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KISS ME, KILL ME

DAVID McKENNA


��Beeno blames his allergy attack on Roxanne, for letting him watch the fight at her apartment after Theresa threw him out for loving Leni. Nothing like a house full of cats and a first-round knockout to turn his mood around. He cocks his arm to throw a full can of beer at the TV image of Mike Tyson hovering over his glass-jawed opponent.
��Roxanne jumps in front. “I’ll call the cops, I swear.”
��Beeno surrenders to a sneezing fit that leaves him dazed and out of breath, like a boxer holding still for a standing-eight count. He can’t believe the bout didn’t last four rounds, as he wagered it would. He can’t believe his thousand bucks disappeared in a punch.
��“Get over it,” Roxanne says, placing her little hands on his Tyson-size chest. “Sit down and finish your beer.”
��He backs off and points at Binky, her white Persian, then at himself. Cat hairs from the sofa cling to his black jeans and T-shirt.
��“Why don’t you — “
��He draws breath sharply and lets loose another sneeze.
��“ — clean this goddamn zoo.”
�� Roxanne, backpedaling, steps on Binky’s tail. The cat howls and claws her bare calf. Roxanne screams. Beeno sneezes. Two more cats dash from under the sofa. She hands him some Kleenex and keeps one for herself.
��She dabs her leg wound. “Maybe we should go out for a drink.”
��“You drink,“ he says. “I need something stronger.”
��He pulls a cellophane packet from his wallet, cursing his luck, wondering what kind of shape he’d be in if the fight had lasted longer. Blind and drooling, maybe dead. His allergies get worse every day, involve more and more substances. Dust and dairy products. Shellfish, strawberries. Pollen, ragweed and cat fur. Bright light is a burden, so he sleeps while the sun’s up.
��”Let’s try Guacamole Joe’s,” Roxanne suggests. “Mexican food will stifle your symptoms.”
��He shakes white powder onto a small mirror. “What about that Szechuan joint in Ventnor? I’ll sell them your cats for stir-fry.”
��“Then you’ll be dead meat too,“ she says as he kneels to snort two lines through a rolled-up dollar.
��The speed sears his septum and smolders at the base of his skull. “Go ahead. Put me out of my misery.“
�� He’s on his feet now, sniffing fiercely. She laughs at the tears on his cheeks. They step into the dark, past the demolished remains of the Charles, Atlantic City’s last movie house. Around the corner is Joe’s, long and narrow, with a low ceiling and yellow stuccoed walls. Beeno sits with his back to the kitchen at a table in the rear, far from the bar and entrance. His sneezing has stopped but he’s still scratching the roof of his mouth with his tongue and clucking.
��Roxanne suppresses a laugh. “You look goofy.”
��“You should talk,” he counters. “Cross-eyed, freckle-faced Puerto Rican.”
��She laughs out loud. “At least my name’s not Beeno.”
��“I won’t respond to that,” he says. “Not till you pay for the food.”
��He regrets her knowing his nickname, a mispronounced and shortened version of “albino” that will dog him forever. There’s no escape, no matter how strongly he insists he’s just a white guy with thick lips, pink skin and kinky hair the color of skim milk. And now, adding further insult, is the new anti-flatulent called Beano that people are snickering about. Some joke.
��Marty the Foot, the last guy who called Beeno by his Christian name, caught The Virus and won’t survive the spring. The only reliable oddsmaker in town.
��Roxanne seems to read his mind. “You should quit betting on sports.”
��She’s facing him but her crazy eyes won’t focus. Her paprika-red hair cascades to freckled shoulders in angry waves. Her lips move, then close without a sound. He picks up on her effort to be patient as his discomfort subsides to dry clarity.
��“I can’t afford to quit betting,” he says. “I didn’t sell any biscuits this week.”
��“Better quit that too. Cops’ll nail you, you keep dealing at work.”
��Roxanne waits tables in the same casino lounge where Beeno tends bar. He lives with plump, passive Theresa but likes bringing Roxanne to his Chelsea apartment while Theresa is working graveyard as a craps dealer, in the same pit where Leni, his true love, is stationed.
��“Some of my best customers are cops,“ he says.
��Roxanne leans toward him. “Ha. Famous last words.”
��She has tiny features and a voice to match. It’s always surprising, the power in her short, lithe frame when she wraps herself around him.
��“Cops like biscuits with their beer,” he says, shrugging.
��His bootleg Quaaludes are wrapped 20 to a pack in tin foil, like breath mints. Cops he can work with; it’s the wild cards he has to watch. Crackheads from the project looking to take the edge off. White-collar types who could be spotters for the company. Clown-faced street whores with names like Calico and Eden, who do most of their business in taxis and eat ’ludes as if they really were mints.
��Roxanne waves an index finger with a long nail the color of Orange Crush. “Maybe you’re trying to get arrested, so Leni will feel sorry and take you back.”
�� Her feistiness is annoying and, as always, worrisome.
��“Keep it up,” he says pleasantly. “You may yet piss me off.”
��Their waitress has brown dreadlocks and bad posture. Beeno feeds the jukebox and backs off as the room fills with the sound of a bass drum and a drill and a black man shouting fuck dat ho/fuck you bro/down low/too slow/whoa whoa whoa.
��He sits and licks salt from the rim of his margarita glass as Roxanne ventilates.
��“Theresa’s got your number,” she says. “Big, strong Beeno. Tougher than ten spics on speed. Always talking the same trash.”
��“That’s all I know is trash,” he says.
��She drains her glass. “A few drinks and it’s Leni this, Leni that. Like the bitch is too good for you.“
��He flashes a bad-boy grin and pats her thigh under the table. “You’re all too good for me.”
��She lifts the knife from her napkin and points it at him. “You freak. You wouldn’t even be here if I didn’t order the fight on pay-per-view.”
��The blade, inches from his face, has rust spots and a serrated edge. She’s smiling but that doesn’t count for much. He never knows what to expect when Roxanne gets worked up. She might kiss him, she might cut his throat.
�� “Don’t mention the fight,” he says.
��The food arrives, beans in a blanket of dough with green mush and a blob of sour cream on the side. Beeno takes a big bite and coughs. It’s the spiciest burrito he ever tasted.
��“Last week I dreamed Leni was a diving horse on Steel Pier,” Roxanne says. “She was walking the plank, stamping her, what do you call ’em, hooves, and yelling ‘Help, help.’ ”
��Beeno takes another bite, drinks and says, “Did you help?” The burrito is so hot, he’s in tears.
��“I whacked her with a board,” Roxanne says, “and knocked her into the ocean.”
��“Of course,” he says. “Of course.”
��The walls close in further. Their dirty yellow sheen is more pronounced. Beeno is on the lookout for Gila monsters, for the bleeding heart of Christ, for mustachioed rancheros bursting through the door with short-barrelled shotguns.
��The sweat rolling down his face startles him. He feels like a fanatic who fasted too long. The bar, with its backlit Galliano bottles, is gushing golden flame in long, luminous arcs. Is it the speed or the spices? He read somewhere that the body battles jalapeno peppers with natural painkillers that can act as hallucinogens when released quickly and in large quantities.
��“Then she was a rawhide bone you were hiding in the fridge,” Roxanne continues. ”I tried to throw her in the trash, but you wrestled me to the floor and pulled my tongue out.”
��“The thought has crossed my mind.”
��She laughs. “I can’t help it if the truth hurts.”
��He calls for a glass of water. The waitress turns her back and starts toward the bar, past three couples huddled at tiny tables. He watches the front door from the end of a long, poorly lit tunnel.
��A skinny blonde in a short, sequined dress staggers in, followed by a stooped man in a cheap blue suit and straw boater. Beeno recognizes Eden, the streetwalker, and stops chewing. She bangs into a table and stumbles. The stooped man grabs her by the shoulders and seats her at the bar. He steps back, hangs his head, looks around.
��Beeno studies the mush on his plate and stirs up a whirl of green and white and brown. Then he covers his face with his huge white hands and says, “There’s a girl in my guacamole.”
��Roxanne, though her back is to the bar, looks at him as if she knows all. Ever prescient, she says, “One of your whores, no doubt.”
��The room tilts left and then right. Beeno drains the water glass and shuts his eyes. Eden is still there, slumped against the bar, when he opens them. The stooped man removes his old-fashioned hat and scratches his balding head.
��Riding a wave of panic, Beeno grabs the table’s edge with both hands. He’s convinced the stooped man is Eden’s father, searching every bar on Pacific Avenue for the person responsible for her sorry state. Is he signalling someone? Eden will surely identify Beeno as her dealer, or has already, though she seems too stupefied to see past her little red nose. It’s like a bad film at the Charles. The last one before the wrecking ball hit.
��Roxanne examines Beeno with cock-eyed concern and says, “You’re even paler than usual.”
��He eyes her carefully, wondering for a second if she set him up. Her freckled face gleams with animal longing. She wants something to hold.
��He hands her two rolls of pills. “Take these to your place, now, and don’t argue. I’ll see you later.”
��Roxanne turns toward the bar, as if expecting to see police. “What you up to, hot shot?”
��“Just walk,” he says, feeling like a corpse no one had the courtesy to bury. “Leave me a twenty, I’ll make it up.”
��She stands, reaching into her see-through plastic totebag. “I get busted, you’ll be one sorry bastard.”
��The stooped man puts on his hat and walks out the door just behind Roxanne. Beeno wonders if he left to intercept her and considers making a break for the back exit, past the bathrooms and kitchen. He hesitates, closing his eyes, then decides the man is merely availing himself of an opportunity to slip away.
��Eden’s head is resting on the bar. The bartender, a heavyweight with a walrus mustache, taps a cocktail shaker with a long mixing spoon and shouts “Rise and shine.”
��Beeno is thinking more clearly now. The stooped man is a john who changed his mind when he realized Eden was totally looped. She gave the john a hard time when he tried to ditch her. He brought her to Joe’s to sit her down, figuring she’d nod out. And so she has.
��Beeno approaches the bar, pays the waitress, and sidles up to Eden, who’s clutching a blue swizzle stick in her right hand.
��He smiles at the bartender, one big guy to another. “She’s a friend, I’ll take her home.”
��The bartender says through his mustache, “You should maybe take her to detox.”
��Beeno frowns. Even bartenders are self-righteous these days. He sits next to Eden, dips his fingers into a half-empty glass and anoints her cheeks with an ice cube. She tilts her head upward and basks in the cold light beaming from behind the liquor shelves. He pushes aside her stringy yellow hair and slides the ice across her forehead. She straightens slowly with eyes closed, mouth open, scrawny arms folded. A baby pigeon that fell from the nest.
��He holds the ice against her neck and says “How much for a half and half, hon?”
��She opens her eyes and smiles with idiot delight. Her teeth are smeared with lipstick. “No charge for you, big boy.”
��His place is three blocks away, down the street from the library and the triple-X peep show and the burned-out storefront with the sign that says WORLD FAMOUS SALTWATER TAFFIES. It’s late and traffic is light, mostly taxis and jitneys. Just as well. He sees their reflection in a storefront window. A black-clad heavyweight and a little girl with a muscular disorder, in white pumps and frilly anklets. Up close her skin looks snare-drum taut. The dark circles under her eyes remind him of a Little League outfielder, but she’s at least 30, probably older.
��Beeno opens the triple-locked door. Eden sits down hard, and the whooshing sound makes him jump. It’s the sofa where he used to cuddle with Leni. Not so long ago he vowed no other woman would lie there, ever. Theresa, the soul of discretion, didn’t say a word when he cocooned it in protective plastic.
��Eden fumbles through her purse for a cigarette and says, “Any ’ludes?”
��He fetches two pills and watches her gobble them dry. Afterwards, she asks for a beer. Her cigarette ash falls to the rug. Leni wouldn’t like that at all. She was always picking up after him, putting him down.
��Once, for spite, Leni got on hands and knees and scrubbed his bathroom. “I’m allergic to dirt,” she said. German bitch. Her mother was a war bride from a small town where all the undesirables vanished in a single day.
��Eden, reaching just shy of an ashtray, stubs out her cigarette on the light table. He wraps his hand around her boney forearm and lifts, peeling her off the sofa like an old strip of Scotch tape.
��“Big, strong Beeno,” she mumbles.
��When he lets go, she lists to one side. He grabs a handful of hair and holds her at arm’s length. She’s what Leni would call unfortunate looking. Mousy, round-shouldered and knock-kneed. Swaying like a dandelion on a little hill.
��“Fuck me with my socks on,“ she says. “I feel like a schoolgirl.”
��Her skin is a cold white sheet. Her eyes, dull and brown, show neither fear nor desire. It smells like she put in a full night’s work.
��“Kiss me first,” he says, pulling her to him.


��—END—




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