Eleven Ways to Kill Your Lover

by Jonathan Woods

There’s no escaping who you are.

Emily, age 31, blonde, skinny as all get-out, with a mole on the underside of her left buttock, was a psychopath. A lesbian. And a skag user. A1 on all counts.

She lived in a sixth-floor walkup on St. Mark’s Place. What a pain in the ass that was. All those stairs. And the cooking smells coming from the other apartments were enough to make you vomit. Then there were the creeps. Always grabbing your ass on the street. Eying your clutch or your vintage Cartier watch. They even climbed down from the roof trying to get into Emily’s apartment. One had lost his grip and fallen six floors to the sidewalk. SPLAT! Another she stuck with a kitchen knife, but he managed to get away down the fire escape.

Emily’s pad was laid out shotgun-style, living room in the front, bedroom in the back. To get from one to the other, you passed through the kitchen/breakfast nook/bathroom into which the apartment entrance opened. A clawfoot tub sat where the kitchen table should have been. Oh, the pleasures of sipping a mimosa and crunching a slice of Jewish rye toast while vigorously scrubbing your underarms and crotch in a foamy mountain of bubble bath. The pissoir resided in a separate closet barely big enough to squeeze into bare-assed.

New York City circa 1968 filled Emily with joy and amazement. Made her wet between the legs and tickled the bottoms of her feet. She loved to drop acid and sit topless on the front fire escape watching the passing scene below. And, man, in those days St. Mark’s Place was one heck of a scene. Hippies, gurus, dopers, bikers, Santería priests, high-school kids from New Jersey, gays, con artists, lesbians, college girls looking for adventure, drug dealers, Beat poets, drag queens and confidence men meandered the sidewalks. And the smells: piss, dog poop, exhaust fumes, marijuana smoke, hotdogs with mustard, greasy French fries and the proverbial fart. Lovers fucked standing up in the shadowy entrance hallways of apartment buildings. A rape occurred on a rooftop. At the 2^nd Avenue end Gem Spa sat like the Buddha of egg creams. Around the corner mid-block stood the Fillmore East. Grace Slick & Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead. The Doors. A kosher deli next door. Rock & roll, blotter acid and a nosh.

At the 3^rd Avenue end resided the Saint Mark’s Baths, a Turkish bath catering to Russian-Jewish immigrants who liked to show off the length and girth of their circumcised schlongs as they lamented life in the New World. By evening the bath crowd turned gay and rowdy. A whole lot of copulatin’ goin’ on ‘til the dawn’s early light. The AIDS epidemic was still a decade and a half away,

The previous tenants of Emily’s apartment had painted every room black. Black walls, black doors, black ceilings, black radiators. Black industrial carpet covered the floor. Were they vampires? Her bedroom boasted a king mattress covered by a chaos of sheets and pillows and a retro floor lamp with a beaded shade. Books and magazines, a baggie of weed, a full ashtray, a matte-black .45 semi-auto lay amid a scattering of female intimates (pushup bras, shelf bras, cage bras, see-through panties, crotchless panties, thongs, seamed stockings, garter belts, bandeau see-through crop-tops, bralettes, cupless bras, workout bras, boob-hugging tube tops, you name it).    

Emily’s best friend, Audrey, sometimes stayed over. Audrey’s official residence was an efficiency in Chinatown. Whenever she was down there, alone, on the street after dark, Audrey got the heebie-jeebies. Chinatown creeped her out. Her imagination ran wild—a white woman, single and vulnerable, kidnapped off the street, sold into white slavery in Shanghai. A scene from The Brides of Fu Manchu starring Christopher Lee (1966).  

Audrey shared the Chinatown apartment with her two-thirds-Russian, one-third-Jewish live-in-lover Bill Oblomov. On his tax return the box for profession said: “writer.” He hated to be disturbed during his writing time, between noon (when he got up) and 7 p.m. when he left the apartment for some nearby bar frequented by other “writers.” In winter this meant Audrey (who worked uptown in Macy’s makeup department) couldn’t return to her apartment until after dark, which drove her to stay at Emily’s.

Why did Audrey put up with Bill? Well, he paid two-thirds of the rent. They both enjoyed simple food, a boiled potato, pan-fried tilapia, tea in a glass.  Third, if the words were flowing, Bill was an ardent lover. Okay, his wiry Bolshevik beard left scratch marks on the soft flesh of her inner thighs. But his long, athletic tongue made up for it!

During the great-sex-with-Bill period, Audrey was a rare visitor at Emily’s. But on those winter nights when she did stay over…! For starters, Emily would rub antibiotic ointment and shea butter body cream on Audrey’s love wounds. This (Emily’s hands playing jazzily up and down those cold February night, vanilla ice cream thighs) was a total turn-on. Audrey’s heartbeat went off the charts. Vivacissimo.

Oh, baby! Kiss, kiss. Moan, moan.

Back down in Chinatown, as spring sprang, writer’s block arrived like a dose of syph. No more great-sex-with-Bill but plenty of violence! For the first time Audrey noticed Bill’s disgusting yellow teeth. His breath reeking of garlic, green onions, cumin, hot sauce, cigarette smoke, booze and other women. Felt the hardness of his fists.

The next time Emily saw Audrey (about a week into Bill’s writer’s block slump), Audrey sported a stunning shiner. Left eye slammed shut like a steel gate, that side of her face swollen, its unhappy flesh variegated in shades of purple, black, puke yellow and swamp green.

“I guess you ran into a doorknob,” said Emily, as she removed Audrey’s stockings and fiddled with the external elements of her vagina. Cut to: BLACK.

The next morning, over Grape Nuts, banana slices and low-fat milk, they discussed Audrey’s situation. Bill, the “writer,” had to go.

“How shall we do it?” asked Emily, rubbing her hands with delight.

Audrey jumped up and lit a cigarette. Paced back and forth.

“I know,” she said. “We’ll drive him over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. At the top we’ll beat him to a pulp and drop him into the river.”

“Won’t work. He’s too powerful. And there’s no way we can stop at the top of the bridge. Other drivers will see us. Or the cops will come because you can’t stop on a bridge. Not even to pee. It’s a traffic hazard.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

Audrey gnawed on her thumb, looking vague and fraught at the same time.

“How about you get him into the sack,” said Emily, “and when he’s passed out afterwards (like they all do) we’ll drive a six-inch nail through his eyeball into his brain.”

“Eww!”

“Okay then, I’ll seduce him and drive in the nail. You won’t have to be there. Just read about it the next day in the Daily News.”

“No, no, no!”

Audrey was working herself into a tizzy. Emily rolled and lit a spliff, took a deep drag. Then handed it to Audrey, who held it but didn’t take a puff, as she resumed her flamboyant pacing.

“Okay. Let’s simplify,” said Emily, grabbing back the spliff and sucking greedily. “You invite him up on the roof for a few drinks. Stand near the edge and engage him in identifying the heavenly constellations. I’ll be hiding somewhere and I’ll run up behind him and push him over the edge.”

“But what if he turns around at the last minute, grabs you and throws you over? I couldn’t live without you. I’d have to throw myself off the roof after you. And Bill would collect the insurance money. Besides, you can’t see the stars in New York.”

“GAWD! Audrey. You’re so off the f-ing wall. And what insurance are you talking about?”

“I don’t know, doesn’t everyone have life insurance?”

Suddenly Audrey threw her hands up in the air and burst out laughing. She couldn’t stop.

“What’s so funny?” demanded Emily.

Audrey collapsed onto the only chair in the living room and slowly calmed down.

“Why don’t we just hire somebody to do it?” she asked between gasps and giggles.

“Because,” said Emily, “to hire a hitman will cost a boob and a leg. At least ten grand. And chances are, since it’s a man, he’ll fuck it up.”

“Couldn’t we find a hitwoman?” asked Audrey.

Emily came over and hugged Audrey and starting tinkering with one of her tits. Next moment, buck naked, they rolled and tumbled in a batshit swirl of feral lust. Later, sweat-sodden, sated, lying on the futon couch, Emily relit the spliff and puffed. Audrey stared at the black ceiling.

“It’s hopeless,” she said.

“No, it’s not,” said Emily. “We’re back to my idea of the nail through the eye. Besides, I think it would be fun. It’s the essence of my being. I was born to kill.”

Emily pulled Audrey tighter into her arms.

“Hey, Buttercup,” she said. “I’m sure glad we found each other. You ever tried heroin?”

* * *

          The next day they agreed that Audrey would finagle Bill to a lowlife hipster bar on Avenue A. There she would introduce him to Emily, who would do her own finagle (the old hand-down-the-front-of-his-trousers, schlong-grabbing trick) to entice him to a nearby transient hotel across from the Peace Eye Bookstore. What better place to commit the crime of murder? Totally film noir.

          Audrey called Bill at the apartment from a payphone outside Gem Spa. There was no answer. An hour later she called again. Still no answer. What the fuck! After a dozen call attempts, Audrey took the subway to Chinatown and, amid the raunchy bouquet of steaming Bok Choy, climbed the three flights to the efficiency she shared with Bill.

          When she tried her key, the lock had been changed. No one answered when she slammed her hand against the steel door. But the noise brought forth Mr. Dong Lee, the middle-aged pervert who lived in the back apartment. Ashley could see his eyes unbuttoning her white blouse, dropping it on the floor. Then unhooking her lacy little black bralette. Did Asian guys have small dicks? She’d never slept with an Asian guy. Or gal. She wondered if he was circumcised. She cleared her throat.  

          “Have you seen Bill?”

          “Mr. Bill, he win big lottery. Five hundred thousand dollar. He rich. Very rich,” said Mr. Lee.

          “You’re kidding! The lottery! Five hundred thousand dollars!”

          “Me not kidding. He hit big time. Say he done with New York. He leaving town for good. Go south.”

          “Where did he say he was going?”

          “He say go south.”

          “But where?”

          “South.”

          “Shit!”

          “You can say that again.”

          “Shit!”

* * *

          Despite their best efforts, Emily and Audrey never found a trace of Bill. Maybe he’d gone to Cancun or St. Barts or Rio.

          So, Audrey moved into Emily’s pad, became a heroin addict and a hooker and they lived happily ever after.

Until Emily died of a drug overdose.

Evicted from Emily’s apartment, Audrey took up the life of a bag lady and slowly lost her mind.

Her last thought as she lay in a hospice dying of AIDS was of lying on a sandy beach with Bill watching the turquoise waves roll gently in.

You never know how good you have it until you don’t.