Hypocorism (ROUND 30)

scent of the day: Jamaican Ambergris: Purple Sultani, by Ensar Oud

Black Gris is more my speed, my style, my feel. But this I would say is objectively better and more oud-woody than I expected. A beautiful marine-tobacco scent—yes, the tobacco aspect of the ambergris really comes out here. I expected something that might be a cross between Black Gris and Tahetian Gardenia and Bishara. But while there is distant tropical creaminess, it is more to me like a tobacco ambergris with some rum aspects.

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*Guess what? I didn’t work on any of these three dialogues today. Instead I started climbing out of my trench of despair by thinking about the temporary framing of my story. I plant to start the opening scene like a month into their relationship. And I will dip into their relationship over subsequent weeks here and then.

Tip: any artist is going to hit a point of despair in their work—if, of course, they are taking risks. I have had this experience over various projects over the course of twenty years. While it still makes my stomach sink, I know that I have always come out the other side. So now I trust the process, which takes some of the edge off.

Today, and with an eye to getting the framing right, I cleaned up the beginning of the story. These areas I have bolded below. And I put the dialogues, which I still have yet to position in the tale, at the end.

Hypocorism

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not have will destroy you.—Gospel of Thomas (Logion 70)

His school-pickup spiel, before it even got going, elicited teen eyerolls of classic daddy-daughter theater. Her teeth sucking (“Tch”) as she scanned the ceiling made him feel as if he were driving his own daughter to some ice-cream social circa 1952, a Father-Knows-Best figure unable to stop himself from rehashing the leave-room-for-Jesus dance rule into the rearview. But she was a big girl who liked to ride shotgun. “Shotgun shawtee,” she called it. And this afternoon he was baggy-eyed and shifty, her three-day field trip to D.C. having him brimming to the point of bowlegged ooze. So the exaggerated mouth mimicry, surprise snark caught when he glanced over, nearly had him snarl “Fuck it” (fuck the brakes, fuck the transmission, fuck who the fuck sees) and clamp her bratty throat mid pantomime—neck-biting brandings of savage devotion (“Kill any nigga try to stop me fuckin this”) cresting, rubberless and rabid (“You wanted my fuckin baby, huh?”), into ear-licking whimpers of surrender (“Need you more than anything, baby girl”) riding out with whispered repetition (“more than anything”) on the dying aftershocks of pelvic paroxysm.

She could recite the lecture by heart. It used to be simple. “This is nothing but trouble.” But she kept saying “Fuck it.” Then it became “This is nothing but trouble, baby girl.” Her “Fuck it,” in turn, took on a sultry tone, the double entendre too explicit for him not to give. But his give—guarded—was the give of a cheapskate, the give of someone she might have called “anal” if she had the word. He pulled back whenever she tried to put his hand to her breast. A trusted adult needed to be in the loop, in her corner. That was the rule. They had been at this for over a month. The limbo had begun to lose its cuteness. But he kept repeating the rule, like the alcoholic’s Serenity Prayer, as if it were the first time.

Nuances did come to light in the talk with which he filled the holding pattern. He did not want to damn their chances. But he respected the girl’s situation, the sticky ethics of the situation, too much to make it easy. The adult needed to be someone sex-positive and open-minded, nuanced enough to judge case by case, and yet whose blessing could not be bought—at least not in any overt way too untethered to ratiocination, too noisy in the closet. A crack-rock bribe, for instance, should not suffice for the green light. Too loudly that would scream bondage to the bollocks. Yet it would be a lie to say that such cheap grease—among other trump cards in this city of dumpster divers winging perfectly good burgers over the shoulder in slavering search for a fent patch to suck—had never crossed his mind as he sat in the sedan, all around him a zombie horizon of bombed-out industry farmed by smartphones, awaiting the school bell.

She resented the rule. She wanted their tongues to meet. Her mouth hung at the thought, bridled lust venting through sighs—their frustration quotient growing by the day. Yet she respected him for sticking to it, for disproving her quiet doubts—quiet but not silent: “Niggas out to fuck. They ain’t stand on shit but they own asses. No discipline, I swear. How a bitch gonna find someone solid? I know how to say ‘no.’ I need a nigga that can say ‘no.’” In a sneakers-over-smarts world teeming with thugs and malingerers catcalling through blunt smoke on every corner and crumpling under Olde-English impulse (a Philly now shot through by smartphones valorizing, even in households otherwise sheltered, shallow minds quick to barter decency for dopamine in the stampede for likes over legacy), his tight-leashed stability—although easily clownable in the pocket-protector voice of a white man, the Judas of present culture—felt safe. Even as her frustration simmered against his stubbornness, she respected discipline—her own her eyes tilted toward betterment: “I ain’t tryna be scrolling. If they was one gift you could get my ass it would be a flip phone. Niggas’ minds lost.” Even as the waiting stretched her to the verge of being the first to say “Uncle” (“You made your point, nigga”), she needed him to need the rule—early on at least. The boundary meant he knew his own shadow.

Mutual masturbation, always in the front in case the world rolled up, had become their extracurricular ritual in the swelling meantime. But first she told him about the trip.

“So you actually learn anything?”

“Tch. Like, why we walking fifty miles to see a giant pencil?”

“I gotta give you a foot massage.”

“Oh my God. Yes please.”

“. . . .”

“What?”

“I like you saying that. I missed you like crazy.”

“Tch. Nigga tell me about it. Wish you let me send you pictures.”

“I gotta be careful girl.”

“I know.”

“So anything else?”

“The hotel was dirt. You ever eat plastic eggs? Cuz that she was like plastic for real.”

“Damn.”

“And four girls in the room. But two of them go chasing some boys so it was just me and this other bitch I don’t even know but she was nice. Her breath stank, though. And let me tell you, bitch had that Ohio playlist.

“Ohio?”

“Tch. It mean lame.”

“Oh. No pussy poppin?”

“Dead.”

“Hey throw that mahfuck. Hey throw that mahfuck.”

“Stooop.”

“I’m five foot but my throat 6’6’’. You mad cuz ya pussy ain’t fat like this.”

“Oh my god, nigga.”

“. . . .”

“. . . .”

“How come you didn’t go chasing boys too?”

“I got a man.”

“Oh.”

“Yep.”

“He give you foot rubs?”

“Yes. And he like a nerd. But he look like a killer when he take off his glasses. Like you ever see Split? Like that nigga. Except he look like he could be Puerto Rican too.”

“You like that?”

“Yes. I like crazy.”

“Crazy?”

“He’s a writer. He write all this wild shit. He ain’t give a fuck. And I like that. But that nigga need to get more wild in his life.”

“Well, I mean—like what standard you holding this man too?”

“Just saying. But it’s okay cuz he gonna take me to get wings tonight.”

“. . . .”

“. . . .”

“So you have any fun on the trip? What was your favorite part?”

“Chick-fil-A.”

“Girl!”

“The roller coaster too.”

“Busch Gardens?”

“Yes. Let me tell you bitches losing their lashes. I’m dead.”

“You weren’t scared?”

“You know me. I’m with all that shit.”

“That’s what scares me.”

“Your head would scare me too, nigga.”

“. . . .”

“Anyway, I ain’t spend that money you gave me. Here you go.”

“Baby, that’s yours.”

“You can call me that all the time. Please and thank you.”

“Of course, baby.”

“I feel that shit right up in here.”

“Where? Here?”

“Yes.”

“Mmm.”

“What you doing?”

“You smell good.”

“Nigga I’m all nasty.”

“Nah.”

The practice took root early, too early for the better angel of his liking. She would squat over the flattened passenger seat, back arched against glass. He would grunt his body—e-brake hump dug into his ribs, armrest console into his spine—just right to position his nostrils, flared for greedy memory, under the jasmine indoles of the brown eye’s crow-footed pucker. And there he would be for as long as it took, transfixed by the creamy clicks of swollen tension as mere child fingers (nails bitten to stubs) churned with self-mutilating insanity the residual bulges of baby chub into a Velveeta slop: schlup-schlup-schluck-schlup-schlup-schluck (“Hnnnn. . . . Mmmmph”)—the something-about-to-give frenzy of macaroni sounds, feral cousins of feline eyelids and cheeks squelching in face massage, broken like confident jazz by intermittent Vulcan salutes (self-initiated as if with cruel intentions) revealing a too-tight-to-be-true chokepoint of fibroelastic constriction. The resistance even to the strain of two-handed splay (“Spread it, sweetheart”), the obdurate closure, snapped him back each time to the milkweed pods whose fused seams he would pry open in the midsummer fields of a childhood silken with promise. “Wider, baby girl. Wider for me.” He had his orders, knobby roots reaching down into that outer-dark stream from which all rivers flow.

The glimmer of mucosal marbling, bruised plum to bubblegum pink, drew him ever nearer the gamey petals, pleats whose cumin musk would make a joke of Rochas Femme (his ex-wife’s signature scent)—his nose huffing like a famished breatharian, at a hover just shy of touch. Her stink felt right, in no way repulsive. When his son was a toddler he could bite his fingernail growth off like it was his own. That was the closest thing he could connect it to. She seemed made for him, his people. She had been sucking on a Jolly Rancher and it showed green in her saliva, her taunting tuahs (“Tuah”) always dead-on with llama dominance (thwack) despite the distance to the twisting piston audible on the driver’s side.

A seat towel proved largely a formality in the shame-free space he safeguarded with his life. Her juices gushed like a grownup (“Make that fuckin mess, big girl”), the oceanic metallics of her clear squirt mixing in his mouth with the musk dribble of her white cream. Swallowing whatever he could became, after her reprimand about him dragging his heals (“Tch! Nigga you be stallin!”), the sole merciful contact he would allow—merciful but also, to say nothing of its falling short of the impossible merger that would satisfy his divine greed, frustrating in its unreliability without the milking aide of that finger husbandry he hoped one day to floor her with: come-hither hooks to the tubal crown’s textured engorgement galloping faster into bladderward jabs of paternal sternness. Well, technically, it was the sole merciful contact aside from hugs and cheek smooches—and, of course, his alarming arcs of propulsion: solar-flare arabesques (nothing new but never not shocking) that, timed to the stresses of his verbal fury (“Such a fuckin big girl!”), this afternoon gunked both their faces, his tongue flailing in audible exorcism under the mineralic fallout as he held the contorted bridge of evil yoga.

But a rule was a rule. No doubt she saw herself as the head of her household, which would be no lie: cooking scrambled eggs and ramen noodles; doing laundry and dishes; hauling her toddler brother to the corner store on a hiked hip with picked-out fro and buttered lips while her mother, basically catatonic, slept each day away (“Tch. That bitch stay depressed!”). And no doubt at least part of her believed she held the strings. She had set everything off, after all. Well, to be more precise, he was the opener (the oxygen) and she was the closer (the match strike). Or if it is more complicated than simply that he was the architect and she was the catalyst, one could at least say she is the one who shattered the barrier between subtext and reality.

He had just started serving as a b-balling “big brother” to her autistic sibling when they met. She had opened the door angry in a shower cap to the two of them, an outgrown and bleached-out Nemo towel covering too little for him to let it go. “Damn you smell good” came out even though he only smelled himself, mainly the starchy ball sweat through his athletic shorts. “Like who even are you?” Her eyes locked in, though, as if she had once known him but could not place it. He began to speak. “Sorry, I—.” But she told the boy to get inside and kicked him in a way that revealed too much up her thigh to be accidental. He held out his hand. “Nice to meet you,” he said. She switched hands to keep her towel up and took his. “Okay.” He persisted, though. “I gotta smell it.” He knew what he meant by “it.” He pictured what he meant by “it.” But he spoke in a tone of someone with an academic obsession. And he did have one, in fact: his perfume collection had become a long-out-of-hand stopgap to an intimacy deprivation now puking out on her doorstep. “Tch. No nigga. Like what?” She saw through his plausible deniability, and this drove him crazier than her beauty.

But she still held his hand. The blood flow of the courts, the nostalgic hip-hop playing on the courts, had done something to him. His hands were dry for once. And he brought his other hand in. He aimed both to make her question her assumption and yet still get close to her. “Just the neck.” If it was gaslighting, it was white gaslighting. He leaned in. “Boy, stop.” But she said it with a suppressed giggle. And she did not resist as he moved in, sacrificing the whiff he wanted for the nostril-air tickle he wanted more. “No, that’s not it.” “Okay, then. Like bye.” But she was holding his heft through his shorts, weighing it like one might weigh the breast of a sleeping lover in one’s hand, and moving her thumb along him. The petting, soft as it was, would have been as tender as a mother soothing a child whose hitched breaths in the wake of a tantrum had already quieted into purring sleep, only she was clearly sizing him up—her eyes, slightly quizzical as they peered into his dirty soul, making clear (clear as these things can be at least) that she was sizing him up less as object than as project. “Sure?” He asked his question in the upbeat salesman tone of a clipboard canvasser who just had been told “No thank you”—no explicit hint of the seductive tone that would have matched her fondling. She sighed. Her “Yes” had caved into a ragged groan, as if he had asked something entirely different, and closed with a lip bite of succubus asymmetry. Her hand remained out at a phantom as he backed away. And when he backed up her hand out still at a phantom.

He would have felt thunderstruck just by his own courage as he made his way to the car, playing it too cool to look back. But even more he was thunderstruck by her. And despite the flipping-twenty-eight-tails-in-a-row odds, he was thunderstruck yet again when—later that night while toweling up his load from the bathroom linoleum—he reflected on the fact that his body-heat reanimated scent of the day was Bortnikoff’s Coup de Foudre. He was not one to fall easily for woo. In light of all the energy surging inside him, however, its meaning—“lightning bolt”—could only accelerate that self-mythologizing intensity for which jail posed no threat to actionable planning.

Her lips had their Spring fur, still with caucosoid softness. The starkness of that image alone, to say nothing about how sometimes she would hold her arms up like a toddler for him to take off her shirt, meant that the condition had to be met before the reached the next level. So he repeated the rule. He repeated it as if repeating it were progress. She needed to confide in one trusted adult whose progressivism came not at the expense of blindness to the power-dynamic concerns: a third presence (“female, motherly,” he said) whose progressivism might even extend, if only down the line, to the button-slurping variety—a full-on-family fantasy that, while vibrant in the early days of pen-and-paper strategy (“Suck that little bitch, Mamma”), had since dwindled to a tagalong mouth (free-floating like the smile of the Cheshire cat) the more his passion (the not-always-sweet suffering kind) thickened for his one and only.

It was nearly an impossible ask. He knew that. Indeed, he suspected that was precisely the point. And that it could be the point would not be out of character given his typical reasoning through transgressive territories. Take, for example, his article defending the moral permissibility of bestiality, the piece that got him terminated from his professorship in the no-due-process-for-the-privileged heights of the safe-space hysteria. The safeguard conditions he laid out there, one of which was a third-party vetting, together set the acceptability bar too high for most real-life cases ever to clear. Even his fantasies obeyed this logic: any young girl who came onto him (usually after some rescue scene, and usually one where an adult was trying to take advantage of her) he would deny—no matter her pussy flashing insistence or pretzel-position demands—with an electrifying sense of feel-good pride, telling her they would most likely have to wait—and that, even then, he would want her parents to know there had been mutual attraction when she was underage. Any titillation he might have found in the prospect of a downy-fuzzed spinner always gave way to the titillation of basking in his performative restraint, in his putting his foot down on the ethical boundaries that would mean the girl—unless she showed tremendous pluck and planning and persuasion (something uncommon at that age in this era)—not getting what she wanted. He got off less by touching along than by covering all his ethical bases, and proving his fortitude, without sacrificing his liberality. Remaining ethical in the stank of temptation (even if his honor took hits), walking the tightrope over the canyon of taboo—that was a higher eroticism.

Another part of him suspected that the permissibility condition he imposed when it came to his blunt-toking crush remained even months in, if not itself mainly a head game of self-inflicted tantalization, less about protecting her welfare than about preempting his guilt. His love having grown to the point of wanting the best for her, evident not just in the very imposition of the condition but in the advice that often conflicted with his interests (“Explore Europe,” “Go to college,” even “Don’t settle down so young”)—this suspicion, however, seemed more a function of him being an overthinker whose hypochondriacal disposition extended not just to the what-ifs of the body but to the what-ifs of the soul, a disposition for which he had the perfect outlet as an ethics professor where (in lecture and print) he deployed all types of hyperbolic thought experiments to run through the meat grinder of doubt even things we take for granted as perfectly acceptable: circumcising infants, ear-piercing toddlers, marketing junk food to kids, subjecting them to tickle torture, kissing them on the mouth even when they show resistance, indoctrinating them into religions that peddle much more psychic mutilation than just thoughts of eternal damnation. There is a high likelihood, in other words, that the suspicion of bad motives for the no-touch rule reflects less the reality of the situation than the reality of his worrywart temperament. This is the same man, after all, who in first grade checked his own Halloween candy for signs of tampering and ended up throwing out all of it, nothing in the two pillowcases surviving his pristine standards. Just as few kids in the world then did the same thing (despite the era’s razorblades-in-Snickers hysteria), few men otherwise in his shoes now—especially if they are anything like average American men (namely, in an uncritical state of self-satisfied ignorance)—would ever pause long enough to consider that their no-touch rule might not be noble.

A bigger part of him suspected—a much more reasonable suspicion, merely considering no more than deep evolution’s need to load the young with seed—that he would eventually succumb. Her tightness coupled with her beauty, her heady smell of fried tuberose coupled with her persistence (even if oblique, like her working into conversations “Been wantin a baby like forever” or just singing with that extra intensity “♩ If you like it, then you shoulda put a ring on it ♩”)—those were only part of it. Tugging harder at him was movement of her mind, charming in its speed and acuity.

“Okay Gramps!” she said one afternoon as soon as she opened the back door to toss her bag in. “You really in here bumpin grandma music.” He figured he would be broadening her horizons to something smarter and more empowering than the Perc-30 in the anus of her generation. But she turned up the volume and sang the lyrics, directing them his way as he drove: “♩ Long as you know / that I can have any man I want to. / Baby, that’s actual and factual. / But still, I choose you, to be with me / and work on me, so [nigga] you better not flake it up! ♩”—working in those extra two “nigga” syllables in such a way to show her mastery of both rhythm and meaning. “♩ Well you want my heart, uh, / and all my time? ♩” Her stress and higher pitch on the word “time” turned T-Boz’s observation into an interrogative. “♩ Well it won’t be there if you can’t deal with my mind/ ‘Cause a girl like me— / I won’t settle for less. / I require plenty conversation with my sex! ♩”

The way she looked at him while belting out those last words made his eyebrows contort in incredulity.

“What? A bitch need her pussy ate!”

“You’re fucking unreal, I swear! Where you getting that shit from?”

“That’s what she sayin’.”

“She’s saying she doesn’t just want sex. She wants someone intelligent, someone who’ll match—.”

“Nigga, I know. But both true. She smart like me but she a girl like me: she like that tongue gettin in it—two ways.”

“So, on your interpretation, she isn’t saying just that she wants stimulation of the mind in addition to stimulation of the body—.

“No she is saying that, though.”

“No, I know. But you think she’s also saying—she wants plenty of licking?”

“After all that talk she like: ‘Now talk to this, nigga!’”

“Ahahaha. She wants to be orally stimulated and orally stimulated?”

“You said it, nigga—mind and pussy.”

“I’m seeing the song in a different light now. You cracked open a whole new angle. Let me guess—what’s she say? ‘If you gonna get me off, you got to love me deep’? So, if I can channel you here, you’d say it applies both ways here too. She wants someone respectful of her, true to her, all about her, and—”

“Them deep strokes.”

“Ahahaha. You make it hard for me.”

“What?”

“You know what.”

“You make it hard for me too. Tch. Why you think I always wanna be with you when we ain’t doing shit and you keep me hidden?”

Street snappiness (“Look, dumb nigga fakin the limp,” referring to the panhandler at the red light) and mental dexterity (“Bitch switched her shit up but she ain’t trying to hear me,” referring to her teacher shifting the meaning of “wrong” from “illegal” to “immoral” mid-sentence)—these did not come, as they often do, at the expense of wisdom and knowledge of self.

“Whoa, slamming the door and shit. Why you all flustrated?”

“Let me tell you nigga. This bitch—.”

“Oh baby, you really upset.”

“ . . . . ”

“Aww, baby—come give me a hug.”

“This bitch think I copied cuz I talk about ConaLee in that book you gave me.”

“You brought up Night Watch? Ahaha. I’m sorry, I—.”

“Nigga it right after Civil War. What you think Imma do?”

“Nah, you’re good—you’re great. But why you bring her up?”

“Cuz she like me. She livin poor, mom all fucked up. She the only grown up bitch. Tch. Then you got these creepy niggas takin over the crib.”

“Papa—ahaha.”

“Yeah, that nigga Papa. Only thing different, I woulda poisoned that nigga!”

“Get em. Ahahaha.”

“But yeah, so this bitch think I copied my shit. No bitch, even a broke bitch be readin. I swear. White bitches—matter a fact, all these bitches—expect too little, like we dumb.”

“George Bush.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“Can I have another hug?”

“Of course, baby.”

“I feel better.”

“Good. That’s what I want.”

“I wish you was my teacher.”

“. . . .”

“So you used to teach about God?”

“You can say that. Back before the bullshit.”

“I would’ve liked your class. Better than this dumb—tch.”

“I’m too dry.”

“I like dry.”

“You say that, but . . . .”

“You think we woulda fucked?”

“Tempting, but no.”

“Hmm.”

“. . . .”

“. . . .”

“Would’ve been jerking off before class, though.”

“Oh, I know! No panties, front row.”

“Ahahaha. Why you so nasty, little girl?”

“No, for real—I would’ve been your best student.”

“How so? You let me shoot in you mouth before class?”

“Nigga, thought we ain’t goin there!”

“I’m just messing.”

“Tch. You already know, though.”

“So why, then? Why would you be my best?”

“A bitch be thinkin some shit. Don’t underestimate. I got thoughts.”

“Oh, the head good?”

“Nigga, what into you today? You be shuttin down my mouth but look at you!”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Tell me about these thoughts.”

“So you ready, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. Hear me out.”

“Will do.”

“You ready?”

“Ahahaha! Yeah.”

“Okay so I need air, food—all that, right?”

“Yeah you do. Dollar-Menu fiend in this bitch!”

“Boy—.”

“What?”

“Tch. Anyways, I need my mom to be alive. I needed her.”

“Sure.”

“Same thing true of all this shit: trees, cars, dogs.”

“Yep.”

“But can it all be leanin? I mean all this shit. How you gonna have any leanin if all of it leanin?”

“Riddling. Ahaha.”

“But you see what I mean? This shit hangs. That shit hangs. But it all can’t be hangin on somethin else, feel me?”

“Yep. If everything’s hanging—.”

“How the whole hang? Somethin gotta be solid. Somethin gotta hang on nothin.”

“Nothin but itself.”

“What that is—now don’t ask a bitch that! But I do know that whatever it is, it’s always there. That’s what I think about God.—Oooooh mic drop.”

“Go pumpkin. Go pumpkin.”

“See? Best student!”

“You’re making a smart point.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re describing a dependence chain. Leibniz—that’s who I wrote my dissertation on. He says what you say: because there are dependent things (what you call “leaners,” “hangers”), there has to be something that does not depend on anything else (well, on anything else nonidentical to itself)—an ultimate independent foundation. Otherwise the whole chain collapses.”

“It couldn’t even be there in the first place.”

“Exactly.”

“I love that you get me.”

“And, well, even though you brought up your mom, what’s cool—what’s cool is that you’re arguing, like Leibniz, not in terms of going back in time but going down in terms of structural support. You can’t have turtles all the way down.”

“Turtles, nigga! What?”

“Hehe. Turtles gotta stop!”

“Leebnits sound right, though. I like him too.”

“Even if what you say is true, why call it ‘God’? Why say it’s always there? Couldn’t it have just—well, not existed?”

“None of the leaners could’ve made that happen, though. They too busy leanin! Ahaha.”

“But what if they all lean so hard, they drag it down too—like a drowning man pulling the lifeguard under?”

“Okay, Mr. Lawyer. But if the leaners kill it, that mean it was leanin on somethin else. Real solid don’t sink. Quote it!”

“So you’re saying if the leaners—.”

“If they could do that to it—.”

“Then they got power over it.”

“If they could do that, then it lean on them! Ahaha. Got me trippin. Next a bitch be talkin bout turtles.”

“No, it’s sharp. I’m just playing devil’s advocate. This foundation, though—could it have made itself not exist?”

“You gotta exist to do somethin. You can’t un-be before you be. I don’t—. Nigga, you got me not knowin what I’m sayin.”

“Nah, you’re good—more than good. Still—couldn’t it make itself now, or later, not exist?”

“They ain’t even all these coulds without it. So how can—?”

“I see. Yeah, you—.”

“You too smart for me, though.”

“Nah.”

“. . . .”

“. . . .”

“I got a surprise for you.”

“Oh yeah. What?”

“I had gym today.”

“Mmm.”

“We going to the spot before you drop me? Or a nigga gonna stop being embarrassed of me and I sleep over?”

“I’ll never be embarrassed of you—ever.”

Such wisdom, which often reflected admirable optimism and hope in the face of the ugly and indifferent (“Everyone got bad stories but butterflies see the gift in each one” or even just “Delulu ain’t no solulu”), proved stomach-sinking. For one, it could invite the envy even of seasoned poets, Goethes and La Rochefoucaulds. Take her many “nigga” maxims, which she would launch off the top of her head as they drove around the city like an old couple (minus the pettiness and kill-me-already weariness).

“Saying you got shit to do—that be how niggas get out of shit to do!”

“Niggas’ll blame the white folk for they own liquor receipts!”

“Niggas stay mad the elevator smell like piss, but they ain’t takin no steps!”

“A nigga’s demons be raisin his children—let that sink in, nigga.”

The real tragedy, though, was that such wisdom could have been earned only through unbelievable hardship—hardship that, at the same time, carried a silver lining for her suitor: it brought her, like ConaLee, at the very least to the mental age of thirty, right up there with the mental age of Mary (both of them sharing the same introspective equanimity and fun-sized frame, spun to spin) when she signed herself over to Joseph and God.

The qualities of the attracting source, her body and mind, do not alone explain the magnetic effects. One factor not to be underestimated was the murmur taunting him from within: that middle age offered few second chances for snug holiness this likely to move on at any moment. All it might take for her to be gone forever was one of her classmates asking her to come over and smoke. At least that became the worry. It cropped up with unavoidable vivacity in his alone times when, especially during the demon-active witching hour, his native paranoia (from an upbringing even the earliest Alanon intervention could not have offset) overtook him and, in fact, synergized with his more-than-theoretical understanding of the mercuriality of young women—the constructive interference creating a panic wave immense enough to override all the evidence that, however much she was a creature of the hood, she was too through-thick-or-thin in loyalty to be reduced to the label “hoodrat.”

The wave rose more and more even in the sunlight of their together times. Her questions were already nearly too much for him to handle on a good day without the intrusive thoughts. “How it make you feel lookin up at the stars?” Her jugular-flared energy exposed his age. “Yo, what color your favorite song?” Its ravages already evident in the claustrophobic feelings of inadequacy brought on nearly two decades back by his son’s nonstop talk from the car seat, time could not be offset—aside from lurches here and there—even by the stamina boost of this little why-for-every-how stroking his hand in her lap and engorging the car with the junk-in-the-trunk aromas of black teen spirit. “What somethin about you—no jokes, somethin deep—you not tryna see?” Her overload of bushy-tailed care underscored what perhaps was his baseline weariness with life—a weariness of which this affair, for all he knew, was the equivalent of the sexual lunge at the hospice nurse from the deathbed. “Nigga for real, what you trying to be remembered for and shit?” Academia having prolonged his stay in a Neverland where everyone being an overgrown child made the hideousness of being an overgrown child stay blurry enough to ignore, her preaternatural maturity proved a threat. “So how you know, like, when a risk be worth it?” But the mirrors outside the fun-house tower were clear and the grand one she held up, amazing given her frame’s ballerina petiteness in every spot but one, blinded with satellite-telescope-grade reflection: hyperreal enough to seem surreal—a disk of colors and detail spiraling around the blackest abyss. “What’s the last thing that made you cry, really cry?”

Her love required more attention and stamina than he worried he had. Boys her age would have so much more in common. He did not know Kai Cenat, a streamer she watched. He did not know Samara Cyn, her favorite music artist. He did not smoke weed. Aside from the big issues like knowing how to shut off the water main if a leak springs up or how to change a tire or spot the signs of a failing alternator or how to spot employment scams or how to handle first-aide emergencies or how to put things into perspective during times of crisis, even his hard-earned knowledge could be a disadvantage. Everything-is-new excitement and in-this-together bonding came with learning together not to use a metal spatula on the nonstick pan, learning together how to get the earring that went down the drain without having to call a plumber, learning together that not all laundry should be washed in hot water, learning together that assembling furniture without reading the instructions first is a bad idea, learning together that you do more than getting the bathroom super clean by mixing ammonia and bleach, learning together that the tire pressure light coming on did not warrant pulling over and calling for help—or any of the rest of the things he and his ex-wife, yet to come into their fixed habits and expectations, found out the hard way as they fumbled forward into adulthood, mutual naivete leaving room for more vulnerability and less shame.

He pictured it all. He would be right there ahead of time: just a little too fast, a little too certain, a little too closed to the idea that maybe the best thing she needed was not an answer but the room to try, to fail, to learn—an equal, for example, to strategize with on what subway routes to take to make the flight on time, rather than someone who already knew to leave the house much earlier and exactly where to go to catch the JFK AirTrain. He saw himself storm in like a parent with his swollen mental Roledex. saying “That shit a damn MLM, girl!” or “You fuckin never throw water on no electric stove!” He could hear himself. “Baby, I know you upset but please understand that your period might be at least a small factor” or “Bet your neck pain will go away if you sleep with your arms in external rotation like this.” Even if she was not as charmingly naive as other people could be (thinking Palmolive in the dishwasher would work just as well, or that turning the fridge off overnight was a good energy-saving strategy, or that aluminum foil would help the food “heat more evenly” in the microwave, or that music always needed to be on during sex like in the movies), how could he not scoff inside (if only in the bless-her-heart way) at her idea of a proper home cooked meal: Hamburger Helper spruced up with frozen peas—his own signature dish in the first years of marriage?

Such concerns, and the vivid imagery that kicked them off (her laughing and smoking with a boy her age as they listened to music they both grew up with), took the foreground over her heartrending attempts at knowing him deeper and making their togetherness turn into something for which only a catch to bring home to mom aims—something he did not know if he could handle. His distance—palpable through the veneer of presence in his responses (“Shiiit. I just think of how long the damn light took to get here!”)—and his jealousy—palpable through the veneer of nonchalance in his questions (“So who’s that guy you were talking with?”)—did not take long for her to pick up on and try to nip in the bud. “Nigga, please don’t tell me you worried ’bout these young boys? Tch. Get out your head. You already got me!”

It was as if she had access to the privacy behind his eyes. “I know what I want. I don’t want no drama. A bitch want direction, boundaries—a smart nigga that ain’t into all that bullshit. A bitch done learnt the hard way. You listen. You ain’t just react. Shit scary out here. But I ain’t never felt safer with no nigga but you. I ain’t have to think about what I really think and what’s safe to say. You like me for me. You got a bitch vocabulary up: palimpset ([sic]). Nigga, you got me seein my room like that shit. Like who lived in this bitch before? You got a bitch finna travel. You calm me down—ain’t punch no bitch in the mouth in a minute. You tell me not to feel clowned over some dumb shit. Ain’t no other nigga out here hold me down, wanna write letters back and forth. That shit—I swear. Nah, just being with you—I know my feelings better, myself. I’m off the damn phone. The world big, true. But you the one crossed a bitch’s path. You always on my mind. You ain’t gotta worry bout no other nigga. Tch. I know how to say ‘no.’ Look at me, for real. You ain’t gotta worry where I be, who I be with. It’s all yours. You already got me.”

Her words did set his mind at ease. But the quiet those words safeguarded allowed truths to surface from unanticipated dimensions. “Mmm. I can smell that pussy baby,” he said on yet another day parked in the far corner of the woodland cemetery behind her school. He had given up the lecturing by this point, or even focusing so much on a plan of action regarding finding the appropriate third. “That shit wet for me?” The explicit understanding (especially considering the risk telling someone posed) had become just to wait until she became legal—even though, in her view, he had an unreasonably strict standard of when that was. “Oh fuck yeah it is, huh? Mmm. You can play with it, baby.” The implicit understanding, however, was that they would not hold out beyond their trip to Miami, planned for the summer vacation before her last year in her school.

“Let me see you spread it for Daddy.” His voice, as usual after to-the-gills absences, was hoarse with domineering desire. But this was the first time he claimed the title “Daddy” aloud in her presence. He could feel that it did not land well. She always liked to say, perfectly reflecting the Aristotelian distinction between a person whose authority comes from without (by appointment, by inheritance) and a person whose authority comes from within (commanding respect by his very being, bearing, merit), “No nigga can control me unless he can control me—feel me?” And yet he knew that, blazing entirely from his root chakra, that the problem was not on his end. He had said it with full throat—no stutter, not even a micro hesistancy into which only the most perceptive empaths could tune. But even though he knew he uttered the third-person “Daddy” from that inherent authority of earned command, she did not pull down her sweats and spread for his vision those lips that—with a deep sense of personal pride one might not expect given his assumed tastes—he had watched change (in what almost seemed an artistic timelapse of existentialist haunt) from downy soft to ebony kink.

“Daddy” was a rough word, yes. It was rougher in his mouth, back teeth floating in white honey since the day she grabbed him up. But rough too were those petechial throttlings in the buildup to those extra orgasms she needed in the wake of what was already a big mess. Shamanic vision would reveal her in these moments as the fevered foreground of a matrilineal chain telescoping back to the bonobo gangbangs that carved such greed into the genome. Throat play—sometimes a three-finger retch-maker down into the bumpiest regions he could reach, but mainly just strangleholds—became another exception in their dance of creative compliance with the rule. What else could one do to shut up the puppy whimpers? “Fuck me. Please fuck me. Why won’t you fuck me?” Life-and-death roughhousing had her tongue lolling in bliss. If need be she would shoot commands with demonic eyes made more demonic by her having to command in the first place. But as their vibes grew more in sync, moments of two-left-feet giving way to astral collocations in which both felt equally led (a confusion of agency, of provenance, known to artists in the muse’s thrall), that became unnecessary. Wet wheezes of nymphet stridor, these alone—something in the modulation of their pitch (although the right hemisphere’s panoptic-wisdom surely encompassed more than that)—taunted for a harder clamp. Harder clamps did tend to bring on last-ditch squeals of struggle (public indications of her private stars), these muzzled by getting the thumbs just right not to slip in the neck sweat. Sometimes they even brought on kicks and claws of self-defense (face rakes straight from Krav Maga), these muzzled with ear-whispered threats that were unlike him but came easy with her. “Watch the fuck what happens you touch me again! One more fuckin time, little girl!” Her fingers circled with greater intensity through it all, her nub quadrupled in size and hooded by tissue noticeably leatherized. It did take several times of her saying “Please stop asking me the same thing” for him to restrain himself from making sure afterwards that, no matter the writing on her face (dazed, puffed, flushed; capillaries shattered under the eyes and in the eyes), her death’s-door comportment was no more than a masterclass in method acting. And even then—especially in the extreme times (like when one of her flails busted the rearview mirror clean off the frame)—it was hard for a worrywart such as himself to swallow back the urge. He might let slip, in the breathy silence, a “Hey—baby?” But she would shut it down—looking at him, as if he were dense, with a slumped exhale of “Are you serious right now? How many damn times?”

No, some other explanation was operative. The watery tremor in her eyes when he spoke the word—a wavering that someone fluent in the emoji affect of Gen Alpha might read as finally being seen, of shame exhaling into safety—gave the held-breath energy of something too intense to articulate. He took the manga eyes, how they brimmed, as a struggle—almost purposely impotent—to hide sadness. And that sadness, corroborated in his mind by her sudden slump, jacked the explanation right into the base of his skull. Like a red bird suddenly landing before your vision on the windowsill, the explanation seemed too adventitious—indeed, too unbidden—for it to be mere projection even from the magical corners of the underworld. It was an explanation reasonable in hindsight given the violence of her self-play and her nasty mouth. A back-contorting montage erupted in high definition before his mind’s eye: her growing from inarticulate infancy to teetering toddlerhood and beyond—a montage that would have been family wholesome, bildungsroman bittersweetness coloring spelling bees and sleepovers, had not the one core constant through all the change been her serving as the Swiss-cheese sex sleeve for some older man in her home. He did not know if it was her father or just some guy with her mother. All he knew was that she stepped up the school bus looking, in her lexicon, “ran the fuck through.”

His reaction to the vision, there might have been more selfish reasons for it. He sensed she would wreck his life, for one. It was less about authorities finding out. Her mouth was too ride-or-die, too wise beyond its years, to wreck his world with a word. It was more her cursed beauty, beauty pitiable enough to make a scholar burn his first editions: their foxed pages whose rust-colored constellations of mildew he would finger in the spine-protective v-cradle and whose musty-vanilla lignin he would sniff in a reverential trance—split screen—splurted in a maniacal laughter with Kingsford lighter fluid as if nothing more than grill charcoal for testosterone protein.

One thing was her breeding-hormone body—hard to blame on gas-station milk alone since her soul seemed meant for some voodoo sage, the kind that gave bayou kids nightmares merely by mention of her name. But the face—against that, the body did not matter. It could have had one of those mini embryo-body arms—a nub, a flipper (wet-looking even when dry). Had the block known its Greek mythology, more than one corner thug—especially considering her predilection, at least when he first met her, for getting men to fight (“Stab that fuckin nigga!”)—would have called her “Helen of the hood” or “Heleniqua” by now. And he knew himself well. Making her his girl would mean, however much she tried to set him at ease, no sleep deeper than the cortisol twilight of prison. The more typical elbow-patched professor might have been different. But for him it would mean carrying a gun again—especially through monkey-business sectors where all the ook-ook-ook catcalls (nose-bone grunts that made the construction-site classics sound like Connery pillow talk) not only disrupted higher-order reflection and conversation with their sheer percussive might but could explode at random into frenzies of contagious violence if—in the “ghetto catch-22” that defies the Jane Goodall paradigm—you try to usher your partner away from the harassment in silence. That itself would be, he knew, a problem for everyone. He feared his quick trigger. His jealousy once landed him behind bars for two nights, the first time in over ten years he failed to show for his Monday-Wednesday courses. Perhaps the inner daimon he used to have his first-year students read about was looking out for him now, knowing his artistic vocation could not flourish in the hood from which it had clawed itself free.

Whatever the reason, he called her by her first name—another first beyond their introduction. She turned, her baby cheeks—it was unclear whether they really were streaked or whether his seeing them as such was an imposition—splitting him in two. The distant seer of himself was himself, the autoscopic gaze admonishing from an inverted world. His love needed to evolve. The message traveled along the sight line. Not one break from a school environment (from kindergarten well into his thirties), his maturity paled compared to hers. But he could not siphon some of hers to right the scales. She could not unsee, unfeel. She could not unsee, unfeel, what the montage made seem she really did see and feel. The insufficient best he could do would be to behave himself—behave, even if it entailed the stumbling steps of an impostor, like the man she needed him to be and of whom he had shown glimmers well before she was born.

That was the man who would not tell her “Suck those balls good, baby” but rather “Be the ancestor of your future happiness.” That was the man who would not tell her “Spread that little asshole” but rather “The full story always entails forgiveness.” That was the man who would not tell her “All the way in, Sweetheart” but rather “Go after what you care for most, because you’ll get your heart broken no matter the path—even the path of avoidance. Take my word for it.”

That was the man who, although wanting to promise her—as any good father figure does—“nothing bad will happen on my watch,” knew—as any wise father figure does—that such a promise is impossible to keep: strangling all possibilities for disappointment was an impossibility not only for humans but even for divinities, because it would entail (both as a means and as a consequence) the very bad things in question—the ultimate one, cauterizing the soul into a vegetative state of living death, more vile than rape. That was the man who could encourage her to reclaim the wondernaut facet of lost childhood. That was the man who could tell her that the norms of treatment, the scripts given, were not the only way. That was the man who could at least promise to be with her as she wept, witness to her every broken heart—all the while with guard up, a moment-tarnishing sacrifice of the responsible adult: prepared to lift her chin up from where, in her slobbering reduction of love into desire, she needed it to go; prepared even if it meant activating the “I hate you” fury of an early sprouter not yet thirty bleeds into the mystery of matriarchal time.

“Baby—baby come here.” Tone stripped of the greasy greed that normally would attend the command, he watched himself live—not just fantasize—on the point of tears. He held her close with a kiss to the temple. He could smell, this close, that her breath would taste like Carnation milk from the can—as if she could not give up her mother’s nipple the way some could not let go of their thumb.

“It’ll be okay,” he whispered. He was the one who needed to snuggle her too tight, not the other way around. He squeezed her. She was deboned. She had that endless give of ear cartilage.

“I love you, baby girl.” She did not knock him out of this change with one of her phrases: “Nigga, what the fuck up with you?” She gave in. She nuzzled like a cat. And that only solidified his resolve.

He could feel the heartbreak his head swore his heart demanded—the price of a higher love. Let her go. You have to let her go. And he knew the self-lacerating temptation doing so would invite. It was the temptation, besting him many times before, to rage against heartbreak by turning beloved into enemy, holding against her precisely what drew him in, if her fight—her resistance to being released—proved insufficient to stop him from walking out of her life: “Little skeezy hoodrat—thirteen, doing this fuckin nasty shit!”

Screaming such tantrum lines into their faces before kicking them out into desolation on the other side of the peephole still stinking of pussy worked over into a cousin of burnt rubber (their knapsacks dangling in one hand, their shoes in the other), maladaptive as it is and a sign of his roots having spread in polluted soil where it is rare to find kid teeth not rotten from soda, was relatively healthy compared to other forms the temptation could take on. For this temptation was a function of (or even correlated with, if not identical to) the temptation, erotic for the displaced monkey tenant inside each of us (regardless of race or creed), to trash the place and steal everything not nailed down before being forced to move on. A good boy who rose out of the drug-addled ghetto by conducting himself with discipline and industry and care, jumping through all the hoops whose promise of at least social and economic stability he trusted with optimistic naivete (the American lie)—such more sinister forms were perhaps likelier than ever to manifest, as a sort of revenge for being born only to be smashed by unjust suffering before obliteration. That was at least his worry. And it made sense given his waning courage to find gratitude in the suffering. It made sense given the mounting weariness in which, with the career wrecked by the kangaroo-court excesses of the 2016-2022 safe-space hysteria and the interpersonal skills atrophied by the resultant isolation, there seemed so little to lose and yet, with the diminished mobility and the chronic pains of sleepless aging, so much to gain.

The worry, although his haters would use it against him if they ever had access to behind his skull, was a good sign that he was not as dangerous as he worried he might be. We all know the common saying, after all, that you are not crazy if you are worried that you are crazy because crazy people do not worry that they are crazy. He did not want to be that person. It was not just for her sake, that he loved her. It was for himself. He had done regrettable things in the past. And, yes, they did approach the level of kicking girls out—out of cars even. But he always circled right back, telling her to get back in and that he was sorry.

The outward behavior is where the rubber meets the road. His track record was good, though, considering his circumstances and where his mind goes. The worst perhaps was his response to a squatter problem some years back. The tenant had been trash from the start, living month to month with her teenage daughter in the studio he had stretched himself thin to buy. From the acrid smell that clung to her when he would collect rent at the door (she never let him inside, but from what he could tell it was gamey in there), it was obvious she was turning tricks. He looked the other way until the neighbors started complaining about people coming and going, noise at all hours of the night—lots of different men.

She ignored his first notice to vacate. Then she stopped answering the door for rent collection altogether. When he filed for eviction, the court rejected his petition: improper wording on the notice, try again. He stayed polite, too painfully polite nearly for himself to bear. Killing with kindness did not work on her kind. It involved category mistakes, like trying to reason with a bear. She called him a “pussy-ass white nigga” from behind the chained door and each time he walked away without any money it was hard not to feel like one. The New York system, which treated possession as nine-tenths of the law, did not give a damn about his deed. Before he could even get a hearing date, she had been there over thirty days. This meant the court would treat her like a legitimate tenant with full legal protections. She was not a squatter in the eyes of the law.

The backup in housing court (he was told it could be up to eighteen months) he figured was the cherry on top. But there was more. The neighbor in 2B was calling him daily, threatening to break his lease over the “parade of men” and the shouting at 3 AM. The city started sending letters with his name on them, all addressed to him as “landlord of record” (a phrase that, like the word “white,” sounded like a slap): a Notice of Violation from HPD for “inadequate heat” (she had called 311 claiming the radiator did not work); a Class B Violation for “unsanitary conditions and vermin infestation,” with thirty days to correct and $50–$150 daily fines accruing after that; a Notice of Violation for “failure to provide access for inspection,” citing multiple unsuccessful attempts to enter the unit; a nuisance-related violation citing “illegal commercial activity or transient use,” prompted by neighbor complaints and a police referral; a follow-up compliance notice referencing “patterned complaints” and advising that “failure to abate conditions could lead to civil penalties or referral for enforcement action.”

His tolerance for having his boundaries pushed was pathologically high. Radical insecurity plus radical discipline made for radical ability to make do—to endure what would send others running, their skin crawling. That superpower had enabled him to work twelve-hour days, seven days a week, for nearly two decades on scholarly drudgery—fueled by library air and peanut butter sandwiches. The membrane between order and eruption is thinner in each of us than we might like to believe. But even he had a breaking point.

That familiar stomach-sinking feeling came over him—the anesthetic rush, the full-body wave, that used to terrify him as a kid. He pictured her laughing at him, telling the men she brought over how “This soft-ass landlord ain’t gonna do shit!” He pictured her bragging how she had been living rent-free for months, how she would milk it for another year easy. The images made him lean even harder into his chipper demeanor.

“Tamisha,” he said through the door one morning. “I won’t pursue any of the money you owe me. Forget the back rent.”

“I been done forgot it, nigga,” she said.

But he ignored that and ignored the chuckles inside. “It’s not about that. I know you have a daughter. I’ll help you find another place.”

Such gentleness, such water-under-bridge gestures, only brought on more disrespect him more—the whole thing unfolding almost as if by the booby-trap design of some hulk within him. “Go on with yo white nerdy ass!” Her cackle cut through the door. “You can’t do shit.”

“Mama, don’t even talk to that nigga,” her daughter said.

“I let you stay here to help you out,” he added into the silence. The heel of his fist meeting the door made no sound.

He hated giving her what she wanted. But he did exactly what a white nerd would do. He wrote, each line making it clear—no matter the bitter fury it betrayed—that she was right: he could not do shit. All he could do was wait—wait for the judge, wait for the marshal—while the violations piled up in is name.

Heart in his throat he suited up in an orange ski mask and biked over there, loins swollen in fantasy of exactly what was going to go down. He kicked in the door without a thought. Her nasty ass was right there on the couch and he drew on her like swat—only her beelined the muzzle of the gun right into her head, which sunk into the stinky couch as he pushed deeper. “You wreck my fuckin place bitch. You ain’t paying bitch. You fuckin whorin in my fucking place bitch?” The daughter had been cooking in the kitchen, her head wrapped. Both mom and daughter were in a sleep shirt. “So bitches want to whore, right? On the fuckin floor.” The mother went down. “You, get the fuck over here.” “Don’t hurt my daughter,” the mother said. “Get down there. Right next to your ghetto-ass whore mother.” His eyes conveyed it all. “Let me see what we working with.” The mother pulled up her night shirt. “That shit all infested, huh?” He leaned in, muzzle resting in the hollow of her throat. She was shaved. One side was tucked up like when a dog’s lip gets stuck on dry gums and it looks like it is snarling out the side of its mouth. “You thinking Imma fuck that?” He now started to hear the code switch people often commented on. That reflection drained some of his fury or at least was correlated with such draining. But his desire both not to see himself and to keep his fury righteous counterbalanced the loss, adding a secondary fuel to the fire—sunk-cost fallacy in dysfunctional action. “Nah I want that fresh shit. Yep. Little bitch’s turn.” She looked at her mom. “Lift it! I think she needs your help. Show her how a slut mom does it. Tits too.”

But even here, in writing, he felt like one of those rapists who goes too soft to surmount the kegeled clamps of even the easier hole. With other characters he was able to push farther. But in his mind this was explicitly him, not someone else. The framing restricted him even more. For in a way—and this does present at least a slight hiccup for any apologia of the man conducted even by those willing to think ethical lines anew (instead of just sticking with the all-pork-is-bad script of the unthinking)—this was less literary in intent (although part of him sensed he was later mine it for material) than a plan, sort of like a suicide plan (an escape hatch), he could fall back on if the months were going to extend over a year. He folded, he went limp, even on the safe-space of the page because it was too real.

The girl barely had her feathers and her nipples were still the tightest of tulips. But it was her tears that had him default back to the pushover. His plan going in had been clear. He was going to shoot his load all over the incestual unit of liver lips, the mother’s mouth sucking the little girl’s clit (kryptonite in image, as far as he is concerned)—the gun pressed to the mother’s skull the whole time. He was oozing but he said, “Now get the fuck up, both of you! Pack your shit cuz you out now: not a week from now, not tomorrow—now!” He stayed there watching them pack. He eyed the girl’s ass in the night shirt, biting his lip. He thought about jerking off and having her at least spread for his climax. But all he did was watch.

The same chest thumping inside the man on the page propelled him into action by month seven. But he drove there in the daytime, in a U-Haul. He did kick in the door. But he never pointed the gun. He simply lifted his shirt to show what he had, and only to the mother. He demanded both of their phones and then sat on one of the big paint buckets where he watched them bring out their stuff. Then he drove the two, the mother stinky in the middle, to her mother’s house. They were too ghetto, he figured, to cause him legal trouble. But he waited, writing out scenes of shootouts with the cops at his door until it was clear nothing would become of it.

The human factor makes knowing what will turn out to be the case difficult to predict. But it is safe to say that if he tried to let his love go and she seemed okay with that and did not put up a fight (a fight for which, given his being raised mainly by women, he would have been baiting her)—yes, the truth of the matter would be much less dramatic. Ugly for his age and unattractive to her wants, his tendency was not to rape and kill and rape again but—judging by the past—to go sad-boy emo to manipulate her with guilt. Weathered like a good cast iron, though, it was unlikely, despite his love for her in particular, that he would engage even in that performance like he might have only ten years prior. It was not just that he knew it would be unattractive to her wants. A lot was due simply to his age (which would make pouting around all the more unattractive)—that his joints hurt, that he was tired: enlarged prostate and sleep apnea reducing him to five hours a night. A lot of it was that he knew that an eruption of rage could much more easily result in cardiac infarction. More than disciplined development of character (and this could be said, not to burst anyone’s bubble, in the case of many men who radiate a wiser-calmer presence as they cross the midlife threshold), the ravage of time was the biggest factor for his golden-hour glow.

Some grooves, of course, have been carved too deep. Not even heroic doses of mushrooms can dislodge you from some of them. So he would likely still be sad-boy emo if she did not fight his decision. But it would be in private. And it would be much closer to Hollywood’s tub of ice cream on the couch than what people might find—and, especially in an anti-art age of witch-hunt cancelation use against him—in his writing.

More than most other fruiting bodies, he could dream himself down into the mycelium network in mainlined detail. His writing makes that perfectly clear, uncomfortably so—dredging it up to remind us all who we are, what we are capable of, at the most inconvenient times (is it ever convenient?). Look at it this way. Lacking due respect for the risk-taking heart (for that nomadic part of us that, wanting what it wants, kicks at the boxes of the controlling mind), lacking due respect for the fact that we are all slated for obliteration (after a trembling blink of not even knowing why the hell we are here), so many would hate the love that is on display here—to say nothing of envy, a much harder emotion for them to face. So many would ban it a priori, without considering the nuances of the case at hand. But take the most intense of these haters, those who would consider him an absolute monster for crossing lines even with the daintiest step—and perhaps more reasonably so than even he would appreciate: taboos provide a semblance of extra-physical order to a reality that would still seem absurd even if we did live forever; taboos, insofar as they block out the live option that no one is ultimately wrong (at least any more ultimately wrong than a flower can be), take the edge off the fact that we are all ultimately fucked. He could write out scenes worse than they could ever imagine—where, instead of kicking her out of the car, he watches his own hands erase the most important counterbalance to the age gap: the contagious optimism of childhood that had promised a man of shadows a second life.

“What happened to love? Huh, bitch?” Ptoo! “Cry on that.” Ghrrhkkhh, huck. “Open that mouth.” Ptkhk. “Lucky I ain’t have a couple of my boys come help me run that nigglet-ass through.” Ptoo. “Look at me when I spit at you.” Ptoo. “Ooh, greasy now, huh? Ain’t sayin shit now. Mmm—real fuckin greasy.” Ptoo! “Claw my hand one more fuckin time!” Splack! “What happened to ‘Slap me. I like it when you slap me’?” Thwk. “Thought you liked that?” Thwk. “Yeah. Uh uh uh uh. Matter a fact, mmhh—yeah give it to me. I want it all. Give it to me. Spread that shit open or I’ll rip it the fuck open. Uh. Give it to me. Mmh. Told you, bitch.” Splack! “Wanna see that mouth bleed.” Splack! “That nose too.” Splack! “Oh fuck yeah.” Schlp-schlp-schlp-schlp. “Pissin up my car again? Bet your ass still piss the bed. How a little kid gonna fuckin be a whore?” Schlp-schlp-schlp-schlp. “My fuckin God!” Schlp-schlp-schlp-schlp. “Oh, you limp now? Look at yourself: purple ass Whoopie-looking monkey.” Splack! “Fuckin piss all over me but ain’t saying shit? Wake the fuck up! Ptoo!” SPLACK! “Act like she ain’t never been choked the fuck out before. Give me a break.” SPLACK! “You know how to get a motherfucker going, huh? Uh uh uh uh. Ghetto fuckin cum dump! Get this bendy when your deadbeat dad ran this shit through? Huh?” SPLACK! “No little girl this open unless they nasty. In and out.” Prfft, fwt. “This that nasty honey.” Frt, frt, frt. “Oh we playin dead now? That ain’t stopping shit. Hear me?” Thwk, THWK, SPLACK! “Uh uh uh uh. Bitch look at you, gorilla-eyed monkey. Wake the fuck up!” SPLACK! “What the—? Shittin too?! Really—really, bitch? You a real pig, huh. Look at it! Face right in there, mmh—like a dog. Uh uh uh uh uh. Act like a dog get treated like a dog. Hear me?” Thmp! “Keep playing.” Thmp! “Where your teeth? Go get them teeth!” Thmp! “Keep playing. Ain’t stopping shit. Uh uh uh uh uh. Ain’t stopping nothin’. Uh uh uh uh uh uh. Ain’t stopping nothin!” SPLACK! “Here we go. Uh-uh-uh-uh. Oh fuck yeah, all up in that baby pussy. Here’s your baby, bitch.” Schlp-schlp-schlp-schlp. “All me up that dead nigglet cunt.” Thmp!

But that ability to face the darkness—the darkness that has people pull their dearest loved ones under water in order not to drown; the darkness that has people knowingly destroying a shared resource, hoarding during a pandemic, because they fear that someone else will take it—only adds to his safety. The positive of his literary devotion to exploring the underground darkness from which all life springs—and, in turn, to confronting and even befriending his own capacity to terrorize—was that, in his life beyond pen and paper, he was less likely to be puppeteered by the shadow. It meant he posed less of a menacing threat than all but the most pure and naive people, those too-guileless-to-be-real archetypes whose manipulable innocence to social maneuvering and petty jealousies sheltered them from the vanity and malice and ulterior motives that make humans especially dangerous among Earth’s creatures: Percival of Arthurian legend, Kimmy Schmidt of “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in Twin. Writing about the darkest parts of the human condition lets him purge extreme emotions in a controlled environment—dark energy exploding onto the pro-social page rather than onto flesh-and-blood poontang. He can better recognize, moreover, the early warning signs of envy, rage, or selfishness. He becomes harder to “puppeteer” because he knows exactly which strings the shadow tries to pull. By exploring the most heinous of antisocial impulses he forces himself to confront—not too dissimilar to “scared straight” programs—the destructive and pathetic consequences of those impulses. The forbidden allure—that which explains why the burqua is actually an evolutionary sound strategy to boost impregnation—gets entirely stripped. Instead of taking the path of the repressor (pretending the basement is empty at greater risk of the beast down there breaking through the floorboards), he has studied the beast. He knows its patterns. He knows what to feed it. And he also knows the importance of locking the basement door and checking the floorboards for weak spots.

Exposure and integration are more effective, of course, than repression and denial. But there are negative sides to his literary devotion too. The obvious negative is that it draws career-ruinous hate (“What sicko fuck would write this shit!”), and mostly from the very people who—given their repression of the Moloch within, the belief that every fiber forming their Whitman multitudes are all good (and it is others who are bad) blinding them to Moloch’s rising—were the real ones to watch out for: the old anti-gay-preacher-caught-banging-all-these-methed-out-boys trope (“See what happens when you be a faggot?”); the old small-town-family-guy-turned-Auschwitz-skull-rapist trope (“Give me some of that Jew brain, bitch!”). But there was also a negative with much less fireworks. In his life beyond the head it amplified his tendency to be an eggshell-walker: hypervigilent, too prone to say “Sorry,” as if in fear of waking some hulking monster. The tendency was well in place since childhood where, for example, he watched his father—blitzed and ready to snap like so many of his caregivers—deck the corpse of his own father, embalmed eye-socket dented for the rest of the service, and still would not let his gripe go at the cemetery: “This motherfucker owed me my money!” It also made him, like consumption of true crime podcasts can make the consumer (to say nothing of what happens to the vision of the podcaster), too quick to assume the worst even when doing so got in the way of his own happiness—like with the Halloween candy or like how, throughout high school and college, he would explain away all but the most autistic-friendly signs of overt flirtation: “They just want to get with my friend” or “They just want help on the paper.”

His worst-first orientation factored here. One clammed-up reaction to the word “Daddy” and he leaped into imagery of a toddler getting reamed out, spun in the process. But a good enough tell, not necessarily that she was a virgin but definitely that the paternalistic ravages he imagined were false, would have been the hymenal webwork of her splay. That, coupled with all her reassurances mixing motherly aplomb with princess devotion (“Yeah nigga, I am someone’s baby—and yo ass betta know whose by now!”), gave him little excuse. But being so caught up in his head, although in many ways a blessing for his professional calling, could also be his curse. He might have been quicker to appreciate other interpretive possibilities had he been more open to reality beyond his assumptions and expectations, assumptions and expectations rooted in a tangle of personal insecurities and stereotypes blocking him from case-by-case judgment. Perhaps some fly on the dashboard—present like a Tinkerbell guardian fluttering to his ear—would have opened him much sooner to the possibility that the word was the final sign of the astral alignment whose case she—the Scorpio to his Taurus—had always shown eagerness to build (and for which he, finding it easy in his love to hold back eye-rolls, taught her the word “kismet”).

He had a history of needing a third presence to help him accept the obvious in time, to help him not let his intrusive doubts blind him to positive news. Were it not for his college roommate, for instance, he would not have seen the flirtations of his would-be wife as what they were. It is easy to look at his writing and see a sinister soul, violent. Just as in the case of many who listen to death metal, though, the opposite is true: he is a gentle sensitive soul—a fact expected given his poetic vocation and perhaps even relevant to his nymphet attraction.

Luckily his new love was also his fairy of encouragement, holding him down even if it meant holding up a rude mirror (“Why you say ‘sorry’ so much?”) or just smacking him upside the head with the autistic-friendly overkill she knew he needed—his good little girl and yet, if only through quiet cunning, his nurturing guide. Luckily she did not need to hear the fatherly advice that the well-meaning coward in him felt she needed at the expense of his seed: “Have the bravery to face the consequences for not following stupid rules.”

She went into the glove compartment. He knew why. Had she not put the CD in just then he would have asked her—it was already forming, stupidly, on his lips—“Are there monsters in me?” That would have been unattractive, to say nothing of the mood she was trying to set, if only because it signaled yet another lap in the holding pattern. And yet he knew, even so, what she would have said. He could literally hear her voice. “We all have monsters in us. You say so yourself.” Had he really trusted himself, a goal she hoped—like any good girl—her presence would nudge along, he would have heard her say what her eyes said to him each day she plopped into the seat with that homecoming sigh of relief. “I see the way you look at me. I know what you want to do to me. And it turns me on that I don’t care what you do to me.”

She put their song on low. Both knew—as if an old couple where, for all the husband’s stubborn airs, the wife has long pulled the strings through psychological suggestion, hush-now redirection, and maternal wiles—this was meant to reorient his mind. And he was okay with that. He would be okay with until death.

There must have been an angel by my side

Something heavenly led me to you

Look at the sky

It’s the color of love

There must have been an angel by my side

Something heavenly came down from above

He led me to you

He led me to you

Neither spoke as it played.

When I was led to you

I knew you were the one for me

I swear the whole world could feel my heartbeat

He looked at her. She looked ahead, singing along without shame.

You gave me the kiss of life

Kiss of life

You gave me the kiss that’s like

The kiss of life

You gave me the kiss of life

Kiss of life

You gave me the kiss that’s like

The kiss of life

She lowered the volume more.

Giving me love, yeah

Giving me love, yeah

“You know you the third. Been the third.”

“Third what?”

She knew him too well to answer. Then came the catalytic question. She voiced it with recessive slang, with we-need-to-talk gravity—plunging him, with its best-of-both-worlds logic, even deeper into what he has dedicated his adult life to avoiding.

“You ever heard of ‘DDLG’?”

DIALOGUES I HAVE TO STICK IN»»»»

Dialogue A

“You really be gassin me.”

“What you mean?”

“You see a lot in me. Like—a lot. That’s pressure.”

“Sorry.”

“No. I like it. Never had nobody do that.”

“Well, I think you’re incredible.”

“You know I’m just a black girl from Philly, right? You be adding extra shit sometimes.”

“Extra shit? Nah.”

“Why I just be sitting there, not thinking—literally staring at the ground and here you go: ‘You have the soul of an old-world poet’?”

“I don’t talk like that.”

“Tch. ‘You look at this sidewalk and see history in the cracks.’”

“You’re dumb.”

“I’m thinking, ‘this man.’ Then I look over and you scribbling notes like I’m a bird.”

“How you know I’m writing about you, Miss Thang?”

“‘Such wisdom for someone so young. Still, I feel sorrow when I pull down her panties.’” I’m dead.

“Hey fuck you!”

“I like that you don’t get me sometimes.”

“Wow. Okay.”

“I do.”

“Okay.”

“Bitch in a big hoodie, hair a mess, looking like a whole boy. And here this nigga go, gettin all white with it: ‘I love this look. It’s very grunge. You’re rejecting dominant beauty standards. Very nineties Seattle.’ Nigga—like, what?”

“Lay-into-me day, huh?”

“Why not? Ahaha. You easy.”

“You’re asking for it, huh?”

“Been.”

“. . . .”

“. . . .”

“You don’t think I get you, though?”

“You get me where it matters—just not all the details. You old.”

“I’m not old.”

“You old.”

“Cruisin for a bruisin, huh?”

“Dead. You good just the way you are.”

“But you mean the slang? Finna glizzy! Finna finna glizzy!”

“You’re so dumb. Yeah. That part.”

“No hat.”

“Cap—oh my God!”

“. . . .”

“But it’s more than that.”

“Oh boy.”

“Don’t get insecure.”

“I feel like I’m about to go home depressed.”

“Cuz that’s you. You worry. You need a real one like me so you don’t overthink.”

“What if you’re the reason I should be worried?”

“Tch. How many times? It’s about trust. I’m a real bitch.”

“I know.”

“Anyway—what I’m trying to say is, I like when you don’t get what’s going on sometimes.”

“That’s—interesting.”

“It makes me feel safe.”

“Weird. But okay.”

“It just does.”

“. . . .”

“It’s like—people my age, they get everything. Which is cool, but it’s boring. And it’s loud. It’s like everybody watching a bitch. With you, it’s the opposite. Yo ass be tryna decode an emoji—hours tying yourself up.”

“I am trying though. Give me that!”

“And I love that. Any girl would. Tch. That ain’t even it, though.”

“Then what is it?”

“It gives me room.”

“What does?”

“When you don’t get it. Like I’m seen but not pulled apart—unconstucted. What’s your word?”

“Deconstructed.”

“Yeah, that. You so smart. You the only nigga that say “indeed” in real life. So that helps.”

“My confusion empowers you.”

“Don’t say it like that. But yeah. It gives me space. A place to see without being seen.”

“I get it. You could have my head all fucked up—telling me this means that when it means the opposite. Ahaha.”

“You in your head so much anyway. It don’t matter. ‘What’s this look mean? What she mean by that? Why her eyebrow go like that?’”

“My girl don’t like to be decoded! Ahaha.”

“I like when you call me that.”

“You are.”

“. . . .”

“But you know I can decode your ass.”

“Yeah. So you think.”

“Oh.”

“But anyway—I don’t know. Tryna put it in words makes it sound so stupid.”

“I’m rolling with ya!”

“You not understanding—that’s part of the coat.”

“Okay, now I’m not.”

“Shut up!”

“So—the coat.”

“Yeah—this big coat. I can disappear.”

“That’s kind of poetic.”

“Don’t make it weird.”

“I’m not!”

“Like, okay—traffic example. If you braking crazy and I’m like, ‘Damn nigga, you trying to snap my neck?’”

“‘A bitch’s neck be clickin.’ That’s what you’d say. Ahaha.”

“Anyway. You take that shit serious.”

“I would know you’re joking. Give me more credit than that, little girl.”

“Mmm.”

“What?”

“Anyway—eventually, yes. But first you go full protector. Your whole driving style change. You apologizing, hanging back—arm out when we stop.”

“Tch. I’d be like: ‘You don’t like how the fuck I drive, then get the fuck out!’”

“You would. But you’d still slow down.”

“And your point is what?”

“The point is—I like that. I like you taking me serious even when I’m not being serious. I don’t know. It’s not the right example maybe.”

“Nah, you’re good.”

“It makes more sense in my mind. I just like that you don’t get it sometimes. Period.”

“. . . .”

“Like when I’m venting about my dumb-ass teacher. I’m just talking. And you think I want advice.”

“Sorry. I’m working on that. I don’t—.”

“You good. I like how protective you get. I do.”

“. . . .”

“But that’s not even what I mean. It’s not that simple.”

“. . . .”

“It’s not just what you do when you don’t get it. It just feels right when you don’t. It’s like a whole vibe.—Jeez. You gotta a bitch’s head spinnin. I ain’t never talk so much.”

“I feel you, though. It’s the coat.”

“Yes. It’s like, you tell me not to smoke. You tell me watch my screen time. You’re that person. That person’s not gonna get it all the time.”

“I’m not over here saying you can’t do shit, though. I don’t want to—.”

“Nigga, if you caught me with a cigarette you rip that shit out my mouth.”

“True.”

“But no, you meet me in the middle. I get that. Like that time you took half my coffee and put more milk in mine.”

“Can’t have my girl twitchin. You shouldn’t even be having coffee.”

“See there you go.”

“Well.”

“That shit means something to me. You want to take care of me.”

“I like taking care of you.”

“I mean you out here teaching me to drive.”

“You’re good—a damn getaway driver.”

“No other man gonna tell me to go with a boy my own age.”

“You hated that!”

“That was in the moment. Cuz I’m like I want you crazy about me. I want a nigga to claim me.”

“I am crazy about you.”

“I know but you can get crazier.”

“. . . .”

“You want what’s best for me. You want to take care of me.”

“. . . .”

“And that’s my point. When you don’t get me—.”

“Yo, why we keep circling to that?”

“Cuz I didn’t say it right. The person who cares doesn’t get me sometimes. It sounds dumb when I say it.”

“No. I get it. You associate the two in your head. My not getting you is linked to, it’s a signal of, my being a caring force.”

“Force? Don’t say it like that.”

“I just mean figure, person.”

“Yes. You got it, though. Like I can fall asleep on top of you.”

“. . . .”

“I like when you say ‘Who’s that? Lil Dorito?’ You sound so corny.”

“I am corny.”

“You not out here pretending to be cool. And that—mm. That hits.”

“Hits where?”

“Don’t be nasty.”

“I’m being sincere.”

“I know. That’s why I like it. It makes me feel at home.”

“Horny and at home. Got it.”

“And like I got this whole world to show you. It’s the whole vibe. It’s what you bring. That’s all I can say.”

“You sweeping me off my feet.”

“It makes me feel like a baby.”

“You are my baby.”

“But its weird cuz it makes me want to have babies.”

“. . . .”

“. . . .”

“I want to say how impressed I am by you. But I don’t want you accusing me of projecting. You just a little black girl from Philly.”

“Don’t do that thing.”

“I’m joking.”

“Good. Cuz you can gas me whenever.”

“You’re out of a dream. You really are.”

“Oh no. You about to cry on me again?”

Dialogue B

“When you taking me out?”

“This is hard. I’m sorry.”

“Nigga have it figured out real quick if I say he can’t smell my pussy.”

“You know it’s not like that.”

“Yeah. You embarrassed of me.”

“Now you just being a brat. Because you know I have no reservation on the inside.”

“On the inside? Tch. What’s that even mean?”

“When I’m just in this world with you.”

“The car.”

“Just looking through my eyes at you and feeling what I feel.

“. . . .”

“But from the outside it can look weird. Think of us going together to, to wherever: out to eat, wherever.”

“I got one life, man.”

“. . . .”

“Niggas would’ve said that because of our skin too.”

“But this cuts deeper. And it should. If anything, I think—.”

“I know, I know. Age of consent, blah blah.”

“I’m not necessarily saying—I mean, if people are going to be consistent (and I’m not saying they should), then yeah. That shit needs to go up to at least thirty. We’re more immature today. Virgin Mary was more mature than me, braver—at like twelve, fucking twelve!”

“This not that, though. Tch. I’m different.”

“I know. That’s why—.”:

“Anyway, niggas pussy now. We on the phones—nobody really living. We need to be more like that bitch Mary.”

“I feel you. You know that. I just—.”

“What’s that Walrus nigga say?”

“Walrus? Ahaha. What the fuck?”

“Stop! You know. That black nigga with the face you played. ‘We’re never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy.’”

“Seal! Ahaha.—Fucking Walrus.”

“It’s for love. People do wild shit for love—real love. Tch. Haters gonna hate. Commitment—that’s the new crazy.”

“. . . .”

“Anyway, nobody gotta know what we on.”

“Girl. Come on.”

“What? That’s them nasty minds. Cuz they jealous.”

“That’s not what I mean, though.”

“Tch. So what you mean then?”

“I know who I’m talking to.”

“What?”

“Miss Anytime Anyplace. Ahaha. How’s it go? ‘I don’t wanna stop just because / people walking by are watching us / I don’t give a damn what they think.’ Ahaha.”

“I’m dead. Reading me now.”

“Ahaha.”

“Not gonna lie. That turns me on. ‘Anytime / and any place / I don’t care who’s around.’ That’s how I feel.”

“Supermarket. Bus stop.”

“Yep.”

“See why you trouble?”

“I like what I like.”

“Me too.”

“‘In the thundering rain / you stare into my eyes. / I can feel your hand / moving up my thighs. / Skirt around my waist, / wall against my face.” I go to sleep with that every night.

“Your voice is pretty. Damn.”

“Thank you.”

“I want to put your face against the wall.”

“Don’t start if you can’t finish.”

“. . . .”

“‘Anytime, anyplace / I don’t care who’s around.’”

“I listened to that all the time back in the day. I don’t think I realized how nasty it is until you got a hold of it.”

“That shit makes me feel seen. She gets me. You put that on that first time—I was like, ‘This nigga.’”

“I promise, though. Hey look at me. You my princess?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll get all this straight soon.”

“. . . .”

“Sorry, my hands are sweaty.”

“That’s the good part.”

Dialogue C

“People think I don’t talk. Crazy right?”

“If they only knew.”

“It just flows with you.”

“Same. I never communicated like this.”

“I hate when you bring her up.”

“I didn’t.”

“But you was.”

“Jesus. In my head and shit.”

“I am.”

“I—it’s just a way to say just how great this is, how perfect we are together.”

“I know. But I don’t like when you put it like that.”

“Sorry.”

“. . . .”

“. . . .”

“Sit with it instead of saying it.”

“Sit with what?”

“With how great we are. Then you won’t be worrying so much. You your own worst enemy with that.”

“You’re worth worrying about, Miss. My not going to jail is worth worrying about.”

“I was thinking of your writing, and how you think—every what if. Anyway, you know I’m not saying shit.”

“But who knows how shit could get out.”

“So just give up, huh?”

“Stop.”

“. . . .”

“You know I’d wait a lifetime if I needed to.”

“Me too. But—. Tch.”

“What?”

“It’s fine. I just hate it.”

“Me too.”

“I mean people.”

“. . . .”

“. . . .”

“Care to expound? Seems like you want to. I can tell you fired up.”

“Let’s be real. Men like young girls. Good skin. Energy.”

“A lot of eggs stored up.”

“You put shit weird. But yes. That’s in y’all.”

“I mean. You preaching to the choir.”

“Anyway, niggas see you with me and they asses get FOMO. And then they hate on it cuz they can’t have it.”

“Sour grapes.”

“What?”

“Never mind. So what about the women, though? They wanna fuck you too?”

“Probably. Cuz I know I’m gorgeous.”

“You’re beauty is literally insane.”

“But the women, they just mad cuz a man chose a bitch with more eggs.”

“Jinx.”

“But the men making the rules.”

“Well—.”

“I mean that’s how it was! White men was making the rules. They want black pussy like this and they can’t have it so they say its bad. That’s another example”

“You’re wild.—I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what?”

“I don’t know about what you’re saying—some of it.”

“Here we go.”

“I mean, for one, if I wanted to fuck some ‘black pussy’ and I was a slave master I’d just make my little midnight stroll to the quarters.”

“The slave master can’t be with her, though—like for good, have a family. He upset because she have a family with someone else, a black nigga. Anyway I’m talking times after, like a hundred years ago, when black and white not allowed to fuck.”

“Jim Crow era, miscegenation laws.”

“You sound like my teacher. Yes, they want what they can’t be have so they hate on it. Hatin-ass niggas.”

“Ops.”

“Stop. I’m serious.”

“I know. You saying they condemn it so they can feel they didn’t miss out.”

“Yep.”

“You don’t find that a stretch?”

“Not all white men. But yeah. And they know a black bitch gonna turn their lives upside down.”

“Once you go black, you never go back.”

“So that’s why they say it goes against God and any white nigga who want a black bitch a perv. Like he having sex with a dog.”

“. . . .”

“Why you shaking your head”

“I mean, I see the theory. White men in power created a society where interracial sex was illegal and unclean. So they had to keep demonizing it to suppress their own attraction.”

“You the professor. Yep.”

“Like a psychological barrier to protect themselves from their own forbidden urges that keep bubbling up.”

“White men always up in the head. I swear.”

“Watch yourself, little girl. Heady mofos build some crazy shit! Look around.”

“I’m joking. But you in your head. I know that.”

“It’s just—.”

“Just what?”

“The bigger problem is the parallel you’re drawing—between black-white sex and adult-minor sex. I—.”

“Men want what they can’t have so they say its bad.”

“I don’t deny that this can—. I mean, you’re right about men being hardwired to desire pubescent girls. Muslims cover girls up at like twelve. There’s wisdom there. And so many people, especially men, seeing us together would feel like they’re missing out—even if they can’t put words to it.”

“So if they say it’s bad they can feel better about not getting any. Period.”

“Or maybe, and I always said this in the Muslim case—maybe it’s even to make the fruit sweeter! So there’s that. But put that aside. The point I want to make now, baby, is that it’s not just FOMO. Every society protects the young. That’s ingrained too. Kids need to be protected until they can have babies. At least that is the evolutionary root.”

“And? I’m talking like my age.”

“There are power differences. The minor is vulnerable.”

“Everyone’s vulnerable, especially women.”

“More vulnerable.”

“Where you draw the line?”

“My point is—. That’s a fair point but my point is it’s not just FOMO. It’s risk management. Look at it this way. When we’re old together, I wouldn’t have FOMO—.”

“Cuz you been had it.”

“Well, maybe but because I’d be with you. And you’re not replaceable.”

“We belong together. That’s what I’m saying. Period.”

“But my point is that I wouldn’t have FOMO not just because of that but because I’d be worried about the girl. And girl, come on. You’d be too. There’s a power difference.”

“What about them NBA niggas with girls tinier than me? Make it make sense.”

“I’m not talking just physical. It’s mental too. The difference in intellect. The difference in wealth, social status—all that. I mean I own property. What does a kid have?”

“What about a rich white man and a poor black woman, an adult—I’m talking back then. That’s imbalanced too. So they shouldn’t have been together?”

“And because of my lifetime of experiences I know what buttons to press to—.”

“I do too, nigga.”

“There’s a lot of insight to what you say. Don’t get me wrong—even the NBA thing. But all I’m—.”

“And everyone bring something different. You can press these buttons but another nigga can press those. We not all the same. And that’s good.”

“No it is. And these are good points. But—.”

“And you think girls my age want to hear you play SWV? You think they gonna feel it like you do, like I do. Nigga, come on.”

“Gloves off, huh?”

“Listen. I consent. End of story. That’s what this’s about right?”

“I mean that word gets fuzzy. A horse—.”

“Boy.”

“Baby you know how I work. This’s how I think.”

“Yep, bitches my age love to hear a nigga talk like Socrates. Out here pressing buttons.”

“I’m ignoring it.”

“Good.”

“A horse may or may not consent to you brushing it, riding it, or whatever. It gives behavior cues. But when people use the term they mean it in—.”

“And when I try to bring your hand to my pussy that’s the same. The fuck.”

“But just hear me out.”

“And you pull away. So you don’t consent. And do I force it? No.”

“Baby, you passionate about this. But be open. And let me keep this straight in my head.”

“Fine. Go ahead.”

“Horses don’t need to know what they’re consenting to in like a verbal way, in language—they don’t need to in order to consent. Behavioral signals, the consent they give with their body language—that’s good enough.”

“But not for me.”

“Obviously not. People get aroused during rape. They don’t want it and yet sometimes they give consent cues, even orgasm and all that.”

“You’re twisting my words.”

“No, I’m not. I know you mean more that what you say. But I’m being literal to be careful, so I can make the point.”

“Fine.”

“Hey.”

“Okaaay.”

“Now with a young person, even if they show signs of interest—.”

“Signs of interest. Oh my God.”

“You’re not being in anyway charitable to me tonight, huh?”

“Are you beign charitable to our situation.”

“See, even that. You know better. You’re being stubborn.”

“. . . .”

“Even if the young person wants it too (mutual attraction, all that), the worry is that they don’t know what they’re consenting to.”

“Don’t know? You talking about a little kid then.”

“Someone even your age.”

“Tch. This not that.”

“Well, the idea is that the minor has such a radically different future to look forward to. So much is going to change with them. And so even when it’s their decision at the time, they might regret it later. They might think: ‘If only I was more informed I wouldn’t have done that.’ A horse doesn’t have such a radically different future. And neither does an adult human. That’s the key difference.”

“Okay I see that with a baby or a very little kid. Cuz so much will change. But—.”

“This gets—let me just say this, baby. This gets to the root. Exploitation—that’s the worry. It’s why I also say the age of consent should, if anything, go up. Because our immaturity is prolonged today.”

“Nigga, no you don’t. You say that to get at people for being unfair, which is my point.”

“Fine, but my point now is that just because the attraction’s mutual—.”

“It’s normal to disagree with earlier choices anyway.”

“It’s complicated. But baby, understand my target. I’m just responding to your theory that people hate it because they secretly want it and can’t have it. I’d say that’s true in the interracial sex case, and the adult-minor sex too. But, especially with adult-minor sex, it could be that people—even the very same people—could also hate it because they believe it harms the vulnerable. And girl, you gotta admit: that’s reasonable. We’re talking children. Children are impressionable. They can be groomed. And then there’s the whole future point.”

“I’m not some professor or whatever. But something’s wrong with that. I just feel it. There’s exceptions. Even an adult can have a crazy different future.”

“Well, they do because of contingencies. Like a blow to the head, a stroke. A kid does—well just because of the nature of the situation. Their wiring—it isn’t all settled.”

“What about when people start living thousands of years? The first person who’ll live to a thousand has already been born. You said people think that.”

“That’s an interesting point. And maybe, in consistency, the age of consent will need to go way up. Ahaha.”

“Also everyone can be groomed.”

“Kids are more vulnerable.”

“Yeah. But again, where’s the line?”

“That’s the—.”

“And we tell them Santa’s real. How’s that okay?”

“Maybe it’s not.”

“And what you say you hate the most?”

“I know what you’re gonna say.”

“That you was circumcised.”

“Yep.”

“So how’s that okay? You had a future.”

“It’s not okay. I hate it.”

“We out here piercing babies’ ears and putting their lives on the Gram. They could grow up and wish it didn’t happen.”

“You’re making my point. All of it could be wrong.”

“But nigga, cutting off dick skin way worse.”

“. . . .”

“There’s always gonna be regrets. People have to live and learn. I can see with cutting the baby. But I’m older. Tch. I’m more mature than most bitches—even adults. You say so yourself.”

“Maybe that’s an example of my grooming you. I could see—.”

“I been thought that before your ass. So please.”

“. . . .”

“There’s gonna be exceptions like us. I know you talking averages and all that. But we an exception.”

“You’re biased. That’s why I—.”

“I know you good. You complete me.”

“Sweetheart—.”

“Fuck some other person watching me. I hate the idea. The idea’s dumb.”

“I think it’s smart actually.”

“It makes sense for logic not for love. It doesn’t make sense in practice.”

“Maybe that’s the point. Because of the dangers.”

“I know you good for me.”

“So you think.”

“Stop. Please. I don’t like that.”

“Okay.”

“And even if you wasn’t good for me, I’d make it part of who I am.”

“How a bitch gonna do that when she’s dead in a ditch? I’m sor—.”

“I would’ve died doing what I love, living my life.”

“I’m sorry for my dark humor.”

“Hear my words now. Cuz that’s the difference. It matters how I look at it. Like if we lived in a place where they didn’t think it was crazy. Even if things go bad, the kid grows up and sees it as a learning experience. You get me?”

“I do. I just feel you’re over—.”

“We give shit power. Here some nigga pull his penis out on the bus and we need counseling. Other places they just laugh. That’s your example, nigga.”

“I know.”

“Like you was telling me about my mom’s voices—how in other places the voices don’t say mean things like ‘Kill yourself’ but just things like ‘Clean your room.’”

“No doubt. In India. It was that Chris Ryan Podcast. He said that.”

“I’m saying that I look at it different. How I take it in is different.”

“Learning experiences. I get you.”

“Cuz I think there’s always good. Like when when a kid gets murdered the people come together. It can build people.”

“Some people it ruins though. Sorry, I—.”

“Because they don’t see it like me. That’s my point. I’m creating a big painting with my life. All the dark stains, like my mom—all that’s important to the whole painting.”

“But even if the experience builds your character, that doesn’t mean it was good. It wasn’t good for the kid to get kidnapped.”

“But it ain’t all poking holes. Tch.”

“Tell me what you mean, baby.”

“This’s good, what we have. So like you really getting me angry because you stalling and now you telling me this.”

“Baby—sweetheart. You know how I feel. I’m just playing devil’s advocate. And I get what you’re saying. The framing does matter. It’s a smart point girl.”

“And what about the fact that we having this conversation? Doesn’t that matter? If it doesn’t, I don’t know what does. Shit seems unfair. That’s what I mean. I hate people.”

“It does. It does. Metacog—.”

“At the end of the day—I’m sorry, but at the end of the day it comes down to my choice and following my heart. I have one life. You now how many bitches on pills since like the sixth grade cuz they now suddenly a boy?”

“I know baby.”

“Make it make sense.”

“. . . .”

“Cuz when you bring all the shit together and don’t just pick at each point like its the whole thing, then us being together—that’s less an issue than changing a kid’s school, talking them away from friends—or whatever. Yeah two wrongs don’t make a right. Blah blah. But this ain’t even no issue in the first place.”

“I know.”

“I’m talking about us, not in general.”

“I know. I know.”

“This’s good. I learn. You learn. You watch yourself. I mean, literally my life’s better with you. I’m happy. I have food. I have love. I have a person. I’m learning all types of shit. You don’t judge me for liking what I like. I feel safer than I ever have.”

“You are.”

“I mean you even say all this shit—all this shit I hate. And I listen.”

“Baby, I get you. I do.”

“We have these conversations. That matters.”

“It does.”

“And see it’s dumb cuz I’m trying to prove why its good. It’s like I’m in a trap. The more I move the more I’m trapped. Love ain’t proof. The fuck?!”

“Baby, it’s okay.”

“. . . .”

“. . . .”

“And at this point I don’t get it. You ain’t fuckin me but you smelling me. You spit on my pussy. Like what’s the problem?”

“. . . .”

“You spit in my mouth, nigga. On God—ain’t no other nigga ever gonna do that. Ever.”

“. . . .”

“Like I’m not seeing where you drawing this line.”

“. . . .”

“So I guess we stop it all, right?”

“. . . .”

“Cuz there always be a reason.”

“. . . .”

“I can’t even be in this car, then. You can’t pick me up, then.”

“. . . .”

“If it’s really about protecting me. Cuz it ain’t even about jail. What we do could get out too. Right?”

“Baby.”

“. . . .”

“You see how dumb?”

“. . . .”

“You extra. You extra when it makes no sense. You don’t know when to stop.”

“I know.”

“No one needs to know what we on. I’ll deny it. No one gonna tell me what I did or didn’t do. This dumb ass president do it. I’ll do it. The fuck?”

“. . . .”

“No one gonna tell me shit.”

“. . . .”

“And fine you want to be careful and so you pick at what I say but it ain’t just talk. We ain’t movin!”

“. . . .”

“It’s my life!”

“Come here baby.”

“. . . .”

“. . . .”

“It’s fine. I’m sorry. I’m just mad.”

“You know I agree with you baby. I’m—.”

“I don’t want no third bitch looking at me. I’m telling you that.”

“It was just—.”

“I can wait. You my person. I can wait. That’s it.”

“Maybe it’s good to be in the moment. Appreciate where we at.”

“Nigga, you telling me to be in the moment? The fuck!”

“. . . .”

“It just gets me heated. We out here killing animals and niggas gonna say I can’t be with you. Like I’m literally gonna die one day.”

“I’m sorry.”

“. . . .”

“Come here. Bring it in baby.”

“. . . .”

“You’re wonderful. You know that? I feel so blessed I met you. You’re a dream.”

“They don’t know about what we have. They just jealous. I heard you about that point. But for real, they jealous. They don’t know about us.”

“Yo.”

“What?”

“You’ll love this.”

“What you excited about? I’m over here about to cry.”

“Jon fuckin B. This gonna be your new shit! Look up Jon B. ‘J’ ‘O’ ‘N.’ Put in ‘They don’t know.’

“. . . .”

“Yeah. There you go.”

“. . . .”

“Put it through the car. Yeah. And rewind it.”

“Oh he looks like you. Oh and he likes black girls. I like him.”

“I had the cut like that. Fucking 90s.”

“. . . .”

“Had the bubble coat too. Ahahaha.”

“. . . .”

“. . . .”

“Am I your angel too? I’m sorry for getting mad.”

“Of course you are! But yo, right here. Just like what you say.”

Don’t listen to what people say

They don’t know about—’bout you and me

Put it out your mind ‘cuz it’s jealousy

They don’t know about this here

“Exactly. Yep.”

“. . . .”

“. . . .”

“Jeez. Damn—.”

“You crying!”

“Just crazy how time flies.”

“You so sweet. They definitely don’t know. They don’t.”

“. . . .”

“I love this song. You right.”

“. . . .”

“Come here.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry about how I’m handling this. I don’t mean—I’m just—.”

“Ssh. I got you.”

“I know baby girl.”

---

“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)

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