LITMIR.BIZ

      When I woke up the next morning, my legs, arms, head, and torso each resonated with pain like the brass tubes on a pipe organ. I could hear somebody puttering around in the front of the apartment near the front door and living room. I lay there for a minute, trying to put together exactly what happened. I remembered the beating. I remembered being helped home by that guy, who during the moment was just a shadow. So with Captain fuckin’ Nemo playing, like, an aria or something on my body I got up and walked out into the other room.

      And nearly shit myself.

      What could only have been my benefactor from last night was standing in the kitchen wielding a frying pan like an ex-con version of Martha Stewart. Okay, fine…you know what I mean, an exer-con Martha Stewart. Whatever. That’s not the point. The point is that he was wearing this little dandelion-yellow apron that he had to have brought with him. And, yup—that’s all he was fucking wearing. Plus he was flexing his butt cheeks in time with the Enrique Iglesias track pumping on the stereo.

      Oooookay.

      He turned around and looked at me and I felt naked. I mean, more naked. Fuck. Anyway, he was looking at me in approval.

      “Me gusta tus huevos, y pinga.”

      “What!”

      “Do you want some brekfas’? I said.”

      I stared.

      “Are you the guy who saved my ass last night out there?”

      “Sí.”

      “And you brought me back here?”

      “Sí.”

      “How did you know where I lived?”

      He ignored this one and put a plate with eggs and beans on the table and gestured at it with his hand. Not knowing what else to do, I sat down and started eating. All fuckin’ around aside, it was really good. The cross-dressing, Mexican ex-con Martha Stewart had a gift. He stared at me with a disturbing fondness and ruffled my hair and touched my cheek before turning around to go back to the kitchen counter to fetch a carafe of orange juice.

      I sat there eating, the place on my cheek feeling hot and violated. He returned, putting a handful of pills on the table for me, I suppose—three of which were white and recognizable as generic Vicodin, the rest were little and blue. Those I didn’t recognize.

      “For dee paing and dee possible infection, que no?”

      I swept up the pills, swallowed them down with OJ, and kept eating. It was about the best fucking meal I’d had since I got here. You know, for Mexico? The Mexican food sucks mammoth shit. But this guy could fucking burn, man. It was righteous. He could cook and he could fight.

      Then I remembered the butt-flexing in time with ol’ Enrique “I’m so straight I’m queer” Iglesias and my blood ran cold. I looked up at him, he still had his back to me and he was dancing around. He was the ugliest motherfucker I’d ever seen. He was all lumpy and his ass looked like two pit bulls fighting in a sack and one has managed to claw halfway free and the other’s dead. He was covered in bad tattoos—knives, la Virgin de Guadalupe, prayerful hands on one arm, but there was a razor blade pressed between the fingers. Nice.

      At no time during this ridiculous exchange did I stop and say, “Wait a fucking minute. Cut. Hold the phone.” I gotta put that up to shock…or maybe I was hypnotized by the butt-flexing. But this was outta hand. My brain was having a rough time connecting Tammy Faye Bakker over there and the display I had witnessed the previous night with those hired thugs. I was officially having a hard time with this. So when he put down a plate of chicharron to go with the eggs and beans and everything else, I figured freaking out could wait until after breakfast. But then I saw him sit across from me with what looked like a salad. I had to ask.

      “Dude, you just made all this good food. What’s with the salad?”

      “I watching my figure, I want to look cute.”

      Well, that’s when I snapped.

      “Are you fucking kidding me? You look like a Sailor Jerry ad, for fuck’s sake!”

      Then I witnessed what must truly be the most disturbing thing ever. Somebody who looked like a cross between RuPaul, Carlos Mencia, and Ron Jeremy…pouting.

      Fucking pouting, for Christ’s sake.

      “Look, man, I’m sorry about that. I’m just a little on edge.”

      The pout faded, replaced by ice-cold eyes and a stone-hard thousand-yard stare. My nuts shrank up inside me and lodged in my throat like an extra set of tonsils. Desperately, I tried a different tack.

      “The food’s really good. Thanks, really. I don’t think my mother or last girlfriend could cook like this. Where’d you learn?”

      “En la carcel.”

      “La carcel, what’s that? Like a cooking school here or something?”

      “In jyail.”

      Jyaii, jyail, what the fuck was jyail? Then I looked at him again a little closer. Oh, fuck, he meant jail!

      I just stared at him stupidly, trying to figure out what the fuck I was gonna do, when he held up a finger and flounced happily over to a bag in the corner and got some papers out of it. He came back to the table and shoved my breakfast out of the way, from which I had just rescued my coffee cup before it all went crashing to the floor. He stared at the mess in confusion from his little “Fag-Hulk smash” moment but soon recovered and pointed at the papers in front of me triumphantly.

      I looked down and saw one of the comic books I had recently worked on. The Chorizo Largo one, and then under that I saw this handwritten letter that looked really familiar…there were some Is dotted with hearts and…oh, sweet blue-blistering fuck. I had found my secret admirer.

      “I jor beegeest fang, I love jew,” he said, his eyes gone all wet.

      “Yeah, well, I ain’t so fond of them myself, but whatever.” What the hell had this got to do with the Jews? Or fangs?

      “Que?”

      “The Jews, they’re okay, I guess.” Me, still not getting it.

      “No, I love joo.”

      “Oh…” Oh, he meant “you.” Oh, fuck.

      He started moving toward me. I looked down in horror to see that his apron was tenting, rapidly transitioning from pup to four-person. Oh God, I’d rather the beat-down in the alleyway. This sucked, I came all this way to avoid prison and a convict was gonna fuck me anyway.

      Then this cat did something that I really didn’t expect, not that I was sitting at home one day expecting a tattoo-covered Mexican convict with an identity crisis and a love of cartoon porn to save my life and then fall in love with me, but you know what I mean. I was revising my position by the nanosecond. Back on track now, he grabbed my hand and led me back to the bedroom.

      “Look, man. Can we talk about this, please? This really isn’t my thing. What do you want? An autograph? Money? What!” Desperately trying to bargain my way out of it. All he did was grunt and pull harder.

      When we got into my bedroom he pulled a knife out from Christ knows where (and believe me, the options were limited and nothing nice). He showed it to me and said, his voice thick with what could only be excitement: “Jew, jew don’ go no place.”

      Then he got on the bed on all fours and arched his back like an overaffectionate house cat. My “weird” threshold was gaining by the minute.

      “I wan’ jew to fock me.”

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