Environment

Going Home

     When Julian looked into his little brother’s big brown eyes, his became glassy and itchy with tears. Thiago wanted to come along with Julian and his friends, but Julian didn’t want him to slow them down. Julian was embarrassed of Thiago, who was 2 years his junior, because he had short stubby legs and winced at the first sign of trouble. If something dangerous were to happen, Julian could imagine his brother getting hurt or even killed.  He would rather put Thiago out of his misery by leaving him behind rather than to see him get his body or feelings hurt by his friends’ rough play. Besides, their cousin Manny couldn’t stand him.

     “He acts like a little fag,” Manny told Julian once. “I just want to beat the shit out of him every time I see him.” It enraged Julian to hear Manny refer to his brother in that way, partly because he agreed with him.

     The tears rolling down Julian’s face were of impotence– that he wasn’t brave enough to abandon his brother or adequately strong to defend him against his older cousin, if Thiago came along. Julian knew what it felt like to be left out of things. On his last day of elementary school, all of the boys in his class were nowhere to be found. He was a leftover of a 5th grade apocalyptic rapture. As Julian exited his last class of the year, his ass numb from inactivity, he bumped into his other classmates who were all laughs and smiles. When Julian asked where they had all been, one of them boasted that they had been watching jungle porn at his house. They had all conspired a day before to do so and didn’t even think of inviting Julian. They had made a pact and drunk the poisoned punch. A mass deflowering. It didn’t bother Julian that they thought that he was a loser. It didn’t bother him that he didn’t get the chance to enjoy the exquisiteness of jungle porn. What bothered Julian was that they had thought that he was too young to understand.

     “Just stay the hell back,” Julian yelled at little Thiago as he descended the hill upon which his grandmother’s house was located. Julian hated excluding his brother, but he wanted Thiago to see him as his strong older brother and the other kids to see him as one of their own. From a distance, Julian waved to his brother, as a way of saying goodbye and telling him to go into the house. But Thiago remained, looking at his brother drifting farther and farther away from him, his sputtered whimpers drifting into the loud howl of an abandoned puppy. “Just shut up,” said Julian, looking at his brother’s distant silhouette. “Don’t make me go up there again.”

     The other boys were waiting at the bottom of the hill, impatiently for Julian to hurry up. Although he wasn’t the youngest in the group, Julian felt less wily than the rest. He hung out with them because they were tough and Julian wanted to toughen up. A menace by association. These street kids could rough you up and rob you blind without a moment’s notice. Julian liked that about them.

     Julian’s hiking party included his cousin Manny, who, unlike Julian– in Tijuana solely for summer vacation– was living in Mexico due to his parents’ finances. They grew up together, and being only a year apart, this meant that they were in constant competition for their family’s approval. Success in this gauntlet meant more to Manny than to Julian due to the former’s lack of parental affection. Manny’s parents had too many kids to care for and too little time to care about them individually.

     The youngest kid in the group was nicknamed Rabbit, but he also went by “El Sex” because his mother was one of the town’s prostitutes. Rabbit was never home, and nobody ever visited his house or even knew where it was located. He was always at other people’s houses, and the only time you could assume that he was home was when all of a sudden you couldn’t find him at anybody else’s house. For all they knew, Rabbit didn’t even have a hole to call home.

     The last kid’s name was Coco. He wasn’t really a kid though, he was way older than any of the other kids and looked more like a man than a kid. He was charming and had a smile that made Julian’s face fill with warmth until his temples began to perspire. That smile was the same he placed on Julian’s eyes with the grace of a dove as Pastor Emmanuel invoked the name of the Holy Spirit, dunking Coco into the local church’s baptismal waters. When he emerged from the small pool, Coco blew water out of his nose and took suffocating breaths. Once he found his composure, he stuck out his tongue as though he had just helter-skeltered down and out of a water park slide.

     “Guess who I caught fingering herself?” Coco asked as he hopped excitedly around his three companions.

     “Who? Who did you see?” Rabbit asked, wearing a big grin, its malice augmented by the length of his buck teeth. “Was it your mom?”

     “Ugh. No, stupid. I saw Dora. Dora was the one. I caught her dipping her fingers into her hole when I went to visit her brother.”

     “Was she all naked and shit?” Manny asked.

     “Yeah, pretty much,” Coco said with a chuckle.

     “So, you saw her big tits?” Julian asked.

     “How do you know she has big tits?” Coco asked.

     “Yeah, how do you know?” Manny asked.

     “Yeah, how do you know?” Rabbit echoed.

     It came as a surprise that Julian would have that form of sexual reconnaissance, given that he had such neatly trimmed and combed hair and a fresh, round face. The face of a cherub. He was deemed too cute to know of such things. To them, Julian was a larger version of his younger brother.

     “Well, you can see how big they are when she wears tight shirts,” Julian said.

     “Yeah, that’s true,” Coco confirmed with a smile.

     Coco told the others that when he saw Dora pleasuring herself, he froze. It looked as though Dora was trying to wedge her whole hand into her vagina.

     “Ugh, I don’t think I can shake her hand ever again,” said Rabbit, wiping his lips with his shirt sleeve, then spitting. Rabbit always punctuated all of his remarks with spit. Sometimes loogies, but even when he didn’t have any saliva to spit with, the mere puff of precipitated air expelling through his puckered lips was enough to satisfy his oral fixation.

     “That was like a month ago and she’s probably washed her hand a million times since then,” Coco assured him. “Plus, you shake a person’s whole hand, not just one finger, stupid.” Coco enjoyed calling everyone “stupid,” especially kids younger than he was, right to their faces, and to adults behind their back and under his breath.

     “So, what happened? Did you bang her?” Julian asked, allowing the sparseness of the town’s edge to loosen his tongue and start talking like an adult.

     “No,” Coco said, looking down sullenly. “I had the chance, but I was too chickenshit to take it.” As he led the way towards the surrounding hills, Coco told the story of a similar thing that happened to him years ago, when he used to accompany his mother to clean rich people’s houses.

     “Well, she wasn’t my babysitter,” Coco said. “She was babysitting the son of my mom’s bosses.” On one occasion, the babysitter was under the impression that Coco’s mom wasn’t coming to clean the house, so she decided to take a shower and walk around the house naked. “When she saw my mom and me in the kitchen, she freaked the fuck out.”  The sitter tried to unwind the knot on the towel wrapped around her head, but it was wound so tight that she had to reach for a small dish rag. “She had some big ol’ titties,” Coco said, jumping up and down. “They were just bouncing and bouncing. Boom, boom, boom.”

     “Did you get to see her pussy?” Manny asked. Manny was obsessed with vaginas. A few years back, Manny, Julian and their older cousin Stan, who had just turned 18, rented a couple of porno videos. Up to that point, Julian had only heard of porno movies but had never actually seen one. He was very excited, but he also needed to pee and he didn’t want to miss all of the loving, so he held it in. The nudity took longer to reveal itself than he expected and by the time the first woman revealed her silicone-enhanced body, Julian was about ready to burst.

     “Why don’t they show the girl’s pussy? They just keep showing her tits. Man, I wish she would turn around so I could look at it,” Manny said.

     “Just shut up and look at the girl,” Stan replied.

     “Um, I’ll be back,” Julian said as he jumped off the couch. “I gotta use the bathroom.” Julian ran past Manny and Stan, hunched over with a double-handed grip on his crotch. While the other two boys were under the laughing assumption that Julian’s testicles had spontaneously combusted, Julian was unloading his bladder, hosing the toilet as quickly as possible, trying not to miss the scene’s penetrating content.

     Coco said that he got a little glimpse of the sitter’s pubic region, but that she kept covering it.

     “Then what happened?” asked Rabbit.

     “My stupid mom started yelling at her, which woke her the fuck up, and the fine-ass babysitter ran with her big ol’ booty into the bathroom,” Coco said, licking his lips. “Man, if only my mom hadn’t been there. What I wouldn’t have done.”

     “What would’ve you done?” Julian asked.

     “Well, I would’ve jumped on her and fucked her, stupid,” Coco said, incredulous in the face of Julian’s naiveté.

     “Yeah, stupid,” said Manny.

     “Yeah, stupid,” echoed Rabbit immediately after, both acting as if they themselves knew what Coco was alluding to and would have taken a similar course of action.

     My cousin Manny and Rabbit had become inseparable ever since the former took a beating in lieu of the latter. Rabbit had the mouth to start fights and Manny the body to finish them. These two were so close that they used to masturbate in each other’s presence, covered in blankets, to Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, “The Doors.” The scene from which they drew the most inspiration was one depicting Nico, from the Velvet Underground, performing fellatio on Jim Morrison. When Julian met up with them after one of their “blanket sessions,” as they used to refer to them, they were practically holding hands. Even when it came to coming, Manny would come first and Rabbit would echo right after.

     Julian felt left out, as he had on multiple occasions. He loathed his baby face because of it. To make it up to him, Manny decided to treat his younger cousin to an all-American, fun-loving pornfest. Upon Manny’s pushing play, the video flashed a splash of illumination onto the dark wood paneling, consuming the room with light. The image of a brunette woman lying on her back, legs splayed open, and a man with the biggest penis Julian had ever seen, took over the screen. This thing protruding out of the man’s torso was inserted slowly into the woman, who was as surprised as Julian and Manny, to see how it kept fitting inside of her. She made it disappear completely. “But how?” Julian wondered. It was an act of magic, for all he knew. A miracle.

     “Where did it go, and how did it get there?” Julian asked. Manny and Rabbit snickered quietly.

     “It’s because chicks have three holes,” Coco said, stopping the expedition and turning around to face Julian. At an incline, Coco looked bigger and wiser than usual. “One of the holes is for shitting, the other for pissing and the last one’s for fucking.”

     “Oh, that’s where they stick the semens, right?” Rabbit said. “That’s what they call artificial cocks. Right, Coco? Semens?”

     “No, stupid. Semen is the shit that shoots out of your cock when the tip starts hurting so much that it makes you want to pee. Semen is pee that comes from your balls.”

     “So what’s the name for artificial cocks?”

     “Those are called dildos, stupid,” Coco said as he turned around and continued the walk.

     The hike brought the boys closer and closer to the hill’s summit. As they traversed its steady incline, they came across different types of desert creatures, such as lizards, butterflies, big cockroaches and rats, suicidal squirrels and intrepid gophers, all of which served as target practice for the boys.

     “Holy shit,” Rabbit screamed. “Did you see how I almost clocked that gopher on his stupid, pointy teeth?”

     “You almost did, gopher teeth,” Coco said, as he, Manny and Julian broke into laughter. “I actually dated a girl with big, fucked-up teeth. She was the first girl I did it with.”

     “Did what?” asked Julian.

     “Sex, you idiot,” Coco quipped.

     “Why do you always talk about sex, man?” Julian asked.

     “Because sex is everywhere,” Coco replied, spreading his arms like wings, palms facing up, twisting his torso from side to side. “The birds sing because they want to fuck other birds. We’re here because our parents fucked. Rats fuck like crazy. That’s why there are so many goddamned rats in the world. You see how the bees are buzzing around the flowers? They’re fucking them.”

     “Wait, really?” Manny asked.

     “Really?” Rabbit asked.

     “Yeah,” Coco said. “I want to fuck every girl I see because fucking feels so good. In fact, if Julian were a chick, I’d probably want to put my fingers down her panties.”

     Manny and Rabbit went into a teasing frenzy and started to push Julian around, poking him with the sticks they were using to mutilate all of the innocent creatures that they came across and weren’t smart enough to run away. Julian was the only innocent amongst them, or at least the only one who wasn’t afraid to admit it.

     “Alright, stop acting like faggots and leave him alone,” Coco commanded. “Yeah, so this girl was all up on my nuts. She kept telling her friends about me.” When they finally reached the top of the hill, Coco turned around to face the other kids. He planted his walking stick perpendicular to the ground, and they all took a seat on whatever they could find.

     “So, then what happened?” Manny asked. “Did you see her pussy?”

     “Yeah, did you see her pussy?” emphasized Rabbit.

     “Well, one day when I was walking by the bathroom I saw her walking out. So I pulled her into the guys’ bathroom and locked it,” said Coco. “After that, she started jerking my dick and I put my fingers in her pussy.”

     Manny’s mannerisms became jittery, manic. He was receiving the drug upon which his brain depended. Rabbit, who was sitting right next to Coco, couldn’t take his eyes off of the storyteller. Julian was worried. He was hoping that Coco and his girl didn’t get caught. He wanted to hear more but was afraid that an adult in the story would find out what Coco was doing in the bathroom.

     “Did you dildo in her pussy?” Rabbit asked, not blinking once.

     “Man, are you stupid or something?” Coco asked, exasperated. “I’ve told you a thousand times, dildos are fake cocks. Man, you should know. Your mom probably sticks a couple of them in her pussy when she’s not getting fucked by half the neighborhood.”

     Coco and Manny started laughing, coughing because of the amount of dust their giddy feet were kicking up. Rabbit laughed, taking his friends’ reaction as a compulsory laugh track he subconsciously needed to obey. Julian laughed under the same pretenses, but he could see that the remark had hurt Rabbit a little bit, his upper lip drooping slowly, draping over his chipper smile.

     “Yeah, so then she bent over and spread her ass for me and that’s when I shoved it in,” Coco said. “Man, she was so fucking tight that I busted a big-ass nut in her.”

     “How long did it last?” Julian asked. All eyes turned to Julian. How come I didn’t think of that? Manny and Rabbit wondered. This was the main reason why the boys hated and liked Julian. He was intuitive and sensitive. He thought of things they would’ve never thought possible, making them feel curious and stupid, all at once. After a second or so, all eyes went back to Coco.

     “I think it lasted like a minute,” Coco said, scratching the back of his head, the tingling feeling that accompanies nervousness. “It’s because once you stick it in you automatically come.” The boys’ eyes bulged in disbelief. “One time I had sex and held my come inside my balls for five whole minutes.”

     “Damn, that’s a long time,” Manny said.

     “A long fucking time,” Rabbit said, padding Coco on the back.

     “Yeah, I felt like my balls were going to blow u—” Coco said, suddenly interrupted by something he saw.

     “What happened?” Julian asked.

     “I don’t know,” said Coco, “I just saw something black run behind you guys.”

     “Yeah, me too,” Rabbit said.

     Manny and Julian turned to see what the other boys were so alarmed about. Coco stood up in one clean motion and pulled his wooden Excalibur out of the earth. He brought his index finger up to his face and formed a cross with the line between his lips, whispering, “Shut the fuck up.”

     The other boys rose up slowly and spread out around the bush Coco had motioned to.

     “Rabbit, when I tell you, you’re going to throw this rock at the bush,” Coco instructed.

     “Okay,” Rabbit whispered.

     When Coco mimed the stone throw, Rabbit launched the rock into the bush. The bush shook for a moment. Nothing happened. With a look of puzzlement, the boys took a step forward. The bush rattled once again, and a piglet, brown and hairy, bolted out as if on fire, past the four boys. Coco yelled out to follow it. As they sprinted downhill, right behind it, the piglet kept looking, unsuccessfully, for another place to hide, swerving left and right, jumping over rocks and fallen branches. The boys picked up rocks along the way and threw them at the fleeing animal, trying to injure it. The piglet veered away from the points where the rocks collided, gliding through the clouds of dust rippling around it.

     “Look, it’s going into that cave,” Manny said.

     “I’m not fucking going in there,” Julian said, curtailing his stride, falling behind the pack.

     “Yeah, you are, fucking pussy,” Coco yelled, trying to catch his breath.

     The piglet ran in, as did Coco, Manny and Rabbit. It took Julian a few seconds, but he reluctantly joined them. When he finally caught up with the other three inside the dark cave, Manny was shining a light on the creature.

     “It looks like a baby,” Julian said, alarmed by how small and defenseless the creature was. Its shivering vulnerability reminded Julian of the nights when he used to console his brother after he’d wake up from a nightmare.

     “You look like a baby,” Rabbit scoffed, poking Manny’s ribs with his elbow.

     “Let’s kill it,” Coco said as he began to gather several rocks. Manny and Rabbit did the same. The piglet was trying to burrow itself, digging desperately into the dirt.

     “Get him! He’s trying to get away,” yelled Manny.

     The boys began to hit the piglet with a torrential rain of rocks, eliciting ear-piercing cries from the animal, similar to those of a child. This was the very reason Julian had refused to bring his brother Thiago along. He could picture his brother being tortured in the same fashion by the gang. Julian closed his eyes. The boys laughed. The symphony of pain and play reverberated through the cave walls and through Julian’s tortured eardrums.

     “Coco, it’s running towards you,” yelled Rabbit. Coco kicked the piglet like a soccer ball, its little, broken body thudding off the wall and bouncing on the dirty ground. “That’s my boy,” Rabbit yelled, as he and Coco hand-slapped, echoing over the piglet’s dying whimpers.

     “Hey, Julian,” Coco said, “open your goddamned eyes, you little pussy.” Julian opened his eyes and saw the piglet heaving violently, its last breaths interrupted by spastic jerks. It looked like a run-over puppy. “Come over and kick it a little. Don’t worry. It’s almost dead.”

     “No,” Julian said turning his back to the boys. “It wasn’t hurting anybody.” Hurting things was fun, Julian thought, but killing was different. He imagined it felt like drowning, like being thrown from the third story of a building and not knowing whether you would survive or never open your eyes again. “Just do it without me.”

     “What?” Coco asked. “Bring his faggot ass over here.” Manny and Rabbit ran over to Julian, who was beginning to run towards the mouth of the cave. They dove towards him before he could exit and grabbed his legs, knocking him flat on his face. They flipped him over and dragged him by his feet towards Coco, who was standing over the piglet’s tenderized body. Manny and Rabbit picked Julian up and each held him by his arms.

     “Here, kiss your baby boyfriend,” Coco said, picking up the bloody pig from the ground and shoving it in Julian’s face. The piglet’s eyes were hanging out of its sockets like a landfill baby doll, and blood was gushing out of its baby snout. It was shrieking in pain. “I want you to kick me, Julian,” Coco mocked, snorting like a pig.

     Julian knew what he had to do. The piglet would never be the same. It would never run or play again. Even if he refused to torture it, it would die at the hands of his friends or in agonizing pain if he were to convince them to leave it alone and go home.

     With one eye opened and the other half-closed, Julian saw the piglet on its side, running in circles with the only leg that wasn’t completely broken. He took a deep breath, a big gulp of snot and closed his tear-lined eyes. With tears rolling down his cheeks like drops of blood, Julian let out a loud cry that filled the totality of the cave and jumped up in the air, breaking free from his captors’ grasp. As he landed back on the dirt floor, Julian crushed the piglet’s skull. The sound was similar to that of stepping on a raw egg, the bloody yolk bathing the ground adjacent to it. Julian’s shoes were spattered red with blood and muddy with purple brain matter goop and bone. He released it from their cruelty, just like he would’ve wanted someone else to do for his brother. To end his misery in the face of brutality. To send him to heaven instead of living in hell.

     “What the fuck?” Manny yelled, “What did you do, stupid?”

     “What did you do, stupid?” Rabbit yelled, or maybe it was just the cave’s echo.

     “That’s okay, guys,” Coco reassured them. “We were going to kill it anyway.” Coco began to unzip his pants and motioned the rest of the group to do the same. “Let’s pee on it now.”

     Julian was apprehensive once again, but he also knew that if he didn’t comply, it would take them even longer to head back home. As the boys whipped out their baby penises, Coco pulled out his large, over-developed one. Manny and Rabbit started to spray and splatter their urine on the piglet’s desecrated carcass almost on command, but Julian was having trouble starting. Manny and Rabbit were laughing and crossing streams and Coco kept tugging and jerking at his penis, which looked erect. Julian was first to finish.

     “Hey, Coco. What the fuck are you doing?” asked Rabbit.

     “I’m jerk—”

     “Aw, dude. Are you jerking off?” Manny interrupted.

     “Yeah,” Coco answered with a smile.

     Julian remembered what that looked like from the pornos he had seen, but it wasn’t until that moment, until he saw Coco release semen, that he figured out what had happened to him a few months back while watching Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film “The Godfather.”

     The scene where Michael Corleone undresses his Sicilian wife Apollonia, exposing her small, perky, olive-tone breasts. That sight gave Julian a strange sensation in the pit of his stomach, as if he needed to pee. After everybody went to sleep, Julian rewatched the consummation scene, and the sensation in his pants returned. The organ that had delineated his boyhood was slowly petrifying and cobblestoning the way into his manhood. The scene passed, and so did the feeling. Julian rewound again, and again the feeling returned, a little more intense each time. The rush that it elicited was an addictive feeling. Julian did it over and over. He was transfixed on Simonetta Stefanelli’s Barbie-doll breasts. Julian stared at her body for an eternity. The amount of time necessary for Julian to thrust himself out of childhood and come forcefully into manhood. When he reached the unbearable feeling Coco had mentioned, he felt a warmth emanating from his innermost being. Julian imagined that this was what Mary, the mother of Christ, must have felt when her body was inhabited by the Spirit of God. It was complete and utter envelopment. A baptism by fire.

     After the intensity of the moment allowed Julian to blink and move his limbs again, he found that he had soiled his white cotton briefs with the same substance that Coco was dripping onto the piglet’s cadaver.

     “This is the cave of dicks,” Coco said proudly. “And I’ll beat the crap out of you, like I did this pig, if you mention this to anybody.” They shook on it and zipped up their pants.

     They were greeted by a darkening sky as they emerged from the darkness of the cave. Everybody was quiet, even Rabbit. Julian wished he had stayed back, playing the stupid games his brother wanted to play. He knew that they had a long way to go before they saw any streetlights. Coco would probably run off before then, with one of his real friends. Rabbit would disappear like he always did. Manny would start acting as if he was Coco, talking about things he knew nothing about. And Julian would go back to being his brother’s older, chubbier twin. But he knew that even after he crossed the threshold of his grandmother’s house, he would never be able find his way back home.

Artwork by Cory Bilicko

Bilicko, C. (2016). Pee-Shy [Painting]. Oil on canvas, Long Beach, CA.

Seizing The Rope

     A woman standing listless in front of a periodic-table-sized Greek menu stared blankly, her eyes shrink-wrapped with insomnia and hatred for the world, waiting for Peter and me to order. She didn’t seem amused by my indecision, so I picked the only thing on the menu that I could pronounce.

     “I’ll have a gyro,” I said, pronouncing it “ji-row.” Peter chuckled.

     “What he meant to say was ‘yee-ey-roh’,” Peter said to the woman, followed by an apologetic smile on my behalf. The woman didn’t seem amused by Peter’s kind gesture either and continued her unblinking, writhing stare, waiting to put in our orders, head back to the kitchen and instruct the cook to defile our food.

     To my surprise, my order came with a large side of fries, a large salad and a large drink. This establishment was one of those B-graded places that try to compensate for their shitty food quality by stuffing you with a large quantity of it. Peter ordered a side salad and a Styrofoam cup for water.

     As I struggled to chew the dry strips of rubbery lamb, crunchy with bits of ground bone, Peter made an attempt to educate me on whatever bullshit was floating around in his head. It was a habit of his that I didn’t find particularly amusing. For tonight’s lesson, he was going to teach me about the finer details of Greek cuisine.

     “Tzaztiki sauce is made out of cucumber,” he said, as he angled the greasy bottle onto my food basket and squeezed it, ejaculating a spurt of sauce onto my sinewy cuts of meat.

     Up to this point, all of our interactions had been kept strictly within the confines of the college bookstore we worked at. We were friendly, but weren’t really friends. The foreplay that two people enjoy during the beginning period of their acquaintance, before they decide whether to become real friends or people that they used to know, was nearing its end for us. This was our chance to see if our relationship could survive beyond the book stacks.

     Peter was older, in his late fifties, maybe sixties, and preferred not to socialize with college-aged employees. A loner by choice. He believed that his intellectual superiority wouldn’t allow them to keep up with his wit and sense of humor. He spoke German and wore rings bearing strange sigils that had obscure, mystical Celtic significance. The fact that I was a few decades younger than Peter, and still able to carry a stimulating conversation with him made me believe that maybe we could indeed be friends.

     My coworkers didn’t see this other side of Peter. They refused to. They were too focused with his obsession of correcting their grammar and accusing them of contaminating the English language. I admit that it wasn’t easy to be around Peter, but I refused succumbing to the same prejudices my coworkers had built around him. Besides, it felt dangerous to hang out with the most despicable person in the bookstore, a man that was even disliked by management. The boss kept Peter around because he couldn’t just fire him for being grossly unpopular.

     The unknown quality that had at first attracted me to Peter, the challenge of winning over someone you admire and proving to them that you are worth their time, soon became the very reason why I grew tired of him. The more I got to know him, the needier he became. I found his presence suffocating, especially the excuses he would fabricate just to have something to talk to me about. His constant checking up on me. He was aware that I enjoyed the occasional dirty pun, but he soon began using this licentious liberty to introduce sexual anecdotes, such as sharing his opinion on what outfits my bare chest would look good in, and live updates on the erectness of his penis and the reasons behind its petrification.

     Peter had a unique way of demonstrating his affection towards me, prodding the small of my back with his index finger as I bent over to pick up a stack of books, and whispering “Freeze!” into my ear. When I would turn around to confirm that indeed it was Peter, he’d burst out laughing in what sounded like a combination of a seizure and an asthma attack. “It’s a little something I like to do,” he said. “It has a sexual connotation that I’m not comfortable discussing at work.”

     After a while, it didn’t matter what the topic of conversation was, Peter seemed to find a way of twisting and turning it into something sexual.

     “Are you here to ask me something or to look at my legs?” he said, as he was standing on a tall ladder. He was wearing shorts, as he commonly did, exposing his pale, harry legs, striped with varicose veins and spangled with leaky capillaries.

     “No,” I said, wincing at the thought. My attraction towards Peter was intellectual and the only organ of his I wanted to interact with was his brain. “I just wanted to ask–“

     “You know I have a foot fetish,” he said, bursting out into his spastic laughter. “Don’t be such a tease.” As I walked away, half indignant, half appalled, Peter kept calling me back, promising to be serious.

     He often mentioned how he and his partner were devout practitioners of the Wiccan religion, according to him, his ancestors’ true religion. On one occasion, Peter described to me a secret ritual that took place at one of the covens. One in which he and other members of his sect would receive fellatio from a young initiate, who would then take their semen and swallow it.

     “They really are a ton of fun. You should join us sometime,” he suggested.

     At the time, part of me knew that the relationship Peter had with me was of a predatory nature, but I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and simply see it as one of his many quirks. Embrace it as part of his personality, as part of what made him unique. However, Peter mistook my willingness to be open with him for vulnerability. Because I hadn’t made it known to him that his advances were bothersome, he accepted my silence as consent.

     “So, can I see your feet?” Peter asked, as we waited for our bus outside the Greek restaurant. I was taken aback by the directness of his request, but not completely surprised. I couldn’t really think of a reason why showing Peter my foot could potentially backfire. His attraction towards me wasn’t as subtle as he thought and his flirtation had replaced the witty banter we once shared. Maybe if I gave him what he craved for so much, he could see that there was no chemistry, get over it and move on. Maybe by doing this, Peter and I could find that first high and rekindle our intellectual conversations.

     As I began untying my sneaker, Peter sat there slapping his hands on his thighs.

     “I didn’t know that you also took this bus,” Peter said. I found his attempt of making this situation less awkward to be pathetic, like a cop trying to be your friend as he’s writing you up for speeding. “I wonder why I’ve never seen you on it.” I laughed, rolling the slightly moist sock off my foot and balling it into my empty shoe.

     I was aware that we took the same bus for a while, even before we had stricken our first conversation. Back when I agreed with most of my coworkers that Peter was a fucking weirdo. I used to avoid boarding the same bus as him, opting to wait another hour or so for the next one to arrive.

     “Yeah, what a coincidence,” I said.

     “Well, I think the word you should’ve used is ‘serendipitous’,” he said leaning back on his seat, stroking his rogue mustache and beard with his thumb and index fingers, drawing an oval from the base of his nose, around his lips, down and around his chin. “What you should’ve said is ‘How serendipitous’.”

     This was the way that Peter treated people, preferring to be right in spite of being perceived as an asshole. He only ate peanut butter sandwiches for lunch out of a scratched-up, microwave-mutilated, green-lidded Tupperware that was the exact dimensions of four soggy bread slices. He was getting a Master’s degree in Magical Arts and never divulged what he planned to do with it after he graduated. His hair was long and oily, wispy with barely enough girth to support a hair tie. He didn’t care if his druidic peanut butter breath and armpit stench bothered anybody he came in contact with.

     “It’s just cheaper if you don’t care about what people think,” Peter once told me.

     As I rolled up my pant sleeve to my left knee, partially cutting the blood circulation, Peter took my foot with such gentleness and care. The soft night breeze grazed cool on my skin as Peter held my foot in his sweaty palm. He was acting differently, unlike the aggressive, combative attitude he took against argumentative customers or incompetent coworkers. This was Peter the lover. He looked at my foot from all angles. I thought of him as a doctor, a podiatrist. At least, that’s how I decided to feel about it. He analyzed the sole and thumbed his way down from the ball of my foot to the heel. Every couple of seconds he hummed softly, “Hmmm…hmmm…hmmm.” It reminded me of a foot exam, as if he were approving my foot, saying “Hmmm, yes. This is a strong, healthy foot.” I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the massaging gestures of his hands felt great, almost therapeutic after walking in a maze of books, for four hours straight. The hums started to morph in to moans, dropping the Hippocratic “h” altogether. He raised my foot closer to his face and readjusted his glasses as he squinted.

     “Please don’t put it in your mouth,” I requested, slightly retracting my foot, laughing nervously. It was my version of the call girl “no-kiss-on-the-lips” clause. I wanted to keep it casual, but the pressure he was applying to my foot, along with his breathing, became more violent. More amorous. His thumbs were pressing themselves into the folds on the plant of my foot, past my nerves and muscles, into my bones.

     As Peter placed my sweaty foot on his lap, I was trying to think of ways to desexualize what was going on between us. An argument in which him deriving sexual pleasure from touching this utilitarian extremity was not akin to cupping a breast or jerking a penis. It was only my stinky foot after all, it wasn’t like it was my mouth or my ass being used for erotic purposes. I caught a hint of peanut butter as he crinkled his nose, letting his jaw drop and sticking his tongue out, as he did every time he analyzed something. He did it to read the fine print on book receipts and as he stared intently at my left toe.

     Being treated as a sexual object took me by surprise. I was fully aware that Peter had a foot fetish and, thanks to internet porn, what a fetish itself was. I was there, at our store’s Christmas party, when he broadcasted to the whole staff that he had an affinity for feet. I laughed nervously when our boss teased Peter of being a pedophile. I was the one that went up to Peter, after all of our coworkers had had their fill of ridiculing him, and asked follow up questions about his sexual deviancy related to foot worship. If I had indeed initiated this, then why was I wishing I had never initiated it at all?

     Moments later, Peter began to tug repeatedly at the fabric in his crotch. It didn’t look as though he was pleasing himself, it seemed like he had already taken care of that part during the moaning. His face showed signs of discomfort. When I studied the area, I noticed that— even in the dim street lighting— a small stain had bloomed and puddled on his khaki pants. The dark circle was immediately concealed when he placed his backpack on his lap. The warm build-up and release now left both his crotch and my foot out in the cold.

     Peter was gay, so what did that make me? I knew this for a fact because he had shown me a picture of him and his partner once. He was married to a man who looked like his identical twin. Together, they looked like Gandalf the White embracing Gandalf the Grey. Like Thing 1 and Thing 2. But now, not even the vastness of Seussian wit could help to name the thing I had just taken part in. This man had just made love to my foot with his hand and stained his pants as a result.

     Had this made me gay, even if I hadn’t derived any form of pleasure from the act? I couldn’t feel relief even after we had consummated Peter’s strange request. Not when semen was spilled. My mother once told me that when a man comes, he only does so out of love. Women can fake it all they want, but men can’t.

     “He feels it every time, even when whacking off a quick one in a bathroom he wouldn’t even take a shit in,” my mother once said. “It’s like spilling blood.”

     If Peter were to be found dead later that night, the police would bring me in for questioning after they found my DNA— skin cells and lint— under his dirty, lifeless fingernails. I could be convicted of his murder based on what we had just done. Brutal, bizarre Los Angeles Murder Case, Began with sex and suicide, the headline would read. I had played along with Peter’s fucked up joke and I figured that I wasn’t the first person ever to use sex as a weapon, as a means of getting what I wanted, having seen my mother do it many times before.

     Peter looked away as I slipped my toes back into the cold sock, over my instep, rolling the cuff midway up my shin. He was such a gentleman. I broke the silence by mentioning to him that it had been my first time eating Greek food.

     “It’s quite good, isn’t it?” Peter asked, scratching the bald spot at the crown of his head.

     “Yeah, I think I’m starting to develop a taste for it,” I said, mirroring his uneasiness. It was our way of checking to see if the other was okay. Of asking, “Was it good for you?”

     As I tied my shoelaces, I looked up at him, he was sniffing his hands, snorting the sourness of my feet, taking deep breaths of my essence. We continued to sit there without exchanging a word or glance. All I could think of was of the great pun that this encounter had created. One about a man who had helped another pour cucumber sauce all over his leg of lamb and, in return, had needed to use the latter’s foot to help the former pour his cucumber’s sauce. The night’s demureness and the wind’s howling aversion told me that it probably wasn’t an appropriate time for joking. Peter continued to drum his palms on his thighs.

     When the bus finally arrived, Peter shot up and walked briskly towards the door. He looked back, a gesture that he was waiting for me to board.

     “You know, I actually need to stop by the library to pick up a book,” I said. “Go on ahead without me.” Peter went inside and the bus drove off. I sat back down on the bus bench and waited another hour or so for the next bus to arrive.

     After that episode, Peter kept asking to see my feet. Sometimes, he would approach me and not even bother with a greeting of any type or even say “Freeze!” He’d simply ask to see my feet with the ease that one opens the refrigerator, and grabs a beer with the only goal of satisfying a longing. He asked multiple times a day. The same question.

     “So, when can I look at your feet again?” Peter asked.

     I was neck deep into something I only wanted to dip my toe in. Did he expect me to kick my shoes off, throw caution, along with my socks, to the wind and show him my feet in broad bookstore with coworkers and students walking around? Did he think we were lovers? And I, his mistress?

     After I realized that our encounter did nothing to improve our friendship, I did what my mother would do and I began to distance myself from Peter. Like her, I tend to attract needy people in an effort to feel needed. My mother attracted and nurtured a doomed relationship past the torrents of marriage and the penal system, for as long as she could, until my father served her the divorce papers from prison. My relationship with Peter had reached this point.

     My disassociation from Peter began to garner as much attention in the bookstore as when I first started talking to him. The staff continued to view Peter as strange as ever and me a little less so.

     “You guys looked fucking weird together,” a coworker mentioned. “He looked like your grandfather.”

     I wanted to tell her that he actually was a very nice guy and that he was weird for reasons other than the ones she and everybody else thought. Reasons unknown to her. But I withheld the real reason out of respect for Peter. His work life was already hard enough with all of his neuroses and stigmas that came from being the oldest person around. I didn’t want to add the title of pervert, which he was, onto his plate and the title of gay lover, which I totally wasn’t, to mine.

     “Yeah, he’s a fucking weirdo,” I replied, taking the most humane route, a mercy kill, and giving my coworker the validation she so callously craved for.

     I walked towards the bus stop after another late shift. Peter had worked that same shift with me, but he wasn’t waiting for the bus at his usual spot. I assumed that his partner had picked him up, as was sometimes the case. I boarded the incoming bus, looked around and I didn’t see him there, to my relief. We both knew what I had done to him. We had both used each other, but I felt that I had done so with a wicked motive in mind, and he was merely satisfying his basal needs.

     The bus arrived at its next stop and a group of people got in. Peter was one of them. I fixed my gaze on him, trying not to blink, as to not miss the moment when our sights could possibly cross. He paid for his fare and walked down the seat-framed walkway. As he neared my seat, he didn’t even glance towards my direction. When he passed me, I got a hint of peanut butter mixed with the ripeness of compounded underarm sweat, two scents that I had nostalgically associated with him. Peter found a seat near the rear of the bus.

     I kept looking back, partly to see what he was doing and partly to see if he would finally notice that I was also on the bus, a serendipitous phenomenon he wondered about the night he fondled my foot. He didn’t. He simply looked out the window and dozed off with his mouth open.

 

Artwork

Bilicko, C. (2017). Push, Pull [Painting]. Oil and acrylic on canvas, Long Beach, CA.

Till Moons Shall Wax And Wane No More

     It didn’t bother me one bit that he was in his underwear; only the boxer fly between me and his infamous, hyperactive, incorrigible penis. Having heard so many of his escapades, I felt like I had already seen him naked, stitching together in my imagination the graphic details in his stories. I had mentioned to him that I really liked his suit. It was dark blue with brown pinstripes. He completed the ensemble with a white button down dress shirt and a solid red tie. He thought I wanted the suit, when all I really wanted was for him to know that he looked good in it. Now he was proudly handing it to me on a hanger. Looking at his hairy, disproportionately skinny legs, I saw why my family thought of him as being inherently good. He would give you the clothes off his back. That’s the kind of guy my uncle Dario was. When it came to you, he came in second. That’s why he was a notoriously good lover. He was generous. Ladies loved him. His family loved him. And he loved them all. I counted 15 visible hearts patterned on his boxers, and wondered if the one in his chest was stronger than all of those combined.

     “A man needs to be like a dog,” Uncle Dario once told me.

     According to him, a man should have sex with any woman he can get his hands on. As practice. It was what the Lord commanded. As men, we needed to keep our wives satisfied. Even as a child of 12, he felt that it was important for me to know that. In his mind, he was the best example of this. He prided himself on being a ravenous lover and his topics of conversation always fell on the saucier side. They were usually followed by his wife lightly smacking his arm with a dissuading “Oh, you.” Her presence did little to deter his libido.

     “You know, Amado’s wife is quite the knock out,” Uncle Dario said. He liked the fact that she was big and robust. In heels, she was almost twice his size. The prospect of facing a wall of legs piqued his curiosity. What he wouldn’t do to that amount of woman.

     “If only Amado was a damn cuckold,” he murmured as Amado and his gigantic wife made their way from their car to a party Uncle Dario was hosting in the park. Amado and my uncle shared similar physical characteristics. They were both short, stocky and with a perfectly round belly that protruded at their sternum and bulged slightly over their belt buckle. Their upper lips were nonexistent, dense with mustache hair. Uncle Dario appreciated a woman who enjoyed the mild tickling of neatly trimmed love-whiskers. His mustache was bigger than Amado’s. This gave him a sense of pride, as if this fact made him manlier than his friend.

     Uncle Dario’s wife seemed unfazed by her husband’s sensual comments. There was something going on behind closed doors that the rest of us weren’t privy to. Maybe it was her way of occasionally loosening the leash and allowing her husband to sniff at another man’s marked territory. My uncle’s flirtation with extramarital romancing was on her terms, therefore she didn’t feel threatened by it.

     My uncle’s feelings for Amado’s wife went beyond the blinding delusions of lust. They borderlined the condition that all men with diminutive proportions seem to contract at one point or another. The desire to conquer large masses of stuff. Whether it be land or a woman’s body. As Amado and Nancy approached Uncle Dario, I could picture Nancy extending her hand towards my uncle and he extending his while holding his cock in it. Nancy’s hands were thick, her fingers adorned with gold rings set with large rubies and emeralds. To have such a large, strong grip constrict its coils around his manhood was akin to the snake of Eden slithering up and down the Tree. Sin from the source. Tasting the sweetness of the forbidden. Allowing its poison to disintegrate God’s Commandments. All my uncle wanted was five minutes with her. That would be all he needed.

     Uncle Dario was like a father to me, my model of what a man should be. He was always well-dressed, even in old pictures of his youth, taken in the early 1970s. In them he wore his hair long, to his shoulders, with a much thinner mustache under his nose. He liked to be well dressed because he liked to be complemented. It wasn’t necessarily vanity. It was simply a way of meeting chicks. A residual mode of living from back in the day when he was young. Any mention of women and Uncle Dario’s curiosity was soon indulged. For my 13th birthday, my mother posed the idea of renting a bounce house, and filling it with scantily-clad teenage girls, so that they could jump with me in all of their careless nubile suppleness. In other words, her version of what she thought my ultimate fantasy would be. Uncle Dario overheard this conversation and posed that for his 54th birthday, he wanted my mother to leave out the bounce house altogether, and instead have the teenage girls bounce on him.

     When Amado and Nancy finally reached my uncle, Amado outstretched his hand in an act of friendship. Uncle Dario did the same. His hand said friendship, but his eyes were wiping their ass with the Commandment that begins with “Thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s wife.” Instead, he wanted to bash his neighbor’s head in à la Cain and Abel.

     “Let me just take her for one ride,” Uncle Dario’s eyes fantasized.

     When it was time to welcome Nancy, he outstretched his hand to shake hers. In Latin America, it is customary to hug your male friends and to hug and kiss your female friends. We didn’t do that in our family. We were Christian. Only, we weren’t wholly Christians. We were Catholics turned Southern Baptists claiming to be Christians. We were fakes. As fake as my mother claimed Nancy’s breasts to be.

     We shook everybody’s hand. Men, women and children. It helped to stave off creepy pedophile interactions as well as deeply repressed homosexual ones. And in the current situation Uncle Dario found himself in, infidelity. One whose inception stemmed from erection-inducing hugs.

     As my uncle shook Nancy’s hand, his eyes were checking to see if anything else was shaking as a result. Call it the ocular Richter scale. He stared at her breasts for what felt like hours. Nancy’s bosoms were at the same height as my uncle’s head and almost as big. If they were supermarket items, the rack would be at eye level. Premium. Best sellers and leading brands with the highest markup. He didn’t stand a chance.

     “Those tits are fake,” my mother whispered to Uncle Dario’s wife. My uncle didn’t care. Nancy’s breasts could have been two flesh-colored, over-inflated helium balloons partially concealed by her lace brassiere, and they would have continued to elicit the same chemical reaction in his brain and in his trousers.

     “Other than her huge beach balls, she’s got nothing going on for her,” my mother added. “She’s hideous.”

     Nancy’s face was sweaty from all the thick makeup clogging up her pores. From a distance, a thick five o’clock shadow was easy to spot, even under the thick coats of foundation. She used it to conceal her stubble and vellus hairs on her chin, cheeks and near her ears. Her upper lip was beaded with perspiration as it was the area that needed the most concealment. It resembled the make up on Cesar Romero’s 1960s Joker more than the women on the television commercials for that very product. Her thick eyebrows were meticulously plucked into two black furry caterpillars, darkened further by brow pencil. Her eyelashes were drenched in tarry mascara, with small drops of oil-like substance miring on either corner of her eyes. She pressed her bright red lips together— as bright and red as the veins invading her eyes— to wipe the condensation off her upper lip.

     Anything from her chest up didn’t seem to matter to my uncle. Nancy could’ve been headless for all he cared. His mouth was watering from the scent of the meat grilling on the red hot coals and from the flesh bulging out of her push-up bra and hot red dress. She had thick legs, small ankles and a supple pair of buttocks. A horse’s ass, according to Uncle Dario. He was an ass man. When you come from Mexico— a culture that idolizes the round, fleshy parts that form a person’s lower rear area and has over 15 ways of referring to it— you really can’t help it.

     “She wears all of that mask of caked-on makeup because she’s truly a man,” my mother snickered to my uncle’s wife.

     “You guys are just jealous of her,” Uncle Dario later rebutted. “Besides, I think we’d be good so long as my mustache was thicker and she kept shaving hers.”

     As he disengaged from the prolonged handshake, my uncle’s eyes became transfixed on the gentle tremors that accompanied her buttocks as she trotted away. Her dress had the elegance you would expect to see in the first few minutes of a 1980s porno movie, prior to the female protagonist stripping naked. The kind of clothing meant to be ripped off, cummed on and flung to the floor. Disposable. Nancy’s heels kept burying themselves into the muddied grass as she walked over to greet the other guests. I expected Amado to pull out a hoof pick to clean Nancy’s stilettoes  once they found a seat.

     According to Amado, they were dressed up because he and Nancy were going to a discotheque afterwards. Uncle Dario loved to dance and this was a dagger plunging deep in his heart. I could see it in his eyes. The ones he inherited from my grandmother. Sweet and tender. His mind was falling victim to visions of Amado holding his wife— his thumbs pressing up against her hip bones and the other four fingers resting on the upper curvature of her equestrian posterior. My uncle’s eyes yearned to trade places with Amado, for his friend to stay at the barbecue flipping burgers, wearing an apron that read: “…and I can also cook.”

     Uncle Dario’s eyes welled up with tears. Not necessarily emanating from melancholy, or from the black smoke of the fire burning off the fat on the meat. But from yet another place. He wanted to be the one dancing with Nancy and have his head sandwiched by her. Him resting his head on her large breasts and she resting her head on his.

     Uncle Dario loved his wife. He prayed to God at night. But that day, Nancy left without saying goodbye.

     “Look, your girlfriend’s leaving,” Uncle Dario’s wife scoffed as she pointed to his dream girl walking away in the distance. She and my mother cackled heartily. Uncle Dario joined in with a forced chuckle. He turned around to face the roaring flame gently incinerating the meat. He pulled out a bandanna from his back pocket, opened it and wiped his whole face with it, leaving it in there longer than all of the previous times. He needed to forget Nancy, at least for the time being. To reset his thoughts.

     When he pulled his face out of the ornamented cloth, he looked over at me and smiled.

     “Hey you,” Uncle Dario said. “Wanna come over and help me with these?” I got up and ran over to him and he placed his hand on my shoulder. “Look, I’m going to show you how to cook a proper hamburger.” He exhaled the full weight of his arm on both my shoulders and I wrapped my arm around the small of his back.

     “You know,” he said, “that suit’s going to look really good on you when you get bigger.” I felt him inhale deeply and billow out a prolonged sigh as we stood there, staring quietly at the globs of meat change color, from strawberry pink to hickory brown.

     That day, my uncle showed me the signs of when a piece of meat needed to be flipped on a grill. He also taught me that even if you have the ability to ravage a battalion of women, beyond the point of depletion, requiring medical care via intravenous rehydration, you can still get your heart broken by a single woman.

     Sometimes, the wife of another.

 

Photo Credit

Oseguera, J. L., Jr. (2017). The Heart Needs [Photograph]. stripSearchLA, Los Angeles.

What We Have Left Undone

     Blue Line broke down.

     Again.

     The turd that transports you from 7th Street and Wilshire in Downtown LA to the city of Long Beach had a power outage from the Washington station to its last stop on 7th. For five miserable stops I sat in a crowded bus full of miserable people. Their misery most likely accompanied them prior to drudging it into the bus. An older passenger in particular was filled with the Spirit and, in the fashion of a Prophet of Old, began to raise his voice, and testify that which was in his heart.

     “Fuck you, muthafucka,” he said as a Caucasian cyclist walked past him. The cyclist spread his sweaty, spandex-bound ass cheeks on the seat and didn’t return the gesture or share a single glance with his offender. “You white people think that you can treat us like we beneath you. Well, fuck you.” The old man seemed to be staring at nothing in particular. His slightly closed eyes and the light seafoam green in them gave me the impression that he may have been blind. I wondered if his corneal opacity made everyone that crossed his path look a little white.

     Rhetoric of this nature usually doesn’t come from someone dressed in a sport coat, organic cotton t-shirt and stone-washed jeans. The absence of urine and feces smells emanating from him further supported my theory that he wasn’t homeless. Having been raised in a family where all the men were Evangelical Baptist preachers, I’ve learned that even a good sermon can fall on deaf ears. Especially when the listener doesn’t give a damn about the speaker or subject. When you address the many, you’re really talking to no one.

     An abrupt silence swept the interior of the bus. Some of its passengers perked their ears and peeked their eyes at the big man with the big mouth sitting at the front of the bus. They seemed more interested in seeing what crazy thing might erupt as a result of the old man’s violent speech than with the message itself.

     “My people built this muthafucka,” he continued to yell. “There’s gonna be a day when white people are gonna stop fuckin’ with black people. You best believe that.” The whole thing seemed improvised, relying heavily on verbal fillers such a “fuck” and a soft-pitched “huh.” Every couple of seconds, the tense silence was broken by a muttered “fuckin’ ass.” The way his jaw quivered— after delivering a silence-shattering profanity— came from the adrenaline coursing through his body and not from fear. He had chucked that feeling out the window a few stops back.

     The other passengers reacting to the unraveling of this man began to whisper and giggle amongst themselves. Others were snickering and pointing at him. This heckling reaction did little to defuse the man’s incendiary character.

     “I see you muthafuckas laughin’ and rollin’ your goddamn eyes at me. Well, fuck ya’ll,” he said. “My black ass paid my dues. I served my muthafuckin’ country in Nam, so I can say whatever the fuck I want.”

     “OK man. Just calm down. That’s not the way,” another man in the back of the bus said. His attempt to pacify and meet the old man halfway was no match for the anger seething inside of the latter.

     “Fuck that. You think if a black boy did what that white did, it’d be the same?” The old man was answering questions that not a single person in that bus had asked or had any curiosity in knowing the answer to.

     “It’s not the way,” the same voice replied a little quieter, with a hint of despondency.

     “Fuck that. That black boy be in jail by now. Hell, that boy be dead by now. They’d lynch his black ass.”

     The passion with which the man was speaking brought him to his feet. He had to immediately pull his pants up to prevent the rest of us from seeing the upper part of his ass. His midriff was one amassed as a result of coming home, sitting comfortably on a couch and snacking on your favorite treats while watching your favorite show. It was a privileged gut. The wobbliness in his legs— due either to his age or the bus’s shitty suspension— made him seek the aid of two hooped-straps dangling from the overhead support bars. The bickering amidst the riders got louder and rowdier. They’d had it with him, and random spurts of “sit down already” and “quiet down” began to shower his unstable body.

     “I won’t sit down or shut up,” the old man said in a mocking tone, gesticulating loudly. “My people built this muthafuckin’ country and all of them buildings you muthafuckas work and live in.”

     “Shut the fuck up,” a young man yelled out. His voice was loud enough to be heard, but with the faintness of one who doesn’t want to call attention to his specific location. The old man turned his head towards the back of the bus and squinted his eyes, trying to use some sort of x-ray vision or echolocation. He realized it would take more than furrowing his brow and wrinkling his nose to sniff out the coward who dared to challenge him.

     “What you say, nigga?” the old man replied, expecting his nemesis to take the bait and come clean.

     “I said ‘shut the fuck up’.” A short teenager emerged from the back of the bus. The over-sized LA Dodgers jersey and cap that he was sporting made him look even skinnier. It didn’t seem to bother him that the old man was twice his size and could easily place him in a head lock and lift him over his head. This would make a really cool story to tell his other baggily-clad friends at a later time. Of how he beat the crap out of a tall black fool. He would probably omit the fact that the man was old enough to be his grandfather. The young man stuck his chin up, wearing the faint wisps of hair covering his upper lip and chin proudly.

     This quickfire exchange propelled the old man to take a few steps forward— out of his comfort zone and out of his coat. As he flung it over to an empty seat, his phone came flying out making a loud thud on the floor.

     “Why don’t you come down here and say that again?” the old man said.

     “Shut the fuck up, old man,” the young man insisted, grabbing onto a stainless-steel pole with one hand and readjusting his balls with the other. He did it to reassert his stripling masculinity and let the onlookers know that he indeed had two testicles and a penis bouncing around in his sagging jeans.

     “I may be 65 years old, but I can still bust your muthafuckin’ mouth,” the old man said. “Bring your ass down here.”

     People started calling out to the driver to stop the bus. What was once a harmless old coot spouting off about black pride and white violence soon became the very type of act that the old man was trying to bring light to. Possibly even attempt to end. The bus driver slammed on the brakes. Most of the passengers started yelling at the brash youth to back down and take his seat. However, the young man was on deck with miniature baseball bats in each hand, ready to bang them on the old man’s bald head. He was now in full Dodger regalia. The youth began to descend the small steps in the back of the bus. When the old man saw this, he braced himself and pulled out a giant half-drunk plastic water bottle. He gripped it with both hands, ready to mildly bludgeon the youth with the power of 8.0 Alkaline pH.

     “You a fuckin’ coward,” the old man yelled. “Put them muthafuckas away and then we can do this.” His voice cracked. The bottle crinkled and popped as his gripped readjusted. His fear was audible. Maybe he had gone too far. You could tell that all he wanted was to vent his anger in a public forum. He felt wounded by the acts of violence that unfolded in Charlottesville, Virginia a day before. He was a preacher preaching to sinners who didn’t want to repent, who didn’t want to open their eyes and acknowledge his fears. His pain.

     The young man banged the two bats against each other like a percussion instrument, meant to taunt and intimidate. The old man was looking at the youth approaching him, while at the same time, at all of the people staring at him. Part of him was hoping that the people he was insulting a few moments ago would step up and protect him from this disrespectful teenager. He was 65-muthafuckin’-years-old after all, and when you get to be that age there’s an unspoken leniency. An “old boys will be old boys” mixed with a “he’ll tire himself out” mentality you have to accept when interacting with some elderly people. All at once, the old man was tired of being ignored and scared of being taken too seriously.

     As the young man approached the bus’s rear exit, he asked the driver to let him out.

     “Man, you’re lucky I don’t want to do this right now,” the young man said as he jumped out onto the curb.

     “You a bitch,” the old man taunted with a sense of relief. “You can’t even take on my old black ass.” His emasculated voice regained its full arrogant potency as he saw that his well-being was no longer in question. The old man looked out the window to see the young man walking parallel to the curbed bus, playing his miniature weapons like a clave instrument to the tune of this old man’s derision.

     “Yeah, keep walking, young’n,” the old man yelled out the window as the bus driver resumed his route. He wiped the condensation bubbling up on his temples and forehead. The look in his eyes was that of a blind man who could now see. His close brush with violence opened his eyes and closed his mouth. He looked tired. The dark luster of his skin was a few shades lighter. Cries of “just get off” and “you didn’t serve in Vietnam, you fucking liar” began to fill the bus. The adrenaline that had vacated his body seemed to have aged him a few years. It was hard for him to breathe and get up from his seat. The old man asked the driver— in a calm, respectful manner— to let him off.

     The bus driver stopped, and the man was pushed out by a sea of applause and cheers. The cheering quickly turned to laughter when the old man chased after the departing bus and reentered it looking for his phone. He looked under the seats, and there it was, in his hand all along. He stepped out again and began lecturing a man napping on a bus bench with his head hanging off to the side. Then he approached a group of homeless men sitting in the shade, preaching to them from the Gospel of Sticking It to the Man. He pointed vigorously at them, trying to stoke in them the fire of dissent. The men just stared at him with blank faces, zapped from too much sun.

     The bus breathed a collective sigh of relief. The madness was over. Now they could all go back to worrying about their own personal misery and not be overwhelmed with other people’s crap. That was how these people viewed the old man and how most people view the misfortunes that befall others. Homeless people? Other people’s crap. Racial violence? Other people’s crap. Because it’s not happening to me, it doesn’t matter to me.

     As I exited the bus, I motioned a young man— whose seat was closer to the exit than mine— to go on ahead of me. He did the same. I took a step towards the door and so did he. I gave him a look of contrition and he did the same. We both smiled and said “sorry” in unison. We laughed. He finally went on ahead of me. The smile I gave him stayed on my lips for a few seconds, but the one he gave me stayed on my mind for the rest of the day. We both witnessed the acts of violence that unfolded on the bus. We both knew of the terrorist attacks that took place in Charlottesville. He was black. I Hispanic. But in spite of all that, we both understood that we were both riding on the same bus and needed to get off on the same stop. We decided to be cordial to one another and not allow the violence that enraptured our day to affect that.

     That is what made me smile. The fact that we had the ability to decide.

 

Photo Credit

New bus fares [Photograph found in Herald-Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Evening Herald Express, Los Angeles]. (n.d.). Retrieved August 22, 2017, from http://photos.lapl.org/carlweb/jsp/photosearch_pageADV.jsp (Originally photographed 1952)

Out Of Chaos

     Orchestral sounds are created through a synergy of sound and motion. The players, the conductor and the music all play their part like actors on a stage. The sea of musicians flows and sways to the rhythm of the music. It is an all-encompassing energy that bursts off of the stage and onto the audience. It emanates from each individual musician pouring their soul into the instruments they are holding, the ones that they’ve invested countless hours in mastering. “I kind of view the pages of music backed up against a landscape,” Los Angeles-based violinist Jordan Ann Martone said. “It’s the story I’m trying to tell through the piece of music.” The orchestra becomes an actress whose body language and facial expressions reach the deepest caverns of the audience’s collective soul. “People don’t realize it because music is always there,” Martone added. “It affects people more than they realize.”

     Having grown up in the city of Lancaster, Calif.— located in the northeast part of Los Angeles County— Martone and her family made frequent visits to the city of Los Angeles for various events and performances. “I would always go to shows and musicals with my family,” Martone said. She comes from a musical family and began to play the piano at the age of 4. “When I turned 7 or 8, in my elementary school, there was a strings class,” she said. It was a small strings program in a community that glorified sports and the military. However, the young Martone was convinced that she wanted to take part in this program. Convincing her mother of allowing her to leave the piano for the violin was a different story. “My mom told me: ‘I’m not going to let you quit the piano, but you can add the violin’,” she recalled. Having been raised in a musical home, Martone was familiar with all of the instruments. “But the violin was the one that was really unique— the sound— and I liked it a lot,” she added.

     Because she already knew how to play the piano, Martone found it easy to play the violin. She was the only kid in her school that was serious about playing this instrument. “I was kind of an oddball in my school because it consumed my life,” Martone said. As her skills improved over time, so did the quality of the violins she was playing. “Every violin is completely different because they’re all handmade, usually,” she said. “So you can play something absolutely perfectly on your instrument and then go pick up somebody else’s to demonstrate and it’ll sound terrible.”

     Martone went through a series of violins, starting with a beginner, factory-made, cookie-cutter instrument to one that was high-quality and one-of-a-kind that she purchased from her violin teacher Michael Ferril. “It was something that I could not afford,” Martone said. “But I was so lucky to have been in that situation where I was able to purchase it.” With violin, unlike a piano whose notes are already in tune, you can put your finger anywhere on the instrument and it can sound awful. “Getting it to sound good is so difficult,” she said. “In my opinion, it’s one of the hardest instruments to play.” It takes years and years of sounding bad in order to reach a point at which you can make the instrument sound good. Most people who try to learn the violin get discouraged by the bad that they never get to the good. Martone herself went through a period of self-doubt. “Things started getting hard, and I actually had to practice more and be more involved if I wanted to progress,” she vividly remembers. She started to get impatient with the disproportionate amount of practice she had to invest compared to the small amount of progress she was making. “My mom sat down with me and told me, ‘This is one of the hardest things you’ve had to do in your little 10-year-old life,'” Martone recalled. “‘If you push through this, I think you’ll be really thankful.'”

     She was glad that her mother didn’t let her quit, because that’s what it took. That little extra push. “It took rewiring my brain,” she said. “You do it just purely by your musical mind and muscle memory, which is kind of crazy now that I think back on it.”

     Martone stated that she owed a lot of her career as a violinist to her mother, who is a stage actress and singer. “If I wasn’t a violinist, I might go into acting,” Martone said. She believes that acting teaches you stage presence and performance techniques. “It drives me nuts when I see violinists on stage that are just ‘plant-and-play’ type of people,” she said. “They stand and have no expression. They make the most beautiful sound you’ve heard, but where’s the expression? Where’s that story you’re trying to tell me?” While she’s on stage, Martone takes on the persona of an actress singing a song and really performing it for the audience. “That’s what I know. It’s my performance experience,” she said. She feels that it helps her enhance the story that she is telling through her playing. “Entertain me! We’re in the entertainment business. It’s a big part of what I do,” she added.

     While a student at the California State University in Northridge, Martone was asked to substitute for a violinist in the semi-professional Debut Orchestra. The concert would feature music by the world-famous film composer John Williams, conducted by Williams himself. “I thought I’d be playing somewhere in the back,” she said. “But no. I was playing third chair, second violin and I was freaking out.” She was playing the hardest music that she had ever encountered right under the very man who wrote it. “It was a lot of pressure because I definitely wanted to do a good job. I had to do a good job,” she said. “It was so incredible and so memorable. It was a dream come true and the biggest kick in the butt all in one.”

     This performance set in motion something that Martone had wanted to do ever since she was a child— watching videos of musicians in the studio, recording the music for films like Star Wars. “I have a huge love for film music. I listen to it a lot. I’d say that it forms 80 percent of my listening material,” she said. “It’s my favorite music.” Aside from her live performances and teaching— privately and at local schools— Martone enjoys recording music in the studio. She has played on soundtracks for films, television shows and video games, most of which she cannot discuss until after the project has been released to the public. “The film industry is not as wealthy as it used to be,” she noted. “I realize that I live in a different age now.” Even in LA— the film music capital of the world— there’s been a large amount of outsourcing to Europe and other orchestras overseas in order to save money.” However, Martone remains hopeful. “If I could go to Fox Studios and record for those films every day, that would be my dream job,” she said.

     Her love for film music can only be matched by her love for the city of Los Angeles. “I just can’t believe I’m here,” Martone said. Even in the midst of hours upon hours of traffic, the violinist appreciates the fact that she is in LA. “I don’t care. I get to drive down Highland Avenue, in the city where my dreams are coming true,” she said. Even in her various travels to New York, NY and Paris, France, she has never found a place quite like LA. “It represents so much opportunity for me personally. It’s very exciting,” she added. “I’m so happy to be here. I’m very lucky that I am. It’s a huge deal.”

     Martone is writing the script to her life with a bow in one hand and her violin in the other. Her devotion for film music has led her to become a huge advocate for it. “I wonder how different people’s lives would be if they listened to more film music instead of pop music on the daily,” Martone said. The growing popularity of live orchestras playing along to film has garnered mass appreciation for orchestral music. In an age where this type of music is no longer in vogue, orchestras are losing their footing in people’s lives. “It’s interesting to see the popularity of that grow, because everybody loves movies,” she said. “When they realize that an orchestra is playing that right now, it helps bring the appreciation back. It’s helping the interest in live music a bit more and the classical study that goes behind that.”

     She sees music as the silent hero to the entire world of film and television. “I don’t think people realize how important it really is in everything they watch,” Martone said. “Without film music, you don’t have a film. You have one with much less emotion.”

     Like a seasoned actress preparing for yet another role, Martone approaches each project with the same enthusiasm and curiosity she did when she was in her childhood strings class. “It’s discovering new music or things I can do with my instrument that I hadn’t before,” Martone said. “Because I love music ultimately. That’s the core of what I love and what I do.” When people ask her if she ever gets bored of playing the same instrument she has played all of her life, her answer is always a resounding “no.” “The music is constantly changing and evolving, and there are so many different possibilities out there,” Martone said. “You never know what’s going to affect you the most.”

     She is willing to embrace each role life serves up for her, even if it were one in which she wasn’t a musician. “I would always want to be involved in the arts. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been drawn to,” she said. Whether she’s playing as part of the orchestra’s body or in an all-female electric strings quartet, Martone draws energy from the music, her fellow musicians, the conductor and the audience. “I never know which performance hit the person in the back row,” Martone said. “It’s that thought that keeps me going.”

To learn more about Jordan Ann Martone’s music, please check out her website:

www.jordanann.com

Oseguera, J. L., Jr. (2017, July 30). La Violinista [Photograph]. Silhouettes, stripSearchLA, Los Angeles.

In Thought, Word and Deed

As soon as the words “with mouth” left my lips, her head began its slow descent towards my lap like a discordant apple falling from the branch of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We had created our own vocabulary. Our own language: part verbal, part body. She was in a long-distance relationship with a man who lived across the world, in Singapore, her home. Close enough for sexting and dirty show-and-tell via Skype, but far enough for her to seek supplementary companionship. She craved the warmth of physical contact. While we lay in each other’s arms after having made love, she used to tell me that her boyfriend refused to have sex with her. Vaginal. I asked why. She didn’t know. I brought up the slight possibility that he may be gay and using her as a beard. No, that wasn’t it, she assured me, as if I was the one who needed assurance. He liked doing it in every way, fill all her holes, except for the one that mattered most to her. He was a devout Christian and would not lose his virginity before marriage. Having been raised in that sexually stunting, hormonally frustrating climate— with balls as blue as the Virgin’s cloak— I totally understood his apprehension and guilt.

I was raised to fear the villainous and venereal woman’s vagina as if it were Satan’s filthy mouth itself. To plunge my virginity into it would swing open the gates of Hell and drag me in, kicking and screaming, digging my bloodied finger nails into the landsliding abyss. However, she was a friend in need and aside from having learnt the lesson of divine chastity, I had also learnt that of divine compassion. Now, this compassionate heart of mine had given me the task of filling not only her woman-sized hole, but the one the size of the Atlantic. One that needed an ocean of love to fill. So there we were, fucking under God’s watchful, wrathful and vengeful eyes. We didn’t hide our naked bodies in shame. Instead, she opened her mouth and took a mouthful out of my apple.

* * * *

Music was our drug of choice. It always seemed to get us in the mood, playing with our emotions. We liked the same bands, and the ones whose affinity we didn’t share we accepted because we trusted each other’s taste. We were sitting in my car listening to Foxygen, and the song “San Francisco” came on. My eyes began to gather tears as my throat closed up. She noticed that I had suddenly gotten quiet. She touched my clenched hand on the steering wheel, and I relaxed it.

“Are you OK?” she asked.

“It’s just that this song reminds me of my ex-wife,” I replied. She looked confused. “It reminds me of her because that was the last place that we went to as a couple.” It was our last resort to make things work. It was also the place where we hit rock bottom and broke up for good.

“We can just skip this song if you like.”

“No, it’s fine.” I looked over at her. In the blurriness of tears I could see a concerned look in her eyes. “Just keep your hand on mine and sit here with me.” I wanted to listen to the song and mourn in silence. So we did.

* * * *

We were lying on a blanket on the floor. I was lying on my side, propping my head up with one arm and placing the other on my thigh. She was sitting on her calves— inside the curvature made by my legs and torso— perked up looking down at me. The lights were off, and the only light was emanating from an old Bed Bath and Beyond pine-scented candle I dug out from under the bathroom sink. The candle’s dimmed brilliance reflected the tears welling up in her eyes, as if there was a feeling she was trying to disguise. I smiled and asked her what was wrong. She nodded away my question with a soft hum. I could tell that she didn’t want to make eye contact with me. I placed my free hand on her thighs, and she looked down on it. She bit down on her bottom lip. I felt a single, sultry tear sprinkle on my knuckles like the first raindrops of summer.

“What’s wrong?” I asked again. She let out a flustered sigh and wiped the tears from her face and the secretion from her nose.

“It’s hard to explain,” she answered. It was difficult because her English was pretty good, but not good enough to express a complex emotion. An emotion that even a native English speaker would have a hard time explaining. I dragged my body closer to her knees and outstretched my hand to meet hers.

“You can tell me anything.”

“I know,” she sniffled. But it wasn’t so much a matter of intimacy as it was a matter of fluency.

“Just say it in Malay,” I said. I didn’t care if I couldn’t understand it. All I understood was that she needed to vent. She had been building up so much pressure in her heart for so long, that it seemed impossible to release it. At first, she began to speak softly to me. Slowly. Then her speech became louder and faster. Violent. She was looking at me in a way she hadn’t before. Flailing her arms, clicking her wrists, gripping her palms. I felt conflicted. Sad because of the eruptive catharsis I was beholding and aroused because of the level of intimacy we were reaching. That look in her eyes. Those dark, soulful eyes.

I propped myself up into a seated position and buried her in my arms. Her body was shaking. She felt warm and cold. Stiff and frail. I held her close and tight, suffocating any doubt in her mind. She continued to speak in a language I couldn’t begin to decipher, let alone understand. However, I understood everything she was feeling, everything her heart was expressing. Every single word.

* * * *

It was a steady, slow-building orgasm. It had been welling up inside of me like tears held back from a repressed emotion. The care and passion with which she was tugging at my penis had the charm of wanting to do a good job that comes from inexperience. It was naïve, coy and playful. She was pushing buttons without knowing the type of reactions they would trigger in my body. It reminded me of the first time we had been intimate, when we used to meet in her apartment to listen to The Beatles and drink Japanese wheat tea. At the time, I didn’t know if it was the sweetness in her eyes, the bitterness of John Lennon’s singing or the savoriness of the tea, but I felt the need to invade her lips with mine. To occupy her mouth with my tongue. At first, she pulled away— half appalled, half pleasantly surprised.

“Why did you kiss me?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I saw it in your eyes.”

“Well, in case you didn’t know, I have a boyfriend.” She said it more so to remind herself of the fact than to get me to stop. She was still within firing range, and her eyes were still conveying the same message as before.

“OK, can I just have one more kiss?” This time, I was the one who had to pull away. We decided to forget the whole incident and go back to listening to music, each of us sitting at the couch’s extremes. She kept looking over, smiling nervously. I knew what she wanted, I could see it in the way her slightly crooked teeth were digging into her bottom lip. In her quivering silence I could hear her screaming for another kiss. For what she had so strongly opposed and at the same time couldn’t get enough of.

Her lips were starved for love, the kind of love that only I could give her.

“Do you want to kiss me?” I asked. She nodded her head affirmatively. I slid over to her end of the couch and placed my arm around her. I wanted to take her to a secluded place, a place beyond shame, beyond judgement, beyond inhibition. A place beyond love. What we felt wasn’t just love. It was lust. We kissed each other like it was going to be the last time. I placed her hand on my thigh, and she started to slide it up towards my crotch, which by this point seemed like it was going to burst out of its seams. I heard the sound of my zipper becoming undone slowly. I felt her digging inside, removing the layers of cloth between her hand and my stiffened flesh.

She took its content in her hands without questioning. All of the questions, the doubts that she had from when we first kissed had dissipated by now. Her willingness to humor my hormonal urge compelled me to help with the unzipping and simply pull it out and place it in her hands. By this point my heart was throbbing with desire, and I didn’t care whether things were moving too fast. We were ready. She welcomed me in her hands. Part of me felt that she was jerking me around, using me as a surrogate lover. Her touch felt cold. Almost robotic, as though she was simply going through the motions. We both wanted the same things, but each for very different reasons.

We looked at each other and realized the murkiness of the situation. I placed her face in my hands and gave her a kiss. I felt her grip get tighter and the rhythm of it getting faster and warmer. It told me that she finally understood what this was about. She treated my body as if she herself was a man, stroking with the skill of a chronic masturbator. As if my penis was her own and she was going to be the one who would climax through it. I felt strong in her hand. In its clasp, that hardened tissue had a purpose, and its purpose was to be the best it had ever been. Not for me, but for her. For all of the hard work she was investing in my happiness and pleasure. There was something lodged inside of me that I needed her to help me get out. I was full of love for her and filling up more and more with every one of her kisses. I was about to reach a breaking point. A point of rapturous rupture. I felt a feral, starved beast trying to claw its way out of my urethra. It was my turn to release the pent-up pressure.

It came as a surprise, as it always does. I didn’t know how to feel, so I just felt. I simply was. It was an out-of-body, ethereal experience, losing myself in the moment, letting go of conscious thought and welcoming chaos.

As I came back to coherence, I realized that she was still toiling away. Throughout my life, I have always been told, if it feels good, then go with it. So, I did. It was electric. A religious experience and a celestial dialogue with the divine. This was her way of thanking me for being there for her. For treating her like a woman and not just like some stupid Singaporean girl with no say in her sexuality. That night, I returned her generosity and helped her release her tension and turned my hands into instruments of torturous pleasure. The sight of her face writhing in the exquisite pain of sex told me more than her words— in English or Malay, from human or demonic tongue— ever could.

* * * *

In the months that we spent together, we created a little world for ourselves. A four-walled Eden in a one-bedroom-one-bath apartment. We fought, made love and learned many things about ourselves that we wouldn’t have had our paths not crossed. She taught me how to be intimate with a woman and how to tend to her emotional needs. I taught her how a man likes to be touched and that it’s perfectly normal to have sexual thoughts and feelings. The only lesson we forgot to teach one another was how to live life without the other.

Bilicko, C. (2017). Bridging the Gap [Painting]. Acrylic on wood, Long Beach, CA.

Dance With the Leopards in the Madman’s House

Her large, sagging breasts were being held tightly against her body with one arm, while the other was preoccupied picking up coins falling out of her cleavage. For every coin that she picked up off the floor, four more came rushing out. A coin in the bosom was worth four on the floor. She was like a walking slot machine. The assorted coins dropping out of her clutched breasts chimed loudly. They jingled off the ground, waterfalling uncontrollably. For a brief moment, the clatter of coins clashing on the rubber-lined floors disrupted the smartphone consumption of some riders; others went unfazed.

The real gold was falling out of her fleshy lips. Whatever she was on granted her the ability to dig deep into her vocabulary for profanity that could easily proliferate within the bus’s physical space. With the force of a tornado, her words hit the ears of the riders, most of which began to dig through their purses and backpacks for earbuds, to drown away with music what she couldn’t with drugs. The threats she was making consisted of popping you in the mouth and demanding that you pay her 20 dollars. Like an actor reciting a well rehearsed Shakespeare soliloquy, she let out an eloquent and uninterrupted stream of “punk-ass bitches” and “I’m gonna kill that mothafucka.”

She was wearing a royal-blue sundress, with big sky-blue Hawaiian plumeria flowers printed all over it. It was concealing the lower half of her body, just below her bloated navel. Her voluptuousness was part of the reason why the dress hadn’t slid all the way off, down to her ankles. Her hair was dyed blonde and buzzed cut. Her make-up seemed to have been applied haphazardly and looked clownish at best. It did little to hide her age or the unfortunate experiences she had faced. Her expression was that of an angry, snarling bulldog trying to escape the rough petting of children.

After successfully gathering all of the wayward coins off the floor and under other patrons’ seats, she went back to the heap of bags she had placed near the rear exit. As she moved toward her large canvas bag, she released her breasts from their restraint. They descended like wet socks thrown over and teetering on a clothesline— bouncing up and down, swinging back and forth, side to side— restrained by a single clothespin. They were long and flat, like twin turbines on a fighter jet. Get too close and she would’ve knocked your head clean off.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” she yelled. Nobody was within a 3-foot radius from her. “I kick your mothafucking ass, mothafucka.” She was peering her head forward and pointing out the double Plexiglas doors. It almost looked as though she was arguing with her reflection, chasing her own shadow like a lost boy from Neverland. She was yet another victim of LA, the land of never-gonna-happen, where you can easily La-La your life away. The bystanders treat people like this bosomy lady as a mere inconvenience, a bump on the road. Other people don’t help because they can’t even help themselves. There we were, me on the road home and she on the road to perdition.

When I saw her large nipples making eye contact with me, I had to do a double take just to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me. My instinctive reaction was to look away and then sneak a look. Back and forth. Don’t look, then look. I was like a prudish maiden hiding her curiosity behind a delicately crocheted white lace fan. I couldn’t stop looking. I wanted to analyze her body and figure out where all of her scars and bruises had come from. When did all of the neglect that she and the citizens of the city inflicted on her begin to happen? When she noticed that I was admiring her large chest, she smiled and threw a penny at me. It was her way of saying “I see you looking at my titties. I’m glad you like them.” I was compelled to pick it up and return the coin she had so laboriously worked to collect a few moments ago, but I was apprehensive to do so due to her mercurial temper which could have turned on a dime from coy to destroy. From coquettishly rubbing her nipple to scrubbing the floor with me.

Using the same disruptive and imposing will with which she had thrusted herself into the bus’s rear exit, she now demanded the driver to stop the goddamned bus.

“Let me out, let me out,” she yelled. “Let me the fuck out.” She pulled up her dress and tucked her gelatinous breasts into it one by one. As she swung the cluster of bags onto her back, a dirty piece of cardboard fell out from one of them, like a dirty little secret. She exited the bus yelling at the top of her lungs, “Good morning, Beverly Hills.” It was 10:37 p.m., and we were in Hollywood. This elicited a “Shut the fuck up” from another patron who had slept through the whole debacle. He appeared to be a hybrid of the Snow White dwarves Sleepy and Grumpy. By the scent emanating from his direction, he could have also been Stinky, if ever the group of little men decided to incorporate an eighth member.

The sign left behind read:

“HOMELESS
CHANGE
THANK YOU.”

Succinct. To the point. Twitter friendly.

The word “CHANGE” wasn’t followed by a question mark. Why bother? Did she even have a choice? Did we? She didn’t want to complicate her message or go over the character limit. It simply wasn’t in her character. I picked it up and took it with me when I exited the bus. I placed it on a bus bench. Maybe someone else would find it useful or inspiring. It definitely inspired me. That night, I lay in bed— wide awake— with the image of that woman’s sadness on my mind.

Oseguera, J. L., Jr. (2017). Where I Hide With My Loneliness [Drawing]. stripSearchLA, Los Angeles, CA.