays of self-portraits ranged in rows
like the walls of a labyrinth she was trying to scratch
her way out of. She'd more or less accurately rendered
her own tight platinum curls, aquiline nose and steely
grey eyes, but had added what he assumed to be unconsciously
angry embellishments: grinding incisors and throats
knotted with too many blood vessels and flexed sinews.
He'd used what had oozed into his diseased
orbits as evidence to convince himself of an obvious
falsehood: that a good man's influence, steadfast,
normal and true, would eventually soften all the wrenched
tendons and yanked-back eyelids and lips, to induce
a clearer vision, free of expressionistic distortions.
Only now, a huge chunk of life too late, did Biff
understand that he'd examined her sketchbooks through
eyes sick with love.
Long-term death and disintegration,
one way or another: that's what Chica brought. He'd
been hoping all this time that her species of soul
cannibal only fed on bachelors in their late twenties.
But now, a husband in his very late thirties, he knew
he hadn't shaken her yet, and probably never would.
They were doomed to bump up against each other whenever
any birthday approached that ended in that most vain
and vexatious digit: zero.
Of course he succumbed. It was like
relaxing everything, including the autonomic functions
of his body. He deliberately took a deep breath, stepped
into his shoes, and delivered himself up to the chaos
that hung, anyway, over this imitation of a home and
job, this fleeting hiatus of ersatz normalcy, the
abyss on either side. Opening the front door was like
abandoning his wife on a ridge between jagged sandstone
cliffs in a red desert.
In no time a certain boxy family station
wagon was lurching into the first of an interminable
series of expressway tunnels. It vanished into blackness
thick as the fur on a Labrador retriever that fetches
anything thrown out in front of its face, heedless
of peril to the teeth and tongue. He'd been given
the address of a barber who opened early.
There were several painful pit-stops
along the way, as daffodil-colored gravel accumulated
in a special cup, which his wife had magnetized to
the dash for that purpose. The little stones needed
analyzing.
