by M. Christian
I know I was very bad about freaking out like I did when you told me you were late, very politely and sweetly I have to add, just like a lady would, and not like a slut who “did” you in an alley like that slut Marsha said. I like the way you said it directly and to the point, with only a little screaming and crying. It was just hard for me to accept that the dream I’ve had since I was a little boy of having a beautiful wife and a wonderful little house with a white picket fence was finally going to come true. It just took a call from your daddy and a visit from your three brothers for me to realize that it really was happening and that it wasn’t just some kind of fantastic dream I was having.
I know that our wedding wasn’t as good as you wanted. I really wanted to take you to a nice hotel with real silverware and tablecloths and flowers on the table, a really good dance band, and a real big cake with white sugar frosting, and that we could have taken a real trip somewhere for a honeymoon. But even though I really did want to find a real good job where I might even have to wear a suit, I wasn’t making enough money at Bob’s Auto Body to afford the wedding you deserved. I seriously thought that it was better to save my money for my wonderful family – and not spend it on stupid things for my stupid car, or, tragically, our wedding – even though I know you wanted and deserved something so much better, my wonderful, beautiful wife.
I just wish I could go back in time and give you that fantastic wedding, one that would have showed how much I care for you and how happy I was that we were becoming man and wife. I hated that we had to get married in city hall, and I’m sorry that I kept calling it “getting hitched” and introducing you to everyone as “the new ball and chain”. It was nerves, beloved. Just nerves. I really didn’t like that we had the reception at Smelly O’Douls and the dance in a suite at the Budget 8 down by the railroad tracks, and I’m very embarrassed that I went around asking people for money to help pay for “beer and shit”. I’m really glad your dad took me behind the restaurant and talked to me about that and how I was acting, because I really had no idea of how much of a jerk and an idiot I was being, and no matter what Frank and that stupid Earl said, your dad never touched me in any way, and I really did slip and fall and hit my eye on a doorknob.
I really wanted a good band to play for us, not Frank’s cousin who was just out of jail and needed a job. But he was good enough, I guess, and I really liked it when he played “Freebird” and we danced. But I agree with you, darling, that someone had to have stolen your sweet uncle Ray’s wallet and broken into the cars parked behind the Budget 8 and, yes, absolutely he was the only person who could have done it. You’re right, you’re absolutely right.
More than anything, though, I wish we could have had a proper and romantic honeymoon. Your uncle Ray was very nice to give us the money to go to Mexico; I just wish I hadn’t had to use it to take care of my mother, who was suddenly very sick and needed that operation on her “guts”. But even though we spent our three-day honeymoon in Chicago with my friend Skylark, who you’re absolutely right in calling a “smelly hippy”, and one of those three days was spent with him driving around some very scary parts of the city while he did some “business”, I still had a great time, because I was with the woman I love.
The best time, of course, was that afternoon when Skylark had to go see his probation officer and we had his awful little place all to ourselves. It wasn’t a nice hotel with mint chocolates on the pillows, but it was wonderful because I had you all to myself. I still think back on that time, about how beautiful you looked, how happy I was that we were man and wife, and that we had our whole lives before us to raise a family and have good times together. That day was also the best, because we woke up late with the sun streaming through the dirty windows and I looked over at you, staring into your golden eyes, and said, “So, you wanna do it?”
Sex with you, Sandy, is an incredible experience – more than that, it makes my heart sing with pleasure and my body tense with excitement. Seeing you in bed that day, your bosoms surging with sensuality, was more than I could stand. My manhood became engorged, my ardor became profound – it was all more than I could stand. I particularly remember how much pleasure you gave me with your lips and mouth, more than anything because I knew how such an act made you feel, how people had told you it was dirty, a bad thing to do. But for me, for us, it was a good and pleasurable thing. But that was only because we were now man and wife.
After your mouth, I remember how excited you became, how moist your sex had become. I realized that you were ready to be taken in a womanly way, and I was more than happy to oblige, and slid myself into your wet woman-space. I just wish it hadn’t been as good for me as it was, for maybe I would have been able to hold off on my orgasm longer and not been as tired as I had become and so would have been able to give you your own share of bodily pleasure.
The next few months with you were a delight, even though I was idiotic not to say how much pleasure you gave me with your body and in making us a home we could share together. I know my salary wasn’t enough to buy a house, but even though we had to make do with my little apartment over my mother’s garage, I was happy there with you. I particularly liked the little “homey” touches you gave to the place, the lace curtains, new TV trays, and plastic flowers you put in bottles and jars in the kitchen. Even though I cruelly teased you about them, in my heart I knew you were just trying to give us a pretty home.
I just wish my frequent late nights at Bob’s Auto Body didn’t keep me away from you and our house, but I was really trying to earn enough so that we could have the best of lives. I know that coming home at one or even two o’clock in the morning was a rude and thoughtless thing to do, even worse being how I snapped at you for being upset. But, darling, I was very tired from trying hard to earn us enough to make a happy home, and was feeling very guilty and ashamed for not doing enough for you and our lives together. I appreciate your also not mentioning how my breath often smelled of beer, even though I knew you knew I’d been drinking. You are a wonderful woman in so many ways, and your not humiliating me by pointing out my problem with alcohol is just one of them.
I understand that you have needs, and I especially understand that because I was not in our wonderful and beautifully decorated home enough, you felt unloved and unappreciated. I also understand that you’d been craving my love as well as the return of the fantastic sex life we’d shared together. I only have myself to blame for your reaching out to someone else for love and comfort. I agree with you that of all the people you could have reached out to to get what I had been so foolish to deny you, Frank was the worst. I do not fault you for being intimate with him, darling, though I now share your hatred of him, because he told me about your affair in such a coarse and ungentlemanly fashion. That he bragged to me while we were out drinking with Earl, telling me that he “banged her silly”, was unspeakably rude and insulting to you. I consider that to be more insulting than the fact that he touched you. You are, and always will be, a lady. Even though you may still work at the Kwiki Mart, not be as thin or beautiful as those models in my insultingly sexist Playboys (which I know you hate me for having around and am so sorry make you feel uncomfortable), you are beautiful and sexy, and I was always happy with our relationship.
Even when you told me that you weren’t actually pregnant, I may have acted very badly and said all sorts of rude and insulting things, it was only because of my disappointment that we would not be having a new life to raise children together in our pretty and well-maintained little home. My being gone for a few days was just my way of dealing with the sadness I felt that we would not be a family, even though I knew that we could always try again and that it would be as lovely and sensual as all of our other sexual interludes.
Perhaps it’s because of the pure depths of my love, Sandy, that I can find no fault in anything about you. You are a pure red rose, a woman beyond compare, as lovely as a woman from one of those romance novels you read – which I apologize for calling “girl trash”. T
hey are lovely stories, with very good writers, as I would know if I would ever pick one up and read one.
Every moment with you, no matter how fleeting, has been magical. I would never want to hurt you in any way, and the thought of it sickens me to my very depths. That is why I’m writing to confess to you my deep and shameful sin.
As I’ve said, Sandy, sex with you has always been a remarkable and magical experience, not at all like the cheap and tawdry images in my stupid magazines. I could never have sex with another woman and have it ever be as good as it was with you. But I am a fool like most men and did not realize how much you meant to me until I’d committed the ultimate idiotic act.
Not that I am completely innocent. I know how you felt about Marsha, but when I saw her I did not respect your wishes to stay away from her. What did you call her? “A villainous vixen.” I remember saying that you were wrong – in a very coarse and rude way – about that, but now I realize that you were absolutely right about her. Instead of listening to you, I allowed myself to be deluded by one of her cheap, slutty outfits and her bargain basement perfume. I thought she just wanted to talk, honestly, and thought that a beer or two wouldn’t hurt.
But it did hurt – and it hurt the one most precious to me. I allowed myself to be led astray and seduced. I was weak, thinking of my own physical pleasure with a slut who everyone knows has slept with everyone in town, and in so doing, hurt you tremendously. I have to say, though, that the experience was horrible and shallow – despite what that jerk Frank may have told you about it being “better than anything I’ve ever had”. Although she put her mouth on my manhood, it was bad, the worst I’ve ever had, and when we performed intercourse, it was so disappointing that afterward I swore that I would never, ever have sex with another woman – except for you, my darling.
But I know now that I can never have the infinite pleasure and happiness I’ve shared with you. I’ve betrayed the magical connection we’d shared together through one stupid act of carnal pleasure. I’ve lost through my own foolishness the one who’s meant the most to me, my reason for living. I’ve lost you.
That’s why I can’t go on, Sandy. That’s why I can’t live any longer. That I’ve hurt you and ruined our lives together has made living unbearable. That’s why I’ve decided to take my own life with my father’s shotgun, which I shot myself with from across the room. I’m sorry for the mess it might cause, but more than anything, I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused you, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known, much prettier and sexier than anyone, especially that slut Marsha.
Regrets,
Tom
Sitting on a chair, arms on the desk, fingers on the keyboard, words on the screen . . . Tom, a hole in his chest. Sandy smiled at the note that was long overdue to her, if she did say so herself.
Before she picked up the phone, touched fingers to buttons, dialed the police, Sandy had one quick, certain thought: I’m sorry I didn’t do this sooner.
The New Motor
M. Christian
IT IS NOT our place to say, via hindsight, what exactly happened that one particular night. It’s easy to dismiss, with scorn or even a kind of parental, historical fondness, that he was just visited by vivid dreams, a hallucinatory fever, a form of 1854 delusion (after all, we smile, frown, grimace, laugh or otherwise; this was 1854), or some hybrid kin of them all: a vision one third unresolved traumas, one third bad meal of steak and potatoes, one third nineteenth-century crippling social situation. What we cannot dismiss – because it’s there with minuscule precision, in detailed blocks of blurry type in rag pulp sidebills, in the fine-filigreed pages of the genteel or just the skilled – was that John Murray Spear, a spiritualist of some quite personal renown and respect, did indeed depart Miss August’s Rooming House for Gentlemen of Stature (near the corner of Sycamore and Spruce in Baltimore, Maryland), and go forth to tell anyone who would listen and some did, as those newspapers reported and those diaries told – about his visitation by the Association of Electricizers.
Close your eyes, metaphorically, and envision the images that might have fluttered through the expansive and trained consciousness of Mr Spear as he lay, barely waking, on a cheap mattress more tick than stuffing, the too-warm embrace of a humid Baltimore summer morning pouring through the thin gauze of the window. Amid the jumble and clutter of a day’s thoughts, they walk – as contemporary A.J. Davis expressed: “spirits with a mechanical turn of mind” – into the far-reaching mind of John Murray Spear.
Perhaps gears lit with fairy energies; they turn and tumble through his waking, shining metal honed with eldritch tools, playing inadvertent peg-toss with his sheet-raising morning priapism. Maybe a great churning clockwork contraption, whose complexity echoes Medusa’s curse of knowing equally insanity or death. Or they might have taken the form of a Con-Ed employee in bedazzling ethereal refinements, in a saintly pose of divine grace, while the animated logos and mascots of every power company that was, is and will be flitted around his nuclear halo – commercial cherubs to his crackling, humming, arcing power.
Their form was something that escaped even Spear himself, for when he spoke of their visitation – and he did, oh, yes, he did, from his own mount and other less spiritual soapboxes – a 220-watt gaze seemed to consume him and his articulations became less detail and more impact: “Their form,” he said to his breakfast companions and often, for many weeks thereafter, to any stranger on the street, “is fast and incorporeal. I don’t possess the mind to express their appearance in words, but their message, dear –” sir, madam, officer, friend “– is clear and ringing in my ears: Go forth, they spoke. Go forth and with these two simple hands bring into the world a machine, a great work of engineering, that would take motive power from the magnetic store of nature and therefore be as independent of artificial sources of energy as this, our own human body. Go, this conglomeration of spirits pronounced, and build the Physical Savior of the Race, The New Messiah . . . the New Motor!”
John Murray Spear did, indeed, say these words: from that reasonably expensive boarding house in summer-heated Baltimore to the swampy humidity of the capital, then upwards towards the cooler North-eastern states. He spoke of the visitation of the Electricizers to a shocked and tutting crowd of theosophists in Providence, his hypnotic description of the coming glory of the Motor and how it would bring about a New Age of Man Through Machine ticking out of synch with their slowly shaking, disbelieving heads.
He spoke of the Motor in Boston, before a hall not as packed as it had previously been for the spiritualist of some repute, and answered with complete sincerity questions of the Motor’s construction (“things of this earthly sphere coupled with the energies of transcendent motion and ethereal force”), creation (“for a small donation you can speed its manifestation and arrival here, to us”), method of operation (“can one envision a locomotive, some new machine of human use and creation, that might come during the new millennium? The works of the Motor may be visible to some of us with the enriched spiritual vision, but the true powers of it will be as unseen as that machine of ages undreamed”), and patentability (“if the material servants of this, our Government of Country, should grant me the license of its manufacture then I see no reason not to accept”).
Coal and snow beard, hair wild with his feverish retellings, supple body (for a man of his forty summers) bending wildly with each description of the glory of the Motor and his saving of mankind through its mechanical enlightenment, Spear made himself a sight as he traveled. For some, he was a sight that brought smiles, frowns, or sadness at his state of affairs. But as he slowly, town by town, street by street, meeting by meeting, told his tale, made his claims, his entreaties, he gathered people who listened earnestly to his description of the Mechanical Savior of the Race, the New Motor.
With each meeting they watched, drawn by him and his description of the action of the Motor. Again, we can only imagine what they saw in the older, yet virile and definitely passionate Spear: men enticed by
the engineering spirituality – this was, after all, 1854, a time when all of the world’s ills seemed to have the potential of being cured by the right use of the steam engine – their members enlivened by the churning, throbbing, mechanizations of the Motor. Women enraptured by the . . . hard drive of Spear himself, the license to become excited by something, and, assuredly, what could be safer than something not obviously sexual, as the New Motor? So, with male members erect and throbbing at the thought of the Mechanical Savior of the Race, the New Messiah, and female sexes flowering and moist equally, at the thought of driving pistons, churning cams, humming flywheels, twirling governors, rasping bellows and other, pounding, sliding, gleaming parts (some the Motor’s, some Mr Spear’s), they went from couple to few, smattering to intimate gathering, dinner party to small crowd – with John Murray Spear and his clockwork choir invisible at the intangible controls.
Trickling together, their small number slowly gathering into a very small belief, they worked their way to the High Rock of their faith: a small farmhouse just outside of Lynn, Massachusetts. As to why they stopped . . . guesses include that the small hamlet of saltbox houses and cod fishermen was a perfect harmonious position from which to assemble the various physical attributes that would form the birth stage of their divine appliance, that the small religion had found a home in the craggy-faced, intolerant faces of the townspeople, or that, simply, they had run out of cash.
Reasons unknown, Spear and his traveling companions stopped, took a collective breath and, perhaps checking their wallets, purses and secret stashes, determined that the soil there, the homes there, the people there, the weather there, would be ideal, and – at the direction of their engineering apostle – set out to assemble the reason (perhaps) for their companionship. There they set out to actually create the Mechanical Messiah, Clockwork Jesus, Divine Device, Holy Contraption – their New Motor.