Noah Cicero - Best Behavior

We went inside the gas station/food court.

It was a large building with a high ceiling and bad lighting. I didn't want to eat there because I knew the food was going to be expensive but I was starving. I went and got some pizza and sat down. The convict came over and sat next to me and said, “That girl is getting that guy his food and paying for it.”

“They never met before today,” I said.

“No, they never met before,” the convict said, giggling.

“The pizza was expensive.”

“Yeah, I know. I ain't got much money.”

“What you going to do now?”

“I don't know. You know I haven't had sex in four years.”

“That's a long time.”

“I know. I'm dying for it. I need to have sex. I love sex. John would have sex with me all the time. I don't feel right without sex.”

“A lot of people don't.”

“It never occurred to me how much I like sex until I was sitting in prison for a year, and I could just feel it down there rumbling, screaming for some dick.”

“Screaming for dick?”

“Sweetie, let me tell you. I would sit in that bottom bunk and just daydream for hours about dick. All I wanted was some dick. I didn't care about going to amusement parks or swimming in the ocean. I just wanted some dick, some love, some anything.”

“Prison can be hard on a person's genitals.”

“I don't know what it is. I mean, you get naked and someone fucks your pussy and it makes a fucking mess. The sheets are everywhere. Your hair gets all fucked up. You smell like sweat. You're all sticky down in your pants. But I missed it. I like to see naked men walking around my house. I like to see their hairy bodies and their penis wobble a little as they walk. I like when he's naked for me too, he's taken it all off and crawls all over me,” she said.

“I like to touch women. Sometimes I get lonely and that's all I wanna do is just touch a woman all over.”

“Oh sweetie, you're telling me. I was so lonely in prison. So scared sometimes, so worried, so stressed out. Around that third year I was convinced I was gonna die in there. I don't know what got me through. I was so lonely and all I wanted to do was see a naked man come towards me and feel his dick slide up in me.”

“That's reasonable.”

“I really want to have sex,” she said giving me a funny look.

I looked at her and thought she was crazy. She was trying to get me to have sex with her on a Greyhound bus as it passed through Pennsylvania. I was at least 15 years young than her. But I was bored and lonely and hadn't had sex in a long time and said, “I don't know if we can have sex, but I'll finger fuck you.”

She said, “You serious?”

“Yeah, why not?”

She clapped her hands and said, “Hot damn.”

Which was a bit dramatic.

We finished eating our expensive pizza and went back to the bus.

We sat next to each other. She had a funny shit-grinning look on her face. She was really happy. She had been in prison for four years and in less than a day she was breaking a law by finger fucking on a bus.

I slipped my hand in her pants.

She slipped her hand in my pants.

I pressed my fingertips to her vagina.

It was shaved. I imagined her shaving her pussy in a prison shower with a cheap plastic razor. I could see her telling some of her fellow inmates that when she got out she would get some dick and they would love her shaved pussy.

She cupped my penis, then rubbed it up and down.

Her vagina became wet. I slowly slipped my fingers in.

I had not had sex in so long that I had forgotten what a wet pussy felt like. There's something magical about a wet pussy. You can't help but think, “Her pussy is wet for me.” It instills a sense of pride and one's self-esteem can't help but rise a little, at least for an hour.

My fingers were in her pussy swirling around in her wetness.

Her hand pumped my penis. I looked down at her hand in my pants and wanted to laugh. But I decided that was impolite and laughed inside my head.

She giggled and said, “Maybe you should get off the bus with me.”

“I don't know. I have to meet friends there.”

She looked sad and said, “You don't think we can fuck?”

“It doesn't seem like it's possible, it's still daylight outside.”

She looked sad again, “Well, I'm happy you're finger fucking me.”

“It is good.”

Eventually I grew tired of finger fucking her and of her touching my penis. I just didn't care. She wasn't attractive and I didn't even know her name. She was a sad old woman and I was a sad young man. It made me depressed that we were both so sad we had to finger fuck and give hand jobs on a Greyhound bus to feel okay about life.

I took my hand out of her pants and she took her hand out of mine.

We sat together for a while.

Her head was on my shoulder and my hand was on her leg.

It was emotional but in a real pathetic way.

I went back to my seat and pretended to sleep. I wasn't good with women. I used to be a long time ago. I had confidence and a will to assert myself on others when I was in my early twenties. I would go to the bar and meet women. I would talk with women about things like music, books, and philosophy. We would get drunk and go home together. Sometimes I would date one of them. Then we would break up and I would have drunk sex with women again. But time passed and life beat me down. My brother killed himself, I never saw my parents again. I didn't have health care. I didn't have a good job. I didn't know what to do with my life. My life had no focus or clarity and wasn't very satisfying. I lost confidence in myself. Women like confidence. Women like men who have some focus in life, even poor women prefer men who want to get promoted at the beer can factory. I didn't even care about being promoted at a pizza shop. The world finds lazy people like me who want to write alone in rooms and cry to blues songs somehow an affront to the social contract, to the state of affairs of society.

The bus arrived on the border of Jersey. The woman and I both got off the bus to smoke. We didn't even say goodbye. We didn't even tell each other our names. She lit a cigarette and walked to another bus and I stood outside the bus smoking. She was gone. It was anonymous sex. Everyone on the bus was anonymous. The bus driver was paid to drive me across America and I didn't even know his name. I was in an anonymous town. And to everyone else I was anonymous. No one knew me standing there outside the bus on the border of Jersey.

I was going to be in New York soon. There were people there waiting for me. Tom White, the publisher of my first book, would be at the bus stop. Tom White was 50 years old. He was short with long hippy hair. I don't think he was a hippy. I think you had to be older for that and I don't recall him ever mentioning Janis Joplin or taking acid. He was from Bakersfield, California. He grew up in the desert. His father ran off when he was little to become a physicist. Hu Chin's father was a physicist also. I was surrounded by men with physicist fathers and my father was a meat cutter at K-mart. It was daunting knowing that they came from the penis of a physicist and I came from the penis of a meat cutter.

Tom was raised by his mother. She was a narcissistic high school teacher of English. She didn't spend quality time with little Tom. She would let him do what he wanted. Sometimes she would enter the room he was in and talk about things that did not concern Tom. Tom's mother eventually had several more kids with several more men that she did not concern herself with.

Tom White, his brother, sister and mother all lived in the same house barely communicating with each other. Tom would walk around the yard trying to find something to do but there was nothing to do. Sometimes he would sit in the summer on the brown baked grass and stare at his shoes.