by Chris Vola
The Ex shuts the door behind her.
She reaches for the baggies that have been exposed the entire time and feels the coolness of a glass stem.
*
After lunch and before Cognitive Behavioral Education, she sits in a folding chair on a vine-walled patio next to a small patch of legumes and vegetables she helps tend, smoking Marlboros with Eric and Dave.
Eric is in his mid-to-late-twenties, pudgy and rosacea-flushed, generic side-swept hair and blue cardigan, Northeastern non-accent, never makes eye contact.
Dave is beef-bellied, self-proclaimed “OG roughneck” who looks like he probably sported several different goatie/rat-tail combinations in the early- to mid-nineties, and who, she thinks, would probably be attractive to someone looking to get thrown around a little.
They’re sitting around a small circular table, staring at the garden.
“The string beans are doing OK, but those tomatoes are getting huge,” Eric says, ashing onto his lap. “They’re like…”
“Goat balls right!” Dave says.
“How do you know what goat balls look like?”
“You think because I’m from Queens I never seen a goat?”
“No, I –”
“Well you’re right, I hadn’t. Up close. Until the drive down here. Me and the lady stopped at this farm because she wanted to buy vegan lip balm or some shit and I walked around to this pen where they had ducks and chickens and donkeys and these mini-llama things, uh…”
“Alpacas?”
“Fuck if I know. Anyways in the corner is this big goat, looks like he’s sitting on a boulder but when he gets up, blam! Dude’s got some real low-hangers, like I for real thought it was some kind of freak midget cow haha but nah there were two balls and I’m looking around for a chick goat because I’m like this guy has to get laid ay-sap, those things were like dragging on the dirt, all red and scuffed, just like your tomatoes over there.”
“I wish you didn’t have to be so gross,” Eric mumbles, reaching for the communal pack. Dave snatches it away, removes the last cigarette, balls the pack in his fist and lets it fall onto the patio’s brick tiles.
“I call it like I see it dude. Baby girl gets it, am I right?”
“I think they look more like my parents’ Rottweiler’s,” she says, “before he got neutered.”
“Ha! See? You need to lighten up.”
Eric reaches for the largest cigarette butt in the ashtray at the center of the table, tries to smooth it out. “I need to stop setting unrealistic expectations and become less ambivalent about my recovery.”
“Man stop repeating these counselors and doctors. What you need is what the goat needs. Some pussy. Or at least the prospect of pussy. Sorry baby girl.”
She shrugs, inhales the last of her smoke.
“Sexual contact between residents is explicitly prohibited and may result in immediate dismissal. Which, for me, would mean breaching a court order. Which would…” Eric grabs his left hand with his right hand to stop them both from shaking.
“Bro,” Dave says, “I’m not saying hook up with someone here. Baby girl’s not your type – and honestly out of your range – and the rest of these motherfuckers are basically comatose and like –”
“Mentally broken? Unable to experience pleasure?”
“I was going to say like introverted but that’s not right.”
“Isolated,” she says.
“Isolated. That’s what’s up. Nobody with twenty-five percent of their head screwed on would want to be put in isolation upstate, but here they look for it. No, you want someone immune to your particular brand of bullshit, like my lady, someone you can talk to on a real level, someone who can calm you down, stop you from doing something stupid. Also: pussy. How you think I stay so jolly? It’s not from being all Johnny green-thumb every day, that’s for sure. I never see you make any calls to anyone when they let us.”
Eric starts rocking and hugging himself and she knows what’s coming next. She turns away from the table and scans the garden for signs of the Brussels sprouts she planted a few months ago finally forcing themselves out of the earth.
“There is someone I let myself think about sometimes,” Eric says. “An account manager where I used to work. We were put on the same project right before I had to leave. She had really big green eyes. Like leaves or something. She seemed really, um, clean.”
“Call her then.”
“I can’t.”
“You scared?”
“No, I mean yeah, I mean the quickest way I’d be able to find her number or email is on Facebook or LinkedIn but I had to deactivate them after the restraining orders and even if I created a new account and friended her there’s an overwhelming probability that the counselors will contact my probation officer and then, you know, can’t risk it.”
Dave finishes his cigarette, flicks it like a paper football between two wooden string bean poles. “All I know is I’m pretty sure it’s hard to get locked up for talking shit to someone on a computer. Not even talking shit. You were basically just repeating stuff that actually happened.”
“Not just repeating,” Eric mutters, twitching again, searching his pockets for something that isn’t there. He sighs/groans. “I’m fucked.”
Even though it’s her favorite time of day, when the sun seems to hover, to taste the day’s evaporating embers before beginning what she once described as a “violent downward purge” in a free-write session, she considers leaving the patio and sitting in her room until dinner.
She’s heard the build-up to Eric’s demise, all of the variations that depend on his current intake of anti-psychotics. The post-college slump year that turned into a decade. The beers that turned into shots that turned into coconut water that turned into crushed Dexedrine that turned into Valium and high fructose corn syrup. The anxiety, the skin issues, the gastrointestinal issues, the money. The lack. The profiles of lives that had once intersected with his, getting older like he was but full. Their promotions, masters programs, the moves from studios to one-bedrooms to first mortgages, the second and third long-term relationships, engagement updates, the baby/puppy/vacation, the waking up early on weekends, farmers markets, nostalgic three-day hangovers, the passively self-congratulatory links to articles – 25 Things You’re Too Old for When You’re 25 – the faux-existential uproar.
Mostly he would focus on a selection of the women he’d known. Single-night randoms, sharers of a few dates, girlfriends of a few months. Buoyed by an aching OxyContin lull, he would obsess over the details of their departures from his life, deciding that in most cases it hadn’t been entirely his fault. They’d been immature and incapable of knowing what they wanted or needed. They hadn’t given him enough time to reach his potential as a lover. They were the unwitting products of a second or third-generation throwaway culture.
He would study the men who populated the pictures they posted, gauging the possibility of intimacy until it was obvious. He tried to make himself angry at these beneficiaries of his sloppy seconds, but didn’t they have a right to know what their girlfriends and fiancées had done with him not so long ago, what they were capable of? He would have wanted someone to tell him.
The first messages he sent were basic; a clinical description of a specific encounter – …underwear discard (both), digital stimulation (her), missionary penetration, testicle massage during doggystyle… – and, if he’d been with the woman for longer than one night, a list of predilections: counterclockwise cunnilingus, hair pulling (only during reverse cowgirl), light choking while blowing in ear and nibbling, light anal rimming (NO penetration).
The responses he got ranged from the expectedly hostile, threats of beatdowns and legal actions, to blocked profiles and email warnings from automated moderators, to nothing, a pregnant and wondering dead space.
Convincing himself that his work was vital, Eric had to persevere.
Which at first seemed kind of funny to her in a pitiful, if slightly messed up way. The
n he started talking about the videos he made after enlisting the help of an IT guy from work with a penchant for tube sites. How they would download and combine clips from multiple scenes to create accurate depictions of the acts he’d described. How they would superimpose his head and the heads of the women he’d been with over the actors’. How it still didn’t feel like enough. How he started making split-screen videos, juxtaposing the porn with images of himself performing weird approximations of the activities his former partners had enjoyed: attempting Bikram postures while naked, smearing on eyeliner and lip gloss and smiling into an off-camera mirror while adjusting a wig, lightly sliding a box cutter across his femoral artery while sobbing, his upper lip crusting and caked with blood and dust.
How the legal actions were no longer just threats.
She decides that the sun is worth it, leans back and stares at the tops of the trees beyond the garden sloping down the hill in front of them towards the stream until they vaporize along with her retinas and nothing hurts.
Eric’s eyes roll back and it looks like he’s about to try to channel some kind of epileptic white-boy voodoo: “I can’t go, I can’t go, I can’t go to prison.”
“You got nothing to worry about,” Dave says. “You’re prep-school soft.”
Eric fiddles with the top button of his cardigan until it twists off in his hand. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning the closest you’re ever going to get to real prison was when you got tripped up during a lacrosse game and someone’s stick grazed your ass crack. Even if your pop’s lawyer fucks up, you’ll be on some white-collar Martha Stewart minimum-security shit, picking vegetables like we’re doing here.”
“My mother let my stepfather drive me to soccer tournaments until I was 12. He told me to pretend my foreskin was a Push Pop.”
“There you go, already got in some bitch practice. Also, uhh?”
“No more lawyers. The apology payments stopped when I came here. If this place works it works; maybe I change my name, get a retail job in a bedroom community in an outdoorsy state with a Mediterranean climate and a low rate of binge drinking and preventable hospitalizations. If it doesn’t, I’m alone again, really alone. Cock-bait.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah.”
“OK plan B then.”
“Which is?”
“Death and destruction,” she says.
“Ha! Blam! Don’t give him any ideas baby girl. This dude’s liable to take the next bus to the nearest middle school or movie theater and tear shit up!” Dave offers her a fist-bump, she accepts. “Actually I never really even had a Plan A. I just wanted to say ‘Plan B’ in a sentence that isn’t related to me being woken up by some ratchet-ass trick whining about how I need to take her to the clinic. Ha! Right?”
She declines a second bump.
“Nah,” Dave says, “but I still think the key is to find a sane chick willing to take care of you, to make you stop obsessing and cutting and whatever other weird shit you were doing. Maybe focus on what you want to look for when you get out of here, instead of feeling sorry for yourself and like moping and twitching all the time. Who do you want to be with and who do you want to be?”
“I’ve never really considered that,” Eric says. “I always just thought I would meet a girl and just know it was right, you know? That they would cure me and everything would be different. I would become like them. I never thought about being, um, proactive and having a list of requirements, or like ever considered what was important to me and finding a partner who shared that. God, I’ve been doing it wrong the entire time, I’m such a –”
“We already know you’re a dumbass bro. But now it’s time for some, what do the counselors call it, inner retraction?”
“Inner reflection,” she says.
“Right.”
“I want someone who smells good when they smell bad,” Eric says. “Who jogs regularly but doesn’t care if I don’t. Who hasn’t totally given up on monogamy and the belief that a serious relationship is a foundation of mental and physical well-being. Who’s kind of a feminist but doesn’t want to completely tear down the current power structures or subvert gender roles. Who wears ironically hot librarian glasses to correct any vision problems à la Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns. Who won’t allow me to check out of the world completely but won’t be aggressive, demanding, or unrealistic about reeling me back in, and won’t compromise my masculinity in the process. Who realizes that I might be awkward and dysfunctional in bars and other similar social settings and knows that I’m only ignoring her sometimes because I never spent that much time with girls as a teenager and instead retreated into porn, chemical abuse, and multi-player online role-playing games. Who likes to cuddle even when I’m crying. Who doesn’t have any dietary restrictions and isn’t indecisive about where to eat on date nights. Who will be supportive of my recovery and won’t make hostile or debilitating comments about my weight fluctuations. Who won’t mistake sexual interest (and sexts) for misogyny. Who doesn’t freak out because I’m sometimes clumsy, but always well-intentioned. Who changes her hair style three or four times a week to reflect her mood and outfit choices. Who never asks me if she can pull off bangs. Who doesn’t see a prescription-induced lack of sex drive as overly problematic. Who won’t ask to meet my mother. Who won’t talk about my mother. Who wants to be with a mostly normal guy who’s sick of being accused of horrible stuff and who understands that victimhood isn’t a psychiatric disorder. Who likes 90s indie rock – think Pavement, Silver Jews, Toad the Wet Sprocket – and some retroactively catchy power-pop.”
Dave’s gut expands with choked-back laughter that tries to burst through the lining of his gray hoodie. “Bro I meant do you like blondes or brunettes, big tits or fat asses, Asians or Dominicans, not some crazy list of your mommy and step-daddy issues.”
“I was reflecting,” Eric says.
“You’re still making everything about you. The woman is what you need, yes, but she’s only a piece, like a stabilizer, nothing more. You’ve got to do the work to get better on your own. Man up. That’s why people your age are fucked: you never get over yourselves and the kind-of-bad stuff that’s happened to you. I see that shit already in some of my older kids.”
“My age?” Eric mumbles, running his fingers across a purple-blotched cheek.
“Whining about people talking shit about them digitally, whatever. Why do you think you’re single and perpetually screwed up? I’m like yo, have some real shit happen to you and then come back to me. Then we can talk.”
Eric fidgets in his cardigan pockets, finds a loose pill in one of them, swallows it. He bows his head until his face is a few inches above the table, his breaths dispersing a few prematurely fallen seed pods.
“Have you sufficiently dealt with real shit?” she asks.
“From day one baby girl,” Dave says. “The only time I can remember my pops laughing before he bounced out on us was when I was six and it was Thanksgiving and my mom told me to get napkins at the bodega. How the fuck was I supposed to know what ‘sanitary napkins’ were? When I brought them back and she started slapping me around for being a smartass, I heard this weird wheezing coming from across the room. Here’s pops, this rotted-out, 250-pound lump of a former longshoreman and he’s holding the pink box of pads, tears coming out of his eyes, his face turning all sorts of magenta, what it sounded like when he’d try to start his crusted Oldsmobile. That noise was scarier than anything they could ever do to me. Started playing in punk bands at 14, when punk wasn’t some Green Day sing-along MTV swill, though I know that’s hard for you to fathom. Got deep into the scene and involved with some real grimy gutter bitches, knocked up three that I know of, two that kept them. Stop me if you know where this is going.”
“It’s fine,” she says, watching dusk overtake the garden. Dollops of drool puddle under Eric’s nose.
“So then, duh, I got into standard strung-out asshole stuff, real stupid and high, stealing shit, did two years of a
three-year bid for possession, went cold turkey while I was inside. Which was horrible, but not as bad as a few years later, after I’d been back on my feet, producing records for some bands you may have actually heard of, married, couple more kids, keeping my shit mostly together, until my flaming cunt of an ex decides this guy she sees at happy hour sometimes, this fat fucking claims adjuster from Long Island, is going to provide more of a ‘stable environment’ for her and my kids. Ha! This bitch is a Klonopin Pez dispenser, unstable enough for all of us. She should be the one here. I was locked up for seven hundred and sixteen days and didn’t get anally raped until the first meeting with her divorce lawyer.”
“Am I fat?” Eric whispers to the table, eyes clouded and dripping.
“You sneak Double Stuf Oreos after every meal and curl up in your room sobbing and touching yourself when we’re supposed to being doing Pilates or rock climbing,” Dave says. “Do you really want me to answer that? What I’m trying to say, baby girl and salivating moron, is that you define yourself by how good you are at forgetting. Not just the bad shit that’s happened, the good shit you didn’t do, the self-fulfilling screw-ups, the addiction. Forget about a future of finger-fucking princess charming, living a TV ending, collecting social security. The best chance you got is to look ahead, tunnel-vision, be smart enough to separate the good shit people do and say from the bad shit people do and say but not get too attached to either. Because you have to be in control when that fucked-up tide in the back of your head the counselors talk about starts to roll in. You know how hard it is to focus on holding it back; nobody but you can help with that. I’m cool with it. I’m good. Blam!”
“Then why are you here?” she says.
“Because my lady’s old man used to manage a hedge fund and I occasionally drink too much wine when she has douchey friends over for dinner. More than occasionally. Not a good look, according to her. And, according to her, an end to her paying my child support and providing me with the kind of uppity lifestyle I’ve become accustomed to unless I complete a successful three-month vacation. Because maybe we’re in love. And maybe the older you get, the more you realize love is really just a series of increasingly shitty and uncomfortable transactions with a payoff that shrinks faster than you do. Ha! Write that in your dark-ass notebook.”
