Always Happy Hour

by Mary Miller

“It was nothing,” he says. “It was easy.”

  “But what’d you do? What happened?” I ask, knowing I’ll never know what happened. I’ll never know what he does when I’m not with him. When I’m alone I don’t do anything the least bit interesting. He tugs at my panties and I help him, kick them to the end of the bed. I run my hand over his prickly head because it’s what I like best about him. But once I’m safe inside my apartment, I won’t answer his calls or listen to his voice mails. I’ll watch him through the peephole until he goes away and if he acts crazy I’ll document his behavior and get a restraining order. I’ll tell Farrell, the apartment manager, to keep a lookout and she’ll be happy to be given this assignment—she loves a purpose, someone she might yell at as she hobbles around the parking lot on her crutches. I’ll even move if I have to, to Texas or North Carolina, somewhere far enough away that he won’t bother to find me unless a bad man calls and offers him money and he’s the only bad man I can say for sure I know. This is not my life. It isn’t the one, I tell myself, as I wrap my legs around him as tightly as possible.

  DIRTY

  They all want videos. This one bought a digital camera with his tax refund and films me in bed, doing things to him, while he watches the screen. He asks me questions—do you like this? do you like this?—answering for me when I grow unresponsive. I notice the soles of my feet are dirty. I don’t know how they got so dirty, I’ve been inside all day: padding around on his carpet, heating up soup and watching television.

  “Do you like choking on my cock?” he asks.

  I look into the camera and say no and after that he’s irritated because I’ve messed up his video and this one was on target to be a good one. I’d done everything right, acted just like a whore. It’s taking forever so I get on top and ride him until he’s about to come, then hop off and watch him make a mess on his belly.

  “That’s a ton,” I say. Boys like to hear things like this. I hand him a wad of Kleenex and he wipes his stomach, the hairs sticking together to form a little peak.

  We get dressed and go to China Buffet 2.

  I fill a plate and set it at the table, my Sprite already there. I go back for an egg roll, cream cheese fried wontons, slices of cantaloupe, a bowl of ice cream. I nod at the Chinese girls as I pass. There are real Chinese people here, not like at the other place in the old Shoney’s.

  He tucks his napkin into his shirt like his fat father and eyeballs me. He knows I won’t eat half of it. He knows I won’t eat much of anything even though I carry chocolate bars in my purse, packages of cookies and honey roasted peanuts.

  “What are you looking at?” I ask, as I pick the egg and bits of carrot out of my fried rice, sip my Sprite. The Chinese girl comes over and tops it off. “Take your plate away?” she asks him. He tells her he’s still working on it. There’s a half a chicken stick and some shreds of cabbage.

  When we get back to his house, he goes into the other bedroom to play guitar and smoke a joint. My sister smoked a bunch of his pot once and said it was Mexican dirt weed. She says I’m not allowed to smoke his dirt weed or ride on the back of his motorcycle because I’ll fall off and hit my head and my brains will spill all over the pavement. She acts like my mother even though I already have a mother. She knows I’ll listen to her because I know she knows how things are in a way my mother will never know. I want to talk to her but she’s still in the hospital so I call my friend Iris.

  I tell her I’m not sucking dick on camera anymore, her baby crying in the background.

  “It can’t be good,” she says. “What good can come of it?”

  “I don’t know—sometimes we watch it together and it turns us on.”

  “It doesn’t turn you on,” she says, and I tell her she’s right, it doesn’t, but the idea of it does. “Ideas are useless,” she says, “as soon as you have one you forget it. I read self-help books and I’m fixed for like a day—for a day I’m not putting my shit on anybody and I’m only thinking good thoughts and the next day everything’s fucked again.” The baby is wailing now. “I have to go,” she says, “little man’s hungry. You should see my tits, they’re so big. You’re going to end up on the internet so stop, just stop.”

  I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. I need a new toothbrush. This one is shitty because it came from the dentist.

  My boyfriend starts a new song and I pause to hear what it is—“Folsom Prison.” He tries to sound exactly like Johnny Cash, which bothers me because he has no imagination but he thinks he’s a fucking genius because he’s registered with BMI. Ryan Ellington’s BMI card is stuck to the bottom right-hand corner of the bathroom mirror. I bet Ryan Ellington is hot. I wipe a little foamy spit on it and then get in his bed, on the side that’s mine, the side that doesn’t have a table to set things on, and pull the spread up to my chin. It’s black and gray with a stripy animal print circa 1989. It has linty balls all over it, which I pick off and release between the bed and wall.

  “I’m about to feed the fish,” he says, from the doorway.

  “I’m sleeping.”

  “Come watch.”

  “I don’t want to,” I say, but then he’s mad, so I get up and go in there and sit on a foldout chair next to the table with all his drug stuff on it: a wooden box with spiky metal teeth, rolling papers, a yellow plastic lighter and a Zippo, an ashtray littered with roaches. I want a cigarette but I’d have to go outside to smoke it.

  He has live crickets in a mesh bucket, which he drops into the tank two at a time. The fish open their mouths and eat them off the top of the water: bloop! The fish are too small for eating but too big to be in a tank. He got them out of the river. I don’t like the river because there are gars and snakes and the water makes you feel all crackly and tight when it dries on your skin but I go with him because his ex-girlfriend never went with him once in four years and I don’t want to be like her. She once prostituted herself behind a Blockbuster Video. There are also some snails and a crawfish. The crawfish is a monster. I like to watch him eat the fish when they die because it goes on forever unless you fall asleep.

  “Do you want to feed them?” he asks.

  “They smell awful.”

  “Come on, just one.”

  I reach my hand in and they jump all over it.

  “You complain a lot.”

  “I’m difficult,” I say, though I don’t know if I’m difficult because I don’t know how difficult other girls are. He says I’m more difficult than most, though not as difficult as the Blockbuster girl, but he also says it’s okay because I’m pretty and pretty girls have room, unlike fat girls, like my sister, who have no room, who should learn to keep their mouths shut.

  I grab one and throw it in, right above a fish’s mouth: bloop! Then I turn around and walk out, wash my hands and get back in bed. Adult Swim is on. They aren’t shows I’d have ever watched on my own but I like them now, especially the one with the mean baby and talking dog. I feel like I’m figuring something out about boys when I watch them—something like how much they can appreciate smart when it’s presented to them as stupid.

  He takes off all his clothes and gets into bed with me. I put my head on his shoulder and stick my face in his armpit; even when he stinks I like it, especially when he stinks. I’m allergic to his semen, though. It burns and gives me infections, but he always wants to put it in me because he has this notion about “spilled seed.” Anything outside the vagina constitutes spilled. I tell him I’m going to get pregnant but he knows this isn’t true because I’m on the pill and the pill is 99.9 percent effective if you take it every day, which I do. I also have a tilted uterus.

  In the morning, he wakes me at six-thirty and then gets in the shower. I stand in front of the refrigerator listening to him sing “Ramblin’ Man.” He likes to picture himself on the open road with his guitar strapped to his back but he never goes anywhere. To guarantee he stays put, he buys property that poor people live in. He owns a whole little neighborhood of nine houses that should be conde
mned. I help him clean them out when the poor people pick up and move in the middle of the night and he pays me in buffets, hot showers, and a warm place to sleep because I don’t work, which is temporary, my not working, but the longer I don’t work the less I can imagine going back to my cubicle at the government office where I used to take disability claims, reinstating prisoners’ benefits while they gawked.

  I’m careful not to burn the toast because he won’t eat it if there’s any black on it. Then I slab on butter and jelly while a couple of eggs fry. When the eggs look about done, I top them with pepperjack and cheddar and he makes a sandwich out of the whole thing and eats it while standing over the sink. I sit on the counter and watch, kick my legs—the yolks squirt and dribble because I didn’t cook them long enough, he could get salmonella—and think about my day, all the empty hours and how I don’t even have enough money to go to lunch, how he didn’t leave me any money on the piano bench yesterday like he sometimes does. I wipe a glob of yellow off his beard and he picks up his briefcase and kisses me goodbye. After I lock the door behind him, I think how much I love him, how he is like a husband and I am like a wife.

  I spend the day waiting for him, but I force myself to do a few things so I’ll have something to tell him when he asks what I did. I jumped rope five hundred times. I read to page 38 in my library book. I cleaned the bathtub and took a bath.

  When he gets home, I want to go somewhere, the drive-in maybe, but he wants me to handcuff him to the bed. All day long he’s been in charge and now he wants somebody else to be in charge. I like handcuffing him to the bed for a few minutes, while I sit on his face, but then I want to leave him there and go cut my toenails or watch television. I don’t want to do the things he wants me to do to him.

  I slap him hard and call him the names he likes—bitch, whore, cunt. He tosses his head from side to side like you never see anyone do in real life. It reminds me of a princess trapped in a tower. I slap him again and work my finger into his asshole and think about what I’m going to eat for supper because there’s nothing to eat here that I like. He doesn’t even have any milk. If he’d give me some money, I’d go buy milk. Then I could eat cereal.

  “Please,” he says, “please.” More head tossing.

  “Don’t beg,” I say, “I hate for a man to beg,” but he thinks this is part of the program so he bites his lip. I slap him hard and scoot to the edge of the bed and look at him out of the corner of my eye, which I imagine is pretty creepy. If I were him and he were me, I’d be creeped out.

  “I’m going to leave you here,” I say.

  He looks at me like a dog, uncomprehending, whatever I say goes. I put my panties on and close the door. In the kitchen, I wash my hands and listen to the wheelchair man roll around, the laugh track on his television erupt. The house is split into three pieces: my boyfriend (slumlord) on one end, the wheelchair man in the middle, and a pretty white girl who talks black on the other end. Sometimes she comes over and wants to wash her clothes and I tell her I’m sorry, I was on my way out, but then I have to leave, which really pisses me off.

  I turn on the big-screen in the den. Like everything else, he got it for free or cheap and there’s something wrong with it. In this case, the picture is usually shaped like a bow tie. Right now it’s not but it could go into bow tie mode at any minute. I lie on the fake leather couch and watch Man vs. Wild, nestle my feet into a pile of blankets. So far nothing has proven useful—it’s doubtful I’ll ever have a reason to make my pants into a flotation device. On day five in the middle of nowhere, Bear is lying on the ground in the pitch dark talking about how hungry he is, and then he’s talking about how lonely he is. Just about everyone seems to need my love and it makes me sad because already my love has been spread around too much and there are still so many people I might have saved who will now be lost forever.

  My boyfriend is hollering from the bedroom—he has to take a piss. I go into the kitchen and look through the cabinets and there’s still nothing, and then I remember the pint of ice cream in the freezer. There’s a lot left but I already picked out all the heath bar chunks so it’s barely worth eating. I take the top off and put the carton in the microwave, slurp it from a big spoon while Bear finds his way back to civilization.

  I fall asleep. When I wake up, it’s dark. I like it when this happens. I twist my hair into a bun on top of my head and walk quietly back to the bedroom and open the door.

  “You fucking bitch,” he says, without looking at me.

  I make like I’m going to walk out and he turns and says, “No—you’re not a bitch, you’re a smart, beautiful woman.” I can’t stand to be called a woman. I’m a girl. I’ll always be a girl. I take the little key and unlock him and he runs to the bathroom and pees for a long time, a heavy stream. Tomorrow is Saturday and we’ll go to the river and drink beer and maybe catch more fish to put in the tank. Some of them will die from shock and then the monster will have a heyday. I think about this and try to get excited. He goes into the kitchen so I follow him in there and kneel on the linoleum. He gags me again and again until I throw up a small pool of sour vanilla. Now he’s happy. Now he will do whatever I want, he says. I want to see my sister. I want to eat Thai food with her at our favorite place where we used to live but I can’t because she’s in the hospital and we don’t live there anymore.

  I scoop up the mess with a paper towel and stay on the floor.

  “So?” he says, opening a can of Diet Rite. With his other hand, he pets the top of my head.

  Second choice would be the drive-in, where I’d fall asleep in his arms before the double feature begins, but then I think about the last time we went to the drive-in, how he had a taillight out and we got pulled over and he wasn’t wearing any underwear so he couldn’t tuck his one-hitter into his crotch like he usually does so he told me to put it in my panties but I refused and we were pushing it back and forth while the policeman was walking toward us and then he shoved it between his ass cheeks at the last second. The cop asked him to get out and the two of them walked around the car to look at the taillight and when he finally got back in, he said, I know not to ever consider your panties again and I said, No, please don’t consider them, and then I had to drink myself out of a panic attack while he laughed and took a single shot of whiskey, like every time he comes back from Murfreesboro with a slab of marijuana in his motorcycle jacket.

  “I wonder what Coach is doing,” I say, though I know what Coach is doing—getting drunk on his couch. When he gets really drunk, he’ll spy on his neighbors or hide things from himself around the house. Coach is the only person we hang out with, a bad alcoholic with a cough like he’s dying.

  We drive over there with half a bottle of whiskey and a six-pack and he answers the door in his sunglasses.

  “Miss Amy,” he says.

  “Nice hat,” I say. He’s wearing a cap with a pile of fake shit on the brim. Shithead, it says. I know a girl gave it to him, the fat one he’s having sex with but won’t take out of the house. He makes her park in back so nobody can see her car.

  I put my beer in the refrigerator and sit on one of two couches. There are also two televisions. Right now there’s baseball on one and Seinfeld on the other. Coach rolls a joint and they smoke it. This is called a “safety meeting.” They text each other back and forth: safety meeting? safety meeting? because you can’t text things like let’s get together and smoke some dope.

  Coach deals three stacks of cards and we take turns tossing them into an upturned cowboy hat under the baseball TV. Whoever lands the most is due a quarter from everybody playing. Except me, I don’t pay. My cards fly everywhere.

  “Will you fix me a drink?” Coach asks. This is new. We wait to see what I’ll say. I don’t say anything but I walk over to him and take his empty glass.

  “Not too much water,” he says.

  I go into the kitchen, which is full of to-go boxes and plastic forks and other things boys have trouble throwing out, and fill his glass almost al
l the way with whiskey and add a splash of water. He used to drink it with Coke but it exacerbated his psoriasis. His legs are red and scaly and he always wears shorts. It’s an admirable quality, I think, showcasing one’s most glaring defect.

  He compliments me on my drink-making skills and we watch Seinfeld without the sound. George, Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer are sitting around a booth at the diner, drinking coffee and not eating. Then Kramer throws up his hands and walks out. Then it’s back to Jerry’s apartment where Jerry is talking on the enormous landline. I think about pizza—I could suggest we order pizza and they’d say okay and it would come and I wouldn’t touch it, or I’d eat five slices and it still wouldn’t be enough.

  I smoke because I can and think about what Coach will do when we leave, if the fat girl’ll come over and make him late-night snacks or try to get him off.

  There’s a knock at the door. We look at each other and don’t move. Finally, I stand but Coach gets up and puts his arm out like he’s going to take care of it so I sit back down. Of course it’s the fat girl, who I’ve never met, never even seen. All I know is that she does all of the work of a girlfriend but gets none of the reward. He tells her he has company and she asks if she can join us and he says no because he’s busy and she starts crying and then the door closes so we can’t hear what they’re saying.

  “Why won’t he just let her come in?”

  My boyfriend says it’s not our business, so I tell him I want pizza and he gets out his cell phone and orders what I like and I don’t think he’d ever put me on the internet so I should just stop worrying about it. I should let him keep his videos. I like how skinny my face looks when sucking dick, from that angle. I look strung-out, crack whore. My boyfriend is sweet, though. He orders me pizza and takes me out in public and when I say I want to go home, he takes me home. I could rest my head on his shoulder and he’d kiss it, no matter who was around. I’m so lucky.

  The fat girl drives off, taking out a garbage can, maybe, and Coach comes back in and sits down.