Donald Westlake - Sacred Monster

“This won’t take long, sir.”

Oooooooooooooooooohooooooooooooooooooooooooohooooooooooooooo ooooooocooooooooooooooohooooooooooooooooooooooooh ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, wow.

I hurt all over. My bones ache. God’s giant fists are squeezing my internal organs, twisting and grinding. Why do I do it, if it makes me sick?

“Ready for a few questions, sir?”

I open my eyes; slowly, very slowly. It is daytime, but thank God a high, thin cloud cover shields me from the sun. I am home; where else would I be? Here is my broad slate patio, grayer than the thin cloud way up above, spread like a monochrome quilt between my house and my pool. Big house; white; Tara, you know what I mean? I can’t look at the pool; dancing waters.

And ahead of me is the interviewer. A neat, drab man, a plain man in plain gray slacks, plain tan sports jacket, button-down blue shirt, maroon bow tie. Brown loafers, black socks. Steno pad at the ready, ball-point pen at the ready, eyes at the ready.

I open my mouth, which alters the balance of my body, which makes me dizzy, which makes me want to return to sweet oblivion. But duty calls. “Sure, pal,” my voice says, with some assistance from me. “Anything for the press.”

“Thank you,” the interviewer says, neat and polite. He has a round, neat head without flab or jowls or character at all. No lumpy nose, thick lips, shaggy eyebrows, big ears. Nothing. Not a character you can catch hold of. He has a head like a shaved coconut with a seedy, flat wig pasted on.

Which is why he’s a reporter and I’m a star. I am interesting. Even when I’m — oh, God! in pain! — I’m interesting. I mean, here he is, you see what I mean, pen and pad in hand, interested in me, while I don’t give a fat rat’s ass about him . You see how it works?

Well, no, let’s be fair. It isn’t just the face, this interestingly mottled and cunningly cragged visage the world has grown over the years to know and to love and to pay money for the sight of. Behind the face there’s — there was — there is, dammit! — well, there was, anyway — a talent that would knock your socks off and tan your toes. This face, this voice... the slope of this shoulder, the movement of these hands...

I could still do it, if I had to. You don’t think so? I could. I don’t have to, of course, haven’t had to for a long time, but I still could, if push came to goddamn shove. Still could.

Not today, however. Today I’m doing well enough just to sketch in the vaguest outline of a man being here. I risk disembowelment, self-destruction, by making a smile in my interviewer’s direction, using all those muscles in the face . I say, “Where would I be without the press, huh?”

“I guess that’s right,” he says. He’s so toneless I may die; I’m suffering life deprivation.

In fact, I’m suffering . “Listen, pal,” I say, my voice waving and shaking all on its own, “I’m sorry, but I got really wasted last night. I took chemicals science hasn’t discovered yet. I mean I just got back to this solar system, you follow me? I’m sorry, pal, but I just got to sit down.”

He looks at me with faint concern. “Sir,” he says, “you are sitting down.”

I gaze about me in mild amaze. Son of a bitch, the man speaks true! Blue canvas cups my penitent rump. A pale blue terry-cloth robe is closed over legs stretching away from me over the slates, ankles crossed, feet bare but wonderfully clean. I am a clean person.

But sick. “In that case,” I say, leaning forward, stretching out these arms, these arms, “in that case,” tipping over my own knees, palms brushing slate, canvas chair groaning as I depart, “in that case, I got to lie down.”

And so I do, stretching out on my back, the coolness of the slate filtering through the terry cloth to soothe my fevered ass, my sacrificial shoulder blades. My right hand comes up, knowing the appropriate gesture all by itself, the back of the hand resting on my forehead, fingers slightly curled. I gaze up past this monument at the herringbone sky. I speak:

“It is true that I am rich and famous. The movies I star in have never grossed less than eighty million. I make so much money I’m an industry . I support entire villages of lawyers and agents and managers and secretaries and accountants and hookers and dope dealers and plastic surgeons and ex-wives and relatives and friends and gardeners and poolmen and gym instructors. I’ve got people to stand me up when it is absolutely necessary that I stand up, to dry me out and clean me off when I must go once again in front of that old debbil camera, people to keep me out of trouble with the law, to buy me the very best dope money can buy. These people don’t just love me, man, they need me.”

I smile, thinking of my citizens. Delicately, carefully, I turn my head just enough to include the interviewer in my smile. “Jack Pine’s army,” I say.

“Yes, sir.”

“But probably you want to know how it all began, am I right?”

“Yes, sir, I would,” he says.

“How a God-given talent became such a far-flung enterprise.”

I gaze again heavenward, thinking back...

screams, screaming, engine roars, flashing lights in red and white reflecting from the bumper chrome, slicking on the heaving trunk of the car, madness, danger, movement, peril, speed...

No! I blink, I make some sort of noise out of my throat, I press the back of my head against the hard slate, my fingers clench at air. I will not let that in!

It’s all right. It’s all right. “Yes,” I say, nodding, catching hold of the reins once more. I smile. The practiced sentences roll forth: “It all began, it all began, the night I lost my virginity.”

She was my first. Wendy. Of course, I wasn’t her first. Not even that night. But she was really nice. Really nice.

We went to the same school, she was a year behind me. I was sixteen, Wendy was fifteen, she went sometimes with three, four guys in a car. Her father’s car. I heard about it, but I never thought she’d do it with me .

Buddy fixed it up, Buddy Pal, he set the whole thing up, just the two of us and Wendy. And naturally, because he set it up with Wendy, he went first.

Frank William Pal, Jr., known as Buddy, smiled at Wendy and backed out of the car. With the door open, the interior light had come on, and Wendy shielded her eyes with a pudgy-fingered hand. Supine on the backseat, blue jeans and panties in a snarl around her right ankle on the floor, sweater and bra bunched up to her armpits, she was less pretty but more provocative than when seen in the corridors at school, prancing along, eyes wise with knowing sidelong glances, lips full and mouth pink when she laughed. Now she breathed in little gasps, her pale belly contracting, and her voice was hoarse as she said, “Ow. Shut the door, willya?”

“I’ll send Jack over,” Buddy told her, and shut the door, killing the light. It was a soft and humid spring night, and the car windows were all steamed on the inside, making them opaque in the darkness. Buddy, a skinny six-footer of sixteen with nondescript brown hair, took the roll of paper towels he’d left on the car roof, ripped off a few, and put the roll back on the roof. After using the towels, he pulled his pants up, secured them, stepped into his loafers, and walked away from the dark and silent Buick, down the dirt road among the pine trees in the dark.