Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (18 page)

Stan appeared at the doorway.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up,” I whispered, from the toilet.

“I’m not asleep,” he said. “You say ‘sorry’ too much. I’ve been awake the whole time.”

“Why?” I grabbed one of his white duck hand towels and wiped my face, getting a glimpse in the medicine cabinet mirror.

He stepped behind me and looked into my reflection. He must have been six feet five. Blue eyes, drooping lids. He braced his arms on the sink’s edge, so I was caught in the middle between the sink and his chest. If I moved one inch, I’d be in his arms.

He spoke to me in the looking glass. “You’re driving me crazy, you know that.”

He said it, he didn’t ask. But I still shook my head. I couldn’t breathe.

“Yeah, the way you walk around this place, the way you smell …”

I could smell myself, too; I could smell him, like gunpowder and Mr. Daniel’s — but I couldn’t speak. My legs shook a little, my knees still stinging from where the flesh had been scraped off in the parking lot. Stan felt me shiver, too. He put his long hands on my shoulders and turned me around to face him so my bottom was pressed against the sink.

“You know what you’re doing to me?” he repeated. He got down on his knees in one motion, parted the shirttail of the chamois I was wearing, and pressed his face right into my cunt. I grabbed the sink to stop from falling over. He steadied my thighs with his hands. His fingers were like soft sandpaper.

He was crazy; it was like he had to get inside me — he had to get his entire head in me. He was going to cannibalize me from the cunt out, put my cock in his pot and stir it until I screamed. The only way to relieve his ache was to take us both right down the rabbit hole. I could feel myself getting bigger and smaller every second.

“He’s a great fuck …” Wasn’t that Temma’s advertisement when Stan had first arrived in town? Who was she talking about? Not this man. Not where he was taking me now.

I gasped from holding my breath for so long.

Baby.

I couldn’t speak, but he heard me. His tongue was stroking me, and it was all I could hang on to. I doubled over. Stan stood all the way up and lifted me one more time — this man was never going to let my feet touch the floor again.

I hopped onto his waist, hugging my legs and arms around him. He sank into me, like the last piece of a puzzle. My head dropped back. He squeezed my bottom to lift me just an inch off of his cock.

He was going to make me wait.

“I’m going to make sweet belly love to you, till you come for me,” he said, carrying me across the floor to his bed. His sheets were blue jersey; an
Economist
lay half-read on the floor. I bit into his shoulder.

Who was this man? Xena, Temma — none of them looked desperate when they said his name. Their bellies didn’t tremble like mine.

Susie. He called my name over and over.

I pulled all his weight onto me, and he shuddered. The tables turned.

“Are you okay?” I guess that was his big question.

Yeah, I was. Daylight was breaking. He got up to get me another whiskey and a ginger ale. I asked him if I could roll a joint, and he tossed me a baggie from under some Emma Goldman autobiographies on the floor.

“What are you reading her for?” I asked, licking the Zig-Zag.

“I’ve been reading Emma since I was a draft dodger.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. How’d you do it?”

“I wore a dress.”

“Like Phil Ochs?” I threw the sheets off. “Or like a Teamster girlfriend singing “The Draft Dodger Rag”?”

“How can you be old enough to know that song?” he asked.

“I’m not.”

I started it, and he caught up to me on the second line:

Yes, I’m only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen
And I always carry a purse

I reached out for him with my scabbed-up hand. “I’m not eighteen, but I know a lot of things,” I said. “You underestimated me — I guess I thought you were an asshole, too.”

“Yeah, you got that right,” Stan said, and took a drag. “How old are you?” He exhaled. “No, don’t tell me.”

I wouldn’t. I couldn’t stand to lie apart from him. I was an infant; I wanted him to cradle me and never let my toes touch the ground.

“How can I go off to Detroit and leave without you? Shit!
” I said. I straddled his lap and blew a smoke ring. His blue eyes framed right in the center. His cock grew hard again underneath me.

Everyone — everyone but Stan and a couple other comrades — was heading to Michigan for the summer camp. This was the first moment I hadn’t craved going away. I never wanted another day to break.

“You’re going to be fine,” he said. “You gotta go.” He took the joint from me. “There’s not a man alive who’s not an asshole — that’s all you need to know — but you’re gonna be okay.” His hard-on started to soften.

Why’d he have to go and say that? Fuck, Stan. Didn’t he get it? I would have told him I loved him right then, but I knew it wasn’t cool.

Instead, I moved his hand between my legs again, and the wetness shut him up. Feel how I feel. I leaned down to take his mouth in mine and make all the nonsense stop.

Greyhound to Detroit via Amarillo

This was Motown, this was New France
Where the Chippewa did the firedance
That was long ago
This is here and now
But the memory still remains somehow

— Sam Roberts

I
prepared for Detroit two ways: like I might be back in two weeks, and like I might settle in for good. Tracey promised that if I didn’t come back, she would ship my neatly-packed boxes to me. I noticed she scrawled, “This is a bad idea” and “Come back baby come back” on my record crates.

I was only taking a rucksack on the Greyhound. It was like hiking with my dad — “take only the bare minimum.” I decided to bring three paperbacks, which Bill and I diligently picked out from my favorite bookstore in Los Angeles, Papa Bach’s.

Papa Bach’s was the heart of beatnik Venice, an ocean poet’s diaspora, even if it was on Santa Monica Boulevard in West L.A. The never-scrubbed floors were laid out like a hoarder’s attic, rat-packed shelves ready to teeter over under their own weight. Stream-of-consciousness ruled the store’s organization, where sections like “Poetry” led to “Madmen,” which led to Charlie Manson’s song lyrics.

My dad made a beeline for some of his friend’s chapbooks on the poetry shelves. “This is a novel,” he said, “but they keep it here anyway,” offering me a copy of Charles Bukowski’s Post Office.

My eyes brightened. “I didn’t know he wrote a novel!” I said, and snatched it out of his hands. “About working in a postal office!”

My dad laughed at me. “Yeah, the big time.”

“I love stories about what it’s like to work somewhere!”

“I know, honey; this is one of the best.”

I asked Bill if there were any good Commie writers I hadn’t read yet in my IS study group.

“Yeah, lots.” He disappeared into the stacks and returned with John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World.

“How about a thriller?” he asked. He had found a copy of Day of the Jackal for a dime.

I was set. I made seven peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly sandwiches. I had granola with chocolate chip cookies. I wore my green Starry Plough T-shirt, weathered hiking boots, and my mother’s old denim sailor’s coat.

The L.A. Greyhound Station was in Skid Row, downtown. It smelled like urine and disinfectant. I left before six am and was so sleepy I fell into the front row behind the driver and didn’t wake up until Barstow, the last of California’s desert before you cross the state line. I was starving, and it was my first chance to look around to see who my traveling posse was for the next three days.

I was the only passenger under sixty. Every row was seniors, people who looked like Oxnard’s finest — no doubt avid George Putnam listeners. Well, no matter, that’s why I brought my books. I had a lot of diary writing I wanted to do, too — but I had to go to the bathroom first.

“Take care now, little lady,” the driver said, when I got up to head to the toilet. “The smoking section’s at the back of the bus.”

It seemed no matter how tough I tried to dress, everyone treated me like an innocent little lamb — I just had that kind of face. I smiled at him. “I can handle the Marlboros!” The real challenge would be inhaling the toilet stall air freshener.

The back row of every Greyhound bus has a bathroom on the left and three seats on the right. In those days, the passengers could open their own windows; hence, the smoking section had a vent.

To my great pleasure, I saw that the two smokers in the aisle so far were young, long-haired, and probably smoking something besides Camels. Hallelujah — I was going to move my seat.

It was a boy and a girl, but they weren’t related. Lizzie, the hippie girl, was as tiny as an elf, traveling with her skateboard, getting off in Albuquerque to face a felony charge of defacing a McDonald’s — she’d sprayed “Barf, Baby, Barf” on their cement walls one prom night and had been on the lam for six months in Los Angeles. Her parents had told her she had to come in before it got a lot worse.

“How bad could it get?” I asked.

“Oh god, don’t ask — but my mom’s a tiger,” she said. We talked so fast I didn’t see half the desert slip by.

The young man propped against the open window was beautiful — like a storybook Jesus with a faint scar on his cheek. “Jesus Meets Chuck Conners in
The Rifleman
.” But he hardly said a word. He asked to borrow my Day of the Jackal, and looked grateful when I broke out the PBJ sandwiches. I told him I could cut the crusts off for him like my grandma did in Oxnard.

Lizzie and I hugged goodbye in Albuquerque. No new girls got on board. “Jesus” asked me if I wanted to smoke a joint before the driver called
us back inside. We walked to the alley behind the station and lit one up. It was quiet next to the trash bins.

“You sure are pretty,” he said.

“Me? You’re the one who’s pretty,” I said. The sun was going down, and when he turned to face the last light from the horizon, his eyes were golden.

We returned to the bus, just the two of us in the back, and I asked him if he wanted something else to eat. He reached up to take a cookie out of my hand, but put it back in my lap, his head hanging down.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “What’s going on?” I tilted his head up with the tips of my fingers, and his lips parted like a child’s. Oh my god. I had to put something there, so I kissed him. A little voice in my head said, This is not mercy; this will not help, but the bigger voice said, Feed him now, and that’s what won.

He sucked on me for the next ten miles. It felt good, and then it felt sweaty — bad sweat, like it was never going to end. I pushed him off. “I like kissing you, but you gotta tell me what’s wrong.”

He rolled his eyes — the first sign of a sense of humor. “Will you read to me from the Jackal?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said. I know what it’s like to work yourself up to saying something difficult. I picked up the book from where he stopped on page four. Could he not read? I didn’t want to ask. I jumped in from where I’d left my bookmark:

Col. Rodin: We are not terrorists, you understand. We are patriots. Our duty is to the soldiers who’ve died fighting in Algeria, and to the three million French citizens who have always lived there.

The Jackal: And so you want to get rid of him.

Jesus put covered my hands with his on the book’s open page. “I’m AWOL,” he said.

“Oh, shit …” I said. “How long, where from?”

Jesus looked around the rest of the seats like he was just noticing that the Ozzie and Harriet brigade surrounded us. He shook his head gravely at me, in a way I recognized from the IS.

“Are you going to keep me on a need-to-know basis?” I asked, trying to get another smile out of him. “I don’t even have a name to call you.”

“My name’s Beau!” he said, like that was one thing he would never deny.

“Well, I thought you were Jesus ’cause you look so sad and beautiful.”