Western Swing (9 page)

Loren always makes me feel something—love, hate, disgust, warmth, frustration, passion, sick. He's so damn intense, and I don't always like intense. Feeling all the time burns me out. Every so often I like sex that's all sweat and no emotions.

Unless he was a total loser, I figured on taking the third pass. Number three must be a little daring to take a shot after seeing one and two strike out, but he wouldn't be too cocky or he'd try sooner. Three is a safe number.

Knowing that, I still managed to screw up.

“Hi there.”

“Hello.”

“Care to meet a nice guy with charm and personality?”

“No.”

“How about me. I'm a jerk.”

“That was rehearsed. Go away.”

“How about I buy you a drink instead?”

“You're caller number one.”

“Huh?”

“I never pick number one. They're always inadequate.”

“Hey, nobody calls me inadequate.”

“Not in that way. Desperate, insecure. You've got a flaw, I can feel it. Sorry, but I like to think I can do better.”

“Nobody else'll try.”

“Wanna bet?”

Snappy patter is a delicate art form. We can't all be Neil Simon and Marsha Mason. Still, I try to keep it above astrology, where are you from, and insinuating eye contact. The goal with a possible sex object is to score a few points without overpowering the poor schmuck while testing him for some sign of intelligence and quickness. It helps if both parties have the same end in mind.

This kid, number one, showed a certain persistence and a winning smile, but he looked too young to trust. I wanted a man who could take my mind off me for an hour, not a cute charmer with clear eyes. Certainly not a cowboy—a typical, thin, side-burned, dressed-up-to-go-to-town kid cowboy. I figured his age at twenty-two, only one year older than my daughters. Confidence practically oozed from under his huge felt hat. I don't care much for men with that kind of seducing confidence. They intrigue me, but I don't like them.

Maybe the kid sensed this or maybe he only knew one approach and that happened to be the winning line.

He smiled. “You left your husband today, right?” The thirty points for intuition light must have flashed because the boy pressed on.

“You're looking for a fast, meaningless good time. No strings. No aftershocks. A basic quickie.” Brains in a cowboy always shock me. I know they're no dumber than anyone else, but they usually act like they are and it throws me off when they aren't.

I nodded. “Something like that.”

“Look no farther. Nobody gets hung up over me and I get hung up over nobody.”

Further might have been better than farther, but I wasn't certain. Besides, his chin was cute. “I can get that from my fingers.”

“I'm better than fingers. I weigh more.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“You can buy me a drink. But I'm warning you. I don't like you so far and I'm not stuck on this stool. If I see a better offer, you're out of luck.”

• • •

Wyoming cowboys are real strange people. They dress funny. You see a character in town made out like a complete dude, jeans tucked inside knee-high Tony Lamas, three silk handkerchiefs around his neck, bandanna out the back pocket, cowboy hat the size of a Karmann Ghia with a little string pulled tight under his neck, that character almost surely works with cows. The tough, macho cowboys you run into on the street probably drive trucks or sack groceries at Safeway. They dress up like a real cowboy at work, and a real cowboy come to town decks out like Tom Mix in
The Border Bandito
.

The kid, whose name turned out to be Billy G, worked with cows. His jeans weren't jammed into his boots, thank God, but he wore a side-button, black cavalry shirt and a belt with a giant bronze buckle that said COORS. His hat was a dark brown umbrella with a peacock eye feather stuck in front. He offered me a pinch of wintergreen snuff. I refused.

• • •

Billy G bought a few drinks which turned into dinner which turned into your usual modern system of verbal foreplay. The boy had a certain smoothness, I'll have to give him that. Whether instincts or experience, he paced us through the various levels of enticement, never pushing at any crucial moments which would have allowed me to make a decision. Some eye contact, a touch to the hair, a hand on the knee, another round of scotch, and suddenly I was a little drunk and being steered by the elbow into a restaurant full of Billy G's buddies.

“The whole damn spread's here,” he said.

“Spread?”

We wasted ten minutes on slapping shoulders, waving across the tables, and answering
What's going down, You're growing uglier by the minute, Gettin' any lately,
and
Don't do anything I wouldn't do.
Not a man in the place spoke a sentence he hadn't spoken at least three hundred times. Billy G showed me off—“Look what I got, guys”—like a mounted elk.

Well, I wasn't mounted yet. Reading the cute menu (Buffalo Bill Burgers and Calamity Jane Steaks) I began to feel misgivings. Loren needed me to remind him when to eat. Also, I had meant to pack his Vision Quest bag that night, even saved a Twinkie surprise to hide under his spare socks. Now he wouldn't remember the spare socks.

I knew exactly what would happen. Loren would realize he was helpless without me and trot off down the road for salvation from pimply Marcie. For months now she'd been waiting to save his tortured artistic soul—which was my job. Marcie couldn't handle Loren. He'd convince her that saving a tortured soul meant sitting on it.

The waitress had bloodred fingernails, blue hair, and chewed gum, naturally.

“Can I getcha another drink?”

“Scotch.”

“Whatcha eatin'?”

“I'll have the Bridger cut prime rib and a baked potato. Russian dressing on the salad.”

“All we got's French and Thousand Island, honey.”

“Thousand Island, then.”

Billy G was born in Chicago, but turned cowboy when he hit thirteen.

“How long ago was that?”

“A lifetime.”

“Mine or yours?”

He cowboyed at the Flying Fist Ranch, which he called the Flying Fuck, FF for short, and seemed to think I was totally uneducated because I never heard of it.

“Big as Delaware but worth more,” he said. “Thorne Axel's private kingdom.”

“Who's Thorne Axel?”

Billy G was aghast. “You never heard of Thorne Axel?”

“Well, shit, I'm sorry.”

“He owns the Flying Fist. Everybody knows Thorne Axel.”

“I don't.”

“You'll have to meet him.”

Supper came and Billy G lost the train of thought. He cut up his entire steak before taking the first bite. I found that odd. My prime was a bit rare for my tastes, I don't suck blood as a rule, but it tasted fine and Billy G was paying, so I didn't complain. If I am a bitch, which is hard to deny, I'm a better bitch than most. I almost never complain. Nobody likes a complainer, but everyone loves a bitch.

Ten minutes of silent chewing later, Billy G's mind came back from his stomach. “Thorne's on a drunk.”

I'd been thinking of calling Loren to remind him about the socks, so I missed it. “What?”

“Thorne's been drunk three days. The whole crew came to town to cheer him up. I saw him around here sometime yesterday.”

“Why's Thorne on a drunk?”

Billy G put his right hand over his liver like a half-mast pledge of allegiance and belched, not loudly, but still enough to antagonize my romantic interests. “Wife left him again. Kid's a dope dealer. Daughter turned dramatic and shot up a herd of yearlings. It was a mess.”

“Why'd she shoot the yearlings?”

“Who can figure the mind of a crazy woman? You want the potato skin?”

“No.”

“Vitamins're in the skin. I always eat the skin.” Billy G speared my potato leavings with his steak knife. “That's the trouble with E.T.”

“Who?”

“Thorne's hippie son. He's a vegetarian, but he don't eat potato skins. No protein'll make your brains dry out.”

“His real name is E.T.?”

“Ain't it a shame.” Billy G lowered his voice. “He sits with his legs crossed above his knees, like a girl.”

I whispered back, “Maybe E.T.'s a fag.”

“Naw, Thorne'd kill him if he sucked wienie. Probably just a lack of potato skins.”

“I don't eat potato skins.”

He pointed with his knife. “You cross your legs above the knees.”

• • •

Given that Billy G belched after supper, said “crazywoman” as if the two went together, and wore a black shirt, which ever since Johnny Cash I have found obscene, I wonder why I went ahead and slept with him.

I knew I was going to sleep with somebody. The sleeping—nice word for sex, isn't it—came from a personal need caused by anxiety at leaving Loren. Some people get drunk. Some people go for long walks and cry. I fuck. Perhaps it's Grandma's blood again. She's easy to blame. She's dead. More likely, though, I just need to feel another man's butt every now and then. The marriage with Ron lagged along for fifteen reasonably good years, but once every eight or ten months, the pressure of mediocrity became pain and, without premeditation, I drove to some country bar on the southeast side of Houston and picked up a stranger.

I get off with strangers and I didn't with Ron. He wasn't bad in bed, he lasted as long as most, but with Ron I had a past and future. I can't get off if I'm worried about past and future. Same with Ace and sometimes, but not always, Mickey and Loren.

Anyway, Billy G was my first transgression against Loren, and since we'd split up that morning, I didn't count him as a technical fool-around.

However, Billy G wasn't the usual type I chose for morphine sex. I generally pick guys who need me as much as I need them. Lost souls, nerds, and salesmen. These guys appreciate me. The Billy Gs of the world look at it as conquering me—another notch on the bedpost. I'd rather find a man with an active fantasy life and make all his dreams come true. While satisfying my own itch, of course. The pain lays have nothing in common with the true loves. That's a whole different thing.

Roxanne says my attitude toward sex is practically male.

I chose Billy G because he didn't agree that his boss's son was probably gay. That seemed almost noble of him. Every man I ever met would jump all over an insinuation about another man's heteroness. Each confirmed queer means one less competitor, I suppose. You try it. Say, “I think that guy's a fag,” to any man about any man and he'll agree with you every time.

Thorne's son was a hippie, a vegetarian, and a drug dealer, all causes for manhood suspicion, but Billy G dismissed my fag label. I liked that. So I took him upstairs and fucked his brains out.

• • •

Women have chosen lovers for less.

That's why it's all right for me to move on Billy G, but it's not all right for Loren to stick one in little Marcie. This is no double standard here, I don't buy that crap. This is truth. Loren can't make love without falling in it. Look what happened with me and that mouse of a wife of his. One hump and he's ready to get married.

I use my extramarital sex for medicinal purposes. There's a lot of pressure in being me, and a six-hour frenzy session with a stranger releases that pressure. It damn sure beats drinking and crying.

• • •

Besides, I'm not the coldhearted man-eater my daughters and almost everyone else thinks I am. Leaving Loren caused me considerable distress. If it hadn't, I wouldn't have kept Billy G awake all night, but every time we collapsed in a heap of sweat and exhaustion, I'd stop and think of poor Loren—Loren reading, or Loren walking in the woods alone, or Loren sitting at his typewriter.

The only way to block the tears and nausea was to shove Billy G in and go at it. After five or six hours, even that didn't help, so I let the wasted kid go to sleep. He wasn't worth much by then anyway. Billy G must have thought he'd gotten hold of God's own nympho.

I mean, I loved Loren. I married the creep. Personal extravaganzas should be fair. True love overcomes circumstances. That's what I'd always been taught and that's what I believed. I wanted to be loved. Is that asking too much? I wanted a man I could talk to and count on. I wanted two lawn chairs on a sun deck, and a piano, and a greenhouse for my vegetables. I wanted another baby. I didn't want to drink twelve shots of scotch and suck a cowboy's dick, for Chrissake. I wanted to be normal.

Things just never worked out the way I wanted.

Around dawn, I slid out of bed and knelt on the bathroom tile and threw up everything.

Given life to live all over again, I wouldn't have crawled into my bag and fallen asleep next to the dying fire that third night of the Vision Quest.

I've had these dreams for a couple of years now, they're like reverse nightmares, but much worse than a nightmare because with a nightmare, waking up is relief. In my dreams, something good happens, something very good that feels so real, and I know is real. I'm happy. Often I'm so happy I say, “Thank God, this isn't a dream, the waiting is over,” only it is a dream. The happiness carries over for a couple of seconds after I awaken, then recognition rolls in and my stomach contracts like I've been hit. A day that begins with one of these dreams is a hard day to finish.

We were all together, Buggie, Ann, and I in the Alice Street duplex—in our tiny kitchen with the cartoons held to the refrigerator by strawberry magnets and the herb chart on the wall surrounded by Buggie's preschool drawings of eagles and elephants. Buggie looked around five, maybe. His blond hair hung down in his eyes and over his collar. Ann never would cut his hair. She always made me do it, then she would pick at his head for a week, sighing and saying I'd cut too much.

Ann stood next to the double sink, backlit by the sun pouring in our kitchen window. I couldn't see her face clearly, but she wore an old Denver Broncos football jersey she'd picked up at a yard sale, faded jeans, and sandals she bought from a hippie store up by the capitol. They were supposed to do something good for her feet, something to do with the natural slope of the arch.

The Bug wanted to go outside and dig a hole. He sat at the breakfast table, ignoring cold Zoom, banging his plastic bucket with his plastic shovel. The handle of the shovel was wood, but the scoop part was plastic.

I quizzed him on
Walden. “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,”
I read. “What do you think Thoreau meant by that?”

Buggie looked down at his little blue pail. “I dunno.”

“You knew yesterday. Did you forget already?”

Ann turned on water at the sink. “Don't you think that's a little abstract for a kindergartner?”

“You're never too young for
Walden.
What do you think he meant by truth, Buggie?”

Buggie squirmed in the chair and banged the shovel from side to side in the bucket. He twisted his mouth around, thinking. I taught Buggie to always twist his mouth around when he was thinking.

“Truth is knowing what happens,” he said.

I beamed at Ann. “Aha,” I said, “too young to understand, huh?”

Buggie continued: “The man says it's better to know what's happening than to be famous or rich or those other things.”

“Right. Now do you think that's proper?”

“Mary wants to go outside. The worms leave if we're not there early.”

“Do you think it's better to know what's happening than to have love, money, or fame?”

He slid out of his chair. “I'd rather be loved.”

Hell, it was only a dream. I think.

It would be just like Buggie to say, “I'd rather be loved.” He was a real earnest boy with melting brown eyes and a straight mouth. As a baby, he hardly ever cried, but he didn't laugh much either. Buggie never acted the way I would expect a kid to act. He didn't demand the attention other kids crave, and he never put out precocious sayings we could write down and send to his grandparents—which was probably for the best, since none of his grandparents could stand us.

Mostly he pushed soldiers or trucks around his room or the backyard. Soldier pushing was serious business to Buggie. He was much too intense to “play.”

As I recall, Buggie rode his bike a lot. A red Western Auto Flyer with pedals he had to stand on to reach. The details still come to mind, his hands, for instance, and those filthy off-white tennis shoes he was so proud of. I can remember every crack on that plastic shovel with the wooden handle, but I can't seem to remember what Buggie was like. I can't see his face anymore.

• • •

Ann and Buggie. Where did the woman leave off and the child begin? How was I supposed to see a difference? Maybe that jumbled-together feeling, my inability to separate one from the other, was why I let Ann down so badly the last couple of years. I like to think there was a reason other than me being me.

It's just that nothing in my background prepared me for the emotions of fatherhood. Before Buggie, I stuck children in a category with geography, motorcycles, and corporate structures—things I'd never thought about, had an opinion of or any curiosity for. Buggie was the first child I ever looked at up close.

Ann, too, was something I'd never experienced. She was a nonstudent who'd been taking care of herself for so long she knew what she was doing. At the time, I thought that was kind of unique, though now I realize there're a lot more single moms in the world than there are students.

I don't know what I was emotionally prepared for back then—smoking pot, I suppose. Watching TV. Fantasizing a rich and creative sex life based mainly on female English professors and graveyard-shift waitresses.

The spring of my junior year at DU, I used the one-two punch of marijuana and daytime television to, for all purposes, lobotomize my sensibility. I slept fourteen hours a night, ate no hot food, made it through school by putting in just enough effort to keep from losing my Guaranteed Student Loan. The problem was my attitude, of course. What other problem is there? I wanted to be a writer and refused to be anything else. I thought life was meaningless unless I was a writer and the fact that I hadn't written anything longer than the dedications to my first three novels depressed me into becoming an apathetic, make that pathetic, wreck. That Ann saw anything salvageable in me is one of those mysteries that reinforces my belief in Unexplainable Shit.

But women are always falling in love with potential instead of fact. Men aren't like that.

• • •

The joint I was smoking had a runner, a little line of fire that crept down to my finger and threatened to cut off the burning end, dumping hot coal in my lap. Besides the uncontrolled runner, my attention was split pretty evenly between a half-finished essay on “Dryden's Use of Romantic Imagery” and
Gilligan's Island
on the TV. All three confused me somewhat, which is nothing new.

On the one hand, Dryden said his girlfriend could raise the dead, which didn't make sense unless he was personifying his prick, while on the other hand, the Captain beat Gilligan across the head and shoulders with a navy cap. Even high, I didn't find this funny, but evidently I was supposed to because all these people in the TV audience were cracking up. This upset me on account of I've always been proud of my ability to see humor in any situation, and if most people thought one man beating another with a cap was funny, I was slipping away from most people. And on the third hand, if I had three hands, the joint had to be dealt with immediately. I spit on my finger and studied the joint carefully, working out a repair plan, when a woman carried a baby into my living room.

“I knocked on the door, but you didn't answer,” she said.

What to do with the finger wad of spit? I must have looked peculiar, sitting there pointing a foamy noogie at the ceiling, but I couldn't stick it back in my mouth or under the end table. The woman was kind of pretty, I didn't want to disgust her in the first three seconds of our relationship.

“I didn't think you would mind if I came on in, it's sort of an emergency.”

The coal finally released into my lap, I jumped up, slapping at myself and stomping on the carpet. In the confusion of the moment, I stealthily scraped my finger clean on an empty Cheetos bag. I don't think she noticed.

Standing, I saw the woman was shorter than me by a couple of inches, and a little skinnier. Her dusty-blond hair hung straight across her shoulders to about the elbow level. The diapered boy sat perched on her right hip where he concentrated on pulling a dangly gold-colored earring out of her lobe. The baby looked especially clean.

“My baby swallowed a tube of Krazy Glue and I've got to get him to a doctor.”

“You need a ride?”

“No, no, I have a car, but I run a day-care center in my place. Nine kids are waiting down there.”

I set Dryden and the empty roach paper on the pile of books, notebooks, food wrappers, marijuana-smoking paraphernalia, and about a dozen dirty coffee cups that hid my end table. Here was something interesting. So long as the kid didn't die from glue poisoning, this might turn into something fun to watch myself handle.

The baby didn't look on the edge of death. He leaned forward and reached for me, making a gurgling sound in his throat. I didn't know whether babies gurgle as a rule, or that was glue eating his stomach, but he didn't seem to be feeling any pain, and the woman stood there looking concerned and expectant, but certainly nowhere near panic.

“What can I do to help?”

“Would you watch the kids while we're gone? Dr. Karnes is just a couple of blocks down Anders Street. It shouldn't take long.”

“An entire tube of Krazy Glue?”

“The top was off. You don't have to do anything, just be there and watch so they don't hurt themselves.”

The baby and I looked in each other's eyes and he smiled. I was amazed. “Okay.”

• • •

That's how I came to be sitting in a kitchen chair, more or less surrounded by nine little people: six boys, three Jesses, a Jason, Justin, and Jeremiah; and three girls, Heather, Heather, and Thamu Kamala. The kitchen was an exact copy of mine only clean and filled with cribs and baby beds. They were stacked on top of each other. Someone had tacked a picture of the Rocky Mountains over the sink and framed it with red curtains so it would look like a window instead of a picture. On top of the refrigerator I spotted
Betty Crocker's Cookbook, Be Here Now,
and Joan Baez's book about her husband the draft dodger.

Six or seven of the little rug rats stood in a rough semicircle, sucking on thumbs and blankets and earless bears and staring at me. On the whole, they were a pretty cute bunch—all mammals are cute at the toddler stage, why should people be different—except most of their noses dripped and one of the Jesses was ugly as a hobbit.

“Can any of you blink?” I asked.

They all stared.

“Watch this.” With both hands, I pointed at my eyes and blinked several times in succession.

Justin sniffed, but no one else seemed to understand. How old does a kid have to be to learn blinking anyway?

Deep from my memory came a game I remember my brother Patrick playing with Kathy when she was about this age. I pushed on my nose and popped out my tongue. Then I pulled on my left ear, sliding my tongue to the right corner of my mouth, then pulled on my right ear, sliding my tongue to the left corner. This trick makes for an interesting cause-and-effect illusion if you do it right.

The oldest girl, Thamu Kamala, said, “Jason pooped his pants.”

“He should change them.”

“He's too little.”

“Which one's Jason?”

She pointed to an oversize baby curled in the fetal position under a crib. Looked like crib death to me.

“Is he dead?”

“What's dead?”

I walked into the bathroom and found a hand mirror on a shelf above a line of five porta-potties. Back in the kitchen, I knelt and held the mirror in front of Jason's little nose.

“He's alive.”

“His diaper stinks.”

“Do you know how to change it?”

“Course not.”

“Me either. Where's the TV?”

For three hours, the kids stared at me while I sat on the couch and watched reruns.
Andy Griffith
,
Petticoat Junction
,
The
Beverly Hillbillies
,
Dark Shadows
, and
I Love Lucy
twice. A couple of the younger boys curled up next to me and slept with their fists in their mouths. Ugly Jesse looked much cuter asleep than he had awake, more like a troll doll than a hobbit. I considered putting him and the other sleeper in cribs—the living room was even more littered with cribs, baby beds, and bassinets than the kitchen—but the couch felt comfortable, and most of the cribs were crammed with toys, jackets, coloring books, all kinds of kiddie junk. Not stuff I'd want to sleep on.

Thamu Kamala put her hands on her hips. “You aren't going to change any diapers?”

“Diapers are outside my frame of reference.”

“Are you going to read stories and put the little ones down for naps?”

“I only brought this one book.” I showed Thamu Kamala the Dryden volume. “Would you like a reading of
Satire Upon the True-Blue Protestant Poet T.S.
”?

“That's all you got?”

“You have something against Dryden?”

She considered a moment, pretending to review all the Dryden she knew. I say pretending because I don't think Thamu Kamala knew any Dryden.

“Okay, let's try it.”

“All human things are subject to decay,”
I read.

Another Jesse fell asleep around line 89, then I lost a Heather to
Petticoat Junction
on line 120. Thamu Kamala soon joined her and by the bitter end, all but one little Heather were asleep or lined up on the floor, staring openmouthed at the TV.

“How did you like the poem?” I asked Heather. She would have been a regular-looking kid except Heather's hair flew out in a mass of red curls, like Orphan Annie mated with Bozo the Clown.

“Did you understand the part about Sir Formal's oration?”

Heather didn't move and, of course, she didn't blink.

“Cat got your tongue? That sometimes happens to me too. Just toss away your inhibitions and speak what's on your mind. Pop it right on out.”

Thamu Kamala sat up and gave me a look of extreme disgust. I've been on the receiving end of looks of disgust from some of the finest women around, but who would have expected such intense disgust from a preschooler? Thamu Kamala was the youngest person yet to actively hate me.