“She won’t let you,” I heard Marco whisper. It took me a second to figure out what he said and what it meant. The music had stopped playing but I could hear Janet Jackson being played from somewhere else. Marco’s head went under the blanket and I shifted a little. I could still feel Alexis, warm on one side, as I looked at the ceiling. I felt Marco put me in his mouth, but it hurt and I pushed him off. I turned back toward Alexis and he started to work me with his hand. I stared at Alexis’s neck and the spill of her hair on the couch as he touched me more. I moved my hand back and found Marco’s penis. I closed my eyes and flipped over. I heard Alexis breathing, slurry and asleep, on one side of me, and I heard Marco, breathing through his nose quickly, on the other side. We both came on the other’s hand. We didn’t say anything to each other. I heard the shower turn off in the bathroom. I felt frozen and unsure of what to do next. Marco used the blanket to wipe himself off and nodded for me to do the same. I heard Daphne and David exit the bathroom and slip into Marco’s bedroom. David looked pale and weak from vomiting. I pretended to fall asleep, hoping Alexis would wake up or flip over to face me. I thought maybe she wasn’t really asleep. I thought about the photos I took of her and then I realized that someone else would see them—the person developing the film. I felt a nervous sickness then.
I slipped off the couch and put my clothes back on. I noticed that it was past 2 a.m. by that time. I stepped outside and breathed in deeply. I thought about getting the film out of the camera and taking it. I tried to go back inside, but I was locked out. I pressed my ear to the door but couldn’t hear anything. In a way, it sounded like nothing had happened.
Elvia
During the time I was seeing Daphne and hanging out with the other New Wave kids from Hermiston, I met Elvia, a beautiful and quiet Hispanic girl who dressed more conservatively than the rest. I started to talk to her more and more when she made it up to the Tri-Cities on the weekends. Pretty soon, we decided we would be boyfriend and girlfriend. But first, I had to tell Daphne and stop having sex with her. This was tricky because they worked at the same place, a burger joint called Arctic Circle. After news broke about Elvia and I, Daphne was stone cold to us both. I would come pick up Elvia when she got off her shift sometimes and Daphne stared hatefully at us. Soon enough, Daphne’s anger boiled over and she spray-painted a message for me on a water tower near the highway exit. It said, KEVIN SAMSEL IS A DICK.
Elvia and I went out for about a year, and even though I had a couple of prior girlfriends, I felt like this was the first girlfriend I could really get into. She was so pretty, with perfect olive-brown skin and thin-but-plump lips that my mouth will never forget. Her face often displayed a sexy pout or a smile so giddy and mischievous that it ignited her whole being. Our sex felt alive and loving and totally open. Plus, she had a mysterious personality that intrigued me. She lived with white foster parents who were very religious and wouldn’t even let her listen to Top 40 music in the house. Once, they threw out all the cassettes that she had hidden in her closet. Even her David Hart cassette. She had cried about that and I tried to ease her pain by making her mix tapes, which were eventually found and thrown out as well.
Her own parents were somewhere not far away, but it was always kind of vague as to why she didn’t live with them. Maybe they were too poor.
Sometimes, during the week, because we couldn’t see each other, we would write letters. In these letters, she was more goofy than she was in person. She’d crack jokes, make fun of her foster parents, and quote fake Bible passages. If she hadn’t lived with such conservative white people, she may have been a Goth or a punk.
One week she sent me a serious letter and told me that she was pregnant. I tried to make a plan to see her that weekend (we’d sometimes sneak long-distance phone calls to each other), but she told me she was grounded. She asked me to send her $300 so she could get an abortion. I emptied out my bank account and scrounged up some more tip money and sent cash. A week later she called me and said she hadn’t gotten the money yet. I really need it, she said. She was crying. I told her I’d send it again, but this time it would be a money order. But first I went down to the post office and asked them if the letter had not been sent for some reason. I kicked myself for sending cash and my suspicious mind kept thinking that a crooked mailman probably stole the valuable letter. I could picture him sitting in his mail truck, holding it up to the light and glimpsing the hundred-dollar bills through the envelope.
The people at the post office couldn’t solve the mystery for me.
Two days later, with a rock of heavy embarrassment in my gut, I had to call Elvia and tell her that I could send her only $150. She seemed disappointed and cold and then told me that she was probably going to move after her upcoming high school graduation. What do you mean? I asked her. I’ll tell you later, she said.
Daphne and the other Hermiston Wavers were still coming up to the Tri-Cities on weekends, but Elvia wasn’t catching rides with them anymore. I heard from one of them that Elvia had moved away. I had this person snoop around and a couple of months later, I had a new phone number for Elvia. One in Yakima. Someone thought that she had moved there with a cousin. An older Mexican guy.
I called the number one night when Mom and Dad were gone. I was able to sneak long distance calls on our phone sometimes, even though Dad would get mad about it. Elvia answered. I said hello and her voice answered back, sounding shocked and sad, as if she had been caught stealing something. At first, she seemed regretful that she hadn’t spoken to me. I asked her why and she became vague and nervous. I told her that I loved her and that I wanted to come see her. Finally, she told me that she had moved to Yakima to live with a new boyfriend. An older guy I knew nothing about. I asked her all the selfish questions: Why did she do this to me? Were they having sex? Was the sex better? Did she ever love me? We both started to cry, but I was trying to stay calm.
Mom and Dad drove up the gravel driveway at that moment. I was using the phone in the kitchen, where they were about to enter, arms full of Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets. “Get off the phone. It’s time to eat,” said Dad. They sat down just ten feet away at the dining room table. I tried to stretch the phone cord into the hallway, but Dad got angry and told me not to pull it so hard. It was already crackly. “It’s time to eat!” Dad shouted. It was as if he and Mom had gotten into a fight on the way home. He was in a foul mood.
“Are you going to go to school somewhere there?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to have babies,” she said.
I thought she was saying this to hurt me, to make me give up. “You’re going to have babies with him?” I said.
Then Dad walked over and pushed his finger on the hang-up button. “Did you hear me?” he said.
“I’m not hungry right now,” I said.
I went to my room and paced around, hoping the tension in the house would decrease. I went out to the kitchen again and told them I wasn’t feeling well, hoping that would calm things down. Dad bit into a piece of chicken and tore off a chunk of meat. He was the kind of eater who devoured everything to the bone.
As they ate their dinner, I snuck down the hall and into their bedroom, where the other phone was. I picked it up and called Elvia again. She answered after several rings and started crying. I felt like I was now in the position of comforter and I started telling her that things would be okay and that I loved her. I wanted to ask her what she meant when she said the baby thing, but she was too upset to go back to that.
After a few minutes, a man’s voice came on. Her new boyfriend. “Just leave her alone,” he said. “She doesn’t want to talk to you any more.”
“Yes, she does,” I said. I felt stupid, like I was challenging him to a fight from seventy miles away. “Who are you?” I asked.
“Look, man, it’s over. You’re upsetting her.” He said this like he was trying to be cool. “C’mon, dude.”
In my head, I tried to imagine her, in this shitty little farm town, crying in the corner of some tiny one-bedroom house. I knew I’d probably never see her again.
I told myself that it wasn’t my fault.
Yvette
When I was nineteen, I briefly went out with a black girl from Pasco named Yvette. The first time I saw her, she was wearing a very sexy turquoise dress at a Pasco High School dance. When I introduced her to my brother Matt, I could tell he liked her too and I felt guilty about that.
I went to eat dinner at Yvette’s house and the food was totally different from what my family ever had. It was soul food. Her mom even called it that.
She was a virgin and we often talked about having sex and where we should do it.
My cousin Tana gave me a key to her apartment and I often stayed at her place when she was gone. Her fish needed to be fed.
Yvette and I eventually tried to have sex in Tana’s bed. It almost seemed too planned out and it was hard to get excited. Yvette said she wanted to do it, but we couldn’t make it work for some reason. I was nervous and started to have performance anxiety. Her vagina was slick but felt like a wall. Her hymen would not budge.
I didn’t see her for about a month after that. I knew it wasn’t working out without her having to tell me. But I saw her one last time at a party in East Pasco. It was at some DJ’s house—the kind with weeds and dirt in the front yard instead of grass. Some raw homemade-sounding hip-hop was blaring out of the living room stereo when I came in. Everyone looked at me suspiciously since I was the only white person there. Yvette led me to a dark bedroom and we went in. I couldn’t see a thing but I could hear her breathing hard. She reached into my pants and started jerking me off. My pants fell and I could sense her moving down my body as I stood there, surprised and unsure of what to do. I touched her head softly and felt her short blunt hair until I came.
Basement
Right before I moved out of my parents’ house to live with friends in Richland, I relegated my suitcase of porn to the basement, a narrow dirt-walled space that had been there since before the fire. I tried to bury it under some saggy boxes and moldy clothes, but my dad found it later. I claimed not to know anything about it. I said it probably belonged to Mark.
The Stilts
My first apartment was at the Stilts, the cheapest housing in the Tri-Cities, in uptown Richland. I lived there for two short months. The first month I was living with three other guys who had decided to move out right as I was moving in. I was the only one there for the second month. The one thing I remember about the Stilts was that it used to be an army barracks or something. There were six rooms in each apartment, with a small kitchen and bathroom. A lot of kids just out of high school lived there and there were always parties.
It was a period of time for me where I tried to exact revenge on the ghost of Pam. I still resented the fact that she was my first real girlfriend. Initially blinded by my pubescent desperation, I eventually realized she was simply a dullard. I regretted all the time I had invested in her, only to have her cheat on me. She instilled in me a precedent that I would constantly rehash—seducing people and then cheating on them. I was guilty of using bodies as I recorded sound bites in my brain—little quotes about how much of a nice guy I was, how cute I was—that I played back in my head to somehow validate my actions and make myself feel good. I was taking advantage of anyone I thought was as weak as me.
Holly
Holly was sixteen when I started going out with her. I was nineteen and trudging through my one and only year of community college in Pasco. I met Holly at the Palace and I was attracted by her combination of toughness and innocence. On the surface, you’d see a leather jacket, torn jeans, wrestling shoes, and jet-black hair spiked into a Mohawk. But she also had the sweetest dimpled smile and she would write mushy love letters to me and invite me to do stuff with her and her mom. She was also a big girl.
I feel bad saying this but I’d feel worse if I lied—I initially went out with her because she was very large-breasted and I wanted to feel her up. A month or so into the relationship, we were ready to have sex. Then I learned that she was a virgin. I knew from my own unfortunate experience with Pam that people usually fall in love with the first boyfriend or girlfriend they have sex with. But I was such a horndog that I decided not to care. The first time happened in her bedroom when her mom was gone. I wasn’t too far removed from my virginity either, so it didn’t last long. After that, we would have to sneak around different places to have sex and sometimes we’d do it in my Volkswagen Rabbit somehow, once in the parking lot of the community college. When I decided to break up with her a month later, I was suddenly the scum of the scene. All of Holly’s friends at the Palace sneered at me, called me an asshole, or just put their noses in the air when I walked by. Holly ignored me as well, but she did so with a face full of disappointment and regret.
The next year, Holly went to her prom with Chuck, a guy I was sharing a small trailer with. It felt like a taunt to see their picture—her standing in front of Chuck, his arms around her chubby waist—displayed on the shelf next to our small TV. This was my punishment for screwing over a virgin.
Taternuts
This is how I learned about cunnilingus from a policeman’s wife and became a legendary fryer at the same time.
First off, I was a graveyard waiter at a place called the Top Hat. It was an all-night diner in Pasco, just down the street from where the prostitutes walked around. They’d sometimes come in with their johns and I had to serve them coffee and pie.
On my way home from work, I stopped at a doughnut shop called Taternuts. The reason being, of course, because it was there. And because it was open, which many places weren’t at five thirty in the morning.
A man wearing an Ocean Pacific shirt and graced with a mustache as thick as Gene Shalit’s was strong-arming a blob of dough on a floured surface near the entrance. I checked out his action over the plastic sneeze guard.
“Whatcha up to?” he asked me. I was wearing a tie and probably looked like I had been out all night drinking.
“Uh, I just got off work. I wait tables. The Top Hat. Graveyard.” I moistly chewed out the words, amid cake doughnut debris. “These cake ones are awesome,” I said.
“They’re called spuddies,” he enlightened me.
“What the—”
“We don’t make doughnuts here. These are made with potato flour mix. The cake ones are spuddies and the raised ones are taternuts.” He folded up the flattened dough three times and then plopped it atop a machine that fed the dough into a cutter-type roller. “This is taternut dough. It has yeast, so it rises in here.” He opened a metal door and showed me some hot racks near his feet. “The spuddie dough doesn’t have yeast, so it stays cake.” He let me think about this. “Want a job?” he asked me.
A few days later, I went from graveyard-shift waiter to early-morning taternut fryer. It was closer to home, there were free taternuts, and the pay was better. The man I worked with was called Big K. He was about thirty and built like a tight end, about six-three, 240 pounds. Big K’s sister was a large woman named Debra and she was real bossy sometimes and real funny at other times. Whenever we got busy, which we did a lot it seemed for just a doughnut—I mean taternut—shop, Debra would say things like: “Shake yourself” and “C’mon Kev, you want me to take over back there? Gotta get crankin’!”
It was easy to get pissed at her but she knew how to make you work harder. She would have made a great basketball coach. Maybe it was the fact that she was getting married to a cop who came in all the time. You know, it’s funny; I never really thought about it until now: a cop marrying a woman who runs a doughnut shop. I mean taternut shop.
Most of the people who came into the taternut shop were people who worked a couple of miles down the road at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Also there were lots of teachers, sundry retired folks, suits, and assorted early risers. It seemed like a requirement to like sports if y
ou were a regular. And if you were a regular that also meant having the same thing every day. If Debra saw you coming from across the parking lot (even at a snail’s pace) she’d shout out, “Sedale, chocolate taternut and a decaf for Joe. Quick.” If a customer came in and his usual diet wasn’t set up at his everyday spot there must’ve been something wrong somewhere. We were a well-oiled machine.
Sports were the reason I became known as Sedale. Big K was a pretty goofy jock kind of guy who was always making funny noises and doing silly pranks. I was mostly into music at the time, but I still had a passing interest in sports clinging to me from my days as a statistics-hoarding football freak in junior high. Big K and I went out after work a few times and played some playground basketball. His stiff but powerful inside play reminded me of Robert “the Chief” Parrish of the Celtics, while my quick, slashing drives and hustle earned me the alias Sedale Threatt, who was a backup point guard for the Philadelphia 76ers.
So we’d be working in the midst of some mad rush and our pace is faster than the taternuts can fry in the fryer and just to keep the mood fun for all, K would shout out my nickname in an exaggerated PA announcer voice: “Sedaaaale Threeeeeeatt!” and then I would go “The Chieeeeeeeef!” All the customers seemed used to these outbursts and even our occasional and random animal noises.
A Common Pornography: A Memoir Page 9