R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

It was early evening, and I had risked the roaring four-lane traffic to try out the small diner across from my motel. Hard to look cool scrambling across a busy road-almost as hard as looking tough queued up for airport security. The diner sported the name Odd-Jobs in lightless neon tubing across the front, but it was the Day-Glo quip on the port- a-sign that caught my attention: Eat or be eaten. I was just sitting at a booth, pretending to study the menu, swirling my coffee with a clinking spoon, and then there she was, tits on a stick.

Just so you know, there’s always a girl with me. You could say I’m like Hollywood that way. Always hunting for a fresher face.

I didn’t waste time-I never do. I was standing up just as she was sitting down. The key, I’ve found, is to beat the waitress to the punch… Or maybe that’s just a superstition of mine.

“Mind if I join you?”

She looked up as if startled and simply said, “Eew. “

“Eew?” I exclaimed. “I haven’t even unbuttoned my trenchcoat yet!”

All hotties have routines specifically designed for contingencies like me. Some just tell you to go fuck yourself, literally. Others, the ones who are genuinely evil or who just desperately want to be nice, find more creative ways to tell you to go fuck yourself. I actually had one chick offer me change like I was a bum or something!

Molly desperately wanted to be nice. “Sorry, but… I don’t even know you.”

“Apparently you know me well enough to be grossed out.”

“I just got this thing about first impressions.”

I certainly wasn’t complaining from my end: narrow hips and a flat abdomen. High breasts beneath a largely ceremonial bra. A boyish athleticism rounded into feminine allure, like a red-headed Mia Farrow or Gwyneth Paltrow-which simply made it seem all the more appropriate, given that I was a combination of Brad Pitt and the Devil.

“Here I thought first impressions were the only thing I was good at.”

Believe me when I tell you that I have a winning grin, the kind that can shrug away even the most determined ill-willing. She looked at me as though assessing my planetary credentials, then laughed a girlish in-spite-of-her-better-judgment laugh…

“A martyr, huh?”

“Depends on the cause,” I said, sliding into the seat opposite. Just so you know, I’ve been called a sexist pig exactly sixty-nine times. Coincidence? I think not.

The fact is, I am a sexist, in the sense that someone who plays cello all the time is called a cellist. I. Love. Sex. All things being equal, I will choose getting laid pretty much every time. And just so you know, when I say “love,” I don’t mean the snuggle-with-your-wife-on-the-couch variety but the real deal-you know, the kind only crackheads and junkies can know.

The love that keeps you coming back.

An old girlfriend of mine laid it all out for me once. She was a systems analyst named Joyce Pennington, but everyone used to call her Jimmy for some reason. No fewer than 7 of those 69 accusations belong to her-a whopping 11 percent. (She’s also responsible for 9 out of the 19 times I’ve been called a narcissist, but that’s another story.) The first four times she called me a sexist I just shrugged it off-prick a guy with the same insult long enough and he becomes numb. But the fifth time I blew my stack for some reason. So in the calm voice I use to package all my outrage, I gave her the little spiel I gave you above. It was fucking biology, for chrissakes. Was hunger a sin? How about shitting? Was voiding my bowel yet another fascistic exercise?

“And murder isn’t biological?” she replied. I swear her laugh lopped two inches off my dick. You know, that cruel feminine chuckle you hear so often on Sex and the City, the one that says (with pious charity) that, sure, men are all half retarded, but we love them anyway, don’t we? The kind of laugh that men reserve for Labrador retrievers. Bad boy. Bad.

“Oh, Diss,” she continued. “How can you treat women equally if you see them as accessories to your dick?”

I stared at her wordlessly.

“Well?”

So I told her my dick was the only thing I was proud of… that for as long as I could remember I used my sexual prowess as a crutch, a way to limp around the fact that I was too much of a loser for anyone to love. Nobody lubs me. Boo-hoo.

Whatever it takes to get laid.

She figured it out eventually, of course. 2002. On the fourth of July, no less. Jimmy was one smart chick.

Patriotic too.

See, the thing is, I score large. Since I was fourteen, I have slept with at least 558 different women, probably more if you count the nights I’ve blacked out from drinking. I think this is pretty impressive, given that I’m not a rock star. So this is my dilemma: how can I stop seeing women as accessories to my dick when so many of them so obviously want to be?

Seriously.

Look, I know it’s a problem, a vice even. I know it shuts down the possibility of a mature relationship with a certain percentage of the world’s population: the hottie demographic. I know the older I get, the more debauched and pathetic I become. If I were completely honest, I would admit that when the Bonjours handed me that photo of Dead Jennifer, my first thoughts were almost entirely carnal-that when I trolled her Facebook page on the Web afterward, I secretly hoped to find photos of some drunken lingerie party.

But I can’t help myself. Even my second therapist said I have bigger fish to fry.

Like the fact that I think nobody loves me. So we talked, Molly and me.

She had this narrow, birdlike intensity, with a look that avoided yours with push-pin concentration, as though you were part of her game world but perpetually fixed just to the right of the cursor. It was a strange tick, one of those little wrinkles that never gets ironed out of a personality, like hiding your teeth when you smile.

I found it intensely erotic.

She was a journalist with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, or the “PG” as she continually referred to it. Well, she was actually more of a stringer than a real journalist, and she was hoping to break into the biz by writing an in-depth story on-you guessed it-the disappearance of Jennifer Bonjour.

Score. So much meaningless shit happens that coincidences are bound to abound. Sometimes the world is so small it can only be grand.

“Opportunity of a lifetime,” I said.

She made a pained face. “It’s horrible, I know. But I figure it can’t be all that bad if I help… you know, find her…” She trailed as though unconvinced.

“The dead don’t sweat,” I said, grinning. “Neither should you.”

There’s such mystery in meeting a woman for the first time. I knew she had a life, that behind her scenes there were scads of people-friends, family, lovers-and to be honest, I didn’t really give a fuck. I know that sounds bad, like banging her was all I cared about. But the fact of the matter is probably worse.

Remember, I don’t forget. This makes me pretty much impossible to get along with, simply because the longer I know a person, the less they seem a person. Remember, I see all the ways you people repeat.

This makes falling in love pretty much radioactive. The pain is stacked high enough as it is, and with me it never, ever goes away. So the way I see it, this means either I become celibate like a priest or I womanize like a hound dog. What would you choose?

“And you?” Molly asked. “What brings you to the booming metropolis of Ruddick?”

I shot her my best whisky-ad grin: rueful, infinitely assured. The kind that says, Oh, yes, I will be laid tonight. Teeth are a window on our genes, and my pearly-whites positively gleamed.

“An opportunity of a lifetime.”

If my ragged good looks were the hook, then Dead Jennifer was the bait. I knew it the instant I finished describing the Bonjours and their piteous request: I was Molly Modano’s first break. Her initial Oh-no-not-another-one wariness dissolved into avid interest. After about five minutes of relentless questioning I began to wonder who was catching whom. I also realized that I almost certainly wasn’t going to score that night. In Molly’s eyes I had made the miraculous transition from being another asshole to being a possible night of fun in the sack to being a resource, something that required cultivation and rationing. I cursed myself for not lying at the outset, certain that somewhere in some journalism textbook stuffed in the back of her closet there was a rule that said, “Do not, under any circumstances, bang your sources.”