as you were (iii)

part three

Nov 14, 2024

Have you ever, while lying naked next to another body, thought about how many gallons of sweat they’ve produced? I like to steal candid glances and ring out their gym towel flesh with my mind’s eye. I spend lazy Sundays, gawking open-mouthed at their flesh, calculating how many Evian bottles their runoff would fill as if they were a guess how many carnival jar of M&M’s. On these mornings, I still feel dad’s calloused hand in mine, I hear him crooning above the calliope, “what say you, tiger? Gimme the first thing that pops into your head.”

Would it be possible to keep the sweat bottles in my closet? Would I need to rent a storage space? A warehouse? Would I be surprised by how many there are? How few? Sometimes, I’ll burrow in the crook of their neck. They’ll wake with a morning inhale, running their sausage fingers through my hair as I size up their pores—are they generous or stingy? Peppercorns or pinpricks?

Beating a stranger in the race back to consciousness is a weird thing. You wake in a room, your room, the place you spend unconscious hours, drooling and shedding skin—where the little motes loafing in the new sun are eensy orbs of yesterselves only now, you have company. You can’t be sure they’re all yours anymore; this is a problem; this makes everything gross. Among all this, something’s lying next to you, still as a miscarriage, curled up on its side, and you’re free to watch and stoke and smell and imagine…

To be fair, this one isn’t a total stranger. I know, yes, the flesh beside me is called Trevor, but right now, I can’t see his face, so he doesn’t get to be “Trevor.” He’s just some strange, freckled torso with a flat tire of flab pooling like Dali clocks around the side he’s lying on. It appears as though he’s melting into my sheets. I’m thinking of sweat again…if the average human sweats approximately 280 gallons of sweat per year, and…well, Trevor is prone to excessive sweating in the hot months, so, to be safe, let’s say Trevor gives off 300 gallons every year and Trevor is currently thirty-five years, four months, and seventeen days old and Evian bottles hold 16.9 oz of liquid…so…that would mean… we’re looking at…like…79,527 Evian bottles of Trevor sweat. How many vending machines would it take to hold him?

It’s been a while since I’ve seen him. Trevor and I used to be quite serious. In fact, I once caught myself thinking he may very well be “the one.” We were going strong for six months until we found ourselves drunk, sitting in a Denny’s at 2 am, sipping milkshakes and swapping yarns about the worst things we’ve ever done.

He sat, swirling sloppy figure eights in the brown slush, telling me how once, when he was seventeen, he was driving home from a concert, buzzed and belting along to cranked music, and hit an old stray. He made a ba-dump! sound and whipped his head forward to illustrate the collision.

He got real sweaty, swirling the shake with increased intensity, telling me how his belly filled with a hot fuzz when he saw the mutt spinning ass over teakettle in the rearview—how it streaked the pavement a twinkling red before coming to rest in a teddy bear heap.

He didn’t know what to do. He’d just gotten his license. Will dad take the car away? Without question. He couldn’t risk it, so he kept driving; it was the only thing that made sense.

He paused briefly and stopped swirling the barber pole straw. He seemed far away, the image of that furry lump screaming bright across his eyes—he swallowed and waved it off, saying it’s “no big deal”—as soon as he got a place of his own, he went down to the pound and found the oldest, neediest pup and brought him home. It became a ritual of sorts. Chloe, his greying German Shepard at the time, was just the latest embodiment of this particular neurosis. She was a sweetie pie, always smiling and whinnying when I came over, bringing me her favorite tennis ball and looking up at me as the kitchen light sparkled in her rheumy eyes.

The morning after the Denny’s confessional, he texted, “Should I come straight to yours?” I’d forgotten he was supposed to drive me to Newark to catch my Christmas flight. I held the phone, thinking of the dog he hit, wanting nothing more to do with him or his revolving door of geriatric pups, so I ghosted him, called an Uber, and flew to Oregon.

The strange thing is that, usually, when it comes to flying, I’m a nervous wreck. It takes me three months of affirmations and qigong to work up the nerve to even book the damn tickets, but on that post-Denny’s flight, I was calm, surprisingly so. At no point did I experience my usual jitters or clammy appendages. Hell, for the first time in my life, I had the stomach to pull up the shutter and watch the clouds out the window. For some reason, I attributed this irregular ease and sudden aviary machismo to Trevor, and ever since, it’s mutually understood that we only hook up when I need him to be my lucky rabbit’s foot—to settle the cauldron of pre-flight nerves. It also helps that he knows where to get Trazodone on short notice.

It’s been a while since we’d slept together. I’m staring at his back, trying to recognize it. I don’t remember it looking like this. His freckles are bigger and less circular, more drawn out and angular, dark like tar pits. The once hairless terrain is now littered with meringue kisses of pubic quality hairs, stray strands of black fronds sticking out like hummingbird moth proboscises, curling into cute Fibonacci approximates.

I ghost my fingertips along his spine. Whenever I cross a vertebra, I hear him say ba-dump! and see the light sparkle in Chloe’s rheumy eyes.

If I tore into him, I suspect I’d find an eclipse of furry moths smiling up at the tasty light.

The pre-flight jitters hit me when I hung up with mom, rushing into the space opened by my reflexive “okay.”

I texted Trevor, “✈️🍆🍑???”

He got back right away, “when?”

“tonight?”

“Should I come straight to yours?”

I booked the 10 am out of Newark, threw some clothes in my luggage, and waited. I wasn’t even horny; the thought of his saliva on my cock skeeved me out, but this is the price to avoid tragedy; no one wants to carry a rabbit’s foot.

I get through security fast and take a seat facing the gate, waiting for the pilots to arrive. I like to get a good look at them to make sure they’re not drunkards or suicidal. Ideally, I hope to overhear them talking about their kids so I know they’ve got skin in the game.

As I wait, I have an impromptu phone session with Dr. Horn; she’s always good about fitting me in last minute. She believes that because I haven’t been back to my childhood home since dad and I moved out—that I haven’t seen the place as a complex adult, I should expect the ordeal to be “triggering.”

I disagree. I see where she’s coming from, but I don’t remember anything from those years. I don’t remember much about the house at all, really—certainly nothing that would trigger me. Sure, some disjointed vignettes bubble top of mind once in a blue moon, but they’re always hazy—hazy, boring, banal shit.

I contrast this with the vivid memories I have from my post-divorce childhood. I know I’m capable of creating, storing, and revisiting lucid childhood images—in fact, I’ve been told my memory is exceptional and that I have an eye for detail. Therefore, the lack of clear memories—exciting or mundane—must mean my childhood in mom’s house, the home Dr. Horn suspects will trigger an unconscious avalanche, was vanilla, uneventful, lame, and thus, not worth the brain space necessary to conjure it in living color.

Dr. Horn says this is exactly what a repressed person would say.

I am not a repressed person.

“Repressed people” are those who strut around feeling no pain, believing their shit don’t stink; the type of Uber-human who is always at the height of their powers but when presented with the simplest of things—the rainbow blotches in an oil spill, Lucky Charms, the smell of ripe cantaloupe, yellow snow—the horrors they’ve kept at bay come rushing back. Their bodies go from blissful remission to end-stage in a blink. They lose their footing and enlist drugs, alcohol, sleep, sex, excess, to throw shovelfuls of psycho-dirt back on their wounds so they can get back to their un-smelly shit and “every day, in every way, I am getting better and better” crap.

That ain’t me.

Dr. Horn knows I abhor this label, but still, she urges me, “not just as your therapist, but as your friend,” to consider the possibility (however remote) that I may (like the vast majority of us) have repressed a few memories from those early days.

She tells me about an old patient of hers, a lifeguard who, back in his heyday, did a prodigious amount of LSD. According to Dr. Horn, the thing about LSD is that it’s known to be quite pesky—it likes to hide in the body, playing house between vertebrae, lying in wait for the right movement—a neck crack with peculiar angle and force or a new yoga contortion and poof!—the acid emerges for an old times’ sakes swim in the blood. This happened to her lifeguard patient. It was midday, and he was on duty, perched in his wooden tower. There was a crick in his neck, so like he had done thousands of times before, he cracked his neck, but this time, on a micro-level, he did something right and started tripping balls. A kid drowned as he sat there floating in his own universe—“…bottom line is, you never know when you’ll lose control…you never know what you’ve picked up along the way…all I’m saying is, be prepared.”

She wants me to use the flight time to “reflect” and journal—to visualize that old home so I can better understand the unconscious forces that made me slingshot myself into my current clusterfuck.

“…and please, don’t take the trazodone.”

I forgot she knows about the Trevor/trazodone ritual.

“Trevor didn’t have any, so don’t worry about that,” I say, despite having washed the pills down in the Uber. She starts talking about something else but they’re calling my boarding group. I thank her and hang up while she’s mid-sentence.

The scanner at the gate beeps, and the bubbly gate agent scrunches her smiling eyes, “Thank you, Brandon!” I nod, fumbling my phone back in my pocket as the trazodone settles in. The wheels of my luggage Choo Choo along the crumpled jet bridge floor. I’m thinking about the dog Trevor left in the street—how it must have cried and whimpered and prayed (to the extent that dogs can pray.) I blame him for its death despite knowing I would’ve done the same—kept driving, kept moving forward. I feel like I’m relapsing somehow, imagining myself standing over the furry lump cooked and faded by the moth-laden halogen—thirty years too late to do shit about it other than throw up my hands and say, “I’m here, aren’t I?”

continue…