over from the far lane and had a good crack at harvesting the door ninja off his left fender.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t actually want a cab.
So I let the cabbie take me back to the Village, getting into the tangle of it, headed for the backstreet address in the handheld. The cabbie was white and extremely proud of it. He was of the opinion that he was the Last White Cabbie in New York City, in fact, because all of the others were fucken monkeys who got off the fucken boat and the fucken city said welcome to fucken America oh and have a fucken taxi driver medallion while you’re fucken at it you fucken monkey you.
The property that had been held for this group was a narrow building with back-alley access. There was a handpainted wooden sign propped up by the front door. Whoever made it had gotten all their knowledge of the written word through cave painting. A legless guy on the corner, perched on an ancient diarrhea-stained skateboard, watched me as I kind of bent to the side and squinted at the sign, struggling to translate it. The word NULL was clear. The other major term seemed to be MHP BUKKAKE. Bukkake, whatever it was, appeared to be hip among the young folk of today.
So, like an idiot, I went in.
The hall was lit by a single lamp with a green shade, turning everything the color of snot. A large man who appeared not to know he was bald sat at a chair and table boosted from a school, asscheeks overflowing the seat’s weathered plastic. He clanked a tin box full of coins at me. “Two bucks,” he croaked. His neck inflated like a frog’s when he spoke.
“For what?”
“It’s movie night, man.”
“Shit, I forgot,” I covered. I gave him ten bucks. “For the cause, dude.”
“Cool.” He took the ten bucks, made to put it in the box, and then pocketed it when he thought I wasn’t looking.
It was a walk-up—the only way to go was upstairs. Tinny noise clattered down the stairs. I headed up.
It was dark and big. Most of the walls on that floor had been knocked out, turning it into a makeshift auditorium. The seating was several rows of interlocking plastic chairs. Must’ve been fifty people in there, halflit by the glow of the movie being projected onto one long wall, plastered smooth and painted white. I took the first free seat close to the staircase I could find. The movie glow let me read the white plastic ink on the T-shirt of the big guy next to me: NO, I WON’T FIX YOUR FUCKING COMPUTER.
It was a Godzilla movie, one of the old Japanese ones. Some poor mad bastard strapped into a rubber lizard suit and paid ramen money to stomp on a balsa model of Tokyo.
There was a clumsy cut, and then another pretend lizard-monster clumped across a bonsai Tokyo. The picture quality was different. It was cut in from another movie. Cut back to Godzilla; but in slow motion, with a rose filter over the image, and what sounded like Justin Timberlake mixed in over the top.
There was a perceptible shift in the audience. I heard the guy next to me hold his breath.
More rubber lizards appeared, cut in from what could have been half a dozen movies. Then a long, loving tracking shot of Godzilla, from his lizard toes up to his bulging eyes. The music swelled. Another cut; white doves flying. And then a snatch of homemade film, someone in a Godzilla mask, going “Grrrrh” in a way that sounded distinctly American.
Someone across the room said. “Yeahhh,” and I looked across. My eyes were adjusting to the dark now. Mostly men, in T-shirts and shorts. A few women, dressed the same way, obviously there with boyfriends. The only woman who looked to be there alone was a skinny girl on the far side, with dyed-black hair, a dyed-black wifebeater, and what looked like full-sleeve tattoos. I panned back, and for the first time got a good look at the guy next to me.
He was wearing a large green foam glove molded to resemble a lizard paw on his right hand. And his right hand was placed very determinedly on his crotch.
On the screen, Godzilla was wrestling with another lizard monster. Gasps from a porno flick were laid over the top.
Someone groaned in the dark. I looked over to see a woman rubbing her boyfriend’s lap with a lizard-paw glove.
“This isn’t fair,” I hissed, hating the world for insisting on always fucking doing this to me.
The guy next to me turned around. Sweat glittered on his forehead. “Dude,” he whispered, “you didn’t get a glove?”
“No, it’s…no one’s told me what MHP means, that’s all.” I wasn’t going to admit I didn’t know what bukkake was, since it was so obviously a badge of the cool.
He smiled in the dark, showing me teeth that would’ve made Shane MacGowan puke. “You didn’t know we got a word now? Damn, you’ve been away, dude. Macroher-petophile. Herpetophile, for people who, you know, like lizards.
People who want to fuck Godzilla.
The sound track erupted with a roar mixed with an aggressive orgasm, and his beady eyes snapped back to the screen. Godzilla had his teeth in the neck of another reptile. The audience was heaving now, a subsonic rumble of deep gasping, fifty people radiating wet heat into the auditorium.
The tattooed girl took out a little handheld, backlit, and was scratching notes into its handwriting-recognition system with a stylus.
Godzilla had a lizardy thing down in the dirt, grappling wildly. The guy next to me groaned, “Yeah, take it, you bitch…”
Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” entered the sound track.
The guy next to me began frantically scrubbing his crotch with the glove. I decided to keep my eyes on the screen. It was obvious to me by this point that I was never ever going to have sex again, and I just needed to get through this until the lights came up and I could find someone to question.
