Oscar Hammerstein

            

I don’t know the reason we drank pickle juice vodka. But we shared two shots of it, passed them back and forth between us. She was loud and sunburned. Smelled sweetly of sweat and I felt like a giant sweat bee as I stood in front of her. Her bare knee firmly entrenched in the crotch of my blue jeans. Her skin was cool with the air conditioning.

“Your hands are warm,” she smiled. I left white imprints on her arms where my fingers had been, but her skin regained the color of her burn after I stopped touching her. She liked it when I rubbed my hands down her arms and warmed her up, and I was happy to oblige her desire for me to touch her. Her eyes were drunk and glistened. They were what I recalled first about her. Her eyes. How full they always seemed. The beautiful way she told her whole story while saying nothing of herself at all. I stood and watched her speak to me about an empty house I wanted to buy. I heard nothing about the house. Here I was now. Feeling like the luckiest man on earth. With the house, and with the girl.

“I won’t remember any of this tomorrow,” she laughed.

“Probably not,” I smiled having a drink. I wanted her to remember. Her saying it made me wonder what in her life she had forgotten. And that jurist inside of me accused me of again thinking too much. Guilty, I plead softly. But I simply wanted to be something she remembered. The jury wasn’t swayed and I was executed swiftly. At least, I didn’t cry like a bitch about it, or file unnecessary appeals and drag it on. The tax payer dollar meant something to me. She asked if I heard what she had said and I smiled and said no. She didn’t know about the trial. She repeated a joke and I laughed.

She had been golfing all day, though she wasn’t much of a golfer, she admitted. Nobody is, I replied. A reason to drink before two. That is what golf is. Good for business relationships and because she was in an odd place in life. I don’t really know what that means. To be in an odd place in life. I’ve always been in an odd place, I guess, so I had no normal place to compare the odd one to. She was still wearing her short white shorts and a black floral-print blouse. I imagined the view of her from the fairway. Holding a club, bending over to tee a ball as my two pressed against her kneecap. And I spit out every corny golf joke that related to sex that I could manage. Stroke. Ball wash. Driver on the back nine. A hole in one.

I was courageous and motivated in how much I adored her. And how good I felt in her presence. The feeling of her beauty reflecting upon me. She was the perfect mix of Audrey Hepburn and Julia Roberts. No. It is they who resembled her. She was annoying in no way. And she didn’t smoke. I have never been more certain about much of anything in my life. And I knew the significance of the moment, the opportunity. I felt like an Olympic athlete and she was my once every four years. Only gold would do and I drank as quickly as I could to get to where she was. But I couldn’t catch up, I knew, so I tried to keep up with the joking and the laughter. 

         She claimed she was sobering up now that she was out of the sun, but I couldn’t tell for sure that she was. She looked pretty shitfaced and the debate raged in me whether if I took her to the bathroom and screwed her, would it constitute some kind of pansexual assault, being that no inebriated person can identify as a male or female, or consent to sexual intercourse, I learned in a sexual ethics training at work. The wise-ass thinker in me called me a broke Harvey Weinstein. 

She’d been golfing with bankers and people she worked with at the agency and I could smell the sweat on her soft skin which was something like saltwater taffy, and there was an orgy of her in my nose and I got as hard as a geek kid over a free video arcade. I could smell all of her and I had never wanted to inhale anything more in my life. I recall that I had told her that pickle juice makes hiccups go away and she hiccuped and laughed, but said it felt like someone stabbing her in the chest. Some phantom O.J. Simpson, which isn’t funny, someone said. But I said it was and we laughed recklessly. I don’t care about pretentious sensitivity or virtue signaling. Nicole Brown isn’t losing any sleep. 

She said throw in a shot of Vodka and you got yourself a deal, daddy. The pretty bartender grinned and looked at me and I shook my head. Pickle juice and vodka, it is. The fireballs came before, but again after to kill the taste of the pickle juice from our mouths and she breathed hot cinnamon on my face as I leaned into her, holding on to that beautiful thin leg and moving up to her waist. Humping it like a scared child humps the saddle of a pony at the Fair so not to fall off. 

I had a tab and it is okay when you have a tab because the damage always seems far less than what it ends up being in the morning when your account is overdrawn. But I wasn’t thinking of my bank account then. I would have robbed the gas station next door and came back with money to buy us drinks if I needed to. I could have bought a thousand shots if the night required it. If she was an elephant that required so many shots to get in the mood and I was so inclined and attracted to elephants in that way.

The bar was clearing out. She was entirely too close to me, people around us surely thought, but not close enough for me, I felt. And I thought to kiss her, but I resisted because I didn't want the first time to be in that bar. I am a sentimental guy that way, I guess. So the proximity of her lips and eyes to mine, her breath on my face, teased me and my desire grew. Her eyes drove me mad the way they glimmered in the bar light. The way they smiled when she smiled. She remarked, more than once, that someone told her they think she has “doe-like” eyes and I made an inappropriate joke about a deer and that is the way it went. Like rocking on a banana boat in the middle of the Atlantic waiting for a wave to upset all my little Juan’s and Jose’s and for the sharks to naturally do what they do when they see a little chalupa kicking its legs. I thought of a banana boat because the Harry Belafonte song played. And she sang, Day-O. 

It’s metaphoric language. It cannot be offensive. I was drunk on beer and hope and what broken glass of a heart I had in my chest was being blown by a gay guy named Steve in Toledo into perfect form. Into a fancy blue vase of sorts that is beautiful, but not practical in anyway. She is that guy in Toledo. She is Steve, though she isn’t doing anything but sitting there and talking too loud and making jokes with me and laughing, finally at ease, she says, with her knee inadvertently in my crotch. The vase will never hold anything. It should be kept on a shelf so some indifferent klutz that has broken plenty of vases before and will break many more, can never break it. But my shelves are empty.

A heart is not a practical organ, not like the penis, but it is beautiful in that which it conjures and in its purpose. A heart like mine, especially. And that fancy blue vase gets given and given, broken and blown and broken again, but it had never been given to the right one. And it breaks and Steve from Toledo in my chest blows another as fancy as the last and keeps it a while until the right girl comes and then she goes and the ridiculous process continues. On and on. Much the same goes for my penis. They suffer twin fates, for the most part.

But there I stood because I was too excited to sit down. Like a kid, really, at Christmas. It wasn’t the prospect of sex with her. It was the hope in those eyes that seemed to desire what I desire and the thought that we might desire the same thing together occurred to me. Those beautiful and perfect inspiring eyes like nothing else on this earth. The thought that they led somewhere where I have never been intrigued me. And it became a belief. I was flooded by the innate feeling that I experienced that which all the poets have written about at one time or another. That feeling which I need not name because it is too presumptuous to name until it works out in the end, whereupon, I can exalt it and practically tell everyone I told you so even though I never told anyone. And if it doesn’t work, I can bury it and pretend it never was so not to look like a fool because I was so sadly sure of it.

Her knee was rubbing my crotch still. She turned and realized what she was doing after a while and kept it going. I was like a farm animal getting in perfect line with her knee as though it were the insemination point of the animal I was supposed to stud. Moreover, she realized what I was doing and the lack of a withdraw or a move meant consent, I reasoned, and I ached and raged in my balls and bowels. An army in me that had yet to be released upon an enemy in what would be an overwhelming war like the Nazis blitzkrieg of Poland to slaughter Calvary horses and her infrastructure indifferently with tanks. All to appease the Hitler of my desire for her. And my nose was full of her saltwater taffy skin and all I wanted to do was to lick every inch of her as Hitler wanted to lick the world.

And she took a swig of that pickle juice vodka and made that face you could imagine that pickle juice vodka would make you make. That puckered-sort-of-grin. And the lines in her face did this amazing shift and formed this incredible pattern like bedsheets after sex. And I told her about my mouth watering and she told me she had a nickname in college and I laughed and she told me about this guy from some bar and other misadventures in sex since she had been single and I wondered what she was leaving out or omitting in all that she was confessing to me like I was some priest and she was in my confessional. But then I squashed the thought and told myself not to ask or to wonder. Hail Mary!

I smiled at her, knowing where she had been. But I knew that I was not the person she wanted, really. I was a temporary fix to something that was broken, a bridge over troubled and uncertain water. That which would heal itself in time. But I cursed myself for having doubt that I could not be more and I said to hell with it and decided that was enough for me so long as I don’t add any scars to her. Then she told me how much she loves Oscar Hammerstein and I laughed because it was so off-the-wall and I could never imagine anyone in the world telling me they love Oscar Hammerstein, particularly someone so beautiful and young. And then she told me about her favorite college professor, her best friend, friends who have passed, and then her son and her ex. And we were talking about sex when her ex walked in, sat down with this painful look on his face, and introduced himself. And as quick as he came he left and we laughed because it was bizarre. And I imagined he was out in the dark waiting for us to leave and would probably shoot me, or us, but I didn’t care. I would bleed out on a sidewalk for her, I knew, which scared me only because I knew what it meant. That I was Gatsby and she was Daisy. A broke Gatsby, my thinker told me.

We left and I felt like Bill Cosby who had slipped her something in her drink, but she was able to walk, and if she was able to walk, then she was fine, I told myself. Screw that feminist sexual ethics programming, I thought. She said she was fine and never felt better then she laughed as we hit the hot heat of the sidewalk. Her ex was not outside waiting, lurking, and I took her in my arm and we walked home. 

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“Oklahoma,” she said.

I looked at her and she laughed at me. Oscar Hammerstein reference number one. Then a block or so away I told her there is nothing so pleasing as “the sound of music” to me, and she punched me in the arm and called me a dork and a “show boat.” And I asked her if she had ever been to the “state fair” because I’d like to go this year and she said no, and asked if I ever spent any time in the “south pacific.” And I couldn’t think of any more Oscar Hammerstein musicals, but I could tell she did because she grinned and when we got to her house and I remarked about her rosebushes and said it was a nice place, she said it is, for “the king and I.” And to shut her up I kissed her on the porch and she dropped her bag. I kissed her hard and grabbed her arm and pulled her into me because she said something about liking being grabbed and choked earlier, or so I thought.

I asked her if she wanted to establish a safe word and she laughed and said she doesn’t believe in them and I said holy hell and she said okay, just in case it gets too rough, the safe word would be, appropriately, “Oscar Hammerstein.” And I said that is a mouthful and she laughed and dropped and said so is this, but I will leave that much between us.

And I stood there blown away as I noticed a peacock painting above her mantle that stared at me and it blew my mind as I felt it was a sign from God. And I wanted to tell her about it, but I didn’t want to distract her because she was occupied. I knew it was a sign as were so many other things that led me here. That which I kept in my pocket. Inevitability and fate can be scary things. Realizing at last your purpose in a very uncertain world, is also scary, even for those who seemingly fear nothing at all. People are easier off looking at a green light across a bay rather than holding it in their palm and not knowing what to do with it. And there that green light was, in the base of my palm along with her head and I didn’t know what the hell to do with either, but to stand there and wait. My lips were wet with hers and I stood there contemplating my place in the universe and practically every possible outcome of this turn-of-events.

So we stumbled upstairs and fell into bed and I trashed all those stories she told me of this and that and ridded my mind of the face of her ex introducing himself and the taste of pickle juice vodka and Nicole Brown’s autopsy photos and the rolling white Bronco and the Kardashians and those tacos and chalupas on rickety banana boats singing Day-O and all the distractions that came between her and I. And I remembered what Ted Williams once said about hitting, which also applies to sex. “God gets you to the plate. But once you’re there, you’re on your own.” And she got undressed and I got undressed and I slid into her, and dug in, but before I raked the plate with my bat, I stepped back and I stood on the other side of the confessional.

“There is something I have to tell you,” I said outside her pink door. My eyeball looking into the wet keyhole.

She took a breath. Our bodies clung together with the sweat of our brief but intense union. Her skin was salty and sweet on my tongue. “Well, what do you have to say?”

“I must confess to you that I paid a witch fifty dollars to make you fall in love with me.”

“Fifty dollars?”

“Yes. She was at the fairgrounds last Tuesday. They were putting hexes on people for 100. Love spells were on special.”

She pulled me into her and gasped and vibrated like an idling supercharged Camaro as my key turned the ignition. Every muscle in her thin body seemed to twitch. “Well,” she panted. “I’ll be sure to let you know if it works. Or else you can – go get your – money back.”

I laughed and pushed further into her. My cross necklace beat over her face and I imagined Jesus disapproved of me, first for hiring a witch, and second for wearing his cross during the pleasure of premarital sex. I put my hand on her throat and slaughtered horses with my onslaught. The blitzkrieg. Then those slaughtered horses made me think of “Goodbye, Horses,” which made me think of Buffalo Bill singing it in drag with his dick between his legs, saying “I’d fuck me,’ which made me think of Jodi Foster and lesbians and I wondered about the sex lives of lesbians and I thought the witch was a lesbian and I wondered if there were any kind of money back guarantees for her love spells. I settled that there probably wasn’t and I laughed again because I confused sex with love, for the thousandth time of my life. Not that I have loved everyone I had sex with, but I presumed that most of them loved me when I wanted them to for some reason. But that ushered in a morgue full of exes and rotting bodies like those mass graves in the holocaust, so I cleared my head again, and buried myself into her until I saw O.J. Simpson running across the back of the airport of my eyelids in that Hertz commercial, hurdling luggage as he went, as my troops shelled Poland, ceaselessly with the mercy of only their own exhaustion. In and out. In and out. In and out. Flap, flap, flap went the bombers and the artillery. Smiling, gritty krauts and scattered, mutilated Poles. Good God, the horror of it! The wicked pleasure.

And I almost didn’t notice her wheezing “Oscar Hammerstein” and I thought I killed her and she lied there still and lifeless as I exploded into her bunker a bunker buster. But she gasped back to life and took a long breath afterwards and smiled at me through the dark, as exhausted as me, glistening with sweat.

“Hail Mary,” she exhaled with a smile.

“Hail Mary,” I agreed.

“That was like riding a ‘carousel’ through a nuclear fucking bomb.” Another clever Hammerstein reference. Then she pulled off the condom and whipped it against the wall and joked about round two.

And I told her round two would come soon. Probably, after she passed out. She smiled and said okay and held my hand and after a minute I said through the dark, “But, you know, green grow the lilacs.”

“I fucking love Oscar Hammerstein,” she laughed. And then she went to sleep.