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  For Julie. I figured it out too late. For my daughter, Assia.

  For my friends and family who raised me.

  contents

  top gun

  shower me with your love

  epiphany

  squeaky clean

  my morning

  used and abused

  collateral damage

  animal planet

  maps of africa

  ahab

  straw dogs

  desperado

  big red

  smile

  karma chameleon

  willie

  coop-coop

  relapse

  choppers

  the predator

  crazy sexy cool

  say anything

  the i.e.

  eating out

  supercuts

  white chocolate

  gorilla piss

  robocop

  splitsville

  captain caveman

  this is sparta

  board games

  jude the dude

  street meat

  unicorns

  gingerbread man

  stained

  a brand-new you

  acknowledgments

  about the author

  top gun

  I’M IN A CAB LEANING my face out the window, gone off Percocets and ketamine. This motherfucker crosses the street in front of me looking just like Goose from Top Gun. I’m thinking that was fucked-up how he died, leaving a wife and kid.

  I say, “Rest in peace, Goose.” And the cab drives off.

  Earlier at Jeff’s high-rise apartment, I copped some drugs from a Dominican with a silver briefcase. Jeff got the MDMA, I got the vials of Ketamine. I cooked the K in the oven. He had some Australian chick licking the Molly off his fingertips. Just the three of us. They’re rolling, I’m not.

  She said she doesn’t do K cuz it makes her lose control.

  I tell her in that case, do as much as you want.

  She does as much as she wants; Jeff does, too. We’re chopping it up with his cheese knife, snorting the lines with a wrinkly one-dollar bill; it’s all the Dominican left us. This goes on for hours, rolling and K-holes and she’s grinding her teeth, rubbing her thighs together. I tell her to come cuddle, but it’s awkward. She don’t even know me. She gets up and we pretend like it never happened.

  It’s around then I realize, she’s not fucking me solo. Either he’s gonna fuck or we’re all gonna fuck. So how bad do you want it? Bad enough to see your homeboy naked, hairy ass and all? I smashed chicks back in the day with cats that are like my brothers. Toss ’em up, one in the mouth, one in the vagina, it’s nothing. But I don’t know with Jeff.

  Shit, if we can be all the way honest, it’s kind of what I prefer for threesomes—two dudes and a chick. With two dudes, I can focus on the chick. With two girls it gets complicated; I don’t know where to look, who to pay attention to. I’m trying to eat pussy and smash at the same time. Shit’s hard, like doing algebra.

  I tried it once with Annie and her homegirl after a night of whiskey and muscle relaxers. I couldn’t get my dick to stay hard. I even ate two Viagras, nothing. I just ended up eating them out and we’re hitting each other.

  She’d be like, “Eat my pussy, bitch,” and slap me upside the head.

  And I’d be like, “Yeah, take that, bitch,” and smack her across the face.

  I usually don’t go for all that bitch shit, but since I couldn’t get my dick hard I figured we were on some aggro dyke shit, so I let it slide. When they came, they excused themselves and went home with no eye contact. I’m standing there buck naked, limp dick, thinking about how we just murdered my roommate’s new couch.

  That was the last threesome I had. I don’t know if I wanna jump back in with hairy Jeff and the assless Australian, banging it out doggy-style while he’s getting head, shooting me a thumbs-up. I feel like he’d wink at me midstroke, like, “Yeah, we’re killing this, bro!” and I wouldn’t know where to look so I’d look down at his nipples and a piece of me would die inside.

  So I bail and Jeff fucks and I’m in the cab thinking about Goose. We would’ve had to have been best friends like Maverick and Goose to run a busto on that chick, or she would’ve had to look like Nicole Kidman to get me to double up with him. But she’s not that cute and we’re not that close and that’s okay. I’m nodding my head to Modest Mouse on my iPod looking at the East River as the cabbie drives over the Williamsburg Bridge. I kinda wanna tell him to turn around. But I don’t.

  So I link up with Brad and we rage all night just like the last six nights. Popping pills and doing K. We’re on his roof watching the sunrise and talking about aliens. New York looks like a Nintendo game, like Megaman. Shit gets real digital on this ketamine.

  “This place ain’t natural,” I say. “We been around for thousands and thousands of years on this planet, and now they got us walking on concrete. What the fuck is that? Shit, I couldn’t tell you the last time I walked barefoot on some earth, touched some dirt. Shit out here, you gotta take a fucking train just to lay on some grass. They trying to kill us out here.”

  New York is nice to look at, but I’m ready to go.

  We’re back down on the fire escape taking rails of K to the face. I’m swabbing the blood out of my nose with wet Q-tips, giving him the ketamine pep talk to get him motivated. He’s like a bunch of my friends: creative and talented and not doing shit.

  He’s scared. I recognize it, cuz I’m scared, too. Doing shit is scary, waking up is scary, getting up every morning, looking in the mirror, and trying to like yourself is fucking hard. I get it. I keep telling him, “All you got to do is do!” I’m saying it over and over. “All you got to do is do!”

  I’m hugging him, telling him I love him.

  I woulda ran a busto with Brad.

  It’s six thirty in the morning. I go to bed. I got a flight this afternoon.

  I call Assia from the airport. It’s her birthday. My old boss Tony from the pager store told me that no matter what, you always gotta see your kid on her birthday. When old people tell you shit, you should listen. I kept that up till her grandparents moved her down to Florida. Now I give her phone calls.

  I call Assia, but she doesn’t answer. I leave her a message on her birthday. My daughter gets a message. I tell her I love her. I tell her I’m proud of her. I tell her fifteen years ago on this day when they pulled her out of her mom, her head was all pointy and I was pissed-off with the doctor that they messed up her head. I tell her they told me it’s just from the birth canal and that her head would be okay. I tell her her head turned out just fine and I couldn’t be happier with her. I tell her I love her, I tell her goodbye.

  I get on my plane and fly.

  shower me with your love

  I GOT HER IN THE studio, little punk rock, porn chick. She had the sunglasses on, dark hair with the bangs, tats and all that. Stood about four foot somethin’.

  I say, “Look at you. You adorable little young thing, get in my pocket.” She’s laughing.

  We’re on the air talking about all the nasty things she’s done: fucking and sucking and all the run-of-the-mill shit. Then she starts talking about pissing. Pissing in cups, pissing on dudes, dudes pissing on her. The whole nine.

  I tell her, “That’s hot.”

  She’s like, “Yeah it is.”

  I’m talking shit. “Bet you won’t piss on
me.”

  She calls my bluff. “I’ll piss on you.”

  We go to music.

  How we gonna do this? Do I lay down and have her do it on my chest? I look at the carpet; it’s filthy. I tell her to do it on my leg.

  I’m outside the studio, looking for a garbage bag to catch the piss.

  “Tully, where the trash bags at?”

  He gives me a look, tells me where to go.

  We’re back in the studio; the song’s done. I’m in the chair, garbage bag down, pants rolled up. She straddles my leg, pulls her skirt up, and pushes her panties to the side.

  Surprisingly, my dick’s hard as hell. This shit’s kinda sexy to me. I guess I’m the kind of guy that likes to get pissed on. Like a toilet.

  I’m a toilet.

  I put the mike to her crotch.

  She goes. A long, hot, steady stream of piss hits my leg, runs down my ankle, down my foot, to my toes and onto the bag. It’s making a pool.

  “I shoulda gave you a forty!”

  “Yeah, right?!”

  I wipe up with a paper towel; we take phone calls. Cats are saying I’m crazy. Crazy like a fox. They’re calling me a bitch for letting her piss on my leg. Call me what you want, but you’re calling.

  Show’s over.

  I’m like, “We should do ecstasy and fuck. You wanna do ecstasy and fuck?”

  She smiles, “Yeah.”

  Can’t do it at her house; she lives three deep in a one-bedroom apartment. We end up at my house. I feed her some E and take some myself. We’re making out in the bed. My heart’s racing, I get flush, the E’s kicking in.

  She wants to fuck.

  I’m doing it all slow and sensual, ecstasy style. Taking my time, like I’m doing something, making love and shit.

  She wants it harder, so I do it harder. Now she wants it harder than that. So I’m fuckin’ her harder than that. She wants it harder still.

  These porn chicks and their hard fucking. They come into the studio and we gotta give ’em vibrators that hit like jackhammers cuz their clits are so blew out.

  I’m three minutes into fucking this chick and I’m already sweating. I’m sposed to do this for another three hours? I’m holding her little baby legs in each hand by the ankles, smashing till my dick is numb. This is some bullshit.

  My dick goes soft in five minutes. I blame the E.

  “Hey babe, it’s the E. The shit made me go soft. I’ma take a Viagra.”

  “You sure you okay?”

  I’m burning up sweating, heart jumping out of my chest, pill popping trying to fuck a porn star like a porn star. “Yeah.”

  I take a Viagra. We hit the living room; she wants to hear Lil Wayne.

  We’re laid out on the shag carpet, I’m going down on her, rolling our asses off. It’s euphoric. I’m feeling warm all over. There’s no place on earth I’d rather be right now, than in between her legs. Then it hits me—Lil Wayne is so fucking good!

  She cums.

  I feel the heat between my legs; the Viagra’s kicking in. I get on top, we fuck for a while on the floor. Take a break. I love drugs. This is the best. We’re talking about life and shit like that. You know. Really vibing.

  She gets up to pee.

  I’m watching her little naked body as she runs down the hall.

  Something’s off.

  Her gait’s not really a gait. It’s more like a waddle. And her torso’s longer than I remember, her limbs are shorter than I recall, and her head’s big as hell for her body.

  She scampers like a midget. But she’s too tall to be a midget.

  Hell naw!

  I’m fucking a dwarf, a tall-ass dwarf. Shit’s got me fucked-up.

  I had a midget on my bucket list, but that was just talk.

  Now I finally got one, and I don’t know what to do with it. I always thought I’d be prepared for this, but I got hit out of nowhere with a surprise dwarf while rolling my balls off.

  I’m sitting there buck naked on the carpet, eyeballs twitching, teeth grinding, and I’m getting all emotional. Thinking, Goddamn, you’re doing ecstasy with midgets. This is fucking crazy, man. What are you gonna do? Don’t say nothing to her, you don’t wanna hurt her feelings. It’s not her fault she’s a dwarf. She’s just playing the hand she was dealt.

  Then I start thinking about people doing the best they can with what they got, motherfuckers running marathons on prosthetic legs, the little old man at the bus stop with threadbare clothes but he’s clean and they’re tucked in and I damn near well up.

  Life is beautiful.

  The toilet flushes.

  She waddles back into the room, kisses me on the mouth, and lays down next to me real dwarflike.

  Ain’t shit to do but finish what we started. I pop another pill and give her one, too. We fuck until my dick doesn’t work, so I pop another Viagra and fuck her some more. Hard as I can.

  epiphany

  WE DIDN’T HAVE JEWS IN my neighborhood growing up. I didn’t think about them one way or another. My auntie was the housekeeper for some; I never met ’em. We weren’t allowed in the house, but they’d give us hand-me-downs and that was pretty cool.

  When I came to LA, I used to cuss out the Hasidic ones. These motherfuckers would jaywalk a caravan of strollers across the street right in front of the car and not have the decency to even look up.

  They’d do that shit to me and I’d holler out the window, “You’re welcome, bitch!”

  And they’d still ignore me.

  My best friend Andrea’s ex-husband was Jewish, so she was always riding for Israel and shit. She’d be in the passenger seat ducking down, shushing me.

  “Jude!”

  “What?”

  “You sound anti-Semitic.”

  “I’m not anti-Semitic, I fucked tons of Jewish chicks.”

  “Jude, you’ll fuck anything with a hole. That doesn’t count.”

  And I’d be like, “They’re jaywalking all up in front of the car like they own the place and don’t even fucking wave.”

  Then she’d say, “Black people do that, and you don’t get mad at them.”

  “Well yeah, they walk slow as hell, but that’s cuz they got an inferiority complex. They think by having me wait at the light that’s gonna make up for the sixties. And at least they acknowledge you. They’ll stare you down. These Jewish cats pretend you don’t even exist! Fuck that! Lose your little I’m-better-than-you God-chose-me attitude you Jewish motherfuckers!”

  She’d just shake her head and say, “Anti-Semite.”

  We’d go round and round about it all the way to Bed Bath & Beyond.

  But that’s all I thought about the Jews. That I liked fucking the chicks, the Hasidic ones were assholes, and whatever I learned from the Anne Frank movie.

  When I got to New York and got the job at Sirius, I was at some club with a few of the bosses and a couple of ’em come over to me. One of ’em puts his arm around me, all chummy with this shit-eating grin, and he says under his breath, “Welcome, welcome. It’s good to see we got another member of the Tribe here.”

  I say, “What?”

  So he says it louder with a nod: “It’s good to have another member of the Tribe here.”

  I’m confused. I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.

  I say, “Member of the Tribe? What tribe you talkin’ bout?”

  He goes, “The Jewish tribe; you’re the Rude Jew, aren’t you?”

  I say, “Nah I’m Rude Jude, J-U-D-E. My folks were Catholic, my dad’s Italian. I’m not Jewish.”

  And he doesn’t say anything; he just takes his arm from around my shoulder and they all disperse.

  They ain’t say shit else to me for the rest of the day.

  Who the fuck does that? I don’t run up on Italians with some secret handshake.

  I got it into my head that there was some secret Jewish club going on. As the weeks went by I noticed that damn near all my bosses were Jewish. Yom Kippur, there’d be fucking tumbleweeds
rolling through upper management’s office cuz nobody was there. The percentages don’t add up. How the fuck does a group of motherfuckers who represent 2 percent of the population in America represent 90 percent of my bosses? Jewish nepotism.

  I’m looking at these cats bitter as hell, like, “How you get this job?” This goes on for years. I’m busting my ass, watching our stock prices fall, and these cats keep their jobs. I’m looking at dudes collecting paychecks and I don’t even know what the fuck they do and I’m mad. I get this anger in me, this resentment.

  One night, I’m out with these motherfuckers and some other manager cats and they’re all Jewish and doing business with each other with their nice watches. Fuck these dudes. I like ’em, but I don’t respect what the fuck they do and I’m jealous that they’re doing better than me. I leave.

  At the crib, I’m trying to unwind. It’s one in the morning. I got work the next day but I’m like, “Fuck it, I’ma do some Whip-Its.”

  I got a box of nitrous cartridges, a cracker, and a punchy balloon. I’m doing four Whip-Its at a time. I’m sucking it down, passing out, coming to. I decide I’m gonna jerk off and catch a nut while the wah-wah-wahs are going on in my head. I’m out of lotion, I get the olive oil, I got my pants around my ankles, I’m looking at Internet porn, trying to find the perfect scene, trying to time it just right.

  I find one. She’s got a fat ass, she’s blowing him. I’m staring at her ass, watching her head bob up and down. I hit the balloon, the wah-wah-wahs come, I’m jerkin’, I bust.

  That was the shit.

  I’m leaning back in my chair. Pants down, dress shirt on, I got a shriveled balloon in my left hand, semen’s on my right. Enjoy the moment. I barely soak it in, look to my left, and there’s four more Whip-Its in the box. Let’s go. I kick off my pants, wipe myself down with my boxers, throw on some music, and get to filling that balloon.

  I start hitting it, Smashing Pumpkins is on; “1979,” that’s my shit. I’m breathing in ’n’ out on the balloon, in and out. I sound like Darth Vader. I’m thinking about my bosses and how they’re all richer than me and how come? Do they deserve it? I’m thinking about the Jew Club of insiders and how they look out for each other and I’m like, Fuck them dudes. And the wah-wah-wahs are coming but I still just keep breathing it in and my head goes fuzzy and I’m dreaming and I’m playing out scenarios from the day in my head for what feels like hours and I keep sucking in that gas and there’s a thud.