Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica (3 page)

Holy goddamn,
Angela said, her snout pressed up against the glass, her eyes picking out shapes in the dark.
There’s a boat,
she narrated.
There’s a couch, there’s fridge or something—a stove?
Her hands with their chipped and bitten nails were folded under her belly, cradling the thought of it.
How long you think it’ll take to get normal here? Not that it was ever normal, but you know.
She gave me a look, like we were in on knowing that this place wasn’t normal, the two of us together in a vehicle of boys who thought this road was the whole world, more or less. Behind us Hank and Marcus tossed their empties to shatter into the street, and the dogs howled.

The karaoke place was not a bar like the ones back in San Francisco, the gay one in the Castro where giant men sang “The Rose” or the one in the Tenderloin where hipsters crooned coun- try songs and Pat Benatar. It was a small house on the side of the road, sitting squat in a hazy halo of its own light. The only work- ing streetlamp in miles shone down on a patch of parking lot, and

still more light brightened the front porch. An illuminated sign stuck with plastic letters beamed
STILL OPEN SING YOUR BLUES AWAY FREE FOR HURRICANE VICTIMS
.
Fuck yeah!
Angela squealed. She popped the door open and swung out from the truck before Aidan killed the engine. Her hand whumped the hood.
You should join the army more often,
she chirped.
We never do anything this fun around here!

Hank and Marcus’s wallet chains clanked on the truck as they clambered off, the dogs’ collars jangling as they tied their rope leashes down. Surrounding the small house I could spot the foun- dations of the businesses the hurricane had lifted away. Chunky cement piles and the jagged peaks of split beams. The karaoke hut sat pristine in the middle of it all, as if it had blown over from another town, was dropped on the side of Route 12 like Dorothy’s house onto a witch. Only a bit of blue tarp caught the light and revealed that it had been in the storm at all.
It’s Like The Witch’s House In Hansel And Gretel,
I told Aidan.
Just Sitting Here In The Middle Of Nowhere.

It’s not nowhere, it’s Route 12,
Aidan said.
Route 12’s always

been here and this karaoke place has always been on Route 12, and just because you’ve never been to either place don’t mean it didn’t exist before you showed up.
Aidan banged out the car and joined his people on the front porch, walking in long, shit-kick- ing strides. His baseball hat was shoved brim-first into his back pocket; Hank and Marcus both wore theirs. I sat in the cab and watched them smoking and smacking at each other, the tongues of their work boots sticking up over the cuffs of their jeans, holes in the flannels tossed over their T-shirts. I knew a dozen queer girls back home who tried to look like them, and Hank and Marcus

would at the very least joke about kicking their ass. This was the last time I’d ever have to hang out with any of them. Perhaps An- gela would wander through the backyard to smoke cigarettes and talk, but I wouldn’t be able to keep smoking with her, not with her baby getting bigger there inside her stomach. Hank and Marcus were Aidan’s friends, not mine. Possibly Aidan wasn’t even my friend. Just someone I got stuck with while at my mom’s in Florida, because what else do you do while at your mom’s in Florida except forget you’re gay and fuck a hick?

Off to the side, Angela stood looking out into the darkness, blowing Marlboro smoke up through the grid of her bangs hung long over her mouth. Aidan thought I was being a snob, and I figured I should just accept it—that I was a snob, that I would never see this place as the real world, a reasonable place to live, but as a sub-terrain of disaster and stunted options and kitsch. The armored muscle of an alligator, and the seashell sculpture of that same alligator leaning against a seashell palm and smoking a seashell cigar. The upturned corpse of an alligator in the middle of the road, it’s scaled belly torn open and looted by vultures. I would only ever see Aidan as some weird
other,
first as a boy in a Dunkin’ Donuts uniform dropping stale turds of Munchkins into a box; soon as a boy in a sandy camouflage, tearing away his own self in order to merge with something larger, the way a storm wrenches a roof from its house. And into the hole will come rain and mud and destruction.

The dude who ran the karaoke place seemed mad with near-death and generator fumes. The cluster of gas-chugging machines sput- tered and hummed behind the building, keeping the place aglow

and powering the machines playing synthesized approximations of the hits of the ages. I could hear the electronic tinkle of “Blue Vel- vet” faint behind the generators’ roar. As promised on the news, the karaoke rooms were free; coolers of melted ice bobbed with free plastic bottles of water.

We’re drinking beer tonight, ’cause my brother is joining the service tomorrow,
Angela told the proprietor, whose face wrinkled and shook at her words.

No alcohol, I’m sorry, drink the water, please, as much as you want,
he moved his arms at us in a weird hula, like he was pushing waves of clean water toward us. He was a Japanese man whose hair gleamed with a grimy coat of grease—sweat from the heat and sweat from panic. I wonder what situation had brought him to this random place in Florida, and if his life was better for being here.

Our boy’s going in the army,
Hank said, clapping his paw heavy on Aidan’s back.
Tonight’s his last night, man, you gotta let us celebrate. This could be his last week alive, bro!

Marcus snorted into his sleeve and Aidan shook the hand from his back, murmuring,
Dude!
Angela spun and whacked Hank, the bottom of her beer bottle almost clipping his jaw.
Why would you say that, you sick fucker? Don’t you ever say that, take that back!

No, no!
the proprietor waved his hands in front of us, break- ing up the energy.
We’re all alive here! We’re all celebrating! Do what you like, that’s okay. Take some water for later. You all have houses?

Yes, sir,
Angela said. She held her beer bottle behind her back, demurely, and bowed a bit. Hank touched his jaw.

You have generators, TV, roofs on your houses?
he contin- ued, and we nodded. More or less.
You can see, my neighbors are all gone. All my neighbors, boom!
His hands clapped together and flew into the air, like his neighbors. His flicking fingers were beams and pipes and tiles and brick.
I have to wonder, why not me?
This is a pet peeve of mine, people trying to read personal sig- nificance into big-ass random events like hurricanes. Why would something like a hurricane have anything to do with any of us? A giant, impersonal muscle of wet wind.
I have to keep thinking about it,
the guy nodded.
Maybe it’s so people can sing. Sing- ing helps people.
He nodded. I was reluctantly touched that he thought getting tanked and croaking out “You Shook Me All Night Long” would help anyone heal from their house being smashed to shit, but what did I know. I wasn’t even an expert on my own life anymore. The generators continued to exude their stink, and we waited to be shown the karaoke chamber. Behind me, Hank and Marcus coughed bits of laughter into their cuffs at the sentimental guy.
Let’s go, dude!
Angela’s beer hand swung back out and into the air. She could only act demure for so long.

Something about the layout of the karaoke place felt like a really bad brothel. The carpet was chunked with geometry and spat- tered with oblong cigarette burns; it rolled down a hallway that sprouted private rooms and dead-ended where the hurricane had ripped a chunk of the back wall off. The proprietor shrugged and pointed—
I’m still the luckiest! I’m still here!
Our room was lined with Naugahyde benches, the covers split, revealing a bulk of foam stuffing. A table was piled with binders listing songs, and a remote control that plugged the songs into the system. The proprietor

demonstrated: “The Greatest Love of All” chimed into the room, joined by a video of sheep in a meadow. One sheep turned to face the camera, chomping on grass. It looked alarmed.
Everybody’s searching for a hero.
The words lit up across the pasture.
Never found anyone who could fill my dreams.
The proprietor left with a wave.

Man, he is demented,
Marcus cackled. He took hold of a mic and tossed it meanly at Angela.
Sing, bitch.
The binder was full of music I’d never heard of. Maybe it was Florida music. There was a strange amount of offerings from Stryper. Lots of metal, Megadeth, Pantera.

They got I Left My Heart in San Francisco,
Hank offered. They laughed. I inched closer to pregnant Angela. She was seven- teen and I was thirty and somehow I felt like she was the one to protect me in this place, not the reverse. Angela with her shaved head and long bangs and absurdly elfin nose. Angela screwed Hank and Marcus, and I screwed her brother, who soon would be dragging himself through mud with a rifle clutched to his chest while some old man prodded him with calls of
faggot
. I watched them all drink, inhaled the collective yeasty stink. It had been weeks since I had done anything but smoke Aidan’s useless pot. I thought, maybe this is the real reason I’ve come to Florida. Not to help my mom but to find a new life that alienated me enough to make my old life look good. My old life of sleeping around with girls and getting too wasted and not keeping jobs. It had begun to feel pathetic, but as it turned out I didn’t understand what pathetic could be. It was like San Francisco was a fairy ring of unreality that enchanted time itself; you played while outside the world aged and died, time marched on, and wars exploded—this was America,

something San Francisco was not involved with. The thought reso- nated. This Is America.

Inside the karaoke room, which had the unmistakable vibe of a place where women had had bad sex for money, Angela sang Eminem. When the vocals sped up, she lost the rhythm and de- volved into a coughing fit.
Hallie’s a good name for a girl, though,
she said, calming her spasms with a slug of beer. Hank hung with a cigarette out the open window, his smoke merging with the generator fumes.
What you think, Hank? Marcus?
The two boys looked down at the scarred carpet; Hank spit out the window.
Call it whatever you want, fuck do I care? After Aidan leaves, doubt I’ll be seeing you much.
The Eminem beat rolled on. On the television, an undersea landscape of tropical fish. A snorkeler kicked by with a tube in her mouth. Aidan was glued to it like a Discovery program. Something in his face. Was it pathetic to have feelings for someone because of the wonder in their face when they watched nature on a karaoke television? He looked at me.
That’s Hawaii, right?
I nodded.
I’d rather be going there.

Maybe we’ll bomb ’em and you’ll get to,
Marcus laughed and kicked out with his boot.
Sing, bitch! C’mon.

Angela sang. She sang “Livin’ on a Prayer.” She sang Billy Joel, first “My Life” and then “Piano Man.” She sang Nirvana and “Que Sera Sera,” Madonna and Depeche Mode.
All I ever wanted or ever needed here in my arms.
Hank and Marcus took turns smoking at the window. Aidan put his arm around me and we watched the weird karaoke video travel from Hawaii to Germany to California to China to some jungle somewhere and back to that sheep. I did not shrug his arm from my lesbo shoulder. I let myself sink into his armpit. The lyrics ran like the ribbon of news at the

bottom of a news channel.
It doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not. If I could get out of this place. Whatever will be will be. All apologies.
I lifted my hand up and clutched Aidan’s arm. Aidan was a mystery to me, but an arm I understood. An arm was perhaps inherently good. A thin cloud of diesel hung in the room; beer bottles rolled into a pile at the carpet. Aidan’s arm with it’s muscle and tendons. I palmed my way up to the back of his neck and cupped it. I felt the short hairs at his nape, the weird lump in the front of his throat.
Get a room!
Hank burped like a toad, and Angela sang
Those one-track minds who took you for a working boy—