Yet-To-Come

“Sorry buddy, you can’t come in.”

“Why the hell not? I’ve been here before.”

“Not looking like this, you haven’t. We’re closing early anyway because it’s Christmas Eve. Why don’t you just go home?”

Dick could see that the doorman would not listen to reason. Perhaps he would listen to bribery.

“I can pay the five-cent cover,” Dick said, waving a nickel bag of future-poo black tar in the man’s face.

“You take that scag and get out of here before I call the cops.”

“I’ll be back with a Molotov fucking cocktail, you piece of shit.”

Dick stomped away from the club that tried very hard to be Studio 54. He put the heroin back in his coat pocket and fumbled around in there. There were a lot more bags of the stuff. He vaguely remembered grabbing them, but his recollections have been hazy of late. Even if it weren’t laced with future poo, smack wasn’t his thing. He must have taken it for its barter value, which now proved itself to be limited.

He turned right at the corner and started walking uptown. The doorman’s crack about his looks stung. He stopped and took a look at his reflection in a shop window. Christ, he was a mess.

He was back on the boner blow with a vengeance and his once form-fitting disco pants had their elasticity ruined through prolonged stretching. The fabric under Dick’s tumescence, starched and scaly, flapped back and forth like a pelican’s neck pouch. As unsettling a visual as that was, it was nothing compared to the rash covering most of his face. There was not only redness, but also cracks in the skin and hives that seeped.

It was an allergic reaction to future poo. He had never experienced one this severe and long lasting, but he had never been exposed to it the way he had back in late November. It was horrible and also so unnecessary. Dick thought about the events leading up to it and put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Josef Mengele and Edith Massey.

If Felix got the advance on the South American deal, he was going to spend part of that money to hire Edith Massey to play the older, heavier Tiny Quim. After the Jonestown massacre, Mengele could have at least tried to come up with an alternative plan. Instead, he cut bait. By the same token, Massey could have agreed to perform for delayed payment or equity, but she opted to simply stop returning Felix’s phone calls.

Oscar was undeterred. He was dead set on the scene where the not so Tiny Quim would take a shit on Ebenezer Spooge’s face. And if they couldn’t get the real Edith Massey, they would just have to create one of their own.

After many hours of work, Oscar constructed a bloated papier-mâché replica of Ms. Massey that resembled the actress in so far as she too resembled a bloated creation of papier-mâché. With its chicken-wire frame and heavy weights in the feet, the ersatz Edith was able to remain in a crouched position without falling over.

The big scene was ready for filming. Rhea donned a black robe to play the Ghost of Christmas Yet-To-Come, which required a lot of pointing but no speaking of lines. She was a little short to pull off the Grim Reaper look effectively, but fortunately, this was the 1970s so platform shoes were easy to come by.

Dick positioned himself under her gaping anus and Oscar yelled  “Action.” The papier-mâché figure was loaded with future poo and because Oscar felt no need to limit the amount to what a human being could produce in a single bowel movement, pretty much the entire interior was filled.

The plug was pulled and over 100 pounds of future poo was dumped on Dick’s face. The way his arms and legs flailed about, he looked like he might be in trouble, but it was also movie magic so Oscar kept filming for two solid minutes. When it was over, he scraped the future poo off Dick and slapped his face to revive him (Oscar was not about to attempt mouth-to-mouth).  Dick seemed OK despite having swallowed some of the stuff and almost suffocating. The allergic reaction didn’t kick in until several hours later and had since shown little sign of abating.

“I told you that pant-load porn was no good, you nasty man!” shouted a voice behind him.

Dick spun around and saw it was that prostitute from the Chelsea Hotel lobby. She stood with her hands on her hips and laughed at him cruelly. She might have warned him, but she was also very glad it happened. He hated her, but knew he would be on the losing side of a physical altercation, so he limped away toward Times Square where a monster like him would just be another face in the crowd.

He shuffled along the blinking lights of the vice pits while voices in the shadows offered every illicit substance available in 1978. They didn’t have what he wanted, but having stolen all of Felix’s boner blow when he grabbed the heroin, he still had a sizable supply.

He tried to remember why he took the stuff and ran. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but for reasons he could not recall and probably would not hold up under scrutiny. He thought harder. That was it. It was the means to cut loose and start over, and as he suspected, it turned out to be a stupid move in retrospect. On the plus side, this was a good place to sell his surplus smack.

He was approaching the Kaduki Theater, a Times Square movie house that specialized in shit porn. “NOW SHOWING: DICK SPITZ AND RHEA DYER IN YULE LOG HUMBUGGERY” was emblazoned across the marquee.

So the movie was completed after all. Dick had no recollection of that and was curious what happened. He bought a ticket and went inside.

Most of the film was pretty much how he expected it to be. It was just the last scene that surprised him. Ebeneezer Spooge had just seen himself have an old and fat Tiny Quim take a huge shit on his face, killing him in the process. Rather than accept that fate, he embraced the true spirit of Christmas, which meant getting non-lethally shat upon by Tiny Quim when she was young and hot.

There was only one problem. It wasn’t him in the final scene. It was Felix Pynchon and it was not convincing at all. Dick was enraged, but at present, the only outlet for his anger was to go to the box office and demand his money back.

“This is a sham. That was not Dick Spitz at the end of the movie,” he declared.

“How can you be so sure?” said the man selling tickets.

“Because I’m Dick Spitz!”

“Yeah, right. Last I heard, Dick Spitz wasn’t dying from face cancer so why don’t you run along before I’m forced to beat you with a tire iron.”

Dick saw himself running out of options. Just then, Nadine’s name popped into his head. She obviously really liked him when he spent the night at her place. He should go see her and fall in love with her until he was back on his feet. He  trotted off toward her apartment, fingers crossed.

It was very late at night so he had to bang on her door repeatedly to get her to answer.

“Dick, what happened to you?” she said when she opened the door and saw his face.

“I love you, Nadine,” Dick said.

“No, no you don’t. Look, I have to get up early to go spend Christmas with my family in Connecticut. I really don’t have time for this.”

“You’re going to want to make time. You see this rash on my face? It’s from poo, but not just any poo. It’s future poo. And how do I know that? It’s because I’m from the future as well.”

“You and the poo are from the future.”

“Yes! And because I come from the future, I already know what’s going to happen in advance. I know Ronald Reagan is going to be the next president. I know the World Trade Center is going to get knocked down 23 years from now by terrorists flying jetliners on a kamikaze mission. And when you know what will happen ahead of time, you can profit from it. I can make us very, very rich.”

“I thought I’d find you here, you cheating snake,” shouted a voice behind Dick. He recognized the voice immediately. It was Rhea Dyer’s.

“Wait, who are you?” Nadine said.

“I am his wife,” Rhea said.

“What are you, like 12?” Nadine said.

“I am almost 19 and I married Dick three months ago. It didn’t take him long to forget his wedding vows.”

“You know, I don’t need this,” Nadine said and slammed the door in Dick’s face.

Dick turned around and faced Rhea.

“I can explain,” he said.

“Please don’t,” she said. “Oscar has been worried sick about you and Felix, well he’s just livid.”

“What about you?”

“A little of both to be honest. I’m glad I found you before you wound up dead or in prison. We’re moving the whole operation to LA. The San Fernando Valley is the place to make porn flicks these days and there are more than enough junkies out there whom we can get to shoot future poo into their veins. Are you in?”

“Yeah. Hey, you’re not going to tell Felix that I blabbed about being from the future, are you?”

“I don’t think he needs to hear that. Besides, that girl didn’t believe a word of it so there’s no harm done. There’s a Christmas party tomorrow afternoon at the Chelsea, but tonight I thought we’d go back to your place.”

“Really?”

“What can I say? I’m a predator at heart. I successfully hunted you and now I want to enjoy the spoils.”

“But what about this?” he said, waving his hand across his face.

“It’s gross, but allergic reactions aren’t contagious. Don’t worry about it. I’ve fucked uglier.”

The two took a cab back to Dick’s apartment. He hadn’t been there in some time and there was the smell of rotting food in the kitchen and an unflushed toilet in the bathroom. He felt embarrassed about the state of the place, but he also felt something else for the first time in his life. He felt grateful.

“You know you’re going to have to quit doing Priapaine recreationally. It’s really fucking you up. That can wait until tomorrow though. It’ll come in handy tonight. I brought some with me in case you ran out. Let me spread you out a line.”

She handed the mirror to him and he hoovered it all in a single snort. His cock stiffened. He felt like he was the king of the world. Rhea mounted him as he lay on his back. She rode him slowly at first then picked up the pace to a fevered pitch.

“Oh fuck yeah,” she said. “Hey Dick, I got an idea.”

“What?”

“I want you to be even higher. I’m going to spread out another line.”

“I don’t want to stop.”

“We’re not going to.”

Still riding him, she leaned over and poured more white powder on the mirror. She made a fat rail and put the mirror next to his head.

“It’s to your left. I’ll hold the straw for you. Merry Christmas, Ebenezer.”

“Merry Christmas, Tiny Quim.”

Dick turned his head, put his nostril on the straw, and inhaled sharply through his nose. He felt the powder burn the hell out of his sinus cavity. He realized this wasn’t Priapaine he snorted. It was pure China white. He thrashed around, but Rhea stayed on him, riding him like a champion broncobuster. After a series of spasms, he lay still, his lifeless eyes staring up at the ceiling. Though Dick Spitz was dead, his erection was not. Rhea stayed on him until she decided she had enough.

She gathered her things and headed toward the door. She glanced over her shoulder to have one more look at the dead porn star.

“God bless us everyone,” she said.