A. Homes - The End of Alice

I am stunned. This unexpected rush of fine feeling, this revelation, has come as news to me. Clearly I suffer from a kind of internal blindness — so much of my life, my feelings occur unbeknownst to me.

The letter. The letter is still in my hands. I try to read it but can’t. It appears not to be in English. I struggle with the language, a pidgin-twisted tongue — the anxiety of my awakening has crippled me.

I beg you, translate for me.

Matt bought Doc Martens. Took Matt to Tower. Wash Sq. Pk. Ate falafel, baba ganoush. Matt had an egg cream.

Matt. Matt. What is this Matt, like a door-mat, like a thing I should wipe my feet on, a thing I should walk over to get through to her?

She must be on drugs. Her language, the words she uses are brainless, convey nothing. They come with no pictures, no complement. That, or she is retarded — with pathetic eating habits, like those of some third-world villager. A poor correspondent; I have given her so much and she fails me. Nearly every time she fails me. I am close to hysterical with confusion. My breath is short. I don’t understand what she is saying except that she let the boy cajole her into being his chauffeur. She’s taken the boy and his friends into the city on some sort of medicinal (Doc Martens?) shopping spree instead of doing what she ought.

Riled. Despite my flash of fine feeling for her. This girl is a fool.

“Ink worm,” Clayton says while I furiously scrawl back the first draft of my reply. It often takes several tries before I get it right. “Ink worm.”

I continue to write. I write faster and faster and more furiously.

In the back of my head, I hear Clayton singing to me. “Inchworm. Inchworm. Measuring the marigolds. You and your arithmetic will probably go far. Inchworm.

“Ink worm,” he says again. I shake my head as if to brush him from my thoughts. “You’re getting into something you won’t be able to get out of.”

Fuck off, I think, but am too busy crafting my reply to say it.

“You’re in too deep.”

Ink worm.

He’s jealous. I’m glad. It is a test. If he were really as indifferent as he pretends to be, I’d worry. That I continue to evoke emotion is heartening after all these years. After all, jealousy is but another form of arousal, and some people will do anything to get a stiffy.

He puts his arms around me. My movement is restricted. I can no longer work the pen across the full line of the paper. I am writing in short columns — four words wide. Clayton squeezes my arms tighter.

“Stop,” he says. “Stop.” He pins me down. I cannot write anymore. He wants my comfort. I offer none.

He goes for my zipper. I allow it. Paper and pen fall to the floor. I have no will. I will always allow it — who can pass up the opportunity to be serviced, especially when service is such a rare occurrence? Clearly, Clayton is trying to get on my good side. I close my eyes, ignore him, and think about my girls, all my girls, all that has come before, will come again. I am aroused. I am hard. It is Clayton. I know it is Clayton, and yet where it counts, I think it is someone else, some exceptionally talented member of the junior committee.

The silky slipper of a mouth swallows me whole.

I pray he doesn’t talk. Not now. I am not interested in the lurid lullaby of an innocent man. We are all innocent men. Our innocence is our crime.

My pants are down. I am erect in my breezeless cell. His mouth, his most experienced organ, is upon me, and despite how he thinks of himself, Clayton is best at sucking. He is on me, indefatigably dipping up and down on my cock. And all I can think of is that he is a she, a ten-year-old frisky filly with a long brown mane that I yank to make her whinny and neigh.

I shoot. Clayton swallows my milk, a thirsty babe, a starving suckler, choking for a half-second, inhaling his enthusiasm and then drinking it down. And while I’m still pumping out empty but deep relief, he rolls me over. As I’m turning, I see his face, the stubble of his beard, and am disgusted: a man. How unlikely, how rude and raw. How could I have come to such a thing? What has happened to me? What has happened? He turns me over, I assume to take his turn, to beat and bugger and remind me of who I am. This is the price I pay for my age, my desire, my experience. I expect to be fucked, but instead there is the heart-stopping tickle of a tongue between my legs, coming at me from the back, licking the long hairs, teasing the tops of my thighs, tonguing me in places a man is rarely touched. He is kissing my ass, licking my loving piles. He parts my cheeks, my white moony mounds, and his mouth is there, tonguing my tushy hole. Too much. Too good. I am too old for something so new. I shake, rattle, tremble, and begin to fill again with blood. This has not happened in a long time, a very long time. I am flush with youth, fresh with possibility, am literally overcome — frightened and repulsed from whence it comes and where it goes. It is one thing to fuck it, to lose oneself in that way, but quite another to kiss it, to tenderly poke one’s tongue around the ruffled edges of the darkest, foulest mouth. The more interesting it is, the better it feels, the less I think of Clayton. To have a head down there, two eyes in such a place, is not the right thing. In his desperate depression he is making himself be what he thinks I want him to be — a lover.

I am an old man, set in my ways. I will kill Clayton before I let him do this again.

I squirt onto my stomach, staining myself, my belly hairs.

Wordless, with shit on his tongue, Clayton leaves.

In this late life, the genitalia hang thick, puckered, and nearly nude. The skin — brown, dark, deep with wrinkles and flappy turkey toughness — is dotted with coarse and crispy hairs, follicles of negritude that burst through the surface, further ruining it. The budding breasts that are so arresting on a twelve-year-old are suddenly one’s own, bulging out of the former flat like fatty tumors; the exposed pink dot of nip spreads out, glowing like a baboon’s red butt. Spare tire, not the graceful rounds of a Rubens or now a Balthus, mine is the Michelin man, white circles of cheap lard, Crisco — hard but soft — the Pillsbury doughboy personified. And the greatest part, our private giantess, begins to droop, to hang low; it begins to behave erratically like a sulky monkey, slow to respond, slow to begin the long climb, the rise to attention, sometimes entirely a refusenik. The internal walnut, the ring-o-prostate, clamps down demanding to piss constantly, further humiliating the tired old owner by forcing him to stand at the pissoir surrounded by boys and their hoses, their high-vol-ume water pumps, while he squirts in short, uneven streams. An article — written by a woman no less — tells us that we never learned to pee right: we press and push when we should relax, that it is not about forcing it out, but about letting go. And so we go and go and go.

That Clayton finds this attractive, something he can put himself close to, is the final straw. I have no feeling for him but the worst.

We of great seniority, awaiting our senility, the complete forgetfulness of the sensual, live with the memory of softness, of impossible tenderness — something far too subtle for our weathered fingertips to comprehend were we even to come upon it now in this deteriorated condition. Although, I wonder. I wonder if I would not feel more deeply upon the alteration of several layers of finger skin. Perhaps things could be improved upon. I think that now before I would try again, I would make certain preparations. In advance, I would boil my hands until they were puffy and pink, open to sensation. I would warm them over the fire of a stove, the flame of a Bunsen burner, the heat of a candle, a match, until they were ripe and ready. And when they were so parboiled, when they were abuzz, tingling, then and only then would I touch the girl. My hot hand cupped over her mound, my fingers prepared to play her like the best Knabe, my baby grand, I’ll tickle her ivory. I hold her under my thumb and feel the shock, the recoil of recognition, as she realizes that she is in fact being brushed by a stranger for purposes not entirely necessary. These are the touches that aren’t quite touches. There is a quiver, a waver during which time it is important that the hand does not move, ground must be held. A short breath is drawn and we are past the initial surprise. She coats herself with greasy goo. With a second finger, I part that curtain and begin my investigation in earnest.