Problems (5 page)

My head was buzzing, and I felt dizzy. I thought of fucking Ogden to distract myself.

I thought of how I was going to say, “Yeah, fuck me, Daddy,” as he pounded me from behind.

I thought of how when he fucked me missionary, he pulled down the cups of my bra so my tits spilled out.

For an old dude, Ogden had a nice body. He was thin but muscular. He had a few white hairs on his chest and belly. He was tall. When
he was fucking me on the edge of the bed, I liked putting my hand out and feeling his stomach. I liked how it was hard and fuzzy, and how there was no fat there. You couldn't tell he was old till you scanned back up and looked at his face. Or his ass. He had an old, droopy, sad ass. Most men have sad asses, but Peter didn't. Peter had a robust, taut booty that stuck out. I didn't understand why women liked men's butts, like how they showed women checking them out in movies.

One time Ogden fingered my ass as he fucked my mouth. I was on all fours on the bed, and he was standing. I pulled back too far, and his cock fell out of my mouth. “C'mon,” he said, and put his cock back into my mouth. I liked feeling like a thing.

I liked feeling like nothing.

There was more nothing in a woman. There was the asshole, pussy, and mouth. But you could also store a baby in the belly and two jugs of milk fit perfectly in each tit.

Imagine the voice-over in a car commercial, and the image of a woman's naked body on a shiny black surface, the camera slowly panning up.
The female body, luxurious and roomy, can accommodate three cocks and three babies at full capacity. One baby sucking on each nipple and one sleeping comfortably inside
[show ultrasound of zygote in women's belly]
while there is one cock in the pussy, one in the ass, and one sliding in and out of the mouth
.

I imagined being tied to a bed and different men coming in and fucking me.

I was pouring sweat. I was horny and felt gross. The slicks of sweat gathered underneath my tits. My high school best friend, Molly, used to say belly buttons smelled like hot dogs. I wanted to take
a long shower, brush my teeth, buy a cardigan, and be a normal human fucking being.

I thought about a man pushing my head down so my forehead pressed against the counter as he fucked me from behind.

I went on Facebook and found this guy, Ian, I knew from high school. He used be hot and wore
T
-shirts of cool bands you were embarrassed to say you'd never heard of. He had gotten fat, and his status updates were about the food he cooked. “Made vegetable fajitas with peppers, tomatoes, onions from the farmer's market, avocados, and Mexican cheese, wrapped in a homemade tortilla.” And then there was a picture of what looked like sad brown food covered in a fat scoop of sour cream on a terra-cotta plate. Why did seventeen people like this? Why did some girl named Terry need the recipe to make it for “her hubby”?

The word “hubby” made me cringe.

Molly was on Gchat.

When I got out of the store, the cool air felt good on my hot skin. My hoodie was getting wet. I smelled rank. I broke into a run. Passed the couples, dodged umbrellas. Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me.

Fall off the Earth. Get high and think about how you should stop getting high.

My life was my own to fuck up. At least in America where you know you're free.

When I was kid, I was always on airplanes. I was an army brat,
so we moved a lot. I would imagine how if the plane crashed others would be saved before me. I imagined the frustration rising up in me. Wanting to shout, “Do you have any idea who I am?” There would be no way to tell them I was special. That I knew somehow I was destined for greatness. I thought it would be a misunderstanding if I died.

But then you grow up, and all the extras are real people. Like when you look down from a bridge and have to wrap your mind around how in each little toy car is a real person with a whole life. There are smart people everywhere. There are idiots everywhere. There is no order to it. There is no reason you're not dying in a cancer ward and some little kid is.

Ran up Elizabeth's stoop. I could hear the rats rustling just out of my peripheral vision. After I buzzed Elizabeth, I turned back and made myself stare at the rats bursting out of the garbage. Some were going into the hole in the garbage bag while other rats were running out, their skin touching as they passed one another. It made me jumpy, like one was about to run up my leg. Rats had teeth.

Molly once told me that her friend had a male rat, and when it went down her arm, she could feel the rat's balls on her skin.

All Elizabeth's furniture had been found on the street or looked as though it had. The sofa had a maroon velvet sheet with black roses on it that was always sliding off. There was a sticker on the mirror of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom that read, “Fuck You! I'm Batman.” Noah, her ex, had his paintings hung up on the wall because he didn't have the money to put them in storage. Or so he claimed. She had dumped him nearly two years ago. There was something sinister about the way he left his stuff around. It was probably some kind of male territory type thing, like, “My shit is here so this bitch is still mine.”

Noah's paintings were creepy. They looked like what would happen if Norman Rockwell were possessed by Charles Manson. They featured adolescent boys wearing white briefs and disturbing white masks with horns or snouts. A lot of the scenes were in nature. There was one of a little girl stabbing a giant fuzzy panda, and blood poured out of the wound and spattered her long dress.

You live in New York, and you're so cool. You have an apartment in the East Village, and you call yourself an artist. But after a while, you forget what it was you were so excited about. There is nothing here for you. You feel like a sucker every day paying fourteen bucks for a pack of smokes. You take stock of your resources, and you don't have anything. You call yourself an artist, but you work fifty million hours a week just to sleep in a room where only a bed fits. You go to bars where you can't sit down or hear anyone talk. You're a hipster in New York City. There are a million of you, and it doesn't matter that you believe you're talented, because no one cares and you're only getting older. The thing you didn't realize when you were fourteen and thought Kurt Cobain was God was that not every weirdo with an ironic tee from Urban Outfitters makes it. There are a lot of people in their sixties, toothless, broken, and poor, who have stories of almost making it. At what point do people hear “loser” when you say “artist”?

I didn't care how amazingly successful you got as long as you weren't younger than me.

The first thing Elizabeth did after opening the door was shush me. Not a good sign. She pointed through her railroad apartment to the bedroom, where I could make out two sleeping bodies. “Noah and Candy,” she told me. I didn't know who Candy was.

I was disappointed she had let Noah in and into her bed, where he was probably crashing from whatever drug he had injected or
smoked. That didn't bode well for Elizabeth's sobriety. Said me, the girl who was fiending for a bag of heroin, but hey, you still had those feelings. A year into Elizabeth's relationship with Noah, he lost his job and started smoking crack. I didn't know which had come first, losing his job or smoking crack, but my money was on the crack. He pretended to go to work every morning but instead went to his studio where he smoked crack and fucked around. He claimed he was taking care of the bills. But it all came out when Elizabeth started getting bills with bright red “Final Notice” warnings. Elizabeth's mother paid all the back debt. Noah had helped Elizabeth clean up when they first met, so he laid a guilt trip on her when she tried kicking him out. And then he got her hooked on dope again, so she couldn't really get away. But she didn't blame him. She said, “I'm an adult. No one can make you do anything.”

“Shit,” was the first thing Noah said when he came into the kitchen.

Noah owned a lot of scarves.

Five years of hardcore drug use had taken a heavy toll on him. The whole time they were together, he seemed frozen at twenty-five, but now he looked like he was pushing forty. It was weird how age didn't work in steady steps but was like a car accident: it hit you one day and left you fucked-up forever.

Noah took a jar of organic peanut butter out of the cabinet. He scooped some on his finger. The jar fell out of his hand and broke into pieces. He picked up a shard of the jar and wiped the peanut butter onto a piece of bread.

Noah's teeth were black and broke off in his sleep. Junkies don't brush. Don't ask me why. I don't know why.

Noah had contracted Hep. C. from all the injectables. When I asked Elizabeth what she thought would happen to him, she said these words like they were no big deal, “He's going to die.”

Candy couldn't find her pills. She dumped her purse on the bed. Losing drugs makes you crazy. You alternate between “It has to be here” and “I am going to be sick really soon, and there's nothing I can do to help it.”

Candy cornered Elizabeth and tried to pull the “Maybe you accidentally somehow . . .” Elizabeth rolled her eyes. Candy was screaming at Noah to get off his ass and help her. Noah's eyes kept closing. I figured it out. Noah had stolen Candy's Xanax.