Peep Show for the Monster - Written by Curtis M. Carlson

I decided to go to a Grateful Dead show. I was about to graduate college, finally after many years of sucking ass in classrooms and college ghettos. I thought since I was moving I should buy myself a van. No more Salem Oregon, off to see Jerry Garcia and then move to Portland, Oregon to work full time with my new computer.

I had saved a little money from my student loans, which is back when you could actually have some money left from your student loan. I bought a 1958 forestry van, laid some planks on top of the roof racks so that I could have extra storage, loaded my sculptures and paintings and paint and clothes and books into this old wreck and headed off to see the Dead.

It was 1991 and that old forestry van was a bucket of rust, but I liked it, it was manual transmission and made me feel like I was driving a tank.

I ended up in the parking lot of the Dead Show in Eugene Oregon. Me my van and a couple hundred dollars that I was going to use to get to Portland and get a place to stay. Parked the van, locked up and stood there looking at the empty lot. I had no intentions, not even to go into the show, except to get really really loaded on acid and see God.

The last year was grueling, worked 80 hour weeks, lived in a flooded laundry room with pallets laid on the floor so that I wouldn't get my feet wet, and taking a full load at school. I worked group homes overnight during the week, went to classes during the day and on the weekend I would drive to Portland and work from 4 pm on Friday straight through to 4 pm on Sunday, head back down to Monmouth where I lived in an indoor swap and get one nights sleep and have back at it at school and work.

I had abandoned my college career seeing that, for me group home work would not pay any more with or without a degree. The only reason why I gave up on my nice little life to go back to school was my father had made a deal with me. He promised that if I would finish my BA, he would purchase a Personal Computer for me.

I knew that I would be good on these machines, and had wanted one for myself for years and years. I never thought that I would get anything like this. As a youth my father was under the firm conviction that Personal computers in the home were a ridiculous idea and that nobody but the trendy assholes and morons would ever have computers in their home. Now he has several, I guess that makes him a trendy, asshole moron three times over.

With my hopes set on getting a computer and getting out of the group home business by being an innovator of the now baby internet, I set back to school.

I am almost convinced that this was the worst thing I could have done, I should have learned to cook methamphetamines, there was a better chance of me being successful in that than in computing.

My two little lesbian hippie friends had set me up with the place to stay. For years I had my own apartment in Salem, but to try to save money and be closer to the college campus I gave it up for this cheap little place three blocks from campus.

The lady I rented this laundry room from was a monster. She had given birth to five children, most of which were never home, hell half the time she had no idea where any of them were. You could tell that at one time she was hot hot hot. But five kids later, and a hundred pounds after and a car accident that had left her without one eye and an empty eye socket that sat halfway down on her face, she was hideous. Her nose was just two holes in a small pinch of a scar offset from center of her face. What a mess this lady was, but I needed this place, I needed to finish college I needed a permanent address and a phone and a place to shower and park my car.

So lived with this beast, like a troll living in the laundry room with a mattress on pallets and water beetles swimming underneath me. There was a small hole in the wall about 6 by 10 inches. It was the remnants of the vent to the dryer. I covered it with a small piece of cloth so that I would have some sort of sense of privacy.

During the day, between classes I would often come back to this little shit hole and my soggy mattress to get a hour sleep and to masturbate and do a little more speed so that I could make it through my grueling schedule. I noticed one day while I was masturbating that she had moved the cloth and was watching me beat off. Just standing there with that eye socket watching me. I was a little dark, so I don't know that she saw that I had noticed her. It was a bit disconcerting, but I finished off and acted like I never knew that she had watched.

I saw here watching me often, I jerked it often. I took to hanging a picture of a nude woman just above the hole I had also lined the shelves of my little room with roses. I would wander around during the day often and steal roses from the neighbor's bushes. I guess in such a filthy ugly life, I had to have some reminder of beauty. Work, go to school, do speed to stay awake and masturbate while the monster watched. A weird life for sure.

I noticed that she was starting to treat me much better since she had started watching me masturbate. She would allow me to come and go through the front door and would often share her food with me. This was a God send, the food that is, during the weekdays, I had mo way of cooking for myself, (it is never a good idea to plug in electrical appliances when you are living in 3 inches of water). I could eat at work, but not much, they would notice the food missing and I just couldn't loose that job.

I became more and more comfortable with her watching me, always watching me. I was on display, a live peep show for this grotesque creature. I became reliant on the food and I was certainly reliant on the place to live and store my belongings. She started realizing my reliance. She was nasty but she was not stupid. I started staring straight at her while I jerked off, and she started getting really turned on by this. Of course I was actually staring at the picture of this nude girl. She started inviting me in when the kids where in school and I had a break from my classes. She started giving me beers and speed. The beer I was not to thrilled about, but the speed. The speed was like gasoline for an engine. I really needed this. The pace I was going was impossible without chemical help. I went to classes most of the day and worked all night. I would study for my classes at night, and then on the weekends I would try to get a couple hours here and there at night on the job.

She was from hippie stock, so her speed was good and clean and of high quality. Twice a week the Amway guy would show up with laundry detergent, shampoo and speed. Beside, the nature of the habit was such that I was having to do more and more just to stay awake for my jobs and school, and this is not a cheap habit. Being supplemented by the ogre really helped. Beside, all this was so that I could get that computer and start a new life.

She would give me speed in the afternoons when I had a break from classes then she would offer me a beer, and talk nasty to me. Talking about how she loved her old man and how it was just so easy to keep having sex with him to the point that she ended up with so many kids. She would talk about her accident, she had crossed a railroad crossing and gotten hit in her car by a train. She would talk about how immediately after her accident, after she was released from the hospital she would drive that same road and sit at the railroad crossing unable to cross. Sometimes for hours she would sit there trying to get the nerve to cross. She talked about how one time she was sitting there. Just sitting there way out in the country at the railroad crossing afraid to cross and a man got in her car and raped her. She told me that often she would go and sit at this railroad crossing and the same man would come out of the bushes and rape her, she said this went on for a long long time. Then as quickly as this guy showed up he was gone, she would sit and sit, day and night at this crossing waiting for him to come rape her and he never showed back up. She said, it made her feel dirty, but she was ever so sad when he was gone from her life.

Her old man was in Eugene going to college. He was one of those fortunate bastards whose dad died and left a trust fund for him. He would get all tuition paid, and his housing and living expenses paid for as long as he stayed in college and when he turned 40 he would get the remainder of the trust fund in cash. I guess his father knew he was a hopeless drug fiend and that if he got the cash, he would never do anything except sit around and smoke pot and trip on LSD.

I ran into that lucky bastard years later, I was working security at a bar and he showed up on his 40th birthday. He told me to keep getting the money he had stayed in school and had two Masters and two PhDs. He was really high that night, tripping on Acid, smelling like pot and buying everyone in the bar drinks, with a young stripper hanging on his arm. Good for him, he was the best educated junkie I knew. He kept walking up and looking at me strangely and laughing uncontrollably. His ex-old lady must have told him what I had done to get through college.

Back to the mutant lady, and my efforts to finish college. She was a mess, I guess I was too, but I was on a mission, to get that computer and do whatever it took to get it. I would come home in the afternoons and she would give me a line of speed and a beer and we would roll a joint and she would talk about how she missed fucking her husband and how she missed seeing her husband naked and all this nonsense. I knew what she wanted I was holding out for her to offer me some of that left over pizza in the fridge, cause I was hungry, and so was she.

One day she took my clothes when I was in the shower. She told me It was an accident, that she was just cleaning up the kid's laundry while I was bathing and that she didn't realized that those were my clothes. She knew. So there I was, naked and her at the kitchen table, with a beer and a joint and a line of speed and my clothes, and cold pizza. I knew what I had to do, I knew there was no getting out of this situation. I came out and causally started a conversation, eating pizza and drinking my one beer. She reached over with her terribly scarred hands and started fondling my penis. I felt odd to say the least. I did a particularly large line of speed and lit the joint. I stood up pizza on my breathe, smoking a joint and a cold can of beer in one hand and my head spinning with the effects of the amphetamines. She ever so gently put her lipless mouth on my penis and started sucking.

I got hard and looked out at the spring cherry blossoms and thought how odd it was that snow was falling. Her one good eye looking up at me with longing and the neighbor sitting at her coffee table watching and that cold pizza sitting just out of reach. I thought long and hard about that Pizza, I thought about my hunger, the huger in my belly the hunger in her vagina and how her breasts after 5 children were shaped a lot like a slice of pizza. I thought about the picture of that naked woman, and I thought about computer. I noticed that she had a huge scar about 8 inches long and a half an inch wide that went right down the middle of her head, right down her head like someone had parted her hair with a meat cleaver.

It was over soon enough and we went right back to talking about mundane things and eating cold pizza and smoking cigarettes.

I had an afternoon class and the kid's bus would be pulling up soon, so I washed myself off in the kitchen sink and got dressed and went off to school.

This episode happened at least twice a week for several weeks. School was coming to an end and I was looking forward to graduation and that computer. The week of graduation, my parents were coming up for the ceremony and to bring me that computer. I was exhausted and excited.

My monster lover was getting a little weird. She could not handle the speed as well as I could. She would just sit around the house tweaking and thinking and letting her mind run away with her. I was sure that I made it clear that no matter what happened I was leaving the week after graduation and that was the end of all of it. The end to her peep shows, the end to her blow jobs, and the end to the one can of beer and cold pizza.

I came home and the door was locked. I knew she was inside, because she never left the house. I knew that something terrible was going through her head and that I was in a real pickle. I had all my belongings in that hole I lived in and that my car keys and final papers and everything was in there. I was going to have to do something drastic.

I could hear her in there crying. A faint whimper. I knew that she knew that our afternoon rendezvous' were soon coming to an end. I talked and pleaded and finally convinced her to let me in. She did. It was sad. It was sick. Her massive body and hideous face and scars, sitting in the living room in the dark quivering with sorrow.

I consoled her I held her and rocked her in my arms, I tried to reassure her that it was for the best. We both knew it was true, because I was graduating and moving to Portland and was going to start working on my new computer and would not be able to make a living in that small college town, besides, she had never gotten a divorce from her husband. I thought of every excuse, every reason I could. A calm came over her and I knew what I had to do. I went to my afternoon class, called work and told them I was ill and was not going to make it in that night. I drove to the neighboring town (the town we were in was a dry town and did not sell alcohol) and bought a fifth of whiskey and started drinking. About a inch from the bottom of the bottle I came in from my hole and poured her a couple of shots, walked into the other room and masturbated until my penis was erect. She sat on the couch until I felt I was ready to go. She got up, took off her clothes, exposing those two pink-white slices of Pizza and sad gently down on my erect tool. It felt like someone had put an overturned bowl of warm oatmeal on me. Not pleasant but not particularly unpleasant. She had five children and her vagina had not kept it's youthful tightness, though she was still quite well lubricated.

I laid there on my back, finishing the last of the fifth while she made slow and passionate love. I stared up at her and her odd shape and her empty eye socket and her slices of Pizza and thought about graduation and my computer and my new life in Portland and the cherry blossoms and dead roses.

The whiskey made it terribly difficult to ejaculate, therefore drawing the ordeal out for what seemed like and eternity.

We both knew that it was over with. She got up and left the room, I went in and washed myself off in the kitchen sink and started loading my belongings, what few I had into boxes.

Graduation came, my parents came, and my dad told me that my Personal Computer was waiting for me. After the ceremony, I met them out in front of the auditorium and my father told me that he was very proud of my achievement and that I deserved my computer. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a small box about 2 inches by three inches by 1/2 inch. I opened it wondering what it was. It was a small $20 spell checking computer. He said "It is yours, personally, and it is a computer, I never said what kind of computer I would get you." and laughed. At first I thought it was just a joke and that we were going to go get my computer later. Turns out that it was a joke but no other computer was coming. I had been duped by a cruel father. A father who's reasoning was that It was so important for me to graduate that he would lie to me even if it meant crushing my dreams. Fucking Bastard!

I don't know why I didn't kill him on the spot. I don't know why he would treat me like that. I don't know why I believed him in the first place. He had always been a son of a bitch.

I guess the trauma I had put myself through the last nine months, had me in a state of shock. I purchased that old van, loaded up my belonging, leaving the dried roses, and headed to the Dead Show.

So there I was, at this yearly festival, feeling raped and used and like a fool. I was a the graduate. Computer-less and with nothing but group homes and bad memories to look forward to.