Grimoire Diabolique

Nick made a few adjustments on the tripod. “Just about.”

“Lights bright enough, Nick?” Spooky complained in her velvet-soft voice. She sat upright, nude, on the very cheap coffee table that complemented the “suite,” which was actually a room at the Howard Johnson’s on Route 233 near Rome, New York. They got a special rate of ten dollars for two hours because the bathroom was completely out of order thanks to the crack dealers who’d trashed the place last week when a drop went bad. Nick and Frankie figured they’d spend the money they’d saved on extra drugs. This was a scat flick. Who needed a fuckin’ bathroom?

“Fuckin’ lights are cookin’ me like a motherfuckin’ curry-and-ginger pheasant satay,” Spooky maintained her complaint, the simile prompted by old memories of four-star Big Apple cuisine back when she was with Ford.

“Live with it, bitch,” Frankie remarked.

“Throat yourself, you dead-dick goombah motherfucker,” Spooky quietly retorted.

“Jerk me off,” Frankie snapped back. Then he paused and belted out a laugh. “Oh, wait a minute! You can’t jerk me off! ’cos you ain’t got no hands!”

“Yeah, I wish I had hands, then I could give you the finger.” She looked at Nick. “How do you like this useless piece of shit? Fuckin’ guy’s got more cock than three men and he can’t do shit with the motherfucker. What good’s a stunt-cock who can’t fuck? Like tits on a motherfuckin’ bull.”

Frankie did not take these remarks particularly well. His paste-white prescription-morphine-derivative-junkie face pinkened at the insult. “You fuckin’ armless jizz-can, I was the number one male porn star for a year!”

“Yeah, motherfucker, and what are you now? A dead-dick goombah motherfucker. Gonna take you all motherfuckin’ night to get your dick half-hard like last time?”

Frankie stood naked and shuddering like Parkinson’s, his once steroid-embellished muscles now sagging in debilitation. “Why, I oughta—”

Nick appeared weary. “Frankie, come on. We only got an hour left, and we gotta do a twenty-minute scat.”

Spooky chuckled as she sat, kind of hunched over now. At her waistline, not a single roll of fat could be seen, as if her musculature had been coated with white wall paint. “Frankie’s fuckin’ nervous ’cos he knows he won’t be able to fuckin’ get it up, and if Frankie can’t get it up, Vinch won’t have any reason to keep him around any fuckin’ more. This time next week he’ll be in one of the fuckin’ pylons on that new train bridge they’re building across the Mohawk River. Smackheads can’t get it up.” Spooky grinned ever so subtly, batting her eyes. “Live with it.”

Frankie was close to convulsions now. “I ain’t no junkie!” he bellowed, needle tracks standing out like stitches on both arms.

Even Nick spared a chuckle at this one. “Frankie, face it. You’re a junkie,” he said as he lit his pipe and sucked down some crystal meth fumes. “So let’s just get on with it. If you can’t do the wet shot, I’ll do it. Then you shit on her face at the end.”

“Oh, not another one of those,” Spooky said.

Frankie pointed his finger at her like a Beretta 92. “Yes, another one of those, whore. And I ate a whole plate of fried garlic and squid ravioli for lunch. Just for you.”

Spooky did not look pleased but by now this was pretty much par for her personal golf course. She raised her stumps as if she actually had arms to throw up in concession. “So let’s just do this motherfucker and get it the fuck over with.”

“Good idea.” Nick put down the pipe and was re-focusing on the coffee table. He was naked too, by the way, and nearly as emaciated as Frankie, yet not so well-endowed. At least his still worked, though, after a few Viagras which he popped a moment later. He passed the bottle to Frankie. “You’re letting the chick psych you out. Here, and hurry it up. The Yankees are on.”

Frankie, still pouting, popped half the bottle.

“Jesus, Frankie! You’ll OD!” Nick yelled.

“God, I hope so,” Spooky said.

“Just gimme a minute,” Frankie said, assured. His dick was flaccid as a handful of overcooked spaghetti, twelve inches of overcooked spaghetti, to be more precise. At any rate, it was impressive. Like a fuckin’ pork tenderloin between his legs.

Spooky needed no prompting when Nick put his crotch in front of her eerily still-pretty face. She sucked like the destitute, maladapted scat-junkie trooper that she was. Nick wasn’t quite so far along in the drug-induced libidinal-system debilitation as Frankie. It only took him ten minutes to pull six inches of crane.

“I’m ready,” he said. “How ’bout you?”

Frankie huffed, puffed-faced and masturbating as if working a bicycle pump to save his life. Soon, though, things south of the waistline began to inflate.

Spooky grinned. “Think harder about your dad, Frankie.”

“FUCK!” Frankie bellowed. The image of his father—a man who’d beaten and sodomized Frankie from ages four through fourteen—couldn’t have presented a less-erotic reaction in Frankie’s mind. The mammoth penis went dead-flaccid in about a second.

Laughter fluttered from Spooky’s throat, gentle as a stream of moths.

“Come on, Spooky,” Nick reasoned. “Lay off him. You’re fuckin’ him up.”

“I can’t fuckin’ help it. I hate that greaseball motherfucker. Doesn’t fuckin’ matter what I say any-fuckin’-way. It’s gonna take that big lummox till next Easter to get half wood. He might as well be jerking off a fuckin’ empty rubber.”

Frankie’s dead-meat cock flapped against his leg when he turned briskly and glared at Spooky. “I oughta —”

“You oughta what? Huh? I’ll tell you what you oughta fuckin’ do. You oughta grow a dick that works, you fuckin’ pasta-scarfing piss-ant small- time mob errand-boy very-quickly-outliving-his-usefulness no-dick piece of garbage.”

Frankie bulled forward, Nick pushing him back. “I oughta fuckin’ kill you,” Frankie yelled.

Spooky laughed, raising her stumps. “Shit, I’ve been begging for someone to kill me for ten motherfuckin’ years.” Her pair of diminutive tattoos enforced this assertion: rifle-scope crosshairs over her heart and, along the front of her throat, a six-inch perforation mark and the words CUT HERE. “You don’t have the fuckin’ balls to kill me, Frankie. There’s nothing in your sack but two dead eggs.”

Nick was fighting the losing battle in trying to push Frankie away from her. “Frankie, Frankie, come on, don’t do it!” Nick yelled. “Vinch wants her alive for the scats—you kill her and we’re all lunch meat.”

“I don’t care! I’m killin’ her!”

“Did you blow your dad, or did he just fuck you in the ass, huh, Frankie?” Spooky continued to taunt. “Bet you got hard every time back then.”

“I’m gonna kill her, Nick, I’m gonna—”

“You’re an impotent waste of space, Frankie,” she saw fit to add. “Do the human race a favor. Fuckin’ hang yourself.”

“You’re dead, bitch! Dead!”

“Cool down, Frankie,” Nick implored. “Cool down. You kill her, then Vinch’ll have that psycho doctor of his do a job on both of us. You heard about what he did to Tony and Darcy, didn’t you?”

Frankie stalled momentarily. It wasn’t a pretty story. Indeed, then, he began to cool down.

A grateful impasse ensued. Frankie gained his composure. “All right, all right,” he conceded. He stood feet apart, closed his eyes, and began to masturbate again. Spooky sighed, asked Nick, “Hey, load a pipe and light me up first, will you? I’m motherfuckin’ feenin’, like, really fuckin’ bad.” This was but one inconvenience of being armless: Spooky, a clinical drug addict, couldn’t smoke drugs without assistance. Nor could she wipe her ass, effectively wash herself, clip her toenails, etc. “I’ve gotta have a hit. I got the motherfuckin’ meth bugs crawling all over me. How about it, Nick?”

“No,” Nick put his foot down. “When we’re done.”

“Fuck that motherfuckin’ shit, man! I need some ice! Now!”

“When we’re done,” Nick repeated, half-blitzed himself.

“Come on, Nick. I’ll stick my tongue up your asshole.”