Swifty

He spotted her over the head of a life- sized Taylor Swift promotional cut- out for jeans.

Taylor Swift, a young country singer, who, at least in this ad campaign, appeared to only smile with one side of her mouth.

But this girl, she was not smiling with any part of her mouth. She was doing her job like a bitter automaton. Bitter was an assumption, but she did not look at all happy.

But how many Saturday night Wal-Mart cashiers were?

He wheeled his cart, filled only with two XXL children’s button down shirts, over to her check- out line. He cupped his breath and smelled it. He was thankful for the check-out conveyor belt; it would ensure a marked distance between her and what he had just smelled in his hand.

He was on the spot, so his woo- lines would have to be old standards.

Perhaps something along the lines of, “Give me your phone number or a tissue, because if you don’t give me those digits, I’m going to cry.”

Her name tag read Bonnie. Bonnie in Scots- Gaelic meant beautiful.

Beautiful was a bit generous, but, if, on any slow night, light on the customers, her co-workers were to throw together a hastily organized Employee Beauty Competition (as the blue collars liked to say, “for shits and giggles”), competing against all the old folks and tax deductibles on staff, she just might win. Her looks were the stuff of big fish in small ponds. As the prize announcing her victory, he envisioned a plastic tiara ganked from the toy aisle.

Tuesday would be the 2008 presidential election. Obama/Biden vs. McCain/Palin. He decided to use this in his opening.

“Is it true that Wal-Mart has been pressuring its employees to vote Republican?”

He had heard this on the news. Undercover of hastily arranged morale pep talks, Wal-Mart honchos stood accused of haranguing their employees to vote pachyderm.

“Huh?” she replied. She had a red state drawl.

He repeated the question.

“Is it true that Wal-Mart has been pressuring its employees to vote McCain/Palin?”

“You’re looking for a can for paintin’?”

“Nothing, forget it.”

He felt stupid, though she deserved the honor more. His shame only made her that much more attractive. Light brown hair to her shoulders, real, honest- to- goodness cerulean eyes, freckles across the bridge of a button nose. Twentyish, thin, shapely in the legs. She was clearly wearing stretchy jeans similar to the ones that Taylor Swift had been promoting in the life- sized promotional cut-out. He couldn’t decipher her breasts with the loose cashiers smock covering them, but her legs became discernible as she leaned away from the conveyor belt to turn off her register’s glowing light.

Never one to quit while ahead, he decided to try again.

“Do you get an employee discount?”

“I get a discount on everything,” she bragged. “Twenty percent. But if you’re askin’ me to discount these shirts for you, the answer’s no.”

Her southern twang would be fun to imitate.

“If I was your friend, would you let me use your discount?”

“Maybe. But you’re not my friend. I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

He picked up the pen available to customers for filling out checks and signing credit card slips and scribbled on the back of his receipt.

“Here’s my phone number. Call me. Maybe we can be friends. And someday, you’ll let me use your discount.”

It was all so perfectly trashy. Wal-Mart, discounts, political ignorance, the scruff on his chin, the way his breath smelled. Her snotty disdain for no reason and tight- fitting Taylor Swift jeans.

When he had sex with her later that night, he didn’t use a condom. It was the perfect trailer park coda and he liked good endings. She, the Wal-Mart cashier with two kids at home, babysat by her mother, with absolutely no fear of getting pregnant by him, the smelly stranger, who bought his clothes 20 years too small.

©Fiona Helmsley

Meet Cute

FH: Barry was a good guy. He was my favorite counselor. I remember he wore black leather pants.

SF: He was the only staff member there that I respected, besides some of the nurses…

SF: …So you came into Barry’s office, high and crying about your dog being missing, and sometime after that Barry saw your public access show on TV. He knew nothing about punk rock and at first I thought he had to be talking about George Tabb’s Destroy Television. This is going to sound horrible, but I had met so many scumbags at the clinic that when Barry told me about the show and that you were into punk, only then did I decide to talk to you. I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. A few days later you brought in a video of the show and I loved it. I was like, Quelle Surprise! This girl could be interesting.

FH: My dog was never really missing, he was just hiding in the closet…

SF: And seeing the public access show and your talent just made me want to kill that Tommy guy more. I mean, cognitively, I knew he wasn’t to blame for your problems. I’ve been blamed for other people’s problems and I knew it wasn’t fair, but it was so obvious to anyone watching that if you were in your right mind you would not have been with him at all. How old were you? Twenty-two, twenty-three? He was at least fifty, maybe 60, and he wore green acid- washed jeans!

FH: Then I saw you at the Suckdog show at Acme Underground.

SF: Are you trying to change the subject?

FH: It makes me uncomfortable. It’s like talking about another person, another person who is doing terrible, horrible things to themselves. Especially when it comes to that guy, Tommy.

SF: I think it’s important. It’s a definite low. But at the same time, one of the things that was so endearing about you was that as you went through so much of it…well, you didn’t wear it. That’s why I think the opening quote of your book is so perfect. I remember doing paperwork with you and you going on and on about that scumbag and how he had gone to the same high school as Jim Carroll, as if hallway proximity to Jim Carroll gave him some kind of fucking creditability! I remember you trying to convince me that he was a regular guy, that you and he had a regular relationship, that you two were going to the movies that afternoon. And as soon as you said "movies" I knew that that dirtbag had gotten the free movie passes that we gave to any client at the clinic who agreed to take an AIDS test first…

© Fiona Helmsley

Cold Feet

While homeless in New York City, my friend Marie and I became friendly with a man known as Starr. Starr presented himself to us as a person well-versed in the ways of the street, a person more than willing to help look out for a pair of eighteen year old punk rock girls from the suburbs. Starr was African-American, with cookie- cutter shaped stars tattooed on his temples. He wore black leather pants that looked like they had become one with his body from continuous wear, like he had a darker, second skin from the waist down. One day, the three of us were sitting on a street corner asking people for spare change to buy heroin when an Indian man drinking a beer in a brown paper bag set down next to us. The man was friendly and a little drunk, and over the course of the conversation let it be known he would like to get to know me better, and flashed a wallet full of cash. I wanted to get high, but was by no means desperate enough to agree to have sex with the man. But before I could give him the brush off, Starr took me aside. “You won’t have to do anything with him,” he said. “Just tell him you know a spot by the river where you two can go.” Starr opened the small bag he carried with him wide enough so that I could see that there was a brick inside. As I walked with the man towards the East River, I felt like I was outside of myself, watching my body as it ambled down the streets with this drunken stranger. Starr slunk behind us, keeping his distance, trying to conceal himself behind monuments and people. The Indian man held my hand without a care in the world, babbling away. Closing in on the East River Park, I had to confront the fact that no third option was going to present itself, no deus ex machina was going to fall from the sky and save the man from Starr’s brick and line my pockets with gold. I stopped and turned to the man. “You need to get out of here,” I said. “My friend is going to rob you.” He looked at me, confused. “You need to go,” I said firmly. We had stopped in the middle of the block and when Starr rounded the corner, he expected us to be farther ahead, so he made no effort to hide himself. Finally, the man understood what was about to happen to him and took off. “What happened?” Starr asked, cradling his bag under his arm. “I don’t know,” I answered. “He said he couldn’t do it, that he didn’t have it in him. I think he got cold feet.”

© Fiona Helmsley

Sliver

You sold dope for a short period of time (a junkie seller never works out, but all seem willing to try to buck the trend) and kept the bags inside the silver foil wrappers of a Juicy Fruit gum pack. You thought your ingenuity genius, what cop is going to think to look through a pack of gum? Your customers would hand over their ten dollar allotments, often times in the same spare change denominations they had begged, and you would reach into your bag, pull out your pack of Juicy Fruit, and give them as many sticks of gum.

One day, three of your most unsavory customers, one an ex-boxer with teeth as gnarled as his English, surrounded you on a street corner in broad daylight.  Junkies without dope in the morning are like bombs waiting to be diffused. “Give us the dope,” they said. Funny, how just the day before you would have considered them friends.  You didn’t make it easy for them; it was your only line of defense. They went through your bag, your pockets, bloodied your eye. You made them do the guesswork, and every lead you withheld was another punch.

 “Where’s the fucking dope!”  

Finally, they found it. You'd put it in your socks.

Later, you reported seeing the empty foil wrappers, discarded on the street, riding the wind. Shiny and reflective, they were everywhere, and seemed to dance on the air. The street in front of you seemed to be peppered with oblong streaks of silver. You weren’t sure if it was real, or because of the damage they’d done to your head, but it struck you, for a fleeting moment, as beautiful.

©Fiona Helmsley

Mama Take Me Home

My mom had not budged an inch since making her decree: if I wanted to live at home, I had to go to and complete rehab.

She had been able to force me in the first time, in the middle of my senior year of high school when I was seventeen. I stayed an eventful two weeks. Over those fourteen days, Kurt Cobain killed himself after escaping a rehab he too had been forced into, and my roommate (who had a habit of fucking fruit after lights out) had a full on frothing at the mouth withdrawal- related seizure in the pool.

But most importantly to our story, I turned eighteen. In order to absolve myself of personal responsibility (and hopefully garner some let me come home wiggle room with my mom) I forced the rehab's administration to kick me out by refusing to attend all groups and daily activities. I was putting all my early release eggs on the sophist idea that if I was ejected from the facility, that was, say, different from just up and leaving the facility. Perhaps, my con cried out, Mom, I tried. Perhaps, my con kvetched, but they just wouldn’t let me.

But Mom slice said no dice and stuck to her enabler-free guns. I would not be allowed anywhere near our familial homestead until I completed a thirty day inpatient program.

No sleep (at home) till rehab.

So I finished my senior year of high school living at a house where my friend Marie was trying to finish hers, due to similar circumstances. I just barely graduated, getting my good night's sleep with my head on the desk between final exams. A hunka hunka of burning mess, I was eventually banned from participating in my high school’s graduation ceremony for coming to the practice high and nodding out in what would have been my stage seat at the ceremony. If there was to be any silver lining to this debacle, it was the sweetness shown to me by my closest alphabetical neighbor in class roll call. He and I had never gotten along, but trying to get me to come out of my heroin- induced stupor, he showed an endearing side of himself I’d never seen during all our years of school together.

“Wake up, Fiona!” he said, grabbing my hand and then squeezing it. “You have to open your eyes!”

His actions that day wiped clean a slate filled with twelve years of accumulated hallway dickery.

Baring a miracle, my original post- high school plan of attending John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City was out of the question, though at this point, it really held no interest to me anyway. The whole trajectory of my life had changed with one snort of heroin off the floor of a reasonable clean Subway Sandwich shop bathroom. Here I was, only a few, scant months later, homeless, baring rehab.

And I kind of thought it was great.

At first.

Making the best of my situation, I pandered to my punk rock identification and its off -shoot sensibility of dirty, smelly transience as a revolutionary act. I indulged myself, allowing myself to believe there was actually something insurrectionary about making your place of residence a sidewalk and letting your day start whenever you said it did, regardless of the sun’s place in the sky. The delusion I was stickin' it to the man sustained me, as I partook in what was essentially the same hippie lifestyle from the 60’s, but with darker clothes, different music and distain for hippies.

That summer, I traveled to California and stayed in Berkeley, a place I’d read about and wanted to visit for years, mostly because of a fascination with the decade that I denied my lifestyle emulated. Spending about five minutes in the hallowed People’s Park, the rest of the trip was spent mooching food, bumming change and fighting with the people I was traveling with. The trip sucked and I was mentally and physically exhausted- in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, I did harbor ambitions’ for my life besides living off of other peoples generosities’ and then ranking on them for the choices that afforded them the ability to be generous.

Though not done with drugs, I was done with the chaos of that summer’s unstable living conditions and that big, empty feeling that came from knowing I was not doing an iota of what I could have been with my life.

I wanted to come home.

Mom, I will go to rehab and I will stay.
My mom played her tough love role to the hilt. She had been well- schooled by her Love The Addict, Hate the Disease self- help books and the Al-Anon support group meetings she had attended in my absence. She wouldn’t even pick me up at the shopping center I was living behind (sleeping on cardboard boxes with two other destitute romanticists) and dispatched my uncle to ferry me to the rehab.

“That,” he said, after we exchanged luke- warm pleasantries as I boarded his truck, “is a hair don’t.”

My friend Theo had attempted to give me a Chelsea girl haircut earlier in the month but I had opted for the only ‘do choice remaining- a completely shaved head- when I hadn’t liked the results. My Manson family post Charlie’s conviction coif was then jazzed with haphazardly applied random black spots- the concept being leopard print, the reality being sloppy, haphazardly applied random black spots.

There was a Rorschach test on my head.

“Shut up!” I said, like the brat kid I was. Though I was acquiescing to my mother’s demands I was still resentful about them and made sure my family knew it.

As things stood, all I had to wear over my impending 28 day stay was the effluvium rich clothing on my back- A Die, Die, Die my Darling Misfits t-shirt and pair of cut off black thermal shorts with one other every third day rotator t- shirt in my bag. The rehab I was going to was in close proximity to Rhode Island and a popular beach area. My mom, thinking ahead to cover any reasons I might later concoct to justify going AWOL, had given my uncle a shopping bag containing new shorts and shirts, shoes and a beach towel. Digging deeper into the bag, I could feel something made of stretchy, clingy material. Considering the towel, I had a feeling as to what it was. I pulled it out.

A fucking bikini.

Blue, with black polka dots.

“Goes with your hair,” my uncle said, raising his eyebrows as he spoke.

© Fiona Helmsley

The Nature of A Parasite

I knew it was going to be him as soon as I met him, as soon as I learned where he was from. I’m not really sure why I made him wait. I guess because it seemed like the lady- like thing to do.

It was the night before he and his family would be leaving to go back to New York. He had talked of bringing me up to the cottage, but that proved an impossibility when his parents were still up and entertaining at 2 am. They’d thrown a good- bye party for themselves and all of the other residents who vacationed down in The Cove. Instead, I met him by the big oak tree and he led me down an overgrown path towards the tall grass that separated his family’s property from the marshland. I could hear his parents and their guests laughing inside the cottage, someone was warbling a tune about the Navy. I wondered what it was like to be so intoxicated that you thought your own voice worthy of sharing with the rest of the room.

“Here,” he said, stopping right before we hit the marsh and the ground turned into soggy quicksand. The air smelled heavy with salt. He looked around for a clearing among the dense patches of reeds. “Lie down,” he said, finding one about the size of a standard water closet.

“Have you ever done this before?” he asked. “You’re not going to try to stop me once I start, are you?”

Someone laughed inside the cottage, then a woman said in a loud, flirtatious tone, “Bellevue, Frank! Bellevue!”

“Take your clothes off,” he said.

I began to unbutton my blouse. He watched me for a moment, then removed his shirt. He began to fumble with the braided belt on his pants.

“Umm,” he said. There was the sound of clapping flesh as he got on top of me. He pushed my skirt up around my thighs. His hands moved to my hips, then to my backside, searching for a zipper. Finally he found it and dragged it down.

“Take it off,” he said. He rolled off of me, and I slid the skirt down my legs and off at my sandals.

“Tell me how you want it,” he said, taking my hand and mashing it atop the hard spot in the front of his pants. “Squeeze it,” he said, scrunching my hand up with his own. He pushed my head down into the earth and stuck his tongue into my ear. His head dropped lower to my neck and he rubbed his face into my cleavage, then undid the clasp of my bra. He groped my breasts like he was a god, and could change their shape.

“Umm,” he moaned, “Umm,”

His movements became frantic. His hands slid down the sides of my stomach and looped inside the sides of my underwear. He slipped his hands underneath and slid the fabric down my legs.

“Ah!” he said, bolting upright. He held his arm in front of his face and flicked something off and into the reeds. “One of god’s creations, looking to turn me into a blood meal. I forgot my father took the dogs out here once and they came back covered in ticks. A doctor had to come in from town and give them a special bath.”

He reoriented himself to my splayed form in front of him.

“Did I ask? I don’t remember. Have you done this before, or must I break a nymph in?” He moved one of his hands between my legs and stuck a finger inside me. “You like that? How about this?” I felt a second, then a third. “Yes, you like it. You’ve wanted it all summer.”

He fumbled with the button of his pants and pulled down his zipper, pushing his pants down past to his knees.

“Take it out,” he said.

Someone turned on the porch lights on the back of the cottage and the glow offered a reaching illumination.

I reached up into the slit of his boxer shorts. His penis was hard and stiff, like a harpoon. The skin felt like the rubber of a bicycle tire. Fluid leaked from the tip.

“Line it up,” he said. “But just align it. I'll do the rest."

I stared at him blankly.

“No,” I said.

“What do you mean, no?”

“You figure it out,” I answered.

“What does that mean, you figure it out? You locals are all out of your gourds. You lure me out here with your yokel innuendos, let me stick three and a half good fingers inside of you, then say no?”

“I never said no,” I answered. “I just said no to that.”

“You know what? I like you quiet. Keep your mouth shut or I’ll roll you in the marsh.”

He yanked down his boxer shorts, took his penis into his hand and barreled it inside of me.

“Uh…” he said, letting out a low groan. “You feel so good,” he buried his face into my neck. “Wrap your legs around me.” He pinched the flesh of my thigh hard.

“What the hell...” Something crumbled off of my leg and into his hand.

He stood up and in the illumination from the porch light I could see them, little dots, like chocolate chips, on his legs, where the skin had been exposed, on the sides of his arms, where he’d supported his weight.

He sprang to his feet and began jumping foot to foot like a frenzied Indian doing a rain dance.

“You know...I’ve never been to New York…” I said, trying to retain my repose. “I’ve always wanted to go… I was thinking, perhaps I could come and visit you over Christmas?”

“What are you talking about?” he said, stretching himself into unnatural positions. “At a time like this? You are covered in blood- sucking parasites and you haven’t even moved!” He struggled to hug himself, to reach his arms around his back.

“I live here. I suppose I am used to them. Do you not have ticks in New York?”

“We have roaches," he growled.

“You said I felt so good… I could feel even better in New York. You could break a nymph in. I know I’m supposed to be in New York City. It’s something I’ve felt my whole life…”

“Did you really think you could use your feminine wiles to finagle an invitation to my parent’s apartment?”

“No.. it’s just that my parents would never let me go on my own, but if I knew someone there, if I had an invitation…”

He removed his pants from around his ankles and after shaking them furiously, began to put them back on.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “If I did something for you, why not do something for me in return?”

He looked at me blankly.

"Because my dear, I am a parasite. I gorge, but never give. Take, but never trade. To do differently would be antithetical to my nature."

© Fiona Helmsley

Depth

The things I want to do to this boy. The things I want him to do to me.

At first, I expected him to be sort of shy or passive, blame for that placed squarely on the shoulders of pop culture concepts like Mrs. Robinson and cougars. I assumed because of the gap in our ages (I’m older by seven years) he would want me to lead the show or dominate it with an accumulated sexual knowledge greater than his own.

Perhaps those extra circles around the block would even be my appeal. I played this scenario out in my head and was ready to eventually become resentful and bored because of it. Because sometimes I like to be shown. And a good majority of the time, I want to be dominated.

Then he flipped the script.

He comes threw my storm door like a home invasion fantasy.

Every time, after he leaves, I say to myself, next time, there will be much less talking and much more invading.

But there is always talking, he’s too interesting to not acknowledge in that way and time always seems to pass between visits, events transpire, and we need to refamiliarize.

I watch him as he talks, and most of the time, I’m thinking, I want to kiss you. The want is so strong I have to sit on my hands, play with my hair, fiddle for my chap stick.

Those lips of yours that are moving, telling me things, smart things, funny things, things about you- I want them silent and on mine. Yes, I’m listening, but I want to get into your lap and bite your lips. Your stories are amusing, but we don’t have that much time (he’s going through a bad break-up with a live-in girlfriend and they share an automobile, so there are always time constraints) and more than anything, I want to have those lips and you on top of me.

The swirling, just vaguely contained desire I feel makes me insecure as I’m going against my nature. I’m being phony. This dogmatic, self- oppression- he is man, not meat!- makes me act like I did as an inexperienced teenager, before losing my virginity in the dirt pile in the backyard, before sex work, all that- nervous and shy. I do like that I can control myself, it says to me that I’m not completely damaged. But I do not like the time wasted as a result.

And how is it respectful to sit on your hands when the other person wants it too?

But I tell myself I have to wait; let him talk, otherwise it would be bad form. It’s so ridiculous waiting like a hungry animal for the appropriate moment to arrive and when it does, knowing I will wish I had acted sooner so I could have had more of it.

His body is incredible. In the dark, all I see and feel is taunt muscle. His thighs are like blocks of rock.

Sometimes, when the moment comes and I hop into his lap, he’ll wrap his arms around me and lean forward, away from the couch, his arms and legs holding the weight of me there on his thighs.

When this happens, I think that sometime I hope we have an opportunity for him to fuck me like this- holding me there on his cock, leaning me backward, the only safety net preventing me from falling to the floor his arms and his cock.

I have to hope for this opportunity because I don’t get to see him that much and though he always gets me off, I’m never satisfied. I want more, more, more, more of his taunt body and long hair that I like to pull like fine ropes to bring him closer or deeper or hold him there.

His sex has depth. When I pull his hair I’m just helping to guide a course he’s already set. It’s what he seems to be going for with his body, all his sexual appendages- cock, finger, mouth- the bottom, the back, the furthest point.

It’s the motif of our sexual congress. It’s my motive for all the torturous waiting.

Depth.

What I’d really like is one night or two or however many it takes for me to get sick of him, not sick of him forever-just sick of him for a little while.

One night to have my gluttonous fill- to check off my to do to you list and to not feel as he’s going out the door that I’ve wasted precious time pandering to a misplaced idea of emotional depth when the physical kind feels so nice.

© Fiona Helmsley