Apathy and Other Small Victories (4 page)

Still, when it comes to sex there’s always been the tacit understanding, or the pretense of the tacit understanding at least, that I’m in charge. That even if I’m not the guy in the back alley behind the Dumpster, I’m at least some guy. A guy at least.

Not with Gwen. She manhandled me.

It was always a blur of pain and fear and domination. I remembered it, and could only deal with it afterwards, as a collection of warped Polaroids stapled to the inside of my head:

Me flat on my back, my arms splayed out like I was being crucified, my legs kicking helplessly with her on top leaning over, crushing my biceps with her hands and screaming in my face.

Me on top of her, my back arched, my mouth wide open, my head almost snapping off at the neck because she was pulling my hair, while her other hand palmed my side with almost hydraulic pressure, collapsing my lung and squashing my spleen.

Me behind her but backed into the ornate wooden headboard of her bed, frantically trying to push her away as she slammed me against the wall with her ass.

Me on my back again, both my arms pinned above my head, her one hand vise-gripping both my wrists, her other hand flat on my chest, her fingers popping my ribs like bubble wrap.

Whatever position we were in, I was the one getting fucked. At first I tried exerting myself, gently, but firm enough to let her know that I could take over any time I wanted to. But then I felt the raw power, the machine-like force and resistance. It was unyielding. I would’ve had to push full out and strain with everything I had to overpower her, and even then I wasn’t sure that I could. I didn’t want to find out that I couldn’t.

Not that she was a big girl or anything. She was about 5‘7”, medium frame, built like any twenty-five-year-old woman who keeps in shape. But she was fucking solid, and thick, without being broad or outwardly mannish. Her muscles must have been coiled tighter than a normal person’s. Maybe they were more dense. There was something mutant about her. Because I don’t go around getting out-muscled by girls. Not usually anyway. But with her there was nothing I could do. She was the sadistic older brother who holds you down and slaps your forehead over and over again, lets a string of spit fall until it almost hits your face and then slurps it up, over and over again. Only this older brother was fucking me. I’m telling mom.

I tried faking an orgasm but she either didn’t notice or didn’t care. I tried bucking her off but that only made it hurt worse. My bones were weak from the pounding. My pelvis was shattered. My whole body felt like early onset osteoporosis. I’d have to join a swimming pool therapy class and lift a beach ball over my head with the rest of the old ladies at the Y. Is calcium more potent if you snort it? I was brittle. I was a broken man.

And then, after it was over, after she was done kicking my naked ass until there was nothing left of it, she had the audacity to curl up on my dislocated shoulder, nestle her head underneath my fractured jaw and sigh and say, “Hold me. Hold me tighter.”

“I can’t. My arm is broken in three places.”

“Ahh, that feels so good. To know you’re there. It feels so safe.”

This as I was openly weeping.

I lacked the strength to be incredulous, indignant, or even quietly sarcastic. It sounded like some cheap scam straight out of a trashy women’s magazine. Some
Please Your Man? Please Yourself!
article on how to use basic psychology and transparent strategy to create the illusion of power in your relationship. There was a cute chess metaphor about queen taking king while leaving all the other pieces on the board, and some anecdotal scientific evidence about how men like to hunt and make fire, how women find shoes and lipstick empowering.

I knew that article. I knew that magazine. And I could tolerate its simple, harmless, vapid philosophy. With enough alcohol I could even participate in it for a few hours at a time. But Gwen was reading a different magazine. One you can only get over the Internet from shadow publishers in former Soviet Republics. One you have delivered to a PO box wrapped in brown paper and sealed in plastic. This article was not called
Please Your Man? Please Yourself!
It was called
He Is Not Boss, He Is Bitch!
And it read in rough translation:

Strip him down. Toss him like rag doll and beat him within inch of life. Beat him until humiliation hurt worse than pain. Maybe set him on fire and laugh. Then be kitten. Tell him he is boss, is brute man, so he will pay for jewelry and fur coats. Pay for trip to America to find old man husband who will die in sleep and leave you rich fortune.

Magazines make me sad.

Some nights, as I lay in bed crying softly with my head under my pillow, I could hear the guy in the apartment above me having sex. I could hear him fucking his guinea pig. The squeals were unmerciful.

He used to take it out for walks on a leash, a long thin chain that was attached to the back of the patent leather corset the guinea pig was always wearing, bulging out of either side like a squashed sausage. It had a cute little leather slave hood strapped over its head so all you could see were its spastically twitching nose and panicked eyes as it scurried frantically all over the sidewalk, straining against the chain, trying desperately to escape. But it could not.

“Hey conchumbo!” its master said, walking towards me as I stood outside the building gasping in horror. I’d heard the squeals a few nights before and convinced myself that it was just the TV, or a warped recording of
The Chipmunks Sing Christmas
. It was the only way I could go on living. But really it was worse than I had imagined.

“You’re new to the building right?”

“Yeah,” I said, staring first at the guinea pig, then at him. He was at least 6‘5” and about 97 lbs, so pale he could’ve been albino. He had no eyebrows. He was wearing a long leather trench coat that billowed behind him as he walked and a T-shirt with a punk band on the front that I’d never heard of because they weren’t the Sex Pistols.

“What apartment you in?” he said in a strange, forced accent, like he’d seen
Scarface
way too many times.

“302.”

His leather pants were tight on his spindly legs. There were zippers everywhere.

“That’s right below me mambala! Sorry if I kept you up the other night, heh heh,” and he smiled and yanked the leash as the guinea pig tried to dart out into the busy street to die.

“I’m Mobo.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“My name is Mobo.”

“Is that Swedish?”

“No,” he said, and looked away. In a far off voice, he continued. “It was given to me by a Honduranian shaman, a man of great power and wisdom.” He had a long goatee shaved out away from his face into a nappy stalk that he stroked lightly with his whole hand as he talked. He looked like the pharaoh of a ruined perverted civilization.

“You lived in Honduras?” I said.

“No. The shaman did. I met him one night in an airport in Dallas. I had a layover.”

“I see.”

“And this bitch here,” he yanked on the leash again, “is Ivan.”

Ivan darted all over the sidewalk, so close to freedom yet so terribly far away.

“That outfit’s… something.”

“It’s waterproof,” he said.

“Yikes.”

Mobo looked me up and down, still stroking his goatee.

“Listen moncheechee, I know we just met, but I can tell things about people. I have this perception.” He cocked his head and listened to the clouds singing as they passed before the sun, but he couldn’t hear them because they were too far away. “I can tell you’re a man who knows how the game is played.”

“Oh jesus.”

“What do you say you come up to my apartment and we have a business convo, macho de pucho.”

“Uh, I can’t. I have to go see my girlfriend. Her name is Gwendolyn.” And in that moment, I loved her dearly.

“Ha ha, I know how it is my man. Las minas. Minatas! Ha ha ha.” And he laughed at the joke I didn’t know he’d made. “That’s good. That’s good. Stay busy. Keeps you sane. But if you ever need a little something, a little powder, a few pills, you come up to my place. Anytime. You want to get happy, get fucked up, get focused, I’ll show you what they
really
put in those piñatas!”

“Uh, what?”

“I sell fireworks too. M-80s, Roman candles, top of the line army issue shit. You get the downstairs neighbor discount.”

“That’s fantastic.”

“There’s a lot you can do in this town, a lot that can happen armurro. You just need to know the right people. Come up anytime. Unless you hear me taking care of some
other
business. Then you’ve got to wait your turn.”

And something inside of me died.

Mobo jerked the leash and dragged little Ivan towards the front door.

“Till we meet again mamado,” he said, and the door closed behind them.

And they went up to his apartment, the guinea pig stiffening his tiny legs but unable to put up any real resistance. Mobo whispered several Spanish-sounding gibberish words as he dragged the terrified animal into the boudoir. Then he kissed Ivan harshly on his little mouth, and turned off the lights. And many, many laws of God and man were broken in the darkness.

 * * *

“Ahhh, that was so good.”

It was after sex again and my head was broken. I was definitely bleeding internally. I think my brain was injured. I was having trouble doing simple multiplication. That’s the test I use to gauge head trauma whenever I’m really drunk or I fall down. I’d never had to do it after sex though. I thought 4 × 3 was 8, and 7 × 5 was 200. Fuck.

Gwen and I had been butting heads like rams. She’d lean over and
bang!
smack me right in the forehead, then rear back and do it again. She seemed to like it, but I was real dizzy. I was one of those rams that had no horns, a baby ram or a girl ram, so it was just my soft head getting bashed in. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing on that mountain anyway.

“Ow,” I said, lightly running my fingers over my forehead, looking for the crack in my skull. You would think that after so many sex beatings I’d have been numb to the pain, that I was all scar tissue and fused bone and dead inside, but she always found a way to make it hurt like new.

She took a breath like she was about to say something, but then she didn’t and I was glad. Then she did anyway.

“At first, I thought you were just using me,” she said.

“I definitely am.” I just wasn’t sure for what.

“Asshole!” she said, and punched me in the side. And she laughed as my kidney began to hemorrhage.

That’s the beauty of honesty. Everyone’s so unused to hearing it they just assume you’re kidding, and you get to feel very good and forthcoming without suffering any consequences except for traces of blood in your urine for the next day or two.

“No,” she said, “I was afraid you were just using me to get a
position
,” and she waited for me to catch on and chime in with something clever so we could be just like a witty couple on a sitcom. But I was too preoccupied with my internal injuries to play Smothers Brothers. I didn’t need laughs. I needed a doctor.

“A
job
I mean,” and she grinned, pleased with herself. “But you’re not, are you.”

“Ugh,” I said, and I flinched as she moved towards me, bracing myself for more punishing sex. But she draped her arm over my chest instead.

“Even if you were, I’d help you,” she whispered as I slipped into a coma.

“So?” she said, some time later.

“Huh?”

“Do you want me to talk to anybody for you?”

“Huh?”

“Haven’t you been listening? At Panopticon. Do you want me to talk to anybody about you maybe getting a job.”

“Huh?”

“You’d have to start out on the ground floor, maybe even as a temp. But you’d move up quickly. I know you would.”

“What?”

“There’s a lot of opportunity,” she said, and raised herself up on one elbow. “So do you want me to talk to anyone for you?”

“At your insurance company?” She actually seemed serious. “No thanks, I’m all right.”

She looked at me for a long time. Not long enough for me to turn my head and look at her, but still pretty long.

“You’re so,
independent
,” she said.

It was nice of her to want to believe the best about me. People tend to do that with the strangers they’re fucking. If she wanted to think that apathy and independence were the same thing, good for her. Maybe she was right.

And it was nice of her to want to help me out with a job, whatever her real motivations were. Apart from beating the shit out of me during sex she seemed like a nice person. But nice just isn’t enough anymore. Everybody’s nice, or they at least try to be, or pretend to be. You have to go to France or New York City to find a real asshole these days, and they’re only doing it because people expect them to, like those monkeys at the zoo who throw their shit at visitors through the bars. It’s more reputation than a real desire to smear feces all over somebody. And that’s just sad.

“What are you thinking?” Gwen said.

I pretended to be asleep.

Marlene had been teaching me sign language during those hours when Doug was on the couch in his office, sipping iced tea and sobbing into his hands. She said I was getting pretty good. I knew the whole alphabet and a couple of words, but I mostly said
fuck
,
shit
,
dick head
,
asshole
and
sex
. It was just like first grade.

And just like in first grade,
shit
was my favorite. To make the sign you stick out your thumb and then close your other hand around it, then pull your thumb down out of your fist. It’s disturbingly graphic. You can almost hear the
plop
. Marlene said I should be a translator, like at the United Nations, but there’s no country where everybody’s deaf so I don’t know who I could represent. And even if there was a deaf country I doubt me telling the Lebanese ambassador to go fuck himself in sign language would go over too well, geopolitically speaking.