July 6. Phoenicia, NY to Mansfield, PA . I woke up first. Kate and I were on opposite sides of the bed facing away from each other. I rolled over and stared at her back, which was uncovered. She has dark-toned skin with yellow in it, almost no body hair. Her skin shines. It's my favorite kind, some strange Northern European accident, the result of Huns sacking Krakow or something. I didn't feel awkward about the night before. In fact I wanted to slide over and onto her and wake her up by fucking her. I used to do that to Jamie, one of my exes. She said it was her favorite way to wake up. But I didn't want to push anything with Kate. She was in charge. She had a boyfriend and I was just the motorcycle boy taking her away from it all for the time being. I started to get up.

�� �"Where are you going?" she said softly.
�� �"To get some coffee."
�� �"Come here."
�� �She wiggled herself back towards me and I got back in bed and spooned her. I was awake and she wasn't really. I started to kiss the back of her neck and I felt her press her hips back against me. I rolled on top of her and slid down her back so my dick was between her legs. It felt so good. She pushed back against me. We did that for a minute or so before it felt really dangerous.
�� �"That feels intense," she said sleepily.
�� �"It feels good."
�� �"It does. We better stop."
�� �I rolled off of her. We lay in bed staring at the ceiling.
�� �"I crossed a line last night," she said. "But it could've been worse. We should cool it out a little."
�� �"Okay."
�� �"In DC Comics they have �else worlds.' It's an issue or a series that has no effect on the state of the greater story. Like a non-sequitir, an alternate reality that doesn't affect the main story line. Batman can die or fall in love or go back in time and it doesn't screw up the regular serial. This is an else world for me. As long as I don't fuck you it can be an else world."
�� �"I like that," I said. "An else world. I've never heard of that."
�� �"Was that the best handjob of your life last night?"
�� �"It was."
�� �Kate likes to crow about things she's good at. It was the best handjob I'd ever had, but I wanted that to be a private secret that grew towards the light and not a forced confession. I got up and went across the street to get us coffee. I was thinking about "else worlds" as I came back to the room. Did any of the other characters in those worlds ever make it into a permanent reality? Or did all the characters live tangential existences, connected for a moment in the hearts and minds of their readers through that one experience together? If situations you're in don't effect the rest of your life, do they exist at all after they're over? It's the kind of thinking that you shouldn't really do in the morning when you're trying to fall in love with a relative stranger.
�� �When I got back to the Phoenicia, Kate was sitting on the bed in her underwear. She had showered. I handed her her coffee. She flipped over onto her stomach and kicked her legs up behind her to show off her ass. I saw her check in the mirror to make sure I was watching.
�� �"I saw a cute caf� downstairs," I said.
�� �"Yeah I know. Saw it yesterday. I've been thinking about it ever since we woke up."
�� �It was already like ten o'clock, but Kate wasn't going anywhere in a hurry.
�� �"If we go to breakfast will you actually eat?" I said.
�� �"I eat," she said. "I just have standards for what I eat. Plus I've been kinda nervous� and stressed out."
�� �"About work or about the ride?"
�� �"Both. It's not that easy convincing your boyfriend that something like this is a good idea."
�� �"That's cause it isn't a good idea," I said.
�� �"It's not," Kate pouted.
�� �"Not for him," I said.
�� �I kind of wantd to expound on the danger of the "else world" concept right then, but I didn't want to stamp it out yet. It was, so far, pretty interesting. Out on the street the town looked different. The sun was shining over the mountain and half of main street was bright with it. A yellow school bus parked in the gas station was unloading young teens, summer campers of some kind. The kids were all over the place. They roamed in threes and fours, their heads tipped together in secret counsel planning their freedom in town like sailors on a shore leave. All of the boutiques that lined the main drag were open. Their cutesy little flags called for peace, and the flowers in the window boxes waved lazily in the wind. The Tibetan guy sat on the front step of his shop, his copper face a model either of eastern patience or American bourgeois malaise. It was enough to set me off again pondering globalization and the relationship of boutiques to political asylum cases.
�� �Phoenicia had changed overnight. It looked like I'd thought the Catskills would look before the ride, a once wild country tamed to a petting zoo by its proximity to New York. One more reason to keep heading West in search of real mountains.
�� �We ate a good breakfast at the natural food caf�. Kate actually got down on her tofu scramble and I was glad to see her eat well. It scares me when women don't eat well. It's a sign that all the fucked up societal shit has gotten to them. Either they think they're fat, or that the food is unhealthy, or they have some crazy psychosomatic wheat allergy or some shit. It's no good. Probably goes for men too. Don't trust people who don't eat well. They'll end up killing themselves somehow. The only excuse is love. Love kills curbs your appetite for a while.
�� �"So how long have you been a vegetarian?" I asked.
�� �"Almost seven years. I did it after my first trip to India."
�� �"Is it for health or ideology?"
�� �"Both I guess. I think it has to be for you to stick with it."
�� �"So meat is murder?"
�� �"Yeah. It's the most fucked up industry. It's like the worst of what we are, animals bred in cages blown up on hormones, slaughtered in their own shit and misery. How can you think their pain doesn't leak into the food?"
�� �"I don't know. There's a lot of shit fucked up about the world we live in. I don't think you can separate yourself from it no matter what you do."
�� �"Don't you think you have to make certain stands?"
�� �"I guess so. Meat isn't one for me though. I mean I couldn't have survived on the Rez not eating meat. Lakota eat meat as a side dish and it's rude to turn down food. Being vegetarian seems limiting. I mean food is celebration. Lots of people celebrate with meat."
�� �"I can understand that, I guess."
�� �Kate looked hurt.
�� �"If you tell me you don't judge people who eat meat then I'm cool with it," I said.
�� �"I don't judge anyone. Period. Except yuppies kind of."
�� �"I judge," I said. "I can't help it."
�� �"You judge me� for being vegetarian."
�� �"I'm just tired of the holier than thou thing wherever it comes from. I mean meat is murder? The Cold War was murder too."
�� �"Yeah, well, I didn't kill anyone in the Cold War. Vegetarians didn't kill anyone."
�� �"No but the same people who are vegetarians are usually upper middle class kids who live off the fat of the land one way or another. Show me the vegetarian who won't go to college because college is murder and then you might convince me to quit eating meat."
�� �"That's so fucking reactionary."
�� �"Well I'm a reactionary then."
�� �"You're judging me right now."
�� �"Not you. Your upper middle art school vegan friends."
�� �"You're the prep school boy, not me," she said. "I grew up in a shit ass town and I don't eat meat because it always kind of grossed me out and then I went to India and realized I didn't have to."
�� �"And now you eat frozen pizza every night."
�� �"Fuck you."
�� �I reached out and grabbed her hand to let her know the argument was just for fun. I don't really care what people think if I like them. The waitress came over to fill our coffees up and gave us the "young lovers" look. Else World.
�� �
Riding Curves Pt. 2
��� After breakfast we went back up to our room and packed up. Kate took charge and rolled everything up tight. She kept the green kerchief around her neck and every time I looked at her I could see her wet in the shower, her white tank top see-through from water and the green kerchief tied tight around her neck like a collar. As we walked out of the room Kate tucked the stuffed red crab she'd given me into the covers.
��� "He can hang out with his little friends," she said. "Crabs do like hotels."
��� We didn't get out until noon by the time I'd wrestled with the climbing rope that I strapped the bag down with. I was getting better at tying the thing up, but it still wasn't a science. I did it different each morning. I always used the same combination of knots: a bowline first, then a bunch of hitches passing from one side to the other, then the trucker's hitch down the meridian to cinch the pack down. The trouble was I sometimes threw more hitches in, or started from the opposite side, or came around a different portion of the bag and if you don't make sure it's snug it will come loose in the wind.
��� The sun was shining bright and hot when we pulled out of the parking lot the hotel shared with a river tubing operation. Sunburned teenagers leaned out of the tube rental shed showing off their hemp and shell necklaces, and their red faces pulsed with hormonal excess. As we burned out of Phoenicia I looked up at the ridgeline high above us. It had been invisible the day before. The Catksills are dry 4000 ft mountains. I remember hiking there once, and the high deciduous canopy reminded me of a Chinese forest. Not that I've ever seen one. On that day I sat on a rock ledge, the woods spread out below me like a live carpet, and watched a hawk turn circles in a thermal. The mountains looked good in the mid-summer sun, pulsing green through the light haze.
��� We rode through the heart of the mountains on NY 28 to NY 30. The latter followed the edge of a lake for almost fifteen miles. It curved back and forth and flashed sparkling views of the water through the trees. I almost killed us again coming around one turn. The road was posted with yellow signs that depicted the different kinds of upcoming turns with arrows twisted in different shapes and then below them the speed suggested to ride the turn successfully. Those signs suck if you're riding a bike because the speeds are meaningless and they just cause anxiety. A 20 mph turn can be done comfortably at 35 mph on a motorcycle because two wheels allow you a tighter turning radius than four, but if you're going 35 and you see the sign, you think you might run off the road so you slow way down.
��� Maybe it's just my inclination to follow rules that gives me trouble. I test the boundaries of any system I'm in, but I always stay in the system. I've been working for degrees like I was on a conveyor belt since I was about five. I don't like to admit it, but I even take some kind of pleasure when I make a good stop at a stop sign and then I see a cop car. Like, yessir, officer sir, don't worry about me. I'm a solid citizen. A law abider. Anyway those signs began to get in my head because the minute you don't trust the sign, the turn turns out to be sharper than you thought and you end up braking halfway through, which is not a good feeling. Braking in the Turn. Album name for my next band.
��� Riding turns on a bike it's best to just pick you're line and ride it well without regard to the speedometer of the signage. It's like skiing that way, or anything else in life for that matter. Keep your eyes well ahead of you in the direction you're going, keep your balance over your center, and hold as clean a line as you can. Speed and safety don't have a direct relationship. A close turn came up on me right before a narrow bridge that ran over the lake, and it was the kind that the suggested speed for cars, 15 mph, was probably about right for me too. As I started into the turn I was going too fast, around 30. About midway into the turn I saw gravel and dirt kicked up onto the road from an access road that came in from the right side at the end of the bridge. It freaked me out so I straightened the bike in the turn and braked. By the time I'd slowed down enough to feel safe, I didn't have much room left in the turn and there wasn't any speed left to give the bike stability. I needed to lean the bike over harder than usual and push some gas into it but I was too scared to realize that. As I brought the bike around gingerly I looked up through the turn and caught view of an eighteen wheeler barreling down the narrow bridge towards us. My eyes fixed on its silver grill and the bike drifted further toward the high marble curb. I could see the edge shining like teeth. When I realized how close I was to it, I jerked the handle bars to the left and gassed the bike instinctively. The tire barely missed the curb as I brought he bike around. In the meantime my eyes had fixed on the truck barreling towards me and the bike, following my eyes, had drifted too far toward the center line. I straightened out in time to miss the truck but the windblast crushed me in the full in the face and the bike danced two feet sideways.
��� The whole thing was a perfect example of the separation between rider and passenger. I couldn't say anything afterward. I was sweating and breathing hard with the adrenaline pumping through me cold. And all the while Kate didn't even notice the drama. She just sat back there with her head on a swivel checking the scene of the lake stretching way out into the distance toward the blue mountain ridge in the west. If she did notice that I had almost killed her, she never said anything about it and I didn't either. It was the second time in two days that I thought I might end up killing us both, and this time it made me feel really irresponsible. Wisdom said I should come clean with her and tell her I wasn't a real good rider and we should turn back. But Teddy Roosevelt once said, "If someone asks if you can do something tell em yes; then work like hell to find out how to do it." Sometimes you just have to pretend your way into things.
��� It took me a full hour before I was riding the curves well again at all. We came out of the mountains and hit NY 17, which is a big highway that runs west along the bottom of the state through Binghamton. It meets up with the Susquehenna River there. A friend of mine in Boston told me it was a good road for westing. It's a bigger road now than when he used it. They've expanded it because it's about to become part of the I-84 system that runs all the way across the country. Freeway riding on a bike is boring. You can go super fast without noticing but it lulls you into a trance and then all of a sudden someone cuts you off at that speed and you're like FUCK! I just wanted to make some good time since we'd barely gotten anywhere the day before and then we'd just spent two hours winding around through the trees. We should have started earlier, again, I guess, but the late night underwear parties and the leisurely mornings with kissing and breakfast weren't something I would've given up.
��� I kept running the shower scene back in my head, seeing Kate wet, the green kerchief an improvised sign of our attraction. Verde que te quiero verde. That's Lorca I think. Green how I love you green. Doesn't translate very well. Green is the color of passion in Spanish. Green is different in different languages. All colors are probably. "We'll make a green rhythm, even more dread than what the days of glory bred." That's Linton Kwesi Johnson, a West Indian poet, using green as something true, powerful, unending. My dick got hard thinking about Kate's neck and the kerchief, and I imagined being on top of her in bed that morning, watching the muscles in her back move as she arched towards me. They were hot moments, especially in rewind, and the fact that she was right behind me but I couldn't say anything about it to her made them hotter somehow. I didn't have to say anything to her. It was something we could just ooze back and forth over. That's the beauty of riding with someone you dig. Lots of good non-verbal communication and never any awkward silence. Just the hum of the wind and the engine and all the different smells hitting your nose. Cut hay. A pine grove. A flattened skunk. A stream.
��� The sun got hot and we were dehydrated from riding on the interstate. You can't underestimate how the wind will dry you out. It sucks the water out of you through your clothes. I exited at a town by the river and we rode into a mega gas station with a store and about thirty pumps. I'm all for mom and pop stores. I love small town gas stations. But there is something sweet about a mega gas station. They give you the illusion that the whole world is yours for the taking, at a modest price. No one really notices you. Anonymity really can be freedom. Also, the facilities are pleasantly excessive. You never have to wait. It's easy to go to the bathroom. There's food and drink in all manner of shiny colored packages. Every now and then you run into some other bikers or a trucker who wants to know where you're riding from and what year the bike is. I know I just went on about the evils of the Interstate, and I stand by the human cost of it, but the whole reason that world thrives is because we still want to stop and spend our money somewhere that shines, where the product is guaranteed, where we don't have to waist time being nice.
��� I gassed the bike up while Kate went inside to get something to snack on. She was still wandering the aisles when I came in to pay. I got some bright orange peanut butter crackers and another bottle of water and went outside to sit down on the curb. Kate came out a minute later with a bag of Doritos and a Krispy Kreme donut. She had a guilty look on her face cause she'd only saved me a small bite of the donut. I can't explain this but I liked the way Kate was selfish the way I like mosquito bites in between my toes. Between pleasure and pain, there is a swollen itchy place that I love to scratch.
��� "There's a vending machine down there that sells live bait," she said.
��� "What kind?"
��� "I don't know," she said.
��� "Probably night crawlers."
��� She got up and walked down to the machine. It was black and said "Live Bait" in orange neon lettering. She came running back over with a big smile on her face.
��� "I wish we had a camera," she said.
��� "What kind is it?"
��� "Night crawlers. Guaranteed to be alive or your money back."
��� She sat back down next to me and we finished the Doritos together.
��� "I only buy the 25 cent size."
��� "We might need another one."
��� Kate leaned forward, munching a Dorito, considering a new idea.
��� "Would you rather hit a deer, a dog, a cat, or a skunk on the highway? Don't consider the damage to your own person just tell me what you'd rather kill and rank them."
��� "Most want to kill to least, or the other way?"
��� "Most to least."
��� It was another arbitrary question and it annoyed me. But then I thought to myself maybe it annoyed me because I held on too tight. I mean, why did I think my answer was binding. It was just for fun.
��� "Deer, cat, dog, skunk," I said,
��� "You like skunks too," she laughed. "I want a pet skunk when I get a house. Actually I see myself in a little trailer on a nice piece of land with three cats and a skunk."
��� "Family life," I said.
��� "Sort of."
��� "You don't want a real family?"
��� "What's a real family? A guy and a woman who pop out two babies and get divorced?"
��� I laughed. That was both of our families in a pretty ugly thumbnail sketch. We talked for a while. I don't know what else we talked about. It didn't matter. It felt so good to be in the sun, off the bike, with her. I'd had my breakup with Gretchen ten months before and it had been that long since I sat next to a woman and talked in any real way.
���
Gretchen and the Baby
��� I met Gretchen while we were working on an organic farm together. It was one of my ideological experiments. Back to the land. Gretchen was very tall and German looking. She and her boyfriend, Steve, were from Detroit. They had moved to the farm together from Oregon where they'd been living in a yurt and farming high on a mountainside near Grant's Pass.
��� Our story in brief-we exchanged pregnant glances across the rows of swelling plant ovaries for about a month as we pushed seeds into the fertile soil with our fingers. One day we were washing lettuce together in the outdoor sinks. We were sweaty and we kneaded the lettuce into the cool water side by side listening to Manu Chao. I remember she was wearing tall rubber PVC boots and short blue retro gym shorts. She had a great body. A little austere but long and lean. We stood there next to each other and you could feel the electricity running in the water, up our arms and down our bodies into our pants. We exchanged a look when we grabbed the same head of lettuce, and then both of us laughed out loud and shrugged it off. A couple days later she told me she had feelings for me. I had them for her too. We tried to cool it but that only lasted two weeks. Each of us began to get up earlier in the morning. Me to stretch before work and her to do her yoga. Both of us to steal the quiet moments in the main house alone before we headed out to work.
��� One Saturday night we stayed up late at the fire outside the cabin she shared with Steve. He'd left us there alone and gone to bed. As soon as we were alone together the feeling was overwhelming.
��� "What are we gonna do?" she asked me.
��� "I don't know," I said.
��� She took my hand and pressed it to her cheek and then lay her head in my lap. Steve stepped out of the shadows. We hadn't even kissed.
��� "What the fuck is going on?" he said.
��� "Nothing," I said.
��� He picked up a fire log and stood in front of the two of us for a menacing minute. I took a deep breath and prepared to get hit. He turned and smashed a chair with the log, called Gretchen a bunch of names, and headed out. She went after him. The next morning I told the head farmer I had to leave and why. He looked me dead in the eye and asked me if she was worth it. I said yes. What he knew and I didn't was that what we were doing happened all the time on farms.
��� I left the next day. I drove out to South Dakota for a sundance on Pine Ridge. Gretchen and I stayed in phone contact. I remember sitting on the top of a butte to get a signal and declaring my love for her. After a few days she broke it off with her boyfriend and asked me to come pick her up. I drove back and we ran away together to Boston. Her boyfriend told her I didn't love her, I just wanted to win. To beat him. To conquer her. He said he'd known guys like me before. He might've been right, I guess. I can't think about all that anymore. I've thought it through too many times. I think I did love her but it didn't last long. She moved back to Boston with me. I had two years of school left. The first winter was awful. She couldn't really make friends easily and she didn't have much of a reason for being there other than me. She enrolled in acupuncture school and worked at a bakery. The money issue was tense. My sister was paying for my living expenses while I studied and Gretchen had to work. She resented me for it. I resented her for resenting me. Then one day she told me she was pregnant.
��� I remember her telling me that and me thinking first, "Fuck it. It's finally over." I was relieved. God was telling me to stop wasting all of my fucking energy chasing ass. It was time to be a man, to settle down, to make an honest run at it. Time to be a good soldier.
��� A second after I had that realization, Gretchen told me she wasn't ready to have a baby and that she would go and get pills. I don't know what she wanted me to say. As soon as she told me she wasn't ready, I realized I wasn't in love with her. I felt a heavy guilt and sorrow. I'd been playing. I didn't want her and I didn't want a child. I couldn't tell her any of that though. I was too chicken. So I told her it was her choice. Maybe she wanted me to convince her to have it. I don't know. She had the abortion and it messed her health up. She had some hypochondriac tendencies and they worsened. She had some depressive tendencies and they worsened. I had gotten a girlfriend pregngant once before, but I was so young I didn't think too much about it. This time I thought about it plenty. We were killing a life. Not just the one inside of her but also the one we had talked about living with each other. We were killing all of it out of fear and some sense that we could be in control of what we wanted in our lives. We were doubling down the bet we've made as a generation. We could live our dreams so long as we stayed true to them, even if we weren't true about anything else.
��� Our relationship began to die. Gretchen had already lost an ovary to cancer when she was nineteen. The abortion surprised her cause she thought she was sterile from her surgery.� She got sick and started to think the abortion had done it to her. She was depressed. Maybe she had been when I met her. She needed me, she said. I didn't want a patient and I stopped trusting her because she kept quitting jobs and then regretting it and then formulating these new master plans over and over again. She said I judged her and it made her feel uncomfortable. She was right about that. I did judge her. I thought she was weak and that she wanted to kill me for not loving her enough. I don't hardly trust anyone who loves me. I always think they want something from me that I can't give. That's divorce baggage I guess. Totally textbook. The docs call them intimacy issues. I don't show my problems to anyone because I don't believe they'll continue to love me.
��� We hung on with each other for a year, but the last three months were a mess. She moved home to Detroit for a few weeks and then came back to Boston. I was happier without her. After she came back we talked and talked about how to make things better. Nothing changed. We'd been in love with ideas of each other, but we were living with the real thing. She was still in love with the idea of me. I finally made what you would call a unilateral decision. It had taken me that long to have the guts to tell her I didn't love her because she had been too scared to have the child I didn't want.
��� When I broke up with Gretchen, she hated me in the way that people who love you can hate you. It was a terrible feeling. I broke it off clean and sent her home to her folks. It was August. The breakup and all the shit after lasted through January.� All that time I kept getting crazy love/hate letters and messages. It had been the same with my first girlfriend, Holly's older sister. I didn't want to just disappear on Gretchen because I felt responsibility for ripping her out of the life she'd been living and relocating her to Boston. I felt guilty about everything. But I'd decided that I had learned something about breakups and if I didn't make her hate me, she'd keep loving me and keep hating me both. I finally let the idea of staying close to her go for good when she asked me to go see her shrink with her. I asked her if it was his idea or hers and she hesitated and then said it was hers. Bad idea.
��� "I think you're still blame me for leaving you," I said. "Which is fine but isn't going to help you get over it at all."
��� "Maybe you're right," she said, her voice so gentle and accepting that it cut me to the quick.
��� Needless to say she never called me again. I didn't look at other women for a few months cause the idea of it made me sick. All of my own shit came back to haunt me. How I'm impulsive and mistrustful and at the same time, whiny and demanding of the people I live around. It's not a picture of myself I particularly like. I like the picture of myself as a cool but sensitive man who doesn't let life knock him off balance too much.
��� I actually met Kate for the first time in my brooding period. She says I ignored her completely. I remember the night. She came out with me and Noah and Kirsten to a bar. I'd been on a date with one of the waitresses there and she was working that night. She was a really beautiful black girl named Shemika. We'd been out a couple times and kissed but I was too fucked up to know what to do with her. She was young and said she just wanted to fuck, smoke weed, and hang out. Her dad had been a NBA player. I don't think I had the confidence right then to deal with the race thing. Maybe she'd pull my underwear off and laugh me out of the room. Or maybe I wouldn't be man enough to deal with all the looks from the brothers and sisters out there that saw one of their own most beautiful on the arm of a skinny ass white guy with a worried look on his face.
��� Anyway, when I met Kate that time she had on the same jeans she rode in, a hoody, and an army camp hat. She looked like a boy compared to Shemika. I just figured she was one of Kirsten's gay friends cause she had a lot of them and so I didn't try to vibe with her at all.
��� Sitting on the curb with Kate felt so good because I just treated her like she was Forrest. It sounds so simple but I have a hard time with it.
��� My sister said it best to me once, "You just have lower standards for women than you do for men."
��� Kate wasn't a woman to me, though. Not exactly anyway. First of all, she is bisexual, which means she checks out chicks. Second of all, since she was someone else's girl, she couldn't be mine. She had to fit into some other category for me besides girlfriend, and my only other categories are my family and my close friends, who are all brothers to me in some way or another. So I treated her like a brother. Sort of. None of my brothers had ever jacked me off in the shower.���
��� "Do you ever have dreams about fucking a guy?" Kate asked.
��� We were still sitting on the curb outside the gas station.
��� "I don't think so."
��� "Never?"
��� "Not really."
��� "I remember the first time I dreamt about fucking another girl," she started.
��� She told me a story about how she was in an art class in high school with this girl who was kind of a jock. Kate was one of the weird kids in high school. The girl stared at her everyday in class. Kate said it creeped her out at the time. One night though she had a dream and she fucked the girl with one of the miniature mannequins they had lying around the art room. She woke up all wet and swollen.
��� "That was when I knew I wanted to lick girls," Kate said. "It didn't happen until my first year in college, though."
��� I had a dream right after college where I fucked my college roommate in the ass. He's one of my best friends. It totally weirded me out. I'm a horny ass dude and I nearly break my neck looking at women on a regular basis, so I know I dig them. I hate body hair and strong smells so I figured I could never think about doing anything with a dude. But that dream was real and I woke up hard from it. Pretty fucking weird. I didn't tell Kate anything about it then, but it felt good that she had asked.
���
Mt. Pisgah
��� We finally got up from the curb and got back on the bike. We turned south, following the Susquehanna into Pennsylvania on PA 220 through towns called Athens, Milan, Ulster. You never know with towns like that how they got their names. Sometimes it's that the people who moved there named them after the old country. But other times it's that some land grant company back in the 1700s decided it could entice immigrants to its new towns if it made them feel like they were coming an unspoiled version of the old country instead of some uncleared piece of forest in the heart of Iroquois country.
The destination for the day was Pennsylvania Rt. 6. I'd seen it on the map and it looked like the most scenic way to get west. Pennsylvania is essentially a massive rectangular box, all even except that its eastern edge is ragged and torn because it's delineated by the rambling and mighty Delaware River. PA Rt. 6 wiggles gently right across the top of the box for the western three-quarters of the state. It's the most rural bit of Pennsylvania and the Western half of it winds through the big green splotch of the Allegheny National Forest.
One our way south, we rode through a bunch of small farming towns. They were very wholesome and Christian looking. We rode by an Amish farm and a boy and his dad were standing by the road. The boy was probably about 11. He wore high-waisted gray pants with thick suspenders, a white t-shirt and a straw hat. He waved at us as we passed and had a huge smile on his face like he'd seen something he'd never seen before. It made me proud and I gunned the engine and waved as we passed. The dad didn't move a muscle. I thought about what we must have looked like to that kid with our helmets and long hair and our loaded down bike. We reached the junction with Rt. 6 and took a right. It felt good to be pointing due west again. It's that simple when you're heading south, you just turn right. There's a kind of gravity on any long trip that pulls at you when you're going the wrong direction. I always feel it strongest when I'm going west. Is that feeling unique to America, I wonder? Is promise always western in this broad continent?
The road turned windy and very beautiful. The towns were even smaller now. Green rolling pastures swelled on either side of us, rose gently toward two low ridgelines that bobbed like the phone wires to the left and right. Old barns, many of them white with green or black shudders, punctuated the landscape, gave shape to the endless green stretches and the different patterns of tawny jelly rolls and scattered hay bales. Every farm was kept up well and you didn't see anything laying around in the yards. No junked out cars or anything. It was God's country. Really beautiful farmland.
��� We stopped near Luther's Mill to get gas. I tried to run my card through at the pump, but it didn't work for some reason. Kate had gone in to go to the bathroom. When she came back out, I got back on the back, totally forgetting I hadn't paid. As we pulled out of the lot, the cashier, a pale drawn woman with feathered hair and bad teeth came running after with the look of a raging banshee on her face. It jogged my memory. My cheeks flushed and I pulled over to the curb.
"You didn't pay," she said.
I nodded but couldn't say anything. Kate laughed, got off the bike and paid the woman.
��� "Nice one," she said to me when she turned back.
��� I smiled to hide the fact that I hate being embarrassed to an irrational degree. I don't know if it's being out of control, being exposed, what. It's like a fire wells up in my stomach and blazes in my cheeks. Kate saw it happen to me. She kissed my cheek and slapped me on the back like a horse.
"You're sweet," she said. "You should've just floored it."
���� I revved out of the lot past a local ice cream stand whose sign showed a pink cow licking a black and white ice cream cone.
��� "Mmmmm. Ice Cream," Kate cooed in my ear.
��� Most of the farms we passed were dairy farms with black and white Holsteins that ambled over the green hills. We hadn't been going too long before Kate slapped my shoulder and yelled into my ear.
"My ass hurts and I wanna smoke."
I nodded to show I'd heard her and I started to search for good places to turn out. My ass was sore too. We were rolling through a particularly beautiful stretch of road where the valley narrowed and the road rose and fell on its curves through the hills. I saw a sign for Mt. Pisgah State Park and I turned down the road. Mt. Pisgah is where Moses first saw the promised land, the valley of Canaan. He never got to live there, just saw it stretch out beneath him to the sea and then died the next day. Mt. Pisgah is a promise.
The road got prettier and prettier. Huge fields opened up around us. Some were planted. Others full of wild flowers. We rode for a few miles and there was still no sign of the park so I turned up a dirt road to the top of a hill and stopped. There were fields all around us and we had a 360 view of the territory around us. Pennsylvania. William Penn's forest. I saw it. Rolling wooded land as far as the eye could see that had been cleared, tamed, cultivated. It looked like England but with harder edges and harsher light. The dirt road was crowned pretty badly, so I parked the bike on the right edge and leaned the kickstand onto a flat stone. The bike was tippy with the pack on the back and it was a delicate balance to make it stay on the edge of the crowned road.
We got off and walked through the overgrown drainage ditch into a meadow that had been hayed recently. A line of trees separated the pasture we were in from the one next to us. Fields like that, separated by venerable tree lines and split rail fences, always remind me of the Civil War. Kate walked over to the trees to go to the bathroom. Watching girls go to the bathroom outside gets me every time. They always look so nervous, like a rhino will come out of nowhere and bust them in the ass with their pants around their ankles. She came back over and broke out her little one-hitter pipe. We smoked and the soreness went out of me as I exhaled. The green meadow began to pulse and I noticed all the different flowers and the bugs moving between them. Sometimes it kind of amazes me how much I look past and filter out when I'm caught up in my own shit. Then I smoke and the world comes into focus around me and it's almost overwhelming. I think that's why people get paranoid when they smoke weed. The world is just too much to take without all the filters.
Weed divorces you from your ego and shows you the world as it is, unconcerned with your particularity. That's the Rastafarian belief anyway-wisdom weed, ganja, the herb that sprung up from the earth covering King Solomon's grave. It works better in nature than in the city. In nature weed makes the world huge, marvelous, mysterious, interconnected. In the city weed can make the world look like a big shipwreck, with drowning people clawing all over each other for air, like crabs on a surf-pounded barnacled rock.
��� I was tripping out on all of that when I heard a sound I couldn't place and then Kate yelling over to me.
��� "Hey," she called. "Hey."
��� I turned around. The bike was on its side on the edge of the road. Kate was on all fours at the bottom of the ditch. The stuff from the tank bag was strewn at intervals in between Kate and the bike. She was waving at me. Her voice wasn't that urgent. I think she was probably caught between being afraid to call my attention to the fallen bike and being afraid period. I got up and ran over there.
��� "You alright?" I asked.
��� She wasn't crying or anything. I didn't really stop to check on her. I went straight to the bike. Kate got up from where she was. She was babbling something at me but I couldn't hear her.
��� "Help me get her up," I said.
��� We pushed the bike upright. Gas and oil had leaked out and the smell of it hit my nose. The foot peg on the right side had been crunched up and the mirror was bent at an unnatural angle. I rested the kickstand back on the flat rock it had been on and I pulled the tangled pack loose from the bike.
��� "I'm so sorry," Kate said. "I don't know what happened. I tried to get onto the bike to get into the tank bag..."
��� "It's alright," I said.
��� I wasn't so sure. You aren't supposed to drop motorcycles. It's not good for them. I was mad at Kate. I should have been worried if she was alright but part of me was saying it served her right.
��� "Is the bike okay?"
��� "I don't know," I said. "We'll let it sit for a while so the fluids can go back where they're supposed to be."
��� Kate looked crestfallen.
��� "It'll be alright," I said.
��� "I'm such a fuck-up," she said.
��� I laughed but she gnawed on her lip fiercely. I could see her eyes turning in on herself. Women can brutalize themselves that way. I've seen my sister do it before. Kate starts thinking about how she was careless getting on the bike and that she's always careless. Careless in her relationship with Blake, careless about her professional life, careless about the way she grabbed me up. Her carelessness becomes the cause and theme of a deep anxiety she has begun feeling about her life. She's 27, old enough to start thinking about a husband and kids. She has no job. Her relationship is uninspired. But she knows the world is hers if she just weren't so fucking careless. Carelessness, in this instance, is sin in theological terms, the turning away from all that is good for some inborn defect that defies rational probing. I walked over and hugged her and kissed the top of her head.
��� "The bike will be fine," I said.
��� I was still worried though. I could picture what had happened. Kate didn't really understand how the bike worked at all. I should have told her it was delicate on the hill there. She usually got on the bike in style once I was already on it. She'd step on the peg on one side and then swing her leg over in one motion, like a cowboy in movies. If she tried that, which I think she did, while the bike was balanced where it was... crash. Whichever side she started from it would've turned out bad. One of two things happened. She either started on the uphill side, stepped down fine on the peg, then swung her leg over. In that case she and the bike would have just kept going over that way. Dramatic. The other option is that she stepped on the downhill side and the whole thing just went back towards her immediately and before she knew it she was on her ass in the ditch. I laughed again at the image of her on her hands and knees calling out to me with surprise still in her voice.
��� "I'm so sorry," she kept saying.
��� "It's fine," I said.
��� Maybe now you'll respect the bike, I thought. Lesson learned.
��� "Will it start?" she asked.
��� "I don't know," I said. But when I saw her face I added, "Probably."
��� "Well there are worse places to be stuck," she said.
��� I saw what she meant. It was a beautiful spot and we could've had a nice time there. But I saw it differently. We were in someone's field. There are very few farmers in America that want someone they don't know in their field. And we were far from anyone capable of fixing the bike. The weed turned on me a little bit and I started worrying about what would happen if the thing didn't start. Here we were, two stoned out hippie looking bikers, sitting inexplicably in a random meadow with a bike that wouldn't go. I imagined walking into one of those white-washed Christian towns with our painted helmets and having to confess our sins to the congregation and plead them to help us. We are adulterers, druggies, dissipated youths. I knew Kate was too proud to accept Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior on a temporary basis, so that was that. I hoped the bike would start.
��� Kate gathered all the stuff up out of the ditch and put it back together neatly. When she was finished I re-tied the pack because it had come loose in the fall. She held it centered so the bike stayed upright. I waited a minute cause I was nervous. The bike started first try. I made a u-turn on the dirt really slow.
��� "Should we get going?" Kate said over the engine.
��� "May as well," I said.
��� I was relieved. She stepped on the foot peg and swung her leg over the bike. It was a really pretty way to get on cause she stood straight up when she did it so that she was way over the bike until she sat down. I laughed again. Must've been some fall.
��� "You alright," I yelled back over my shoulder.
��� Leaving Mt. Pisgah it struck me that we'd had a glimpse of the promised land, and then a glimpse of Sheol. We were riding the road. I wasn't stiff or sore anymore and the ride stayed beautiful winding us through one small godly Pennsylvania town after another. I was feeling pretty good again when we road into some town and the Church, a nice old white wood church, had a sign out front that read, "Are you right with the Lord?" The weed made it echo. I didn't know. I did know I didn't feel like stopping in the town.
��� On the way out a young looking guy in a black Ford F-350 pulled out behind us with a roar and road right up on my ass until the speed limit changed and I buzzed out from underneath him. The Honda Nighthawk 750 is quick and it can run out from underneath something even at highway speeds.
���
India Hotel
��� We rode for another hour or so before we were both ready to stop. Neither one of us said anything about what we were doing for lodging but we both wanted to be in a hotel again. I know I did and it was the first day she didn't mention anything about camping the whole day. The sky was still bright blue when we road into Mansfield, PA. The town had a cute intersection and I stopped the bike there. Instead of parking meters they had iron posts painted black on which were mounted iron horse heads holding metal buckets in their mouths. On the post a sign said, "One dollar parking- all day." It was evening so we didn't pay. Mansfield had a college of some kind in it. Every storefront in the town had the U.S. Army flag flying in front. Must have been left over from the 4th. We walked over to the coffee shop on the corner. Every town has a coffee shop now. Three twenty-somethings sat at one of the tables in the back. The place was a cross between a city coffee shop and a craft barn. There was fancy crochet work on the walls. The girl at the counter was a dyke. Kate ordered for us and they started to talk. I walked around and stared at the walls. I noticed one of the guys looking at me.
��� "How's it going?" I said.
��� "Pretty good," he had a pizza in front of him and a friend on either side. He had both ears pierced with hoops and the tips of his hair were peroxided. He was heavy and wore a close-clipped goatee. "Where'd you all ride from?" he asked in a hip-hop accent.
��� "Boston," I said.
��� "I just moved here from DC," he said. "It's pretty small town here."
��� "Hey, do you know any cheap hotels?" I asked.
��� "There's a Days Inn back that way. And if you go the other way there's the Mansfield Inn a block away and then if you want really cheap you go out of town that way and there's a motel called the Stardust or some shit. It's cheap."
��� "Nice," I said. "Thanks a lot."
��� "Hey," he said. "My friend is spinning tonight at the Days Inn and my other friend bartends. We're trying to get people up for going so you all should come if you feel like it."
��� "Thanks, bro."
��� I always use all kinds of corny addresses when I talk to people younger than me. I don't know if it's to reassure them or me. The guy clearly wanted to talk some more and he definitely wanted to recruit us for his Day's Inn party. We were both tired but I was ready to man up and take the invitation. Kate shot me a glance from where she was standing in the center of the room that made me realize that was not going to happen.
��� "You guys take care," I said. "Maybe we'll see you later on."
��� On the way out Kate said, "I think I'll pass on the Day's Inn bar."
��� The Mansfield Inn was right down the block so we buzzed down there. Kate went in to inquire about the room price. She came out a couple minutes later.
��� "It's $60 but I got him down to $50. I think we can do better."
��� At that moment an Indian man with an ample belly, lush sideburns, and a cheap double-breasted suit jacket emerged from inside, "I will show you the room," he said. "The room is very beautiful. You will see."
��� "That's alright," Kate said.
��� "No, no. I will show you. If you are not liking it then you may go."
��� Kate got off the bike and I parked it. I was starting to wonder about India. I mean Kate's been there and she understands something about the place. My contact with the subcontinent consists of one Mohsin Ali, a mogul prince who flew in the RAF and was a journalistic colleague of my mother's during my growing up. He became one in my mind with Hurree Babu, the sly loudmouth in Rudyard Kipling's book Kim, one of the great colonial picaresque novels of all time, and another piece of my Indian puzzle. Add to that Ghandi's biography and autobiography: the first a picture of a hero beyond human parallel and the second the messy accumulation of an arrogant ideologue's idiosyncratic ruminations. Both made me love the man. Add to that 6th street in the East Village of Manhattan, where I lived for nine months and where Bengalis cook greasy "Indian" food for tourists and the staff live twelve to an apartment above the shops. Add next, a course called Classical Indian Philosophy in the Harvard Sanskrit Studies Department, a heady and nearly incomprehensible tour of Sanskrit thought in the Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain traditions read through the lens of contemporary analytics. Finally add my purest form of contact with the people, a lot of brief conversations with cheap hotel owners all across America, most of whom seem to be named Patil for a reason I don't understand. Maybe Patil means hotel owner in Punjabi or something. I've no idea. None of my experiences with India seem to relate to any of the others. Maybe that's the lesson. India is multiform and coherent only in its diversity, a tapestry of culture, la la la. I thought of old Patil at the Econolodge in Westfield, the first man to host me and Kate. He would have thought this blustery double-barreled Indian Elvis who was trying hard to sell us on his room was gauche, desperate, altogether without class. After all Old Patil had a franchise on a nationally recognized brand and this guy was begging motorcycle rif-raff for his pennies.
We followed the guy to a room which he displayed with a flourish of his cuff. It really was nice. A four-poster canopy bed. Sort of over the top colonial d�cor. For the price it was unbeatable if you cared at all. We didn't. He gave us a palm up gesture, a look like we didn't appreciate the finer things in life, a very subtle head wag, and then turned on his heel in disgust. I was laughing when we got on the bike. Between Jack Sweeney and this Indian guy it was the second time Kate had completely broken down a middle-aged man that would have raked me over the coals.
��� We got on the bike and rode out of town. After about a mile and a half cruising down one of those semi-industrial strips where the town power plant and lumber yard live,� I was about to turn around and beg the Elvis's forgiveness when the Starcrest Inn appeared like a mirage on our horizon. It didn't even look like it was still in business. There was no one there and nothing had been maintained or repainted. The yard was cut, though, and there was a car parked behind the office. We pulled in. This time we both went inside to check the deal. I was expecting a scary white person, some cross between the Perkins Motel and the bulbous-eyed woman from The Foodstop, but as soon as we were in the door the smell of curry hit my nose and my eyes were drawn in the dim light to an altar for Ganesh. An older Indian woman with a bright gold tooth and a face I liked right away answered the door. She looked like a queen of the gypsies with her copper skin, her straight bearing, and her silver bangeld arms. The room was $34. Perfect.
The Gypsy Queen gave us a key to look the room over. Kate went out with it. It dawned on me that hotels were for Indians what laundries had been for the Chinese, a chance to run businesses that no one else wanted because the work was too hard, but that provided a steady long term profit if executed properly. As I stood in the driveway, a room on the other side of the horseshoe shaped motor court opened, a tough looking character in a loose tank top and mesh shorts emerged, sat on the curb and lit a cigarette. It took me a second bit I could see she was a woman by the jog bra under the tank top. Everything else made her look like an out of shape boxer. She stared at me. I met her glance and then looked away towards Kate. Kate stepped out the door and gave me the thumbs up so I went into pay. When I was finished I rode the bike around the driveway. As I passed, the tough girl raised her chin at me in greeting. I nodded back. The bike gives you the respect of all kinds of people who'd write you off otherwise.
��� The room was unbelievable. You can't imagine anyone even being able to track down the sheer randomness of the d�cor. The bedspread was purple with pink and red flowers. The curtains were mustard color with brown and white flowers. The carpet was wine-red and stained. The entire wall behind the bed was covered by a wallpapered mural-size photograph of a meadow of wildflowers so it was mostly green. The room almost made you dizzy, like being in an Indian bazaar or a bowl of masala, or a cheap as motel filled with second hand rummage. Kate loved it. She touched everything. She ripped the bedspread off the bed.
��� "This is the best room I've ever stayed in," she said, an edge of greedy excitement in her voice. "No one will believe this. I wish I had my fucking camera."
��� "Are you hungry?"
��� "Not so much. Let's just go to the supermarket and get stuff for sandwiches."
��� We went to a Super Walmart up the road. It was popping. Kate got some tomatoes and mozzarella and a baguette. It all looked bright shiny and well packaged but it was all going to taste like shit. On the way to the checkout counter there was a wire bin full of black rubber studded dog bones for 89 cents each. Kate stopped and fingered one.
��� "We should get one of these and you can fuck me with it."
��� I laughed. She didn't. As we walked out of the store she said she was sorry she didn't buy the bone. I got hard. I was not used to someone thinking like that. I would never tell someone I wanted to get fucked by a black rubber dogbone. I would never even tell someone I wanted to fuck them with a black rubber dogbone.
��� We rode back to the Starcrest and were happy to arrive again. The husband of the proprietess was mowing the lawn. He waved to us and smiled wide. It felt like we did it every day. We made our makeshift dinner. I wasn't even really hungry cause I was so hot and tired. After dinner Kate got up and went outside to call her boyfriend from the payphone. She had to wait a while cause the tough chick was on the payphone telling someone her whole arrest story. We could hear it in our room.
���
Trinity of the Starcrest
��� I got into my underwear and wrote in my Captain's log. It was my solace. I wrote Kate another letter that I wasn't going to send her. It said I felt like I was falling for her. I don't know if I was. I was definitely under her spell and I wanted to fuck her so bad she probably could've made me do anything for her. But I was just enjoying the whole thing and to say I was falling for her was probably part of my own little romantic game with myself. I was getting used to having her around, though, and I was liking it. I was mad jealous when she took her nightly trip outside to call Blake. I had no way of knowing what went on in those conversations. Were they all kissy-kissy, luvvyduvvy and then she came back in and got naked with me? Kind of creepy. I could never pull something like that off. If I'm done with somebody I'm done with them. Kate came back in after a while. ��� "I'm kind of sick of calling him. He says he can't sleep without me."
��� "That's sweet," I said, but I didn't like the implication that every other night of the year she slept by his side.
��� "He's a big fucking baby."
��� It was a trap I already knew. Never talk bad about a chick's boyfriend even if she's doing it. They do the momma bear thing and they'll rip your fucking head off or quietly hate you if you say anything. I didn't want to talk shit about the dude anyway. I didn't really understand why he would let his girl get on the back of someone else's motorcycle for a week. What if we wrecked? Apart from that he sounded like a pretty good boyfriend from whatever she told me. Except he wasn't really fucking her either and I don't care what they say every woman wants and needs to be fucked.
��� "Let's get naked," Kate said. "I just want to lie around and smoke weed and kiss you all night."
��� "Sounds good," I said.�
��� We got undressed and started kissing. I went down on Kate.
��� "What are you doing?" she asked.
��� "What do you think I'm doing?"
��� "That's against the rules," she said.
��� "Then you need to go over the rules again."
��� "I can get you off but you can't get me off."
��� "Those are shitty rules."
��� I went back down on her and she didn't complain. I was starting to get into it when there was a loud knock at the door. Kate started pretty bad, like her boyfriend had us on camera. I hopped up and looked through the peephole. It was the tough chick.
��� "We have company," I said.
��� "Who?"
��� "The chick on the phone."
��� "The dyke?"
��� I nodded. Kate jumped up and threw her dress on. More pounding on the door.
��� "Hold on a sec," I said.
��� I pulled my pants on and through the button down shirt I wore in the evenings on unbuttoned.
��� "Hey how's it going," I said.
��� "Pretty cool, pretty cool," she said. "Ya'll got a smoke for me?"
��� She had a raspy voice and no front teeth. Looked about thirty but hard living.
��� "I have one," Kate said. "They're the fancy kind. Got them at a tobacconist."
��� If I see someone who looks real poor I always put on some kind of down home accent. Kate goes the other way. She sounds more posh than usual. It made me nervous as she handed over her gold trimmed Nat Sherman to this chick. The girl lit up right away and dragged deep until smoke came pouring out her nose.
��� "Name's Trin,' she said. "Trinity."
��� "I'm Giles," I said.
��� "Kate." Kate stuck her hand under my arm. I was hanging from the doorframe.
��� "Guess you all probly heard everything from my phone call. I'm goin court tomorrow for violatin probation. Yall got anything to drink or some weed or something? Just drank up my last beer."
��� She held it up.
��� "No, we don't," Kate said. She stepped outside.
��� "What are you bi?" Trin said to Kate in an abrupt growl.
��� "Maybe," Kate said.
��� "Seen it right off," Trinity said. "I've been gay my whole life."
��� "So you know bi girls are trouble," Kate said.
��� "Sheeyat," Trin laughed through the gap in her teeth and her tongue poked out. "Ya'll always end up running off with some no good motherfucker cause you really want the dick."
��� "Not always," Kate said.
��� "Mostly."
��� "I can't believe the first thing you asked my was if I'm bi," Kate said. "Can you believe that?" she asked me.
��� I was out of my realm. I was just a dumb dude swinging on a doorframe.
��� "Ya'll are cool people," Trinity said. "That's one thing when you're a ugly bull dyke you could tell cool people right off."'
��� I blushed. I wasn't that cool. I kind of wanted Trinity to go away so I could go back to bed with Kate. Kate seemed amped on the whole thing and was running her mouth. Trinity told us the story of her DUI. How she came up here from New Orleans following a girl who got back with her ex and then got a restraining order on Trin who couldn't get bus money to get out of town. She stayed around living in this hotel. The Gypsy Queen had given her a deal at first, then started feeding her, then let her stay for free.
"Her food sucks, though," Trin said. "Gives me the shits."
Trinity's story unfolded rapidly. She'd finally got busted on a DUI. She knew all the cops by then. When she got pulled over she verbally abused them by name, called them a bunch of dickless motherfuckers, until they abashedly took her in and gave her a court date. Trinity laughed the whole way through the re-telling and I could imagine her laughing her way all the way to the jail, heaping abuse on a bunch of stiff Christian boys who went from small college football to law enforcement.
��� "You're cute as hell," she said to Kate.
��� "Thanks," Kate said. She shot me a look I couldn't quite interpret.
��� "I could do some work with you," Trinity said. "Mind if I come in?"
��� She made like she would push past me. I stayed in the doorframe.
"We're going to bed," I said. "Been on the bike all day."
��� "That's cool," she said. "I'd go to bed if I had a pretty little thing like that."
��� "That's what I was thinking," I said.
��� Kate looked at me gratefully. Trinity cooled it out some and then started talking about her baby girl. She was drunk already and didn't want to leave.
��� "I got pictures of my little girl. I'll show ya'll. Be right back."
��� She put her beer down on the doorstep and took off at a fast walk toward the back of the building. Kate looked at me.
��� "Almost got in too deep there," she said.
��� "Yeah. She's alright but she'll be here all night if we let her."
��� "I know. I was just so blown away by her calling me out bi that I got carried away."
��� "It's cool," I said. "We'll fade to black on her when she gets back."
��� Trinity came back with a bag of fried chicken, a photo album, and a guinea pig. She asked me to hold the guinea pig, who happily burrowed into my armpit, while Trinity took out the photo album. It was a huge leather photo album but there were only about three pages of pictures of her and her little girl inside and one picture of the woman she'd come to Pennsylvania with.
��� "Rape baby," she said, showing us a shot of a toddler. "I'll never tell her though."
��� I had sympathy for Trinity. She was a street kid through and through. She could read us like a book. But she was lonelier than hell and I didn't want to be her friend for the evening. She was looking to have a blow-out before she went to court.
��� "I'm real tired, Trinity," I said. "Great to meet you and good luck on that court date."
��� "You sure I can't come in and get down with ya'll," she said matter of factly.
��� "Not tonight," I said. "I can handle it myself tonight."
��� She laughed and gave me a pound. Kate blushed but looked super relieved. I handed her the guinea pig back.
��� "Ya'll are cool people," she said as she turned to go.
��� Kate walked back inside under my arm. I watched Trinity go, dangling the guinea pig by its scruff as its legs worked hard to find something solid, and then I closed the door and latched it. Trin was alright but she was desperate to get into something. I think she was pretty sure she was going to jail or at least getting shipped back to New Orleans. I guess her probation officer was down there. I wonder if she was even allowed to leave the state. Doubt it. She probably did the meth thing and wound up jamming up here with that woman who turned on her. Rough story. You could tell she was a cool person but she was too low to the ground. Raped. Teeth knocked out. Probation. Jail. Those are all tickets to the other side. Can't judge people over there but you can't really relate to them either unless you knew them before they went. They will always mark you for what they can take.
��� I spent the last year of school working for a homeless ministry in downtown Boston. Eventually my eyes got used to looking into people's eyes and determining if they were hustling me or not. I'm not saying I'm always right, just that I'm in the habit of looking. There's a particularly kind of shine in the eye of the addict, the hustler, the drifter. When you see it, you don't need to hear the story. In fact, shut the story out because most of them know that the longer they hold you, the more they reveal, the more obligated you will be to them. There's power in having worked for them. My job was to give them free shit, not my own shit. I could in all sincerity and clarity, look at them and tell them to go to hell if they asked for money from me. Then I could ask them if they wanted food, clothing, detox, counseling, etc.
��� "I like the way you handled that," Kate said. "You made everyone feel good."
��� "You just have to be firm with people like that," I said, like an expert. "Otherwise they never leave."
��� "I know."
��� Kate took her dress off over her head.
��� "So you can handle me on your own tonight huh?"
��� "I think I can."
��� I stepped towards her and let my hands rest on her hips.
��� The phone rang. It was the Gypsy Queen.
��� "Hello," I said.
��� "What is that woman doing?" she said.
��� "Nothing. She just left."
��� "She asked you for something?"
��� "No. Just said hi."
��� "I tell her she can stay if she is not bothering. Now she is bothering."
��� "No. It's fine. She just came to say hello."
��� "Very sorry, okay? She only is staying one night more."
��� "Thanks for the call."
��� We hung up.
��� "Who was that?"
��� "Our proprietress worried about our visitor."
��� Kate laughed.
��� "I love this place," she said.
��� She climbed on top of me and looked me in the eyes.
��� "Thanks for taking me on this trip," she said. "I feel like a new person."
��� "Else world," I said.
��� "Maybe," she said.
"We need to change the rules we have about touching," I said.
"What do you have in mind?"
"I want to be able to get you off."
"How's this," Kate said. "I can use you to get me off."
"What does that mean?"
"You'll like it."
Kate slid her underewear off and I scooted close to her.
"Put your fingers in my mouth."
I did and she sucked them and spit on them. With her other hand she rubbed her clit and opened her pussy up.
"Now watch," she said.
She took three of my fingeres and squeezed them together and pushed them inside of herself. She pushed them in and out slowly until I got the feel for it and started to help her. Her hand moved to my wrist and lay on it lightly, giving my arm directions with her touch.
"Put another finger in."
I did. She breathed in and exhaled slowly as it went in.
"Put it all in."
I squeezed my fingers together. She grabbed my arm with both of her hands and guided it carefully. Her eyes were closed and her mouth open and she breathed slowly and heavily. I could tell it hurt and I could tell she liked it. I'd never seen that on a woman's face before. I was so hard myself that my dick was pulsing and it felt like all I needed to do was brush something and I would shoot. She pushed my whole hand inside of her up to the wrist and I felt her hands clamp tight on my forearm and I felt her stomach quake. Her breasts trembled slightly as she came and she held my hand inside of her for a long moment before she pushed it out knuckle by knuckle. I had the urge to cry. She looked up at me and her eyes were bright and clear and smiling.
"You see?" she said.

�