But this is as far as it goes with the play-by-play. This ain’t no how-to guide.
I lie across Beth’s bed. She asks me about school, and I tell her about an essay on happiness that I had to read for class. What would you rather have, a trick knee or a broken leg? I say.
I beg your pardon? she says
Of the two, I say. Which would you rather?
The leg, she says. It’ll heal.
Beth, her big brown nipples pressing through the silk, sits against the headboard with her knees bent and parted, no panties. An invite. And how could I pass on an invite like this? With Kim’s face a foosball knocking around my skull, I strip down to my boxer briefs and tell her she ain’t cool for seducing me.
So this is what you call seduction? she says.
Peoples, pause please before you blister me too tough. Me and Beth, we ain’t all the way reckless. We’ve got rules: no open-mouth kissing, no proclamations of love, a limit on postcoital pillow talk. Before that, though, I make a rhythm that lasts a few songs and part of another. She rests her thigh, warm and twitchy, across my stomach when we finish, while we lay looking at the TV without watching it, a paranormal quiet between us. This goes on till I get up to clean off. Our postsession cool-off is pretty much standard but what happens in the bathroom borders on the semifantastic. What happens in the bathroom is this: it hits me that I couldn’t, for a jackpot, recall Beth’s last name. Oh boy, talk about all bad intimacies. I grab the sink with both hands and look into the mirror. See a face that’s the face of a sucker who could do this on a whim to a good chick. I rub my nuts and smell a finger. To smell another woman on your nuts when you love your girl (I know, I know, I know) is foul. To be stumped on the last name of the girl that’s all over your nuts when you love your girl is no less than lowdown dirty despicable. I mumble the alphabet, hoping a letter will help the name catch hold.
You want to know some funny shit? I say, back in the room, stepping into my boxer briefs. I can’t remember your last name for shit.
Are you serious? she says. Do you think admitting that fact’s a little foolish? she says.
Admitting that fact might be the least of my fool, I say.
It’s Ford, she says. And for the record, you’re the worst.
Beth’s an army girl, a corporal, which in a strange way makes our setup extra-special. I bend to lace my shoes, see a fitted cap under the bed. I should shrug it off, but what can I say, I’m an opportunist. I toss it on the bed and ask if it’s competition for the crown.
Beth smirks. She asks if I can give her the storage fee. It’s early I know but things a little tight this month, she says.
You need it? I say.
Wouldn’t ask if I didn’t, she says.
So check it, I hope you don’t be letting your less special houseguests snoop, I say. Can’t have nobody stumbling on my stash.
If I have a guest you can believe he’s occupied, she says. The last thing he’s worried about is playing a sleuth.
What’s the size of the thing it takes to kill it, whatever it is?
Beth says this and I can hear Half Man in my head (the old jabbering voice of dissent) warning me against hitting Beth raw, reminding my silly ass that she’s in the field in a major way.
If your dad’s a plumber, you learn pipe work, how to dredge a pipe; if he’s a writer, he gives you books, show you how to write a decent sentence; if Pops is a preacher, maybe he teaches you Sunday sermons. My dad (by dad I mean Big Ken, who isn’t my real dad, but stepped up when my biological pops was into sleight of hand) was, Ibullshityounot, on everything I love, right hand to God, a pimp. Some days he’d take me along while he checked his hos: white girls who lived in dank apartments, who wore robes well in the afternoons and who smelled of cigarette smoke. Sometimes he’d have other errands to run, and would leave me with them. They’d occupy me the best they could, and when he swooped in an hour or so later, he’d stuff fives and tens in my pockets and let me lap-drive to the next spot. He never talked about what he was, and when I got older he never held his hustle up as a model, but for the last long while I’ve wondered how much of what he was is what I am.
Beth gets up to take a shower. She leaves her door cracked, tells me that the sergeant pulled her aside and said she might get stationed in another state, that I might have to find another spot to stash my work. She says I’ve got a few months, maybe more, but she wants to give me a heads-up. I lay her cash on her blanket and stroll in the kitchen, where I prep a few oz’s and scrub the pot and utensils clean. Forget the cliché: in this life cleanliness is next to freedom! I leave with a swollen plastic sack stuffed in my sleeve and my eyes stabbing every which way.
Here’s the mantra of me and my homeboys: Don’t let daylight catch you! When you live with your girl you can explain away loads of suspect business, but strolling in at the crack of dawn ain’t one of them. The homies, some of them would rather catch a misdemeanor (a couple of them actually have) and spend a night in a holding tank than face their girl after she’s spent a whole night seething. Now it ain’t a hard fast rule break when I creep through my front door, but it’s that hour when the sun ain’t far off from being an orange badge behind the clouds. I hope Kim’s asleep, but hope, what’s that? She’s on the couch with the blinds open and the lights off. What you doing up? I say. Kim keeps her back to me. Long strands fall over her shoulders. Long legs sprawled in shadows sectioned by blinds. She don’t say a word; matterfact, she don’t shrug or jerk or nothing. She’s got it bad, that not-answering shit, but all I can do at this hour is sigh. What you doing up?
The news, she says. Guess you didn’t see it.
Who watches the news? Why would I be watching the news? I say.
Why wouldn’t you? she says. If you did, you would’ve heard about the big bust.
What that got to do with me? I say. I know you ain’t worrying over the next nigger’s troubles.
Kim throws a small and hard thing across the room, knocks a picture of us at the Rose Festival carnival off the wall. I tip over and rehang it.
Keep thinking it’s gonna be the next person, she says.
She looks fierce. She never looked this fierce. Not when we met. My freshman year at P State. She was walking up to the bar on campus, a sway of hips and a strut to annihilate a young punk. Where we met should have been the harbinger of harbingers, but I didn’t have it in me to dismiss a girl with a walk like that. She’s couple years older but I lied about how old I was (claimed the age I am now) and we were shacked up quick enough that the shit might’ve been bad judgment. And the truth is, though I talk tough, and these last couple years ain’t been no romance novel (show me a love that is), I wouldn’t trade her for no one — period. What’d your boy Nietzsche say: There is always some madness in love. There is always some reason in madness.
Maybe the old German saw into the maw of my tomorrows.
The stories I could tell. How once she found my car outside a chick’s condo and sliced my tires; how she once wrote, Fuck You Champ, in red lipstick all over my windshield; how, after a random fuck rang our home line, she ripped my laptop screen off its hinges; how the night of the day her girl allegedly spied me on a lunch date she doused me out of a dead sleep with a pot of cold water and warned next time it’d be hot!
Good sense says I’ve hurt her too much to keep her, says too that I’ll never find another who loves this hard, who knows what it means to have a home, knows too what it means to have a home and lose one. I sit down beside her and pull her close, wishing I could snatch out my heart and show her, but knowing, with all the room I’ve saved for hurt, this mettle ain’t much to see.