PoetrySexLife

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Introductions, Cont.

My new roommate was sick the day we all moved in, at the drug store with his parents loading up on cough drops, Alka-Seltzer, and vitamin C drops.  So the first people I met were my across the hall neighbors; two young men who would become staple figures in my life over the next year and one of them would be dead in less than that.  And when I talk about his death, don’t think this’ll be one of those stories where you’ll be all weepy and down about the world after you read it like A Separate Piece or Flowers for Algernon.  I don’t deal in bullshit—that’s not what this is about. This story is a celebration of life, a tale of young men who grabbed the bull by the balls and lived life like it was once lived by free human beings who believe that the definition of life in is the ground you stand on and life that year, to quote Ice Cube, was all about bitches and money.

Mark, the future dead guy (god, aren’t we all?), was a burly hulking figure, his hairstyle oscillating from a fluffed out brillo pad to a slapping bald no guard trim cut, his barrel chest always led the way when he sauntered the third floor hallway of Kohl Hall dormitory. Mark was a hunter from way back, born with a stainless steel 12-guage in his infant fist, and he could shoot straight before he was weaned from the nipple. Mark once told me that he’d come across a dead hunter’s body when he was nine, said the guy’d been there about three days and stunk beyond death.  Three months later, in late November, after drinking three 40-oz bottles of King Cobra malt liquor, smoking a blunt wrapped in black-n-mild cigar paper, he told me that what he’d come across in that forest was a moose, not a man, up in Canada. I said, so there was no dead guy? He said there was but he was the one who shot him. Even in a stoned and drunken stupor I was taken aback by this piece of brutal info. I mean, you see people die on television and in the news but it all seems so fantastic like some joke that one breath whispers across the silence to the next one. But to actually hear that the guy you’d just shared a stick of sticky with had actually pushed someone’s lever from life to death; well that was some heavy shit man.

I said, you killed him?  He told me the story about how this guy was a novice hunter, had just taken it up and was wearing Realtree Camo, head to toe, with no safety orange.  Mark told me how he’d sat in the dark early morning in his deer stand watching the leaves shake in a bush a hundred feet away; he said he watched for a good two minutes before shouldering his 30/30 and sighting in on the hidden mass. He waited another ten to fifteen seconds before the mass broke from the bush and walked free. He spoke in detail about how it all seemed slow motion to him; his finger squeezes the trigger and his shoulder recoils with the rifle and there are the familiar dropped weight and broken branch sounds that followed a clean kill. He said there was no screaming, no drama like in the movies. It was an honest mistake he was eventually cleared of but the spooky thing about the story was when he grabbed my shoulder the way that only heterosexual men who have a deep respect for each other can, and said, it was natural, man. I asked what and he said, killing a man. It was as natural as waking up and taking a piss in the morning.

I asked if he enjoyed it, an odd question I know, but one I felt was validated by the conversation and the identical THC molecules running through both our bloodstreams and fucking with our heads. Without hesitation, he said, No. That was the end of the conversation. My good friend, who would be dead in seven months, had killed a man and was not proud of it, but nor was he ashamed.  According to Mark, killing another human being was a natural phenomenon that went so much deeper than those written words and passed down morals would ever lead us to believe. For years, I thought it was this statement more than anything else involved with Mark Strausser’s death that killed him.

Mark’s roommate’s name was Phil Scotterson and he was a living testament that junk food can sustain a body well into its twenties. Phil was a second-generation plumber’s son and the first in his family to go to college. He was involved in a bad car accident when he was twelve that left half his brains hanging out of his skull, modern medicine gave him what they called a limited lease, three years to live, and Phil doubled that and substance abused his body as a final fuck you to those doctors who wrote him off. He came to school with a killer stereo system, a brand new Ford F150, a cute back home girlfriend who only gave blowjobs when she was on her period, and the entire Pink Floyd catalog.

Phil was a massive kid, six foot four, three hundred pounds (another fuck you to those doctors who had him dead at five six and one thirty), feet that smelled like the crusty crud underneath an unwashed circumcised penis head, his sheets always smelling like spent semen, no doubt extracted during Mark’s absences to class, the one porno tape Phil owned spinning away in the hand me down Oscar VCR, pumping and staving off his sexual frustrations at having a girlfriend two hundred miles away but a willing fist so close. Phil was not a man to abstain from the pursuit and capture of pleasure. He was the amongst the world’s worst drunks, burning himself with cigarettes, punching brick walls and stop signs, picking fights with people half his size, and knocking on your door at three in the morning to tell you he just puked all over the bathroom floor.  Once, my roommate was getting a blowjob in his lower bunk with a blanket hanging down for privacy. I was studying at my desk with headphones on trying to ignore the sexual chocolate happening behind me, Phil comes barging in the room, turns on the TV, and starts talking as loud as he can, this girl who just showed her tits to me. Then he sits down on my roommate’s bed without looking and rips the blanket down, exposing their action for both of us to see. I went into obvious hysterics because the shit was funny, the poor girl ran from the room mortified, and my roommate pulled his pants up and smacked Phil on the head with a rolled up magazine, more annoyed than angry. Looking back now, I don’t understand why a girl who was okay with sucking a dick with someone else in the room, headphones or not, would be upset about being exposed for doing what we all (except Phil) knew she was doing anyway.  Some girls are a trip, man.

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