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  “Even if he was, I can’t believe any program would want electroshock as a sponsor.”

  “Right you are. None did. The fucker’s check bounced, too. He tried to pay me off in Ultrams, these non-opiate painkillers they sell online, which actually are opiates, just really shitty ones, so I just took his car. Bent fuck like that, he’s not going to go to the authorities.”

  When we were done paramilitarizing our friend in law enforcement, Nora tapped me on the shoulder, and when I turned just clamped her hands on my shoulders and her mouth on my lips. Pressing hard. I was so far from thinking about sex at that moment . . . but at the same time, in a room with Nora, I was never not thinking about sex.

  I had kind of killed for this woman. Not kind of—who am I kidding?—I’d offed a man in a public toilet. (Looks good on any résumé.) And now we were in a room where the only panting was coming from a riot-geared nude law enforcer.

  But what did I know? Once again, I wanted to say something, that I’d seen the wrong name on the cop’s driver’s license. But before I could, there was that clamp action. Mouth to mouth. I needed to say something anyway. It was eating at me.

  “Nora, listen . . .” The words jerked up hot in my throat and out of my mouth. Projectile verbiage. “We need to talk.” How many times had I heard that from a woman and cringed? (Whether in real life or on film, it’s never good.) An Obama bobblehead by the bed looked at me like it knew everything. A judgmental bobblehead.

  “Throw me down,” Nora croaked.

  “What?” (You never know when lust will strike. It’s like epilepsy.)

  “Throw you down where? Here?”

  By way of answer, Nora yanked her T-shirt over her head. She raised her arms, exposing half-moons of sweat. For some reason I had to fight the urge to jam my face in her armpit. Good fucking God, was everything a drug when you didn’t have drugs? I wanted to breathe her fumes like they were carbon monoxide coming out of a ’73 Camaro and I was in a garage trying to off myself. In a good way. Sometimes—and I don’t know why this is—you can be strung out like the proverbial lab rat, and not have heroin for a while, and not even notice. Then, just when you think you’re out of the woods, you get the first twinges, the first skrank in the back of your neck. The first judder in the bowels. At which point you’d shoot shoe polish in your eyes, if it brought relief—or plunge your face into the armpit of a woman you were insanely crazy about. Just because you could. And it might block out the looming pain. Don’t ask me to make sense. It was all just happening.

  “Come on, damn it!”

  Nora stripped fast, inches in front of me. I kept glancing over her bony shoulder at the pie-eyed “policeman” on the bed. He’d graduated from grasps to grunts. The ascent of man. I didn’t want to look at him. I didn’t want to think about him. Mostly I didn’t want to inhale him. He’d had some kind of release. (Did I mention this already? It’s not something you forget.) It smelled like he’d shit beef starch—another reason I took the Nora underarm plunge. I’d never done one before. (I’ve since learned it’s a “Euro thing.” Your Euros love their odors.) But at that moment, surrounded by heinous sensory input, my face did my thinking for me. The last image to scrape my eyeballs was my own mouth, open wide, like a thirsty dog’s, reflected in the black Plexiglas of the deputy’s riot helmet. Then blackness. Not damp, dank, pungent blackness, like you might expect. More air freshenery. Aluminum-silicate dry and deodorized, chemically floral blackness. Not that Nora was particularly hygienic, but she used five deodorants, all packed—in retrospect—with enough aluminum to make her brain crunchy. (I’d seen on the Discovery Channel how, when they did autopsies on the brains of dementia sufferers, the scalpel literally scraped metal aluminum bits. Cerebral fallout from a lifetime of Reynolds Wrap, aluminum pots and pans, and the aforementioned super-dry deodorants. They might have had crunch-brain, but damn it, they smelled like Glade!)

  Nora grabbed me by an ear and yanked my head out of her pit.

  I raised my eyes and saw she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring past me, at the mirror, while the policeman quivered sporadically.

  She squeezed my ear in one hand while the other snaked between her legs. What I saw, when I think about it, stuns me to this day. But wait . . .

  That boyish waist, those enormous breasts, her pale, blue-veined sweat-shiny eggshell skin, and that one double nipple-ringed nipple. Why two-in-one? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. I still wanted to ask about the German shepherd ink, too. The daddy thing. But not now. Never now.

  Our captive stayed propped up, limp, against the bare double mattress. Over the blond pouf of her wig my eyes caught his. His look of dumb animal pain hit me like some strange passion-accelerant. I grabbed Nora and half pushed, half fell over the scrote-scorched victim, onto the bed above him.

  With her left hand, just the forefinger, Nora tugged up the top of her slit, exposing a purply clitoris so large I wondered if she might be a hermaphrodite. It was shocking, hot, and National Geographic–worthy all at once. With her right hand, she began slapping the marshmallowy protuberance, as if it had disobeyed her, accompanying each smack with a moan so stark and personal I felt like I was eavesdropping.

  To keep my skull from imploding, I stared away from Nora, to the law enforcer. His Plexiglas visor was raised, and as I locked into his cowlike eyes, I felt myself flooded with a weird affection. Not just for him, but for the squawking grackles outside, for the irritating one-song warble of the ice cream truck, for the whorls in the bedroom wood, which formed eyeballs that regarded me like they knew things . . . Just wanting Nora—wanting something that wasn’t a drug—was such a novelty, such a world-changingly unlikely circumstance, I was afraid to breathe for fear it would all turn out to be some near-death hallucination. (A junkie, on some level, lives his whole life as a near-death experience.) But I looked again, and it was real.

  Biting her lip, Nora stopped slapping herself and grabbed my hand, exposing herself completely, using me to rub her slick SeaWorld clitoris. When she mumbled, I knew she wasn’t speaking to me, and I didn’t care. I don’t even know how I ended up inside her. Somehow I just was. Only—how to say this?—it did not feel like fucking so much as swimming. I’d never encountered a hole so capacious. She began touching herself again, yanking her sex upward, squeezing her yawning slit tight as she alternately thrummed her circus clit and tugged it with abandon. When I started to actually move, she whispered huskily, “Don’t!” She just wanted me to hold still while she worked herself around and above me, her intensity and focus more beautifully obscene than whatever frantic faster-harder I’d imagined. Just holding there, not moving at all, scorched me more than anything in my life. And when I thought I couldn’t get harder, Nora let go of herself, rubbed her sex-soaked hand in my face, smelling faintly of dirty soy sauce and iron, then reared back and, with no warning whatsoever, reached past me and backhanded the semicomatose cop across the face. And did it again. We went from zero to cop-smacking and fucking at the same time. The whole thing—I don’t know if it even counted as sex. It was some other dimension, I sensed, that could have gone on with me or without me. I was along for the ride. Which, had I had an ego, might have stung it. But ego was gone. There was a sizzling in the back of my skull. Until, in a voice that might have belonged to a talking animal, Nora screamed, “Yes-s-s! . . .” and the officer, or whoever he was, made a noise like a man swallowing a can opener, pitched forward, spat blood on both of us, and died.

  After that, things got strange.

  Book Four

  In my fits of optimism, I remind myself that my life has been a hell, my hell, a hell to my taste.

  E. M. CIORAN

  TWENTY-SIX

  Mrs. Santa Claus Has This to Say About Fellatio

  “We love death!” was the first thing that Beatrice Ender, the executive in charge of CSI Vegas said to me. “But it has to be creative!”

  She certainly had a
creative beehive—the likes of which I hadn’t seen since my days as a young pornster in the Hustler mailroom, where Ohio blue hairs stuffed dildos into plain brown boxes for shipment to eager consumers. (Neighbor ladies, where I grew up, used to say, “Guess who just got their hair did!”) Combined with a largish frame, apple cheeks, and contagious good humor, her do also made her a ringer for Edie the Egg Lady from Pink Flamingos. Except, of course, that Bea wore a smart pantsuit, sat at a desk, and probably banked a million a year, while Edie occupied a playpen in nothing more than fat-biting girdle and triple-F brassiere, and lived for her eggies.

  Thanks, apparently, to Harold’s ridiculous restless-knee buildup, I was invited to make the drive up the 5 to Santa Clarita Studios. Nora insisted she wanted to come with. We didn’t talk much on the way up. Instead, we listened to Rush Limbaugh, with whom she was slightly obsessed. “I mean, dope fiends used to be cool, right? Lenny fucking Bruce? Billie fucking Holiday? Chet? Keith? Bela Lugosi? Lassie?”

  “Lassie?”

  “You didn’t know? The poor pup needed a bang of cortisone, coke, and morphine before every show. She was like a little Judy Garland. After two seasons she OD’d and they had to get a different collie. But fucking Limbaugh?” She sighed and sniffed. Wiped her nose. Somebody needed her medicine. “That douche bag should have his junkie license revoked.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “What? You like Rush? You’re a dittohead?”

  “No, I mean about Lassie.”

  “Fuck yeah. You ever hear of the Tour de France? In the fifties, before Lance Armstrong and doping and all that crap, there was even a popular needle cocktail for American riders called la Lassie. The recipe showed up in all the gossip magazines.”

  When we arrived on the Santa Clarita lot, Nora announced that the air smelled like fat lady’s feet. When I didn’t respond—what was there to say?—she added, defensively, that she wasn’t being “sizeist,” she just knew the smell, because her grandmother used to beat her with her Indian moccasin, then shove it in her mouth for “sassing off.” “Tasted like White Shoulders and cat piss.”

  “Nice.”

  I have to admit, I was relieved when Nora said she’d wait in the car while I went about my business. “I’ve got AC and my book,” she said, holding up her copy of Phoolan Devi, Bandit Queen of India. Her new heroine.

  Minutes later I was ushered in to meet Beatrice by a fawning intern in a plaid wool shirt with Necco-Wafer-sized tribal earholes. Leaving Nora sitting there left me with a mild tingle of dread, but I had other concerns. Even though he had insisted, had sworn up and down, I still felt compelled to ask Harold, the last time I saw him upright (Mexican tar takes a toll), if I could really talk up the jiggly leg syndrome, if he had really laid some track. He’d be pissed about the car, but a balloon of chiba would make him un-pissed pretty fast.

  I hardly felt comfortable claiming credit for an entire disease financed and generated by Big Pharma. Then again, this was show business, and credit was a malleable concept. Somehow, having a disease under your belt felt like a real plus, CSI-wise, even if it wasn’t one that couldn’t actually kill you—unless you restlessly kicked somebody who kicked you back, perhaps in the throat, crushing your larynx and impeding your ability to breathe until you died writhing on the linoleum like a goldfish plucked out of the bowl and dropped by a sadistic five-year-old. Harold, who claimed he knew the ins and outs of the TV world—due to some sketchy service in the consultant trenches, and of course his Bruckheimer connect—suggested I go even further. Harold suggested I bring up my fetish days. Back in the dawn of the 1-900 era, I had a gig as fetish wrangler, cooking up come-on ads to entice men to shell out for phone sex. (Two dollars for the first two minutes, five dollars every minute after.) The numbers were part of the draw. 1-900-NUN-LOVE, etc. . . . Creativity will not be thwarted!

  People in the business, Harold swore, loved to be in a room with somebody who’d actually done something, somebody who’d “been there,” somebody “real,” somebody who’d even sat next to somebody real. For a while, in the nineties, writers started getting fake jail tattoos. Spiderwebbed elbows, inked-on teardrops, a broken line around the neck with “CUT HERE” Gothed in beneath. Nothing better, in a meeting, then being able to say you’d been “down.” Everything that would have screwed you for a job as bank teller could get you hired on a show.)

  Much to my surprise, Harold was kind of right. The friendly exec producer and I hit it off. During the interview, Bea was fascinated by my past. In spite of myself, I went on to tell her about my stint doing “erotic” copy, banging out fake sex letters for Penthouse Forum: Dear Penthouse, One day, when my girlfriend and I were hiking, my face got stuck in a chain-link fence and my pants came off. Next thing I know, Cathy picked up this long stick . . . and so on.

  Porn and mayhem were subjects Bea warmed to. At first it was strange, say, talking vaginal chainsaw crimes with this sweet, rosy-cheeked older lady. Before our chat, I had no idea how sexist—or classist—I apparently was. But why shouldn’t Mrs. Claus be able to chat about fellatio?

  “What does it say,” Beatrice wondered, after we’d polished off a pot of green tea and a tray of chocolate rugelach,“that our entertainment is so murder-centric? Murder is our prime-time porn. What you were doing was no different than what we do—just a matter of adjectives. There has to be a story, of course. But the dirty little secret is, people love seeing other people die. Blood spatter is the new money shot. That’s why Dexter is so hot. I mean, we always react with horror to the idea of Aztecs killing a virgin, slicing her heart out, and offering it to the gods, but what do we do, show after show? We just have more advanced technology—and different gods—but that’s not necessarily progress.”

  What could I do but agree? The great thing about heroin is that it’s a great enthusiasm generator. So that, when Bea leaned forward over her desk, revealing her ample senior gal cleavage, and asked if I had any “special experiences, stuff that might make a good episode,” I didn’t hesitate. I said, “You bet!” I said, “Absolutely!” I said,” I’ve got a ton of shit!”

  “Good shit?” I think it tickled her, talking this way.

  “Well,” I said, excited myself to hear what was going to come out of my mouth next, “how about Adult Babies?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know, infantilism.” It was her resemblance to Edie the Egg Lady that inspired the idea, but I thought it better not to mention it. I adored Edie, but people are funny about comparisons. I once had a girlfriend who told me I reminded her of Michael Richards. I could not have sex with her after that. I kept waiting for her to scream out “Oh, Kramer!” or “Fuck me, Kramer!” Or, as Marlon Brando claimed Ronald Reagan pleaded just before their first tryst (using a different name, of course), “Come on, Kramer, just put it in an inch!”

  So I didn’t mention Edie. But I did find myself, at ten in the morning in the thrumming heart of CSI headquarters, expounding on the finer points of manpers, big-boy pacifiers, and milk-play to a woman of a certain age I’d barely known for half an hour. But already wished could have been my mother.

  It was the milk-play that got to Bea. She seemed to want to press me, literally, and—after the rugelach ran out and she had the tribal-eared intern haul in some bear claws—suggested we move to a couch. Bea kept eating, crumbs kept getting stuck to her lip gloss, and I kept sweating in that acrid way you sweat when panic—however distant, however benevolent—begins to take over. It was hard to imagine that she was being flirty. I chose to believe that her chief interest indeed was a potential episode subject. Despite the way our thighs touched on the couch. We were so close I could actually feel Bea’s heat. Which had me sweating on the left side of my body, underneath the sheen of panic sweat already there. It occurred to me that I was perspiring in two distinct emotional flavors. And I wondered if maybe Grissom could solve a crime with sweat-taste.

  Thankfull
y, my potential employer interrupted my bad idea. “So, you’ve had some experience, have you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What we need are details, dear.”

  “Well,” I began, keeping my eyes fixed on a photo of Billy Petersen that was glaring down from the wall as if to say, Where else could you be paid to be creepy? “There are men who like to be nursed, usually powerful, important types. Their thing is finding women who can, you know, put them in diapers, spank their bottom, breast feed them.”

  “Breast feed?”

  I explained, as best I could. “You’ve got your drinkers and your stinkers.”

  Bea’s eyes shone, a little glazed. Surely I hallucinated that she had licked the shiny nub of her bear claw before she nibbled it. “Ooh, this is good. Do tell.”

  “Well, not to get too technical, your drinker’s focus is up top. Mommy’s milk. They, you know, suckle. Your stinkers prefer when Mommy goes south. They make a mess, Mommy changes their diaper.”

  “So . . . they could find a grown man, in a diaper . . .”

  “With diaper rash,” I threw in, and thought she was going to wet the couch cushion. Bea pressed a button I didn’t even see. Tribal Ears padded back in. Stopped in the doorway and snuck a look at me. “Andy, get everybody in here.” When Andy padded back out, Bea eased sideways a little more on the sofa. “Lloyd, I think we may have got something delicious here.”