R/T/M

by Douglas, Sean

  If I kill a mosquito, sucking the blood from me, I feel no remorse.

  Mosquitoes don’t go to heaven.

  Why should humans be any different?

  Who decide that humans were a superior species to mosquitoes?

  All we are is smart monkeys. Tool-using monkeys with big fucking brains.

  But not big enough to get over racism and homophobia and religious differences.

  Just big enough to realize ourselves as a part of, yet simultaneously separate from our environment.

  Just big enough to realize that there is the self, and there is the not-self.

  Just big enough to outsmart ourselves.

  Nothing is permanent.

  Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

  On a long enough timeline nothing matters.

  On a long enough timeline any event becomes insignificant in relation to the whole.

  The light from some of the stars which seem to shine at night comes from stars which died before the beginning of human history.

  What’s so great about being alive?

  Ten years after I ran into her again.

  She was bartending at the lightweight pseudo-fetish club that I went to every Wednesday.

  She made eye contact and waved at me and I beelined right over to her, ignoring the blonde girl in the lingerie that I had just broken up with who was trying to give me a ration of shit. I was talking with her and it was like I was alive again and all of the despair in my life drained away. The blonde came up behind me and was poking me in the shoulder saying, “That was rude!”, but I brushed her hand off me and then slapped it off me and shot her a look that made her turn on her heel and stomp off in a fuss.

  Whatever. She’d be back. Stupid cooze.

  Whenever the girl I had loved so intensely came around she’d smile and we’d talk.

  She was working, so we only had a couple sentences at a time.

  I asked if we could hang out. If I could call her. Not like boyfriend and girlfriend, but it would mean so much to me if we could just hang out every now and then. I would have done anything to get her to agree to be in my life in any way.

  She said she had a boyfriend. She said he was, “spiffy”.

  I said it didn’t matter. He could come along!

  It wasn’t working. She gradually resumed the expression she had when she told me to stop sending her stuff in the mail.

  I said, “Fine.”, and I took a card from my wallet.

  “This is my card. I thought about you every day for five years and every other day for five years after that. There’s nothing I can do that will change your mind either way, but if you ever decided to call, it would mean the world to me.” I put the card down on the bar and picked up my beer and walked to the other side of the club.

  I didn’t sleep for a couple days after that. When I finally passed out, I slept for, like, twelve hours.

  When I woke up I felt better.

  I had said what I had wanted to tell her for ten years and now my love for her was hers to deal with.

  Let her lose some fucking sleep for a change.

  I had the blonde in the lingerie over and I fucked her like a porn star until she begged me to stop because she was so sore that when she came it hurt.

  I may never be able to love someone that intensely ever again, but I wasn’t going to let that ruin my life.

  I hadn’t killed myself and it was time to live.

  But in those few days something about me had changed.

  Metamorphosis is a cliché, but I’d like to hear your suggestions.

  I knew that my heart had been broken and would never heal.

  I knew that I could feel lust and compassion and sympathy but I would never love another woman.

  I knew intuitively that you only get one shot at something that burned that brightly and seemed like it could last forever.

  So there you go.

  Even someone as alien and abnormal and fucked up as I have become can love.

  It doesn’t excuse my actions, but maybe it explains them.

  It took a girl almost literally throwing herself at me to break my year of self-imposed celibacy.

  I’m in the dining hall and my friend Joe comes up with this redhead.

  She looks a little heavyset but she’s got blue eyes and a nice face.

  But remember I’m Mister Hate right now so I don’t make a fuss over her.

  We talk a while and she invites me to go to a Beltane celebration.

  I figure, what the fuck, so I agree to go.

  She picks me up and we go out to this Beltane celebration.

  It’s out in the country on some old farm.

  There’s a bunch of people in renaissance garb and cloaks. You know tights and poet shirts with big poofy sleeves and v-collars with a rawhide lace across them. And everyone had long stringy hair.

  It was a fucking joke.

  The only cool person was this old dude that everyone said was a druid priest. But he was really drunk and I didn’t really get a chance to talk with him because he was surrounded by crazy looking people in cloaks.

  Night falls and there’s a pit and a big old bonfire and there are people in cloaks dancing in circles around it.

  All day long people kept giving me knowing glances whenever the redhead introduced me to them but I ignored them. The glances, that is. I wasn’t planning on making anything big about the outing.

  It’s time to go to bed and the girl and I have a tent all to ourselves.

  I’m used to sleeping in my clothes, so I just take off my shoes and lay down on my back with my hands behind my head.

  The girl says she’s going to get comfortable and she takes off her poet shirt and crushed velvet skirt.

  I thought she was overweight. Instead she has huge tits and big hips.

  A real hourglass figure.

  She climbs into the sleeping bag and I spoon her.

  I start rubbing my hands over her body and she cranes her neck around and starts kissing me.

  I get my fingers into her and she reaches back and puts a hand into my pants and starts jerking me off.

  She moans and shakes when she cums on my fingers and she takes her hand off of my dick and out of my pants. Guess I have to wait till next time for mine.

  We go to sleep and the next day is pretty uneventful.

  I catch a lot of knowing looks again but whatever. They probably figure we fucked, but fuck them. All of those ass-pirates can go get fucked.

  We make plans to hang out a week later.

  She comes over to my dorm room and blah blah blah we fucked.

  It’s always great to fantasize about great big firm tits, but finally getting them is kind of disappointing.

  Anything over a D cup is a waste and this chick had to custom order her bras because they didn’t carry her size in stores.

  She did this thing where she’d pretend to pass out during sex because it was so good, then she’d gasp and look at me like she didn’t know who I was or where she was. Fuck it. I didn’t care. I just kept fucking her.

  One day she shows up and we get into it and when she takes off her shirt there’s a tattoo on her tit that wasn’t there last time. Her personal sigil which kind of looked like the Mortal Kombat logo. I’m all like, “What the fuck is that?”. She replies, “It’s a tattoo,” with a silent “dummy!”. I say, “I know it’s a tattoo, but how the fuck did that happen? Doesn’t that kind of come up in conversation? Like, ‘Hey. How was your week? Great! I got a tattoo on my tit!’’?

  She just looked right through me. I fucked her anyway.

  The next week she shows up with the other tit tattooed with the Star of Solomon.

  That was it.

  I stopped returning her calls and I sent her a letter telling her I was breaking up with her because I knew if I broke up with her in person she’d freak out and probably chase me around the house with a kitchen knife.

  I saw her years later and her ass was fucking huge and
her face had gotten all jowly.

  It was at a birthday party for the model-quality blonde I was fucking at the time.

  The best revenge is living well.

  Like I said, I was a terrible person to be in a relationship with.

  I wasn’t sadistic.

  At least not at first.

  I just didn’t play the games that men and women play with each other.

  I’d never flatter a girl that was fishing for compliments.

  If a girl was flirting with someone else while I was around I wouldn’t get jealous, I’d just leave and let her figure it out.

  If a girl said she loved me I’d never say it back.

  I wasn’t going to compromise my integrity by lying and saying I loved.

  I knew what love felt like and what I felt with them wasn’t love.

  Every now and then I’d get what I wanted.

  There was a hot blonde with blue-grey eyes that dressed all punk and sexy.

  She played keyboards in a ska band and I thought that was pretty hot.

  I talked her up and it took a year, but I was in.

  It was great because a guy that fucked me over called her when I was over and I got on the phone and talked with him. I was cool as a cucumber and I could feel him seething through the phone lines.

  Fuck you. I win. You lose. Deal.

  When we’d fuck in her dorm room she made the best genuine sex sounds.

  She had a small pussy and I have a big dick.

  I mean bigger than average.

  If the average penis is five inches long and I’m swinging seven then I call that big.

  I’ve gotten a few complaints that it’s too thick and only a couple complaints that it’s not long enough.

  I can do faster and harder, but deeper just isn’t on the menu.

  I’m no John Holmes motherfucker, but God has been kind.

  I was famous. I could have had any girl in that suite.

  Even the college experimenting lesbos thought I had a magic dick.

  We’d fuck, like, three times a day. Every day.

  She started getting into ecstasy and she got me into it and we’d fuck on ecstasy.

  We’d fuck for hours and hours. Taking big chugs from water bottles and eating candy and dried fruit while fucking each other raw.

  But then the summer came and she came over one day with a bee in her bonnet and wanted to know where the relationship was going. I wasn’t going to lie to her. I said I didn’t know and that was it.

  Next semester I find out she was a total fucking whore. She fucked this guy that I thought she picked me over. She double-teamed her high-school sweetheart with her friend who the guy dated after her. She fucked her room-mate’s boyfriend. Everyone was fucking everyone else and I didn’t even get a three-way out of the deal. It kind of made me feel dirty. Not that I didn’t get some on the side, but she made me seem true-blue in comparison.

  The next year I hooked up with a girl one of my gay theater friends introduced me to.

  He asked me nicely not to fuck her, but fuck him, if it wasn’t me it would have been someone else.

  I was into this thing where I would draw all over girls with hi-liters and then put them under fluorescent black-lites and take pictures of it.

  I don’t know where I was going with that, but I thought it was pretty fucking cool and it gave me yet another excuse to talk to chicks.

  I had the she-friend over the house to model and I really wasn’t planning on getting fresh with her.

  She took off her clothes and she had on a lacy black bra and panty set.

  She had a nice body. Well, nice in its own way.

  She ran cross-country in high-school and the dining center food hadn’t taken its toll. She had washboard abs and leg muscles that writhed under her skin like the muscles of a snake under snakeskin.

  Not much in the tit department, but then again I’m not really a tit-man.

  I like a nice firm round set, but it’s not sine quo non.

  And no, she wasn’t a blonde. Her hair was a shocking natural day-glo orange.

  And yes, the carpet matched the drapes.

  I inked her up and we took a set of photos.

  A couple rolls of film of her in different weird positions.

  She took a shower and washed off the hi-liter and she came back in her bra and panties and I guess having someone do what I did to her was pretty sexy because we started making out. Well, I wanted it and she wanted it, so we did it. She told me to be gentle. That it had been awhile. Yeah right.

  I wasn’t unnecessarily rough, but I gave her a good long ride. She was crying and clawing my back and biting my shoulder. But she never told me to stop. She was a real trooper.

  After it was over, I guess she wasn’t completely traumatized. She was chipper and she complimented me on my “girth”. We just naturally fell into a relationship. I was working full-time and going to school full-time so I’d usually see her for a couple hours in the afternoon. I’d come over, we’d have sex and then we’d take a nap, and then I’d have to take off for work. We did that shtick for a whole school year.

  After a while she started getting funny about sex. She’d have to masturbate before we had sex to get in the mood, then she’d hop on and ride me like a jockey heading for glory until she came a couple times and squeezed me to orgasm with her insides. It was weird, but it’s not the kind of thing you stop to talk about. Then things got even weirder. She’d start crying after about an hour of sex and push my chest till I was far enough away that my dick popped out of her, then she’d turn over onto her stomach. I figured maybe she wanted it in her ass, so I tried that but that just wasn’t going to happen. I’d get it worked in till the head was almost all the way in then she’d moan and turn over on her side and curl into the fetal position and just sob. Not just once, I mean, this went on for at least a month. Again, we never really talked about it. She was crazy. I was fucking someone that was crazy. Even if we did talk about it, it probably wouldn’t’ve made any sense.

  Then came the summer. The death knell of collegiate affairs. She went home for the summer. It was only a half hour away, but she only came up to see me, like, once a week. I knew her libido was more intense than that so I figured something was going on. So one time when she came up I put the spurs to her, and while she was in the shower I checked her cell phone. The calls to me were mixed in with calls to her high-school sweetheart, Steve or Dave or John or whatever. So I called him.

  He answered, “Hello?”.

  I said his name, then, “I think she’s seeing us both at the same time so we might as well figure out if we’re cool with that.”

  “Who is this? Why the fuck should I believe you?”

  “Well, smart guy, I’m calling you from your girl’s cell phone and she’s naked in my shower right now, if you really want I can get her on the phone, but she’d probably be soaking wet and pissed.”

  He took a minute to think about things. It was obviously a bit of a shock. “What are you, some kind of asshole?”

  “Look, dude. I don’t have any problem with you. Our girl’s playing both of us, and from where I’m at she’s going to have to make a choice. Either she sticks with me or she sticks with you. Either way I know I’m not going to trust her anymore.”

  He started swearing. Remember when Malcolm X intimated that swearing is the recourse of the ignorant man who does not know how to express himself? Well…

  So I just hung up.

  The girl came out of the shower and she could tell by the look on my face that something was up.

  “I called your boyfriend.”

  She just narrowed her eyes.

  “I told him I thought that you were playing us both for fools. He didn’t believe me and he didn’t have much else constructive to say. I told him that I was going to tell you that you’d have to pick and stick with one or the other of us but I wasn’t going to time-share your vagina anymore.”

  She picked up the phone and checked to see
if I was bluffing, which, of course, I wasn’t.

  She shot me a look that would’ve sterilized a weaker man and she gave me the silent treatment with a few nasty looks for good measure while she got dressed and got her shit together, punching it into her oversized purse.

  When she strutted towards the door, I said, “Tell me how that works out.”, and she slammed the door behind her. I never heard from her again.

  Whatever.

  Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and I’ll stab you in the fucking face.

  The next year was back to masturbation and solitary refinement.

  I was too goddamned busy with work and school to talk up any girls.

  That’s probably not entirely true, but I had been burned again, so I wasn’t really very impressed with the fairness of the fairer sex.

  My room-mate, a quirky kid that always wore a fedora and thick-black-framed glasses, had a friend.

  I had run into his friend a few years back. I was stubbornly walking from my mom’s house to the bank because the selfish bitch wouldn’t give me a ride. So I thought, “Fuck her.”, and set off on foot. When I got to the bank this girl with shortish curlyish brown hair and cat’s eye glasses that I thought I recognized from the punk rock club scene was behind me in line. I didn’t say anything because I was in “fuck everybody” mode. I was walking away from the bank and she pulled up and asked me if I wanted a ride. I might have been pissed, but I wasn’t oblivious. I got in and we made small talk. I asked her if I could smoke and she asked if she could have one. I smoked cloves and she hadn’t really had many of them.

  Now it’s years later and she’s still smoking my brand. So every time she put one in her mouth and sucked, well, there’s something to be said about that. She said she was exhausted and she wanted to lay down and take a nap. My friend replied to the implied hint that he had some work to do. I said she could just crash in my room as long as she didn’t fuck with anything and locked the door if she left before I got back. I left the door unlocked and left. Fuck it. I didn’t care. If anything was fucked with I’d just take it out on my room-mate for having a fucked up klepto lady-friend.

  I came back and my room-mate was gone and my door is unlocked and the girl is in my bed, under the covers, and I can tell that she’s only wearing a bra on the top half, and I look down and her jeans are in a heap on the floor. Somewhat surprised, I recompose myself and say, “Hey.”. She replied, “Hey.”. I said, “You mind if I climb up there? I’m kind of tired myself.”. She thinks for a second and says, “Fine.”. I ask, “Want to watch something?”. She says, “Sure.”. I put in my VHS tape of David Lynch’s ‘Fire Walk with Me’. That movie’s like Spanish Fly. It’s subliminally sexual and hypnotically erotic. So first I’m laying on top of the covers on my back. Then I turn over and spoon her and I’m smelling the back of her neck. Then she turns over and kisses me. From there we go for glory, making out hardcore. She flips back the covers and I slide into second. I take off her bra and she wrestles with my fly. She’s jerking me off and making out with me and rubbing her legs together. I rub between her legs over her panties, then flip them aside and ease a couple fingers into her and she jerks me off faster and fucks my fingers, breathing faster, and I’m hard as a fucking steel rod. She pushes my pants down off of my hips and I tug her panties off and throw them on the floor. I’m kneeling at the foot of the bed and she’s lying on her back on the bed and she asks, “Do you have any condoms?”. I shrug and look off to my right, over my shoulder, then look back at her.