Beautiful Children Read online

  She'd tried wigs next. A Catholic schoolgirl wig. A braided horsehair thing that went down to her ass. This sleek black silent-movie-star deal that a drag queen had received one hell of a beating over. Cheri had collagen injected into her lips every two weeks. She did five sessions a month under the lights of a rotating tanning bed. Cheri had her own nutritionist, personal trainer, and personal waxer. And back at the start of the new year, Cheri Blossom had spent five grand on new tits. Not a thing had been wrong with her God-given goodies, mind you. In actuality Cheri's breasts had been lovely. Curved little pears. They'd hung freely and pointed a bit to the sides and had lain supple beneath her T-shirts in a manner that attracted glances both discreet and unabashed. But then her boyfriend had provided her with that pamphlet. He'd explained the procedure and gone over all her questions twice. He'd told her that her worries were stupid, she was being a bitch. Her boyfriend had bugged and pestered. And on a clear February afternoon when they'd been doing shrooms for like six hours, Cheri had giggled, What the fuck. She'd let him drive. Just outside of the city limits. An office complex: from the outside it looked like the kind of place you'd get insurance for your car. (Afterward she realized her boyfriend must have had an arrangement, maybe had even gotten a piece of the action, to set it up so quickly.) In the time it takes to complete a load of laundry, this mulatto doctor had verified the money order. In the converted back room of his office, he'd given Cheri a sleeping gas that, when combined with the shrooms, provided Cheri with about five seconds of bliss and then somewhere around three hours of blackness. This doctor had made incisions into the hearts of Cheri's nipples. Stuck this weird vacuum tubing thing into precious treasures that maybe had not been the biggest in the world but that nobody had ever complained about. He'd done a bunch of other shit that Cheri did not care to know the details of, but that probably got her boyfriend off, demented bastard, him and his piercings and tatts and his latest ridiculous thing, wanting to shove a triple-A battery through his nose. That overcast afternoon, when Cheri Blossom had been dragged out of that storefront, she had been transformed. From a fresh-faced nymphet favored by old men and shy youths, she'd been turned into some sort of Amazon, the wet dream of all red-blooded teenagers and midlife-crisis businessmen. Two melons beneath her knit sweater. Cleavage you could land planes on. (Silicon Valley she later called it.) It had taken her two days to learn how to walk with the new weight. Another month to fully adjust to dancing with wet sandbags inside of her. For a week after that, her lower back still hurt something fierce. Even tonight, before taking to the catwalk, Cheri powdered her underarm scars with talcum (also giving a quick poof to her bull's-eye of pubic hair, just for luck). But meanwhile, just like her boyfriend had promised, not only had her investment been returned, but it had doubled. New stereo equipment. High-definition plasma flat screen. A significant increase in the quantity and grade of the new shit her boyfriend's connection kept bringing around. Again and again Cheri reminded herself of this. She attempted to embrace the creature comforts.

  But then it would be four in the morning and the Slinky Fox would have changed shifts. Some of the girls, a few bouncers, and the DJs would have convoyed downtown and parked their exhausted rears in the coffee shop of the Horseshoe. They'd be in their usual booth in the corner, scarfing down ninety-nine-cent night-owl specials, and Cheri would pick at the yolk of her over-easies, and she'd get all melancholy. See, she could handle that her breasts no longer bounced. Yes, her implants were so big that the skin over them was stretched and thin, they were too big for her body, these unnatural balloons, the left suspended a visible smidge higher than the right. Her breasts no longer gave her pleasure, hasta la vista to the electric tingles of joy she used to feel when her boyfriend bit down on her breast. Sayonara to the rush when he dug his teeth into her areolas and buried himself fully inside her and ejaculated and totally pushed her over the edge. But the thing that basically devastated her at four in the morning in a casino coffee shop was her nipples.

  Because her nipples had been beautiful. Truly they had.

  Thin. Long. The same chestnut shade as her natural hair. A thousand little goose-pimply protuberances appearing on her areolas when she got aroused. Her nipples used to turn thick and full, becoming a shade richer around the fifth of every month, staying that way through the tenth. They used to wrinkle in hot weather. Her nipples used to have personality. And now this personality had been infiltrated. Dissected. It had been taken apart and put back together, stretched and spread and all but turned to plastic. Pink antiseptic saucers with ugly little nubs. They hardly moved or got excited or did any damn thing. As much as Cheri Blossom had hate inside her loving and Christian heart, she hated her new nipples. So when her fella came up with yet another winner, it hadn't meant anything. Again, she'd said, what the fuck. Filled out another money order at the Western Union.

  Which is why, with Patti Smith wailing and “Free Money” entering its final crescendo, as the half circle of wolves around her pinned back their ears and hooted and hollered and whooped, while her mark drooled and took deep breaths and blew the crotch of the panties out past his nose like a little pink sail—it is why Cheri could take the match that she'd had in her hand this whole song long.

  And is why she could strike that match on the bald crown of the mark's head. Why she could move the flame to her nipples, onto her surgically hollowed-out nipple cases.

  With a debutante's grace Cheri lit on fire the dyed stubs of red wax and tiny red wicks that she had packed into her surgically hollowed-out nipple casings.

  Shadowy bar folk clapped and whistled and high-fived and went Holy shit. They threw crumpled dollar bills and fives and someone accidentally let go of a ten. They realized that they were watching magic, they were extras getting to see a stellar performance, a recital by not just any stripper, but A STAR.

  And now Cheri Blossom wiggled her flaming prosthetic sandbags in the guy's face. She smothered his head with plastic and silicon and good old-fashioned fire. And lucky bastard that her client was, he got to blow out Cheri's nipples—which is what most clients did.

  Or he got to extinguish them with his fingers—which some toughs did to try and impress her.

  If he so chose, he could even put his lips around them and suck out the flame, like her boyfriend totally got into.

  But this guy, he seemed embarrassed. Ashamed. He really didn't know what to do. And he had to get to blowing. These candles weren't even candles, just shaved candle parts that had been lumped together and topped with string. Little bitty things.

  Only this guy was like, like—like the flaming nipples had interrupted him, caught him totally off guard.

  Like something else was on his mind.

  The extras were all around, they were yelling and laughing and howling and offering to take his place. And the flame was getting closer, flickering, burning down through the wick. Cheri was starting to wonder what would happen if the flames hit onto her plastic. Just what kind of fucked-up chemicals got involved then? She wasn't beginning to worry, not really, but something had to happen, quick. She was about to extinguish the things herself, when the prematurely balding guy returned from wherever his mind was vacationing, and the situation finally registered with him.

  He took a weak breath.

  Music thumped. Bass bumped. Extras laughed and high-fived and hooted.

  While the wisps of smoke danced upward, behind the guy's glasses, his eyes were large and brown and apologetic. They were relieved.

  He purposefully avoided looking up at her, instead staring at Cheri's smoking tits for two, three seconds. His Adam's apple bobbed. He let out another breath and for a moment seemed to concentrate. And here the level of his stare rose. Reflected neon and white ribbons of electric light danced along the lenses of his spectacles, and suddenly his face revealed itself as stony, possessed, as if he had just reached a decision.

  3.3

  The bill feeder unceremoniously rejected Kenny's dollar for what felt like the hun
dredth time. His shoulders hunched and tensed, and he curled over the front of the machine like a question mark, grabbing the bill with a defeated swipe, returning to the task of rubbing the dollar over the gleaming steel console, trying to iron out its creases. From the next machine, Newell landed an elbow into his abdomen. “This is sweet. How sweet is this?”

  The boy pumped five nickels into a slot. His index finger jabbed on a square yellow button in the middle of the console. He quickly slapped a green button with his palm.

  “Ooowh. Almost got me a fully loaded convertible!”

  Another thrown elbow. “See. I look twenty-one. I'm always telling my dad.”

  A nudge now. “Damn. Two cherries that time.

  “You played Tetron IV? I just rented it from Blockbuster. Those graphics are way better.”

  Rubbing his ribs, Kenny stared back. Although hair obstructed his view, and caused him to blink rapidly, he took in Newell's energy and joy, felt its contagious spread. He laughed, an awkward, donkeylike snort, and tried the dollar in front of him once more, but again the father of our country reappeared, scrolling out from the bill feeder like a mocking green tongue. “It's broke,” Kenny said. “Mine's broken.”

  “Mine works great. See. Nothing to it.”

  Kenny shook his head. With hasty jerks, he began searching through his pants for another dollar, and had a fleeting thought of the Nintendo system his aunt had bought him two Christmases ago, the controlling stylus veering crazily to the right side of the screen. “So,” he said. “Bing was really cool to me.”

  Newell continued staring into the screen, dropping coins.

  “He's actually really nice.”

  “I still say you should have come for Byrne and them.” He punched Kenny's shoulder, then made a second motion. When Kenny flinched, Newell nailed him twice more. Kenny rubbed his shoulder, although Newell's words hurt a lot more, and Kenny could not just rub away their truth. He stared for a moment at the small moth holes along his sleeve, at the curl of thinned cotton at that sleeve's end. Then he became distracted, something frilly skimming along the small of his back. And it wasn't just frilly, either—a fair amount of weight pressing at him.

  A dumpy woman. Making her way between the stools and players, she filled the black leotard as if it were a sausage casing. Her arm was raised straight above her head, and she was balancing a small tray filled with neon drinks. She brushed past Kenny and looked back over her shoulder, ready to apologize. As Kenny watched her eyes narrow, a penny of doubt lodged in his chest. She kept moving, though, and squeezed past a large-boned housewife in imitation designer evening wear, navigating the narrow space of the row, eventually delivering a bottle of amber beer to a dumpy-looking grandfather, whose smile of thanks revealed a missing set of uppers.

  “This is the life, huh?” Newell's elbow dug once more at Kenny's ribs. “Free and easy.”

  The boy pumped away, oblivious, dropping more coins into the slot machine like he couldn't get rid of his money fast enough. Kenny eyed the waitress, watching her sloppy rear shift from left to right as she continued her route. When she turned a corner, he kept staring down the row, checking to see if she—or anyone else—might be coming back. Newell said something that Kenny did not pay attention to. Still he grunted an affirmative response, and momentarily absorbed the sight of the large-boned housewife—she was gazing at the terminal in front of her with dead eyes, clutching a rosary in her large-knuckled fist, blowing a large pink bubble and then sucking it back in. Each time she pulled at the slot, she performed this little ritual, Kenny saw. Along the row, he saw baggy retirees chain-smoking and playing two machines apiece, rotely jabbing a left-right sequence of buttons on one machine, then repeating the sequence on the other. Their faces were uniformly drained from extended bouts of concentrated anticipation, yet still focused on the screens in front of them. Kenny watched a husband and wife playing their machines side by side. He watched friends wasting the night hanging out and drinking and playing. Groups of people that were ostensibly together, yet were separate together.

  He became faintly aware of a series of electronic tones next to him, Newell removing his titanium wafer from its holster, Newell checking the number of the call, pressing a button.

  The ringing ended. “That should take care of them,” the boy said. He took up the drawl of a popular rapper: “Let's get this party started right.”

  “Once you start to play a lot,” Kenny answered, “you don't really think about each spin.” He recognized an urgency in his voice, a fervor whose intensity almost took him aback. Thinking over what he wanted to say now, he slowed down, took care to be precise, and repeated if not the exact words, the ideas he'd heard from his aunt through the years. “Here's the thing. The last spin was just like this one. This one is like the next. You lose and then you win and most of the times if you win it's just three coins. Even if it's a bunch more, they're only nickels.”

  Newell took in the wisdom. An exclamation point snorted through his nose.

  “Don't you need the machine to take your money first?”

  The boy grinned at his own cleverness, and now smacked the yellow button, an ecstatic punctuation. Computerized clicks sounded. Graphics simulated the acceleration of slots and then their slowing. The screen in front of Newell started blinking and flashing.

  “YEAAAAH-DAAAWG.” Newell pogoed on his stool. The musical notes of celebration continued. “THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.”

  3.4

  Francesca was long gone and most of the girl's friends had bailed, and what remained were friends of friends mostly, a few half friends, and a couple of kids the girl did not know, older kids, juniors and seniors, all of them scattered around the truck, resting on stolen milk crates, broken-down ice cream coolers, and a few old bar stools with torn cushions and leaky stuffing. Green Wool James was at this makeshift table. This douche bag named Piggy was next to him, nodding and using Wite-Out to paint the fingernails of her other neighbor, some zit-faced idiot with a white picket fence for a Mohawk—he kept dragging on a cigarette, then tapping its ash into a smoked green bottle. Talk about the war had died down, and attentions had turned to Sellout, this drinking game, everyone going around their little makeshift table, naming great rock songs that had been turned into commercials. The Beatles and “Revolution” for Nike got things started, although that was more a ghost story than fact, it had happened so long ago that most of the people in the truck hadn't been alive back then, nobody had even seen the actual commercial. But everyone knew about it, just like they knew “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones for Microsoft. And the Who got tagged for that “best I ever had” song, which had been used by Lexus automobiles. Then what all agreed was a damn fucking shame: Princess Cruises’ purchase of Iggy Pop's “Lust for Life.” Which was quickly topped by Black Sabbath's “Crazy Train” and its accompanying television spot for Nissan, which got tabbed as the ultimate crime against rock, until someone trotted out Zeppelin's barrage of Cadillac commercials, and Queen's “We Are the Champions” for an erectile dysfunction pill, and, oh yeah, the Ramones’ atrocity (corn chips or cell phones or whatever it was). Naturalamente, Dylan came next, “The Times They Are A-Changin,” the investment house of Bendem, Over, and Plunge.

  From the back of the truck, the girl with the shaved head kept trying to make eye contact with Green Wool James, but he kept looking away, into his paperback, whatever. Someone said “Blowin’ in the Wind” just got sold to a chili company, and laughter was everywhere, the jokes started flying. “All Along the Watchtower” for high-range sniper rifles. That “aches just like a woman” one for maxi pads. People were laughing and pounding their fists together and having a good time, and out of nowhere, Green Wool James wondered if there was a different standard for someone like Bob Dylan and like a one-hit wonder. Dylan was this icon and was recognized for a kind of integrity and already had more zillions than he'd ever know what to do with, so yeah, what's he doing, but then again, what about the band that struc
k it big with one song but hadn't seen any money from their music for ten years and now all of them had shitty real-life jobs. Green Wool James asked whether preserving the integrity of the best song you'd ever recorded was worth giving up whatever financial benefits and renewed exposure selling your song to a commercial might provide. He pointed out that half of the people making fun of sellouts were wearing Old Navy gear, and he pointed out that clothing companies like Independent and Vans weren't any better, they just made their fortunes by marketing directly to punks and skaters. James said he didn't see anything wrong with this. He liked it when a commercial used a song he recognized. It was a treat, just like when a television show he enjoyed watching—or a video game he enjoyed playing—used a song he liked. It put the song back into his head, which was a good thing, especially if he hadn't heard the song in a while. Green Wool James said he'd barely even heard of Zeppelin until he'd seen the Cadillac commercial, but after he'd seen the commercial, he'd downloaded their greatest hits, which he enjoyed a lot. James wondered when exactly it had become a law that where your song got played and how it got used had any bearing on whether you had integrity or what kind of person you were. He said he thought it was a lot more complicated than this, and quickly brought up the techno artist who sold a song to a commercial for a car company, then gave all the money to a group that fought pollution. Was anything wrong with that, James wanted to know. How about if your wife had cancer and the only way you could afford treatments was to sell your song to some burger barn?

  I think hierarchical elitism sucks, he said. Does that mean I shouldn't try to go to a good college?

  The girl was lit, kinda, and sitting a ways from the roundtable, and with the distance and how sound was reflecting off the hull, it was hard for her to follow just who was saying what, what was happening: there was James glancing up from his paperback to commiserate with Piggy about something or other; there was Piggy laughing—Where the fuck did you get “hierarchical elitism”? Half an overheard remark caused James to defect from Piggy into an impromptu threesome with the other boys, before a fragment of something else changed the pairings once more. The geometric configurations of dialogue were perpetually shifting and none of their formulations included the girl with the shaved head, which was fine with her, whatever. She was cool just sitting there, chilling out, and she stopped listening to them, gradually occupying herself with the sight of the broad wooden plank that served as their table. It was interesting to the girl that every time someone put down a beer, the plank jiggled. And it was noticeable that every time someone picked one up, the plank jiggled worse. The girl started grooving on the way the dark green bottles kept inching their way toward the far side of the plank, as if by osmosis or something, all starting in one place and creeping down like that. The plank was balanced between a pair of cinder blocks and some old telephone books and the girl with the shaved head wondered if maybe cinder blocks came in different sizes. If probably the cinder blocks and the phone books were at uneven proportions. In the hull's darkness, lit cigarette embers looked like so many fireflies to the girl, and she took a drag on her clove and decided to remember that image for a poem. She told herself that a vindictive and evil witch would not think twice about having all the bottles slide down the side of the table and dousing someone. A vindictive and evil witch just might turn your heart to stone.