Pain Killers (15 page)

“Oh, you think I’m lying?” Her tone was part amusement, part malice. “What are you gonna do about it?” she taunted. “You gonna clamp your fingers around my neck? You gonna slap me across the face?”

She paused long enough to fish yet another Newport out, rip the filter off and light it. “Fuck!
Put your uniform on!
”

“I didn’t bring a uniform. I’m undercover. At least I
was….
” Then I got struck sentimental. “The first time we fucked, you said, ‘Try to make me happy but don’t leave marks.’ I didn’t know it was from a movie.”

“
I’ll Kiss You When I’m Dead.
A cult classic. Could you please shut up and hurt me?”

“Is
that
you, or is that from another movie?”

Sometimes when I had sex with Tina, I thought of that scene in
The Godfather
where the senator from Nevada cowers in a whorehouse in his underwear, trying to explain the dead hooker beside him to Robert Duvall.
“We’ve done it a thousand times before…. She
liked
it.”

Just like old times. Until Tina threw a curve and whispered, “Call me Satan’s little whore.”

She slid her hands down the wall, stuck her behind out and shrieked dramatically. “Unless a woman be pure of womb, she may not know the Lord. But the Devil has a portal! Make me a whore of Satan!”

“
What
did you just say?”

She kept her voice low, barely audible. “Do me up the ass.”

“Up your ass?”

“You used to love it.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t love it.” Now
I
was whispering. “The last time we committed sodomy as God intended, I got that bacterial thing. Fourteen weeks on Flagyl.”

“Oooh, Daddy!” she shrieked, startling me even more. “Keep me pure! Slap my booty!
Make me your virgin cum-bucket!
”

I saw her check over my shoulder. That’s when I spotted the lens poking out of the unlatched bed overhead.

“What the fuck!” I stood up for a closer look. “A hidden camera? Are you going to blackmail me? Is that why you’re acting like you’re on crack?”

Tina looked offended. “This is
not
how I act on crack! And it’s not a
blackmail
thing. I was going to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“Don’t get mad, but there’s this website. Bible Sluts. I know it’s ridiculous. But it’s a paycheck. All you do is quote Corinthians or something while you, you know…put on a show. Why are you looking at me that way?”

“You have any other Bible buddies?”

She acted insulted. “Come on, I wouldn’t do it with anyone but you.”

“Were you planning to tell me I was starring in Christian entertainment?”

“I thought it would be fun. I really wanted to fuck you.”

“You left
me,
remember?”

“I had a disease that required my full attention. Can we talk about something else?”

“Fine. You still haven’t said why you’re here.”

“The reverend pulled some strings.”

“Reverend D?”
I backed away—as far away as you can back in a shoebox. “Where’d you meet a walking rap sheet like him?”

“NA. We were both court ordered.” Tina bit her thumb. “You know, things haven’t been great since we split…. I needed to make some money. He had some work.”

“Work?”

She read my expression and said, “Look, there wasn’t any sex. I mean, not
real
sex. That’s how I’ve been paying for treatment. It’s not what you think. I thought it would be fun to do something with you.”

“Tina, for Christ’s sake!” I didn’t mean to shout, but it was impossible not to. “I saw you out there, remember? With Bernstein.
Naked.
”

“If I knew you were in the audience, I’d have waved.”

“How the fuck did you know I was here?”

“A girl has ways. I told you, I took the job to surprise you.”

“I’m surprised. In fact, I’m more than surprised. I’m fucking tormented! Who hired you to spend the night with the kosher Nazi?”

“Didn’t I tell you already? The old guy.”

She slid her fishnet-pantyhosed calves into knee-high boots, doing it slow, like a cam-girl. That kind of nasty. Then, out of nowhere, I made the connection, blurting, “Golda Meir!”

Tina stopped her show and looked at me. “Not the reaction I was going for, baby.”

“No,” I said, “I mean Golda Meir’s stockings, in Bernstein’s fetish photo.”

“That was pretty twisted.”

“Exactly. Dead icon perv. Fits right in with the faux candids Zell laid out on my dresser. Sun Myung in his two-piece and the rest of the team.”

Tina curled a finger under the elastic of her pantyhose. “Does that tell you something, baby?” She pulled the fishnets away from her belly, showing me the deep diamond impressions left on the flesh underneath, mashing her pubic hair so that it looked like she’d been pressing herself against a screen door. What kind of early damage made that necessary?

“It tells
me
that the same freak who gave you Golda broke into my bedroom and planted a photo of Sun Myung Moon in a bikini.”

Tina let go and the elastic snapped back with a smack.

“Ow!” she cried, touching the fresh red mark on her skin. “Do that again!”

An hour later, I leaned back with my head against a folded newspaper— protection from the trailer ooze—and watched Tina dress.

My ex-wife had a way of putting on clothes that was dirtier than taking them off. She was covering up, but you knew what was underneath. When she finished dressing, she applied makeup from a compact at the fetid kitchenette.

“So tell me again,” I said.

“Tell you what?”

“Why you had to meet Bernstein.”

She snapped the compact shut. “I told you, the old guy, Zell, wanted me to give him a message and a package.”

“What kind of package?”

“Cash.”

“I still don’t get it. Why you?”

“I know the reverend. The reverend and Harry do business.”

“Now it’s
Harry
?”

Tina rolled her eyes.

“The old guy’s in financing. Distribution. He’s got a piece of the reverend’s escort agency, Christian Fun Girls. The same ones who do outcall appear in his movies. They’ve got stuff on the Web—”

“Born-again porn?”

“Don’t judge, Manny. You’ve done worse for less.”

“I’m not judging. I’m asking. I want to know. For Christ’s sake, Tina. You show up at Quentin. You do…whatever you did. Then you break into this dump. Just tell me what the deal is.”

“Do you have a memory disorder? I had a message for Bernstein.”

“What was it?”

“‘The eagle has landed.’”

“You’re fucking kidding me!”

“So it’s not original. Look, Zell told me I wouldn’t have to screw the Nazi.”

“And you believed him?”

“Hey, I’m a big girl. And he wasn’t lying. I told you, Bernstein and I just hung for a while. He’s really only interested in one thing. No, two things—his right and left bicep.”

“What did you get out of it?”

“Besides money?” She ran her hand from the throbbing bump on my head, down over my mouth, across my lips. “Well, Zell told me you were going to be up here. So…I figured I could see you. I thought it would be hot. Wait!” She straightened up. “Is it the Alterna.com stuff? Is
that
why you’re so paranoid?”

“If I knew what that was, I probably would be.”

“You haven’t seen that site? Nothing but extreme fetish and depravity. It’s like dirty anthropology. These women post pictures with these demented thumbnails. Then, when a guy sends photos of himself in Boris and Natasha drag or a nice note about strap-ons, they get his address and blackmail him. The reverend told me about that.”

“Wow. We’ve been split six months and you’re already making a splash. Couldn’t you have taken a waitress gig?”

“Are you kidding? I just spent six weeks in an eating disorder clinic. I needed something I could do in my spare time to pay for treatment. It’s not like I have health insurance. I didn’t ask for a dime, if you’ll recall.”

“I wish you would have. So was somebody hacking the server or what? How did you get their addresses?”

“Off their driver’s licenses. When they finally meet for a face-to-face, the first thing you do is check their license. Second thing is leave.”

“Wait! You actually meet? Do you go to bed with them?”

“Where these types go does not always involve bed. The concept doesn’t apply. Anyway, the Alterna.com scam’s a side gig. I love you being jealous, but basically, I’m a dispatcher.”

“For an escort agency.”

“Yeah, but not regular prostitutes. It’s a Christian outcall service. All the girls are saving themselves for Jesus.” She pulled out another Newport, ripped the filter off but stopped before she flicked the lighter. “I light a flame in this trailer, is it going to blow? I’m not sure how methane smells.”

“You’ve already smoked about ninety,” I said, “but the next one could trigger Armageddon.” I snatched her cigarette and threw it in the sink. “Better safe than sorry.”

Tina shot me a look that could cure cancer. She knew fifteen different ways to get on her knees.

“Think of all the guys who’d pay to do all the shit I want you to do to me.”

“I thought you didn’t do sex.”

“I don’t. I said think of all the guys who’d pay me if I did. Now tell me what’s going on with you.”

She aimed her eyes up at me. Eased my zipper down. I pulled it back up.

“Baby, please. I just need you to listen….”

I filled her in on the rest of the saga: from Sun Myung to the warden, my upcoming accidental sex change and the drugs I found under the trailer, up to the subject of my investigation…. When I mentioned his name, Tina blanched and slowly slid down the wall.

“
Josef Mengele?
That’s just…That’s just
sick
!”

Tina stood back up and made her way blindly to the damp mattress and sat down. Her eyes darkened. “I went through a Holocaust phase in junior high. I read about everything. It really got to me. I was a troubled teen.”

“That was your job.”

“Yeah, but I was also anorexic.” She took a puff of Newport, blew the smoke out fast, then raised her fist to her mouth and bit it. “So all those photos of emaciated bodies really got to me. It was like torture porn.
Look how skinny a human being can get and still be alive.
I was so obsessed with the starvation I didn’t know about the other stuff until they showed us a movie at school. They talked about Mengele. The experiments. After that, I was in the library all the time. Do you know what that sick fuck did?”

“Besides shooting typhus into three-year-olds and wearing perfumed scarves to the ramps every morning to decide who got the Zyklon B? I have an idea.”

Tina went even more ashen. “But the other stuff…” She pushed out her lower lip and twisted it, as though causing herself pain to counter the pain she was describing. “Like his twin genital fetish. How he’d force twin sisters to have sex with other twins. If the twins were a boy and girl, he mated them. To see which would reproduce twins. He’d start dissecting them while they were alive…. It always came back to carving up their matching little things. He’d surgically remove their wombs and preserve them in jars.”

“Twin reproductive research. Mengele would say he was trying to save his race.”

“And I could cut your heart out and say I was researching razor blades.”

Tina began to shiver and I put my arm around her. Her voice had shrunk. “Can we just go to bed? I feel diseased….”

Suddenly I noticed how hollow-eyed she was. “Baby,” I said, as unaccusingly as I could, “have you been taking care of yourself? How’s the food thing going?”

“How do you think?” She threw a cigarette on the floor, looking disappointed the place didn’t go up in flames. “At least being a junkie has cachet. Shooting up in gas station bathrooms is classy compared to throwing up in them. You don’t get to feel like some junkie outlaw. You feel like a pathetic freak. There’s nothing lower than eating a Sara Lee pound cake in your car. Unthawed. Then going to Arby’s for three milkshakes and a place to puke it all. I had nearly nine months, then yesterday I relapsed.”

I know I’ve said it before, but for most of our marriage, I lived in total ignorance of my wife’s secret eating. It was as if she occupied a parallel universe. When I found out, I felt chumped off.
As if she’d done it all to me.
No doubt this is why narcissists make bad ambulance attendants.

Tina’s darkened eyes held on mine. “I ate five microwave Zone meals and a box of cake mix.”

“Quit bragging,” I said.

It was an all-purpose response. But it made her laugh. Until her sobs bubbled up underneath. She threw herself against me and wept into my chest.

Somehow, in all this pain and squalor, I never loved her more. Never felt more alone. I wondered how it was that I had attracted a person in that kind of turmoil. Maybe it was that I never had to explain. With Tina I could relax.

Then an odd thought lodged in my brain.

Tina grabbed my hand. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“Okay, if you want to know, I was thinking how people like us don’t even need Mengele. We’re our own medical experiments: you emptying your body, me filling mine up with cut chemicals and Mexican smack. Then I thought about my old man….”

“Your father? You never talk about him.”

“He left the motor running in the garage, did himself in with carbon monoxide. I mean, what the fuck? His family saves him from the Nazis when he’s ten, and what happens? Three decades later he gasses himself.” I rubbed my hand over my face. “Does that make him some kind of retro-collaborator? You know, like the Jewish capos in the camps?” I stared off, saw my father’s face—forever wry, sweetly sad—and suddenly the pang of loss tore so deep a knife in the heart would have tickled by comparison.

Her slap brought me back.

“Baby,” she said, “you’re a million miles away. I need you here. What the fuck are you on?”

“Me? Are you serious? We were talking about you!” Nothing fired up my indignation like accusations of drug use. Especially when I was on drugs. “So why do you think you relapsed?”