Luke Goebel - Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours

Once my father and me and my brother went to Montana. When Brother was a few years old, Carl, he had spinal meningitis. He snapped out of it. All that was left over was a twitch and a squeak. First cast, a trout through the eye, my brother! He was always so calmly brown eyed and beautiful. When I was a few years older than 7 or so, I broke my arm badly in several places. I was so impressed with the hospital, with the doctors, rooms, all the people, the fluorescents and smells, the difference between being inside and outside of a place, I forgot all about the arm. See, Doc starts telling me jokes and chatting up my mother, a real looker and rich, sets the arm, pulls the cast on the other. It takes hours to get home, and I realize the mistake — sometimes it's like that when I think of Catherine. Sometimes I wish I had more jokes.

I made another mistake and dated my first girlfriend. This was at eighteen. I thought I was a man and wore a woman's fur coat around with my hair long. A huge black negroid tried to hold me up for cash outside of the club where she worked. She worked taking off her clothes like a boy. That's how she looked on stage. Hey, it's work! I don't judge. Look, I told that man, flatten me . He was six-foot-ten and full of jails and sperm. He started laughing and gripped crotch. He shot his head toward me. Giant. He could have murdered me in one shot. I was impressed. He wound cloth around his knuckles. I couldn't wait for the jets overhead to knock me back. But he just starts laughing and shaking his head at me, and gets into his car and asks me and my girl, who'd come out and started smoking and yelling at me , if we needed to get to someplace. She had just come out the club's exit. Me and her crawled in. It was a great old Cadillac coach with a leather roof, but the interior was shot to pilling and ratty fabric, the foam busting through armrests. She was the kind of little girl who had a dildo that plugged into the wall and it had a long cord and the end she put inside her was a terrible color of skin. I hate that I tell everything, but it's all I got to work with.

After I saw her use it, and her paintings, I didn't really want to touch her or watch her dance, but we were together.

She and that man decided to make it. It was my fault. I had to walk all the way back home and eventually to my kin.

When I was 19 it was jail plus rehabs. When I was 20, it was rehab plus rehab. When I was 21, rehab again two more times. I am not a dainty soul when drunk and never wanted not to be not blacked out. This was the last time, at 21, but the night guards made such a nice sound walking around at night guarding us. I wish I could go back! Life was simpler. Here I am. Here you are too.

There was an Armenian man doing one rehab with me. Harry. He would tell me sometimes he couldn't get it up, but Harry's tongue always worked overtime, he said. He looked at me so blankly with trouble behind the blanks. He was enormous and showed me his tongue. It was full of bumps. That's all they want, he told me.

I've tried that approach myself, when I first started seeing Catherine. On account of I could not get functioning. That's how much I was in love. We met in our teacher's class, a wildly famous man with feathers and grease cloth for clothing in NYC. A real genius California Indian Gun Nut from NY. It took time to get over that and get it worked out. Me and her. Him and her.

There was another guy, he had a colostomy bag and got it all over our shower until I transferred up to a room with a view of an older British woman with pearls for her neck and breasts across the courtyard. At rehab with me and Harry. The man with the shit bag told me I had girly tits when we lived together. He tried to touch them. I punched his face. I still remember that. I still think that.

They are hairy now, but I guess he was partly right. When I walk around with my wiener low, I think of that. Of how my body isn't pretty like any fighter's. Catherine says she feels awkward standing naked in front of animals. I tell you. I'll tell you. I'll love a woman for that. She is a fully human person with herself intact. Everything that was ever before me I have done the wrong things to or with. She smokes ciggies. She has hair like horses standing in smoke. She steps through Manhattan. She can play Arabian music on recordings for days. I've been everywhere but Africa and China and North Korea and a few others. She is my girl even though she isn't.

See, they move me up to my room. They give me numbers now and IVs.

Amylase 876 Lipase 2660

475 1381

522 ?

They come at 4 a.m. or slightly after that and put a needle in my arm. I've asked them to use it in my hand. They've started taking blood from my wrist each morning. It feels so good to be asleep. Then to have a woman wake me up and take my hand, even to stick a vein, take part of me away with her.

Nothing is working and I know why: it's Catherine. I am feeling often like I don't have enough jump in my beans. The truth is I have given too much away. I'm like Christ without his magic. All I got is the side wound. The open heart. The world doesn't want to hear this sort of thing out of me. That man, he probably stretched my first girlfriend to the moon. Men like thinking of things like that. Women, too, some. Why say negroid instead of black? It's unpardonable, but I liked him and he was real and I didn't want to be safe, I wanted to be the one who wasn't privileged. I'll tell you: because it makes me wrong instead of right. Right by only saying the right word? Give me a new joke! This is the united America. Pick your common magazine. It's a disaster. Let's not kid ourselves. Using the right words! Don't fiddle my faddle, lesser evil, poppycock. Either way it's peanuts and popcorn. I'm not going to use the right word and perpetuate the wrong stereotype. I wish it were easier to take. I could have said person of color, as this happened, and then what? Then who's safe.

Everywhere my Catherine and I went, men had urges for her. She's in New York. She says to me last week, a woman like me in a town like this, and she smiles, which I can hear over the telephone line, then giggles. You should see what a class act she always is. The kind who won't let you in the room while she's taking a pee. Always locks the door. Always hose and perfect dresses. Ties around the waist. Little ears and earrings and that neck on her. Always with some new terrifically brilliant thought to share, a viewpoint to take you to see it — a church in the West Village with a hole in its giant door you can see to a quaint unmowed lawn of fallow grasses, a few old headstones, a smell of fresh earth, right in the city, her in a dress. I could get sick all over again, the world still moving, never a second of peace from Yours Truly for Yours Truly, and Catherine shows us heaven on earth.

See, a few days now and they got my case figured out finally.

I got drinking man's disease. Pancreatitis. The banana above the gut is inflamed. All I can do is lie around and not eat and wait. They give me a suppository. Hard as Hell to peel. I get it free and run it under cold water, crouch in my robe, slip it up inside.

You know who used to want to play with my hole? Catherine. She was always rubbing it while she would please me. Well, and enough of that. I get shy telling her secrets and using her name. Why do I do it? For sound. And for feeling.

Sue me.

Funny I got drinker's disease after all these years without a whiskey. I can't take the good drugs because of sobriety. Well, a little bit here and there I slip out of the nurses. But for the most part, it's just Hell and waiting. Catherine doesn't call. I'm getting older. The old cripple died in her sleep with nothing doing on my part, of course. They don't let me eat. Did you hear what happened to the old cripple? I can't drink water. I smoke in the shower here and the nurses know my tricks. Chew a sponge. Catherine is the most beautiful part of me I have ever had removed. I can't believe I still got to let her go. Feels like I am just touring the facilities here. Next time, though, it will be for keeps. They'll take me and keep me and put me down. All my skin will then be in the game. This time I am lucky, I suppose. The suppository is kicking in and the world is opening back to me like a morning glory in the sphincter of evening. The light through the window. I'm just waiting to get another round of trouble lined up. I'll never get over her, you know? You know that? Hey, you want to know, hey look? You're looking. You're looking.