Hey, Nineteen (ROUND 2)

Let’s workshop this story, which takes place mainly on the first hole of a mini-golf course in the mid-1980s, where a baby-boomer man struggles to see his Gen-X girlfriend for who she really is

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Hey, Nineteen

The first hole opened with a funhouse windmill. “What’re the rules? I don’t know what to do,” she said. The menacing clown head at the hub, brightened by outdoor paint still in the air, cackled through the corroded holes of an intercom speaker. Between hypnosis-swirling eyes and a cracked grin with jagged teeth, its nose—a single bulb—flickered arcs of red erraticism. “Just take the putter and swing,” he said, worried his words were swallowed by the chorus crescendo of Genesis: ♪“There’s too many men, too many people, making too many problems, and not much love to go around.”♪ He pointed toward the base of the windmill at what reminded him of a cartoon mousehole. “Just get it right through there.”

He chuckled at her helplessness in the beginning, taking it as a harbinger of a giggly good time. Her utterances of fawn-like bewilderment held for him the promise of an evening away from the lingering shadow. Trust issues after his indiscretion, almost two years back, still weighed upon togetherness. At least that was how he saw it. Mood-tainting reminders came easy. Mere breasts in a movie—even if entirely unaffiliated with infidelity, even if met with none of his gourmand grunts—could conjure the specter of betrayal, however much she insisted nothing was wrong (that she was just “a Pisces spacing out”). Mere bikini bottoms in music videos she liked (“If This Is It” from Huey Lewis and the News, and even the much milder “Club Tropicana” from Wham!) could provoke tension, however much—facing his need to get things out in the open (“What’s bothering you, Babe?”)—she would respond with an exasperated air: “Nothing. I’m just trying to watch the damn video!” Mere mention of the possibility that one of her girlfriends could sleep on the couch would be met with quick comebacks (“She only had one wine cooler” or “Her friend’s picking her up” or “She walked here”), however much he had already circulated his litany of reminders.

(1) The entanglement with her older sister had been much more circumstance than pursuit—indeed, lacking the bandwidth and the stability to bear the responsibility for one woman let alone two, he had opposed her staying in their already-cramped apartment (especially for what would be, knowing the older sister’s state and prospects, an indefinite period of time).

(2) It was already bad enough that his girlfriend drank a lot (which triggered things in him he thought were in the past) and so, seeing her sister sneaking Everclear in what was supposed to be her time to dry up, he could not help but fall into the childhood response to his father’s nonstop drinking and all the failed promises the man had made to quit—a response, initially of tantrum but soon enough (tantrum failing to control) of joining in on the dysfunction (perhaps like young soldiers do when they rape Vietcong villages in misplaced protest of having been sent to war); a response that gave him a feeling of power and almost sexual titillation: hiding his father’s money; putting his father’s hand in cold water while he slept; setting fire to the mattress or the upholstery of the living room rocker and then blaming it on his father falling asleep with a cigarette.

(3) His early academic career had cratered only a few months before the affair and so, with the additional burden of an abruptly-ending apartment lease, he found himself at the threshold of an uncertain future—a precarious position given his history of self-destructive behavior in the face of transition: as in the time, only five years old and citing his having to pee before they left for what would be a handoff at a Poughkeepsie police station, he drank medicine-cabinet elixirs at random (three Cheracol caps of amber codeine syrup, chased with a slug of Milk of Magnesia) after his father conveyed the news that he would have to go to a foster home for a while; or as in the time, only a few years later, he enlisted his friend to help him slash up the jeep upholstery of a man over to see his mom and then, perhaps in retrospect a cry for help, took the box cutter to his own palm (smearing blood on the rearview mirror) and then to his own cheek (face-butting blood prints into the windshield); or as in the time he stole a car from a dealership parking lot (with that same, by then, drug-broken and war-bound buddy) after spotting the keys left in the door, likely because he feared the change of going off to college; or as in the time he smashed several windows in the apartment after his wife, his penguin other half for over five years, announced she was a lesbian and needed an immediate break for her sanity.

(4) He was still nursing an infected gash from an identity-melding LSD romance with another late teen—another blonde, another student—to whom, in his fractured judgment, he had proposed despite having sworn he would never marry again; despite her toxic desire to be smacked and choked even outside of bedrooms where, for her, it could never be any other story than him molesting his single-digit neighbor (sometimes with tender whispers of “Milk that udder just a little bit faster, Sweetheart” and other times with violent threats of “I’ll slit Mommy’s throat, Cunt, if I see any blood or shit on this cock”), a little girl character that slid too easily into his single-digit daughter; despite even a weekend in jail after, having dropped on him mid-dinner ideas about moving to Spain (which she never said would be without him, but he took it that way perhaps to add a sense of injustice to his anger over the disruption), she refused to leave his apartment and things got physical and she called the cops on him—a scene he found hard not to suspect, especially given the restraining-order-violating intensity of their fucking the night he got out (complete with forced analingus and harder hits than the night of arrest), was her plan to enrich the story.  

(5) He self-identified as “warped” and “not right” due to his son now not being under the same roof as him—the condition of the divorce having been, originally, that his son would be with him most of the time, which soon shifted to less of the time (after his ex moved across the country to a city with “superior schools”).

(6) He had been struggling (before he took matters into his own hands and bought fish doxycycline) with the mood fevers of later-stage Lyme, which insurance doctors—skeptical because he had no bull’s eye rash or memory of any tick bite—refused to treat despite a positive ELISA and a childhood in the mountains of the Hudson Valley pretending he was hunting Vietcong.

(7) His cousin, the first person he would seek out in a room of all the people he ever knew, had recently died—receiving full military honors (flag-draped casket, bugled “Taps,” rifle volley, stock VA headstone) despite a heroin overdose in what had been an addiction, so he suspected, rooted in an under-the-table fight against the palsy disfigurements and joint ravages of Lyme.

(8) He was a good man at heart, as was evident—so at least he felt—in his confessing the affair to his girlfriend before even a week of guilt could pass.

Her paralysis struck him funny, a cute kind of funny. He felt that way as he walked through the proper stance, warm sentimentality swelling within. “Feet shoulder-width, relaxed grip. Hey, see this? Slight bend at the hip and knees.” He felt that way as he demonstrated the proper swing, a fluid motion that missed the target but modeled the essence. “Move your arms as one: one unit, like a pendulum,” he said just as David Byrne entered the heights of a hypnotic refrain: ♪“Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.”♪ He reiterated the point, shouting even louder in case the drone of Talking Heads had something to do with the undeniable disconnect. “It comes from the shoulders, not from the wrist.” Full of genuine naivete as to what he had yet to realize was happening, he continued to feel that way (amused affection) even as he plummeted all expectations in a high-volume christening: “None of it matters, babe. Just friggin’ whack the thing! No biggie.”

She remained stuck, rolling and rolling in place, as if capsized in the churning whitewater of a hydraulic jump. “I just wanna know the rules.” Her eyes, beyond any care of notice, darted around with edgy concern at the surrounding patrons. He suppressed the social urge, the prehuman urge baked in for self-preservation, to track wherever they flitted. They were psychosis eyes, wide and unblinking—somehow perfect for the song: “And you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful house.’” Her words, framed by fantodic pupils of dilation that settled on nothing for long, seemed more for herself than for him—a detachment, although in hindsight present from the start, undeniable though the repetition. “You want as few strokes as possible. But it ain’t no biggie,” he said. He added a casual shrug in hopes of knocking her from the recursive trap, back into the downstream current with everyone else. “Just have fun. We don’t need to keep score. You got this!”

Nothing having changed even with rock-bottom standards, eventually one of her utterances became the first of what was in his mind a concerning number of times. The windmill’s whimsical blades—asymmetrical, oversized, mismatched in shape even—blocked and revealed, blocked and revealed, the archway portal at a whirling-dervish rate too dizzying for the eye to follow just one (although by no means a blur when take altogether). “I’m so confused,” she said with stranded tonality. He swallowed hard in the brief silence of a private regathering, catching a sudden whiff of water-feature chlorine through the curtain of frying oil. He positioned his mouth into what amounted to a thin veneer of his former smile. The brownie, which she had gobbled in full with defiance he had warned would meet karma, had clearly kicked in. She took hold of the putter, held out to her multiple times already. “I don’t know what to do.”

He remained nonchalant, or tried to. But in the same child-fantasy mode of someone sneaking a booger nibble on a crammed train, he could not help but peek around for a sense of what the other patrons were making of the scene. The repetitions, ratcheting up in decibel, had taken on a growing edge of desperation, regressing toward toddler tones of paralysis that could not but set anyone’s nerves on end. Her head was getting the best of her.

His own head was a concern. Having himself taken a corner nibble of one of the many edible terrors still freezer-burning from way back with the previous girlfriend, his own head was definitely a concern. He had been on clammy standby, several levels of readiness above baseline peace, before they even arrived at Putt Putt Pandemonium. He had woven his hypervigilant way there through a downtown unexpectedly jammed with honks and sirens, struggling to ignore the anxiety about the likelihood of anxiety in the altered state to come. Second-guessing the size of the bite (especially as someone with such a resolute track record of weed dysphoria), he had clenched the wheel (like his jaw) knowing she would crank the radio up even higher—having turned it on to shut out his “Virgo talk”—so she could screech along with Huey Lewis’s low-register growl of “girl”: ♪“Girl don’t lie, just to save my feelings. / Girl don’t cry, and tell me nothing’s wrong. / Girl don’t try to make up phony reasons.”♪ It was the same song, unstoppable most dawns in his own head, whose music video she would watch—wine-cooler empties gathering around her on the couch—again and again, having recorded it over his wedding day (fragments of which still warbled through each sand-between-fingers fracture from one MTV hit to the next); having recorded it, with no ill-will she claimed, by means of scotch tape over the VHS overwrite tab he himself had broken off with welling eyes in a private ceremony the day he got back from his honeymoon.

He knew he needed to use less words. That had been a recurring issue too. Talking was his love language, not hers. So he compromised, showing instead of telling. He hit another ball and another, laughing at his purposely wayward putts in that redirecting mode of a parent dealing with a playground knee scrape. The clown, as if to highlight the disconnect, heckled through the metal speaker rusted in the burnt orange of his former university.

He tugged at the constricting collar of the t-shirt beneath his button down. His own anxiety, flourishing in the realization that he was responsible for holding more than just himself together, no doubt colored what he saw. But from what he could gather from the eyes of the women (sideways in scorn when not openly rolling) and from the eyes of the men (concerned), her behavior was given the stock interpretation. It was that damsel-in-distress signal, almost as universal and as magnetic as the one for choking. It was that catnip ping of “pick me,” the classic lure of vulnerability typical of an attention-craving blonde. It was that little-girl-lost act of “somebody help me,” which even men standing next to their girlfriends find irresistible (especially emanating from a diminutive blonde with lips painted as brightly as baboon vulva). It was that cliché I-need-someone-strong-to-lead-me ploy used for who knows how long, at least subconsciously, to draw in rescue—some bristling hero to swagger in and wrap himself around her, resolute enough to make his heartbeats at the backdoor felt as he shows the ingénue how it should be done.

Her sister had given off the same signal that first time, a mere three days into her flight from a drinking problem that—with the help of a blackeye breakup—had worsened beyond denial far enough for her theme phrase to be (even for strangers): “I’d rather be dry, but at least I’m alive.” “Ow,” she groaned, clutching her thigh, as he passed by the room—his bedroom—in which she had been secluding herself during the work-week hours that found them alone: she in there; he away in his office. He paused at the threshold. “Ow” morphed imperceptibly into “Mmh,” a moan mistakeable for pleasure. And when he stepped in to see about—offering no more than to massage—what was presumably a muscle cramp, he just knew from the cognac on her breath cutting through the dank musk of ovulation (which filled the room as only vicious masturbation could) that his mouth would find its prize pantyless under that snug tank dress she had jiggled around in whenever she did come out. It was too mistakable for prepubescent, everywhere but the ginger-blonde landing strip, to be coincidence. It had tasted—even in its bubblegum guts—too much like Wonka wallpaper not to have been fondled in frustrated wait. How could he not whisper, coming up for air from soft petals so lily white, that harsh reprimand of fatherly confession: “I knew you’d be trouble, little girl”?

Yes, his girlfriend did have that gum-snapping tang of someone whose mascara tears get her out of speeding tickets, however heavy her Cosmo breath. She did make that girls-just-wanna-have-fun squeal, that Lauper yelp, of someone whose airheaded charm prompts even the most stoic passerby to toss his jacket over a puddle. She did exude that fruity plume—vibrant peach, dewy berry—of someone who would view such belittling gestures as the pinnacle of respect. But however much she looked the part, their interpretation missed the mark. The truth was that her paralytic refrain served a self-soothing purpose. Her elder by well over a decade and, perhaps more importantly, a specialist in Meaning Management Theory (the theory that the pursuit of meaning is the primary way humans stave off the omnipresent dread of death), that was how he saw it: a mantric form of rock-rocking in a mental corner, a psychic pacing for solace.

The pattern was not unusual. For as long as he had known her she would turn acutely self-conscious under the presumably-scrutinous gaze of others, particularly when trying something—however trivial or low-stakes—for the first-time. Even without the crippling mega-dose of intestinal marijuana, there would have been issues here (all other things being equal). The awareness that people (sleeper hecklers, for all she knew) stood poised with their putters waiting for her to make her move so that they could finally make theirs—that would have made her retreat into herself, at least to his notice: unable to focus fully on his words, unable to immerse herself in the intimate experience they could be having. Compounded by his involuntary tendency to mirror the mood of his intimate partner (something he had made little progress on despite having identified the problem decades ago), her sensitivity to the possibility of judgment had threatened to torpedo public outings before. It could be the best of sober times and yet she would struggle with what rendered dining out together next to impossible if, say, the tables were too close.

Like those with shy bladders at public urinals (a perdition he knew well), she found it difficult to buy into what most people bought into: the faith in the invisible bubbles of privacy that, by some magic of unspoken agreement, cocoon each couple from one another even in cramped quarters. He sensed a parallel between them. Inability to get out of his head and surrender to the delusions crucial for organic action, inability to pause his second-guessing headiness—that is what he believes provoked his high-school jazz teacher to deliver the terminal verdict that, despite his significant physical and compositional talent, he would never join the upper echelons: the preternatural performances of the greats, so it was explained to him, demanded devolving into a goldfish (or any creature tied to the peg of the present by the smallest of leashes).

The edible still had more peak to climb. He knew so, having concocted the canna-oil behind it with none other than Columbian Gold, the very same sativa strain he insisted—against those who held that cocaine was the reference—Donald Fagen had in mind when he sang ♪“The Cuervo Gold, / the fine Colombian— / make tonight a wonderful thing.”♪ But her distress transcended the struggle to tamp down the tremors of self-consciousness with her typical strategies of white knuckling. There was more to say. There would be more to say, he knew, for any human so suddenly stripped of the normal feeling of control—so abruptly opened to the mechanical alienness at the heart of the peristaltic ripples of one’s own swallowing (drier and drier, at least in his case) and even at the heart of one’s own heartbeats (arising in utero before even a brain, itself alien, took shape to regulate them). The way she repeated—so gravely but so mechanically, so finally—“I’m confused” and “I don’t know what to do,” it was no leap to think her confusion, her not knowing what to do, came from a place of profound disquiet: a core of vulnerability more fundamental than, however foundational to, stage fright. It was hard, for him at least, not to think that, beneath the ditzy surface of distress over the nature of the mini-golf game, she trembled in distress over the grand game in which ultimately no one has asked to participate: terrified at having been thrown into this, like this—addicted to life, for who knows why, only to die (only to die after the prolonged nausea of knowing that there is no way to escape mortality, and yet that it would be equally a terror if one somehow could).

It seemed unlikely, so he was willing to admit, that what ultimately plagued her would bubble up—mid-crisis, at least—into more torturable levels of consciousness. The body has its ways. It takes care of us just as it takes care of the zebra: endorphins conjuring euphoria even as the lion, too present to save the choice hunks for last, devours its testicles and rectum. And when the nauseating ennui forces us to confront the gaze of the chasm, is it not the body that whispers diversion dreams of travel to distant lands? The body takes care of us, even if its maneuvers make us look ridiculous: closing our eyes tight against the impending doom of the lion, as if not seeing means not there. Much like the pot-smoking teen who involuntarily shrinks the grand paranoia gnawing at the core of it all into the parochial paranoia about law enforcement, it made sense that she would cling to something tangible and circumscribable enough to serve as a lifeline. Come that most penetrative terror, few will look down the sheer face into the yawning abyss of their untethered selves. They will burrow their eyes, instead, into their icepick holds, dramatizing—and even inventing, if need be—the physical precariousness of those holds as a means of ducking the metaphysical precariousness of those holds. It stood to reason, then, that she would cling, even at the cost of ruining everyone’s time (like the weed-dysphoric teen constantly casting over-the-shoulder glances and murmuring “Did you hear that?”, “Is that the cops?”)—cling to the slim reed of confusion about the immediate task; cling to the farfetched nubbin that she was simply confused about how to proceed with what everyone around her (laughing, cheering) navigated like second-nature.

“Just hit the ball and have fun, Babe,” he said with a carefreeness perceptibly strained. “What’re the rules?” Her voice had taken on a dissociated quality, as if it came from a severed head roboticized in a vat of nutrient goo. “I’m so confused.” His voice—the voice telling her what to do, again and again—must have seemed to her, he figured, as if muffled underwater. His short and wiry stature, he figured, likely did not help his struggle to break through the sea of spectators darkened in her mind.

He sought to seize her gaze, as if that would anchor her against the gnawing undertow. He wanted to shake her into seeing the situation for what it was: a stage set of garish cardboard, no more menacing than the creaking plastic skeletons of a dime-store Halloween display—not the best example given that only a few months prior he had struggled to understand her terror screams, which she voiced even when no children were around, during a “haunted hayride” not entirely divorced from the glowing signs of fast-food in the distance. He knew, however, to tread lightly. He had, after all, an academic article, still pending peer review from when everything was okay with his career, that criticized those “over-green practitioners” who took it as their gung-ho mission to tear down phobias (fear of flying or fear of spiders or whatever) without reflecting first on the value those phobias might have for the person and their family and the society at large. “We need to take a more conservative approach,” so he wrote in his concluding remarks. “Those very phobias might be load-bearing walls preventing patients from crumbling under deeper issues (past trauma or, ultimately, fear of death in the grand absurdity). So-called ‘irrational fears,’ so the practitioner must consider before narrowly trying to eradicate them, may serve a protective function by keeping more paralyzing anxieties at bay.”

At the same time, however, he sensed that, against the power of the brownie, he lacked the purchase to do much anyway. Her eyes flitted around—hypervigilant, zooming in on everyone else aside from him (shrinking perhaps in the impotence proven by time). He also knew that the psyche’s defenses against the absurd were too old and thorough, too good at filling voids, for him to do too much damage even if he did have the power to disabuse her of her convenient distraction. New distractions would likely just fill their place since, as one referee for his paper said as a point of criticism: “The psyche abhors a void. It naturally seeks to maintain equilibrium. We should not underestimate how adept it is. It will fill gaps left by removed defenses with new mechanisms.” So for one last double check before suggesting that they abandon the game and head to the concession stand or even to the car, he said, “No one’s taking it serious, Babe. It’s no biggie.”

Infant screams unanswered are eventually bound to draw the action of strangers. That primal code applied here as well. Damsel-in-distress signals could be catnip even to men arm-in-arm with their own lovers. He knew that well. And yet it is not as if humans lack agency. Restraint remained possible—yes, even while balls deep in the most manicured clutch of madness.

He knew that too. On her right, in a spork mount that allowed for the cervical aggression she panted for, her sister had cooed an incandescent darkness from the beginning: “Give me a baby, Daddy. Be with me.” Breathy pleading, as if someone begging to be executed out of their misery, contorted what little voice remained in the final stretch of their first session together. But even with two hands crushing her windpipe (on the verge of obliterating a living-squirting mirror of his falling short yet again), he overcame the bacchanalian vortex and released his right hand to jerk his juices all over her little heaving body (even as far as that beat-red face whose choke petechiae—purple spots in the thousands, clustered around her cheeks and eyes—she blamed, for her sister’s sake, on a day of bawling to the point of vomiting over how much of a burden she had become). The following morning opened with gluckiest roman prayer he had ever received: her gagging reckless in volume even after the shower flow squeaked off; her “eyes on fire,” just like in the song “Josie” by his favorite band, even in the silence after the screech of the curtain—leaving it all up to him to pull away, yet to be drained. But even then—despite the pent-up hour waiting for his girlfriend to leave and despite her sister’s more forceful hiss (“Shoot it deep in me, Daddy!”)—he managed yet again to resist that procreative urge of destruction, smack-smacking (almost punching) her face as a consolation prize her sighing expression revealed to be third-rate at best. He managed to resist, the defiant “No!” of some Grecian daimon exploding out of the inner black, even during the third and last session where, barely breaking free in the final strokes (their violence heightened by the seemingly purposeful ambiguity of her phrase “Fuck that bitch!”), she tried to hold him in place by the balls with her bright talons coupled with a snarling stare of “Don’t you fucking dare pull out this time!”—the same two daggers that glowed like a gorgon behind her sister’s shoulder as he threw more confusion into the mix, the mix of not knowing where he would live or where he would work or where his heart was, by tattling on them not even twenty-four hours later.

The catnip had proved too potent, however. Flicking their cigarettes in theatrical unison, two men—eager to prove their masculine sensitivity—stepped in like bouncers to show her what to do. They had to have witnessed his own fraught attempts to explain, to show, to comfort, to reassure. And yet in their barging approach they sneered at him with sidelong glances that seemed to say, as if he had been refusing to help—indeed, chuckling at—a paraplegic in frantic struggle to wheel up an icy ramp out of nonetheless than a hailstorm, “How could you be so heartless?!”

Volatile energy coursed through his wired frame. Various psychological studies from the previous decade showed that neurotransmitters in the retina reliably trigger the release of tranquilizing hormones when stimulated by Baker-Miller pink: a shade more widely known as “Drunk-Tank Pink” or “Pepto-Bismol Pink” or “Barbie Pink” or “Bubblegum Pink.” He knew the research. But neither her spaghetti-strap dress nor her crossbody purse dampened his hostile and self-mutilating impulses by any noticeable degree. He could practically hear their lewd thoughts. These self-appointed saviors spoke to her as if he were no more significant than the putter they had commandeered from him, their words dense with the mansplaining expected by the nightclub scent piercing through the menthol smoke of their cigarettes: bergamot, over black pepper, over animalic musk, over leather purse—evoking, altogether, unprotected Arabic sex in a brand new luxury car baked by the sun of Dubai.

The one in minimal shorts of electric blue and a polo of neon pink spoke first. “This, Sweetheart, is a golf ball. And this?” He paused, as if revealing the secrets of the universe: “A putter.” Then the other spoke, his shorts—bright yellow, stark against a black polo—even more minimal. “Both hands, Sweetheart. Yep, like that,” he said with a sense of revelation. “Nah, don’t feel bad. Never feel bad. Girls are allowed to struggle.”

What did they say that he had failed to say? Nothing. And were not their words offensive, so obviously condescending for an intellect like hers (one of his better students over the years, however much he struggled to get her to own—to integrate—her inner depth)? Yet they had been heard. Her nodding responsiveness, the settling of her eyes and the relaxation of her shoulders, made it clear that they had been heard.

Had the situation not been so dreadfully dismal and degrading, he could not have resisted laughing. Various other men who had hung back, slicing at his inadequacy merely with distant glances clear as their exhaled smoke, were emboldened to chime in for their small share of credit on the rescue mission. “Just gotta try getting it in the hole—few hits as possible.” All the witnesses had clearly branded this a crisis requiring the decisive action of proper men. “You got this,” they said in one grand indictment.

The collective reassurance corralled her fractured attention. To their cheers—cheers that seemed to kick up a perineal (almost fecal) undertone in their scent, cheers it was hard not to think were energized at least in part by a chimpish desire to see him flounder—she hit the ball with a bubbly laugh. “Like that?” The question floated (nudged to them by eyes never at him), her voice airier than ever.

And yet they had been wrong. He felt it in his marrow. They had been wrong about what she really needed, about what was really going on. How could that be? If they were so blind to her true struggle (diagnosing her situation by offensive tropes), how could the breakthrough be explained? It was a puzzle, but only for his emotions.

His theory stood throbbing with confidence. Their intrusion underscored the seriousness of her plight. To take the center stage of another couple’s private bubble, completely disregarding common decorum—how could that fail to carry a strong whiff of martial-law emergency? We are social creatures. Others displaying things-really-are-serious behavior carries a special weight. The communally-nudged awareness of the gravity meant a jarring jolt of adrenaline. The jolt numbed the panic. It directed the all-over-the-place mind to an essential focal point, like the body directs blood to the core in freezing water. The body protects itself. It endows us with energy to hold on longer and run faster, to dig into keep-it-together reserves we might have doubted we had, come dire straits.

That was what happened here. Like a police siren snapping a drunk driver back into his lane, their blaring voices knocked her out of her rut by sheer force of bearing witness. A pawing grizzly right outside the nylon, a camping-stove explosion threatening to burn down all shelter from frostbite gusts—what better antidote even for a tent-bound mountaineer’s ennui-forced despair over the seeming indifference or lack of ultimate meaning of the cosmos? Such moments of crisis bring into sharp relief the vitality of the present, sidelining the head-case cascade of why questions with the immediacy of survival.

That at least was his idea, as he replayed the night with the full cocktail of emotions in the quiet of bed—chest still tight after having been brought to the brink of cocked-pistol DEFCON. Seeing her rebound so drastically, he had stormed off to the car in his squeaky loafers. Some part of him knew, unbuttoning his navy-blue linen, that he had reached his limit—indeed, that he would grab the knife in the glove compartment if she did not follow. He half-hoped that she would not follow, that he held no ground in her eyes. The pain-and-dread eradicating disindividuation of Dionysus beckoned, just like it did the first moment he had sucked her sister’s asshole and just like it did when he blew their cover. Its temptation was almost too much even though he knew hell would be awaiting him once constricted back into himself.

But she did follow. As he leaned against the car (calmed by the cigarette), he watched her descend the outdoor stairs. She stepped carefully in the heels he had warned against, holding the metal rail and looking down the whole time—mistakeable for her sister. The glowing action was far away up the hill, but the synthesizer melody of “Blue Monday” rang through a parking-lot speaker. At the bottom she held her arms out in a gesture of “why?,” her pink dress hiked up too high. That questioning gesture, as she clicked across the parking lot in the twilight, lost any edge of confrontation by the time she reached him. An eyelash strip dangling, she said “Please don’t leave me like that” and put her head on his chest. He breathed in the heavy strawberry nectar, as the New Order lyrics somehow tightly trussed the moment: ♪“How does it feel / to treat me like you do— / when you've laid your hands upon me / and told me who you are?”♪

His words spilled out in a dirty-yellow torrent as she fumbled with her lashes. His voice had the air of a lifeline thrown across a growing chasm as she sighed in frustration into the visor mirror. He chronicled the signals she had been giving out on the green and how uncomfortable he had been made to feel and even how a fault-line fissure had been on the brink of opening to swallow much too much. Her engagement seemed distant. The haze of the weed, he figured, blunted the impact of his points and made it difficult for her to keep the thread. “Really?” she said, distanced from emotion and not quite at the human moment. He continued, nevertheless, speaking out the maelstrom inside his skull, looking over briefly at one point to find that she had begun touching up her lipstick even though their destination—however circuitous he had been making the path—was home.

She remained quiet, her thoughts strafing some space beyond his reach—a space deeper, so the conviction had long dug in his mind, than most would have gathered from her looks. He tried to make it clear, without delving into details, that the side of himself clinging to restraint and peace and order, the side that had him mutter his go-to orgasm phrase in snake hisses beyond easy recognition, had nearly collapsed again into the side longing for primal chaos, the side that gave the phrase its content: “Yesss, yess—just like Sissy.” He had been close to returning, in other words, to whatever identity had him, later that night after the second session, squeeze the throat of her sister (sudden enough for her Walkman to drop to the kitchen floor, tight enough for surprise sounds of retching) and whisper into her ear an insane directive he could not believe had come from his mouth: “Twenty minutes, you bring that pussy to the bedroom”—a directive that went unfollowed (luckily, because what would they all say to one another the next day?) as he fucked his girlfriend at the perfect angle in wait for her own blood to come in and suckle like a greedy infant that taboo button just above the creamy piston, as if closing a circuit none of them thought to think had been leaking vital fluid.

She flipped the visor back up, her gaze adrift somewhere—deep, he surmised—beyond the streaks of passing lights. He sought to coax something out of her by clenching the steering wheel like his teeth, hands wringing the leather forcibly enough to groan. The mauling twists conjured a milky neck into the spotlight of his mental theater. He searched, albeit through fleeting peripheral glances, for condemnation or understanding—something definitive—in her eyes, but found nothing but an inscrutable curtain against the muted hum of the engine.

Raindrops began to patter against the windshield. “Everything’s okay,” she said at last. He sensed, although lacking any tangible evidence beyond his skin, she was about to reach for the radio. “I’m pretty high, though. Maybe it would be good if we got some of my wine coolers?” Her tone, a mix of light effervescence and plea, suggested she had returned at least to base camp. “Can we stop and get some, the green ones? Pleeeeaase?”

“But I’m the DJ tonight. Got it?”

“Great! Dad music: limp dicks on one of those fancy boats.”

“A yacht.”

“No one can dance to it.”

“So now you’re ready to banter.”

“Pisces don’t do big words.”

He shook his head, grinning to himself. “I see through the airhead act, the whole party-party-party ‘I’m bored’ ditzy thing.”

She fished out a stick of Juicy Fruit from her purse. He could almost feel her need to reach for the dial.

“And you’re too smart for that poppy stuff. Who can take it all the damn time like that? Who can live on fast food? That can’t be the chief source of emotional and intellectual calories!”

“I’m getting a migraine,” she said, slipping the gum into her mouth.

“Push aside the lack of virtuosity in the instrumentation, the lack of chord progressions—all that. Where’s the wordplay, the sophisticated irony, the complexity, the depth, the black humor, the subversive edge? There’s a difference between lyrics that are open-ended due to thought-out design and lyrics that are open-ended due to laziness and lack of skill.”

She snapped her gum. “Let’s just have a good time,” she said with a sigh.

He shook his head again, still grinning to himself. “Steely Dan, though—.”

“Here we go with this guy.”

“Put the jokes aside. I’ll say it again. It might be ‘Virgo’ of me, but I will. You’d get so much from them—you’d find so much resonance if you just sat and gave them a chance: Fagen’s one-of-a-kind vocals; Becker’s sophisticated guitar lines. Jeez. You only see dryness. But that’s just the surface. Don’t get me wrong, it can get real heady, But there’s this irreverent passion too. Like that song where Fagen’s mocking John Lennon as just another rich guy lip-smacking about how lovely the world would be without possessions. And what about ‘Deacon Blues’? ♪‘And die behind the wheel’♪—that one. The damn guy’s got suicide plans because he can’t shake the idea of himself as a loser. Tons of emotion there. And under it all there’s this tongue-in-cheek humor. They’re named after a damn steam-powered dildo!”

He was going to ask if she had made any progress on the Burroughs book he had suggested she read, the one where the strap on dildo appears. But he thought better of it. She had been resistant—“I don’t understand a word of this”—and Psychology 101 made it clear that forcing people to eat greens often backfires.

“Your paper—that thing was the most sophisticated in the class: graduate level. You understand, deeper than most, how easy it is for people to project their own outlooks or worries or whatever onto each other, especially after shared trauma. You understand how easy it is for people to support blatant projections with blatant confirmation bias.”

“Again with the paper! You gave me the topic. You practically wrote the thing!”

“Don’t miss my point here. You understand self-delusion. You understand how common it is to deflect one’s own struggles. Steely Dan is all about the mind-games we play on ourselves. Self-delusion: that’s a central theme in their music. That’s the point.”

He felt his final words landed with more impact than usual. So he restrained himself from continuing, letting the music of silence work its rhetorical magic.

“So we’re going for the coolers?”

“Yes. Yes, we’re going. I’m low on smokes too. I just got to figure out where the hell we are.—And you know,” so he just had to add, “all these drum-machine songs you like—well, Steely Dan were some of the first to use drum machines because real drummers drift. They wanted precision. Just don’t mistake precision, meticulous care, for soullessness.”

He pressed the rightward-triangle button on the cassette deck, which had been stopped on side one of Gaucho.

♪. . . me along when you slide on down.

Hey, Nineteen

that's ’Retha Franklin.

She don’t remember the Queen of Soul.

It’s hard times befallen

the sole survivors.

She thinks I’m crazy

but I’m just growin’ old.

Hey, Nineteen.

No, we got nothin’ in common.

No, we can’t dance together.

No, we can’t talk at all.

Please take me along when you slide on down.♪

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