I lean in above her and shout, over her screams, “Try to scream, scream, keep screaming….” I’ve opened all the windows and the door to my terrace and when I stand over her, the mouth opens and not even screams come out anymore, just horrible, guttural, animal-like noises, sometimes interrupted by retching sounds. “Scream, honey,” I urge, “keep screaming.”
Ellis, American Psycho
Iago Coakes was buying meat. He would have liked to go to a butcher and chat with a fat jolly expert about meat, but there wasn’t one in LA. So he fondled lumps of flesh through plastic and tried to sniff blood through cellophane. It was important to get the right cuts, the right bits of the right animals. Today he was after venison. He liked the idea of a once proud and free animal like the stag being killed for his plate, the removal of consciousness for the sake of taste. Of course the venison he bought came from a farm, where the deer are grown intensively, and pumped full of pig hormones to make them grow faster; but then Coakes liked that idea too.
Iago Coakes walked along the corridors between cold cabinets. He watched florescent light, near gray, fall flat from humming strip lamps, to fuse with the bass low of refrigeration units. But what oppressed the grand, safari suited writer, as he pondered through ranks of beef, pig, bird and lamb, waiting to be recognised, was the sweat that coated his back; a greasy slick from where the fake leather seats in his SUV met the California sun, growing colder in the air-conditioning, making him shiver.
He paused by a freezer packed with TV dinners. Once, when he had been young-ish and at college, he had laughed at the idea of food specifically marketed to be eaten in front of the screen. Of course, he thought, even then an addict, all meals were to be eaten-in, whilst watching television.
He reached the freezer that held the great 10lb bags of bacon, smoked and cured. Despite a part Jewish ancestry, or perhaps because of it, Coakes loved pork. As he ran his hands slowly over the thick ice cold plastic, feeling the bone hard lumps of frozen bacon, he groaned, and furrowed another chin against his chest. Coakes weighed the pig by feel, and and selecting the heaviest pack, could almost smelling it cooking. He tossed the yard of meat into his cart, and thundered off, rich and cured.
Later, as he sat in traffic a few blocks from the market, Coakes saw the girl again, and pursued her. Today, she wore a strapless top, in some eye watering green, cream shorts to the middle of white thighs, pop socks and gym pumps. She looked younger than he remembered.
The pursuit was difficult for Coakes, not because the girl moved quickly, but because it’s always hard to stealthily follow a pedestrian from a bright red Range Rover about the size of a Brontosaurus. He half considered walking - dismissed the heresy. Too much, the thigh rubbing rash and chafe of belly roll; the fearful toll trickling sweat, could have upon the open sore of his arse, where he had scratched and dug haemorrhoids with long, dirty fingernails.
She bent to inspect something in a shop window, arching her back, sticking her butt out, and by Christ, the air caught in his throat. So soft, so… young. Coakes shivered. But it was alright, the girl was legal. He’d paid a PI to know her real age, and, other things. He soothed the anxious jolt with a stroke at his hardening lump. Coakes had watched every episode of OZ, and developed a desperate fear of prison, of becoming some Neo-Nazi’s cum dumpster, of gaining an internal swastika tattoo, burnt in Biro ink with a red hot Aids needle. Sometimes, when he had those nightmares, he would wake up in the fetal position, his soft tummy slick with semen.
Coakes stopped the car, started, parked and loitered the whole length of Vermont Avenue, watching her gaze at the clothes she couldn’t afford; hungrily, as if she were starving to death from a lack of stuff. She wasn’t well off, perhaps an orphan - he couldn’t find out - and couldn’t afford to look after herself, couldn’t even dress herself it seemed.
He sat staring at her, half dead eyed, and as he pulled off to follow once more, his powerful vehicle almost narrowly avoided a foul looking crone, all sports leisure wear and carcinogenically orange skin. She had stepped in front of his fat metal bull-bar, causing him to slam the breaks and jerk his head back and forth, in the agonising dance of whiplash. The old woman groaked at him, some sort of primitive Slavic hunting language, totally incomprehensible and furious. Coakes rolled down his window to yell, but before he could speak the golem had spat in his face and hobbled off.
The spit rolled down over Coakes’ thin lips and mouth, like cum. Aghast and almost breathless, he wiped the lazy white saliva from his face with a man sized Kleenex. A particularly absorbent brand of tissue he always carried for such incidents. He spotted the girl heading unto another street and pulled off after her. As he passed the Puma-clad hag, he kicked open the driver side door and knocked the bitch down, skinning her knees and green-stem snapping her left hip. She screamed again, this time in agony; and as he turned the corner off Vermont he watched as she began to cry. Coakes enjoyed the thought that likely, she had no medical insurance and would not walk again. He was fully erect.
He drove home. Although the girl, his Juliet, was within reach, he wanted to be away before the evil old cow could report his description to the police. Later, he would review the news coverage of the attack on the local public access network and eat a cream cheese, onion and raw pork rind salad. It had been a good day.
Not for the first time, Iago Coakes considered suicide. Lying drunk and naked on his deck, looking down over the pit of South Central Los Angeles, tearfully and with gentle strokes, as one might give an old companion animal, maintaining a weak stiff, Coakes weighed the sum of his life and found it wanting. Sure, he was successful - an award winning TV critic with a column syndicated in twenty three states, and occasional punditry on Fox News and Total Christian Television. True, he was wealthy - even by the standards of Hollywood, where the mysterious source of his fortune was a topic of frequent speculation amongst his smug celebrity neighbours. Neighbours who universally considered Coakes a festering sore on the face of the city. Safe to say, he was envied, if not admired, at least from a distance, as he strode into McDowell’s with a busty escort on each stout arm. Not too bad, Coakes thought, for a man of his age and singular appearance. But something was lacking, he knew, as he sat, considering how a rope might feel, slunk around his chubby neck and cast over the side of the deck; considering how he could leap and hang suspended in the air a moment, free and thinking nothing, till the slack snapped, and popped his throat. Almost painless. An end to the constant craving. Pussy, muff, slit, poon, vaj, gee, beef, gash, twat, minge, Freud’s toothless mouth, Angelina’s car park. Christ, would it ever end, the hunger; this emptying, all consuming lust for cunt?
Coakes had tried analysis, baring his soul in a sulfurous stupor. But he wasn’t a Catholic, and in any case, there was too much to confess. Too much that could not be forgiven. As he stood, watching over the grid work of neighborhoods, low buildings, orange in the rusty sunset; Coakes felt a slug of bile rise in his throat, a sudden burning rush that left his lips involuntarily, fanning out in a flame of raw acidic puke. For a moment all of Los Angeles was hidden, as if consumed by his gray sick.
As Coakes leaned on his hand rail, gasping, something smashed against the screen door behind him, and ricocheted into the gulf. A narrow miss. He turned and observed in the foggy distance, a dance of vehement irritation. On a deck parallel to his own, three hundred feet away, across the rolling hills, Jack Nicholson waved a furious 9 iron.
‘Coakes, you dirty fuck,’ he yelled, voice tiny with distance.
‘Get your ugly naked ass out of my sight!’
As Nicholson lined up another shot, Coakes, maudlin self pity forgotten, stood and faced his antagonist, arms outstretched, and flopped his short but heavy penis back and forth; in a defiant imitation of a helicopters blades. He turned and bent double, poking his arse out through the bars of the railing, and squeezed, face redder than the sundown sky. A turd, firm and coiling, loosed itself and pumped out over the drop, as Coakes, from his angelic perch, shat on celebrity, and the greater Los Angeles area.
Powered by FireStats