A. Homes - The End of Alice

Cursing her openly, I’d slide my hand up that sleeve of khaki, whilst grabbing the flesh of her face between my teeth. Finger-fucking her, I’d bite her cheek, piercing it. I’d give her a sizable piece of my mind. I can afford it. God, they are so annoying when they believe they can think for themselves.

My yellow truck is lost. I am suspicious, thinking that perhaps my grandmother has stolen it, jealous.

“Where is my truck?”

“Who knows,” my grandmother says.

“I can’t find it.”

“That’s what happens when you drive all over town; maybe your little meter maid knows where it is.”

“I want my truck.”

She doesn’t answer.

“When’s Mama coming home?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

My yellow truck has gone to Cincinnati. When I am released, sprung from this rat trap, I’ll visit that museum and tell them the story of how my grandmother kept it hidden from me, kept it for weeks parked in the back of her closet.

Had I not been so distracted, diverted, I think by now I should have been a congressman, an inventor, or at least a novelist. If I could have contained my feeling, if I could have channeled my libido into my career — although I suppose I did that in a sense — if I could have given myself a more familiar and well-accepted career, as many wonderful men have done, if I could have guided my prick instead of having been guided by it, I could have been a leader of men, a molder of morals. Who do you think gives us missiles and fighter planes? Frigates? Certainly not some fur-trapped pussy, that much is clear — they have no interest. Cock and balls, that’s what it’s all about, everyone knows. Why don’t the candidates just go ahead and drop their shorts so we can see for ourselves what they’ve got, who’s the bigger, better man. Elect big dick, he’s calm, he’s collected, he’s the winner all around. You know it. But because we can’t see it, because we’re so gullible, the shrively dick always wins. Why? Because he fights, he overcompensates, he competes because it all means so damn much to him.

War is a circle jerk.

It pisses me off that they can have so much and I have to starve.

It’s surprising, I write back, how much we have in common.

Again, she has found them, the sweaty threesome in which her mark is buried. They are in the luncheonette, en booth. He is protected, bounded by his mascots, his sycophants, his small cadre — one with a nose so large it can hardly accommodate his even larger, thick-framed glasses; the other so rotund, front and back, that there is a gap, one or two inches of unbearably white, Crisco-soft lard, between the bottom of his T-shirt and the top of his pants. And he, in the middle, average in every way but, surrounded by such freakage, seeming to her like a demigod.

He notices nothing outside of himself, the entirety of his focus is internally directed. His oblivion may be his greatest attribute.

Thoroughly spaced.

Ten times in fifteen minutes he loses his place in the conversation. With all the frequency and regularity of breathing, he says, “Huh?” and his friends willingly fill in the blanks. Far from stupid — according to her — but forever catching up, he radiates the preoccupation of a boy for whom history holds great things.

She sits at the far end of the counter, hunched over a plate of cottage cheese and cling peaches, watching them in their booth, mesmerized by the consumption, which so far she has counted as four plates of french fries, two club sandwiches, four Cokes, and three milk shakes. When the last drops of spit/milky chocolate shake are sucked up through the straws with great fanfare and gurgle, the silence that follows is almost instantly filled with the by now trademark series of ragged bellowy belches that echo through the establishment. The boys smile and rub their stomachs, proud of their gastronomic gluttony and the resonance of the displaced gases. Upon encouragement from the owners the threesome pay their check and leave.

The tennis racket belonging to our boy remains in the booth. Shaking her head, the waitress plucks it from the corner, and before she turns around, it is snatched from her hand.

“I’ll catch him,” my girl says. She races out of the restaurant and, looking right and left, spies the three down the block, window-shopping the music store. “Hey,” she calls, “hey,” hurrying happily toward them in what is almost a childlike skip, waving the racket as though it were a flag. “Your racket, your racket.” Finally he catches on, looking at her as she extends the racket (and herself) toward him, thrusting the ball-beater back into his possession. “Oh, yeah,” he says, taking it from her with one hand and rubbing his chest with the other, his expression that of someone performing a complicated trick, a sophisticated display of coordination. And in the rubbing, he seems for a second to give his own left tit a tiny tweak. “I forgot.”

Noticing the tit through the T-shirt, she smiles and wishes to tweak it herself with her two front teeth. He notices nothing about her. To him she is an object of little interest. Too old, too ready and able to wonder aloud what his mother would say if she knew he’d left the racket behind — What’s the matter with you? Don’t you take anything seriously? You would if you had to work for it. He looks at his shoes, bracing himself for her verbal assault. Because the moment is unanticipated, because her action, her fast-forwarding of the process, has caught her unawares, she is without words. She fumbles, blushes, averts her eyes, and seems much more like a little girl, a dainty doe, than the brazen hussy we know her to be. The picture of her so unsure — so drunkenly filled with the destabilizing flush of adrenaline and whore-moans — warms my heart. And it is possible that this rickety path, this rocky start, only helped her. Had she been cooler, more calculated, she might have come off as distant, unapproachable, a bitch. But here, like this, she is, for the moment, no better, no worse, no less than he.

“Maybe we should play,” she says. “I was on the team in high school, but I’m really out of practice.”

Head hunkered down, still stupidly waiting for the strike, he glances at her, eyes rolling up and around like loose eggs.

“I’d pay you for your time. Five dollars an hour? Think about it,” she says, not at all knowing what she is doing, with no idea of what will come next, pushing forward only because she is desperate not to leave empty-handed — she must realize some profit, some tangible progress, from this encounter. Unwilling to let the moment fade, she pulls a pen from her pocket — the habit of keeping a writing utensil handy comes from college, but the point of having paper, too, has thus far escaped her. “Here’s my number,” she says, taking his limp hand and scrawling the details on the soft flesh of his palm.

“Should I give you mine?” he asks. She nods and prepares to tattoo his numbers onto her skin — even though she already knows them, having found the family name first on the mailbox at the end of the drive and then in the phone book. It’s so easy to spy when no one thinks you’re looking.

He closes his eyes as if to conjure a photographic replica of the seven digits that phone home — that ring the bell, that fetch the maid, who finds the boy and tells him that someone, somewhere, wishes to speak with him. There, on the street, she feels she can see through the boy. Through his thin white T-shirt, she begins to examine him, the occasional holes in the cotton like guiding points, reference marks. Taking a step back to sharpen her focus, she breaks him down into sections that can be reviewed, called back again and again at will. She divides him up as though there’s too much of him, as though he can’t be filed whole.