THE WOMAN OPENED the door to Room 6 of the Lonely Motel with its brand-new key fob on an incredibly warm day in December of 1980. Cautiously, she stepped over the threshold, holding her pregnant belly as she breathed in the smell of cigarettes and stale perfume.
Ray and Lola Baumgarten had bought this plot of land along Genesee Street in the hope of attracting flight attendants and businessmen on layovers after the 1977 expansion of Buffalo Niagara International’s East Terminal, but business had never picked up the way they’d hoped. Eventually what was known then as The Paradise Motel came to be synonymous with drug deals and cheap trysts with prostitutes.
In March of 1979, under the weight of massive debt, Ray Baumgarten passed away from a coronary. His wife, who fell into a deep depression, changed it’s name to the Lonely Motel before hanging herself in Room 6 in the fall of 1980. Under new management, The Lonely Motel welcomed prostitutes and drug dealers with open arms by renting out rooms by the hour.
Mary Booker had rented Room 6 for two hours, but she didn’t expect to be there much longer than one. Her husband, Clevon, had left her shortly after she’d decided to keep the baby despite his objections. See, Mary had been raped on her way home from work—
‘WAIT WAIT WAIT,’ Shyla said, holding up her hands. ‘You didn’t say this was going be a rape story.’
‘It’s not a rape story,’ Angel said. ‘Mary was raped, but that’s just the, uh, what do you call it? The backstory. There’s no rape in this.’
Shyla narrowed her eyes. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Is that a trigger for you, Shyla?’
‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t, what?’
‘Don’t get all smug about trigger warnings. I know they’re bullshit, but can’t a woman just not want to hear about rape without it being a goddamn thing? Every time you turn on the TV there’s another woman getting raped and murdered. Every time you flick past the news it’s ‘rape culture on campus’ and celebrity sex assaults and some new moral fucking panic. Enough already.’
Angel hadn’t expected such a tirade, but he supposed just because he was paying her to listen he shouldn’t force that part of the story on her. She had a right to say ‘no,’ for now. ‘I was just setting the scene,’ he explained. ‘We can avoid it, if that’s what you want.’
Shyla nodded. ‘Please. Just… just fast-forward a bit, I guess.’
FAST-FORWARD, THEN. Clevon didn’t want her to keep the baby, but Mary was a good Christian girl who believed in the ‘sanctity of life.’ When Clevon left her, she still thought she could do it on her own. Mary was a big fan of What’s Happening!!, and though it didn’t look easy, she thought if Mabel could handle two kids on her own, she could handle one kid and part-time evenings at the Land’s End Diner.
As time went by, her resolve weakened. She started to worry more. Violent crime rates kept escalating, and Mary began to wonder what sort of world she’d be bringing her child into; she only had to think about how it had been conceived to be reminded of it. By the thirtieth week of her pregnancy, her worry had grown into an obsession. She went to the hospital.
In 1970, New York State was the first to legalize abortions up to the twenty-fourth week. Despite the circumstances of her conception, Mary was too far along to legally have an abortion performed. They suggested she carry the fetus to term, and put him or her up for adoption.
Mary agreed that was what she would do, but she had no intention of carrying her child another day let alone twelve to fifteen more weeks. As she drove back to her flat from the hospital, she passed the blinking neon sign of the Lonely Motel. If ever there was a place she belonged right then, she thought, it was there.
The words HOURLY RATES caught her eye. She was naïve, despite her encounter, so she had no idea why a motel would have an hourly rate, nor why the man behind the desk, who wore a paisley shirt with a wide collar, and too much strong-smelling tonic in his hair and on his mustache, gave her and her swollen belly a lascivious look.
‘Do the closets have clothes hangers?’ she asked him.
He replied that customers expected hangers whether they spent the night or not, so they were provided free of charge.
‘Yes, but are they wire hangers?’
He said he thought they were, and when the police asked him later why he didn’t think to wonder why a woman in her condition might be inquiring about coat hangers, he reminded them that he was a desk clerk and not the Amazing Kreskin. He took her ten bucks and gave her the key, as he was paid to do by The Management. ‘Black, white, Chinese—all I care about is the green, you know what I mean?’ he told them.
So, Mary entered Room 6 with a key whose fob brandished the motel’s brand new name, and the man behind the desk thought about all the money he would make that evening from women turning tricks for businessmen on layovers who stopped by for a quick hump on their way to the Hyatt.
She sat down on the bed to remove her shoes. The mattress had a good bounce to it, she thought, not like the small, hard double she’d shared with Clevon, and had spent the last few months curled up on all alone, just trying to keep warm. She thought the room felt welcoming, as if it were whispering to her, lulling her into a false sense of peacefulness. Mary wrote all this and more down on the motel stationary, a letter she’d addressed To my Unborn Child.
It was the motel’s idea for her to write the letter, according to her scrawled words—an indication of how deteriorated her mental state had become by then. She wrote about the assault, how she had tried to love and care for the child inside her despite how it had come to be, how she and her husband had argued day after day until he’d left her, how she’d tried to carry on with just the two of them when she couldn’t be bothered to feed herself and get out of bed some days, and how she’d come to realize that her child was never meant to live. She feared for the future of the world, and ‘our children’s children.’
She wrote all this down, and signed it Love, Mom.
Then she rolled down her pantyhose.
She removed her pleated green wool skirt, and her slip. She slid down her nylon briefs. She unbuttoned her blouse, scowling at the vertical dark brown line that had appeared recently on her round belly, like a scar from her solar plexus through her navel to her pelvis. She folded the blouse and placed it on the bed alongside her stockings, slip and underwear.
Mary removed her Cross Your Heart bra (which the police bagged, only to file away among shelves of dust-covered evidence boxes, and later discard, the only indication it ever having been there an entry in an old ledger—one Cross Your Heart bra, one pair women’s nylon underwear, one pair tan hosiery), and placed it with the rest of her clothing. She stood in front of the full length mirror, studying her newly curvy body, wondering how long it would take to get her figure back, wondering when the linea nigra—as the hospital OB/GYN had called it earlier in the day—would fade, if and when her breasts would return to their normal size.
She crossed to the bathroom and flicked on the light. Under the harsh bulb her eyes looked tired, her skin sallow, her hair coming loose from its tight bun. She turned on the water in the tub, and returned to the room.
On the bedside table she flicked on the clock radio, tuned to a modern rock station. When she did listen to music it was the oldies and classical, but she thought the rock music, if loud enough, would drown out any cries of pain she might make. The clock’s red digital numbers told her she’d been in the room already for just over an hour.
The closet door opened silently on new hinges. The rack contained three hangers, two wire, and one wood with the paper dry cleaners’ cover still on it. She grabbed one of the wire hangers, bending it as she returned to the bathroom. The sound of water splashing in the tub drowned out the radio, playing some song with a hillbilly twang about a girl named Bobby Sue and a boy named Billy Joe.
She stepped into the bath, careful not to slip. The water warmed her toes. The rest of her felt frozen, as if in response to the horror of what she was about to do.
Sitting down in the running water, she opened her legs with her knees raised. She’d managed to separate the two ends of the wire, where it coiled around the hook, and attempted to straighten out the bends.
She bent the hook into a sharper curve, her fingers turning pale from the pressure against the metal. As she brought the hooked end to her vagina, she felt the baby kick. Mary hadn’t felt him kick since that morning, before her visit to the hospital, where usually he’d been quite energetic, and it made her wonder if he somehow sensed what was coming for him, the way Room 6 had sensed her presence, and welcomed her inside. It made her wonder if she was doing the right thing, or if she should get up right now, get dressed, and leave.
With the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, she parted her labia.
Her right hand began to shake at the thought of inserting the hanger. She’d bent the wire so the sharp end would snag the fetus or at least the umbilical cord for her to yank it out. It looked vicious, like the knife the man had used when he’d done those horrible things to her.
The metal parted her pink flesh, cold inside of her. She felt it pushing against her vaginal walls as she inserted it as far as her thumb, then fed in another inch, two, three, making her think of lowering a rope for a child stuck in a well, like that episode of Emergency! Mary had seen when she was still a girl.
I’m not hurting him, I’ll be saving him, she thought, echoing the words she’d written in her letter. Sparing him from a life of pain.
The coiled end of the wire kept hitting the floor of the tub, her wrist sore from bending too far back. The angle was bad. She pushed herself to her feet, holding the wire carefully so as not to drastically change its angle, and prevent it from coming out.
The baby kicked her several times in a row as she stood, as if fending off an attack with karate. Grinding her teeth against the pain, she pressed her free hand flat against the wall tile and raised her left leg onto the rim, still holding the wire with her right hand.
Vaguely, above the splashing water, she heard John Lennon moaning for two or more of his fans to come together over him, and assumed it was a sex reference. Everything was about sex these days. Mary thought it was no wonder the psychopath had felt compelled to do what he had to her.
She fed in the wire. In a moment, it struck something firm and spongy. With no concept of her inner workings, she supposed she must have pushed it in too far. The baby must have been close. Mary gave it one last hard push, felt the flesh inside her part and the wire move freely before stopping again.
The baby kicked wildly, shifting around much more than he ever had before.
Relieved, Mary twisted the wire, moving it back and forth, hoping to snag him and drag him out of her. Pain erupted in her abdomen, and Mary lost hold of the wire. It remained hanging out of her, wobbling like a doorstop as she tried to steady her breathing.
The first drops of blood dripped from the end of the wire and splashed pink into the water below. Overcome by a sudden grand terror, Mary slowly lowered her quivering leg as more blood began to pour out of her, thin and running down her inner thighs, mixing with the water at her feet. Using both hands to grasp the wire, she tried to pull it out as gingerly as possible despite the violent tremors in her fingers.
It wouldn’t budge.
She tugged, and another sharp pain flared, far worse than the first. The bottom of the tub looked like feeding time at the shark tank. Mary felt woozy, like she might pass out at any moment. The way she saw it, she had two choices: pull the wire out and potentially bleed to death in this tub, or leave the wire inside her, dress around it (she felt certain it would end up poking out of the bottom of her skirt, like a thin metal tail), and somehow get herself to the hospital.
She imagined the doctor’s impatient glare. She thought about what his older white nurse would think of her, a black woman with a coat hook in her vagina, giving herself a back-alley abortion like some common street trash. Who knows? They might even assume it was a sex thing. Everything was about sex these days. No one knew it more acutely than Mary.
No—she would have to get the wire out herself.
The baby struggled as she pushed the wire deeper inside of herself, as delicately as she could muster with her fingers shaking so badly. She couldn’t tell which side of the wire was barbed. She hoped, as she pressed the metal against what she assumed was her cervix, that she’d done so with the smooth side.
And she pulled…
The wire came out of her with a springy twang, bringing more blood with it. But it was out. She was free.
Breathing a prayer to Jesus, she bent to put the warped hanger on the toilet seat.
As she bent she slipped on the slick ceramic floor and fell forward. Her head struck the tile and she slid down the wall, her forehead striking the hot water knob, splitting open, her front teeth smashing against the faucet. She fell into the tub, but even though the water was shallow, there was no saving Mary. She was already unconscious by the time she landed face-first in the running water.
ANGEL FELT SHYLA’S body shudder through the hand he used to work the dildo. ‘That story made my pussy want to shrivel up like a salted snail,’ she said.
‘Do you want to take a bweak for a while?’ Angel asked, and bit his lip, hoping she hadn’t caught his unintended lapse.
‘How about forever?’
‘Hmm. How about a ciga— a cigarette?’ he said, deliberately forming the word to preserve the R.
‘That might help. Grab my purse?’
Angel got up and handed her the purse from the bedside table. As she reached into it, the dildo slipped out of her a notch, still inside her up to the top of the eleventh ring: ten inches deep, five inches wide. He’d lucked out when the agency sent Shyla. Her cunt was an absolute marvel.
The other women, even those who’d had several children through natural birth, had only been able to stretch the girth of a baseball bat or a liquor bottle. Shyla, by some miracle, could stretch so wide he thought she might be able to accept what he had to give her.
Her gifted pussy would allow her to receive his gift to her.
She lit two cigarettes, handing one to Angel, dragging on the other. He thanked her, still staring at her beautiful vagina. She exhaled a wispy gray cloud. As her belly shifted, the dildo stayed put.
‘Was the baby okay?’
‘He survived. Once her two hours were up, the desk clerk came into the woom—room,’ Angel corrected himself, ‘and found her in the tub. She was braindead by the time the paramedics arrived. She died in the hospital a few days later.”
With a scowl, Shyla said, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but… did I just hear a lisp?’
‘It’s not—’ Angel shook his head. ‘—it’s not a lisp. A lisp is when you pronounce S like T-H.’
‘Right, sorry. What is it called then?’
‘Speech therapists call it rhoticism,’ he told her, ‘or derhotacization. It took me a long time to master saying my Rs for some reason when I was a kid. But it’s not a lisp.’
‘Okay. I mean, you seem fine with it now.’
‘It’s usually fine, just… sometimes it comes out when I’m stressed.’
‘Well, it could be worse.’
‘Could it?’
Shyla shrugged. ‘It’s just something you say. Could be worse. I mean, it could always be worse, right? You could have been born brain damaged. You could have… I don’t know, been born with two heads, or a little arm.’
‘Phocomelia,’ Angel said. ‘I don’t think it would be that bad. Aside from only being able to jerk off with one hand.’
Shyla snickered. The room sat silent until she noticed the traffic out in the street, and turned toward the blinds. ‘You know, I always wanted to be a mother,’ she said.
‘Oh?’
‘Mm-hmm. Never happen though.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m kind of okay with that.’
‘Why not?’
‘When I was younger, I… well, a lot of damage was done to my lady parts, and I had to have an emergency trachelectomy.’
‘Trachel—?’
‘—ectomy. Removal of the cervix.’
‘Ouch,’ Angel said.
‘It wasn’t that bad. Expensive, though. My dad went into debt to pay for it, that’s how come I started doing this. I was bleeding internally. We had to get it done. Only problem is, it didn’t heal right. So now I’ve got an extra deep vagina.’
‘That doesn’t seem like much of a problem to me.’
Shyla shrugged. ‘Well, it’s hard to feel satisfied by an average-length penis when your pussy just goes on forever.’
‘Like the Delaware Aqueduct,’ Angel remarked. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Shyla. Maybe we can rectify that today. Tit for tat.’
‘And tat for tits.’ Shyla grinned, cupping her heavy breasts and squeezing them. Her cherry red lips formed an O as Angel pushed the dildo deeper. ‘Bad angle,’ she grunted, and Angel pulled it out a notch.
‘Sorry,’ Angel said, getting up from the bed to sit in the chair opposite. ‘What’s the weirdest thing a client has ever asked you to do?’
‘I mean, this is up there, don’t get me wrong.’ Shyla winked. ‘Kidding. Let’s see, there was the diaper guy, and the pee drinker…’ Her eyes alighted. ‘Oh! There was that guy who was into queening.’
‘Queening?’
‘Facesitting,’ she explained.
‘Oh,’ Angel said, and fell silent.
‘I can’t believe I forgot,’ Shyla said. ‘The sub lies on his back, and the dom sits on his face, covering his nose and mouth with her pussy and butthole so he can’t breathe. The woman is in complete control, except like most BDSM stuff there’s an out, a safe word, but with facesitting it’s a little different. The guy can’t actually talk because he’s being smothered, unless he’s a pussy whisperer or something. So he’s got to tap out—you know, like in a wrestling match?’
Angel nodded, listening intently, smoking faster so the minty tobacco would smother the strong chemical smell that arose from his memories.
‘So this guy, he was really into facesitting, so much that he had this thing he called a ‘smother box’—’ Off Angel’s quizzical look she explained, ‘Basically it’s this nice wooden box with a pillow on the inside, and a hole on the top like the ones on a massage table. This thing was really elaborate. I’m pretty sure he made it himself. It had all kinds of engravings on it, too. Like ancient Chinese and Indian pornographic etchings. I don’t know if they were replicas or just something he had someone do for the box. Maybe he did them himself, I don’t know.’
‘That’s dedication.’
‘That’s what I said. Anyway, aside from the smother box, he wasn’t all that out of the ordinary. You know, no obvious red flags.’
‘Red flags?’
‘Danger signs. ‘Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.’ Although I charge two-hundred and sixty, and I usually expect a tip,’ she added with another wink.
‘Danger signs—like what?’
‘Well like, do they exhibit odd behavior. I mean, a lot of clients—we never call them johns, that’s what cops call them—a lot of them are weird, or socially awkward, but I mean things like, do they try to coerce you into doing things you’ve explicitly said you won’t do. Do they look like a cop, because cops still harass us even when we’re not getting our business on the street. Do they,’ she thought a moment, ‘do they try to get you to secluded areas instead of their apartment or a hotel. Do they act drunk or high, or do they behave erratically—as opposed to erotically,’ she added, grinning slightly at her silly little joke. ‘The guys with the fetish gear and whatnot, we don’t usually have to worry about. They’re there for the act. Most guys are there for the woman, but the fetish guys… they know what they want and the woman is just an accessory.’
Angel nodded thoughtfully. ‘You seem to know a lot about people. Are you in school?’
Shyla grinned. ‘Paying my way through college, right? Not this girl. You’d be surprised how much you can learn about people if you’re paying attention.’
‘I don’t doubt it. So how could you tell I wasn’t a danger?’
‘Well, first off, you called me to a motel, and even though the Lonely has a bit of a reputation, it’s a known place. Dispatch probably already checked you off for red flags when she heard where you were staying. Plus, you were specific about what kind of woman you wanted.’
‘So are serial killers,’ Angel remarked.
‘True, but you also said you’d hired from the agency before and didn’t get what you wanted.’
‘The dispatcher told you that.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I could have been lying.’
‘There’s that chance, sure. But why lie about that?’
‘I suppose.’
‘When I got here, there was a big red flag. For me, anyway.’
‘Oh?’
‘You shook my hand. Some guys kiss it, the way men used to, but the first and pretty much only time I’ve ever had my hand shook by a client he ended up trying to beat the shit out of me while we were fucking, so I’ve been wary of hand-shakers ever since.’
‘Interesting.’
‘Also, you’re African-American. Light skinned, but it’s pretty obvious you’re not Latino or Tonawanda Indian, or anything like that.’
‘Okay,’ Angel said with a smirk. ‘So why was that a good thing?’
‘Well, everybody knows serial killers are mostly white. You’re also well-dressed, which isn’t necessarily good or bad, but in your case I saw it as a good sign.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of the scar.’
Curious, Angel asked, ‘What about my scar made you trust me?’
‘With the clothes, it gave you a look of vulnerability. I thought a psychopath would be too vain not to cover it up with manscara, especially someone as well-groomed as you are.’
‘That’s an interesting evaluation. Anything else?’
‘Well, your bag of tricks,’ Shyla said, nodding toward it, ‘it was a little off-putting at first. I mean, for all I knew, you had a dead body cut up in pieces inside there. Especially with that smell, when I first stepped in? Woof. But then you took out the lube, and the toys, and I knew you were safe.’
‘How so?’
‘Aside from the size of this one, there was nothing out of the ordinary.’
‘No smother boxes, as far as you could see,’ Angel said with a toothy grin.
‘And no diapers, which is a definite plus.’
Smiling, Angel said, ‘So why don’t you tell me about the Smother Man?’
‘Okay,’ Shyla said, seemingly pleased to get to tell a story of her own. She stubbed out her cigarette, and began.
