J. Osborne: Black Gum

“If I’d met you when I was young, I would have killed you. But then I got old, and I killed Harold.”

The preacher closed his eyes and held up a hand. He said, “Let us pray.”

We collected our checks from a disinterested secretary and stepped out into the ice and the cold.

Charlie said, “I liked the thing he did with his hand.”

“The—” I made a chopping motion.

“Yeah.”

“I fucking hate going to church.”

“Next time we’ll just donate plasma.”

Charlie and I went to the Corner Store. He picked out a thirty-pack of Keystone and took it up to the counter.

The clerk said, “You got your ID?”

Charlie nodded and took out his wallet and showed him.

The clerk rang up the beer. He said, “You got any weed?”

Charlie shook his head and paid for the Keystone and left.

I’ve never been good face-to-face, never been quick on it. There’s a term, something about the spirit of the staircase, that thing you might have said, but now there’s a delay and we all live on those stairs, waiting for our shoe to drop.

When I met Hanna at the Cellar Bar we were quiet around each other, though we’d written to each other a lot. Then the beer came and we talked and we learned what was real and what was not.

She was in a blue knit cap and a t-shirt.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“It’s cold out there. But not in here.”

She took a paper bag out of her purse and rolled an apple out of it onto the table and started eating it.

“You know what they say,” I said.

“Apples are delicious,” she said.

I laughed. “I’m not sure that’s what they say.”

“That’s what I say.”

“You know what they say: it’s really fucking cold outside.”

“You know what they say: it’s not so cold in here.”

A table of old women were celebrating their friend’s birthday party. They cheered and sipped margaritas.

“They’re into it,” Hanna said.

“Having a time,” I said.

“I can’t get that way anymore.”

“Why’s that?”

She kind of focused on the space behind my head. “I got too drunk a year ago and threatened to rip my sister’s cunt out with barb wire.”

At that point, most sensible men might go in a different direction. But at that point, I just needed someone to be close to me. I needed to breathe in the smell of her hair and hold on to her and wake up next to her and brush my teeth with her there in the next room. I felt all of these things and I don’t know why because I didn’t know this person just the same as I didn’t know any of the people I spent my time around. I felt like I’d died and someone new was in my place. I was still coming down off the relationship with my wife and I was thirsty.

I told her about what had happened between my wife and me. It was a truncated version, but I found myself filling in the blank spaces until it became less about the give and take, less about what had happened, and more about how those things had affected me, the way they’d changed me, the way they left me with an emptiness.

It was all true, but I didn’t tell it to feel better. I told her that because I knew, somehow, that a woman who might threaten to rip out her sister’s privates wouldn’t be able to not fuck a man on his way down.

She put her hand over mine and her eyes glazed over.

The old women roared. The birthday girl had unwrapped a giant dildo.

“That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah. They’re so into it.”

“No, I mean the size of that thing. Jesus.”

“Right.”

When I dropped her off, I’d just put the car in park and turned the music down when I looked over and saw that she was crying.

Her face was red and puffy.

She reached for my belt.

I pushed her hand away.

She looked at me and said, “Please.”

I said, “I think I’ll be all right.”

She said, “You think I’m ugly.”

I said, “That’s not it. I think you’re pretty. I just don’t want to.”

Hanna pushed my hands away and undid the belt. She was full-on sobbing now, really getting into it. She took my dick out and it was half-hard.

All teeth.

I braced my hands on the passenger-side headrest and the roof.

Closed my eyes and tried to focus on the warmth and the wetness of it. But the teeth cut into me and eventually I cried out and she quit and sobbed heavily and threw the door open and ran back into her house.

I deleted my account on the dating site later that night.

I told Charlie about what happened the next morning. He was under the Mustang.

“You got bitched again,” he said.

“I guess I did.”

“You’d better watch out. Next time she’s gonna fuck your ass.”

“Shut up.”

“You take a shower with your clothes on?”

“I took a shower. But I took my clothes off.”

“Did you cry?”

“Shut up.”

“Man, I’m your friend. But since you came here, you’ve been just…I don’t know.”

“What?”

“Different.”

“Well, fuck yeah I’m different.”

He rolled out from under the car and pointed a socket wrench at me. “I know that shit is fucked up for you right now. But you’ve gotta get it together. I’m your friend. You need to listen to me. You’re like a thirsty woman but it’s worse because you’re supposed to be a dude. You’re different. If you’re gonna be different, at least be a man about it.”

We were quiet for a long time. Wind chimes down the street.

We walked inside and didn’t talk to each other.

The pilot light on the fridge kicked on.

Finally, I said, “All right. You’re right.”

“Of course I’m right. So here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna go out to the Last Call tonight, and you’re gonna hang out and drink some beer and we’re gonna talk about our dicks and comment on the size of all the titties we see. But you’re not gonna pursue like some sad little queer.”

“Okay. I’m down.”

“And you need to get a fucking job or something, man. One, you need to occupy your time. Two,” he stabbed his finger at a stack of bills.

“I’ve been on the job hunt.”

“You’re like a dog looking out the window at squirrels.”

“I’ve been trying.”

“Not hunting, is all I’m saying.”

“I don’t know what I’m trying to do.”

Charlie loaded the bowl. “Probably you should smoke some weed about it.”

We ate a couple rolls each and met up with Shane at Last Call. Machine gun music in the jukebox. Rednecks and metal kids and women in glitter.

Charlie pointed at a woman in a halter top. “Big titties,” he said.

“Big titties,” we echoed.

Shane’s pupils were huge. He said, “Picture me like this. Picture me reaching enlightenment.”

“Like, dying?” Charlie bounced in place in his chair.

“Nah, like, picture me as this old ass monk. In all the vestments.”

“The fuck is a ‘vestment?’”

“Like a robe and I’m bald and shit.”

We pictured it. A woman in short-shorts walked by. Charlie said, “Shelf booty.”

“Shelf booty,” we echoed.

“I guarantee you that I could meet the Buddha. He could come down and talk to me and there’d be gold light and shit and me and him would go out into a garden and I’d feel at peace with fucking everything. I guarantee you this: even if that was the case, if a hoodrat nigga like you came to me with some of this shit, I would ingest it post haste and run slamdancing down the halls of my monastery.”

Charlie said, “I have no idea what the fuck you just said. But I am higher than a motherfucker.”