“Mmm, look at that face,” I said when I saw myself in the mirror. It was sculpted with beautiful high cheekbones and full lips. Bright blue eyes looked back at me with admiration from under an expensive haircut. This was that sweet honeymoon period when you first get a new body and this one was well built. It was so quick, strong and responsive that it was a pleasure to drive. And all original equipment, too.
That was the exterior. The interior was a different matter. It was full of all kinds of trach. There was addiction, vanity, fecklessness, dishonesty, and greed stinking the place up. I shouldn’t complain because those are the very attributes that allowed me entry to this new vehicle. I drove it downstairs and down the sidewalk to find the nearest place to fuel it as my hunger pangs’ intensity increased.
“Hey, Rico!” a voice called out behind me. Rico’s body responded before my mind and out of reflex turned around. “Where you going in such a hurry?” I had to rifle through some really unpleasant memories to get a name.
“Hey, Paulie. I’m just going to get something to eat.” Damn. I sounded like a bad mafia stereotype. The voice wasn’t anywhere near the quality of the body.
“So, you got money to eat, but no money to pay me back? You said you was making an investment and you’d pay me back with interest.”
Reluctantly, I reopened Rico’s disturbing memory files. He had used the money to get the haircut and the clothes and to rent the AirBnB that I thought was his home. He was a con-man. I had been driving a thirty-six-year-old named Carly who lived in a cold-water flat in the Bronx and thought this would be an upgrade. She ran from the bed and got dressed rapidly after I left her during sex. She had no idea where she was or how she got there. I’d been driving her for six days.
“Why are you busting my balls? It’s an investment. I’ll come to you as soon as it pays off.” Paulie was stone-faced.
“Okay, big shot investor. Let me buy you lunch at Tony’s and you tell me all about it. If it’s that good, then I want to get in on it.”
After eating the finest cannelloni I ever had, Paulie took me to his cousin’s pig farm upstate. I rode in his Caddy’s capacious trunk. He looked me right in the eyes when he capped me, making the transfer easier. It was hard watching Rico’s beautiful body being eaten by the pigs like a plate of chicken wings.
Paulie wasn’t sporty like Rico. He was more of a luxury model and gave me easy access to the things I needed.I never ate and drank so well and I was surrounded by so many heavily compromised people that I could move easily if I wanted to.
“Mmm, look at that face,” said my voluptuous Italian wife.
Literature in Small Doses 