02 October 2001 ~ The boy who gave birth, and the girl who gave him a can of Coke...

I was cleaning out some of the stuff on my hard-drive this evening, and found some of the most hilarious stuff...

Found one thing in particular that I nearly busted a gut over: a piece I wrote in Santa Fe about this guy that I had a twenty-second attraction to. Seriously, it was only about twenty seconds. He was a great kid -- a WEIRD kid, but everybody in Santa Fe is weird, and at least THIS particular weird kid didn't shoot heroin. Anyway, I met him and immediately decided that I wanted to go to bed with him. And twenty seconds later, that was about the dumbest idea I'd ever thought up. And a few months later, there was another twenty seconds when it seemed like a pretty good idea...

But then again, this WAS a pretty weird kid... This was a kid whose greatest joy in life was pretending to be a woman in labor, and screaming, in the middle of the hallway, "You must PUSH the child out!!!" (Seriously, he wasn't shooting heroin. Seriously. Or anything else, as far as I know. He was just weird. And he was from Oklahoma City. I'm pretty sure there's something in the water in that town that makes EVERYBODY a little bizarre...)

Anyway, this piece I wrote was based on the approximately forty seconds I wanted to screw this kid... Maybe you won't find it as freaking amusing as I do, because you probably haven't been fortunate enough to meet this cute little dweeb, but I hope you'll find something in it...

...Coke and the Point of No Return...

It was five months ago when I first saw Damian. And at the time, I was tempted to assert that my attraction to him was pure and harmless. But in all matters of Damian-dom, there is temptation, and I can no longer assert anything.

I was behind the counter, he was a customer. The Coke machine had eaten his money, and he came to complain about it. Of course, it wasn’t my Coke machine – I had nothing to do with the Coke machine. But the customer is, after all, always right. My co-workers had a stash of Cokes in the mini-fridge, so I told him to walk around back and I’d give him one if he promised not to tell where he got it.

Our fingers touched ever-so-briefly as I handed him one of the embezzled sodas, and that was the moment I first get a look at his face. The shiver that ran up my arms embedded itself in my eyes, and I know he saw it. He was tall and skinny with bright hazel eyes – almost bright blue, but almost bright green, and a deep warm brown all at once. Perfect skin. GAHD, he had amazing skin; smooth and beige as sand dunes. His features flowed effortlessly and artistically across the landscape of his face. I could hear his thoughts in my hand as we touched that first time, and it was as if my fingers were the tentacles of a catfish, slowly feeling the soft sweet bottom of a riverbed. That perfect brown hair framing that perfect face with its perfectly pink lips, the colors contrasting and accentuating and pulling me closer and closer.

I though for a moment that I would have to kiss him. Our gaze had been locked for well over two full seconds, which, under the circumstances, put us about three seconds shy of The Point of No Return. At THAT point, of course, I would have closed down the window, and he would have set down the Coke, and we would have been naked and sweaty and trembling within five minutes. The language of those eyes, gently exploring, contemplating, wanting, caressing the riverbed of my thoughts... oh, I could feel every one of my senses come alive. I could see his hand pulling away from mine to lift his shirt, to lift my shirt, to graze my cheek with those fingers... I could smell his body, taste a few drops of Coke left over on his tongue, feel the words in his eyes tenderly pouring over me like water... I could hear... I heard his thoughts...

It was a sort of mental telephone conversation... I heard the electric hum of metallic wires sparkling inside their rubber cases, across a few inches of distance. I heard his eyes speaking to me, whispering sweet nothings, the sound of shadowy breath amplified twenty times over. And then I heard a click. His eyes broke away from mine, and there was silence: empty, longing, unsatisfied silence.

“I’m Damian,” he said.

“Helena,” I replied, gulping an extra few lungfuls of blessed scarce oxygen which just didn’t seem to be moving into my body as it normally should. “Nice to meet you.”

“Thank you so much for the Coke! You have no idea how thirsty I was!”

I smiled and told him he was welcome. I giggled and said, “the customer is always right.” I opened the door for him so he wouldn’t spill the Coke. I watched his back turn and his perfect skinny frame with its topping of perfect brown hair walk slowly down the hallway. My heart resumed pounding.

It took us three and a half months to speak again; he was having trouble with his boyfriend, he’s said, and had nowhere else to go but my room. My door is perpetually open, literally, for any street riffraff or friends or some combination of the the two to enter with their problems, questions, or obscene jokes.

“Do you think I’m attractive?” he asked.

“You’re gay,” I blurted.

“Bi, and so what?”

“I can’t find you attractive,” I replied, desperately searching for justification of my harsh-sounding statement. “If I let myself find you attractive, I would be all over you like a can of soda you just spilled in your lap.”

“Really? So you don’t think he found me unattractive?”

“Do you remember when I gave you that Coke?”

“Coke... um... oh gahd... yes... that was... so... long ago...”

And there it was again. There it was, those eyes, that skin as smooth as whatever the hell I said it was as smooth as before, those eyes, those eyes full of passion and heaving breath.

We broke it off. It was too intense. He said he needed to go to his room. It was late. He had homework. I had to work at eight in the morning. I walked him halfway to his room. “Can I have a kiss goodnight?” he asked.

“What?”

He didn’t reply. He pushed me against the opposite wall. His fingers grazed my cheek like a cobweb stirring in a summer breeze. Our gaze caught. Our eyes locked. One second, two seconds, THREE seconds... And then, the Point of No Return had finally arrived. His mouth tasted like Coke.

HA! I find that so fucking funny I can't even explain it to you! Of course, I never did sleep with him. I slept with the boy down the hall. And then later -- much later -- I slept with the boy who lived downstairs from the boy who lived down the hall. (And then got naked with his sometimes-girlfriend, but that TOTALLY doesn't count for anything!)

And poor Damian disappeared into the abyss of former classmates, and I never heard a word from him after... I guess it would have been the day before I came back to Binghamton... I recall it quite vividly. We were sitting on a staircase together, a bunch of us weird Santa Fe kids... Brian was smiling to himself. Jane was flirting with Brian. Claire was griping. And I was watching Damian demonstrate how to make fake barfing noises with his tongue. That was the last time I saw him.

Ah, nostalgia...
~Helena*