The BIg Break (BBW Noir)

[mal57]

Mal Monsieur (aka MrWrong) is my name, BBW Noir is my game. This is a new story featuring my chubby chasing private detective Shiva Shapiro. DA was my primary venue though that's gonna change now that it sucks, and this is my first time cross-posting here. If you want to check out my other Shiva stories however, DA is where they live, https://www.deviantart.com/mrwrong1.

This is story #7 featuring Shiva though it can be read by itself, no backstory needed. First chapter is a little low-key but it doesn't stay that way.

Finally, vis a vis DeviantArt's "Eclipse" debacle (the irony...): if anyone is aware of any good places to post fatfic/WGlit/etc (besides here), let me know.

Thanks for reading.

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The Big Break (1)

I once found a hundred dollar bill on Hollywood Boulevard, saw a Silver Surfer on Sunset, met a midget on Melrose, got a blow job on Beverly, and divorced my (first) wife on Wilshire. But nothing good ever happened to me on Olympic, except maybe avoiding some bad traffic on the westbound 10. Then again, I couldn’t remember anything bad happening on that boulevard either. 

    Til tonight. 

    Why didn’t I take Pico instead?  

    | Hey babe - bad news

    I took a deep breath and waited for the first red light to respond to her text. 

    | What’s up?

    | Can’t come Sat 

    | How come?

    | Car died, my brother is supposed to come fix it Sunday

    | Can’t borrow your mom’s?

    | She might need it

    | I’ll come out there

    My erstwhile boo Luz was out in Riverside temporarily, taking care of her jilted mom. However it was going on six weeks since she and her son Lance had left their place in Boyle Heights and the arrangement seemed less temporary by the day. We kept in touch twenty-first century-style, Zooming, texting, and sometimes sexting, but there always seemed to be an excuse for us not to get together in the flesh. I was desperate to give her the benefit of the doubt but after 25 years as a private investigator I had more bullshit expertise than a manure salesman, and what I was smelling from her wasn’t mulch. 

    The dots danced for a little while and then stopped and bad vibes settled over me like a gift blanket from Lord Amherst. The phone buzzed ten seconds later, Luz on the line. 

    “Hey.”

    “Hey.”

    The light went green and I looked for a place to pull over. I took my first option, a Jack in the Box drive-thru, and parked behind the dumpsters. 

    “Shiva…” she began, and the catch in her throat was the only spoiler I needed to know how this particular movie was going to end. 

    I wanted to let her off the hook, tell her I understood. Sure, Luz was on the plus side of 250 pounds and thus a little too much woman for most guys, but she was also smart, funny, cool, and objectively beautiful, not to mention fifteen years my junior. I knew damn well a guy like me wasn’t supposed to have a Luz in his life, and even from first flirt there was a part of me that had been waiting for the universe to balance itself out again. I just didn’t think it would happen over the phone, in a Jack in the Box parking lot.  

    “It’s cool,” I told her. “Trust me, I get it.”

    “It’s not you, I swear.”

    “That’s nice of you to say.”

    “It’s just, you know, Lance needs my attention right now, and getting kicked out of our apartment…”

    “Wait — what?”

    I patted my shirt pocket for cigarettes, though I hadn’t smoked since Friends was still airing new episodes. 

    “Shiva —”

    “I thought you were out there because your dad split on your mom.”

    “That part was true,” she said. “But Lance and I were also being evicted. I told you the bookstore had been cutting my hours, I was broke.”

    “Jesus Luz, I would have given you the money…”

    “I’m not some loser who leans on her boyfriend for rent money, Shiva.”

    “Yet this isn’t really about rent money, right?” 

    “No, it’s not,” she sighed. “I needed a re-boot, Shiva. I want to go back to college, I want to be there for Lance. I want better, and I can’t get do it in the city, it’s too hard there now.”

    Light rain was falling, the lights of Olympic Boulevard behind me shining like multicolored confetti in the droplets on my windshield.

    “We’re talking about Los Angeles, Luz. It’s never been easy.”

    “I thought we could make it work long-distance.” 

    “Til what, I moved out to Riverside?”

    “I don’t know,” she mumbled. “Yeah, maybe.”

    “I’m a 49-year-old private detective who didn’t even finish high school. What the hell am I gonna do out there, be a greeter at Target?”

    “Target doesn’t have greeters — that’s Walmart.”

    “Like I said, I get it,” I told her. “You’re a great person, Luz. And you do deserve better, in all ways.”

    She was crying now, and though I wasn’t sure she should feel worse than me at that moment, there we were. 

    “You okay?” I asked.

    “Yeah,” she sniffed. “So is this it?”

    “That appears to be the case.”

    “You’re making it too easy.”

    “Want it harder?”

    She laughed, sobbed, recovered. 

    “Please take care of yourself, Shiva,” she said. “You deserve better too.”

    “Say hi to Lance, I’m sure he’ll miss me.”

    She snorted out a laugh. Both of us knew he’d miss me like a fungal infection. 

    “Goodbye Shiva.”

    “Bye Luz.”

    I don’t actually remember leaving Jack in the Box but a few minutes later I blew the light at Crenshaw and nearly wound up replacing the hood ornament on a white Lincoln Navigator. It wasn’t the first time I’d blacked out behind the wheel but certainly the first time I’d done so while sober. Horns blared from all directions as the Lincoln’s driver rolled down his window to give me a well-deserved verbal mauling. 

    “M-m-m-motherfucker wh-wha-what the fu-fu-fuck are you do-do-doing!?”

    His stutter was the least of his problems. A light-skinned black man in a white doo-rag, he was ugly on a mythological level, all caveman brow and cinderblock chin with razor bumps like ski moguls across both cheeks.  

    “Re-Re-Re-relax, asshole!” I yelled back. “Take a deep breath and count to ten. We’ll talk next week when you’re at eight.”

    I knew I was in the wrong but this was the United States of America so why let that stop me? I gave him a one-finger salute, made a three-point turn into the eastbound lane and drove on, now fully conscious, for better or worse.

[mal57]

The Big Break (2)

“Oh shit — is that you? Or maybe I’m hallucinating… who let Bill Cosby near my drink?”

    “It’s only been twelve years,” I told Ephraim. “Thirteen, something like that.”

    “Sounds about right,” he said. “Lucky thirteen.”

    Ephraim was at the end of the bar and I chose a stool six away from his. He was a stocky, pop-eyed Chicano with an enviably full, irrationally dark head of hair he wore slicked back with 40-weight, the tips tickling his collar. He still took tips from the Iceberg Slim style guide, black suit over a purple shirt he wore halfway open to his smooth, brown, convex belly. His 24-carat smile matched a gold chain thick as a #2 pencil around his neck, a stud in his left ear and rings on every knuckle, a fake Rolex peeking out from his right shirt cuff.

    The Blue Angel Inn was his place, a low-key jiggle ** amid the dollar stores, pawn shops and botanas of South Alvarado. Lushly proportioned ladies were its niche, from milkshake-thick to downright zaftig, a tough itch to scratch even in a big city of diverse tastes. From what I remembered the downside was that it was often quantity over quality at the Angel, where one had to ignore a few stretchmarks, C-section scars and gang tattoos, not to mention a missing tooth and some slipshod grooming here and there to get their fat on.

    Case in point, the bartender was a big-boned, busty black woman with Medusa braids and a face mean enough to boil ice cubes. Love handles twice the size of the ass below them spilled out of her stretch jeans and the pink tube top above gave her F-cup floppers as much support as a deadbeat dad gives his third stepkid. She glanced my way, didn’t seem impressed with what she saw, and so turned her attention back to the flat screen on the far wall, currently showing Jeopardy. 

    “Double Johnnie Red, neat,” I told the back of her head. 

    She poured my drink and pushed it at me without taking her eyes off the TV. It was the Daily Double after all, subtitles on so she could follow the action despite the booming, bass-heavy hip hop assaulting us from the club's sound system. Above it was a CCTV monitor and a buzzer for the front door. 

    I looked over at the empty stage, all stains and scuff marks under the pitiless house lights. Then I looked at my watch and realized I’d made a grave mistake. A tour of Auschwitz was less depressing than an off-hour boobie bar. 

    “When do the girls go on?” I asked Ephraim. 

    “Not yet,” he replied. “You’re mad-early papi, and the rain ain’t gonna help. This is LA man — you get a little sprinkle everyone turns into the Wicked Witch of the West.”

    I killed my skimpily-poured, watered-down scotch in two gulps and reached for my wallet. In the meantime Ephraim grabbed his drink, slid off his stool and chose another that narrowed the distance between us by half. 

    “The night is young homie, just chill,” he said. “Drinks are on me til then.”

    That changed the equation somewhat. I thanked him and put my wallet away.

    “Wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again,” he added. 

    “Same.”

    We let that marinate for a while as the bartender refilled my glass. 

    “You ain’t still married, are you?” he asked. 

    I held up a ringless hand. 

    “Yeah, I called that one right,” he scoffed.

    “A lot of people did.”

    “You lookin’ for company? I got a girl you gonna love, assuming your tastes are still the same from last decade, mas o menos…”

    “I’ll think about it,” I said, though I was already thinking about it. 

    He tapped and swope his phone for a few seconds and then handed it to me. 

    “Don’t think too long,” Ephraim warned. “You good with black girls?”

    “Sure,” I said. “The darker the berry…” 

    “…the sweatier the Jew,” he confirmed and the bartender rolled her eyes from Eureka to Ensenada. 

    The pic was only from the chest-up but there was plenty to like, plenty in general. She appeared plausibly millennial and rather attractive in a sublimely slutty way, sporting enough bright blue eye shadow to cause an eclipse, the brows above penciled arcs, her wig a lush, shiny Jerhi-curled cascade. And Jesus in my Rice Krispies, she was fat. Her cheeks were like twin scoops of mocha fudge ice cream squeezing her maraschino cherry lips into a perma-pucker, onyx eyes just barely visible behind them. Her primary chin was plumply clefted and the backup topped a half dozen rolls that surrounded her neck like a stack of chocolate frosted donuts. They in turn sank deep into shoulders so soft and round it looked like your hand would sink in right to your elbow if you touched them.

    “That’s Juicy,” he narrated, accurately. “27 years old, a short-stacked four-and-a-half bills of beauticious bootyliciousness. Lucky you, she’s only been working a couple weeks. Her schedule wound up empty tonight but it won’t stay that way, whatever the weather.”

    I handed Ephraim back his phone.

    “Okay,” I told him. “I could use some company. Or a lot of it.”

    “Yeah, I could tell,” he said, flashing a literal 24-carat smile. “Honey, text Juicy?” 

    The bartender dipped her fingers into her pudding ** of cleavage from where she retrieved her phone and began tapping. 

    “How much?” I inquired. I didn’t like how he sipped his drink before answering. 

    “Six,” he decided. “And whatever you wanna work out with her regarding gratuities — same as always.”

    “Jesus Ephraim, six?” I choked. “Is she gonna do my taxes too?”

    “It ain’t the Bush administration anymore, Shiva.”

    “And I’m not Donald Trump.”

    “Okay, okay five,” he relented. “And that’s ‘cause I know you. Or maybe it should be eight ‘cause I know you, right?”

    I shrugged my answer.

    “Man you people drive a hard bargain,” he said, the acid in his laughter melting the concrete floor like xenomorph blood. “Anyway she’s worth it — you’ll see.”  

    “She be ready in a half hour,” the bosomy bartender announced. 

    I gave her a sawbuck as tip that she took without acknowledgment. She slid it between her pontoons, the phone behind it.

    “Where am I going?” I asked. 

    “2532 Olympic, off Arapahoe. Koreatown. Buzz 4D.”

    It was close, a five-minute drive max. Plenty of time to hit an ATM, grab a bottle of something sweet for her and high-octane for me. I thanked him and we shook hands. 

    “Nice to see you again,” he said, showing off those El Dorado choppers again. “Don’t be a stranger.”

    “I won’t,” I lied.

    I was almost at the door when he called after me.  

    “Hey Shiva?”

    “Yeah?”

    “Cheer the fuck up. You’re gonna have fun.”

[mal57]

The Big Break (3)

  I could have — should have gone home and jerked it to some cyber tush, but time alone meant time to think about Luz. That her name meant “light” en Español was just too perfect a metaphor as I dove head-first back into the darkness and the desperate need for avoidance pushed through my dubiety like a guy on an all-egg diet trying to pass a three-day dookie. 

    The door closed behind me with a graven thunk, the living room shittily sterile as only a commercial Airbnb in a sketchy part of town could be. Faux-wood floors, Chinese-made furniture and discount air freshener, perfect for hosting frugal European tourists or low-rent johns like myself. I placed my package store booty carefully on the floor next to the welcome matt and waited, listening. 

    “Oh baby I was waiting for you…” 

    Juicy, I presumed, or at least an identifiably female voice. Always a good first sign. High-register and soft but thick like buttercream frosting, a bit breathless as well, a quality that often indicated the body attached to it was quite viscous indeed. 

    I followed the red glow past an IKEA kitchenette and a plastic ficus into the bedroom beyond where I encountered a nine-course banquet of womanly superfluity. Her chubbalicious mug was a sweet bonbon just as advertised, her queen-sized body nearly filling the full-sized bed, clad in a black translucent teddy that revealed and concealed with equal effectiveness. Roll upon roll of darkly delicious fatty fat ringed her torso, her limbs so packed with pudge they appeared almost prehensile, sporting so many bulges and creases a Victorian explorer could spend half a lifetime mapping their tubular topography. Big round breasts overflowed lacy black cups, the straps well-buried to where they were mere suggestions. At the center of it all sat a pretty plush pumpkin belly that spilled forth from sheer panties, with a tiny black bow on the waistband that nearly stopped my heart. 

    “You like?” she asked, following my glaze-eyed gaze, doll fingers twiddling the lacy hem of her lingerie.

    I could barely gulp my assent, my knees overcooked ramen. 

    “Give me thirty seconds,” I mumbled, stumbling back towards the bathroom. 

    “Okay but don’t make me wait too long,” she said. “I’m a very hungry girl.”

    My head felt like a half-full tank of nitrous oxide as I closed the door of the coffin-sized bathroom behind me.  As I hung my jacket and shoulder holster, avec Glock-19, it did occur to me that being in a separate room from my weapon whilst putting my banana into a strange **’s fruit salad perhaps wasn’t the wisest course of action. But I was too far gone now, flesh-buzzed enough to figure if I was gonna meet my maker there were far worse ways to spend my last moments on earth than atop of a near-quarter ton of portly paradise like her. 

    She was even more delicious on second viewing, now on her side with her mounds of manna pouring out fore and aft in a different and yet equally fascinating way. One hand supported her head as the other lazily stroked a Himalayan hip, thighs stacked like super-sized sacks of molasses.

    “Just one little detail before we get rolling, daddy,” she said. 

    “Gotcha, mama,” I told her, reaching into my front pocket for the rolled-up fee that I placed on the end table beside her. “And there’s a not-so-little gift in there for you as well, just for being you.”

    “Oh thank you,” she cooed. “You know we big girls always like a little extra.”

    “Goes for us chubby chasers, too,” I said, loosening my belt. “So, ah, what’s our time frame?” 

    “Ephie says you’ve got me all night,” she said. “And if you ask nice, I’ll let you buy me breakfast.”

    Five Franklins now seemed like quite the bargain and I regretted the high hand I’d played with him back at the Blue Angel. Yet a high-roller’s hook-up after so long an absence was suspicious as a canary in a cat house. 

    “Relax, daddy,” she said as I sat down on was left of the mattress. “You look tense — wanna get high?” 

    “Depends on the high.”

    “Just **. Do you smoke?”

    “Not since you were learning your ABCs.”

    “Well I’ve got some really good shit,” she whispered, as if the DEA had the place wired. “Fresh from Humboldt County.”

    I had to submit a clean pee and plasma test to the state of California every year to retain my PI and concealed carry license, but after some quick mental calendar consultation I realized I didn’t have to provide bodily fluids to the boys in Sacramento for another four months. Surely it was enough time to metabolize a few tokes of jazz cabbage… 

    “Alright, fire it up,” I told her.

    “Hang on.”

    She rolled over like a lava tsunami to the other side of the bed and reached down, displaying a grand buffet of derriere. Of equal interest were the exceptionally bulbous backs of her thighs, so plump and protuberant they resembled a spare set of cheeks propping up her primary posterior. The fat female form could render some rather exotic anatomy but I'd never seen anything quite like them. Interrupting my contemplation she then rolled back towards me to the pleading protests of the bed frame, holding a pink Zippo and a neatly rolled spliff. 

    “What do you think of my double-butt?” she said, glancing back self-consciously towards the features in question. “Kinda weird, right?”

    “In the best possible way.”

    “Good answer,” she giggled. “Anyway two asses are better than one, right?”

    She placed the ** between her lips and lit up, pulling in smoke like a sea lion preparing for a dive to the ocean floor. She then passed it to me before filling the room with a foggy exhale. Unfortunately I allowed muscle memory to take over, Cheech and Chonging my hit and coughing for a full five minutes in the aftermath, to Juicy’s combined concern and amusement. Once finished  my lungs felt like lava but the aftertaste was sweetly herbaceous and it wasn’t long before my synapses were bathed in a soft, distantly familiar THC glow. 

    “Excuse me while I kiss the sky,” I mumbled, easing back onto my elbows. She guided my head down onto her thighscape, which yielded like a cloud-filled pillow. I could smell her perfume, fruity and flowery through the smoke, mixed with the earthy aroma of fat girl perspiration. 

    “Good, huh?” she wheezed after a long, luxurious exhale. “More?”

    “God no.”

    “Okay then.” 

    She leaned over toward the end table and extinguished the spliff on a coaster, her weight creating a tectonic shift of the bed beneath us as her flesh moved tidally beneath my head. I then laughed for no particular reason, the room so hazy now I could hardly see the hallway six feet in front of me.

    “So what do you like?” she inquired. 

    “What do I…?” 

    “What do you like?,” she repeated, which was helpful as I’d already forgotten the question. “Got any fetishes? Besides fat, obviously… I’m open to pretty much anything besides doo-doo and stuff that leaves scars.”

    “It all sounds great,” I told her, Little Shiva swelling with approval. “But I think I just want to dive into your chocolate jaccuzi like Augustus Gloop.”

    “Well you've got that Golden Ticket,” she shrugged. “You like fat talk?”

    “What’s that?” 

    “Oh lover,” she hummed, her voice dropping an octave as she leaned into me in a marshmallow wave. “That’s where I tell you all about my big, fat body and how soft and heavy it is.”

    “Ah, right,” I mumbled as she walked her fingers across my lap. 

    “I guess you do like it,” she purred and gave my package a squishy squeeze. 

    “Wait,” I protested. My tongue felt like it had only a partial connection to the rest of me. “Give me a minute…” 

    “There's just so much soft, squishy, jiggly fat on my body, ooooh, and it’s all yours, daddy…”

    Her voice slid its way through my ear straight to my cortex as she pulled down my zipper and brought my sniper out from its nest.

    “You’ve gotta slow down,” I begged. “I’m about to blow like Krakatoa, and my recharge rate is not what it used to be.”

    “But then why did you let me get so fat for you? You know I’m just a big, helpless, greedy ball of blubber…” 

    “Ah, fuck.”

[mal57]

The Big Break (4)

 “Sorry,” she shrugged. “I guess it’s been a while?”

    She wiped her hand off with a Kleenex and then passed me the box to clean up the front of my pants. 

    “Yes and no,” I confessed. “I was in a long-distance relationship for a couple months.”

    “‘Was’?”

    “Yeah, it’s over,” I told her, hardly believing it myself. “Anyway you are good at that.”

    “What, fat talk?” she giggled. “Thanks, though I swear I didn’t mean for you to pop off so soon.”

    “I believe you, but listen, it’s a little crowded in here. Care to move over to the living room for cocktails?”

    “Sure, but you gotta give me a hand,” she said. 

    She meant getting out of bed, and she let me work just hard enough to feel every semi-liquid ounce of her without popping a vertebrae in the process. I watched gravity re-settled her lady luggage a bit lower on her body as she rose to her feet, though she was young enough to retain a smooth, perky, pulvinate appearance. And she was a short stack indeed, the top of her wig barely hitting my shirt pocket. I stepped back and she reached under her belly, allowing me a glimpse of her bald, Bengal tiger-sized pussy as she packed it back inside her panties. The shimmy as she pulled the side straps from her hips and snapped them back into place had her jiggling from her toes to her earlobes and back down again. I moved aside to let her waddle past me, watching every part of her quivered and quaked though her “double butt” thighs shook and slapped together with particular abandon. 

    “White russian okay?” I asked. I was at the kitchenette now unpacking the Kahlua, Stoli and quart of half and half I’d picked up at the corner store. In my experience big gals liked their drinks sweet and creamy, more dessert than digestif. I grabbed a pair of plastic low-ball glasses from the cabinet and filled them with ice from the minifridge door.

    “Delish,” she replied, licking her lips before she recklessly plopped herself onto the flimsy-looking couch. She pulled the teddy from between bulges and winked as I surveyed her seated form.

    “So what’s your name?” she asked. "Or rather, what should I call you?"

    I debated what to tell her, settling on the truth. 

    “Shiva.”

    “Cool. Am I the biggest girl you’ve been with?”

    “You’re not, but definitely the most beautiful.”

    Girls of her dusky complexion don’t blush but the way she bit her lip and fluttered her falsies was a close enough approximation.

    “So what do you do besides this?” I inquired.

    “Oh my god, terrible question,” she sighed, though still smiling. I'd asked because she displayed suspiciously good dental work for someone in her trade, not to mention her accent was way more student loan than street.

    “You can answer or not,” I told her. “Just making conversation.”

    “Screenwriter,” she confessed. “At least that’s what I came out here to do. I have an MFA in creative writing from Spelman. What a cliche, huh?”

    “Any luck?”

    “Not so far. I tried getting an internship at a studio to make contacts but those gigs always go to the Ken and Barbie types, and I can’t afford to work for free anyway. So I did a little character modeling, then fetish stuff, then porn, and now this.”

    “Seems like a great way to get material as a writer,” I suggested.

    “That’s what I told myself,” she sighed. “At least the first couple weeks. I had a temp job but it sucked dick and paid like shit. With this I suck the dicks and it actually pays pretty well.”

    I gave her drink a single stir and delivered it across a coffee table flimsy as a Tiddlywink on toothpicks. I sat down next to her on the fourteen inches of couch she failed to occupy and we tapped plastic cups. I realized I was still high as Sputnik as I glanced over and for a second thought she was actually growing bigger by the second, swelling up right in front of me. 

    “Mmm, yummy,” she said, licking her lips and batting her eyelashes like Japanese fans. “So what do you do?”

    “Private investigator.” 

    She flashed a smirk wide as the Cheshire cat’s Winnebago.

    “What?” I asked. 

    “I actually thought you were a cop.”

    “You weren’t worried?”

    “Cops like fat girls too,” she shrugged. “Anyway we have to talk — I really want to write a screenplay about a private detective.”

    “There’s an original idea.”

    “There are no original ideas,” she declared. “But as a black woman in the sex industry I have an original viewpoint.”

    I nodded my concurrence and sipped my drink. She drained half of hers with a slurp.  

    “Sorry, but I’ve gotta go pee-pee,” she announced. 

    “Yeah, no worries,” I told her. “Need help?”

    “I’m not that fat,” she giggled. 

    She rocked herself back and forth twice, lunged forward with a mighty gasp and then fell back with a cute little cry of frustration. It took many seconds for her quaking to settle into quivers and she looked as surprised as I felt at just how much movement one stationary body could contain. 

    “You okay?” I asked.

    “Okay, I guess I am that fat,” she admitted, with a grin that deepened her dimples and crowded her eyes. “And this damn couch is too low, too.”

    “Is that fat talk?”

    “I suppose, but it’s also true.”

    I helped her up again and watched her waddle to the bathroom. It was was pure visual Viagra, from her bountiful backfat to her quavering cankles, the double butt behind her thighs pure poetry in motion. By the time she (barely) cleared the doorway with her hips, things were getting crowded in my boxers again. I went to the kitchenette to freshen our drinks when I heard a Holy Fuck! through the parchment-thin wall between us.

    “You brought your gun???” 

    I forgot I’d left it hanging on the back of the bathroom door. 

    “Yeah, sorry,” I told her. “I should have mentioned it.”

    “How did you know I won’t go psycho and shoot you?”

    “You don’t seem the type — and trust me, I know the type.”

    I heard a flush and a few spins of the toilet paper dispenser. There was a long delay between the second flush and the sound of the sink, and another before I heard the door open. As the old song had it, Miss Juicy was built for comfort, not speed.  

    “Oh my god, that bathroom is re-dick,” she moaned as she finally squeezed her way out. “This apartment must have been made for anorexic midgets or something…”

    Testicularly recharged and enjoying my buzzy high, I was about to lead us back to the boudoir when I heard someone out in the hall, the exterior walls apparently made out of the same balsa wood and tinfoil as those inside the apartment. There was more than one person, how many I wasn’t quite sure, and though I couldn’t make out individual words something about the hushed yet urgent nature of their conversation tickled my ears like a nest of hungry hornets. 

    “What?” Juicy asked, noting my concern. 

    I put my finger to my lips as I nodded towards the hall. They were now directly in front of the door. 

    “This it?”

    “Yeah…” 

    I shoved Juicy aside — no modest proposition given her Holmberg 15A-sized center of gravity — squeezed past her and grabbed my Glock from the bathroom. I spun back into the living room and aimed just as the front door flung open with a splintering snap. A hoodied hood in black jeans and a ski-mask stepped through the breech, and began to raise a pump action shotgun to his shoulder before thinking better of it. Clearly he hadn't expected someone armed and ready. 

    “Drop your shit and put your hands on your head — slowly, ” I ordered, the intruder’s forehead bisected by the foreward sight of the Glock. He slowly put his left hand up in the air, and then without breaking eye contact bent at the knees and laid the boomstick down on the rug with his right. 

    “Hey, I think I made a mistake,” he said with a surprisingly even affect, straightening up again in steady slow-mo. 

    “An accurate assessment,” I told him. “Now take your fucking mask off.”

    “Come on dude, just let me walk away. Long term it’s better for your health — trust me. You don’t know who I work for.”

    “Funny, I’ve only ever heard that threat from punks. I’m glad you respect your employer but please don’t make me repeat myself.”

    I re-racked the chamber to reinforce the urgency of my request, hearing a short, sharp cry from Juicy behind me. The tresspasser flinched, nodded, and then slowly reached up above his head and removed his ski cap from the top like a waiter at a fancy restaurant uncovering an entree. I was now looking at a 30-something Caucasian gentleman with a dark buzz cut and a babyish face. 

    Thanks to the creaking of the cheap floor I could hear Juicy behind me, backing slowly into the bedroom. 

    “You know this guy?” I asked her. 

    “What?” she squeaked. 

    “Are you fucking deaf?!” I shouted. 

    “No!” she cried. “I swear!”

    “So you won’t mind if I kill him, right?”

    “No — please don’t…” 

    “What’s your name?” I asked the thug. 

    “Tom.” 

    “Okay, Tom, now step forward and turn around,” I told him. “Slow as a garden snail on morphine. I’m really nervous right now and this gun has a meth head’s trigger.” 

    “Let's not do this, bro.” 

    “NOW!” 

    I stomped the floor, making the room shook and Juicy squeal. 

    “Okay, okay,” he mumbled, turning in place. 

    Beads of choke-sweat dotted the back of his neck like morning dew. I turned the gun around in my hand then lifted it high in the air and brought the butt end down on the back of his head like I was pounding a six-penny nail into solid oak. He crumpled to the floor like a dollar store lawn chair and Juicy screamed like double murder.

[mal57]

The Big Break (5)

 “I swear I had no idea!” Juicy swore, dressing herself fast as she could, which was not nearly fast enough for my purposes. I kept the Glock on her as motivation but basic physics dictated how fast a woman her size did anything, regardless of intention.

    “I’m maybe 70/30 on that,” I informed her. “That’s why you’re still alive but your pimp might not be by tomorrow.”

    She was huffing and puffing like a storybook giant and anxious as an overbred chihuahua. The question was whether she was nervous as an innocent patsy in a bad situation, or she hadn’t planned on my continuing existence at this point. Though her easy manner leading up to the incident made me inclined to believe her, despite knowing whores lie like woodchucks chuck. She'd slipped a black maxi-dress over her mega body and now had one shoe on, trying to guide her tumid tootsie into the other one blind, clearly unable to see or reach past her own Juicy-ness. 

    I searched her ho-bag in the meantime and found no weapons or obvious tools of ill-intent, just a stash box, phone, condoms, lube, douche kit, spare panties and other tricks of the trade. I took my money back off the nightstand and put it in my pocket, then tapped her iPhone to life. Her screensaver was a snapshot of the famous Hollywood sign in Griffith Park.

    “What’s your password?” I asked, and she told me. “Anything here you wouldn’t want me to see?”

    “Well there’s this guy I met online… Keeps sending me dick pics. Yuck.”

    “I meant between you and Ephraim. I’m really not in the mood for any more surprises.”

    “You were a new trick, he said take good care of you — that’s all I know.”

    I looked through her texts, those with Honey the bartender and then with Ephraim, aka “EPX.” It was all quotidien pimp-prostie stuff, mostly the Who, What, Where, and When of our date. She'd finally managed to shoe herself but also wind herself with her efforts. Rather than getting up she fell back on the bed with a mighty chin-to-cankles flesh tsunami, exhausted. 

    “Don’t get comfy,” I told her. “We’re going back to the Blue Angel to straighten this out.”

    “Please… give me… a minute,” she pleadingly panted, eyes closed. She had her hand on her chest, breathing with her whole body. “I feel like… I’m gonna… pass out.”

    “No siesta, Petunia,” I warned. “Even if you’re innocent in this, we both need to get out of here before Plan B arrives.”

    She sighed and then reluctantly rolled herself over and up from the bed. I stepped over the thug still snoozing off his contusion in the living room, goosing Juicy along with my gun as she waddled around him. Out in the hallway she was moving slower than platectonics, head bobbing on her shoulders, arms held high at her sides for ballast. 

    “Please… we have to… stop,” she begged, her high, breathy voice now a barely-audible chirp. Her eyes were glassy, her wig askew, her ebony puss pouring sweat. 

    “Wait — are you alright?” I inquired. 

    “I… don’t… know,” she gasped, holding the wall. “I feel like… I’m having… a fucking… heart attack…” 

    “Oh shit,” I muttered as her knees started to shake, which shook the rest of her in turn. 

    She began to swoon and I reached out to grab her hand, but she pulled it away, leaned back and swung her leg towards mine with an ear-piercing Hi-YA! Catching her off-balance, I easily pushed her away. She took one shaky step to the side then fell into the wall and bounced back off it like a party balloon, dazed.

    “Damn it!” she screamed in flabby frustration. It seemed she'd been trying for a nut shot but as she could only raise her over-upholstered knee a few inches, barely able to softly pummel the front of my thighs.

    I stepped sideways and gave her a sharp thwack in the meatiest part of her tush with my gun.

    “Ow!” she cried. 

    “The bullets hurt way worse, trust me,” I reminded her. “Try that shit again and I'll happily ventilate your back forty.”

    Furious, she reached up to try and smack me back but stumbled, and her wig toppled off her head, revealing a dome as clean and smooth as the old Brown Derby restaurant on Wilshire. 

    “Oh shit,” she muttered, now breathless for real. “Can you grab that for me?” 

    The false coiffure sat on the carpeted floor like a stunned animal. I picked it up and handed it back to her. 

    “Alopecia,” she explained, shaking it out and stretching it back over her denuded dome. That explained the drawn-on eyebrows and the super-smooth FUPA. “All my hair fell out when I was seventeen and never grew back.”

    “Probably saves you a lot on waxing though.”

    I tapped her on the tush again, prodding her towards the elevator, which seemed to take four Star Wars sequels to arrive at our floor. Once inside I checked the weight limit reflexively, figuring we were well more than halfway to its thousand-pound limit.

    “Sorry about that,” Juicy said sheepishly. She was leaning against the wall, the spread of her backfat and bottom adding another eight inches to her considerable width. "I was a lot smaller when I took that self-defense course."

    “It’s okay,” I told her. “But FYI, that knee-in-the-balls stuff only works in the movies. Next time go for the face, and use your nails.”

    “I’ll keep it in mind.”

    The lobby was really just a vestibule but I made Juicy hang back in the elevator anyway while I cleared it, Glock-first. Outside it was still raining, the block empty. I kept my gun low and Juicy in front of me and eventually we made it around the corner to my car. As more than one plump paramour had reminded me, my Celica was not supersize-friendly and once inside she filled the front from door to gear shift. We pulled out onto Olympic with the car leaning so far to the right I thought we'd tip over.  

    “You should forget about this and go home,” she told me. “Ephraim isn’t someone you want to mess with.”

    “Please,” I sighed. “He’s a purple-pricked punk, like every pimp. That's why he set me up."

    We were waiting on the red light at Arapahoe as I ground my teeth and gripped the steering wheel like it owed me money.

    “But who wants to kill you?”

    “All kinds of people. I’m a private eye.”

    “Riiight…”

    “Which means I ruin people’s lives for a living,” I explained. “Most deserve it, but they rarely see it that way. I catch people sleeping around on their spouses, stalking their exes, avoiding child support payments, faking insurance claims, faking job applications…” 

    I was babbling, adrenaline pulsing through me like Metamucil through a goose. We were moving again, heading towards South Alvarado. 

    “I also help gather evidence for civil cases, sometimes with big money at stake. I’ve worked a few missing persons cases too, and some people don’t want to be found…”

    “Interesting,” she said. “This is good to know for my screenplay — I really should be taking notes.”

[mal57]

“Damn Shiva, this ain’t Target,” Ephraim joked, though his joviality seemed about as spontaneous as a basic cable reality show. “You got a problem with the merchandise, you let me know but you don’t bring it back to the store with you.” 

    “The merchandise was top notch,” I told him. I was moving towards the bar behind Juicy, whose U-boat-sized body hid my gun and every other part of me south of my shoulders. “The problem was with your customer service representatives.”

    “You back on the hard stuff?” he scoffed. “I got no idea what you’re talkin’ about.”

    I searched his face for bullshit, came up snake eyes but kept rolling. After all this was a pimp I was dealing with. 

    “Who paid you?” I inquired, revealing the gun to help focus his thinking. 

    “Yo man — don’t fuckin’ shoot,” he exhaled, hands up in front of him so quick I felt a breeze. “Nobody paid me nothin except you. Whatever else you’re thinking, it’s wrong.”

    From the corner of my eye I saw Honey, the bosomy bartender from before, slowly reaching below the counter. 

    “Put those bottle grabbers where I can see them,” I warned her with a wave of the Glock, and she stood up straight as a Marine in a girdle. Her chest took an extra second to follow. “And please, darling, kill the so-called music.”

    “I'm just gonna grab the remote,” she said. I liked seeing her nervous, maybe a little too much. 

    “That’s fine.”

    She took it from atop the bar, clicked a button and the place went blessedly silent. 

    Otherwise the Blue Angel wasn’t much more crowded than when I’d left. The only two clients I could see were a chunky black man in a gray suit at the end of the bar, sitting still as a statue and looking at me like I was his dead grandfather in a tutu. The other was a scrappy young Latino who’d been heading towards the bar but was now edging back towards the bathrooms. 

    “Stay where you are,” I told him. “Nineteen bullets in the magazine and I can afford to spend at least four on you.”

    “You’ve lost it man, calm down,” Ephraim insisted. I watched a single bead of sweat make its lazy way down his forehead to his nose. “What happened?”

    “Everything was going great,” I explained. “And then we had an unexpected visitor, armed and motivated.”

    “No idea what you’re talking about, amigo — I swear to fuckin’ god.”

    “So just a random apartment invasion?”

    “Gotta be, man. Juicy — you know anything about this shit?”

    I watched her wig swivel from side to side in front of me. 

    “Hey, this is my set — how the fuck am I s’posed to dance without music?”

    We all turned towards the stage, where a blonde-bewigged woman of mixed race and middle age had stepped out from behind a purple curtain. She stood glaring at Ephraim, hands on her hips, and Lords of Flatbush what hips they were. She was preternaturally pear-shaped to where even from the front I could see she carried enough keister meat to cushion an aircraft carrier, flanked by saddle bags big enough for a caravan of cowboys. Her waist was narrow and her shoulders scrawny by contrast, with teacup-sized titties held back by a bikini top that could have been a pair of Doritos connected by rubberbands. Of course I recognized her, All-Ass Annie unmistakeable despite thirteen years of female entropy and 40 pounds added to her namesake anatomy. 

    “Well?” she demanded, looking around the room. She then saw my gun and her expression quickly shifted from perturbance to alarm.

    “Oh shit,” she said, backing up towards the curtain. “Wait — fuckin’ Shiva Shapiro?”

    “Stay right where you are, Chunky Cheeks,” I warned her. “Last time I was here with you, I wound up leaving without my grandfather’s watch.”

    “The fuck you talking about? I don’ even know your damn grampa!”

    “Come on Shiva, you know that’s bullshit,” Ephraim insisted. “You were buzzed, you blew all your cash at the bar and then tried to dip out without paying for your lap dance. You gave me the watch to cover your tab and came back saying she took it.”

    “Is that right?” I asked, though it didn’t come out quite as rhetorical as I’d intended. The truth was I didn’t remember much from that period in my life so he could have been right. 

    “Yeah, it’s right. And that's when I eighty-sixed your ass,” he continued, wiping a fresh sheen of sweat from his brow. “But I figured shit, thirteen years, let’s let bygones be bygones…”

    “Hey, can I split?” the businessman inquired from the other end of the bar. He had his hands up in supplication. “I was just trying to have a drink and look at some booty. I ain’t involved in y’all’s bullshit.”

    “No,” I instructed him. I sat him back down with a flick of the gun. “Just keep your mouth shut and your head down and you’ll go home with your epidermis intact.”

    “My name is Ray, by the way.”

    “Who gives a shit?”

    “I read somewhere if a crazy guy is holding a gun on you, tell him your name,” he shrugged. “It humanizes you or some shit.”

    “Shut the fuck up, Ray.”

    “Gotcha.”

    “I’m Martín,” the Latino kid said in a shaky voice. “I’m very human.”

    “I din’t steal no watch,” All-Ass Annie spat, arms crossed indignantly over her chest. She shifted her stance, causing an insouciant shake of her eponymous asset. 

    “So you say, but even back then, you could have hidden Big Ben in that thing of yours,” I muttered. She was about to respond but I precluded it with some Glock attention.

    “Ah, guys?”

    Honey the bartender was turned away from me, looking at the security camera monitor. 

    “What now?” Ephraim sighed. 

    “Lock the door and close the front gate.” 

    “The fuck you talkin’ about now?”

    But I saw what she saw in the monitor and swallowed so hard my tongue nearly went down my throat. A big man in a white doo-rag and a black raincoat stepping up from the curb, holding something long and narrow at his side that wasn’t a softball bat or a bouquet of sunflowers. 

    “LOCK THE DOOR AND CLOSE THE FRONT FUCKING GATE!”

    “Ow!” Juicy cried as Ephraim suddenly pushed past us, snatching the gun out of my hand as he did so. 

    Before I could even think on that, he dove for the front door, bolting it, then flipped up a panel half-hidden below the transom and pressed a button. I heard a mechanical clank and glanced back at the monitor, which showed the man with the rifle stopping as the gate closed in front of him. He lifted the gun and pointed it at the security camera and we heard a thundercrack from outside that definitely wasn’t thunder. The screen went dead. 

    “Everybody get down!” I hollered, pulling a yelping Juicy onto the floor with me. 

    The rat-tat-tat of gunfire followed, Honey shrieking as a liquor bottle exploded beside her. I was spooned with Juicy on the other side of the bar, feeling her giant jellyfish of a torso expand and contract beneath my arm way faster than normal human respiration. 

    “Shiva, what the FUCK did you bring back wit’ you???” Ephraim demanded, kneeling at my head and pointing my gun at my temple. 

    “No idea,” I told him. “Sorry.”

    “SORRY???”

    “My god, oh my god…”

    It was the businessman from the other end of the bar.

    “You okay, Ray?” I called out. 

    “No, asshole — I got shot!”

    “How bad?”

    “My fuckin’ leg!” 

    “You didn’t answer my question.”

    “Fuck you!”

    “I’m calling the cops,” I heard Honey say. 

    “Bitch, take that phone out and I'll slice your tomatoes up into pico de gallo,” Ephraim warned her. “Police is the last thing we need in here.”

    “They’re coming anyway,” I said. “Even on South Alvarado, ‘shots fired’ is ‘shots fired.’”

    “Yeah I know, punk,” he growled back. “But the call ain’t gonna come from in here, and no one is gonna say shit about it when they do show up — right?”

    There was furious banging on the gate, then it stopped, and we heard yelling from outside.

    “OH-OH-OH-OH-OH-” 

    It first sounded like a man having the world’s angriest orgasm but after a few more stammered syllables I realized exactly who we were dealing with.

    “…OH-OH-Open… this fuckin’… guh-guh-guh-GATE!!!”

[mal57]

The Big Break (7)

“I juh-juh-juh-just want the white muh-muh-muh-motherfucker!”

    I formed a mental image of the stuttering, mythologically ugly driver of the white Lincoln SUV. The one that nearly t-boned me on Olympic, just after Luz had curbstomped my heart via Verizon Unlimited Talk and Text. 

    In a different head I wouldn’t have given in to random road rage on the streets of Los Angeles, as you never knew who you were trading motherfuckers and cocksuckers with. It could be just another frustrated motorist, or it could be the type who’ll send friends to bust into an Airbnb and shoot you, or if that doesn’t work, follow you back to a titty bar and kill you himself. 

    “Shiva — you know this nigga?!” Ephraim demanded. 

    “I do and I don’t,” I replied, as honest an answer as I could think of. 

    “Dickhead, this ain’t no time for riddles!” he hollered, flicking off the Glock’s safety. “You the only white motherfucker in here!”

    “I’m half-Jewish, half-Galician Spanish for what it’s worth.” 

    “It's worth me blowing half your motherfucking head off and throwin' what’s left of it to this King George the Sixth nigga as a peace offering!”

    There was more banging on the gate and staccato shouting, followed by an ominous silence. 

    “My leg is bleeding,” Ray the businessman moaned.

    “You ain’t dead so count your blessings,” Ephraim snarled, now looking around. “What the fuck happened to Annie?” 

    “She went back behind the curtain while you guys were arguing,” Martín informed him. 

    “She had the right idea,” Ephraim announced. “Everybody — stay low, head for the stage, through the curtain and out the back door. Bitches go first ‘cause I’m a gentleman.”

    “I don’t think I can walk,” Ray said. 

    “Then crawl, nigga! Juicy, get your fat ass up off the floor. Shiva, give her a hand.”

    I pushed at her plushness and felt the gelatinous rebound of her back against my chest but she was otherwise inert. Ephraim give her a tap on the side of her head as well but she failed to move. 

    “Shit, please don’t tell me my best earner had a goddamn heart attack…” he moaned. 

    I reached up over her shoulder and blindly fingered through her neck rolls to find a pulse. I dared breathe only when I felt it. 

    “She’s alive, just out cold,” I reported.

    “Fan-fucking-tastic,” Ephraim sighed. “It’d take ten of us to get her out of here… Honey, give me a cup of ice water.”

    “You thirsty?” she asked, incredulous. 

    “GIVE ME A GODDAMN CUP OF ICE WATER!” he barked. 

    She filled a cup from the mixer gun and handed it to him around the side of the bar. He then poured the whole thing over Juicy’s head, splashing me in the process.

    “What the…?” she sputtered. 

    “Wake up, sunshine, we got pancakes out back in the alley,” he snarked. 

    We heard a big hemi engine rev outside. 

    “How strong is that gate?” I inquired. 

    “Not that strong.” 

    “Shit.”

    “What’s going on?” Juicy asked. “Last I remember I was at the place on Olympic…” 

    “You have to move, very quickly,” I informed her. “That’s what’s going on.”

    “I got this,” Ephraim said, impatient, and then waved toward the other side of the bar with my gun. “You go help the nigga with the shot leg.”

    “My name is Ray,” he reminded him.

    Honey was already hurrying her wobbling self across the floor, bent over and holding her bobbling chest with both hands to keep it inside her top. Martín helped her up onto the stage and followed behind her. In the meantime I checked on Ray who’d been shot in the calf, likely a ricochet as there didn’t seem to be too much damage. A direct hit by the rifle I’d seen in the monitor would have been a first step towards a second career as a Moby Dick cosplayer. That said there was a lot of blood so I pulled off my belt and made a tourniquet just below his knee to be sure. As I did so, he cringed and cursed various people who’d apparently had intercourse with various mothers. 

    “This shit is your fault?” he asked as I helped him to his feet. 

    “Pretty much,” I admitted. “If we live through this I’ll buy you a new suit.”

    In the meantime Ephraim was prodding a dazed, waddling Juicy toward the stage, Ray and I behind them. 

    “I can’t climb steps!” she cried, stopping at the edge.

    “You betta learn quick then,” Ephraim hissed. 

    Juicy let out a frustrated squeal as she took the steps one at a time with the pimp’s impatient help, while Ray and I went around them and I helped him onto the stage ass-first and then up to his feet. I was last through the curtain when I heard the scream of rubber on pavement and then the Gojira-like crash and groan of a large vehicle colliding with a steel facade. I looked back one last time and saw the front wall had buckled but the gate hadn’t been breached.

    We were all backstage now, seven people in a space hardly bigger than a Hobbit’s walk-in closet. Juicy took the space of three all by herself, Annie two more so really it was ten and felt like fifteen. It was hot in the little room too, and it smelled of cheap perfume and just-been-shot-at sweat. Ray was looking scarily pale for a black man so I sat him down on the lone seat in front of a plywood makeup table. 

    “Oh god… I’m gonna… die,” Juicy gasped, having used all the oxygen her inefficient pulmonary system could manage. Her complexion darker than Ray’s though somehow she looked even paler. She leaned into the wall and slid down onto her fulsome fundament with a plop. 

    “The damn thing is stuck!” Annie was shouting. I looked over Ephraim’s shoulder and saw she and Martín were fruitlessly pushing at a steel security door, her frustration punctuated by the bouncing of her balloonish buns. 

    “Yeah I forgot I put the dumpster in front of it, locked the wheels,” he sighed. “Got sick of you girls steppin’ outside and gettin’ lost in back there between sets.”

    “I’m an engineer and that’s a serious breach of city fire codes,” Ray mentioned. 

    “Keep talkin’ and I’ll blow a hole through the back of that fat mouth of yours to match the one in your leg.”

    There was a bathroom behind me, of similar miniscularity to the dressing room, and reflecting on the bare drywall was the faint yet unmistakeable pale yellow glow of a street light. Pushing the door open a few inches further I could see a small window with wired glass above the toilet. 

    “Stay where I can see you, bar mitzvah boy,” Ephraim warned as he caught me eyeing the bathroom as escape route, however improbable. “You’ve had enough bright ideas for one night, trust me.”

    I made a few mental calculations and ran the odds as Ephraim turned away to help All-Ass Annie and Martín push at the door. They had it open a few inches now and another big shove got them a few inches more but then it stopped with a nasty screeching sound. 

    “Fuck this shit, I’m going!” Annie announced, before heedlessly trying to shove her hefty haunches into the breach. She made it further than I’d have wagered, though not nearly far enough. The door jamb was now dug in deep between her bulging bundt cakes. 

    “Ow!” she cried, wiggling and jiggling for several seconds with plenty of intent and little progress. Martín tried to help, giving her soft hip a solid shove. 

    “Fool, you ain’t paid to touch that!” Ephraim warned the kid, pulling him away. 

    We heard another conversation-stopping crash from inside the club, enough of a distraction where I was able to slip into the bathroom and climb up onto the toilet. I ripped the padlock off the rotten window frame and stepped up onto a shaky toilet tank as Ephraim shot two holes through the sheetrock, the women all screaming and Ephraim shouting at Ray to get the fuck out of the way. 

    I’m still not sure how I vaulted myself through that little window, but I am most certain I couldn’t recreate that feat again whatever the circumstances. The immediate next step wasn’t nearly as fortuitous however, as I found myself falling head-first onto the concrete below. With no time to put my arms out, my head and shoulder took the brunt of the fall and so rather than being able to jump up and make a run for it, I lay there for far too many precious seconds, unsure of what was up and where was down. The rain was coming down hard and cold and, likely the only thing keeping me conscious, and I considered the possibility my neck was broken. I smelled garbage and oil fumes and heard the groaning of the obstinate dumpster beside me, and then Ephraim’s outraged vocalizations from above. 

    “I’ll kill you motherfucker! I’ll fuckin’ KILL you, cabrón!” 

    The walls and ground morphed into Dalíesque arabesques as I struggled to my knees and then toppled over again, more stars in my eyes than Alpha and Proxima Centuri put together.

    “Please… Ephraim… this is murder,” I groggily pleaded. “You don’t want to do this.”

    “Oh, but I do!” he declared. “I really, REALLY fuckin’ do!”

    I stared up the barrel of my own gun with the pimp’s enraged satanic frog mask of a face behind it, strands of long, greasy hair falling over his forehead like tentacles.  

    “Thuh-thuh-thuh-there you are, fah-fah-fah-faggot.”

    He was at the front end of the alley, doo rag soaked gray, skidmarked skin gruesomely jaundiced in the yellow lights. He sauntered towards me through the rain, swinging the rifle at his side like Steve Garvey stepping up to home plate with loaded bases on a sunny summer Sunday afternoon.

    “You know the F-word is just as bad as the N-word these days,” I told him, with the confidence of a man certain of his own immediate demise. “Or so I hear.”

    “Sh-sh-sh-sh—”

    “Shut the fuck up?” Ephraim suggested. 

    I flinched at the report, loud in the narrow alleyway, as the damp front of thug’s doo rag flowered with blood. His eyes crossed and he crumpled to the ground like his bones had all been replaced by melba toast.

    “Ugly-ass Porky Pig motherfucker,” Ephraim muttered. I heard the hammer of my gun click. “Dammit, Shiva — you outta bullets.” 

    “No, I think you're out of bullets,” I informed him.

    “Anyway the cops are gonna be here any second,” he said. “Get your ass up and take the blocks out from under the wheels of the dumpster so we can get out.”

    “So you can kill me?”

    “So you can kill me?” he mocked in an exagerrated white man's accent. “Asshole, I could have watched that buffalo-headed motherfucker shoot you and had that in my dreams for the next week or two, and then taken him out. But I saved your sorry-ass life instead.”

    Of course he was right.

    “Thanks?”

    “De nada, puto! Now move the damn dumpster!”

    The adrenaline had leaked out of me along with the contents of my bladder and my head and shoulder felt like a bag of broken glass. Yet still I managed to crawl to the dumpster, where I pushed away the blocks from behind the wheels, then used it to stand up before rolling the thing away. All-Ass Annie immediately fell out of the door and stumbled across the alley, cursing as her massive mudflaps shook like a pair of epileptic toddlers. Martín emerged next and I heard the first police sirens from far away. The kid looked at me, then at the stuttering thug’s corpse fifteen feet away and took off down the alley and out onto South Alvarado where he disappeared. Ephraim helped a still-dazed and gasping Juicy make her way out and then Honey did the same for Ray.

    “It’s cold!” Annie observed, hugging her very naked self as she shivered from bingo wings to saddlebags. Ephraim gave her his jacket. 

    “I’m gettin’ the fuck outta here, see y’all never,” Honey announced and then jiggled off down the alley. 

    “You gonna get snatched,” Ephraim said. “Cops are waitin’ out there — don’t say nothing.”

    “Don’t worry,” she announced over her shoulder. “I’m blamin’ all this shit on him.”

    She meant me. 

    “Chinese is open, rest of us can go out through there, go out on 13th,” Ephraim said. 

    He stepped across the alley to another steel security door that had Mandarin characters stenciled onto it. 

    “Wow, you really fucked up,” Juicy informed me as we followed behind him. 

    “Such insight,” I sighed. “You'll make an excellent screenwriter.”

    Ephraim banged twice on the door and it opened. A small Asian man who could have been 38 or 83 looked out, shook his head and retreated, leaving the door open for us. Ephraim moved aside to allow Juicy in and All-Ass Annie followed, with Ray limping behind. As I stepped forward he let go of the heavy spring-loaded door and I caught it. When I turned to look at him, he smacked the left side of my head with my gun like he was tenderizing a 2-inch pork chop. I stumbled, fell onto my back and then slammed my head on the cold concrete for the second time in ten minutes. He threw the Glock down onto my chest and it bounced onto the ground beside me, then kneeled beside me and rifled through my front pockets til he found the roll of money I’d grabbed back from Juicy. 

    “Nice seeing you again, Shiva,” he said.

    The Chinese restaurant’s security door closed behind him with a thunk and I was alone. I turned my head and looked at my gun for a few seconds as the sirens grew louder and the world slowly darkened around it, until all I could see was the end of the barrel in a pinpoint, and then not even that.

[mal57]

The Big Break (8)

“It looks kinda cool,” she said, smirking at me from behind gigantic cheetah print shades. “Badass.”

    My hand reflexively went up to the Frankenstein-like stitches on my left cheek. I'd been unconscious at the time, but whoever had sewn me up in Saint Murphy’s ER seemed to have lacked opposable thumbs. 

    “Glad you think so,” I told her. 

    “Glad you recognized me with my clothes on,” she said cheekily, and with cheeks like hers she hardly had to try. 

    We were a month and a half from the melee at the Blue Angel, gone but hardly forgotten, as the multiple cracks to the cranium and Ephraim’s coup de grace with the Glock upside my head had left me with chronic tinnitus as a minute-by-minute reminder. The ear doc at St. Murphy’s told me it might go away and it might not, and in the meantime I was more or less learning to live with a tiny telephone ringing in my left ear from wakeup to pass out. 

    The man Ephraim had killed that night was Ternel Walter, a dope slinger from Watts. I’d caught the mule-faced mulatto at the tail end of a two-day crack and Hawaiian kush bender, which explained why he wasn’t inclined to forget our little tête-à-tête at the corner of Crenshaw and Olympic. He’d followed me to the Blue Angel and then sent a lackey to kill me at the Airbnb fuckpad in Koreatown, and after said lackey had defecated the duvet he decided to finish me off himself.

    Tinnitus aside, in sending me off to La-La Land Ephraim had done us all quite the favor, as when detectives came to see me the next day at St. Murphy’s I could plausibly claim amnesia. Ray, the businessman who’d taken a bullet in the calf, was married with four children and seemed rather hazy about the details himself. Ephraim, Honey, Juicy-Kayla, and All-Ass Annie all told the same tale of Ternel’s one-man siege of the Blue Angel, how we’d run for our lives out the back door. It helped that with a felony record longer than Moby Dick and enough narcotics in his corpse to kill a white whale, he didn’t make for a very sympathetic victim.

    There was still the matter of the mood-killng mook I’d left on the floor at the Airbnb but nothing had come of it. I suppose he’d woken up at some point and scrammola’d, and lucky for all of us it was the kind of neighborhood where you could find anything but a witness.

    “What are you drinking?” I asked. 

    “White russian, please.”

    I smiled.

    “Appetizers?”

    “Nah, I’m trying to lose weight.”

    “You sure?”

    It took her less time to reconsider than a female mayfly took to choose a baby daddy. 

    “They’ve got good jalapeño poppers here,” she informed me. “That’s like a vegetable, right?” 

    “On my food chart, yeah.”

    We were at an outdoor bar near the beach in El Segundo, which meant the planes taking off from LAX every few minutes cruised low enough over our heads to rattle the glasses on the tables. But because of the tinnitus noisy places were now my new best friends, and cool ocean air was bracing despite the periodic reek of jet fuel mixing in from above. 

    Juicy told me her real name was Kayla Hemple and ziplining 300 yards of high-tension wires couldn’t have shocked me more the text she’d sent earlier that day. Daylight rendered her sweetly pretty in her moonfaced way, a blue scarf covering her hairless head and her eyebrows drawn on in a far less Joan Crawfordesque way this time. Whatever her intentions, she hadn’t gotten any smaller in the meantime — perhaps the opposite, with her plethoric pulchritude packed into tartan pants and a black Spandex top that allowed excess flab to escape from every aperture possible. The blubber bubbling out from around her arms alone was enough to push a runway model into plus-sizes, while a muffin top twice the diameter of a king’s wedding cake ringed her midriff. The neckline of her top squeezed her shoulder flesh so it buffered her neck rolls like a pillow you’d wear on a long train trip. 

    I’m saying the girl was fat. 

    “So I assume you brought me here to kill me,” I told her as I returned from the bar and we clicked plastic glasses. 

    She waited through the roar of a passing DC-10 before responding. 

    “Pfft, with what?” she scoffed. A dismissive wave of her hand sent a ripple through the doll arm attached to it. “I’ve never held a gun in my life and you pretty much saw the extent of my martial arts skills.”

    “Maybe you’ve got someone putting a bomb in my car right now. Or you'll mickey my scotch when I'm in the john.”

    “Not my style. I’m just a round-the-way girl from Atlanta.”

    “You’re hardly just that,” I assured her. “So are you still…?”

    “Escorting? No.”

    “I assume that’s a good thing.”

    “I think so.”

    A beachy blonde barmaid dropped off the poppers, regarded the physical incongruity between us and gave me a big stoned smile. Kayla pinched a popper with bright blue talons and disappeared the little fried treat between her lush lips. I was mesmerized by her munching, the pumping of her cheeks as she chewed and the way the rolls around her throat undulated when she swallowed. 

    “You know I never did get paid.”

    “Sorry, I’ll take care of that,” I told her. “Double fee, the least I can do.”

    “Hmm, okay,” she said, popping a popper into her punim. “You get back together with your girl?”

    It took a second for me to realize she was talking about Luz, which made me wonder what else I'd told her that night.

    “No. How’s your writing going?”

    “Stalled like a five-year old Fiat. You still wanna help?”

    “Whatever you need, I owe you.”

    “Well I still wanna write about a private detective.”

    I laughed. 

    “What?” 

    “Nothing. My first wife was a reporter. We met when she did a profile on me for the LA Journal.”

    “‘First’? How many have you had?”

    “Just two.”

    She smiled, raising those penciled eyebrows above her shades as she partook of another popper. 

    “Well I promise we ain’t gonna get married, but I’d love to shadow you for a little while, see how you work.”

    “I’m happy to help, but a lot of what we PIs do these days is online,” I warned. “And when I do get out of the office it generally involves sitting in my car drinking stale coffee for two to twelve hours at a stretch.”

    “That’s okay,” she said. “I just want to get the essence of it, hear some of your stories.”

    “They’re equally boring.”

    “I doubt it. What are you doing tonight?”

    She bit her lip expectantly and not because she wanted to taste her own Chapstick. In the long seconds of silence that followed I listened to seagulls screeching over the light R&B on the bar’s soundsystem, quickly obliterated by yet another jet that sounded like it was about to crash into the parking lot behind us. A parade of thoughts marched through my head as I stared at her shades. 

    “Nothing yet,” I told her.

    “Good, let’s get out of here,” she said, and licked her lips in a way I was fairly sure didn’t involve residual jalapeño popper grease. 

    I waved over the waitress who dropped a check that I paid with cash. Kayla rolled herself off a bench seat that creaked with gratitude and hiked up her pants with a furiously flabby shimmy. She told me she needed to use the bathroom before she left and I drank in the  view of her toddling body like a bedouin at an oasis. Kayla’s gait was slower than a DMV clerk on quaaludes with that wide-armed, penguinesque waddle-walk of hers. Once she emerged I walked her to her car, unsurprised it was a fat-friendly Chevy Equinox.

    “Where to?” I asked. She leaned against the hood for a minute as she caught her breath. She then clicked open her doors and I helped her inside. 

    “My place,” she suggested. “I’m in Inglewood.”

    Not far, basically on the other side of the airport. 

    “I’ll take my own car if you don’t mind,” I told her. 

    She paused, not long but long enough to tell me all I needed to know.

    “You sure?” she said. “I can drive you back here later.”

    “I’m sure. So where am I going?”

    She told me she lived at 284 Clementine Street, off Hawthorne. I followed her out of the parking lot and as we wound slowly through late-day traffic I punched her address into SnoopSearch, my PI’s professional information aggregator. The house was a foreclosure that had been ceded to the city of Inglewood, condemned seven months ago due to severe termite infestation. The plates on her Equinox were registered not to Kayla Hemple but to a Daron Karabashian, who lived in Montebello, and belonged to a 2015 Land Rover. And the only Kayla Hemple I found was 86 years old, though she did live in Atlanta.

[mal57]

The Big Break (9)

I followed her for two miles on the 105 and then made sure to get in front of her. Waze was telling us to take Hawthorne all the way up, that the 405 was jammed up like a 500 pound girl in a hotel bathtub, but I got into the exit lane anyway and she stayed behind me. I sped up with Kayla right behind me and waited until we were just at the turn, where I made a quick left back down onto the 105, almost hitting the divider and bringing on much honking consternation from my fellow freeway drivers. 

    I looked right and watched the Equinox turn away down the exit ramp, already too far for me to see her expression. I texted her once I was back cruising steadily towards the Hawthorne exit.

    | Sorry, Waze confused me — see you there. 

    | NP

    As promised, Hawthorne heading north was clear as Crystal Pepsi and ten minutes later I cruised past the musty-looking court-style bungalow at 284 Clementine and parked in the service alley around the corner. I followed it back, ducking behind fences and garbage cans til I found the pocket-sized backyard, overgrown like a peek inside the panties of a 70s pornstar. The sun was setting and the back window was open, looking into the kitchen. I texted Kayla again. 

    | Here 

    | Ugh, still stuck in traffic X(

    | Sorry again! Parked around the corner, I’ll wait

    | Go on in, spare key taped under the mailbox 

    I waited for a long fifteen seconds, holding my breath, straining to hear over the ringing in my brain. Then I heard it, electronic chirping from inside the house — message received. Shadows shifted from within but I heard no voices. Just one of them. 

    I scooped some gravel from the ground, tossed it at the metal back door and then retreated behind the garbage cans beside me to see who showed up. A second later a tallish, thirtyish white man opened the back door. His dark hair was cut high and tight, his face roundish and cleanshaven atop square shoulders, all of it familiar despite six weeks’ distance and the brief, stressful nature of our initial encounter. 

    I stood up from behind the bins and aimed my Glock with both hands. 

    “Bang,” I said. 

    “Ah, fuck,” he whispered. 

    “Hi Tom.”

    “You gonna shoot me?”

    “That’s up to you. Drop the piece, kick it out into the yard and put your hands on top of your head. If you add any additional choreography I will indeed finish what we started back in Koreatown.”

    I watched him run through his options and was relieved when he chose the simplest, dropping and kicking his gun as told. 

    “Anyone else inside?” I inquired. 

    “Maybe.”

    That meant no. I moved out from behind the garbage bins, kicked open the flimsy back gate and made two long strides through dog shit and messy foliage to meet him at the back door. I kept my eyes and the gun on him the whole time, besides a glance at the weapon he'd kicked into the yard. A silver Glock 22, similar to my 19 but bigger, the .40 calibre ammo a bit more expensive and harder to find. The 22 was also a cop gun, LAPD standard issue.

    “The city not giving you enough overtime, Tom? You have to moonlight for Ternel?”

    “He’s dead,” Tom said. “You know that. This was for me.”

    “Revenge is for fools.”

    “So is whatever you think you're doing. If I'm looking at this situation, I see a home invasion.”

    “Isn't that ironic.”

    “Doncha think?”

    “So you're a cop?”

    “Does that make you nervous?”

    “Not particularly,” I told him. “I'm a PI and I’m good at it. I’ll find out who you are, whatever other extracurricular activities you’re into. I'll drop a dime to Internal Affairs and you’ll spend the rest of your life talking to the roaches in a protective custody cell at Chino.”

    “Yeah, yeah. But you won't kill me.”

    We stared at each other for a very long few seconds. He knew as well as I did that if I killed a cop it wouldn’t matter if he was kidnapping preschoolers and feeding them to his dobermans in his off hours. His buddies in blue would hunt me down and make me dead — that was the Cop Code. We also knew if I left him alive again he’d come after me like a dead girl in a Japanese horror movie. And even dumb as he was, he’d be sure not to fuck it up a third time. 

    “Hello?”

    Kayla’s tentative greeting from inside the house shouldn’t have taken Tom by surprise, but then smart, disciplined cops don’t wind up in such situations in the first place. In his ever-so-brief acknowledgment of her presence I dove for his knees and he toppled at Kayla’s feet like a stack of rotten logs. Tom immediately began scrambling back towards her, up on his elbows and kicking at my face as I tried to neuter his nuts with the butt of my gun. 

    In the melee a surprised Kayla jumped back out of the way, which begat a bobbling of blubber that had its own inertia well beyond her control. She stumbled then slipped on the dusty floor, reached out to grab the counter to steady herself but gravity had other ideas and the ungainly girl found herself falling helplessly forward — right into Tom. Her knee, doughy as it was, proved quite the blunt-force weapon this time as it slammed into Tom’s chest with her 450 pounds fully behind it. The rest of her came down on top of him like the Hindenberg into a New Jersey field, and she then tipping sideways towards his head, burying him. His disembodied legs continued to kick blindly, Kayla squealing and flailing as she struggled against her own intractable flesh. 

    I clambered to my feet and when one of his legs stopped moving for a moment I stomped it at the ankle like a pissed-off Riverdancer, so hard I cracked the flimsy floor below it and the ** bent beneath the heel of my oxford in a sickeningly unnatural way. Tom shrieked, and the nuclear blast of pain must have provided a burst of gamma ray strength that allowed him push Kayla off him and she rolled back into the kitchen wall like a duffel bag full of donuts. 

    I backed out the door leaving Tom in no condition to follow, pink-faced, shaking and clutching his lower leg. Kayla was crawling away from back where she'd come and I let her, her huge, plaid-covered ass waving goodbye. Deciding it was time to scram myself, I picked up Tom’s gun from the dirt and as I stood up I saw a neighbor peering out his back door at me, an ancient black man with no shirt, his hair a wild gray corona edged orange in the setting sun. I was happy to see he wasn’t holding a phone or a gun, and he didn’t seem to notice either of the two I was carrying. It helped he was twenty feet away and wore glasses with lenses that may have been borrowed from the top of a lighthouse. 

    “Who you?” he inquired. 

    “Department of Small Houses,” I told him. I holstered my Glock, dug into my pocket and flashed my PI license for him. 

    “What the hell was all that noise?”

    “Big dog in there, scared the crud out of me,” I explained. 

    “Mother-fucker!” Tom bellowed from behind me. “You’re fucking dead, Shapiro — Dead!”

    “A dog that can talk?”

    I heard a car door slam and an engine start, looked through the gap between houses and caught a glimpse of a silver Chevy Eclipse rolling back down Clementine Street.

    “You know at first glance it looks like the Lakers have been using your gutters for free throw practice,” I said, looking back at the old man. “Don’t force me to take a second look or I might have to write you up.”

    “Don’t you be lookin’ at my gutters, boy.” 

    “I’d prefer not to,” I said. “It’s been a long day already.”

    “Good evening to you,” he replied warily, backed up and shut his door. 

    I took Manchester back east, past the space ship-styled Forum, under the 110 into South-Central. A few blocks later I took a left on Main and rode up to 75th Street where an eponymously-named primary school happened to back up against the headquarters of the 77th Police Precinct. I parked under a shady eucalyptus beside the school where I took out Tom's Glock 22, cleared the chamber, popped the clip and removed the firing pin. I then wiped my prints off with a handkerchief, re-attached the cover plate, opened my window and tossed it over the fence. I found a payphone at a tease mall back on Manchester and dialed 911. When the operator answered I told her I’d seen a gun laying in the playground at 75th Street Elementary School and hung up. I heard sirens before the light changed at Manchester and Main.

    I saw the plan: He’d found Juicy, or Kayla — whomever — and paid her to be bait, luring me back to the empty house. He’d tell the incident review board he just happened to be rolling past, went in to investigate and I surprised him. A busted ankle and LAPD finding his service weapon in a schoolyard probably wasn't part of it. If the City of Inglewood's policy on such things was anything like most police departments, he'd be an unemployed gimp soon enough. And a dangerous one, but as I'd told Juicy/Kayla/?, plenty of people wanted me dead, several of whom were meaner and certainy smarter than him, and there I was. Still.

    I allowed myself a chuckle as I drove back to Hollywood, that turned into a giggle and was right-on roaring laughter as I pulled in behind my building thirty minutes later. I dragged myself up to my apartment and into my kitchen where I opened a fifth of Early Times and emptied half of it into a Muppets tumbler I’d received many years ago gratis for filling up my tank at Chevron. I drank down the whiskey like root beer and paused before the refill, hummed the first few seconds of a Black Flag song to myself and then listened. The ringing had stopped. 

 

    END

[swahilimonkfish]

Man, I'm looking forward to reading this. Saw you'd posted it on dA. Glad to see you posting it here to; more people deserve to read your stuff.

[mal57]

3 minutes ago, swahilimonkfish said:

Man, I'm looking forward to reading this. Saw you'd posted it on dA. Glad to see you posting it here to; more people deserve to read your stuff.

Thanks, I hope you enjoy it! Glad to see you're still around. I'm considering moving everything to a blog and just putting teasers with links on various social media.

[John Smith]

Not bad. Frankly, the story was not really my cup of tea but I feel some interesting potential coming along.

A Neo-Noir mystery WG short story series, that let involving a rather exotic protagonist and non-white secondary characters not being portrayed through incrementally-negative stereotypical ways?? 

[swahilimonkfish]

11 hours ago, mal57 said:

Thanks, I hope you enjoy it! Glad to see you're still around. I'm considering moving everything to a blog and just putting teasers with links on various social media.

Yeah, the blog thing could work. Especially for you, where your work is so distinctive. Putting it all in one place, a shrine to MrWrong and all in MrWrongness, seems smart

[mal57]

14 hours ago, John Smith said:

Not bad. Frankly, the story was not really my cup of tea but I feel some interesting potential coming along.

A Neo-Noir mystery WG short story series, that let involving a rather exotic protagonist and non-white secondary characters not being portrayed through incrementally-negative stereotypical ways?? 

Thanks. Do you feel I cross the line with the stereotypes?

O/A my goal is to play with the assumptions behind types, turning them on their head and transcending the expectations, rather than using them as shortcuts or for easy jokes. I try to create characters that have agency and aren't cardboard cut-outs, whoever they are. Does that make sense? I'm a white Jew of a certain age and demographic so obviously I can only perceive so much.

[John Smith]

8 hours ago, mal57 said:

Thanks. Do you feel I cross the line with the stereotypes?

O/A my goal is to play with the assumptions behind types, turning them on their head and transcending the expectations, rather than using them as shortcuts or for easy jokes. I try to create characters that have agency and aren't cardboard cut-outs, whoever they are. Does that make sense? I'm a white Jew of a certain age and demographic so obviously I can only perceive so much.

Well, you can still juggle with a few stereotypes without reinforcing them. One best example are the portrayal of Lex Luthor (impersonated by the actor Jesse Eiseinberg) in DC Extended Universe films, or about black protagonists in popular TV shows and films. Alexander Luthor Junior is semi-openly stated to be an Askhenazi Jew, an outlier on the IQ scale and quite a young, quirky, arrogant billion-grossing business tycoon. But these characteristical traits about the character, made by two young Jewish immigrants in the early 1940s and likely not so offensive back then but potentially now, stops there: what made the character a villain are his ideological, philosophic and selfish leitmotiv. At last, he's constantly contrasted to both Batman/Bruce Wayne (a multibillionaire psychopathic business tycoon like him with sime VERY questionable philosophical onset about vigileantism, but a Gentile) or most especially Superman/Kal-El/Clark Kent (a covert Space Jew - Krypton being a metaphor for ancient Israel. Or Atlantis?? Whatever... - coupled by a rambling, flying Jungiotic Messianic figure) .

Or again the title protagonists Luke Cagw and Black Lightning. Carl Lucas and Jefferson Pierce fits the superpowered outlier of the "Angry Black Man" trope (somehow regarding Luke, given the fact he didn't developped/inherited electrokinetic/weather-based powers) , but their respective shows goes and explores far beyond the one-dimensional Blaxpoitation roots of their original comic book issues.

 

Literal subversion of pop culture tropes are pretty trrendy in postmodern literrature. It's quite an exercice if we have somehow of a limited lens indeed - so ebery single of we, writers, have because we are humans after all - but what's matter is trying. Don't worry too much. 

[mal57]

On 7/30/2020 at 5:20 PM, John Smith said:

Well, you can still juggle with a few stereotypes without reinforcing them. One best example are the portrayal of Lex Luthor (impersonated by the actor Jesse Eiseinberg) in DC Extended Universe films, or about black protagonists in popular TV shows and films. Alexander Luthor Junior is semi-openly stated to be an Askhenazi Jew, an outlier on the IQ scale and quite a young, quirky, arrogant billion-grossing business tycoon. But these characteristical traits about the character, made by two young Jewish immigrants in the early 1940s and likely not so offensive back then but potentially now, stops there: what made the character a villain are his ideological, philosophic and selfish leitmotiv. At last, he's constantly contrasted to both Batman/Bruce Wayne (a multibillionaire psychopathic business tycoon like him with sime VERY questionable philosophical onset about vigileantism, but a Gentile) or most especially Superman/Kal-El/Clark Kent (a covert Space Jew - Krypton being a metaphor for ancient Israel. Or Atlantis?? Whatever... - coupled by a rambling, flying Jungiotic Messianic figure) .

Or again the title protagonists Luke Cagw and Black Lightning. Carl Lucas and Jefferson Pierce fits the superpowered outlier of the "Angry Black Man" trope (somehow regarding Luke, given the fact he didn't developped/inherited electrokinetic/weather-based powers) , but their respective shows goes and explores far beyond the one-dimensional Blaxpoitation roots of their original comic book issues.

 

Literal subversion of pop culture tropes are pretty trrendy in postmodern literrature. It's quite an exercice if we have somehow of a limited lens indeed - so ebery single of we, writers, have because we are humans after all - but what's matter is trying. Don't worry too much. 

Okay, I misinterpreted, thought you were dinging me for indulging in stereotypes here (Which I do!), though as explained I always try to subvert them and give them agency. 

And I was aware of the Superman connection... I mean, "Jor-El" and "Kal-El" is Hebrew! The origin story says it all: Superman arrives on earth after the destruction of his homeland, winding up the ultimate outsider in the Goyishe Midwest. Generally speaking that's the Diaspora of Biblical times, and more specfically to Superman the 1880-1920 mass emmigration after waves of pogroms by the Czars through the shtetls of Russia and Ukraine, and general lack of hospitality in Poland, Austria, Hungary and elsewhere in central and eastern Europe following a worldwide economic downturn. Siegel and Schuster's parents would have come to the US on that wave, as my great-grandparents did. (Then in 1920 racist president Woodrow Wilson and many others in Washington began aligning Jews with Communism, shutting down Jewish immigration until after the Holocaust... another story, but 1920 isn't an arbitrary year.)

Jews have done pretty well for themselves in this country since but in the 20s and 30s there was a lot of open anti-Semitism from the highest levels of politics, commerce, and media. William Randolph Hurst, the then-equivalent of Rupert Murdoch, openly advocated in his newspapers for Jews to be supressed if not banished, and Henry Ford as well. Charles Lindbergh, the biggest celebrity in the world in the 1920s, was an open admirer of fascism and also a virulent anti-Semite. Jews were formally banned from Ivy League universities (You'll see a lot of successful Jewish men of a certain age with degrees from City College in New York, "the Jewish Harvard"), and all kinds of trades and businesses. Hollywood is Hollywood because the New York-based movie industry refused to employ Jews but Southern California was a blank slate.

All that to say, as young men raised in this environment one can see how Siegel and Schuster would come up with the idea of an all-powerful outsider fighting for justice.

[John Smith]

6 hours ago, mal57 said:

Okay, I misinterpreted, thought you were dinging me for indulging in stereotypes here (Which I do!), though as explained I always try to subvert them and give them agency. 

And I was aware of the Superman connection... I mean, "Jor-El" and "Kal-El" is Hebrew! The origin story says it all: Superman arrives on earth after the destruction of his homeland, winding up the ultimate outsider in the Goyishe Midwest. Generally speaking that's the Diaspora of Biblical times, and more specfically to Superman the 1880-1920 mass emmigration after waves of pogroms by the Czars through the shtetls of Russia and Ukraine, and general lack of hospitality in Poland, Austria, Hungary and elsewhere in central and eastern Europe following a worldwide economic downturn. Siegel and Schuster's parents would have come to the US on that wave, as my great-grandparents did. (Then in 1920 racist president Woodrow Wilson and many others in Washington began aligning Jews with Communism, shutting down Jewish immigration until after the Holocaust... another story, but 1920 isn't an arbitrary year.)

Jews have done pretty well for themselves in this country since but in the 20s and 30s there was a lot of open anti-Semitism from the highest levels of politics, commerce, and media. William Randolph Hurst, the then-equivalent of Rupert Murdoch, openly advocated in his newspapers for Jews to be supressed if not banished, and Henry Ford as well. Charles Lindbergh, the biggest celebrity in the world in the 1920s, was an open admirer of fascism and also a virulent anti-Semite. Jews were formally banned from Ivy League universities (You'll see a lot of successful Jewish men of a certain age with degrees from City College in New York, "the Jewish Harvard"), and all kinds of trades and businesses. Hollywood is Hollywood because the New York-based movie industry refused to employ Jews but Southern California was a blank slate.

All that to say, as young men raised in this environment one can see how Siegel and Schuster would come up with the idea of an all-powerful outsider fighting for justice.

I cinsider myself as a history nerd (and attended such analog program as well, back then) but you're instructing me a lot about this episode of Western history.

Wow, that's crazy what people can do out of spite or ignorance, even fear about the "Other" . Superman has somehow successfully enabled to transcend these barriers of their host's making, although there has still a lot of work to do nowadays. 

 

These topics and their subverted allegories are what I appreciate the most about American comic book culture (especially the superhero genre) which renders them unique. Whether this is Superman, Batman, the X-Men, Spiderman and so on.

[mal57]

16 hours ago, John Smith said:

I cinsider myself as a history nerd (and attended such analog program as well, back then) but you're instructing me a lot about this episode of Western history.

Wow, that's crazy what people can do out of spite or ignorance, even fear about the "Other" . Superman has somehow successfully enabled to transcend these barriers of their host's making, although there has still a lot of work to do nowadays. 

 

These topics and their subverted allegories are what I appreciate the most about American comic book culture (especially the superhero genre) which renders them unique. Whether this is Superman, Batman, the X-Men, Spiderman and so on.

This is my family's history so I guess I have a special perspective and interest in it. Though really, a ridiculous amount of 20th North American culture was created by the descendants of Eastern European diaspora Jews, and often embodies their perspectives to varying degrees. Glad I could inform.

[AdiposeAdorer]

This is a hugely impressive, like all your Shiva stuff. There aren't many WG-stories around that feel complete and polished in the way yours do.

As far as your use of stereotypes go, I'm not exactly qualified to comment on how well that works, but I see what you're doing there, in terms of sketching out Shiva's world. I've always thought of noir as, fundamentally, city stories, and the amount of detail you put into this version of Los Angeles is a lot of what makes all this sing.

[mal57]

3 hours ago, AdiposeAdorer said:

This is a hugely impressive, like all your Shiva stuff. There aren't many WG-stories around that feel complete and polished in the way yours do.

As far as your use of stereotypes go, I'm not exactly qualified to comment on how well that works, but I see what you're doing there, in terms of sketching out Shiva's world. I've always thought of noir as, fundamentally, city stories, and the amount of detail you put into this version of Los Angeles is a lot of what makes all this sing.

I really appreciate that, thanks. I put a fair amount of time and effort into making these work beyond the fatty stuff and I'm glad it comes off that way.

As far as the stereotypes, one thing I neglected to say so far is that I've lived in a very large, very diverse city for most of my life and while these characters are fictional and certainly exagerrated they do "exist." That said, going forward I'll be more conscious of subverting expectations. As I (sort of) told Mr. Smith, letting stereotypes do the work of filling out characters is just hacky.

And yeah, most noir is urban though small towns can host the same situations. I'm thinking of Jim Thompson or Elmore Leonard, who've set noirish stories in rural settings. I'm a city guy so this comes easier to me. The problem I'm running up against is that my knowledge of LA is a little too limited to keep it as a setting, story after story. I've visited a bunch of times and even lived there for a few months so I've seen a lot more of it than the average tourist, but it's SO vast (100 square miles!) that probably 85% is still terra incognita. Yet Shiva is supposed to be a native and a guy who gets around, and I don't have that knowledge. Luckily I figure most of the few people reading these have never even been there so I can just keep faking it!

[AdiposeAdorer]

1 hour ago, mal57 said:

I really appreciate that, thanks. I put a fair amount of time and effort into making these work beyond the fatty stuff and I'm glad it comes off that way.

As far as the stereotypes, one thing I neglected to say so far is that I've lived in a very large, very diverse city for most of my life and while these characters are fictional and certainly exagerrated they do "exist." That said, going forward I'll be more conscious of subverting expectations. As I (sort of) told Mr. Smith, letting stereotypes do the work of filling out characters is just hacky.

And yeah, most noir is urban though small towns can host the same situations. I'm thinking of Jim Thompson or Elmore Leonard, who've set noirish stories in rural settings. I'm a city guy so this comes easier to me. The problem I'm running up against is that my knowledge of LA is a little too limited to keep it as a setting, story after story. I've visited a bunch of times and even lived there for a few months so I've seen a lot more of it than the average tourist, but it's SO vast (100 square miles) that probably 85% is still terra incognita. Yet Shiva is supposed to be a native and a guy who gets around, and I don't have that knowledge. Luckily I figure most of the few people reading these have never even been there so I can just keep faking it!

It definitely does come off that way. Not to be obvious but, these stories read and are shaped like actual literature, if that makes sense, in a way that even very good WG fiction rarely tries for. Not that there's anything wrong in not trying for that, of course, but it's interesting to see you pull this stuff off.

Personally, I'm from a country of about the same population-size as NYC, and while I've done a fair bit of traveling in my time, the only part of the US I've ever been to is Hawaii. So, as far as I'm concerned, you can keep faking it all you like. Though, I get that you might eventually run into a bit of a wall there, as far as material goes.