James Callan

Savage Longing

Maybe it’s me, but I find the mundanity of living, rife with its routines and needs –work, sleep, defecation, taxes– offset by the frequent, savage longing that seems to pounce upon me at every turn and corner.

How do I mean? Well, take the drive-thru at McDonald’s. It starts with golden arches, and the seduction only grows from there. There is the inviting glow of combo meals with their Homeric calories, temptations for cheap. Yet more alluring, by far, than any burgers or treats, is the effeminate voice, servile and oh-so-promising, through the intercom. Two minutes later, there she is, a greasy bag in her hand, a weak coffee extending out the narrow window to my car.

An exchange of meat and fluids for a few dollar bills makes it difficult to avoid drawing certain filthy comparisons. I reach through the window to accept my Number 4 while deeply entrenched in the salacious narratives playing in my mind. Eye contact is sparing between us, but we indulge in a modicum of discourse: Enjoy your meal. Thank you so much, have a wonderful day.

But before that: the plump hand with its faded heart tattoo and many silver rings. The tacky, dragon-like talons that curve, purple and bejewelled, impractical press-ons that I cannot look at without immediately daydreaming about a handjob. The oversized lips, endowed with plush extravagance. How they glisten, wet and dark, like cherry-cola. How they part to reveal an empty smile that I actively delude myself is flirtatious, an overt invitation to sex. The mangle of teeth she tries (and fails) to hide –such disarray, but so very white. The brush of her dimpled knuckles over mine.

I drive away from McDonald’s burdened with a cheap meal and a good chance of late afternoon diarrhea. But more than that, I leave McDonald’s with a half-strength erection, a dab of pre-cum on the inside fabric of my boxer-briefs, and two or three days of imaginative fuel for my five or six indulgences of self gratification. At the bottom of the bag, the underside of my paper cup, I am sure to find her number scrawled in pen. But all I find are far too many packets of ketchup. No napkins whatsoever.

***

I often find myself pulling into the Petco parking lot, drawn in by its friendly logo and what I know awaits inside. I enter the store with its familiar aroma of rodent piss and straw bedding, scan the brightly lit room with the bogus intention of locating more food for Fluffer, my tuxedo tomcat. I have a four-month supply at home, ever expanding, soon to eclipse five months of surplus, and undoubtedly, eventually, half a year of dried kibble will encumber the small capacity of my kitchen pantry. Am I preparing for the apocalypse? Certainly not.

Then why so much cat food? What gives?

This: I require the excuse to visit Petco, yet again, for the third time this week, the eighth time in the past fortnight, the umpteenth time this month, so I can determine if she is working. Who? The chubby blonde with the puffy blue eyes and the androgynous, pixie haircut. Her name tag has cordially introduced her to me. Haley. Sweet Haley.

My cravings demand that I drink her in, commit her dumpy physique and robust limbs to my memory, safeguard her pouty lips in the library of my longings and devotions. And so I haul the ten-pound bag of kibble onto the counter as I watch the perfect eroticism of her scanning the barcode with the laser gun. She asks for my number (for my frequent shopper discount). I give it to her, slow and deliberate.

“Should I write it down for you?” I ask.

“No need,” she lets me know. “It’s in the system.”

I chuck the cat food in the backseat and drive to the nearest semi-secluded spot before my arousal curbs from its towering peak. I unzip my denim shorts and wonder how much it would cost me to invest in tinted windows. I grip the old McDonald’s bag on the floor beneath the passenger’s seat to grease up my palms. I touch myself and whisper/whimper her name. Haley! I erupt, exhale, and search for napkins. There is nothing but an endless supply of ketchup packets, an enormity of cat food.

***

This is what I mean. These sudden, ambushing longings. These savage, torturous cravings that infuse an otherwise dull life with a certain –albeit painful– exuberant hue.

Am I alone? Can you relate? Am I a freak, or am I just being indecorous in my blatant honesty? Is this the typical male existence? A boner for each woman I encounter? A masturbation fantasy for anyone vaguely human-shaped and probably female?

It’s true, sometimes I chafe my dick raw thinking about the demure lady who works at the drugstore, my dentist with her platinum bouffant and monstrous tits –I won’t deny it. I can’t begin to guess how many times I’ve fantasized about my boss, her severe fringe and subtle underbite, her wet sex pervading the cramped office in my mind. She can be a real bitch, and on days when she treats me like scum I lube myself up the moment I get home from work. I recall her cruel remarks, the demeaning names she showered upon me. It takes two seconds to get hard, then I’m lost in a lovely fairy tale, pretty pictures in my head, our backs and assess up against a pile of paperwork, her threats or incentives that echo in forceful ultimatum. I make noises. Grunts and oaths. “I’ll behave. I promise to behave!” And then it’s cleanup time.

On my hands and knees, a little wash of shame accompanies my sudden sobriety. When I see my boss the next morning, I feel dirty, and that feels good. So I often do it all again.

It’s all a bit exhausting, being aroused all the time, left, right, and center. The prompts are everywhere, the desire is endless. But really, these episodes of need in the aftermath of my many quotidian encounters with so-and-so or whosiewhatsit are like little glimpses into Shangri-La. The soulless security guard who elects to frisk me in LAX? This episode is filed away, used later, and becomes an idyllic jaunt to Nirvana. The chirpy, septuagenarian who takes my picture at the DMV? I remember the tally of her crows feet, her lazy, open mouth as she assessed the washed photos of my mugshot, and voilà! I enter another realm. I dip into a volcanic thermal pool in Valhalla. In my cheerful, vile mind, the excess of golden bracelets that jangle on her bony wrists make music as they take me, knead me, mold me into an animal, and ultimately cause me to explode.

Excessively poetic? Perhaps. But what I frankly mean to say is this: while they come with a certain frustration, I wouldn’t discard my primal urges for a million dollars. Okay, maybe a million dollars. But for real, I openly accept my troubled and ravenous ways.

***

On rare and magnificent occasions, fantasy transcends to affair. The hands that wave to say hello, to take my money, to offer me change, to prod at my cavities with a sinister tool; these same hands, on merciful and remarkable instances, unbutton my shirt, pull at the elastic of my boxer-briefs, take up my sex in their clammy grip, guide me into their mouths, between their legs. It’s these mythical moments I discover my own personal religion. I look to the heavens (often the ceiling of a motel bedroom) and consider the real possibility that yes, there might be a god after all.

My most recent love affair was certainly divine, although it ended, as they all do, in emotional turmoil, with a deep sense of loss and a lingering bitterness that will never fully fade. But that came later. Much later. After all the savage, carnal lust. The foodstuffs and spreads that we licked off human plates, from navel soup bowls, and deep, briney crevices.

It spawned from peanut butter, believe it or not. Our love, our lust, our passion; it resulted from a chance encounter prompted by a defect label on an extra crunchy Jif jar. I didn’t notice when I plucked it from the shelf. And if I had, I would not have cared. After all, I’m not going to eat the label, you know? It’s the contents that will cover my toast, satiate that morning pang for a bite to accompany my coffee. But in retrospect, how glad I am that I took the jar with the faulty label. Random chance can be a bitch, but today, she is a saint, an angel of mercy.

I dropped the Jif into my basket. There is no way I could have foreseen it: how the spread would never see the golden side of rough toasted bread, but cover a canvas of flesh, both hers and mine.

***

There she was at the checkout. Hannah. She worked almost every day, it seemed. Every day that I shopped, anyhow, and as always, I was glad to see her, to watch her finger my groceries and tell me how much I owed her for the pleasure. Sometimes I’d opt to wait in a much longer queue, sacrifice three to five minutes so I could share that flicker of eye contact with Hannah, stare at her bored, sad face as she mindlessly shuffled my shopping to beep against the square of laser projections.

She was soft, and getting softer all the time, with a doughy neck and thick forearms, pale and round as a wood grub. She wasn’t fat, but transitioning that way, and her unspectacular features were elevated only by her youth. She wasn’t particularly beautiful, but she was very particularly her, which, for whatever reason, made her particularly beautiful to me. When the spark ignites –often surprising who plucks at my heartstrings, tweaks my loins– the subject becomes a goddess, no matter how society may judge her physical faults. Haley, Hannah, whoever; when the cherub makes his mark, the peon becomes a princess. She outshines the model, the movie star, the pinup girl. She is the center of the world, and the gravity of her sexual appeal makes a circling moon out of me.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Hannah scans my can of peaches, my shrink-wrapped sausage, my frozen pizza. She handles each item with soulless automation. Her rhythm is slowed by the weighted items, the unpackaged fruits and vegetables that require a code. But her pace is regular, never truly halting, until she handles the peanut butter with its defunct label.

I watch as she struggles, tilts the jar, unable to induce the familiar, expectant beep that allows her to move on to the next item, and the next, and the next, until eight hours pass and she becomes the real Hannah, a myth and mystery that no doubt blooms beyond the muted professionalism required of her in the cold, halogen landscape of the supermarket. I zero in on her hands, her pale flesh taut with grocery store chill, and as they work on the peanut butter puzzle, I note their black talons, those ridiculous, monitor lizard daggers that make any task graceless. It’s amazing it took it this long, but there it is: the handjob daydream playing out in my one-track mind.

“Sorry,” Hannah says, and rewards my patience with a nanosecond of direct eye contact. “It’s the label,” she tells me. “It’s folded over. Can’t get to the barcode.” She stops trying to make the thing beep, uses her Godzilla claws to pinch and peel back the label which has stuck inward upon itself.

I watch in utter delight. I am in no rush, even if the sour lady behind me is rolling her eyes and shuffling her feet, sighing heavily every ten seconds, anything to communicate the words “Hurry up” without actually speaking them.

“Should I run and grab another one?” I offer.

“No, no. I’m almost there.” Then, finally smiling, she scans the amended peanut butter label and waggles one of her sorceress fingers at the jar. “Bad jar,” she jokes. “Bad, bad jar.”

We share a mild chuckle, and then I take my chance, employ a playground flirtation. “Well, I knew you were working today,” I tell her. “So I made sure to grab the one that was messed up.” My words didn’t come with a physical wink, but they carried one, unseen, in spirit.

Once again, I am rewarded with her brown eyes, and in them I see clear communication. Through the exasperated sighs and shuffling from the irritated woman behind me in the queue, I decipher an unspoken message in the doe-brown gaze that sparkles across the conveyor belt. Maybe I am deluded, but I swear it was an open invitation to love. In any case, when I laid bare my soul, ignored the throat-clearing of the demon grunting behind me, I was gifted with Hannah’s coy smile suppressed by a bitten lower lip, and finally, audible affirmation: Yes, here is my number.

***

I didn’t wait long. I texted her that evening, and she didn’t wait long, either, to text me back. She was as eager and forward as I, it seemed, and so I agreed to her suggestion: dinner at my place. I gave her my address and paced by the window until I saw her emerge from a lousy little car. I opened the front door before she got the chance to knock, and before I had the chance to see Hannah in her street clothes, they were on the floor, and so were mine. We stumbled, blinded by our smothering embraces, our limbs and mouths frantic and occupied, but eventually made it to the bedroom. In the other room, dinner got cold, and neither one of us cared.

We had sex many times, which is something I didn’t know I was capable of. Not in one night, one session. But really, it was easy. My body behaved, responded, performed. And though I owe my surprising ineptitude mostly to Hannah, to her radiant, soft body and doughy upper arms, her luminous small breasts and devout hunger for me, in truth, I may owe it all to the peanut butter, the freak catalyst to this glorious debauchery and fiery passion.

We applied the spread in the most creative and filthy of ways. Hannah smeared the condiment in dark corners and crevices I didn’t know I had, and in hidden valleys I was happy to discover on her own body. We explored our frisky palate, tasting, sampling, eating, indulging, feasting off of one another. After a time, we moved on from the Jif, wiping free our lips and chins and making love again, longer, harder, faster. And we didn’t stop when the peanut butter jar was down to a thin residue lining the glass. Next, it was pizza sauce, pesto, and coconut cream. It was cold on our flesh, but soon became warm, wedged between our slick, snaking bodies. In the end, my bed sheets were a write-off, totally unsalvageable. Hannah and I tossed them to the floor, let our bodies warm each other during the night, and awoke in the morning, shrouded in a disgusting, artful crust of congealed juices.

This went on for a while. Many months, I am happy to report. Sex with Hannah was always ferocious, never clean. Honestly, I could’ve done without all that food –Hannah was tasty enough on her own– but she was totally into it, and so I yielded to her desire, which became my own. My grocery bill skyrocketed, which added a measure of reluctance about the edible nature of our affair. But really, once you place pineapple rings to frame the nipples of your lover’s snow-white tits, there is no going back. Tropical fruit has never been so sweet.

“Shall we wine and dine?” Hannah would ask, bright and bawdy over the phone. It was our private joke, code for sitophilia, or as the layman might say, “fucking with food.”

“How about a movie?” I’d sometimes suggest. “Or I take you out to dinner, for real. You know, a nice restaurant?” After all the sex, I was desperate to become closer to her. Not physically –the only way to get closer would be to shrink and crawl up inside of her– but emotionally, romantically. I wanted to treat her like a princess, not a buffet.

“Or, I could get another jar of Jif?” If nothing else, Hannah was persistent. With her, it was always raunchy, edible sex.

“Really?” I’d ask, almost implore, using only my tone to communicate a desperate need to go beyond our sandwich spread fetish. “How about a walk on the beach?” Too cliché? Was I too old, too boring for Hannah, who maybe, just maybe, only appreciated me for my complimentary coupling with cream cheese or Greek yogurt, the fund to supply them to her. “Let’s try something different,” I’d say.

“We could go with Skippy,” Hannah offered. “There’s a sale on.”

“How about the zoo?”

There was a long pause on the other line. Eventually I heard something. A Sigh? “Hannah? You there?”

“Actually, I’m feeling a little tired,” she told me. “Maybe I’ll sit this one out.”

This felt like the beginning of the end. I didn’t want to lose her. “Skippy is on sale?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she brightened up. “Big time sale. Two for one!”

This time I sighed. “I’ll swing by the supermarket before I come pick you up.”

“I’m looking forward to wining and dining, baby.”

“Yeah. It’ll be great…”

***

And really, truly, it was great, even if I did feel that our relationship was stuck in the mud, unable to pass beyond the claggy mire of so much peanut butter. But here’s the thing: Hannah was beautiful, desirable, and smooth, even when we went with crunchy. It was fun for a while, but I wish we could skip the spreads. Don’t’ mistake me, I don’t mean to complain. I like peanut butter and cream cheese, I really do, but it’s the creamy flesh of the young supermarket attendant that really filled me up. Besides, all that rich spread, I was starting to get soft.

It was inevitable that we would fizzle out. Or, rather, it was inevitable that her passion for me would fizzle out, that I would beg for her to allow me, just allow me, please, to buy more peanut butter, anything, caviar if she desired some, if it would bring her back to my bed, to my arms, where I may embrace her cetacean-smooth body and feel her heartbeat against my own. I longed to fall asleep with her, encrusted and filthy, as we had so many times before, my face embedded in her mustard-hardened hair as she snored, her soft body rising, falling in perfect rhythm.

How was it that I ever had cause to complain?

***

And now, as things have developed, after Hannah met Pete, a boy her own age who skateboards past my house on the way to his work, the supermarket, where he and Hannah share sly winks across their respective serving counters, it becomes clear: I have been ousted, outdueled, beaten. My own relationship with Hannah has been reduced to shopper and cashier, the way it began. And although we cannot undo all the gorgeous, filthy things that we have done to each other, neither can we celebrate them, honor them with retellings of the past, or hope to reenact them. Not now, perhaps not ever. As her boyfriend, Pete does not allow Hannah to take my calls or text me back, or even talk to me outside of what he calls “modest professional discourse.”

When I shop for groceries, when Pete’s queue is virtually empty, I opt for Hannah’s, even as it winds, long and serpentine, deep into the aisles. From far away, I project a pretense of patience. I wait and study the products that hem me in, the many jars of peanut butter. In this state of hopeful expectation, I bide my time and will my erection to remain at bay. I listen to the scanner-gun beeps that tally the long seconds of my brimming anticipation, and as I approach, nearer to Hannah, I savor each one of her monotone greetings, sterile and polite.

I wait. I endure. I suffer throughout, until I get my chance, my own moment with Hannah, where maybe, just maybe, fortune will fall upon me once again.