I ordered two rum and o.j.‘s and when the drinks came in thin-stemmed goblets I accidentally broke the glass with the pressure of my fingers, splashing the drink all over me. Luckily I didn’t cut myself. They gave me a free refill.
We sat thigh to thigh in the cab headed for the West Side. I felt like a hunter bringing home game, but I also felt angry. I felt frightened. I wanted to bang her brains out.
She made herself comfortable on the couch. I put on the Coltrane album and made drinks in the kitchen.
After ten minutes or so of totally meaningless conversation I brought my arm in a sunrise-to-sunset arch behind her back, caressing the side of her neck. She turned her head to me, eyes down, bypassed my mouth and kissed me under my ear. I leaned back, my hands in her hair. She pressed her palms against my stomach. I tensed my gut muscles. She slid her hand back up to my throat. I slightly disentangled myself enough to move, and holding her by the arms I raised her to a standing position. She seemed unsteady, as if unsure about what I was doing. We walked temple to temple almost in slow motion to my bedroom. Her arm had somehow wound up across my shoulder and it felt unnatural there.
Sliding to the bed we started tongueing and grinding which didn’t feel like much because we had all our clothes on. After a few minutes we parted in slow motion and undressed ourselves, sitting back to back cater-cornered on the bed. I purposely didn’t look at her undressing, as if that was a sign of my maturity. She didn’t look at me. When we were nude we lay back on the bed, on our sides. She slid her thigh between my legs. The first full flesh contact was a rush and I crushed her ribs with a grinding hug. She was flat-chested but long-legged. I slid my hand down her spine, through her buttocks and into her cunt. It was only damp. My fingers touched the hard rubber rim of a diaphragm. La Donna used a diaphragm.
“Do you need to put in jelly?” I asked casually mainly to show her I was hip and experienced with diaphragms.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Nah, I was thinking maybe we should put some in now rather than at the last minute, you know?” I tried to make that suggestion sound soft and romantic.
“I guess.” She went into the living room and returned with a nylon floral cosmetic bag dangling from a loop around her thumb.
She sat on the bed and took out a tube of cream and a clear plastic syringe.
“You want me to do that for you?” I softly offered. I didn’t know why we were being so polite. It was like our well-mannered gentleness was a margarine substitute for intimacy.
“No. It’s okay.” She raised the syringe slightly above eye level, screwed the mouth of the tube into the mouth of the syringe and squeezed, forcing the plunger all the way out and filling the glass with cream. She reminded me of Madame Curie.
“Here at the Will Rogers Institute, our scientists work tirelessly,” I announced into my fist. She gave a short, preoccupied chuckle, then leaned back until her spine was only inches off the bed, and shot up the cream. She sat up and put all the stuff back into Her cosmetic bag and dropped the bag on the floor. I reached for her, my eyes averted, and we slowly re-clinched. I slid down her body dryly kissing everything in my path, nipples, beauty marks, ribs, navel and finally pubic hair. She twisted her legs so I couldn’t go any farther.
“I just put in the cream.” She winced.
“I don’t mind.” I gently parted her thighs and got to work. She lay back, eyes closed, a look of discomfort on her face, flinching now and then, finally reaching down for me and making motions to pull me up. I felt unappreciated. I crawled back up her body wiping my mouth on her belly. She rolled me off and went for my prick. She sucked too hard; every once in a while her teeth pinched me. The idea of what she was doing was more exciting than the actual physical sensation and I knew I wouldn’t come if she blew me for an hour. I slightly raised my knees; she took the cue and crawled up my body. We kissed, rolled over. I slipped myself inside her, then immediately pulled out. No. This had all the markings of a bum fuck and no. Not tonight. Not after this week. I couldn’t take it. She frowned.
“Whoa, listen.” I sat up, smiling. “We gotta relax, you think?” I held out my hand as if to touch her, but left it hovering over her thigh. She propped herself on her elbows, her stomach tensing.
“You think?” I smiled harder, but not greasy.
She nodded in tentative agreement. “What do you have in mind?”
“Listen, let’s start all over again.”
“What do you mean?” .
“Let’s get dressed and start over again.” I shrugged. “Just trust me, okay?” I wasn’t sure exactly what I had in mind, but I trusted me. I got dressed. She didn’t move. “No, it’ll be good, it’ll be good.” I handed her her dress. She slipped it over her head, moved to the edge of the bed and put on her shoes.
“Come here.” I sat on the floor cross-legged at the foot of the bed and patted a spot in front of me. Then I got up, went into the living room, threw on the Coltrane again and came back in with a lit joint.
“Just sip it. I don’t want no acid trip here. We’re just gonna… ” I nodded and dipped my head. “Nice, like that.” I passed her the jay and closed my eyes.
After a few tokes, I reached across to her and held her hand. Okay, Mr. Kenny. Get horny. Get sexy. Think thighs, think lady. Think clothes. Black and slinky and dropping like petals. Think pink. I kneaded her palm with my thumb. I slid my fingers under her dress, letting them rest on the softest part of her thigh. She rubbed my arm with both hands as if to draw me to her crotch. I helped her to her feet, turned her around to face the bed and hugged her from behind, kissing her neck, drawing my fingers down her throat, squeezing her with my arms. Reaching behind her, she tugged my pants down my hips. I unzipped the back of her dress and pushed it down to her stomach by running my hands in a V from her shoulders to her belly. She kept working on my dick, her fingers moving from my balls to the head. I plunged my hands into her bush, pushing her dress past her hips until it dropped to her ankles.
She was as stoned as I was. Her two front teeth glistened between her slightly parted lips. She stood on tiptoe and I slipped inside, my arms draped across her hips like a G-string. My lips formed the words “I love you,” then they shaped “Wa wa” as if to erase “I love you.”
And then we went at it. She held on to my neck, her pelvis pushing against my arms as I kept grinding inside her, running my fingers through her bush, rubbing her clit, slamming her buttocks with my hips until we both fell belly down on the bed. I flashed on the words “class clown.” We disentangled to sprawl across the center of the bed. She lay on her back, I slipped myself inside, this time from the front. She sucked in air, ran the soles of her feet up and down the backs of my thighs, and I knew I couldn’t last. I was going to pop my wad. She clawed my ass and moaned in my ear and I was a goner. I gave it all I had.
“Oh go!” she shouted, and I exploded, then kept going, kept going more with my hips than with my traumatized prick until she pressed her cunt bone right into me, clamped my ass as hard as she could, slowed me down to short, intense movements, rocking crotches until she started trembling like the vibrations of a train approaching a station. She let out with a roaring gasp. The mattress was shaking like magic fingers. When I ,’ finally rolled off, we were both pockmarked with puddles of sweat in the valleys of our bodies and there was a huge wet spot the exact shape of the continent of Africa on the dark brown sheets.
I reached over to hold her face in my hands and kissed her on the mouth. I felt terrified. Not me. I felt not me. Despite the sweat, I grabbed her, hugged her, my fingers yammering through her hair. I was scaring her. She laughed and tried to get playful, tickling my ribs. I didn’t respond. Didn’t even crack a smile. Just pressed her to me, my hands on her shoulder blades, my cheek on her jaw, our body heat rising like steam. Not me.
“Fin gonna pee in bed.” Pushing me away, she jumped up for the bathroom.
I jerked, remembering the sensation of the fragile glass exploding in my hand
. I flashed on sitting in the high school auditorium with a bunch of guys watching some dumb shit movie, The Yearling, Old Yeller. It was assembly day. We wore white shirts. I cracked jokes nonstop for the first twenty minutes of the movie. A fat kid in the row in front of me turned around and said, “Do we gotta listen to you all movie?” Snickers. I was so mortified I said, “Yes,” and, gray-faced, continued rifling for another fifteen minutes until I could slide into silence gracefully. The snickers were from my friends. I felt betrayed. Lied to. I hated everybody; I felt so alone I wanted to run away, die, make them worry.
I remembered being made to stay after class one day in fifth grade for acting like an asshole in an attempt to entertain my classmates. Everybody filed out at three o’clock, me sitting alone, arms folded across my desk watching them leave, still winking and rolling my eyes at those who were looking back at me on their way out. But the reality was that I felt horrible, an animal in a cage. I expected the teacher to yell at me; instead, she sat next to me in a student’s small chair, put her hand on my cheek and said, “Kenny, what are you afraid of?” All I could focus on in that moment was how I never saw a big person sit on one of those small chairs and how my face chilled when she touched me and how I was going to kick fucking Peter Moriarity’s ass for woofing on my mother at lunch.
Kristin returned from the bathroom, lay down next to me and started playing with my stomach hair. My impulse was to slap her hand away. It was the most irritating sensation I had ever felt. I wanted her to keep her fucking hands to herself. I needed to sleep. I wanted to grab her face and slowly explain through clenched teeth how fucking badly I needed to sleep. I wanted her out. She would never let me sleep. I had to sleep. She was going to get heavy with me, demand things of me. Off my back. I had to sleep. I would never sleep. Get off my back. I lay in bed rigid. A six-foot stick of dynamite.
She moved away from me, confused. Leave, leave, leave.
“I wonder what time it is?” she murmured.
I raised my head to see over her to the digital. “One-thirty.”
She exhaled through her nose.
“I think I better get going.”
“Sure.”
“If I stay out, my sister’ll freak.”
“Okay.”
“You’re not mad?”
When we left the house, I felt hollow looking at our half-drained drinks on the floor by the couch.
We had to come back upstairs because she’d forgotten her cosmetic bag.
She lived six blocks down from me on West End Avenue.
“Listen, I’ll call you during the week, okay?”
“Sure.” She kissed me.
It was 2:05 in the morning, but I didn’t feel tired. My crotch was damp and gummed up with come and diaphragm cream. I was still horny. On impulse I flagged down a cab on West End and went back to Mr. Natural’s.
The place was still hopping. I moved cockily through the crowds rapping to this broad and that one but not anybody who was really available. At three o’clock the place had thinned enough so that I could check out everybody there. Only two girls left were possibilities. One was talking to seven guys at once, the other to three guys. I was beginning to feel desperate. I gravitated toward the nearest girl and increased her audience to four. She smiled briefly at me and kept talking. Suddenly bright lights blinked on and off. Everybody flinched. The shag-haired bartender in white shirt and thin tie leaned over the bar and droned: “Last call, last call, you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
SATURDAY
I woke up Saturday late, close to ten-thirty. I remembered two dreams: one a nightmare, one a comedy skit The nightmare was a one-scene deal. I was standing in an arena with two other guys; we were slaves in ancient Rome. Across the arena big-horned bulls snorted and pawed. Between us and the bulls was a wriggling clump of fanged snakes. The bulls were supposed to charge across the snakes to get us. If the snakes killed the bulls we would be granted our freedom. If not, we would be gored to death. The nightmare ended with the sensation of snake fangs flying into my face. The snakes had attacked us before the bulls did.
The comedy was a little easier to take.
I was standing outside a big modern house. It was nighttime and there was a party going on inside. It was all women. A dwarf left the house and came up to me. He told me the party was shit because all the women were frigid. It was impossible for a guy to pick up a girl. I stood there thinking it might have less to do with the women’s frigidity and more to do with the fact that this dude was a dwarf. As if he read my mind, he said, “I know what you’re thinking, and it’s not because I’m a dwarf. My friend had the same goddamn problem in there:” Then this friend of his comes out to join us. He’s also a dwarf. The end.
I noticed the clock and panicked. It was my weekend and I felt like I’d lost precious hours by sleeping. It was my “leisure” time and I was blowing it. What leisure time? That’s all I had was leisure time. I knew I should read the classifieds again, but I couldn’t even think about it.
I lay in bed fingering my stomach muscles. I was supposed to do something that day but I couldn’t remember what. I wanted to take a shot at jogging, but there was something else. Montauk. That was it. La Donna and I had planned to rent a car and drive out to Montauk. We had’ meant it to be a mood piece, a romantic, poetic thing like going to Coney Island in the winter, but even at the time we made those plans it seemed ludicrous to me. The romantic sentiment was totally out of sync with the anger and tension we felt around each other. It was her idea so I didn’t sly no, but I knew it would be a bummer. If you’re not happy with each other and you plan a thing like that, all you wind up thinking about is how goddamn cold it would be, what a long son-of-a-bitch ride it would be and the absurdity and irony of the whole gesture itself.
Outside my window, the sun shone colorlessly. It was a bright whitish day devoid of blue, or even gray. I thought of Montauk, that long rocky deserted point at the tip of Long Island whipped by winter wind and bloodless bleached sunlight. In a way the whole trip would be appropriate. Just her and me standing in the deserted cold bleakness right on the edge, the end. Suddenly I felt great relief that she wasn’t around anymore. It was over. It really sucked, the last few months. It used to be good, it used to be real… in the beginning. There used to be some real emotional feelings, loving feelings, whether we were always fucked up or not; the good feelings were there, the pleasure was there, but now it was really like February Montauk Point and it was over. That was over. But people could change. Maybe someday we’d do it up right. Me teaching her singing. She was right, we weren’t helping each other just now. We both had a lot of moves to make and they required elbow room. Yup yup.
I fantasized about La Donna coming back. It was very possible. She still had her boots and her sheet music in the closet. As a matter of fact, I would have laid even money on her coining back; those were brand-new boots. She would at least have to make a guest appearance to get her boots.
I turned on the TV and watched Soul Train. I still couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t know what to do with the day. It was after eleven. I wasn’t going out to Montauk but I wasn’t getting up, either. It was almost noon. I whimpered in frustration. The fifty dancing kids on the box seemed to be making fun of my paralysis. I leapt put of bed and turned off the TV. Love and ache keep you strong and handsome. I decided to jog. Jogging, swimming and biking were the three best exercises for your heart because the motion and exertion were constant and rhythmic. When I opened my door, the Post fell from the jamb and lay headline up on the hall floor.
I trotted down to Riverside Park in sweat pants, long Johns, a turtleneck and a hooded sweat shirt. I hadn’t run since Basic Training. The day remained colorless. The wind pummeled everything with sudden jerky gusts.
Squatting on my hunches I bounced up and down on the balls of my feet. I spread my legs and stretched right and left, my hands on my thighs. I rested one foot against a car hood and pushed my chest against m
y knee, then switched feet. I sat on the asphalt running path, held the soles of my feet together in a modified lotus position and jiggled my knees for, three minutes. I was stretched, ready. I headed uptown to Eighty-sixth Street. There I would turn around and run down to Seventy-second, a total distance of one mile and one block. I did the nine blocks up to Eighty-sixth without too much trouble,, then headed downtown. It was easier than I’d imagined. La Donna kept me going. I felt like a 1930s Olympic Nazi with bulging tendons running for the sun, the snowcaps. Love, heart, pride and youth. New breed. Blond, with visions. La Donna watching and glowing. By the time I got back down to Seventy-seventh Street where I’d started I was dead. The wind was sucking out my lungs, my knees were exploding from pain. Five more blocks. I staggered more than ran to Seventy-second Street. Seventy-second was the end of the path, the end of the park, became a mass of construction equipment, wooden barricades and beyond that the entrance to the West Side Highway.
I was huffing, hands on hips, circling slowly, staring down at the octagonal asphalt tiles.
There was a playground at Seventy-seventh Street and I figured maybe I’d watch some kids play basketball for a while.
It was deserted except for two kids. The wind was too bitter and gusty for ball. One was playing alone. He was black, about twelve years old, a tall stringbean dressed in an apple green warm-up suit with white pip-ing on the legs and arms. He looked serious as he hunkered down the court, gave a slight jump, pumped the ball with bent elbows behind his ears and missed his shot. He missed most of his shots and never smiled. When he pivoted toward the basket I saw the name MELVIN stitched on the back of his jacket. The other kid was a chubby, teen-age Puerto Rican lounging on a bench nearby. Next to his leg was a titanic portable radio. He wore a stadium coat, cuffed dungarees, heavy horn-rimmed glasses and sported the beginnings of a mustache. On his sneakers he’d inked a power fist. He sat there picking his nose and watching Melvin play. The radio was blaring a Joni Mitchell song, and I couldn’t think of a more inappropriate sound to hook up with that kid.
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