Pee On Water

DOODLE FACE

Maybe in high school it seemed cool to get your girlfriend pregnant, raise up babies while you were still babies, lean your tiny new person against a peavey amp while you practiced guitar. By college, we knew it was stupid. We stopped picking out names like “Hella” and “Marmaduke.” We realized being young was the only thing we had, so it would be crazy to go and create something younger.

I was hanging with the Daz and we’d lifted a little at the gas station store, just for fun. I did it just to make him laugh. I pocketed a “sexual enhancer,” which was a spray that made your dick feel less so you could fuck more. Once we got on the street, I showed him and he laughed and dared me to spray it on my hand, so I sprayed it on his hand. He sprayed it on my face, then his face. We punched each other as hard as we could, which wasn’t that hard, but the shit worked, we couldn’t feel anything but numb.

Walking across the highway, the cars were inches from our shorts. This kind of glory walk always made me feel like I had just died but nothing had actually happened, that the rules, if there were any, were not going to get me. This feeling was really misleading. All that while, somewhere deep inside a pussy, a sexy place was turning to a health-class place. My sperm had grown some doodly human face. Her egg, smaller than eyes could see, had stretched and puffed and was going to bulge into a whole wrinkly person. When I got my sexy ass into bed, time no longer clicked off. All during the night, the doodly human grew.

The Daz was the only one being real about it. “It’s about time someone had Junior,” Theo drawled and the jokes came too easy. Everyone wanted to babysit it. Muffy had already bought it baby adidas sneakers. A lot of people said it sucked, but I could see they were still excited. They remembered the high school dream-nightmare and would now live it out through doodle face.

Twenty-three is a sweet-ass age. College is over and yeah that feels a little sandy and low, but there are still huge mouthfuls of time before getting old, before getting famous. Life is unfucked by consequence. You always know it can happen, waking up every morning to a pointy fact, the dread slacking your muscles like strings. I thought mine would be murder by mistake. Like I’d be driving with Daz in the middle of nowhere, some kid roller skating up ahead, I look over to skip the spoken word on the Outkast CD, and hit the kid dead. What if the next morning and every one after, the kid wakes me by putting pennies on my eyes. Like the kid is in pale colors. Ghosts is what I mean.

There is a way out of everything. In monopoly jail, you can always roll for doubles; you don’t always have to pay. I sat with her twice, her name on the written-out list. I poked her with the pencils. I whispered jokes I made up on the spot. I tried to give her head in the bathroom. Anything to relax psycho princess, which is what Daz called her to her face. Psycho princess would not be relaxed. The head made her cry. The jokes made her smirk. When her name was blandly called, she got up ran back down the stairs, breathing out in the street again. Standing in the parking lot. The first time she did it she laughed and I laughed too, but it was cause I had nothing else to do and cause it felt like a huge mass of steel and other metals had fallen in my stomach and there was no human way possible to ever lift it out again. The second time I slapped her across the face.

Daz had been coaching me through it all, preaching to me Buddhist things to relax me, buying me beers, talking me up. His big plan was to take me to this mountain up north where his guru was and show me real live monks. We were going to wake up and chant with everyone and then meditate, meditate while walking, then through eating, through dishwashing, and so on. I don’t know how to meditate, but he said it didn’t matter. Then he met this girl and got crazy about her. He says having sex with her is like a shroom trip without the shrooms. He says he’s got call waiting.

I got so down last week I didn’t just want doodle head dead, but Gina dead and me too, and both our sets of parents dead so they wouldn’t have to deal, and then I started rooting for the earth microwaving itself like popcorn, the peace in the middle east war spilling into the Africa wars, sweeping the whole globe in a killing party, murdering off everyone so I wouldn’t miss out on anything. Then I listened to Paul Simon a little and that calmed me down a little and I could look at everything from further back. I thought how many sexy places there were for my dick to slip in. All the stoops that were waiting to be smoked on, the movies being made to be criticized, and all the countries that had never caught a glimpse of me and the Daz, catching a glimpse of us and smiling, letting us into their new wet places, rolling us foreign magic cigarettes.

Right before all this shit, I was thinking about breaking it up. It had reached that soggy girlfriend point where it wasn’t all that exciting and my own life was starting to grandly separate itself out like milk. Or like cream. The only kind that got me crazy was sex in her butt and part of that was how I was conflicted about it, and another part was she didn’t want to. I had both of us convinced it was the only way that felt good for me anymore, that I had done it the other way a million times over and now I had graduated to the next level, something harder, weirder. I got addicted to the horrified feeling it gave me while I did it. What the fuck are you doing? One of my voices would ask another. I don’t fucking know, was the response, shown in my wild face and her body jerking forward.

This whole time I’ve been on the toilet in Penn Station. My shit was all jumpy and I felt like I might puke. Now I don’t want to leave. There is no one at my parents’ house where I’m going and Daz hasn’t texted me back. I haven’t talked to my parents’ since this happened. I said happy Father’s Day in an email. There is a guy in the stall next to me that’s been here just as long. Maybe we could both just stay here.

New York is glam and grit. Neon signs, dry lumps of dog shit. I have my head phones on, but I’ve almost used up my Stones CD. It’s my 4^th time around and I’m beginning to believe them less. Are they working with me or against me? I duck into Borders and pretend I’m looking for something. 5 minutes left the borders people say. Fuck Borders I say very quiet with the Stones backing me up. I sneak over to literature and read all the Hemingway last lines. Then I’m back on the street again. Glam and grit, neon shit.

Maybe I’m making this too complicated. Doesn’t life start just sleeping, eating and faces? Bobbling around big-headed. I’ve seen babies. They are brilliant in the bathtub, they make games with the sponges. They make you count while they go under, then surface breathless a second later. It gives you a little high. But then it gets tired. It keeps going and going. You go to sleep and they’re alive. You wake up they’re alive. Even later when you die, they’re still alive.

Gina calls and I kill the call with a button. She calls again and I kill that too. My parents’ house has no one home. Fat Gina is what my cell phone calls her, but it’s cause this kid is going to be sitting in pale colors at the foot of my bed. Ghosting me. And Fat Gina won’t disappear so easy either. These will be the bad gods that hang overhead. If only I had left psycho princess on her own, she’d be pouring all her female mania into a conceptual sculpture. Dogs can be babies, cats can be babies. You don’t have to actually have one.

There was a terrible silence in the room. I opened and closed the refrigerator just to make noise. If only the air conditioner would start with its little kick. If the Daz can trip without shrooms, then I can do it without pussy too. I turned on the ceiling fan as a start. I opened all the windows, turned up all the heat. Put on the oldest record I could find. Filled up the bath tub. Jerked off into the toilet. I drank a beer. It felt a little different.

I don’t put on my seatbelt anymore cause I’m hoping I might get hurt. There was a boy in the house and he was sexy as hell, but it didn’t matter this night. This night no one cared. It’s crazy Daz is in NYC and not texting me back. Even if he’s got pussy coming out his mouth and nose and ears. There could be a gay porn called ear, nose, and throat man. Different guys could come in his mouth and ears and nose, and he could be dressed like a doctor. No, like a superhero. The air conditioner kicked on and it felt all of a sudden that things could work out. Long live doodle face. My mom called and I threw my flip phone against the wall. Walked over, picked it up and it was off, but when I turned it back on it seemed fine.

The boy that was sexy as hell was trying to find a way to leave his baby-filled girlfriend without being arrested by the karma police. Ha. Like maybe I’m just in a private funk of catastrophic proportions. Poor little doodle will be born and I’ll give him my parents’ money and then find some foreign-born girl that’s both simple and sophisticated, both, and do it in her ass until I get old.

Hopefully I’ll get old gracefully, give up trying to look cool and act cool and feel young and all that, cause that’s what it’s like when you listen to the Stones 10 times in a row. The songs just happen, the songs lose their minds. Poor little doodle. It’s fun to figure things out at first and go places and play the games, and then friends, yeah, it’s cool, but there are these long moments, single hours where you end up with these people you are supposed to have fun with, except you don’t, you just sit around and get self-conscious. And everyday there is clothing and bathing and dishes and you have to keep saying, “Well this is different this time because,” or “I like doing these simple things cause.” And that’s a problem too. You can convince yourself of anything, convince yourself you like a chick, or don’t like her, that the color of your walls puts you on edge, or that those trees outside make you painfully nostalgic. And you’re like, cool, maybe I’m an outdoorsy sort of guy, maybe that’s why, but then once you’re out in the wild, you miss your cell phone like crazy, you miss dance music, microwave popcorn, stupid ass shit. I know I’m going on forever. But I’m sexy as hell and I’ll fuck you in my parents’ bed if you show up at my door. I’m so sick of myself. If the bath had been warmer, the shroom trip would have worked better, but the water was lukewarm so it didn’t feel anything like drugs. It felt like there was a puddle so big I could fit my whole body in its cold dirty center.

Maybe in high school it seemed like a cool idea to fuck your girlfriend pregnant. You’d just rest your crying little girl up against the peavey amp and riff out a lullaby. You’d be like Kurt Cobain, except alive and well. With no bullet in the brain. With no end to the story. But to bring baby into this world is to start part two of your two-part life.

He had a pimple on his back that he couldn’t reach with either hand. He opened the medicine cabinet and looked for another mirror, so he could do the thing where you look into the mirror with the other mirror. He couldn’t find another mirror. The other day, where was he, he had had two mirrors and that’s when he had seen the pimple. He got out a CD and tried to use that. It was too rainbowy. Fuck the pimple. He wanted to tweeze his eyebrows, but resisted. He did a line of coke cause he found some in his parents’ bathroom. The air conditioner kicked itself off and don’t die he thought, as the sound faded far away.

The beer made his body feel like not moving, and he not moved on his bed. The coke made him feel clear, but then more beer fuzzed him out. The cell phone sat unflipped on his stomach and together he and the phone waited for the nonsense sound of a text message. Sometimes he heard that sound like a ghost in the night, but it wasn’t the text message, just a ghost. He texted to the Daz “save me” but the Daz was out, busy, bouncing basketballs against car windows, tripping on drugs with no drugs.

He found he could make tears in his eyes, and they fell warm on his face just like tears, but they couldn’t be tears cause he hadn’t cried since he was a kid, and now he was some monster almost father, but they felt warm and tear-like they sat on his cheeks feeling sorry for him, each drop a little bit of sorry, each tear a little thing lacking the complexity to be a creature, the power to be alive, but doing more than a drop of water does when spilled from a Poland Spring bottle, not manufactured and handled, but made by his own eyes, a magic way to have his cheeks touched without any person to touch his cheeks.