"I couldn't help it. You make me that way."
"Do you really want me, Tiff?" He was watching himself now as he always liked to do, chumping some little bitch off with his slick-stud number, not looking in a mirror but going off somewhere in his head and watching his performance. Pimping a girl off. Getting her off with his Charlie Charm shit. Smooth as stuff and double tough as Memphis Garrett Snuff. Run that game right down her throat, understand? Oh, he liked it when it was like this, when he could play the girl like a musical instrument, make her hum and sing. Make her jump and shout and knock herself out. It was making him so hard to watch himself inside his good-looking head and he held himself on his elbows right over her. "You really want me, baby?"
"Yes. Yes. YES."
"Ask me nice, then. Beg me for it if you want it."
"Please."
"What?" He let the head go in, it was already slick and it seared him with her cherry-red fire.
"YES, YES, YEEEESSSSSS."
Don't ever doubt there are some boss players out there who know how to take a little girl and make her a love slave. Just 'cause a few of 'em are thirteen, fourteen, don't think they don't got the ole diamond-cutter's touch for the big O. Cold got to be. Down, Jim. He could see himself getting her off now and hanging in there where a lesser stud would let 'er buck and kick loose. Hanging in and gritting his pearly whites in concentration, Stayhard Incorporated, and if you think I'm sexy, if you really, truly DO want my body, come on, girl, and tell me about it. Tell me more. Work with me, Annie.
"Nnnnnnnn," she responded to Dr. Feelgood's teen romance.
"Yes," he said, twenty-four hours a day and we're up all night.
"Uh." Slick as seals.
"Yeah." Fall in love with some of this. And Fourth of Julysville.
Oh, my. This is what they were talking about at school. Oh. No wonder. God. Oh. Oh, yes. Greg. Oh, you sweet, you perfect . . . oh . . . OH GOD . . . OOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH!
It's all he can do to make himself stay in her and keep the kisses going, a little soft reggae posturepedic boom-chickaboom-chickaboom-and TCOB, the doctor is still on the job, a few little gentle nuzzlings into the sweaty shadows, an endearment or two. Nice J.O.B., he thinks, and he's up and away and off chopping up some Hollywood high on the Formica.
"Let's do some lines, angel." Superstud.
Spain's first nightmares are gentle and deceptively lacking portent.
Even though it was only a nightmare, he saw it clearly, brightly, transcribed lucidly on the dream screen of his mind, a vivid and incredible scenario that was remarkably detailed and agonizingly real. And because of the absence of threat, it was all the more frightening to him. Unlike a dream where you're pursued by bad guys through a temple, jump into a waiting car, and just as you speed off down the hill, you run out of gas, and the nightmare comprises those seconds of fear as you hope the car's momentum from the downhill slope will carry it over the top of the hill to safety, but as it reaches the last few inches, the car begins to inch to a stop then starts rolling backward and the dream is your struggle to get out of the car as it rolls back toward them . . . unlike that sort of a dream, the nightmare he sees carried no overt threat. And later, when the violent dreams begin to assail him, he will remember this dream as benign and harmless, but when he has this dream, one of his first bad nightmares, it shakes him to the quick.
Here is the dream: it is afternoon. He is the sports-caster on a local radio station. No, he doesn't know why either, he was never on the air in his life and has little interest in sports. He is the color man, half of a famous color-and-play-by-play team, and the radio station is in the basement of a large metropolitan bank. The walls of the studio are lime green. He is quite successful and popular, and he enjoys a reputation for being adept at baseball, excellent at basketball, and the number-one color man for football games. These are all well-delineated details.
He is on the air. It is halftime at a big game. Saturday afternoon, and he can smell the smoke there in the hot, sweaty pressbox of the ball club.
The roar of the crowd.
"Unitas drops back," his play-by-play man says, "he's going to throw the bomb! Three seconds to half-time on the clock, Frank."
He responds without a trace of a lisp or hint of a stammer as he says, "That's right, Gil, three seconds and Unitas is in trouble, he's got to let it go now or — WOW! There it goes! What a cannon! Johnny Unitas gets off a perfect, textbook-classic spiral, what a gorgeous ball, and . . . unbelievable, Raymond Berry's got it in the end zone! A ninety-five-yard bullet out of the Unitas rifle and the Baltimore Colts end the half with a six-point lead over the Green Bay Packers as the gun sounds, twenty to fourteen."
"Into the spot, and you guys are sounding good in the truck," the voice says over the nightmare intercom. Dream logic confuses television and radio, but Spain is unaware of this and dreams on.
"Telegram, Frank," an engineer says, handing him the yellow Western Union envelope. He opens it and reads:
FRANK YOU ARE A WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT. I WISH YOU WERE DEAD. And it is signed Sylvester P. Landis III, and there is an address.
"Gil," he asks his phantom colleague, "who is Sylvester P. Landis the third?"
"Never heard of him. What's the matter, Frank?"
"Here," he says, "read this."
"Damn," the man says. "And you don't know this guy?"
"Never saw the name before. What ya think? Think this might be a prank?"
"Oh, hell, yes. Just some whacko out there listening to us. Throw it in the trash. Come on — forget it, man. Let's get the stats and go to work. You take care of the halftime and I'll pick up at the end of the color, okay?"
"Fine," Spain says, and he does a flawless halftime job. The baton twirlers, the marching bands, the Sousa music, he makes it all flow like fine wine. The rest of the game goes beautifully. At the end of the game he goes back to the station and there is a big fuss made by someone out in the parking lot. The men all go outside and find that the police have apprehended a weird-looking crazy who has defaced Frank's new BMW with a spray can of red paint. He has printed "piece of shit" on the trunk and "Frank sucks" on the passenger door in neatly sprayed aerosol Day-Glo.
"Do you know this man, Frank?" one of the uniformed cops says to him.
"No. Who the hell is he?"
"Claims he knows you. He says his name is Sylvester P. Landis."
"Some whacko. Look." He shows the cop the telegram.
"Did you send this?" The cops are looking at the weird crazy. He is a goofy-looking guy with a crazed, spaced-out expression. Thick, Coke-bottle glasses, horrible acne, bad teeth, a total loser.
"Sure, pig, so what? I wish Frank was dead."
"Uh huh. Mr. Landis . . . you are under arrest." And they drag the weirdo off reading him his rights, handcuffed, and ease into the back of a waiting squad car.
Time passes. Frank (Spain) learns the guy is a harmless crank who likes to send sportscasters hate mail. Spain seems to realize he is dreaming at this point and wonders what the hell all of this has to do with anything. But the dream plays on. The spray painting of the BMW is the first act of vandalism the crazy has ever engaged in, and he is released. There are calls and mail, but Frank ignores it all. Then, one night he returns home and finds his apartment trashed. Across the wall in red Day-Glo is the legend I WISH FRANK WAS DEAD. The police arrest Landis. He confesses. There is a trial. He is found guilty and sentenced to two years in jail for Defacing A Sportscaster's Property, but before he can serve time, he commits suicide in his cell. He has left a suicide note. Spray-painted in red on the cell wall it says: FRANK IS A PIECE OF SHIT.