Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  —

  Let us not speculate too much on the origin of the hardening of Coffee Thomas’s eerily joyless grin, and let’s just say what needs to be said: Coffee Thomas started fucking homely girls left and right, and pretty soon he was fucking a different one every evening. His tastes tended toward “available.” If I had to describe any evidence of his preference beyond willingness, I would say “older,” “tragically grateful,” a proclivity for “beaded shirts,” having a notable “smell of chickpeas,” owning “several incense burners” and being “fundamentally sad.”

  Where it used to be that I suffered through only a few minutes of nerdy, baseless threats, buying coffee soon become a gauntlet. I’d approach the shop, he’d put down that week’s postmodern literature or Eastern philosophy he was pretending to read, and say, “Guess what?” And so it began that while he made me coffee, I listened to what last night’s woman was open to do with his penis.

  She was always a model. Or should have been. She was always “unbelievably gorgeous,” tall and thin and all the other markers for conventional beauty. Then, because it was a small town, my family would be seated across the room from him at our town’s one Japanese restaurant and I’d watch him lecture neighboring tables that sushi is eaten with the hands in order to impress his date . . . a forty-something frizzy-haired aspiring jewelry designer who had taken up belly dancing to find herself.

  I found him repugnant. I stopped going there for coffee. I started making it at home.

  My parents kept going to the coffee shop and Coffee Thomas shared tell of his conquests with my father in the same terrible candor but refrained from doing so with my mother, so neither of them had any reason to dislike him. One of them must have expressed that my absence had to do with hurt feelings and I guess Coffee Thomas didn’t want that. A few months after I disappeared from his coffee shop—I was about fifteen at the time—he sent a message through my father that he’d like to bury the hatchet. My father gave him our home number, which he called. He got me on the phone and invited me out for tacos. I was cornered, and my parents had whatever weird stake they did in wanting me and him to be friends, so I agreed.

  He picked me up in his car and we drove to a local Mexican restaurant. We ordered at the counter and sat down; we hadn’t said very much to each other beyond the usual pleasantries that people exchange. I should have taken this to mean that we had nothing in common, shared no sensibilities or interests or preferences and had absolutely no reason to stage this impersonation of friendship for our parents. There was no loss here in our not being friends! There was no point for us to patch anything up because we weren’t working with anything that could be fixed. No hard feelings; let’s go back to our respective homes.

  We got our food and started to try our hand at conversation and, because he’s horrible, he immediately started criticizing my eating habits. Granted, I eat like I should be wearing a helmet when I’m unsupervised, but he said to me, “You know, you’d be a lot healthier if you slowed down to actually enjoy what you’re eating.”

  This seemed silly because the only rational explanation for why I eat the way I do is that I enjoy it too much. “What?”

  Coffee Thomas’s way was that of superiority and he leaned back in his chair with much satisfaction and said, “Chew your drink, and drink your food, that’s what I believe,” then he looked at me deeply, as if tedium at the dinner table was the gateway to nirvana.

  Conversation started and stopped like this for a few minutes, until I became resigned to sit there and eat my tacos in uneasy silence. Because Coffee Thomas could not resist being listened to, he abhorred silence. Apparently unable to stop himself, he pointed to a woman seated across the restaurant and said, “See her?” and I nodded because my eyeballs work, “I took her out a few weeks ago. Isn’t she beautiful?” He waved to her and she looked away mortified because she was seated with what appeared to be her husband and children.

  Maybe Coffee Thomas was just on a higher plane than me, like he believed he was. Maybe he was less judgmental and more receptive and loving and giving, and maybe he saw beauty with eyes that were just more open than mine (despite their workmanlike effectiveness). But no, she was not. She was emphatically not. She was a regular-looking lady, if not particularly mousy, who thought nothing of fucking a teenager despite her marriage.

  I was unsettled. “No.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said. Then he paused and added, “Besides, you’d really have to see her with her clothes off to know how beautiful she is.”

  “Dude. That is exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s gross.”

  “There’s nothing gross about what she and I are capable of together.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying. All you do is talk about your sex life, even though I don’t care and I find it off-putting. I also think it’s completely gross and tasteless to point out women you’ve slept with. That’s not my business and it’s not yours to make it mine.”

  “You know what your problem is?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a prude.”

  “What? No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. What I’m talking about—what I live—is not only a part of life, it’s the most beautiful part of life. It’s an expression of everything that elevates us. It’s physical enlightenment. And you don’t realize that and you try to apply your Judeo-Christian morality to it, but it’s completely outside of that.”

  As surprising as it was—for the first time in my life—to be accused of being too Judeo-Christian in my morals, I don’t take kindly to being yelled at in restaurants by my contemporaries. I told him, “This is outside a discussion of my morality. I think it’s inappropriate and gross for you to constantly brag about all the sex you have.”

  Coffee Thomas looked at me for a long serious moment and said, “I’ve never had sex.”

  Then he paused and let me hope against hope it had all been a big, strange, meaningless dream. A hallucination.

  “. . . But I’ve made love about a thousand times.”

  “That’s it.” I stood up and told him it was time to go home. He reminded me that we’d taken his car to get there and unless I wanted to walk the whole way, I was at his mercy. I told him that if he didn’t take me home, I would call my parents and tell them I couldn’t stand the sight of his face anymore. Sensing the social embarrassment of having to involve parents, he agreed to take me home. I gathered up my uneaten dinner in a takeout container and we walked silently to his Subaru Outback (obviously) in the parking lot. Once inside, things went really wrong.

  As I said, he was not a fan of silence, but there was no hoping we might have a conversation with any civility anymore. He said he had some CDs in the glove compartment and asked, through his teeth, if I could suffer long enough to do him the small favor of picking one out. I had no objection to spending the next ten minutes listening to music instead of his self-content, so I opened the glove compartment.

  Out tumbled a translucent purple dildo.

  It landed in my lap and writhed there like a newborn worm. I looked at it.

  There are times in life when things happen that are so outside the bounds of reality and acceptable occurrence that you’re unable to process them and so instead regard their unfolding with a kind of emotionless distance.

  When its writhing stopped and the dildo was still between my knees, I said, “Why the fuck do you have a dildo in your glove compartment?”

  “Relax,” he said, “It’s me.”

  “What?”

  “It’s me. I had it made.”

  “I don’t—” I didn’t! “What do you mean?”

  “It’s me. It’s a silicone mold of my penis.”

  “What—”

  “I met this girl, she’s unbelievably beautiful . . .”

 
“Oh my God.”

  “But I’m going away next week and I want her to enjoy me when I’m not around.”

  “Stop the car. Stop the fucking car right now.”

  “Calm down, it’s not like it’s been used yet—”

  “Now.”

  The Outback came to an abrupt stop along the road. I gingerly used my takeout container’s brown paper bag to remove the dildo from its place on my lap and then I tossed it at him, because you only get so many opportunities in life to use a dildo offensively. I then opened the passenger’s side door, got out and walked the rest of the way home. We have not spoken since.

  —

  Looking back, what strikes me most about this waking nightmare is that his behavior seemed to suggest I should be less appalled because the dildo was really just a big glittery Xerox of his own cock. Had a garden-variety dildo landed in my lap, would my shock have been warranted? It seemed I should have been soothed to know that the dildo was just a fleshy raincheck for his weird peen.

  To this day, I’m uncertain why that would affect whether or not this thing surpassed a social boundary, but I’ve never made a dick joke quite the same again. If I learned any lasting lessons, it’s to remain wary of glove compartments and refuse to open them if such a request is made. Further, I even struggle sometimes to enjoy tacos, which—frankly—hurts the most.

  THE TIME I ATTENDED AN ORGY

  I was a pretty late bloomer when it came to boys. Most girls started holding hands in third or fourth grade, kissing in fifth or sixth, dry humping—as teens are wont—by eighth. Because my hometown was so small, most of the kids with whom I attended kindergarten ended up right alongside me in high school. Consequently, if you’d forged a reputation as chubby and unlikeable in elementary school, it was pretty hard to shake.

  I ended up getting my first kiss at fifteen when I went to visit a friend in rural Maine and got to be the exciting new girl for a few weeks. I was Californian and blond enough so they were all really impressed at how I wore sunglasses even when it was overcast and they asked me if I knew any movie stars. That first kiss came from a young aspiring pharmacist who was a foot shorter than me and had tricked out his car to look like KITT from Knight Rider. He was a nice guy. My second kiss was from an older boy with a devilock, so that’s one I can be proud of.

  My already slow development was further stymied by isolation due to homeschooling, which I’d taken up in seventh grade. As soon as you take a moment to breathe that out and let your shock subside, I’ll say that I started homeschooling for reasons that are neither relevant nor terribly interesting. The point is I ended up in a charter school program that had me taking classes at the local community college, which was terrifying after a few years of schooling alone.

  I was socially inept and disinterested in dating of any kind until the first day of my sociology course, when this guy walked in and obliterated all solitary impulse: he was wolfishly handsome with straight black hair cut in a perfect rock ’n’ roll shag. Of course, he dressed like a sexually aggressive eleven-year-old at a mall goth store in baggy jeans and bowling shirts and he had a wallet chain. I know I’ve already mentioned that teenage hormones can make you discard reason, but it’s quite remarkable just how fully they can make you discard taste as well.

  I stared at him throughout that entire first class and could not believe his cheekbones. It was a real infatuation at first sight and one that persisted even when he spoke. The first time I heard his voice was when our extremely urbane German sociology professor was tasked with answering a stupid question about evolution. He mentioned, offhand, the lemur.

  “Oh yeah!” the beautiful one exclaimed, “Like aye-ayes.”

  “Pardon me?” said the professor.

  “Like those aye-aye things in Madagascar. Natives kill them because they think they’re, like, demons.”

  The professor looked at him silently, straightened his glasses and returned to talking about real things. In retrospect, this interaction revealed nothing appealing about him, but at the time I sat there in class drawing hearts on my notepad as my own swelled with thoughts of He likes animals! In this way, teenage girls have no survival skills and are unequipped for the world.

  For the rest of the semester, I’d stare at him longingly through class and think of him around the clock. It was silly because I knew I’d never work up the confidence to speak with him myself. Or anyone. I knew no one else in the class and spoke to no one else on campus. I’d show up, attend my classes, go home and quietly do my homework. Every day.

  As the semester progressed, I noticed a few of the more sexually advanced girls (all of them nineteen or twenty) would talk to him after class. To this day, I always get kind of jealous of women who can sit on desks and make it look so insouciant and enticing and effortless and it’s exactly thoughts like these that make me the sort of person who cannot sit insouciantly on a fucking desk.

  One such girl ended up sitting next to me in class one day. A few minutes before class began, I took off my sunglasses and slid them into their case. She caught the designer logo labeled inside and looked at me startled, as if the weird, unlikeable lump of matter beside her had suddenly become sentient and interesting. Little did she know I’d gotten them from an outlet mall.

  “Great glasses,” she said in that slow, contralto, drawn-out way that sexually advanced teenage girls do so well. “I’m looking for a new pair. I lost mine over spring break.”

  I was really frightened that this girl was talking to me, because she wore hoop earrings and tight pants. I looked at her with wide eyes and she must have interpreted this as awe, because she continued.

  “Yeah, I was down in TJ, partying like a rock star.”

  “Oh,” I said and I had absolutely no idea where that was. Tangentially, I did not crack the code that LA and Los Angeles were the same place until high school.

  “Yeah,” she said and grinned coyly, “my nose still hurts.”

  “Did you fall on it?”

  She paused for a moment and looked at me unsurely. Then she laughed. “You’re funny. What’s your name?”

  Her name was Tiffany. Before long, she started sitting next to me in class and asking me questions about homework. Soon after, some of her other attractive friends started to sit in little satellite formations around us. They were all cooler and older and sexually experienced and carried themselves as such. I was waiting for them to figure out I was sixteen and a virgin and slept with the lights on. Or that I maintained a scrapbook filled with pictures of my favorite action figures. Or that I drew portraits of myself eating spaghetti with Dostoevsky, one noodle strung between our lips like in Lady and the Tramp. Or that I was wearing Batman underwear from the little boys’ section of JC Penney. Or that I’d spent my last two months’ worth of Saturday nights making a suit of chain mail.

  —

  One day after class, Tiffany came up to me and asked what I was doing later that night. I told her I didn’t have any plans and she said some of her friends from class were organizing a study session at her place. The midterm was about two weeks off and our professor’s tests were notoriously hard, so I agreed.

  She motioned to the tall, beautiful teenage boy. “We’re going to study with him.”

  I tried not to show the thrill in my spine and shrugged. “Cool,” I said. Just like in the movies!

  “It’ll be really fun,” Tiffany continued, “four girls and one guy,” and it was here she offered an exaggerated, cartoonish wink. She gave me directions to her place and told me to show up around eight, which I thought was pretty late to start studying, but I figured she was so popular she must have lots of social engagements to attend after school or had to buy more hoop earrings and cutoffs.

  I went home and ritualistically showered, slathered myself in the nicest moisturizers I owned and meticulously obscured my face in cosmetics. I made a bunch of flash cards from the text we
’d been studying because I figured men were impressed by fastidiousness. Then I sat back and stared at the ceiling and wondered what it would be like to finally talk to him. I told my parents where I was off to and left half an hour before eight because I am chronically early to everything. I figured that punctuality, in addition to prim organization, would make me irresistible.

  I was the first one at Tiffany’s apartment, which was the kind of space you fantasize about when you’re a teenager living with your parents: a windowless basement in someone else’s house with low ceilings and no stove. She let me in and asked if I’d like some Turkish coffee, which I found supremely exotic.

  I cataloged every object in her apartment, awed at what it was like to be an adult and independent and capricious and cook things with a hot plate. She had a print of Starry Night taped to her wall. All other decorative art came in the form of—I’m serious—framed vanity shots of herself. One whole wall was just a bunch of black-and-white headshots, arty portraits, candid photos of her smiling with her eyes closed or being held up in a bikini on the beach by a row of interchangeable ripped dudes. There was even a painting of her with a sheet slipping down to reveal her breasts. She came over to me looking at all the photos and handed me an espresso cup.

  “I used to model,” she said.

  I was so out of my league. “Why’d you stop?”

  “They kept telling me my legs were too long.”

  I nodded with intense admiration.

  “They want girls to look perfect but not, you know, like too perfect,” she said and shrugged with all the wisdom and experience one could have in life.