Big City Nights

…I’m bound by obligation. It’s the same as before, only now more gruesome, though mercifully fleeting. I watch her thick calves. She’s cooking something among the filth, the spilled and dried beans across the counter, the months-old cups and glasses filled with things horribly changed from what they were. Her cat runs over and takes a swipe at my dog. He looks at me with an eyebrow raised. I slam three glasses of wine and open the other bottle. I’m too tired to go anywhere else. I look at her ass wedged into her skirt. In her photos she was much thinner, much thinner. I owe her a fuck, though. I know it, she knows it, and Satan knows it. For the last 18 months we’ve been exchanging naked or near naked phone pictures. She got her taxes back early and sent me money for gas. I drink the wine and notice a pipe packed with weed on the table, next to a dried puddle that could be chocolate milk or beer. I tap it and look at her from my chair. Her broad back turns and she smiles at me, “Of course. I never smoke it, but I get it for some reason.”

I fish a lighter from the wreckage and light the bowl. She turns and keeps cooking. Her giant body is locked into my peripheral view. I think about her photos while I hold the hit. The devil whispers: It’s all in the angles, motherfucker. I nod at the living room and blow a cloud toward it. From the end of the pipe there are busted blinds, hairy carpet stained and uncared for, her belongings scattered across the place. I smell the thick and hot odor of cat shit from the bathroom. I follow it to the door. The litter box is full and spilling over with clumps of saturated grains and piles of feces. I piss, flush, and look at the tub. It’s dirty to the point of disturbing. I lived across the country as a kid, I stayed with junkies and punk rock rejects, I lived in the worst shit holes of New York City, Los Angeles, and the towns and scenes in between, and I have never been so repulsed. A rat crawling across the floor would give the place some dignity. I’ve been here for a total of twenty minutes and I’m already more drunk and high than I’ve been in a year. She sets the plates down. I don’t register what she’s made, but I eat it with her. Under the table, she runs the toe of her pump up my shin, “What are you thinking?”

I think she lives like an animal, but I tell her the food is delicious and I’m really stoned and happy to be out of San Francisco, which is true. I eat, drink, and smoke two more bowls until she’s bargained from her weight.

She’s on her back. Her legs are massive, pale flanks and they’re spread, bent at the knees. I’m looking down through the moonlight, which is fucking bright enough to beat the dark, and I see her naked, morbidly obese body and the reality hits my cock like tomahawks, but I keep going. The moon shines in the window and it makes a rolling neon marquee in purple, and the marquee spells words like fat, failure, rock bottom and suicide, and I let it roll while I keep going. I ask her to get on all fours. She manages the move and I’m moving in and out of the flanks. Her hair’s short and she’s grunting. My hips propel waves of fat over her back. I think about my father digging a trench. I had a job with him in Arizona on the same crew two years after my mother died. He’d been homeless until a fat woman herself took him in and bought him new teeth and health. He was lifting weights in the backyard during that time, and his body had become servile with bulk muscle and bad labor jobs. I’d moved into their place for a short time and we’d gotten the job together. The weed is strong and I’m looking down at her, pounding away while the devil whispers in my ear again: Look at you now, motherfucker, fucking the flanks of your father. He’s dead now, have some goddamn respect. Shame on you, motherfucker, shame... I have to stop and lay on my back, while she puts her weight on me and shuffles herself forward and back above my hips. Her stomach is anchored upon mine, and I hold strong and look at the window. There has to be more than this. The love I’ve lost because of jail, the traps I’ve sprung on myself because of my hatred for the workforce. All the people who read my work and write reviews and send me letters are in their warm living rooms, two cars in the garage and maybe one in the driveway. Shelves full of permanence embedded in photos, in proud souvenirs of commitment, rooms of furniture and success. It’s bad thinking, the city says to me. You’re a fucking writer, you’re a writer who lives your art, streamlines through the lies with beauty and fists. You suffer nothing you’re unaware of, boy. You alone create your living nightmare. Stand up and shake off the filth, the hot liquid shame that has found you at birth. There is something out there, boy, something in the world is moving in on you, something to find and keep you, to bring you home for good.

She’s wailing now, her head is back and she’s wailing at the ceiling, “HOLY FUCK! I’M COMING! YOU SON OF A BITCH I’M COMING!” She presses her fat palms into my chest, quivers then collapses onto me. I exhale quietly and deeply to support her weight. A big leg finds the floor and she presses off me and walks to the bathroom. I unroll the condom and jack off thinking about the girl who poured my coffee in Medford.