Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas Read Free Book Online Page B

beenwatching me watch. She’s smiling again, extra toothy, as though she’s discovered some great secret about me: I’m a man.
    â€œShe’s pretty hot, huh?”
    I shrug my shoulders. She’s not entirely right, anyway. I’m a man, yes, but my thoughts shift from her and the dancing ladies to junior high English—Ms. Rizzo’s class. She’s only twenty-four. She calls me to the board, rolling the chalk in one hand, her other on her jutted-out hip. I’m in my seat, stiff and immovable in my wide-wale corduroys. Ms. Rizzo has just said “diphthong” and let her tongue peek out through her perfect teeth and stay there. I know she has peppermint breath and her perfume smells like citrus water. The other boys are in heaven. I’m in hell. I try to think of ugly girls and bland literature.
“It nods and curtsies and recovers
. . .” The heat from my ass moves its way up my body and settles in my neck and cheeks.
    â€œSure you don’t want a real drink now?” she asks. Her first, on top of the wine before, has gotten to her. She has boozy confidence. It enables her to slouch, speak in low tones, and stare.
    â€œI’m sure.”
    â€œA bohemian who doesn’t drink—what’s that?”
    â€œWhy am I a bohemian?”
    â€œWell, you sure ain’t a lawyer. I know them. I’ve got one.”
    I wonder if she leaves her paintings out to torture him, the assistant DA. I only shared selected paragraphs with Claire, complete with contextual introductions, and I always read them to her. I picture her husband in the coffee shop, beaky, dark bearded, and thin, ashamed when seeing me, shocked when I say hello. I see her paintings hanging in their house, her sketches and doodles beside the telephone and on the fridge along with their son’s. I wonder how he exhales in the galleries of her depicted flesh.
    The video is ending. The panzer drives off into the sunset with the dancers. Now a blonde tart on a jet ski zips along the coast of the Riviera. She’s wearing a Stetson hat and wielding a boomerang.
    â€œOh, that bitch is so dry,” she hisses. My mother used to call whitegirls tarts and hussies. If I were in the video, and if she were drunk, I’d walk the jet-ski tart home. Jane or Judy closes her eyes and leans back. She opens her mouth in the shape of a small circle and exhales. Black girls, as I remember being told, were fast. She will have to be walked home, too.
    â€œThat was harder than I thought.”
    â€œWhat was?”
    â€œFinishing the work for that show.” She leans forward, exhaling heavily. She puts her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. Her radii and ulnae are mantislike, longer than her humeri. No bone in her arm can be thicker than a chopstick. With all the soft, bright colors on and around her she almost looks like a child except her face is showing signs of age. She has two deep creases running alongside her nose and another across her forehead. Her age and her fatigue against the creamsicle backdrop make her look out of place, and because of this, I imagine her to be lonely. She smiles at me again, broadly, and her eyelids droop.
    I had always put girls to sleep. It was a gift. Whenever I was broke and hungry, I would go to a bar or a party, meet a girl, and listen to her talk about her parents, her job, her last or current boyfriend, about her dissatisfaction with her life, and her theories on how life could be different. I’d listen and that alone would be enough—a great enough act of heroism—to be invited home with them, where I would then talk about pretty much anything until they couldn’t listen anymore. They’d drift off. In the morning I’d make breakfast and they’d look at me strangely, no longer a hero, just a symbol of their great dissatisfaction. I’d leave them wherever it was they believed themselves stranded—hero-less—two eggs