Creamy Bullets (6 page)

Monogamy

I
know you’re going to nibble the guy down the hall…at just this moment your eyes have the same look as the night you told me…I was hungry and then I wasn’t…you went ahead and ordered and I watched you eat…is it good?

I think I made the decision as I moved you into the new apartment…I was going to trust you as much as you trusted me…you can’t even lift me to throw me.

You said: Forget about it.

You said: He’s gross.

You said: I hate people with red hair.

You would bite me and later we would eat breakfast…I don’t like my stomach feeling this way…everyone seems to yell at me everyday all the time now…I should be mad at you.

You said: Not down the hall, on the third floor.

Your window looks out onto Broadway…or is it his window?…it was that night after he worked late at the Texaco…we had done it once in the ass and he wanted to do it that way too…you bit him…he was pumping gas all day…the only dishes you packed were a bowl, two plates, five glasses and a bottle opener…it didn’t seem like you were carrying anything…sitting in the car…putting on make-up.

You said: Nibble, not bite.

I can barely lift you, let alone throw you…you just started to yell at me to eat something…your eyes did the same thing as they do with me…all my friends told me—Don’t move her furniture in there…A wave of jealous heat passed through me.

You say you were drunk or stoned…it was only one night long…you don’t have any furniture…you say you like to turn the tables on me…I decided to eat some pretzels.

I went to knock on his door, just to see…you acted like you didn’t remember where…that little alarm kept going off in my head…decisions, decisions…you hit my face with your hand…your fist in the air…your teeth on his chest…traffic moving outside.

You said: He has red hair.

You said: He’s an idiot.

A box of your clothes tumbled down the stairs…I was hungry at first and then you told me…so much yelling and shouting, I can’t remember who from (from everyone involved)…you have a habit of calling me Dummy these days.

A guy in a bathrobe answered the door…I couldn’t tell what color his hair was…his TV had a pornographic movie showing…I accidentally broke one of the glasses…the straight salty stick kind, not the twist kind…my mouth was jealous and bruised.

Sometimes we would eat breakfast and sometimes I’d leave you naked…when you’re nervous it’s hard for you to fuck…we used to do it in the car…then he pulled your hair and bit you.

You ordered something greasy—chicken strips or French fries…you had a fork, knife, and spoon…you had a half-bag of sugar…a box of wooden matches and a nut cracker…sometimes a little aggression can help you relax…I took off my glasses and things got blurry.

How are your chicken strips—or French fries?

You laid on your new bed…the guy wore a hat and his robe was loose…I couldn’t tell how fat, or old, he was…you don’t have a TV but there are magazines in your bathroom…if you were so drunk or stoned why do you remember the biting?

I wanted to eat some of your chicken strips or French fries…I don’t like my stomach feeling this way…his hat had the name of a gas station on it…I’m so used to the noise…it really doesn’t bother me anymore.

He said: Forget about it.

He said: Down the hall.

He said: Magazines in the bathroom.

A voice in his room says
“You feel so gooood.”
…and then the chicken strips…I wish I could throw you further…your underwear spilled out onto the stairs…I called him an idiot.

You had an annoying alarm clock I dreaded waking up to…you took off all your clothes…your back bones stood out…you hugged your knees…he pulled your hair and bit you…you were drunk or eating French fries…something greasy.

If you threw me off a bridge would you trust me more?…a hot wave passed though the room…I told all my friends that we were in love…I mean, I keep seeing your eyes do that thing…like when I talk in your ear…like when you point to your ear and say: Right here.

He says he wants it in the ass…I made a decision to fuck you in the ass…sometimes you bite me…it was like I did all the moving and you just sat there…the rearview mirror…your lipstick…he smelled like gasoline…I recalled my affection for gas fumes as a child…idiot…dummy…I took off all my clothes…I used to want to work at a gas station…all my friends told me I made bad decisions…all my friends eat breakfast with me.

I made a decision to throw your alarm clock out the window…I’ll buy you another one…all the traffic outside…do you trust me?

Fur Coat

S
o we have a little fucky-fucky. Lenny and I and some bum we pick up from a car crash. The bum says, “You guys are famous and I know you got drugs”. Lenny grabs the bum’s hand and burns him with a lighter. When we get back to the house the TV is already flickering on channel 89. “Okay bum,” says Lenny, “you get your ass up but keep your head down so I don’t have to see ya. I’m gonna watch TV while we do it.” The bum nods his head toward a pile of cocaine on the coffee table. We give him permission to dull his senses.

I pick up the telephone and start to phone the pay-per-view. “No, no, I like it like this. Just stand behind me and moan like a girl,” says Lenny.

“You want me to nibble on your ear?” I ask.

Lenny throws his head back and his ear kinda winks at me or something. My mouth goes all sticky around his fuzzy neck and waxy ears. It reminds me of Butterfinger candy bars. Lenny just watches the TV picture warping and scrambling around the image of a black woman’s breasts swinging in circles. Once in a while the sound comes on the speaker and you hear these people on TV say stuff like “oh yeah, fuck me hard, you want my ass, you want to cum in my tight ass.” Or other things like that.

“Give me the fuckin’ whip,” says Lenny. “The whipper, I need more whipper.” I grab the old whip cream canister and give it to him with a fresh cartridge twisted on. He takes a long hit, his face turning red and evil. He starts to hit the bum in the back of the head with the canister and the bum flinches madly before collapsing flat on the floor. I twist Lenny back around and grab his prick. He squirts up my arm and we start cracking up, our eyes squished shut as the last drop oozes out. I carefully hold my arm out not to spill a drop and Lenny gets the needle ready. I look at the bleedin’ bum on the ground and feel itchy. My left arm tries to restrain itself from my belt and buttonflys. The pump is pulled on the giant-looking hypo and a shitload of Lenny’s spunk is filling it up thick and good. He’s fuckin’ karate choppin his arm and beggin’ for a vein to appear. One does, quivering to the surface like an earthquake. He stabs at it and injects the dead sperm back in his system.

“Suck that cock,” someone on TV says through the static of the moment. The hypo falls to the ground and Lenny grabs his other needle with God-knows-what in it. He won’t give me details. He just says it’s his way to have multiple orgasms. “Honey showed me,” he said to me once. “She’d fuckin’ cum all over my face in splashes when we were into the hard-core shit. She’d take a razor blade to my jizz like it was coke.”

I wipe my arm off with a dirty rag and then start wrestling with my pants. Lenny flops on the carpet and holds the groggy bum like a teddy bear. They both sound like they’re speaking in tongues, but the bum’s inflection sounds more pained. I want a hit off the whipper but there’s blood and greasy hair shit all over it. I start on my dick with both hands like I’m playing drums, fast and hard, with a rocket ready to blast off in my stomach. I want to squirt on Lenny’s face. When I first met him I wasn’t too into that, but he always treats me real sweet for a few days after I do it. “Look at me, Lenny! Fuckin’ look at me,” I shout. Lenny looks up and I almost lose my climax because I forget he’s grown some stupid beard. I’ve told him before it looks too artsy faggy like the Beatles or some shit. Luckily, when I look away my eyes spot a big poster of Honey on the wall. Damn sexy wife, this poor fuckin’ comedian had.

“I want to fuck your wife,” I say to Lenny as my surge explodes. “Tangle this shit in her hair,” I say as my second shot flies toward my chest. I grab both the hypos off the floor and suck some of my jism into one of them. The beaten bum on the floor twists into a question mark at my feet and his lips creak open into an idiot smile. “Wow,” he says, “do you guys have insurance for all this?”

“Later,” I say, “We’ll talk about it later.” My face folds into itself and a sharp biting sensation trickles down my arm and then doubles back through my shoulders and chest. It makes me feel like I’m wearing a fur coat. An imploding fur ball that covers my body with the softness of a lazy dream.

When my eyes feel clean and weightless again, I open them slowly, to be confronted with eager sunlight slapping me in the face. The sound of two men fade in. I look over into the kitchen and see Lenny and the bum wearing new clothes and lighting a circle of candles. Blisters and bruises spot their hands and arms. They’re talking about something like it was a secret. The morning newspaper is sprawled on the floor. I can see the front-page story. It’s about someone famous being dead.

The Camp Psychic

M
y parents put me in a summer camp when I was fourteen because they found some of my poetry and thought I was going to kill a bunch of people. When I say “found” I mean my dad snooped through my notebook. There was a poem about living in the gutters and eating Charleston Chew candy bars and feeling pain and anger in all my being. I didn’t really know what a gutter was; I always imagined them to be basement apartments—really narrow ones with just room enough for a small dirty mattress. The Charleston Chew was my favorite candy and I remember thinking I could live off them if I ever had to. Each one was about a foot long and you could freeze them and break them up in little pieces. As far as
pain and anger
go, I think I was just going through a punk phase. It wasn’t that I felt really angry about anything, just indifferent. I used words like anger as default when I didn’t feel anything.

My dad was yelling at me in my bedroom, the evidence flopping in his angry right hand. “Are there any drugs in your room?!” he demanded to know. Whenever I did anything he disapproved of, my dad instantly thought I was smoking something. “If I ever see someone selling you drugs, I’ll kill them.” My dad was small and pale and worked as a pharmacist. He had bad hair like Billy Crystal.

The next day, I heard my mom and dad looking through some pamphlets for summer camps. They were going to send me away. They thought I needed a change of scenery, was becoming too isolated. They wanted me to be part of a group for summer, maybe learn something. They called an outdoorsman camp. It was full. They tried a tennis camp. It had been cancelled. They were told the arts & crafts retreat was good but it was too expensive. I was too old for the Catholic youth getaway. Finally, my mom found one that worked. Being a failed junior high actress herself, she thought it would be good for me to spend the next four weeks at the Walla Walla Drama Camp.

Located in a small wooded area behind a high school, the surroundings looked like the perfect place for amateur child actors pretending to be campers. The tents made me feel like I was in the Army. There were nineteen other kids and five older camp leaders there. One camp leader per tent. The one in my tent was a college freshman named Carlos. My tentmates were Steven, a chubby twelve-year-old whose nose always bled, Todd, a thirteen-year-old rocker who wore leather wristbands and never brushed his teeth, and Dodger, an eleven-year-old Mexican who looked like he was eighteen. He was tall, big, and had a mustache. He even dressed like he was already grown up (tucked-in shirt, dark blue slacks). We got our own cot, two cardboard boxes to keep our stuff in, a flashlight, and some bug spray. Each cot had one crummy pillow that felt like it held a dozen feathers and some left-over cotton candy.

Our first night, we played the usual getting-to-know-you games and passed around a can of sausages before Carlos announced, “There’s something you guys need to know about me.” I thought he was going to tell us that he committed a crime or something, but instead he said, “I’m gifted in the psychic arts.”

No one said a thing at first because we were trying to figure out what this whole psychic arts business was.

“Do you guys know what that means?” he asked finally.

Todd picked at some zits on his neck and Dodger looked down at his white sneakers.

“Does it mean you can tell us our horoscopes?” said Steven.

“Close,” said Carlos. “It means I like to eat people.” He let his bad joke gain weight with a serious pause and then burst out laughing. “I’m just shitting you,” he said. I remember being shocked and delighted by his casual swear and thinking that the camp might actually turn out to be fun. At least I might learn how to swear better.

Carlos grabbed some paper from one of his boxes and passed around some pens. “I want everyone to write down the name of a coin. You know—penny, dime, silver dollar, whatever. In the morning, when I wake up I’ll know what you wrote on your paper.” We each wrote something down. “Now fold up your paper and put it under your pillow tonight while you sleep.” We did as he said. I wrote Nickel.

It took me a long time to fall asleep that first night. I kept shifting in my cot and worrying about what activities we were going to be doing. I had never been in a play and even speaking in class gave me butterflies. Images of Steve Martin with the fake arrow through his head kept swirling in my half-dream thoughts. The images got blurrier and blurrier until they scattered into nothing.

“Rise and shine,” Carlos announced the next morning. “It’s time to read your little minds.”

We rubbed our eyes and sat up. I stuck my hand under my pillow to make sure my answer remained untouched. I had it folded a special way so I could see if Carlos cheated. It hadn’t been unfolded. My secret was safe.

Dodger’s paper was sticking out of his pillow, about ready to fall on the ground. If Carlos were going to peek at someone’s answer, Dodger’s would have been easiest. Carlos pointed to the dangling paper and told Dodger to hold it to his forehead. When Dodger held it up I could easily see the answer.

“A half dollar,” says Carlos. “Your answer is half dollar.”

“I could have told you that,” I said. “You can see the answer between his fingers. He didn’t even fold his paper.”

Carlos waved off my comments. “His mind is just easy to read. Bigger kids have less psychic protection. It’s a fact.” I thought Dodger was going to tackle Carlos after that comment but he just wadded up his paper and threw it in the far garbage can.

“Okay. I’ll do you next,” Carlos said to me. I held my paper up to my head. It was folded in a star-shape, a trick I learned from my 6th grade girlfriend, Sheila (we’d gone out for three days before Christmas break ruined it).

With his eyes closed, Carlos took a deep breath. “It’s a small one…I see Eisenhower…your coin is a dime.”

I unfolded the paper carefully. “Nice try,” I said. I held up my paper. It was in all caps: NICKEL.

“Well, no psychic is perfect,” he said. He quickly turned to Todd. “Let’s me touch your paper.” Todd gave him a suspicious look. Carlos reached out and Todd let him pass his hand over the paper. His was folded in a triangle, like the shape we used for playing table football. Carlos snapped his fingers. “Susan B. Anthony dollar,” he announced. Todd unfolded his paper. It said silver dollar. “My mind saw s and dollar,” Carlos stammered. “I guess my mind can’t read your sloppy writing.” Todd scoffed and shook his head before folding the paper back into the triangle.

By this time, Steven was visibly shaken by this whole scene. I thought maybe he just had to go to the bathroom but it was his face and hands that mostly spasmed as he held his paper aloft. He’d taken a pencil and blacked out one side of the paper in an effort to conceal his answer. Carlos looked him right in the eye and rubbed his chin intensely. “Steven,” he whispered dramatically. “I know you wrote quarter.”

Steven took a step back and his mouth started to quiver. “You’re right,” he said. “I wrote down quarter and then I tried to switch it to penny.” He reached under his pillow and pulled out another paper, folded as small and square as a piece of gum. Carlos took it from him and unfolded it quietly and slowly. He held it up. It did, in fact, say in a nervous scrawl, quarter. Steven turned pale and started screaming. Most of the other kids and camp leaders poked their heads into our tent to see what was happening. Carlos tried to calm Steven but he wouldn’t stop screaming and pointing his finger at the paper. It was the kind of scream that sounds hollow but full of terror, as if the screamer can’t quite get all his breath into his throat. I imagine it’s what dolphins would sound like if they screamed. Finally, one of the camp leaders, a ridiculously chesty girl named Nicole, pressed Steven into her green halter top, and led him away to a trailer office. Carlos watched them as they left, his eyes jealous and pained. We never saw Steven again.

I didn’t learn a lot during that camp. And I didn’t start believing in psychics either. Carlos was just an actor good at playing hokey characters. Dodger never really came out of his shell but he was the best one at playing grown-ups. He was appropriately stiff and creatively dull. Todd was actually pretty impressive. He was still a scrunge, but his acting had more energy than others and he impressed the camp leaders with his range. I was better at exercises where I played supporting parts. I couldn’t carry a scene and I couldn’t memorize lines. My favorite part of the camp actually was when we played kickball against the fat camp on the other side of the school grounds. We got beat terribly until our last game, when I kicked the winning runs in. I got a merit badge for that.

When my parents picked me up on the last day of camp, Carlos walked over to meet them. He made a big deal about giving me his phone number, like we were going to be friends. But I’m pretty sure he actually hated me. My dad wrote our number down for him in return and smiled like a goon as he shook his hand.

In the backseat of the car, I unfolded the paper and saw that Carlos had written 1-800-JERKOFF. I laughed a little about that but then felt tricked and angry inside. “You gotta be shitting me,” I said quietly. My dad turned the radio down and looked back at me with a glare.

“What kind of English is that?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

My mom closed her magazine for a second and put her hand on her forehead like she was nursing a headache.

I turned around and looked out the back window, the road blurring past us, each little town disappearing as we sped past. I wished I could read my parents’ minds. I wasn’t sure what I was worth anymore.