Installment Stub 1.4: Ideka Nuffin

Ideka Nuffin was in a white-hot rage as she entered the Sedelia statehouse.  She had been mellow at the start of her commute but has seen something that triggered her.  Actually, she had seen several “somethings”: Privately owned vehicles, undoubtedly powered by internal combustion engines that burned petroleum.

Ideka was the pro-tem representative from Hancock Park and resented the multiple bus hops required to commute from her home to the statehouse.  Representatives from the outlying regions had moved into apartments near the new statehouse or found friends or family to lodge with.  Ideka had not moved to a 6000 square-foot, luxury condominium one block north of Wilshire Blvd so she could live in a slum.  No sir, she would commute.

She did resent, however, that she was force to ride the bus just like the common people.  Buses were not designed for women who wear size 26W muumuus.  There was just no way she could get comfortable and the organically grown, sustainably harvested, 900 thread-count Egyptian cotton kept bunching up beneath her as she sweated atop the vinyl covered seat.  She felt slighted that Kenny Lane had not arranged for a driver to be assigned to her.  He said that there were no drivers or vehicles available.

And then she saw the trucks scuttling about.  They were clearly being used by private citizens for God knew what.  “No drivers or vehicles available my ass” she thought.

She bee-lined to Kenny’s modest office and started ripping into him.  She considered him a rube and did not think he would be too hard to jerk.  Besides, Kenny reminded Ideka of the first man she had ever slept with, old and hairy and white.  The only difference is that Kenny did not smell like he had bathed in Obsession for Men.

She called Kenny a liar.  She called him incompetent.  She accused him of being racist and a misogynist.  After she had given him the tune-up she told him why she was mad.  She fully expected him to cough up a set of keys on the spot. 

Kenny’s only response was “We will talk about it.”

***

Ideka learned radical ideology in her mother’s bed.

Ideka’s mother was a ‘film maker’ in Southern California and made ends meet by hooking on the side.  One evening, her client objected to wearing a rubber.  Ideka’s mother helpfully pointed out that a four year old girl cannot get pregnant…and invited Ideka into the romp…for a little bit more money.

“…a little bit more money…” turned into a lot more money.  The cameras scattered around the bedroom, while discrete, documented the resulting forty-five minutes of festivities with great fidelity.  Ideka’s mother was excited by this opportunity to combine her two professions.  Bringing Ideka into bed was hugely profitable as Ideka’s mom would wring ‘referrals’ for future clients out of her exhausted partner before lowering the boom on him.

When the “betrayed” partner asked what he was getting for the blackmail her mother would laugh and, while continuing to point a handgun toward the John's midsection, would nod toward Ideka:  “You got Nuffin.  If you pay then you still get nuffin.  Your wife don’t get no emails.  The cops get nuffin.  Your boss gets nuffin.”  

"You decide you ain't gonna pay, then they all get sometin'" she would say.

The one time Ideka’s mother dispensed with the precaution of displaying her Hi-Point .380 was when she fell in love with the John and planned on promoting him to “boyfriend”.  Ideka was eight when she watched the John beat her mother to within an inch of her life before ransacking the apartment and stealing the computer and cameras.

Ideka’s mother continued to put the squeeze on the men she was blackmailing.  Her favorite trick was to double-down and continue to get 'referrals' for additional, even wealthier men from the men she was blackmailing.  “Lookit” she would say, “the more I git from the next guy the less I gotta git from you, so make sure your referral is rollin' in dough.”  Of course she never reduced her demands on the older clients, even as the decades flew by.

Ideka was raised to know right from wrong.  According to her mother, the only act that was inherently wrong was to ever give a John a break or to extort anything less than the maximum amount out of him.  By those standards, Ideka grew into a woman of extraordinary virtue.

Compromise the John.  Then give him a tremendous shove to get the John off balance and then to relentlessly keep pushing lest the John recover and whup your ass;  that was Ideka’s radical ideology.

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