Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

Soon he gave up reading the want ads altogether or visiting once a week the state unemployment office to check the listings there. When they saw the Kid walk through the door the clerks rolled their eyes and sighed audibly and he noticed and slumped down in the chair and waited until finally one of the clerks called him over and gave him a shorter and shorter list of potential employers and sent him out to be interviewed and not hired again. He made them feel like failures and they in turn passed it back until to break the downward spiral he stayed home at his mother’s and let night turn into day and day into night and talked to Iggy and watched porn on his computer until he ran out of money and maxed out his debit card.

That’s when he started clicking his way onto the sex-talk chat room that he didn’t know at first was a sex-talk chat room. He thought it was a regular discussion forum open to all subjects. It’s how he met brandi18. He followed his mouse from craigslist.org to Calusa to jobs to food/hospitality as if he were looking for a job on the Internet. In minutes he was depressed and discouraged by the curt clean language of the job requirements and knew he was defeated before he even started, so he followed his mouse back out to Calusa again and clicked on services and from there to adults where he declared he was over eighteen years of age and watched a little free porn for a while and when he had jerked off into a tissue he zipped up his fly and clicked out to Calusa again and tried checking out discussion forums thinking maybe somebody out there with a female iguana was looking for a stud like Iggy and he could raise a little cash on stud fees.

He knew people did that with dogs and horses, so why not iguanas? Iggy was ready. Once a year since Iggy was three years old and sexually mature as summer came on and there was a slight increase in the length of the day and a rise in humidity and temperature, starting at his head and dewlap and ending at his tail Iggy turned orange. Male iguanas have two penises hidden in a pouch between their hind legs and in breeding season the pouch swells and the iguana grows restless and lustful and will try to mate with anything animate or inanimate shaped even vaguely like a female iguana, biting down where it thinks the neck is supposed to be located and humping its backside with one of its penises until it splats a dollop of semen and relaxes its grip and sleeps for a short while, when it starts all over again with the second penis. Then a short rest period and it’s back to the first. And on and on.

Usually the Kid filled an athletic sock with wood chips and tied off the open end and tossed it on the floor of Iggy’s cage for him to mate with and a week or ten days later Iggy’s color would slowly turn back to its normal green and he’d calm down and resume his old habits and quiet routines, finished for the year with sex. This time the Kid thought he’d try to put the iguana’s annual sexual crescendo to some money-making use and save himself a sock in the process.

He typed: healthy full-grown m iguana available 2 mate w healthy f. And waited for a response. His handle was iggyzbro.

Almost immediately he received a reply.

brandi18: Huh?

He wasn’t going to dignify the question with an answer — obviously brandi18 knew nothing about iguanas — but when no one else after a day and a night responded to his text, iggyzbro wrote: my iguana rdy 2 breed. do u have a f and want babies? stud fee neg. He would have written negotiable but wasn’t sure how to spell it.

brandi18: stud fees r for losers. r u a ho?

iggyzbro: no way.

brandi18: way. illegal 2 sell sex on craigslist u no.

iggyzbro: im selling iguana sex.

brandi18: gross!!! u serious???

iggyzbro: do u have a f iguana?

brandi18: that’s not what i call it.

iggyzbro: what do u call it?

brandi18: pends on my mood.

iggyzbro: mine’s called iggy.

brandi18: cool. how big is iggy?

iggyzbro: huge. what’s yrs called?

brandi18: like i said, pends on my mood.

iggyzbro: what mood u in today?

brandi18: kinda curious abt u. lol.

iggyzbro: k. what’s yours called when yr curious abt me?

brandi18: kittycat. get it?

iggyzbro: no.

brandi18: gotta go. my mom’s calling me. how old r u?

iggyzbro: 21

brandi18: yeah, sure.

iggyzbro: how old r u?

brandi18: 2 young 4 u and iggy 4 sure.

iggyzbro: pends. iggy likes iguanas younger than him if theyre sexually mature. is yrs sexually mature?

brandi18: what do u mean?

iggyzbro: how old r u?

By this time the Kid knew they were no longer talking about iguanas and was scrambling to keep up with brandi18. At first she said she was eighteen and when he asked if she was on Facebook and had any pictures of herself posted there and said maybe he’d check her out and be her friend she admitted that she was only kidding, she was really fourteen. But she looked older, she wrote.

The Kid pulled up Facebook and signed on and peeped her, then came back and told her she did look seventeen or even eighteen but was real cute. yr a hottie, he added after a pause. He decided not to ask her to friend him and instead continued their conversation on the craigslist forum. It was their own more or less private thread and felt safer to him than Facebook if she really was only fourteen — although he couldn’t imagine why a girl would lie about that, say she was younger than she really was. Until they’re eighteen or so underage girls usually say they’re older than they really are to keep the guy from logging off and deleting the evidence.

No harm just chatting with her, he decided. If he ran into her at a bus stop or sat next to her in a café he’d feel safe asking her about herself like this and telling her a few things about himself. Especially someone as pretty as brandi18, cute and a hottie: in the picture on Facebook she had long brown hair with blond streaks tied back in a ponytail and cream-colored skin and didn’t seem to be wearing any makeup or jewelry except for pearl studs in her ears. Her eyes were large and round and either blue or hazel, he couldn’t quite tell from the photograph, and she appeared to be looking slightly up at the camera as if she had taken it herself with her cell phone with her arm extended and the camera held above her head a ways. It gave her a flirty look that he liked — warm and reassuring but also inviting. Promising. Tempting. She was wearing a Disney World T-shirt, he noticed.

She told him her real name was Brandi and she used brandi18 online because there were seventeen other Brandis in front of her subscribing to the same Internet provider. She said her mom and dad were divorced and she lived with her mom alone in West Calusa Gardens, a suburb that she said was boring and she hated. sux, she wrote. Especially because she could only get to the mall by bus except when her mom drove her and that she said sux 2 .

He agreed. He told her he had a car, a two-year-old Beemer that he’d almost totaled a few weeks ago so it was in the body shop forcing him to take the bus too. which sux, he wrote. so i no how u feel. He wished his Beemer was fixed so he could drive her around in it and she wouldn’t have to rely on her mom.

that wld b cool, she wrote.

He said he was living with his mom too but only temporarily because he’d just gotten out of the army and was still getting adjusted to civilian life and planned to take night courses at Calusa Community College in the fall in computer programming.