Sara sat on her haunches with her arms wrapped around her knees, shifting her weight from foot to toe to high heel with no rhyme or reason, creating this awkward sway, as though she were being blown by cold wind coming from every direction. Her eyes were wide and fixed upon my new kitten, Dennis, who was splayed out across the wooden floor. Dennis was wildly oscillating his head in the way that kittens do when focusing on a moving object of considerable interest.
“Awwww, look at the ki-en,” Sara cried, omitting the two t’s in kitten’s pronunciation. The bottom half of her face split open into a huge gummy smile. You could hear spit stretching across the inside of her cheeks. Her teeth were tiny and kinda brown, as if her baby teeth hadn’t fallen out 24 – 19 years before like they should have. They looked soft, vulnerable. She intensified her sway so that her ponytail swished around behind her and the floorboards creaked beneath her oddly distributed weight.
How on earth does she do that in high heels? I thought. Dennis rose to his feet and assumed pouncing position. His head continued to magnetically follow Sara. He meowed and Sara almost lost it.
“Oh my gawd,” she said, “what an adorable ki-en!” I thought she was going to tip over and fall crashing across the wood floors, Dennis bolting away in terror, ruining their charming moment together. But she maintained her balance, keeping her new friend’s interest. Dennis clawed at the floor, piercing through the polyurethane and extracting tiny little splinters.
“Hey!” I said to Dennis.
“Be nice,” Sara said.
Sara somehow managed to untangle one of the arms which had been wrapped around her knees. She wobbled a little, widening her eyes, drawing in a short, sharp breath and pivoting her feet to readjust.
“Haha – my arm fell asleep!” she said, looking up at me and smiling. I made what I felt to be a look of caution and swayed sympathetically with her, hoping she wouldn’t fall, waiting for her to fall. She rubbed her arm against her skirt and leg, consciousness eventually flowing back into the sleepy appendage. She turned her attention back to Dennis, or the ki-en, who was still in ready-mode, his paws positioned in such a way that he could leap into space. Or into Sara. She reached her hand out to stroke Dennis’s face. Her dangling fingers and Dennis approached one another in slow motion. I heard the music from Gone With The Wind playing somewhere in my hippocampus – that music when the two people are running toward each other, madly in love. About an inch floated between Sara’s hand and Dennis’ head. Dennis lifted up its paw to greet Sara. Sara arched her eyebrows and nodded, emphasizing her interest in petting him. Just as her index finger graced Dennis’ whisker he brought his paw down across Sara’s hand, unsheathing his claws at some invisible moment known only to Dennis.
“OW! You little shit!” Sara shouted. Dennis dashed to the far corner off the room, licking his claws and squinting in that way that cats do when they are immensely pleased with themselves. Sara held up her hand and studied it. Four clean claw marks jogged about an inch just under her thumb. They hadn’t even begun to bleed yet.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, “I’m used to this sort of thing.” She glared at me severely. I looked away sheepishly. “You wanna go dip a cotton ball in some hydrogen peroxide for me?”
“Yeah,” I said, “yeah, of course.”
I tip-toe ran through the kitchen and into the bathroom. I opened the medicine cabinet, pulled out and uncapped the big, brown plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide. I didn’t actually have any cotton balls, because nobody actually has any cotton balls, so I unraveled what I felt to be a sufficient length of double-ply toilet paper, crumpled it up, and doused it in 67 cent generic hydrogen peroxide from K-Mart.
Maybe I should give Sara more credit, I thought.
I walked back through the kitchen, wielding a drippy wad of sterile toilet paper. When I reached the living room Sara was still on her haunches, perfectly balanced, once again holding Dennis’ attention with her arrhythmic sway.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Second Coming
I decided to sell my dick to Lance for $237.00 because that’s all he had in his checking account and I needed money to pay my gas bill.
“You sure about this?” he asked, punching his PIN number into an ATM machine.
“Yeah,” I said, “I mean, I really don’t use it that much anymore, and whenever I do, I just get depressed afterwards.”
“Huh. What about…I dunno…like peeing, or whatever?”
“I’ll just sit down to do it. Like a girl, I guess.”
“Yeah you will, girl. No, but I mean, how will you actually pee without a…um…dickhole?”
“I dunno. I’m sure there’s gonna be a big hole in my pubes, so I’ll probably just pee out of that. Sort of like a hot water faucet turned on all the way.
“Haha. Gross. Hey – can I just give you $200.00? It only lets me take money out in multiples of like…I dunno – $20, $40, $80…up through $500...you see what I mean?”
I peeked over his shoulder and saw what he meant.
“Um,” I said, “can you like take out $200.00, put your card back in after it ejects and then take out $20.00? I’ll sell it to you for $220.00, I guess. My gas bill is only $208.93, or something, but I was hoping to have a nice dinner tonight. You know…just ‘cause it’ll be my last night with my dick, or whatever.”
“Sorta like the Last Supper?”
“Um…yeah, I guess.”
“You gonna go, like, jerk off in the bathroom before dessert, or anything like that?”
“Nah – I’m sick of it. Sick of coming.”
"What?"
"I'm sick of coming; I don't like to do it anymore."
“What the hell is wrong with you? Are you suicidal? Coming is like…I dunno…life’s perpetual manifestation, or something.”
“Yeah, but I mean…it’s like, you know that one Bill Hicks stand-up where he talks about how every payload has like 200,000,000 sperm in it? I dunno. It’s sort of depressing to watch all those lives splatter down the drain, or drown in the tip of a condom. Sort of makes sense why Catholics don’t allow contraception, in a way.”
“Well, sperm isn’t really alive, unless you wanna get all metaphorical, or whatever. So you’re trying to knock a girl up, then? Is that it? Who? Still can’t get over Sally, huh?”
“What? Sally and I broke up ten years ago and she’s dead! Are you an idiot? Besides, I didn’t give a shit when she died, and I don’t give a shit now.”
“Wow, you’re thoughtful. I’m just saying, man – that’s how it is in the movies. There’s always some ex-girlfriend stuff going on.”
“Yeah, but not a dead and cremated ex-girlfriend. What am I gonna do, go the Appalachian trail, where her ashes were spread and randomly stick my dick in the mud and hope that some flowers pop up? Hell, you’re the one who was waiting for us to break up, anyway, so take it – buy my dick, stud. I’ll give it to you after we eat dinner, er, after I eat dinner…you know what I mean.”
“Man, Sally and me wasn’t even about…it was only one time and…whatever. Are you sure you wanna do this?”
“Man – yeah, I wanna do this. $220.00; that’s my final offer. I hate to charge you, but like I said – gotta pay the gas bill.”
Lance shrugged, flicked the ATM’s touch screen, said “ow – fuckin’ fingernail,” shook his finger a little, and the machine whirred and clicked and shuffled and spat out ten twenty-dollar bills with tattered edges. Lance yanked the wad from the slot and stuffed it into his back pocket. He pulled his card out and pushed it back in, beginning the diminutive transaction.
I rubbed my jeans and found my slug tucked away, squishing against my inseam. One of those abhorrent montages began Power Pointing in my head as I petted my phallus during our final moments together – the first time I ever saw my own jizz, spurting and dripping from my urethra like freshly decorked champagne; the first time Lance and I confided in being members of the Secret Society of Jerking Off with Alarming Regularity; the first time I fantasized about Mindy Hurst – freshman class president – bent over the filing cabinet in my dad’s study, screaming in delight as I pulled her hair back with one hand, choked her with the other, and shook with unguarded joy as I filled her warm, soft guts with magical plasma – with civilizations of myself – while the football team stood watching and cheering me on over by the bookshelf, lifting up their shirts to reveal the letters of my name spray-painted on their torsos; the first time I ever thought about David Mann, captain of the football team, his dick massive and throbbing violently in both of my hands like a sump pump; the first time it actually happened with Mindy Hurst, and how it wasn’t what I had expected; the first time I left the condom in its wrapper on Sally’s night stand and Trojan Horsed into her world, deploying my men in a fiery coup d'état; when I began to resent Sally when she stopped eating birth control pills once a day and started eating McDonalds twice a day, varicose veins forming in pockets on her thighs like relief maps; the first time I left the dinner sofa during the middle of Seinfeld and tramped into Sally’s bathroom, popping a button off my button-fly jeans as I tore them open, brandishing my flimsy noodle and fighting with it desperately, trying to think about anything, anything! – Sally’s friends, Sally’s sisters, Sally’s parents, bagels, Napa Valley, post-structuralism, the kitten from those “Hang in There” posters; the first time I broke up with Sally because I was bored; the last time Sally broke up with me because I could no longer perform; the first time I heard that Sally blew her head into a thousand fucking pieces with her dad’s twelve gauge, and that I didn’t even care.
“The deal’s off,” I announced.
Lance turned around, holding up a twenty dollar note. “Huh?”
“Trust me – you don’t want what I’ve got. I’ve known you for years, and…man, I can’t even get it up anymore. I honestly haven’t had an erection in like, six months. I don’t wanna sell you a lemon.”
“Dude,” Lance said, “I don’t even believe you. That’s bullshit. Man, you’ve just gotta stop beating yourself up and...wait, hold on, I’ve gotta take this – hello? Hey, what up, Preston? What’s the matter, you stuck on Dragoncastle again, you fuckin’ dork?”
Lance wandered off with his cell phone sandwiched between his shoulder and his ear, talking loudly to someone called Preston, apparently. I took a seat against the ATM machine and flicked my dick listlessly through my jeans. I closed my eyes tight.
When I opened them, I saw Sally sitting in a gazebo that looked sort of like a giant chocolate cupcake outlined with vanilla frosting, surrounded by night sky – like 3:00 AM-caliber darkness with no light pollution. Sleet fell like darts, sticking into the surrounding grass and breaking onto a cobblestone path in musical little clinks and clanks. The cobblestone path was black and white and led to the gazebo. In fact, pretty much everything was black and white, except for Sally’s face, which was bleeding severe red – from the eyes and the ears and the nose and perhaps from some other orifice that had been poked or shot into her. I gasped for air and got a mouthful of sleet. I spit the needles of sleet onto the cobblestones and approached the Gazebo. Sally’s hulking father, who I hadn’t noticed until now, freight-trained down the cobblestone path, wearing a black and white plaid lumberjack shirt, which was tucked into white Wranglers, which were tucked into black SWAT team boots, which crumbled cobblestones beneath them. I acquiesced off to one side and his shoulder still plowed into me, knocking me to the ground. I expected to take a kick to the ribcage, but the sound of his footsteps faded away behind me.
“Hey,” I heard Sally say, “Come here. Please.”
I stood up, wiped off my shirtsleeves and shook it off, as they say. I composed myself and walked carefully over to Sally to get a better look at her. Her wounds had vanished and she had some bizarre, religious-looking headpiece on. Like a nun’s, but not really. I took four steps up the marble staircase of the gazebo and sat down next to her on the white marble bench.
“What happened to your face?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it was all bloody and gross before. Now it’s fine.”
“Oh, that. Yeah, my dad beats the shit out of me sometimes. I’m dead, though, so it doesn’t hurt – plus it heals quickly.”
“But doesn’t that bother you?”
She just smiled and laughed. It started to occur to me that I was in one of those dreams in which one can control his actions – a lucid dream, I believe they’re called. I had so much to ask Sally, but I couldn’t think of a single question; it’s like when you walk into a record store and immediately forget all 27 albums you’re trying to find.
“Hell,” she said, “you can punch me all you want.”
I thought about this for a minute; it was a lucid dream, after all. And if Sally said it didn’t hurt…
“Really? I mean, you won’t be like, mad at me or anything? This is all very strange, and I’m just sort of curious, and you know how society says you can’t hit women, and I know you dumped me because I couldn’t get it up, but this isn't about revenge or anything, and it’s like how sex and violence are sort of in the same…”
“Shut. Up. Honey, I’m dead. What matters is how you feel about it. Let’s see what you’ve got. C’mon – give it to me.”
I scooted back a little and studied Sally’s face. She looked the same as she had ten years ago – sort of an oval head, dimply face, too much make-up, blond hair that looked black, because of some stringy, almost Hassidic-looking black curls spiraling from the brim of her religious-looking headpiece. Her eyes were still perfect, though. She sat cross-legged, facing me. She wore a black blouse and a short, black skirt. She was a little plump, but in a rather adorable way, in spite of her varicose veins, which were still present and accounted for. She was smiling. She looked great, honestly – better than she had when we first started dating and were so in love with one another. I threw my fist into her cheekbone and felt ten-thousand tiny bones snapping between my fingers; it sounded like I’d just punched a bag full of Corn Flakes. Disbelief and horror had never been so delightful. I shuddered involuntarily and cracked a huge grin.
“That was so Awesome and weird!” I shouted. My voice boomed light-years into the darkness. I pulled my fist away. Oh, but her mouth was a disaster! She began spitting out teeth, blood trickling through the gaps and onto her thighs. She chewed up some of her broken, bloody teeth and swallowed them like chips and salsa. Then she started laughing.”
“See?” she said, coughing up the shards of teeth she’d just swallowed, “I’m fine!”
“But you look…”
“Close your eyes.”
I did as I was told.
“Now open them.”
She looked just as she had before I smashed her face open. What a fucked up dream; I wanted to know more.
“So, um,” I said, “this isn’t real…I know I’m just dreaming this…but while I have you here, what’s up with you killing yourself? I mean, what did I do?”
Sally laughed, fanning herself with a restaurant menu she was suddenly holding for some reason.
“Oh, you,” she said, “you’re so fucking narcissistic. You think this has to do with the fact that you couldn’t get it up, don’t you?”
Aw, man, I wasn’t expecting this, I thought. I just wanted to punch her in the face some more, blink, and do it again, though only because it was fun and satisfying – not because I was mad at her, or anything.
“What’s that,” she said, “you wanna punch me some more?”
“What? How’d you…”
“I can read minds, travel to people’s dreams, boast shocking resilience – you can do a lot when you’re dead, honey.”
“No,” I said, “That’s so…strange. No, I mean, I’m just curious. Why did you kill yourself?”
“You don’t even care about why I killed myself! Well, you do, but only if it relates to you and your dick – your dick that you fought with like a water hose in my bathroom, wasting all your jizz on my linoleum, not on me; your dick that you’re trying to pawn off on poor old Lance…”
“No!” I interrupted, “I called the whole thing off! I can’t let Lance live with my pain! Can’t I just stay with you? I mean…I still love you!”
“No you don’t, and no you can’t. Besides, Lance has a dick of his own, dear. Believe me.”
“This is so...yeah, I know you and Lance, whatever, after we broke up, but I don’t care…”
“Don’t you want to know about how big Lance’s dick is? How it plowed through me? How every time his heart beat, his vein would throb against my clitoris as I dug my fingernails into his back? Don’t you want to hear about how he didn’t even look me in the eyes? How he buried his face in the pillow you left on my bed after I left you, screaming into it?”
“What? Why are you…”
“Having seventeen orgasms in twenty minutes was probably the last great feeling I ever…”
“Stop it. Just…shut up!” I craned my neck, looking for an exit. Only black and white surrounded us.
“Look,” she continued, “I knew from a very young age that I was going to kill myself. It’s just…I don’t know. Intuition, I suppose.”
“How could you know something like that,” I said, “I could maybe see like bi-curiosity starting early on, but you really knew you were going to kill yourself? That’s insane!”
“Well, I mean, we’re all going to die, anyway, right? Why not expedite the process a little?”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Then why are you selling your dick to Lance for $237.00?”
“I’m not! I already told you – the deal is off! He’s just on the phone, talking to some guy named Preston right now.”
“Who?”
“I dunno – some guy; one of his role-playing dork friends. Sally, look – I’m obviously dreaming, or having one of those gnarly American Indian mystical journeys right now, but I’m finished. I’ve learned my lesson, or whatever.”
“You want to go back to your impotent world where you date girls until they fatten up, so you can leave them to blow their brains out alone in a government subsidized apartment? You haven't learned shit.”
“Hey! You’re the one who claims that your suicide was predetermined – you can’t renege like that.”
“Well, if you haven’t noticed, logic really holds no ground after death, but I’ll let you have this one. But I really did love you.”
“Then why did you dump me? Why did you leave me hanging, while you boned my best friend in some ridiculous…whatever?
“So you do care.”
“Yeah? So?”
“See, was that really so hard?”
“I…well, yeah, I mean, I guess it took me ten years and I had to bust your face open, but…I guess I was just, I dunno, jealous that you got here first. That’s why I said that I didn’t care.”
“Look – like I said, I knew from a very young age that I was going to kill myself. Just because your stupid dick is broken doesn’t mean you should."
"What makes you think that I'm suicidal?"
"You just said that you were jealous that I got here first."
"Oh, man...I mean, it's not that I'm suicidal...it's just that I worry all the time that everything in life will become so grueling that I'll eventually become suicidal. It's like I have a fear of suicide, if that makes any sense."
"Then do something - make yourself busy. Hell, go marry a nice girl, adopt a child, and please just shut the fuck up about how miserable you are. I’ll be honest – I felt bad for even dragging you into my existential crisis in the first place. But I belong here. Sure, Dad beats my face in every now and then, but it makes him happy. I was born to be a martyr – just not in the world you live in and the one I chose to leave.”
“Wow. This is all a lot to swallow.”
“I know, honey – and I choked on it. Doesn’t mean you have to, though.”
She smiled at me. I felt warm. I grabbed her by the back of her headpiece and kissed her on the lips. She kissed back, tasting like fruit punch and cheesecake for some reason. I tried to nibble on her under bite to see if he teeth tasted as good as she seemed to think earlier, but she laughed into my mouth and pushed me away.
“No, no,” she said, “that’s enough. The more you live, the more I’ll love you when you come to my world.”
“Yeah, but what if I live to be like 95, and I’m all wrinkly and gross and full of veins?”
I held up my wrists and cringed. Sally chuckled. She lifted her leg and lay it across my lap. She took my wrist in her hands and stroked them with her fingernails.
“Then I’ll play your veins like a violin, and you can play mine like the bagpipes.”
I squeezed her right thigh and closed my eyes, moving my fingers over her veins like brail. I smiled.
“Besides, how do you know you aren’t dead?”
“Huh?”
I opened my eyes and Lance was still on the phone.
“How do you know you aren’t dead, Preston?” he asked.
I rubbed my eyes and looked up at Lance, who jostled me with his work boot, screwed up his face into a twisted smile and threw up his free hand in that “what the fuck are you doing?” sort of way. I looked down. I was squeezing my right thigh, massaging a tremendous lump growing beneath my hands and under my jeans.
“No dude,” he said into the phone, “If there’s a skull floating above your guy’s portrait, it means he’s dead, not poisoned…yeah…no, if your dude’s poisoned, then he has like, a little beaker of purple juice with steam coming out of it…yeah, I don’t know why they changed it in the sequel, either. It's little inconsistencies like that that make ChumSoft such a lousy software developer. Look man, I gotta cut out; my best friend just got a boner. Ye…yeah, I know, it’s not as weird as it sounds, though. Look – I’ll tell you about it later. All right man – peace.”
Lance slapped his flip-phone shut.
“Man,” he said, “Preston doesn’t know shit about RPGs; fucking idiot.” He looked down at me, cheesing like a creep. “Well, well, well – look who’s got Bugs Bunny digging through his jeans!”
“Huh-huh!” I chuckled stupidly. “Man, wait till you hear this dream I had.”
“Dude, I don’t even wanna know. Actually, you know what? Fuck it – I’ve got $220.00 cash. Whadaya say fuck the gas bill and two dicks go out to dinner and talk about dreams, huh?”
Lance reached out his hand. I slapped it, held on tight, and he pulled me to my feet.
“You sure about this?” he asked, punching his PIN number into an ATM machine.
“Yeah,” I said, “I mean, I really don’t use it that much anymore, and whenever I do, I just get depressed afterwards.”
“Huh. What about…I dunno…like peeing, or whatever?”
“I’ll just sit down to do it. Like a girl, I guess.”
“Yeah you will, girl. No, but I mean, how will you actually pee without a…um…dickhole?”
“I dunno. I’m sure there’s gonna be a big hole in my pubes, so I’ll probably just pee out of that. Sort of like a hot water faucet turned on all the way.
“Haha. Gross. Hey – can I just give you $200.00? It only lets me take money out in multiples of like…I dunno – $20, $40, $80…up through $500...you see what I mean?”
I peeked over his shoulder and saw what he meant.
“Um,” I said, “can you like take out $200.00, put your card back in after it ejects and then take out $20.00? I’ll sell it to you for $220.00, I guess. My gas bill is only $208.93, or something, but I was hoping to have a nice dinner tonight. You know…just ‘cause it’ll be my last night with my dick, or whatever.”
“Sorta like the Last Supper?”
“Um…yeah, I guess.”
“You gonna go, like, jerk off in the bathroom before dessert, or anything like that?”
“Nah – I’m sick of it. Sick of coming.”
"What?"
"I'm sick of coming; I don't like to do it anymore."
“What the hell is wrong with you? Are you suicidal? Coming is like…I dunno…life’s perpetual manifestation, or something.”
“Yeah, but I mean…it’s like, you know that one Bill Hicks stand-up where he talks about how every payload has like 200,000,000 sperm in it? I dunno. It’s sort of depressing to watch all those lives splatter down the drain, or drown in the tip of a condom. Sort of makes sense why Catholics don’t allow contraception, in a way.”
“Well, sperm isn’t really alive, unless you wanna get all metaphorical, or whatever. So you’re trying to knock a girl up, then? Is that it? Who? Still can’t get over Sally, huh?”
“What? Sally and I broke up ten years ago and she’s dead! Are you an idiot? Besides, I didn’t give a shit when she died, and I don’t give a shit now.”
“Wow, you’re thoughtful. I’m just saying, man – that’s how it is in the movies. There’s always some ex-girlfriend stuff going on.”
“Yeah, but not a dead and cremated ex-girlfriend. What am I gonna do, go the Appalachian trail, where her ashes were spread and randomly stick my dick in the mud and hope that some flowers pop up? Hell, you’re the one who was waiting for us to break up, anyway, so take it – buy my dick, stud. I’ll give it to you after we eat dinner, er, after I eat dinner…you know what I mean.”
“Man, Sally and me wasn’t even about…it was only one time and…whatever. Are you sure you wanna do this?”
“Man – yeah, I wanna do this. $220.00; that’s my final offer. I hate to charge you, but like I said – gotta pay the gas bill.”
Lance shrugged, flicked the ATM’s touch screen, said “ow – fuckin’ fingernail,” shook his finger a little, and the machine whirred and clicked and shuffled and spat out ten twenty-dollar bills with tattered edges. Lance yanked the wad from the slot and stuffed it into his back pocket. He pulled his card out and pushed it back in, beginning the diminutive transaction.
I rubbed my jeans and found my slug tucked away, squishing against my inseam. One of those abhorrent montages began Power Pointing in my head as I petted my phallus during our final moments together – the first time I ever saw my own jizz, spurting and dripping from my urethra like freshly decorked champagne; the first time Lance and I confided in being members of the Secret Society of Jerking Off with Alarming Regularity; the first time I fantasized about Mindy Hurst – freshman class president – bent over the filing cabinet in my dad’s study, screaming in delight as I pulled her hair back with one hand, choked her with the other, and shook with unguarded joy as I filled her warm, soft guts with magical plasma – with civilizations of myself – while the football team stood watching and cheering me on over by the bookshelf, lifting up their shirts to reveal the letters of my name spray-painted on their torsos; the first time I ever thought about David Mann, captain of the football team, his dick massive and throbbing violently in both of my hands like a sump pump; the first time it actually happened with Mindy Hurst, and how it wasn’t what I had expected; the first time I left the condom in its wrapper on Sally’s night stand and Trojan Horsed into her world, deploying my men in a fiery coup d'état; when I began to resent Sally when she stopped eating birth control pills once a day and started eating McDonalds twice a day, varicose veins forming in pockets on her thighs like relief maps; the first time I left the dinner sofa during the middle of Seinfeld and tramped into Sally’s bathroom, popping a button off my button-fly jeans as I tore them open, brandishing my flimsy noodle and fighting with it desperately, trying to think about anything, anything! – Sally’s friends, Sally’s sisters, Sally’s parents, bagels, Napa Valley, post-structuralism, the kitten from those “Hang in There” posters; the first time I broke up with Sally because I was bored; the last time Sally broke up with me because I could no longer perform; the first time I heard that Sally blew her head into a thousand fucking pieces with her dad’s twelve gauge, and that I didn’t even care.
“The deal’s off,” I announced.
Lance turned around, holding up a twenty dollar note. “Huh?”
“Trust me – you don’t want what I’ve got. I’ve known you for years, and…man, I can’t even get it up anymore. I honestly haven’t had an erection in like, six months. I don’t wanna sell you a lemon.”
“Dude,” Lance said, “I don’t even believe you. That’s bullshit. Man, you’ve just gotta stop beating yourself up and...wait, hold on, I’ve gotta take this – hello? Hey, what up, Preston? What’s the matter, you stuck on Dragoncastle again, you fuckin’ dork?”
Lance wandered off with his cell phone sandwiched between his shoulder and his ear, talking loudly to someone called Preston, apparently. I took a seat against the ATM machine and flicked my dick listlessly through my jeans. I closed my eyes tight.
When I opened them, I saw Sally sitting in a gazebo that looked sort of like a giant chocolate cupcake outlined with vanilla frosting, surrounded by night sky – like 3:00 AM-caliber darkness with no light pollution. Sleet fell like darts, sticking into the surrounding grass and breaking onto a cobblestone path in musical little clinks and clanks. The cobblestone path was black and white and led to the gazebo. In fact, pretty much everything was black and white, except for Sally’s face, which was bleeding severe red – from the eyes and the ears and the nose and perhaps from some other orifice that had been poked or shot into her. I gasped for air and got a mouthful of sleet. I spit the needles of sleet onto the cobblestones and approached the Gazebo. Sally’s hulking father, who I hadn’t noticed until now, freight-trained down the cobblestone path, wearing a black and white plaid lumberjack shirt, which was tucked into white Wranglers, which were tucked into black SWAT team boots, which crumbled cobblestones beneath them. I acquiesced off to one side and his shoulder still plowed into me, knocking me to the ground. I expected to take a kick to the ribcage, but the sound of his footsteps faded away behind me.
“Hey,” I heard Sally say, “Come here. Please.”
I stood up, wiped off my shirtsleeves and shook it off, as they say. I composed myself and walked carefully over to Sally to get a better look at her. Her wounds had vanished and she had some bizarre, religious-looking headpiece on. Like a nun’s, but not really. I took four steps up the marble staircase of the gazebo and sat down next to her on the white marble bench.
“What happened to your face?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it was all bloody and gross before. Now it’s fine.”
“Oh, that. Yeah, my dad beats the shit out of me sometimes. I’m dead, though, so it doesn’t hurt – plus it heals quickly.”
“But doesn’t that bother you?”
She just smiled and laughed. It started to occur to me that I was in one of those dreams in which one can control his actions – a lucid dream, I believe they’re called. I had so much to ask Sally, but I couldn’t think of a single question; it’s like when you walk into a record store and immediately forget all 27 albums you’re trying to find.
“Hell,” she said, “you can punch me all you want.”
I thought about this for a minute; it was a lucid dream, after all. And if Sally said it didn’t hurt…
“Really? I mean, you won’t be like, mad at me or anything? This is all very strange, and I’m just sort of curious, and you know how society says you can’t hit women, and I know you dumped me because I couldn’t get it up, but this isn't about revenge or anything, and it’s like how sex and violence are sort of in the same…”
“Shut. Up. Honey, I’m dead. What matters is how you feel about it. Let’s see what you’ve got. C’mon – give it to me.”
I scooted back a little and studied Sally’s face. She looked the same as she had ten years ago – sort of an oval head, dimply face, too much make-up, blond hair that looked black, because of some stringy, almost Hassidic-looking black curls spiraling from the brim of her religious-looking headpiece. Her eyes were still perfect, though. She sat cross-legged, facing me. She wore a black blouse and a short, black skirt. She was a little plump, but in a rather adorable way, in spite of her varicose veins, which were still present and accounted for. She was smiling. She looked great, honestly – better than she had when we first started dating and were so in love with one another. I threw my fist into her cheekbone and felt ten-thousand tiny bones snapping between my fingers; it sounded like I’d just punched a bag full of Corn Flakes. Disbelief and horror had never been so delightful. I shuddered involuntarily and cracked a huge grin.
“That was so Awesome and weird!” I shouted. My voice boomed light-years into the darkness. I pulled my fist away. Oh, but her mouth was a disaster! She began spitting out teeth, blood trickling through the gaps and onto her thighs. She chewed up some of her broken, bloody teeth and swallowed them like chips and salsa. Then she started laughing.”
“See?” she said, coughing up the shards of teeth she’d just swallowed, “I’m fine!”
“But you look…”
“Close your eyes.”
I did as I was told.
“Now open them.”
She looked just as she had before I smashed her face open. What a fucked up dream; I wanted to know more.
“So, um,” I said, “this isn’t real…I know I’m just dreaming this…but while I have you here, what’s up with you killing yourself? I mean, what did I do?”
Sally laughed, fanning herself with a restaurant menu she was suddenly holding for some reason.
“Oh, you,” she said, “you’re so fucking narcissistic. You think this has to do with the fact that you couldn’t get it up, don’t you?”
Aw, man, I wasn’t expecting this, I thought. I just wanted to punch her in the face some more, blink, and do it again, though only because it was fun and satisfying – not because I was mad at her, or anything.
“What’s that,” she said, “you wanna punch me some more?”
“What? How’d you…”
“I can read minds, travel to people’s dreams, boast shocking resilience – you can do a lot when you’re dead, honey.”
“No,” I said, “That’s so…strange. No, I mean, I’m just curious. Why did you kill yourself?”
“You don’t even care about why I killed myself! Well, you do, but only if it relates to you and your dick – your dick that you fought with like a water hose in my bathroom, wasting all your jizz on my linoleum, not on me; your dick that you’re trying to pawn off on poor old Lance…”
“No!” I interrupted, “I called the whole thing off! I can’t let Lance live with my pain! Can’t I just stay with you? I mean…I still love you!”
“No you don’t, and no you can’t. Besides, Lance has a dick of his own, dear. Believe me.”
“This is so...yeah, I know you and Lance, whatever, after we broke up, but I don’t care…”
“Don’t you want to know about how big Lance’s dick is? How it plowed through me? How every time his heart beat, his vein would throb against my clitoris as I dug my fingernails into his back? Don’t you want to hear about how he didn’t even look me in the eyes? How he buried his face in the pillow you left on my bed after I left you, screaming into it?”
“What? Why are you…”
“Having seventeen orgasms in twenty minutes was probably the last great feeling I ever…”
“Stop it. Just…shut up!” I craned my neck, looking for an exit. Only black and white surrounded us.
“Look,” she continued, “I knew from a very young age that I was going to kill myself. It’s just…I don’t know. Intuition, I suppose.”
“How could you know something like that,” I said, “I could maybe see like bi-curiosity starting early on, but you really knew you were going to kill yourself? That’s insane!”
“Well, I mean, we’re all going to die, anyway, right? Why not expedite the process a little?”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Then why are you selling your dick to Lance for $237.00?”
“I’m not! I already told you – the deal is off! He’s just on the phone, talking to some guy named Preston right now.”
“Who?”
“I dunno – some guy; one of his role-playing dork friends. Sally, look – I’m obviously dreaming, or having one of those gnarly American Indian mystical journeys right now, but I’m finished. I’ve learned my lesson, or whatever.”
“You want to go back to your impotent world where you date girls until they fatten up, so you can leave them to blow their brains out alone in a government subsidized apartment? You haven't learned shit.”
“Hey! You’re the one who claims that your suicide was predetermined – you can’t renege like that.”
“Well, if you haven’t noticed, logic really holds no ground after death, but I’ll let you have this one. But I really did love you.”
“Then why did you dump me? Why did you leave me hanging, while you boned my best friend in some ridiculous…whatever?
“So you do care.”
“Yeah? So?”
“See, was that really so hard?”
“I…well, yeah, I mean, I guess it took me ten years and I had to bust your face open, but…I guess I was just, I dunno, jealous that you got here first. That’s why I said that I didn’t care.”
“Look – like I said, I knew from a very young age that I was going to kill myself. Just because your stupid dick is broken doesn’t mean you should."
"What makes you think that I'm suicidal?"
"You just said that you were jealous that I got here first."
"Oh, man...I mean, it's not that I'm suicidal...it's just that I worry all the time that everything in life will become so grueling that I'll eventually become suicidal. It's like I have a fear of suicide, if that makes any sense."
"Then do something - make yourself busy. Hell, go marry a nice girl, adopt a child, and please just shut the fuck up about how miserable you are. I’ll be honest – I felt bad for even dragging you into my existential crisis in the first place. But I belong here. Sure, Dad beats my face in every now and then, but it makes him happy. I was born to be a martyr – just not in the world you live in and the one I chose to leave.”
“Wow. This is all a lot to swallow.”
“I know, honey – and I choked on it. Doesn’t mean you have to, though.”
She smiled at me. I felt warm. I grabbed her by the back of her headpiece and kissed her on the lips. She kissed back, tasting like fruit punch and cheesecake for some reason. I tried to nibble on her under bite to see if he teeth tasted as good as she seemed to think earlier, but she laughed into my mouth and pushed me away.
“No, no,” she said, “that’s enough. The more you live, the more I’ll love you when you come to my world.”
“Yeah, but what if I live to be like 95, and I’m all wrinkly and gross and full of veins?”
I held up my wrists and cringed. Sally chuckled. She lifted her leg and lay it across my lap. She took my wrist in her hands and stroked them with her fingernails.
“Then I’ll play your veins like a violin, and you can play mine like the bagpipes.”
I squeezed her right thigh and closed my eyes, moving my fingers over her veins like brail. I smiled.
“Besides, how do you know you aren’t dead?”
“Huh?”
I opened my eyes and Lance was still on the phone.
“How do you know you aren’t dead, Preston?” he asked.
I rubbed my eyes and looked up at Lance, who jostled me with his work boot, screwed up his face into a twisted smile and threw up his free hand in that “what the fuck are you doing?” sort of way. I looked down. I was squeezing my right thigh, massaging a tremendous lump growing beneath my hands and under my jeans.
“No dude,” he said into the phone, “If there’s a skull floating above your guy’s portrait, it means he’s dead, not poisoned…yeah…no, if your dude’s poisoned, then he has like, a little beaker of purple juice with steam coming out of it…yeah, I don’t know why they changed it in the sequel, either. It's little inconsistencies like that that make ChumSoft such a lousy software developer. Look man, I gotta cut out; my best friend just got a boner. Ye…yeah, I know, it’s not as weird as it sounds, though. Look – I’ll tell you about it later. All right man – peace.”
Lance slapped his flip-phone shut.
“Man,” he said, “Preston doesn’t know shit about RPGs; fucking idiot.” He looked down at me, cheesing like a creep. “Well, well, well – look who’s got Bugs Bunny digging through his jeans!”
“Huh-huh!” I chuckled stupidly. “Man, wait till you hear this dream I had.”
“Dude, I don’t even wanna know. Actually, you know what? Fuck it – I’ve got $220.00 cash. Whadaya say fuck the gas bill and two dicks go out to dinner and talk about dreams, huh?”
Lance reached out his hand. I slapped it, held on tight, and he pulled me to my feet.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Ode to Dustyn
Having Dustyn as a roommate is sort of like having a rooster, except rather than cock-a-doodle-dooing in the morning, Dustyn hawks loogies when he wakes up in the afternoon – tremendous loogies which shake the house and have probably shown up on the Richter Scale. Breathing in through his nose to gather phlegm and snot – a noise akin to that of trucks downshifting on the highway – he will hawk and spit into the toilet while peeing with the door open in his underwear.
Dustyn is Native American, so he’s beige, hairy and has scholarships. He’s lived in Oklahoma, Missouri and Indiana so far. He wears glasses which make one think of Easy Rider-era Peter Fonda. I’m pretty sure he has a mustache. Hold on – let me go check…yeah, he does. He also has this weird anti-dandruff shampoo in the shower that smells like Tire Barn and doesn’t work. The majority of my female friends have a crush on him. Little black kids think he’s the ugliest person they’ve ever seen – at least according to two, whose proclamation Dustyn overheard while biking back from school last year. He knows how to cook remarkably good ramen noodles.
“I don’t mean to brag, or anything,” he said one evening, slurping his noodles loudly, “but my noodles are the fuckin’ shit.” He doesn’t even use the powder.
You always know when Dustyn is around because he has a tendency to stomp, rather than walk. While other roommates, such as Austin, modestly fight gravity and either tip-toe or delegate their weight to other parts of the body in an effort to soften their footsteps, Dustyn makes no attempt to conceal the fact that he’s present and accounted for. Sometimes when he’s stampeding down the stairs in the early afternoon he will hawk post-awakening loogies, (or aftershocks, if you will) either opening the front door and spitting into the bushes surrounding our porch, or spitting into whatever trashcan happens to be in close range. Sometimes he’ll sing, too. The Sisters of Mercy’s “Black Planet” was a big hit during fall of 2007, for example. After making coffee and telling me to go buy weed for him, he’ll ask if I’ve eaten yet, and where I want to go. When I first moved in with Dustyn, I felt as though he was using me for my car, since he doesn’t own one. But as time wore on, it became more apparent that he was using me for companionship – to vent about an irritating and condescending teacher; to ask who in the fuck I brought home last night; to just talk jibberish all afternoon – and that’s perfectly fine with me. I believe our record of nonstop jibberish clocks in at around four hours. I even gave him an extra copy of my car key that I have for some reason. He’s using it now to go get cigarettes.
Aside from going to Herron, eating out, using my car to go get cigarettes and staying with Erin, his girlfriend, Dustyn rarely leaves the house. The first thing I noticed about his domesticity is the fact that there are always blankets and pillows in the living room, and this dates back to a time when I hardly knew him, but would find myself, by happenstance, in whatever house or apartment he resided.
“I’m cold,” he said the other day, when it was like 70 degrees in the room. But the blankets aren’t just for Dustyn – they’re also for his friends, for those who sleep over, or for those who happen to find themselves incapable of finding their way up to their bedrooms. There’s even a spare mattress leaning against the wall in the living room, which he brought down for some drunk and aloof guests sometime last year. I can’t even count how many times Dustyn has tucked me into the couch.
“Need anything else?” he’ll ask.
“Did you guys just wake up? You look like shit,” Dustyn pointed out to friends Adam and Krystal, as they staggered toward us last Sunday, ironing their jeans with their hands and squinting in the sunlight. About four of us were strewn about the outside seating of Peppy Grill, this terribly awesome, dive-y breakfast food-oriented restaurant located a ten-fifteen minute bike-ride from our house. Dustyn is always the funniest, most observant person in the group, Peppy or otherwise. He generated about 85% of the laughter from out table while we ordered, waited, talked, smoked, and ate our way through Sunday Brunch. Our friend Bechtel disappeared for like fifteen minutes to take a shit, as he alleged, but I guarantee that he was laughing as hard as he could at Dustyn’s shrewd eye and sharp tongue; I think I heard him while I waited in line.
Dustyn was ranked 26 in Halo 3 last time I checked. That means he’s exceptionally good, in case you were wondering. His online name is DUSTY DIRTWEED. He listens to Coast to Coast while he plays at night and makes farting noises with his mouth at George Noorey’s guests, while they claim to be psychic, divine, probed by extraterrestrials, et al. Although he seems to be genuinely interested in the bizarre, intangible energy we seem to be faced with in these days – what will happen in 2012; why are there cults; are we really fucked, or is it just fear – he’s still one of the most driven people I’ve met in my entire life.
Dustyn is a printmaker. His prints consist of pop-culture references, pot smoke, upper-case letters, feathers, explosions, large, sensitive-looking people, guys on motorcycles, and anything else you talk about while he works on them. He mixes the absurd with the real. His prints are everywhere – not just in our house, but in our friend Brent’s house; in Hai Yang’s apartment; in houses and apartments of people I barely know. One of the first prints he ever gave me was a super-sized drawing of Scottie Pippen, of Chicago Bulls fame, getting a cheeseburger slam-dunked into his mouth by a tiny, anonymous player. I taped the print to the outside of my bedroom door when I lived in Chile, and although I’m not entirely sure whether or not my Chilean friends quite understood the pop culture references, they loved it, nonetheless. Dustyn doesn’t wear clothing with prints or graphics on them, however. He hasn’t explained why this is, but it may be related to why Boyz II Men’s favorite band is Metallica, why doctors smoke, or why world-class chefs sometimes eat and thoroughly enjoy fast food. He owns prescription sunglasses, which he wears on particularly sunny days; he’ll also wear them in restaurants, Kroger and the gas station, as he leaves his Peter Fonda glasses at home when he steps out in his sunscripts. Although people who wear sunglasses indoors are usually cops, rapists and/or all-around assholes, Dustyn gets away with it. After all, the glasses were prescribed to him. Dustyn used to wear women’s jeans, but he found some website which ships him Levi 511’s, or 509’s, or whatever the skinniest male cut is. His shoes range from slip-on to water-resistant to whatever his best friend William left us when he moved to San Francisco. He has several coats, including a green Desert Storm-era camouflage number with no pockets, which is allegedly supposed to obscure its wearer from enemies during sandstorms; a poofy, magenta Arctic lab coat which looks like “homeless people clothing,” according to someone – quite possibly Dustyn; and a standard pea coat, with anchors on the buttons, lapels falling to the knees, etc.
Whenever Dustyn finds something to be particularly absurd, obvious, ironic, or bothersome, he will cross his eyes in the northernmost corners of his sockets – by the bridge of his nose – protrude his upper-lip and utter a noise which is difficult to spell out phonetically, but “dyurrrrr” comes to mind. He sometimes inflects upward or downward, depending on the severity of the circumstance; upward usually suggests the banal; downward perhaps a little more difficult to cope with, such as having to clean up after someone, or work on an irritating school assignment. Sometimes he will grab his invisible boner and pretend to masturbate in a comical and unrealistically expeditious way, suggesting that whatever instance has elicited this reaction is so ridiculous that the only way to illustrate it is to get oneself off. This pushes irony to its limits and points out that as detached we may be to whatever trivial matter we putty in our hands, we are prone to it all the same – confronting absurdity with reality. I have actually stolen Dustyn’s cross-eyed lip-protrusion, but I can’t do it as well as he can, even when I practice in the mirror.
Dustyn graduates from Herron in May and will probably need to rent a freight train in order to move all the prints, posters, paintings and t-shirt designs he’s squeezed into his portfolio. Not to mention the blankets, pillows, bottles of Tire Barn shampoo, blank t-shirts, skinny jeans, military-and-extreme-weather-oriented coats and the bricks of ramen he will boil, season, and delight his new Californian friends with. I’m not sure whether or not we’ll find ourselves sharing rent and utilities again, but I’ll always smile whenever a tremor purrs along the San Andreas fault line in the afternoon.
Dustyn is Native American, so he’s beige, hairy and has scholarships. He’s lived in Oklahoma, Missouri and Indiana so far. He wears glasses which make one think of Easy Rider-era Peter Fonda. I’m pretty sure he has a mustache. Hold on – let me go check…yeah, he does. He also has this weird anti-dandruff shampoo in the shower that smells like Tire Barn and doesn’t work. The majority of my female friends have a crush on him. Little black kids think he’s the ugliest person they’ve ever seen – at least according to two, whose proclamation Dustyn overheard while biking back from school last year. He knows how to cook remarkably good ramen noodles.
“I don’t mean to brag, or anything,” he said one evening, slurping his noodles loudly, “but my noodles are the fuckin’ shit.” He doesn’t even use the powder.
You always know when Dustyn is around because he has a tendency to stomp, rather than walk. While other roommates, such as Austin, modestly fight gravity and either tip-toe or delegate their weight to other parts of the body in an effort to soften their footsteps, Dustyn makes no attempt to conceal the fact that he’s present and accounted for. Sometimes when he’s stampeding down the stairs in the early afternoon he will hawk post-awakening loogies, (or aftershocks, if you will) either opening the front door and spitting into the bushes surrounding our porch, or spitting into whatever trashcan happens to be in close range. Sometimes he’ll sing, too. The Sisters of Mercy’s “Black Planet” was a big hit during fall of 2007, for example. After making coffee and telling me to go buy weed for him, he’ll ask if I’ve eaten yet, and where I want to go. When I first moved in with Dustyn, I felt as though he was using me for my car, since he doesn’t own one. But as time wore on, it became more apparent that he was using me for companionship – to vent about an irritating and condescending teacher; to ask who in the fuck I brought home last night; to just talk jibberish all afternoon – and that’s perfectly fine with me. I believe our record of nonstop jibberish clocks in at around four hours. I even gave him an extra copy of my car key that I have for some reason. He’s using it now to go get cigarettes.
Aside from going to Herron, eating out, using my car to go get cigarettes and staying with Erin, his girlfriend, Dustyn rarely leaves the house. The first thing I noticed about his domesticity is the fact that there are always blankets and pillows in the living room, and this dates back to a time when I hardly knew him, but would find myself, by happenstance, in whatever house or apartment he resided.
“I’m cold,” he said the other day, when it was like 70 degrees in the room. But the blankets aren’t just for Dustyn – they’re also for his friends, for those who sleep over, or for those who happen to find themselves incapable of finding their way up to their bedrooms. There’s even a spare mattress leaning against the wall in the living room, which he brought down for some drunk and aloof guests sometime last year. I can’t even count how many times Dustyn has tucked me into the couch.
“Need anything else?” he’ll ask.
“Did you guys just wake up? You look like shit,” Dustyn pointed out to friends Adam and Krystal, as they staggered toward us last Sunday, ironing their jeans with their hands and squinting in the sunlight. About four of us were strewn about the outside seating of Peppy Grill, this terribly awesome, dive-y breakfast food-oriented restaurant located a ten-fifteen minute bike-ride from our house. Dustyn is always the funniest, most observant person in the group, Peppy or otherwise. He generated about 85% of the laughter from out table while we ordered, waited, talked, smoked, and ate our way through Sunday Brunch. Our friend Bechtel disappeared for like fifteen minutes to take a shit, as he alleged, but I guarantee that he was laughing as hard as he could at Dustyn’s shrewd eye and sharp tongue; I think I heard him while I waited in line.
Dustyn was ranked 26 in Halo 3 last time I checked. That means he’s exceptionally good, in case you were wondering. His online name is DUSTY DIRTWEED. He listens to Coast to Coast while he plays at night and makes farting noises with his mouth at George Noorey’s guests, while they claim to be psychic, divine, probed by extraterrestrials, et al. Although he seems to be genuinely interested in the bizarre, intangible energy we seem to be faced with in these days – what will happen in 2012; why are there cults; are we really fucked, or is it just fear – he’s still one of the most driven people I’ve met in my entire life.
Dustyn is a printmaker. His prints consist of pop-culture references, pot smoke, upper-case letters, feathers, explosions, large, sensitive-looking people, guys on motorcycles, and anything else you talk about while he works on them. He mixes the absurd with the real. His prints are everywhere – not just in our house, but in our friend Brent’s house; in Hai Yang’s apartment; in houses and apartments of people I barely know. One of the first prints he ever gave me was a super-sized drawing of Scottie Pippen, of Chicago Bulls fame, getting a cheeseburger slam-dunked into his mouth by a tiny, anonymous player. I taped the print to the outside of my bedroom door when I lived in Chile, and although I’m not entirely sure whether or not my Chilean friends quite understood the pop culture references, they loved it, nonetheless. Dustyn doesn’t wear clothing with prints or graphics on them, however. He hasn’t explained why this is, but it may be related to why Boyz II Men’s favorite band is Metallica, why doctors smoke, or why world-class chefs sometimes eat and thoroughly enjoy fast food. He owns prescription sunglasses, which he wears on particularly sunny days; he’ll also wear them in restaurants, Kroger and the gas station, as he leaves his Peter Fonda glasses at home when he steps out in his sunscripts. Although people who wear sunglasses indoors are usually cops, rapists and/or all-around assholes, Dustyn gets away with it. After all, the glasses were prescribed to him. Dustyn used to wear women’s jeans, but he found some website which ships him Levi 511’s, or 509’s, or whatever the skinniest male cut is. His shoes range from slip-on to water-resistant to whatever his best friend William left us when he moved to San Francisco. He has several coats, including a green Desert Storm-era camouflage number with no pockets, which is allegedly supposed to obscure its wearer from enemies during sandstorms; a poofy, magenta Arctic lab coat which looks like “homeless people clothing,” according to someone – quite possibly Dustyn; and a standard pea coat, with anchors on the buttons, lapels falling to the knees, etc.
Whenever Dustyn finds something to be particularly absurd, obvious, ironic, or bothersome, he will cross his eyes in the northernmost corners of his sockets – by the bridge of his nose – protrude his upper-lip and utter a noise which is difficult to spell out phonetically, but “dyurrrrr” comes to mind. He sometimes inflects upward or downward, depending on the severity of the circumstance; upward usually suggests the banal; downward perhaps a little more difficult to cope with, such as having to clean up after someone, or work on an irritating school assignment. Sometimes he will grab his invisible boner and pretend to masturbate in a comical and unrealistically expeditious way, suggesting that whatever instance has elicited this reaction is so ridiculous that the only way to illustrate it is to get oneself off. This pushes irony to its limits and points out that as detached we may be to whatever trivial matter we putty in our hands, we are prone to it all the same – confronting absurdity with reality. I have actually stolen Dustyn’s cross-eyed lip-protrusion, but I can’t do it as well as he can, even when I practice in the mirror.
Dustyn graduates from Herron in May and will probably need to rent a freight train in order to move all the prints, posters, paintings and t-shirt designs he’s squeezed into his portfolio. Not to mention the blankets, pillows, bottles of Tire Barn shampoo, blank t-shirts, skinny jeans, military-and-extreme-weather-oriented coats and the bricks of ramen he will boil, season, and delight his new Californian friends with. I’m not sure whether or not we’ll find ourselves sharing rent and utilities again, but I’ll always smile whenever a tremor purrs along the San Andreas fault line in the afternoon.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Fortress
I woke up around 12:30 PM in a closet. Andrea snored and sweated next to me. Shirts, pants, bras, coats, luggage, shawls lay haphazardly across us – unnecessary blankets for a hot New Year’s Eve in Valparaiso, Chile. I massaged the bridge of my nose with my thumb and forefinger, rolling sleep-crust out of the corner of one of my eyes. I flicked the crust on my duffel bag and Andrea farted. I stood up and bumped my head on something.
“Ow,” I said. Andrea muttered something incomprehensible.
“Huh?”
“It’s so hot,” she said, “I couldn’t sleep at all.”
I blinked a few times, scratched my head and shuddered involuntarily.
“Why are we in a closet, by the way?” I asked.
“It’s the only comfortable spot Stefan said was open for us to sleep. Don’t you remember? Were you really that drunk last night?”
“No – just sort of out of it, I guess.” I was actually wasted. Probably. Who knows.
I gently pushed the closet door open with my finger and stepped into the kitchen. Sunlight poured through the venetian blinds, splashing across the linoleum floor. A handful of snoring Chileans were strewn about, including Marcelo, my best Chilean friend. As I recall, he was snuggling with one of the knobby, wooden legs of the kitchen table. Upon hearing my footsteps, he yawned and stretched his body and limbs in a series of arcs, joints and bones cracking and popping. He squinted and smiled a huge, cartoonish grin and held out his hand for a hi-five, which I reached over and slapped. I heard a pair of flip-flops clip-clap-clip-clap-clip-clapping down the hallway. I looked up and saw a tall, well-proportioned, short haired girl emerged from the hall, sending a text message with little beeps from her cell phone. I didn’t remember her from the night before.
“Buenos dias,” I said. She laughed.
“Buenas tardes,” she said. Oh yeah – I guess Noon had passed. A cloud momentarily eclipsed the sun, somewhat assuaging the light in the room.
“Que haces?” I asked.
Not looking up, she replied with a maelstrom of Chilean Spanish which seemed to suggest that something was irritating her in some way or another. I shrugged, assuming the gesture to be vague and universal enough. Marcelo said something to her that was apparently hilarious, as she doubled over with laughter. She said something just as funny, which sent Marcelo into a fit of laughter. He rolled around, creaking the floorboards beneath him. She clip-clap-clip-clapped out of the kitchen and into another room. Marcelo looked up at me.
“She’s cute,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, “yeah she is.”
Marcelo was a lifesaver to Andrea and me when we first arrived in Santiago. Not only was he our first bilingual friend, but he helped find us an apartment and gave us free internet access at the Café where he worked. He also furnished our apartment with a couple of flip-n-fucks he wasn’t using. Andrea and I would pull our flip-n-fucks into the living room to use as chairs during the day, then drag them into our respective bedrooms and unfold them into beds by night. Although it was common knowledge that Marcelo had a mammoth crush on me, I always accepted it as flattery. Besides, he seemed to make it his unyielding duty to fix me up with his cute female friends, so I was never quite sure where his intentions lay.
“You should talks to her, maybe get her number,” he said.
“You mean I should talk to her,” I corrected.
“Oh, come on,” he whined, “we’re on vacation! No grammar!”
Andrea slithered through the closet door, a cigarette dangling from her lips, last night’s makeup smeared across her face.
“It got cloudy,” she said, staring at some fixed point which may or may not have existed. She shook out of it after a few seconds and looked down and formed a cartoonish grin, akin to the one Marcelo had given me a few moments earlier. “Hi Marcelo!” Marcelo reached his arms toward Andrea for a hug, which she scurried over to reciprocate. I rooted around the kitchen to find my backpack.
“What are you guys up to today?” I asked.
“I think I wanted to grab lunch,” said Marcelo.
“Right on. I’ll probably pass on lunch, though.”
“What will you do?”
“I dunno – probably walk around and check out the hills for awhile. Plus, there’s that – remember Andrea? From back in September? – that weird grey building that looks like a prison, or whatever. I’m gonna go see what that’s all about.”
“Ahh…yeah, you were obsessed with that thing,” Andrea said, plopping into a chair.
“Oh, we can come with you?” Marcelo looked at Andrea and nodded.
“No, let’s just go and get lunch, the two of us,” she said, “Sam likes to walk around by himself and listen to music for hours on-end; it’s really weird.”
She smiled at me in that sweet, understanding way that I’ve loved all ten years we’ve been friends. I gathered my things.
“I’ll send you a text later,” I said.
* * *
Clouds accumulated across the sky in layers of grey, white, and whatever limited rainbow exists between the two. I hiked an unremembered street, which was paved up a severe incline. Stray dogs patrolled the street, panting and wagging their tails, trotting mechanically down the hill. I paused to turn around and gaze at the Pacific, or at least the bay which cradles Valparaiso. The water was obscured by fog, but the color palate of paint coating the thousands and thousands of houses built up along the hill took whatever breath I had away, as it always does in Valparaiso. Downtown’s traffic purred in the distance and tugboats occasionally tooted into the valley. I checked my phone for texts. I turned to continue my climb.
About an hour walk to the enigmatic grey structure, I estimated. I plodded onward, listening to Mahogany, some band from Brooklyn that was influenced by Bach and the Cocteau Twins, apparently. Good hill-climbing music, I suppose. A soccer ball rolled in front of me. I looked around and saw two kids running toward the ball and then slowing down. I stopped the ball with my foot, turned toward the kids, set my aim, and corner-kicked it to the younger kid, or maybe just shorter kid, who had begun waving his arms and hopping up and down. The ball flew over to him and he head-butted it to his left and chased after it. His friend skipped over to him and dispensed orders or advice, from what I gathered from his tone. I carried on up the hill.
Two or three blocks passed. Smoke rose from a grill across the street, surrounded by three surly men, peppering meat and jostling one another, swilling beer and laughing. They stared for a moment at the lanky gringo climbing their street. I quickly looked away. A load of clothes was hanging on a clothesline on my side of the street, blowing softly in the wind. I continued to climb. Houses became more and more scarce and dilapidated. More and more people stared, children leaning against them, asking questions. The grey building, as it came into focus, appeared to be substantially fortified. I recall a barbed-wire fence coming into view, but maybe I just assumed it was a barbed-wire fence. The clouds seemed to have no intention of letting the sunlight penetrate. I heard a gunshot. Or perhaps just imagined it. The pavement turned to dirt and the houses started to taper off, trees cropping up in lieu of residence. I turned around once again to face the tiny city below me. The purr of city traffic was now a mere hum, competing with the wind for volume. The boats were docked and the colorful houses became obscured by the grey roofs which topped them. I looked to my left. A crude set of soccer goals, constructed of crooked branches, faced each other at close proximity. My phone vibrated. I glanced back up at the fortress, now shrouded in fog and mist. I turned around and headed back down the hill, checking my phone. It was Andrea, telling me that our friend Carol had arrived.
* * *
Marcelo, Carol, and Andrea leaned against a ledge by the beach as I approached them. They smiled and pushed off the ledge one by one, so we could hug and dispense the customary Chilean cheek-kiss.
Carol was our other bilingual friend, though she typically got irritated with Andrea and me when we spoke English. Dark, round, with Mapuchi bone-structure, Carol was quite beautiful and exotic-looking. Too bad she has a girlfriend, I would often remind myself.
As the four of us stood around, chatting and gesturing and igniting cigarettes, a wave of sunlight suddenly washed over Valparaiso. Beams of light blasted through the clouds which had been lurking above the city during the afternoon.
“Que bonita,” I heard a woman say, as she walked by us. Her children skipped and cheered behind her. The city’s collective spirit seemed to revive all at once – the people around us began talking more, we all smiled, our conversation seemed to become more interesting, and we all decided to celebrate by picking up some alcohol at a grocer’s, sit on the rocky beach and start getting drunk. Andrea and I split a six-pack of Escudo, Chile’s Budweiser (or Coors, I guess) while I bought a bottle of mango-infused pisco for myself. Marcelo and Carol bought several six-packs of Escudo, as well as a few bottles of wine.
We crossed over large chunks of rocks – practically boulders – looking around for the perfect spot. Although we didn’t manage to find rocks which would perfectly accommodate each of our chiropractic needs, whatever those were, we found a nice spot a few yards from the water. The clouds were practically non-existent now, as though the sun had burnt them away as it began its descent toward the west. Further down the crescent of the shore were some stone ruins, which must have at one point been a dock. They were covered in massive, brown sea lions, some flopping around on one another, others sunbathing. Andrea and Carol were laughing behind Marcelo and me, tossing small stones into the water. Marcelo and I marveled aloud at how pleasant the day was turning out to be. I broke the mango pisco’s seal with a small burst of satisfying little snaps, flicked the cap into a tiny cavern in the rocks, and brought the bottle to my lips.
“I love Valparaiso,” said Marcelo.
“We came here our second week in Chile,” I said, “and we’ve been planning on returning ever since. We’ve just had so much work lately.”
“How are your class going?”
I resisted the temptation to correct him, which was sort of ironic, since we were talking about the English classes Andrea and I taught, and we always correct on the spot in the classroom, but hey – we were on vacation.
“Not bad – sometimes it can be difficult to make business English fun and exciting, but my students are all really cool. Well, with the exception of Pablo; he sorta sucks.”
I continued to take sips from the bottle of mango pisco, shuddering with each large gulp, feeling that weird dichotomy of warmth and poison that alcohol provides. Children skipped across the rocks, stray dogs travelled in packs, smiling and wagging their tails, and Marcelo reclined on his rock. Andrea called me over. I leaned my bottle against Marcelo, telling him to help himself, and I took a few giant, awkward steps over the massive sea rocks and perched next to Andrea. We mused about how pleasant the afternoon had turned out, just as Marcelo and I had done. We talked about the first time we arrived, when we were only hanging out with English-speakers and how much progress we had made.
“Well,” I said, “we are still hanging out with friends who speak English. So I don’t know how much progress we’ve really made.”
“True, true,” said Andrea, laughing. “But still – we don’t speak that much English around them.”
“We don’t really have to,” I said, “it’s weird to think that we live in Chile, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she said, “I don’t even think about it anymore. We’re just sort of…here.”
Marcelo and Carol crawled over some rocks to join us. We clanked our beer cans, wine bottles, and pisco bottle together in a weird, somewhat discordant clank, proclaiming “Salud.” The sky began to turn orange, painting the incoming clouds pink and purple.
* * *
Being substantially drunk at this point, I could hardly distinguish one person from the other, aside from those who I arrived with, so to pass a few seconds’ time I checked my phone for text messages and didn’t have any and I slid my phone into my back pocket and staggered around from room to room, looking for a cute Chilean girl to hopefully ring in the new year with, but Calina, the girl with the flip-flops who I saw earlier in the morning – the main girl I was after, I had decided at some point in the last few minutes – was engaged with dinner preparations in the kitchen, talking to what seemed like as many as six people at once, mostly guys, so I wrote her off for the time being since I didn’t really have any sort of flirtatious gambit up my sleeve and I turned around to walk through the hallway, brushing against a wall as I walked and I passed by Stefan, the curious looking Chilean guy with a mullet and a thick, almost Cro-Magnon eyebrow who told Andrea and me to sleep in the kitchen closet the night before and I managed an “hola,” and he looked sheepishly away from me, smiling and chuckling a little – I think I had talked briefly about Chilean hip-hop with him the night before, so I wondered if I had said something stupid or weird, but quickly dismissed the thought and peeked inside what I assumed was a bedroom, where Marcelo and Carol were laughing loudly, thoroughly drunk, snapping pictures of everything in sight, including a prominent poster of Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s president, which sat proudly in the middle of the wall, the words “Estoy Contigo” beneath her and I thought about saying hi to them, but they seemed to be busy having a good time and I didn’t want to cut into their fun, exotic Latin American energy or anything, and besides, I hadn’t seen Andrea for awhile and I needed some gringo solidarity, so I stepped outside the house and onto the porch, and although Andrea wasn’t there, I got distracted by the hilly streets, which were filled with packs of people singing, laughing, shouting, jumping on each-others’ backs, screaming into the air, the dark hills covered in glowing pock-marks from grill fires, blinking with the silhouettes of people swaying and dancing around them, filling the night with an uncontrolled energy which made me sit down on the porch steps and take a drink of my wine or maybe someone else’s wine and watch the hills for an uncertain amount of time, when suddenly I saw the dark shadow of the grey fortress, which I intended to trek to earlier in the day, an enigmatic behemoth of a shadow which seemed almost like a live atomic bomb waiting to blow the city of Valparaiso into a million pieces, but the amount of beer and wine and pisco I had consumed over the course of the afternoon still brought upon me feelings of regret for not making it all the way to the fortress – hell, I thought, I could have at least made it to the no trespassing sign – whatever the translation was in Spanish – which I had decided surrounded the fortress, which became more and more foreboding the more I thought about it, though my thoughts were interrupted by a voice, followed by furniture scooting across the floor, shoes squeaking, and excited squeals – dinner was ready, so I stood up, balancing myself on the metal railing to my left, and stepped inside, holding onto my wineglass (or again, maybe somebody else’s wineglass) and I hung around the back of the hallway while people were served, waiting my turn, since I felt sort of like an outcast at the party, in the city, in Chile, and about ten minutes passed and I had about three ribs on a plate in front of me, salt and pepper sparkling in a moat of sauce surrounding them and the meal was over in what seemed like a matter of minutes, perhaps brought to an end prematurely by the sound of fireworks exploding outside, which sent people running and tripping and stomping over to whatever windows were available, the voices of the party shifting from the right speaker to the left speaker as they watched bright, fantastic lights as they popped, snapped and exploded into streams of multicolored nebulas, eliciting cheers and shrieks of marvel and wonder, not just from the Chileans and probably Andrea, who I still hadn’t seen for quite awhile, but from me, as it was a pretty spectacular display – so spectacular, in fact, that I passed out immediately afterwards on a spare bed that I knew I had to secure and I think I slept through the countdown, or maybe I just forgot it.
- - - - -
…and get hard in a hot tub even though it feels good and it’s really hard and it’s really hard to masturbate and get hard in a hot tub even though it feels good to masturbate and get hard in a hot tub even though it feels good and it’s really hard to masturbate and get hard in a hot tub even though it feels good to masturbate and get hard in a hot tub even though it feels good to masturbate and get hard in a hot tub even though it feels good and it’s really hard to masturbate and get hard in a hot tub even though it feels good to get hard and it’s really hard to get hard and it’s really hard…
- - - - -
I was half asleep and half awake when I awakened from a weird, recurring hot tub dream and I reached down to grab my penis and fire off some civilizations onto my chest when I felt stubble and an ear and I ran my fingers through his hair and my penis was flaccid as he bobbed up and down on it, sucking hard, as though he was trying to suck melted asiago cheese out of a slimy manicotti noodle and I said “What the fuck?” and pushed the man’s head. He started to push himself off me, stretching my dick with his mouth, releasing and snapping it against my leg and he tripped and fell and scampered for the door like some sort of slippery otter, sliding through the door before I could turn on the light and identify him. I reached down and felt my dick, which was covered in spit and slime. I used a sheet to wipe it off and I smelled the sheet because I always smell stuff and the guy had nasty breath, or nasty spit, or maybe my dick smelled, and I said “What the fuck!” again, though louder and more exclamatory this time around. I could hear people talking and shouting and singing in the other rooms of the house.
I took a deep breath.
I reached down and felt around for my pants, which were bunched up around my thighs, giving the revolting degenerate just enough time to suck and slip away, I figured. I pulled my pants up and realized who had been in the bedroom with his mouth around my dick. Andrea cracked the door open, letting in a houseful of chatter.
“Sam, what’s wrong,” she said over the noise, “did you yell just now?”
“Marcelo was just in here, sucking my dick while I was passed out, I shouted.” Andrea’s eyes widened and her lips formed an O, which was expanding while she turned her head to close the door. The door shut, muffling the laughter and commotion of the party and Andrea composed herself and faced me, cocking her head a little to one side.
“Sam,” she said, “are you sure it was Marcelo? There are quite a few shady people here.”
“It had to have been Mar,” I shouted, even though the door was shut and I didn’t need to speak over anyone. I was not listening to reason or alternatives; my mind was made up; my mind was still floating in a pond of pisco, beer, wine, and who knows what else. Semen, perhaps? Did he jam his cock in my open mouth? Did I snore on it, my lips flapping around the shaft like in cartoons, when Bugs Bunny falls asleep while eating a carrot? I shouted something. Probably “fuck.”
“I’m so sorry, Sam,” said Andrea. I have no idea how she managed to remain so calm. “I don’t think it was Marcelo, though. I mean, that Stefan guy was talking about how cute you were earlier. So was Pedro.”
“What the hell?” I demanded.
“Sam, I’m sure we’ll figure everything out. Let me go get Mar.”
“I swear to God, I’m gonna kill every fucking faggot in here!”
Andrea’s sympathetic countenance suddenly fell flat.
“Sam,” she said sternly. She gave me a glare of admonition. Oops. Even in my rage, I knew my choice of words was over the line – especially in front of someone I knew fought so vehemently for equal rights.
“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. “That was uncalled for.”
“Oh, Sam,” said Andrea. She wrapped her arms around me and I hugged back. At that point, Marcelo walked into the room, looking concerned.
“Guys, what happen?” he said. I pulled away from Andrea’s hug. I didn’t want her to sustain any tornado damage.
“I don’t know, Mar,” I said, looking him straight in the eye. “I was passed out. Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
“I was on the porch with Carol,” he said, “I haven’t been inside for maybe an hour.”
“You fucking liar,” I shouted, “you were in here, sucking my dick while I was passed out. I fucking saw your hair.”
Marcelo opened every pore and orifice in his face and his eyebrows drooped down with disbelief.
“What are you talking about?”
“You heard me – you’re constantly flirting with me, and…and you decided, ‘what the hell – it’s New Year’s – I’m gonna make a move on Sam.’”
I could almost feel his heart break in two.
“I didn’t do that, Sam!” he shouted, sniffling, “you’re one of my best friends! I would never do that!” He looked over at Andrea, who looked simply miserable – as though there was absolutely nothing she could possibly do to simmer me down.
“Then who did,” I said, “I mean, I woke up, felt something happening to my penis, sat up, and someone ran out of the room. I mean, Mar, you’re always flirting with me and hugging me, anyway, and it really bugs me.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Sam?” he said, “you’re drunks!”
“You mean, you’re drunk,” said Andrea, correcting him a little tactlessly.
“Why are you correct me, Andrea,” he said, “this isn’t the time! What the fuck?”
I honestly laughed a little when Andrea corrected him; I think she did too. It was a nice, albeit utterly bizarre moment of comic relief.
Carol walked in the room.
“What happened?” she asked, in English. I didn’t feel like explaining everything again. I had had enough.
“God, I don’t even care anymore!” I shouted, knocking something over and breaking it. Someone tackled me and I forget happened next.
* * *
I woke up next to Carol, who was laying across a sleeping bag, staring at the ceiling. We were in the same room. I turned and faced the ceiling. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and turned to face Carol.
“Hey,” I said, “do you know when the next bus back to Santiago is?” Carol continued to stare at the ceiling. “Because I don’t think I’m welcome here.” She shook her head and continued to stare. I wasn’t sure which of my sentences she was responding to. Quite possibly both of them. The door opened, a crack of sunlight casting shadows across the bedroom walls. A tall Chilean guy said something in Spanish to Carol, who responded in Spanish, addressing him as Pedro. A few other voices on Carol’s side spoke as well, and got up to leave the room. Carol followed them. Pedro fixed a stare at me, unblinking. He looked like he had never been more disappointed in anything or anyone in five-hundred lifetimes. He held the door open for Carol and the others. He finally turned his glare away and left the room, leaving me in the dark.
* * *
I staggered down the street, toward the coast, the traffic, the bus station. I was dressed in a wife beater and a pair of jeans with holes in them. I left my bag at the house – all I had was a change of socks and underwear, anyway. The sun was bright and hot and I squinted so hard that it began to hurt, as though I was trying to crush the town with my eyelids. I got to an abandoned church on the corner when I heard Andrea call my name. I turned around. She was walking down the street, cigarette dangling from her lips, cocking her head a little to the left. She was holding my bag. I looked behind me and found a stoop for the two of us to fit on. I leaned against it until she reached me.
“Don’t you want your bag,” she asked.
“Eh – may as well take it, since you brought it to me. Just socks and boxer briefs, though. Thanks.”
We sat down and sighed collectively.
“How ya feeling, cap’n?” she asked. I just stared at the ground and shrugged.
“I basically got kicked out of the house for getting raped,” I said. “I honestly have no idea how I feel – I’m really not looking forward to dealing with whatever conclusion I may come to, though.”
“It’s such an ugly situation,” she said. She rested her head on my shoulder and took a drag from her cigarette, accidentally blowing smoke my face. This cheered me up a little. We both started chuckling simultaneously.
“Sorry,” she said, in-between little fits of coughing and laughter. I kissed her on the head. When the laughter subsided, I continued.
“Man, I think I really fucked things up with Marcelo,” I said. Andrea nodded and took another drag from her cigarette. “Damn.”
“I don’t blame you for thinking it was him, though,” she said, “I mean, I’m sure he’ll come to understand that in time. But you’d better stay away from him for awhile; you really did hurt his feelings.”
I buried my face in my hands and pulled the skin that covered my cheekbones.
“I believe you though, Sam,” she said, “I don’t think you’re lying about what happened. I just don’t think it was Marcelo.”
I sat up and placed my hands on my knees.
“So that’s what they’re saying?” I said, “that I made it all up?”
Andrea looked down and cracked one of those half-smiles that isn’t really a smile, but an affirmation. I closed my eyes and shook my head. I mean, was it really just a dream? Did I really make this up, strong as my convictions are that this really did happen to me?
“I believe you,” I heard Andrea say again.
I stood up suddenly, almost falling, and sat back down.
“Thanks Andrea,” I said.
* * *
I sat on a bench in some park downtown, an unopened bottle of mango pisco lodged into the crotch of my jeans; some food/liquor mart happened to be open, even though it was New Year’s Day. I listened to Teenage Fanclub on my headphones. I watched children chasing birds around. The trees in the park were tall and green. A group of four or five punk rockers sat in the grass in a little half circle, singing some song that sounded a lot like Teenage Fanclub. I had the volume up really high, though. The next bus to Santiago was at 8:00 in the evening. It was 11:00 AM. I closed my fist over the thick pisco cap when I felt my phone vibrate against my thigh in my left pant-pocket. I squirmed and popped it out with my thumb. It was Andrea.
* * *
I nodded on the front porch as Andrea adumbrated what was about to take place, which was essentially a trial of sorts, to find out who the culprit was, or if it was just a ghost, as the house’s residence had jokingly conjectured.
“I’m not looking forward to this,” said Andrea.
“Yeah, I’m not particularly looking forward to it, either,” I confessed.
Once seated inside, people in the house started to gather in an awkward circle in the room in which the incident had taken place.
Couldn’t they have picked a better courtroom, I thought.
Once everyone was inside, Pedro began to speak. Marcelo and Carol translated for the room, as I was about to hear a set of vocab words and conjugations that I really hadn’t anticipated back in the Dallas Airport back in September, when Andrea and I thumbed through our Lonely Planet Spanish-English dictionary, waiting for our flight to Santiago. Pedro finished what he had to say.
“Okay,” said Carol said to me, “You understand that this is a very, very serious situation, right? You are essentially accusing somebody of rape. You know this, right?”
“Of course I do,” I said. Pedro spoke again.
“What time did this happen?”
“I have no idea…”
“It was about 1:30 when I walked in,” said Andrea, “So it must have happened shortly before then.” Carol checked something on her cell phone.
“Okay,” Carol said, “I was outside with Marcelo around 1:15. Because – remember Mar? We were talking to Mariela on the porch then. On my cell phone. See?” She showed him the time and he nodded.
“A, um, lot us was outside,” said Calina, the clip-clap flip-flop girl, “who wasn’t?”
“I don’t know,” said Stefan, via Marcelo.
“Were you outside with us, Stefan?” asked Pedro, via Carol.
“Si, si,” He said. He was tearing up an empty pack of cigarettes, building a little hill on the floor.
“But…you come in here for grab something?” asked Calina. I thought it was nice that she was practicing English, even in such an uncomfortable situation. I didn’t correct her.
“I came in to put on some cologne,” he said, via Marcelo. It was then that I remembered a very distinct smell.
“I do remember there being a strong smell of musk,” I said.
“Musk?” the room asked.
“Um…I don’t know. It’s a very specific type of smell, I guess. Not really sure how to translate it, though.”
“Oh…okay,” said Marcelo. He went on to explain to the room, in Spanish, what musk apparently was. Everyone nodded. Even Stefan.
“So, did you do it?” asked Pedro to Stefan in Spanish, which I understood. I thought he was jumping the gun a little quickly, but the two were apparently good friends, so perhaps he was trying to prove him innocent as quickly as possible, while still playing the fair and impartial Samaritan.
“No,” Stefan said, via Carol, “I mean, it’s an ugly situation, but I didn’t do it. I mean, something like that would ruin my life, if someone were to find out about it.”
His explanation smelled a little like musk.
“So, who did it, then?” asked Pedro in Spanish. The room sat in silence, everyone looking down, crumpling cellophane, checking for text messages which didn’t exist, and so on. Did everyone in here suck me off while I was passed out? I immediately dismissed the jocular thought and looked down myself. I glanced to my right, where Stefan was sitting. He was tearing up another empty pack of cigarettes, letting the pieces fall like snow on his hill. I wondered if he would put a fortress on top. I spoke.
“Look,” I said, “nobody is going to admit that they actually did this. I mean, like Stefan said, being labeled as a sex offender ruins a person’s life. Even if they do deserve it. And I do think you did this, Stefan.” Marcelo translated all this for me. I looked at Stefan. He nodded.
“Well,” said Pedro, who was ready to wrap this up and get this dramatic, falsely accusing gringo out of here, “I guess we’ll never know. I’m sorry this had to happen to you, Sam.”
I shrugged. Had anything really been solved? Did I acquiesce too early?
Chairs scooted, people stood up, people helped other people off the floor, and so on. Andrea, Marcelo, Carol and I started saying goodbye to everyone. I gave Marcelo a big hug and a kiss on the cheek.
“I know it wasn’t you,” I said, “I’m so sorry, amigo.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, “we go out in a few days and get cosmopolitans. Promise?”
“Most definitely.”
I even hugged Pedro, who I didn’t particularly care for.
“I’m sorry Sam,” he managed in English. We pulled away and he looked me up and down. He patted me on the back.
“We ready?” asked Andrea. She, Marcelo, Carol and I headed out the door.
Nobody said bye to Stefan.
* * *
I walked along the street and past the abandoned church, my stagger having subsided a bit after closure, if you even want to call it that. I insisted that I take the late bus, rather than chance an awkward car ride with Marcelo and Carol, even after we’d made up. I approached a crossroad, the perpendicular street paved along a severe incline. I recognized the street as one of many I had traversed the day before on my walk. Or was it? I came to a street sign and leaned against it, looking across the hilly crest of Valparaiso. An intestinal tract of streets and alleys wormed tortuously around a rainbow of painted hoses houses and sheds. The hot sun extracted the rank, disgusting smell from the beer cans, the half-eaten hot dogs, the wet brown bags cast down from the excited drunks the night before. I screwed up my face and looked up toward the top of the hill. The grey fortress sat atop the hill in clear view, without a cloud concealing it.
“Ow,” I said. Andrea muttered something incomprehensible.
“Huh?”
“It’s so hot,” she said, “I couldn’t sleep at all.”
I blinked a few times, scratched my head and shuddered involuntarily.
“Why are we in a closet, by the way?” I asked.
“It’s the only comfortable spot Stefan said was open for us to sleep. Don’t you remember? Were you really that drunk last night?”
“No – just sort of out of it, I guess.” I was actually wasted. Probably. Who knows.
I gently pushed the closet door open with my finger and stepped into the kitchen. Sunlight poured through the venetian blinds, splashing across the linoleum floor. A handful of snoring Chileans were strewn about, including Marcelo, my best Chilean friend. As I recall, he was snuggling with one of the knobby, wooden legs of the kitchen table. Upon hearing my footsteps, he yawned and stretched his body and limbs in a series of arcs, joints and bones cracking and popping. He squinted and smiled a huge, cartoonish grin and held out his hand for a hi-five, which I reached over and slapped. I heard a pair of flip-flops clip-clap-clip-clap-clip-clapping down the hallway. I looked up and saw a tall, well-proportioned, short haired girl emerged from the hall, sending a text message with little beeps from her cell phone. I didn’t remember her from the night before.
“Buenos dias,” I said. She laughed.
“Buenas tardes,” she said. Oh yeah – I guess Noon had passed. A cloud momentarily eclipsed the sun, somewhat assuaging the light in the room.
“Que haces?” I asked.
Not looking up, she replied with a maelstrom of Chilean Spanish which seemed to suggest that something was irritating her in some way or another. I shrugged, assuming the gesture to be vague and universal enough. Marcelo said something to her that was apparently hilarious, as she doubled over with laughter. She said something just as funny, which sent Marcelo into a fit of laughter. He rolled around, creaking the floorboards beneath him. She clip-clap-clip-clapped out of the kitchen and into another room. Marcelo looked up at me.
“She’s cute,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, “yeah she is.”
Marcelo was a lifesaver to Andrea and me when we first arrived in Santiago. Not only was he our first bilingual friend, but he helped find us an apartment and gave us free internet access at the Café where he worked. He also furnished our apartment with a couple of flip-n-fucks he wasn’t using. Andrea and I would pull our flip-n-fucks into the living room to use as chairs during the day, then drag them into our respective bedrooms and unfold them into beds by night. Although it was common knowledge that Marcelo had a mammoth crush on me, I always accepted it as flattery. Besides, he seemed to make it his unyielding duty to fix me up with his cute female friends, so I was never quite sure where his intentions lay.
“You should talks to her, maybe get her number,” he said.
“You mean I should talk to her,” I corrected.
“Oh, come on,” he whined, “we’re on vacation! No grammar!”
Andrea slithered through the closet door, a cigarette dangling from her lips, last night’s makeup smeared across her face.
“It got cloudy,” she said, staring at some fixed point which may or may not have existed. She shook out of it after a few seconds and looked down and formed a cartoonish grin, akin to the one Marcelo had given me a few moments earlier. “Hi Marcelo!” Marcelo reached his arms toward Andrea for a hug, which she scurried over to reciprocate. I rooted around the kitchen to find my backpack.
“What are you guys up to today?” I asked.
“I think I wanted to grab lunch,” said Marcelo.
“Right on. I’ll probably pass on lunch, though.”
“What will you do?”
“I dunno – probably walk around and check out the hills for awhile. Plus, there’s that – remember Andrea? From back in September? – that weird grey building that looks like a prison, or whatever. I’m gonna go see what that’s all about.”
“Ahh…yeah, you were obsessed with that thing,” Andrea said, plopping into a chair.
“Oh, we can come with you?” Marcelo looked at Andrea and nodded.
“No, let’s just go and get lunch, the two of us,” she said, “Sam likes to walk around by himself and listen to music for hours on-end; it’s really weird.”
She smiled at me in that sweet, understanding way that I’ve loved all ten years we’ve been friends. I gathered my things.
“I’ll send you a text later,” I said.
* * *
Clouds accumulated across the sky in layers of grey, white, and whatever limited rainbow exists between the two. I hiked an unremembered street, which was paved up a severe incline. Stray dogs patrolled the street, panting and wagging their tails, trotting mechanically down the hill. I paused to turn around and gaze at the Pacific, or at least the bay which cradles Valparaiso. The water was obscured by fog, but the color palate of paint coating the thousands and thousands of houses built up along the hill took whatever breath I had away, as it always does in Valparaiso. Downtown’s traffic purred in the distance and tugboats occasionally tooted into the valley. I checked my phone for texts. I turned to continue my climb.
About an hour walk to the enigmatic grey structure, I estimated. I plodded onward, listening to Mahogany, some band from Brooklyn that was influenced by Bach and the Cocteau Twins, apparently. Good hill-climbing music, I suppose. A soccer ball rolled in front of me. I looked around and saw two kids running toward the ball and then slowing down. I stopped the ball with my foot, turned toward the kids, set my aim, and corner-kicked it to the younger kid, or maybe just shorter kid, who had begun waving his arms and hopping up and down. The ball flew over to him and he head-butted it to his left and chased after it. His friend skipped over to him and dispensed orders or advice, from what I gathered from his tone. I carried on up the hill.
Two or three blocks passed. Smoke rose from a grill across the street, surrounded by three surly men, peppering meat and jostling one another, swilling beer and laughing. They stared for a moment at the lanky gringo climbing their street. I quickly looked away. A load of clothes was hanging on a clothesline on my side of the street, blowing softly in the wind. I continued to climb. Houses became more and more scarce and dilapidated. More and more people stared, children leaning against them, asking questions. The grey building, as it came into focus, appeared to be substantially fortified. I recall a barbed-wire fence coming into view, but maybe I just assumed it was a barbed-wire fence. The clouds seemed to have no intention of letting the sunlight penetrate. I heard a gunshot. Or perhaps just imagined it. The pavement turned to dirt and the houses started to taper off, trees cropping up in lieu of residence. I turned around once again to face the tiny city below me. The purr of city traffic was now a mere hum, competing with the wind for volume. The boats were docked and the colorful houses became obscured by the grey roofs which topped them. I looked to my left. A crude set of soccer goals, constructed of crooked branches, faced each other at close proximity. My phone vibrated. I glanced back up at the fortress, now shrouded in fog and mist. I turned around and headed back down the hill, checking my phone. It was Andrea, telling me that our friend Carol had arrived.
* * *
Marcelo, Carol, and Andrea leaned against a ledge by the beach as I approached them. They smiled and pushed off the ledge one by one, so we could hug and dispense the customary Chilean cheek-kiss.
Carol was our other bilingual friend, though she typically got irritated with Andrea and me when we spoke English. Dark, round, with Mapuchi bone-structure, Carol was quite beautiful and exotic-looking. Too bad she has a girlfriend, I would often remind myself.
As the four of us stood around, chatting and gesturing and igniting cigarettes, a wave of sunlight suddenly washed over Valparaiso. Beams of light blasted through the clouds which had been lurking above the city during the afternoon.
“Que bonita,” I heard a woman say, as she walked by us. Her children skipped and cheered behind her. The city’s collective spirit seemed to revive all at once – the people around us began talking more, we all smiled, our conversation seemed to become more interesting, and we all decided to celebrate by picking up some alcohol at a grocer’s, sit on the rocky beach and start getting drunk. Andrea and I split a six-pack of Escudo, Chile’s Budweiser (or Coors, I guess) while I bought a bottle of mango-infused pisco for myself. Marcelo and Carol bought several six-packs of Escudo, as well as a few bottles of wine.
We crossed over large chunks of rocks – practically boulders – looking around for the perfect spot. Although we didn’t manage to find rocks which would perfectly accommodate each of our chiropractic needs, whatever those were, we found a nice spot a few yards from the water. The clouds were practically non-existent now, as though the sun had burnt them away as it began its descent toward the west. Further down the crescent of the shore were some stone ruins, which must have at one point been a dock. They were covered in massive, brown sea lions, some flopping around on one another, others sunbathing. Andrea and Carol were laughing behind Marcelo and me, tossing small stones into the water. Marcelo and I marveled aloud at how pleasant the day was turning out to be. I broke the mango pisco’s seal with a small burst of satisfying little snaps, flicked the cap into a tiny cavern in the rocks, and brought the bottle to my lips.
“I love Valparaiso,” said Marcelo.
“We came here our second week in Chile,” I said, “and we’ve been planning on returning ever since. We’ve just had so much work lately.”
“How are your class going?”
I resisted the temptation to correct him, which was sort of ironic, since we were talking about the English classes Andrea and I taught, and we always correct on the spot in the classroom, but hey – we were on vacation.
“Not bad – sometimes it can be difficult to make business English fun and exciting, but my students are all really cool. Well, with the exception of Pablo; he sorta sucks.”
I continued to take sips from the bottle of mango pisco, shuddering with each large gulp, feeling that weird dichotomy of warmth and poison that alcohol provides. Children skipped across the rocks, stray dogs travelled in packs, smiling and wagging their tails, and Marcelo reclined on his rock. Andrea called me over. I leaned my bottle against Marcelo, telling him to help himself, and I took a few giant, awkward steps over the massive sea rocks and perched next to Andrea. We mused about how pleasant the afternoon had turned out, just as Marcelo and I had done. We talked about the first time we arrived, when we were only hanging out with English-speakers and how much progress we had made.
“Well,” I said, “we are still hanging out with friends who speak English. So I don’t know how much progress we’ve really made.”
“True, true,” said Andrea, laughing. “But still – we don’t speak that much English around them.”
“We don’t really have to,” I said, “it’s weird to think that we live in Chile, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she said, “I don’t even think about it anymore. We’re just sort of…here.”
Marcelo and Carol crawled over some rocks to join us. We clanked our beer cans, wine bottles, and pisco bottle together in a weird, somewhat discordant clank, proclaiming “Salud.” The sky began to turn orange, painting the incoming clouds pink and purple.
* * *
Being substantially drunk at this point, I could hardly distinguish one person from the other, aside from those who I arrived with, so to pass a few seconds’ time I checked my phone for text messages and didn’t have any and I slid my phone into my back pocket and staggered around from room to room, looking for a cute Chilean girl to hopefully ring in the new year with, but Calina, the girl with the flip-flops who I saw earlier in the morning – the main girl I was after, I had decided at some point in the last few minutes – was engaged with dinner preparations in the kitchen, talking to what seemed like as many as six people at once, mostly guys, so I wrote her off for the time being since I didn’t really have any sort of flirtatious gambit up my sleeve and I turned around to walk through the hallway, brushing against a wall as I walked and I passed by Stefan, the curious looking Chilean guy with a mullet and a thick, almost Cro-Magnon eyebrow who told Andrea and me to sleep in the kitchen closet the night before and I managed an “hola,” and he looked sheepishly away from me, smiling and chuckling a little – I think I had talked briefly about Chilean hip-hop with him the night before, so I wondered if I had said something stupid or weird, but quickly dismissed the thought and peeked inside what I assumed was a bedroom, where Marcelo and Carol were laughing loudly, thoroughly drunk, snapping pictures of everything in sight, including a prominent poster of Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s president, which sat proudly in the middle of the wall, the words “Estoy Contigo” beneath her and I thought about saying hi to them, but they seemed to be busy having a good time and I didn’t want to cut into their fun, exotic Latin American energy or anything, and besides, I hadn’t seen Andrea for awhile and I needed some gringo solidarity, so I stepped outside the house and onto the porch, and although Andrea wasn’t there, I got distracted by the hilly streets, which were filled with packs of people singing, laughing, shouting, jumping on each-others’ backs, screaming into the air, the dark hills covered in glowing pock-marks from grill fires, blinking with the silhouettes of people swaying and dancing around them, filling the night with an uncontrolled energy which made me sit down on the porch steps and take a drink of my wine or maybe someone else’s wine and watch the hills for an uncertain amount of time, when suddenly I saw the dark shadow of the grey fortress, which I intended to trek to earlier in the day, an enigmatic behemoth of a shadow which seemed almost like a live atomic bomb waiting to blow the city of Valparaiso into a million pieces, but the amount of beer and wine and pisco I had consumed over the course of the afternoon still brought upon me feelings of regret for not making it all the way to the fortress – hell, I thought, I could have at least made it to the no trespassing sign – whatever the translation was in Spanish – which I had decided surrounded the fortress, which became more and more foreboding the more I thought about it, though my thoughts were interrupted by a voice, followed by furniture scooting across the floor, shoes squeaking, and excited squeals – dinner was ready, so I stood up, balancing myself on the metal railing to my left, and stepped inside, holding onto my wineglass (or again, maybe somebody else’s wineglass) and I hung around the back of the hallway while people were served, waiting my turn, since I felt sort of like an outcast at the party, in the city, in Chile, and about ten minutes passed and I had about three ribs on a plate in front of me, salt and pepper sparkling in a moat of sauce surrounding them and the meal was over in what seemed like a matter of minutes, perhaps brought to an end prematurely by the sound of fireworks exploding outside, which sent people running and tripping and stomping over to whatever windows were available, the voices of the party shifting from the right speaker to the left speaker as they watched bright, fantastic lights as they popped, snapped and exploded into streams of multicolored nebulas, eliciting cheers and shrieks of marvel and wonder, not just from the Chileans and probably Andrea, who I still hadn’t seen for quite awhile, but from me, as it was a pretty spectacular display – so spectacular, in fact, that I passed out immediately afterwards on a spare bed that I knew I had to secure and I think I slept through the countdown, or maybe I just forgot it.
- - - - -
…and get hard in a hot tub even though it feels good and it’s really hard and it’s really hard to masturbate and get hard in a hot tub even though it feels good to masturbate and get hard in a hot tub even though it feels good and it’s really hard to masturbate and get hard in a hot tub even though it feels good to masturbate and get hard in a hot tub even though it feels good to masturbate and get hard in a hot tub even though it feels good and it’s really hard to masturbate and get hard in a hot tub even though it feels good to get hard and it’s really hard to get hard and it’s really hard…
- - - - -
I was half asleep and half awake when I awakened from a weird, recurring hot tub dream and I reached down to grab my penis and fire off some civilizations onto my chest when I felt stubble and an ear and I ran my fingers through his hair and my penis was flaccid as he bobbed up and down on it, sucking hard, as though he was trying to suck melted asiago cheese out of a slimy manicotti noodle and I said “What the fuck?” and pushed the man’s head. He started to push himself off me, stretching my dick with his mouth, releasing and snapping it against my leg and he tripped and fell and scampered for the door like some sort of slippery otter, sliding through the door before I could turn on the light and identify him. I reached down and felt my dick, which was covered in spit and slime. I used a sheet to wipe it off and I smelled the sheet because I always smell stuff and the guy had nasty breath, or nasty spit, or maybe my dick smelled, and I said “What the fuck!” again, though louder and more exclamatory this time around. I could hear people talking and shouting and singing in the other rooms of the house.
I took a deep breath.
I reached down and felt around for my pants, which were bunched up around my thighs, giving the revolting degenerate just enough time to suck and slip away, I figured. I pulled my pants up and realized who had been in the bedroom with his mouth around my dick. Andrea cracked the door open, letting in a houseful of chatter.
“Sam, what’s wrong,” she said over the noise, “did you yell just now?”
“Marcelo was just in here, sucking my dick while I was passed out, I shouted.” Andrea’s eyes widened and her lips formed an O, which was expanding while she turned her head to close the door. The door shut, muffling the laughter and commotion of the party and Andrea composed herself and faced me, cocking her head a little to one side.
“Sam,” she said, “are you sure it was Marcelo? There are quite a few shady people here.”
“It had to have been Mar,” I shouted, even though the door was shut and I didn’t need to speak over anyone. I was not listening to reason or alternatives; my mind was made up; my mind was still floating in a pond of pisco, beer, wine, and who knows what else. Semen, perhaps? Did he jam his cock in my open mouth? Did I snore on it, my lips flapping around the shaft like in cartoons, when Bugs Bunny falls asleep while eating a carrot? I shouted something. Probably “fuck.”
“I’m so sorry, Sam,” said Andrea. I have no idea how she managed to remain so calm. “I don’t think it was Marcelo, though. I mean, that Stefan guy was talking about how cute you were earlier. So was Pedro.”
“What the hell?” I demanded.
“Sam, I’m sure we’ll figure everything out. Let me go get Mar.”
“I swear to God, I’m gonna kill every fucking faggot in here!”
Andrea’s sympathetic countenance suddenly fell flat.
“Sam,” she said sternly. She gave me a glare of admonition. Oops. Even in my rage, I knew my choice of words was over the line – especially in front of someone I knew fought so vehemently for equal rights.
“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. “That was uncalled for.”
“Oh, Sam,” said Andrea. She wrapped her arms around me and I hugged back. At that point, Marcelo walked into the room, looking concerned.
“Guys, what happen?” he said. I pulled away from Andrea’s hug. I didn’t want her to sustain any tornado damage.
“I don’t know, Mar,” I said, looking him straight in the eye. “I was passed out. Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
“I was on the porch with Carol,” he said, “I haven’t been inside for maybe an hour.”
“You fucking liar,” I shouted, “you were in here, sucking my dick while I was passed out. I fucking saw your hair.”
Marcelo opened every pore and orifice in his face and his eyebrows drooped down with disbelief.
“What are you talking about?”
“You heard me – you’re constantly flirting with me, and…and you decided, ‘what the hell – it’s New Year’s – I’m gonna make a move on Sam.’”
I could almost feel his heart break in two.
“I didn’t do that, Sam!” he shouted, sniffling, “you’re one of my best friends! I would never do that!” He looked over at Andrea, who looked simply miserable – as though there was absolutely nothing she could possibly do to simmer me down.
“Then who did,” I said, “I mean, I woke up, felt something happening to my penis, sat up, and someone ran out of the room. I mean, Mar, you’re always flirting with me and hugging me, anyway, and it really bugs me.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Sam?” he said, “you’re drunks!”
“You mean, you’re drunk,” said Andrea, correcting him a little tactlessly.
“Why are you correct me, Andrea,” he said, “this isn’t the time! What the fuck?”
I honestly laughed a little when Andrea corrected him; I think she did too. It was a nice, albeit utterly bizarre moment of comic relief.
Carol walked in the room.
“What happened?” she asked, in English. I didn’t feel like explaining everything again. I had had enough.
“God, I don’t even care anymore!” I shouted, knocking something over and breaking it. Someone tackled me and I forget happened next.
* * *
I woke up next to Carol, who was laying across a sleeping bag, staring at the ceiling. We were in the same room. I turned and faced the ceiling. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and turned to face Carol.
“Hey,” I said, “do you know when the next bus back to Santiago is?” Carol continued to stare at the ceiling. “Because I don’t think I’m welcome here.” She shook her head and continued to stare. I wasn’t sure which of my sentences she was responding to. Quite possibly both of them. The door opened, a crack of sunlight casting shadows across the bedroom walls. A tall Chilean guy said something in Spanish to Carol, who responded in Spanish, addressing him as Pedro. A few other voices on Carol’s side spoke as well, and got up to leave the room. Carol followed them. Pedro fixed a stare at me, unblinking. He looked like he had never been more disappointed in anything or anyone in five-hundred lifetimes. He held the door open for Carol and the others. He finally turned his glare away and left the room, leaving me in the dark.
* * *
I staggered down the street, toward the coast, the traffic, the bus station. I was dressed in a wife beater and a pair of jeans with holes in them. I left my bag at the house – all I had was a change of socks and underwear, anyway. The sun was bright and hot and I squinted so hard that it began to hurt, as though I was trying to crush the town with my eyelids. I got to an abandoned church on the corner when I heard Andrea call my name. I turned around. She was walking down the street, cigarette dangling from her lips, cocking her head a little to the left. She was holding my bag. I looked behind me and found a stoop for the two of us to fit on. I leaned against it until she reached me.
“Don’t you want your bag,” she asked.
“Eh – may as well take it, since you brought it to me. Just socks and boxer briefs, though. Thanks.”
We sat down and sighed collectively.
“How ya feeling, cap’n?” she asked. I just stared at the ground and shrugged.
“I basically got kicked out of the house for getting raped,” I said. “I honestly have no idea how I feel – I’m really not looking forward to dealing with whatever conclusion I may come to, though.”
“It’s such an ugly situation,” she said. She rested her head on my shoulder and took a drag from her cigarette, accidentally blowing smoke my face. This cheered me up a little. We both started chuckling simultaneously.
“Sorry,” she said, in-between little fits of coughing and laughter. I kissed her on the head. When the laughter subsided, I continued.
“Man, I think I really fucked things up with Marcelo,” I said. Andrea nodded and took another drag from her cigarette. “Damn.”
“I don’t blame you for thinking it was him, though,” she said, “I mean, I’m sure he’ll come to understand that in time. But you’d better stay away from him for awhile; you really did hurt his feelings.”
I buried my face in my hands and pulled the skin that covered my cheekbones.
“I believe you though, Sam,” she said, “I don’t think you’re lying about what happened. I just don’t think it was Marcelo.”
I sat up and placed my hands on my knees.
“So that’s what they’re saying?” I said, “that I made it all up?”
Andrea looked down and cracked one of those half-smiles that isn’t really a smile, but an affirmation. I closed my eyes and shook my head. I mean, was it really just a dream? Did I really make this up, strong as my convictions are that this really did happen to me?
“I believe you,” I heard Andrea say again.
I stood up suddenly, almost falling, and sat back down.
“Thanks Andrea,” I said.
* * *
I sat on a bench in some park downtown, an unopened bottle of mango pisco lodged into the crotch of my jeans; some food/liquor mart happened to be open, even though it was New Year’s Day. I listened to Teenage Fanclub on my headphones. I watched children chasing birds around. The trees in the park were tall and green. A group of four or five punk rockers sat in the grass in a little half circle, singing some song that sounded a lot like Teenage Fanclub. I had the volume up really high, though. The next bus to Santiago was at 8:00 in the evening. It was 11:00 AM. I closed my fist over the thick pisco cap when I felt my phone vibrate against my thigh in my left pant-pocket. I squirmed and popped it out with my thumb. It was Andrea.
* * *
I nodded on the front porch as Andrea adumbrated what was about to take place, which was essentially a trial of sorts, to find out who the culprit was, or if it was just a ghost, as the house’s residence had jokingly conjectured.
“I’m not looking forward to this,” said Andrea.
“Yeah, I’m not particularly looking forward to it, either,” I confessed.
Once seated inside, people in the house started to gather in an awkward circle in the room in which the incident had taken place.
Couldn’t they have picked a better courtroom, I thought.
Once everyone was inside, Pedro began to speak. Marcelo and Carol translated for the room, as I was about to hear a set of vocab words and conjugations that I really hadn’t anticipated back in the Dallas Airport back in September, when Andrea and I thumbed through our Lonely Planet Spanish-English dictionary, waiting for our flight to Santiago. Pedro finished what he had to say.
“Okay,” said Carol said to me, “You understand that this is a very, very serious situation, right? You are essentially accusing somebody of rape. You know this, right?”
“Of course I do,” I said. Pedro spoke again.
“What time did this happen?”
“I have no idea…”
“It was about 1:30 when I walked in,” said Andrea, “So it must have happened shortly before then.” Carol checked something on her cell phone.
“Okay,” Carol said, “I was outside with Marcelo around 1:15. Because – remember Mar? We were talking to Mariela on the porch then. On my cell phone. See?” She showed him the time and he nodded.
“A, um, lot us was outside,” said Calina, the clip-clap flip-flop girl, “who wasn’t?”
“I don’t know,” said Stefan, via Marcelo.
“Were you outside with us, Stefan?” asked Pedro, via Carol.
“Si, si,” He said. He was tearing up an empty pack of cigarettes, building a little hill on the floor.
“But…you come in here for grab something?” asked Calina. I thought it was nice that she was practicing English, even in such an uncomfortable situation. I didn’t correct her.
“I came in to put on some cologne,” he said, via Marcelo. It was then that I remembered a very distinct smell.
“I do remember there being a strong smell of musk,” I said.
“Musk?” the room asked.
“Um…I don’t know. It’s a very specific type of smell, I guess. Not really sure how to translate it, though.”
“Oh…okay,” said Marcelo. He went on to explain to the room, in Spanish, what musk apparently was. Everyone nodded. Even Stefan.
“So, did you do it?” asked Pedro to Stefan in Spanish, which I understood. I thought he was jumping the gun a little quickly, but the two were apparently good friends, so perhaps he was trying to prove him innocent as quickly as possible, while still playing the fair and impartial Samaritan.
“No,” Stefan said, via Carol, “I mean, it’s an ugly situation, but I didn’t do it. I mean, something like that would ruin my life, if someone were to find out about it.”
His explanation smelled a little like musk.
“So, who did it, then?” asked Pedro in Spanish. The room sat in silence, everyone looking down, crumpling cellophane, checking for text messages which didn’t exist, and so on. Did everyone in here suck me off while I was passed out? I immediately dismissed the jocular thought and looked down myself. I glanced to my right, where Stefan was sitting. He was tearing up another empty pack of cigarettes, letting the pieces fall like snow on his hill. I wondered if he would put a fortress on top. I spoke.
“Look,” I said, “nobody is going to admit that they actually did this. I mean, like Stefan said, being labeled as a sex offender ruins a person’s life. Even if they do deserve it. And I do think you did this, Stefan.” Marcelo translated all this for me. I looked at Stefan. He nodded.
“Well,” said Pedro, who was ready to wrap this up and get this dramatic, falsely accusing gringo out of here, “I guess we’ll never know. I’m sorry this had to happen to you, Sam.”
I shrugged. Had anything really been solved? Did I acquiesce too early?
Chairs scooted, people stood up, people helped other people off the floor, and so on. Andrea, Marcelo, Carol and I started saying goodbye to everyone. I gave Marcelo a big hug and a kiss on the cheek.
“I know it wasn’t you,” I said, “I’m so sorry, amigo.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, “we go out in a few days and get cosmopolitans. Promise?”
“Most definitely.”
I even hugged Pedro, who I didn’t particularly care for.
“I’m sorry Sam,” he managed in English. We pulled away and he looked me up and down. He patted me on the back.
“We ready?” asked Andrea. She, Marcelo, Carol and I headed out the door.
Nobody said bye to Stefan.
* * *
I walked along the street and past the abandoned church, my stagger having subsided a bit after closure, if you even want to call it that. I insisted that I take the late bus, rather than chance an awkward car ride with Marcelo and Carol, even after we’d made up. I approached a crossroad, the perpendicular street paved along a severe incline. I recognized the street as one of many I had traversed the day before on my walk. Or was it? I came to a street sign and leaned against it, looking across the hilly crest of Valparaiso. An intestinal tract of streets and alleys wormed tortuously around a rainbow of painted hoses houses and sheds. The hot sun extracted the rank, disgusting smell from the beer cans, the half-eaten hot dogs, the wet brown bags cast down from the excited drunks the night before. I screwed up my face and looked up toward the top of the hill. The grey fortress sat atop the hill in clear view, without a cloud concealing it.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
The Girl At 603 E. Washington, Suite 1000
There was a bet - I think between Sam Jackson and Bryan Wyatt, and perhaps any other Jimmy John's delivery driver wanting in - that the first person to get the phone number of the girl who works at 603 E. Washington, Suite 1000, would get like $20.00. I never quite understood the monetary aspect of it - the sheer number of endorphins that would fire off in one's brain upon punching the digits of said phone number into one's cell phone would be its own reward. I'm pretty sure the girl's name is Amanda, but it could just as easily be Katie or Jennifer or Jessica or Stephanie or any other name that someone could shout at a group of girls at the mall and elicit at least three or four head-turns. The girl has brown, shoulder-length hair and bone-structure that makes a solid case for universal beauty. She dresses earth-tone-professionally, but somewhat seductively. Her skirts typically fall to the shins, a side-slit showing off her thigh a little. She's impossibly nice, but in a way that is in no way contrived or unctuous. It's as though she had no external influence on how to conduct herself, but that she just knew, from the moment she emerged from her mother's vaginal canal (or from Zeus' forehead, were one to liken the girl to Athena, the immortal, indispensable beauty of Greek mythology-fame) that love and friendliness are the only vehicles for conduct. It's as though she's lived thousands of lifetimes and that love and friendliness was the gambit she consistently learned and would subsequently reinforce and delight others with from a trillion B.C. to 2009 and onward. She works in an office. I'm pretty sure I've heard her answer the phone and say, "Good afternoon, Indiana Business College, how can I help you?" before, so I'm assuming she works for Indiana Business College. She sometimes orders vegetarian subs with no cheese, so she may be a vegan, but I doubt she acts sanctimonious and irritating and preachy about it, unlike anarchist kids with dreadlocks and poorly-edited zines and hockey pucks in their ears and shitty dogs and breath that smells like boiled eggs and cigarettes, who crucify people for owning a television and not "waking up." She wouldn't even bring up the fact that she's vegan, unless it was for a practical concern, such as discussing dinner options with her waiter.
Anyway, she has won the hearts of just about every Jimmy John's delivery driver at the Meridian store. Whenever an order to 603 E. Washington, suite 1000 is called in, drivers will scurry around, negotiating a trade between one's $30.00 order for the other's $5.50 603 order.
"Oh, I need to stop and get gas, anyway," I may say to Bernie, in order to score his 603 order, just for a chance to squeeze in any sort of charm or footnote into the girl's psyche, hoping that we may run into each other when neither of us is in uniform, and that some form of intimacy will follow.
It's always annoying when the other drivers manage to talk with her and brag about it.
"I talked to [girl] for like ten minutes just now," Bryan may say, sauntering into Jimmy John's after a 603 delivery and hi-fiving the other drivers, who reciprocate out of courtesy, but whose hearts are being poked and jabbed, the rusty gears of jealousy cranking and churning cacophanously.
"Yeah, I talked to her for like fifteen minutes yesterday," I might respond, falling into the ugly world of Freudian one-upmanship, embellishing my claim with the knowledge that there is no tangible evidence to back it.
"Right on," Bryan will say. He'll nod and smirk in that knowing way that his conversation was fresher and newer than mine. I'll then envy Bryan for the rest of the afternoon. I'll leave on delivery and pass by an attractive girl and avert my eyes when her's and mine meet, thinking that even looking at another girl is somehow a form of cheating on the very idea that the Girl from 603 E. Washington, Suite 1000, and I could conceivably form an intimate union.
"See, at least I'm faithful," I'll say to nobody, rubbing the bridge of my nose.
The girl passed me on the way to the bathroom while I was sitting at the bar and binge drinking with Ryan and Josh at May's Tavern on Dorman Street the other night.
"Hey, what's up?" she asked.
"How's it going?" I asked back.
She was still in her work clothing, unless she always dresses like that. I didn't recognize her for the first 1.4 seconds or so of our brief interchange. She clicked on to the bathroom in her professional-looking hi-heels and I was left at the bar, hunched over my blackberry vodka and club soda and in a state of social paralysis. Ryan, a big, burly, well-read and possibly ethnic fairweather bar buddy of mine was talking about Detroit, or something, and I nodded and said "yeah" and "right on" and some other affirmations, but I wasn't following what he was saying - I was figuring out how to talk to the girl, how to come off as charming, and not as a clumsy and repulsive goat-legged fellow, blowing hideous notes into his flute. She eventually returned to her seat, but I didn't see her pass by, as I was busy nodding ingenuinely at Ryan and planning this insurmountable, juggernaut task of walking over to the girl's table and talking to her.
"Talk to her/that's right," sang Crowded House's Neil Finn in my head, "It could mean more than you think."
The men's room is close to the table where the girl was sitting. I walked in, shut the door, and splashed water in my face in the same way that Paul Giamatti's character does in the movie Sideways, when he's having intimacy issues and is calling himself a loser after that long, awkward scene when Virginia Madsen's character grabs his hands and indulges in her soliloquy about life or loneliness or whatever and he retracts it because of insecurity and the fucking critical demons who shrink out dicks with irritatingly enigmatic magic and jab their firey pitchforks perpetually into our lower backs whenever we're supposed to be confident. I thought about shaving my beard when I got home and leaving the mustache but decided that I would look like a used car salesman so I flushed the urinal to make it seem like I was peeing and left the bathroom and returned to my seat next to Ryan at the Bar. He was talking to Josh about something deep and intangible, so I turned toward the girl's table and she had her coat on and was about an inch away from some guy's face. They were talking, but I couldn't hear what they were saying. I mean, I was too far away from them to be able to hear them, anyway, but they were talking in that way that people talk when they are in love with one-another - you know what I'm talking about - when you can't necessarily discern any words, or even phonemes, but they are obviously talking about something that is immensely pleasing, because they punctuate each exchange with blue-skyed giggles and soft kisses on the mouth. And they were doing just that.
She passed me by after their darling little moment, heading towards the front door. I watched her, hoping for some eye-contact - as though the mere sight of me for the second time of the evening would erase any sort of memory she had of the guy. But no - she was looking down and fighting a smile. I don't know how many of you watch The Office, and I hate to drag this all down with pop culture, or whatever, but she looked exactly the way Pam did when Jim asked her out on a date at the end of season 3, which was a long and difficult season for Pam. In other words, uncontrollable, absolutely genuine happiness, like God pissed Kool-Aid into her mouth.
The guy she kissed was, to use a colloquialism that may not stand the test of time, a bro. He was probably like, 5'4" and wore a black sock hat and sort of baggy jeans. He looked like his name ought to be Chad, or Blake, or Bryce. He was playing pool, his boner inflating against the side of the pool table with each shot he took. He held his head high and laughed at his friend's jokes, even if they weren't funny. He probably listened to Nickelback...forget it - he reinforced every single negative stereotype that one attributes to a guy who has managed to succeed in some way - this being not only sharing an intimate moment with a remarkably beautiful young woman, but making her smile as a result of it, as though she actually looks forward to taking time out of her day to spend time with him, phone him, text him, and think about him. I want to take a picture of him, hang it up on my wall, and invite my friends over to throw darts at it; I want my roommate to draw him on a punching bag which I can then inflate and dropkick; I want to write an essay that serves the purpose of defining exactly what a bro is, so that I can relieve myself of narcissistic subjectivity and create awareness, through thorough research and citation, that this guy is not entitled to indulge in any sort of intimacy with the girl from 603 E. Washington, Suite 1000, and that she has been finagled into this courtship through oily rhetoric and shit-eating grins.
If I ever meet him though, I know exactly what will happen. I hate to quote Morrissey, but, "In my life/why do I smile/at people who I'd much rather/kick in the eye?"
Anyway, she has won the hearts of just about every Jimmy John's delivery driver at the Meridian store. Whenever an order to 603 E. Washington, suite 1000 is called in, drivers will scurry around, negotiating a trade between one's $30.00 order for the other's $5.50 603 order.
"Oh, I need to stop and get gas, anyway," I may say to Bernie, in order to score his 603 order, just for a chance to squeeze in any sort of charm or footnote into the girl's psyche, hoping that we may run into each other when neither of us is in uniform, and that some form of intimacy will follow.
It's always annoying when the other drivers manage to talk with her and brag about it.
"I talked to [girl] for like ten minutes just now," Bryan may say, sauntering into Jimmy John's after a 603 delivery and hi-fiving the other drivers, who reciprocate out of courtesy, but whose hearts are being poked and jabbed, the rusty gears of jealousy cranking and churning cacophanously.
"Yeah, I talked to her for like fifteen minutes yesterday," I might respond, falling into the ugly world of Freudian one-upmanship, embellishing my claim with the knowledge that there is no tangible evidence to back it.
"Right on," Bryan will say. He'll nod and smirk in that knowing way that his conversation was fresher and newer than mine. I'll then envy Bryan for the rest of the afternoon. I'll leave on delivery and pass by an attractive girl and avert my eyes when her's and mine meet, thinking that even looking at another girl is somehow a form of cheating on the very idea that the Girl from 603 E. Washington, Suite 1000, and I could conceivably form an intimate union.
"See, at least I'm faithful," I'll say to nobody, rubbing the bridge of my nose.
The girl passed me on the way to the bathroom while I was sitting at the bar and binge drinking with Ryan and Josh at May's Tavern on Dorman Street the other night.
"Hey, what's up?" she asked.
"How's it going?" I asked back.
She was still in her work clothing, unless she always dresses like that. I didn't recognize her for the first 1.4 seconds or so of our brief interchange. She clicked on to the bathroom in her professional-looking hi-heels and I was left at the bar, hunched over my blackberry vodka and club soda and in a state of social paralysis. Ryan, a big, burly, well-read and possibly ethnic fairweather bar buddy of mine was talking about Detroit, or something, and I nodded and said "yeah" and "right on" and some other affirmations, but I wasn't following what he was saying - I was figuring out how to talk to the girl, how to come off as charming, and not as a clumsy and repulsive goat-legged fellow, blowing hideous notes into his flute. She eventually returned to her seat, but I didn't see her pass by, as I was busy nodding ingenuinely at Ryan and planning this insurmountable, juggernaut task of walking over to the girl's table and talking to her.
"Talk to her/that's right," sang Crowded House's Neil Finn in my head, "It could mean more than you think."
The men's room is close to the table where the girl was sitting. I walked in, shut the door, and splashed water in my face in the same way that Paul Giamatti's character does in the movie Sideways, when he's having intimacy issues and is calling himself a loser after that long, awkward scene when Virginia Madsen's character grabs his hands and indulges in her soliloquy about life or loneliness or whatever and he retracts it because of insecurity and the fucking critical demons who shrink out dicks with irritatingly enigmatic magic and jab their firey pitchforks perpetually into our lower backs whenever we're supposed to be confident. I thought about shaving my beard when I got home and leaving the mustache but decided that I would look like a used car salesman so I flushed the urinal to make it seem like I was peeing and left the bathroom and returned to my seat next to Ryan at the Bar. He was talking to Josh about something deep and intangible, so I turned toward the girl's table and she had her coat on and was about an inch away from some guy's face. They were talking, but I couldn't hear what they were saying. I mean, I was too far away from them to be able to hear them, anyway, but they were talking in that way that people talk when they are in love with one-another - you know what I'm talking about - when you can't necessarily discern any words, or even phonemes, but they are obviously talking about something that is immensely pleasing, because they punctuate each exchange with blue-skyed giggles and soft kisses on the mouth. And they were doing just that.
She passed me by after their darling little moment, heading towards the front door. I watched her, hoping for some eye-contact - as though the mere sight of me for the second time of the evening would erase any sort of memory she had of the guy. But no - she was looking down and fighting a smile. I don't know how many of you watch The Office, and I hate to drag this all down with pop culture, or whatever, but she looked exactly the way Pam did when Jim asked her out on a date at the end of season 3, which was a long and difficult season for Pam. In other words, uncontrollable, absolutely genuine happiness, like God pissed Kool-Aid into her mouth.
The guy she kissed was, to use a colloquialism that may not stand the test of time, a bro. He was probably like, 5'4" and wore a black sock hat and sort of baggy jeans. He looked like his name ought to be Chad, or Blake, or Bryce. He was playing pool, his boner inflating against the side of the pool table with each shot he took. He held his head high and laughed at his friend's jokes, even if they weren't funny. He probably listened to Nickelback...forget it - he reinforced every single negative stereotype that one attributes to a guy who has managed to succeed in some way - this being not only sharing an intimate moment with a remarkably beautiful young woman, but making her smile as a result of it, as though she actually looks forward to taking time out of her day to spend time with him, phone him, text him, and think about him. I want to take a picture of him, hang it up on my wall, and invite my friends over to throw darts at it; I want my roommate to draw him on a punching bag which I can then inflate and dropkick; I want to write an essay that serves the purpose of defining exactly what a bro is, so that I can relieve myself of narcissistic subjectivity and create awareness, through thorough research and citation, that this guy is not entitled to indulge in any sort of intimacy with the girl from 603 E. Washington, Suite 1000, and that she has been finagled into this courtship through oily rhetoric and shit-eating grins.
If I ever meet him though, I know exactly what will happen. I hate to quote Morrissey, but, "In my life/why do I smile/at people who I'd much rather/kick in the eye?"
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