Work Text:
"Stop me if you've heard this one before, alright? So, a guy walks into a sex shop . . ."
--
It's always dim in the crammed aisles of the Pro's Pit, because that's supposed to be alluring, seductive, enticing. She's supposed to lead you around like she's got her claws in your tie and she's whispering her room number in your ear. You always thought that in combination with the overwhelming smell of incense, cheap plastic and shame, it just made it seem like she was stumbling and leaning on you and begging for a ride, drunk and guilty, on her way home from an orgy organized on Craigslist. She signed up hoping for a real wild time and shows up at the suburban shithouse only to the sight of 20-something shut-in dicksacks all eying her like a piece of prime roast, and she's lonely enough she fucks them anyway. If this city was a woman - and she is, you know, she's brung you low and shoved your face insistently towards her festering snatch enough that you're pretty damn certain of that fact - then this place is the back of her sock drawer. The little warm dark secret she pretends to hide, but no one actually gives a shit what she shoves up her cooter, as long as breakfast is on the table in the morning and she keeps out of respectable neighborhoods.
The kid behind the counter is giving you one of his odd looks. Attempting to look confused, clearly trying to hide a lopsided grin by assaulting his lower lip with those enormous enamel monoliths that jut all impudently out of his mouth, feet crossed up on the counter and Jokes Quarterly hanging limply in his lap. He has a pen in one hand, interrupted from his vigilant taking of notes. The row of specialty "equipment" looms from the murk in the glass case behind him, latex and leather all shiny and provocative. It takes you a minute to connect that possibly you've been muttering out loud to yourself again, but you shoot him an ugly look for his trouble anyway.
He laughs suddenly, like a bark, as if you've just performed a much-practiced trick obediently.
"You're just a weird guy, you know?"
"Shove it up your ass, John." You know there's a metaphor in there somewhere about the irony of being a John in a sex shop, but every time you try you only end up sounding on the verge of a psychotic break with your ranting about prostitutes, and John will look at you over the counter, eyes glinting like a blue steel trap and telling you in an upbeat way that maybe you'll get it next time, man, just he can't really let you buy any BSDM stuff now, he's worried about you.
You slam your bag down on the counter and rip the zipper open, shoving a piece of paper with Bro's handwriting scrawled on it. You've worked for Bro for a few weeks now (just a job to hold me over, dude, that's all I need until I can get it together for classes or some shit. Little dude, this is the third time you've flunked out, it ain't happening. Just one more time, Bro, that's all I fucking need), running around town doing his errands, manning cameras, moderating the website. He pays you beans, not even beans, more like peas, but it doesn't really matter because he pays for the roof over your head, the food you eat, the water bill, the fridge repair guy when a shitty Buster Sword lays utter waste to the ice maker. You're way too old to be doing this. John flings his eyes dramatically towards the ceiling before hauling himself up to get fetch your items.
"Why do you even bothering coming here, Dave? You can get all this stuff online, you know."
"Because it's cheaper."
"It's totally not!"
"It is if you're giving me the employee discount."
"You're not getting the employee discount!" He stops with a huff while wielding an enormous horse cock, slamming it down into your bag. It pokes out of the top, and you busy yourself trying to get it all in before you have to go skating back home with equine wiener flopping about all over the place.
"Then I'm supporting small local business."
That seems to satisfy him, and after you check out he lets you lean over the counter to peer through a new issue of Playboy to point out your favorites before he kicks you out. (Yours: dark-haired chicks with eyes that see right through you, perfect perky tits, great asses and legs up to her armpits. His: the rangy blondes with the impish, knowing smiles and small waists.)
--
It's Friday and Bro's called you ten times and gotten a hold you once.
"You know you could at least do the fucking job you begged me to get."
"Dude, fuck you, I finished the list."
"Well get your ass back here, because there's another list. I'm leaving it in the microwave, so if you want your check this week or air conditioning in the apartment, you best get fucking hustlin' back here before it's burnt to oblivion."
John is laughing raucously as you storm out of the door, and wiping the crumbs off the glass counter from where you spilled all over the place while ranting over lunch.
--
Lilac, though you suspect that's not her real name, enjoys the regularity of Tuesday and getting to hold something in her hands before she delicately pays for her seafoam colored tentacled shaped toys and art film style lesbian porn in cash from perfectly manicured hands. She dresses like every day is the funeral for her love life, because you've both asked her out before, and each time she turns you down in the most delicate and destroying way as possible. John goes first, softly and a bit shy, rubbing his hands on his knees and bumbling out an invitation for, uh, a movie, dinner at a nice place, paintball, anything you want to do really? Thank you, Jonathan, I mean that, she's always perfectly articulate and graceful as she lays her hand over his and looks at him with those eyes that see right through you. But I'm afraid I've got to wash my hair. It's a matter of most urgency, you understand. When, from your customary place sitting cross-legged on the counter, you follow up with, baby, ignore that chump, you wanna ride with a real man and see the inside of my crib? She doesn't even bother to glance your way when she tells you to get fucked, David. John's frozen look of wide-eyed heartbreak changes instantly into another of his wheezy laughs, and suddenly it was worth it.
Weeks later, when John's helping her try on a strap-on and telling her all about how ravishing she looks and you're telling her you'd wouldn't let her fuck you with that monster if she paid you damn, she invites you both out for drinks, so you close up shop at 2 in the afternoon and move from one cool, dark place to another, where you lounge on deep red seats and laugh helplessly at one another trying to down as many expensive brightly colored concoctions as possible.
"I suppose it is 5o'clock somewhere." She sighs over the top of her glass, eyes trained behind the counter on the sharp curves of the dark-lidded bartender, and you follow her thousand yard stare to the dame in deep red and emerald eyes and suddenly it all makes sense. You nudge her and waggle your eyebrows above your shades laviciously until she throws her wine in your face and you're both laughing so hard you have to hold each other up and John is giving you his odd look. She interprets your dreams with a slur and a half-smirk, tracing the future line on your palm and mock gasping while she exclaims how short it is, you haven't long to live, you should really be getting on that quest for eternal love or you'll miss your chance entirely.
Later still, when it truly is 5o'clock somewhere, after you help her to her apartment (a cold, white place, where she lays starkly in her black dress against ivory colored sheets. You cover her in a knitted purple blanket, and she smiles in her stupor and you think you love her, but not like that) and you're walking home with John, you nudge him with your shoulder and give him a sidelong glance.
"She's just too good for us, we'd ruin her."
John just snorts into his hand, and rolls his eyes at you.
"No, geez Dave, you dumbass, she likes girls. How long did it take you to figure that one out?"
--
He tells you he likes seeing you laugh, though, and you're not sure how to respond to something like that. In your confusion you end up pushing him against the door to your apartment and kissing him open-mouthed, hands twisting in his Ghostbusters t-shirt, until an unpleasant tingling sensation is on your tongue. You leap back to the sight of him grinning like the world's newly crowned shit-eating champion and pressing a bag of Pop Rocks into your chest.
--
Bro has given up trying to leave you messages, simply taking what he can get out of you before you're back in the Pit and bringing popcorn, kicking John as you both try to sit in the same chair and watch Tit-tanic, Big Monsters, Ghost Butt-sters, and your favorite, Cock Heir.
"Oh god it's fucking huge. Look at this thing, man, how do you even wear pants with that."
"Wow, her orgasm is totally hurting my ears, can you turn that down oh geez!"
"This would be better with like even more nonsensical shit in the background. Bring in the dancing wiener clowns, we're getting stale up here, and will somebody get the hose to get some of this goo off the damn set."
"Yeah, you're totally right."
"I'm always right."
"Just not clowns."
"Yeah. No clowns."
--
Jade, you think, likes coming in because of the thrill of doing something so very not allowed. She enjoys the scandal, the idea that she's breaking rules and not caring, despite the fact that in this day and age she's somewhere below downloading Ke$ha's album from Pirate Cove and above Jay Walking. She always slams things down on the counter with a vigor right out of the jungle, as if she could holler like Tarzan while swinging from her leashes and tight sparkly collars. It always wakes you up from where you're dozing against John's chair.
She's got bright green eyes and a wild mane of dark hair and a wilder still temperament. She interrupts your rant about Jane Goodall taking it up the ass from a Silverback to ask if you're asking her out for coffee, and John is giving you a knowing gotcha! smirk as you're forced to mumble out a yeah and a nod. She scribbles her number down on the back of the receipt as she pays ($413.06, whips, chains, collars, and the smallest leather corset you've ever seen) and gives you a toothy look as she skips out of the store.
You're all caught up in her. How she greets the stars like old friends and the way she tangles her fingers in yours and the way she ducks away from your attempts at kissing her with an impish, knowing smile and drags your arm around her small waist while you dance up and down the street. You tell her the city is a woman that's brought you low, and she laughs, but then again you're not sure she's stopped laughing since you met, and you don't mind. She finally lets you kiss her as she's falling asleep against you on the cab ride back to her place.
There's a terrifying fire in her eyes while she holds you down by your hair and tells you Bad dog! and you don't think your ass will ever recover from the brutal mauling it received from the end of her brand new shiny crop and oh god it's the monster strap-on and John must have sold it to her and was sitting at him watching sitcoms and grinning right the fuck now about how reamed you were gonna get and you hate him so very much.
She pats you on the back while you cry like a girl and her enormous white slobbery hell beast has broken in the room to drool on you and the clock blinks 3:00am. (She makes you coffee and pretty soon she's laughing and you're sulking about how she's putting a frozen steak on your ass, and you think you love her, but not like that.)
"I don't think you're really up for this . . . maybe we'd be better friends? I love friends! And if you're really going to cry every time and try to hide in the bathroom, then I can't really take you for a lover, sorry Dave!"
--
He tells you that you should see girls more often, that you look happy (does love make you walk funny like that though, Dave?), and you frown pointedly and pull down your pants to show him the damage. He laughs wheezily, and is still laughing about how stupid your face must have been when he grabs you by the hips and turns you around to suck you off. There aren't any Pop Rocks, but you feel the need to tell him that if he dared tried that move on your dick you'd rip his testicles off with your bare hands, and he doesn't stop laughing until you kiss him with tongue afterwards and he makes a disgusted face while the Prankster's Gambit slows its careening descent to being permanently lodged in John's favor.
It rockets off the edge when he smacks you on the ass with a hand buzzer as you walk out.
--
"Oh my god, gross Dave, don't put it in your mouth!"
"I'm doin' it man. Makin' it happen."
"Please don't quote your stupid comic while you're doing this, the only thing you're making is making it worse!"
"No, cherry is the worst."
"Don't mix them together!"
"Sparkling banana-strawberry-bacon is magically delicious and I'd suck Leprechaun cock for it."
"You are totally wasting merchandise here and you're going to get me totally fired!"
You have to buy 50 bucks worth of lube in the end, and Bro is giving you a look over the edge of his sunglasses when you waltz in the door three hours late, but you decide it was worth it when the image of John laughing so hard he's crying is your new phone background.
--
Rose ("It was on her driver's license, Dave, I do actually freakin' check because it's my job, you know!") gives that knowing smile over the edge of her wine glass as you gingerly sit down and immediately launch into a diatribe about the evils of Pop Rocks and hand buzzers, and simply nods and runs her thumb along your heart line on your palm.
"I think it's like that."
"You do know that you are the last person in this city, the country, possibly all life on earth, to realize this, David."
"Fuck you. What's it say?"
"Sometimes, I believe we need a little mystery in the world. Our hands really don't tell the future, they merely serve as a record what we have held in the past. You can change fate." And she's smiling because she knows it's horseshit, the snarky broad. "Now you've already made me late for my date, and I think you're far past overdue for your own."
--
"So, what's your life story and stuff?"
"I'm pretty sure we've been over this, dude."
"Well, I know, but only in bits and pieces, and I want the whole thing! Like at all once!"
"Why?"
"Because, I have to talk to my dad, and I just really don't want to mess up any details?"
You scoff, but you tell him anyway. Born and raised in Texas, lived with your Bro off the rotten fruits of his debauchery empire, barely half-assed your way through High School, tried the joys of Higher Education one two three times you're out to the penalty box and they're holding the sport trophy above your head and it's too, too far to jump for. John has to tug on your hair to get your attention back from the great sucking black hole of the Sports Metaphor. You shift to pull him closer, and he objects because you are already elbowing him really hard in the ribs and your stupid dumb butt is getting in the way of cuddling.
You tell him that's it. That's the whole story, and it seems strangely lacking - like there's a hole in the middle you've forgotten, but you don't bother with it. You think you used to make music, but sometimes it feels like you can't remember. He hums into your chest and starts a strange winding tale about a boy growing up in a little house, how he got all As through High School, how he got all As through his Ivy League School, how he decided one day that he was sick of it, sick of everything (something is missing, Dave, but I don't know what it is?) and got a dead end job at a dead end store just to hold him over until he got something better lined up, and he'd been lining up for years. He looks up at you thoughtfully.
"Do you think I know how to play the piano? Sometimes, I guess it feels like I can't remember."
(What you don't tell him is the ending, where one day you walked into a sex shop, and you think you love him, and it's definitely like that.)
--
When you first meet his father, you're in your best suit and tie, and John is in his best shorts and ratty t-shirt.
"You didn't really have to wear this, you know!" He's still fussing with the lapels and straightening your tie, despite his protests.
"Yeah I did."
"You didn't!"
"Did."
His Dad is all easy charm and gentlemanly grace, and you admire just how cool he manages to make that old-fashioned pipe look as he rolls it side to side, looking amused by his son babbling his ear off while he expertly slings around icing.
"It's just really funny, Dad, because he's a sex worker, like me and all?"
"I'm not a sex worker, Jesus Shitkicking Christ, John!"
His father's eyes crinkle at the side when he smiles, and you think John will have the same smile one day, and that makes it all seem worth it. (You end up with a total of three entire cakes consumed, five pies to the face, two instances of saran wrap over the toilet seat, one good morning wet willie and one hushed conciliatory hand job for your ruined suit in his childhood bed while he frantically whispers to you to keep quiet because Dad will definitely hear you Dave, just shut your stupid face!)
--
"Oh cool it glows in the dark!"
"Mine is way better, dude, it vibrates along with the music."
"That's just way lame, okay, and it doesn't look sturdy enough at all?"
"Bring it, en guard, Egbert. You killed my father, prepare to die."
Your end up getting wanged in the face by flippant dildo, and Jade carefully places a frozen steak on your eye as she chides you both about playing it safe and sane.
--
Bro just looks John up and down once, nodding very slightly, before turning back to his mess of wires. Lil Cal stares glassy-eyed at him from his place of honor on the desk and goes back to ignoring the both of you.
"I don't think he likes me, Dave."
"He likes you fine. Trust me, you'd know if he didn't like you."
"I just really don't think he likes me--!" He practically screams when Lil Cal is suddenly in his lap.
"He likes you."
(When John is in the kitchen, fussing over how you two just don't have anything at all to eat, Dave? How do you live like this? I'm pretty sure this is not the way adults live? You lean against Bro's desk, watching him type for a moment. I quit. Good, little dude, because you're fired. You can't fire me, I already quit. I rehired you for a second there, just so I could get the joy of firing you. He holds up his fist for a final bunp. You love him too, in your own way.)
--
The day John gets fired is the day he tells you he finally feels like he can breathe again. It's 4:13pm and the city, she's hunkered low and starved, and you're sitting in his lap flipping through the newest edition of Playgirl, pointing out your favorites. (Yours: the dark-haired ones with eyes that see right through you. His: the rangy blondes with the impish, knowing smirks.)
The whole time his manager is turning red in the face, yelling and yelling into the slowly serene expression dawning on John's face. He looks happy, and later you tell him that you like it when he looks happy, as he grips your hand like an anchor to keep him stapled to the ground - to stop him floating away into the sky with giddiness.
"I know how to play the piano, Dave!"
And that's the last time you talk about it, as you lock the door to the Pro's Pit for one last time, inhaling the scent of hidden corners and desperate attempts and deep trust, looking through the dark glass to the walls of twisting, tantalizing paraphernalia. (And the city sighs as if she can fill her lungs freely for the very first time with you, and you think you love her, because you do.)
--
It's always dim in the crammed booths of the Derse Club, because it's supposed to be alluring, seductive, enticing. She leads you around with her claws in your tie and whispers her room number in your ear, and before you get further, Rose and Jade hurriedly hush your mumbling as the lights dim and John steps on stage. You think you might be more nervous than he is, because you've chewed straight through your fingernails, and you've been too damn scared to laugh whenever he practices jokes on you.
The kid up on stage is giving you one of his odd looks. Attempting to look serious, clearly trying to hide a lopsided grin by assaulting his lower lip with those enormous enamel monoliths that jut all impudently out of his mouth, twisting around a microphone in his long pianist fingers. He sticks his tongue out at you, and you shoot him an ugly look for his trouble.
"Stop me if you've heard this one before, alright? So, a guy walks into a sex shop . . ."