UNDERCOOKED FISH
Dinner that evening had been either humbly magnificent or magnificent in its humility: Salmon, lightly-cooked with ginger and garlic, damp, white rice and heated spinach from a can. Tim had placed the plate in front of him and gone back to the stove, and Eli, waiting for his host to to sit so they could begin eating together, leaned in to smell the meal. The potency of the seared ginger and garlic hit his nose like a pungent hammer fashioned from warm air and vapor and he leaned in further, inhaling deeper, smiling.
“Oh my God, this smells amazing.”
“I cooked the fish with ginger, garlic, sesame oil and soy sauce.”
Eli leaned in again. Yes, he could smell the soy sauce now, almost forming itself around the ginger and garlic like walls. It was like the garlic and ginger were two people co-habitating a space only to have a soy house with sesame windows spontaneously erected around them with the prevailing principle of design being to perfectly complement and facilitate the daily activities of the inhabitants.
This was the house that soy built and whether mortgaging, renting or squatting, garlic and ginger had made it their home.
Tim sat and began to say grace. It wasn’t the grace of a Christian, but rather the grace of a “Far-East Space Cowboy, Rosicrucian, spirit-walking, sovereign.”
“I’m really glad we have this meal and I’m very happy to have you here to share it with.”
“Samesies,” Eli thought, smirking inwardly at how gay the sentiment of reciprocity sounded.
“Me as well,” he said with outward solemnity.
They dug in. It was incredibly satisfying, and Eli found himself eating very slowly and deliberately even though he was usually inclined toward gulping his food down mindlessly. Such mindlessness would profane this meal though; This meal symbolized brotherhood and acceptance into one’s world that transcended the financial costs and the small (though commonplace) miracle of eating fish in the mountainous reaches of the Sonoran desert.
They’d had fish (sole) the night before and the night before that also (whitefish…tuna… he wasn’t sure) and in all cases Tim had cooked the fish gently which had made it juicier and more flavourful.
One could almost imagine themself a bear in the Pacific Northwest catching a salmon right from the river and biting into its still-living flesh with relish while eating fish cooked so non-committaly.
Over last night’s meal of near-raw sole, their pre-dinner conversation about women and meeting them on other planes of existence than this prompted Eli to tell Tim about the one girl he’d been dreaming about -V, a significantly younger and very naive former conquest. She wasn’t the one he thought he should be dreaming about, which might present problems down the road, but right now he was more concerned that his dreams of her had been scenes of violent fuck-making. He vividly remembered slapping her in the face in the midst of a sexual struggle, then turning her over and sodomizing her while pinning her arms behind her back (he woke up with damp shorts for his troubles). All the while she seemed to be enjoying the degradation, and the pain and most of all enjoying the…
There was one more thing she was enjoying but the realization hadn’t reached his conscious mind during last night’s meal because Tim began responding to Eli’s dream revelation with his peculiar brand of paranoid/enlightened stream-of-consciousness and the monotonous gravitas took over Eli’s thoughts -not effectively enough as to imprint its content on his memory, but enough to distract him from the mystery of V’os implacable enjoyment of being roughly, even “sinfully” taken. Instead, while Tim droned on, Eli’s mind had wandered to the thought of how appropriate it was to be having a conversation about hatefully defiling a sweet young girl while thoroughly enjoying a piece of undercooked fish.
Last night’s conversation about his dreamed depravities with this young girl had also been something of a milestone in his relationship with Tim. He had spoken openly and vulnerably, not attempting to humble-brag when describing that the dream girl was actually someone real he had slept with, and someone who was furthermore almost every bit as pliant and submissive in real life as she was in the dream (God bless her heart). But tonight was a little different; Tonight they were talking about ____________ and the young man felt compelled to talk about Mindy, a story he couldn’t relate without a modicum of humble-braggadociousness.
“I was leaving Florence a few weeks back, heading to Phoenix…” Eli related how he’d found Florence depressing with its surfeit of correctional facilities and sleepy population, and after spending one evening and one morning
NOT IN JAIL; JUST VISITING
in the town he had set out hitch-hiking toward Phoenix. En route, a woman had reached out to him and made conversation. She was Hispanic, and had a cute, round face. She asked him about where he was from and what he was doing dressed like a paramilitary. He explained that he was a film-maker and told her of his journey, and she suddenly asked if he was hungry.
He knew what this was and had mixed feelings, but also had personally challenged himself to always say “yes” to new possibilities. They walked 10 minutes to her small one-bedroom house in the ghetto outskirts of an already ghetto town, all the while talking about her recent abandonment by her boyfriend. When they arrived she entered first to calm her dog, a yappy chihuahua named Chili. ‘Yappy chihuahua’ he mused; a redundancy if there ever was one. He supposed his general dislike of the breed went back to his teenage years when his Salvadorean girlfriend at the time had babysat a couple of them for a few weeks. It was bad enough to have to wait for her parents to go upstairs before making a move, but when the dogs alerted her parents to every shift of his ass cheek with a shrill series of barks…well, he didn’t like the breed. However, he felt he could get past his dislike today as he suspected that there were no parents here to be alerted and maybe there never had been.
“This is caldo,” she had said indicating a pot of hearty-looking soup on the stovetop.
He glanced in: potatoes and meat.
He looked at her: same.
He smiled at this thought and she smiled back as she began serving him.
The soup, caldo, was quite good on its own but he poured in some of the offered hot sauce. She watched him while he ate and talked about her life, and circumstances, and kids, and plans to leave this town. He put his bowl on a side table when he’d finished and then moved to the front porch and began packing his corncob pipe with some tobacco he’d purchased from a Circle K mere minutes before meeting her. It was a rough smoke; he should have expected as much when the teenage, skater townie joking with the clerk reassured him that he smoked this brand all the time. Still, it was tobacco, and he let her take a hit off his pipe which they both realized on some level was an overture toward some greater sharing, if not an escalation.
“It’s hot as a fuck out here” he observed, benevolently, if profanely. He moved back into the house onto the love-seat where he had been sitting for the meal. She sat beside him and started talking about _______. He cast her a series of sidelong glances, meeting her eyes a few times but mostly observing her in profile. He could tell she was kind and decent and tried to do well. He knew too that her kindness had been wasted upon sleepy people who had been cruel or indifferent to her. She wasn’t lovely but she had a loveliness about her, and she needed something from him. What though?
Some dick?
Maybe, not primarily.
She needed intimacy that was kind. It didn’t have to be deeply satisfying, earth-shattering or even lasting; just kind intimacy with a kind person.
He needed something too. But he was only prepared to give so much of himself. He knew he didn’t want to kiss her and he knew he didn’t want to make love to her, but his libido had been piqued and a blowjob sounded just fine.
Knowing now what he wanted, he struggled with how to broach such an indecent proposal.
“I wanna ask you something but I don’t know how to say it.”
“Just use your mouth.”
“That’s what I was hoping you would do.”
She looked over at him a little surprised and he grabbed her left hand and placed it on the bulge in his fatigue trousers. She seemed a little flushed and a shiver went through her. “Hold on,” she said and went into the kitchen to pen the dog. He unbuckled his utility belt and undid his pants, still very much locked into his rig -a tactical vest laden with pouches, secured to his belt and pants with keeps -but his dick was free.
She came back into the living room and her eyes widened. Sitting beside him she started stroking.
“This is the biggest dick I’ve ever seen.”
He smirked at this observation and attributed it to her lack of sexual experience. He knew he was average-sized and when women said this kind of thing he knew they were being kind and took it for what it was.
She went down on him.
He applied gentle pressure to the back of her head as she did so. It wasn’t the best blowjob he’d ever had but it was the best one he could remember at this moment.
Something about the whole situation was primal and visceral and greasy.
Greasy. That word kept going through his head. A kind of catch-all term for debauchery he’d picked up watching The Trailer Park Boys, but also greasy in a more tangible sense. He hadn’t showered in about 24 hours (not his longest unbathed stretch to be sure) but he’d done some hard-marching in that time and she was paying especial attention to the bits of him which would become unpalatable quickest of all. He felt vaguely bad for her in the same way Al Swearengen must have felt vaguely bad for his whores when he stripped down to his dirty long-johns and got a blowjob from them after a long day of running the Gem. Eli wondered idly if those feelings of pity only turned Al on more like they did him in this moment as the meat and potato woman paid his dick the highest respect one can pay a thing (to put it in one’s mouth).
“Mmmmm…you’re the best” he muttered. She stopped sucking and lifted her head to face him.
“You can say what you want but you don’t have to lie to me.”
“I’m not lying.”
She looked at him skeptically for a moment then resumed her veneration.
“Poor girl,” he thought to himself, “She doesn’t believe me.”
At length she’d finished, they’d talked some and he carried on north. Later that afternoon when he’d arrived in Phoenix as a result of some fortuitous hitch-hiking, he found a note Mindy had tucked into his bag while searching for his journal:
“Her note said I was the highlight of her year,” Eli said as Tim sat listening with an ambivalent, though attentive expression. The expression didn’t change and so Eli elaborated.
“She fed ME and sucked MY dick and I was the highlight of HER year.” A smirk developed on Tim’s face upon Eli’s articulation of this realization, implying that he too had been the highlight of the year for many women before his self-imposed exile into the remote reaches of the Sonoran desert.
Eli withdrew into his mind not wanting to think about Tim getting his dick sucked. He focused on his own experience; he liked the idea of being the highlight of someone’s year simply by allowing them to feed and blow him. It satisfied his ego. He thought there was something Christ-like about it (“Take this all of you and eat it; this is my body…”). Perhaps his Light was so strong that contact with him -“helping” him actually elevated others. By that rationale he had made Mindy better, elevated her, by allowing her to partake of him.
And at this thought he realized what he hadn’t the night before, what V, the girl from the from the dream he’d discussed had enjoyed so much beyond the pain and the degradation.
“I slapped and anally raped her and it was the highlight of her year because in the dream (as in real life) she believed I was better than her and any contact with me elevated her.”
Eli’s eyes widened while squinting at the pleasant discomfort of this thought. This was powerful. Some cult shit. He had a fondness for these women (though no admiration) but they idolized him and wanted to partake in his Light, even if the illumination apparatus was a greasy, average-sized, non-consensual dick.
He looked down at his somewhat diminished plate of undercooked fish.
Perhaps last night’s comparison of defiling a young, pliant girl to devouring a piece of undercooked fish could be taken even further into a metaphysical conceit of Donne-esque proportions, but Eli had no inclination to do so.
As if on cue, Tim’s voice began to register and he listened to the old hippie’s deconstruction of reality with a quiet mind as he cleaned his plate.
Write-Errantry 