ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM
                        
The Cock Blockers
(part 2)
                          5.

May 9th.  Turning into the Dairy Queen parking lot, Stretch noticed the Wes mobile, an early nineties model Mustang GT 5.slow, parked in front like a sprung mousetrap.  Its presence confirmed Gina Jamerson was indeed working the afternoon shift.
Wes sat in a corner booth near the door.  He huddled over a chocolate milkshake.  Pinching the straw in his teeth, he eased it up five inches from the cup before taking the straw to the back of his throat.
Stretch shook his head.  “This is going to be the easiest three hundred bucks I ever made… and I useta sling dope for a living.”
When he entered the lobby, Wes almost gagged on his straw.  This was what Wes feared the most, the reason he spent so many hours loitering at DQ slurping a myriad milkshake, fellating a phalanx of straws.  The prospect of another man with more than an acorn hat for a cock and a wealth of experience in the ways of love making speaking Gina Jamerson kept Wes awake at night gripping his fleshlight like a crucifix.
At the counter Stretch noticed Wes straining his neck to see what was going on.  Unfortunately, what was going on was a long time in coming.  He must have stood in front of that fucking cash register ten fucking minutes, watching Gina Jamerson’s thatch of blonde hair bounce around behind the kitchen service window as she flirted with the toothless, muletted mulatto short order cook and the whup-eyed Venezuelan dishwasher.
Finally after some fleeting eye contact and an exaggerated eye roll for the amusement of the swarthy kitchen help, Gina Jamerson returned to her station behind the cash register.
“Can I help you?”
Damn, Stretch thought, she talked as though she had never held his dick in her mouth.  He wondered how many customers she had to resort to this tone of voice with.  He was sure the number was a damn sight more than Wes’s reckoning.  If she served a banana split for every cock she sucked, the Chiquita warehouses would stand empty.
“Aw girl.  Listen to yourself.  Can I help you?  Like I’m some sort of customer or something.”
“You’re standing in line at a Dairy Queen.”
“Well… I wouldn’t really call it a line.”
Gina Jamerson tilted her chin up.  Stretch glanced over his shoulder and saw Wes standing behind him.  The chocolate shake visibly trembled in his hand.
“You come here to try that new spicy chicken sammich?” Wes asked.
Gina Jamerson returned Stretch’s smirk with glassy-eyed resignation.
“That’s exactly why I’m here, Wes.”
They stood there a solid minute staring at each other.
“You gonna order?” Wes finally asked.
“No.  You go ahead and order.  I haven’t decided what I want yet.”
“I thought you said you wanted the spicy chicken sammich.”
“But French Fries or onion rings, you know?  Now I know you prefer the French fry in your mouth over the onion ring.”
“I don’t like onions,” Wes conceded.
“As well you shouldn’t.  With everything else you got going against you, bad breath should be avoided at all costs.”
Gina Jamerson turned around and made faces at the short order cook.  Seeing the way the cook’s shoulder ratcheted quickly up and down, Stretch really hoped he was cleaning the grill.
“Well one of you better start ordering quick,” Gina Jamerson said.  “I got other things I could be doing.”
Stretch put his hands on his hips and mad dog glared at Wes.
“I’ll have another chocolate shake, sweetie,” Wes mumbled, the pet name dribbling off his lips with endearing falsity.
“I can’t give you my discount this time, Wes.”
“I can handle full price.  It’s not your DQ discount I love you for.”
Gina Jamerson’s jaw ratcheted tighter.  Stretch could practically hear her teeth creaking like steel girders just shy of buckling.
When she returned with the shake, Wes leaned in and whispered “don’t forget I texted you.  Any time you want to answer.”
Was that the sound of her incisors imploding?  Stretch smiled.  Three hundred dollars = a handful of dope, a bellyful of booze and a lapful of ass at the titty flop.
Stretch let the tension build another ten seconds before stepping forward “I’m ready to order.  I’ll have the jumbo cheeseburger combo.”
“What about the spicy chicken sammich?” Wes asked.
“Fuck the spicy chicken sammich, Wes.  But not literally.  Since I know how much you love to poke your little dick into inanimate objects.”
Confronted with his pre-Gina Jamerson sexual proclivities, Wes back-pedaled out of the lobby.
“Goddammit,” Stretch turned his attention back to Gina Jamerson.  “I look like the kinda guy to you who goes around eating spicy chicken sammiches?”
Gina Jamerson said nothing.
“Fuck.  It amazes me that boy even has enough sense in his head to get up in the morning and walk around, you know?”
Gina Jamerson said nothing.
“So he’s a boyfriend of your’s?”
Gina Jamerson said nothing.
“Seriously.  He’s telling everyone you two are fixing to spend the rest of your lives together pumping out babies and eating spicy chicken sammiches.”
Gina Jamerson said nothing.  Her eyes drifted past Stretch’s shoulder.  He turned around and there Wes stood.  The milk shake’s straw embedded in his yap, the cocoa gruel made the slow ascension to the mouth that had only recently acquired the taste of pussy.
“Goddammit, Wes!” Stretch sputtered.  “What?  What do you want?  Don’t I see your dumb ass enough at work?”
“I ain’t here for you,” Wes said.  “Not that I gotta explain myself to the likes of you.  I just wanted to ask my girlfriend how well the spicy chicken sammiches been selling.  To save her from having to text me the answer.  Even if she does have unlimited texts.”
The words hung in the air like helium filled balloons of social retardation.
“Why yes, Wes,” Gina Jamerson said mechanically.  “The spicy chicken sandwich has been selling phenomenally.  And DQ owes the success of this product all to you, Wes.”
Wes grinned triumphantly at Stretch.  Stretch raised an eyebrow, puzzled at the nature of this odd victory.
“Here’s your order,” Gina Jamerson said.
“Awww, what the fuck’s this?”  Stretch asked, raising the bag.  “I wanted to dine in.”
“Hell no.  You’re leaving.  And you can take my dumb ass boyfriend with you.”
“You’re breaking up with him?”  Stretch could scarcely contain the glee from his voice.
“No way.  Seeing you again makes me realize now more than ever why I need to stick with a nice guy like Wes.”
“Wes is a schmuck!”
“Wha--?”
“No offense, Wes.  You’re a buddy, but you hump plastic toys.  You fellate bananas and other things.”
“So.”
“So?”
“You guys mind taking this outside?” Gina Jamerson asked.  “There’s other customers who would like to order.”
Stretch studied the grim-faced customer behind him, a middle-aged man holding hands with twin eight year-old blonde girls.
“You should try the spicy chicken sammich,” Wes offered.  “It’s delicious.”

                           6.

May 14th.  Big Dog began the day with a midmorning trip to his mother’s house.  While she fried eggs and bacon, he slipped into her bedroom and opened her panty drawer.
Over the years Big Dog had grown adept at shutting off the part of his mind that equated these swaths of fabric with the corresponding parts of his mom’s anatomy.  Her strangely stained undies might have proven to be anathema for his young brother, Small Dog, whose hunger for the hydrocodone couldn’t match Big Dog’s pharmaceutical fervor, but for BD, sifting through Mom’s unmentionables was just another day in the life.
He found the dusky vial at the bottom of the pastel monkey pile.  With the picture of Pope John Paul II offering his two fingered benediction from its one nail crucifixion on the opposing wall, Big Dog shook out fifteen pink pills from Mom’s freshly refilled prescription bottle.
If his mother were a fabulist, she would have woven a story about a pot-bellied faery, a drug fiend on wings immune to the debilitating sight of elderly underwear, arriving with the first noon light bearing bushels of laundry in need of a good washing and departing with fistfuls of her back pain pills.  It would make a great bed time story for the chemically dependant youth.  Maybe church it up with some singing squirrels and a wise-cracking possum and sell the Disneyfied version to a studio for a mint.  But alas, she was no fabulist, just a real estate agent.
With the pills secured in the front pocket of his Wranglers, the pot-bellied faery closed the drawer and returned to the kitchen.  Though he was dying to tell someone not currently monetarily involved with the three hundred dollar pool about his strategy to separate Wes from his newly beloved, he didn’t feel like explaining the back story to his mother (or the involvement of her Loritabs).  Instead he spent the duration of breakfast breaking down the Alabama Crimson Tide’s offensive line for his mother to get an idea how dominate the team would be next season.
As he was giving his opinion of the Tide’s third string middle linebacker, his mom cut in asking “is that your jet ski tied onto the back of your F250.”
“Sure is, Mom.”
“You going jet skiing?”
“Not at all.  Anyway, Tydaius Brown is a big ole boy.  6’4, about 280lbs…”
There was something about a pile of bacon and eggs, talking some Alabama college football, and pocketing a pantsful of pain pills that elevated Big Dog from merely existing to being on top of the world.  He felt today was an anything-can-happen day.  A rarity in his life of workday routine.  Popping two Loritab 10s may have also helped inspire his mood.
Inside his F250 extended cab, Big Dog opened the glove compartment and grabbed the industrial-sized pillbox adorned with the words GOD IS LOVE.  He added the thirteen remaining tabs to the arsenal of ten Vicodin, five Xanax and twenty klonopam he’d managed to wheedle from his girlfriend the night before.
Since dating Gina Jamerson for four days in August of last summer, he couldn’t remember her favorite color, the panties she was most partial to.  He couldn’t recall what she liked to eat or which sexual position she preferred.  But if there’s one thing he did remember about Gina Jamerson, it was her voracious appetite for the pills.  Their fuck sessions ending as abruptly as it did due to her introduction to Jumbo with his three herniated discs and seemingly unlimited access to pain killers and muscle relaxers.
Gina Jamerson shared a two bedroom trailer staked down on the southeast side of Blissful Haven Mobile Home Estates.  Big Dog remembered she shared a crackerbox with Cyndi Ryan, a grim-faced girl who made her attraction to black men known to every white fella brave enough to hold eye contact longer than three seconds.  Fortunately there were no Cadillacs parked on the patio.  Wes’s 5.slow was also absent.
He gave his best Jehovah’s Witness knock, a five minute hammering that should have reminded Gina Jamerson of her sex life with Wes.  She answered finally, looking like a hot mess, bleary-eyed and generally disheveled.
“What the fuck you doing here, Big Dog?” She greeted.  “It’s not even noon yet.”
“Baby!  Is that how you greet an old friend?”
“That’s how I greet anyone who knocks on this door like a maniac before like two o’clock.  Even my boyfriend has more sense than that and he’s a moron.”
“You got a boyfriend?”
“You know I do.  He’s one of your best butt buddies.  Wes Brock.”
“Really?  Wes Brock?  Two inch dick Wes?  He’s never mentioned you.  Always talking about a red head named Tami that he’s crazy for.”
Gina Jamerson arched a wicked eyebrow.
Big Dog looked around uneasily at the neighboring tin boxes, the gaping doorways and blind windows and the incessant baby caterwauling that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.  The twenty prison years worth of illegal drugs in his pocket inspired a surfboard of paranoia riding a crest of sweat.
“Hey, can I come in?”
“No.”
“C’mon!  It’s me, Big Dog.  I got something for you.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before.  And it’ll only take you about five minutes to show me too, right?”
Look at the smart mouth on this girl.  How did Wes even last an afternoon in her presence?  Especially when his pants came down.  There was not a facet of Wes’s existence that didn’t invite ridicule from the witty.
Obviously she wasn’t in the mood to play cutesy.  He withdrew the pillbox from the pocket of his Crimson Tide hoodie and shook it enticingly like an opiate mariachi.
“I don’t know, how long does it take you to show some appreciation for my dope cocktail.”
“Well…”
“Got some Loritab, Xanax, Klonopam, hell, I think I might even have some stool softeners up in this bitch.”
“Wow!  As great as a couple stool softeners might sound right now, I think I’m going to have to pass on that.  Yeah.  You know your buddy Ladders was here a few nights ago with some Xanax he was feeling pretty generous with.  And last night it was Stretch here looking to hook me up with Loritabs.”
“Hook you up?  Anything happen that Wes should be aware of.”
“Wes was here helping me highlight my hair.”
“Ah that’s gay.  The Gina Jamerson I remember didn’t stand for short-dicked fellas fucking about with hair care products.”
“The Gina Jamerson you remember didn’t have a bunch of jackass factory rats betting how long I’d be dating a short-dicked fella who pisses on his own balls then laughs about it.”
“What’s that suppose to mean?”
“What do you think it means?”
“You wanna dump Wes today, I’ll half the pot with you.  One hundred dollars cash.”
“A hundred dollars?”
“Give or take… or the cash equivalent in Loritabs.”
“And all I have to do is tell him to leave me alone, huh?”
“Hell, I’m sure you tell him that every day as it is.  What I need you to do to win the money is to tell Wes you are completely and utterly done with him.  You don’t want to see him again in any emotional, physical, sexual or cell phone textual way ever.”
“You get that drawn up by a lawyer.”
“Better.  The Polish Hammer.”
“I don’t like that guy.”
“Of course you don’t.  You’re a woman.”
“When’s his date in the pool?”
“Next week.”
“So I got to keep this shit up at least another week?”
“Or you can end it all now and take what I got in my GOD IS LOVE box of bliss.”
“Tempting, but I’m joking.  Wes is a moron.  He’s hung like a cashew.  He’s up my ass all the time, but not in a good way.  But he can be a sweetie.  He thinks of me.  I don’t have to hear him constantly beg me to send him pictures of my pussy on the cell phone so he can show all his asshole friends like you at work.”
“You’ll get tired of him.”
“I’m all ready tired of him.”
“Wish I woulda brought a tape recorder.”
“What difference does it make?  I could suck a dick right in front of him and he’d forgive me before I even got around to tonguing the balls.”
“I say we put that to the test!”
“All ready have.  Goodbye, Big Dog.  Next time you’re feeling generous with your pills, go ahead and stick them in the mail slot.”

                            7.

May 21st.
“I don’t think my baby would like me being here,” Wes muttered, glancing uncomfortably at the garish neon pink and purple interior of Fantasms.
For someone desperate enough to fuck plastic pussy with such regularity, he spent a disproportional amount of time staring at the wall rather than gawking at the g-string divas grinding and gyrating on stage.
“Well if she really loved and trusted you, she wouldn’t care if you were here or not, right?” I countered.
“She knows I have no reason to be here.”
“Yet here we are.”
“Cause you drove!  I told you not to pull in here.”
“You didn’t have to come in.  I didn’t drag you.  You could have stayed in the car.”
“Yeah right.  With no radio.  And as hot as it is out there.”
“So there’s a lot of gray area there, between your heart and that stripper’s eight inch heel.”
“Wha--?”
“Exactly.  Conventional morality doesn’t concern us.”
“I hate it when you talk like this, Hammer.”
“You hate it when I talk sense.”
“I hate it when you try to sound like a dang psychiatrist.”
“They happen to sound like me.”
“Like a douchebag.  Which is what you are for bringing me here.”
“It’s hot outside.  There’s air conditioning in here.  We’re thirsty and there’s Coors Lite on tap.  The titties bouncing around us is what I like to call collateral grooviness.”
“Is that what you tell your wife?”
“I don’t tell the wife anything, except for the times she finds a stripper’s number in my pocket.  And as you may or may not know, stripper’s legitimate phone numbers aren’t so easy to come by.  Even for the Polish Hammer.”
“So rare it’s never happened.”
“Not true.”
“Was trying to be funny.”
“Well stop, you’re no good at it.  There’s a living, breathing example of the Polish Hammer’s stripper conquests right over there.”
“The short girl with hair like a black helmet and a fucked-up belly?”
“She just had a kid, man.  Give her belly a break.”
“She’s kinda funny looking ain’t she?”
“She’s Russian/Asian, what do you want?  She ain’t funny looking, she’s exotic.  The other strippers call her Betelguese, cause she wears black, I guess.  Her real stripper name is Kitty.  Her fake real name is Rhianon.  I’m not allowed to tell anyone her real real name.
“Why is she crying in that guy’s lap?”
“Mostly because her boyfriend beats her pretty constant.  But also because she’s trying to guilt the sucker upstairs in the hopes he’ll spring for a hundred dollar fuck and suck.  Right about now she’s telling him that her and her newborn baby are having to stay at the Green Park Motel across from the Wal-Mart.”
“Then who’s watching her baby while she’s here?”
“Now see there, Wes.  If you used that little prick of yours for anything other than pissing and fucking puppets you wouldn’t even think to ask that.”
“I’ve been fucking. D’uh.  Gina Jamerson…”
“But no where near as regularly as that first week.”
“Well, you know, she gets tired from work.  And then other nights she has girls’ night out.  She needs to unwind.”
“Wes, there’s nothing more cruel in all the world than a disinterested woman.  And all women lose interest eventually.  And it usually comes when you love them the most.  This is just the facts.  It’s almost enough to make me wanna stay faithful to my wife.”
“Why don’t you then?”
“Ha ha.”
“Seriously.  She always makes your lunch for work.  She takes care of your kids.  She don’t run around on you.”
“Why didn’t you stick to just fucking your flashlight, Wes?”
“Fleshlight.  And it’s always gotta be a joke with you.”
“Wes, it comes down to this.  I will always love women.  Much like you can’t get over losing your virginity to Gina Jamerson.  But it comes down to this.  No matter what you do for her, there’s going to come a moment when you’re sitting across from her and there’s going to be a Pacific Ocean’s worth of distance in the three feet of air between you.  And she’s going to look you dead in the eye and tell you she never asked for anything.  Anything you’ve ever done.”
“She don’t ask for nothing.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Well…”
“This may be true on the surface of things.  They don’t ‘ask’ you to listen to her sob over work problems or husband trouble or the fucking Cubbies fielding a substandard team.  But let me tell you, there’s absolutely no difference between asking and expecting.  She may not ask you to listen or sympathize or offer support, but let her call you 3 am with the latest crisis yanking tears outta her pretty head and tell her you ain’t got time to listen and see what happens.”
“I don’t mind being there for her.”
“That’s not the point, you thick-headed, mullet-wearing, flashlight-jackass.”
“Fleshlight.  And why the hostility?”
“The fact is, you’re going to need her to be there for you one day and she won’t be.  It’ll be inconvenient for her.  It will bum her out.  She’ll have something more enjoyable to keep her interest.  In the case of Gina Jamerson, more than likely it will be a big, fat cock.  And there’s nothing you’ll be able to do with it.  But take it. Man, nothing matches that horrible feeling of emotional abandonment.  Nothing like it.”
“Yeah…”
“Which is why I like strippers.”
“C’mon.  Sex for money…”
“Sex for money?  I’m the goddam Polish Hammer.  The Eastern European Epitome, baby.  I haven’t paid for sex since I was thirteen.  Personality.  Personality and a fashion aesthetic that burns the cerebral cortex.  Also I give them drugs.”
“It’s just meaningless.”
“That’s the whole point.”
“Gina Jamerson makes everything worthwhile.”
“For you and every other swinging dick.”
“See, why do you say mean shit like that.  I know today is your day for the break-up pool.  You’ve been wasting your time from the moment you picked me up today talking about checking out that new Cupcake Creations in Huntsville.”
“Only way I knew to get you off Gina Jamerson’s apron strings.”
“Hammer, why can’t you just let me be happy.”
“Because you can’t be happy.  I know you’re not happy.  And you’re going to be even less happy.  Today, tomorrow, a month from now, that foundation you’re building on is gonna disappear to another zip code and everything you’ve built is gonna collapse into that bottomless pit.  And, then, everyone will laugh at you.”
“You’ll love that, won’t you?”
“Nope.  I got a whole yard full of bottomless pits.  Wife looks at me now, all she sees is an abyss.”
“I’m not leaving Gina Jamerson so you can win three hundred bucks.”
“Fine, fuckwad.  Can you at least buy me a beer.  That goddam eight dollar chocolate cupcake took a bite outta my wallet.”
“Sure.”
“Waitress, I’ll have three Coors Lites on him.”
“Dammit, man!”
Kitty lurched away from the fella near pervert’s row.  The guy’s shirt a Jackson Pollack print of smeared tears and mascara.
“Hey, Kitty, how’s it going?”
“You wanna go upstairs.  My son needs formula.”
“Well, you know the Polish Hammer don’t believe in paying for… Kitty… Kitty… hey, girl, well… I’ll just talk to you later on, then…”

                           8.

July 26th.
“I can’t believe they’re getting married,” Big Dog said.
We stood holding small bags of bird seed because apparently rice upsets the local bird’s bellies, outside the double doors of the Hope’s Bluff Baptist Church.  We waited for the newly weds to run the gauntlet of friends, family and us, the other guys, the sort of guys who plan on whipping the bird seed at the bride and groom’s eyes.
“How the hell did we get here?” Ladders mumbled.  It was difficult to ascertain if he was speaking the wedding in general or this moment in time.  He had all ready gobbled a pocketful of Xanax.  He could scarcely open his eyes and saliva dribbled down his chin. 
I held the wedding card containing the three hundred dollars from the dating pool.  “I can’t believe he didn’t invite any of us to stand up in his wedding.  They were all her ‘friends’.”
“That’s the way Gina Jamerson wanted it.”
“Gina Brock, now.”
“She’ll always be Gina Jamerson to me.”
“I got a feeling she’ll always be Gina Jamerson to a lot of guys.”
“I can’t believe there’s no open bar at the reception.”
“I can’t believe we decided to come anyway.”
“Fuck it,” Big Dog spit a stream of saliva-tinged Skoal across the church steps.  “I got two cases of PBR in the back of the Z250 and some party favors compliments of the love that is god.”  He took his pillbox out and savored the sound of many Loritabs jumbling into each other like a little opium mosh pit.
“What I want to know,” Stretch said giving me the evil redneck eye, “is what the hell did you even say to Wes to make him run to Gina Jamerson’s house trailer and propose marriage?”
“I don’t know.  I was fucked up.  My girlfriend left me.”
Big Dog said “I’m telling you this makes no sense.  She told me herself she don’t like the sonofabitch.”
“Marriage probably won’t last six months,” Stretch said.
“Oh yeah?” I said.  “You wanna put some money on that?  Maybe a little divorce pool.  Fifty dollar buy in.  Who wants in?”
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© 2012 zygoteinmycoffee Ink.
KARL KOWESKI is the 320th resident of Alabama to read a book and he has accomplished this feat 40 times.  An enemy of the Amish everywhere, Karl has death warrants out for him in eight Mennonite communities.
KARL KOWEKI'S first full length collection of short stories is now available from
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Blood And Greasepaint
Stories by Karl Koweski
203 pages
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Epic Rites Press, 2010