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Dillon stood up, wobbly, weak, and deeply unhappy.
“Nasty little punk, stinking up the place!” Tattoo said.
This, Dillon thought, was really not fair: the place already reeked of puke and piss and worse. There was a man passed out facedown on the bench, a brown stain in his trousers.
Tattoo swaggered over, grabbed Dillon’s T-shirt, and kicked him in the knee. Dillon dropped to the floor, landing painfully on the concrete. “Clean that up, boy!”
What? What? How had this happened? How was he here, on his knees? Part of him counseled quiet submission: the man was bigger and had friends. But part of him, despite the alcohol-fueled misery in his brain, simply could not shut up.
“Can I use that mop on your head?”
First rule of stand-up comedy: never let a heckler get the upper hand.
Tattoo, whose limp salt-and-pepper hair did, arguably, re
semble a mop, gaped in astonishment. Then he grinned, showing a row of overly bright, cheap false teeth. “Well, I guess I get to hand out my first ass-kicking of the day!”
Dillon closed his eyes and focused and almost immediately the brutal hangover faded, and subtle but utterly impossible changes began to transform Dillon’s body and face. He said, “Ass-kicking, or ass-kissing?”
This earned him a hard kick meant for his stomach, but which deflected off his arm, knocking his hand into his own puddle of puke. Bad. But on the other hand, his hangover pain was fast receding.
A relief, but not the point, really. The point was that Dillon Poe was changing. Physically. The change was subtle at first and mostly visible in his eyes, which had shifted from brown to a sort of tarnished gold color. His pupils narrowed and formed vertical, thin, elongated diamond-shaped slits. His hair seemed to suck into his head, which now bulged at the back and tapered to a version of his own face rendered in the green of a new spring leaf.
Dillon knew about the physical change, or at least thought he did. He’d caught a terrifying glimpse of himself in a barroom mirror, seeing a reptilian version of his face visible past the bottles of booze.
But he had also begun to guess that there was something about this snakelike version of himself that caused more fascination than revulsion. If anything, the few people whose reactions he’d been able to gauge seemed to find him attractive, even mesmerizing. They stared, but not in horror. Even his fellow denizens of the drunk tank did not recoil in fear or disgust, but turned fascinated, enthralled faces to him.
Dillon was not in a happy or generous frame of mind. He had clearly screwed up the night before, outing himself as a mutant. And now he was in a cage with men, every single one of whom looked meaner and bigger and tougher than he—well, aside from the weeping tourist in the chinos and canary-yellow polo shirt. But it didn’t matter, because Dillon Poe—this hypnotic, serpentine version of Dillon Poe—was more than capable of dealing with Tattoo.
Dillon looked up from the floor at the man and said, “You clean it up, tough guy. In fact, lick it up. Start with my hand.”
Without hesitation Tattoo stuck out his tongue and began licking Dillon’s scaly green hand, as avidly as a dog welcoming his master. It was fascinating watching Tattoo’s rheumy eyes, the expression of brute incomprehension, the alarm, the anger, the . . . impotence. The panic he was helpless to express.
“Now lick up that mess on the floor,” Dillon said. Instantly Tattoo dropped to his hands and knees. He said, “I don’t want to do this!” but without hesitation lowered his head, his long, grizzled hair trailing in the mess, and began lapping it up like a dog going after a dropped table scrap.
The entire room stood or sat frozen in stark disbelief. It was like they were an oil painting, all open mouths and wide eyes and expressions of disbelief. One man moaned, “Is this a hallucination? Is this real? Am I really seeing this?”
Dillon stood—his morph came with a lithely muscular body several inches taller than his own, an athlete’s body—facing Tattoo’s two buddies, who advanced, belligerent but nervous.
One said, “Hey, Spence, come on, man, stop that! Get up off your knees! Get away from that thing!” He tugged at his partner’s shirt, but Tattoo—aka Spence, apparently—would not stop licking the puke. In fact, could not stop. He tried to speak but only incomprehensible grunts emerged—it’s hard to talk with a mouth full of another person’s vomit.
The other thug snarled at Dillon. “What did you do to him, freak?”
“I am really not in the mood to be picked on,” Dillon said. His voice, too, was subtly different now. His normal voice was a bit too high-pitched to ever be authoritative, and he had a slight lisp on “s” sounds. But this voice? This voice was like a musical instrument in the hands of a master. This voice persuaded, cajoled, and seduced.
The man frowned and stopped, then shook his head in confusion before finding his anger again. “I don’t give a damn what you’re up for, freak!”
Dillon turned to this fellow, younger than Spence, with a tweaker’s emaciated body and rotting teeth. He would have tolerated any number of insults, but that particular one, “freak,” was something he’d heard too many times in his young life, both at school and at home.
Freak for having no friends.
Freak for his physical awkwardness.
Freak for the way he looked at girls who would have nothing to do with him.
Freak for being the only one of five siblings who rejected walks and hikes and camping and biking and all the other physically tiring wastes of time his family loved.
Freak for sitting in his room for days on end watching stand-up comics like Louis, Maron, Frankie Boyle, Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Jeselnik, Jimmy Carr, and the few surviving videos of the godfather of stand-up, Richard Pryor.
