Creamy Bullets (12 page)

Swimsuit Issue

G
uys just stare at my tits without shame. It doesn’t matter what I wear. I’ll throw something on with a plunge and my whole day is chaos. Every neck cranes freakishly, every eyeball almost popping out like fingers nervously brushing me. The sound of their breathing like an asthma ward. Slow cars cruising beside me. Some of the women have to hold themselves back. They all want to kill me.

At least I can get some service at the hardware store now. Not like ten years ago, when I was going on dates with record store clerks and delivery men—guys who welcomed the non-threatening stature of my small sickly-looking titties. I couldn’t even call them tits. I had a child’s chest. Titties. A cute name. But mine were horrible and that was why I ended up smashing people’s shit. I’d get fed up with everything and I didn’t trust nature or God or even my friends.

When I was 28, I somehow ended up with a guy twice my age. My family gave up on me by that point. They didn’t even know his name. They just called him
the old guy
, even though his name was simple, strong, standard.

Jack.

He didn’t really give a shit about anything. I mean, Jack was really nice but he was a rebel, a man who couldn’t be told what to do or think. He made a bunch of money working for some drug company and getting out just before they got sued for clogging up some kid’s heart valve or something. They even talked about it on
60 Minutes
and when they tried to interview Jack he just smiled and said he had nothing more to do with the company. The reporter, some black lady with feathered hair poofed out like Farrah Fawcett, asked him something else and Jack stuck his hand out to block the camera and climbed into his Porsche. It was so cool. Sometimes I’ll watch that clip on some web site and imagine that I’m there too, in the Porsche, wearing sunglasses and a really expensive dress. And sometimes, yeah, I’ll tell people I was there. The camera never gets a good shot into the car.

Besides, I have been in that car. I’ve been all over that car. I know what the dome light of that car feels like on the bottom of my left foot. I know the perfect way to brace myself against the leather steering wheel. I know the exact position to put the rear view mirror so I can see all this happen. I liked to watch him do it to me, his furry back clenching and sweating. It’s why they call it a rear view mirror, I joked to him.

But he hated my titties too. He asked me if I had cancer the first time we had sex. Or at least it seemed like he was asking me that. His face made a horrible face. He screwed me real fast because he wanted to get it over with. His anguish over my body matched my own level of self-hatred. I came despite the hate, or because of it. Then he said I had a pretty face.

I shouldn’t say I hate myself. That’s not right. I do have a nice face. Cute hair, brown and wavy. My arms aren’t gross. I’m thin around the waist and ankles. My ass is actually pretty good. I went to school. I achieved some goals. I type eighty words a minute. I can go a whole weekend alone without killing myself.

So Jack set it up for me pretty quick. Had me quit my job and send the boys to grandma’s. I didn’t mention my kids yet, did I? Twin boys. Thurston and Lee, eight years old. Good kids, independent, always prowling the neighborhood with those Hispanic kids from down the street. Those little guys are proof that I was once loved by someone my parents approved of. His name was Lesley, like a girl. Won’t Lesley be surprised.

It seemed like an eternity later when I could finally remove the bandages. I dragged myself around the halls of the hospital and felt like I was taking someone else’s body for a walk. Jack sent me new swimsuits every day while I healed. He said they were actual ones he saw in the swimsuit issue of a sports magazine. He couldn’t wait to get me out to the beach.

I’ll always remember that moment of the bandages circling off me. I watched in the mirror that the nurse held just right, so all I saw was my middle, now top-heavy, ready to burst forth. It was like watching myself being born again, without a face.

It’s amazing what boobs can do. It feels so weird to even say that word in regards to myself. I always used it when talking about others. Ashley’s boobs. Naomi’s boobs. Someone once said,
If they don’t bounce, they’re not boobs
. Now I bounce. Jack liked to see me bounce. He didn’t want to go a night without doing something obscene to me after my operation. His enthusiasm cranked up my confidence and helped me grow into my new body. And it did feel like a whole new body. Like my tits had taken over my body.

As soon as my scars healed and I got used to the sheer mass and weight of my breasts—the almost ridiculous presence of them—I emailed an old boyfriend from ten years ago and dropped a hint about my new look. This is someone who jokingly called me “little boy” until I started crying. We went out for a whole year and
only
had doggy-style sex. Sometimes he told me to put a t-shirt on when we did it. I think he gave me my first orgasm.

Steve emailed me back and said he was working in a music store, teaching guitar lessons to kids. He told me he’d send me a guitar if I sent him photos of myself. I looked him up on the Internet and saw that he was still cute. I don’t really know what I’d do with a guitar but I wanted him to see me so I asked Jack to snap some pictures of me. I didn’t say anything about Steve, though I’m sure he probably wouldn’t care. He talked to his old girlfriends and I didn’t freak out about that.

They turned out pretty good. In one of them I’m sitting on the edge of bed, leaning over a little, the silicone working its magic, staring straight through the lens like missiles. There’s a profile shot where you can really see what a nice job the surgeon did. Jack said we should send that one to the doctor. He could put that one on his business card, Jack said. We took a few in some of my new swimsuits too, and then several in the shower. Jack asked me to soap myself up. I liked touching them for the camera. I felt like I could do anything with them and they’d look good. I sent a couple of the photos to Steve and he wrote back saying they looked
sensational
. He said he wrote a song about me and wanted me to hear it. I asked for his phone number so he wouldn’t call when I was with Jack. I was jittery about calling him though, and it took me two weeks to gather the nerve.

He sounded the same as he always did when he answered. Really sweet but with a nasty temper buried somewhere. He asked if I was sending more photos and who took the ones he’d already seen. I lied to him and told him a girlfriend had taken them. Stacey, I said her name was. She had hers done too, I said for some reason. We talked for about an hour. He’d ask about my parents and my kids and my life but the discussion always ended up on my tits. Or
breasts
, as Steve first called them. It took him a few cautious moments to warn up to tits, but then he really enjoyed saying it. What did your parents say about them? What do your kids think about them? Sometimes it was like he was interviewing just my tits.

Finally, he played me his song. He set his phone down next to where he was, picked up his guitar, and started serenading me. He stopped halfway.
Can you hear me?
he yelled down at the phone. Yes, I shouted back. He continued his song. Over the phone it sounded like a fuzzy old radio. Some of the words were hard to make out. There was a part where he said something about my face looking hard or maybe he was saying my face made him hard. I didn’t want to ask. By the time he got to the third verse I was able to ignore the terrible melody and focus on the words. They dripped with nostalgia, regret, and horniness. I asked him to sing it again and I touched myself as he did. I couldn’t quite bring myself off but it was enough for me just knowing that he wanted to have sex with me again.

The next day, he sent me an email saying that he was
thrilled, maybe too thrilled
, to have talked to me. He wrote a description of the kinds of photos he wanted me to send next and asked if he could see a photo of my friend Stacey as well. I responded and told him Stacey wouldn’t do it. He sent me a snippy reply, one that was rude and all business. Something like:

Talk to Stacey some more and tell her I’ll make it worth her while. And send me some photos of you with your wig.

I had told him, while on the phone, about buying a wig after the operation. I didn’t say anything about Jack wanting to see me with long blonde hair. I didn’t say anything about Jack at all. I said something dumb like,
I’m just into having fun now
. To him it probably sounded like,
I’ll hump anything with a penis
. Anyway, I just so happen to have a couple of wig shots. I sent them to him. I titled the email: Say Hello to Your New Blonde Goddess.

After that, Steve insisted on calling the blonde me by a different name. Letecia.

I started to have panic attacks and stopped emailing with Steve. Jack was getting more possessive and I was starting to worry he’d find out.

One night at dinner, Jack said he wanted to get me liposuction. Imagine yourself with fifteen pounds chopped off, he said. You’d be a knockout. I thought it was a weird thing to talk about at dinner but I was happy. I knew that if Jack was spending that kind of money on me it meant that he really loved me. He wanted to make it easy on me and I felt my heart swell and lift. I felt like I couldn’t breathe for a moment and when I saw tears form in his eyes, I started crying too. I touched his face and he leaned forward into my hand. He moved to kiss me and his hands moved over my breasts so gently. My
breasts
. I don’t mind that word right now, at this moment. It seems right and pure. They were warm to his touch. Always warm.

But the next morning, I realized that I didn’t want another surgery. I looked over at Jack as he slept. He had wrinkles, spots, gray bristly hair. Sometimes I forgot what he looked like when he wasn’t around. I’d imagine him as a superior being, a master of life, of getting things done. He got things done for me. But what about him? I never noticed that hair growing out of his ears. The weird lines all over his neck. Not wrinkles really, but lines. Like graph paper. I smelled his neck. It smelled like band-aids. My eyes and nose circled his head slowly as he wheezed. Sometimes when he slept he made so much noise it was like he was fighting with someone. There were age spots on his scalp. His hair barely survived there. He was too tan. I wondered if he’d get cancer. I pulled the sheets back and looked down on his body. He had half of a morning hard-on but it was hard to notice under the girth of his belly. His belly button the size of a quarter. I reached over to my purse and took a quarter out. I set it there and it fell inside. For a moment I wondered how far it went. Did it actually disappear in there? Would he carry that quarter around for a few days before noticing it?

I got out of bed quietly. I picked some clothes out of the closet and took off my pajamas. There was a full-length mirror on the closet door. It was a double door, so the mirror was actually in two pieces. In one mirror, I looked at myself naked for a couple of slow minutes. In the other mirror, I watched Jack sleep, the covers pulled down. I wondered if he would wake up if I stared at him long enough. I slowly got dressed, trying to stare at him without blinking. My eyes started to hurt. I finally left the room, closing the door softly. I walked by the boys’ room and they were already up and gone. It was a school day. A warm, promising, no clouds in the sky kind of day. I opened the front door and felt the sun on my skin. It lit up my body and I felt good. I slammed the door right then and there.

Homewreckers

O
ne of the girls next door was getting ready to move out. My wife and I thought they were lesbians but we weren’t sure. Sometimes we heard moaning and what sounded like a bed frame quivering and knocking against the wall. They were big girls. Big knocking sounds.

Once I went over to ask them about an ant problem. An invasion. Neither girl was there, but their back door was open. I walked in to find another open door. A messy bedroom with sweat-stained bras slung over the brass doorknobs. Cups bigger than my fists. I listened to the silence whistle as I opened a dresser drawer. Stretched out panties and crisp condom wrappers. I heard a toilet flush.

My wife was doing sit-ups in the front room. She was naked. I entered with her morning coffee. “This is a nice view,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said.

“For the coffee?” I asked.

She took a sip and leaned her chest on her knees before resuming. “And everything else,” she answered.

“Was that you last night? Out here? Making sounds?” I asked.

“No. Fell asleep on couch.” Her sentences were short to accommodate her exercise. “Lesbians,” she said between huffs.

“Those lesbians like their sounds,” I said. I poured some M&Ms into a cup of yogurt and fingered my belly button. The fatter I got, the deeper my inny got.

“The ants are back,” she said as she left the room.

“Here’s how the ant kingdom works,” said James, the maintenance guy. “The worker ants are sent out to find food for the queen. They find crumbs or whatever and take them back to where the queen is. The queen can be a big ol’ bitch. Like, up to six inches long.” He held out a measured distance between his huge fingers. There was a ring on one of the fingers that looked like it would cut the circulation off.

“You’re not serious,” I said.

“Oh yeah,” he said, eyes getting wide like some UFO chaser. “Those queens can kill a snake or a squirrel.”

“A squirrel?”

“Well, I saw one eat a hamster once.” He pulled some small plastic circular things from his coat pocket. They looked like miniature models of the Superdome. “These traps have poison and the worker ants get contaminated and go back to the queen ant. The scent of the stuff in these things makes the queen want to breed, so she has sex with a few of her workers and eventually dies.”

I couldn’t help but imagine a weird ant porno—some tinny techno music playing over a poisonous insect gang bang.

Early morning. Too early to wake up. Maybe before six. A rhythmic thump came through the walls in our bedroom, jarring me from a dream. My wife had fallen asleep on the couch, but now she was up, ready to get in bed with me. Our TV set played a marathon of home improvement shows in the front room. I tuned my ears to the dull clunking, hoping I could hear voices or at least a sharp muffled scream or something. My sense of hearing was good in the dark. My penis was getting hard.

“What are you doing?” my wife asked from the doorway.

“Nothing,” I said, eyes half-closed. I nodded at the wall. “Does that sound like lesbian love to you?”

“It’s kind of a man’s tempo, isn’t it?”

The sounds stopped. There were no screams, groans, or exhales. My wife turned on the light. Blankets in a teepee-shape.

A couple weeks ago, James went home for lunch. He lived with his grandmother just a few blocks away from the apartment. She always cooked for him. Brown bag lunch. Most days, I’d see him eating lunch in his truck. But on this day, he ate enchiladas and watched a soap opera with his grandmother. He was supposed to be fixing the water heater in my quad but was behind as usual.

On his way back to work, he passed by a woman who flagged him down. He thought it was someone who needed help. He circled back around the block. On his return, he saw that she was an attractive woman, probably about thirty years old. He rolled the passenger side window down.

“Wanna have some fun?” she asked.

“Yeah. Um. What, uh, what are you doing?”

She fidgeted with the hem of her skirt and leaned over. She looked a little like an old girlfriend of his. “Can I get in? It’s hot out here,” she said.

James was nervous. He had never been with a prostitute before. He tried to remember what the laws are, the protocol. “Are you a cop?” he forced himself to ask.

“Let me in. I’ll show you my pussy. That way you’ll know I’m not a cop.”

He unlocked the door for her. “I don’t see too many girls like you out here,” he said.

She got in the car and smiled at him. She lifted her blouse a little and pulled the waistband down on her skirt and panties. Her stomach was a little chubby. “See, I’ll show you my pussy. See? I got a cute pussy.”

James wanted to reach over and touch it but he just looked. He knew he still had to be careful. What would his grandmother say if this were one of those stings? If he went to jail? He thought if he didn’t bring up money, he’d be safe. He hoped she was just a crazy person, a nymphomaniac. “Are you just like a, uh, exhibitionist or something?” When he talked to her it felt like swallowing. Half pride, half greasy air.

“Yeah, that’s exactly it,” she said. “So, what do you want to do? I could suck you off or we could fuck.”

“What do you want to do?” James asked meekly.

“I want to fuck,” she said. “I haven’t been fucked today.”

The neighbor girls sat outside, drinking and smoking as the sun went down. I could see boxes taped up and stacked in the front room. They had moved a few bigger things that day with a U-Haul.

It was hard to tell, really, if they were lovers or sisters or just friends. They looked a lot alike, but one of them had prettier hair. My wife and I never saw them touch. They talked mostly about their friends and said names we didn’t know and used combinations of verbs that were unfamiliar to us. Our front door was open and some of their smoke had started drifting in. Suddenly they were yelling at each other.

“You still don’t know how to make eggs,” shouted the one with nice hair.

“I had a shitty childhood,” the other answered.

“You’re not a kid anymore.”

“Can’t I just…”

And then their voices trailed off and hushed.

As they went back inside and closed the door, one of them said, “It’s obvious that we all have our weaknesses.”

A few hours later, sounds again through the wall. Were they singing to each other?

I even pressed a glass to the wall.

Then, with my free ear, I heard a siren. It got louder. It turned into my alarm clock.

My wife slept on the couch. Wine on her lips.

“I only do this once a week,” Molly said to James. She had given him her name, right after she voiced her preference for fucking. “I’m a student,” she said. “I just do this to help me pay for school. You have a condom, don’t you?”

“No, sorry. Do you?” He wished he could just get to the sex. Just pull over somewhere and pound her in the backseat.

“This store,” she pointed. “They sell singles.”

He turned a tight corner, scraping and bumping a high curb. He parked in front of the Mini-mart and rushed inside.

There were people standing in line. Someone buying a bunch of lottery tickets. A man on crutches with a case of beer. A woman behind him with a jar of salsa and a newspaper. James looked out the window, saw Molly waiting in his car, looking at something in her lap. He shifted his weight, feeling the swelling of his penis fade against that leg. Molly kept looking up, around. The cashier was slow, maybe actually retarded, mumbling something to the excited lottery ticket buyer. They both laughed. The man on crutches sighed and started to smell like urine and tobacco. James almost forgot what he was in line for. Self-consciously, he let the woman behind him go before him. Molly was smoking in his car. She took the air freshener off his rear view mirror and snuck it in her purse.

My wife was in the kitchen killing ants. Smashing them with a fingertip. I snuck up behind and wrapped around her, cupping her breasts. She ran warm water over her hands as I groped her. “What were you doing at the neighbors?” she asked me.

“When?” I said.

“Yesterday,” she said, slipping away from me. “I saw you come out. What’s that about?”

“They’re lesbians,” I said with a hiccup.

“How do you know that? Did you see them doing it?”

“No.”

I didn’t tell her about the one with pretty hair. I didn’t tell her that I saw her crying. I didn’t tell her that we talked. That we locked the door.

“What were you doing there?”

“Nothing. I looked around.”

I didn’t tell her that they were sisters. I didn’t tell her about the hug. I didn’t feel like telling her about how it felt. The soft body that let my fingers press in. Her name was Jodi. I let it stay in my mouth. We were quiet.

She dried her hands on a kitchen towel. “What would you be looking for?”

“Ants,” I said. “I wondered if they had problems too.”

James was breathing heavy, trying to explain to his grandmother. He was sitting on the couch. She was in her big rocking chair. “It was Dad’s old girlfriend, Denise. She’d babysit me when I was eight or nine and tell me these stories about how she used to be a prostitute. The kind of things she’d have to do. It was weird. They were like adventure stories. I kind of liked them. Every time she’d talk about getting into someone’s car, I’d imagine it like a kidnapping. Like she had to escape. Mostly it was about the escape, getting to the end of the adventure, walking away with the money. Dad didn’t know she told me these stories. She also told me that was how she met Dad. When Dad was still with Mom.”

The TV was still on in front of them, the volume on zero. James sighed. He felt his words tainting the room, the photographs on his grandmother’s mantel, the chairs, the brown carpet. He couldn’t stand to look at his grandmother just then. His eyes went out of focus on the TV, blurry images that had no place in this private moment. His throat felt like it was closing, or flooding with sickness.

“She showed me things,” he continued. “She showed me her female parts.”

He heard his grandmother moaning softly. Tears came to him.

“Dad told me later that she was crazy. He said Denise didn’t have any friends to talk to. But it was weird. Because I liked her more than most people. So I thought we were friends. She told me secrets and I saw something amazing in that. Dad never told me anything. There was nothing for us to share. When Denise left I wanted to go find her, but I wasn’t even old enough to drive yet. When I was old enough, I couldn’t bring myself to drive to that part of town. I couldn’t approach a woman like that. I always hoped that Denise or someone like her would find me, that they would pick me out.”

He closed his eyes and felt his cheeks get wet. He covered his face and took a deep breath before he went on. “I’m just scared that I’ll like it too much. Already, I feel like a different person.”

Outside the front door came the sound of his grandmother’s cat fighting with a neighborhood cat. James got up to open the door. He called for the cat. He was glad for this distraction. He looked up and down the street, moving his stiff neck. He breathed in the outdoor air. The cat sprinted around a corner and ran into the house. It leaped into the rocking chair with James’s grandmother. She woke from her sleep, startled.

The sounds were happening again. I had just fallen asleep and now I was wide-awake again. I wanted to pound on the wall but held myself back. I tried to reason with myself. They were surely nice girls. They probably didn’t know they were making so much noise. I looked over at my wife who was still sleeping, mouth half-open and wet in the corners, eyelids twitching, one arm flopped over her head as if waiting for a teacher to call on her. I climbed out of bed and put some sweats on. As I was walking out the back door by the kitchen, I saw a swarm of ants on the counter hauling away big crumbs of cheese and Ritz crackers. I took some paper towels and wiped them into an open paper bag. I made sure to get them all, even as they tried climbing out of the bag. I could almost hear them calling out or screaming. From the bedroom, the knocking became louder and faster. I went outside with the bag. I cased the apartments, trying to see anything. Through one of their windows, I was able to see around the curtains and into the bedroom. The girl with pretty hair was lying there, reading a book. I couldn’t see anyone else. It was quiet. Before I went back into my apartment, I put the bag of ants on the sidewalk and lit it on fire. After all the popping and hissing and smoke, I heard the banging again, coming from the bedroom.