Honey is Sweeter than Blood (8 page)

Buck skibeddy fucking Druthers.  He was responsible for a rise in divorces, as fathers and grandfathers left their wives of many years to take on hot little high school girls who had suddenly found the old codgers irresistible.  Young men just wanted to screw like panting dogs,
Cosmopolitan
advised, but older men took their time in
making love
 (even if drugs were often needed to make it possible at all).  How was Justin going to become a seasoned lover when he wasn’t getting any practice now?

Justin drifted closer to the theater aimlessly, thinking he might purchase some snacks at least, play some video games, half-blindly buy a ticket to something with a lot of soothing gunfights, car wrecks and explosions.  But when he got close to the entrance, he was soured by the sight of a cute little redhead with her midriff bared up to the bottom of her breasts and down to the border of her pubis, holding the hand of a balding, white-haired man in a sweater that looked like it hadn’t been laundered since Dubbya Dubbya Two.  Justin turned to face a huge poster of Buck as Gustav Nife in the window, and made his hand into a gun which he pointed at that seamed face with the stubbly cheeks girls imagined scraping against their tender flesh.  His thumb fell like the hammer of the magnum his dad kept locked up in his gun cabinet.

*     *     *

Waiting in line at the Megaplex was like waiting to board a ride at Disneyland, but it only enhanced the anticipation, the intoxicating suspense shared by Kaylee, Latrina, Taffeta and Shenandoah, who had already dyed her green hair platinum blond like Spunk had it now, and was letting it grow out so she could make a forward-facing ponytail out of it.  The girls babbled excitedly, all of them having a distinctly Latino and/or African-American sound-ing accent despite their being all too Anglo.

There were indeed spotlights painting the night sky, white stretch limos and police cars and local camera crews.  The mingled sounds of the crowd lent it all a tingling atmosphere like a carnival or perhaps more like a concert.  Kaylee was visibly trembling nonstop, seized onto Shenandoah’s arm abruptly and tightly.  “What if I got close enough to grab him and kiss him, Shen?”

“Oh, man, they’d grab you and arrest you.”

“It would be worth it, bitch, and you know it!” she cackled as if drugged.  “I am going to stick my
tongue
 down his throat!”

“I’m going to grab his
sack
!” Taffeta yelled.  They all squealed loudly enough to splinter glass, at that statement.

“Just think, he was actually inside one of these limos!” Latrina said as they drew closer to the building, where Buck would be sitting at a long table in the lobby with representatives of the community and the National Heart Association, to shake hands, sign autographs and accept additional contributions.  He himself had suffered a heart attack a few years ago and wore a pacemaker which pushed out his skin in a hard bump that young girls dreamed of cupping in their delicate hands, running their tongues over.

“Just think, he’s in that building right now!” Shenandoah said.  “I’m going to take one look at him in the flesh and pass out.”

“Oh my God…we’ll be through the doors any minute now,” Taffeta said, holding onto Latrina’s hand.

Kaylee craned her neck, stood on tip-toes, to get a sense of how many rows of heads still preceded them before the threshold.  Her brows knotted and she said, “Hey”…more to herself than to her girlfriends.  “That looks like Justin…”

“Justin?” Shenandoah echoed.  “What would he be doing going to see Buck Druthers? He hates him.”

“Well…I can tell he liked
Heart Attack
.  Maybe he wants to see the movie again.”

“Maybe he just pretends to hate Buck, but really he’s gay and in love with him!”

Kaylee had to laugh long and hard at that.

Minutes later all four girls linked hands so as not to get separated in the creeping but powerful glacier push of flesh, but mostly just to lend each other support as they cleared the threshold and entered the lobby, passing from night into a blazing light that seemed to emanate from the table obscured ahead of them.  “Oh my God, oh my God, bitches, we’re through!” Shenandoah gushed.

Kaylee smiled, but she rose on her toes again and stretched her neck to scan for that head which had looked so familiar.  Something vague had unsettled her, as if she had seen a smoky black aura around that blond head that was invisible to everyone but her.

Behind Kaylee and her friends, another group had just crossed the threshold and began to chant in unison, “Buck! Buck! Buck! Buck!” Kaylee twisted half around to look at them, a bit startled.  It was mostly girls but there were a few boyfriends, who wore frayed cardigans and flannel shirts tucked into high-waisted pants, or else flannel bathrobes with pajama pants and slippers, their hair mussed and cheeks shaded with down in place of stubble.  They reminded Kaylee of her five-year-old niece who pulled her pants down below her exposed tummy to look like Spunk.

Ahead of her, she heard another voice cry out, and she jerked to face forward again.  Because this voice had shouted, “Buck you!”

And then there was one loud blast of thunder.  Some people cheered, thinking it was a special effect.  Others screamed in horror, though these screams were almost indistinguishable from the shrieks of delight Kaylee had been hearing all along.  She would learn from the news tomorrow that even some who saw what happened would think it was all a publicity stunt, part of tonight’s entertainment.

The police converged.  Security began to urge the crowd back, and pandemonium ensued.  Kaylee would also learn tomorrow that a thirteen-year-old girl was crushed to death between the advancing and retreating ranks, she and her glossy photo of Buck Druthers trampled under a confused stampede of sneakered feet.

Kaylee would only see the blood on TV.  She would only ever see Buck Druthers on the screen, never in the flesh…as if he had never been real, after all, just a computer-generated star, like Jack Elam in his co-starring role in
Heart Attack
and Strother Martin starring as Don Vito Corleone in the upcoming remake of
The Godfather
.  She would see the (censored for television) assassination of Buck Druthers as local camera crews recorded it.  But right now, as it happened, she didn’t need to have witnessed the act to know that it was her brother Justin who had shot and killed Buck Druthers.

And though Kaylee would be horrified, enraged and embarrassed that it was her brother who had killed one of the world’s top stars, in a way she would find herself excited…and proud.  Her brother…
her brother
…had looked Buck Druthers in the eye.  Her brother had been spattered with the blood of Buck Druthers.  Her brother, made of the same genetic material as herself, would go down in history as the one who had put a .44 slug in and out of the skull of the man who would go on to win a second Oscar, posthumously, for his role as serial killer Gustav Nife.

She would find that her friends would soon get over their shunning of her, and come to envy her.

*     *     *

“Buck You!” towered the headline on
The New York Post, The Enquirer, Newsweek, Time, People
and
Babe Parade
.

Justin was tried as an adult…but despite the premeditated nature of his crime, he still avoided the death penalty because of his age, and because of the question of his mental state at the time of the killing.  In the courtroom he quoted some of Burt Reynolds’ lines from the movie
Heart Attack
, such as, “Someone has to stop that son of a bitch” and, “That monster is going down.” Justin had memorized them as he had certain lines from
Taxi Driver
, though in the courtroom he gave the impression not of a devout movie fan but of someone who had lost his sense of reality…proving that Justin had learned some of the skills of his favorite actor, DeNiro.

His lawyer argued that the defendant had so empathized with Reynolds’ character—and to his credit Druthers had done such an excellent job of embodying the character of Gustav Nife—that Justin Spring had thought he was ridding the world of a dangerous mass murderer.  Sympathetically, many people spoke out on the hazards of violent entertainment and its effects on impressionable young minds.

But the success of
Heart Attack
, and the spectacular demise of its star (which helped immeasurably to make
Heart Attack
the highest grossing film of all time), launched a whole string of psycho killer movies.  Some of the lead characters in these films were older men, like Buck/Gustav…though some were young kids, like Justin Spring.  

Justin hadn’t been in prison for a month before he received his first fan letter.  In it, there was a Polaroid of a sixteen-year-old girl posing in her bathing suit.  The four other Polaroids of her, which showed her naked, had been confiscated by the warden.

More letters came in.  More photos, panties and curly locks of pubic hair were confiscated and stockpiled by the warden.

Justin would sit on the edge of his cot, unmolested by his respectful cell mate, and read letter after letter, stare at photo after photo of young girls (he saw how their hair and clothing styles changed over the months).  And sometimes he would find himself grinning with pride.  And sometimes he would find himself with tears of frustration in his young eyes.

Damask

“…independent and original minds must cling to things or pull things apart in order to ward off madness or death…”

–Nabokov,
Ada

My interest in aborted fetuses began on Christmas Eve, which I suppose is appropriate in a way.  The eve of a remarkable birth.  When we think of Christ, it is with the double image of the newborn babe and the tortured man
in extremis
.  They are distinct, separate images that blur nonetheless into one another, like those 3D book and video boxes that when angled one way show this image, when tilted another show an altered variation.  Like Damask linen, with its two parallel sets of thread, that give it a different look from various angles.  Presto-change-o.  Loaves into fishes, broken water into dying whine.

I was at work when I received the email, so it was fortunate that my cubicle was along the back wall, shielded by padded partitions and a potted plant.  It was from my old buddy Dwayne, who had been my roommate in college.  An animated email Xmas card.  Oh, by the way, some people are offended by this easily typed shortening of the yuletide holiday, saying that it removes the Christ from the mas, but in fact the X is an antiquated
representation
 of Christ, like that fish symbol people like to mutate for their bumper stickers.  So there.  Personally, I’m offended for reasons of tradition rather than of religion that every other seasonal card now says “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” rather than “Merry Christmas,” in the interest of political correctness.  You know, I once brought up Kwanza in front of some coworkers from Ghana and they’d never heard of it; one woman actually grew angry when I explained to her that it was an African celebration.  Not to her it wasn’t, she said.  She said it was just something we’d fabricated in America.   I thought that was funny; me, whiter than a cave fish, explaining Kwanza to a table full of Africans…like a missionary preaching Christianity.

This animated Happy Seasonal Yadda Yadda Greetings card started out with a colorful cartoon of Santa sliding down a chimney into a cute little scene with lumpen stockings crucified to the mantel and a tree almost as big as the potted plant that shelters my desk.  Santa smilingly dumped out his sack…and from it tumbled these scanned photographic images, that settled at the bottom of my screen.  The tinkling X-mas music was suddenly replaced by the sound of a baby crying, distorted so that it sounded like it was underwater.  It took me a few seconds to realize that these scanned colored photos were of aborted fetuses, or at least some parts thereof.

I had thought for a moment there that Dwayne was getting waaaay too mellow in his old age.  This was more like the Dwayne I knew (who while he was in school designed a web site where he would post photos of his girlfriend Damask’s sanitary napkins, documenting the progression of several of her periods; his site got more hits than his brother’s classy site dedicated to Japanese author Yukio Mishima, whose aesthetic motto was: “my heart’s leaning was for Death and Night and Blood.”).

I chuckled and wagged my head in disgusted amusement, playing the animated card over several times, wondering who I might forward it on to and coming up with no one.  I was about to delete it when I leaned in and gave the fragments of fetuses a closer look, out of sheer morbid curiosity.  I’d never seen graphic photos of aborted fetuses before, except at a fair one time when someone handed me an anti-abortion pamphlet but I tossed it in a trash basket after a moment of gazing at its gruesome cover photo, now merely a red blur to me.

There were four sections, apparently none of them coming from the same fetus, though at first they’d given the impression of being disconnected parts of a single puzzle.  There was a leg, pretty much floating by itself, raw and red as if a dog had been gnawing on it.  There was a fairly intact fetus, in that it had a head and two arms, though the body tapered off to a twist like a mermaid embryo below the waist (this picture was a little too small to see clearly).  The two most outstanding sections were of (A) a decapitated head, very well formed, though burned or melted-looking…it appeared more like the head of an infant, a baby, a child, a person, than of an embryo, a fetus, it’s all just semantics, isn’t it? (B) an unidentifiable mess/mass of torn tissue like a placenta ground under cleated shoes, a plate full of dog food or corned beef hash, bloodily red and sebaceously yellow, with this one doll limb of an arm extending out from its center.  As if that was the only part of the baby that had formed so far, reaching out into existence to pull the rest after it.

Believe it or not, but I used to be against abortion.  I know that as a man, I’m not supposed to have an opinion (though if a woman wanted to have a child of mine, even if I didn’t want it, I’d sure as hades have to pay her child support;
then
I’d be included in the equation) but I always used to argue, well, if it isn’t a human being, what is it in there? A shoe? A rubber chicken? Isn’t a rose bush a rose bush before the flowers bloom? A woman can do whatever she wants to her body, we’re told, but if a woman went to a surgeon (even a cosmetic one) and said I want to have my arms removed as a political protest or because my husband is an amputee freak or what have you, she would be refused, and if a woman stood on a street corner shearing her lips and the tip of her nose and her earlobes off with tinsnips, she’d be carted to a loony bin.  But,
but
, she can have this
other
 body (admittedly, parasitic, dependent on her for existence, but so is a newborn) scalded in saline solution or sucked out of her in chunks because she is the master of her own body.  I find a lot of men who vehemently support abortion to be ridiculous P.C. brown noses, or else they’re just relieved that there’s another mode of birth control available to them.  Politicians make a lot of the rights of women to their bodies.  How generous of them to give women their own bodies, so that they won’t have to give them jobs that pay as well as men’s or the pinnacles of political power or seats at the World Bank.  It’s a bone, to placate them.  Here, this is yours.  You can own procreation, own your own body, play with the flesh as much as you want while we’ll play in our sandbox full of gold dust over here.  If aborted fetuses were used as fuel for submarines, tanks or automobiles then it might be another matter.

I no longer rejected the idea of abortion, calling it immoral.  No longer debated the issue, as when I’d been in my late teens, a decade ago.  It wasn’t that I no longer saw the fetus as being a human being.  It was
because
 I saw the fetus as being a human being that I now supported abortion.  You see, that floating chewed leg there could be the leg of our neighbor who poisoned my dog Tara when I was a kid.  Aborted before he could grow up into a puppy-poisoning human being.  That mermaid embryo there could be the older kid who beat me up in front of my younger brother when we were on our way up town to buy some comic books, for no reason at all, I didn’t even know him, though in my mind I see him as being the same kid who once cut through our yard and, when I said hi to him, spit some cigarette-tasting saliva in my face.  That burned or flayed decapitated head, with its mouth open as if to swallow amniotic fluid or apple juice from a sippy cup, could be seen as being the head of my Uncle Pat who twice made me go down on him when we were visiting him and his wife down in Florida one summer.  That doll arm in its vomit puddle of half digested meat could be my X-girlfriend Sara, who cheated on me with men and women and presumably barnyard animals, extraterrestrials, a zombie Elvis and Sasquatch before dumping me for some yuppie in a more spacious cubicle than my own, roomy enough I guess for her 2.5 kids (two whole ones and one Amazing Mermaid Boy?).

I sat there, that Xmas eve, staring at those red scraps on my monitor and thinking along those lines.  Imaging which sex that one might have grown up to be.  What color hair would it have had.  Had it been allowed to finish baking in life’s oven until done, might that gaping decapitated head have become some beautiful Nicole Kidman redhead whose mouth I would want to suction cup mine to?  Might the tiny arm in the pancake have formed into that of a lovely Asian woman who would use her delicate hand to slowly, slowly pull at my straining dick? Might I have wanted to run my tongue along that floating disconnected leg, meaty and full and with a prickle of calve stubble, and up into the nexus point where only a tatter of flesh existed in this unformed form? One could easily extrapolate, with a little imagination.  After all, we all start out this way.  Just as one could
age
the decapitated head into a Nicole Kidman, one could
regress
 a tanned muscular leg of Britney Spears into that severed little limb, an arm of Angelina Jolie into that itsy bitsy stick arm grasping out of its primordial pool of flesh.

It isn’t that I was into pedophilia.  It wasn’t that these were bits of children or pre-children (I’ll drop that human being vs.  bits of inconsequential cells argument henceforth) that started me thinking along sexual lines.  After all, I was an odd mix of small town conservatism and free thinking beyond the conventional realm of liberalism.  I considered the photos of Jock Sturges, for instance, to be eerie pedophilia that might not be in coffee table books if he weren’t so talented with his phallic camera, and reading
Lolita
,
The Enchanter
and
Ada
 in succession back in my college days left me more than a little creeped out and just a wee bit suspicious about Nabokov’s predilections for nymphets (I recall one photo of him as an old man significantly half-obscured under a luridly wet, dark rain slicker like a giant foreskin with a crooked smile that was creepily carnal and which hinted at the often mean-spirited intellectual smugness I had come away from him with) and doubting he would ever have gotten a publisher near these books if he weren’t so fucking brilliant.  Sure, well, I’ll admit to having found these photos and these books sensuous, in a disturbing way, and I am drawn to the disturbing or I’d never have sought such things out in the first place, but the point is, at the end of the day I wanted a fully grown, fully developed, adult woman.  Call me old fashioned.

*     *     *

Well the whole office was slacking off, ready to leave early (at noon), so I decided to send an email hello to Dwayne, who lived in California now, and ask him how he and his bride, Tamsin, a pretty blond Brit I’d never met, were doing.  I did so, then weeded through my junk mail, ignoring all the porn ads (I might peek at free samples, but I’d be damned if I was going to pay money to look at it, on my income), and just as I was about to go offline, I saw that I already had a reply from Dwayne.  I read it, fired one back, and a few minutes later he reciprocated.  We went back and forth like this for a bit:

I said:
You sick fuck.  Same old Dwayne.  I’m at work, idiot! Good thing no one else saw it.  Where do you find that stuff? How’s the wife and little one doing? I wouldn’t mind meeting them one day, y’know.  Happy Kwanza, man!

And Dwayne:
Ha! I knew you’d like that.  Damask sent it to me.  She designed it, in fact.  The family is fine.  You could always come out here, you know.  We’d put you up.  Say hello to your bro and your folks for me.

Me:
Damask…that figures.  So she’s still in graphic arts, then.  I didn’t know you kept in touch with her.  Where is she at these days? Yeah, I’ll come to California as soon as I hit the lottery.  I’ll pass along your Hanukkah greetings to my family.

Dwayne:
Damask lives in Lowell.  I’m surprised you haven’t run into her.  I wish she wouldn’t send me the occasional email, though…Tamsin has heard too many stories about her.  Happy Winter Solstice!

Me:
Can you give me Damask’s email addy? I want to say hi.  Merry XXXmas!

Dwayne:
Say hi, huh? Yeah…I knew you always had a thing for Damask.  Just watch out, huh? She’s a freaky little girl, man! All Hail Cthulhu!

Me:
Aww, you’re just getting old.  You’re too domesticated.  And who said I had a thing for your girlfriend? By the way, any nude pictures of Tamsin you could email me? Thanks for the address.

Dwayne:
Old??? Hey, you’re older than me, pal.  You turn thirty next month, am I right? And go find your own Tamsin.  Seriously…go find your own Tamsin.  She’s a treasure, dude, and hopefully not the only one.  Take care, buddy.

*     *     *

Damask agreed to meet me for lunch.  Also, she e-mailed me another example of her amusing animated greetings, this one an early 30th birthday card for me.  It was a photo of that same aborted, disembodied fetus head, but oddly taken from another angle and shown much larger, a cartoon party hat added, and its jaw worked like a Monty Python animation as it sang, “Happy Birthday To You!” in a watery voice like that drowning baby cry which accompanied the Xmas message.  She always was talented, I recalled.

Staring at that hairless, tenderized head made me perversely use my powers of extrapolation to age it into Damask herself, as best I could recall her from those college days.  The raw little scalp grew thick, crazy wild black hair that she wore like a thundercloud, and the wrinkled red flesh turned smooth and pale as a puddle of candle wax.  Big, too-big doll eyes lined and accented in too much kohl.  A mouth too small and pouty like that of an insolent child.  She was very petite, Damask, and almost could have passed for a child, really.

And yes, my friend knew me well.  I’d always been attracted to her, but too loyal to act on it.  I had been dismayed, but at the same time excited, when one time the three of us had gone to a gallery where she had a few paintings on display, and she gave my ass a quick squeeze without even meeting my eyes.

She was there at the Cuban restaurant before me, waved me to the table, stood to give me a hug, still so small even in platform shoes that I smelled the nest of curls at the top of her head.  Her wild tendriled mane of yore, snarled Medusa snakes, was gathered back more or less into a huge puffy ponytail like dirty clothes kicked under a bed.  Its color wasn’t black as I remembered it, more of a dark auburn.  She hadn’t aged much; her face was still child-like, though I saw some subtle lines in her forehead and her throat looked like a more mature woman’s.  A beguiling mix, that blend of girl and woman.  I had pictured her all in black, like in the old days, but she wore a gray T-shirt (cut short to show a tease of midriff as was the style with young girls, though at thirty she could still get away with it) and olive drab combat pants too large for her, rolled up at the cuffs.  We sat and both ordered coconut-encrusted haddock and Havana martinis.