“Drink this and sober up!”
Spoon’s leather jacket reeked of cheap gin and absinthe.
“Jesus, Spoon! You stink!”
“Shut the fuck up, bitch!”
He snatched the glass from my hand and smashed it on the floor. A sliver of flying glass caught me, and blood trickled down my cheek.
“So, I smell, huh? What kinda smell? Answer me, bitch! Answer me!”
Spoon grabbed me by the neck and started to choke me.
“ I… I’ll… tell you… let… me go… I can’t breathe…”
He tore his hands from my throat and flung me against the wall. His eyes were glassy and unfocused. He’d been doing drugs again.
“You smell like a loser, you bastard! You’re nothing but one big inferiority complex.”
He snatched a bottle of white rum from the table and threw it against the wall. It smashed, filling the room with the sound of splintering glass and the sweet aroma of the liquor.
Then suddenly, he sat down on the floor, motionless, staring vacantly into space. His hands were covered in blood, cut by shards of the broken glass. Looking closely at his face, I noticed some dried blood. So, he’d been fighting, too. Sitting there on the floor, his fly undone, he looked absolutely pathetic.
“Why don’t you zip your fly? Did you forget to do it after you peed?
Or have you been out fucking other women?”
I knew he hadn’t.
“Fucking? What makes you think I’ve been out fucking? You’ve had some guy in here while I’ve been out, haven’t you? You brought him here, spread your legs and let him fuck you, didn’t you, you cheap whore! I bet you bring guys back here every time I go out, you fucking bitch!”
Ranting and raving, he grabbed me by the hair and dragged me around the room through the carpet of broken glass, the sharp splinters piercing my skin.
“Is he black or white? Don’t tell me he’s fucking Japanese! They’re all such ugly bastards.”
“You scum! You’re just a no-good drunken junkie! I’m one of those ugly Japanese bastards, too. But I’m still better than you. Dirty asshole! You were born miserable and you’ll always be fucking miserable!”
I wanted to cry to relieve the pain. I sobbed convulsively, but the tears just wouldn’t come.
Spoon just didn’t have a middle ground on anything. In fact, it was from living with him that I discovered there were actually people who couldn’t eat plain, lightly flavored food. He was altogether too sweet, too spicy, and too greasy for that. One minute I was swimming in the sweetest of sweet cream, and the next I felt as though I’d had pepper sauce poured over my head. My stomach just couldn’t cope with it. I knew I was on my way to an ulcer.
“Goddammit! Every fucker makes an ass of me! I can’t do anything right,” he cried.
“I can’t make an ass of you—you already are one! I love you. Am I weird? I think you’re sweet. I mean it….”
Spoon stopped breathing. He just stared at me.
Shit, I thought, he’s going to hit me.
I screwed my eyes shut and clenched my jaw so he wouldn’t break any teeth—he had already knocked out two of them. How was it that the same hands that hurt me like this could also tickle me or take me to the very heights of ecstasy?
But he didn’t hit me. He took my head in his hands and kissed me. I struggled to free myself, but he kept a tight hold on my chin. An odor filled my mouth like a virus entering my bloodstream, a mixture of marijuana and alcohol that spread and flowed through my body.
“I can feel you, Spoon.”
Suddenly he pushed me away and started to throw up. It didn’t look like he was going to stop, so I took him to the bathroom and stroked his back.
Tears trickled down his bloody cheeks. Spoon continued to puke even after everything in his stomach had come up and all that was left was a mixture of blood and stomach juices. I kept on stroking his back; it was like comforting someone who’d just been told he had six months to live. He cried pathetically. But what was I supposed to do? I mean, I’m not a nurse.
I took the spoon from his pocket and used it to scoop the puke up off the floor and dump it into the garbage can. I felt like I wanted to tell God about it.
“Hey, God! Look at me scooping puke up off the floor with a silver spoon!”
After I’d finished cleaning up the mess, I went to bed while Spoon washed his face. When he had finished, he came in feeling better, and in an apologetic voice he called my name. But I didn’t answer. I was pretending to be asleep.
“Kim, I wanna fuck you. I suppose you don’t want to do it tonight, huh?”
Fucking was all he knew. In his heart he must have been screaming, What do you want me to do? How can / make you feel better ? What else is there besides fucking?
He was just a little, immature kid in a grown-up body. My darling Spoon. This black demon was gradually filling my mind with dirty words. But there was still some free space left. There would always be space for more until the day my mind was full and whistled like a boiling kettle.
“Kim, I wanna fuck you. I wanna make you feel good. Are you sleeping? Are you asleep? Shit! I’m doing my best to make you feel better and you won’t even let me touch you.”
Spoon climbed into bed beside me and turned his back on me with a sigh.
“You could always rape me.”
Spoon turned back, surprised. I gave him a big grin in the dark.
He stopped being miserable.
I had been to bed with other guys twice since me and Spoon started I living together. But it had nothing at all to do with wanting to have sex with them.
Every now and then I just felt really nervous that I had let myself get so caught up in my feelings for Spoon. He was like a big jigsaw puzzle, and I didn’t want to turn into one of the pieces.
One day after work I went to see a guy, an old friend. We had a very close relationship, but very relaxed—there was no pressure. We were what you might call partners in crime. In his room that night he did the same things he had always done; I thought he knew me inside out, but I left his apartment feeling defeated. Now I knew I was addicted to Spoon.
When I got back home, Spoon was sprawled out on top of the bedcovers, sleeping facedown with a glass of gin on the floor beside him. I just looked at his big, bare feet and burst into tears.
He woke up when he felt my tears falling onto his feet. I guess he thought I only cried when we made love or when he was hitting me.
“Kim? What’s wrong? Why are you crying? What’s the matter? Did someone hit you?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Did somebody do something to you?”
“No. I just missed you, that’s all.”
“Naturally—what do you expect?”
I didn’t know what was so natural about it, but he dragged me into bed and started taking my clothes off like he was opening a bag of caramels. Then he started to run his tongue over my body, licking me all over. Suddenly his tongue stiffened. I looked down and saw with horror that there was a bright purple bruise on my chest.
Spoon was so dumbfounded that he couldn’t even hit me. He held me by the shoulders, his hands trembling. I really thought he was going to kill me. I steeled myself and looked at his face. I expected to see his eyes wild with anger, but all I saw was desperation and sadness.
I had never wanted to see Spoon’s eyes filled with sorrow like that.
The pain was written all over his face, like on one of those teleprint signs going from left to right: “I AM SAD… I AM SAD… I AM SAD… ”
A cold sweat broke out across my forehead. I had to do something.
Spoon wasn’t supposed to look like that. He was only supposed to have that nonchalant, vacant expression. I wracked my brains for something to say.