Free Chicken by David Henry Sterry Page B

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    It’s like kissing dead flesh sprayed with Lemon Pledge. I work and I work and I work, but the jaws of life can’t pry her out of the wreckage, and mouth-to-mouth is not working. Georgia’s vagina has arrived DOA.
    The great thing about cunnilingus as opposed to intercourse for a boy chicken is that the erection is superfluous, so the mind can wander without repercussion. So as I continue to try to resuscitate Georgia’s Sleeping Beauty, I time-travel to Sunny’s party. Maybe that black guy from the Hollywood Employment Agency’ll be there. Maybe some crazy young girliegirl’ll show me the meaning of life. Kristy’s sitting at home. What would she think if she saw me here now on this bed between Georgia’s legs? She’d flush me like a soiled toilet.
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    My dad loved smoking and taking home movies, and he did them both relentlessly. His 8mm Bell & Howell had a klieg light on top you could use to scan the exercise yard at Sing Sing, so in our home movies we squint stiff, grinning like bad TV movie-of-the-week actors trying to portray a happy family. And it’s silent, so there’s no chirrupy little Christmas sounds coming out of the jittery surreal family, captured like bugs in amber.
    I’m four, it’s Christmas morning, and the industrial-strength light is burning a hole in my little corneas as I swim in an ocean of G.I. Joes, sporting goods, and little stuffed dogs.
    I spot my little Roy Rogers cowboy outfit. It gets no cooler than that for a four-year-old boy. I put on my little ten-gallon hat, slip on my little holster, and ease my guns in. Sharp I turn, a gunslinger squinting into the high-noon OK Corral Christmasmorning searchlight. I draw, whipping out my six-shooter, and rapid-fire the trigger with my left palm, while aiming straight into the camera, blasting away rat- a- tat- tat , blazing bullets at the smoking dad behind the camera.
    Bam! I’m hit, plugged with hot lead. My gun falls in slow motion, I clutch my wee breast, sway painfully, then drop, and writhe on the floor in heroic American agony.
    Then my whole body goes limp. It’s peaceful in the womb of death, eyes closed to the roaring smoky spotlight. I lie there for a long time on the floor.
    Dead.
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    â€˜Life is so peculiar – shoo be doo-wop do wah!’
    Louis Armstrong sings; the gumbo’s got a big hot kick hiding in it, and they ain’t nobody here but us chickens. Three-D’s become my home away from home. Although what home I’m away from is unclear. Sunny’s my mothersuperior fatherconfessor bigbrother. But in the back of my mind, I know he only puts up with me because I’m making him money.
    He asks all about Baby and Sweety. Apparently he knows them socially, and his pink’s so tickled by my tale he can’t help but shout out, ‘Hoooo-ie! Ain’t that some shit!’ and a good old-fashioned ‘ Et toi! ’
    It’s fun telling my war story in this Fraternity of Freaks.
    Sunny gives me the lowdown on everyone:
    Dave’s six-foot-two, a long, lean, gorgeous orphan who survived institutionalized sexual molestation and will service anything that moves. Actually, it doesn’t have to move: If you pay Dave, he’ll schtup it.
    Laura’s not quite five feet, not quite ninety pounds, half Cherokee, half Irish, half Swedish. I say that’s one half too many. Sunny says, ‘You don’t know Laura.’ She survived a mother who burned her with cigarettes, matches, candles. She hates men, hates women, and loves pain.
    Cruella’s six-foot-four and so black she’s almost blue. She’s got huge fake breasts, but everything else is real. Decked out in a sparkly evening gown with a slit that goes all the way up to there, she flashes incredible Betty Grable legs. If Betty Grable were a six-four black transsexual. She survived being found in a trash can when she was three days old. We talk