Adam Levin - Hot Pink

JAKE: Actually, I do feel a little bit insulted. In fact, very insulted.

BEN: That’s pretty effing ridiculous!

“We’ll come back to this exchange later,” said the therapist. “For now, while it’s still fresh in our minds, can we agree the transcription is accurate?”

I said, “I didn’t say it with an exclamation point.”

“Regardless of how you said it,” said the therapist, “that’s how it sounded. The third word you used signifies aggression. It’s important to know that—”

“Signify sniveling for Jake, then,” I said. “I think we can all agree Jake sniveled.”

A group shrug.

“That’s a very subjective analysis, Ben,” said the therapist, “and we’ll explore it later.”

I said, “It’s a context-based analysis. And that’s the only kind Skinner allows for. I just read about it in Verbal Behavior. Isn’t this a behavioral therapy group?”

“It’s a cognitive -behavioral therapy group, stress on the cognitive , and you shouldn’t be reading Skinner,” said the therapist. “Skinner’s wrong-minded.”

“Skinner’s a monster,” said one of the women. “He tried to make factories where you brought him your children and he turned your children into various types of professionals.”

“Skinner’s an ingrate,” the man next to me said. “The guy just has no respect for the subconscious. He thinks we don’t have minds. And we do have minds and our minds are like computers.”

“But really good computers,” the woman said.

“The best computers ever,” the therapist said.

“The problem,” Jake said, “is Skinner thinks thinking doesn’t matter. And that’s ugly, man. That’s truly ugly. Maybe it’s Skinner who makes you feel so angry all the time, Ben. Because, like, what happens to free will if thinking doesn’t matter? Because what’s will, you know? It’s free thinking. And, frankly, I freely think Skinner’s worldview is an insult to my humanity. For one thing, he should’ve quit making those rats salivate to buzzers, because it was cruel to do it to those animals. And he definitely should have kept his dumb ideas to himself. He’s harmful, actually.”

“You’re a genius,” I said.

The therapist wrote it down like this:

JAKE: B. F. Skinner’s philosophy of human psychology is not only disempowering, but dehumanizing.

BEN: You’re a (real effing) genius!

After the meeting, I found Tell waiting in the bus-stop shelter. She took my hand and walked us to her truck in the lot by the cancer ward.

“You missed the instructional portion of group,” I said.

She kissed me — pressed me against the front of her pickup and kissed my neck fast, once, with licked lips. Then she tugged on my belt loops and kicked at my insteps. I was thinking: It is not as dark outside as you expected, summer is coming. I was thinking: This is the first time you’ve ever been kissed first.

I had my hands in her hair, then on her arms, her hips. She squeezed the back of my neck and bit my mouth. Everything about us felt clean and susceptible. Her skin was warm — even hot — beneath my hands, but her face cooled mine like a hotel pillowcase.

Soon she pulled my stupid hair and I opened my eyes. “We’re scratching the hood,” she said. “You want to see inside? I rebuilt the engine with my uncle.”

She popped the hood and showed me some things. I don’t know what she showed me.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said. “In yours. I want to drive it.”

Tell grabbed a Johnny Cash tape from the deck in her truck and we took my car to Denny’s. She put the tape in and drove fast. The first song was “Long Black Veil.” So was the second. She asked, “Why’d you decide to buy an auto-tranny?”

I didn’t know what that meant. Then I knew, but it took a second: tranny was transmission. My car’s was automatic. She wanted to know if I could drive stick. I didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t. “You prefer a standard transmission ?” I said, with that heavy stress on the standard transmission to suggest that what had stalled my response was pleasant surprise, not incomprehension, much less calculation.

Tell said, “See, now, that’s why I like you. When you act like a Steve, it’s cause you’re being sweet and you don’t even know it — you think you’re working something. I’m gonna cut all your nappy hair off and make you famous. Do you have a little Jewish sister who looks just like you?”

“Leah,” I said.

“I bet she’s a knockout.”

“I don’t remember ‘Long Black Veil’ being this long,” I said.

“It’s my favorite.”

Tell parked us at the far end of the lot, facing the Ford dealership. Before we got out of the car, she started kissing me again. Then we reclined our seats and the tape switched sides and “Long Black Veil” started up again and ended and started up again. We listened to it one more time, then walked to the restaurant.

A few steps outside the entrance, Tell stopped. She said, “I know this’ll sound weird, but I want you to do something for me.”

“Name it.”

She said, “I want you to pick me up by the ankles and swing me face-first into the side of that dumpster.”

“Ha! Fuck that,” I said, laughing.

“Don’t curse at me,” she said. “If you think I’m too heavy, I’ll stay on my feet and you can swing me by a wrist.” At her waist she balled her hands like they were cuffed. “Pick a wrist.”

“Quit it,” I said.

She said, “I’m serious. I want you to.”

I continued to refuse and she continued to ask me. I was crouching beside her, trying to light a pair of cigarettes — it had gotten windy and my lighter was dying — when a semi-truck pulled into the lot. A tall, pale man stepped out of the cab and walked in our direction. He offered me a friendly half-nod in greeting and met Tell’s face — she was winking at him — with a closed fist on the chin. Moaning, she fell back into the wall. I dropped the lighter and went forward to attack. I don’t know how to fight. I thought I’d punch the middle of the back of his neck. To make that happen, though, I’d have had to jump higher. I missed his neck entirely, barely grazed his shoulder. He spun around and whammed me a fast one to the jaw. The unlit cigarettes popped from my lips, and I sat where I’d stood, like any clown out of Hemingway.

Pointing his finger too close to my eyes, he said, “Sometimes they like it.”

“Thank you,” Tell told him. “Get away from us now.”

He went inside the restaurant. My jaw only tingled. It hadn’t started hurting yet. I lay on my back and listened to the highway, the Doppler-shifting buzzings of passing cars. I didn’t have a thought. I could have fallen asleep. “Ben,” Tell said, and I opened my eyes. Her face was upside down over my own. Blood from her chin dripped into my hair.

“You’re bleeding,” I said. “He was wearing a ring.”

“We’re fine,” she said. “Just punched. Get up.”

She pressed her lips to my swelling jaw and led me through diesel fumes across two parking lots. It did occur to me that Tell’s offhandedness was worthy of alarm, likely indicative of something bad, something wrong , but I didn’t feel even slightly alarmed. Her nonchalance detached me from my own observations, turned me academic. It felt almost as if I were reading about her, as if the person pulling on my hand were only describing Jane Tell to me.

I was slow from getting hit and, just as I was summing words to form a question that would address the matter — one no more complicated than “What just happened?”—Tell edged us between the wall of the SuperTarget and the dollar-ride carousel next to the door where we fucked sitting up with our clothes on. That was the only time I got hit and it was the only time that fucking Tell, or fucking anyone, ever felt entirely right. What would normally have struck me as haunting seemed merely striking. Like when you first learn your body is made of cells, or your emotions chemicals. The first time you cheer for a gangster in a movie. Before you realize what you’re accepting.