Register Now!
Link To: Home
 
featured personal

search articles

media blogs

  • scanner
    scanner
  • screengrab
    screengrab
  • modern materialist
    the modern
    materialist
  • 61 frames per second
    61 frames
    per second
  • the remote island
    the remote
    island
  • date machine
    date
    machine

photo blogs

  • slice
    slice
    with m. sharkey
  • paper airplane crush
    paper
    airplane crush
  • autumn
    autumn
  • brandonland
    brandonland
  • chase
    chase
  • rose & olive
    rose & olive
Rose & Olive
Houston neighbors pull back the curtains and expose each other’s lives.
Scanner
Your daily cup of WTF?
Date Machine
Putting your baggage to good use.
The Modern Materialist
Almost everything you want.
Autumn Sonnichsen
A fashionable L.A. photo editor exploring all manner of hyper-sexual girls down south.
ScreenGrab
The Hooksexup Film Blog
Chase
The creator of Supercult.com poses his pretty posse.
The Remote Island
Hooksexup's TV blog.
61 Frames Per Second
Smarter gaming.
ScreenGrab
The Hooksexup Film Blog
Slice
Each month a new artist; each image a new angle. This month: M. Sharkey.
Paper Airplane Crush
A San Francisco photographer on the eternal search for the girls of summer.
Brandonland
A California boy in L.A. capturing beach parties, sunsets and plenty of skin.

new this week
Dating Advice From . . . Prop 8 Protesters by Meghan Pleticha
Q: What makes a protest a good date? A: Nothing makes people connect like a common enemy.
Ginger Red by Aaron Cansler
/photography/
Screengrab by Various
Today in Hooksexup's film blog: Mickey Rourke in Iron Man 2.
The Modern Materialist by Various
Almost everything you want. Today: A plethora of ways to feel so good.
61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine
Today in Hooksexup's videogame blog: Street Fighter. The movie. A new one. With that chick from that Superman show. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about!
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian
Mad Men's January Jones struts her stuff in Vanity Fair. Plus: Damages returns, the latest Gossip Girl guest star and Donna Martin capitulates.
Date Machine by Various
Today in Hooksexup's dating blog: Are all women GAY?
The Truth is Out There by Iris Smyles
First-date love, lies and X-files. /personal essays/
 FICTION


The Wig

  Send to a Friend
  Printer Friendly Format
  Leave Feedback
  Read Feedback
  Hooksexup RSS
More wind. I was cold. I could see pairs of people crossing the Mall, grabbing onto one another beneath stars-and-stripes umbrellas bought at one of the price-gouging concession trucks. The Lincoln was empty except for a man leaning against the statue looking out at the rain. He said something about being stuck, but hell, if it kept the animal away the rain was fine with him. There are tunnels under this building, he said. Built in WWII or during the Cold War, one of those, in case the city got bombed. I went through them when I was a kid. Well, no, maybe not. He put his index finger up to his temple and pretended to screw it into his head. I don't know what I'm remembering, he said. Then he asked if I visited the memorials much at night and if I appreciated how beautifully they were lit. His wife read the Gettysburg Address carved in the marble above then came over and offered me a cherry LifeSaver. I took one. Then they offered me a ride.
    I got into the back of the car, a Mercury Grand Marquis that smelled like dogs. The seat made a noise when I lowered myself into it, as though it was stuffed with hay. The woman pulled out another roll of LifeSavers from the glove compartment. She told me to keep it, she had a whole box from Costco. I held the pack in my pocket, twirling the cylinder between my thumb and index finger. The man switched on the heat. I felt tired, so I leaned my head against the window, looking up at the streetlights that bent over Wisconsin Avenue like the town elders. I stared at the back of their heads, the flesh of his scalp squeezed into a ridge ear to ear. I wondered what it could possibly be like to have someone you could have sex with whenever you wanted with no rigmarole. It didn't seem equitable. The rest of us had to plead and interpret the encrypted scramble of the porn channel.

promotion
    We headed north. The man said, Let's stop at the Cathedral. We parked illegally and darted out of the car, running across the grass to get out of the open where the killer could be lurking. I showed them the gargoyle with the TV camera. They said they'd been to the Cathedral upwards of fifty times and never noticed. There's a space shuttle in one of the stained glass windows, I told them. The man didn't believe me, so we tried to get into the nave, but it was locked. I kept saying it was true about the space shuttle and soon he believed me.
    The man stayed outside to smoke while the woman and I snuck into one of the tombs on the north side of the building. We sat close together on a stone pew and finished another roll of LifeSavers, crunching away. I told her I liked the way she smelled, that I liked her perfume, that she smelled clean. She said what I was smelling wasn't perfume, it was soap, eucalyptus. I said, Ukulele? She laughed. I kept moving closer to her, because I liked the way she smelled. I told her it was one of those smells you want to roll up a twenty to snort. She said she'd never heard anything like that before and she thought that I was clever. I told her I was cold, especially my legs. I pushed against her to get closer. I said I liked her hair because it
She let out a yelp. Her hand fell to my lap, and she was rubbing me.
was brown and curled under and stayed in place. I said I hadn't noticed she wore glasses, but that she looked good in them and I mentioned the statistic that claimed people who wore glasses were smarter. She said she'd never heard that before, either. I like brown hair better than blond hair, I said. And again, I said I was cold. I had my legs pressed up so hard against her that she sat sideways on the pew. I asked her if she had on a lot of layers, you know, under her coat, and what the layers were. She said she had on a sweater and a long-sleeved crewneck shirt from Lands' End. For a few moments we listened to the sound of our breathing echoing in the chamber and watching our breath blow heat into the air, colliding. Then I asked her what she had on under the crewneck.
    "That's all."
    "That's all?"
    "Well, you know . . . "
    "What?"
    "A bra."
    My hand was balled up in my windbreaker. I tried to move her arm with my elbow. If she would put her hand on it, just for a second. I thought about kissing the side of her face, or putting my hand on her leg. My elbow was a stump, trying to hook the inside of her elbow. I began digging my arm into her. She pulled her arm tight into her side. It was getting late. I didn't have time for this game. What was a hand job to her? She'd done a million hand jobs, who knows what else. Finally, she moved. But not how I wanted. She put her arm around my shoulders and rubbed my tricep to get me warm. Then she put both arms around me and rocked, side to side. It made me furious. I put my chin on her arm, trying to push it down with my head. She held me tighter. I wrenched my hand from my pocket, grasped her arm, and pulled down like I was trying to do a chin-up on a bar. But she was strong. She lifted weights, probably. My skinny hands were nothing on her biceps. Her breaths were coming faster in our struggle, in a high register, like a girl's. Mine were steady and low. At last I put every ounce of strength into a yank on her forearm. She let out a yelp! Her hand fell to my lap, and she was rubbing me. My hips began to rise but soon the man was calling us.
    He looked up at the building, admiring its flying buttresses, regarding them as great sentinels on duty around the church. The woman said she preferred classical architecture that she objected to the inordinate verticality of Gothic, that the buttresses were ugly, looking as if the scaffolding were left in place. Well! The man said. Well, well! He asked me what I thought. But I was filled with such contempt for both of them. I just said I liked it fine.
    Driving north on Connecticut Avenue, I imagined I was on a boat, feeling neither anxious nor happy, just wallowing, the excitement in my stomach from bouncing on bad shocks, not from what was in store with the woman. And what was in store? She would put her hand on it, right on it, maybe more. There would be no fumbling around. We'd go right to it. My seat was damp, the smell of dogs so strong it was as though three wolfhounds sat on top of me, panting in my face. The man talked about how the Wizards were cursed, the coaching always bad, how if there was a wrong decision to be made, they'd make it, a 30-point lead to lose, they'd lose it. What were we being punished for? He wanted to know. The Red Sox traded Babe Ruth so, understandably, they were destined to have victory outside their grasp for eternity, but what had we done?
    "We didn't fight the Jim Crow laws." The woman looked out her window at houses lit up at night.
    The Jim Crow laws? The man said. At the stoplight he looked at her. This was the only town with Jim Crow laws? Then how do you explain the success of the Atlanta Braves or for that matter the Washington Redskins? The woman shrugged. The man pressed in the lighter. He lit his cigarette, rolled down his window and threw the lighter out. I can't believe I did that, he said. Am I the biggest idiot you ever saw? I just threw the lighter out the window. He stopped the car, backing up at thirty miles per hour. Pulling over, he turned on the emergency flashers and got out, running back to look for the lighter in the street. Cars shot by. Water splashed the
I heard the question before she asked: "Do you want to know what women like?"
windows. I sat up to look out at the man searching the black street. He jumped up on the median to avoid a speeding Camry. The woman glanced over. He bent into the gutter, kicking around the ground with his foot. Can't see a thing, he said, getting back in the car. I'll have to come back in the day. We drove on. The woman reached over and pressed off the emergency flashers. After a pause the man said, I wish you wouldn't do that. You'll attract the police, she began. That's not the point, the man interrupted. I'm driving. They became silent. Eventually, everyone hates everyone.
    The main street into my subdevelopment zipped past us, The National 4-H, Washingtonian Country Club, Ruth Bay Lake. We passed some stores, a Starbucks, a Sunoco. When we passed the entrances to the beltway, I became uncomfortable, the air in the car heavy. She knew. I knew. He had to have known. A cold current of knowledge whipped through us, round and round. When we came to the Connecticut-University divide I became breathless. I thought, if he bears left, stays on Connecticut, I will be fine. But he took University, a road covered in concrete instead of asphalt. I wanted to be let out of the car. I said I needed to be getting home. People will be looking for me. The man said, sure, we'll turn right around, just need to stop by the house and check on the dogs. I said, okay, check on the dogs, but after that I really need to be getting home. Why don't you just try to relax, the man said. I moved around in the back seat. All these electronics stores, signs in Spanish and Vietnamese, stores threatening to go out of business, identical houses packed in, the strip malls and movie theatres with sixteen miniscule screens and not one of the films worth watching. I would never find my way out. I moved side-to-side, door-to-door. Do you have to go to the bathroom? The man asked. I said yes. You can go at the house, the man said. Then he asked if I liked dogs. He'd probably been watching me with the Jack Russells back at the Lincoln Memorial. Maybe he thought I was trying to get picked up by the men with the dogs. We turned into a residential area, a dead street, every house the same, every car, Sienna, Sienna, Sienna, Odyssey. Then, out of nowhere, a crowded traffic circle. I was thrown against the door as the man swerved from near misses with vans and SUVs. He told us to hang on as he went into a skid. Finally, we turned off onto a calm street, deeper and deeper into Hinton.
    Soon we pulled in front of the house, a sad looking split-level. The man said, come in and see the dogs. You gotta. They are out-of-control cute. Eleven pups. And they allllll want to be held. I said I was tired and needed to get home and should probably stay in the car. I said I'd wait for them to finish feeding the dogs and to come back and give me a ride. You don't want to come in for one little sec? The man asked. I'm so tired, I said. You know, I'm tired, too, the woman said. I'm going to march myself right up to a bath and then bed. Suit yourselves, the man said. I'm not one bit tired, but suit yourselves. They left me. I watched them run in the house through a side entrance. Rain battered the roof of the car. I was wet. I wondered why the woman didn't want to be with me in the car and what would have happened if she'd stayed.
    I waited for a long time. I could see no activity in the house. Maybe they forgot about me. I zipped my jacket and left the car, running across the lawn to the front door. I rapped the knocker. No one came. I pressed my ear against the door. I heard nothing. I knocked again then ran around to the side. The door was open a crack. I went in. The smell of dogs and dog excrement and cooked meat overwhelmed me. It was more than a smell, it was a grease that got in my lungs, saturating my clothes and hair. I walked through the house. Every room had something turned on — a stereo, a TV, a Nintendo — but no person listening or watching or playing. The wall-to-wall carpeting was the color of liver. The walls were a shade up from the carpet. I looked into a rec room at a photo gallery on a wood-paneled wall. It was covered in framed photographs of kids and dogs, the woman in a Navy nurse uniform posing with the family, the man not understanding the photographer's instruction to "look right here into the lens." I walked up several levels with wood bars on the sides of narrow steps and down a hallway. I saw her through the doorway of a room at the top
of three more stairs. I was going to turn around but she saw me and gestured for me to come in. There were clothes all over the bed, shirts on hangers, some in cleaning bags. She was busy buttoning all the top buttons. Is this your room? I asked and then felt idiotic because of course it was her room, it had a huge bed and a couch and all of her things spread around. The dresser was crowded with keepsakes, jeweled boxes, crystal bottles, holiday cards and an earring tree. In the center was a Styrofoam head on which someone had stuck earrings, drawn a lipstick mouth and put on a pair of green cat-eye sunglasses. A TV was tuned to the USA channel, the sound off on a movie from the 1980s. I watched a close-up of a hand opening a car door, the car door opening, feet leaving the ground, legs swinging into the car, door closing. A lot of effort just to get someone the hell out of a driveway.
    Sit down, she said. Do you want some iced tea? No thanks, I said. Do you want to listen to some music? She asked. Okay, I said. She put the Flamingos on a Bang & Olufsen CD player that was too high-tech for the run-down state of the house. Then she turned toward me and I heard the question before she asked.
    "Do you want to know what women like?"
    She put her tongue in my mouth and her hand on my crotch and moved my hand onto hers. A lot to coordinate. My tongue just lay there, saliva collecting. With the palm of my hand I scooped into her like a shovel digging the foundation for the new Town Hall. She unbuttoned my jeans and started to put her hand inside my underwear but withdrew it. She spit into her fingers,
She was as hairless as any punish-fucked cheerleader.
then plunged into my pants. How she knew to do that I'll never know but I rocked into her hand and was nearly to the other side when of course, she had to take my hand and put it inside the waistband of her pants. This was not what I wanted. There would be pubic hair to push back, and moisture. I considered getting up to leave, saying I had to mow lawns in the morning and that there were people waiting up for me. But she spit more saliva into her hand. Lower and deeper into her pants, I felt around for what I didn't want to touch. Further and further down until I hit softness. Lo and behold, no pubic hair, completely shaven. I was relieved. There were girls on the porn-scramble channel with no pubic hair. Cheerleader types with angel faces. They were always in trouble for eating out another cheerleader or blowing the janitor. I let my hand go slack, an exhausted panhandler unable to raise a dime. The woman stood and began to undress. I guessed I was supposed to watch and comment, the way Hard Harv on the porn-scramble did it, sitting like a piece of furniture, supplying wood while girls took off their clothes before him. She took off her sneakers. I said I liked her toenail polish. She took off her pants. I said her legs were good. Reading her underwear out loud, I said Hanes for Her. She slipped off the underwear and though I didn't spend time looking I could see my hand didn't lie, she was as hairless as any punish-fucked cheerleader. Starting at the bottom, she unbuttoned her retro-plaid blouse, throwing it onto the bed with the other shirts. Her bra was beige and plain. I couldn't think of anything to say about it. I was just glad I didn't have to get involved with it. She reached back and unhooked it, tossing it onto the bed that served as closet. Her breasts were small and nothing to speak of so I didn't. I thought that was the end of the undressing scene but I was mistaken. She put her hand on her forehead and took off her hair. Bald. And I mean bald as a . . . completely bald person. She hung up her hair on the Styrofoam head that suddenly became the only pretty girl in the room, mocking me from behind its green cat-eye sunglasses. I wanted to grab the head and run. Frantically searching for something to say, all I could come up with was tea. In my best porn snarl, I said, I usually have hot tea before I do this. She turned her head to the side, a bewildered space alien, show me to your leader. No, no, I said, I'll find the kitchen myself. My uncle has a house exactly like this, same layout. You probably keep the tea in the same place.
    I ran. About thirty dogs barked their heads off at me in the kitchen. A huge yellow Lab burst out of a cage and chased me to the door, got my ankle in his teeth and wouldn't let go. I dragged him across the linoleum floor with my leg. Then countless puppies leapt up and bit me on the hands, three of them sinking teeth into my other ankle. A black Lab shuffled into the room, her nipples practically scraping the floor. What the hell is wrong with that dog, I thought. The dog muttered something, turned amid the chaos and shuffled out. I put my hands on the door. There were five locks and the dogs, apoplectic now, sounded as though they were being vivisected alive. A dozen jaws clamped onto my legs. I moved the bolt of one lock, which made the teeth of another clench down into the first, and all the other locks armed themselves with backup bolts. Metal rods tore into my skin. I eased my hand out from inside the lock, leaving behind a few layers of flesh I didn't need. The door opened. What a surprise, I set off an alarm. A spotlight came on. I shot across the yard. What in God's name were these people protecting? At the corner of something and something, the dog, seeing I was lost, turned and trotted back to the house. Thanks for your help.  


©2005 Julia Slavin and hooksexup.com






ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Julia Slavin is the author of The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club and Other Stories and the novel Carnivore Diet.


To buy Carnivore Diet, click here.
Click here to read other features from the 2005 Fall Fiction Issue
promotion


partner links
VIP Access
This click gets you to the city's hottest barbells.
The Position of The Day Video
Superdeluxe.com
Honesty. Integrity. Ads
The Onion
Cracked.com
Photos, Videos, and More
CollegeHumor.com
Belgian Nun Reprimanded for Dirty Dancing
Fark.com
AskMen.com Presents From The Bar To The Bedroom
Learn the 11 fundamental rules to approaching, scoring and satisfying any woman. Order now!
sponsored links

Advertisers, click here to get listed!


advertise on Hooksexup | affiliate program | home | photography | personal essays | fiction | dispatches | video | opinions | regulars | search | personals | horoscopes | retroHooksexup | HooksexupShop | about us |

account status
| login | join | TOS | help

©2009 hooksexup.com, Inc.