Thrill-Bent (3 page)

I remember when I last saw Ralph wearing these pants. Just a few weeks earlier, we were playing pool at the Snake Ranch Social Club. Ralph knows almost everybody inside the Ranch at any given moment, and often he’ll telephone the bartender before we go over and ask him to put our names up on the pool chalkboard (in fact, immediately after sex, sometimes while he’s still inside me, Ralph reaches over to his phone on the bedside table, and I hear him whisper, “Hey buddy, it’s Ralphie. Listen, do me a favor and put me on the board, man.”) Ralph and I were particularly hammered from a marathon combination of vodka, marijuana, and levelers, and I was kicking his ass in a surreal game of eightball. I kept missing easy shots—I couldn’t remember getting even one stripe down, but every time I turned back to the game after dancing dizzily but intensely by myself to Janis or Bill Withers on the jukebox, I’d somehow be in the lead. Finally, Ralph came over to dance with me and leaned into me, belly to belly, thigh to thigh. As we swayed, I felt something hard in his pants, something bulky and bobbing, like a sack of fibroid tumors or those oversized glass grapes that grandmas have on their dining room tables. He rubbed against me lewdly, grinding back and forth until I reached down into his big front pockets and came up with six striped billiard balls, three on each side. He had been stealthily palming whichever of my stripes was most convenient every time I turned my back, waiting for me to notice. But finally, he got impatient, or maybe he was just incredulous that I had so little trouble accepting my mysterious conquest. “Not many men would have the balls to pull that stunt,” I said, pulling Ralph into the Ranch’s back room and rolling around on his multiply balled lap, slipping and sliding like I was log rolling. “I want to
earn
my stripes,” I crooned. I don’t remember whether my hair was in a ponytail that night, or whether Ralph pulled the elastic out of my hair during my wild ride on his lap.

I do remember, though not with much warmth, an incident from earlier that same evening. A cabbie had walked into the club, and Ralph called him over to where we were sitting. Ralph left to feed the jukebox and the man and I made affable conversation for several minutes. Neither of us introduced ourselves by name. I was reeling on my barstool, steadying myself against the solid wood bar with both hands, remarkably charm-schooled, I thought, for being so drunk. When Ralph returned, he said to me, “This is Tommy, he drives for the Slope.” He turned to Tommy and gestured toward me, “And this is J ... J ... J ...”—the stuttering was subtle and brief; I probably wouldn’t even have noticed it except for what came next—“Judy,” he said.

I didn’t correct him; the whole situation seemed too absurd. I had been sleeping with Ralph for months. He’d yelled my name when he came, breathed it in his sleep when he reached for me, announced it when leaving messages on my voicemail, underlined it when he left notes jammed into the slot in my mailbox. He knew my name. So why didn’t I give him shit right then and there about being so “leveled” he’d forgotten it? Was it only the fact of this cabbie standing between us, shaking my hand heartily and having no idea that my name wasn’t Judy? After a fraught silence, Ralph derailed the moment by looking away from me, distracted by another conversation. His head spun so fast, I knew he realized the severity of his mistake. As he turned, his face lost its solid features. I had no idea who he was. I was the one who’d been de-named, but I felt he’d lost his identity, as though he’d let something slip that revealed him as a blurred imposter.

I raise my head and see miles of air and no ground in the immediate vicinity. I feel like I’m a character in a small child’s drawing, hovering wide-eyed in space, no horizontal line to represent the horizon. I’m scared, and I would like to be held tight against any prospect of harm, but I can’t get any closer to Ralph because of my lack of swiveling capability. I grab his hip and try to turn him toward me, but he locks like a turnstile after a ten-degree rotation. He looks at me, our heads directly opposite, but our bodies can only flap vaguely toward each other, trapped in a dream of perfect symmetry. His eyes are narrowed and he gives me a horny half-smile; I can see that he’s afraid I’m going to lose it right here, I’m going to flip out and we won’t get back to our business at hand, much less to dry land.

It occurs to me that our inability to fully face one another is appropriate, metaphorically. Since the beginning I’ve known that Ralph and I weren’t going to last, but still I’ve tried to make him conform to my version of a head-on collision. I’ve wanted to be the ponytail holder in his pocket, the shrewd, skirted eightball maven who gives him a run for his money, the pretty mainsqueeze who charms his endless parade of drunken Snake Ranch brethren with my coquettish banter, the savvy journalist with whom he willingly junkets. I’ve craved eye-to-eye, neck-and-neck, toe-to-toe. But maybe up in the air with Ralph is where I’m meant to be, after all. Touching each other’s private places, but not in each other’s line of fire. I am pointed southwest, he’s pointed south-east, and it’s amazing how much heat we have generated at the intersection of where our oblique paths cross. Like two sticks that rub together to finally create fire, our separate, contrastive lives are actually responsible for our ignition.

I feel Ralph’s cock through his pants; it is trundled up against his thigh like a thick bankroll. I smile. He smiles. I stroke him firmly with the palm of my hand, as though I’m trying to rub off some trace of honey or stubborn dirt that has gotten stuck there. I unbutton his pants and unzip his fly. Through the slit in his boxer shorts, I grasp his penis—I grasp but don’t pull it in any direction. I let it point where it will, up into the vast, disinterested sky. I am always surprised at how fleshy a man’s erection is; from the hard rocketlike cylinder that thrusts angrily against his clothes is unveiled this warm, vulnerable skin, this rubbery and tender wing. I lick my hand and create a moist and punishing cage, a plush constraint that Ralph wants to go in and out of again and again. I gaze out at the blue-frosted cake of the Atlantic, and I am punctured, finally. Ralph’s fingers have crept inside me, and they twinkle there like hard, wet stars. We hear a dilatory creak as the trim brakes in the track underneath us gradually release their hold on our car’s fins, then a languid and melancholy cry as the train begins to move again toward the next extemporaneous curve.

W
illiam Burroughs wrote, “I am the movies.” Or it’s hard to say whether Burroughs, sober as a judge or riding the brown rump of God’s Own Medicine far beyond the finish line, wrote anything of the sort. Bill might have scrawled on a popcorn bag, “I am
at
the movies” in the dark buttonhole of a Kansas City porno palace, just to remind himself of his placement in space and time, to reassure his aching boner that its urgent bird call would not dissipate nightlong into oblivion. He was
at the movies.
He was
here.
Then Brion Gysin came along with his nail scissors and his Remington manual and they tucked back into the Beat Hotel and designed a Franken-Burroughs in their stay-up-all-night free time. They cut his stuff up, collaged it like refrigerator poetry, took words and sentences and puzzle-pieced them together with the vainglory of an Ezra in a Wasteland. They divined the divine behind the illusion; or, as Burroughs liked to say: “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.” So
I am the movies
may not be Burroughs’s line at all, but it is a line all the same, a remnant from the future made of words that flash like flimsy frames.

On the evolutionary road to becoming an urban boheme, a twenty-first-century mover and shaker with five thousand “friends,” it is important to understand the concept of frames-per-second. In early films, like the one of two men dancing in their three-piece suits in a glaring stage-lit studio, the light flickers at a regular rate of four frames per second, giving the operation a slo-mo feeling, a stop-and-go rhythm, making us snickeringly aware of the artifice. Oh, there are two men dancing in front of a charmingly primitive movie camera, heh-heh. But after a while someone figured out that the speed of the shutter would have to increase—there would have to be more frames, and more dark spaces in between frames—in order to capture a lifelike motion. The more choices we include, the more intentions we clarify each second, the more believable are our lives. In other words: the more seams we have, the more seamless we seem.
Bah-dum-pum.
The movies are just another, more elaborate form of everyone’s favorite baby game, Peek-a-boo. Any toddler knows that continuous reality is ultimately testable. Go away! Come back! Go away! Come back! What is really happening during the dark intervals between frames? Am I hiding? Is the image/object hiding? Both, maybe? I am, in fact, the movies. I am here and I am gone in the space of a fortieth of a second. And I want my loved ones to appear and disappear, to gather and scatter accordingly.

Driving with my dad was always an e-ticket ride. Not only in my biased opinion, the skewed outlook of a thrill-seeker-in-training, but also in the eyes of my neighbors and schoolmates and swim lesson cronies, anyone whose geographical situation might put them in line to get a toe up in my dad’s carpool. He had a series of Fiat convertibles (their diminutive bodies made him seem more godlike and helm-worthy), with bucket seats that barely squeezed two adults but could accommodate three or four squirrelly pre-pubescents. The “backseat” was roughly the size of a briefcase. Seatbelt laws were a thing of the future, but the Fiat’s cramped quarters made them unnecessary anyway—there is nowhere for a sardine to go, even if you shake the can. My memories of driving with my dad often include someone’s elbow jammed up against my esophagus or the soggy Wheat Chex smell of leather upholstery smashing my cheek flat against my aching molars. The view of the road was never a full-fledged navigational view; I could never take in the little white stick-noodles in the middle of the road, or anticipate the S-curve of a familiar route from a handful of yards away. Instead, I glimpsed limbs of trees and shiny windows chugging by, or the shadows of trees and buildings flying past backward against the windshield; I felt the slap of air ruffling through the car at an alarming rate, lifting a skirt or a hat, tossing papers and wadded-up Kleenex into the unstoppable clip of oblivion.

My dad’s car was a place where ordinary rules didn’t apply; the physical laws of sight and sound and rapid air movement were suspended inside that five-speed blender, that churning, unpredictable fun zone. On the way home from swim class, the car crammed with girls trussed in damp towels, my dad did the usual tricks: he drove with his knees (“No hands! No hands!”) and accelerated down graduated hills so the wheels actually popped up off the ground momentarily at each apex. “Goddamn fucking hell!” he shouted. “Fucking Jesus Christ’s pubic bone!” And he whapped the dash with the knuckle-force of ten men, knocking out a rhythm so complex it would choke Gene Krupa. Rat-a-tat-tat-a-bipple-bipple-bat-a-bop. Then he drove another block and repeated the same exact sequence at the next intersection. “Goddamn fucking hell!” Rat-a-tat-tat-a-bipple-bipple-bat-a-bop. The old dashboard sang out in metal harmony, panging like a happy twin. This routine caused an explosion of giggles from the passengers every time, as the combination of bizarre parental swear words and ritualized thwapping catapulted us into a giddiness beyond our usual slaphappy schoolgirl ferment. My dad’s performance was disconcerting, but not scary somehow. It always seemed planned, a kind of savant clown dance hatched just for these rides home. I knew better, of course. I’d seen my dad out in the yard mowing the lawn when he thought no one was watching: shimmying like a stripper on speed and poking at his balls so fast and hard I worried he might do permanent genetic damage.

To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in spirit to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or does it take more chutzpah to simply pack it in? I’ve always wondered if there is a place, a sort of neurological Narnia, in between to be and not to be. Is the question really so divisive? What if I want to choose against being, to rebut the earnest battle cry of
throw me a life preserver, I’m going under?
Sometimes I’d like to take a yellow highlighter to the fine print on the hemline of the contract signed by my ancestors without my permission. What if I want to put my whole body, my entire ruthless carcass, into the pyre, but I don’t necessarily want to die? Is there a prayer for the likes of a midair carouser with a hefty thrill-bent? Is there a name for the section of the waterfall in between the thrust and the crash? To be or not to be ... or to dangle for a voodoo moment in the pause between.

When I was a kid, I would sit in my dad’s lap while he sipped iced scotch, smelling his spiked breath and feeling the hardness of his thighs, rubbing my hand against his sandpapery jaw and whispering coded offerings into his ear, scrabbled syllables that were made somehow significant as they traveled the short distance from my mouth. My mind did not yet have to construct a meaning separate from my body’s intentions. My gibberish entered my father’s hot ear, and he rolled his eyes—but didn’t pull his face away from my exploring hand—as if to refuse my babbled invocations. His mind, he wanted me to know, was eddying elsewhere in an intellectually acute vortex beyond this silly baby game. And then he bounced me on his knee. The bounces were unlike any bounces I’ve sustained since (although a surprisingly large portion of my early thirties was spent bouncing on knees of various breadths and knobbiness-es). I say sustained because there was a vehemence and unpredictability to my father’s rate of bouncing so that I, as the bouncee, felt a sense of mastery if I managed just to stay on. Of course I realize, mainly because I was repeatedly informed by my former psychologist (the psychologist whose vocal patterns, Israeli accent, and thick black horn rims reminded me more and more of Henry Kissinger until I finally quit on her voicemail, convinced that she was doing me, much like Kissinger did Cambodia, more harm than good), that lap-bouncing is both sexual and infantalizing when acted upon an eight-year-old girl by her father, but I’m telling you, at the time it felt more like an Olympic event. If the combination of steady rhythm and the occasional introduction of a surprise element are what makes a good blow job a good blow job, then the same judication applies to a bounce job. In my father’s case, the surprise element, the throwing me a wrench just when I thought the whole episode was winding down, was accomplished by his familiar Tourettic seizures. The intense shaking and vibrating that occurred in his lower body as a matter of course would work itself gracefully into the slow, steady bounce, as though it was all part of the plan to service me with extra-wild fun. Before I knew it I was hanging on for dear life, begging him to stop but knowing in my heart that stopping wasn’t possible. Stopping, deciding to end an agitation that brings both the giver and the taker such staggering pleasure, was about as likely as plucking an eagle from the air.

We had two standing dates each week: Saturday morning at Von’s Supermarket, and Wednesday evening at Besta-Wan pizza parlor. The shopping date had been a tradition since before I can remember, my dad and me piling into the Fiat with the running grocery list that had been sitting on the end of the kitchen counter all week, collecting items haphazardly. My mother’s cursive was finely drawn, pretty and feminine (an artifact from the days when penmanship was one of the staples of a girl’s education), while most of the list would be in my father’s ultra-neat, compressed handwriting that was a hardy hybrid of cursive and all-cap printing. Mostly, his letters were autonomous, untouched on all sides, tiny like a typewriter’s font, and darkly even from bold pencil pressure, but sometimes two letters would be connected at the hip where speed and efficiency demanded. I tried to approximate my father’s style when I learned to write, wanting to duplicate its competent graphic simplicity, lines that curved only as much as they needed to, each of their heads skimming an invisible wire along the path to meaning. But my version featured long-necked giraffes and snoozy garden snakes dangling their tails in all directions. I couldn’t seem to get my letters to lean uniformly. My dad’s characters bowed just slightly to the right, but mine cranked east and west randomly, refusing to conform to my devoted will. My father’s handwriting dominated the grocery list, and my mother’s additions always seemed to me whimsical and luxurious—
lemons, diet black cherry soda, cotton balls
—the requests of a princess aching to roam outside her castle. My father cooked, made the list, did the shopping. I was allowed to choose one thing from the supermarket shelves every Saturday. A box of 50/50 bars, Space Food Sticks, Chocolate Malt-O-Meal, Shake-A-Pudd’n. Whatever item loomed freshest in my mind from the ads between Saturday morning cartoons was what I’d scout for in the aisles that day. I insisted on captaining the expedition, commanding the cart while my dad tended to the items on his list, keeping one hand on the hard plastic handle in case I sprang out after something shiny. My dad kept me straight and true, gliding down those wide, waxed expressway aisles like they were Autobahns. He could drive anything with one hand, one finger, even, could steady the most unruly and disobeying lawnmower, Fiat convertible, Slip ’N’ Slide, garden hose, motorbike, or grocery cart in the civilized world.

When my dad poked his face into my bedroom on Wednesday evenings, cranking open the door without a squeak or a thought for privacy, then grinned and said, “Ready?” my heart was butterflied like a thick steak, doubled in surface. The call had been made, the pizza ordered, the requisite ten minutes abided until it was the perfect moment for us to begin the ten-mile drive to retrieve it fresh from the oven. Those ten miles on the somnam-bulant California coastline between Glencrest Drive and Encinitas Boulevard are etched in my memory like a dreamscape.

At dusk, our suburban neighborhood took on a strange character, a penciled roughness that made everything seem approximate rather than precise. I could recite all the details in my sleep, but like a favorite doll dressed suddenly in period costume—she still clanks her eyes open and shut with the same shameless ferocity, her stiff plump limbs still emerge ham-pink from her sleeves and bloomers—the comfortable ease with which I usually grabbed what was undoubtedly mine had turned to tentative stroking, a re-examination of all the trappings I took for granted. The Hunters’ vine-covered redwood latticework, so broad and high it could only have been purchased to keep nosy neighbors from peeking into their living room window, appeared briefly to be a drive-in movie screen seen from the back, the images on its surface flickering and reversed, unintelligible. The shadow of the telephone wire in the road looked like a painted ribbon, thin and gracefully scalloping the sidewalk. Sprinkler systems seemed to pop on one by one, bobbing their heads like praying mantises, as though we were tripping some invisible wire as we drove by. And the sky, the Russian-blue thick fur of the sky, stood behind the little hills of our town and punched out black trees like Christmas cookies, each one perfectly aligned and separate, pointy elbows joined in a straight-backed, kicky folk dance. I could smell salt, and chimney smoke from the new upscale model homes my friends and I snuck into to ride the long winding staircase banisters—those new nuclear families built fires in their shiny brass-accented fireplaces every evening at the first hint of chill, even in summer. And the smell of smoke rolled down the hill from Dell Street and infused the air of the not-so-new nuclear families who had lived in the valley for years, the parents parked in front of the evening news, the kids smoking copious amounts of marijuana in the backyard behind the rusted tetherball pole, or the basketball hoop that had been reduced to a few stray shreds of net that hung like cobwebs, or the creaky swingset that no one used anymore except when the stoned teenagers thought swinging sounded like a good idea. The smell of cedar-chip chimney smoke and the smell of salt from the ever-present, overriding ocean made me bleary-eyed and sharp-nostriled, made me feel that I was home. And then we turned onto the Pacific Coast Highway, the tunnel of wind aggravating our faces and our hair, and the smell of anything else was lost to the fish and salt and seaweed and miles of fine, warm, undissolvable sand.