| news | | | recent | | | archives | | | dispatches | | | goods | | | contributing | | | about |
by Ezekiel Buchheit | 06 Mar 2007, 0:00
I am 43 years old and I have horns. I may be 38. Perhaps 40. As young as 27. I'm not sure. I can't dive for a Frisbee over a lawn, lush or not, land and expect not to hurt for a week, but my hips won't need replacing. I am more aware of gravity than others. The Younger, we'll call them. The Others. I'm less aware of fashion. Just as aware of pussy but far less capable of attaining it. And I do have horns. It's hard to get a job with horns. Like facial tattoos, or surgically implanted bolts on your knuckles, or a split tongue that thank God healed, these extra epidermal matrices limit your prospects. Which is why I agreed to the photo shoot.
I don't screw in the spikes anymore, but the bolts, they're not going anywhere. The skin can't heal. It's all circular scar tissue bonded to stainless steel.
You can see it in Bessy, the lactation queen, we're all getting older but we aren't growing up. But that's standard. Average. Everyone gets old, so few grow up. The rest are just aged children.
Goddamn I'm old.
On this side of town, in this neighborhood, with these people, I get less stares. And the few I get aren't openly gawking, but they still come. I am a king of sorts, perhaps, or a prince. The Prince of Freaks. My performance is driving to the grocery store for some tortilla chips and a can of salsa. I don't need a venue. There's no setup. I'm always on, even now, so long after I've turned off.
Bessy had a customer and I wondered if breast milk goes sour. In the tit, in the glands, can it really keep producing this long and stay fresh. We aren't cows.
I sat on her living room couch, and the man, he balanced an erection against fear induced adrenalin. Her customer, he could have walked here from a bank, and he wasn't the teller. He could have walked here from any corporate ivy tower except his shoes weren't made for walking. They were made for display. So was the car he arrived in. I didn't see him arrive, but I knew it was his car. Nobody else in this neighbohood has that car. No matter what drugs they deal.
And no, I'm not jealous. The word is envy, because I hold no ill will towards the man. I don't wish him death. Of all the people I'd like to see slide underneath a semi, he isn't one of them.
He's staring, alternating between me and her tits as she squirts milk into a baby bottle.
A baby bottle. That's so priceless. She could have been in marketing if she wanted to, if she studied. She knows what she's doing, it's instinctual. More and more I've been thinking this way. Where we all could have been.
The man wants to fuck her. Maybe not. What he wants is to get a suck off her titty but I'm here. It's not just the presence of a witness, the accountability style witness, not the kind that will turn you in, but the kind that turns you inward and makes you ashamed. But it isn't just the witness, it's me and I'm unstable. Clearly. I'm a checkerboard and the pieces are doing battle. The king and queen sit under one eye, the pawns lay in ruins across may chest. Knights and bishops battle along my arms and palms. For real, literally. Battle Chess the Tattoo. And I have horns.
Bessy finishes filling the bottle, pulls her titty up and "accidentally" squirts my buddy and then she giggles and then she apologizes with a finger in her mouth and you can see the veins in her breasts and when she's squeezing them, the skin turns to leather and the milk is dripping down her breasts and she asks for help from him cleaning it off and he glances at me and I roll my eyes and search her coffee table for a magazine to read. It's all Home and Garden and Better Housekeeping and boring shit I don't understand.
She fucks a lot. Sometimes business is slow, but that's rare, more often she takes a vacation and her breasts dry up so she fucks a lot. If they made a home abortion kit she'd buy it. As it is now she has to keep going in. But she gets a discount for being such a regular customer. Yes, I've helped her. I've earned this exterior. I created and live in my own purgatory.
When it's over, after he's paid and she's tucked back away her udders, I put down the magazine and look at her and try to remember her name. Of course I know it, we've known each other since high school. I try and remember her name the way it was when I was terrified of walking down the hallway and she was a member of that most mysterious alien gender I would have given key organs to the black market to get solid, photographic information on.
"You in the market?" she asked, a hand on each breast, jiggling them halfheartedly. She sits in a chair I guess is French, the kind that you imagine is prettier than it is comfortable, across from me and begins to rearrange the magazines on the coffee table that I have scattered. Into the classic fan arrangement. Just enough of each title is revealed so you know which is which.
I shrugged and tried to relax on the couch, sink my body in and dig my shoulders into the cushions but I can't because I don't want to be here and that little voice is telling me over and over that all I have to do is walk out and fuck the photos and it's angry because it knows that I am ignoring it.
"It's been a long time."
I tried not to roll my eyes and the effort forced me to sigh like a teenager. "Is this going to go somewhere?"
"I don't know, you're the one here. I didn't go to you, you came here. Remember? My place."
I breathed again and mustered the strength to lift the train back onto the tracks. It's my train. I do the work.
This was about the money. So I took inventory.
"There's a photo shoot," I said.
4,200 hours spent in a chair.
"It's different," I said. "I think."
$150 per hour, on average for $630,000. All in ink, the end result is that now I'm a muddled blue-green.
"Legitimate. Not porn. I mean, I don't think."
"Something wrong with porn?"
"You know what I mean. Or maybe you don't. It's a photo shoot that's not going in a fetish magazine, that's not going to be the pick of the month on a website, that's not going to be traded in Polaroid form from high-schooler to high-schooler to kiddie porner to senator or something. A real shoot with a real photographer with a real paycheck."
47 different cosmetic surgeries. Or anti-cosmetic surgeries. Piercings at first, then beads slipped under the skin. Under the knuckles, up along the arms. In my head. $50 a piercing, I stopped at 67. The beads cost a couple hundred each. I stopped at fourteen. Removing the piercings was free. Removing the beads cost $2500 each. I did it through a real doctor. The kind without horns. The kind with a degree and an education and low public visibility. The bolts, they were $3000 each. I have eleven. Four at the knuckles on each hand. A Mohawk running down along a head so covered in ink, shaved so many times, burned and scarred hair can't grow there anymore. At the peak of each shoulder I used to screw in a spike the stood six inches high. I look like you could plug me in, attach me to a machine, a computer, screw in some wires and cable, a cyborg, a non human entity just from the bolts, the conduits, alone. I don't screw in any of the spikes anymore. I'm humble now.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"It's about the paycheck."
"Yeah, it's about the paycheck. What does that mean?"
"You sell tittie milk. What's that about? I don't think it matters one way or the other. Not anymore, and I'm not sure it ever really did. You know, I can't get a job at a fucking post office or gas station. Gas station. Not even the fucking graveyard shift where they hire nothing but the night morlocks. I mean, the real freaks. I can't get a job there, hell, I can't even walk in through the front door. People scream, people drop shit, women lock their car doors, men get angry. People cry and shake. I was sued for an old man's death once, for a heart attack and you fucking know what, I'm old like him now. Never throught it would happen. But I'm old like him now, and it keeps happening, I keep getting older."
The horns. Living coral, grafted to my skull. A dull blue color, more of an off white. I can't hide these short of wearing a sombrero and just for the sake of humor I gave that a shot. It's a rare human being that understands the true humor of seeing a fully tattooed man with fist-bolts walking down the street in a sombrero. If I find this man or woman I'll marry them and start a family somewhere in the south of France. The horns get longer constantly because they are alive. Pro Osteon implants, this is a bone graft people receive, a bone graft from the sea where coral is altered to a calcium substance and used to reconnected seriously damaged bones
"Shhh, shhh."
"What?"
"I don't want to hear anymore about your poor sad little life. You're a fucking freak by choice. Nobody else is going to go in on this with you, you know. They haven't all had the same enlightenment that you've recently gone through. In fact, we're all a little pissed, you know."
I nodded. "That's why I talked to you first."
Eventually the real bone replaces the Pro Osteon and all is good. I have a thin layer of this where the skin of my skull was split just above the temple on either side of my head. From there it is living coral. But the bone is replacing it. Slowly, the bone grows from my skull and is eating away the coral and these horns, man, they're real. I have horns.
"You need me."
"Yeah, I do."
"We're getting paid?"
"Yes."
"How much?"
I can't count the upkeep. I can't begin to but a price to the medicines, to the infections, the routine maintenance and cleaning, to the general, day to day hygienic responsibilities of this body. This inhuman machine. But if I had to guess
"A lot."
She shook her head, leaned back and sighed. Eyes closed.
"What is this really about?"
Hundreds of thousands of dollars. A lifetime of earnings.
"I told you," I said, "It's about the paycheck."
Feel like commenting?
your name
link?
Who is the current US president?