Beautiful Blemish (5 page)

Safety

We were caught up in the moment. We were sitting in the front and the stage was right there.

    
I had dry-humped my girlfriend before the show. My buttons still buttoned and my zipper still zipped. I came in my underwear and then wiped it out with a towel. Then we went to see a popular band. The lead singer was very cute but seemed to have problems with her weight. She would look really good in a video and then she was all frumpy in some magazine. She's the kind of singer who spun around when she danced. She did it in her videos that way too. The audience loved it when she did that. They clapped and screamed. Her band played this happy, but kind of depressing, folk music.

    
When I fucked the girl before the show it was something that wasn't planned, but we had done it like that before. She had her clothes on too. She could make me do it that way because she was new. We weren't sick to death of looking at each other. Our bodies fit together well and she would tell me exactly what to do and it was just right. "Spread your legs a little," she said.

My friend Shawn went to the show with us and sat beside me, mesmerized by the cute
folky
singer and her thin, flowing dress. There was a time when making your dress swish around and spin with you was pretty cool.

    
It was a mellow show, maybe about half of the people were up out of their seat and dancing. We sat down during the slow songs. Shawn was really getting into it and didn't even really look at the band at all. He just stared at the singer and smiled real hard.

    
When it happened during the band’s #1 hit song I wasn't sure what to do. I felt everyone's uneasiness, their disapproval. The mood of the place totally changed. Shawn had jumped on stage and was walking toward the singer with his arms open, as if to hug her. Two of the guys in the band converged from each side and stood in front of her like bodyguards. Someone ran up behind Shawn, grabbed him, and led him off the stage. A roadie or one of those guys with the laminated name tags. He didn't get a hug from the singer. In fact it frightened her. I think she even stopped singing for a moment and the audience seemed concerned for her safety. After the song she said, "Thank you" and it sounded forced, like she didn't know what else to say. Watching the rest of the show was like watching someone display a birthday cake with the frosting all smeared up.

The next day I was making a mix tape of songs for my girlfriend and for some reason I decided to put the #1 hit
song
at the end of both sides of the tape. I wanted her to really like each side of the tape and then have this uneasy feeling at the end. Our memory of that
song,
and especially at that odd moment when people thought Shawn was some sort of weird stalker--the second chorus when everyone became concerned for the singer's safety--it was my attempt at a dark personal joke.

    
But one of the weird things was that she claimed her cat liked that song. Whenever she played it at home the cat would come and jump on her lap and rub against her, purring.

A few months later, her cat started to act tired and dizzy all the time. She took it to the vet and found out that it had brain cancer or something just as bad. She had to put it to sleep.

    
After that we started to drift apart. She never listened to the tape anymore and I started to feel an odd guilt. I wanted to see her and cry with her but I just couldn't do it. I took back the mix tape and listened to it, thinking I could find something to fix on it. I heard the end of each side, that song. It didn't feel the same. I began to feel what Shawn must have felt like, being taken off the stage that night--overcome by admiration, and no hug to show for it. The song was ruptured and monstrous. It had turned into something completely horrible.
 

Personal

My personal history or who I am is not relevant here. I want you to look at everyone, besides me, and think about saying yes to all of them. Yes.

The other day I had to get drunk to save my marriage. My wife forced me. We went to the store and we were ready to fight. She told me to pick a beer. She said she had to clean us out a little.

    
I was being difficult. I wanted to play basketball at the park. We took the 12-pack out of the car and placed it courtside. She accused me of being unfeeling as I shot 3-pointers. I wasn't doing very well. I always wanted to impress people with my athletic ability. When I was young I used to play basketball until I couldn't see.
Until I was lost in the dark.

    
"Are you afraid of losing control, or are you afraid of having too much control?" I think she asked me. I was confused by her question. It felt like a trick. My wife's issues were solely about our future.
About turning into my parents.
My parents barely speak.

 
   
I drank many beers while I played--I know it wasn't right. I admit I was wrong.

I have this funny thing I do when I'm lying. I laugh. People can stand there and tell me all these bad things I've done and I just laugh and laugh and laugh. I deny all the accusations and I laugh. It's an easy thing to do. Blowing these hard nervous sounds out of my mouth while my heart or whatever it is breaks inside me. I'll blow out every fucking candle in the house with it, with these sounds, with my mouth.

The dog's leash wasn't long enough. And it was stupid, the dog was. I had to take him for a walk and it was always roping around me. For my dignity, I didn't spin with the rope. I just dropped it and let it circle around me until it unwrapped from me.

    
We had to do this many times, the dog and I.

    
The neighbor girl was out in her yard. She saw the dog doing this to me. The dog, a galloping kind of Lab, didn't know anything yet. It wasn't trained. The girl watered her flowers in the heat. Her body, her house, the low sun, all of it quivered and warped like an old film. You can imagine what I did to the dog. You can imagine that the girl ran inside her house and wanted no part of me. Knowing what you know now, you can guess that I wasn't laughing.

Blowjob

She said she was going to give me the blowjob from Hell. So we found a place to park on the way home. It was a cemetery.

    
She said her cousin had given her boyfriend the best blowjob. She said they talked about it at work. She said she told her cousin that she was going to give me the blowjob from Hell that night. It was a competition.

    
But who is to judge which oral sex is better? I thought about asking but decided against it. It would imply that I wanted a blowjob from her cousin. I'm not sure if I would have disputed this, her cousin giving me one. They were different types of women. So different that I wondered if they would even
be
friends if they weren't related.

    
It was going good there in the cemetery. It was an act she prided herself in, like how she was proud of her tits. I liked her tits. They were small but good. They had a shape. Friends of mine had seen her tits and said that they were good ones, proud ones.

    
I didn't last long enough. She seemed disappointed in me. Maybe we both had an idea in our heads what the blowjob from Hell would be like, and how long it would last. It wasn't to be.

    
When I started the car and pulled back onto the thin winding cemetery road, I ran over a couple of small tombstones. We were stuck for a moment, but then the ground became more solid, and we drove off. We looked at the dark landscape, with all its concrete teeth sticking up and poking out of the ground. The ground so dug-up and reapplied.

Legs

I wanted to touch it through her shirt. I wanted to suck the tit. This is what feels like a cleft to me. When there are all these public people doing public things and I stand there thinking about crawling up between a woman's legs. I feel like I need eyes everywhere all over me. I feel like I should have eyes everywhere to see it all.
All of the sexy women in their unique clothes.

    
One of them had her face pressed against a shop window. She had a milk mustache and it was smearing there. Also she was shaking.

    
But she was pretty and I could not stop looking at her heavy, hanging chest. It makes everything seem new again.

I've adopted a game from a friend. She told me that when she drives home from work, she looks at all the men walking on the sidewalks in her part of town. She has to pick the two best-looking ones before she reaches her house, her driveway. When she gets inside, in her bedroom, she masturbates while thinking of them. "If I put something in my mouth, I'll cum very quickly," she tells me. I play that game now, too. I like the challenge, but sometimes I don't win. Sometimes, there are no women on the streets.

    
Also, you must know, and it is very important for the details in your mind to add this in: I don't need to put anything in my mouth to cum.

When I was a boy I wanted to bite my cousin's knees. I wanted to pierce her pantyhose. I would go into the laundry room and rub her pantyhose against my mouth.

    
Now, when I find myself in a room full of legs, I can only think:
This is great! This is amazing! But...how did I get here?

Factory People

Sometimes I ran out of money eight or nine days before payday.
 
I called the numbers for my credit cards to check their balances.
 
In
Arkansas
, it was the worst.
 
Once, two of them were over the limit and one had five dollars and nineteen cents credit on it, just enough for a hamburger at
Hardee's
.
 
I checked on my Chevron card and found out I still had about $25 on that one.
 
It saved me again.

    
I slipped Levi's over my tattered long johns and put on my shoes, leaving the laces untied.
 
I climbed into the Jeep and aimed it toward the gas station.
 
It was a gas-sucking thing that I got stuck with after my divorce in
Montana
.
 
The monthly payment on it was killing me; it was more expensive than my alimony.
 
My ex-wife made more money than I did and she ended up with the car that was paid for.
 

    
I worked at a factory where we assembled wooden furniture.
 
I was doing cribs for a couple of weeks.
 
I couldn't wait to get back to the shelving units—where Danny supervises.
 
A guy I talked sports with.
 
He was about 50 and had worked there for twenty years.
 
He actually cared about the craft of it all.
 
When I was doing cribs I got stuck working with Jenna, this big black lesbian who talked about other fat people all day: Rosie O'Donnell, Kathy Bates, that woman who's the daughter of one of the Mommas and Papas.
 
It wasn't such a bad job, though.
 
At least it didn't smell.
 
I had worked in some factories that smelled like a bathroom after a high school
kegger
.

    
I put in five dollars of gas at the Chevron, so they didn't think I was there just for food.
 
That would've been too embarrassing.
 
Living off a gas station credit card.

    
When I went into work that afternoon, Jenna gave me some look like she knew a secret about me.
 
I quickly got sick of the grin and asked her what was up.

    
"I understand you're a poet," she said.

    
"Where did you hear a thing like that?" I asked her.

    
"My girlfriend Mary says she really likes this poet she hears down at the Acme Cafe on Sunday nights.
 
And I don't think there're too many people around with a name like Guy
Killman
."

    
I grinned a little out of the side of my mouth.
 
I always tried to keep my writing away from people I work with—people who probably didn't read books.
 
"I guess you found me out then," I admitted.
 
"I don't tell many people about that stuff."

    
She reached up and turned down the radio on top of the glue machine.
 
"Oh sure, but you don't mind getting up in front of a bunch of strangers and saying it out loud."

    
I shrugged.

    
"Are you going to bring in some of your poems so I can read them?
 
I like poetry.
 
I had a friend in
Alabama
who wrote the most beautiful stuff you’d ever read.
 
I'll bring in a book he did.
 
You can look at it."

    
This was the part that was always uncomfortable for me.
 
"Well, you know my stuff doesn't really fit into the 'beautiful' category.
 
It's mostly about being messed around with by women and being mad about it."

    
"Not too uplifting, huh?"

    
"I'd say not."

The next day I had brought some poems in for her.
 
I had a few of them photocopied on nice resume' paper and I told her she could buy them for a dollar each if she liked them.
 
I felt really low for doing that but she said she'd bring me ten bucks the next day.

    
By the end of the week she was raving about my poems, even going to the Acme that weekend to hear me read.
 
She also bought me a drink and got me talking.
 
I was telling her about how I ended up there, in
Arkansas
, assembling baby cribs for temp agency pay.
 
How I rented a house as small as a garage and I hadn't even had the heat turned on yet.
 
The next day at work she brought me some kitchen stuff she said I could have if I wanted.
 
Some of it I really needed--bowls and forks and spoons.
 
For some reason, I found that spoons disappeared as frequently as socks in a bachelor's house.
 
She also brought the
Alabama
guy's poetry book.
 
I hadn't heard of him before, but he had a few good publishing credits.
 
At lunch I struggled through the first few pages.
 
It was bland work, swinging from unemotional to overemotional, often in the same stanza.
 
I couldn't see any similarities to my work at all, but she insisted I was her new favorite poet.
 
She invited me over for dinner the next night and I felt I had to accept.

At her house I was surprised at how normal everything seemed.
 
Generic paintings and thrift store crafts hung from the walls.
 
It reminded me of my aunt's home in
Idaho
.

    
I recognized her girlfriend, Mary, from the cafe readings.
 
I even remember her reading a poem once.
 
It was about playing in a water sprinkler with her dad, and even though I wasn't into "nice poetry" I found it comforting, easy to listen to.
 
I complimented her on it.
 
She smiled and asked me to sign the poems Jenna bought off of me, "For when you get famous," she said.

    
As I was signing them, trying hard to make my signature look neat, not like a 6th-grader, as my mother once accused, I asked them why exactly they liked my poems.

    
"I like them because they're sad.
 
And I think writing that is sad is really healthy," said Jenna.

    
Mary thought about it for a minute.
 
"They're just real emotions and thoughts that most people have when they're alone."

    
What they said made me feel good and helped reaffirm my thought that most people, no matter how happy, have angry, frustrated thoughts, too.

    
For dinner, we had spaghetti with a pasty sauce and French bread from a bakery that I frequented during my first weeks in my new state.
 
I told the two of them about being low on cash after moving from
Montana
, about how I discovered the bakery and was surprised at how cheap the doughnuts were. Their glazed doughnuts were fifteen cents each and I'd buy ten of them and that would be my food for the day.
 
They laughed at the story but had a concerned look on their faces while they smiled.

    
After dinner, Jenna showed me some more poems by the
Alabama
poet and I had to tell her that it wasn't really my cup of tea.

    
"Oh, it doesn't float your boat," she kind of said and asked at the same time.
 
She started to say something else about the man but stopped herself short, breathing heavily.
 
Maybe she was in love with the guy from
Alabama
.
 
I thought she was mad, but then she said she had a present for me.
 

    
I loomed in the living room and looked at dusty photographs around the television.
 
They all seemed about ten years old.
 
"How do you like working at the factory?" Mary asked me.

    
"It's okay.
 
I mean, I'm starting to make money anyway.
 
I'm still looking for a job at one of the radio or TV stations though."

    
She pulled out a joint and lit it up. The scent mixed in nicely with the spaghetti smell.
 
"Jenna's been there for nine years now," she told me.

    
"I don't know how she can stand it," I said, then felt bad for saying it.
 
I was very conscious of how people in the south felt that northerners often talked down to them.

    
"Oh, it's just easier to fall into some things,” Mary said. “The more you work at a place like that, the harder it is to leave and start over somewhere.
 
Why did you move here anyway?"

    
I knew the answer and always felt foolish when I had to speak it.
 
For a few seconds I tried to think of another answer that might seem logical, but had to settle for the truth.
 
"I just got bored with living in
Montana
.
 
I wanted to try something totally different.
 
I had a radio show there, but it was only on the weekends.
 
My ex-wife was starting to hate me too much."

    
Mary sucked smoke into her mouth and straightened her back as the marijuana cast its spell on her.
 
She didn't respond to my answer.
 
I looked at her and almost forgot she was a lesbian.
 
I wouldn't have really guessed it until Jenna talked about her at work.

    
"I got some blankets for
ya
'," Jenna announced, as she came out of the hallway and into the living room.
 
She set two dark green army blankets on the couch, by my coat.
 
"These will help you get through the winter if you don't get your heat turned on," she said.

    
"I got an electric heater," I said almost defensively.

    
"You're
gonna
need a little more than that.
 
You may have to find someone to snuggle with too.
 
That helps."

    
I had actually met someone two weeks before that I was starting to develop a romance with, but I was apprehensive because I was broke and divorced.
 
It was a girl named Dawn, a small thing with large divided breasts.
 
We had to be discreet when we were together because she was just seventeen and I was 25.
 
There was something very pure about her, something I'd never really seen before, maybe a southern kind of glow.
 
It drew me to her, and made me always want to hold her close.