Rabbit Remembered

Coke whores, there are no coke whores. There are just women who aren't as uptight as others, is all. It was true, back before he was clean, when he was a regular at the Laid-Back, the girls who hung around there looking for drugs and action liked to give blow jobs because it was a quick way to bring a guy off and less fuss and muss for them. They didn't even have to take off their pantyhose in the car. Their mouths did smell afterwards and when he was stoned he liked to kiss them even though they resisted and said he was sick, basically queer. Those girls for all their being whorish had very little imagination, very narrow parameters. If I was going to get AIDS it would have showed up by now.

Not necessarily. I read where the virus can be dormant for fifteen years. It hides around the base of the spine.

Well my God. And this is supposed to be a marriage.

You can fuck me though.

Now there's a rational woman for you. What about AIDS?

Nelson, I said you can fuck me. Take it or leave it.

I'll leave it. I've lost interest.

So you have. What a baby.

And it was lovely to have a woman's head down there, all that hair under your hands, the tips of her ears and back of her neck, you can't see her face but her shoulders tense up when you come, and some have said it excited them too, but according to Pru they were lying because they wanted something else. Women lie the way blacks lie. If you're a slave face telling the truth gets you very little. They forget how. He sees that all the time at the Center. Only for the powers that be does knowing things pay off. Only they can afford to know the truth. He doesn't like Roy knowing what a blow job is. The boy is fourteen, masturbation should be enough. The lightness of it, the newness, the feeling of leaning up against a tall white closed door, the sensation Nelson used to get of standing on his head for a second, the tiny muscles going into spasm: the sensation moves you into another world, up and out, chilly like ice cream, private like thought, a metallic taste in the mouth afterwards, the taste of having been somewhere different. But he wants the images in the boy's head to be innocent, bridal, the girl who sits next to him in an Ohio classroom lying under him all lace and crushed flowers in his mind as he comes in his bed's safety. Not this juvenile filth off the Internet. Who would have thought the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?

And Dad heres another one. A guys wife on there honeymoon begs off making love and she- goes to sleep and gets up at 3am to get a glass of water and sees hes still awake and asks why. He says his dick is so hard their isnt enough skin left to close his eyes with.

This is more like it, Nelson supposes. Straight married sex, at least. Judy has gone off the deep end with boys, he doesn't know when she lost her virginity, it must have been in Pennsylvania, when they all still lived in this house, Judy in the front bedroom, there were some pretty late dates, he remembers, coming in that sticky front door, whose pop woke him up, footsteps slithering up the stairs, when she was just sixteen, seventeen, and still had her freckles. Pru would know. Pru would't talk about it with him. Well why not? she asked back one time. Your Aunt Mim's a tart, all you Angstroms are like rabbits.

And she herself, with Dad, in this very room he sat in now, his face lit by a computer screen. He could never quite wrap his mind around it. Which was healthy. There is such a thing as healthy denial. Children use it to keep the image of the caregiver benign despite abuse. Pru when he got after her about it would say she didn't understand it either. It just happened, Nelson. Things just happen. Not everything happens for some deep reason, like you were taught at social work school.

Oh, is that what I was taught?

Yes, and to keep asking questions, instead of trying to give answers.

I should have answers? What's your question?