Maggie Estep

Joe

One day Joe woke up with a headache so violent it made a red curtain hang in front of his eyes. He blinked several times, but it wouldn't go away. He sat up. He moved his head. He opened the newspaper, even though trying to read any of its print made the red curtain throb.

LOS ANGELES (AP)-Children were greeted with hugs, love, and performing clowns today as they returned to the Jewish community center that was a place of terror just six days earlier.

Joe was glad he didn't live in Los Angeles. He lived in Chicago, near Rogers Park. The neighborhood was home to rehabs, furniture moving companies, people on SSI, gangs, and women who worked for tips.

Joe thought about the performing clowns cavorting around the murder scene. Which made him remember Susan's clown outfit, the one with bright red suspenders holding up a red garter belt and white fishnet stockings.

Thinking of this gave Joe a hard-on in spite of the now-blinding headache. He dialed 911. Joe briefly marveled over having a hard-on in spite of the fact that something was obviously very wrong with his head. This was the last thought he had for a long time.

When Joe came to in the hospital three days later, a nurse was there at his bedside, emptying a tube full of his urine. "They removed the tumor from your brain. It was the size of a grapefruit."

Joe wondered why it was that tumors were always compared to fruit. He wondered if the nurse liked to have sex with fruit. Susan did.

* * *

Joe met Susan at the rehab where he worked as a janitor. No one really knew how Susan had gotten to the detox. She'd been left in the waiting room, sedated, with her hands bound behind her back by a handkerchief.

She was half Iranian and had a beautiful nose. She wore lots of cheap jewelry that turned her skin green. Her hair was so long it touched her ass.

She suffered severe withdrawal from heroin. Three days off the stuff and her hormones were raging.

Counselors at the rehab caught Susan trying to have sex with virtually all the rehab inmates, male and female. One day, Joe found her in his broom closet. With his mop. She was leaning forward against the Band-Aid-colored wall. She had inserted the mop handle into herself from behind. She had her long black skirt bunched up over her ass.

When Joe walked in, she froze. Then she turned her head and looked at him. Her eyes were black hot coals and impossible to read. Joe slowly backed out of the closet. He went down the hall and into one of the counselor's offices, where he mechanically started emptying the trash, paying absolutely no mind to the counselor who was in there.

About ten minutes later, Joe went back into his broom closet. He knew she wouldn't be there anymore. He carefully picked the mop up and licked its handle. It tasted like sugar.

Joe had been raised in a motorcycle gang in Oregon. He was first laid at age twelve, by Martha, his half brother's common-law wife. She was four feet eleven inches with kinky blond hair and facial tattoos. One night she just crawled inside Joe's sleeping bag and started sucking his dick. Once he was hard, she hoisted up her denim miniskirt, straddled him, and rode up and down on him so vigorously he was sure she was going to break his dick off. When Joe tried to kiss her, she slapped him so hard his lip bled. He was so afraid of her he couldn't come. But she did, making a horrible sound like a wounded moose. A few minutes later, as she was crawling out of Joe's sleeping bag, his half brother came over. He made a clucking sound in his throat and then laughed. Joe thought maybe his half brother would kill him. But he didn't.

The next day Martha fell off the back of Joe's half brother's bike and rolled under a truck on the highway.

"You killed her," Joe's half brother accused that night. How Joe had killed her, he wasn't sure. And it was never mentioned again.

When Joe was sixteen, there was a massive raid of the motorcycle gang, and most of its members were indicted on murder and narcotics charges. Joe fled. He started hitchhiking east and got off in Chicago. Some guys jumped him and stole his shoes. One of them put his dick in Joe's mouth and came on his face. Joe went to a Salvation Army and slept there one night.

He ended up in a detox and was ultimately given a job as a janitor there. One night, he got picked up by a tiny stripper at a bar that some of the detox workers frequented. She wasn't stripping there, just getting drunk. She didn't even talk to Joe before putting her hand on his crotch. She took him home and told him to shut up and turn over, and she rammed stuff up his ass. First a finger. Then a hair brush handle. Then she ripped the arm off a smiling plastic doll and rammed it up his ass. Joe didn't protest. He watched her jerk off. She didn't put anything up her own ass. Her name was Jolene.

He saw her a few times a week for several months. Then she was murdered. The cops never figured out who did it or why. She was found stabbed in the bathtub in her apartment.

Now Joe hadn't had sex in two years. Every time he fucked someone, they died.

The day after the mop incident, Joe found Susan in his broom closet again. She was completely naked but didn't have anything inserted inside herself.

"What are you doing?" Joe asked.

"Nothing," Susan said.

She stood up and turned her back to him. She was so skinny her shoulder blades poked out like razors, but she had a nice shape, hips rounding out slightly from a miniscule waist.

She bent forward and smashed her cheek against the Band-

Aid-colored wall. She had extremely long straight black pubic

hairs that parted to reveal the pinkness between them. She

turned her head and looked at Joe with hot coal eyes. Joe didn't

move. He didn't even put his hand to his dick that was so hard

and distended it hurt.

"That's a really bad idea," Joe said to her after eternal seconds.

"Yeah yeah yeah," Susan said and then arched her back and wiggled her hips slightly.

"Do you need a place to live?" he asked.

Susan straightened up and turned around and her face turned little girl.

"Yeah."

"Okay. You can live with me," Joe said.

* * *

An hour later, Susan had packed up her plastic bag of belongings: two pairs of panties, a black T-shirt, and a bra.

The moment they set foot inside Joe's small two-room apartment, Susan lay down on the floor and fell asleep. After sitting there watching her sleep for a few hours, Joe gently scooped her up and put her on his twin bed. An hour later she woke up and went back to the floor. She was still asleep in the morning when the phone rang and one of the counselors from the rehab called to tell Joe he'd lost his job. Consorting with the patients was strictly against the rules. But Joe didn't care. He had Susan in his apartment.

When Susan woke up she was horny. She didn't even brush her teeth or take a piss, she sat up on the floor and reached for Joe, who was sitting in the only chair he owned, a plastic armchair the color of avocados. She put her hand on his crotch and Joe made a face.

"What, baby?" Susan said.

"Don't do that."

"What's the matter?"

"I don't wanna."

"Yes you do," Susan purred, feeling the big lump in his pants.

"No," Joe said.

Susan peeled off her shirt. She had an orange bra on.

"I got this in France at Tati," she said, running her hands over the bra. "Tati is this amazing cheapo store they got over there. Kind of like our Kmart or something, only the underwear is nice cotton. You can't find nice cotton underwear at Kmart," she said, defiantly, as if expecting Joe to contradict her.

"I realize that," Joe said, even though he didn't. "Why were you in France?"

"Come on," the girl said, taking off the bra and teasing her dark brown nipples so they stood up like angry blueberries.

But Joe wouldn't do anything.

Over the next few weeks, Susan tried a lot of things. She got outfits. First just run-of-the-mill things like vicious red teddies and garters and stockings and fuck-me pumps. She would dance in front of Joe in his tiny apartment and Joe would watch but he wouldn't touch. She got a nurse's outfit. It was starchy and hard when she rubbed up against Joe's skin while he tried to sleep. It gave him a hard-on but he still wouldn't fuck her. He didn't want Susan to die. He thought maybe even telling her about it, about the curse of the women he fucked, could kill her.

Then Susan got the clown outfit. It was the stupidest, craziest thing any girl had ever done to or for him. The tenderness of that stupid crazy gesture almost melted his resolve. But not quite.

Not even when he came home from work one day-he'd gotten hired on as a housekeeping aide at the seedy Heart of Chicago Motor Court not too far away-and found Susan in bed with another girl, a chubby Spanish girl with a lascivious red mouth, and the two of them relentlessly ate each other and inserted fingers and vibrators into each other. Joe just made eggs. He and his hard-on.

And then Susan started shooting dope again.

Pretty soon she had gone through all Joe's money buying dope. She would shoot up all over her body and Joe would just watch. He locked her in the bathroom one day to try and make her kick her habit but she just jumped out the third-story window.

A few days after jumping out of Joe's bathroom window, Susan resurfaced.

She was at least ten pounds thinner and her eyes were huge and full of pain.

"I'm sorry, baby," she said when Joe opened the door and let her in, and he folded her into his arms and felt her bones poking into him.

"It's all okay," he reassured her, but after a minute she grew fidgety and then Joe went and sold his stereo to get her some dope.

In a week, Susan had pawned everything Joe had, which wasn't much. When his apartment was completely barren, Susan left. The next morning, Joe woke up with the headache.

After the surgery, as he lay in his hospital bed reflecting on what life would be like now that he'd had the grapefruit taken out of his head, Joe glanced at a newspaper and saw that the singer Carnie Wilson was having her stomach taken out and having a new one put in. This one would be the size of a peanut.

Carnie Wilson was quoted saying: "I am so obese I could die."

Maybe the grapefruit from Joe's head could try shoving itself inside the peanut in Carnie's stomach. Thinking about it gave Joe the first hard-on he'd had since Susan had left.

When Joe got out of the hospital he didn't want to go home. Home would remind him of Susan and of the grapefruit. He wandered the streets for nearly twenty-four hours straight and then, completely exhausted, he went home. There was an eviction notice taped to his door. He would have to find a job soon.

Two days later, when Joe was walking and wandering as he'd taken to doing, he bumped into a woman on Wilson Avenue whose hands were smeared with tattoos of the motorcycle gang who'd raised him. She was stocky with brassy blond hair. She had on a Black Sabbath concert T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Her arms had loose meat hanging off them. She noticed Joe staring at her tattoos and she started talking to him.

"I ain't running with them anymore, though," she said after Joe asked her about the motorcycle gang's Chicago offshoot. "I got a good job. I'm a lifeguard. Lotta old people come in there and dog paddle and I sit there. They let me smoke too. No one says shit. Sometimes my husband comes in and we sit there and get fucked up and the old people don't care," she said.

"I'll hook you up if you want," she told Joe after a while.

"What's that?"

"They need a weekend lifeguard. I'll hook you up."

"I can't really swim."

"I'll teach you," she said.

* * *

A week later, the woman, whose name was Denise, let Joe pass the lifeguard test and then hired him as part-time lifeguard. Five days a week, Joe sat in his room watching the little black and white TV he'd found in a Dumpster on Astor Street. On weekends he was a lifeguard.

Denise started hitting on Joe. One Saturday, when he came in for his shift and went into the tiny office where he was to sit for the next nine hours watching old people dog paddle, he found Denise sitting there, smoking a Kool. She was wearing cut-off shorts and a tank top. She had enormous breasts. They seemed to have a life of their own. He reflected that if Denise were to travel, a separate passport would have to be issued for her tits.

"You wanna come over tonight? Stewie's out of town," Denise said to Joe, taking a languorous pull on her Kool.

"Oh," he said, frightened.

"Oh? I make you an offer and 'Oh' is all you got for me?" 1 can t.

"You can't what, boy?" Denise hissed through her very small teeth.

Joe thought about how her teeth were so tiny and her tits so huge. Her maker had clearly been having a bad day when her number had come up.

To quell any more nastiness, Joe agreed to come by her place that night.

When he got there, she was wearing nothing but skimpy mesh underpants that rode up her strange flat ass. When Joe didn't instantly grab her and throw her down and fuck her, she flew into a rage. She looked horrible when she was angry.

Finally, as she was calling him a cocksucking pussy, Joe reached down inside the panties and put his finger inside her. She shut right up. He pushed her down to the floor. He moved the crotch of the panties aside and stuck his dick in her. She said: "Baby, baby, baby" and her hips wiggled and her eyes rolled back in her head. The moment Joe came, he pulled out of her, hoisted his pants back up, and left. He figured her death was imminent. He didn't want to see it.

The next day Joe didn't show up at the swimming pool. He didn't want to be hearing about Denise's death. He stayed in for a week straight.

He pulled the phone out of the wall. He cooked up a big batch of rice, the only thing in his cupboard, and subsisted on that.

On the eighth day, he went by the detox where he had once worked. The detox people agreed to hire him back. Patients came and went and sometimes Joe wondered if Susan would appear again.

One day, Joe was walking home from the detox when he saw Denise coming down the street. She was with another older woman. A short woman.

"Joe, babe, what's up?" Denise said.

"Hi," Joe said, and his heart stammered.

"You look pale, what's wrong?" Denise asked.

"Joe?" the other woman said, scrutinizing Joe.

Joe looked nervously from Denise to the other woman.

"Joe, did you used to live in Oregon?" the woman demanded.

"Yes," Joe said tightly. The woman was Martha, his half brother's common-law wife, the first woman whose death was on his head.

"I thought so. How you doin' kid?" Martha said, and she pressed her short squat body up to his.

Joe stood frozen.

He didn't understand.

Just a day later, watching a movie on TV, he saw the stripper, the ex-girlfriend who'd turned up murdered. She was playing a nurse on a TV movie that had been filmed just a few months earlier.

Joe consulted with one of the counselors at the detox, who then hooked him up with a shrink.

"I thought I killed everyone I slept with," Joe told the shrink, a small man with close-cropped dark hair and an extraordinarily long nose.

The shrink was fascinated and told Joe he ought to come in three times a week. He then had many colleagues talk to Joe and take pictures of his brain. They concluded that the grapefruit's position inside Joe's brain had triggered an extreme sexual guilt complex. Now that it was gone, so was the complex. Joe needn't think he killed everyone he fucked anymore.

The detox hired Joe back. Eventually, Susan did come back through. At first he didn't recognize her. Her hair was shorn short and she was dressed in vivid colors. But she still wore the cheap jewelry that turned her skin green.

She pretended not to recognize Joe. He cornered her in the hall when she was heading to the bathroom.

"Come live with me. It'll be different this time, I promise you that."

Susan just laughed at him, a hollow lifeless laugh. She wordlessly walked ahead into the bathroom. Joe left her alone for the rest of the day. He tried again the following day.

She just laughed again though. She wouldn't speak.

One night, when all the other patients were in the TV room, catatonically staring at the big screen TV, Joe ran into Susan in the hallway. She was sadly shuffling down the hall. She was wearing a limp blue bathrobe.

"Susan," Joe said, planting himself in front of her.

"You sent me off the deep end, Joe," she said, looking up at him with her lifeless eyes.

"It's all a terrible mistake. I had a grapefruit in my head. I loved you. I didn't want to kill you."

"You're insane."

"No. It was the grapefruit."

"Joe, you need help."

"Let me show you," he said and he forcefully took hold of Susan's bony arm and led her toward the broom closet.

"You have to leave me alone," Susan protested when he'd gotten her in there.

"Look," Joe said, putting his hands to his head and parting the hair there to show her the scar. "There was a thing in my head. A tumor. I can explain everything."

She just looked at him with those hollow eyes. He put his hands on her shoulders and forcibly flipped her around. He leaned her forward so that her cheek pressed against the Band-Aid-colored wall and her ass arched out. He bunched her limp blue robe up over her hips. He parted the incredibly long straight black pubic hairs and kissed her and licked her. He put his fingers inside her. He rubbed his painfully distended dick against her ass. She finally turned her head and looked at him and a fragment of life had come back into her eyes.

Maggie Estep has published two books, Diary of an Emotional Idiot and Soft Maniacs: Stories. Her third, The Woman Who Ate the Sun-a crime novel involving Coney Island, horse racing, a stripper, and a pianist-will be published in 2002. Maggie lives in Brooklyn, plays classical piano, and hangs out at racetracks, cheering on long shots. Visit her online at www.maggieestep.com.

"Joe," by Maggie Estep, © 2000 by Maggie Estep, first appeared in Gynomite, edited by Liz Belile (New Mouth from the Dirty South LLC, 2000). Reprinted by permission of the author.

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Content

Maggie Estep
Joe