can’t or won’t tell what happened to them there. Most of the locals know about the Black Box. I heard the warnings; that’s why I went.
You think you know me. I’m the sad, sick, deluded loser in the darkest corner of the club, who believes if he just keeps tipping, one day, maybe he’ll pay enough to do more than look. I am all that, and less. I keep coming, I keep paying, and they can barely bring themselves to touch my hand long enough to take money from it.
They know my name. They all shout it out when I come in, pretending to fight over me, but I always get Brandi. We have something special, she and I. She understands what I want.
She is not the prettiest, or the nicest. Drugs have made her scrawny and mean, but they have opened her to me.
She doesn’t fuck around. “Let’s get you started,” she says, grazing my crotch with a champagne bottle. It’s always open when I get there, and I’ve never asked to open it, like the other customers often do. I don’t want to know what’s really in it.
The first time, I was scared, like anyone would be. Sydni was my dancer. She had a weave and atrocious fake tits and a dangling tampon string. I dropped fifty on her for a private show, and another fifty for champagne. The only thing I remember after that is that she didn’t drink any.
I came to on a bus bench across the street from the club a few hours before dawn. A plane roared overhead, touched down and sucked newspapers off my body. I was wearing somebody else’s clothes, beer-soaked rags from the lost and found box at the club. My gold chain was missing. My wallet was cleaned out, and four hundred dollars was gone from my account, the limit I could pull out of an ATM.
There was only a hole from the first drink to when I woke up, a total void. Anything could have happened, before they robbed and stripped me. With such a vacuum, anything was possible.
But Nature hates a vacuum.
I waited a week before I went back. I wore shabby clothes and carried only a two hundred dollar roll. I cancelled all my credit cards and moved all but one hundred dollars out of my checking account.
They gave me to Brandi. She took all my money.
I woke up walking in a glade in Balboa park as the sun bled over the horizon. They gave me another glorious hole, but this time, dreams came bubbling out. Visions. Memories.
Slivers of what they said, when they thought I couldn’t hear, and what they did to me. What they did to each other. Her bony ass crushing my tiny cock, her long yellow teeth and dry gray tongue, the mouth of the bottle; her zombie eyes, sucking mine into a perfect void that ate me up and spit me out into the empty morning.
I go back about once a week. The drugs they use on me each time have the permanent effect of a heavyweight prizefight. Whole parts of my brain are going to sleep and waking less each time I recover. They get more brazen, milking me, steering me to the ATM until the bouncers cut me off and dump me on the street. I really believe they’re selling my blood.
The visions get richer, which is how I know my mind is not dying. They go on longer each time, you see, blending into waking life, so when I close my eyes, I can relive every moment in the hole, and more.
Because I could see things that I shouldn’t have seen, I started to wonder. I saw Brandi after they rushed me out, saw her shower and snort coke or go down on another stripper in the dressing rooms, and it made sense. I was seeing all of it through her eyes.
Her real name is Rhonda Elaine Scroggins. I see her go home to a trashed apartment and a boyfriend turning fat and bald, ripening into the spirit and image of the stepfather who taught her to do things to men for money. I see him hit her, make her suck off his friends at poker parties, see him feed her coke until her head is a buzzing hole of infinite possibility, and she will do anything. That’s when she is closest to me, closer than when I feed her bills at the club. I am the
You think you know me. I’m the sad, sick, deluded loser in the darkest corner of the club, who believes if he just keeps tipping, one day, maybe he’ll pay enough to do more than look. I am all that, and less. I keep coming, I keep paying, and they can barely bring themselves to touch my hand long enough to take money from it.
They know my name. They all shout it out when I come in, pretending to fight over me, but I always get Brandi. We have something special, she and I. She understands what I want.
She is not the prettiest, or the nicest. Drugs have made her scrawny and mean, but they have opened her to me.
She doesn’t fuck around. “Let’s get you started,” she says, grazing my crotch with a champagne bottle. It’s always open when I get there, and I’ve never asked to open it, like the other customers often do. I don’t want to know what’s really in it.
The first time, I was scared, like anyone would be. Sydni was my dancer. She had a weave and atrocious fake tits and a dangling tampon string. I dropped fifty on her for a private show, and another fifty for champagne. The only thing I remember after that is that she didn’t drink any.
I came to on a bus bench across the street from the club a few hours before dawn. A plane roared overhead, touched down and sucked newspapers off my body. I was wearing somebody else’s clothes, beer-soaked rags from the lost and found box at the club. My gold chain was missing. My wallet was cleaned out, and four hundred dollars was gone from my account, the limit I could pull out of an ATM.
There was only a hole from the first drink to when I woke up, a total void. Anything could have happened, before they robbed and stripped me. With such a vacuum, anything was possible.
But Nature hates a vacuum.
I waited a week before I went back. I wore shabby clothes and carried only a two hundred dollar roll. I cancelled all my credit cards and moved all but one hundred dollars out of my checking account.
They gave me to Brandi. She took all my money.
I woke up walking in a glade in Balboa park as the sun bled over the horizon. They gave me another glorious hole, but this time, dreams came bubbling out. Visions. Memories.
Slivers of what they said, when they thought I couldn’t hear, and what they did to me. What they did to each other. Her bony ass crushing my tiny cock, her long yellow teeth and dry gray tongue, the mouth of the bottle; her zombie eyes, sucking mine into a perfect void that ate me up and spit me out into the empty morning.
I go back about once a week. The drugs they use on me each time have the permanent effect of a heavyweight prizefight. Whole parts of my brain are going to sleep and waking less each time I recover. They get more brazen, milking me, steering me to the ATM until the bouncers cut me off and dump me on the street. I really believe they’re selling my blood.
The visions get richer, which is how I know my mind is not dying. They go on longer each time, you see, blending into waking life, so when I close my eyes, I can relive every moment in the hole, and more.
Because I could see things that I shouldn’t have seen, I started to wonder. I saw Brandi after they rushed me out, saw her shower and snort coke or go down on another stripper in the dressing rooms, and it made sense. I was seeing all of it through her eyes.
Her real name is Rhonda Elaine Scroggins. I see her go home to a trashed apartment and a boyfriend turning fat and bald, ripening into the spirit and image of the stepfather who taught her to do things to men for money. I see him hit her, make her suck off his friends at poker parties, see him feed her coke until her head is a buzzing hole of infinite possibility, and she will do anything. That’s when she is closest to me, closer than when I feed her bills at the club. I am the
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