Craig Davidson - Rust and Bone - Stories

“Are you insinuating I wished Wayne’s dick would break? That I somehow rigged his penis to … explode? ”

“Mr. Chancey.” The addiction counselor is maybe twenty-five, recent college grad with this high breathy voice like he’s got a penny-whistle lodged in his throat. “If you could save your conversation for the break. Bette, please go on.”

Bette O’Neal is a large woman: I believe the euphemism is Rubenesque . She’s a dual addict: an overeating nymphomaniac.

“Well, okay, so I’m at my son’s high-school basketball game, alright? He’s seventeen, a senior. The ah, the point guard or something. So they’re playing and it’s a close game, five points, around that and I’m in the stands which’re crowded but not too crowded—not a playoff game or like that.” Bette sips from the liter bottle of Pepsi she’s brought. “There’s this guy on the other team— boy I guess I should say, but who knows? What’s the legal age nowadays?”

“Eighteen.” The counselor’s name is Joey. “The legal age of adulthood is eighteen.”

“Oh. So okay, maybe legally he’s a boy, but a lot of it depends on maturity and … like, upbringing, doesn’t it? Not like I actually did anything—I mean, physically speaking. Anyway this guy, boy, whatever, he’s tall and lanky and … lithe I guess, which I know’d usually describe a girl or like a cat but this boy, he really was lithe . I’m sitting there in the stands totally consumed —can’t take my eyes off him, the way he’s running up and down the court. The gym’s got that smell you get when guys or gals or people, just any old people, find themselves in close contact. Like sweat but I don’t know, deeper than sweat. Know what I’m talking about?” A few people nod and Bette says, “So I’m staring at this boy and touching myself. Brought a coat on account of the chill and lay it across my lap. Strange but I didn’t imagine fucking, his hands on my tits, my mouth on his cock, any of that—just watching him run and jump was enough. The biggest turn-on was his youth: he was young and clean and probably disease-free, which, even though I wasn’t fucking him I still felt was, y’know, a plus . Orgasmed five times real quick, like a string of firecrackers going off.” Sip of Pepsi. “That was my week.”

“Thank you for sharing, Bette.” Joey’d winced every time Bette used the words fucking, cock, or tits . “While it’s commendable you didn’t act on your urges, you must admit such behavior is not socially acceptable.”

“Ah, lay offa her,” says Baney Jones, a sixty-three-year-old serial exposer.

“I’m not on her, Mr. Jones,” says Joey. “We’re trying to create a supportive and honest environment. That means critical appraisal of—”

“Ah, your mother wears army boots!” Baney slaps a liverspotted palm on the table. “You’re giving her the gears! Reading her the riot act!”

“It’s okay,” Bette says. “I’m a big girl, sweetheart; I can handle it.”

Baney tugs a plaid-pattern porkpie hat tight over his skull, shooting Joey a glare from beneath the brim. Joey elects to move on. “Owen, is there anything you’d like to contribute this evening?”

Early twenties with a mop of sandy-reddish hair, Owen Traylor’s a tragic case: working a summer construction crew on break from college, he was struck— impaled, is I guess the right word—with a length of rebar: it split the left side of his head behind the eye and the pressure forced a portion of Owen’s brain through the wound. Thankfully the hospital’s got a crack neurosurgeon on staff who was able to patch Owen’s skull in a grueling ten-hour procedure. He’s damn lucky but something’s still jakey in his noggin, a few mis-crossed wires because Owen’s blowing his load all the time . We’re talking fifteen, twenty times a day. Riding the bus, say, or shopping for deli meats at the supermarket and blammo—Mount Vesuvius. Poor bastard wears adult diapers but the constant convulsions have turned his abs hard as granite. Owen’s not an addict so much as a neurological anomaly but attends regular as clockwork, and if it helps him, hey, that’s peachy.

“Went on a date the other night,” he says. “Sandy, that girl in my sociology class.”

“You handed round a photo, didn’t you?” I ask. “Black hair, right? Green eyes?”

“Ah, yes,” Baney says. “Fine bosoms, as I recall. High and proud.”

“Right,” Owen goes on, “that’s her. She’s real smart and talented— she painted my portrait, did I tell you?—and, I don’t know, just, oh you could say, great . She’s got a fantastic laugh and I’m not a funny guy, not naturally, but still I’m always trying to say something to crack her up.”

Joey taps his ballpoint pen on a legal pad. “Is Sandy aware of your physical handicap?”

“It never came up.” Owen shifts uncomfortably in his orange cafeteria-style chair. “We been seeing each other for a month or so, on and off. The other night things got, well … intimate .”

Everybody leans forward perceptibly. Baney says, “ Now we’re down to brass tacks.”

“Mr. Jones,” Joey warns, “please.”

“So we’re at her place watching TV on the couch. One thing led to another and …”

“How did one thing lead to another?” Bette wants to know. “Don’t skimp, Owen. Don’t give us the ole dot-dot-dot to skip past the good bits.”

“This is a sexual recovery group,” says Joey, “not Penthouse Forum .”

“Well,” Owen says, “we kissed and then, uh, then some other stuff. But when we were, y’know, expressing our love, I found I couldn’t … it was impossible to … like, do what it is I do twenty times a day.”

“Are you saying,” Joey asks, “you had difficulty reaching orgasm?”

“The guy who loses it in elevators and movie theaters and in church, for god’s sake, this same guy can’t deliver when it counts.” Owen shakes his head. “Can you believe the irony?”

“So what?” says Bette. “Did she get off?”

“Think so.”

“So what’s the big deal?”

“I thought,” Owen says, confused, “it was important to a woman that she satisfy her man. Like, a confirmation of her skills or something.”

The fluff girl snorts. “Don’t care so long as I get mine.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Bette says.

Owen looks relieved. “So you think it’s okay?”

“Did you go down on her ungrudgingly?” I ask.

Owen nods, blushing.

“Then she’s yours for life, m’man.”

Joey claps his hands and clicks his teeth. “Moving on! We have a new member with us tonight. Please introduce yourself and tell us a little.”

The fluff girl speaks. “Hello, everyone. My name is Beatrice. I’m a sex addict.”

“Welcome, Beatrice,” we say in unison.

“Just moved to town. I grew up out East but lived all over. I’ve got reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome; basically, I’m hypersensitve to touch.” As if to prove this, she traces a finger along the tabletop and down the cool steel leg. “Feel everything at a heightened sensory level. When I get with a man I’m not looking for love or even sex … I’m after friction. Men are just … vehicles, is the medical term. Friction delivery systems.”

“I see,” says Joey. “What do you hope to accomplish here?”

“I’m hoping to get laid.”

“I like your moxie!” Baney says.

“Beatrice,” Joey says dourly, “that is not at all the ob -jec- tive .”

“Wait a minute, now, hear me out.” She holds her hands out in the manner of a policewoman halting traffic. “We’re all addicts here, aren’t we? And the nature of addiction—all addiction—is to hurt. Hurt yourself, hurt others. Am I lying?” Beatrice’s fingertips running over the weave of her jeans. “And our addiction’s different, isn’t it? Alcoholics don’t romance the bottle or apologize after drinking it; drug addicts don’t worry about knocking their needles up. Our addiction is intensely personal so we need to be responsible. Find that fine line between our needs and the existence of others.” Beatrice’s fingertips moving along the table’s gum-pebbled underside. “It’s okay for a viper to lie down with another viper—all vipers know their nature, right? Problem’s when the viper lies down with the lamb.”