Honest Conversation Is Overrated
Actual Human Interactions Witnessed Or Overheard
In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century America
In Twentieth And Twenty-First Century America
1.) I lost my favorite shirt.
2.) In the pocket of my favorite shirt is the key to my hotel room. 3.) Because we're in the penthouse, and you need a penthouse room key just to get on to the penthouse elevator (or to access the penthouse floor via the stairway), I can't even get to the floor I am staying on, to knock on the door, to see if my hotel roommate, Mazarine, is around to let me in. 4.) I could call Mazarine, but I don't have her number memorized. I do have it in my cellphone, but... 5.) My cellphone is in the pocket of my favorite shirt. 6.) I have imbibed just enough alcohol to be cranky about it. 7.) It is nearly 5:30 in the morning. 8.) After several hours searching for my shirt, I ask the concierge to give me another key. He does. When I go upstairs and in to my room, the first thing I notice is that there, on the bed, is my favorite shirt. 9.) I'm the kind of person who makes absolutely sure that when I remove an item of clothing filled with objects, I check all my pockets and transfer anything I need. Therefore, when I removed my favorite shirt in my room, I transferred the hotel room key to my pants pocket, which means that I had the key with me THE ENTIRE TIME. When I still lived with Ben, he took a vacation to a woody retreat, and did a lot of acid. At some point, during the trip, he borrowed his friend, Lisabelle (last referenced here)'s cell phone. He was fairly certain he returned it, but when it was nearly time for he and Lisabelle to leave, she couldn't find the phone, and knew that the last time she had seen it, Ben was using it. To call me. According to Ben, he spent the next hours cleaning the house they were staying at. Every couch cushion was flipped, and dusted for potential cell phone remains. Every jacket in the house was emptied of pockets. Every cupboard emptied, then refilled and reorganized. Every square inch of the house was covered. At this point, Lisabelle's poor pussy-whipped boyfriend was informed that he had to hypnotize Ben, to make him remember what he did with it. The hypnosis didn't work, but during the hypnosis, Lisabelle put her hands in her pocket, where her cellphone had been the whole time. Upon hearing this story straight from the twink's mouth, Sir Trick said "Wait. They thought to hypnotize you? She wasn't thorough enough to check her pockets, but she thought of hypnotizing you? Why not just burn the house to the ground, and use a metal detector to find it?" I have spent the month of August trying to burn down my past and discover where I went wrong. While, technically, July is when I lost Ryan, August is when I lost dignity, Ben, Sora, my mind (when I moved to Arifuckenzona), the list is endless. "Your life is a fucken novel on acid." JBob says. We've seen each other once in the past decade. About a year ago we met for lunch in Boston, just after Sora disappeared. We had a good time, and some good laughs (and I stewed about him being hotter at 31, then he was when we were in high school, sleeping in the same room). And since slam nationals were in Madison, where he lives, we agreed to hang out during the competition. The highlight for JBob was when, in order to psych me up for a particular poem, he got to repeatedly shove me, and slap me in the face. It worked. "What do you mean 'my life is a novel on acid'?" "Well, ok, you're part of this big weird community where most people seem to know you, and, at least on the surface, like you. But you've got two nemeses. One is this Punky Brewster looking gay kid with leggings, and too much eyeshadow. And then there's the thirty-five year old Gothtard who wanders around in his lame-ass black trenchcoat all the time, leering at you." "You've got it wrong." I say. "Ben is not my nemesis, he's just...you know, Ben. And the Gothtard isn't my nemesis, I'm his. If I chose a rival, it would be someone who had a talent for what they do, or at least someone with dignity. That dingleberry doesn't even warrant a special name in my Livejournal." "Well, that's because he already has a special name. A Blue Light Special name. In his case, probably a flashing blue light pulsing to the rhythm of some lame ass techno band from 1994." We are walking to JBob's house. We are both fairly drunkwasted. We also spent some time in a Madison parking lot with a Boston poetry friend smoking a non-cigarette. I am vaguely aware of the turns we take between my hotel and his house. And when we get there, we resume smoking, and talking about high school, while the Olympic Opening Ceremonies play on his TV. "I totally had a gay crush on Fledge." JBob says. "Everyone had a gay crush on Fledge. He was cute, funny, and hung like a...like I'm too high to come up with something funny." "Yea, but, I used to wait outside the showers to try and see him naked." Well, this is uncomfortable. My hot, hilarious friend and former roommate is confessing a gay crush while we're both hammered and sitting on his couch. My hot, hilarious married to a girl friend and former roommate. God, I wish she was a bitch so I could sleep with JBob and not feel guilty. Silence ensues. "Well, I have to work tomorrow. So I should get to sleep. Do you want to crash here, or...." "I'll, uh, I'll just go back to the hotel. Yea. The hotel. Thanks for having me over. This was" awkward hug "fun." And he gives me spoken directions on how to get back to the hotel. Directions which I can't concentrate on because I'm thinking stupid stupid stupid just go back there and stupid stupid back to the stupid hotel but I think he was trying to no stupid stupid stupid just go. I've been walking aimlessly for about fifteen minutes, and thinking I'm hopelessly lost, when I look up and see a crowd of mostly-dressed-in-black-people in a circle around someone performing bad hip-hop. Clearly, I'm back in the poetry zone. And, sure enough, I see the hotel. I want to turn around and go back
0 Comments
Jim, my roommate Byrne, and several other people in the poetry community seem to have the mistaken impression that I hate all Gay People. "And I don't mean you're self-loathing. It's just other Gay People you hate. I mean, if I were to make a pie chart of The Gay Community where the red part was people you hated, and the black part was people you liked, it'd look like a watermelon."
"To be fair," I replied, "the chart would look exactly the same were you to divvy up the straight people I did and didn't like." But it's Pride Week, and most of the people annoying me are Gay. Here's the thing, I don't like PDA, even when it's hot gay guys groping each other and doing the type of kiss that surrenders to Germans. I don't like the huge rainbows, the Madonna karaoke or the horrible fashion shows with clothes designed by people who should never be given scissors within a hundred yards of curtains or bathmats. When I was invited me to read for Coming Out Day, rather than Pride, at a local spoken word venue, I knew the organizer understood me. Ryan and I had a couple of hilarious conversations about how we hated melodramatic gay people. Which made his choice to kill himself rather than come out to his parents all the funnier. Ok, I didn't find it funny at the time, but it makes me giggle now. Ben and I used to riff on hating stereotypical Gays, too. And that was funny because Ben is as stereotypically Gay as you can get without bursting into Flamer (note, I am not calling him a Flamer...he's just sort of sparky). But it was Sora that I really bonded with on the loving homosexual men, and disliking Gays. And while I may joke about not liking Gays because of their fashion sense, their musical taste, their propensity for PDAs, their coifs, their deliberately screechy octavoices, or their gonorrhea; the truth is none of them seem to know how to kiss properly. Trey kisses like a damp sponge being pressed against your lips and slightly squeezed into your mouth. I met him, as I'm sure you're shocked to know, over The Internet. And his kissing was the only thing I could fault him on, but I haven't called him back. Breezy uses his tongue like a woodpecker searching for ants at the back of my throat. I wouldn't have called him back either, but the thing is, he has this great apartment. I mean, the apartment itself is average. Not furnished very well, devoid of any art, but it's on the water, meaning bay breeze, which, given the current heatwave, is good enough reason for me to continue seeing him. "So you're dating a guy for his apartment." Asterisk said. "I've done worse. I've dated people because I've liked their dog." And while I've never dated someone for their dog (and I do love dogs), I did threaten to break up with someone when their ex-roommate got custody of their awesome cat. But it's not just the apartment. Despite his being the sort of Gay you can see from space even when your eyes are closed and you're facing in the opposite direction, staring into the sun, he looks really good naked, and since he has no roommates, we spend a lot of time naked in various rooms. But we're not dating. I know we're not dating because both of us had sex a few hours before we met up (with other people, natch), and then a few hours after we parted ways. Clem was the guy a few hours earlier, and he received kisses exactly the way a closet case kisses back when they're about to freak out. Our sex didn't really last long. We'd been trying to meet for months. And by we, I mean he. I gave up on him after the first night of his utter wishy-washiness. He wanted to meet. He wanted to bottom. He had the night off, but, horrors, what if someone saw me go into his house and knew I was A Homosexual? What would the neighbors say? (I surmise they'd say "Yawn. He could do better.") Three months and eleven potential meet-ups later, he sent me his address, and I hopped on a bus that connected with another bus, and yet another bus that dropped me off in his neighborhood. We made very small talk before we went into his bedroom, where he closed his shades, turned off all the lights, and took off his clothes. When I tell you he had the tiniest penis I've ever seen, I'm not trying to insult him. As much as I can appreciate a good looking penis, it's not the part of the body I'm most looking for. His ass was assdequate. But barely had he slid his skivvies around his ankles, when he started stuttering. He had one hand on my cock, and said "Your c-c-cock is so big. I can not b-b-bottom for you." Which is flattering, but not at all true. Not even remotely true. So I started putting my clothes back on. "I can jerk you..." "No." "You can't." "You've got a car, right?" In the movie version of my life, I'm smoking a cigarette. Perhaps two cigarettes. "Yes. I have car." Apparently, my cock was also so big he forgot how to use articles in his sentences. "You're giving me a ride home then." And he did, without question. And as soon as he dropped me off at the house, I e-mailed Breezy, and he took care of my Indigo Testicles. And I took care of his. And he took care of mine. And I took care of...you get the idea. When it was finally well past time for sleep, Breezy plopped down beside me on his bed, and grabbed my arms around him. Which is fine. I can be rather cuddly when the mood strikes, much to the chagrin of Sora, and the amusement of Zach. The latter referring to me as a Reverse Teddy Bear. "A big furry thing that never lets go." Breezy was the first guy I've ever thought of as aggressively huggable. Every time I was certain he was asleep, and I tried to move to a more comfortable position, he would wait for me to adjust, and then commandeer both my arms, roll his neck under my chin, and slide his butt up against my cock, which is a pretty surefire way to get me to not move too much for a while. "Where are you going?" He asked when it was time for me to head home, shower, and consider going to work. "Home." "Not yet you're not." And he was correct. Three times. When I got the e-mail from Diego, telling me he would die without a sperm transfusion, I wondered if meeting him was a bit over the top. True, I hadn't been laid since Wednesday afternoon, but it was only Friday afternoon, and I had a show to go to Friday night. But he was insistent that he come over. he was insistent about everything. Kissing too desperate. Mashing of mouths, yanking of head. It was like kissing a fish that kept flopping around to different sides of your face. "Am I too rough?" He asked. "No." You just suck at this. "I am ready to be-" don't say it, don't say it, don't say it "taken by you, Big Boy." Sora developed a sense of dirty talk sometime after the first year or so of our on/off/on/off/off/off/on/whatever dating cycle. I think this goes back to a conversation we had where I mentioned liking when a guy was vocal in bed. But what I meant was guttural, or pleasured, not loquacious and porn talky. But Sora gets away with it because I like him & he has a sexy voice. Diego...Diego doesn't fall into either category. It's not just the bad kissing, the bad porn talk, or the everything else. Diego proved something I suspected, but didn't know for sure. I'm not into black dudes. It's not a racist thing. I cold surely fall in love with someone black, and I can damn sure realize when someone black is hot, but I'm just not into them, precisely the same way I'm not into women. They can get me hard, they can get me interested, but they can't make me come. Diego tried and tried and tried and tried, until Byrne knocked on my door to let me know it was time to go to the show. I don't think he heard what we were doing (and if he's read this far, I'm sure he now regrets it). "What do we do?" Diego asked. "You have not--" "We've got to go." I said. "Sorry, I didn't realize this would take so" epically "long." "I will call you later." He, I hope, lied. "You are such a whore. Again." Dmitri said, when I relayed the stories to him. "Who killed himself this time?" "Ouch. No one. I mean, I'm sure someone, but nobody I know. It's just..." Oh shit. Trey kisses sponge, Breezy woodpecker, Diego cinder block, Clem like a terrified mannequin. Diego is too needy armed, Trey too non-existent. Diego too existent. Clem not enough anything. These ass shaped men trying to fit themselves in my heart slot. And, in theory, the piece should fit. Not perfectly, or even well. But they should drop into the too big space for them, and slide around like the last pretzel in a kiddie pool sized bowl. Everything about Breezy is nearly acceptable except that he isn't Sora. And, fuck. The best thing about having your perfect boyfriend commit suicide a month into your relationship is that you realize pretty quickly that there's no way you can improve upon your relationship or bring things back to the way they were. He's never going to be nearly as responsive, even if you dig him up and put a tape recorder in his chest. He's never going to kiss back, or silently judge you for your horrible necrophilia jokes. Ok, he will always silently judge you for your necrophilia jokes, because silent judgment is one of the few things corpses are good at. But, I digress. Sora is, thank everything, in no way shape or form dead. Nor is he, nor has he ever been perfect, as my friends frequently remind me. But he kisses properly, which is sometimes enough. And we've become accustomed to our cycle of whatever it is we do or don't. And Zach was right about me. I'm just this big, furry thing that never lets go. On my way home from work, I saw two dozen or so people sitting in the bleachers around an empty baseball field. The lights were on, but the dugout was empty, and the field was bare. I thought of you. Waiting for some sorted adventure, some ridiculous snatch of conversation. Any sign of entertaining life.
I went outside, a few minutes later, and there were a few people playing underhand softball. Does there really have to be metaphor everywhere I look? See the game is going on, whether people are watching or not. And people are always watching, whether or not they can see the game. And existentialist metaphor is so dated and boring. Would you like another cookie for your cache? I've been not seeing Sora, and Zach, and an assortment of other supposedly interested parties (I'm not calling Sora or Zach supposedlies...but the rest of them) for months now. The kind of people that obsessively call or IM or e-mail saying how much they want to see you, but none of them have any interest in actually hanging out, they just want you to pay attention to them. Attention and interest are such dissimilar similar words. Interest accrues, attention wanes. The crowd shows up expecting some sort of show or game, but they're easily distracted by other passing shinies. I am tired of games, of faked interest, and attention seekers. This is why I've been macheteing people out of my life. Weed friends. A good way to fall out of friendship with me: e-mail me a link to your suicide note. Don't explain why you are depressed, just mention chasms and blackness and voids and pain. Forget the fact that my first ex actually killed himself, whereas you are just an attention seeking bottom feeder who will call the next day as though nothing was wrong. Threatening suicide is like posting an ad for gay sex on Craigslist. You can't chalk it up to a phase, or drunken experimentation. It's something you either really want, or you're an asshole for doing it. Typing of assholes, this morning I repeatedly woke up on the right side of the bed. It's what was going on around the bed that was wrong. I was having a terrible reaction to a fairly mundane dream, the first time. I woke up to the sound of my landlady's voice outside my window. She wasn't yelling, but she wasn't having a pleasant conversation, either. By the time I got my clothes on, and headed out to the driveway, both she and the upstairs neighbor she was talking with were gone. I was asleep for another two hours when I had another frustrating return to consciousness, and I heard someone pounding on the front storm door (it didn't occur to me until just now that we have no storm door to our apartment, the upstairs apartment has one). I heard her voice again, and waited for her to come in without calling me, so I could take my bad mood out on her. But she didn't come in. As she walked through the driveway I heard her say "I usually hate coming here, but this time, I feel pretty good." And she did her obnoxious twitter laugh. Was she coming to FINALLY fix the washer that broke down in February? Perhaps, install the dishwasher she promised would be set up by Labor Day 2007? Of course not. She was gone when I was calm enough to walk outside, where a police officer told me he and an electrician were cutting off power. As you can probably guess by this post, it wasn't the power to our apartment. "Do you live in Apartment A?" He asked. "Nope." "It's not your unlucky day, then." And he smiled. "Cruella Deville over there," and he pointed to where the landlady's car had been "doesn't like you, though. She thought we were here to cut the downstairs power." I'm really glad I don't understand what goes on in her head. What sort of game she's watching behind those eyes. When airing dirty laundry, make sure to describe it properly. No, I didn't break up with my most recent ex because he slept on Pokemon sheets, they were just one of the many neon signals that we weren't a good match. The manipulative lying, the partial indecisiveness (he couldn't complete anything), and the fact that all of my friends have been telling me for over a year to get around him were other factors. Also, technically, he dumped me. Via e-mail. Twatwaffle.
The Pokemon sheets were a factor, though. Eleven year age differences are entirely too much to deal with, which is why the guy I'm currently crushinating on, is only nine years younger than me. Shut up. As it turns out Zack and I have much in common. We've both lived in Arizona, we both hate nice people, we've both slept with Mr. Hot Positive Load (though only one of us got The Applause), we both love watching trainwreck comedy, and we're both awesome. You have no idea what a relief it is to spend hours talking with a guy, have sex, and not immediately start writing a bad_sex entry in my head. Although... After we got done, in the midst of perhaps the best cuddle of the current millennium, Zack said "I have something I want to say, but there's no way for it not to be weird." I knew this was too perfect to be real. "Thank you." Awww. "You know," I said, "on the list of weird things people have said to me in bed, that doesn't even rate." He giggled. "Hot positive load." "I once dated a guy who said 'You're better than my brother.'" More giggling. And then we give each other walking tours of our previous lust lives, mine ending with Sora. "I mean, the Pokemon sheets. Pokemon. I asked if he had anything that wouldn't make me feel like a child molester, and he mentioned having Digimon sheets. Which is less okay. Anyhow, sex with him was weird anyway. He was really good at it, but whenever he came, he used to say 'Squirtle!'"* And then we laughed until the sun crawled in through the window, desperate to explore the gaps between my chin and his neck, and the knot of our fingers. *-this is not true, at all It is not often that I'm left speechless. I've got words for just about everything. They say certain Inuit tribes have over one hundred and fifty words for snow. The Swahili language has no word for boredom. And, according to various websites and books, there are a variety of languages that don't have a direct translation for love. Which makes me wonder if they're inundated with thousands of words to describe manipulative, lying ex-boyfriends. If not, they can borrow a few of mine.
Thanks to an internet stalker friend, I started a profile on what is, essentially, fagspace. Even the coding is similar to Myspace. So, instantly, I hated it. When I, further, discovered that they have old school AOL-style chatrooms, I contemplated deleting my account all together. And then I started talking with a cute guy, who was Interesting and Interested, and that was all fine, well, and good. Later, while I was putting up some pictures, I got an IM from someone familiar looking. Maybe someone from the poetry scene, or the comic book store. A passing acquaintance. One that I had possibly imagined naked. We were small talking about Boston, and why he hates it, and why I love it, when I asked him why he left. "I'm more of a small town guy." He said. "Too many people in the city know me, or think they know me, and things get really awkward." I decided not tell him "You do look kind of familiar." Damn it, fingers, don't type without consulting my brain. He sighed. (We were chatting via webcam, so I could see him. {Don't judge me! I have three hundred and fortyteen words for fuck off.}) "You probably know me from the clubs. I used to be a gogo dancer." No. "I don't go to clubs. I must have just seen you around." And we small talked, and he asked me if I minded if he friended me. Of course, I didn't. So when the invitation came, I clicked on his profile, and...and then I knew. I can't imagine there are too many inoffensive ways to say "On my bookshelf, I have four DVDs of you getting fucked. Including a birthday orgy scene, where you were, by the way, amazing." So, I'm speechless, because, believe it or not, porn stars intimidate me. Not because of their huge cocks, or perfect asses (I have ninety-twelve hundred words for those...some of them overlap with the words for ex-boyfriends); I am intimidated because I know that they've had better looking, better endowed, paid professionals in their ass. And knowing things like that is much different than imagining things like that, suspecting things like that, or being told things like that. I know exactly what frequency he moans in when he means it. And, if the whole derivation of porn names is true, I know the name of his first pet, and what street he lived on as a kid. And I want to move to that street. I want to find thirtyleven words for the way his bare feet scraped against the cracked pavement, twenty-twodred ways to describe the way the air smelled the first time he noticed his neighbor's cleft chin, surely the trees in his neighborhood have an infinite amount of terms for the way he peeled back their bark with his fingers. Understand, I don't have very many words for love, and none of them describe the way I feel for this guy who's real name I just learned, at all. How (fill in one of the thirtillion words for desperately naive stupidity brought about by the confusions of lust and love here) do you think I am? The word for the way I feel is a lust I am all too not unfamiliar with. And I am acquainted with more variations of the feeling of lust than heterosexual male teenagers have words for breasts. Recently, my lust was called into question by Sora, who never did get a grip on the way I felt about him, so he let me slip between his fingers. As though love and lust were like binary. There is only 0 and 1, there is no 3.14etc. Square roots are right out! And since his language had no direct equivalent for my feelings, he could never hear them quite right. All my explanations were babble and gobbledy-greek. They say that when your ears ring, you are hearing that frequency for the last time in your life. It's the sound of a frayed nerve ending giving out. From that point on, every middle G sharp will sound just a little bit flatter to you. You will probably never notice this. There are fifteen foursand things I would have liked to express each time Sora and I have said goodbye. They all mean something like fuck you and please don't leave. What they boil down to is "I'm sorry that you were never able to be honest with me, though really, I shouldn't be the one apologizing since that isn't my fault; and fault isn't exactly the right word there, but language is weak and cowardly sort of like packing up all your belongings and moving while I was out of state; or the way you only really talked with me when you were drunk; and precisely the way a goodbye e-mail feels the day after you left with my come on your ass and a smile on your lips like nothing was wrong anymore." I don't want to name that feeling after him. He has already infected too much of my vocabulary. His name already too reggaeton. The last thing I said to him, not knowing anything was wrong, was "I love you." May those words ring in his ears until he can never hear them again. And the next time they make the same mistake I tell them not to get caught in cycles. Stop making the same mistakes over and over. Idiots, learn from the past. I am caught in my own cycle making the same past over and etc. Idiot, learn from people's mistakes. Bad sex is a cycle. Different face, different flaw. Same result. Revolving door of disappointment. I'm caught in my past. Repeating the same cycle etc. and over. What I was trying to say the other night was that we're both repeating ourselves. We're both past-locked revolving, and it just isn't working for either of us, but still, I prefer it to the alternative. I'm told I'm good at writing sestinas, villanelles, and pantoums. All these form poems where you have to repeat words, echo lines. It's the way I'm wired, I guess. I keep having the same relationships, sometimes with the same people. Cycle etc. Past idiots caught in repeating flaws. I know better than this. We all know better than this. And I keep telling someone he's not crazy (it's a cycle) because crazy people don't realize they're crazy. But I think I'm over and over wrong. Maybe he is crazy isn't the etc. point. Sometimes knowing you're crazy and not fixing it makes you a more dangerous kind of revolving crazy. None of my recent posts seem overly and overly sane. I am presently moreso single than I've been in a year and half. I'm taking over and over advantage of it, but it's really more that I'm taking over and over disadvantage of it. Nothing is fitting together properly. None of these men have comfortable flaws. And months ago I mentioned that he had ruined sex with other men for me, and I thought I was being hyperbolic. But the past few revolving nights seem to prove that I was being overly honest. I'm tired of you reminding me of Elvis and Ryan etc. etc. Be more dangerous crazy honest with me. I would be more worried about missing you already if I didn't already miss you when we were together. So, Steggy, the poet I toured with in 2003 is here in Austin. He is dressed in his blue footy pajamas and his rabbit ears hat on a near full time basis. I haven't seen him since he moved out of Boston in 2004. So I called him to see where he was hanging out after our bout. Turns out, he was with Mr. Drunk Bisexual from the previous post, as well as with my friend Asterisk. So I go to their hotel room, knock on the door, and go in. And there, leaning against the dresser, is Ben. Just after I say hello, my phone rings.
"Hey Safey, it's Sora. Are you okay? I just got this feeling that something really terrible is happening to you right now." Sora wins at life. I must still look like a poet. Or a drug addict. The two aren't necessarily indistinguishable. But while I'm waiting for the train home from Sora's, a guy offers me some trees for some haze, and I don't think he's trying to solve global warming.
I have no trees. The only haze is in my mind, because I didn't sleep much last night. It was my turn to sleep on the floor, and my body clock is more of a blinking digital 12:00 VCR flash (which I suspect is the real reason DVDs were invented). I get on the train and am surprised to see an old friend back from Africa who shares smacknothing talk with me between Providence and Boston, where I pack, and go to meet another bus. The beginning of my trek to Dallas. I noted several years ago that Cerberus is actually a Greyhound. I think if Americans were serious about rehabilitating criminals, instead of sending them to jail, they'd put them on a bus for a week. This theory is shot to hell when I discover my first seatmate is fresh from jail and headed to rehab I said no, no, no. He entertains me with the level of lies I haven't heard since I deported Elvis almost a decade ago. And then I fall asleep. Wake up in New York. Grand Central Fuck Yourself Port Afuckenkillyourselfthority. The 9:15 bus I'm supposed to take doesn't exist. The next one is, of course, 11:45, and it will be pack packed. And, of course, the really obese woman in front of me clicks her seat back against my knees, and a woman and her toddler squeeze in next to me. And the baby rarely cries but she kicks and grabs my arm. And the mother's knee is in my hip, and it's like this all the way to fucken Richmond Virginia. Richmond to Roanoake to everywhichwhere Caroliginiasee, the bus is a hive of crackheads and loud women and crying oh my god kids. And somewhere in Tennessee Nate gets on. Nate. Nnnnnnnnnnate. If I wasn't stupidly Sorafied (he is not stupid, I am not stupid, I am using it as in wicked, as in hella, as in completely), I'd have noticed sooner how unnervingly sexy he is. Not beautiful like Sora. Not hot like...hot people. He looks like what would happen if Gary Sinese got Tobey Maguire pregnant. And he's of course Irish, and is reading The Hitchhiker's Guide, and I am reading The World According To Garp, which makes us best buddies because obviously we're both nerds who are Irish who listen to The Dropkick Murphys and The Pogues. And everything is a racist joke to him, except the religious ones. And hours pass. He is showing me pictures of his fiancee, asking if I approve. And she's obviously also Irish, and pretty, and, sure I approve of why not her? "It's just..." and he stares at me, "I've always had a thing for redheads..." And the stare keeps lingering there, like someone sprayed Axe bodyspray in a microwave. "O...k. I don't really have a type, in that way. But. Good for you." And he is a kicked puppy that I keep feeding and at my god every stop he wants to know what I'm buying and oh man I'm tired but the conversation and the sleep can't coincide and he has so much to say and instead of a knee in my hip, it's a tongue in my ear, and not in the cool way that Sora does it. "And I'm a soldier." He says. "So when I say Fuck Bush, I know what I'm talking about and" yip yip bubbledy bloo. And he keeps touching my leg, which is not his beautiful fiancee. And all I want to do is sleep, and I don't think I've eaten anything since my God Boston. When he switches buses in Texarcana, he takes down all my info so that we can keep in touch. I can't imagine what I'll say if he ever actually calls or writes. And blissful then sleep until Dallllllllldallllllldalllas. Where poets and old friends and a camera await me. While the national poetry slam starts in Austin on Tuesday, there is a pre-nationals invitational tournament in Dallas on Sunday night. So I left Boston a little oh god too early. And the rest of my team doesn't arrive until Monday, so instead of competing, I volunteer to record the event. Put down poetry book, pick up tripod and video and lay down on weird angle floor. And so many people I've not maybe purposefully maybe not seen for a while. I am called by hot_rod_poet's name no less than a dozen times (mostly by the same person). This is because all white people from Boston look alike. Even though, according to my last show in Boston, I am actually a 6'2 black man named Wiz. After the show and some requisite drinks and food, I hang out with my not teammates (another team from Boston comprised of people I have previously been on teams with), and then there is...then there is drunkoolery. And beer? "I want a beer." Someone drunk drunk tipsily tells me. "I" of course "don't have any beer." I look around for support. There is drunk boy, drunk boy's nearly as drunk friend, Asterisk, and Insaferubenmode, a friend of mine who (obviously) has nearly the same name. Drunk Boy invites all to get beer with him at the gas station across the street. When Asterisk, Insaferubenmode, and I decline, he says "Anyone who doesn't get beer with me is gay." He is, in fact, two thirds correct. But Asterisk looks mock horrified and Drunk Boy says, "Oh, you know I'm kidding. I'm as bisexual as they come." And his friend says "On your face." And Asterisk and I are of course obliged along with Insaferubenmode to begin BeerQuest. Which fails. But I do get to see Drunk Boy climb a pole and run super speedy across the street and then Asterisk says "I couldn't fuck him. When he gets drunk his eyes go crazy, and I can't tell if he's looking for me or looking at me." And there is much laughter, and you know, I hardly ever spend time with just Asterisk, and we amuse ourselves muchly. Then Asterisk goes to sleep, and I grab my bathing suit and head to the pool where Drunk Boy, Drunk Boy's friend, pageloads of LJ friend/poets and some sort of family reunion that has nothing to do with poetry but who have decided to record some video of performing poets who are swimming and making, according to the management, too much noise, since the pool is supposed to have been closed for three hours so be quiet anyway. And it's not that I was looking to see Drunk Boy naked, it just sort of happened, and good for him and good for whichever sex and whichever person he ends up with because well, yea, good for him and everyone involved. And I am involved, but not with him, with Sora and. And. Well, you know. He's no but who is Sora. And it occurs to me I should have been sleeping hours ago. But the pool. And the computer. And Dallas. And LJ poet friends. And the maniac from Albuquerque (not a slam poet) who is in town for American Idol with his band, a novel he's working on, his website, a team of flying reindeer, the blueprints to Fort Knox, and a whole other wagon full of bullshit if anyone believes the first few piles he shovels at you. And, you know, naked on your face. And in a few couple maybe less than one hours I'm off to Austin and don't ask me how but you know it will happen and more poetry and dizzy and blur and more naked would be great and I wish Sora were here (though he needn't be but I wouldn't mind naked), but rumor has it Ben is coming in how did this happen stead. This is meanfunny I guess but I don't know where Ben is planning on staying. But I have an idea. I brought some masking tape. I'm thinking of taping off a section of the hotel room I'm sharing with Wiz, fifteen inches by four feet, and labeling it "Van Seat" in honor of the "bed" I slept on in his house. It was more comfortable than Sora's floor (but that's not my usual place when I stay over), and didn't smell as badly as the Greyhound seats, but it was still you know a too small van seat for my long legs, and really I just always need an excuse for something to do. I hate my roommate. Owes money. Stinks up the house. Steals my porn. Won't leave.
My boyfriend[?], Sora, hates his roommate as well. I'm not sure as to why. But last year I lived with him for four months, and I suspect that the person responsible for their antagonistic relationship is him. But I love him, so I don't tell him this. One of his major problems is that his roommate has been letting one of her friends crash on their couch since the day they moved in, nearly a month ago. This guy doesn't pay rent, or any bills. Aside from that, I know very little about him. Late one night a few weeks ago, Sora calls me to say "Ewww. So, you know how I told you my roomtwat's friend has been crashing on our couch?" I reply in the affirmative. "Well, an hour ago, for the third time, I walked in while he was jerking off." "Have you told him that you have a bathroom with a lock on the door?" He laughs, and continues with his bitching. A week later, I decide to come visit his apartment. As soon as we get in the door, the couchjerker flits his eyes at us, lowers his head and says hey. He's adorable. If I had this guy on my couch, I would ORDER him to jerk off whenever I came home. Sora feels differently, he grumbles in the couchjerker's direction, and pulls me into his bedroom. After watching a couple of hours of Drawn Together, we get down to the busy busy. There's some head involved, some ass slappage, some anal, and a little more head for good measure. We aren't as loud as usual, but we weren't completely silent. After toweling off, I open the door and walk to the bathroom to pee. As soon as I enter the living room, couchjerker shoots me this horrified look, prompting me to put on my serious face, and my fuck you voice and say "What are you looking at? You don't pay rent here. You don't get to look at me like that. If we're too loud for you, fuck you, find your own apartment." Then I walk into the kitchen, burst out laughing, pop my head back into the living room and say "I'm just kidding." He does not laugh back. The next morning, the three of us are all in the living room. Sora is playing Kingdom Hearts (I know, I know), I'm alternating between massaging his back and checking my e-mail, and couchjerker is sitting on the couch, continuing to look traumatized. He looks as though he is constantly watching someone rape his favorite kitten. It's almost cute, but not quite. At around noon, Sora realizes, holy shit, it's almost noon, and he has to leave for work at 12:30. So he gets up, goes to his room, and closes the door behind him. I follow. And, as I'm wont to do, I stand behind him, wrap my arms around his chest and kiss him, giving rise to both his spirits and his cock. I grab on to it, and start slowly pulling it up,. "I've got to leave for work in fifteen minutes." He says. "We don't have time to....ohhhhhhh. I mean..." I know what he means. Usually, if we're finished in less than an hour, one or both of us has fallen asleep. Fifteen minutes for both of us? I'm determined to make this work. Off come his pants, off come my pants. I press my cock between his prodigious buttocks cheeks while I jerk him off. Then I kneel down, turn him around so we're facing each other, and put some serious smack to his ass while I blow him. He explodes rather quickly. I lean back on his bed and stare at my cock. "Do we have time?" He asks. Of course we do. "But, I'm terrible at giving head." He says. This is not true. I'm not a big fan of getting head. I don't mind it. It beats listening to Slipknot while monkeys throw pudding at you, but I much prefer anal. But Sora is...well, I love him, so his tongue gets bonus points. He doesn't use much tongue. He is mostly lips, moving so fast, I swear he's gonna get whiplash. And within a minute I watch a web of come blossom between his lips. I didn't even know I was....and then I feel the wave. And then another, and another and a...wow. We towel off, and Sora gets dressed for work. I grab my backpack, and get ready to head home. We stop in the kitchen to grab a couple of sodas. Couchjerker is in there, looking...well, yea, traumatized as usual. In an effort to make him uncomfortable, without being mean (mostly because I find it funny), I start small talking with him. At this point, the roommate (who I hadn't met yet) comes out of her room, wearing her work clothes, and starts loudly bitching about being late for work, and how she hates this and that and yadda and yin and yang and whatever. I roll my eyes, and turn back toward couchjerker. I squeeze his arm as I say "It was nice to meet you." He barks like a dog who's had his tail stepped on, causing Sora to laugh. A swooping laugh that turns into a cough. A cough that launches web of come out of his mouth and on to the left breast of his roommate's waitress uniform. Unable to resist, I say "Damn. That's the first time my come has been on a woman's tits since the early nineties." Sora continues to choke laughter. Couchjerker continues to look traumatized. The roommate just shoots me a disgusted look, and walks back into her room. I really must visit Sora more often. I hate Divine. Forgetting the $1200 she owes me, the smell of the wretched food she cooks at three in the morning, and the way she blasts 'NSync and the Backstreet Boys when she thinks I'm not home (seriously, what year is this? 1998?), the real reason I don't like her is because...I don't like her. Not the way she looks, not the way she smells, not the way she acts, not the way she laughs, nothing.
Before I realized how much I despised her, we were talking about roommate boundaries. Not just the usual "don't eat my food" crap, or the "kindly don't wipe your gargantuan behind on my nice clean towels" plea, but the discussion of physical boundaries. Specifically, the door between our rooms. It's a French door. I don't mean it surrenders every time someone knocks on it, that it forces its tongue down your throat when you kiss, or that it creaks with an accent egu, I mean it's one of those doors that slides into the wall, instead of folding open and closed on hinges. It covers nearly the entire wall between my bedroom and hers. And while it closes enough to keep someone from accidentally getting a look into the other person's room, it does fuck all for preventing noise pollution. But, apart from the occasional pop music violation, it's usually not a problem. Usually. A couple of months ago, I came back from visiting my racist grandmother at about two-thirty in the morning. I was exhaustired. I'd mowed her lawn, replaced he mailbox, walked her evil evil dog, and then gotten home just in time to miss the last T (the Boston subway) home, which meant I'd had to walk a couple of miles. When I got home, all I wanted to do was drop into a coma. So I took off my clothes, flopped on my bed, and...and I noticed the music in the background. The faint warbling of Carrie Underwood. I wondered why Jesus was at the wheel at this time of night. Then I heard a weird hiccuping of air. Imagine an asthmatic frog trying to run a marathon, and you have some idea of this fantastically odd sound coming from underneath the French Pocket door. Of course, I had to investigate. I threw on my bathrobe and crept toward the door. Carrie Underwood gave way to Whitney Houston. I peered through the crack between the doors, and saw my roommate shoving a gigantic dildo up her ass while jerking off to a porn DVD. MY PORN DVD. Oh, Whitney, while you are certainly correct in you're assertion that "It's not right", I beg to differ with you about your next contention. It's not okay. I walked back over to my bed, turned my radio on (sadly, it was not playing anything that fit the situation), and called my boyfriend, loudly discussing my visit to racist grandma, and how distressed I was that my favorite porn DVD was missing. As soon as the radio clicked on, she let out a rather large hiccup, muted both the TV and her computer (from which the evil music was coming), and stopped producing any sound at all. Now, at the time, Sora and I were doing the are we or aren't we dating, and even if we aren't how do we feel about fucking every now and then two step. We talked a lot on the phone, but rarely saw each other. This made me horny and irritable. Since my roommate owed me money, and had taken to hiding from me whenever I was home, she became the target of much of my rage. Still, if the bitch hadn't snuck into my room and stolen one of my porn DVDs (which, honestly, wasn't really my favorite), things might have gone differently. A week after the night of hiccuping doom, I heard her talking on her cell phone. She told whoever was on the other end of the line how tired she'd been lately. How she had worked nine straight days (this was not true, she'd spent the entire previous day cowering in her room), and was really excited to have the next day off. "I'm totally sleeping in until four in the afternoon." She said. The hell she was. I grabbed my cell phone, walked outside, and called up Sora. "What are you doing tomorrow morning?" I asked. "I dunno." He replied. "What are you doing tomorrow morning?" "You." He called me at five the next morning to let me know that he was just getting off the highway. I removed the lube and condoms from my desk. When he arrived, we spent about ten minutes loudly discussing our relationship, and how we could improve it. "I wish you'd spank me more." He said. I wasn't sure if he was serious, or trying to shock my roommate, who'd been making annoyed rustling sounds in her room since our discussion began. I decided to err on the side of optimism, and yank him over my lap. There was a loud thwap. This was followed by a "Oh, yeeeeeeeeah." I giggled. Then I smacked his ass again. Then things got noisy. Smacks, sighs, grunts, the squishy squishy of lubricated skin in skin. She turned her iTunes on. We got louder. She turned her computer volume to full blast. We got louder. At some point, the utter ridiculous level of our passion went from funny to really hot. No matter how loud her precious Justin Timberlake proclaimed that he was bringing sexy back, we brought it back louder and harder. While I did register the slamming of her door, I didn't let it pause the best sex my Sora and I had had since...well, ever. I don't know how long she was gone, or what she did while she was away. I just know that we were still going at it when I heard the front door slam shut, and a muffled "Are you fucken kidding me?" came from the hallway. Then the door shut again. A few hours later, when we were both mostly spent, and watching Shin Chan episodes on his computer, Sora went into the kitchen to get something to drink. When he came back in, he was wearing his evil grin that I find incredibly sexy. "Your roommate is in the kitchen." He whispered. "She doesn't look too happy." "Why are we whispering?" I asked. "Because I heard her say she was really looking forward to hanging out with whoever was on the other line of her phone, but she had to shower first." I was puzzled. "So...why does that mean we have to whisper?" "I figured now might be a good time for the two of us to take a long, hot, loud shower together." Have I mentioned how much I love him? So we were in the shower, finding interesting uses for the loofah, when I noticed her angrily shouting. I presumed it was into her call phone. "I know I told you I'd be there in an hour or so, but MY ASSHOLE FUCKEN ROOMMATE has been hogging the shower." I laughed. Sora laughed too, and began licking his way down my stomach. I had an idea where he was headed. I giggled to myself about how I'd turned headed into a sort of pun. Sora wrapped his lips around my extremely happy and diligent cock. I let out a loud moan. Somewhere in the middle of my ear, I registered a sound. I couldn't place it, but I knew it carried a sort of foreboding. It was the sound of distant water running. My body tensed as the water in the shower blasted from hot to cold. This was then followed by another unpleasant sensation: teeth. In the last place a guy wants to feel teeth. I got louder. And from the kitchen I heard my roommate getting the last laugh. |
Categories
All
Archives
December 2023
|