Chicken by David Henry Sterry Read Free Book Online

compactor when she was five-eight and didn’t escape until she was five-foot-two. She’s wearing a silky shiny neon-green knee-length skirt with a silky shiny brown blouse that’s at least two sizes too big. The overalleffect of Georgia is fleshy, shiny, and smoky.
    I’m on the edge of the Cliffs of Hyperventilation, my mind mile-a-minuting, pulse pounding, trying to focus on my breathing. I don’t know it at the time, but this turns out to be a very smart move, and when I do manage to track down my breath and force it to get regular, I immediately feel power and control. And Lord, I need power and control right now.
    Frannie the Coma Girl. She loves me. Sunny told me so. I see myself in her mirror: long, muscled, and woody. I’m the sixty-minute chicken, star of my own loverstudguy movie.
    Georgia motions to the envelope on the dresser. A hundred-dollar bill lives in there. I casually make it mine. Just the act of making contact with the money is a great balmy calm to me and activates the voice in my head:
    â€˜Oh, baby … you love it, don’t you? Oh, baby, baby, baby.’
    An adrenaline subway rushes up me, tingly little charges that fire inside, like an addict when the score is knocking on the door. I pose by the mirror. I pose in the chair. I pose by the dresser. I shoot her with a look that has no smile in it, and when I catch her eyeballing me, this big bossy brassy ballbusting babe blushes.
    â€˜Would you mind … uh … taking off your … uh … clothes …’
    The power in this room has shifted, and it’s intoxicating. In real life I’m so small. Here I’m so big.
    Georgia wants me to tell her how pretty she is. Apparently her painintheassbastard husband never does.
    â€˜You know, as soon as I walked in, I said to myself, ‘She is really pretty.’ And you really are. If you were at a party and I saw you I’d definitely hit on you.’ I come from a long line of toads, and it flows out of me, easy as fur pie.
    She eats it up with a silver spoon. Asks me to play with myself. Play. I’m struck by what an odd phrase that is. Play. Jungle gym. Teeter-totter. Barbie dolls.
    So I lie on the bed, and I play. I like watching myself playing in the mirror. And I like the fact that she can’t take her eyes off me,but can’t look right at me, either. The air’s filled with sex, and I’m the bullgooseloony chicken.
    I conclude, based upon my very limited database, that women in Hollywood like to watch naked young men masturbate.
    My blood is coming to a rolling boil as I play, and if I squint hard enough I can imagine this crazy baby’s the beautiful minx star of my loverstudguy movie.
    Georgia shuffles over awkwardly, hikes up her skirt, and kneels on the bed next to my head, a bouquet of stale cigarette and nasty booze arriving with her.
    Where exactly are we going with this?
    Suddenly she has one knee on either side of my head. I disappear under the bigtop tent of her green neon skirt, and I’m swallowed up in her dark suffocating circus, where the clowns are scary and the lions unchained.
    As her nether underworld zooms in slow motion toward my face, the heat of Georgia blasts me like a furnace, feminine fresh chemicals burning the hairs in my nostrils. It’s like a scientist who never actually smelled a woman created an aroma of what female genitals would smell like in a germ-free world. But underneath lurks something dank humid and sordid, like her vagina’s been hanging out in a seedy bar. I can’t breathe. I’m drowning in all this alcohol-saturated smoke-drenched genitalia.
    It’s all I can do not to throw her off and fly away. But I can’t. The son of an immigrant is here to get the job done. And if I can walk out of this room with a hundred dollars, then at least I’m worth that.
    Georgia’s planted herself unmoving on my face. A joke pops into my head. As long as I’ve got