Epitaph on a Tyrant

Giovanni

C’mon, stay a while. She’s only a helpless codependent trying her damnedest to manipulate you. Had she been prettier, I’d have let her enslave me. Too bad she looked better before asking for a ride to the oral surgeon on our first date. We had met online not five hours earlier. And I’m a people pleaser, so I said yes. She knows what she did, and she did what she had to do.

The evil bitch bled in my mouth, though. I’m not even trying to fuck and she’s bleeding in my mouth. I should probably get tested. She just got done telling me the last guy was an ex-con. He stole her purse on his way back to jail or prison or wherever on an unrelated charge. Bet he didn’t have to take her stupid ass to the lamp store and the dry cleaner and the Sunny Side Up. Good boy. But I don’t real-ly care.

Mary, mother of Christ, I just miss my stargirl so damn much. And she let a child molester fuck her asshole, so I’ve probably had AIDS since last March. Why, why. She warned you. She’s fickle. Boohoo, never meant to hurt you, so handsome, funny, genuinely nice, but not annoyingly so, any girl would be lucky to have you, the brilliant literary genius, but how about dad’s geriatric bassist. Dad the hack. It would have been nice to stab those ugly little eyes out of his empty head.

Easy. Maybe you’re just pissed because you haven’t smoked weed since six in the morning. It’s okay to admit you have a problem. You’re doing too much, you don’t think straight, that’s how you wind up in faraway places humoring absolute strangers and losing your goddamn mind. Stupid fucking idiot. Had better play with your phone before your inquisitor wipes her ass.

Gee, absolutely nothing, not a single notification, no one gives a shit, but let’s check der email for the sake of chicken der email. Even though there’s seldom more than spam. Not for boner pills and Russian brides anymore, usually pizzerias and predatory loans. Hey, look! Sad News. Is that right? It’ll have to be an awfully gut-punching item in order to ruin my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

“If you’re receiving this email, it’s because you attended one of the sessions at MTVM. I really wish I was writing with any other announcement than the one I’m about to write—Giancarlo DiTrapano died in New York this week.”

No fucking way. You have g o t to be ffffuckking kidding me. He died. What’s that supposed to mean? He just up and decided to drop dead? That’s suicide, but you’re telling me he died. How could he have died. Is he presumed dead? Is there a body? The guy publishes everyone’s personal business for a living, but his cause of death is top secret. Ridiculous. There must be some reason.

Probably sniffed some poisonous coke and busted his heart. Maybe he and DMX have the same plug. Or else he caught covid and turned blue, but some bard would’ve tweeted as much. Deep in the night, our dear leader soared into sainthood. I don’t know. Maybe it’s too embarrassing. He drank too much milk stepped on a rake and had an aneurysm in a public toilet trying to pass an apple stuck up his ass. Erotic asphyxiation is always on the table.

Looks like he hasn’t tweeted in four days. Well, goddamn. I guess he’s really gone. According to his final tweet, he was sad because a butch queen stood him up. Her carriage must’ve turned back into a pumpkin. Imagine how she feels now that he’s gone ghost. Not much, judging by her fluoride stare. Thumbing through his timeline, my teeth begin to itch. Hard to believe I used to cyberstalk him.

I was obsessed with Gian for the better part of two summers. I wanted to be a writer and he was a publisher. He was only a man, but he was already a legend. Unlike most of my idols, he wasn’t dead. And his tweets were better back then. I thought, here’s someone who could help me decipher a cherished vision of myself even I can scarcely understand.

I heard he hosted a weeklong writing workshop at his family’s olive orchard complete with haunted villa and Nazi-occupied castelletto, fabulously located in an ancient village atop a mountain by the Tyrrhenian Sea. Yeah, yeah. Let me guess. Svengali fleeces posho through bewitched birdsong telling of artistic epiphany in a faraway paradise. It’s probably some kind of timeshare scam.

But I wanted an audience with him. That’s why I PayPal’d Chelsea Hodson $2,900 for the privilege. Blew another grand on plane tickets. Parting with so much money at once made me sick to my stomach. Half my goddamn savings, gone. I didn’t even have a job. But I told all my high school friends I’d been specially selected to suck cock for a book deal. Anything in service of a teenage dream. I never thought to simply DM him.

We met outside a pizza place at the airport in Rome. It wasn’t love. He smiles like a skull, hamburger eyes flooded with steely yellow flame. The dead are always cheesing. We shook hands and sat down. He says something like, So, you’re Italian, compelling me to chronicle the historical waves of immigration from Italy to Milwaukee through the arrival of my paternal grandparents in the late sixties. He took care to nod every so often and took leave as soon as he could. He was much more interested in everyone else.

Sure, Gian showed us a good time, I s’pose. There was food, though he skimped on breakfast, and there was drink, though I alone drank to drunkenness on the very first night and forced a hug on his husband. Let’s see, what else. I glimpsed the Colosseum through the window of a moving car en route to a reading no one attended, not even the audience. And then he bought me gelato with what I presume was my money. Sorry. I’m not complaining. It was enough to have felt like a real writer for once.

As it happens, Gian had instructed his uncle’s ghost to lock me out of the villa, whereupon I was driven into the orchard and invited to whack an olive tree with a bamboo stick as he and his slaves grinned behind their camera phones. I matched them for every chuckle, convinced we were having a gay old harvest time, but I soon found myself standing there alone. They were milling around on the patio.

Though I’d sweated through mine, Gian denied me the shirt off his back. True, I didn’t ask for his shirt. But you’d think someone with so many shirts to spare would’ve been more sensitive to the quiet desperation of the shirtless. I was practically naked with my shame. And it’s impossible to ask someone for a shirt when you’re shirtless. That’s shameless. I repeat, Gian did not give me the shirt off his back.

That stingy fucker hardly even passed me the spliff, man. By the end of the workshop, I had hardly breathed more than a roach worth. I usually smoke almost a gram daily. Waiting for Chelsea and Gian to wake, I took my breakfast, a blob of mozzarella, on the patio and watched the ocean twinkle at the bottom of a big blue sky. I couldn’t wait for those bums to chauffer me back to civilization. Until I noticed a hunk of Gian’s hash lying on the table.

Holy shit. I immediately ducked down and cupped my hands over the hash, looking every which way for witnesses. We were alone, me and the jones, so I emptied the tip of a Camel Blue and shoved a chunk of the hunk inside, struck a lighter and sucked on the flame, head cocked back, smoldering tobacco raining down on my face. But the hash wouldn’t burn. I tried again and the cigarette canoed. Defeated, I threw the broken hash in a Styrofoam bowl on the dining room table.

Gian had good reason not to like me. I think he thought me a supremacist or a sycophant because I shave my head and laugh without my eyes. That’s male pattern baldness and major depression, but I’m an unlovable asshole at bottom. I fucking knew he would hate me. More probably he thought nothing of me. Whatever. My moral turpitude is none of his concern, especially not now. I wanted him to pretend to like my prose, not my personality.

He never published me, so Gian mustn’t have given a shit about my literary genius in his lifetime. He didn’t even bother to return either of my emails, offending my artistic temperament with such apparent violence that I almost abandoned my delusions of grandeur in a fit of teenage angst. I underwent something like (h)yo͞oˈmilədē. It’s horrible. I could’ve been, would’ve been, and should’ve been a New York Post Best Smelling Author, but the mean old man wouldn’t let me.

What a big baby I’ve been. Here I’m told Gian up and decided to drop dead of indeterminate, inexplicable, totally indescribable causes. Just like that, the tyrant has massacred, not only me, but an entire scene, casting a pall over generations of hacks, wannabes, mediocrities, and masters. What a vulgar display of power. Self-destruct and peace the fuck out forever, literature be damned. Knowing his disciples will build monuments in his honor. He died happy.

I’d believe anyone who told me Gian burst into flames with a laugh and vanished. It’s a shame we can only know him through the memory of a memory of a mortal-made occult in a life like a last hope, cut so short you half expect an apology. I used to think we would meet again. Say, outside the Pulitzers. I didn’t know whether I’d hug him or punch him. But I thought we had more time.

Although you could never, having died, hope to publish my novel, as of yet unfinished, the offer stands. I’ll do the deed. I said I would. I know you’re married, but he doesn’t have to know. He’s never going to read this, after all. I can’t imagine anyone will. And I know I’m not your type, you’re all about fat men. I have a thing for fat women myself. We’re more alike than you ever knew. If only my mouth were as big as yours.

No, lie back down. Relax. You’re so stiff.

Let me feather your blistering glans with the hair of my tongue, pearly yellows swirling like petals upon your necrotic shaft as gingival plaque envelopes everything like so much aspic, unhinge my jaw so as to fondle your septic scrotum with bleeding gums and, bloated underbelly bouncing between my eyes, smearing putrefied fupa across my face, bob my brainstem, slowly at first, then faster, baby, faster, forcing you deeper and deeper until your gummy precum spritzes my nasopharynx, casserole of undigested rotisserie chicken bubbles to the back of my throat and, tickling your flyblown urethra just right, pops the pimple of ejaculate festering deep inside your balls since your unknowable death, blasting both atlas and axis clean through the nape of my neck and slamming shut your casket on both of our corpses.

The evil bitch falls back into bed with a belch and smiles as though fighting back tears. Little tea candles seem to flicker in the black bathwater of her sad eyes.

“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing. Just an email, my—uhm, someone I went to Italy with, they died . . .”

“Oh wow. That’s too bad.”

“—yeah . . .”

Taking heart, she tosses her crispy yellow/black curls and grins. The bloodstain on her bottom lip crazes.

“I’m mad at you.”

“Yeah? You’re mad at me? What for?”

“Because you won’t come over for Easter! Wait, are you crying?”

I close my eyes and swallow.