“You kids have a good night. I’ll come back another time.”
There was something deathly unsexual and anticlimactic and flattening in his words, his old man eyes and his pleasure at seeing us, young and hot and alive. He had more fun in that moment than you and I had in our first fuck and there was no getting around it and I wasn’t surprised when you said you should go check on Peach because she’s been really depressed. I wasn’t surprised that you didn’t suggest we go to your bed and fuck again. I was bad and you are the boss.
But this is what surprises me. A day later—you didn’t even wait a whole day—you texted me:
Hey Joe, I can’t make it in today. Sorry!
And that exclamation point was the beginning of the end of us and I made a mistake by writing back:
Okay!
And then you made plans to go out with Lynn and Chana instead of seeing me.
You: I miss you girls. I have an emergency session with Dr. Nicky, but want to get late lunch and/or happy hour?
Chana: Who is this? Haha. Yes. Fine.
Lynn: I’m already in pajamas and Housewives mode. Have one for me!
So this was it, right? The true end because instead of seeing me, you were opting to see a mental health professional and a girlfriend to talk about me. And when a girl likes talking about you more than talking to you, well, in my experience, that’s the end. So I was gonna fucking kill myself and everyone in the shop and take out the Eric Carmen CD and smash it into bits because I stopped believing in myself and our future. I wrote back to you, pathetic:
Okay!
It’s a good thing you knew that I was close to losing my shit because not five seconds after I shut off the CD—sometimes silence is the best sound—and sat down on the stool and thought about castrating myself like the perv in Little Children you wrote back again:
But what are you doing tonight?
And all was well in the universe because that smile was your gaping wet pussy that knew that I had more to give. And I was okay again. It was clear to me now that you were going to your shrink to talk about your problem, that you enjoy sex more when there’s an audience. And you were going to see Chana because you’ve been busy with me and she’s been away on vacation and you wanted to tell her all about the best head of your life in Macy’s. That emoticon was your way of saying that we don’t work together anymore. We fuck together. So I told you to be at my place at seven and you wrote back:
See you then!
It was 7:12 when I realized that the candles were cursed. Five little votive candles that I picked up at Pier 1 Imports because of some guy in the bookstore who stayed in my head for some reason. He seemed cool, like a guy I’d be friends with if I was on the market for friends, and he dumped a heavy bag on the counter so he could get out his credit card and he sighed. “Fucking candles. Women and candles, right?”
“Right,” I said, and I didn’t realize it but an imprint was made then and I would never have a woman over without candles lit because of some pussy-whipped husband buying Tom Clancy for himself and candles for his sex-withholding wife. What makes us become us? What fucks us up and why? I have no idea but I know that at 7:12 I started to resent those candles and the little pathetic scented fires in each of them. The pizza was cold and the wine I bought—I hate wine—was getting shittier by the second. You can’t let wine breathe for that long—and I knew you weren’t coming and that it was a matter of time before you flaked out on me and sure enough at 7:14 when I was sitting at the table—the table I dragged home and up the stairs for this very moment—when you texted:
Don’t hate me but I have to bail
And that smiley face is your body, closed, and your eyes averted and your resignation from all things me, from all things us, and I don’t need to read your e-mail to know that I can’t fully blame this on Peach because she’s not the spazzing dick, that’s me, and I put Twizzlers in a vase for you, Beck. I pick up the vase and throw it at the wall, at the tapestry I bought from an old lady down the street to cover the hole in the wall to make you feel more at ease in my place. The vase doesn’t crack. It just bounces onto the couch and I must be the limpest limp dick in the world. I can’t even break a vase and I lunge at the candles but I don’t want to set this place on fire. You were in this place and still you fucked me. I cannot hold this place responsible and I cannot blame the vase or the Twizzlers or the DO NOT CROSS police tape on the shower curtains and I lower my hand onto a candle and the fire is hot and my skin aches and I’d set my dick on fire if I could but we know that I’m a limp dick pussy. I don’t have the balls to do that. The smell of burnt flesh overwhelms the cold pizza and it’s a good thing I didn’t waste any money on flowers.
29
I’LL tell you something about suicide, Beck. If I were going to off myself with a handgun or a noose or a permanent swim, which I’m not, now would be the time to do it. You have dismissed me and it’s been five hours and eleven days since you took your love away and all of our songs sound bad because they will never see us standing from such great heights and no, you will not still love me tomorrow because you never loved me at all. I’m not Bobby Short or (the real) Beck and you don’t want to defy the logic of all sex laws with me and you are not in love again and you do not love, love, love it. I made it inside of you and you don’t want me back. Nothing is fun anymore, not even coming up with tweaked-out Benji tweets:
Coke. Because I’ll sleep when I’m dead. #cocacola #hahaha
“Excuse me but can you stop with your phone and look at me,” an uppity old broad squawks. I hit TWEET and offer my assistance.
The bitch barks, “I said I don’t need a bag. I brought my own.”
“Good for you,” I snap and crumple the paper bag and throw it in the trash just to let her know who’s boss and Ethan sighs and apologizes to her and pulls the bag out of the trash and this is what my life has come to: me, Ethan, and a bunch of book-buying assholes.
I spend day after day with Ethan and getting to know him is no easy thing especially now that I don’t get to tell you about him. You complained about the loud fan in the employee restroom and pushed me to replace it as anyone would; Ethan calls it a “sound machine” and claims it doesn’t bother him. He’s almost like a hermaphrodite, this kid, in a CK One asexual cologne 1992 sort of way. Without asking I can tell you that he knows all the words to “Gonna Make You Sweat” and he’d be at home on a dance floor sidestepping, clapping, and counting. Out loud. He’s aggressive in all the wrong ways and he was born too late and he looks tired at forty-one from years of hunting for a color-blocked, Rick Dees–narrated way of life. You can either feel bad for the guy or jump him and steal his wallet. He’s a litmus test of a person and half the customers meet his smile and the other half glare at him and I tell him all the time that he should work in an old folks home and I mean it. He could deejay dance parties for people in wheelchairs, on life support. People with crooked, chamomile-scented dicks and lazy, warped vaginas would spark to his total, complete, and tragically inherent want for a time long gone.
“Have a good one, ma’am!”
“Ethan, you don’t have to call everybody ‘ma’am,’?” I say. “Some people, some people you just wave or leave it at ‘you’re welcome.’?”