with the Daily Double! Big fuckin’ deal!!!
Deborah Lansing, whom I hadn’t seen for about two years, called around this time and left a message on my machine. I wasn’t too keen on calling her back since she wasn’t exactly friendly the last few times I had seen her on the street. It was rumored that the girl was on smack. Maybe she wanted to borrow money? I didn’t have none, in any case. What else could she have wanted from me? Two more messages came, however, and I finally dialed her number.
“May I speak to Deborah, please,” I asked when some old guy picked up the phone.
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“Bui.”
“Booey?!”
“Bui.”
“Hold on a second.”
Who’s the geezer?
I wondered, then Deborah’s voice came on: “I’m so glad you called me back.”
“How’ve you been?”
“Not good.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I can’t really talk right now. Listen, can I stay at your place for a couple of days?”
I hesitated.
“It will only be for a couple of days,” she continued, “I promise.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“It’s sort of an emergency.”
“All right. What time?”
“How about nine?”
“I’ll see you then.”
You just want her ass
, a little voice told me as I hung up the phone.
But why shouldn’t I think such thoughts? Because she’s in trouble and she’s asking for your help and you are incapable of helping anyone without tallying a potential benefit for yourself. Shut the fuck up, you righteous motherfucker. It’s wrong, son, according to Our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen
. I hastily made a little sign of the cross in compliance. And just think, Deborah’s dad is a retired USMC sergeant who did two tours in Nam to protect democracy for the likes of me.…
Our first time was very forgettable. I was sitting at the bar, alone and lubricated, when she came in with two friends and sat down at a booth.
There’s that Deborah
, I registered from behind my crazed lens, the cheery-looking one with a body like a pickup truck. “I like to sleep with Greg,” she had told me on a previous occasion, “because he has such a big butt.”
“You’re like a monkey,” she said to me later when we were totally fucked up and in bed.
“That makes me feel real good,” I slurred after a pause.
“Don’t be so sensitive,” she said.
Another pause.
“Okay. You remind me of a squirrel.”
“That’s better,” I said. Then we slept. There was a second time also, about a year later, and that, too, was very forgettable.
I will never
, I had promised myself—
no matter how horny I get—sleep with this woman ever again
.
The stunted growth of my race, I’ve often reasoned, comes from the fact that we have, for the last forty centuries or so, eaten nothing but MSG, duck sauce, mung beans, hot mustard, fermented garbage, flakes of carrot, Ramen Pride, and an occasional glazed doughnut, to be washed down by cup after cup of the world’s strongest coffee, sweetened by a digit or two of condensed milk at the bottom.
You were sired by a ring-tailed lemur
, goes a little ditty in my head,
and your mother is a gray squirrel!
I imagined Deborah’s father to be some boozy red-faced guy in a Phillies cap and an open shirt.
“Bui!”
“Yes, sir!”
“Do you know that I served two tours in your fuckin’ country during the prime of my life?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Do you know that I risked getting myself killed by little bastards like you just to defend your fuckin’ freedom?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you failed to satisfy my beautiful daughter?”
“I was drunk, sir!”
“I was drunk, too, when I fucked your mother twenty years ago!”
“You’re a better man than I am, sir.”
“You’re damn right. I was in the United States Marines!”
I emptied a clip from my AK-47, bent down to retrieve the loose change from his pocket, doffed my V.C. helmet, and disappeared into the jungle.
Nine o’clock came and went and there was no sign of