DELICIOUS TACOS
THE PUSSY
What Now, She Says
We go out a couple times. We make out, maybe we bone. Or maybe we don’t, and I just never call you. Or maybe we do, and then we get married and move slightly out of town to some place where people of modest means can get a pretty big yard, and we get a goat, but the fucking thing is too loud and keeps chewing through the fence- they are surprisingly clever animals. Maybe it actually figures out the latch. But point being the goat keeps getting out and getting into the neighbor’s yard and eating his heirloom tomatoes or whateverthefuck- maybe we laugh at this. Maybe this discord with our neighbors only brings us closer together, like, us against the world. Maybe not, maybe you never wanted to get it in the first place, maybe you never wanted to move to the suburbs, maybe you secretly blame me for everything moving too fast and now you’re stuck here out in Calabasas or something and now you’re like 33 and if you leave me you’ll never have biological children, but if you stay with me you don’t know how you can stand even one more fucking second in this house in the middle of nowhere and separating the bank accounts is going to be such a god damned pain in the ass, and the goat isn’t cute anymore, it was a stupid idea, and it has an expected life span of like 35 more years but any place you give it away to might use it for meat and that would pretty much be unconscionable. You don’t want it, but you can’t get rid of it. That’s what it’s going to be like with you and me in like four years. Maybe. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t have a fuckin crystal ball.
Sunday Call with Mom
Have to call my mother. Haven’t spoken to her in three weeks. This puts a lot of pressure on the conversation. No doubt she has done things in the past three weeks, and I will hear about those things. It will now take three times as long to hear about all the things. Meals she has prepared; Amnesty International meetings she went to. Things pertaining to yoga, her yoga instructor. Her yoga instructor’s husband. He is a musician. He plays in a band; perhaps my mother will have gone to see the band perform, typically at an Italian restaurant. I will hear about the quality of the show.
Then I will be expected to say things. My things should also, logically, take three times as long as normal to say because of the lacuna in our communication. But I don’t talk about work. I hate talking about work; I am ashamed of how menial and unrewarding my job is, plus, bringing it up in any detail makes the humiliation and trauma fresh to me, and I don’t want her to hear this in my voice. I don’t want my mother to know that my life is mostly horrible. I also can’t talk to her about the thing that makes me the most happy, which is having unprotected sex with women much younger than me, right after I meet them. I can’t tell her how I’m extremely good at this and I’m pleased that I have become so practiced at it. That I had feared that as my age advanced and my hair turned gray and yet I still didn’t have any success or money, that the type of woman I am attracted to, which is ones that are over fifteen years younger than me– I had feared that I would lose my access to these women, that they would see me as a gross boring old pervert. But in fact it is easier when you are thirty six years old to have unprotected sex very fast with nineteen year olds than it has been at any other time. It is unbelievably easy, like a joke, and I can see this going on for ten more years, and their bodies are so beautiful, their pussies just lightly musky and fresh-tasting; I love when I’m fucking them to pretend that I’m going to ejaculate inside them and my copious seed will find purchase in their fertile and healthy young wombs and they will be pregnant and their lives will be ruined; this gives me so much happiness and pleasure. I cannot tell my mother about this. She likes to hear about the cat though.
I can tell her about birds I’ve seen and days I’ve spent in the park or mountains, and meals I’ve prepared. We can discuss different techniques for roasting a chicken, though frankly, I have absolutely perfected roasting a chicken and it should be a one sided conversation. But she tipped me off to a side dish where you simply halve a baguette and sit the chicken right on top of it, allowing fats and juices to soak into the bread which becomes a moist, rich, crusty sort of toast. This was revolutionary for me because previously roasting a chicken was a day long labor due to the side dishes: mashed potatoes or pommes Anna; drunkenly wrestling with wet slippery tubers and sharp blades– having an effortless yet delicious starch means a chicken can be roasted after work on a Tuesday night. Just because you have a stressful career is no reason you shouldn’t live well.
I kind of want to tell her: Ma, I’m all fucked up, I’m trapped in this job and it’s crushing me and I have no way out, and I’m a sex addict and I always hurt people and I’m going to get AIDS; I drink like a hobo and wake up on weekdays so hung over that my eyeballs hurt; sometimes I get so drunk on work nights that I break things and cry. I don’t know what I’m gonna do and please please help me. And if she knew that was how I felt she would desperately want to hear it. But I don’t want to worry her. I don’t want her to be sad. And it’s true, you know, I do like cooking chicken and looking at birds.
I wonder what shit she has going on that she’s keeping from me. Maybe she’s fucking nineteen year olds too, who knows.
Tippy the Thirsty Squirrel
If I didn’t have to fuck I’d move to Montana. Get a cabin; some acreage. Out there you can own a pond. Maybe; I have no fucking idea. But I’m pretty sure you can get a place on a fuckton of land with a breathtaking view of snow capped mountains and possibly a creek running through it where you can flyfish, if you’re into flyfishing. Huge meadows, maybe lightly forested, that bloom in the spring with tiny delicate wildflowers. Songbirds massing on trees to pick berries in the fall; stopping through on their way to Panama. Elk. Deer. Wolves maybe. Bears. Maybe one nosy and mischievous bear with whom you are constantly in an arms race as he finds more and more fiendishly clever ways to get into your garbage and you find more and more Rube Goldbergian ways to keep him out, and you secretly respect and take delight in such an adversary until one day he mauls your dog and you have to just shoot him. Then he becomes an awesome rug for your hearth. His face snarling in the firelight, even though in life he just looked a bit curious and dumb like a gas station attendant who hasn’t done math in fifteen years trying to figure out a piece of long division.
If I didn’t have to fuck I’d move to Montana. Cold clean snows, a big garden; big blackberry patch like you would find in the woods when you were a kid and come out looking like the Passion of the Christ. A wife who would home can these berries. Scold me for eating too many fresh; that’s a jar of preserves you’re gonna miss in the winter. I will look up guiltily with my lips purple and give her one of those chimp grins with seeds in my teeth. Incorrigible. She’ll playfully bat me with her wooden spoon, which she has boiled to prevent botulism. My wife is no home canning slouch.
Little towheaded kids running around, swimming in the creek; I have given them a very serious lecture on staying away from rattlesnakes. Dad is usually jovial so it’s a little scary when he’s serious. The rattlesnake is more scared of you than you are of him. Freezer with an elk in it. My wife is sick of elk jerky; we all are. We are sick of elk stew and elk fritters and elk salad and elk whateverthefuck but it’s going to be the better part of a decade before we are done eating this god damn elk. Elk chili. She is sick of conscientiously braising game meats so it’s not like biting into a fan belt when you try to eat it. Just once she would like to fry something in a pan for five minutes and be done. Just once she would like to order some fucking Chinese, but it’s the god damn Pony Express out here. There are no Chinese people in Montana. A guy would have to haul those little paper cartons over a mountain pass on a mule to get Chinese food here.