The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Palin camp may get SNL time to respond to Fey sketches. Wahlberg camp still mum on their demands. Plus: Dexter, Brothers and Sisters and Gwen Ifill reacts to Queen Latifah.
The cross-country drive. I've always loved it.
The auras, for instance. The familiar sharpness, the history-paved-over aura of the East Coast that peters out little by little through the purplish-brown leafless November hills of western Pennsylvania, its edges still lingering like frayed gauze into Ohio where the Midwest begins its soporific expanse. After Ohio it's all farms and small convenience stores, sagging strip malls, John Cougar Mellencamp on the radio. The small cities are like chance conglomerations, people and buildings swept together at low points as if by draining water. There's a beauty to riding through southern Indiana's oceans of brown cornfields awaiting spring planting, stately run-down farmhouses and box trailers and mobile homes floating like white barges and dinghies on the placid land, listening to "Ain't That America?" and smoking and bobbing your head, singing along with the chorus.
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In Indiana, we stopped at a big mall to shop for sneakers. It was five-thirty and people were streaming in from the stacked parking lots, having all just gotten off work, determined to dump their paychecks back into the economy before they even received them. The structure sat surrounded by flat asphalt and parking ramps, farting steam from its back end where the heating system struggled to keep the shoppers comfortable.
At Sears we found what we were looking for, the mainstay of Dead-tour footwear: Converse Chuck Taylor high-tops at fourteen dollars a pair. They were comfortable, cheap, and, being made only of canvas and rubber, relatively karma-free. Also, there was the brand name. Converse: opposite, contrary. If Nikes were about winning, Converse were about opposing, or, more beautifully, transposing certain elements of a thing to turn it into its own opposite conversion. The word contained both rebellion and alchemy. Randy bought blue, and I bought black. Then we strolled through the mall's wide, vaulted walkways, under skylights, past fountains and lush trees and the food court where we ate warmed-over bean tacos and drank Cokes.
"Observing rounded buttocks. Extreme crotch activity. I repeat: extreme crotch activity. Loss of control imminent."
Small children everywhere tried to yank their parents around, pulling their arms and straining in the direction of arcades and toy stores, but the parents would not yield. I didn't see a single parent giving in, except to buy their children soft-serve ice cream at the mouth of the food court to shut them up. Otherwise, they stayed their own courses. The first Santa of the year sat gloomily in an atrium, but his only customers were a few slouching junior high kids who would probably tell him they wanted kegs of beer or hookers or submachine guns. Adults walked dazed through the place, as through a palace filled with treasure. Their heads swung wildly from side to side afraid they might miss what they were looking for, which was not a specified item but some vague dreamed-of thing that would complete some circuit of happiness in them. In a store filled with beautiful useless gadgets, we bought a set of walkie-talkies guaranteed to have a range of one mile. They made us happy. We walked separately around the mall, informing each other of our actions in cop-speak:
"I'm standing in front of the Gap, over."
"Anything happening there?"
"Observing a female individual who is of the extremely attractive type, and there is activity in my crotch. Over."
"Don't let her out of your sight until I get there. I'm on my way."
"Subject is bending over to look through a stack of shirts. Observing rounded buttocks. Extreme crotch activity. I repeat: extreme crotch activity. Loss of control imminent."
We took Route 70, which would carry us all the way to southern Utah and become fifteen down through Vegas into L.A. for the Long Beach shows. We crossed Illinois, Missouri, Kansas. In Kansas the Great Plains become endless, taking up the entire state, and when you enter Colorado it seems wrong that there's nothing to mark the border but a sign, no change in the landscape, just more flat brown. Coming up on Denver, the Rockies rear up stunningly, like a miracle out of the low foothills, telling you nothing is endless; an end is always a beginning.
I preferred driving through the long nights, when we had the planet to ourselves. Nighttime trucks were ghostly behemoths, huge unmanned beasts of burden, and cars were dimly glowing worlds just for their inhabitants. The names of places meant more at night, shining on their signs in the headlights: Bethune, Golden, Arriba, Silver Plume, Rifle, Parachute. I remembered them, tried to understand the cryptic sentences they formed. And of course the white lines, bordered at the periphery of the headlights by dead grass, encroaching sand, earth, snow, dynamited rock faces, culverts, scrub brush, forest: the edges of things, hints of hidden vistas, darkened places. While Randy slept I smoked and guzzled twenty-ounce coffees and put on the headphones with Fela or Lou Reed or Coleman Hawkins, or I listened to the rushing air and the engine, or crazy preachers and cheesy DJs on the radio. Delirium sometimes brought strange fears and visions in the predawn hours, cars coming the other way were suddenly on the wrong side of the road, the white line at the shoulder seemed to be leading me into a tree or signpost, indistinct lights flicked across the sky like UFOs. I felt the demons and angels that inhabited truck stops and side roads and overpasses and places where people had died, felt them as ominous propulsions causing me to jam the gas pedal to the floor, or as auras of protection and well-being that made me slow down and bask in them before they were left behind. When morning finally caught up with us — reaching brightly out across the starry sky or materializing slowly from inside white clouds — it always felt like the end of a lifetime, and for a few moments as the day broke, I looked back on the night with a nostalgia I imagined was like that of an old man for his youth.
Were they hunters? Fugitives? Drifters? Maybe just kids partying. I settled on fugitives.
Near dawn the third night we slashed through a desert rainstorm that didn't wake Randy. The old wipers struggled vainly to throw the deluge aside, and I slowed to forty, unable to see much. Then suddenly we were out of it into green starlight. To the southeast, stark black shapes of flattop mountains — ominous as the bodies of sleeping dinosaurs — were crowned by dimly glowing haze, backlit by the very first infiltration of the sun, and all else was still night. An orange point of light pulsed near the top of the closest mountain. After staring at it for a minute, it came to me that it was a campfire. I wondered about the men sitting around it. Were they hunters? Fugitives? Drifters? Maybe just kids partying. I settled on fugitives. Prison escapees roasting a prairie dog killed with a rock. There were bad men, but they had made a daring escape and I was rooting for them. I lost sight of the fire as the sun rose behind the mountain, sharpening its silhouette for a few minutes and turning the eastern sky into a gold-platinum alloy.
We stopped at a roadside store called Pay 'n Take in southeastern Nevada to buy snacks and cigarettes. Some high school kids hanging out by the slots and video game machines snickered at our hair. There were a couple of low whistles, but when we looked over they shut up. After we bought our stuff, Randy dropped a quarter in one of the slot machines and immediately won twenty-five dollars. The store owner, a gaunt man of about fifty with a smoker's voice, came over as we were sweeping the coins out of the trough.
"You boys twenty-one?"
"Yeah," said Randy.
I was afraid he might take the money back.
"Got ID?" he asked.
"No, we lost it," Randy said.
The man nodded his head and seemed to think this over. "Take what you've got there and get on out," he said. His tone was not quite unfriendly.
The high school kids followed us into the lot and one of them hissed at us. I wasn't sure what this meant, and I guess Randy wasn't either, so we ignored it.
"Hey you guys," the kid said.
We were at the car and we turned toward them. The lead kid approached us furtively and the other two hung back a few yards.
"You guys got any weed?" the kid asked. He had buzz-cut brown hair and was a little fat, but he carried it with an air of confidence. He was next to Randy, and I was on the far side of the car by the passenger door.
"No," Randy said. "Sorry."
I could see the cop car in the side mirror. It came up onto our tail and rode us.
"Come on," the kid said. "I know you guys got some. We got money if you could sell us maybe just a joint."
"Sorry," I said. We're dry as a bone. I wish we did have some." I thought of the bag of great indica bud in my knapsack, pot like these kids had never dreamed of, and wondered how they might handle it.
The kids shrugged and turned away, walking back toward the store. "Hold on," I said. "Come here."
I opened the car door and sat down on the seat. I unzipped the front pocket of my pack, worked the baggie open without pulling it out, and extracted a small heart-shaped green bud. The kid was standing next to me. "Here, take that."
"How much?"
"Don't worry about it. Enjoy."
His squinting kid-toughness evaporated for a second and his eyes widened. "Wow. Thanks dude."
"De nada."
Back on the highway, Randy shook his head. "That was about the stupidest thing I've ever seen."
"Yeah, but think of the fun those kids'll have. That'll ruin them for the schwag Mexican they're probably used to."
"Think of the time you'd do, no, make that we'd do, in some godforsaken Nevada jail for selling to a minor."
"I didn't sell it."
He gave me a look.
"Okay, it was stupid. But maybe that kid will learn something about generosity too, while he's tripping out on that indica and thinking how he got it free."
"Judge," Randy whined, "I was only trying to teach the kid some values. You understand, Judge, don't you?" Then suddenly he wasn't smiling. "Oh fuck." He was looking in the rearview, and I looked back and saw the state trooper. A white Caprice, wide and low across its lane a hundred yards back and closing like death. The black rack of lights on top wasn't flashing, but watched us with dark menace. The whole thing flew vividly through my head: the arrest, the seedy holding cell, the harsh Nevada sentence, the prison time, and of course the anal rape.
"Don't worry man," I said. "I'll take responsibility for everything."
Randy was silent, chewing on the inside of his cheek. I faced forward, and I could see the cop car in the side mirror. It came up onto our tail and rode us. I watched the corner of the roof rack, waiting for them to light us up. Our speedometer pointed exactly at the speed limit, and I suddenly felt that was suspicious and wished Randy would speed up just a hair, to show them we had nothing to hide. I was about to tell him to do that when the cruiser washed over into the other lane and slid smoothly past us, accelerating and quickly becoming a small white bead on the road ahead.
We both breathed for a minute, then Randy said, "No more stupid fucking around. Okay?"
Jane was there. Just her and the four Ketamine tripsters. She was sitting in a chair, smoking a cigarette. A small black puppy was in her lap.
Even on the way into the L.A. basin, as the low hillsides began to sprout condos like patches of white lichen, I felt good things in store. In California anything was possible.
Another beautiful thing about the tour was that we were always headed home. Out on the road we'd pass other carloads of heads and smirk and flash peace signs at each other or rap at gas stations. The legendary travelers on the American frontier pioneers, mountain men, rail-riders, Jack Kerouac had all followed their own evanescent ideas of a destination, and some had found them or built them, but we were true nomads: our home traveled with us. There was no need for us to be the lonely, peregrine souls our predecessors had been. If we had an elusive goal, a Shangri-la we pursued, it was one of the mind, maybe of the soul those final frontiers but we tried not to take it too seriously. At the end of every long drive there would be a stadium, a parking lot where Grateful Dead Land was beginning to sprout up; a van here, a school bus there, longhaired kids wandering the sidewalks and motel lobbies, all the harbingers of heavy, primordial rock ‘n roll gathering in the air.
Randy and I got a room in a little twin-level motel near the Long Beach Arena, and we ended up right next door to the hard-partying Jersey crew. Frankie had come up with a vial of Ketamine. At the time I hadn't heard of it. The name Special K hadn't been invented yet. Frankie got it off a veterinarian in Berkeley. He and Evans and Earl and Vince spent most of their time holed up in their room whacked out on the stuff. Frankie claimed he left his body and traveled to Pluto. The first night they tried to get me to take some, but I looked at the vial and saw the warning label, which read, For use in cats and subhuman primates only, and I declined.
The second night, after the show, Randy transferred his stuff into a black '71 BMW 2002 he had just bought with all his T-shirt money. Lauren, his old girlfriend, had come down from Seattle, and they were going to head back north together the next morning. I got the urge to strike out alone and decided I'd head up the coast that night, find a secluded beach to sleep on, maybe strum a few tunes under the stars. I went next door to see if Earl could sell me some buds, and Jane was there. Just her and the four Ketamine tripsters. She was sitting in a straight chair near the flimsy desk and holding the remote, smoking a cigarette. A small black puppy was in her lap.
As we headed north on the 405 through all of L.A., I felt the same way about the lights winking conspiratorially at me from the buildings and hillsides.
"It's good to see you." I walked over and gave her a hug.
It took me a while to get through to Earl about what I wanted. He kept trying to translate what I was saying into some language of groans he was inventing. Once he understood, he didn't want to be bothered with weighing it, so he let me eye out an eighth-ounce for myself from his big bag. I was a little generous.
"Well," I said. "I'm heading up the coast tonight. Find a beach and sleep under the stars. Guess I'll see you guys at the Kaiser shows."
"You want company?" Jane asked. She smiled. Her round cheeks were a deadly complement to her tall thin frame.
"Sure." Then I said, "Where's Don?"
"Don won't be joining us," she said.
She had very little with her. All of it fit in one black cotton Mexican bag that had a shoulder strap running down from its drawstring mouth to its base. She slung it over her shoulder and tucked the tiny sleeping puppy under her arm, waved to the guys in the room, and we walked straight out into the parking lot. Getting into the car with her, winding slowly out to the freeway, I felt a childish nervousness. Not teenage jitters that would have been only natural but something from farther back, nervousness steeped in wonder, fear combined with the feeling that nothing could possibly go wrong. It made me remember when I was nine, driving down a Swiss mountain with my family at night. We had been skiing and needed to get to a hotel near the airport for a morning flight. There was snow coming down, and my parents had disagreed about whether we should leave. My father prevailed, as usual, and we piled into the rented car. My mother buckled herself in and every so often muttered things under her breath like, "Insanity," or "Sheer madness." Around the turns I could hear her sharp intakes of breath as the car drifted in its lane. I shared her fear, but my father's face was so slow and serene as it took in the road ahead, his movements so sure and solid as he rotated the wheel and worked the pedals, that I couldn't help being infused with his confidence as well, and fear and confidence formed a delicious soup in my chest. It was the first time I experienced something like being high. The feeling turned to pure excitement, charged that night with wonder, and every glowing snowflake and quiet shush of tires moving sideways on snow exploded minutely into my memory. As we headed north on the 405 through all of LA, I felt the same way about the lights winking conspiratorially at me from the buildings and hillsides, and I felt kinship with the people inside those apartments and houses, families with little boys sleeping in back bedrooms while the parents watched the late show and drank gin or beer, drunks fighting sleep to postpone the terrible morning, coke-addled struggling actors chewing each other's ears off about all the work they'd almost gotten, maybe even a few real movie stars on benders in hotels; so many unknowable lives. They were still awake with us, had stayed up late so their lights would be on when Jane and I passed.
The bleary-eyed Mexican clerk must have taken us for a couple, and I hoped he was right.
It was a different world when we hooked back up with the Pacific Coast Highway. We cranked the windows all the way down and let the sea air whip through the car. The beach houses of Malibu slid by, most of them long and low, giving a slow motion feel to the drive. The smell of the sea, the palms and small beaches and waves like easy breaths, made the garish city behind us seem like overkill. Jane kicked off her black canvas slip-ons and propped one long foot on the dashboard while she smoked. She was so tall that this brought her knee very close to her face, her wide white Indian-print skirt becoming a tent.
Don had dumped her, she told me. He flew into an irrational rage during an argument, threw three hundred dollars at her and told her to go get her own room, and while she was at it she could look for another ride up to the Bay. She had taken the money, but had walked down to the smaller motel and hooked up with the Jersey crew instead of spending it on a room. "He can go fuck himself," she said. "That's it."
I didn't answer this, but nodded my head. I didn't think it would be wise to agree that he could fuck himself, but I wanted her to know I sympathized. She was staring out the window. I wondered about my friendship with Don. It was hard to know how far into the wrong I was, and whether he and I would get beyond this. The morality of the situation was hazy. It was possible that what was happening was only natural, and nothing would come of it, but I had to admit that wasn't the likeliest possibility. I wanted to ask Jane how she thought Don would take it, but bringing him up seemed a bad move; also, it would be assuming that something was actually happening between us, which hadn't been established.
We stopped at a convenience mart for some water and puppy food. Wandering around in the little store together was exhilarating Jane called questions to me across the aisles as if we were used to shopping together: "How about some peanuts?" "Sure, sounds good." The bleary-eyed Mexican clerk must have taken us for a couple, and I hoped he was right.
We drove out past Ventura along the coast and found a state beach that had a small parking lot. I pulled my sleeping bag from the trunk and stuffed the pillowcase with sweaters. Wooden steps led down to the beach, and we walked north about two hundred yards, carrying our shoes, and tucked ourselves up near some scrub and low sandy pines. The puppy was awake now. It strained against the long piece of clothesline Jane had fashioned as a leash and ran yipping around us, biting at our ankles. We laid out the bag and sat down on it. It was a calm low tide, and the water was some distance away, its whispers blowing airily across the sand and over us. I had thought we might smoke a joint, but the feel of the place needed no enhancement. The puppy was getting hysterical, pulling on any loose piece of cloth and shaking its head viciously. Jane gave it the toe of her shoe to latch onto and it began a tug-of-war with her, its growl a high-pitched parody of fierceness. We shared a cigarette and waited for him to calm down, but he didn't.
I kissed her cheek and ventured another farther in, catching the hiplike swell at the base of her nose.
"He's got some pit bull in him, I think," Jane said. She decided to walk him and try to tire him out. She took him down to the water and he barked at the small waves, attacking them. I could hear her laughing softly and talking to the puppy, but I couldn't hear what she was saying. She ran northward along the beach, and the dog followed. Her upper body became invisible against the ocean as she receded, but the white cloth of her skirt still floated and shape-shifted spectrally, and the pale flashes underneath were the soles of her feet. She kept going until she disappeared completely. I stared hard into the night, waiting for some sign of her to reappear, and my chest clenched just slightly, the way it had eight years earlier by the Gulf of Oman, watching my father swim.
She didn't come back for a long time, and I climbed into the sleeping bag and lay on my back awake, trying to make my mind blank. A high black pine branch swayed overhead against the almost-black sky, hypnotizing me.
"You up?" she whispered when she got back.
"Yeah."
"He's still pretty hyper, but he sure tired me out."
She tied the leash to her wrist and crawled in with me. The dog began chewing on my hair and pulling it, his lungs sounding like a tiny steam engine running full-tilt.
"This isn't going to work," I said. "Here . . . " I untied the leash from her wrist and stood and walked the puppy to a nearby tree, tying him so the cord would bring him up just short of us. I gave him my sweatshirt to bed down on. He barked for a few minutes, but then quieted down. Jane was breathing heavily, either from strain or emotion, and I wrapped her in my arms. I kissed her cheek (it was firm and round, better even than I had imagined it), and ventured another farther in, catching the hiplike swell at the base of her nose. She kissed me once, on the side of the mouth, and we fell asleep that way.
"AAAAHHH!" I woke to my own voice screaming. Pain in the side of my hand. I put my hand there and grazed the tail end of the puppy retreating from its guerilla attack. It had slipped its leash and scampered over and bitten right through my ear.
"What is it?" Jane lifted her head from the makeshift pillow and struggled to open her eyes. It was bright out, but we were still in the shadow of the trees, which stretched far out onto the beach before the new sun.
Her tall thin body was round in all the right places, her breasts a little bigger than I had thought.
"Look at this." I showed her the blood on my fingers. "That thing just mauled me."
"Wow, bad dog." It was almost as if she were talking to me.
"Jesus, no kidding."
She looked at my ear. "He got right through there. I know what you need."
"What's that?"
"A swim, to clean it off." She was up and shucking her skirt and T-shirt before this could even register. She was wearing panties and no bra. Her tall thin body was round in all the right places, her breasts a little bigger than I had thought. "Come on," she said, skipping toward the water, the puppy leaping along behind in a frenzy of glee, "get moving, slowpoke."
I stripped to my boxers and ran after her. She didn't slow at the light cold surf, but bounded through it and dove in, driven either by fortitude or her own nakedness. I did the same, driven by pride. We swam for a few minutes while the puppy barked shrilly from shore and attacked the waves. We spoke in breathless generalities: "Whooh! This is cold!" "Yeah. Feels great!" We swam close to each other, me following her, then her following me, but didn't touch. When we waded out I shook the sand from my sweatshirt and gave it to her, and she put it over her wet body. She dried her legs with her own long-sleeved shirt and slipped into her skirt. I shed my boxers, put on my shorts, and paced to let the air dry me. There had never been a finer morning.
Back at the car, Jane took a pint of Vodka from her bag and swabbed my ear with it. "Hey, I've got an idea." She pulled a velvet pouch out and rummaged in it until she came up with a small gold hoop earring. She flicked a lighter underneath to sterilize it, then blew on it to cool it, and put it through the hole in my ear. "It's really quite a clean little hole. It's going to look pretty hip."
"How do I look?" I asked.
"Fabulous," she said, and leaned in and kissed me.
One simple fact subsumed all others: she was the most beautiful girl I had ever been with.
Ten minutes we kissed, there in the front seat of the car. Then we ducked back from each other and smiled, that gauging look after the first kiss. Just having the freedom to stare into her lush eyes, her soft green world, not to have to look away, was powerful. One simple fact subsumed all others: she was the most beautiful girl I had ever been with. Looking at her was deep pleasure. I reached and tucked her wet curly hair behind her ear.
"Where's the puppy?" she asked.
"I don't know."
"Puppy!" she called, getting out of the car.
I got out too and whistled.
"Here puppy!"
We walked around the lot, then back down to the beach. Jane went north and I went south along the water, calling out. Back up to the lot, across the road to the wooded hillside, back down to the beach. No puppy.
After two hours of looking, we started to talk about moving on. Since Jane had only had him for a couple of days she was willing to consider this.
"I'm sure he'll be fine," I said. "He probably just took off down the beach and kept going. Somebody will find him and take care of him."
"You're probably right."
We made another pass over the area. I shook the bushes around where we had camped, whistling, fearing when I bent down that I'd see him crouched in among some half-buried Pabst cans, wagging his vicious little tail. But he didn't turn up. Back by the car, Jane stood looking toward the beach.
"Poor little guy. He didn't even have a name yet."
"Maybe somebody else will name him."
She tilted her head back to inhale the breeze off the sea, accentuating the smooth turn at the base of her jawbone, usually hidden by the padding of her rounded cheeks. I thought she might cry, but she smiled instead. "I'll name him right now." She closed her eyes and spread her arms. Her left hand came very close to my face and I tried to take it in mine, but she pulled it back and took a step away from me, her eyes still closed. "The puppy's name is . . . " she made small circles with her hands, " . . . Sign."
"That's the name? Sign?"
"Don't you like it?"
"Sure, I like it. Better than Fido." Right then I became afraid that whatever I thought was happening between us wouldn't happen.
I had my car door open, and she opened the passenger side.
"Heard you last night. Fun. Heard your girl." He laughed in the same way. "Wooh! Fun. Bet you're feelin' good." He was drunk.
We had three days before the Kaiser shows in Oakland, and we traveled slowly up the coast. We got a motel room near Morro Bay, too far from the beach to see the ocean but close enough to feel it, and made love for the first time. We stayed up most of the night, unable to get enough of each other. The next morning, I woke up before Jane and went out on the room's tiny concrete terrace for a cigarette, and to do some thinking. I slid the glass door shut behind me. I was in my boxers and one of Randy's black skeleton T-shirts, and I sat in the metal chair with the dirty white rubber webbing across the seat and backrest. The terrace faced east, and below it was a vacant sandy lot grown over with sawgrass, baby palms, rusted iron barrels, and piles of colorful garbage.
"Mornin'."
I looked to my right and saw an old man on the next terrace, only about ten feet away, sitting in his chair and smoking. His skin was brown and sun-ravaged, slipping off his puffy face and pointy shoulders in pastry-thin droops. All he wore was a pair of new jeans, and his tan gut hung out over his beltline as if he'd swallowed a watermelon, accentuated by the skinny arm resting across it.
"Morning," I said.
"Looks like a fine one."
"Yeah." I took a drag and nodded. "It does indeed."
"Feelin' good, are you?"
"Yeah, I'm feeling just fine. How about yourself?"
He uttered a strange little laugh. "Well . . . " He made a small sweeping gesture with his cigarette that, along with the laugh, somehow explained his entire condition. I nodded and looked down at the vacant lot below.
"I bet you're feelin' good."
I nodded but didn't answer.
"Heard you last night. Fun. Heard your girl." He laughed in the same way. "Wooh! Fun. Bet you're feelin' good." He was drunk.
I nodded and lifted the corner of my mouth to show him I understood, all in good fun, but didn't look at him and hoped he would take the hint. I was thinking about how there was something physical about Jane that tugged at me whenever I looked at her, a gentle pull on some fishing line threaded through my stomach, how her toes and the tendons behind her knees and her collarbone drew my hands to them. But our conversations held no electricity. When we spoke we both projected a false warmth to mask blank distance. We smiled a lot. I told myself I was too young to worry about good conversation; I told myself just to go with it.
"I'd sure be feelin' good. Old man like me could use some of that. Yes, yes. She suck it for you?"
"Take it easy," I said, getting up and opening the door into the room.
"C'mon. Little girl suck it for you?"
"Bye bye." I shut the door behind me.
Jane woke as I was putting my jeans on. She rolled and breathed and told me to come over there. I went to the bed and sat next to her and we kissed and she said, "Get those clothes off and get back here."
"I kind of want to get going."
"We'll get going later. Come on." She was pulling at me.
"Let's do it later," I said. "In the car maybe."
"Then too." She kissed me and gave me her whole tongue and that was it: I started scrabbling at my boxers. But as much as I wanted to I couldn't lose myself in it. Whenever she got close she started moaning and I backed off my rhythm. "Come on!" she said, so finally I clamped a hand over her mouth and went ahead, and we came at once and she and I both screamed.
I slid off her. "Oh, shit," I said, shaking my head, smiling.
"What?"
I laughed. "Nothing. That was great." The old man must have thought I was putting on a show just for him. I didn't care. n°
Excerpted from Tiger in a Trance, which will be published on August 19 by Doubleday. To order this book, click here.
Max Ludington's fiction has appeared in Tin House and Meridian. He received his MFA from Columbia University and now lives in New York. Tiger in a Trance is his first novel.
