You Suck: A Love Story

most of the money. I’ll never get out of this business at this rate.”
    “You need a gimmick,” said her roommate, a cocktail waitress at the Venetian. “Like those Blue Men guys in the show. I swear they’d just be a bunch of frat boys beating on garbage cans if they weren’t painted blue.”
    And so it began. The fallen Cheddar princess of Fond du Lac found some semipermanent skin dye, opened credit-card deposit accounts, had some pictures taken, placed ads in all the free sleaze rags around the city, and Blue was born. It wasn’t as if she wouldn’t have been able to make a living without the gimmick-most guys will shag a snake if you hold it steady for them. But it turned out they would pay a lot for the exotica of a blue woman.
    She worked as much as she could handle, and her savings had climbed to the point where she could actually see the possibility of an exit. But about that same time, she realized that by going blue, she had opted out of the pipe dream of every hooker, stripper, and telemarketer: the rich guy who would take her away from it all. The whale who would drop a fortune on her to become his personal pet. There would
    be no big score for the blue chick, or so she thought, until the Animals called her in for a combination strip show and fuckfest. Where they got the money didn’t matter. What mattered was that they had a lot of it, and it appeared that they would keep giving it to her until it was all gone. She had nearly half a million dollars in her makeup case, and Blue-the character Blue-could put up with a lot of attention from the Animals while she hid in the back of her mind and formulated an investment strategy. The tall, skinny one, Drew, had opened the hotel-room door and said, “Hi. We discussed it and agreed that when we were kids, we all really wanted to bone a Smurf.”
    “I get that a lot,” said Blue.
    W e just wanted to bone a Smurf,” Lash said.
    “Understandably,” said Tommy.
    “She’s really nice,” Lash said.
    “Important quality in a ho,” said Tommy.
    “But now we can’t seem to quit.”
    “So you want me to do what-hold an intervention?”
    “No, you’re our leader. We look to you for other things. So we want you to give us money so we can keep partying, and pay our rents and stuff.”
    “And when all of my money is gone, then I can intervene.”
    “Sure, if you feel you have to,” said Lash. “How’s your credit?”
    “Lash, are you high?”
    “Of course.”
    “Right. Of course. What was I thinking?” Tommy was relaxing now about Lash noticing that he was a vampire. Clearly the former stewards of Safeway night stock, in addition to being wasted, had gone collectively out of their minds. “Lash, I don’t almost have an MBA like you, but isn’t there sort of some business principle that you’re violating? I mean, isn’t there a class about not spending your rent money on hookers or something?”
    “Step off, Flood,” Lash said. “You hooked up with a vampire.”
    “She was cute,” Tommy said.
    “An important quality in a vampire,” Lash said, looking over the top of his shades.
    “She had sex with me,” Tommy countered. He wanted to say that she was nice, but Lash had already used “nice” for his blue hooker.
    “I think I’ve made my point,” Lash said. “Give me your money.”
    “You haven’t made your point. You completely haven’t made your point.” Tommy reared back as if to punch Lash in the chest, as the Animals did to one another all the time, but remembered that now he might crush some of the Animals’ ribs. Instead, he said, “Don’t make me cave in your skinny chest, bee-yotch.”
    “Your redheaded vampire kung fu is no match for the fearsome blue booty kung fu.” Lash made a howling chicken noise and waved his hands around as he fell back into a fighting stance, then went right back onto his ass on the steps. He laughed until he choked, then coughed and said, “Seriously, dude, if
    you don’t give us money, we’re going to be totally broke in about six hours. I did the math.”
    “You could go back to work,” Tommy said. “Clint called here last night. They’re buried at the store.
    They need night stockers.”
    “No?” Lash said, pulling down his sunglasses.
    “Yes,” Tommy said.
    “Then we’re not fired?”
    “Evidently not,” Tommy said.
    “That’s it. We could go back to work. That’s what we’ll tell her. We have to go back to work.”
    “Why didn’t you just tell her to go