King of the Perverts (6 page)

She roars.

I run for my life.

We’re in the parking lot. I’m clutching my pants, trying to pull them on. She’s stark naked. Tall and languid, muscular and athletic. And fast. Somewhere behind us, I hear the loud clomps of another set of feet. I chance a look back over my shoulder and see Mongo behind us, camera in hand. He’s laughing, struggling to keep up with us. Danielle is closing fast.

We cover six blocks before I can finally shake her.

Interlude 4

Jack Mehoff

I wait a long time before I return to the motel. I’m walking around in my bare feet, without a shirt on, praying I don’t get mugged or picked up by the cops. Maybe Danielle has already called them and they’re out looking for a shirtless, shoeless guy right now. I’m guessing she could very easily have me arrested for assault. Be easy to pin the crime on me, too, considering all the DNA evidence on her face.

I feel awful for her. And more than that, I’m disgusted with myself. I can’t believe I did that to someone. I also realize I’m not cut out for this. I like sex as much as the next guy, don’t mind getting a little kinky at all, but not if it’s one-sided. I just crossed a line.

Part of me wants to be picked up by the cops. I certainly deserve it.

Eventually, I make it back to the room, very careful to be quiet as I pass the adjoining room Danielle and I had been in. I don’t hear anything and assume she’s probably gotten her things and cleared out by now. Still, I very gently tap on the door to room 27.

Mongo opens the door a crack and I’m greeted by his scary rape smile. “Hello, lover boy.”

“Hilarious. Please open the door now. I would like to go to sleep.”

It’s nearly four in the morning and I’ve been walking the streets of Muncie for the past two hours. I’m dead on my feet.

Mongo opens the door and says, “Am proud of you, little trooper. Did not think you had guts to complete
challengean
.”

“Whatever. I wouldn’t call it guts. More like stupidity.”

“Is only getting harder from here. Becoming King is not simple task. Sooner you understand this, easier it will be rest of the way.”

I plop down on my bed and crawl under the covers. “If there is a rest of the way. I’m not comfortable with what I just did tonight, Mongo. Asking a chick to pee on me or rolling her on her back while we’re fucking is one thing, but this shit tonight crosses the line.”

Mongo doesn’t say anything. He just watches me. His rapey grin is gone, but I almost prefer that to the look he’s giving me now. After I’m completely creeped out, he finally speaks. “Game is not about what you are comfortable with. Is about how far you go to win money.”

“Well, I’m not willing to go much farther. I’m not cool with this anymore. Money be damned.”

Mongo is in my face before I realize he’s moving. It’s scary how fast he’s there, looming over me.

“You don’t get picture, homo man. You don’t have option to quit. According to updated scoreboard, you are now in third place behind Baton Rouge and Athens, Georgia. Not quitting now. Got it?”

I can’t answer, just nod.

Mongo stands straight and reaches behind his back. He pulls out a long, black, comically large hunting knife, which he uses to pick dirt from beneath his fingernails. He says, “Oh, almost forgot to mention. After you win, you will be splitting money with me. Fifty-fifty. I think is only fair considering how hard I work to help you win game. Don’t you agree?”

I nod again. He flips the knife over, catches it by the blade and rears back. I don’t even see the thing move through the air. It seems to just transfer from his hand to the mattress a few inches from my nose, buried to the hilt. This time, I can’t help but make a little pee-pee in my pants. Mongo leans over and removes the blade from the bed, hovering close enough that I can smell his breath, an odd mixture of vodka and pancake syrup.

“Good. Glad to know we see eye to eye. Is very important for us to be on same team.
Very
important.”

•

It takes a while, but I finally sleep. When I wake up, the sun is getting low in the sky.

“Time to rise, Sleeping Beauty.” Mongo stands at the end of my bed, holding the laptop. “Time to learn about next challenge. It is doozy.”

We watch the video.

This keeps getting worse.

Peter Oh’Tool demonstrates the proper way to execute something called a
donkey punch
. The girl in the video is wearing a fake smile, pretending to enjoy and even get off on this particular example of what I suppose you could term as sadism, but I can see the pain in her face.

Fuck. I’m going to have to be drunk to pull this off.

•

After a meal, we hit the local bars, as we’ve done the past five nights. I recognize several of the college-age women from previous excursions, and they seem to recognize me, which really spooks me. What if Danielle or one of her friends sees me? What if they’ve gotten the word out about me?

The bartenders are starting to recognize us as well, which spooks Mongo. We’ve tried to stay close to the motel room since all of the equipment is already set up there and it’s easier to convince a chick to walk across the street to my room rather than take a cab or hop in our rented Festiva and drive across town. But we seem to have hit a saturation point.

“We need new place,” Mongo says. I have to agree with him.

We head a few miles down the road, away from the Ball State hotspots, and find a dive filled with older, more pathetic folks. The music is slower and not as loud, the lounge lizards deliberately making their way around the room in the languid motions of the drunk and the hopeless and the tragically out of touch with today’s popular culture. Mongo finds a quiet spot in the back of the bar, leaving me to my task of procuring a victim for the donkey punch.

I sit at the bar and nurse a beer. I have no desire whatsoever to go forward. Mongo has kept his distance so far, but that won’t last long. He’ll be on my ass soon and then I’ll have to figure something out. But I have every intention of waiting until the last minute, hoping I can think of a way out of this challenge. I have no motivation, and it shows in the few poor interactions I have with women that come and go. I can’t help it. They all seem too nice to consider doing to them what I’m required by this goddamn challenge.

By ten, the bar is packed with a slightly more diverse cross-section of society, probably aided by an influx of wannabes who couldn’t get into a more hip spot. People are streaming all over, talking, smoking, laughing, arguing, and all of them completely ignoring me. The bartender would probably have kicked my pathetic ass from my spot at the bar by now for driving away business, but he seems too busy at the moment to notice, either. I’m like a black hole on a barstool, and he’ll eventually get back to me and tell me to piss off.

Despite my presumed invisibility, I notice a guy down the bar watching me. I realize he’s been there for quite some time, I just hadn’t really caught on that he was staring at me until just now. When he sees me watching him back, he raises his glass and nods in my direction. I look down at my glass. This would be just my luck. The only person in the entire place interested in getting naked with me is going to be this squirrelly-looking middle-aged weirdo with huge, tinted pedophile glasses. I steal a quick glance to see if he’s still watching me, but he’s not. He’s gone.

And then he’s there again, right next to me. I look around for an escape but I’m boxed in. People are crowding the bar to place their orders or retrieve their drinks. There are five people positioned behind me in a semi-circle, their backs to me, jabbering away with each other, oblivious of the fact they’ve hemmed me in. Somehow, Mr. Pedo angles around them and squeezes right next to me.

“Hi,” he says.

I consider ignoring him, but that will probably just anger him. He’s got the look of your typical suburban serial killer, just waiting for someone to rudely snub him and set him off. I don’t really want to end up in pieces, stuffed in this guy’s chest freezer, so I respond with a very stiff-sounding, “Hey.”

“My name is Jack Mehoff.”

Shit. Of course it is. “Hi, Jack.”

“I’m your biggest fan.”

I turn to look at the guy. “What?”

He repeats, in the exact same tone, like his response is a prerecorded message, “I’m your biggest fan.”

I’m not sure how to respond. That’s not a problem because he doesn’t bother to wait for one anyway.

“I picked you from the beginning. I think you have the perfect blend of charm, desperation, and compromised morals to be the King.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Jack looks around, but no one is listening to us. “The show.”

How the hell can he know about that? The show won’t even begin to air for weeks, well after the game is over. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do.
King of the Perverts
? A reality-based game show built around the idea of a sexcathlon pitting ten contestants against each other in increasingly difficult
–
”

I cut him off. “Yeah, OK, just stop.” I eyeball the guy a little closer. He talks with a strange inflection and I’m reminded of a robot. There’s no emotion in his words, very monotone. “How do you know about that?”

“I was in the audience for the taping of the show’s first episode. But it’s not really a secret at this point. The Dixar website has begun posting short teaser trailers. Just brief bytes pumping a new game show. You’re prominently featured in the latest one. Nice
alligator fuckhouse
, by the way.”

“I am?”

“Yeah, though you can’t really see your face. They made sure not to reveal what any of the contestants look like. But I knew it was you.”

I look around for Mongo but he’s lost in a sea of drinkers. “You realize the game isn’t over yet, right? I’m not supposed to talk to anyone about it.”

“I know. But I couldn’t help myself. I want to see you win.”

“Well, thanks for the support, but
–
”

“You look like you could use a little assistance tonight.”

“Thanks, but I’m doing just fine on my own.”

“No you’re not. At this rate, you’ll never get the donkey punch in.”

I can’t help it and gape at the guy. “How the hell do you know about that?”

“It’s my hobby.” He pushes his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose and takes a deep breath. “You can probably tell by my voice that I’m different. I have something called Asperger’s. It’s a form of high-functioning autism. I tend to get very focused on things and obsess over them. It can seem to be weird to other people.”

Again, he sounds like he’s reading a cue card, or reciting something he’s memorized and uttered many times before. I feel bad for thinking he was a weirdo now. “No, I didn’t notice anything.”

“It’s OK. I’m used to it. And it’s pretty much true. To most people, the way I act seems very much out of the ordinary, but I rarely realize it until it’s too late. The hard part is not being weird. The hard part is the realization that you are weird and there really isn’t much you can do about it.”

I don’t feel bad anymore. Now I’m feeling uncomfortable. “Yeah…” What the hell do I say next?

“And now you’re probably uncomfortable with how open and candid I’m being because until five minutes ago you didn’t know me, but now you know me more than some people you’ve known for five years, and that’s pretty strange as well, having a complete stranger come up to you and unload all of their deficiencies on you, though I don’t look at my Asperger’s as a deficiency. It’s more of a quirk, and sometimes it’s a gift because of my ability to hyper-focus on problems and ideas and figure out complex issues rapidly. I think it has something to do with the fact that I use about forty-three percent more of my brain than most people do.”

OK, fuck, now I’m scared again. It’s creepy the way this dude is reading my mind.

“And now you’re probably getting freaked out because I can tell exactly what you’re thinking like I can read your mind, but really it comes down to prior experience with similar social situations, as well as my uncanny ability to predict what people will do in
–
”

“OK, fuck, just stop doing that!”

Jack Mehoff pushes his glasses up his nose. It’s such a cliché nerd thing to do. I wonder if he’s doing it on purpose just to fuck with me. He opens his mouth to speak again and I cut him off quick before he can repeat my thoughts back to me one more time.

“Look, I’m sorry for yelling at you. I didn’t mean to do it because I was mad, you were just starting to … well, you were starting to creep me out a little bit.”

“I know. I have that effect on people. I’ll try to stop doing that, but I won’t notice when you’re getting uncomfortable so you’ll have to tell me. Don’t worry about offending me. I actually prefer when people tell me things like that, because I can’t process it on my own.”

“OK, Jack. I will make sure to tell you from now on when you’re creeping me the fuck out. Jack? Right now, you’re sort of creeping me the fuck out.”

“OK.” Jack faces the bar and sips his drink. It looks like a glass of Coke. I have a feeling there’s nothing other than that in the glass. He says, “I’ll leave you alone now, but I actually came over here to point out the lady at the far end of the bar.”

I look, searching the far end and I spot her right away. Forty-ish looking cougar with bad hair, worse skin, and a scowl pointed in my direction. She’s sipping her drinks through a black straw, drawing hard enough that her cheeks collapse. She looks like she could suck a golf ball through a garden hose and find such a thing enjoyable. She releases her straw and licks her upper lip, all the while boring a hole right through me with her stare.