He arrives at a house that, despite its unfamiliar architecture, he instinctively recognizes as his own. The front door opens, Nell stepping into the clean mid-afternoon sunlight. Barefoot, wearing a short summer dress. She moves haltingly, trembling, arms outstretched in search of an elusive balance. Then a magical thing happens: hairline fissures run down her arms and legs, thin and twisting like cracks in granite. Her face shatters, the fractured portions—high arch of cheek, fluent plane of brow—flaking off, skin curled and like burnt paper. Her expression does not change, though her eyes lighten to a brilliant shade of blue. Graham thinks of a Russian doll, of a chrysalis birthing some strange new-old and beautiful thing. She skips lightly down the path—oh, the way she moves. Her beauty is so merciless it exists nearly in the abstract. And though he knows, deep in those chambers of heart and mind that never truly sleep, this is only a dream, he still holds an unshakable belief in its possibility.
Other times, driving the streets at night, his restless mind slipping in and out of focus, a different dream comes. He repossesses another car. This one never takes a concrete form: four wheels, bland and nondescript. A getaway vehicle. He drives through the city as he knows it: redbrick houses and beige apartment complexes with squares of light burning in odd windows, darkened parks, pockets of ugliness and despair overlooked by distant snow-capped hills. He pulls up to the house he and his wife have shared for twenty-five years, idling at the curb for a long empty second. He sees Nell’s trembling silhouette in the front window. Then he sets the car in gear and pulls away, turning the corner at the end of the block, the red eyes of those taillights dimming, gone. He does not know where he is going, doesn’t quite accept his own dream logic. The vision dissolves—he often snaps out of it with an audible yelp—and in its wake all that exists is a cold and resolute self-loathing.
“Nobody really holds anyone,” said Paris. “You only hold someone as well as you’re able and you’re only held as much as you’ll allow. In the beginning, you know, that’s where the excitement lies: the uncertainty, right? The … fear.” Paris turned to Graham and smiled. He had a way of smiling that made Graham sad. “Don’t you think it’d be nice if life was like the Riverside? I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Everybody works together. Everybody gets along. There’s love, sure, but not the kind that breaks people in half, wrecks things. Puppy love. Nobody gets hurt. Everyone’s just … friends. It’d be good, I think. A good life.” He laughed, the stiff barking noise of a small dog. “I’m an idiot.”
Turtle swam back to shore. It stood in the shallows, staring, with ancient pondering eyes, at the box it’d been plucked from.
“Silly thing.” Paris walked down to the water and picked the turtle up, returning it to the box. It seemed content to be back, its existence delimited by those four off-brown walls.
“Where’s the frog?”
“Think you lost him.”
“He’ll be okay. He’s resourceful.”
Paris waded out into the lake, where Dillson swam in meandering circles. “Get your feathered ass over here.” At the last possible moment the duck took flight: a splash of water, a dim flapping of wings, a plump shape fleeing across the moon’s face into the first ashes of light to the east. Paris stood in water up to his knees, shaking his head. High above, a jet left its gauzy contrail on the lightening cupola of sky.
“Maybe this is the way it happens.” Paris did not elaborate.
“Maybe so. Listen, I’m not gonna take your camper.”
“Really?”
“I came, you weren’t here. That’s my story.”
“Hey, man, thanks.”
“It’s temporary. Agency’ll send someone else.”
“I only need a week to cut the episode.”
“You should be okay. Can’t stay here, though.”
“Right. I’m a no-good deadbeat.” Paris’s quasi-criminal status appeared to energize him. “I’m on the lam. Bonnie and Clyde.”
He came out of the water. “I really hate to do this, seeing as you’ve exceeded your good Samaritan quota for this week, but I’ve got to ask you one last favor.”
BEAMS OF PREDAWN SUNLIGHT filtered over the horizon, touching the hoods of parked cars, the windows of office buildings. Moon still visible, a pale hub above the hills. The city hung suspended between darkness and day. Early morning dog walkers and paperboys went about their business with an air of reluctant obligation.
Graham drove silent suburban streets, a meandering route home. He loved this time of day, everything clean and fresh and full of possibility. A cardboard box sat on the seat beside him. Hamster, mouse, guinea pig, and turtle slept quietly inside. All four were touching, drawing heat from one another, bodies expanding and contracting as they breathed. Two cages and an aquarium stacked in the footwell, next to a sack of cedar shavings, another of barley pellets. He pulled into his driveway, hefted the box, and went inside.
The television was on, muted, tuned to another episode of The Beachcombers. Nick was hollering at Relic, presumably for stealing logs. Nell lay on the recliner. Even in sleep, her body shook fitfully.
Graham switched the TV off. Sparrows congregated on the backyard picnic table, brown bodies staggered in ranks like Confederate soldiers. He thought of the first time he’d seen Nell, at a high-school dance. A slim beautiful girl standing in the splintered light of a revolving mirror ball. She danced alone, swaying her hips and snapping her fingers to the beat. He was stunned when she asked him to dance. He wondered if it were a joke to amuse her friends, not really caring if it was in his desire to be next to her. He remembered her eyes in the malarial heat and darkness of the high-school gym, glittering blue, pupils wide and dark. The sparrows took flight en masse, a dark flurry of bodies vanishing over the rooftops.
“H-H-Honey?”
Nell was awake, rubbing her eyes.
“Just me. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Wh-wh-what’s t-that you g-got?”
Graham set the box on the armrest. “Some new friends I made last night.”
He set the guinea pig on Nell’s lap. It burrowed into the loose folds of her sweater, warbling contentedly.
“I h-had a g-g-guinea p-pig when I w-whu-was a kid.”
Graham placed the remaining animals on different parts of his wife. They roamed the prone topography of her body: the backs of her hands, swells of her arms, crook of her neck.
“T-tuh-tickles,” she said. “W-wh-where w-wuh-will we put these g-guys?”
“We’ll find room.”
In the mellow half-light of the den, the animals made a nest of Graham’s wife. Marian Mouse nuzzled through the soft curls of Nell’s hair. Turtle sought the valley between her breasts, paused as though awaiting permission, then eased down. Nell petted BP’s head, the guinea pig happy to receive any attention.
Her hand hardly trembled. It hardly trembled at all.
A distressed squeak from somewhere below. Graham scanned his wife’s body: no hamster. It must’ve slipped between the seat and back, down into the guts of the recliner.
“Stay as still as you can,” he told Nell, kneeling beneath the leg rest and lifting the green corduroy flap, exposing the chair’s inner workings. The hamster was caught in a V of metal struts forming the recliner’s levering mechanism. Each strut was attached to a heavy spring quivering with the movement of Nell’s body. The hamster hung helplessly, stunted legs kicking the air, eyes bulging comically.
“Please,” Graham said, reaching a hand towards the shivering creature. “Please, Nell, please stay still.”
FRICTION
My name is Sam. I’m a sex addict.
Welcome, Sam.
Thanks, all of you. So, when did I first realize I had a problem—that’s the question, is it? Guess it’d be in my teens; fifteen, maybe sixteen. Standing in a bodega in the city where I grew up, only place you could find Black Bart licorice gum— remember that stuff? This woman came in for cigarettes. She wasn’t remarkable in any tangible way. I re
call her elbow. The, um, inside of it—crook of her arm, really. When she reached over the counter to pay you saw these downy hairs, a raised blue vein and I wanted to touch that spot, smell and taste it. Crazy, but I wanted to shrink myself, atomize like those scientists in Fantastic Voyage, view things on a cellular level. I wanted to know everything about it—not her, you understand, I didn’t care about her history or goals or fears, any of that. Just be intimate with that unthinking portion of her. That was the first time I felt that way—my whole world collapsing in a single gesture or stimulus. Same way Hank Aaron must’ve felt swinging a bat for the first time, Ray Charles tickling those ivories. So this is it, huh? My life’s purpose. Crush homeruns. Write great music. Obsess about a woman’s elbow. Oh. To some the wheat, others the chaff. But you make do, right?
I’VE GOT THE GIRL bent over a glasstop desk with her ass in the air, my hands on her hips, thrusting diligently. Her name’s Caitlin—no, Kitten. Glass fogged under Kitten’s armpits and her nipple rings produce a glasscutter clink on the tabletop. She’s blowing Wayne and every so often pauses to exhort me to Fuck her, Fuck her hard, Fill her up, Harder, Faster, Make her cum, et cetera. Klieg lights hot on my skin and a cameraman between my spread legs, zoomed in for an insertion shot. Give it a little swizzlestick action and Kitten moans at this pedestrian maneuver. Wayne’s leaning forward, red flushmarks across his thighs caused by pressure from the table. An eagle spread-winged across Kitten’s lower back, red rose clutched in each talon.
“Give it to me,” she says. “Give it to your little whore.”
“Cut!” The director barks. “Take twenty, people.”
Break for a set change. The cameraman slots a fresh tape into his handheld, the sound tech adjusts his levels, a gopher swabs the desktop with Windex. Towel wrapped round my waist, I consult the craft table’s meager offerings—mesh sack of oranges, box of Triscuits, brown-looking bananas—select an orange and sit on the sofa.
I’m peeling the orange and stuffing rinds between the cushions when a girl sits beside me. She approaches from behind, barefooted, easing herself down stealthily as though her intention is to catch me unawares. Moderately tall, maybe five-six, long legs, narrow waist, high breasts. Naked as a jaybird. Untucking the towel, she takes me in her hand.
“Thanks,” I tell her, sectioning the orange.
“Just doing my job. Want some oil or anything?”
“That’s okay. You got a soft touch. Not like the last fluffer—like pulling weeds.”
“There are those who believe I have healing hands.”
The girl’s eyes swim with gold flecks like you’d find floating in a bottle of Goldschlager and she’s looking off across the set, into darkened corners filled with dusty props and costume racks. The boom mike guy sits on an overturned milk crate, watching. She laughs softly, though at what I’m unsure.
The orange is dry and gross, like a pulp-sucking vampire’s been at it. “Want some?”
“Hands are sorta full, here.”
“My name is Samuel. Sam Chancey. And yours is …?”
“Do you really need to know, Samuel Chancey? I mean, would it enhance any of this?”
“No,” I say. “Well, I mean, possibly. Who knows? Just like to know, is all.”
“And I’d like to fuck Douglas Fairbanks. Ain’t gonna happen.”
“Okay, well then, are you new—like, to the city?”
“What’s with the small talk? We’re way past that stage—I’m in your pants already.” She snorts out her nostrils like a pissed-off bull. “What are you, one of those touchy-feely New Age types? Bet you got healing crystals in your nightstand.”
“Don’t even know what’s in there. Toenail clippers and Dristan nasal spray, I think.”
This gets a laugh and I ask her where she’s from. She takes my hand and draws it between her legs. “Make yourself useful.” She’s wet—I mean sopping—and I’m rubbing her pussy gingerly, then faster. Her face pinches up and she makes a noise like she’s stifling a sneeze, orgasming twice in rapid succession. “Okay,” she’s whispering, more to herself than me. “Okay, okay, oooo-kay.” Breathing heavily, splotches of color on her throat, clitoris the size of a pomegranate seed. She butts her chin against my shoulder, opening her mouth to orgasm again; when she pulls away thin crescent-shaped divots, the imprint of her teeth, are visible in my flesh.
“Thanks.” A slight shudder. “That was pretty alright.”
“You’re not that hard to please.”
“I’m hypersensitive. There are drugs, but I don’t take them.”
“Drugs to do what?”
“Y’know, like, dampen the sensation. Anyway, don’t like them. Like my entire body is packed in cotton batten or something.”
“Who wants that?”
“I know, right?” She kicks a thigh over mine, hooks her foot around my calf, draws my legs wider. “Sure, it’d probably make things better in the long run, but we are who we are.”
“You betcha.” My winning smile. “Warts and all.”
Wayne Harvey sits on the sofa. A silverhaired veteran, women love my co-star’s gallant demeanor: he treats starlets as though their maidenhood remains unsullied. Overlooking the bowlegs and turkey wattle, he’s quite dashing: the Jimmy Stewart of hardcore porn. The fluffer takes him in her other hand.
“I thank you for your efforts, milady,” Wayne says. “But I’m afraid your kindly ministrations will have no effect.”
“Why—what’s the matter?”
“Wayne’s penis is broken,” I inform her.
He shoots me a sour look. “True, Samuel—if crudely put.”
It happened a few years back. Wayne was in a solo scene with this acrobatic little blonde: she was jerking and bucking and practically doing the loop-de-loop. Wayne was sweating buckets and holding on for dear life, now she’s riding him, Wayne’s thrusting up to meet her and the gal’s biting her bottom lip begging for more but they come together awkwardly and something just went snap.
Shocking but true: you can break your dick. A fibrous sheath, the tunica albunginea, surrounds the tubes and blood vessels; when erect, the sheath is stretched tight and hard beneath the skin. Severe trauma can rupture the tunica: roughly the same force it would take to, say, bust your nose. The medical term is a penile fracture—though doctors familiar with the injury use the euphemism “bent wick.”
I was standing off set and heard this awful noise: the closest comparison I can manage is the sound of a drumstick torn from a roast turkey. Then the girl’s screaming and Wayne’s hopping around hollering. His cock hung buckled at this hideous jackknifed angle and the taut skin kept it bent, no way to release to the pressure. The tip a dusky eggplant bulb and a fearsome hematoma, this dark grape-sized bubble, swelling along the break. There’s poor Wayne staring down at his mangled unit, black as blood sausage, squeezing it at the root as though that might help. I’m not going to lie: it was pretty fucking revolting.
Thankfully this story has a happy ending. Unable to summon a screenworthy erection, Wayne underwent IPP surgery—Inflatable Penis Prosthetic. The urologist made an incision at the base of Wayne’s penis and threaded an expandable bladder up the shaft, then another incision in the testicular sac to deposit a pump the size and weight of a triple-A battery. A hole drilled into his hipbone anchored the prosthesis; the sundry tubes and wires were tucked behind his abdominal wall. Damn thing works like a charm: Wayne pumps up and wades on in, then deflates and lounges around until it’s time to re-inflate for action. Porno’s Six Million Dollar Man.
“Are you sure?” the fluff girl asks him. “Really, I don’t mind.”
“Well, if it’s no bother.” Wayne smiles. “But please view my lack of arousal as an expression of my physical limitations, not a comment on your skills.”
The two of them fall into an easy repartee, the sort Wayne excels at: meaningless and lighthearted, subjects ranging from recent movies to stale jokes to articles he’s read on some humanitarian topic: Save the Monk
ey-Eating Eagles, Liberate the Goatherds of East Timor, Thalidomide Babies March for World Peace, et cetera. She even laughs at Wayne’s ghastly puns: I once knew a bailiff who moonlighted as a bartender, my dear. He served subpoena coladas. Get the girl off and she won’t even pay attention to me—how’s that for gratitude? My nose is distinctly out of joint.
Before the final scene we experience what might be charitably described as a “technical malfunction.” More pointedly, Wayne’s prosthesis … well, explodes. The guy’s pumping up, cock rising steadily, then this panicked expression crosses his face and he’s scrabbling at his crotch crying, “Sweet lord!,” clawing at his balls and I’m wondering is he looking for the pump in there, an off switch or something and his cock’s just monstrous, I mean red and swollen and Wayne’s staring down with an expression of sick dread then this pop, not loud exactly but percussive like a pistol fired under wet sand and his cock—Christ, it expands and Wayne’s on the floor screaming bloody blue murder and there’s this noise like when you blow up a balloon and let go except it’s coming out his pisshole.
“Man down!” hollers the director. “Jesus, man down! ”
Wayne’s rolling around with his eyes rolled to the white, mouth open but no sound coming out. Two minutes ago you’re cracking one-liners and detailing the plight of East Timorian shepherds; now your penis is curled like a fishhook and blood’s leaking out. It’s a funny old world.
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