by Rufi Thorpe
“Are you on drugs?” I asked her, in a soft voice, so that we wouldn’t be heard on the street. We were just passing a street vendor grilling corn and kabobs. The scent of burned corn was intoxicating. “Are you hungry?” I asked, before she’d had time to answer, gesturing at the corn. Perhaps I did not want to hear her answer. I did not want to put Lor in the same category as my mother and her drinking. I did not want to think of her that way, the way I thought of animals: beings that were charming but were not in control of themselves, incapable of being responsible for their actions.
“I’m starving,” she admitted, and I bought us both an ear of corn and steered us toward a bench, where I could set down the tea set. I sat down, but Lorrie Ann stayed standing upright, the corn cob held in both hands.
For a moment we just ate, greedy for the smoky, burned, sweet corn.
“This is so good I could cry,” she said.
“It’s my favorite,” I said. “So is that what this is—drugs?”
“Of course not,” Lorrie Ann said, so easily that I believed her completely. “It would probably be easier if it was about drugs. I was traveling with this girl. Woman. Whatever. And we just hit this point where—you know how complicated it can get? Traveling with somebody, and their world becomes your world?”
I nodded, still neatly shearing the rows of corn with my teeth like a typewriter going across a page. I wanted so badly for her to have an answer that made sense.
“It sounds so ordinary,” Lor said, “but somehow it was absolutely too much, and I started to realize that she was crazy, like the big things that she believed in were terribly warped, and then we had a fight and she went crazy and threw all my shoes off the balcony into the river and kicked me out of our hotel.”
This was insane, but I kept nodding. Where was Zach? If he was dead, wouldn’t she have called me? Had she called me? Had I simply not gotten the crucial voice mail? She paused and chewed on her corn for a bit. The mid-morning sun was pure and drenching as honey.
“I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “I don’t know why I lied to you. Of course I’m on drugs. I shouldn’t have lied. I’m sorry. It’s just a reflex, but then I felt so bad for lying that I could hardly concentrate on what I was saying.”
“What drugs?” I asked.
“Opiates,” she said.
“What opiates?”
“Whatever opiates are available.” She shrugged her narrow shoulders. Her breasts seemed much smaller. She was thin, really thin. “I know it sounds bad, Mia,” she said, “but it’s not all Basketball Diaries and Trainspotting.”
“So what is it then,” I asked, “if it’s not that?”
“It’s like the ordinary way Americans eat themselves to death. It’s like anything.”
I listened, squinting. I knew in part what she meant: the war on drugs had fooled all of us. The first time I tried cocaine at a party at Yale, I had thought: That’s it? That’s all? That’s what we’ve all been afraid of? But I still thought of opiates as something altogether different. You didn’t casually do heroin. You didn’t do heroin on the weekends.
“I won’t be sick on your couch or have hallucinations or anything,” she said.
“All right.” I was looking at her pink slippers and thinking of her bleeding feet underneath.
“I won’t steal your TV.”
“We don’t have a TV.”
“We?” she asked.
I was brought up short. I was thinking so many things that I wasn’t saying that I was having difficulty keeping track of the conversation. “We?” she had asked. What on earth did she mean? What did the sound “we” signify? Then, just as quickly, I understood. “Franklin,” I said, upset. Lorrie Ann knew about Franklin. I had told her all about him.
“God, that’s right,” she said. “I didn’t realize you two were living together.”
“For a year,” I said tightly.
“For a year,” she echoed. Her half-finished corncob dangled from her hand like something dirty or ruined, as though she no longer wanted to be touching it.
“Where can I put this?” she asked, holding it out to me like a child. My stomach clenched. The bad luck vultures were not done. They had come to stay.
As it turned out, it was the helpful Arman who had first initiated Lorrie Ann in the ways of opiates. Together they abused the medication he was given for his legs, or for the absence of his legs, which was oxycodone, generic for OxyContin. Through the crippled-vet grapevine he was also able to procure fentanyl suckers and patches, which they occasionally abused while watching comedies from Redbox as all the while Zach spasmed in his chair nearby.
“We weren’t wild or anything,” Lorrie Ann said. There is no way she could imagine how much more revolting I found her quiet addiction than any Dionysian revelry she could have indulged in. It made me angry to think of Lorrie Ann high, in sweatpants, watching National Lampoon movies, her head in Arman’s lap, her eyes glazed. It made me angry because it made me so sad. I imagined his dark hand, stroking the fine gold filaments of her hair.
“What a fucking loser” was all I could say to her.
“He wasn’t a loser,” she said. By this time we were at my kitchen table. I had hidden the pregnancy test in a drawer with the place mats.
“He was a fucking loser,” I said, blowing on my tea.
“You women, man,” Arman said, the first night he had come over to Lorrie Ann’s. “You’re like Luthers with vaginas.”
“Luthers with vaginas? Like New-Testament-Luther Luthers?” Lorrie Ann asked. She could not imagine what Arman meant, but she was interested because it seemed to her like an unexpected thing to say. She was prepared to like Arman simply because he was legless and her next-door neighbor. If he was interesting, that would be a bonus. So few people she met were ever interesting.
“Yeah, like, I don’t know, it just seems to me that women have been part of the slave class for most of history, right? But now they have all this freedom they don’t know what to do with, and it’s kind of like the period of reformation in a religion. You know, women have access to this reset button.”
“Reset button?” Lor asked.
Arman sat back on the couch, lolled his head to the side, smiling, that long black hair of his shimmering like water. “You know, like, women used to be born into their destiny. That determined them, usually. But now, they’re educated and shit, and they have an opportunity to reassess the world, and once they have reassessed the world, they can reassess the way they belong to the world, and from there they can reinvent themselves so that they fit into the world in the way they want to, so that they can control how they will belong to it. Reset button. Not a linear journey either. More like Leibniz. There’s monadic stuff happening with women.”
“What is ‘monadic’?” Lorrie Ann demanded. She was excited. It had been so long since she was intellectually excited that she didn’t even understand exactly that this was what she was feeling. She heard the timer ding in the kitchen, but she didn’t get up to get it. She was making cinnamon rolls, the kind with orange-flavored frosting. It was one in the morning on a Tuesday.
“Oh, a monad?” he said. “Monads are weird. Okay, basically, there was this guy named Leibniz. And he invented this idea of metaphysical atoms. So monads are to the metaphysical world what atoms are to the physical world. Only, that’s just a way into thinking it, because it’s not quite that. Leibniz didn’t actually believe that there was a divide between the physical and the metaphysical. Most philosophers, from Plato on, believe there is this distinction between the world of ideas and the world of things. Leibniz thought they were the same thing and the monad was how it was architecturally organized.”
“But what is a monad?” Lorrie Ann asked. “Like, would the concept of ‘red’ or ‘blue’ be a monad? Give me an example.”
“Do you mind if I …?” he asked, pulling a pipe of marijuana from his pocket. Lorrie Ann waved at him to go ahead, and waited impatiently as he took a few puffs. “Okay, ex
ample of a monad,” Arman said, leaning back again into the couch. The cinnamon rolls were burning. “Well, it’s not a concept. So it’s not red or blue or pretty or ugly. It’s more like each human being is a monad, and the existence of God is a monad, and the thing about the monads is that each one is a tiny mirror of the universe, and it fits in harmoniously with all the other monads, so that they all reflect and affect one another, no matter how far removed from one another they are in space and time.”
“Is a tree a monad?” she asked, almost breathless with the beauty of this concept.
“I think so. Yeah, I think everything that exists would be a monad, kind of. I don’t know. I haven’t read Leibniz in years.”
Lorrie Ann just stared at him. She wanted to pick him up and shake him up and down until all of the amazing things inside of him came out, so that she could paw through all the ideas like a kid going through the fallen candy from a piñata.
“So with women, it seems like this monadic thing, like the universe is actually going to change in response to the way they are changing themselves, and they are actually changing themselves by changing the way they look at the universe. They are so much more in tune with their intuition than men, and their sense of destiny is more holistic and that demands this kind of integration, not only within society, but within themselves. They are looking to be right sized. So that they work right with all the other monads and they are all in harmony like they should be. So I guess when I said they were Luthers with vaginas, what I really meant is that they are going to take the holy book and translate it, so it isn’t in Latin anymore, but in their own tongue, and that’s going to change the nature of the book itself. Shazam!”
It was with these sorts of stoner sophistries, these eccentric flashes of insight, that Arman managed to win my Lorrie Ann.
She just stared at him. “I vote that you never stop talking,” she said.
Arman laughed. “Usually girls want me to stop talking.”
“No,” Lorrie Ann said, “I would actually pay you to keep talking.”
“Well,” he said, “you don’t have to pay me.”
“That’s lucky, I don’t have any money.”
She was a goner from then on. An absolute fucking goner.
Together they ate the burned cinnamon rolls, and Lorrie Ann wondered all night why he didn’t try to kiss her.
But it wasn’t Arman’s style to kiss Lorrie Ann. Instead, he waited for her to kiss him. If I had to guess, I would say that even Arman’s trysts with young stoner chicks who wandered into his Costa Mesa smoke shop were motivated by a profound insecurity. He had, after all, lost his legs. It was no longer comfortable for him to have sex in any position but with the woman on top, and he felt emasculated by this.
“He can’t just take off the thingies and rest on his stumps like they were knees?” I asked Lor in one of our phone calls.
“It hurts too much,” she said, “and besides there’s something wrong with, like, the ballast. Without the shins there to stabilize, he has to keep himself entirely up with his arms, and his arms are really buff from the crutches, but it’s so physically exhausting that he can’t come like that, and honestly, it just isn’t very fun.”
“Hmm …,” I said.
“So I always have to be on top,” she said.
“Do you mind?”
“Not at all. But I think he does.”
“Why should he mind?”
“I’m not sure,” Lorrie Ann said, and I wished I could read her face.
“Does he just get bored of it?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “He just has a really hard time coming.”
“That’s kind of odd,” I said.
“So I usually have to finish him with my mouth.”
“That’s really odd,” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I only really slept with Jim before.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve slept with like thirty guys and I’m telling you: it’s weird.”
“Shut up.”
“Prude.”
“Whore.”
“I love you,” I said, laughing.
“I love you more,” she told me.
From what I could piece together through many such conversations, Arman was the sort of man able to achieve orgasm only when the woman was in a subservient position. Submission and dominance were his game, and Lorrie Ann riding away on top, bringing herself to climax like the brave cowgirl she was, was just not hot to him. I wished that I could show Lorrie Ann the legions and legions of wonderful men who, upon hearing of this, would have cried out in horror, “What a shame! What a waste!” For who wouldn’t want to be ridden by the beautiful, buxom Lorrie Ann? Only a fool, and Arman was most definitely that. Though he was a very, very smart fool.
Arman was the rare, true autodidact. I have always been secretly envious of such people, since my own education, while extensive, also has the orderly nature of an English garden. I was educated in an entirely purposive way. Arman, though, Arman had filled his mind with a vagabond mixture of trash and treasure. He had read all the major philosophers from the pre-Socratics on, but he had also read those more minor figures, like de Tocqueville, who were no longer in fashion. He read H. P. Lovecraft voraciously and had gone through an intense Hermann Hesse period, which centered, predictably, on Steppenwolf. He venerated obscure fiction writers like Harry Crews and had absolutely arcane taste in poetry. He worshipped Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont, but he adored Milton above all others. In fact, when he wrote lyrics to songs, for he played the bass and Lorrie Ann the guitar, and much of their relationship took the form of smoking pot and fiddling with their instruments together, composing songs that never were more than half finished, his cadences and word choice were disturbingly Miltonic while remaining as emotionally immature as any Matchbox Twenty song.
Predictably, perhaps, he took himself painfully seriously.
“I am a man of many sorrows,” he wrote Lorrie Ann once, in a letter explaining why he could not be faithful to her even though he loved her. “I am torn between the notion of love as some grand a priori concept and love as a living, cultivated reality. You are real, Lorrie Ann. Real as a hand, real as a pillow. Which is precisely what I cannot stand in you, and why I cannot abide as your kept man. I must be free to explore the infinite potentiality of the universe. You simply cannot be my muse. You don’t inspire me. And yet, I love you. Honestly, what am I to do? I am being torn asunder like Dionysus.”
I am being unfair in presenting him this way, so coldly showing only the worst parts of Arman. For Lorrie Ann did fall in love with him, and she had her reasons, though I suspect a large part of her love was really pity in the cloak of love.
For instance, here is how Arman lost his legs:
He and his “battle buddies” (how bizarre and troubling I found this term, as though his comrades were action figures or some other child’s “my buddy” toy) were clearing a building. He walked into a room and saw his “brother” (one of his platoon) in a face-off with an eight-year-old holding an Uzi. The child and his comrade were both stock-still as in the building all around them there were screams and bursts of fire. What could Arman do? He shot the boy and saved his friend.
“He was just a child,” he sobbed to Lorrie Ann one night. “He was just a little boy.”
After that, Arman stayed perpetually drunk. He went on all his missions drunk. He spent all his pay on alcohol, which was difficult and costly to procure. A bottle of Crown Royal could cost upward of two hundred dollars. He was often so drunk in combat that he would fail to keep coherent grasp of the mission and would wind up stopping somewhere and just vomiting into a corner. When they fought in cities, he mostly hid behind buildings, hoping not to have to kill anyone, hoping also that a muj would stumble across him and end his farcical existence. Once, he lay down in an alley for the duration of a firefight. “I was just napping,” he explained, “but everyone thought I was dead. Even my guys were surprised when lat
er I got up.” But Arman was not reprimanded or punished for this behavior, extreme as it was. “The leadership had unraveled” was his enigmatic explanation.
It was during one of these drunken missions that Arman was accidentally left behind in a building destined to be blown up. In the explosion, one of the support beams fell on him, severing his legs at the shins. “I was so happy to finally be dying,” he told Lorrie Ann, “that when one of my buddies came and tried to get me, I actually threatened to shoot him. ‘I’ll have no legs,’ I begged him. ‘Please don’t save me. If you have any mercy, just shoot me in the face, please. Shoot me in the face, brother.’ ” But his battle buddy did not, could not, in the end, bring himself to do it. Once they were back stateside, the young man had come to him in the hospital, crying and apologizing. He knew that Arman had meant it, and that it was because of him that Arman would now have to live out the rest of his days as a crippled child-killer.
“I could have been a happy dead person,” Arman summed up. “But instead, I’m this.”
“He wasn’t a loser,” Lorrie Ann said, that day at my kitchen table. Her eyes seemed glassy. Was she high? Or was she just tired? I didn’t know. I didn’t know a lot about drugs, really. “He was just lost.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “I’m not saying he was consciously malevolent or something.”
“No, but, I just kept thinking, what if Jim had come back and I wasn’t there? What if he’d been alone with all of that, with everything he’d done? Wouldn’t I want some girl to try to love him, even though he was so broken? Wouldn’t I barter my soul itself for a girl to do that for him?” She brought her thumb to her mouth and began to nibble on the nail. She still chewed them, after all these years.
I didn’t know how to answer her. I wanted to say that Jim was different, that Arman had never been half the man Jim was, but I couldn’t, because the truth was, I didn’t think Jim had been much of a man anyway. Granted, in comparison to Arman he was like Prince Charming, but still. What I really wanted to say was that no man was worth Lorrie Ann’s soul. That she shouldn’t give herself up for anyone ever.