Thank heaven for little girls
for little girls get bigger every day!Thank heaven for little girls
they grow up in the most delightful way!Those little eyes so helpless and appealing
one day will flash and send you crashin’ thru the ceilin’
Chevalier - Thank Heaven for Little Girls
Settle down, settle down, you tell yourself, eying the girls - young girls, much too young girls - at your daughters sports day. God but junior highschool pups are more mature these days, with their dolphin eyes and doe skin tans. You don’t remember such ingenues being so sensual. It must be all those juicy beef hormones. You take a swig of Gatorade, and swallow hard, the sickly sweet fizz reminding you of sherbet dips and chemical burn. Racked with the other parents, bowling pins on Hillsborough shaky seating, you watch the egg and spoon race in which your daughter is competing, contained intensity warring with compassion fatigue. Grinning broadly through her braces, a steady handed Pippy Blondestocking, Melody is winning shamelessly. Her mothers hardy pilgrim genes are betraying centuries of proud Coakes failure.
A man, ginger, a translucent bag of organs dotted with freckles, nudges you and says..
‘Great show huh! Which one’s your kid? Our girl’s Cynthia, see there in the red trainers?’
You size up this friendly idiot in Target sweat pants and Yankees cap, an intellectual rube from the dim trough of the bell curve, and painfully return his smile.
His goat, milk bottle white with a vitamin C frizz, this snow sculpture with a head injury, is pacing second last, her egg twitching as if it’s about to hatch.
‘Isn’t she a darling?’ he says, and ‘Which ones yours?’
The question repeated, suspicious. Now you have to answer, or risk being tackled in the stand; pegged by a mouth breather’s craw, Donald Sutherland in the Body Snatchers. A pervert, a freak, a monster who’s defeated post Columbine, 9/11, Virginia Tech, Baby Maddy, security to seek his wank fodder from a high school sports day. You point vaguely, the effort forcing a vocal quake through your arse hole.
‘The blonde girl in the..’
The crowd roar, rise like a wave on a sea of sheep. The bloodless goober waves at his little failure, and looks back at you grinning.
‘The little girl who’s won.’
The fucker, smirking, clasps your shoulder impudently, and smirks like a hooker in a seminary.
‘You’re Melody Coakes’s father? Jeez guy, you must be so proud. Cynthia’s always talking about your little girl. Didn’t she have her first book published last year? Why the kid’s a certified genius!’
You certainly didn’t notice any hand painted launch invite from your precocious petal, or the column inches devoted to her in your own bloody paper. You absolutely did not cut out the New York Times best seller list dated May 5th, with the name Melody Coakes proudly wedged between Cecilia Ahern and JK Rowling, and tape it to the inside of your bidet.
‘That’s our Melody,’ you hear yourself say, feeling like a 2-D character on a language learning tape. Hallo Pieter, das ist Lucy. Guten abend Lucy. Guten abend Pieter. Kannst du mein scheiße essen? *Munch* *Munch* Oh Danke, es ist sehr gut!
‘Wow, just aw shucks wow. You guys just have to come over to our place for dinner tonight. I know Cynthia would be delighted to..blah, yob, rub rub rub.’
The man’s mouth, you suspect, works independent of any mental control. He is in effect, a machine, a clockwork toy. Each morning his wife, plain and dutiful, industrious like him - doubtless in bonds or marketing - takes a great iron key and twists it in his rectum, and off he goes, mouth and eyes working at random, slight judders from the daily routine triggering one or another canned animation; a jerky walk the only clue to his condition.
Missy you think, Missy St Claire, what have you done to me? It’s Christmas ‘95 and you’re ramming your head into the belly of old Mercer, stalwart scion, blunderbuss magnate, and he’s hooked your neck in the crook of a beefy arm, and he’s pummeling your face to shredded haddock and just as you begin to lose consciousness, wondering if your first mistake had been to suggest he publish a book by that upstart queer, or in lacing tonight’s coke with the faintest hint of PCP, when just like that you’re on the floor rubbing life back in your neck and gasping the Manhattan air like it’s an alpine curative.
Old Mercer St Claire is on his cellphone - the number that must be called only in vital emergency number one - and Christ the old bugger, this seventy eight year old billionaire whose nod has ended presidencies, is crying.
Much later, at Mount Sinai Mercer clasps a hand that vigged Capone on your bony shoulder, says…
‘Iago my boy, I’m going to have to ask you a very great favor.’
And in that moment the course of your life is set, your dreams of crumbling Maxwell, besting Murdock, pinned to that which hangs fragile, crashing, whittled, in the room beyond.
Missy St Claire is eighteen and puffy, for a junky. Cute despite her brush with the almighty. It takes the bitch all of ten minutes to rumble you shadowing her. You’re on a street, clean and civilised, somewhere on the Upper East Side, close to Columbia, where the kid is nominally enrolled, and she turns, spots you forty feet off, faking an interest in a display of kosher wedding cakes; and smashes into you, hate of black hair blurring her eyes, Nancy Spungen in a tartan mini.
‘The fuck!’ she squeals, voice high and cured from endless cigarettes.
‘What are you followin’ me for you fuckin’ perv.’
When you fail to react she drops her fists, shoves her face in yours, labret piercing, button nose, those almost invisible eyebrows that tell you she’s a natural blonde.
‘Oh shit, you’re a suit. You’re one of daddies cronies right? Well you can shit right off, you fink fucker!’
She raises a leg to knee you in the delicates, and you catch the crook and tip her on her ass.
When she backs away cussing, you light a Joe Camel, your childhood favourite, and let her know the score. One month, no junk, no skipping the city. For thirty days she is your job, and you are not her bodyguard, but her babysitter.
The sun is rising over Broadway, and you’re still smoking, watching your young quarry undress. You’ve followed Missy St Claire through what you hope is not an average day. She’s ground you down with twenty seven hours of whirl wind socialising, tried to shake you at gateposts where Mercer’s influence is readily visible. Librarians and security guards demand no identification, bouncers keep the rope pulled back after the kid has passed. The old man’s people have put the city on notice. You’ve watched her change costume a half dozen times, and already you’re accustomed, if not immune, to tear drop breasts, and tats of Govinda and Betty Boop. She’s changed persona twice requently. There’s Missy the charmer, taking your arm in HooochiHihow introducing you to James St. James in platform shoes and a snow white wig. Missy the bitch, hitting the rape alarm on West 116th St, screaming ‘He touched me!’ as a burly Nubian in a Gucci suit appears from nowhere to deal with campus security. There’s Missy the party animal, upstairs in Perestroika, tits out, going shot for shot with Russian gangsters and young Republicans. At last, here’s Missy St Claire defeated, settling listless in cotton stockings, panties and a furred parka hood from Vivian Westwood, knees up before her, shivering in the pre-dawn chill.
‘How can you keep up?’ she asks, nudging Ray Bans down to the tip of a soft nose.
‘I’ve had guys beg for mercy on my schedule.’
You say nothing, put a hand under a pant of sodden pit, into a jacket pocket and draw out…
‘Pills? What speed? Oh you’re kidding. That’s too good.’
She starts to laugh, breaks into coughing. All too easy to forget this girl was on life support just two hectic and unslept days before. You stand up, approach, and she shrinks back into her seat, smaller than you’ve seen her. Lifting a tussled blanket from the bedspread you wrap her in the chair like an invalid, and sit between her feet. She laughs, and kicks your back, little a much younger girl.
You smile and nod, nod and smile, and imagine the sheer loveliness of a gentle Eastern European tongue, scooping the pooled sweat from between your buttocks, where it has run wild and free, free and wild, on this unaccountably hot and dry Seattle morning.
You excuse yourself, and move rapidly from the little man, aware as you do so that, tic like, he will only dig deeper, later, for having been temporarily removed.
The stands are packed with men and women like him, harmless upper middle class nobodies in gap sweaters and prep school colours. The working man you can talk to, chat of sports or pussy, share a brewsky. The nancy intellectual you can patronise. The aristocrat you toady, compliment or smarm - you genuinely worship him. But the middle class Lawrence, Topher or Quinne, him you detest. He reminds you of yourself.
You pad down the stand, to where a swarthy Turk bares a chest tray like a second belly. Christ they even have hot-dogmen. You buy a chilli dog, knowing your arse will suffer later, judging the changes of wind direction to dodge the Turks harsh garlic pant in bullet time. As you masticate the dog, you feel a loop of sauce peel free and sail downwind to your eighteen hundred dollar Dolce and Gabbana pin stripe tie. You let it fall.
In the white tiled staff restroom, you lean in close, as close as your belly will allow, to the stinking urinal. As the green piss cake fizzes under your translucent slash, as always you feel a crazy compulsion to pick up the sticky puck, to mouth it, to suck and swallow the leak of other men’s accumulated urine. With an effort you control the urge. Yoplait pulls up beside you. Oh fuck off, you think, keeping your eyes locked straight ahead.
‘Hey Coakes,’ he says. ‘fancy meeting you here. Ha ha. Thought you could get away from me.’
Without a trace of embarrassment, the bloodless grotesque peers over the urinal barrier and visibly inspects your package. He snorts and slaps your shoulder.
‘Not much to play with buddy.’
As he moves to wash his hands you purple and turn, your cock still out, wide and short and pocked with moles and blackheads; the nose of an alcoholic boxer, broken above a kinky neck beard.
‘Listen buddy,’ you say, ‘I’m a grower not a shower.’
This red haired nematode just smiles and dries his hands off on a paper towel. With a snarl you grab the lapels of his tracksuit, haul the ginger bodily into an open cubicle. You leaning back against the door frame as he falls speechless to the toilet seat, and you grab your damp chode between thumb and forefinger, rubbing the thing to life.
‘Look you dozy stink pig, see, I’m as big as anyone.’
Your voice breaks and you pound away, eliciting a weak twitch and a treacle of left over piss that stains your chinos horribly. Your cheeks redden, and the brim sting of girl water forms at the corner of your eyes. The ginger makes a break for the door, and your slap him with your cock hand. He falls back hard onto the tiles, rubbing at his face where you touched it.
Missy’s tells you they’re ‘An all girl punk rock band’, but ‘The Gee’s’ sound like that grunge crap to you. Their gimmick is that the bassist, drummer and lead guiatarist are all Japanese, and speak no English whatsoever. This would of course be far less entertaining, if Mercer St Claire’s little lost girl spoke any slope herself. Crowded into a pukey rehearsal room in Korea Town, she walks them through a new song she’s written entirely on the mouth; humming sections as the band feed their Tamagotchi. You watch her sing a capella into a wireless microphone, hair before her eyes like a kid playing dress up. You suspect that knotted, chewing gummed bush baby is a wig, relically accrued by a thousand vacuum lipped groupies, hand sown from the tooth pubes of Slash. She mouth’s it contemplatively, laces her jackboots in red and yellow as the band piece something together, and catches you looking, pokes out her tongue - a deep sea fish peeping from the black. That night as the band cover Macarena and she fucks a chest of drawers live on stage, you feel a powerful stirring in your loins.
Missy takes you oversized sweater and baggy jeans shopping, and you report back to the old man that everything is peachy. As she sucks you off in a booth a CBGB’s, you tell him you’re keeping her in your sights. When she ties you off, back stage at Sound Garden, squeezing air out of the droppers neck, just like the movies, and pierces a vein as you stretch ecstatically, you don’t call at all.
A hat peeps over the stall door, a face, fifty something, black and roughly stubbled in grey. Gingers on his knees before you, your hand balled in his hair.
‘Gentlemen. I’m going to have to ask you to put your clothes back on and come with me.’
In the principles office you fidget with a pencil on his desk.
‘Mr Coakes, Mr Van Housen. In light of the seriousness of this offence..’
Van Housen, his seat as far from yours as the expansive office will allow, has folded in on himself, shaking his head again and again, and sucking one thumb audibly, like a scolded child. He’s developed a taste.
‘I should already have called the police.’
You stare out the window behind the principle, watch the three legged race end a field away, girls hugging and sweating in the afternoon sun, the tingle of that elusive hard appearing now, long after the appropriate moment, like an abortion doctor turning up to a Bar Mitzvah. Oh now, you think, great, just what I need.
‘The fact that this is a first offense, and both of your daughters are exemplary students…’
And the fact we’d separately or jointly sue the pants off this two bit academy, with more press attention than Prince Williams sex change operation, you think, as you stealthily unbutton under the desk and flip out your hard to startle Van Ginger, mouthing - ‘See’. He lets out a low moan, and begins to paw at his high back chair.
‘…if you both leave now and agree never to set foot on school grounds again.’
‘Fine,’ you say, rubbing a finger under your sticky bell end, and holding the head out a cheesy cheesy hand.
Having known true relief, caught in the chill cement of sleep, swooned to the gentle rot of fruit, softening in a kippled corner, you feel no need to rise. Tangled up with Missy in the coal cellar, you watch the comings and going through a rotoscope of heavy lids. Junk is hard to come by, but you can make Meth almost anywhere, from many common household ingredients. This is how you fund the good life. Your Oompa-Loompa’s handling the fiery temperaments of methamphetamine, as you tie off on a bed of coal, crushing wicked brave spiders as they raise their ugly heads. You’re in Oakland, or Portland, you forget which, it’s been weeks since either of you’ve seen the sun, safe in this itching concrete sarcophagus. Missy shakes herself awake, a coal dust sculpture coughing to life.
‘Where’s Wally?’ she says, rubbing softly at her face with a perpendicular palm.
‘Never mind Wally,’ you say, and rest your lips on hers, a dry kiss, grave and slow. ‘Where the hell are we?’
She shakes again, twists to you, warm in your crook.
‘Baby, we’re all out.’
‘Well get that fucker Wally on the line,’ you say, and smile as she rises on willowy arms, the lumpy knobs of needle marks your tribal tattoo.
Missy calls your contact in wherever, who insists on meeting in person. You can feel the net tighten, but you feel the hunger more. Outside, above ground, where the overpeople walk, is brighter than you remembered, and cold. Bundled in jumpers you wander through a suburb, avoiding glances like they sting. You take a bus into the city, Missy on your lap, shaking softly, nusseling you like a little kid. You hold her tight, whispering promises you can’t keep.
You leave her in a cafe with a pay phone, an oversized mug of hot chocolate, and Ani DeFranco on the radio, and go meet Wally. You find him in a parking lot, one of those outdoor upscale lifestyle center’s with each store isolated in it’s own flat roofed bungalow. You share a smoke and do the hand over. Enough premium H for weeks. Afterward the sky doesn’t seem so much like a roof any more. You lie back on the bonnet of Wally’s Camero, roll the stuff up under your baggy jumper and take a breath.
‘Where’s the girl.’
You imagine this is what they mean when they say ’snub nosed gun’. A short piece, old fashioned, connected to a jowly tough in a monkey suit. Not a bounty hunter, one of Mercer’s men.
‘Listen, I’ve got money.’
He puts a bullet in your knee. Broad daylight, just a whine, silenced you think, in shock, slipping to the tarmacadam. Staring up at the gray sky and a nose like a boxer’s, broken and corpuscled, a great monkey mouth, shadowed beneath his trilby. As he crouches, patting through your pockets with hard leather gloves, he farts, a noxious swill chording your tongue with sewer dank belches. You vomit, almost choking on the stuff, the pain in your leg a bellowing animal. The fat man drops a cellphone in your lap.
‘Call her.’
You cough.
‘Whatever he’s offered you.. We’ll find a way to double it.’
He puts another round in the other leg, begins to recede to black, stands on your wound, exploding everything in sunburst yellow.
‘Call her.’
Hog tied in the back of a black BMW, roaring toward oblivion, you watch helpless as Mercer’s goon fingers Missy, high as fuck, capitulating. You’re sweating and already you feel your bowels begin to quake and loosen. The goon looks back at you, vomit stained and bleeding; smiles as a Neil Diamond track kicks off on the stereo.
‘You don’t mind, do you Paul?’
In the passenger seat Missy is moaning, his fingers deep in her snatch.
‘I never properly introduced myself.’
He’s casual now, utterly confident that he has won. You tear at plastic rope bonds, just one chance, just one fucking chance. The thug laughs, watching you struggle.
‘I don’t think I properly introduced myself.’
He checks the road and looks back again, his smirk satanic.
‘Iago Coakes is the name. Don’t worry, you haven’t heard of me. Till today.’
He pauses to poke a yellow tongue in Missy’s ear. You groan through the gag, an animal keen, powerless and broken.
‘Tilll today, I wasn’t anybody. But don’t you worry, you little junkie cunt. I’m going to be a big man, a very big man.’
In the car park you ignore your daughters babble and watch the ginger’s family bundle him into the back seat of their car, wife fuming and striking at his expressionless face. Those big puzzled eyes catch yours across the lot, and he begins to panic, grunting and huffing as his good Christian wife and moma locks him in, climbing in front beside their bloodless daughter. You blow the fuck a kiss. You get in your car, alongside Melody, who’s shut up now, she knows that look, and raise each window with the door control. You release a true stinker, an eggy quake that bodes of yeast infections and stomach cancer. Nice you think, as your daughter covers her mouth with her shirt, showing a little tit, nice.
Powered by FireStats