Contents
About the Author
Also by Chuck Palahniuk
Dedication
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Copyright
Invisible Monsters
Survivor
Fight Club
Choke
Lullaby
Diary
Haunted
Rant
Snuff
Pygmy
Fugitives and Refugees
For Lump.
Forever.
If you’re going to read this, don’t bother.
After a couple pages, you won’t want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you’re still in one piece.
Save yourself.
There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair.
You’re not getting any younger.
What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and worse.
What you’re getting here is a stupid story about a stupid little boy. A stupid true life story about nobody you’d ever want to meet. Picture this little spaz being about waist high with a handful of blond hair, combed and parted on one side. Picture the icky little shit smiling in old school photos with some of his baby teeth missing and his first adult teeth coming in crooked. Picture him wearing a stupid sweater striped blue and yellow, a birthday sweater that used to be his favorite. Even that young, picture him biting his dickhead fingernails. His favorite shoes are Keds. His favorite food, fucking corn dogs.
Imagine some dweeby little boy wearing no seat belt and riding in a stolen school bus with his mommy after dinner. Only there’s a police car parked at their motel so the Mommy just blows on past at sixty or seventy miles an hour.
This is about a stupid little weasel who, for sure, used to be about the stupidest little rat fink crybaby twerp that ever lived.
The little cooz.
The Mommy says, “We’ll have to hurry,” and they drive uphill on a narrow road, their back wheels wagging from side to side on the ice. In their headlights the snow looks blue, spreading from the edge of the road out into the dark forest.
Picture this all being his fault. The little peckerwood.
The Mommy stops the bus a little ways back from the base of a rock cliff, so the headlights glare against its white face, and she says, “Here’s as far as we’re going to get,” and the words come boiling out as white clouds that show how big inside her lungs are.
The Mommy sets the parking brake and says, “You can get out, but leave your coat in the bus.”
Picture this stupid runt letting the Mommy stand him right in front of the school bus. This bogus little Benedict Arnold just stands looking into the glare of the headlights, and lets the Mommy pull the favorite sweater off over his head. This wimpy little squealer just stands there in the snow, half naked, while the bus’s motor races, and the roar echoes off the cliff, and the Mommy disappears to somewhere behind him in the night and the cold. The headlights blind him, and the motor noise covers any sound of the trees scraping together in wind. The air is too cold to breathe more than a mouthful at a time so this little mucous membrane tries to breathe twice as fast.
He doesn’t run away. He doesn’t do anything.
From somewhere behind him, the Mommy says, “Now whatever you do, don’t turn around.”
The Mommy tells him how there used to be a beautiful girl in ancient Greece, the daughter of a potter.
Like every time she gets out of jail and comes back to claim him, the kid and the Mommy have been in a different motel every night. They’ll eat fast food for every meal, and just drive all day, every day. At lunch today, the kid tried to eat his corn dog while it was still too hot and almost swallowed it whole, but it got stuck and he couldn’t breathe or talk until the Mommy charged around from her side of the table.
Then two arms were hugging him from behind, lifting him off his feet, and the Mommy whispered, “Breathe! Breathe, damn it!”
After that, the kid was crying, and the entire restaurant crowded around.
At that moment, it seemed the whole world cared what happened to him. All those people were hugging him and petting his hair. Everybody asked if he was okay.
It seemed that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.
“Okay. There,” the Mommy said as she wiped his mouth, “now I’ve given you life.”
The next moment, a waitress recognized him from a photograph on an old milk carton, and then the Mommy was driving the evil little squealer back to their motel room at seventy miles an hour.
On the way back, they’d got off the highway and bought a can of black spray paint.
Even after all their rushing around, where they’ve arrived is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
Now from behind him, this stupid kid hears the rattle of the Mommy shaking the spray paint, the marble inside the can knocking from end to end, and the Mommy says how the ancient Greek girl was in love with a young man.
“But the young man was from another country and had to go back,” the Mommy says.
There’s a hissing sound, and the kid smells spray paint. The bus motor changes sounds, clunks, running faster now and louder, and the bus rocks a little from tire to tire.
So the last night the girl and her lover would be together, the Mommy says, the girl brought a lamp and set it so it threw the lover’s shadow on the wall.
The hiss of spray paint stops and starts. There’s a short hiss, after that a longer hiss.
And the Mommy says how the girl traced the outline of her lover’s shadow so she would always have a record of how he looked, a document of this exact moment, the last moment they would be together.
Our little crybaby just keeps looking straight into the headlights. His eyes water, and when he shuts them he can see the light shining, red, right through his eyelids, his own flesh and blood.
And the Mommy says how the next day, the girl’s lover was gone, but his shadow was still there.
Just for a second, the kid looks back to where the Mommy is tracing the outline of his stupid shadow against the cliff face, only the boy’s so far away that his shadow falls a head taller than the mother. His skinny arms look big around. His stubby legs stretch long. His pinched shoulders spread wide.
And the Mommy tells him, “Don’t look. Don’t move a muscle or you’ll ruin all my work.”
And the doofus little tattletale turns to stare into the headlights.
The can of spray paint hisses, and the Mommy says that before the Greeks, nobody had any art. This was how painting pictures was invented. She tells the story of how the girl’s father used the outline on the wall to model a clay version of the young man, and that’s the way sculpture was invented.
For serious, the Mommy told him, “Art never comes from happiness.”
Here is where symbols were born.
The kid stands, shivering now in the glare, trying to not move, and the Mommy keeps working, telling the huge shadow how someday it will teach people everything that she’s taught it. Someday it will be a doctor saving people. Returning them to happiness. Or something better than happiness: peace.
It’ll be respected.
Someday.
This is even after the Easter Bunny turned out to be a lie. Even after Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and Saint Christopher and Newtonian physics and the Niels Bohr model of the atom, this stupid, stupid kid still believed the Mommy.
Someday, when he’s grown up, the Mommy tells the shadow, the kid will come back here and see how he’s grown into the exact outline she’d planned for him this night.
The kid’s bare arms shake with the cold.
And the Mommy said, “Control yourself, damn it. Hold still or you’ll ruin everything.”
And the kid tried to feel warmer, but no matter how bright they were, the headlights didn’t give off any heat.
“I need to make a clear outline,” the Mommy said. “If you tremble, you’ll turn out all blurred.”
It wasn’t until years later, until this stupid little loser was through college with honors and he’d busted his hump to get into the University of Southern California School of Medicine—until he was twenty-four years old and in his second year of medical school, when his mother was diagnosed and he was named as her guardian—it wasn’t until then that it dawned on this little stooge that growing strong and rich and smart was only the first half of your life story.
Now the kid’s ears ache with the cold. He feels dizzy and hyperventilated. His little stool-pigeon chest is all dimpled chicken skin. His nipples are pinched up by the cold into hard red pimples, and the little ejaculate tells himself: For real, I deserve this.
And the Mommy says, “Try to at least stand up straight.”
The kid rolls his shoulders back and imagines the headlights are a firing squad. He deserves pneumonia. He deserves tuberculosis.
See also: Hypothermia.
See also: Typhoid fever.
And the Mommy says, “After tonight, I’m not going to be around to nag you.”
The bus motor idles, putting out a long tornado of blue smoke.
And the Mommy says, “So hold still, and don’t make me spank you.”
And sure as hell, this little brat deserved to get spanked. He deserved whatever he got. This is the deluded little rube who really thought the future would be any better. If you just worked hard enough. If you just learned enough. Ran fast enough. Everything would turn out right, and your life would amount to something.
The wind gusts and dry grains of snow scatter down from the trees, each flake stinging against his ears and cheeks. More snow melts between the laces of his shoes.
“You’ll see,” the Mommy says. “This will be worth a little suffering.”
This would be a story he could tell his own son. Someday.
The ancient girl, the Mommy tells him, she never saw her lover ever again.
And the kid is stupid enough to think a picture or a sculpture or a story could somehow replace anybody you love.
And the Mommy says, “You have so much to look forward to.”
It’s hard to swallow, but this is the stupid, lazy, ridiculous little kid who just stood shaking, squinting into the glare and the roar, and who thought the future would be so bright. Picture anybody growing up so stupid he didn’t know that hope is just another phase you’ll grow out of. Who thought you could make something, anything, that would last forever.
It feels stupid even to remember this stuff. It’s a wonder he’s lived this long.
So, again, if you’re going to read this, don’t.
This isn’t about somebody brave and kind and dedicated. He isn’t anybody you’re going to fall in love with.
Just so you know, what you’re reading is the complete and relentless story of an addict. Because in most twelve-step recovery programs, the fourth step makes you take inventory of your life. Every lame, suck-ass moment of your life, you have to get a notebook and write it down. A complete inventory of your crimes. That way, every sin is right at your fingertips. Then you have to fix it all. This goes for alcoholics, drug abusers, and overeaters, as well as sex addicts.
This way you can go back and review the worst of your life any time you want.
Because supposedly, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
So if you’re reading this, to tell the truth, it’s really none of your business.
That stupid little boy, that cold night, all of this will just become more of the stupid shit to think about during sex, to keep from shooting your load. If you’re a guy.
This is the weak little suck-ass whose mommy said, “Just hold on a little while longer, just try a little harder and everything will be all right.”
Hah.
The Mommy who said, “Someday, this will be worth all our effort, I promise.”
And this little dickwad, this stupid stupid little sucker, he stood there this whole time shaking, half naked in the snow, and really believed somebody could even promise something so impossible.
So if you think this is going to save you . . .
If you think anything is going to save you . . .
Please consider this your final warning.
It’s dark and starting to rain when I get to the church, and Nico’s waiting for somebody to unlock the side door, hugging herself in the cold.
“Hold on to these for me,” she says and hands me a warm fistful of silk.
“Just for a couple hours,” she says. “I don’t have any pockets.” She’s wearing a jacket made of some fake orange suede with a bright orange fur collar. The skirt of her flower-print dress shows hanging out. No pantyhose. She climbs up the steps to the church door, her feet careful and turned sideways in black spike heels.
What she hands me is warm and damp.
It’s her panties. And she smiles.
Inside the glass doors, a woman pushes a mop around. Nico knocks on the glass, then points at her wristwatch. The woman dunks the mop back in a bucket. She lifts the mop and squeezes it. She leans the mop handle near the doorway and then fishes a ring of keys out of her smock pocket. While she’s unlocking the door, the woman shouts through the glass.
“You people are in Room 234 tonight,” the woman says. “The Sunday school room.”
By now, more people are in the parking lot. People walk up the steps, saying hi, and I stash Nico’s panties in my pocket. Behind me, other people hustle the last few steps to catch the door before it swings shut. Believe it or not, you know everybody here.
These people are legends. Every single one of these men and women you’ve heard about for years.
In the 1950s a leading vacuum cleaner tried a little design improvement. It added a spinning propeller, a razor-sharp blade mounted a few inches inside the end of the vacuum hose. Inrushing air would spin the blade, and the blade would chop up any lint or string or pet hair that might clog the hose.
At least that was the plan.
What happened is a lot of these men raced to the hospital emergency room with their dicks mangled.
At least that’s the myth.
That old urban legend about the surprise party for the pretty housewife, how all her friends and family hid in one room, and when they burst out and yelled “Happy birthday” they found her stretched out on the sofa with the family dog licking peanut butter from between her legs . . .
Well, she’s real.
The legendary woman who gives head to guys who are driving, only the guy loses control of his car and hits the brakes so hard the woman bites him in half, I know them.
Those men and women, they’re all here.
These people are the reason every emergency room has a diamond-tipped drill. For tapping a hole through the thick bottoms of champagne and soda bottles. To relieve the suction.
These are the people who come waddling in from the night, saying they tripped and fell on the zucchini, the lightbulb, the Barbie doll, the billiard balls, the struggling gerbil.
See also: The pool cue.
See also: The teddy bear hamster.
They slipped in the shower and fell, bull’s-eye, on a greased shampoo bottle. They’re always being attacked by a person or persons unknown and assaulted with candles, with baseballs, with hard-boiled eggs, flashlights, and screwdrivers that now need removing. Here are the guys who get stuck in the water inlet port of their whirlpool hot tub.
Halfway down the hallway to Room 234, Nico pulls me against the wall. She waits until some people have walked past us and says, “I know a place we can go.”
Everybody else is going into the pastel Sunday school room, and Nico smiles after them. She twirls one finger next to her ear, the international sign language for crazy, and she says, “Losers.” She pulls me the other way, toward a sign that says Women.
Among the folks in Room 234 is the bogus county health official who calls to quiz fourteen-year-old girls about the appearance of their vagina.
Here’s the cheerleader who gets her stomach pumped and they find a pound of sperm. Her name is LouAnn.
The guy in the movie theater with his dick stuck through the bottom of a box of popcorn, you can call him Steve, and tonight his sorry ass is sitting around a paint-stained table, squeezed into a child’s plastic Sunday school chair.
All these people you think are a big joke. Go ahead and frigging laugh your frigging head off.
These are sexual compulsives.
All these people you thought were urban legends, well, they’re human. Complete with names and faces. Jobs and families. College degrees and arrest records.
In the women’s room, Nico pulls me down onto the cold tile and squats over my hips, digging me out of my pants. With her other hand, Nico cups the back of my neck and pulls my face, my open mouth, into hers. Her tongue wrestling against my tongue, she’s wetting the head of my dog with the pad of her thumb. She’s pushing my jeans down off my hips. She lifts the hem of her dress in a curtsey with her eyes closed and her head tilted a little back. She settles her pubes hard against my pubes and says something against the side of my neck.
I say, “God, you’re so beautiful,” because for the next few minutes I can.
And Nico pulls back to look at me and says, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
And I say, “I don’t know.” I say, “Nothing, I guess.” I say, “Never mind.”
The tile smells disinfected and feels gritty under my butt. The walls go up to an acoustical tile ceiling and air vents furry with dust and crud. There’s that blood smell from the rusty metal box for used napkins.
“Your release form,” I say. I snap my fingers. “Did you bring it?”
Nico lifts her hips a little and then drops, lifts and settles herself. Her head still back, her eyes still closed, she fishes inside the neckline of her dress and brings out a folded square of blue paper and drops it on my chest.
I say, “Good girl,” and take the pen clipped on my shirt pocket.
A little higher each time, Nico lifts her hips and sits down hard. Grinding a little front to back. With a hand planted on the top of each thigh, she pushes herself up, then drops.
“Round the world,” I say. “Round the world, Nico.”
She opens her eyes maybe halfway and looks down at me, and I make a stirring motion with the pen, the way you’d stir a cup of coffee. Even through my clothes, I’m getting the grid of the tile engraved in my back.
“Round the world, now,” I say. “Do it for me, baby.”
And Nico closes her eyes and gathers her skirt around her waist with both hands. She settles all her weight on my hips and swings one foot over my belly. She swings the other foot around so she’s still on me, but facing my feet.
“Good,” I say and unfold the blue paper. I spread it flat against her round humped back and sign my name at the bottom, on the blank that says sponsor. Through her dress, you can feel the thick back of her bra, elastic with five or six little wire hooks. You can feel her rib bones under a thick layer of muscle.
Right now, down the hall in Room 234 is the girlfriend of your best friend’s cousin, the girl who almost died banging herself on the stick shift of a Ford Pinto after she ate Spanish fly. Her name is Mandy.
There’s the guy who snuck into a clinic in a white coat and gave pelvic exams.
There’s the guy who always lies in his motel room, naked on top of the covers with his morning boner, pretending to sleep until the maid walks in.
All those rumored friends of friends of friends of friends . . . they’re all here.
The man crippled by the automatic milking machine, his name is Howard.
The girl hanging naked from the shower curtain rod, half dead from autoerotic asphyxiation, she’s Paula and she’s a sexaholic.
Hello, Paula.
Give me your subway feelers. Your trench coat flashers.
The men mounting cameras inside the lip of some women’s room toilet bowl.
The guy rubbing his semen on the flaps of deposit envelopes at automatic tellers.
All the peeping toms. The nymphos. The dirty old men. The restroom lurkers. The handballers.
All these sexual bogeymen and -women your mom warned you about. All those scary cautionary tales.
We’re all here. Alive and unwell.
This is the twelve-step world of sexual addiction. Compulsive sexual behavior. Every night of the week, they meet in the back room of some church. In some community center conference room. Every night, in every city. You even have virtual meetings on the Internet.
My best friend, Denny, I met him at a sexaholics meeting. Denny had got up to the point where he needed to masturbate fifteen times a day just to break even. Anymore, he could barely make a fist, and he was worried about what all that petroleum jelly might do to him, long term.
He’d considered changing to some lotion, but anything made to soften skin seemed to be counterproductive.
Denny and all these men and women you think are so horrible or funny or pathetic, here’s where they all let their hair down. This is where we all go to open up.
Here are prostitutes and sex criminals out on a three-hour release from their minimum-security jail, elbow to elbow with women who love gang bangs and men who give head in adult bookstores. The hooker reunites with the john here. The molester faces the molested.
Nico brings her big white ass almost to the top of my dog and bangs herself down. Up and then down. Riding her guts tight around the length of me. Pistoning up and then slamming down. Pushing off against my thighs, the muscles in her arms get bigger and bigger. My thighs under each of her hands go numb and white.
“Now that we know each other,” I say, “Nico? Would you say you liked me?”
She turns to look back over her shoulder at me, “When you’re a doctor, you’ll be able to write prescriptions for anything, right?”
That’s if I ever go back to school. Never underestimate the power of a medical degree for getting you laid. I bring my hands up, each hand open against the stretched smooth underside of each thigh. To help lift her, I figure, and she twines her cool soft fingers through mine.
Sleeved tight around my dog, without looking back, she says, “My friends bet me money that you’re already married.”
I hold her smooth white ass in my hands.
“How much?” I say.
I tell Nico that her friends might be right.
The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don’t know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress.
In the modern Oedipal story, it’s the mother who kills the father and then takes the son.
And it’s not as if you can divorce your mother.
Or kill her.
And Nico says, “What do you mean all the other women? Jeez, how many are we talking about?” She says, “I’m glad we used a rubber.”
For a complete list of sexual partners, I’d have to check my fourth step. My moral inventory notebook. The complete and relentless history of my addiction.
That’s if I ever go back and complete the damn step.
For all those people in Room 234, working on their twelve steps in a sexaholics meeting is a valuable important tool for understanding and recovering from . . . well, you get the idea.
For me, it’s a terrific how-to seminar. Tips. Techniques. Strategies for getting laid you never dreamed of. Personal contacts. When they tell their stories, these addict people are frigging brilliant. Plus there’s the jail girls out for their three hours of sex addict talk therapy.
Nico included.
Wednesday nights mean Nico. Friday nights mean Tanya. Sundays mean Leeza. Leeza sweats yellow with nicotine. You can almost put your hands around her waist since her abs are rock-hard from coughing. Tanya always smuggles in some rubber sex toy, usually a dildo or a string of latex beads. Some sexual equivalent of the prize in a box of cereal.
The old rule about how a thing of beauty is a joy forever, in my experience, even the most beauteous thing is only a joy for about three hours, tops. After that, she’ll want to tell you all about her childhood traumas. Part of meeting these jail girls is it’s so sweet to look at your watch and know she’ll be behind bars in half an hour.
It’s a Cinderella story, only at midnight she turns back into a fugitive.
It’s not that I don’t love these women. I love them just as much as you’d love a magazine centerfold, a fuck video, an adult website, and for sure, for a sexaholic that can be buckets of love. And it’s not that Nico loves me much, either.
This isn’t so much romance as it is opportunity. You put twenty sexaholics around a table, night after night, and don’t be surprised.
Plus the sexaholic recovery books they sell here, it’s every way you always wanted to get laid but didn’t know how. Of course, all this is to help you realize you’re a sex junkie. It’s delivered in a kind of “if you do any of the following things, you may be an alcoholic” checklist. Their helpful hints include:
Do you cut the lining out of your bathing suit so your genitals show through?
Do you leave your fly or blouse open and pretend to hold conversations in glass telephone booths, standing so your clothes gap open with no underwear inside?
Do you jog without a bra or athletic supporter in order to attract sexual partners?
My answer to all the above is, Well, I do now!
Plus, being a pervert here is not your fault. Compulsive sexual behavior is not about always getting your dick sucked. It’s a disease. It’s a physical addiction just waiting for the Diagnostic Statistical Manual to give it a code of its own so treatment can be billed to medical insurance.
The story is even Bill Wilson, a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, couldn’t overcome the sex monkey on his back, and spent his sober life cheating on his wife and filled with guilt.
The story is that sex addicts become dependent on a body chemistry created by constant sex. Orgasms flood the body with endorphins that kill pain and tranquilize you. Sex addicts are really addicted to the endorphins, not the sex. Sex addicts have lower natural levels of monoamine oxidase. Sex addicts really crave the peptide phenylethylamine that might be triggered by danger, by infatuation, by risk and fear.
For a sex addict, your tits, your dick, your clit or tongue or asshole is a shot of heroin, always there, always ready to use. Nico and I love each other as much as any junkie loves his fix.
Nico bears down hard, bucking my dog against the front wall of her insides, using two wet fingers on herself.
I say, “What if that cleaning woman walks in?”
And Nico stirs me around inside herself, saying, “Oh yeah. That would be so hot.”
Me, I can’t help imagining what kind of a big shining butt print we’re going to polish into the waxed tile. A row of sinks look down. Fluorescent lights flicker, and reflected in the chrome pipes under each sink you can see Nico’s throat is one long straight tube, her head thrown back, eyes closed, her breath panting out at the ceiling. Her big flower-print breasts. Her tongue hangs off to one side. The juice coming off her is scalding hot.
To keep from triggering I say, “What all did you tell your folks about us?”
And Nico says, “They want to meet you.”
I think about the perfect thing to say next, but it doesn’t really matter. You can say anything here. Enemas, orgies, animals, admit to any obscenity, and nobody is ever surprised.
In Room 234, everybody compares war stories. Everybody takes their turn. That’s the first part of the meeting, the check-in part.
After that they’ll read the readings, the prayer things, they’ll discuss the topic for the night. They’ll each work on one of the twelve steps. The first step is to admit you’re powerless. You have an addiction, and you can’t stop. The first step is to tell your story, all the worst parts. Your lowest lows.
The problem with sex is the same as with any addiction. You’re always recovering. You’re always backsliding. Acting out. Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against. All these people who say they want a life free from sexual compulsion, I mean forget it. I mean, what could ever be better than sex?
For sure, even the worst blow job is better than, say, sniffing the best rose . . . watching the greatest sunset. Hearing children laugh.
I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hotgushing, butt-cramping, gut-hosing orgasm.
Painting a picture, composing an opera, that’s just something you do until you find the next willing piece of ass.
The minute something better than sex comes along, you call me. Have me paged.
None of these people in Room 234 are Romeos or Casanovas or Don Juans. These aren’t Mata Haris or Salomes. These are people you shake hands with every day. Not ugly, not beautiful. You stand next to these legends on the elevator. They serve you coffee. These mythological creatures tear your ticket stub. They cash your paycheck. They put the Communion wafer on your tongue.
In the women’s room, inside Nico, I cross my arms behind my head.
For the next I don’t know how long, I’ve got no problems in the world. No mother. No medical bills. No shitty museum job. No jerk-off best friend. Nothing.
I feel nothing.
To make it last, to keep from triggering, I tell Nico’s flowered backside how beautiful she is, how sweet she is and how much I need her. Her skin and hair. To make it last. Because this is the only time I can say it. Because the moment this is over, we’ll hate each other. The moment we find ourselves cold and sweating on the bathroom floor, the moment after we both come, we won’t want to even look at each other.
The only person we’ll hate more than each other is ourselves.
These are the only few minutes I can be human.
Just for these minutes, I don’t feel lonely.
And riding me up and down, Nico says, “So when do I get to meet your mom?”
And, “Never,” I say. “That’s impossible, I mean.”
And Nico, her whole body clenched and jacking me with her boiling wet insides, she says, “She in prison or a loony bin or something?”
Yeah, for a lot of her life.
Ask any guy about his mom during sex, and you can delay the big blast forever.
And Nico says, “So is she dead now?”
And I say, “Sort of.”
Anymore, when I go to visit my mom. I don’t even pretend to be myself.
Hell, I don’t even pretend to know myself very well.
Not anymore.
My mom, it’s like her sole occupation at this point is losing weight. What’s left of her is so thin, she has to be a puppet. Some kind of special effect. There’s just not enough of her yellow skin left to fit a real person inside. Her thin puppet arms hover around on the blankets, always picking at bits of lint. Her shrunken head will collapse around the drinking straw in her mouth. When I used to come as myself, as Victor, her son Victor Mancini, none of those visits lasted ten minutes before she’d ring for the nurse and tell me she was just too tired.
Then one week, my mom thinks I’m some court-appointed public defender who represented her a couple times, Fred Hastings. Her face opens up when she sees me and she lies back into her stack of pillows and shakes her head a little, saying, “Oh, Fred.” She says, “My fingerprints were all over those boxes of hair dye. It was reckless endangerment, open and shut, but it was still a brilliant sociopolitical action.”
I tell her that’s not how it looked on the store’s security camera.
Plus, there was the kidnapping charge. It was all on videotape.
And she laughs, she actually laughs and says, “Fred, you were such a fool to try and save me.”
She talks that way a half hour, mostly about that misguided incident with the hair dye. Then she asks me to bring her a newspaper from the dayroom.
In the hall outside her room is some doctor, a woman in a white coat holding a clipboard. She has, it looks like, long dark hair twisted into the shape of a little black brain on the back of her head. She’s not wearing makeup so her face just looks like skin. A pair of black-framed glasses are folded and sticking out of her chest pocket.
Is she in charge of Mrs. Mancini, I ask.
The doctor looks at the clipboard. She unfolds the glasses and slips them on and looks again, the whole time saying, “Mrs. Mancini, Mrs. Mancini, Mrs. Mancini . . .”
She keeps clicking and unclicking a ballpoint pen in one hand.
I ask, “Why is she still losing weight?”
The skin along the parts in her hair, the skin above and behind the doctor’s ears, is as clear and white as the skin inside her other tan lines must look. If women knew how their ears come across, the firm fleshy edge, the little dark hood at the top, all the smooth contours coiled and channeling you to the tight darkness inside, well, more women would wear their hair down.
“Mrs. Mancini,” she says, “needs a feeding tube. She feels hunger, but she’s forgotten what the feeling means. Consequently, she doesn’t eat.”
I say, “How much is this tube going to cost?”
A nurse down the hall calls, “Paige?”
This doctor looks at me in my britches and waistcoat, my powdered wig and buckle shoes, and she says, “What are you supposed to be?”
The nurse calls, “Miss Marshall?”
My job, it’s too hard to explain here. “I just happen to be the backbone of early colonial America.”
“Which is?” she says.
“An Irish indentured servant.”
She just looks at me, nodding her head. Then she looks down at the chart. “It’s either we put a tube into her stomach,” the doctor says. “Or she’ll starve to death.”
I look into the dark secret insides of her ear and ask if we could maybe explore some other options.
Down the hall, the nurse stands with her fists planted on her hips and shouts, “Miss Marshall!”
And the doctor winces. She holds up an index finger to stop me talking, and she says, “Listen.” She says, “I really do have to finish rounds. Let’s talk more on your next visit.”
Then she turns and walks the ten or twelve steps to where the nurse is waiting and says, “Nurse Gilman.” She says, her voice rushed and the words crushed together, “You can at least pay me the respect of calling me Dr. Marshall.” She says, “Especially in front of a visitor.” She says, “Especially if you’re going to shout down the length of a hallway. It’s a small courtesy, Nurse Gilman, but I think I’ve earned that, and I think if you start behaving like a professional yourself, you’ll find everyone around you will be a great deal more cooperative. . . .”
By the time I get the newspaper from the dayroom, my mom’s asleep. Her terrible yellow hands are crossed on her chest, a plastic hospital bracelet heat-sealed around one wrist.
The moment Denny bends over, his wig falls off and lands in the mud and horse poop and about two hundred Japanese tourists giggle and crowd forward to get his shaved head on videotape.
I go, “Sorry,” and go to pick up the wig. It’s not very white anymore, and it smells bad since, for sure, about a million dogs and chickens take a leak here every day.
Since he’s bent over, his cravat hangs in his face, blinding him. “Dude,” Denny says, “tell me what’s happening.”
Here I am, the backbone of early colonial America.
The stupid shit we do for money.
From the edge of the town square, His Lord High Charlie, the colonial governor, is watching us, standing with his arms crossed, his feet planted about ten feet apart. Milkmaids carry around buckets of milk. Cobblers hammer on shoes. The blacksmith bangs away on the same piece of metal, pretending the same as everybody else not to be watching Denny bent over in the middle of the town square, getting locked in the stocks again.
“They caught me chewing gum, dude,” Denny says to my feet.
Being bent over, his nose starts to run, and he sniffs. “For sure,” he says and sniffs, “His Highness is going to blab to the town council this time.”
The wooden top half of the stocks swings closed to hold him around the neck, and I snug it down, careful not to pinch his skin. I say, “Sorry, dude, that’s got to be way cold.” Then I do the padlock. Then I fish a rag out of my waistcoat pocket.
A clear little drop of snot dangles off the tip of Denny’s nose, so I hold the rag against it and say, “Blow, dude.”
Denny blows a long rattling goob I feel slam into the rag.
The rag’s pretty nasty and full already, but all I’d have to do is offer him a nice clean facial tissue and I’d be next in line for a disciplinary action. There’s about countless ways you can screw up around here.
On the back of his head, somebody’s felt-penned “Eat me” in bright red, so I shake out his shitty wig and try to cover the writing, except the wig’s soaked full of nasty brown water that trickles around the shaved sides of his head and drips off the tip of his nose.
“I’m banished for sure,” he says and sniffs.
Cold and starting to shake, Denny says, “Dude, I feel air. . . . I think my shirt’s pulled out of my breeches in back.”
He’s right, and tourists are shooting his butt crack from every angle. The colonial governor is eyeballing this, and the tourists keep right on taping as I grab Denny’s waistband in both hands and tug it back up.
Denny says, “The good part about being in the stocks is I’ve racked up three weeks of sobriety.” He says, “At least this way I can’t go in the privy every half hour and, you know, beat off.”
And I say, “Careful with that recovery stuff, dude. You’re liable to explode.”
I take his left hand and lock it in place, then his right hand. Denny’s spent so much of this past summer in the stocks he has white rings around his wrists and neck where he never gets any sun.
“Monday,” he says, “I forgot and wore my wristwatch.”
The wig slides off again, landing smack wet in the mud. His cravat, soaked in snot and crap, flaps in his face. The Japanese all giggle as if this is a gag we’d rehearsed.
The colonial governor keeps staring at Denny and me for signs of us being historically inappropriate so he can lobby the town council to banish us to the wilderness, just boot us out the town gate and let the savages shoot arrows and massacre our unemployed butts.
“Tuesday,” Denny tells my shoes, “His Highness saw I had Chap Stick on my lips.”
Every time I pick up the stupid wig, it weighs more. This time I slap it against the side of my boot before spreading it over the “Eat me” words.