Rob

by branded

ROB wasn't like the other guys I ran with in my hometown, BOYS masquerading as men, still clinging desperately to mama's teat in the converted basements of the houses they grew up in. Rob was a man already at nineteen, which was more than the fact than he was older than me at the time, but some thing he carried around that no other boy had, some gift that escapes description.

He was the kind of guy that never had a GIRLFRIEND, only Girl FRIENDS—you know the kind of boy you call when your current lover fucked your best friend, wound up in jail, got busted for dealin', beat somebody up—any of the number of pitfalls inherent to the WHITE TRASH adolescent hetero relationship. ROB would console you, tell you that you've been done wrong like good friends do, and come pick you up in his latest rustbox. One time he had a grey T-bird that he drove at 70 miles an hour downtown one of the times I told him—NO I STILL DON'T WANT TO BE YOUR GIRLFRIEND—despite the fact that my boyfriend had slept with that BITCH Jenny and stole my Metallica “Ride the Lightning” T-Shirt.

Anyway. I met ROB at a pizza joint where we were doing the minimum wage hustle in the traditional gendered division of labor native to fast food delivery pits—I was pounding dough in the back room during the day and working the prep line nights while HE drove delivery—thursday through sunday, the five to god knows whenever dinner shift. First time I gave him a whirl I drank half a bottle of vodka in the Terryville woods sitting in his '83 Oldsmobile, red, play-doh colored in the bondoed spots above the fenders. I got so drunk I PUKED my guts out everywhere, some over this bridge into a muddy river, it splashed when it hit, I barely remember, save the embarrassment of puking like some girly girl in front of this guy, this BLOND OLDER guy for chrissake, who I was trying to impress and instead drizzled pizza inspired puke on his shoes and the door of his car. What I also remember is how Rob held my hair while I spewed and stopped at a convenience store to buy me a bottle of water to drink on the way home and actually took me home like I wanted instead of convincing me to come back to his place so he could take advantage of my drunken stupor, like any of the other ASSHOLES I normally rode around with, who wouldn't have thought twice about sticking their DICKS in the nearest available orifice after I'd passed out. He walked me to right up to my own front door and stayed parked on the curb 'til I'd staggered inside.

We dated for about two weeks, suprisingly enough, considering my first impression, but I broke it off pretty quick. He wanted me to trip out with him this one time, but I decided to drink myself into oblivion instead and we ended up back at his place where I said yes and we had sex for about thirty seconds before he blew his load—it was purple monsters after all, good good LSD that makes sex the best carnival ride at the park. I didn't return his phone calls after that. It wasn't about his performance or whether or not I liked him—he was BEYOND sex for me—it was like I'd spoiled this clean white china plate by pissing sex all over it and trying to serve dinner on it without washing it first. This man said things I had never heard of before, beautiful MAGIC things that touched me in places no COCK could go. I'd have sex with boys and then they'd be gone or I'd get bored or both—I wanted what I had with Rob to last and last like an endless night where the sun never rises and the crickets chirp out their life stories for eternity.

He was pretty pissed that I'd done him like a cheap road house WHORE and it took him a little while to forgive me but it turned into a friendship that would outlast five years of GOOD FOR NUTHIN' boyfriends. We would sit in the most beautiful places we could find in the northwestern hills of connecticut and he would talk about our souls merging and leaping into the hawks flying overhead—how it was really possible if you only believe that we are all the same energy, the same life, every rock and leaf and flesh. I wouldn't see him for two months and I'd be smoking a cigarette, wondering what had become of him and then the phone would ring and he'd be on the other end, ready to pick me up in his new junkyard model. We never so much as kissed after that substance induced night, but one time he brought me to this swimming hole and picked me up out of that brown warm water and just held me and looked into my face—just looked and squinted, like I was some kinda LIGHT that hurt his eyes.

He moved out of the country and into the city of Bristol when I went to see him so we went to this SHITTY public park and climbed up to the top of the tallest rock there and sat with our backs against each other, our arms linked, our elbows touching. His voice was a trembly whisper. He saw the future stretched out in front of him like some desert of hopeless. He didn't want to be like his friends he'd grown up with, married to women they hated and hit, in jail, out of their minds on beer and prescription sleeping pills and sixty hours a week with no overtime pay, hanging sheetrock, working on cars, making plastic lipstick tubes out in the industrial park. He said that they LAUGHED at him and his science fiction and his poetry, paperbacks from the used bookstore hanging out of the ass pocket of his Levi's. They dogged him for not fucking me—what was the point of talkin' with some chick with no PUSSY thrown in to make the time spent worth it. They laughed at him for listening to old Smashing Pumpkins and Jane's Addiction instead of Slayer. He wanted a NEW WORLD but how, when leaving meant abandoning those most familiar, to be a STRANGER forever on streets that would never call out your name. I left him on that rock with the sun crouching down behind the buildings, a silhouette against the deserted sky.

He took me on an acid adventure once. We dropped our hits, ran over his buddy mike's house to park the car, ignored the snickers about what we had planned to do out all alone in the woods. We climbed over a fence and through a JUNGLE—july had vines and flowers growing in thick ropes over the path. The green forest was breathing its soft air on us, exhaling rain and wet earth, plants reaching out their tiny hands to tickle our arms and legs as we hiked forward, ROB's hand yanking mine as he hauled me to the place he wanted me to see. A jagged cliff with an open mouth of cave loomed over us, grey and brown and red rock formations melting its colors onto the soil, crystal teeth sparkling and chewing. THIS IS THE BEST PART he said and pulled me into a tunnel at the foot of the shifting living mass of rock. At first it was a walk, then a crawl, then as he pulled my hand up to the next ledge, it was only a sliver of space to fit into. I had my back wedged up against the damp rock wall and my sneakered feet braced against the opposite wall and moved sideways, like an upside down CRAB. The crevice was only ten inches wide. I was on three white blotters, peaking, close to losing my MIND. Rob's cheerful breathless voice was up ahead calling ALMOST THERE. I followed it like a foglight, that voice oozing warm rivulets of strength into my Chuck Taylors. I broke out into the light, made new into a strange tripping creature, born into Nature's muggy jungle air into Rob's arms, as if we were the ADAM and EVE in some LSD shaped inversion of the forest primeval. No letdowns, no bad vibes, no gutrot, we talked until the sun went down and we could hardly see to get out, talked magic and new and philosophical and wonderful, figuring out all of the world's secrets all of life's reasons in the mouth of that timeless cave. It was REAL. the longest hardest MINDFUCK of my life, leaving my mind drysore and spent but satisfied in the dashboard afterglow of the ride home.

We drifted in and out of each other's lives like people do, it became harder and harder to keep in touch, after we had invested more in more into our separate tracks, my hometown boyfriends, his high school buddies, factories and faultlines between us. We moved a lot, by evictions and wanderlust, NEED and wildness. I was on the phone with him before my next move. He said that he would ALWAYS love me, that even though we didn't see much of each other, that I was with him, in his back pocket, like a tattered photograph you NEVER stop needing to look at. I never heard from him again. When I finally had a new number to call from, he had moved, somewhere to beyond my reach. We'd always caught up with each other before but not after that last CLICK and dialtone. I imagine him on some mountaintop in colorado, living off of tree bark, kayaking down some raging river, driving some fast car that always starts on the first try in a land of no winters and shutoff notices, anywhere but alone on that rock in that park where I left him that day, because he was different, an old man at nineteen, he had MAGIC, he got out, flying with some hawk overhead. Please.

Mama Goes In

by goatgirl

A Wall is Something You Can Count On

by goatgirl

A nearly-full glass of brandy and milk sat abandoned on the coffee table. Sarah looked around again for her mother. Chris and Willy were asleep on another couch, leaning against each other companionably, and next to them Andy and his girlfriend were making out in slow motion.

The woman straddled him, grinding her hips against his bony thighs. It looked like porn, Sarah thought, so long as you didn’t look too close. The woman’s flesh hung over all the way around the top of her acid-washed jeans, and Andy’s eyes kept closing. Under the curtain of smoke swirling against the ceiling, every surface crawled with beer cans and cigarette butts. A regular pulse of explosions glowed soundlessly on the TV while Robert Plant wailed into the dim room. No sign of her mother or Eric.

Sarah held the glass to her mouth and sipped. The drink tasted like a melted milkshake but burned the back of her throat. Quickly, in case her mother staggered back into the room, she emptied the glass in a few quick swallows, gagging as she put it down. Her throat and stomach were warm. She picked up a half-smoked cigarette from the ashtray and lit it, watching the match approach her face and holding her pinky out delicately, choking out the first drag.

Shit.

Chris, at the other end of the couch, sat up.

“Don’ waste that,” he said, leaning towards her with his hand out. “You’re too young anyway.” She handed him the smoldering butt and stood up, teetering on the heels of her borrowed shoes. She looked back at Chris to see if he was watching her, but his eyes were already closed. The cigarette smoldered between his finders. She dragged her shoulder against the wall in the hallway, liking the hardness of the sheetrock and wood.

A wall, she thought, is something you can count on.

A sliver of darkness showed through the crack of her mother’s doorway, and Sarah listened there for a minute.

Nothing.

She poked the door open, and in the slot of light on the bed Sarah could see two sheet-tangled forms. The room smelled of breath and cigarettes, a funk so strong it hovered above the bed. Her mother lay closest to the door, facing Sarah, her mouth open. The sheet lay limply across her stomach and her slack breasts hung to one side, the pale nipples huge. Sarah could not see the face on the other sheet-draped shape, but it was Eric’s hand, with its heavy skull ring, that snaked over her mother’s hip.

“Mom?” Sarah whispered. The figures on the bed were silent. She called again, louder, and Eric’s hand slid off her mother’s hip. He lifted himself on one elbow. Navy blue tattoos marched across his body in the dim light, dipping across a flabby chest that hung to one side, like a woman’s. Like her mother’s.

“Whaddyawant?” Eric mumbled.

“Mom?” Sarah said again.

“Go to bed. It’s late.” Eric lay down again and turned his back to her, pulling the sheet further off her mother’s bare torso.

Sarah shut the door quietly and leaned against it, her mind foul and dark like the stale bedroom. She couldn’t think what to do next. There should be some rule for this, some article in Teen Magazine on how to act when your mother’s passed out and you feel like you’re five years old.

She decided to brush her teeth.

Sarah was spitting blue foam into the sink when she realized that there was a man asleep in the bathtub. She thought he was a friend of Eric’s, but she wasn’t sure. She poked his arm and the man let out a wet snore. His hand was stuffed in his pants, and there was a thin, dried crust in the corners of his mouth. She stepped into the bathtub, carefully placing her feet between the man’s legs. She prodded his foot.

Nothing. Out cold.

She kicked him, the pointed toe of her boot hitting his upper thigh. The man’s body body absorbed the blow completely and silently; she kicked him again. It was hard to get a satisfying swing in the small bathtub. She aimed her foot at the man’s thighs and crotch, pummeling his unconscious body.

When a drop of sweat tickled between her shoulders she stopped, horrified. She was panting, her hair hanging in her face. She looked at the sleeping man in the tub, saw his open mouth, pale skin, greasy hair; he could have been her uncle, her father. Her foot felt bruised.

She stepped carefully out of the bathtub, gripping the shower rod, the wall, then the back of the toilet. Her head soared ten feet above her body, and her body seemed not her own. Her knees were trembling.

Closing the shower curtain, she baby-stepped over to the sink. She saw a Raggedy Ann reflection: dark triangles of eyeliner under her eyes and two spots of red punctuating her round face. She poked at her fallen bangs, so carefully curled two hours before. Her mother’s baggy eyes hid behind her blue ones, and her mother’s rounded hips and breasts were rising from Sarah’s body as she watched. Sarah turned on the hot water and splashed it on her face, soaking her bangs and the neck of her t-shirt. She scrubbed until the eyeliner disappeared, until her cheeks were crimson and shiny. As she buried her face in the towel, her skin felt tight.

Looking again in the mirror, red eyes stared back at her. She was herself again. Then she turned off the bathroom light, standing in the dark for a moment before opening the door to the smoky hallway.

Sarah sat on the floor outside her mother’s bedroom, leaning against the wall, listening to the double inhale-exhale sneaking out from under the dark door. The floating feeling was stronger, and she imagined her body spinning round and round beneath her balloon head, the opposite of the girl in The Exorcist. I’m possessed, she thought. She sat silently spinning in the hallway, listening to Andy and that woman groaning in the living room in the pauses between songs, until she fell asleep.