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Banging Sylvia Plath

Joshua Copeland

    “I want you to get out in the world. I want you to meet people. Be like other people. Be like other people.”
    I nodded and nodded. “Totally. That’s what I need. Meet people. Be like them.”
    Dr. Gia Matereus Cercilious—she had Latinized her real name—had a long, thin neck like a swan. She wore a silk scarf to hide it and I didn’t know why...I liked her neck and I thought she was pretty and delicate. Her bony framework had a dainty, X-Ray quality to it: brittle wrists, a narrow, fashion model’s face, dandelion eyes, featherweight arms and legs, wasp waist. Plus, I had jerked off to her like a hundred and one times. I imagined some agitated Slovakian plumber defiling her in her office. That beat any of the masturbation fodder in the bondage mags I bought on Cahuenga Blvd. I had just read an interview in Film Threat with Joel M. Reed and he said that the B&D models in those mags—not dissimilar to biker chicks—were actually over-the-hill hard-core porn stars. I hated hard-core porn. Nurse Ratched, Georgina Spelvin, Eve Ellis, Liz Bathory, Lilly Tiger, Arlana Blue, Wynter Storm, Arita the Ballerina, they all got their start in hard-core. Gia, and any defilation of her, was soft-core. I looked into her eyes. Dry.
    She was new to her occupation. New to the real world. I could tell. As a child: platinum rafters ran overhead, thrushes sung her awake in the morning, South American maids poured her glasses of milk, she rolled around in flower beds nude smiling a post-coital smile, rubbing the orchids, daises, marigolds, and daffodils all over her body, petals leaking off her, through her, between her fingers, between her legs. I bet she still called her father “daddy.”
    When I told her I brought meth up here with me from Cincinnati and that I didn’t know what I’d do when I ran out, she freaked—landmark of a newbie—and said with vouchsafed condescension, “Ovy, quit with the speed. It’s not cool, dude.” In other circumstances I would have smiled. But right then, right there, in that office, in that city, in that state, there was nothing funny.
    “Borders Book Store—you like to go to the one in Santa Monica, right?—has book discussions every couple weeks. Why don’t you start going to those? I mean, you like to read, don’t you?”
    “Yeah. That’d get me out in public more. For sure.” I wanted to say I was too scared to do anything like that. But I was too nervous to say I was too nervous to go. I mean, Gia made me antsy. I felt self-conscious around her. She was within the circle, within the realm, within the palace. I’m sure she had a boyfriend. And she had a job. A well-paying one. Dr. Cercilious didn’t live off other people.
    Unlike me. My mom deposited $700 into my account on the first of every month. I came out there to slip into the film business as a writer. But I couldn’t even hold a job at the prestigious Argyle Hotel on Sunset washing dishes with the Latinos (Everyone there was surprised a white boy took the job. Not in a racist way, I hoped. They said white persons in LA usually refuse dishwashing jobs). The cook fired me after four days of freaking out my coworkers with my anxious tics and brick-walled, bloodshot eyes and waxworks pallor. And these were tough, working class dudes. That short one, Alonzo, he had just moved there from Guatemala. He’d watch “Sesame Street” every day to try and learn English.
    At first my coworkers took pity on me. They’d ask the waiters to send me back $200 deserts and they smiled whenever they addressed me. But the eyes belied the smile. And in the end, fear got the better of them, of everyone.
    I knew nada about writing scripts, plays, novels, short stories, poems. I didn’t much listen back at Dayton U. Sylvia Plath wrote in her journals that she had very little talent, that most of the infants on the planet had more talent than her, and that writing was all about practice, about etching those techniques into your skull. Well...I didn’t like to practice. So I didn’t. It’s vertigo-inducing, the work a wannabe writer must do to be a real writer. The noun’s the easy part; it’s the verb that’s the hard part.
    Gia popped open a Slimfast milkshake. “You’ll socialize, Ovy. Right now you’re not getting out at all. It’s not healthy. So what do you say? It’s just a book discussion, not a party or a huge rock concert. Do it for me.”
    “No problem.”
    The sunshine through the elms popped like a mutiny of flash bulbs. The students giggled and held hands, their backpacks slung off a shoulder. The radios blasted in treble from the long line of open car windows on Westwood. I raced past and through it all, eyes down, head low, shoulders hunched—the Raskolnikov shuffle—to my Nissan Stanza.
    Per usual, the drive back from UCLA to my studio apartment in East LA was around an hour and twenty minutes. The CD player in my car was broken and the radio stations played shit; the world had phased me out of MTV and popular culture. And the DJ’s always tried to ape Stern: “Listen to Jay Davidson! He’s trying to curb his auto-erotic manipulations!” Effete, effete, effete. Stern had moved to Sirius. I didn’t have money for Sirius.
    And that sucked. Cause I was a huge fan. He provided masturbation material, he talked people down from jumping off bridges, he was like a salve to all of us losers out there. I would fantasize myself as an intern on the radio show. The TV show on E kicked ass. That went off the air too. For his “Miss Amputee 2000 Beauty Contest” the winner had to chew and swallow two handfuls of live maggots. Which she did.
    I passed the pregnant hooker on East Pico. She paced slowly, walking that swampy LA walk, and she looked far off in some dream. Was she high? She grinned at all the passing cars like she was. Her long blonde hair swayed like a pendulum as she trudged. Couldn’t have been older than twenty. I wanted to yell out, “You’d look good with a lollipop!” The distant cars and people shimmered like they were behind a thick glass of fumes; the whole city swam in hot and humid glassiness.
    The other day I had read in How to Write Screenplays that Sell that writers trying to make it in Hollywood notoriously write about writers trying to make it in Hollywood.
    At the gate I ran my keycard through and parked in my spot, B-45. I walked the ten to fifteen minute walk—meandering by all the other apartment buildings in the complex with their crew cut gardens—to my building, A5. Terminus with a capital T.
    In the hall I stopped beside a door. Drama: A man was screaming at his girlfriend or wife. “I WORK ALL GODDAMN DAY TO COME HOME TO THIS SHIT?! YOU SIT AND WATCH THEM COURT SHOWS ALL DAY! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! I’M OUTTA HERE!” I didn’t start walking soon enough. He threw open the door—the knob slammed into the wall—and saw me there.
    He wore a business suit and was much bigger than me. He was panting and rage contorted his face funhouse style. The eyes bulged: cartoonish, jungle-crazy eyes. That’s all that registered before I bolted. He took off in the opposite direction. I didn’t look back. Shit.
    Hall after hall, rights, lefts, two flights of stairs, and I finally arrived at my apartment. I lived in apartment 303. With the roaches. There was nothing worse than coming home at the end of the day, hungry as hell, and flipping on the lights to see roaches retreat behind the sofa or into the disposal or into the trash or down the bathtub drain. Your appetite dissolved. And I saw them during the day too. That’s when you know your infestation means business. It acquires a life in and of itself. Every day I would wake up and walk into the bathroom to find a gaggle of them roosting in the bathtub. I had to turn on the shower and watch them swirl down the drain.
    I unlocked the door, opened it, and switched on a lamp. A roach shot behind the couch.
    I owned no TV. I owned no computer. I was too poor to own either and my mom refused to send me a buck more to buy one or the other. A walkway ran right outside my window. One night two uniformed security guards stopped to gawk. “Man. Look at that. Hardly any furniture,” said one.
    “Looks like nobody lives there,” the other said. “Wow.”
    There was always “what to do” trouble. I’d go to the library on Ivar and take out like six or seven books. That way, when one book began to bore after a few hours, I could start in on another, ad infinitum.
    I collapsed on the sofa with The Bell Jar. Plath was around 19 when she won the fashion magazine contest that brought her to New York. James Dickey was around 23 when he wrote an early draft of “The Sheep Child,” one of my favorite poems. Mailer was around 25 when he finished The Naked and the Dead. Right there, in that city, in that room, I was 27.
    Two sentences into the book I stopped to zone out. This happened often. I remembered the day I found the parking spot only three blocks away from the library and I had to walk by Bally’s Gym. It cost around 600 a month to belong. A faux-brunette swaggered out of Bally’s onto the sidewalk ahead of me with lime green platform heels and a tight red miniskirt. She walked that LA slomo walk, probably fevered with a well earned endorphin high. Then, like she was The Queen of Los Angeles, like cameras were popcorning all around her, she pulled a cigarette out of her purse and lit it. I saw the outline of a thong.
    I never forgot her. In the four months I had lived there my weight had shot down from 180 to 127. Gia asked me my sexual orientation and ordered an AIDS test. She thought the weight loss was too rapid. I didn’t tell her I was a virgin.
    I had eight or nine pages behind me after about three hours. Too many commercial breaks, too many distractions: An Arab couple kept walking by outside with loads of laundry—the woman was done up like an Eskimo and the temp was around 100. Or...a tenant down the hall blasted Metallica’s “Fade to Black” repeatedly, AD NAUSEUM. Or...a tenant across the walkway blasted Selena’s rendition of “Back on the Chain Gang” repeatedly, AD NAUSEUM. Or...a daydreamy ectoplasm crackled two feet above my head about teeny bopper girlies asking for my autograph.
    When I graduated Dayton U, my college chum Kim Buckwalter—she was so nice to me, I always saw her as my real mom—cut out an advertisement in the back of Ladies’ Home Journal for a poetry contest and gave it to me. So I sent a poem called “Life on the Moon” to the contest. It began like this:
    I have tried through medication
    And hospitalization
    To feel the “sunlight.”
    But it’s been nothing but night
    And blight.
    Happiness remains out of sight.
    And went on for five more pages. Months later the “judges” replied. They had selected my poem to be read at their annual banquet. I would only have to pay a couple thou for a seat. Special guests David “Stringbean” Akeman from “Hee Haw” and Jon “Bowzer” Bauman from the rock group Sha Na Na would attend. If I paid $500 more I could read my poem on the contest’s public access TV show. I passed on the whole deal.
    ...Tendrils on my calf. A baby roach. The prehensile claws tickled in a bad way. I screamed and flicked it off. The thing darted into the kitchenette. This surfer kid had bombed and sprayed and wiped pesticides all over my apartment three separate times. He sprayed in every crevice and scrubbed down the walls, the counters, the floors, the bathrooms. It took about three hours. The dude wore a surgeon’s mask and a gray suit and I had to be out of the apartment while he did it. “You take off, I spray and wipe and bomb, you come back, no more roaches.” The kid was droopy and lazy and depressed and depressing, kind of like that ubiquitous, tread marked Cincinnati slush back in Ohio. He didn’t walk. He trudged.
    And it never worked. I remember I trekked the fifteen minutes to the landlord’s office—located inside the complex—at the first roach sighting. “And who or what agencies have you told about this, sir?” were the first words out of the tall, lanky, insecure clerk. So the surfer kid—he worked for the landlord—was sent up to spray and wipe and bomb. I knew none of those treatments would work if the kernel of the infestation was in another apartment. As, apparently, it was. And they were German cockroaches. They’re asexually potent breeders, the hardest type of roach to get rid of.
    Enough daydreaming! I pulled myself back down into myself and thought: What to do, what to do, what to do? I usually spent my nights at Borders. I looked at my watch: 2:13 p.m. My mom had suggested I take my car to the Nissan Dealership service shop by Griffith Park after this cracker-lunk at the auto repair shop just off Gereurro said it leaked oil. He wanted to fix it. Mom said the cracker-lunk could be trying to rip me off, and there would be a great deal more probity to the Nissan Dealership. My Triple A map indicated the dealership was 40 minutes south, towards Orange County. I snorted a line of meth, shoved a Kleenex in my pocket, grabbed a book, walked that long walk all the way to the car, and took off into the perpetually heavy traffic.
    “Hello sir. How do you do?” The words stewed in a thick Italian accent. We shook hands. “I’m Tony.” Yeah I know. It says it on your name tag. “I’m the head tech here.” I introduced myself. He stood at my height, about 5-foot-9, with quaffed dark hair and a fake tan. His smock shone virginal and white. Three dots peppered his earlobe. I rubbed my running nose.
    “Yeah, I took my car for a tune up at this repair shop and the guy there said it leaked oil. He, um, showed me how black his fingers were.”
    “Were they Armenian? Don’t trust the Armenians.”
    LA had grilled an angry psycho frown into my face, but I managed a smile. “I don’t really know. I wouldn’t know their accent.”
    “You look young,” he said. “Very young. Like sixteen. In this city people will try and take advantage of you because you look so innocent, no?”
    “Nope. I’m over-the-hill. Been to college and everything.”
    “Well, park it over there. See the three on that garage? We’ll take a look at it.”
    “I’m really worried it’s an oil leak,” I said.
    “It could be many things, it—”
    “Uh, are oil leaks expensive to fix? I’m worried. The guy at the shop I took it to said they were, and he said that they take forever to repair.” I knitted my brows.
    “Eh, yes, they can be expensive. As for time, maybe takes three or four days. You have to find where the leak is at. That can take a while.” He patted me on the shoulder. “But we must think positive. It is what will get us through life.”
    The shop was roomy. Roomy and fancy and clean. Many garages, all in a row. No slovenly five o’ clock shadowed repairmen. And of course Tony was right: So many people in that city tried to rip you off. Especially when they saw my Ohio plates. Angelinos angled for just three cents. But this shop looked too bourgeoisie to try anything like that.
    I pulled up into the garage. Tony was waiting for me. I stepped out and handed him the keys.
    “How much time are we looking at here?” I asked.
    “Eh, give us about three hours or so.”
    Oh man. I panicked. Three fucking hours. The meth hangover would wallop me like Oxford dictionaries the second hour. The easiest place to ride out a meth hangover is at home, not out in public.
    He patted me on the shoulder again. I flinched. “Relax. Don’t look so down about it. I will tell my boys to hurry.”
    I sat down in the small waiting room with its outdated auto magazines—worth nothing to me since I didn’t know dick about cars—and opened the True Crime book I brought with me: Story of a Serial Rapist. Some husky airport security guard in Houston went postal and raped female after female, all in their own homes. He staked out their houses during the day and slipped pencils on the sills of their open windows so when the women shut the windows, they wouldn’t shut all the way. This left space to pry and push them open when he returned at night. (What the fuck? Didn’t the girls notice the pencils when they shut their windows?). He forced one girl to use her vibrator on herself. When he busted through another lady’s window she tore off her shirt and screamed, “Is this what you want, you sick prick?!” A sad attempt to save face. He did an older woman in the morning while she was in bed half-asleep and her husband was out jogging. She thought he was her husband and kept her eyes shut and didn’t fully wake. The DA couldn’t prosecute him for that one.
    Andrea Dworkin reviewed the book in the New Yorker back in 04. That’s how I found out about it. George Paine, the author, had gone out of his way to trash her in the preface. He wrote she wrongly blamed all men for the depravity of a few. He defended journalists who try to invade rape victims’ privacy. The dude even added a comedic flourish to one rape. He made jest of a young woman who tried to hide her wedding ring so the rapist wouldn’t steal it. She failed.
    I guess Mr. George was just asking for it. Dworkin began her review, “All the victims in George Paine’s new book, Story of a Serial Rapist, were raped twice: the first time by a hard working airport security guard named Jerry Stankoskis, the second time by the author himself, who dwells in drooling fashion on prying detail after prying detail.” She called it S&M porn.
    Eventually Tony walked in. “Not through with car yet.” He was wiping oil off his hands with pumice. “But it can’t be oil leak. The L-Ring Progenitor cap is very rusty. So it’s probably just AC water leak. No big worry. Much less serious than oil leak. No major repairs needed.”
    I blew out like a balloon. “Thank God.”
    He looked over my shoulder. “What are you reading? You look like a reader of books.”
    I held it up. The look on his face: Victorian disapprobation?
    “So how would you feel about McDonald’s?” he asked. “It’s just down the street. Your car will not be ready for another hour or so.”
    His proposal made me nervous. “Sure. Okay. Right.” I got up and started walking.
    “No sir, no. I mean the both of us. I’m buying.” Out of the corner of my eye a young repairman grinned at us.
    We walked three blocks. I felt the LA sun tunnel through the smog, right at me. The humidity burned high. I imagined the molecules as bubbles bouncing off my face. Like every public place in that city, the McDonald’s was crowded, so we had to wait in line a while. A blonde teen behind us caught my eye. Tony seemed to register my attention to her. She couldn’t have been older than nineteen: platform heels, tan legs—a beach tan, a real tan—with white skin peeking up under her Daisy Duke cut offs, along with a tiny ripple of cellulite. Her hair was long and just-out-of-the-shower wet (the style there) and she wore a pink halter top, abdomen exposed. A belly button ring studded her flat, flat stomach. The Angelino girls stood out much more than the Cincinnati tread marked skanks; they italicized themselves.
    When I first arrived in LA I stayed two weeks at The Palace Inn, right off Santa Monica Blvd. One day I was lying in bed and the owner’s Venezuelan wife, Mrs. Jaramiello, walked in. She was mid-30’s, opal eyes—lots of white around the pupils, like marbles in milk—and her dark hair cascaded like a waterfall. More importantly, she wore a see-through shirt with a black laced bra: instant hard on. Mrs. Jaramiellio sensed my excitement; she looked pretty uncomfortable. That turned me on more. The skin flute orchestra struck up for weeks after.
    We sat down with our food. Tony would lose his place every time I wiped my nose. He asked if I had a cold. We talked jobs. He said the previous year the want ads were packed, but, “now there’s nothing but security jobs, and you are thin and not so tall. Must be like football player to get those.” We talked of our real homes. He grew up in Apia, Italy, but they were too “Christ-loving” there, so he moved first to San Francisco, then to LA. He hardly knew the language here and had no family or friends to help set him up. On Sundays he hung out the whole day at the Santa Monica beach, all alone. I didn’t hear any talk about a wife, ex-wife, girlfriend, or kids. He spent his Friday nights and Saturdays in Tijuana.
    “Ovy. Your forefinger. Why is it—how do you say—not there?”
    I lowered my eyes to his lapel and closed my hands into my lap under the table. “Back at Dayton U I got drunk at a party and decided to prank this asshole’s car. My friend Haas lent me his pocket knife to slash the tires. So I stabbed the tire thinking the knife was locked out, right? But it wasn’t. It snapped back on my finger. Thus...” I shook my head. “Makes it hard to type.”
    He winced. “They didn’t do that where I went to school.”
    I perked up. “How’d you get this job? How much does it pay per hour?”
    “Per hour I don’t know. Salary is about sixty thousand a year. Why?”
    “Maybe it’s something I could do. An auto repairman.”
    “Eh, I am...” he waved his hands around, trying to think of the right words, “...many steps up from repairman. I am technician. First they must train you. School. The plant. Up near Topanga Canyon.” Something occurred to him and he lit up. “So, you want to work with cars here? I see a lot of talent in you, kid. A lot of promise. There’s a load of shit to learn. But with my help you can do it, right? I know everyone there is to know.”
    I leaned my face into my hand, stretching my mouth. “All my friends from college, they support themselves. They are across the moat, into the palace. It hurts to be around them. And I can’t live off my mom forever. I feel like a big enough loser as it is.”
    He reached across the table and—for the third time—patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t talk like that. This is LA. That’s all people do here, live off other people.”
    I had only eaten half my Big Mac and none of the fries. I pushed the tray away and slumped into my chair. It was hard to look him in the eye. On that note, since I got to LA, it was hard to look anyone in the eye.
    He pushed the tray back toward me and said, “Go on and eat, my friend. Eat your Big Mac. I love McDonald’s.”
    “No, I try not to eat meat. I’ve been an animal lover since I was born. Card-carrying member of PETA and everything.”
    He shook his head and said with a full mouth, “You are too thin. I could break you in two.”
    “This place reminds me,” I said, my eyes still lowered to his lapel, “of the time my family vacationed out west when I was nine. We were waiting in line in another packed McDonald’s here in LA with two big, buff, giggly Hells Angels bikers behind us. One held a shiny, silver earring dangling from his thumb and forefinger. My little brother was about seven at the time, and the biker placed the earring by my brother’s ear for a second—my brother didn’t notice—and both the bikers stared at each other and grinned.” I looked up into his face, allowing time for my story to impress its moral. We walked back to the shop and he left me. I never saw him in the flesh again.
    When my car was done, this geeky tech with a gob of shaving cream in his right nostril told me the problem was an oil leak. I shook with fear. Where would the cash come from to fix it? And that’s at least three days without a car, three days stuck at 330 West 33rd Street, Building A5, apartment 303. Like Ad Seg in a prison. Locked within a closet, within a closet. I told the tech I’d call to schedule an appointment to take the car in.
    I walked down the hall of A5. The top notch humidity stung. Hives blossomed on my neck and cheeks: common symptoms upon returning. I turned a corner and saw the tall angry guy walking toward me, the one who caught me outside his door. My heartbeat surged in my ears. The hall carpet offered itself up, a fuck of a lot easier to look at than him. It symbolized, in turgid drama, all of Los Angeles: the green and black fibers tangled up with one another in some cosmic and inconsequential jungle. I risked looking up to say hi.
    I’ve never seen eyes kindle more with rage and burnt out hatred. All at me. How can people live like that? How did he sleep at night? Red vessels rimmed the whites—worse than mine—and I wrote in my diary later that night, “It was like a film projector projected footage of a spastic volcano onto his face.” He looked me right in the eye and mouthed something I couldn’t hear. Our “encounter” reverberated inside me all night at low simmer. Not a bad idea to caption all my encounters in LA between quotation marks.
    I unlocked my door and turned on a lamp. No roaches. And I had worked up a minor appetite driving back from the dealership. I opened up a cabinet for a paper plate and spotted a house centipede lounging in one of the plastic bowls. They’ll scamper into my pad for the AC when it heats up too much outside. “Sorry man,” I told the thing as I sprayed the Raid. It works slowly on house centipedes as they undulate: They writhe and twist like worms and epileptics and ants under magnifying glasses.
    I watched for a bit and said, “You didn’t come up here to bother me.” It just wanted sanctuary. It wanted AC. So I pulled it out between my thumb and the nub of my forefinger, tossed it to the kitchenette floor, and stomped it: mercy kill.
    Not its intention, but it had ruined my appetite. I reached under the sofa and pulled out Bound and Gagged, the issue with Wynter Storm and Liz Bathory on the cover tied to chairs back to back, a big ripe juicy apple stuffed into each model’s mouth. It was a May of 2002 issue, but the photo itself looked older. By the bikini wax job—a Sumerian/French 3.5 Waxing—I’d say it was taken circa December of 97. Wynter looked like she’d been pregnant: there were stretch marks the mag didn’t bother to clean up, and the blubber really bulged at tummy level, like an inner tube. I wondered why the photographer, Mr. T, chose to shoot them sitting down. At least model her standing and oblique to the camera, to trim her down. “You annoy me, Wynter Storm,” I said. Joel M. Reed, the bucktoothed man with chipmunk cheeks and horn-rimmed glasses responsible for the B&D film classics Bloodsucking Freaks, The Teaching of Marcy, Barb Wire Dolls, Nazi Love Camp 7, The Defilers, The Schoolgirls get Raped, and the whole Rapeman to the Rescue series (“Righting Wrongs through Penetration!”), maintained in a 1998 interview with Ben is Dead that men who were into the male dom bondage scene—guys like me, who only liked women as subs—were actually Femdom strapon lovers and homosexual masochists with extremely debilitating mom complexes. Only they didn’t know it.
    It went something like: “Don’t get me wrong. Gayness is great. I used to live in San Francisco so I should know. I’m not homophobic. But the thing is, many 100 lb weaklings who drool at bound babes unconsciously fantasize of dressing up in tighty-whitey skivvies after Ned Beatty in Deliverance or after Michael P Fay about to get it in Singapore while a big fat grouchy guy in mommy’s blouse chases them around with a 16 plait 2 toned snakewhip. But they can’t face their fantasies, so instead they overcompensate with B&D and S&M magazines and websites—and, of course, all the movies I’ve written and directed—that use women as subs. The male in question becomes—there is no delicate way to put this—a fucking psycho.” Apparently he had sold out. The PC movement avalanches forward...
    It took forever—I must’ve checked my watch twenty times—but 8:00 rolled around. Because I would be venturing to Borders, I primped myself up: black Levi Dockers that didn’t sag when I bought them, a tight white Gap muscle shirt that delineated my skeleton framework, and dark, just-shined loafers. I slapped on some English Leather cologne, did two lines, checked my stash—about three lines worth left, oh no, oh fuck, nightmare city—and left for the bookstore: about a fifty minute drive without traffic.
    The hardest steps I ever took were into the Santa Monica Borders. Everyone looked at me: a skull chattering on toothpicks. Add to that my bleached pallor, my shoulders squeezing up to my neck, and the red tributaries rooted in the whites of my eyes, eyes darting every which way ala the schizophrenic hustle.
    I asked at the counter about their book discussions. The clerk said, “It’s next week, on Friday the...” he checked the calendar “...the 24th. Eight to nine p.m., sir.” I sucked in air.
    With luck I found a chair—it was a Friday night, so customers packed the store—and sat down with the Bukowski autobio Hank, written by Neeli Cherkofsky. I read about a night where a young, aspiring, and unpublished writer showed his stuff to Buk. Buk was amazed. It was after midnight, but he rang up Cherkofsky and screamed, “You won’t believe this kid! He’s a fucking genius! Get your ass over here!”
    Neeli arrived yawning, read the manuscript—he had read the kid’s stuff before—and said with airs, “Hank, What the Fuck, this is pretentious I-want-to-write-like-Virginia-Woolf-but-I-don’t-have-the-talent bullshit. Seriously. Read it again.”
    So Buk did. Then he threw it in the fireplace and shouted, “That was terrible!!!” The kid burst into tears and ran out, throwing all the blame on Cherkofsky and none on Buk. Neeli scripted the scene like he himself was the wronged party.
    At the Melrose Mall, the escalators and the mirrors that ran parallel to them sparked a nasty vertigo. You looked into either mirror and saw thousands of escalators.
    The autobio depressed me. Plus, my life wasn’t half as hard as Buk’s. I found another book: The Body as Machine: A Medical Glossary. Back in Cincy, for nonfiction, I’d always buy the book. For years I had nursed a habit of underlining important info in nonfiction books so I could go back months later and review the highlighted items; if I didn’t I wouldn’t remember much. But you couldn’t do that with books from a library—what if the librarian found out you were defacing the books?—and you couldn’t do that with books you perused but didn’t buy at a bookstore—what if someone eventually bought the book, so it wouldn’t be there months later to review, or what if the clerks saw you defacing their books? They’d charge you and knock your dick out of place. And I was always so low on cash I couldn’t afford to buy books at Borders, so...in one ear and right out the other.
    Eventually I got up to take a leak. This is what it’s like in an LA Borders men’s room on a Friday night: “JAMEY GET A GRIP!” scribbled in pink bubblegum lipstick on a mirror. A patron had tipped over the trash can and balled up paper towels sprawled the breadth of the floor. Possibly the same patron had punched or smacked or perpetrated some act of violence against the soap dispenser and smashed it in two. Pink soapy liquid was splattered everywhere like blood in a horror movie. Two toilets were overflowed. Someone had lined another toilet seat with a thick, thick, THICK ring of toilet paper, off of which dripped gobs of dark runny shit—I didn’t understand the aerodynamics of that; I mean, how did that happen? A photography book of black and white male nudes (Mapplethorpe, maybe?) sat splayed open on the floor of another stall. Something dried and splashed indented the pages. My area of expertise: sperm.
    I didn’t breathe through my nose till I was out of there.
    A highfalutin-looking babe had taken my seat. Luckily I found another and got back to the medical glossary. Close to closing time I looked up at the patron in the chair beside me and an epiphany struck: This Borders was a preview of hell. The guy looked around sixty and he was dressed like a professor, i.e. his clothes were mismatched as fuck, dingy white Generic sneakers, blue and white Argyle socks, tan corduroy pants and plaid button down shirt topped with the seventies emphasized collar. He snored audibly. A big, thick volume, The Logistics of Mathematical Vector and Scalar Computations, sat open faced on his lap.
    I left for home at midnight, the Friday closing time. Back in my complex, as I wound past dinky, assembly line gardens, I met up with a tenant who spoke English (Of which there were very few; most of the tenants were foreigners who had congregated into the complex after the Rodney King riots back in the early 90’s). She smelled of Noxema, the cream my mom used to rub on her face before bed. The lady told me that last night a young male in Building D4 had been attacked and raped while he was in bed by an unknown assailant, but the landlord was hushing it up. No bad publicity allowed.
    I got home and switched on some AM talk radio. I think I was the only person in that city who listened to AM talk radio. It was terrible. The hosts desperately tried to provoke. I know they didn’t believe half their rants, but they knew if they could get callers all pissed off and frothing, people might not actually turn the dial to an FM music channel.
    No, wait. There was one decent and honest exchange. Rikki Rackman, back before my time, hosted “Headbanger’s Ball” on MTV. After “Headbanger’s Ball” went off the air, KABC-AM—an LA AM radio station—gave Rackman his own talk show. He was still at it when I moved to Los Angeles, doing talk radio and dating Liz Bathory. I guess she “dressed the part” whenever she’d come to KABC to see him, because one of the hosts of an earlier talk radio program, Ron Foster, would dis the shit out of her every day on air. Why did her apparel bother him? He screamed that Liz dressed like a slut, a whore, a skank, a ho, a manhole (a chick who’s vagina has been stretched to gummy oblivion), a semen repository, a sperm bucket, you name it.
    So one day Matt Stuart, a Stern wannabe, announced the topic for that day’s show: violence in the workplace, and the palace intrigue accorded it. Without naming names, he said one of his coworkers had wrongly and viciously stomped another coworker. The lines opened and the first caller was Rikki’s cousin. Apparently, Rikki had physically laid into Ron Foster, and the station had fired the former headbanger thusly. The cousin screamed that Rikki was the wronged party, not Ron Foster, and that the least Matt could do was to be honest about who and what he was talking about. Matt stuttered and quickly cut to a commercial, and when he was back on air the topic was: “Which supermarket do you prefer for pet food: Ralph’s or Food4Less?”
    I listened to the radio till eight a.m., my usual bedtime. With the sun shining through the curtains, I brushed my teeth, got undressed, and grabbed the tube of Retin A cream and squeezed some into my palm and rubbed it into my dick. I did that every morning before bed. The stuff is prescribed to burn acne off your face. But if you religiously rubbed it onto your shlong, it would burn like hellfire when you jerked off, especially if you didn’t use any lubricant. The pain was immense, like thorns were curling around and hugging into your penis. It was awesome. I described it in my diary as “blowhole stimulating”
    On Monday my phone rang. My phone never rang.
    “Hello?”
    “Hello. Is Ovy Boeneem there?”
    “This is he.”
    “Ovy, this is Tony. I assure, the mechanic was wrong. He is young, you know? Like you. Not so experienced. No, what I tell, it is the right problem. It is water leak from conditioner.” Tony sounded offended the technician had contradicted him.
    My shoulders collapsed. “Thank God. At least I can relax some.”
    “And it’s nothing to worry about, very little time, very little money to fix.”
    Some small talk followed. He sounded a tad too happy. Was he drunk? I looked at my watch: around seven p.m.
    “Have you found a job yet, my friend?”
    “Nope. Haven’t even been looking.”
    “Because you know, if things, they go bad, you could move in with me.”
    “Uh...”
    “Because...I would like to get to know you better and you to get to know me better.”
    Silence.
    “Do you understand this?”
    “Yeah. You know who Art Bell is, right? There was some nutcase hippie caller who said he was working on time travel using a bicycle chain. I don’t understand—”
    “It’s hard for me to believe, that you are 27. That’s what you said, right? 27?”
    “Yeah, on Art Bell there was some dude—”
    “Because you look so young, so very young, people will try and take advantage of you in this city.”
    We talked on about ten more minutes.
    The next night: “Hi Ovy!! It’s Tony!!” He sounded giddy, like we were old college drinking buddies.
    I sighed. “Hey. What’s up, man.”
    “Well, how is your car? We got to get that conditioner leak fixed, you know?”
    (We?)
    “Yeah...yeah...” I’d take the car back to the Armenians—or whoever they were—before I’d take it back to that Nissan dealership.
    “The Angeles heat, it is killing, just killing.”
    “I’ll take it down to you sometime next week.” I talked some about Cincy, then: “What’s up with you, Tony?”
    “I just came back from Ralph’s. Did shopping for the week.”
    “Huh. I got to Food4Less.”
    “So you must tell me Ovy: You live alone? No girlfriend?”
    “Nope. Single with a capital S.”
    He giggled. “LA is a lonely place,” he said. “See, these people, they move to big cities because they want—how do you say—lights and parties and action. They want to be around people, meet people, go out. But take it from me kid: Many in big cities are lonely.”
    “Yeah...” I drifted off, lost my place, and came back “...I’ve seen all the billboards that say, ‘Are you lonely? Do you need help? Do you want to connect and meet people? Do you want friends? Find them here: The Yellow Pages.’ I know what cities are like, I mean, look where I grew up. But I wasn’t expecting this. Not this.”
    “And the area you live in. It is a bad area.”
    “That it is, that it is.” Actually the gang members were pretty polite.
    “Lucky you have a car. Too dangerous for you to take walks.”
    “That’s what the tenants here say...”
    “Hey! I just thought of something! Me!” He was practically shouting. “Your mom stops sending you money, you can move in with me! You’ll never be lonely with me!”
    Gadar (Gay Radar) is usually on point. I’ve seen men think I’m attractive, but unless they’re mentally ill, or in Tony’s case, desperately desperate, they usually leave me alone.
    He was on a roll: “You know what you remind me of? ‘Fidanzata!’ Say it with me!” He spelled it out.
    “What does it mean?”
    “Just come on! Repeat after me: ‘Fidanzata!’” He enunciated each syllable.
    I sighed. “Okay. Fidanzata. What does it mean, man?”
    “Hee hee hee. It means ‘my friend.’ ‘My lady friend.’ Hee hee.” There’s that one B&D mag with Nurse Ratched on the cover sitting atop Liz Bathory. I got to save up for that one.
    I said I had to go, I said I needed to pick up meds from Walgreen’s pharmacy. A lie. I had already picked up my Prozac...and my Zoloft and my Risperidol and my Zyprexa and my Ambien and my Xanax and my Buspar about five days ago. Gia doled out my meds on a weekly basis so I would never have enough to kill myself.
    The next night Tony of The Dotted Ear called. And the next. And the next. Always around 7:00, 7:30. Some uninviting sixth sense told me he fondled himself as we talked. The last time I ever heard his voice was the Friday night of the book discussion. I couldn’t think of much to say. Most of my sentences trailed off into ellipses. Finally I said I had to go.
    “But, but, your car. You must bring it in, the leak, it must be fixed. Or else the AC will break down. The filter caps will rust and fall off. And it will be up over a hundred next week. You must.”
    I squinted: Was that a baby roach running all over my Ragu-stained ladle in the kitchenette sink? “Um...what? Yeah, I heard. About the weather. I’ll call to make an appointment. Right now I got to go to a book discussion.”
    “Uh...uh...okay. But it is serious.”
    “Gotcha. Talk to you later.”
    “No, no, but hold on...These...these...drugs...I do not judge, you know? If you would move in with me, anything about you would be okay. And Manuel at work, he will sell me cocaine. Like your Tony Montana. And I love to drink, like at your college parties you miss so much, so the same as you, I am user of drugs. Just not cocaine. A user of alcohol.”
    I kept quiet.
    “And Manuel will sell good stuff, not talcum powder, not rip me off. And I could buy for you too. Free of no charge. I have plenty saved up to spend on this cocaine.”
    I didn’t say a word.
    “My house, it is your house too. Right at this moment I am watching TV. I am doing nothing. You can come over. I live right off 800 block of Sepulveda. And Monday I’ll talk to Manuel.”
    “I got a book discussion to go to. No can do.”
    His voice rose. “Okay. You choose. To be happy and fun or this book discussion. If it’s really true and you’re not lying to get rid of me. This is the last time I can call. I can’t keep calling. I’ll get in trouble. Where ever you take the car, make sure to tell them it leaks oil, not water. I lied. I lied to please, because you seem burdened. Much luck with your life. Buono fortuna.” Click.
    I hung up, kept my hand on the receiver, picked it up again, and dialed my mom.
    “What do you think about me coming home?”
    “Jesus. I don’t.”
    My mom did the amateur nights at the Cincinnati comedy clubs—Go Bananas, The Funny Bone, Dave and Buster’s—for a year after she graduated Dayton U. Then she gave up the scene all together because, in her own words, “I just wasn’t too funny. I bombed every night.” She moved on to do post baccalaureate work.
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t want to. Too painful a prospect. For your own good, it’s best you stay out there. Pound the pavement for work. Things come up. You’ll find a job, become your own person, no more dependence on mommy.”
    I ran my hand through my hair. “Mom, what the fuck? I came out here knowing no one. I didn’t know my way around. It’s like a totally different country. And this city’s fucking huge. Everything, my friends, my college, my family, my whole life, is in Cincinnati. The only life I live can be in that city. Everything inside of me revolves around Cincy. Right now I’m out in the boondocks.”
    “Yeah yeah yeah, woe is me, the same old bullshit. I don’t see what the problem is. You know what? Where’s our laugh track? You remember when you were just a little kid, at Colfax Elementary? How I used to rip you a new one with that tape? I had that audiocassette of canned laughter, and you’d give me some sad sack sob story, as you always did, it was always about kids teasing you at Colfax, or some other dumb shit, and I’d bring out the recorder and press Play at all the right moments, all the moments you were like, ‘Mom, I feel so awful!’ and getting all choked up. Ah, those were the days.”
    I felt like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens II, locked in a soundproof room, screaming for help at the remote cameras no one was watching and trying to throw chairs through the bulletproof windows while spidery facehuggers scurried and tap danced across the floor toward me.
    “Mom, it is not that hard to understand. I cannot, CANNOT, hold a job here. Even in Cincy, where things were more laid back, I had trouble with jobs. I don’t see how I’m going to be a part of things on this planet. I don’t see how I will make it here or anywhere.”
    She laughed uproariously. “How Shakespearian!”
    “But—”
    “Boohoo. Don’t act the artsy-fartsy doomsayer stereotype.”
    “Mom I’m not—”
    She sucked in and screamed: LIGHTEN UP! STOP FEELING SORRY FOR YOURSELF! BE SOMEBODY! What’s your friend Bumsy from Akron doing? The other day your sister said she saw him on Bloomsburg TV. And Misha Kapler, she’s an LCSW now, and...”
    I footslogged into Borders heart rate up, head low, eyeballs somersaulting. A Christian Science band played away upstairs in the coffee shop. I searched around and found the book discussion right by the B Section. I was familiar with this corner of the store: every book by Burroughs or Bukowski you could ever imagine, even shelves and shelves of nonfiction books about them; they had Speed, the book Burroughs’s son Billy wrote about drug addiction before he died a homeless bum.
    The “discussion” was two men and two women sitting and laughing. No table to hide fidgety hands. I stood there and watched about a minute. They were Angelinos with a capital A, with all the heinous mannerisms: the smug, pretty face, the well-defined physique, the hyper-expensive clothes, the regal arch of the brow, the “social” laugh, the overly elevated diction, the goody goody two shoes demeanor, the traces of hard-core, Type A Personality. Sterile as hospital bed sheets. “Ill bred crackers” I called them in my diary. I surrendered to my worst half and bolted.
    Gia will be frustrated with me. And she’ll be pert about it, too. I mused on the doctor: She was not as innocent and pink and girlie as she had seemed. I’ve seen other shrinks before, and she’s much more stone-faced and derisive than the worst of them. And always anxious, always surreptitiously checking the clock above me. Our appointments ended at the exact second they were supposed to; when it was time, her nodding became phony and she came pretty close to cutting me off mid-sentence. A few times she had even forgotten about our appointments: Once I walked in on her while she was going at her sushi lunch.
    I drove home a little relieved, but only a little. I mostly felt down and weak and I wondered how I was going to make it in the world—how I was going to make it in life—if I couldn’t even join a stupid little book discussion. On Haspurita the tall, scrawny, axe-faced hooker was slumped all over the curb like a long legged insect, sky blue heels off, rubbing her feet, staring the Thousand Yard Stare. She was cloaked in a transparent plastic sheath, with only a bikini on under that. She looked up and tried to make eye contact. I looked away. But it reminded me: I said aloud, “One of these days I’m going to do what Holden Caulfield did, hire a hooker just for conversation. I reiterate: just for conversation. I don’t want to be pissing pus.”
    Fumble through my glove compartment for my keycard, the gate screeches open, park in B-45, hike past all the other buildings into A5, break out in hives, up two flights of stairs, down long empty halls, open my door, the roaches retreat. Someone was, again, playing Metallica’s “Fade to Black” over and over. Some serious shit to torture me with the song, in that city, in that neighborhood, in that apartment. Goddamn them. Made me mad.
    I closed the curtains and undressed and checked my watch. Eleven hours till bedtime. What to do? I needed to do something, something to forget about my failure at Borders. I didn’t feel like Helpless heroines or Hogtied tonight. “Lily Tiger, Liz Bathory, Darla Crane, Arita the Ballerina, Georgina Spelvin, I’m on to ya. You’re not as innocent as you pretend to be, with your ga ga eyes.” From my collection deep under the sofa I pulled out Newlook Magazine—a quasi-nudie mag, not a bondage mag—and paged to the layout of the nude blonde.
    I always theorized you could tell the desperate, geeky, or testosterone-addled male authors who cheated on their wives and fucked their Creative Writing girlie students by the way they construed women into their writing. In fact, all guy writers and failed guy writers, if they’re single, or if they’re sleazy, or if their dick acts as a compass needle, their words will indict them. So check this out:
    The blonde posed on all fours. Goose flesh bespeckled her derriere. Her breasts were real and hung like teats. The Montgomery’s Tubercles stood out on her areolae. She had the tramp stamp: a mean Luftwaffe hawk tattooed in blue right above her gluteus maximus furrow. But was she a hard-core porn star like some of the other ladies in Newlook? The magazine—despite its English name—was German, so I couldn’t read it to find out: I took four years of German in middle and high school, but I had forgotten most of it. Not much gynecological detail to her—graphic genitalia and rectitude are inversely proportional: the really pretty and guiltless chicks don’t do hard-core shots. The girl definitely looked better than the weather-worn babes in Tied Toys. I decided her seraphic, soft-core. “I proceed to dive into your open arms,” I told her.
    I kneeled, as if to an alter, placed the publication far enough back so I wouldn’t spurt all over it, and began, and...nothing happened. After many minutes I was still at half-mast. “Fuck! Shit! Goddamnit! Can’t I think of anything arousing?!” I let go, sat back, and drifted. I remembered back to my family vacation out west when I was nine. In Wyoming, we stayed far off the highway in a hilly mountain town with no streetlights. We would eat out a lot at Elvira’s, a dinky hick restaurant on the town’s outskirts. One night I wandered away from the table and into the barroom. It was dark and empty of drinkers save for one dude, definitely the quintessential hillbilly. He called me over. I pulled myself up onto the barstool next to him. I couldn’t see my family or anyone else in the eating area. The hillbilly smacked the bar with his palm and yelled, “Another Schlitz! I’m thirsty Grady! Get off that shitter, pronto!!!” Then he cackled and elbowed me and said, “Hey kid, wanna know what we do in our spare time up here in Oree?
    “To fuck sheep,” he said, “you need a pair of high galoshes and a tennis racket with the webbing cut out. You sneak up behind the sheep, slip both its back legs in the high galoshes so it can’t run away, and—listen up, this is the good part—from behind, you pull the racket over its head and neck, and you mount.” He gyrated his hips on the barstool. “Keep holding the racquet the whole time. For leverage. Oh, and make sure you’re a good ways away from the house. Cause them sheep holler like a motherfucker.”
    I wasn’t in LA anymore. I was in Oree. At night. Tony was nude except for steel toed cowboy boots and a white, Western Straw Stetson. I was kneeling naked on a bale of hay. My dick was chafed and raw and burning. The Cardigans played on my Discman. The sheep was gently chewing on grass, ignorant to the both of us. Tony rubbed Noxema all over his face and chest and legs and penis. He tiptoed commando-like to behind the sheep, slipped its back legs into the black, thigh-high galoshes, winked at me, put the webless racket over its head, gripped the racquet tight with one hand while he maneuvered wincingly into the orifice, and started grinding away. The sheep groaned. I began to jerk off. With no lubricant. The hay poked and needled my legs and the balls of my feet in tandem to my rhythm (Useless double major, Film Studies and English). Tony’s ass was perfect, his stomach was washboard, his chest and arms and legs were contoured like Greek sculpture, and his bristly mustache glistened in the moonlight. I could smell the Noxema. “This is great, is it not, Ovy?” The sheep struggled and bellowed. Tony’s bounce quickened. The animal began to pant out a litany of staccato, rhythmic grunts. That made me harder.

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This appears in a pre-2010 issue of cc&d magazine. Saddle-stitched issues are no longer printed, but you can requesting it “re-released” through amazon sale as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.

This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of cc&d magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
printed, but you can requesting it
“re-released” through amazon sale
as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book!
Email us for re-release to order.