Hypocorism (ROUND 15)
Let's workshop this story that, troubling as it is beautiful, examines the intricate power dynamics and linguistic structures at play in a man's passionate relationship with a girl he deems too young
scent of the day: Opus VII, by Amouage
Opus VII (2013, Alberto Morillas and Pierre Negrin)—a spicy-green aromatic fragrance with a smokey darkness that treads the line between savory and repulsive (imagine, in short, a galbanum leather like Bandit, only it lines an ocean-sprayed wool hat infused with warmth from both the oily scalp of the wearer and the Fate Man spices of a humid Indian kitchen)—
opens with the pungency of body-odor cumin and various toasted foodie elements (licoricey-rooty fennel, mapley-nutty fenugreek, citrus-mint cardamom, nutty nutmeg) blended into a bitter vegetable pablum (grassy-earthy galbanum) that has taken on a rosey-metallic edge in part from aromatic pink pepper,
the mineralic brine of ambergris here (an ambroxan-centered recreation in all but the 2013 batches) not only salting the curry dish (I think, in particular, of potato-pea samosas dipped in a steel katori bowl of mint chutney) but also clarifying the humid space where this is taking place: the ocean of Honour Man (both scents sharing a peppered-wood-and-resin backbone of musky salinity, a function of the ambergris-patchouli-muscone-pink-pepper-olibanum overlap),
only here we are tucked away from the windborne open and down in the wood-paneled metal-trimmed leather kitchenette of an ocean yacht where the smoke of burning incense (ghee-fat sandalwood dipped in boot-polish cypriol, leathery-spicy agarwood dipped in juniper-pine olibanum)
intermingles with the fatty costus aroma of fingers that have been scratching unwashed scalp (scalp thick with salty sebum from greasy weeks at sea, as the addition cypriol-oud combo makes clear, and yet, perhaps because the sea-tossed mystic in question is a vegetarian, with more the mushroomy-soiley-yeasty-vegetal-herbal undertone of lanolinic goat fur than the sour-cheesy-gamey-smoky-meaty undertone of sulfurous cat fur)—
the overall result being a fatty-foodie leather fragrance that, ringing out (like Royal Tobacco and Silver Oud after it) with an inimitable uniqueness perhaps greater than the Koran, could very well end up, given its umami flair and the oceanic nostalgia it makes me feel, my favorite from the Opus line (beating out Opus VI and maybe even, although I would have to stretch given the Amber Xtreme that comes out a bit in the deep dry down, Royal Tobacco and Silver Oud),
despite (1) the fact that it is fairly linear (themes recur like waves, cumin and green bitterness resurfacing deep into the drydown) and (2) the fact that my version contains a synthetic ambergris accord (fortunately not annoying) rather than the real ambergris of the first edition (Amouage having pulled a bait and switch here just like it did with Epic Man’s oud and castoreum after the first year or two of its release).
*I am no worldbuilder. Plot and character are low on my priorities. I do not follow in the steps of Tolkien or Faulkner in that way. My priority is more philosophical and poetic—cutting to the ideas and psychology. That said, the character I have created here with this unknown girl—wow. She is so impressive to me. I keep rooting for her in my dreams. I worked all over today. But mainly I focused on the God-proof dialogue they have.
Hypocorism
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not have will destroy you.—Gospel of Thomas (Logion 70)
His school-pickup spiel, before it even got going, elicited teen eyerolls of classic daddy-daughter theater. Her teeth sucking (“Tch”) as she scanned the ceiling made him feel as if he were driving his own daughter to some ice-cream social circa 1952, a Father-Knows-Best figure unable to stop himself from rehashing the leave-room-for-Jesus dance rule into the rearview. But she was a big girl who liked to ride shotgun. “Shotgun shawtee,” she called it. And this afternoon he was baggy-eyed and shifty, not having seen her in nearly a week and brimming to the point of ooze. So the exaggerated mouth mimicry, surprise snark caught when he glanced over, nearly had him snarl “Fuck it” (fuck the brakes, fuck the transmission, fuck who sees) and clamp her bratty throat mid pantomime—neck-biting brandings of savage devotion (“Kill any nigga try to stop me fuckin’ this”) cresting, rubberless and rabid (“You wanted my fuckin’ baby, huh?”), into ear-licking whimpers of surrender (“Need you more than anything, baby girl”) riding out with whispered repetition (“more than anything”) on the dying aftershocks of pelvic paroxysm.
She could recite the lecture by heart. A trusted adult needed to be in the loop, in her corner. That was the rule: someone sex-positive and open-minded, nuanced enough to judge case by case, and yet whose blessing could not be bought—at least not in any overt way too untethered to ratiocination, too noisy in the closet. A crack-rock bribe, for instance, should not suffice for the green light. Too loudly it screamed bondage to the bollocks. Yet it would be a lie to say that such cheap grease—among other trump cards in this city of fent-patch dumpster divers—had never crossed his mind as he sat in the car, all around him a zombie horizon of bombed-out industry farmed by smartphones, awaiting the school bell.
She resented the rule. Yet she respected him for sticking to it, for disproving her quiet doubts—quiet but not silent: “Niggas out to fuck. They ain't stand on shit but they own asses. No discipline, I swear. How a bitch gonna find someone solid? I know how to say ‘no.’ I need a nigga that can say ‘no.’" In a sneakers-over-smarts world teeming with thugs and malingerers catcalling through blunt smoke on every corner and crumpling under Olde-English impulse (a Philly now shot through by smartphones valorizing, even in households otherwise sheltered, shallow minds quick to barter decency for dopamine in the stampede for likes over legacy), his tight-leashed stability—although easily clownable in the pocket-protector voice of a white man—felt safe. Even as her frustration simmered against his stubbornness, even as the waiting stretched her to the verge of saying “You made your point, nigga," she needed him to need the rule. The boundary meant he knew his own shadow.
In the swelling meantime, mutual masturbation had become their extracurricular ritual. Always in the front, in case anybody rolled up—she would squat over the flattened passenger seat, back arched against the window. The e-brake hump digging into his ribs, the armrest console into his spine—he would position his nostrils, flared for greedy memory, just right under the jasmine indoles of the brown eye’s crow-footed pucker, transfixed by the creamy clicks of swollen tension as mere child fingers (nails bitten to stubs) churned with self-mutilating insanity the residual bulges of baby chub into a cheesy slop: schlup-schlup-schluck-schlup-schlup-schluck (“Hnnnn. . . . Mmmmph”), no whisper of hymenal webwork showing itself even as her sudden Vulcan salute (self-initiated as if with cruel intentions) shifted to two-handed splay. “Wider, baby girl." He had his orders, knobby roots reaching down into the outer-dark stream from which all rivers flow.
The glimmer of mucosal marbling, bruised plum to bubblegum pink, drew him ever nearer the gamey petals, pleats whose cumin musk would make a joke of Rochas Femme (his ex-wife’s signature scent)—his nose huffing like a famished breatharian, at a hover just shy of touch, as both worked themselves with the Jolly-Rancher-colored slick of her taunting tuahs (“Tuah”) always dead-on with llama dominance (thwack) despite the distance to the audible churn on the driver's side. Her grownup gush into his gargling mouth (“Make that fuckin’ mess, big girl”) became, after her recent reprimand about him dragging his heals (“Tch! Nigga you be stallin’!”), the sole merciful contact he would allow (frustrating in its unreliability without the milking aide of that finger husbandry he hoped one day to floor her with, come-hither hooks to the tubal crown’s textured engorgement galloping faster into bladderward jabs of paternal sternness)—well, technically, the sole merciful contact aside from hugs and cheek smooches and, of course, his alarming arcs of propulsion, solar-flare arabesques shocking from day one (“Such a fuckin big girl!”), that sometimes gunked both their faces, not just his own (tongue flailing in audible exorcism under the fallout).
But a rule was a rule. No doubt she saw herself as the head of her household, which would be no lie: cooking scrambled eggs and ramen noodles; doing laundry and dishes; hauling her toddler brother to the corner store on a hiked hip with picked-out fro and buttered lips while her mother, basically catatonic, slept each day away (“Tch. That bitch stay depressed!”). And no doubt at least part of her believed she held the strings, also true: having set everything off one afternoon as he dropped off the autistic sibling he mentored as a b-balling “big brother,” petting his crotch (“I like your glasses”) with a succubus lip bite at the front door—shower-capped and wrapped in an outgrown Nemo towel—and leaving him thunderstruck as he walked back to his car (only to be, despite the flipping-twenty-eight-tails-in-a-row odds, thunderstruck yet again when, later that night while toweling up his load from the bathroom linoleum, he reflected on the fact that his reanimated scent of the day was Bortnikoff’s Coup de Foudre, whose meaning—“lightning bolt”—could only accelerate that self-mythologizing intensity for which jail posed no threat to actionable planning). Before they took it to the next level, however, that day-one condition had to be met. She needed to confide in one trusted adult whose progressivism came not at the expense of blindness to the power-dynamic concerns: a third presence (“female, motherly,” he said) whose progressivism might even extend, if only down the line, to the button-slurping variety—a full-on-family fantasy that, while vibrant in the early days of pen-and-paper strategy (“Suck that little bitch, Mamma”), had since dwindled to a tagalong mouth (free-floating like the smile of the Cheshire cat) the more his passion (the not-always-sweet suffering kind) thickened for his one and only.
It was nearly an impossible ask. He knew that. Indeed, he suspected that was precisely the point. And that it could be the point would not be out of character given his typical reasoning through transgressive territories. For example, his academic article defending the moral permissibility of bestiality, the piece that got him terminated from his professorship in the no-due-process-for-the-privileged heights of the safe-space hysteria, laid out safeguard conditions (one of which was a third-party vetting, as in the case at hand) that together set the acceptability bar too high for most real-life cases ever to clear. Even his fantasies obeyed this logic: any young girl who came onto him (usually after some rescue scene) he would deny—no matter her pussy flashing insistence or pretzel-position demands—with an electrifying sense of feel-good pride, telling her they would most likely have to wait—and that, even then, he would want her parents to know there had been mutual attraction when she was underage. Any titillation he might have found in the prospect of a downy spinner always gave way to the titillation of basking in his performative restraint and in his laying out the ethical boundaries that would mean the girl—unless she showed tremendous pluck and planning and persuasion (something not common at that age in this era)—not getting what she wanted. He got off not by touching, but by covering all his ethical bases without sacrificing his liberality. Temptation is a test of character. Remaining ethical despite the taboo was the highest eroticism.
Another part of him suspected that the permissibility condition he imposed when it came to his blunt-toking crush remained even months in, if not itself mainly a head game of self-inflicted tantalization, less about protecting her welfare than about preempting his guilt. His love having grown to the point of wanting the best for her, evident not just in the very imposition of the condition but in the advice that often conflicted with his interests (“Explore Europe,” “Go to college,” even “Don’t settle down so young”)—this suspicion, however, seemed more a function of him being an overthinker whose hypochondriacal disposition extended not just to the what-ifs of the body but to the what-ifs of the soul, a disposition for which he had the perfect outlet as an ethics professor where (in lecture and print) he deployed all types of hyperbolic thought experiments to run through the meat grinder of doubt even things we take for granted as perfectly acceptable: circumcising infants, ear-piercing toddlers, marketing junk food to kids, subjecting them to tickle torture, kissing them on the mouth even when they show resistance, indoctrinating them into religions that peddle much more psychic mutilation than just thoughts of eternal damnation. There is a high likelihood, in other words, that the suspicion of bad motives for the no-touch rule reflects less the reality of the situation than the reality of his worrywart temperament. This is the same man, after all, who in first grade checked his own Halloween candy for signs of tampering and ended up throwing out all of it, nothing in the two pillowcases surviving his pristine standards. Just as few kids in the world then did the same thing (despite the era’s razorblades-in-Snickers hysteria), few men otherwise in his shoes now—especially if they are anything like average American men (namely, in an uncritical state of self-satisfied ignorance)—would ever pause long enough to consider that their no-touch rule might not be noble.
A bigger part of him suspected—a much more reasonable suspicion, merely considering no more than deep evolution’s need to load the young with seed—that he would eventually succumb. Her tightness coupled with her beauty, her heady smell of fried tuberose coupled with her persistence (even if oblique, like her working into conversations “Been wantin a baby like forever” or just singing with that extra intensity “♩ If you like it, then you shoulda put a ring on it ♩”)—those were only part of it. Tugging harder at him was movement of her mind, charming in its speed and acuity.
“Okay Gramps!” she said one afternoon as soon as she opened the back door to toss her bag in. “You really in here bumpin’ grandma music.” He figured he would be broadening her horizons to something smarter and more empowering than the Perc-30 in the anus of her generation. But she turned up the volume and sang the lyrics, directing them his way as he drove: “♩ Long as you know / that I can have any man I want to. / Baby, that's actual and factual. / But still, I choose you, to be with me / and work on me, so [nigga] you better not flake it up! ♩”—working in those extra two “nigga” syllables in such a way to show her mastery of both rhythm and meaning. “♩ Well you want my heart, uh, / and all my time? ♩” Her stress and higher pitch on the word “time” turned T-Boz’s observation into an interrogative. “♩ Well it won't be there if you can't deal with my mind/ 'Cause a girl like me— / I won't settle for less. / I require plenty conversation with my sex! ♩”
The way she looked at him while belting out those last words made his eyebrows contort in incredulity.
“What? A bitch need her pussy ate!”
“You’re fucking unreal, I swear! Where you getting that shit from?”
“That’s what she sayin’.”
“She’s saying she doesn’t just want sex. She wants someone intelligent, someone who’ll match—.”
“Nigga, I know. But both true. She smart like me but she a girl like me: she like that tongue gettin’ in it—two ways.”
“So, on your interpretation, she isn’t saying just that she wants stimulation of the mind in addition to stimulation of the body—.
“No she is saying that, though.”
“No, I know. But you think she’s also saying—she wants plenty of licking?”
“After all that talk she like: ‘Now talk to this, nigga!’”
“Ahahaha. She wants to be orally stimulated and orally stimulated?”
“You said it, nigga—mind and pussy.”
“I’m seeing the song in a different light now. You cracked open a whole new angle. Let me guess—what’s she say? ‘If you gonna get me off, you got to love me deep’? So, if I can channel you here, you’d say it applies both ways here too. She wants someone respectful of her, true to her, all about her, and—”
“Them deep strokes.”
“Ahahaha. You make it hard for me.”
“What?”
“You know what.”
“You make it hard for me too. Tch. Why you think I always wanna be with you when we ain’t doing shit and you keep me hidden?”
Street snappiness (“Look, dumb nigga fakin’ the limp,” referring to the panhandler at the red light) and mental dexterity (“Bitch switched her shit up but she ain’t trying to hear me,” referring to her teacher shifting the meaning of “wrong” from “illegal” to “immoral” mid-sentence)—these did not come, as they often do, at the expense of wisdom and knowledge of self.
“Whoa, slamming the door and shit. Why you all flustered?”
“Let me tell you nigga. This bitch—.”
“Oh baby, you really upset.”
. . .
“Aww, baby—come give me a hug.”
“This bitch think I copied cuz I talk about ConaLee in that book you gave me.”
“You brought up Night Watch? Ahaha. I’m sorry, I—.”
“Nigga it about right after Civil War. What you think Imma do?”
“Nah, you’re good—you’re great. But why you bring her up?”
“Cuz she like me. She livin poor, mom all fucked up. She young like me, but she the only grown up bitch. Then you got these creepy niggas takin over the crib.”
“Papa—ahaha.”
“Yeah, that nigga Papa. Only thing different, I woulda poisoned that nigga!”
“Get em. Ahahaha.”
“But yeah, so this bitch think I copied my essay. No bitch, even a broke bitch be readin. I swear. White bitches—matter a fact, all these bitches—expectin too little, like we dumb.”
“George Bush.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
“Can I have another hug?”
“Of course, baby.”
“I feel better.”
“Good.” That’s what I want.”
“I wish you was my teacher.”
. . .
“So you used to teach about God and all that?”
“Yep. Back before the bullshit.”
“I would’ve liked your class. Better than this dumb—tch.”
“I’m too dry.”
“I like dry.”
“You say that, but . . . .”
“You think we woulda fucked?”
“Tempting, but no.”
“Hmm.”
. . .
. . .
“You would’ve had me jerking off before each class, though.”
“Oh, I know! No panties, front row.”
“Ahahaha. Why you so nasty, little girl?”
“I would’ve been your best student.”
“How so? Cuz you let me shoot in you mouth before class?”
“Nigga, I thought we ain’t going there!”
“I’m just messing.”
“Tch. You already know, though.”
“So why, then? Why would you be my best?”
“I be thinkin some shit. Don’t underestimate. I got thoughts.”
“Oh, the head good?”
“Nigga, what into you today? You be shuttin down my mouth but look at you!”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Tell me about these thoughts.”
“So you ready, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Okay. Hear me out.”
“Will do.”
“You ready?”
“Ahahaha! Yeah.”
“Okay so I need air, food—all that, right?”
“Yeah you do. Dollar-Menu fiend in this bitch!”
“Boy—.”
“What?”
“Tch. And I need my mom to be alive. Well, I needed her.”
“Sure.”
“Same thing true of everythin around: trees, cars, dogs—all of it.”
“Yep.”
“But can it all be leanin? I mean all this shit. How you gonna have any leaning if all of it leanin?”
“Riddling. Ahaha.”
“But you see what I mean, though. This shit hangs. That shit hangs. But it all can’t be hangin on somethin else, feel me?”
“Yep. If everything’s hanging—.”
“How the whole hang? Somethin gotta be solid. Somethin gotta hang on nothin—nothin but itself. What that is—now don’t ask a bitch that! But I do know that whatever it is, it’s always there. That’s what I think about God.—Oooooh mic drop.”
“Go pumpkin. Go pumpkin.”
“See? Best student!”
“You’re making a smart point.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re describing a dependence chain. Leibniz—that’s who I wrote my dissertation on. He says what you say: because there are dependent things (what you call “leaners,” “hangers”), there has to be something that does not depend on anything else (well, on anything else nonidentical to itself)—an ultimate independent foundation. Otherwise the whole chain collapses.”
“It couldn’t even be there in the first place.”
“Exactly.”
“I love that you get me.”
“And, well, even though you brought up your mom, what’s cool—what’s cool is that you’re arguing, like Leibniz, not in terms of going back in time but going down in terms of structural support. You can’t have turtles all the way down.”
“Turtles, nigga! What?”
“Hehe. Turtles gotta stop!”
“Leebnits sound right, though. I like him too.”
“Even if what you say is true, why call it ‘God’? Why say it’s always there? Couldn’t it have just—well, not existed?”
“None of the leaners could’ve made that happen, though. They too busy leanin! Ahaha.”
“But what if they all lean so hard, they drag it down too—like a drowning man pulling the lifeguard under?”
“Okay, Mr. Lawyer. But if the leaners kill it, that mean it was leanin on somethin else. Real solid don’t sink. Quote it!”
“So you’re saying if the leaners—.”
“If they could do that to it, then it lean on them! Ahaha. You got me trippin. Next a bitch be talkin bout turtles.”
“No, it’s sharp. And I’m just playing devil’s advocate. This foundation, though—could it have made itself not exist, though?”
“You gotta exist to do somethin. You can’t un-be before you be. I don’t—. Nigga, you got me not knowin what I’m sayin.”
“Nah, you’re good—more than good. Still—couldn’t it make itself now, or later, not exist?”
“They ain’t even all these coulds without it. So how can—?”
“I see. Yeah, you—.”
“You too smart for me, though.”
“Nah.”
. . .
. . .
“We going to the spot before you drop me? Or a nigga gonna stop being embarrassed of me and I sleep over?”
“I’ll never be embarrassed of you—ever.”
Such wisdom, which often reflected admirable optimism and hope in the face of the ugly and indifferent (“Everyone got bad stories but butterflies see the gift in each one” or even just “Delulu ain’t no solulu”), proved stomach-sinking. For one, it could invite the envy even of seasoned poets, Goethes and La Rochefoucaulds. Take her many “nigga” maxims, which she would launch off the top of her head as they drove around the city like an old couple (minus the pettiness and kill-me-already weariness).
“Saying you got shit to do—that be how niggas get out of shit to do!”
“Niggas’ll blame the white folk for they own liquor receipts!”
“Niggas stay mad the elevator smell like piss, but they ain’t takin no steps!"
“A nigga’s demons be raisin his children—let that sink in, nigga.”
The real tragedy, though, was that such wisdom could have been earned only through unbelievable hardship—hardship that, at the same time, carried a silver lining for her suitor: it brought her, like ConaLee, at the very least to the mental age of thirty, right up there with the mental age of Mary (both of them sharing the same introspective equanimity and fun-sized frame, spun to spin) when she signed herself over to Joseph and God.
The qualities of the attracting source, her body and mind, do not alone explain the magnetic effects. One factor not to be underestimated was the murmur taunting him from within: that middle age offered few second chances for snug holiness this likely to move on at any moment. All it might take for her to be gone forever was one of her classmates asking her to come over and smoke. At least that became the worry. It cropped up with unavoidable vivacity in his alone times when, especially during the demon-active witching hour, his native paranoia (from an upbringing even the earliest Alanon intervention could not have offset) overtook him and, in fact, synergized with his more-than-theoretical understanding of the mercuriality of young women—the constructive interference creating a panic wave immense enough to override all the evidence that, however much she was a creature of the hood, she was too through-thick-or-thin in loyalty to be reduced to the label “hoodrat.”
The wave rose more and more even in the sunlight of their together times. Her questions were already nearly too much for him to handle on a good day without the intrusive thoughts. “How it make you feel lookin’ up at the stars?” Her jugular-flared energy exposed his age. “Yo, what color your favorite song?” Its ravages already evident in the claustrophobic feelings of inadequacy brought on nearly two decades back by his son’s nonstop talk from the car seat, time could not be offset—aside from lurches here and there—even by the stamina boost of this little why-for-every-how stroking his hand in her lap and engorging the car with the junk-in-the-trunk aromas of black teen spirit. “What somethin’ about you—no jokes, somethin’ deep—you not tryna see?” Her overload of bushy-tailed care underscored what perhaps was his baseline weariness with life—a weariness of which this affair, for all he knew, was the equivalent of the sexual lunge at the hospice nurse from the deathbed. “Nigga for real, what you trying to be remembered for and shit?” Academia having prolonged his stay in a Neverland where everyone being an overgrown child made the hideousness of being an overgrown child stay blurry enough to ignore, her preaternatural maturity proved a threat. “So how you know, like, when a risk be worth it?” But the mirrors outside the fun-house tower were clear and the grand one she held up, amazing given her frame’s ballerina petiteness in every spot but one, blinded with satellite-telescope-grade reflection: hyperreal enough to seem surreal—a disk of colors and detail spiraling around the blackest abyss. “What’s the last thing that made you cry, really cry?”
Her love required more attention and stamina than he had to muster. Boys her age would have so much more in common. He did not know Kai Cenat, a streamer she watched. He did not know Samara Cyn, her favorite music artist. He did not smoke weed. Aside from the big issues like knowing how to shut off the water main if a leak springs up or how to change a tire or spot the signs of a failing alternator or how to spot employment scams or how to handle first-aide emergencies or how to put things into perspective during times of crisis, even his hard-earned knowledge could be a disadvantage. Everything-is-new excitement and in-this-together bonding came with learning together not to use a metal spatula on the nonstick pan, learning together how to get the earring that went down the drain without having to call a plumber, learning together that not all laundry should be washed in hot water, learning together that assembling furniture without reading the instructions first is a bad idea, learning together that you do more than getting the bathroom super clean by mixing ammonia and bleach, learning together that the tire pressure light coming on did not warrant pulling over and calling for help—or any of the rest of the things he and his ex-wife, yet to come into their fixed habits and expectations, found out the hard way as they fumbled forward into adulthood, mutual naivete leaving room for more vulnerability and less shame.
He pictured it all. He would be right there ahead of time: just a little too fast, a little too certain, a little too closed to the idea that maybe the best thing she needed was not an answer but the room to try, to fail, to learn—an equal, for example, to strategize with on what subway routes to take to make the flight on time, rather than someone who already knew to leave the house much earlier and exactly where to go to catch the JFK AirTrain. He saw himself storm in like a parent with his swollen mental Roledex. saying “That shit a damn MLM, girl!” or “You fuckin’ never throw water on no electric stove!” He could hear himself. “Baby, I know you upset but please understand that your period might be at least a small factor” or “Bet your neck pain will go away if you sleep with your arms in external rotation like this.” Even if she was not as charmingly naive as other people could be (thinking Palmolive in the dishwasher would work just as well, or that turning the fridge off overnight was a good energy-saving strategy, or that aluminum foil would help the food “heat more evenly” in the microwave, or that music always needed to be on during sex like in the movies), how could he not scoff inside (if only in the bless-her-heart way) at her idea of a proper home cooked meal: Hamburger Helper spruced up with frozen peas—his own signature dish in the first years of marriage?
Such concerns, and the vivid imagery that kicked them off (her laughing and smoking with a boy her age as they listened to music they both grew up with), took the foreground over her heartrending attempts at knowing him deeper and making their togetherness turn into something for which only a catch to bring home to mom aims—something he did not know if he could handle. His distance—palpable through the veneer of presence in his responses (“Shiiit. I just think of how long the damn light took to get here!”)—and his jealousy—palpable through the veneer of nonchalance in his questions (“So who’s that guy you were talking with?”)—did not take long for her to pick up on and try to nip in the bud. “Nigga, please don’t tell me you worried ’bout these young boys? Tch. Get out your head. You already got me!”
It was as if she had access to the privacy behind his eyes. “I know what I want. I don’t want no drama. A bitch want direction, boundaries—a smart nigga that ain’t into all that bullshit. A bitch done learnt the hard way. You listen. You ain’t just react. Shit scary out here. But I ain’t never felt safer with no nigga but you. I ain’t have to think about what I really think and what’s safe to say. You like me for me. You got a bitch vocabulary up: palimpset ([sic]). Nigga, you got me seein my room like that shit. Like who lived in this bitch before? You got a bitch finna travel. You calm me down—ain’t punch no bitch in the mouth in a minute. You tell me not to feel clowned over some dumb shit. Ain’t no other nigga out here hold me down, wanna write letters back and forth. That shit—I swear. Nah, just being with you—I know my feelings better, myself. I’m off the damn phone. The world big, true. But you the one crossed a bitch’s path. You always on my mind. You ain’t gotta worry bout no other nigga. Tch. I know how to say ‘no.’ Look at me, for real. You ain’t gotta worry where I be, who I be with. It’s all yours. You already got me.”
Her words did set his mind at ease. But the quiet those words safeguarded allowed truths to surface from unanticipated dimensions. “Mmm. I can smell that pussy baby,” he said on yet another day parked in the far corner of the woodland cemetery behind her school. He had given up the lecturing by this point, or even focusing so much on a plan of action regarding finding the appropriate third. “That shit wet for me?” The explicit understanding (especially considering the risk telling someone posed) had become just to wait until she became legal—even though, in her view, he had an unreasonably strict standard of when that was. “Oh fuck yeah it is, huh? Mmm. You can play with it, baby.” The implicit understanding, however, was that they would not hold out beyond their trip to Miami, planned for the summer vacation before her last year in her school.
“Let me see you spread it for Daddy.” His voice, as usual after to-the-gills absences, was hoarse with domineering desire. But this was the first time he claimed the title “Daddy” aloud in her presence. He could feel that it did not land well. She always liked to say, perfectly reflecting the Aristotelian distinction between a person whose authority comes from without (by appointment, by inheritance) and a person whose authority comes from within (commanding respect by his very being, bearing, merit), “No nigga can control me unless he can control me—feel me?” And yet he knew that, blazing entirely from his root chakra, that the problem was not on his end. He had said it with full throat—no stutter, not even a micro hesistancy into which only the most perceptive empaths could tune. But even though he knew he uttered the third-person “Daddy” from that inherent authority of earned command, she did not pull down her sweats and spread for his vision those lips that—with a deep sense of personal pride one might not expect given his assumed tastes—he had watched change (in what almost seemed an artistic timelapse of existentialist haunt) from downy soft to ebony kink.
A subtle sadness and tremor in her eyes jacked the meaning right into the base of his skull. Like a red bird suddenly landing before your vision on the windowsill, the meaning seemed too adventitious—indeed, too unbidden—for it to be mere projection even from the magical corners of the underworld. It was a meaning anyone could have guessed in hindsight given the violence of her self-play and her nasty mouth. A back-contorting montage erupted in high definition before his mind’s eye: her growing from inarticulate infancy to teetering toddlerhood and beyond—a montage that would have been family wholesome, bildungsroman bittersweetness coloring spelling bees and sleepovers, had not the one core constant through all the change been her serving as the Swiss-cheese sex sleeve for some older man in her home. He did not know if it was her father or just some guy with her mother. All he knew was that she stepped up the school bus looking,, in her lexicon, “ran the fuck through.”
His reaction to the vision, there might have been more selfish reasons for it. He sensed she would wreck his life, for one. It was less about authorities finding out. Her mouth was too ride-or-die, too wise beyond its years, to wreck his world with a word. It was more her cursed beauty, beauty pitiable enough to make a scholar burn his first editions: their foxed pages whose rust-colored constellations of mildew he would finger in the spine-protective v-cradle and whose musty-vanilla lignin he would sniff in a reverential trance—split screen—splurted in a maniacal laughter with Kingsford lighter fluid as if nothing more than grill charcoal for testosterone protein.
One thing was her breeding-hormone body—hard to blame on gas-station milk alone since her soul seemed meant for some voodoo sage, the kind that gave bayou kids nightmares merely by mention of her name. But the face, against that the body did not matter. It could have had one of those mini embryo-body arms—a nub, a flipper. Had the block known its Greek mythology, more than one corner thug—especially considering her predilection for getting men to fight (“Stab that fucking nigga!”)—would have called her “Helen of the hood” or “Heleniqua” by now. And he knew himself well. Making her his girl would mean, however much she tried to set him at ease, no sleep deeper than the cortisol twilight of prison. The more typical elbow-patched professor might have been different. But for him it would mean carrying a gun again—especially through monkey-business sectors where all the ook-ook-ook catcalls (nose-bone grunts that made the construction-site classics sound like Connery pillow talk) not only disrupted higher-order reflection and conversation with their sheer percussive might but could explode at random into frenzies of contagious violence if—in the “ghetto catch-22” that defies the Jane Goodall paradigm—you try to usher your partner away from the harassment in silence. That itself would be, he knew, a problem for everyone. He feared his quick trigger—his jealousy already once landing him behind bars for two nights, the first time in over ten years he failed to show for his Monday-Wednesday courses. Perhaps the inner daimon he used to have his first-year students read about was looking out for him now, knowing his artistic vocation could not flourish in the hood from which it had clawed itself free.
Whatever the reason, he called her by her first name—another first beyond their introduction. She turned, her baby cheeks—it was unclear whether they really were streaked or whether his seeing them as such was an imposition—splitting him in two. The distant seer of himself was himself, the autoscopic gaze admonishing from an inverted world. His love needed to evolve. The message traveled along the sight line. His maturity paled compared to hers. But he could not siphon some of hers to right the scales. She could not unsee, unfeel. She could not unsee, unfeel, what the montage made seem she really did see and feel. The insufficient best he could do would be to behave himself—behave, even if it entailed the stumbling steps of an impostor, like the man she needed him to be and of whom he had shown glimmers well before she was born.
That was the man who would not tell her “Suck those balls good, baby" but rather “Be the ancestor of your future happiness." That was the man who would not tell her “Spread that little asshole" but rather “The full story always entails forgiveness." That was the man who would not tell her “All the way in, Sweetheart" but rather “Go after what you care for most, because you'll get your heart broken no matter the path—even the path of avoidance. Take my word for it."
That was the man who, although wanting to promise her—as any good father does—“nothing bad will happen on my watch," knew—as any wise father does—that such a promise is impossible to keep: strangling all possibilities for disappointment was an impossibility not only for humans but even for divinities, because it would entail (both as a means and as a consequence) the very bad things in question—the ultimate one, cauterizing the soul into a vegetative state of living death, more vile than rape. That was the man who could encourage her to reclaim the wondernaut facet of lost childhood. That was the man who could tell her that the norms of treatment, the scripts given, were not the only way. That was the man who could at least promise to be with her as she wept, witness to her every broken heart—all the while with guard up, a moment-tarnishing sacrifice of the responsible adult: prepared to lift her chin up from where, in her slobbering reduction of love into desire, she needed it to go; prepared even if it meant activating the “I hate you" fury of an early sprouter not yet thirty bleeds into the mystery of matriarchal time.
“Baby—baby come here.” Tone stripped of the greasy greed that normally would attend the command, he watched himself live—not just fantasize—on the point of tears. He held her close with a kiss to the temple. “It'll be okay," he whispered. He was the one who needed to snuggle her too tight, not the other way around. “I love you, baby girl." She did not knock him out of this change with one of her phrases: “Nigga, what the fuck up with you?” She gave in. And that only solidified his resolve.
He could feel the heartbreak his head swore his heart demanded—the price of a higher love. Let her go. You have to let her go. And he knew exactly the self-lacerating temptation doing so would invite. It was the temptation, besting him too many times before, to rage against heartbreak by turning beloved into enemy, holding against her precisely what drew him in, if her fight proved insufficient to stop him from walking out of her life: “Little skeezy hoodrat—this young, doing this fuckin’ nasty shit!”
Screaming such tantrum lines into their faces before kicking them out into desolation on the other side of the peephole still stinking of pussy worked over into a cousin of burnt rubber (their knapsacks dangling in one hand, their shoes in the other), maladaptive as it is and a sign of his roots having grown in polluted soil where it is rare to find kid teeth not rotten from soda, was relatively healthy compared to other forms the temptation could take on. For this temptation was a function of (or even correlated with, if not identical to) the temptation, erotic for the displaced monkey tenant inside each of us (regardless of race or creed), to trash the place and steal everything not nailed down before being forced to move on. A good boy who rose out of the drug-addled ghetto by conducting himself with great discipline and industry and care, jumping through all the hoops whose promise of at least social and economic stability he trusted with optimistic naivete—such more sinister forms were perhaps, so he worried, likelier than ever to manifest (as a sort of revenge for being born only to be smashed by unjust suffering before obliteration) given the waning courage to find gratitude in the suffering; given the mounting weariness in which, with the career wrecked by the kangaroo-court excesses of the 2016-2022 safe-space hysteria and the interpersonal skills atrophied by the resultant isolation, there seemed so little to lose and yet, with the diminished mobility and the chronic pains of sleepless aging, so much to gain.
More than most other fruiting bodies, he could dream himself down into the mycelium network in mainlined detail. And he did so in the silence of the impact of his “Daddy,” watching his own hands erase the most important counterbalance to the age gap: the contagious optimism of childhood that had promised a man of shadows a second life.
“What happened to love, huh? Ptoo! Cry on that. Ghrrhkkhh, huck. Open that mouth. Ptkhk. Lucky I ain’t have a couple of my boys come help me run that nigglet-ass through. Ptoo. Look at me when I spit at you. Ptoo. Ooh, greasy now, huh? Ain’t sayin’ shit now. Mmm—real fuckin’ greasy. Ptoo! Claw my hand one more fucking time!” Splack! “What happened to ‘Slap me. I like it when you slap me’?” Thwk. “Thought you liked that?” Thwk. “Yeah. Uh uh uh uh. Matter a fact, mmhh—yeah give it to me. I want it all. Give it to me. Uh. Give it to me. Mmh. Told you, bitch.” Splack! “Wanna see that mouth bleed.” Splack! “That nose too.” Splack! “Oh fuck yeah.” Schlp-schlp-schlp-schlp. “Pissin’ up my car again? Bet your ass still piss the bed. How a littrle kid gonna fuckin’ be a whore?” Schlp-schlp-schlp-schlp. “My fucking God!” Schlp-schlp-schlp-schlp. “Oh, you limp now? Look at yourself: purple ass Whoopie-looking monkey.” Splack! “Fuckin’ piss all over me but ain’t saying shit? Wake the fuck up! Ptoo!” SPLACK! “Act like she ain’t been choked the fuck out before. Give me a break.” SPLACK! “You know how to get a motherfucker going, huh? Uh uh uh uh. Ghetto fucking cum dump! Get this bendy when your deadbeat dad ran this shit through? Huh?” SPLACK! “No little girl this open unless they nasty. In and out.” Prfft, fwt. “This that nasty honey.” Frt, frt, frt. “Oh we playin’ dead now? That ain't stopping shit. Hear me?” Thwk, THWK, SPLACK! “Uh uh uh uh. Bitch look at you, gorilla-eyed monkey. Wake the fuck up!” SPLACK! “What the—? Shittin’ too?! Really—really, bitch? You a real pig, huh. Look at it! Face right in there, mmh—like a dog. Uh uh uh uh uh. Act like a dog get treated like a dog. Hear me?” Thmp! “Keep playing.” Thmp! “Where your teeth? Go get them teeth!” Thmp! “Keep playing. Ain’t stopping shit. Uh uh uh uh uh. Ain’t stopping nothin’. Uh uh uh uh uh uh. Ain’t stopping nothin!” SPLACK! “Here we go. Uh-uh-uh-uh Oh fuck yeah, all up in that baby pussy.” Schlp-schlp-schlp-schlp. “All me up that nigglet cunt.” Thmp!
The positive of his literary devotion to exploring the underground darkness from which all life springs—and, in turn, to confronting and even befriending his own capacity to terrorize—was that, in his life beyond pen and paper, he was less likely to be puppeteered by the shadow. It meant he posed less of a menacing threat than all but the most pure and naive people, those too-guileless-to-be-real archetypes whose manipulable innocence to social maneuvering and petty jealousies sheltered them from the vanity and malice and ulterior motives that make humans especially dangerous among Earth’s creatures: Percival of Arthurian legend, Kimmy Schmidt of “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in Twins. The negative side to his devotion, aside from drawing career-ruinous hate (“What sicko fuck would write this shit!”) from the very people who—given their repression of the Moloch within—were the real ones to watch out for (the old anti-gay-preacher-caught-banging-all-these-methed-out-boys trope, the old small-town-family-guy-turned-Auschwitz-skull-rapist trope), was that—in his life beyond the brain—it not only made him an eggshell-walker (hypervigilent, too prone to say “Sorry,” as if in fear of waking some hulking monster), it also made him too quick to assume the worst even when doing so got in the way of his own happiness—like with the Halloween candy or like how, throughout high school and college, he would explain away all but the most autistic-friendly signs of overt flirtation (“They just want to get with my friend,” “They just want help on the paper”) or like how, in the case at hand, he figured her reaction to word meant she probably spent her childhood getting reamed out.
He might have been quicker on the uptake had he been less in his head—well, less in those parts of his head closed off, by a deep-rooted combo of social hangups and personal insecurities, to memories of all her reassurances mixing motherly aplomb with princess devotion: “Yeah nigga, I am someone’s baby—and yo ass betta know whose by now!” He might have been quicker to appreciate other interpretive possibilities had he been more open to reality beyond his assumptions and expectations, assumptions and expectations rooted in stereotypes blocking him from case-by-case judgment. “Daddy” was a rough word, yes—and rougher in his mouth, back teeth floating in white honey. But so too were those petechial throttlings in the buildup to orgasm. Even these, though, did not always provoke clawing struggle in the victim. Sometimes they correlated with displays of tongue-lolling bliss, taunting—like only a nymphet could—for a harder clamp. And even when squeals of struggle could be gagged only by getting the thumbs just right not to slip in the sweat, some of that could be chalked up to pleasurable role-play anyway.
Perhaps some fly on the dashboard—present like a Tinkerbell guardian fluttering to his ear—would have opened him to the possibility that the word was the final sign of the astral alignment whose case she—the Scorpio to his Taurus—had always shown eagerness to build (and for which he, finding it easy in his love to hold back eye-rolls, taught her the word “kismet”). Perhaps such a fairy would have smacked him upside the head, insisting (just like the college roommate who helped him see, over twenty years back, the flirtations of his would-be wife as what they were) that he pay closer attention not just to the song she put on low (“♩ When I was led to you, / I knew you were the one for me ♩”) but to the best-of-both-worlds question that broke their silence—particularly, how she voiced it: the recessive slang, the we-need-to-talk gravity.
“You ever heard of ‘DDLG’?”