The Price of the Ticket Page 6

  YOU’RE

  FUCKED

  CHUMP*

  As he shouldered the big air-freight crate Pauley sent his mind to a quiet wood-paneled library, with tweeting rosy finches in the aviary out the floor-to-ceiling arched windows between floor-to-ceiling shelves of floor-to-ceiling Alfred North Whitehead. There he puttered peacefully with the letters in their little puzzle, as he did many mornings, having turned the lights out on the words firmly re-spelt the night before, as he brushed the sawdust off his eyebrows and locked the double doors, only to find the letters scrambled and hopeful–with the potential of spelling something new–the following morning. Clouds of mighty joy.

  The kind of library that was always cool, so you had to wear a button-up sweater to ward off the chill, with suede patches on the elbows and a little pocket over your appendix for your snuff box. And your right brain could put its boots up on the radiator–fancy cowboy jobs, hand-stitched with riding heels, no, Italian loafers with woven uppers and little tassels, no, beaded moccasins of deer hide chewed soft by convicted S&L operators paroled to community service–laying aside for the time being the notion of your right brain as a centipede: writhing to get out of the brilliantly conceived chicken-wire traps constantly improvised for it by the sawdust-enflocked left-brain-tweezers, ethered cotton, little binocular lenses built onto its spectacles, capable only of real concentration while observing the sex act between centipedes.…

  That’s fifty pairs of Italian loafers.

  Then, of course, he had to move the Econoline’s wrecked transmission for the fiftieth time–along with a greasy wooden surplus ammunition box full of synchronizer rings, machine bolts and worn eccentric races spilling powdered bearings. This casing and its ancillary box received rueful thoughts, of hours and hours wasted. Today at least he knew where to put them. Out in the alley. They’d be gone in an hour, never to haunt him again.

  A buck says half an hour. No way. They don’t even make that model anymore. Two bucks. Three. Done. He put the transmission casing on top of the box. The way to move them as one was to embrace the whole deal like a new-born calf. Ninety-weight placenta. Lick it off. Nice. You’re welcome. Keep your back straight and your legs under the load. Thanks again. If you stagger a little, it looks like you’re working. That’s good. You’re welcome. Squinting in the bright California sunlight he set the crate on the sidewalk next to the dirt square full of dog shit and lady slippers–Spring and All. Bored kids had torn the square’s tree out by its roots at least a year ago, and the Friends of the Urban Canopy hadn’t gotten around to replacing it. Four tall pointed eucalyptus stakes with the Friends’ logo still tilted there, their trunk-encircling wire and strips of recap rubber dangling. But no tree. A guy across the alley had gotten Pauley to cut up the trunk and limbs for kindling. Said it burned good. Then, right after their annual fundraiser, the chief financial officer of the Friends of the Urban Canopy took a powder, and his secretary, to Peru.

  He spotted the Toyota pickup, parked across the alley, and hope sprang anew. Six hundred bucks. Pauley knew a guy who had a similar model with 275,000 miles on it. It wasn’t too much to expect a couple of years out of this one, at least. But even if it only lasted five or six months it would still be a good deal. A buck says six months. A year. No way. Two bucks. A month. Ten bucks. Eighteen months. Three clams. Done. Be sure to write the bet down. Write it down adjacent a note regarding the pathetic joy you take in this six-hundred-dollar pickup truck.

  Beyond the Toyota parked at the mouth of the alley and across the street, Rompierre the upholsterer was just setting his father’s lawn chair on the sidewalk. Soon the crippled old man would appear, as he did nearly every day, to spend his morning in that chair, dozing in the sunlight beside the door to his son’s business, his madrone walking stick tilted between his legs.

  Rompierre went back into his shop, and Pauley reflected a moment on the empty chair. Probably only ever hit the kid once or twice a year. A good boy. Supports the whole family.

  Maybe Pauley would put a chair next to the door of his own business and leave it there, empty.

  How many times had he had that thought?

  Back in the basement Pauley shouldered his way past the crated Torquemada and glanced at the dusty clock with Chinese numbers on the wall. Big hand on the ideogram for ten, little hand on the ideogram for eight. The rest of the neighborhood was still asleep, particularly one Celeste Bonnard, who had to sleep until eleven every day, just in case Pauley wanted to knock off for an hour to come upstairs and jump in bed with her. So she said. Such a nice girl. The fact was, Pauley was generally afraid to knock off for five minutes, let alone an entire hour. Tempus lucre est. That’s right: afraid.

  One minute. Three. Two. Done: subtract two minutes for dawdling, the bet is on from seven fifty-two, which means the first payoff on the tranny bet comes due at eight twenty-two, the second one at eight minutes before nine.

  The Spartacus model was simple and popular. It consisted of two peeler logs, notched and bored so as to easily assemble into a cross with two half-inch carriage bolts, nuts, flat and lock washers. There were several variations on the theme, each carefully delineated in Pauley’s employer’s mail-order catalog, Affliction–which itself was so popular that Algernon Comstock (‘Load’ to his intimates) had early realized he could charge for it. Comstock was the kind of guy who could make money simply by waking up in the morning, Affliction being a case in point. Comstock had hit upon photography as the best way to illustrate some of the uses for his sex toys: instant popularity. He also liked to supervise the photo sessions and not incidentally screen the models–all of them male. It was subheaded, after all, A Male Order Catalog in a swash “wedding” typeface, though women liked to look at it too, of course. At first Comstock distributed the Catalog at no charge. As the poses became more suggestive, the Catalog became more prized. Comstock realized he could charge a couple of bucks for it. Surprise, the Catalog became even more popular. Comstock increased the production values and the price. Champagne, he couldn’t print enough of them. He increased the print run and raised the price again. Still they sold out.

  Currently a full-time staff produced the Catalog twice a year. It ran to 96 pages, the print run was 40,000, the cover price was $8.95, and it was available exclusively from Affliction Enterprises, direct. You do the numbers. No, you do them. Okay, that’s enough Italian loafers for a whole family of centipedes. My head hurts. So skip it.

  Items in the Catalog included pornographic literature, videos, and soundless grainy 8 mm. black-and-white loops for the old-fashioned; all manner of sex toys; lingerie; leather clothes–for example, mink-lined black or red or lavender suede short-shorts with importunate apertures and zippers, but not excluding motorcycle jackets, chic trench coats, and shooting attire; spanking accessories like serrated ping-pong paddles, quirts, and braided whips; clips, chains, cock rings, dildos and vibrators; flavored lubricants (strawberry, mint, licorice, jalapeño) and herbal stimulants; inhalants, piercing kits, board games, obscene chess sets; and, of course, torture racks.

  Comstock’s discovery was that a certain range of men existed–he called it a market. Women, too, he would hasten to add, with a hypocritical smile; for Comstock was a man who had built himself a universe in which, beyond his sainted mother and selected camp icons, few women figured. In San Francisco this certain range of men could walk down the street and shop for any sex toy they wanted, emphasis on any, and that wasn’t going to change. But men of similar tastes living in, say, Biloxi, Mississippi, had no such facile option–indeed, as Comstock liked primly to point out, such an option was likely to be frowned upon by local consensus, if not by legislation, if not by the local vigilante committee.

  Orders ran to the millions of dollars.

  A bed of rough planks tessellated by rows of inverted golf-shoe cleats, assembled by the half-mile and cut to order at a little plant in Fremont, sold well. But Pauley’s torture racks were the E-ticket in large appliances.

  Ou
tside of the literature section (assiduously curated by a queen with a Ph.D. in philology) torture racks were the really original items. Comstock had a partner called Willie Paradise, neither of which was his real name. Willie had a pseudonymous nickname, too. Certain among his acquaintance called him “The Funnel,” or “Willie the Funnel.” Nobody had ever explained to Pauley how Willie had come by this handle, and even Comstock, a man whose humor was as coarse as it was broad, when introducing his partner, generally demurred. “This is The Funnel. Willie The Funnel. Don’t ask.”

  But when it came to designing machines for homespun erotic torture, Willie the Funnel was a recognized genius with no known peers outside of 15th-century Spain, an authority with a staff consulting on implements erotoquisitory. These did not include devices like hand-cranked electrical generators, cattle prods, reheatable metal bars or iron maidens, which Willie considered heavy-handed affronts to the ideal of pleasure through pain. But he devoted a great deal of research to things like the spring tension on alligator clips designed for nipple- or genital-pinching. Affliction had a carefully indexed and cross-referenced two-page chart in tiny type devoted to Willie’s line of alligator clips. They were called Scorpions and came in many sizes and colors, some with hair and feathers on them.

  Indeed, a few of the torture racks had optional hair, too. One extravagant version was available in mink. But such options were applied after Pauley delivered the basic unit to the warehouse. Except for lovingly lit photographs in the Catalog, he’d never actually seen one of his racks in use.

  A variant was the railroad tie, or Golden Spike model. Normally of peeler poles or freshly-milled timber in 4x4, 6x6 or 8x8" versions, the railroad tie models were unusual because they were of dense seasoned oak, approximately 9x12", rough, weathered, and saturated black with creosote. All ties were guaranteed previously owned by a railroad, the odd customer paid a little bit extra for it to have been a Western railroad, and most had gravel embedded in them from decades of use. The effects of these materials on naked skin were nothing if not abrasive and caustic–as Pauley had good reason to know. A creosote splinter from a railroad tie became infected sooner and stung worse than a tannin splinter from redwood (the Junipero Serra model), which, of course, was precisely why Willie The Funnel had thought them up. You could even order a special bottle of iodine from the pages of Affliction, with a latex dispenser cap that looked like two pursed lips–Pauley kept a bottle in the shop. The Load and The Funnel–these guys thought of everything, then they made money on it.

  Pauley, on the other hand, nearly lost his health to the Golden Spike prototype. The railroad ties had to be notched with a chain saw, which filled his shop with the most acrid fumes he’d experienced since his father had taken him as a little boy to visit the galvanizing tank over which the progenitor had leaned and choked all his working days.

  The fumes were a result of burning chain oil and creosote, of which carbon monoxide was probably the least noxious–if most toxic–component. It was all new ground to Pauley, not covered in prison woodshop courses. But three hundred dollars worth of new exhaust fan, hood, and ancillary ducting had taken care of the fumes. After that, he only had to worry about the ‘moral pollution’, as his landlord had called it, just before borrowing a copy of the Affliction catalog, never to return it.

  Pauley shifted two crated Junipero Serra models. The second exposed a piece of wall near the telephone, to which was nailed a letter from the San Francisco Franchise Tax Board, informing Pauley he hadn’t bought himself a business license. The price? Two percent of his annual gross since he started in business. Plus penalties. Plus interest on both. Compounded monthly.

  Pauley sighed. He had forgotten that letter. Without another thought he reversed the crate back to where it had come from, hiding the letter again. He’d figure a way to work around the crates.

  The letter meant that Pauley had to figure out what his annual gross was, lest the state do it for him. Hah. His little business had been paying the rent for about a year. There’d lately been enough cash for a decent chain saw, a half-dozen extra chains, a sharpening file, gun muffs for hearing protection, a charcoal-filtered breathing mask, the exhaust fan and ducting, extremely late state and federal quarterly tax returns, and the Toyota truck. But there definitely wasn’t enough for the San Francisco Franchise Tax Board, which he viewed as just another bureaucracy waiting around the next corner with its hand out.

  Two years ago it had been all Pauley could do to convince a singularly unsympathetic parole officer to let him start his own business. He’d been so adamant about getting out of high scaffold erection–forty to fifty hours a week, sixty-two weeks and counting–that the parole officer (his ‘proctologist’) had become suspicious that Pauley was somehow not holding down a straight job–a strict requirement of his parole. In the hope of busting him for absenteeism the proctologist frequently appeared at Pauley’s job sites, and there were always enough minor trespasses to make this threat more than a nuisance. For instance, Pauley was surrounded by dope smokers. Consorting with convicted felons was a technical violation too, though it should have been little more than a laugh–half the men on the erection crews and two women in the office had pulled hard time–but it wasn’t funny. If the pesky functionary could make even a minor infraction stick, a stroke of his pencil could send Pauley back to prison to do the entire balance of his unserved sentence–18 months.

  Pauley was worried, but he needn’t have bothered. One look at Washington Square Park from a 2x8 alongside the tenth-story lantern cupola of St. Peter & St. Paul’s Cathedral had been enough for the parole officer. It had been enough for Pauley from the beginning. Fifty-odd was too old to keep up with the likes of, say, Agosto, a twenty-year-old biker who liked to smoke reefer right before he put scaffolds together, the higher the better. Agosto loved nothing more than the rattle under his feet of a scaffold buck anchored to a pair of cantilevered 4x4’s by two strands of No. 9 wire and a duplex nail 150 feet off the ground in a spanking afternoon westerly. Hanging thus by one arm he liked to scream that anybody who couldn’t fly likewise was ‘Anal! Completely anal!’, tapping his free forefinger between his crossed, stoned eyes for emphasis, as he swung out over the cityscape.

  As soon as he saw the probation officer, Agosto knew. Pauley didn’t figure it out until later, on one bright, clear, blustery day, when this proctologist snuck up on him only to suddenly freeze with one foot on a scaffold board and the other on a sill, his clipboard clutched under one arm and both hands locked to a standard. The scaffold clanked uncertainly in the wind. Between the proctologist’s feet grinned a slip of daylight twelve inches wide and ten stories deep, and he couldn’t take his eyes off it. Beyond the sill behind him Agosto tilted his head, tapped his forefinger between his crossed eyes, and silently mouthed the words anal, completely anal. Pauley couldn’t help himself–he pretended for a minute or two that he couldn’t understand what was bothering the poor proctologist, while the trapped acrophobe tried to stutter the mantra that would magically transport him ten stories and fifty blocks, back to his ground floor office.

  Pauley and Agosto helped the proctologist get down, and were very solicitous about it. Two weeks later Pauley had permission to start his own business, and he climbed no more scaffolds. After three months Pauley was making enough money to rent the basement beneath his apartment building. One job led to the next, and then he was remodeling the bathroom in Comstock’s swank Victorian. One day, in the interest of “Quadraphonic dreaming,” Comstock put him to hanging four giant speakers in the master bedroom. Needing to move the vast water bed in order to get a stepladder into a corner so as to avoid scratching the maroon velvet stretched over the walls, it took the combined manpower of Pauley, Comstock and Willie to so much as budge the thing.

  “Hey, we’re butch,” said Willie. “We can move it.”

  Undulating like a quartering sea as it inched away from the wall, the bed gradually exposed a quantity of dust, a fountain pen, a theatrical subwo
ofer, a policeman’s nightstick, two pairs of handcuffs, a pile of chromed case-hardened two inch chain, a padlock big enough to use on a railroad switch, and, finally, the largest container of Vaseline Pauley had ever seen.

  “There’s that darned old Mt. Blanc,” said Comstock, not moving to pick it up.

  The three of them stood around for a minute, looking at this stuff.

  “Damn,” said Pauley at last. “That’s enough lubrication to grease Hannibal’s army through a tight pass in the Alps.”

  Willie looked at Comstock and smiled mischievously. “How near the mark.”

  “Don’t get tacky,” Comstock snapped huffily.

  “Tacky?” Willie protested, as if puzzled. “How can you treat the world’s finest pen like this?”

  When the bathroom was finished Willie put Pauley to prototyping a Catherine Wheel at time plus materials plus a percentage–a sign of great trust.

  Pauley, who had never been trusted by anybody, was deeply touched.

  Six months after the Wheel was in production, Pauley was off probation.

  In a bar a few months later he ran into a guy from the scaffold crew. They had a drink. The guy told Pauley about how a tower crane swinging a three-yard concrete bucket had brushed Agosto off the top of a building like a crumb off a table. The guy swore he’d made it the fourteen stories down to the ground in time to hear Agosto’s last words, which were: “Lunch? Already?”

  Pauley nursed his drink. After a long silence he asked the guy if he’d quit. The guy nodded and said, “Damn straight.” They finished their drinks and ordered two more. Pauley watched Agosto’s friend’s face in the bar mirror. After a while he said, “How long did you last?” The guy nodded and plucked his cigarette out of an ashtray on the bar and took a deep compulsive drag, nodding some more and exhaling smoke as he crushed it out. “Two weeks.”

  After chain-sawing a timber to length he bored holes for chains, turnbuckles, gimbals, ringbolts, whatever. While nobody ever actually had nailed himself to one of these crosses, so far as Pauley knew, there was a large variety of outboard hardware and accessories available, in chrome or so-called powder black. Most of it was manufactured by an order of Dominican monks in northern California with nearly 150 years of high-quality iron-mongery behind them, mostly in exquisitely wrought 200-candle chandeliers, but also miscellaneous sconces and candelabra, as well as latches, bolts and hinges for church doors, bannisters, balusters, window grates and the like; and, finally, accessories for flagellants. They also distilled Sangre di San Sebastiani, a particularly astringent red brandy. Pauley kept a bottle in his kitchen.