THIRTEEN
What bothers me are the bugs. They come up every time the light goes down. They come at me when I am sleep. I see their little antennae moved robotically in my direction. I have never woken up with a bug on my face but I want to kill them all anyway.
I get up. The fridge has nothing in it. I feel my guts about to drop. Down the street is the Sav-a-Center. We go down to get some food. We are musician #1, J, and musician #2, B, and myself, non-musician #1, M.
There’s blood on the street.
“Don’t tell me that’s...” I say, pointing to what better not be blood.
“He was running,” J says.
“What?!?”
“He was running. Look,” he points down to the spiral trail along the concrete.
“See. See the spiral? That’s him runnin’ and that there,” he pointed over to the skid marks around the corner, “That’s the car tracks. They peeled off. They killed him fast.”
“Fucked up,” B says.
I had been living on their floor for months now. There is no privacy. There is only Us. Capital U, fuck the rest.
J has a theory. How you change things in America is buy a gun. Then you start shooting local officials. Then they will listen. Violence is it. There is no small talk. Only the bullet. Fear and the bullet.
J lives at the bottom of the American lake. That’s what the surface of the water looks like from the bottom.
B is less revolutionary. He has no political believes save for the fact that he hates anyone whose in charge.
I am hungry, so neither of these ideas matter. I don’t want to believe in the bullet. Passing the end of the blood streaks, I see J’s philosophy right there on the broken concrete road.
New Orleans after Katrina was like that. Potholes, blood streaks, bad politics.
The Sav-a-Center is a giant phosphorescent warehouse of goods.
We walk into the goddess. Mothers in plaid, kids playing with those blow up bouncy balls. I rip some butter sticks out of the box and slip two quarters into my pockets.
If you order lunch meats from the butcher, ask for a pound of meat and a pound of cheese, and put those in your pockets too. They never will catch you.
Hours later, I lay on the mattress and Erin is licking ice cream from a plate.
“Can you please not do that?”
“What?” She has ice cream on her lips. “What the fuck?”
“It’s the licking.”
“You don’t like the licking?”
“I do. Jesus, woman, does it have to be sex with you all the time?”
“Do you want it to be?”
“Goddamn it!” I didn’t want to give her what she wanted but I did. Her skin hung on her looser then when I knew her at 16. I was some other age. Older then 16 for sure. Now I was much older and she had grown, but stretched in all the wrong places.
“Just like always.”
“What?”
“You’re a tease.”
“I am not.”
“You are so gay!”
“Am not!”
“Look at you, you’re turning red.”
“Fuck you.”
She kicks me with her bare feet and sucks more ice cream off the plate.
“You don’t like this?”
She slips her fingers under her bra strap and shows me her tits. They hang lower but her long nipples and large areola still remained as I remembered it. Last I saw them it was a pitch-black night in Northern California. Small white moon beams through closed black curtains hit her small body. I put myself in her. It was too wet and too loose, even then. I lose it. Now its 8 years later.
“It’s strange we met up here?’
“It is. Coincidence?”
“Shut up.” She rolls off. “You know you want me.” She pulls up her panties. I see that they are blue. I didn’t catch that before. It was dark when we took off our clothes.
“And?”
“I don’t know. You got some boxers?”
“Yeah. In the closet. She went in there. “I hate this pair.” She undoes her bra. Her breasts move loosely in the summer sun light.
“Hey.”
“Hey what?”
“Come ere.”
“Fuck you.”
“No.”
She came over to me. She held my face. “No. You be quiet.”
I felt her hand on my cock. She pushes her fingers above my jeans. I pull on her clothes.
“No.”
She kisses me all over my chest. I couldn’t take any more. I was in her, moving. She held onto to me, talking to my shoulder. “Yes,” she gnaws at my skin. “Come in me.”
I move and go and then it hits. She feels me come. She presses on my back. I fall on her. Both of our chests are beating with hot sweat oil.
Thunder rolls across the ceiling. A tropical storm is coming. A good New Orleans storm to break the heat.
I watch her go over to the curtains.
“I love coming here.”
“Love?” I said. “That’s interesting.”
“What?” She turns around. I hated her look.
The light in the room faded, just a touch.
“No, have a drink.”
“No.”
“Come on.”
“No. I won’t drink again.”
“Why?”
“Do you think I need to stay?’
She moves across the room. Her hard heels click across the wood panel. “Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m drinking.”
“Of course you are.”
“What?”
“Drinking.”
“Yes. I’m having a drink. That’s what people do. They have a drink.”
“And a drink...and another drink…”
“Yes. And it doesn’t mean anything.”
“I don’t want to fight.” She folds her arms. “I better go.”
“No.”
“I’m going.”
“We are going to talk about this.”
“Talk,” she said to me, “Talk is just that, a whole bunch of nothing. You wanna talk, you go fuck yourself.”
She storms past.
“Hey,” but there was no stopping her. She left and I didn’t know what to do. The silence was good. The pacing was good. I went to the bed. I laid down and let the sweat gather. The heat was still there. Little droplets of rain tap on the window sill. I wait for nothing to happen. Again.
