Gabrielle Taylor's "Cockluck"

Part 22 | But You, My Sweet, are Different

So that afternoon Emerson called and informed me politely that he was buying me dinner wherever I liked best.

When I hung up, Auntie said, "good, you'll have the place to yourself tonight. I've got a date with JB after work. So you can bring Emerson home after your date."

"It's not a date."

"Right, he's buying you dinner as a medical experiment."

After dinner he walked me home and I invited him up to lend him a book. While I hunted through my library he put on some music.

"...you were KY Jelly, I was vaseline..."

"I don't want to be vaseline," Emerson called.

"Sorry?"

He came round into the room. "When I was in third grade, I decided to be a punk rocker for Halloween. Spur of the moment decision that I needed a Mohawk. So, there I was in the bathroom pondering over the materials at hand when my eyes settled on the vat of vaseline.

"By the time I was done, I looked like I had a helmet of hair roughly equivalent to the hair style of little lego men. Very shiny and plastic. Strangely heavy. Naturally the spikes refused to stay up. They'd slop over under their own weight. But, by then the bus was coming in ten minutes, so I had to go to school that way -- looking and feeling like a complete ass. It took a week of repeated, vigorous shampooings before my hair stopped looking like a grease pit."

"I remember pulling a fine tooth comb through my hair and scraping off fingers full of days old vaseline. Clean days old vaseline, mind."

I climbed on my drafting table stool with the spinning seat to reach the book, and as I came down, it slipped, and so did I, and wrenched my neck.

"Come on," he said, "I'll fix that."

I sat on my futon with my legs over the arm, and he sat sideways with the heels of his hands on my shoulders. His hands were very cold and firm and I was gelatinously tired.

"Another time when I tried to forge my father's signature to a disciplinary note. That didn't have a happy ending either. The old man refused to spank me that night for fear of killing me, and then sent me to my room. Ever seen a pissed off Sicilian up close and personal? Yes? Then you perhaps understand my mortal terror. I always did have poor handwriting, damn me. My dad is going to die of a massive coronary one of these days. Or his head will just explode.

"Then there was another time when I mistook the plumber for an escaped murderer. He matched the description given on the news. And he peeked in the window! I saw him! Not one of my stellar moments."

"Did you call the police?" My voice, I don't know where it came from.

"I was nine. I hid in the attic. My dad laughed too. By then it was funny. Another time I nearly set the house on fire. Why am I telling you these things?"

"You're naturally perverse. Go on."

"I was a bit of a firebug as a kid. Every fifth of July, for six years straight, I went out to collect all the dead and unused fireworks, and dissected them for the gunpowder. Even the burnt ones had a little left. So by this point -- I was... eleven -- I had a sandwich baggie full of gunpowder in my bedroom. Mom apparently didn't know what it was because she never asked about it, and the old man never came into my room, thank god.

"So, I was experimenting with my chemistry set, and the baggie was on the windowsill behind the curtain. I tried to light the bunsen burner and an errant spark shot off... straight into my precious hard-earned bag of gunpowder!"

"I watched in horror and fascination as the baggie promptly flares up into a ball of fire."

"Years of work, destroyed in a heartbeat."

"Precisely! All my plans dashed! What's worse, even though the curtain didn't catch, there is a large scorch mark on the windowsill, and worst of all, my room is filled with a huge thick cloud of smoke. Meanwhile, the old man is asleep in the living room just down the hall in front of the teevee. Loud teevee, so he didn't hear while over the next forty five minute I painfully dragged all the fans in the house into my bedroom. I knew if he found out that my life would be crippled for the next six years. So then I stand at my bedroom door carefully opening and closing it. He never did find out -- but my dreams of blowing up a baggie of gunpowder were ruined."

"I could call him and tell him."

"That wouldn't be as much fun as it sounds. Besides, later I found other ways of blowing things up. High school chemistry stuff. Match-head grenades. Some petty vandalism. Spray painted a pornographic image of the vice-principal and the principal of our high school on a building across from the facility. That was good for two enforced years of military school, which I liked so much I stayed. It beat Battle Mountain."

I straightened a little with loose clay limbs. "Battle Mountain? I knew someone from there once. Lynd Valentine. Of course, that was his stage name, but maybe you knew him when."

Emerson flipped me around so that my legs were over his knees and held my nape so that he looked straight down at me.

He said, "damnit, I AM Lynd Valentine. Did you really not know? I didn't come to make trouble -- I'll leave if you want me to and never bother you again."

Circumstance has given him weight -- perhaps Galahad was right, times make the man and not man that makes the times. Perhaps any unresolved man could come from my past and put his fingers into my lungs. Not just any man, but one of a small number -- Corin, Alan, Lynd, perhaps Richard, perhaps William. Stefan once, but not now. Lynd -- Emerson -- is the strongest one left, the strongest push-me-pull-you. Far from perfect. He has laxities that leave me cool. I would overwhelm him; he is weak. He romances. He lacks perspective. He has an inadequate sense of irony.

"Oh," I said. "Oh."

I fell asleep.

Posted by gtaylor at March 21, 2002 10:38 PM