Made in China Chapter 4

            Betty Brown was my wife. I was married. Although that might ruin the romantic compellation of my story for some I cannot deny it because I must remain truthful. And frankly, I don’t give a damn. Although, lying is a way of life these days, my parents taught me better. Betty died miserably of the KITTY along with millions of other rich and poor women. Wealth bought no one a reprieve. There was no cure to be bought like there was with HIV. I buried her myself amid a deep grove of pine trees in a bed of gentle needles and soft Earth. It was a place she loved. There were too many dead women to mourn, some say, but I guess we each mourn those special to us in different ways. I still mourn Betty Brown though maybe I shouldn’t. She got her fated disease from cheating on me with the mailman whose name was Bill Brightside. The KITTY occurs when two different sperm samples intermix inside a vaginal cave. Some people would call it Karma. Bill’s wife died of it, too. She had been raped by his best friend from high school at a card game, he told us over and over when he hand delivered our mail, every day, knocking on the door rather than leaving it in the mailbox. I doubt that funny business was true about his wife. People made up sob stories all the time in those days about how terrible they had it, how they were robbed by life. They don’t do that so much anymore. No one gives a shit.

Betty confessed her affair when we knew she was going to die, when it was abundantly clear that she had the fatal vaginal disease. I was confused because Bill wasn’t anything special, in fact, he was rather dumb looking, chubby, balding and he had big goofy ears. She cried real tears not for betraying me or our bonds of holy matrimony, but for being guilty of a crime against her own health. She was so afraid to die which I have never been. She was raised a Baptist so Hell was the only reason she tried to be good for so long, fooling everyone, even me. I realized then as those fat tears rolled down her hollowing face that I didn’t know her at all and that she didn’t know me and I may as well have married a flamingo. She had asked me if I ever took those penis enlargement pills. No, I said. Then she laughed about how small Bill’s penis was as though it was some cruel trick played on her and as though it would have been alright had it been a real kielbasa. I was somewhere acceptably between the two, she said, certainly not big, but not small. I never asked. She rambled. “It was too late to stop!” she pleaded insanely about her infidelity, dying in bed. In the end she was as mad as a hatter and she insisted I make love to her one last time as she lay decaying under ghost-white sheets. A warm sun peered in through the window and a warm breeze blew with it. I wish it had been dark and cold. Her skin was clammy and her bones were like misdirected tent poles that seemed on the verge of penetrating her flaking ash-colored skin that seemed dead already. But she held up and I did it and afterwards I collapsed on her emotional and physically exhausted. And she died with her eyes wide-open amidst the intense orgasm of death. I lied there after she died for quite some time and cried. Not for her. For the world. For never knowing real love. For living through the worst war in human history. I forgave her for her affair with Bill but I can’t say that I truly miss her. I do sometimes when I smell pinesap or beer. Bill died as well from a hatchet in his back. I didn’t kill him. Apparently, he fucked other wives too and someone up the street got him. He lay there one Thursday afternoon in the street with the hatchet in his back and the bag of scattered mail on the ground beside of him. No one moved him they all went and sorted for their mail. And that is how I became a mailman.

Ho hum.

I married Betty Brown in sheer desperation. I completed high school through correspondence classes and managed straight A’s, nailing English just like dad, though the quality of my education was surely diminished from his. I earned a scholarship to Dartmouth but Dartmouth closed between the time I left Ohio on a train and the time I arrived at the New Hampshire station. Betty met the same fate. She was from South Carolina. We stood at the train station with at least that in common, bags in hand, looking at each other desperately from fifty feet. We were the only two who seemed lost. Everyone else had places to go and they hustled about while we stood there like pitiful statues awaiting pigeon shit. Ever-aspiring, we parlayed our doomed affinity into a shared pitcher of beer at a nearby pub, followed by another, and another, and pretty soon we were playing darts and making out in a car that wasn’t ours in a rainy parking lot. Fat raindrops cried down the windshield. Thunder cracked and shook the tiny car. She cut me down at third base. We were both going home, having learned that we would never receive higher education, feeling utterly dismal about our chances in the new world. I was convinced I would be a garbage man. She was dressed up like a boy because it was common for women to be kidnapped after most began to die and there were two full years of KITTY deaths already. She was a perfect virgin when we met. We got married in Niagara Falls on the Canadian side where it was the prettiest, and surely still is. We were worried they would turn us away because neither of us had passports, but the Border Patrol checkpoint was abandoned with only a sign that said philosophically, “Who fucking cares?”

Her name during the marriage ceremony was Bob Brown. That is what is on the certificate so I suppose now I could argue that I wasn’t even really married. It was a sham! But I don’t. People looked at us like we were homosexuals, skeptical though, if one of us could be a woman, betting in their heads as to which of us had the pussy. We both wore tuxes, black ones with red carnations. Shortly after, we made love for the first time in a cheap motel called The Royal Flush with the sound of the tremendous waterfall for inspiration in the background coming in through an open window. The beat-up motel sign that greeted us, lured us in, had a royal flush on it, hearts, of course, and it said beneath the hand, confidently, “….where there is always vacancy for love!”  which was always true unless there was a billiards or poker tournament in town. It was my first time, too, but I played it cool while she screamed like a murdered cat. Before that night I only had my hand for a partner, who never said anything.

            Betty was sterilized as most women were in an attempt to prevent the KITTY from killing her. It was widely believed that the operation would help reduce the chances of getting the disease though truly no one knew why it killed anyone at that point. It, of course, didn’t work. Women wore talismans, no tampons, special tampons, they shaved, they didn’t shave, anything you could imagine—snake venom, lemon juice, so on and so forth. But it wasn’t until after most of them died when it was discovered that it was the “two sperm scenario” that was killing them. Condom companies testified in front of Congress in official after-the-fact hearings and boasted that they could have saved billions of women had they only been used! If only! Religious people said the same thing for abstinence and monogamy (which made the machismo Congressmen yawn) but that was unthinkable in the expression of modern feminism and manliness which requires men and women to be blithering morons thinking that polygamous sex will bring them freedom and happiness instead of the reality of their depraving. We couldn’t outsmart nature forever, someone concluded best. “Goddamn bitches had it coming!” some old drunk said to me once when I was drowning my sorrows in a crowded bar called The Cock & Hen. It was days after Betty died and I was miserably fed up with all the escalating sorrow in the world, not seemingly capable of adapting to it like the rest of them. By the looks of the old fool, he never had much luck with women. After 78% (more or less) of all women died off and most men turned to homosexuality, some wiseass scaled the pole to the sign I saw on my way out of the bar and scratched out the neon flashing, The, & Hen, leaving only a glaring Cock.

That was my first and last experience in a gay bar.

            My dad and I pulled the Mustang out of a splintered garage that had been leveled by a tornado. The owner died faithfully in the car and since I was pickin’ his car I felt some kind of obligation to bury him out of respect. He resembled a dead rat, his mouth wide-open and his teeth bucked out. As I was digging the hole in the back of his house after having secured the Mustang in my garage, every so often some other people still pickin’ and raccoonin’ (vulturin’ some call it) poked their dirty heads out the back sliding glass door looking quickly for anything valuable. In seeing me digging a hole for some week-old corpse, they would never fail to ask me mockingly, “Who died? Prince Albert?” (Sometimes it was Prince Albert, or King George, or King William, or Queen Mary, or Prince Harry, or Duchess Cumslut, it all depended on their monarch of choice.) But I gave each of them a disparaging look and they carried on with their business of pickin’ the bones off the dead knowing backyards are hardly ever worth the time. I didn’t know his name but I didn’t want to leave his grave unmarked so I put a hubcap I found in the garage on the fresh dirt. It was from a Mercury of some kind and I wrote in marker on an empty space, “Here lies one of a billion served by God…” I am sure the hubcap was probably later stolen by someone with a use for it.

The car was ruby red and when I turned her over the CD that was in the CD player began to play. It was Dion and the Belmonts singing “Ruby, Baby” so I named her, Ruby, Baby, and left the CD in the player. By coincidence, the dreaded Casanovas’ theme song was two up on the same CD from that, “The Wanderer,” which they blare from their trucks as they cruise for women. I didn’t let it bother me. I painted her name in pretty cursive on her quarter panel, which if she was a real woman, I like to think, would be equivalent to her thigh. A friend of mine named Charlie Lust helped me fix her up, modifying her to be better able to compete with the smaller, leaner Chinese cars which everyone drove these days. He supped up the motor and gave her dual exhaust and added a dual nitrous-oxide tank system to give her an extra boost. He put a set of impenetrable tires on her and tinted the windows and added a razor-sharp hood scoop. We mounted a twelve-gauge shotgun to the passenger side door on a bolted swivel, just in case, and a rear camera so I could see behind me. Then ambitiously we added a snow plow to her front which would definitely slow me down some but would serve me well in the obstacles I was sure to encounter. It wasn’t a bulky plow, nothing she couldn’t handle with the engine she had in her, yet, I could not stop thinking about the tortoise and the hare looking at it. Perhaps, it would be advantageous for me to drive a tank.

The race is in a week. I stuck the sticker that I received in the mail in the front windshield which could be used as a gas voucher for free fuel at participating stations along the way, so the letter said. That sticker was a gold star with “666” embossed on it and the stations would be marked with the same symbol. I felt uneasy in having the Devil’s number on my car but the rules were the rules so I counteracted it’s impiety with a Jesus Christ air freshener that hung from my rearview, which was hard to find. Though I don’t believe much, I believe in balance, the Yin and the Yang. Charlie and I sat in my garage listening to Elvis on a small CD player drinking a beer. Our work was almost entirely finished. He told a bunch of dirty jokes. Grease streaks covered his face and his overalls. He always wore a ball cap and chewed tobacco. I asked him why he helped me. He had been so kind since I met him shortly after Betty’s death when I was at the junkyard looking for parts.

“Nuttin’ better to do, I s’pose,” he replied modestly in his usual course grunting. This was him doing something to make him feel real, to stay sane in a very insane world. All of his family had died within three short years of various illnesses and tragedies. His mother and three younger brothers died last, he once mentioned casually trying his best not to seem as though he was soliciting pity, murdered by a Casanova who swore they were hiding a woman. He knew I sympathized but he kept up the popular veneer.

Ho hum.

I try to incorporate little tidbits of information here and there and perhaps they fall in inopportune places but I must describe to those future peoples what is happening here in 2039 or else I feel it will all be forgotten, footsteps on the beach like. Maybe it is all best forgotten but for those of us trying to live decently through it perhaps it can explain our lives a little better. Maybe I am just writing in case I die in that goddamn race.

            A booming business these days with the lack of women is telephone sex. You can call up a woman, who might not even be a real women―an entrepreneurial fellow with a high pitch, or a computer woman programmed to say the right things and blow you across telephone lines until you ejaculate or your minutes are up, whichever comes first (no pun intended). You have to wire the money over though, credit cards being non-existent for the most part. Western Union has really made out in this quagmire. So too has RadioShack. Both were about extinct until people needed to wire money the old fashioned way and people needed radios and the sort of electronic devices the appliance store could provide. RadioShack thrives since it is the sole retailer of Betties, realistic think-and-talk robot women for those men with money to burn. To tell the truth, I can do without. For whatever reason, I am not a sex-crazed, desperate asshole, seeking any reasonable hole, willing or unwilling, to penetrate. I am not a Casanova. I wouldn’t rape anything (even as a teenager if I felt my hand wasn’t up to sex, I didn’t force it). To me, it is funny business and my grandpa always told me to be wary of funny business. I am perfectly capable of relieving myself to the sight of Zula Zane, whose pretty face and body dances illustriously on the vivid stage of my mind regularly. The attraction is so great that I needn’t use hands.

The other cars in the death race were all made in China. Everything is made in China since American motor companies shit out, officially, eighteen years ago, on the 4^th of July, no less. It is generally accepted that everything Chinese is superior which is due partly to the impervious Chinese women, not one of whom has died of the KITTY in the twelve years it has been known to exist. They have been tested and are immune for some unknown reason. So, naturally, in place of small plastics and a bunch of other junk, China’s top export is women from ages twelve to eighty, to be used however the buyer may choose. There are Made in China magazines all over the place, filled with different Chinese women, from which one with money could buy. Suit yourself! Pick your pleasure! Guaranteed obedience! The Chinese government sold women for as little as $2500 up to $250,000, depending on flaws or defects, weight, or disposition. Where once they forced women pregnant with girls to have abortions, or to throw babies in the Yellow River, now they encourage female pregnancies and manipulate genetics to keep up with demand. And the President of China, now by far the richest and most stable country in the world (protected by the recently upgraded Great Wall), ambitiously wants everyone to know who they have to thank for their pussy. So realizing that a sticker wouldn’t stick to flesh like it did to the bottom of plastic toys and all the junk they used to export, he ordered that every exported Chinese woman have the best three words in the world tattooed uniformly to her right ass cheek…

Made in China