Knockout (6 page)

“I'm trying to remain positive,” Jayhole said, “but it's damn hard.”

It was hard. So far I'd invested hundreds of hours designing my fall collection, but I knew no one gave a shit. When I'd started making jewelry I had visions of hot women handing me cold flutes of champagne, dreams of gold-toothed rappers stopping by my kiosk and begging me to design them diamond-crusted crucifixes. None of that had happened yet. I still did my visualization
exercises to help make these things happen, but remaining positive was getting difficult. At the swap meet each weekend, I laid my piece of black velvet across my card table and spread out my wares, but almost everyone walked by my booth without breaking stride. On the rare occasion someone stopped, they laughed at my jewelry like it was some sort of gag gift.

“Keep plugging away,” I told Jayhole, placing my hand gently on his shoulder. “Don't listen to the naysayers. Our passion to our craft is the only thing that matters.”

Jayhole must've appreciated what I'd told him because after I said this he pulled me into his arms and locked me in a bear hug. He held me there for a long time, squeezing my head into his chest. When he let me go, I saw there were tears in his eyes.

“You're the only one who understands,” he said.

I knew the horse steroids were giving him crazy mood swings, but from what I could tell his gratitude seemed genuine. Maybe Jayhole just needed some time to trust me? Maybe these jokes he played on me masked some sort of unresolved inner pain? Maybe everything would be wonderful between us from this point forward?

Later that evening, Jayhole broke into my room and wrote the word “Fuckstick” on Stabby's fur in purple marker. He also took a scissors and cut cock-and-ball-shaped holes in all of my T-shirts.

While I scrubbed the marker off Stabby, I thought about disassembling all my jewelry and selling the stones for scrap so I could get enough money together to move out. I got out a pliers, but I just couldn't tear everything apart; I didn't want to give up yet. In the end, I decided the best plan of attack to survive the next few weeks was to avoid Jayhole as much as possible. To make it harder for Jayhole to keep tabs on me, I started to climb in and out of my room through my window. When I was inside my room, I used a flashlight and moved around slowly, trying to not
make my floorboards creak. At first I had a hard time adjusting to the darkness, but soon I became proficient at eating soup from a bowl I couldn't see and pissing into a Snapple bottle using only the faint light of the moon.

O
ne night, I heard Jayhole out in the hall doing some push-ups. I was paranoid he'd heard me moving around in my room so I slid underneath my bed to hide. As I lay there among the dust, I noticed a manila envelope taped to the bed frame with the words “Dan's Suicide Note” written on it. I ripped it open.

“To whom it may concern,” the note inside said, “I'm killing myself because my roommate Jayhole is driving me insane. He keeps playing horrible pranks on me and every time I try to move out he tracks me down and brings me back here. It's like some demented game to him. I've tried to escape a number of times over the last year, but he won't let me leave.”

I must have ripped open the envelope too loudly because the next thing I knew Jayhole burst into my room, grabbed on to my ankle, and yanked me out from under my bed.

“What's this?” he asked, snatching Dan's note out of my hand.

“I found it while I was cleaning,” I lied, “but I hadn't gotten a chance to read it yet.”

Jayhole read Dan's note and then he crumpled it into a ball. He took his lighter from his pocket and lit it on fire and then he dropped it onto my floor and stood over it while it burned. The fire alarm in the hall went off, but Jayhole yelled over it. “That Dan,” he bellowed, “that guy really had a bizarre sense of humor, didn't he?”

T
hat night, after Jayhole left for his dart league, I put Stabby in his carrier and packed my suitcase. I was planning to sleep in my Corolla that night. The next morning, I'd go to a laundromat and
steal some newer bras and panties to give to my sister-in-law as a peace offering. I hoped this would be enough for her to let me crash on their couch again.

I loaded Stabby into the trunk first. When I walked back to get my suitcase, Jayhole popped up from the azaleas. He was dressed all in black and his face was painted camouflage. Strangles was draped around his shoulders. I ran to my car, but before I got there, Jayhole shot me in the neck with a blow dart. My hands went numb and I dropped my keys. My knees went sideways and I toppled over into the shrubs.

“I didn't think I put enough tranquilizer on that blow dart,” Jayhole said as he stood over me, his head blocking out the moon, “but watching the way you fell, I might have used too much, huh?”

Even though my eyes were having trouble focusing, I could tell Jayhole was excited about catching me. His eyes were open wide and his nostrils were flared. I tried to yell for help, but my tongue wouldn't cooperate. Jayhole set Strangles down on the ground beside me and I felt him curl around my calf. Even though I was scared shitless, I couldn't keep my eyes open.

I
n the morning, I woke up handcuffed to my bedframe. Jayhole stood across my room from me, flipping through a batch of earrings I'd recently made. I heard Caruso's music upstairs, the heavy bass of his speakers pounding through the ceiling and into my chest. Jayhole's scrapbook was sitting on the floor. There was a new picture of me pasted in it. When he saw I was awake, he walked over and pressed his boot into my stomach.

“What you need to understand,” he said, “is that no matter where you go, I'll find you.”

He pressed his foot down harder, making it difficult to breathe.

“Now you say it,” he told me.

I thought about Dan and his suicide note. I understood how awesome it might have felt for him to jump from that bridge and fly through the air for a few seconds before he hit that water. How wonderful those precious moments of freedom probably felt before his face smashed into the river and his nose got pushed up into his brain and everything went black and Jayholeless.

“No matter where I go, you'll always find me,” I repeated.

Jayhole bent down and unlocked the handcuffs. Then he went out into the kitchen and fried up one of my stolen steaks. I curled up under my covers. I listened to the bass of Caruso's dance mix, ooontz, ooontz, ooontz, pounding over and over, never stopping, never ceasing. The pounding sounded so close it felt like it was happening right inside my stupid head.

II

M
aybe it was Stockholm Syndrome kicking in, but over the next few weeks I learned to accept my situation with Jayhole. Like most abductees, I started to focus on the positive aspects of my current living situation. I had a roof over my head, didn't I? Other people certainly had problems with their roommates too, didn't they? Numerous scientific studies have proven that humans can get used to just about anything as long as they maintain proper perspective, right?

By now Jayhole had started to ask me to do him an occasional favor. Doing his laundry or helping him steal a Labradoodle from his ex-girlfriend's yard. That kind of thing. I did these favors without asking too many questions because Jayhole asked me not to ask too many questions as a personal favor to him.

One day Jayhole asked me to run to the liquor store to get him a
case of beer. When I got back with the beer, Jayhole wasn't home and there was a strange man passed out on our kitchen floor. The man's long black beard was knotted around our radiator. Besides being beardtied to our radiator, there was a balled tube sock stuffed into the man's mouth and his hair had been cut in an unflattering way. The word “SHIT” had been written in capital letters on his forehead.

“Did Jayhole do this to you?” I asked the man. “Are you another one of his jokes?”

The man removed the tube sock from his mouth.

“I'm looking for my wife,” he told me.

The man was about my age and I could tell from the tone of his voice he was very tired of saying this particular sentence. I could tell that he'd said it too many times and now he wanted to say something different or better. The man tried to struggle to his feet. I warned him to stay down, but he got halfway up before the skin on his face pulled taut and he made a sound that reminded me of when Jayhole and I were down by the river and Jayhole kept hitting that muskrat over and over with that golf club.

“You're beardtied,” I explained to him. “You're beardtied good.”

The man slumped back down to the kitchen floor. I noticed he had a tattoo of a Jesus fish on his left arm. His fish had claw marks on it though, like he'd tried to scratch it away. I wanted to tell him about how Jayhole had recently beardtied me to the handle of his van, about how I had learned my lesson about beards. I wanted to tell the man that while the finely trimmed goatee I now wore might look dapper and sophisticated, it was mostly for safety.

The man was jerking his head back and forth to see if he could pull himself free, but this was useless; his beard was really knotted, he was wasting his energy. I handed him my pocketknife.

“It's the only way,” I said.

The man's beard was a thoughtful beard, something you could
tell he took great pride in. It wasn't something that had occurred because of laziness or because he'd lost a bet on a college football game. He tried to get his fingernail inside the knot, but that was not going to work either.

The man soon stopped pulling. Then he picked up my knife and started to saw. When he'd finished, I handed him a beer. He gulped it down. His beard was a jagged mess now, totally ruined. I could see the wheels turning in his head. It was starting to come back to him, how he'd arrived here, who'd done this horrible injustice. I was expecting him to yell out Jayhole's name, but instead he shook his fist and yelled, “Caruso!”

T
he man's name was Harley. He said he'd driven here to win his wife Erica back from Caruso but then Caruso had jumped him from behind and bonked him on the head with a lead pipe or a baseball bat, he did not know which.

As we talked, I heard the front door open and Jayhole walked into the kitchen.

“This looks like a fun time,” he said, noting the knot of beard around the radiator. “This looks like a fun time indeed.”

I popped open a beer for Jayhole, explained how I'd thought that Harley was one of his practical jokes, but then found out that Caruso was responsible.

“Christ,” Jayhole said. “Beardtying is my move. Isn't anything sacred anymore?”

Harley pulled out a worn picture of Erica from his wallet and pushed it across the kitchen table. In the picture, she was wearing a skirt. She had incredibly curvy calves, calves that I could only think about running my tongue, slowly, up and down, over and over again. I'd long imagined finding a woman who would let me do this to her body without charging me premium prices, but I hadn't found one yet.

While we sat there, we heard Caruso start to tromp around above us. The overhead light rattled and the dishes in our kitchen cabinets bumped together. The saltshaker on the table tipped over.

“Is he jumping rope up there?” Harley asked. “Or doing step aerobics?”

“That's just his normal walking,” I explained.

“That's incredibly noisy normal walking,” Harley said.

Jayhole took off his boot and chucked it at the ceiling, but that didn't do anything to make Caruso stop. Soon Jayhole stormed out to the garage. When he came back he was holding a chainsaw.

“What's that for?” I asked, but Jayhole didn't answer me. He walked into my room and climbed up on top of my bed. He started up the chainsaw. As he revved the engine, my room filled with blue smoke. Harley and I moved under the doorjamb and watched as Jayhole shoved the chainsaw into my ceiling. Chunks of plaster and wood rained down onto my jewelry table and bedroom floor. When the dust finally cleared, there was a hole in my ceiling. Caruso's head quickly popped through it.

“What in the fuck?” he yelled down. “Are you crazy?”

“The girl comes down here now,” Jayhole yelled up.

“No, no, no,” Caruso said. “No way in hell. The girl stays put.”

“This here is her husband,” Jayhole said, motioning to Harley. “And he wants to talk to her.”

Caruso's head disappeared and I heard him discussing the situation with Erica. Before this, whenever I'd climbed up on my bed to eavesdrop on them everything was muffled. I couldn't hear their conversations clearly and I could never tell if they were moaning in pain or moaning sexually. The hole in the ceiling made the acoustics wonderful; you could hear everything they were saying like they were whispering it right into your ear.

“You stay here,” Erica said to Caruso. “I'll handle this.”

Erica walked down the front stairs and into my room. Her hair
was ratty and her face was so-so, but her calves looked even more buxom in real life than in the picture Harley had shown us. At first she held out her arms to Harley like she was going to give him a hug, but when he stepped closer, she clocked him. It was a good punch and Harley fell to the ground.

“We're done,” she yelled down at him. “We're finished. I've told you that a hundred times already, but I guess you needed to hear it again?”

Erica stormed upstairs. I knelt down next to Harley. There was a small river of blood sliding out of his mouth and down into the neck of his sweater. His eye was swollen and the word on his forehead was smudged. You could still make out the “S” and the “H” pretty well, but the “I” and the “T” were really hard to read.

III

T
he next morning I found that Caruso had covered the hole in my ceiling with an area rug. Unfortunately, whenever he or Erica walked around upstairs plaster dust rained into my room. I wiped things down constantly, but there always seemed to be a new layer of dust covering everything. While I wiped down my mini fridge, there was a knock on the door. When I opened it I found Harley standing there.