“Let go,” she said, pulling the syringe out. She pressed a tissue over the vein, folded her arm up, then slid back into the chair. When Madison saw how startled I looked she laughed.
“You're not one of those people who consider seeing your parents argue intense?”
“I think seeing a seagull with a broken wing on the side of the road can be just as horrible as—”
“As what?” Madison asked. “Getting raped?”
“No,” I said, “of course not. I just don't think there is a real hierarchy of pain.”
Madison nodded. “Fair enough. So what's your opinion of blow jobs?” Her smile was not a smile at all.
“Do you have some kind of philosophy about them?”
Madison rolled her head dreamily toward me. I could tell the drug was taking effect. “Well, many powerful things seem based on them: rockets, skyscrapers, guns. But, in a way, they're all pitiful. When I have one in my mouth I think of it like a dumb worm. It doesn't know the difference between a cunt, a hand or a mouth. And while the men think I'm either servile or kind, depending on their feelings for me, I know that it's a service. When I give head, I'm like a mechanic. The cock is a car. The car's owner, just like the owner of the cock, knows nothing about me or how I really feel about him.”
“It's all so esoteric.”
“Esoteric?” she repeated angrily. “Tell me how you lost your virginity.”
“No,” I said. “Let's talk about my job.”
“Tell me what happened, it's part of the interview,” she said. “And sit down over here by me.” She patted the chair near her.
I didn't want to tell the story and tried to change the subject by asking how tips were at the bar. She ignored me and said, “Please continue.”
“O.K.,” I said, “I'll tell you, but it won't prove anything.”
Madison looked up slowly, her eyes were glassy now and she smiled.
“I rode the bus down to Georgia. It smelled horrible, because an old lady in the back had shit in her pants and I remember thinking how the trees and shrubs on the back roads seemed lushly malignant. He picked me up. We drove to a subdivision where he and other boys from the college had a duplex. We went up to his room, it was sparse, anemic with calculus textbooks in a metal bookshelf and a mattress on the floor. He undressed me and placed my hand on his little cock. Afterward, he went to the bathroom and I found a gold earring stuck between the wall and the bed.”
“Let me tell you mine,” Madison said, she sat up in her chair and reached for the light, turned it away so we sat more in the shadows. I thought of dark confessionals and how when I take a new lover I always dim the light. “Sometimes, just kissing I got so wet my underwear would be soaked. There was this guy. He told me he wanted us to have a baby. Sure I fell for it, I chose him over the other groping potheads. But after a while he kept bugging me to fuck, he would scream every time I said I wasn't ready. He started to talk in baby talk to me and he'd say I was the same as little girls we saw on the street. I got angry. And while he was away two friends of his came over and asked me if I'd have sex with them. I said I would and they took me to an apartment. I think it was one of their uncles’. It was empty with just a single lawn chair and a card table. I leaned against the wall and they fucked me one after another.”
“And you never told your boyfriend?”
“No, we did it right after and I pretended to be a virgin.”
“I feel sorry for you.”
“Why? That's how I felt.”
I was aware of being clichéd, sentimental and wanted to show her I could be as tough and raw as herself.
“What's the worst thing you ever saw?”
“My father with a boner.” She laughed hard, then her face pulled up suddenly, as if she had thought of something horrible. “I'm not unwilling to die,” she said, looking at me with sleepy eyes. “After a while the men who come around here seem as inconsequential as flies.”
C h a p t e r S i x
IT WAS A HARD NIGHT, MY ONE-WEEK ANNIVERSARY AT CARmen's. I got home around five in the morning. There was a sliver of light creeping over the horizon. I closed the curtain against it and lay waiting nervously for sleep. It wasn't sleep that came, just levels of flattened consciousness, one moved into the next as easily as lovers move toward one another in dreams.
I had expected the night to go as all the others: the slow setup and stocking, the first customers, then the frantic rush that lasted until closing, but tonight a couple of weird things happened. First, Susan ran downstairs naked, her bare chest splitting the crowd, swaying under the computerized lights. The upstairs door banged open and Madison pounded down after her. She pulled Susan by the wrist, twisting her arm so the girl's head was nuzzled in the crook of Madison's neck. She got her to the foot of the stairs before Susan stiffened her legs, grabbed onto the railing and wouldn't let go. Madison touched her chin, whispered something in her ear and stroked her hair. Susan's eyes went soft and she let Madison lead her up the steep staircase. She looked at me just before the two of them disappeared behind the metal wall. It scared me because I couldn't tell if it was a warning or if she loathed me, felt I was Madison's accomplice. Then at closing, while I was wiping down the tables in back, this jerk came over, one who ordered slippery nipples all night. Each time he said the name he grinned like a sophomore in high school. He came back, offered me a five pinched between his thumb and forefinger. I didn't like how he folded the bill long ways, or how he held it slightly away, but I reached out anyway. Of course, he pulled the bill back and laughed. I noticed the deep red capillaries spidering through his cheek and how his beard was wet around his mouth. I shifted my eyes down to my rag and continued wiping wet ovals over the glass tabletop. There was something anemic about him, with his khaki overcoat. “Sorry, I didn't mean nothin’.” He grinned sheepishly, revealing a sliver of chewing tobacco caught between his teeth. He held the bill out closer this time. Turn the other cheek, I thought and reached out for the money. But he pulled it back again. I scrubbed a sticky spot off the glass, picked up a swizzle stick and a napkin from the floor. The man just stood there holding out his money, his mouth clenched in a broad and scary smile.
The clock moved interminably toward morning. I opened the curtains a bit, the raw light reminded me of infected skin. Daylight was trying to trick me into thinking life was good. Instead, I lay in the dim light, listening to the early morning news on the transistor radio, trying to see what the people across the way were doing. I hoped Madison would come by today. I thought of telling her I loved her, not so much because I did, but because I was desperate for some elemental connection with her. Sometimes I imagined us in this bed, spooned together, her breasts pressed into my back, the soft hair of her pussy curling toward my rear. I knew I was lonely and that she made me feel inadequate, but I have always been attracted to people who make me feel inadequate. But I wanted to center my life on myself, not this continuous pattern of revolving around another. The first construction sounds of the day started down the block: the hum of the crane, a jackhammer. The workmen came to me, their tool belts flapping gently against their rears. I remembered how the stranger had held me from behind with an arm around my waist tight as a seat belt. I imagined Bell fucking Kevin, two young men connected in the missionary position. I tried to clear my head by staring at the water stain on the ceiling shaped like a daisy. I didn't like thinking of Bell connected to anyone but me. I thought about my former lovers. I remembered how a man was inside me and I was nowhere, and in an effort to arouse myself I would think FUCK ME, and just the visualization of those words, I wouldn't even have to say them, would send me over. That was the first time my sex life became two things — the mechanical sexual reality and the ongoing fantasy. The first fantasies were naive — a stranger licking my pussy, taking me from behind; each act I developed to the last detail, flat strokes of his tongue, his calloused fingertips on the goose-pimpled skin of my rear.