Lit Riffs (5 page)

“Or why we should stay away from each other at all times.”

“Face it: we’re both snobs.”

“We don’t like anybody or anything—”

“That’s ’cause nobody and nothing is good enough for us—”

“Or so we
think
—”

“So here we are, pretending we’re right and they’re wrong—”

“When really we both know better—”

“If we don’t they’ll be letting us know real soon.”

“Would you rather spend the rest of your life in prison or the nuthouse?”

“That’s a rough one. Gimme some time. Neither.”

“My answer exactly.”

“But what’s gonna happen when we get to the point—”

“Wait, I already know what you’re about to say—”

“When we both think the same thing—”

“Always—”

“So we no longer need to talk at all?”

“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”

“Either that or find out what we can’t stand about each other and go our separate ways.”

“All right. So we’ve agreed about all the things we
hate
—so much so we don’t even need to discuss them….

“Yeah …”

“Yeah, well, what about the things we actually
like
?”

“What about ’em?”

“Well, JUST WHAT ARE THEY? I mean,
I wanna see an itemized list
.”

“Can’t be done.”

“Why not?”

“Guess.”

“We don’t like enough things to fill out the fingers of one hand much less a whole sheet of paper.”

“Right again.”

“Though there is one thing …”

“Yeah … ?

“Well … I’m kinda hesitant to bring it up …”

“For God’s sake, WHY?”

“Because … well …”

“Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?”

“Uhh …”

“You are. After all we’ve been through.”

“Yeah, but look at it this way: when the rest of human experience is totally worthless, and we see eye to eye to such an extent we can barely talk, that leaves just ONE THING.”

“Hmmm … and what if that runs out, too?”

“It won’t.”

“Why?”

“Trust me.”

“Why?”

“You’ve got nothing better to do.”

“True enough.”

“Hey.”

“What?”

“Let’s fuck.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

From that night it began to seem as if they measured their time more in terms of when and for how long they had to be apart than when they saw each other. They became so attuned to each other’s thought patterns that conversation did indeed sometimes become all but superfluous. Yet, curiously, that was all they lived for. Or so they thought. So he thought. There was never the slightest doubt in his mind.

After a few months, she began to have second thoughts. They were
too much
alike. Lovers brought something unexpected, some tension to the relationship that made it click, cook, and change. This was more like brother and sister. Which she never told him, but she increasingly found less than dizzyingly erotic. It was simply too pat. Yet there he was, as happy as she had ever seen anyone be in her life. Her reservations made her feel guilty, and the fact that she didn’t voice them compounded the guilt. She was hiding plenty from him, more all the time in fact. She couldn’t stand the thought of him being unhappy. If things continued on their present course, she was going to end up bored out of her fucking mind. She was beginning to feel like his mother: precisely because she understood all this and he didn’t. Whereas he felt like a 100 percent fulfilled
LOVER
, if not a flat-out husband.

One thing was clear: they were not communicating. He just thought they were. He was living in a dream that she had the power to break in a moment, with a word. She had never heard of anything more unfair in her life. And what was most unfair about it was that it was nobody’s fault. There were no villains, no excuses, no nothing, and she was going crazy. Something had to give. There was no solution, short of death. And she was not prepared to die. He was healthier than anyone else she knew. Why shouldn’t he be: she, as he’d put it so often, repeating the phrase till she could scream, “completed” him. Completed him. Was that even fair to him, assuming it was true? What sort of life could he possibly have, when both of them were so alienated, and the crucial difference was that she had had over forty years to acclimate herself to it, even view it with a certain wry detachment, whereas he, being a child of the sixties with all that that entailed, thought there was no reason on earth why he should acclimate himself to anything? Why shouldn’t they just be happy? Wasn’t that what it was all about? Hadn’t they found it in each other?
But we aren’t
supposed
to he happy
, she wanted to scream.

She thought about it all the time. How could he not notice? Had he gone senile? Maybe his whole generation was senile, with their Beatles and drugs and notions of happiness as some inalienable birthright instead of an occasional holiday that sneaks up on you while you figure out a way to fuck it up. She was just too set in her ways. Whereas he could bend to anything, and did, regularly. Which was one of the main reasons why she was beginning to feel like a mother. Who the hell was she to remake and define his whole life? Yet that was seemingly exactly what he wanted. What else was there for him? It was sickening. Once they were alike; now they were both her. One was more than enough.

One day she sat down and made a list of possible solutions:

(1)
Commit suicide. Then he would be free
. Unacceptable. As pointless as life was, she had no intention of checking out until absolutely necessary. Besides, who was to say that he might not kill himself in grief immediately thereafter, becoming her shadow even in death?

(2)
Confront him. Tell him she couldn’t stand it anymore. Then ask for his advice
. Trouble was, she suspected he wouldn’t have any. He had externalized his own emptiness to the point he thought she was perfect. Perfect. Some joke that was. A forty-six-year-old divorcée and intermittent alcoholic subject to chronic depression and conviction that life is meaningless and empty, an individual with zero interests, no skills, shit job, ex-hooker, no children, now carrying on an obviously deeply sick relationship with a boy almost twenty years her junior, half her age. Maybe she had let the whole mess get started in the first place simply as a hedge against the fact she’d never had children. Now she had a son. Whom she fucked. Who imitated her in every way he knew how. Lord help us. If this was perfection, give me a country of miscreants, mutants, psychos, and cripples.

(3)
Demand they break up
. Break his heart. Deprive him of his sole reason for staying alive.
HURT HIM
. And herself as well, no doubt about it. Back to the office and the papers and slimy men making hideous propositions over chili dogs? The coffee klatch? Bach and Mozart, even? She’d rather kill herself.
She
would have nothing to live for in that case. Yet somehow she got by before him. How? She could not remember.

(4)
Force herself to develop some new outside interest which was sure to alienate him
. A cult? Antirock crusade? Right-wing politics? Jesus freaks? The Chamber of Commerce? Fascinating Womanhood? She would rather learn bass (as he had in fact even on occasion urged her, for Christ’s sake) and join his damn rock band. And she hated his singing as well as his songs. She would rather be dead.

(5)
Kill him
. At least if she did it right, he’d never know what hit him, never know unhappiness for the rest of his life. But she had no right to do this. Besides, it would break her heart; she would kill herself first. Besides, she couldn’t stand the thought of either prison or the mental ward.

(6)
Simply disappear
. Pull a Judge Crater. Somehow that seemed the most cowardly way out of all. And more than likely, they’d end up back together.

It was a single word which made up her mind for her. One morning she awoke, turned her head on the pillow, looked at him sleeping so blissfully beside her with one arm wrapped around her naked body and even a sleeping hand cupping her breast, and she thought:
I am his guru
. GURU. That was the end. To be anyone’s “guru” was more than she could bear, whatever the consequences. It was funny how life worked. Nothing had changed. Just one word. But that word made all the difference in the world. For her it was like “Hitler” or “nigger” or any of those other buzzwords that set alarms raging in the human heart. She would murder a busload of schoolchildren in cold blood before she would be even one single human’s “guru.” Just looking at him there on the pillow, she wanted to vomit.

But what to do? Stealthily she crept out of bed, padded into the kitchen, and over a cup of coffee plotted. Out of six possible escape hatches, no single one of which was satisfactory, perhaps she could contrive a combination kiss-off that might work. Yes. She dressed, making sure to keep as quiet as before so he’d sleep on while she plotted, then drove the car to the liquor store, where she bought a half gallon of Johnnie Walker Black. Arriving back home, she began to mix it with the coffee, fifty-fifty. Drank it down pretty fast. By the third cup she had hatched fifteen more schemes, each more outlandishly unworkable than its predecessor. By the time he awoke, she was drunker than she’d been in years, plotzed, zonked, a mess. She checked the bathroom mirror: yep, it’d done the trick. She looked
fifty
years old if she looked a day. Keep this up for a week and she’d be a hundred. How could he possibly want to fuck that, much less idolize it?

He walked into the kitchen and blinked, still half asleep but palpably shocked: “What are you
doing?
”

“Whaddaya mean, waddami doin’? I’m having a li’l
fun
, thaz wad I’m doin’. Wat the fugh’s it to ya, anyway?”

She knew this wouldn’t be enough. He commenced to grill her: “Is anything
wrong?
”

“YA DAMN RIGHT SUMTHINZ WRONG. LIFE STINKS, TAZ WAT. I TRIED TO ENJOY IT, BUT IT WUZZA LIE I’M GONNA DRINK UNTIL I CROAK.”

Jeez, was this corny. But he was buying it. Was there no depth to which her respect for him could not sink?

“But … but … everything was going so well …”

“YEAH-SO
YOU
THOUGHT. I
HATED
EVERY SECOND OF IT.” Well, there was certainly enough truth in this. “I’M JUST TOO SET IN MY WAYS. NOT YOUNG LIKE YOU. GWAN AN’ LIVE. I WAN’ DIE.”

“But WHY? You’ve got ME, we’ve got EACH OTHER.”

“BIG
DEAL
.” Better soften the payload a bit. “All we are is MIRRORS of each other. We used to be two IN … INN … N-DIVVIJAWLS … NOW WE’RE JUST ONE
LUMP
… not even hardly HUMAN….”

He began to cry. Well, tough shit. “But we’ve shared so
much
—so many
ideas
, made so much
good love
, enriched each other in SO MANY WAYS …

“YEAH, THAT’S WHY I WANNA DIE, JERKOFF … ain’t no YOU or I anymore … just WE … face it: WE ARE BORING AS SHIT. Wanna drink?”

“NO. I want … God, all of a sudden I don’t know….”

Time to up the ante with a little gross-out: “I DO. YER RIGHT ABOUT THE LAV MAKING AT LEAST”—yanking her dress up and panties down, ripping the latter in the process, spreading her legs as crudely as she could—“HOW ’BOUT A LI’L POO-ZEE? C’MON, BUSTER BROWN—LESSEE YA
LAP THAT CUNNY UP
… or”—in the world’s absolute worst Mae West impression—“PIPE ME YER WAGSTAFF, BIG BOY, I WANNA FRESH LOADA A.M. JIZM RIGHT HERE….”

He was getting physically ill. On the other hand, so was she. This project obviously called for more extreme measures. She ran out and jumped into the car, drove it 90 mph to a shabby house well-known as headquarters of the local Hell’s Angels chapter, and invited them all back to the house for a gangfuck. This was asking for serious trouble, but anything was better than being Baba Ram Dass. Fourteen of them came roaring after her. When they arrived back at the homestead, she lay down in the middle of the living room floor, hiked her dress again, and hollered, “
C’mon, boys … firs’ come, firs serve
…”

They didn’t look any too eager—but then he like a damn fool had to go and try to protect her Maidenly Honor. He picked a fistfight with them. They beat him to a pulp, one of them demanded a blow job from her, she refused, sirens began to be heard in the distance, they all did the quickest disappearing act she’d ever seen outside the movies. She drove him to the hospital. While he was laid up in there three straight weeks, she hired one whore after another to go into the ward disguised as nurses and seduce him. It didn’t work until she spiked his orange juice with a triple dose of street acid: she sent three different girls up that day, and he fucked, sucked, and orifically jimjammed his little brains loose. With the third one of the day she pretended to innocently wander in on them—“
What is this? I thought you LOVED me?
”