I don’t stand for anything, really. I guess I stand for money because that’s what makes me an American, right? What I do know is that everybody gets what’s coming to them and all I’m trying to do is dodge it. I’m the one who dug this hole and she’s the one tossing the dirt in on me. I want to blame her and everybody else, there’s no answer, there’s no way but down. I’m sick of saying yes, I’m tired of being nice. Everything goes wrong for me when its supposed to go right. Everything falls apart.
It’s not a mystery. It’s not a surprise. The first time anyone sees her, they meet their demise. Let me start at the top, otherwise you might think this is a little too overdramatic for a smalltime guy who just wants to score some dough. I’m not a game show host, but I can flash a smile and take a paranoid loser’s money any day of the week. I’ve met assholes like this Rhomme guy my whole life. They got everything in the world and all they want is more. There’s always that one broad that’ll take their money and never really love ‘em. His office was covered in hardwood, stupid paintings, and a thin layer of oil exhaust. He leered at me with his fat face across a desk the size of a Buick atop of which sat a Nazi luger on a bible. He asked me the same thing every other dope with some lawyer cash asks, “Is she doin' somebody behind my back?” And I repeat my same old line, “Look pal, I only do surveillance. I can get your answer and you won’t like it. All it will do is cost you. If you think she’s doin' it, then she is. That’s just the way the world works.”
He mumbled something at me through a jagged mouth and tossed five large on the desk to show he was serious. All he wants to know is who it is. Like every fool caught in this game, I took the money and ran.
I know where they live and what they do. All I had to do was watch. But. I didn’t, did I? I guess that’s what they call buying a ticket to the Titanic, 'cause baby, I was sunk. On the street, I saw her standing there, smoking a cigarette like she knew I was watching. She moved like an animal, serious, lithe, and somber. She had a way of looking dreamily into the distance that made her appear wise beyond her years, like she had been hurt too many times for a girl still so young. And she was young. It didn’t take long, she boarded a cab and I followed her. She shopped, dined with beautiful friends, and lazily made her way to the Victory Hotel, a place I knew well.
It seems like our worlds, revolving, spinning out of control collided that day, the way we were meant to be, smashing into each other. I don’t believe in karma, I didn’t believe in love, and I certainly don’t believe in fate. But, something makes you decide, something makes you choose. It's like the only thing that makes us really alive is the opportunity for extreme emotion, to feel beyond our humanity, to feel like a person, to feel alive.
You gotta believe that all of this happened so fast. I was poisoned by this urge, this thought that I could be somebody. The second I saw her, she captured me. I tracked her through the hotel and spied from the fire escape. He was already there waiting for her. I don’t blame him. This is a girl you’d wait forever for. But, she wanted games, she wanted to play. She pouted, she waned.
This whole thing was a game, that’s all it ever was. Now look, I’m a watcher, an observer, I stay objective baby, I don’t never get involved. But, this time something snapped. I saw her enter the room, put out her cigarette and down her purse. He looked at her like she was the end of the world and he hit her face like there was no tomorrow. But the strangest thing happened, she wanted more. This really rattled my cage. She kissed him harder, deeper, and he relented. He took her, brutalized her and I watched helplessly like a dog with a dangling treat. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, even as she cried. As it happened, I saw my future bleak and foreboding. I felt that this was the only time that if I did something, it would matter.
He began to hit her pretty face so hard, she puked. I could smell the acid through the window. He beat her like a bad dog and my heart, my soul, made me react, the way a man should. I kicked through the glass like I was born to. I entered like a savior, but one without a flock. Now, I don’t carry a gun. I’ve had every reason to but I knew I’d use it. Jail doesn’t suit a guy like me. Guns don’t scare me, idiots that carry them do. As I watched him destroy her, he got madder and madder. Mad like a dog that kills what it fucks. When he put the gun to her face, I became an animal.
This happened for me in slow motion. She captured me with one look. She knew who I was and who sent me. She knew I’d been watching. Most fools who carry a gun don’t use it to shoot, they use it to threaten, they wanna talk first. This motherfucker shot immediately. I give him tons of credit, man, 'cause he was in the middle of doing business. I hadn’t been shot before, and what I didn’t expect was the fury I felt, not the pain. I took the shot like a blast of heroin, exploding my collarbone. I dominated him, my hands on his neck wrenched his life out as she was on the bed crying and crying. It was easy, like snuffing a cigarette. He died like a swatted fly. She was still screaming “Kill him, kill him” after his last breath escaped his pleading lips. I imagine now that he was warning me, cautioning his same fate. But I don’t believe in fate. I believe in progress, in pain. I guess because I had already fallen into her trap.
She lied on the bed and cried. Her perfect makeup smeared with tears. She is beautiful when she cries. She said, “You’re all I need,” as I bled on her bed. I should have realized then that she would be my end. Because from that moment on, I was her victim, her plaything. On that bed, I became her man. She kept saying, “No one will ever know.” I gave in to her trance, mesmerized by her beauty. I gave her everything I had.
I fell so hard I couldn’t see straight. She was such a bad girl. She blurred out who I really was. She made me forget I had my own blood. We met at an indefinable place where fire and water merge. She made me think I was a real person for the first time and I believed her. She was magic. She did me like she meant it, like she loved me. Her body was made for one thing and she knew how to use it.
Rhomme grabbed me on the corner one dark day. “You see her?” I nodded. “I’ve been watching.”
“Who is he?”
“He comes around the house in the afternoon. His Benz is more expensive than the Chrysler building. This guy is serious, he waters the plants man.”
Rhomme looked like he took a gut punch, his fat eyes hardened.
“What’s he look like?
“He’s greyer than a fox. He treats her like some lonesome queen, always bringing her things. But I think she wants to play another game. The Brooks Bros. suit matters and so do the gifts. She’s into the glory, man.”
He looked me right in the eye.
“Will you kill her?”
Without hesitation, I replied.
“That will cost ya.”
Before any of this, I always had this thought, this certainty that I could get myself out when the water began to boil. When things got too hot I had options, everybody does. Easy ways to end it like leaping from tall buildings or hanging from the shower curtain would do just fine. Hell, get enough bourbon in me, I’m liable to doing anything crazy. It’s chickeny, I know, so the Plan B was always to slip away down south like Brazil or Peru or something, somewhere I could blend without crawling around feeling watched.
Rhomme offered me a cool mill. Half now, half later. It all seemed so easy, kill a beautiful dame for a million bucks. Every man has his price and this was the kind that made my eyes light up with dollar signs. He gave me the dough in a simple shoebox and I walked down the street like I was disgusted with it. You rob a guy in an expensive suit carrying a briefcase, not some nobody wearing a two-day beard with a cardboard box. I thought I had it made. Of course I wasn’t going to kill her. I had other plans.
I found her at the Victory. She lazed in the tub, her wet hair up, a thin cigarette parting those beautiful thick red lips while her soapy breasts bobbed atop the water. She was humming a tune about blood and the moon. As she looked up at me, her eyes charged from boredom to hunger. I fanned the cash into the air above her and she squealed as it rained down. She pulled me right into the bath with her and we splashed and moaned the whole night through.
We spent a week together like this, burning through that money and each other like dying wolves. She was intoxicating. We rolled around on expensive carpets, ate fine food like pigs, and screwed like rabbits. She never cared who was watching. She would straddle me in dark corners of dive bars, pressing her skin into my face, laughing like a possessed witch. She was mean on champagne. She’d slap my face in a crowded restaurant and cry out when I bent her arm the wrong way, but not in pain, in encouragement. She used her saccharine sweetness to mask how sour she really was and I was hooked on her taste. She had tender moments, too, but they were part of her games. She would make me feel bad about hurting her and then needle me with that guilt so I would do it harder. The need to feel the way she made me feel was overwhelming, a violent hunger consuming me. Her thick hair would pull out and her flawless soft flesh would welt, but she never cried uncle. She made me feel powerful to the point that nothing else mattered. I felt like her king but I acted like her slave. I was powerless to her touch and I knew it. I just couldn’t come down off her and that’s when things got sloppy.
When she asked about the money, I told her it was Rhomme’s fee for me to ‘watch’ her. I just didn’t want to tell her the truth. She laughed like she couldn’t put it together. Whenever her husband came up, she made it clear how much she wanted him dead. She made it my idea, like I was a hero saving her from misery. Of course I would kill him for her. Of course I would take all his money and take her away. Of course I would commit to her with a single kiss from her lips. Nothing carved in stone, no contract signed and notarized, no exchange of blood after cutting ourselves. A kiss. I promised death for a kiss.
At least Rhomme paid me with money, she paid me with a promise. The bullet wound began to hurt more and spread to my shoulder. She did the best she could to clean it, but she also used it to make me squirm, jamming her long nails into the hole, my flesh thorny, volcanic. She drove me down the coast in a big bastard of a car faster and faster, her lipstick perfect. I spent a week dying in her arms draining blood and soul for her love. I became empty, cold. I needed help from the car and onto the Doc’s operating table. He looked down at me with a yellow grin and stuck me with enough drugs to kill a herd of cattle. In my vision her serious face defocused and she blew me a kiss that blew me to pieces.
The trance I awoke from was disturbing. I had a clarity, an understanding that felt sober and vacant. She was gone and I could breathe. It wasn’t her air, it was mine. I met her in a park next to the water, it churned beneath us. She pressed her syrupy lips to mine and a key into my hand. Her eyes swallowed me. She smiled and stood up, the wind billowing her dress. I tried to take her right there but she resisted, not giving in, another game. She pointed a delicate finger toward her massive car. “Hit him with it.” That’s all she had to say. This is how I want to remember her. She looked strong and determined, strangely angelic. A boarding pass was gracefully slipped into my shirt pocket, “Meet me,” she said and started to turn away, but then our eyes met again. Her hand in mine, she kissed me goodbye, a kiss of innocence, passion, and fear. I had to watch her walk away. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I did everything I could not to weep at that sight but my nerves were too frayed. In this moment, I saw the end, the point of no return, the threshold of pain, and I climbed through.
That car of hers revved like a monster. It was a slick bullet and I was the pistol. I knew Rhomme’s routine and I knew where to find him. The Rabbit Hole is not a place men go to for spiritual enlightenment, it’s a place where women pretend to work for money and you felt sorry for them. I spotted him leering at skinny girls with his damp face. I blended in, took a slug of whiskey, and watched him spend his money. I figured he could use some fun on his last night alive so I let him have it. His car was parked at the bottom of the hill on Sycamore. It was an ideal setup. There was nowhere for him to run. It was a turkey shoot. I parked at the top of the hill and waited. I tried to pretend that what I was about to do was harmless and without consequence. The sooner this was done, the better. I started to itch. Something didn’t sit right with me. I worried the thickness of the boat ticket between my fingers. I’d see her in the morning. I hoped she packed those shoes I liked. I was panicking internally. All those disastrous maybes surfaced like rotten corpses in the middle of a dark lake. I needed her sweat, her skin.
As time passed, I hardened into quiet resentment. I burned a whole pack of smokes waiting for this bozo and sure enough the irony of my life reared its ugly head again. He never showed. Morning light began to sweep across the dirty city and Rhomme’s unused car. However he got away, I’ll never know. I had to make my own getaway because I had a ship to catch.
I looked for her on the docks, in the public spaces on the decks, in our cabin, everywhere. She was absent, so I waited. I’ve done four-night stakeouts easily before, but this one left me an empty shell. I laid across the bed thirsty for her touch to awaken me. The boat began to move after a few deadened fog horn calls and I started in on the maybe game again.
At the height of my doubt, the cabin door wrenched open. The purity of my excitement was quickly poisoned. It was Rhomme. Open-mouthed, he said, “You, too? That two-timing—“
I socked him, mashed his nose in. Before I could stop him, he reached into his pocket and gut shot me through his coat. I put his whole head through the porthole window and bolted. Blood streamed from my belly and through my fingers as I made my way down the ship decks. I was a wild fleeing animal until I saw her lounging at the bow. Radiant red dress, flowing hair, and dangerous eyes. I left gallons of blood on my way to her. Our embrace was heaven. Collapsing, I uttered, “Why?”
She leaned me to the rail and said, “You were fun.” Her lips kissed mine one last time with such force that I toppled from the ship. My last thought before ceding to the abyss was about how strange love really is. Her wavering face looked down at me and then she was gone.
This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2015.