14 Fictional Positions

by Williamson, Eric Miles

  My father is not the only one who can get married around here.

  My grandfather died today and now he is not married anymore. My grandfather outlived three wives but he did not outlive his latest. My grandfather was a lecher and he was certainly in league with my father against me. My grandfather introduced me to Wife. Wife may have been a daughter of his. Wife may have been one of my grandfather’s concubines. All of grandfather’s daughters were born somewhere in California, he used to say.

  I attended my father’s first wedding, though I don’t remember the event. I was only two weeks old. I have seen the pictures. I was very small, and I looked like a little white rat, pointy nose and little black eyes that never blinked. My grandfather held me while my father proceeded through the vows at the church and the refreshment line at the reception. I seemed to be always crying, then. My grandfather was teasing me. He was teasing me because I wasn’t married.

  Twelve hours ago I held my grandfather while my father proceeded through the vows in my apartment and the refreshment line at the ice cooler. My grandfather was teasing me. He was teasing me because I wasn’t married.

  Before the guests arrived at my apartment I put everything I own into the closets and locked the doors. My family is not trustworthy. They drink too much. They are Irish, and that is why our men are named Mr. Murphy. I am not Irish, though. I believe I am a Turk. My mother was not even sure whose child I am. I suppose this makes me an American. My favorite spirit is absinthe. I smoke fine tobacco, but much too much of it. My father is an anti-smoker. My mother is dead.

  The family was not surprised when they entered my empty apartment. They have never seen it any other way. They do not ask me what I do with the furniture and clothes they donate to my poverty. I once told them I give their gifts to worthier causes than myself. You see, I am an educated man and I am an honest man: therefore, I am a poor man.

  My father works in a gas station and votes for Republicans.

  If I leave cigarettes in the refrigerator, he smokes them.

  Psycho-Sexual Responses Necessarily Lead to Cannibalism,

  But Just Try to Tell That to Young People

  My father’s second wife seduced me. I had long hair then. That is how we wore our hair, in those days. She was named Lucy. She had long hair too. She came into my bedroom and asked me if I liked her breasts.

  “Do you like my breasts?” she said.

  “I have no reason not to,” I said.

  “You should not read the Bible so much,” she said.

  “I don’t read it that much,” I said. “Sometimes I just pretend I’m reading it.”

  It was then that I knew that she was not trustworthy.

  The next morning she pinched my rear. My father was not watching, but I am certain he knew what she did. He has a knack for finding these kinds of things out. I had a slow leak on my left-front tire and I stopped by the gas station after my class that day.

  My father looked at me and said, as if nothing at all had happened, “You should probably get an oil change and a lube job while you’re here.”

  That is how I know that he knew.

  It’s Better to Shoot the Wrong Man

  Than Not to Shoot at All

  My father’s new wife has been undeniably faithful to him ever since she began to be my girlfriend. She was my girlfriend for nine years before she married my father. I was always worthy of her trust.

  Now my girlfriend is married to my father, and she has abused me. She used to beg me to make love to her, “Please,” she would say, “Please, I am devoted to you and I have been faithful.”

  But I am a moral person, and it is, as it will always be, my duty not only to maintain, but to elevate the dignity of my lofty family name.

  I do not take the name of Mr. Murphy lightly.

  Armageddon: If You Don’t Survive, So What? If You Do

  Just Think of the Smooth Commute

  I met Wife for the first time at my father’s wedding reception. She looked out of place because it was obvious she wasn’t a Murphy. She was uncharacteristically drunk for a Murphy. By the time she arrived all the beer and wine coolers, except the beer in my grandfather’s hand, had been consumed. Murphys can hold their liquor.

  My grandfather was propped upright in a beach chair he had brought with him and his gray skin was almost the same color as his gray hair. It is not polite to disrupt weddings in my family. Weddings are sacred and hallowed events. My grandfather was aware of this, so he merely sunk into the beach chair, quietly and politely, and died.

  He had just seen the girl who had walked in off the street looking for a free drink. The girl was wearing a Walkman stereo headset and a tight fitting blue silk dress and a nice body. She is the girl I married. She is Wife.

  “Ankle straps,” he said, and he pointed, and he winked at me. He smiled and finished his beer. My grandfather had always liked ankle straps.

  That’s probably when he died, though it only looked like he had passed out and sunk into his beach chair. There is no way of being absolutely certain about these things. It is empirically verifiable, however, that the empty can in his hand had been the last beer in the apartment.

  The ambulance drivers were trying to get the stretcher down the stairs outside my apartment when Wife first spoke to me. I do not know what she said, but she had a nice voice and she did not have an Irish accent.

  The ambulance drivers slipped, and my grandfather’s body slid off the stretcher. My grandfather’s body landed on its side, and was not badly damaged.

  The girl turned to me and said, “I know a way we can get a free bottle of champagne.”

  “Indeed?”

  “If we get married at the Hitching Post,” she said, “they give us a bottle free.”

  “And what is the price of the wedding?”

  “Gamble on the Clown of Fortune wheel at Circus Circus,” she said. “Ten bucks a pop. Ten thousand jackpot. Free wedding even if you don’t hit the jackpot. With the free wedding, free booze.”

  That is when Wife became my fiancée.

  I am convinced Grandfather Murphy would have wanted it that way.

  The Winnebago of our Passion is Parked

  In a Tow-Away Zone

  To the hotel I brought no baggage, excepting Wife and a nearly empty bottle of Almond Flavored Goncourt Brothers’ Champagne, compliments of the Hitching Post.

  The wedding, also compliments of the Hitching Post, was simple, devoid of ornament, offensive to no person’s religion or sexual orientation. An old Negro man, while Wife and I waited our turn at the altar, trotted through the lobby with a partially consumed watermelon balanced in his palms like a juicy pink baby. I did not laugh, nor did I comment to the man concerning the preposterous stereotype he was helping to perpetuate: I am a man who minds only business which is his own.

  Already I cannot recall the words of the ceremony, resultant, perhaps, of my reverence for the holiness of consecration, but, more likely, because I was annoyed by the watermelon man’s biting and slurping. His name, I learned later, was Berfelle, and he made his living as a gratuity coffer, serving as a Professional Witnesser of Marriages.

  When the ceremony was over, I attempted to kiss my new bride, Wife. She shunned me, and said to the Official, “Where’s the free booze?”

  After obtaining said liquor, Wife, expertly uncorking the bottle and chugging like a sailor, turned to me and proclaimed, with curled lips, “This tastes like shit,” puckering her lips and adding, “Lay one on me, baby.”

  Which I did.

  The Official played a videotape he had made of our wedding ceremony, and there, on the wall, were Wife and I, life-sized and slightly blurred on the big screen, myself rather tastefully attired in subdued plaid (the Murphy weave), and Wife displaying her wares in a way which seemed to me inappropria
te, for a married woman.

  The event was nonetheless surprisingly romantic. I doubt I shall soon forget it, entirely.

  Historians Will Speak of Us in the Past Tense

  My share of the champagne tossed back by Wife, Wife squatted in the corner of the motor lodge room with her blue silk dress hiked above her thighs and panties, matching blue, around her ankles, Wife not merely squatting but relieving herself vigorously, and with expression, on the carpet, Wife not merely relieving herself on the carpet, vigorously, and with expression, but screaming at me words which sear my ears still, I was relatively certain that no consummation of our union was immediately forthcoming.

  “Fuck you,” Wife explained.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said, “but you have your dress hiked above your thighs and your panties, blue to match your dress, around your ankles, the very ankles which may have been Grandfather Murphy’s last worldly sight, and, Wife, you are relieving yourself, vigorously, and with expression.”

  Wife repeated her refrain.

  I looked out the window. The moon hung white and slender in the sky like a distant lonely toenail clipping, the emblem of our love.

  Usually, when things like this had happened to me, I had played the part of the curious onlooker, the voyeur, for I am a man on whom little is lost. Usually, at times like this, I had found a way to tactfully, unobtrusively, even subtly light a cigarette and pour myself a generous drink, toasting, if you will, the humanity of our idiosyncrasies. This time, however, was different. This time, I had no cigarettes. This time, the bottle was empty.

  Failure is Not as Easy as it Seems

  Wife’s sudden and untimely departure having taken me by surprise, I had the opportunity to consider my position relative to the situation.

  Outside my room at Irving’s Motor Lodge there were many disturbing noises, sounds which reminded me that I was a married man and Wife had left me. The sounds of police sirens and rubber tires ground on asphalt, the squelches of arming car alarms, a cat on the roof crunching through the loose gravel.

  The television in the hotel room did not work.

  “Front desk.”

  “Mr. Murphy in 101. Are there any messages for me?”

  “No.”

  “My television does not work, and Wife has left me.”

  “It’s probably a bad picture tube.”

  Wife had forgotten to put on her shoes and had been picked up by a truckdriver, or worse.

  I drive a 1967 Dodge Polara. It used to be a police car. Now it is my car.

  Policemen did not trust me until I cut my hair in 1977. I was twenty then. Now I cut my hair often.

  We Can’t Help Thinking We Have Forgotten Something:

  The Tragedy is We Have Not

  My position relative to things was as follows:

  Approximately 6000 feet altitude.

  Second floor, Irving’s Motor Lodge.

  Facing the West, as had my Irish forebears, looking into a flickering neon aurora borealis.

  Fifteen feet from Wife’s fluid opinion of me.

  Philosophically opposed to all branches of ontology, phenomenology, epistemology, and metaphysics.

  On the interstate highway of love, I am roadkill.

  I only know what time it is when I don’t have to tell somebody else.

  Waning tumescence, waxing sobriety.

  Four days before the next paycheck from my existentially fulfilling but low paying job.

  Consider the sincerity of incompetence.

  There are oil slicks in the harbor, but that is preferable to periscopes.

  Married and Wifeless.

  Being a Murphy, however, has its benefits: Murphies, when confronted with The Great Hopeless, The Ridiculous, and/or The Somewhat Stupid, shave their heads and burrow like moles into the professionally manured soils of adversity.

  Bald, I walked down Virginia Avenue, Casinos rising from the earth like flickering Rubik’s Cubes, in search of Wife. Hot air pumped in shafts from open glass doors onto the sidewalks, smelling of every person within. From none did I catch the distinct licorice odor of Wife.

  In a moment of tender remembrance, of nostalgia, I paused outside the Hitching Post and watched an elderly bejewelled couple commit their wedding kiss and watch their video. Berfelle shared in their toast of Almond Flavored Goncourt Bros. Champagne, and in my imagination, which many have underrated, I too shared the moment with a drink—actually, I believe, lifting my hand to clink an imaginary plastic flue.

  Some of Our Colleagues Have Been Incarcerated, Others Have Not

  The Point is Moot: We All Do Time

  Every woman I have ever met has had a chance of becoming a Mrs. Murphy. All women are assessed with equal consideration and unbiased scrutiny, regardless of weight, shoe size, and melanin level. I have never looked at a woman and not imagined her naked, though I admit to having derived varying degrees of pleasure, or lack thereof, from their respective imagined nakednesses. And though I cannot halt my imaginings from intruding upon the virgin sanctities of pre-blossomed youth, I have never acted upon the advice and recommendation of my healthy testosterone. To be honest, I had hoped tonight, the night of my wedding, would remediate my celibate condition.

  At Sparks Junior High School, when I was in the seventh grade, I was propositioned by a girl named Heather McGhetter. Header, as the boys called her, was reputed to spend her afternoons behind the tennis courts, on her knees, ministering to the strained needs of her male classmates. I had never sought the succor of Header McGhetter, not out of fear, but from an apprehension concerning the merits and dismerits of the mysterious and potentially contagious process. The childhood myths about Cooties, I had learned, had become clinically verifiable realities.

  In the cafeteria, during nutrition hour, Header McGhetter accosted me.

  “Will you meet me behind the tennis courts?”

  “Header,” I replied, “although I am flattered by your concern for my well-being, and although your weight is counterbalanced by your attractive and ample bosoms, I will not, most certainly not, meet you behind the tennis courts.”

  “Faggot,” said she.

  “I beg your pardon?” said I.

  “Faggot!” she cried.

  Our classmates took note.

  Life is a Hair Shirt

  I stood on the Virginia Avenue bridge over the Truckee River watching the black waters of time and ice flow like wrinkled cellophane over granite boulders and bottomless sands. I, Mr. Murphy, citizen and registered potential soldier, recalled the significant events of my short life. I recalled my birth, the grinning doctor who spanked me into being, recalled many of my step-brothers and step-sisters and half-brothers and half-sisters and ex-step-brothers and ex-step-sisters and foster brothers and foster sisters and ex-foster brothers and ex-foster sisters and adoptive brothers and adoptive sisters and ex’s of both the latter two, recalled the heart-shaped rock I gave to Angela Fisher in the sixth grade as a symbol of my devotion, a symbol which she threw at my head, with precision, recalled knocking for six hours on the door of my prom-date’s home before drinking a bottle of whiskey alone on Donner Pass, a location appropriate for my desires at the time, and, as I stood on the Virginia Avenue bridge, I was overwhelmed with tenderness for the world, for its citizenry, for Wife.

  I strode toward town with satisfaction, knowing that though I was a Murphy, and though neither Christian nor philosopher, I was, though surely barbarian, no savage.

  Imagine my surprise, however, when passing Circus Circus, its glittering carrousel horses and elephants and tigers ringing with jackpot quarters, midget blackjack dealers rocking heavy torsos over unsteady feet, fishnet-stockinged young women spreading elaborately supported cleavage over felt tables—imagine my surprise when, at the Clown of Fortune, I spotted Wife, and not on
ly Wife, but, at her side and tugging the heavy black ball of the machine’s arm, an enormous Texan, aglitter with sequined vest and towering Stetson and wearing cowboy boots that sparkled like the heavens. The heavy black ball having been tugged, the four eyeballs of the Clown of Fortune spinning in its head, I saw Wife kiss the Texan. The eyeballs stopped spinning and no jackpot was obtained. From the mouth of the Clown of Fortune issued the familiar coupon, which Wife snatched, for a free wedding at the Hitching Post, and the couple made for the exit, which was for me the entrance, through which I had not entered, and through which they now passed, embracing.

  “Wife,” I said. “Darling.”

  She pretended she did not notice me, her lawfully wedded husband.

  I knew where they were headed. You see, I was not born yesterday.

  At the bar, I drank Old Bushmills, my liquor of choice. A rock and roll orchestra played pleasant tunes from the era before my own, tunes I had heard my parents humming together when they were in love. I did not like the tunes, nor did they elicit fond memories. The singer would not have looked attractive had she been shorn of her vestments. I believe the whiskey was diluted by more than the cubes of ice in my glass. The unattractive singer cast significant looks in my direction.

  During the break, she approached, then sat next to, me.

  “Buy me a drink, looker?”

  “No.”

  She bore an expression of surprise.

  “You got a problem?”

  “No.”

  “Well?”

  I smiled, and I thought of my knowledge of love.

  “I am Mr. Murphy,” I said. “I drink alone.”