Mussels

No, that’s not quite what happened. I’m going to tell this story again and again until I get it right. It doesn’t deserve to be recorded but it needs to be honest even if it isn’t true.

We made it to the restaurant way late. I was used to eating dinner and indulging in my first cocktail at five o’clock, an hour after work released me and here we were entering the restaurant at eight o’clock like a couple of dodgy aristocrats. The name of the place was Mussels but I was warned by Sheila not to get the mussels. I hadn’t intended to order the mussels but now I wanted them just to spite her in a you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do-anymore kinda way. I felt resentful. We sat in a booth across from each other. Low lighting changed her face. I was used to seeing her under bright sterile fluorescence. Sheila was my manager at Rosewell Tech. Maybe that’s why I wanted the mussels, because all day every day she bossed me around. I didn’t mind being a subservient toady for pay but this was “me” time now. My slavish devotion couldn’t be bought anymore. I felt firm.

“I just love this place,” Sheila said.

“It’s nice.” My lie was a reflex. It wasn’t nice. There was a framed portrait of Doodles Weaver or some shit hovering above our table.

Back to Sheila’s face. At work she looked fierce and confident and difficult to approach. But now, in this dimly casual atmosphere she seemed challenging and vituperative. A woman came up to our table and gave us menus and asked us if we wanted drinks. I went ahead and ordered a Rob Roy with extra Angostura bitters.

Sheila ordered a Sprite.

A Sprite. What was she doing? Was I not supposed to drink? Maybe she was battling a drinking problem. Maybe I was. Was she testing me? Using this dinner to size me up? I was confused, scared and glad I didn’t smoke. Sheila ordering a drink, a real drink would have relaxed me. Now I felt like a lone degenerate.

“So, I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you out to dinner,” she said.

I knew. It was about the Williams account. I had ordered $500,000 worth of equipment that had been technically invented but did not yet exist. It was a blunder on my part and a lot of people spent a lot of time straightening things out. I heard a guy from Accounts Payable got the ax for cutting the outlandish back-breaking checks.

But I played dumb. “Well, yes, actually.”

“Well, don’t worry. Your job is safe.” She smiled for the first time in my life.

I hadn’t thought my job was in jeopardy. Now I was worried. I nodded. The waitress arrived with our drinks. I was afraid to touch mine. I didn’t want to look like a boozer. The waitress with a nametag that said MADGE asked us if we were ready to order. We hadn’t even looked at the menus. I looked at mine and was transfixed by a nervous fly flicking and shifting.

Then Sheila announced, “I’ll start with the mussels.”

This woman was spraying torment straight into my brain. I picked up the menu, flipping the fly into the air. It swooped down and landed on Sheila’s head. I pretended not to notice and said, “I’ll have the garlic bread,” and then immediately regretted it.

Sheila smiled. “I heard you were interested in satanic silent films. I am too. I thought we could discuss them. Have you ever seen Seven Footprints to Satan (1929)?”

So that’s what we talked about.

No. That’s not quite what happened.

She said, “I’ll have the mussels.”

I took out my penis and said, “How about this muscle?”

No. Wrong.

She said, “I’ll have the mussels.”

And I ordered the escargot and we lived happily ever after.

“I’ll have the mussels…”

“You bet you will!” said the waitress, Maude or Mona or whatever and Sheila announced I was getting a promotion and a raise and my own brown-nosing little suck-up to assist me.

And when the check came Sheila paid it.

***

From: Everything Dissolves

A Series of Poor Decisions, Part 4

The unfamiliar bitter drip—well, rather what has now become familiar in recent times—slides down the back of your throat and you gag as you pace outside a stranger’s apartment at four in the morning. The amount of cocaine you’ve ingested is too much, and you know this not as any veteran of taking illicit substances but because your body is screaming. You are aware of and have no other choice but to accept the fact that this may be how you die: standing alone outside the apartment of a man whom you met at a bar, waiting for an Uber to get you home, feeling your heart vibrate like a hummingbird’s then stop completely, then continue again after the excruciating silence fills the inside of your chest—over and over.

The fear that would normally begin washing over you at a time like this is dulled by the alcohol, and with this boost in morale given to you, you take a moment to understand that if this stranger’s coke was laced with rat poison or fentanyl your heart would have stopped by now and your breathing narrowed to asphyxiation. You have not keeled over and so this is good news.

The headlights of the car cut through the night and burn the insides of your eyes. It pulls up and you disregard any notion of social awareness, leaping into the front passenger seat. You are visibly trembling, fidgeting with the zipper on your torn and stained bomber jacket.

His name is Eric. He is a young, handsome African-American with long dreads and a soft face. He appears feminine and speaks with a low rasp as if trying to lull you into docility with his voice. You appreciate this and decide to trust Eric. With nothing else to do but expel word vomit to quell the effects of the narcotics, you begin to tell him everything that is on your mind without stopping, with surprising eloquence. You trust the words you are saying because they are said clearly and with certainty. This is what you tell him:

“Sometimes I want to be an alcoholic. I want the darkness to encompass me. I want to feel the tight constriction of dependence. I want to put holes in my body with each stinging swallow. There is a naïve power in taking control of your own mortality, commandeering the wheel and deciding your own death in the face of its inevitability. In a way it’s a form of revolt, of dissent. An avenue to express your anger and desperation that comes with the knowledge of your impending end. Sometimes you just want to give the middle finger to the stardust that birthed you into this explosion of chaos without your consent. You want to retain some semblance of authority over your own fate and wellbeing. It feels cheap to be drained of yourself by the very force that made you endure it all without ever asking if you wanted any of it in the first place. Like the Vietnamese monks lighting themselves on fire. With each extra shot you know shouldn’t be consumed, you are in protest of the entirety of the universe. And during the whole process, in the back of your head, you are thinking, what an asshole you are for thinking this way.

“I am so terrified of death. And yet I do everything in my power to ensure an early witness to it. I can’t explain it. I am a biological freak. My brain has been unspared by the gods or the fates but I am doomed to be a monster, to fuck up and destroy all that’s beautiful around me, to roam through darkness until my legs give out and I die at the feet of the villagers and their pitchforks. No matter how goddamn hard I try I can’t fucking fix myself. I don’t know why I do this. I don’t have any answers.”

You take a deep breath and turn to see that somehow Eric is still listening. “Do you ever feel like that?” you say.

“I think I do,” he says and smiles at you, boring his eyes into the spot below your nose.

“Can I light a cigarette in here?”

“Sure.” He rolls down the window. “You can keep talking if you like.”

You realize that the car is stopped and is idling in front of your apartment.

“I can turn off the meter, you won’t be charged,” he says. “You could just come over if you want. I’ve got drinks and everything.”

The dim orange glow of the sun is rising over the trees. You can hear the first morning’s birdcalls chiming back and forth around you. The damage to your body is beginning to emerge in the sharp pains dancing and pulsing around your temples. How long has it been?

You want badly for Eric to say something soothing enough to match his voice, some wisdom to impart that will dissolve your need to remove yourself from your own skin, but instead this is what you get.

When you fail to answer his suggestion, Eric confronts the core of what he’s trying to communicate: “Are you gay?”

“No,” you reply.

“Are you sure? I keep catching you looking at me.”

“I’ve been taught to maintain eye contact when having a conversation. I’m polite.”

“Have you ever tried though?”

Eric describes gay sexual encounters as if it’s a type of ethnic food. This does little to assuage you but you make an effort to study the details of his face. The male form does nothing for you but there are feminine features common in some men’s faces that can be focused on and found attractive enough to blossom across throughout the entire person.

“You’re really, really sexy,” he says. “You deserve all the attention. I can give that to you. Have you ever kissed a man?”

***

You have kissed a man once and only once. It was years ago, funnily enough while trading lines of coke with an old friend inside his car, parked outside the ruins of a closed down high school. He was a fellow artist, volatile and insane, but made his instability work to his advantage through his pieces. You had a habit of drinking to excess together and cruising down highways and downtown streets at suicidal speeds. He owned a handgun, the first one you’d ever seen, and would routinely pull it out amongst company, pointing it at his head or at others, explaining the fragility of life and how quickly it could be snuffed out with one adjustment of his index finger against metal.

That night in the car was the night he introduced you to cocaine. He drove across town in the middle of the night while you sat in the passenger seat, chain-smoking his Marlboro Lights and taking swigs from a fifth of Jim Beam.

“The guy we are going to see is a crazy man, Henry,” he told you. “Don’t look him in the eyes, and I’ll do the talking. He once fucked a severed goat head.”

There were many follow-up questions you had to this statement but kept your mouth shut and watched as he parked and stepped across the street into a waiting vehicle. The man in the car was blanketed in the shadows of the back alley and you couldn’t make out his face. You didn’t feel the need to anyway.

When he returned he opened up the little bag of white powder, dipped in his car key and held it up to your face. “Now close one nostril with your finger and snort hard.”

“Is this shit safe?” you said.

“As safe as it’s gonna be.”

You remember very little about your first reaction to taking the drug. It was underwhelming. It was nothing compared to the elation that came from alcohol, and you immediately understood that you would never have an issue with cocaine like you did with booze.

Thirty minutes later you were in front of the foreclosed campus, trading lines cut up with an expired J.C Penney card.

“Have you ever watched gay porn?” he asked, tilting his head back and vigorously rubbing his nose.

“No,” you said. “No, I haven’t.”

“Then how do you know if you’re not gay? How do you know you wouldn’t enjoy it?”

“To tell you the truth I couldn’t give a fuck either way. But I sure like pussy, so I figured that was the end of the road in the sexual spectrum department.”

“But what if you’re missing out on a whole other side of yourself, man? You could be walking around, living a half-life for the rest of your existence.”

“Look, if this is your way of coming out to me, my dude, you don’t need to spin a whole philosophical yarn to do it.”

“Damnit, man, that’s not what I’m saying. Here—I’m gonna kiss you now, and you’re gonna tell me what you feel. Got it?”

You snorted up another thin, pretty line, sucked at the cigarette in your hand. “This is ridiculous.”

“Is it? Is it ridiculous to question things? To want to know more about yourself?”

“Shit, that coke is short-circuiting your brain cells.”

He leaned in, the white debris crusted around the rims of his nostrils. “Just fuckin’ don’t be a pussy and kiss me.”

You let it happen. All at once, his dried lips were upon you and you felt the rough, sandpaper-like stubble scrape against the sides of your mouth. It was quick and impassionate. Purely scientific. You detached.

“So what do you feel?” he asked.

“Nothing,” you told him. “I feel nothing.”

He grinned. “Well, there you go! We disproved my theory! We gained insight.”

He leaned back into his seat, picked up the 36 Chambers CD off the center console, and began cutting up more lines.

***

“So, have you?” Eric repeats.

“No, I haven’t.”

He leans in close enough that you can smell the delicate cologne beneath his collarbone. “Why don’t you try? You are so handsome. I just wanna kiss you.”

You balk. The inescapable truth is that you are alone and painfully in need of human touch and affection. You can’t help but be flattered that someone, regardless of gender, finds you attractive. And so you want to give this to him. Maybe any sort of intimate human contact will satiate the lonesomeness. You need someone to show you that you are enough.

“I’m not gay,” you reiterate.

“I know,” he says. “I’m not saying you are, man. Relax. You’re up for new things. I respect that. I totally get it.”

All that you can hear is the arrhythmic pulse of your heart. “Okay then.”

The kiss that follows is an empty ghost. It is nothing more than a vague physical sensation. Nothing has been cured and no void has been filled, even for a brief moment. You are no more loved, nor accepted, nor whole. As Eric stares at you expecting some reaction, you wish only to throw your head into a solid wall so you may punish yourself before falling unconscious, and for however long that lasts, you will no longer have to deal with this putrid rot feeling that’s begun to climb out of you like a parasite.

This thing is inside you. This thing that breaks your soul and poisons your mind. It is not you, but something that has taken root somewhere within you. You know this. You have to believe this. You have not always been this despicable, miserable monster. You were once a child. You smiled. You were happy—you can’t recall any examples of this but know still that it is true. What has happened to you?

You are struck with the terrifying, drug-induced notion that the only way to feel normal again is to take a knife, plunge it into your abdomen, and dig around your insides with it until you find the invading creature, remove it and kill it.

“What about head?”

The words pull you back out from your own mind. You are not sure if you heard him right. “What?”

Eric’s hand slides down and begins rubbing his cock through his jeans. “How ‘bout you go down on me?”

You are suddenly much more sober. “Nah, man.”

Only bitter anger resonates throughout you. Any lonesomeness and depression is gone. You don’t know where the anger came from, but acknowledge that you would rather feel this rage and self-hate than what you felt before. You’d like to hurt something, set something on fire. There are holes in the ozone layer, islands of plastic trash the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean, rhinos bleeding to death from the stump where their stolen horn used to be, children dying from exhaustion in prison camps at the border. This is the world and you feel every iota of the pain and anger it screams out into the empty universe. All of it has settled and hardened into a coal-black stone at the center of your stomach, and you recognize that you are no longer in control.

Eric takes your hand with the one not busy unzipping his pants, pulling it towards his lap. “C’mon. Just do it. I come fast.”

You rip your hand away from him, the rage causing your breath to quicken. As you go to pull open the car door, you hear a click. Eric has locked the doors.

“Just do it,” he says. “Then I’ll let you out.”

“You’re making a mistake,” you say. “You need to unlock this fucking door.” You are not frightened. You feel nothing but the stone in your stomach.

“Look, man. Don’t make this weird. Just suck my dick.” Eric’s cock is out. His hand reaches around your neck to grab the back of your head. “I won’t tell anyone.”

The first punch lands in the pocket between his right eye and nose. You feel the bridge cave in against your middle knuckle and blood spurts out both nostrils onto his shirt. You’ve forgotten how punching a man in the face feels like punching a brick wall. Human bone is strong, but the nasal bone takes only about seven pounds of force to break. This is why many boxers have noses like a jutting cliff face. The second collides with his jaw, snapping his neck sideways and his head slams into the driver’s side window. Blood begins pooling out of his mouth like an overflowing sink. He spits out a tooth. You grab him by the hair and bash his forehead into the steering wheel. The horn goes off.

“Let me the fuck out,” you tell him.

Eric sits cowering in the corner with his hands up over his face, spitting blood into his lap. He reaches over and unlocks the doors. He says nothing.

You open the car door and step out into the morning air. Before the door can be closed, the car swerves into the street and is soon gone. You look down at your aching left hand and see his blood smeared across your knuckles. You wipe the blood against your shirtsleeve and walk into your apartment. You realize at this moment that you are very tired.

A few days later you describe the event to Donahue.

“If you’re gonna put this in the book,” he tells you, “make him some guy who picked you up hitchhiking or something. No one’s gonna believe that this shit happened to you on two different Uber rides.”

“Yeah, maybe,” you say. “Fuckin’ Uber though, man. They really need to vet their fucking drivers.”

A Series of Poor Decisions, Part 3

Within five minutes of talking you understand that there’s something wrong with her. You recognized her as the airy waitress at the restaurant down the block who always told you your aura was navy blue whenever you tried to order your food. Now you are sitting next to her at the Sparrow, six and a half drinks in, and she’s asking where’s that cute little tattooed girl you always came in with?

“Which?” you say.

She smirks. “Cockiness doesn’t suit you,” she replies.

“It’s not that. I just can’t seem to make ‘em stick around long enough to make an impression.”

She looks at you up and down through wide-brimmed glasses that magnify the brown in her eyes. Her face is gaunt and narrow. She is shark-like and the steady, intense gaze she keeps on you gives the worrying impression that at moment she may decide for no reason other than instinct to pounce and bite off your nose. You don’t remember ever finding her attractive before but figure you must have been wrong because now you do.

“Well it doesn’t matter,” she says, and sucks her vodka-soda up through a plastic straw. “Never liked her anyway.”

“Yeah. Neither did I, I guess.”

“Well, God obviously had different plans for you. You should be thanking Him for leading you away from all that before it got even worse.”

You cough. “What was that?”

“God,” she laughs. “You thought this wasn’t God’s choice? He was watching over you, like He always will. I could see the poison she was seeping into you, every time you came in. She was no good for you. I knew it. But He freed you, Henry.” She smiles wide, as if she’s reminded herself of the beauty of this reality she’s chosen. “And now you don’t ever have to look back. Right? Isn’t that wonderful?”

You look down the bar, to where Donahue, whom you came with, sits at a table with some people he knows. Donahue is a tall, Scottish college grad with a wild mane of red, curled hair and a deep red beard that makes him resemble what you might get if a pillaging Viking raped one of his ancestors—which may not be so far off. Donahue is your good friend and editor, but when not fixing up your whiskey-soaked ramblings, also serves as your impromptu caretaker, ensuring that you don’t get yourself in so much trouble you’ll end up dead or arrested, but just enough to keep the pages flowing for him to edit. He is staring at you intently, his eyes wide and locked in distress as if trying to communicate that a live bear is behind you. He is holding up his phone and pointing to it with violent stabs. You grin and give him the thumbs up, and turn back around to the God-fearing predator.

“Do you not believe in God,” she asks.

“Ah, uh. No. No, not really. I mean, there’s always the, uh, possibility but—no. Not really.”

There is a brief pause, and her eyes scan you up and down once more. This doesn’t give off the feeling it previously did. It’s like she’s reading your soul to decide if you’re already damned to Hell.

Before she can whip out the crucifix and holy water, you add: “I mean, do I believe that there’s some kind of force in the universe that’s more complicated than we can understand—something bigger than myself, in whatever form that may be? Do I believe in karma? Could you call that God? Sure. I’m not an asshole. Do I believe in the big, all-powerful bearded man in the sky—the hyper-violent Santa Clause figure, watching you and weighing your sins and good deeds, deciding whether or not you’re gonna spend eternity getting your foreskin repeatedly torn off and put back on by red-skinned demons after you die? No. I got enough of that in Catholic school.” You stop for a moment, realizing you may have laid it on a little strong there. You backpedal: “Ah, I mean, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, though. Whatever gets you through it isn’t my business. I’m glad you have something that works for you.”

You have always found religion fascinating, and have studied just about every one out there. It’s a vital part of each country and peoples’ culture and way of life. Many people have done many horrible things in the name of these religions, but you can’t fault the average layman who just wants to sing in a building with like-minded people once a week and imagine that infinite nothingness isn’t the result of their inevitable death. Besides, if it weren’t religion it would just be something else. You understand that. That’s the quintessential aspect of being a human, ever since our first ancestors looked up and saw bright white bolts of lightening striking the night sky. Without these stories making sense of what we otherwise couldn’t, we as a species never would have gotten as far as we did.

You tell her all this. You just fail to mention that maybe it wasn’t such a great thing that we did make it this far, and that religion has turned into nothing different than any other money-grubbing, power-hungry, pedophile-hiding institution that only serves as another way to keep stupid people content, poor people even poorer, and ensuring that we as a whole don’t ask too many questions that may not be too conducive to their centuries-old, systematic destruction of free thought and healthy chaos.

Yes, seeing as you are planning on sleeping with this good Christian woman, you leave that part out.

“Plus,” you say, and take a sip from your drink, “it’s not like you’re a Scientologist or anything.”

There’s a palpable moment of tension as her eyes bore into you. “I’m a born-again Christian,” she says. “I converted from Scientology.”

The whiskey goes down your windpipe. Through the coughing fit you manage to sputter, “Well…welcome back!”

She slaps you on the back. “You alright there?”

“Yeah, yeah. Wrong tube.”

“Well, good,” she laughs. “I can’t have you dying on me yet. At least not until I’m done with you.” She winks and stands up. “I’m going to the bathroom. But I’d like to keep talking to you. You’re smart. And open-minded. A lot of smart guys aren’t open-minded. And vice versa. Don’t you go anywhere until I’m back. I think we should take this to my place and I can offend you with more of my beliefs.”

“I’m not easily offended,” you tell her.

“Good. That’s good. Be right back.”

The second she’s gone Donahue beelines over to your barstool. “Man, you gotta check your texts.”

“Oh, that’s what that meant?”

“Listen, I’m trying to help you. As your editor I insist we leave this bar right now and go somewhere else before she comes back.”

“Why’s that?”

“She’s crazy. Do I need to spell that out? You’ve spent the last half-hour talking to her.”

“Yeah, I gathered. A bit pious, isn’t she? But hey, I don’t judge, baby.”

“A bit? Trust me, Henry, I’m trying to help you here.”

“Yes, and I appreciate that.” You pat him on the forehead and tickle his chin. “But from what I hear, this is God’s plan.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Exactly!” You hold up your drink and guzzle the watered down remains. “She’s not a Westboro Baptist or anything is she?”

“No, but—”

“Yeah I didn’t get that vibe. Feel like she would have led with the ‘death to fags’ angle pretty quickly. She’s not gonna try to indoctrinate me into a death cult then? Fuck me and hand me the Kool-Aid for the approaching inter-dimensional spaceship?”

“Don’t be a dick. You just gotta listen to me—I know her. You don’t need to get tangled up in that.”

“Oh come on, Donny, now you’re just tempting me. At this point I gotta find out.”

“Has she brought up her love of all things Trump yet?”

Your eyes light up. “Oh ho ho, not yet. Should I ask?”

“Yes. Yes you should.”

“Well, that settles it then. You’ve convinced me.”

Donahue sighs and grabs your shoulder. “Okay, good. Good. Then let’s get out of here now then? I’m guessing the convent is gonna be wondering where she escaped to pretty soon anyway.”

You look across the room and see that she’s on her way back over. “No, no, you shoo. How can I possibly not go through with this now?”

His face drops down to the floor. “I don’t know, moral integrity? Oh yeah. I forgot you’re incapable of possessing that.”

Just before she reaches the two of you, Donahue gives his final warning, like an ashamed father: “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“If I had a nickel.” You smile at him with the whiskey sloshing around the inside of your head like a storm is raging across your brain cells.

He grimaces and shoots you his best frustrated, defeated look before retreating back to his table.

I’m not mad I’m just disappointed.

Your poor decision sits back down beside you, glancing over questioningly at Donahue. “So, you coming or what?”

“Does Christ have stigmata?”

She forces a snort. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

***

You sit with her in a small, gated backyard. The cigarette passes between the two of you, and past the gate, beyond the hill below, is the freeway. It is empty and quiet and dark. A wall of discarded trash like a protective barrier lines the shadowed asphalt. It is all you can seem to focus on. The roads are like veins running down the mangled arm of a dead drug addict. They are dried up and no longer hum with the movement of blood. They are of no use. You prefer it this way—the quiet lifelessness. It allows the beating of your own heart to fill the insides of your ears and remind you that there is still time to change. How you choose to take it, though, is that it means tonight you do not yet have to.

“What do you want to do with your life?” she asks.

This knocks you off guard, though you don’t know why, as the majority of your life you have never had a problem deciding what path you want to take. Through one way or another, the answers have always been there glowing in your face and you have attached yourself wholeheartedly to that next option that inevitably presents itself. And when that next path has dried up and halted at a dead-end, you have never needed to float aimlessly in the purgatory between decisions. The next step has always shown itself to you and you promptly move forward in that direction. You recognize that you are lucky in this regard. Most people wander their entire lives searching for purpose. Purpose has always found you. There has always been some new path to traverse.

Despite this, inexplicably you respond, “Sometimes I think I know and sometimes I don’t.” Though you decide there may still be some truth to this.

“I want to do something big,” she says, blowing out smoke. “I always knew I would. I’m gonna join the Air Force.”

“The Air Force? Why?”

Without the hesitation you imagine a semi-sane person would feel before disclosing this type of thing, she proudly declares, “So when the time comes I’ll be first in line to join President Trump’s Space Force.”

You give yourself a moment to absorb this. “Like, the outer space…force?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I wanna be the first woman on the moon.”

“Well, that’s noble.”

“So I can see for myself if the Nazis really put bases up there.”

“Ah.”

“And think about it,” she points the cigarette at you from between two fingers, “how else am I ever gonna really be able to prove the Earth is flat unless I go up there and see it with my own eyes?”

You are now fascinated by this woman, and wish for nothing more than to keep listening to everything she has to say, and then to fuck her. You have never fucked a flat-earther, and would consider it an honor to have the opportunity to attempt fucking the crazy out of her.

“That’s a fantastic point,” you say.

Her eyes narrow to slits. “You’re making fun of me aren’t you?”

You don’t wish to lie to this person, and so are overcome with relief when she continues talking without waiting for an answer: “That’s fine though, it’s not like I don’t get it all the time. But you have your opinions and I have mine. And we can each respect them, can’t we?”

“Of course,” you reply, and you mean this. You would rather have an open-minded ex-space alien worshipping, Trump supporting, born-again Christian flat-earther than a close-minded liberal any goddamn day of the week.

“I figured,” she says. “That’s why I like you. I’m guessing you’re not a big Trump supporter either. No one seems to be in this town. I love the man. I think he’s the greatest president we’ve ever had, and I’m proud I voted for him. I don’t have a problem telling people that. You don’t feel the same. And that’s okay.”

“How do you know? My MAGA hat’s just in the wash right now.”

“Very funny. All I’m saying is we don’t need to share the same political beliefs to have good sex. Right? Unless that violates your moral codes.”

“It would violate my moral codes not to. I mean, I think the guy’s a fucking idiot and he’s probably on the spectrum, but hey who isn’t, y’know? I can ignore my political leanings for fifteen to twenty minutes.”

“Make it thirty.”

“Deal.”

She grins and reaches out to slide her hand up your thigh.

“Just one thing,” you say, putting out your cigarette. “When you’re about to come, call me Donald.”

The act is the closest to patriotic you have or will ever feel. You decide this is your duty as an American, and with each violent thrust causing her to scream and convulse, it is as if you are fucking her with the American Flag itself. You decide this is a metaphor for every war against bigotry, tyranny and racism, and what you are doing now you are doing in the name of freedom and liberty. With your dick, you are fighting back for the greater good and you will not lose. It is at the moment the King James Bible vibrating on the bed stand finally falls to the floor, and the female ejaculate rockets directly into your face like a well-aimed Scud missile, that the thought briefly but genuinely comes to you: “I should run for Senate.”

A Series of Poor Decisions, Part 2

You are more drunk than you can ever remember being, although you can’t recall much of anything anyway, including how or where you arrived at this state of inebriation in the first place. What you are aware of is that you are alone and you are driving a car, and that the car you’re driving isn’t yours.

The awareness of your loneliness seems to operate through a game of extremes; that is, you are able to stave off the guilt and self-hatred while living in the happy gray medium of handleable intoxication, but it is while existing whether in the overwhelming sensory acuteness of sobriety in the morning, or while struggling through the suicidal depression that inevitably comes at the end of the night after drinking far too much, that you are unable to focus on anything but the exact thing you’ve been drinking to avoid. Tonight you find yourself at the latter end of the spectrum.

You realize that you need to do something to quell the urge to drive your car into a guardrail, something that will flood your brain with however many endorphins can still get through.

This is when you get the idea. On a main road not too far from you is a popular strip club. Next to that strip club is what has only been explained to you as a brothel. It’s called the Cat Club and it has been there for as long as you’ve lived in the area. It’s a tiny little shack of a building with multi-colored lights strung up around the entrance and a sign next to the door with the silhouette of a voluptuous woman and the words: OPEN 24-HOURS. PRIVATE MASSAGES.

You’ve never understood how something so blatantly a whorehouse could have sat on the side of this high-traffic road for so long and remain in business, but you don’t know what exactly goes on in there. You’ve never been into the Cat Club, but tonight you decide you will find out.

You pull up to the side of the Cat Club at three in the morning, open the door and fall out of the car. It’s the only building on the entire road that still has its lights on other than the 7-11 down a block or two. Stepping towards the entrance you remember the rumors that went around for a while that one of your old friends from high school started working here after she became addicted to meth and heroin. You hope she’s here because it would be nice to see her again.

Inside, the Cat Club is narrow and claustrophobic. The lobby is hardly larger than a prison cell. A little desk sits to the left of you with a call bell sitting atop it, and ahead a small corridor runs down about thirty feet with two doors on either side that each open up to a private room. Small TVs are attached to the walls in the corners, playing softcore porn with the volume off. The video quality is bad, and combined with the miniature size of the screens it looks more like two vague collections of beige squares slamming into each other. The lighting is low and glows red. This is your favorite part about the Cat Club so far. You’ve never liked bright lights. You can hide in this kind of lighting.

Before you can ring the call bell, a woman drifts out from one of the rooms. She is a little shorter than you, with long brown hair and blue eyes. She wears an appropriate amount of makeup for her line of work. Beneath it you can see the age etched into her skin and in the fading glow in her eyes earned only by people who have endured the kind of pain that would break most. There is a weathered beauty in her face. You imagine she must be around thirty-five. A see-through black negligee drapes over her body, tied together with a satin ribbon around her stomach—underneath perhaps the biggest breasts you have ever seen in your life. They spill out quite on purpose, mountains of white flesh pushing out against the negligee as if at any moment by sheer weight they’ll tear open the seams and break free.

There is some kind of brief exchange that you immediately cannot recall, and she smiles and leads you by the hand into the first private room. You smash into the wall on the way in and almost trip on an electric fan sitting on the floor beneath you.

“You okay there, honey?” she says, and laughs.

You nod and try your best to sound reasonably sober, but all that comes out are nonsensical mumbles spoken with a swollen tongue. If she didn’t know before, you know that she does now. This doesn’t bother her though, and she continues leading you into the room, and sits you down on a wide, cushioned bench against the wall.

The room is just an extension of what you’ve already seen: Attached to the walls are two small televisions playing porn with the volume off. The walls themselves are decorated with vague Thai designs and paintings of positions from the Kama Sutra. Lining a few shelves nailed into the walls are dozens of unlit candles and various statues of fertility goddesses from entirely different cultures. In the center of the room is a basic massage table. Beyond that, in the corner opposite you is a small bed with a purple curtain pulled back around it.

The woman smiles, standing over you with the door open in case you turn out to be a serial killer and she can escape when you pull out the meat cleaver. “So what’re you looking for, honey?”

“How much do you charge?” you manage.

“If you really want to have fun I’m three hundred. But that’s full service. You get everything: a massage, hand job, blow job, fuck my tits. Even you’ll come once I’m finished.” She laughs and taps your nose with the end of her fake nail. “Otherwise it’s one-twenty for just the lap dance. Then you can watch and finish yourself.”

A literary magazine just recently paid four hundred dollars for one of your stories. You decide that buying a prostitute with money you’ve earned from writing is simply putting that money back into your writing. This is research for your next book. This may even count as a tax write-off.

“Whole thing,” you say. “Three hundred.”

She grins and strokes her hand down your chest. “Perfect—ah…I’ll just take your card and charge that down the hall then.”

You nod and pull out the card, and inexplicably tell her, “I’m a writer. I spend my writing money on you. You cost one story and you are worth one story. Spend money to make money, right?”

She looks around the room and giggles uncomfortably. “Sure, honey. Be right back.”

When the woman returns she hands the card back to you. “It was declined, babe,” she says. “You got another one?”

“Don’t think that’s right,” you retort. “My writing money. It’s in, uh—savings.” It is not lost on you even in your advanced inebriation that you are attempting to dip into your savings account to buy a hooker. You assign yourself the mental note that cash is much less uncomfortable for both parties if you find yourself in a similar situation in the future.

She takes the card back out of your hand, eyeing you up and down with a flicker of pity. “Alright then. One second.”

The next time she returns, she appears a bit less annoyed with you but the margin is still wide. “It only let me charge two hundred. You may need to go to the 7-11 down the street and pull out the rest of the cash yourself.” She pulls you closer into her chest. You can smell the cheap perfume masking the sweat of whoever was in this room before you. “Can you do that for me? I’ll be right here, babe.”

“Yes,” you say. “Yes I can.”

She takes off your hat and places it onto her head. It doesn’t fit right. “Just in case,” she giggles. “Now you have to come back.”

You stumble under the harsh fluorescent lights of the convenience store and weave to the back where the ATM waits for your bad decision. The store clerk says something as you pass but you just throw your arm up over your shoulder and say you’ll give him twenty bucks, and to fuck off and get off your back.

The ATM is a foreign construct. You stand in front of it for a full five minutes before the memory returns to you how one is supposed to access the thing. You go into savings, do the mental math, fail, and attempt to pull out two hundred dollars. It declines. Without reading what comes on the screen you try again. Declined. On the screen again pops up the warning you’d ignored: Suspicious activity on account. Cannot withdraw more funds.

You’ve attempted to take out too much money too many times from different devices. You are—as you have been countless times in different ways—cut off. You stare at the screen. You have been defeated.

The store clerk yells at you as you leave, and you charge out the door without answering. You really would have given him those twenty bucks.

The woman is waiting for you in the lobby. “Missed you, babe. You got that for me?” You explain what happened, and the woman frowns. “Well, you won’t get the works. That’s too bad.”

She leads you back into the room and instructs you to sit back on the cushioned bench. She closes the door. Her bare legs straddle you and she leans back, thrusting against your limp cock. The negligee falls to the floor. Without the clothing’s support her breasts are too large and sag down to her stomach under the weight of age and gravity. You begin to unbutton your jeans, and reach up to touch her hanging tit with the free hand.

The second you make contact, as if waiting for this to happen, she jolts up from the bench. “Nope, nope. You grabbed my tit too hard. Get the fuck off me. You grabbed my tit too hard, we’re done.”

“Wait, what? What?” You’re confused. You had barely brushed against her.

Her entire demeanor has shifted. “You grabbed my tit too hard, we’re done here. Have fun jerking off to porn and get the fuck out.” She tosses you a tissue from the table adjacent and walks out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

You immediately stand up, button up your pants and wobble back out into the lobby. The woman is there standing alone, drifting into a different room. “Hey, hey,” you slur, “what did I do? I didn’t do anything to you.” You realize you are leaning against the desk for support.

“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “You’re done, goodbye.”

“My money, lady.”

“What did I say? You’re done—get out. Go ahead and write about this, dumbass.”

She glides away into the private room, aware of what she’s gotten away with.

You are too drunk to form an argument. You have no one to argue with any longer anyway. You are too tired.

After six tries you are able to get the key into the car door. You throw the keys on the front seat, close the door and begin walking home. The smoke from the cigarette in your mouth twirls up towards the streetlights and disappears.

A prostitute just rolled you for two hundred dollars.

A Series of Poor Decisions, Part 1

You are drinking at the Guilty Sparrow. It does not matter what day or what time of day it is, as this is the sole activity you now participate in if you’re not jerking off, vomiting or fucking—if not all three at once. You are with your old coworker Joseph, as you often tend to be these days. He is a heavyset, perpetually depressed Hispanic hopeless romantic—always stooping low over the bar counter like a dying tree to illustrate this—with a serious drinking problem to match yours. In the last few weeks you and Joseph have taken to each other’s company quite well. You’ve always stayed friends since the day you were fired, but he finds company in misery, and he has been unable to find anyone more miserable than you. His girlfriend of five years left him when he asked her to move in. This was a year ago now but he still talks about it. He can drink more than you and you don’t like that, but you love him.

He’s talking to your friend Miles. Miles is a gaunt and unpredictable drug addict with an underlying issue of undetermined mental illness. His constant erratic movements and incoherent rambling always unsettles you until you’ve drunk enough to ignore and then enjoy his unique brand of company. You’ve known him since the two of you were four years old and he had frosted tips like a member of the Backstreet Boys. He used to mix cocaine and heroin in a needle and shoot that. He wore sleeves to hide the track marks and became very paranoid when people asked about why he wore his sleeves in ninety-degree heat. After the two of you talked he got on methadone and kicked the junk. He still does every other drug but at least he doesn’t do heroin, and you love him.

Miles and Joseph are talking about the baggie full of pills that Miles has pulled out onto the bar top.

“This is Ecstasy,” he says. “My guy told me it’s the best shit he’s gotten.” He opens up the baggie and pops two into his mouth. “You want some?”

“Fuck yeah I do,” says Joseph. He reaches out and pops one in his mouth as well. He begins chewing.

You look over at them from the side of your vision. Before you can ask him why he’s chewing an Ecstasy pill, Joseph swallows and says, “This is a Flintstones vitamin.”

“No, it’s not,” says Miles. “It’s Ecstasy. My guy told me it was the best shit he’s ever gotten.”

“Yeah, the best Flintstones vitamins he’s ever gotten. You bought a bag of vitamins from your drug dealer. Mine was cherry flavored.”

Miles leans in and peers through the plastic like a scientist studying a petri dish through a microscope. “You’re fibbing.”

“I’m not. How much did you pay for that?”

“A hundred fifty,” Miles tells him.

“You just bought twenty dollars worth of Flintstone vitamins. How many have you taken so far?”

“Four, I think.”

“And how’re you feeling?”

“Nothing so far, but it just takes a second.” Miles pauses and ponders this, staring through the shelves of liquor in front of us like he’s experiencing a war flashback.

Joseph picks up the bag and pulls out a little green one, shoves it front of his face. “Dude, it’s shaped like a fucking dinosaur.”

Miles looks at this and you can see the exact moment his heart breaks.

“What you’ve taken has made you healthier. You have literally achieved the opposite effect of Ecstasy.” He eats the little green chewable in his hand. “Apple.”

Miles is distraught. He gets up and leaves to call or stab his drug dealer. This is when the person who’s been sitting on the other side of him is revealed to you.

Her hair is shoulder-length and curled and strawberry blonde. Her eyes are large. Her legs are long and bloom out from a pink pencil skirt. She sits erect, almost regal, despite her apparent intoxication, suggesting it had been hammered in at an early age to remain ladylike, regardless of how her own personality would eventually steer her towards anything or everything otherwise. She is sitting alone. You lean across the bar without hesitation. There is no time for hesitation any longer. There are too many holes bleeding from every part of you, and the irony is that the more you fill them with what they require, the faster you are going to die anyway. There is no time for hesitation.

“You are fucking gorgeous,” you tell her.

“Ah hehehehe.”

She laughs like that, high-pitched and overacted. You do your best to ignore this.

“Well, thanks,” she slurs. “You are too.”

Joseph butts in, taking it upon himself to be your wingman. “Y’know, my boy’s an author. You ever fucked an author? Do you read?”

“Ohhhh is he?” This doesn’t appear to impress her but nonetheless she moves to the seat closer to you. “And who are you?”

“I don’t think she reads,” he whispers to you. “I’m Joseph,” he redirects to her. “Isn’t my boy good looking? Who wouldn’t love that face?”

You’re not sure if he’s just trying to get you laid and live vicariously through you or he’s gotten so drunk and lonely that some feelings are coming out.

“He’s gorgeous,” she says and grabs your leg.

“I’m Henry,” you tell her. You feel the need to reciprocate, honor the friendship and maybe get Joseph’s dick sucked instead. “What about my friend though? You think he’s cute?”

She appraises his appearance through one eye. “You’re both cute. I’d fuck both of you.”

Anna the bartender comes by and rolls her eyes. She’s become accustomed to a very different Henry than the one she’s been used to in these last few weeks. “Another round boys…and…lady?”

“Shots!” Joseph shouts. “Three tequilas, no training wheels.”

“Wooo! Shots!” the girl screams, throwing her hands up. “You guys are so much fun. Like ah hehehehe…so much fun. Her bedroom eyes drift between the two of you.

You realize as the shots are put out in front of you that you never got her name. This doesn’t bother you.

Joseph holds up his shot. “So, what’re we cheersing to?”

“I wanna fuck both of you at the same time,” she says.

Anna makes a face like she bit into human shit and walks away.

“To fucking both of us!” he screams. He looks at you and shrugs as the shot goes down, like, So…down?

If you were sober this would be one of the worst ideas you could possibly think of. Right now you can’t imagine why this ideas has never been expressed until this moment.

“I want one of you to fuck me in the ass while the other fucks my mouth,” she says.

You almost choke on your tequila. “Yeah, yep. We can do that.”

You and Joseph exchange glances. “We’ve gone this far,” he mumbles. “It would be uncouth to leave her hanging at this point.”

“It would be ungentlemanly,” you agree.

She eyes both of you. “Okay, okay, lemme just check with my boyfriend.”

Her boyfriend.

Joseph launches into a fit of laughter.

“Is this like, an open relationship situation?” you ask.

“I’m not sure. I can’t remember,” she says. “Lemme call him and ask.”

Joseph looks at you, his entire face lit up. You’ve never seen him enjoying himself this much before.

Call him and ask? you mouth to him. She’s fucking crazy.

He shrugs and talks with his hands: Is that bad?

I didn’t say that.

She steps away to make the call and see if her boyfriend will give her the okay to get double penetrated.

Joseph watches her walk out the door with the phone on her ear. “What would you rather take?” he asks.

“I’d rather the mouth but I’ll take one for the team if you need me to.”

“Not a fan of anal?”

“Not for me, no.”

“That’s fair. Alright, it’s settled then,” Joseph decides. “Makes you wonder why her pussy wasn’t an option, though, doesn’t it?”

“I was just thinking that,” you say. And you were. You really were.

Before you can dwell on that for too long she returns, sits down next to you and straightens out her skirt. “He didn’t answer. Poor baby must be asleep. Wanna take me home?”

“Is this the home where your boyfriend lives?” you ask.

“Ah don’t worry about that,” Joseph interjects. “We’ll figure that out when we get there, right…uh—what was your name?”

She throws her head back and kicks up a leg. Her stilettos look like weapons. “Ah hehehehe. You’re so funny. You guys kill me. Seriously.”

Joseph leads you down the street in a direction you can’t stabilize yourself enough to be aware of. It’s nighttime. You wish you were a sailor so you could navigate by the stars, but realize you’re so drunk there are multiple copies of each star in the sky and so even if you could, fuck all it would do for you. You think about how often pirates must have gotten lost at sea in the 1700’s.

The girl piles into the back while you collapse into the passenger seat like someone had thrown you.

“So where to?” Joseph asks the girl. He is shit drunk, but you have done enough tonight to make the bleeding stop for now, and so you could hardly care what happens at this point. You don’t hurt anymore and that is all that matters. She gives him vague directions and Joseph tears down the street like he’ll win a prize for getting there within a certain time limit.

Joseph insists on talking while driving, twisting around with one hand on the wheel to make eye contact with her. “So we should just come in, is what you’re saying. I’m sure he won’t mind. He can watch! Maybe he’d be into that.”

“That is true,” you add. “Cucking is becoming a more and more universally accepted sexual kink these days. Have you ever typed ‘cuck and bull’ into Pornhub? It’s a thriving community. We don’t judge!”

“No not all,” says Joseph. “It might wake up something in him. Maybe he just needs a little push to learn that we accept him.”

“I agree. Let us give him the courage to step out of his shell and accept his desires. We’d be doing him a service, I think.”

“In fact, it might even be detrimental for him not to watch us fucking his girlfriend,” says Joseph. “I don’t think it’s fair of any of us to deprive him of the sexual awakening that this could provide. I’ll go as far as to say we’d be doing him a disservice if we don’t.”

“Just something to think about,” you tell her.

“Ah hehehehe. You boys are too funny. And so fucking sexy. I want you both fucking all of my holes.” She starts pulling down her blouse. “You wanna see my boobies?”

Her specific choice of vernacular is off-putting, but Joseph is unperturbed, and shouts, “Yes!”

You turn around and there they are. Her tits are out in the backseat. She starts playing with them and making fake orgasm faces like a poorly trained porn star, her mouth open and her tongue sliding across her lips, her eyes rolling to the back of her head. If you hadn’t before now, you decide that she is insane.

“Oh shit!” Joseph takes his eyes entirely off the road to enjoy the show taking place behind him.

“No, no, no.” You wave your hands in front of his face. “You drive, I’ll watch for the both of us and relay it back to you through descriptive words.”

As you say this, the girl throws her body into the back of your seats and points to a turn that you are at this point about to pass. “Oh shoot, there! Turn there!”

Joseph spares no time, whipping his Ford Explorer at a hairpin turn, slamming into the curb and launching you three feet into the air. The car lands on its right two wheels, and the left two follow after a moment of angled suspension like a spiraling rollercoaster, slamming down onto the cement with the force of an anvil dropping from a two-story building.

Nobody moves. The car stays idling in silence. You stare forward, your eyes wide with the feeling you imagine someone must experience after recognizing they almost just died. Joseph says nothing, his hands gripping the steering wheel.

The girl points her finger towards the house you’ve nearly crashed in front of. “There I am! Thanks, boys!” She takes your phone out of your trembling hands, puts in her number, calls herself, and kisses you both on the cheek before jumping out and skipping towards her door. “I’ll let you know if boyfriend will let you fuck me! Have a good night!”

And she disappears inside her house.

You and Joseph continue staring forward.

“We never even got her name,” he says.

A grin stretches across your face. “No,” you laugh. “No, we didn’t.”

The next night you and Joseph are back drinking at the bar when you receive this text:

Hello. Thank you so much again for the ride home. But boyfriend and I decided that we aren’t going to go for the threesome. I’m sorry I showed you my boobies, that wasn’t cool. That’s not something my dog and I agreed on. Hope you’re having a good night! Bye bye.

You show this to Joseph.

“Her dog?” he says. “Well that explains a lot.”