Making Nice (14 page)

One Sunday she took an hour getting ready to go to the dog park, and I told her to giddy-it the fuck up. She gave me the whole
I do this for you!
thing in the car on the way and I said, “Whoa now. Slow down there Seabiscuit. If you’re doing it for me lose the fancy fuckin’ footwear. It annoys me.”

She got real quiet then, looked out the window at passing stuff, said, “You can just drop me off wherever.”

“OK,” I said. “How about in the La Brea Tar Pits? Be sure to say hi to the woolly mammoths and sabertooths for me, and I’m not even fucking kidding man.”

“Don’t call me
man
!” she yelled, and when I glanced over I could see that she’d started crying, which is another thing. She could be very dramatic sometimes, but worse, the drama seemed rehearsed, like she learned it from watching too many lady-movies. She’d cry about stuff that wasn’t worth crying about, and allow for all these pregnant pauses and deep breathe and whisper-say something dramatic like:
“You’re mean.”
Exhale through mouth, close eyes, shake head slowly, clomp away.

She also wrote me notes, dramatic ones declaring dramatic things like:
Miss you!
And,
You really embarrassed me last night … I work with her!
And one time, verbatim, I’m not even kidding, this:

Risk or regret.

That’s the phrase associated with thoughts of you.

You are someone I invest my time in who is an impossible situation.

I think you are amazing.

I haven’t felt connected to anyone the way I do with you every morning we wake up together.

Risk or Regret.

Almost every night before I go to bed.

Risk or Regret.

I didn’t know what to do with that info so I put a C
+
at the top of it and gave it back. More drama. More whisper talk. More clomping.

I felt bad about that one and followed her out of the room and told her I was only kidding and that I was sorry. She said, regular volume, “Sorry for what? Do you even know?” I said for being a jackass. “That’s a start,” she said. But instead of explaining that I’m a moron and don’t wanna fall in love and have to fuck her forever, I just kissed her and fucked her for what felt like forever.

So there were things about each other we grew not to like, and the sex went from three or four positions to one or two, sometimes one or none when one or both of us was tired, which was a lot. We made each other yawn. I got to know the fillings in her back teeth.

We started spending most weeknights on the couch watching
America’s Funniest Home Videos
and animal documentaries. We were watching this one where they have slow-motion aerial footage of a wolf chasing a mother and baby gazelle all over Mongolia for like ten minutes, and sometime early on the mother and baby got split up, so then it was just the wolf and the little gazelle, but the little gazelle could really move, I mean,
really
move, so they’re zigging and zagging and leaping and then just flat-out
going
until the little gazelle gets tired and collapses to the ground and the wolf eats him up, just fuckin’ rips him apart, but then later on we find out the wolf eventually starves to death anyway, and then this baby elephant goes blind in a sandstorm but continues following his mother’s footprints using only his sense of smell, only he follows them in the wrong direction so he dies, too, when all of a sudden I felt her scooching closer to me on the couch and I looked at her, and without even turning away from the TV she out of nowhere says she wants to try anal sex. I blinked at her ear for a few seconds before saying, “OK.” And before you know it I was Frenching her, and then before you know it I was doing my high school locker combination move on her (33-14-4) followed by my lazyboy technique and then my eating-her-pussy maneuvers before she pulled me up by my hair and rolled on her side and I stuck it in there and moved it around for a while. The whole time she talked her dirty talk, every now and again dropping in half-rhetorical questions to encourage my participation, but it didn’t work cause I always gave one-word answers.

“… you like having your cock in my ass, Mister Bad Boy?”

“Yep.”

And it went on like that, not for too long, just right up until she started yelling don’t stop. Then, after the ten seconds where I remain perfectly still with my mouth open for some reason, I apologized and went wide-legged into the kitchen for paper towels like a gentleman.

Overall I’d say it was OK—like going through a little door into a big room. I prefer vaginas. But what was a lot of fun though was to pretend that she got pregnant from it, and then the next day to pretend that she gave birth to our turd-baby and that we named him Francis. The day after that she broke up with me by dramatic note, which basically said, I can’t do this anymore, which I read and then put in the sink garbage disposal. For the next few nights I dreamt she left me angry voicemails about my laundry, and for the next few weeks I wondered what it meant and back-and-forthed about trying to win her back, exactly one-half of me wanting to, exactly the other half of me not. I decided nothing, and realized I suck at making decisions. My younger brother, on the other hand, doesn’t. He slept with three women, decided he liked the third, and married her. This is despite our on-her-deathbed-in-the-den mother saying, “AJ, you know I love Tara, but don’t you think you should have some fun first?” He squeezed her hand and told her his mind was made up. I set about the business of unmaking it five minutes later, in the kitchen, by demanding he honor our mother by fucking more girls. He looked me right in the hairdo and said, “Sorry bro.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” I said. “Apologize to that woman in there, because you’re breaking her fucking heart. Then apologize to yourself when your marriage falls apart in ten years but now you’re balder and fatter and can’t get the quality ass you can right now. Then reject the apology ’cause you don’t deserve forgiveness, you divorced piece a shit!”

“You’re a moron piece a shit,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“I know so.”

“Well here’s what I know so: Mom made the mistake of not fucking enough people before getting married, and she’s telling you not to make the same mistake. She’s being a good mom to you, and you’re not listening, and I don’t think you’re seeing either because I’m pretty sure Tara’s face is a dirty sneaker with googly eyes and a wig on.”

“You’re eating Mom’s pain pills again?”

“Yeah. So?”

“I love her,” he said. “Be happy for me.”

“No, because I love
you.
And I’m telling you, as your brother and as your friend: fuck more girls. A lot more. AJ, every day millions of people die, and with their last breaths they look at their loved ones gathered around them and say, Oh, shit, I’m dying, I shoulda had sex with more people. But no one ever dies saying, Oh, shit, I shoulda had sex with
less
people … except maybe if they’re dying of AIDS, or cervical cancer, or were raped.”

“That’s really dumb.”

“Is it?”

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

Then he walked out of the room, leaving me there alone in the kitchen, amazed and unsettled by his calm confidence, his
above-this-ness
, a little because of the drugs I ate and the weird-looking stained-glass sea horse suction-cupped to the window. Then I thought,
Focus!
Then I thought,
Balls
. Then I thought if I can’t change AJ’s mind than maybe I can change Tara’s, and that’s when I started treating her real shitty whenever possible. I also unprotecto-ed her best friend after my mother’s funeral, and that Christmas I stuck gum under her coffee table and left it there. No matter what I did, though, she was always good-humored and forgiving about it, unshakable as him, and in the weeks and months after my breakup I thought back on all this, wondering how doubtlessness like that happens. And I don’t know. What I do know is that when I asked my father when he was sure about marrying Mom he said, “When I stopped wakin’ up with boners.”

I still wake up with boner
s is the other thought I thought most in the weeks following the breakup and, unlike my brother, I decided to use them on as many girls as possible. I decided to listen to our mother. I decided to have
fun
.

Of course it wasn’t always, in fact a lot of the time I felt lonely and miserable, especially in the beginning, when I realized I had no real gal-getting skills and just jerked off a lot and ate snacks in bed. It also crossed my mind that I had given up on something good, something with potential, someone who cared about and believed in me. In the end though I let her go, and over the next few years I changed from a mostly passive prick to a mostly aggressive one, sexing a lot of girls and I’m pretty sure contracting HPV in my throat.

I continued sport-boning broads even after best-manning my brother and Tara’s not-as-bad-as-I-thought-it’d-be wedding; even after they had a daughter and named her Marie, our mother’s name; even after I saw firsthand how full and rich their life together seemed. I told myself it was probably them just keeping up appearances, but when I drunkenly accused my brother of keeping up appearances he assured me that wasn’t the case, then asked if I’d be Marie’s godfather.

I was so surprised I hugged him and apologized for being a jerk, and told him I’d consider it a real honor. Then I found out I had to take some kind of church class and turned down the job. He ended up going with Javier, this bible-thumping family-man fuck-faced friend of his with narrow shoulders, and when I went to the baptism at St. John’s I was kinda bummed it wasn’t me up there waterboarding that baby. And after the priest hocus-pocused and abracadabra-ed her and Javier promised his promises and everyone got up to leave for the reception, I stayed seated in the pew, mesmerized by the sound of the women walking out, their high heels clicking and clonking and echoing in the almost-empty and expensively built house of god.

The reception was at their place, where I proceeded to drink beers with my father, the widower, the new grandpa with the new toupee. We were alone on the couch not talking to people, including each other, until I turned to him and said, “What do you do when the grass isn’t always greener. When it’s brownish on both sides. Like my dick.”

He squinted, sipped his beer, and said, “Leave me the fuck alone.”

“Sure.”

I got up and tried my best to muster up the enthusiasm to flirt with married girls in flowery sundresses, but quickly ended up back on the couch with my feet on the coffee table with green gum still stuck underneath. I checked.

I woke early the next morning, alone, around six or seven. I couldn’t fall back asleep, so I lay there feeling bad and hungry for about an hour, eventually getting up and dressed and finding the car keys and looking for someplace to eat breakfast. I ended up at a place called the Lighthouse Grill, where there were no glass bricks and where I got a pretty decent serving of restaurant-toast and eggs-over-easy and tomatoes. I was about halfway through when this guy and his lady and their daughter were seated at the table next to mine. They looked over at me a few times, so, when I wasn’t chewing, I tried to look like I was thinking about something, but I wasn’t, not really, just:
Squint.
Eventually they read their menus.

Just as the waitress asked me how everything was, the ice cubes at the bottom of my glass rushed up and smacked me in the teeth, and some juice dribbled onto my chin. I wiped it with my shirtsleeve and said, “Good, thanks.” Sure thing, she said and dropped my check on the table and turned around and asked the guy and his lady and their daughter if they knew what they’d like. They did, kind of, and the lady ordered some restaurant-eggs and -toast, and the guy ordered steak and eggs, and their daughter ordered restaurant–Rice Krispies and continued drawing pictures of animals with crayons on the back of her paper place mat. I didn’t think the drawings were very good, but after the waitress returned with their beverages she put both hands on her knees in an exaggerated way and said, “Oh how pretty! Is that an elephant?” And the little girl nodded. “And what’s this one, a rhinoceros?” she said. And again the little girl nodded. “And this one, here,” said the waitress, pointing. “What’s this one?”

“It’s a giraffe!” exclaimed the little girl.

“Wow,” said the waitress. “A giraffe. That’s
great.
”

But it wasn’t great, it looked more like a dinosaur than a giraffe. And as much as I’d have enjoyed holding that against her, I have to admit a lot of things haven’t really turned out the way I’d have liked them to either.

A
LL
L
ATERAL

Consider the look on Whatsherface’s face when I bought her a well drink and told her I lived on a boat. Maybe my life wasn’t so bad. More important, it was cheap, with slip fees coming in at under five hundred a month and utilities topping out around twenty, plus there was a parking lot so I didn’t have to hate myself extra when I forgot to move my car for the twice-a-week street sweepers. Also, as long as you were topside and facing the right direction—in this case 127 degrees SSW between the super-hulls of
Fah Get A Boat It
and
Let’s Get Naughty-Cal
—you’d be hard-pressed to beat the view: a shoddy bait barge in the middle of the harbor listing heavily under the weight of a dozen or so fat, barking sea lions and some marine birds. All considered, it was a damp version of pretty OK.

But then she asked what I did for work, and I told her.

“I pump fuel at the marina fuel dock for eight dollars an hour, but mostly I read books and eat sandwiches, or watch my dog laze in the sun and lick pelican shit off the cement.”

The look changed, got scrunchier.

“When that gets old,” I said, “I sit on a chair in front of the shack and eyewitness the trash floating by on the tide. Mostly it’s plastic—soda bottles and tampon applicators and stuff like that, one time a doll head on a stick, another a dead cat covered in seaweed.”