Hands
Joseph Skinner
I'm a mechanic. I like to work with my hands. I like the rough feel of a ratchet wrench handle in my palm, and the soft give of the vice grips as they lock in, and the Archimedean power of a cheater bar as it wrestles down a stubborn stud. At the end of the day, I'm not concerned with scrubbing my hands with Grease Release until they're shiny clean. I get the worst of it off, but I enjoy seeing the blackness between the ridges of my fingers, making my prints stand out. As my wife Sabrina likes to say, those grimy prints are my identity.
Sometimes my hands fuck up. This one week they fucked up big time. The reason, I think, was that I was just horny; Sabrina was on the rag or something and not giving me any. What can I say? I was distracted.
Anyway, on Monday there was the overtorqueing of a head gasket, which of course split the gasket. Then there were the two studs I busted, both real grizzlies to drill out. Tuesday I started spot-welding a gas tank without checking to see if it was completely dry: about two seconds away from sending J.B.'s Autoworks up in a fireball.
Wednesday morning bright and early I left a diesel engine running as I changed its air filter, and a whole set of little hex wrenches got sucked into the engine. This did not make a pretty noise. J.B. came flying in out of the boneyard. He suggested I take some time off. Take a hike, he said. Find your center. I didn't know if this actually meant I was fired, or what. J.B. is a fatherly old hippie, but he has a business to run.
Back home -- Sabrina and I lived in Pojoaque then, which is about halfway between Santa Fe and Los Alamos, birthplace of the A-bomb -- I scrubbed my hands really good, getting every trace of my job off. Sabrina wanted to know what was going on, so I told her.
Hey, everybody fucks up, she told me. That's par for the course, and for a guy to think he never will is so much macho bullshit.
I'll show you macho, I said, and I grabbed her by the neck and wrestled her down on the bed, my hands around her throat. She likes it rough, sometimes. But this morning she jabbed me hard in the side. Get outta here, she said.
I'm going hiking up in mountains, I pouted, rubbing my ribs. I'm going to meditate. Find my center.
You don't know how to meditate, she pointed out. She was looking at me a little worried now.
I laced on my new waffle-stompers and stuffed two cheese sandwiches and a wide-mouth water jar into a fanny pack and headed for the JĒmez. My car was a VW bus borrowed from the shop, and it wasn't hitting so well on a cylinder or two, so it took its time toiling through the pinon-studded foothills up into the land of the ponderous ponderosa. It was late September, a nip of fall in the air. Fat yellow roadside chamisas, accompanied by slender lavender asters, roasted pungently in the sun. The aspens on the higher slopes had already turned, streaks of gold in green ore. I got caught in the last of the morning rush hour traffic snaking its way to Los Alamos, which slowed me down even more, but at last I made it to the butterscotch-scented high country above the Atomic City. There I stopped at a familiar but unmarked trailhead.
I was the only person on the trail. This trail rises steeply at first and then runs along a saddle and eventually reaches an outcropping of tuff which affords a formidable view of Los Alamos, not to mention the Espanola valley and the R°o Grande. Sabrina hates this trail because of its closeness to Los Alamos. She believes nasty radioactive things are dumped near it. She critically points out those weird little concrete boxes you can see through clearings, and she resents not being able to wander very far off the trail without encountering a fence with a dire yellow-and-black DOE No Trespassing notice. The land beyond the fence is said to be peppered with mines. She can't imagine why I would choose to hike up here.
I settled myself on the outcrop, against a wind-twisted ponderosa growing through a crevice in the tuff. Los Alamos doesn't look like much unless you know what goes on down there. The main labs look like your vintage 1950s high school, and the houses are pure suburbia. You would think it would be one big bunker bristling with gun turrets, but no, it's by far the most middle-American looking town in all of northern New Mexico. I think this ordinariness makes it even more sinister, but Sabrina, like I said, is not appreciative. She accepts the irony in the juxtaposition between this most technological of towns and the surrounding cliffside caves, where the ancient Anasazi lived, but she does so grudgingly.
I assumed the classical position of meditation, legs folded with feet on thighs opposite, arms akimbo, hands prayerfully at mid-chest. I closed my eyes and tried to reach the sublime.
Now, two things tend to happen to me when I attempt to meditate in the wilderness: I get to thinking, and I get horny (or in today's case, even hornier), not necessarily in that order. I try my best to achieve that thoughtless, out-of-the body emptiness you're supposed to get when you meditate, but instead the opposite seems to happen: my mind and my body merge into a self-fulfilling fullness, a self-consuming convolution something like the proverbial snake that tries to swallow itself. As a matter of fact, certain positions of yoga lead me to wonder precisely what it would be like to be able to suck my own cock, like Kokopelli, the Anasazi fertility symbol, petroglyphs of whom you can sometimes find in these mountains. (But why is fertility symbolized by a guy sucking himself off? Could this be related to Nietzsche's idea that all good and fertile thought involves the re-absorption of semen?)
At any rate, I usually end up doing something weird. I've climbed naked up evergreens, letting the bark scratch and the needles prickle; I've rubbed my bare haunches against mossy rocks like an animal leaving its musky mark, all the while making strange whining noises; I've poked a hole in the warm, damp silt on the banks of the Rio Grande and fucked, so to speak, Mother Earth. Afterwards, I've always felt stupid and ashamed, as if God or somebody had been watching me.
This morning I tried my best to behave, but it was to no avail. These hands, these hands that had been fucking up all week, these mischievous hands began to abandon their pious configuration and pluck nervously, involuntarily, at the snaps of my denim shirt. They reached over my shoulders and pulled it off in one ten-clawed tug, and my right thumb and forefinger seized my left nipple and squeezed hard. My tit burned and my cock swelled up fit to pop my fly buttons.
I forced my hands to stop for a moment. I stared down at Los Alamos, tried to collect myself. I tried to put my mind on something neutral, an article in Scientific American for instance, a magazine to which I subscribe and sometimes even read. But all I could think about was those hands. I recalled reading somewhere, possibly indeed in Scientific American, that we owe all technological progress, if you can call it progress, to our hands. Human history, in other words, is the history of that notorious old opposable thumb. The brain developed as the hands used tools, say the anthropologists. From those stone scrapers that hollowed out these Anasazi caves to the Los Alamos computers that developed newer, better weapons systems, it was ultimately a matter of hands.
After a while, I gave in. My hands deftly undid the laces of my hiking boots and reached for my belt buckle while my feet, those pitiful pseudo-hands, pushed my boots off. My pelvis arched eagerly to the sky as I rolled back onto my shoulders and my hands shucked my pants and underwear off. Naked, I writhed beneath the tree, the fir needles mortifying my flesh, turning it a stippled pink. I grasped my cock with both greedy paws. Now, I said, with a deep and satisfying sigh, now I've gotten in touch with my center.
I ground the back of my head against the trunk of the tree, my toes alternately splaying and grasping the rock. My meat pumping in my hand like a piston in a cylinder, I braced myself on my knees to come.
That's when I saw her frozen in her tracks on the trail, watching me, the woman.
Now, she looked an awful lot like Sabrina, complete with Sabrina's green plaid shirt, but I really couldn't tell from that distance. It would not have been beyond Sabrina to follow me here and spy on me. If I had to explain myself to her, whoever it was, I would simply say that I had not believed anyone was behind me, since I had heard no other car park at the trailhead there even by the time I reached the summit of the first rise; and that furthermore, I had no idea I could be seen from the trail. What would be harder to explain was why I did not stop as soon as I saw her. Here I'd have to fall (spuriously, I agree) back on the boys-will-be-boys argument: once we get started, we can't stop. Once we men get our hands on our tools, we can't let go.
My wad shot out in a pitiful, sluggish arc in the general direction of the Atomic City, and my shame exploded at the same time as my orgasm. My unit still pulsing, I slunk behind my pocked rock like a reptile, leaving my clothes up there by the tree.
My mind was very clear (Nietzsche was wrong). I listened intently for the woman's footsteps of departure. I heard nothing; either she was still there, or the sound of her movements were swallowed up by that tremendous silence blaring from the valley below -- a silence like stereo speakers turned up full blast but playing nothing. As I cowered, my naked ass hanging over Los Alamos, I couldn't help but wonder how long it took those Los Alamos scientists who exploded the first atomic bomb to feel their shame; I wondered if for some it hadn't come as instantaneously as mine had when I popped my rocks.
I remained for a long time frozen in a squat, my balls grazing the ground; I did not even move to brush from them a clambering woodlands ant; only when it got to my asshole did I give it a pinch of the sphincter and it dropped off, confused and disoriented. After a while another insect, a large and colorful grasshopper, so common this time of year, hopped beneath my gaze. Gaudy creature, assembly of plates and rivets dipped in high- gloss lacquers. A second later, another hopper, the male, plopped down beside her. They faced off, gazing into each other's huge, unblinking eyes, and shortly the male, who was slightly smaller than she, clambered aboard, and they fucked.
There was something oddly titillating in the contrast between their rigid, unblinking faces and the quivering and writhing of their linked abdomens, through which an intense, peristaltic communication was taking place. Every energy was concentrated in the genital act, with everything above the lively abdomens nothing but a shell of still armor. (Maybe only a man would find this provocative -- we are often accused by our females of being too genitally-oriented. ) The female grasshopper, in the throes of insect passion, began to incline her rear steadily upward while the male scrabbled on her armor to keep his place. How helpless he was in this act, I thought, how dependent on her will and cooperation. His spurred legs scrabbled and slipped, and only the firm grip of her abdomen on his, the two tubes fused, prevented him from taking an embarrassing spill.
Rape, it occurred to me in my moment of lucid shame, is impossible among such creatures. Then I flashed, to use one of J.B.'s favorite expressions, on this further elaboration: it takes hands to rape. It takes hands to grapple, to seize, to pin down and, more important, to hold a weapon. Most important of all: it took the evolution of the hands to form the brain that could even conceive of such a thing as rape . To say that an animal could rape was only so much anthropomorphism. The human hand grasped the tool; the brain developed to use that tool; and then everything else followed: language, abstract thinking, social power, rape. That, I think, must have been the gist of that Scientific American article.
And I further flashed on the reality of flashing: to hold your cock before an unexpectant woman, as I had just done, was to advertise both the instrument of rape as well as the weapon- holding ability that made rape possible.
By this time, I was in a sheer panic to get out of there. I shucked on my clothes, not daring to look to where she had been standing. After dressing I finally and sheepishly looked over, but she was gone. I plunged down the trail in a trot, then reined myself in to a fast walk: good God, what if she were ahead of me and thought I was after her? On the drive back to Pojoaque I was sure I was going to get pulled over and charged with exhibitionism: just what I needed.
Sabrina was tranquilly at home when I got back.
What have you been doing, fucking trees? she asked, dissolving a glob of pine sap in my hair with peanut oil. Funny she knew it was there.
I found my center, anyway, I said. I think.
Show me.
To prove to her I hadn't used myself up fucking trees, I mounted her and, keeping my hands prayerfully at my chest, fucked her in squat thrusts.
This man's a Yogi! she exclaimed.
Look, Ma, no hands! I cried.
I didn't mention the woman, but I told her about the grasshoppers and the rape theory and she said I thought about things too much. Which reminded me of a show on Nova about computers and artificial intelligence which said that computers really could never think, the way we think of thinking, because they don't have a body and therefore can't learn the way we beings with bodies learn. But by this time I was tired of thinking about it all, so I let it go. After a while Sabrina mounted me and fucked me with smooth cam-like strokes. It had been a long time since I'd come three times in one day, not to mention gone hiking too, so I knew I was going to sleep well that night. I thought I'd go back to the shop tomorrow. I figured I'd wake up pretty refreshed, ready to pull some engines, just let the hands do their work, no longer horny, undistracted by extraneous thoughts, mindfully mindless, which is really the best way to get the job done.
