“Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles.”
“So whatchu want then?”
“Look, I’m offering you my free services.”
“That’s my loyal Polynesian lover.”
“You want me to straighten that boy out? I’ll take him down to the handball courts and let the parolees slap him around a little bit. They got tags on their faces that’ll scare the shit out of him. Look like mutherfucking Maori warriors. Make him wish he never saw a sphincter.”
“Damn!” she shouts, coming out the car, jumping in my face, right there in her g and a T-shirt.
“I’m trying to help out your family here,” I say. “Your peeps.”
“Family? Peeps? What you talking about, fool?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Me? Me? Where the hell you been? You talking like you in another place. You forget where you’re at? No one knows wassup anymore. Not your own son, not no one.”
13
I Know What I’m Talking About
I KNOW what I’m talking about. It’s embedded in me, too, that modern gluttony of the mind, that wild lewd greed. I’d ruined the only substantive relationship I’ve ever had with a woman because of the evolving sexual palette, the revolving nasty image. I was twenty-two, I was a walking hard-on. I crossed the busy streets of San Jo with my tongue out the side of my mouth. A sharp shift in the wind, an exotic accent, a gentle moment with a stranger, an idiosyncrasy as stupid as how one sips her morning coffee, had me tucking and repositioning and disappearing into obscure places for a stroke session. My poor girl and I would double-back beast twice a day, but she had only a partial understanding of the rotten nature of my organ. I was a demon. I should’ve been purged by fire, burnt at the stake. Or sent off to war.
In the beginning, Sharon was constantly making plans. Plans upon plans. She was like a kid building a fort in the yard. There were orchards and vineyards and beaches where our nuptials would be consummated, exotic locales in South America and New Zealand where our first child would be conceived. I bought a subscription to Bride magazine for her birthday, and she giggled. She considered the >utility of certain friends ten years in the future, measured by who we’d be in the future: the Tusifales. That we could change and actually grow together, morph into some variable beyond our control, fascinated her. She was petite, blue-eyed, and thin-boned, but when she’d envision our future, Sharon inflated into a prophetic American genie.
Our pact was based on faith, on not cheating. For us it was a matter of driving toward the sanctimonious, of preparing ourselves for the carriage—when it came—of love. Every woman I’d dated before Sharon had been casual about adultery. “Just don’t tell me about it” had been a common utterance. That meant, by translation, “I won’t tell you about it either.” They wanted to keep the gates open. For fun or just in case.
Everyone I knew had cheated, was cheating. Even my happily married sister, Tali, whose friends often say, “She was meant to be a loving wife,” had had an affair with a brotha when she’d first gotten married. I overheard her telling a girlfriend named Tonicia about it at a luau, worried that she’d been knocked up and that the baby was gonna come out a little too brown for dove-white McLaughlin’s tastes. “Poor McLaughlin!” the friend cried. “He got a sperm-bank son and a baby on the way that ain’t his’n!” She’d asked for advice and the friend shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Just keep the kid and that dude away from those DNA-testing scumbags!” I struggled with desire. I felt, somehow, sexually gypped in a monogamous deal, a fool on the stage. Like I’d been suckered into the narrative by a deceased Puritan playwright who was no longer culturally relevant.
In Sharon’s daily absence, I started a ritual, the three-dollar three-minute run. Back then, 1999, 2000, I’d quit school eight classes short of a degree and was pushing a broom at the Mountain View Parks and Rec so she could finish up without worrying about tuition. She worshipped me for it, her parents questioned my ambition. That was tough to take: her mother was a swing-shift clerk at a Mervyns liquor store and her pops was unemployed. He always enjoyed speaking to the myriad ways in which he was overqualified for any job. I’d think, But you’ve yet to look into our burgeoning fast food industry, sir. You could be so overqualified pushing chalupas and bean burritos that no one would know the difference.
Anyway, after work I’d catch the bus to the 7-Eleven in downtown Mountain View. Inside I’d buy a bag of barbecue Cornuts and a peach-flavored Kern’s nectar. This was the first step of the ritual, getting the paper change (three one-dollar bills, each worth a minute in the booth) from the purchase and making sure the store clerk (this one a different Singh) wasn’t suspicious. But he never made eye contact, which was the way I liked it. Each visit I’d walk under the bridge of the door determined to be inconspicuous despite the customer beep announcing me.
On the day of my sixth uncaught month it all blew up.
I went behind the 7-Eleven alleyway and started toward the booth. I kicked at a few broken stones of concrete. The air was Bay Area cool, half an hour before sundown, mid-March, the sea blowing its salty kisses inland. I was taking the half-breaths that I was used to in the alleyway. In my Parks and Rec T-shirt, Ben Davis jeans, and steel-toed boots, I was sweating profusely in the crotch and under-arm regions, yet not enough to stifle the rising of arm and leg hair. I was at the tips of my senses, alert for any interruption to the ritual.
I passed the back door of Delia’s Cleaners, a few hanging racks on wheels, rusting at the corners, discarded plastic. A bottle of Olde English, unfinished by a golden third. Two more doors with numbers painted on the wall above, 223 and 225. There was a cardboard box on its side between the two doors, popcorn filler spilled out the mouth, the Styrofoam floating on the ground wind of the alleyway.
The back doorstep of Ga Bo Ja Korea Buffet was stacked with empty kimchi bottles, the scent of garlic and soy strong. A penny-bronze pussycat was digging through a box of kalbi bones. Sometimes the cat would run when I came, but that day it just sat there and watched me. I didn’t like what I imagined on its face of disheveled whiskers and so I hissed, “Hey!” and it scuttled into the restaurant. I could feel the excitement growing despite the stench of the alleyway. I reached down, still walking, and shifted my boot. I looked behind me and quickened my step.
The boot. The package. The wood. The johnson. The rooster. Used to call it the engine. I can remember the day when the engine would run wild on the cheapest gas, the oil dripping constantly. One shot of Elle MacPherson’s nipple poking through the green latex fabric of a Sports Illustrated shoot—one nipple!—and it was running on empty for weeks. That photo would last in my head for a year, long enough for the next annual S.I. shoot on the beaches of Jamaica to hit the shelves by the millions.
I can remember, too, that primeval feeling I’d have when Sharon would walk into our shared studio, soaked from a two-hour workout at the 24-Hour Nautilus. I’d cross the limited space of our studio like a lion pacing his cage. Keen in the olfactories, watching her strip down, smelling the salt from her sweat-dried brown skin. The absolutism in my guts to fuck her absolute and hard feels now strangely foreign, almost out of body, the memory not even nostalgic. But I was losing interest even back then. A year into living together, I began to fantasize about Sharon’s best friend, Susan, or Sharon’s mother, Jan, the liquor store clerk, Susan’s mother, both mothers, or a big messy sandwich with everyone involved.
That’s the kind of deviant I was becoming at twenty-two, not even a father yet, a decade from a midlife crisis. Oedipus manipulating the images caught in his own head, wannabe orgy proprietor. I craved anything that would make the gasoline—Sharon, monogamy—not monotonous.
My straying mind was something I would try and hide from Sharon, but eventually I started dropping clues about the warped nature of my desire. Leaving hints at the scene. I had, for instance, placed a copy of Updike’s Rabbit, Run on Sharon’s dresser. I’d felt a kinship with the perpetually fleein
g Rabbit Angstrom. After she’d read it as I knew she would, and said, “That was good,” I offered her the next step-up with Updike, a tattered paperback copy of Couples that I’d bought at Recycle Bookstore on the Alameda. After she read it, I’d awaited a reprimand of some sort: adultery, philanderers, swingers, et cetera.
Instead, she’d said, “His picture sure doesn’t fit a spouse swapper. He looks kind of New Englandy and bookish.”
I said, “Okay, try this,” and handed her Tropic of Cancer.
“Now this guy,” she’d said, two days later, “he’s interesting. Should we get a bidet?”
I soon discovered that Susan, the best friend, frequented a nude beach. Susan was muscular and somewhat butch, yet I found her very sexy. She had the quads of a gymnast, the bob to match, and the tattoos of a nineteenth-century swabbie.
I’d said, “I bet Susan needs some company in the sun, huh?”
“Nah. She doesn’t want you going with her.”
“No,” I said, kicking my toes into the heel of the other foot. “I meant you.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me? Susan says we don’t talk enough.”
“Well, then you should go. Talk on the beach.”
“Not Susan and I. You and I.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, I don’t like the idea of old men watching. They hide behind the rocks and wait for Susan to roll over.”
I said, “I’d be back there, too,” and Sharon laughed. For some reason, I became embarrassed. “I’m just kidding.”
“Really, Paulie. Sometimes you’re so strange,” and then, “Let’s eat out tonight. Get ready to go.”
So I started bringing Playboy home. I put the magazine on the coffee table in front of the television, a place where visitors would not only find it but find it first. Right between the framed photos of myself and Sharon pointing at the camera at Alcatraz, the other of Sharon and Susan hugging in Vegas. When Sharon had come home from her workout at the gym, she’d said, “What’s this?”
“What?” I said.
Sharon was flipping through the pages and she’d already found the centerfold, an Amer-Asian with a bob. “Well, isn’t she cute? She’s got hair like Susan.”
“Yes,” I said, approaching Sharon, trying to find her scent, “like Katie Couric.”
She pulled away. “Don’t.” She was studying each photograph. “So young.”
“Nineteen.”
“How do you know?”
“It says right here.” I reached for the magazine and Sharon moved half a step away. I said, “It gives her basic bio. Ambitions, the kind of men she likes, a pic of her cheerleading days.”
“What guy wouldn’t want to do her,” said Sharon matter-of-factly. “What an ass.”
“What?”
“You might as well get a subscription.” Sharon tossed the Playboy on the coffee table. It slid and spun. “Save some money that way.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“If you say so.”
I was a little confused, having been prepared for a verbal assault. I was ready to take the discussion back to another century, touting the French Renaissance and its full-body models, or another decade and Marilyn Monroe—“the sexual avatar of class,” I’d planned to say—or another memorized phrase: “The last artistic venue of portraiture.”
I bought us tickets for the stage. Maybe we weren’t getting out enough, maybe the studio was cramping our growth as a couple. A freak show might change that. On a Thursday night, I drove Sharon to downtown Berkeley to see an X-rated contemporary version of a Sophoclean tale, Eddie Puss, that was being performed by the Jugs-Or-Nuts, a traveling troupe of thespian transvestites.
I had a hard time taking the troupe seriously, especially since Eddie Puss was much smaller than his own mother. Yet when I watched for expressions of disgust from Sharon during key moments in the play, she’d either yawn or roll her eyes. Once she said, “How embarrassing for you men,” and then turned her head to sleep. By the end of Act II, she was snoring so loud I had to wake her up with a nudge. I followed Sharon under the neon-lit sign and watched her toss the Eddie Puss ticket stubs into the first garbage can.
From behind I threw out a bone, something Catholic from my childhood: “Do you want to go to confession with me tomorrow?”
“Are you kidding? I’d be in there until next year! No sin booths for me!”
Nothing seemed to get a rise out of Sharon. Her basic attitude was instructive: on the second year of a relationship things plateau, especially sex; that’s the way it goes for every couple. Like the dull commitment of lifetime service to the National Guard. Perhaps I had been looking for a fight, a spark between us, even if I’d lose the fight.
The spark that would make me feel alive....
No sparks at the end of the alleyway, and I hung a left into the parking lot. Ivy was everywhere, feeding like a virus on the concrete and steel. Three cars were parked in parallel forty-five degree angles. I kept my eyes to myself. I’d learned my lesson during the first week of the ritual when I witnessed two people fucking in the backseat of a Toyota Camry. They had seen me coming and kept going. The shocks of the undulating car creaked like an old bed. They seemed encouraged by the idea of getting caught. I had picked up my stride and ducked into the back entrance of the bookstore.
I passed the three cars without incident and walked up the four-step staircase into the bookstore. This the worst part of the ritual, nodding at the clerk. He was just what you’d expect in a bookstore like this, truly filthy: pockmarked with the cavernous pores of alcoholism, lips smeared white with an anti-cold-sore cream that didn’t prevent him from constantly licking his lips. On that day, he had on an Arco mechanic’s shirt with the sewn-on name tag LOU and was shelving giant rubber phalli behind the counter—black, white, brown, red, transparent, striped—next to boxes of artificial vaginas molded in cold wax directly from the porn stars themselves. Then he was on his tippy-toes, stretching out for packaged Mardi Gras beads and the bigger version, a row of Ping-Pong balls on a string.
I slid past the counter, and he turned and said, “Hey, buddy. What did the ovary say to the other ovary?”
I didn’t look at him, I didn’t look at the items for sale behind him, but I stopped, my eyes on the ground. I couldn’t believe my ears. In half a year’s time, I hadn’t exchanged one word with anybody in the bookstore, let alone Lou. It was a bad omen. I considered exiting the joint at once. But the image of Lou following me out the door, wondering if I was an undercover cop or a spy from another bookstore, kept me from leaving. And the thought of having to right-hook Lou on those plague-ridden lips before escaping down the alleyway was a trial I wouldn’t put my fist through.
“What?” I managed.
His laugh sounded like the squeaky collusions of mice behind the wall. “Hey, there’s Dick!” he said, slug tongue out of his mouth. “Let’s egg him!”
The joke depressed me: my mind was fast to self-indict. When were Sharon’s ovaries last drowning in my “protein fishies,” as she used to call it during the early days? It was three weeks, maybe longer. Our sex was missionary, her head propped, my face to the side of her head buried in the pillow.
Sharon herself had started it. We’d lain down together, and she had stretched her neck to one side of the pillow. Automatically. When we’d first met, that meant nuzzle the neck, blow on the ear, nibble the lobe. But things had changed. My instinct had been to follow her lead and push my face into the pillow. There wasn’t the slightest protestation from Sharon.
We no longer showered together. Sharon was invariably dressed before I woke up in the morning, no matter how early I rose. She’d also be dressed when I came home and dropped into the couch to yell at whatever demagogue I could find on cable news. And she’d been sleeping in a G-string, a knee-length Stanford T-shirt and black silk blinders that looked like doilies over her eyes. Sharon had loved Naked Thursday, a twenty-four-hour affair of mutual nudity where I was not allo
wed to touch her until midnight struck. That had been painful and rewarding, with a strong element of Catholic deprivation to it that I admired even then. By the time the moment of consummation came, I was desperate for contact. But no more prancing around our studio in the buff. Naked Thursday went out like a lot of Thursdays do, without note.
At the counter, Lou was now bent over a six-foot plastic doll, genially oxygenating it as if he were blowing up a raft for the kids at the lake. I walked past the desk to the gallery of both real and televised moans and all the way to the last unoccupied booth in line closest to the door (which opened into the lot for exit but not entrance), locked the booth, dropped my pants to the knees but no further, inserted a dollar into the pay slot, still standing, turned the volume down on the private screening, and flipped to channel eighteen, which featured Sapphic encounters, women feasting on women, violating each other in every conceivable way. My goal was to finish before I used up the three dollars, which gave me three minutes in all.
But the machine was not cooperating. Bad omen on that day, Aphrodite issuing a warning. It kept flicking back to channel thirteen. Each time I reached out and hit the flashing red button and returned to the isle of Lesbos, the screen jumped to two men in a steamy sauna with skimpy white bath towels around their waists. Finally the channel just stayed where it was, wouldn’t move. And despite my efforts to mute the machine, it remained at full volume. Above their grunts and squeaky palms, everyone in the gallery could hear the conversation on the screen, my screen, and I knew that if I didn’t find a fix fast, I’d have someone waiting outside my booth in seconds.
“You look like a big friendly bear, don’tchu?”
“Grrrrrrrr.”
“And I’ll be your little bear-er, won’t I?”
“Grrrrrrr.”
Then the machine went crazy. Flashing from channel to channel faster than an eyeblink, I saw silicon lips crying the Oh of ecstasy in mass libidinous excretion in the water on the streets in the gutter on rooftops in someone’s sometimes many people’s mouths, bubbling over like the froth of sewage on the shore of a stream outside an insidious chemical plant, and in the depleted well of romance in my head, I found the recurring picture of Sharon dancing through the bookstore. Prancing and pirouetting past that nest of Herpes at the counter, the only woman clothed, she did not belong in the filth, even the filth of my own imagination.
What We Are Page 11