There had been no showers in the desert for weeks at a stretch. There had been bitch baths in the tent, by flashlight. The sand scoured the folds of your body, was gritty in your waistline and nostrils, anus and lungs. Here, my white briefs were folded into thirds, and placed atop the cool closed lid of the commode. My towel and talc were at the ready.
At some point I was redeployed. Given back to lower Alabama, to the blanket of wet heat, the punctuation of air-conditioning. I then spent years in school because I couldn’t determine anything else with traction. Money is such a limp conquest. Bitch baths are when you wipe yourself clean with a rag. Joy was the girl who had sent letters of dull optimism while I was at war: tiny circles dotted her i’s; she promised to meet me on the base tarmac when I returned, etc. The loofah was a queer little bundle of lime-colored plastic netting, dangling by a soft rope from this hook on a suction cup. She bought it at a bath store in an outlet mall off I-10, and I made fun of it. And her.
And the university offered me a part-time thing immediately after graduation. Male department bigwigs asked me about the war during the interview, and I said only that I didn’t know what to say, and they nodded back at me and were silent, as if I were withholding something magical. Yes, they offered me this adjunct teaching thing, alongside this other job thing, where I show up at alumni fund-raisers and talk to rich or important men, my hands constantly scooping peanuts. Or rather, I don’t talk while the men nod and reflect on me and on war. I eat peanuts, peanuts.
Bo-ring, Joy says, her index finger like a pistol at her temple.
I stood beneath the piping-hot water and thought of these men, their nose hairs protruding like spider legs, their theoretical empathies and deconstructionist blurbs, and something clicked: though I was already clean, I decided to grab hold of that loofah, douse it in her verbena body wash, then lather myself.
It felt good and slick and yet grainy, explosive. Shhh, I thought. I hated that Joy was right, shhh. I then thought of the gay cowboy movie she recently made me watch, and wondered whether or not I had, would, or was turning homosexual. To counter this I started to hum to mumble to sing the lyrics to an old song by the Stone Temple Pilots, the one whose guitar riff sounds like a rape, before finally stumbling into thoughts on yesterday’s Ellen, which featured a southern trust-funder who made a documentary about being rich. He wanted to be not-rich, like, culturally, but without having to lose his actual money. He confronted his rich father about this with a video camera. I am a man, a man, the song says, maybe. I know you want what’s on my mind. I was so alone in that shower. The verbena reminded me of a Faulkner novel.
When your unit is preparing to redeploy home you have to use power washers to cleanse every single speck of Holy Land from all equipment: tanks, Humvees, tents, etc. Every goddamn speck, they order, as you stand there, your sweat evaporating before it even has a chance to lick the skin, the water pressure so intense it peels paint; so intense that when it touches you, when it barely glances the inside crook of your elbow, it gives you a third-degree burn. Happens so fast that it doesn’t even hurt — and then the skin is gone, and it does hurt, big time. Anyway, given all the other tasks you’ve had to swallow, cleaning sand off of armored personnel carriers seems anticlimactic, fucking stupid.
I brushed the loofah across my abdomen and thought briefly of my embarrassingly small TIAA-CREF retirement portfolio, and then of this quirky kid, Alex, who makes semi-decent grades in my Contemporary Issues class. He’s a frat boy, wealthy and light-brown-headed, with those madras shorts that all southern boys sport. I pictured his soft, swoopy bangs, and again worried that I might be homosexual, and looked down at my penis as the water spouted off the end. It did not stretch forth. I then worried that maybe my penis wasn’t stretching forth because of the severed ear that Alex brought into my office hours — but not because I wasn’t homosexual for him. I then decided to purposely think about the gay cowboy movie, and, conversely, about Joy fellating me, up and down, in tandem with her hand, and how fond I can be of this. There was no response to either. There was a ton of foam in the loofah net, in proportion to the small amount of verbena soap employed.
Joy says that peanuts are the good kind of fat. The problem is that a can of nuts lists 39 Pieces as a Serving — but no mention of whether or not these pieces are whole peanuts or half, both of which populate every peanut container and bowl. The southern trust-funder-turned-documentary-filmmaker was one of many über-wealthy heirs who appeared on Ellen to talk about how they could distance — and had distanced — themselves from their fortunes, to induce social change. In the desert, there was this American Indian cook, Choctaw so he said, around sixty, who was a fevered alcoholic and who brewed applejack wine and took his bitch baths out of the same industrial-sized pot he cooked chow with. Somebody saw him doing so one night and word of “sick-ass Indian water” streaked through camp. People switched back to dehydrated MREs for a day or two, and cursed his filthy breed, then showed back up for pasta with fake butter and garlic powder anyway. It was just too good for racism or body oils.
When you think about it, contemporary issues aren’t that contemporary — Alex the frat boy said in class. I mean, like, what the hell is Vietnam, anyway? he asked. Are we not so over that?
Social change. Well, to tell you the truth, I would rather have fought alongside faggots than women, because the lust for women makes straight male soldiers not pay attention, and maybe not pay attention to not getting themselves killed — I said to Joy, at which point she didn’t speak to me until I explained that this view did not preclude women from being top-notch killers. Only that straight men were sex pigs who shouldn’t be distracted in a combat zone. None of the university presses wish to consider my scholarship. Joy tells me to perhaps consider some other career, something that pays. Says that I’m a veteran and a man and white, so how hard can it be? I worry that I will deposit remainder feces on the loofah, but I must scrub effectively. People were hooking up all over the desert. Male and female soldiers could overlook the rankest of places, the most stable of marriages, just to get it on for a few hot seconds. The thing is, we had to fuck so much because we just weren’t shooting enough people to change things, to wash away the fear.
Alex came to my office hours two days after we watched a documentary film about 1960s Birmingham and those black girls who got bombed at church. He was strangely giddy, lugging a full backpack. He came in and looked around and said: I know this is, um, weird, but. . and then pulled out a mason jar filled with dark pink liquid and a bobbing ear. Thousands of tiny floaties swirled in the brine. He told me he found it in his great-aunt’s basement after she died. He, Alex, tries to trash-talk anything or anyone deviant in contemporary issues. I’m certain this is because he is homo, and afraid.
Indeed, in tandem with the loofah device, a minuscule amount of verbena body wash is enough for the entire process: right armpit, then across chest into left armpit, back to chest, down to penis, anus, legs, anus again, pubic hair, legs and anus and rinse and inspect and rinse. This is enough. My back stays under the hot water, and I imagine it lobster-colored. So damn hot I sometimes wonder if afterwards I could take a dry towel and rub enough friction up to remove the flesh. I know that I am not attracted to Ellen’s turncoat heir. I take hold of my penis again and flip-flop it up and down in a nice rhythm while thinking of his segment, just to make sure. Nothing unusual happens.