The Vocabulary of Guns

62.

Lafayette, Louisiana is a snarl of Interstate wrapped around itself in steep banks and hairpin turns. Driving through is like running the track at LeMans. It’s past midnight now. All my senses are keen. I hear the thoughts of passing truck drivers; catch in a glance all their hopes, dreams and fears. One hand on the steering wheel, the other on the gearshift, seatbeltless; I ride the wave of the insomniac, the night trawlers who people the Earth. The city disappears as quickly as it arrived. My father’s first college town, one of many for that multi-degreed man. You stayed in school for a long time back then, if you could. ‘You’ll go to graduate school if we let you go to graduate school,’ the old bitch on the draft board told my father. How different it might have been if she had followed through on her threat and sent my father packing off to The ‘Nam. Of course he would never have seen Charlie. With his brain and ability to type they would have put him behind a desk or up some colonel’s ass. I grin as I drive to imagine my father with a crew cut, my beatnik, poetry-reading pop saluting, polishing his shoes to a gleam, driving the brass around. Drinking off-base. Going with whores. Seeing the Orient or for that matter the Occident. Cashing out of the Service and heading for…where? San Francisco? Europe? The moon? No, probably he would have come right back to Louisiana, to this redneck world of racial tension and cheap beer, where the friends were close but not too close and his mother was the same. He’d come back here and he’d write about the war and what it had done to him. Like Faulkner and Hemingway it would have changed him, made him stronger without killing him. He would have chosen better than to marry the first piece of ass he got. True. It makes sense. As the night reclaims those of us on the road to the west or at least Lake Charles, with the Honda whining under my feet and the shell of glass and cheap steel around me and the radio picking up nothing but country and Cajun music and so it’s just silence and the roar of commercial vehicles passing me every 18 seconds, I realize why my old man has never given me much advice about poontang. He has practically no experience to speak of. He must have been a cherry when he met his first wife, his shortest marriage, only 10 months. Well, when your wife screws your best friend 6 months into ‘until death to us part’ you’d be a fool to stick around to see exactly whose death will part you.

And JW is my first. She doesn’t know this. She won’t know this until she reads this, years from now, if ever. I’ve told her so many lies about my past that she thinks all manner of things about me. Abortions, male prostitution, older women, the whole shebang. The reality is I never even got a stinkfinger until I started running with her. I wonder, years from now, years from the time I am writing about when I did what I needed to do instead of just dreaming about it and writing about it, I wonder if all those years later she’ll remember our first time. The hotel room looming high above Canal Street. The mist on the river. The lights of Algiers glowing like another country seen from a plane. The perfect clean quality of the room, sterile, scrubbed, a bed free from memory. How we turned off the single lamp and ignored the bucket of champagne and lashed onto one another with blood heat and flesh-digging nails. Her natural ability to feel tremendous pleasure. And I, who had bragged about my conquests in the most oblique of ways found myself done more quickly than I could have imagined possible. How that’s okay because when you’re young and dumb you’re also full of cum. And how, on that first night of the rest of all my sexual days and nights we did it again, easily and this time I already had improved my technique and I was able to last as long as I wanted. Do you remember, JW, wherever you are? Do you remember how you said ‘stop’ because it was too intense? And how I couldn’t and I didn’t? I remember. I’ll remember that feeling forever. Even if I drive to every place on Earth and kill every man that needs killing I will never forget that feeling that I had with you, JW. I should have stopped when you said ‘stop.’ I’ll be sorry about that for the rest of my life. Not for you, though. For me.