King of the Perverts by Steve Lowe

Mongo says. I have to agree with him.
    We head a few miles down the road, away from the Ball State hotspots, and find a dive filled with older, more pathetic folks. The music is slower and not as loud, the lounge lizards deliberately making their way around the room in the languid motions of the drunk and the hopeless and the tragically out of touch with today’s popular culture. Mongo finds a quiet spot in the back of the bar, leaving me to my task of procuring a victim for the donkey punch.
    I sit at the bar and nurse a beer. I have no desire whatsoever to go forward. Mongo has kept his distance so far, but that won’t last long. He’ll be on my ass soon and then I’ll have to figure something out. But I have every intention of waiting until the last minute, hoping I can think of a way out of this challenge. I have no motivation, and it shows in the few poor interactions I have with women that come and go. I can’t help it. They all seem too nice to consider doing to them what I’m required by this goddamn challenge.
    By ten, the bar is packed with a slightly more diverse cross-section of society, probably aided by an influx of wannabes who couldn’t get into a more hip spot. People are streaming all over, talking, smoking, laughing, arguing, and all of them completely ignoring me. The bartender would probably have kicked my pathetic ass from my spot at the bar by now for driving away business, but he seems too busy at the moment to notice, either. I’m like a black hole on a barstool, and he’ll eventually get back to me and tell me to piss off.
    Despite my presumed invisibility, I notice a guy down the bar watching me. I realize he’s been there for quite some time, I just hadn’t really caught on that he was staring at me until just now. When he sees me watching him back, he raises his glass and nods in my direction. I look down at my glass. This would be just my luck. The only person in the entire place interested in getting naked with me is going to be this squirrelly-looking middle-aged weirdo with huge, tinted pedophile glasses. I steal a quick glance to see if he’s still watching me, but he’s not. He’s gone.
    And then he’s there again, right next to me. I look around for an escape but I’m boxed in. People are crowding the bar to place their orders or retrieve their drinks. There are five people positioned behind me in a semi-circle, their backs to me, jabbering away with each other, oblivious of the fact they’ve hemmed me in. Somehow, Mr. Pedo angles around them and squeezes right next to me.
    “Hi,” he says.
    I consider ignoring him, but that will probably just anger him. He’s got the look of your typical suburban serial killer, just waiting for someone to rudely snub him and set him off. I don’t really want to end up in pieces, stuffed in this guy’s chest freezer, so I respond with a very stiff-sounding, “Hey.”
    “My name is Jack Mehoff.”
    Shit. Of course it is. “Hi, Jack.”
    “I’m your biggest fan.”
    I turn to look at the guy. “What?”
    He repeats, in the exact same tone, like his response is a prerecorded message, “I’m your biggest fan.”
    I’m not sure how to respond. That’s not a problem because he doesn’t bother to wait for one anyway.
    “I picked you from the beginning. I think you have the perfect blend of charm, desperation, and compromised morals to be the King.”
    “What the fuck are you talking about?”
    Jack looks around, but no one is listening to us. “The show.”
    How the hell can he know about that? The show won’t even begin to air for weeks, well after the game is over. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Sure you do. King of the Perverts ? A reality-based game show built around the idea of a sexcathlon pitting ten contestants against each other in increasingly difficult – ”
    I cut him off. “Yeah, OK, just stop.” I eyeball the guy a little closer. He talks with a strange inflection and I’m reminded of a