I came back from the bathroom to find my favorite Delroy Shamoy paperback ripped straight in half—a scissor or knife or, God willing, a hand being the culprit. But whose scissor or knife? Whose hand? Whose hand has the power to rip a paperback in half like that, so cleanly?
Nobody wanted to look at me. Nobody even looked in my general direction. For a while I sat like the dunce with the cap, feeling sad and helpless. I wanted to order another drink, but the bartender passed without hint of stopping and I would’ve drawn more attention to myself by calling him over, so I sipped the remaining liquid in my glass, tonguing what I could of the sides. I did this for a few minutes before this too started to feel ridiculous. The tonguing. Who tongues a glass? Was it the tonguing that got the rest of the bar to turn away? No, I thought, I wasn’t tonguing the glass before I went to the bathroom. I was sitting quietly reading Delroy Shamoy’s third installment of his Castle Porn series.
I was thoroughly engrossed by Delroy Shamoy, even if it was the weakest of the books I’ve read so far, but damn me, I was going to see it through because I like Delroy Shamoy. I like the way he writes sentences and builds big ideas from the grainiest of nuggets. I like his characters, even the forgettable ones. I like that Delroy Shamoy is famous but not too famous, the way baseball players who hit home runs are but ones who hit singles aren’t. I like him a lot and have recommended him to scores of other people.
Which got me thinking… maybe it’s because his name is Delroy Shamoy and he wrote a book called Castle Porn: Year of the Sex Slave and the cover is hot pink and bordered by black crucifixes and the stock photo features a duck-billed woman with a pirate hat holding the hand of a dragon that is about to breathe fire into her face—though anyone who knows fantasy knows that real dragons don’t breathe fire, they breathe insecurities into their victims. They invite them to join future misdeeds by first poisoning and then convincing—it’s like magic.
All of that doesn’t matter if the only thing people see is the cover.
I retraced my steps, wondering if I’d lifted the paperback to turn the pages. Maybe, in doing so, they’d seen it. They? Or one of them, one single person. One single person can make a lot of trouble for a lot of people.
Shamoy taught me that in Volume 1 of Castle Porn where Derrick Underbolt’s inquiry into the rape of his younger sister does a hell of a lot more damage than the original crime and turns him into a murderer. His violent streak involves clowns, con men, pimps, tricks, a couple crooked cops, and even a cat named Dr. Slick that has prescient powers. By the third volume, the one I was reading before the cutting/ripping/slicing, his inquiries have taken him into a hellscape in which sinners of centuries past reside and are watched over by that temperamental talking dragon from the cover. His name is Sam, which I found funny. That an angry dragon would be named Sam.
Between the cover, the title, and the back cover’s tagline, which was now cut down the middle so that it read, “Will Underbolt Come / Out Alive?” somebody in the bar had had it out for me. But what could I do? I was not Derrick Underbolt with his preternatural knack for kicking ass and asking questions later. I was a stranger with a pornographic-sounding book that had been cut/ripped/sliced in half. Which got me thinking…
First, I want to make it clear that Castle Porn is not pornographic, not really anyway. It is not Fatal Blow-J or Scissor Spankers or Melle and Melange and Menage, such was the rotation of fantasy that my book club read and discussed over text and in real life. These were the types of books that eluded the mainstream media due to their provocative and often incendiary descriptions of sex, the kind you “wouldn’t bring home to mom,” the saying goes. They had found a mostly accepting spot among our group, however, because of two reasons: 1) We were all virgins except for our leader, Sadie, who surprisingly had a tougher time analyzing the sex scenes than we all did—so bullshit, so unrealistic! And 2) As I alluded, we despised what the mainstream recommended to us, the crap that littered talk shows and bestseller lists and bookstores and even libraries, though we mostly excused libraries because they were contending with the whole book-ban thing and had to offer something as a bargaining chip. These were books like The Vacation Plot and Reminders of Jake and The Woman Within. They were written in a syrupy and often sassy voice plagued with ironic, woke detachment, which wasn’t their fault since they were essentially doing what was expected of them in a post-earnest world… Anyway, we missed the books that staged heroes against zeroes and chained them to a bed, even if it was fantastic, even if it was, as Sadie had once put it, “an optimist’s dream or a masochist’s or both. I don’t know.”
Once, when I was a lot younger than I am now, I had a recurring fantasy of being chained to a bed, though my feet were where the headboard was, and it was like I was being carried forward on a raft. In other words, my feet would get to shore first. And who was doing the navigating? I wasn’t adept enough to captain a boat—heck, even a raft—so the steering was being done by a woman old enough to be my mother, who of course wasn’t my mother. She was whoever I wanted her to be, so sometimes she was a teacher and other times a home health aide, and once or twice a waitress with one of those order pads you see in diners. She was a woman of many vocations and talents and grace, who could make me feel as if I was the one with power, even though I was the one chained to the bed. A lesson I later learned is what the most powerful do: give us a smattering of hope before crushing us. In my fantasy, we never touched, but the idea that we could was sexualized enough, if only she would will it. She never did, and I wasn’t one to beg. It was one long cock-tease of a fantasy, the equivalent of a masochist stuck in an optimist’s dream song. Never-ending.
I promise I’ll get to what I was thinking at the bar, still in mid-thought about whether to challenge the other patrons, maybe the bartender himself, or to run. The last option wasn’t ideal because I still needed to pay, and since I couldn’t seem to make eye contact with the bartender or any of the barbacks, who were students my age or younger, I figured I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
We called our club Iron Fist after a favorite book of Sadie’s, and my slow, aching desire to bring in more urban crime fantasy, which is what I was attempting with Castle Porn, though still a call-out to the genre we proudly read. Not that it was devoid of sex—you don’t call a trilogy Castle Porn and expect sailboats along the Rhone—but it didn’t employ sex as an inciting element (though, in retrospect, maybe the rape of Derrick’s younger sister is its inciting revenge plot rolled into sexualized theatre, so it was thriller and camp in one). But it had enough whip-fast violence and crime clichés to appease even the most ardent reader, while being cheeky enough to mock those clichés—and did I mention that Derrick Underbolt was funny? A sense of humor like a ripcord when all other means and devices failed him. It delighted the rest of the group that Derrick Underbolt was funny and wise enough to propagate clichés while mocking them, and it made them interested enough to read Volumes 1 and 2 and genuinely excited to read Volume 3.
In between starting 3 and that moment at the bar, I’d read a piece—listened to a podcast actually—about Charlotte Rellabee’s new book, Exit Night. Rellabee was one of a slew of authors we rebelled against due to her soaring popularity and the way she’d eclipsed the entire fiction market, the entire publishing industry really. The podcast went on to say that prior to Rellabee’s success, her typical now-fan had gone from reading no more than ten books per year to twenty, most of which were classified as “beach reads” or “mystery-lite,” whatever that meant. Rellabee’s success, they claimed, had pushed those readers to consume even more books, making the connection, I think, between populism and exposure. What surprised me most was the number of fans who praised Rellabee’s treatment of domestic issues like abuse, fidelity, and sex. Her readers liked, the podcast host said, that Rellabee didn’t care so much about probing the ethics of these issues as she did writing lurid sex scenes and moving on. This was lazy, I thought in the car, before making the connection later in bed that maybe what Rellabee was doing was not so different than what authors like Delroy Shamoy were. But not wanting to give any more air to that statement, because it was ridiculous wasn’t it, I picked up Castle Porn: Year of the Sex Slave and smiled my way through Chapter 7 of Derrick Underbolt’s saga, moments before he’s about to meet Sam the Dragon.
*
It wasn’t that I couldn’t read it anymore either. The book was ripped/cut/sliced, not burned. Even if it had been, I could have always gotten another. Given how much I like Delroy Shamoy, I wouldn’t have minded another should I have ever leant it to a friend and not gotten it back, the way friends who are also heavy readers are guilty of. If I’d left the bar right then and there and gone home, I could’ve even applied some razzle dazzle to get the pages back into readable shape, probably enough for me to read through Derrick Underbolt’s encounter with Sam, depending on the pacing. How fast or slow or unearned or deserving. How long the fight would be or if they’d fight at all—one of Shamoy’s gifts was pitting sworn enemies against each other and not pulling the trigger, setting off the bomb, striking the match, etc., and seeing what happens when the readers’ expectations are frayed like the motives they’re reading about. In Volume 2 of Castle Porn, for example, Derrick Underbolt meets a former boyfriend of his late sister whom he’s convinced is connected to a crime family and, allegedly, the one who put a baby in her belly, which instigated a cover-up since the baby-putter-inner was also a state congressman—anyway, the plot gets complicated and is probably a story left for another time. The important thing to note is that Derrick Underbolt meets the former boyfriend in a pizza joint and plans on stabbing the Romeo through the groin as they’re seated at one of those old-school booths, with the red lacquer that absorbs as much grease as humanly possible, and the reader is led to believe that between the pizza and the lacquer and the potential blood, this will be a red-themed affair.
But Delroy Shamoy does nothing of the sort. Instead, he lets the two enjoy a pleasant enough conversation over some slices while the old boyfriend expresses his sorrow and Underbolt expresses his before a call comes in from Underbolt’s aunt who says she needs his help with her sick husband, thereby foiling the pizza parlor plan—
The point is that the potential mayhem is pacified by a conversation about pizza, it’s the old Shamoy trick [in Shamoy’s early books, long before the Castle Porn series, he employed a similar device, though in reverse: a mundane conversation about car rims, for instance, turns into a threatening display of male ego and eventually, kidnapping and murder].
All this drama or lack thereof, its ambiguity at the very least, was halted the second the cut/rip/slice occurred, as if my presence in the novel had been yanked away while in the bathroom, which is as good a time as any to say that, in retrospect, it did feel like that.
Time, I mean. Yanked. Pulled. Wrenched.
I was drunk. I realized this while seated at the bar, but standing in the stall made it feel worse. Senseless and sentient at the same time, like trying to turn a doorknob with giant mitts on, the work made easier in some respects and harder in others. And what they say about time when you’re drunk is true as well, that it stands on its head and does somersaults and throws a curveball when you least expect it, this time while my pants were down. I was in the stall and whizzing when I caught sight of the hairs around my belly button, how dark and untidy they appeared, and followed their imperfect lines up to my shirt where my stomach made a tide line out of it. I wasn’t sure how long it’d been since I shaved them, and in between trying to remember and deciding when I’d shave again (lest those hairs get out of control and completely cover what little skin was still showing, and the skin—how it sagged, sagged, sagged), I lost track of my aim and started whizzing over the seat. If you’ve ever whizzed on a seat, you know the direction the whiz takes is completely random. Even if you were a particle physicist you couldn’t be sure, and this whiz not only squirted back at me, missing my eye by only a hair, but it also cascaded down onto the blue tile floor, made wetter-seeming by the tile’s glossiness. And as it cascaded, though in retrospect maybe it was just a steady drip, the bathroom door opened and in came two footsteps. The footsteps stopped, at least the sound of them did, and then the door closed. There was a discrete difference between the door opening and closing—the opening squeaked and the closing harumphed. Harumphed, that’s a useless verb. Who harumphs? I was once again alone.
I cleaned the whiz using toilet paper and my boot, then used more toilet paper to grab the whizzed-on paper that had stuck to my boot. I could’ve opted for paper towels that were stacked by the sink, but that would’ve required momentarily leaving the stall to fetch them, inviting room for anybody, a total stranger in this case since I was an unknown in a bar full of unknowns, to walk inside the stall. I couldn’t imagine telling a stranger, “Hold up a second, I need to clean something really quick,” which would’ve made a stranger feel a hundred degrees of awkward and suspicious of what I needed to clean, but then again maybe it was honest. God knows we all need a little honesty sometimes. [FWIW, I don’t believe in God, at least in the personal sense. Derrick Underbolt is the same way—he believes that somewhere in the lineage of human development, perhaps as recently as between his birth and the rape of his sister, God went missing and exists only as a mirage of the good that once was. A sunrise along the beach where an old couple watch their granddaughter dip her toes into the water; a guardian in the form of a citizen who sees a rolled-over truck and rushes over to save the driver—even if said driver is already dead. The rushing over, Derrick Underbolt or God might say, is proof in itself.]
I left the stall, not before checking to make sure my boots were scrubbed of toilet paper debris, and made my way back to the bar, where, as you now know, my Delroy Shamoy paperback was ripped in half. Cut in half. Sliced in half.
I’m aware my arrival at the original premise, that is ‘Who in the world ripped my Delroy Shamoy paperback?’ has come full circle and, yet, has gone nowhere. It hasn’t brought me or the reader any closer to resolution. I’m also aware, as is sometimes the case with literature—though let’s be honest, ‘smut literature,’ doesn’t perform this unforgivable sin—there is a tendency of the writer to circumvent narration and leave the reader superfluously hanging in the balance, blind to the writer’s true intentions. The reader, so lost in the language, thinks though doesn’t say, ‘Is this for the writer’s enjoyment or mine?’; ‘Is this going anywhere?’; ‘Am I even having fun?’ [The answer to all these questions depends on trust. Is the writer worthy of it?]
Before now, Delroy Shamoy had never let me down, and maybe he still hasn’t, I don’t know. It’s not his fault that his words were severed in half, and while I still haven’t gotten to the good part, Chapter 7, where, presumably, Sam the Dragon is about to unleash a jubilee of troubles upon Derrick Underbolt, I can trust my experience that Delroy Shamoy will deliver. Whatever uncertainty and staged ennui that existed before Derrick Underbolt’s meeting with Sam will be deposited, henceforth, into the reader’s consciousness like splendid little daggers.
And I am sick of waiting. I’m sick of this bar where men suck air through their teeth whenever a stranger enters it who is not their friend or lover or drug guy; who grin when that person enters, but aren’t really grinning, they’re pretend-grinning before briefly acknowledging the stranger and saying something cutting like, “The pollinator is here,” which doesn’t sound cutting at first until they say it again, on another evening and another, to the same bartender, and to themselves, under their collective breath, “The pollinator is here, he’s coming to fuck us.”
Derrick Underbolt would never have said some stupid, baseless thing like that. Derrick speaks in metaphor in his mind only (‘The queue was a pack of abandoned dogs,’ ‘A coat like that of a spotted owl,’) but to the thug he’s about to expunge, “Do you want to die now, or would you prefer to eat your supper first?” Because his victims always seemed to be eating before Derrick killed them, ‘supper’ always meant supper. I’m not sure what Derrick would’ve thought when he finally met Sam, how he would’ve metaphorized Sam in his mind. Sam was already a dragon, and Derrick could not have thought, ‘I’m about to confront the dragon.’ Or ‘If I want to be free, then I’ll have to slay the dragon.’ Or something cheeky like, ‘He’s nothing but hot air.’ Maybe Sam, talking dragon he is as judged from the whimsical drawing on the cover, would’ve metaphorized Derrick Underbolt, and the two of them would’ve stood next to one another in a cave of burning relics, lost in the preponderance of misplaced thoughts, doing nothing for a while.
One of them will cry. One of them will break down and cry in the middle of not doing anything. One of them will cry in their mind if not in real life.
The pollinator is here, he’s coming to fuck us.
I heard it again and did nothing. Didn’t even think about doing something because, as I said, the words weren’t enough to affect me. They were poetic and maybe a little dulcet and absolutely fecund, which was funny considering I’d never pollinated anything in my life up till now. I was like the bee that had gotten lost in a rainstorm and had found the flower, the stigma, already spent and wasted. So I smiled when I heard it and produced the book, Castle Porn: Year of the Sex Slave, and laid it on the bar and went to the bathroom because if I was going to settle in to read, to finish Derrick Underbolt’s conquest (and the one to come, surely there was one to come), then I wanted to be well relieved.
I went to the bathroom that evening, same as the evening before and the evening before that one, and came back to find my Delroy Shamoy paperback ripped straight in half. Cut. Sliced. Who knows. Nobody looked at me, nobody said anything at all. I sat like the dunce.
If the pollinator comment had referred to me at all, it was like having heard something in the past tense. You sucked. You screwed up. You failed. The sucking, the screwing, the failing done with. The past as prologue, some important writer had said that.
I wasn’t going to fuck anyone. If I did, that too would be in the past. It couldn’t hurt me any longer.
I thought of Sadie, the non-virgin in our group, in between trying to get the attention of the bartender whose name I wish I’d gotten. Calling someone by their name will do a lot for their ego, but it can also do the reverse. It can make it feel personalized, like an unintended affront. I thought how Sadie would have no problem asking for her bill, she’d have no issue asking what in the hell happened to her book before fucking the bartender with her eyes, her candor, her heart. She’d take no prisoners or give no quarter. She’d apologize to no one for reading a book called Castle Porn: Year of the Sex Slave, the way Derrick Underbolt wouldn’t have apologized for fighting for his sister’s name and legacy, even though her life had ended years earlier. It’s funny that Derrick Underbolt never gave up in this pursuit, never gave up the ghost so to speak, he continued to chase it until he killed it and, once killed, till it haunted him again.
Waiting for someone to be the first to speak, I thought about this: the first time I came here. How it looked very much like it does now, with this group of caterpillars, hairy in their hanging on, looking at me to say something. The future rash of old carpet beneath our feet. The lack of dependable light from a spinning fan, and how the fan filtered new dust from old and deposited it onto glassware. The haughty patronage to hometown sports, like the bastion of mainstream book allegiance. Pendants. Awards. Tallies. Attention. Recognition. Fame!
Sadie, non-virgin scorekeeper she was, would hate this planned chaos. How perfunctory it all seems.
Charlotte Rellabee and her books would find a captive, mainstream audience among the caterpillars’ wives at home, soaking in their cornmeal-scented baths.
Delroy Shamoy would be prisoner of his own genius.
Derrick Underbolt, meanwhile, would have a drink, maybe a second or third, and just as he’s planning to strike, as he edges his ankle higher to grab the knife concealed in his sock, like a warrior in the Scottish Highlands, Sam the Dragon would approach and, without a hint of ironic detachment, say, “You are the light and the enlightened. You are the gun and the wound. You are the balm and the embalmed. You look starved, my boy, have you eaten? It’s time for supper.”
I sat like the dunce.
