Dirty Shoulders

by Liz Maher

He is not nice to you at all. But you aren't much for nice, anyway. Sometimes you wish that niceness made a bigger impression on you but for the most part it does not register. What makes an impression is when, after you stand back to back and link arms and he flips you upside down and over, and your shoe flies off, he goes over and picks it up and acts like he is going to give it to you and then instead throws it into the middle of the street and laughs. You try to act astonished and horrified but really inside you are cracking up because you think it is pretty funny that he did this. You know this is a problem--but...well...you know. Go get my fucking shoe you say--and he goes out into the street and picks up the cheap gold shoe and throws it further onto the Bowery. You ask someone else to go get the shoe for you, another guy and Mr. Nice and the other guy start wrestling in the midst of on coming traffic. You hope that they are fighting about you even though Mr. Nice isn't really the kind of guy to fight over a girl, especially you, but most likely they are fighting because they have penises and that's what penises do. Later you sit on Nice's lap and kiss his ears and face and whisper things to him about how sweet you think he is which is true in some version of the world. You wish that you can take him home and put him in a giant king-sized bed big enough for both of you and into freshly washed sheets that smell like clean mountain sun and filled with feathers just like "what's his name's" bed. By the way--you don't really like "what's his name" you only like his bed because "what's his name" is a fucking asshole in disguise as a decent functioning person. You do not understand why "what's his name," this fucking asshole, pretends to like you when you know damn well you confuse him far less than you should--because, honestly, he just isn't smart enough to be confused by you. So you fantasize about having your own king-size bed to put whoever you want into such as your friend with whom you are now laying on the sidewalk smoking cigarettes and shit--talking about someday having violent sex in Atlantic city: you would wait in the hotel room getting obnoxiously drunk and wearing trashy lingerie while he plays poker and loses. There will be no going back to your crappy apartment in Brooklyn because you have roommates and dogs that tried to bite his balls off last time and a creaky piece of shit futon that you bought third hand for 70 bucks with no sheets on it and dog hair and loose screws so it makes tons of noise when you try to have sex. No going to his house because you know all of his roommates way too well and his room is too psychotically messy. This is why you decide to go fuck outside somewhere--in Soho, somewhere. You do not tell him you are having your period because every single time you have fucked around with him in the past, you have been on your period (one time you told him it was because he must be a lunatic--ha, ha) and there is a part of you that actually believes that if you ignore things they will go away. You haven't had much success with this theory but that never stops you from using it when it's momentarily convenient. So you don't tell him and arm in arm you wander into the streets, and look for somewhere to have sex. You try a few places, you give him a blow job on a bench but you get embarrassed so you put on your white stilettos that you had in your bag and he puts his cop sunglasses on and you go buy condoms and finallyÉfinally, you descend down low deep beneath the cars and trucks in a shadowy pay parking lot. The lot is covered in sharp black gravel and the diseased soot of 10,000 automobiles that have leaked oil and died in this unsavory cemetery. You both take off your pants and underwear but leave your tops on like you did in high school when you were worried your parents might catch you and you begin doing it. He realizes you are bleeding and, thankfully, he laughs his ass off. You laugh too and he laughs so hard he looses his erection. I laughed my hard-on away he says! You love that he says this. You also love that when you finish, after he comes with his dick in your mouth and you swallow, after you remove the gravel from your vagina and ponder what likely strain of hepatitis you are infected with, after you seize the opportunity to put your nose in the hollow of his breast bone and inhale his unexpected sweet creamy smell and notice that he is wearing a gold necklace, you love how you lay back in the gravel heads facing north and south for a minute and how he strokes your dirty filthy feet and ankles. You acknowledge the ambivalent city towering up around you and its impersonal approval of your actions. It is time to go and you notice his hands and flimsy button-down shirt are streaked with red blood and you both laugh again in disbelief. Your feet and knees are all scraped up (you still have scars) and there is dirt and blood and sex all over everything surrounding your collective aura. You emerge from the dark shelter of the parking lot, arms draped over dirty shoulders, and then, making conversation, he makes you promise to have an abortion if you ever get pregnant and you refuse and tell him that if you ever are, you will move away to a small town where know one knows you and raise the little bastard on your own and he will be home-schooled and vegetarian and he, Mr. Nice, will never ever hear from either of you. He makes you promise to at least tell him first and you say okay and smile to yourself. You don't know why this makes you smile, but it does. You stumble through the bright stylish lights coming out of Soho storefronts, holding each other up looking like escaped convicts fresh with new murder. He leads you to your subway stop and kisses you goodbye in a kind of old-fashioned way.

You are a vampire. Your metal subway coffin rumbles toward you. Once on the train, oddly, you feel good. You feel happy. You feel kind of proud of having had wild nasty dirty bloody funny parking lot sex. You wonder if this is what you are allowed to feel or if instead, if you were normal, instead if you would feel embarrassed and degraded. You aren't sure. But you decide that you are smart enough just to appreciate the pageantry without any interpretation. You ponder this flushed and exhausted on your way to alphabet city to sleep in "what's his name's" king-size bed.

Photograph by Laura Podolnick