(Originally posted Saturday, June 07, 2008 )
Chad The Dictator, Part III
Chad and I stared at each other across the body of the dead whore. Each of us was wrapped swaddled in the cheap pill-cotton blue blankets we’d stripped off the hotel’s bed, We were naked underneath, and wearing the blankets like loincloths around our secret shared fraternal shame, starting over the lifeless lump of flesh, as pink as Tyson grocery store chicken.
“Is she dead?” I whispered.
“What the fuck do you think?” he asked. He gave her arm a kick. No movement. He looked like he was going to cry. Instead, I did.
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “This is the last friggin’ chapter, Ese.”
“Shut up you pussy. Shut up and think.”
“Wake up,” I screamed, shaking her. “Wake up. We didn’t even do anything to you but love you.”
“You didn’t love her. You’re just saying that because she’s dead.”
Chad got up, and dropped his blanket, then wrapped it around her body. We were about to dump her out the fire escape window into the ventilation shaft when the super barged in.
“What the hell are you doing with her?” he asked.
“It’s all a big mistake… she died. We didn’t do anything.” I got on my knees and begged for mercy.
“For Christ’s sake. She’s just a narcoleptic,” he said. “What were you going to do, throw her out into the alley?”
Suddenly the prostitute started wheezing and kicking in the blanket.
“Let me out of here you mother fisting toe fucking rim lickers.”
Later, we sat at the bar with a topless dancer, but neither one of us could muster much enthusiasm.
“Makes you think,” Chad said.
“You know what I think sometimes,” I said, already trying to numb the pain of the experience with a particularly rancid strain of BC skunk, “I think giraffes might actually be Martians.”
“You fucking moron.”
“What?”
“You shit-for-brains Americans,” he said with his perfect middle-American Ohio accent. “You’re all so spoiled. You don’t know what it’s like to have an entire economy based on surface mining and oil and tapestry-making. You like to be dreamy when the rest of the world is fighting for survival.”
“How am I spoiled, you fuck face?”
“We just almost went to jail for life after stuffing a whore down an airshaft, and here you are, talking about giraffes being Martians. Are you all tall children, or what? I mean, don’t you ever ask yourself what life is all about? What’s important? There are people fighting over water and rice in some parts of the world, and here you are talking up your own ass.”
“‘ Can be dreamy if I want to.”
The strippers were getting really bored, and Chad pushed his off, so now both of them were dancing for me, and expected double lap dance money. Foul ball! They danced faster and faster, and were definitely not into it, even when they playfully suggested that they give me a shot of Jagermeister from a shot glass one of them was holding between her breasts. She somehow did it, but it was all pretty pro forma. Frankly, I think she was thrown off her game because Chad was on his tirade about moral idiots and the philosophy of David Hume.
“Does your friend ever shut up?” asked one of the dancers.
“Hey, bitch,” I said. “He’s a god damned important man. He’s got an entire commonwealth to think about.” I was mad at him, too, but nobody insults my wing man.
“Then why don’t you go blow each other, faggots.”
I gave her fifty cents, and she and her friend left and called me a cheap-no-tipping mother fucker while I did clean-up with a “word of the day” napkin. The word was “echolalia.”
“The whole future of my country rests on one thing,” Chad said, almost in tears now, “And that’s the continued survival of my dynasty. What happens if I go? My idiot brother takes over as heir presumptive. And you should meet my brother, someday. If you cut open Auggi’s brain you’d find nothing but something that looks like red velvet cake and smells like boiled shrimp. I mean, he’s not a leader. He’s the kind of guy who would invade Turkey for the dope. If I go, so goes the Empire. And here I am, almost going to jail over some dead hooker.”
He was on a roll, stressing to me the great categorical imperatives of putting yourself out for the weak and filling the void of leadership with a great man figure who can change history.”
“Chad,” I said, “I’ve got to be honest. I really wanted that lap dance, and besides, I always though Thomas Carlyle’s great man theory was bullshit, and you probably have diplomatic immunity anyway, so I’ve gotta say, I think you’re just being a thumb-sucker at this point.”
“You just don’t get it, do you, Husacker.”
“In fact, you always turn into a thumb-sucker around 4 a.m. I’ve been studying you. It’s just after the booze wears off, and right before you get tired. I feel like I’m putting a baby to sleep.”
“You think I’m a baby? Well let me show you something.”
He took me home and showed me the telegram. There was trouble at home. He had just gotten a call that his father was in desperate straits back home in Krazikistan. His father’s regime had just hit an all-time low in the “Corruption Perception Index.” “It’s those damn judges,” he said. “Everybody gots to get paid. Sure, I’ll mete justice, but I want a Porsche first. God damn career bureaucrats from the Soviet era.”
We were at a bar later and somebody offered us a couple of crimmies, and normally, Chad might have gone for it out of sheer enthusiasm and love of adventure and a belly full of pluck. But something was happening. World historical forces weighed heavy on his brow while we were trying to order buffalo wings.
“My dad is not well,” he said into his double-malt scotch. “There is a middle-class pressure to open up the economy a little. But he’s too afraid. He thinks the elites will kill him if he does it. It’s tough to be in charge. Makes a man gray.”
“Why can’t he just like, you know, turn the hoses on?”
Chad shook his head.
“You’re clueless, bro.”
“If it’s worth anything, I thought that you kept your head with the dead whore. You showed sang froid in there. Like a real leader.”
“Thanks, Hunsacker. And just for the record. I do have diplomatic immunity. They can’t do shit to me.”
And then we both started laughing, but after a while, there was no more joy in it. He was feeling the pull to go home and help his dad reconfigure the army.
“We need to reorganize. Retrain. To pick the good apples right off the tree. My dad needs somebody he can trust. If he dies, Auggie will step in and align us with China and Russia. What I need is to bring back people with me. People I can trust.”
He looked deep into my eyes.
“Would you come with me, Husacker? Would you come fight for my country if you were called?”
I couldn’t believe it. Here I was, trying to pull my way through business calculus with a C+ average, and my frat brother-the guy whom I plainly said I would die for in the Pledge of Fraternal Obeisance-was actually asking me to do it.
“But I’m an American.”
“Didn’t your dad fight in the war? Your grandfather?”
“Yeah, but that was a different time.”
“Didn’t you ever feel like you’d never live up to them?”
I had a mouth full of chicken wing. It was hanging out my maw when he asked, and I sat there probably looking like a champion dill weed.
“Well,” he continued, “Now’s the time to go to the mountains to see what you’re made of, Husacker. To save a country from imploding and going back to medieval times. To save democracy.”
He pulled out a picture of a young woman with sultry wide eyes, smiling from underneath a small white hijab.
“If I couldn’t stir emotion in you breast, maybe she could. It’s my sister.”
After a while, he had me getting kind of excited, lubricated as I might have been my marijuana, wine, crack and my not-too-shabby orgasm. I was even thinking I might have said “Yes, sure, anything for you buddy,” though I couldn’t remember the next day, really, and the whole time I’m thinking to myself, “But wait, I wouldn’t be fighting for democracy, I’d be fighting for the damn dictatorship!”
Didn’t matter. The next day he was talking about vaccinations, intensive physical training and passports. He spent the next few weeks calling me “captain.”
You can read Part I of this short story here.
You can read Part II of this short story here.
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