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Member
Join Date: Jan 2004
Posts: 10
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The Lesser Evil
This time we’ve gone too far.
The realization fills my veins with icewater as I stare at the dilapidated 1982 Cadillac, a once-was car in a once-was time, a sliver of light through a cracked door of some accidental continuum, a vacuum of humanity, a display of the undiluted depravity of our collective minds. Disembodied babydoll carcasses have been superglued in random positions, casting lewd shadows over the white chipped paint. Burning crosses decorate the hood, by the texture and crude style you can easily deduce that they were painted by hand. Bullet holes form ripples in the windshield with spidery cracks gravitating outward. Trying to get away. This is nowhere end.
Here is undeniable and inescapable. The crushing weight of this current unending state is the smell of sewage from a nearby plants boiling gasses in the heat wave air is unbearably oppressive. We’re parked in a vacant lot behind an abandoned gas station, overgrown by skeletal weeds that rattle when the dusty wind kicks up, emphysema cough. There are three of us on the scene; Fuckup is in the back seat, rummaging through the endless piles of trash that the family car has accumulated. He is deathly thin, almost skeletal, and all his actions, movements, comments lend themselves to my image of him as flat matte cardboard, a pale paperdoll with a neat mop of dark brown hair about two inches from his shoulders. He has flat gray eyes that exaggerate his mood to caricature level and he is always moving, always fidgeting. He holds up a greasy roach triumphantly. Empty tin can smile.
The Queen is off somewhere in the festering field, doing his Queen thing. His sickly pale but dressed excessively in designer suits, he’s got big sex-kitten lips that just beg for a biting kiss, feel the blood run down your chin? His eyes are blue, glinting blue always betraying that terrible mind inside. He's standing up next to the car, I see him now, hip popped out and hair perfectly mussed like a camera is poised before him to take a photo for cellophane immortalization in Vogue. But no, that's just your average everyday Queen, strung out and perfectly put together. He’s speaking in disenchanted tones over an expensive cell phone. I can’t make out the words; they’re too full of disdain. But his eyes gleam and I know. He’s making money.
I sigh, detached. I am Lolita Jeanne Gray, born a whore and sworn in under solemn oath kicking and screaming. My hair is black and greasy, I’m wearing a skintight stained bright red dress, black fishnets and high red stilettos. I smell like a confetti of gin sex cigarettes and vomit. Lather rinse repeat. I’m wearing so much greasy stage makeup that I can feel my face sagging. I groan and lean against the cinderblock skeleton, wonder how much longer we’ll be here. Maybe forever. Take a sip from the flask. I wonder if the Queen has any cigarettes. I realize he’s walking towards me and attempt to rouse myself. Fail.
“Lolita, you fantastic mess. Get off your ass. Move. Come on, we’ve got to va.”
I blink emptily at him. He’s agitated. “Fuckup!” He calls.
Fuckup’s head pops out the door of the smoke filled car. “Yeah?”
“Start the car.”
Queen picks me up over his shoulder and carries me over to the car, tosses me into the back seat. Fuckup has started the engine and is waiting in the passenger seat, still sucking on that roach. He glances back at me.
“She’s fucked up. Can she still work?” Fuckup asks.
The car starts moving with a jolt.
“She’s fine,” the Queen tells him, staring at the road before us. “Put her jacket on.”
Fuckup maneuvers clumsily into the back seat as the car continues to roll jostling like a drunk suddenly ousted from a bar. He retrieves my moth-eaten mink coat and arranges it around my doll shoulders. I smile placidly as we pull off the dirt road onto the paved and vanish in a cloud of smoke.
We arrive at the factory about six. It’s Sunday in this place where it actually matters, and the chain link fence is padlocked shut. Some call it a clinic but... we drive around to the back and cut a hole into the links to get in. The Queen carries me over his shoulder and sets me up on the steps.
“Lita, my priceless dollar whore. Get up.” I blink a few times and find my way to my feet.
We travel down to the basement, staggering and motion sick. We find the tanks, groping blindly in the darkness. As I pass my hands over the damp rusted surface I feel the glossy biohazard emblem.
“Here,” I say quietly in my doll voice. I stumble as I pull off my stiletto. Beside me there is a rustling of trash bags.
“Ready?” I ask. I can feel Fuckup panting beside me. The tanks are massive. I steel myself for the smells of vinegar and amniotic fluid. And then...
My stiletto clangs against the tank. Almost immediately there is a vile black liquid roaring out. I stagger up the stairs and into the halls looking for some ether. This place is terrifying, pastel walls and pastel tile floors trying in vain to mute the insidious evil that lurks just before the surface, in all the surgical instruments swimming in vats of disinfectant and glinting evilly. So much torment in these walls, I can almost hear it humming with is virile existence. When I hear the Queen’s voice shouting directions down to Fuckup, it’s my cue. The score is almost complete.
I stand atop the stairs that descend to the basement floor, feeling the scene out with the radar of experience. The Queen is surely atop the largest tank now, groping blindly for the drain switch. Fuckup is wading through the black swill clutching a now full trash bag. There is a soft glow atop the tank from the Queens cigarette. His soft hangs are examining, probing. Oh, there it is. He feels it. I move down to where the tide of depthless black goo comes together with the cold concrete stairs and laps over my feet. There’s a sudden sucking noise and I close my eyes, feel the intense pressure of the room. I think of Fuckup as he was, I know, just seconds before, bobbing waist deep in The Muck, blue white orbs faintly gleaming in the nonlight and he snatches them up by radar. Kind of like an insidious cranberry bog.
It’s the smell that gets me, really, every single time. It crawls in through the wiry hairs in your nose and infects all of your senses till there is nothing but the white hot scraping pain of it. Its a smell you never really get rid of, its like a virus, and everything you’ll smell in the future is through its slight transparent ghost odor.
I detach myself from the scent of this place. The suction is gone now, and I hear Fuckup clomp clomping up through puddles. The Queen will wait until all the residue is gone, I hear him flipping open his sell-phone to talk to the buyer. As Fuckup walks past me up the stairs there another wave of that god awful stench. I walk out into the lobby with him. Those neon sign eyes read ‘Tired! Tired! Tired!’
“Good one?” I ask, watching him negotiate with his burden up the stairs.
“Yeah,” He nods, unsmiling.
“The Queen’s in a good mood, then?”
Fuckup’s face flashes ‘Uncertain”. Right.
We load the bag into the trunk and Fuckup puts on a new layer of pants over the muck encrusted ones. We get into the car and wait for the Queen. I touch up my makeup, blood red lips on pasty white face, pursed and glossed and cheap as can be but oh-so trash-Americana gorgeous. The Queen is sauntering out of the factory, under the big sign that spells out
BRADLEY ABORTION CLINIC
in somber blue letters, he spray paints
THANKS
in bright red, in his own manic lettering.
How many of these jobs have we pulled, I wonder as he pulls away, driving at a frenzied pace. Gotta get them to the buyer fresh, he used to tell me when I was new. Hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago.
Night is coming on in soft graphite shadows, spreading out and knitting together. I’m waking up, finally. The car dips and ditches and sputters along and I yawn, do the last of out coke. Good morning, starship.
“Are we going out tonight?” I drag the syllables clumsily. The Queen nods dismissively. He’s changed into a classy charcoal suit, the sleaze coming in around the edges like a faded photograph. He’s dirty under the skin, I want to fuck. I pull off my shoes and toss them onto the floor, sitting cross-legged and pouting as dark sets in.
At about eleven we pull up to the broke down apartment complex. Its too early to go up, we wander into a bar down the street. Split a bottle of tequila and wander back to the building. At about twelve we stagger up, I’m leaning on the Queen for support. Fuckup carries the product up, faithfully trudging behind us.
We are greeted with an intense urgency, as if everyone was awaiting our arrival. Bright lights and screaming music, we feed off these people. This is fair, we are they that keep them alive. The whole room erupts in ecstatic shouts as Fuckup dangles the black bag over a dilapidated coffee table. Fresh, beautiful ripe fetus spills out onto the table. People get off right away, Queen smiling as he collects his fee. Cutting the shit into lines or shooting it mainline, everyone's got a preference.
We are taken to our usual table eventually and let Fuckup take care of all the hassling. A Geisha comes to take our order, her face is wrinkled downward awkwardly and resembles melted wax.
“Dinner,” I tell her. She smiles her red painted lips.
“Very good.”
The party is loud and raucous, it’s in honor of the mayors new bill imposing a tax on law. There is the overwhelming pressure of body heat, and all around are watercolored blurs of people intermingling; fucking, fighting, dancing. The mayor is sitting with his little stitched together daughter, she has thick black messy seams.
“Can I play with her?” I ask, smiling to myself. Such pretty curls and curls of blonde hair spilling down her back.
“Please?”
But now dinner is here, a full heaping saucer of cocaine. I ask for a doggie bag for most of it, I’m on a diet. Chopstick straws up my nose. Sometimes I just can’t help myself, haha. Towards one dinner is done and the Queen is talking business with the mayor, hands caressing his free knee, the other is bouncing his little girl.
Such talk bores me, I slink out into the center of the crowd and eventually encounter Fuckup. He’s met a whore from the Starlight district. She’s got a massive tattoo on her back of that imposing structure, the epicenter of our whole universe, The Starlight Motel. Where it all went wrong first and we couldn’t be more thankful. As I star at it, it seems to move, to breathe. I do another line.
I mingle with the Chaos Princess, a big trannie who delights in driving into the Straight World and taking apart little boys. He has no teeth but dull razors that stick out from his gums covered in rust and blood. His dick protrudes nicely in his tight dress.
From across the room I glance into the dimly lit corner that contains the booth the Queen sits at with the mayor. On a greasy piece of butchers paper he is writing with a flourish that would seem unnatural with anyone but him. He pushes this over to the mayor, who signs with a sweat drenched brow.
The Queen buys everyone around and I hang about on his arm, mascara running down my face and nose bleeding, his priceless trophy wife. We dance to the throbbing music for a bit as Fuckup and his girl bring the car around.
We run laughing out into the streets, careful not to walk out onto the wrong side of the pavement. Once Queen and I drove right in, right fucking into the enemy. We went to the DMV miserably sober, trying to pretend we belonged there and failing. The Queen wanted a license, just in case we were stopped on the way home from one of our little visits to the Factories. Get some credit in the Straight World. It was so strange, since my abduction from this place I had solely returned to it for business purposes.
The Queen was born so far from me, out in the twilight of living. He has no name here, no social security, nothing. As far as anyone here knows he has never existed. Fuckup too. But not me. Lolita Gray had a mother and a father and a slip of paper that certified my live birth (by a different name, of course). Not that I remember that time at all. Regardless, returning to it, even for the facile task of requesting a license that is impossible to obtain, was disturbing. It was disgusting in its solidity, everything so hard and cruel and bland. And the sobriety, the awful weight of sobriety. It’s frightening, really.
Fuckup drives us back to the apartment in Starlight. It’s a small, dingy place really, there is no furniture except single dirty mattress in the middle of the floor and the floorboards are warped severely in backward arches. Soon I’m on my back, metal springs raking over me while he breathes hot sour gin smell all over me. A lovely nausea rises in my stomach and I’m alive alive alive. I love it ever so much when he’s in a good mood.
It’s the light that wakes me, the pale stinging early morning sun that we arrived to but the bitter full blast shit that burns me up. Here the sun is different, it feels like you’re being bleached and withering up from the inside. The locals board up their windows and everyone sleeps during the day. This is as far from the straight world as it gets, they don‘t even know it‘s here. Plagues run rampant and throughout the night there are terrible orgies. It is the most vile and glaring perversion of humanity. It’s poetic. I love the Starlight, the brilliant Amazonian women who parade through the greenish smoke obscured night taking anything not bolted down. Rings from off your fingers, cigarettes from your hands, your life especially.
I roll over to wake the Queen but he’s already gone. The apartment is taking a progressively offensive odor that mildly resembles roadkill as the sun continues to beat down through the window. I pad over to it and peek out cautiously on the abandoned streets below. A tumbleweed blows by. It’s time to find some junk. I close the blinds.
I find Fuckup’s smack in its usual position, under the toilet lid, complete with a rusty rig. I curl into the corner and tie off, lie twitching and moaning softly as the rush comes over me. Nod out...
I wake up with a start and realize I was screaming. Shit, I think I’m pregnant. The Queen is still nowhere to be seen but from the floor I see Fuckup lying on the mattress. He must’ve slept with us. I walk over to where he lies, cold and blue lipped. I stare into those dead gray eyes, open and glazed, lovingly I wipe the white residue of bile from the corner of his mouth. He’s fine, of course, but I get a kick out of it every time, pullmyhandbackand...
smack
Tiny bloody little curved lines where my nails cut in as a red handprint starts to come together around the edges. There’s a choking sound in his throat as he tries to start breathing again, he heaves a sigh and closes his eyes, rolls over. Dear sweet Fuckup. I realize now where his broad is, on the floor near the mattress I see her shadow swinging slowly suspended from the ceiling. Perhaps it was the light from these open windows that got to her... regardless, I sigh and swing her around, check her pockets for cash. She’s got about a thou, small fare for a trick of her caliber. I look up and take out my knife. She’s beautiful, I balance awkwardly on the edge of the mattress and cut under her chin, up, oval-like, around her hairline. It would be a shame to waste such a pretty face. It comes off smoothly with little resistance. Someone is going to take care of this body. It’s too early to wake Fuckup- shit, what the hell am I even doing awake?
The face makes a sickening thwack as I drop it on the counter and rifle through the cabinets for something to drink. There is a dusty bottle of vodka, probably left over from the previous inhabitants. I gulp it down till my head stops spinning and flop down next to Fuckup. I never realized how mottled and scarred his arms are before this very moment. Blue veins cut glowing neon rivers cut across them, dancing a drunken tango across his pale flesh. In a mockery of this I feel my neurons begin to snap
one...two
run down dance hall. This is a symptom common to straight borns, I find myself wondering what his mother looked like
three... four
I know I can find out, the question is... Do I really want to? It’s a terrible idea, there's a large margin for massive downer. But I feel curiosity crawling in the tips of my fingers. My hands have begun to drift towards his face. I pull myself towards him, put my face close to his. Stare deep at his blank countenance, peaceful almost. Biting my lip, I place my fingertips against his temples
whitehot flash, raw primal scream... red red glaring lights red red red everywhere this must be a whorehouse everything is scalding liquid and it’s impossible to breathe with this damned... shrieking filling my head everything is so impossibly blurry but... the edges begin to sharpen and I see her lying on the bejissomed shag carpeting skirt around her waist in a pool of blood and she is thin with a bone chest and a face contorted in agony. I feel her, I’m inside of her, he is everywhere. In the glow around I see blurs of shapes fucking but I’m so enveloped by the sheer sensation of all the atoms inside me being wrenched apart...She’s screaming head thrown back hair matted pain pain pain everywhere but suddenly its all... Receding, now, a strong tide being suddenly sucked back and everything is getting darker around the edges and the black is growing towards crawling into the center, the picture is a pool of light off in the distance and from faraway underwater (i cant breathe im drowning) between her legs on a patch of bare concrete is a writing bloody lump she is moaning oh the dark shit shit shit
FUCK! I’m on the mattress again, sweating and heaving breath inches from Fuckup’s face, hands fluttering around his hair. My muscles are aching and stiff, I’m gonna be sick I’m gonna fucken puke.
We’re sicker than we know. All of us.
I don’t hear the door open but the footsteps are achingly close, faraway and someone is slapping my empty body. I snap back into reality.
“Lita, fucking Lita!”
“What the fuck?” I ask, the liquor in my voice stumbling.
“We’ve got company, sober the fuck up,” he tells me, wrenching me into a sitting position.
I glare into the face of his client, “What the fuck do you want?” Although its all too obvious what he’s come for.
He is an old man, tiny, perhaps 5’3, with a long hawk like nose, a big too bright smile with long thin teeth. Long fingers, clutched together before him. He is salivating.
He reaches out for my shoulder, his fingers burn. His fingernails are thick and yellow. I shake my head and pull the vial from my bra, toss it to him, avoiding contact with those wretched hands.
“Trimester?” He asks, fingers caressing its cold glass surface.
“First,” I say, watching the shiver make its way down his spine. This man is the Archbishop of the Catholic church, a creature of such vice and corruption that he had transcended the boundary from the straight world to this bent dimension through sheer power of will. One day during the morning vespers with an altar boy on his knees before him he had a vision, an apparition, if you will. There was harder shit. And here he was. He loved the shit, you could see his heart pounding through that hazy light reflecting from his vestment
He’s paid up front, as eager junkies always do. His presence fills me with unease; he’s a revolting specimen of those who can’t handle their dope. The Queen, however, is amused with my repulsion. After Sanctified Sam gets off with his own greasy needle, The Queen calls attention to me.
“Look at all that skin, that soft smooth skin, those big doe eyes,” He says, velvety and unsettling, over his shoulder and into that wrinkled white ear. His eyes glint into mine, he is clapping his hands gleefully as the nearly incapacitated fiend begins to make his way towards me. I shake my head at him, silently plead
no no no
He’s giddy, I watch the floor as the jerky form makes his way across the room, faster and faster and slightly stumbling, coming towards me. I don’t dare look up, but I feel him before me, the overpowering smell of incense and semen fills my nose. I back up against the wall- too late, I feel him against me, oh god, those hands all over me, my neck first. Once again I am at a loss of breath, flashes of his memory consume my mind- The crying little faces as his hands pushed them below his waste
my child
And up I look to him, his big big beaming face try to push myself in, try
__________________
Lolita Gray
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