WHEN WE MADE LOVE
The other night I went to a party.
Their party.
I know you know who I’m talking about.
I got there at around eleven thirty, with a liter bottle of ginger ale that I flooded to the top with Kentucky Gentleman. The drink whirlpooled to the color of brushed amber, and it smelled vaguely like cleaning supplies – I couldn’t say exactly which one, but it’d probably be store-brand.
I still feel awkward at these get-togethers – no matter how many of these drinks I make. I know you don’t see these people very much anymore – it’s still weird when we’re both in the same room, I don’t want to lie about that – and no one really wants to deal with the drama of it all too much.
I guess I “won” the right to them, but I wasn’t really trying to – it’s just the way the chips fell. And just like roulette, the prize is really in the gloating, if anything. It’s not like I did anything to earn this. It’s just the way the chips fell.
My drink was awful fizzy, and it made it hard to breathe through my nose. I couldn’t stop sniffing for the whole night – it felt like the whiskey was entering my sinuses, and that somehow rotted mahogany had turned into gas. The stuff has a way of getting caught in your lungs till the morning.
After losing a game of beer pong that I didn’t care all too much about with these people I didn’t care all too much about, this guy we both know asked: “Hey, what was it like to make love to her?”
To you.
He said he always had a thing for you and admitted that he used to be jealous of me with a drunk shrug that faked nonchalance as well as your roommate faked orgasms. Or at least as well as she did that with that one guy she was seeing in July.
(I’ll still never get why someone who studies clinical psychology can feel comfortable calling their partner “daddy” in bed.)
When I thought about his question, I wanted to say that it was wild and crazy and like something from a playboy write-in, but it wasn’t, really.
I wanted to say that it felt like our souls were connecting and our moans and whimpers made songs that sang in symphony with one another, but it wasn’t really like that either.
I wanted to compare you to a porn star or us to a romance novel or it to a firework display gone awry, but it wasn’t really any of those things, and as I heard myself aloud trying to describe it, I sounded like a pitbull trying force out the subtle tones of a soft purr.
I rambled on about this until I thought of the time I went to the beach with my parents when I was four. It’s one of the first things I can remember. My parents bought me a sunhat and velcro sandals and gas station sunglasses, with flames on the side, just for the occasion. They took lots of pictures. I don’t know where those pictures are now.
When we got to the beach, my mother covered herself in suntan lotion, spreading over the freckles that covered her arms and legs in a desperate attempt to stop more from scattering about. Some doctors say that freckles are a sign of skin cancer, but I always thought that they were beautiful, like a leopard. Do leopards get skin cancer? I don’t know – I hope not. They don’t deserve it; they’re elegant things, and I know how you feel about elegant things getting spoiled.
My father speared the sand with a giant rented umbrella and rocked it back and forth with the rhythms of an oil pump. While he grunted against the strains of his paternal obligations – those ones he was held to even when on holiday – I saw the ocean for the first time:
An impossibly straight line; unending arms, extended; a big blue hug made of the same stuff I knew how to doggy paddle in. I hadn’t learned any other type of stroke at that point, but I was particularly good at the doggy paddle. Olympic invitations and all of that.
While everyone had their eyes on what they thought they had to do, I ran into the ocean with my sunhat and velcro sandals and gas station sunglasses and fell straight forward, plummeting into it – the cobalt crashing into me.
I floated underneath the surface and tried to drag myself towards it with pudgy arms. All of my training in doggy paddling couldn’t help me underneath its force as it tossed me back into the air and underneath its indigo and I felt so helpless to the tides and to the moon and to the turning of the earth that all affected it.
The ocean chose when I could breathe and when I couldn’t breathe and I was completely at its mercy, lost in it without a cord to hold onto. Up and down, against the sand and the air, breathing in plenty of both.
The ocean was something I wanted to be a part of, but when you’re in it, there’s more going on beneath its skin than it’ll ever let on. Hidden torrents and secret storms, all submerged beneath the velvet smushing of its waves.
It took my gas station sunglasses, the ones with flames on the side, and I didn’t even care very much.
Before I could make anything out of it, before I could even feel excited or scared or process much of the all I felt in that moment, my dad reached down with his earthy hands and yanked me to shore.
After that, swimming at the pool wasn’t very exciting anymore.
I remember the next time I went to the beach, some friends and I let the whitecaps of the waves chase us when they rolled in, and as the riptide pulled them back, we’d chase them, too. It was fun, but it wasn’t the same.
It will never be the same, really.
That’s what it was like when we made love, I stammered.
That guy we both know laughed, grabbed another beer, and said, yeah, he totally figured as much.
walnut & string
She was the second girl I ever saw naked. The first one was, of course, my high school girlfriend, Marie – I can still remember the first time in her parents’ poolhouse that afternoon two Septembers ago – but this time was different, entirely different. This girl's name was Stacy… Stacy Something, I didn’t even know, to tell you the truth. I mean, we were just introduced, I barely knew a thing about her. But I knew her body, and let me tell you, it was a body worth knowing. She was thin, incredibly so: her flesh lined out trenches between the bones of her ribcage and her hips poked soft plateaus out her sides. My fingers trembled as I peered over the tiny curves and acute angles that the light emphasized on her body. Sweat started slinking down my brow as I slowly reached forward and curled my fingers around that abrasive piece of charcoal I was meant to sketch her with. Everyone had already started drawing her by now, and here I was, slack-jawed and spellbound to the sight of a stranger I knew I’d never see again. People always said that Life Drawing 220 was a pretty taxing course, but no one ever mentioned all of the emotional exhaustion involved.
I think the professor chose Stacy as a model because her shape was in such sharp contrast to the normal people who volunteered for the course: middle aged men with spherical bellies and concave buttocks to train us in capturing light and shadow, or older women, with what Richie called “flapjack titties,” to train us in… I couldn’t even tell you… moral endurance? I looked over Richie’s shoulder to see how his work was coming along, but all that was there was a plain page with nothing but a pair of B-cup breasts in the center. I chortled; he turned to me abruptly, his gold hoop on his left ear bouncing against the wire of his headphone earbud, which was constantly whispering Robert Plant.
He laughed out an explanation: "Gotta draw the best parts first, right?” He stuck out his tongue and rocked his head back and forth to the secret beats of John Bonham’s bass drum. I turned back to my own page, my eye twitching as I looked up at Stacy Something – I really tried to respect her enough to make up for Richie. I started with her wide, white eyes, and moved out; her soft centers to sharp edges, from her hairs curled core to its spiked split ends.
By the end of the class period, I had finished Stacy’s face, shoulders, upper arms, breast, torso, and her hand, with fraying strands of hair curling around an extended finger. It was far from done, but the progress was there, and even without the sum, her parts were beautiful. Professor Marshall made his way around, the sunlight twitching between his scalp’s grey perimeter as he nodded in approval at each individuals’ work. He stopped at Richie’s – still just a pair of breasts with one or two ribs tacked below it – and the professor sighed, rubbing his temple.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Richie,” he stammered, “but whatever bizarre chromosomes you’ve got in you have made you one hell of an artist. Honestly, this is visceral stuff. Visceral. Keep up the good work.”
I sat, astonished, and Richie turned around, lifting his index and pinky fingers and sticking out his tongue like an 80’s cock-rocker. Professor Marshall glanced over a few others, stopped by mine, and scratched his 5 o’clock shadow. I tucked my hands into themselves to keep them still.
“Well, James,” he pursed his lips, “it’s, well… it’s perfectly fine, I guess. Perfectly fine. As usual, it ‘gets the job done’, as they say.” He smiled with a slanted mouth and sauntered on towards the rest of the students.
Professor Marshall asked us to leave our work in the studio for further review, but after that, I wouldn’t wanted to have taken it home anyway.
The sublime and skeletal Stacy put on a robe and descended from her stage to gaze through everyone’s reflections of her, as though she were at the optometrist, peering through different lenses before finding and choosing the most flattering sight.
Before she could even reach ground level, I had managed myself into my sweater and scrambled out the door.
≡
That night, I put all my books by Clive Bell, Liu Xie, Arthur Schopenhauer, Leo Tolstoy, and all those other clueless aestheticians and theologians into a cardboard box and tucked them under my dirty clothes in my dorm closet. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” groaned out my boombox as I forced myself into a long, belligerent sleep.
I woke up to a key turning in the lock.
“Lying in bed to ‘So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright’? Aw Jesus, what’s happened now, James? Has Claire called you? That fucking cuntress.” That was Skylar, my dormmate – he’s a sculpturing major.
“No,” I said, rubbing my eyes, “no, nothing like that.” He was dragging in a 4 foot mass of chicken wire, half caked in clay – god knows what it was supposed to be this time. “It was just… I don’t even know what art really is anymore, do you know what I mean? I thought I did, I definitely thought I did. But now… I don’t think I even belong at Cal Art anymore. My dad keeps talking about this dot com bubble or something and saying that there’s barely going to be any jobs – and, if I’m not even good in my own class, how am I going to fare in the real world where people aren’t obligated to say ‘three nice things’ about one of my charcoal drawings? I just feel like I’m living in an illusion or something.”
Skylar rubbed his dirtied hands on an old t-shirt, his own skin browner than the clay that flaked off. “Man, fuck that – you’re a brilliant artist! All your stuff looks so realistic and, I dunno, true, y’know?” He tossed the shirt on this bed, already covered with a tartan shell.
“Thanks, Skylar, I appreciate that and all, but... I feel like there’s something intrinsic to art that I just don’t get – or my professors don’t think I do. When I say that my favorite artist is Da Vinci, people give me this pitying look like I’m a fucking cripple.”
“I mean, I don’t know what to tell you, man, I just carve shit.” He laughed, “But look. If you really wanna know what your professors want out of your art, why don’t you just ask ‘em? I mean, they’re a buncha awkward old fucks, but it helps to know what to cater towards. How do you think the 10-foot steel cock I made last term got put on display in the Sculpture Garden for three months?”
That was true – ‘Steely Dan’ was lauded by most of the professors. And, to be honest, it was a pretty decent sculpture.
“Well,” I turned down the volume on the boombox, “as long as I don’t have to mold a set of genitals… I guess it couldn’t hurt.”
≡
I breathed in and out in preparation, limply raised my hand, and knocked on Professor Marshall’s office door. A voice came through, muffled through the yellow wood and frosted glass:
“Not now, my friend, I am most certainly busy.” He sounded testy – I could practically see him through the wall, waving a dismissing hand.
“Um, it’s James?”
No response.
“James Young?”
No response.
“I called you yesterday about having a meeting today at three?”
“Oh! Right, right, right.” I could hear him shuffling papers and slamming drawers. “Give me just a morsel of a moment.” After a few more rearrangements, the door swung open. He stood smiling and a bit out of breath, “Ah! Yes, come in, come in. Take a seat, my boy.” Sweat glistened on his temple and padded the cotton armpits in his shirt. “Not that seat, the other one. Yes, there, thank you.”
“Uh-huh. Well, I wanted to talk about the nude portrait we worked on earlier this week. I was just wondering, well, what you thought was wrong with mine?”
“Oh, you wanted to discuss that.” He turned to look out the window. “Well, it’s an elaborate issue. There’s nothing wrong with your art, James, nothing explicitly unbearable about it or anything. It’s merely, how would one put it? Uncomplicated.”
“Oh?” I spoke through my locking jaw. “I… suppose I can see what you mean, but… I don’t think I’m the only uncomplicated one in the class?” I was speaking faster than I meant to, “I mean, look at Richie! He just drew the model’s chest, and I think that’s pretty much the least complicated thing I could think of!”
“James, James… there’s no reason to point fingers or divert blame for your own inequities – it’s extremely unbecoming.” He smiled. “Now, Richie… he just made something true to himself, and in his straightforwardness, he added a layer complexity – don’t you get it? By focusing on something so raw, he was able to show us the rawness in ourselves, the audience. Yours just shows that you can copy a picture pretty well.” He turned towards the window. “Look, for example, at the geese out there on the lawn. Do they move you, Jim?”
“Um,” I wanted to correct him on my name, but decided not to, “I suppose they don’t. Particularly.”
“Of course not, because a goose is a goose is a goose, my boy. And if you draw a goose, all you’ve done is draw a goose, and whose going to be emotionally arisen by a goose?” I shrugged. “Precisely. But take a look at my painting, ‘Bluejay.’” He pointed to the wall. “Tell me that doesn’t move you.”
The painting was a completely black canvas, with two intersecting purple lines.
“I know,” he said, “Even after all these years, I still see something new every time I look at it. Well, Jim, all I can say is focus on portraying what you’re seeing, because I’m sure you’re a lot less boring than your paintings suggest you are. A lot less. At least I pray so!” He let out a boisterous laugh, “Let the world know what it really means to be Jim Young. I’d suggest seeing some other professors to see what they think. Maybe some of the ones focusing in impressionism or abstract art–”
“Or still life?” I asked.
“If…” he hesitated, “if you think that you would somehow learn something from that, then go for it.” He smiled the same sideways smiled as before. “Well, I’m sorry to cut this short, but I was in the middle of some very important work. So unless you have any other questions…?”
A silent second.
“I… um, I guess not. Have good day, Professor Marshall.” I walked out and quietly shut the door behind me and stared down the hall corridor, sighing as a way to convince myself of relief. Before leaving the building, I re-opened the door to pop my head in. “And Professor Marshall, I just wanted to say – ” he stood still, wide-eyed, and dropped a container of K-Y Jelly into his desk drawer and slammed it shut in swift and practiced motions. Both our faces both flooded and drained with blood in waves. “– thanks… for your help,” I choked out, before slamming the door.
I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking and my tongue from sliding to the back of my throat. I stumbled my way back to my dorm room, trying to sidestep the image of what I just saw and the speckled goose shit that was dabbled across the grass.
≡
After a few cups of coffee, I was able to numb myself into rational thought. Despite the way we, erm, came to conclude the conversation, I thought the meeting was ultimately beneficial, so I heeded his advice and decided to contact a few other teachers in different fields. I contacted Professor Lo, who taught French and German Impressionism 180, and met her the next day in the film lab. When I got there, she was shooting a projector and changing reels that had nothing on them but plain, colored film. This reel filled the white sheet on the wall with a turquoise rectangle. I knocked on the open doorframe.
“Professor Lo?”
She looked up, her small eyes alight and compounding underneath her glasses’ storm window lenses. She shuffled towards me as fast as her Birkenstocks would allow.
“And I’m guessing that makes you James!” She smiled broadly, marching over with an outstretched hand to shake mine. “Pleasure to meet you! Real pleasure – that’s a strong handshake you have there, mister! Come on in!” She turned on a second projector and yellow square overlapped the turquoise one.
“Thanks,” I chuckled, “can I ask what you’re doing here, Professor?”
“Oh this? It’s, well, it’s nothing really. I just found this outrageous old film stock and I think it’s pretty pretty, dontcha think, chief?” The two color blocks flickered over one another to make a seafoam blend, twitching as the shutters of the cameras sputtered at each other in conversation.
“Yes,” I said, “yes, it’s nice.”
“So, darling,” she oof-ed as she lifted the reel off of the first projector, “what brings you to me today? I don’t think you’re in one of my classes now, are you?”
“No, no, I haven’t taken yours yet – I will in the spring – but not yet. Erm, do you need any help with those reels, by the way?” The backs of her hands were bright red.
“I’m fine, pumpkin. Do continue.”
“Right, well… I guess I just don’t know how to deeply connect with the audience through my art, you know? It seems like everyone sees my stuff as merely ‘good,’ but not ‘riveting’ or ‘visceral,’ y’know? How do I cross that line?”
Professor Lo dropped the new reel onto the projector and turned it on: violet. “Well, have you got a sample of it for me?” I handed over a folder, and she walked towards the light in the doorway and held the papers up to it. “Nice, very nice. These are all very pretty. So what’s the problem, James?”
“Really? You mean that? Thank you – none of my own professors seem to appreciate them. They don’t seem to think of them as art – at best, they think they’re, well, just pretty.”
“Just pretty?” She scoffed, “Being pretty is all that art’s about! Look at that screen! That’s pretty, and boy howdy, you can’t tell me that’s not art!” One of the projectors seemed to be overheating, and filled the room with stench that reminded me of melting ants. “And look at this:” she took out a stone from his pocket, “I found this beauty on my walk to work today! See how pretty this pebble is?”
It was grey, and had chewing gum debris across its bottom.
“Art is everywhere, my child! And these,” she held my drawings, “are kind of pretty, too! So you bet you’ve made some art.”
“Erm,” I scratched my head, “thanks. I guess, I don’t know, are there any particular artists I should study to better wrap my head around this?”
“You’re asking for things to study? That’s a dangerous game there, dumpling! I mean, like I say in class” she chuckled to herself, “don’t make me Kant a bitch!” Her chuckles deformed into snorts, “Get it?” She sighed contentedly.
“Oh my, but seriously,” she continued, “you oughta read some of Emmanuel Kant’s work on the importance of the Beauty and the Sublime. It’s a real pretty read. And, I mean, I’m sure every other Professor’s going to go against me on this, but it’s nice to flip through a Thomas Kinkade series every once in a while. He may not be the deepest guy out there, but his stuff sure is nice to look at! He did a great piece on Nascar last year. I think you two may have a lot in common, actually!”
“Um,” the stink from the projector started to make me lightheaded, “thanks Professor Lo. Have a good day I – I appreciate your help.”
“Have a beautiful day, yourself, young thing! Keep up the pretty work!”
Something about being compared to a Nascar painter and the smell of smoldering cellulose made the end of this conversation less pleasant if I caught her, too, lube-handed.
≡
After that meeting, I figured I needed to talk to someone different – in every way possible, preferably. I contacted one of Skylar’s old teachers, Professor Hunt, who taught Woodcraft 250. I met him behind the Carpentry Lab, by the loading trucks. He had his flannel sleeves rolled up past his elbow, revealing a series of smudged out tattoos – words they looked like – the only clear one reading “Isabelle.”
“PROFESSOR HUNT?” I had to shout over wirr-ing and grinding of the various power tools that were running in the open air woodshop. He lifted up his safety goggles and squinted.
“YOU THAT KID WHO CALLED ME? JAMES OR WHATEVER?”
“YEAH THAT’S ME. I CALLED YOU BECAUSE –”
“HOLD ON, COME OVER ‘ROUND THE BUILDING, HERE.” We were surrounded by white aluminum siding and field. “Whew. That’s better. Hey, help me with this lumber real quick, if ya could – much obliged.” He tossed me the far end of a twelve foot 4”x4” and we reared it into the flatbed of his truck. “Riiiight there.” After we dropped it in, and he bent over and kneaded his spine as low as he could reach. It’s always funny seeing rigid old men attempt anything requiring flexibility; they can manage to make the most mundane activity look like gymnastic feats. “Thanks, kid – just pulled my back out a bit ago so I appreciate the hand. So yeah, what’s the deal? What dya need?”
“Oh, well, Skylar told me he had you as a professor –”
“Skylar Perry?”
“Yeah.”
“Good kid. Smartass, but a good kid. Anyways, yeah I had him. What about him?”
“He, um, mentioned you were a brilliant professor and suggested I seek out your advice for something.”
“Skylar said that?” He chuckled, “Bullshit. But I’ll help for what it’s worth, though I’ve got to head into town.”
“Oh, that’s fine, I’m going to the Quill and Coffee anyway, so I can walk with you if that’s alright.”
“Nah, don’t worry about that,” he patted his truck, “hop in, kid. I won’t be far from where I’m heading.” I climbed into the passenger side, and shifted the jerky bags and beer cans that were on the seat to the floor. “Sorry about all this shit, I’ve been real busy lately.”
“No, not a problem at all. So, I – ” his engine burst into ignition and blanketed over my voice.
“WHAT WAS THAT, KID? IT’S ALWAYS LOUD AT FIRST, BUT AFTER AWHILE – oh – after awhile it shuts up. Like a slut in confession, y’know? Eventually they wear themselves out after passing all that blame.” He burst out three practiced “heh’s” and picked up a rocks glass from the cup holder. He sipped on it, carefully balancing it amidst the trucks rocking.
I think it was a Black Russian.
I feigned laughter back.
“Well, I came here to, erm, confess, too. I don’t really know much about purpose. In art. My professors seem to think that my work doesn’t have much purpose at all, though I try to have it, I really do. I mean, sculptures and installations can theoretically take much longer than paintings to create, so you must have a pretty firm idea in mind of what the end result will be before you start carving or sawing for chiseling, right?”
He laughed with a great big HAH. “Man, a conundrum as old as time, ain’t it, kid? Whether art has to mean something or can it get away with just lookin’ nice? Like, should it be a scraggly hooker you pay 20 bucks to for a blowie, or a gorgeous stripper you toss 20 ones on? I guess either way you end up coming, as long as you take the risk of beating off in the bathroom, do ya feel me?”
“…I don’t think I do, erm, ‘feel you,’ sir.”
“Well, kid – gah, how do I put this…?” He snapped his fingers, “You ever hear the story of the biggest ball of yarn?”
“I don’t think I have.”
“Well it goes a little something like this,” he sipped from his glass as he pulled out of campus, “this one guy, Farmer Joe, has the biggest ball of yarn in all the state. Or, he thinks he does, but this other guy, Farmer Mike, has a big ball of yarn, too – equally big, so he says. There was all sorts of hubbub about who was gonna represent the state at the state fair – real prestigious shit, y’know – so they did what anyone would do, and they took the balls of yarn to the nearest high school and unraveled them around the running track. Took three days, and the crowds were hootin’ and hollerin’ the whole time, and once they got to the end – do you mind if I smoke? Cool, could you light this? …Thanks, kid. Anyways, where was I – yeah, so once they got to the end, the strings ended up coming to the exact same point in the track at the end, but one was tied in a knot and the other was wrapped around a walnut.”
“…And?” I asked.
“And… well,” I watched his eyes turn from dark paternal orbs into half moons; he was giggling. “I’m gonna be real with ya kid, I’m on some pretty heavy oxycontin right now, so I don’t really remember why I mentioned that. It seemed like an important thing to say, though.” He laughed to himself a bit, shaking his head. “Sorry, I’m sorry – wish I was a bit more in control right now – FUCK!” He slammed on his breaks, car screeching to halt a few feet before a mother with a stroller. “Fucking spics – this town has become a mad fiesta over the past fifteen years. If they didn’t bring pupusas up here with ‘em they might as well be extinct by now.” He flicked his cigarette out the window and took a long, lukewarm gulp from his drink as we pulled into a construction site. “But yeah, that story,” he wiped his mouth, “unlike those spics, art has a purpose. But it doesn’t need it. I don’t know.” He slapped by shoulder, “maybe art is like those spics after all!”
He was… a complex man.
“Anyways, we’re here, chief." We got out. “And hey, again, sorry I couldn’t be any more help.” He gestured past my shoulder, “Coffee shop’s about three blocks yonder, by the way.”
“No, no,” I shook my head, “its fine – it actually did kind of help, in a weird way.” Aside from his views on the influx of Hispanics, it actually was. He shrugged and we shook hands, “Can I, er, ask what you’re doing here, by the way?”
“Here?” He jerked his head to point behind him, “Moonlighting. Art doesn’t pay, kid. Call that the lesson of the day if you want to.” He slammed his car door shut.
“Oh… oh, well, thanks again.”
“No problem,” he picked up a hardhat from his flatbed and slapped it on his head, “catch you around, kid.”
“Catch you around, Professor.” I have to admit, it felt weird saying that to a drunk guy in a toolbelt, but he still managed a sense of power and authority, even despite his idiosyncrasies.
Beyond him, his friends at the site were working on soon-to-open opera house and concert hall, layering and weaving wood slats in an miraging effect that would absorb and divert echoes. I shouted to Professor Hunt that I thought it was coming along beautifully, but the forming walls and roof caught the words and hid them, lost under the percussive symphony of electric drills and circular saws.
≡
The bell of the coffee shop chimed as I entered, Skylar looked over his shoulder and waved me down to his table; he was with a girl, as per usual.
“Hey, dude – how’d the meeting with Hunt go? Crazy old fuck, ain’t he?”
“Crazy, but some of the stuff he said made some sense, when he wasn’t near hallucinating.” He eyes snapped up from the girls’, “Thanks for getting me in touch with him, though – I really do appreciate it.” I walked grabbed a seat from another table and pulled it over.
“My pleasure, bud. What’s this about hallucinating, though? He never quite seemed like the hippie type.” The girl next to him, ahem-ed. “Oh, but first, this young lady here is Stacy.”
The thin brunette slowly looked up with soft eyes and angled features. We both had a few seconds hesitance, and a start of recognition. She was the model from class.
“You know,” Skylar smiled, “she does some nude modeling here at the school!” Her thin eyebrows broke downward and she punched him in the shoulder.
“You’re such a dick! I was going for that quiet, mysterious femme fatale look – you totally fucking ruined it!” They laughed it off. “Anyways, we’ve already had the pleasure, Skylar. His pleasure, at least, I’m sure.”
“Oh, uh – ” I started a sentence, but didn’t know where to go with it.
“You two know each other?” Skylar asked. “Oooohh, no way! Is it weird seeing one another with clothes on?”
“Hey, I wasn’t naked!” I realized I was blushing, and so was she.
“So Stacy, did James here capture your bare and glorious frame in a good light?” Skylar was enjoying this way too much.
“Actually,” she said softly, “I really liked yours, James. It was nice. I like what you did with my hand in my hair, you had a good attention to detail. It was a lot better than that pervert next to you who only drew my tits. And, if you don’t mind me saying, your professor’s can be even creepier than him.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” I laughed, and they chuckled along, waiting for a story I wasn’t about to get into.
“But really,” she interrupted, “yours was very pretty, and, I don’t know, very sweet. It was earnest. Real, y’know?”
“Thanks,” I blushed again, “really, that means a lot, Stacy.”
“But did you see Nico’s fauvist piece?” I shook my head. She tossed her hands on her heart, “That was a masterpiece, however.” She grabbed her breasts. “I feel honored that these puppies could inspire something as brilliant as that.”
I was jealous, but being earnest is better than being a pervert, I guess.
I flagged down the waitress and ordered a coffee. Skylar, Stacy Something, and I spent the afternoon eating and laughing, and watching the movement of the street outside; it filled and flowed with a flurry of college students and locals, some with plans that evening and some wandering aimlessly, all enjoying the warm glow and silken breeze that the late April evening was offering. They moved like an impressionistic painting: colorful, swift, and poignant, but satisfyingly meaningless, despite all their beauty and force.
saguaro
“You can scratch it, you know,” said the man. The woman responded with an embarrassed giggle in the form of a hiccup.
“Oh, thanks, I mean, I’m sorry.” She scratched her nose and resumed her stoic position. “I’m sorry about that, Marc – er – Mister Remington,” she quickly corrected herself.
“Marc. It’s Marc.” The man’s hands were as red as a riverbed and very strong, though his wrists were thin and mottled. He wiped off the clay on his apron, removed the bandana gripping his forehead, and massaged his temples. He gazed at the bust before him, an ambiguous mass frantic for a form, doing its best to imitate the body four feet beyond it. Her body was long, she would’ve looked starved if not for her nervous energy. She moved in short, accidental motions. When she spoke, the words came out like a tic:
“How long have you been doing this, Marc? This sculpting thing?” Marc exhaled over several seconds, and she tucked her head to her chest, embarrassed. “Sculpturing? Is it sculpturing? I’m sorry, I get it confused.”
“Sculpturing, yeah.” He replied, almost smirking. “I’ve been doing it for a long while.”
“Oh. And um…” she waited to speak, “how long is that?”
“I never remember not doing it.” He capped his thumbs around the bumps where her eyes would be. He circled his fingers, making the sockets as small and hollow as broken butterfly eggs.
“Oh. That’s a long time, alright.” Again, her chin fell to her chest. “Do you,” she swallowed hard, “live out here alone? Or do you have a, um… a wife”
“A wife?” he swallowed hard. “No. No I do not. Nothing close to it. It’s just been me here for about two years.” He stared hard into the bust. “Two years.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Me and my husband split about ten months ago. It’s been all sorts of trouble – he’s made all sorts of threats to me and our boy, but things are finally starting to-“
“Hold still, please,” Marc interrupted, “move as little as necessary. Facial muscles, especially.” She promptly closed her mouth with a sudden flutter of her eyelashes, her neck tensing to keep her chin raised and level.
☰
After about two hours more of sculpting and a day in the kiln, the woman returned to retrieve her bust. It was silky and detailed, slight but magical. She felt that it captured a sense of her constant motion, and she was enchanted with the result. He made a version of her that showed everything that was ever beautiful in her, amplified to an unrealistic degree. She paid him with a generous tip, as she carried off her self-image; a prop in a period play with the Phoenix Theatre Company.
Marc was pleased that his customer was content, but sad that his work can sometimes be a lovely form of lying.
He returned to his workshop, walking past the client room, to the rear of the building. He preferred to work in a relative silence, with nothing but the tinny echoing of his radio, so made his studio twelve miles from the city, on a lonely Arizonan stretch. His footsteps sifted on the soft cement, encased in collateral clay or stone dust, as he made his way to the refrigerator. He reached in, his hands appearing to steam in response to its interior, grabbing an Oak Creek lager and opening it on the brunt of his forearm. He threw the bottle cap to the ends of the workshop, it ricocheting three or four times until settling it some corner he’d never care to clean. He tipped it to his mouth, sipping, his chapped lips slightly recoiling at glass’ sharp chill. His speakers droned the Gin Blossoms: ‘If I hadn't blown the whole thing years ago, I might not be alone.’ He coughed and laughed at the same time, forced, as if he couldn’t choose which to do, and slammed down his cervesa. It landed on an old Polaroid with caramel-skinned woman, nose-ringed and coyly smiling, sitting in a pickup truck bed with a bottle of red wine. A familiar discolored wrist led to fingers that snaked through her heat-crisped hair. Cigarette holes impaled her eye-sockets. It was dated 9/4/1993 in blue sharpie.
Marc made his way to two heavy, brick-colored sliding doors. He threw them open, thumping into the room. It was dark and mild in there, with still air smelling of heavy sugar. On the shelves were a long series of faces – or rather one face, repeated, with minor differences: a thinner nose here, a wider brow there. What was varied was the medium: some were carved into tree stumps, pineapples, others into coconuts and pumpkins. Living things, petrified like ancient mummies, to resist the rot of time. He looked across his gallery of grotesques and contorted his mouth into the shape of a rhombus, a polygon of self-disgust. He rustled saliva to and fro in his mouth to spit on the ground, but instead clenched his teeth and swallowed it.
He decided to close the shop early for the day, at 2 pm.
☰
Marc drove his ’88 Nissan Hardbody down Route 17, towards the city. He stopped at a Beer and Wine outlet, and bought himself a 50 ounce jug of Wild Irish Rose, ignoring the eyes of the teller.
He drove south, sipping from the jug at stoplights. He saw a large square sign, a stylized firebird, reading ‘WELCOME TO PHOENIX’. He slowed, smacked his lips, and spun his wheel to the left, turning around and aiming himself back north. Tonight was not a night for fake people and fake jokes and a morning where both pretend that you’d like to see each other again. Tonight needs to be something a bit more lucid, a bit more spiritual. Marc needed to get this riling demon out of him, this demon frozen in the Polaroid of his mind, constantly shaking around in it, developing, developing, developing into something more and more eviscerating. He took a large gulp of his bitter wine, capped it and tossed it onto the passenger seat, and aimed himself towards his shop. Tonight was a night for an exorcism.
☰
When Marc got there, his body swayed, seasick. He walked unevenly, as though his studio was treading stormy waters. He raise himself onto his Genie cargo lift, and carried a 6’x3’x3’ clay prism to his carving stand, standing it upright, like a monolith. He put on his work gloves, and after a few chugs of Irish Rose, he wrapped his fists in wire, holding a two foot strand between his hands. He arced his arms and sliced large, superfluous chunks from the form, shaping a slender center. Once the silhouette was outlined, he unfurled his toolset, a collection of pen-handled shapes rivaling those of a dentist. He smoothed bumps and removed knicks, slowly revealing the shape of a woman beneath: thin legs with a poking knees, a belly button ring, one pierced nipple, one untouched; slender arms with hinting tones, long fingers with short nails, lips soft and throbbing like larvae, and a thick mane, reaching to a middle vertebra of the curving, tender back. The abdomen was strong and thin, with sly muscles mountain ranging the ribcage.
In the background, his radio crackled the drones of Depeche Mode: ‘In a world full of nothing, though it's not love, it means something.’ Marc let out a heavy sigh, stood up and calmly walked in the direction of the radio. He raised the 32 millimeter straight gouge in his hand, and stabbed along the affixing plastic seam.
Stab.
Stab. Stab. Stab.
Plastic chips bounced everywhere as it garbled out its swan song: ‘though it’s not love, it means something. Though it’s not love, it means something.’ Marc speared its center, and cracked the cheap radio apart like a clam, its components snapping like copper tendons.
Silence.
Marc exhaled, appeased. He resumed his work, smoothing his definitions of the form. He made small arches in her feet, a birthmark on the back of her knee, and crafted so many details that one could think that he invented them as he went along. The digital clock blinked a crimson 3:00 AM. He stepped back, taking the last sips of his lukewarm wine, and surveyed the body:
Flawless.
Too flawless.
He saw the Polaroid in his peripherals and ran too it, ripping it off the table. He held it up – she never looked this good, this statue looks like a goddess, and Zabrina was no real goddess, was she? Was she? He bit on the corner of the picture until he began to taste ink, and spat it on the ground.
“She really was,” he said aloud. “But not in this way.”
He walked towards the statue, gently placing his hands against its cheekbones. He recalled his memories with Zabrina, hundreds of contradicting ones – idyllic and hurtful ones, eciting and horrifying ones, ones where he felt his soul spread across the sky, and others where he felt unworthy of human compassion. He pushed the hard to swallow ones down and looked into the statues eyes, longingly and slowly pressing his hands together, crushing the face: the clay rose up and belched down between his palms, the head spilling forth like a thick vitriol, until all that was left was a warbling sheet of clay and with a stretching, eerie grin. Marc slowly gritted his teeth, and pushed the clay figure away from him; it fell against the concrete floor, back bending like a spectrogram.
He made his way to the kitchen, and grabbed a bottle of vodka and tobacco, and rolled a cigarette. He walked out into the brisk desert dark, dawning a flannel shirt on his way out. He needed fresh air.
☰
Marc dreamt that he saw Zabrina again, brown and glowing, waving at him, calling for him on the edge of some horizon. He ran to her, but every time he tried to touch her, something bit him, like there was a forcefield he couldn’t see. He tried and tried, but grew exhausted as his hands started shedding scarlet tears. He couldn’t touch her, but he promised her he’d wait there, until that bastard magic broke. There were always thing stopping him from having her; other men, other focuses, other needs – excuses – but he wouldn’t let this silly thing stop him now when he was so, so close.
☰
He woke up curled and cold under the orange-browns of the desert dawn. Towering over him was a saguaro cactus. It was as broad as a god. He laughed at himself, mulling over the fuzzy recollections of his dream. He must have thought that this cactus was Zabrina, and he must have tried to embrace it all night, the dumb son of a bitch. He shook his head at his foolishness – he used to not drink much, and this was a good example as to why. He saw his house some quarter mile away, so he groaned himself onto two legs at began to make his way back.
After a few paces, he turned around, eyeing the way the shape of the cactus stood so strong when shadowed in the sunlight. Years ago he and Zabrina drove through the Navajo nation during the early autumn. They each took three drops of LSD, and spent the night painting the plateaus on the horizon. During his trip he spoke about the Navajos’ appreciation for “Mother Saguaro” and he said he could see how those plants could be seen as the birthplace of all things. A few weeks later Zabrina came home with a tourists’ book on Saguaro cactuses, “to better learn where he came from.” Marc remembered one of the passages:
Saguaro cacti in the drier parts of Arizona grow at half the rate of those in regions of reliable precipitation. These smaller saguaros will grow to an average of 15-20 feet tall.
He smiled, and returned home, and was very shocked to find the next morning that someone had broken in to his studio and demolished his radio. What the fuck would lead someone to do something like that? he wondered.
☰
Over the next several days he continued sculpting and stonecutting when he could; two gravestones and a bust, but his mind kept wandering and he found himself eyeing the saguaro on the horizon when the sun oranged in its rise and setting. Seeing it contented him, and being next to it gave him a sense of euphoria. He hired a professional landscaper to uproot it and cut it to seven feet.
☰
Once the cut cactus was placed on his carving block, Marc couldn’t restrain from working on it. His hands sweat as he sheathed them with gloves, and they shook when he wrapped wire around the fingers. The corners of his lips twitched with a withheld arousal. He looped the wire around at the top of the saguaro, and pulled downwards. It was difficult and resistant; he had to seesaw his arms back and forth to make any headway into the plant; cactus water sprayed all over his tools, making their blades salted and slick. He couldn’t use his normal methods on a skin so thick; he had never worked with cacti before – it was unpredictable and electrifying.
He grabbed a pair of pliers and began to pull out its needles one a time. They held on as hard as they good – after twenty minutes of doing this, lactic acid begin flooding the streams and rivers of his triceps. He ignored it and worked on.
The spines on a saguaro cactus can grow as rapidly as a millimeter a day. They are thick, and difficult to remove from a live saguaro. Even cacti dead as long as six months tend to have a very rigid structure, and some spines grow internally, and are impossible to remove.
He continued until the hundreds (thousands?) of needles that were on it were clear. He passed out on his mattress in the backroom, and slept for half an hour, but was soon stirred awake by his own excitement. He lifted himself back up, and returned to the studio. It was time to carve.
Marc’s new radio hummed Soundgarden with a clearer reception: “I pray to keep heaven, send hell away, no one sings like you anymore.”
☰
Over the next few days, Marc crafted a replica of Zabrina, drawn from his mind’s eye. It had every honest imperfection, idealism aside. The slight love handles, the scar on her left breast. It was no goddess, but it was sincere. The lime green structures inside the cactus were lined with a deep, dark, almost black lining from its skeletal support system. The space between was a cartilage white; her body was a curling nebula of earthy shades. He carved her sitting, legs spread, one hand in front of her womb, and one outstretched that she gazed at, just like when she’d hold a cigarette.
This is perfect. Flawful and perfect.
That night Marc slept soundly, and had the first wet dream he had had for thirteen years.
☰
When Marc woke up, he found himself huddled into himself, resting in the fetal position on the lap of his sculpted Zabrina. Its surface was soft, and seemed to sink with the flexibility of a sturdy mattress. He laughed and guessed that he got drunk the previous night, as well. He fell back asleep as quickly as he awoke, resting his head in the statue’s right hand.
Native birds such as Gila woodpeckers, purple martins, house finches, and gilded flickers build nests inside holes in saguaros. They will live there for as long as 4 years, because their thick, fleshy outer membranes provide an effective insulation, making them ideal homes for these species.
Marc finally woke up several hours later, unaware of the time. He put on coffee, and admired the saguaro, licking his lips at the smell of its creamy cactus water that lay like runny egg on the studio floor. He began cleaning up his workshop, washing off the tools with a revitalized vigor. He mopped the floor while listening to his answering machine play back inquiring voices. He returned calls and marked calendars, and felt filled with a sweeter blood than he had for months. While sweeping the floor, he found the cigarette-pierced Polaroid. Marc stared at its empty eyes for several shaking seconds, and then placed it in his ashtray, struck a match and lit its corner. He watched the woman’s taupe skin boil and curl, the black corners of her background meld with her hair and flesh, until the photograph became a wilting charcoal rose.
He smiled out of some sort of self-obligation, emptied the ashtray and continued cleaning the space with an anxious agility.
☰
The following day Marc met with two clients, one of them being a gravestone for a dead cat, “Marcia.”
“Do you know why she was named Marcia?” She left little time for Marc to respond before she explained, “Well, her father feline was named Michael – off of Mike Brady, from that show The Brady Bunch – and her mother cat was name Carol, from the mom on the same show. And well, they just hit it off, and Marcia was the oldest girl of the litter, and everyone just loved her. Everyone always just loved Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”
“HAH.” Out came a forced laugh, like a popped balloon: one syllable echoing into the studio’s corners to the incredible discomfort to both of them. Marc never really offered those sympathy laughs with customers, but today… today he couldn’t contain himself; he was bursting at the seams. “Yes, Marcia. Do you remember the episode where they went to Hawaii?”
“Why, yes, of course.”
“I never saw it, but I’ve been to Hawaii once. Hiked all over with someone special. I was thinking about it earlier today. Really worth doing.”
“Yes, I hear it’s a wonderful place. Simply spectacular to vacation at; I hope to go there with a certain someone special, myself! But that’s only if they allow Michael to sit in a plane seat – he simply hates the cage.”
“Oh,” his brows furrowed, “Cats can’t hike, though.”
☰
Once he was finished with his customers, Marc put another cup of coffee on; he needed something to fire him, having not slept the previous night. He opened the sliding doors to the backroom, and went one room further: a white tiled cell with a large drain in the center. It was time to begin the petrifaction process, starting with an acid wash. Marc got onto his Genie and lifted the statue, carefully carrying it to the tiled room. He filled a backpack sprayer with baking soda and citric acid, and sprayed the emerald figure with this mixture every ten minutes for the next fifteen hours. Every subsequent time, it seemed to shine more, catch the light, absorb it, create it. His eyes glazed over at its splendor. The white stripes running up its breasts mesmerized him; the dark greens seduced his sensibilities. He fell on the floor, eyes blank, the sprayer showering its acidic insides onto the back of his scalp and his shoulders.
Overwatering of cacti is the single largest contributor to plant loss. Their vascular cambium become overwhelmed when flooded with an unfamiliar amount of liquid and seize up, at the risk of flooding its xylem and phloem.
☰
When Marc awoke, he had a silvery flavor in his mouth and a bluntly aching brain. He slowly rose, lightly tracing a wound on the back of his head. He got on two feet with a sway, and walked towards the main studio to find his watch and wash himself in the sink. He heard the radio singing Morrissey: “November spawned a monster in the shape of this child…” His watch couldn’t be found; he looked in the restroom mirror, collecting water in his cupped hands and gently splashing his face. He didn’t bleed too much and it had already clotted – he’d be ok. Not having health insurance helps one rationalize using one’s own first aid abilities.
Marc started a shower. He looked back, surveying himself again in the mirror: lavender bags hung below his eyes. Not enough sleep – if I get some I’ll be fine. He thought of his sculpture and smiled at how close it was to completion. He grew aroused, and stepped into the shower to relieve himself.
While in there he heard a deep roaring, like a drumming thunder. The argon oven? He leapt out of his shower before he finished, and ran to the oven with squishing, naked footsteps. He dripped warm water onto the citrus floor of the holding room, and saw the door closed and locked, the oven heated to 1400 degrees Fahrenheit. The statue was no longer in the tiled alcove, but in the locked oven, now shrieking with heat. He didn’t remember placing in there or turning it on… but the temperature was right. Marc was confronted with a sense of undefined unease, like when mad at a friend for something they did in a dream. He mined through his mind, trying to decipher how this happened. But did it matter? – It was nearly finished. He set the timer for seven minutes and walked back to his shower, passing the Genie on the way.
He rinsed through his hair, puzzled. His head made noises like an off key quartet – he hadn’t had an epileptic fit in years, it was strange for it to come back now. But it didn’t matter, he was alright, he had recovered, and he was soon to finish his masterpiece, so to speak. He turned the shower off and shook his hair like a dog, and pulled back the shower curtain.
In front of him was a six foot woman, shimmering like jade ceramic, radiant from fire’s touch, standing pigeon-toed with breasts perking upwards and eyes lowered to Marc’s trembling mouth.
“Oh god…” he clasped his hands to the back of his head: no blood. “I’m hallucinate-“
“Shhhh” said the green goddess, placing a warm finger against his mouth. “I’m back. Didn’t you want me to come back, all this time?” Her voice had the same high pitch and slight gravel as… her’s.
“Z-Zabrina?” he whispered in disbelief. She bit her lip and nodded slowly. Her eyes were dark and glassy, reflecting his own terror and exhilaration back to him.
“I’m yours now. All for you – like you always wanted. I used to not want to be owned – but I am nothing with you, Marc. Would you… would you still have me?”
Marc fell down, naked and sopping, and held onto her heated leg, kissing the firm surface of her thigh. Tears ran down his face, slightly sizzling on contact with the statue’s midriff. His heart sang and his cock throbbed. “Have me.” She said, as she walked across the hall way to a mattress laying in the corner his makeshift bedroom. “Make me yours. Own me. I want to make up for lost time.” She reclined on to it, and spread her legs, her labia gleaming with heat.
Saguaro fruit are highly edible and prized by local people. The O'odham tribes have a long and rich history of using the fruit as an aphrodisiac, as well as using its sacred nectar during seasonal sacrifices.
He swallowed her slick body, kissing every part he could. His tongue pressed against her clitoris, and her exaggerated body arched in ecstasy. She yet out a layered yell, as though with two voices at once. Her hot hands held his cheeks.
“Own me.” Marc chewed his lip and nodded. He took his member, and pressed it into her crevice, his body shuddering against the sensation of her sweltering insides. “Own me!” more voices yelled. He thrust forth, slamming his pelvis against her manufactured form. Heat swam through his body in pleasure, and then an incredible pain. He stopped, pale, blood draining from his face.
“What is it, Marc? You suddenly don’t want me anymore?” He tried to pull himself out but he was stuck. His penis was in incredible pain; pricked, pierced. Blood flowed out of her womb like the mouth of a waterfall. The more he resisted, the more torrented out of him.
“Oh, you.” Her voice was no longer Zabrina’s – it sounded like the voice he thought in, the voice inside his head. “It’s hard work owning someone else, isn’t it, Marc? Here, let me be on top.” She breathed five breaths at once and flipped him, impaling him deeper into her, puncturing him in apathetic ecstasy. She rocked her body up and down – pounding his hips to a soundtrack of eroding bones and shredding flesh.
Even cacti dead as long as six months tend to have a very rigid structure, and some spines grow internally, and are impossible to remove.
“Stop, please for the love of god, please stop,” he wheezed out, barely a noise left in him.
“Don’t be selfish, baby” she said in tiered baritones, “I haven’t come yet. That’s not very fair of you.” She drew her head back and continued to bob on him, his screams muffled by the pounding of petrified wood against marrow.
☰
Twelve days later, investigating officers found Marc’s body with nine broken bones, caked in blood and castrated. His fingers were shoved into his eye sockets; puss gloved his palms and his mottled wrists.
In the center of the studio stood an enormous statue of a young woman, one hand covering her womb, one hand outstretched, holding what appeared to be a scorched black rose, wilted from the remains of an old and unintelligible Polaroid photograph.
The cactus flower, echinopsis oxygona is sweet-smelling, but short lived. It opens towards evening, hoping for a pollinator, but inevitably dies the following morning. A Saguaro cactus can have as many as hundreds of thousands of its flowers die in its lifetime. Oftentimes, its pollinators will die as well, attempting to re-pollinate the dead flower, exhausting its last ounces of life while under the euphoria-inducing aroma of its own decay.
a waiting room
“I’ve done it, I’ve really done it,” said a younger man in a tweed jacket and slacks, in that vowel-y drawl that’s so common in us 1950’s men of the North Americas. “I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my savoir!” His eyes turned into optimistic crescent moons as he waited for reponse. A doctor in a white labcoat and a headmirror sat across from him, legs crossed, chin resting on his left hand, meditatively.
“Riiight.” He made pensive tsks-tsks with the tip of his tongue. “I’ve seen this sort of thing many times before, and it’s been particularly contagious this season. I don’t know if it’s with that war in Korea or because the population isn’t smoking Surgeon General-approved cigarettes, but the whole Christ-y bug has been popping up like hot cross buns on hemorrhoids. You follow me?”
“To some degree, yes, but the only man I follow is my Messiah, Jesus-“
“Yeah, yeah, Jesus Christ. I know, I know.” The doctor clenched the bridge of his nose between two fingers, wincing. He held out his other hand with a small slip of paper in the palm. “Take this down to the pharmacy. They oughta sort you out; take two doses of reasonable skepticism, 20 milliliters of ennui, and be sure to shoot up some ‘horrifying realization of your own insignificance’ once every six hours. That oughta get you back to the way things were: ship shape, you know?”
“Well I don’t want to be ship shape. The only ship I want to be on is the deck of the great fisher of men, Jesus Chr-“
“Jesus Christ, yeah, I get it. I’m well aware of his many brands and labels.” The doctor took the man’s hand and placed the paper in it. “Now take this to Nurse Godfrey-” the man was practically in a daze and refusing to hold on to the paper, so the doctor had to overlap his own hands around his and force him to form a loose, gelatinous fist. “Now take these to Nurse Godfrey – are you listening? She’ll give you the address of the nearest pharmacy.” The man’s hand slowly tightened around the prescription, without any recognition of the words just said. “Great. Now off you go, let me know if you have any problems. And please, do your neighborhood a favor, and don’t go about knocking on doors to talk about the bible and your cloud-king and all of that. We don’t need a goddamned outbreak of this here in New Jersey, or the whole place could be under governmental quarantine in a week.”
All of us in the waiting room overheard this conversation; the window on the doctor’s door was broken. They tried to fix it: cover in with cling wrap and duct tape, but it was perfectly transparent, and words were slightly muffled at best. The doctor was either oblivious to this, or just didn’t especially care.
The religious man glided across the room with a vacant look in his eyes, as though he was daydreaming, or as though this was a daydream, or as though he couldn’t make the distinction between the two. He laughed to himself, bypassing the Nurse and as he drifted out the door. He looked like a zombie – a perfectly content zombie. We all envied him.
From the office came a damp cough followed by a thick thrust of liquid hitting tin; the doctor was vomiting into a waste-bin, two fingers in his mouth. “Oh God, I’m so fat…” he heaved; I was closest to the door, so I heard the brunt of the wailing. “When will somebody love me, Lord?” He looked towards the fluorescent lighting of his office, wispy-eyed, and sobbed like a child. “I just want somebody to hold so badly. Like a pair of pants needs two hairy drumstick legs to fill them. Without somebody, I’m just denim. I’M JUST DENIM, GODDAMNIT.” He held the bin to his mouth again and vomited; the noise echoed across the room like a wet shotgun blast. My stomach grumbled in a dull ache; no one seemed to react to him, however. “I’m just a little Levi man…” he sniveled. The doctor took a moment to deeply inhale, mumbled a few more nonsense sobs, and then popped his head out into the waiting room with a beaming smile:
“Mr. Jeffries? Whenever you’re ready, head on back.” A man in a striped shirt, a beret, and a penciled-in moustache surefootedly stepped into the backroom. The door closed with a slam, but again, everything could be overheard:
“So what seems to be the problem with you, Mr. Jeffries?” The thin man revealed a malnourished cigarette (about as wide as copper wire) out of an upscale case and placed it on the corner of his mouth. “I’m sorry, Mr. Jeffries, but there is no smoking in this room. Nicotine’s no good for the sinuses. Great for pregnancy though, makes the child hungry and strong. So what seems to be the problem?” The thin man scoffed, returning its cigarette to the case, and breathed in, as if preparing his mouth for something he could not predict:
“Oui oui, non escargot, Eiffel de Moulin Rouge, Notre Dame le gouda fromage, haw haw haw haw haw!”
“I see. Very interesting. I haven’t run into an Accidental Antiquated Stereotype – or AAS – for awhile now, but it shouldn’t be anything serious.” He scribbled on a piece of paper. “I mean, it’s only French – and what are they gonna do about it?” He patted the thin man on the back, expecting an agreeing chuckle. “Here, take this to the Nurse, she’ll get you a porterhouse steak and some country western to listen to, and you can even rent out the hospital Chevy for a half hour spin. That oughta get you out of it.” The thin man bowed, smirking. “Have a great day, Mr. Jeffries.”
“Waterloo, waterloo!” He waved in thanks.
The doctor seemed very knowledgeable in solving these people’s problems, or at least efficient in getting them out the door quickly. As soon as the man left, he shut the door:
“So much fat, weighing me down… like an anchor of cellulite.” He vomited again into the bin. After a few moments, he opened the door, trash can in hand: “Mrs. Phillips?”
“Oh, well now, that’s me.” An elderly woman with horn-rimmed glasses shuffled towards the door. The chain on the glasses looped her throat, but held taut, lifting the excess flesh of her neck and holding it sturdy, like a shelf of skin. It was adorable, and so was the way she walked; the quaintness of age always tickled me. Once she passed the coffee table, though, I noticed that she was wearing a pair of yellow roller skates. How classic.
“Now let’s get you inside, Mrs. Phillips, and talk about what’s been eating you up.”
“Well, it’s my fear, you know, that relatively common fear hereabouts that one of these days we’ll all be stuck at any moment in one of those finger traps made by the Siamese. Or are they call the Thai now? Or was it vee-it-something? My goodness, they’re a shifty bunch, well anyways, I always have this fear that we’ll get stuck in it, and the harder we try to pull out, the more we’ll get pulled in, like they’re a black hole with very undiscerning hygiene…”
She continued rambling, but I didn’t bother paying attention; it was all so very run of the mill. People and their problems – they try to make issues out of anything, desperate for some sense of identity, whether it be a tragic hero or otherwise. I’m here for a different reason, one I’m ashamed to say.
And it’s not like I’m already comfortable enough in this place; I hate waiting rooms – and doctor’s offices in general. One time, when I was little, I had to give a urine sample. I didn’t know how much to put in the cup, so I filled it up halfway; a smart compromise, I thought. The doctor at the time gave it a quick glance, said dismissingly, “It’s half empty.” I was going to protest and say it actually was half full and that he was just being pessimistic, but as soon as I opened my mouth, he jerked his hand with the cup and doused my face in my own urine. All the nurses laughed, and I was rather embarrassed. So forgive me for being uneasy here, I just don’t want to drink my own piss again.
After mulling over that trauma in my head, my eyes began dancing around the room at random. When I came to, they were staring at an infant on the central coffee table, dressed as an elephant, complete with billowy ears and a ragged little trunk on his forehead. He knew what was wrong with me, that little elephant. He stared at me with aquamarine eyes, aware of me, aware of himself, gazing into my very being – he shat his pants unblinkingly. The smell wafted to me, and the child’s eyes stayed wide. I bet he was doing it on purpose, the little prick, and he just wanted to put me more on edge. He knew how I felt, and the shit-stink made it all the worse, and he knew it, he knew it, he knew it. All two-year-olds are this way, you know – they understand the world and do their best to undermine it. I’d loved to ring his little neck and his shit-stained bottom-
“Mr. Ward?” The doctor looked over with an inquiring glance and a grin.
“Yes?” I swallowed air, nervous.
“I’m ready to see you now.” He placed a trash can on the floor with a swift, sloshy stir and opened the door wider.
Here goes nothing.
Here goes something?
Here goes my pride.
Hear ye, here ye.
“What brings you into my domain today, Mr. Ward?” The doctor looked on with an raised eyebrow, expectant and optimistic.
“Well…” I was nervous to say; I took a deep breath, and softened my voice, so the others in the waiting room couldn’t hear, “well, it’s not like there’s anything wrong with my mental state or any of that. It’s something… down there. You know, man-to-man.” He nodded. “It’s just, I’ve had this strange pain in my stomach for the past week or so, and it grinds like a bike chain. Sometimes it hurts when I eat, y’know, especially cereal or ice cream…”
“So let me get this straight,” he cut me off; his eyes glazed in furious perplexity and he spoke in a way that made the whole thing very clandestine, “it hurts… in your stomach?”
“Yes, it’s embarrassing, I know, but-“
“It’s very brave of you to come in here like this, boy, but there’s nothing I can do to help you. Science has its limits, and you have to work out something in your own private life if you really want to fix it.” He placed his hand on my shoulder with a soft motion, gently leading me towards the door.
“Doctor, I realize this is very unorthodox, but you must help me. It hurts, and I truly can’t understand why!”
“I’m no miracle worker!” He raised his voice, “I simply don’t have to the equipment or know-how. Now please leave my office at once, before-“
“Please!” I panicked. “Please doctor, you don’t underst-“
“No, you don’t understand!” His voice boomed. “I’m not having some lunatic pervert fouling up my office with his uneasy ‘tummy!’” The waiting room crackled with whispers. “God – if there was one – knows what life you’ve led to bring you to me in the state you’re in today. You have the audacity to claim that ice cream and, and cereal make you sick? You blame milk, and lactose, and cows – everything but yourself. The milk industry has done wonders for this country, and you want to slander it because you itty-bitty-belly hurts?” the doctor mocked that last part in a child’s voice, “Leave, before I let the authorities know what a horrendous condition you’re in.”
I removed my pants and placed them over my head, and walked through the waiting room towards the door – I was far to06336o embarrassed to show my face (though I could smell the shit of the cheeky child, he heard everything, the little fuck). I sprinted down the stairwell the street, and marched away from his office, ignoring the weekly procession of penny-farthings in memoriam to the 12 Americans killed The Great Crocheting. People glanced at me as I thrashed my way through them in a fainting fervor. I found an alley, walked down it, and threw my back against a wall as I sank down the asphalt floor.
I knew this would happen, but I hoped this world would different now. Perhaps I am insane, thinking that my stomach got aches from a certain type of food or something. Preposterous. It hurts though, to know that there’s no real cure for it. It hurts to know that the sickness is, well, me. I just have to hope that I’ll get better someday – that I’ll be better, good enough for this wonderful world around me. I just have to be a proud American, and hide my pain behind a shielding smile. I guess I’ll just have to wait.
And put my pants back on, in due time.