All Write, Already!

In those days, Jack Chick was pushing hard on us, trying to get us out spreading the good word with his tracts like there was no tomorrow. Every morning, he'd line us up in his seedy little office there just off the Strip in Vegas, and he'd belch gin fumes at us until we were all drunk just from breathing.

"You fuckers," he'd say, as his eyes, yellow-rimmed like two piss holes in the snow, bored in on our scrubbed faces, "you fuckers just better get off your lazy asses and start pushing the tracts! I want to see Somebody Loves You in the hands of every little girl in this city! Aw yeah, every little tramp slut who ran away from home..." And from there, he'd trail off, mumbling and groping himself shakily while we scrambled to get out of the office before we saw more than Jesus wanted us to.

I think that the others were probably hard-core on Christ, moreso than I was, at any rate. That was why I lagged everyone in the sales figures. Churches could smell the devotion on them, like some sort of incense. With me, all they smelled was the gallon of Brut I was using to cover up the reek that clung to me from being in Chick's employ. For some reason, Chick wouldn't fire me, though. I kept hoping he would, kept praying that one day I would be able to escape from his booze-soaked clutches and go back to the smack that had been my friend for years, until Chick pulled me out of it.

About a month before I finally worked up the courage to quit Chick Enterprises for good, Jack called me in my little studio apartment. It was about 2:15 A.M., and I was having the horse shakes anyway, so I was awake.

"Eric," he slurred into the receiver, and I knew that there would be trouble, "get your ass over here right now." The click that ended the call had all the finality of a judge's gavel crashing down on a death sentence.

I pulled my beat up Festiva into the driveway of Chick's bungalow on the edge of the city, out near where the desert still rules, and walked up to the door. Before I could knock, Chick had already opened the door.

He looked bad. I don't think it's possible to look really good when you're blind drunk, haven't shaven in about four days, and are only wearing a pair of lime green French-cut men's bikini briefs, but Chick managed to push the bounds of even that look. He slithered into a robe as I walked into the living room.

It's a little-known fact that blood has a smell, because most people don't come in contact with enough blood to get a good whiff. It's a meaty, metallic smell, like a steak covered in pennies. In this particular instance, the smell of the blood was coming from hookers. Probably three or four of them, although the fact that I can't tell you exactly how many should tell you what condition they were in.

"Don't know how it happened, Eric." Ice cubes clinked, and I realized that he'd poured himself a water glass full of bourbon. "But you gotta help me. I helped you, man. It's only fair. It's only fair."

I wanted to argue, to run. Hell, I wanted to be anywhere but in a room with this guy. But he had me dead to rights: it was only fair that I help him out, just like he got me off the junk.

So I grabbed some towels, and some Hefty sacks, and we proceeded to work together to clean up the mess he'd made. He put on some light rock, Foreigner or Journey or something, and we started to sway and bop to the rhythm as we dropped fingers or ears into the trash bags.

Eventually, the living room was cleaned up, and we drove out on some county road into the desert, picked a tapped-out oil well more or less at random, and started tossing the sacks down the wellhead. The sun started to rise just as we finished, and as we drove back to Chick's bungalow so I could drop him off, I reflected that I'd probably never have a better job than that one. I never had.

Still, to this day I wonder how he could have made such a mess and not had a drop on himself, except around his mouth. Some questions just don't have answers, I suppose.