1
Marsha Sprinkle has always been glad she’s self-employed. She’s her own boss and that’s the way it must continue to be. She can’t imagine having regular office hours, punching time clocks, or paying taxes. Fellow employees are impossible for her to picture unless she can dominate their every move. Marsha is better than other people. She knows that. Smarter, too. Maybe not about the needless crap they tried to teach her in school, but about important stuff like how to put things over on other people who think they have the right to speak to her before being spoken to first. The ones who make unashamed eye contact as if it were their God-given right to invade her privacy. Marsha just feels everybody else on earth is … well, too familiar. Common. No one has the right to know her.
She knows she still looks good. Forty years hasn’t dented her sexual magnetism. Not that it matters to her except when she can use her appeal to punish. To trap. To enslave the clueless men who actually believe they will one day penetrate her. Thrust their filthy member into any of her openings above or below the waist. Especially into her own mouth, the oral cavity that refuses to tell the truth unless it is whispered privately for her alone to hear. Marsha won’t even imagine sex. All that moaning and thrusting and humping with another human. Sweating. Drooling. For what? That’s what Marsha wants to know. For what?!
Oh, she knows how to walk the walk, thrust out her natural-born tits and effortlessly swivel that still-well-rounded behind while ignoring men’s panting gazes, just to frustrate them, torture the lamebrain bastards who even for one moment think they could invade her insides. Like the moronic Daryl Hotchkins, her crime partner, her fake “chauffeur,” her sexual slave, who actually agreed to work for her if he could have sex with her just one day a year. That’s right. Once. Every 365 days and not one more, and Marsha made sure Daryl understood this. Divide all that lust time up hourly and you sure as hell get a low minimum wage, yet Marsha feels she is still overpaying Daryl. It has been a long haul to Marsha Sprinkle’s vagina, but today, Tuesday, November 19, 2019, is that day, the end of his one-year journey. He doesn’t know it yet but there’ll be a detour. A dead end. Marsha Sprinkle is no man’s used-up calendar.
But first things first. It’s a workday and she has to concentrate. She has always felt safe in whatever foreclosed McMansion they’ve squatted in. “Squat” is a word she dislikes, so homeless, so housing crisis. Daryl knows how to fool the neighbors, showing them fake leases he’s typed up and jerry-rigging the electricity so these rubes pay for not only their own home’s power but Marsha and Daryl’s, too. They aren’t squatting, they have taken charge of a house no one else could control.
Marsha likes how impersonal the interior design is in this “starter castle,” as she once heard a real estate agent refer to her current unlawful occupancy. She needs empty rooms around the ones she deigns to inhabit, voids she’d never enter but needs to know are there, sadly existing but not benefiting from her presence. And of course, the countless other giant bedrooms with full baths are the perfect dumping grounds for the thirty or so rifled-through, picked-clean suitcases she and Daryl have appropriated from the baggage-claim carousels at Baltimore/Washington International Airport.
The ridiculous cathedral ceilings give Marsha the required headroom respect she needs to feel one with the house’s vacant hauteur. Rich yet possessionless, fancy but hardly to the manor born, a style no one could call their own. The overpriced and oversize furniture left behind had failed to flip this white elephant of a house, and that suits her just fine. It can’t compete with her. She’ll never let the plush sectional sofas, the neoclassical mirrored tables, or the ludicrous Mediterranean chandeliers forget that she’s the boss. Marsha is like a McMansion herself: too big for the land underneath it, defying both nature and the environment, and daring anyone to move inside … her.
Marsha hates anything old. Antiques. Vintage. Collectibles. It’s all dirty to her. Used. Stained with other people’s fluids—children’s tears, unwanted sperm, stray mucus, even unrequired food. Nothing smells here. Odors are an unwanted invasion of her superiority, an interruption to her focused life. She has never worn deodorant in her life. Why would she? Her underarms smell like nothing. Nothing at all.
The walls are bare. Freshly painted—she can tell because there are no telltale smudges around the frames of the artwork she had immediately taken down. How dare some pathetic painter try to ruin her self-perfection with any form of competition? The cool circulating breeze of the air conditioner is still set at sixty degrees despite the chilly fall morning. Marsha is always too hot, even though there’s not an extra pound on her well-maintained body. She’s never really hungry. That would be weak. Oh, she knows she needs fuel. Why do you think they invented crackers? That’s all she eats. Not the cheap ones. No Ritz or saltines for her. The good ones. From Eddie’s on Charles Street. Or Graul’s in Ruxton. Imported. They turn to waste quickly and quietly. In. Out. Little pellets that leave no trace or mess. She remembers to flush the already-clean water in the house’s toilet several times a day just so it will be pristine enough to receive her regularly scheduled but oh-so-spare eliminations with the proper hygienic welcome.
Daryl is always assigned the bedroom farthest from hers. Here he can take cold shower after cold shower as he waits day after day to fulfill the lust she knows he feels for her. He’s in a good mood this morning, thinking about his pie-in-the-sky supposed payday. Daryl doesn’t need much in life, just stealing and her “crazy cave,” as he once so vulgarly called her private parts. He’s from the Erie Canal area in New York, so what do you expect? Marsha may be from a similar blue-collar neighborhood in Baltimore—Dutch Village, it was ridiculously named—but those so-called “townhouses” that boasted “sliding glass doors” and a pool are nothing more to her than McSlums, and she got out early and never looked back. She may be a criminal, but she’s a classy one now, a mastermind if you really want to know. Daryl is nothing more than a common thief, and without Marsha planning their “actions” he’d be out on the streets, where he’s gonna be today anyway. Furloughed. Fired. Whatever you want to call it.
Daryl’s not bad-looking. She realizes that some lesser mortals might go for his trim thirty-five-year-old hillbilly build and his long brown hair, which he often wears up under a chauffeur’s cap whenever they’re doing a job. She’s heard a woman or two comment on “what a cute little butt he has,” whatever that could possibly mean, but his cocky assurance alone is enough to make Marsha gag. She’s seen him buttoning up that uniform shirt over his swimmer’s-build chest that somehow is both scrawny and muscular at the same time, and OK, he does have that flat stomach with a trail of light brown hair going all the way up to his annoyingly always-hard nipples, but all Marsha sees is a landing pad for his filthy little spermatozoa that would like to crawl up inside her and make her pregnant. Not again. No, she gave birth once and has been paying for it ever since. He may think he’s going to invade her body with his confident erection filled with future colic-infected, learning-disability-stricken children, but he’s got another thing coming. And it’s not gonna be her.
Here he is now. Plodding down the white, unstained carpeting on that ridiculously grand circular staircase. Marsha ignores the bulge in his pants as she slips on a saucy but elegant blond wig over her naturally … well, who knows what the real color of her hair is these days? Does it matter? Not when she’s wearing this hairpiece she’s never worn before that came out of that monogrammed suitcase on carousel number four from United Airlines. There’s always a treasure trove of disguises in strangers’ suitcases. Maternity outfits, padded bras, falls. All ready to seize. Identification papers and personal items, too, that enable Marsha to avoid the terrible truth of everyday life. Like Daryl’s disgusting unit aimed her way, rearing its ugly head. He had violated the third wall of decency by once mentioning he was circumcised. As if she cared! There it was, showing itself off unashamed through the too-tight polyester pants of the chauffeur uniform they stole off a hanger in the back seat of what had to be the last stretch limo this side of prom night, parked outside the Prime Rib restaurant years ago. He likes to brag how the pants “still fit” as if this were some sort of erotic news bulletin. She pretends she doesn’t notice the leer of anticipation in his eyes as she quickly slips out of the expensive white silk pajamas freshly swiped from an Alaska Airlines bag and into an understated periwinkle-blue Gucci suit that lets the world know she means business. In this case, business class, British Airways. Flight 217. Heathrow to D.C. Direct. Last Christmas.
“Ready?” Daryl asks impatiently at the front door. It’s early. 6:00 a.m. early. Usually he’s a lazy bastard, so she knows he’s anticipating getting his work done in the morning so he can have the whole afternoon ahead of him to pounce. On her. Oh, she’s ready, all right! Just you wait. For plans he can’t even imagine. As Daryl electronically opens the door to the ridiculous five-car garage outside, Marsha grabs a snappy winter-white wool jacket she swiped off a luggage cart outside Dulles Airport and slips it on. She’s headed north. It might be chillier.
Marsha schedules ahead. Today is also the last day for their black town car they had leased on a credit card they’ll of course never pay. She’ll give Daryl one thing. He does know how to build a chain of false identity by stealing junk mail from mailboxes and using those preaddressed mailing labels the March of Dimes sends out without asking if the residents want them or not to get new credit cards that can be maxed out in the first thirty days before Mastercard or Visa catch on and cancel. There’s nothing else in the garage besides the limo. No garden equipment, no lawn mowers. Marsha doesn’t mow her lawn, she moves. She’s gone. Gone without wind.
Daryl can be a good actor, too, and he takes his chauffeur role seriously. You can never tell who might be watching. Realtors. The neighbors. He pulls out the car and drives it up to the front door for his “client.” Marsha regally steps out of the house. It’s nice out. Not that she cares. The only time she notices the weather is when flights are canceled. Just as Daryl leaps out to open the back door, Marsha opens her own lying mouth for her first “practice” lie of the day, but she doesn’t get a chance. A large horsefly accidentally flies directly into her oral cavity before she can speak. Outside in the air, this creature doesn’t seem that big, but from inside her mouth it feels like that giant flying reptile Rodan she once saw in a movie on cable. Her jaws are no match for this frightening pest, who, temporarily blinded in panic, begins biting her tongue with its tiny bloodsucking mouth. But Marsha is ready for any curveball nature might throw her. At first she considers spitting out this invasive monster, but then her reflexes take over and her snapping-turtle-like tongue, hidden behind her freshly glossed lips, rips the unwanted tormentor from the roof of her mouth, and with one bite of her cavity-free teeth, the execution of this pesky intruder is complete. Yes, she swallows.
“Hurry it up!” she snaps to a confused Daryl, who’s not sure what he just saw. Knowing how she hates his “nosy questions,” he just helps her into the back of the town car and closes the door behind her without the thud he knows could easily get on her nerves. They pull out of the driveway and glide through “Happy Hollow,” their ridiculously named development of McMansions. Hollow it is, but there’s nothing “happy” about it. All but one of the eight oversize houses sit empty or foreclosed by the banks. Expensive portable residential basketball hoops stand alone like giant floats in driveways, abandoned by their former families’ athletic children, lonely for even a single ball to swish through their nets.
Only one couple is left besides Marsha and Daryl, and wouldn’t you know it, they have a dog. Its name is Frederick, Marsha knows from hearing the blowsy woman who lives there yell its name every time they drive by, and then out comes this idiot creature, bounding toward them, giving chase. Is the dog so dim-witted that it actually believes their moving limousine is another dog? Apparently so. Slobbering, barking, jumping up, falling back down with its pencil dick fully exposed, racing forward and again jumping back up and smacking its ignorant head on their backseat window, it acts as if it’s just seen Satan. Actually, it has. Marsha doesn’t blink. Not even once. Frederick! she thinks. What a stupid fucking name.
Finally, they’re in the real world. A place Marsha distrusts outside the aorta of classless wealth where she knows how to hide. Of course, Daryl drives at the exact speed limit so as not to attract “county-mounties,” as he calls the police. Marsha is glad to be using gasoline, harnessing energy, baiting the environment. Daryl knows she likes to take Falls Road all the way into Baltimore City on the way to the airport, avoiding trucks whose drivers she’s convinced are always looking down from their cabs onto her passing crotch. She debates stopping at Whole Foods on the way to pick up some of her favorite upscale crackers (their own brand of organic multiseeded flatbreads are quite yummy) but decides against it. That horsefly has left a bad aftertaste in her mouth.
Instead, she touches Daryl icily on the back of his jacket and says in a misleadingly friendly voice, “You know you’re going a little bit bald in the back.” “What?” answers Daryl with alarm as he rips off his cap in a panic and looks in the rearview mirror. “Just a little,” she lies, feeling the adrenaline she always gets from untruthful statements. “You can’t see it from the front,” she continues, greedy for thrills, “but I noticed it yesterday. Don’t worry,” she adds with a dig, “you can always wear hats to cover it up.” “I’m not balding,” he sputters in narcissistic paranoia, turning his head to the left and the right, trying to get a fuller picture in the reflection. What a fool! Every day she lies to him and every day he believes her. It’s not even a challenge anymore.
The “commute” to work, as Marsha thinks of their twice-monthly drive to the airport, is fairly uneventful. Daryl dares not even turn on the radio because he knows music troubles Marsha. It’s too cheery and upbeat and all the huffing and puffing and strumming that goes along with instruments hardly seems worth the effort. Silence is better. Silence is about her.
They pass the Roland Park neighborhood, and Marsha chuckles out loud over all the memories she has of ripping off that much-loved supermarket on Roland Avenue where longtime faded-gentry families sign the bill on house credit. Customers there may think they’re better than Marsha because she hails from Dutch Village, but who’s the fool now? The shoppers who carelessly shouted out their account numbers to the trusting clerks for the world to hear as their groceries were bagged and charged, or Marsha, who wrote them down and used them herself the next time she shopped there? Oh, those were the days!
Time passes by quickly when you’re having fun. Suddenly, they’ve turned onto Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, in Marsha’s opinion the most direct route through the city to the airport, no matter what the clueless GPS dictates. Marsha’s preferred route always overrules what any ridiculous navigating device has to say. She knows every escape route there is, and no computer is going to help her in that department.
Despite the poverty, despair, and rage of this neighborhood, Marsha likes it here. No snitches. At every red light are squeegee beggars, often aggressive, who squirt car windows with soap and then dare drivers not to give them money to clean it off. Marsha usually tells Daryl to give them a few bucks. She respects their line of work. They’re scammers, too. They’re not lazy. They have jobs! They’re here every day on the same corner at the exact same time. In costume. Marsha’s convinced there’s a pimp who controls the whole scene, putting the hungry “actors” through hair and makeup every morning, feeding them, giving them signs with well-written, heart-wrenching messages, handing them borrowed or rented real-life babies or skinny stray dogs for props and dropping them off every morning and picking them up every night before pocketing all the money.
She’d better have a cracker. She’s got a few of those Haute Cuisine brand Basil & Sweet Pepper ones in the otherwise empty pocketbook she plans to ditch in baggage claim after her on-time arrival. They’re still fresh in the baggie. Crisp. Almost sweet. Easily passed through her small intestine and colon toward the tiny wave of muscle contractions she has learned to control to assure a painless, speedy ejection.
Daryl doesn’t really get nervous before one of their heists. It excites him to feel good down there and evil up top. As he turns onto Russell Street, the exit that leads to the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, he remembers Hammerjacks, the long-gone heavy-metal club that was razed and replaced with a football stadium, where Daryl got his criminal feet wet for the first time, before he met Marsha. That night Marky Mark, the stud-muffin white rapper, played, long before he became Mark Wahlberg. Even Daryl was shocked at the pubescent girls who were sexually awakened and encouraged to be excited in a lewd way by their horny mothers who brought them there on one of those all-ages-admitted concert nights. Daryl almost felt heroic when he swiped a bad mom’s wallet from her purse underneath her chair. Didn’t she deserve it? Hadn’t she just swilled down two sloe gin cocktails and bought a third for her underage daughter? The wallet was just sitting there, his for the picking. No wonder he got a hard-on. Theft was sex, wasn’t it?
Finally, he had a vocation. His parents might have been divorced but that didn’t stop both of them from nagging about him getting a job. His father, Bruce, was on lifetime disability from losing a leg in a freak accident at his job in a steel mill, but you couldn’t call that a career, could you? Even his mom, Betty, who had been fired from the gift shop at the Erie Canal Discovery Center for drinking on the job, had the nerve to suggest he seek employment. Fuck that and them.
He left the club, fully aroused in a new way. He didn’t try to hide it, he just adjusted his rod in his pants so it rested upward, just below the buckle of the old Sunny’s Surplus belt he’d worn for years. He was a loner with a boner, he chuckled to himself. A new superiority was throbbing all through him.
And then he heard it. A loud crash. The Number 22 bus had pulled away from the stop, and another driver in a car trying to get around to turn had collided into the side of the transit vehicle. Finally, Daryl had the nerve to do what every like-minded criminal in Baltimore knows they must. Run and get on the bus for insurance claims. Get a “suitcase,” as some of the old-timer grifters still called phony neck injuries, marrying the word “suit” as in law with “case” as in court. “Suitcase,” the all-purpose secret word for fraud.
Amazingly, his erection still held. It was a little painful going up those first bus steps, but so what, it felt even sexier doing a second scam before he’d completely gotten away with the first one. The lucky few passengers on board were already going into their cries of “whiplash,” holding their necks and moaning out loud. He limped to an empty seat and held his knee as if it had been painfully slammed in the impact. Even the bus driver was faking injuries as he called into his dispatcher to report the accident, exaggerating the speed he had been going to make it sound worse. Daryl knew he was surrounded by fellow swindlers and felt, for the first time, part of a community.
Then she got on. Last to board. She looked different from the others. That parentheses-shaped hairdo curtained each side of her angry face like a stage. Made up not to attract but to intimidate. She glared at Daryl, who glowered back and then spread his legs to show her who was boss. Marsha ignored his ridiculous genital display and moved to the empty seat right next to him to show her lack of apprehension as the Maryland Transit Administration accident investigator got on board and everyone went into full injury mode, holding their “aching” backs and whimpering in phony pain. Even Marsha joined in, which shocked Daryl, who hadn’t realized she was on his team. Here’s a real cool cucumber, he thought, as he stood up to get past her and fill out the report first, before the others’ lying testimony became redundant to a skeptical transit authority claims adjustor. Daryl made sure he paused just for a second with his crotch right in front of Marsha’s seated face. What he didn’t realize was that while the lump in front of his pants was still there, the lump in the back—his wallet—was not. Marsha had just stolen it.
He was pissed for nine long years. And then he saw her again. In Nordstrom at Towson Town Center. She looked kind of the same, only meaner. Her hair was different, but whose wasn’t? His was long now, a little greasy but it looked cool. He could tell by how women looked at him. Women who were nothing compared to this hot tamale. His cock practically jumped out of his drawers, springing to attention at the memory of her brazen pickpocketing. Who cared about his old wallet? She could have it for all he cared as long as he got to have her now. He’d better wait, though. He was on the way to the manager’s office wearing a pair of new-enough Nike tennis shoes with a rip in one of them that he’d stolen at a gym and planned on claiming had been torn on the escalator when he got his foot stuck. It was usually good for a hundred dollars or so—managers would pay that just to get rid of you. But you couldn’t pull off this scam with a hard-on showing.
She was taking a coat off a mannequin right in the store. Did she fucking work here, he wondered in amazement as he did a U-turn at the top of the escalator and went back down to investigate. It was her all right. She was boosting! Slicing off the security tag with a box cutter and brazenly putting the coat right on in the store. At that moment, their eyes locked. His criminal cock jumped involuntarily. Almost in respect. She looked down and recognized it. Him and it. The bus scammer and his signifying penis. The duo that didn’t seem to fear her. We’ll see about that, she thought as she turned on her heels and went up the escalator. Daryl followed in an awed trance, his dick pointing the way.
He couldn’t believe it. Both he and Marsha were going to the manager’s office to scam. She barged in first and didn’t even bother to close the door as she filled out the job application forms with what must have been a phony name and bogus contact information. He had to hand it to her. Who would suspect her of thievery if she was supposedly seeking employment while wearing the coat she was stealing? As she exited, she ignored him, which made his penis feel challenged from rejection, but what could Daryl do? He had to go right into his “I just ripped my tennis shoe on your faulty escalator” spiel with the manager, who actually believed him for once. Two hundred bucks they gave him! A record high. Maybe this vixen was his lucky charm!
Outside she was waiting. In a town car, no less. “Get in!” she ordered from behind the wheel through the passenger-side window. He did. That was the day they stole the chauffeur’s uniform. The day of their first airport luggage theft. She needed him without his penis; he needed her with it. They were a team, but their needs couldn’t have been more different.
Copyright © 2022 by John Waters
