reflectivity

(first appeared in The Subterranean Quarterly April 2013)

It was the blue jumpsuit that gave him away. He was from the Recollections Department and he was here for one of my memories. I knew which one and he was welcome to it.

I don’t think I’d thought about it in years and that wasn’t an accident. I had flown down to New Orleans to celebrate Mardi Gas with an old college friend and on the last night of our visit he had driven us out of the city to a structure that, while making a mobile home look like The Four Seasons by comparison, had no doubt been enjoying the first break in a long series of slasher movies being filmed there.

He had found hookers for us.

I knew that if I turned and ran something would come hurtling out of the woods and chop me to pieces so I proceeded inside.

The uncomfortable moment where we had to decide which of us gets the better looking of the two prostitutes was thankfully avoided when they were both ugly as shit. They were both vaguely ethnic but in a way that I couldn’t tell if they were Eastern European, Vietnamese or retarded but the idea of actually paying them to have sex seemed so absurd that I realized that it must be happening. These two women had never made it into anyone’s dreams, that much I was sure of. In fact, I was pretty certain that if I had chosen to follow my initial inclination and run upon arrival that it would have been one of their family members that came hurtling out of the woods to chop me to pieces.

I got the girl with a little schnauzer in her.

My friend looked tickled to death as he headed off with his prize and it suddenly occurred to me that back in college he was the guy who always acted above trying to get laid but would then get drunk and whisper suggestive things out his window to all the girls walking by. I don’t know why but in that moment it became crystal clear he was a lunatic that no doubt owned at least one coat made from human skin.

The man in the jumpsuit approached my front door.

I will spare you the details of my actual sexual encounter but I will say this much: I remember standing over her before the festivities were about to begin and looking down at my dick and seeing it the same way you see your hand when it is underwater in the pool and you’re moving it and it shimmies and morphs and changes shapes in crazy ways.

I peered down between her legs and into the dark thicket that contained her womanhood then returned my gaze to my seemingly-liquid dick and said “you poor bastard” half to myself and half to my dick.

As you’ve been nice enough to stay with me this far I will give you one other tidbit about the sex act. Because I found her abhorrent I found it difficult to cum. I kept my eyes closed tight and tried to imagine almost any other female I’d ever known, but it was no use. I was plowing the holy hell out of her and she kept yelping in a manner that made me certain my schnauzer instincts were dead on and the room filled with an odor that gave me the impression that when she wasn’t engaged in intercourse her vagina was used as a tire manufacturing plant.

I heard my front door bell and realized that I was sweating profusely.

My friend ended up marrying the first girl who would sleep with him. Looking back I’m surprised he didn’t propose that night. He seemed extraordinarily pleased with himself as we drove away and for all I know he did pop the question but her grasp of the English language was so poor she thought he was under the impression her name was Mary.

“No Mary.”

I opened the front door and saw the man in the blue jumpsuit.

I lost touch with my old friend. We both moved around a lot after that and I realized as the man in the jumpsuit unpacked his gear that the New Orleans trip was my signature memory of him.

Oh well, people come and go but that memory has to go.

Wait. What was I saying?