Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

I told her, when she left me, over the telephone, that I had memorized her feet, I told her. I had them sunk in my mind, I told her. I had lust on all over for them, I told her. She waited on me to prove it. She was always waiting on Yours Truly to win her, or I misunderstood. The first times we were together I sucked her feet whole. I licked her from crack to crack. I sat back on her couch, and she stood on the arm and the back of the sofa and lowered herself down to my taste. This was on a terrific street up above a China person's restaurant in NYC. I always feel like a little guy trying to prove I can. She is beyond immaculate. Then I went nuts along her. Mouthed everything.

A nurse puts the ink into me.

Do you know how nervous she makes me? They are going to look inside. Look inside of me. They are going to look inside. I prefer not to think about what's inside. Other than the heart, gut, words. You want to look? Hey, don't look! Hey, hey, don't look in there.

A stroke person is coming from below — being rolled around the halls.

<<< >>>

I feel the ink. It is for the CTscan. It is warmer than my blood. It is like a whiskey, hot bourbon, in my lungs and stomach first without throat and I feel I've wet myself and am weak. I feel the warm ink reach my toes. Whiskey is a taste I haven't had since the snow coming sideways through Montana, blinding out the black mountain, long ago with a woman who worked the casinos and cooked beans for me. I'm a living thing in a hospital on my back.

Catherine is from Colorado.

I am from Ohio. Who wins, you figure? Aspen to New York? Or Ohio to hospital?

While inside the CTscan, Oh, I see Jesus Christ. I see serpents. I see lots of things with my eyes shut. Leftovers from mouthfuls of peyote. I wore a blanket around a bunch of Injuns for sixteen hours, plus. Up in Mendocino. Afterwards, we ate ribs out of Styrofoam, store-bought fried chickens, brownies, and Faygo Soda — I looked at the ice of vision on everything in the new day's sun moving — I still don't see like a person.

Now I know I'm not just going to die from suffering. That's what peyote is good for.

Catherine, I don't know?

For the past week I had broken ribs or lung and bone cancer. I went from doctor to doctor holding my side. Tied a dress shirt around my ribs to sleep right at night. The Docs said, “Muscular skeletal, from coughing, those ciggies, hold, it will heal.” Bastards! I had only thoughts of Catherine and feeling the hurt side.

I'm Six Foot Five, Six, Seven, and have had pain.

A femur in half, my skull broke a few times, busted arms, some dog bites, cuts and minor burns, distemper, hyper this and that. Mentally unhealthy: family history of alcoholism, drugs, and whatnot.

My grandfather, his father was a banker who owned a bank. His father's father started the bank, made uniforms for the Union army, built engines for coal mining trains. All of them are severe or wild and entrepreneuring in black and white photos in suits. My grandfather started one of his legs on fire thirty-however-many years ago. He burned the eyelets of his boots black into the skin, green hickory fire lit with gasoline, gasoline, leg, Ohio. The old backyard. My origins. He made himself a roastbeef sandwich before he drove up to the hospital. Little horseradish, mustard, on pumpernickel. “They never feed you in those places,” he said to his wife, my Mamma. His leg was smelling up the kitchen, the way she tells it—80 years old and clean — them still together humping across the weather. Those two my champion winners, keeping me upright and my family in order, mostly.

So, I waited out pain on a bare futon mattress on my floor at home until here. None of us have the same homes. We are all just looking around a lot of the time. Unless you count some of the great jumping beans I have known. Guys who grunt and hump and hope their way through life. All of them having done time in the nut house bin or prison before. All drugged up and half-drunk. I only did ever jail. I spent my early twenties in rehabs — got used to the music of shifts.

See, I adjusted to the pain, used Icy Hot, had pills and ciggies. Finally, it was thinking of Catherine did me in, and I decided to come to the ER for a jot of R&R. Catherine is in New York City. She says she needs to get herself figured out first. She says she needs to clean house first. She says all sorts of things. Bottom line, I'm suffering from love lost. I've waited till I was about thirty to do more than have sex.

I told her about her feet I'd memorized.

“Your first two toes peek from those red mules,” I proved on a phone line to her. I was hunching over standing in my living room with no furniture, side in the kind of pain as one who has been stabbed. “Your bigtoe toenails are symmetrical, rising from their sides to a higher curve of middle,” I said.

We had been all throughout New York City. Lived there together. Looked at fine things and plays and walked through talking — never got real sleep. I love how the pigeons will bank crazy with their wings spread high through the angles of a shadow on a summer day in Hell's Kitchen. A dollar slice. The bandaged smells of the subways that are all hers. I was smoking a cig in my living room in the woods. “Your second toes are long,” I said, “but not longer. Your other three are nearly the same length as one another. You have high strong arches. Nice little heels. I want to suck on them Baby. Sex, Kitten.” She didn't say a word or even giggle. I miss driving when I was fifteen years ago. When I was a jumping jack and didn't think but new pussy and highway. A clot of sun. The sky forever. A song. I hear the old woman coughing her sputum. Steak, potato, then a doctor comes in with no hair.

“Mr. Clean,” I address him.

I ask him about the woman. Say I've had it with her. Say I'm not right.

He tells me she's paralyzed from the neck down. Gives me the look like he understands where I am coming from. I cannot remember where I'm coming from. I've been East a long time. I fell in love for the first time with a New York woman. I haven't had any steak. I think it'd be Christian to put that old woman out of this life.

Lately, I've been keeping lakeside in my cottage in western New York. I teach freshman college. The other day, middle of class, me showing them all who's boss, a woman's voice is climbing through the scales. She's singing up my spine. I got tears in my face. The kids are all staring at me. Sometimes it's unbreakable how the beauty of art comes after you, making you feel everything and bawl in front of the very people you're supposed to be hectoring. I felt every moment of her singing after she was finished, singing up through my spine. I had to walk home and leave everyone behind.

You know why we get sick?

Giving away what we should have kept.

A few days ago, before I came here, a fox showed while I was on the floor. It looked sick. He was on my porch and I am lying in the room on the floormat playing with myself naked to the fall, the whole great long stretch of my body. Since peyote animals come to me. I was playing with myself to shoots of orange like bayonets on majestic New York trees. The sliding door open to all the colors. I can almost get quiet, nearly, at times. Sometimes the sky opens in light through a window.

This is, it seems, all of any God, until moments when God comes near.

The little tail was thin and wispy, the eyes nearly closed, it wobbled from side to side. I was jerking off trying not to hurt the ribs. I'd been thinking of Catherine's big nipples, her Greek pussy, her big ass and tiny middle. Her green eyes her dark hair and pale skin with blue veins. She has golden circuits around each pupil. She rode on a motor scooter in the rain with me through Spain on a vast freeway. There is nothing outside of America. Semitrailers whizzing by. Love is when you start watching dirty movies and wind up thinking of someone you've had your penis in and wind up turning off the movie. Let me rephrase that: I had started a dirty movie and thought of Catherine and turned it off and thought more of her.