It’s not even that he decides to kneel—he simply finds he feels weight against his knees. His position might make her think he wants her underwear off. His face is at the height of her underwear as she walks toward him. He can feel the weave of his slacks’ fabric, the texture of the carpet below that, over that, against his knees. Her expression is a combination of seductive and aroused, with an overlay of slight amusement meant to convey sophistication, the loss of all illusions long ago. It’s the sort of expression that looks devastating in a photograph but becomes awkward when it’s maintained over real time. When he clasps his hands in front of his chest it’s now clear he is kneeling to pray. There can now be no mistaking what he’s doing. His color is very high. Her breasts stop their slight tremble and sway when she stops. She’s now on the same side of the bed but not yet right up against him. His gaze at the room’s ceiling is supplicatory. His lips are soundlessly moving. She stands confused. Her awareness of her own nudity becomes a different kind of awareness. She’s not sure how to stand or look while he’s gazing so intently upward. His eyes are not closed. Her sister and her husband and kids and the man’s wife and tiny son have taken the man’s Voyager minivan to the mall. She crosses her arms and looks briefly behind her: the door, her blouse and brassiere, the wife’s antique dresser stippled with sunlight through the window’s leaves. She could try, for just a moment, to imagine what is happening in his head. A bathroom scale barely peeking out from below the foot of the bed, beneath the gauzy hem of the comforter. Even for an instant, to try putting herself in his place.
The question she asks makes his forehead pucker as he winces. She has crossed her arms. It’s a three-word question.
‘It’s not what you think,’ he says. His eyes never leave the middle distance between the ceiling and themselves. She’s now aware of just how she’s standing, how silly it might look through a window. It’s not excitement that’s hardened her nipples. Her own forehead forms a puzzled line.
He says, ‘It’s not what you think I’m afraid of.’
And what if she joined him on the floor, just like this, clasped in supplication: just this way.
SIGNIFYING NOTHING
Here is a weird one for you. It was a couple of years ago, and I was 19, and getting ready to move out of my folks’ house, and get out on my own, and one day as I was getting ready, I suddenly get this memory of my father waggling his dick in my face one time when I was a little kid. The memory comes up out of nowhere, but it is so detailed and solid-seeming, I know it is totally true. I suddenly know it really happened, and was not a dream, even though it had the same kind of bizarre weirdness to it dreams have. Here is the sudden memory. I was around 8 or 9, and I was down in the rec room by myself, after school, watching TV. My father came down and came into the rec room, and was standing in front of me, like between me and the TV, not saying anything, and I didn’t say anything. And, without saying anything, he took his dick out, and started kind of waggling it in my face. I remember nobody else was home. I think it was winter, because I remember it was cold down in the rec room, and I had Mom’s TV afghan wrapped around me. Part of the total weirdness of the incident of my father waggling his dick at me down there was that, the whole time, he did not say anything (I would have remembered it if he said anything), and there was nothing in the memory about what his face looked like, like what his expression looked like. I do not remember if he even looked at me. All I remember was the dick. The dick, like, claimed all of my attention. He was just sort of waggling it in my face, without saying anything or making any type of comment, shaking it kind of like you do in the can, like when you are shaking off, but, also, there was something threatening and a little bully-seeming about the way he did it, I remember, too, like the dick was a fist he was putting in my face and daring me to say anything, and I remember I was wrapped up in the afghan, and could not get up or move out of the way of the dick, and all I remembered doing was sort of moving my head all over the place, trying to get it out of my face (the dick). It was one of those totally bizarre incidents which are so weird, it seems like it is not happening even while it is happening. The only time I even had glimpsed my father’s dick before was in locker rooms. I remember my head kind of moving around all over the place, on my neck, and the dick kind of following me all over the place, and having totally bizarre thoughts going through my head while he did it, like, ‘I am moving my head just like a snake,’ etc. He did not have a boner. I remember the dick was a little bit darker than the rest of him, and big, with a big ugly vein down one side of it. The little hole-thing at the end looked slitty and pissed off, and it opened and closed a little as my father waggled the dick, keeping the dick threateningly in my face no matter where I moved my head around to. That is the memory. After I had it (the memory), I went around my folks’ house in a haze, in, like, a daze, totally freaked out, not telling anybody about it, and not asking anything. I know that was the only time my father ever did anything like that. This was when I was packing, and going around to stores getting old boxes to move with. Sometimes, I walked around my folks’ house in shock, feeling totally weird. I kept thinking about the sudden memory. I went into my folks’ room, and down to the rec room. The rec room had a new entertainment system, instead of the old TV, but my Mom’s TV afghan was still there, spread over the back of the couch when not in use. It was still the same afghan as in the memory. I kept trying to think about why my father would do something like that, and what he could have been thinking of, like, what it could have meant, and trying to remember if there had been any kind of look or emotion, during it, on his face.
Now it gets even weirder, because I finally, the day my father took a half day off, and we went down and rented a van for me to pack and move out with, I, finally, in the van, on the way home from the rental place, brought it up, and asked him about the memory. I asked him about it straight up. It is not like there is a way to gradually lead up to something like that. My father had put the rental of the van on his card, and he was the one driving it home. I remember the radio in the van did not work. In the van, out of (from his perspective) nowhere, I suddenly tell my father I just had recently remembered the day he came down and waggled his dick in my face when I was a little kid, and I sort of briefly described what I had remembered, and asked him, ‘What the fuck was up with that?’ When he kept merely driving the van, and did not say or do anything to respond, I persisted, and brought the incident up again, and asked him the same question all over again. (I pretended like maybe he did not hear what I said the first time.) And then what my father does—we are in the van, on a brief straight away on the route home to my folks’ house, so I can get ready to move out on my own—he, without moving his hands on the wheel or moving one muscle except for his neck, turns his head to look at me, and gives me this look. It is not a pissed off look, or a confused one like he believes he did not quite hear. And it is not like he says, ‘What the hell is the matter with you,’ or ‘Get the fuck outta here,’ or any of the usual things he says where you can tell he is pissed off. He does not say one thing, however, this look he gives me says it all, like he can not believe he just heard this shit come out of my mouth, like he is in total disbelief, and total disgust, like not only did he never in his life waggle his dick at me for no reason when I was a little kid but just the fact that I could even fucking imagine that he ever waggled his dick at me, and then like, believe it, and then come into his own presence in this rental van and, like, accuse him. Etc., etc. The look he reacted and gave me in the van while he drove, after I brought up the memory and asked him straight up about it—this is what sent me totally over the edge, where my father was concerned. The look he turned and slowly gave me said he was embarrassed for me, and embarrassed for himself for even being related to me. Imagine if you were at a large, fancy, and coat-and-tie dinner or track banquet with your father, and if, like, you all of a sudden got up on the banquet table and bent down and took a shit right there on the table, in front of everybody at th
e dinner—this would be the look your father would be giving you as you did it (took a shit). Roughly, it was then, in the van, that I felt like I could have killed him. For a second, I felt like I wished the van would open up and swallow me whole, I was so embarrassed. But, just split seconds later, what I felt was I was so totally pissed off I could have killed him. It was weird—the memory in itself did not, at the time, get me pissed off, but only freaked out, like in a shocked daze. But, in the rented van that day, the way my father did not even say anything, but merely drove home to the house in silence, with both hands on the wheel, and that look on his face about me asking about it—now I was totally pissed off. I always thought that thing you hear about seeing ‘red’ if you get mad enough was a figure of speech, but it is real. After I packed up all my shit in the van, I moved away, and did not get in contact with my folks for over a year. Not a word. My apartment, in the same town, was maybe only two miles away, but I did not even tell them my phone number. I pretended they did not exist. I was so disgusted and pissed off. My Mom had no clue why I was not in contact, but I sure was not going to mention a word to her about any of it, and I knew, for fucking-‘A’ sure, my father was not going to say anything to her about it. Everything I saw stayed slightly red for months, after I moved out and broke off contact, or at least a pink tinge. I did not think of the memory of my father waggling his dick at me as a little kid very often, but barely a day went by that I did not remember that look in the van he gave me when I brought it up again. I wanted to kill him. For months, I thought about going home when nobody was there and kicking his ass. My sisters had no clue why I was not in contact with my folks, and said I must have gone crazy, and was breaking my Mom’s heart, and when I called them they gave me shit about breaking off contact without explanation constantly, but I was so pissed off, I knew I was going to go to my grave never saying another fucking word about it. It was not that I was chicken to say anything about it, but I was so fucking over the edge about it, it felt like, if I ever mentioned it again, and got any kind of look from somebody, something terrible would happen. Almost every day, I imagined that, as I went home and was kicking his ass, my father would keep asking me why I was doing it, and what it meant, but I would not say anything, nor would my face have any look or emotion on it as I beat the shit out of him.
Then, as time passed, I, little by little, got over the whole thing. I still knew that the memory of my father waggling his dick at me in the rec room was real, but, little by little, I started to realize, just because I remembered the incident, that did not mean, necessarily, my father did. I started to see that maybe he had forgotten the whole incident. It was possible that the whole incident was so weird and unexplained, that my father, psychologically, blocked it out of his memory, and that when I, out of (from his point of view) nowhere, brought it up to him in the van, he did not remember ever doing something as bizarre and unexplained as coming down and threateningly waggling his dick at a little kid, and thought I had lost my fucking mind, and gave me a look that said he was totally disgusted. It is not like I totally believed my father had no memory of it, but more like I was admitting, little by little, it was possible he blocked it out. Little by little, it seemed like the moral of a memory of any incident that weird is, anything is possible. After the year, I got to this position in my attitude where I figured that, if my father was willing to forget about the whole thing of me bringing up the memory of the incident in the van, and to never bring it up, then I was willing to forget the whole thing. I knew that I, for fucking-‘A’ goddamn sure, would never bring any of it up again. When I arrived at this attitude about the whole thing, it was around early July, right before the 4th Of July, which is also my littlest sister’s birthday, and so, out of (to them) nowhere, I call my folks’ house, and ask if I can come along for my sister’s birthday, and meet them at the special restaurant they traditionally take my sister to on her birthday, because she loves it so much (the restaurant). This restaurant, which is in our town’s down town, is Italian, kind of expensive, and has mostly dark, wooden decor, and has menus in Italian. (Our family is not Italian.) It was ironic that it was at this restaurant, on a birthday, that I would be getting back in contact with my folks, because, when I was a little kid, our family tradition was that this was ‘my’ special restaurant, where I always got to go for my birthday. I somewhere, as a kid, got the idea that it was run by The Mob, in which I had a total fascination, as a little kid, and always bugged my folks until they took me on at least my birthday—until, little by little, as I grew up, I outgrew it, and then, somehow, it passed into being my littlest sister’s special restaurant, like she had inherited it. It has black and red checkered table cloths, and all the waiters look like enforcers for The Mob, and, on the restaurant’s tables, there are always empty wine bottles with candles stuck in the hole, which have melted, and several colors of wax run and harden up all over the sides of the bottle in lines and varied patterns. As a little kid, I remembered having a weird fascination in the wine bottles with all the dried wax running all over them, and of having to be asked, over and over, by my father, not to keep picking the wax off. When I arrived at the restaurant, in a coat and tie, they were all already there, at a table. I remember my Mom looked totally enthusiastic and pleased just to see me, and I could tell she was willing to forget the whole year of me not contacting them, she was just so pleased to feel like a family again.
My father said, ‘You’re late.’ His face had zero expression either way. My Mom said, ‘I’m afraid we already ordered, is that OK.’
My father said they had ordered for me already, being as I was a little late getting there.
I sat down, and smilingly asked what they ordered me.
My father said, ‘A chicken presto dish thing your mother ordered for you.’
I said, ‘But I hate chicken. I always hated it. How could you forget I hate chicken?’
We all looked at each other for a second, around the table, even my littlest sister, and her boyfriend with the hair. There was one long split second of all looking at each other. This was when the waiter was bringing everybody’s chicken. Then my father smiled, and drew one of his fists back jokingly, and said, ‘Get the fuck outta here.’ Then my Mom put her hand up against her upper chest, like she does when she is afraid she’s going to laugh too hard, and laughed. The waiter put my plate in front of me, and I pretended to look down and make a face, and we all laughed. It was good.
BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN
B.I. #40 06-97
BENTON RIDGE OH
‘It’s the arm. You wouldn’t think of it as a asset like that would you. But it’s the arm. You want to see it? You won’t get disgusted? Well here it is. Here’s the arm. This is why I go by the name Johnny One-Arm. I made it up, not anybody being, like, hardhearted—me. I see how you’re trying to be polite and not look at it. Go ahead and look though. It don’t bother me. Inside my head I don’t call it the arm I call it the Asset. How all would you describe it? Go on. You think it’ll hurt my feelings? You want to hear me describe it? It looks like a arm that changed its mind early on in the game when it was in Mama’s stomach with the rest of me. It’s more like a itty tiny little flipper, it’s little and wet-looking and darker than the rest of me is. It looks wet even when it’s dry. It’s not a pretty sight at all. I usually keep it in the sleeve until it’s time to haul it out and use it for the Asset. Notice the shoulder’s normal, it’s just like the other shoulder. It’s just the arm. It’ll only go down to like the titty-nipple of my chest here, see? It’s a little sucker. It ain’t pretty. It moves fine, I can move it around fine. If you look close here at the end there’s these little majiggers you can tell started out wanting to be fingers but didn’t form. When I was in her stomach. The other arm—see? It’s a normal arm, a little muscley on account of using it all the time. It’s normal and long and the right color, that’s the arm I show all the time, most times I keep the other sleeve pinned up so it don’t look to be even anything
like a arm in there at all. It’s strong though. The arm is. It’s hard on the eyes but it’s strong, sometimes I’ll try and get them to armwrestle it to see how strong it is. It’s a strong little flippery sucker. If they think they can stand to touch it. I always say if they don’t think they can stand touching it why that’s OK, it don’t hurt my feelings. You want to touch it?’
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men: Stories Page 7