High School, pt. 11.Some years back, D____ asked me to suck her toes. We were three-quarters Jewish and it was Yom Kippur. She told me to get her off with her pants on, but in subtler words. It was a powerful feeling. Since then I've harbored the fetish in secret. It’s only reared its head a couple times since. I don't seek it out in porn.
Epicurus preached: love is a false emotion; go to the bathroom with your sweet wife and watch her take a shit just as you do. Breathe in its foulness and you will not see her as so sweet. It is only the mystique that you love.
a few years back, I failed a course in metaphysics. I don't agree with Epicurus
I asked her to take off her boots, or maybe she did it on her own, to feel the grass between her toes. It was a long time ago. They were the littlest Doc Martins I'd ever seen, handed-down, worn thin and grey as Chicago winter. I needed to hold one and measure it. I lifted it and watched her blush. She'd refused socks for years and they were the rottenest things I'd ever smellt, and I loved her more for it
she was too good, not for this world or anything, just for everyone around her and thus we were all in love with her. she feigned lesbianism to keep us away, and when that didn't work she tried celibacy, hiding her kisses on the markered walls of flophouses. D____ would have hated her for her beauty, and for her restraint. she lent me the Zohar and a hundred biographies. I was always in trouble and she was always holding a book for me, perhaps the only person I've ever returned a borrowed book to. now that she is gone, she is unaware that we toast her, her mutual friends. we've tried to conjure her like a demon with our glasses, and failed every time. when she returns, the sun speeds up like our heartbeats and there is never enough time to tell her how we feel. she knows this, so she hides against the whitewashed walls that used to cage teenagers, occasionally secreting a kiss.
2. It was no surprise she'd became a dominatrix. all the nicest girls I’ve ever known had, at some point, and she knew how to handle pain better than the rest of us. she was the one who dressed his tracks and made sure his sleeves were always rolled down.
she had a wig for each day of the month and smiled when she cried. perhaps we never knew her
when she got her first tattoo, her aunt removed it with a pumice stone. when she told the story, she smiled, crying. she is the only one that hasn't changed, even jet set, half famous and half wealthy, she smiles all the same and ignores her pager for me.
3. I was always jealous of him, most men really, but especially him. I coveted his face, his face and his arms which would by now must be slathered in ink and foreign oil. I pined for her, and she dated my best friend. this was a pattern that repeated itself over and over again, except unlike the others, she was silly. Ridiculous, with all all of these beautiful, watered-down Semitic flaws He wasn’t supposed to do this to the silly ones, just the models and sluts and pieces of ass and junior rotcies. The silly ones were left for me to pine for. Even with a broken heart she said no.
4. He was made entirely out of magic and argyle. He sang robotic songs of protest and rat pack punk, caravanning his mothers minivan from one end of the earth to the other. I am sure, that under his sweaters, he had wings.
5. He never had a dog, but his brother, who would later live with me, used to run around trying to bite us while we played clunky story-adventure games on the most advanced PC 1989 had to offer. He was a mess of recessive genes and genius. He showed me my first dirty picture, a lazerprinted picture of Princess Jazmine fucking the tiger from Aladdin. His parents would never forgive me for it, cuz in return I began my carreer as a smutwriter, spreading crude horror stories throughout our schools, full of methamphetamine oral sex, demonrape, disembowelment, murder, and approximations of Kabbalism and the light of the Golden Dawn. For a few years, I was a magnet school hero. People had heard of me from as far as Kenwood and I was 60 pages into my first novel, by the time my parents were called. Then we lost touch. More I was banned from his family. His father, who drank defiantly against stereotypes and emblazoned the walls with the fetishes that found him his wife in the first place, hated me. He started studying, anyway, and our worlds would not be able to intersect. He came to me years later, asking me to help him smoke pot and it felt good to have him back.
6. she wore assless pants to Chemistry one day, forcing curved marble to fit molded plastic, begging for seduction. she was a malicious sixteen year old, the kind that drag older men to their doom. she was softcore, bottled, brown as root beer, with goateed men and rumors buzzing around her like flies. for a moment she was the empowered stripper lesbian we were all afraid of, and then it was gone. she never let anyone know she was smart. she hid her paint, her brushes, her canvas under the oversize hoodies of gangsterboyfriends sexed stupid and always smiling. she smiled too, and because we never knew why, we thought it was because she was happy. we never guessed that it was to control us.
7. he fell in love with the same girl I did, I think because she was charitable enough to take our virginity, but he was much older than I was and years later, he’s still waiting to recover. It was D____, again and always. She was the greatest story I ever told. I called her “everything I wanted to save.” Her sleeves wer already rolled, her gut was a mess of holes, she’d sworn off women with a twelve year old pregnant, lost to military school, and forever in love with her. She settled for the rest of us, first me, strapping and hairy with a big barrel for a gut and hopelessly under her spell until the day that I wasn’t. She’d sworn off men, now, and sworn off women, and far riper, and far older than her age at thirteen found the most effeminate man she could find and it was perfect. I don’t know how it ended but I know it ended. He still tells me about her at shows. He’s still hurting, it seems, and D_____’s getting married.
8. She was the only Asian girl I’ve ever seen smoke crack. We were across the street, buying bags from the projects strategically placed across the street from our school.
“How Cute.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard a dimebag called cute, but the way she was analyzing it was odd.
“I didn’t know it had crystals in it?”
“Crystals?” We thought she meant something else, not what you usually find in pot from the ghetto.
“Yeah, it’s got these cute little rocks in it.”
We looked at each other and shrugged. We decided not to tell her, and felt vaguely like bad people. Mostly though, we laughed about it.
We were lizards, stretched across a giant misplaced rock on a terrible field with highway all around us, watching the son tear across the sky. We owned it, because it was too big to move, and one of us was always there. We stole a million treasures, just to present them to one another. We wrestled with complicated thoughts and the clasps of bras, back when such things were terrifying. I miss those days when our empire stretched from Rosemont to Chinatown, when we would breathe a million shades of silver-blue smoke and drink a million tints of red-orange hot sauce, riding escalators and breaking things, shoplifting and singing, and contemplating melodrama. We made fools of ourselves, in the way that all teenagers make fools of themselves, and I miss it.
When I see these kids now, I’m full of judgment. I look at their tits and look away, refuse them the contraband I begged from strangers and hmmpf them off as obnoxious brats.
All of my friends have homes now, and sometimes I feel like a hypocrite.
I’m gonna go out to an all-ages show now, and try not to bitch.
