by Andy Schell
After he’s gone, I sit in my car and laugh. After wiping the water from my eyes and blowing my nose, I realize why straight women are obsessed with. waterproof mascara and those little pocket packs of tissues. And no wonder a lot of them would rather eat a good bar of chocolate and read a good book than fuck their three minute husbands.
At least I’m safe from AIDS. They say straight men don’t get it, so I guess JT is protected. But if he’s straight, what’s he doing with me? What a crock of shit. I’m an idiot. That guy didn’t connect with me any more than he connects with his wife or any of the hundreds of other people he’s probably done it with. Shit, I’ve yet to meet a guy who is willing to connect truly connect the way Amity and I do. Maybe I should marry Amity. Not only do I love her, but it may help me to stay alive.
he bills keep rolling in for the dinners I offer to charge, fancy cowboy boots Amity yearns for, concert tickets name it, I charge it. But along with the overdue notices, phone calls start. I’m amazed at the tenacity of these peol: collection agencies who call eight times a day. And though I like I’m sinking under it all, it’s worth it. Amity is so happy me that Hunt fades out of the picture. I’m satisfied to have gone because I’ve never liked having him around after hearing bar story of beating up fags. It’s weird, this competitiveness I with her boyfriends. I know I can’t satisfy her in the same they can, but for some reason I want to try. Before she goes on a date, I become wildly entertaining and make her laugh much as possible so her date seems substandard and boring comparison. I bring home little sugar cakes from her favorite can bakery and pick up her laundry from the cleaners, and that it’s warm enough, I wash her car once a week.
If actions speak louder than words, then Amity must know
I feel. But since I’ve made no verbal declaration, she takes another beau, Wade. Wade is a flight attendant who believes in power of green algae. He’s tall and has a good body, but he’s in the head, Amity says. “Dumber than a jar of hair.” He
make her laugh, because he’s always promoting the benefits of green algae. She laments, “I’ve tried to tell him I don’t need more oxygen. I need more clothes.” I can tell she’s bored with the whole thing, and it’s almost as if she’s daring me to tell her to get rid of him. I ask her what she sees in him, and she tells me his mother has an oceanfront house in Pebble Beach, and that’s what she sees in him. She’s planning a trip to Pebble Beach with Wade near the end of the month. “You must think I’m awful,” she tells me.
“Not at all,” I assure her. “You’re just with the wrong guy.”
“I hate this,” Amity says of her period. She’s lying on the sofa, a hot-water bottle on her abdomen. “Muffle is miserable, Harry.” Muffle is another name for her Virginia. Virginia, Muffle, Libby,
Lady. I really think she has a schizophrenic pussy.
“What can I do for you?” I ask.
“Will you drive me to Ben Franklin? I’m craving penny candy.” Pinny Caindee.
The five-and-dime is only blocks away in Snider Plaza. We both go into the store. If Amity’s getting penny candy, then I want some too. She loads up on all kinds of bite-size confections: saltwater taffy, caramels, Tootsie Rolls, Bit O’Honeys, candy corn, jelly beans, Dots, licorice you name it. I get some jawbreakers and Hot Tamales.
Back at home, we sit on the sofa, get stoned, and eat. And she eats it all. Everything. Then she wants to go to a movie. I drive us in her car to see Romancing the Stone, and we have to travel on Central Expressway to get to the theater.
Central Expressway, nicknamed Suicide Express by the locals, is an infamous freeway in Dallas on which people die horrible deaths. Every day. It has only two lanes in each direction, no shoulder (only walls), and insidious curves. There are no on ramps where you can build up speed to merge. The traffic hurls along at 70 mph, so anyone entering the expressway must go from a complete stop to 70 mph, while concentrating on the curve ahead, and trying
not to hit the side wall. Did I mention Texas allows open containers of alcohol while driving? …. “Here, Harry. Take another hit off the joint.”
“No!” I scream. “You’re trying to make me kill us both!” heart is thumping. I’m at the edge of Mockingbird Lane, ready turn on to Suicide Express. :
“It’ll make you drive better, I swear,” Amity pleads, laughing
She cranks up the stereo louder so that the Thompson Twins shouting “Doctor! Doctor!”
“You’re going to need a fucking doctor if you give me more of that pot!” I yell.
“OK, OK. Get ready!” she shouts, bracing herself,
against the dash
I put it in first gear and hold the clutch in. Then I step on the gas.
Amity whoops, “Go!”
I pop the clutch, the tires squeal, our heads snap back, and we jettison into the traffic, screaming like passengers in a crashin airplane. “We’re going to die! We’re going to die big time!” Big Tom.t
As we pass the brightly colored candy counter at the movie theater Amity makes an ugh sound and looks as if she’s going vomit. We sit in the back of the theater and watch the movie, and halfway through Amity whispers that she wants a diet drink. I her favorite, Diet Dr. Pepper, and return with popcorn too. pushes the popcorn into her mouth as if all these meetings is having with Gorbachov are just for show and the Soviets are going to drop the bomb at any moment. She washes it down with a huge gulp of Diet Dr. Pepper. After the salty popcorn is gone, Amity gets up and leaves. She returns with malted milk balls. Christ, two hours ago she ate enough candy to satisfy a busload of kindergartners. An hour later she was ready to puke at the sight of
the candy case in the lobby. And now she’s wolfing malted milk balls as if they’re a cure for cancer. I can’t figure her out.
At the end of the film, when Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner are reunited, Amity reaches over and takes my hand. I look sideways at her in the dark while the movie screen lights up her face. She’s not looking at me, but focusing on the movie. Yet she’s quietly holding my hand with no explanation.
It really is the strangest, most tender moment. Sometimes Mat thew and I held hands during movies, but it always seemed like a statement. A we’re-just-as-good-as-anyone-else gesture. We would sit there, clenched in unity, and when the lights went up after the picture ended, and all the straight couples had unclasped and were gathering their coats, we’d wait a few moments longer to ensure the effect of our statement. Of course, that took the romance out of it and made it a political gesture. And though political gestures are necessary, they’re seldom sexy. So this public act of hand holding with Amity is a provocative, new, free feeling. Straight people have it so easy.
Two days later, Amity is over her period but now has a raging yeast infection, something I’m not at all familiar with, but she assures me it’s true. I offer my services, and since she doesn’t want to poo up to go to the drug store (because women in Texas feel obligated to wear a ball gown to a 7-11, and even Amity suffers this burden), she sends me to the pharmacist for Monistat cream.
“Hep Yew?” the lady pharmacist who looks like Dolly Parton asks.
“I’m picking up a prescription for Amity Stone.” “What’s the prescription?” “Monistat.” “And you are?”
Not suffering from a yeast infection, Dolly. “Harry Ford, her roommate.”
She gets the stuff, has me sign the log, inspects my name as if hllUy
I’m a scam artist, and carefully hands me the pussy cream as if it’ kryptonite. I rip it from her hands and hustle to the register.
“
“
When I bring it home, Amity yips, Relief. She takes medicine and rushes into the bathroom, and for the first time
I met her, she closes the door. I start to head for the kitchen to a Diet Dr. Pepper, but she yells out, “You’re so good to me,
No guy would ever help a girl with this. Thank you, babe.” “You’re welcome,” I call.
“Do you know how hard it is to lie down on a c
old floor and do this?” she asks.
“I know it sucks. Every time I get a yeast infection I vow it’ my last,” I answer. *
“It’s not a picnic in the park, is it?” she responds, as if I’ serious. “I mean, here I am, fixin’ to shoot Libby in the with chilly cream! It’s about as pleasant as a drive-by shooting.”
I imagine her with a loaded gun pointed at her crotch. “Do shoot it like a gun?”
“Sort of. Well, not really,” she yells. “I mean, you won’t a bang or anything.”
“Are you doing it now?” “Are you ready?” she asks, as if I have anything to do with “Maybe I should take a hit off the bong first,” I joke. “Good idea, babe, but hurry. I’m freezing lying on this
“Just get it over with,” I tell her. “I don’t need drugs for this.“i
“I do,” she says. “Fire up that bong and pass it through door.”
I laugh and grab the bong off the hallway floor. There’s still left in the bowl, so I open the door a crack and slide it in on floor, followed by the lighter.
“Grazie!” she yells. I hear the bubbling of the water in chamber, followed by silence, followed by exhalation. “OK, Harry, here we go. Medicine time for Muffle!”
“I’m ready.” I keep thinking about the vaginal monikers
invented by the straight guys in my college dorm: hairy carport, love taco, Cindy’s trap door. But girls always seem to give it feminine names or liken it to a flower. Georgia O’Keefe made it downright glorious. What in the hell is going on behind that bath room door?
“Ahhhh!” Amity screams. Then she starts singing in a high pitched voice:
When you see Libby Libby Libby on your table table table, you better pet her, pet her, pet her, while you’re able able able!
“Is it over?” I ask.
“It will be in a couple days, darling’. But at the moment it’s like a Jane Fonda workout. I feel the burn!”
The next week, the day before she’s to leave on her trip with Wade, I say, “Don’t go. Let’s buzz down to Padre Island and cross the border to Mexico.” Padre Island is off the gulf coast of southern Texas, where college students spend their spring break burning through their parents’ money by drinking cases of Jack Daniel’s Whiskey and puking it over the sides of chartered “booze cruise” barges. It’s also a favorite junket of Dallas-based flight attendants, just a nonstop flight from Dallas to Brownsville, the gateway city, and we can be down there in just over an hour.
“Harry,” Amity says, “I thought you were supposed to be working a three-day trip tomorrow?”
I was. But yesterday I signed it over to a flight attendant who wanted the hours. I don’t mind her going out with someone besides me, but Wade ? I mean, he’s a nice guy and all, but he doesn’t even make her laugh. “I’m not working this week. Let’s go to Padre. We’ll bake and drink Margaritas.”
“What about Wade and his blue green algae?” Amity wonders, doing her doe-eyed look.
“Tell him you’re in search of a blue green cocktail instead.”
We wear sufficient clothing for the flight down, but pack nothing but swimsuits and the boxer shorts Amity lifted from Troy, since it’s now full-on summer and we’re into minimalist attire. Our flight down to Brownsville is staffed by a woman with clownish makeup. Amity whispers, “Barnum and Bailey, y’all.” The attendant also has the longest, biggest hair I’ve seen in Texas yet. I check to see if her name tag says, “Rapunzel.” In contrast, our flight’s also a woman, has hair shorn so severely that we’re able to see her. scalp. “Well I guess those two even themselves out,” Amity says,
brushing the crumbs off her seat cushion before sitting down. “What do you mean?”
“The captain and Rapunzel are lovers. They think knows, but it’s a common fact.”
I buckle my seat belt. “That hair has got to be heavy. At some point it’s going to snap her neck.”
“Good, she’s senior to us. We’ll both move up a number the seniority list.” Amity checks her own hair’s reflection in little purse mirror she carries. “Harry, promise if my hair ever that big, you’ll write me a note.”
We order two glasses of champagne from the woman with colossal coif, and when she brings them, we inspect them for hair All clear, we sip them and snack on the little bags of dr) nuts with MSG glaze, while flipping through the in-flight to check out the Slut of the Month, a girl Amity claims has more abortions than there are Osmond children.
As the jet turns to make its final approach to the runway Brownsville, Amity states, “My parents have a second home on the island.”
I’m surprised she didn’t mention it before. “Are they now?”
“I don’t know,” she says, looking out the window to the lush farmland of the Rio Grande Valley as it grows closer and closer.
My parents have a home in Colorado, and I can’t imagine going to Aspen and not staying in the family house even though I’d have to sneak us in with my extra key. “You don’t want to stay with them?”
“No,” she says. “If they’re there, they’ll only make us crazy. We didn’t bring any nice clothes, and they’ll want to drag us to the Yacht Club and make us play bridge all day while sipping Manhattans.”
“Sounds awful,” I admit.
“We’re not even going to call them,” she states.
“I understand,” I answer. But I don’t believe her parents have a home on Padre Island. What is this thing with her family? Does she even have a family?
Amity takes off her sunglasses and holds my hand. Her eyes sparkle as she changes her entire chemistry to address me. “Let’s not talk about my family. This is going to be a wonderful two days together, Harry. Just you and me. We don’t need anyone else, do we?”
“No, we don’t.”
“Power nap!” she barks without a segue, breaking regulations by reclining her seat fully before landing. In seconds she’s out cold. The jet’s gear drops with a thud, and the engines whine while we line up with the runway. We come roaring in and touch down with a hard bounce as if we’ve been shot out of the sky and the pilots deploy the thrust reversers with full force, as if the runway were the length of a Band-Aid. The shrill noise is deafening as the reverse thrust slows the aircraft. We’re still moving at a good clip when the captain steers the jet onto a taxiway as if she’s making a left turn through a yellow stoplight. Everyone on board is thrown against the right side of his seat. And Amity sleeps through all of it.
As the pilots shut down the engines at the gate, I lean over to gently wake her. Just as I’m about to touch her shoulder, she pops up like a piece of toast from a toaster. “Let’s go!”
“Ahhh!” I jolt, slamming back against my own armrest. “God, Amity! Why do you do that?”
“Do what?” she asks, grabbing her tote.
I approach the rental desk to rent a cheap car. After handing over my credit card, the agent informs me my authorization has been denied. I make a lame joke and hand her another card. Denied again. Fuck. These card people are closing in on me. I’ve got to get these payments out. It’s just that even my minimum payments are too high now for me to have any money to live. I’m afraid try my third and last card, and luckily I don’t have to when Amity dives in and saves the day, happily producing her credit card to agent. “Sorry,” I tell her, embarrassed. I’ll pay you back as soon as we get home.” “Don’t worry about it, Harry,” she smiles, fully sincere. “We’re a team.”
We find a reasonable hotel next to the ocean. Amity checks us in, and we head immediately for the beach.
The almost tepid ocean is like a Kansas horizon right before tornado, but the charcoal darkness of the water is sliced with of rolling white waves. The patches of sky are the same brilliant blues of any Caribbean horizon and strung together with high cumulus clouds looking like giant popcorn floating by. We dig toes into the warm sand. Let the sun soak into our skin. Walk with our feet in the water. Snack on chips. Flip through magazines.
In the late afternoon, after w
e’re tanned and warmed and talked out, we grab the rental car and head across the border to Matamoros, Mexico.
We stroll through the dusty dirt streets of Mexico, dressed in our boxer shorts and short sleeved button downs. We’re energized
by the brass of the mariachi music floating out of a nearby bar as we inspect ashtrays, rugs, velvet paintings, and maracas laid out on the brilliant blankets of the street vendors. When I offer to buy Amity a pair of maracas, she tells me she already has a pair, then shakes her titties. I laugh, and so do the local men on the street, while their wives scold them and usher them back into the shops or on their way.
We decide we’re hungry for local flavor of a more edible character, so we dine in a restaurant that looks like something from the Hollywood of the 1940’s. Large round tables with white starched tablecloths and napkins, big red velvet chairs, a huge dance floor in the middle of the restaurant, and a large live orchestra that plays while we eat.
There is something special about this day, this evening, this dinner. Amity’s hair is curly, full, and gorgeous, and her ears are adorned with gold hoop earrings, and this combination makes her look almost like a Latin Grace Kelly. And though she’s wearing only a starched white men’s shortsleeved dress shirt, boxer shorts, and little leather slip-on shoes, she’s glamorous beyond words. She leaves the top two buttons of her shirt open, and the string of pearls around her neck spills into her freckled cleavage.
And tonight she looks at me as if I’m the finest man in the world. And I completely forget that I’ve seen her look at Bart this way. And Troy. And Hunt. And probably Wade. And Miguel Arturo. And while she gazes at me with magic in her eyes, I can’t help but notice the waiters appraise my status. Nice score, amigo, their faces tell me. And the bass player in the band nods his approval. And the couple at the next table, who are only mildly enjoying them selves, seem to look at Amity and me with melancholy envy. Man, this is it. The thing that everyone is looking for. I feel like the one guy in the room who every other guy wants to be.