Slipping...

He stopped because she said it was too hard. Not what he was doing, but what she doing. Climaxing for what the..?, he had lost count at five, and that was during the first two hours of the entire evening. He had yet to, even almost.

“God, just let my head slow down,” she whimpered. She was still quivering and breathing heavy. Her breathing eventually slowed.

Hey, you okay?” he asked concerned but with a chuckle.

“Yeah,” she mumbled something.

“What’d you say?”

She slurred a string of nonsense. “Sharper” What? “… shopping…” Slipping…

“You’re out aren’t you?”

She was.

He giggled, and then realized how inflamed he still was. “Shit.” He hadn’t been laid in over two years, but still managed to give someone the "best sex she’d ever had," and raise it the requested kink factor, which was higher than he'd expected. Not surprised, just not expected.

Maybe in the morning… why should that be any different? This is how it always went. Alone and wide-awake, in a dark, strange place, turgid and purple; physically, mentally and yes, spiritually.

She had bought him a pack of smokes, that’s where they met, they actually met online, but she picked him up at the 7-Eleven. Bought herself and his broke-ass packs of cigarettes. 

She said later she thought she was picking up a high-schooler the way he had acted. He fished out a cigarette, crawled over her, and walked naked through the strange apartment. Her hippie roommate and son were away.

They had been messaging back and forth for only two days. He liked her look; a little vintage, short black hair, red lips. He had heated it up quick, and she told him to call her. 

He did the next day, and got her voicemail. Her pre-recorded message gave her full name. She had a name from a crime noir novel and a gun moll’s tone and accent from the Boston area.

They later messaged quickly again, and it was at a feverish pitch. She said, “I’m getting in the shower and dressing up for you, I’ll call you to come on over.” He had told her that he liked old pin-up type fashions, totally in a straight-guy way, though.

She called back around 10 o’clock, and told him to come over— she was fortuitously a 15 minute bus ride away, at most— and to pick her up a pack of cigarettes. 

He told her he was totally broke, but would get the cash and run for them. She said she would just pick him up at the 7-Eleven.

He got there, and there was this group of four teen-age boys out front to the left of the doors, so he picked the right side, and stationed himself. 

Three young girls, skin still browning in the night of early summer, came out and walked in front of him. He looked them up and down, he rarely did that. 

The gun moll was closer to his age, and a little big, he knew; he was comparing. The teen-age boys tried to whistle, and cat-call at them, but the girls weren’t impressed.

Seconds later he saw her, walking from the left-side of the store, in a tight red dress, fishnets, and some high pumps; like it was totally practiced. “Hello boys,” she said to the teenagers, totally practiced.

“Hey, you look great.” He held the door for her.

“So do you,” she said.

She got Newport’s, of course, and him a pack of his own brand. They got in this crappy Miata, whose top had been left down in the evening's previous shower.

“So, how ya don’?” she asked.

“I can’t keep my hands off you.”

“Aw.” They kissed a good bit. “Wow,” she said. And they drove away.

On the couch, he lit his cigarrette, and got nervous. Then the thought hit hard. The pills. Earlier, at his house he had a big chicken dinner, rare but that’s what he got from the food pantry that week.

During the evening's activities, he had to use the bathroom, and turned on the faucet to silence the immense farting that commenced. They came at a lengthy duration and standing at the basin, with his hand on the faucet, his frazzled eyes were drawn to the pill bottles above the sink.

“Oh, Jesus.” The first one’s contents jumped off the label, like in an 82pt. Boston Herald headline font: Xanax. Ritalin was in the other two, her son’s and hers.

Now, he sat on the couch wondering what to do. He would just smoke his cigarette, of course.

He wasn’t pissed or resentful about not getting satisfied himself, by the sex. She had begged him in all sorts of dirty ways, but he demurred; he was still too shy with her, which was pretty coy because he was a total switch. The night was pretty rough.

He realized he didn't have a "disease of more", as was oft quoted. He had a Disease of Want. 

He had messaged her that he was more interested in watching her react to his touches, watch her rise and fall, and “slip…” He had left that open-ended deliberately, implying slipping into orgasm and sleep. He saw the former more times than were counted, and the latter, as well. Shouldn’t he then, be satisfied as well? Expectations fulfilled?

Rather than cop her drugs, he got up off the couch, and before crawling into bed with her, he did steal one of her cigarettes, totally forgetting about the baby food jar full of marijuana right next to them. He smelled it earlier, he wasn't interested. He could get better, if he wanted. She hadn't smoked.

He put the little dish they used as an ashtray across her big ass; she had never moved from where he had released her. He enjoyed the novelty of the quick-burning menthol, and of hearing someone slumber deeply again. He touched her forehead, still moist and fevered; hooked her hair behind her ear. 

He smiled, self-satisfied, and respectfully picked up the dish before putting the butt out, placed it on the nightstand, hunkered up close and put his arm around a pretty much perfect stranger for the first time in distant memory. And slipped himself…

A Zipped–up Grace in Transit

I was on the Orange Line, riding into town from Malden Center, trying to straighten out my thoughts. I had a speaking engagement that I was going to and was trying to turn the meandering, convoluted mess my head was in into some sort of structure to speak, hoping to deliver a message that was coherent, if not extemporaneous.

My afternoon had not gone well. It was the Sunday of the Columbus Day weekend, where, as I had written in a poem years before, there was a "rich October burn: When the sun plays across the face like a lover's smile upon parting." It was that rare last weekend of flush.

Despite such sentiment, I was dealing with a different parting, and focused as such, was overlooking a fortuitous joining. Per usual. I had just shown the apartment I was to take over to a future roommate. I was moving back to it in East Watertown, but my wife was moving out to leave the state.

"So, do you think she's really going to move out?" he asked.

I looked around. Half the apartment was boxed up. The rest was staged for packing. "Looks like it."

He thought the room was small, and I knocked twenty bucks off the rent. He didn't have a job. I was desperate to get out of Malden. No way I could afford the place, even at half the rent. I wanted my books. I wanted my technology stuff, my zines, my comic books. I wanted Missy Loo to sleep on my chest, snoring and purring. Anything to get me out of Malden.

He took the room. I rode the bus back to Harvard Square. I was speaking later that night, just around the corner from the apartment. I had a couple of hours to kill. I was going to hang-out, learn some HTML, write or something. I didn't even have money for one cup of coffee, but was hoping I could jump on someplace's signal. At Harvard I discovered everyone had similar ideas; it was packed, and after my experience at the apartment I felt vulnerable. I went back to Malden.

It took quite awhile to get there, and once in my room, I dropped my bag on the floor with hesitation, latently worried about bed bugs. But relieved that the bug that was my current roommate was gone, I stretched out on the only piece of furniture I could trust, because I had been dutifully spraying the mattress down with 91% alcohol to kill the bugs and eggs, and liberally applying talcum powder to it afterwards— cuts the bastards that survive to ribbons.

I don't know where I drifted to; I didn't doze or really dream. I guess I went back to SF, down in the Christmas Tree Warehouse; laying alone in bed, shivering, drunk, visions of Yankee Pot Roast, and Oven Broiled Chicken, Suckling Pig (with the apple in its mouth) drifting by overhead like in an old Merrie Melodies cartoon. The room came into focus again, I was surprised how much time had past, but it still wasn't enough. I got ready to go back to Watertown.

So, back on the T, rolling out of Wellington Square, I noticed this young woman in a hijab sitting three seats to my right. She had a small leather-bound Koran in here lap that could be zipped shut. But it was open in her lap, and her lips were moving, forming the words, but making no sound. I watched her mouth, curious. She was very attractive, and I had been in a phase of admiring how a well-chosen stylish hijab could frame a lovely, exotic face in a way that the hooded sweatshirts of her New England peers couldn't.

Somewhere around Sully Square, her head raises to look out the window across the car from us, and her lips are still moving. She's praying, I thought, not that unusual as I had been making my petitions on the train lately too, except it was my little "screw you" to everyone else who had their noses in their phones. I had begun to worry if that diminished the intent of my humble requests for an intersession.

But when the Orange Line travels between Sully and Bunker Hill Community College, there is this long stretch where passengers seated as the woman and I were, can see out across East Cambridge and the Boston side of the Charles River. In the evening hours the sun, as it sets, takes up a good portion of this space, and this balmy October evening it was taking a long rest like it was trying to catch its breath. It hung there in some fiery hue between crimson and a harvest orange.

I snuck a quick look at the girl, she was growing on me. She was still praying as the light filled the car. I was shocked to find that a corona the same color as the sun had encircled her face. Little tongues of flame licked about her cheekbones and jawline. It seemed she was transformed into a beautiful saint with all the ecstasy of the longing of Rumi.

Now I am sure there was a practical reason for this "illusion", based on the angles of refraction between the observer, subject, and light-source. I'm sure the glass had something to do with it. I thought about rainbows; sure you needed to be in the right spot, the antisolar point, and the bow appears at an angle of  ≈ 41° off the line that connects the head of the observer to their head's shadow...and so on. But the reality is that that rainbow that you see, is yours and yours only; it only exists because you are there to observe it. Even the guy standing next to you, he may see a rainbow, but it's not yours. Rainbows only exist if there is an observer, or its surrogate like a camera, to witness them.

And so it was here, I had come a long way already. The Presence of the Mystery. This was affirmed to me by this beautiful woman, who for a few brief moments on a October weekend was in grace— the belief that despite all worldly appearances, the universe makes sense, and reality is on your side. And if reality isn't on your side, you have made this choice. Reality does not choose sides, people do. Get yourself on reality's side, and be in its perfect alignment. I was present to recognize it, to bear witness to it, and to partake in her state of grace. This was evidenced by the fact the kid sitting next to me on my left had gone on the nod, in the middle of a text message.