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She oozed unspeakable evil like a ruptured jelly donut on a termite mound in the Congo during the rainy season, but as long as she paid my thirty bucks a day plus expenses, she could be week-old, cheese Danish colonized with blow-fly eggs and kicked under the icebox for all I cared. As a matter of fact, I kind of liked a donut every now and then with my espresso, or sometimes a nice flaky, fruit popover hot from the oven. That she had legs that went all the way up to her eyebrows, love handles like pork tenderloins, and a mouth like a hamburger bun didn't hurt too much either. So after our business was concluded, we mated briefly like feral dingoes, bucking desperately against the Hewlett Packard multi-function machine, yowling like the damned, three-legged curs of Gomorrah. If either one of us was hoping for some small scrap of comfort to blot out the shit storm of futility and despair called The Sausalito Memorial Day Art Festival, then he or she had hoped wrong. It felt more like I'd been pitchforked into an open grave with drainage and pest control issues, and the lady looked like she felt the same way.
My piggy eyes narrowed in appreciation, and a dirty little simper scurried across my collapsed features like a rodent on a week-old cadaver.
"I could grow to like this," I said over my shoulder, soaping my torpid sex at the grimy sink of my "executive suite." She smirked, spit a thick wad of Juicy Fruit into the wastebasket, put her Macanudo out on the back of my neck, flicked the butt into my demitasse, tugged down the hem of her nun's habit, and strutted out my office swinging her can like a tetherball in a tornado. The clickety-clack of her high heels on the cracked linoleum echoed like taps for the dead, and I wondered who might have died. Couldn't be me, cupcake, 'cause I'd been dead inside ever since my floppy-eared spaniel, Prince Licorice III, had been run down on a dark, wet night out on Highway 9. A little late for trumpets now. In the chuckling, ghost-filled silence, I whispered hoarsely, "And you have a nice day too, Sister."
Memories of that arthritic, black as night, 18 year-old bag of bones hit me in the gut like a body shot from a liquored up Liza Minnelli: Licky savaging the arm of the little girl who wanted to pet the "nice doggy"; Licky, furtive and guilty, gobbling the cat's wet food and then throwing it up in the pantry; Licky whining, wiggling and drooling at the Lazy Boy for another gobbet of gristly TV dinner offal. Good old Licky, I shall join you one day, my brother, at the council fires of our forefathers. But before that joyous reunion, I shall eat the half-inflated lungs of your murderer; I shall dance like Fred Astaire around his eviscerated corpse, chanting the ancient songs of our people (  and you do the hokey pokey  ). Then I'll back over the carcass a few times until I hear the head pop.
On days I don't take my medication, I'm almost positive the one I seek is Woody Harrelson.
My body shook with grief and loneliness, and helpless unh unh unh sounds escaped my trembling lips. Then I pulled myself together, shook off the post-coital melancholy, and considered the dubious bill of goods Ms. Zebub - or Belle as she insisted I call her - had tried to sell me. Unfortunately, without thinking, I also took a last swig from my demitasse.
To be continued.
By Henry E. Panky
"the desperate struggle to amuse"
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