Drowning Tucson (8 page)

He thought about Stella waiting for him in some new lingerie she had probably picked out from a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue. He felt bile rising in his throat at the sight of this woman kneeling in front of him, the thought of what Satin had in store. They looked at each other. Her eyes sort of shrugged with lazy mischief, and she reached around and grabbed him by the ass, but suddenly he wanted nothing to do with her if it meant he had to get it up and slide it in her out there in the desert behind the Loveboat, next to a tower of empty kegs. He felt himself beginning to go limp, the very thought of it making him so self-conscious his dick shrank even further, to the point where he was certain it looked like little more than a piece of molted rattlesnake. But they didn’t notice. They kept chanting and chanting and demanding that Torres do precisely to the woman what they’d had in store for her all night. Satin looked around as if she too were having second thoughts about the whole thing, realizing that to pick one of the bunch, especially a leader, might have been a mistake, until the crowd began pulling stacks of cash from their pockets and socks, and rings from their fingers, and chains from under their shirts.

The moment Satin saw greenbacks and jewels she shut out the faces in the crowd. They were all the same man to her, and she was ready to take requests and aware of the fact that whatever she ultimately decided to do would not only pay her rent for a couple months but would also have to
include the nervous bastard she had pulled from the crowd of drunken airmen, what are the chances. All this to pay for my shitty studio and save for a ticket to Amsterdam, where I can make some real money for doing this shit. So close. Maybe this will be the last time I’ll have to do this, if these cheapasses cough up enough money. She looked at the cash lying on the ground around her and tried to add it up. Mostly ones and fives.

The men chanted and someone fired up a joint and began passing it around and saying this shit’s gonna be great. Manny realized he was tipsy now and beyond his better judgment, but that was all right because he noticed that not only had Satin taken off the rest of her skimpy nurse outfit while he was worrying about his appearance but several of the men were circled about them smoking cigarettes and laughing and calling out suck him off and let him put it in your ass, putting their hands down their own pants and staring at Satin touching herself slowly and smiling, while Manny watched as one, two, five, nine cocks flopped out of boxer shorts and between opened pants zippers and the men put their cigarettes to their lips and stroked themselves, laughing, shouting put two fingers in, yeah, that’s it, and open wider bitch, and Satin complied because all she saw was the money lying in piles around her, and she put two more fingers inside, looked up at Manny, licked her lips, and moaned whatever you want, Cap’m. She ignored their yells and closed her eyes so she wouldn’t cry because they had been right, all those kids she had grown up with. They were right when they said she was born be a porn star or something with a name like Satin Sheets. They made fun of her parents for not knowing any better. What kind of dumbass names their daughter Satin Sheets? Sassy. Call me Sassy. Oh, like Sassy Sheets is better. So, here I am. Satin. On my knees being what I was born to be.

By this point Manny was at full attention, watching the men who were pumping away while others sat atop the dumpster or on overturned kegs sipping their drinks and smoking cigarettes and laughing, all eyes on Satin as she pulled Manny toward her and ran her tongue over his kneecap and up his left thigh and finally licked his sack and grabbed his cock and kissed it and cuddled it against her cheek then buried it in her throat, and Manny jumped a little at her ferociousness but soon got used to it, pretending to close his eyes while she sucked on him and rubbed
away at her cunt, moaning and grunting, but Manny was watching the men around him through squinted eyes and was overtaken with excitement and started shaking and heard the moans of the other men as Satin bent over in front of Manny and screamed fuck me, Cap’m, and he did just that while the men cheered and hollered and whooped and drank and smoked and pumped, the noise building into a frenzy of voices and grunts and yells that swirled above their heads and shook the sails of the Loveboat and flew above the city in a swarm of obscenities and primal moans crashing against the sides of houses and buildings and waking the people asleep within who thought it was a dream, and children hid their heads beneath their bedclothes and whimpered while wives shook their husbands and they turned on their clock radios or clicked their television remotes, but no mention was made of the event by the media so the wakened sleepers assured their wives and children that it was nothing unusual and tucked them back into bed and kissed them on their foreheads and shut off their televisions and their radios and all the lights in the house and went back to sleep while the spent men behind the Loveboat let out rushes of pent-up breath and zipped up their pants and stumbled into cars, onto motorcycles, and out onto the sidewalk, shaking their heads or whispering that fuckin maniac Torres.

Manny slid the key into the deadbolt and turned it slowly enough not to wake his kids or his wife. He was still trembling. He closed the door behind him and removed his shoes. A bath is exactly what I need right now. Even though it’s past three in the morning and I have to get up for work in two-and-a-half hours, I need to sit in the tub and let my bones rest and my muscles relax. He stepped into the bathroom and shut the door. Since the master bedroom was at the very end of the hall and the kids’ room was between it and the bathroom, Manny figured Stella would not wake to the sound of running water. But if she does, will she notice I’m still shaking? He looked in the mirror. What the hell was I thinking fucking that girl back there? Who knows where she’s been? He grimaced at his reflection, then turned the bathtub faucet to the hottest setting and sat atop the toilet waiting on the tub to fill up, letting the steam fill the room and clear his pores and loosen his breathing. What
have I done? What if Stella smells Satin on me? He didn’t want to lose his wife over some cheap whore.

Manny inhaled the steam of the bathwater, remembering how powerful Stella made him feel as his wife, the same way he felt every time he went in front of a promotion committee and they awarded him a higher rank. Each time Manny came home with a new patch, Stella took great pride in removing his lower-ranking patches and stitching on the new one.

As he listened to the water pouring from the faucet, Manny glanced over at his younger son’s potty chair, reminded of the time so many years ago when he’d wandered into the bathroom early one morning while his parents slept and lifted the lid of the toilet gently so it would not fall back down with a crash and wake his parents, and he tore off a piece of toilet paper—out of ritual instead of necessity—and placed it in the bowl of water and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, wincing as the crust scraped the soft pad of skin in the corners where his eyelids met, and let loose a burst of urine that pained him with its initial blast because it had been testing the limits of his bladder as he slept. He did not hear his father enter the bathroom because he was lulled by the sound and the force of his pee crashing into the toilet bowl. When his father came up beside him and pulled a big brown monster from the front of his boxers, Manny almost cried out in horror. His father leaned over the bowl, placing his hand on the sink opposite him, and unleashed a roar of piss so loud it sounded as if the very heavens were crashing to the ground. Manny stared in disbelief. The tiny nub he held between his fingers suddenly baffled and embarrassed him.

Manny chuckled over that day in the bathroom with his father. He hadn’t been able to look away. He’d even dreamed about it. The steam slowly began to clear and he removed his soiled clothes. The bath was full. The water was exactly how he liked it, almost unbearably hot. He eased himself into the large, claw-footed tub and let the water spill over him. The bathwater slowly broke down the film that covered him, the smell of Satin and sex and liquor.

Stella had not woken up, so he felt safe to ease the rest of his body into the water, taking a deep breath and sliding his head down the back of the tub to the bottom until only his knees were exposed to the
air. Holding his breath until he could feel his lungs being pinched within his chest, he thought about the Loveboat. Even though he was ashamed, he wanted to do it again. It wasn’t cheating on his wife or finally getting some stranger after years of being with the same woman. It was something else entirely. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

Little bubbles of air seeped out from his nostrils. Manny loved how it felt being underwater. It was the same way he had felt when Satin had him in her mouth and he saw all those men around him and it seemed like he was floating, finally relieving the terrible pressure that had been building within him for so many years, a pressure he had tried to press out so many different times, sleeping with several women before he married and even one or two in the year immediately following his wedding, though he had never enjoyed any of it. Not the way he enjoyed giving it to Satin behind the Loveboat.

Stella was unaware that Manny had been faking it in bed since before the birth of their first son, Justin. He felt bad because Stella seemed truly happy in their marriage. She scheduled family portraits at Olan Mills once a year. She’s a good woman. She even referred to herself as Mrs. Torres when he introduced her to colleagues, not just Stella. If she finds out about Satin, it will break her heart. And the boys. If this story spreads around the base, I’m screwed. Kids hear and talk a lot. Justin will find out. He’ll ask his mother. She’ll come crying to me, and I’ll have no explanation. She hadn’t done anything to deserve a husband like him. He pinched his eyes together as hard as he could, trying to make himself cry. But the dialogue in his head was an act, and he knew it. He couldn’t make himself truly care while he was lying in bathwater that smelled of sex.

He wished he could tell Stella that he’d had this weird feeling, like an itch, ever since he was a boy. One day he simply woke up and felt strange inside. A dull buzzing. As if he had sucked a gnat into his lungs and it was beating its tiny wings against the walls, trying to get out. At twelve he had scratched the itch for the first time when he and his friend Cory were walking home from school one day and Cory had asked him you ever punched your clown? Manny tried to pretend he
knew what that meant while Cory motioned for him to follow him into a cluster of bushes and pulled a magazine from his backpack with pictures of women on their backs with their legs splayed, one man drilling into her and two more standing by her head while she held a dick in each fist, smiling at the camera. Manny’s pants became very tight in the front. Cory flipped the pages and explained see, he’s fucking her and she’s sucking those other guys’ dicks, and Manny knew he understood because his body was flushed in a way that it had never been before. He tried to shift his feet and adjust himself so he would feel more comfortable, but it didn’t help. When Cory said do you feel it, Manny knew exactly what he was talking about and nodded and said yeah, so they’re fucking, but paying more attention to the three, sometimes four or five dicks in each picture rather than the woman and the revolting crack between her legs that looked to him like the honey ham his mom bought from the deli for his school lunches, and when Cory asked do you want to feel something cool, Manny nodded and watched in awkward silence as Cory placed the magazine down on the ground and pulled down his pants and palmed his joint and then said spit on your hand like this, don’t worry, I’m not a fag or anything, and he spat a glob onto his palm and rubbed it all over his joint and then wrapped his hand around it and started moving it back and forth and Manny watched in curious amazement, and Cory said damn, it feels good, you’ve got to try it, nodding toward Manny’s crotch until Manny thought why not, since he was dying to get rid of the weird tingling in his pants, so he did the same thing Cory had done, spitting and stroking and looking from Cory to the magazine to his own dick, proud that he was actually slightly bigger than Cory but eventually only staring at Cory and his thrusting hand and his scrunched-up face and his head tilting back with his eyes closed and his thighs starting to shake and then he gaped in amazement as a few drops of clear liquid spurted from Cory’s dick and left a strand hanging from the tip, swinging in the breeze and slowly stretching toward the ground, and Cory’s face was flushed and he was panting a little and saying goddam, goddam, over and over, while Manny watched him and kept spitting on his hand until he felt a surge of energy shooting from the tingling head of his
cock to all of his extremities, causing him to shake, and then with a burst it was over and Manny stood dizzy and breathless.

That was the first time Manny noticed the dull buzzing in his chest leaving and being replaced by a pressure that slowly began to build from that moment. But that time had been an accident. The first time he had consciously attempted to alleviate the pressure was at the age of fourteen when Hallie, a girl from school who had been giving him looks since he first started the seventh grade at Carson, walked through a dried-out wash with him one day smoking cigarettes as they headed toward their neighborhood and asked are you a virgin? When he said yes, she smiled and said I am too, but I don’t want to be anymore, and since we’re friends we should do it together. So they had met at his friend Jason’s house three weekends later, while Jason’s parents were away. Jason’s older brother bought them a bottle of Kessler and they went to the den and drank until Jason finally got bored and went to bed and Manny and Hallie laid together on the couch and kissed and touched each other and she grabbed his hand and placed it beneath her skirt and between her legs where it was warm and soggy like mud after a flashflood. What came after had made him sick. It scared him the way she squirmed and moaned beneath him and got soggier. The sound of their bodies meeting was like a fat man chewing his food too loudly. And the smell was awful. He hadn’t expected anything like it. With Cory it had been clean, out in the open. The tingling sensation shooting through his body happened again, but it wasn’t right. So he thought it must be her, because the next day the burdensome pressure was still there, vaguely taunting him, begging him to appease it. He had no idea how to solve the problem, no idea until he had put himself on display in front of a crowd of drunken men outside a strip club.