by Alex Behr
PRELUDE TO A KISS
Walk into the party. Try not to look at the couch with the Afghan blanket over the top, another piece of furniture the cat ripped up. You will not sit there. You will never get up again. You’ll fall into the cushions and dogs will eat your corpse. Your butt will grow instantly from the size it was at age seventeen to the size it will be twenty years later, but the rest of your body will stay the same. Your butt will be glutinous and firm in places where the squats have had an effect, but wide. You could turn each cheek into a bird feeder. Sprinkle suet on top.
You sit anyway, super-glued to the polycotton fabric. You do a bong hit of a crushed Quaalude. It feels like plastic is coating your lungs. Not a good idea.
You pass around a handmade pipe, trying to ingratiate yourself with the friends of your new boyfriend: roofers and bikers and petty ex-cons. It’s the pipe that Fred—boyfriend #1—made you in shop class. He found a scrap piece of cedar and carved and sanded it for you, bought you a screen for the top. The pipe goes around the circle and never makes it back to you. You are too high to notice. Guns are under beds. Dogs sleep in corners.
You don’t believe in karma, except when something bad happens. You’re cheating on Fred with Billy—boyfriend #2—no wonder the pipe disappears.
You break up with Fred, and he says on the phone, heartbroken, “Ralph said I could shoot you with his rifle.”
Now, much older, you walk down the street with no sidewalks in Virginia, past the burned-down antique mall, the cement factory, and the auto repair store. You walk on a yellow-slabbed path to the bike trail, the old C&O canal. You stop in front of the Masonic Temple, a brick faux-Colonial building, with no erect bushes or spherical shrubbery by the entrance. Just white trim and harsh bricks and the Masonic emblem centered above the first story. The compass spreads out, intertwined with a square, and a side rule underneath. The G in the middle. The goal. The G-spot.
Questions of Masonic wives: Will he have to ride a goat? Is it evil? Why does he have to wear an apron?
The Masons don’t recruit you, though you lost your virginity in their shadow, and you don’t marry Fred. His spit tastes bad—pot mixed with the tang of Crest toothpaste. He sucks your tongue hard in the parked car, and it doesn’t feel good.
The Pinto is on your side. The Pinto with its puke-green exterior and the inside that smells of spilled soda and milk, not with the patina of child, but of teen-boy. Crusted catsup packs from late-night stoner runs to a hamburger place; cassette tape of Lou Reed’s Rock n Roll Animal—with the song “Heroin.” On the cover, Lou looks nothing like your boyhood crush, David Cassidy. The orange-lit skin, the blurry metal necklace, the studded bracelet, the mic cord wrapped around another wrist. Lou looks to the side with black lips. He will not pose with a horse. He will not ask you to join his fan club.
You take the lyrics of “Heroin” literally, like a bedtime story, with the simple, arpeggiated guitar chords. “Jesus’ Son. Hair. Oh. In. It’s my wife and it’s my life. Leads to a center in my head. And then I’m better off dead.”
You are scared of needles. You back away. Even though Billy sometimes stays with Willis, whose walls and aquarium are covered with blood tracks. You think it looks like an art installation made of fake blood—the set of a splatter film. But it’s real blood shot out from a syringe. Gay porn cartoons are drawn on the bathroom wall during junkie constipation. The kitchen has a blackened spoon. Willis eats pizza every day and works at a hotel at night. You borrow Burroughs from him. You read Basketball Diaries. He mocks you. He thinks you should work at his hotel as a whore for Arab tourists. He is in love with Billy. Of course he mocks you. You bring him an anti-drug poster from the Falls Church Police Department. Willis studies it to see if there’s anything he’s missed, if there’s any description that seems incorrect. You wear white pants and a buttoned shirt. He signs your yearbook in blood, writing, Art is anything you can get away with—Andy Warhol.
At home you practice Chopin, the repetitive notes under modulating chords. A procession to a cemetery, graves covered with moss.
Your teacher says, “You can’t play his Preludes unless you experience pain.” You will find that pain.
ANGEL DUST
I.
Gib holds his pee and doesn’t laugh when one kid stutters on the rug. He chews and tries to swallow mustard-flavored meat. Aiden calls him short. That is first grade.
Third grade. Gib comes home and cries about the bullying. Shrimp Little Dinky. He wants to kick things, but his sister Liza strokes his hair, says no. He spits on the bed through the sheets, drooling hate in the flavors of watermelon and peanut butter.
II.
I pound on the cab’s steering wheel. Sarah digs a pencil into her leg. She wants to know me because she’s tasted me.
III.
My sister Liza, now dead, never teased me for playing with a stick. Oak. Maple. Hickory. The stick had a name, transferred to others as they broke in snake or gopher holes, or were tossed off the overpass. Liza, the orange lollipop, knew the stick’s name.
How can I tell my girlfriend the secret name, her breath frosting the window, when she fears me?
IV.
Their father, a career NSA spy, slaps hellos. Belts goodbyes. Seven is too many. They start dying. Anorexia takes the first one, Liza. Six left.
This burger is the best comfort food. Radio off!
Gib’s girlfriend pays for cab repairs. Gib has a long tongue. He says he once gave a ride to Idi Amin. He sold drugs to hookers. He got robbed in Anacostia. He tells his girlfriend he knew the color of his boss’s sheets. Lies tumble from his mouth, now with all his teeth, then with fewer.
V.
“I had to wipe my nose twenty times in each class. I sniffled a hundred more. I coughed a lot.”
“Does that mean you want to sleep with me?”
“My throat hurts.”
“Turn off the flashlight.”
“Look at the shadows.”
“It’s irritating my eyes.”
“Are there fairies in-between the slats of the blinds?”
“Sure. One of them is Liza, watching you.”
VI.
I unplug the TV but the sound keeps going: Leave the jokes to me, Chuckles.
I have pot sex with Sarah. The one who smells like my dead candy sister. And I have Dilaudid sex with him. We spatter blood on the aquarium and on the walls. Cockroaches descend into Pepsi bottles. Is this love?
Oh, another wrinkle cream with no urgency in making any change happen whatsoever.
I tie up my German shepherd outside the gay bathhouse on St. Mark’s Place.
It’s better to give than to receive.
VII.
Bodies falling. Drowning. Shot dead in the water. Soldiers stepping on uniformed corpses in the churning tide.
“Are you upset about the violence?” my remaining sister asks her son.
“It’s a movie.”
“Maybe not so good here.”
My nephew shuts off his iPad.
I am the host. My skin yellowed by hep C. No one was supposed to know. My nephew sips a Frappuccino, tonguing sugary goo.
No one hands me a stick to caress as a guide toward death. Neither oak, nor maple, nor hickory.
VIII.
The sand cools when the storm comes. Translucent insects flatten to survive. I hold bones of desiccated crabs pressed into tire tracks that course over me. I can’t express pain, but it is visible during lightning flares. Thunder follows, deafening. It opens a space between the water below—of salt, fish, and bone fragments from an anorexic—and the air tumid with water and wind. Ions shudder.
EXIT
If you see a tall building in Portland, do you feel embarrassed for it? The striving, the corporate fuckitude looking down with glinted windows on a river polluted with shit and industrial waste, glided over by dragon boaters?
When you cross a bridge, do you remember walking across with your son, guiding him over the scary view of r
iver beneath the concrete? Clanging metal wires and grids. Waves. Car exhaust?
Your neural tangles binding and strengthening with thoughts of true skyscrapers left behind in the old life (San Francisco) and acceptance of a less dramatic life (Portland) with your younger son (forever blending in time and space) and your husband (who pierced you first at age twenty-five with a needle and ink). You and your husband clasp veiny hands and baby hands together and say in unison on the sidewalk: “One, two, three, up!” You both lift him, and he is secure with you (he does not want to break the mother’s back). A childhood of jumping. Again! It is his joy.
Do you hear the word jump and wince?
Do you remember the arrow thrust of that word from your husband’s lips? How that arrow pierced you and you cried out in public?
How he blames you later for driving him to the hospital. (I did not need to go to the ER. You made me go.)
How he blames you later for outpatient care. (You made me go to crazy camp.)
How you had to call your wedding minister from the Church of the Sub-Genius, breaking your husband’s privacy. You should be on the outside with your people. Your minister is his best friend. The singer of his former punk band turned corporate. You call, smoothing grime and cat hair from your shoes into sidewalks around your home, saying: “He’s sleeping all day. He says he wishes he’d killed himself three months ago. He’s living only for his son. What should I do when he wakes? What should I do? What should I do?” (Remember: If he blames you later, he said he had the desire. He said he had the plan.)
The public space: emergency room. He is handing over the insurance card. He has no job. Handing over your fate to more debt. Handing over your private heart to a social worker, intermediating between the two of you. The skin on skin severed. The heartbeat on heartbeat severed. The pen, instead, carving words onto the paper.
What: The social worker says to you on the vinyl cushion that the contrast between living with you (domineering, poisonous) and being in love (unsaid: with a true artist) is too much. (You don’t need to refer to the exact words. You know, even as you’d seduced him two days before, even as he’d cried on your chest, wetting your t-shirt, because his love crush had a boyfriend.) A woman overhears. Says her husband’s even worse.
Admitting nurse. What: Do you have thoughts of self-harm?
He says: Yes.
Admitting nurse. What: Do you have a plan?
He says: Jump.
He won’t tell you where. It is his secret.
SEX BOMB
Do they have to cut open my penis parts to get the sperm out?
So you pee it out in a cup and pour it on the egg?
So it gets out of the cup and searches around and finds the egg and tells the other sperms and they all jump into it?
So what do they do? They wait until they’re eighteen and kiss and hug and then start pooping out eggs and sperm?
Do they hide in a room and lock the door because they don’t want to be embarrassed that they’re pooping out eggs and sperm?
How do the eggs get back in? Do they jump into the last cup of pee and jump onto a vagina hair and open a trapdoor and get in?
To make a baby, you cut a hole in Dad’s nuts and put a tube in, then cut a hole in Mom’s stomach and get the egg out. You put a crack in it, then the egg sucks up the sperm. Then you take the tube out from Dad and patch it up, then patch Mom up. Then Mom sits on the egg.
The egg peeks out of the woman’s mouth, like Jerry by his mouse hole. And Tom the sperm and his fellow soldiers swarm out of the man’s butt. They hold on to the woman’s pubic hair and pull themselves inside her. That one sperm, Tom, finds the egg and smashes it. And that is how the baby is made.
FALLEN NEST
Cookie checked her phone messages from a pay phone, one of the last ones in Portland, she guessed. She had parked by a Laundromat, much to her daughter Molly’s dismay. Molly hated errands with that narcissism of youth. Cookie didn’t have pity, though, because Molly had dropped her cell phone in the toilet that morning. Molly held onto Cookie’s pants and cried, then slapped at her when she tried to pick her up. Cookie looked away, gathering her breath. She didn’t want to panic with this four-year-old creature, this person who took up most of her brain and made it stupid. She zipped up Molly’s green parka and ripped out a page from the phone book for something Molly could destroy.
Cookie forwarded through her messages, but no one had left a new one. She let Molly hit her. Maybe, magically, the pain would reach Gretchen, her first daughter, and she would call again, defending her poor mom. They had talked the night before, after Molly had fallen asleep. Gretchen had gotten Cookie’s number from Paul, her birth father. She knew the correct adoption lingo. She had a dad, an anthropology professor at Berkeley; she had a birth father, who moved desks around in a used office furniture store. Now she wanted Cookie, her birth mother. Cookie never thought of Paul as a “birth father,” just as the guy who had once declared his love for her on a paper bag. She kept the bag in a metal box, but she hadn’t spoken to him in years.
She didn’t have the nerve to call Gretchen back, not knowing if the number she had left was her parents’ or hers. She wondered what habits Gretchen had. Her lost baby, now thirteen.
But Molly took her attention, not letting her complete the simple, obsessive task of redialing. Cookie pulled her back from the curb. “I’m going to count to five,” she said. “Then you’re going to have to do what I say.”
“Onetwothreefourfive,” Molly said. “I said it. What are you going to do?” Her black pigtails stuck out like bat wings. She slapped Cookie again.
At the bus stop by the pay phone, a woman in a gray coat and yoga pants glared at them. She should’ve been looking for the bus, as if looking would make it arrive ahead of schedule, but she twisted her mouth and said to Cookie, “The best way to enrage a child is to avoid looking in her eyes.”
Cookie frowned, confused. She didn’t have to look at Molly to know she was there. Every breath was folded up in Molly’s screams. The woman smiled, as if expecting Cookie to thank her.
The woman opened her purse and fumbled inside it, pulling out a crinkled Hershey’s Kiss. “Is it OK if I give her some chocolate?”
Molly accepted it, shyly, and shoved it in her mouth.
“Thanks,” Cookie said, hating herself for letting a stranger intimidate her. She put Molly, complaining, into the car seat, but forgave her when she fell asleep, her tiny fist curled around printed names from the white pages.
Cookie drove to her father’s house, a cabin outside Portland. He agreed to look after Molly so Cookie could go to a First Mothers’ meeting, for women who had given up their children for adoption. She wasn’t even supposed to use the phrase “given up.” She was supposed to feel positive about her choice. In the adoption world, all her choices were supposed to have arisen from love, not fear or self-loathing. She wondered about mothers, their many failings, though her father, Bud, wasn’t much better.
Bud didn’t trust people who were punctual, so Cookie took Molly to a creek, bubbling with motor oil and antifreeze. Molly ran to the bridge and climbed up on the railing, her tights snagging on the wood. She balanced with her arms dangling over, and Cookie didn’t stop her. She was too old to think she could win with fate. She called, “Be careful,” as an afterthought.
Molly swayed, shouting, “I’m a fairy!” She fluttered her hands and Cookie ran to her. She pulled Molly down and shook her arm.
“Don’t you listen to anything I say anymore?” Cookie said. Such a force of will poured out from Molly. She was fearless where Cookie was not anymore. When Cookie became a mom, she lost her singularity: her skin, breasts, eyes, ears, and mouth—even the first time, with Gretchen, the baby she didn’t keep or name. Molly wrapped her arms around Cookie’s neck and kissed her with sour-juice breath. Cookie murmured secret names into her daughter’s hair.
If you’re cold, you take your mittens off for your child. You give her your last pie
ce of cake. You try to be less selfish, but only for her. You feign interest in other friends’ children. It doesn’t work.
Inside Bud’s house, Cookie and Molly negotiated around boxes of cassette tapes, stacks of newspapers, and socialist journals. The front room smelled of cigarettes and peanut butter. Coffee mugs were made into makeshift ashtrays, balanced on bookshelves and sofa arms.
Cookie had called her dad “Bud” since she was little, because he said “Dad” was patriarchal. But he couldn’t erase her deference to him by insisting on a name change or inviting her to smoke pot with him and his friends.
Cookie told Molly to run to the backyard. She liked to play among the shopping carts arranged with shells and animal bones.
Bud got Cookie a soda and ruffled her hair. “Don’t bother with duct tape,” he said to her, as if they had been talking politics the whole time. He listened to the public stations at the bottom of the dial. He told her, as if she didn’t know, that the Homeland Security Threat Level was currently Orange. The government was warning the public to stock duct tape and cans of food in case of a terrorist bioattack.
“It’s ridiculous,” he said. “All we have to do is have enough duct tape to seal off the basements? Then what? We’ll die of oxygen deprivation.”
“I have a bumper sticker for you—it’s a free idea,” Cookie said. “You’ll love it. ‘You can’t duct-tape freedom.’ Sell it on the Internet.” She wondered how to bring up money. It was bad enough he knew about the First Mothers’ group. He called it a “cult of pain.”
Then Molly screamed. Cookie ran toward the sound and found her daughter in the back room, hidden under a red blanket.
