My Life in Heavy Metal (7 page)

Where do you live? I say.

This question seems to spook him. He runs a hand through his hair, which crackles, and shows me his biceps with the two veins that intersect like rural routes on a map, hoping I'll be so mesmerized as to forget my question.

Around here, he says, gesturing vaguely.

Really? I bite into my lime. Where?

Now he leans back, looking much less sure of himself, running my hair through his thumb and forefinger, like a suit he's considering. Yeah, he says, I got this box right behind the bar. It's pretty cool. I never have to worry about DUIs.

A response so lame that I'm sort of rooting for him to not be speaking English anymore. And it dawns on me, falls on me actually, as bricks fall upon the naive from a great height: Lancey lives with his parents. A twenty-seven–year-old dependent. His hulking Computer Boy bod cramped onto a single bed, Cheryl Tiegs tacked
to the wall, Rubik's cube on the dresser, mom bustling into his room with his underwear washed and folded into little squares, making him macaroni and cheese, dad yelling at him to take out the garbage. Only the great sadness of this realization rescues me from the competing desire to start chewing his lips, which, thank god, before I can do this Marcie knifes her way over, all miffed and studded, and I peel off to the bathroom before anything catty can happen and sit and listen to my bladder empty of tonic and wonder why Brisby couldn't have stuck around long enough to save me from myself.

I'm talking to Gala about this shit, because she knows my whole deal, every hopeful seems-like-a-nice-guy-really-smart-kissed-me-goodnight flameout, and I tell her, There's no way I can give him the goods now, right? Right, Gala? If he's living at home?

Why not? she says.

It's, just, like a rule, right? Didn't we have that rule?

But Gala, though my best friend in the world, is maybe not the best person to consult, because five months ago she caught her husband cheating and gave him the boot, and the whole thing's made her less sure of everything. She used to give me these stern speeches about not treating my body like a disposable washcloth; pride in ownership and so forth. Now, she just asks: Well, what do you
want
to do?

I want to fuck him silly, I say. Oh my god, Gala, you have no idea. I was on my way to lunch today and he was sitting there on the floor of his office with these parts all around him and this big screwdriver and these forearms.

A handyman, Gala says.

A handyman who lives with this parents.

You don't know that.

That's what all the strutting is about, I say.
Overcompensation.

Maybe the strutting is just strutting. Maybe he's hung, Gala says.

Which, I mean: How did we get from
disposable washcloth
to
hung
?

Call him, Gala says. You've got a phone list, right? Just call him.

What if his mom answers? What am I supposed say: Hello ma'am. You don't know me, but I want to lick your son's balls. Is he expected home later?

A door slams over at her place and my godson, Justin (who is so cute I would actually eat him if not monitored), comes howling in. Gala tells me to hang on a sec and yells at Justin to please go into the other room, mommy's talking to someone on the phone right now, which makes me feel very much like a depraved auntie.

He does know this computer stuff, I say, so he's got to have some kind of an intellect, right? Besides, I've always been kind of a geek, haven't I Gal? In school. Wasn't I always kind of a geek?

But Justin's going crazy now, hollering something about pizza, daddy gives him pizza, he wants pizza. He's such a little
man
I want to laugh, though actually what happens is I start crying a little bit, thinking about Gala and how she looked in her bridal gown, how she gazed at John during their first dance, with such dreamy trust that me and the other bridesmaids could feel the hammering of our hearts. Not that marriage is any bowl of mousse, but at a certain point you realize it's better than tearing around town with the big scarlet
Un
on your chest. Getting involved with guys who are either dogs outright or else sensitive guys, which just means their molten core of misogyny is buried a little deeper, takes
a little longer to get to, that place where you're eating breakfast at some lousy diner after a night of wild angry sex, at-least-we-still-have-this sex, or no sex at all, and you want to ask him:
What happened to that other thing we had?
But he's looking down at his plate, hacking up a waffle, and his face is like a cursor, a dead blink, so you just ask him to pass the syrup.

Only it's worse than that, because maybe it's not them at all. Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the one who somehow fucks it up, demands too much, needs too much, gets too angry, weepy, moody. Maybe I'm unlovable is the truth, and I plunge into one of those moments where I can see everything I'm never going to get—the guy, the dress, the one dance—and Justin's wailing away and Gala says she has to go, so I hang up.

Brisby and me are heading out for some tacos, but the elevator's taking forever and the whole office seems trapped under a glaze of late-afternoon discontent, except for Computer Boy, who we can hear laughing, one of those insincere machine-gun laughs—
chut-chut-chut
—like the modern-rock jocks do all the time. Brisby looks at me and we drift toward his little tittie-poster-festooned office. It's not like we're eavesdropping either, because he's practically shouting:
No way, dude! She looked like ass. What were her stats, dude? You fucking liar! She was fucking bacterial! Chut-chut-chut. Yeah, if it was me, I'd send that shit out for dry-cleaning! Wait, where'd you find that? In the crack? Bleach, dude! Clorox! Chut-chut-chut. I'm fuckin' serious, dude. That shit will make you go blind. Penicillin, dude. Penis chillin. Chut-chut-chut.

And what's remarkable is not that someone who has been alive for nearly three decades would speak like this (though that is kind
of remarkable) but that it goes on and on and on, this proto-fratboy-speak that's not so much offensive after a while as sad, imbued with the deep lonely rage of the Geek Player.

All Brisby and I can say in the elevator is: Wow.

I work up a few
chut-chut
s over lunch, but Brisby wants to talk about his fiancée, whom I've met twice and who seems cool, kind of pretty in a J. Crew way, maybe a little on the uptight side. She wants Brisby to take these classes before they get married, is the latest issue, with her priest. (She has a
priest
!) This will bring them closer together, she figures, which I'm not so sure about, because Brisby's not a churchy kind of guy. Even after his mom had a stroke and he had to move back from Dallas, you didn't hear him talking about God's Great Plan or any of that crapola. He just said: What am I supposed to do, let her drown in drool?

But now he's looking at me, the poor guy, like what do I think he should do. Suddenly I feel flustered. What are the priest's stats? I say.

Brisby goes into his Morley Safer face, the one he uses when he's got some bigwig on the phone, and for a sec I'm afraid I've pissed him off.

He's not currently bacterial, Brisby says. I know that.

Is his penis chillin? Do you know if his penis is chillin?

Shit. Brisby smacks his forehead. I forgot to ask.

And just sitting there, munching on our tacos, with sour cream painting our lips and hot sauce burning our throats, I'm so relieved Brisby is around, that he's a friend of mine. That we heard Computer Boy together so that he can provide, if not moral guidance, at least a foretaste of the devout shame I would experience post-bop.

* * *

Then it's Halloween, which means the paper throws one of these mandatory costume parties intended to lube up the advertisers. I figure, what the hell, it's a Saturday night, I'm not getting any younger, so I go as Lolita: kneesocks, pleated skirt, twin braids, and the dogs of this world howl and howl; there's something about the prospect of boffing a twelve-year-old that sends the sperm count into orbit.

Plenty of booze and some decent grilled shrimp appetizers and a DJ who somehow manages to not suck. The little club they've rented out, Sub Rosa, has this tiny sunken dance floor, and all the chicks, me included, do their thing once management clears out, screaming along to “Got to Be Real” and “I Will Survive,” shaking gynapalooza style, while the dweebs from business circle around fanning the flames, and the place actually starts to get a little sexy, a little sweaty, which is when Computer Boy makes his entrance. He's wearing this Zorro-meets-Liberace getup, raccoon mask, pinkie rings, a spangled cape that whips around as he vogues, and this big whoop goes up and us chickees tear off the cape and all he's wearing is a white leather vest and a matching
codpiece
and there it is, Der Weinerschnitzel, sitting up like a pleased little puppy. It all comes together now: he's a queen. A big flaming murder-'em-with-my-abs queen. Perfect.

Then his date appears, Marcie the Production Ho, trussed up in a tit-spiller, buried under blue eye shadow, and throwing sass. The pair of them, what a freak show, like Rocky Horror without the singalong.

But what the hell! The music's good and the gin's cast a certain forgiving silliness onto everything and I'm enjoying flailing around in the belief of my sexiness, which is being reinforced by the menfolk,
who ask me if I'm a naughty girl and do I want detention and paw my skirt and gaze upon my hair like it's a divine accomplishment. I mean, how many of these nights does one get, anyway?

I can feel Brisby checking me out from the edge of the room, where he and fiancée are poking at the remains of the appetizers. They're both dressed in prison stripes and dopey little hats, with a little plastic ball and chain between them (get it?) and it's obvious Elle Elle Bean is in one of her snits, wants out of here, away from the depravity, and even though Brisby is probably my last link to common sense, to my not doing something marvelous and stupid, I'm ready for them to ship off into their goddamn bloodless duet of a life and leave the rest of us to gobble each other up. What it is: I don't like the look on Brisby's face, so glum and smug that I want to walk over there and slap him, though before I can even take a step in that direction, he's gone. Of course.

I turn back to the party and there's Lancelot, launching into this exuberant B-boy Pentium Chip dance routine, which is sexy in a Tourettesy sort of way, and highly effective as a herding strategy. He backs me into this dark, quiet corner with his goddamn sensational cock of a cock, away from the music but still in plain view, and I can feel the booze thickening my tongue, my resistance going to pudding.

Where's your date? I say weakly.

He looks around. Who? Marcie? Yeah, she looks cool, huh?

Very escort service, I say. Very STD.

I don't see your partner in crime, he says. What's his name? Bixby?

Which almost makes me laugh, because Lancey obviously thinks we're a thing, he's that out to lunch. But before I can make the next crack, he takes a step forward so that he's actually, um, against me.

You're cool, he says. You know that? I like you.

For just a second I step back from the situation and look at this dumb brute in what amounts to cut-rate lederhosen and try to figure out whatever happened to subtlety, restraint, courtship, the wise gentle dance of desire against its tether. Then Lancelot leans down and presses his mouth against mine, and his lips are soft and wet on the inside and I can taste the Geek Player Binaca on his breath as he nibbles his way into my mouth, and his body grinds against mine, warm and hard. We start macking right there, in front of more or less everyone, so that I am magically reduced from Prepubescent Catholic School Girl to Office Slut and what's more, I'm
happy
about this, because I can feel his complicated grid of back muscles, his thighs, the silk of his armpit hair and I realize that even though this experience is total bullshit, it's also absolutely perfect, like in the movies, one of those deals where our differences are actually complementary and everyone goes: Oh, of course, why didn't we see it all along? They're
soul mates.
As opposed to real life where they say: You let him put his tongue
where
?

Here in the veiny arms of Lance the Computer Boy, I'm ready to surrender the idea of the perfect guy, someone I can talk to about anything on earth, because, really, in the end, isn't talk sort of over-rated? Isn't talk just a way of pushing some romantic agenda that never works anyway? And besides, I could learn to speak computer, all those ones and zeroes, and I might even be able to train Lancey to burp with his mouth shut and not say
skank
so much, and having kids will settle him down; I sense he'll be a good father, because I can feel already how much he appreciates the maternal role, just by the way he keeps kneading my hips, like a Lamaze coach.

Then there's this loud
pop
and a fuzzy static sound and the music goes dead and the entire room turns on us, like we somehow
dry-humped the music into silence, which, as it turns out … that little ledge against which I was seeking added pestle leverage seems to have been, in fact, an outlet. Nay, the very outlet into which DJ Dennis (DJ Dennis?) plugged his suspiciously karaoke-compatible DK2 Partymaster system.

Reentry into the world of the dwindling party would be shitty enough, but old Lancelot just has to complete the show by calling out, Thanks for the dance, babe! before ducking behind the appetizer table in an effort to conceal his
raging shaft of manhood.

On the plus side is the fact that Marcie the Production Ho has taken X, rendering her unable to do anything worse than hug me fiercely and offer to pierce my septum.

I slip outside, into the lousy mucky air. Everyone watches me leave, the slutty aging reporter chick, which, if I were still drunk, might actually be a step up from aging reporter chick. But the booze is all through with my blood; it's coming off in acetone fumes, and the parking lot is empty and I'm leaving alone.