Chapter 10: Where an Unusual Dinner with Annie Mercyx Takes Place

I made the man his triple espresso, filled the next two orders, and basically survived my shift. I wasn’t really sure what to think about the conversation I’d had with Mercyx. The night before, I’d thought I would throw all issues of His Church That Sunday into the Dumpster behind the burrito shop or burn them, but now there were a few more copies to contend with. I was still embarrassed about them, but clearly Mercyx had thought they were worthwhile, so now pride mixed in with the shame.

Then there was this dinner with Mercyx at Blowfish thing. Like I said, Blowfish wasn’t a place Mercyx would go – she had a sleeve full of tattoos on her left arm; short, cropped, perpetually bleached hair; and muscled calves harder than Schwarzenegger’s biceps. Mercyx was a burrito-and-run kind of gal, and we assumed, Beale and I, that she was a lesbian, although I have to admit that despite all our adolescent conversations, we’d never ventured anywhere close to Mercyx’s sex life.

It’s very strange, when I think back on it, that we hadn’t. Beale’s comics were all about masturbation and frustrated libido, and mine occasionally dabbled in that direction; so you’d think somewhere in there we would have discussed intimate matters, but it just never happened. Mercyx was one of the guys – a fellow cyclist, pool shark, and zinester.

Don’t get me wrong, Mercyx wasn’t unattractive. If anything she was hyperattractive – in a small tits, low hips, Suicide Girls kind of way – but we kind of considered her an untouchable. It was like if we’d shown any interest in her, we couldn’t have been her friend. We saw the way she fucked with other men in her brash, slick-tongued way, and decided we’d rather be in collusion than on a collision.

Mercyx was tough, and we were soft zine boys. At first, we felt privileged just to be in her presence, and then later, since we’d been hanging out with her for almost a year, we forgot her presence as a sexual being all together. She was gender-neutral Mercyx, the Photocopy Queen and our compadre.

So yeah. I’d finally decided that the whole thing was no big deal, that it was just the raw meat, that she’d chosen Blowfish simply because she had a primal urge to sink her teeth into something fleshy and uncooked. There were better, cheaper sushi joints in town, but it was near my apartment and she knew she’d have to cart the zine stash there afterwards.

I walked down the stairs of my apartment, took in the cooling breeze of an unseasonably warm spring evening, and sauntered down Alberta Street, not thinking anything at all about my unwashed, after-cycling T-shirt, my threadbare black jeans, my half-tied Chuck Taylors. I walked down the street and arrived at Blowfish. And there I saw Annie Mercyx, and Annie Mercyx was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

I am surprised, when I think back on it, that I got words out of my mouth at all. Mercyx was wearing a strapless dress, a kitschy cotton number with ferris wheels on it in pink and yellow pastels. She had on a heavy coat of soft pink lipstick to match, and an ochre-colored eye shadow that extended cat-like to her temples. The contrast between the hard tattoos and the soft colors of her dress was a visual fiasco, making her appear comic and freaky and completely stunning all at once. I suppose the average person would have seen her and just thought she was strange; but for me it was all my fantasies come to life, a beautiful alien from a sci-fi movie.

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