From Lemur
Tom Bradley

Spencer the unpopular bus boy lives in a duplex, puce stucco smeared over splintery frame, located in a lower-class residential neighborhood.

He drives up in his busted jalopy and parks on the street. When he gets out, a potato masher, pilfered from work, slips from his backpack and lands on his toe. He gathers it back up before it can be seen by the nice old couple who share the place with him. They're sitting on their front stoop, enjoying the night air.

Limping a bit, Spencer heads for his door.

"Good evening," says Mr. Nussbaum.

"Have you injured yourself, Mr. Sproul?" asks Mrs. Nussbaum.

"Oh, quite well, ma’am. Yet thank you for the proffer."

After he goes in, they exchange puzzled looks. "A kind of oral dyslexia, maybe?" speculates the old man.

———

Spencer's living room is poorly lit, cheaply furnished, and crammed with serial killer memorabilia. Lining the walls, crowding every corner, are candle-lit shrines to all the psychos whose pictures fill his locker at work. Spencer has every book, magazine and newspaper article about his idols, plus videos, DVDs, tee shirts, action figures, lunch buckets—at least one example of every novelty item ever marketed off the reputations of these sickos.

In the middle of the room is an uncomfortable-looking red vinyl couch with a coffee table positioned in front of it. Upon this coffee table sits a scrapbook, labeled ROSTER OF TALENT. It’s full of pictures and information about famous homicidal maniacs.

A large, provocatively-dressed African-American woman named Mahalia sits on the couch. Spencer stands behind, dressed in his food-stained bus boy shirt. At his direction, she leafs through the scrapbook and examines its horrific contents. She is supposed to turn the pages only when he says so, and to shudder on cue. Bored to the point of death, Mahalia suppresses yawns even as she tries to look and act scared.

Behind his back Spencer holds the potato masher. He intends to brain her with it when the right moment arrives.

"Turn the page, please. This man, Fish, Albert Fish, he poked sundry needles deeply inside his own personal, um, you know—"

"Not his wee-willy-winkums?"

"No, no." Spencer blushes. "His, er, intimate crouch area. And he kept them poked there for years and days and much of the bigness time. To keep him—"

Spencer forgets what he’s trying so hard to say, because he has decided to adjust his stance. He places his feet just so.

"—focused. The needles kept him—"

"You don’t say. Really?" says Mahalia. "I find that so shocking and scary. Like to give me the chills all the way up and down my spinal cord."

"Next page, please."

Spencer squints at the scrapbook and attempts to read aloud the text of a pasted-in newspaper article. This isn’t easy, because he is quite uncomfortable with the printed word. He contorts his face with mental effort, and laboriously sounds out each syllable.

"'For three years, this sc-scoun-n-n-ndrel terror—terrorized Cincinnati with a string of—' Turn the page. '—bru-talities that defy descrip—'"

"Not Cincinnati! My Auntie Louanda lives sort of by there. Well, actually, she’s a bit further out, on Route—"

Spencer clears his throat and Mahalia clams up. He raises the potato masher over his head and closes in, pushing his pelvis against the back of the couch.

"Yes, all these master geniuses, they always are leaving a majorly clue. Each has his own, the same, sort of, um, you know—" He glances down at his feet. "They leave it over and over again. Like a whatchamacallit."

"Try calling card."

"Like that. One of those. Some psychiatrical-type doctors say it’s because, deep down in their secretive insides, they want to get caught."

"Get caught? By the po-lice? And get their heads busted?" Under her breath, Mahalia says, "Sure, you bet, white boy. Tell me another."

"Other psychiatrical specialist, er, physicists, they say it’s like a mind game thing with the—" Spencer loses his train of thought again. There’s something amiss with the way he’s holding the potato masher. He adjusts it to a more threatening angle.

"I’m listening," says Mahalia. "I hear you back there. It’s like a mind game thing with the who? Try to tighten up, lover." She mutters, "So we can get this boresome shit over with."

"—with the detectives. A mind game with the apprehensive detectives. Like, what do you call, matching witticisms."

"Witticisms, huh? Mm, mm, mm. If that don’t beat all. You should run for president."

"Still other psychiatricalists say it’s more like an artist signing his work."

Spencer obviously expects a strong reaction to this startling revelation. He nudges the back of the couch with his knee. Mahalia does her best.

"Nawwww. You don’t mean it. Like art work? Get the fuck out. Like an oil painting or poem or concerto? Who would imagine such an immoral thing?" She yawns outright. "Serial killers thinking of themselves as artists. Is that just the limit of surprising evilness, or what?" She does an impression of a nasal Caucasian honk. "I mean, totally."

Spencer tries to up the ante. He just wants an unfaked reaction.

"Jack the Ripper—"

"Damn," says Mahalia, looking about the room. "Where?"

"He sent pieces of kidneys—no, it was livers, I think—something like that. He mailed them to the Pope over in Portugal."

"Now what kind of twisted intellect would mail terrible things to that little old sweetheart? The world is so very sincerely full of badness." Mahalia looks about the living room, pretending to shudder. "And such a house of horrors you run here, Sugar! Like a spook alley. But not in the racist sense of the term, of course." She flips a few pages. "In fact, I ain’t seen one colored face all evening."

She comes to the Ted Bundy chapter.

"The forceful police caught this master genius because they only caused a matching-up of his dentistry recordings against bite markers on a corpse's defunct, um ..." Spencer can’t bring himself to say buttocks in mixed company.

Mahalia turns to a photo of the bitten ass in question, and is finally put off. "Crazy honky motherfucker ... oops. Excuse me. Goodness gracious."

Spencer climaxes, or tries to. "Page! Turn it! This master genius' only tool was a double-edged razor blade, lesser than an inching squareness—" (reading over Mahalia’s shoulder) "... with which he inf-inf-flicted more dam-m-m-mage than any twelve axe murderers—" (creeping up slowly) "—because he took his time."

Spencer’s got the potato masher in both hands, and is wound up tight as Tiger Woods before a big drive.

"That is the most disturbing thing I have ever heard," says Mahalia. "I am sure it’s gonna give me goosenights and bumpmares. I mean nightbumps and maregooses."

She starts to laugh, spoiling the mood. His potato-mashing arm goes limp.

Glancing at her watch, Mahalia says, "Look, honey. Let’s get to the point. For another twenty bucks I watch you jack off, and we call it a night."

He does not respond.

She turns to look him in the eye. "Not a secretor?"

Embarrassed, he glances at a great mass of ketchup blister-packets piled high on the floor nearby. He's been pilfering the condiment from Lemuel’s Family Restaurant for years. Lemmy, the Lemur logo, seems to leer at him from the labels.

Spencer gives Mahalia what he thinks is his scary look.

"Oh, my," she says. "And how am I to interpret that facial expression? You know, we working girls are experts at interpreting facial expressions. Part of on-the-job safety. OSHA regulations."

He growls.

"Getting a bit pugnacious, are we? Well, how about this?" She stands up and looms over him. "In return for fifty bucks, I refrain from knocking you on your cracker ass and emptying your wallet altogether."

He tries to get his potato masher back up.

Mahalia belly-laughs. "That’s a very im-po-tent looking blunt object. Yes, and you a very im-po-tent man, I can tell. You act im-po-tent. You dress im-po-tent." She reaches out, caresses his weapon and strokes his stained shirt. "Ketchup is the closest you ever gonna come to being drenched in red, darlin'. I suggest you cling to them individual servings and squeeze with all your tiny might."

She turns her back on him.

"I won’t even bother robbing your weak-ass money. Take it to the grocery store, the bag boys will just laugh at me. Bye, now."

Tom Bradley's prose shares the legendary pages of London's AMBIT Magazine with those proto-Bizarros, J.G. Ballard and Ralph Steadman. His first nonfiction book is Fission Among the Fanatics (Spuyten Duyvil Press 2007). Various of his novels have been nominated for the Editor's Book Award and the New York University Bobst Prize, and one was a finalist in the AWP Award Series in the Novel. Reviews and excerpts, a couple hours of recorded readings, plus links to Bradley's essays in Salon.com and other such high-tone swanky magazines are at www.tombradley.org.