15
Smoker
Corey began training four, five nights a week in May, thanks to his mother’s credit card. The other grapplers at Bestway were high school wrestlers, firemen, bearded jiujitsu hippies in full-sleeve tattoos who worked at the mall, computer programmers, a DEA agent with a mustache, a young sullen Marine with acne, a thick-limbed tow-truck driver and various other guys of mixed complexions, ages, sizes, body odors and temperaments. There was a woman, Cindy, a black belt who was a doctor. People’s jobs and identities off the mat mattered little; the only thing that counted was their skill. A guy named Scott was very good. He wore a shirt from the Mansfield Fire Department. He’d been training several years and during Corey’s painful tutelage as a beginner made a custom of putting Corey in his place. When it was time to spar, Scott didn’t even look at him; he lay back with his hands behind his head as if he were at the beach and talked with friends while toying with Corey with his legs. Corey fought his legs, which fell on him like rollers in a car wash. Eventually Scott would notice him and casually flip Corey over and finish him with a one-arm guillotine.
While he was still coughing from the choke, Scott would ask if he wanted to go again, to which Corey would of course say yes, and with a sigh of boredom, Scott would gather Corey into his guard like a father pulling a baby into his lap and choke him again.
One day Corey tried to use one of the tricky moves he’d picked up online to surprise the fireman. He trapped one of Scott’s large clammy feet under his arm, leaned back on his side, and heel-hooked him. A heel hook is a dangerous move that can pop somebody’s knee and rip their ligaments. Scott tapped.
“Finally! Thank you, God.”
Scott said, “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I was gonna take a break.”
“Oh no you don’t. Get back here. You’re not walking away now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Get over here now.”
Corey came back and kneeled down. They slapped hands, and the fireman scooted into Corey, hooked his feet under Corey’s legs, grabbed his elbows, and butterfly-swept him. When he scrambled, Scott took his back, and the relentless process of getting choked began again, a process that consumes the whole body. Corey was gasping, fighting to feed his working heart. Scott worked his arm under Corey’s chin. Then the choke came, the massive brain-killing pressure. Grimacing, his eyes rolled back to the whites, Corey tapped his partner’s arm. Scott let him go, and Corey lay slumped on the mat, coughing.
“There’s a time to play and a time to play.”
The same thing happened in Muay Thai, which met on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays. The trainees were different from jits; there was a Mexican guy who tied on a headband with a red sun like a kamikaze before they rang the bell. Muay Thai is a striking art and an important component of unarmed combat perhaps best known for its roundhouse leg kicks. Corey felt he had to try it. He crept forward, hands high, bouncing his toe in blind imitation of the others, no idea what he was doing, trying to sock people in their headgear and nearly getting knocked unconscious. Eddie thought he was going too hard, so he had them switch partners so he could spar with Corey himself. With the ball of his foot he kicked Corey in the stomach. The blow knocked Corey on his behind and sent him rolling backwards head over heels like a stuntman in a movie. People thought it was hilarious. “Ong Bak!” they shouted.
Unsmiling, Eddie marched over to Corey, high-fived him and made him finish the round.
To Corey, getting beaten, getting tapped out, getting humiliated was a disaster. He got another old tire from outside a Midas and hung it on the baseball backstop out in Houghs Neck and cracked it with his fists. Guys playing catch ignored him. In his room at home, he reviewed the mechanics of how your weight shifts onto your lead leg, your hips and shoulders twist as you push off the ball of your rear foot. Outside his brown room door was his father. The mechanics are: You’re slamming a door shut. The plane of the door is your shoulders. Your arm travels forward, the hand turning over, the fist tightening on impact, snapping, striking the target with your first two knuckles. If it goes out at ninety miles an hour, it comes back at a hundred miles an hour to protect your face. The Thai fighter has eight limbs: fists, feet, elbows, knees. Nine, if you count the head—the head-butt—the Irish kiss. He made his artistic strokes—jab, cross, hook, uppercut, overhand—learning to raise his heel and twist on the ball of his foot when he threw a hook, his eyes looking in his mirror over the blurred bar of his hand.
For Mother’s Day, he gave his mom a card. No sailboat this year. He drew his mother as a fighter with her knee on the belly of an anonymous man and her arm cocked back to punch him in the face.
The train to Dorchester is aboveground. It comes on a curve. The tracks curve and away beyond them, out the back window, is the South Shore. Then the train stops at the platform. The sun is shining in the car. The doors open. She uses the cane to stand. She rocks to her feet. Now she is on her feet and stepping to the door, carrying a knit bag which has a Sanskrit word on it, the first syllable of OM. She has fifteen seconds, she has timed it, to get off, if no one knocks her over. People go around her, chatting, taking e-cigarettes out of their purses. She steps across the gap and doesn’t trip. The doors slam and do not catch her dress, which is long, loose, linen; she seems not aware of how close it comes to being caught. It touches the ground around her feet. It drags on the cement as she goes down the steps. The T has gone away, north, to Boston. She descends the staircase, one step at a time, using the cane, knit purse on her hip, back bent, head thrust forward on atrophying neck. At the bottom of the stairs—she hasn’t fallen yet—she heads down a tunnel, graffitied, that goes beneath the tracks. On the other side, there are stairs again. She rests a minute and then starts climbing.
When she makes it to the street, she sets off through an alley—it’s the only way to go—through a maze of concrete barriers and rusted cyclone fence. A littered embankment rises up from a retaining wall to a decaying fortress of brick housing projects. The other commuters have all outpaced her. She travels here alone.
There’s a crazed man blocking the sidewalk on Dorchester Avenue. He’s there every day saying “Hey, baby” to the office women. If Gloria wants to get around him, she has to cross the street, but the curbstone is very high; it must have been built in the horse-and-buggy days, before sewers, to keep doorways above floodwater and manure. Furthermore, two avenues cross here in an X like a pair of open shears, making a wide distance for her to cross before a car—and the light is short.
She presses on, pretends he isn’t there.
Getting to work has become the hardest thing she does. Still, she does it—has been doing it since February—and, as a result, she’s fallen. She’s fallen numerous times since beginning to take the T. Once, she stood up early on the train to anticipate her stop, the train lurched, and she pitched over sideways. Blacks and Vietnamese ran to pick her up—minorities she’d always believed to be more enlightened, and maybe they were; they were her saints—they gave her back her cane—and she was too embattled to even thank them, for the train kept roaring on—to Savin Hill—and now she had to go back. What was she to do? Change at JFK. Two enormous flights of stairs or an elevator that stank like urine.
Heroin gives people diarrhea. She found the elevator reeking with a sludge of brown shit like pudding batter. There was shit smeared on the stainless steel buttons. Two floors: 1 and 2. She managed to push 2 with her elbow.
“I apologize for that,” an MBTA guy told her. The MBTA people were great—Boston’s best. She had a new appreciation.
She fell again and again—climbing into buses; in the street across from Planet Fitness; beneath the Cambodian signs. Her dropping toe, which she tried to raise, caught the ground when her thigh got tired. Shin and thigh grew quickly weary. Anterior tibialis. Her arm was too weak to hold her on the cane. She’d begin to twist and lean. She’d scream when she saw the fall coming. She couldn’t help it. People looked. She’d pitched over and smashed down on the cement. Her Greek hat fell off, her woven purse spilled open, her keys and lipstick, which she never used anymore, rolled out. The cell phone popped open and the battery fell out.
She couldn’t stand up without help. Recently, she had fallen on Dorchester Avenue when a pair of women were walking by. Speaking coolly and with composure from the ground, Gloria had told them she needed help to stand. One woman, in sunglasses, had had a cigarette hanging off her lip. She’d said “Here” in a gravel voice and handed her purse to her friend and tried to help Gloria stand with one hand while holding her cigarette with the other. They’d staggered.
“I can’t hold you, honey. Ya gotta use your legs.”
“I can’t. That’s why I need your help.”
The woman, who was a drunk, let her fall again. Gloria fell backwards while looking up, like someone falling backwards into the gray ocean with her eyes never leaving the faces of the people in the lifeboat.
“I can’t help her,” the drunk said to her friend.
Men in newsboy hats hung out at 7-Eleven, drinking coffee and reading the paper. A man put down his paper, ran and helped her up. Gloria told him she needed her purse. He went around the sidewalk picking up her things—lipstick, wallet, keys, a Tibetan elephant charm. The two women had hurried away.
Gloria said, “I can’t find my cell phone.”
“It’s not here. Are you sure you had it?”
“Yes. I know what I had. I’ve been robbed. Those two women took it. Can you get it back from them?”
“Aren’t those your friends?”
“They’re not my friends. They’re a couple of thieves. Can you call the police?”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, goddamnit, I’m sure.”
She’d lost her phone, money, the last shred of her dignity when she collapsed in front of strangers or—worse—the people at her job. Her most agonizing spill was the one she took on the ramp outside her job and had to let her colleagues help her up.
What was wrong with her? they asked. She had always been aloof, reading art books, taking her lunches apart, skipping the office parties and balloons. Now she was getting her comeuppance. They wanted gossip.
“I’m infirm,” she said.
She took to wearing sunglasses to conceal her face in public. When she fell, the glasses flew off as well—another twenty-dollar pair of glasses broken, another trip to Walgreens in her future to look at the sunglasses rack and see her face in the mirror, the butterfly suture on her forehead. She knocked a tooth out in the front of her mouth. It broke her down. “I can’t go out like this!” she wept.
Insurance sent her three different bills for the dentist, who had seemed so nice, but it must have been a lie—three steadily increasing amounts. She dried her eyes and read the statements with her bifocals on her as-yet-unbroken nose.
“This isn’t right,” she said, and prepared to call the insurance company. She used a hands-free device with her new cell phone, a headset with a boom mike, like a telemarketer. It took her several tries to put the jack in with her hands.
Today, she had gotten to work without falling. Now she was seated at her desk in her cubicle, the cane by her side. At the end of the day, she would face the journey home.
At Gloria’s clinic day, the neurologist noted she had been diagnosed roughly a year ago. He assessed the state of her body. He tested her ability to generate force with her hands, lift her arms, raise her knees. The flesh was disappearing from her shoulders; a hollow was developing behind her arms at the site of the teres major. When he asked her to stand up straight, she had difficulty. Her back was humped. When she raised one foot, she lost her balance. He held her. She pressed down on his hand. Her hand couldn’t grip him; she was pressing him with the bones of her wrist.
The physical therapist fitted her with orthotic braces at wrist and ankle—shiny plastic gauntlets that secured with Velcro fasteners. They kept Gloria’s toes from dropping. The most significant piece of equipment she got was a walker. She was graduating from a cane.
The therapist showed her how to use it: set it in front of her, take a step with one foot, then the other, then move the walker out again.
The therapist had a practical, no-feeling-sorry-for-yourself way about her that discouraged Gloria from opening up. Gloria kept everything bottled inside until she saw Dawn Gillespie. In Dawn’s office, at the first question from her, “How have you been?,” Gloria broke down crying. Her temples flushed, the vein in her forehead stood out, her eyes squeezed shut, mucus ran from the point of her thin nose, and she sobbed: “I think I need to talk to somebody.” In a few minutes, however, she had pulled herself together.
Nevertheless, Dawn scheduled an assessment of Gloria at her home to see what her “support structure” was like. Shortly, the social worker arrived in Quincy with her clipboard.
Gloria invited her to sit. She told Dawn that her hands were so weak that she was having trouble manipulating a mouse at her job even with orthotics. She was having trouble bathing and performing tasks related to hygiene.
“Toileting?”
“No. Not that, but—I didn’t want to say it—tampons.”
“I always say, there’s no room for shyness,” and Dawn explained the basic human fact that we all have body functions. “Is this something we can outsource to an intimate partner?” She looked around as if someone else might be in the house whom she hadn’t seen yet.
“Corey’s father lives with us,” said Gloria.
“He couldn’t make it today,” said Corey. The social worker looked at him. Corey’s mother explained that he was very angry with his father.
“I’m not angry at anyone. I’m just worried about my mom.”
“You sound angry,” the social worker said. She added that being angry was perfectly okay.
Gloria began to take The Ride to work—a free service provided by the MBTA for the disabled. In the morning, a car would stop outside their house and honk. The driver was a grizzled guy with a heavy New England accent. He watched Gloria coming down her steps, Corey walking backwards in front of her, ready to catch her if she tripped.
“Here she comes. Take it slow and easy.”
Gloria did not respond.
When she reached his car, the driver made a move to help, but Corey insisted on buckling his mother’s seatbelt. “I usually do that. Never mind. Whatever you’re more comfortable with.” The driver took the walker after Corey had folded it and put it in the trunk, then jumped behind the wheel and sped away with Gloria as if she had put him behind schedule.
The school year ended. Corey sat through his finals.
Surrounded by her peers, who were trading hugs on senior graduation day, Molly ignored him. That is, she tried, but he forced his way into her circle to wish her well at college.
She wished him luck in turn. The implied meaning before their onlookers seemed to be that he was the one who would be needing luck to mend his many faults. Her friends smiled and waited for him to leave.
Corey backed away, went home in the sun, missing the ceremony. He had failed his finals and wondered what would happen.
He got a landscaping job working for an Italian, a short stocky older fellow in a straw hat.
With school out of the way, he planned to devote himself to a pure life of martial arts, paid for by mowing lawns and planting flowers.
June. Corey and his mother hadn’t seen Leonard in several days. Now, in the hot weather, they lived in suspense about when he would appear. He’d be gone for days, then, in the middle of the night, Corey would wake up and know that someone else was in the house, and in the morning, he’d see Leonard lying asleep on the futon—a cheese-white shoulder stippled with purple zit scars thrusting up from the blankets; a pile of iron-gray hair. Leonard’s hair looked as full as a judge’s wig when crowned by the fedora. Without the hat, there was a mangy hole in it as if it had been sprayed with weed killer. The white pate glowed like a shard of bone in the nest of steel-wool hair. His morbidly alabaster calves lay heavily on the mattress opposite the head—they were hairless on the backs and gleamed. The man’s hips were wreathed in sheets like a Roman. The rest of his person—his clothes and accessories—lay around like a disassembled body. His black trousers stretched across the coffee table like a tongue. The fedora rested on a bag, creating the impression of a droid which remained awake while Leonard slept and which could zip around the floor fetching math books at his master’s whim. The aviator glasses were substitute eyes filming Corey as he reacted to the sight of his father’s body, a film that Leonard would watch when he was awake.
Other times, upon opening his door in the morning, Corey’s eye would follow the spill of dancing shadows and golden-blue lights that shone in through the blinds across the coffee table to the futon—and there’d be no one there. But he would see the evidence that Leonard had come and gone: His things had been moved; the bed was open; the sheets cast off; the blankets were awry.
His father left his long curling hairs and the smell of his body on the mattress. Corey’s first action of the day was to close the futon so his mother could use it as a couch. He hated touching the fabric that had touched his father’s nakedness. He smelled the man in the cotton. He rolled the sheets and blankets in a wad and set them in a mound on Leonard’s pile of bags.
Occasionally, Leonard left his cop bag behind in the house. Corey thought of looking in it but never did. He shoved it behind the furniture with his foot and went to wash his hands.
Now, in his second month of training, Corey began to realize that his daily defeats at the gym, where he went fresh from landscaping every afternoon with grass stains on his knees, were part of a long slow enlightenment. The experienced guys watched him getting beaten and told him, “You see how you’re getting swept? Don’t let him control you. The first thing you have to do is win the grip fight”—and he listened. In mid-June, he rolled again with Scott and actually passed his guard. There were extenuating factors—Scott was tired—and Corey’s success was short-lived—a minute later Scott nearly crushed his neck with a Peruvian necktie—but the fact remained that Corey had learned something since he’d started. Later in the month, he competed in a submission grappling tournament at Waltham High in the beginner’s lightweight division, and won his first match. Other teams sat in the bleacher seats, black guys with their hair dyed blond, drinking Pedialyte after their weigh-ins, jiujitsu girlfriends stripping down to pink Bad Boy shorts and competing too, everyone getting almost naked—the ripped abs, the mixture of celebration and fear.
Everyone filmed the matches on their cell phones.
At the end of June, Bestway held a smoker—a gym fight. A bunch of guys showed up from a nearby school, South Shore Sport Fighting. Moms and wives sat in folding chairs while the competitors warmed up, hitting focus mitts and skipping rope. The sun fell inside the warehouse door. A pair of whirring shop fans blew air across the seats. Eddie had a microphone. “I don’t really like talking on this thing,” he said. “Anyways, thanks for coming. Our first fight is gonna be…”
Corey had bought a mouthpiece for this occasion. He put it in. Both he and his opponent wore visored headgear and shin pads. At the bell, his opponent rushed across the cage and punched him in the face. The punches landed short of Corey’s face and Corey didn’t move, but the headgear flew off and, Eddie, who was refereeing, ran and fetched it and strapped it back on Corey’s head. “Fight!” he shouted, and they resumed. His opponent began walking him down, nailing him with solid, whacking Thai kicks, which came too fast to block, while Corey stuck out his jab and retreated. In a clinch, he got thrown off balance. The pads kept him from getting knocked out. It felt out of control, like being in a car accident but not being hurt.
When the fight was over, his opponent took off his headgear, revealing a sweating head, brown eyes, and a heavy dark brown mustache like a forty-niner panning for gold in Jack London’s Yukon Territory.
“You got a lotta balls stepping in with me,” he said.
The day after the smoker, Corey met Adrian on the Esplanade. When he arrived, he found Adrian waiting at a point directly across the river from MIT. He was impossible to miss: He was wearing a shirt with the sleeves ripped off, heavy black-framed glasses, an all-black baseball cap, tiny shorts, and high-top black combat boots.
Stalled in the middle of the sidewalk and staring into space, he was forcing joggers in spandex bras and clinging tights to run around him.
Corey waved a hand in front of his face. “The cosine of the coefficient of the integral of the square root of the—what’s up, buddy?”
Adrian came out of his trance. “I was just thinking of the most beautiful theorem!”
He led Corey along the riverbank. Sailboats were bounding in slow motion over the water. A gentle silence held sway, as if, in this part of Boston, the outdoors was just another wing of the library. College girls sunbathed on the grass.
Adrian said his summer was going well. He was in physics camp at MIT. It was such a great school! He couldn’t wait to go there in the fall! He wouldn’t have to live under his mother’s roof anymore! It was so satisfying seeing his plans work out. He was learning such interesting things! He’d even begun finding ways to enjoy himself. Since he wasn’t working, he used his free time to study here on the riverbank. The views were so exciting! It was a perfect place for physics!
“Yep, I can see that,” Corey said.
“Yes, it’s the perfect place for beautiful ideas.”
“Might be hard to concentrate.”
They went past the sunbathing women into a natural arcade of interlacing trees which formed a tunnel over the path. Adrian discoursed on the topic of his current studies: relativistic momentum and the fact that the sun is losing mass. With each step, the giant, dense muscles of his legs jumped and flexed as if they were being galvanized with electric shocks. His shorts were so short that you could see the hair growing out of his crotch and spreading down his thighs. Corey avoided the sight of him. He noticed a thin lone man looking at them through the trees.
“Let’s go back the other way. My meter’s going to run out.”
On the way back, Adrian asked what was on his mind. Corey said he had just fought at his gym.
“That’s right, you said you were taking martial arts.”
“That’s right, I am. I told you that a while ago.”
“I didn’t know how seriously to take that.”
“Maybe you ought to take it seriously.”
Adrian asked if he had won or lost.
“I lost, but it was a decision. Nobody knocked me out.”
“That’s good. Even for a crazy person like you who doesn’t care if he gets knocked out.”
“I’m not crazy, Adrian.”
“I’m not crazy! Go ahead and knock me out!”
“I did all right. I stung the guy a couple times.”
“Who was the guy?”
“A Thai boxer.”
“A Thai boxer. Was he crazy too?”
“Not sure. Couldn’t tell you. It was a good day for me. I even stopped thinking about him.” He jerked his head at MIT across the river.
“You mean your father?”
“Yep.”
“Hmm.” Adrian pressed his lip. “I know in the past I’ve looked at this differently from you, probably because of my mother—well, definitely because of her! But there are two sides to everything. It might help you get it off your chest to talk about what’s been going on with your father—if not with me, then with a therapist or a counselor. It could be really good for you. I could tell you how to get a therapist for free—or almost free. You’d be surprised at the insights you can get! Or if you want to, you can talk to me. It’ll give me a chance to try to put my mother out of my mind. I can put forth challenging ideas and maybe you can practice being open-minded. It could be really fruitful. Maybe I’ll learn something that will spark new ideas with me too. It could be good for both of us.”
“I’ll tell you: That sonofabitch hasn’t been home in weeks. Not in daytime.”
“But I thought you didn’t like him—”
“Of course I don’t like him, but he’s supposed to help my mother. He’s just using our house as a hotel. Let me tell you what I’d like to do to his face.”
“Go on,” said Adrian. “That’s very interesting.”
They returned to where they had started. Corey said he had to leave; he couldn’t afford to get a ticket. Adrian said that was fine; he had a problem set to do. “It was pleasant to take a walk. It was pleasant to look at the babes. That made me feel good. Let’s see: It’ll be satisfying to think about the interesting ideas in my problem set. I’m learning interesting things. My workouts have been going well. Everything is going well; I’ll be very satisfied to stay here and think about the equations for relativistic momentum.” Adrian stretched and sighed, bringing his hands to his ears and flexing both his biceps, showing his abundant armpit hair, while smiling down at the sunbathers lying on the grass in their bikinis.
The sigh, the stretch, the secret smile—Adrian seemed to be acting out a show of contentment and satisfaction.
Corey noticed an oiled man watching them.
“Dude, that guy’s looking at you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s looking right at you. It’s gotta be your shorts. Why are you wearing Daisy Dukes?”
“I really fill out a pair of shorts, don’t I?”
“I have no idea.”
“Not just in front; in behind too. I’ve got big glutes.”
“I’d fill out my shorts too if I wore a cup everywhere.”
“I’d fill them out without it.”
“Guys are looking at you.”
“I’m doing exactly what babes do to get attention. It works for them; why shouldn’t it work for me?”
“It might not be the same.”
“Why shouldn’t it be?”
“All right, I’m going.”
Corey hiked up the grassy slope to the hatchback, which was parked one block over on an avenue of brownstones, and headed back to Quincy in gathering afternoon traffic—workingmen were getting off work. He looped around the river on Storrow Drive, past the place where he had just been, into the tunnel beneath the city, then out into the sunlight. Shopping plaza. The dilapidated homes of Dorchester. A beach-white causeway. Now a glimpse of blue water.
In the stop-and-go traffic, he was surrounded by trucks filled with disassembled scaffolding, rope rigging, ladders, power tools, groups of guys with hats on backwards, joking, riding shoulder to shoulder. A sense of having soiled himself with Adrian grew in him as he traveled home.
Now that he was alone, Adrian walked around until he found a place to sit and study physics, facing a pair of females, who were sunning on the grass.
Occasionally, as he studied, a girl turned over, presenting a different portion of her body to the sun. Adrian adjusted himself beneath his textbook, which was resting on his knees. Sailboats continued tacking back and forth soundlessly on the water. An hour passed. A female wearing a baseball hat stood up, bent down, picked up her shorts, and wriggled into them, getting them above her hips. Toting her shoulder bag, she walked his way, looking at her phone, sport sandals slapping the path, bracelets jingling.
As she passed him, Adrian said something to make her look. He had removed his penis from his shorts. When she turned, he spread his knees and made sure she saw it. She was wearing sunglasses. She kept walking without changing her expression.
Her friends were waiting some distance away.
“Where?”
“Under the tree.” She pointed. Her friends looked at Adrian, who pretended to study. They turned away as a group and went off wherever they were going. There was some laughter. Adrian watched to see what they would do, but they did nothing.
When they were gone, Adrian shut his book. He yawned again and stretched.
He crossed the bridge to MIT and set out across the athletic field, in his tight shorts and combat boots. The field smelled like cut grass.
On the other side, there was a space-age building with hexagonal windows. The lobby was air-conditioned. It had soaring walls of high-gloss white and geometric designs—simple Euclidean shapes—triangles, circles—in primary colors. Daylight coming from the windows created a greenhouse effect. A security guard walked out from behind a steel staircase and it was Leonard.
Adrian followed him downstairs.
“The best thing happened today!” he said when they were in the basement. “But before I tell you, you’re going to want to know: I saw your son. We had a nice long conversation. I got him to talk about you. He told me…,” and Adrian began painting Corey’s admissions to him in vivid terms. “He sees you as this giant monster, which he’s powerless to defeat, so he has to kill it. He has homicidal feelings towards you.”
“He said he’s going to kill me?”
“Not verbatim. But the homicidal ideation is clear. I know that from my own feelings of rage.”
Then Adrian told Leonard his good news.
“I was studying on the Esplanade and there was this chick sunbathing on the grass, showing off her body, using all her sexual power to dominate me. She was showing me everything I wanted and I couldn’t have. Well, I gave her a show of my own. I took my penis out of my shorts and when she walked by, I made her look at something she couldn’t have!”
“Did she do anything?”
“That’s the thing: She didn’t do anything! She didn’t say a word.”
“Are you sure she saw you?”
“Oh yeah. I could tell from her face. She couldn’t miss it—trust me.”
“She might not have seen anything, if she wasn’t looking.”
“No, I know she did. She had these friends and they all started laughing about it together.”
“They were laughing?”
“Yeah, it was great.”
“You’re lucky nothing happened.”
“No. She was happy. She was laughing about it with them. I bet it made her feel important. She’s probably going to get herself off tonight thinking about me. It completely proves my theory that women are just as aroused by seeing a dick as I am by seeing a pussy.”
Leonard said, “Sometimes people laugh when they’re afraid.”