You Suck: A Love Story

need to borrow some money.”
    “What? You guys have over a hundred grand each from the art we sold.”
    “Yeah, we did. We had a big weekend.”
    Tommy figured in his head. “You guys blew over six hundred grand in what-four days?”
    “No,” Lash said. “No, not all of it. We’re not completely broke.”
    “Then why do you need to borrow money?”
    “Just twenty grand or so, to get us through to tomorrow,” Lash said. “Luckily I almost have my MBA and have mad business skills. Otherwise we’d have been broke yesterday.”
    Tommy nodded. Twenty grand was about six months’ salary for him at the Safeway. He’d been a little intimidated by Lash’s almost-MBA up until now. Now he was just worried that Lash would be able to tell he had changed. He said, “So, like you were saying, you’re fucked.”
    “We were doing fine, only down like ten grand each, until we met Blue.” Lash looked at the ceiling wistfully, like it was a distant memory he was trying to conjure, instead of something that had happened a couple of nights ago.
    “Blue?”
    “You know that group they have in Vegas? The Blue Men?”
    “Yeah, the guys who paint themselves blue and pound on pipes and stuff?” Tommy was lost.
    “Yeah,” Lash said. “Well, it turns out there are blue women, too. Or at least there’s one. And dude, she’s sucking us dry.”
    I n the back seat of the limo, Blue held Barry’s face between her boobs, snugly enough to keep him under control, but not so snug that he couldn’t breathe. While the other Animals had drunk, smoked, and fucked themselves into a zombielike stupor-and now lay sprawled about the glittery interior of the limo-Barry had opted to do two hits of XTC, a line of coke, and a bong load of sticky skunk weed, which had put his brain into some sort of redundant tribal loop that had him kneeling naked before her, chanting “sweet blue titties” for the last twenty minutes. She just couldn’t take it anymore, so she had grabbed his curl-fringed bald head and pulled his face into her cleavage just to shut him up. Mercifully, he had gone quiet, because she really didn’t want to suffocate him as long as he still had money.
    It takes a meandering road of wrong turns to take a girl from being the milky-skinned Cheddar princess of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, to a blue-dyed call girl turning tricks at downtown casinos in Vegas, but Blue would be damned if she’d add yet another wrong turn by smothering a golden goose between her proportionally improbable silicon joy orbs. The Animals were her way out, and if she had to stay in
    character as an Alien pleasure Unit or a blueberry muffin to keep them on the hook, she would.
    Blue was a method hooker. Early in her adventures, after she’d left cocktailing due to a propensity for spilling drinks, and before she’d begun stripping, where her lack of balance was mitigated by the presence of a sturdy pole, she had a short career acting in low-budget porn. She befriended a promising actress named Lotta Vulva, who gave her a book on the Stanislavski Method. “If you can find your sense memory,” Lotta said, “it will keep you from barfing on the actors. Directors hate that.” The “Method” had served Blue well since then, as it allowed her to calculate betting odds or figure her checkbook while her character was performing acts that she herself would have found unpleasant or outright disgusting. (How much better to reside in her sense memory of the budding Cheddar princess, coaxing the hearty, whole-milk goodness from the udders of a Holstein, than to face the harshly lit reality of her actions?) After six months Blue was driven out of the film business by a “defect” one director called “not enough tits to fill a shot glass,” which no amount of Method was able to remedy. She returned to cocktailing, albeit at a strip club, where she seldom had to carry more than one ten-dollar beer at a time, until she saved enough money for breast-augmentation surgery and made her way to the pole. She danced her way through her twenties, before she was driven off the stage by younger, more gravity-resistant girls, and because she had skipped personal typing class in high school and had therefore besmirched her permanent record, she landed in the employ of an outcall escort service.
    “I feel like I’m doing Domino’s delivery blow jobs,” Blue told her roommate. “Satisfaction in twenty minutes or less or your money back. And the agency is taking