Ken Wahl jerks his cock in front of my face. Kevin, Steven, and a bunch of other fuckheads hold me still on my living room couch while the man who used to play Vinnie Terranova spits on his cock. This is what I get for asking a guy like Kevin Jenkins to be my best man, knowing he holds grudges and has a fucking memory, recalls how as teens I babbled to him about Vinnie T and the criminally underwatched “Wiseguy,” how no one watched TV Wednesday nights at 10, and how inspired Ray Sharkey and Kevin Spacey were in their story arcs as Sonny Steelgrave and Mel Profit.

Time hasn’t been good to Vinnie T. Bloodshot eyes, thick stubble, and folds of neck fat. The skin under his eyes is purple, bruised-looking. The papers ate him up earlier this year after he filed suit against his ex-wife and ex-business manager, blaming their thieving for indebting him up to his thick eyebrows.

How much is Kevin paying him to fly to Topeka for such a fucked up bachelor party? The real strippers are in my room, probably laughing about my “Shawshank” poster. Maybe they’re in the doorway, watching this all go down. Would they even recognize the fat guy gyrating in front of next week’s groom? Kevin probably called him directly as the fat ass can’t have an agent, even one he might have kept after portraying Boomer Hayes in the 1991 bomb “The Taking of Beverly Hills.”

“Seems he wants a taste,” Vinnie T says over his towering gut, sneering down at me as the guys chant “FAGGOT! FAGGOT!” I look up at him, this man who never responded to any of my autograph requests. Fingers pry my mouth open as his huge dick thrusts inches away.

“Go file Chapter 7!”

The guys crack up, smack my head, hiss “idiot!” For a second, Vinnie T’s face falls. Seeing the impact of my comment is surreal, knowing how much ass he used to kick.

Speech therapy always ran late Wednesday nights. I’d get home and sprint to my room, lock the door, too excited to study the speech therapy manual before the theme song kicked in. It never got old, Vinnie T walking out of prison to the Organized Crime Bureau offices. He was that kind of guy, someone who’d risk prison rape to build cred for infiltrating criminal organizations.

“Okay, fuckhead,” Vinnie T says, moving up on me. “We’ll see what jokes you got in a minute.”

“Hey dude,” Kevin says.

“Get your money’s worth,” Vinnie T says, grinding his dick against my nose. He smacks it against my forehead, his sweaty, hairy balls tickling the skin under my nose. As it enters my mouth, I close my eyes. It’s sad how things have ended up for us, how I still have that turquoise notebook that tried teaching me to speak right. It’s no more than twenty feet away, in my bedroom closet. I still open it some mornings before work, thinking one day it will all click.

Flecks of dried blood pepper the pages, dropped when I was in eighth grade and didn’t have a VCR or mirror in my room. I’d wait for commercials to rush into the bathroom, view the blood spilled by picking at things on my face, things I should have known to leave alone.

—
David Erlewine‘s work appears or is forthcoming in Thieves Jargon, The Pedestal, FRiGG, and other places. He edits flash fiction for JMWW. You can find his blog at http://www.whizbyfiction.blogspot.com/