Dropping Bombs On Your Mom

Continuing along from the last post, Nabs and I are still at it with the Facebook pulp collaboration.

- Nabil -

Sugar’s panicked eyes swept the room looking for her son. “You OK baby?”

“He’s fine. We were just about to have a big bowl of ice cream.” DuPont patted Max’s knee.

Sugar pushed herself upright gingerly, the pain in her neck made her weak and pathetic. DuPont stared at his lieutenant and rubbed the right side of his neck with the back of his hand. “Close shave Sweetness. Almost ruined your farewell party today.”

DuPont had known all along that Sugar planned to quietly abandon her employment today. She’d been planning it since this contract came in a month ago. One last job and in the ensuing chaos, she’d take Max and get the fuck out of Dodge.

Sugar’s face went slack, her stomach tightened. She thought of Max and whether he would be allowed to live. The boy just looked down at his feet.

“Relax Sweetness. You’re free to go. But not until you finish the job.” Sugar could tell when someone was lying. Over the years she’d been tutored by the best and she picked up on all the signs. DuPont wasn’t lying.

“Shit. It’s empty isn’t it?”

DuPont was silent. He spun the briefcase around and lifted its shattered lid revealing nothing. “The Arabs are going to be a tad displeased Sweetness. But you’ll make things right. And then you can be on your way. Now tell me what happened.”

A pretty guard walked into the room carrying a pot of coffee, one glass of ice tea and a bowl of vanilla ice cream with maple syrup. The guard poured the coffee and handed Max the bowl. DuPont picked up his iced tea “I’m waiting”

Sugar went through it all. The hunt. The trap she’d set. Four weeks to bring the guy out of the woodwork and convince him she was a legitimate buyer. But by the time she got to the motel in Las Cruces, someone had reached him first.

Max ignored his ice cream as he listened to his mother.

They’d searched the motel room after they killed him. The man’s body was a giant crimson X marking the spot. A large sinkhole of blood where his stomach used to be. As she walked in, the three swarthy goons were standing around the small side table, their backs to the door. They had turned the man’s stomach inside out and were scrabbling through it. Sugar reached for her blade.

- Scotty -

There was a large pile of sand next to the eviscerated innards on the table, when she walked in one of the men reached into it and flung a fistful into her face. Before her hand could hit the hilt of her weapon her eyes filled with grit and slammed shut. While she was stunned one of the goons got behind her and slipped a garrote around her neck.

“You work for DuPont, no?” The voice was raspy, like a comic book villain.

“Who are y—” the wire tightened.

“Answer the question.” This time the voice was different and came from the third man in the room.

The tally ran off in her head. The first speaker, A, was in front of her, about six feet, the second, B, was off to her left and moving slowly, probably about ten feet away. The third one, C, was squeezing off quite a bit of her air supply. It was time to cut this shit short.

She brought her heel back onto C’s instep at the same time she swung her head back into his nose. There was an explosion of dampness in her hair and the wire slackened, giving her the freedom to move out of the way of the knife coming at her from A. She used the thug’s momentum to drive the knife into C. A was off-balance and blade-deep in his buddy; Sugar unsheathed her sword, running it across his neck. Two down.

B had moved quickly and he caught her with a solid right hook. It was enough to knock her onto the bed next to what used to be her contact. As she hit the mattress she spun off to the right and swung the katana in a tight arc, and slicing through his femoral artery. He looked at her and his eyes were vacant, the hopeless flash of inevitable death turned into rage and in his last throe he lunged at her with a lock-blade SOG; Sugar was fast enough to avoid the impromptu tracheotomy but not fast enough to avoid having her neck opened up. She stumbled to the bathroom and washed the dirt from her eyes and grabbed a box of kleenex from the night stand on her way out the door. In hindsight the briefcase did feel a bit light. Fucking hindsight.

. . .

“That’s hell of a story, Sugar.”

“The briefcase was full of dirt, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Hold still for a second.” DuPont leaned over Sugar, prying one of her eyes open and scraping his fingernail over the tear duct. He wiped his finger on a tissue and handed it to the guard. “Give this to Michelle and tell her I want to analyze it.”

“The briefcase was full of dirt because that was what you were supposed to get.”

“Dirt?”

“A soil sample, luckily your little buddies didn’t know what it was either. Too bad for Mr. Kinch, really.”

Wow, it’s been a busy six months, very little time to work on anything and it’ll be at least a couple months before I can really focus on longer pieces again . . . in the mean time I’ve been feeling a Lester Dent/Pulp vibe. My buddy Nabil posted a small opener as his Facebook status and we’ve been going back and forth in the comment thread. It’ll be fun to see where it ends up.

– Nabil –
The boy looks at the woman slumped in the passenger seat, the worn beige velour already changing color as the blood issues grotesquely from her wounded neck. She drags the katana into the car and brings it to rest on her inner thigh. She does this slowly, as though any disturbance to the blade or the hair and flesh that clung to it would quicken her crawl to death. ‘What do we do now Mom?’

– Scotty –
“First push these into mommy’s neck,” she stuffed his hands full of napkins, “now we need to go to see DuPont, you remember how to drive, right baby?”

Max was twelve, his mom taught him how to drive when he was ten—around the same time she was teaching him how to properly field strip a .45. He turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of the driveway, pushing the clump of napkins into his mother’s neck, while nearly standing in order to reach the pedals at the same time. Max knew where DuPont was at, he’d been to the ranch house before.

He was always terrified of talking to the man. Jim DuPont’s one gold tooth and large glasses made him look like an angry fly. Max was always afraid he’d slip up and call him “The Incisor” to his face. The car glided down the highway, kicking up dust in its wake. . .

– Nabil –
By the time Max pulled into the mile-long drive way to the ranch, his Mother had passed out. The napkins he’d used to stem her bleeding stuck to the nape of her neck in the shape of a ferocious tumor. The boy thought this whole damn scene looked like something from one of his comic books. Splashes of hideous colour on drab backgrounds.

“Wake up Mom” he said as they approached the guarded gate. DuPont considered himself an authority on the world’s greatest dictators and he’d read somewhere that Ghaddafi only had women as bodyguards because they were less likely to betray him. He liked the thought of that, and not being one to be outdone by a camel jockey, DuPont had most of his men taken care of and began ‘getting in touch with his feminine side’ as he liked to describe his corporate restructure.

The heavy set guard bent over and looked at the boy behind the steering wheel. She noticed the bleeding woman, smiled and pointed her MP-5 towards the house. “Better get that bitch cleaned up for the man. He’s gonna love this”

– Scotty –
Two of the guards lifted Max’s mom out of the car and took her into the house. They put her down on a Holstein patterned couch that was covered in visqueen and had a sheet of that crinkly hospital exam paper on top of it. The sound of that paper crunching gave Max a shiver, he followed the guards and sat on the ground next to his mother, holding the kleenex in place.

“Call Doctor Francis, we’ve got a bleeder.” She turned to look at Max “Kid, your mom’s going to get cleaned up here, Mr. DuPont will be out soon.” And she left.

The air was crisp and over-conditioned, too cool to be comfortable. His mother was awake but not speaking. They held each others eyes, both hoping the other would get out of this mess in one piece; it felt like they had been doing that for days when DuPont finally walked in with Dr. Francis.

“Sweet Jesus, you’ve gotten yourself into a fix this time Sugar. The doc here will take care of you.” His voice was calm, and clever. “Max, come with me. . . . Since you’re both alive, I assume Sugar got the package?”

Dontsaysincisordontsayincisordontsayincisor “Yes Mr. Dupont,” exhale, “my mom put a briefcase in the trunk of the car.”

“And since you’re alive, she got you.”

“Um, I suppose so Mr. In-” FUCK “. . . DuPont.”

“While the doctor is sewing up your mother’s carelessness you can get yourself washed up and put some food in that belly.” DuPont abruptly turned and walked down another hallway as a guard fluidly took his place and guided Max to the shower.

Sugar Maxwell Carlson woke up clean and freshly stitched. Max, DuPont, and Dr. Francis were in the living room; and the briefcase was sitting on the coffee table. “Welcome back, Sugar.”

There’s been lots of radio silence (not really surprising, considering how generally slack I am). Anyway, I’ve been working on that novella a bit more and now it’s taking a bit more shape. In fact, I’m considering doing the novel thang, hence the lack of recently posted short stories.

In any case, if you’d like to take a gander at a small preview of the revised work it’s here. Note that it’s been revised to take place in New York rather than Seattle.

This time it’s from a novella I’m working on called Porno En Fuego (tentatively).

Bounding from the end of the bar, Bob Farcas was on Henry Sera like a great glandular chipmunk. His cheeks puffed—“HENRY, it’s great to see you again! Shots?” A pause to look at the bar “. . . shots!”
“Farcas, you prick, are you trying to get me drunk?”
“Yes.”
“Great. I’m a team player, let’s see if we can do this thing.”

Porno En Fuego (Sample Chapter)

Today I went out to Coney Island, I was out on business and afterward I took a stroll down to the boardwalk. The whole sky was grey, rain was alternating between a fine mist and a steady drizzle; just light enough that you wouldn’t get anything more than damp by walking around in it. The neighborhood of Brighton Beach looks very much like a Sydney suburb, the brick buildings stacked up into awkward blocks all on a march toward the water. It struck me as very odd that in the midst of this decade’s real estate frenzy this area hadn’t been completely razed for glass and steel luxury high rises. Here it is, 45 minutes from Manhattan with a city beach and a quaint boardwalk, but just blocks away from that beach are all the hallmarks of a poor Brooklyn ’hood: strangely understocked bodegas, stores selling the national costume of Pakistan, shop signage in Cyrillic or Arabic scripts.

I felt like a strange intruder in a hand made Zegna suit, fresh from a sales call, out of place with the Poors. Guys that would have hardballed me had I walked down the street in a T shirt walked by as if we were invisible to one another. When I got down the beach I enjoyed its emptiness; it was a weekday, and a rainy overcast one at that. The whole place was silent and most of the shops were shuttered, scenes like this always make me feel like I’m being let in on a secret. I sat down in Ruby’s and had a hotdog in the place where they were invented; I washed it down with a cold American beer, afterward I walked to Stillwell Ave and hopped the D back to West 4th.

. . . But so what? Everything is fucked. Still, today the intorwebby is all aflutter with the nymag article about condo firesales over on the Williamsburg waterfront. The neighborhood has gone apeshit along with the rest of the nation over the last decade. Williamsburg boomed like all of the other tough places turned sexy; quirky working class strongholds that saw their asses blown out by textbook gentrification. If you’re from Seattle just think of Ballard, if you’re from Sydney just think of Newtown, if you aren’t from either of those places you surely have a neighborhood like that in your town. Young adults from upper middle class Ohio families bought or rented lofts with family money, all the while pretending that they paid for their lifestyles with the dough they made working at the record store part time. Now they mope along Bedford Ave. in small jeans and big hair, their souls haunted by the possibility of having to pay their own rent. The yuppies that flooded into the new condo developments are now holding back, most sites are over 50% unsold, many of the rest exist only as renderings on brochures or the placards around their empty lots.

The shadenfreude is thick, it tastes just like one of those beautiful steaks you get at the Strip House—perfectly cooked and just a bit bloody. Out here, for us little folk at least, the recession has been a hoot; the only tangible effect is another $400 off that outrageous fucking rent we pay. The bankers are still making money but at least they aren’t throwing it in our faces like they used to. All in all, we’re yukking it up . . . while the rest of the country teeters on the brink of depression. To hear the reports you’d think that everybody west of the Hudson has begun raising rabbits in backyard hutches, trading their precious meat and skins for goods and services;   families are living in the hollowed out shells of abandoned tract homes—shit, according to the newspapers everybody in the Midwest is mere months away from riding around in biodiesel-fueled Plymouth Dusters and shooting each other for scraps of food. I hear the new haircuts will be fierce, and that’s no small consolation, post apocalyptic America will be a mean, sexy place.

Don’t worry Real America, our check is in the post. As soon as the magnitude of the CRE bust becomes apparent and second wave of ARM recasts goes rolling through the heartland we’ll be feeling your pain. Hedgies will be begging for the opportunity to work on your rabbit farms as our streets once again start to reek of piss and rape. The soft-pawwed trust fund hipsters who loudly pine for the days when this town was “tough,” people who use terms like “Disney-fication,” dudes that think things are too safe—they’ll finally have the opportunity to get mugged. We’ll all be in the government cheese line together, pointing in glee, shaming one another for the unchecked avarice that got us into this spot to begin with; content with watching our own houses burn as long as Those Bastards get fucked too.

It finally happened—I gave up on my own little hand-rolled blogs and decided to switch to WordPress. Anyway, here we are in yet another incarnation of DBOYM. The idea is that I will be updating this thing more than once every three months, perhaps I’ll even be able to stick to that rigorous schedule. We’ll see.

A new bit of short fiction.

My hands felt like blocks of wood, and my feet were starting to get those nasty, driving pains that precede proper medical frost bite. Jim and Dan were down in the valley trying to scare some deer out into the meadow, and I was slowly succumbing to hypothermia up on the ridge. . .

1.5 page PDF

I’ve actually started writing again after about a year of frantic work getting things sorted out here in NY. I’ll post a couple of chapters when I get settled.

The original plan was to do a bunch of shorts here on the site and eventually have something of a collection by this time. Unfortunately, running a business in startup mode, settling into New York, and managing an engagement turned out to be a lot more time consuming than I originally thought. Still, it’s not such a bad thing as it’s given me a bit of time to think about writing in general. It’s also given me a bit of time to work on my atrocious grammar; oh, it’s still bad, but it’s much improved.

East 14th Street on a Friday night. There can be little that is more soul crushing that hanging out in your downtown apartment on a Friday. The whole city circles you, a reveling buzzard. The throngs of Williamsburg kids flew by me tonight, they were going from the L stop to some rad Alphabet City bar and I was going to the bodega for a 40 of Bud Light.

The small stretch of 14th street that I walk down has awesome kids with fantastical, ironic hair lurching past. If I keep walking I know that there’s the Blarney Cove ahead just another half block; Popeye is there, hugging people and limping over to pour another gin and tonic. The large latina girl, I forget her name but I remember her telling me how much she liked getting fucked by two guys at the same time. (And it was ok to tell me because I wasn’t her type so she would never have to worry about freaking out a future prospect, she assured me of that.) That bar smells like bars; it’s the sort of joint you can get drunk in and belt out "Total Eclipse of the Heart’’ with your girlfriend and the chick you both plan on fucking later, and nobody will think anything of it.

The Blarney Cove might be nice but I opt to skip the hangover and drink myself to sleep, the weekend’s ahead and there’s at least one epic night planned. I must save my strength.