Let The Chips Fall: The Michael Biancho Series, #2

Susan

Susan was definitely a handful. I don’t know if I can say she was born that way or she

Just developed into that kind of person. It’s not so much that she intentionally tried to fuck up everything she touched it just came out that way. When she was a young girl she realized that being the only female in a family dominated by males gave her a crutch to lean on when there was a situation that called for it. She would constantly cry to her mother that it wasn’t her fault, that she couldn’t understand why no one believed her. If she had the wisdom to look in the mirror than maybe she would have seen that it was her, not them that was causing a problem.

Her mother was her biggest supporter but also her biggest problem if anyone would have had the nerve to confront the situation. She always defended her daughter even when to everyone in attendance Susan was dead wrong. Whether it was smoking pot, cigarettes, drinking too much or taking some other illegal substance her mother always ran to her defense. It got to the point where her father and brothers just shut them both off and let her mother deal with any crisis that she caused. Why waste the time or breath.

Her father, God rest his soul, was a meek though good man who weighed less than his wife (he was a chubby chaser). Although he would yell and threaten he never carried through. Yeah he corrected Susan physically when she was younger but how do you spank a forty five year old woman. She was now that age but had never matured to more than a fifth grader. She would cry and whine to get her way and was relentless in an argument never giving up no matter if she was proven wrong beyond a reasonable doubt. The constant stream of dialogue would have bored Carl Sagan let alone her three brothers, Michael, Vin and Paulie, the baby of the bunch. They got older and just tuned her out with their own families and worries to concern themselves with they didn’t have time to deal with her and her bullshit.

Not that it stopped her though. If nothing else she was relentless and now with the corresponding wives to her brothers to gab to it was almost never ending. The wives were all nice but the tolerance they showed was more than most humans could bear. She would call up out of the blue and start to ramble about everything from her mother’s health and care to her recent boyfriend’s latest transgression. The stories although incredible were endless. Boyfriends leaving her somewhere and just driving away so she would call a family member to pick her up. Boyfriends coming to her parents house to bang on the door because she had their drugs and decided that they shouldn’t take them anymore so she would steal them. Boyfriends coming to somehow profess their love to her which her brothers and secretly even her father couldn’t understand. Boyfriends coming at three o’clock in the morning and banging on the door because they were horny which her brothers couldn’t understand.

Little did she know her life was about to radically change. The profound way it would happen was bound to make another part of her scattered brain break free. If she was tested by MENSA she would probably be accepted with open arms until she started to speak to the other members. In reality she was that smart but her common sense had evacuated when she was a child and never returned. Her common sense ran the other way when the little devil that sits on all of our shoulders tapped it and scared the crap out of it. At the same time she could type a letter, carry on a conversation, paint her nails, smoke a cigarette and not get nail polish anywhere it wasn’t supposed to be nor loose her place in the conversation or with her typing. But chewing gum and walking was a different matter altogether.

I just felt in all fairness that by right I had to explain Susan to any and all people who decide to push on and read this story; it wouldn’t have been fair to let you go in blind. It was not written to cause psychological damage. It was written just as a way of a vent for those of us who had to deal with her on a daily basis. May God Bless Our Souls..........

Julian

The whole key to not being caught is to blatantly look obvious. If you seem like you are trying to hide something more than likely someone will notice you. If you can remember back to when you were young, or if you have kids, when do you catch them or better yet when do they get caught? Isn’t it always when they try to hide something? The proverbial hand in the cookie jar or trying to sneak an extra snack or drink into bed. As they get older it doesn’t change. Even into adulthood it doesn’t change. I have seen men in my life that lived a lie right in front of their respective spouse’s eyes and have never been caught. Yeah they were good talkers but looking back in hindsight I would guess that their spouses thought they were so obvious, so blatant that they couldn’t possibly do something like that.

I do know the difference between right and wrong and good and evil. I had problems growing up and my family was highly dysfunctional but that didn’t stop me from learning some of my mother’s lessons or picking things up in school or on the limited amount of television I was allowed to watch. Julian’s family was a God fearing family believe it or not and went to church at nine A.M. every Sunday. They went to confessions on Saturday afternoon in order to be prepared to receive the Gift of Christ on Sunday. You can look back and wonder if his parents ever really confessed their sins and if they did why didn’t the priest do anything to help him.

He was an only child raised right in the heart of Staten Island, New York, the forgotten of the five boroughs compromising New York City. The island itself was not too large, fourteen miles by seventeen miles and when they moved there it probably had one hundred thousand inhabitants. Nowadays it has close to one million and growing. His mother and father were conservative devout Catholics through and through and had enough second generation Italian left in them to speak the language in front of him when they wanted to hide something.

Most people in his neighborhood probably thought he lived a nice quiet prosperous life because his parents schooled him from a young age to portray that image to those around. Mother father and son living in perfect harmony. The boy was well behaved and respectful, the parents hard working and seemingly nice although they kept mostly to themselves. That was the way they were perceived by their surrounding neighbors.

If I could go back in time and change one thing in my life I would cry out to a neighbor or for that matter a stranger and tell them the truth about that family situation. Being younger back then may have made people pause but now in adulthood they would listen. I would go back to the priests in his church and shake them and scream at them for doing nothing. Unfortunately even though others probably suspected in my youth no one ever took action. Would things have turned out differently is not a course I can pursue at this point because there is no way to know.

Julian makes a good living and actually could afford to live differently and even support a wife, kids and a house. Maybe a dog, a nice car and some fish in a tank. That is the fantasy version of him dreaming, no he will go on hiding in plain sight until the next time the urge calls him and then he will strike.

Who will be next to pay the price?

-1-

No Luck

Sunday evening. He couldn’t take it anymore. One extra day of this and he would either kill six people or take an axe, ignore the pain and chop his own head off. She wouldn’t stop. Over and over again she had to hear about how great she was and how no one else in the United States or any of it’s far away holdings could ever compare to her. She was almost mad enough in her thinking to be classified as a terrorist threat but her name was not Sheikh Al Araqua Bin Albuquerque or some other denominational slang alias. She constantly picked stupid insignificant fights with her mother, brothers and friends and then fought to the death without ever relenting or letting go in any of them. Then to top it all off when the other party finally gave in or just gave up she crowed and whooped as if she won the Super Bowl. It became her all-being and the reason she got up every day. Her mother just let it go, happy to appease her and move on with her life. Her mother was somewhat sick with a touch of emphysema and an old injury that never healed right.

It didn’t stop her in the least. She attacked with aplomb until she got her way almost as if she was a three year old who wanted candy in a store. She kicked and screamed until her mother said it was okay. Her brothers had pretty much distanced themselves having gotten to a point in their lives where their own family’s needs were more important than that of their sibling. Who could blame them?

He sat on the edge of the bed contemplating his life and his surroundings. Did he think she would allow him to walk out? Not a chance in hell that would ever be allowed to happen. He took out the gun he knew she had in the drawer and carefully stared at it. He felt the cold metal and smelt the gun oil. The more he thought about it the more he realized that his own mother would never get over the grief and would die of a broken heart if he took his own life. It was a dilemma for the ages. I do understand anyone who comes along and reviews this man’s situation would think he had other choices but in the harsh light of her reality he had none.

He put the cold barrel in his mouth and slightly chipped a tooth which brought tears to his eyes. She would be home soon and if he didn’t act now he would be stuck forever with no future. He flicked off the safety and lightly put pressure on the trigger unsure of his next move but knowing he had to make one quickly. He was thinking about everything that had gone right in his life although the list was short compared to everything that had gone wrong. That list was much, much, much longer. He started to chew on the barrel and for a passing moment he felt very gay. Even that would have been better than staying with her, like this. Cowardice was not in his normal nature except in confrontations with her where there was no escape. How had he allowed himself to come into her life and then be all consumed? Didn’t he have a half decent brain or some guts that he could use to right his sinking ship? He had a thought albeit an outlandish one. It would reduce him to a mere shell of himself for a while, probably a couple of years at least but at least he would be out. There was no way knowing if with her all-consuming personality she would wait any length of time. If he played his cards right and came out of this alive he could resume some normalcy down the road. His mother would still be distraught but he wouldn’t kill himself which would push her over the edge. He took the gun out of his mouth aimed at the wall and fired. The blast from the gun shook the bedroom and the bullet created a small hole where it exited the house. He aimed at the ceiling fixture they hung above the bed and fired. The shards of glass from the fixture and the bulb rained down of the bed. It was twelve in the afternoon on a Saturday; someone had to have heard that. He sat in the silence waiting for the sound of the sirens. Two or three minutes went by and nothing. He aimed at the little Jesus statue that she had on their dresser and then thought better of jinxing himself by killing a religious statue so he aimed at the flat screen T.V. and blew it all to hell. She loved that T.V. more than she loved life itself watching Oprah and Dr. Phil and Jerry Freaking Springer. She definitely was a candidate to be on that show. He believed she harbored a jealousy towards anyone who got to go on there and ruin their lives by exposing their deepest darkest secrets to the world. The television showered a cascade of sparks as the explosion ripped through the house. Where were the cops? Surely someone heard that. Finally in the distance he heard the beginnings of the sound of joy, they were coming for him. Tears of happiness now rolled down his face into the tears of despair from moments earlier. He was partially deaf from firing the gun in a confined space but there was nothing wrong with crying with joy while he awaited the inevitable. He felt powerful with the sparks dying in the rug and the plaster dust and shards of glass sprinkled around the room. He aimed at a picture of him together with her on the beach down the Jersey Shore and fired again. He looked at the result upon re-opening his eyes and was extremely happy to have blown her freaking head off and not touched his own face in the photo. She thought that was the best picture they ever took together and it made him more euphoric with satisfaction that he destroyed her place in it.

The one shame in this whole situation was that he wouldn’t be here to witness the look on her face when she came into the room and saw the carnage. Okay carnage is a little strong but her T.V. was gone, there were holes in the ceiling and walls, and the best picture of them together was now missing her image. He wished he could call Candid Camera to come film her expression. That gave him a thought, he ran to the closet and got out the tripod and the video camera and set it up in the far corner of the room. He plugged in the charger just to make sure it didn’t die in the middle of film. He set it on wide angle and pressed the record button after checking from behind it to make sure it was set up at the right height to capture her face as it came through the door and saw the damage. It was at that point when he suddenly realized that the sirens he had heard weren’t screaming anymore, nor did he hear them approaching in his direction. He was so consumed setting up his little ruse that he had blanked out all of the sound around him. He turned back towards the center of the room ready to walk outside and get captured by the police when he heard, Stop Police shouted from the doorway only twelve feet or so away. He couldn’t comprehend that and raised his head towards the shout but unfortunately for him he also raised the gun that was in his hand towards the shouts. That you can call a bad fucking move. Within a second new gunfire rang out in the room but it did not come from his gun. Instead it came from the two weapons that were pointing at him from the doorway. The first bullet entered his stomach and although he could feel immediate pain he figured he could go through surgery and rehab and get by. If the worst thing was that his plan was safe. The really, really, really unfortunate part was that the second bullet pierced a little higher in his chest area and immediately punctured his heart. He fell back in pain as his gun flew up in the air landing three or four feet away.

The pain was not the worst. The worst part was that he was still able to grip life although he knew that it was leaving him as he writhed on the floor waiting for the end. The worst part was that he was supposed to either let the cops shoot him once (hopefully low) when he came out of the house after they surrounded it or he was supposed to let them talk him out of there dropping his weapon and not getting shot at all. Being killed was not part of the plan. He was he supposed to go to an institution where she would forget about him and leave him alone sooner or later when she got some other sucker to come along. One, two, three years were the price he was willing to pay to play at insanity and get away from her. He was not supposed to die, that sucked. 

He never had luck, none in his whole damn pathetic excuse for a life. It wasn’t that he didn’t try or take risks to make his life better its just that they never panned out. There was the time he sold his motorcycle, eighteen carrot thick gold chain, his Tag Heuer watch an ex-girlfriend had given him, his television and some other odds and ends to put the money in a stock his friend had told him was guaranteed to go up two or three times. His friend was the type of guy the money always followed and he figured he couldn’t lose. The day after he set his account up at E-trade and dumped the whole eleven thousand dollars he raised into it the Feds raided the companies offices and found it to be a complete multi hundred million dollar Ponzi scheme with no real business or assets.

Or there was the girl he should have at least dated, the nubile African queen Matiqua. But he knew his mother’s old fashioned hard core ways would never accept a woman of color into the family. He knew she was attracted by the way she came onto him at work, she was successful as a lawyer and didn’t look down on him in his job as the office inner city delivery guy. She treated him well and made appreciative comments but he let them slip his grasp and then eventually changed jobs for the eighteenth time in his short life. He bumped into her once while commuting to his mechanics job and she lit up upon seeing him. With grease embedded in all of his orifices he couldn’t bear to look at her as he waited for the train they were taking to get him to his stop. She went so far as to slip him her card which he discarded in the first garbage can he saw when he got off. He wondered now as he was taking his last breaths what it must have felt like to wrap your head in those huge, watermelon shaped breasts she had. They had to be a triple F at least.

What a weird thing to think about as it was getting harder just to keep his eyes open. He didn’t think two minutes had passed since he had been shot and yet memories were coming and going through his brain. Well at least where ever he was going she wouldn’t be able to nag him and follow him there. He grasped that thought as he finally felt at peace and said to himself as he took his last breath, At least my luck is finally changing.

-2-

Luck

Sunday night. Michael had never had this type of feeling before odd as that was. He couldn’t believe he had let himself be talked into buying Gravity Boots by one of the young buff guys at work and installing a bar in his bedroom closet so he could hang upside down and do crunches. The exercise was created by a masochist to help you lose the belly and make Abs of which he was still the owner of only one. When the girls he was partying with saw the bar in his closet they automatically started pushing him towards it. They wanted him to hang from it. These were hard bodied girls he had picked up the night before at a local bar and combined he didn’t think they had three percent body fat between them. He had enough body fat to go around; as a matter of fact he had enough to hand out to one or two of his neighbors on the floor in the apartment building he lived in. Being easily persuaded by beautiful girls had always been his weak point but who could blame him.

There was Lisa, his ex, who had convinced him that he was her everything until he went on a misguided weekend excursion with the people he worked with and came home to a promiscuous slut who he then wished he had for the previous eighteen years. Alas she was with another now. There was the promiscuous slut he had gone away with on that misguided weekend only to find out that sometimes all things are not as they appear. (Can you say Hemorrhoids?) Those were only two but there were many others.

These two were trying to get him to hang upside down promising major rewards in return. By nature he was a talker so he was trying to buy time, get their clothes off, have them double team him, and find out what the hell rewards meant. They moved around the room like jungle cats, very graceful and feline. He moved around the room after them like a Three Toed Sloth bumping into things as he tried to look and act casual. As he pursued them and conversed he actually was thinking about the pros and the cons. He listed them mentally:

Pros

1. These are hard bodied hotties and if I give them what they want they will give me what

I want.

2. Whatever happened would go down in the annals of Biancho history whether it was good or bad because it would definitely be outside of the box.

3. They couldn’t rob him because his building security was top notch and he had some cash but no cards so the most they could run off with was a few hundred dollars.

4. If they robbed him and ran he could get in some exercise.

5. My Horse Sized Appendage would look a lot bigger than normal with gravity.

6. These were hard bodied hotties and if I gave them what they want they will give me what I want.

Cons

1. Sometimes when I hang on the bar upside down my bowels explode and I have to get right sided and run to the bathroom to blow it out.

2. I could only do four crunches at most so if they wanted to see Body by Jake they were bound to be mistaken.

3. When I hang upside down all of my extra fat drops down and my man breasts, although small when standing, drop down over my chin upside down.

4. My buttocks were full of cottage cheese styled cellulite that was sure to look like congealed cottage cheese upside down.

5. My Horse Sized Appendage would look a lot bigger than normal with gravity and they would run shrieking from my room and out of my apartment and I would have to explain that to the building management.

6. These were hard bodied hotties and if I didn’t give them what they wanted they would leave and I would have no new experience to learn from plus I would have to go into the bathroom and take care of Mr. Toilet Water Toucher because he would be enraged and pissed off.

Number six on the con side was the final straw and after some more flirting, banter and play he felt himself relenting. He asked the girls Tracy and Rosie what they wanted or expected from him. They said he was to disrobe down to his underwear and then get into the boots and hang and they would take it from there. He was still delaying until Tracy walked over to Rosie and started to kiss her. He watched in awe as their tongues intertwined and his mouth fell to the open position. They had done this before, he knew they were friends when he chatted them up at the bar previously this evening but this was slightly different. The funny thing is this wasn’t new to him. Since his escape from his marriage and his new found singular freedom he had actually scored a few of these situations and paid for a few others of similar quality. He had seen it in porno and obviously in person but it always had the same effect and now before him it succeeded again in driving him crazy with lust.

He knew he would be disrobing momentarily but the distraction caused his Man Thing that was Bigger than a Taco Bell Chicken Enchilada to unfold from its evening nap and spring to powerful attention. That did it, within seconds he was undressed and putting on the boots as the girls giggled and applauded and kept kissing. He didn’t care anymore, he was still young, (Forty Two is considered young isn’t it) somewhat in good shape, (let’s not really go there) very wealthy, (worth over ten million but who’s counting) and not attached.

He put on the boots and went to the bar. He pulled his legs up using the doorway to walk them up and over the bar and then strapped the boots with their clasps to the bar. The girls again giggled and kissed and made their way over to the doorway where he was suspended. Tracy started to touch and lightly rub various parts of his body to warm him up while Rosie walked inside. She was back in less than a minute with a pair of scissors.

What are those for? he asked as he opened his eyes hearing her pad back into the room.

Don’t worry Michael, we are not going to Bobbitize you. and she that she approached him and simply made two cuts and his boxer briefs parted and fell to the floor. In order not to explode right there he stared down at them to see if there were any skid marks and was relieved to see he had put on new briefs before leaving the apartment tonight. He stared and analyzed and didn’t even want to look up at the girls knowing his other mind from the lower half of his body would take over and he would blow this opportunity. He heard some mild ruffling so he decided to peek up and when he did he was in awe, both girls stood before him naked. He had more hair on his ears than they did on their bodies and the effect was instantaneous, he felt he added another inch or two right there. They walked over with mischievous looks in their eyes and he could swear after that they bowed down to his Laundry Detergent Giant sized Building Block of Girl Humper as Rosie started to stroke in the general area he actually thought he heard Tracy coo. He had never had a sexual experience he could remember where cooing was involved but he felt that this was triumph for him.

Okay now came the really important part. The girls stopped cooing and started concentrating on pleasure, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. He was tremendously excited to begin with but when they started to concentrate on that one pleasurable area he was overwhelmed. He felt his Thing That Was Five Times Bigger than any China Man’s become totally engorged. It was too much for him when each girl started one on side and met at the tip and he felt that familiar feeling. He felt as if his groans were rattling the windows as he raced towards the conclusion and then he exploded like a geyser. The one thing he seemed to forget at this point was that he was hanging upside down and the explosion blew out at a strange angle for any mortal man. He felt the first and biggest splatter hit his inverted chin. Sure enough  he was even groaning as every piece of his seed blew out onto his jaw, chin, face, nose, even some hit his eyelashes. It felt like the Niagara Falls of orgasm showers. He was amazed at the amount (probably that gravity thing again) but at the same time the embarrassment was huge. The range of emotions that traveled through him was enormous as he fought with himself to stay casual and act cool.

Oh you poor thing. Tracy said. Let’s clean him up before we clean up each other.

Michael thought to himself as he hung suspended with the girls cleaning him up: Please God take me now because I will never experience anything better than this.

He didn’t know what his future held at that point but suffice to say looking back he wasn’t even close.

-3-

Bedlam

Michael woke up early Monday morning ready to take on the world. It was how he woke most mornings in his now single life. No kids, wife, pets or worries. Financial consideration that used to plague his relationship with Lisa, his first wife was now a thing of the past. His ex- wife’s house was paid off; the kids had money put aside to go to any college in the world they wished plus a lot for their futures after. His retirement was on its way to being fully funded. Girls were constantly coming on to him even though he still had much of his stomach that he had throughout his marriage but they didn’t seem to mind and he was shallow enough not to care what their reasons were. It had been over two years since the weekend that changed his life and he felt like after the initial celebrity and then the challenge of re-building his firm Holden, Tate and Smith he was on his way to an interesting and very crazy second part of his life. He was not afraid to take chances, risks or flat out go for broke as long as the adrenaline pumped through his body as he went about pursuing his dreams.  

He made his way to the office downtown on record time and attacked his day. He strode in and said good morning to the receptionist who blushed and in barely a whisper responded as she usually did. He felt like George Clooney when he got that reaction every day because of that sheepish little daily response. Damn he would have to give that girl a raise to keep her there for ego purposes. He then broached the quiet boardroom where few of his co-workers had arrived. He saw Johnny Mackey sitting at his desk eating a bagel with one hand and scratching his balls with the other and he said a hello which Johnny grunted at. He kept going and arrived at his office to find his secretary Dee sitting at her desk preparing for the day. She had helped him these past two years and she had been handsomely rewarded to the point where she had gone to Europe for two weeks, traveled the Virgin Islands and bought a small co-op. He appreciated her diligence and showed it by paying her a nice salary and bonus and never sexually harassing her in return. Although she was very pretty and he was clearly attracted his one previous experience with a co-worker had gone awfully bad and he was happy just to have a functioning person that was female to help propel him towards his goals. Dee gave him his messages that came in over the weekend and they were relatively light mostly just bankers seeing if he had come to a decision on different deals figuring that like them he was putting in weekend hours, he was past that at this stage of his life. He only gave out his cell number to the bankers he completed deals with and they rarely called on weekends being that they had also reached a certain station in life. He went into his office and sat at his desk booting up his computer. His phone rang and he let Dee pick it up. It’s your sister she said to his consternation. She knew he hated speaking to her but to keep the family peace and find out about his mother he entertained calls from time to time. Usually afterwards he felt dirty and wished he had a shower built in his office. She could drive Mother Teresa crazy. He was convinced that if the pope ever met his sister he would make the church disown her and have her exorcized. He took a sip of coffee