Life After Men – By Dale Bridges
Danny’s partially rotten head makes a totally grosso crunching noise when I smash it with my $2500 Gucci handbag. He falls to the sidewalk and sort of flops around helplessly while I stand over him, hands on hips, and glare. For a second, his spasms remind me of the last time we frogged, almost two months ago. That was not a pretty sight, either.
“Emily!” Tiffany screams at me. “What’s your malfunction?”
She snatches the purse away from me and tries to wipe the blood and brain matter off before it has a chance to dry. It doesn’t work. She just ends up smearing everything around and making it about a gazillion times worse. She reaches inside the bag and pulls out the brick I’ve been carrying around all afternoon for just this occasion.
“How many times have I told you to use the Ralph Lauren bag if you want to bash your boyfriend’s skull in? That’s why we have it, you little strump.”
She tosses the purse into a nearby dumpster in disgust and then kicks Danny right in the goodies. Danny moans and rolls over on his stomach (also a move that reminds me of our sex life). Then, for no reason at all, Tiff goes totally nervy and starts to yell and kick him at the same time. “That! Was! My! Favorite! Purse!”
Tiffany has been a real blue-ribbon bitch this week. I wish I could say she’s just having her mensies or something, but she doesn’t cycle until next week. She’s signed up to leave on one of the evacuation boats today, and she’s all nervy because I won’t go with her. As if. There’s no way I’m getting on an oil tanker full of lezzies and sailing off to some godpiss island somewhere in the middle of the ocean. Nope. Not this necro bitch. I’d rather hide out here on the mainland and wait for a cure than hit the high seas with a bunch of nervy strumps.
Finally, Tiffany stops wailing on my ex long enough to take out her iPhone and check her messages. “What do you want to do now?” she asks, nodding towards Danny.
Obviously, the humane thing would be to put him out of his misery. I don’t know if he feels any pain, but he’s gushing blood like a stuck pig and making one hell of a mess. On the other hand, in order to dispose of him properly, we’d have to burn the body and then saw his head off and take it to a Bio Hazard Disposal Unit. By the time we finished filling out the godpiss paperwork, Tiffany would have to leave. And what kind of a send-off is that?
I shrug. “Wanna get a fruit smoothie?”
“You know it,” Tiffany says. So we head off in the direction of Jamba Juice, leaving Danny to the whims of the Sanitation Commission.
* * *
I know he’s not much to look at now, but Danny was a gorgeous hunk of man-meat when I first met him six months ago. For the reals. He had dimples all the way to China and these beautiful abs that bulged out over his stomach like mini loaves of baked bread. Mmm. He was yummy. I wanted to frog his brains out the first time I saw him.
He picked me up at a bar called Stabs near the marina. Well, I let him think he picked me up. You know how beasties are—they want to make all the moves but they’re too stupid to know when to frog and when to frog off. Danny wasn’t the sharpest shank in the prison shower, so I practically had to sit on his godpiss face before he got the godpiss hint.
I had four months of mind-blowing, thank-you-Jesus, don’t-tell-my-mom-I-do-that sex before he started to change. Tiffany warned me it would happen. She told me not to get too attached.
“It’s great for a while,” she said. “He’ll bring you flowers every day and frog you like a water buffalo every night. He’ll buy you those awful chocolate candies with the jizzy stuff in the middle. Then, after a couple of months, he’ll start getting all nervy for no reason. When you want to talk about it, his eyes will glass over and he’ll moan. Aaaaaaahhhh. The next thing you know, he’s staying out with the boys all night long and coming home with bloodstains on his collar. That’s when you’ll have to bash his head in, just like all the others.”
“Shut up, whore,” I said. “We can’t all be frigid muff divers like you.”
“Don’t knock it until you try it,” the strump replied.
Tiffany is always trying to get under my skin…and under my skirt. About a year ago, she joined this new cult—sorry, I mean “political interest group”—called Life After Men. As far as I can tell, the LAMs are just a bunch of New Age lezzies that sit around bitching about the patriarchal ideal of feminine beauty and stuffing their muzzles with high-carb, microwaveable snacks. Today, the LAMs are getting on an evacuation boat together and sailing off to some all-vaj Xanadu somewhere in the Caribbean. No beasties allowed. Sounds about as fun as an ice-cold douche.
No one knows for sure why the virus only affects beasties, but the LAMs have a few theories on the subject. They think the virus triggers some sort of genetic mutation in the Y chromosome that shuts down the frontal lobe of the brain and turns all the good men into lobotomized monsters that act out their most basic instincts: frogging, killing, and eating, in that order. (Boys will be boys, as my mother used to say. Talk about a nervy bitch.) According to the LAM Manifesto, the military was planning to use the virus to create an army of indestructible super soldiers, which is why women, homos, and pappies are immune.
Tiffany says she believes all this crap, but if you want to know the truth, I think she just goes along with it because she likes the attention. Tiffany is bi. At least, she used to be when we were growing up. These days, who knows. She hated beasties long before this virus thing came along and now I think she’s trying to go straight vaj. Whatevs. I couldn’t care less. There’s no way I’m turning lezzie, though. Not on your life. Best friends or not, I like pole. One dick, two dicks. Black dicks, blue dicks. I love ‘em all. Chop the foreskin off and I’ll ride that rocket ship like Neil Frogging Armstrong, or keep it on and I’ll snuggle down with a turtleneck. I’d rather be a necro-lover than camel-toe kisser any day.
I know she doesn’t look like it, but Tiffany is kind of a freaky genius. Somehow, she just knows things — all kinds of things — pretty much everything there is to know, in fact. I’m with her 24/7, and I’ve never see her read anything more academic than Cosmo. It’s like her brain was programmed at birth with all the information she would ever need.
For instance, there was this one time in seventh grade when she got into a big argument with our math teacher about the value of zero. Mr. Gustafson was one of those teachers all the boys liked and all the girls hated, primarily because he was a frogging perv. I always brought an extra sweatshirt to his class because no matter how many layers of clothing you had on that creepy beastie stared at you like you were naked. He really had it in for Tiffany, too. In fact, all our teachers hated Tiff. I’m not sure why.
“Look,” Mr. Gustafson told Tiffany once, as he held an apple in front of his bloated, scabby face. “This is one apple.” He put his hands behind his back slowly, like he was attempting to explain a magic trick to a retarded kid. “Now, there are zero apples. It’s very simple. Even a spoiled rich girl who spends all her time at the mall should be able to figure it out.”
All the boys in the class went “OOOOOOHHH,” just like the beasties always do when they smell public humiliation.
Tiffany smiled sweetly. “Actually, there’s still one apple, dipshit,” she said. “It’s behind your back. Just because you can’t see the apple doesn’t, like, negate its existence. And even if you completely obliterate the apple, you don’t have zero apples—you have nothing. Zero is not an actual number. It’s a theoretical numeral that we use for mathematical purposes. It’s very simple. Even a second-rate junior high teacher who still lives with his mother should be able to figure it out.”
See what I mean? We were twelve years old. Where the hell did she learn that? It’s not like VH1 has a Behind the Equations special.
* * *
After Jamba Juice, Tiffany and I head down to the beach to snatch a few rays before her boat leaves. Infected beasties are sensitive to sunlight, so they never come out during the day. It has something to do with photosynthesis or melanin or something. Whatevs. I’m sure Tiffany knows. Since Danny was only a couple of months into the change, he was still about half-human, which is why he was could hang out with us. He bitched about it the whole time, though. “Oh, the sun hurts my eyes. Oh, my skin is on fire.” Finally, I just got sick of his nervy voice and decided to break up with him. Technically, the law says you’re supposed to wait until they try to eat your brains before you take a whack at them, but what’s the point? Once the magic is gone, get them before they get you—that’s what I say.
The beach is filled with women, of course. Nervy lezzies, every one. There are a few homos playing in the water and a couple of pappies passed out like beached whales near the lifeguard chair, but besides that it’s vaj as far as the eye can see. What a world.
“You want me to get your back?” Tiffany asks.
“Sure,” I say, even though I know it’s a trap. “But stay away from my fun hole, bitch. You’re not on your lezzie island yet.”
Tiffany rolls her eyes. She squirts the cold, white lotion onto my back, and you can almost hear the lezzies wet themselves as they watch her rub it in. When she’s done, we swap places and I do her. Afterwards, we get into tanning positions.
My eyes are closed for less than five godpiss minutes when the world suddenly goes dark. What the hell, I think, must be a frogging eclipse or something. Nope. It’s just two LAMs hovering over us like vultures waiting for a snack.
They want Tiffany, of course. She’s like their guru or messiah or something, and if they don’t hear from her every twenty minutes, they freak out and form a search party. These two look like characters in a weird nursery rhyme, the anorexic Jack Sprat and his enormous wife. The head strump, Alice, has spiky pink hair, a nose ring, and fat rolls holding up her fat rolls. Her scrawny sidekick, Denise, has grosso blond dreadlocks, no chin, and the mournful eyes of a stray puppy starving in the rain. I’ve met them both before. Tiffany holds LAM meetings at the apartment all the time. Needless to say, they hate my frogging guts.
I push my sunglasses onto my forehead and smile up at them. “Hello, Alan. Hello, Dennis.”
“My name is Alice,” the bull moose says. She’s wearing a two-piece bathing suit, although her gut hangs so low the second piece is MIA. “And this is Denise.”
Denise picks up a seashell and pretends to examine it.
I push my shades back down. “Oh, right. Sorry.”
Alice runs her nervy eyes over my thin, girlish figure and sneers. “It’s not too late to sign up for the evacuation,” she says. “Or are you still whoring around with the patriarchy?”
Tiffany puts up a warning hand, but it’s too late.
“Thanks for the offer,” I answer. “But I get seasick. You can do me a huge favor, though. You’re, like, blocking my sun. Could you take a few steps back? Stomp your hoof once for yes and twice for no.”
Alice grunts and makes a move like she’s going to jump me. Which, considering she has the girth of a small planet, could be cause for alarm. Denise drops the seashell and starts digging in the sand with her toe.
“All right, girls, that’s enough,” Tiffany says. “What do you need, Alice?”
Alice stops glaring at me and answers Tiffany in a sugar-sweet voice. “All the supplies are loaded on the boat. We should get on board now to make sure we get a seat.”
“We have assigned seats,” Tiffany answers. “And the ship doesn’t leave for three hours. Why don’t you take roll and double check the supply list? We can’t just turn around and come back if we forget something, you know?”
Alice doesn’t budge. It’s obvious she’d rather use deodorant for the first time than leave Tiffany alone with me for even one moment. She looks at me with hate and suspicion. Now I know how Jonah felt right before the whale swallowed him.
“Oh, don’t worry about me, Alan.” I blow her a kiss. “I’ll just wait right here until you get back.”
Alice spins on her heels and stomps away. Instead of weaving in and out of the people lying out on the beach, she marches in a straight line, scattering bikini-clad tourists everywhere like a nervy rhino charging through a herd of squirrels.
A soft, whimpering sound escapes from Denise’s mouth.
“What are you saying?” I ask. Tiffany puts her hand on my shoulder but I shrug it off. “Speak up, you nervy strump. I can’t hear you.”
Denise’s eyes are big and blue and filled with salt water like the ocean, and suddenly I see the whole story: Denise is in love with Alice, mooning over her every day, while Alice moons over Tiffany, and Tiffany moons over me, and I moon over every frogging beastie on the planet that’s trying to destroy me. It’s not a love triangle; it’s a love pentagram.
I have no idea why I get so nervy about the LAMS. It’s not as though I’ve had such great experiences with men my whole life. My dad was a drunk, my brother was a rapey perv, and all my boyfriends were violent bastards even before the virus came along. But you know how it is—old habits blah blah blah. I love Tiffany more than she will ever know, but I can’t tell her that. She just needs to leave. I need her to go. It’s as simple as that.
Part of me wants to stand up and hug Denise and tell her I’m sorry. I want to get in that boat and sail off with them into the sunset and never look back. But this is not a fairy tale and I’m not a princess waiting to be rescued. So I just wave my hand in front of my face like I’m shooing away a fly and say, “Whatevs. Just frog off, OK?”
Denise sniffles and tiptoes away. Tiffany shakes her head and turns her back to me without saying a word. Finally, some godpiss peace and quiet.
* * *
For the next couple of hours, Tiffany and I are more or less alone. I try to forget about Denise and the beasties and the end of the world, and focus on not getting nervy. I don’t handle goodbyes well. Just ask Danny. I hate it when people get all gushy and emotional about it. If it were up to me, I would never say goodbye to anyone. No “See you later,” either. Nothing. If it were up to me, I would leave people behind, just like that, and remember them however I saw them last, as my friend or enemy or whatever, not as some snotting, blubbery actor trying to play out a scene from a movie.
I would love to just get up and leave right now. Just walk off and remember Tiffany the way she is at this moment, her kinky, brown hair tied up in a crazy bun on top of her head and the white sand clinging to her tan thighs like a galaxy of tiny stars a million miles away. Right now, without a bunch of stupid, sappy words to get in the way, she is perfect and I love her.
Of course, we can’t leave well enough alone, can we? Tiffany has to open her big, strumpy mouth and ruin everything.
“I’m not coming back, you know?” she says.
“Really? I thought you were going on one of those weekend evacuations. You know, just a quick trip down to Mexico for a senorita salad.”
“I’m serious.”
“Yeah, well, stop it. It’s boring.”
“Would you quit being sarcastic and look at me for a second?”
I prop myself up on one elbow and stare at her. “Happy?”
“Are you going to be serious?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
I sigh. “Because every time we have a serious conversation, you try to convince me to tag along with your lezzie friends and I get nervy and then we end up yelling at each other. It’s very third grade.”
“Things aren’t going to change here.”
“Who wants change? My life is perfect.”
“You’re a carrier,” Tiffany explains to me for, like, the gazillionth time. “All women are carriers. That’s why homosexuals and old men don’t catch the virus. It’s because they don’t have sex with women. It’s going to be like this for the rest of your life. You’ll find a man who’s handsome and charming and healthy. After a while, you will fall in love with him. You always do. The doctors will tell you they have new medication or some groundbreaking surgery. You’ll try it but it won’t work. You’ll use protection, but that only postpones the inevitable. Eventually, the virus that’s dormant inside of you will infect him. The man you love will slowly die in front of your eyes. One morning, you will wake up next to a mindless, insensitive animal, and you’ll be forced to lure him out into the street and crack his skull open before he tries to murder you.”
“But you’re forgetting the best part,” I whisper.
“What’s that?”
“All the free drinks he’ll buy me.”
Tiffany laughs. “Don’t you ever stop joking around?”
I smile. “Never.”
She smiles too. “Can you at least tell me why you’re staying?”
“Sure. I’m staying for the same reason you’re going. It’s inevitable. It’s in our nature. You’ve got to start your lezzie colony and try to save this godpiss world, and I have to stick around and watch the world die. I want them to die, Tiffany, all of those terrible beasties. I love them, and I want to watch them suffer. That’s just the way it is. I couldn’t give two shits about saving the world. I just want to save myself.” I laugh. “And who knows, maybe I’ll frog so many guys along the way that I’ll kill off every hetero beastie on the planet. Then you and your strumps can come back home.”
Tiffany smiles and throws her arms around me.
I let her hug me for a few seconds and then I shrug her off. “OK, that’s enough of that. You’ll get plenty of woman-love at your new home.”
She leans back and wipes away a tear. “Emily, I just want to say—”
“Don’t say it. I don’t want to hear your stupid goodbye speech. Just do me one last favor. I’m going to lie back down here and close my eyes, and I want you to get on your godpiss boat without ruining the moment. Can you do that for me? I’ll close my eyes and when I open them, you’ll be gone. It’s like what you told Mr. Gustafson. Do you remember that? Just because you can’t see something, doesn’t negate its existence, right?”
Tiffany gives me a nervy look but she doesn’t try to argue. I lie down and close my eyes. I stay that way for almost an hour, just listening to the sound of hungry seagulls screaming overhead. Finally, I start to shiver. When I open my eyes, I see that the beach is empty and the sun is almost down. I slip into a cotton sweatshirt and blue jeans, and gather up my shit.
It’s a long walk back to my empty apartment and I can already hear the quiet rustle of a thousand dead boyfriends shuffling through the streets of Newport. I’ve never had the heart to put them completely out of their misery. When twilight falls, they gather around my building and look longingly towards my window. I see them every night, standing in the hollow glow of the streetlamps or pacing back and forth in front of my car. No one knows why beasties seek out the women who infect them. Even Tiffany doesn’t have an answer for that one. Some girls think it’s disturbing, but I find it sort of comforting. It’s like a serenade. Every night, I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, and listen to the chorus of low moans from outside. Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—their voices unite in harmony and produce a single, continuous note that throbs through the warm, salty air, sending tingles up my spine, and for that one moment, I fall in love with them all over again, those beautiful undead vicious boyfriends of mine.
Dale Bridges is a fiction writer, essayist, and freelance journalist living in Austin, Texas. His writing has appeared in more than twenty publications, including The Rumpus, Barrelhouse Magazine, and Mikrokosmos Journal. As A&E editor for Boulder Weekly, he won multiple awards for his feature writing, cultural criticism, and narrative nonfiction. Dale’s fiction and essays have been anthologized, and his first collection of short stories, Justice, Inc., will be published by Monkey Puzzle Press in 2014. To read more of his writing, go to dalebridges.org.