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  Heartbalm

  A Novel by Malachi Stone

  ©2013 by Malachi Stone

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission of the author. All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE - AND NOW A WORD FROM MY SPONSOR

  CHAPTER TWO - THE ITALIANATE PRONUNCIATION

  CHAPTER THREE - PERMUTATIONS AND COMBINATIONS

  CHAPTER FOUR - COLD CALLING

  CHAPTER FIVE - THE CURSE OF THE HOLSTEIN WOMEN

  CHAPTER SIX - MEN’S TRIBUTES TO WOMEN

  CHAPTER SEVEN - A MAN AFTER MY OWN HEART

  CHAPTER EIGHT - RAPED OVER THE COALS

  CHAPTER NINE - THE TWO GERASIMI

  CHAPTER TEN - PUSSY CRICK

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - SPITWAD FROM THE TEACHER

  CHAPTER TWELVE - I CAN’T GET NO

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - SHITCANERY

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - COULD WE AFFORD TO DO THIS?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - WHO’S COMPLAINING?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - DEAD SERIOUS

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - STILL LIFE WITH CORPSE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - THE GOOD SHIT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CONNECT WITH ME ONLINE

  CHAPTER ONE - AND NOW A WORD FROM MY SPONSOR

  “Hi, I’m Ricky and I’m a sex addict, an alcoholic and a methamphetamine addict.”

  That’s about all I need by way of introduction. My real first name is Vercingetorix but I never use it at meetings. The regular crowd gave me a “Hi, Ricky!” with real Walmart enthusiasm. We get together like this in the church basement every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday morning bright and early at eight AM, coffee and donuts available for a small honorarium. Today was a specially scheduled Friday-after-Thanksgiving meeting. This morning’s crowd consisted of about twenty coffee’d up specimens. After two years of making the meetings I knew every last one of them. My sponsor Kevin sat sprawled in a folding chair in the front row facing me at the lectern where I proceeded to share on topics germane to my personal trifecta of addictions.

  “Well, yesterday we had a great turkey day with the family, and today my older daughter marches in the Santa Claus parade with her pom pom squad,” I began. Polite laughter mixed in with a few aww’s. “Lately she’s been insisting that we call her Anna, you know, with the a sound the same as in pom pom. I guess it’s her age or whatever, some kind of preteen affectation.” As if the name we had chosen for her—Anastasia—weren’t an affectation of its own. “Anyway, our other kids are going to be there with Diane, cheering her on. I guess all I want to say is that I’m grateful to my Higher Power and to all of you that I’m here, alive, clean, faithful and sober, and able to enjoy the good things that are going on in my life. Thanks.”

  Our group doesn’t applaud unless someone has shared an exceptional story. Mine was garden-variety candy-assed sharing today so I met only polite silence borne out of mutual respect. Or maybe mutual dread, the realization that pride goeth before a fall. I thought I sensed a species of dread recognition from those old enough to know better.

  I had been coasting for at least a month, maybe longer, going through the motions, standing up at meetings but not sharing anything personal, anything of consequence, and nothing with an emotional price tag on it. At least my sponsor gave me the thumbs-up gesture of encouragement as I passed by to resume my seat next to him. There was always a seat or two open on either side of Kevin, a safety zone, whether you’re talking bars or twelve-step meetings.

  Next up was Kendra, a big-boned washed-out blonde in ass-snug jeans, a Harrah’s Casino sweatshirt, and pony hair tied tight to show off her big forehead. Kendra was what we locals call a “hoosier,” a term of opprobrium roughly equivalent to “trailer trash.” I thought I detected a rumble and shuffle of uneasy excitement from the males at this mixed meeting, an ass-shifting of anticipation. Kendra’s sharing tended to be of the memorable variety, her own personal brand of freestyle eroticism bordering on the far side of pornographic. Perfect attendees knew her to be a thirty-eight-year-old serial divorcée with a penchant for initiating hobosexual ambush encounters in public places. There’s even a term for it: at the meetings now and then I’ve heard it referred to as “shitbum sex.” And anybody who named their daughter Kendra, making no secret of the fact they would have preferred a boy, was already setting the stage for long-term psychosexual disturbances. Maybe that’s why Kendra’s sharing was always better than a letter to Penthouse.

  “Hi, I’m Kendra and I’m a sexual and love addict.”

  “Hi, Kendra.” Her greeting from the group seemed markedly more enthusiastic than mine had been.

  “Hi, guys,” she responded with an uncomfortable shrug before launching into her customary rapid-fire pressured delivery. “Well, Sunday night I suffered a relapse, I guess you could say. Weekend was a bummer, knew it was a mistake to go online when I was in one of my moods, should have called my sponsor but didn’t, yada yada yada, same old same old, bought the t-shirt, wore it out. Anyhow, before I know it, there I am cruising every horny hookups webpage I can think of, like the bad penny you all know me to be.” All in the same breath.

  “You’re not a bad penny, Kendra,” Bob the group leader protested. His reedy voice sounded like an oboe. “Stop running yourself down. You’re human like all the rest of us. Looking for love in all the wrong places.”

  “Thanks, Bob. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, wore it out, like I said. Cut to the chase, some dude agrees to hook up outside a strip club in Washington Park. He asks do I mind that he’s black. I mean, what am I gonna say at that point, right? I guess the guy’s name of Tyranno should of tipped me. So next thing I know we’re all in his Jimmy, me and him shoehorned in, ass cheek to ass cheek with three or four of his runnin’ buds, heading for East St. Louis. We all pile out once we get there; he’s got this nice house—nice by East St. Louis standards, that is. Little cracker box, bars on the windows—you all know the kind I mean. Anyway, we ease on inside, share a few drinks, smoke some 420, one thing leads to another. You know how it goes. Sure enough, before long one of the guys gets one particular nasty ol’ idea in his head, lets on how he wouldn’t say no to a bukkake session. Well, a course nobody’s fixin’ to argue with him at that point. All eyes are on little ole me. You all are familiar with the term bukkake, right? I think it’s Japanese origin.”

  Murmured recognition. Nobody in that crowd was about interrupt Kendra’s momentum at this point by asking her to define her terms.

  “Whatever. I know it’s unprotected sex, risk-taking behavior and all that, stupid stupid stupid, and I didn’t even know hardly any of the guys’ street names, but brainless me, behind all that booze and dope buzz all of a sudden I heard myself sayin’ yes. Well, wouldn’tcha know, no sooner’n the word’s outta my mouth, here’s Tyranno on the horn putting out the four one one. Inside of fifteen minutes there’s maybe fifty horndog homeboys crammed into that little shitbox house of his, and before the night was over I wound up with a face full a oatmeal an nobody offerin’ me so much as a wet warsh rag.”

  By now I estimated most if not all of the men at the meeting harbored the same fantasy as
I did.

  “What’s worse, unbeknowits to me Tyranno caught all the action on his videophone, and now he says not only won’t he delete it, he’s going to post it on amateur porn sites all over the Internet. So it looks like this time you can call me F. U. C. K’d: forlorn used Cahokia klutz.”

  Kevin, gaunt as ever, leaned over to me and drawled in a raspy whisper under his droopy mustache, “How about Frankenstein-ugly cum kisser?”

  “Or fills up contaminated kleenex,” I offered, covering my mouth.

  “Not bad. How about, uh, floppy-uddered cracker knuckle-dragger?”

  GSM. Game set match. Never trade acronyms with a borderline schizophrenic who thinks Walmart is slipping Sani-Flush into his medication.

  Ever since our health insurance lapsed and we fell back on the erstwhile George W. Bush plan, I could no longer afford the one-on-one psychotherapy; Diane insisted as a condition of holding our marriage together that I regularly attend these Sexual Addicts Anonymous meetings. In the past two years I had learned much about myself: that I am addicted to arousal, that I crave humiliating and shaming my partner, that I have deep-seated contempt for women, am preoccupied with anonymous sex, fearful of intimacy and have a morbid dread of castration causing me to be constantly mindful of my cock and balls. In other words, a typical All-American male. Joe College.

  Still, for the past two years I had remained scrupulously faithful to Diane, a fact I credit more to the other condition she imposed on our marriage’s survival: weekly vespers, liturgy and monthly confession at Sts. Boris and Gleb Eastern Orthodox Church. In church I was confessing to Jesus Christ Himself, not to nineteen other perverts just like me.

  Bob the insurance man, group leader for this particular Wednesday, tried to put Kendra’s relapse into perspective for her in a supportive way. Then Kendra began heading back to her seat. As she passed by, she shot me a wink—a wink meant for me and me alone. The other men in the room, taking advantage of the opportunity, craned their necks and focused their own peculiar brand of x-ray vision on the slow swing of her ass as her low heels clicked their way down the center aisle. Kendra might have been flattered; these were men who’d spent half their lives looking at porn.

  Stan took the podium. Stan, we all knew, grappled with his fascination over the glory holes in a local adult bookstore. I surreptitiously glanced at my watch as Stan launched into the latest chapter in his troubling saga of peekaboo fellatio on the installment plan. When it was over, Bob told Stan to call on his Higher Power and reminded him to phone his sponsor the moment he felt the urge next time, adding that we’re all in the same boat. Bob’s advice, while well intentioned, tends to be one-size-fits-all. Then Bob opened it up to the floor and Kevin began offering Stan his own unique insight.

  “I’m sick and tired of hearing this same old happy horseshit,” Kevin began, his deep voice and laconic drawl making it sound almost like he knew what he was talking about. “Long as I’ve been coming here, your lame-assed rap ain’t never changed, Stan. And you ain’t never gonna change. Never. You know why that is, Hoss?”

  “Why?” Stan asked, his husky boy’s voice full of anticipation. It was like he really wanted to know but was afraid to hear the answer from this werewolf in our midst, this veiled prophet of the streets, hater of Catholics, fearer of clandestine Sani-Flush contamination and inveigher against black hair, whose frequent arrests for nighttime screaming had become so commonplace they rarely made the papers any more.

  “It’s because you get off on it,” Kevin pronounced as his verdict. “You get your nuts off just as much standing up here with your face hanging out humiliating yourself in front of a bunch a perverts as you do hiding behind a busted drywall on your knees with your mouth open. Don’t you get it?”

  “No. What?”

  “The meetings are giving you the exact same sick payoff you want out of the glory hole trip: Self-abasement. Mortification. Degradation. And until you don’t need those things any more, Stan, until you no longer need to fill up the gaping glory hole your soul has become, the other glory holes will go on singing their siren song, the one that only you and all the other cock-suckerin’ dogs like you can hear.”

  “All right,” Bob interrupted, “now that’s a bit much. Let’s try and remember the reason we’re all here, which is to help each other get over our addictions. Name-calling is particularly inappropriate and doesn’t serve that purpose at all. Don’t you agree, Kevin? Kevin?”

  My sponsor pulled down the bill of his Cardinal’s cap to mustache level, tilted it back and turned his face away to sulk. Or maybe he was scoping out the room for lurking papists.

  One or two more sharing sessions later, the meeting adjourned with the Serenity Prayer and we took leave of one another, at least until Saturday. I had to open up the office by nine AM and interview my new prospective employee, a Ms. Heart Robbins.

  I had just reached my car a half-block from the church when I felt a tap on my right arm. I turned to encounter Kendra M. She said, “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself, Kendra. Can I give you a lift?” I asked.

  “Where you headed?” I could see her breath, its vapor mixing with mine in strange and changing patterns.

  “Downtown.”

  “If it ain’t too much trouble, then.”

  I held the passenger door open for her and said, “No trouble at all. It’d be a pleasure, actually. Hope you don’t mind being seen riding around in this old beater of mine. A hundred eighty-nine thousand miles on her and still running. Three quarters of the way to the moon if you like astronomy.”

  “Left your Jag-you-are home today?”

  “Jaguar’s in the shop, in the bay next to my Mercedes.”

  “Don’t forget, I hear you constantly bitchin’ at all them meetings three times a week ‘bout your financial troubles and how hurtin’ for money you all are on accounta your addictions over the years. Alcohol, meth, and pussy.” She counted them off on her fingers. “Them three left you all broke and shit.”

  “You know me too well, Kendra. You can see right through me. Most folks find it especially hard to believe that a lawyer with his own practice could have no money. It’s particularly galling because people hate lawyers in general and rich lawyers in particular, and lump me into both categories.” I nodded for her to get in.

  “Life sure ain’t fair. But you can’t never tell, can you? Like for instance this one old dago that still stayed in Washington Park”—she pronounced it Washinton—“even after the niggers got so bad, until he was like the next-to-the-last white man left in town, he walks the streets lookin’ like a total hobo, with patches on his ass, wearin’ this ole busted out World War Two jacket, you’d pitcher him standin’ in a cheese line or hangin’ around on the sidewalk waitin’ for the food pantry to open up? I ast a friend of mine and as it turns out, that ole duffer was the head of the local mafia. Can you believe it? Had money up the ass. Fact was he chose to live like he didn’t. Funny, huh?”

  She eyed me curiously. Still holding the door like a chauffeur I beckoned her to sit.

  “Such a gentleman.” She scootched herself gracefully into the right front passenger seat where my Diane had last sat. After I pulled away from the curb she said, “They got them that Santy Claus thing goin’ on this mornin’, ain’t they?”

  “Yep. The parade. Kinda cold for it this year. You going?”

  “I ain’t much for parades. You got you a daughter in it, right?”

  “I’m flattered. At least somebody was listening to me sharing.”

  “Oh, I always listen. Listen like a panther. To everybody, I mean. I ain’t singlin’ you out or nothin.’” We had gone two blocks before she shot me a sidelong glance and ventured, “Although I have to admit mine was sorta embarrassin’ this particular time.”

  “Not at all; that’s what these meetings are for, so we can let our hair down with sympathetic people. People wrestling with these same feelings.”

  “Waren’t exactly sure how sympathetic the members,
especially the male members, might be with the idea of a white woman, you know, havin’ group sex with a whole bunch a black men, is all.”

  “Well, see? Now you know we all support you, Kendra. You’re no different than me or anybody else in the group, except maybe more honest. By the way, what was that wink all about?”

  “Wink? What wink?” she asked.

  “Maybe you had something in your eye.”

  “Maybe.”

  I dropped her off a block north of the fountain. Waiting at a light before proceeding to my interview I caught myself watching the swing and sway of her ass as she sashayed along the crosswalk. Seen through those tight jeans hers truly was a beautiful ass. And that wink had been no accident.

  My storefront office faces on a side street in downtown Belleville, Illinois that had escaped suburban renewal. It was a street that time forgot, World War One-era antique storefronts with crumbling paint over brick, creeping dry rot, dilapidated canvas awnings and warped screen doors. Half the stores were boarded-up empty, bearing their For Lease signs like cancellation stamps. Some had been torn down; empty lots gaped like missing teeth, exposing on adjacent buildings the faded and forgotten ghosts of wall billboards painted by men long dead. There is a strictly enforced sign ordinance in Belleville, so the only advertisement for my existence is stenciled prominently on the store window in vulgar gild letters: Rick Galeer, Attorney at Law. The morning sun magnifies and projects it against the far wall inside.

  One of the primary areas of my practice is child advocacy. In exchange for referrals of guardian ad litem work by an organization known as COBAW (the acronym stands for Children of Battered and Abused Women) I am obliged to offer a subsidized paralegal secretarial position for a worthy battered woman selected by the organization. In my case, Heart Robbins, about whom I knew nothing other than her name, the logical assumption that she had suffered a history of battery and abuse, and the fact that, during the same time period while I was busily engaged in being faithful to my Diane lo these past two years, Heart had managed to successfully complete four semesters of legal career coursework at the local junior college.