Fickle Read online

  I doubled back and trucked it like a son of a bitch around the block. This way I could come at you from the opposite direction and you’d have less reason to suspect that I’d been following you. I was worried that you wouldn’t still be there, but when I got near I was happy to see that my gamble had paid off. You had your hands up to hold your collar together like you were cold. You had on your fingerless gloves.

  God I want to bite down hard on those beautiful white fingers, one by one, eyeing your cold bloodless face to see how you handle the pain. Anything for you, Killer Chick.

  I breathed down, which didn’t take too long even though I’m out of shape compared to what I used to be, then I walked forward at what I hoped would come across as a normal pace. Walking by you was a risk, but I wanted to see what you were looking at.

  When got about fifteen feet from you I glanced up at what you were so intent on watching, trying my hardest to come off as a guy who was just walking along, sees this girl looking up at a window, and then glances up himself out of curiosity. Problem was I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was we were looking at so I had to stop. The building was one of those converted warehouses, the type that are mixed use, some commercial and some residential—maybe with gang executions taking place down in the cellar even as dickweeds pay top dollar for the penthouse pads. It had a lot of big windows, the upper ones arched, some with fancy shades, some with what looked like sheets hanging over them. Up fairly high—maybe fourth or fifth floor—was one that caught my eye. There was some light coming from way back inside the place that made it less black than the other windows. I stopped and concentrated and, sure enough, the more I looked, the more I could tell that someone was moving around.

  When I lowered my eyes, I was surprised to find you staring at me in a way that made it seem like you’d picked up that I wasn’t just a passing stranger. Unfortunately I reacted by turning away and walking off quickly, which blew my whole thing of coming across as some passing dude. I’m sure I spooked you, and I’m sorry about that, but next time don’t kill someone and expect to get away with it just because you’re a hot chick.

  Will you kill me eventually, Killer Chick? Lately I’ve been holding a blade up against my scrote whenever I jerk off. That’s you in my head, Killer Chick. It’s all you.

  TALK, NIHILIST DOGS

  garbo @ 01.27 04:34 am

  You’re sooooooooo hot.

  garbo @ 01.27 04:38 am

  I mean in a demented sort of way. I got a real soft spot for dumb guys.

  garbo @ 01.27 04:44 am

  Or do I mean creepy? Yeah that’s it, you’re a creepy, dim-witted sort of guy and all this makes me really hot for you. In any event, you can do me any time.

  fullfrontal @ 01.27 04:53 am

  you talk to yourself like this a lot, garbo? Cause I don’t see no one answering.

  garbo @ 01.27 05:04 am

  A girl’s got to amuse herself, does she not?

  fullfrontal @ 01.27 05:05 am

  Be my guest.

  garbo @ 01.27 05:06 am

  So how about that little get-together we’ve been putting off, sailor?

  eddielizard @ 01.27 05:07 am

  She is sum hoo-wah. Where you writin from chickie? Because I think I seein’ you outside pokin at you cell right now. Look up at the man in the window little black hoo-wah with de titanic tits and the mountain of azz.

  garbo @ 01.27 05:09 am

  That’s an actual whore you’re trying to signal, loser. Better watch out or she’ll take you up on it.

  fullfrontal @ 01.27 05:10 am

  Look you can blow me, OK? Mail me offsite. But if I show up and yer a dude it’s off, got it?

  garbo @ 01.27 06:14 am

  Dudes do dudes better, dewd.

  fullfrontal @ 01.27 06:16 am

  I only swap with chicks. One of those primal things.

  garbo @ 01.27 06:34 am

  Chill, bruthah, I’m a chick. I can’t help how you “read” me. And btw I swallow. We still on?

  fullfrontal @ 01.27 07:03 am

  bring a toothbrush.

  13

  January 27 @ 10:42 pm

  >BIG BROTHER IS WA-A-ATCHING<

  About all the hinting that Escroto is an azzzzz-hole: to some of you I may have been revealing some latent prejudices—am I anti-Hispanic? Nope: turns out the guy’s simply an asshole. The warm smug feeling I’m nurturing at having got someone’s number at first glance is some little solace, but all in all I’d rather not have lived through today. Here’s why.

  I decided to follow hitman’s advice and so set up a “date” for myself this chillin’ Saturday eve down at the police station, where I hoped to examine Mr. Suicide’s diary—the original itself—in some sort of garbled attempt to gauge the handwriting, ink, mysterious smears, and anything else that might pop out at me when I opened it. I phoned ahead and the desk sergeant was as nice as pie. I don my wedge-heel lace-up boots and my faux-fur-trimmed coat, and thus I’m feeling kind of “kitted out,” which my women readers know is a real confidence kickah. So I get to the cop shop around 4:45, that moment of dusk where night’s kind of hovering overhead like a black cloth about to be dropped over the city’s not-so-gilded cage. The station is “urban grim” in architecture, with a hell of a set of stone entry stairs jutting out, the obligatory twin ridged iron pedestals at either end of the stair’s bottom step balancing their white orbs of light. Inside you’ve got your predictable study in oligarchical repression, the metal detector manned by drones with chubby holsters eyeing you to gauge whether you’re a candidate for a strip search. I should have thought to leave my satchel at home—now the cops know that I’m reading an old print of An Eye for an Eye, wear Creed Santal, and carry o.b.’s for those on-the-road-time-of-the-month moments.

  I ask for Burly-Bear, get sent up the medieval elevator, and step out into the checkerboard-floored corridor lined with pebble-glassed doors. I wander a bit and am just peeking over my shoulder at the elevator with some idea of backtracking when a door bangs open way down the hall and I see Escroto emerging from the restroom. He points a lazy finger at me as he saunters forward, then sticks his dry hand in mine.

  Quickie side bitch to the guys out there—I get it that you consider ducking into the john just a “whip it, flick it, and zip it” affair—I’ll even cop to being envious that you get to do it standing up—but wash your hands afterwards, for the rest of our sakes, huh? I don’t relish the idea of shaking a hand that’s recently been shaking a dick, and I think I speak for the rest of us non-pigs, both male and female, in saying so. Thanx! :)

  Any-ho, I ask whether he might direct me to Burly-Bear, and he retorts that he will escort me in to see the man, all the while sizing me up with derision in his beady eyes. Like, what? Am I supposed to feel put down at the idea that I’m not trampy enough for his personal fuk fantasies?

  Note to Escroto—the day you see the inside of my undies will be the day you identify me in the morgue.

  So he leads me into a kind of desk corral and that’s when Escroto does this stagey finger-snap and “recalls” that Burly-Bear is not available but is there anything that he may do for me?

  I’m not exactly sure that he knows about Burly-Bear having given me a copy of Mr. Suicide’s diary, and if he does not know then I sure don’t want to be the one to spill it. So I just tell him that I might be able to assist them by taking a look at Mr. Suicide’s diary. Naturally, if Escroto doesn’t know that I already have a copy of the diary, my offer comes off as a flimsy attempt to lay my eyes on it, but I take solace in the fact that there isn’t any real harm in his concluding that I’m just “some nosy clit.”

  I ask and he smirks and licks at his moustache—I think this is supposed to come across as “mulling.” Fact is, it turns out, he has something else entirely on his brain, so, after deflecting the question of my seeing the diary, he gets to another topic. I’ll do it in dialog so you can get a flavor for what a class act Escroto is:

  S
cene: cop corral—Escroto resting a haunch on the desk while I stand, my satchel tight on my shoulder like I’ve got leaving on the brain.

  Escroto: Funny thing, you comin’ here tonight.

  Me: I aim to amuse.

  Escroto: Something I want you to see. Surveillance shot from—waddayawannacallit—throwback music store you went into after the concert that evening. You know, before you hit the train station. (He reaches back, grabs a yellow envelope, and tosses it onto Burly-Bear’s desk.)

  Me: Why do I get the feeling you’re trying to get my fingerprints all over whatever’s in here?

  Escroto: Dunno.

  I extract a pile of overexposed black-and-white photo shots printed on shit-stock paper, apparently from a security surveillance camera. Each has a date and time stamp, digital monitor style. After a long moment, I catch on that the woman in the pictures is me. Black-and-white aerial is not my angle. My forehead and nose glare, my hair drapes my head like a shroud. My coat is shorter than I’d imagined, my skirt longer. I look thinner and less shapely than I like to think of myself. Overall, I come off as stand-off-ish.

  Me: So what does this prove? I told you I was there before I went to the train station that night, and, lo and behold, there I am. What’s the point?

  Escroto: (studying me through his little spy cam eyes, no pretense at anything resembling friendliness now) Look a little harder, huh?

  I leaf through the photos, come across a string of them in which a man is next to me, reaching for the same record I’m reaching for. We appear to glance at one another, maybe exchange a word. The sequence lasts about ten pictures, which seems to correspond to maybe fifteen seconds. It ends with the man leaving the camera range as I study the back of a record.

  Me: Any clue about what I’m supposed to be seeing here, detective?

  Escroto: (his turn at sarcasm) Aw, don’t give up so easy. Give ’em another look, eh?

  Me: (chilly sigh)

  I look down at the photos, push them around so I can see several at once. The man’s not very tall and is wearing dark clothes and a scarf that strikes me as a tiny bit fey. His face is mostly a glare, but I can make out what looks like a cleft chin, longish hair. Then I flash back on the subway station, the man’s face dislodged from his skull, lying half-wrinkled against his chest with empty eyes. It’s beyond memory—a reliving. The fact is I had no true recollection of what I’d witnessed in the subway station until there in the station, standing next to Escroto, viewing the surveillance photos and seeing Mr. Suicide, alive and smiling at me as we reached for the same record. Needing to steady myself, I place my fingers against Burly-Bear’s desk and close my eyes, then immediately open them, afraid to be alone in my head with that image.

  Escroto: Use a seat? (He nudges Burly-Bear’s chair with his leg and it swivels an inch or two in my direction. I sit, more or less abruptly.) Waddah?

  Me: (catching on) Oh. Water. No. Yes. Yes, actually. (I breathe consciously for a few moments, willing the death image back to the recesses of my brain, where it burrows itself, ready to spring out again in all its funhouse glory.)

  Escroto: (resettling his haunch as he offers me the paper cup) You look a little shocked.

  Me: I’d forgotten his face.

  Escroto: Yeah, just, uh, take your time and let me know when you’re ready to talk about it.

  Me: Talk about what?

  Escroto: (lazily scratching at his inner thigh) Howzabout the fact that you was shopping with a guy—a so-called stranger—maybe ten minutes before he got killed by a train directly at your feet. Guy you’re supposed to not know, way you’ve been tellin’ it.

  Me: I wasn’t shopping with him; I was browsing the vinyls next to him.

  Escroto: You usually smile at guys you’re browsing next to when they grab your ass?

  Me: What?

  Escroto: (leaning in, then dropping a finger on one photo. In it, it’s true that it looks like the man is touching the back of my coat, his hand slightly cupped. Could be that he’s either about to squeeze my butt or might be already doing it, if you really want to see it that way.)

  Me: He never touched me.

  Escroto: (jamming the finger against the picture) He’s touching. And you’re not surprised.

  Me: We reached for the same record, smiled, and he walked off. There’s nothing else.

  Escroto: (sitting back). Pretty big coincidence, wouldn’t you say? You and him checking out the records together, then you and him in the subway station together.

  Me: (sensing I’ve won a point) The store is above the T. You see people with old records in that station all the time. Am I supposed to believe that you don’t know that?

  Escroto: What I know and what I can prove might be two different things. (He nods like there’s a subtext going on between us, which there isn’t.)

  Me: (something dawning on me) This is the classical section.

  Escroto: Howzat?

  Me: I’m reaching for Le Printemps du Spring, the music I’d just been listening to at a concert hall near to there. So is—so is this man.

  Escroto: Now he was at the concert with you? Kind of works against your “strangers in the night” story, wouldn’t you say?

  Me: I bet he was there—it fits.

  Escroto: Fits?

  Me: His place, his clothes, his diary, Stravinsky at the Berklee—all the same guy. So he must have walked over to buy a vinyl of what he’d just heard.

  Escroto: (sarcastically) Oh, just like you did?

  Me: Exactly. It makes total sense.

  Escroto: (He thinks a little, and when he talks, I realize that we’re actually in a conversation, at least for the moment.) You know what don’t go with that, though?

  Me: What?

  Escroto: Guy buying a record after a concert, smiling at some girl. Don’t go with suicide a couple of minutes later. Not to me.

  Me: I agree. It barely seems possible.

  I pick up one of the surveillance photos and study it. I recognize the perfunctory smile on my face. I’d have offered a flutter of eye movement in his direction, exactly enough to qualify as polite and no more. If you focus on just me, Mr. Suicide and I are strictly strangers, a pair of secret agents passing microfilm. But, as I study the shots, I decide that Mr. Suicide isn’t quite as cool and casual. The way he heads directly for me, the sharp turn of his head to look at my face when we almost collide. He smiles big and his eyes are aimed at mine. In other words:

  he’d bumped me on purpose in that store—only to go and bump me on purpose 15 minutes later, on his way off the platform!

  I look up, excited to share this observation, and find Escroto staring at me with his dead eyes.

  I think it’s the outrageous unfairness of the game the cops are playing that makes me become very angry at that moment. Obviously they know a lot about Mr. Suicide by now. Obviously they must have concluded that he didn’t commit suicide and that he was involved in some relationship that could have made someone crazy enough to shove him in front of a train—they must think this or they’d be off my back. And obviously they don’t know all that much about that dangerous relationship or, again, they’d be off my back. What particularly galls and frustrates me, however, is that I’m sure that if the damned police would just let me know what they know, I’d actually be good at helping them solve their little bullshit mystery.

  Me: I don’t have anything else to say about these. I need to get somewhere.

  Escroto: Thought you was looking to take a gander at the guy’s diary. Wasn’t that it?

  Me: I don’t have time to do that anymore. I’ll do it another time.

  Escroto: (pauses—I pause, too, as if seeking his permission to leave—which apparently satisfies him. I watch him gather the photo copies off Burly-Bear’s desk and slide them back into the envelope, then reach back behind himself to drop it back where it came from, which was sitting on top of an open copy of some book with the word “confession” in its title. How to Extract a False Confession, perhaps?
Confession of a Corrupt Cop? At least he can read, which surprises me a little. Finally he speaks.) Suit yourself.

  He watches me make my way out of there. I leave in a daze. I get home. I sit. I blog.

  GIVE IT TO ME STRAIGHT

  i.went.to.harvard @ January 27 11:37 pm

  What happened to this lawyer of yours? Shouldn’t you be deflecting characters like this Escroto by throwing Mr. Groin’s name at him?

  fickel @ January 27 11:42 pm

  You try it when they’re flashing pix at you and accusing you of canoodling with the dead guy.

  i.went.to.harvard @ January 27 11:45 pm

  Look, we know you were expecting the nice cop and the nasty one threw you, but you gotta keep that lawyer card in the back of your mind. Mr. Groin will find out Mr. Suicide’s identity if you ask him to, regardless of whatever strategy the cops think they’re playing out.

  marleybones @ January 27 11:53 pm

  But what to make of this weird record shop moment?

  webmaggot @ January 27 11:54 pm

  Do you remember anyone bumping your butt?

  fickel @ January 27 11:56 pm

  Now that I’ve seen the pictures it seems like it happened, since it must have. But he made no impression on me—he definitely did not do anything that seemed like a come-on. Oh, this is such a nightmare! It wasn’t until today that I really minded what was going on, but now I’m feeling really close to this death. For the first time I get that I do have a connection to it.

  chinkigirl @ January 28 12:23 am

  fickel, you seem to be intimating that Mr. Suicide’s casual encounter with you wasn’t as casual as it would appear. I don’t want to send you to a darker place, but do you think it’s possible that in spite of your not knowing Mr. Suicide maybe the reverse was not true?

  fickel @ January 28 12:37 am

  You mean that he knew me.

  chinkigirl @ January 28 12:38 am

  Well, yes.

  marleybones @ January 28 12:59 am

  I believe that what chinkigirl is getting at, and what fickel is beginning to accept, is something that I think all the women on the blog have been wondering from the start: the possibility that Mr. Suicide may have been stalking her. That is, it’s possible that Mr. S was following fickel around due to some obsession he’d developed over her. That’s not a conclusion a woman is likely to draw all that easily or “sensibly;” hence my hesitation to bring it up earlier.