Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

“Take this for gas, man,” says Ethan, little thicket of bills between two fingers like a stubbed-out cigar. “Get lunch or whatever. I appreciate you doing this. There’s a show at Side Bar tonight that I’d seriously die if I missed it. You ever heard of the Flower Rangers? Killer. You should check ’em out.” My God but he’s a sorry sight in daylight: crow’s-feet and gin blossoms, scabby eczemas at the hairline, neck tripled up on itself in blood-flushed rolls. He looks like he might die at the concert, or maybe on the way to the venue, or maybe right here while we’re talking if I don’t hurry up.

I take his money, tell him he’s more than welcome, that it’s my pleasure. “Have fun tonight, Ethan. Get your dick sucked for me.”

“Sure thing,” he says, though we both know he won’t.

Sungold’s in my shotgun seat, rolling us cigarettes. The second part of this favor is I have to bring her with me. Ethan was adamant. I pretended first to resist, then to relent.

Sungold isn’t her original last name, obviously — I mean historically —though it is the name that she was born with. Her father picked it out not long after he came over as a strapping young bootstrapper in the early ’80s. He saw it printed on the side of a box of tomatoes in a grocery store and thought it sounded American, Floridian, full of hope: sun and gold. It wasn’t until he had a daughter that he got sentimental, nostalgic for the homeland and patronymics. Her three older brothers are named Franklin, Reagan, and Henry Ford.

She’s telling me this while we’re driving through the void that Florida becomes outside of all city limits (and sometimes within them). I tell her she’s lucky he didn’t spot an Ovengold turkey in the deli case, or a roadside stand selling sunchokes or, worse yet, boiled peanuts. “Although boiled peanuts are pretty awesome. Holler if you see a sign. We’ll stop.”

She gets the Cajun flavor and I get original recipe, the kind that taste like hot, slippery salt. Then the sky opens up with a thunderclap, unleashes white blinding curtains of rain that at first I think we should power through, try to get on the other side of, but after we’re passed by a big rig that was invisible until the moment it boomed by us, I decide to pull over, wait it out. We taste each other’s peanuts and talk about music, specifically how much we hate Ethan’s taste in it. She says she likes hip-hop, mostly, but also Joni Mitchell and the Kinks. I like hip-hop, too, but for some reason scroll past Jay Z and Kanye to find the most esoteric thing in my arsenal, this Royal Trux album where they sound like the Rolling Stones in a blender full of heroin — one of the poetry prof’s touchstones, as if that needed to be said. The poetry prof once told me that for people who think Stephen Malkmus is Jesus, the Royal Trux are like the Old Testament. I didn’t tell her that I didn’t know — or care — who Stephen Malkmus was, and she chose to interpret my silence as contemplative pleasure (our signature form of miscommunication) so she Dropboxed me the MP3s, which got cloud-backupped to my phone the last time I updated, but I guess I’m the one who never deleted the album. I have no idea what I want Sungold to think of it, or of me for having chosen to put it on. In the rearview mirror I can see the mushroom suit getting ruined in the truck bed while we fill the cabin with American Spirit smoke and try to relate to these schedule-one ballads — if they are ballads — which come to think of it make more sense right now than they ever have before. They’re the perfect sound track to this obliterating rain.

I want to revise something I said earlier, the thing about nobody wanting to see Sungold’s tits. I want to see them. I think she wears a sports bra beneath her chambray, holding back great sloppy fat ones, and I want to take them across the face. She’s easy to be around and smart, and I like the sound of her voice, apart from whatever it is she’s talking about, though increasingly I find myself attending to the actual words she says. I hired her as a joke on Ethan, and now I feel awful about it, but also grateful to get to have her around all the time, which in turn makes me feel both better and worse. No more salacious idolatry of Melissa/Jessica — that honey trap, that photo spread. I want to fuck Sungold till she prays in her mother tongue. I want to suck my own come off the tip of her clitoris. I want to love her everywhere she stinks from and give her half of everything I steal.

I start telling all this to Sungold but somehow it comes out wrong. She gets hung up on the preface to my conversion, doesn’t like my summary judgment of Melissa/Jessica, is offended on their behalf and never mind the fact that their mere existence has made her own life more difficult in a thousand ways — though I should admit that this is a fact whose facticity she disputes. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned her clit at all.

Sungold has this idea that women are to be respected irrespective of who they are and what they look (or smell) like — that is, for no reason. She says I talk about women like they’re some exotic species of animal, as though hunt-and-capture were the only mode of interaction, as if their bodies were a personal provocation, as though their lives were an aspect of my life rather than self-contained, inviolable, requiring no justification, and lived without reference to me.

For a minute it seems like we’re finally understanding each other. I start to get excited again. A minute later this turns out to have been premature. Simply to understand a position is not to endorse it, apparently. Her disgust is palpable, material, feels as real as the rain on the windshield or the mud we discover we’re stuck in when I try to put the truck back on the road.

“What now?” I say and she looks at me in this way that says, I am babysitting a tiresome and probably retarded child . It’s the same look I give Ethan whenever he’s not looking at me.

“We push,” she says, and opens the truck door, hops out, hits the mud with a squelch.

The mushroom suit’s pulp by the time we get it to the restaurant. The manager meets us in the parking lot, unhappy. He’s got facial hair that tells you he knows how to use all the alternate heads his electric razor came with, that he’s paid for more than one Baptist girl’s abortion but still votes Republican because he expects to retire rich. He can see we’re muddy but he doesn’t offer us use of his facilities. He doesn’t even offer us to-go cups. We are obviously the worst thing that has happened to him all month.

Through the front windows we can see that here the servers’ shirts have not been cut to pornographic ribbons. They wear 501s and arch-supportive closed-toe shoes; a range of genders, age brackets, and body types are represented among their ranks. Still not a black person to be seen anywhere, but of course there are miracles and then there are miracles. As the busboys unload the carcass we can hear jazz at a civilized decibel. It’s probably a miserable place to work. I bet they notice if you steal.

“Thanks for the hospitality,” I say to the manager.

“Thanks for nothing,” he says and smacks the truck gate, as if we needed another clue that it’s time to leave.

I use the drive home to walk back the worst of what I said during my epiphany. “I’m not unteachable,” I tell Polina. “My worldview could stand some realignment, sure.”

“I’m not your teacher,” she says. “I’m your employee, your accessory to fraud, and your friend, kind of, or I was until you decided my mouth would look better with your dick in it, which by the way is the reason that me and the other waitresses are more the same than different, why we have solidarity — or ought to have it — even if they are a nasty bunch of anorexic airhead cunts.”