Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon (19 page)

“She told—” I began, but the doctor wasn’t about to hear it.

“I don’t care who told you to do it. Your entire thumb may become gangrenous and you know how we treat gangrene?”

“Maggots.”

“Maggots.” The doctor nodded.

Lindsay smiled at me, her rotten teeth studded with M&M’s and pieces of peanut.

“Maggots, nigger!” she exclaimed.

Separation and Reunification

Over the years I had many more uniformly unpleasant adventures involving Lindsay Dawn Riley. I was injured multiple times, sexually assaulted, and I drank bleach to escape from her house during one particularly dark period in my life.

It seemed impossible for me to escape her clutches, until an incident in September 1999 that involved a faked death, being chased through a graveyard, and having my skull fractured by a malfunctioning model rocket. The incident, of course, involved Lindsay Dawn Riley, yet in the aftermath of the incident she disappeared.

I remained in contact with Todd, but when I called him even he admitted he had neither seen nor heard from Lindsay Dawn Riley. It was a real surprise considering Todd’s hobby was listening to the police scanner and Lindsay’s hobby was being the main character of whatever story the police scanner was telling.

After eight years and no sign of Lindsay, I had written her off. I was still in contact with Todd, so I still visited Tucson occasionally, yet neither of us had any information about Lindsay or her whereabouts.

Lindsay had certainly changed me. I was more willing to get drunk in strange places and bite people in a fistfight. I no longer feared death, because whatever primordial rudeness Lindsay Dawn Riley embodied was much worse than the reaper.

There’s no pretending I could forget her. You don’t forget someone like Lindsay. But I had just about lost track of the way she smelled. Sort of a hot garbage smell, only half drowned in a perfume discontinued in the ’90s because it contained radium. That rotting meat rubbed with orange peels smell of Lindsay Dawn Riley was just about gone.

I was in Tucson in October 2007 for a possible wedding. There was an engagement, there were reservations made at a chapel, there were dresses, and tuxes, and invitations. Unfortunately, the bride and groom had never met. At the last minute the groom mysteriously grew some balls and decided he had to meet his dream girl before the wedding. Just to be sure.

“You have to meet her before you go through with this,” I shouted at Todd over the phone. “If you’re not going to then I want you to do me a different favor. Think of all the stupid, fucked up things you have done in your life. Go through them all. Make a nice list. Then get ready to add marrying your fucking women’s prison pen pal without meeting her in advance to that list.”

Todd hung up the phone on me, but he came around. He always does.

“You’ve gotta be here for it,” he said. “I need the moral support.”

“You’re such a fucking little baby girl,” I complained, but I knew I would be there for him.

I’m always there for little baby Toddina in her little baby dress.

I hopped a red eye from Chicago to Tucson. I packed light, like they teach you in the SAS handbook. Who needs a suitcase full of a bunch of bullshit when you can kill a deer with your bare hands and turn its skin into an all-weather shelter? Not me, that’s for sure.

“Open your luggage…whoa, holy shit that’s empty,” the TSA screeners would no doubt declare upon seeing four articles of clothing and a toothbrush.

And I never even bothered to tell those simpletons that I could have killed them all in ten seconds with that toothbrush. Luckily, terrorists don’t have the SAS handbook. That’s reserved for SAS dudes and also bad-asses who use the Internet to download the PDF from the right website.

My flight was uneventful. Tucson was hot, dry, and ugly like a lopsided coffee mug fresh out of a grade school kiln. I didn’t even need to improvise an SAS sextant to find Todd’s apartment. I knew the way.

“What the fuck is up!?” I shouted when Todd answered his door.

He looked older, less hairy. Like David Bowie if David Bowie had a bunch of scars from weird skin infections and suicide attempts.

“Rita is getting out in two hours,” Todd said. “I am nervous as fuck.”

“Don’t be, bro,” I said. “What do you have to be nervous about? You totally know how to live on the outside without resorting to cutting up a bitch’s face with a razor in the shower. You even buy some of your own clothes. Think about Rita. She’s more afraid of us than we are of her.”

“That’s what they say about tigers, and tigers fuck people up all the time,” Todd countered.

“Sometimes,” I agreed, “but overall, who is winning? Us or tigers?”

“Us.” Todd had to agree.

“Exactly,” I replied.

“Hey, come in,” he said, finally realizing that he left me standing on his doorstep like some asshole kid trying to sell tins of popcorn you don’t even get until like six weeks later because everybody loves to plan more than a month in advance for a snack food.

I mean shit, what the hell are the Boy Scouts thinking still pushing all that crappy popcorn? The Girl Scouts at least have a product with those cookies. Something to look forward to when you make an order. Some Samoans and Thin Mints.

But in this day and age of instant gratification and a shitload of food that tastes better than air-popped bullshit, what kind of lame dickhead is going to be all excited about getting that tin of popcorn? Who even notices a qualitative difference in popcorn? I eat it like once a year outside of a movie theater and it’s always worse than the popcorn at the movie theater. Always.

Boy Scouts are bitches. Tell them I said that shit; I don’t give any fuck. What are they going to do, be cheerful and thrifty? Slit my throat with citizenship badges?

Todd allowed me into his surprisingly well-stacked and non-death-smelling domicile. It appeared he finally plucked all of the dead June bugs out that were tangled up in his shag carpet the last time I was there. I still saw a few wing casings, but you had to really be looking for dead June bug parts to spot them.

“So let’s see the pictures,” I said.

Todd grinned and I followed him to his computer. The first picture was just the lame poorly lit Polaroid from the prison pen pals website. Rita looked okay, but the flash made her look extra pale and evil. Although she might have been pale and evil anyway on account of her being in prison for nineteen years charged with nine counts of felony arson. She burned down a bunch of schools and churches at night.

“Oh, damn,” I exclaimed when he brought up the next picture. “That is crazy.”

The rest of the pictures were photographs of Rita shoving various objects into her vagina. Nearly all of them were extreme closeups of said vagina being stuffed full of the aforementioned various objects.

“Holy shit, that girl is crazy,” I remarked at her scandalous poses with huge ass telephones betwixt her nether-loins and also up her bootyhole.

“Is that her bootyhole?” I inquired.

“That’s her vagina, too,” Todd explained. “Just a different part.”

“I am really looking forward to meeting her,” I said. “Yo, do you think she will want to be into some crazy prison scene? Like will she want to choke you and stick pens up your dickhole?”

Todd just stared at me.

“Hey, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to besmirch the name of yon maiden fair, but I just looked at seventy-five pictures of that bitch’s crazy-ass hooch.”

“I knew I shouldn’t have opened up to you,” Todd complained, and turned the computer off.

He was right, he shouldn’t have, but that was no excuse for my bad behavior. Something had come over me. Some rude strain had infested my brain. It was almost as if I was being haunted by…no…it couldn’t be.

“Yo, I think I am possessed by Lindsay Dawn Riley,” I said. “Before we do shit, I need to get an exorcism.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘yo’?”

“Yo, I don’t know, I think there are some specters or some shit up inside my mind.”

“You are not possessed,” Todd said. “You’ll be fine. It’s just jet lag. Or something. Take a nap.”

Against my better judgment I drank half a bottle of Nyquil and stretched out on Todd’s couch that made crunching sounds and smelled like a birthday cake. I fell asleep almost instantly and dreamed of Lindsay Dawn Riley. Her rough features were beautiful, her bulging grotesquery was like the rapturous curves of that one broad with the ass from the Internet.

You know who I mean. The one who for a long time she was just pictures of an ass and then
Playboy
got her to pose and her face looked like an old goat with highlights in its hair. Vitamin Guerrero or some shit.

In my dream Lindsay was like an angel. And she was calling to me, saying, “I’m in the jail. You’ve got to save me. Save me, you’re my only hope.”

And then I woke up and Todd was in a tuxedo poking me in the face.

“Yo, I just had the craziest dream,” I shouted.

“You’re still doing it,” he observed.

“Man, fuck you and your noticing things bullshit. I am talking about some important shit here. Not some trivial shit like a wedding to some crazy broad that burns churches.”

“Hey!”

“Hay is for horses, motherfucker. Let’s roll.”

And roll we did, once we were able to find a taxi willing to drive us out to the prison. We arrived at the prison and Todd was allowed in right away because of some shit about scheduling a conjugal visit for marriage or something. Yet, due to a snafu and red tapes I was not being permitted inside the premises.

“Let me see the warden,” I told the guard dude who was hassling my shit.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said.

“This is bullshit,” I informed him. “I am an Iraqi Freedom veteran. I didn’t die face down in the sands of Iraq just so some dude in a brown shirt could tell me I wasn’t allowed to exercise my Constitutional rights inside a prison.”

“What unit were you with?” the guard asked. “I was stationed in Baqubah.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I heard about you guys. Bunch of chode-pullers. I was part of Commando Alpha One. Yep. We were the guys who captured Saddam. You know that picture of Saddam? I’m the dude. That’s me with the swirly face.”

“Oh shit, let me put you through to the warden.” He pressed a bunch of buttons while staring at me like a dickhead because he was just faking pressing buttons.

“Real funny, why don’t you station yourself back the fuck up out of my way so I can get in there and help my number one dude with his wedding. Or if you want I can make a sextant out of some pipe cleaners and rip your ass up with it. Got a preference?”

This dude wasn’t budging. I thought about using some of my moves to disarm and disable him, but there were a bunch of other guard dudes with shotguns walking around. Somehow they knew my weakness to shotguns, the one type of bullet that is impossible for me to dodge.

I waited for the next fifteen minutes, desperately wondering what was going on with Todd and Rita in the prison. Knowing Todd, he was getting mauled by some skinks or some sort of weird shit that crawled up out of a drainpipe.

I was about to bust out those SAS moves anyway when suddenly in walks the warden.

“Warden,” I shouted. “Can I talk with you for a minute?”

“Sure, what the fuck is up?” He said something like that.

“Hey, look, bro. I know your job is to lock up all these ladies, but check this out. I had this really vivid dream last night and there was this woman I knew in the dream and she was begging me to come bust her out of prison. Do you think I could come in and bust her out?”

“Well, we don’t normally allow breakouts,” the warden said, and my heart sank. “But your story has moved me deeply so come with me.”

I pumped my fist in excitement and flipped a super hard bird at the guard guy as I walked past him with the warden. He couldn’t even begin to comprehend the degrees of ownage I was bestowing, so he looked away. I am pretty sure I saw some tears. At least some of them welling up.

Me and the warden walked along a walkway that went over the deep pit where all the women prisoners were kept in triple-max security and we entered the warden’s control room. He had all these monitors showing all parts of the prison, including the cells and even the showers.

“Oh, hell yes,” I said, noticing some women showering. “You can just watch them shower whenever?”

“Rules, don’t it?” the warden said, and then he busted out this big computer keyboard. “Okay, so what the fuck sort of name is it?”

“Lindsay Dawn Riley,” I said.

The warden punched in the buttons on the keyboard and her name came up and then it said
SEARCHING
…and there was a magnifying glass looking at folders on the screen. Suddenly, Lindsay’s picture popped up on the screen. She was an inmate!

“Yo, she’s here!” I exclaimed. “I gotta bust her out.”

The warden shook his head sadly.

“I’m afraid not, my friend,” he said. “Look at what it says right here.”

He pointed at the big screen.

“Yo, she is diseased?” I asked.

“No, deceased,” the warden corrected. “She is dead.”

I felt the “yo” die before it left my lips. I had no rational response to the realization that this woman who I thought was invincible, was eternal, died of liver cancer in a shitty Tucson jail.

“How long ago?” I asked.

“She died in the infirmary about three months back,” said the warden. “I’m so sorry.”

“She was supposed to be alive,” I said.

The warden tried to comfort me as best as he could, but it was no use. Dejected, I followed a guard out and back to the main entrance. Todd was waiting there, a ring on his finger and a smile on his face.

“I’m married!” he shouted.

“Congratulations, man.” I gave him a heartfelt hug, my gloved hand clicking as I squeezed the nape of his neck.

I couldn’t feign being fine.

“Did you find Lindsay?” he asked, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Is she still here?” He looked around as if he would see her trundling around a corner. “Are we going to get her out?”