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By Kitrell Andis

Poet Norm Slider, author of The Big Green Weenie Up Your A**, finds work in book retail, defiles 17 year old fan & saves harelip hooker from psyco pimp.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483501093

Book preview

CEO

Part I

1

It’s not easy, trying to get a bite of taco and squeeze into her ass at the same time. Not without slopping sauce on the sheets. Shauna has a thing about cleanliness.

Ow! Careful.

Her stubborn brown flower. Pursed and dry. Closed. The tongue makes little circles around it and she shivers; she starts moaning as the tongue pushes in. Oooohhh. Oh, yeah. Like that. Yeah."

A greasy finger slides in and she jerks. The tongue again, gathering saliva, a little bubble on her button, then ease the head in. She is panting, Ah! Ah! Ah!

Like that?

Oh, yeah, baby.

Then her butt is slamming back, doing the work. The stomach growls, taco sauce drips on my bare chest taking another bite. I reach around, running my hand down along her belly, into her patch. Her teeth start clicking as I massage the little guy in the boat.

I’m pouring sweat by the time she starts to grunt and jerk in little spasms. Come with me, baby. Come in my ass. C’mon.

I’m…trying! I gasp. And finally a few million years of biological instinct frees itself and starts swimming against the tide of cocaine we’ve been snorting, jumping little waterfalls of adrenaline, wending its archaic route until it finds its target—

Ah, shit—

And I collapse on top of her, panting, my lungs clawing for oxygen.

Hey, do you mind? You’re sweating on me, she says. Wait. Don’t take it out yet. And then she’s reaching over the side of the bed for Kleenex. Okay, lift up. Here, roll over. And she takes the condom off, wiping me with a tissue, before she wads the condom inside it.

I tell Shauna I read somewhere that that is the most frequent last statement from the dying.

What is?

Oh, shit.

Then she gives me a look of bewilderment where her eyebrows go up and her eyes roll together. Like two lead balls rolling down either side of a metal V, meeting at the bottom. What’s that supposed to mean?

She turns on the television with the remote—some Martial Arts flick—but immediately gets absorbed in staring at her long, red fingernails, which she must spend a hell of a lot of time taking care of.

Lying on her belly Shauna looks pretty good. Of course she’s only about twenty-four, twenty-five. She takes care of her skin, which is milky white down along her lower back and buttocks. And her thick, wavy ginger hair, parted in the middle and falling to her freckled shoulders.

But suddenly, bored with her nails, she rolls over on her back to light a cigarette, and there is the harelip again. It jumps off her face.

What’re you staring at?

I don’t say anything, but then I don’t have to.

It’s ugly. Think I don’t know that. People starin’.

Reaching my beer from the nightstand, I take a long pull. Then I look at it again, a good long look.

"Hell, it’s not that bad," I say.

Shauna glares at me.

Leaning down, I kiss her full on the mouth. When I try to put my arms around her she stiffens and turns her face away. Don’t.

What’s’a’matter?

I don’t like guys kissing me, she says.

Oh.

Jerry at the club says I ought to think about surgery. I dunno. Idea of somebody cutting me. Anyway, Buster says I got classic lines, I’ll age nice. That’s one of the reasons he picked me. He says who needs a face, right? We do videos for a couple years, make a little money and do a couple box covers. Then it’s back to dancing—features. Dancing as the feature, that’s where the real money is. Anyway, they got lightning tricks, make me look like a movie star. She smiles, pleased with herself.

It’s lighting, L-I-G-H-T-I-N-G, not light-ning.

Yeah.

Who’s Buster?

Huh?

Buster. You just said he’s gonna make you a star.

Shauna avoids my eyes, looking off into space for a moment. Oh, yeah. He’s nobody, just a guy, she says quickly, her green eyes going dull. After a moment they come back to life. My hair’s real, the color. My legs’re pretty good. And my boobs are perfect, I mean P-E-R-F-E-C-T, you gotta admit. She grins at me, reaching out a forefinger and running a blood-red nail down the center of my chest.

Uh-oh! Shauna cocks her head to one side likes she’s listening to distinguish some sound from very far away; then she’s scrambling frantically to get up from the bed. I gotta take a dump.

2

Trying to get another bite of taco, I dip sauce right on her sheet! Aw, shit. I pull the covers up to hide the orange spot.

What I’m doing here, I don’t really know. Well, no, that’s stupid; I’m here to get laid. That’s what I’m doing here. It’s all I’ve been thinking about since she called the office this afternoon.

Hello, this is Norm.

Hi, it’s Shauna. You told me you worked at BOOKsMART, but you didn’t tell me you were the manager. Wow!

At first I couldn’t place her, then she reminded me about the club last weekend, watching her strip for two sets, buying her glass after glass of champagne, which—she lowered her voice, whispering into the phone—wasn’t really champagne at all, but some carbonated fruit drink, and I’m like, NO! and she, "No, really! And then she was back to the manager again, The manager! I can’t believe it."

I’m not the manager, I told her, I’m the assistant manager.

Same difference, she cooed.

Not quite.

Of course she couldn’t have known about my situation. I don’t think, anyway. It’s hard to remember what all we talked about Saturday night; that memory like a pane of glass, suddenly shattered, shards of it sparkling, flying through the air. I know I awoke Sunday about noon in a state of panic, my mouth like an ashtray after a party, my head pounding. Linda wouldn’t speak to me the whole day; her two kids would look at each other, questioning glances, then at Linda, then at me. Linda would just shake her head when I tried to apologize. I can’t talk to you now.

Thinking back, it’s hard to remember when it started going bad. Linda would probably say last Christmas or right after, when I got a DUI and had to go to court and lost my license for three months. But maybe not; I mean, what the hell do I know about what she thinks anymore. We haven’t had sex since then, I know that for sure.

I think it started earlier, like last summer. Right after old Eddie Purcell got fired when the business was sold, and our new manager Wanda Kropke suddenly appeared. Picked by Corporate from another store, with no other interviews, she just showed up one day with the keys. A big-busted paranoid with stringy blond hair and the biggest ass cheeks I’ve ever seen. All fawning and obsequious until she thinks you might cross her, then bared sharp teeth are snapping at your vitals. That’s the thing that gets me. If she just behaved like the asshole she really is, she wouldn’t be so hard to fight. But she’s very good at dividing opposition. She never personally reprimands or disciplines anybody; if she’s out on the floor, she’s always quick with a smile for an employee, or questions about the employee’s spouse or sick mother in the hospital, and so on. Back up in the office, it’s a different story. She has me document every mistake she catches on her little walk-through in order to deny upcoming merit raises—‘9/4 June daydreaming at register, check for shortages at countdown…9/7 Bob talked back to customer at information desk, cut his hours…"

Old Eddie, whenever he got a little extra in his annual bonus from saving the company some money, he’d throw a party, paying for it out of his extra. I have a feeling we’re not going to be partying much this year, even though Wanda’s saving money, lots of it. In October Terri Brown left for a manager’s position at TOY LAND; she was one of our hardest-working, most efficient employees, and we’d have needed two people to replace her productivity. Instead, she wasn’t replaced at all. It was up to me, of course, to explain it to everyone. Corporate says we’re not hitting our sales projections, we’re going to have to pick up the slack… Then Greg Hinkle was fired reportedly for telling a customer that if she didn’t like how she was being treated she might want to shop elsewhere—which is actually believable. He was a skinny, pimply, nose-picking geek with terrible hygiene, but he was also the best goddamned merchandiser I’ve ever seen; unfortunately he was also arrogant and condescending to everyone.

Two people gone and not replaced, that seemed to satisfy Wanda; she almost took on a little glow. But then in early November, the furnace started acting up and we had to have the repair people in. One day in the office she