“I just came to tell you that you have your annual employee review on the twentieth. It might really help if you’d put some extra effort into your appearance, just for that one day, just to show me that you can, if you wanted to.”
I was wearing what I always wore, that is, a faded black T-shirt (printed with Primus—Suck on This, bought for eighty-nine cents at the Goodwill the day after I moved in with Lise), rather faded black jeans (five bucks, same Goodwill), and gray canvas fake Chucks. I hadn’t gotten around to buying many more clothes, since it was hot and the last thing on my mind was buying sweaters and nice wool slacks and Oxford shirts. “Um, okay,” was my response. “Thanks for the reminder. I’ve got this guy on hold, so . . .”
“So get back to what you’re getting paid for,” Trace snapped, giving the Post-Its one last sneer and turning to his next victim, Moll, who visibly paled when he walked up and tapped her on the shoulder.
After work, I went to the Salvation Army to look for nice clothes, but everything I liked was too big for me—the perennial problem in my life. I didn’t want to spend forever shopping out of the boys’ section—I mean, at least when I was wearing all black, I looked something like an adult, or at least a college kid. I stood in front of one of the mirrors holding up blazers against myself, not really seeing anything except the chapped lips, glasses, and the raspberry-red roseacea stains on my cheeks that my mother called “my natural blusher.” Several days’ growth of hair stained my upper lip and chin, but it mostly just looked dirty. I looked like a boy playing Dress Up In Daddy’s Clothes.
Before I knew it, the store was closing and they kicked me out. I wandered around Grand Street for a while in the hot, murky dark, looking for stars in the sullen sky, sucking down air pollution, smoking and humming songs. A homeless guy asked me for a cigarette; I was running low, so I said no. Almost without pausing, he called me a “fuckin’ asshole” and kept walking.
I walked the rest of the way home, enjoying the cooler air of evening, to find Lise and her friend Elizabeth on the futon together, drinking bottles of beer and watching a movie. “Hey, Squire,” Lise said. Elizabeth burst out laughing.
“Hi,” I said, going to the fridge and taking out the cold-water pitcher. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” said Elizabeth. “I should get going, Lise.”
“Yeah—okay—let me know about shopping tomorrow.”
“Do you want to come to the show?”
“No, I have plans. Remember?”
“Oh, yeah. Totally. Well, bye—see ya, Squire.” Elizabeth’s voice became a drawl that was supposed to be suggestive, but mostly just made her sound like a drag queen.
“Bye,” I said, not looking up until I heard the door close. “So, not to be paranoid, but what were you laughing about?”
“That’s paranoid, Squire,” Lise said, frowning, then smiling and sticking out her tongue. “Now, grab a beer and some dinner. They’re showing the first three Star Trek movies, and we’re only half-way through Wrath of Khan. And Liz brought over some killer bud. Ah, there’s that smile.”
4th September, 1:13 p.m.
Juba has me tripping. I had to print this out:
[this, printed out, glued into the composition book]
My most beloved Squire,
Summer is hell. SO BORED. There’s got to be some way I can get addicted to crack or something. There’s no crack in San Sabas as far as I can tell, just a lot of idiots who think that being a debutante is actually a really good thing. What kind of brainwashing did they have? Anyway, enough of that. Arachne and I waxed our legs—what a rush! Worth it, too. You should try it sometime. Arachne’s boyfriend is coming back from Chicago day after tomorrow and apparently they are going to have sex for the very first time. She’s already rehearsed what she’s going to do and say—she’s definitely going to give him a bj. She was kind of iffy on it, but I told her she has to do it for Science to see if it’s really gross or what. If she doesn’t like it, I have to buy her lunch for the first month of school.
Now if I can get my parents off my back about this debutante thing, I’ll consider myself to be doing something right. They obviously don’t know me at all if they think I’d be into something that stupid—I mean, all that money that I’d really rather spend coming to visit you and show you the tattoo that Arachne gave me. I would take a picture of it, but it’s in such a weird place and I don’t think the camera would reach.
So when are you coming to see me? You do like me, don’t you? You should come for my birthday—sweet sixteen. I think my mom is making a cake with swoops of pink frosting and silver decorettes. Dear Gaia. Arachne and I intend to play along until midnight or so, then we’re going downtown to drink Jäger and try to stir up some trouble. She just got the freshest pair of leopard-skin thigh boots out of this catalogue and she looks really hot in ‘em. I will take a picture and send it to you.
This picture was something we did last night. It really looks like it hurts, but it’s actually pretty comfortable—she stuck a pillow under my neck so I could relax. Don’t you think she should become a photographer?
...Juba...
“I am human and I need to be loved just like everybody else does”
The accompanying picture is just way too intense. I waited until everybody else had gone home before I even looked at it, and I’m glad I did. She’s right, it really does look like it hurts, and yes, Arachne has a long future ahead of herself as a photographer for Hustler. She’s not as good as Juba, but she could probably get work.
I e-mailed her back and told her that yes, I did like her, but that I didn’t think I could make it out for her birthday. Am I leading her on? Man, it’s kind of exciting—I mean, she’s seen pictures of me; what does she think she’s doing? Why would anybody develop an unreasonable attachment to a broke guy who looks like a cross between a sparrow and a frog? But whatever. It’s good for my ego. I just wish that real girls would actually take an interest every once in a while. Since Amanda, I think I’ve been on like three dates, all either boring or disastrous (remember Julia? And the shellfish? Yeah). Amanda really fucked me up in a lot of ways. I just don’t even know if I can actually have sex anymore. What was it like? I just remember it being really, really nice, if a little terrifying. It’s a big trust issue thing, putting a part of yourself into another person. Like, inside. But I really enjoy the kissing and snuggling part, and the soft sleepy feeling that comes after you’ve come, which I actually do get to feel on a regular basis. Or did. I can’t really jack off with Lise in the apartment, which is kind of a drag, so I’ve changed my schedule to daytimes. I usually get my rocks off right at the end of my lunch break, which makes going back to work really difficult. It’s also hard to visualize a horny goddess fingering her slick open pussy while you’re standing in an echoing, cold metal stall. Oh well. Maybe I should just ask Lise if there’s a good time when I could get off when she’s not around. Would she mind? Maybe a note?
I returned from lunch, still licking the pizza from my chops and hoping to take a few minutes for my daily constitutional, but Beth grabbed me in the hall and dragged me towards the support office. “Meeting, Squire, meeting; did you forget? Trace is going to ream your ass for this,” she muttered under her breath.
The support technicians looked up as one as I came in. Gently I eased myself down onto the carpet, at Moll’s feet—the safest place from a psychic standpoint. We always sat together at meetings, so we could trade knowing looks.
This staff meeting was almost exactly like every other. Words careened around the room—words that meant nothing to me, like “proactive,” “morale,” “retirement benefits,” and “Solaris.” Grievances were aired. Beth actually raised her voice. All through it, Trace just sat there and watched all of us, warily, as if expecting a gun to be produced at any moment.
“Certain members of the support team haven’t exactly been pulling their weight,” said Trace when he finally spoke, stretching like an anaconda contemplati
ng lunging for a suckling pig. “Of course, Moll has baby Kellie, and Thomas has his back injury, and Squire...” He glanced over at me and bared all his teeth, even the molars. “Of course, Squire has his other career which obviously means more to him than Link-Up does.”
There were soft sniggers of laughter. I took a deep breath and looked past Trace’s left ear to the wall.
“What I have to say doesn’t come easily. I’d love it if we could have a free-wheelin’, nice and easy approach to technical support. But we can’t. Our competition is very professional. They don’t have the sheer technical skill that we have, of course, but they treat each customer as a priority individual. None of this ‘Sorry, I don’t have an answer for that, and I’m not crazy about your tone of voice, ma’am’ stuff. Squire.”
“There was nothing else I could do,” I blurted. “She was insulting me. She was getting personal. I told her there was nothing I could do about the stupid T1—if I could have crawled down there and spun fiber-optics out of my ass, I would have.”
More sniggers. Moll poked me with her toe.
“That’s all right, Squire. But at the same time, how would you feel if you were that person?”
Of course the obvious answer was “I wouldn’t give a shit,” but I had the feeling that wouldn’t fly. I shook my head and looked at the carpet.
“Exactly. We have to be professional. We have to take Link-Up seriously. We’re on top, but we won’t stay there without your help . . .”
After the meeting broke up, we all slumped back into our ergonomic chairs and reapplied headsets to our skulls. I didn’t immediately put myself back on the phone, though. I let my hand hang over the button for a full ten minutes before I pressed it and let the meaningless words spill from my mouth—”Link-Up Tech Support, my name is Squire, how can I help you today?
5 September, 11:22 p.m.
I’m getting stoned and I’d rather be drinking. No booze in the house. Lise traded one of her co-workers, a seventeen-year-old high school dropout, all of our vodka and our whiskey and all our gin for this huge bag of Oregon buds. I see the wisdom of Lise’s decision now, but all the same, I need to get fucked up and I’d rather be drinking my way there.
I’m getting stoned and I’d rather be drawing. I got a new pen today and I want to see what it looks like on my troublesome recycled paper.
I’m getting stoned and I’d rather be . . . making daiquiris. Banana and melon daiquiris. The get-chicks-into-bed strength daiquiris. The kind of daiquiris that will make Lise shed her tough-gal exterior, rip off her black lace tank top, and devour me. Yeah. I want daiquiris.
I’m getting stoned and I’d rather be reacting to people emotionally—the kind of emotionalism released by alcohol. Pot doesn’t have any emotionalism. It brings either clarity or a cloud. Nothing in between. At the moment I’m realizing clarity. My repressed desire for Lise is making its way to the surface again. What the truth is, Squire, is that you’re starting to dig her again, the way you swore you wouldn’t. Remember the time you couldn’t even look her in the eye for a week after you called to ask her on a “date,” and you chickened out and hung up on her? Remember how you listened to her conversations with your mother through the walls, just so that you could hear her voice when you jacked off? You thought you buried all that. You didn’t. Quit kidding yourself, baby.
I’m getting stoned and I’d rather be getting laid.
I’m getting really stoned and repetitive. Just a little bit. I really wish I’d gotten drunk instead. I have enough stress in my life already without looking at Lise’s feet every night, wondering what they taste like.
Lise home. She got more liquor, oh, bless her. She’s pouring a really stiff shot of gin in a tall glass, dropping in ice, and shoving an olive on top. “It’s a fucking martini, Einstein, a fucking dry martini,” she says. “You’re welcome.”
Shortly after, there came that Sunday afternoon. I never did forget that, and I doubt I ever will.
The blistering heat of the last week had mellowed to a nearly pleasant Crock-Pot intensity, and there was nothing on cable more fascinating than the Weather Channel. I had worn one of Lise’s tank tops on Friday (a winsome number, pale green with a Bee Gees sparkly iron-on) and had gotten a really bad sunburn. Friday night and Saturday had seen me lying face down on the futon, wearing only boxers, reading graphic novels while occasionally slathering my neck, shoulders, and arms with aloe vera. Lise had to cover some shifts at Pronto, without protest, grateful for their air conditioning. Sunday, though, we’d spent the day drinking beer, eating popsicles, smoking some of the new weed, and watching a tape of Voltron episodes she had gotten at a yard sale.
The tape ended. I assumed my former face-down position on the futon, head dangling somewhat over the side, and Lise put on some music. She opened another beer. “Want another popsicle?” she asked.
“No, I’ll hurl.”
“Hmmmm . . . can I put some more aloe on your back? You’re looking kind of peely-snaky back there.”
I looked at her ankles and feet, crossed casually, bare, one big toenail gently scratching a mosquito bite on the opposite metatarsal arch. I bit my lip and said casually, “Uh, yeah, sure; it’s in the fridge.”
I stripped off my shirt, closed my eyes and lay as still as I could, trying to control my breathing, trying to make my heart stop beating so quickly. My fingers were sticky with popsicle leavings, but I left them dangling on the ends of my pink peeling arms. When a stimulus came it was shocking—Lise’s hands, cold with aloe, moving with excruciating slowness on my sensitive back. I gasped a bit. “Sorry,” Lise mumbled.
“No, it’s just cold. Feels pretty nice, actually.”
“Well, good.” Her hands became more brisk, slathering me heavily with the slick aloe, then began to work in earnest, rubbing it into my skin. “You’re so skinny, child,” she declared, flicking her fingernail against my shoulder blade.
“I try to be fat,” I protested, and we both laughed.
“You eat enough junk food. I’ve seen you.”
“It’s my nervous energy,” I said.
“That much is obvious. You have enough neurotic energy to fuel the southeast grid. And maybe then some.”
“Am I neurotic?” I asked pleasantly.
“Are you neurotic. Are there hicks at a bait store? You set new records of neurosis, pal. Whole new schools could be set up just to study how loopy you are.”
“And why do you put up with it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I kinda like you.”
We both stopped breathing for a second.
I turned over and looked up at her, and she bent over and kissed me on the mouth, her lips sweet with lager and sugar. Her breasts brushed my collarbones, then she was pressed up against me, all the delicious weight and smell and skin of her, sweaty and smooth, and her heart beating quickly against mine.
September 6th, 1:04 a.m.
So there is love. There exists love. I assumed, having given and received Valentines before (admittedly, receiving far fewer than I gave), that I understood love, that I had been “in love.” Nothing of the kind. Love is not a state that I myself create or destroy—it’s a continuum, a medium, a sea into and out of which we pass. I have been dipped into this sea like Achilles into the Styx, and all of me but the tendon is made invincible by love.
I breathe in love—I exhale love. I feel like a mutant gene has been awakened inside me, like an X-ray shatters the helix and breeds a monster—the mutant gene that makes me run across the street for olives and malt liquor at odd hours of the night. Some would be shocked by the impersonal nature of love, but it’s both universal and terribly individual, as every atom has its place, its significance, in a vast and uncaring cosmos.
Isn’t it amazing how a kiss can just go on and on for what seems like ever? How your whole body is giving you demanding signals every few seconds—hurry up, I want to fuck, I want to fuck—but your mind and your heart draw it on for longer, enjoying
the tension, the astonishment. Surely that happens only the first time you kiss someone—with Amanda I thought I’d explode with excitement after kissing her for five seconds, and we’d usually end up panting and covered with jizz fifty-five seconds later. This afternoon it was a long time of kissing, and then a long time of taking off each other’s clothes (she had it easy, just some shorts and some jockeys, and all I had to deal with was a light dress and some knickers and that bitch of a bra with the closure on the front, which caused me no end of grief and my lady fair no end of amusement. (Vexation, I should say. Not grief. I was caused some vexation.) But once that was done with . . . Oh, man. I’ve forgotten what nipples are like. I mean, there’s my nipples, which are small and pink and almost always hard, but they’re not girl nipples, which startle me with their size, their springy firmness, their responsiveness. I thought my nipples were pretty sensitive—she pinched the hell out of them in fact—but if you so much as brush hers with your fingertip, she’s humping your leg. That was great. I never had anything but a basset hound hump my leg before. It was much more exciting this time.
And she came. And she was sopping wet and horny afterward. And we fucked three times tonight already and I’m looking at her now, asleep on her side next to me, and I want to have her again. She is so beautiful. Next to her I’m a peeling red monstrosity. She took great pleasure in ripping big peeling chunks of skin off my back—it both hurt like hell and turned me on. She is as icky as me. The floor is littered with bits of shed skin and the shed skins of condoms, glistening in the light from a candle. This is really bad for my eyes. I should put it down and go to sleep. But I have to get some of this love out of my system or I’m going to burst.
5:35 a.m.
Lise by dawn. Lovely, stinking of sex, smiling in her sleep. Mom is going to lose it.
“. . . Put your arms around me . . .” I breathed softly down her neck, and she rolled over and obeyed me, eyes still closed, lips pursed as if she were trying to concentrate. I kissed her face and chest and wrapped my legs around hers under the flannel sheet. “Wake up; let’s make out,” I whispered. I was on fire with the desire to bring her to orgasm again. The sense of power it gave me was incredible.
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