Jane.

by Riya Anne Polcastro

  16

  (Angela) What’s better than being the hottest chick in the room? Having the hottest chick in the room on your arm. Duh. OK, OK, so she didn’t officially agree to be my girlfriend yet . . . but she didn’t deny it either! And I said "girlfriend" loud and clear. Loud and motherfucking clear. She definitely heard me. And she didn't deny it. ‘Bout time! 'Bout motherfucking time! I been putting in work, for real. I buy her clothes, twenty sacks, and whatever expensive vodka she’s into at the moment. Every pay day. I put that sugar up her nose. I do all sorts of little favors for her too. Wash her dishes and sweep her floor. I even rush down to pay the bill whenever her phone gets shut off.

  I know, I know; it was supposed to be a joke. I thought she was this preppy goody-goody I could scare off. She looked like one of those bitches at the bar that’s always looking down her nose at you and won’t even give you the time of day. But Julia wanted to bring her in, make her part of this Circle she was building on the down low. I tried to tell her this chick was a bad idea, but she wouldn’t listen. And I know I was supposed to get rid of her on my own. I tried to do that too.

  It took a while, but she finally stopped getting mad at me for calling her babe. Maybe the same thing’s happening here with the girlfriend label. I got my fingers crossed anyway.

  She wouldn’t give me none either, nope, not ‘til her aunt got real crazy last week and she started spending the night at my place. A couple nights in, she finally let me at it. She tried to act like it wasn’t that great, but I know she’s just being sheisty. I’m wearing this girl down, son! I’m wearing her down!

  What’s that saying? When there’s a bunch of jealousy in the air? You can cut it with a knife? OK, maybe that’s tension . . . nevermind, same thing anyway. That’s what it feels like up in here with this jealousy hanging all thick in the air. Cindi can’t never accept it when her exes move on. She likes to string them along, keep ‘em single with all these bullshit false hopes. But she couldn’t do that to me, and now she’s hating it. Daniel’s jealous too! My trophy done trumped his win in our love triangle for sure! He’s wishing he was me right about now.

  Cindi’s still trying real hard not to look jealous. She’s trying to act like she’s Jane’s new best friend or something. I see her pull a bottle of cheap vodka from the freezer, so I turn back to Daniel with my meanest gangster scowl. "That don’t look like Grey Goose to me, yo. You’re making me look bad!"

  He’s got his hands in his pockets, and he hangs his bald head. "I didn’t know."

  I laugh and hop up and down. "I did good, huh?"

  "Yeah," he nods. "That’s an understatement."

  Part Four: Cocktales

  1

  (Daniel Long) I wonder aloud if a little cocaine would make up for the shitty alcohol.

  "Uh, hells yeah it would!" Angela jumps up and down like a cracked-out kangaroo. "OK, OK," I shush. "Geez, I’ve got neighbors downstairs."

  So Cindi and I head off to Keizer to pick up an eight ball. By the time we get back, I am out over a hundred bucks, and the girls have drained half a bottle of vodka and half a bottle of Jäger.

  "Katrina!" Cindi screeches and throws her arms around Angela’s sister by another father. "Holy shit, what are you doing here? I haven’t seen you in forever!" But then she pulls back, sniffing out the drama like a dog sniffs out a fishy vagina. "What’s the matter?"

  They go on and on bitching about some poor guy that didn’t live up to Katrina’s expectations. All this sappy girl talk—exaggerations, flailing limbs, big gestures and even bigger facial expressions—I feel like an extra in a really bad chick flick. Why can’t they just hurry up and take their clothes off? I don’t have any reason to stand here listening to this crap, so I go to my chair instead. I pull the coffee table closer so that it’s between my knees. Then I line up my paraphernalia: a razor blade and CD case, a couple of different half-length plastic drinking straws. Next, the pièce de résistance: a sandwich bag knotted around a taught, white ball. I coax the knot undone, kind of like coaxing Cindi’s panties off while she can still see straight, and pour about a quarter or so of the chunky white powder onto the case.

  This is my favorite part. It’s something like a ritual, a methodical foreplay where every chunk and grain is ground to a fine powder. This is better than the drug itself. Chop, chop. It’s hypnotizing. Scrape. Chop, chop, chop. I sweep the powder into mounds, dice it up again, and sweep it into another mound. There is just something tranquil about it. I could do this for hours. My breath keeps time with the lazy, repetitive motion. Crunch, crunch. No one gives as much love and attention to their booger sugar as I do.

  In fact, I am so engrossed I don’t notice when Jane sits on the floor next to me. "What’cha got there?"

  I glance up, startled out of my trance, look right down her shirt. It isn’t my fault. If only I could do a line right off of her boobs. But I try to sound relaxed and cool, mumbling, "Oh, just a little coke." No big deal. That’s how cool I am.

  I cut the mound into lines, and she asks, "Got enough to share?" She bats her eyelashes in that same fake naïveté Cindi tries to use. Still, I’d love to cover her in this cocaine, as meager a serving as it is next to her beauty, and lick it clean off.

  "You do this kind of stuff?" I pretend to be surprised.

  "I have, once or twice."

  If she were my girl, she would be up to her nipples in cocaine every day. I’ve got to wonder what it would take to steal her away. What could Angela possibly have that I don’t? It’s true, I’m going to die a lonely old man. The thought of it grabs my soul and starts to pull it down. Depression is a familiar friend. But not now. Not tonight! I’ve got cocaine and hot girls in my apartment. Come back later, I tell it, after the girls have left. Don’t ruin my chances. OK, OK, maybe my chances aren’t that fantastic to begin with. Bald, fat, middle-aged. Just a boring old white guy with an eight ball and a free bar in his kitchen.

  I pin my hopes on the powder lines and nudge the CD case towards Jane. "Really?" she beams.

  I nod, "Of course."

  "Wait, just a second." She sniffs at the air a little and then jumps up and runs to the bathroom. "Gotta clear some blockage," she laughs. That probably should have killed it. Except Cindi has already taught me that the hotter a girl is the raunchier she probably is. And Jane is really raunchy.

  The other three follow Jane’s laughter into the living room. Angela and Katrina stop short, and their jaws drop. I hate that I have to tell them to stop bouncing up and down when they realize that there is a line for each of them. Especially since Katrina is wearing one of those really low-cut V-neck shirts. Jane comes back and sits down cross-legged on the floor while the sisters play patty-cake or something. She says she’s sorry for taking so long. "I had one stuck way up there!"

  The four of them laugh like maniacs, and I’m feeling a little out of place. Like the world inverted or something and I’m a nice young lady among a bunch of crude, disgusting boys.

  "Whatta ya’ll using to snort it?" Katrina asks. She has this twang when she talks, country gangster like her sister. But more country.

  "I’ve got a lovely assortment of straws." Each of them wrinkles her nose and frowns in progression at the lineup of neon tubes before them. "Not good enough for you ladies?"

  "Kinda cheap," Katrina points out. "I usually use a bill."

  I feel a little timid pulling my wallet out, but I do it anyway, peering inside and then looking around the room at them. "Is there a specific denomination . . ."

  "Yes!" Katrina and Angela shout in unison. Then Katrina enlightens me, "You should always use a full bill. A hundred dollars."

  "Maybe I only have ones . . ."

  Jane rolls her eyes. She can see right into my wallet. Not by accident either. I want her to know I could take care of her better than Angela can. "A one is too cheap," she points out. I almost laugh at how serious she is but manage to hold back. "A hundred is too much. Someone’s liable to jack it." She squints over at Ange
la who squints back with a frown. "A twenty should do. It’s not too cheap, and if it runs off, you ain’t out too much." The more she drinks, the more Jane takes on the gangster mannerisms of her cohorts. Disappointing, true, but I have to believe this is purely situational; get rid of the other influences in the room and I am sure she will go back to a normal white girl.

  I take a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and roll it into an expert cylinder. "Here you go."

  Jane takes it from me and holds it just inside of her right nostril. She inhales the length of the line and holds her head back, eyes closed. She looks like an angel: peaceful and regal. Her lips part, and she smiles wide before she lifts her lids.

  Angela goes next, then Katrina. "I don’t know if I want to," Cindi protests when it’s her turn. I rub her back gently, and she explains, "It’s just that I’ve never done anything like that before."

  "There’s nothing to worry about," Jane says. "It’s really not that big of a deal. The Man blows it way out of proportion!" It’s cute how she says it, like a little cocaine revolutionary dressed in pink! I want to draw a peace sign on her face and teach her to make love not war.

  I’m so engrossed in my fantasies that I don’t catch Cindi’s distress right away. "Oh shit," she cries. "Oh shit! I think it is stuck!" She bounces up and down in a panic until Jane grabs her hand and rushes her off to the bathroom.

  Impossible! All the care I give my cocaine, there’s no way I missed a rock.

  I hear Jane say, "Here I’ll teach you a trick." Then the faucet comes on, and they both come back with wet faces.

  "What the hell?" Katrina laughs.

  "Helps it get to where it needs to go faster," Jane explains as she sits back down. She smiles and smacks her lips. "I love drainage."

  It almost isn’t worth that salty, briny nastiness at the back of the throat. I’d much rather just chop it up. Cindi pokes me in the gut as if I were the Pillsbury Doughboy and points at the last line on the CD case. My turn. The shortest line is left, but that’s no accident on my part. Cindi hands me the rolled up twenty and for a second, I think about all of the noses that it’s already been inside of. I should get myself a fresh bill, but that would be just as presumptuous as a stranger expecting Grey Goose or the gangster sisters’ idea to snort from a hundred-dollar bill so one of them could walk off with it at the end of the night.

  For a second, I anticipate something new. Maybe this time, maybe whatever is supposed to happen when this drug hits my bloodstream, maybe it will finally happen. But it doesn’t. I only feel the same nothingness as always. Don’t get me wrong, I still really like cocaine: the idea of it, the look and texture, the illicitness. I like the fact that a little too much and this horrid stench of a life would finally be over. It wouldn’t be hard. Wouldn’t take any effort. Not like putting a bullet in my brain or driving off of a cliff. Those acts take force. An overdose, well, that’s a risk I’ll wager each and every time I set a line up.

  2

  Something like saline drips down the back of my throat until it is numb. Even then it itches, so I give Angela a little nudge with my shoulder. "Did you bring anything with you?"

  Daniel tells us that if we want to smoke in the house, we have to take our shirts off. "And if you want to smoke marijuana in the house, then you have to take your shirts off and do it in the bathroom with the fan on."

  Harsh. "That’s OK," I smile. "We can smoke it on the balcony." I jump up and grab Angela’s hand to lead her outside.

  It works like a charm. "No," he jumps up, "you can’t smoke that out there!"

  I give him a puzzled look. "Why not? We’re in Oregon; it’s cool. Everybody smokes weed; don’t worry about it."

  "No, you don’t understand. You might live in Oregon but I live in Nazi Germany." So collected, so reserved all night, Daniel’s sudden animation is intoxicating. The energy in the room is almost visible, and it appears to be growing exponentially. "The managers here are hardcore, OK? Just go smoke in the bathroom. You don’t have to take your shirts off. Whatever, OK?" The vision behind his eyes makes me smirk: cop cars and SWAT teams surround the apartment complex; the headlines read "FBI Called to Coke Den by Wayward Marijuana Smoke."

  As soon as the green earthiness hits my lips, my senses explode. First there is the overwhelming calm of marijuana as it settles into my lungs. Then, the THC kick-starts the coke into full motion. And here comes the best part: I’m overcome with serenity, with a sense that all can be right with the world, that any peace that can be imagined can be accomplished. The absoluteness of my own brilliance and the brilliance of those around me comes into immediate focus, as does the profound consequence of our ideas on matters du jour. My head and my heart have run away together, like the cow that jumped over the moon. The world can be saved, and we can play an integral role.

  In a moment anyway, for now the drainage has come on full force, and my attention refocuses on the vibrations of my gag reflex. "I want a cigarette," I exclaim. No sooner had I led them all in here to smoke weed, then I lead them back out through the living room to smoke cancer sticks out back.

  The nicotine massages my uvula. It slams the brakes on a tiny hint of coke-induced nausea so that the tranquility of the night can envelop my body. I am full of both energy and calm at the same time. I feel perfect. I am perfect. And Katrina is way too good for this boy who treats her like dog shit. Telling her so right now is an urgent matter, so I cross the length of the balcony, all of six feet, and throw my arms around her. "You know, you can do sooo much better! You shouldn’t put up with his shit for a minute longer!"

  Her smile stretches from ear to ear, and her head bobs up and down in an exaggerated fashion. "I know!" She lets out an animalistic growl then smacks herself on the forehead and says, "I finally get it! I finally fucking get it! I do deserve so much better!" She jumps up and down, stomping the cement.

  Daniel looks nervous. I wonder if there are many times when he is not nervous.

  We all decide that we are very hot and agree that none of us should take anyone else’s shit ever again. Even Danny agrees, though we all know that he is full of shit even as we speak, and Cindi, or whatever replacement of her his future may hold, will walk all over him until his dying day.

  3

  (Daniel) A few more lines and I find myself agreeing that communism is the way to go if we the people are to have any chance at survival. Communism is a joke, but I would say anything to get into these girls’ pants. Their conversations are so random and impossible to follow that they have me agreeing to a whole slew of random oaths and declarations I personally do not give a fuck about. Boy troubles and war and how gangster they think they are, blah, blah, blah. But hey, there’s alcohol, cocaine, and hot girls; what more could a guy want? Maybe some earplugs. It really is too bad they talk so much.

  By the end of the night, my spank bank is full of brand new fantasies starring each of the girls. In one, Angela and Jane can’t agree on who will run the military when their little group of communist potheads takes over the government. "I’m in charge!" Angela insists.

  "Hell no you ain’t!"

  "What? Why not?" She sounds indignant, maybe even a little hurt. She furrows her bushy brows and squints hard.

  Jane laughs. "Cause you’re a fucking showoff! You’d be all invading whatever the fuck country you feel like and stealing their shit!"

  "Hells yes! You know this!"

  Jane rolls her eyes and shakes her head. "The Earth ain’t a fucking playground, kid! You ain’t gonna bully everybody around. We can’t change the status quo if you go around doing shit like that!"

  So they argue about their little imaginary revolution, and then all of a sudden, Angela tackles Jane and pins her on the middle of the floor. She spreads Jane’s knees and pretends to bite her clit through her blue jeans. Jane laughs. She is quick and wily and has Angela on the ground before I even see her break free. Then, somehow, from underneath her, Angela pulls Jane’s shirt over her head. Boobies! My empty dining room
is turning into a sexy wrestling ring! My boner presses against my zipper. It would be a noticeable bulge if all the girls weren’t too preoccupied with each other to pay me any attention. They go back and forth pinning each other a couple of times until Angela ends up with her stomach to the floor. She tries to wiggle free while Jane rides her like a bucking bronco, one hand on her neck and the other in the air. Angela throws her in a matter of seconds, but it’s still a good show while it lasts. They are a whirlwind of flesh and hair. Jane’s bra is the next to go, thank you god! Then Cindi jumps in the middle and knocks our ex-lover out of the way. She grabs both of Jane’s breasts, leans in and licks one then the other. She latches onto the left and takes as much of it into her mouth as can while she’s rubbing and squeezing the right one.

  My dick is so hard now it bursts through my zipper. It’s a lot bigger in my fantasies. Not wanting to disturb the girls, I stroke it gently myself. They don’t notice.

  Cindi sucks on Jane’s tit until she leaves a huge purple mark. Next she kisses a trail down Jane’s stomach until she gets to her jeans. She grabs the button with her teeth and rips it open; she uses her teeth for the unzipping too. Her hands are still too busy squeezing and rubbing up above. She gives each nipple one last tug and lets go to yank Jane’s pants off. There are no panties in her way, so she buries her face between Jane’s legs. She slurps and sucks, using two fingers to feel her from the inside.

  Katrina takes her own pants off and kneels at Jane’s head. She leans over her and takes over where Cindi left off with her breasts. Meanwhile, Jane reaches her right hand over her head and grazes her fingernails up Katrina’s thigh until she reaches her pussy. She teases Katrina’s lips and tugs on her clitoris. Then she puts two fingers inside and wiggles them around, coaxing, prodding, and pulling until she convinces Katrina to sit on her face. With her tongue inside, Jane reaches back and puts a finger in her friend’s butt. Katrina’s moaning and squealing, and Cindi steps up her licking and sucking and poking to compete. Angela’s feeling left out, but the only non-incest spot left is behind her ex. She’s a trooper though, so she bends down behind Cindi and undoes her pants. And even though their position makes oral almost impossible, Angela goes for it. Her face is smooshed to the floor, but she goes at Cindi’s coochie like a dog after raw meat anyway. The only thing that could possibly make this fantasy better is if one of them would notice me here in the corner, saunter over, and climb onto my penis. Jealous, the other girls would follow, and I would fuck each of them. Of course, even my fantasies have limits. Instead of spoiling this one, I relegate myself to the background and stroke myself like a madman to the train of cunnilingus.