LABYRINTH
I can’t believe she left her bra. I stand holding it like a frail object of devotion, some kind of magic fetish. Through the fourth floor window, I watch her drive away and notice how quiet the apartment building is in late afternoon as it eases into evening. The rising moon sends thin shafts of light through the thick woods across the street, leaves and branches swaying with the wind following a winter storm. I turn away from the window, thinking about work, where we both should have been this afternoon. She agreed to have lunch and didn’t say no for the rest of the day.
Her empty souvenir dangles from my hand as I listen to the phone message of my wife’s recorded explanation of her afternoon. “It’s me, honey. I know you’re not home but I have to call now. I’ve got another meeting and then they have me scheduled to speak and do a presentation for another group of clients. The meetings won’t be over till late.”
She muffles the phone and he can hear her talking to someone else. She comes back. “You probably should call Tom and tell him we can’t take the kids this weekend. I might need to stay another day or two. Corporate is lining up some potential client meetings and they’re hinting that they want me to stay and speak. There is some good news. My period should be over by the time I get home. I’ll call tomorrow. Love you. Bye.”
An hour before, before she left her bra between the sheets, she sits on the edge of the bed, pulling on her clothes. As she gets dressed, she asks me if my wife ever gets jealous. “I can tell you about jealousy,” she says as she pulls on her jeans. “My boyfriend’s the jealous type. He gets really upset if he thinks I’m going out on him. I can’t figure it, though. He’ll score any babe that’s ready to spread her legs for him,” and after a pause, “and maybe a few guys as well. My friend Cindy thinks Tony,” which I now know is her boyfriend’s name, “and the drummer have been getting it on.”
“The drummer, and the drummer’s a guy? And Tony’s your boyfriend?”
“Yeah, he’s the singer and the band is really good. Maybe you’ve heard of them, Death Grip. When he gets dolled up for a performance, he looks like a girl, a really cute one. Hard to resist.” She clicks her tongue and gives me a small wink, going on from there, talking about the band as she finishes getting dressed. On her way out, she takes the empty wine glasses from the dining table to the kitchen and wipes lipstick from the one she’d drank from. She picks up her purse and then hugs me and kisses me good-bye.
“See you at the water cooler.” She winks again as she says it and turns to leave. “Cindy and I are going out to Point Reyes tomorrow to do some tripping. Do you want to come along? We can all take off work together. Should be fun.”
“You mean, like psychedelic tripping?” I ask, feeling like an ignorant teenager. She nods. “It’s been years since I knew anyone who does psychedelics,” I say.
I look down at my crooked finger and remember my last trip on acid. I remember the trip to the park under the summer sun and my shock at finding out the men’s restroom is a pick-up spot for gays as I look around while I zoom in my mind and almost pee on my shoes, seeing leering eyes and hallucinating faces as I try to stem the flow, pulling up my zipper and shuffling out the exit while they giggle at me. I tell my girlfriend, Betty, who waited outside, and we both laugh. We go back to my apartment and watch the afternoon sunlight weave through the wind rustled curtains and cast soft serpents of light on the walls. In between we watch the ceiling move. It was warm and we took off most of our clothes as we started to hug and caress and then a knock comes at the door.
How he knows where I live, I never figure out but standing there at the doorway is her ex-boyfriend and his boyfriend. Her ex-boyfriend, Russell, is a handsome guy, reminiscent of Montgomery Clift, the actor. I’d seen and heard about Russell in high school. A lot of girls thought he was really cute but he was off limits because he was Betty’s boyfriend. She later told me she’d always wondered why he never did more than kiss her goodnight, though they were boyfriend and girlfriend all through high school. He came out to her after graduation and they broke up. Betty and I started dating after that and I quickly learned that she really enjoyed sex.
There he stands and introduces his new boyfriend and they both let out a chuckle. Feeling a little uncomfortable but not particularly awkward, wearing only a pair of cut-offs at this point, I invite them in. While I’m at the doorway, Betty pulls on my t-shirt, which is large enough for her to mostly hide in as she huddles her knees to her chest and pulls the shirt down around her ankles.
I’m really stoned at this point and have a difficult time figuring out what’s going on. Betty and Russell make small talk and then he makes mention of the suggestive nature of our undress and how perfect their timing was and how it looks like Betty and I were getting intimate. He talks about how he and his boyfriend were going to go back to his place and get it on. Like the guys in the park bathroom, he seems to be leering at me or her or both. I’m not sure what’s going on but I know for sure I’m getting a little uncomfortable. It seems like he’s saying we could all have sex together and I’m not at all interested in the idea. I decide I need to put on a shirt or something to stop his incessant staring at my torso.
Not too keen on being ogled or fondled by Russell and his boyfriend, I stand up and go to get a shirt from the closet, a large walk-in closet in the small studio apartment.
“You can’t come out of the closet until you go in,” I hear him say. It’s a weird comment but, at that point, the whole episode has turned weird. I turn quickly and Russell and his boyfriend are standing in the closet with me, uncomfortably close. Why is he in the closet with me? The only answers I can come up with don’t seem like much fun for me. “What’s the matter? I hear him say. “Afraid you might do something your daddy wouldn’t like?”
I stand motionless and speechless for what seems like a long time. During that time, I can see on Russell’s face that he’s enjoying this kind of mind game. “I don’t like this,” I say, my voice dry, detached and matter of fact. “You need to leave…”
“Or you’ll do what?” he says. I remember the orange sun coming in through the curtains, partially blinding me as I struck out to punch him in the face and missing, catching my finger on something as I swing my fist, breaking my finger. “Don’t like me talking about your daddy? Maybe he was queer, too.”
His hand cups my crotch right before my other fist hits him flush in the face, sending him back two or three steps. My girlfriend’s aghast, eyes wide, sitting up and pressing the t-shirt down between her crossed legs. His boyfriend is screaming at him, demanding to know what crazy shit he’s up to. It’s crazy. I’m pissed off and embarrassed. He and his boyfriend scurry out the front door and Betty closes it with a thud.
After they leave, I sit numb, bewildered and spinning, lost in the moment, my brain incoherent and the throbbing pain in my finger demanding attention. A serious bum trip to be sure, all the more serious because it opens the door to memories, visions and dreams that continue to unsettle me, like the time my father, drunk and naked, came into my bedroom, two weeks after my seventeenth birthday, sat down on my bed and started rubbing my leg. How, throughout my childhood, I’d always been viscerally frightened in my father’s presence. How I’d been stared at, with leering eyes, embarrassed and humiliated by my spontaneous boyhood erections.
Once the sequence gets going, the maelstrom of memories of sexual misbehavior from my childhood attains a weird momentum and for many years to come, the only way I ease the torment is to find a cute woman and have sex to the point of forgetfulness and finally, exhaustion.
In my primal panic, I figure there are two ways to deal with my shame and embarrassment about being a boy, being a man and having an erection, either cut it off or pound it into submission. I choose the latter as a way to distract from the anger, the remorse, the confusion, the betrayal in the realm of relentless desire.
The nightmarish memories continue, prompted by the acid-fueled trauma of being trapped in a bad-tip psychedelic closet with a predator and that connects to being locked into a family of predators. Like attracts like. My mother leering at me through my bedroom door late at night to see what I might be doing beneath the blankets and her drunken stench as she reaches her hand down my pants at the drive-in or my stepmother waltzing past my bedroom door in a see through bra. All this and more.
The bra I hold in my hand brings me back to presence. It’s three thirty in the morning. I give up the idea of sleep and begin to clean my place up. I finish as first light begins to break over the hills to the east. The last thing I do before leaving is to put her bra into nice small box, wrap it with a bow and put it into a nice, dainty decorative bag, like you can get at a cosmetics counter in a department store.
She’d told me what beach they’d be at while they tripped. I put the box on the car seat and drive there through the early light, an hour or two away. I don’t know exactly where to find her but I need to get away and think I’ll just drive around until I spot her car. I find it parked at a secluded beach that takes a while to find. She and her friend Cindy sit atop a sand dune watching the waves. A stiff breeze blows white caps across the ocean and sends small clouds scudding across the sky.
“Oh my God. I’m so glad to see you and so sorry, too.” I don’t get to ask why before she tells me. “I wasn’t sure you’d come today, so I called Tony and he’s driving up here to be with us. He should be here any minute. You might not want to stick around but then again, she wraps her arms around my neck and looks me in the eye. Her friend says nothing. “Maybe you’ll find it amusing. He said he’s bringing his friend, the drummer. It should be very interesting.” I’m not sure what kind of trip she’s on but she’s got something going on that I’m not tuned into.
As I walk from the dunes, Tony and his friend get out of an aging muscle car, black and dented. I don’t know who is who but it seems nearly comic, both skinny, with long black hair swirling around the raised collars of their leather jackets. An aching stereotype. One throws his arm around the shoulder of the other. As they stagger by I expect the evil eye or some other indicator of jealousy. They never quite look at me but it’s obvious they recognize my presence. They smell like cigarettes, alcohol, leather and body odor. One of them gives me a bit of side-eye.
“He probably thinks we’re a couple of fags,” he says loudly, with a sarcastic tone.
“And he hates fags,” the other says and laughs, “‘cause his daddy was queer.”