Live, From the End of the World Read online

  I love her almost as much as she makes me feel queasy. Piercing porn makes me shudder in all the wrong ways.

  Well, I love her platonically. She doesn’t like guys like me. Doesn’t really go for the roguish-asshole type.

  Helene Anderson is my first love, after all.

  The Thing’s stools and tables are typical fare. Everything’s pockmarked. Beat up. Looks as if it’s been run over by a truck. Not an inch of wood is bereft of words or etchings. Notes from lovers who met over a beer, spent one round enamored, and then moved on.

  The walls’re covered in murals. Thick, shitty paint five or six layers deep. Images of massively-mammaried mermaids that guzzle booze and chortle with bouncy blue nipples.

  Above the scarred booths is chalked: YOU PUKE, YOU CLEAN.

  Which is totally fair.

  THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH, reads the sign on the rear wall, near the sign for The Thing’s most-famous drink: Ass juice.

  I say, “It has everything to do with your belief in God!” I barely make sense to myself.

  I’m drunk.

  Sue me.

  The main attraction of The Thing is the varying kinds of alarming pornography that play on screens throughout the bar. Midget porn. Torture porn. Lesbian rubber fetish. Creampies. Internals. Hentai. Tentacle porn. Shaving. Blood play. And a lotta porn you haven’t bothered watching. It’s kinda gross. Even for a porn veteran like moi.

  I crack my neck. “Lemme start simply.”

  Carl Sagan’s the guy I wanna sound like, but I don’t have it in me. So I say: “Religion is a shitty car with a shiny paint job that no thinking person would ever buy.”

  Fred cradles his beer. I’ve done this to him before. He’ll listen to me cuz he’s my friend. I’ll win the conversation cuz I’m more belligerent than he is.

  I knock back a shot of Evan Williams whiskey. “And your pedophile, ordained ‘men of the cloth’ are rotten salesmen hawking broken wares.”

  Fred’s eyes wander toward a screen showing a naked midget being folded into a suitcase.

  I scratch my nose. Snap my fingers to get his attention again. “Let’s say you’re buying a used car. Now, only the most gullible dipshit would take every word of the salesman as truth. All the same, you check it out. It’s clean. Has a red gloss color. Looks fine. But you’re still gonna ask some questions and kick the tires. Hell, you’ll probably bring a friend along so he can give it the once-over, too. Then you’ll take it for a spin.

  “After about a mile, you smell something. You pull it over. Pop the hood. Smoke billows out. The radiator is fucked. You’re in the red and the engine casing is cracked. You’re amazed that the damn thing even started, let alone got around the block.

  “So would you buy it?”

  Fred rolls his eyes. “Of course not.”

  “Right. Of course not.” I cross my arms. “Religion is the same way. People who don’t use their brains to sift through the nonsense, they’re content to have the paint job and the empty promises. What it costs—your common sense for a fairy tale—is worth it to them. Shit looks nice, but nothing works.

  “Outside religion? People are fairly fuckin incredulous. If they put as much thought into their beliefs as they do when they’re buying a goddamn cable package, the world would be a very different place.”

  Fred arches his eyebrows. “But you don’t buy religion.”

  “The fuck man? That’s not the point.”

  “I mean you don’t actually put any money on the table.”

  “Dude—”

  Fred’s I’m-nearing-drunk lisp starts to set in. “I just think the analogy sucks.”

  “Dude, every Sunday or Sabbath or whatever, they take collections. There are donations constantly. Televangelists are on TV and online twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. It’s not even the physical currency you should be worried about. Religion stands diametrically opposed to knowledge and reason. Hello? Garden of Eden? The Earth’s somehow only ten thousand years old?”

  Fred puts his hand up. Waggles it back and forth like he’s waving, but really he just wants me to shut up for a second. “You’re totally ignoring the kind of comfort it gives people,” he says. “Or might give people who aren’t doing anyone any harm. Run that shit by a grieving mother who just buried her kid and prays for God to take care of her child. Go ahead, Mr. Clever. Mr. Rational. Tell her what you just told me. Tell her that she’s an idiot in your opinion. Tell her there’s nothing—no greater, caring force. No smiling face. Go ahead and hurt someone a little more. You’re getting pretty good at that.”

  I wanna point out that if this benevolent “God” motherfucker was actually looking after some hypothetical mother’s spawn, well, the kid wouldn’t be dead, would he? But that’d be kind of a dick move.

  There’s one tape that always seems to be in rotation. The midget porn. In it, some dude arrives at a hotel lugging a medium-sized suitcase. Is he a businessman ready to make a life-altering deal? Perhaps a tired lawyer fried from too much time saving innocents on death row?

  Oh ho! I think not!

  The guy opens the door to his room. Violently chucks the carryall onto the bed. Slowly unzips it. The camera angle changes to inside the bag. Light pours into the scene. Birth through metal teeth.

  Out bounces a naked midget fiending for a cock to gobble.

  Fred yells at me. “Your skepticism doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist.”

  I yell back. “Your faith doesn’t mean God does exist.”

  “Then how can you explain how life and matter came into being from nothingness?”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Try this on for size: One theory says universes are birthed, in a way. Meaning our universe—the physics, gravity, matter, energy, everything we know—is in fact an inherited, mutated trait of our parent universe. There might be a whole megaverse. Or a metaverse. Like a big old bathtub full of bubbles. How awe-inspiring is that? Even the thought of it is more impressive than a pathetic little god that concerns itself with what’s happening on just one planet and might get mad if I decide to jerk off.”

  Fred grunts. “Well. That’s definitely a lotta words.” He gets up. Wobbles in the general direction of the bathroom.

  I don’t feel like sitting by myself. I look for my girlfriend, who ditched me and Fred about thirty seconds into the religion conversation. She said she was gonna play some pinball.

  From the back of the bar comes her triumphant “Whoop!” and the tell-tale crack of a top score being obliterated.

  Helene struts over from a Gottlieb Centigrade 37 pinball machine and takes a seat next to me. She puts her skinny arms around my shoulders. Scratches my head. Asks what’s wrong.

  I start mumbling something about everyone dying in a fire and stab the table with a Buck knife.

  But The Woman is keen on her victory with the flippers. “You owe me ten bucks. I beat your score.”

  I squint at her. “Lies.”

  “Truths.” She pauses. Picks up a shot of whiskey. “You keep trying to shatter your friend’s beliefs and you’re gonna get real lonely real soon.”

  I stretch my neck. Tilt my head back. Lean on Helene’s arm. “I hate everyone. I’m certain of it now.”

  “You aren’t too well-liked yourself.” Helene does her shot.

  Fred rounds the corner on his way back from the toilet. He grips The Thing’s oft-abused mechanical pony for balance. He wipes at his jacket with the tattered remains of some single-ply toilet paper. Then plunks down on a rickety chair opposite me and Helene.

  He says, “There were three people fuckin in the bathroom when I opened the door.” Fred fiddles with the cross around his neck—a nervous tick.

  My eyes bounce from Helene’s to his. I say, “The religiously-inclined think your kind does that shit all the time.”

  “There were two guys and one
girl,” Fred says. “It wasn’t, like, a threesome. Not a mainstream threesome. One was on the girl and the other was on the middle guy.” He glares at me. “Kinda weird.”

  His eyes rotate. He stares at the mermaid tits on the wall. He grabs his beer. Swigs it. Sets it down. Takes my shot of Evan Williams. Downs it. Goes back to chugging the beer.

  He says, “They didn’t care about me. I mean...I was just there and the chick asked me to slap her. I said ‘No’ and hauled ass out. One of the guys, the who was nailing the middle dude—he’d pierced his own nipple with his day job’s nametag.

  “It was a Wal-Mart thing. A plastic piece of crap. HI, MY NAME IS: DAN, it said. This DAN dude looked at me and called me a ‘nigger faggot.’ He pulled out of the middle guy. He tried to blow his load at me.” Fred blinks. Focuses on the markings in the table. “Dude, he tried to assault me with cum.”

  Fred’s jacket is still sloppy with trace amounts of the splooge he he’s been wiping off. “Well, he did assault me with cum, I guess.”

  It’s hard not to laugh. I say, “V-Day for the fuckballs.”

  Helene heads off to grab a quick, final round of fresh drinks. I feel for the brass knuckles in my pocket.

  Fred eyes me. “I think I want to leave before they make their way over here.”

  I nod. “Sure.”

  Helene brings over three shots of ass juice, two Yuenglings and a shot of Evan Williams. I catch her eyes and glance toward the door. We file outside into the cool air. It’s still heavy with the scent of a superstorm.

  I free an American Spirit. Pop it between Helene’s lips. She cups her hands around my Zippo. Inhales deeply of the loving, burning carcinogens from her cig.

  I light my cigarette and watch Fred.

  His hands shake as he fires up a Marb Light—which, let’s be serious, is far too weak for any self-respecting journalist to smoke.

  So, I do something very stupid.

  I call him a faggot for smoking em.

  He snaps.

  Throws a punch at me.

  I deserve it.

  My body wants to duck. My brain’s lost somewhere in between “Haha, someone shot a load of goo at Fred,”—and—”bisexual threesome? Hmmm.”

  Fred connects.

  Doesn’t hurt so much as surprise the shit out of me. I’m six beers and five shots of whiskey into the night. Feeling pain isn’t much of an issue.

  Helene shouts, “Fred,” like an angry mom.

  I stumble. Rebound.

  I love Fred. We’re like brothers. I don’t wanna hit him, and I ain’t gonna. “What the fuck, man?” I dig my palms into his shoulders. Push hard.

  Fred falls on his ass.

  I walk over to him and kneel. “I shouldn’a said that. It was a slip. A dumb slip, man. I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sorry.” I look up at Helene, search for some sympathy. She doesn’t have much for me.

  Bad night.

  Two men and a woman come strutting outside. Giggling. The woman spits at Fred. She tucks her not-unappealing breasts back into a spiky corset. The larger of the two guys laughs. Tugs at his pants. His nametag dances against his jacket.

  HI, MY NAME IS: DAN.

  Whatever rage building up inside Fred finds a new target: The guy who’d mocked him for being a “nigger faggot.” The guy who ruined his jacket. The guy who probably shocked him into questioning the existence of divinity.

  A major part of Fred’s psychological dilemma regarding religion and the epithets of “nigger” and “faggot” has to do with the fact that he’s a black, gay man born in West Africa who converted to Catholicism under great personal duress. Fred’s an easy target for my verbal prodding, but I’m “allowed” to do that stupid shit cuz we’ve been friends for twelve years.

  DAN...well, DAN’s the enemy.

  Fred headbutts DAN in the nuts. DAN flops back and hits the sidewalk hard. Fred’s on top of him in an instant.

  I see Fred’s head bob. Like my friend’s gonna give the guy a blow job. But there’s a flash of teeth. Fred bites down and embeds his pearly whites in DAN’s thigh. DAN screams while Fred held on. A rabid dog.

  I look over to the other guy. The one DAN had been fuckin in the ass and in turn was pumping the chick. Mr. Catcher-Pitcher. Looks like he’s got something in his hand. A bottle. Maybe.

  I don’t give him a chance to do anything. I yank my brass knuckles out of my pocket. Punch him in the temple. The Catcher-Pitcher responds by whimpering like a whipped dog. He falls behind DAN. I squat over him. Grab the bridge of his nose with the first knuckles of my index and middle finger.

  If you do this properly, holding the nasal cartilage firm, and snap your wrist to the left or the right, you can break someone’s nose. But, the speed, as much as the force, really counts. You gotta compensate for the cartilage’s elasticity. Snap fast, you’ll get the desired pain. Go slow, you’ll just be sort of annoying.

  There’s a crack. Catcher-Pitcher coats my hands with blood.

  I smile.

  Fred kneels on DAN’s chest. He pounds away at whatever face remains in that pulpy, toothy mess of the guy’s head.

  Helene holds a switchblade to Spit Girl’s neck. There’s a Gothic-style cross wrapped around the slutty angel’s throat. The kind of shit someone might buy at some mall atrocity.

  Helene taps it with the knife’s tip. Stares Spit Girl down. Says, “Oh, that’s cute.”

  Janice/Jaundice/Absinthe runs outside. Her eyes grow huge. She mumbles something about cops and waiting here and blood and man she’s all over the place.

  I lock eyes, and say, very calm, “It’s okay, ma’am. I’m a scientist.”

  It sounded more impressive in my head.

  Helene hails a cab. We jump in. Barrel toward Brooklyn. Happy to leave three assholes terrified and broken.

  Chapter 3:

  No Vacancies at the Roach Motel

  Helene and I wake up the next morning. Go to kiss. And burp into each other’s mouths.

  Should’ve seen that coming.

  The sheer volume of alcohol we all drank when we got home would have likely killed any large animal that didn’t have the sense to stay in the zoo.

  The giggle-worthy gas burst wakes us up enough that we can competently light our cigarettes. I lie back on the bed. Face the ceiling. Recount the batshit insanity that transpired the night before. I remember it all, of course—people who say they don’t remember what happens across a night of drinking are either lying or are not real drinkers.

  I am a professional, damn it.

  Helene throws her arm across my chest. Nuzzles my neck.

  My mind floats to the cautiously quiet sex we had before falling asleep. Cautious and quiet cuz we didn’t want to wake Fred up. Sex cuz we just really, really wanted to have sex.

  Violence has that effect on us.

  Mouths open. Hushed panting. Her nails on my chest then my back. Pushing heat.

  Pillars of yellow from the cursed sun stream through the cracks in the blinds of our bedroom window. They caress the side of Helene’s face. Bathe it. Strands of hair tumble from behind her ear and shimmer like gold. Smoke curls around her lips and blooms into a grey blue cloud as it snakes through the light.

  I exhale my own cloud of smoke. “Do you think Fred lived through the night, or is there a dead, gay black man on our couch? More importantly, what will we tell the authorities?”

  “Poppa bear, we should probably be more concerned about whether or not those fuckheads at the bar are gonna come looking for us. Or if they’ve already sent the cops.”

  “Not too worried. What’re they gonna tell the cops? ‘We called an upstanding gay black man a “nigger faggot,” attacked him with semen, and then got beat up for it. Save us?’ Cops hate perverts. Trust me. I know this.”

  Helene ponders it. “You do realize that the
re wasn’t a lot left of that guy’s head when Fred was done with him—and you used very-illegal brass knuckles on the other.”

  “Nobody saw the knuckles. One person felt em. Don’t worry.”

  Helene stamps out her American Spirit and crawls off the bed toward the dresser. I get up and walk behind her, wrapping my arms around her waist. “I love you, Momma Bear.”

  “I love you, too, Poppa Bear.”

  We never talk about a Baby Bear in any capacity. Not beyond acknowledging that we both want a kid someday. But when that day will come is anyone’s guess.

  I shamble out of bedroom. Take a desperately-needed piss. I wave to Fred and squint against the brightness of the living room.

  Fred’s sitting on the couch in his boxers. He has a small glass of whiskey in his hand. He eyeballs some cable news on the TV and checks the feeds on his datapad. “Hair of the dog.” He lifts the whiskey. Smirks with alarming charm for someone who beat a person’s head to juice the night before.

  I plop down on the couch next to him. “I am thrilled that you’ve been helping yourself to my stock of booze.” I offer him a cigarette. He shoves it between his lips. I fire his up after lighting another for myself.

  I exhale. “So, what’s good?”

  He turns the volume up for an hourly news report from one of the local stations. “Good? We’re journalists. Bad is good and good is bad.”

  Onscreen they’re cutting between two talking heads. Each one appeals to a given demographic with a minimal disruption of political correctness. The woman’s in her late twenties, maybe early thirties, and looks half Japanese and half honky. The man’s white, quite a bit older, and has a touch of grey amidst his brown mane. He cuts a fatherly figure.

  Except he looks like he wants to fuck the Asian chick up against a wall every time they shoot the breeze. I’ve always found the practice of “friendly banter” idiotic, though I understand it’s supposed to give the newscast “personality.”