Choke (23 page)

Denny’s already sitting ringside in the dark, sketching on the yellow
pad in his lap, three and a half empty beer bottles on the table next to him. He doesn’t look up at the dancer, a brunette with straight black hair, on her hands and knees. She snaps her head from side to side to whip the stage with her hair, her hair looking purple in the red light. With her hands, she smooths the hair back off her face and crawls to the edge of the stage.

The music is loud dance techno mixed with samples of dogs barking, car alarms, Hitler youth rallies. You hear sounds of
breaking glass and gunshots. You hear women screaming and fire engine sirens in the music.

“Hey Picasso,” the dancer says, and she dangles her foot in front of Denny.

Without looking up from his pad, Denny takes a buck out of his pants pocket and slips it between her toes. On the seat next to him is another rock wrapped in his pink blanket.

For serious, the world is gone wrong when we dance to fire alarms. Fire alarms don’t mean fires anymore.

If there were a real fire, they’d just have somebody with a nice voice announce, “Buick station wagon, license number BRK 773, your lights are on.” In the event of a real nuclear attack, they’d just shout, “Phone call at the bar for Austin Letterman. Phone call for Austin Letterman.”

The world won’t end with a whimper or a bang, but with a discreet, tasteful announcement: “Bill Rivervale, phone call holding, line two.” Then, nothing.

With one hand, the dancer takes Denny’s money from between her toes. She lies on her front, her elbows propped on the edge of the stage, squashing her breasts together, and says, “Let’s see how it turned out.”

Denny makes a couple fast lines and turns the pad for her to see.

And she says, “That’s supposed to be me?”

“No,” Denny says, and turns the pad to study it himself. “It’s supposed to be a composite order column the way the Romans made. See here,” he says, and points to something with his smudged finger, “see how the Romans combined the volutes of the Ionic order with the Corinthian acanthus leaves but still kept all the proportions the same.”

The dancer, she’s Cherry Daiquiri from our last visit here
only now her blond hair’s dyed black. On the inside of one thigh is a little round bandage.

By now I’ve walked up to look over Denny’s shoulder, and I say, “Dude.”

And Denny says, “Dude.”

And I say, “It sounds like you’ve been at the library again.”

To Cherry, I say, “It’s good you took care of that mole.”

Cherry Daiquiri swings her hair in a fan around her head. She bows, then throws her long black hair back over her shoulders. “And I tinted my hair,” she says. With one hand, she reaches back for a few strands and holds them out near me, rubbing them between two fingers.

“It’s black now,” she says.

“I figured it’s safer,” she says, “since you told me blondes have the highest amount of skin cancer.”

Me, I’m shaking each beer bottle, trying to find the one with any beer left to drink, and I look at Denny.

Denny’s drawing, not listening, not even here.

Corinthian Tuscan composite architraves of the entablature … They should let some people into the library by prescription only. For serious, books about architecture are Denny’s pornography. Yeah, first it’s a few rocks. Then it’s fan-tracery vaulting. My point is, this is America. You start out with hand jobs and progress to orgies. You smoke some dope and then, the big H. This is our whole culture of bigger, better, stronger, faster. The key word is progress.

In America, if your addiction isn’t always new and improved, you’re a failure.

To Cherry, I tap my head. Then I point my finger at her. I wink and say, “Smart girl.”

She’s trying to bend one foot behind her head and says, “You
can’t be too careful.” Her bush is still shaved, her skin still freckled pink. Her toenails are silver. The music changes to a blast of machine-gun fire, then the whistle of falling bombs, and Cherry says, “Break time.” She finds the slit in the curtain and she’s gone backstage.

“Look at us, dude,” I say. I find the last bottle of beer and it’s warm. I say, “All women have to do is get naked, and we give them all our money. I mean, why are we such slaves?”

Denny flips over the page on his pad and starts something new.

I move his rock to the floor and sit down.

I’m just tired, I tell him. It seems women are always bossing me around. First my mom, and now Dr. Marshall. In between, there’s Nico and Leeza and Tanya to keep happy. Gwen, who wouldn’t even let me rape her. They’re all just in it for themselves. They all think men are obsolete. Useless. As if we’re just some sexual appendix.

Just the life support system for an erection. Or a wallet.

From now on, I say, I’m not giving any more ground.

I’m going on strike.

From now on, women can open their own doors.

They can pick up the check for their own dinners.

I’m not moving anybody’s big heavy sofas, not anymore.

No more opening stuck jar lids, either.

And never again am I ever going to put down another toilet seat.

Hell, from now on I’m peeing on every seat.

With two fingers, I give the waitress the international sign language for two. Two more beers, please.

I say, “Let’s just see women try and get along without me. Let’s just watch their little female world grind to a halt.”

The warm beer tastes from Denny’s mouth, his teeth and Chapstick, that’s how bad I need to drink right now.

“And for real,” I say, “if I’m on a sinking ship, I’m getting in the lifeboat first.”

We don’t need women. There are plenty other things in the world to have sex with, just go to a sexaholics meeting and take notes. There’s microwaved watermelons. There’s the vibrating handles of lawn mowers right at crotch level. There’s vacuum cleaners and beanbag chairs. Internet sites. All those old chat room sex hounds pretending to be sixteen-year-old girls. For serious, old FBI guys make the sexiest cyberbabes.

Please, just show me one thing in this world that is what you’d think.

To Denny I say, this is me talking, I say, “Women don’t want equal rights. They have more power being
oppressed.
They
need
men to be the vast enemy conspiracy. Their whole identity is based on it.”

And Denny turns just his head, owl-style, to look at me, his eyes bunched under his eyebrows, and he says, “Dude, you are spiraling out of control.”

“No, I mean it,” I say.

I say I could just kill the guy who invented the dildo. I really could.

The music changes to an air raid siren. Then a new dancer struts out, glowing pink inside some sheer baby doll lingerie, her bush and breasts so almost there.

She drops one strap off her shoulder. She sucks on her index finger. Her other shoulder strap drops, and it’s only her breasts that keep her lingerie from falling to her feet.

Denny and me both watching her, the lingerie drops.

When a tow truck from the auto club gets here, the front desk girl
needs to go out to meet it, so I tell her, sure, I’ll watch her desk.

For serious, but when the bus dropped me off at St. Anthony’s today I noticed two of her tires were flat. Both rear wheels are resting right on the rims, I told her, and forced myself to make eye contact the whole time.

The security monitor shows the dining room, where old women are eating different shades of gray mashed food for lunch.

The intercom dial is set on number one, and you can hear elevator music and water running somewhere.

The monitor cycles through the crafts room, empty. Ten seconds pass. Then the dayroom, where the television is dark. Then ten seconds later, the library, where Paige is pushing my mom in her wheelchair past the shelves of battered old books.

With the intercom control, I dial-switch around until I hear them on number six.

“I wish I had the courage not to fight and doubt everything,” my mom says. She reaches out and touches the spine of a book, saying, “I wish, just once, I could say,
‘This.
This is good enough. Just because I
choose
it.’ ”

She takes the book out, sees the cover, and shoves the book back on the shelf, shaking her head.

And from the speaker, scratchy and muffled, my mom’s voice says, “How did you decide to become a doctor?”

Paige shrugs. “You have to trade your youth for something. …”

The monitor cycles to a view of the empty loading dock behind St. Anthony’s.

Now in voice-over, my mom’s voice says, “But how did you make the commitment?”

And Paige’s voice-over says, “I don’t know. One day, I just wanted to be a doctor …,” and fades into some other room.

The monitor cycles to a view of the front parking lot, where a tow truck is parked and the driver is kneeling next to a blue car. The front desk girl stands off to one side with her arms folded.

I dial-switch from number to number, listening.

The monitor cycles to show me sitting with my ear to the intercom speaker.

There’s the clatter of somebody typing on number five. On
eight, there’s the whir of a blow-dryer. On two, I hear my mom’s voice saying, “You know the old phrase ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it’? Well, I think those who
remember
their past are even worse off.”

In voice-over, Paige says, “Those who remember the past tend to get the story really screwed up.”

The monitor cycles to show them going down a corridor, a book open in my mom’s lap. Even in black-and-white, you can tell it’s her diary. And she’s reading it, smiling.

She looks up, twisting to see Paige behind the wheelchair, and says, “In my opinion, those who remember the past are paralyzed by it.”

And Paige pushes her along, saying, “How about: ‘Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us’?”

And their voices fade out again.

There’s somebody snoring on number three. On number ten, there’s the creak of a rocking chair.

The monitor cycles to show the front parking lot, where the girl is signing something on a clipboard.

Before I can find Paige again, the front desk girl will be back, saying her tires are fine. She’ll be looking at me sideways, again.

What Would Jesus NOT Do?

As it turns out, some asshole just let the air out of them.

Wednesdays mean Nico.

Fridays mean Tanya.

Sundays mean Leeza, and I catch her in the parking lot at the community center. Two doors down from the sexaholics meeting, we waste some sperm in a janitor’s closet with a mop next to us, left standing in a bucket of gray water. There’s cases of toilet tissue for Leeza to lean over, and I’m splitting her ass so hard that with my every drive, she head-butts a shelf of folded rags. I’m licking the sweat off her back for a nicotine buzz.

This is life on earth as I knew it. The kind of rough, messy sex where you first want to spread some newspapers. This is me trying to put things back the way they were before Paige Marshall. Period revival. Me trying to reconstruct how my life worked until just a few weeks ago. How my dysfunction used to function so beautifully.

Asking the back of Leeza’s scrubby hair, I say, “You’d tell me if I was getting too sweet, wouldn’t you?”

Pulling her hips back against me, I say, “Tell the truth.”

I’m ramming at a regular steady pace, asking, “You don’t think I’m getting soft, do you?”

To keep from triggering, I picture airplane crash sites and stepping in crap.

My dog burning hard, I imagine police photos of car wrecks and point-blank shotgun damage. To keep from feeling anything, I just keep stuffing it.

Stuffing dick, stuffing feelings. When you’re a sexaholic, it’s for sure the same thing.

Plugged in deep, I reach around her. Forced in tight, I reach under her to twist a hard pointed nipple in each hand.

And sweating her dark brown shadow into the light brown case of toilet paper, Leeza says, “Ease up.” She says, “Just what are you trying to prove?”