By
Willie Smith
“Get beyond panties?”
“Oh yeh.”
“Get in?”
“A finger.”
“Which one? How far?”
“Up to the palm. The middle. The fuck you. Happened naturally. Never
gave it a thought. After it was in, all the way, asked myself
why not the index? But the index seemed too pointed. The pinky
ridiculous. Thumb too awkward to angle – me behind the
wheel, she in the passenger seat. The ring finger notoriously has almost no independent control. No, the middle finger rose to
the occasion. It is, after all, the longest; and the object of the mission is
to explore this terra incognita as deeply as possible – right?”
“Wouldn’t know.
I’m the virgin here.”
“Me too. Except for my left middle finger.”
“Then she dumped you?”
I filled my mouth. Quickly
lowered the bottle back under the dash. Swallowed
three ounces of sticky sweet cheap. “We made out like that – parked – at
least a dozen times. The affair lasted nearly six weeks. This was not a case of
getting lucky for a night or a weekend. This was…”
Doug grinned out over the wheel, “Love?”
Between my knees
I readjusted grip on the neck of the quart. “I don’t know what that word
means.”
“Nobody does,” he chuckled. Then blurted, “Does it smell like fish?”
“Scallops.” I
treated myself to another gulp.
“Rank?”
“No… yes; just enough to be…”
“Interesting?”
“Fascinating. Sweet, tart, musky, oily…”
Doug grunted. Lapsed
into momentary absorption with his driving. Or
perhaps into moody contemplation of a scent he did not have the privilege of
remembering.
“So how did you do it?”
“Don’t change the subject,” he frowned,
nudged into the left lane, accelerating to pass a stationwagon we had been
coming up on the past two minutes. “Look at this geezer in the
“Maybe he figures the slower he drives the
slower time will pass.” As we shot by I caught a glimpse of a small wizened
head under a greasy baseball cap. “Appears not much left on his clock. Were you
going to use a gun? You said once your dad keeps a forty-five in the house.”
“Guns are impersonal.” He swung us back into
the right lane, pushed it up to seventy, rapidly left the stationwagon far
behind on the two-lane highway cut straight through bottomland. “I’m gonna get
a bumpersticker says: Gun owner? Show
some guts – use a knife!”
“You stabbed yourself?”
“Hanging.” His face brightened as he grinned
out into the thirty yards of tarmac the headlights continually ate. “I
attempted to hang myself from a beam in the diningroom ceiling.”
“The one your mom payed a bundle a couple
years ago to have remodelers come in and expose, give it the Colonial look?”
“The one.”
The car had crept up to what felt like
eighty. I was too busy balancing the quart to steal a peek at the needle. It
felt great. I hoped we were only doing eighty; because I looked forward to
feeling ninety, maybe even the barely-imaginable one hundred.
“So – once you kicked the chair out from
under – the rope broke, or it turned out to be too long? – just like in the
funnies?”
“No.” He pulled his foot off the pedal,
and we dropped back to the fifty-five-ish we’d been doing since leaving the
parkinglot at the halfway house. “I choked. I chickened out. Stood still. Just
plain didn’t do it.”
“But…?”
“Dear Old Dad happened home early from the
office. Caught me standing on his favorite straightback, neck through the
noose; even had hands tied behind my back, as I was from the get-go afraid of
not following through – hoped taking my hands out of it would make the deed
that much easier to accomplish. In the event, all it did was render me helpless
in the presence of DOD.”
“Dod?”
“Dear Old Dad.”
“Oh. So was DOD terrified, furious,
dumbfounded – all of the above?”
“Sure. Underneath – mad, scared, ashamed.
DOD, after all, is human. But the son
of a bitch didn’t miss a beat, right then and there, on the surface putting
forth a command performance. ‘Well, well,’ the smug prick says, ‘we are a danger to ourselves today, aren’t
we?’ And he hops on the phone to 911. Has me ITA Bethesda psych faster than you
can say handjob. My dad beats off. I
caught him at it once.”
“You told me.” Gazing ahead at the
double-yellow rolling into us, I weaved the screwtop to my lips, took a
conversational sip. “When your mom was layed up in the hospital with her
appendectomy.”
“I
don’t mean,” he swerved, but we hit – bump! bump! – anyway a headlightfrozen
possum, “then. I caught him less than
a year later down in the rec room jizzing the portable while his wife – my
mother – stood upstairs reheating lunch.”
“What was on?” I sipped again, held quart
erect. “Lassie?”
“Nothing.” Doug grunted. “He was wanking
straight into the eye of a dead tv. I swear, the bastard is sick.”
I shrugged. “What a career in the military
will do.”
“Career hell – it’s genetic. I come from a
long line of jackoffs.”
“I’ve been known,” I mused in cocky, yet
maudlin, self-disclosure – tv actor on the eve of battle – “to touch it upon
occasion myself.”
“Bien
sur, mon ami – but you are no forty-eight year old pater familias. A full
Colonel in the US Army with the majority of his sex life behind him. You aren’t
going to throw up, are you?”
“What do you care?” I belched;
exaggeratedly begged pardon. “This is my car. Belongs to Dad, I mean. My dad. A
civilian employee attached for the past twenty-two years to the US Army, who is
now on his livingroom couch dead drunk after a routine Tuesday at his gray
metal desk in a senseless bureaucracy. Men in their late forties living
unfulfilled lives exhibit masturbatory tendencies. Bears shit in the woods.
So?”
“Did she suck it?”
I held the grooved glass mouth pensively
to my lower lip. Said half into the bottle, half at the windshield, “Once. As I
accelerated onto the freeway, in this very car. We were driving home from
parking along the river after a movie. She sort of toppled over. Her head
drifted into my lap.”
“Wow!” His foot touched it up toward
seventy. “You experienced oral?”
“It was romantic. I wouldn’t even be
telling you this, she hadn’t dumped me.”
In his seat Doug squirmed. The Chevy
lurched, swerved. The headlights revealed drainage ditch, barbed wire, green
swath of cow pasture. Jerking the car back under control, the headlights
leveling back on the tarmac, he croaked, “What’s it feel like? I’m quite familiar
with the hands on experience; I’m no self virgin. But – moist warm suction?”
“It was more,” I tapped the glass neck on
the padded dash – that same battle-tested actor toying with a captured potato
masher – “more a dry kiss on the zipper.”
“You
never got it out?”
“I was driving.”
He clucked tongue. Shook head slowly.
Grunted in a tone that summoned up between us the queasy word pantywaste.
“So why didn’t you have the guts to do the
pelvic thrust would’ve toppled the straightback out from under your feet?”
“Don’t be defensive. I’m not faulting you.
I’m sneering at fate.”
I glugged at the wine. Swallowed
obstreperously – so as to scare away whatever fear it was that had swished pantywaste into the sink of my consciousness.
Half the trouble in this world is caused by anticipating the other half of the
trouble… “Fate I’d be all zipped up accelerating, craning my head to look for
headlights in the lane I wanted, when she finally, for the first time in our
entire relationship…?”
“Fate in a larger sense. The kismet that
mandates the whole male-female disaster. Sex – whoever devised such a torture?
Was it,” he grinned maniacally, “the Armenians?”
“No, Doug. It was God. God invented sex.
Don’t you remember that testicle Eve ate in the garden? Picked it right off the
ball tree, just like God told her not to.”
“Please. I’m driving. Don’t confuse me
with Jewish fairy tales.”
“No.” He frowned out over the wheel. “Just
Librium, Elavil, Phenobarb; Seconal to get to sleep at night. Did you love her?
– was she the cunt, I mean, that fits?”
“They say beware that one.”
“The one that fits? Who are they?”
“Them’s the kind scissors your balls off.”
“No, no. That’s the one that fits. I’m
asking who are they?”
“Oh.” I rolled down my window; flipped out
the empty. “Common sense. Majority opinion.” I ran the window back up. “You
know – all the assholes in the world and you too.”
“Did you just litter this beautiful
farmland?”
“Sorry… maybe I shouldn’t’a wolfed the
whole bottle…”
“Don’t worry,” he grinned. “I love litter.
Litter – perfect metaphor for life itself. Here we are littering the planet
with replicas of ourselves. Go ahead, litter – perfectly natural human
activity. The perfect fit.”
“Hey, I was in love. I didn’t get this
girl pregnant. I mean, she did once say she wanted to have my baby.
Fingerfucking evidently aroused her maternal instincts.”
“Did she, like, drool or anything on your
zipper?”
“Dry peck. Strictly.”
“No more impact than a gnat, huh?”
“Actually… you must know… felt exactly
like a grasshopper landed on my crotch. Stuck there a good long minute to mouse
around for something good to eat.”
“Would you kindly shut up?” He squirmed
around in the seat, keeping a grip on the wheel with his left hand, while the
right plundered his crotch. “You’re making my balls itch. Ta gueule!”
Doug had lived two years in France. Unlike
most Army brats he had attended an off-base French high school. He boasted a
splendid Parisian accent, and was something just this side of fluent. He took a
sardonic pleasure in telling people to shut up in French. He enjoyed greeting
me with his own personally concocted Salut,
salaud! (Hi, bastard!). I’d had four years of American high school French.
As long as he kept it to no more than two or three words, I understood well
enough.
The headlights swallowed another mile or
two of flat highway. I decided to prove how drunk I wasn’t by staring silently
ten yards ahead at the speeding tarmac.
“How long,” he finally said, as the
silence was becoming claustrophobic, “did her head stay down? Just till you got
your lane?”
“I dunno… did you remain standing on the
chair till the medics arrived?”
“Of course!” He glared over at me like I
was crazy. “I had to. My hands were tied. If I jumped off the chair I’d’ve
killed myself.”
“Yeh. OK. Well… I got my lane. Kicked it
up to seventy… she’s still down there under the wheel, in my lap.”
“Are you by now – inside your pants of
course – fully erect?”
“Well…”
“This car is an automatic; but it’s
starting to feel like a stick shift – right?”
I grabbed compulsively for the bottle no
longer present. Slowly unclenched empty fist. “OK – it amounted to a couple dry pecks; interspersed with a
certain amount of moving around – like getting comfortable on a pillow. I blew
it when I took a hand off the wheel; lowered the palm onto her head; just
thought I’d run fingers through ringlets. She got a permanent earlier that day
– presumably with our date in mind.”
“You blew
it?”
“OK, Sigmund.” I hiccupped. “There are no
mistakes. Every slip intentional. Let’s just say I browned it. Outta the frying
pan and into the pun. Look – you want a blow by blow account? I’m only telling
you this accounta she dumped me.”
“You already said that. Dumped you out of
the pan before she was properly browned.”
“How close,” I hiccupped, “were you?”
“This kiss and tell smacks of revenge, n’est-ce pas? Albeit you know my lips
are sealed. Although only in death are lips ever sealed; rotted away, at any
rate. But I’m ugly, overweight, mentally unstable, have no friends – your
immaculate blowjob is safer with me than with any other cad in the school
district.”
“How close, Doug? And hey – I’m your,” I
hiccupped, “we’re friends.”
“We stimulate each other intellectually.
I’m not in touch with my feelings. How could anyone not in touch with his own
feelings have friends?” He glanced over at me through his thick-lensed black
plastic-frame glasses. His fat freckly face looked serious, or at least
seriously feigning seriousness; I never knew when Doug was serious; he didn’t
seem to either. “Close to what?”
“To suicide.” I hiccupped. “Exactly how
numb do you expect me to think is
that acromegalic skull of yours?”
“Oh.” He popped on the brights, flooding
more of the highway, ditches, fences into view. “The shrink thinks it unlikely
I’ll repeat – provided I continue in therapy, stay on the medication.”
“I’m not talking now. I mean last week, when you perched on that chair, before,” I
hiccupped, “your dad happened in to provide you with an out.”
“He actually made me feel more like
killing myself.”
“I thought you were out of touch with your
feelings?”
“Suicide isn’t a feeling. It’s a
destination. I dunno… close as a pilgrim contemplating a map, slowly realizing
it’s not a map at all; just a blank sheet of typing paper.”
“Leave a note?”
“Well… no.” He snapped off the brights. “I
wanted the family to wonder. Besides, my whole life – tonight included – is one
long endless suicide note.”
“A note is something dashed off, brief,
disconnected…”
“Yeh.” He grinned out over the wheel at
the flat, inexhaustible highway. “That’s what I said.”
“Nausea washed over me. To rise above the
vertigo I blurted, “Wish I’d raped her. I mean, if I knew she was gonna dump me
anyway…”
“She lettered in field hockey. She’s first
string center girls basketball. You’re no more in shape than yours flabbily –
pocketpool champ, bookworm chump, heavy thought lifter, serious mind bender. I
doubt you could take her. What did she ever see in a ninety-pound weakling like
you anyway?”
“She’s an honor student.” I sat on a
hiccup – used the suppression like a surfboard to ride out the nausea. “She’ll
do well in college. Be a bank vice president, chairman… chairwoman… of some… board.”
“And you’ll be?”
“Oh… another sixty years of rambling,
unfinished suicide note.”
“And I’ll be,” he popped buttons on the
dash to replace the headlights with the parkinglights, “damned.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.” The dim bulbs lit
almost nothing of the road ahead. “You’re not mean enough to be damned. People
out of touch with their feelings just get recycled. You’ll come back as the
same damn thing.”
“And that isn’t,” he squinted, hunched
further over the wheel, “hell?”
“Why,
this is hell; nor am I out of it – isn’t
that what Mephistopheles says?”
“By the way,” he sat back up straight,
“don’t get the idea I don’t touch it. My sex life, you see, is a very touching
tale.” He chuckled, chortled, half choked on his own joke. “Self touching!”
“So what are you doing,” a painful cross
between a hiccup and a belch wrenched up from my throat, shook my body like a
sob, “now? Feeling your way in the dark?”
“Right!” he guffawed. “Navigation via
masturbation!”
I gazed a moment out the passenger window
at the night. Then turned back and said drunkenly, “I, too, can be
self-destructive.”
“Oh yes,” he nodded at the windshield.
“You certainly drink that way.”
“Hey… this my first time. Gimme a chance.
Ten years ahead I may yet evolve into a highly successful social drinker.
Besides, I just got dumped. I deserve to get sloppy till my tits hang out.”
“Why, this is self-pity – nor are you out
of it.”
He killed the parkinglights. We continued
at a steady pace our plunge into the night. I glanced again out the side window
– the view now utterly black. Dimly I retrieved from short-term what must have
been side-glow from the parkinglights. Gray static my memory probably was
exaggerating. This present true blackness strangely peaceful, reassuring… But
was it, in turn, truly blackness?
“No. What I meant was,” I looked back over
at Doug’s shadowy form, lit now only in instrument lights, “I get
self-destructive at home. When my dad rages drunk through the house. Hate it
when he does that. Identical rage runs through my blood. Dad’s rage in action
awakened my congenital rage. As a kid I had nothing permissible to rage
against. So I learned self-rage. I’d lie in bed hating my drunken father’s
guts. Unable to act it out. Gnashing teeth imagining kicking him in the neck,
so his florid head explodes in blood, brain, bone. I hate my dad so much I have
gnashed the enamel off my teeth. Next week I go in for two root canals. Gnashed
the nerves of a couple molars to death. I… guess,” I spat at the black window,
“you could say this getting dumped called up…”
“Are you puking? I won’t tolerate puking.
Roll down the window if…”
I watched foam ooze across glass. “That’s
how come you jack off. You so much hate your own dad the choked rage manifests
as chronic self-abuse. Obvious as this bile crawling up my throat right now. We
are both father haters – patricides waiting in the wings. Because our
progenitors belong to the Army. How did you picture the Army – when as a
toddler you first heard the word?”
“Why don’t you roll the window down. Stick
your head out. Get some air you won’t maybe need to puke.”
“A buncha guys concentrating nervously on
some very serious stuff involving guns and bombs. That’s how I pictured it. We
actually lived on base till I was seven – when they finally excluded civilians
from military housing.”
“See?” The Chevy again began to
accelerate. “Exactly my point – who are they?”
“They?”
“The they
who threw you off the base, so you could no longer, past age seven, enjoy such
privileges and perks as low rent and PX shopping?”
“Jerks, I guess. Actually just a
construction to avoid the passive voice; no need to get excited. What time you
gotta get back to the halfway?’
“Would you please open your window?”
“Look – I’m not going to,” I angrily
cranked down the glass, “going to…” stuck my head out, puked. Coughed and spat
a few times. Pulled my head back in from the uproar of the slipstream. Buttoned
up the window. Cleared my throat, saying, “So what time?”
“I dunno – how long does a movie last? Did
you get any on the door?”
“A hundred-twenty minutes. Fifteen to get
there. Fifteen back. Factor in popcorn. Call it three hours. What do you care? Not
your vehicle. This car belongs to the jerk cursed me with these alcoholic
genes. I took you to a movie?”
“They don’t let me out just to drive my
friend around so he can get drunk because he got dumped.”
“Thought you had no friends.”
“All right – my intellectual foil and
fellow victim of weltschmerz, ennui, abulia, angst.”
“Never knew you were so fond of me.”
“I’m not. Especially when you make the car
smell like puke. Could you leave that window down?”
“Here comes another car.”
“Yeh. I see it.”
“Turn on your lights – he can’t see you.”
“Doesn’t matter. I see him.”
“He’s flashing brights. He sees you now!”
“OK – long as he can see me I don’t need
to look. I’ll just turn my head like this and we can continue our conversation
face to face. Don’t look so worried – I’ll hold the wheel steady. I don’t need
to look out the windshield to hold the wheel.”
“C’mon, Doug. Turn on your lights and pay
attention to the road. You trying to get me sober? OK. It worked. I’m sober.
Now turn on the lights, look where you are going and drive accordingly.”
“Please?” he leered into my face.
The oncoming driver leaned on his horn.
“Please drive the fucking car!”
“Sure.” He swiveled his head back out over
the wheel. “That’s no problem.”
We swerved. Missed by inches the black
Buick four-door hammering down on us at a combined speed of over one hundred
miles-per-hour, driver blaring horn all the way, horn still dying a violent
doppler death behind us, as Doug continued:
“If you don’t mind, though, I’ll keep the
lights off. It’s so much more restful on the eyes to drive in the dark. Would
you mind rolling that window down? Your breath stinks like puke.”
I rolled my window all the way down, saying,
“I got all the puke outside on the highway back there. Besides, it’s part of
the deal – when you drive a guy around so he can get drunk for the first time
you gotta expect a little vomit. Do you think of your dad when you jerk off?”
“No. Just of how much I hate him. He’s not
there. Just the hate.”
“So when you start to think of how much
you hate your father, you pull it out and wank?”
“It’s not that simple. First the hate –
through a series of meditations – transforms into lust. Then I distill from the
lust a favorite fantasy – such as screwing my mother to death with a baseball
bat.”
“Of course.” I wished for more wine. “The
Orestes complex superimposed on an Oedipus. Does your sister Ellen play a
part?”
“Bien
sûr. I often imagine – while jerking off – bobsledding with her. We fly off
the track. Launch into the air. Get naked. I’m on top. After fifteen seconds of
the Hump of the Century we smash into the wall of a castle and are killed
instantly. No, you see: the gods are
the emotions. The emotions are the gods. Can’t Mars become Venus, Ares
penetrate Aphrodite, Jehovah merge with the Virgin? Why is it therefore so hard
to believe hate can switch to lust or vice versa?”
“Hard?
Vice? Look who’s talking no mistakes.
Doug, I think your Freudian camisole is showing.”
“I can’t help it. I hate the bastard. Hate
him so hard, makes me wanna fuck Mom in the ass to death with a baseball bat.”
“You are one sick motherfucker.”
“Thank you.”
“The mother
of all motherfuckers.”
“Hey – ta
gueule!”
“Hit a nerve?”
“No. You hit an impossibility. You see, I
hate my mother – the sniveling duplicitous bitch. Hysteria Queen, Empirin
Empress, Goddess of Supermarket Gaga!”
“But didn’t you just lecture hate is no
impediment to lust?”
“Lust, sure – but not fucking!”
“Lust is confined to fantasies?”
“This is not to say,” he slowed to a sane
twenty-five, as it became dimly apparent we were entering some curves, as the
highway sloped toward the river, “not to say one doesn’t experience fantasies
during coitus.”
“This is a virgin talking.”
He glanced over in the dark. “You don’t
need to experience coitus to know what it’s all about. Sex is blood-programmed,
instinctive. It’s parenthood that requires tutoring. And,” he popped on the
headlights, “of course there are no tutors. Not even God knows how to be a
parent. Consider the mess in the Garden – ever see such a display of poor
parenting as Yahweh exhibits? He catches his children in the midst of
discovering the joys of sexual congress. What’s he do? – Out, you little
bastards! You’re disinherited, both of you, ya filthy degenerate beasts! The
Christians are right – we are fallen, all fallen; even God is fallen.”
“Suicide the only hope?”
“Suicide is too rational. Too mundane. Too
bourgeois.” He swerved onto the gravelly shoulder that showed an abrupt drop
into a ditch; jerked it back onto the tarmac. “Or is that medication talking?
What’s needed, de toute façon, is something mystical – a ritual
never before enacted, a danse macabre fresher than the concept birth. A joyous acceptance of
holocaust.”
“Mass hypnotic suicide?”
“Yeh… kinda. Go back and shotgun grandma. Better
never to have been born. Pre-uterine suicide the only answer. Pre-uterine
suicide!” He guffawed, grinning, slamming the heels of his palms against the
wheel. “Kill me before I was multiplied!”
“But you’re a fake. You choked.”
“I know. I’m a phony. How come I want to
kill myself – not only is the entire universe fake, but I am, too.”
“It’s not the medication, Doug. It’s
genuine – you’re trapped. So am I. I’m a displaced fingerfucker and you’re a
failed suicide.”
“The juice from thawing scallops, you
mean?”
“Yeh – like when you pick up a package in
Safeway and it leaks onto your fingers.”
“I wouldn’t know. My mom does the food
shopping.”
“Mine too. But I useta as a small boy tag
along. It’s an old memory.”
“Old as feces. Scallops. Bien sûr, bien sûr.”
“Hey…” I glanced over at his bulky
shoulders rounded apelike over the wheel, now better illuminated by light the
highway threw back from the headlights… “You’re not gonna use my chatter as
fodder for jerkoff fantasies?”
“You think I’m driving you around for
free? Look – you were unlucky in love. But now – thanks to your chauffeur – you
got lucky with wine.”
“Oh?”
“You’re still alive. Apparently you failed
to get any vomit on the car. You’re not even in the hospital yet.”
“What are those lights in the rearview?
They just started flashing – is it a cop?”
He frowned up at the rearview. Squinted.
Shook his head, “No.”
“Sure?”
“Oh no – it is merely the tooth fairy on
one of her fabled late-night missions.” He got back to his driving, grinned out
over the wheel. “Of course it’s the cops – who the fuck did you think?”
“Wait…,” I hiccupped. “I know Daphne
changes into a laurel, Arachne into a spider, Mergus the merganser, Myrrha the
myrrh tree. Because The Metamorphoses tells me so. But on what
authority do you claim Mars can merge into Venus, much less versa vice?”
“On the authority of analogy. Everything
in this world is a metaphor. Goethe tells us that. Everything in the universe
stands for something else. Look – what happens when this cop pulls us over? I
don’t have a license.”
“What?’
“DOD won’t let me get one. Because I can’t
yet parallel park with sufficient exactitude. We could change places. I’ll
scoot over, you slide over top of me.”
“But I’m drunk. That was the whole idea –
you drive while I get safely drunk!”
“Well, the best layed wives of mice and
men gang oft… here he comes! I’m pulling over…”
The Chevy bumped and rumbled over the
narrow shoulder, Doug bringing it to a halt after thirty yards of dusty gravel.
As the car was stopping, the police cruiser roared past at full tilt. It’s
flashing ruby and sapphire lights disappeared around a bend a hundred yards
ahead of where we leaned motionless on the edge of the ditch.
“Oh. I guess he doesn’t want us after
all.”
“Nobody wants us.”
“Now that
is alcohol talking. Just because some slut of a jock honor student threw you
out of her pants…”
“Hey
– that’s my girlfriend you’re slurring!”
“Not since she took up with the varsity
quarterback; who passes courses on the basis of chiseled Anglo-Saxon features
and timely touchdown completions. And you with the best grades in the school.
Nobody has a higher grade point. I’d say the bitch traded down.”
“But I think I still love…”
“Merde
alors! Love has nothing to do with thinking.
Love is a certainty like no other certainty. You can be certain the interior
angles of any triangle sum to 180 degrees. But the certainty of love is
qualitatively beyond geometric certainty – because love is alien to thought.”
“How would you know? You’re a virgin.
You’ve never loved.”
“Yes,” he grinned at the windshield, “but
I’ve thought about it a lot.”
“But I thought you said thinking…”
“I’ve thought about love mystically –
alchemically, mythologically. Mythical thought isn’t thought.”
“Oh?’
“It’s pictures.”
“The way you picture screwing your mother
to death anally with a Louisville Slugger?”
“Exactly.” He snapped off the emergency,
took his foot off the brake, looked around, eased the Chevy back onto the road.
“Love is the geometry that underlies fantasies.”
“I thought that cop must be after us because
of your erratic driving.”
“I wasn’t driving,” the car lurched into
the bend the cop had disappeared around, “erratically. I was driving
mystically.”
“It’s mystical you kept missing things. And hey, wait – earlier
back there somewhere on the road you claimed nobody knows the meaning of love.
Now you drag geometry into the metaphor.”
“Euclid in drag? Triangular faggots?
Metaphors mix; they don’t crossdress.
Look – my balls are starting to itch again. But, no – I meant, and plainly said,
the meaning of love is by definition
a mystery. Which in no way denies that love underlies fantasy. Thus people
making love fantasize about someone else other than the person they are
screwing. Because sex is so screwed up only love can straighten it out.”
“When we get down to the river, would you
please just drive the car into the water?”
“Oh no. In fact,” he cocked his left arm
above the wheel, looked down at an imaginary watch, “the movie just got out. I
think we better start back.”
Now I thought about it, it did seem enough
time had elapsed for a movie.
Doug executed a sharp U that flung me
against the passenger door. All four tires screeched. My stomach struggled to
match the momentum flipflop. I felt the hapless organ search desperately for
anything left it could possibly eject.
He wriggled in his seat. Cleared his
throat. Sat back straight, arms fully extended onto the wheel. “So what movie
did we see?”
I fought back stomach acid, head hung in
silence.
“What’s playing where – do we know? We
need to get our stories straight, synchronize watches, all that. We can’t have
the nurse at the halfway think we just drove down to the river and blew each
other.”
“I… I,” I said, “I think Night of the Living Dead is at the,” I
belched, winced at bile spray the back of my throat, “Edgemont.”
“That stupid piece of shit? Are you gonna
puke again?”
“Possibly. You’ve seen it?”
“Just overheard people summarize it in the
hall between classes. I never see movies. I’d rather stay home and masturbate.
My fantasies are better directed, better acted, provide me with more original
ideas to mull over.”
“What – the same fantasies over and over?”
“Oh no. Sometimes the baseball bat is a
spitting cobra, or a proton beam, or a coprolite dildo. Sometimes Mumsie sports
a string bikini, sometimes an American flag mumu. Just last night I knelt
behind Sis while she belted the Anthem up Mumsie’s vulva. A seventy-six piece
band blared, and she sang in tune, but the words were all from Kubla Kahn. With
her face jammed into Mother’s muff I could only pick out every fifth word: … Kubla…
pleasure… Alph… caverns…”
“I can’t go in with you. They’ll see I’m
too drunk to drive. Lock me up for the night.”
“They have no authority over you.”
“Then they’ll call the cops and the cops
will lock me up in a worse place.”
“OK. It won’t happen. I’m being paranoid.
But let’s perfect the alibi. Never hurts to have an alibi. Every minute of your
life you should have an alibi – just in case. Take right now: I was driving the
vehicle, officer; I couldn’t possibly have thrown that wine bottle out onto the
passenger side of the road.”
“That happened over an hour ago! Although,
come to think of it, it was right about here; on the opposite shoulder.”
“I speak hypothetically, mon ami.”
“Hypodermically,
said the punk to the drunk, as their junker plunked a skunk.”
“Actually I believe it was an opossum. But
that’s why I failed at suicide. Because – stood on the edge of the chair – a
hypothetical error became apparent.”
“Hypothetical?”
“An error in the hypothesis. The error
itself real. Securing the rope to the
beam, arranging the chair, climbing up on the chair, tying hands, threading
head through noose… the whole time I’d been gloating over the note. I was lying
a moment ago; attempting to save face. Sure – I left a note. I’m that much of a
conformist.”
“You’re the most normal guy I know, Doug.”
A remark I would’ve loved to’ve punctuated with a gulp of cheap wine straight
from the bottle.
“Typed it on my portable Hermes. Kindly
allow me to quote: ‘You people drove me to this. How can people like you stand
to go on living? If this encourages you to commit suicide – any of you assholes
– then I shall not have died in vain.’ Tiens!
Isn’t that the finest suicide note you ever heard?”
“Definitely,” I agreed, because getting him
to shut up would definitely be too difficult. Quietly I rolled the window back
up.
“Can you feel the anger transmute into
despair? There is no hope even to abandon.
And it didn’t take long to write. Just something dashed off the night before,
when I was having trouble sleeping, anticipating the next day’s hanging. Quick
to memorize, too. The original is still in my suitcase at the halfway. Would
you like a Xerox copy for your files?”
About a mile ahead headlights appeared.
“Why do you think she dumped me?”
“Huh?” He glanced over, then shot his eyes
back out on the highway. “Oh. Well – should I spare your feelings?”
“I’m asking you because you’re a nut, an
asshole, a lone wolf – I want the truth. I need to know. Because…”
“Because tonight you’re a lone wolf psycho
yourself. This night’s very own Mr. Self Destructo. Let me finish first: So I’m
on the edge of the chair, my head a chad hanging from my ticket out, and it
finally dawns: I won’t be there to watch their faces as they read the note.”
“Simple enough realization.”
“I know – can you believe it took that
long to sink in?”
I gazed at the distant headlights brighten
and spread apart as they approached. “I can believe it. Being dumped still
hasn’t sunk...”
“Isn’t it marvelous how irrationally we go
along in life, till, in an instant, the veil lifts, and we perceive the
insanity of our situation? Then proceed to praise this flash of logic as insight; when in fact it might make more
sense to marvel at the days, the weeks, the years it took for this scrap of duh to float up into consciousness? Why does anybody think
– much less brag – intelligent life exists on this planet? So I failed to kill
myself because the whole shebang suddenly seemed stupid, and the stupidest move
seemed to be to hold still and wait for somebody to catch me standing there.”
“Did she dump me because, despite all
those A’s, I’m in reality stupid?
Shouldn’t we maybe be in the other lane?”
“On
the contrary, you’re too aware. You obey all the rules. You don’t even jaywalk.
How come you get those top grades. Girls go for guys who break the rules. You
got dumped for failure to revolt. This is the right lane, don’t worry.”
“The quarterback breaks the rules? As a
matter of fact this is the left lane; which is decidedly not the right lane, OK?”
“Don’t get uptight. The road’s smoother in
this lane. Too many bumps over in the right. Well, yeah… maybe he just has a
large penis. He is better looking,
better built.”
“Yeah, but somebody is coming, you idiot!”
“Hey, c’mon,” he glanced over. “My IQ is
160. I’m actually an extraordinarily intelligent suicidal maniac.”
“OK. Look… please?”
He swerved right. Three seconds later, the
approaching vehicle roared past – a blue station wagon cruising under thirty; a
slight elderly party with a baseball cap at the wheel.
“It’s him – that old guy,” I said without
thinking; then thought, and added, “How can that be?"
“Maybe he stopped to mend a fence. You
sure it’s the same guy, the slowpoke? Whatever, I was enjoying the one-sided
chicken. He must be blind not to see us. He didn’t react at all. Just kept
coming. But you needn’t have worried. I was going to chicken out; just a second
or two later than when you begged me. I certainly didn’t want us to get killed.
Not when there’s an alibi to tell. I will
be able to watch the nurse’s face when I lie about The Body Snatchers.”
“Night
of the Living Dead.”
“That’s a stupid movie. Don’t you find Body Snatchers more appropriate?”
“You know,” I gazed what I imagined was wistfully out the passenger window,
“sometimes I get ecstatic hating my dad.”
I sensed his right arm raise. A snap, then
soft yellowish interior illumination, told me he had switched on the dome
light. “Now what is that but Ares switched into Aphrodite? Anger metamorphosed
into lust, caterpillar spite become butterfly orgasm? Check out your face
reflected in the window – is it ecstasy?”
I let my concentration drift, till the dim
image – with the night behind it – settled into focus. The features were
obscure. Eyes hollowed. Dark hair blended into the blackness of the speeding
roadside. Lips blurred in the shadow of a large nose. But the familiar face
seemed to be decidedly, if faintly, expressing… nothing. Nothing to the nth.
“Well, no.” I sighed at the image ghosted
on the glass. “A little tired, a little drunk, a little distant… mostly a pile
of nothing. I could be anybody lost in a crowd – probably male, maybe eighteen,
Tuesday night rolling over into Wednesday.”
“Describe once more your progenitor.
Sketch his character. Help me get a grip on this extase.”
“Dad resembles Rumplestiltskin.” I looked
back out, through the windshield, at the nothing on the highway. “In his
drunken rages he symbolically stamps a foot through the floor; grabs the other
foot in both hands; jerks up; rips himself apart. He is furious both with the
world and with himself. Dad wouldn’t
stop at suicide – he’d do murder-suicide. But, like your own dad, like all
rat-eyed bureaucrats, he lacks guts. So he daily dies the life of a catatonic
Rumplestiltskin. Mine with alcoholic rage, yours with ultra-sober petty
pickiness.”
“Paper asses,” he sneered; one of Doug’s
pet words; from paperassier – argot
for bureaucrat. “Paper ass lifers.”
“What makes us,” I considered shrugging,
but couldn’t muster the effort, “any better?”
Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed him
shrug. Felt the Chevy slow to something approaching the limit. After a
relatively sane quarter-mile of silence he said, “Nothing.”
“Our
father who art behind the desk,” I recited. “One penis, above testicles,
with paycheck and health insurance for all. Hollow be thy name. Thy retirement come, thy will be done, on
television as it is in Winnebago.” Then squirmed in my seat – butt gone to
sleep. “I come from a long line of paper asses. My grandfather was a paper ass
at the post office.”
“It’s in our genes.” He squirmed in his
own seat, jerked at pants, tucked in shirt. “Hey – I gotta get outta here.”
“Well, stop the car first. You gotta
piss?”
“I mean out of this halfway. My own
grandfather worked for the War Department, right across the river in D.C. He
did something with typewriters and filing cabinets; I believe a telephone was
also intimately involved. But whatever,” he shook his head, “I gotta get my
diploma, go to college, settle down and become a paper ass. I mean, why kill
yourself when it’s so easy to commit suicide all your life anyway?”