We arrive at Baker’s house—her parents’ house—where I always used to pick Baker up with a handbag full of extra panties for their daughter to take over to my house. Memories of her mom packing extra undies for her daughter, us all knowing what was about to happen (apparently)—Baker getting to my house and we throw down and skrog (which is some term invented by my old friend Chad meant to say: to fuck with animal intent and abandon)—don’t you just want sometimes, to throw down and skrog? Baker and I actually fucked like this, reaching upwards, begging for each other’s genitals, clawing them, raking them with fingernails, teeth, skin.
Baker grabs my arm and brings me inside their house. Everything looks like it is untouched from years ago. I mean: seven years I’ve been coming here, of cleaning and living, arranging the same books and knickknacks in the exact same way. Lift it up, wipe underneath a statuette’s profile, shadow, then replacing the object—clean?—yes!—done!!
Charisma pulls me inside and Mary and Manny erupt with greetings for me. It’s like everything my (now divorced) parents could have said to me if they gave a shit: that I was welcome and loved—for starts.
Mary is standing right in front of me and she says: “Look at you!” She hugs me tightly and Baker is all: “Mom! Let him breathe! Get off!! Mary! You’re acting like as if he was your boyfriend!”
“Oh, so you two is now a boyfriend and a girlfriend? Baker! You have to tell me about these blips in your relationship history.”
“We ain’t boyfriend and girlfriend!” Baker shouts.
“Yeah, Baker will never have me,” I say. “She’s too into paramilitary guys, like this Rambuncto. She’ll marry someone like him and I’ll be across the country living alone in an urban hut in Hollywood.”
“Did I tell you?” Charisma says. “That Matthew is in film school?”
“Is this true?” Mary asks.
Then Manny is like: “Y’all, I can’t see the television.”
Charisma goes to him, grabs the remote, throws it through the door to the kitchen.
“Get your own remote! I’ve got a friend over! How many people do I bring for you to see? Huh? Mom: put Manny in his place when he gets out of line. These nature documentaries and space programs are ruining your brains for sensible urban living!”
“We don’t be watchin’ no nature show. No astrophysics here, neither.”
“I know that,”’Charisma says. “Maybe you should.”
Mary goes back to her chair.
I go to Manny and shake his hand. “Good to see you, sir.”
“Good to see you, too. Do you have a few minutes? I can show you my new paintings.”
Charisma grabs a book off the shelf and throws it across the room at her uncle.
“No,” she says. “I haven’t got to see Matthew all day and you two isn’t going to spend the remainder of his day taking even more time from me and him. Matt: you can go upstairs and I’ll meet you in a few minutes.”
“Ok. Good to see you two. I hope you have a good night.”
Charisma stands facing me, blinking her eyes in a flurry. I take her hand and kiss it, then I’m bounding up the stairs two and three at a time, throwing my bag on the floor of the bedroom toward the front of the house—Charisma’s old room—and I’m taking the vial from off my neck and rummaging through a milk crate for a mirror—something—before finding a copy of Stephen King’s IT laid flat on the front of a bookshelf. I’m pouring out and setting up, retrieving my debit card and smoothing out the coke, cutting off the first few lines for me and Bakerton—taking the first for myself and leaving the next two for Charisma and I.
Their voices come from downstairs:
“..it’s not that, Mom—it’s not. Rambuncto isn’t an issue, he’s not even a factor. He’s..look..when Brooky was in prison I didn’t need your permission to go visit her—I didn’t need your encouragement!! Did I? No I did not. Everything was playground—cowbells—there’s this Snoop Dogg lyric I can look up for you that explains the whole thing! It’s a polished-brass couplet that sums up my entire world! I knew you would never understand and it is exactly because—I mean as if it was designed by a physicist in his laboratory—”
Unintelligible talk in Mary’s voice.
“—Matt is going to make movies!”
“I..don’t understand..why, ever..you always go with them artist types but where is Matthew? He got his..out of Dayton. Gone. Far. What ever happened to that girl you said he finally went for? What was her name?”
“It’s Rebecca and I’d appreciate if you didn’t mention her while he’s here.”
“Why?”
“Because! Because she died. Ok? So she’s gone. And Matt is fragile because of it. When he’s opened up enough to come here, I don’t want us to push him any farther. Yes!! Every time you talk about it..it is a climbing axe stuck between his shoulder blades. Just don’t turn the axe, ok? Don’t. Turn. Thy. Motherfucking. Axe.”
Then a few minutes of whispering only.
“..reasons..left his job..California..dating a psycho bitch! Shhh!! I’ll be back, Mom. Just..whatever you normally do. And..don’t be packing..bunch of underwear..he’s seen all my panties before. Shut up and watch TV, then. You’re all fucking degenerates.”
Then the door to upstairs opened and Charisma came up.
“Please don’t ask me what we were talking about,” she says, sitting across from me.
“I heard most of it anyway.”
“I figured you did,” Baker says. “Where’s our coke?”
“That’s it,” I toss the metal vial on the floor.
Charisma picks it up. “That’s it?”
“I thought there was more,” I say.
She unscrews the vial. “Where did it all go?”
“I..uh..I guess I snorted it.”
“Did you and Nik do some?”
“Nah I..never showed Nik I had any. I left to go to the bathroom and did some lines. But I never knew that much was missing..I mean geez..I never..we can get more, can’t we?”
“Yeah but not tonight!” Baker wails.
I take the vial from her, turn it upside down, nothing comes out. I’m genuinely amazed.
“Fuck, Charisma. If I had known you wanted to do some together tonight I would have saved more. I’m sorry, girl.”
She can see it in my eyes that I’m sincere.
“Let’s do this,” she says, hiding her disappointment.
She cuts lines from the cover of IT.
I offer her every other one of mine.
I get up on my cross-legged knees and kiss her: the reddest, fullest, broken-ass surfaces of lips I have ever kissed. Sex with her like bleeding—bleeding pink of vagina lips held wide and me licking here and there for a home run. Remembering when I had done that to her, remembering a face full of cum and thinking how much I love when a girl cums in my face, how supple and giving a girl can be once you’ve made her cum..ready to spread legs wide bend over a sink let me fuck her from behind fucking Charisma on the edge of my mattress her refusing to let me cum so she can have it all night—boom! one, boom! two, and there is boom! three! And more than one girl telling me, “Two is good!” but after three a girl I just met will let me fuck her any way I want and beg me to cum: in her, on her, will tie me to a chair and fuck me with her mouth, will pull her knees to her chest undercover in the bed and let me treat her like she’s a childhood girlfriend or stuffed animal, rubbing our genitals together until I finally bust her pouch full of white cum—that’s an envelope I sign, seal, deliver.
Charisma played a game that night. No words. She’d do a line, staring at me before and after like she was subservient: a straight slave with love intentions. Someone who would serve my interests. Then I would give her a master look, snorting my line, pulling off her bra with my teeth—no one is a master to her groove, or clothes, whoever is the master and who is the slave doesn’t even come into play then I’m raking my fingernail along the surface of her breast, coming to her plumpish nips, subverting the nipple, cutting her so slightly with my touch.
Charisma and I slept in bed that night, together. Like boyfriend and girlfriend. Except we both knew—had always known—that a relationship between us would never work. We were fuck buddies above all. That’s all we would ever be. Never a pinch of ownership or partnership. As many nights as I’d sought her out at the seasonal Halloween store where she worked in the mall. As much as I would cheat on my actual girlfriends at the time, always, only, ever to be with her. As many times as I would steal away intimacy with Charisma, I would always go away, I would always go back, to a girl I liked more, but who I could never express myself with sexually. Charisma would never have me and I would never have her (emotionally). She wanted to fuck her genius and I wanted to fuck her like I wanted to fuck the girl next door—except she wasn’t my next-door neighbor—she was the girl from East Dayton, and I was the guy from North Dayton. Those were our “sides of the tracks.” As much as I have tended, in this life, to pick girlfriends from North Dayton, there is something in me that always loves an East Dayton girl.