Another night draws itself to a
close and Roy Jefferson finds himself alone, standing outside a chic Los
Angeles dining establishment and with another in a series of attempts made on
his life. Dressed for the occasion and
with twin stab wounds still relinquishing fresh droplets of blood
, Roy brings a
hand to his forehead as the wetness begins to tickle the top of the bridge of
his nose. He is getting used to
these aggravated assaults on his personal well-being and is quick with
deflecting the brunt of the danger. Roy
just knows exactly what to say to get under a person’s skin. Things like,
“You ever pop out any kids?” He asked this of his dinner companion earlier
in the evening and with an air of calm that was well suited to the elegance
provided by their immediate surroundings.
“Pop out?” she said. “No.
I’m afraid I haven’t.”
“Don’t be afraid. It’s good to nip those things in the bud when
they come along.”
“Nip in the bud,” she repeated
blankly.
“I nipped it in the bud too. You know, took care of it.”
“You’re serious.”
But he wasn’t serious. He wasn’t serious about any of it. Roy didn’t care one way or the other about
whether the girl sitting across the table had children or abortions or ringworm
for that matter. All he cared about was
the envelope and how far he could push it.
“Sure I’m serious. Three times now. You can’t let a situation like that go
unattended.”
“No.
I wouldn’t even if I–”
“Come on now. You’re a young pretty girl. Every pretty girl’s had a spill or two that
needed a little cleaning up.”
The subject of Roy’s entertainment
for the evening was Roberta Watson. A
friend of a friend of a friend. She was
prim. She was proper. She enjoyed a weekly tennis lesson and liked
to date men with alligators on their sweaters.
Skinny and supple, she already had it in her head that she’d augment her
breast line no sooner than the strain of motherhood will have taken its toll on
her fragile figure. A nip here and a
tuck there is just what the doctor orders after a woman hits 35. It’s so skanky when girls do it before then,
and so pretentious when they do it after.
“Are you saying you’ve condoned
three abortions? That’s not being
responsible; that’s not what being a man is all about.”
“First of all, of course I was
responsible. I paid for it. And secondly, being a man is all about having
a penis and the coinciding scrotum and testicles.”
“That’s not what I mean. Don’t you believe in a soul?”
“Soul rhymes with butthole.” Roy threw back the rest of his whiskey and
soda and gestured the waiter to bring him another.
“What?!”
“What about in extreme cases?”
They were both very drunk at this
point and Roy had been egging her on from the moment he heard her say “moral
values.” These two words in succession,
isolated and extrapolated from the middle of a sentence, the rest of which, he
had failed to discern the contents of.
They were on a blind date, you understand. And they weren’t exactly hitting it off.
Roy stopped her mid-monologue when
he heard it, moral values and asked her what it meant. Argued that it was like saying “wet water.”
“Something can be wet without having
water on it. But anything wet more than
likely has water in it. And anytime you
run into the liquid form, water is invariably wet.” That was the first time she called him
stupid.
Roy didn’t have to order his first
double-tall stiff drink before he knew that Roberta was not going to be the
one for him. It wasn’t anything she
said at first. Something more in the way
she moved. Like she was made out of fine
crystal that was ready to crack at any moment and stab at you with the chards
of her own broken self. Rather than let
the night go to waste, Roy decided to make the best of things. That’s what Roy does. He makes the best of things.
“Life is a gift.” Roberta finished her brightly hued,
fruit-flavored cocktail and also signaled the waiter for another.
“I won’t argue that,” Roy said. “Let me give you an extreme case. Wanna hear a story?”
“No.”
“A girl; a friend of mine, we’ll
call her Lucy. A girlfriend invites her
out, says she’s going to be designated driver.
Disappears halfway through the night.
Lucy’s stuck at a party, drunk as could be.”
“That’s hardly an extreme case.”
“Let me finish.” Roy puts a hand up as in a stop signal. “She’s drunk as drunk could be; she just
wants to lay her head down. The guys at
the place are all being nice, good hosts, all very gentlemanly. They show her to a room she can pass out in.”
“This isn’t an extreme case.” Roy puts his hand up again to shush the
interruption.
“She’s passed out cold. At some hour of the morning, early enough for
it to still be dark out, three or four guys show up to the room with a bottle
of lube and rail her in the ass. She’s
face-down, passed out; nothing in the world can wake her. After it’s all over, the cum starts leaking
out of her ass and a few of the little swimmers make in and swim all the way
upstream. All she knows is she woke up
hung over with a bruised, greasy ass and a month later, she’s… well um… late. To put it delicately.” Roberta, sickened beyond the ability to
speak, struggled for words. “I mean,
technically speaking, Lucy could still be a virgin.”
“That’s so stupid,” the words
errupted. “Why would you say something
like that?”
“Only because things are stupid
doesn’t make them not true,” Roy replied in angst.
“Is it true?”
“No.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“But things like that happen.
Lots of things are true and stupid.”
“Like you?!” Roberta said. Childish as it sounded, she meant what she
said with every fiber of her being. “A
girl who passes out drunk at a party with people she doesn’t trust deserves
what she gets,” Roberta shouted over the white noise of people talking and
glasses clinking.
“So you’re saying that life in forms
can be a curse, even when it’s a blessed curse.
And furthermore that carelessness of any kind is deserving of such a
life-long curse.”
“I didn’t say that.” Had she telekinetic abilities, Roy would have
already been dead from a dropped ceiling fan or an exploded head.
“You know you’re pretty when you’re
angry.” Roy dropped his tone and smiled
as if he believed himself to be the most charming man on Earth.
“Fuck you,” she snarled, snatching up
her purse as she stood up to leave.
“Is this our first fight? Every good couple fights, darlin’.”
“This was a mistake,” Roberta said
to herself, taking a deep, calming breath.
Right then, Roy looked her in the eye with that same self-satisfied grin
and told her, “I think I love you.” Roberta
fidgeted awkwardly. “You see, I’m not
what you would call superficial,” he continued.
Poor Roberta was lost now. “Looks don’t matter to me.”
That’s when she lunged at him with
an appetizer fork. Having grazed the tip
of his forehead, her efforts were otherwise benign. And Roy Jefferson, poised out front of the trendy, upscale Los Angeles restaurant, touches an index finger to the
front of his head, brings it back down to see the blood and smiles.
“You still got it, Roy boy. You’re a good man.
Where we are is somewhere and where
we’re going, I can't say. Everything from
far off looks like a dot and every dot looks to me like the place we’re headed
until we come right up close to it and it passes us by. Then it becomes the place where we were. I’m on an escalator. We’re
on an escalator. It feels like we’re
standing still at times but we’re actually moving along gradually and quite
steadily. Then it feels like we’re
racing forward at times but we’re still just moving along, gradually and
steadily.
