Average

I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it. Please believe me. I didn’t know I could. I’m not the kind of person who is violent. Honest to God, I’ve always fallen in line, I’ve always tried to be good. It’s her fault. It’s their fault, not mine. They always push me. Women, I mean. I try and I try and I try, but it never does any use. I even stroked her hair and told her everything’d be all right as she ruined my favorite jeans. I didn’t drop her in a ditch somewhere. I buried her in a churchyard, her arms crossed over the hole in her chest. I tried not to. Lord knows I did. But I just.. I just lost myself. Somehow I hope that she’ll know now that I truly didn’t mean any of it. I hope she understands now. I’m sorry. Wait. Please sit.. I’ll explain things; maybe I can put this into some perspective for you…

As you can see, I’m not particularly good looking. I’m pretty average, at least I consider myself that way. And you live here. There’s not many options for guys like me. I mean, I’m a nice enough guy but women out here don’t tend to pay guys like me much mind. They usually can’t look past our pockmarks, or our slight guts, or our plain brown eyes, or our rough hands, or our sidelong leers of knowing they’ll never accept us or give us the time of day. I’ve never been in a fight or hit a woman in my entire life, which is more than I can say for half the guys I’ve worked with. I mean, I’m a social worker and some of the people I’ve been employed with can’t seem to follow the advice they give to the beaten welfare mothers they see on a daily basis. But anyway. The place I was working for at the time had a changing of the guard in management, and some guys lost their jobs so I got their unfinished cases dumped on my desk. I was so exhausted I took the bus downtown to a bar instead of driving to it. I don’t even drink often, except when the occasion permitted; you know, birthdays and marriages and the like. But I was on a mission that night to forget about that day of work sorting through hundreds of broken lives…
Look. I lied to you a bit back there and I might as well fess up. I didn’t go to just a bar. I went to a strip club. I still don’t believe I did that. I’ve prayed so hard that God can forgive me for that; to have wallowed in sin for hours. I guess it was my frustration manifesting itself in some kind of lust for drink and skin.
I was beyond being tipsy or drunk that night. I’d taken a seat somewhere towards the back of the room, watching the women take and leave the stage, listening to the announcement of the next songs through the smoky PA system. My main concern, then, was to not be seen by any of the people whose cases I’d been working on if they happened to be in the place that night. I saw her at the bar section: leaned over talking, her tits flopped, resting, on the bar top, to some horned-out Chinese man. He wasn’t even talking to her face. But in the red light of the place, it was all I could distinctly make out. She looked bored with having her tits being stared at in widescreen by the slant-eye, and she looked up at me. I finished my drink and turned away, faking a sour face. I turned back to the stage and a few moments later she was next to me. My nose let me know that before my eyes did; she smelled amazing. Kind of like those chocolates with the cherry in the middle, with that syrup. She asked me if I came to this kind of place a lot. I tried not to stare at her natural breasts. I said I didn’t have any money. She didn’t look disappointed. She was so gorgeous. A real blonde, striking green eyes, perfect rounded chin, long eyelashes with light amounts of glitter in them. She said she had noticed me when I came in – it might have been a lie but I didn’t really care – and that she liked the way I carried myself. She said she didn’t care for any of the deadly handsome guys who always showed up on Friday nights, that they always treated the other girls and her like they were their slaves. I asked her why she was doing it and she said she had not ever had anything she liked as much as stripping. She said the lifestyle was one where she could be free. I liked that. I asked when she was done working. She didn’t seem like a bad person. She’d gotten off of work about the time I came in – that’s what she said, but again, she could have been lying to me – and that she was waiting for her friend to pick her up (She must have been trying to pick up a couple of bucks off the regulars as she waited). But she waited around for me. I’m sure of it. I don’t remember much except thinking I was going to Hell as I awoke with a small hand toying with the patches of hair on my chest. I was nice to her. She liked me. She said so. As she pulled her thong back on and dressed her alabaster body, I sat up and stared across my bed into the picture of water running over black pebbles. It reads “Tranquility” under it. She kissed me before she turned the corner and out of my apartment.
Now, I visit my church often. Three times a week, in fact, just so I can get on. But after that morning I didn’t go. I should have made a bee-line for the confessional, I should have picked up my rosary and prayed for hours, I should have recited Hail Mary’s until my tongue went numb and the sweet languid taste of her mouth was exorcized from mine. But I didn’t. I wanted more. I wanted her. I couldn’t think. I didn’t want to be sitting alone, naked, with half a hard-on on my bed in my crumby apartment staring at some stupid picture. I wanted her to be with me right then.
I went looking for her. I went back to the skin bar in a high collared jacket and asked when she was working again. They told me the wrong times. I know they did because they said she’d be back in two nights, but I was there the next night and saw her. I couldn’t even look at her on stage. She was mine and here she was naked and open for all the sleazes in the room to see. I waited until her set was over before I approached her. She smiled like she did that morning she left. She was glad to see me again. I said I wanted to see her outside of her work and outside of me being plastered. She laughed and I convinced her to let me take her to dinner.
We continued like that for some time. Three days. I’d go in and wait in the back for her sets to be over, averting my eyes every time, and then we’d go out and eat and then make love everywhere in my sparse apartment. On the fourth night, I came in just like I always did, and I saw her. But she was leaving, smiling her smile I thought was only for me at some tall skinny European-looking godless swine.
She didn’t struggle much. She just stared at me with those amazing emerald eyes and screamed obscenities and hurled curses on me. She couldn’t do much. After I buried the business end of my Bowie in the euro prick’s neck, I wrestled her to the ground and bound her hands. She said I was nuts. That it was just fucking. That it was just for fun. I had been watching the road intensely, only looking back periodically in the rearview to make sure she hadn’t gotten out of her bindings. We were heading east towards Barstow. She fucking used me. She didn’t give a shit about me. She said I was special and not like the other guys. She said I was that guy she wanted. Lies. I hadn’t said a word since I’d bound her feet, too, and threw her in the back of my Camry, but as I pulled up to the roadside Church of God I told her that this was the retribution of God for living a life of sin and bewitching the heart of a God-fearing man; for drawing a good man into her Jezebel lifestyle.
I told her I hoped that she should writhe in Hell forever. I don’t hope that now. I don’t want that now. Not for her. I love her. I wish it had been me in back of that church. I wish I could tell her to her face that I’m sorry. But there it is. What’s done is done and I implore you to please do what I ask.

The old man sitting across the room, under the picture of tranquility, in the fold-up chair the young man had been kind enough to excavate from under the piles of moldy clothes and Carl’s Jr. wrappers nodded. The old man curled his long moustache with his index finger and sighed. He didn’t want to do this. He kept this to himself as he drew the black gun from the breast pocket of his jacket and slowly screwed down the silencer onto the barrel.