Kamikaze Lust Read online

  REPORTER ON STRIKE KILLS AUNT

  Brooklyn, New York—Rachel Silver, a midlevel reporter at The City News before the Newspaper

  Guild went on strike last fall, was arraigned in State Supreme Court this morning after administering the suicide of her aunt, Lorraine Slivowitz.

  Although the family had been consulting with Milford P. Kaminsky, it is unclear whether the Master of Self-Deliverance was present at the time of death….

  Freddy mewed a few times before scratching hard at my knee cap. “Stop it or I’ll call the ASPCA and have them put you to sleep!”

  She backed away, and I felt awful, threatening her with euthanasia. I was so guilty I fed her an entire can of fishy wet food, and a bowl of crunchies. I watched her speckled stomach expand, her teeth clinking in kitty ecstasy against the glass bowl. She was too damn easy to please.

  Back at my desk, I dug up the Ziploc bag of microcassette tapes containing the Alexis Calyx sessions. I hadn’t transcribed one of them, perhaps knowing all along what I would find: that though I’d accepted the responsibility of deconstructing her life, it was she who’d done the deconstruction job on me.

  Silver was recently fired from her second job as ghostwriter for Alexis Calyx, the erstwhile X -rated film star who has since become a producer of adult films herself. “I should have known better,” Calyx said. “It’s always those frigid types you have to worry about.…”

  I dropped the bag of microcassettes to the floor and jumped on top of it, crushing the plastic with my platform boots, smashing the tapes beyond use. My apartment suddenly stifling, I ripped off my sweater and threw it to the ground. It landed next to the pile of videotapes Alexis had given me, all of those fucking porno films. I stepped up to them, hoisted my leg back, and kicked the pile with full force, kicking and kicking until the videos covered the floor and I felt queasy for ever taking pleasure in them. Like a bulimic perusing her half-eaten packages of potato chips, pretzels, organic wheat sticks, fat-free Devil Dogs, her empty Dominos boxes, I needed to purge.

  Into the kitchen I marched and grabbed the sharpest of my nonsharpening butcher knives. I took an old Alexis Calyx tape and forced the knife into its rigid white holes, the vagina dentata, stabbing until the black plastic cracked and the shiny brown tape came rolling out. I punctured another tape, watching on the wall the chiaroscuro of my arm rising and falling with the knife, and thinking myself a murderer. My limbs were buried in endless curls of videotape: dead movies. But I kept up the slaughter, finding my way toward X-posure, the movie that had so inextricably bonded me to Shade.

  Silver, too, was involved in a lesbian love triangle with fellow News reporter Teesha Marie Simpson and biker chick Tina—

  who was a bitch, a motherfucker, a cunt; I hated her!

  This stuff of supermarket tabloids set off my rubber band ball. I slammed the knife into the video and didn’t stop until I was surrounded by plastic fragments like pieces of glass from a smashed window after a car wreck. The few nicks in my skin throbbed, but it still wasn’t enough.

  I opened my underwear drawer and removed the pop-gun, its pathetic cork flaccid, dangling. I snipped the string and the cork bounced to the floor. Into my mind floated the beginning of every Hebrew prayer I’d tried to forget: Baruch atah adonoi…pressure walled behind my eyes. I cut into the wood, determined to saw the whole thing off with a nonsharpening knife, a process that became as cumbersome as felling a Redwood. I found a hammer and banged until the shaft weakened into thin splints. I broke off each one individually. Nothing was left of the toy but its yellow handle. A half moon in my trembling palm.

  The telephone rang. I plucked a few splinters from my fingers waiting on the message that eventually ushered in RR’s voice. Always, a third party waiting in the wings, always another triangle. I picked up as he was about to sign off. “What do you want?”

  “Fine, thanks, and yourself?”

  “Alexis fired me,” I said, video refuse collecting at my feet as I trudged in circles.

  “Like everyone in New York didn’t see that coming. You’re too much like her.”

  “She said the same thing a few weeks ago, I just don’t see it.”

  “The question is: are you a good bitch or a bad bitch?”

  “I’m hanging up.”

  “Okay, I’ll be right there.”

  “Where?”

  “Your apartment.”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t want to see you, I don’t even like you.”

  “That’s not important. We can go someplace, have a little fun.”

  I stopped pacing, sat down on the floor. “You want to have fun?”

  “Yeah.”

  “With me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What makes you think I’m any fun? Do I seem like a funloving person?”

  He laughed so I laughed, as relieved by the banter as I’d been earlier, happening upon that strategically placed parking garage. But my apartment was a mess, the kind of burglarized chic that followed a search for top-secret documents in spy movies: drawers hanging open, mountains of loose videotape, shards of black plastic everywhere, not to mention the wood shavings from my castrated pop-gun. No way was he coming over here.

  “All right, I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  “Just don’t forget your toothbrush,” he said.

  Hanging up, I found myself lying on a bed of videotape. As if it were a religious ceremony, I collected a few pieces of tape in my fists and hurled them at the ceiling, laughing maniacally as the room drizzled with celluloid.

  The films were mere training videos. I could be more Silver Ray than Rachel Silver, I even had the porn star’s shaved pussy. Alexis had seen the transformation brewing; Shade, though intrigued, had tried to run from it; but RR all along had been waiting for this very moment.

  I got up, went into the bathroom, and opened my medicine chest. Beneath the shelves, rust blistered into trails of desiccated tears. I removed my toothbrush, its splayed bristles reminding me of Shade, the week we’d shared just about everything in this apartment. My eyes oceaned over, and I knew I had to toss it. Silver Ray needed her own toothbrush.

  OH, LITTLE PLAYMATE

  It was 2:10 a.m. in New York, 11:10 p.m. in Las Vegas when I gave up time. I was groggy-eyed and claustrophobic; ready to disembark at McCarran Airport. From the runway, I could see the cityscape glimmering like the rhinestones on one of Aunt Lorraine’s sweatshirts. I thought of her lying in bed at home, that smell of her room that drove Mom crazy. Dying stinks like an airplane bathroom.

  I wanted to turn around. Forgo the distant lights that kindled my amusement-park anxiety: the heart palpitations and head-spins, the sensory overload. My father once had a union buddy who worked the gate at Coney Island and gave us free tickets for the rides. I was very young the few times we went. What I remembered was Neil following me around the arcade and unbuckling our safety bar on the Cyclone. Now, Neil happened to be living somewhere inside those hills of screaming neon. I was already biased against this city.

  RR yanked my garment bag from the compartment above us and turned to me. “Give me your watch,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You’re in my time zone now.”

  “I’ll set it back.”

  “Un-uh,” he nodded, making a curling motion with his forefinger. “Give it here.”

  In his eyes I saw the two of us together in the first-class bathroom just a few hours ago, the lens out of focus, but the stench of urine still so overwhelming I felt dizzy. Wanting only to get off the plane, I unsnapped the clasp of my watch and handed it over. His cheeks dimpled as if my relinquishing that little bit of control had contented him. I was on his time, in his world. As bullied as I felt, I pretended it was nothing, smiling as we left the airport, the way Silver Ray would do it.

  The night was cold, yet nothing like the deep freeze we’d left back in New York. RR hailed a red and white taxi, and we climbed inside. For a quick second I was actually relieved
not to have to make any decisions. To have everything taken care of.

  “MGM,” RR said.

  “Huh?”

  “Over there,” he pointed to a glowing green microcosm that usurped at least five boulevard blocks. “Dorothy’s inside…and Toto too.”

  “I thought she went back to Kansas.”

  “Yeah, but she couldn’t find work. They all turn up here when the work stops.”

  “I hated that movie,” I said. We were stopped at a traffic light, overshadowed by the sparkle of the emerald city. It was guarded by two irate-looking lions: wash-ups. Long past courage, anger was all they had left.

  “Okay, next,” he laughed, then pointed to the Tropicana. I started to relax, as we cruised the strip, a looking glass in motion with the windows rolled up and radio playing loud. Songs from boot-in-your ear country to neurotic rock fell in synch with the flashes of green of white of glittering gold; the exhaust of a million vehicles cast a filmy screen over the Day-Glo boulevard. Color dripped from the buildings, streamed like cars through time-lapse photographs. Everywhere, an assault of lights taking me back to the airplane cabin and its dingy stars, the noxious buzz of the airplane bathroom, where I’d let him in and kissed him like a porn star should. It just seemed the thing to do. For kissing him was easier than talking to him, though I couldn’t help but notice how tight he kept his mouth, as if he couldn’t stop sneering. I’d gotten used to Shade’s lush and lulling lips, the way she tickled my gums with her tongue. My longing for her turned to anger. I tore open the buttons on RR’s shirt and dug my fingernails into his chest as hard as I could. He pushed me up against the sink, lifting my shirt, biting down hard on my nipples. Violently he came to me, as if he were some kind of sexualized cyborg, a sci-fi version of Long Dong Silver. But he did have his human side, the one now reaching for my hand in the back of this cab reeking of pine antiseptic.

  I held his hand, but kept my eyes glued to the window as we traversed the haphazard diorama of Western culture, slipping between medieval castles and circus clowns, the ancient pyramids, Paris, and New York, New York. Here, too, came Ronald McDonald dressed in a sequined tuxedo once owned by Liberace. It was a landscape that seemed familiar, as if the lights and the energy and the license had been neurologically implanted by three decades of television and movies. Just once I wanted to arrive in a place free of prefab imagery; I wanted to make it my own.

  Still, the strip was bigger, louder, flashier than I had imagined. The town pumped like a massive strobe, with soap-box speakers cranking out the bass so the streets trembled. New York might have been the city that never slept, but Las Vegas never shut up. It pulsated with an aura of twenty-four hour foreplay, but no coming. Just like our mile-high expedition, the two of us, in the bathroom, fiddling endlessly with each other as if we were in combat, a residue of desperation clinging to the metal walls. Our pants had come down in synch. I traced the outline of his dick beneath his tight, thigh-length briefs. It was bigger than a breadbox, bigger than Barbie, much too big for me. A pang shot up my vagina. I fell backwards, and my head clapped against the mirror. Delirious, I asked if he had a condom.

  “Shit.” He sighed, his hands dropped to his sides. “Shit.”

  He stared at me, his face blue-balled, pent-up, moody, and aggressive. I was almost guilty enough to blow him as an act of mercy, but felt queasy and couldn’t breathe; as if together we’d drained the last drops of air from the bathroom. We zipped up, banging elbows we were squeezed so close, even first class leaving too little room for sex gone bad. Up in the clouds, I thought I could be Silver Ray. I was wrong.

  I would have given up on her entirely had we not found our way to Caesar’s Palace. From the moment we walked through the thick glass doors and were greeted by the computerized clink-bing-bing of the slot machines, the place screamed Silver Ray’s name. No matter that the machines and tables were crammed with people so obviously American with their bottle-blond hair and fancy jogging suits, their male-pattern baldness and wrinkled chino pants, inside we were all Romans. And you know what they say about being in Rome: let pleasure reign supreme and anyone be king or queen. Providing you had the dough.

  I could only imagine the number of paychecks, credit cards, second mortgages that paved these roads to Rome. Me, I was on the porn-star package; all expenses paid. I fought another flash of the plane, turning instead to the tranced-out tourists dipping into their plastic coin buckets and bowing before the quarter slots as if they’d hit Mecca. It was a religious thing as far as I could tell, you pull, you pray.

  RR cashed a few bills, and we practiced pulling and praying until the doorbells started giving me a headache. “What next?” I said.

  He lifted me up against a dollar slot machine, slipped his knees in between my legs, and kissed me under the blaring lights of the casino. I tried to shut my eyes, be in the romance, but felt accosted by the ringing, the shouting, the clink of quarters jiggling in their containers. The fantasy hadn’t kicked in yet. I pulled my head back.

  “Ever play baccarat?” he said.

  “I’ve never played anything.” Because of my father’s OTB habit, I would have worn the same pair of sneakers through four years of high school if it hadn’t been for Aunt Lorraine. She always saw to it that I was taken care of. The thought of her hit me harder this time; here, where the fun never stopped. I grabbed the back of RR’s neck and kissed him to make everything else start melting away.

  He lifted me from the slot machine, and on the way to the table explained the rules of baccarat. “All you need to do is remember the numbers.”

  “I’m a verbal person.”

  “Change your thinking,” he said.

  Sitting down, I noticed a sign that said twenty-five-dollar minimum and almost gagged. “This is the James Bond game, isn’t it?”

  “You know more than you think.”

  “The name is Rod. Robbie Rod.”

  “All right, if that’s who you want.” He set down two stacks of chips in front of me. “Are you ready to play?”

  “Yes,” I nodded. It was a dull game, but for its high-rolling stakes. We simply bet on who would come closest to the number nine. I didn’t like the other players betting on my hand, it upped the pressure to win, and when I felt pressured my performance faltered. I finished a glass of champagne and ordered another.

  “You should bet higher,” RR said.

  “But I’m losing.”

  “You worry too much, it’s kind of endearing, but enough already.”

  “It’s your money,” I said, and he smiled. I put down a couple of chips and bet on the dealer. RR did the same. Not only was it his money, but now I had him following my bets. And he was supposed to know the game. My teeth chattered against the champagne glass as I sipped. The dealer drew an eight, beating everyone at the table. I won! The dealer slapped down the chips in front of us and screamed: “Winner!”

  “I like that, could you say that again!” I shouted. The player next to me rolled his eyes. “What?”

  “It’s etiquette,” RR nudged me. “You don’t talk like that to the dealer.”

  I shrugged. “It was a joke.”

  “Just play.”

  Gamblers had no sense of humor. Dad used to come home with OTB tickets hanging out of his pockets and swear on his life he wasn’t gambling. The more Mom jeered at him, the more sober his contention. He hadn’t been near the place, how dare she even suggest it.

  I finished another glass of champagne, and this time played three chips, with RR following my lead. I lost. Everyone at the table smiled. I felt as if the walls were screaming: Loser! I needed another drink, I needed more money. I wanted to win again.

  Thankfully, RR pulled out another roll of chips. As if he were dripping with cash. Maybe he was. I had no idea where his money came from; apparently he hadn’t seen a movie through in years. What if it were his second mortgage I was running through? His vacation fund? He was going to kill me.

  Yet the more scared and guilty I felt, the
more liberal I became in my betting. I was convinced I could get it back, save his house, his car, his credit rating. With a stack of chips in front of me, I even went for the near-impossible tie. RR looked at me as if I were crazy. This was the all or nothing play. Just before the dealer flipped, he pushed out his pile of chips and tagged along again. Oh shit, I thought. My head spun like a slot machine.

  I almost fell off my chair when the dealer and I both came up with seven. “Winner!” he shouted. I jumped up and down as our chips multiplied. RR in an uncharacteristic burst of passion grabbed me and hugged me. The bells in Caesar’s Palace sung simultaneously. “I am never leaving this casino!” I shouted.

  My streak held out a while longer; no more big wins, however. The hotel comped us bottles of champagne, a steak dinner, and a limo home in the hopes of keeping us under its roof until we started losing again. I would have obliged, but RR made us quit. I’m not sure whether this was instinctive or because he had time on his side. There were no clocks in the casino. No windows. Nothing to distinguish one hour from the next, morning from evening.

  Outside, night flashed electric. Like degenerate dignitaries we stepped into the house limo and set out for the proverbial dark, desert highway. Watching the strip shrink behind us, I thought it was probably morning in New York, one day since I found Tina Macadam at Shade’s apartment. It seemed like weeks ago when I kept to the facts, minutes when I let emotion seep through the cracks.

  An attempt to banish Shade from my thoughts found me looking out the window, but the emptiness mimicked my heart. I leaned back against the spongy vinyl seat. RR’s arm stirred behind me. “Tired?” he said.

  “Wired, actually.” I bounced back up, turned toward him. “So, how much did I make?” He smiled. “Come on, tell me, tell me.”

  “A couple thousand, after you cut the losses.”

  “Come on, really.”

  “We were playing hundred dollar chips.”

  “Jesus, you’re serious!” All night long I’d had no idea of the stakes, the chips were like Monopoly money to me.