He says that if we do it we’ll get to know each-other better or something, which I am not really buying. He is sweating and our breaths still taste like the Pepsi we shared on the car-ride over here—a jolty twenty-five minutes in his Volkswagen with the roll-down windows and the fucked-up radio. We’re not even in his place—this is some friend of a friend’s, and his place would have to be pretty fucking bad to make this preferable. I don’t feel pressured—just a little sad about it all—at the mall he seemed pretty cool. Goes to show. I ask him some trivia questions, starting out with stuff about love and ‘us’ and stuff, but carefully start to branch out into the animal kingdom and like the history and electronic circuitry and stuff, which is my go-to for diffusing a rocky amorous entanglement. You hook them with the self-interest, and by the time it’s done, one two, by the time they realize what you’re really doing, bam, they’re in it for the argument, heels-dug for the fucking principle of the thing, because you see the trivia questions begin to actually get contentious. A grey area. It becomes a conversation. Why can’t we just have conversations? I even give him a couple of wins, and like that he is jelly in my hands. He admits that he didn’t know all he thought he did about the first integrated circuits (or ICs). Then he makes some comment about the chicks at IIT, i.e., my college, and the night is pretty much over right there. Done-zo. But I can still get some coffee out of this, I think, I hope, but mother luck would have it that his friend has got his own Mr. Coffee hidden behind some empty boxes on the dinged, cramped plastic counters and pretty soon we’re twiddling our thumbs waiting for the thing to heat up. Dratz. It buzzes and wheezes and shit. He gives up a little though, in paying attention to me, because of the waiting, and starts walking around the place, and gets to one of the windows far across the shared dining/living place of the apartment, and after about a minute of silence says to the room’s empty air, ‘yo look: two people fucking’ and I’ll admit my interest is piqued so I go over to the battered window and indeed, through our window and down two floors and through the open window of the apartment complex across the alley there are basically two people fucking. It is sort of weird and far-away-seeming because their heads are obscured by the window’s frame, like they could be anybody, though of course we don’t know them.

“Do you know them?” He asks.

“Oh yeah, I know exactly who that is.”

“Really?”

“No. Jesus. God. Fuck.”

I’ve had a lot of luck in finding guys that can keep up. I’ve told the same guy two weeks apart that I was on my period and it actually worked. There are certain things they don’t touch, most of them. We watch the couple fuck. It is the most placid and real thing we’ve done together so far: actually a little sentimental. Like, I feel like if I keep doing this I will get a little choked up, I don’t know, and I don’t want him to see me cry. Tears are bitch food. I don’t know if he is like, imagining us down there, or if, like me, he’s taking it in more like how one takes in a sex scene in a movie, where it’s erotic, yeah, but not like, really erotic, serious erotic, because it doesn’t seem totally real. Because it’s a movie. Etc. Even though the people here are real, it still doesn’t feel real, maybe because we don’t know them. But if we did know them, then there would be this whole added element of familiarity which would, I assume, also sort of take the eroticism out of it. God we’re really in a bind, aren’t we? All of us. I don’t relay this to him. I don’t say a thing. He’s probably imagining it’s us. He asks me about some more stuff relating to integrated circuits though, and I suddenly realize that he’s embarrassed to watch this with me, to watch this act, which is crazy after what he has said. Like, I feel almost a little insulted. Would he have looked this sheepish after fucking me? He’s at once compelled to watch but also unable to speak candidly about the stuff unfolding right in front of us. It’s a little depressing. It goes into my personal mind folder that comprises all my little evidences that men are children, but also that children aren’t so bad. Children have got novel ideas. Children have got all the parts we have. They’ve got time to burn. The couple fucking change positions and now I can see the woman’s back and her shoulder-length black bob, which swooshes back and forth, covering the shape of her face. It is sort of like one of those desk-lamps with the fringe, shivering when you accidentally bump it. Inside the window frame the two lamps are going at it: hard, fast. They must be turned on. Ha. Jesus Christ. I am a riot. The guy, on his back under black-hair-girl stiffens up like a board, and I guess that’s the end of the show. Black hair gets off in a sort of side-ways slumping turn to decouple from the manhood or whatever and stands up, back to us. She’s thin, strong, young. We get a great 1/8 sec. shot of flaccid dick. Black-hair is much taller than I imagined. She towers over the guy. We think they are done but she goes around below the bed and pulls black straps that are attached to each corner. Pretty soon the man is tied spread-eagle, face-up on the bed’s rumpled sheets, and then the woman leaves. We watch the man in silence, whose face is still not totally shown to us. Over a minute somehow the guy gets an arm free and reaches a TV remote on the nightstand and turns on the TV, which buzzes to life. He fiddles with the remote. We are watching the man watch TV now; he moves and we see he is totally flaccid. Like, his dick is a tiny pool of flesh, an un-watered plant, the withered ego of a bullied, ugly child. But then the guy standing next to me names the TV show, which seems beside the point, but is also miraculous, because I can barely hear the set down there. Then he is describing it to me—