The Oldest Boy

“The Oldest Boy”

“She choked me.”
Serrated breaths. Salted tongue.
“She fucking choked me, Christian.”
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Do you have any Xanax?”
“I have Klonopin.”
I hear my heart crack. Or maybe it’s a floorboard.
“That’s fine,” I sigh. “Where are you?”
“I’m at my place,” he says. “It’s just off the highway. I’ll send you directions.”

We had slept together plenty. In my car, that time I gave him money for an 8 ball and he drove us around for hours only to climb back into the drivers seat with crack instead. “You owe me,” I told him. “I don’t want this shit.”

I did it anyway.

We also fucked at the squalid house in San Marcos where we’d often trek to buy my ultimate vice (aside from terribly disillusioned older men) but never at his place. I had no idea where he lived. Only that he had a 1 year old son and a girlfriend he had left to be wherever he was, alone and “free.”

I pull up unsure of where to park. I post up next to the thing and idle. It’s a motor home. Just… right there on the highway.

He pours out of the front door and up to my window like weathered molasses.

“Hey you. C’mon in.”

I kill the engine and take his hand. I’m not sure why. Inside are troves of empty cans, too many to count, and half smoked cigarettes covering every flat surface. I clear a space and sit.

“So what happened?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “We started arguing, she said she took me in to help, not to run a flop house. Whatever that is. I may just go to a women’s shelter tomorrow.”

I won’t. Instead I’ll get my shit almost all the way together, I will get on mood stabilizers and anti-anxiety meds and I will work the overnight or the 6 to 2 and feed the cows and chain smoke on the porch. Until I stop all of that and start dancing again, this time without my wifey, without a shield, just the ever present sneers and whispers of men touching my shoulder as they lean in,

“You’re so much better than this.”

I’ll consider throwing a drink at them but instead I just giggle and press down on their scrotum and take their money home to my new apartment and stuff it into the drawer next to my hash. I’ll smoke and watch 30 Rock and meditate and one day I will be almost fine.

“Damn, I’m sorry doll.” He rustles around and finds a discarded pair of pants, pulls out a few little blues. I say thanks, pop two in my mouth and one in my purse.

We kiss.
We fuck.
Blanketed in a thick, wet heat. His beer belly sweats and pulses, catches a glint of light through a window and looks just like the moon. A moonrise. I’m twitching, repulsed but wet, expelling each breath in the same way a cauldron bubbles. I close my eyes.

I remember when this all started, before the fun turned into tightening ropes. How D and I drove back to Houston in the devils hour after a pickup. Over the horizon we saw what looked like a sunrise.
Could this happen?
Are we experiencing some sort of cataclysmic event, some sort of spurring of the rest of humanity and ourselves into an unknown territory of extra terrestrials or bliss or bitter ends?
We pulled up to the top of a hill in the middle of an empty highway and shut off the headlights.

“What do you think that is?” I asked.

“Part of me hopes we never find out,” D whispered.

We sat for awhile. A long while, just idling in the middle of an empty stretch of nighttime highway. Eventually, though, we had to keep going; keep moving forward down this path we were on. And then there it was, beyond the bend:

The fluorescent lights of Al’s Used Tractors.

It could never have been as glamorous as we had hoped. We just giggled and flexed our irises and clamored on toward our respective hells.

Christian slaps my ass and puts his hand around my throat. A gentle squeeze. I slide my head back, pushing my throat into his palm. I can feel the little blues in my blood.
Moonrise. Moonrise…

He cums on my stomach and stands up.

Blanket of thick, wet heat.

“Whoa, what the fuck? Did you piss in my bed?”

I prop myself up and assess the damage. Two feet by three feet. I go red almost as quickly as I recover.

“No, I.. I just squirted for the first time.”

He punches the air; mentally blots his masculine bingo sheet.

I’ve still never squirted.

I grab my shit and step outside into a slight but christening breeze. I lean out of it and light up a red. I’m trying to cough smoke rings.
Still can’t do that either.

He saunters down and grabs a cigarette from the pack in my hand.

“Have you been writing?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t have anything to write about.”

The splinter in his front tooth almost sparkles.

“You could write about me.”

“Isn’t that uh… a bit… narcissistic of you?”

“Nah. I make a great muse.”

I don’t think this is quite what he meant.

I throw my cigarette into the gravel.

“Sure man. Whatever you say.”

I hug him goodbye, for what I know will be the very last time.

“Hey Sloan?”

“Yeah?” I answer.

“You owe me five bucks for those pills.”

I stuff a wrinkled bill into his pocket and then I exit rock bottom, stage left.