Little Baby Faulkner

2

Baker and I had a history. From the first I saw her practicing color guard with the school's JROTC program—her face so smooth, her hair: an angel's!—to the time I followed her across the gym floor during a science exhibition—projects everywhere, and none more important to me than my own—I tracked her down and we spoke and she did seem kinda dumb to me. But I liked her anyway, and over the years we'd become fuck buddies. From that time watching The Great Gatsby (Robert Redford version) sitting in the dark of the basement where her apartment was, her dog outside listening. And Baker and I moved deliberately to a lying down position and kissed in the dark—and all we did was kiss—but the seed was sewn, and it wasn't till a couple years since The Great Gatsby that we hooked up in my place on Second Street in Dayton Ohio (with the help of a bottle of Aftershock) that we finally took it all the way.

Fucking Baker had become an exalted experience. Full of imagination and the fulfillment of imagination. Her puss was so red and so tight..it was unimaginable. Truly, the best sex of my life, right there. Soap suds—the works. Tight as a flower mate by a honeybee 🐝, the bee shaking his tail feathers to get in there. Before we had stood in the light of a street lamp visible five floors below..and when it turned red we stopped touching each other and when it turned green we started again.

My friend Julian was mad at me when I told him Baker and I had fucked. He asked me to describe her vagina, which I did. Red. Redder 🌶 than the purest red in a box of Crayons 🖍—a set of oil paints. Wet and snug and so tight she made me cum in her after five strokes, even after she asked me not to cum. We never used a condom—not in the beginning. Kept it clear and functioning. Lord of the Flies. The next morning she jacked me off with two hands while she waited for her mother to pick her up. Then it was off and on, whenever one of us happened to call the other. And it never seemed off-limits, even when one of us was in relationship—it was never cheating, with us.

This is the girl I was flying from LA to Dayton to meet. This is the girl when I showed her picture to my film school buddy, he said:

"You fucked that?"

To which I said, "Yep."

And that was the end of the conversation. The end of Mike's constant pestering me about getting a girlfriend, about everything he pestered me about, right down to the bottom of why I took baths instead of showers. Right down to the end of who my Christmas present was: A girl who I woke up in my LA bed to see. A girl I fucked during film school: brown hair, lovely petite, screaming sex in her chokers and all blackness and pink panties 💝 you could see above her back. Her back hurt. She needed relief. Any way I could provide it, I was willing. Fucked that girl in the equipment room, just, like, that.

I don't remember that film school girl's name—believe that? I don't remember my Christmas present's name. She was a costume girl for Adam Sandler. And the fact that I didn't remember her name isn't really an act of pathological sport fucking—more an act of casualty that we all engage in. Fuck one girl, forget her name. Forget her phone number and wake up the next morning with more unknowns in your address book: "Molly, 323.818.9544"—total unknown. Don't remember a Molly—don't remember anyone. No one new, no one old. A real bright way of living, there.

But on that night Baker and I decided to invite each other to spend a coke weekend at her house in Ohio..on the night I invited myself into this anonymous dance and supper club, on that night I stayed sober enough to remember two cute girls a few years older than me who danced and opened up their world to me.

"Do you wanna dance with us?"

These women were formally dressed and I with my six-pocket cargo pants they grabbed me by the hands and took me to the place under the skylight and they freak-danced me, holding me in the envelope of brightness where each of them plus the skylight made a triangle of importable lust, striking jealousy in the eyes of the boys more normal to this party. Soon they picked me out as the threat, the tall nail which is inevitably hammered down, and the girls were saying goodbye and the bartenders and bouncers were telling me goodbye and the street lamp having just come on was guiding me home across the street with the intersection of the homeless man sleeping in the couch that had been thrown out the window and my school was far behind me and I let myself into the Alto Nido—it's the building shown in the opening shot of Sunset Boulevard—and I took the stairs (down) and I struggled with the lock and soon was in the wood-floored studio apartment where I had the pages of an entire screenplay (one I was writing) placed end to end across the floor.

This and some snail puzzles (dubbed thee by my friend Michael). They were stacked on the writing desk with a bunch of cocaine stacked next to them. I was reaching for a result and I thought coke could help. It seemed to speed up my thinking, but no result came. These were some mathematical puzzles that had been puzzling me and I didn't know whether it was more in the problem-solving vein to take them to Dayton on my Baker weekend or to leave them here and let them simmer.

I thought of the dead man out there on the sidewalk—he seemed dead to me. I had never used enough drugs to make myself actually homeless. I didn't have sympathy for that man. This was what happened when you couldn't control your addiction. When you lost your job and lost your wife and lost your nerve to walk into a job interview on LSD or walk into a job interview on meth and coke—if you couldn't make that work, then you couldn't make it work—period.

The idea that there were people out there who had never tried drugs was empty to me: I did not understand how that could be. My cousin divorced her husband after he 1) had back surgery 2) was prescribed opiates 3) became addicted to those opiates and 4) went to rehab to end his addiction. To me that seemed like the best-case scenario, minus the divorce. But, I mean, how in this first world of ours could anyone live for long without coming into contact with drugs? We live on them, can't function without them. Anyone who has tried alcohol knows that if this drug was introduced today it would be illegal. Same with cigs. The most dangerous drugs are on the street, legal to get. And a couple of the most transformative drugs are listed as the most restricted in our world. The real problem is you have people walking around with no general knowledge of drugs and their actual dangers and benefits.

I set up a line of coke, snarfed it.

I set up another line, banged it.

Mmm. Salad wenches of lines spreading before me the remnants of ecstasy flying, colliding. Rummaging in my mind tailwinds of stories I had yet to tell. Yardley dangers of Pluto, planets banging across each other to form craters, my jizz the center of the galaxy, girlfriend gone, somewhere at a Starbucks sitting out front talking with a homeless man, treating him better than she treats me (I have seen this) and her going home to some weekly hotel where she barely makes the rent, has to eat off the employee shelf at work—all she had to do was not wake me up at night, not engage me in impossible swirls of arguments that never end, there is never a truce, never a peace of the day, but me waking up with her kneeling over my body yelling at me. Never stopping. One who wants not to live together, not to love each other, but to be one end of a debate course, for us to work it all out and for her to be right! I could not take any more of that.

I punched up my ticket—laptop, coke—making sure I got the flight times, origins and destinations, correct. Making sure I had the times correct. Enough room for changes to and from Dayton Ohio. I'd pack my bag tomorrow. I called Baker.

"Hi y'all" (said in an English accent). "I hope you have been following my YouTube channel as of late where myself and my house mouse—we will call her 'B'—move into a fabulous house in East Dayton. This weekend we have a guest, my old friend Matt from Colonel White. Anyway—any who—he's coming for a visit. A sortie. An exportage. If you will. I" (sound of a smooch) "you, fuck boy! I smooch you I smooch you I smoooch 💋 you!!"