Guy

What can I say about her that isn't cliché? She liked to catch glimpses of her eyes in the rearview mirror. She liked to wear dark-blue sweaters and jeans; she wore socks to bed. She thought she would die like her grandfather, of kidney disease and diabetes.

All the rest is average: a pale bedspread, a tabby cat, a spritz of perfume on her throat and wrists, a tendency toward paranoia when it came to other women, a fanaticism for chocolate (dark), an aquiline nose, freckles sprinkled on her shoulders, collarbones so deep they cast shadows, crocheted covers for square tissue boxes.

She thought that she was fat, but they all do; if not too fat then too thin, too round, too flat--they all think this way. The girl could laugh, though. She could sit in a diner with me for hours and drink coffee and buzz.

I stopped calling. Because she was stuck doing something she hated.

You stop calling, you see a woman's true colors. That's cliché, too: true colors. There's a reason some things become cliché. She had true colors; they came out crimson and black, like a cheesy vampire costume, all flair and no substance, very flammable. I would open my front door and there she'd be, at six in the morning, asleep and shivering on my front porch. Psycho, they say. It works on some guys. Some guys wake them up, take them inside, wrap them in a blanket, listen to their sob stories. I stepped over her and went to the car. She jumped on the hood and tried to sue when she sprained her ankle. You really have to watch out for the ones who say they hate their jobs.

There were the pain girls, the black-sheathed ones with dull hair/ eyes/skin, complacent speech, no makeup, bored expressions. They were beat poets and artists, writers, coffeehouse slackers. They went to bed easy, especially the vegetarians, for some reason. They didn't like strings, in theory. In real life they clung just as bad as the ones with car payments; only difference was, they really loved their pain. Without it, they couldn't make their art. They tasted like smoke and coffee and ink.

I laughed at the pain girls, I didn't fall for them. I never appreciated their "artistic expression." I never bought the "stripper with a heart of gold"--another cliché, yet prominent. I went to strip clubs at noon, when the places were almost empty and the girls smoked at the bar between dances. I drank a lot of scotch on those days. I had to, before touching all that silicone and makeup. Those were creepy girls, most of them dumb and lonely and abused, many of them mothers, a few of them married. None were good at drawing lines in the sand. How do you let a guy hold your breasts in his hands, kiss you on the mouth and then not fuck him? Maybe they don't fuck everyone, but they all fucked me. Could have been the fifties I tucked into their G-strings.

I have had two women, a redhead named Josie and her roommate, these crazy girls always at war. I fucked them both while they squirmed around together, and it was fun, I suppose, but I don't prefer it. I don't like having to take it out once it's in, and you know girls get all jealous, my turn my turn my turn.

I had a girl who tasted so good I ate her out while she slept. She said it felt comforting; she must have been used to it. I don't know what she ate to make it taste so good; I would have asked, but I couldn't keep my mouth out of her pussy whenever she showed up.

•

My father told me not to fall in love before 30, to just fuck and fuck and fuck and leave them if they wouldn't fuck. My mother was packing her china in the dining room. It was his parting advice, when I was 12; I left with my mother that night and he died before 1 could visit the next summer. He had looked so tired, telling me that; he blamed love for making him stupid, not my mother for holding out.

He was right about the fucking, really. I know what those vampire stories are about. Every time I leave the house I'm out for blood, and I get it where I must. Those stories are all code, about men who never settled down with a woman who made him stay home and then stopped fucking him. It about those goddamned guys out there watching sports at the bar with their buddies every night, watching the waitress' ass and picturing it, naked and pink and open in their hands. It's about that magical moment when she feels you looking and likes it.

I haven't met many women who didn't say they loved me. They like to fall in love, they think it's a requirement. I didn't fall in love, not with the best ones, not even with the ones who refused me because they thought that might help. I just moved along, moved along, moved along.

It's not like I'm made of stone. Sometimes I'd be with a great girl, tight ass and heavy breasts and a flat belly. A few of them could do things most girls only think they can do, like read a book, tell a joke, talk sports, suck dick, that sort of thing. You know, you could get comfortable with a laid-back girl like that; you start thinking about snagging that girl for life.

That's why my dad told me to fuck and fuck and fuck, because when you do you find out that no woman is unique, they all say my turn my turn my turn, and they all get old. I've had a few 10s, and I thought about handing rocks over to them, but I always recovered my senses before I actually showed up at the Tiffany counter.

It's leisure, my mother says, leisure and boredom, that makes me act like this, every day in the strip clubs and no job. I live off what my dad left me, only me. When that account runs dry, and it isn't going anywhere soon, I'll go to school, do what I have to do.

For now, though, I'm back in the strip club again, this time at night, a big scotch on my table, and this fake breasted chick is sitting with me, talking while I'm trying to watch the stripper onstage. She's going to fuck me tonight, but I've fucked her before; I don't have to pay much attention. She's talking about heading to her place and taking some mushrooms, which is fine by me, as long as she's supplying and I get a fuck out of it. I stay to applaud the girl who's onstage, some fresh ass I haven't done before; I give her a Benjamin and she sees me in a whole new light. I leave with the stripper at my table and we take separate cars to her house. She mixes her 'shrooms into some ice cream, but I eat them straight. I fuck her, quick, while the drugs are taking hold. I know I might not feel like it after I'm completely psyched out.

"This shit is not working," she says as she walks into a wall. She falls down easy, this nasty red spot forming on her forehead. Her breasts have doubled in size, but that could be my trip. I turn away from her; I don't like looking at women when I'm high.

I turn on the TV. In a few hours the bitch is crying, saying something about how I take her sublime energy, and she threatens to leave. She storms out and I think, Oh shit. She's going to get caught, she's going to kill herself, she's having a bad trip, I gotta go after her.

It takes forever to get off the couch. The front door keeps moving and I make my way outside. At first I can't find her, but then I hear the click click click of her heels. She's barely dressed, halfway down the block. I run after her, but the air is water. I swim to her, my arms flailing.

We lie in someone's front yard, grass making little grooves in our skin; we watch the sky and there's a little rain that feels incredible. Her trip is really terrible; I feel bad for her. But at the same time I don't give a shit, so I say nothing. When she feels better we walk a little. She can barely balance in her heels and she must be freezing in her tiny stripper skirt and tank top, but the 'shrooms are keeping her warm, or else she's a really good sport. The walking clears my head. I'm coming down and wanting something, a cup of coffee maybe. The sun has come up. I tell the stripper that we just go too fast, too damn fast, and she throws up in the gutter.

I walk her back home and put her to bed, then I go out looking for coffee. I find a book-store with a coffee bar; there's jazz on the intercom and clocks painted on the tables. Exhaustion seeps up from the ground, through my toes, up my legs and into my organs and then my head, until I can barely stand up. I get my coffee and stumble to a bookshelf and there's that girl, the psycho, the one with the crocheted tissue box covers and the pale bedspread. Suddenly the only thing I want is to smell her perfume, to wake up on her clean pillowcases again. She's reading Goethe. She's running her fingers through her long, blondish hair, lighter at the ends, twisting those long fingers through gnarls and tangles. When she looks up I'm there, and I'm too tired to pretend I didn't see her.

She smiles at me. I think I must look like hell, but then a woman loves a man who looks like hell. They like fixer-uppers. She moves closer to me and I don't protest. She gathers me into her chest, my face in her neck, my cheek on her blue sweater, and she says, "There used to be a time when vocalists didn't compete with the background music, when they complemented a piano and drum. I don't remember it, I was born in 1977. But they play it sometimes here. Hear that--there's some horn, a crescendo."

Maybe she didn't say that. I wasn't all the way down yet. But she held my head to her shoulder and moved me a little, back and forth.

I haven't many women who didn't say they loved me. They like to fall in love, they think it's a requirement.