Richie Narvaez is the author of Roachkiller and Other Stories, Hipster Death Rattle, Holly Hernandez and the Death of Disco, and Noiryorican. He lives in the Bronx.
The blue collar men just zip up and leave.
The white collar men leave money on the dresser. (Which goes to the church, of course.)
A basketball player talked about sports strategies with my husband the whole time.
There was the lumbersexual who commented on the bedroom décor, which made me blush with pride. He’s the one who suggested I choose a more neutral rug. My Lord, it made the room! The New York Times did a feature.
Most of them say nothing and leave as if they’d never been.
What started this was that I was bored with all the parties, weekends, and vacations with lobbyists, not to mention my husband Mitch’s bursitis-inducing addiction to Internet pornography. Our marriage was in peril. So, after the most honest talk we had ever had, we decided on this . . . solution.
Mitch would glue on a goatee to disguise his face and find them on buses and in bars, at church socials (not our church, of course) and flea markets. Always far from his office and far from the Capitol.
Once the men arrived, impatient to drop their trousers, I offered them a sherry to slow them down. It usually went untouched. Meanwhile, on an accent chair in the corner, dressed in a parka and a fur hat, my husband pleasured himself with the red-faced fury of a teacher’s union representative.
That went along fine for a while.
Then he came home with the not-so-young youth pastor, who said I reminded him of his momma and cried in my arms. He was the one who passed away in the middle of it, pants around his ankles. Heart attack, I guess.
When Mitch realized what happened, he stopped his hand in mid-blur and said, “Holy crap.”
I said, “I have a tennis lesson in an hour.”
He said he’d wait for a local school shooting and then hide this body among the others.
“Won’t wash,” I told him. “It’s August and school’s out. Isn’t it, genius?”
He asked me if I had any bright ideas, and I said I did but that, frankly, it was his problem. Honestly, I didn’t have any. I just wanted to shower and get ready for the club.
So Mitch put on pants and went to ask our daughter, and she said to bury the body in the woods, since that’s what people on CSI did. (Gets her brains from me, that girl.)
Well, Mitch got the body in the car eventually. Most of it. The arms were still sticking out of the trunk hours later when I came home. Mitch looked beat, like an weary turtle, so I guess I felt bad enough to do him a favor. I said, “That’s what a hatchet is for, no?” and then I went inside to tell Consuela to start dinner.
He finally got the trunk closed. The rest you probably know about.
He found a clearing in the woods, started digging, and was at it for hours. He had just shoved the pieces into the ground and was about to cover it all up, when a group of nosey Canadian tourists on a hike stumbled across the scene.
He would have gotten away with it if he hadn’t stopped to pleasure himself one more time, over the body parts.
So, pictures were taken.
There was a minor scandal, and I understand it trended on the Twitter. Mitch made a statement, and the Libs said they would “crucify” him, which is of course blasphemy, but what do you expect from the Libs? In the end nothing happened and no one was hurt. In fact, it seemed to have helped my husband in the polls.
More importantly, it saved our marriage. It allowed us to be even more honest about our true desires. Now I am the one in the surprisingly comfy parka and hat, sitting on the accent chair, sometimes watching, but most times swiping through recipes on my Kindle, while my husband chews a (red) rubber ball and (patriotically) entertains a gun lobbyist.
~ fin ~
Richie Narvaez is the author of Roachkiller and Other Stories, Hipster Death Rattle, Holly Hernandez and the Death of Disco, and Noiryorican. He lives in the Bronx.
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