love is a dead rat with maggots

So here's the story Max wrote for me about the "Hood of the Car" incident. If I were you, I'd read my post first (below) and then read his, because you get a much better idea of how well he wrote this story. Or maybe I'm just a proud girlfriend. Anyway here it goes:

love is a dead rat with maggots

Infinite maudlin words have been used to describe what we humans call love… People allude to rainbows, moonlight, stardust, and other such ephemeral horse fodder, but for me this most sinister mistress is best embodied by the very tangible form of a dead rat, crawling with maggots. I did not draw this observation in a dream or in a fit of romantic passion, but through a very personal and traumatic experience, which made plain to me the inexplicable condition of love.

It was a hot summer night in Thai Town, the type of night when you want to dry out your eyeballs with one of those dental suction tools to keep them from boiling over. I was pan searing a can of Spam on my hardwood floor when the telephone rang. Ding-a-ling. It was Hiu Kay, this Oriental dish that had been on my menu several months now, the kind with three wasabi peppers next to her name, if you catch my drift. She had a set of pins on her that would drive a duck daffy, and a puss to match. “What’s the score, sugar,” I asked, flicking my Pall Mall at the cat who’d just appeared on the window sill. “Max, you have to come quick! There’s this huge rat on my car! This huge rat!” “Whoa, whoa, slow down, pussycat,” I answered. She sounded hysterical. “You just hold up there, lock the doors and windows and I’ll be over before you can spell Mickey Mouse.”

M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.

I could tell she was a wreck the second she opened the door; teeth chattering, clumps of hair lodged in her fists, face the color of spoiled milk… No point exchanging pleasantries here. “Pull yourself together, sugar,” I barked as I pushed past her into the apartment. As I made my way towards the living room I saw her roommate Kate standing at the kitchen counter holding a chigger of whiskey. She was hardly keeping together herself, and this was a broad who’d lost half her ear in a knife fight with a rabid circus monkey. I snatched the whiskey out of her hand, threw it down and poured myself another. “OK, so where is he?” I demanded. Huey just stood there looking nervous, until finally I had to give her a shake. “Goddamnit, I didn’t drive all the way over here just to babysit a couple of spooked hens, now where’s the rat!” “Max, you don’t understand,” she began, “it’s huge! It’s as big as a cat, and it’s stuck to the hood of my car!” A rat the size of a cat stuck to the hood of her car. I could just picture my beautiful Hui Kay driving through Beverly Hills with this humongous dead rodent splayed spread-eagle on her hood, tail pointing skyward with rigor mortis, whiskers twitching in the wind, blood baking on her windshield in the blazing sun. Fellow motorists’ would honk and she’d think someone was making a pass. She’d fix her hair and try to look coy, oblivious to the rotting carcass two feet from her face. Dames.

After giving the whiskey some time to seep into my blood, I grabbed a spatula and a plastic baggie and headed for the door. The girls eyed me like I was goofy… something was on their mind, but they were afraid to tell me. “Well Christ, spit it out,” I demanded. “You’re going to need a bigger spatula,” Huey finally told me. “And a bigger bag,” added Kate. I looked at the tools in my hand, surely ample enough for any normal size rat. Either this thing was a monster, or the women were exaggerating, as women often do. Huey was terrified of rodents, terrified like you or I would be terrified of an epileptic eye-surgeon. But Kate, on the other hand, wouldn’t sling this kind of barber. She was a real Newshawk, she’d covered the East L.A. beat during the bloody aftermath of the Villaraigosa candidacy. Not the type of dame to jaw on about fish stories. “A maggot stood up and waved at me,” she exclaimed. No, if it had been your average mouse she’d have taken care of it herself. The girls were on the square, and if that was the case I was going to need another sip of giggle juice. I was no daisy, but I wasn’t pest control either.

Two more stiff hookers of whiskey and I was ready to face the mouse. Instead of the spatula I now had a two-foot square of cardboard, and in place of the zip-lock I had a 5 gallon garbage bag… if that wasn’t big enough I’d have to get myself some slickers and a chainsaw. Huey gave me some hot mustard full on the lips and a braid of hair as I stalked off to meet my adversary. She also gave me two plastic baggies to wear over my hands – “mice carry disease, you know.”

I wasn’t exactly armed to the teeth, but I felt fairly confident as I descended the stairs into the parking garage for my date with Mickey – he was dead, after all. As soon as I was close enough to see the car I could see the rat, tail sticking straight up in the air just as I had imagined. Christ it was big… some rats eat cheese, this one ate cows. Right away I knew I was under-equipped. What I needed was a snow shovel and wood chopper, but I would have to work with what I had.

The rat was laying face down on the passenger side of the hood, right up by the windshield; in fact, bits of it were on the windshield. There was no question this rodent had had its final curtain pulled. Besides the blood and the stiff tail, it was crawling with maggots; big, bloated maggots who’d been feeding well all day and hadn’t made a dent. Kate wasn’t joking when she said one had waved at her. The fat little insects had gone over the edge with the rams, they were lit up on mouse flesh and only too happy to greet any visitors who had come to join the feast. I wasn’t interested in this dinner party, the meat was undercooked and the company was low class. It was dirty business, but good pay if you’re counting in the currency of female affection, and so I set to my work.

The first thing I had to do was slide the cardboard underneath it, no easy task as my little friend had been baked to the roof like he was made out of tar. I pushed it and angled it and tried different spots, but the rat wouldn’t budge. As distasteful as it was, I had no choice but to lift it up by the tail… Huey was right about the plastic baggies on my hands after all. At first I tried to just squeeze it with two fingers, but it was like trying to pick up a wet banana with chopsticks dipped in Vaseline. Finally I had to just suck it up and grab it with my fist. It felt warm from the sun and for a second I thought I saw the rat twitch, though it was just the movement of maggots through its innards. I pulled it up and the body peeled off the hood like a three-day-old Band-Aid, leaving behind dried blood, tufts of fur, and scores of angry maggots. Even in death the rat looked fearsome, like it could whip around and sink its pointy teeth into me at any moment. Quickly, I slid the cardboard under the heavy beast and deposited it into the bag before those terrible parasites could crawl up it’s tail and start feasting on me. I scraped off what I could from the car into the bag and pulled tight the drawstring. The smell nearly knocked me silly, and had I wound up horizontal the maggots would surely have eaten me. As fast as I could I ran to the dumpster and disposed of mister whiskers.

When I got back up to the apartment the first thing I did was head to the bathroom and attempt to puke up my guts, though they refused to relinquish the dead rat I felt crawling around in my belly. I could feel his dead flesh all over me, I scrubbed my hands, I washed my face, I even brushed my teeth. When I opened the bathroom door I was ready to make a bee-line for the nearest gin mill and forget this ever happened, but there she stood, my beautiful Hiu Kay, waiting for me with a full glass of hootch. The curve of her lips, the nape of her delicate neck, the way the light reflected in her eyes. She was soft, but brassy; silly, but smart; beautiful, but kind, and a score of other things that dead rats most definitely are not. This was the reason I’d wrapped my fingers around that stiff tail, braved the maggots, sniffed that rancid flesh. She had to be some tomato to get an egg like me to do a thing like that, and so while some people may think of love in terms of sparkling stars and budding roses, for me it will always be a dead rat with maggots.