"The Liquid Life" (installment twenty-eight)

Public sex material is certainly delivered in different ways, dating this piece somewhat, but that's kind of what makes having a detailed literary piece from 20-years ago so valuable.


ELENDELE AND DOMINIQUE DISCUSS THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF PORN, HOWEVER BRIEFLY

“Dominique,” Elendele beckons me, locking my locks in her long nails and pulling on them for just the perfect hurt. “Baby,” she pursues, pushing me back against two stacked pillows and sitting on my chest with her precious puma before my faltering eyes, “don’t you have any dirty magazines we can look at? You know, sex books. We could look at them and get high and hot and try something different.”

I can dig the protocol. “Baby,” I baby her back, “I don’t have any, but if you want I’ll run down to the Korean liquor store. Those people will sell anything for a buck.”

She smirks me, “You don’t think they’re dirty do you?” And she waits, still smirking, thinking with her little line-irrigated forehead. That’s what is going to make her look older than her age, those wrinkles there from all the worrying, plotting, and philosophizing under all those curls. She runs her finger in circles round her tire-tread lips. Here it comes.

“You know,” Elendele says, and she pulls up close to my ears to whisper, “I was in one. Naked I mean. You know, with my legs spread.”

I’m numb to all this by now. That’s how she is. I don’t even think about her in a magazine because I can’t spend the energy when there’s some fandango in a door in her head waiting to pop out, perhaps at any moment. No jumping. No speech. No catharsis. So on she goes. “Cassius got me to do it.”

“I have asked you not to mention the name of that false prince in front of me.”

“You were the one who said we needed a good agent,” she reminded me, “Anyway, it wasn’t a centerfold or anything. One of the girls after the centerfold, one of the girls at the end, near the advertisements for the real porn. I was going to be the centerfold, but they got the Redondo Beach Miss Budweiser at the last minute and put there.”

I am a dustsurfer on the wave of stucco swooshing the ceiling over.

“Sooo,” she yells, hoping to move me with volume now. Fully afraid that I’m bored of her vaudeville. “You’re not mad. Sure you’re mad you damn Catholic mama’s boy, say something. You think they’re dirty those magazines, don’t you?”

I decide to give her a little. I love her so much. “No, I like them a lot. It’s just that I wouldn’t want someone in my family or the police to find them cleaning out my place if I died suddenly.”

Curve ball. Strike. She actually has to shut up a minute and redo the forehead. She says, “But you’d be dead. What makes you think you’d care about what happens after you’re dead?”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I say, “but still.”