One Hundred Virgins Copyright 2006 Jason McGathey All rights reserved. EXQUISITE NOISE PUBLISHING 4798 Leap Court Hilliard, OH 43026 Also by this author: Night Driving (2001) License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. exploratory surgery 1 The drilling of the peepholes we’ve debated from day one. Feverish with longing, it seems unjust that a mere two inches of wood should separate us from our neighbor Stephanie. Questions inevitably surround an enterprise such as this - whether illegal, or, of more importance, whether she’ll find out - renewed each time we see or hear her pass. Yet one look at that haughty countenance, that lustrous black hair, and the potential for seeing her body naked is like dynamite in the hands of a three year old. Ultimately, this small piece of business is taken care of one winter afternoon while Stephanie’s off walking her dog. Damon drilling the holes as I play lookout, and after all this time, the days of frantic plotting and heated debate, the physical effort behind this act of perversion takes but a few seconds. Four holes in a door, and now we’re free to spend another eternity weighing this invasion. The drilling is implemented, strategically enough, in two separate rows - one chest high, the other at our belts, four holes total. Affording us ample vantage points into every inch of her bedroom, from every angle, the placing perfect, we hope, to analyze every inch of her nubile, clothes free body. And this first afternoon, after Damon’s finished drilling and Stephanie returns with her dog, any shock over what we’ve done gives way, replaced by rampant lust. High fives all around, fellows, in celebration of our genius. This brilliant gambit offers us our first glimpse into the private life of our mysterious downstairs neighbor. In person, Stephanie keeps a constant smirk on her face, wordlessly asserting her superiority. But watching her in this light, behind closed doors, the condescension she wears like that bulky black coat is all but gone. And armed now with this secret special knowledge, the tics and mannerisms of her interior world, it’s impossible to feel anything less than at least her equal. The three of us may very well be the only people alive aware that she talks to her dog almost incessantly, sometimes while toking on a giant water bong. Her own boyfriend might not even know this, but we do. A halfhearted workout buff, Stephanie’s no rock solid specimen of leanness, but keeps herself in shape to the extent that she could pose nude for Hustler and emerge unscathed. Curves worth bragging about, and an engaging smile on the rare occasions she chooses to share it. She has a job waiting tables at this trendy campus restaurant called Cap City Diner, on Olentangy River Rd. She has a boring boyfriend with a boring office job and as the details bored us to tears before, such mundane data concerns us now even less. Now, any conversation initiated while passing her on the sidewalk or the front porch means stealing valuable time she might spend indoors. Disrobing for a shower, maybe even masturbating, who knows. I smell the possibilities here. This university, this city, I know they are ripe for the taking. Shooting off in every direction, the major arteries, the minor ones too, each pulses and flows with its own peculiar rhythm. A million future histories, a million possibilities. You move somewhere new, and the hidden volumes there escape you. Every supermarket, gas station, restaurant and tavern, every billboard and street light, encumbered with the weight of years gone past, but none of this is immediately apparent. Heartache, mirth, rage and romance, there is plenty of this and more sunk within the fissures of these buildings and sidewalks. But to the outsider, they’re anonymous places and things, as they appear to us until we peel off the skin and live inside them awhile. Columbus comes calling, luring us into its fiery midst. We arrive the first of the year, Alan and I moving the bulk of our stuff in with the help of his wacko ex girlfriend Alexis. Sixty seven degrees in January, it’s a record setting swell of mercury, and the heat helps assuage the customary misery of making a winter move. Damon arrives a day later, with his parents and a fuckmate named Tammy, but by now the temperature has already fallen fifteen degrees. Capturing this epic moment for posterity, Damon’s mom snaps a picture of the three of us, grinning in threadbare clothes before our even less impressive homestead. Meanwhile Damon’s worrywart dad hands me a garbage sack full of used paperbacks, feeling I could use this sizeable diversion. He hassles a passing jogger, with questions about the neighborhood. “Is this a pretty safe place to live, you think?” “How should I know, man?” the jogger retorts, without breaking stride, “I just moved here myself.” Clearly shaken by this trashy environment we’ve chosen to roost in, mom and pop Privette drive away, shaking their heads. The fifteenth largest city in the nation, Columbus boasts the biggest college campus in the country, OSU, four blocks away from our house. But the whole metropolis, university included, seems to regard itself as a charming little village, an attitude that pervades everything from the isolated, communal feel each neighborhood possesses unto itself, to the driving habits of its residents. Everyone in this town continually cruises five miles below the posted speed limit, a senseless quirk on par with our lack of a major professional sport. The real story here isn’t the city, however, but the apartment we’re moving into. Otherwise known as 1990 ½ Summit Street, this is the physical manifestation of our long harbored bohemian dreams. We’ve heard the legends about the meat market atmosphere of this campus scene, within walking distance of its myriad bars. If the home we’re moving into is also a nightmarish dump and less than a half mile away from the crackhouse district, so be it. Taking up floors two and three of an ancient house that has been split into four roughshod pieces - giving us two downstairs neighbors and one beside us upstairs - our living quarters are dreadfully unsanitary, but we just don’t care. Rent, at a paltry three sixty per, is the cheapest around, and our landlord, a shady campus property baron named Wayne Ault, is currently under investigation for income tax fraud. We figure he won’t be giving us too much trouble, but he’s probably not repairing a whole hell of a lot around here, either. Our first attempts at cleaning up the pigsty are laughably ineffective, leading us to pretty much resign and rarely attempt again. But twenty one dollars spent on cleaning supplies buys us a token effort, and we begin the damn near impossible task demanding our attention. First things first, we prop up this department store mannequin in one corner of our kitchen, our version of a faithful watchdog. Damon once bought this beauty for fifty dollars, and has modified it since with a glued on rug of pubic hair, metallic robot breasts jutting out straight from Madonna’s Blonde Ambition era wardrobe, and the thick makeup job a downtown whore might wear. The dingy green and white tile of our kitchen floor is crudded over with black, ditto the bathroom. Whoever rented the place immediately before us - a bunch of skate punks, judging from the scuffed up hardwood floors and various stickers plastered all over the refrigerator - seriously ran 1990 ½ Summit Street to seed. Inexplicably, they left a dozen bags of kitty litter behind, too, but also this intricately carved wooden floor lamp that I swiftly claim as my own. Mushrooms are growing in the light sockets; our bathroom window is nothing but a taped up sheet of plywood, and raccoon tracks are discernible along its eastern wall, between the sink and commode. Wiring proves a joke - we blow light bulbs at a record clip as days go by - and in the master bedroom, a leak is soon discovered so severe that Alan nearly kills himself one afternoon climbing all over the roof trying to remedy it. A sad setup we’ve willed ourselves into, though typical of the campus area. By chopping up this once beautiful, spacious house, that faceless someone from decades past has rendered these four bizarrely construed apartments. In our case this means Alan, who owns a large bed and really nice stereo and more stuff than Damon and I combined, is to be given the master second floor bedroom. In actuality, with an ornamental marble fireplace and all, this should be the living room, but we’re not concerned with such trivialities. Along the long hall which leads from the stair landing and the filthy bathroom, filthy kitchen, in between these and Alan’s room, my own tidy corner of the galaxy lays. A snug little twelve by twelve alcove, hardwood floors but more or less warm, tucked, as it is, in the middle of our apartment.