by John Jodzio
“Listen, Francine,” he said, “I am pretty sure I have syphilis. Not positive, but pretty sure.”
My new lover was pale. He had freckles and moles spread out all over his body. He was young, much younger than me. There was a tiny shamrock tattoo among all the freckles. I understood what he was trying to do there—you had to search for it like it was a real shamrock, right? I don’t know why, maybe it was his laidback attitude, but I got the feeling he was Canadian.
When he said what he said about having syphilis, I laughed. I took my hand and I hit it playfully on his freckled, probably Canadian chest.
“Syphilis?” I said. “That’s it? You said it was something important.”
My new lover’s eyes narrowed. I had not seen him this serious in the entire forty-five minutes I’d known him. I’d only known three sides of him so far—angry/sexy and then playful/sexy and now serious/sexy, but I loved all of them equally and decided I would continue to love whatever other sides I saw.
“Syphilis is no joke,” he said. “Syphilis will fuck your shit up.”
I laughed at him again. I knew it was horrible to laugh at someone you loved when they were so concerned, but I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t help myself because actually, syphilis was a joke to me. It was a joke because my life was already fucked up. I was already mostly crazy and when I did not put my contacts into my eyes I could hardly make it from my bedroom to my bathroom without catastrophe. What I mean to say is that I did not care about becoming any crazier or blinder, just as long as I would be these things with my new lover.
As we talked, the buzzer of my apartment began going off, rapid fire, these short and insistent bursts.
“Don’t you hear that?” my new lover asked.
“Don’t I hear what?” I said.
I first saw my new lover outside the Asian grocery store near my house. He was being yelled at by the grocery store owner, Mr. Yu. My lover held his skateboard under his arm and as Mr. Yu yelled at him, he held up his middle finger and told Yu, in perfect Cantonese, to fuck the fuck off.
“Hey!” I yelled as he hopped on his skateboard. “Hold on!”
I was carrying a bag of groceries that I had purchased at the bodega across the street from my apartment. I had stopped going to Yu’s grocery store because Yu had found out I’d lived in China and that I spoke Cantonese. After Yu found this out, he said horrible things about his Indian wife to me. His wife sat right next to him at the counter, doing her word jumble and not knowing what Yu was saying. Yu expected me to laugh with him about how fat and ugly and good for nothing his wife was, but all I wanted to do was buy that good coconut milk beverage that Yu’s store carried.
“What now?” my new lover asked.
The street lights had just turned on with their hissing and popping and under this silvery light his blue eyes looked lovely. The anger had not disappeared from them yet and I saw that beneath the surface my lover was a complicated young man whose rage quite possibly would be his downfall.
“I bought way too much food,” I told him. “I don’t know what I am going to do with all of it.”
I had used this line on men before, batting my eyelashes and pretending to be helpless or unable to calculate how much a single woman could eat. It had always worked. My first husband, William, the one who I had moved to China with, was propositioned in this very same way.
“This cutlet is much too big,” I’d told William. “There’s absolutely no way I can eat it all.”
I’d invited William back to my kitchen and after we’d eaten, I’d invited William into my bed. Soon after that, we married and moved to China. Once we were there, though, William had left me for a Chinese woman. I imagined that this woman had shown William a heaping bag of mysterious Chinese groceries with eels and oxtails and that she’d pretended to be helpless and stupid too. It was a vicious cycle, this thing with men and food and desire, one that none of us would ever break no matter how hard we tried.
“Look,” I said now, tipping down my bag of groceries to show my new lover the contents. “Without you, all of this goes bad.”
My lover looked into the grocery bag. Then he looked me up and down. He looked down the block and then he looked at his watch and then he looked at me again.
“I guess I could eat,” he said.
As we laid curled up together on my futon, I realized if we never left my apartment to seek a cure for our syphilis our eyes would get crusted over with pink goo and we would moan and shit everywhere and maybe smear our shit on the walls or on my leather sofa, just me and my new love.
“What if we never went outside ever again?” I asked him. “Wouldn’t that be absolutely romantic?”
“Would the buzzer be going off all the time?” he asked. “Because that buzzer is driving me apeshit.”
I did not want to bore my lover with the mundane details of my daily life. For instance, why the buzzer of my apartment kept going off. I wanted our love to be a huge love, an all-consuming love that transcended time and space. Every love in my life up until this point had ended with both of us alive and angry and now I wanted something different. I wanted something epic, something where I died intertwined in someone’s soiled arms and legs.
The reason the buzzer in my apartment kept going off was that a prostitute named Alejandra had lived here before me. She was a prostitute whose specialty was being choked. One night she had gotten choked a little bit too much and I got a discount on my rent now because men who did not know she was dead kept coming to my apartment and buzzing my buzzer.
“Alejandra,” the men said to me when I pressed the intercom button. “Alejandra, is that you?”
Sometimes the men got past my security door by mashing their hands over a block of intercom buttons and someone else in my building, someone old or lonely or crazy, would just buzz them up. Then these men stood in front of my door chanting Alejandra’s name.
“Maybe it’s an emergency,” my lover said to me when the buzzer went off. “Maybe it’s a long lost friend. You are cordoning yourself off from a lot of possibilities here.”
Cordoning. I liked that word. Up until that point, I’d wondered if my new lover was smart enough to hold my attention over the many months we’d be holed up in my apartment, but this word, cordoning, made me breathe easier. He was smart enough! He had used the word cordoning!
“It’s not any of those things,” I told him. “It’s just someone messing with me.”
My new lover looked annoyed at my explanation, but I put my tongue inside his mouth and then I grabbed onto his hips and pulled him down on the couch on top of me.
“I am probably going to give you syphilis again,” he told me.
“Of course you are,” I said.
I had not totally lied when I met my new lover; I had purchased too much food. I had recently gone to the bulk store and bought an industrial size jar of pickles and a dozen gallon-sized cans of beef barley soup. I had a bag of pretzels that was roughly the size of a twin bed, a wheel of cheese that I had to cut in half to fit inside my fridge. If we didn’t overeat, if we didn’t get bored eating the same things over and over, we could stay here for a very long time.
“This is messed up,” he said, hoisting up the bag of pretzels. “Who could eat all these?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Who could eat all of those before they died, you know? Probably not us, that’s for sure.”
My lover sat down next to me and he lifted my fingers up to his lips, kissed them slowly, one by one. I closed my eyes. I suppose at this point I should have fantasized that we were somewhere else, like on a tropical island with a long white beach and clear blue water, but what I imagined was him and me just sitting right here on my couch a few months from now when we were a little older and a lot crazier.
The buzzer went off again and he dropped my hands in my lap.
“Jesus,” he said. “Does that thing ever stop?”
I got up from the couch and went o
ver to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine from the huge cardboard box on the counter. I took a drink and my new lover snapped a picture of me with his phone. Then he began to push some buttons.
“I just sent your picture to my friend Alex,” he told me. “I wanted to show him what I just got down with.”
I stood up and he took a few more pictures of me from different angles. Then he sent those to Alex too. My lover’s cell phone rang and he answered it.
“Totally,” he told the person on the phone. “A total cougar.”
My new lover talked to the person on the phone for a couple of minutes. I started to wave at him to get his attention. Hello, I waved, I am over here, remember me?
“Uh-huh,” he said to the person on the phone. “Sure, sure. I’ll be there in like twenty minutes.”
When he was finished talking, my lover stood up and slipped on his pants. Then he pulled his shirt over his head.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Are you going somewhere?”
“This was fun,” he said lacing up his shoes. “But I’ve got to go now. I’ve got business.”
He stood in front of me now and I suddenly realized how much taller and skinnier he was than me, thought about how sometimes you forget how much taller and skinnier someone is than you when you mostly know them from being on top of or behind you. He kissed my cheek and then he walked toward the door. I could not imagine him leaving now and so I ran over and pressed my body around his. I had plenty of things that I’d used in the past to make men stay—I’m pregnant and it’s yours, I just took a handful of your sleeping pills and I am going to die, I’m pregnant and it’s yours and I just swallowed a handful of your sleeping pills—but none of those would really work in this situation.
“I thought we were in love,” I said.
“We’re in love,” he said. “You can’t question that. But business is business.”
“There’s all this food,” I told him. “There’s me.”
I dug my fingers into his back, but he still pushed his way toward the door. I slid down his body and grabbed his legs, but he pushed me off. I rolled into my coat rack and he grabbed his skateboard and ran down the hall. I got up and chased after him, but by the time I arrived to the street, he was rolling away.
“Go to the clinic!” he yelled back to me. “Make sure you go and get yourself checked out!”
After my new lover was gone, I went back to my apartment and sat on my couch. I covered myself up with a blanket and opened a huge bag of pretzels. I propped the bag on my stomach and ate handful after handful until my lips burned from the salt.
As I sat there, the buzzer went off again. It would not quit this time. I thought it might be my new lover returning to tell me how sorry he was and how much he had missed me, so I got up to look. Instead there was a man in a grey suit standing in the entryway. He had dark, spiked hair and sunglasses. He held a bouquet of orange flowers in his fist.
“What?” I said, pressing the intercom. “What do you want?”
“Alejandra?” the man said. “Is that you?”
I stared at the man standing in the entryway. I did not feel like there was anything wrong with my blood or my brain at this moment, but I knew that there was something inside me now, something my lover had given me that either had to be cut out or killed off for me to continue on.
“Yes,” I told him. “It’s me. It’s Alejandra.”
“Can I come up?” he asked.
The man was wearing leather gloves; he was clenching and unclenching his hands, gripping and re-gripping that bouquet of flowers.
“Hold on one second,” I said.
I went around and tidied up my apartment. I closed my blinds and I lit a scented candle. I lowered the lights in my apartment and then I pressed the security button and let him in. I heard him running up the stairs. I propped open my door and then I laid down on my bed. I heard his footsteps coming down the hall.
“I’m here,” I called out.
I arched my neck. I took a deep breath. I waited for his hands.
IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D ALREADY BE HOME
There are some things you should not do in the rich town up the mountain from yours and one of those is sticking your dick in their mail slots or dog doors and moving it around and thrusting your hips in and out and sometimes urinating, but sometimes not, depending on how you feel and what kind of rug they have and honestly, whether or not you have to piss, but this, this is precisely what my little brother Carl and I started doing one Saturday morning after our baseball season ended.
“This is how revenge works,” I told Carl as we biked the hill to Buena Vista. “It’s an eye for an eye. And sometimes it is also urine for an eye.”
This was the twenty-second straight year that our town had lost to Buena Vista. This was the twenty-second straight year that Buena Vista had gone to the Under 16 Nationals. It was, we kept reading on a number of billboards taken out by THEIR booster club in OUR town, some sort of North American record.
Our town, Cuffs River, took this year’s loss badly, but our coach, Ron Turnbull, took it the worst. After the game, instead of taking the exit ramp to his house, Coach Turnbull drove his pickup right off the Cuffs River Bridge. No skid marks or anything. He just decided that enough was enough and floored it right through the guardrail and into the murky runoff below.
“Turnbull was a man of substance,” I told Carl. “He just picked a stupid place to live.”
Of anyone in Cuffs River, my brother Carl was hit the hardest by Turnbull’s death. I’d heard every one of Turnbull’s rah-rah speeches two or three times and was annoyed by the chewed up cigar butt that was permanently housed in the corner of his mouth, but Carl loved him. Turnbull had made Carl our team manager. Turnbull had given Carl rides home in his truck every night after practice. Turnbull always had a huge stash of Carl’s favorite food, red licorice, in his duffel bag. Turnbull, Turnbull, Turnbull. Carl was so in love with the man that anytime anyone mentioned his name now, in the dollar store or at the swimming pool, Carl would smack himself in the chest two times with his fist and then furiously point up at the sky.
“Toooornbill!” he’d moan.
By now, no one in town paid Carl much mind. He was just another kid who had to wear a hockey helmet wherever he went. Another kid who threw up whenever he got too excited. He was any one of a number of people in Cuffs River who pointed at the heavens and moaned for a lost loved one.
“I’m responsible,” Carl told me as we sat on our couch watching TV. Carl had just gone to the barber and gotten his hair cut like Turnbull’s, a crewcut, high and tight. “I’m the one.”
I got up and walked over to the refrigerator and grabbed a Coke. I snapped it open, slid back down onto the couch. I passed it over to Carl and he took a drink. Carl wasn’t supposed to drink anything carbonated, but we were already breaking some of my mother’s rules today, so why not break some more? We’d already finished one bag of fun-size candy bars and were halfway through another.
“You aren’t responsible,” I told Carl. “It’s not your fault.”
One thing you learned in Cuffs River early on—Buena Vista would do whatever it took to beat our asses. They flew in these kids from hot dusty countries, doctored up their birth certificates; put their families up in fancy hotels with cable and air for the entire summer. I know it was weird, but whenever I looked at the map of Central America, I couldn’t help but imagine this swarm of hungry and talented young men, bats in their hands, sprinting across the border and running toward our town just to smash my dreams.
“So close you could taste it!” Carl yelled out.
Other than moaning about Turnbull this had been Carl’s favorite phrase lately. Whenever he said it, he took his fingers and smashed them together until just the tiniest gap remained.
The really sad thing about this year was I thought it was THE YEAR. Of course, I had thought that about the year before too. And the year befo
re that. I guess I thought it every year. I knew Ron Turnbull did too, but this year, man, I think we both really thought it.
During the off-season, while every other kid was screwing off, my team got together and ran the canyon roads. In our algebra class, whenever Mr. Benson turned his back, we worked on our signals. Eric Kowalke, the catcher on our team, set up a makeshift batting cage in his garage and we rode our bikes over there on the weekends and hit off a tee into a drop cloth. This spring, when we ran out onto the field, I thought that this extra work would pay off. I thought that this year Buena Vista would be bitching about us playing on ESPN.
“Toornbill,” Carl moaned again.
I was sick of taking care of Carl. I was sick of him saying the same things over and over again. I was sick of Buena Vista always beating our asses.
We’d just moved into this new apartment the week before and there were cardboard boxes surrounding us, stacked up against the walls. I walked over and kicked one of the boxes as hard as I could. It fell into another one, tipped that one over and a couple more tumbled off the pile and onto the floor.
I walked over into the kitchen and grabbed another soda. I looked at Carl. His new haircut wasn’t doing much for him. With short hair his head looked like a relief map—raised mountains, lowered valleys, buttes.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” I told him after I’d calmed down. “Kicking stuff. I lost it there for a minute. That’s not cool.”
Even with the volume on the television blaring, I could hear Carl’s stomach gurgle. Then he started to gag. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed the garbage can and hurried into the living room, but it was already too late. The contents of Carl’s stomach, everything we’d eaten and drunk that afternoon, spilled out in a watery brown pile in the middle of the floor.
My mother was working to try to get us out of Cuffs River. She’d been talking about this for the last two years, but hadn’t made much headway. She worked two full-time jobs just to keep us afloat, a day job at a florist and then one at night at a bakery decorating cakes. Every night, she came home around ten. She was dead tired and all she could do was flop down on the couch and beckon me over to rub her feet.