Down There

By William Wilson

Is cheating congenital?

Thats the question plaguing William Wilson, a courtroom lawyer, as he tries to escape The Syndrome. But just one more delicious fling

Bad decision, for now he finds himself faced with a ruinous personal injury law suit being brought against him by a young white woman half his age claiming mutilating personal damages from their brief bathroom tryst. Is she playing the race card in reverse?

Its not helpful that Wilsons marriage has already been plagued by the color consciousness of his light-skin wifes family and friends. Its not helpful that his rich mother-in-law has vowed to bust up the marriage for the sake of her own bloodline and her grandchildrens skin. And hair

As the forces of sex, class and color wage ruthlessly against his career and family, against his lifestyle and sanity, the one person he can call upon for the answer, and for deliverance, is ironically stalking him.

Authentically rendered, Down There is a morally and politically brave excursion into human obsession.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524641238

William Wilson

The author, William Wilson, is a writer living in New York. [e-mail]

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© 2016 William Wilson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/11/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-4124-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-4122-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-4123-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016915673

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Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Jacket Design & Back Cover Painting: Raven Williamson

Jacket Front Portrait: ©Valerie Gerrard Brown & Mara Motley M.D.

Jacket Back Cover: ©William Wilson

Contents

Prologue.  Single White Female Plaintiff

1.  Shtup Diary

2.  Trusted Father

3.  A Good Boy’s Find

4.  Cream-Filled

5.  First Extra-Marital

6.  Cruel Joke

7.  Broke Clock’s Reprieve

8.  Bright Side of Biscuit

9.  Failed Aesthetic

10.  White Pudenda

11.  Lena’s Horn

12.  Ejaculation Six

13.  Enjoyed and Enjoined

14.  Robin Hood

15.  Original Sin

16.  Mother Wit

17.  Trojan Horse of Age and Class

18.  Verified Trust

19.  Cracking Code

20.  One Eighth Shy

21.  Bar Royalty

22.  Mustered Morals

23.  A Martyr’s Urology

24.  Charmed Loin

25.  Born in His Hand

26.  Hair Peace

27.  Social Climbing

28.  Goin’ To Like Us?

29.  Domesticated Radical

30.  Redbone Mischief

31.  Proof of Faith

32.  Papering Prophylactic

33.  White Glove Test

34.  Party Expendables

35.  Bread Plate Trespass

36.  Third Race

37.  The First Punch

38.  Ancestral Silence

39.  Mother

40.  William Wilson

41.  Tungsten Cherry

42.  Luck of the Drawer

43.  Gland Concourse

44.  Puppetted Purpose

45.  A Mystic’s Pick

46.  Shtupping Katz’ Reporter

47.  Lye in the Eye?

48.  Uncle-Niece Jig

49.  Scofflaw’s Vantage

50.  Dumb Motion

51.  Deep Naked Calls

52.  Alien Landing

53.  Trespassing Pumps

54.  Designa Vagina

55.  Breath of a Pestilence

56.  Trifecta

57.  Loss of Consortium

58.  Snippets of Face and Tallow

59.  Assumption of Risk

60.  The Christmas Letter

61.  Gift Horse

62.  My Habeas Corpus

63.  A Stepfather’s Piece

64.  Counselling! Me?

65.  Paupers’ Jelly

66.  Seeing Your McDonald’s Made

67.  Stairwell Retainer

68.  Bubble Gum Billing

69.  No Mary Poppins

70.  Stipulation of Girth

71.  Natural Selection

72.  S.R.O. Blues

73.  By-Gone Bone

74.  Catchpenny Company

75.  Genital Pi

76.  Asthmatic Might

77.  Squander

78.  Blank Bank

79.  Mandingo Awakened

80.  Greek Chastity

81.  Church-Blest Theft

82.  Knotty Pine Partner

For my good wife

…where hymen, time and destiny were stalking ’twixt her and he.

E.A.P.

Down There

a Novel

Prologue

Single White Female Plaintiff

The lawyer, Irving Shapiro, had said her damages would be measured by how little she could pump her pelvis now, how little she could control the muscles down there.

From victim to victim, personal injury claims are analyzed differently, he explained. For two victims suffering the same injury and now both are confined to wheel chairs, let’s say; now if a robust, ambulatory life of sport and travel one had enjoyed, while a sedentary life of, let’s say reading and lounging, the other; to the more active one would the loss of movement appear greater. To him would the assessment of his damages caused by the defendant’s negligence be greater most likely.

So Ann Denham sat there in the lawyer’s office and told how her movement had been restricted by the defendant’s negligence; how she’d lost control. Told nearly as much of the last date that ran through her mind as she could without dying of embarrassment. She’d position her buttocks on the pillow, her legs splayed deparate for the guy, some Italian she’d just met; while her fiance Sean was still away. The guy is hovering over on elbows and knees, she says, his member protruding from his hand’s trembling fidget. And once in her he’s snaking the early course of the corkscrew churn powered by two hundred pounds of hairy ass, whose dance she attempts to meet by contracting her muscles, as she always had, as she’d been expert at, since she could remember, that instinctive gyration she’d found she could whirl below her belly when as a girl no taller than her mother’s golf bag she found herself undulating just like that out of nowhere as if an effort to push something off her stomach or keep a hula hoop in the air, pumping all alone in and out in mid-air. Muffie! her mother had exclaimed, and spanked her legs. But it hadn’t been her fault and she’d close herself in the closet and do it some more.

But now, try as she might with all her might, she couldn’t get the muscles to draw the least grasp, the whole system now destitute of its once taut tone that had from freshman year glazed the slongs of her parents’ friends’ sons. No, now the thing would not obey her call to clamp, the walls now at-large, slack about this guy, as permissive as a grandparent.

She could feel her face strain as her brain sent futile commands to her pelvis. The last time she ended up peeing on herself, though her date then didn’t seem to mind the rain as he named it high-mindedly. What a gentleman! Now, though, the strain risked moving the wrong muscles, those commanding the adjacent system, and she’d be more embarrassed that an accident lay solid on the sheets when the guy was finished than by what he might otherwise think of her cunny if the sheets were just wet.

So she abandoned any further attempt, and as the guy worked she braced for his discovery of her ruin. And his movements told the whole predictable story: the happy impetuousness of first slide through the liquid break, then the full probe’s plunge, the headlong prerogative of a man’s impatience; then the intercourse’s distinct gauge, dick-sensed along the way, the first bite of the vaginal lip and the suck of its early strictures giving way abruptly to as slack a sinkage as if taking him through some flap and out in the fresh air again. And all along the noisy queef of air broke pockets from her like the wheeze of a balloon. Embarrassingly wired for sound. She couldn’t remember having been so much air before. Then his stop for a moment to question the plumb’s find, then the what-the-hell resumption, a continuing plunge in and out testing for a familiar fit, and what wall and position might semblance the friction the other girls gave. He lifted her thighs up to aid the locationing. Position, reposition. His grip on the headboard said he’d found it, though it still slopped elusive to the quest for come. But the speed of his pump said he’d nail it any way. Or kill someone trying. It was as if he no longer knew she was there, as if he was to get off by himself. The board banged the wall, her head banged the board, the box spring squealed, the air pockets popped, and she lay there yielding what she no longer had. And from her ramp on the pillow she was embarrassed to see so much earnestness still at work, ashamed to witness in the sanctified shutter of his eyes, in the murmured prayer, in the concourse of veins swelling on his face, and in the spastic crank of the balls-blazed pelvis, how seriously he sought the grail. His fire was a cyclist’s crank near the summit’s crest; the last drive drove against the enemy incline; the resolve of the righteous on the lee side of right; a boy’s faith in Christmas. And was that indeed brain-matter that she eventually discovered spotting her pillowcase where his left ear had lain as he’d fucked and fucked and fucked his brains out?

Do you think it might’ve been? she had asked the attorney, who seemed to be taking it all in so clinically. Like a lawyer should, Ann guessed.

And she, now with fewer vaginal events under her control, was ashamed of how little she could do to help the guy. She lay there, the passive host of a belly full of dick, dick she could not work or clamp one tactile whit. And when finally his palsy locked him into a shutter signaling the come was tapped, she barely felt the heat of its throb passing up in her. It wasn’t long before he would shrivel and slosh outsized in the pool he’d discharged, where her slightest movement—a cough or a sneeze or a mere spoken word—would expel him back out like a melted cheese. His great chest rose and fell rapidly trying to catch air, giving him good reason not to say a word. She felt his thoughts, though, but whatever anger he might have felt—that had raged against the bedboard and the plaster he dislodged—was well masked. He was polite when asking for the bathroom, and mercifully kept his eyes off hers. Her phone sat mockingly quiet for forty eight hours before she realized this one wasn’t going to call again either.

In her in-tact days, with just the twitch of her pubococcygeus muscle (as Dr. Cooperman named it for her), she could sluice and churn the least fry swimming in her. Before the defendant’s ruin, she’d be the one beating off frat frosh born-again in her. "Pussy’s good, pussy’s gooooood," one Sigma had prayed through her blond tufts as she pumped him to putty. And having been delivered, guys couldn’t image how pitiful they looked when begging for more. What sad eyes; what sadder boners. She’d been so proud of herself.

But now dethroned from such a height of craft, and rendered virtually paralyzed down there, her personal injury claim had to be assessed a greater loss entitling her to a huge verdict. Shapiro already had an economist ready to tell the jury what the thing was worth.

Her thoughts raced from figure to imagined figure of the amount now sitting in the miscreant’s accounts, the joint accounts he held with his wife, his rich wife, the investigator had said—brokerage accounts and money markets, and houses and a boat and that chicken business of theirs—, all would be transferable to her account when the money judgment was in. The wife’s own condition down there could be used against him as well, Shapiro had said. Used as evidence of the damage she herself had suffered. And that the guy should be kept off the street. She was in the money, Shapiro declared. So who’d need Daddy now?

1

Shtup Diary

So that’s how the deposition went, Father. In that conference room that day. A vebatim transcript of the girl’s account. The girl suing me for everything I had.

As a lawyer myself, I thought I could be a son-of-a-bitch in cross-examination. But my own lawyer proved murderous in impeaching the girl at the deposition. Badgered her so bad that she ended up giving all this septic stuff, this day-in-the-life depiction of her sex life. He even had her read from what her own lawyer called her "shtup diary, the notebook her lawyer had her keep to chronicle her damages, the lawyer thinking this to be the best way to have the jury spend a typical day" with the plaintiff and see how a once mundane function like intercourse had been rendered hopeless for this mere twentysomething otherwise in her prime.

Thus, standing over her and waging his merciless finger, my lawyer got it all down, word for vulgar word, then recycled them against her.

"So this guy, this EYE-talian gentleman, the one you said, ah, fucked his brains out—your words, if I’m correct—in your apartment, then was never heard from again, how many guys like him had you been able to, ah, muscle before you got on that airplane flight?"

Objection! the girl’s lawyer roared.

I remember how the court reporter twitched and squirmed and crinkled her porcelain nose, hardly able to contain her disgust as she banged away at her little machine. Oh, dear, such a mouth on her! she’d exclaim at each vulgarity the girl’s mouth gabbed. And I could see how the girl’s shameless narrative pierced her spinster soul as she struggled not to gasp any louder, her eyes somersaulting in horror. But one more pussy or dick or reference to the girl peeing during sex, and she’d be out of here, her bespeckled eyes said. Would pack up the thing and the pages folding from it and stomp out of the room. She’d rather forfeit her fee than have to listen to such filth being narrated in front of the lawyers and paralegals and me, the shamefaced black man being sued.

When the old woman did look on the girl, she seemed to be channeling shame for the whole race, this blond haired whore in Bonwit blouse, who could have been family but for what she’d taken up with. Her own daughter would have never squandered her gift—had she had a daughter. The Talmud would have warned her. Cain’s son’s curse, it was. And who’d marry her now anyway, the Talmud allowing divorces for much less of a female problem than what this girl’s claiming? And with such an old man—me—, my demand to depose her having compelled the girl to sit in the same conference room with me and suffer a lawyer’s withering onslaught! Well, just one more pussy and she’s out of here, the woman’s scowl said. She’d be the first out the room when this mess was over, taking with her the moral conscience of our little litigious band.

2

Trusted Father

And seated awkwardly across the conference room table from the girl that first day of the deposition, I mused how so often it had been I who’d been the moral conscience in the room, in most rooms. In courtrooms, at my club, in our church; anywhere, virtually. For instance, I had always been the one asked to bless the table, at any household—family or friends—we’d be invited to dine at. But now, after my infamy was out, the host or hostess would abruptly snatch the benefication from the tip of my lips, lest I say words over their table and blaspheme their oxtails and collards.

Yet before then, before I was caught, I’d been the moral authority; unimpeachable; the parent in our household designated to propound the Daddy Doctrine. So I busted her and we had the drug talk which devolved into my opening a bottle of Merlot and us drinking from the bottle. Why couldn’t a 16 year old found out to be a pothead not have a drink with her old man? And as our talk rambled and my buzz grew, my daughter’s little mouth betrayed an innocence even her confessions could not belie, as she’d wield the bottleneck again and again to lips trembling to snitch.

My daughter confided in me, trusted me like no daughter of a father could have possibly before. She didn’t have as candid a spirit with her mother, though, and I think this because of that unforgivable comparison she makes herself make with her mother. Why couldn’t I have come out light skin like Mommy? her eyes always asked in any photo that caught them cheek-to-cheek. Oh, she had all her mothers airs—a sheriff’s eye out for social crime, ready to block-tackle any club climbers’ climb or chill her hopes to belong. She just didn’t have the justifying color. Or the hair. No, she was dark like me so she shared more with me.

Her mother had little tolerance for our daughter’s dissatisfaction with herself. Nor did my wife have my patience with detangling. So for the most part I became the parent entrusted with our daughter’s hair. I had been around my mother and aunts enough Saturdays of my boyhood to have acquired some familiarity with the hot comb. So from the stove-top’s fire I’d apply the comb’s scorching teeth to the stunted strands the precious head sprout, as the smell of singed hair and Blue Magic® would take to the kitchen as I’d tease out what improbable growth the pomade might make possible. And while the skin of an ear might now and then burn, she’d hardly complain about such small mishaps to our father-daughter bond as my little girl stood to admire the Daddy Bangs I’d tufted, and to luxuriate in the locks momentarily liberated and which, for at least the length of Sunday school, would obey the whip of her head, like the long-haired little girls —the good hair little girls—who looked more like her mother.

Oh Daddy, I love it! It’s like a dream come true.

Realizing how needful she was of Daddy, our conversations stopped being awkward to me even as puberty made its first visit. And that night of the pot bust her confessions ranged and her questions bounded, and I was made to walk her through that dose of same-sex bobby sockers sometimes contract during that transit to self.

We’d had heart-to-heart father-daughter’s before, since when, across from my chair, her legs dangling high up from the living room floor, the little lady she was then, perhaps three or four, quizzed me about this or that icky fact of life or what made Mommy like-white and she and me not. And later we’d had our talks about boy sex. But here, on same-sex, she was indeed a tenderfoot.

I had already seen how circumspect she could become in the presence of one girl, Inka Johnson, her eyes just that much wider, her thoughts much less aired, as if deferential to some den mother’s presence. I’d even seen Egret, at the deb ball, seated on her lap, playfully, though, and out in the open, so nothing to concern parents or cubbies or Scripture. A crush would be understandable, perhaps.

As she pulled another swing and re-handed me the bottle, I saw how blind I’d been in not busting her before, for her thumb and index bore the brown stain careless smoker forget they’re indelibly branding.

But she hadn’t yet come out, the Johnson girl, and there were few markers to her penchant, nothing like the idea Egret’s grandmother, my mother-in-law, had instilled about such girls practicing such. No frumpy, dowdy dyke with leg stance akimbo. No, Inka was quite girly, more lipstick than dip-stick, her makeup and dress always scrupulously employed to pitch the frills of her God-given sex. For those few of us parents suspecting, she never seemed to feel guilty for passing straight. She’d be seen in pair company with a girl strolling by you, and but for the telltale intimacy betrayed by the harmony, each in the other’s bite, you might think them twin beauties on a girls’ night out, launching their eligibility on sucker sugar-daddies.

I don’t understand it, Daddy. I mean, she’s my friend and all, but I wouldn’t want anybody to think I was that way, you know? There seemed a question accidentally asked.

They grew up together, Egret and Inka, although, according to my wife, on clearly different strata, if house-size and shopping and travel were the measure. Inka was clearly athletic, had ruled the crossbars. Her period must have then come, well before Egret’s, for just like that her figure quickly hour-glassed, the woman subsuming, even before varsity, the tomboy she’d so shortly been. Egret was to catch up, of course, but not until Trigonometry. But her frame was never to mount the breasts and behind Inka’s had so flamboyantly, nor the calves and thighs that always embarrassed boys—and men—caught lost in the leerings that trailed her. My wife, trying to temper our daughter’s fears, had assured her her set would eventually come; that she should hold off on the implants she’d been begging; and that Inka’s advantage merely stemmed from the incautious diet of people of that culture.

Before the pot bust there had been little caution in our father-daughter’s, and now, with wine, the bond barred nothing. Inka had been the sexiest senior in their yearbook, Egret conceded, but by the time she gave the Salutatorian she’d gotten more finger than the ball team captain. They weren’t best friends but friends enough that Inka shared with her how it was done, she said, her eyeballs holding mine to insure I knew there were trade secrets being imparted. But as long as they’d known each other Inka had never gotten funny with her that way, my daughter assured me. Among her following, Inka was known for her courtesy, and as distasteful as Egret found detailed accounts of the birds she’d sock-puppet, Egret couldn’t help but admire her friend. No boy had ever asked permission first before making a move on her drawers, she insisted I know, taking another swig to the teapoon-size mouth.

Guilt often plagued her choice of Inka as a friend, I knew. But Inka’s predicament served to fuel the arrogance Egret had come to enjoy from her own straight sex and the blessing of living parents. And in straight company Egret wasn’t above high-hatting Inka either, with tales of jocks or her breathing mom and dad. The arrogance of normalcy and health. So I had to school her.

I knew my daughter better than she knew herself, so I could see the smoke cloud she was letting herself fly into, trying to out-shout what conscience may have been whispering in her ear. And I knew conscience would eventually be heard.

There’s nothing to be arrogant about, young lady, I began. She knows herself and accepts herself.

I don’t think I could live with myself if I was like that.

Egret, baby, you.., people have a duty to know themselves. How else are you going to be able to really know what you’re really worth?

Even if I was, I wouldn’t do any of that, wouldn’t let anybody know I was like that. Disgusting.

Yeah? Well after you defraud yourself, baby, all other sins are easy; after that.

I’d have to bang it out of my fucking brain someway, the noun coming on more shrill that its offensive adjective. I’m sorry, Daddy.

Well, about your brain, just because you may be enjoying a quiet conscience for a while doesn’t mean you’re right. Or alright. You really have to have it out with yourself.

Besides, she went on, nobody is really themself to other people, not really, Daddy. They just represent. So how are you suppose to tell yourself from the person who’s representing you? The person that everybody else sees?

You just have to do it. There’s no other way. No healthy way. And if you know yourself, you’ll know others better.

Mo’ better, she offered with a giggle, to cut the seriousness a little.

And you don’t get to know yourself from just thinking in some ivory tower, baby. You got to be doing, taking action. Going out there and seeing what you’re made of. And shunning a friend is not going to help you know who your really are, baby.

Sometimes it’s really scary, what they say behind her back, Daddy.

"I know, baby. But you’ve got to go for it in order to know who you are. Know your weaknesses, know your sins. Then God will tell you how to deal with it. Not you and not me."

I guess I can deal with it. And believe me, Daddy, I have my own sins.

I know you can, baby. And when you do, don’t mistake your talents and your defects, but understand them. ’Cause a person’s got a better chance than anyone else to deal with their sins and their imperfections. Once they admit they’re there.

I must have been so caught up in the exuberance of imparting the Daddy Doctrine that I’d failed to see the tears that had collected at the bottom of her shades and now trickled down her cheeks. (The significance of the few nods she’d shaken out of during our talk had yet to register, either.) But she came over and jumped into my lap. And along with the hug she insisted, she took off her glasses to certify her truth with eye contact the dark glass had hindered. Her eyes were as red as the wine, but steadfast, determined to hold mine through the trial.

Then, finally crying, she trusted me with her heart’s secret treasure. Daddy, all I want is to have what you and Mommy have.

And years later she would trust in me even more. Through theft and shame and a coat-hanger health care plan. For, as she would later say in Group, I had been there for her at her every distress; that I’d seem to come at her most needful hour. On that abortion table sophomore year just when she knew, even under the ether, just when she could feel, the second she could feel, from that last determined tug, that the decision could no longer be reversed or that screaming stop to the lady down the table, who’d been rooting so earnest between her legs, would have come too late, and that there would be nothing to take back to the dorm in one piece, nothing to show Paris, her partner, what beauty they’d made together. What would have been the daughter their hearts had named Dar! For the lady had said the sex. But not whose nose or chin. And she swore it hadn’t had more than a weekend of heartbeats. Just then, when her mess hit the bucket and she was being drained and packed, did I come to her, her towering father with my understanding eyes who could see the practicality in her decision and to do it here, me her steadfast father shown down from the garage’s kleg lighting that oversaw procedures next to a ’69 Chevy hoist one stall over. Bonehaus Collisons, the body shop was called. Of course I would frown on the venue, teeming as it was with grease monkeys, but her soror Jackie, who had had two two semesters before, had said there’d be no peeking from the other side of the curtain where the noise and hydraulics were, and that Bessie, the lady subletting the car stall for medical, knew the whole pelvic floor like the back of her hand, and could stop bleeding as good as a barber, seeing how she served virtually the whole AUC in ATL, Spelman high among them. Georgia State too. So Egret went in at twelve weeks and had it before its parts could be made out, before its pulse could hazard a rhythm, while their Dar! was not yet an unscrambled egg. And indeed Egret left Bonehaus’ with nothing to show. No scandal of college motherhood either, though. Rather, a virtuous launch upon the post-graduate world furnished by alumnae’s womb snipped of disgrace by coathanger.

I was there, too, in the hallway, I her father, when Paris put her out, and I’d seen how low she’d stoop—chumped herself, as she knew I would have said—, just moments before, on the other side of the door, offering head to the boy’s organ still sodden with the new girl’s sera.

And I’d been there yet again in that tiny office in Macy’s where they lock you until the cops, my face transmuted into the family portrait on the desk she’d been handcuffed to, the desk of the department manager who’d locked her in, the picture—of wife and children and him the bread-winning husband who sustained them all on a manager’s meek wage, Egret was sure—mocking this daughter of a lawyer daddy, mocking her and the little black dress she’d stuffed in her bag. And I’d seen this family man feel her up before letting her go with a stern warning and wagging the finger he’d forced her to smear.

Of course I had not really been there, nor witnessed any of my daughter’s mortal sins—to kill, to covet, to steal. But the idea of me had, and it had gotten her through. For I, her vertical father, was her one true compass. This she had said at Group, and at our last confession, that honorable night, years before my own sin was out, Father; before I ruined what me and Mommy had.

So we’re out grocery shopping, my daughter and me, her hair now flowing in husband-hunting length. She’s proudly finished her first month on the new job, second grade at Bronx P.S. 11, now out with her old man touring the supermarket aisles near her apartment to stock her frig, itself long home to but mold and frost. The new principal is tyrannical about lesson planning and a pain in the ass when visiting her class and few of the kids know what not to say about their parents’ problems and Julio’s father may be the neighborhood drug dealer but he did buy those lighted lanyards for every one of the second grader on the class trip to Ringling Brothers and she’d not feeling it for any of the male teachers yet; but she’s happy to have finished the program—successfully this time—blood and urine clear, this time; her license back, her record sealed. And she’s happy to have me with her, not being able to see me at the house anymore. Maybe it’s the meds, but she’s adjusted quite well to the splits her mother and I have agreed. Given how close we’d been, I admit I had expected that she’d skew just that much over the fence to my side; not enough to hurt her mother but just enough to let me off the hook, that wink, that hand press that says, It’s okay, Daddy. It’s not your fault, Daddy, and I need that now. The air of that now.

We’re at the check out. The items lumber pass us toward the cashier: weeks’ worth of daily bread or one last orgy’s fare. The conveyer stops and the verdict is in: $101.86. Towering over my daughter at the credit card terminal, I am tempted to pull out my wallet. But her card is already out and she swiftly swipes. And as she positions to answer the machine’s request for numbers, I notice how vigilantly, how swiftly she shifts her body to guard from me the PIN she’s punching. I’ve never seen her more agile. I don’t say a word. Nor do I cry. Not until after I’ve dropped her and her items off.

I stood to lose everything I had from the white girl’s suit. But what more in the world had I really had than the trust shown lost by my daughter’s flinch.

3

A Good Boy’s Find

So I’m left to fight the girl’s law suit without the one person I knew I could count on. Children are suppose to be part of the family, not a part of the marriage. Yet when my marriage went, my children—and thus my family—went too.

Sadly, there’s not much unique to my predicament. As a father, as a husband, as a man. Like most men, I’d been a good boy, once. Until, that is, I discovered what I really had down there. Sister Emile discovered it too, that day in first grade.

I had looked up and there she was towering over my desk at the rear of the third row. I had been busy with himself and did not see that she had come to tour the rows, inspecting penmanship and making sure all writing was right-handed, her course preceded by the poke of her yard stick extended menacingly from her fist, its black tip occasionally jabbed to coax a pen from a boy’s left hand or to discourage the errant course of his cursives. Displacing the visions of her I’d curioiusly conjured, her tall habited person administered its eyes down on my endeavor. With her free hand she reached down under my desk and pulled my hand out and presented it to light. And there, in front of the thirty eight heads now craned toward me, my smeared with palm declared my secret to the class. pants and presented it to light. And there, in front of the thirty eight heads now craned toward me, my six year-old palm could be seen smeared with the goo the tickle reliably delivered.

I didn’t know how long Sister Emile had been standing there over me, for I had been sawing away punctilious, like a demon at a new-found fun, and would have drawn even more of the remembered delight when the shadow of the flowing black gown, that encapsulated somewhere in its layers the Saturn spirit that was the stern sister, startled me back to the Catholic world.

At first I thought she might still not know what I had been doing. After all, despite the mystery of her shroud, even as fresh as I was from my first Holy Communion and lost to the mystery of girls, the world was full of hints, and I somehow knew there was nowhere under Sister Emile’s habit a thing like mine. And therefore no such game to tempt her. I knew however all the other boys knew why my hand now looked as it did, even the ones who might not have yet found the secret method. And because few of them snickered but rather seemed to be holding me to adult account—the eyes of the smart ones (the good readers like me)—, I knew how mortal a sin I had committed right there in the Catholic church building that housed the rectory of the unforgiving Fathers, Father Burke particularly who would make unexplained visits detaining Sister Emile outside our classroom door for so long a part of the lesson-time that even the more learning-indifferent of our class knew we were being robbed; how unforgivable my sin committed right there in the building that also housed the convent of the Cistercian sisters and the Catholic school classrooms postered with angels and saints and the bright forewarning of the Ten Commandments banner above Sister’s desk; sin committed right after Arithmatic and in the middle of Penmanship where all the other boys held pens in their hands. If Sister Emile didn’t know, they would explain it to her, the boys’ eyes said. But Sister’s eyes said she did know, and that, despite the tears now running from me, shaming me was her duty.

Sternly, Sister commanded that all heads turn toward me, and like the sound of a hundred pupils turning the page of their catechisms at once, the frantic swish of uniform obedience broke the hellish silence. With my fly still undone, I stood before the class as Sister Emile grunt through her grit teeth the punishment that awaited me. Her white face, as white as her framing wimple, scrunched to preface her lesson plan on sin.

I’d be like the devil, she guaranteed me and my rapt classmates, if I spent that much time with myself anymore. The devil was a boy himself when he first sinned, with his hands, he like an animal being made to attend to that part of himself sooner than angels and good normal boys were supposed to. And then even as a boy he was never able to be good again, no matter how hard he tried. The angels wouldn’t let him. He would kneel to pray and they’d smack his little folded hands from under his chin, would slap them away and only let him seek prayer through his gut, so he’d only have one appetite of everything there was to want. He’d try at good deeds, even worried at the little falters of the good angels themselves, but they made sure God didn’t find out. He, like some boys, Sister said, was not meant to be good, so the angels gave him slack and let him go native, free to splash and sprawl in the false feeling of the flesh, free from the good that meant him no good, like the bad readers Sister never asked to try to read aloud lest the good readers exalt to snicker. For, as to the good ones, it’s better the bad be as expected. But there was still hope for me, Sister said, even though my father wore overalls and a hammer on his belt.

That was indeed the fate of the demon that Saint Michael was shown punishing at the front of the room, his teeth grit like Sister’s were now, marking the strain of his sword against sin. On the flip chart at the front of the room the poster page seemed perpetually folded to this battle. The devil’s personage and its black fish flesh, treading the fondling fires into which the Archangel gradually sent him, thrust by mighty thrust, he, depicted among the angels and saints, as black as black could be to make it clear that no soul could be lurking inside its charcoal crust for which an angel need repent for knifing. And Michael, God’s favorite, was taking full advantage of his favor, the devil’s face paining for mercy as the Archangel righteously paid his blood-toothed sword through and through the tailed being, the demon re-assigned to that lower-form appendage like last year’s bad boys left back in the first grade, its meat opened up like an Easter lamb and running a crimson juice, its eyes popping the blood pressure press of the saint’s boot, while an array of white angels looked on to chorus the trial, but not one in sympathy, let alone in the creature’s defense, not parent nor progeny nor any of the thirty nine first grade boys who bore various shades inferred from his color.

And Sister Emile when on. She and the other boys might not have been aware of what I had been doing with myself, but that didn’t mean no one was looking. Unawares, each of us entertains at least two beings without even knowing they’re there, Sister said, and like the battle portrayed at the front of the room, St. Michael and Satan had probably been fighting right by my desk for possession of my hand, the unexplained flutter of any book page, or a furl of the flag posted near the door, the likely agent of that battle’s squall.

For despite the devil’s vanquish depicted above, he was still very much around and on the lookout for soft spots for crime. And though right now the devil was still outnumbered, certainly by Sister’s count, it never troubles him how many the angels may be. Through her red rage, Sister retold the catechism lesson of divine retribution, of how the devil had tempted a wicked high priest to commit a grievous sin but how Michael cut off the priest’s hands first (although the saint, being an angel of repentance, and on the advice of St. Peter, permitted the hands to be reunited to the body). The devil had apparently won the battle over me today, Sister conceded, and I would have to do a hardy penance to be as lucky as the wicked priest. And that penance, to wholly cleanse me—and to save my hands—, had to be a mighty powerful dose, not the baby aspirin of the ten Hail Marys Father Burke might normally absolve me with, which like a failed physic still left you blocked up plain with sin that might sit so near the bowel trap yet fail to fully purge. And as I looked down frightened at my wrists and the crooked black stitches of the re-attached hands I visualized dangling from me, I could see some of the thirty eight joined me in my shutter.

And I could see that Sister Emile believed what she said. Her look was severe and harsh and she seemed to have become Michael herself—all but the emerald wings and the golden hair and the radiance that would shame her drab dress. Sister’s stance was as fighting, though, and her yardstick as much the saint’s sword, held aloft in her instructional hand, its tip as riddling as Michael’s steel, her waist wrapped by her nun’s whipping rope, her lap girded with a tuck of habit that she might flail away freely and dismember me right then and right there.

What’d I do? my pathetic eyes asked. Wasn’t that what it’s for?

I shut my eyes and shielded by head to the blow surely coming, while my screams raced to repeat and repeat that I’d never do it again. I could hardly hear myself, though, over the snicker and rollick of the thirty eight I stood before. But when I opened my eyes I was surprised to see Sister’s weapon at rest at her side and her hand extended down from on high to lead me to the boys’ room. To wash me and my hands rather than cut them off.

Yet even after that washing, Sister Emile’s ablution proved only skin deep; hardly worth the effort. For wasn’t I the product of an old man’s seed, the seed that wrote my code? The algorithm that informed my sin?

4

Cream-Filled

So yes, I’d been young and cream-filled. Even unto those early days of the marriage. It didn’t take long for whatever virtue was left to drop—drop like a mantle—, my beastly lust shadow-boxing the Hail Marys I futilely mumbled; my penitent soul impounded by quenchless flesh.

The sound bite of marriage vows was still on the air when I found there was little to discriminate against. For the dick beholds beauty the edged-eye might eschew, particularly when you’re passing into a Venus, spread out under, a week’s worth of jism, a long, gorgeous and unchoked pony, a thousand cc’s if a dribble, and the coefficient chromosomes and brain cells obliged along for the ride; the ride astride soul’s hoodlum steed.

The regret to come later has been put in a box until when cum, for a time, has petered out and the mind regains dominion. Until then let the balls have their bedlam and the glans-head its hilt, for in the fuss and frenzy, slobber of neck-sweat never tasted so sweet, nor ear wax lapped so dulcet; spit could be swapped in the throes of the fit, and the cleft might be swiped in a what-the-hell lick. And the tongue not be silenced while I torrent a gusher, as crazed oaths utter throughout the spate, mumbled mention of the thing’s gifted marvel, plauding obeisance and esteem, in prayerful tribute to the pussy.

5

First Extra-Marital

Of course, the heading of my moral compass hadn’t always been True South. I’d been quite incorruptible early on. Those long gone days of my faithfulness are a sweet memory, like a fumbled first kiss; and in their summons I, for brief moments, lift the shroud that buried the unfledged flesh of my innocence.

For before that first piece I remembered I’d been so monogamous—fiercely monogamous, a moralist on marriage almost; like looking at baby pictures of myself—, before that first extra-marital piece that had turned me out in the world, like Satyr might have Vesta.

She was the color of a roan and, as an office secretary, was assigned to me just as gratuitously, that first law firm job out of school, insurance defense. She didn’t have the finest features. Her nose wasn’t as straight as the ideal of beauty to which I’d been catechized, flaring just beyond that degree of angle that otherwise declares my wife’s people white.

She was more coarse than the younger ones that had been cropping up from Personnel lately, ones with