Matthew Licht

Genital Pulp

Matthew Licht

The man in the black robe said ten thousand bucks or two years. I felt like a new life had been granted. The men in blue uniforms kept their hands on their guns when I approached the bench to say thanks, your honor. The County Clerk’s office was down the hall. There were a few forms to sign.

Cash payment would’ve seemed fishy, or at least a bit too flashy.

The neighborhood swarmed with Bail Bonds offices, but paralegal dreariness could wait. The Blind Justice Inn seemed a better place to celebrate conditional freedom.

A guy I’d seen before was at the counter, watching the barmaid get an early afternoon keg started. She poured off glass after glass of foam that would’ve settled into beer, if given half a chance. Suds vanished down the drain until what looked like a glass of beer in a TV ad appeared.

She caught the nod in the mirror, pulled another.

The guy on the next stool was on his way out of the courtroom next to the one I was headed into when I first saw him.

“Got off easy,” I said, to break the ice. “Can’t understand why, but I didn’t want to stick around or ask too many questions, know what I mean?”

“They always ask me the same question,” the guy said. “And the answer’s always no.” He didn’t say what the question was.

The best way to get people to talk is to shut up.

He eventually got tired of country music and background TV chatter. “My brother was always getting into my stuff,” he said. “That was the problem.”

He looked too old to dwell on sibling invasions of privacy, especially in court. “He found the acid.”

The story was less childish than it’d sounded at first, or perhaps even more. The guy said he was twenty-five when the alleged incident occurred. The brother in question was legally adult.

The guy who was telling the story came home from a day of pretending to look for work so he could get another free dinner at his parents’ house. When he opened the front door, he smelled excrement, blood and oysters. Satanic metal blared louder than Pops would normally allow.

You live under my roof, Pops always said, you obey my laws. No crazy noise. Cops will forcibly remove you if I tell them you threatened me while intoxicated.

Which was most of the time, in the nosy brother’s case.

Pops often slapped Mom around. She put up with rough treatment. She had an irritating voice, and her insipid manner grated on everyone. Though a lousy cook, she fixed and served meals. She also cleaned house after a fashion, did laundry, took beer and cigarette orders, and went to the supermarket. Mom was an unpleasant slave.

The brother who found the acid didn’t even pretend to seek employment. He dropped out of high school, dropped his girlfriend, dropped a lawnmower on his foot so he’d have an excuse to drop everything except getting high.

He didn’t ask Mom to score weed for him, although she might’ve done that too. She’d deliver another boring lecture, act like a victim, and take a beating if Pops found out.

Headphones kept the peace. The brother who found the acid kept quiet in his smelly room. He’d blotted out the window with garbage bags. Chaos raged in his head. Heavy metal born from New Jersey’s toxic waste-dumps deadened his eardrums and drowned out the world with messages of death pain blood and the devil.

Pops approved of peace, but not lazy bums. Nothing could convince him that employment was anything but gainful. He’d worked in a foundry, but had retired early with a full disability pension. The brother who found the acid implied Pops had dropped the hot anvil on his foot on purpose, and got a beating. The cops came. Trip to the emergency room. The judge ordered family counseling. Pops had no choice but to comply. Stone-faced, he listened to his wife and children vent their inarticulate rage before mealy-mouthed therapists.

One afternoon, despite injunctions and restraining orders, Pops stormed into his younger son’s room and demolished the stereo system which was on the verge of repossession anyway. He broke the entire satanic record collection over his knees, and scrawled Get a Job or Get Out in black magic marker on the girlie foldouts taped to the walls.

Selling acid isn’t really a job but it’s not a bad way to pick up tax-free cash. The merchandise is easy to conceal, and those who’re into it are really into it.

Bars are a good place to sell hallucinogens. The guy gave me his sales pitch, but I wasn’t interested. Beer pleasantly softens a world where what passes for reality is hallucinatory enough.

The guy shook an eyedropper bottle, and said it held over ten thousand hits’ worth of life- altering trips. At least one or two cases of instant schizophrenia in there, he said. Just happens, to some unlucky people. But it’s their choice. No one forces them to drop acid. A lifetime’s worth of insanity defences is no deterrent. Exhibit B looked like the cigarette coupons women used to get addicted to. They licked green stamps, absorbed occult nicotine.

You should’ve seen my mother’s teeth.

The guy who was telling the story said he was headed home from a successful sales trip when he sensed something was wrong. Dealers develop extra-sensory instincts, or else. Ditch your dope and run away, stay free to push another day. But he didn’t drop his dope. He was sold out, cashed up. He wanted a bong-hit of weed, which he purchased with LSD profits. Don’t get too hooked on the merch is dealer rule #1 or #2.

The guy sensed his wholesale inventory was gone, and that everything in his depressing world was different.

His dealer instinct was accurate, but that was no consolation. The brother who found the acid had blood all over him. He was listening to Pops’ ancient Hi-fi, which usually played Perry Como, Benny Goodman, Dino, Sinatra. The record was taped and Krazy Glued together. Heavy metal never sounded worse.

Parental body parts were strewn about the living room, decorated with stab-wounds galore. A set of steak knives, rarely used for their intended purpose, stuck out of human knife-blocks.

“Never took acid before,” the brother said. “Wild. Music sounds real different.”

“How much did you drop?”

 “The whole bottle.” 

“You won’t be coming down for a long, long time, bro.”

“That’s OK. I kind of like where my head’s at now.”

The parental torsos were missing heads and other not-strictly-essential protrusions. An intestinal trail led to their bedroom. The mess in there was in tune with the house’s general disorder. Pops had often complained about Mom’s slovenliness, with gratuitous racial slurs thrown in. The missing parts were in there. Steak knives worked fine as oyster bars on eyeballs. The meat-cleaver in the kitchen drawer split even the thickest skulls.

Pops had kept nearly five grand stashed under the mattress. He didn’t trust bankers. The brother who found the acid also unearthed Pops’ paranoid Fort Knox, but wasn’t interested in colored bits of paper, unless they were soaked with LSD. He licked the banknotes, tossed them around like gory confetti. There was no clue what Pops was saving the money for. Certainly not clothes for his wife or to get his sons’ teeth straightened.

The brother who sold acid figured the money was sufficient indemnity for his lost hallucinogen stock. He pocketed the dough, broke with principle and called the cops.

“Thing is,” he said, “I always wanted to murder them too. If I knew Pops had money stashed in the house, I would’ve made it look like someone broke in and torture-murdered them for it. But in the end everything worked out. Always does, if you know what I mean.”

“So what were you in court for?” I asked. “How come they let you off?” Pretty ballsy, bringing industrial amounts of LSD-25 into a courtroom if you’re up on drug charges.

“You got it wrong. I go in once a year to testify against my brother. Put on the suit and tell the Judge he’s not ready to re-enter society. Or at least I’m not willing or able to take care of him. He’s still high as hell. So I say I’m scared he’ll come after me, next. I tell them he threatened to do wipe out the whole family, only I wrestled Mom’s butcher knife from his grip.”

“Did that really happen?”

He dodged the question. “Nobody knows how long it takes an average human to metabolize a massive acid OD. Legally, they write you off as permanently insane after three trips, at least in New Jersey.”

“What does your brother think?”

“Like I said, he’s not legally reliable. He’s OK. His life’s not too different from before, except they make him work in the prison laundry. One thing’s sure, he’ll never steal my acid again.”

The barmaid changed the TV channel to a car race by remote control.

The guy who sold acid wasn’t much younger than me. LSD experience used to be a badge of honor. “So, you’ve never tripped?”

“Course I’ve tripped,” he said. His stare made me suspect that I might’ve been tripping too. “I mean, how else am I supposed to know I got the good stuff?”

Beer’s usually a reassuring drink. Hank Williams and neon beer ad mirrors radiated and reflected freaky vibes.

“So you cooked up the stuff that made your brother chop up your folks?”

He shook his head slowly. “Got a college boy to produce the product. Then I got my girlfriend to take care of him, if you know what I mean.”

The scene played in my head, starring the barmaid. I drew prison bars through a puddle on the counter. My cigarettes were soaked, but I managed to light one anyway. The barmaid asked if we wanted another round. The way she said round implied hole. I fell in.

“Come here often?” I asked her. She didn’t answer.

The courthouse was a mirage in the glowing malt liquor ad mirror. Gray granite shimmered into pulsating atomic energy molecules. Governmental architecture fizzed like frozen Ice Age beer.

“I’m friends with all the judges, at this point,” the guy said. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but judges become awful friendly when I come around to deliver my annual testimony. Leniency solves delinquency.”

“But they keep your brother behind bars on your say-so.”

He shrugged. “Look, we’re all prisoners. The world’s just a jail we dream up daily. Nothing in the known universe, for instance, could’ve kept you off this particular stool at this moment.”

Ten grand is lenient if it’s one-tenth of the proceeds from the last job. Had to wonder if it’s true there’s no such thing as luck when the barmaid brought beer and said, this round’s on the house. She winked at the brother who sold acid. Or maybe I dreamed she did. Free beer is a kind of leniency too. Five bucks glowed pink on the damp counter, so I said, how ‘bout a round of whiskey with these, and pour yourself a shot too.

Several 80-proof drips dropped on the barmaid’s tank top when she tossed it down.

Think back on first tit, first hit. Remember when it first dawned that reality isn’t anything you can hang onto, just a bunch of electrons in endless motion, restless, meaningless, either positive or negative but there’s no way to tell.

An Arms Deal

By Matthew Licht

Prostitutes can say no to a john, but pimps slap fussy prostitutes. Makeup was invented to cover bruises, too.

Prostitutes don’t have to go out for drinks with their clients before or after a date.

Being a prostitute is legal. Advertising that you’re a prostitute isn’t. The charge is solicitation. I should know. I’m a lawyer.

Lawyers can, in theory, refuse a client. I’d made the mistake of soliciting clients among friends. Make that, people I knew. When a client asks you out for drinks, you’re supposed to go. Senior partners at the firm call this sort of artificial socializing client relations. The partners slap around employees in ways that no cosmetics would cover.

So I was at cocktails with two clients.

Fred was a business major in college. He thinks about money almost exclusively. He was thinking and talking about money on his cell phone when he ploughed his corporate executive car into a kid on a bicycle. The kid allegedly failed to give the prescribed hand signal. Fred was going too fast. He hit the brakes too late. He sent the kid flying. The kid died of a compressed skull fracture. No helmet.

Fred didn’t leave the scene.

He said his cell phone was in speaker mode, on the passenger seat. He said the kid was riding a little stunt bike, invisible from an SUV cockpit. He said the kid was hot-dogging.

The firm doesn’t pay its associates to disbelieve clients. No eyewitnesses. Fred had no prior arrests. He was a pillar of the community. Voluntarily submitted blood and urine samples showed legal alcohol levels. No hit-and-run.

Jason was an English Lit Ph.D. He worked in publishing. His firm used poetry as a tax hedge against bestseller profits, and Jason was their poetry editor. His live-in girlfriend Laura was a poet. She was watering their marijuana plants on the fire escape when it gave way. She took a five-story spill into the cement courtyard. Garbage cans broke her fall, but she was left quadriplegic, maybe permanently so.

Laura was in no shape to sue the landlord herself, so Jason called the only lawyer he knew personally. We were friends in college, he said. You handed me your card at a party last year.

Jason was at work on a novel. This work-in-progress had already devoured years. Laura gave him lots of encouragement, he said, and was a good proofreader. He didn’t want to talk about his new caregiver role.

Fred cracked quadriplegic jokes. He was indignant about kids’ lack of common sense, and negligent mothers who let their kids stunt-ride on heavy traffic arteries without a helmet. He cracked negligent mother jokes.

Jason was worried he and Laura could be arrested for marijuana horticulture. His landlord’s lawyers would push the illegal drug issue. Fire escapes were for emergency use only, and there were legal precedents of stoned hippie suicide leaps. Jason’s girlfriend Laura was obese. Fire escape safety codes might not take overweight people into account.

Fred didn’t know Laura’s dimensions, or he would’ve told fat broad jokes.

Laura had regained partial control of two fingers on her left hand and could wiggle both big toes. Doctors held out slight hope she might recover use of her limbs, but couldn’t be sure, couldn’t say when.

Doctors give up easier than lawyers, and they don’t have to go out for drinks with patients.

The chemistry requirements for Medical School proved insuperable. Law School was a relative breeze. The rationale is that nobody dies if you screw up a non-death penalty case. No matter how hard you wish they would.

Sometimes I wonder whether doctors mentally urge certain patients to die, die, die.

Fred’s jokes were like a nervous tic. I considered him as a doctor might. Sometimes I look at a client and think: five-to-ten months at a minimum-security facility. Or, this guy will have to pay close to a million in damages. A doctor looks at a cancer patient across the desk and thinks: make sure the bills are paid up-front.

Fred had dark circles around his eyes. The lips of his eyelids were like sunsets on postcards from Florida. He made faces to illustrate his jokes, but also to divert attention from his hands. Fred practically had stigmata. He scratched his way through a few dead baby jokes.

Jason got up to go to the bathroom. He didn’t like Fred, or his sense of humor. My inner doctor observed Jason on his way to the Hi-Life Bar’s head. The stoop indicated possible skeletal deterioration. There was also hair loss, and his thick eyeglasses indicated severe myopia.

My conservative estimate was that Laura Waneright might recover 1.5-to-2 million dollars, plus extra for pain and suffering. Any drug-related counter-charges would probably be dismissed.

Jason passed behind a man on a stool at the bar who had no arms, not even stumps. His broad shoulders went nowhere. His shirtsleeves were rolled and tucked like in a barracks. There was no straw in the pint of beer in front of him on the counter. He stared at the TV, which showed a weird boxing match in which men in padded headgear punched and kicked away at each other. I didn’t want Fred to notice the man, didn’t want to hear amputee jokes.

The guy looked dangerous. One crack out of Fred and he’d saunter over, chew off his ears and nose like a grizzly bear.

I thought he’d hoist the glass with his mouth, somehow.

A woman walked past the armless man, and stopped to say hello. Their chat looked friendly. She knew him, knew his story.

One of the fighters on TV laid the other low with a knee to the solar plexus. The fight was over. Seconds stepped in to scrape the loser off the canvas.

The guy with no arms took in the KO, but still didn’t drink. Maybe he enjoyed watching beer bubbles in motion, or got drunk by osmosis.

Jason emerged from the men’s room lost in thought. Not a glance towards the double-amputee or severe birth-defect man. Thalidomide cases yielded hefty settlements.

Fred cracked himself up, scratched himself raw. He had track-marks on his forearms.

Jason wore weed jackets with leather patches on the elbows and cardigans for office wear.

The armless guy, who was dressed like a skinhead, shimmied off his stool, and headed to the Hi-Life men’s room. He walked with a pronounced gimp. His right shoulder stump described wide circles in the air with each rolling step. His tough-guy boots were custom clubfoot shoes.

He had a cartridge belt slung over his left shoulder, like someone had hung it on him, like he was a coat-rack.

He disappeared into the toilet.

Fred wanted to score weed. He asked Jason if he set off smoke detectors in airplane bathrooms. Federal offence, but maybe I could get him off. Get off, get it? Like get high?

Jason groaned.

“Hey Fred,” I said. “Lay off the one-liners. I’ll get this round.”

The Hi-Life’s bartender could’ve been the armless man’s brother. I wanted to ask how he drank, but didn’t know how to phrase the question. The bartender might take such enquiries the wrong way. An offer to buy the cripple a round would seem patronizing.

“Three of the same, please,” I said. I didn’t ask, do you know what happened to that man who’s sitting? The barman might’ve said, Yeah, I do. So what?

No further questions, your honor.

Never ask a question in court, unless you know the answer.

You can’t lie in the court of the human body. Jury members wouldn’t like Fred. I was going to advise him not to tell jokes in court, and try to talk him into a settlement.

Forgot to mention the kid Fred killed was a ghetto youth. Police blotter reporters live for such stories.

Please hit and run next time, Fred. Then I can refuse your case.

After another round of drinks and another round of Thai boxing on TV, the armless man emerged the toilet, settled on his stool and resumed his meditation on a glass of beer. His cartridge belt was in place, his pants zipped, his suspenders T-square straight, his shoulders still tucked away. Maybe he asks whoever’s in the men’s room to give him a hand.

Jason took a cigarette from Fred’s pack, lit it shakily, and squirmed. He looked like a man who needs to talk.

“You know, I didn’t sign up for this,” he said. “Laura and I were just sort of hanging on together until one of us found another place to live, or someone else we wanted to live with. We had nothing left to say to each other. We weren’t together, physically, or not often. Could she sue me? Like, for abandonment? We’re not legally married or anything.”

He wanted me to say it was within his rights to walk out on a companion stricken helpless.

“She could bring suit,” I said. “But I wouldn’t handle her case.”

Jason blew a crooked smoke ring.

“Conflict of interest,” I said.

Jason wanted escape clauses, ethical indulgences, or at least a pat on the back from a guy he sort of knew in college.

“You think I’m a scumbag, fine. But you guys are worse. You don’t even see how badly you’ve whored out.”

Fred didn’t see. Of course he sold out. Selling out was the idea. Fred was in business. A kid who flew because Fred was talking business instead of driving was an unforeseen expense in terms of legal fees and damages.

Gravity dragged Laura down because she wanted to get high. Jason wanted dope and occasional sex, not responsibility.

I needed to take a leak. “’Scuse me.”

“The best…no, the worst minds of my generation,” Jason said, “destroyed by Law School, Business School.”

Fred said, “Fuck you, flake.” He wasn’t joking.

The armless man contemplated a glass of beer on the bar.

There was no one else in the Hi-Life’s toilet, just a condom machine, green soap in dispensers, lemon urinal cake perfume and a lugubrious light.

Hey Fred, you’re stuck with self-mutilation nightmares and a conviction for reckless driving and vehicular homicide. Joke about that, fuck-face.

Hey Jason, find another fat pothead who can walk, you smug little scumbag.

Please, please, armless man. Waddle in here again to show how you can piss without assistance.

He spots me staring, approaches slowly. “What’re you looking at?”

“Huh? Oh hey, ‘scuse me, guy. Just curious, is all. I mean, were you the victim of an industrial accident? On-the-job mishap? Negligence on your employer’s part? Here, take my card. Uh, whoops, let me tuck it in your pocket. I can help you recover…”

He busts my face in with a head-butt for soliciting like a whore.

Story by Matthew Licht

matthewlicht87@gmail.com

Matthew Licht rocketed to world-wide obscurity with his story collections The Moose Show and Justine, Joe & the Zen Garbageman (both might still be available from Salt Pubs. UK). A pseudonymous trilogy of murder mysteries is due out this Fall from Erasmo Edizioni (Livorno, Italy), as is a yet-to-be-titled book of hard-core sockeroos from a mysterious Utah-based publisher known only by the acronym HST, and an extremely unorthodox art book, Enigma 17, from Livorno-based publisher Origini Edizioni.