I like the young female character, Adriana. She’s not someone I would date – too pretty, too exotic – but she’s fascinating to watch. Bracelets, fried yellow hair with long streaks of black roots, too much makeup. I am slightly shocked when she dies – it’s so matter-of-fact, her death, but that’s the brilliance of the show. Because that’s how it is in real life. Death just happens – it’s rarely spectacular; there are often no warnings.
One morning, my father got up and went downstairs to make coffee. My mother joined him minutes later after putting on makeup in the bathroom. My father was dead, slumped in his chair. According to my mother, the newspaper was opened to the Sports section, which my father never read. That detail became an essential part of the story for some reason. Maybe because there was not much else to say about his death.
I don’t know what to watch after The Sopranos – I feel empty, lost – so I pick up a book I’ve been reading, a novel that Jason’s girlfriend left behind. The book is about a girl who has leukemia and will die unless her sister, who’s the narrator, donates bone marrow, except she doesn’t want to donate any more bone marrow – she’s been doing it all her life, getting her marrow harvested, and she doesn’t feel like anyone in her family loves her for who she is, only for her marrow. So she rebels, comes to her senses after a teacher has a word with her about her dilemma. I skip some pages. She donates the bone marrow and gets hit by a bus.
I throw the novel in the garbage.
In the evening, I watch some porn online. I’m not abnormally interested in pornography; I don’t subscribe to any particular site, but there’s always a nice array of free clips on video sites if you search for them: a library of vaginas and dicks and asses and everything that can be inserted, expelled, swallowed and spat out.
Today, I spend a few moments watching a man shoving various objects into a very large vagina: dildos, beer bottles, root vegetables. The video is unsexy; it’s like a science experiment you should be able to post on educational websites – showcase the miracles and realities of the grown-up world.
I click on a couple of other videos: a woman in a teenager’s outfit pretending to lose her virginity in front of an audience of men and women in cocktail attire, a she-male getting gangbanged by two skinheads, a girl covered in a sheet of fishnet-textured rubber getting her vagina inflated with a see-through vagina pump, etcetera. I am aroused, but I’m searching for a specific kind of performer, so I have to control my urge to rub one out.
I find her eventually: a tattooed bald porn star named Belladonna, who lets an ugly man come in her mouth. In my mind, I superimpose Bride’s face on Belladonna’s – Belladonna is too pretty, too symmetrical. Belladonna is non-verbal, mostly gurgling and moaning, but I have a memory of Bride’s voice demanding I come on her face, and in my head I hear, “Shoot it on my face, baby, come on, shoot it.” I come.
I have a nap. After the nap, I look for more videos. Find more Belladonna. Jerk off. Turn off the computer. Think of Bride, turn on the computer, find more Belladonna.
I keep looking at the phone, both when it’s silent and when it rings, but when it rings it’s always the wrong number – it’s business, Mark, Jason, telemarketers.
Two more days follow. I jerk off until my dick starts to feel raw. I come up with many excuses for her not calling, invent justifications like an insecure girclass="underline" She got really scared of her strong emotions. She has abandonment issues and doesn’t want to get hurt.
My guess is that she’s playing a game, a similar game to mine, where she’s feigning disinterest to make me curious. And she’s better at this game than I am, even though she has no way of knowing that, because in the state I’m in right now, there’s no way she could lose.
27
DAY FIVE: I’M GOING TO SEEK HER OUT. SHE HAS WON.
I show up at the smoothie shack right before it closes. The shack is busy: hordes of girls sucking on straws, chattering, slapping their flip-flops against the concrete tiles, $isi’s latest hit blasting on the speakers. Some of the girls are bald; my hands tingle at these false sightings.
She is not behind the counter.
I wait in line, consciously tuning out the conversations around me. The line stalls as usual – some temporary catastrophe has befallen the juicer – then there is a miraculous resurrection and the line coughs and moves forward again.
The ginger-haired boy behind the counter has no idea who Bride is. When I say her name, I realize how dumb of me it was to not ask Bride to see her ID or something to confirm that was indeed her name.
“I don’t know any Bride,” he says. “You sure she works here?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s the chick’s name? Like bride, like she’s married?”
“Never mind,” I tell him and grab my acai smoothie and push through the cloud of coconut, sun and sweat to surface outside.
I untie Dog and start walking.
I’ve no idea where I’m going, but as soon as I come across a poster of $isi with a guitar, I stop. The poster announces An impromptu appearance! $isi’s Acoustic Beach Tour.
Now I recall all the unanswered calls and two emails from Mark letting me know about $isi doing a small spontaneous tour. I recall making a note to reply but not replying.
On the poster, $isi is pictured wearing a white blouse, no makeup. I look closely. The blouse seems see-through but you can’t make out the nipples. Her head is smooth like an egg. She’s holding a guitar, which makes me wonder if Mark has finally invested in some guitar lessons for her as he always promised. Good for her if he did.
Did she pick this particular beach town because she knows this is where my beach house is? Is this a masochistic manifestation of her leftover attraction to me? I wonder if she’ll try to contact me, if she will hang up, if I’ll be forced to hang up, if we’ll end up not hanging up but talking. All three options are bad.
A tiny claw inside my throat squeezes then lets go. I take a few deep breaths and tell myself to calm down. I calm down.
When I get to the small stage under a huge white tent, there are people already gathering around even though the concert is not supposed to start for a while. There are security guys everywhere, already. I walk around the white tent to see if I can spot her trailer, but I get stopped by a man as big as a gorilla.
Back in the tent, a tall wooden stool and a mike are set up on the stage. I watch as $isi comes out from behind a white parting in the tent, with a guitar. Her sudden appearance is so shocking that my body doesn’t even react to it – no anxiety, no time for it. She sits on the stool and starts plinking away, tuning.
The girls erupt in screams but quickly quiet down. Everyone starts taking pictures with their phones. The security guys form a line in front of the stage, but the girls don’t even try to force through. I walk toward the stage. I’m shoved and pushed by hordes of girls rushing from all over the beach.
“She’s so real. She’s like real-real,” a lispy blond says to a non-Bride Ribbonhead beside me.
“I follow her on Twitter. She posts hilarious photos. Like the dog that’s on the cover of Vogue,” says the non-Bride. “Dogue.”