Nonculture

  ”I want you to do me on the living room rug,” Darla says, “it’s really old.” 

She is slightly stumbling as she leads me through a maze of oak doorways.  She’s rambling as well, voicing her thoughts as fast as they can come to her mind.  Combined with the occasional near-trip into a vase, it makes her look adorably silly.

“Alright,” I say, stumbling a little myself and chuckling under my breath, “wherever sounds fine.”  It’s true, I do not mind.  Guilt for a rug is not a luxury I am able to focus on; my conscience is strictly short-term.

We walk through a small chamber with an old Greek looking statue in it; the wood walls are dark and polished, the hardwood beneath the plush area rug is pristine.  Darla’s family is rich, but we fuck anyway.  She likes to pretend she lives on the fringe, and I’d fallen off the edge long ago. I guess that gives her something to admire in me while giving me something to grab on to in her.  She lives with her parents in this ancient house that smells of perfume and wood oil.  I’m sure all of the furniture and wall paintings and statues are antiques, but none of this makes the place feel whole, like a home.  Instead it just feels like a museum to me.

“How many other people have fucked on that rug before my family bought it?” she continues on, using an arm along the wall to steady herself, “I want a memory on it besides opening Christmas presents or dad kicking the dog for pissing on it.”

“Of course,” I say.  Darla is on a crusade to defile a rug, and I’m in no mood to argue.

When we are done, I just lie there.  It’s been a long week; I’m back with Quartermaster for the summer, moving military people in and out of their homes.  It takes a lot out of you, all of that up and down stairs with boxes and couches.  The foreign nationals, or FN’s as they are popularly coined through military anachronism, slack off at every opportunity because they can, and because they know I’m the American kid with something to prove.  So, they slack and let me perform.

“Why you come here, do this?” they ask me in unapologetically broken English.  I don’t answer them; I just grab another table end and wait for one of them to finish a cigarette and grab the other.  They don’t need to know my reasons.

Darla cradles me, limp in her hand, and sings along to the Billie Holiday tape in the player she’d put in the middle of the living room.  She rocks back and forth when she does this, and it annoys me, but she gets me stoned enough so that I don’t mind much.  Plus, the pot and wine help relax my muscles.  Two songs later I’ve almost fallen asleep on the old rug, but I feel Darla squeezing me.  Despite my brain telling me to sleep, my cock is still young and has a mind of its own.  The blood begins to return despite my efforts to detour it.

“Can you get it up again?” She squeezes.

“Of course.”

We get off of the rug, our ashes and wine and stain of memory left on it, and walk up the winding staircase.  Every third stair or so is old and creaky, and she turns back to tell me her parents are sleeping so be quiet. 

Her room is at the top of the stairs to the right.  She raises a single finger to her lips and points to the end of the hallway with her other hand.  Be quiet, right, got it.  Inside her room is a four poster bed with billowing drapery, a full sized oval vanity mirror and several dressers, each of which is worth more than a year or two of my salary, I’ve no doubt.

“Shit, we forgot the wine downstairs,” I realize aloud.

She’s already naked in the bed, her long black hair splayed out, her legs spread.  Her arms are grabbing the posts in the headboard.  This pose, with the inviting bud between her legs, her arm muscles flexed and pulling up the skin to make her breasts perfect round orbs is something that I want to imprint on my brain, something that I want to be able to recall at any instant of any future day, but I am drunk.  There will be a hazy memory of this, nothing more.

“Leave it.  Just come here, I want it now,” she says.  Her breasts ebb at me with her breath.  She really does look beautiful; a black-maned Greek sculpture with solid white curves.  I decide to leave the wine.

Darla likes it hard enough to put the thick oak heard board into the wall, hard enough to make her bite and moan so that I have to cover her mouth, but not hard enough to actually hurt.  She likes me to pull her hair, but not too hard.  We go for a long time.  Pot usually does this, especially for the second time around.  Finally she says I need to roll off, she’s getting sore.  I haven’t come a second time, but I’m too tired to even work out an eloquent way to ask her to finish me off with her mouth.  She’s asleep inside of three minutes; I lie there staring at the ceiling unable to sleep.  The pot’s got me spinning tonight; I’m too tired, wearing myself out.  But I see no reason to stop.  I’m in a big, sterile museum with a beautiful girl I barely know, a dirty rug and an unspent payload.  That’s not an inventory list that screams happiness – I don’t know what it screams, but whatever the word or sentiment is, it is a forceful whisper that sucks the air out of my chest and lays on me like an invisible anvil.  I look at the clock – I’ll have to get up and go to work in two hours.  I’ve drunk away any conscience for one more night; another immediate goal achieved.  The ceiling continues to spin as the sun comes up, and my balls begin to ache from being full, but despite those, everything else seems empty.

I drag ass all day at work.  Hangovers and furniture moving don’t mix.  We are up and down narrow staircases with loveseats and book collections.  Nobody wants to get the box of books when it comes to moving, so I make sure to grab it every time just to show the FN’s that I’m not making light of what puts food on their table.  It gets me just enough respect for them not to leave me behind when they pull out at 6 a.m. every morning.

Around mid-day, my energy spent, I drop a boxful of a Major’s cassette tapes and they scatter down several flights of stairs – Tsshhacktsshhacktsshhack! all the way down – the cases shattering. My coworker FN’s find this amusing of course.

“You tired, Ami boy?  Look at the reech Ami boy, drunk and stink like whore!”  They’re enjoying it.  Can’t say I blame them.

“Not too tired to kick your ass,” is the best I can manage for a response, which only makes them laugh harder.  Let them have their day.  I’ll be back with my chip on my shoulder tomorrow.

The shower after work feels better than a blowjob on ecstasy.  I try to take an extra long one, but the hot water runs out about ten minutes in.  Unpaid gas bill.  Just like the phone.  Just like the rent.  I have electricity for tonight at least; lights and music and ice for the drinks are all I need for a complete evening.

With no TV to watch since the cable is also unpaid, I take a drink out to my porch.  The crickets buzz and it’s humid.  Somebody is grilling hot dogs.  A breeze tells me it’s going to rain later.  I walk back to the turntable and flip through some records, deciding on the Eight Miles High seven inch.  It is feeling like a Husker Du evening; fuzzy with a dash of pop sadness.

I plop the needle into a groove and settle back on the porch with my feet up and a rum and coke in my hand.  The breeze begins to thin out the humidity a little and the mosquitoes scatter in it like shards of exploding cassette cases; specks of malaria carriers sent to a pond and out of harm’s way.  Dusk brings out the after work joggers, dog walkers, and those with less productive pursuits – the drinkers.  I toast into the air – both to myself and everything around – to a nice, quiet evening of individual achievements, mine having already been met and ready to be enjoyed.

Several blissful drinks later, a brand new Acura pulls in front of my apartment and Darla gets out.  My instinct is to retract my toast to the evening – both quiet and individual having been stripped from my goals for it, now it is left only with the designation of “evening” and nothing more.  Darla waves as she walks up the sidewalk, her store-ripped jeans and Che Guevara t-shirt fitting perfectly on her curved frame.  Sometimes Darla wanted to be on the outside so much it made me swell with delight at her efforts, because I can see through the thin layer of carefully planned rebelliousness.  In high school, I probably would have ridiculed her; now, wiser, I find it cute.  I don’t know why, but I’ve always found girls who wished they could be bad much more endearing than actual bad girls.  Maybe because they were less of a lost cause, or maybe because I thought they might not be gone enough to try and save me.  If I wanted saving.

I fix us drinks and reset the needle on the turntable.  We sit there looking out at the trees and cobblestone.  It is quiet out there, but the stereo interrupts the quiet just enough to be heard by us on the porch.  I lean back in my chair and put my feet up again, Darla follows suit.

“Husker Du, nice,” she says, then grimaces at her first sip of the drink.  “Gaah!  Is this straight up?”

“That’s how I roll, baby.”

“It’s disgusting.”

“It’s the quickest way to drink away your conscience.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Shots would be quicker, I guess,” I sidetrack myself.

“Sometimes you’re fucking weird,” she blurts, but I don’t mind. 

We both light up smokes and listen to Bob Mould scream his guts out as the sun finally sets and the breeze dies.  It’s beautiful; purple and blue and orange in a gradient, as if the horizon were candlelit.  Thinking along that line, I set a candle on the porch table and we fight off the returning mosquitoes with our cigarettes.  A last jogger and dog walker go by, most people in the neighborhood now preparing for a meal or television as the dark has set.

“You know who we remind me of?” I ask her.

“A Norman Rockwell painting?  If they had multiple piercings in those,” she says, “I mean, look at this neighborhood, it’s ridiculous.”

“It’s the one thing I can afford – my own setting.  And, no, I wasn’t thinking Rockwell.  Have you seen Repo Man?”

“The movie?  Emilio Estevez?  Of course.  Great movie…except for Emilio Estevez.  Whatever happened to that guy, anyway?”

“I dunno – But, what we remind me of, in a way – we’re the punk couple that robs stores.  Except you’re not black.”

“Is this where I say ‘let’s go do some crimes?’”

“No, this is where I say ‘let’s get married and get a house with a white picket fence.’  Only we don’t get busted or shot in this version.  Or whatever it was that happened to them.  Fried by an alien car trunk.”

She takes a drag off of her cigarette, then says,

“If you love somebody is it possible to just fuck them?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I say, actually wondering what the answer is.

“Well, there you have it,” she says. 

Damn, she was good.

I stick with Husker Du and move on to Warehouse Songs & Stories.  Darla has gotten through her first drinks, and with a numbed mouth no longer complains about my pours.  The mosquitoes swirl around us as we sing “Charity, Chastity, Prudence and Hope!” at the top of our lungs until the candle runs out.  The neighborhood takes no notice.

Predictably, we wind up in bed.  She lies there as she did last night, her white skin reflecting moonlight, her breasts looking like sister Earths, legs spread and arms outstretched to me.

“Now,” she says.

I crawl on top of her and she locks me in with her legs.  I go slow and press flush to her.

“Oooohmm,” she says.

“Uhh,” I say.

Slow.  Quiet for the sake of quiet.  We move and sweat, but I’m doing it how I want to do it; for once soft and gentle.  Muscles tired and sore, contracting, expanding, a slow therapy that dissipates the conscience and ache.  I can smell her hair and her inviting bud’s scent at the same time; it’s a sweet summer evening and the crusades rolled into one.  Her breathing increases, I’ve got my mouth on her neck and push in further, and I know I never want to leave there; I never want to stop this delicate battle.

“I love you,” I say into her neck, then look up at her, still pushing in.

Her brow is furrowed.  “Don’t say that to me now, it ruins it.”  I feel the bud contract, and though the grip is a universe of feeling unto itself, I know its cause.  It is not invitation, it is expulsion.

I don’t say anything; guilt is not a luxury I can focus on.  Guilt is a rug you stain and leave behind.

I pick up the pace.  I grab her hair.  I go deeper; soft and gentle having run its course.

“Oaaaahaah!” she yells, and she has rejoined the delicate battle on her own terms.

I grunt also, but I’ve disassociated.  I’m in the museum of Darla, and none of my art hangs on the walls.  The crusade is over; the sweet summer evening has contracted malaria.  I figure I’ll just grab on for now and give her something to admire.

Tomorrow, I’ll be back with my chip on my shoulder.  You don’t need to know my reasons, but I guess I’ve spilled that being saved wouldn’t be so bad at all.