The simple act of recalling it and writing it down is making me feel dirty. And it happened ten years ago, for chrissakes.
Of course, I didn't feel the least bit dirty at the time, but that was how things were on Paxil, which is to say there weren't any things, no things to feel. No thoughts. No emotions. I was no more than a consciousless id that bebopped and scatted about Jamestown, NY and its surrounding suburbs with the ease of an animal, or Ted Bundy.
It was now mid summer, a mid summer's morning. It was unspeakably hot, for it was late July, and in upstate New York, there is only one true summer: late July. From May to August, the temperatures are relatively the same, peaks of 70's and low 80's, with breezes and bits of rainstorms. There's no need for air conditioning, and at night, by lake Chautauqua, jeans and sweatshirts are a necessity, not just to keep the mosquitoes at bay. But late July is another season altogether, a beast, one that doesn't seem to belong north of the Mason Dixon. The last week of it is high 90's hot, and the wetness of the air makes activity unbearable. The county becomes a jungle of sorts, if there was a jungle with black bears, ferns and towering gothic churches. The lawns grow high and unkempt, the way I'd imagine the county would look if a virus wiped out humanity and all the mowers rusted to pieces. The city abandons its deep fryers and hotwings, and takes to the lake, or the porches--depending upon socioeconomic status--to drink steeped sun-tea and Big Gulps over ice in vinyl lawn chairs with aluminum frames. The kids play in yards with hoses. Inevitably, someone cracks open a fire hydrant.
It was during this week I woke up in Dusty's room, hot and wet with a gigantic beer shit knocking at my back door.
[You know, I'll never understand why this happens, the post drinking, communal bed beer shit. Infallibly, if I go out partying with a man or woman, and I go home with a man or woman and spend the night with them--sex or no sex--I will awaken to the desperate gurgling of my colon. Ever have to take a shit, and you're trying to hold it in, but some gas bubbles are racing it to the asshole, and they really pinch like fuckers when they pass the poop, so you're expecting them to be enormous--the passing hurts so much--but they come out as the teensiest fffft, because the real bugger is the enormous beer shit? That's the kind of shit I had to take.]
Dusty was knocking on my forehead with his big hand and its weedy fingers. "Bunny, wake up. Buh-nny. Bunny, bunny, bunny." Sheesh he was stupid. I could hear his track pants crackle between his upper thigh and his midsection, and with his head now six inches from mine, he said, "Bunny, I got you a popsicle." There was a coldness in between my tits. I opened my eyes. The coldness was a neon green tube of ice bisecting my torso.
"Thanks."
"I gotta go to BP now. I'll call you later."
"Okay."
I was naked on Dusty's twin bed with a skein of wet, pilled sheets twisted uncomfortably beneath me. Wu Tang Clan rapped from the corner. I remembered requesting Wu Tang Clan at some point in the evening, and ten hours later, and my request was still being honored out of drug abuse and laziness. On the other side of the room was Dusty with his gym bag, standing to the side of what you could call a gaggle of young men, a gaggle that comprised the '98 and '99 Atlanta Brave draft picks. They looked amused and also perplexed by the situation.
Between me and the gaggle, the carpet was gelatinous. It looked faintly beautiful. I picked up my head and rubbed my eyes to get a better look at it, and when they cleared, I could see that the gelatin wasn't a sparkly surface resembling snow, but more regular gray Burbur with dedicated spots of gloss. Upon even closer inspection, the spots became the rubber of greasy, used condoms. My mouth tasted like Slim-jims and sperm. I ripped open the neon tube with my teeth.
"Hi guys," I said. I giggled it to them. Why would this situation be embarrassing?
The events of the prior night realigned in my memory. It was necessary to sort them. I had smoked the chronology away with Dusty's crappy weed. Let's see. Dusty and I went to The Rusty Nail to drink pitchers of beer and play games of darts. We made out in his car, and then went to Washington Ave. to score weed from the guy with the perfect afro who looked like a walking microphone. He had kicked me out of his house because I talked too much, and wouldn't "be cool." I waited in Dusty's car. We smoked the weed, went to another bar, fucked behind the bar, drank more beer, hit on women (unsuccessfully) and danced to Prodigee--Dusty in surfer wear, me in five inch heels, a painted on shirt and plastic pants. That's right: black, shiny, plastic pants. Tight, wet, black, plastic pants.
I repeat. Black, shiny, tight, plastic pants.
When Dusty and the boys left, I high-tailed it to the bathroom, bent at a forty-five degree angle, so as not to provoke the beer shit. It landed at the bottom of Dusty's toilet with a clang, displacing a veritable tsunami of toilet water up the sides of the bowl. It had flown through my anus at a curious velocity. The whole ordeal remained curious until I remembered that my anus was still coated--inside and out--with KY.
"Silly Bunny," I giggled with the neon green tube between my teeth.
And it was just an act, so simple. That was how it was done during the manic summer. I would think, 'I would like a cock in my ass. Hey, this young man over here has a cock. I will put it in my ass now,' and what I said I was going to do, I did, in the same linear way I circumnavigated lake Chautauqua each morning at dawn. Most disconcertingly--in hindsight--I didn't feel anything about it.
I bet you're wondering where Candace went. I had to leave her behind. She was dead weight, always wanting to spoon and rub each other's feet and talk about how we felt. The sex had been super fun, and she was a sweet and smart girl. I liked her, but didn't love her, you know? Not at all. And I missed muscles a lot, particularly the cock muscle, which can never be authentically faked by finger or silicone toy. One day, I craved cock more than Candace, so I had to let her go.
And this is the part that hurts. It was the manic summer. I couldn't feel anything, so I couldn't feel Candace either, couldn't connect with her. For a long time, I didn't even remember what it was like to be with her. I saw her again, perhaps five years later, and all I had to go on was her body in a hot tub. That was all I had stored--her parts and pieces--not her smile, her idiosyncrasies or the things she had said to me, not even enough to write her character properly in a short story on the Internet. Nothing of consequence. But even those superficial recollections--the parts and pieces--evoked a profound sense of regret and the feeling that things with Candace were not what I had thought they were. I had lied to myself. The times I had once remembered as quite one-dimensional, the two of us having an emotion-free exchange of pleasure in bacterial-laden hot tub water were, years later, emotional and arousing, intensely so. I could barely breathe thinking of her skin. She had the most amazing skin, soft and slippery, and every part of it that way. The skin of her nipples was no softer than the skin of her arms or back. My own skin was much rougher, but she was made up of the thinnest epithelial layers, clitoral skin. Foreskin. Even her feet were slippery. And there had been something there between us, something more than pretty skin; it was something I couldn't feel at the time, and years later couldn't remember. But it was there, and I had missed it.
I felt like crying. I was regretful and I didn't even know why. That's the worst kind of regret. Even worse than realizing you once wore black, plastic pants in public.
Posted by The Bunny at 6:18 AM