"She put me up for adoption," he goes. "She tried to give me a better life. I only want to return the favor."
I go, "By busting in there?"
"If that's what it takes," the kid goes, sticking his chin at me.
By busting in and embarrassing Cassie when she's focused on setting her world's record that's going to revive her career? Embarrass her in front of the crew and all her professional colleagues? I go, "Kid, don't be doing her that kind of favor."
Standing around, the four, five hundred dudes shift from one foot to the other. Dudes stare at the monitors hanging from the ceiling, Cassie Wright riding cowgirl on the boner of Cord Cuervo as he sits in his wheelchair, she's bracing her weight with one arm planted on the plaster cast of his fake broken leg. The fact nobody's walked out, it's a testimony to what dudes will endure for a piece of ass. If there was a free, hot piece of snatch waiting on top of Mount Everest or on the moon, we'd have a high-speed elevator already built. Commuter space flights every ten minutes.
"Kid," I go, "believe it or not. " I'm tipping my head toward the stairs, the locked door, the lights and set behind it, and I go, "The lady up there, she don't want to be saved."
And the kid goes, "I knew you wouldn't understand."
His flowers he's holding, the leaves and petals went twisted and dark.
The kid goes how, when he was little, he come across the picture of a lady on the Internet, more than pretty, and he couldn't not surf to look at her every day after school. In the picture, she was naked and playing some wrestling game with some naked superhero muscle guys. The private parts of them were showing, but they were all trying to hide them inside each other. Some tag kind of game. The kid sounded out the letters of her name listed under the bottom of the picture, and they said "Cassie Wright." He typed those letters into the Internet, and a lot more naked pictures popped up.
Pictures and video clips, a million zillion results the kid had to track down.
"Dude," I go, "the legal standard is 'instances of sex. " I go how the kid can tell her his feelings. Say, "Thank you, Mommy." Tell Cassie he loves her. But it's not impossible he maybe slips a finger inside? Maybe, reaching to hug her, his little finger by accident sticks in her ass? I go, "Dude, that way it's a win-win."
The kid only shakes his head, going how he grew up with her pictures, hunting her movies, learning everything about her. When his balls dropped, his obsession only got worse.
"Dude," I go, "stop being so selfish. This is her big day."
One afternoon, the kid goes how he was beating off and forgot to lock his bedroom door. His adopted mom must've got home from work early, and she walked in on him and started hollering. She caught him.
"Dude," I go, "in flagrante?"
"No," kid 72 goes, "beating off."
The kid's adopted mom starts yelling, asking if he knows who that woman is. Does this kid know who he's fantasizing about? Does he have any idea, any inkling about the identity of that slut? The kid's there with his dingus in one hand, a Cassie Wright split-beaver shot on his monitor, and his adopted mom just goes on and on.
"Dude," I go.
"She's yelling," the kid goes. "She's screaming: 'That's your birth mother.»
His adopted mom's yelling how he's pounding pud to pictures of what's probably his own conception.
"Dude," I go, "if Cassie don't get fucked by six hundred dudes today, she's screwed."
And the kid 72 goes, "I can't." He's fingering the silver cross, going, "Maybe if I talked to her first, maybe then I could." He goes, "But ever since my adopted mom said what she said, since she told me the truth, I haven't been able to.»
The kid looks down at his limp, wilted flowers.
And I snap my fingers, holding my arm straight up in the air—I'm snapping my fingers, throwing my voice at the television dude. I'm going, "Teddy-bear dude, we got an emergency here." I go, "The kid needs a pill or nobody's getting famous today."
A light flares, high up and way off to one side. The door at the top of the steps swings open, and a black shape stands outlined. "Gentlemen," the shape says, "I need the following numbers…"
And, my hand in the air, I'm still snapping my fingers, waving to get help our way.
14. Mr. 72
How I told it to Mr. Bacardi, that wasn't the whole deal. Not even half the story. When I first downloaded clips of Cassie Wright, I wanted to see her maybe knitting a regular ordinary thing, I don't know, out of yarn. Or I wanted to watch her cooking a pan of something on a stove. Just, I guess, reading a book in a chair next to a lamp in a nice room without gallons of hot jizz all over her.
On bulletin boards, online message boards, where fans post details about every mole and eyelash Cassie Wright has, every color lipstick she's wore, guys dissect every blow job, I don't know, like it was for college-homework extra credit. Cassie Wright was born in Missoula, Montana. Her parents are Alvin and Lenni Wright. They live in Great Falls these days. And, yes, Cassie Wright had a baby she gave up nineteen years ago.
Surfing the Web, I looked for pictures of her vacuuming carpet. Driving a car. With her clothes on and nothing getting stuffed inside of her.
Some money orders I mailed, and nothing ever came back. But the first package I got was a Cassie Wright pocket vagina, the premium, limited-edition, numbered version. Number four thousand two hundred. Totally museum-quality. Mint condition. Small enough I'd carry it to school in my jeans pocket, with my left hand tracing the folds and soft hairs of her. In Modern American Studies, I'd sit in the back row with my left fingers Brailling, blind, deep in my pocket, until I knew every fold and wrinkle by heart. Ask me the state capitals of Wyoming or Phoenix, and I'd shrug. But ask me anything about the pussy flaps of Cassie Wright, and I could draw you a map.
That pocket vagina, you could press the clitoris and it would pop out. Press it back inside the hood. Press again to make it pop out. I could do this until my fingertips were red raw, about to bleed. I slept with it under my pillow.
My teacher Mr. Harlan, in my Dynamics of Science class—one day, handing back papers, he saw the calluses on my fingertips, already cracked and dark pink, and he asked if I was learning guitar. I don't know. Let's just say those hours and weeks of constant pleasure weren't doing Cassie Wright's vagina any good, either.
Let's just hope, looking at some of the six hundred guys here today, that the real deal is more durable than the latex version. As the vagina started to break apart, I saved newspaper-delivery money until I could send away for a previously owned Cassie Wright latex breast replica. I could only afford the left one, but anybody would tell you it's the better of the two. Of course, it's too big to fit in my pocket, too big for under my pillow. It's too big to do anything but collect dust under the bed.
So I mowed lawns. I returned pop bottles for the deposit. I walked dogs. Washed cars. Raked leaves.
This part I didn't tell Mr. Bacardi. How could I?
Winters, I shoveled snow. Cleaned the black, stinking crud out of roof gutters with my bare hands. Washed St. Bernards. I hung Christmas lights and trimmed hedges.
Nighttime, I'd squeeze my breast replica. Rub the dusty nipple against my lips. Lick it. Tweak it between two fingers until I fell asleep.
I drained and changed the oil in big four-door automatic-trannie old-lady cars. Needing the money to buy a Cassie Wright replica, fully realistic sex surrogate, that makes you pretty much the bitch slave of every old lady in town. I don't know.
I went trick-or-treating for UNICEF, and those worm-eaten, starving kids in Bangladesh didn't see one nickel of the thirty bucks that folks donated.
The day the brown package arrived in the mail, my adopted mom called me at school to ask should she open it.