"I want out of this marriage but I don't know how to do it,” she said, lowering her voice as if someone else was around and listening. She was being really quiet and careful and all. "I don't know how to proceed. I don't just want to ask him for a divorce. I want him to hate me. I want him to have a reason to divorce me." And right then and there, I felt something on my leg. It was that feeling, you know, that feeling of someone's fingertips on you, on a part of you. It's an unmistakable feeling. I closed my eyes and wished that she'd disappear. It's true. I wished she'd fucking disappear. "You could help me," she said.
"Why would I want to do that?" I asked. My eyes were closed as tight as could be. I couldn't see a goddamn thing. But her hand kept moving up my leg. I could feel her nails through my khakis. They felt long and manicured and smooth. I hate to admit it but I started to get a little excited. I mean, she was an attractive lady with blonde hair and green eyes and natural beauty and all. It was hard not to feel that way, even though I didn't want to feel that way. But she had me in an awkward position. "Jason's my friend," I said.
"I know he is," she said. She was whispering now in a goddamn sexy voice. She was whispering really quiet like she didn't want anyone to hear her, like Jason was in the next room or something. Then her fingers reached the crotch of my khakis. She was running her finger up my zipper and I could feel her breath on my face. She must have been close. I couldn't tell. My goddamn eyes were shut tight as hell. "And I know you wouldn't want him to be in a loveless marriage, would you?"
"I guess not," I said. I was kind of frightened. She was making me so goddamn nervous now. I kept thinking of Jason coming home to make a vanilla Coke or to smoke a cigarette or to take a crap or something. He would do that, you know, come all the way home to do one of those things. He's a goddamn pig like that.
"We could go back in the living room. You could undress again, like you just got out of the shower." I was shaking all over the goddamn place. I was really that nervous. "We could act like this conversation never happened. We could do something that could get me out of this marriage," she said.
"And what's that?" I asked, like a goddamn idiot. I was pretty sure that I knew what she wanted. It's true.
"You know ..." And then she slipped her tongue in my ear. But right then, like a goddamn revelation, the doorbell rang. It rang frantically and repeatedly and loud as all hell. She pulled away and I opened my eyes. She was already out of the kitchen, answering the front door. I heard a conversation between her and a repairman, or maybe a cable man or something. I wasn't sure and I didn't care. I just wanted out of the house. I just wanted out of that goddamn place. I decided right then and there that it was time to leave.
I grabbed my wallet and my backpack off the couch and headed for the front door. Betty was talking up a storm with the cable man. She was leaning in all close to him too like a goddamn whore, what, with the way she was smiling at him and leaning on him with her hand on his waist and batting her eyes and all. But I could see that he didn't mind. I knew that this wasn't a random house call. And I knew that he wasn't a random goddamn cable man. I excused myself and walked out the door, almost shoving the cable guy to the ground. Betty called to me as I walked away, a little embarrassed at how I shoved the cable man aside. I could hear her calling my name as I walked down the street. But I didn't look back. I just walked straight ahead, like I knew where I was going, even though I had no idea where I would go.
It was kind of an unexpected goddamn thing to do, I admit. But sometimes, unexpected things lead to more unexpected things. It's true.
14.
I probably walked two or three miles before my heart finally stopped racing. Betty the whore got me pretty riled up. I mean, I was excited and nervous and confused and all sorts of disappointed. Betty was a very attractive young lady. There's no doubt about that. But I knew there must have been a reason why she married Jason. Don't get me wrong. Jason is a hell of a nice guy. We go way back, what, to like the second grade or something. But he is a goddamn pig and his house is full of rundown crap and he drives around in the turd-on-wheels and he's not the best looking guy in the world. There must have been something screwed up about Betty that would make her want to live like that. You know, because it's rare that an attractive woman would want to marry such a goddamn pig. And now I knew what it was. Betty had issues, serious issues. It was pretty apparent to me that she had some mental problems or something. I mean, she was fucking crazy. Did she think that I would actually go through with it? Or that I wouldn't tell Jason about her proposition? I don't know. I was pretty confused about it. Initially, I was really happy for Jason, especially when I first got to his house. I thought he was happy. And when he wrote me those letters, he sounded really happy. It was all bullshit though. I started to feel really sorry for him. I would be devastated if I found out that my Jessica was acting that way behind my back. Seriously, I think I would kill myself. She's my everything. It's true. All of my success is because of her and the kids. They inspired me to follow my dreams. I even dedicated my new novel to them. The dedication reads: To my wife and kids - my inspiration, my everything.
But like I said, after I walked for a while, my heart stopped racing and I was glad I was outside. It was a beautiful day, what, with the sun out and the birds singing and all that crap. The smell of pine came in on the wind from the woods surrounding the neighborhood. I decided to take a shortcut and walk through the woods. I knew a path that would take me pretty close to Gunter Air Force Base. Maybe (I thought) I could find Jason and get our evening started early. I'll have to get him pretty drunk before I tell him what a whore his wife is. It's going to break his heart. I know it. It's true.
I cut through the yard of the first house I could find, jumped the backyard fence, and took the grassy hill down to the woods. Man, talk about memories. These woods were the central location to many of my childhood adventures. I had my first fight back here. It was with Kenny Jones, that little bastard. Thinking back, he wasn't a bully or anything like that. He was actually a scrawny little fuck who annoyed people more than anything. He'd taunt you with his whining and his buckteeth and his tongue-wagging and his red hair and freckles. He was really annoying. I remember riding my bike through the woods to get home after school one day. And he and a small group of his friends were standing out here making little bonfires with Kenny's dad's Zippo lighter and a can of lighter fluid. As I rode by, he started taunting me about little blonde Patty Green. He had his suspicions about me liking her since I never joined in on the taunting she received from the other kids at her birthday party. I never bought into the whore-teasing she got. I really did like her. But Kenny started taunting me about it in the woods (Simon and Patty sittin' in a tree, etc.). That scrawny fuck started wagging his tongue at me, yelling that I was in love with Patty and that she was a whore and all. And I just felt the rage build inside of my little heart. My little heart just couldn't take it, especially not from a scrawny fuck like Kenny Jones. So I hopped off my bike and let him have it. The fight didn't last too long. It was one of those kicked-in-the-balls kind of affairs. I gave him a swift kick in the nuts and he toppled over his bike and laid there on the ground. That was it. It was over in less than five seconds. But my dignity and Patty's honor was saved in that eternal five seconds. I was really quite happy about that. And his friends just stood there in awe. They didn't do a goddamn thing. Kenny showed up to school with the goofiest limp the next day. And he got a real lashing when the other kids found out what had happened in the woods. He didn't taunt me much after that. And Patty never found out what I did for her. It's a goddamn shame.
And it's memories like that that I don't want to ruin by finding out if that was little blonde Patty Green working at Cinammon's Big Boobie Bonanza. The fact that she might actually be as whorish as the kids said she was would just ruin these memories for me. And sometimes, especially when I'm by myself, these memories are all I have, even if I didn't dust them off and let them out too often. I walked past the spot
where I kicked Kenny in the nuts. There wasn't a single sign of our incident: no burn marks, no rumpled grass, no tire tracks from our bikes, nothing. There wasn't one goddamn sign of that incident, just my memory of it. That was a shame too. They should have built a memorial here for that fight. It changed my life.
Before I knew it, I was at the end of the woods and I could see Gunter Air Force Base in the distance. It wasn't too far away, maybe a mile or so. I continued to huff it. I was enjoying the weather so much that I didn't even notice how far I had walked, maybe ten miles or so. What was another goddamn mile after walking ten miles or so? I jaywalked across the main boulevard and headed into another neighborhood that surrounded the entrance to the air force base. It was called Montgomery Manors. I had another friend in the seventh grade who lived in this part of town, good old Tony Boland. We used to call him Tony the Loverboy. He was a really smooth cat, real good-looking and all. All the girls liked him. He was one of those guys. Everyone knew one of those guys when they were young. You know, the kind that all the girls liked. Well, Tony was the Loverboy in our group. He looked like a god next to the rest of us pudgy dip-shits.
Anyway, I walked past the street Loverboy Tony lived on. He had this girlfriend named Leslie and she lived next door to Tony's house. She was a cute little thing with brown hair and blue eyes and twenty-year-old tits on a twelve-year-old's body. She looked well beyond her years to us other twelve-year-olds. All the kids would say she looked older, like that was something special. She did look pretty mature for a twelve-year-old. And she was in love with our Loverboy Tony. Tony used to tell me how he'd sneak into her house late at night and they would do it. That's how he'd say it to me: we did it last night. And I would always ask him to tell me just exactly what they did in her room. I was so clueless back then. I had no idea what he was talking about. But the thing was, Tony was pretty clueless too; I just didn't know it at the time. So, one day he told me to spend the night over at his house and he'd tell me exactly what they did. So I packed my bags and my mom dropped me off at his house after school. And this is what we did.
Tony's room was upstairs so we'd stock up on a bunch of supplies like cream soda and Twinkies and make a camp in his room. He had this huge pop-up tent and we'd get inside and lay our sleeping bags out and pile up all our junk food in between us. Tony played the Prince album 1999 on his record player. He loved the song Little Red Corvette. That Prince guy seemed like a dirty little bastard and Tony said his music got him all riled up and excited. He then told me how he'd sneak into Leslie's room really late at night and they'd listen to Prince music and take off all their clothes and do it. When I asked him to tell me exactly what they were doing, he told me he was sticking his thing in her thing. Since I was pretty fucking clueless, I had no mental image to compare this information to. I mean, I knew what my thing was but I didn't know what a girl's thing was. And Tony wasn't much help in the description-department. He just kept telling me how it was nice and warm and comforting and that it was near her butt. But what did help with my mental image were all those Playboys we found in the ditch behind our school. Tony had a few of them stashed under his bed and he pulled them out and used them as a diagram for his story. He'd point to the grown women's parts and correlate them with Leslie's little girl parts. He tried to explain how Leslie's thing was exactly the same as the lady in the picture except Leslie's was smaller and not as hairy. That confused me even more, the not as hairy part. And that's all he told me about doing it. I didn't know anymore than I did before I spent the night. But I did have this respect for Tony that I didn't have before. He had gone where only grown men had gone and I thought he was the cooler for it. I really looked up to him. Leslie called him on the phone later that night and he slipped out the window and didn't come back until the next morning. I stayed in his room by myself, eating Twinkies and listening to Prince for the rest of the night.
A couple of weeks later, Tony's dad called my mom and asked her to bring me to his house. He said he needed to talk to the both of us. When we got there, he told us that Leslie was pregnant and that her and Tony had run away. He wanted to know if I knew where they were. And of course, I didn't. But he was really torn up about it and was sad that his son had gotten a girl pregnant while he was in the seventh grade. The police eventually found Tony and Leslie. They had broken into her uncle's house on the other side of town and were living there, pretending they were married. Tony's dad eventually sent him to a military school in Atlanta. And Leslie's parents made her get an abortion and sent her to a Catholic girls school in Birmingham. I never saw Tony again after that. My mother assumed that I was doing the same thing Tony was doing until I convinced her that I didn't even have a girlfriend to do that with. She knew that was true. I was into comic books and my BMX bicycle more than girls at the time. I was such a dork in the seventh grade. I didn't become interested in girls until the summer after the seventh grade when I met Valerie and discovered fondling. But I would remain a virgin until I was seventeen because of all of this. The thought of getting a girl pregnant at that age was horrifying to me. It's true.
I eventually found myself at the gate to the air force base (time flew by). I had no idea where Jason worked so I asked the guard at the gate if he knew him. He said he didn't. The guard was a real fucking genius, I tell you. He was this big oaf with a crew-cut and an M.P. uniform and chewing tobacco lodged in his teeth. I didn't want to piss him off, though. He was armed, you know.
"Are you sure you don't know him? You must see him every day when he drives through this gate?" I asked.
"What kind of car does he drive? I nice one or a clunker?"
"A real clunker. He drives a beat-up Chevette that kicks and screams all over the place." He must have notice that turd-on-wheels. You can't miss the piece of shit.
"Oh yes. I do know who you're talking about. Does he work for Civil Service?"
"That's right. He works for Civil Service."
"I'll get someone to give you a lift. Just sign this visitors sheet."
I signed the visitors sheet and another M.P. gave me a lift in one of those military Jeeps. He was a real fucking genius too. He looked just like Gomer Pyle and had that same way of talking, real slow and all. He kept asking me questions on the way over to Jason's building like he was interrogating me or something. It was getting on my nerves.
"What do you do for a living?" he asked, all loud and slow and annoying as hell. He had to talk loud because the Jeep was a convertible. He had to fight the sound of the wind and fighter planes flying all over the goddamn place.
"I'm a writer. My new novel, THE RISE AND FALL OF A TITAN, will be published in the next few weeks."
"Really? I always wanted to be a writer ..." Thankfully, before he could finish, we reached the building and I hopped out of the Jeep so fast that I forgot to ask Gomer for directions. I just shot in the building and asked the first guy I saw if he knew who Jason was. He did and he took me to his office. The building smelled like all the other government buildings I'd been in: stale and musty and old. Jason was sitting behind his desk not looking particularly busy or anything. He was pretty surprised to see me.
"What are you doing here? Is something wrong?" he asked. He was pretty smart, you know. We thought a lot alike.
"No, nothing's wrong. I just decided to go for a walk and I ended up here."
"You walked all the way down here from my house? Are you crazy?"
"I guess so."
I told him how I was walking down memory lane and he understood. He told me he did that a lot too, walk down memory lane that is. You can get pretty distracted walking down memory lane. I got so distracted that I walked fifteen goddamn miles. When you think about it, that's a pretty long ways. And my feet were sore as hell. They were throbbing like crazy. Walking that far was pretty stupid. It's true.
15.
After sitting in Jason's office for an hour, I still couldn't figure out what he did for a living. I mean, it didn't seem like he really did anything in p
articular. He focused all of his energy on a game of Solitaire on his computer. He was pretty goddamn good too; he'd win every other game or so. When actual work finally did come in for him to do, in the form of an e-mail request, he'd slam his fists on his desk and yell about goddamn this and that fucker that. He really hated when his boss would interrupt his game with actual work. Jason was such a lazy goddamn pig. It's true. But in a way, I understood. When I was employed by TechForce, I avoided actual work as much as possible. It's not hard to do, you know. I would just do the absolute minimum to get by. The rest of the time, I was writing my novel, THE RISE AND FALL OF A TITAN. In fact, the titan that I referred to in the title of my book was the former C.E.O. from TechForce: Mr. Hans Fitzsimmons. But I'll get to that later.
So actually, I understood why Jason liked his job so much since he could play Solitaire all day long. And I understood Jason's hatred towards his actual work. I hated to work too. That's why I followed my dreams and became a writer, because I hated to work eight to five for someone like Mr. Folsom and his goddamn lazy eye and Hans Fitzsimmons and his goddamn embezzling. It just made me sick. It's true. But watching Jason play Solitaire for hours made me sick too. I mean, you can watch someone else play video games for only so long. After a while, it gets pretty goddamn boring, especially if they are making plays you wouldn't make. Jason was pretty good at Solitaire; it was obvious he played it all the time. But he also made a lot of stupid moves. He must have had the game set to an easy level. The computer was pretty forgiving to his stupid moves. And his stupid moves were driving me crazy. But that was one thing we had in common: a love for video games. I've watched Jason make millions of stupid moves playing hundreds of stupid games.
The Meteoric Rise of Simon Burchwood Page 12
