It Feels So Good When I Stop Read online

  “No. It means you do it because you’re free to.”

  Two days later I called Jocelyn and asked her if she wanted to talk. She wanted to know why. I told her I didn’t want her to move to New York, that we should get married. She said she didn’t think she could count on me, but to come over anyway if I was serious about talking. We sat on her bed. The first thing she asked me was if I’d been with anyone else. I lied to her because I was ashamed and I knew she’d never let me forget it. She kept asking. She said, no, really, it would be okay, honest—especially since we were split up—as long as I told her the truth about it. Amherst is a small town. She didn’t want to be the only idiot who didn’t know. I resisted further. She said if I was honest with her, we could start over—right then and there—swear to God—with a clean slate. She was all smiles and understanding. I thought about Keith Richards having all of his poisoned blood replaced with a supply that was fresh, promising, and bright. I came clean—sort of. I told Jocelyn that Leyla and I had protected sex—missionary position only—one time. And by “one time” I meant I’d had a single, unsatisfying—depressing, if you really must know—semi-orgasm.

  Jocelyn went totally fucking ballistic. She didn’t know what was worse—that I lied to her or that I “stuck my dick into that smoky old purse.” She was so upset she skinned a pillow alive, rolled the case into a ball, and threw it at a glass on her dresser.

  She wanted to know how I could be so fucking cruel and vulgar? I told her I was still in love with her, and that we weren’t even going out at the time. That made it worse. She started crying and said she was crushed that I could turn off my feelings for her so quickly. I told her I hadn’t turned off anything. She asked me why I did it if I was still so in love with her? I think Leyla might have been right, that I just needed a freebie. But I told Jocelyn I didn’t know why I did it. Jocelyn wasn’t happy about that answer. I told her I’d make something up if she wanted me to. She said she’d take me back if I was absolutely explicit about what Leyla and I did to each other, where we did it, who else knew about it, et cetera. It was like she’d prepared a list long beforehand because she knew I’d be unfaithful at some point, which, technically I had not been. She made me feel like I’d been cheating on her since day one with her best friend, when all I’d done was bend the truth.

  She pressed me for the details. Fool me once. I gave her the answers that I’d want to hear if I was in her position. I’d never believe them, but I’d still want to hear them.

  I WAS WORRIED about getting attacked by Tinker again, but more than that, I didn’t want to run into Marie. I had a growing feeling that once she sobered up and thought about it, she’d come around to blaming me for the hookup. When we took our walk, Roy and I kept away from her end of Opal Cove Road. It didn’t make any difference. Marie’s Subaru rolled to a stop in front of us.

  “I knew it, Roy.”

  Marie got out but stood behind the open door. She was wearing a long, dark paisley scarf tight against her head. She looked a lot better than the last time I’d seen her.

  “How is he?” she asked.

  I palmed Roy’s head. “Pretty good.”

  “Hey there, Roy,” she said.

  He was a loyal kid. He gave her the cold shoulder. She wasn’t expecting that.

  “Don’t take it personally. It takes him a while to warm up to people, right, kid?” I rubbed his head. He bristled. “See what I mean?” Marie smiled weakly. I watched her watching Roy like she was waiting for him to do something remarkable. She started fidgeting with the door’s foam rubber seal.

  “Do you think we could get together sometime and talk?” she asked.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s nothing bad. Honestly.”

  RICHIE’S STEREO SPEAKERS were enormous. He pointed them out into the living room from his bedroom doorway. We were listening to the album All Rise by Naked Raygun, watching a Nuremberg trials documentary on TV with the sound off. We were stripped down to our boxers, lying on ratty, his-and-his loveseats that were too short for our bodies. The loveseats smelled like old Band-Aids. A full-on August heat wave made it seem like the living room of a forgotten elderly shut-in. At least when you’re broke and it’s cold, you can put on more clothes. But you can only get so naked when it’s hot.

  “Why in the fuck does Hitler get to own that ’stache?” Richie asked. We weren’t even high, so I took it as rhetorical. He lifted his chin while pinching his upper lip. “I think I’d look good in one. But if I wore one around this town, every lefty hippie peacenik fuck would want to tear a strip off me.” He was right. Amherst was one of those places that was liberal to a fault. It made you feel uncomfortable, like the person who found the unrecy cled mouthwash bottle in your trash might be waiting for you in the dark.

  “Melanie’s beard is thicker than the one Gregory Peck grew for Moby Dick,” Richie said, “and everyone cuts her a free pass because she’s a dyke expressing herself.” Melanie was a busboy at Esposito’s. She was also a friend of Richie’s. I brought that up. “Not the fucking point,” he said. “What is the point is, why can’t I, a decent, semi-law-abiding citizen, wear a Hitler? It’s bullshit.”

  “Because it would bum a lot of people out.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” The perspiration oozing down the lovely brown hips of a Michelob bottle collected in the dent of my sternum. The ceiling was unevenly stained by secondhand smoke and seepage.

  “Yeah, why? Think about it. Stalin was just as big a douche as Hitler. And he had a mustache.” No arguments from me there. “Well, then why the fuck aren’t mobs of people out gang-shaving Burt Reynolds or Tom Selleck?”

  I egged him on. “Or what’s-his-face, that dude from the Toronto Maple Leafs?”

  “Wendel Fucking Clark. There’s another one. Why’s he still walking the streets, and I can’t grow a Hitler?”

  “Nobody’s stopping you. Grow one.”

  Richie got a look on his face like it just occurred to him that buying some relatively expensive thing—a used, beater motorcycle or two work-free weeks of fucking off—were doable if he was smart about it. “Look at these fucking psychopaths,” he said. A chain gang of Nazi defendants donned their translation headphones in unison. “One of the really fucked-up things is that these guys had, like, wives and shit who loved them. I mean truly loved them.”

  “Hard to imagine.” But it wasn’t really.

  “This fucking guy.” Richie presented a particularly horrible and homely Nazi as his case in point. “This guy’s wife worshipped the ground he walked on.”

  “He probably persuaded her.” I said it like Major Hoch stetter from Hogan’s Heroes.

  “Fuck that. She always had a hot strudel waiting for him when he got home from a hard day at the Zyklon B plant.”

  Richie scratched at the large shamrock tattoo high on his biceps. It was a money-green reminder of a night he’d never remember. He wasn’t even Irish. When I asked him why he didn’t have it removed, he told me there was no point, like it was a mole his doctor told him not to worry about. I told Jocelyn the whole tattoo story, and she said Richie was a schnauxer. It was a Yiddish word she invented. A schnauxer is a guy who realizes he bought a case of the wrong shade of house paint and ends up using it anyway.

  “You ever see Eichmann’s old lady?” I asked.

  “Nice?”

  “Hell yeah. Feeders like this.” I supported two enormous air tits, my beer jammed tight in their cleavage.

  “You laugh. I bet you money you’re not far off. And name me a bigger animal than Eichmann.”

  It was my turn to go to the fridge for beers. Richie did some soul-searching in the forty seconds I was gone.

  “Yeah,” he said, like he hated to admit it, “it’s about time I got a serious girlfriend.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Well, why the fuck do you have one?”

  “No, I mean you hook up with more women than anyone I know. Why g
et tied down?”

  “So, if you could trap as much pelt as me, you wouldn’t be in an exclusive thing?”

  “No, I would, but—”

  “Damn right, you would. Your old lady’s awesome. You know how fast some other dog would be sniffing her ass? They already are.”

  I knew Richie had a small crush on Jocelyn. I wasn’t concerned. He was a good friend. In fact, I actually enjoyed knowing he liked her, because there was no way she’d ever have anything to do with him.

  We stopped talking and listened to the end of the song “Peacemaker.” The lead Nuremberg prosecutor was pounding sand up the ass of some kraut who had it coming.

  “That guy is no bullshit,” Richie said. “He never even went to college.”

  “No shit? How’d he get this gig?”

  “You don’t have to go to law school or college to take the bar exam.” Richie said it like it was something he’d considered doing.

  “You should take it. But wait till your Hitler’s nice and full.”

  “That would be fucking hilarious. Distract all those Amherst College lawyer wannabes. They’d shit themselves.”

  “You could single-handedly change the face of the Massachusetts legal system.” Richie liked that idea.

  The faces of the condemned Nazis were as sullen as their victims’. One by one, black hoods turned them into footnotes before the gallows floor vanished from beneath their feet.

  “Fuck it,” Richie said. “I am officially growing a Hitler.” He lifted the window shade to gauge if the sun was any closer to cutting us some slack. A wide blade of white sunlight momentarily obliterated the Nuremberg trials.

  “I got the beers,” I said. “You flip the record.”

  “Christ,” Richie said. “It’s like a fucking oven in here.”

  MARIE WAS PICKING me up at seven. I didn’t want her to see how I was living, so I waited on the front porch. I was already at the sidewalk when she drove up.

  “You have to get in this door,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Right.” She put the Subaru in park and got out. I squeezed past her. Her hair looked damp. It smelled like a banana daiquiri. I cleared the stick shifter and got myself seated. The Hefty-bag passenger window sagged in against my face.

  “Sorry about the window.”

  “It’s dark out anyway.” I checked out her ass as she got back in. It looked pretty good, even in navy blue Dickies. She left the door open to keep the dome light on. She let out a sigh, like the first of many hurdles had been negotiated. Then she just sat there for what seemed like an extraordinarily long time, staring at the windshield. I pretended to think nothing of it. I looked around the car’s interior like I was taking in the great room at Mon ticello. Marie snapped herself to attention. “Okay, let’s go eat,” she said, like she was psyching herself up for a Brazilian wax.

  “We can do this another time if you don’t feel good. I’m not even hungry.”

  “Please.” She took my hand, and I flinched. “It’s important for me to do this.”

  “Okay.” My door had no handle. I was Ted Bundy’d in.

  WE WENT TO the Crow’s Nest. From across the room, the waiter and cook nodded at me when we walked in.

  “Come here a lot?” Marie asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Two for dinner, Captain?” the waiter asked with menus in hand.

  MARIE PICKED THE chunks of meat from her lobster roll and scraped off most of the mayo before eating it. She scrubbed her front teeth with her tongue after each swallow. She looked like she was working a football mouthpiece into proper position. It was a little disgusting to watch. I deducted a few beauty points.

  “So, what did you want to talk to me about?”

  She took a sip of her cocktail. “Have you ever made a film?”

  “No.” I didn’t think she was talking about porn, but I wasn’t sure. Jocelyn and I had snapped a few Polaroids of each other that were bluish in tint. Garden-variety back-of-the-top-drawer stuff. But that was all. We pillow-talked about doing more, and that was arousing enough. Plus it would be a drag if my parents saw it. Or if I had a kid someday—which was never going to happen, but if I did—it would blow having sex movies of me out there.

  “I’m a filmmaker.” She swallowed, then pushed the sides of her hair behind her ears. “I thought maybe you’d work for me for a couple weeks.” I pictured a false-walled torture chamber retrofitted to 97 Opal Cove Road. “I can’t pay you a lot.”

  “Why me?”

  “Honestly? The way you take care of that baby gave me a feeling about you.”

  “Really? I almost got him eaten.”

  “But you didn’t.” She took a drink. “And you didn’t fuck me when I was wasted.”

  “If I was more shitfaced I would have.”

  “Thanks a lot. Am I that attractive?”

  “No. Yes. I meant if I’d have had more to drink-”

  She smiled. “I know what you mean. If, if, if. If I was the queen of England, I’d pee Moët.”

  We laughed. I felt the earliest pinch of a crush.

  “Seriously,” she said, “why are you trying to make me think you’re repulsive for not being repulsive?”

  “Is that what I’m doing?”

  I WAS WAITING as the bus pulled into Amherst Station. It was near midnight. I’d been staring at a small cluster of fireflies flickering above a patch of unruly garbage grass, trying not to think about the family I’d financially destroy if my health-insuranceless body was taken over by cancer. Thankfully, I spotted Jocelyn seated—like an angel—near the back of the bus. She stayed there well after the initial crush of passengers moved forward. Jockeying for position was not her thing. I moved closer to the door as passengers filed off. They all looked beat.

  “People are fucked,” she said before her second foot touched the pavement. She was wearing the white linen pants. That meant a thong could be in my immediate future. We kissed.

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, boy, you’re going to love this.” She scanned the small crowd. “See dumpy-ass over there? With the Princess Leia haircut?”

  The young woman in question was standing in a puddle of urine-colored light. Her billowing Sinbad pants and leotard top were chicken-broth green. She poked the pay phone dial pad like it was the chest of someone who had wronged her.

  “Of all the fucking people, who do you think sat down next to me?”

  “Nut job?”

  “And, oh, my God, does she ever smell.” Jocelyn gagged. A fake, but a nice touch.

  “Onion pizza?”

  “Worse. Halibut.”

  “Oh, man.”

  “I’m not kidding. I had to put Blistex on my nostrils. Feel.”

  I touched her mustache patch. It was still slippery. I felt a twinge in my dick.

  “And that’s not the best part.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “I make a special trip to the Strand to buy a book for the trip, right?” She drew a copy of Maxine Hong-Kingston’s Woman Warrior from her pocketbook. “So as I’m smearing Blistex all over my face so I can read without puking, she sees the book on my lap and asks me if she can take a look at it because she likes the title.”

  “And you let her?”

  “I didn’t think she was going to read the whole thing.”

  “No shit.”

  “Can you believe that?”

  “Did you tell her you wanted it back?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because at first I thought she was just reading a few lines, you know? Then when she turned the page, I was thinking, There’s no fucking way. And then, I’m not kidding, I was fascinated. What kind of person does that? I mean, to smell like that’s one thing. Maybe she can’t help it, you know? Some people smell. What can you do? But reading a stranger’s book is just . . .” She shook her head, trying to jar the right word loose.

  “Fucked up.”

  “Isn’t
it? And you know what she said when she gave it back? She said she was disappointed. She expected it to be different.” Jocelyn’s mouth was open wide with reen acted shock. “Can you fucking believe that?”

  I took the book from her. “It’s pretty thick. She’s a fast reader.” I spread the book open, raised it to my face, and took deep a whiff.

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “It smells like sea monkeys.”

  Jocelyn was entertained, but she acted like she didn’t want to be. “You’re sick.”

  “You’re the one laughing, so what’s that make you?”

  “Sicker, probably.”

  The driver was pulling the last of the suitcases from the bus’s lower compartment. Jocelyn took the opportunity to distance herself from the oddball sniffing the crotch of The Woman Warrior. I watched her walk. A thong it would be. She slipped the driver a couple bucks’ tip.

  “Why did you do that?” I said out of the corner of my mouth.

  “Because that’s what you do.” Jocelyn’s family was loaded and domestically disinterested enough to have their standing weekly grocery order delivered by a young man her mother described as a “nice colored fellow.”

  I took her bag, and we walked arm in arm in a line tangent to the rancid pool of light. “Go slow,” I said. “I want to see if I can smell her.”

  “Stop.”

  I pulled Jocelyn closer to me. Princess Leia was giving the gears to whoever the poor fuck was that she’d called: “Do not fucking stand there and tell me you didn’t tell me that.”

  Jocelyn squeezed my arm. “My God,” she whispered, “look at the receiver.” The cord leading to it was frayed and completely severed from the rest of the telephone.

  “Do not humiliate me here,” Leia said to her imaginary friend.

  “Humiliate her somewhere else,” I whispered.

  Jocelyn nibbled my ear and told me I was a terrible person.

  We walked toward my house along Pleasant Street. It was late June. Trustafarians with names like Zephyr, Flake, and Winnebago were reenacting scenes from Billy Jack, Burning Man, and Bread and Puppet on Amherst Common. They had established a tiny Hoover ville of high-end pop tents, a small circular trampoline, and some anti-whatever signs. Someone was blowing a spastic tune on a flute. Two dudes were squeezing those long African drums Paul Simon had a total hard-on for around the time of the Graceland album. Birds from deep within the majestic, centuries-old elm trees were screaming like their throats were being cut.