TROPICANA
By Veronica Phillips
Lisette’s tiny dog began humping Isabella the day that Lisette, Mikey and Isabella all had sex together for the first time. Isabella squealed into her hands and pretended to thrash around on the second queen of the motel room. Lisette laughed as she tried to get the dog to heel. “Poppy! No! Poppy! No!”
Poppy eventually gave up, more from boredom than any control Lisette had over the thing. Lisette navigated a wedge of pre-cut pineapple between her teeth, covering her chewing mouth before she spoke. “I think she’s doing that because she sees you as submissive now, Bellie.”
Isabella extended one long middle finger towards Lisette. She looked winded from pretending to fight the dog, her exposed abdomen distended as it pumped in air. Isabella always took forever to get her clothes back on. Mikey didn’t love it. When she lay on her back, her tits would bow outward like the eyes of a cow. When she remembered to, she’d push them together into nice little balloons as he fucked her, but eventually she’d get tired or distracted, and Mikey would be stuck on the farm, as it were.
Lisette gave a high-pitched sigh and stretched her small body. Lisette was tiny all the way through, including her tits and ass. She refused to get any surgery done because of her line of work.
Mikey wished he could combine Isabella’s size with Lisette’s bounce. Together: the ideal tit.
“Pass me the cantaloupe,” Isabella called. She was on her stomach now, facing the motel TV. When she kicked up her feet, her silver anklet slid up her calf. The bottom of her foot was almost white, even though the rest of her was like brown sugar; a divided line indicating where she stopped applying the oil that sizzled her in those fluorescent blue beds.
When Mikey first saw Isabella, he thought her dark coloration was from the mud. Mikey arrived at the club just in time to see her lose. A bleach blonde, hair stringy from the wet dirt, had Isabella pinned and straddled. Mikey didn’t remember walking up to the wrestling ring, plopped in the middle of this dance club, but he was suddenly close enough to see the flex of the blonde’s thighs digging into Isabella’s waist. Isabella thumped her feet (masked in mud, lily-white soles not yet revealed) like a tantrumy kid. Mikey imagined straddling Isabella in the same way.
That night, Mikey was medium-drunk and majorly sexually determined. The band had just finished a short leg, and Mikey had been in a good mood from plane to car to his place, but before he could even put his bag down, Alexa had thrust a shoebox at him. Said thrust shoebox reminded Mikey of being gifted a kitten in the same way by his mom when he was ten. Mikey had loved that thing, but they’d neutered him wrong at a cheap vet, and he died when he was only three months old. Mikey has had no interest in cats since.
He was preparing to tell Alexa they’d need to give it away. Maybe they could get the pity he’d been thinking about instead. But the cardboard box held no kitten, botched or otherwise. Instead, it held a scorched metal spoon, three G-strings (one with a layer of dried blood running all the way up the floss-thin ass strap) and a black acrylic fingernail.
“I don’t shoot up, I don’t get a period and I don’t wear hooker press-ons,” Alexa pointed at each piece of evidence. “I’ll come for my stuff when you’re out of the house.” All this to say, on that specific night, Mikey needed a mudfuck with this nightclub’s big-breasted loser. He made it to the ropes while Isabella inaudibly cussed at the dirt-crusted blonde through her browned teeth. Despite being caked in sludge, the acrid smell of which was now reaching Mikey’s nose, he could tell Isabella was especially hot. In fact, the mud smeared in the impression of four fingers and a palm across her face made the whites of her eyes appear supernaturally vibrant, and her baby-smooth lips especially pink.
The DJ crackled something over the loudspeaker. Isabella’s scary white eyes rolled to Mikey with an imploring air, like he was supposed to be doing something. He watched her mouth move but heard nothing.
“Huh?”
“You’re from somewhere, right?” Isabella shouted.
“Lodi, California. You?”
“I meant like I’ve seen you somewhere.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah.” Mikey didn’t want to say outright what he did. Telling girls felt like begging.
“That’s really awesome.”
Some asshole’s arm shot past Mikey, then. In his hairy, stupid hand was a literal fistful of dollars.
Another inaudible utterance from Isabella. Another “What!” from Mikey.
“It’s like an auction. Whoever pays the most gets to wrestle the loser.”
Isabella’s mouth hadn’t moved when she said this. Mikey turned to see a smokeshow apparition next to him. Icy blonde hair was piled atop a thin face, skin so pale as to glow in the club lights. Perfect nose.
“The loser?” Mikey asked. “How’s that a tournament?”
“Would you want to be touched by any of these guys?” The hot specter tilted her beautiful face in tiny gesturing increments left and right, illuminating the deadbeats thrusting cash into the ring.
Mikey had no choice. He had to save Isabella from peril. That’s how he’d tell the story to his friends.
He overbid by a grand and pinned Isabella within three seconds. He told himself it was to save her from extended humiliation. Same positioning as the previous victor, his knees bracketing her plush ass. He leaned forward and planted both his elbows around her face. “Do you wanna go get fucked up with me?”
Isabella dribbled mud from her mouth before her freaky white eyes tilted up to his. She smiled. “Sure.”
While Isabella showered, the apparition—“Lisette”, she intoned with a butter-smooth tone—hung by the ring with Mikey. “That shit is an instant UTI,” she said of the mud, with authoritative uppityness. Lisette’s voice held none of the nasality of The Valley. Her black shift dress was thin and strappy, but it almost reached her knees. Mikey couldn’t place what she possibly did for a living. He remembered that sometimes the answer around here was nothing.
Fearing a lull, Mikey bought them both double vodka sodas. He’d downed most of his by the time Isabella wrapped her now clean, but still very browned hand around his shoulder. Lisette’s eyebrows lifted. “Bellie?”
Isabella’s face rumpled in displeasure and then half-smoothed. “Hi, Lisette.”
“You two know each other?”
Lisette nodded with a tight smile that somehow suited her face. Isabella shrugged. “Oh, God, we should all totally go out together,” Mikey said, like the idea had just dawned upon him.
Lisette shrugged. “I don’t have anything tomorrow morning.”
Isabella chewed her pink lip. “Yeah.”
Sometimes, on a bender, Mikey felt like he could do magic. Alexa was gone, but two beautiful new women appeared. One moment, they’re at the mud club, the next, they’re seated in a booth in some cavernous dance hall. Whatever was betwixt the two girls, irrelevant. Lisette took prim sips from bright blue liquid in a martini glass.
“How’s work been, Bellie?”
Isabella had relaxed in Lisette’s presence during the taxi ride to the club. She’d also clung onto Mikey’s thigh at any moment that they weren’t in motion. Lisette had hardly touched Mikey, which was making him obsessive.
Isabella scratched behind her ear and examined the crusted dirt from the pit under her French-tipped nails. “I’m just kind of having fun.”
Where Lisette had the posture of a ballet dancer, Isabella was unselfconsciously slumped against the white leather couch Mikey had shelled out five hundred bucks to claim. Lisette pursed her lips and gently probed one of the clips holding her hair up. “That might be why you’re not getting bigger shoots.”
“You two models? Have I seen you on any billboards?”
Isabella snorted. Her drink had turned the corners of her mouth orange.
Lisette looked to Mikey. “Well, I’m not supposed to talk about it yet, but I’m going to be Miss July.”
Isabella shot up at this. “No! No!” She was pissed. But she was excited.
Lisette shimmied her ballet shoulders. “Mmhm.”
“God, how’d you convince him?”
“I didn’t convince him. My tests were great, Jenny told him she likes me, and I behave myself at those parties.”
Isabella thunked back against the chair. “I should get on that.”
Lisette propped her chin on her hand. She wore a tennis bracelet. “You have shit,” Lisette purred, “all over your face.”
Isabella looked wounded. She wiped her face with a sticky napkin.
Lisette neatly set down her drained glass. “And, you know, you’re not really eligible. Considering you’ve posed nude already.”
Isabella shot up once again, looking around the room for someone to share her outrage. “You were in that same fucking shoot with me!”
“I had on a leather dress. You were in your birthday suit.” Lisette spoke like somebody’s mother.
Isabella bit her lip. She looked like she might hit Lisette.
“You girls got a copy of that?” Mikey joked.
They weren’t looking at him. “You could always go for Pet of the Month,” Lisette said tartly, with a pat to Isabella’s thigh. “I’m going to powder my nose.”
Isabella craned her neck as Lisette swayed away. “She gets all those nice things because she’s a hooker,” Isabella slurred into her fresh mai tai. Where had that come from? She was slouched forward now, elbows heavy on the table. “She’d suck her dog off for the right price.”
Mikey had no interest in that. But he willed himself to remember this story for
later.
For Mikey’s next trick, he would induce time travel! Motel room. He could tell from the roughness of the sheets. Mikey didn’t mind slumming it, especially now that he didn’t have to. Isabella was underneath him, and she sounded really great. Loud and high, like a porn star. Mikey felt heroic for staying hard, considering how drunk he was.
Somewhere in this last magic trick, Mikey had also caused Lisette to disappear. Isabella made the highest noise yet. Mikey looked down just in time to see her squirt onto the coarse sheets, the sight of which caused Mikey to come. She laughed and kissed him. Mikey laughed, too. Everything was always so nice in the exact twenty seconds after ejaculation!
“All done?”
Mikey jumped out of his skin. Who the fuck was that?
Lisette didn’t seem put out. Mikey appeared to have shelled out for a double queen room, and so Lisette was lying out on the other bed, propped up against the headboard, still ballerina-postured.
She seemed fine.
Isabella sniffed and reached down to touch herself, prodding. “You have a big dick. I don’t do that very often.”
Mikey knew and loved this about himself. “Thanks.”
Lisette sat up, interested for the first time all night. “Did what?”
“I squirted.”
“You do that?” Lisette was already off the bed, moving toward them. She peered down–looking past all their junk without comment–at the wet spot on the sheets. “Huh. That’s sexy.”
Isabella looked down between her legs. She seemed to be hiding a smile. The way she was sorta happy made Mikey sorta sad.
“I gotta piss.” Mikey grabbed his jeans on the way to the bathroom. He wanted some of the coke he’d pocketed when he left the apartment, but even more important, he didn’t want the girls to nab any.
He stared at himself in the bathroom mirror for a while, and this proved interesting enough for Mikey to realize that he was truly fucked up. As he pivoted between his left eye and his right eye, left eye and right eye, he felt the usual swim of emotions that accompanied an oncoming bender.
Delight, of course. A feeling of deservedness, because that bitch Alexa had chucked him out like he didn’t pay for all her fucking dance classes and cocaine and rent. Even after she gave toothy head! A feeling of determination that once this bender was over, he’d get a shaman, finally. Daniel really liked his guy, even credited him for keeping him sober (save for pills) and married for six whole months. What was most impressive was the fact that Daniel was willing to credit anyone else for anything.
Mikey had a stronger resolve than Daniel. With a shaman, he could probably kick everything if he wanted to. He could have not just a wife, but a baby, too, by next March. The blow had by now infused him with a giddy magnanimousness–he was rich, all the money he ever had could go to cocaine, he could get more tomorrow, and of course he could sack up and share some. But then he heard the girls whispering.
Mikey’d opened the bathroom door too hard, and the handle ca-chunked into the wall. He was ready to ask them what the fuck they were talking about, and why, exactly, he knew that it was about him and the fact that he came too early or couldn’t get hard enough.
But they were asleep. Isabella curled up in the same place he’d left her, probably in the spot of wet she’d created. Lisette was on the other bed; a dainty slice of blanket folded over her. He was too scared to lie next to Lisette. He sensed she’d be gone in the morning. Mikey couldn’t sleep, anyway. So he cracked the blinds and stared out at the empty, steamy pool. Late-night hotel swimming had lost its novelty a couple of years ago. He didn’t like to think it was just because that chick in Berlin had slipped and cracked her head real bad that one time, because he didn’t like thinking that shit like that affected him. But he had stopped swimming all the same.
Someone whined. Mikey thought that chick had made it to the hospital okay, but maybe he was wrong and would turn around and see her still-dripping ghost soaking the ugly carpet. “Shh,” someone said. Then another whine. Yuck. He did feel destined to be haunted, sometimes. Uh oh. This was not a very bender-friendly line of thinking.
He turned around. Lisette was awake and fumbling with something beside the bed. There was a small tattoo on her shoulder. A star or a flower.
When Lisette sat up, she held a small, caramel-colored dog with short hair and a long nose in her arms. Bender magic!
“Like a rabbit out of a hat.” Mikey was surprised at how he slurred.
Lisette smiled warmly at the dog, and then him. “This is Poppy.”
“Can I pet him?”
Lisette nodded sweetly. She looked like a kid with a toy.
Mikey was good with animals. He loved them. Daniel used to have this joke Mikey hated about his ex-girlfriend’s chihuahua. When it would get all giddy after sunset, he’d scream, “There’s a rat in the houuusseee!” and stamp his combat boots as the dog just barely skittered away in time. One night, he didn’t miss, and that was the end of that relationship. This was, of course, pre-shaman.
“What’s there?”
“Honky-tonks and fried food.”
“Mechanical bulls?”
“Yeah, but I’ve never ridden one.”
Mikey fondled between the crumpled sheets for a lighter. He plucked it from its damp spot and shook it. Isabella gushed every time, which kept him going at her in a caveman-brained way, even though he should really have been angling to impress Lisette. Lisette was the long game. If she could handle him during a bender, she’d love him post-shaman.
Lisette and Isabella both reached their joints toward him the way his nephew would demand Goldfish in his chubby toddler hand. Or like his nephew used to. Mikey was not permitted nephew access anymore.
Mikey lit each of their joints and then his own. Lisette blew her first hit up to the ceiling. “You’ve never ridden a mechanical bull? As a Good Southern Girl?”
Isabella launched her legs up to grasp her ankles in a half-hearted stretch. She stuck her joint between her teeth, the image of a hokey cowgirl. “I’m a spazz, Lisette.”
Mikey preferred when Isabella was on her front. She showed too much squish on her back.
“I could show you.” Lisette reached across Isabella’s chest, her elbow brushing the other girl’s nipples, and placed a translucent ashtray between the trio before tapping her joint on the edge.
Mikey groped around the wet sheets for the bottle of Julio. He was going to have to be way, way more fucked up if Lisette was suggesting a trip to Saddle Ranch to watch Isabella fly off that janky, cracked pleather bull.
Instead, Lisette grasped Mikey’s still-sensitive cock. He yelped, which was embarrassing enough to make him angry. He slapped Lisette’s hand away.
She ran her tongue along her pretty teeth. “Our volunteer stud needs a warm-up, it looks like.”
Mikey liked the sound of that. His anger faded. He shifted up the bed a little, presuming Lisette would slide between his legs. Instead, she cupped Isabella’s breasts in her hands and brought her mouth to her nipple.
Isabella said, “Whoa.” Her voice was soft and wobbly. Lisette retreated, flicked her hair behind her shoulder, and went to the other.
Mikey cupped his balls. When Lisette pulled away, there was a string of spit tethering the girls.
Lisette reached again for Mikey. He didn’t swat her away this time.
“Alright. Bellie, it’s time to giddy-up.”
Mikey was sad remembering the chihuahua, so he rubbed Poppy’s ears very softly. In return, she leaned against his hand. This unlocked some latch of Lisette’s pussy, because she gasped and said, “She likes you!” and by the time Mikey was going, “Aw, yeah, that’s sweet,” Lisette had kissed him.
She rolled over on her stomach for him, which was surprising and great. After a short few pumps, he said, “I’m close,” because he was, and looked to the other bed. Isabella’s white eyes stared back at him. She lazily ran her hand along the short coat of the dog, who sought solace with Isabella as his mommy got mauled.
Mikey came inside Lisette a bit later. She stood up and looked out at the pool while one of her hands rested on the front of her small patch of pubes. She was zoned out, but she didn’t seem fucked up.
“What time are you getting out of here tomorrow, Lisette?” Isabella asked in between puppy belly kisses.
“I don’t have anything tomorrow.” Lisette sounded far away as she reached between her legs and watched Mikey’s come extend between her fingers.
“Me neither,” Isabella said.
An unknown, broken amount of time passed. There were restaurants and bars somewhere in there, but they passed in flashes. Fluorescent lights, burgers, Lisette sipping a Diet Coke. Yellowy wall sconces, leathery booths, the taste of olives making Mikey’s stomach churn. He was confused as to why he’d even ordered a martini, which was objectively the faggiest drink.
The motel was easier to remember. They spent the most time there. They had a midnight swim (or maybe it was 2 AM or 9:30 PM, Mikey wouldn’t know) and no one cracked their head. Isabella snorted some horse after Lisette told her she would take care of her, which consisted of holding her upright as she nodded off to American Dad reruns. Mikey thought that was nice. They consistently fucked Mikey separately in some kind of unspoken agreement.
Mikey would plow Lisette, and then Isabella would give Mikey head in the shower while Lisette sat on the toilet and peed out whatever Mikey put in her. Or Isabella would pry her asscheeks open and let Mikey go at it (hands, mouth and cock), while Lisette sat at the desk behind them and rolled joints for when they were done.
Lisette licked the paper shut and said, “You’re from Nashville, right, Bellie?” Isabella no longer made a face at that nickname. Mikey didn’t like it.
“Yes, ma’am,” Isabella said in a phony Southern accent. Mikey wondered when she had lost it.
Isabella straddled Mikey, who was certain Lisette would retreat to observe. But as Bellie sank down on him with a hiss, Lisette took a sip of tequila and planted her bikinied butt beside them.
Her dog yipped at some movement by the pool. Poppy enjoyed staring out the windows for impossibly long amounts of time before unceremoniously taking a dump on the floor. Lisette made a shushing sound. She always cooed and cradled it when it made a noise. But this event was more important, apparently.
Lisette got up on her knees and brought a hand to the small of Isabella’s back. “So you want your hips to stay up around the front of the bull, and then tilt the rest of you back.” Isabella wobbled, bringing her hands to Mikey’s stomach for balance, which smushed her tits together in the way he liked.
“And then you just sort of go with it. Rock back and forth a little so you can sorta picture the motion.” Lisette was speaking very softly. She was looking at a blip of scar tissue from an abandoned piercing on Isabella’s navel.
“Mm,” Isabella said. Her eyes were closed, and she had her lips stuffed underneath her teeth.
Mikey looked at Lisette. Her hand was between her legs. “Okay, a little faster.” Lisette pivoted away from Mikey and swung a leg out, up, and over his chest. It was very elegant. Mikey had a flashbulb memory of her finger running along the mirror last night (or the night before, or maybe an hour ago). Before she’d popped her coke-covered finger into her mouth, she’d said, “ I could do cheerleading for the Lakers down the road if I ever really wanted to.”
She settled on his face without asking. She smelled more like chlorine than vagina. He didn’t remember going swimming that recently, but they must have. He licked her, and she said “ah” in a way that could be real or fake.
Isabella rocked the furthest forward she had on him so far–his dick curved forward, not in a painful way, but I mean, how would they know?
“Like that, Bellie! Exactly!”
“We should get more!” Isabella responded, a non-sequiter.
“More what?” Lisette laughed.
“More everything!” Isabella chirped in her Valley way. “Drugs n’ stuff!”
Lisette laughed louder. “More everything, sure!”
She didn’t ever fully settle on Mikey’s face, which he appreciated. He wasn’t that interested in getting her off.
No one said anything until Lisette eventually said, “Yeah?” about something Mikey couldn’t see, and Isabella said, “I’m fucking coming!”
Then Isabella was flumping next to him, and there was cold air on Mikey’s dick for only a fraction of a second before Lisette leaned forward and swallowed him up again. Mikey stopped trying to reach Lisette’s vagina and alternated between looking at Lisette’s butthole and watching Isabella rub herself off again.
When Mikey finished, everyone was breathing hard, like they’d all just cum a few ounces into Lisette’s mouth.
Lisette swung off Mikey with the same grace she’d swung onto him. Isabella scooted just in time and winced. She’d landed on the empty bottle of Don Julio.
She swung it back and forth emphatically, as if worried others wouldn’t pick up on the drought. Lisette followed the bottle’s swaying motion like she was getting hypnotized. Alexa used to do hypnotherapy. Some shit had happened with her uncle. Fuck. Now Mikey had broken his No-Alexa-thoughts streak.
“I think we should get the most fucked up we have so far.”
Lisette launched herself into a sitting position. “Tequilllllaaaaa!” Lisette shouted into the room. She did a little mouth-trumpet reference to The Champs’ song.
Isabella propped up on her elbows. “Ohmygod. One time Robbie did that song at karaoke. It was so fucking funny.”
Lisette tilted her head. “I don’t get it.”
“Because the song is all like–” it was time for Isabella’s bad dun-dun-dun-a-dun-dun-dun-dun. “And there’s no words. So you just, like, stand there and say tequila twice.”
Lisette burst into actual laughter. When she genuinely laughed, it sounded spelled out: “ha-ha-ha!”
“Who’s Robbie?” Mikey asked.
Lisette and Isabella both blinked at him. “Like, a friend,” Lisette said.
Isabella rolled over to Mikey. “You wanna call your guy?”
As Mikey rummaged around for his cell, Isabella and Lisette rattled off an endless shopping list of narcotics, which Mikey couldn’t bristle at because he wanted Lisette to think he was as rich as he was. It was then that Poppy began to hump Isabella.
“OK, fuck!” Isabella called out forty seconds post-canine molestation. “I’m fucking bored. Where is all our shit?”
Lisette reached for the ice bucket and cracked the top of the last cooler bottle. “Here, little love slave. How about you drink, and I count to ten.”
“Love slave?”
“Because of the dog humping. And because of that spread in Maxim. April?” Isabella wrapped her hand around the bottom of the cooler. Lisette still clung to the neck.
“You saw that?” Isabella asked.
“You looked great,” Lisette said.
Isabella smiled. “Are you going to count super slow?”
“Yes.”
“Bitch.”
Isabella put the bottle to her lips. Lisette slid her hand down to grasp it in the middle and tipped it up. Isabella blinked up at Lisette.
“One,” Lisette said.
Isabella’s throat bobbed in response.
Could Mikey, maybe, go three rounds?
“Two.”
At Lisette’s count of seven, Mikey’s guy Caleb knocked on the motel door, and Mikey realized he’d been staring at the girls with his mouth open like a fucking idiot. Caleb held a black plastic bag that contained other smaller bags. Caleb always packed everything up so neatly. It felt like Christmas. He didn’t even mind the way Poppy yapped without pause. He didn’t really need to hear what Caleb was saying, anyway. It was always only really about the rubber-banded wad of cash that he wanted Mikey to hand over. Caleb left. Mikey snatched the fresh bottle of Don Julio from the bag and turned to Lisette and Isabella and said, “Don’t bother counting.” The girls cheered as Mikey went, and went, and went, and went. He clutched the plastic bag tight between his fingers. He wanted to be the first to get at the blow.
A little later, Mikey was actually enjoying the sound of Isabella making Lisette laugh. Everything in the room had that perfect first buzz glow. Someone had opened the blinds just enough to let in golden hour. Mikey felt joy. The girls were beautiful. Lisette was standing on the bed and ring-a-round-the-rosying Isabella, who sat in the middle of the mattress. Each time Lisette wobbled, the girls would interlock hands.
“Can we go out to dinner?” Lisette called, her back facing away from Mikey, the very tips of her fingers touching Isabella’s for balance.
She was a sweet girl.
“Fuck yeah, we can.”
There was a flash of a conversation in the restaurant bathroom that stuck. Dark green marble. Lisette sitting beside the sink, thighs parted and legs kicking softly. Between her and the faucet was her compact mirror, all lined up with coke. “Should we ditch her?”
Lisette scratched her nose in her perfect, delicate way. “Hm?”
“Isabellie. Isabella. Do we need her?”
Lisette narrowed her eyes. “Yes. We do.”
“Sure. Alright. For sure.”
More time travel.
Then it was golden hour again but there was no more joy. It wasn’t that he’d just opened his eyes, because he could feel that his eyes were already open. They were so dry that they hurt when he blinked. It was more as if his brain had dried out enough to remind him to actually see. Lisette was naked and draped over Isabella’s back. She ground down into her like she had a dick, and Isabella moaned like she was being fucked. Mikey groped towards them. “Do you wanna fuck?” Lisette asked.
Mikey wanted help. Mikey wanted someone to hold his hand. Mikey had gone mute. Mikey’s nettled eyes finally gave in. He fell asleep.
A finger under his lip. Sharp.
“D’you wanna go dancing?”
Lisette’s hair was slicked back in a tight ponytail. Isabella was turned away from them, in shorts that showed the bottom curves of each of her asscheeks. They were both holding tall glasses of vodka and orange juice. Mikey didn’t need to taste them to know. The two girls talked at length at one point about how they never took juice or soda “plain,” only ever to fight back alcohol. They’d thrown their pillows at him when he’d called them pussies. He’d slept on his own because of it, and reminded himself to be bitchy with them tonight so that he could sleep alone again.
Mikey wasn’t ready for the bender to be over. But something inside of him had started to wither.
“Get me a bottle,” Mikey’s voice creaked. Get me a binky. Let me suck milk through your nipple. Put me in a diaper. Put me in a bassinet and loop it onto the branch of a tree. Rock me gently while I sleep in the breeze. Let me return to the womb and come out of a different mommy. Let the kittens live and let Alexa stay and let me never have written a single good fucking song. Mikey looked through the semi-cracked blinds at the night sky and the dark pool as he got back some lukewarm Stoli that tasted like barf.
He didn’t want to go out.
“I wanna watch you two fuck.”
Isabella turned around to look at Lisette.
Lisette turned back to Mikey with her eyebrow cocked. “We don’t feel like it.” “I’ll pay you.”
Lisette shook her head. “I’m not a hooker.”
Isabella folded her arms. “How much?”
“Isabella.” Lisette sounded pissed. “You don’t have to do that. We don’t have to do anything.”
“I’m covering this whole fucking weekend,” Mikey said.
Both of Lisette’s eyebrows went up then. Isabella looked down and scuffed her black Chuck sneaker on the motel floor.
“It’s been a week,” Isabella finally mumbled.
This happened sometimes, on a bender. It never felt great. The best thing one could do was power through it. Or stop! Something really deep within Mikey shouted, something that made him believe when it was the right place, at the right time, he really could do sobriety and a shaman and have babies. Maybe not with Lisette, though. He may have to adjust course there. Mikey pivoted and hoped the girls would run with it.
“Let’s go fucking dancing! Then!”
Neither of the girls moved. But then Isabella threw her hands up and shouted, “Woohoo!” in a party girl voice that was sarcastic but not mean. Lisette swirled around to look at Isabella. The back of her ponytail wrapped around her shoulders. Mikey wondered if she was smiling. He squeezed the Stolich tighter and did not three, but six, pulls this time.
Mikey only remembered one thing from the club: a girl’s pale hands up in the air. Strobe lights allowed them to appear to transport six inches with each flicker. He didn’t remember any sound.
And then Mikey was sitting on the side of the bed watching three Isabellas on the floor, all laughing as they fought out of their shirts. Mikey closed his eyes. He opened them when his dick stopped sitting in the cold air and instead got doused in hot n’ wet. Lisette was sucking him down.
He closed his eyes again. He opened them when he was hard. He’s not sure what he thought about to get him there. When she came closer, the three Isabellas became one, and she was kissing Lisette’s ear and whispering, “C’mon, Mommy. C’mon, Mommy.”
There was a gark sound. Mikey’s dick–and he never thought he would say this–felt a little too wet and a little too hot. He opened his eyes again.
Lisette was twisting away from Mikey’s dick and toward Isabella. Isabella was reaching to grab Lisette’s hair into a ponytail.
A fella could expect a dick covered in vomit from someone like Bellie, but Lisette had really let Mikey down. He thought and/or said “fucking bitch” and shoved her away from him. A few blinking images appeared to Mikey. Isabella saying, “Babe, oh babe,” and it wasn’t to Mikey, but to a curled-up Lisette. Lisette on the floor, staring outward. A new puddle of orange beneath her. Then Isabella stumbling and chucking pillows around on the opposite bed, like she was looking for something. Then Mikey stared for a long time at the bulb of the lamp by the nightstand.
He woke up feeling scraped clean. Hangovers like this one made him imagine that he’d had various implements carving out all of his insides while he slept: a curette digging through his brains, a melon baller for the lining of his guts, a dental scaler on his muscles, an ice-cream scoop to haul out the last bits of good feeling in his heart, too. Sore in the head and arms from all that had been dug out of him.
After the mini-fridge stopped humming, the room was silent. No breathing, even. Which reminded Mikey that he needed to breathe in. So he did, filling up all the hollow pockets of his insides. It hurt. The blankets and pillows on the other bed did not reveal any manicured hands or anklet-ed feet.
Mikey sat up, and all the fluids of his body rushed into the hollowed spots. It rushed into his face, up through his intestines. Into his bladder. He had to piss. Maybe to puke. Maybe to shit. Maybe all at the same time. The bender, it seemed, was coming to an end.
He thought of the word gingerly as he stepped out of bed. His feet did not hit dry, shitty carpet, but instead juicy orange bile squishing out of dry, shitty carpet. This, unsurprisingly, made him vomit.
“What is your fucking problem?” Mikey shouted as he attempted to right himself, hand grasping for the edge of the bed so he didn’t eat it right into the now double-layered vomit on the floor. His voice rasped. Whoever came to hollow him out while he slept must have also scraped out his vocal cords with the twines of a fork.
No response. Not even a faucet dripping back at him. He remembered a few nights ago that Bellie had fallen asleep in the bathtub after a hit from the glass pipe. He’d found it funny. Lisette found it funny, too, though now he’s not sure if she was even in the room at the time.
The bathroom was empty. He opened the shower curtain, and his unsteady feet almost sent him careening into the (also empty) tub. What the fuck.
He returned to the bedroom and scanned the floor. It was less cluttered than before. Bellie and Lisette tended to shed their clothes in a Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb trail of pasties and thongs.
All that was left now was a toppled bottle of rum, Mikey’s shoes and the puke. Where were his fucking pants? He held his dick self-consciously. It was tacky with the remnants of last night’s disaster. This was just fucking like a chick. Just fucking like two chicks.
They had the very minimal fucking decency to not steal his pants. But when he went to look in his wallet, there was no cash. “Bitches, bitches, bitches, bitches, bitches.” Those two bitches and their little dog, too. Motherfuck.
Mikey didn’t need to throw up physically as much as he did spiritually. He went to the toilet and got up as much puke as he could. His was as orange as Lisette’s. He didn’t remember having a screwdriver.
Five hours later, he tried and failed to kill himself with a concoction of whatever could be found in the motel room. Bender over.
—
Today, in his brown leather wallet, sat twenty-six dollars and no cents. No sense, more like! Har har. That’d kill in his non-Hollywood meetings!
When he thought back to the final night with Lisette and Isabella, he realized that maybe there had never been cash in there in the first place. Maybe they weren’t stinking whorish thieves but twenty-year-olds who didn’t feel like burning out with a freak anymore and dipped. He’d never know.
He liked going to the non-Hollywood meetings because he didn’t have to act tough, and because the men were meaner. “Get a grip or die,” was the sentiment. The people in the Hollywood meetings over on La Cienega were too soft. Relapses every few days, everyone pouting understandingly.
Everyone everywhere was too soft. Mikey certainly was. He was kind of a pussy these days, actually. He realized recently that for all the fights he’d been in, he’d never been punched in the face while sober. Realizing this made him start crossing the street to avoid other men at night. He cried–not “boohoo,” but a tear down the edge of his cheek that blipped off his jaw–in group sometimes. These things weren’t bad, though. They felt like waking up.
So it wasn’t the softness, really. It was how easy everyone went on each other, on themselves. A girl he went on four dates with wondered if he would enjoy stepping away from “pure stoicism” and trying out “California sober”. When he’d said he had no fucking clue what she was talking about, she’d said it was just smoking weed. He thought instead of “California sober,” he should try dating women over twenty-nine.
He was not dating at all right now. After his first glow of sobriety, there’d been the crippling boredom, and now that had passed, and Mikey was just trying to learn how to live with himself. It turned out that he couldn't stomach a shaman. And immediately landing a wife was both a bad idea and impossible. So he was doing things like solo weekend getaways. Christ.
His friends from meetings had recommended this restaurant in Palm Springs. “Cary Grant used to have his estate there.”
“I don’t know who she is,” Mikey had said.
That got a big, non-Hollywood meeting laugh. Unfortunately, Mikey wasn’t kidding. Cary Grant (a man) had a pretty boring-looking restaurant. But boring-looking was probably good. Mikey told the hostess that he’d like to sit outside. It was just barely starting to cool off into the desert evening, but sitting out in the heat would give Mikey an excuse for the sweat that was already darkening his white button-up.
Mikey used to wake up drenched in his own sweat. As he went through withdrawal and processed all the junk leaving his body, he sweated constantly. And now, sober, it was revealed he was just a sweaty guy. With a gut.
The girl up front didn’t recognize him when he checked in. She told him it’d be a few minutes, and he could wait over where the other normie guests were milling around. This happened more and more. Mikey tried to believe it was good for his humility, but in all honesty, he fluctuated between wishing he’d never written a note and wishing he was smoking crack with a girl who couldn’t believe this was happening to her–the this in question being nodding off while sucking Mikey’s dick.
Sometimes he could see improvement. He hated women a little less. “Did you know you once fucked me when I was asleep?” Alexa challenged through the phone when it was her turn for Step 9. He had hoped this call would go easier than with Britt, whom he had definitely hit in the face. “M’really sorry,” Mikey said to both of them, and meant it.
Still, he couldn’t throw it all down the drain if he tried. Still, he could afford to eat in fancy restaurants and used-to-be-homes of old-timey gay dudes. He had to stow some of that immense unfairness away, or he’d try to kill himself again.
Mikey put his hands in his pockets and followed one particularly tall palm tree from its sandy base at the perimeter of the estate all the way up to its fronds, painting the evening sky. Pretty.
“Oh, whoa,” a girl said, and Mikey felt sweet relief at being recognized. He didn’t know he needed it. He shouldn’t have needed it.
He turned to see not a groupie in her late thirties (everyone aged, not just Mikey), but Bellie. She looked–Mikey thought of a descriptor his grandma used all the time–lovely. She looked lovely. Her hair was really long. It was still dark, but it was no longer cooked straight. It fell all wavy over her shoulders, reaching down the neckline of her black minidress. She cocked her head like a puppy would. “Mikey.”
“Bellie,” Mikey said. He was relieved and frightened to see her.
“Hon?” An ice queen’s voice said. “They can take us early.”
Behind Bellie, silhouetted in the sun dipping behind Cary Grant’s building, was Lisette. She was still perfect. She also wore a short black dress. The back was low. She hooked her chin over her shoulder to look at Isabella. Isabella was still fixated on Mikey.
“Wow.”
“Oh, wow, I, God, how are you girls?”
Lisette stepped away from the hostess stand and stood next to Isabella. “We’re good,” she answered for them both.
Isabella turned to look at Lisette and nodded in agreement. Bellie had freckles across her pillowy tits now.
“Did you guys–you still see each other sometimes?” Mikey sometimes wondered if he had always sounded this stupid around them.
Lisette turned to Isabella to answer the question. “We never really stopped hanging out, actually.”
Mikey didn’t know what cued him to it. But they were fucking. Well, honestly, probably, dating. In love, actually, he sensed from one of Isabella’s slow blinks. “Oh, I’m–” Mikey suddenly felt a greasy lump in his throat. “That’s so. This is so–” he tried again. Isabella’s brow was furrowed with what seemed like some concern.
“And your doggy?” Mikey tried instead.
Lisette shook her head slightly. “Poppy died a couple of years ago. She was pretty old.” “It died? Babe, that’s just the most awful.” Mikey was shocked to hear his own voice crack with genuine emotion.
Lisette gathered her now-caramel-toned hair in her hands to cool her neck. “Dogs die, Mikey. It’s sad, but it’s whatever.”
Mikey nodded. And then, in a rush, he asked, “Did you ditch me? Or did I tell you to leave?”
Mikey didn’t know that question sat inside of him.
Lisette brought up a languid hand. She wore no polish, but her nails were pristine. “I sense,” she swirled her pointer finger loosely in the air, “that you sense, that it doesn’t matter.” A shaman’s answer.
Mikey nodded. She was right. “Well–I–I’m really happy for you two,” Mikey said, and meant it. “Real, real happy.”
Lisette dropped her hair. She smiled, still reserved, but seemed sincere when she said, “Thanks, Mikey.”
Bellie looked to Lisette, seemingly the only person she was able to talk to directly right now. Mikey had never known a feeling like that. “We sorta owe you,” she said. The lump in his throat broke, then, and Mikey made a wobbly, sobbing sound. His vision was too blurry to decipher Isabella and Lisette’s responding expressions.
The hostess emerged behind the two girls. “Ladies, if you’ll follow me.”
“Great, yeah,” Lisette turned from Mikey. The two women said soft goodbyes in exact unison, which Mikey could not gather himself to return.
When the hostess returned, Mikey still hadn’t pulled himself together. He was starting to hiccup.
“Can I–would it be alright if I still got a table?” Mikey asked, and the hostess took pity on him, saying, “Absolutely, right this way,” like he wasn’t sobbing into his hands. Mikey had soaked through his napkin by the time his server arrived. Lisette and Isabella were seated at the other end of the patio, and Isabella was touching her fingers to Lisette’s open palm. It was so nice. It was just so nice.
Before the waiter could speak, Mikey jammed a pointer finger over to the women. “Whatever they order, can you just–whatever. It’s on me. And send them a bottle of wine. Like the–” Mikey thought about grabbing the waiter by his jacket lapel to emphasize how urgent this request was. That felt too aggressive, so he just fisted around nothing. “Send them the nicest shit you’ve got. I’m good for it.”
The waiter said something in the affirmative and spun on his heel as fast as he could. Mikey didn’t care. Mikey was only smiling so big and crying so much that his lips were starting to sting from the salt.
“That’s really nice. That’s just really so nice.”