I am the life of the party, but I always go home alone. At my friend Joe's birthday party, my cousin joked that she had seen me on Nelson Street, and instead of letting an obese pedestrian cross in front of me, I pressed on the gas. "He is such a bastard," — she laughed — "if the girl had been thin and pretty he would have let her cross." "Au contraire," I retorted: "Last week a beautiful thin girl showing ample cleavage passed in front of me — I almost ran that bitch down too."
My brother came up to Morgantown from Houston to visit me a few weeks ago. He took my Mother to church and when he got back he mentioned how there had been plenty of good pussy there — much better than the pussy in Houston. Maybe because of all the college kids here in Morgantown. That sounded interesting to me — I didn't even know college kids went to church. So after he went back to Houston I headed down to the church to check things out for myself.
Sure enough, a girl came up to me after the service to tell me I might want to dress more formally the next time I came. She also asked if there was anything I wanted her to tell the father for me.
Boy, Morgantown sure is small, I thought. "Well," I said, "You can ask the father to bring me some cash the next time he drives by my apartment — my food stamps are gone—"
"No," she said, "the father, as in Our Lord, God, The Father."
"Oh," I laughed. "Well, you can tell him to go suck a dick."
I am trying to introduce my girlfriend to all the new classics. She is only 20, though, and it is almost a nuisance trying to pry open her jejune mind. Last week I took her to Almodovar's new film Heartbreak City, about a transsexual assassin/prostitute who stops taking her anti-depressants, and as a result begins to perform sadism on her Johns so as not to fall in love with them. In the end, the distinction blurs between her clients, in her role of prostitute, and her targets, in her role as assassin.
"It was ok," my girlfriend laughed, "but she sure was slutty."
Self-help is now a prevailing part of pop culture. Just the other day, a prostitute — a prostitute — was giving me the third degree on what I should do with my life: "Sexual love," she said, "is the stepping stone to a new way of life for you. Love gives us progeny, and begets the family dynamic, which gives meaning to life, and will open the closed doors in your heart. But the first thing for you will be to get off the food stamps, get a full time job — that will be the means through which you can achieve self-respect, autonomy, and eventually become a fully-realized man."
"Shut up and shit in that kitty litter!" I said.
Now that I have finished my murder mystery/sex comedy P is for pussy, I am dedicating my time to the research of my new book: One too many pussy jokes: How my marriage ended as I got this scar on my neck. I have had to endure some real barbs down at the wharf district from the passersby who stop and watch me try out my routines. I tell them if they don't like the jokes they can just go suck a dick instead.
I was watching the ball game the other day, innocently thumbing my cock, when my wife shouted out:
"Hey Tom! Brenda is on the phone. She says things didn't turn out to good in Mexico; she had to start hooking because of the heroin and oxycontin addiction. Her father got her into detox." "Tell her I am sorry to hear that." "Yeah, well, she is going to be let out next week, and then she is going to a fat camp. She wants to know can she stay here till it begins." "Ok, but tell her this time she stays in the guestroom."
So I had checked myself into rehab and had had to listen to all the Christian chatter, so I signed myself out. I walked home, got drunk, and went to pick up more beer and an issue of Playboy's Nudes. I saw the same phlebotomist that worked in the rehab unit come into line as I was paying. He looked confused for a moment, and then asked if he could jerk me off in the alleyway.
Some literary Nabokov-thesis-writing cocksucker- fiancé of my sister is staying with my parents and me. I quoted to him from Ada or Ardor, referring to my sister: "Eccentricity is the greatest grief's greatest remedy." I then told him how venerable I found the world of Homer and how modern literature almost shuns primordial, fundamental emotion. He replied, in front of my whole family, that while surfing the web on my computer he had seen my search history — and that indeed I did "hold Ilium sacrosiliac."
Some people can sure be a drag. Take my brother. I used to work at a place where I saw my bosses' wife's huge, voluptuous behind and immense thighs all day. Her frame was truly majestic — a delicate waist tapering to a paradise of fleshy tissue. An umbrella of soft firm flesh. I composed the poem:
It is true, that of, interests of men —
The ass, haunches, butt, legs, thighs —
My Bosses' wife's are a womanly ten
As if some vibrantly sprightly spark
Decided to strike out on a carnal lark
My pupils dilate and my hungry loins cry —
To her haunches my attentions fly
The thing was, her butt was so big. It seemed to walk behind her on its own accord, and I gazed at her walking by while feeling myself in a void of habitual and truncated lust. I thought to myself: "If the bust of Nefertiti were instead a statue and she then materialized in the modern era to be the sex-bomb she was born to be, maybe her haunches would approach the robust beauty of my bosses' wife's." A few times I joked to my brother of taking a picture of these haunches on the sly and sending him the photos. A few weeks later he came to visit me. One day, during many an awkward silence, I decided to say something. I said:
"You remember how I told you about my bosses' wife?"
"Yeah, dude, sure."
"Well, the problem is you get so accustomed to looking at that all day and normal women just don't look the same; I saw a really cute girl after leaving work one day and my thought was: 'Those aren't child-bearing thighs!'"
Instead of his usual grimace of annoyance, which was the answer to everything I say, he paused for a moment, got red in the face, and went to pack his suitcase, leaving my apartment in extreme indignation.
I would have said something to correct his misapprehension but I was so glad he was leaving I just let the issue go.
I ran into an old high school buddy the other day. Well, actually, he wasn't a buddy — I actually used to fantasize about clubbing him to death because he attracted women so easily and then irrepressibly, in unbelievable detail, boasted about his conquests, even to other females. I only heard about these conquests because we were on the tennis team together. I ran into him the other day, the bastard. He said that I looked good because I had lost a lot of weight. "The three Ds" I responded: "Discipline, discipline, and discipline." "And it hasn't had anything to do with your homelessness?"
Martin Jones lives in West Virginia. He likes easy crosswords, literary critiques of Proust, and fuckin'.