We Come to Our Senses (6 page)

I don't dare look at them. Rather, I force myself deeper into memory as the gas fumes embalm me. I fix my eyes on the pocket watch, and inhale, and daydream.

At my going-away party, she said, “Don't get all Los Angeles on us.”

“Impossible,” I replied. “You exist, here. So I'll never really leave.”

Malapalacas con grapacomundos y fucking stupid cohbomayaca!

There, on the edge of the party guests, she hovers. She sparks and crackles and is a thousand times warmer than the California sun, but without a whisper of its dry suffocation.

Órale,
homies
, the Mexican woman says to the young
vatos
, and starts mocking her man.
Look at the
cabrón
who thinks he can handle a real Chicana. Thinks he can—

The
pachuco
slaps the woman in the jaw, and I am right back in the Valley. Full of fire and love and bad timing and southern manhood, I have a good idea about what to do now. I know exactly what to do now.

He flicks his cigarette into her black hair, calls her a whore.

“Hey?” I shout at him. “Get away from her, man.”

Like a gunshot he's on me, the first blow knocking stars into my vision. He strikes and smashes until I fall, the grated parking lot ripping my chin. He then mocks my accent while kicking my ribs—
Get-uh-way frum her may-un!
The
vatos
cut up in the background.

A kick to the head launches me beyond the liminal; I am home now, with her. I savor her electricity, respire her scent. Tangled up in a patchwork quilt, we watch the daybreak lighten the black-green Atlantic. We kiss, forever, beneath the dry rustle of palmetto leaves. Then I leave her. True story.

Ferric saliva, alongside a “Hurry the fuck up, girl!” drag me back to Southern Cal. My ribs hurt so bad that I shiver. I try to stand up but my knees buckle, so I just kneel on the oil-stained concrete. Wipe the blood from my mouth, spit.

I look up to see the Latina steal the last of my possessions from the car. She runs to join her partner in the golden convertible. They look at me and burst into laughter.

“Later, bitch!” the woman yells at me, then kisses her man deeply. As the car peels out, she slings my pizza like a Wham-O. When the Cadillac meets the street, she hurls my script in the air. A litter of loose pages arch and flit in the couple's wake, tumbling high against the backdrop of endless L.A. strip mall.

Blending into the streetscape, highlighted by chrome and asphalt, I know this Mexican woman is no criminal. Rather, she is lovely, ethereal. Primed with personal agency. She steals my pocket watch and conspires to humiliate me, yet I can't help but smile, and picture her a shade away from rediscovering some innocence, deep, deep inside.

Because I know about chicks.

Clean

THROUGH THE BATHROOM
door I thanked Joy very much for her critique, and then stepped into the shower, which was scalding. No response came. I tucked my left arm behind my back, clasped my right wrist, and clenched. Forced myself to endure the temperature while staring down her beloved loofah. (This was all, of course, following shave and defecation, both of which had been peppered by Joy's grooming suggestions.) Yes, I got in, tucked and clasped as always, and began to boil myself. After some minutes, my body vibrating like a tuning fork, no fistula for release, the water at last became sufferable, at which point I exhaled, clutched the bar soap, and began to clean.

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.

Joy knocks on the door and asks if she can get in, says she's sorry about lecturing me. Um, I'm using the
thing
, I answer, and she says, Good for you, isn't it nice? and comes in to pee without wondering if I care. It is nice, I say, though the verbena foam is fading. A vinyl curtain between us, the soggy loofah rope around my wrist, I picture her bound up with her sister who lives in Montgomery, which produces some elongation. Terrified, I hold my breath until she exits, and force myself to recall a time before the desert. Joy remembers not to flush, which I love and appreciate.

Taped to the jar that held the ear was a weathered postcard of a black man, strung up above the manicured lawn of a historic southern courthouse. It was not our courthouse, but was quite similar, and the lawn featured a white marble
statue of a soldier atop a tall pedestal, no doubt dedicated by the ladies of the town in the first decade of the twentieth century, just like ours was. In the picture, everyone seemed to be gathered around the marble soldier: the lynchee, men, women, and one little girl. The spectators were all white, though none of them looked rich. The hanging black body was beyond mutilated, and the face collapsed. People grinned from beneath. At these events it was not uncommon for men and their boys to penetrate the live body with corkscrews, extracting small tubes of flesh before the hanging. (They usually only cut the ears, nose, and penis off after death.) I hated it, just hated being so constantly at war: with a statue, a postcard, an ear. With love. Looking at Alex, I was devastated to think that by discussing the jar's significance I might infect him with my battle. Who was he to have to worry about the southern past? What else but sorrow would it bring him to question it?

On the one hand, statistically it just makes sense: since there seem to be fewer homosexuals than straight men, there would be fewer soldiers (hetero) distracted by sex, and thus fewer mistakes made on account of lust-based preoccupations. I mean, given the numbers, no women soldiers equals less lust, right? From the other side of the argument, I just can't fathom a bunch of fags wanting to rape their fellow Joes all over the desert. I stepped out of the shower and toweled off, then lifted the commode to stare at Joy's pee and tissue, and flushed. Alex asked if he should bring the ear to class to show what happened before civil rights. I said, No, and could tell that he was dejected. I felt bad and wanted so goddamn
much to hold him. Instead, I told him that he should return the ear to the basement, and never speak of it again. Told him that, if possible, it was generally best to stick to the proven methods, advice which I believe we should all remember to remember, lest things begin to get away from us.

They