Jennifer Greidus Archives

ALTOIDS BURN SO GOOD by Jennifer Greidus

June 4, 2018 · Fiction

Cheetah’s mom is dead. So’s his dad. He lives with his almost-deaf uncle Grant. His uncle plays a lot of solitaire and has a lot of different girlfriends. When Cheetah was in fourth grade, Uncle Grant was a volunteer fireman. He laughed a lot. He made casseroles and brought them over on Sundays. Now, Uncle Grant doesn’t put out fires, cook, or even laugh. For three months, he hasn’t left the apartment. Uncle Grant made Cheetah change the locks because the rent’s been overdue since June.

Cheetah would like to be a volunteer fireman, but he can’t until he’s eighteen. That’s three years from now. He might have to have a GED, too. He can’t remember and doesn’t know if he’ll bother if that’s the case.

Uncle Grant sleeps hard, and his girlfriends come and go. They bring him Wendy’s, wake him, feed him, fuck, and leave. When they forget to bring extra salt packets for his fries, Cheetah knows it. The girlfriends get apologetic, and they’re loud about it so Uncle Grant can hear their remorse, how they know they’re stupid.

Most of the girlfriends think Cheetah is cute, almost handsome. They flirt with him. He thinks they think statutory rape accusations are only for men.

One girlfriend, Jeanette, is especially frisky. Tonight, she seeks him out. After the fast food and the fucking, she leaves Uncle Grant’s bedroom and joins Cheetah in the living room. He was just thinking about jerking off again into one of the hundred fast food napkins Uncle Grant left on the floor next to the recliner.

Jeanette touches his shoulder. “Aren’t you bored here alone all day?”

“Nope.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Nope.”

“Do you want one?” She lights a cigarette and plops down on the coffee table, next to where Cheetah’s propped his feet. She pinches his big toe and blows smoke in front of his face. She nods at the TV. “How about we watch something more upbeat.”

She squeezes the arch of his foot. Her pink nails--homemade manicure--dig into his sock. He yanks his foot free because it tickles. For the first time, he takes his eyes off the Cops marathon and looks in her eyes. “I like this show. I like it a lot.”

“Looks like you like it a little too much.” She nods at the mound of crumpled paper products next to the chair, all sticky with Cheetah’s jizz. The one on top is from just fifteen minutes ago, and it crowns the lot of at least fifty others like it.

“Whatever. Can I have a cigarette?”

“You’re too young,” she says, although she’s retrieving one from the pack.

Just as she pulls it out, Cheetah says, “Just kidding. You were gonna give me one, weren’t you? Pathetic.”

Jeanette glares at him, but after a lifetime’s vying for men’s attention and approval, she seems used to this cruelty. Her eyes widen as if she expects an apology. Cheetah sees the same eyes on every one of Uncle Grant’s girlfriends: searching for the next person who’ll give them the feeling that they matter in some way.

“Why do you come here?” Cheetah says. “To be treated like shit? Used. It’s kinda disgusting.”

“We like each other. It’s just some fun.” She lights up and cocks her head to the left. “It’d be nice to leave the house sometime, though.”

Cheetah snorts. “Good luck with that.”

“He’s a homebody.”

Cheetah sits up and turns down the volume on Cops. He leans forward, elbows on his knees. He puts his face nearer hers. “You know he’s fucking, like, twelve other chicks, right? You don’t see all those fast food bags in the trash? You don’t ever go to Burger King, do you? No. You’re a Wendy’s chick. Fridays. Nine o’clock. Wendy’s.”

Jeanette frowns and looks down. She fingers the chipped glass of the coffee table surface. Cheetah feels like shit about what he said. He can’t take it back, though; she’ll be here all night, thinking she has a friend.

He picks at one of the coffee table’s legs, bitten up from a Shih Tzu they had last year but who died. Cheetah had locked the dog in the bathroom before school because the dog always chewed Cheetah’s cum-crusty underwear. The dog clawed and ripped at the chipboard bathroom door all day. When Cheetah got home, he found the dog’s tongue impaled with a thick dagger of wood. The floor and the dog were slick with vomit. With his fingers, Cheetah pushed past the vomitus in the dog’s mouth and tugged a five-inch piece from its throat.

Jeanette squeezes Cheetah’s knee. “Anyway, no girlfriend for you?”

“What’s your spirit animal?”

“What?”

“Spirit animal,” Cheetah says, sitting back in the recliner and turning up the volume a little. “You know. Native Americans. Those totem pole things?”

Jeanette slides her ass across the table, so Cheetah’s thigh is within reach. She squeezes that. “I don’t know. I’ve always felt special about jellyfish.”

Cheetah mutes the TV again and sneers at her. “You think the Native Americans gave a fuck about jellyfish?”

He feels a pull in his groin. He checks the time on his phone. It’s been about a half-hour since he came. He needs to do it again soon, or he’ll start to think about the Shih Tzu, dropping out of high school, and his parents, who were shot by a disgruntled bus driver on their way home from a Revival meeting in Pittsburgh. If Cheetah keeps ejaculating, he’ll never be sad again.

He stands and tosses the remote on the chair. “I know you know where the door is. I’m going to bed.” He’s not going to bed. He’s going to the bathroom to come in the toilet. Maybe the sink. Sometimes Uncle Grant leaves piss unflushed, and it creeps Cheetah out for a little while.

His dick is sore, as usual, and his hand is rough. This is the seventh time he’s come today. At this point in the day, the callouses make it better. He shoots in the sink and rinses the dime-sized glop down the drain. He’s surprised when much of anything comes out of him at all.

He stands in front of the bathroom mirror and pops an Altoid. He hates the mints. Loves to hate them. They burn the fuck out of his cheek, and he knows they’re supposed to, that someone made them this way. The mints must be meant to burn the fuck out of your cheek, and the world knows nothing bad is going to happen if you like that burn, because they’ve done tests on bunnies or whatever. The bunnies thought Altoids burned so good.

Jennifer Greidus

CARS THAT TREATED ME POORLY by Jennifer Greidus

May 2, 2018 · Fiction

These aren’t pictures of my cars. In fact, they may not even be pictures of the years of my cars. They are the color of my cars, the model, the make. The years, however, are a blur of heartbreak, manslaughter, and ice storms.

Volvo 66: My mother conceived her second child in this car. (Remember, not this car but a car such as this car.) There was a big scene and a miscarriage, which led to a complicated D&C, and then we had to have a memorial for the fetus. I am an only child.

Honda Accord: I drove this car to Kentucky, where I went to college. I drove it home 4 months later because I dropped out of college. I dropped out because they wanted me to swim, and I was scared of showing parts of my body in swimming class. The drive home was sad, too, because I had no music.

Lincoln Continental: I drove this car to Buffalo, NY. Or rather, I tried to. There was an ice storm. I think it was the 90s. I didn’t know that Bridge Freezes Before Road Surface was a serious thing. My friend was playing Madonna and singing to “True Blue” with her feet on the dashboard. I hit the side rail and then went down an embankment. The lawyer said “embankment,” but it was really more of a cliff. My friend went through the windshield.

Acura MDX: I took my grandma to the hospital in this car. She was cranky. She was also a woman who worried a lot about personal composure. She was unkind to me a lot. When we got to the hospital, she tripped on the space between the floor and the elevator. You know, that small gap, like 2 inches. I didn’t help her up right away. That was a conscious decision, not to help her up right away. On the way home in this car, she told me I looked fat.

Toyota Tacoma: I was raped in the backseat of this truck.

Jennifer Greidus

TUNA SANDWICH by Jennifer Greidus

March 27, 2018 · Fiction

He orders tuna salad because he always orders tuna salad. Today, he also orders bacon potato soup. It’s too hot for soup. He likes to wipe his pretty mouth with the back of a hand. He sneers at the waitresses and only pays attention to the ones with fat tits. One of them, Trina, is my favorite waitress. Her tits are fat. I want to tell her to cover them up. Her skirt is tight, too, and the material that’s supposed to hide the zipper is pulled too far to do its job. He’s not an ass man, though.

My mother’s tits are like that, fallen and fat. Jiggly. To the trucker sitting next to him, Tuna Sandwich whispers, “ A loose handful’s where it’s at, am I right?”

I know my mother’s a whore. But lots of the mothers that Tuna Sandwich fucked weren’t whores. Trina’s a mom, and she’s never whored. Her skin is too pale and clear to be that of a cocksucker. Plus, Trina lets me sit in her booth without ordering anything but seltzer for seven nights straight during the dinner rush. She’s kind. I bet she knits and watches TV until exactly ten p.m. Trina lets me sit here with seltzer and saltines just so I can stare at this fuck who pumped cum in my mother and sliced her cunt when he was done.

I still popped out of her, though. Nine months later. My mother likes to tell me that it’s almost a blessing, her sliced cunt, because she had a wider hole to push me out of.

I have been useless to her until now. She loves me, yeah. She always saves me the last piece of donut. But I was in tow wherever she went: welfare office, subsidized child care drop-off, the casino parking lots at two a.m., Hank’s to buy weed and share rum that I was occasionally allowed to sip if I was quiet. I was always quiet.

I was also always useless. For sixteen years, she used the room next to mine to blow guys for ten dollars because she was too scarred up to fuck. If I were a good son, I would have gotten a job. I just stayed in bed and hoped she was focused enough to make them ejaculate quickly so I could sleep.

When she saw him--Tuna Sandwich--she peeped. My mother never does anything quieter than guffaw. It’s the only way I knew; she peeped, turned me around by the shoulders, and we left the convenience store without papers, Fritos, or grape Gatorade.

Now, I spit a thick gob onto my fingertips, walk behind Tuna Sandwich, and fling it into his greasy hair. Trina sees me and lifts an eyebrow. She smiles, then, because Tuna Sandwich calls her Trina Tits-a-lot. He has tucked money into the shirt pocket of her uniform while copping a feel more than once. Until now, her only revenge was wiping her pussy juice on his tuna sandwich white bread.

For me, Trina lifted his keys. Trina told me she serves him his last cup of coffee at 10 p.m. and that my six green pills will be crushed in it. Trina told me he's small but strong.

She joins me in the men’s room, drops his motel key in my hand, and slaps my ass. “You look so fuckin’ good tonight. I’m not going to see you in here tomorrow, am I?”

“No.”

“Do good work.” She kisses my cheek, straightens her skirt, and leaves me be.

------------

Tuna Sandwich wakes up on a creeper. When I said, “Do you sell those dolly things? You know, the ones that go under cars?” the auto parts guy sneered at me. I’m sixteen, for one, and I’m frail, for two. Also, I lisp a little. He asked me if I needed help getting it into my van, and it sucked, because I did.

If I woke up on a creeper in my motel room, it would take me a minute or two to panic. I’d be almost curious when I came to. I might take some time to assess. It wouldn’t make any sense to a good person.

It doesn’t take Tuna Sandwich but twelve seconds to panic, though, because I know the fuck knows he’s led the kind of life where waking up cocooned to a creeper with rope and bungee cords and duct tape over your mouth is the kind of thing he’s been waiting to come around the corner since puberty.

He shakes his head like a dog after a swim. He groans through the tape. I smile from the bed. I was watching Fixture, the one where Kimmy does the bull run in Barcelona. I turn up the TV, super loud. I go to him. I hover.

He’s using his feet and lower legs to push himself away from me. He bumps his head into the wall and squeezes his eyes closed. His nostrils are blown to the size of dimes. His eyes burn: what, what, what.

He knows what. It’s a hundred whats.

It’s me taking off his shoes and socks and jamming my mom’s metal emery board under his big toenail what. It’s me dragging his faggot ass over to the writing table so I can steady myself on the chair, stand on his chest, and stomp up and down on him until I’m sure I’ve broken ribs what. It’s me moving to his balls and cracking down with my heel. It’s me plunging the emery board into his right eyeball.

Best of all, it’s me struggling to cut through the cartilage of his throat with my Swiss Army knife, because I am sixteen, frail, and lispy. A hundred whats let me take my time, and his left eyeball screams at me the whole time I do.

I’m going to sit here. I’m going to sit here and see what kind of piece of shit person shows up looking for this cocksucker because they missed him. No one will miss him. No one. I’ll be sitting here for days, sucking in his stench until I’m bored and go to Atlantic City.

Jennifer Greidus

MR. ANGEL by Jennifer Greidus

March 10, 2018 · Fiction

She was no Ingrid. She was more of a Pat, or even a “Chuck,” but she was no Ingrid. An Ingrid would never own a truck stop on 85, and an Ingrid would never tell blue jokes to men who haven’t bathed in a couple weeks. When her daughter, my lover, took me there to eat, Ingrid always saved us a booth in the corner, away from Manuel, Jim, and Shaky, because those three stank more than anyone.

While she was alive and in her thirties and forties, Ingrid had two wishes. One of them was to bowl a perfect game. A perfect game is 300, all strikes, plus the two extra strikes you get at the end for bowling all strikes in the previous frames. She never bowled a perfect game.

Her second wish was to make love to Criss Angel. Mr Angel was a bit of a humdinger. A Casanova. He liked the ladies, and he liked them large. He also liked the boys--at least this is what my lover and I heard (no libel suits, please)--and the boys were the kind of boys who liked getting paid for sexual favors. Also, we heard the boys he liked--all rumor, of course--were skinny boys from Midwestern states.

As an aside, my lover and I think it’s a bit pretentious to spell your name like Criss and not Chris.

Ingrid never did get to make love to Criss Angel. But that’s not to say she didn’t get damn close. In 2009, Mr. Angel and Ingrid enjoyed champagne and strawberries in his suite at The Luxor. He had a fancy bathroom. Ingrid liked to tell her poker partners that Mr. Angel drank too much bubbly that night and couldn’t get it up. She and he parted ways, sans penetration.

Five years later, the two met in Dollywood. Ingrid was rather hush-hush about the encounter. They stayed in a cabin. She told us he wanted to go on the water rides. The log flume. When my lover quizzed Ingrid about the evening, she said the log flume made Mr. Angel queasy. We found this hard to believe because we all know the log flume makes everyone horny.

When they met for a third time in 2019, the washed-up Mindfreak was subsisting on heroin-boys, coffee, and cracker Snak-Paks. He showed up in her motel lobby. My lover and I were there, watching Les Bleus football--my lover had a thing for Basque country, the Napoleonic Wars, and baguettes, and felt some affinity for anything French.

Ingrid dropped her crossword puzzle and went to him. She held him like a baby, but her hand slipped down his torso and seized a handful of whatever she could find in his pants. I’ll wrap it up here by saying that, although Criss Angel spent the night in Ingrid’s motel room, after she brought him French toast and orange juice, he dropped dead right in front of the dresser.

For weeks, Ingrid liked to tell her poker partners that he stuck it to her right before he hit the ground--that he was stuffed in and subsequently slid out of her vagina with his last breath--but we know she was taking a shit when he kicked it. Two months to the day after Mr. Angel died, so did Ingrid.

My lover and I now run Ingrid’s truck stop. We let Manny, Jim, and Shaky sit wherever they want; they were pallbearers at Ingrid’s funeral, and that casket was no joke.

My lover has been depressed since her mother’s death, and nothing--not my mouth, not flaxseed waffles, not bonsai--help her move on. I try to stay upbeat. We smoke a lot of cigarettes. She can’t even put the effort into inhaling. She hasn’t eaten my pussy in months.

Even Manny, Jim, and Shaky notice her blues. Manny tells her she looks like she lost weight. She has not. Jim says her custard pie is better than ever. Custard isn’t my favorite, but when I taste it, it’s the same as before. Shaky just winks at her a lot. It’s all he can do.

We go to bed high and hungry all the time. I feel bad eating when she never does. Sometimes, I’ll sneak into our motel bathroom and scoff down a smuggled juice box and Swiss Rolls. I eat like a squirrel, with the chocolatey outer shell melting between my greedy squirrel claws as I munch away. I make fierce eye contact with myself in the mirror as I eat. I am a bad girlfriend.

After my fifth Swiss Roll this week, I return to the bed, light a joint, and pass it to my lover. I only smoke so she doesn’t smell the artificial flavorings on my breath.

The TV is muted. The TV is always on and muted. It stays on the one channel to her liking. The channel features old sitcoms. At 2 a.m. every night, I know by heart the reflections and shadows that will hit the ceiling. I don’t even need the theme song. Red, red, pink, shadow, shadow, white, blue, red, red, pink. Black. Commercials, multi, too many possibilities to keep track of patterns. I do know the commercial for dog food with bits of real bacon, however; the ceiling takes on a lot of orange, then. The flashes go back to blue. Usually blue.

Now, she drops sideways, her head in my lap. She says, “We need to re-gravel the parking lot.”

I say, “First, we get the septic fixed.” Even as I say this, I swear that I can hear the pipes burbling.

“The septic is fine.”

“It is not fine. There are floaty things in everyone’s toilet. All the time. And sometimes even in the bathtubs.”

“It’s more satisfying to re-gravel. We see where the money goes.”

“Septic first,” I insist.

“Gravel.”

“Fine. Gravel.”

We have arguments all the time. I let her win. We never do anything, anyway.

We look left when the metal closet door slides open. It’s where my lover keeps all the shoes she never wears. She has a lot of shoes. We mostly keep our clothing on chairs and the floor. It’s a closet door that has jammed and come off the track so many times, we just decided never to open it again.

It’s not even graceful, the revelation. Criss Angel is in a tuck-n-roll position on the top shelf of the closet. There is no mirror magic. He doesn’t glide. He’s not in one place and then suddenly in another. We don’t Ohhhh. We don’t Ahhhh. He just plummets from the top shelf, arms and legs scrabbling at the shoes, and lands on his back. He groans.

This ghost of Criss Angel is always nude.

This ghost of Criss Angel comes once or twice a week.

My lover and I sigh.

Mr. Angel has a penis that looks like bamboo shoots. Like six shoots tied parallel with twine. He’s still wearing all that makeup. Ingrid loved the makeup. She did hers like his and went dancing or bowling. Mr. Angel’s nipples are like dinner plates. Crystalline sockets for eyes. His mouth is French. His nose is Polish. I think his teeth might be Welsh.

Which one of you wants me? His mouth moves. My lover and I know what he’s saying, but he’s not making any noise.

“Neither one of us wants you,” my lover says and sits up. He asks us this every time.

Let’s have a coffee.

“No one wants a coffee,” my lover says.

Mr. Angel plays with the twine around his penis. His hips gyrate. His eye sockets dim. His body flickers. I need Ingrid’s holes. I need some holes. Anyone’s holes.

“Not it,” my lover says.

“Not it,” I say.

“What are you going to do with that bamboo penis, anyway?” My lover smirks.

Just some milk, then. I’ve had no cow’s milk for ages.

My lover stands, sighs, and puts on her robe. “Cow’s milk, and then you fuck off?”

Cow’s milk. Criss Angel moans. His crystalline tongue swipes across his French lips.

My lover sighs again and puts on her slippers. She finger-combs her hair in the mirror over the TV stand. “My mother should be here moaning, not you. You had three million chances to make love and fill my mother’s holes.” My lover grimaces as she says that. She kisses my cheek and heads for the door.

Mr. Angel’s dinner-plate nipples perk up. Ingrid had two wishes.

“We know,” my lover and I say. “Making love to you and bowling a perfect game.”

Criss Angel’s nipples perk up further. He gyrates. Bowling a perfect game.

“Do you want your milk or not?”

Thunderbird Lanes. Never forget.

After another month of Criss Angel visits, which usually come in the middle of Punky Brewster, my lover and I pull out the topographic map and make a plan. We stand like generals over an if > then flowchart on our round card table in the motel room.

We are concerned about all the cow’s milk--my lover is vegan--and the special two-part Perils of Punky is coming up this week. We don’t want to miss it.

“We can’t do anything with that bamboo penis,” I say.

“He talks about the fucking bowling a lot.”

“We can’t take him bowling.”

“How about we bowl? Maybe Ingrid keeps shipping him back so that we’ll bowl.”

We pull ourselves together. My lover calls the emergency sewer hotline. I get the gravel crew on the books for Wednesday. We brush ourselves off. We finish a joint. We unpack Ingrid’s bowling shirt.

I am a size four, and my lover is a size twelve. But Ingrid was top-heavy, sort of an upside-down pear. A size eighteen. Regardless, my lover and I take turns wearing her bowling shirt. It is light purple--maybe it’s lavender if you’re into being specific about tones and shades--and her name is on the right breast pocket. You can’t hold anything in there, the pocket, because it’s sewn shut. Her name is in cursive, purple thread--eggplant if you’re into tones and shades.

We bowl like hell in her memory. We bowl so Criss Angel will stay away. We bowl the fuck out of bowling. No one bowls like we do. I never so much as won a trophy in my life, but I have the heart of a lion when it comes to bowling.

We pick off 300-games like nobody’s business.

A few times during the week, the metal doors of our closet creak. The more we bowl, the less they creak. Mr. Angel never tumbles out. My lover can sleep without the TV. She eats my pussy. She kisses me a lot with a face full of pussy juice. We bowl even when we’re sick. We bowl on Christmas.

Jennifer Greidus