The needle was still in her arm where he put it. He said it was because of what had happened one time when I was wired. She dreamt of a very few things, one of which was her father, who had a high brow that she could never reach from his lap. Of course, soon enough, some idiot would bump into him who was all muscle and slicked hair, and he’d want to tear everyone’s heads off. She didn’t even know me and said, “So like, when are we going to fuck?”
The park was closed and the rest started to pitch up their tents. She told me, “It’s not your guilt, it’s her regret, and you don’t have the right to take it away from her.” They got used to a lot of things. I think I did it for her. He wanted to stay looking sick.
She believed that we were our own and only. I once said, “Keep your pussy to yourself, no thank you. I can’t do anything with it, and if I did do something that has never been done before to you it’s not the other night, it’s this: I fucked you over before I had the chance. I changed your life. Now go. Set off a trend.” “You’re not getting any less pregnant,” he said. She considered safe sex as the police horse entered the park. The bar at the corner of 7th and ave A looked exactly the same as the bar on 8th and ave B: same people, same layout, same jukebox, same bouncer asking for the same piece of id in the same way.
He didn’t ask for any of this. The needle was completely symbolic for something else. She had only touched it. I didn’t believe anyone. He remembered nothing of it except that he wasn’t where he started, and his clothes were wet, or missing, might not have been his own clothes, but he’s kept them since then.
Only this far to survive. He said, “everything has a way of resisting its own fracture.” I wanted to read as much as I could but I got bored. She told me that she actually preferred quickies, that it didn’t matter. He would scrape off his scabs because he didn’t want people to stop giving him change. Personally, I think it had to do with my mother sticking her tongue into my mouth when I was six.
He picked a pubic hair from his tongue and said, “I think you’re going bald dear.” They called it prostitution and she shot up in an alleyway. Some things are extremely vivid, but that’s expected. He would stare at her swollen belly as she would smoke one cigarette after another. I didn’t want anyone near me, I didn’t want to remember.
She let the needle stay as she leaned back. It was like walking on water. For days and days he fed upon himself. When I took off her clothes, I had one thing on my mind: “Fuck this bitch the right way for once.” She said that it had something to do with my father and intimacy.
Sometimes it smelled bad, or they would remember to smell it, the smell of it: a breeze would pass by and they know what it first smelled like before they got used to it. He tried to understand the jagged, suspended motions of the bag where he tied the end of it. Perhaps my one shining moment was when she was leaving. All those operations a failure, except the one that had scarred her womb, if I hadn’t been born my mother might have had other children by now. “Do you like it?” she said and that was the last thing on his mind.
“Look at her, man” he said, “she did this. I just helped her out when it got too hard on her own.” “I only wanted to live a little bit longer,” she would say. The suspense of total chaos should not be determined by ‘the thin blue line’. As she came onto him, he had the sudden urge to smash the glass across her mouth. As if I’ve grown sick of it, “I’m going to end up in shit so what’s the fucking point?”
Her mother had dated many men until she found the one that would eventually force her out. He would remember his father, but all he had now was the sensation that it was once hot, what he felt for his father’s abandonment, but it was tired now, and it could not be twisted for anything more. He told her that I write because there was a gun to my head. I was boning some other bitch. He said, “We have much too much time on our hands.”
She didn’t suck his cock, she pecked at it. I wouldn’t do it: I had yet a long way to go. She was falling apart, handing out pieces of herself in exchange for emptiness. “One more year”, he says, when deep inside his mind he feels that he will be doing this forever. She asked him to.