The Cure

[The below was written in about a half-hour. While I had a headache. ...These are excuses for the below being choppy and pretty stupid.]

Right now -- no matter when you're reading this -- a very large number of humans are making excuses not to have sex with their boyfriends or girlfriends.

Buddhists know that life is suffering. Millions of them turning down sex.

Without Hinduism the Western world would would be stuck in the missionary position and sex wouldn't be the highest art. Still, millions of Hindus saying "not right now honey."

Married Jews, Christians, Muslims, obligated by their respective gods (can we be adults and admit the Abrahamic religions worship different things?) to procreate, have the go ahead from on high to fuck without rubbers or the pill -- completely unencumbered -- but millions of them are too tired.

Agnostics, atheists, Wiccans, Satanists, Other: Millions of these people have headaches or other sudden, as nonexistent as atheists consider gods, ailments that preclude them from taking a moment's pleasure. (But at least a half-hour when done correctly.)

Millions of people in this world have easy access to the very reason humans exist: to procreate, and so to perform the act that can result in procreation. And millions are ensuring that they not do it.

And you're not off the hook either gays, lesbians, transgendered people, etc. Not when you're the perfect segue into my next point.

Evolution has taken millions of years to ensure that sex is its own reward. That it feels good. And millions (billions?) don't drink or take drugs, so an orgasm is the best thing they're going to feel. (Well, an orgasm is the best thing anyone will feel whether they're into drink and/or drugs. But coming while on pure Ex is -- I'm getting off track.)

Still: So many people in this world have spent a lot of today's thought on a reason or even a full-blown plan that will get them out of "having" to fuck tonight.

The human race has something deeply wrong with it.

We are commanded by religions, by gods, by greedy genes, by the pleasure principle, by what seems to be common sense, ad infinitum, to fuck each other. But we don't want to. (But will tomorrow dear. Promise.)

Millions of us genuinely do feel too tired, too stressed, too overwhelmed, too depressed, too anxious, too fill in the blank to have sex right now.

But even the above, seemingly valid, "reasons" to skip sex are incredibly stupid.

Millions (billions?) of people wake up in the morning, have to be somewhere (work, for instance), so they drink the caffeinated beverage of their choice. It makes them feel more awake.

And sex makes people feel less tired, less stressed, less overwhelmed, less depressed, less anxious, less fill in the blank. It's proven beyond all doubt.

But millions of people deny themselves and their lover something guaranteed by their own humanity to make them feel good. Or at least better than they had pre-coitus.

Millions of people are turning each other down right now because their guy or gal angered them in some way at some point (maybe just today, or maybe repeatedly). So sex is withheld for the purpose of denying the other person momentary happiness.

Millions of wives/husbands/girlfriends/boyfriends/other aren't fucking the person next to them in bed because that person didn't do a chore they were supposed to take care of today.

Which puts sex on the level of a chore and relationships on the way to their demise.

So fucking what (pun intended, and intended to induce a groan since it very well may be the only one you make today) if someone forgot to pick up something on the way home despite the fact you reminded someone more than once. So fucking what if someone should have washed the dishes since you cooked and, furthermore, clattered around in the sink as loudly as you could to remind someone that someone was being an asshole?

So fucking what so fucking what so fucking what?

Your response is to deny both of you the best thing either of you can experience? Especially when angry sex is the best sex people in long-term relationships can have?

To deprive your someone you're depriving yourself. You're taking the exact kind of shit in the middle of your bed resentment best mushrooms from.

Too stressed to fuck? Fucking will relieve your tension. Pissed off? Punch your someone in the guts then fuck your someone's brains out.

Millions: Stop making excuses, stop denying yourselves the best thing you have in your lives and drop trou already.

Gun Control

She got home to find me sipping syrah and watching television.

"How was work?"

She tossed her keys onto the small table by the window where we used to eat dinner together, stopped for a moment to glare at me, then went into the kitchen.

Almost immediately she was back, purposely standing in front of the TV, with a half-full garbage bag in her hand. She raised it shoulder-high and let it drop.

"What is this?"

"It's a garbage bag that could use more refuse before it makes sense to discard it."

"What did I ask you to do before I left this morning?"

"To empty the garbage from the kitchen. But when I saw what I was dealing with I thought we should throw away more garbage than the plastic that contains it."

We stared at each other.

"Sweetness, it's Double Jeopardy now and you're kind of in the way."

She pressed the Power button on the TV set.

I pressed the Power button on the remote.

She pulled the TV's cord from the electrical outlet.

"You had all day. I asked you to do only one thing."

"And I thought that one thing was ridiculous."

Her eyes were huge for her face and, terribly, all the more gorgeous and absorbing when she was in a fury...

"Get the fuck out of my house."

"I love you" -- I stood, stating a fact I had to reiterate so often it had come to insult both of us -- "I'll take the bag out."

"No. Get the fuck out of my house."

"I'M TAKING OUT THE GOD DAMNED TRASH JESUS GODDAMNED CHRIST!"

As I went for the bag she went for the telephone in the hall.

"And I'm calling my Dad. He'll be here in twenty minutes."

I knew she kept a loaded gun in the bedroom closet, the location of which she never told me in our months of living together.

"Fucking fine. Tell your Dad I said hello and that his fucking daughter needs to get back on her fucking meds."

"I'm dialing."

I yanked the door open and slammed it behind me.

The trash remained in the middle of the room.

Yesterday

Skating sucked yesterday... In the outdoor section, all the (wooden) ramps at the skate park were warped from the winter, and dropping in was like picking my way through a minefield... "OK I'll drop in here, have to miss those nails and that indentation (on the vertical part of the ramp, no less), then deal with the crack right before the fun box (at some parks not-so-aptly named), then immediately get my feet together for a 180 -- but have to jump before the exposed screw at the top of the box -- then land and navigate fakie (backwards) between the water puddles."

After only two hours of dealing with the not-so-fun boxes and treacherous ramps I ended up going to Lummox University. The place is even more of a skate park now than it was when I was a teenager, learning everything I know now. I was totally blown away: the perfect street course. Rails of all lengths and gradations of steepness, a huge gap to 180 over that allowed you to choose, by picking your launch spot, how far you needed to jump and how far you wanted to drop, and on and on.

And all within an area the size of a football field.

Why did I even go to the park? I already had jammed my left shoulder by misjudging my speed when launching to a disaster soul... I had no idea I would be going as fast as I was, since I hadn't dropped in on the ramp I used until that trick, and so I seemed to hang in the air after my jump, waiting to come down to earth so my skates could catch the ledge. My back skate did, but by then my front foot didn't know what to do with itself. I had almost launched the entire fun box, and I was straightening my skate out to land on the flat just when it caught the last half-foot of the ledge.

This made my front foot wash over the top of the ledge. which led to my entire body spinning ninety degrees atop the ledge, then to me taking the two-foot drop (from ledge to ground -- five feet for my shoulder) on my shoulder. At speed.

Back to the university:

I decided to give it a go at my favorite rail of all time -- an aluminum tube made smooth by thousands of previous grinds, hundreds of them my own -- long enough to make you proud you could actually lock in and ride out your grind for that long, but not long enough that if you fell you would be going too fast and hurt yourself (the rail runs down eleven steps).

I had a porn star (grind -- my balance mostly on the soul of my front skate, my back skate on the rail between my second and third wheels) locked in on my fourth try, but was a little off balance when I came off the rail fakie, my preferred may to dismount rails (the best-looking), with my left wheels not quite level with the ground. My boot was almost sliding along the concrete -- and all my weight was on that skate. This caused me to bend my knees until my ass almost touched the ground and my arms to spin like windmill blades as I attempted to get my balance onto my right skate.

Suddenly my left foot gave out entirely. My left skate's ankle strap exploded which, I soon found out, carved scrapes into my lower leg as it buckled into the skate. The scrapes on my lower leg, together, look like a shark bite.

(From pseudo-landing the grind to buckle explosion took only about two seconds, in which I covered a distance of about five feet.)

Naturally, I immediately removed the broken skate and heaved it into a wall while yelling FUCK! as loud as I could. I had almost proved to myself that I was perhaps three-fourths as good a skater as I had been almost a decade ago.

...My behavior is not kid-friendly in that it is completely childish, I thought as some parents who walked by gave me reproachful looks, holding their kid's head between them as though trying to insulate his mind from the word I had yelled. They turned away from me the moment I looked at them, vehement, likely afraid that my anger at botching the landing could be turned on them...

I calmed down an iota as I thought the situation over, seething while examining my skate: that's what the ankle strap is for: to break in a situation that would otherwise break your ankle. So I suppose I can't complain too much.

I should definitely use the broken-skate-thing as a reason/excuse to finally quit skating... But my christ it's harder to give up than smoking...

It's About Suppression

A girl moved in two doors down, and was the first friendly neighbor I had had in four years of living in my apartment complex in Downtown/Logan/Dupont DC.

We went out for a drink the first Wednesday we met. In the following weeks I would stop at her place to borrow her blow-dryer, which I used as a makeshift-iron when I needed to look decent (which wasn't too often). She called me whenever she had a spider or roach crawling up her wall.

The first time she called me I went over simply to tell her that, as a rule, I do not kill things. That, whenever an insect makes its presence known in my apartment I simply scoop it up with newspaper and let it our the door.

"And that's why this place is infested!"

Sure, she was right, but I don't like the thoughts that go through my head just before I kill anything sentient.

The thoughts I have before I eat anything (formerly) sentient are all about my taste buds' alacrity... But I don't kill things myself. I let others do it in massive murder factories, which makes me somewhat morally superior to those who do not, of course...

"Are you done already?"

I should have been. I rolled up the newspaper as I stared at the bug, asked its forgiveness (which I'm sure I did not get) and killed it simply because she wanted it dead.

She and I had a drink and a bug-killing session (not on the same days... We didn't toast the insects' extinction) about once a week until one night when she called me, frantic.

A roach.

I looked everywhere in her studio and couldn't see anything. Then I moved to her dressing room/bathroom and asked

"What should I do? It's gone."

"Check everywhere!"

"Uh... Should I open your medicine chest and all that shit too?"

"Do whatever!" she yelled from a perch on a stool.

I immediately went to her medicine chest, recalling when I had seen a cockroach climbing on my own toothbrush (immediately discarded -- with everything else that was in its vicinity) in my own medicine chest, and also recalling my days as a drug addict. On what had become instinct, I immediately went for where I knew pills would be.

I found a single brown bottle, the label facing away from me, more than half-full. Saliva flooded my mouth as I checked over my shoulder and, to make sure she was still in the other room, yelled

"I don't see the thing here!"

"Look harder!" Her voice came from the same spot in the same room where I'd last seen her.

I turned the bottle around and the label shouted VALTREX.

She had herpes.

I never had been afraid of catching an STD, even when I was fucking the sluttiest girl in Whatever State University without a condom every weekday, while cheating on her and being cheated on on the weekends (and sure neither of us was using condoms then, either). (I was in the running for sluttiest guy on campus.)

But fear got me then, cold and irrational.

I came quickly out of the dressing/bathroom.

"Look, roaches can go anywhere. The one you saw is on the sixth floor by now" (we lived on the eighth).

"Stick around for a while. I have some rum... And I can't stand the thought of..." She went on and I wasn't listening.

She thought she was more attractive than she was and interesting by virtue of being younger than me. I hadn't tried to fool around with her, however, because her face was pockmarked and she was a horrible tipper. And now the bottle...

"Look, I'm not killing anything anyway."

"Big Man!"

I was closing the door behind me:

"Naturally, I realize how my inability to find and kill an insect means I have a Tic-Tac dick.

"...Sleep well."

I went to my apartment and, still irrational, took a very hot, very long shower.

The Sporting Life

"Fuck. If we don't turn off we're getting mugged."

"Calvin? CALVIN, COME ON!"

V had already crossed to the other side of the street, which I wanted to avoid because there were two teenagers leaning on Section Eight fences at 3:30 a.m. there.

"V, come here" I seethed through my teeth and across the road... But he already had resumed walking.

"Goddam you forever V -- stay close to me."

I crossed the road at a run to wrap his sleeve around my hand, trying to keep him close while he tried to control his legs and walk the straight line of the sidewalk.

I let go of him for one second as I hopped across the gutter, just after we passed the two kids ("What's up?" "What's up."). Then one of the kids was in front of me.

"Gimme your wallet."

I was straddling the yellow lines in the middle of the road.

Where the fuck was a car, even at 3:30?

Oh yeah, not in this neighborhood. Not even a cop car.

"I'm sorry -- What?"

The kid couldn't have been more than fifteen. He shoved a box-cutter (if fucking terrorists caused 9/11 with them, it stands to reason someone will fork over a simple wallet when faced with one) into my stomach, only enough to press in the skin around it.

My eyes, of course, immediately examined the tool, and I immediately saw that the possible cause of my death -- the blade -- was rusty and dull.

If I was to die it would be from infection... Possibly sepsis... The medics would have hours to put Humpty together again.

But fuck -- what did the other guy have... What was he threatening V with... How could I have let him go for that one goddam moment...

"Gimme your damn wallet man."

He wasn't acting calmly enough -- and was too young -- to convince me he had the balls to slit my throat. Only my stomach was in danger... Then again, maybe everyone who dies choking on their own blood in the middle of DC roads thinks this a few spoken sentences before their windpipe feels the wind...

"Look, that's not gonna work out."

"The fuck did your say?"

He pressed the box-cutter harder into me. At that point it still wasn't even cutting the cotton I was wearing.

...Still... What does the other guy have on V? What is my stalling accom--

"CALVIN!"

V came rushing across the street, oblivious to what was going on with me and the kid. He bear-hugged me across the street to the other sidewalk.

It was over. The kids made no effort to follow as I dragged V by his collar as fast as I could.

I made us walk a few blocks out of our way before we came to V's English basement, while trying to explain to him the danger we had been in. When he asked "What?" in utter incomprehension for the fifth time I knew his drunkenness saved both our asses.

I talked to V after I woke on the sofa and he came out of bed. I was happy to discover that he didn't recall anything that had happened past one o'clock of what was technically the same day.

It reminded me of the relief and surprise I felt when, as we shared a bottle of Shiraz before passing out after our encounter, the wine glass didn't shake in my hand.

Bitches

I had to go to the second-floor's bathroom because the first-floor's was completely mobbed. After waiting on the stairs for about five guys to come out I was able to go in.

I went to the one open urinal and started to think of when I was ten years old and the family went on vacation to Niagara. My stage fright was just abating when a guy stood at the urinal next to me and put a beer in a plastic cup atop the stained porcelain, directly beneath the pipes where the effluent water flooded down when you depressed the handle... And I could see the pipes sweat just above his drink...

My dick shrank until it was nothing but an oversized clitoris.

"Fucking bitches. I mean, man, you bring them out, you buy them drinks and then the bitches are like (he puts a childish expression on his face and speaks faux-apologetically): 'I'm kinda seeing someone.'

"Fucking fuck you bitch! Tell me that before I buy you five drinks!

"...I mean bitches, right?"

I was still trying to convince myself that I had heard what I had heard, which prevented me from responding.

"You've been there man. Watch out some bitch could be doing it to you right now."

He flushed, and with the sound of flowing water my dick reappeared and I pissed.

...If anyone would've taken the bet, my life was on whatever girl he came with not being the slightest bit involved with anyone...

I came out of the bathroom after washing my hands. The line for the women's went down the stairs.

I stood on a landing: "My friend just came out of here to go find us a table -- anyone have any idea where he went?" I asked, effectively, every girl on the stairs.

The girl standing right in front of me said

"Yeah, he went through there."

"Thanks so much."

I went through the door-frame-without-a-door and to the second floor's bar. I thought about how all my friends were downstairs... Christ, two of them had come all the way from the other coast just to see me...

But in my mind that schmuck was still pouring out bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch.

I sat on a barstool, turned it away from the bar, and spotted the fucker quickly. He was sitting on a couch, which was across from another couch (both running parallel to my line of sight) on which other guys dressed exactly like him sat (khakis, undershirts that clashed with their long-sleeve, pinstripe, button-up Polos, anyplace-brown shoes). And there were girls with them -- one apiece. The "bitches."

Every one of the guys was more muscular than me -- accomplishing a feat fit for a ten-year-old. But I had skill and speed... But not enough to take down three guys who, when I punched them, would end up less damaged than my own knuckles.

I turned my barstool around and ordered a Stoli on the rocks.

I exhaled from the bottom of my lungs, then turned around with the tumbler in my hand.

I was amazed to see the guy who had previously shit from his mouth leave suddenly to piss again... Or maybe to stumble around for a "bitch" who would appreciate his sensitive nature.

His presence on the couch had hid his leather bomber jacket from my view. It was draped on the couch's back.

I drained my drink and immediately began walking... slow, calm.

I had no idea what I was going to do, but found myself doing this:

I grabbed bathroom-boy's jacket by its collar and slung it over my shoulder, mid-stride.

"Don't worry about it guys," I said to the males (I would kill myself for calling them "men") on the couch, not looking directly at them, not looking away.

As I made my way to the stairs, down to the first floor and out to the insanity of Eighteenth Street Washington DC on a Friday night I didn't hurry, didn't complain when I was held up for a few minutes in the entryway by a girl who had lost her shoe on the stairs. I didn't look behind me.

I was either going to get the shit knocked out of me or I wasn't. I thought of the best position to take to cover my head and internal organs once they had me on the ground.

But I got outside and to the sidewalk to my amazement, and immediately crossed the street. I spun the jacket around my arm like cotton candy around a stick and held it close to my stomach so it couldn't be seen from behind.

Then I walked the mile downhill, home, never looking behind me.

When I got into my apartment, with the locks clacked behind me, I finally took a deep inhale and let out a long exhale.

Why was what I had just done so important to me? Why, from the word "bitch," did I have to harm that piece of shit in some way?

I tried on his jacket. Finding that it fit was an unexpected bonus...

I'm sure the douchebag chalked up his loss to a mindless act of theft...

But it's not about him and never was. It's come to be about the fact that every time I wear that jacket my shoulders go back and my chin comes up and I remember that I can overcome rational fear to do the irrational: what I believe is fair.

And She Was

It had not been a good evening. She wanted to stay in the apartment, I desperately wanted to be the fuck out of there on a Friday night like a normal goddam twenty-five-year-old.

We lived together in Tacoma Park, an ex-urb so close to DC you would smell the Potomac if your stood in the right spot.

She gave in and decided to drive us to a bar she had been to on Connecticut Avenue.

"Why are you taking this way? We're going around half the freaking Beltway. ...We should've just parked and taken the Metro, like I said before."

"This is the only way I know how to go where we're going -- and we're already driving, so just be quiet."

I was getting the shakes. And I couldn't let her see that. ...The alcohol withdrawal drove an impatience that bordered on insanity...

Still, who the fuck drives slower than the speed limit?

I held my tongue and wrenched my hands all the way to The Four Provinces, a not-so Irish bar. It took us forty-five minutes to get there when it should have taken fifteen. ...Or would have, if I had driven.

But she drove because both of us knew I was going to get loaded... I physically needed to at that point.

She parked her Beetle on the street a few blocks away from the bar. We walked, picking our way along curbs and jaywalking across four-lane streets, never touching.

We got a table for two once we were inside. I immediately ordered a Guinness plus one because the place was so busy I knew it would be a while before we saw our waitress again.

"Did you know Guinness has less alcohol in it that Busch Light?"

Her stare answered: How could you possibly think I would care?

She stared off and twirled the stem of her wine glass in her fingers.

God I wished she would just get drunk so we could fucking forget about everything...

I finished my first glass in three gulps and held up a hand to the waitress for a third.

I finally felt not-sick.

I calmed. Everything around me stopped being an assault on my senses.

I sat back in my chair and looked at her: her thin top gathered by a string that was knotted loosely around her champagne-flute neck; her witch-black hair so long it almost touched the ground; her eyes large orbs of undisturbed water on a night full of clouds, glistening.

I had never told her that I loved her. I wanted to, then.

"What? Why are you looking at me like that? ...You can't be drunk already."

"No, I'm not. It's just...

"...You look good tonight.

"You always look good."

"I like the band that's playing."

"So do I."

I cupped the hand she had around the wine glass and bent over the table. I kissed her on one of her cheeks, which felt delicate as paper-thin glass to my lips. Then we pressed our heads together, side by side.

When I sat back both of us were smiling.