Chapter 10
Pumping gas at Merc's station has given me a whole new lease on life. I make dogshit for wages, two-seventy-five an hour, but the free-lance action, the tape loops, the hardcore stills, the eight-by-ten magazines Merc and I put out on the sly they more than make up for the humiliation of actually having to work with my hands.
Phlegm was the anal rapist-Phlegm was Shitty Dick. Simple, brutal, very clever and very greedy, you still see him on the airwaves, every night of the week, starting about twelve midnight, you can catch his new act, from the "heart of Newark," the Rex Phlegm Show. He seems to have a thing for sex changes, cross-dressers, transsexuals, flits, twirps, psychic healters, dog trainers, literati from the Big Apple, and old showbiz hacks who smarm and whine about the good old days, when the studios used to provide dormitory accommodations for aspiring, contract stars and starlets.
You can take or leave Rex Phlegm, the midnight host. I enjoy his show, and whenever Merc scores some powerhouse bennies, both of us are up in the "wee wee" hours of the morning, watching Rex and his human zoo, packaging hardcore enema loops in the station office.
As far as Rex the Rapist, that is another story. Rex said he had a deal, and he was right. He had a deal with the Network-they said, "Rex, get us some hot stories, contemporary stuff, stuff that leans on the paranoia, the tension between the newly liberated quims and the psychopathic cavemen. Do that for us, Rex, go out on a limb, and we'll go out on a limb for you." Rex went off the limb, and through the windows of several suburban bedrooms, and then climbed right into the sack with several highly unwilling, and oft times underaged females, and did his "thing" with them, whether or not they liked it, like Charmane, or whether it caused permanent brain damage, as in the case of Debbie Milhaud.
Rex was part of a vast News gathering and News making team, a team that has players in Washington, New York, and in the local precinct house as well. When I brought Rex in, the desk sergeant called Milhaud on the phone, and the Lieutenant came down pronto. He greeted Rex with a big smile, and handed me my walking papers without even looking at me. They left the station arm in arm, and I distinctly heard Milhaud offer Phlegm a dinner invitation as they passed out of earshot.
I had broken the rules of team play. My punishment was not the locker room, nor the bench, but exile, out on the streets, out with the hordes of ninnies who sit nightly in front of their sets and watch with glee as Kristine Hundt goes over the daily atrocity photos with them, pointing out details, cute correspondences, neat family fun. The team depends on the loyalty of the players for success, for new stories, for feedback with the ninnies who suck up what the team offers, prechewed and pre-digested, pablum and puke, the feeders and the fed.
Rex was a creative member of the team, and Milhaud was playing his own vital part, keeping operating costs at the department soaring year after year, busting the petty loop freak, the nickle bag hustler, the unlicensed masseuse, the Oakie with the cracked tailight lens. Milhaud did his job keeping the coffers full and the public dollars rolling in to feed law enforcement families, and Rex did his job creating new paranoia, new tensions, new hysteria and dryheaving hatred amongst the ninnies. His Shitty Dick act must have brought the local station at least a twenty-five percent increase in advertising profits, and he did make the Network two short days after I was canned from the force.
Geraldo Jivaro, the Third World Network spokesman, seized upon the story of Shitty Dick, and how the insistent activities of investigative reporter Rex Phlegm forced the "ultimate chauvinist pig" to crawl back into his moist hole and leave the female population of our town at peace with themselves at long last. The spot of Jivaro's once monthly special news show, "Fuck Off, America," sandwiched in between Jivaro's own expose of the brassiere industry's tie in to the defense establishment, and the insider's report on the Enema Liberation Movement made Rex Phlegm an overnight sensation. Within two months, he had that midnight talk show of his own, and the rest of history.
I don't grudge Rex his success, and hell, I don't even grudge Milhaud his own maintenance of his job-they both played ball with the team. I only wish someone had told me earlier that I was on the team too, and that something was expected of me other than what I thought I was supposed to be doing. Sure, now it seems logical. The long term bucks of prolonging the Shitty Dick case to its limits made for the greater good-more people got more mileage out of the case than would ever have been possible had I brought Shitty Dick to justice after, say, his fifteenth anal attack. Ninnies got adrenal flashes-the NoseWitness Team got sponsorship boosts-Rex got a new job Milhaud got promoted, and his daughter got Ginsend-UFO psychotherapy at the Beverly Hills Institute for Macrame. I got shitcanned.
I have the public spirit, however. I'm not bitter. I realize that the greater good was served. I'm a real help to Merc too. Why, with my inside knowledge of Vice Squad technique, Merc doesn't even need a lawyer. We've got the inside track on new markets too, with Merc's innate sense of the sleazy. We're at the top of the heap in the loop business now, and we'll stay there. We keep a low profile. We don't fuck with the superficial aspects of the trade, the penthouse apartments, the Rolls Royces, the air-conditioned Valley plant. Hell no. We do it in the toilet out behind the station, and we package in the service bays or in the office. Keeps the overhead at a minimum, and the product, my God, the product is raunchy.
Ted Turk stopped in the other day, still looking for that side money, that freelance stuff. I filled him in on my change of trades, and he nodded and chewed the fat with me a while. I filled his tank with Premium, invited him back to the toilet to watch a pair of sailors fucking each other with chainsaws. He went for it. Lots of folks do....