Self-Reliance
by Andrew Mozina
December 12, 2007
After Ronald Reagan became president, hard times found me in West Allis, Wisconsin. They followed me around, then they got ahead of me, like my shadow. The kicked sun flew into the air every morning but crossed the sky low and to the south, like a wobbly punt that curves out of bounds. A wrecking ball was knocking down six blocks worth of Allis-Chalmers. Twenty-foot-tall dump trucks hauled off the rubble. Some debris went by train. Borden's still made milk and sherbert and ice cream at the plant on Highway 100, and Elsie the Cow's red and yellow face still smiled that sure-I'll-have-some-milk! smile from the side of the building, but I was laid off from Borden's — this time for good, it seemed — and trying to make it delivering pizzas two nights a week at Todd's Pizza Mountain.
Then something happened at a New Year's Eve party. It was at a fancy condo in Bishop's Woods. I barely knew the people. Dwayne knew them. Dwayne was my best friend. We worked in the ice-cream freezers together, lived together, chased women together, and got laid off the past September together. He'd met Stephanie at The Happy Tap last summer after a softball game. She was a softball groupie. "Bring the whole team," she said.
Dwayne insisted we go to two other parties first, so we didn't get to Stephanie's until 2 a.m. They had one of those blue siren lights going in the living room, and Prince's "1999" was shaking the place. The revolving light slipped over lamps and pictures and the couple making out on the couch. I turned to tell Dwayne that the light and sound were like two hands feeling the room, but he'd disappeared. I wandered around — the sun room, the kitchen — running into little groups of people I didn't know.
I caught up with Dwayne in one of the bedrooms. He had Stephanie against the wall and they were kissing like mad. They broke it off — or I should say, Stephanie broke it off — when I came into the room.
"Happy New Year!" she said. She gave me a weird, lewd, drunken smile, but like she knew she was doing it. I smiled back and winked for good measure. I'd talked to her once at The Happy Tap. She was sarcastic, but I liked her. "Happy New Year," she said and kissed me on the mouth, then deeper.
"Do you have a friend?" Dwayne asked her, coming up to us.
Beautiful Dwayne always got the good-looking one, I always got the friend, the "ugly" one. I didn't mind. She was usually nicer. She'd be real nervous and sweat through her perfume, and then you could smell what she was really like.
But there was no friend tonight, so I kept kissing Stephanie with my eyes half-closed. I could hear Dwayne's hands moving across the fabric of her dress, her dress sliding against her slip. I thought I was touching her where I was touching her and where he was touching her. Sometimes we'd meet a pair of women and end up on opposite sides of the living room at the apartment, but we'd never been with the same girl before. Then Dwayne pulled on her and I let her go.
"See ya," Dwayne said to me, his fingers on the spaghetti straps of her dress. But she said, "I want him here."
"Come on, Steph."
"Let him stay — I want to do it this time." She talked in a pouty secret voice, but I could hear everything.
Dwayne said no way.
Stephanie slipped out of his arms and pulled her straps up. "Happy New Year," she said and wobbled for the door.
Old Dwayne cursed and shot her an icy, macho glare — the way he looked at the next batter after someone had just tagged a home run off him — but he was too horny to negotiate. "All right," he said to her, "come on. Let's go."
He pulled her to him, tipped her onto the bed, and lay on top of her. I shut the door and took off my shoes and jeans. I couldn't decide whether the lamp on the nightstand should be off or on. I turned it off, but then it seemed too dark, so I turned it back on. "What the hell is wrong with you?" Dwayne grunted. They had undressed quickly, and Dwayne entered her doggy-style, as if he wanted to keep her between us.
I laughed at myself, finished undressing, and crawled onto the bed. Stephanie's head was near the headboard, her hair hanging down. There was really no space for me to be in front of her, and I wondered if Dwayne had done this on purpose.
I kissed the side of her face through her hair. She turned to me and kissed me sloppily on the mouth and then trailed her lips up my cheek. "69," she whispered in my ear.
I couldn't tell if she was serious or joking, so I lay on my back across the top of the bed, perpendicular to Dwayne and Stephanie, and Stephanie kissed me from above, her hair falling down my cheeks and neck. We did this for a long time — it really got me going. I almost forgot about 69ing until she whispered a reminder. Then while I was twisting my hips over, right up onto the headboard, pivoting on my shoulders, trying to travel headfirst down Stephanie's body so as to sneak up on where the two of them were joined, my dick got surprisingly close to my own mouth. "Hey, that's not for you," she said.
"Sure, I know that."
"I bet he can suck his own dick," she giggled over her shoulder.
"He better not," Dwayne said, puffing a little. The bed was rocking.
"I never have," I said. "I never knew."
"If you suck your dick here, man, I'm going to kill you," Dwayne said. "As soon as I'm done."
The way it turned out, Dwayne and I were facing each other, kneeling at opposite ends of Stephanie. It was strange and exciting — with the power of a famous historical moment on TV. Dwayne closed his eyes or looked at Stephanie's hips the whole time. When she finished me with her hand, I shot clean over her shoulder and got some on Dwayne. It took him forever after that, and when he finally came his face looked like a bee was stinging him in the ass.
I thought Stephanie was maybe too drunk to come. As Dwayne and I were getting dressed, she was still lying face down on the bed, her right hand groping around like she'd lost something. She made me think of the difference between getting laid and getting laid off. I wanted to give her another chance.
I started to slide my jeans down again, but Dwayne grabbed my arm. "That's enough, Loverboy." He buckled his belt, and business was officially closed for the night.
We walked through the sharp, cold air to where Dwayne's car was parked in a lot surrounded by snow and woods. Dwayne wasn't talking.
"Sorry about jizzing on you," I said, "and sticking around, too." "Doesn't matter. I was getting tired of her anyway." He opened the driver side, grabbed the scraper and threw it to me. While the car warmed up, I scratched frost off the windows. Dwayne sat behind the wheel with his hands between his legs, his chin tucked in his collar, his eyes staring at the dash.
We tooled up and down the hills of Elm Grove Road, past The Red Mill where Dwayne and I sometimes took women for fish fry, past Linfield where we went to grade school and where Dwayne was the king of full-court murderball.
"Remember last year?" Dwayne said.
"Not really."
"Now that was a great party." Dwayne made a gesture with his right hand that reminded me of the Statue of Liberty. "Me and Cheryl — man! I'll never forget that."
Cheryl was Dwayne's steady for two whole months, until she wanted a rock.
Nostalgia in a guy like Dwayne is never a good sign. I thought I'd bring him up to date with a humorous story.
"Hey, remember that ad in the Journal for the forklift operator at Krueger? I forgot to tell you what happened.
About a thousand guys showed up but it turned out some new guy put through a two-year-old job req by accident." I laughed a start-up laugh.
"I'm sick of getting fucked over."
Dwayne wasn't moaning over nothing. UPS didn't need anyone, the breweries didn't need anyone. Allis-Chalmers would never need anyone again. We couldn't do what they needed at Allen-Bradley. That went for a bunch of places. I was lucky to get my job at Todd's Pizza Mountain. Meanwhile, I was checking out every men's department in the Milwaukee metropolitan area, trying to become a salesman. I hadn't had a single decent interview. A matter of appearance, I thought.
"Have you ever thought of selling men's clothing?" I asked Dwayne. "You sort of look like a mannequin."
"Listen, I'm not working any job where I have to tell other guys their seat is too tight or their crotch is too low, or shit like that."
"I'd like it. Especially working on commission. You'd sort of be your own boss. The better you do, the more money you get. Can't get laid off if you're self-employed."
"They could still fire you," Dwayne said, racing down 124th Street. Then he gave me a look like he just noticed I had a horn on my forehead. "You would like it. I hear about you sucking your dick one more time, I'm moving out. I'm not living with a fag."
"Everybody masturbates."
"Christ, Rudy! Do you always have to come out and say shit like that? Jesus."
Maybe I'd gone too far. Like the time a bunch of us were over at Red Carpet Lanes, and I said that it'd be great if we kept score just by writing down the feelings we had as the ball rolled toward the pins. It was one of those moments when you feel people looking at you and you think, "Are they for me or against me?" It's not a great moment.
New Year's Day we got tanked on beer and chips and watched the Rose Bowl. The game was a see-saw battle. Every Michigan touchdown had Dwayne throwing his fist in the air, and then holding his palm up so we could do a "high five." Every USC score confused and angered him. "Fuck!" he'd yell.
I was rooting for Michigan as well. I couldn't resist a team named the Wolverines.
When Michigan lost, Dwayne broke his hand on the coffee table.
"Fuck! I bet two hundred bucks on that game!" He cradled his hand and groaned. His face was twisted just like the face of an injured Michigan player who'd been pulled out of the game. I thought of pointing this out to Dwayne, but it was hard to talk over his howling and swearing.
I hustled him to the emergency room, but then I had to rush off to work. He resented that. After they set his bones in order, I picked him up on the way to one of my deliveries and took him home. He got me in trouble by opening the box and grabbing a piece of pizza as he bailed out of the car. Todd always said, "No friends in the delivery car."
"Some friend," I thought, as the bastard made off with the slice.
Being unemployed had understandably put a bug up Dwayne's ass. But even with medical bills on the way, he kept living the high life, wining and dining the ladies, loading his credit cards. Finally I had to let him go out by himself sometimes, because I didn't have the cash, even though I was dying to find a girl who would go with my new trick, a girl with a certain look in the eye.
The odd thing was, even though we'd been laid off for months, I was dreaming more and more about the freezer, mainly variations on one dream where I was made to wear an embarrassing hairdo. I would try to undo it, but it was frozen. On warmup break, it would almost thaw out — sometimes I could even work with it a little — but the bell always dinged and I had to go back in. The freezer would be deserted. I'd search for people up and down the frosty aisles, but I always ended up trying to look in a tub of ice cream. My fingers would freeze to the lid and then I knew I was caught and then I'd wake up.
Dwayne said my dreams showed a secret desire to be trapped and frozen to death. I said the opposite, and we also argued about what the embarrassing hairdo meant. Then I came home from the Pizza Mountain one Saturday night in late February and all of Dwayne's stuff was gone. He just packed up and left. No note or anything. We were behind in phone, gas, electric, and rent. I'd put the bills out for him to put in his check, but those envelopes were still stuck to the refrigerator with magnets. The last phone bill had a lot of Los Angeles calls on it. He'd told me once that in L.A. it was very easy to get beautiful women, plus there was no winter to cut into ice-cream consumption. Maybe he went to California, was all I could think. I didn't know what to do, so I went into my room, took off my pants, flipped my hips over my head, and sucked my own dick.
Monday night I went to Todd's Pizza Mountain knowing I needed at least another shift. When I got back from the last delivery of dinner rush, Todd was sitting at the little table in front that customers sometimes waited at, staring at the traffic on Highway 100. His paper hat was tipped way back. Even with his lion-colored mustache he looked more like a skinny busboy than a businessman pushing forty. His pizza mountain was crushed between a Greek restaurant and a barber shop — a slot with some counters, an oven, a sink. The tiny marquee letters on the menu board said "Try our Special, Super Special, and Deluxe Super Special." I'd been thinking we got along all right. I'd imagined telling him what a reliable worker I was, how with him making and me delivering we could build this place. He could turn heads over at the West Allis Chamber of Commerce.
"Not a bad night," I said, taking a seat. "For a Monday."
"A little slow, a little slow."
"That's because it's a Monday. How about a Friday? How about Monday, Friday, Saturday? Just one more night. Come on."
"This isn't General Motors," he said.
"You do a decent business. All's I'm asking is — "
"Rudy, I'd love to, I really would." He put his forearms on the table, leaned at me. "But who am I supposed to cut? Dennis has two kids. Then where's Dennis? Tim's in trouble. Where's Tim?"
"Tim makes his own trouble." We both knew Tim had a gambling problem.
There must've been something in my face or the way I said it, but Todd did a double-take. "Listen, if I could
do more for you, I would, but I can't. I thought you wanted to sell clothes anyway."
"I don't know where my career is headed right now," I said foolishly.
It occurred to me that I had entirely forgotten what I'd planned on saying to him about my reliability, about our future. Then the phone rang and Todd got up to take the order.
"Midway Motor Lodge." He ripped the ticket from the pad and headed back to make the pizza. I asked him if it was a man or a woman, and he said a woman — with an accent.
I perked up. Delivering to motels always made me horny. Motel people were lonely, they drank, they offered you things. When he hired me, Todd had said that every delivery guy who'd put in serious time with him had gotten into "something interesting" on a delivery. "Who needs benefits!" he'd said.
Things were looking good when I had to stop for a six-pack on my way to the Motor Lodge, but the person who opened the door to 211 was a man.
The man was dressed in black. His black shirt was unbuttoned all the way, and his thin stomach was swirled with dark hair. He had about an eight-day beard and a pointy chin.
"Come in," he said. His accent was sort of Russian but not quite. "Rita, pay him."
He went to sit at the end of the bed, picked up a camera — a fancy-looking one — and started taking pictures of what was happening on TV. I thought he was some foreign artist, doing something really imaginative by taking pictures of other pictures.
Rita came out of the bathroom. She wore a man's white dress shirt tucked in and brown jeans that had the back pockets ripped off and little zippers at the ankles. She was barefoot. Her dark eyes seemed distressed. Whatever her troubles might be, I wanted to help her solve them.
The man saw me staring at her bent over her purse and he smiled in a smug way. I was embarrassed and looked away. She waved a traveler's check. It was probably all right to take it, but I shook my head. I was in no hurry. When she didn't argue with me, I was surprised. She said something to the man in a foreign language, but I knew it had to do with not having money.
He ignored her and took another picture of the TV.
"Are you a photographer?" I asked him. I was never afraid to ask an obvious question.
He jerked his head at Rita. "Pornographer." He grinned at me. I could tell he took me for an idiot, but I wasn't sure what that meant about what he'd said.
She cursed him in their language and rifled through a duffle bag.
I put the pizza and six-pack on a low dresser. I became aware of my throat.
"You brought us beer," he said. "Very nice. Rita said it was illegal, extra charge. Why don't you have one? Throw one to me."
I did this. His brown eyes were very small.
"'Illegal' surprised me," he went on. "I came to this country to avoid 'illegal.'"
"We don't have a liquor license, is all. Is pornography illegal in your country?"
"Sure, sure. So you see, I had to come." He raised his hands as if he'd had no choice at all and smiled hard. He opened his beer and guzzled from it. Then I opened mine and did the same.
Rita put in her two cents, in their language, shaking her head, now back to her purse, paging through big, colorful bills.
He put his beer on the carpet and took pictures of the TV screen again. With each click, I couldn't help but imagine Rita posed in a different position.
"Do you make movies, too?" I said.
"Ah, films. Not so many now, but who knows."
Rita said something fierce to him. Maybe she was embarrassed about him bringing up his pornography. With just a few singles crushed in her hand, she dumped the purse on the bed in disgust and strode toward the windows, passing in front of the man. He patted her on the butt and smiled. Rita rummaged through a suitcase lying open against the wall.
The man snapped another picture of the TV. "Yes," he said, satisfied with the shot. It was three guys riding horses out west.
He picked up his beer and let the camera dangle from his neck. "So she is beautiful?" he said, referring to Rita, and took another swig. His eyes still watched me as he drank.
I nodded silently. This man had a way of making me feel I'd known him for a long time — even that I owed him money or something, but I liked where this was going. He lifted his chin a little. The small brown foreign eyes saw something in me.
"I have a talent," I said.
He nodded, he expected to hear exactly this. He spoke to the woman in their language and laughed, as if everybody had a talent.
She said the equivalent of "Ta-dah" and was holding the cash. The man turned toward me and put out his hand to stop her.
"What is your talent?"
"You can hire actors for your movies, can't you?" I was being very careful.
"Sure, sure," he said quickly, a little irritated with me.
Rita scolded him in their language, her hands on her hips.
He snapped at her, so meanly that my eyes locked onto his eyes. I took his side in their argument, only because I thought it would bring me to Rita in the long run. Rita threw up her hands. She appealed to a god. I could tell that.
"We have studios," he went on in a quiet voice, looking at me intently. "We have studios in California. We are always looking for new talent. What is your talent?"
I wanted to tell him, but I couldn't. "It's embarrassing," I breathed.
"No," he said. "Your talent is your soul. You must be proud."
"I want to be proud," I said. Then I looked to Rita, who avoided my eyes.
"Then tell me," the man said. "Don't be shy."
"All right," I said, my heart starting to beat in my ears. I looked nowhere in the room: "I can suck my own dick."
He whistled soft and low. "Impossible," he said. Rita put her hand to her mouth, as if she were about to sneeze.
"I've done it," I said.
"I don't believe you." He picked up his camera and took another picture of the TV. I saw myself leaving that
room and getting into my car and driving back to Todd's Pizza Mountain, my tip a few coins of change, if they even had enough for the whole bill.
"I can prove it," I said.
He lowered his camera and squinted at me. "He says he can prove," he said, as if he were speaking to Rita, but he didn't take his eyes off of me.
She slapped him on the shoulder and swore. He ignored her. He had hypnotist's eyes, and he knew it. "So prove," he said. "And maybe I pay you extra, huh?"
"How much?"
He made a clown frown and nodded his head from side to side. "Five dollars," he finally said.
"I am looking for work," I said, looking right back into his eyes. "Sir, I really hope that if you are pleased by my demonstration, you will give me a ten-dollar tip — plus a job. I'll follow you to California in my car. Sir, I am very serious about this."
Rita appealed to a god again.
A small part of the man's smile came back. "Okay, let's stop this fucking around. Okay? Go on. Prove."
I took a long drink of beer and set the can down on the dresser with a trembling hand. I thought my time had come. While I took down my pants, I felt like a con escaping from jail, taking off my striped prison outfit. I was sweating a lot under my arms. I touched my skin and my fingers were ice cold. I was shivering.
Rita whispered to him in a quick urgent voice, but he shushed her.
When I was naked except for my T-shirt, I crawled on the bed. I stared at Rita, her face, her breasts, the gathering of cloth in her crotch. I swung my legs over my head and went into the position. I moved my leg so it would block the man from my view, but so that I could see Rita through my legs. Because of the angle, I could only see her face, her sweet, confused, face, which was turned away. It reminded me of some of the second-rate faces my various friends had had, but I loved these faces. These people all had to have a lot of inner resources to make it with second-string looks. I respected that.
I got my dick in my mouth and went at it. The man took pictures. Rita stepped away to where I couldn't see her. I thought she might be getting undressed to join me in my audition, which would be the first in a famous career. Maybe gay films, but I didn't think like Dwayne. I thought anyone would be interested in seeing a sexual feat. Or maybe I'd branch out and do the straight-ahead stuff and only do my trick by myself, at the end, as the credits were rolling. We would all live in California, where Dwayne was. I would leave the apartment and the bills just as Dwayne had. I sucked my own dick. I was really going at it.
At first I didn't even notice the laughter. I only noticed it when it was going full blast, when the man was slapping his thigh and sucking air in a spastic rhythm and Rita was giggling hysterically. Then I saw her face hanging over me. It reminded me of Stephanie's hovering face and how much I had loved kissing her, and for an unbelievable instant I thought Rita still might join me. But her cheeks were streaked with tears of laughter. In a soft accent that killed me, she said, "We are so sorry. We are not pornos. Tibor — he has a bad sense of humor."
I looked into her mouth. For a second, I could see the bottoms of her two wet front teeth, then her lips closed like curtains. I looked at my shrinking dick. "That's okay," I murmured.
If you took off all of your skin, so that the surface of your body was just a land of Hooksexups, you would try to be completely still, because even a little air blowing on you — maybe the moving air between the rooms of a house, or the little wind you make when you turn your head — might be enough to make you scream bloody murder. When I was getting dressed, I tried to hold myself still like that. I kept telling myself I didn't know these people, I'd never see them again. But as still as I was, just the warm air escaping from their bodies raked my open Hooksexups. I could hear the sounds of a scream echoing inside my head like a yell from deep in the freezer.
Gradually, though, I got numb. I remembered Stephanie face down on the bed, maybe fighting off the spins. Why had she taken on both of us that night? Was she needling Dwayne? Or looking for humiliation? Or just trying to come?
Up close, Rita's face showed damage. She put money in my hands. Tibor sat and stared at the TV. "Good-bye, Tibor," I said. "Good-bye, Rita."
I closed their door with a soft click and walked down the hall, trying to make sense of what had happened. I had believed Tibor, and I needed the money, and I was not afraid. Yes, they had seen everything about me, but then it occurred to me that you can't rely on yourself if you feel ashamed of yourself. I had done what I thought might help me. What else can you do? And then I thought I could even go back and sit and talk with Rita and Tibor — and it wouldn't matter. I wondered how anyone could possibly fear relations with other humans. I wondered how humiliation worked, because I couldn't see that feeling anymore.
I guess I'm saying that all I had left was a strong feeling. It was a Mary Tyler Moore feeling, a you're-gonna-make-it-after-all feeling. I saw a light on under another door. I knocked.
"Who is it?" a woman's voice said.
"Pizza man," I said. Deception seemed necessary, and now I would do what was necessary, but I couldn't actually lie.
The door to 219 opened, pulling the chain tight. Part of a middle-aged woman's face appeared, in the gap.
Our eyes met as she moved her head to take me in.
"I've come to set you free," I said.
She slammed the door.
But I thought positively. I was self-reliant. The self-reliant man relies on himself not to give up. The self-reliant man does not fear rejection. He is useful to himself at all times.
I went down the hall, looking for light under the doors.
©2007 Andrew Mozina & hooksexup.com