Old Boxers

Post coitum omne animal triste
(After coition, all animals are sad)

When I was five, my mother and I went to a fair. Being afraid of the rides, I’ve always had an attraction to the booths at these sorts of things. One of the booths at that fair that day was for fingerprinting. This attracted both of us; I had a chance to stick my fingers in ink, and my mother had a chance to have a copy of my fingerprints, which was important, the man at the booth explained, in case anything happened to me. My mother had her prints done as well. These came on a paper with basic information about the person: age, race, sex. When we got home I looked into the bag with our prints in it. I studied my fingers on the page against my fingers. I read the information.

AGE: 5
RACE: White
SEX: M

I looked over my mother’s information.

AGE: 23
RACE: White
SEX: F

F? I buried my face in my arms on the table and started to cry at the shame of having a mother who had an “F” in sex. She had failed, had had sex. I was there with her as proof to everyone that she had done so.

When I was seventeen, I picked a girl up from her house while her parents were at work. We were on spring break. She was a redheaded virgin with large breasts who liked to talk about books, so we would talk.
That night my mother knocked on my door to hand me the phone. “It’s somebody named Timothy Phillips.”
“Who?”
“He says he’s Lauren Phillips’ father. Who’s Lauren Phillips?”
“She’s a girl. OK. Hand me the phone.” She gave me the phone and stepped outside. I could see her shadow under the door.
“Hello.”
“This is Timothy?”
“Yessir.”
“I want you to stay away from my daughter. She’s not allowed to date. I don’t know if you knew that or not, don’t care, but I know she went off with you today and you’re not to contact her anymore.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. (of course I knew) Yessir.”
“Do you understand? No calling, nothing.”
“Yessir.”
“Goodbye, then.”
“Goodbye.”

Wright was my mother’s maiden name. It didn’t belong to her. It was her mother’s husband’s name. But he wasn’t my mother’s father. My mother’s last name is Roberts. My father’s last name is Denney. Wright, my last name, is mine, alone.

There is no sex until twenty-one, but there are blow jobs. There are many blow jobs by many girls, topless, in many poorly lit parking lots behind the tinted windows of my Explorer.

Like Lauren the day I picked her up, red hair done up in pig tails in the back seat, coats thrown in the seat next to us, mid afternoon under cover of the new hospital parking deck, touching a penis for the first time. I ran my hands through her hair and said her name quietly. I watched out for people passing by, hoping that if they got close they wouldn’t be able to see through the tint. She didn’t want to taste it, but wanted to rub it into her skin. When it was over, I kissed her on the cheek and we sat there for a long time before I had to take her back. She lived on a dirt road, and just to be safe she had me drop her off a quarter mile down from her house and walked the rest of the way. It was the middle of the day and her neighbor saw.

Then there was Carolyn. There was Carolyn in the dark, pulled over to an empty gas station parking lot to finish what she had started on the road back from the airport after she’d been gone for a month. I laid the seat back and massaged the back of her neck, noticing the price for gas had gone up again.

There was Carolyn in my bedroom floor, on blankets and a sleeping bag before I had a bed in the new apartment. There was Carolyn on the road from Andalusia Farm to Savannah, five days before she was to leave for good, red dress pulled down to her waist, refusing to finish in a church parking lot. She told me later she was mad at me that day, that she had become suddenly aware I could treat her, use her, like all the others.

When I jerk off there are scenes of girls sucking me off.

A few years ago my mother told me that my father was having an affair with one of the nurses that dealt with my mother regularly during her pregnancy.

I have a brother twenty minutes from where I grew up who is less than a year younger than me. His mother later married. He took that man’s last name. When I was nineteen I heard he had gotten his girlfriend pregnant. We’ve never met.

Samantha in the milk cooler at the grocery store we worked at in high school, smock thrown over a palate of sixty boxes of milk that hold four gallons a piece, rushing to swallow me before the manager comes to the stockroom for a smoke, nipples poking through her shirt from the thirty-four degree cooler. After, I walk out first and check for managers and stray customers. When I see we’re O.K., I open the door and hold it for her to walk out. She heads to the left, towards the bathroom, and I head to the right, towards the front of the store.

Carolyn is on her knees in her bedroom floor; first hers, then mine. She locks eyes with me and licks the shaft.

I come.

Carolyn was my first. Afterwards, she lay on top of me, holding my head, trying to calm me down.

Three months later, irate, she punched me over and over in the chest and called me a mother fucker when she found text messages that I couldn’t explain.

Six months after that, she stood silently over me while I explained how I wanted to be honest with her about the blonde in my class. Nothing had happened, but I couldn’t promise nothing would happen.

Nine months later, she came to my door at 6:30 in the morning with bacon and eggs and bread to make us breakfast after leaving the night before in a rage from having gone through my emails.

Three months ago she told me about her new abstinence. When I didn’t understand, she explained. She told me about the guy at work who had gotten her and her friend Rachel drunk, had managed to get rid of Rachel just long enough to get Carolyn into bed. When Rachel got back they were still in the bed.

She told me about the other guy at work, Jeff, whom she had known was a jerk, had thought was seedy, had known just wanted to fuck her; how she had went over to his place, gotten drunk, didn’t use a condom.

She told me about the girl’s night with all the girls from work where she got drunk and yelled “I had sex with Jeff!” and how they didn’t talk to her now.

She told me about the night, sober, she let Jeff come over, knowing he had stolen $40 dollars from her the last time, and sober, had sex with him again.

I come.

There is my mother, my brother’s mother, Carolyn, and an old pair of boxers pulled from under the bed to wipe my hands on.