The Sabotage Cafe

by Joshua Furst

  It was hard to tell if Trent believed her, hard to tell what he was thinking at all. Wanting to make sure he understood that, whatever happened later, she wanted him now, she did the only thing she could think to do. She took him in her mouth. Then remembering the other boys in the room, she pulled away and looked up at him.

  “Let's at least go into the other room,” she said.

  If I could have told her …

  She wouldn't have listened, though. She was enraptured.

  I COULD SEE THEM, Cheryl and Trent, trying every second of each day to get into each other's pants. In her first month or so at the Sabotage Café, that's all either of them could think about. Sex, and the urgent rush toward sex, and the damp exhaustion, the clinging and panting that echoed afterward, allowed them—Cheryl, at least—to imagine, for as long as it lasted, that she had landed in a secure location where her terror and hunger couldn't get in.

  Opportunity was everywhere, but to find it took searching. It crouched in the shadows under fire escapes, in the alleyways behind Crazy Eights, the pool hall on Twenty-second Avenue. It hid in the tunnels linking the University of Minnesota buildings together. It lurked in the bathrooms at Starbucks and Caribou Coffee, the bathroom at the Viking, at the Den and the Blue Room and Positively 4th Street and all the other bars and college hangouts crowded around the U of M campus. It waited under shrubs, behind ferns and reeds, in the dark crannies along the Mississippi. The two of them seized it wherever they found it—a rushed kiss, then another, a tug of a lip, a handful of ass, of hair, of tit or dick—then they pulled apart, palm to breastbone, not here, but then where, God, where can we go? There was always a stranger or five or six nearby, someone knocking at the bathroom door—What's taking you so long? What are you doing in there?—witnesses everywhere leering and scolding.

  Even at home, in the Sabotage Café, they had to be on guard, they couldn't luxuriate; Devin or Mike or some other random kid was always threatening to break up the fun.

  “What's the big deal, Betty?” Trent asked her once. “They won't come in. They know.”

  “What do they know?”

  “That I'll fucking pluck their fucking eyes out if they do.”

  But they did come in. She'd be lying on her back between Trent's outstretched legs, the two of them sprawled across the leaky bean-bag, on something—they were always on some drug or other— watching the colors shift behind their eyelids as their hands pressed buttons on each other's bodies. And there would be Devin, willfully obtuse. “Hey, check this out.” Standing over them, pulling up his sleeves to show off his track marks while he held his cigarette out for them to see.

  He took a drag and blew a smoke ring. “I've got to get it to there first,” he said, pointing to a spot half an inch from the filter.

  “Yeah, that's great.” Trent kicked at him. “Now go away.”

  “Hold on. Watch. It's ready now.” Devin demanded attention, forced them to indulge him. Clamping the cigarette between his teeth, he held up a finger—“Wait”—then began flicking it in and out of his mouth. He twirled the cigarette around in there. He put it out on his tongue without getting burned.

  The fingers stopped prowling. The opportunity dwindled. Cheryl's hands remained yoked around Trent's neck, his under her shirt, where he could still tickle and probe in a limited, ineffectual way.

  “Fucking Devin, man, what does it take to get you to go fuck off somewhere else, huh? We could give two shits about your fucking parlor games.”

  Cheryl pulled at Trent's earlobe, at his greasy hair. She wanted to shut her eyes, to stretch, to shudder. There were currents streaming from her nipple to her navel. She tugged Trent by the neck, twisted his face over hers. She bit his lip.

  Devin crouched and scavenged, then threw the pennies and junk he found on the floor at them. “Whoa, man, whoa, I don't need to see that shit.”

  He wouldn't take a hint, or taking the hint, he perverted it. He crouched and watched them. “Ouuu, ahhh, baby, more, more.” He mocked them. He lingered, a mosquito hovering in the corner. They tried to ignore him, but he kept returning to buzz in their ears until Trent finally flopped back on the beanbag.

  The current stopped flowing. Trent controlled the switch. He flicked it back and forth, but he wouldn't leave it on. Cheryl was frazzled, dazed and exhausted, but still unsatisfied, her heartbeat slowly returning to normal.

  And then, having won, Devin swaggered toward the door, kicking the beanbag on his way out. “See ya. Wouldn't wanna be ya.”

  A faint whiff of mildew floated through the air.

  Trent scowled at the ceiling. When Cheryl tried to touch him, he batted her away. “We're the oppressed,” he said. “Just like the fucking Palestinians.” Then, prying himself out from under her, he said, “Fuck it. Let's go get some forties.”

  Oppression entered and exited the café, mocking them, giving them just enough time alone to remember what it was they couldn't have. Mike would leave for Chipotle and five minutes later, Devin would crawl in from spanging, and when Cheryl and Trent fled the building to search the streets for cracks they could pry open and hide inside of, oppression would roll in on the northwestern winds, catapulting south, storming down on them, waves of rain flooding and washing them away; they'd float toward the river and eddy under the bridge, swirled together with a mess of other street kids, with the rest of the runoff that had been carried out of the Dinky-town gutters.

  For a few days, they found relief in a culvert that jutted out over the river along the West Bank. That was fun—if chilly—rocking to the rhythm of the rain, banging their bodies against the corrugated steel. But oppression eventually found them here, too, in the form of a girl, sickly, with scabs riddling her face. She was cowering under a jumble of army-surplus blankets, bunkered behind a massive frame pack. Trent said, “What the fuck? Where'd you fucking come from?” “Iowa,” she answered. Her voice was shot, hoarse and drowsy. Then the other end of the blanket rustled and another face popped out, as gaunt and shattered as the girl's, this one hidden by patchy tufts of blood and beard. “Leave us alone. We're sick,” the guy told them, and because compassion was part of the code Cheryl and Trent tried to live by, they fled, oppressed again, this time by the implications they couldn't scrape off their minds.

  Oppression seeped across the city like packing foam, caulking up even their most secret nooks. They might as well stay home and try to reason with Mike and Devin, the two unreasonable quantities they knew. Couldn't Devin see that his gross-out schemes, the zits and sores and boogers he was so proud of, didn't amuse them? Couldn't he find someone else to annoy? And didn't Mike understand that they thought it was great, terrific, that he'd nabbed that goth chick's number after slipping her a free order of chips and guac, but they didn't care? If she was so desperate for his dick inside her, why didn't he chase her down right now and fuck her, leave them alone.

  Just leave them alone.

  “Why can't you all just leave us alone?” Cheryl yearned to shout it, to stomp her feet, to scream.

  But being left alone would be too easy. It would be too nice. If she really wanted to be left alone, she might as well have stayed in Plymouth, where being left alone was all there was to do.

  Anyway, even when the two of them did find solitude, oppression often snuck up and ransacked them. Trent would pass out, too drunk to fuck, leaving Cheryl frustrated and wide awake.

  Sometimes, when they managed to stay sober, when they were able to outlast Mike and Devin, they'd linger in the living room, dry humping. Gradually articles of clothing would come off, Cheryl's boots, her jeans. Her shirt would be smushed up into her armpits. Trent's cargoes would be down around his knees. If they muffled themselves they could almost pull it off. But it wasn't fun. The bean-bag was uncomfortable, Trent's belt buckle had a way of stabbing Cheryl's thigh. She couldn't relax; she was always aware of the guys in the next room, afraid of discovery, and she inevitably became so anxious that she patted Trent's shoulder and made him stop. “Jus
t pretend they aren't there,” Trent said. “They won't wake up.” She couldn't, though. When she closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the sensations he was drawing out of her body, she imagined Devin snickering in the doorway, heard Mike muttering and shouting in his sleep. Trent was determined, though, once he got going, and if he was quick, she could usually keep herself from freaking out by biting her lip, digging her nails into his back, until his thrusting and hoarse grunting was done. What tortured her most about nights like these were the tantalizing intimations they contained. He'd change position, and just for a moment, she'd see the place she was so desperate to reach, boxed in glass, surrounded by a web of laser-triggered alarms, and all she could do was stare at it and wish.

  She touched herself sometimes, but it wasn't the same. The physical sensation was a lesser thrill than having him, his presence over her, inside and around her, taking her consciousness—her soul, she sometimes thought—and submerging it, overwhelming it, claiming it briefly as his own. This is what she yearned for: to feel him rushing over her. To be obliterated beneath him.

  The problem this time was Benny, the balding twenty-three-year-old meth-head who smothered the rims of his bloodshot eyes with thick black liner and plastered black polish over his splintered fingernails—a pathetic specimen from the black place their infatuation with darkness might one day lead them. He'd shared his stash with Cheryl and the boys, mocking them for their refusal to shoot, and now he was dancing, in his peg-leg jeans, around the ruins of the Wreck Room.

  Cheryl, who'd never done the stuff before, was fighting off nervous visions of frying eggs—This is your brain; this is your brain on drugs. After two razor-thin lines, she began to turn down the jewel case circling round and round the room. “Naw, I'm alright,” she said. “I'm cool.” When she looked to Trent for how to behave, he didn't seem all that bent to her—a little friskier, maybe, that was all. Her eyes felt like pinwheels. She sat on her hands. She gnawed at her lip, trying to come off as less tweaked than she was. And then she discovered she was craving the stuff. Watching impatiently as it made the rounds of the party gathered in the café. Worrying over the size of her portions.

  Since the kids weren't paying, they had no choice, once the drugs were gone, but to ride out Benny's interminable ramble about his struggle to find his dealer that day. He kept losing the drama in the mass of details, and if no one told him to get to the fucking point, he'd linger for twenty minutes, half an hour, over the terrors of a broken stoplight. The various randoms who'd shown up that night— kids going by names like Torque and Scab and Ivan—had found excuses to bolt hours ago. But Benny just kept jabbering on, giving up altogether on his story and spewing out the random junk in his head. He was on to Jelly Bellies now, how there were so many flavors you couldn't keep them straight, you had to eat them one at a time and concentrate, strain your brain, to connect the taste in your mouth with the list on the back of the bag. “It's hard, man! And they're all fake and chemically, so half the time all they taste like is sugar.”

  Devin nodded like a drone—“Yeah, man, exactly”—but everyone else was trying to ignore him. Mike, the only one of them who had stayed clean, leafed through a year-old issue of Bounty Hunter. Trent and Cheryl sat on the floor a few feet from each other, playing cat and mouse games; their fingers perched and scurrying along the wood, trying to catch and not be caught.

  Leaning in to kiss her ear, Trent whispered, “What do you think, Betty? Let's light his fucking hair on fire.”

  “You think he'd notice?”

  “Fuck, yeah. Prince noticed when it happened to him, and how high must he have fucking been, you know?”

  “You mean Michael Jackson?”

  “No—Prince. In the eighties. When his hair lit up onstage.”

  Prickly, more anxious now that she was high to resist the sickly side of her emotions, she pushed it. “That was Michael Jackson. During that commercial he did for Coke.”

  He pulled back. “Don't fucking tell me what the fuck I mean.” A smile stretched tight across his teeth, and his eyes darted cruelly over her. A warning: If you cross me, you must be my enemy.

  “Sorry,” she said. She tapped his wrist with a tentative finger. “I'm sorry,” she said again, but he wasn't giving. The meth exaggerated her insecurities, contorted the signs she was getting from him, it made every moment fraught with the possibility of catastrophe. To prove her contrition, she wrapped herself around him, smothered him under her weight and warmth. His rancor had never been aimed at her before, and she was scared to utter the plea on her lips: Let me in, see me, understand, I adore you. Instead, she rubbed the tense muscles in his shoulder, apologized unrelentingly until he finally softened beneath her.

  Benny's patter continued to fly over them. “… those ones are easy 'cause they're just what they are, like blue: blueberry. White: coconut. Crimson: raspberry—or is it cinnamon? There's an apple too that looks like that. See? Everything gets so complicated!” Like migrating geese, his words whizzed by, at a distance, on an altitude unrelated to their own. “But anyway, it's the speckled ones that can really fuck you up. There's like fifteen different versions of green with green specks and they're all—”

  Her lips pressed to Trent's chest, Cheryl kissed him through one of the ragged holes in his t-shirt. “I'm sorry,” she said again. “I was just being a bitch.” Her smile was weak and it disappeared quickly.

  He nodded, slowly, sagely, then it was over. His arm was around her, his fingers trailing up and down her spine. He pried under her cargoes, worked his hand in and palmed her ass cheek, and she kept on kissing him, violent kisses, as though she was trying to climb into his mouth, leave her skin behind and pour herself into him. The way his hand clenched, fingernails digging skin, pulling her pelvis toward his own—she'd give him anything, let him shred her to pieces, if that's what it took to retain his desire.

  On the other side of the tapestry-draped box that the boys had set up as a coffee table, Devin and Benny were shouting at each other now. They'd left Benny's Jelly Belly anxiety behind. Cheryl couldn't tell what they were on to, but whatever it was, she was sure it was stupid. A struggle for dominance over nothing at all.

  “Benny! Benny! Listen to yourself!” said Devin. “I know you've got less brain cells than a fucking retard, but come on!”

  “Devin, man, if you only knew how I listen to myself. I hear myself all day. I can't shut it off.” Benny pointed at his lower eyelid, peeled it back like an alien from Cocoon. “It keeps me up. Days go by. Weeks. Lifetimes. Forever.”

  “I'll shut it off for you.” Devin pulled at the blond scraggle on his chin, picked at it, like scratching would uncover something.

  “Hey, man, it's cool, okay? I'm just talking, you know? Right? Conversing.” When Benny smiled, his black rotting gums made him look like a creature come back from the grave, something Cheryl's old skater friends might have stumbled across in a video game and blasted to smithereens without a thought.

  “Well, converse differently,” said Devin, “or I'll get my boot to converse with your ass.”

  Benny held his hands out in front of himself, palms down, patting air. It was hard to tell how frightened he really was. He always looked spooked; if you said hello to him in the street he'd wince.

  Not that Cheryl cared either way how this turned out. She just wanted him gone, and Devin too, and Mike. Trent's fingers dug deeper into her ass, and she let out a little moan. Then she rolled off of him. “Let's go somewhere,” she whispered. “I can't stand it.”

  She could feel his thoughts in the pulse of his fingers against her shoulder blade, his ideas ramming up against each other as he ran through the secluded places he knew—Pillsbury Park with its curfew and its trolling cops, that cinder-block outpost at the top of the Stadium Village parking ramp. He was calculating the probability of diminished desire in relation to distance and time. Maybe Cheryl wasn't making herself clear: all they had to do was leave the room. She'd fuck him in the stairwell, in the middl
e of the street, anywhere, just let's get rid of these guys. She slid her hand up the leg of his shorts and his eyes bulged, his groin rose.

  “Come on,” he said. “I want to check something out.”

  They fled to the kitchen. Rectangles of caked grease and soot framed the spaces where appliances had once been. Mouse droppings spread across the floor like spilled Tic Tacs. Trent yanked open the window. On the other side, maybe two feet away, was a stucco wall. He traced the path for her: a short leap to the drainpipe, then a quick, careful scramble up to the roof; they could use the rusty bolts as footholds. Dangerous but worth it. She followed him up.

  The roof was vast and empty, an expanse of tar paper glittering in moonlight. It was heaven, salvation. They were finally alone.

  That night, for the first time, she let the desire rush through her unmitigated. It was oceanic, a salt-heavy weight roiling under her skin, lapping at her pelvis, dampening everything, condensing on the surface in filmy layers. She imagined taking him whole into her system—like that weird spiny fish she and Jarod had seen on the Discovery Channel—and holding him there, soaking him in her juices, until the two of them became a single organism, sharing veins and arteries and internal organs, never to be parted again.

  A few days later, they dragged a torn inflatable kiddie pool up to cushion their bodies against the grit and tar. They worked out a code involving obscure hand gestures and references to Debbie Harry. Trent would flash a sign, Cheryl would say, “Debbie's hungry,” and then they'd race off, poking and pulling each other, scaling the wall to the roof and the release that existed for them there.

  Fuck was the word she preferred to use. Fuck kept everything on a level, helped her deny, at least to Trent, whatever else might be going on. But with every new entry he made in her body, he penetrated deeper. Fuck helped her focus on the physical act, on the bodies bumping into bodies, helped her overlook the other stuff her body held, all that spiritual muck she felt him probing. Whatever part love played in her feelings had to be hidden, from herself as well as him. Love wasn't cool. Love just fucked things up. And this thing between them would last longer without it.