Follow the Stream Back Up

“Whilst Man, however well-behaved, At best is but a monkey shaved.”—W. S. Gilbert (1884)

What I remember is a bitter January morning wrangling a junkyard transmission into a ‘53 Packard, jacked up on blocks. Richie and I should have been trudging through the snow to classes at the U instead of our backs jammed against a freezing curb, lining up an Ultramatic, the biggest I’d ever seen. 

  Two cars rolled up—Alan would come upon you anywhere, anytime, and frequently intoxicated. 

“Charlie?” 

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Beautiful day, huh?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  The transmission teetered.

  “We got two women and Bunny's pad.”

  Alan peered under the car. “Back-to-back racks.”

  “Hold it there, Richie. It’s Alan.”

  “Not Alan. Fuck no!” grunting disgustedly.

  “What do they look like?” I asked, 

  “Check 'em out,” said Alan. 

  I edged out for a look. I couldn't place ‘em.  

Alan fished a loose cigarette from his jacket and lit it. “The one in the Studebaker has the hots for you.”

“The one with twenty-four zeroes?”

“Yeah.” 

“No chance.” 

Alan began to hover. “You don’t want to fuck her? Those nipples have to be the size of quarters. Wait'll she sticks 'em in your face.” He shivered a little. “Besides, we’re not getting any unless you're with us. That's the unfortunate truth of it.”

It was just my luck.

“C'mon, man, those girls won't wait.”

“It’s almost on the spline.”

“Make it fast.”

Richie and I went in and cleaned up and then went out to the cars. Alan took me aside. “If we find out you kissed her, we'll never talk to you again.”

A weird tension was in the air when Richie and I took our places in the motorcade. I was in the car, jammed against the fat one, thinking of all the witty things I would say.

“Uh, [laughs] I don't want you to feel creepy, but the thing is, I came here mainly because of you [laughs],” was how she began. “I mean, uhm, I thought about you all day.”

I should have said nothing. What I said was, “Yeah, [laughs] I'm here, you know,” squeezing the soft flesh of her shoulders.

“[laughs] Yes, of course,” she said, pressing a boob against me. 

She said more on the way to Bunny's—including personal details about her past—but there was nothing she could say to make up for the thought that I could lose all my friends with a faux pas. 

Snow flurries were filling the air when we arrived. Brian, who had been the burly, myopic guard on our high school football team, was downstairs, waiting. We talked for a second, turned on the music, and began dancing. I rocked the chosen one, fondling her monstrous boobs while she swung a bottle of whiskey in the air, taking swigs straight out.

Miss Baun, my old Latin teacher, should see me now!

The party had barely come alive when the cute one dashed out in the snow without any boots or coat. I grabbed Alan. “What the hell is going on?” 

Alan gestured wildly. “She got the clap. Afraid we’d beat the shit out of her.”

“She's out in the snow with her teeth chattering?”

“Insane.”

I was a little drunk by then and took the heavy cavalry upstairs to a bedroom and closed the door. When problems arise, it’s tempting to expect someone else to fix them. Sometimes the only person who can is you. She put her mouth close to my ear so that her breath, heated by the whisky, was warm on my cheek. “I talk to dead people.” 

She brought what she had promised. Her vast curvature was a steep hill, but I managed to slip in after a few false moves. After a near stroke, I tapped the footboard to signal next in the rotation. When I got back out in the hall, Richie was huddled with Brian. From the look on Richie’s face, I know he was thinking, How will I ever find the opening amongst the folds of skin and rolls of fat?

Brian raised his bushy eyebrows. “What’s your problem?”

Richie shifted from foot to foot and whispered loudly, “Her hole.”

Brian squinted out of his coke-bottle glasses: “Have her piss and follow the stream back up!”