CHAPTER 2: DON’T FALL ASLEEP AFTER THE ACT!!!!! (OR DURING…)


“Don't have sex man. It leads to kissing and pretty soon you have to start talking to them.”

- Steve Martin


You’ll come out like a champ. Offer her a glass of water even. Sounds like a lotta work eh? Just don’t go overboard. She’ll think you’re creepy. TELL her that you had a good time. With a little more lyricality than that. Don’t expect her to know so by the spunk dripping from the used prophylactic in the corner. That little gooey exclamation is only good enough for you.

On a tangent, I highly recommend ordering condoms from the Internet. They are cheaper in bulk, like everything. And every man should need condoms in bulk, right? Goddamn right. Having that many will motivate you to use them. Do not keep them in your wallet, car, cell-phone case, shoe, any other retard place, unless you’re looking to procreate. Get a fresh one every time you go out. Don’t install it in the 5th change pocket unless it’s big enough not to scrunch the shit out of it. The integrity of your Johnson, and its freedom to do as it pleases, are of the utmost importance.

Don’t talk about your puppy Charley or your first trip to the zoo while you’re laying there in the afterglow. Just touch her lightly, maybe interlace legs a little. If she wants to talk, let her know you’re still conscious to listen. Make some response, but it needn’t be much. This can get more elaborate later in the game, and if you’ve established a precedent, be prepared to suffer. The ruse, however, remains worth it. If god forbid you should get that far, it will result in nice Christmas presents. After a sufficient amount of time has passed, kiss her somewhere not on her face, and roll your ass over.

Be personable in the morning. Even if you’re not. Leave your phone number, or Pizza Hut’s, depending. Don’t take hers unless you’ve actually been connived into taking a serious fancy to her. Leave it up to her. They like that control. And as annoying as multiple calls may be, that’s what caller ID is for. So many girls have had so many guys not call, and jerk them around, and yada yada yada, by turning the tables just a little and giving her what she feels she’s been giving out all this time, you’ll stand out. In a few hours, you may have ended up being better than any boy she’s ever dated.

But don’t be perfect. Never be perfect. Aside from it being suspect, most of the interesting ones need a touch of the bad boy, a touch of the jerk. Miss getting the door at least once, throw a glance or two at what could have been another woman, make nice talk, but give her smiles laden with most of what you know, move a little too fast at least once. There’s a fine line…creep or Casanova, and I would never claim to be the latter, but I’ve gotten along well enough by trying not to be the former.

All these things cross my mind as Susannah makes murmurs about going to the bedroom, and I murmur back that I’d like to have her right there in the living room. That I’d like to wake up with some rug burns.

The clothes slide off like they were never there in the first place. That primordial touch… the first brushing of full flesh to flesh, the way…she stops. What the fuck?

“Shit, I almost forgot. Wanna do some blow?” Susannah’s eyes darkle twinkly, and there is something tentacled and fierce just below her pupils. Maybe not so nice and normal; the blow question isn’t much of a question.

I check my nostrils. Only the right one clear, all of a sudden, like every time I gear up to do this. I think the left side is afraid of cocaine. Which is odd in itself, because uppers are a true rarity for me.

Naked, she sprawls across that burgundy carpet, a pale splash of flesh, as she cuts a few rails for us on the glass table. She fingers herself with a dab of the white powder right after she does her first line, arching an eyebrow and half a grin at my own nakedness. A tiny, pleasured intake of breath. Unexpected again, and so fucking hot. I have to restrain the very lizard-brain impulse to fuck her through the floor.

The drug is clean, painless. Good stuff. Like a shot of novocaine in the upper lip, the whole front of my face goes buzzing numb, my thoughts transmuted to crackling Tron cars racing each other. I wonder what her clit must be feeling right now…and since I’ve gotten a clean view of clean goods, I’m comfortable wondering what the number 5 coke and pussy combo tastes like, and if I can get an apple pie, instead of fries with that.

Let me tell you a story Tim. Down at Soulard, in the open-air market, as a child of no more than five or six - one of three or four legitimately clear memories I have of the grandfather I knew. I don’t remember anything about the day other than the ride in the manual transmission pickup which he was getting too old to handle, and this one thing: A barrel of peanuts. My grandfather talking to a friend, and he sees me eyeing the peanuts. He looks to the owner of the booth, who is doing business with someone else, and whispers to me, “Go ahead, he ain’t lookin’.” Free peanut, grandpa approved and certified.

I am a Thief.

And I’ve never felt sorry for it.

Peanuts, candy, food, baseball cards, books, anything I could steal from any of my jobs, money, drugs, accents, swaggers, nervous tics, traits, knowledge, hearts, and even souls. Though I wagered for those. Still…wagering against me in billiards is not a fair wager, so it depends upon your views of sharkery. I maintain that I stole those scraps of paper on which teenagers drunkenly, laughingly, signed away their everlasting spirits. I thought it was a good joke too.

Over a decade later, I still have those souls in my wallet. And I wonder what’s happened to those people.

Even my words. What pays my bills. Elements of everything I’ve read, people from every step of my life. I take it, make it my own, and sell it for what it’s worth.

This is the whitehot center of what has brought me success in these endeavors. I take from every encounter. I learn. Every person a scroll in a foreign tongue, and for every one deciphered, the easier the next becomes. I’ve made mistakes merely to see the reactions. I have set in motion months of emotional turmoil, just to see. I thrive on what I find. So much in our condition pushes me to delve deeper every time.

There is nothing more wonderfully delicate in this world than this animal too aware of itself. There is nothing more gratifying than opening that awareness further, to see what butterflies are folded inside these caterpillars.

But in the end…no matter what I have given or helped you see or become, still know that I have taken more away than I ever gave.

I am a Thief.

I steal Susannah’s breath. And allow her to borrow mine. I let her feel the length, breadth, and width of me. I open myself, because I am not cruel. Tim, one should never be cruel. They will after all, in time, become your characters. And who else can you love, if not the prototypes for your poor players?

Nothing else strikes me as does their singular beauty. For all my pursuits, glimpses into esoteric subjects and pleasures - distractions and diversions galore - the study of one woman eclipses all these things. They gather depth and clarity, their personalities defined by layers and layers of emotional scarring and mending. They feel the world so…acutely.

It may take one or two bad memories to create a brute, or a ticking time bomb of a man. Women are statistically, in comparison, hardly ever serial killers, rapists, or criminals of a psychopathic thread. Women mend. It’s men that are weak.

But that doesn’t mean something vile or hurt or wild isn’t left after we’ve done our impish, primitive damage. The last guy tinkered with Susannah’s thinker. Her face, her mannerisms, personality, and décor - all red herrings to draw away from this vein of poison shot through her. She may truly not even remember it exists until a glass of wine turns into three, and suddenly, gosh, there’s a bag of narcotics stashed somewhere in her spice rack.

There’s something more violent in her approach than I expected. And the violence is towards herself. She wants someone to touch her demon. Because it’s newborn. She wants to see what it does. What it’s for.

I’m a more than willing guinea pig.

Oh, speaking of scars, cultivate them. Physical ones, not emotional. They make great stories. If you get an appropriate wound, don’t do Neosporin. Pick at it. You’ll look worn, weathered, basically like a man. A good alternative to actually being a blue collar thug (There is a distinction, between blue collar, and blue collar thug. I’m not here to offend any Teamsters, or my own genealogy for that matter.), is looking like you were once a rough and tumble man. They want you to fix the sink as much as they want you to spigot sweet nothings in their ears.

The crudely jagged rip across my shoulder blade from a nail I staggered across at a wet t-shirt frat party; the slivers criss-crossing my fingers from shards of a shattered window I broke; the bleached white line from my first toy wagon in the depression on my upper lip where god supposedly whispered the secret and then told me to shut the fuck up about it: they all become evidence of this time I was attacked by a guy with a knife, and escaped. Sometimes it was by my father. Sometimes it was this hobo in New Orleans, the second time I went for Mardi Gras. Sometimes it was an ex. People think it’s really fucked up if your face has been cut. It doesn’t have to be even remotely disfiguring, but suddenly, your face is absolutely precious. It survived vicious assault, still to be beautiful. Or something like that.

Skid marks from rollerblading have become motorcycle accidents. A deep gouge in my right ass cheek, from an ill-considered gymnastic maneuver in a catering hall kitchen, has been an arrow I was pierced with. The white hairline tracers up the backs of my legs, from an icy soccer season and lots of slide tackles are remnants of a tumble/slide I took down part of a mountain, skiing naked on a dare.

You’re a reader. You know what people do, what their descriptions of it were like. Expand your life experiences, to whatever end. Your past is your own picture to paint.

The second round is finished, and Susannah is temporarily spent. Her shadow is nothing like mine. Hers, for the moment, is content. Sated with bruises and teeth marks, and even the rust of blood drawn from my chest, tiny ribbons of my flesh under her fingernails. The carpet is rough and pleasurable beneath my back, as I stare to the ceiling, watching the fan tick tick tick slowly round. My heart fires a relentless goose-step beat.

Relish the feel of her sweat mixed with mine cooling salty on my body. I tasted someone else’s heartbreak tonite. Again. Pleasure, in trade for your pain. Give me yourself so I can make you my own. Let me tear your worldview out by its extremities, and imprison it in my pen. It’s a fair deal for a few hours of feeling wanted and needed, isn’t it?

“Does it ever stop,” she asks. I figure she means the coke.

“We can sweat it out, if you want.” Half-spoon her suggestive-like.

“No, I meant the messes we make.”

“That’s a little heavy.” I hate this. It invariably ends up as revealing. One thing I can never really compromise is my ethos…so they usually end up seeing little bits of me. The ones left that are tangible, anyway. I don’t like being asked deep questions. I’m not a sharing person. But I also can’t help but answer. They deserve something from me. Endorphins alone just don’t cut the mustard with most women.

“I don’t think it’s beyond you.” She does some convincing with her ass against my privates.

I am too easily convinced. Endorphins work just fine for me.

“Why call it a mess? Why not just call it experience, and move on? If you’re not stupid, it’s a mistake you’ve learned not to make again. Nothing more. Just be glad that you won’t be fooled a second time.”

“Why does it always have to be about picking yourself up?”

“Because we’re born not knowing shit about a world our predecessors made infinitely complex. You’re bound to fall on your ass. Repeatedly.”

“It should get easier.”

“You can’t assume that. The older you get, the closer the actual difficult parts. Dying hurts. You have to learn to run with the knowledge that everything you love will be taken from you. Just like the other sacrificed gods, just like Jesus, just like whatever tiny or huge fall you’ve just taken: you never understand the sweet, if you don’t know agony. You die little deaths so you can come back tempered by the flame. It’s either that or allow yourself to be unmade.” The coke is waaayyy making me ramble.

“I don’t want my spirit refined. I don’t buy into that Eastern Zen koan the world is suffering crap. I just want the world to stop working against me.” She’s paying too much attention. And wants answers I’ve spent a lot of time digging for.

Sometimes they will see you for what you are. I’ve made a mistake here. I’m getting lax in my judgment. However, it’s far too late to bail gracefully.

“Stop believing that it’s suffering,” I tell her. “We have more control than we think. But rarely the courage to exercise it. Just by stepping sideways, looking at ourselves from a different viewpoint, we can completely change the way we think about what happens.”

“Where do you get off with this optimistic dogshit? I know it’s empty in there, “ she says rapping knuckles on my man titty. “Why do you think I dumped my bag for you? ‘Cause I saw that you don’t give a Fuck. I knew what you were thinking about me. I wanted to talk to you. Nihilism, Agnosticism, Fuck Youism whatever, give me something that isn’t predicated on false hope. I know you fucking know something I don’t.”

She’s looking me in the eyes saying this, and it’s not fair, because I wasn’t ready. My guard is down, of late, and I cannot fathom why. I knew this was too easy. I’ve more than finished with this vanity. These last maneuvers and reminiscences are only for this guide you requested. Sheer business. I shouldn’t be faltering like this.

I will come through on it. You deserve that much. Trapped on a boat for two years might leave one a bit bereft in these departments. I want you to be happy, mon ami. I want you to be the scribbler and the lusty lothario you want to be. But when this is complete, I’ll quit this tangled web.

“What I believe for myself, and what I believe and want for other people, are entirely different things. I wouldn’t wish thinking the way I do on anyone. I meant what I said,” is how I finally reply.

“Just as long as you’re not feeding me lines. I know the score. You’re smart…the first smart one I’ve talked to…maybe ever. I just wanted to know you were really saying something.” She gets the first genuine smile of the night, and sees that she’s clawed her way under my skin.

“The only choice is to move forward, regardless of our feelings on the subject. Otherwise you get wrecked all over the freeway. I’m sure there are at least a few people who you’re partly responsible for, that wouldn’t want you to finish life as asphalt burger.” More self-help prattle. But she seems satisfied.

She cuts up more coke. There isn’t anything else to be said. The brutal intent is out there, spoken, burned into backs and knees on the rug damp with our heat. Our psyches splinter and rethread in lipbleeding kisses and urgent rhythms. Two vampires drawing from each other, it’s finished too soon, and we cringe from a morning dawning with harsh green-edged light.

After a few glasses of water and the Teletubbies, we make pancakes. Thinking feels like chewing glass, so a powerful Bloody Mary accompanies my flapjacks. We eat and talk about the dying plants in her kitchen. A brief kiss, that feels too intimate. Too much like she’s on the verge of asking me to stay. From there, the hollywoodhillzhaze swallows me. I wait for the next assignment or opportunity.

I will not see Susannah again.