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By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Click here to start with Chapter One.
Chapter Two
June 5
We were at the Fox and Hound. It stank of rotting carpet, of old alcohol, of broken glass. The entire decor is black and it’s always dark so you can’t see the puke stains in the carpet or get distracted from the Tom Waits albums playing on the jukebox, and I’m sure it’s cheaper: the owners don’t have to keep redecorating every time something is stained with blood or vomit. And the whites of eyes are so much more startling when set off against the highest quality black pleather.
Dani was leaning against me, running her hand up my leg. Like always, when I was with Dani, I thought of nothing but sex with her; but I wasn’t just with Dani so I had to try and think about things besides sex with Dani.
Like the continuing siege of Sarajevo and a fierce discussion of it led by Nellie. “We could finish it in a second if we wanted to. It’s a foolish disaster,” Nellie said. “If WE were better people, we would form a regiment to go over there and lift it ourselves, us, fighting the way the Abraham Lincoln Brigade did in the Spanish Civil War, but, you know, non-violently.”
I imagined my friends and I non-violently marching through a minefield into a hail of mortar rounds and artillery fire and asked the gap-toothed waitress for another vodka tonic.
A vodka tonic there meant a glass of cheap vodka and a bottle of tonic water. You put in as much of the tonic water as wouldn’t spill over the rim of the glass and suffered through the burning until the glass was empty enough to truly dilute the vodka, or until your throat was too numb for it to matter.
To my right were a few of my co-workers and my boss’s daughter who my co-workers brought because one of them is into her. He’d talked about her that whole day, describing his admiration for her body in such graphic detail that it had stopped sounding in any way sexy or enticing and started sounding like something he’d had to memorize the attributes of for an oral anatomy exam. I expected him to give the weight of each breast and buttock in cubic centimeters, to talk about the way the excretion of her glands worked to produce the pheromones that he must be responding to .
The boss’s daughter talked loudly and constantly. Her every sentence strung with noun, verb, adjective, adverb and gerund forms of the word fuck. And she spoke so quickly it was almost impossible to decipher what she was actually saying. There was something about her car that might involve a puppy or something about a game of tennis that had some connection to her break-up with her boyfriend.
Part of it went like this (the rest I either didn’t hear or blocked out entirely): “So, fuck...I was fucking playing tennis and these people had fucking signed up for the fucking court after me and we just fucking wanted to play one more fucking set and my piece-of-shit boyfriend is like ‘OK, you can have the court since you signed up for it.' That little fucking bastard better crawl back to me on his knees,” the boss’s daughter said.
I imagined myself and my friends non-violently marching through a country club into a hail of tennis balls and blazingly white-toothed smiles and started drinking the new vodka tonic; happy that I could still feel it burn.
Dani’s hands had reached higher and she was putting her tongue in my ear. It became hard to listen to anyone’s conversation. Nellie watched all this happen, rolled her eyes, then looked away to talk to Jean. Dani whispered something, a scratchy feather sound through a filter of her saliva. I didn’t hear, but I understood.
Then we weren’t sitting there anymore...I don’t remember leaving the table...or maybe I do, maybe we told everyone we were going to get Brenna from the club she was at and would be back..or maybe we told them we were going to...I guess it doesn’t matter what we told them. We were through the doorway and running down the street. She was chasing me. A small knot of gay men standing in front of J.R.'s split in two to get out of our way, laughing at us and pointing.
She caught me on the corner and grabbed me around with both arms and pressed me up against a tree before kissing me hard on the mouth so fiercely that the insides of my lips tore against my front teeth. A gay couple, arm-in-arm, wearing tight little shorts and tight little shirts wolf-whistled at us and one of them shouted, "Get a room!"
This time she ran away at top speed and I pretended I couldn’t catch her. The next block was empty and we passed a whole set of houses, including one I used to live in before I had traveled and returned homeless to sleep on the couches of friends and the beds of girlfriends and ex-girlfriends.
I slammed into her on the corner grabbing her with my arms so she didn’t fall down and we stood like that, with me holding her. I could feel her heart racing from the exertion. Feeling her heart race was more thrilling than kissing her.
We started walking, our arms around each other. In the middle of 15th street, we misjudged the lights and a driver swerved not to hit us. He stuck his head out of his car and said something that I thought was Spanish, but Dani said was just a normal everyday American "Fuck you."
On the next block was a paint store, a parking lot and further down, the New Vegas Lounge, where Brenna was supposed to be seeing a Rockabilly band. I don’t think we’d really meant to find Brenna, but, we’d had no direction so we’d headed towards her anyway.
After crossing, we stood locked together on the empty dark corner, the flat white light glowing green in the backlit leaves. I sank away into a place that was deep, dark and overheated. My hands sealed to her, I forgot, on the empty street corner, not to run them up her skirt. We moved toward the empty asphalt of the parking lot, moved towards two smooth white trucks, parked side-to-side, angled towards each other; the space between them forming a tunnel, and, at the end, a swath of thick grass between the smooth trucks and a wall beyond the grass. We moved--conjoined-- down the tunnel until we were on the grass and I moved on top of her smooth white legs and she pulled me to her and bit my lip again...
I don’t know how long we were under there or who saw us. I don’t remember sleeping, but maybe I did because there was a sensation like waking. Waking clear-headed and sober.
“Do you want to go back?” I asked, avoiding her eyes as I pushed myself to my knees.
“We could just go back to my place,” she said and I knew she knew I was avoiding her eyes.
“They’ll expect us back. We shouldn’t just disappear. We can go to your place afterwards,” I said, pulling my pants up, then reaching out with my hand to help her up. I brushed grass off the back of her skirt.
We
walked back slowly, holding hands but silent.
We stopped again on 15th street to look at a dilapidated red brick house
set back from all the rest. There was a flag of the Earth on a flagpole
in the unkempt yard. A brass plaque on its gate read, Embassy for Space.
“No one ever goes in or out...Not in the conventional ways anyway,”
I said, hoping she’d laugh and everything would be ok, but she said
nothing.
When we got back to the Fox and Hound, Brenna had arrived and my co-workers had left. Julian, Nell’s ex-boyfriend, had shown up and was trying to get her attention, but Nell was flirting with Kerran, our soon-to-be roommate and the bassist in Bleed Monkey (who she’d previously had a thing with). Julian was, in turns, buying everyone shots and glowering at Nell and Kerran. Jean found all this hilarious and from her corner did an under-her-breath commentary on the whole thing like some twisted sports announcer of sexual betrayal.
Nell
didn’t even seem to notice that Julian was there. She should just
cut him loose. That would be less cruel than leaving him flopping around
like a a still-living, half-gutted fish. It doesn’t agree with her
sainthood.
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
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2004 Me Three