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This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN#/ISBN# issue/book “Question Everything” cc&d, v280 (the February 2018 issue) Order this as a 6"x9" paperback book:  |
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The Death of the Opposite Sex
Joshua Copeland
A cloud drifted in front of the moon, melting it into a phosphorescent circle. The night sky darkened and we disintegrated into forms, no longer people, no longer distinct things. A slight breeze picked up, rattling the dry leaves in the trees. For a moment, nothing. Canyons in between seconds. Sarah broke the stupor: “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we all took our clothes off?” She giggled. My eyes lit up. “Come on,” she said. “It’ll be great. I mean, how long have we all been friends?” I thought this only happened in adult flicks. There we stood on my back deck on a Friday night. My parents were eating out at Sodini’s.
“I’m up for it,” Alan said, sticking out his chest to be funny.
“Oh why not?” Rich said.
“But Ash will perv us,” Jessica said.
“I will not,” I said, “I’ll be a gentleman. Scout’s honor.” I raised my right hand.
“Let’s do this,” Alan said.
The one catch: I didn’t much care for male nudity. But still, it was a great idea. Rich saw Sara naked all the time and Alan saw Jessica naked all the time. The guys knew their girls bodies down to the pore. The only nakedness I ever saw was two dimensional and flat, void of actual flesh. So this would the event: Mark it on my timeline. The animated pages of Playboy. My magazines made real. Act casual, though. Don’t behave as if this was epochal and you were a hard up first timer. Be an adult.
Sara and Jessica both tugged off their shirts and unhooked their bras. Their breasts hung loose and free in the open air, the graphic minutiae lost to the black. Sara hopped on one leg to pull off her jeans, Jessica let her denim skirt drop and stepped out of it, and just like that, both girls stood naked. The dark shaded their triangles of pubic hair—bad lighting. They were vague and amorphous, like two ghosts in tarry murk. Their hands hung to their sides. I tried not to look.
In a flash, Alan and Rich were in their birthday suits. Their organs hung from their bushy hair. Alan did a few jumping jacks. “Stop showing off,” Jessica said. Even through the darkness you could see their pecs were clear cut and specific. Their necks were thick and their stomachs were flat.
Sara looked at me. “And?” she asked.
“Okay, okay. Hold your hormones.”
“We are waiting,” she said.
I pulled my sweater over my head and my hair went static.
“Go Go Go!” Jessica cheered.
I took off my shirt and goose bumps perked up on my chest and arms. I unsnapped my corduroys, pushed them down till they sagged, undid my French cuffs, pulled one leg off, then the other, yanked down my boxers and left my clothes in a pile next to me. Everyone’s mouth dropped. Silence. They just stared at my genitals, little white dashes connecting their eyeballs to my loins. I felt the wet of the wood through my soles. The breeze picked up even more. Leaves scattered.
“Holy shit. Holy shit,” Alan said. “Ash, what is wrong with you?”
“Lord God in Heaven,” Jessica said.
Sara said, “Ashley, what is up with your nuts?” She looked as if she was trying to put herself in my place, to feel what it was like to walk around with these, to feel my pain at showing and telling. The girls’ bodies lost all their glamor. That spark burned out into the night. I felt I was naked around total strangers. The embarrassment was too much to conceal. I bled leper’s blood. With nothing else to do, and a lot expected of me, I looked down to pretend to study my testicles. I felt my heart beating through my chest. “I don’t know. They’re big, I guess.”
“That’s grotesque,” Rich said. “They look like a jumbo shriveled pare. Hasn’t a girl ever said anything?”
My hands glided down to cover myself. I remembered in fourth grade, in the school play “Honest Abe”, I forgot my line, “And to the cabin you go! Off with you, boy!” I just stood there and stared, the parents sensing something was wrong. Mr. Lelinski, the acting coach, put his face in his hands. I wished I could just pop out of existence. All eyes on me. Then and now. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s not be rude. Stripping is an easy embarrassment.” My eyes met theirs.
Sara said, “You ought to get those checked out. Like first thing tomorrow. Wake up and do it. Christ. They look like a bulky raisin.” I wanted to strangle her into fish eyes, just launch myself at her. I’d grab her by the neck, my thumbs would press into her trachea until I heard the brittle snap of the hyoid bone. “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. She wrapped an arm around her breasts and covered her crotch.
“Micro dick, super-sized balls. You should join a circus freak show,” Rich said.
“This is so bad,” Jessica said. “Let’s put our clothes back on.”
“I’m with ya, babe,” Alan said. We all dressed.
That night, in bed, with the pulp fiction translation of moonlight through the blinds and the room a blur, I thought. I always knew there was something wrong with my testicles. They had enlarged at such a slow rate, there was no big gotcha moment when I realized that I was a misfit. Right above me, the ceiling grinned. “What do you do if your testicles grow to enormous proportions?” The crack flapped like a mouth. “Go to a primary care physician, of course. So why, pray tell, have you delayed?”
“Good question, good question. I was afraid to. It was easier just to put it all aside and pretend there was nothing wrong. What is it the people say? ‘Out of sight, out of mind’?”
“How bright of you. You’ve had plenty of chances. They’ve been ‘grotesque,’ as Sara put it, for four years now.” I heard the crackle of plaster as it talked, like a fireplace. Flecks of white paint rained.
“I’m sorry. Like I said, I was too scared.”
“That sounds so much like you,” it said, the funk of caked plaster floating down. “Now you just close those eyes and sleep soundly, knowing that you’re in it quite deep.” It exhaled in delighted frustration. Next door my dad grunted.
On Monday I walked into The Iroquois Building. It was writ large in thick black marble letters above the revolving doors. I said hi to Malik, the retired-cop-turned-security-guard, and stepped into the elevator. The doors shut. I pulled out my orange Xanax bottle and counted out four planks. The average dose was one a day. I gulped down all four. The floors chimed away. I walked down the fifth floor to The Family Research Center and opened the door. Sherri, the temp secretary, was at the filing cabinet. She turned around and said hi. I walked back to the Transcription room. Eight students with bulky headphones on sat in a semicircle. In front of each student, a Professional E16 Tape Recorder. Next to every recorder, a stack of papers. Each paper was divided into four squares. The squares represented fifteen seconds. We had to transcribe dinner conversations, families that the study chose at random. Every “ahem,” every “uh,” every cough, every stutter. There was a lot of rewinding. I would listen for a second or two, then rewind to make sure I caught everything. Nancy and Kimberly would check every transcription, and they were always reprimanding me for ignoring or passing over some small detail. One time Kimberly said, “It’s mistakes like these that can put you on the road to termination.”
I sat next to Marci. Her looks had always blown me away. Her long red hair lay comfy on her shoulders, the whites of her eyes stood out like they were light bulbs, and her smile made a nice half-moon. Her nose was small, girly and unobtrusive. Beneath her green pastel skirt, pale legs sprawled. She had her shoes off, and her toenails were painted with bubblegum lipstick. As I worked, the Xanax high kicked in, and I grew supine. Everything became inconsequential. Boundaries erased themselves. I took off my headphones and motioned for her to take off hers.
I told her she looked great today, save for that bruise on her cheek. “How’d you get it?”
“I fell into a wall.”
“Oooh, you guys are going to get in trouble,” Raphaella said, a bit too loud.
“Who cares,” I said. “This job sucks donkey dick. It’s hellfire.” I shook my head.
Marci tapped her pencil on the table. “It’s lame,” she said. “It’s lame. But it pays the bills. Just think, you’re practicing for the real world.” She flicked me with her fingers on my hand. “Think of it that way.” The blood rushed to my groin.
“Who wants to live in the real world? A cap and a gown? Give me a break, girl.”
“We all have to survive somehow, Ash. You don’t want to be dumpster diving for the rest of your life.”
I made pitter patter against the table with my palms. “Not me. No way, no how. I’ll stay in college forever if I have to. I’ll get degree after degree. I don’t care if I’m a forty year old in a General Writing class of eighteen year olds. I don’t care if I’m a sixty year old in a General Writing class of eighteen year olds. I’ll be at Pitt so long I’ll become a museum piece.” I felt a sneeze building; I was cursed with psychosomatic sneezing. It built and built, I put my hand over my mouth and nose and the stuff shot out of me. I grabbed a tissue out of my pocket and wiped. Marci winced.
“Well, let’s get back to transcribing before Kay yells at us,” she said.
“But we need a break. It’s impossible to listen to dinnertime bullshit chatter for four hours a day, five days a week.” I tapped her ivory-white arm. She drew back.
“Sorry. I’m not like you. I mind being yelled at.” She put her headphones back on, pressed Play, and began to transcribe. Later I walked down the narrow hall past Kay’s office and took a few sharp turns to the tiny bathroom—The Iroquois Building had been an apartment building before offices took it over—and looked in the mirror that was flowered at four corners. A gob of mucus sat on the tip of my nose.
Four. Three. Two. One. The elevator doors cranked open. “See you tomorrow, Malik.” I swished through the revolving doors and was out into the chill. Students packed Forbes Avenue. A girl with a Delta Upsilon jacket walked towards me. A little sister. She had a diminutive frame. Blonde hair down to her shoulders wagged ever so slightly with each step. The red high heels clopped. Her cheeks were rouged and magenta ringed her eyes. A man paced closely behind her. He wore an unzipped gray sun dried Parka. He was maybe mid-thirties. His black and white William Burroughs T-shirt didn’t entirely cover his paunch, leaving his belly button exposed. A thin film of hair blackened his face. He looked like he sat on park benches all day, the pigeons were his only friends, no partner, no family, unemployed, unemployable. He reminded me of a soap dispenser in a highway gas station restroom.
The work week grinded me down slowly. Friday I called my psychiatrist. “Ashley, just between you and me, this is getting out of control,” Dr. Krepps told me over the phone. I imagined her Lilliputian as she rocked in a fetal position on her desk, the phone a huge monument, cratered with manhole sized pockmarks. Every line of her dialogue had a regal yet geeky tone to it; her warnings sounded more like pleas. “This is not good. This is really not good. You need to control your intake.”
“Aw come on. If you don’t prescribe more I’ll withdraw. Plus, Sara invited me to her apartment tonight. I need it. I won’t know anyone there.”
“Okay, but you need to taper it back. I can’t keep doing this. I’ll get in trouble with the board. I might lose my license.”
I drove to Rite Aid. The pharmacist, Bob, peered at me over his thick glasses, eying me warily. His skin looked a tad green under the fluorescence. “This stuff must be like manna,” he said.
As I was zipping up my white full zip fleece jacket I stopped to make conversation with the checkout clerk. I sat next to her a lot in Creative Writing II. “You’ll never believe it,” she said, popping her gum, “But I sent a story out to The Echo Ink Review. They rejected me, but the editor wrote on my story, ‘We shared your story around the office. It was interesting, but not for us.’” Her light and dark blue uniform clung tightly to her body, but she wore horn rimmed glasses and her face was bare, no makeup. “Professor Kinder is too nice to us. I want to know how my stories would fare in the real world. I want a close, clinical eye. I don’t want to be treated like a freshman. I want honesty.”
Around nine Sara picked me up and drove me to her place. As she parallel parked, she said. “I kind of wanted to talk to you. Have you gotten those nuts checked out yet?”
“I have an appointment with Dr. Wolfson next Thursday.”
“Good,” she said, looking behind her as she steered. “Because that was traumatic. I feel scarred. I’ll never look at men’s bodies the same after that.” Her apartment was a house. Two Corinthian columns held up the porch roof, atop each column a frieze of a topless maiden drowning in water, stony and tumultuous. Nine students sat around inside. Sara’s Australian roommate, Shelly, was a nudist, and she walked around in holey grandma underwear. Soon the Xanax high hit and I floated, laying on my back in the Pacific, the sun on my face and nipples, tendrils of rubbery kelp tickling my back. The night drifted on, I said some whacky things and caught people looking at each other from the corners of their eyes.
It ended up that five of us stood around in the kitchen. Sara sat at the table, her head in her hands, her mouth stretched. I leaned against the fridge, opposite Shelly, who stood by the oven with a Coors Light in her hand. There was something stentorian about her, too metallic, too upright. Her curly brown hair ended just above her ears, and a forelock hung over her forehead. Large trapezius muscles slanted into her neck. Shelly looked reinforced. She talked Noirishly, hardly smiling. Her breasts were neutral and unappealing, they were just there, two bobbing hills of flesh, no utilizing them for anything.
“So we hit this new video store in Mount Lebanon,” she said.
“That’s where Lydia Lunch lives, around there,” I said.
“The Incredibly Strange Video Store. Lots of S and M sexploitation films and paraphernalia. They sell Bloodsucking Freaks T shirts. And you know the insignia ‘Enjoy Coke’? They have a shirt there styled just like it in red and white that reads, ‘Enjoy Cock’.”
“No way!” I said.
“Way. Lots of sicko films. My partner and I were in and out. Just remembering it is bad enough. Let me anesthetize myself.” She took a swig off her beer.
A large kitchen knife with a wooden handle lay next to me. Quality, precision, and remarkable perfection. Combining a serrated, never-needs-sharpening blade with an elegantly designed stainless steel handle, it provides balance, control and ease no matter what you’re cutting. I picked it up by the blade and threw it at her, circus style. It missed, clanged loudly against the oven door, and fell to the floor with a bang. Everyone went quiet.
“What the fuck did you do that for?” she asked. I shrugged my shoulders. Protestations sounded.
But why should I let them bother me? I was secure with myself. I had faith in my ability to maneuver within crowds. I was the person I always wanted to be. Why would I even care about the opinion of others? Their lives were biased. They made no indent into me. I was corrugated iron. They were just isles. I was an island, a whole continent. “God,” Shelly said. She walked out.
Sara was sitting straight up. “Ash, what the fuck?”
“That was wrong,” a girl said. “Scary psycho. Jesus.”
“You need a black eye, nutjob,” a punk with a sapphire blue Mohawk and a chicken bone for a nose ring said.
Everyone looked at Sara as if she was my agent, as if she represented me. It was her responsibility to accuse. “Ash,” she asked, “Why did you do that? No, I’m serious. Don’t smirk at me. Why did you do that? Why do you feel you have the right to invade other people’s private space like that?” She stood up shakily and walked over to me. Everyone else left the kitchen, whispering maledictions and shaking their heads.
I heard someone ask Shelly if she was okay.
“Shelly, I am so sorry!” Sara yelled. “He’s drunk! And sick! Drunk and sick! And probably on something!” She grabbed my shoulders. “Ashley, look at me! Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know.”
“I think I know.”
“Why?” I felt her long painted nails dig into me.
“I don’t know.”
She screwed up her face. “What?”
“I was doing Vaudeville.”
“You’re sick.” Then, yelling to Shelly, It’s okay, Shelly! You’re safe! I’m taking him home!” Then back to me. “Let’s go! Get in the car now. Now.”
The morning after, I opened my eyes. The ceiling grinned at me, raising its eyebrows. “It appears someone is quite the sociopath,” it said, sounding like blown leaves. “You’re in for quite a hangover. For the rest of your life.” It winked at me, letting loose a tiny plume of whiteness. “Good luck explaining your behavior to your friends, especially those of the feminine gender.”
What the hell did I just do? What was I thinking? I can never be around them again. Sara, Rich, Jessica, or Alan. The Ceiling read my mind. “See those dusty and cobwebbed window panes? Get used to them. Acclimate yourself to the Spartan nature of your ‘motel’ room; the thin, balding carpet, the artic temperature, the perpetually unmade bed with the coffee-colored stains on the mattress, the CD player/radio, the twelve inch TV with the VCR underneath, the desk and all the notebooks atop it; writings that no one will ever see, so I will call them masturbatory. They’re worth nothing without a second pair of eyes to approve. They’re too purple, too swollen, too many similes and metaphors to be of use to anyone. This is your new life. Enjoy.”
And to a woman, a topless woman. Whatever you do, don’t tell Dr. Krepps.
I lay there with the spins and the roar of blood through my head. The door opened downstairs. That would be my parents. They worked weekends. I stepped out of bed, walked to the bathroom, and vomited. Then I got dressed, buttoning up my Polo shirt over my protruding belly. My mom said I could borrow her Camry and I drove to The Incredibly Strange Video Store.
The place looked like a one room sandcastle half washed away by the tide. I walked in, the lone customer. The videocassette packages shown in the bright light, all primary colors. These movies, I had read about them in Danny Peary’s Cult Movie Classics, but I had never seen them. I knew by heart the storylines of shackled maidens with distressed eyes. I knew the directors with slicked back hair and gold chains. I knew the actresses who were wide-hipped and homely. On the shelves: Greta: The Mad Butcher, The House of Olga, Ilsa: The Wicked Warden, What Have You Done to my Daughters?, Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom, Justine, I Spit on Your Grave, The Defilers, Kidnapped, Rape Squad, SS Devil Camp, Barb Wire Dolls, Fleshomania, The Schoolgirls get Raped, The Renata Moar Funclub, The Smut Peddler. I grabbed the Nazi Love Camp 27 package off the shelf and walked up to the counter.
“That’s a good one,” the clerk said. “I know a guy in Greenfield who owns four copies.” He was in his late twenties. His right eyebrow was mishmashed and stitched up. He had the comb over. His stomach was too round for his Cramps T-shirt. His nose was red and raw, and he sniffled a lot. Gray nose hairs peeked up from under his nostrils. I handed the package to him and he walked behind to the library of cassettes and pulled out the video.
“And let’s see your membership card, please.”
“I’m not a member.” All I could do was stare at the floor and feel my right eyelid twitch.
“Oh, no problem. Here’s the paperwork.” He pulled a sheet out from under the counter.
I filled it out, signing my name, “Ashley Pettibone”.
On the drive home I sneezed extra powerfully. A long string of yellow mucus hung from my nose to the base of the steering wheel. I wiped it on my Levis. On the radio, the DJ, Charlie Cox, said, “An important message for all the parents out there. Western Pen has just discharged a sex offender. He’s a white male, five foot two, long dark hair. He’s twenty two years old, has a tattoo of a black arrow pointing downwards on his stomach, and the word ‘Hard Core’ tattooed in Gothic letters at the base of his neck.”
Charles Bukowski wrote a poem in Mockingbird Wish Me Luck called, “And She Writes and Writes”. He waxed on elitist Dada about his girlfriend’s sister who was fat and had a family and kept squeezing out kid after kid. She sent novels to New York publishers and the publishers kept sending them back. The moral of the poem was that Bukowski was better than her, that he was more “with it,” because he had no kids and spent all his time writing and getting published and having confetti thrown in his face.
I burst in the house, ran up to my room, and shut and locked the door. In a few seconds I was naked. I picked up the package and stared at it. A nude hippie brunette in torn and frayed gray underwear was chained to the ceiling, hanging by her wrists. A muscular man in a tight fitting SS uniform brandished a whip behind her, gritting his teeth. A group of frightened women in smocks huddled in the corner. I shoved the video roughly into the VCR. The motor started up and the wheels began to turn. I flipped on the TV.
First, blackness. Then the words “The Studio of Skin Presents” in front of a 1970s spiral of colors. A dilapidated hallway appeared. Two SS guards walked into view, pushing along two “Jews” in splotched gray smocks. I knew Bob Creely and Mike Busey played the guards, and Kathy Williams and Maria Lease played the Jews. The smocks fit tight and ended above the thighs. The girls walked barefoot and looked far different than the damsel in distress on the cover. Creely and Busey were big men, corpulent men, and they walked in stiff, robotic strides. Static hampered the military music. I sheathed myself in Vaseline.
Creely and Busey shoved the girls into a room with a planked wooden floor and blue plaster walls. An old Hollywood Studio Director’s Lamp, chrome with a black tripod stand, sat barely visible in the corner. Next to that a wooden rocking horse. The room was bright; every crack in the wall, every paint brush swish, every nail in the floorboards, each stain and bit of lint on the actors’ apparel, was distinct. The guards pushed the girls to the middle of the room. “Vee must examine you for de bugs,” Mike said in ersatz German tongue. He brushed a fly off his sweaty forehead. Maria and Kathy pulled their stiff smocks over their heads and just stood there, naked. The film froze on them, and the words “Nazi Love Camp 27” filled the screen, the letters dripping blood. The orchestra struck up some melodrama. Then, “Written and Directed by Bob Creely and Mike Busey”. The words disappeared, and the film continued. The two captives hugged themselves, leaving their privates free to view. Nicotine stains dotted their fingers. The scent of damp wood drifted in from the screen and filled my room.
And I kneeled in the studio, my buttocks resting on my heels. The cinematographer was hunched over, baring his hairy chest, the top of his shirt unbuttoned. A cigar was clenched between his teeth. He winked at me. The boom operator swung the microphone over to me. The actors lost their places and turned to me. Maria and Kathy looked at each other and smiled an “Only in Hollywood” smile. Bob rolled his eyes. The camera quickly swung to me, then back to the actors. The scene continued. The floor creaked in conjunction with my rubbing. I felt the clamminess into my bones. The crew murmured parental approval. Maria and Kathy did a lamentable job of wincing as Bob and Mike examined them. The smell of wet wood enveloped me like I was an embryo and I breathed it, and the odor filled my lungs and I exhaled, sucking in more all the time. Then I spermed. Bob looked up from Kathy’s areole and yelled, “Cut! No more takes! That’s it for the day, kids! Home you go! Drink a beer!” And my world folded back into itself.
