Hypocorism (ROUND 2)
Let's workshop this narrative that, troubling as it is beautiful, examines the intricate power dynamics and linguistic structures at play within a man's passionate relationship with a young girl.
scent of the day: Nose Rest Day
Hypocorism
His school-pickup spiel once again elicited, before it even got going, tween eyerolls of classic daughter-daddy theater, as if he were escorting her to some ice-cream social circa 1952 and rehashing for the umpteenth time through the rearview the one-arm-length rule. But the unexpected mouth mimicry this time nearly had him say “fuck it” and clamp her bratty throat mid pantomime—neck-biting brandings of breath-heavy blood oaths (“Kill any nigga try to stop me fuckin’ this”) cresting, in the rubberless finish of fanged rabidity (“You wanted my fuckin’ baby, huh?”), into ear-tonguing declarations of surrender (“Daddy needs you more than anything, baby girl”) riding out on the melting echoes of pelvic-floor pulsation.
She could recite the lecture by heart. A trusted adult needed to know about their relationship. That was the rule—someone open about sexual politics, of course, and yet whose sanction could not be bribed, at least not in any red-flag way too removed from ratiocination (such as with a cheap grease of “Here’s some crack”). However much she resented the rule, she respected him for sticking to it and proving her secret doubts wrong. In a sneakers-over-smarts world teeming with undisciplined thugs and malingerers and addicts catcalling on every corner and crumpling under Old-English impulse (a Philly shot through by smartphone depictions of shallows quick to barter decency for dopamine in the chase for likes over legacy), his tight-leashed stability—although easily mockable in the nerdy-square voice of a white man—felt safe.
In the swelling meantime, mutual masturbation had become their after-school ritual. She would squat over the flattened passenger seat, back arched against the window, while he positioned himself in such a way--the e-brake hump dug into his back—to get his mouth right under the macaroni-noised tension of child fingers circling with cruel insanity through the fattest lips, no shred of hymenal webwork even as the broadest Vulcan salute shifted to two-handed splay (“Wider for me, Sweetheart"). But before anything more than his nose went to those cumin pleats that would make a joke of vintage Mitsouko, huffing (at a hover just shy of touch) like a famished breatharian grazing in on gamey folds of roast beef weighty on the delicatessen scale (a musky study in mucosal marbling, from bruised plum to bubblegum pink) while both worked themselves in tandem with the Jolly-Rancher-colored slick of her taunting tuahs (“tuah") always dead-on despite the distance to the driver's side churn (her grownup gush over his lips and tongue, the sole mercy contact he eventually permitted in an attempt to spice up what became a rut olfactible enough to have her say in that ghetto-mother tone she used when reprimanding siblings “Tch! Nigga you be stallin’”)—yes, before they took it to the next level, however mature she thought herself (cooking scrambled eggs and ramen noodles, doing laundry and dishes, hauling her toddler brother on a hiked hip with picked-out fro and buttered lips while her never-seen mother slept each day away) or however much she believed she held the strings (having set everything off one afternoon, although in full attunement to his frequencies, by fondling his crotch with a succubus lip bite at the front door in a Nemo towel as he dropped off her older sibling, for whom he served as basketball-playing big brother), his day-one condition needed to be fulfilled: she must confide in one trusted adult, a third presence (definitely female, motherly, in his mind) whose progressivism (perhaps even, if only down the line in full-on family fantasy, a button-slurping progressivism) came not at the expense of blindness to the power-dynamic concerns he himself tried to get her to appreciate.
It was an impossible ask. Part of him worried the condition, if not itself mainly a head game of self-inflicted tantalization, was less about protecting her welfare than about preempting his guilt. Part of him sensed he would eventually succumb, not just due to her heady smell of fried tuberose and her persistence (even if indirect, “Been wantin a baby like forever”) but due to the taunting murmur that middle age offered few second chances for holy tightness this intense and this likely to move on.
But when, on yet another day parked in the far corner of the woodland cemetery behind her school, he cut his lecture short with “Let me see you spread it for Daddy” (his voice hoarse with desire as usual, but this the first time he claimed the title “Daddy” in her presence), she did not pull up her skirt and spread for his vision lips nearly downy soft despite her race. A subtle sadness and tremor in her eyes jacked the meaning right into the base of his skull, a meaning anyone good have guessed in hindsight given the violence of her self-play and her nasty mouth. A back-contorting montage erupted in high definition: her growing from inarticulate infancy to teetering toddlerhood and beyond—a montage that would have been family wholesome, albeit with that bildungsroman bittersweetness coloring even spelling bees and sleepovers, had not the one core constant through all the change been her serving as the Swiss-cheese sex sleeve for her own father.
His reaction to the vision, there might have been more selfish reasons for it. He knew she would wreck his life, for one. It was less about authorities finding out in the five years before her legality. Her mouth was too ride-or-die, too wise beyond its years, to wreck his world with a word. It was more her beauty. One thing was her breeding-hormone body, hard to blame on ghetto milk alone since her soul seemed fit for some voodoo sage giving bayou children 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 no sleep deeper than the cortisol twilight of prison. It would mean carrying a gun again even though 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 had 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 to him, her streaked baby cheeks thrusting him into hyperreal autoscopy—as if the distant seer of himself was himself, his inverted-world self. Tone stripped of any greasy greed that normally would attend the command, he watched himself say “Baby, come here.” He held her close with a kiss to the temple. He whispered that it would be okay. He told her she was loved. And he knew he would have to let her go, without even one dip.