Dark Passions (14 page)

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Authors: Jeff Gelb

BOOK: Dark Passions
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Violet shoved Zoe back, ran to the booths. Lupe stood before number 9, but stepped back when she saw Violet coming fists first to save her husband. Violet grabbed the skeleton key from around Lupe's neck and jammed it into the door. The Occupied light still glowed above, but she could hear nothing inside—no music, no moaning, no Wade. She threw open the door and lunged inside with her fists cocked, but the booth was empty.
“No! No, goddamit, Wade! Where are you, baby?” She whirled on Lupe and the approaching Zoe. “Bring him back, you bitch! How dare you judge him—”
“We don't judge here, sweetie,” Zoe said. “We just help them get where they need to go. Take another look—”
Violet looked inside the booth again, eyes straining in the dim half-light. All she saw was a pile of rags on the bench—Wade's clothes. They were no dirtier than when he came staggering in, but they were all torn and wet and wound up into a tight, owl-turd bundle that stirred as she came closer. Stirred and gave a tiny cry.
“
Her
people come for the ones nobody claims,” Zoe whispered in her ear. “Why don't you go home early, sweetie? He's beautiful now, and he needs you.”
Violet stumbled and bumped into the remaining saloon door on her way out. She didn't even notice Crayonne holding the front door open for her as she wandered out into the night cradling her newborn baby.
Change of Pace
Steve Vernon
 
 
 
F
orty-year-old white men just shouldn't try to rap. It was a shame nobody told the house band before they slid into their third attempt of the evening. Malcolm hated rap. The same damn beat, the same damn lyrics. How many times could you find a rhyme with “pussy”?
The band didn't help matters. A quartet of three fat, balding country crooners, along with a lead singer that they'd undoubtedly found in the wreckage of a condemned piano bar, vainly struggled to morph themselves into the twenty-first century.
Malcolm tried his best to get used to it, willing his ears to close up. It didn't help or matter. The band was the least of Malcolm's problems.
The problem was Maria.
“Women change,” Malcolm said. “That's the hell of it. You think you've got things figured out, and they go and change on you.”
“The old missionary isn't working for you anymore, eh?” Seymour said.
“It isn't that. It's her. She's changed. What worked before just isn't working now. No, sir, it isn't that at all.”
Seymour shrugged and grinned. “I dunno, Malcolm. It sounds like that to me. Have you tried ginseng?”
Malcolm had expected this. Seymour was a holistic healer this year, or at least that's what he called himself. Last year he'd been a cab driver. The year before he worked in a call center. Seymour liked change.
“I've tried ginseng, vitamin E, pheremonal antiperspirant. I've tried it all, and nothing works.”
The band eased into “Margaritaville.” It didn't sound much better than the rap, but at least Malcolm knew most of the words. It was a damn shame the band didn't.
“Maybe it isn't physical. Maybe all you need is a little changeup. Have you thought about another woman?”
Malcolm shook his head. “If I was to get myself another woman, I'd have to get myself another man to keep her satisfied.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Seymour, I'm tiptoeing up to the fifty-year mark. I don't need or want another woman. I'm just trying to keep the woman I want happy.”
“Well, okay, maybe not another woman. But maybe you just need a little change of pace.”
Malcolm stared at his beer, wondering if it was possible to read your future in the foam. He peered as hard as he could, but all he could see was a cluster of tasty bubbles clinging to the side and bottom of the glass.
Seymour kept talking. “You need to loosen up. Invite another woman over for a threesome. Go to a key party. Try new positions.”
“Change your tune,” Malcolm said. “You're starting to sound like a damned fortune cookie.”
“Well, damn it, Malcolm, you can't just ignore it and hope it'll all go away. You've got to try something.”
“Try something?”
Malcolm snorted.
“Seymour, I've tried everything. Last June I surprised her with a romantic bedside banquet of oysters. Flew the fuckers right in from Florida.”
“Oysters are good,” Seymour allowed. “High in zinc, long on libido. Sounds like just the thing to poke the ashes of a dying fuck-fire.”
Malcolm snorted even louder.
“You'd think that, wouldn't you?” He poured another beer. “How the fuck was I supposed to know she was allergic to shellfish? Hell, I can't even spell anaphylactic.”
Seymour sat there, stone-cold silent, but Malcolm could see he was fighting hard not to let the laughter slip out. Truth to tell, Malcolm didn't blame him. It was funny.
Except he wasn't laughing.
“Then you know what she said? Right after the slurred speech and vomiting let up? ‘Honey,' she said, ‘stop trying to build a relationship with a ball-peen hammer.'”
“Damn,” Seymour swore. “That's cold.”
“So then I tried green M&Ms. Everybody knows they make you horny, right? I bought a whole carton of jumbo bags and damned near turned myself color-blind sorting the green ones out of the assortment. Then I blended all of the green ones, must have been nearly a thousand. I blended them up into a giant chocolate smoothy. Chocolate is sexy, isn't it?”
“Can't go wrong with chocolate,” Seymour agreed. “Did you know the Mayans invented it?”
Malcolm couldn't resist.
“Google?”
Seymour shrugged.
“Survivor: Guatemala,”
he confessed. “So what happened? Did the M&Ms work?”
“What happened? It turned out that when she isn't being allergic to shellfish, she's busy developing an allergy to green food dye. Her hives swelled up like orgasmic puffballs, and she spent the whole night in the emergency ward, damn near choking to death.”
“Maybe you need to try some different positions,” Seymour suggested. “There's lots of varied techniques can add a whole lot of jungle to your loving.”
“Kama Sutra, you mean? I tried that last spring. Found a how-to video at a yard sale. Talked the guy down from five bucks to two.”
“So what happened?”
“I'll tell you what happened. Halfway through positions one through six, with Maria's right leg hooked somewhere around my left ear, and her right elbow jammed deeply into an erogenous area of my inner kneecap, I discovered my fucking lumbago. I still limp when it rains.”
Seymour just shook his head, but Malcolm was on a roll.
“Last month I hooked up a set of speakers in the bedroom and tried piping in ‘Bolero,' like in that Bo Derek movie? All it done for Maria was bring on one of her migraine attacks.”
“Shit, sounds like you've tried everything.”
“You ain't just whistling William Tell's overture. Last week I tried voodoo. I sacrificed an entire bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken to Damballah, the god of bad ideas. Then I stripped myself naked and danced a quick oneman tango of desire about Maria while chanting out the only chant I know.”
“What chant was that?” Seymour asked.
“Ooo eee, ooo ah ah—ting tang, walla walla bing bang.”
“Walla walla bing bang?”
Malcolm shrugged. “It was the best I could come up with.”
“Did it work?”
Malcolm laughed. “Oh, it worked all right. Worked so well Maria had a panic attack thinking I'd gone and developed a shivering case of jumped-up St. Vitus jitterbug fever.”
Malcolm tipped back the glass of beer and drained it.
Seymour worked up enough nerve to talk. “Well, hell, Malcolm. It sounds as if you've got the right idea.”
“What, that I need to scare my wife to death? Poison her with shellfish and green M&Ms?”
“Hell, no. The trying-new-things part. That's just what you need to be doing. Only problem is you haven't found the right thing to try.”
Seymour pushed on. Once he'd latched his problemsolving muscles onto a situation, it was harder than juggling fresh scrambled eggs to get him to let go.
“It's like baseball, you know?” Seymour said, grinning like a skinny, buck-toothed Socrates.
Oh hell. A sports metaphor. Malcolm should have known better. Seymour always turned everything into sports. Ever since he'd joined the high-school football team. You'd think he'd have grown out of it by now.
People never change.
“All of the best batters know how to changeup. Otherwise, you get predictable. Even Babe Ruth knew how to bunt. What d'ya think?”
Malcolm did his best to look like he was considering Seymour's explanation.
“What do I think?” he asked, tilting the beer to get the last few drops of barley from the bottom of the glass. “I think it's your round. Ante up, big boy.”
Seymour flagged down a waiter.
“Look,” Malcolm said. “I don't want another woman. I want Maria. I just want things to jazz up a little. I'm not talking sex toys. I don't need any blow-up dolls or hisand-her vibrators. I just want a tune-up, y'hear what I'm saying?”
Seymour nodded, thinking about what Malcolm had said. The waiter showed up with another pitcher. Christ. Maria was going to kill him.
“Well, maybe it is physical. I think I know just what you need,” Seymour said. “I think I know how to fix things up. What you need is a little dose of Spanish Fly.”
Malcolm laughed. “There ain't no such thing.”
“Is too. I know where to get some. Get you laid faster than shit.”
“I don't want to break it to you, Seymour, but most of the shit I've ever known doesn't move that fast or get laid at all. It mostly just lays there and grows maggots until somebody flushes it away.”
“Look,” Seymour said. “I'm trying to tell you this stuff is freaking legendary. I'm talking the real deal. I can get it for you.”
“Sure,” Malcolm said. “I've seen that stuff in the sex shops. Spanish Fly. Quicker Pecker Upper. Fire In The Hole. You know what all of that stuff is? Just a little sugar, a little food coloring, and a big old price tag. The only kind of hole you'll get is the ones that grow in your teeth.”
Seymour shook his head hard. “I'm not talking about anything store-bought. I've got a guy who can get you the real thing. He brings it in from South America or something like that.”
“Something like that?”
“I don't know. He makes it special, you know? Out of certain ingredients.”
“You gonna hook me up with a pusher, Seymour? Man, you've been watching too many
Miami Vice
reruns.”
“What do you have to lose, Malcolm?”
Malcolm thought about it. Seymour was right.
“You've got to try something,” Seymour said. “If you don't use it, you surely will lose her.”
Seymour was dead right. Malcolm was scared he was going to lose Maria. There was no way he wanted that to happen. She was the best thing that ever happened to his fucked-up life.
“What do you say, Malcolm? It's the bottom of the ninth.”
Why the hell not? Maybe it was just what he'd needed. He just needed to change his swing.
He just needed a good pop fly.
Yeah, that was it.
He just needed to pop Maria a little Spanish Fly.
 
 
They climbed into Seymour's primered-over '83 Thunderbird right after they'd finished off their second pitcher of beer, just as the house band hip-hopped over from rap and began disemboweling an old MC Hammer tune. They couldn't touch it.
“You see,” Seymour said, swinging the big car around an overturned garbage can and a snoozing wino, “Spanish Fly isn't really made out of houseflies.”
“So what's it made out of? Zippers?”
Seymour wasn't bothered by Malcolm's sarcasm. He was in full oration mode, showing off his holistic healing skills. Seymour was proud of his job, and a good friend besides, so Malcolm did his best not to let on that he knew full well that Seymour learned most of his skills and technique from reading the labels at Sister Marriedwell's Holistic Health Food Emporium and a stack of
Mother Jones
magazines that he'd picked up in a paper drive.
“The actual drug is made up of dried and crushed carcasses of green blister beetles.”
“So let me get this straight. You're advising me to feed my wife bugs?”
“Couldn't do any worse than the green M&Ms.”
Seymour had a point, but Malcolm couldn't help wondering just what a blister beetle might look like. He kept getting this vision of funky, slime green beetles crawling out of the blisters and bunions of Juan Valdez's dirty sandaled feet.
 
 
Ten minutes later Malcolm and Seymour were standing in a sleazy bodega in the sleaziest corner of the worst side of town.
A fat Puerto Rican clerk with a long, greasy moustache stood behind a counter stuffed full of unnameable cuts of meat. Long ribbons of yellow flypaper dangled down like streamers on a prom night from hell. There were flies of all shapes and sizes hung and stuck on every inch of the paper, like a treasure trove of fat, buzzing crystal.
Seymour spoke to the clerk in a language that sounded a little like Spanish. Malcolm had never known that Seymour knew Spanish. Come to think of it, he didn't know that much about Seymour at all. He was just some guy he'd known since high school. He threw a good football, he'd been divorced twice, and the two of them called each other best friend.

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