Chapter Four

The Orgy

Chaz wakes me up pounding on the door. I’ve got a terrible headache and my leg hurts. When I pull back the blanket I see that there is a fresh gash on my thigh. I don’t remember doing it, but I must have. Who else would have done it. I’m supposed to meet Julie for lunch. I’m thinking that maybe I’ll blow her off and just drink instead. I get up and let Chaz in.
“Dude, you gotta hear about last night,” he says as he walks past me into the apartment. He has melting show in his hair. I hate that. Fucking snow. Chaz drops on the couch and says “Get me a drink and I’ll tell you about the crazy shit I saw last night.” He waves toward the kitchen and I go to find the booze.
I hand him a glass of bourbon and ask him to get on with it.
“Okay, so I’m at this club, Downward spiral you’ve heard of it.”
“On Pine, right?”
“Yeah. Down by the Battlefield. Anyway, I start dancing with this chick. She’s fucking smoking, right. Big tits, great ass, nice face. Anyway, she’s grinding up against me and I’m about to fucking pop. So I ask her if she wants to go back to my place. She say’s no.”
“Shit. That sucks.”
“Yeah. But then she says that there’s this party she wants to go to and will I take her. I say yeah cause I figure I really want to tap this chick and I’ve still got a chance. So I load her in my car. I almost have to carry her, she’s that fucked up. She already gave me the address, so I drive talking to her the whole way so she doesn’t doze off, right.”
“Yeah.”
“We get there. It’s this big house. Like mansion big. We go in and the place is packed with people. Not regular people, fucking beautiful people. I mean I am by far the ugliest person in the room, and I aint bad. So I find the booze and start doing the mingling thing but trying to keep this bitch next to me. I don’t want one of these other bastards to snag her if you know what I mean.
“So we drink and talk to people and dance and after a while I’ve got her ready, so we head up the stairs to find a bedroom. The place is like a mother fucking maze or something. There are hallways that just lead to hallways. We passed like eight bathrooms before we finally found a bedroom.
“Then I open the door and there’s an orgy going on.”
“No shit? “ I ask. I've heard about stuff like that, but I've never seen it. On TV they say that junior high kids are having orgies now.
“Yeah. Like in Rome or some shit. There’s this guy lying on the bed. One chick is riding his cock. Another is grinding her cunt into his face. There’s a chick being tag teamed on the other end of the bed. There are two hot bitches sixty-nine-ing each other on the floor. Some guy is watching and yanking his rod. Plus, get this, there’s this smoking hot red head naked sitting in a chair reading a book. No shit. All this fucking and she’s reading a fucking book.”
“So, what did you do?”
“What do you think? I pulled the chick in the room with me and joined in. It was fucking amazing.”
“Sounds like it, dude.”
“Man you shoulda been there.”
After I scoot him out I go to meet Julie and have some lunch at a little deli downtown. They’ve got pretty good sandwiches and cold beer. Then I go home and watch TV. In the bathroom I notice a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine. I don’t read that. I wonder who the hell would have left that in my apartment. Before bed I heat up a frozen dinner and drink myself to sleep. I wake up several times during the night. The sheets are wet with sweat and something that tastes like a scream is caught in my throat. I wish sometimes that I could afford to move to a better place.



If I had a Hammer

Julie and I go out after work. We have dinner at an Italian place, then go for drinks at a pub called the James Joyce. I drink black and tans and she has some brightly colored girl drink that smells like sun tan lotion. We talk about unimportant things until we’re both sick of the smell of the place. Then we drive to her apartment.
Her place is a lot nicer than mine. It’s clean and doesn’t smell like something dead is caught in the walls. She has a lot of flowered things with lace and frills and pictures on the walls of people she doesn’t know and places she hasn’t been. It’s all very pretty. It looks like someone’s home. No apartment I’ve ever lived in has had that distinction.
She puts on some music, The Cowboy Junkies I think, and we sit next to each other on the couch. At first we just sort of look ahead and don’t say anything. This seems like a terrible disconnect from the last time we were together. Then she took off her clothes almost as soon as I showed up. Then she was asking me to cut her. This time we make out gently, tentatively for a long time. Then, when I finally get the nerve to reach my hand under her shirt she says “Let’s go to the bedroom.” She takes me by the hand and leads me there.
This time is gentle, slow, and normal. No one bleeds. When it’s over I can’t wait to get out of there. I just want to get back to my place and crash. I lie there and wait for her to fall asleep. Then I extract myself from her arms and slip out the door.
At home I drink.