Warning: This is an obscenity-glutted sexist, racist reconsideration of Kate Mustard and Rico Soiree. O, all ye politically correct, read at your own discretion and peril, and then don’t come crying to me…
It is the kind of dilapidated working-class home of two stories built before the 1920s – something Victorian, something Gothic, something eerily gingerbread a la Hansel and Gretel – you’d find in Hudson County, New Jersey, in the state of disrepair that could be expected after around 30 years of neglect.
It is all but impossible to say what this house is doing somewhere outside Kyiv, except for speculations, which are not unreasonable or at all misplaced, that this particular, tiny cross-section of Hudson County has come to lie somewhere outside the capital of Ukraine. Furthermore, the limits of absurdity would not be at all stretched to suggest that while this New Jersey neighborhood has somehow managed to occupy Eastern European land, it simultaneously continues to exist in its original environs back in the States.
Commuting in a purple 1949 Mercury Eight Sedan from work at his Silver English School in Kyiv, this is the home Rico Soiree now comes to at night, where he exists outside Kyiv city limits and inside New Jersey at the same time – all without passports, cross-Atlantic journeys to Newark Airport, or visas back into Ukraine.
He honks the horn as he pulls into the drive to signal that he has arrived. On the second floor, a light goes on in a room and the scraggly silhouette of a thin, ugly, chicken-like woman eagerly appears at the window.
And so it goes, every day, and every night, and as with many happy couples, the weekends, such as the late Saturday morning of this story, are theirs.
“Why can’t you do that for me, you fucking bitch – why???!!!”
Soiree is beating the face and pounding the back of Kate Mustard’s head against the bedroom wall. Mustard, wearing a disgusting coffee-and-semen-stained flamingo-colored slip that exposes her scrawny arms and otherwise accentuates only her complete absence of femininity, is simultaneously cringing in pain, doing her utmost to remain conscious, and smirking at Soiree in defiance.
“You just want to shove it in my mouth and have me look up into your eyes to show your dominance and my submission – so you can get off on it! But I won’t let you, you fucking bastard, I won’t let you!!!”
“Fuck you, you fucking bitch,” Soiree growls between his teeth, slapping Mustard’s face back and forth against the wall in rapid succession. He’s breaking a heavy sweat. As the intensity of his assault builds, he begins to lose himself in it completely, his eyes growing wild, his mouth cracking into a depraved leer.
“You fucking bitch, you miserable fucking bitch – yeah, now I’m getting off! You could have had it easy – you could have – uh, uh, uuuhh… but you wanted some other way – uuuhh… some other fucking way, so now you got it, you fucking bitch! So now I’m giving it to you like this! How do you like it?! How does it fucking feel?!”
“Fuck you, you fucking bastard – you fucking son of a bitch!!!”
“Uh, uh, uuuhh… yeah, bitch, how do you like it, how do you fucking… You don’t do that to me, you don’t deny Rico Soiree. When are you going to learn I’m the king around here – I’m YOUR king, and what your place is under me?! Uh, uh, uuuhh…!!!”
“Fuuuuuck yooouuu…!!!”
“You’re going to shut the fuck up and do what I want; you got that, bitch?! Why you always shooting off your fucking mouth – huh? What you trying to fucking prove?! You bitch, you fucking bitch, you goddamn fucking – uh, uh, uh, uuuuuhhh…!!!”
On the verge of blacking out, Mustard grows silent. This doesn’t stop Soiree, who throws her face-down and drags her by a skinny knobby leg to the head of the stairs, and then continues to pull her down them. She struggles to get her outstretched arms under her face to protect it, but Soiree’s descent is so fast and relentless that her efforts prove futile and her right cheek bounces off each step as she goes down.
Soiree drags Mustard into the kitchen, where he breathes over her hard.
“Make me something to fucking eat,” he says, and leaves to go daub himself off, spray himself with cheap cologne, and calm down.
Minutes later, Soiree is using Mustard’s head to clear off the counter of grease-hardened, grime-encrusted dishes that have been stacking up for weeks. Then he sticks her face into a bowl of hot oatmeal – “Can’t you make me anything else to eat, you stupid, useless bitch!!! Some pancakes, some eggs for crying out loud! You fucking worthless whore! You eat this shit – YOU FUCKING EAT IT!!!”
“Big strong fucking hero,” she gurgles, gasping for breath as he lets her up. “You couldn’t even take an old man, who cut off your fucking ears, you fucking ugly deformed son of a bitch!!!”
“AAAAAAAHHH…!!!” It is less of a cry and scream than a pained and tormented animal groan.
Soiree kicks open the door out of the kitchen into the tiny backyard. He pulls Mustard up on a laundry bench built around the pole of the clothesline and ties her arms to the line with heavy ropes.
“I’m hanging you out to dry – bitch!”
Pushing the clothesline from its wheel, he sends her out into the middle of the yard. She is splayed out in the form of a cross, her feet dangling, not reaching the ground.
“Maybe that’ll shut you the fuck up!”
A high fence of sharpened, rotting wooden pickets surrounds the property on three sides, marking its territory against the other homes. But some planks have crumbled away and broken at the top and some are missing, and through the gaps Soiree sees the large paralyzed dark eyes of two brown-colored black-haired children transfixed on him in dumb fear. They are Colombians, recently immigrated to the States and moved in.
“What the fuck are you staring at, you fucking little cockroach turds?”
Soiree is wearing a white guinea-t, brown dress pants, and slippers, but his silk yellow turban is cocked over to the side, exposing a missing ear. He is drenched in sweat. Not despite, but because of Soiree’s ominous approach, the fear-stricken children cannot help but keep their eyes riveted to the thoroughly abominable and terrifying hole in his head, which he turns to them for their especial scrutiny.
“What’s the matter, you little pieces of shit – never seen anyone hurt or crippled; never seen a man with scars?! I’ll show you!”
Soiree whips the turban off his head to reveal his complete disfigurement and the children gasp and scream, and in their frozen panic, clutch at each other and start crying.
Somehow, Soiree has the big kitchen knife, and he begins waving it at the children over the fence.
“Call the police, and I’ll slice you chocolate-covered insects up! Got me?!”
Their plump young mother rushes out – “O, mis bambinos!” she cries, and her two children run to her and, kneeling, she gathers them to her breast, into which they sink their scared innocent faces. She thinks back to when she was still in Colombia, and she had had the American national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner”, translated into Spanish, and after she had gathered in the words, with her eyes closed, for joy she breathed in the inspiration, thinking, ‘… the land of the free… the home of the brave…’ And was this the land of the free and the home of the brave? No! This was a nightmare, a hell, into which she and her children had been thrown, to be killed, or tormented to death by an insane white devil – “O, no, no, loco diablo, loco diablo blanco…!!!” She makes the sign of the cross over herself and her children repeatedly and feverishly.
An insane white devil, the mother affirms, just like so many others of his kind.
Just like in the movies.
“Shut the fuck up,” Soiree says, highly annoyed, fumbling to wind the turban back around his head. “Yeah, I’m an insane white devil. And it’s insane white devils like me who built this country and made it what it is. While you lousy bunch of dirt-colored chicos and pacos cross the border to live off the fat, the cream, and the gravy, expecting to get it for nothing, acting like it’s owed to you.”
“Call the cops on them, Rico baby,” Kate Mustard yells from the clothesline, her voice’s gnawing timbre cracking.
“What’s that you say, bitch?”
“I said call the fucking cops on them – for invading our privacy. I’m supposed to have some kind of rights here! What the fuck good are they if they’re not protected? And then when the cops come, have them check their papers. I think they’re illegal. Run them the fuck out of here!”
“Hey, Katy – that’s a good fucking idea!”
“Yeah! At least they’re not niggers!”
“What the hell does that matter?”
Filed by Jack Step, for Good Life Home Journal, December 18, 2013