'smoking vegan, smiling gun' -- part one
Hello.

I've been trying to update this for a few solid hours. It's annoying. Apparently, it's over the length limit. What the hell ever. So I'm doing it in four parts. Or something.

A novel by me, dedicated to someone who's not me. This is



smoking vegan, smiling gun
a novel
by tim rogers




smoking vegan,



one


Fuck John Mellencamp for starting all this. Fuck him in the back of the neck with an icepick. "Rock and roll" my ass.

I mean, that's not to say I hate John Mellencamp, or even dislike him. As far as people go, for all I know, he's alright. If I met him under circumstances that didn't involve a weasel, a handgun and a hit and run, I'm sure we could have sat down and had a nice, honest conversation. For some reason, I take it he'd have been a good listener, as long as he didn't mention music.

The reason John Mellencamp shouldn't mention music is because he makes music. He makes music of a certain variety that I wouldn't trust on a guy who mentions music to me.

Take a big fat ball of "rock and roll," drop it into the colander of Midwestern "popularity," and let it sit for an hour in a sink. The unwanted bits that are evil and chaotic enough to stick to the drainpipe -- that's John Mellencamp's music.

I so strongly voice my dislike for John Mellencamp's music in an effort to achieve a certain modicum of honesty. If I pretended to like John Mellencamp on both personal and artistic levels, you'd get this eerie sense that I'm lying to you. That eerie sense would happen to be right, because I would, in fact, be lying to you. So I'm being honest.

I'm also being honest when I say that as long as John Mellencamp stayed off the subject of music, he and I would probably get along quite well. I'd buy him a drink, or something. Maybe we'd end up playing darts. I play darts like a son-of-a-bitch. There's ninja blood in me, I swear.

I mention the darts and my idea about buying John Mellencamp a drink because I want to show you that I, innately, have no hostility toward John Mellencamp, nor do I have any reason to try to kill him.

Why, really, would I want to kill John Mellencamp? I mean, really? He's not a bad person, I'm sure. Sure, he makes music that makes me angry. Yet, if this music happens to come up on the radio, I change the station. It's not as if anyone is pressing John Mellencamp's music into my ears and making me listen to it. Let's get realistic here.

I can recall the exact moment I realized my dislike of John Mellencamp's music. I was in high school. My mother was in the kitchen, with the radio on full blast. I was in the living room, on the sofa, doing homework. My mother was baking cookies, and singing along to "Jack and Diane." It was an otherwise quiet day in the cold of winter.

"Here's a little ditty, about Jack and Diane -- two American kids growing up as best as they can."

Or maybe they're growing up "In the heartland." Either way, you get the point.

I mean, what the fuck?

Next, my mother started singing along to "I want you to dance naked." This, I couldn't take.

I wanted to tell my mother to turn off the radio.

I didn't.

She was scary. She screamed her way through my childhood. She has diabetes now.

"Summer of 69" came up next.

They were having a John Mellencamp weekend. Two out of every three songs they played on the damned radio were by John Mellencamp. They always did this in Indianapolis, Indiana. That's where I went to high school. After high school, I wound up not too far from home -- at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

This was also John Mellencamp's hometown.

After college, I ended up at graduate school, also at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

It was during this graduate school experience that I, quite ridiculously, ran into John Mellencamp.

That's getting ahead.



How this story gets from me studying magazine journalism to my trying to kill John Mellencamp is a bit of a tale. I'm not sure I understand it. There's probably a greater chance of you understanding it.

I might as well get started.



two


One more thing, though -- about John Mellencamp. I'm mentioning above about how I think he must be a decent guy, because I really believe it. I'm mentioning how I hate -- dislike -- his music, because it's something of a character flaw in me. I took creative writing classes in college. They told us, then, that characters had to have flaws. It's hard to see my own flaws. So I'm stressing this one that I know.

My creative writing teacher was gay, and he hated Stephen King, because Stephen King was popular. I'm pretty sure that he hated Stephen King because of his success, not because of his books. This gay writing teacher -- his hatred of Stephen King was pretty much the exact inverse of my dislike of John Mellencamp.

It's like this: the gay writing teacher -- I say he was gay, because he was -- when someone mentioned Stephen King, he got this look on his face.

"What about him?"

He never expressed any specific disdain toward Stephen King's work, not even once.

Well, once, he got close:

"When you're famous, you can write 300,000-word novels, too. For now, stick to short stories, or nothing."

And once, when he was talking about character flaws, he got pretty close to an outright criticism. This gay writing teacher said that Stephen King's idea of a realistic flaw was to afflict his characters with some sort of illness the recovery of which is central to the story. For example, the guy in Misery is bedridden following a car accident -- and later has his foot chopped off by his "Number One Fan," who's holding him hostage in her house. The warden in The Green Mile has a urinary infection that might be contributing to the staleness of his marriage -- or so it goes in the beginning of the book, before he meets a big, black, angel of a prisoner who heals him.

"Two-dimensional," my teacher called it.

At the time I took that class, I had an inguinal hernia. If you don't know what an inguinal hernia is, the best way to explain it is to say that it's what a doctor is looking for when he asks a guy to turn his head and cough during a physical. If that's not specific enough, try this: a link of my small intestine protruded into my scrotum, causing me the pain of being kicked in the groin with every footstep. It compressed my bladder, too, making me urinate every fifteen minutes, on the fifteen minutes. It was like clockwork. I wasn't much of a writer -- the other students in the class always shrugged my work off as "I liked it" because "it was good," and "It was good" because "I liked it." No one seemed to notice that all of my narrators had inguinal hernias. I'm guessing the gay writing teacher did.

He probably thought my narrators were "two-dimensional." Oh, well. I had to drop the class because he was failing me. I'd not turned in a story on time. He made me come visit his office, where he told me the most important part of telling a story was having a story to tell.

Quite frankly, this gay writing teacher told me, I didn't have a story to tell.

He had photographs all over his wall. He was from Puerto Rico. He was balding, at thirty-five. He had a beard. He was an all-around nice guy.

I later read his book:

Gay, from Puerto Rico, bald, with a beard.

That's about the gist of the story.

He probably had a hard time growing up. According to his author bio, he was an only child.

His book didn't mention the Beauty and the Beast poster on his wall. The Beast looked more menacing than ever in his buffalo-ish cartoon shape, on the wall behind this bearded balding gay Puerto-Rican writing professor.

So, this writing professor in reality:

Gay, from Puerto Rico, bald, with a beard, fan of Disney.

A minority in a minority in a minority in a minority in a majority.

"Accentuate the minority" must have been this guy's motto.

Or maybe it was "Poetry? What the fuck?" He liked to scoff loudly at poetry. He was always carrying around books of the stuff and scoffing at it. He hated poetry so much he read it voraciously.
He hated text-emphasis, too. Vocal emphasizing was okay. Text-emphasizing was not. If he saw italics used for any purpose other than book titles, his red pen was going to make a showing.

Before meeting this guy, I'd never had a creative writing professor actually mark my papers. Isn't it all supposed to be up to interpretation?

"You have some talent for story-telling, really," he told me, at that last conference.

I shook my head. "It must be the journalist in me."

"You just need a story to tell," he went on.

"Hmm."

"Something personal."

"I think I'll stick to poetry."

"Poetry?"

"Yeah. For blowing off the creative steam."

"Shit."

Prior to meeting this guy, I'd never had poetry's purpose so clearly laid out for me:

"You know why poetry exists?"

"Um . . . why?"

"So semi-intellectuals can occasionally win twenty-five-dollar gift certificates to Red Lobster, from Yale."

Hmm, I thought: this guy's using his second language well.

I should have heeded his warning. No good comes of poetry.

I was too cocky. I walked out of that office with a second signature on my class-drop slip. And a copy of Indiana University's student literary magazine, Canvas, which he suggested I "take a look at," if I was "so interested in poetry."

He was right, though:

No good comes of poetry.

Maybe he was right about everything else, too?



If I'm going to tell you a story, I'm going to have a story to tell. And I'm going to make points, and be personal. I'm going to emphasize myself. And I might teach you something.

Lesson number one:



three



No good comes of poetry.

I wrote a poem deep into the fall semester of my first graduate year. I wrote it to blow off steam during a big, boring busywork project on magazine writing, editing, and design. It was for a nonexistent sports magazine. I did it well, and doing it well meant doing it tediously.

The poem was written on a whim. It was about a certain devoutly religious Korean girl.

She was, as I've said, devoutly religious. She attended church sometimes more than thrice a week.

Being devoutly religious, however, did not prevent her from having much sex, with me, of all people.

This was during my senior year, before I met the girl I'm currently living with.

That devoutly religious Korean girl was nice and firm and short. Her nipples were black as coal, little as big diamonds, and firm as pencil erasers. When she was naked, they were like vortexes for my eyes. Nothing else mattered -- not her jagged teeth, not her thin hair, not her solid abs. Not her feet.

I never once looked at her feet. I'm not a foot person. I've actually never known anyone who was a "foot person." I'm not sure I know what it means, precisely, to be a "foot person."

Still, I wonder why I never looked at this girl's feet. I had every right to. Like all other non-amputees, she had two of them. I could have at least looked at at least one of them at least once.

What makes this non-foot-looking even stranger is the fact that she regularly washed them. She made a point of drawing out the process. She'd heat up the water, gather up her sponges and moisturizers, and wash her feet for ten minutes. At my place, she used the kitchen sink. At hers, she used the bathroom sink. Her bathroom had pinned-up pictures of supermodels. My bathroom had walls that functioned as a shoulder-massage when you stood up and sat down on the toilet repeatedly. At her house, she had her little pink soaps. At mine, she used her hands.

After sex, she took a shower. She would announce it three minutes beforehand. Then she'd get up and head for the shower.

She didn't have an ass. She was too short. So there was no real incentive to watching her naked retreat to the bathroom. If we were at my place, it was usually Saturday night, so I picked up the remote, and turned on some basketball. My roommate and best friend, gay as he was, and black, always went to the basketball games on Saturday night. He loved Indiana University basketball as much as he loved Corona beer and hanging out with lesbians. He was out mystifying his homosexuality, while I was stuck having heterosex with an assless girl, the both of us totally lacking in mysticality.

I lacked mysticality because I was a white heterosexual American male. She lacked mysticality because her religion forbade it.

Even so, there might have been a little bit of mysticism in that devoutly religious Korean girl. When she started up my shower and padded back through the bedroom and into the kitchen, where she washed her feet, it put some kind of feeling in me. She flowed through a room. Her path from the bathroom to the kitchen was set in devoutly religious Korean stone. She displaced waves of mysticism as she moved, and made me feel it. I felt it all the way from the bed. What I felt was the very thing that had attracted me to her in the first place.

Strange words:

"She lacked mysticality because her religion forbade it."

The forbidden mystical slipped off that dark-nippled devoutly religious Korean girl like water off a duck's feathers. A wake followed her on her path to wash her feet.

Naked too, I once followed her into the kitchen. She had one foot up on the rim of the sink. With her right hand, she was repeatedly testing the temperature of the water:

"Too cold. Too cold. Too cold."

Somewhere in my mind, "I want you to dance naked / if you'd like I'd join you."

She was humming, and drumming the metal of my kitchen sink with her toes. They must have been flexible as a monkey's. I wasn't looking at them.

I put my hands on her hips, and she didn't move. I kissed her on the loose, soft skin of her neck.

"Too cold," she said, of the water, or of my hands.

Inside, she was still warm.

The kissing devoutly religious Korean girl bit tongue. Extended sessions felt like licking Velcro.

We were back on the bed in a second. She was sitting on top of me, and she had her feet pressed to my sides. Her feet were absolutely freezing, as the kitchen sink and the shower kept running, united in their mission to use up all the hot water before my gay roommate could get home, shower, throw spaghetti into the microwave, and watch ESPN.

At the moment, I was thinking of black nipples.

Seconds later, something occurred to me: I could go for some spaghetti right now.

Years later, I was working on a project, and remembering that night -- either because my project involved basketball, because I was cold, or because I was living, at the time, with my current girlfriend, who was always out doing things that I never had to do, meeting people that I never had to meet, and driving a car that I never had to drive. It was all part of law school, she assured me.

I was horny, and a little drunk, when I wondered why I didn't look at that devoutly religious Korean girl's feet that night when I surprised her before she could start washing them. When she sat astride me, all I saw were nipples. Like two black eyes staring right back at me. As for the devoutly religious Korean girl's own eyes -- they remained closed. Maybe she was praying.

Who was she praying to? The God of minority minorities? What was she praying for? A majority?

Furthermore, what had happened to her? Why did she and I quit seeing each other? I was drunk, and in a poetic mood, so I didn't remember.

What had started out as a poem of longing for another chance to look at the girl's feet deteriorated into something of a vaguely veiled criticism of religion:


Washing your feet in my kitchen sink
Showing spiritual calves a-flex
In black nipples we trust, nonstopping to think
Synapse soaked dirty with Jesus Complex

Show face at high place four times a week
Lender of money is slender to loan
Hotwatertight roof refusing to leak
Angry, hesitate, cast the first stone

Stand up legs high first in a crowd
Spigots' flow random significant verses
Shower when seated naturally loud
Closed-eyes closed-feet quiet-curses

Virtuosity baptized what you need so few
Not not enough to let let touch you


It was something of a sonnet. I rattled it off, titled it "Jesus Complex," drank another beer, and looked at the clock.

"Basketball? What the fuck?"

"You know why basketball exists?"

"So people can feel better about their selves, and be tall, and triumph over minority?"

"So semi-intelligent people can win twenty-five-dollar gift certificates to Red Lobster, from Yale?"

"So mostly-talented people can win twenty-five-million-dollar gift certificates from Nike?"

My girlfriend hadn't gotten home yet. Neither had my gay black roommate. It was after midnight, and I was talking to myself. I blacked out for two hours, and woke up with all my work finished.



Imagine my surprise when, a month later, I got an email from Canvas, the Indiana University student literary magazine.

Here we go: I'd won first place in their annual winter poetry open.

They didn't give me a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate to Red Lobster. They did, however, invite me to a reading with free punch and cookies, and they did love to hear my story.

It was at the poetry reading that I met the Smoking Vegan.



four


The Smoking Vegan began stalking me, I have since surmised, three seconds into my reading of my poem.

In the next few months, I'd wonder, "What business does a lesbian have stalking me?"

I have to admit I wasn't sure whether or not she was really a lesbian. I gave her the benefit of the doubt from the start.

Why she looked like a lesbian, exactly, I can't quite put my finger on. She wasn't tall. She wasn't beefy. She wasn't biker-like. She didn't wear anything of any kind of leather. She was dressed like a vegan, with a skirt, and freckled. Her ratty, oily red-brown hair, like dirty pasta, hung out below a cowboy bandana, probably cotton.

Her shoes were poly-leather black platforms. She hovered, and green-eyed me with unsympathy as I top-teeth-scraped the pink icing off a butter cookie. I enjoyed my dairy in a tart way without noticing anything that wasn't pink or buttered or baked. When I saw the short, freckled girl's nose-squinching look, I didn't immediately take it to be that of a beflustered vegan. It was more of a "Pal, do you have any idea what you're doing?" look. It was less of a look of an animal-lover tempted to break my kneecaps with a golf club, and more of the look of a technicality-fearing elementary school science-fair-winner about to brain me with a cookie-eating textbook. Either way, violence was in her look.

The cookies weren't so good. I'd had better. I'd have better. The butter part of the butter cookie was too moist in a gagging way. It made the backs of my nasal passages feel acidy, like drinking orange juice through a straw, through my nose. The Smoking Vegan, who was neither smoking nor immediately vegan at the time, snorted at me, crossed her arms, and said something to her companion.

Her companion was slightly bigger and beefier, yet somehow more immediately feminine. She wore her mind on her bare and pimpled arms. A silver stud in her nose reflected the evening orange café light. The reflected orange light gave the impression of a space-hole in this girl's nose. Looking at that orange and shining space-hole increased my hunger. I packed two more cookies in and saturated them with red punch.

"They make that with lava rocks, you know," the Smoking Vegan said to me. Her voice was thin as mountain air. That's not to say she climbed mountains, or that I did. She, at least, possessed the agility to dodge a good avalanche or two: she had sidled up to my side I know not when.

"I don't taste them," I said, throat full of confection and punch.

"Nobody does. That's the point," she said.

She wanted me to say, "So why do they put the lava rocks in there, anyway?" I didn't say it. I was against falling into some befreckled vegan girl's semantic traps. So I said, "So I see."

The Smoking Vegan snorted, and looked out at the khaki-and-flannel poetry-adoring wave. Her snort moved fluid like a smoker's. I could hear the inside of her small head churning with something. I scanned her baggy body for a cigarette-pack-bulge. She had one, in her loose brown corduroy jacket. The jacket hung low over her tank-topped skintight petiteness. I had just found the cigarettes when she spoke up.

"Your poem was interesting," she said.

"Thanks," I said.

She made a small circle with her lips, and took in a cigaretteless drag.

"I was on the committee."

"Ah," I said.

"I'm a senior," she said.

"I was a senior, once," I said, I know not why.

"I was in charge of all the selections."

"That's a lot of responsibility," I said with a cough. The cookie in my esophagus turned sideways and pushed down the sarcasm.

"Shit. No kidding. All this talent."

Either I didn't catch her facetiousness, or I didn't try to. "You get a lot of submissions?"

"Hicksville," she said. "Abercrombie-and-Bitches. This place. Shit."

"Don't like Indiana?"

This was the first time the girl mentioned John Mellencamp.

"Fucking John-Mellencamp-ass bastards."

"John Mellencamp, did you say?"

"Yeah. You heard of him?"

I scoffed. "Every damned day," I said.

"Oh. You struck me as a guy not from around here."

"I strike me as a guy not from around here, sometimes."

"No kidding. So what's your beef with Mellencamp?"

"My mom used to sing his songs."

"Ouch."

"You're telling me. Nothing like a menopausal woman trying to sing along to pseudo-rock-and-roll."

"Does she still sing along now?"

I shrugged. "She has diabetes, now. I'm guessing that does something to her energy level. For all I know, she's still menopausal. So there's no ruling it out."

"How you grew up to write poetry . . ." the girl said, like there was going to be a second half to her sentence. There wasn't. I continued drinking lava punch, she continued breathing as though through a cigarette.

I finished my cup of punch.

"The poetry isn't much," I said, a minute too late. I talked while biting the rim of the empty paper cup.

"That's what they all say."

"Ah."

"I liked your reading."

"Oh?"

"It felt like I was hearing the poem for the first time."

I scoffed. "It felt like I was reading it for the first time."

The girl snorted. "We were wondering if there was a story behind it."

Still biting the empty-paper-cup-rim, I spoke: "I'm pretty sure there is."



five



By the end of the poetry reading, the Smoking Vegan, who had yet to reveal herself as a smoker and a vegan, gave me her phone number and email address. The twenty "people" who worked hard three days of the semester to put together Indiana University's premier literary arts magazine liked to gather and drink coffee and talk about philosophy on Friday afternoons. They'd enjoy my company, Smoking Vegan told me none too enthusiastically.

I showed up at the Waffle House on Jordan Avenue a little before noon and left during sunset. The Smoking Vegan was sucking on one cigarette as I entered and a different one as I sat down. The Smoking Vegan's table was populated by sorority girls in sorority sweatshirts. All of them dined on dry wheat toast and black hash browns. At the head of the table sat one large and bubbly-fleshed woman of about fifty. She could have been simply thirty and wrinkled. She put away plate after plate of sorority-girl-funded sausages and eggs. I ordered a hamburger, and everyone looked at me. Smoking Vegan had told me beforehand that she was going to pick up the check, so I figured there was no risk.

The large woman talked on and on about something in the Bible. Something about women being submissive to men. She was a real anti-chauvinist. She attacked the Bible in words as general as her fork-cuts of egg were sloppy. My French fries tasted like menthol, and I didn't complain.

"Jack?"

"Yeah?" I said. I was staring at a French fry I'd dipped in my peppered ketchup. I like peppering my ketchup, rather than peppering my fries. It helps the pepper stick. If pepper doesn't stick, what's the point?

On this day, the pepper reminded me in a stomach-trembling way of black cigarette ashes floating in a public toilet.

"You can tell us about your poem now."

I let the French fry slip out of focus; behind it, there was the large woman with the wrinkled and chipped face. She was talking to me.

"Oh, sure," I said, and dropped the fry. I wiped my hands on a big cloth napkin, and cleared my throat. Smoking Vegan scraped her fork most unpalatably across her plate, as if to silence a crowd that didn't exist before they could make noise they weren't going to make. She wasn't looking at me. She sat next to the large woman and her biker-ish lesbianlike friend with the nose stud. The both of them were smoking like it had already gone out of style. The air was left with minty nicotine. Smoking Vegan and company were left with cartons full of dead trend.

"There was this girl," I said, gesturing. Stopping and starting, I spoke: "This Devoutly Religious Korean Girl."

This raised vegan eyebrows, and two non-vegan ones. I checked myself, and choked on my quickly-becoming-menthol mucus. Why the hell had I spoken her name in capital letters? Had I ever thought of the devoutly religious Korean girl as the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl before? My style, my enunciation: it raised eyebrows. Maybe I really did have some gift for storytelling. I'd best not flaunt that gift too flamboyantly, I thought, in such feminist company. I used my storytelling like you wear that sweater your aunt got you: constantly adjusting the cuffs, and the collar, though only in her presence.

All in all, the tale of the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl's feet-washing took an hour. It got pretty drawn-out. I kept going off on tangents about my former gay writing professor, my inguinal hernia, and character flaws. I employed a bit of what might be called a sense of humor in the telling of the story. The large woman didn't laugh. Whenever everyone else laughed, Smoking Vegan looked at the large woman, and decided not to laugh. The large woman didn't look at me. I didn't look at the large woman. I was looking at the Waffle House sign: out in the parking lot, two stories tall, glittering in different ways as the sun moved.

At the conclusion of my story -- me at home, cold, horny, semi-drunk, my girlfriend out at the Law Library -- the table was silent. A dozen vegans' glasses were empty of organic orange juice. I had even gone so far as to explain each one of the poem's lines in detail -- I had no idea why else a sorority girl had handed me a copy of Canvas the second I sat down.

"So," the large woman said. Her "So" was short and stabbing.

"Yes?" I asked. I was pushing a peppered-ketchup-cover French fry around my cold plate with a fork.

"So you still fantasize about this Devoutly Religious Korean Girl?"

Now everyone was capitalizing her name.

"Not really," I said. "I was just thinking about her a little bit, that's all. I was a little drunk, and thinking about her."

"Uh . . . huh."

"What? What?"

"You have a girlfriend, you said?"

"Yeah," I said.

The large woman snorted. "Typical."

"Now," I said, "I didn't say I was fantasizing about her. I'm just saying she crossed my mind, that's all."

The large woman pointed a fork-impaled sausage at me.

"Check your head," she said.

"What?" I asked her.

"Check your head," she repeated.

I tried to say "What?" again. I tried to start some piece of some syllable several times, only to continually get the "Check you head" treatment. The Smoking Vegan, my sole defender, wasn't defending me. Eventually, I gave up, and the large woman began talking about tarot cards. I looked out the window at the Waffle House sign, and the sun's reflection nearly blinded me.



six



It was three days later that the Smoking Vegan's stalking began in earnest. She showed up outside my journalism classes -- the ones I taught, the ones where I assisted professors, the ones I took -- with a bag of organic bagel, just headed to her lunch. She was a journalism student with a minor in philosophy. She liked poetry. She wrote it, and she read it. Three times, walking with this girl into the Indiana Memorial Union building, where we sat and ate and drank -- I Sprite and hatefully undelicious pizza, she aforementioned organic bagel and some one-hundred-percent-juice juice -- I felt like bringing up the Yale Red Lobster Theory of Poetry. I always backed away from jumping into the joke -- either I feared the negative attack at poetry would send this girl over whatever edge she was standing on, or that the mention of lobster would break her poetic confidence: why write poetry, if the most you can aspire to is to win a free meal you can't eat?

Why I felt like the girl was teetering over some edge of extremity, I don't know. Her behavior wasn't the oddest I'd ever seen. She walked calmly, talked calmly -- perhaps with a slow, clinically depressed drawl -- and stalked calmly. I don't even know if I could consider it "stalking" per se. We were both students in Indiana University's relatively close-knit journalism school. We passed one another in the halls at least twice a day. She didn't always say hello, which is either typical or atypical of a stalker, depending on your perspective. For one thing, I didn't say hello, either. I barely looked at her. Which isn't to say I overly disliked the girl. I really didn't like looking at anyone when I walked from class to office with anger, frustration, hunger, and a cup of coffee. My purposes divided, my schedule laid out before me: I didn't have time to look at and say hello to random people. I was sure it was the same with the Smoking Vegan. When the day's chores parted like chauvinistically biblical seas, "before" on one side, "after" on the other, "lunch" being the space between, that was when the Smoking Vegan ran into me with time to talk. And talk we did.

Most of the time, I talked about my gay black roommate's mystified homosexuality, and his job at a bagel shop. It turns out the Smoking Vegan had been there a few times, before she found the bagels she currently adores enough to pay tribute to every day.

"He works, like, twelve hours a week," I said.

"He complains about it all the time," I said.

"He says, ‘Shit, man, why the hell don't you have a job?'" I said.

"And I tell him, ‘Man, I teach classes and shit. This is a job. Especially when you're surrounded by students who use "borrow" as a transitive verb,'" I said.

Drinking Sprite and eating barely-classifiable-as-pizza pizza, I told these stories in such a way as to incite riots of laughter, or at least questions, in any self-deprecating journalism/philosophy student. She didn't laugh. She munched her bagel, and listened with her dirty-green eyes wide open. She sipped her juice, and nodded. I felt like a comedian who was dying out there.

The reason it seems now like she was stalking me is because of her lack of advances. She didn't jump out at me. She didn't try to grab me. She didn't say insane things about self-mutilation. Somewhere buried in the back of her not-an-attitude attitude, the stalking shone through, and I could see it. The Smoking Vegan could not hide her madness from me. Rather than give her the cold shoulder, I walked with her in rain before and after winter break. Even on Valentine's Day, I met this Smoking Vegan, and it was then that I loaned her a book she took a month in returning.

I lent her the book, in part, because she was so damned lazy in the revelation of her insanity. Before I could decide the girl was dangerous, she had to prove me right about her being dangerous. She had yet to do that. Nearly two months I knew this girl, and she hadn't shown herself to be pretty much of anything. What a half-assed stalker I ended up with, I lamented, and still never mentioned my girlfriend. It was so easy not to. You'd never guess how easy it was. I came to understand how not-yet-caught serial killers can be so cool about their everyday life: the kid who rings up your milk at the supermarket doesn't even know anyone's dead.

We were outside the Indiana Memorial Union when I lent the Smoking Vegan a book. We were under the eaves, looking out at the more historic-looking part of Indiana University, with pretty flowering trees and law school and all, staying back from biting cold rain. Smoking Vegan was smoking, and I had my hands in my pockets. I was cold in jeans and a sweater. As it rained, the sweater picked up distance condensation, and I dug through my backpack for my girlfriend's collapsible umbrella. The corner of a book poked out of my backpack.

"What are you reading?" the Smoking Vegan asked me between drags. This was as much of a question as she ever asked.

I pulled the book out of my bag. Gesturing at the cover like it made my explanation easier to understand, I spoke. "It's Toddler-Hunting, by Kono Taeko. It's kind of feminist Japanese literature of the 1970s. It's pretty heavy on themes of sado-masochism. There's this one story -- ‘Ants Swarm,' it's called -- where a wife fears she's pregnant. When she finds out she's not pregnant, she and her husband celebrate, and she begs him to beat her with a fishing rod. The next morning, she goes down to the kitchen to find that she'd left a piece of raw meat on the kitchen counter, and this swarm of black ants is covering it. It's kind of a nasty image."

"Cool," the Smoking Vegan said, a one-word verdict. It was only when she passed judgment on my synopsis that I began to scrutinize the details. Had I gotten it right at all?

"I'll have to read it sometime," the Smoking Vegan said.

"Here," I said, handing her the book. "You can read my copy."

And the Smoking Vegan took the book. Her loose and green wool sweater sleeve brushed the back of my hand as we made the exchange.

And there it was: for the first time, I had given the Smoking Vegan something of mine. She was bound to freak out before she returned it.



She didn't freak out. The closest she got to freaking out was calling me on the Thursday night before Spring Break. My gay black roommate answered the phone. I was in my room, at my desk, chewing on a pencil, avoiding the metal around the eraser. I'd rather have a pistol pressed against the roof of my mouth than touch pencil-eraser-metal with my tongue.

"Heads up, J," my gay black roommate said, and gave the cordless phone a good spiral toss into my room. I caught it before it could put out my computer screen.

Expecting it to be my girlfriend complaining of broken-down car again from a law library pay phone, I let out a hearty "Yo."

"Hey, Jack," the girl said.

"Oh, uh, hi," I said, wondering: how did she get my phone number? As stalkers do, had she looked it up somewhere?

"You gave me your number back at the poetry thing," she said, when I didn't say anything.

"Oh, hi," I said. "I did."

"I was just calling to let you know I want to get your book back to you."

"Oh, the book?" I said it in such a way as to suggest I'd forgotten about it.

"Yeah, the book. I finished it, like, a week ago. I keep forgetting to give it back."

"Oh. Well, just bring it by my class tomorrow."

"I can't," the Smoking Vegan said. "I'm leaving for Spring Break."

"Spring Break?"

The Smoking Vegan let out a smoky sigh. "Yeah. I have to go to my cousin's wedding, in Hawaii."

"I see," I said.

"Anyway, I wanted to get it back to you before then. What do you say you come over and pick it up?"

I looked at the clock. It was inching toward eleven-thirty.

"Sure," I said.

"Who was that?" My gay black roommate was watching car racing highlights on television in a bean bag chair.

"Some girl. This student of mine."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah."

"What she want?"

"She wants to turn in a paper early. I'm going to drive by and pick it up."

"Why don't she just email it to you?"

"I don't know. She's old-fashioned, maybe. Likes a hard copy. Can I borrow your car?"

"Shit. Why don't the little bitch come to you?"

"I don't know. She don't got a car."

"Well, neither do you."

"Shit. Can I borrow your car or not?"

My gay black roommate showed his white teeth. "Shit yeah. I was just playing. What's her name?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. She's just some smoking vegan."

This was the first time I called her "smoking vegan" aloud.

"A smoking vegan?"

"Yeah, Smoking Vegan."

"Smoking Vegan?"

"Yeah, a vegan who smokes."

"Shit," my gay black roommate said, pulling his knee to his chest. "I know plenty of smoking vegans."

"Well, I don't. Where are your keys?"

"By the microwave."

"Thanks," I said. "I'll be right back."



seven



I arrived at the Smoking Vegan's friend's place at a little before midnight. It was out on the west side of Bloomington, in an apartment complex the size of a strip mall. I parked in the lot, and headed for the designated townhouse. A dog barked on an enclosed porch. It sounded hungry for something real, like a baby wanting a steak.

The Smoking Vegan's friend's townhouse was number 973. Surrounding the entrance was a porch with a storm door. The storm door's mesh was loose like an old lace tablecloth. Maybe a bit of my mother's genes had rubbed off on me: I didn't want to open any door that wasn't mine without permission. I pondered with my hands in my pockets: how does one knock on such a weak door? Within the enclosure, the golden numerals 9, 7, and 3 twinkled at me like gangster-gun-barrels.

I wasn't alone and thinking too long before the Smoking Vegan's friend showed up on the porch with a plate of fork in her hands. What had been on the plate was anyone's guess. At first it struck me as a plate awaiting a chunk of birthday cake. Further inspection found three yellow-like crumbs near the dead center. The fork was clean.

"Jack?" When the girl talked, an inner-mouth piercing somewhere struck a tooth somewhere else. I tried to imagine the mouth-piercing hooked on a fork tine, and shivered so hard I made a fist. I must really hate myself, I thought, to imagine such things.

"That's me."

"You got here fast."

I tried to think up an excuse, and couldn't, not before the girl threw open the door, and there was the Smoking Vegan, sitting Indian-style on a wall-to-wall shag carpet and leaning forward.

"You got here fast," Smoking Vegan said.

Rather than make excuses, I agreed: "I did."

Smoking Vegan patted the floor a few feet to her left. She had to tip over halfway to do so. Her left arm extended, and flexed. She was wearing a ribbed olive green tank top that made her look more muscular than she could have been.

"Have a seat."

"Sure."

I sat down a whole three feet from Smoking Vegan. She wasn't smoking at the time. Before I could wonder why not, she asked me if I didn't want something to drink. I said I wouldn't mind it.

"What do you want?"

"What have you got?"

She wasn't sympathetic when she said "Nothing artificial."

"Something real is fine," I let her know.

Smoking Vegan got up and headed through a beaded curtain into her friend's kitchen like it was hers. She reached into a cupboard, slashed some things around inside, and started running tap water. Her friend smiled at me from the olive-colored sofa. A stick of incense was burning on a plastic plate on the glass coffee table. I choked inwardly as Smoking Vegan presented me with a plastic Pizza Express cup of filtered tap water.

"Ahh, Pizza Express."

"You like Pizza Express?"

"Kind of," I said.

"We just had some stuff from there," Smoking Vegan's friend told me, as Smoking Vegan clicked up a cigarette.

"Oh yeah? What'd you have?"

"Breadsticks," Smoking Vegan said with her lips Popeye-clamped around her cigarette. She removed it with a toke grip and tapped out black ashes onto her plate of fork.

"They've got good breadsticks," I said, just to say something.

"They do," Smoking Vegan's friend said.

"It's because they put salt on them that they're so good," I went on.

"Yeah, that salt is good."

"And the cheese sauce is excellent."

Smoking Vegan scoffed smoke. "I wouldn't know," her friend said.

I took a short sniff of Smoking Vegan's smoke. My nose half-coughed.

"Well, take my word for it," I said.

"I guess," her friend said, and was silent.

For some reason, the smoke and the incense and the plastic-tasting tap water pushed me to criticize the vegan lifestyle a little further.

"So, when you guys order Pizza Express, what do you get to drink?"

"We just ask for water," Smoking Vegan said.

"Yeah, water," her friend agreed.

"You trust their water?" I asked, maybe joking.

"We don't drink it. We just want the cups."

"Ahh, the cups."

"Yeah, the cups."

"I knew a lot of people who used to collect those cups," I said.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, in my dorm."

"What dorm did you live in?"

"Forest. Out on, uh, Third Street."

"My sister's friend lives there," Smoking Vegan's friend confessed. "What tower were you in?"

"West. Floor four. The only male floor in West Tower."

"Oh," Smoking Vegan's friend said, looking to her lap. "She's in East."

"East?"

"Yeah."

Smoking Vegan crushed her cigarette on her plate like a dead bird crushes a pane of glass. She measured a breath of the air like she was still smoking.

"This was when?" she was asking me.

"When I was a, uh, a junior. The spring of 1997."

"Ahh," Smoking Vegan said, like it mattered.

"My roommate had a big collection of the cups."

"Your roommate?"

"You had a roommate?" Smoking Vegan wanted to know.

"Yeah," I said. "He was gay."

"Did he have all of the colors?"

"Colors?"

"Yeah, of the cups?"

I looked deep into the plastic depth of the cup in my hand. The color of the tepid tap water didn't register. I blinked, like at chlorine.

"Not really, I think. He had a whole hell of a lot of them."

"Did he have the pink one?"

"There's a pink one?"

Smoking Vegan was rummaging through a paper bag. At one point, she turned it upside-down and shook it at her plate. Grains of salt hit plastic and ash like pepper raining on snow. A little cylindrical plastic cup of cheese with a lid landed in the ash mountain. She picked it up and dusted a black ash off its side with her pinky finger as if her other three fingers were holding a cigarette. They weren't holding a cigarette.

She pushed the little cheese cylinder across brown shag until it came cheek-to-cheek with my cup of water.

"You must be hungry," Smoking Vegan said. I opened my mouth halfway, made some sound with my nose, and picked up the cup. It was warm.

"My sister says she got a pink one."

"There's a pink one?" I asked again.

Smoking Vegan's friend kept her hands clasped in her lap. Her eyes stayed dead on a blank television picture tube when she said, "I've got no reason to believe the little cunt."

"Why don't you ask her to show you?"

"She says she threw that shit away."

"Well, if I ever get a pink one, I'll give it to you," I said, feeling generous.

"I don't need that shit," Smoking Vegan's friend said, like she should be giving a dismissive little wave of her big jeweled hand. She didn't.

Smoking Vegan had already lit another cigarette with a match. She sucked in filtered air. From within the cigarette came the sound of a three-millimeter-tall man wringing out a dry newspaper. I imagined him in a trench coat.

"So you had a collection of the cups? What happened to 'em?" Smoking Vegan pretended like she wanted to know.

"They were my roommate's," I corrected. "And I, uh, played golf with them."

"How do you play golf with plastic cups?"

"That's a little weird."

"I mean, I used them for holes."

"Why not just go play mini-golf or something?"

"IU's got a nice golf course."

"I . . . I played golf in the hall in my dorm, I mean."

"Oh."

"I had a little nine-hole course," I explained.

"The people in your dorm didn't mind? Weren't they scared to walk around or some shit? Scared a ball was going to come flying out of nowhere, or they'd slip and fall?"

"He probably just putted them around."

"Nah -- I used practice balls. Plastic ones."

"So you drove those practice balls down the hall?"

"It was good practice for my swing. If I could hit the ball in such a way as to keep it from hitting the walls, I was doing a good job."

"Ah."

"Since the hallways weren't more than, what, fifty feet long, and the balls bounced so hard, it was always a matter of restraint. I had to contain my swing. It was better than mini-golf."

"Restraint, huh?" Smoking Vegan spoke up, like she didn't want an answer. When her answer didn't come, the shag room returned to the sound of incense burning, like a tap running water a half a mile away. Her cigarette ticked like a bomb as it burned. I reached for something to say like a golfer reaches into his bag of clubs.

"I played the whole thing with a pitching wedge," I mumbled out, just as Smoking Vegan sprang to her feet like kung fu. It was when she dusted her hands that I realized she was finished with her current cigarette. The incense stick was down to half-length.

Smoking Vegan was gone for a second, into a dark room that made me think of a movie about a drug addict, or many movies about many drug addicts. I could almost feel the blue light eking in from behind a black sheet tacked to a bare window. I could almost see a close-up of a burned and bent silver spoon, or a rubber hose around someone's arm. I didn't. For one thing, this wasn't the movies. For another thing, vegans don't do heroin, even if they live like they do, no matter how much they smoke tobacco. For a third thing, it was only midnight. Surely enough, though, the sun was rising somewhere. It always is, you know.

"So, you, uh, you still play golf?" Smoking Vegan's friend wanted to know, with her hands in her lap.

I had quite unknowingly removed the lid from the cylinder of cheese. I bent it in half like a slice of good New York-style pizza.

"Nah, I gave it up."

"Why'd you give it up?"

I scooped up a half a mouthful of warm yellow cheese. "I got my own place."

"A house?" Smoking Vegan's friend said.

"Nah, an apartment."

"You got a roommate?"

"Yeah."

"So it's not your 'own place,' then."

"Well, I mean, it's more of my 'own place' than a dorm."

"You don't like dorms?"

"Well, I mean, I'm a grad student now."

"You're too big for dorms?"

A lump of cheese was cooling in my mouth. It reached thermal equilibrium with my throat. I swallowed it. It stabbed its way down my esophagus. The incense went on soundtracking the silence, and stinking the place up beyond cigarette smoke.

"I just don't have time for all the noise. Parties, drinking, crazy shit, people laughing and hooting and hollering, partying."

"You don't ever party on your own?"

I looked at the girl. Her hands remained buried between her sweatpanted thighs. Her eyebrow rings twitched up a face-fraction.

"Not particularly, no."

"Your roommate wouldn't appreciate it?"

I shrugged, and scooped some more cheese into my mouth. I used my bottom teeth to press it against the backs of my top teeth. I breathed once, through my nose.

"Maybe not."

"What's he like?"

I thought about it for zero seconds. "He's gay."

"The same guy from junior year?"

I had to think about it for one second. "No."

"Are all your roommates gay?"

I took two seconds of thought. "Usually."

"So what makes this guy original?"

Three seconds of thought weren't enough. My shallow dive into thought came up with only "He's black?" Maybe I shouldn't have worded it as a question.

"So he's black and gay?"

"Yeah."

"Sounds like a fun guy."

I let out a scoff. And then another. A balloon taped to my hard palate was deflating into the top of my throat.

Smoking Vegan appeared in the bedroom doorway. With her right shoulder, she tossed up the white sheet that hung over the entrance. As she shifted herself downward and Indian-style next to me, I thought Aha -- I knew there was a sheet hanging over a door somewhere.

Smoking Vegan had a cold dry cigarette between her lip-corner, and a knitted hemp backpack as scraggly as her hair was red resting on her cotton pant leg.

She had one arm in the bag, and I scanned her triceps for tattoos like you'd get in prison. I was imagining Smoking Vegan at a weight bench in a jail yard. I found only freckles too red to contrast with the sunburn she'd no doubt pick up in Hawaii.

"I got your book," she said through the cigarette.

"Ah, my book."

Smoking Vegan's freckled ringed fingers slid the paperback across the shag carpet until it was cheek-to-cheek-to-cheek with my cheese and cup of water.

I picked it up with my fingers on the pages side. I flapped it like a broken hand fan.

"My book."

"I didn't know you were into that kind of shit," Smoking Vegan said, tossing her forehead at the book, focusing her eyes on her match-flame. "You seem like more of a pop-lit kind of guy."

"Oh," I said. "Oh."

Smoking Vegan had grown an attitude as a cigarette grows an orange tip. Smoking Vegan sucked in her attitude flame, and the room vanished silent. I detected a faucet somewhere leaking. My eyes blinked and my skin goosebumped.

"My teacher said she read that book forever ago. Back in the seventies?"

"The seventies?"

"Yeah, I think that's what she said. You met her, remember?"

"Her?"

"Yeah, you met her."

"I met her, yeah. She read it in Japanese?"

"I don't think so. Why would she have?"

"Because this translation was done in 1994."

"She might have been bullshitting, I don't know."

Smoking Vegan aimed the top of her eyes at the olive sofa when she tapped out two lumps of ash. At first orange-black, they soon blinked into white. I looked from the lifeless ash to the girl paralyzed into staring at her hands.

"Interesting stuff, though. Nice language."

"Very subtle, yeah."

"Strong sometimes, too."

"Yeah."

Smoking Vegan took her time on a puff of the current cigarette. I let my eyes unfocus over the relaxing girl on the sofa until everything faded into orange.

Smoking Vegan said something about something poetic. Maybe she said it poetically. Or maybe it was a concrete literary analysis. Which is which is lost to time. Her words rose like incense-givings, and mine, mere answers, dripped out like water-drops containing smoke-clouds.

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"I think so."

"That's right."

"Yeah."

Confident in criticizing without audience, she was spinning a half a story of her own, taking baby steps away from a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate to Red Lobster from Yale as she sat on the very brown, very shag floor of her world. Her words, making no sense, struck the veins inside my skull, and my soul sighed. I dipped my finger into my cup of cheese. Before I could clean it with my teeth, I wished I was smaller.

I used to drink milk, I was thinking. Milk without liquor. Milk had been so good to me. It had lifted me up from weak to strong. Half-drunk and in bed when my girlfriend comes home rattling keys, I'd be feeling like a blob psychically out of control. I'd take up the whole bed. My right big toe would be feeling the metal knob on the closet door. The upper-left corner of my head would be stabbed by the alarm clock. My left pinky finger was buried in my pocket in my jeans on my floor. My right index finger stretched out across Heaven, maybe touching God's index toe, maybe caressing the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl's golden arch. It made me feel big, and cosmic.

When I drank milk it was to make me big. I wanted to grow. I wanted to ride the rollercoasters. I wanted to be taller than my mother.

It was during my first year of high school that I grew taller than my mother, and she was diagnosed with diabetes. I grew antisocial, and her right hand grew to be an organic lid for the M&M jar. She ate candy, and I napped for six hours every day after school. I'd get home and think I wasn't tired, and I'd lie in bed and wonder where the hell I was until I realized where I was and I didn't want to be there. A radio was always playing somewhere. In those days, I was reading The Hobbit, about how fifty-something-year-old tiny-man Bilbo Baggins goes on a long journey through dirty places. I'd think of the glory he found on days when he found real cities with real houses and real beds. I'd think that no bed is realer than one's own. When he mourned in faraway places, it was for his own bed. When he slept in other beds, he was small. I wondered, with wonder, what it was like to fit that squarely in the middle of a regular old sleeping platform.

I wondered what it was like to find something real in someplace faraway.

In the Smoking Vegan's presence, as she went on about nothing interesting, I came to wish I was a shag-brown little teddy bear in her pajama-panted lap. If she'd touch me, that'd have been alright.

No one touched me, and I almost slept Indian-style until the girl zoned-out on the sofa snapped out of her trance and mine with a six-year-old scream -- both high-pitched and like it had been building up for God doesn't know how long.

"Fucking shit! Fuck! Shit!"

Smoking Vegan actively crushed a cigarette. Her hand followed the butt to the plate. She was on her slipper-feet in an instant, as surely as I was wide-awake.

"What the shit!"

I rose up to my knees and leaned over.

Smoking Vegan was speaking thoughtful-like:

"Now, just--"

The pierced girl flapped her right hand. Dangling off and stuck to her index finger was a long white weasel. It flapped like a narrow banner, curling into a circle at the end and unfurling. Its growl was near-invisible in its lowness. The weasel held on for dear anger. Its eyes sparkled like rubies.

The girl was on her feet.

"Fucking little bastard has my ring!"

"Chill!"

I was on my feet in a half a second. My jaw was half-dropped, half-cocked in imitation of a Midwestern overbite that doubles as a third appendage.

"Let go, fucker!"

My eyes were widened on the verge of squinting. My knees were bent. I was leaned forward like Superman about to fly.

"W-w-w-w-here'd that weasel come from?"

"It's a fucking ferret!" the pierced girl bellowed.

"It's a fucking weasel!" I screeched, pointing a finger.

Smoking Vegan dedicated one jeweled, freckled hand to each of the weasel's pink and scurrying hind legs. What with the pierced girl's weasel-waving, the two of them looked like kids illustrating wave amplitudes with a white and fuzzy Slinky.

"Stop it! Hold him still!"

The pierced girl didn't seem to hear the Smoking Vegan. Her weasel-flapping went on for a whole six seconds. I felt veins rising to skin. Beads of sweat were shaking on my temples as I witnessed the struggle. I felt a squirt of adrenaline somewhere near my Achilles tendons.

"You-you-you -- weasel!" was all I could offer the situation.

And it did the trick, too. Right after I screeched "Weasel" at the two girls and the weasel, the furry rope of a creature went limp. It let go of the pierced girl's finger, and she pulled her hand up to her face for inspection. I felt almost like a hero. I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand.

"He's a sweetheart," Smoking Vegan was saying to the weasel's little weasel face.

"Dirty little fucking bastard," the pierced girl was grumbling.

"He's a sweetheart," Smoking Vegan cooed, cradling the little bundle of energy in her arms like a baby. The thing was making a little-bundle-of-energy-sound. It was as if a battery-operated motor were embedded somewhere in the long white sausage-shaped animal.

I was back to Indian-style on the floor, and biting the rim of my plastic Pizza Express cup. I looked into its depths, and saw one of my eyes reflected deep black. Somewhere near the bottom of the cup grew to imaginary depths. Something lay beneath everything that was above me. The water smelled like plastic, and the plastic smelled like nothing.

"He's a sweetheart. He's a sweetheart."

Smoking Vegan was sitting next to her friend. My hands were shaking as I nodded off into my cup of water.

"You have to know how to talk to him."

I let my eyes float up, as my teeth continued to grip the cup rim. The pierced girl leaned her pierced face toward the little weasel in the Smoking Vegan's arms like a baby. She looked at the weasel and bared her teeth.

"Bad. You bad little cocksucking sack of rodent-meat."

At this point, the weasel, like full of karma, latched onto the pierced girl's bullish nose ring with its tiny teeth. I knew from the starting instant that it wasn't going to let go until something was torn. I watched it like you'd watch a train wreck if it happened in super-slow-motion and you had a comfortable place to sit. And something to drink.

Teeth gripped plastic rim; nose smelled water that smelled like plastic.

"Oh my god get this fucking thing off me oh my fucking god."

I wasn't thinking of the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl at all during this time. I don't know what I was thinking of. I don't pride myself in my thinking, or my way of thinking, or even in my thoughts. Yet something strikes me as dangerous about a time when I can't at least know what I'm thinking.

All I have regarding the time I watched the Smoking Vegan hold a weasel's legs while said weasel's teeth clamped on a butch girl's bullish nose ring: it's a sensation, like fingers minutes after they've been dipped in maple syrup. I was recalling French toast like French toast was something worth remembering. Like French toast was something you get once, and you never get again.

When Smoking Vegan talked her friend out of hysteria, and her friend held her face as still as a peach tree on a clear day, and when she whispered about how one more time she wanted that fucking thing off her face, I realized Smoking Vegan was utterly harmless. She wouldn't and couldn't hurt me, now or never. I was wasting my time if a hurting-for is what I was seeking. I poured half of my eyes into the moment; half looked at its own reflection and showed me that I wanted to go home. I was bored in the sight of something metaphysical, between an unoriginal thing, an unoriginal thing, and the original thing they made when they combined. I was shrinking to fit inside my reflected pupil and curl up.

"He's a sweetheart. Let go, sweetheart. Let go."

I wished my water smelled like vodka, at least.

My mouth was full of water, my cheeks puffed up like I was holding my breath, when the pierced girl screamed a scream that you'd swear would come out of a canvas painting of a cayenne pepper if you'd torn it with a sharpened bamboo pole. The weasel let out a bobcat kwowrl, and a stream of blood as thick as a ballpoint pen shot down out of the pierced girl's septum and struck shag.

The incense hit its end and hissed, and maybe-spun on a plastic plate reading "Happy Birthday! You are a Special Person!" I didn't get close enough to scrutinize the Associate Press Style violations of its wording. I don't wager I could have. Something angry and hurt would have picked me up and thrown me toward the microwave.

"Fucking hate you!" the pierced girl, now a piercing shorter, yelled out of her gurgled-with-blood nose. With hands soaked red, she snatched the weasel out of the jaw-dropped Smoking Vegan's hands, and threw it two-handedly into the kitchen.

The weasel flew over the mini-bar. It flew over the four-slot toaster, used each other morning to toast yeastless bread. Its white fur now painted red, it flew above a stack of newspapers, beneath a hanging wok, and crashing into the spice rack atop the microwave. A jar of maybe-paprika hit the cement floor and busted. The weasel was gone behind the brown box of the microwave.

Smoking Vegan didn't turn around to say a word to her friend. She kept looking into the kitchen with the fervor her friend displayed in cupping her hand beneath her blood-pouring head.

I was on my feet, with the cup of water clamped in my teeth, eyes forward on the microwave. My book was in my right hand. My conscience was in my left hand, in my pocket. My attention was forward.

With a clattering of many jars of many spices, the weasel leapt with power and landed, legs leaned back like ready to fly forward with anger. The weasel's sudden appearance atop the microwave, its soon-adopted cocked-and-ready posture, its new and angry kworwl: the plastic cup made to fall from between my rows of teeth, the shag carpet soaked in part, a jet of water blasted up through my sinuses and bubbled out my nose.

I couldn't keep the gagging sound out of the back of my throat. I couldn't help scraping the sides of the top of my esophagus together with what could have been a laugh.

"You think this is funny, motherfucker?" the wounded girl said. She had her head leaning backward. Her left eye, like a fish's, had swiveled around to face me. Blood coated her face like she'd just won a cherry-pie-eating contest. I took it that where she came from she must have seen her fair share.

She went on defending herself against nothing as I checked my head.

"Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you, motherfucker."

"I . . . I . . ."

Smoking Vegan was approaching the microwave with a plastic spatula in hand.

"Come on, sweetheart."

I forget why I was wiping my left hand on my khaki-thigh.

Smoking Vegan turned her head halfway around.

"Maybe you should go," she said.

"Maybe I should."

"I'll, uh, see you after spring break?"

I held up my book, like showing her the back cover description.

"Just stop by my office anytime."

"Cool," Smoking Vegan said, and kept inching forward toward her sweetheart.

The wounded girl, while bleeding, pivoted around grimacing at me as I left. I could see caked brown blood outlines around all her bared teeth.

I didn't feel obligated to apologize for the spilled water, what with all the chaos in the townhouse at the moment. Surely, blood on the shag was more immediate a problem than water. Spilled spices, a red-stained weasel, a torn septum: those girls had more than enough trouble to deal with. There was no harm in adding a little more. More than enough, don't you know, is just more than enough.



Maybe, I wondered as I started up my gay black roommate's car, I was only guilty about the cup because I'd failed to notice what color it was?

It was a big, bad deal, not knowing what color the cup was. To reiterate, I'd played something of a sick-little mini-golf game with multicolored cups from the same establishment all throughout my junior year of college. At one point, as I'd neglected to tell Smoking Vegan and her friend, I started up a tournament, one that proved quite lucrative. I scammed a couple of wannabe frat boys out of three hundred dollars one night. At one short point, I felt like a kid playing a board game with his poor neighbor, making up rules as he goes along. I never got too guilty. There was no reason to feel guilty about earning money.

I pulled the cord on the golf game soon after making the three hundred dollars. I figured I'd quit while I was ahead. Forty of those three hundred dollars went to buying beer. I spent twenty on pizza from Pizza Express. Twenty dollars got matinee movie tickets and popcorn for myself and the Scotch-Irish trombonist who led me to the Devoutly Religious Korean Girl. Fifty bought me groceries for two weeks. A hundred and seventy bought me a thirty-something-inch television from a neighbor who'd bought more marijuana than he could efficiently sell.

This isn't to say that I remember how I spend every dollar I earn. It's just to say that I remember how I spend every dollar I earn interestingly.

What this has to do with the story is probably nothing. You can consider it simply a spelling-out of character flaws before the next phase of the narrative begins. That'd probably be best for everyone.

It might also help to know that I was thinking small when I sat down in my gay black roommate's car.

I was thinking smaller and smaller as I sped down along the side of highway 46 in the orange, black, and gray night, past a veritable death row of office parks. Between the stone ocean of each office building and the paved river of the highway was carved a medium-sized, man-made lake. Each lake, during the day, sported a fountain that sprayed into the air, an illusion of something worth being illusive. At night, the fountains were off, and I wondered what, really, was the purpose of a fake lake outside an office park on a highway. I was thinking of the small comfort, if any, that lake's presence offered anyone sitting, bored, in a cubicle.

I was thinking that I wanted to go home and drink something that'd make me feel bigger.

At home, where all was dark and blue, I couldn't find any liquor harder than soft. The closest I got to payday was a bottle of for-some-reason refrigerated nighttime cough syrup. I couldn't bring myself past the chill of the plastic. I put the bottle into my microwave until it was warm. It didn't take long. After drinking it, I'd go to bed and pass out for the weekend. In my sleep, jangling keys be damned, I'd grow larger, stretching out to consume all of the space I didn't want, all of the space that was mine anyway.

I fantasized about this psychic growth while my cough syrup stood on the edge of a circular plate, and spun. Within my white microwave, the red contents of a plastic bottle, bathed in golden light, were heating from the inside out. I rubbed my temples, and sweated, in the