Depending on how long and thick the cock is that’s supposed to go up there, I like to take plenty of time to stretch it out, or at least have a lot of alcohol or something else numbing.
Anal sex is great—even though sometimes you don’t notice until the next day that you overestimated your ability to stretch.
Overall it was a bad experience with the redhead. Now whenever I see a light-skinned redhead, I chuckle inside and think to myself she’s lazy in bed, has no hair—anywhere, like an alien—eats goldfish and has never had anything up her ass. And her nipples don’t stick out.
My dad, drunk at a party, once said to a redhead friend of my mother’s, “Ginger hair, always moist down there.”
Not at all!
And now, Helen? What are you going to do now? Got a plan?
I could look out the window and ponder nature for a while. It’s summer. The chestnut trees in the hospital yard are in full bloom. Someone—probably a landscaper—has made planters by cutting off the top halves of what look like big, green-plastic trash barrels. If I’m seeing them correctly from this distance, they’re planted with fuschia and bleeding-heart flowers. Those are my favorites. It sounds so romantic. Bleeding-heart. My father taught me the name. I remember everything my father has taught me. Always. The things my mother’s taught me, not so much. But my father doesn’t try to teach me things as often—maybe that makes the lessons easier to remember. My mother blathers on all day about things I’m supposed to remember. Things she thinks are important for me. Half of it I forget immediately; as for the other half, I purposefully do the opposite. My father teaches me things that are important to him. Everything about plants. He’ll say out of the blue: “Did you know you should dig up dahlias in the fall and let them winter over in the basement? And that you plant them again early in the year in the garden?”
Of course I didn’t know that. But duly noted, now I do. Dad derives great pleasure from knowing so much about the natural world. Mom’s afraid of the natural world and her knowledge of it. She always seems to be fighting against it. She fights against dirt in the household. She fights against various insects. In the garden, too. Fights against bacteria of all kinds. Against sex. Against men and against women. There seems to be nothing my mother isn’t bothered by. She once told me that sex with my father caused her pain. That his penis was too big for her insides. This is not information I wanted to know. Wait, I was actually hoping to focus on the natural world outside the hospital. That’ll put me in a better mood than pondering sexual intercourse between my parents. Unfortunately, I always picture things in intricate detail. Sometimes the images aren’t very pretty.
Helen, kill these thoughts of yours.
Boredom is creeping back.
Mom always says, “Boring people are bored.”
Oh well. She also says, “We aren’t put on this earth to be happy.”
Not your kids, anyway, mom.
Try again, Helen. If you’re bored, you can always make a date with yourself to look out the window. Good idea. Busy yourself getting to know your environment. No reason to stay fixated on things down below. Now would be a good time.
I snap my head to the side and stare out the window.
Lawn. Trees. Chestnuts. What else? I see a huge staghorn sumac tree. I guess I don’t even have to say it’s big. Staghorn sumac trees are always big. They scare me. My father taught me that, too. To be scared of staghorn sumac trees. They’re not from here. They’re not native. Asian or something. And they grow a lot faster than our trees. When they’re still small—which is the case for only a short period—they send up a long, thin, rubberlike trunk that puts all its energy into gaining height.
That way they overtake all the surrounding plants. Once they’ve exceeded the height of everything around them, they sprout a broad crown over everything else. That kills everything else had been growing beneath it—light no longer gets through, and the roots of the fast-growing staghorn sumac suck up all the water.
But it’s not all bad. Since the trunk shoots up so fast, it’s unstable compared to our trees. Entire branches break off in the slightest breeze. Serves it right. But the branches often hit people who don’t realize they’re standing under an Asian tree unable to withstand wind because it busies itself trying to outpace everything else in terms of height and forgets to build a sturdy base for itself.
I always walk in a wide arc around staghorn sumac trees. I wouldn’t want one of them to become the epitaph on my gravestone.
When I walk the streets, I see staghorn sumacs all over the place. They seem to grow out of every crack in the earth. They propagate like mad. The city government must be constantly removing them—otherwise they would have completely taken over long ago. Sometimes I notice people who have let one grow in their garden after it appeared. They have no one to blame but themselves. Soon it’ll be the only thing in the garden. But I can’t ring all of their doorbells and warn them. That would be too much work. Unfortunately, not everyone has a father like mine who can teach them such useful things.
The staghorn sumac fronds are big. In the middle a long stem, at the top end a little leaflet like a head, and then a series of very symmetrical lance-shaped leaflets along each side. Left and right, like ribs. I’ll pick out a branch from here and count the leaflets. I’ve got to do something. Twenty-five leaflets on one frond. Eagle-eyed Helen. Not really—like I said, they’re big. Too big. The trunk is smooth and greenish. It looks like uncut brown bread. It feels nice—if you’re brave enough to walk under one and touch it.
Enough about nature. My turn again. For a while now I’ve felt something on my right upper arm. I’m going to look at it. I shift my shoulder forward, grab the fat on my upper arm, and roll it toward me. Now I can see it. Just as I thought—a blackhead. I have no idea why my upper arm is full of them. My own poor explanation for it goes like this: hair tries to grow there but because of the friction from T-shirt sleeve edges, individual hairs stay under the skin and get infected.
And so I come to one of my biggest hobbies. Popping zits. I’ve noticed a big blackhead in Robin’s ear. More precisely in the flat area just outside the ear hole. I’ve often seen people with exceptionally large, black things like that right in the same area. I think people just don’t tell each other and the blackhead then has years to fill itself with dirt and grease. Several times I’ve forgotten to ask people ahead of time and have just reached for their zit in order to pop it. I practically grabbed Robin’s ear. I could barely control myself. But a lot of people aren’t cool with that. When you just pop their zit without asking. They think it’s overstepping a boundary. I’ll ask Robin, though, once we know each other better. I’m sure we’ll get to know each other better. Not going to escape. The blackhead in Robin’s ear, I mean. That’s reserved for me. I clench the blackhead on my upper arm between the thumb and pointer finger of my left hand and, with a squeeze, out comes the worm.
It goes directly from my thumb into my mouth.
With that taken care of, I examine the little wound.
There’s a drop of blood in the hole left behind by the blackhead.
I wipe it off. It doesn’t disappear. It just smears.
Just like on my legs when I’ve shaved them instead of Kanell. Fast and careless. Often I get goose bumps from the cold water and from standing around in the tub. When I shave over them, I tear open every bump. Then I think I looked better with hair because now there’s a pinpoint of blood where every hair was. At some point I put on a pair of nylons over my bleeding legs and discovered an interesting effect. The almost see-through, skin-color nylons smeared each speck of blood into a stripe as I pulled them up my legs. By the time I had them all the way up, they looked like an expensive pair of patterned nylons. I wear them that way a lot when I go out.
Wearing nylons over my bloody legs has another advantage, too. I like to eat my scabs. At the end of a night out, when I take the nylons off again, they rip off the dried blood, and new scabs form. Then, once they’ve
hardened, I can pick them off and eat them.
Tastes almost as good as sleepy seeds. The snack brought by the sandman and left in the corner of your eye closest to your nose.
When I treat my little wounds so poorly, eventually a pore or two will get sealed and keep a hair from coming out. The hair still grows, but it coils up beneath the skin. Like the roots of the avocado in the base of the glass. At some point it gets infected and then Helen enters the game. I’ve been very patient. Despite the fact that the whole time the hair was calling to me, “Get me out of here, I want to grow straight like the other hairs, in the fresh air,” I’ve kept my fingers off it. It’s difficult. But it’s worth the wait.
First I stick a needle into the infected lump and squeeze out the pus. From my fingertip into my mouth with that. Then it’s the hair’s turn. I poke around in the wound as long as it takes to get at the hair. It always looks a bit stunted since it’s never seen the light of day and has had to grow in tight quarters. I grab it with tweezers and pull it slowly out with the infected root. Done. Often another little pleasure will grow in the same spot a few weeks later.
A magpie is hopping across the shortly cropped hospital lawn. In children’s books magpies steal shiny objects like bottle stoppers, aluminum foil, and rings. In reality they steal eggs from small songbirds. They peck them open and slurp them out. I always try to picture just how a magpie hacks a hole in the shell of a songbird’s egg and then uses its beak as a straw to suck out the egg. Or do they do it completely differently? Jump on the egg until it breaks and slurp the puddle of goop off the ground?
Eggs are a constant theme with me. Years ago kids would chant, “Go climb a pole, you egg hole.” For no reason; just because it rhymes. But I always read a lot into it.
I told Kanell once what I thought it meant, and one afternoon we acted it out.
The pussy was the hole, obviously.
Into it an egg. For egg hole.
At first we tried a raw egg. But it broke in Kanell’s hand at the entrance to the pussy. The pieces of shell didn’t cut me or anything. It’s just that everything was covered in goop, and it was cold.
So then we discussed whether it had to be a raw egg. Actually it didn’t. So we boiled one. Hard. Eight minutes. Very hard.
And inserted it. So I finally had the egg hole I’d always imagined from this playground rhyme.
Since then it’s been our inside secret. In the most literal sense of the phrase.
There’s one other thing I’d like to do with Kanell.
I’ve always loved to play around with the lymph nodes in my groin. I slide them around under my skin. The same way you can move your kneecap around. Recently I’ve had the desire for Kanell to trace them with a Sharpie. To accentuate them. The same way you accentuate your eyes with makeup. Is that a sexual fantasy? Or just a new form of body art? It would only be a fantasy if thinking of it made me hot. And that it does. What would happen the first time the fantasy were realized? He’s good about exploring my fantasies, just as I’ve supported his with every fiber of my being, right from the start.
Out on the lawn one magpie is fighting with another. Over what?
We humans think of magpies as evil animals because they eat the young of other birds. But we eat the babies of almost every animal that appears on our menus. Lamb, veal, suckling pig.
Outside, Robin is strolling with a female nurse. The magpies fly off. I look at the two of them, appalled. I’m jealous. No way. I feel a claim to him just because he’s taken a picture of my wounded ass and I gave him a titillating lecture about modifying my underwear. And because the nurse can walk and I can’t. Well, I can, but only very, very slowly. They’re both smoking. And laughing. What is there to laugh about?
I want to be able to walk again. I’m going to walk right now—to the cafeteria. There is one here, right Helen? Yes. The candy striper said something about it. I’m going to slowly go to the cafeteria and get a cup of coffee. Good, Helen, do something normal. Don’t think anymore about Robin and his fuck-pie or about my parents in bed boning each other. I have plenty of time. Good idea. I should have been capable of thinking of it without the two strolling strangers. Coffee always makes me have to go to the bathroom. I’d like to secretly have a bowel movement, without telling anyone here. Just for me. Just so I know I still can and that I haven’t grown together and sealed shut. I won’t tell anyone. That way I can still use this venue to try to bring my parents together. That way the things that are supposed to be together will grow together.
I roll onto my stomach and let my legs slowly drop to the floor. I grab a painkiller from my pill supply and slurp it down. I’ll get some use out of it along the way. Inside, I’m prepared for the long voyage. But not on the outside. I’m still wearing just this tree-top angel outfit, still gathered and knotted at the front. Nothing on the bottom. You can’t walk around like this, even in a hospital, Helen. Even as an ass patient. There are a lot of people running around the halls and in the cafeteria. I go at a snail’s pace to the space-saving, built-in wardrobe. Mom said she had left things for me in there. I open the door. Only pajama bottoms and T-shirts. I’ll never be able to manage that. To put on a pair of pajama bottoms you have to bend down and put in first one leg and then the other. Oh, man. That’ll stretch my ass too much. Mom didn’t think of a bathrobe or something simple like that. Now what, Helen? I walk slowly back to the bed and pull off the sheet. I wrap it around myself and tie it at the shoulder so I look like a Roman on the way to the public baths. This is fine for walking around a hospital. The two ass-piss stains could have been caused by something else. They could be the result of my drooling on the sheet while sucking on a Werther’s Original. Very believable, Helen. Nobody’s going to ask you about it. People aren’t like that. They don’t want to know.
Off we go. To the door. I haven’t left this room in three days. Am I even allowed to wander around? Come on, I’m not going to get in trouble for walking. But am I allowed to walk in the hall as slowly as a dying grandmother? If someone catches me, they can send me right back. Better not to ask in advance. Open the door. There’s a lot going on in the hallway. Everyone is busy doing something. They all seem to know each other here, and everyone is laughing and pushing things around. To my eyes it looks as if they’re doing things just to look as if they’re busy in case the supervisor happens to walk past. They don’t want to be caught smoking in the nurses’ station. Better to chat on the hallway while shifting something around. They can’t fool me. I creep past them. Nobody acknowledges me. I think I’m going so slow they can’t see me with their hurried glances.
It’s just as bright in the hallway as in my room. The linoleum reflects the light back up from the floor. It looks like gray water. I walk on the water. It must have something to do with the pain medication. I still know the way to the elevator. You retain that even over the course of several days. The escape route. I lie there in bed the whole time in pain and know exactly how to get out—without even being conscious of the fact that I know. Out and around to the left. There are bad religious paintings hung all over the place. The nurses probably put them up to please their parents. They all end up here sooner or later. The parents. Proctology unit. Oncology. Palliative care. Something will bring them here. Unless they care for them at home, which I think is the best way.
I bend over and hold my stomach because I can’t reach my ass in this position. It hurts. I’ve made it to the glass door of the central part of the building. I just have to pound the buzzer like Robin and the giant glass door will open automatically. I stand there and don’t go through. I have no money with me. Crap. Have to go back the whole way. No one acknowledges me on the way back, either. I guess I am allowed to wander around. I’m also allowed to take care of my wound myself. It’s in an extremely unhygienic spot. Pretty much the most unhygienic spot Robin can imagine. Room 218. Mine. Open the door and in I go. Back to peace and quiet. Thanks to my idiotic forgetfulness I’ve wasted a lot of energy. I look in the drawer o
f my metal nightstand. There are a few small bills in it. Mom must have put them in there while I was sleeping. Or did she tell me she had? Or did I dream it? My memory’s gone to shit. In any event, I’ve got money now. I hold it in my hand as I walk. They don’t make sheets with pockets yet. My ass is getting used to the motion. I’m a bit quicker now than on the first trip. Probably because the pills are taking effect. I stare at the floor the whole way. We’ll see how far I get before someone comments on my attire. I punch the button. The automatic door swings open and this time I go through. Beyond is a whole new world. Here different diseases mingle. Ass patients and ass nurses aren’t the only ones out and about. An old woman with tubes in her nose is walking around. The tubes run into a backpack that’s attached to a walker.
She obviously has something wrong with her head—not a proctology case. That’s a change of pace. She has beautiful white hair that’s in a long braid coiled on top of her head. And a nice bathrobe on. Black with three-dimensional pink flowers on it. And nice slippers. Made of black velvet. You can see the shape of a bunion through the slippers. Like a tumor on her big toe. It’s growing sideways over the other toes. And by doing that it pushes the joint of the big toe farther and farther to the outside. Until it’s quite far away from the rest of the foot. A bunion like that is a destructive force. It bursts out of all your shoes over time. It’s about to destroy those velvet slippers. The toes end up like teeth in a jaw, crowding and displacing each other and becoming crooked. But the big toe always wins the battle. I know it. I have a bunion, too. Everyone in our family does. Father’s and mother’s side. Very bad genes, all things considered. The big toe always wants to go where the other toes belong, so little toes keep having to be surgically removed. My uncle, my grandmother, and my mother hardly have any toes left. Their feet end up looking like devil’s hooves.
Wetlands Page 10
