by Smith S. Smith

She told him all about Harvey Milk; told him how homosexual teens have the highest suicide rates in America; told him how her cousin had been stuffed inside a gymnasium locker and whipped with towels until he bled when he had ‘came out’. These were topics he thought it was a bit weird to broach during intercourse, but the whole thing just went on for so-so-so-so-long that they had to talk about something, he guessed. Mostly he wouldn’t listen. He’d just go on, turning her over, this way or that. She’d never break a sentence for anything other than a coldly placed, “Wait. Okay. Right there. Good.” What did he care anyways? It was actually kind of refreshing to talk to someone, well… listen to someone, at least. He hadn’t talked to a soul since he’d been fired from the pants factory. Not a one unless you count that guy who asked him for directions to the L-train to whom he hadn’t responded. ‘Loneliness’ was not a ‘thing’ to him; he couldn’t understand it. Why did all these people, all crammed together, all busy and angry and hungry and constipated, why did they all have this desperate need for human contact? Hunan interaction? Couldn’t they just exist in their own little atmosphere? They were never really alone anyways. Who knew, he guessed.

She lit another candle while he worked on her from the top. The last one had melted down to the aluminum base, the wax splayed out, not unlike a Rorschach. He considered chapter seven as the new scent crept up his nostrils. Honey jasmine?
Calypso breeze? Tropical rhubarb? He couldn’t tell. But he did know he’d been using way too much punctuation. Way heavy on ellipsis…his favorite, way too much parenthetical commentary (so cliché), too many dashes—that got annoying, way, way way, too, many, commas, and last but not least, rampant use of the most evil punctuation mark ever: the exclamation point!

“And don’t even get me started on the sitch in Botswana,” she remarked as he turned her for a go at it doggy style. He serenely reviewed chapter seven in his head, not sure if it was his book or her vagina that was now keeping him hard. Ugh. He just couldn’t solve it. It was the forty-two-paragraph section about the doppelganger that concerned him most. Was the section too obviously figurative? Or wait, not subtly literal enough? He licked some perspiration from his upper lip. He wasn’t thinking clearly. Perhaps his brain had jostled around too much during this fuck. Maybe he should think about coming. Get this over with, he guessed. He moved her under him and got on top of her, not unlike an oilrig digging for fresh tar.

Illustration by Chad Kouri

“Oh,” she commented. Over their series of encounters she had come to realize that this meant he was nearly there. She shut her yap and concentrated, hoping to squeeze out one more orgasm. Damn that chapter seven. Maybe the problem was relativity. Chapters six and eight were so tight that it was difficult for anything to look good when sandwiched between them. “Tonight would be a seven revision night and that’s final,” he thought. Almost there. She came again. He came.

Rolling off of her, they both lay panting quietly. He turned to the nightstand and retrieved a cigarette. Pall Mall. His brand this month. He grabbed the candle and put the flame to the tip of his Pall, taking a long, slow pull from it. One more and he offered it to her. She was obliged to take three heavy drags.

“Well then… thanks. I’m off,” she said, sitting up and searching the floor for her white, cotton panties. There were no frills here. She found them entangled with her bra and got decent.

“You should really check out that documentary about the state of agricultural production in this country. Honestly, one of the most fucked up docs I’ve seen in a while. We’re living in a goddamn military-state if you ask me—between the republicans, the armed forces, the agricultural industry, ugh… don’t even get me started.”

He wouldn’t, but he almost felt certain she would leave his apartment talking to the wallpaper about it anyways. This bird was a little batty but she sure didn’t mind making intimate for three or four hours. She was no complainer in the bedroom. Well, not on the topic of the intercourse, at least.

Originally published March 2009 in the His & Hers issue of glasses glasses.

Phil remembered the specifics of the day he went shopping for a toupee. It was a crisp day, one of the first of autumn. A faded baseball cap covered his burning shame. Phil considered the generous patch of flesh on his skull an ode to his many failures.

The toupee store smelled like an OTB. A blend of cigar smoke and squandered paychecks. The clerk that came to help looked shockingly akin to the forty-five year old Denny’s manager who had just sat Phil in his usual booth-for-one, to eat his usual Sunday morning Moons-Over-My-Hammy. His wristwatch was noticeably oversized, his necktie flagrantly mustard-stained and he wore white athletic socks beneath short khaki trousers and above unpolished wingtips. Phil could tell the matted mess of hair on his head was his own, but thought it looked ironically similar to an awful rug. Perhaps this was a hapless sales tactic? To say the least, you wouldn’t want to buy a pair of gardening gloves from this man, let alone a new identity, a fresh start, a piece.

Illustration by Bryce Wymer

The two men exchanged greetings and got down to business. The store clerk, one David, strolled around with Phil, explaining to him the basic models—the human hair, the synthetic, the weaving, the hair bonding. When David spoke Phil couldn’t help but notice a dry white paste in the corners of his mouth and the faint scent of gas-station hotdog. On the bright side, his vernacular was a tad cleaner than his appearance. Phil began to ruminate as he took in David’s utter untidiness. What had happened to this man? What were his dismal circumstances? Phil thought:

‘This poor bastard… Maybe his old lady had just left him and he’d been sleeping in some shabby motel the past several days, unable to eat, unable to sleep and certainly unable to launder, or for that much, take concern in his general outward appearance. Perhaps this David had recently won the regional sales clerk of the year award, right before his wife had vamoosed and he had stumbled into a mire of pity and self-loathing. At least he had managed a fresh shave without removing the blade from his razor and taking it to his pudgy wrists.

‘Perhaps his own children found their father pathetic. His wife had taken them and they had had not one reservation. His son (already twice the athlete his father was) was embarrassed when the toupee salesman made it to his baseball games and tried to rub elbows with the other fathers—brawny men with names like Joe, Mitch and Tom who had terrorized wimps like David during his high school career; one spent largely with the brass section of the marching band. Perhaps his thirteen-year-old daughter was already unable to speak to her father. He was of no help to her with his fumbled words and disparate emotions.

‘But who knew? Maybe things were going to be all right for David. Maybe he’d manage to collect the pieces of his life and start anew. Maybe he’d meet a nice woman, herself recently divorced, at a forty-and-over singles’ mixer at the VFW Post down the road. Maybe they would share their pain over bourbon and cokes and then she would bring David back to her apartment just to feel something inside of her again.

‘But oh no… Wait…

‘What if David was unable to prompt his erection? His unkempt penis hanging limp amongst a wild tangle of pubic hair. Maybe this woman would even press her wrinkled lips to the little thing to try and blow some life into it, but this would only cause David to shake his head and haunch over, gently sobbing. Maybe his lack of rigidity had been the entire problem in the first place. That’s why she had left him those months ago—an ugly, frumpled, depressed, toupee salesman. And maybe for that same reason this new woman would ask him to ‘pull up his trousers’, ‘act like a man’ and ‘get the hell out’ of her stale apartment.

‘What will become of David?’ Phil ruminated. ‘Ahh, Only time will tell…’

Phil left the store and was surprised to notice the weight of a paper bag in his hand as he walked to his Camry. Splitting the tweed handles of the bag and peering into the dark void he made out a mop of flaxen tresses. While he was deep in reverie it appeared he had actually purchased a toupee, maybe out of pity for David, but more likely out of pity for himself.

“I’ll put it on in my Camry,” Phil thought. Then he did.

Wedged into his driver’s seat groove (flabby haunches oozing sideways from his deeply buried femurs), Phil lowered the sun-blocker, which doubled as a vanity mirror. A mess of Chinese menus and freshly clipped coupons fell from the ceiling as he caught a glimpse of ‘the new Phil’ in the coffee-stained mirror. Time slowed. Old eyes met new through a ticker-tape parade of $0.35-off fabric softener snippets and Moo-Shoo Pork portions.

“This is a new day,” he declared, lightly brushing his auburn bangs from his eyes. He saw not Phil, but that whimsical mid-western teenager he had known some twenty years ago, ripe with hopes and dreams. His fat-ass wasn’t in a budget-club Camry anymore, but instead bony buttocks clenched and unclenched in the bucket seat of a 1978 Dodge Charger as he cornered the turns of an Iowa freeway at 60… 70… 80 mph.

Phil reached into the central counsel of his Camry and produced a tube of Ruby Red #45. With his eyes glued to the mirror he applied a thick dram of the melting substance to his pursed lips. He tasted wax, he tasted flesh, he tasted sex. An erection stirred in his worn Dockers. He puckered his lips and gave the vanity mirror a big wet kiss, sitting right there, in the Sunday sunshine of the New England Drug & Sundry Plaza. What a man he made now! Phil wiped at his blood-red lips with the back of his hand and then reached through his open window and smeared a streak of lipstick on the side of his Camry. He hit the gas in neutral, fired the car into gear and threw the bulky six-cylinder directly into a parked coupe across the aisle. The blue two-door buckled under the weight of Phil’s sedan and the hood crumpled in a good two feet.

“Whoops! What now?!” Phil began to unbuckle, intending to get out and examine the damage. But then he caught his reflection between the ruby red lip stains on his vanity mirror. What was he doing? The new Phil didn’t leave a note. No, the new Phil didn’t give a damn about auto claims. In fact, the new Phil didn’t give a FLYING FUCK about auto claims.

“Arrivederci!” with a hand in the air. And that was that.

David left his shift—tired, hungry, miserable—only to find his ’95 Beretta smashed in at the hood.

Originally featured in glasses glasses’ Shirts & Skins issue of January 2009.