The way they characterized the women like different breeds. Black bitch. White cunt. Asian slut.
The line of spit from the cock to the woman’s mouth.
A woman blew two guys. When she took them both in her mouth at the same time, the cocks touched. I wondered if that made the men feel a little gay.
A gangbang scene. The men looked pathetic, jerking off as they waited their turn, and then this one dude rubbed his cock in the woman’s hair and then wrapped some of her hair around his cock and jerked off with it. Men are so weird.
A girl swallowed and then opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue so you could see she really did swallow it all.
An asshole, a wrinkled, gaping hole spitting back the come like an awful little volcano, and you thought to yourself, Why would anyone on Earth want to see that? And yet there it was. Someone on Earth wanted to see just that.
The men were bullies. Pulling, slapping, ordering the women around.
I put the throw pillow underneath me and started to fuck it.
I liked watching the scenes where the women really didn’t look like they wanted it. Like they were just doing it for the money or drugs or whatever.
When I came, I came wanting it all. In one way or another, I wanted to be the men, and I wanted to hurt the woman. I wanted to hurt like the woman, and I wanted to hate the men for hurting me. I wanted to be the man at home jerking off wanting to be the man wanting to hurt the woman. And then I wanted to hurt more.
Isn’t it a little sad we can’t do a little of everything there is to do? I’ll never know what it feels like to jam my cock into a tight little asshole.
I woke up and looked at the clock to see how late I was. Every time I looked at a clock, I hated myself. I grabbed my iPod, threw it in my purse, put on my big purple sunglasses, and ran out and got into a cab. Put my headphones on. Lucinda Williams sang, “Lemon trees don’t make a sound.” Then the iPod died.
Should have showered after I masturbated. My jeans rubbed against my shaved pussy and made me feel wet and gross.
In high school, I went down on a girl at a party in a field. Her hairy, gnarly pussy on my face and the pussy juice all running down my neck. It tasted like pennies.
After I stood there forever, smoking cigarettes and calling Ogden’s phone and getting sent to voicemail, Ogden finally turned the street corner. It always felt like he came out of nowhere, like it was some kind of magic trick when he appeared.
He said he was sorry. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a hundred years. It felt nice to be pressed against the cool leather of his jacket. When love came easy, it felt like it would last forever.
“What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean?” he asked. He took out a pack of American Spirits. “Want to smoke?”
“Sure,” I said. I tried smiling. My teeth felt soft.
We walked down the street. When his hand came near mine, I held it, but then he pulled his away and put it in his jacket pocket.
Robert Lowell wrote, “What woman has the measure of man / who only has to care about himself / and follow the stars’ / extravagant, useless journey across the sky. . / Because they cannot love, they need no love.” The stars don’t need anything. Men do, though. Just because they can’t love doesn’t mean they don’t need love. They need more, usually.
The first time I spent the night with Ogden, I lay on the sofa drinking wine while he hung paintings. All of the paintings looked as much like nothing as you could think of. He stepped back and asked me if one was crooked. I asked him if I could watch television, and he said, “Whatever.”
I passed out at some point. I woke up in the middle of the night on the couch, freezing. The streetlight shone through a window. I couldn’t find the light switch. I walked down the hallway with my hand against the wall. The floor was cold. I woke him up by punching him in the shoulder. “How do you leave me on the sofa with no blanket or sheet or pillow or anything? Why didn’t you wake me up and take me to bed?”
“Sorry,” he mumbled into the pillow.
“Is this your first day on Earth?” I asked him. I found the light, which made him sit up with his eyes squinting. He picked up his glasses from the bedside table, like, “Let me put these glasses on so I can deal with this bullshit.” He asked me to lower my voice. How many times in my life was someone asking me to lower my voice?
“I came here so we could spend some quality time together, not to watch you hang up paintings and then leave me passed out on the sofa. This is the most boring masochistic thing ever.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to deal with whatever crisis you have this week and then have sex with you. I am an actual person,” he said.
“I’m an actual person too. Not a thing you leave on a sofa, for Chrissake. And why is this fucking house so cold?” And then I broke down crying. Then there was silence, and I said, “I want a father figure, not an actual replacement for my actual father who actually neglected me. This isn’t Freudian. It is retarded.”
Sometimes I thought the only natural ending to our relationship would be a homicide/suicide. Anything else would feel like a letdown.
That afternoon after Thanksgiving, we went to a bistro on Eighty-First and Park. He asked the host about sitting at the bar, but I said I wanted a table and pointed to the corner booth, only for the host to walk us past it.
“That’s a four top,” Ogden explained. We had a choice between three different tables.
“Want to hide behind the column?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Do you want to hear the specials?” the waitress asked. He didn’t answer. She picked up the specials menu and pointed at each item while she read it out loud. After she left, he looked at me and said, “What the fuck was that about? She read what was on the menu.”
“How’s your dog?” I asked.
Ogden went on about his car breaking down instead. All the crying messages I had left for him echoed in my head. I wanted to run out of the restaurant and throw myself into traffic.
“The car broke down and I had the dog and the cat with me and I had to take them to a motel. .”
After we ate, we ordered another round of drinks and then went outside to smoke. It looked like it was going to rain. I had always loved dismal weather. I found it comforting. I wrapped my arms around him.
“Let’s go back to your place,” I said.
He stared at me
“Do you have any pot? I want to get stoned and do it,” I said, almost whining.
“No, I don’t think you should come back with me tonight.”
“Why not?”
“I think we should cool it for a while.”
“Why? Peter doesn’t know anything, I swear.”
He shook his head. “That’s not it.”
“What did I do?”
“You didn’t do anything.”
“When did you decide this?”
“A while ago.”
“We can’t just fuck?”
“Nope.”
“We can’t even make out?”
“No.”
“Do you love me?” I asked.
“No,” he said. Extras passed us by, glancing at us. What was the story line they imagined? That old man was hurting that young woman.