Processed cheese, p.22
Processed Cheese, page 22
LavenderLips pulled off a wad of paper towels from the roll that had been placed on the floor before her and swabbed at her mouth. “Sorry,” she said. She had tears in her eyes.
“No problem. That’s what the bucket’s for. What’s the sum so far?”
“I think about a thousand or so. I guess.”
“You okay?”
“I guess.”
“Can we continue on?”
She nodded without acknowledging the camera.
“You’re awfully close to the hundreds.”
“Not close enough. You know, I’m sorry, but frankly, I really don’t know how much longer I can manage this gig.”
“But you’ve been doing a bang-up job.”
“Sure. When do we get to the sexual part?”
“Now,” he said abruptly. “Take off your clothes.”
“Well, if you don’t want me to, I won’t.”
“No, no. I want you to. Please.”
“You don’t sound all that into it.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you could see me.”
“You want the whole taco or what?”
“Down to the molding. And do it slowly.”
So she did. She removed her clothes as if she were a little girl who’d been sent to bed early as punishment for some minor parental infraction too absurd to be taken seriously by anyone. She took her sweet time. She peeled off her halter, her thigh-high boots as if each separate article were a piece of dressing covering a wound. There was an exaggerated degree of pain in every move.
“I want some boom-pah,” MisterMenu said.
“Do I get a free fifty for that?”
“Take it.”
She plucked a bill from the stack and stuffed it into the fringed bag lying on the floor next to her chair. Then she stood, displaying an endless pair of admirable legs, turned, and, flashing a practiced stage glance toward the camera, proceeded to detach her crimson-red bra as if unwrapping a coiled snake from around her chest. The magnificent breasts that now plopped into view were of a size and shape MisterMenu had only ever observed in his imagination. Save yourself for later, he told himself. LavenderLips now directed her attention to her leather miniskirt and began fiddling, in a deliberately languorous manner, with the back zipper for so long it seemed as though it were something she had to find first before she could be freed from the garment. But suddenly, success, and the skirt dropped to her feet. Underneath she was wearing a pair of leopard-print panties, and on her unbelievably flat abdomen rested, strangely enough, an elaborate tattoo of a giant turtle in crazy psychedelic colors, its shell an eye-popping checkerboard of neon inks. And with that the spell was crudely broken.
“Oh, no,” MisterMenu said. “What’s that? What’s that thing there on your belly?”
“The tat?” she said. “It’s not a thing. It’s a tortoise.” She looked offended. “He’s a symbol of the earth. He brings peace and good luck. He protects me. His name is PhyloxBox. I couldn’t live without him.”
“Why’d you do that to your body, desecrating it up like that? I just don’t—”
“Most guys seem to get off on it.”
“I’m not most guys.”
“Like you have to tell me.”
“All right. I’ll try to ignore this, this…daub. Let’s get back to business, shall we? Sit down.”
“I thought we were done with that.”
“Baby, we’re just getting started.”
She made a little-girl pouty face.
“Remove the panties.”
She did.
“Sit.”
She sat. She was looking at the camera now, as if it were a camera and not another person.
“Open your legs.”
She did. He stared for a while at the spot where the rubber met the road, on his face an unreadable expression, data being dutifully processed. When the operation concluded, his expression changed.
“Now,” he said, “where were we?”
“Eleven hundred.”
“Right. Pick it up from there.”
She crumpled up a fifty-dollar note, inserted it carefully into her waiting mouth, looked defiantly into the lens, and swallowed.
“Eleven fifty,” she said.
“Good. Eight fifty to go.”
Then suddenly she wadded up two more bills and swallowed those quickly. Then two more. She took a pause. She took a drink.
“Only thirteen more fifties and you break into the hundreds.”
She looked at him as if she’d just been presented with a dare she couldn’t possibly refuse. She picked up two fifties from the pile and, never for a moment taking her eyes off the camera, rolled them together between her hands into a single paper ball, which she proceeded to toss casually into her mouth as if it were nothing more than a big piece of candy. She choked it down and smiled for the camera as if to say, see, mister, it ain’t nothing, I can gobble down this stuff all the fuck-long day. Then she balled up two more fifties and swallowed those.
“I do like what I’m seeing,” said MisterMenu.
LavenderLips stared quizzically into the lens as if she were far away and thinking of something entirely different. Then abruptly she leaned over and casually vomited, only a portion of which made it into the bucket, the rest splattering violently onto the floor.
She looked up at him. “Sorry,” she said. She ripped off a couple of sheets of paper towel and sheepishly wiped her mouth.
“S’okay,” he said. “S’stuff happens.”
“Do the last two still count?”
“Of course they do. Raw dough don’t always go down so sweet.”
She was studying the tower of money in front of her. She looked into the camera. “I don’t believe I can go on.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I quit.”
“You can’t quit. You haven’t even broken into the hundreds.”
“There’s not enough hundreds even in all that stupid pile to make me eat even one more of those nasty bills.” Something new had come into her large, explosive eyes, something serious and dead.
“But you’re forgetting. You were hired for eight hours today to honor my requests, not yours.”
“But I think you’re forgetting a key phrase in that clause, ‘within reason.’ All requests ‘within reason.’ Forcing someone to eat a pile of money is not ‘reasonable.’”
“How about ordering you to open up your twat, jam your fingers inside, and then suck them clean? Is that within reason? Masturbate with a plastic bottle? Stick your middle finger up your ass? Reasonable? Eat your own shit and smile while doing it? Reasonable? And I’ll bet you’ve heard all those requests, and honored them, too. So let’s make a deal. You need money or you wouldn’t be here. Everybody needs money or they wouldn’t be where they are. So let’s get down to the metal. How much do you need? How much to open up some space around your life?”
“Oh, a couple million, probably.”
“I said some space, not a country retreat.”
“A million, then. Just one.”
“The minimum.”
“I suppose two hundred and fifty would do.”
“The bare minimum.”
“A hundred grand?”
“How much do you need right now, right this minute, to alleviate the pressure that’s squeezing you the tightest?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“What’s it for?”
“Living expenses.”
“Such as?”
She gazed off to her left.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“Okay.”
“Your business.”
She looked back at the camera. “Rent,” she said. “I’m a couple months behind.”
“And what does that entail, exactly?”
“Seven hundred a month.”
“The other three thousand?”
“Food and stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“You know, car payments, loans, electric, clothes, that sort of stuff.”
“And I suppose you’re behind in all those areas, too?”
She nodded.
“Tell you what, let’s make a deal here. You continue on with our little project, polish off, say, another two grand or so, and again that’s added on to the total you get to keep, of course, plus whatever HoneyDrippers is paying you, and on top of that, I’ll throw in…how about an extra ten thousand? How’s that sound? You can handle that, can’t you?”
She nodded.
“Excellent. Let’s get back to business.”
She looked for a moment as if she weren’t wearing makeup anymore and a glimpse of her real face came up for air. The face was unrecognizable. The sight disturbed MisterMenu for a second, but the second passed and he saw her again as he’d always seen her since she first stepped into camera range. Now she was intently studying the pile of money as if she hadn’t noticed it before and was wondering who put it there and what specifically he wanted.
“Makes me gag just looking at it,” she said.
“So close your eyes and take one, just one, and place it carefully in your mouth without looking at it or thinking about it. God, don’t think about it. Just pick one up and stick it in your mouth. But do it quickly, okay? Got to do it quickly. Don’t think, try one right now. Just as a test. Don’t think.”
So she did. And before she knew it the bill was gone. And she hadn’t felt a thing. Swiftly she moved on to another and another after that and soon she was popping note after note into her receptive mouth as if they were all no more than cocktail peanuts and announcing the new grand total after each swallow in the brisk matter-of-fact tone of a track announcer reading off the payouts after each race. She had reached seventeen hundred dollars and two full bottles of water when her body initiated another rebellion. It began with her holding up a finger as if to signal a slight pause in the morning’s activities, on her face a serious focused expression as if she were attending to a dim, faraway sound at the very edge of audibility, then suddenly a volcanic explosion of ejecta, a fire-hose-caliber torrent of water and bits of paper money and whatever else was still in there, shooting out from her in an opulent display of unadulterated rejection.
“Not on the money!” MisterMenu said. He was barking at her now, concerned about the spray.
And once she finally did stop, she couldn’t stop. The retching seemed to have assumed a mind of its own. It possessed her body and wouldn’t let go until it had wrung every speck of loose matter and every drop of loose water from her spastic interior. Those goals achieved, the heaving mercifully subsided at last. Eyes bloodshot, panting like a dog, she stared imploringly into the camera, body goo dripping from her chin. “I can’t go on,” she said. She tore a wad of paper towels from the roll and wiped her face. “Sorry,” she said.
MisterMenu stood, unbuttoned his pants, let them fall to the floor. He stepped out of his boxers. He sat back down. “Ten thousand dollars!” he said. “Ten thousand dollars!” He was practically screaming.
After a significant pause, she lifted one of the MountainMama bottles to her mouth, took a sizable gulp and paused, and then vomited that up. She took a smaller sip. It stayed down. Then, never taking her eyes from the camera, she plucked a bill from the pile, wadded it up, and swallowed without chewing. Immediately she was seized by a major internal contraction. She clutched at her stomach, bent over, and spewed out whatever little remained in her guts. The bucket, having been kicked out of the way long ago, and being more or less irrelevant by this time anyway, left the result to go splattering in every direction.
“Not on the money!” MisterMenu said. “Don’t do it on the money!”
She slipped off her chair and onto the wet floor. On her hands and knees she continued to heave even though she had long ago been thoroughly emptied out. In an interval between spasms she tried taking another taste of water and that, too, came instantly back up. She was little more now than a brutal upchuck machine.
MisterMenu was laid out fully flat on his back in his fancy erotognomic reclining device. His eyes were closed. A hint of a smile going in and out of focus around his thin lips. A gleaming puddle of fresh ejaculate smeared across his hairy abdominal bulge. He had just experienced an event he didn’t even think possible: the achievement of a completely spontaneous, mirabile dictu!, look-ma-no-hands orgasm. And it had been better than even the best of the humdrum coital variety. He bathed in the afterglow.
Naked, sitting in her own slime, LavenderLips, whose body seemed to have settled at last into some momentary simulacrum of physical peace, was toweling off her wet face with one hand, caressing her belly with the other. “My stomach hurts,” she said.
MisterMenu sat up, wiped himself with his boxers, and said, “You’ve been magnificent. Better than you even know. In addition to the ten grand plus the substantial amount you’ve already ingested, you deserve a tip, a big fat tip. Off the top of the pile, however much you can fit in one hand, take it, it’s yours.”
“Really?”
“When I speak, people generally do what I say.”
She cleaned off her right hand with a fresh paper towel, contemplated the stack of cash for a moment, then reached over and seized about a three-inch-thick bundle of hundreds. She showed the camera what she’d done.
MisterMenu said nothing. Which she took as approval.
“Are we done here?”
“Yes,” MisterMenu said, “we’re done here.”
Chapter 16
The River…the Woods…
and All That
“I’ve an idea,” said Graveyard. It had been a week since BlisterPac’s surprise visit. Since then a new dunning letter from Flinders and Poach had punctually arrived each and every day, the threatening tone escalating predictably. And now their cell phones had become infected.
“Fine,” said Ambience. “I’m listening.” She was scrolling through the morning’s text messages, searching for the icky ones. “Here’s the latest,” she said. She read: “‘Wee Willie Winkie runs thru the town / Upstairs, downstairs, everywhere he’d root / Under the mattress, out on the lawn / He’d never give up searching for that fucking loot.’ Signed: A Concerned Friend. Well, how frankly scented-ass cute.”
“Poor Willie.”
“Mommy Goose must be so frustrated.”
“Cause that loot, gentlemen, it hath ‘gone where the woodbine twineth.’” They shared a hearty conspiratorial laugh. “Who’d have thought our friend Mr. Pustule harbored such a hidden fondness for verse?”
“Your average stooge is a more complicated critter than most people think.”
“That’s how they work their way up to the valuable ‘stooge’ position.”
“What was your idea again?” Ambience said.
“I believe the time has indubitably arrived for us to make a hasty exit before our next encounter with the human abscess.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“So it has occurred to me, caramel cluster: what say we drop everything right now, I mean everything, and I mean right this very minute, and sky on outta here on a second madcap holiday getaway?” He had that crafty boyish look that usually meant he just blurted out something he probably couldn’t or shouldn’t get away with.
Okay, she’d play along. “What holiday and where to?”
“Well, as you may or may not know, it’s National Mortuary Month, and in honor of the occasion, I figured we could check in on the wonderful folks who buried my once promising youth under the stone of one sorry-ass name.”
“Oh, please.”
“What? Too much self-pity?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Can’t I even be permitted one brief wallow?”
“No.”
“For old times’ sake, at least?”
“No.”
“You’re evil.”
“And talk about travel, if we’re planning on going anywhere at all, how about a long-overdue hop over to Flinchtown? I haven’t seen Mom since we stopped by on our way to visit that loose-marbles friend of yours in WestTongue—how many years ago? Five? Six?”
“Best for last, lemon drop. Your mother’s is a day at the beach compared to the domestic boot camp we’ll be subjected to by my pack of wack jobs up north. So let’s do the worst first. Get through all the internecine fun my family can deliver as quickly and painlessly as possible. Spread a touch of pecuniary cheer around Randomburg, you know, lay on that whaddya-want, whaddya-need sort of thing for a while. Then scoot on over to Flinchtown, take a breath, and sink into the pink padded pillows of Mama PlaitedHopes’s ratty couch. I can already feel the kinks in my muscles letting go. Yum.”
“You actually think running home to Mommy and Daddy can save you from Mr. BlisterFuck and whoever else they may already have in on this ass hunt? Look how fast they tracked you down here, a total stranger to them. And now they’ve got your name and address. Plus your parents’ personals and everyone else’s you’ve ever spoken a single word to since you learned how to talk. We’re all living ventilated lives now. You know that. Privacy? Odd word—what’s it mean? Some antiquated notion from way back in antiquated times. Forget about it. Long gone, blown out, dust. Never to be seen again, if it ever even existed in the first place. Everyone’s buck naked now 24-7. There are no secrets anymore. There are no places to hide. Have you lost your mind?”
“I know, I know, I know. But I need some time to think. At least we can snatch some time up there. Don’t you agree?”
“I don’t know. I think we’re in a real ratfuck here. And we’re the fuckees.”
