At Night She Cries, While He Rides His Steed Read online

  Contents

  The Life of St. James St. James

  Chapter One

  MONDAY, APRIL 30, 1849—COLOMA, CALIFORNIA: THE DAY THAT I BECAME RICH

  Chapter Two

  BEING RICH MAKES YOU A BETTER PERSON

  Chapter Three

  IT’S HARD TO GET THE SMELL OF SEX OFF

  Chapter Four

  EVERY MAN NEEDS A DYNAMITE MONTAGE TO FEEL ALIVE

  Chapter Five

  THE WILD WEST WAS RAD, BECAUSE YOU COULD JUST KILL PEOPLE

  Chapter Six

  TIME TO TAKE A SHIT IN MY OWN HANDS. I Think That Sentence Is Wrong.

  Chapter Seven

  THE STRENGTH OF A MAN CAN ONLY BE MEASURED BY HOW MUCH HE CAN LIFT

  Chapter Eight

  DEATH IS A HEAVY THING . . . ESPECIALLY WHEN THE CORPSE WEIGHS MORE THAN EIGHT HUNDRED POUNDS

  Chapter Nine

  THERE ARE LAWS NOW? WHAT THE FUCK?

  Chapter Ten

  WHEN YOU’RE RICH, IT’S OKAY TO MURDER PEOPLE

  Chapter Eleven

  AN IRONIC NAME FOR A CHAPTER WHEN YOU LOSE ALL YOUR MONEY

  Chapter Twelve

  WHEN ONE DOOR CLOSES, ANOTHER PERSON IS PROBABLY FUCKING BEHIND IT

  Chapter Thirteen

  AFTER SIX YEARS, I AM FINALLY READY TO LEAVE CHINA

  Chapter Fourteen

  DRUGS ARE FUCKING AWESOME, AND EVERYONE WANTS THEM

  Chapter Fifteen

  IT TAKES ABOUT ONE HOUR UNTIL I AM RICH AGAIN

  Chapter Sixteen

  PEOPLE ARE STARTING TO HATE THE CHINESE. I GET IT.

  Chapter Seventeen

  TIME TO KILL EVERYONE IN SIGHT . . . RELAX, THEY DESERVE IT

  About Ross Patterson

  For Emma, Forever Ago.

  Wait, that’s the title of a fucking Bon Iver album.

  For Nikki, my waitress at the Daytona Beach Hooters who I had sex with and never called back. I knew shit was going down when you drew hearts instead of dotting the i’s in your name on my receipt. In case I left you with child, this book is for you. Also, if you want to fake my signature on it and give it to him or her like it came from me, feel free. I won’t say shit.

  The Life of

  St. James St. James

  June 9, 2015. McSorley’s Old Ale House. New York, NY

  As I sit at an aged wooden table at the back of Manhattan’s oldest bar, a man walks in and demands a Michelob Ultra. The bartender shakes his head and replies, “We only have two types of beer here, light and dark. We also never had to serve women until a court order in 1970.”

  The guy looks at him incredulously and says, “I am a man.”

  “Not if you’re ordering a fucking Michelob Ultra!” I shake my head and laugh to myself as the man walks out. It’s only fitting that I’m doing this here.

  Hello, I’m Saint James Street James. I hate road abbreviations, so I spell out my last name. At some point in your life you’ve seen me partying all over the world, gracing the covers of many famous sport-fishing and leisure magazines over the years—along with my twenty-six-page spread in the infamous July 1973 issue of Playgirl that’s been banned, except in Luxembourg. You may think you already know everything about me, but you don’t. The one secret I’ve been harboring for most of my adult life is . . . that I’m 186 years old. That’s not a misprint, I’m 1-8-6, holmes. Yeah, I put an L in “homes” so you would understand how serious I am.

  I was rich enough to almost triple my life expectancy, while permanently maintaining the looks of a thirty-five-year-old man still in his prime. Oh, and I also beat AIDS. Twice. You can do that shit when you’re rich, and I am really fucking rich. The only other way to beat AIDS is if you win the Olympics. Go ask Magic Johnson or Greg Louganis if you don’t believe me.

  Why am I telling you this? After living 186 years on this planet, I’ve become bored—and unless a scientist invents a new place to put a hole in a woman, I’ve done everything else there is to do in this life. I’m also tired of seeing what the male species has evolved into, so the moment I finish writing my memoirs about my life . . . I’m going to off myself. You read that correctly, I’m going to kill myself. This isn’t going to be a casual Paris Jackson “I ate a bunch of children’s chewy Tylenol” suicide attempt; I’m going to blow my fucking brains out.

  Before I do, I want you to know the real truth about me. That’s why I’m writing this book with nothing but a loaded handgun and a pile of freshly cut pure Bolivian cocaine next to my old classic Remington Rand typewriter that Hemingway gave me. He only used it once, as a urinal at a house party. After relieving himself, he shook twice and typed only one sentence on a piece of paper: “This typewriter smells like piss; get a new one, fuckface.” Classic Hemingway.

  If all of this sounds too intense, then stop reading the rest of this shit right now. Seriously, put down your glasses without the prescription in them and close this book, because this kind of male hubris isn’t for you. I’m not going to apologize for being a real man, and I certainly don’t know when it became trendy to tell everyone that “you weren’t cool in high school.”

  Back in 1827 I was born in a time when men were actually men. We fucked whoever we wanted, whenever we wanted, we didn’t pull out, and the only “child support” that was given was if you put a blanket in the basket before you dropped your illegitimate baby off on a stranger’s front porch. We didn’t cook shit using Pam or butter, just a raw skillet, and maybe a little spit. We put our boxers on backward so we could take a shit without having to pull them down before we sat down in an outhouse.

  The following memoir is filled with the most important stories ever told in the history of the United States. It will end all stories about every other man ever told, so go fuck yourself, Buzz Aldrin. Enjoy my life.

  —Sincerely, St. James St. James

  Chapter One

  MONDAY, APRIL 30, 1849—COLOMA, CALIFORNIA: THE DAY THAT I BECAME RICH

  A tall, thirty-two-year-old man stares deep inside a filthy hellhole of a gold mine with a dimly lit lantern, trying to see through a cloud of dust. This man is me, but I refuse to give any further physical description of myself until I’m wealthy. Most great men usually do. What I can tell you is that I’m jammed between the tits of the great American gold rush of 1849, and shit is fucking real. This isn’t a goddamn hobby where you take your kid out panning for gold with a spaghetti strainer on Sundays hoping for the best. People have died doing this. Which is why I pay someone else to do it for me.

  Suddenly a dirty Chinaman in his forties emerges from the dark hole with three dead parrots clinging to his shirt. He’s smiling through cracked “dying of thirst” lips, but my eyes are fixated on his tiny, yellow hand. I don’t want him touching me, so I shine my lantern in his face and demand that he stop walking toward me.

  Dropping to his knees, he cries out, “You rich, boss. You rich!”

  He opens his hand to reveal a small, brightly speckled rock covered in mud. I make him take off one of his wooden shoes and place the pebble inside it. Carefully, I remove the canteen from around my neck and wash the dirt away. It appears to be gold, but to be sure, I make him bite into it.

  Staring at the nugget nervously, he knows what he has to do. He closes his eyes, places the nugget into his mouth, and bites down hard. Instead of his rotting teeth breaking off instantly, they make a soft imprint. Holy. Fucking. Shit. It’s real hardcore American gold, and I’m fucking rich.

  I won’t bore you with the details of how I then made this Chinaman excavate and load 480 pounds of gold onto my wagon, drag it into town personally (because I didn’t want to tire out my horse), and melt
it down into gold bars by hand while I stood behind him with a loaded shotgun pointed at his head. Come to think of it, that was probably only boring for me—he was probably scared shitless.

  On that note, congratulations, you’ve just read the best first chapter of any book ever written. Notice how I skipped over my childhood and all that bullshit? That’s because nothing cool happens in your life until you become rich, and up until the moment you just read about, I was a poor-ass farmer. My parents were decent people, but they were working-class citizens, whose only claim to fame was that former president Martin Van Buren once took a shit in our outhouse during a campaign visit to California. You sure as fuck didn’t pay fifteen bucks to read about that. Let’s just get to me being rich and fucking awesome. You’re welcome.

  Chapter Two

  BEING RICH MAKES YOU A BETTER PERSON

  July 19, 1853—four years later. An extremely muscular man with calves and forearms that have more definition than Noah Webster’s dictionary busts through the saloon doors of a tasteful whorehouse with a burlap sack full of gold slung over his shoulder. The doors explode off their hinges into a shower of splinters. The surprising thing about this muscular man is that he is lean too, not all ’roided out like a New Jersey teenager triple-stacking a month before spring break. You can see his cock pressing hard against his jeans, almost fighting with the left pant leg, mid-thigh. It’s not like the jeans are super tight or have some kind of Euro cut, it’s just how big his penis is. This man is me, Saint James Street James, and this is now the description I deserve.

  I survey the whorehouse-slash-bar through squinted eyes—eyes so beautiful, butterflies masturbate after looking into them. Every whore in the entire place falls to her knees and prays toward me like I’m a Mayan god. I raise my hand, acknowledging them.

  “Let me get a drink first, whores. Remember, sleeping with me is a privilege, not a right. So I’ll obviously be going by looks again today.”

  “If he doesn’t make love to me right now, I’ll fucking kill myself!” one screams as she presses a knife forcefully into her neck.

  “Grandma, stop it! You’re acting fucking crazy!” her granddaughter says as she tackles her to the ground. Another whore races in and kicks the knife out of her hand as the grandma begins convulsing and speaking in tongues.

  You give these whores an inch, they want the other seven. Unfazed, I walk up to the bar and take a seat. I drop my large burlap sack of gold on the floor and groan heavily, letting everyone in the saloon know who the fuck I am. The weight of the gold causes several floorboards to break, and a few whores faint.

  I yell out to the man behind the bar, who is inches in front of my face: “Quietly hand me an entire bottle of fucking whiskey, and be discreet about it!”

  An old Indian bartender in his fifties, Manuel, stares at me, exasperated. “You’re going to have to pay for those double doors you broke first, Saint James.”

  I exhale in his face for fifty-eight seconds straight without blinking, just to prove a point. He doesn’t blink once, and neither do I. This is our little game. He used to work on our farm and babysit me as a kid. We would play cowboys and Indians, except we weren’t pretending. I consider him the closest thing I have to a “friend” in this town, but men never let that shit show back then. So instead, I reach into my burlap sack and pull out a large chunk of gold and drop it on top of the bar.

  “Here you go, fuckface. Bottle me up.”

  Without a hint of “non,” I chalantly slide my hand into my full-length elk-skin duster and whistle a show tune with pitch-perfect precision. I tap the exposed handle of my six-shooter, which is peeking out from my gun holster, hip-high, and begin counting aloud how long it takes him to get me a drink in numerical “Mississippis.” Manuel shakes his head as he puts a bottle and a shot glass down in front of me. I wave him off.

  “I’m gonna go ahead and grab the whole tit, so you can hold off on putting that training bra on, Manuel.”

  He nods and removes the shot glass from the bar. I take a long swig and eye a couple of the whores. Subtlety does not ensue, and I stick my entire tongue inside the bottle to make sure they know what I want. One whore blushes, as she continues to jack off a random man underneath a table. He gets caught up in my whole shit and tries to make eye contact with me. Even dudes want to be inside me.I

  A buck-naked man suddenly walks through the hole left by the missing saloon doors, wearing only his cowboy boots. He throws a horse saddle on the ground.

  “A goddamn grizzly ate all my clothes off. Can I get a ride to New Mexico to get my other pair of pants?”

  In record time, I unholster my gun and shoot him in the chest. His body goes flying out of the saloon with his dick and balls slamming back against his abdomen. It happens so quickly that it ends up being a double-tap. It’s not like I am staring hard, I just have the hearing of a dolphin. That double-tap sound is so distinct.

  “Jesus, Saint James, you just shot New Mexico Mike!”

  “That motherfucker comes in here like that once a week, and I’m sick of it.”

  “It’s casual Friday,” he says solemnly as he cleans a glass.

  “Is it? Sorry, Manny. I always forget.”

  Two Indian bar backs scurry out and pull Mike by his legs across the floor and out the back door. In memory of Mike, I down the rest of my bottle of whiskey, then proceed to chug an entire bottle that rests in front of a stranger sitting next to me.

  I stand up and smash both bottles off my flexed traps and scream in no particular direction: “I need three whores! Two of them must have some type of background or formal training in circus ‘performantry,’ and the other must be able to throw twice her body mass above her head.”

  Within seconds, I feel a tap on my shoulder, and turn to see three eager women standing in a perfect pyramid directly behind me.

  “I guess you’ll do,” I say, before pushing them over on the floor and walking back to a shitty makeshift bedroom. When I hit the door of the bedroom, I loudly clear my throat, looking back at the whores.

  “I said, ‘I guess you’ll do!’ Get up off the floor and have some respect for yourselves.”

  All three whores run toward the bedroom like I just announced I had a cure for smallpox. A weird man holding a live chicken stands next to the bedroom, and I punch him directly in the dick for looking at me the wrong way. He falls down in front of me, and I step over him as if he doesn’t exist. The chicken scampers away as he holds his junk, writhing on the floor in anguish.

  “I wasn’t looking at you the wrong way, I was born cross-eyed!” the man screams.

  Turns out he really is cross-eyed. I don’t bother apologizing, though; I’m sure he gets that all the time. What am I going to do about it now, not fuck these girls? You can’t hear it, but laughter is coming out of my mouth as I write this.

  After the whores race in, I slam the bedroom door and begin to pull off my pants, peeling them down to the top of my boots. I sit down in an old wooden rocking chair in the corner of the room, take a cigarette out of my duster jacket, and strike a match off my right boot, which is now awkwardly pulled up above my dong. The spark of the match lights up the room, and after lighting my cigarette I use the remaining flame to light a small lantern on the nightstand next to me. All three women are now magically lit as if they’re sitting for a presidential portrait.

  Even in soft, intimate lighting, I can clearly see that two of the whores are sixes on their best day; the other is a firm four. You can do the math yourself, but that is way past a ten total, so don’t fucking judge me. I’m at a whorehouse in Coloma, California, in 1853. Trust me when I say that we are lucky to have sixes.

  I smile as I look down at myself. “Well, dick, it’s up to you now; I drank two bottles of whiskey and killed a dude, now you need to do the fucking.” My dick nods at me. We have a long, storied history together.

  “Will you please take your boots off? We would be honored,” one of the hotter ones says.

  Hav
ing heard this sentence a thousand times before, I laugh in her face. “I know you would, but I’m married. Let’s just get undressed and not pretend that this might turn into something eventually.”

  If a married man takes his boots off to have sex with prostitutes, it’s cheating. If he doesn’t, he’s just blowing off steam and banging whores. The whores know that, yet they always want something more. “Oh, you’ve had sex with over four hundred grimy fucking miners, will you marry me?” I promise that thought wouldn’t be on my mind throughout the rest of our wedded bliss. Hilarious.

  “What do you want us to do?” the larger whore asks.

  “Honestly, you are definitely the spotter of the group—I’d like you to just shut the fuck up and be the best base you can be. Don’t drop the two hotter girls or make direct eye contact with me. And please don’t ask if you can get boned by me too.”

  She nods, obviously knowing her place in life. Inhaling deeply, she braces her fingers together to form a “handbasket” for the others to climb into. One at a time, the two other girls place a foot inside her clasped hands, and she expertly flips each one of them onto the bed. The execution and landing are perfect. I applaud quietly and hop over to the bed with my pants still down around my anklesII to join the other two.

  As the women strip down, I whistle at the two hot ones and smash my index fingers together—signaling the international sign for “You two make out.” They oblige. What happens next is a sexual tornado involving one man, two women, and the girl who was always the first out in “dodge rock.”

  By the way, just because I fuck with my boots on, don’t think for one goddamn second it limits me sexually in any way. Truth be told, it makes me experiment more, because I have to be more creative. To prove it, I start off by blindfolding each of them and making them grab the headboard. This way my dick is truly a surprise, and the one not being dicked always wonders when her turn is coming—and more important, for how long. I switch up my rhythms, knowing their confusion mixed with blindness is something that only Helen Keller or every blind person ever has probably experienced.