Nevertheless, we both agreed we would be better off if we moved. We scanned the ads for ground-floor apartments. We found our dream villa, a reinforced concrete compound with only one small sound and shatterproof window that had originally been built as a fallout shelter. Apparently the original owners had built it above ground with the intention of finding the right underground resting place for it when it was completed. A pit would be dug and it would be lowered with steel cables. The fall of the Berlin Wall had intervened, and in lieu of its original use, it had gone on to have a glamorous history as a top secret government storage depot for germ warfare agents and, finally, as the arms storage hangar for the Brink's security company, before being rented to its first residential tenant. The bunker was in an industrial section of town. It was totally isolatedthere wasn't another residence in a ten-block radius-but its fortified structure made it totally safe. We could fuck with all the abandon we had always wanted, without endangering the welfare of others. The moment we laid our eyes on the bare concrete walls and the space we wanted for the bedroom, which reminded us of the kind of deluxe cells reserved for Mafiosi in maximum security prisons, we knew we were on the road to attaining Nirvana.
I said goodbye to Shapiro. I liked him. He was my kind of person, a no pain, no gain kind of guy, but his in-your-face approach was not going to be successful in all instances. And with our concrete bunker, our "love garden," as we liked to call it, we wouldn't need to avail ourselves of his services. They say adversity makes for strange bedfellows, and I felt in the end that Monica developed a grudging admiration for Shapiro's tenacity and his continual willingness to help her, despite the way she both vociferously and taciturnly challenged his authority. Yes, by isolating ourselves from society in what was effectively a prison of our own making, we were treating the symptom rather than the problem. However, if you call savage fucking on a twentyfour hour basis a symptom, if you call a cunt as warm and salty as the Dead Sea and a dick as hard as the base of a coconut tree symptoms, if you call the screams and cries emanating from two humans of average consciousness and intelligence, sounding like dusk on the Zimbabwean veldt, a symptom, then these were the kinds of symptoms we didn't need to cure. Victimless crime has never qualified in my mind as a transgression. The drama of our lovemaking that played itself out on our enormous new waterbed every morning, evening, and afternoon (when I wasn't on the road)-a commotion that at the very least would have merited a quality-of-life violation in a normal neighborhoodwas tacitly tolerated by the local authorities. If we didn't bother anyone, they wouldn't bother us. And who was there to bother-the hydraulic compactor next door, which slammed car parts into identical metal chunks with a ferocity that, hard as it is to believe, dwarfed my most fervent attempts at compacting Monica's private parts?
(13
Bill had gotten into a full-time aerobics certification program and he was having an affair with his instructor, which meant he could only sporadically cook for us. The single drawback to our new living quarters was the fact that we were so off the beaten track that many take-out places were reticent to deliver to our location. In particular a lot of the Chinese joints on which we depended weren't thrilled to fill our orders. Anyone who knows anything about the take-out business within our neck of the woods will tell you that it's divided up into neat little zones, and while we were only ten blocks from the nearest residential area, which was known universally as Chow (the one next to it was Mein), the blocks are long, and our place fell off to the edge of the neighborhoods outlined in colorful magic marker on the walls in the phone banks of the take-out joints. This meant that delivering Chinese food to us was essentially equivalent to delivering to another city.
In our town, Chinese food is a way of life; its taken for granted like food stamps and other government subsidies. It's not so much a business as an aid program like CARE, that also happens to make a good profit for those who run it. Most people are dependent on Chinese food deliveries and would not be able to survive without them. So running a take-out route carries a certain level of social responsibility with it. The delivery boy working Chow never carries one order. When he goes out, he is feeding a whole area. Every time a take-out place conceded to take our order, they were in essence taking food out of the mouths of babes. At least these babes were going to have to wait long past their normal dinner hours to get their food.
We endured long periods when we weren't able to order in Chinese at all. Throughout the winter months, when the demand to satisfy the hungry mouths on the neighborhood routes is especially high, we didn't stand a chance. During these times we had to descend the food chain to Domino's Pizza and KFC, when we weren't lucky enough to receive shopping bags filled with little plastic containers-care packages from Bill. Monica and I could have gotten a wok and started to cook our own food, but then we would have had to shop. I worked hard when I was on a job, and when I came home at night I liked to fuck. In addition, as everyone knows, when it comes to Chinese food it's more expensive to cook it than to order it in.
Finally a solution arrived for ourproblem. Itwas a hot summer night. Many people in our part of the country still don't have air conditioning due to the expense and the fact that there are so few days when it really gets uncomfortable. But this was one of those brutal days. Most of town had been picnicking by the lake to stay out of the heat. The children could swim, and the adults could enjoy the breeze across the water, which creates little oases of coolness throughout even the warmest weather. We had our pick of take-out Chinese places since hardly anyone orders in during this kind of weather. I remember it well. I decided to try something different from the usual Number One: chicken chow mein, fried rice, egg roll, and wonton soup. I ordered wor shoo op, the braised duck dish I'd loved since I was a boy. It's a dish that's crunchy on the outside and soft inside, a little like Monica's cunt, whose large mound of hair you have to plow through to get to the juicy interior. Monica had the egg foo young combo, and she ordered egg drop soup, more because of the matching colors than because she liked the taste. We always fucked our brains out before we ordered in. We fucked our brains out after we ordered in too, for that matter. Anyway, I happened to be sitting on Monica's face when I noticed the delivery boy staring at us through the window I waved and screamed out, "One minute."
"Look honey, the food's here, let me just come on your face."
"No," she whined. "I want to get fucked so bad." That's domesticity for you. In the throes of our first passion, Monica would have done anything I wanted, but now she was getting particular. It had to be a certain way or not at all. For instance, she liked to be fucked with one leg raised up in a stirrup she'd bought from a used obstetrical parts dealer. Every day it was something new I knew the fucking was going to take longer than coming on her face, which was why I'd suggested the latter, but I also knew that on such a slow night, the delivery fellow wasn't going to get impatient and leave, as had happened on several other occasions when food arrived while we were in the middle of a drawn-out fuck. He'd need every tip he could get on a day like today.