Amputee Hookers

I go out front to grab a smoke and relax a little before hooking up with Sergei and Maggot Arm Joe later to come up with a plan for getting back the stolen computers. The sky’s a gray that’s as dull and incomprehensible as accounting tables, it’s a sad sky, a sky that you can feel on your shoulders. Jeanine and Molly Clark come out of the building. I think about Sergei scaring them away with that “growing like a tumor” line and I chuckle a bit to myself.

“Hi, Mr. Nick,” the kid says, and stops next to me on the stairs.

“Hey, Molly, how are you?”

“Smoking’s bad for you,” she says. “Smoking will kill you.”

The schools hammer this into the kids’ heads these days. And I could come up with some wiseass answer, but the kid’s right, and as propaganda goes, it’s not a bad thing to be filling kids with. I tell her I’m trying to quit.

“You should,” she says.

Jeanine tells her to move along and not bother Mr. Ray—that they need to catch a bus.

“We need to catch a bus now because my daddy can’t pick me up here,” Molly says. “He broke his hand real bad and he can’t drive. He can’t even ride his horses.”

“He rides horses?” I say.

Jeanine says, “Out in the desert—Morango Valley. He tends to wild horses and nurses them back to health.”

I’m thinking, The cowboy? “How’d he break his hand?”

Jeanine shakes her head. “No idea—but it’s not so bad that he can’t drive. He could drive if he had to—he’s just making me go out of my way for his custody.”

Molly says, “Daddy can’t drive—he says so.”

Jeanine rolls her eyes and says in a tired deadpan, “And your daddy never ever lied about a thing.” She drags the kid away and I’m realizing we probably kicked the shit out of some guy who was watching his ex-wife and kid. A cowboy with a broken hand who won’t come around here anymore.

It can’t be a coincidence.

Sergei made him break his own finger, the poor bastard. And I only gave him up because I thought my life depended on it. These facts swirl and gnaw and I keep trying to add them up so that I’m not the bad guy, but it doesn’t work. I fucked up, and the cowboy’s got nothing but pain and fear because of it. I’m wondering if anyone’s better off for having come into contact with me.

The phone’s ringing and I run inside to grab it and it’s Scooter, two doors down at the adult-film place.

He says, “Dude, you have got to come over.”

“You couldn’t come over here?” I say.

“I’m at work,” he says. “I’m on duty.”

“On duty,” I say. “Like you’re a fucking cop. So someone can’t get their porno—like the world’s going to spin off its axis.”

“I’m telling you, Nick—there is some shit you have to see here.”

It’s strange, getting a phone call from someone who is less than an eighth of a mile away from you. Hell, he could have leaned out the window and yelled to me if he didn’t want to move. But this is California at the start of the century, everybody’s on a phone everywhere you go. People in cars, in lines. I see people checking out groceries while they’re talking on the phone, they treat the cashiers like they’re robots. The way people treat people who are serving them should be a crime. I know this. Someday, I’ll see it on the news that one of these cashiers pounded the shit out of someone in a pressed shirt talking on the phone when they should have been courteous and I’ll cheer. Put me on that jury and I’ll send the cashier roses and a Get Out of Jail Free card.

So I walk the twenty-five steps, I count them, from our stoop to Scooter’s door. And when I walk in, he closes the door, spins his “Open/Closed” sign, and leads me to a back room where they have three TVs hooked up to a stack of around twenty-five VCRs.

“So?” I say. “What’s up—your girlfriend have another art-film problem?”

“Not exactly,” he says. He points a remote at the television in the middle and I recognize it immediately, it’s the tape that Tara and I made the other night. The camera’s mostly on her, it’s what she wanted and I can’t say now that I’m upset, and it must be early on, because you can only see my hand when I change nozzles from an empty enema bag to a full one. She’s propped up on one elbow while she masturbates with the other hand. She’s doubled over in pleasure and pain and every couple of minutes she pukes a steady stream of clear water and moans in ecstasy while it happens. She looks beautiful.

“This is fucking amazing,” Scooter says. “She should go on the road.”

I’m embarrassed, but I’m also mad. “Where did you get this?”

“Some guy sold me the VCR this morning,” he says. “I don’t think he knew what he had—I didn’t know the tape was in it until after I bought it.”

“I need that back,” I say. I’m thinking, Some guy?

“I thought you’d want it,” Scooter says. “The original’s all yours.”

“The original?”

“Dude,” Scooter says, “I couldn’t sit on this—we’ve been copying it all morning. This is the best amateur porn I’ve seen all year.” Scooter looks at me like I should be proud. “I watch amateur porn all the time and this is special.”

“You taped it?”

“Taped, packaged, and distributed—hell, I’ve got it in four categories out front.”

And it’s one of those moments where the curiosity nudges the anger aside and I ask, “What four?”

“Black, S/M, Puking, and Enema.”

“You have a puking section? There’s enough puking porno to have a whole section?”

He nods. “Puking and Spitting—they’re together.”

I’m wondering how I’m going to tell Tara. Hey—you made four sections. This day keeps getting worse.

“I’ll show you.”

And Scooter leaves the tape running and takes me out to the floor and shows me the tape in every section. I look at the label and it reads:

PENNY’S PUKE FEST:

HOT AMATEUR PORN WITH PENNY—A SEXY BLACK NEWCUMER WHO’S INTO ENEMAS AND PUKING—THIS TAPE HAS IT GOING AND CUMMING!

“You know she’s Hawaiian?” I say.

“Really?” He looks at me blankly. “Guess it’s too late to fix.”

I’m not sure why I’m pursuing it, and not sure it matters, but I say, “You could fix it.”

Scooter shakes his head. “It was hard enough to write this. I tried to get enemas in the title, but it just didn’t work.”

“Penny’s Puke Pest?”

“You didn’t want me to use her name, did you?”

“No,” I say. My head aches, but I can’t locate and localize the pain. Shards of hard light are jabbing at my corneas—playing stick and move, dancing like a young Ali and impossible to stop. I look next to the puking and spitting section and there’s an amputee section. “What?” I say. “You couldn’t manage some thematic tie-in there? Couldn’t find a way to have my sex life in every section?”

Scooter whistles. “If she would do amputee porn, she could make a fortune.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Huge market—amputee porn. Amputee live sex acts, you name it. Amputee hookers make five hundred percent more for the same sex act as fully limbed hookers.”

“Bullshit.”

Scooter says, “Look it up, dude.”

The fact that he’s sold the tape slaps me hard. “This is a major fucking problem,” I say.

Scooter shakes his head and points to the video case for Penny’s Puke Fest. “I’m telling you—that’s a special tape—that’s going to move some copies.”

“I need those back,” I say.

“I don’t think I could if I wanted to, dude,” Scooter says. He’s still unclear on how wrong this is. “She’s amazing, Nick—she does things on that tape people just don’t do.”

And I think of telling him I know, I was there, but I figure why bother. I need to let Tara know this has happened. Just once, I want to bring somebody some good news today. I need to be calm. I need to contain this damage. I say, “How many copies of that are there?”

“I made fifty—but I sold them to dealers.” He shrugs. “Could be in the hundreds by the end of the week.”

I shake my head.

“It’s a special movie, Nick.”

I want to punch him, but I need some information. Right now, whoever sold him the VCR may be the only person who knows where the computers are. I ask him to tell me about the guy who brought the VCR in.

“Not much to tell.”

“Short? Fat? White? Black? Give me something.”

He looks at me blankly. “Dude—I tell you and tomorrow it’s on the street and no one ever brings me equipment again.”

“Scooter, I swear you are so close to me kicking the shit out of you—and you need to give me a reason not to.”

“You, Nick?” he says, and laughs.

And that does it. I punch him hard in the face—remembering what my dad told me so many years ago. Don’t make the fist until your hand’s right near the face. I feel Scooter’s jaw resist, then him, then he’s in a heap at my feet and I’m about to kick his ribs, but stop myself.

“Tell me something, Scooter.”

He looks up at me, doubled over in a fetal position. He looks away. “You’re putting me in a tight spot here.”

“I can make it worse,” I say, and I get ready to kick him. I feel sick—watching myself do this. This is so far away from the man I wanted to be that I can barely recognize myself. I’m willing and, I’m sure of it, able to seriously hurt Scooter. “I swear, if you don’t tell me, you’re going to wish you never saw that VCR.”

“I don’t know his name,” Scooter says.

“I’m going to fuck you up, Scooter—and when I’m done I’ll let Sergei dance on what’s left.”

The name Sergei apparently scares him more than me hitting him. He closes his eyes. “He’s one of Billy Mangos’ kids.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s not enough?” Scooter says. “He’s a white guy, maybe seventeen, and he works for Billy Mangos down at the shipyards. That’s what I know.”

I look at Scooter for a second, wondering if I should still kick him, whether or not he gave me the information. I’d be in my rights, looked at from certain angles. I can hear the sound on the tape that Scooter left running, it’s Tara’s voice, screaming, there’s the sound of splashes and her calling my name in a voice that sounds something like love and then some wordless gurgling. It clicks in on me that I have more important things to do than hurting Scooter. I look at him for a moment, then I walk out and go back to the Lincoln, trying to figure out what I’m going to tell Tara.