THE THINKER [short story by 200motels] part V

[Scenario: New York 1986. Now that Jacky has gotten comedian Kelly Shine out of the picture, he can go ahead with his plan to feed the girl Inch to the tender mercies of the lunatic Bogdan]

“You think she’s gonna come?” Bogdan asked me anxiously. He and Pedro were drinking light beer. I was already into my second Wild Turkey.

“Don’t worry about a thing. She said she’ll be here.” I felt quite confident. Molly McGuire’s Irish Pub was like my second home, after the gym. It was a congenial place to meet friendly women, or just get drunk and hang out with the fellows at the bar. They were doing a rollicking landslide business that Saturday night. The place was packed with reveling New Yorkers and also many expatriate Irish, Canadians and British. On the dance floor Irish au pair girls danced a lively two-step with construction workers from Staten Island. The current house band, Freedom’s Sword from Scotland, sang:

“Willie come sell your fiddle
Come sell your fiddle so fine
Willie come sell your fiddle
And buy a pint of wine
If I should sell my fiddle
The world would think me mad
Many’s the handsome day
My fiddle and I we had”

Pedro asked, “What is that, English music?”

“Not English, Scottish.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” he persisted. I thought Scotland was part of England. I thought Sherlock Holmes came from Scotland Yard.”

“Lissen, Pedro, take it from me, if you call these guys English you’re gonna end up getting into a fight.”

He brightened up at the prospect. “Good, let ‘em! Motherfuckin’ English are just a bunch of sissies. They don’t have any good fighters. They had that guy whatzisname, Cooper, but he was a tomato can.” The sap was beginning to flow in him, I could tell. “Any motherfuckin’ English….”

“Scottish!”

“…whatever, who wants to kick my ass, I’ll show him how we kick ass in P.R.! Puerto Rico could kick Scotland’s ass anytime.” Pedro was a very patriotic Puerto Rican nationalist. He had even been there once, when he was a kid, to visit his grandparents. He didn’t have too much fun, he had confided to me once, because everything was in Spanish.

I felt the Wild Turkey struggling to take control of my mind. “Lemme tell you something about the English, Pedro, I’ve made a study of it…”

“Shit, man, the only thing you’ve made a study of is the business end of my boxing glove while I’m punching the shit out of you!”

I insisted, “Why don’t you let me talk!? Most people consider the British a bunch of effete tea drinkers, but that stereotype masks a savagery and bloodthirstiness well-known to any race unlucky enough to have experienced their true nature. Just ask the Irish, the Scots or the French, all of whom have experienced endlessly repeated instances of mass-murder, looting and rape. If you wish to dwell upon the nature of the traditional Englishman, look not to the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, but to the murderous mobs of soccer fanatics who engage in mass slaughter at football games. It might interest you to know that football riots did not just start yesterday, but were going on in the time of Oliver Cromwell, may his soul rot in Hell, hundreds of years ago. Just dress these animals up in uniform and you have the British Empire.”

They gaped at me. Bodgan asked, “What the freakin’ hell have you been drinking?”

Pedro said, “Is Ireland near England?”

“Forget it. Miss!” I held up my glass to the waitress. Once, Pedro and I went to a screening of “Julius Caesar” starring Marlon Brando, a particular favorite of his. Pedro insisted on bringing into the theater two gigantic bags of popcorn which he decided to combine right there in the audience while all the Shakespearean acting was going on on the screen. He was making a terrible racket, shaking the bags back and forth and messing around with the popcorn. Finally, a guy sitting in front of us decided he had had enough, and turned around to complain. Pedro caught his eye and, without saying a word, just growled like a dog. The guy got up and moved to another seat. During the scene where the people of Rome are tearing up the city in response to Marc Anthony’s defense of Caesar, I had to explain to Pedro that Romans were Italians. After that, the movie made perfect sense to him.

Inch finally materialized through the crowd, and we stood up to greet her. Her blonde hair was all teased out and she was wearing a mink coat over black aerobic tights and a leopard-print tube top. Little gold rings with stones sparkled on her fingers, and her face was heavily made up in an attempt to mask the bruise Nick had inflicted on her. The dark lighting of the club worked to her advantage. She ordered a beer and turned to me. “Kelly called me from L.A. He’s up for a part in a film called ‘Dog of My Dreams’. It’s about a German shepherd who returns from heaven and saves a child from some kidnappers.”

I said, “It’s too bad he left town so sudden, like.”

“Yeah, well that’s comedians for you. Anyway, if he gets this part I may go and visit him in L.A. for a while.”

“You really like this guy, huh?”

“Jacky, he makes me laugh.” The band finished their set and, seeing a big flashy-looking blonde at our table, came over and sat down. They had lots of hair and big, thick arms and hands like Glasgow dockworkers. I introduced everybody all around. The musicians crowded around Inch, flirting with her and buying her drinks. Bogdan grew agitated at the sight of so much competition and I ran around the table and whispered to him, “You better get cracking or you’re going to miss out on all the fun.” I met an English girl named Gillian at the bar and invited her to sit with us at the table. Bogdan and Inch danced while the band played. Pedro explained the finer points of defensive boxing, comparing Muhammed Ali with Mike Tyson: “See, Ali would run away from the guy and catch him with his long reach. He’s the only fighter that I could say had a good jab when he was moving backward. Tyson relies on his strength. He likes to work from the inside. ‘Course he has to because he’s so short for a heavyweight…”

Inch excused herself to go the Korean deli next door. A few minutes later she came back with cigarettes and a bag of beer sausages which she offered around. There were no takers, so she ate them all herself.

The band finished its last set of the night. By this time we were all pretty far into the bag. The band’s manager, an amiable little Irishman named Seamus with a game leg and a dapper Seville Row suit came over to the table and invited us upstairs to the dressing room for a private party. Inch had switched from beer to straight Tia Maria. Soon she would be ready for Bogdan’s amourous advances, or so I calculated.

We walked in a line up a narrow back staircase, carrying our drinks. The dressing room was a chaotic mess of guitars, costumes and decrepit furniture. The members of the band greeted us and we made ourselves comfortable, a happy group of after-hours revelers gossiping about bars, bands, who was drinking too much, who was on the wagon, who was going out with whom. Somebody told a joke about a schoolteacher and an Irish jockey. The band’s lead guitar player, Gordon, took out an acoustical guitar and strummed a few chords to the approval of two admiring females.

Suddenly Inch stood up, leaving her mink coat draped over the chair. “Is there a place I could lay down for a minute?” she gasped, “I feel like the whole room is spinning around.” She had turned pasty-white and her bosoms seemed to be straining to jump out of the tube top. They led her to a couch where she reclined and closed her eyes. “Just leave me alone for a couple of minutes. I’ll be allright.”

We all turned from her and continued talking. However, the explosive combination of beer, Tia Maria and spicy beer sausage inside her was not to be denied its moment of combustive glory, and all at once exploded from her mouth like some great infernal geyser from hell, soiling her and the sofa.

“Fooking Jesus”, exclaimed Davy the drummer, “Somebody open a fooking window! God, what a stench!”

One girl said, “Oh, the poor thing! Why doesn’t somebody do something?” Still, nobody moved. I felt my whole plan collapse like a house of cards. My new apartment was not going to materialize.

I hadn’t counted on the urgency of Bogdan’s sex drive. He raced over to the couch and helped Inch gently to her feet. “I’ll make sure she gets home all right,” he offered, manoeuvering her toward the door. A woman gathered Inch’s mink coat and bag and pushed them into Bogdan’s free arm as he rushed Inch out the door and down the stairs. This signaled the end of our little after-hours party, but not before somebody said of Bogdan, “That bloke must really be desperate.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” I offered gamely. “I don’t think he’s been with a woman for a while.”

A red-headed chewing gum popper named Maureen asked disinterestedly, “What, did he just get out of the Army?”

“Army, my arse,” deduced Gordon, “Prison’s more bloody like it, if you ask me. That chap looks like a bad lot. I would say that girl’s probably in for a long night.”

“But she’s sick!” protested Maureen.

“I don’t think he cares if she’s bloody dying.” He took another swig from his beer bottle. “It’s going to be a long night.”

Davy chimed in, “And something else is going to be long too, ha ha ha!” All the men laughed.

“You men are worse than pigs. Even a pig wouldn’t do a thing like that,” Maureen opined with disdain.

“Oh, yes they would,” countered Davy, who apparently once had lived on a farm, and the discussion turned to the romantic habits of domesticated livestock.

The next day found me back in the boxing room at the gym, furiously pounding the body bag with my fists as a way of releasing my own pent-up sexual frustration. The English girl of the night before, Gillian, had wanted to come back with me but I had demurred. Who could bring a date back to that dump? What were we gonna do, get it on on a mattress on the floor with mice scurrying all around us in the dark? As I punched the shit out of the bag, I imagined it to be a living body with a face. And the face was mine.

“Yo, Jacky!” A voice startled me from behind. I turned, all winded and sweaty, and came face-to-face with Bogdan. He was relaxed and smiling, and I realized he had gone through with it.

“So, you took her home with you.”

“Just like you said.”

“Frankly, I don’t know how you could get it up. That broad was a freaking mess.”

“Try spending some time in the joint. You’ll find out how much you’re capable of.”

“She can’t have been very much fun.”

“Hell, she slept right through it.” Hearing this, I figured that I could have bought him a rubber sex doll for $29.95 and saved myself a whole lot of trouble. But he seemed satisfied, so why argue with success?

“Where is she now?”

“Back at my place, sleeping it off. I gotta get back there before she wakes up. I just came over to thank you. That’s the nicest thing anybody ever did for me.”

“Hell, what are friends for?”

I never did get the apartment. Bogdan ended up going back to prison for violating his parole by beating up another guy on the subway. Inch moved to Los Angeles and married Kelly, who became a big success as a movie star playing tough-guy roles in adventure movies.

I met a German redhead named Greta at the gym and moved into her rent-controlled apartment in Washington Heights. When we make love she spits at me and screams blood-curdling curses in German. She terrorizes her upstairs neighbors by banging on the ceiling with a broomstick if they should be so bold as to walk around at night. All in all, we’re pretty happy.

One weekend a month I go up to Rockland County and take small arms- and hand-to-hand combat training with a group called the “Committee for the Defense of a Free Ireland.” Once I get good enough, I plan to fly to Dublin and join the I.R.A.

I’ve got it all figured out.
THE END

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Posted on 4/13/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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