by Matt Sumell
Risk or regret.
That’s the phrase associated with thoughts of you.
You are someone I invest my time in who is an impossible situation.
I think you are amazing.
I haven’t felt connected to anyone the way I do with you every morning we wake up together.
Risk or Regret.
Almost every night before I go to bed.
Risk or Regret.
I didn’t know what to do with that info so I put a C+ at the top of it and gave it back. More drama. More whisper talk. More clomping.
I felt bad about that one and followed her out of the room and told her I was only kidding and that I was sorry. She said, regular volume, “Sorry for what? Do you even know?” I said for being a jackass. “That’s a start,” she said. But instead of explaining that I’m a moron and don’t wanna fall in love and have to fuck her forever, I just kissed her and fucked her for what felt like forever.
So there were things about each other we grew not to like, and the sex went from three or four positions to one or two, sometimes one or none when one or both of us was tired, which was a lot. We made each other yawn. I got to know the fillings in her back teeth.
We started spending most weeknights on the couch watching America’s Funniest Home Videos and animal documentaries. We were watching this one where they have slow-motion aerial footage of a wolf chasing a mother and baby gazelle all over Mongolia for like ten minutes, and sometime early on the mother and baby got split up, so then it was just the wolf and the little gazelle, but the little gazelle could really move, I mean, really move, so they’re zigging and zagging and leaping and then just flat-out going until the little gazelle gets tired and collapses to the ground and the wolf eats him up, just fuckin’ rips him apart, but then later on we find out the wolf eventually starves to death anyway, and then this baby elephant goes blind in a sandstorm but continues following his mother’s footprints using only his sense of smell, only he follows them in the wrong direction so he dies, too, when all of a sudden I felt her scooching closer to me on the couch and I looked at her, and without even turning away from the TV she out of nowhere says she wants to try anal sex. I blinked at her ear for a few seconds before saying, “OK.” And before you know it I was Frenching her, and then before you know it I was doing my high school locker combination move on her (33-14-4) followed by my lazyboy technique and then my eating-her-pussy maneuvers before she pulled me up by my hair and rolled on her side and I stuck it in there and moved it around for a while. The whole time she talked her dirty talk, every now and again dropping in half-rhetorical questions to encourage my participation, but it didn’t work cause I always gave one-word answers.
“… you like having your cock in my ass, Mister Bad Boy?”
“Yep.”
And it went on like that, not for too long, just right up until she started yelling don’t stop. Then, after the ten seconds where I remain perfectly still with my mouth open for some reason, I apologized and went wide-legged into the kitchen for paper towels like a gentleman.
Overall I’d say it was OK—like going through a little door into a big room. I prefer vaginas. But what was a lot of fun though was to pretend that she got pregnant from it, and then the next day to pretend that she gave birth to our turd-baby and that we named him Francis. The day after that she broke up with me by dramatic note, which basically said, I can’t do this anymore, which I read and then put in the sink garbage disposal. For the next few nights I dreamt she left me angry voicemails about my laundry, and for the next few weeks I wondered what it meant and back-and-forthed about trying to win her back, exactly one-half of me wanting to, exactly the other half of me not. I decided nothing, and realized I suck at making decisions. My younger brother, on the other hand, doesn’t. He slept with three women, decided he liked the third, and married her. This is despite our on-her-deathbed-in-the-den mother saying, “AJ, you know I love Tara, but don’t you think you should have some fun first?” He squeezed her hand and told her his mind was made up. I set about the business of unmaking it five minutes later, in the kitchen, by demanding he honor our mother by fucking more girls. He looked me right in the hairdo and said, “Sorry bro.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” I said. “Apologize to that woman in there, because you’re breaking her fucking heart. Then apologize to yourself when your marriage falls apart in ten years but now you’re balder and fatter and can’t get the quality ass you can right now. Then reject the apology ’cause you don’t deserve forgiveness, you divorced piece a shit!”
“You’re a moron piece a shit,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“I know so.”
“Well here’s what I know so: Mom made the mistake of not fucking enough people before getting married, and she’s telling you not to make the same mistake. She’s being a good mom to you, and you’re not listening, and I don’t think you’re seeing either because I’m pretty sure Tara’s face is a dirty sneaker with googly eyes and a wig on.”
“You’re eating Mom’s pain pills again?”
“Yeah. So?”
“I love her,” he said. “Be happy for me.”
“No, because I love you. And I’m telling you, as your brother and as your friend: fuck more girls. A lot more. AJ, every day millions of people die, and with their last breaths they look at their loved ones gathered around them and say, Oh, shit, I’m dying, I shoulda had sex with more people. But no one ever dies saying, Oh, shit, I shoulda had sex with less people … except maybe if they’re dying of AIDS, or cervical cancer, or were raped.”
“That’s really dumb.”
“Is it?”
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
Then he walked out of the room, leaving me there alone in the kitchen, amazed and unsettled by his calm confidence, his above-this-ness, a little because of the drugs I ate and the weird-looking stained-glass sea horse suction-cupped to the window. Then I thought, Focus! Then I thought, Balls. Then I thought if I can’t change AJ’s mind than maybe I can change Tara’s, and that’s when I started treating her real shitty whenever possible. I also unprotecto-ed her best friend after my mother’s funeral, and that Christmas I stuck gum under her coffee table and left it there. No matter what I did, though, she was always good-humored and forgiving about it, unshakable as him, and in the weeks and months after my breakup I thought back on all this, wondering how doubtlessness like that happens. And I don’t know. What I do know is that when I asked my father when he was sure about marrying Mom he said, “When I stopped wakin’ up with boners.”
I still wake up with boners is the other thought I thought most in the weeks following the breakup and, unlike my brother, I decided to use them on as many girls as possible. I decided to listen to our mother. I decided to have fun.
Of course it wasn’t always, in fact a lot of the time I felt lonely and miserable, especially in the beginning, when I realized I had no real gal-getting skills and just jerked off a lot and ate snacks in bed. It also crossed my mind that I had given up on something good, something with potential, someone who cared about and believed in me. In the end though I let her go, and over the next few years I changed from a mostly passive prick to a mostly aggressive one, sexing a lot of girls and I’m pretty sure contracting HPV in my throat.
I continued sport-boning broads even after best-manning my brother and Tara’s not-as-bad-as-I-thought-it’d-be wedding; even after they had a daughter and named her Marie, our mother’s name; even after I saw firsthand how full and rich their life together seemed. I told myself it was probably them just keeping up appearances, but when I drunkenly accused my brother of keeping up appearances he assured me that wasn’t the case, then asked if I’d be Marie’s godfather.
I was so surprised I hugged him and apologized for being a jerk, and told him I’d consider it a real honor. Then I found out I had to take some kind of church class and turned down the job. He ended up going with Javier, this bible-thumping family-m
an fuck-faced friend of his with narrow shoulders, and when I went to the baptism at St. John’s I was kinda bummed it wasn’t me up there waterboarding that baby. And after the priest hocus-pocused and abracadabra-ed her and Javier promised his promises and everyone got up to leave for the reception, I stayed seated in the pew, mesmerized by the sound of the women walking out, their high heels clicking and clonking and echoing in the almost-empty and expensively built house of god.
The reception was at their place, where I proceeded to drink beers with my father, the widower, the new grandpa with the new toupee. We were alone on the couch not talking to people, including each other, until I turned to him and said, “What do you do when the grass isn’t always greener. When it’s brownish on both sides. Like my dick.”
He squinted, sipped his beer, and said, “Leave me the fuck alone.”
“Sure.”
I got up and tried my best to muster up the enthusiasm to flirt with married girls in flowery sundresses, but quickly ended up back on the couch with my feet on the coffee table with green gum still stuck underneath. I checked.
I woke early the next morning, alone, around six or seven. I couldn’t fall back asleep, so I lay there feeling bad and hungry for about an hour, eventually getting up and dressed and finding the car keys and looking for someplace to eat breakfast. I ended up at a place called the Lighthouse Grill, where there were no glass bricks and where I got a pretty decent serving of restaurant-toast and eggs-over-easy and tomatoes. I was about halfway through when this guy and his lady and their daughter were seated at the table next to mine. They looked over at me a few times, so, when I wasn’t chewing, I tried to look like I was thinking about something, but I wasn’t, not really, just: Squint. Eventually they read their menus.
Just as the waitress asked me how everything was, the ice cubes at the bottom of my glass rushed up and smacked me in the teeth, and some juice dribbled onto my chin. I wiped it with my shirtsleeve and said, “Good, thanks.” Sure thing, she said and dropped my check on the table and turned around and asked the guy and his lady and their daughter if they knew what they’d like. They did, kind of, and the lady ordered some restaurant-eggs and -toast, and the guy ordered steak and eggs, and their daughter ordered restaurant–Rice Krispies and continued drawing pictures of animals with crayons on the back of her paper place mat. I didn’t think the drawings were very good, but after the waitress returned with their beverages she put both hands on her knees in an exaggerated way and said, “Oh how pretty! Is that an elephant?” And the little girl nodded. “And what’s this one, a rhinoceros?” she said. And again the little girl nodded. “And this one, here,” said the waitress, pointing. “What’s this one?”
“It’s a giraffe!” exclaimed the little girl.
“Wow,” said the waitress. “A giraffe. That’s great.”
But it wasn’t great, it looked more like a dinosaur than a giraffe. And as much as I’d have enjoyed holding that against her, I have to admit a lot of things haven’t really turned out the way I’d have liked them to either.
ALL LATERAL
Consider the look on Whatsherface’s face when I bought her a well drink and told her I lived on a boat. Maybe my life wasn’t so bad. More important, it was cheap, with slip fees coming in at under five hundred a month and utilities topping out around twenty, plus there was a parking lot so I didn’t have to hate myself extra when I forgot to move my car for the twice-a-week street sweepers. Also, as long as you were topside and facing the right direction—in this case 127 degrees SSW between the super-hulls of Fah Get A Boat It and Let’s Get Naughty-Cal—you’d be hard-pressed to beat the view: a shoddy bait barge in the middle of the harbor listing heavily under the weight of a dozen or so fat, barking sea lions and some marine birds. All considered, it was a damp version of pretty OK.
But then she asked what I did for work, and I told her.
“I pump fuel at the marina fuel dock for eight dollars an hour, but mostly I read books and eat sandwiches, or watch my dog laze in the sun and lick pelican shit off the cement.”
The look changed, got scrunchier.
“When that gets old,” I said, “I sit on a chair in front of the shack and eyewitness the trash floating by on the tide. Mostly it’s plastic—soda bottles and tampon applicators and stuff like that, one time a doll head on a stick, another a dead cat covered in seaweed.”
She flipped her hair and sucked her drink straw hard, then glanced around the bar, a shithole on Gaffey in San Pedro called The Spot. The first time I saw it, it was wrapped in yellow police tape. I’d go a couple times a month ’cause I could walk there, and every time I did, an old person fell off a bar stool. I was pretty surprised to see Whatsherface and her friend walk in because neither of them were ugly or wearing hospital bracelets. Whatsherface was a brunette and looked like the kind of girl who’d neatly pile her olive pits on her plate. Her friend—who I was having a hard time paying attention to even though she had a sequined top on—was blond and sneezed like a laser gun. I ducked but they didn’t get the joke.
“Look,” I said, “I didn’t tell you about the drowned cat to make the argument that cats as a species are bad swimmers, but they are bad swimmers. What they’re good at is murderous rampages. Not only do their turds cause birth defects and mental problems, but cats spend all night looking for small animals to kill. For fun. They don’t even eat most of them.” The girls looked at each other and made their eyes big but didn’t say anything, so I kept going on about cats. My cat monologue. My catalogue. “I’m also not trying to make the argument that cats as a species are stupid. If I was making that argument I’d have told you about my father’s cat, Steve, who is a moron and can’t recognize me if I put something, anything, on my head. Like I’ll all of a sudden grab a can of soda or a fork and hold it to my head, and he gets all puffed up and hissy and gives me this who-the-fuck-are-you-supposed-to-be look, kinda like the one you’re both giving me right now.”
“Sorry,” Whatsherface said. “But I’m a cat person. I love cats.”
“She does,” her friend said.
“I believe you,” I said to her friend. “I believe you that your friend loves cats.”
“My cat,” Whatsherface said, “Derek Jeter—he’s not stupid at all. He fetches rubber bands and watches TV and is thoughtful. And he’s so considerate that he wakes me in the morning by gently pawing my face.” She went on to list more supposed-to-be-considerate things Derek Jeter did and said something about natural survival instincts, but I got distracted by her friend glinting her way toward the bathroom like a Sparkletts water truck.
“… and that’s why there are so many strays,” she said.
“There are so many strays ’cause cats fuck a lot and my friend’s tabby got cut in half by the parking garage gate in his apartment complex—how’s that for survival instincts?” She was so horrified that it was kind of great, but I knew I was blowing any chance I had with her, so I did the only thing I could do—I tried to change the subject.
“He kept its body in a shoebox in his fridge for a week so his crazy Guamanian girlfriend could say her teary goodbyes when she got home from her business trip. I mean, imagine that,” I said, “having to choke back the weepies every time you need to cream your coffee or butter your toast. Or do you not refrigerate your butter?”
I swirled my drink and watched the bubbles spin and gather at the top where they looked like fish eggs. Then I put it back down, waiting for her answer, but she didn’t have anything to say about butter or cats or anything else about anything after that, at least not to me. And when her friend came out of the bathroom the two of them whispered to each other and, feeling left out and vindictive, I leaned in and asked the shiny one if her shirt came with matching ice skates. She looked confused, then figured it out and slivered her eyes at me. I smiled dumbly, but it was too late for that because they stood up and left without saying goodbye. I waved at the back of their heads, and then at Johnny with the neck tattoo that looked mor
e like a butthole than a gunshot. When he finally came over I ordered a double something from him, cheers-ed to cat shit everywhere and said bye-bye to myself—“bye-bye”—and drank it down.
* * *
In the morning I was back on the dock again, feeling like trash again, watching the trash flotilla again, which was usually pretty big in the summer ’cause there’s a lot more people on boats and beaches in the summer, but it was overcast and cool that morning, June gloom in July, so there wasn’t much to see until the yacht club kids sailed past in little racers to practice their tacking and buoy-rounding. I rolled up my shirtsleeves and watched from my chair for a while, until some shithead in a shiny new Bayliner came barreling up the channel and smashed into the dock and got all angry with me for not holding his two tons of bad taste off the bulkhead bare-handed. By the time I got him tied off he was already on the dock and squatting, running his fingers along a six-inch gouge.
“Look at this,” he said.
So I looked at it.
“Fuck,” he said. “It’s all fucked up now.”
Then he looked at me, expectantly, like, Say something, so I said something. I said: “What octane?”
He stared at me and shook his head but didn’t leave, I think because somewhere deep down in his shithead heart he knew he was clueless and just putting on a show for the woman who was on deck holding a rope looking confused and scared and besides, we had the cheapest fuel in the harbor. It’s a true fact: our gallons were a good ten cents less than Mike’s in the main channel, and everybody around knew it.
The guy was still sputtering in mock disbelief when the woman interrupted. “Look at him,” she said, trying to break the tension. “He’s got a tongue like a necktie. That a French bulldog?”
“Mostly,” I said. “That’s Jason. He likes garage sales and bird shit.”
She laughed in that singsongy feminine way, high-pitched and sincere, and it made me like her. She all of a sudden reminded me of my mother, and it wouldn’t have seemed odd to me at all if she smelled like Juicy Fruit and Aqua Net, crossed her arms and said, You boys …