Jay Fox - THE WALLS

After ordering a beer and checking out the bathroom, which featured nothing more than the consequence of a weak flush, I took a seat at the bar next to what appeared to be a harmless man. He had become something of a pariah due to a problem that he had evidently been vocalizing for some time. This became apparent rather quickly.

“I can't fuck my wife,” he told me after I ordered a beer.

How does one respond to that?

“Hey, Tommy,” the bartender began in an exhausted tone, “Don't bother the kid.”

“It's fine,” I responded in an overtly jovial way. Before I could ask about Coprolalia or the bathroom, she said,

“He's had his head shrunk, darling. Don't listen to a word a' what he says.”

“And it's not that I'm not, you know, not attracted to her, if that's what you're thinking. That would be so much easier,” he added as though the bartender did not exist, had not spoken, was something of an apparition that materialized whenever he needed another round. “Seriously. I'm not gay. It's not that,” earnestly. “It's so much deeper than that. I just can't do it.”

“Why not?” gingerly.

His face became anguished. It wasn't a harsh face. It had been aged by several years of living in the lower altitudes of the corporate ladder, but it didn't reflect anything more crushing than the repression of ambition. This is not to say that he displayed that dour expression of resignation one sees in the chronically unemployed. He was employed — he even had the tie to prove it. Due to his age, his Midwestern accent, and his presence in the neighborhood, one could even assume that he wasn't struggling to make ends meet. He just looked defeated: his body was of corporate stock — flabby from sitting at a desk all day, but not fat — his face had filled out, and his chin was about as pronounced as a French vowel. Whatever athleticism he may have possessed was by now gone, and so too was that sense of conviction that some people manage to carry with them until Time escorts them into senility or the grave.

That being said, I assumed his problem to be the result of high blood pressure or just a general revulsion to the idea of himself performing the act of coitus, sex, fucking — that series of moments to which the rest of life seems either a prologue or an epilogue.

“You know there are pills for that.” It seemed, at the time, the most rational thing to say. He stared to me with a contemptuous grin. If there is a word for both hating and feeling sorry for someone else's stupidity, then that would probably be the best way to describe this disposition. I was oblivious to this, however, and I added to the fire by adding: “You know, for…what are they calling it now? E.D.?”

“You mean B.D.D., honey: Broke Dick Disease?” the bartender called out over a round of laughs from a group of old men down the bar.

“Fuck off, Pam,” Tommy whined. “No, it's not that,” he began slowly as he turned back to me. “Ever since we had our daughter, Stephanie. I don't know. I guess I just…I just see her-her…you know….”

“Pussy?” the resurgent Pam concluded as she brought us our beers, her crooked smile like corn kernels on a Styrofoam plate. “Five bucks, babe.”

I thanked her. Tommy just stared.

“Her vagina,” he continued. “I see her vagina as special. It's beautiful — the source of life. That's where my daughter came from. She came out of there. I came out of one. A-and I feel like I'm…I don't know. I guess I feel like I'm….”

“You're what?”

“Like I'm making it dirty. Like I'm just ramming this foreign thing into her. Ramming, like a…like a…a ramrod. You know? And, and the last time I did it, the last time I did it…I don't know…it felt like I was trying to kill her with it, like I was stabbing her with this, this thing. And I can't do that to her. I love her.” The words “objectified” and “penis” came into my head.

“You love her too much to fuck her?” Pam asked incredulously. “Jesus, Tommy, every time you bitch about this shit you make less and less sense.”

“Pam, my therapist—”

“Your shrink,” she scoffed. “The more he sees that dyke bitch, the more fucked up he gets,” she said to me. “You think that's just a coinkydink? It's a fucking racket, Tom; she keeps you fucked up to stay in business.”

“Pam, she said that all women feel pain the first time, you know, they have, you know….”

“Sex?”

“Yeah. And, and not just like pain…down there,” as he pointed to his crotch, “but here, too,” as his finger approached his temple.

“That's not fucking true.” It was as though she was admonishing a child.

“So the first time was good for you?”

“I'm not going to tell you the minutia (a lot of emphasis on this word) of my first fuck, Tom. I'll just let you know that the only reason it wasn't anything special was because the loser I — for whatever reason — lost my V-card to didn't know what the fuck he was doing.” She walked away, back to the group of the old men mumbling along with the Kingsmen's “Louie, Louie.”

“Sex is violence,” he resumed. “There's nothing fucking tender about it. We invade them, dominate them. We need to dominate women; that's all the labida [ sic .] is for us — the need for power, power over another living thing. Think about it: Our beginning, our….”

“Initiation?”

“Our fucking initiation,” with vehemence, “into adulthood, manhood, is through violence. My father said I became a man when I went hunting with him for the first time. That was the first time I killed a deer. My friends said I became a man when I had sex for the first time. My uncle said I became a man after I went to war, to Grenada — Operation fucking Fury. And I killed a man there. I saw him. I saw him with his gun. I saw that he was aiming at me, that there were only two choices at that moment — me or him. I saw him, and I shot him.” He became quiet for a moment. He then began anew with a bit less passion. “That's what makes a man: violence, killing, the domination and destruction of another life. And that's the progression of a serial killer, too. Did you know that? That's the progression that we…that I followed. First I hunted, then I raped, then I murdered. We're all potential serial killers. All of us. We're evil by our very nature. We're made this fucking way.”

What maniac concocted it?

“You raped someone?”

“Yes. Just because she said she wanted to do it doesn't mean anything. It was just society making her think she had that desire. I know now that she didn't want it.”

“So you're reducing all women to the role of victim and catamite?” His eyes cross. “Are you saying that she didn't want to have sex with you, or are you saying that no woman wants to have sex?”

“The second one. Sex is intrusive and violent. It's fine for us; but for them it's painful and degrading and violent.”

“I don't think I follow you,” I said after taking down a small portion of my beer. He nearly drained his. “I don't think sex is necessarily violent. You seem to be assuming no small degree of sadomasochism to be inherent in the act.”

“I'm not assuming. I'm telling you. It's sadomast—, sadomaso—, masochistic.”

“That's absurd.”

“Why is it absurd?”

“By your reasoning, the performance of coitus is rape — if a man engages in coitus, then he commits rape. Do you agree with this?”

“Yes.”

“And you certainly agree that all cases of rape are criminal.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, so you would have no problem with this proposition: either all coitus is criminal or no coitus is criminal. Every action falls into the realm of being either criminal or non-criminal; coitus is certainly an act, right?”