“Yeah, that old 80s song,” Mike confirmed. “And as for clothes I offered him some of mine but he kept insisting that he was a professional nudist and that clothes were a social – no…what did he say? A socially amorphous construction of the dominant paradigm designed to oppress and subjugate humans to…” Mike shut one eye and concentrated really hard, “to do…something, I don’t remember what it was. You said a lot of things like that, Trevor.”
Mike just shook his head. “It was a hell of a long haul with you. I was in that truck for what, man…eight hours with you? Something like that. You were whacked.”
“Why didn’t you kick me out?” I asked.
“You were harmless. I wasn’t worried you were gonna do anything. You were so loopy and where were you gonna hide a weapon?”
“That’s what I thought,” Darla said, “when I picked him up.”
“You picked him up?” Mike narrowed his eyes and looked at her.
Oh…. I didn’t realize that Darla hadn’t explained that part to him. Darla went a pale shade of green and averted her eyes.
Joe had one hand on her left thigh, a perfect match of mine on her right. It seemed symmetrical, like it should be there. The look on Mike’s expression gave away exactly what he thought about the fact that Darla had picked me up.
“Uncle Mike, he was standing there, nak*d, on the side of the road wearing nothing but a guitar and a collar, so what was I supposed to do?”
“You were supposed to drive on by and not be a stupid little girl and pick up some nak*d man on the side of the road.”
“That wouldn’t be friendly,” she argued. “It would be safe, but not friendly.”
Mike and Darla had a staring contest while Joe and I played the game of let’s see who can pretend the longest that the other’s hand isn’t on Darla’s thigh. So far, the bastard was winning. He wouldn’t let me lock eyes with him – or maybe he couldn’t. How many beers had he had? Seven? Eight at this point? Far exceeded my two.
“So, that’s it?” I asked. “I got out of the truck and found myself here.”
“Yup, that’s it.”
“What about the pacifier?”
“The what?”
“You said I was sucking on a pacifier when you picked me up.”
“Oh, yeah. You kept talking about something… ‘e’ and how ‘e’ meant that you had to have a pacifier and ‘e’ this and ‘e’ that.”
“It wasn’t ‘e’,” Joe said, his voice a little slurred. “It was peyote.”
Mike made a low whistling sound and his eyes bounced from Joe to Trevor. “Peyote? That’s what you were high on? Man, you people in Massachusetts do some shit I’ve never even looked at.”
“You’ve heard of it, though?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it. It’s that kind of shit Native Americans use when they’re trying to see visions.”
“That fits, right? I mean, he was about to marry a chicken and plan a wedding registry around it,” Darla commented.
“Mavis Connor does have a nice ring to it,” Joe added.
Darla
This was supposed to feel wrong, competitive, like I couldn’t please them both, like I was supposed to be devoted to Trevor and spurn anything Joe sent my way. And instead it was like none of those rules applied. Like the social graces, the few I had, that was, no longer applied to this particular relationship. We were totally winging it as we went along, each of the three of us shuffling one foot forward the tiniest of bits to see if the others would shuffle forward too.
So far, all three of us were, and I was the monkey in the middle and their hands were the balls – no, their balls were the balls but…well, that metaphor doesn’t work either because they weren’t throwing their balls over my head. Wait, that might come later, so…apparently I no longer could make literary structure jokes within the context of damn near anything because the woman before me, the one Trevor had loved, had been a chicken.
A f**king chicken.
And when you learn that about a guy you’re f**king, then pretty much any ability to organize your thoughts goes out the window. Especially, though, when you have two hot men stroking your thighs with hands that want to go higher. They were feeling my legs as a proxy for what we all wanted to feel.
I knew damn well Trevor hadn’t actually f**ked a chicken, but it was fun teasing him into a frothing frenzy. I could think of some other frenzies I’d like to tease him into, though, that didn’t involve talking about sex with a chicken.
Ew. Boy, that sounded as bad in my mind as it did in the telling, huh? Let’s just scratch that joke. Get it? Scratch? OK. I give up.
Mike was completely oblivious on the other side of that booth, thinking that the most important topic right now was what had happened to Trevor and the story of how Mike had, in many ways, been his savior. If the dynamics of this table had made that the priority, we’d all still be laughing about Mavis the chicken. Instead, some sort of social drama was taking place with fingers and palms and pants fabric that felt like sandpaper against my swollen skin as each man claimed his expanse of my body.
And then I saw Aunt Marlene. Mama’s sister. Josie’s mother. Marlene wore black jeggings with fake diamonds around the ankles, six-inch red high heels, and one of those sheer tank tops that you’re supposed to wear under an opaque shirt. She’d been bleaching her hair nearly white since I could remember, and her mouth had the same deep smoker’s grooves I saw on Mama, wrinkled like the folds on those fancy little dogs on television. Thick black eyeliner made her eyes seem even more yellow, and her fingers held a cigarette or a beer. Always. Even when she came to the gas station to buy a pack of Marlboro Lights she had one lit in her left hand, right hand digging in her ginormous purse for her money.
See, I call Josie Aunt Josie because growing up, that’s how it seemed – like she took care of me the way an aunt would. Not like a cousin. Cousin sounds like a peer. Josie wasn’t my peer. When her mama came back from the Cleveland Clinic “not quite right,” as Mama said, Josie moved in with us. Mrs. Humbolt had been great, letting us live with her after our daddies died, but Mama wanted us kids together. Part of it, I think, was that Josie played with me. Kept me busy. Made it so I didn’t ask too many questions. Apparently, I was a motormouth even at the age of four.
Aunt Marlene came home a broken woman and she was what Uncle Mike called the “town barfly.” Proving his point, she was sitting at the bar snuggling up to some guy who was buying her beer after beer. If you could chain-smoke a beer, she was managing to do it, emptying one and guzzling another in the sixty seconds or so I watched her.
Mama had said that Marlene was nice and sweet and in love with Uncle Jeff before. Our life was split in two: there was before and after. The shorthand was so simple even a four year old could understand it. I remember thinking I was lucky, because my mama lost a foot, but Josie’s mama lost her mind. My little-kid understanding of the world thought she had literally lost her mind, as if she’d left it behind on the school playground and it was waiting for her in a cardboard box marked “Lost and Found,” resting in there with a scarf and some notebooks and orphaned mittens.
I once told Josie that, when I was about six and she was thirteen, and she got real quiet, then said, “That’s pretty close to the truth, Darla.”
If I ignored my aunt, she’d ignore me, and the night would roll on just fine. Even when I was little that’s how it worked. She’d pay attention to me if it got her something, or helped her somehow, but otherwise I didn’t exist, like some sort of tool in a toolbox she pulled out only for her own projects.
Maybe that’s how Trevor’s parents saw him. As a tool. Something to use to put together an assemblage of parts to meet some sort of purpose that only made sense to the user. Seeing Marlene reminded me that I should call Josie and get some advice for this quickly-careening situation.
In the meantime, though, I had to deal with the fact that two men were, at this very moment, turning me into their tool.
Joe
A few people from the crowd swung over to congratulate Trevor, and to get the website name for Random Acts of Crazy. Apparently, they have the Internet out here: who knew? Those seven beers were helping me cope, but they also made me rock hard wanting Darla. She looked so happy and radiant right now, emanating a sense of completeness that I couldn’t feel – ever – in my own life. Maybe if I could touch her enough some of it would rub off.
Maybe I just needed to go rub one off.
My head was spinning and Trevor was, once again, the center of attention. I didn’t begrudge him (much) – that took some serious balls, getting on stage and singing a song no one here had heard, then debuting a completely original song without any guitar practice. He was such a natural at this, able to improvise under extraordinary circumstances. Playing bass, for me, meant endless practice and a need for the sheet music within a quick glance. I wasn’t bad – I just needed to be over-rehearsed, while Trevor could fumble his way to an outstanding performance.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t find a way to fit you in on stage,” Darla whispered.
My brain melted at the double entendre and my social filter disappeared. “I’m sure you can find a way to fit me in,” I whispered. Trev looked at us with a stare of study, as if he were observing without judgment. It unnerved me and strengthened me at the same time. Boldness came easily when I wanted to steal drugs from the evidence room, or crash my dad’s car just to get some attention.
This? Being with someone so different, or coming on to what I was growing to view as my best friend’s girlfriend? I didn’t do shit like that.
Now, though, it appeared I did. Anything seemed to go here, as if we were in a debauched land where our culture didn’t apply. Or, maybe, we were the debauched ones. Whatever. Nothing made much sense any more.
Except Darla’s thigh. Trevor seemed to have the same idea, which made a thunderball of hot lead form in my gut, simultaneously heating me up and making me hard. Let me be clear: it wasn’t Trev who made me hard. It was Darla.
And the thought of me and Trevor and Darla – doing what? No progressive sexuality education course, even the one Mom and Dad made me attend at our local Unitarian Universalist church, taught me about how to handle it when the thought of being sexual with a woman I was falling for was enhanced by the idea that another man would be with us.
Operationally, I knew what two men could do with one woman. I’d seen enough YouPorn amateur video to make my eyeballs bleed (and would have preferred that over what I saw, sometimes). On rare occasions our friends in the dorms, or in the apartments we shared, would scroll along and find a tender, loving, intimate video with two men and a woman, and inevitably someone would shout “Too tame!” and on we’d go to Two Girls, One Cup or a woman f**king a Sybian.
Later, though, I’d go back and watch the more intimate portrayal. That’s where my mind had been going for a long time, but who do you talk to about that? Hey, Mom, I find myself drawn to the idea of a threesome. Remember how you told me I could talk to you about anything? Mom? Mom? No, I don’t have a Xanax. What? A bowl? So you can throw up? Oh. Weed. Um…