I look over at my girl and shake my finger at her. “What’s her name?” I ask.
“This one? She is Neela, my granddaughter.”
“I’m happy to give you the sixty shekels, but could you tell Neela that since it was her goat that bit me, I think the least she can do is invite me to tea herself.”
Neela’s grandmother starts yammering away at her.
“Yeah, yeah. Fine,” Neela says and rolls her eyes.
Other than yelling at me to take off my shoes when I start to enter her dusty tent, Neela says nothing as she prepares our tea. I sit on the rug and watch her, wondering what I have done to piss her off. It is almost as if we are married.
She moves around the tent at hyper speed, stooping, bending, squatting, opening jars and canisters and boxes of exotic-smelling plants, flowers, and spices, tossing them into a big copper kettle. When she’s done, she reaches her hand down her shirt, pulls out a key, and goes marching out of the tent, kettle in hand. I watch her unlock the metal cage around the faucet the Israelis have provided—the only source of water in this village they have forced these people to call home.
Neela boils the tea on one of the smoldering cooking fires, and when I see her head back to the tent, I hurry back to my place on the rug. She pours tea into tall glasses filled with crushed mint leaves and slips the glasses into brass holders. When she walks toward me, I think she is going to hand me a glass of tea—or pour it on me. Instead, she lowers herself into my lap and brings her lips together, gently blowing on the tea to cool it. With her other hand, she reaches up and unwinds the black scarf from her head and then her shoulders until it falls away completely. Underneath she is wearing a thin white tank top. It has a picture of Madonna and the words “Material Girl” written on it.
She is stunning. And younger than I had imagined. However young that was. She takes a sip of the tea, leans forward, and, as she kisses me, lets the hot, sweet tea run into my mouth and follows it with her tongue. I forget hot and dry and thirsty. There is only warm, sweet, wet. The tea has long since been swallowed, so it must be her taste. Or some alchemical combination of the two. Does it matter? The tip of her tongue runs across the roof of my mouth. And then I realize, it does.
Reluctantly, almost painfully, I disengage my mouth from hers just enough so I can use it for speaking. “I wasn’t expecting … I was going to give you the money. You don’t have to …”
“I don’t have to do anything,” she says, the corners of her mouth turning up almost imperceptibly—less a smile than a parenthetical.
She lifts her “Material Girl” tank top over her head and lies back against a pile of rolled-up rugs. I have never seen skin the color of hers. She is cinnamon and cocoa and bittersweet chocolate. And suddenly I am ravenous. Neela reaches her arm out, dips her finger into my tea and then slips it into my mouth. The tea is cooler and even more fragrant than before.
Then she takes the glass from my hand, tilts her head back, and lets a tiny trickle of liquid pour from the glass. The drops land on her exposed throat and run down, pooling in the hollows on either side of her clavicles. I stare mesmerized, watching as the perfect stream runs between her perfect breasts and collects in her belly button before continuing on its course.
“Drink your tea,” she says.
I sit up and my heart is racing. My mouth is dry. The thin cotton mattress on which I’ve been sleeping and the muslin sheet that covers me are cold and damp. I shiver in spite of the stifling heat. At first I can’t remember where I am. Only fragments of a dream. Willa. And a gun. And I am running. Trying to stop something terrible from happening. Running but getting nowhere. I have a pounding headache.
My eyes adjust to the darkness. I remember that I am in Neela’s tent. But Neela is gone. So are my Patek Philippe watch and my wallet. The little snake charmer has been thoughtful enough to leave me my passport. My luggage is in the car, so I put on the same dusty, sweaty clothes I wore yesterday. I tentatively stick my head outside the tent, and though I have no idea what time it is, I can tell by where the sun is in the sky that I have slept through most of the day.
Between the hallucinogenic dreams I had last night and the Rip Van Winkle experience I’m having now, it’s becoming more and more obvious there was more than tea in my tea. As I walk toward my car, I notice that the camp is much quieter. The pickup trucks are gone. The bus is gone. The goats are gone. My car and luggage are gone. There are still children playing on the Astroturf and old men smoking hookahs in a tent. I jog over to the men and feel a lead weight land on my head with each step.
“Neela?” I ask vaguely, stupidly.
A few of the old men turn to me for a moment and then go back to their game of dice
“Neela? My car? Where is my car?” Now I am yelling.
Something registers with one of them. He reaches out his hand and I help him up. He hobbles over to Neela’s tent, disappears behind it, and is gone so long I think he too has deserted me. But then I hear yelling—in Arabic. Or something. And he comes out leading a recalcitrant, fully saddled camel.
“Car,” he says, grinning. “Your car.”
Because Neela is not without a heart. She has left me transportation.
I ride the thing to the nearest camel crossing sign and wait for the next lonely bastard to come through. This, I think, is the real Bedouin experience.
Seduced, screwed, conned, robbed, and left sitting on a camel. Neela would have made a terrific agent—in a non-Bedouin setting. She and I have a lot in common, but to her I am no different from any other rich Jew. Like those rich, entitled Hillcrest Country Club Jews were to me. And, absurd as it may sound, that is a revelation. Because I never saw myself as anything but being on her side. Growing up on the outside. Wanting in.
Beverly Hills, 1961. December was when all the juniors had their preliminary college counseling meetings—the ones where the guidance counselor, Mrs. Di Carlo, told students like Stacy Aronson she should be aiming for, say, Tarzana Junior College rather than Harvard. I was not looking forward to mine.
Nine thirty and already it must have been ninety-five degrees in Di Carlo’s office. Her beige bra straps were sticking out from under her sleeveless lime-green blouse. There were dark half-moons of sweat under her armpits and her short copper curls sat like coiled Slinkies, plastered to her scalp.
Every couple of winters, without warning, a vengeful current of air called the Santa Anas came rushing through the desert, dumped a load of scorching heat on L.A., and took off. For days on end there was just heat. Pure and unrelenting.
“You have a real shot at Stanford, Greyson,” she was saying. “And Yale isn’t out of the question.”
I knew I shouldn’t stare, but I was fascinated by the way the loose, wrinkled flesh under her arm undulated as she fanned herself with the brochure from Mills College. She looked down at my file.
“Your grades are stellar. You’re active in student government. You’ve done a little community service work.” Her finger tapped the manila folder. “You might want to take up a sport, though,” she said. She looked up and studied me. “You’re tall,” she said. “How about basketball?”
I was a lousy athlete. The only varsity team I stood a chance of making was debate. “Yeah, great idea,” I said, getting up to leave. “Well, I’ve got math now, so …”
“Greyson, college admissions committees also tend to be impressed by students who’ve had valuable work experience. If you’d like, I could speak to some of our alumni …”
“Uh, yeah, thanks. I’ll think about it and let you know, okay?”
“Alright, dear,” she said, “but remember, he who hesitates is lost.”
“I’ll remember.”
August Van Gilder was not an alumnus of Beverly High. He was the man who owned the Chevron station at the corner of Robertson and Third. I stood across the street for a while just watching the petroleum fumes hang in the sweltering air around the station as if they were afraid to wander too far from their home. The glare from the
sun beating down on the shiny black patches was almost blinding. Cars had been dripping motor oil in the same spots on the same asphalt since 1947 when the station opened.
A woman rushed out of the station’s ladies’ room with a sour look on her face. She held the door open with the tip of one finger and waited impatiently as a little girl wandered out. The woman quickly yanked her finger away. The metal door must have been hot. Then she spit on her finger and wiped it on a handkerchief. Hot and dirty.
The woman pulled the little girl toward a light-blue Eldorado convertible. A man, as pleasant-looking as she was sour-faced, waited in the driver’s seat. A boy—I couldn’t really tell how old—eight, ten, twelve—sat in the back, his face buried in a Green Hornet comic book.
I took a deep breath and choked on the gas fumes. How long had I been standing there? Five minutes? Twenty? A man came out of the ladies’ room carrying a suitcase. He cut across the black asphalt to the city bus stop and sat down on the bench.
Both the male and female patrons who stopped here to use the facilities had to use the ladies’ room. The toilet in the men’s had been clogged for years. Even if the proprietor of the Chevron, Mr. August Van Gilder, made an effort to keep the restroom clean (and quite obviously, it wasn’t a priority), two hundred and fifty people probably used that toilet in the course of one business day. And like the man with the suitcase, probably half those people didn’t even buy any gas.
I’d been one of those freeloading Chevron-toilet-users enough times to know. Not that I went out of my way to relieve myself here. A person only took a leak at the Chevron out of sheer desperation. Mr. Van Gilder must have thought his mechanics had more important things to do than mop up urine and refill the paper towel dispenser all day. But that would be my job now. Probably not what Di Carlo meant by valuable work experience.
I filled my lungs with another airless breath and forced myself to walk toward the body shop. There was no door on the dingy little office inside. A guy in his twenties with an Adam’s apple that made him look like he’d swallowed a hamster stood behind the counter. He was sifting through a little metal box filled with dirty, dog-eared index cards. A rusty old fan was blowing behind him. It wasn’t doing much, just rustling the invoices tacked to the bulletin board next to him. An orange rag covered in grease hung out of the pocket of his mechanic’s jumpsuit. I rested my hands on the counter and noticed how clean my fingernails were.
The guy—Wes, according to his jumpsuit—did not look up. I opened my mouth to speak but Wes held up his hand to stop me. Wes continued to alphabetize. He’d put “Scott, Philip” before “Schwartz, Dave.” I stood there, obediently. I would be lower down the food chain than Wes. Wes, the mechanic with the freakish Adam’s apple who couldn’t alphabetize.
Maybe I’d just tell Wes to go screw himself, I thought. I’d tell August Van Gilder, “Thank you very much but I’ve been elected junior class representative to the Beverly Hills High Student Council. And between that and tutoring those foster kids, Mr. Van Gilder, I’m just not going to have time to pump your goddamn gas and clean your goddamn ladies’ room. You see Mr. Van Gilder, I have a real shot at Stanford. And Yale’s not out of the question.”
Wes finally looked up at me.
“I have an appointment with Mr. Van Gilder,” I said.
My interview went well. Van Gilder hired me on the spot.
I walked around back to the ladies’ room and changed into my jumpsuit.
On the way home, crossing the hot black asphalt at the intersection of Doheny and Olympic, I pretended I was walking across some snow-covered quad. I imagined I was surrounded by Gothic buildings and girls in Fair Isle sweaters.
I didn’t see the Mercedes turn into the crosswalk in front of me. The guy driving didn’t care that I had the right of way. He leaned on his horn, stuck his head out his window and yelled at me, “Stupid little pisher!”
I flipped him off, but it was too late. He was long gone. My fantasy had gone south too. Best-case scenario: I’d get a free ride to UCLA, live at home, and work at the Chevron. Eventually, I guess you got used to the fumes.
New York, 1994. I don’t remember coming back from shock this morning. I know it must have happened. I must have awakened, heavy-headed and confused and no doubt nauseous in the ECT suite. That’s what they call it—a suite. Someone in the hospital’s PR department must have spent quite a while paging through a thesaurus in search of that gem. That euphemism. There are no expensive little soaps in the ECT suite; no minibar stocked with Stoli and Perugina chocolate and six-dollar cans of Coke. I’ve spent a lot of time in hotel suites over the last decade, but not one of them had a bed made up with rubber sheets or came with an in-room defibrillator or a guy in the next bed who thought he was Jesus.
I wonder if I am the only ECT patient who’s noticed. I’ve come to realize lately that if you’re really crazy most people assume you’re also really stupid. They either speak to you in a quiet, slow voice as if speaking to a retarded child or enunciate and yell as if addressing a hard-of-hearing, demented senior. Either way, I resent it. True, I can’t always remember who’s president when they ask me after I wake up in the suite. Or what day it is. Or the name of my doctor. But is that really a fair assessment of my mental acuity? I don’t think so.
I think that when I have the energy I will put a slip of paper into the suggestion box at the nurse’s station. I will suggest they change the word “suite” to “lab” or “chamber” or “electric fun house.” Just to let them know I know.
Somehow I got from there to here. My room, my bed. My head feels dull and thick—like the time I tripped on bad mushrooms in Yemen. Only, then, I awakened next to a naked girl. I can’t tell you who’s president, but I remember every detail of that blow job like it was yesterday.
I lie back on my Styrofoam pillow enjoying the memory, recalling the fine points that might be gone tomorrow. Heat, sweat, scent. I feel myself getting hard and try to locate my dick inside the complicated folds of the hospital gown and the oversized paper pajama bottoms I’m required to wear to ECT. You’d think the scavenger hunt would be enough to lower my flag, but if anything, I’ve gone from half-mast to full. I don’t know, maybe it’s the residual electricity floating through my bloodstream, but ECT always makes me horny. So much so that I’ve taken to hoarding tubes of the good lotion and hiding them in my night table. I have a feeling Milton, the Jamaican orderly in charge of the linen cart, knows what I’m up to. Lately he’s been handing me two or three tubes at a time and winking at me. Milton knows a man has his needs. Even when he’s locked up having his brain lit up like a Christmas tree three times a week.
I have managed to pull the enormous tent-like pants off and toss them onto the floor along with the sheet and blanket and have hiked the hospital gown up onto my chest. I am treating myself to an expert double-fisted hand job.
I am in Yemen, in Thailand, in Santiago. I am remembering—girls with skin the color of coffee, of saffron, of cinnamon. I am remembering how they smelled and tasted and felt as my dick slips and slides up through my left hand and circles down through my right in an endlessly delicious loop.
And then there is a sharp knock at the door, followed, without pause, by the swift banging of the door opening against the opposite wall. And then Milton is backing into my room, pulling a wheelchair.
“Mr. Greyson Todd, please to be meeting Mr. Tyrone Washington, your new roommate,” he says before he turns around. And when he does, turning the chair with him, he is rather stunned by what he finds. The kid in the chair—tall, skinny, black, catatonic with depression—does not even register what’s in front of him. His wet lips and slack jaw hang slightly open. His hands, palms turned up, sit curled in his lap, looking like sick birds. His ECT shunt sticks out of one wrist. And still, I am hard as a goddamn brick.
And having worked fucking hard to get to the exquisitely painful point of eruption, I have no intention of stopping now.
“Milton,” I say through gritted
teeth, pumping myself once or twice to show him I will not be intimidated, “a moment if you wouldn’t mind.”
Milton looks from my face to my dick.
“Please,” I plead.
He chuckles and slaps the Formica table. “Lord.” Then he whips Tyrone’s chair around. “You got five minutes.”
Later that night, I look over at Tyrone lying in a fetal position—all six feet three inches of him curled into a ball—in the bed next to me. He is nineteen and wears a hospital gown and his basketball sneakers. He is a child.
I can’t sleep and it occurs to me to jerk off again. I wonder if he would notice. I know he wouldn’t say anything. But that is not the point. I don’t want to be rude. There are rules of etiquette, even here.
SIXTH
I have never been into being tied down. Until now. Lately I am so anxious to be restrained that this morning I actually grab an ankle strap out of the orderly’s hand and start buckling myself to the table. “Aren’t we the eager little beaver this morning,” says Florence, perennially cheerful. But it’s not so much that I can’t wait to be zapped. If anything, it’s the feeling that being bound and gagged is the only thing that will stop the sensation—that I am the third rail; that I am filled with a kind of buzzing, humming energy that keeps my knees bouncing and toes twiddling. I am chewing the insides of my cheeks and yanking out strands of hair. And so, while God knows I’d much prefer my first voluntary experience playing the M in S&M to be shared with a highly experienced, leather-clad dominatrix—the kind who makes house calls and comes equipped with her own bag of tricks—I have resigned myself to the fact that my first priority is ridding myself of the feeling that my flesh is about to come flying off my bones. So hospital-issue restraints, a paralytic and generic knockout drops will have to do. When I am finally, completely strapped down, the relief is immediate. The restraints provide a kind of counter-pressure I have not been able to give myself. In being secured I finally feel secure. I haven’t told anyone about this, though I admit it’s been hard to hide. I just tell them I’m nervous. If I told them how I really feel they’d think I was out of my mind.
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