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You can kill a lifetime without feeling anything but skin. That's the magic of these
sexaholic chicks.
When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned
or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry,
despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very
viable option.
Monday, I stay home after work and sort through my mom's old tapes from therapy
sessions. Here are two thousand years of women on one shelf. Here's my mother's voice,
steady and deep the way it was when I was a little shit.
The bordello of the subconscious.
Bedtime stories.
Imagine a heavy weight pressing your body, settling your head and arms, deeper and
deeper into the cushions of the couch. The tape playing in headphones, remember to fall
asleep on a towel.
Here's the name Mary Todd Lincoln on one taped session.
No way. Too ugly.
See also: The Wallis Simpson session.
See also: The Martha Ray session.
Here's the three Bronte sisters. Not real women, but symbols, just their names as
empty shells you can project into, you can fill with antique stereotypes and cliches, milk-
white skin and bustles, button shoes and hoop skirts. Naked except for whalebone corsets
and crochet snoods, here are Emily and Charlotte and Anne Bronte lying around naked
and bored on horsehair settees one fetid hot afternoon in the parlor. Sex symbols. You fill
in the rest, the props and positions, the rolltop desk, the pump organ. Insert yourself as
Heathcliff or Mr. Rochester. Just put in the tape and relax.
As if we can ever imagine the past. The past, the future, life on other planets,
everything is such an extension, such a projection of life as we know it.
Me locked in my room, Denny comes and goes.
As if it's just some innocent accident, I catch myself thumbing through the Marshalls
in the phone book. She's not listed. After work some nights, I take the bus that goes past
St. Anthony's. She's never in any of the windows. Riding past, you can't guess which is
her car in the parking lot. I don't get off.
Whether I'd slash her tires or leave a love note, I don't know.
Denny comes and goes, and every day there's fewer rocks in the house. And if you
don't see somebody every day, you see them change. Me watching from an upstairs
window, Denny comes and goes pushing bigger and bigger rocks in a shopping cart, and
every day, Denny looks a little bigger inside his old plaid shirt. His face gets tan, his
chest and shoulders get big enough to spread the plaid out so it doesn't hang in folds. He's
not huge, but he's bigger, big for Denny.
Watching Denny from the window, I am a rock. I am an island.
I call down, does he need any help?
On the sidewalk, Denny looks around, his arms hugging a rock to his chest.
"Up here," I say. "Do you need me to help you?"
Denny heaves the rock into his shopping cart and shrugs. He shakes his head and
looks up at me, one hand shading his eyes. "I don't need help," he says, "but you can help
if you want."
Never mind.
What I want is to be needed.
What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will
eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual
addiction.
See also: Paige Marshall.
It's the same way a drug can be something good and something bad.
You don't eat. You don't sleep. Eating Leeza isn't really eating. Sleeping with Sarah
Bernhardt, you're not really asleep.
The magic of sexual addiction is you don't ever feel hungry or tired or bored or
lonely.
On the dining-room table, all the new cards pile up. All the checks and best wishes
from a lot of strangers who want to believe they're somebody's hero. Who think they're
needed. Some woman writes about how she's started a prayer chain for me. A spiritual
pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully Him around.
The fine line between praying and nagging.
Tuesday evening, a voice on the answering machine is asking for my permission to
move my mom up to the third floor at St. Anthony's, the floor where you go to die. What
I hear first is this isn't Dr. Marshall's voice.
Yelling back at the answering machine, I say, sure. Move the crazy bitch upstairs.
Make her comfortable, but I'm not paying for any heroic measures. Feeding tubes.
Respirators. The way I react could be nicer, but the soft way the administrator talks to
me, the hush in her voice. The way she assumes that I'm a nice person.
I tell her soft little recorded voice not to call me again until Mrs. Mancini is good and
dead.
Unless I'm scamming for money, I'd rather people hate me than feel sorry for me.
Hearing this, I'm not angry. I'm not sad. All I feel anymore is horny.
And Wednesdays mean Nico.
In the women's room, the padded fist of her pubic bone punching me in the nose,
Nico wipes and smears herself up and down my face. For two hours, Nico laces her
fingers together across the back of my head and pulls my face into her until I'm choking
down pubic hair. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]