“Cool,” I stroked. “You must have ... great self-control.”
   “Yes,” she affirmed, showing NOTHING in her eyes. The roach went back and forth a couple of times, then she spoke again. “You know, I’ve always wanted to kill a man.”
   After a brief consideration, I queried, “How would you do it?”
   Without thinking, she answered. “With a gun ... a .38 pistol ... right between the eyes.” Her eyes illustrated as they aimed and pulled the trigger.
I was determined not to let her shock or impress me; hell, they were all probably just putting me on. “No, no,” I disagreed, “strangling is the purest way. You feel their life force soaking up into your fingertips.” Hey, I wrote horror stories, I could get creepier than her.
But she wasn’t swayed. “It has to be a gun. It will be a gun.” I want to see their brains splatter on the wall.”
   “Uh ... okay, as long as you’re sure what you want.” Mmm, great looks and blood lust, definitely a girl to get the adrenaline coursing. I was glad to see Mona return to the living room. She told me she needed to go home to sleep, then her eyes widened to tell me she was freaked by the situation. I asked her if she was sure, really sure. She was. My mind was switching channels from ORGY to EVIL to SEX to DEATH, so I let Mona lead with her certainty. Out in the car I asked her what she had against an orgy with them.
   “I was all for it at first,” she said. “Then I thought, ‘This is never going to happen – Dee is way too jealous of Sickboy.’ Besides, there’s no telling who or what all those three have slept with. Not a good health risk.”
   Good old practical Mona. “It’s just as well,” I confessed. “Those girls scared the hell out of me.”
   A week later we heard news of them again. It seems Angela had woken Sickboy from a deep sleep in the morning, despite his warnings NEVER to commit such an atrocity. A grumpy riser, Sickboy reacted to her bitching about the lack of groceries in the house by picking up his bed frame and bashing her about the head with it. He was trying to shove it through her rib cage when Dee arrived and stopped him.    Mona and I had the same initial reaction to this news, that we probably couldn’t use Angela in a video with Sickboy we were planning; professional considerations had to come first, right? It didn’t end up too bad. Sickboy suffered only a misdemeanor slap on the wrist from the courts and just a few threats from some skinhead friends of Angela. He did have to find a new roommate, though.
   The last time I saw Sickboy was just before I moved away from Austin. I had been sitting on a curb off of Sixth Street, sharing my cheap beer with Old Bob, an aluminum can prospector. A fight between some blacks and wetbacks across the street at the homeless shelter was working up into a small war, and it was closing time all around anyhow, so I dusted off and headed back towards my car. On the way I passed Bondage-A-Go-Go, a fashion club I quit going to because the films they showed on the walls of castrations and pincers ripping off nipples always left me moody. Sickboy was standing outside dressed in black leather bikini pants and harness, dripping sweat and covered with welts. He had been performing inside. A fat girl holding his chain leash forced him down into a dog position so a photographer in spike heels could sit on his back and write out directions to her studio. I think he was getting his big break.
  Mona and I met Sickboy at a performance art show in the Austin of 1990. He and a few of the other performers there were destined to appear in some of our video projects throughout that year, all of them intense, first-take kind of actors, each one deliciously warped. Sickboy’s thing on stage that night was simply to strip to his underwear, sit on a folding chair and put his feet behind his head, a stunt I was to see oft-repeated at later parties. The audience loved him, especially the young girls. Although I personally couldn’t understand it, Sickboy was a sex symbol of the place and time, tall and emaciated, long stringy black hair and deeply pallid skin decorated with self-inflicted scars to the chest and arms (he practiced bloodletting to exorcise his 
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Stars & Scars
demons). Yes, he was the paragon of party ghouls, a Renaissance man, actually – poet, musician, artist and survivalist drinker. He could always find parties to crash and feared not to imbibe the residue suds from the bottoms of discarded cans and cups in those early morning hours. To me he was very real, earthy in a post-apocalyptic sense of the world.
One early a.m. after inviting ourselves to an R.O.T.C. party (if there was beer, we didn’t care who the hosts were), Mona and I went with Sickboy and his girlfriend, Dee, over to his apartment to smoke some reefer. Angela, his roommate, was sleeping when we got there, but she bolted to life once she heard the rustling of rolling papers. The weed and the scene were both potent. Dee was a strikingly sexy teenage version of Carolyn Jones as Morticia Addams (black hair, pale skin), while Angela was a busty Transylvanian wrestling dairy maid type (black hair, pale skin). Sickboy’s paintings of twisted erotica adorned the walls and doors, Mona and the vampire girls were on the couch, I was on the floor, and Sickboy suggested from his chair in the corner that we all get naked and have sex. Mona made the first move with her hand poised at the zipper of her blouse for an instant, ready to pull it down, but her hesitation led to her dismissal of the notion. I was stunned by the smoke to begin with, so the best response I could muster was “All right.”
Dee was more articulate. “I love sex.”
Angela, too. “I adore sex.”
A brief silence, then Mona offered, “Danny and I hate sex.”
My stoned-stupid ears heard that this fantasy vampire orgy was just quashed by Mona’s negative remark, and being unable to offer any verbal ejaculations of support for the idea. I just sat and tingled in the hush of the moment passing. But while I was extremely excited by the gothic group grope scenario, at the same time my instincts splashed some fear on me. Then Angela made those gut feelings of mine go queasy. “Yeah, sex is the best,” she began. “Hey, me and a friend know this goody Christian boy ... me and her are gonna dress up like Jesus Christ with strap-on dildos and rape him.” She punctuated this with a short laugh to herself.
Good Lord, I thought. somebody get a wooden stake and mallet. I wondered where the perversion ended and the insanity began, or if it all was just runaway fashion. Sickboy suddenly became hungry and darted into the kitchen to burn some weenies on the stove, and Mona jumped in quick attendance. Angela wandered off into some other room, and I found myself alone with the alluring Dee and half of the second joint to pass. I tried to make conversation with her, asking about an odd curved scratch I noticed near the inside of her wrist. She rolled up her sleeve to reveal “NOTHING” cut into the flesh, the reddened scab lines as ostentatious as neon. “I did it with an Exacto knife,” she explained, as if discussing needlepoint.
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