Too Adult

“Harrison… John?”

A pharmacist calls out; she calls out the name of a bad person, a petty thief, a litterer, a speeder, a would-be alcoholic, and a rapist. She says it as if it were any other name though. She doesn’t understand the things that I have done or why I need these pills, through the microscopic chicken scratch I seem to be just another decent ass hole with somewhere better to be.

“Thank you.” That’s the most common lie, lying used to leave a bad taste in my mouth but like meatloaf and coffee, it grows on you. I wasn’t thankful, and in a matter of seconds I would never think of that squinty-eyed pharmacist again.

Clenched tightly in my hand, suffocated in the transparent bag, the prescription rattles, my shame echoes louder than the organs in a cathedral. As I walk out a sloppily dressed man looks at me and smiles, not in the creepy sense where your whole sense of security is debunked, but in the sense the he doesn’t feel so alone anymore, not getting it up really unites guys. I look at him and wonder if we are buying these pills for the same person, I laugh on the outside but no one notices, I am very hard to notice.

What am I? Two touches of a button and one quick siren and I can be sanely alone with my thoughts. Sitting in that driver seat I think about all of the places I could go, McDonalds, The Diner, Six Flags, Disney Land, The Wax Museum, The White house, but instead I am on my way home, to a wife that loves me and kids who adore me as far as my wallet can stretch. We are the typical story of the grey suit; discontent and boredom rot the roots of my family one day we will crumble, but not until my next paycheck. Maybe that is why I rape people, sheer discontent and boredom, the manifestation of my shortcomings seething out in the erotic thrill of dominating someone weaker and more attractive than myself. Maybe it is so I can finally have something my wife doesn’t know about me, the smug look in her eyes, those piercing blue eyes once, and I literally mean only once, had an intense fire, they turned me into water. After 20 years of loathing and ice in the bedroom I have managed to build myself back up. The kids, well they are constant reminders that I am out of touch, and even when I was “in touch” with the times my taste still sucked. My daughter rarely talks to me, making small talk for those extra few bucks, I know she is buying drugs but I could care less, when she is not home I usually just take whatever she has left, generation stress is also generation forget. I am not sure if she is a virgin, she doesn’t talk like one, never quite dressed like one, but ideally I hoped the only thing she could catch from her mother was closed leg syndrome. My son, my son, my son, my son. I repeat this to myself at least twenty times a day, repetition instills the conviction that he is MY SON, he doesn’t talk like me, walk like me, he never smiles, he goes out but usually with odd characters you assume he met when he regained consciousness on the playground at recess. Maybe the repition is more of a rationale that I have reason to believe I am not responsible for that mess. The long black pants, quasi-porn cartoons, and a cynical tone that cause flashbacks of the emperor don’t make me disappointed, at least I don’t believe that’s the right word. I could care less whether he played sports or was a genius, I just imagined my son might want to talk to me for more than five minutes a day. The neglect I feel in these walls could institutionalize Freud.

Then again I think I have had these urges long before I let my life go to hell, sometimes the stress and anxiety build up in you and you need to just harness something be sure of something and know that it has a definite end. Through the years it has become habitual, I am not really sure what to do with myself, it is what I have known for so long, it is my Novocain to the mundane and ordinary existence I have created. It’s not when they scream and cry that I experience the euphoria, nor is it when I demean them with the over strung terms of whore and tease, it all comes in the brief moments of clarity when I lay down in my bed next to the constant woman who I wouldn’t rape if she begged me. She lay there knowing nothing, she was ignorant of her own obliviousness, I constructed my misdeeds like poetry, I always got off home free. Except something has happened to me lately. It began in a bar in Monroe, about three towns over from mine. It smelled as a bar should smell, the men were overweight and sad as they should have been, if you are sitting alone in a bar and you are not either a rapist or serial killer then you are seriously fucked up. There is a girl sitting there, nothing about her caught my eye, blonde hair, some colored eyes, a face that had known stress and insomnia, I didn’t want her, but I didn’t have a choice. I slowly made my way over to her, crushing shells beneath my shoes along the way, loosening my cheap tie only to reveal I had forgotten one button on my shirt in the morning. The beauty of making small talk with mediocre women in small bars is, finding money for another drink is half the battle. She sees my suit and wedding ring, it should turn her away but maybe she is as desperate as I am fucked up. We dance on the sticky floor, there is no music playing but when the only thing she does is rub her almost tight ass on my crotch, how much of a beat do you really need. We hook up in a less graphic sense and then she sends me on my way, morality tells her she has almost made it to hell, she needs to stop before she meets Hitler. A tease, the slut, the whore, the nerve, to lead on a dying man in a suit that should be Armani is never a grand idea. I order one more shot then leave the bar, I give her a smirk that excites and frightens her, my lips curl in the most incriminating way, at that point she knew she should have invested in cats and stayed home. Alone with my thoughts I watch everyone leave the bar, the archetypical biker leaving with one of the regulars, a horny old man, half way out the door saying his last slurred goodbye to a waitress who wishes her occupation came with a rifle and then finally my target. Perfection had never appeared so average before. She walks in zig zags and the path becomes so hard to trace in the dark, only the dirt will remember the way she moved, I wasted no time on the other hand take hold of her path, grabbing her from behind i slammed her head into what appeared to be a blue Nissan. She could not open her eyes, she could not beg me to stop, I brought my rag doll into the passenger seat of her car. In a new driver seat I drove down the road for a few minutes, I needed to fully submerge myself in this darkness. In the back seat of the car I mercilessly tore off her clothes and then mine, in situations like this I tend to believe passion is relative, and in some odd way it was there. I bit her shoulder and cupped her breasts she would faintly say no but never showed any defiance; a good rest is incentive enough for people to endure almost anything. Then the problem arose, or in retrospect, it didn’t at all. I kissed her body more, felt her ass, lathered my fingers in the secretions of her body, and yet nothing. No rush of blood of phenomenal excitement, I felt nothing, at least down there. In my panic, my mouth wide, my eyes watering, and my hands shaking she once again told me to stop, scratching my shoulders and slapping my face. I felt none of this for the first time a man realizes his only useful tool is out of commission; the last thing on his mind is the 4 he is trying to rape. I look at her begrudgingly and ask for help. I need it to get it up, she is awake now and says “are you fucking kidding me?” This time she scratches my eye, everything appears on the left for a moment, then she gives me a blow to my broken tools, the swelling tears pour, this is what happens when you remove the grey suit. She managed to get me out of the car, or maybe I managed to make it out of the car, at any rate, on the side of the road, curled in a ball, dirty and wet, I felt shame and embarrassment. The only thing worse then not finishing is never starting. I walked back to that bar, shown for what I was and what most of us are behind the grey suit, a half blind coward with aching balls simply living by habit and pattern.

When I returned home that night and got into bed I’m sure my wife could smell the dirt and beer, she could see my cut and realized I was missing my tie and shoes but she said nothing, didn’t even budge, I was okay with that, she had dreams and I had sensations.

This has persisted now on countless occasions, I lend my condition to the women’s mediocrity, the dullness of their faces, and the predictability of their screams, alas I was fortunate enough to come across a vulnerable 10, a woman only Shakespeare could ever dare to define. She was alone and I will never know why, I savored every second of her fear and torment and yet in the end I was left limp and unsatisfied. That was when I started listening to the commercial, I made that special appointment with my doctor, the one where I don’t look him in the eye and he pretends not to laugh. He thinks it is for my wife, but he obviously has never been married. Looking around his office, examining every square inch of it to avoid his eyes, I see continuous streams of navy blue light in the midst of white walls and overpriced degrees. It seems he just covered it all with masks, degrees to make any minor mistake he commits okay, a white coat to reassure us if he is not a doctor he sure can act like one, and boring walls because nobody wants a doctor they believe had his stomach pumped one too many times. Finally after moments upon moments of needless examination he hands me the sheet, I would call the prescription chicken scratch but I was never one to offend an animal, I could have picked up a bottle of vicaden or cyanide, but I guess medication is also relative and my recovery only coming through me.