Andrew Shaw - Sin Hellcat

Here we go again. You never know, really, what words mean. Such as gross previously, which can also mean twenty of something. Or is that a score? Or a stone? Maybe a gross is twelve twelves. A hell of a point to make, at any rate.

But about words. Take slut, for instance. By dictionary definition, Jodi was a slut, and the woman who came toward us from the revels was not a slut. By dictionary definition. But dictionaries are usually wrong. I don’t know whether you’ve ever noticed that before, but it’s true. Being a Mad Ave word purveyor for so long, it was brought home to me fairly often.

A slut, for instance, is not a prostitute, though the dictionary might claim so. No, a slut by usage is a promiscuous slattern, a sloppy slobby easy make. Jodi, though she worked the midnight trampoline for pay, was not a slut. The woman who had just joined our little group was a slut. Not the dictionary definition. She looked like the kind of woman you would mean if you said the word slut. Okay?

So that’s what she looked like in loose wrinkled clothing, barefoot. Black-haired, by the way. A good-looking woman about three or four years ago, before she decided to be a slut. Also, she was drunk.

She arrived and cast a jewel-fingered hand upon the troll’s elbow. She smiled sickeningly at Rhett, her unfocused eyes damply gleaming. “And is this Everett?” she said, the way women like that say things like that to little children, trying to be cute and motherly simultaneously and missing both by a mile.

The troll — no, I’m not going to call him Dixon Whittington — pushed her hand away ungraciously. “Go on back to the party,” he said.

She went down on one knee, but not too steadily, so she went down on both knees. Then she extended her arms — both draped with gold bracelets — toward Rhett and mulched, “I’m your new mama, honey. Come to mama.”

Rhett, understandably, did his best to fade into the material of Jodi’s skirt.

“Sober up first,” said the troll to mamacita. He had the grace, surprisingly, to look embarrassed.

Me, too. Hadn’t I brought Rhett here?

I suddenly remembered something that I had successfully managed to avoid conscious thought about for eight years. This was before Helen, when I was still a normally oversexed bachelor grinding away at the prevarication factory, finding my physical ease wherever I could, and a fellow pulser on advertising’s bed of gold told me about Will Brockheimer’s wife.

Will Brockheimer was then, and still is so far as I know, an account executive with a fantastic knack for liquor ad copy. Actually, it wasn’t so fantastic as all that if you understood that by Will Brockheimer, liquor ad copy was a love letter. Will has lived on the product of the distiller’s art for fifteen or twenty years by now, and I don’t believe there’s anything else in the world he loves half so much as booze, not even himself. And particularly not his wife.

You know how it is with booze. You drink a lot of it and then you think about sex, and you discover that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. There’s nothing like good Scotch or rye or bourbon or blended whiskey or vodka to make you crave what you can’t perform. After a while, as in Will’s case, this results in even the craving fading away.

Will Brockheimer was married. Will Brockheimer was alcoholically undersexed. Will Brockheimer, so I was told, had a wife who welcomed all substitutes for her booze-limp husband. All you had to do was go along with Will one night after work. He would head immediately for the nearest bar, and drink steadily till around midnight or one in the morning. If you stayed with him, and made sure he swallowed enough to be really reeling, then of course you’d have to take him home. His wife would help you put him to bed, and then, so the scuttlebutt ran, she would help you put her to bed.

I heard about this interesting possibility during a particularly dry spell in my sexual life, all puns intended. And so, two days after first hearing of it, I took action. Seeing to it that I boarded the elevator with Will Brockheimer, whom I knew only casually, I started up a conversation with him on the way down to the ground, and the two of us wound up in a cozy dark joint off Madison Avenue, and Will proceeded to get smashed.

What a strange oblique seduction that was! Plying a girl with liquor in hopeful preparation of later plying her with me, that was something I understood and was familiar with. But plying a man with liquor, in hopeful preparation of later plying his wife, that was strangely twisted, and not entirely enjoyable by any stretch of the imagination.

And he wanted to talk. This man on whom I was even attaching the cuckold’s horn wanted to talk to me, and I must, perforce, talk back. I must smile at him in all guile, and tell him stories, and listen to his stories, and be his pal. And all the time thrust down the quirks of conscience plucking at my mind. For isn’t it drummed into us from earliest childhood that it is more important in life to get laid than anything else? Isn’t copulation our chiefest goal, over mere honesty or truth or pity? Given all the choices of all the magic rings or Araby, comrade of mine, what would your first wish be?

And so, when at the witching hour out he passed, strode I unto the street and flagged a cab. It cost a dollar to get that worthy’s worthless assistance in carting the carcass from bar to car, and then all at once I realized that I didn’t know my drinking pal’s address.

Are you paying attention? Not only did I cuckold this sweet and sodden creature, I even picked his pocket. Out came his wallet, and from the identification card therein I parroted the address to the surly hacky, then nicked back the dollar I’d so far paid the driver, plus another for the trip, before stuffing the wallet back into his pocket.

They lived uptown a ways on the West Side. Not too far uptown, not far enough for a police lock to be necessary or for housewives to feel frightened of tripping down to the corner grocery after dark. Just far enough uptown to be expensive without being too expensive. (I’m going around the bush this away, to be honest, because I don’t properly remember exactly what the address was. Somewhere between Broadway and the park, between Columbus Circle and the Planetarium. Up in there.)

Will blessedly recovered somewhat by the time the cab reached his apartment building. It was at least possible, once the driver had helped me drag him out of the backseat and get him vertical on the sidewalk, for him to stand and even to walk, so long as one held onto his arm and guided him.

Entering the apartment building, the amount and intensity of qualms and queasiness I had to ignore suddenly increased, and it became effectively impossible for me to ransack Will’s pockets once more, in search of keys. Instead, I found the button tagged Brockheimer and pressed it firmly.

In a moment, I heard the voice of the object of my desires, albeit electronically distorted to something similar to the croaking of a frog, and saying only: “Who is it?”

That stumped me. She didn’t know my name, she didn’t even know me. The whole project suddenly seemed absurd. I had been planning to go up to an apartment and have intercourse with a respectable married woman whom I’d never even met before. Ridiculous.

The object of my waning desires spake again, in precisely the same words: “Who is it?”

Since I couldn’t answer that question, I answered another one instead: “I have your husband here, Mrs. Brockheimer.”

There was a pause, and then Mrs. Brockheimer strained the building’s electronics to the utmost, by forcing it to reproduce a sigh. Even through the distortion, it came through as a bitter and fatalistic sigh, a there’s-no-way-out sigh. And she said, “All right. Come on up.”