This is Chapter 1 of the blog novella called Crime Sex Spy Story.

*****

And he carries the reminders / Of ev’ry glove that layed him down 
Or cut him till he cried out / In his anger and his shame
— Paul Simon

I’m lying on the floor with a bloody nose and a black eye, wearing nothing but fighting shorts and hand wraps. If this was a movie, the camera would fade-in to a close up of my face and mislead you into thinking that I’m a prizefighter who’d been knocked out in a bare-knuckles boxing match. But as it panned out, you’d realize that that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m lying on the floor of last night’s Halloween party, surrounded by beer bottles and cigarette butts. I can’t remember where I got the black eye, but the nosebleed is from doing too much cocaine. I try not to do cocaine too often. It’s a helluva drug.

I sit up and try to figure out where I am but I don’t recognize anything around me. From the looks of it, this was one hell of a party, and I’m not the only one who’s passed out. Bozo the clown is huddled on the other end of the room using a jacket for a pillow, there’s a dead nurse on the couch who’s showing enough skin to turn on the dead, and a hipster wrapped in garbage bags is sleeping upright in an armchair looking as ironic as anyone can when stewing in their own juices.

I climb to my feet and the cocaine headache swishes around my skull and settles somewhere around my cerebellum. That’s the problem with cocaine: I can never tell if it’s the drug or all booze I end up drinking when you’re on it, but my head always hurts the next day.

I walk to the fridge and find a bottle of blue Gatorade. I don’t know why or how I knew it was there, but I did. I drink half of it and then shuffle to the washroom to take my morning piss.

There’s a condom still clinging to my flaccid cock but I can’t remember why. I’m sure it’ll come back to me eventually, but for meantime, at least I know that I was safe, so I try not to worry about it.

I consider washing the blood off my face, but I leave it because I think it looks badass and I have to walk home in costume anyway. Then I find my hoodie on the floor and let myself out after I steal one more glimpse of the nurse’s ass cheek dimples hanging out the bottom of her skirt.

I’m dreading the walk home, a walk of shame, but when I step outside I realize that I’m just across the street from my place. I can vaguely recall meeting Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and Alex from A Clockwork Orange on my way home, and them inviting me upstairs to do cocaine with them. I went along with them hoping that maybe Alex wanted to cross swords with me over Dorothy, and for all I know, I did, but I still can’t remember much after that.

I cross the street toward my place and notice a black sedan parked out front and a large man in a leather jacket leaning on it waiting for me. It’s Vlad and I must still be a little high because I’m not afraid.

“Vlad, what a surprise,” I hear myself say. “What are you doing here?”

“I was in neighborhood and thought I’d stop by,” he says in his thick Russian accent. “I tried calling first, but you no answer phone.”

“Yeah, I think I lost my phone last night.”

“That’s not all you lose,” he observes, examining my face.

“You should see the other guy,” I jest.

“We need to talk business Carl,” he digresses.

“Yes, we do,” I assure him. “Why don’t you come in for a coffee, Vlad? We can talk inside. I don’t want the neighbors seeing me like this,” I explain.

Vlad chuckles and slaps me on the back as I lead the way. Yeah, I must still be high because I’m inviting Vlad into the privacy of my home where there are no witnesses and there’s nowhere to run, and I’m not that worried about it.

Inside, I put on a pot of coffee and start cutting the tape from my hands. Worse case scenario, I can always try stabbing Vlad in the neck with the scissors, I think to myself.

“So, Carl” Vlad begins. “It’s been three months and I’m still not number one on Google. I’m beginning to lose patience.”

This what I do for a living: I help make businesses more popular on the internet. I work for myself and it’s an easy lifestyle. I spend just as much time in front of a computer as any else with an office job, but I don’t have to put on pants or leave my apartment most of the time. It can get lonely, but it’s the perfect set-up for someone who drinks as much as I do. I keep late nights, working and drinking, and often spend the first half of the day hung over.

Vlad is a client I regret taking on. I met him through a friend named Jake that I don’t know that well. Jake called me up one day and asked me if I had time for a beer. He wanted to discuss hiring me for a job. We met at a local dive bar around the corner and he told me how he was opening an escort agency. Jake didn’t really strike me as the pimping type, and I guess that’s why Vlad cut him out of the picture.

Vlad had experience running this kind of thing. Jake had met Vlad in that same dive bar a few weeks earlier. They shared a drinking problem and sense of humor and quickly became good friends, and Vlad invited Jake in on his new venture. He needed someone who knew the city and who he could trust and who could drive the girls around, and he’d mistaken their shared sense of humor for shared values. A few months in, Vlad got fed up with how Jake handled the girls. He was too soft on them and Vlad pushed him out.

That’s how I got pulled into this mess. Jake is a nice guy, the kind of guy you could trust. So when he wanted to hire me, I didn’t think to consider the kind of company you have to keep to get an operation like that off the ground. Now Jake was gone and I was left to deal with Vlad on my own. He’s not exactly the kind of client you can fire.

In just three months, I’d taken their site from nothing and put it somewhere in the top five search results for a bunch of relevant keywords. Their traffic kept climbing and the calls were pouring in, but that wasn’t good enough for Vlad. He was paying me for number one and he wasn’t settling for anything less no matter how good the return on his investment was.

“I understand,” I assure him. “And we’re going to get there. It’s just that these things take time.”

“You know, Carl, many ancients societies did not believe in time. They thought of it as an illusion. And even today, many scientists support this belief. They hypothesize that time is just one of many dimensions, and does not exist as a linear construct,” he explains. “I am not one of these people, Carl. For me, time exists only as I experience it. We are born, we have a limited amount of it, and then we die. It’s for this reason that I cherish the time I have in this life,” he says, “and choose not waste it. But I’m beginning to wonder,” he continues, “if maybe I’ve been wasting my time on some of the promises you’ve made.”

“Vlad, you have to trust me on this. In only three months we’re in the top half of the first page for every keyword we’re targeting, we’re getting plenty of traffic, and even you said how busy the girls have been.”

“Do you understand the true inherent paradox of a free market system?” he asked me.

“That perpetual growth is an unsustainable goal?” I venture.

“No,” he says. “That’s the growth economy specifically, not the free market system itself — and that is not a paradox, it’s a just an unrealistic goal.” As if it wasn’t bad enough that Vlad is bigger and stronger and more ruthless than me, he has to be smarter than me, too. “The paradox of a free market system is that everyone strives toward an outcome that would put an end to the system itself: monopoly. I am just one man,” he goes on. “I could never hope to fulfill the demand for sex of an entire city. Nor would I want to try: there are some strange people out there, Carl, who like some very strange things, and I would not feel comfortable providing those as a service. But I excel in the service I do provide, and while I can’t hope to monopolize the market for such services, I can expect to dominate it. What I’m saying here, Carl, is that you are a big part of my picture right now, and I am counting on you for a lot to not let me down.”

Vlad has remained calm and composed this entire time, but this is only making him seem more menacing. He’s the kind of guy who’s at ease with whatever sociopathic impulse entices him, and I have trouble reading him so I’m never sure what impulse is going to be from one moment to the next.

“I’m not going to let you down, Vlad. This I promise you. So far, you’ve more than made back every penny you’ve spent on me, and over the next few months, you’re only going to see an increasing return on your investment,” I assure him. “Stay for a coffee,” I insist, “and I’ll bring you up to speed on what we’re doing next.”

Vlad smiles. He’s enjoying watching me hold my ground and he stays for while and listens to me talk about a blogging strategy that I’m making up as I go along. By the time he leaves, he’s all smiles and chuckles, and he keeps a big arm around my shoulder as I walk him to the door. “Come by the office some night this week,” he insisted. “Some of the girls really like a tough guy,” he said admiring my black eye.

“Let me see how the week goes,” I say. “I have a lot to do.”

“Okay, Carl,” he chuckls, and I shut the door behind him.

Coming off the adrenaline rush, the cocaine headache settles back onto my cerebellum. I’m dehydrated and feeling sick because of it. I find a bottle of Perrier in the fridge and sipped it by the window, watching the foot traffic below and wondering how things got this fucked up. Things weren’t always this fucked up. I used to have my shit together. I used to be happy. But then it all went away. She took it with her when she left.

It’s 10:30am on a Sunday morning and things are moving along steadily on the street below. I think about taking a shower and washing the blood off my face and the film off my dick, but I feel too tired and depressed to bother. Instead, I nod off sitting upright in the armchair while cigarette butts smolder in the ashtray next to me.