I'm going to end up like one of
those old weirdos who lives
in a network of tunnels
burrowed
through trash -
yet I do not fear this.
--Will Self
The Interview
“Well, Annabelle,” I said. “To be honest, I’m appalled at your misandry.”
She shot me a look of incredulity. Incredulity because being an interviewer of the feminine persuasion, she’d never been taken to task for being a smug, man-hating dyke. And honestly, I think my penis must’ve acquired two inches of length and another in girth because I felt that for once, I had achieved a victory for all men against women of her manner.
“Do you even know what misandry is?” I questioned, adding quickly before she could answer, “You probably don’t, I assume, because you’re so busy throwing about the word ‘misogyny’ when it comes to males. Misandry is... a hatred of men as profound as misogyny is to the fairer of our two biological sexes. I’ve always been more of a misanthropist, if you ask me.”
“I think you’re fucking disgusting!” she yelled.
“Today is my twenty-fifth birthday,” I told her, sipping my five dollar coffee outside of a big name coffee shop. I was annoyed that I was there, and I was annoyed that she’d be so nonchalant about crushing my balls under her shoes; spitting in my face, even (as if metaphor and hyperbole are ever out of place!).
She, so august in her demeanor as to suggest that I was not engaging her in discussion, no no, I was ogling her breasts; mentally undressing her, and thinking only of the many ways I could have her right there on that metal table. In reality, yes, I had noticed the small mounds that represented her breasts, perfectly formed underneath her sweater, and I even noticed the fullness of her lips, but there was nothing about her inherently attractive.
Part of me believes I was supposed to be thankful for being brought out into the cold to engage in conversation with an intelligent but humorless woman known for tearing down the most innocuous of men for the most trivial of reasons. I was supposed to be thankful for the opportunity to gaze into her cold, unforgiving eyes. I was supposed to be thankful for the wish granting chance to buy her coffee and suck her phantom cock by way of responsive ingratiation.
Sitting there, pencil in mouth, legs crossed with the crossing leg rocking against her knee like Peggy Bundy, she studied me with a dull, uninspired kind of intensity. Was she bored? I’m sorry, Annabelle, am I boring you?, I asked. She laughed, straightened her legs and asked me what I was going to do in celebration of the event of my twenty-fifth birthday.
Dumb question, bitch. I told her that I was going to booze it up with my friends, and then I was going to Books + to read selections from my first novel (the one we were supposed to talk about in the interview) ¡Existe el amor solamente para matarnos or Love and Men have no Business Doing Business which wasn’t so much a novel as it was a miscellany of short stories and essays weaved together sans any unified thematic through-line, but was sold as such because of its epic length (I was going for something like DFW’s Infinite Jest or Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past or even Rétif de la Bretonne’s Les Nuits de Paris but failed spectacularly): 100 different stories/essays/lots of filler over 300 pages. It’s a scattershot product that will probably never pay dividends despite the local and internet attention.
“I really thought you were going to wax rhapsodically about banging sluts in bookstore bathrooms after a signing,” She said from beneath a smirk.
“Rhapsodically. You’re funny, sweetie. There’s nothing emotionally or nostalgically overpowering about such acts. They are what they are. Or what they are not. Those are jokes. I have a girlfriend. You should meet her.”
“Not interested in threesomes.”
Oh how presumptive she was! My dear Annabelle. I quickly changed the subject to something a bit more-- biographical. I talked about being born in London in 1983 to a couple of expatriates: my mother American and my father from Ireland. She listened holding a face draped in boredom. I lit a cigarette.
“That was twenty-five years ago today,” I said, blowing smoke in her direction.
“You are so fucking rude.”
“That I am, ma’am.”
To continue, I talk about not being Jewish and about how in Britain in the early ‘80’s circumcision wasn’t a regular practice, which meant that, well, you can only guess-- this, of course, only revolted her further, so she leaned forward and very calmly and curtly asked that I refrain from discussing my penis because it makes her queasy and it doesn‘t reflect well on me as an individual of the intellect that I so fervidly claim to wield. I asked her if she was a citizen of Lesbos and she laughed loudly, rising from her chair with the intent, I think, to walk away, but instead leaned down into my ear and delivered a litany of complaints against me, the worst of the male species.
She began with the charge that my book was a self-indulgent, nonsensical, culturally offensive, misogynist, ill-informed, disgusting piece of shit, and that I was a purveyor of all that is wrong with “literature,” classic and current-- adding that my place in the canon of erotica would be characterized not by the fact that I am a romanticist possessing the noblest, most sensitive of sexual graces-- a visionary; aesthete-- rather, I am an immature man-boy who uses women as artifice and a means to climax; reducing them to symbol and object, denying them the humanity and dignity they rightly deserve as beautiful, flower-like persons that are the source of all human life on the planet.
...
Annabelle left me to marinate in that; the steamy sauce of self righteous pseudo-feminist conjecture. She picked up her purse and I laughed mockingly as she exited stage whatever on me, nose high in the air. (...) I expect a glowing report on our-- rapport. On how I charmed her; oh how we laughed!
...
I know for a fact she didn’t read my book. That’s okay. Her preconceived, biased feminist perspective gave her no reason to read it. Especially because my reputation had preceded me. Yeah, I fucked a girl in the bathroom at a Borders and was busted for it. Lewd and lascivious behavior, I believe it was. It was worth it. It’s not like I had to pay a penny of that court bullshit, anyway.
And though I won’t claim to never having exploited or used women, I will defend the stories in my book. They are, for the most part, fictional exercises in poor taste and bad judgment on the part of desultory young men who choose to not have a future in the traditional sense. Yes, most of the stories are centered on sexcapades, orgies, and emotionless trysts, but what is youth without rampant, nay, rampaging indiscretion?
Today is my 25th birthday
The bar was full of people. None of them were patting my back to congratulate me on my twenty-fifth year on this nature forsaken planet. They weren't telling me how good or bad my book is. They weren't telling me that I was a sexist or defending me as a latent women's libber. It was just people trying to get drunk and forget about the perceived or actual (or both) misery of their lives. I could feel that. I could relate to that. So I toasted to all of them whether they heard me or not.
Kelly, my girlfriend, and also the one who suggested the title of my book (the part en español), was running late, so I ate some stale peanuts that tasted as if the salt had been sucked from them by some impudent fucker with zero sense of bar etiquette and watched the hockey game on the HD tube. Every now and then I directed my sights away from the TV to ask for another pint or to look through the gaggle behind me for a hint of curly, bright red hair-- Kelly, O where for art thou?
When she arrived she sat next to me and put her arm around my neck. She was already a little drunk. She asked me how the interview with the bitch went. I said that it went resplendently well and that Annabelle and I hit it off like long lost sisters, celebrating in our flowering femininity. She laughed and tried to call up a studious mien.
“Don’t be... fatuous, MJ. Doooooon’t.”
She stumbled into laughter. Great. Now I had to catch up. She asked me if I’d seen The Big Lebowski. I told her that I’d seen it an innumerable amount of times. With her. She said the word fatuous slowly, giggling about what a funny word it was. I agreed, then bought a bottle of cheap wine and took her to a table.
Punk Lit. 1983
I woke up next to Kelly. We were twisted together in the sheets and spread. I had no idea where I ended and she began. She was snoring softly. Sunlight cut through the thin curtains. The alarm clock was at 12:42 P.M., and for the first time since we started dating, I noticed how utterly stark white her bedroom was. Indeed, her entire apartment was this way. Pale as her skin.
There was a voice message on my phone from Annabelle. She said that she was posting our interview on the blog at that very moment. I considered panicking, but instead reached for my cigarettes, lit one-- the last one-- and then tossed the empty pack into the sink. Happy birthday to me.
Kelly padded with exhaustion into the living room around 2 P.M., running her fingers through her long, matted red hair. I was typing away on my novel using an old typewriter because I felt that it gave me legitimacy as a writer (haha). She yawned, zombied her way next to me, and asked if there was coffee. No, I said. And I smoked the last cigarette. Shit, she said, and walked away, presumably to curse the day I was born-- twenty-five years ago yesterday.
I continued typing. She called from the kitchen, asking if I had any plans to walk to the corner store. I said yes. She left money on the counter and went to take a shower. I typed some more. We were beginning to really piss each other off. The day before my birthday she ranted at me about how she didn’t understand boys, and I pointed out to her that if she has those kinds of issues, dating a boy eleven, almost twelve years younger than herself doesn’t reflect well on her situation.
Fact is, we both agreed to an open relationship-- I guess you kind of have to when you’re married as she was-- and just because I fuck random girls doesn’t mean that I give myself, heart and soul to them. And I don’t expect any different from them. I felt like Kelly was smothering me, pinning me to the floor, “Look, Michael, I made you. I got you that deal. I helped you title the fucker, and I want a lot more commitment from you.”
Blah, blah, blah.
The Borders thing infuriated her to no end. And my cavalier attitude made her angrier. We didn’t talk for several days. The drunk thing at my birthday party was her way of “getting me back.” Before we had sex last night, she told me that she fucked an even younger guy she met at a punk space. A real punk she said. Not one who bangs ugly girls at bookstores.
“I hope for your sake he fucked better than Sid Vicious played bass,” I laughed while thrusting into her. She dribbled whiskey onto her chin, trying to keep from laughing. I don’t think we’d ever actually kissed while fucking. She always had a bottle of booze attached to her lips.
The first time I ever hurt myself over a girl was at the age of eight. Playground drama. My first crush-- her name was Erin, I believe-- told me that she didn't want to play with me anymore. For a boy my age, I suppose this wasn't the most devastating event that could touch my young life (certainly not on par with being grounded so that I couldn't go see the new TMNT movie, or with the pain of knowing that I will probably never have a little brother or sister to be mean to), but it was a definite rejection; the first I'd ever experienced.
It was so sudden; inexplicable. Thus, in a fit of juvenile depressed anger, I somehow got my hands on a metal curtain rod, and proceeded to bang it against the monkey bars. The clangs shook me to my elbows, and when I'd had enough of that feeling, I flung the rod into the bushes. I was still running high on endorphins, so the realization that the curve of the rod had sliced open the heel of the palm of my hand didn't come until I saw the red stuff gushing rather freely.
The night Kelly and I met we had a battle of the scars reminiscent of that scene in Lethal Weapon 2. For most of my scars I made up stories because how I really got them wasn't all that interesting, and recounting truthfully wasn't going to get me where I'd hoped to go with her. But the one true story was the one about the scar on the heel of the palm of my right hand. Chalked it up to women. She blamed men; this beautiful redhead, for all of her scars which were invisible to the naked eye; alas, they were emotional.
We woke up on opposite sides of the bed. At first I wanted to joke with her about how one of us had awakened on the wrong side of the bed, but instead I blurted it out. I said, "The title of my novel is 'Punk Lit. 1983,' a reference to the year of my birth and a tribute to my 'don't give a fuck, DIY lifestyle.'" All I heard was the snap of her panties against her skin and a sigh. After more elongated silence, she laughed.
I finally faced her for the first time that morning. She had the whiskey bottle to her lips, head knocked back, finishing the remnants of last night's sex. It made a thud as it landed on the mattress. "That was my orgasm." I laughed and under the guise of false admission, claimed that I didn't know what the hell was wrong with her.
You know. You fucking know, she said. She told me that I was such a fucking bullshit artist, and that I was so bad at it, but had the perception that I was so good at it that I believed my own bullshit. She said that I wasn't a sexist or any of that, no, I was worse, I was a fucking asshole. "Yeah, Michael, you're so fucking cool. You wrote a shitty book that makes zero fucking sense. 'Johnny Rotten's Angry Letter to the Sex Pistols’ Moronic Fans' was such a brilliant piece of clever bullshit. Golf claps for the clever little monkey. You know what? I'm sick of this. You don't include me in anything. I'm just your redheaded slut, aren't I?"
FUCK YOU, MIKE.
That was the gist of her outburst. But it got better,
"When that slick mohawked fucker was pounding away at my pussy, I imagined you sitting at that bar, eating those nasty fucking peanuts because you never learn your fucking lesson, and I laughed. I moaned a little, but that's because the kid's big dick was no laughing matter. Ugh. ... Ugh! You disgust me. I should just have my husband kick your ass, how’s that? You think you’re so much better than all those dressed punks, but you’re all talk. And pencil. One of these days you’ll be exposed for the pussy you are, and I can’t wait. I will cheer on any hotheaded lunk who decides to bash your smirky face in!”
Once she was dressed, she stormed out into the hall yelling expletives over her shoulder. I walked into the living room and sat on the floor, shifting through the ashtray, finding and lighting the first one-sixth of a cig I could find. I picked up the copy of my book and leafed through to the Johnny Rotten story.
(...) And Vicious, well, he wasn’t a vicious bloke at all, he was the nicest of the bunch (not as nice as Matlock, that pansy, but Matlock doesn’t fuckin’ count 'cause he was a cunt). Ever heard of irony, you ill-educated twits?
Blah, blah, blah. It certainly wasn't as funny as I remembered it being. Maybe she was right. It's an old story and I suppose it displays the number one flaw of my attempt at satire. Especially when real people are involved. In this case, Johnny Rotten. I failed to achieve the goal: to accurately capture the essence of the individual I was satirizing. Absurdity is a useful tool in satire, and at its most genius, satire manages to represent real aspects of a personality and highlight the absurdities in an egregious manner.
In short, let's just say that it's not on the same level with Philip Roth's Our Gang, dated as it is. Moreover, I don't think much positive can be culled from the story except for the fact that I can look back on it in a constructively critical manner. I picked myself up from the carpet and threw the book on the coffee table. I pulled my jacket from the crevice of the couch and made my way out the door.
Kelly consumed my thoughts as I tramped downstairs to the gate. My culpability became more and more apparent to myself-- the sadness a byproduct of the guilt that accompanied this particular dawning-- I slowed to a more pensive kind of promenade.
The sun was up. The air was cold. I was past the gate and on my way down the street to the corner store where I would pick up a pack of smokes. I stopped at the light. A small red headed child was in the back seat of a passing car. Kelly. Oh Kelly. She was in my head again; no sooner gone than returned; pissed at the presumption I'd made. So why was she pissed? Because the mutual openness of our relationship was not voiced. There was never an agreement. No documents were signed in ink or blood. I merely assumed that we were engaged in an open affair after she admitted to me that she was married.
Separated, of course, but definitely, legally married.
The Borders episode simply set everything off. My friend Strange was signing his new book, Fucking Assholes and the Bitches who Fuck Them, and I was there for emotional support and the free booze that would come after. I was sitting in the adjoining coffee shop when I noticed a very cute Asian girl in a skirt standing in line with Strange's book under her arm. I politely moved in and asked if I may be so bold as to make a suggestion. She smiled and said, “sure dude, cool.”
“You could have coffee or whatever it is that you kids get at places like this these days, or you could throw caution to the wind, follow me, and I could show you something you’ve never seen.”
She looked at me blankly, laughed, and said, “I’ll bite.”
We ended up in a men’s bathroom stall, my jeans at my ankles and her skirt hiked. She was silent and I think I perspired heavier with each thrust. Apparently my grunts were heard by someone masturbating in the stall next to ours (at least that’s what I’ll surmise, considering the asshole was gripped by enough moral turpitude to rat us out), and he reported us to security, who interrupted our coitus (boring as it was), notified the police, and the rest is tickets and threats of jail time and a bunch of other bullshit I slept through.
Kelly had a lot of questions for me after she bailed me out. All I could tell her is that I had never been with an Asian girl before. Over and over. Smiling. Occasionally laughing. She accused me of being smug and proud and stupid. “So that’s your reason? ‘Oh, I’ve never fucked an Asian girl before, here’s my chance!’” Pretty much, I intimated with a shrug.
“If this is because I’m married, it does nothing to prove anything. It only shows that you are capable of displaying zero maturity. Maybe I am wasting my time.”
Oh sweet beautiful drama!
“You could’ve said that I’m ‘incapable of displaying maturity,’ but if being verbose gets your point across more forcefully, point fucking taken!”
“And to think that I love you.”
“Oh, that’s fucking noble,” I say. “Thanks for bailing me out, you’re a real fucking sweetheart. ‘Say baby, I’m married, but that’s okay, because we’re separated and as soon as we can afford a divorce, it’s DONE.’ Look, I never asked for anything. I think you’re fun as shit, woman, but you gotta let me fuckin’ be.”
We didn’t see one another again until the night of my birthday.
I stepped into the corner store and the guy behind the counter slapped my pack of cigs onto the counter and smiled, “That’s what you like, right?” Yes, my good man, I said. Yes. I joked that I’d soon be in flavor country. It’s a big country, right? Indeed, he grinned, not really having any idea what I was going on about.
As I was exiting, a dumpy older woman was dragging a screaming child in. I was a bit startled by it, so I stopped and looked back. The child went limp once the threshold was crossed which prompted the lady to verbally blast full bore into it. In Spanish. It reminded me of the days my own mother would stop and critique my tantrums. No screaming. No threats. Just smiling critiques. Laughter, even. This particular woman, however, lacked the maternal wit necessary to counteract the child's behavior.
(I don't know. It always pissed me off when my mother would reduce my-- what I felt like were-- earth shattering fits to sporting events with the same amount of gravitas as a blue collar comedy routine.)
Waving the White Flag
Annabelle called again. I answered. She wanted to know if I’d read our interview. I said no. She cackled deviously and suggested that perhaps I should. I said in so many words that I was busy, but she wasn't buying it. "Writers are never really busy," she barked.
So I humored her. I went to her blog. I still had the phone to my ear. She assumed my silence meant I was reading. I was really just looking at all the pretty colors on the background. My eyes glazed over in the onslaught of secondary and tertiary colors. When I came to the Interviews section, I clicked on the link to the interview, not-so-cleverly titled Meet Michael John Healey, The Biggest Asshole in Town.
“You forgot ‘celebrated author’ in that appraisal you call a title.” I remarked.
“Yeah right. You asked for it, dirtbag.”
So much for objective journalism. I sighed.
I began reading bits aloud to her. She giggled uncontrollably at every line of invective, rejoicing in how deliciously evil it all was, reveling in tearing me apart with bad publicity.
So I launched a defense that would prove ineffective. Yes. Ineffective against her plodding rhetoric that countered my position that these stories were nothing more than disparate pieces of an oeuvre that only borrowed from actual events and that were, at bottom, stories. Fucking stories! Fiction!
“Whether or not something is fiction,” she starts, “matters not in the least. It’s a convenient excuse at most. But it’s mostly bullshit.”
“How is it bullshit? It’s true! Can you read?”
“If that’s some critique of women...”
“It’s not. It’s a question! Jesus. None of those stories, in their entirety are true, and if you actually read them, you’d get the feeling... the idea that it’s not so much women I dislike, it’s people in general. If anything the female characters are smarter and more in control than any of their penis-having counterparts.”
And so on...
We argued the point until I gave up. Waving the white flag, conceding to defeat. The sheer weight of her petty, thin assertions and argument wore me down, and clasping my hands together and shaking them in supplication to the mouthpiece of my phone, I let her have the upper hand. She cackled and hung up.
When I was sixteen I thought I was in love with a young woman two years my senior. Nearly ten years on, it doesn’t seem like such a difference, but I was so young and naive and brazen. I thought this woman beautiful and her pallor was a gift from the Bavarian heavens.
I wrote sappy poetry and played the role I believed was accepted amongst my peers (the concept of subtext was completely foreign to me at the time). But I was a virgin, and deep down, what I really wanted was sex. But I never admitted that to myself. No, I was confident only in my role as the “nice guy,” the one who would surely be emotionally, physically, and romantically ravaged once my friend-- this fraulein-- once she realized that I was the only one there, waiting, and that I would do anything to make her happy.
But she was more interested in partying and fucking random people. I'd made myself a relic. The last of a "dying breed (as the girls would say in a drawl, fanning away the southern heat)," but mostly, a stick in the mud. At sixteen no less! I hadn't the life experience nor the hindsight of a real failed relationship from which to draw hope. I was a wrinkly old conservative inside a sixteen year old body that feigned at romance because I'd never been properly laid-- which was all I ever really wanted anyway. I wasn't mature enough to be a true romantic.
And so my Bavarian beauty and I parted ways. I surrendered to pure logic, and I assure you, she was armed with plenty of it.
I still have her naked photos.
Night fell on the city, and there I was, in the living room, television off, typing away on my laptop (instead of the typewriter, because laptops can do so much more: I can switch windows and write while watching porn) when Kelly managed her way in; drunk. The door was unlocked, but she struggled with her key in the lock for what seemed an eternity. I should’ve laughed, but I was far more disconcerted than amused.
The word count was near 10,000 last I checked, and I checked often, expecting the result to change despite my indecision. Despite the light from the screen, I could feel her point at me. She began to laugh, saying that she read the interview and that I'd made an ass of myself as usual. I didn't argue. In fact, I barely acknowledged her. I continued to type; commenting on Annabelle's blog, in defense of myself. Two words, I typed. Lydia Lunch. Kelly started yelling. “Pay attention to me!”
Taking my eyes off the screen, they met with hers. What? I asked. What? What do you want from me?
Silence.
She sobbed obstreperously in the hope that it would move me. It didn’t. “I think I’m gonna be sick,” she said, and ran into the bathroom. Emptily, I stared into the space she occupied only moments before.
The Response
Lydia Lunch, I believe, once made a statement about exploitation and porn and women, and seeing as you’ve characterized my literature as little more than deviant, pornographic pap, I think it applies. It goes something like this: there wouldn’t even be a market for porn if there weren’t men out there sexually unimaginative enough to need and desire visual aid. Women in pornography are no more exploited than the men who consume it. (...) I was paraphrasing heavily in my comment, but the truth is that I could’ve dedicated pages of comments just on the nature of pornography itself. Not that I truly believed my book was pornographic.
I closed the laptop and lit a cigarette. The sense of righteousness that I normally felt after a long diatribe was not there. Instead I felt fatigued and wasted. I decided that it was time for me to stop forcing myself to write. For the last few weeks I’d been staying up ‘til 4 or 5 A.M., cranking out only sentences at a time. Then erasing them. Then writing new ones. Then erasing them. Then wanting to chuck the whole fuckin’ story in the recycle bin.
On top of the fridge I had half a bottle of cachaça, a couple bottles of cheap brandy, off brand absinthe, and some wine. Couple of boxes. Kelly’s thing. I drink exclusively from the bottle. I’ve been called a snob, but a real snob would actually use glasses intended for wine-- just the price one pays for being “the biggest asshole in town.”
I got up, went to the kitchen, took a dirty glass out of the sink-- there are never clean ones in the cabinet because, well, I don’t do dishes-- and rinsed it under the tap, set it on the counter, and grabbed a bottle of brandy. I’ve always loved brandy because it tastes great in cocktails and even better straight. It is smooth and it’s cheaper than good whiskey.
Cheap whiskey, awful by virtue of name alone, is a rancid, gut rotting bitch-goddess. Brandy can be cheap and still fairly decent. For example, I only drink Christian Brothers or Presidente. Obviously such utterances in certain company will bring me a deluge of excoriation from the connoisseurs, but the thrust of my drinking habits revolve not around the idea that an alcoholic beverage should be gustatorily delightful, but on the idea of economic necessity. It is not uncommon to see me in a liquor store, weighing alcoholic content against dollar value.
Leaving the glass to lounge on the counter, I took the bottle and wandered into the hallway. I popped the cork-like top and took a swig. The bathroom door was open, the room dark. I expected to flip on the light and find Kelly hugging the toilet, asleep, or in the tub, passed out.
But I slapped the switch and the light came on and she wasn’t there. In fact, it was fairly clean. The seat was down and there were no signs that vomit had recently hit the bowl. I turned off the light and stepped into the bedroom. She was in bed, curled into the fetal position on top of the unmade covers.
In that moment I remembered the depth of my feelings for her. Maybe I wasn’t hell-bent on making it work, but I wasn’t an unfeeling brute. Our misunderstandings and arguments don’t cancel out the fact that we’ve done some cool, fun shit together (our trips to the plaza where we’d make fun of little kids falling on their asses while trying to ice skate, our long discussions about what we might do once we get a little bit of cash, nighttime trips to the local video store, etc.). Or that we've also done irresponsible and reckless things (drunk driving and tossing the empty bottles out the sunroof, for example), but all in all, being with her has been one of the best experiences in my life. Staring at her back, I didn’t know if she was asleep or pouting or just thinking. I called her name. No answer.
I crawled into bed with her, bottle and all. I called her name again and took another gulp of the brandy. She let out a moan of exhaustion. Are you sick, I asked. She moaned some more and stretched her legs out. I told her that I planned on getting shit-faced since I couldn’t manage to work on my novel. She said that she didn’t know why she came back because I was the biggest jerk-bag in the universe.
“My head is pounding,” she groaned, turning to look at me. “And that shit stinks. Ugh, I feel like that tattoo of a girl’s name from that story in your book. She goes out and gets obliterated and then wakes up the next morning to find that she’s on some dude’s hairy ass.”
“I’m familiar with the story. I wrote it.”
“It sucks, you know. You’re no fuckin’ Kafka.”
I gave it to her. I’m no Kafka and she’s no Lydia Lunch. But I didn’t say it. I just put my arm around her and closed my eyes.
© Patrick Patterson-Carroll
(2009)
