Roy's Bachelor Party

"Rivers of life divine I see,
And trees of paradise,
I see a world of spirits bright,
Who taste the pleasures there."

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They snatched the baby early one morning.

At five the baby fell asleep having cried the night through, teething and an ear infection its issues.

If its parents had then dropped into exhausted slumber nothing would have happened.

But outside lay a beautiful crisp late spring morning, the sun had just risen behind their house and clean new light bathed the street. The couple needed to get out and be together and enjoy the stillness. Together they walked the dog around the block. They were gone no more than 10 minutes.

As time is infinitely divisible, 10 minutes to them is as long as ten days. They counted the infant abandoned. Further, they reckoned they had cause. If both conditions not been met, they would not have taken her.

The consequences for the parents were grim. Given their evident grief, no one, not police, investigators, reporters or social workers, thought them guilty of more than irresponsibility and horrible bad luck, still they barely escaped a charge of criminal neglect. The loss of their child destroyed them.

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Often she would slide along her life. Her life, thanks to them, was like a video and she both player and viewer. And like a video, when viewing, it was look but not touch, experience but not change.

Sometimes she would settle into the happy times not long after her taking. When she lay with a toddler's scant self-centered awareness crowded amongst their own offspring.

Sometimes, though not often, she would skip earlier and be again the baby crawling across the carpet in a world of fractured shapes and sounds and textures. She would strain to sort out from the baby's unformed vision what the couple who owned the feet she'd targeted looked like, but all she ever knew was the sound of their encouraging laughing voices.

Sometimes, like a child picking at a scab, she'd visit her death. The ambulance would collect her, derelict and drunk, from the steps of the Boston Public Library. Her body a husk, dirty, her clothes indescribable rags. She would lie in the crowded intensive care, gasping, filled with drugs, surrounded by noise, aware only of their quiet calm eyes.

Sometimes she would shift to the time in her 40s when she worked as a waitress in a bar. As any who took food or drink from her were hers, those she fancied she took home and they'd wake the next day dazed and drained, the others she'd ply with drink they couldn't refuse and she'd make bets with herself (or one of them) as to whether her toy'd make it home, or wreck, or get arrested. It was more fun than keeno.

Sometimes she'd live the time when on her 18th year birthday, their richest prince (the word is not quite right) took her from the crowded dorm which was all she'd ever known, took her and her friend Chrysanthemum and two other friends as well which showed how he valued her, and made her his consort and the pleasure of their union lasted and stretched till when she looked at the world outside, it lay barren and airless, blasted by a swollen red sun.

Sometimes she'd visit the horrible moment, when she'd turned 28, when she was at the apex of her beauty and pride. She stood before them restrained, regarded and ruined. She stood while their calm voices explained the consequences of her crime. Her transgression, what it was they never said, could've occurred anytime in her life. For they, like us, punish to please the punisher, not to warn or correct the punished.

Sometimes she'd revisit the Christmas of her 19th year, when she and her companions descended upon a busy mall. Laughing they'd zeroed in on a pod of teenagers going to the movies. The film filled just before the kids got to the ticket counter and they wandered through the stores to kill time before the next showing. Every motion of their hands looked like shoplifting and they were repeatedly searched. Every mall guard thought them loitering and chivied them along. In front of Targets they happened upon similarly harassed kids from the next town over, loud and furious fighting erupted.

Early on she'd cut out the top boy, a senior, football captain and class president. He bought her a slice of pizza, and though he'd paid for it, he ate a bite from her fingers and that was that.

When his girlfriend of two years escaped the mall, talking loudly and distressedly with her friends about their horrible afternoon, wondering repeatedly about what could've happened to her Stevey. Why hadn't he been there to defend her when she was scratched, slugged and nearly stomped? Oh my god, there he was, in broad daylight, a girl bent under him on the hood of his car, he more dog than man.

The experience wouldn't leave the boy. He became haunted. He hunted for the girl and not finding her, gave himself to drugs.

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"Heather, yours is the one to the side of the group over there," Chris told her, "The old guy. Mine's the big guy in the middle."

Heather'd just come off the stage and was catching her breath from dancing before moving out into the crowd to mingle. She squinted across the dim space and picked out her guy. He looked to be in his late forties, hair graying, face tired.

"Swap?" she asked hopefully.

"No way."

She sighed. Her friend was the same height as she, but rounder with the short copper colored hair appropriate for a girl named Chrysanthemum. Heather frowned. She'd rather have the big guy. She had a mental image of being fucked by him. Her eyes'd be looking up at his nipples. Oh well. She'd just have to get what fun she could out of her old guy.

"Oh Heather, maybe yours won't be so bad. Maybe he'll be like sweet and considerate. And you got the stud last time, right?

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His phone vibrated in his pocket. He glanced at the picture then answered, turning away slightly from Tod, the guy next to him, and bending over to shield the phone.

"Hey Tom, how's it going?" Joan's voice asked. She was the only member of their team not out with the bachelor party crowd. This being the twenty-first century, she'd been asked but'd turned it down, as Roy'd hoped no doubt. She was the smartest member the team and the hardest working and the only woman. She was recently divorced with a grade school aged son. Even when young, she'd been attractive by way of her personality and her brains and her health so now in her thirties she'd lost nothing.

"Oh it's just swell," he said without enthusiasm. He hadn't been to such a place in 20 years at least. In fact, not since the guys at his job of the time'd dragged him out prior to his own marriage. The girl up there now was a redhead with large breasts that seemed to be doing their own dance unconnected to the music. He'd watched the one who'd just finished, a slim taut thing, with idle pleasure. She'd known how to dance, she'd seemed to bind and mold the awful music into something exciting and live.

He added, "I've been thinking a bit about why the databases are blocking under load. Maybe the indices on the video rights table could use some looking into."

"Oh Tom," she laughed, "I bet you're the life of that party. Has our bachelor boy been behaving himself?"

"He's telling Chuck about the Red Sox game he and Linda went to last night."

"What was that? It's too noisy there. Talk to you tomorrow," she said and was gone.

Roy was a large man who was beginning to go to fat. He was noisily and publicly happy with his fiance, a woman named Linda who worked in sales support. His conversation consisted solely of either sports or what he and Linda'd done the night before and since they often went to Fenway Park or Foxboro or in to the Garden, his two subjects were often indistinguishable. Actually he really had three subjects because he liked to talk about eating and diets.

His happiness annoyed Joan and when she and Tom had lunch together, she could be merciless. Mimicking Roy's somewhat high pitched ultra sincere voice she'd say, "Dude, after mass yesterday, me and Linda went to this little barbecue place. I had the pulled pork in blueberry sauce, Linda the blackened catfish, Dude, both were excellent and we both had cheesecake for desert. And neither of us will gain a pound because Dude, we've started this new diet. You drink 3 glasses of water before each meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner and it fills you right up and Dude, water has no calories! I only had 3 orders and normally I'd've had 4!"

Joan also pilloried Linda's tweets. Joan followed Linda solely for the purpose of ridiculing her to Tom. "Made Lasagna! Made Brownies! Made Nachos! Made water! Roy's coming to watch the Sox! Not gonna leave my sweety even for a pee!"

Tom actually liked Roy's enthusiasm for Linda. He didn't know exactly why.

If Joan was smartest of their group, Roy was definitely not. Joan was infinitely patient in trying to help him understand the delicate dance performed in a modern ajax driven website, by the browser, the webserver and the database engine. When she was done, Roy would have at least enough of the puzzle under control that he could fix the bug he was assigned.

He glanced about the dim room and froze. Not far from him stood the dancer he'd admired. She stood in a group of guys. They were dressed like guys after work, some in slacks and button down shirts with their ties missing or askew, some like his group, in jeans and knit shirts and running shoes. She wore nothing but a scant triangle over her crotch. It was the most erotic thing he'd ever seen. She looked so tiny and so naked. He watched her laugh and look up at one of the guys, her loose blond hair drifted in front of an eye and she brushed it behind an ear. The motion of her arm raised a breast. He'd admired them during her performance, but aesthetically. Now he felt like he was on fire.

Their waitress came by. Her large breasts wobbled freely, prominent blue veins crisscrossed them. Her ass threatened to pour out of her red vinyl hotpants. He felt her to be an alien insulting creature. He had been going to finish his beer and say so long. His departure wouldn't be missed. Now he ordered another May Day Ale and grimaced again as his fellows ordered Buds.

He stood. Roy, the groom, reached over across the table and grabbed his arm. "Hendon, I'm glad you came out man!"

Tom grinned and shouted, "You gotta put up with me a bit longer! I'm just going to the john!"

"That's great man!" Roy shouted, then he let Tom loose and turned back to the guy on the other side, "When he came to the plate, Linda and me gave him a standing O. We were the only ones up in my section, but I didn't care. I miss him. It was good to see him. The Sox were fucking assholes to trade him. There's no loyalty anymore. And, just like old times, he got bruised by a few foul tips".

Tom headed across to the nasty men's room. He'd been trying to avoid another trip, but with another beer coming the need couldn't be postponed. And his path would take him right by the girl's group. She was looking up at another guy, her hand on his arm. He wondered if they were friends, if she knew the guy, if she was just chatting him up.

As he drew near she looked over, grinned and called, "Hey, buy me a ginger ale?"

He flushed, stunned, but managed to say "Sure," his path to and from the john did take him by the bar.

On his way back, hands still damp from the sink, he hadn't been willing to stay in the fetid air long enough for the blow dryer to work, he stood by the bar and shouted for the ginger ale. She grinned at him from her group, maybe twenty feet away.

Another fellow pushed past her. He saw the guy's hand reach out and pinch her bottom. "Hey," she called angrily, "Keep your hands to yourself." The guy just laughed and moved on to the bar.

"She's a hot one," the guy said to no one in particular.

"That'll be 5 bucks," said the bartender. Tom winced and paid.

Tom handed her the ginger ale. She took it and smiled her thanks, listening with apparent interest to a guy in her group who was going on about something Tom didn't comprehend: "Since the advent of the spoiler on the COT, those guys have been just fucking horrible."

He sat back down and sipped his beer. He watched her miserably. After a time she went over to the bar. To his surprise he saw her stand next to the oaf who'd pinched her. She rubbed her bare shoulder on the guy's side. She looked such a little thing, like a kitten or a kid. She took the guy's drink from his surprised fingers, took a sip and then lifted it up to his open mouth.

After a moment she stood on tiptoe, leaned against the guy, her breasts pressed to his shirt. She kissed him on the cheek.

The bartender shouted, "Hey there! NO TOUCHING!"

She turned to the bartender, made a face, then she slipped away and Tom watched her vanish through a door marked "Employees only".

The copper haired girl had finished. After a few moments, the taut little blond thing strolled onto the stage to a goodly welcome of cheers and catcalls. The music roared and she moved and he felt locked in place.

It seemed both an instant and age to the end of her performance. When she vanished he felt a wave of despair and loneliness. "This is stupid," he told himself and stood. "Hey guys, I'm heading out. Best of luck Roy!"

Roy stood, "Hendon, I'm glad you came out man! Hope you enjoyed yourself."

He made his way across the room. He didn't see her anywhere. He stepped out the entryway, into the harshly lit night. The parking lot looked dark and hard and surreal. To his right he saw a little semi-circle of guys. In the open space in the middle, facing the cement wall of the bar, stood the pincher. His pants puddled about his ankles. He held his hands out before him, maybe a foot and a half apart like he had something in his grip. His ass made the jerking motions all males've found so natural since the first amphibian invented internal fertilization in the primordial swamp. The guy's dick was hard and reaching. His fleshy face grimaced with pleasure, effort and dream. He rutted vigorously with the air.

There came a shout: "Hey asshole! Stop that!" from the door and several burly bar guys hurried out.

Tom'd been transfixed for a moment, gawking like the other guys. Just as the bar security pushed through, the thrusting untouched dick spurted, splashing semen on the wall. Feeling disgusted, Tom pulled himself away as the first punch flew.

He turned his car onto the highway. It was four lanes and it stretched for miles through a land of strip malls, car dealerships, restaurants, and nightclubs. He would follow it 10 miles, the lights annoyingly frequent, then his house was a couple miles to the south.

Traffic was light. It was almost 1 in the morning. After the second light, he saw up ahead the nightmarish blue and red flashing lights of a prowl car. The traffic slowed and moved to the left lane. The cops had pulled a car over. A quick glimpse was enough to let him recognize one of the guys the girl'd been chatting with. He took a mental inventory, a little late now that he was behind the wheel. He'd had 5 beers over maybe 4 hours. He'd eaten before coming and'd shared an order of slimy nachos. He should be fine. He felt like he was driving fine.

There was a ding and the near-empty idiot light on his dash began to flash. "Shit," he muttered. There'd been a quarter tank, he was sure. He thought about the distance. He'd need gas.

He pulled into a Mobil station, 4 lines of angled pumps and a convenience store. A gray Civic was on the other side of his pump. Someone short and slim had her back to him, filling her tank.

She straightened. He felt such a jolt. It was the little dancer. He almost hadn't recognized her. Her smooth face shown from within her hoodie which was pulled up against the chill spring air. Below the sweater she wore jeans and flip flops. She looked like any young high school or college kid. A girl you'd admire in the mall. His mind superimposed images of her standing near naked in the crowd of guys and on the stage with the gleaming pole. Here, she looked like she'd just stepped off a school bus. He was so turned on, his cock positively hurt.

He forced himself to go through the motions of sliding his card in the slot, pressing his pin, fumbling with the nozzle. Soon she would finish and be gone. Of course she wouldn't recognize him!

"Hey!" she said with apparent pleasure, "I remember you. You were sweet and bought me a ginger ale."

He flushed. He couldn't think of anything to say, then managed, "I really enjoyed your dancing."

She smiled in the harsh light. "Well thanks. The parents put me in dance class through high school. Come see me tomorrow I mean tonight? I'm on at 9."

He looked at her, of course he'd had no thought of going back. He felt numb and lost.

Her pump clicked loudly and she said "Shit." She took the nozzle from her car and looked at it. "I paid for like 20 dollars worth, (my Visa's maxed and I had to prepay cash, I was like totally humiliated), and now it's only taken 15. There's almost 2 gallons left? Here!"

She held her nozzle with the hose snaking behind it through the gap to his side of the pump. He looked at it stupidly.

"Hey take it. You haven't even started pumping."

When he took it her fingers touched his hand and he almost dropped it. He now had a nozzle in each hand and seemed unable to sort out what to do.

She grinned at him. "Hey, you gotta like stick it in her hole. And don't try to save time and push the other one up her back hole. She'd come in a flash, but you'd be blown to bits." She smiled, a smile sweet and clean as a spring sunrise, then seeing his incomprehension, added "Your car, idiot." She flip-flopped to her Civic's door and slid in. She paused, "My name's Heather. It'd be nice if you came tonight. You haven't said thanks." Her door slammed. Her car hummed to life, rolled over the concrete and then accelerated hard down the highway.

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Home, in the dark, he first drank several glasses of water as a hangover preventative, then, thinking about how wired and how turned on he was and how much he needed sleep, he masturbated. It took him a long time to come off, once he almost gave it up, but he always thought if he was ever unable to finish, it'd show he was old. His thoughts kept veering to memories of the girl Heather, how she'd looked on the stage, how she'd looked standing all but naked surrounded by drinking clothed guys, how she'd looked at the gas station and he had to force his mind back to his normal sequence, remembering one of the scenes in Fanny Hill. It'd always been his rule, right from when he'd started, never to think of a real person. It seemed rude.

After he showered, he lay in bed for a time, feeling dead. He remembered that he'd forgotten to do something. He stood and went into his dark kitchen. He turned on the stove light. It gave enough illumination to see his calendar. The next day, a Sunday, was blacked out. Below the calendar, on a bulletin board were baby pictures. He looked at them a time, finally touched one, turned off the light and went back to bed.

He had no sense of falling asleep, but he must've because he found himself in a dream. Afterward he realized that it'd been framed by a bit of Victorian erotica he'd read as a kid. His family'd visited his aunt and uncle's for the afternoon and in his cousin's closet, an older kid who was off at college, he'd found hidden behind some science fiction this thick paperback with the picture of a maid, hardly dressed, bending forward on the cover. It'd had some name like the Jewel or the Clam. He couldn't remember. When they'd left after dinner, the book'd left with him. Ever since, whenever he met that cousin, he felt guilty.