Read Online Kamikaze Lust by Lauren Sanders - Free Book Online Page B

with titles scrawled in black magic marker. She stood on a chair to reach the higher shelves and handed tapes down to me in an assembly line process, during which someone knocked at the door.
    “Come in, come in,” Alexis said. A red-headed woman in a tight black body suit and jeans inched open the door. We both stared at her. “Well, what is it?”
    “Um…Alexis?”
    “Yes?”
    “You…um, better come here a sec,” the young woman said, and they exchanged the kind of tell-all glance that informed me they’d known each other for a while. Alexis jumped down from her chair and turned to me.
    “Would you excuse me one moment, please?”
    I nodded, “Sure.”
    I sat down again, glanced around the office. Aside from the rows of tapes kept in their black metal cage behind the desk, the decor was minimalist. A poster for a movie called Sensurround, starring the one and only Alexis Calyx, hung by the door. An abstract painting in black, white, and gray covered most of the wall perpendicular to the desk. Opposite the painting were two windows, Levelors pulled up, unveiling a courtyard view of amputated branches, split fences, the backsides of weathered brick buildings with scaly molding, rusted bars covering the lower floor windows, and a few air conditioners bulging like cysts.
    Alexis still gone, I turned my attention to the pile of videotapes and thumbed through a few titles: All the President’s Women, It’s a Gang-Bang New Year, Sheila and Her Purple Penis, Brothers Do It Deeper .
    I felt as if I’d been yanked from the glamour and excitement of a movie set and deposited in the back alley of Zipless Pictures. I couldn’t help but think of my brothers: Rowdy and his random fits of cursing, spitting in my face, or shoving me around; and Neil, who never hit me, but was always drilling holes in my wall or breaking through the dead bolts I put on my bedroom door with a crowbar. Sometimes he showed up under my bed. Other times he left me dead water bugs and pictures of naked girls with an arm or a leg missing. Once, he locked me in a pair of handcuffs and Dad had to cut them off with a huge metal clip.
    Neil seemed, like the wounded vets home from Vietnam, lost in maze of contemplative terror that as time went on made him violent and angry; Rowdy, on the other hand, maintained the demeanor of a pathetic, petty criminal. Before going to jail for the first time when he was nineteen, he let me in on one of his schemes. He had tape recorded the sounds that different coins made when they were dropped into a public telephone ( b-b-b-b-buuup was a quarter, be-beep a dime, boop a nickel), and dubbed them onto myriad cassette tapes. The system worked like this: You dialed a number, the operator said please deposit X amount for X number of minutes, you put the mouthpiece to the tape deck and pressed play. The sounds registered as real coins.
    He rigged it for me one day. We got the number of a hotel in London from the travel section of the paper and dialed. “See, no coins,” Rowdy whispered, as he held the receiver to his boom box. Right away, a woman with a thick English accent said, “Hullo!” I made a reservation.
    When Neil got wind of Rowdy’s Rube Goldberg contraption, he saw greenbacks glowing behind the empty eyes of his older brother. He sent Rowdy peddling tapes through Brooklyn’s immigrant communities, while he stayed home counting and dispensing their earnings. Years dealing nickel bags of skunk weed had given Neil the ability to turn a profit on such low-level commodities. At least he was selling the pot himself and not brokering it through his idiot brother.
    For months, the cops combed the borough looking for the notorious Telephone Thief until one day they spotted a man standing in a phone booth for hours with a tape deck the size of a traveling suitcase. They brought him in for questioning and, within hours, the cops were ravaging through Rowdy’s room where they discovered cassette tapes replete with