Henry Halliwell: This diet you’re on, what is it? I’ve tried all the others, I might as well try this one.
Billy Halleck: I don’t think you’d like it Henry. In fact, I don’t think you’d like it at all.
King McDowell, Thinner
Iago Coakes ran, had spent the last month running, jogging on an automatic running machine, with the angle set to 23% and the speed at 12 KMH. When he ran, sweat rained off him, down his back, soaking his sweatshirt, and his heart beat so wildly and irregularly he felt certain it would burst. As he ran, a pain would begin up in his side and he would take great gulps of air, as white spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth and fizzed his chin. In front of him glowed the great flat TV screen, but he could not make out its image through the sweat burning his eyes.
Later, after he had flung himself into the showerbath, vomiting bile,when his legs burned and his hips seemed attached by the the weakest of Idi Amin’s stitch work, when his thoughts reeled like an epileptic unicyclist, and his gut tumbled, an infant in a spin cycle, he’d slam down into the recliner, still half strangled and turn to his great God. In his lap the slick perfection of his Mac to dictate his stammered sentences, the words all running together, through a spit flecked head set.
Coakes’ editor was becoming increasingly bewildered and frightened. His last review, a 250 word quickie, had come in fifteen hundred words over. Three single typed pages of of hiphop Hamlet, mixing the Bard with what Coakes imagined was Ebonics, and absurd neologisms like “cuntwhistle”. The article had been an incisive dissection of of Black and Deckers new 10″ Compound Miter Saw. When the panicked editor had suggested a few minor cuts, Coakes had run at him, threatened to drown him with his loose belly flesh; the stretched skin tongue where his bratwurst stomach had been.
Coakes ran, never stopping while he still could move, piss and shit searing the insides of his legs, sweat soaking his pits and arsecrack; the sores on his thighs from chaffing long split and gone septic, green pus and blood spilling forth to mingle with the excrement.
And still he couldn’t sleep or get the smell of meat out of his hands. He lay, covered in sweat, always sweat, shivering and weeping. Rocking back and forth. He was becoming incontinent and the cleaner had put plastic sheets on his bed and demanded a pay rise. He’d agreed, sobbing, his dick half hard and aching in an ironic parody of that night, when he’d needed V and Charlie to do anything. He’d done too much. He couldn’t bear to touch himself, and when O’Reilly sent round a hooker, their hooker, to cheer him up, he’d shit himself, straight off, on the porch and begging her forgiveness, crumpled to the floor.
He’d bought a snub nosed revolver from a pawn shop off Vermont Avenue, and would place the oily, cold barrel in his mouth. Then, lying on the couch in the den, suckling the black cock of death, his breathing would slow and he’d shut his eyes, his tongue teasing the cobalt piss-slit. Coakes would wake, minutes later, hands limp and useless, all his strength gone, and weakly paw the hard gun out of his tight raw throat. It was only after he’d thought to buy bullets, that Coakes consented to check himself into the Betty Ford.
There his daughter came to visit. Melody was hollow cheeked, and had developed dark rings around her eyes. Of course, they’d told him about her arrest in LAX, trying to board a plane to Seattle with a hacksaw in her luggage. TSA had found bits of elbow cartilage stuck in the teeth. She’d said nothing, only sat and stared, and half an hour had gone by before the sheriff, with deep stains under his arms despite the air conditioning, had stuck his head around the door, and she’d stood, manacles clanking.
The papers called for her to be tried as an adult, and Coakes received support and best wishes from several editorials. She went to the chair with a remarkable lack of dignity, screaming and weeping and Schwarzenegger himself threw the switch.
Coakes woke up, startled in his recliner. His back was slick with perspiration from contact with the soft Italian leather. He swallowed twice, the thick gob of sour bile slipping slowly down. His tongue was battered with a white meniscus of dried spit. He swung his hard bulging eyes round, past the bottle of ‘61 Petrus which had cost nearly fourteen hundred English pounds six years before, to rest upon his black nemesis. The remote control sat low and silent, obstinately refusing to move or communicate. It’s batteries had died, and Coakes had ransacked the house looking for more. Cupboards and shelves of cleaning products and canned foods had puked their contents to the kitchen floor and larder. When he could find none, he’d flushed a deep purple and yelled, “That bitch, how could you do this?”
He’d tried to make the television work via his laptop, but the thing was as alien to him as an obelisk on the moon. After that, he’d drunk himself into a stupor and eaten a half pound bag of white chocolate champagne truffles. Now the pale light of another morning had slipped through the curtains, to wake him like an evil rapist. He stood, his back cracking, and a cascade of pistachio shells tumbled from his paunch onto the floor. He wore a long purple stain down the front of his vest.
An idea came to him, and he lumbered forward to his ex-wifes old room. When she left him she had left everything, other than his hateful over-achieving daughter, and he’d sniffed her thongs from the laundry basket, ’till they smelt of nothing but mothballs and semen. He walked passed the dead clothes, to the chest of drawers, pulling out her lingerie drawer, spilling it onto the bed. There, amongst the bras and gray period pants, was a rude orange dildo with a thin white wire running from it to a heavy battery pack.
He remembered buying the thing for her, how she’d insisted on him going into the shop. He’d felt humiliated and dominated and later, as she squealed in her room, he’d lain on the couch in the den, exiled and sleepless. He’d wept that night. He almost wept again upon clasping the batteries, cold as bullets, shuffling into the darkened den, forcing their little hard lump into the back of the remote, violating it, a small plastic wife.
The screen blinked and lightened in its centre, then it’s digital curtains swept back and he breathed easy. John Roberts stared down at him, shuffled his papers and cleared his throat. He began, “Morning Iago, first we go over to Wendy with the financial news…”
Coakes stared at screen and thought, ‘Everything’s coming up Coakes,’ and closing his eyes he sank down once more onto his recliner. When he woke again, the TV had switched itself off.
When Coakes had been young, he’d loved to draw castles and forts. He’d spent hours hunched, his gaunt face almost touching a sheet of paper, his breath ragged from concentration as he slowly drew stickmen fallen to the guns, or cruelly gored on pits of spikes. He’d suck up strings of saliva and let them pool in his mouth, his deep soft lips glistening. That was before his father had bought a television. After that, Iago didn’t draw any more.
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