Sex and Murder Magazine

By S.C. Hayden

The first time I went to her, she asked me for one hundred dollars, but I knew she would have agreed to 30 or 40. We're not talking about two thousand-dollar call girls here; these girls will take whatever they can get. Some people, inevitably, will try and take advantage of them, try to talk the price down to 15 or 20 dollars, trying to get something for nothing; not me, though. I don't believe in getting something for nothing; I'm happy to pay. So let me put the cards on the table-I'm dying. Don't worry, this isn't the story it sounds like it's going to be. This is not a tale about a lonely, dying old man's love for a young prostitute. I will not, in this story, attempt to illustrate the complexity of human need, nor will I try to explain that this young woman was so much more than a simple whore, and how our relationship felt, at times, to me at least, almost holy. This is not a roses in the gutter story.

I won't insult your intelligence with all that. You're a grown-up just like me, and you know that every human being has any number of reasons, both good and bad, often only partly understood, if understood at all, for living the life they live. I'm not looking to exonerate myself here. I'm way past guilt.

There are places in Chinatown where young girls sit in rooms, rooms not much larger than a walk-in closet, and wait for people like me, people who have given 60 dollars to the slick-haired old Chinese man who runs the house, the man who is perpetually smoking, and has a glass eye, and says his name is Lou, but is lying. Behind some doors you can find girls as young as 14, probably even younger, but if you want to open those doors, you have to give Lou a lot more than 60 dollars. But I was never that kind of customer. For whatever it's worth, I was just a man seeking the company of a woman, and willing to pay for it.

I first stepped inside of Sun Wah's Chinese Herbal Medicine one year ago today. It was a cold and dreary February afternoon, and I had spent the majority of the morning hacking up blood. The old woman behind the counter eyed me skeptically while I feigned interest in the jars of dried, crushed plants ranged on wooden shelves behind her. Finally, when I was certain that I was in the right place, I told her that I was looking for company.

"What kind company?" she asked me.

"I'm looking for a girlfriend," I said.

"You come inside."

She took me behind the counter and led me into a back room concealed behind a black sheet tacked up over the doorway.

"You talk Lou," she said, pointing to a man who was sitting on a wooden chair, watching the Red Sox suffer defeat at the hands of the Yankees on a small black-and-white television.

The man turned his head and looked up at me, a cigarette hanging limply from the corner of his mouth, one eye animate and deep brown, one stationary and pale. "What are you looking for?" he asked.

*****

The thing about cancer is that it doesn't just kill you. It's not satisfied with that-it wants to humiliate you first. It wants to enfeeble you, cripple you, demean you, emasculate you; it wants to humble you, it wants to see you beg. For me, it started with explosive, bloody diarrhea. I felt a little rumble in my stomach, a little queasiness, nothing really, and then before I knew it, I was shitting in my pants. Picture it: It's a beautiful spring day, and I'm walking through the Boston Common, and then, without warning, I'm spraying hot, liquid shit out of my ass. I couldn't stop it, I couldn't control it, no matter how hard I tried to hold it in, it just kept coming, soaking through my underpants, running down my legs; thank god I wasn't wearing shorts.

*****

I followed Lou up a flight of stairs and down a long, narrow hallway. The hallway was lined with doors on either side. None of the doors had doorknobs. There were circular holes in the doors where the doorknobs should have been. The lights were on in some of the rooms, and beams of light streamed through the holes and across the dark corridor. I felt immediately like a cat burglar, creeping through the darkened hall, ducking gingerly beneath the beams of light, careful not to trip the alarm.

Lou stopped in front of one of the lit rooms, turned to me and said, "Sixty dollar one hour."

I paid him without hesitation. She must have been asleep when I pushed the door open, because she was slumped in the corner of the room with her knees drawn up to her chest, sitting on a small, fold-out cot. The floor creaked when I stepped inside, and her head popped up and her eyes opened. In an instant she was all smiles, ready for business, brushing her hair out of her face. She was thin and pale, 35 years or so, maybe younger-this line of work has a tendency to age a woman-but still very pretty. She stood up immediately and motioned for me to sit sown. She wore a small, pink, lace nightgown and nothing else.

"You like Chinese massage?" she asked, smiling. When I didn't answer she said, "You like I suck your dick? You like fuck? One hundred dollar."

I accepted her offer, although I paid her 200 when we were finished, not because her service was above average or because it helped assuage my guilt (I felt none), but because I have always believed that people should be properly compensated for the work they do. I don't believe in getting something for nothing.

"Sank you." she said, smiling widely, after rapidly counting the ten, 20-dollar bills I had placed in her small hands.

I regret having fucked her now, but as I said before, I'm not looking for forgiveness.

*****

After the incident in the Boston Common, I went to see a doctor. One week later, I was diagnosed with metastatic colorectal cancer. I was told that the cancer had already spread throughout my lymphatic system and could now appear anywhere in my body, but that the usual rout would be through my liver, then my lungs, then bones, then brain. Splendid, I thought. High-dose chemotherapy and radiation were my only options, and even that would only buy some extra time. The question was, did I want to live another five to ten years, but suffer the symptoms of chemotherapy, often as bad as or worse than the symptoms of the cancer itself, or go without it, and live another two to three years, often in debilitating pain. I chose the second option. Fuck it, I thought, why drag it out? I can always find something to kill the pain.

I should have liver failure, I thought, because during the bad old days, I nearly drank myself to death, or lung cancer, because I still smoke a pack a day, but no, I have colorectal cancer.

"Who the fuck gets cancer in the ass?" I asked the doctor.

"Actually, over sixty thousand people die from colorectal cancer in the United States every year. Of course, the majority of those deaths could have been prevented, had they undergone the appropriate screening," he said, matter of factly.

It had, of course, been a rhetorical question, but doctors are often inept when it comes to normal human conversation.

*****

She said her name was Susan, pronouncing it Soozan, but was lying. I told her my name was Jim. It isn't. Each time I visited Sun Wah's Chinese Herbal Medicine, I asked for Susan. I'm not the type who looks for variety. When I find something I like, I stick with it. That's what got me in trouble with the drink years back. I decided I liked scotch and soda, and boy did I stick with it. Sometimes, if Susan was with another customer, I had to wait in the back room with Lou. I didn't mind waiting. There was no chance that you would run into another john, because house policy dictated that when you finished, you left through a rear door that opened into a back alley and locked itself behind you. Lou had a surveillance camera over the back door and watched people leave the building on a small television monitor. Lou was always talking about baseball, always smoking an unfiltered Camel cigarette, and talking about baseball. You would never guess by the casual way he rattled off batting averages and recapped game highlights that he was running a criminal enterprise.

*****

After a few months, my guts decided to stop digesting the food I ate. Most of the time it wasn't a problem, because I didn't want to eat anything anyway. I was constantly nauseous, and whatever I put in my mouth came out of my ass a little while later in the form of bloody diarrhea. Needless to say, I lost a lot of weight. I would have to recommend colorectal cancer as an effective weight-loss plan to any aspiring runway model. But finally, even the small meals I forced myself to choke down became unbearable. A few bites of anything, and I was on my knees, retching hard enough to burst a blood vessel, coughing up yellow-black bile long after the scant contents of my stomach had been expelled.

I needed surgery. The doctor assured me that it was a routine procedure: "To be expected," he told me. "A complication of the cancer," he said, "easily corrected." They would simply cut a hole in my abdomen and place a rubber tube directly into my stomach. He called it a "G-tube," short for gastrostomy tube. At first I refused, but by that time I was down to 135 pounds, all skin and bones. I had to do something. After the operation I was given information about local support groups for people with gastrostomy tubes, just as I had been given information on support groups for people with cancer when I was first diagnosed. I never called.

There is a clamp on the end of my G-tube, kind of like a little clothespin. The clamp keeps my stomach juices from squirting out all over the place when I'm walking around. At night, before bed, I open the clamp and use the barrel of a 60-cc syringe to instill a nutrient-rich liquid into my stomach. The blended formula comes in cans and is delivered in cases of 24 to my address once a week. There is a sunburst of rainbow colors on the can labels meant to represent health and vitality. The liquid in the cans is, in essence, partially digested food.

*****

It was my fourth or fifth time with Susan. She was bent over the fold-out, sticking her pale, skinny ass in the air, her little silk slip hiked up over her hips. I was standing behind her with my pants around my ankles, ready to push myself inside, when my stomach clenched and my knees buckled underneath me. It felt like an invisible heavyweight fighter had landed a right hook, square in the center of my gut. I crumpled onto the linoleum floor, holding my stomach in my hands, eyes squeezed shut, panting. I was afraid that the diarrhea was about to start squirting, and I tried to crawl to the door, hoping I could make it to a bathroom, but the pain was overwhelming. Susan knelt down beside me and placed her hand on my bloated stomach. She paused for a moment, slid her hand down a little, then paused again.

"Hmmm." she said, as though she had found something she hadn't expected.

I felt the familiar queasiness that normally precedes an episode of explosive diarrhea, and nearly cried in desperation. I didn't want Susan to see me like this, but there was nothing I could do.

"Almost there," Susan said. She slid her hand a few inches to the left until she had apparently found what she was looking for, and pressed. Instantly, the pain, the nausea, the queasiness, were all gone, totally disappeared.

"There," Susan said, "much better for you."

"What did you do?" I asked, bewildered.

"Chinese massage." she said.

I never fucked her again. After that, it would have been like fucking Mother Teresa, like fucking a saint, like fucking an angel. I didn't go to her for sex; I went to her for much more than that. I went to her for what she so nonchalantly called "Chinese massage." It wasn't just the pain that disappeared. It was everything. One hour of touching pressure points on my forehead and the soles of my feet, and I stopped coughing up blood in the morning. A few one-hour sessions swatting my back with her cupped hand, and I could eat solid food again. I knew that what was happening was impossible. She was actually curing me. Acupuncture, aromatherapy, all that crap; I'm sure that some of those things can help alleviate the symptoms of some chronic illnesses, but what she was doing went far beyond symptom management; what she was doing could only rightfully be called "magic."

After a while, she stopped taking my money. She just wouldn't accept it. I tried to leave it on the cot and just walk out, but she told me, in no uncertain terms, that if I paid her she would stop. She would tell Lou that I had hit her, and I would be barred from the building. What could I do?

I saw her once a week for the next three months. Always in the morning, and always for an hour. On one particular morning, she caught me off guard after I had taken off my shirt, by suddenly drawing attention to my G-tube. Up until then, she had always acted as though it hadn't been there, she simply ignored it, and I appreciated her discretion. So when she lifted the G-tube in her hand, and said, "You have fat worm in belly," I was somewhat embarrassed. I wanted to tell her that thanks to her, I didn't even use it anymore; thanks to her, I could eat like a normal human being, but the words caught in my throat.

She pinched the end of the tube with her finger tips and lifted it up. She shook her head from side to side and frowned, as though she were looking at something distasteful, white socks with black pants, perhaps, or a piano-key necktie, rather than something unnatural and grotesque. Slowly, she began to pull the rubber tube out of my bloated abdomen. It looked like she was pulling a long worm, slick and shiny, out of the ground. I was frightened, but it didn't hurt; in fact, it was exhilarating. Inch by inch the rubber tube came out, and I'm there sweating and moaning. When the last inch was pulled free, my asshole clenched up, and I almost came. Panting and exhausted, I leaned back against the wall, spent. She ran her hands over my belly, as though conjuring an image in a crystal ball, then threw her head back and laughed.

"You see," she said, "no more worm."

I looked down at my swollen belly, expecting to see a bleeding hole where the tube had been. There was no wound, no scar, nothing.

It didn't last, though. If I didn't see her every week, the symptoms would come back. The pain, the vomiting, the coughing up blood, and the bloody diarrhea, it all came back. But for the first few days after a visit with Susan, I felt better than healthy, I felt better than well, I felt holy. I felt like I was fucking immortal, I felt like I could read minds. Waking out of Sun Wah's Chinese Herbal Medicine, every cell in my body shivered in ecstasy. I swear, at times, it felt like I was floating, actually floating, ever so slightly above the cracked and dirty sidewalk. By the fourth or fifth day, I felt merely human, and by the sixth or seventh, I felt, once again, like a man with cancer.

I could have gone on that way forever. A new lease on life every seven days. She wasn't charging me, so besides the 60 dollars I paid Lou for each visit, money wasn't a problem. Even if she had been charging me, it wouldn't have mattered-money was something I had plenty of. Really, I could have gone on that way forever, but in the real world, there is no such thing as getting something for nothing. I, of all people, should have known that. Eventually, I started waking up sick. I would see her, and just a day or so later I woke up sick. It wasn't cancer sick though, laying there in bed, feverish and shaking, my heart racing, nauseous. This was a sickness I knew all too well. I was in withdrawal. I recognized the feeling from the bad old days, the days before I finally kicked the drink. If you've ever experienced the DTs, you don't soon forget it. At first it was like a bad case of déjà vu. I thought it was ten years ago, and I was back in detox, but it wasn't a drink I was craving, it was Susan.

It quickly reached the point where I needed to see her every day. I walked into Sun Wah's Chinese Herbal Medicine bleary-eyed and trembling. Five minutes of acupressure, and all the pain disappeared. After a one-hour session, I felt as fine as wine. All day long I thought about Susan. I dreamed about her when I slept, and when I woke in the morning, I rushed to see her.

On some days, I woke up needing a massage so bad, I could barely hold my hands still. It was all I could do to get my clothes on and make my way down to Sun Wah's. One morning I awoke at 5:30 a.m., sick and trembling. My eyes watered, my nose was running, my teeth were chattering, and my skin felt like it was crawling with fire ants. Sun Wah's didn't open its doors until eight o'clock. For two and a half hours I waited, shaking and dry heaving. When the rising sun finally cut through my window, the glare cut viciously through my head. I choked down a handful of Tylenol and stepped out onto the morning sidewalk in a trench coat and sunglasses. It was August by then, and the breezy morning air was a warm and pleasant 75 degrees, but I was freezing.

As I stepped inside of Sun Wah's Chinese Herbal Medicine, I pissed my pants. I hadn't even noticed that I had to pee until it was streaming, first warm, then cold, down my pant leg. I didn't care. I just wanted to get myself upstairs as fast as I could. Lou took one look at me and shook his head. He knew a junkie when he saw one, but he took my 60 dollars and sent me upstairs just the same. I pushed Susan's door open and collapsed on the floor. Twin jets of snot squirted from my nose when my ass hit the linoleum. I looked up at her, eyes red, pupils dilated, arms and legs shaking as though I had Parkinson's disease; I was a mess.

This time, Susan just stared at me with a wicked look in her eyes. I had never seen her look like this before and was actually frightened.

"Please," I said, clasping my hands together as though she was a carved stone idol, and I was deep in prayer, "you have to help me."

I wasn't ashamed to beg; it was all I could do not to cry. It was then that she told me she would only help me if I did something for her. She told me that I had to kill Lou.

"He very bad man," she said, "he very bad man from Burma. Bad for Susan." She told me that if I didn't do it, she would never touch me again. I agreed without hesitation. What she did next was something indescribable. She touched me in ways I didn't know I could be touched. She touched my soul.

Imagine hang gliding over the Himalayas; imagine racing through the ocean like a dolphin, cresting the waves, leaping from the rushing foam; imagine sex with the most beautiful woman in the world, in zero gravity, shot full of the most expensive designer drugs available; imagine a thousand orgasms rolled into one, and you're not even close. I was supposed to do it the next day, just show up in the morning as usual with my 60 dollars and a big smile, and kill him. Shoot him, stab him, bludgeon him, choke him to death with piano wire, she didn't care how I did it, as long as he was dead.

I bought a gun through the back door of a pawn shop on Essex Street an hour after I left Sun Wah's Chinese Herbal Medicine. A 9 mm, four hundred dollars, no questions asked. I drove home with the gun next to me on the passenger seat, in a brown paper bag. It was déjà vu all over again. I kept glancing over at the crinkled paper bag, remembering how, during the bad old days, I used to drive around the city with a fifth of Jack Daniel's in a brown paper bag. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I didn't sleep that night, sitting on the edge of my bed, holding the 9 mm in my hand, hefting its weight, turning it from side to side, watching the dull light glint its rust-flaked barrel. I thought about Susan and what she had done to me with her hands. I rehearsed what I was going to do in my mind over and over again. I'd walk inside with the gun in my pants, hand Lou the 60 dollars, and when he glanced down to count it, as he always did, I'd shoot him; simple as that. I didn't think about what I would do next, about the old woman out front, about the other girls upstairs, about the police. I thought only about Susan, about doing what she wanted me to do, and about the next massage. When the morning came, I headed out to Sun Wah's Chinese Herbal Medicine with a single purpose.

The glass storefront of Sun Wah's was dark, and a single sign with red lettering hung in the door: CLOSED. In a panic, I peered through the window. Everything was gone. The wooden shelves behind the counter were empty. The old woman was nowhere to be seen. I checked my watch. It was eight-thirty. Sun Wah's never opened late. I smashed a hole in the glass with my elbow, reached inside, and unlocked the door. I rushed into the back room where I had sat and waited so many times before, listening patiently as Lou exposed the virtues of the Boston Red Sox. It was empty. The television, the security camera monitor, the small wooden chairs, they were all gone. I pulled the gun out of my pants and marched up the stairs, shouting Susan's name. The hallway was dark and all of the small rooms empty. There was nothing left.

Businesses of that sort have a tendency to disappear and reappear in different places and under different names without warning. I don't know if Lou had somehow gotten wind of my plan, or if the disappearance of Sun Wah's was due to something completely unrelated. Susan certainly hadn't known it was going to happen. I wondered if Lou had been on to her all along. It struck me that I knew next to nothing about either of them. In any case, they were gone, and that fact would be Lou's salvation, and in a different way, my own.

I stood, gazing into Susan's empty room. I sat down on the small fold-out where she had worked her magic on me and wondered what I was going to do next. Then the sickness came on me, and I started to shake. After that it didn't matter. I was just another junkie in Chinatown looking for a fix.

I spent months casing all the whorehouses and happy-ending massage parlors in the area, but I never found her. I walked up and down the streets asking about a man named Lou, a man with a glass eye. No one knew him, or at least no one would admit to it. For the most part, people just smiled politely and shook their heads saying, "No English, sorry, no English."

Whatever it was she had done to me with her hands, whatever kind of black magic she had wrought, it wasn't something I could buy on any street corner. Cold turkey cures are tough, but with time, the shakes, the vomiting, the withdrawal seizures, they all passed. When I was finally cured, when I could step outside without fiending for Susan's Chinese massage, I thought about what I had been willing to do, what I had, in fact, almost done. I've made many mistakes in my life, but for whatever it's worth, I've never killed anyone. I've hustled more fools out of their life savings than I care to admit. I've gained people's trust only to rob them blind. I've committed all seven deadly sins, but have thus far broken only nine of the Ten Commandments. Lying there on that floor, dripping snot and trembling, piss in my pants, I would have done anything for her. Anything for her to press her thumbs into my back and make the pain go away.

I had fallen pretty low, lower even than I had been during the bad old days. I was ready to take another man's life, and I regret that now, but I don't feel guilty about it. As I said before, I'm way past guilt. There is a difference between regret and guilt. Regret is a natural part of the human condition; a byproduct of living a life where difficult decisions have to be made. Guilt is for Catholics, and I stopped being a Catholic a long time ago.

I'd like to say, that after everything, she left me in a better place than where I was when she found me. I'd like to say that for whatever else she may have been, she was also a miracle worker. That she embodied both good and evil, both yin and yang, but as I said before, this isn't a roses in the gutter story. The cancer rebounded with a vengeance, and once again, I'm dying.























































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