“There’s a rainbow!” I said.
“Where!” Carol said and got her camera out of her soft white purse.
You know.
We were a few miles into the Bighorns when the woods felt thick enough for wolves. I pulled off down a side road that barely fit the semi. Trees ten times taller than the truck parted to let us through. I stopped and killed the engine.
I said, “Alright, Carol. This looks good. Now do me a favor and when I say go you press that yellow button right there with the back door symbol on it.”
I crawled in back hoping Carol wouldn’t notice how hard it was for me to climb back there. I unstopped the peephole.
The wolf paced in the rods of sunlight striping through the bullet holes.
“Okay, go,” I said.
The back door slid up with a rolling sound. A line of light moved across the wolf quarters, revealing shit piles and clumps of hair and Cocker Spaniel food pellets scattered everywhere.
The wolf went very slowly to stand at the edge of the haul.
Carol tapped my shoulder and said, “Take a pitcher!”
I took her camera and put it up to the hole. In the pic, his spiky silver body is facing deep green trees, greyish-blue pine fronds, brown flaky trunks. There’s a puff of breath coming off his profile.
His unhinged nostrils worked the air. His coat rose and flattened. A sluice of cold wind came through the peephole and I could smell the wolf in it—a separate smell from the pine and the piss and shit.
He was statue-still.
“Go on!” I said, and he looked back at me. He saw a long-lashed girly eye watching him through his food hole. I saw a current of tension run through his body and he leapt out of the truck, his hind legs in a comical diving posture. I felt for a moment that I’d just lost something. Then I caught a glimpse of him running away. Running!
“Woooohoo!” I went. “Yeah!”
Carol crawled in back and put her hands on my face and said, “Aw, did you cry?” and she kissed me. “It’s so handsome you had a big job like this!” she said and kissed me again, which started the hardest makeout session I’d ever been a part of. We “made love” amongst her suitcases and perfume smell. She was humping me all curvy-like as the birds outside twiddled in branches crisp. Her skin had goose bumps from my cracked window. Her nipples responded accordingly. And her face became drawn down and sleepy-seeming as it ascended the stairs of pleasure that lead to her orgasm.
The law office I worked at in New York made me see a psychiatrist as protocol. After concluding that I seek my father’s approval, he rated me “immature on matters of sex” and it always bothered me. But there in that truck having sex with Carol, I saw how sex is about as immature as it gets, so that lock-eyed psychiatrist’s comment didn’t make sense. I could go wave my dick in his face saying, “Someone humped this and she was all sleepy-looking like someone falling asleep trying to watch a movie past her bedtime,” and that wouldn’t be more immature than sex.
But I’m not saying I didn’t like it. I loved seeing Carol like that. I thought, You can do this anytime you want and I’ll be here to let you. I thought, Now if this ain’t me being a man, then I don’t know what is, and then I orgasmed, which pretty much scared the hell out of me it felt so good. I yelled, “DANG GIRLYYYYY!”
(“Is he losing his virginity in this scene?”) No, it was my second time, but thanks for asking. While the yellow-suited cowboy mockingly spins. And while Carol and I had no idea that in four hundred sex sessions later the very woods around us would ruin our lives forever, making it so we’d never have normal sex again. You’ll see what I mean, and thanks for being confused.
CHAPTER THREE
TWO FLOWERS BLOOMING IN EACH OTHER’S FACES
They drew a straight line through Nebraska and curled through the Iowan bluffs. Morning sun silhouetted trees and telephone wires. Sunsets made backroads golden. The Haircutter drove the truck between the guidelines while his fat heart fainted repeatedly within him.
Carol: rabbit-like. Long front teeth that slope into her mouth. Solid legs that hyperextend—pop backwards at the knee. She’s short and blond. Her brown eyes seem pinched toward (as if attracted to) a pearl that rests or rolls on her protruding sternum. I’d say, “You’re so beautiful,” and she’d say, “Not really, but I know what you mean.” She laughs at the slightest invitation, in giggles that thump like a rabbit’s foot. She coughs up her heart and it sits cross-legged on her lips for a chat. She’s chipper and prim. So rabbit-like, you nearly expect a butterfly to land on her nose. When she opens her legs, you nearly expect a butterfly to be burped from her pussy. Butterflies nearly equal pussies anyway.
We cut through heat haze in our empty truck, smiling. “Man I can’t believe my luck,” I’d say and say. Talk about a joy ride. Carol shouted to me over radio songs with her feet stuck out the high window. Her legs coming out of her cutoff shorts were as hyperextended as my thoughts. I thought about haircutting and how I’d no doubt have to tell her everything. I wondered what sorts of horrors I’d left lying around my apartment. Deflated socks here and there? An unflushed toilet? Pages of bad writing? All my tables! I thought, Will Carol still love me when she sees I need to use Gold Bond? Does she love me? I thought, What is love? I even asked myself what is what? What is? And all that kinky stuff from an astrology textbook you’d find in an antiques store.
Cattle dotted hills the color of their grassy shit patties. I’d smooth my hair in Men’s Room mirrors, I’d suck in my stomach and huff it loose again. Every time I’d eat from her bag of road snacks I’d sneak a look at my teeth in the rearview after. I had no idea how close to or how far away from being kiss-worthy I was. Had I known that she’d one day be begging me to fiddle her diddle in the back of a cab, demanding that I look in her eyes while doing it so she could “come for my pretty lashes” I would have been much more relaxed.
The first time we checked into a motel and laid in that bed together I realized why life is worth living. When a pink little lady runs her dangling cartilage-hard nipples through your chest hair while you pet her rump, while she squeals, finding the pleasure hilarious, while she drips wetness onto your prick, beckoning it, you are touching heaven.
During sex, she flipped and wiggled like a hooked fish. I’m sure I just panted with a startled look on my face wondering, “Is this how?” After sex, her china hand rested on my chest and she told me about the outer space adventure novel she was working on. Her legs wrapped around mine and her feet wrapped too and she was all, “Oozy is a Rootaloid and Romo is a Magazoid and they have a baby named Woomalee Amatrist.” The motel room started dripping a faucet like, “Are y’all done yet?” We went out to the parking lot to cool our sweat. Chiggers bit our bare legs. Semis honked night farts on the interstate. Moths ticked against the lot light overhead and Carol tapped a cigarette. I kept putting my fingers up to smell them when she wasn’t looking. I thought, Wow, “making love” is right. I thought, Dang Girly. I thought, Talk about Cupid. And all that crap.
In those motel mornings, we’d watch a news program on TV while the sun puked its deal out on the world. I’d open the curtain of the large lot window and truckers and families would pass by and look in at us for a flash just to see. Good, I thought. Get some reality mixed into this sick story of a guy who ate his boss’s face off. Carol sat with little pink socks on, eating vending machine doughnuts with crust in her eyes. She always had a certain seriousness for the first hour of the morning, like she’d been with her dead grandma in her dreams and needed to respect that for a while. I’d gather our things and take them out to the truck, which would be attic-hot and smelling like wolf pee. Back in the room, I’d open the map on a bedspread and chew a toothpick waiting for Carol. She’d finally come out of the bathroom steam smiling and smelling like she’d scrubbed with flowers, brushing knots out of her wet hair, which looked like sheering sheep. She’d dress in her cutoff shorts, a spaghetti tank, and the little black high heels with the pointy toe triangles. She’d top it all
off with a cig.
Yes, Carol smoked. It disturbed me, until I was like, “Whoa, you smoke?” and she looked at my fat belly and said, “We all got vices.” Talk about putting your foot in your mouth, along with too much food.
Carol and The Haircutter drove the billboarded interstate smile-bent for New York City. They passed ads for cosmetic surgery, for theme parks, for McDonald’s, etcetera. They used the ads to find lodging at night when H.C. could barely see and when Carol’s valentine radiance was wearing. In the mornings they’d hippity-hop to the wolf-stained truck, recharged and in charge of the sets of charms they’d show like flashcards throughout the new day. They stopped at gas stations for road snacks and Carol let The Haircutter pay. They ate at a diner and The Haircutter, for the first time, felt the royal flush of pride. People saw: her, him, touching, smiling. Bills came and The Haircutter unflinchingly paid. Carol saw a sign on the road in Iowa that said Premise Picked Cherries!; they drove thirty-five miles off-course to a farm where they bought a ten-dollar bag from a genderless blob who had its short-haired head through a hole in a floral bed sheet and who sat in a chair they couldn’t see. Carol asked if it could snap their pic while they were tasting cherries, but it grunted about how since it rained last night “my chair’s stuck in the mud.” H.C. and Carol helped it out of its chair, then loosened its chair from the mud. As it snapped their pic, it said, “Wish I could use y’all every day instead of knockin’ my chair off with a porch post.”
It was about getting food down our necks and about stopping at rest stops. She trickled pee from her little vagina like simply squeezing a lemon, while I sat down on darkness and unfolded a stained hole to plop steaming piles out like some sort of monster’s function in a demented dream. And it was about talking as much as we could to teach each other about who we were and what we liked. Carol had a deep indent between her nose and lips and showed me in a diner how she could hold a cigarette there as a trick. I showed her my trick of being able to make it look like there’s a little bird perched on my finger and I’m petting it. I smelled that my breath smelt like a sponge, so I laughed with my mouth closed, which felt like I was trying to look like a wise-ol’ Santy Clause. Carol tickled my birdy under its chin, saying, “Can I be your Mommy?” Then the bill came and the waitress said, “Y’all two love birds have a nice day,” and I pretty much hit Carol in the face with a sponge—I was drunk with open-mouthed laughter like, “Carol did you hear that?!”
She called Brother and Son’s from a pay phone and lit the cigarette. I came out of the john and saw her across the restaurant, short and blond. I watched her grimace as she told about not being able to come to work anymore. I watched her stub her cig out in a single woman’s ashtray and thank her. Then when we were leaving, I held the door for an old man who was entering with his family and he shouted, “Was it good?” I stated, “Best french toast I ever had in my life.” And later, Carol was all, “You were so nice to that old man!” It was about charming each other like that.
Two kids on the road is what it looked like. Singing along to songs, eating sunflower seeds, “My lips are numb from the salt, let’s try kissing!” But what it felt like was Fat. I felt fat and uncomfortable not being able to fart when I had to, not being able to burp rough when I needed to, and every time we came to a door and I held it open for Carol why’d I feel so stupid? I wasn’t used to it all yet. Girls had always been something I snarled at, not something I was allowed to touch and to take pleasure from. She kept coming over to my side of the bench to cuddle up to my gassy, mewing gut, and I’d think, How the hell’s that something you want to do, Girly? She’d take my hand off the steering wheel and put it up the leg of her shorts. And I’d just kind of sniffle and clear my throat thinking, Please don’t make me fail again! I didn’t know how to pussy-play back then, so I’d just spread the petals, part the sea, and wiggle my fingers in there, but she liked it anyway. She thought it was funny.
Even though I felt uncomfortable, I like those memories very much. She’d need to do a standing hug every time we stopped the truck for whatever reason. Get a little hug session in where I’d stand there confused and laughing. Then she’d need a picture of herself in front of whatever dumb thing—a bronze eagle at some rest stop—and she’d want the pic to be of her pretending to kiss it. Later, when we got the film back, all the pictures of her were just of her head and the sky because I kept smiling when I’d see her pose and my cheek moved the camera up. “Don’t quit your day job,” she said when she saw them. In all the pics of us where she’d held the camera out in front of our faces it looked like she was at Walt Disney World having her pic with that Hunchback of Notre Dame.
I sensed that I would get used to it, though, and that’s what kept me faithful and excited. I knew that I would find comfort sooner or later. Same as I had come to find comfort in New York. You’re the same person no matter what the scenery is, and the scenery is the same scenery no matter what person’s in it. So as long as you’re slept and fed, stuff’s gonna do what stuff’s gonna do. I treated us the same way. As long as I took care of my prize Carol, stuff was gonna do what stuff was gonna do. I just did my best, is what I’m saying. I let myself feel uncomfortable, and I let myself feel comfortable when that happened too. At a motel one night, I was petting her head and I was like, “Man, I love you.” She flailed in the bedskins going, “No! Shh! Not yet! I wanna wait till you rilly fill it!” I was like, Okay whatever, Girly.
When she saw the New York skyline she squealed. It was raining. It was night. The streets were slick and shining different colors. (“It’s just like the movies!”) She cracked her window and held a cig out the crack and sat up straight to drag from it. She pumped her legs and looked around, releasing smoke through her smile and nostrils which was the ugliest she got. We had hip pain and rocks of road snacks in our stomachs. Our buttholes lisped the names of all the processed chemicals. I drove to the area where I’d found the truck; I pulled into a spot and unloaded Carol’s things. I left the keys under the floor mat as instructed. Then, hunched in the rain, I patted the side of the truck and said a little goodbye, and I flinched when Carol saw. Then I was like, She’ll think you have a sensitive side, so I kept going, and she was all, “You got a sensitive side, huh?” There’s the word “man” in “manipulation,” but there’s the word “man” in “woman” too, so I wouldn’t go trusting formulas like those. We took a cab to my apartment with my last few bucks.
What should I tell you about what followed my sudden abandonment in Times Square in ’93? That I serendipitously found a poetry club after walking for two hours and that I met a lady there who listened to my story? That she got me a job working at the shop part of the club because I could name all the English poets and what they wrote and when they wrote it? That I overheard a customer who was serendipitously looking for someone to rent her freshly-dead old aunt’s apartment?
The niece had inherited the apartment and wanted to rent it out for cash. Eight years I lived there on 37th and 6th and I never saw that girl again; I just paid the bills that were sent. It was an old warehouse building, so the elevators were oversized, the ceilings high as trees, the common hallways dark and labyrinthine. The apartment had two big rooms—one, the main room with a three-step elevated kitchen in the corner; the other, the bedroom. They were separated by an optional wooden door that could be pulled out of a slit-hole in the wall. That was my hairboard.
The kitchen was on a triangular dark wooden platform in the corner, raised to the height of three old wooden stairs. This was the apartment’s charming feature. It’s where I wrote under the ceiling-high window on a swivel chair pulled up to my writing table. By the light of the city I tried to write something good, and I never did. Behind my back then was the fridge, sink, and stove in a strip. Above the sink was the old aunt’s portrait. The apartment came with some of her stuff, which I was glad for because I’ve never been one to have stuff, but I’ve always appreciated stuff’s “homey” feel. When I washed my hands at the kit
chen sink, I faced Old Auntie. Her white hair was butt-parted and tied back like Virginia Woolf, which I’d found to be so fitting for the writing room that I’d snapped when I first realized it, and shouted “Yes!” believing it was a sign I would write something good. I mostly just wrote lists of writers and what they wrote and when they wrote it to see if I could remember, and I always did.
The rest of this main room had windows that filled the wall facing 6th Avenue. I taped sheets up to cover them because it was too bright otherwise. No one wants to have to squint in their own main room. And I didn’t want insomniacs across the street standing at their windows unfocusing their eyes on my hairboard either.
I think I had around fifteen tables and they filled that main room. If you saw, you’d think I was some sort of table freak. (“Oh there goes that table freak guy.”) I got into buying tables because I wanted the perfect one to write at. When I’d stepped into the apartment for the first time, I saw that perfect writing spot under the kitchen window so I went straight to Macy’s to shop for a writing table. I bought one there and didn’t write anything good at it, and a few days later I saw a table in a restaurant that was more Lit-like so I paid a thousand dollars for it on the spot—almost half my Brother and Son’s savings. Once I got it home, though, I found that I couldn’t write as much as I wanted to. So the next day I bought a table from a catalog with the credit card I’d received. It went on like that. I bought tables at flea markets, I bought tables out of restaurants, I bought tables from people selling stuff off tables on the street, I bought tables at furniture stores. I tried every kind. All I spent my money on was food and tables. Little did I know, all I needed in order to write well was to have something to write about instead of just lists. Either way, I had an apartment full of tables.
My bedroom was called The Chambers even though I was the only one who knew. The Chambers had a double window next to the bed that I shaded with a red sheet, which later provided me and Carol with a place to make love where it felt like we were doing it inside of a heart. My bed was Old Auntie’s wooden sleigh bed with the curl parts sawed off. The bark was sharp and you had to watch out not to touch it, but better that than trying to get a girl with a sleigh bed.
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