playing the ‘tape’

Freshly sodomized, that’s how you woke up on the last day. You consider it to be your last day because you were still pretty drunk from the night before.

Mid-July, a mid-twenties pathetic. You lived in the up-and-up neighborhood, before the Target moved in, before the writing on the wall in a dive bar explained “if you took a cab here, you don’t belong.” You moved there because you love Salvadorian food. You moved there hastily, when you were engaged to be married at 21 years old. The building was beautiful and well maintained. You didn’t have the energy to figure out how to wash the filters on the air conditioners so you lived with the balcony doors open to get a cross breeze, which inevitably led to having to sleep with your sheets over your head so the mosquitoes could not feast on your inert body. You lived in squalor, but in a really large apartment for the rent you were paying. No t.v., you thought and still to some extent still think that they are tacky. Instead, your apartment was filled with books, most of which you haven’t read, but they make you seem smart and educated, a conceited façade. The kitty litter box lived in the kitchen and was rarely changed. The whole kitchen area could be closed off by double doors so that the wreckage and science experiments weren’t readily visible. Empty beer bottles littered your bathroom. Most of the furniture you inherited from your father, the blue-blood Rye New York side of the family. You’re descended from Rob Roy and Thomas Nast, so stubbornness and vanity and hubris run in your veins, as well as the disease of addiction. Your therapist told you that you should go get help since you were 16.

It was nearly a decade later and your ass-hole hurt. Your sheets were not on your bed, but hanging over the doorway of the balcony so that the light wouldn’t shine through. Your wrists were beginning to bruise from the handcuffs. And you couldn’t find the key.

Ink-neck, so labeled for the tattoos on his neck, wouldn’t let you go to the police station to have them removed. You were tired and humiliated. He thought so lowly of you, he had told you so the night before. He couldn’t believe that you couldn’t remember how many guys from your JCC dodgeball team you dropped on. You think he even called you a slut; although it didn’t keep him from asking you to go drinking with him. Eight hours later he was asking if you had a key to the set of handcuffs that were in the bowl next to the front door. Drunk, you said, “Yes.”

You put on a tube top. Didn’t shower. Tried to hide your restrained hands in a black over the shoulder bag while you and Ink-neck boarded the metro to his house and car, which had a set of keys stuck into the rim of the driver's side door and the ceiling foam. You drove to Wendy’s with him and he blew the tire of his car and so both of you sat at a gas station for an hour or so. You laughed at him. You missed your mother’s birthday party. He wouldn’t drive you home so you went back to your apartment on the metro.

You haven’t spoken to him since. You see him around town every once in a while, and you duck, you hide.

If this is enough to keep you from drinking just for today, turn to page 3.

If you want to drown this memory, turn to page 8.