“His mother had told him a trip was a fall…”
— Neil Young
This is the Best Part of the Trip, This is the Trip, the Best Part
The Brothers Rhymer: Brack, the elder by six years, and Neill, the younger, 19, thin as a rake with a Roger Daltrey mop of golden hair. They lived in Memphis, Tennessee, which, in the 1960s, meant they lived among The Yahoo. Yet they loved their city. They were happy with its restaurants and movie theaters. They both had girlfriends, Memphis gals made of marzipan.
Born of a wanderlust neither could articulate, one sere summer day, they planned a trip Northward in Neill’s lemon-yellow Toyota, just the two of them. Brothers. Neither, today, can remember the genesis for such an impetuous expedition but the memory of it is as ripe as a mellow little pippin.
The strategy: drive to New York City (neither of them had been) and then on to Niagara Falls, Ontario, where their roots were still embedded in the frozen Canadian tundra. On Max and Lolly Rhymer’s kitchen table (their parents’ home was neutral ground, as if they needed that home base for their ambitious strategy), they spread out the service station map which, utilizing two sides, showed the highway system that ran between Memphis and New York City, home of all the writers Neill worshiped, home of Real Adult Life, home of Art and Commerce and Literature and Music and Fucking and Bohemia and Dancing in the Starlight Balanced on the Edge of the World.
It was the summer of 1975.
The first side of the map showed the route to Roanoke, Virginia. Memphis sat like a blackhead in the lower left corner of the map’s face and Roanoke sat like an Algonquian headdress across the face tangentially in the upper right hand corner. Flip the map and its colorful mishmash took you from Roanoke (now down in the corner where on the other side Memphis sat like a blackhead, etc.) upward and to the right straight into New York City itself.
The brothers nodded. It was clear that one day’s drive would take them to Roanoke and another day’s drive would deliver them to God’s feet, as represented by the gray and silver skyscrapers and the scuffed, contaminated sidewalks of Big City Nirvana.
Provisions
The brothers packed habiliments and necessaries and foodstuffs and balms and creams and body soaps.
The U.S. mint, under the guidance of President Mxyzptlk, prepared special silver medals with a portrait of Thaddeus Killgrave and inscribed with a message of friendship and peace, called Indian Peace Medals or peace medals. The wayfarers were to distribute them to the nations they met. These symbolized U.S. sovereignty over the indigenous inhabitants. The mission also prepared advanced weapons to display their soldierly firepower. Among these was an air rifle of about .44 caliber, forks and knives and bain-maries and butter curlers, blacksmithing supplies, and cartography equipment. They also carried flags, gift bundles, lincti, and other items they would need for their journey, outward and inward. Much time went into ensuring a sufficient supply of these objects, and more.
Most important of all: they packed eleven perfectly rolled joints. Eleven droogs, eleven blunts, eleven cannabinoids, eleven excursions via Wavy’s Gravy Train.
The Morning of the Trip
The morning of the trip rose earlier than usual, the sun hauled upward on rusting chains. The morning of the trip was rosy-fingered like that gal from the tennis courts. The morning of the trip found our intrepid explorers wide-tailed and bushy-eyed. They were set to go. They were pilgrims.
Goodbye, Mother. Goodbye, Father. Goodbye, Sister AJ. Goodbye, Lovers and friends and Memphis Soul. Goodbye Barbecue. Goodbye Elvis. If we do not return sell our stuff and give the proceeds to the Diggers.
The Road Itself
The boys drove to Roanoke, stoked on brotherly energy and the open world of possibility. The road was a dance, a song, a TV series seemingly without end, like Gilligan’s Island or As the World Turns. It took them about 13 hours to reach Roanoke. So, poor igmos, they assumed they had another 13 hours the next day to NYC.
That night in their Days Inn room, they shared some mojo smoke and took fatuous photos with a Polaroid. Photos that seemed hilarious at the time. Sitting on the TV. Torso-less head coming out of their luggage. Sitting on the commode. Ha ha.
It was soon dinner time. The bell was mostly internal. Yet its ringing was a vespertine song. They were hungry as hell. I want a pound of flesh, Neill said. They decided to eat at the Days Inn restaurant. Why not? Why drive around high when they were that famished and did not care a whit about Roanoke, Virginia (sorry Roanoke, nothing personal).
On their way across the sizzling asphalt parking lot Brack feigned agog and spoke these words to his younger brother, the hero of our saga (consider calling the book the Neilliad?): “Neill, you forgot your pants!”
And, in that marijuana brain flash, that cracked presque vu, Neill believed it and his heart beat like a winged virtuoso and the expression on his young heroic face was one, briefly, of abject terror. It was the kind of face that could bring a wild braying laugh from the perpetrator of the jape, who understood as he said it, that, being this well-oiled, it was possible Neill would believe it – for the microbial slice of time it took him to lower his gaze from the aforementioned eatery to inspect his privates. And it did. It brought that kind of laugh to Brack’s stoned comportment. He brayed, he guffawed, he cackled, he teared up and spit a sizzling gob onto the tarmac.
And, Neill, though the brunt of the joke, joined the laughter after a moment. It took the brothers some time to calm down enough to enter the restaurant and eat their chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes plus gravy and good southern vegetable. Eventually, they did and the food was consumed and so was the evening and before sleep the brothers lit up one more doobie and their dreams were made of silver and the flashes of color from the kind of wheel their parents used to illuminate the aluminum Christmas tree way back in their childhood home in the land of the Lotus Eaters and the Time of the Clan.
Anyway…you’re way ahead of us. You know that the next day they did not have another 13 hours to drive to reach the City that Never Slips. They had about 6 or 7.
Why? they wondered.
They took out their map and studied it. One side went from Memphis to Roanoke. The other side went from Roanoke to NYC.
Did you study map scales (a ratio which compares a measurement on a map to the actual distance between locations identified on the map) in school? Yeah, so did we. The latter side of said map was double-sized. Live and learn and live again.
Newark (Cerberus at the Ready)
So, our intrepid highwaymen steered their gingko-yellow Corolla through the Garden State. They could almost smell the rotting Apple ahead of them. But their thoughts were full of efflorescence and fogbows and the City as seen in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. They could have been driving on a yellow brick road. They could have been driving on air.
Suddenly – a shot rang out. No, suddenly, there was a police cruiser behind them with its warning light appearing to be the chimes of freedom flashing. What the hell? the brothers thought as one. Briefly, it flickered through their young minds that somewhere in the darkened recesses of their trunk, along with their soiled undergarments, suitcases and comic books, were 3 perfectly rolled joints, all that was left of their stash. Neill knew not where. Brack had secreted them and, Neill hoped, secreted them well.
They pulled onto the breakdown lane. The cruiser parked behind them and the police officer did the slow, oh so casual saunter up to the car. Neill rolled down his window. His palms were not desert palms: they were as wet as fish.
“Where ya goin’?” the officer asked in a New Jersey voice so clichéd it was as if they had hired him from Central Casting for just such pull-overs. Perhaps that is what New Jersey does, or did back then, in the golden, halcyon days of the 1970s.
“New York City,” Neill said. “Sir.” He may not have said ‘sir.’ He may have only thought it. His heart was a bird battered by storm.
“Ya eva been there?” the kind policeman asked.
“No, sir,” Neill said. He definitely said ‘sir’ this time.
“It’s a shithole.”
The brothers sat in stunned silence. What was going on?
“I pulled ya ova because I saw your Tennessee tags and I thought you were lost.”
“No, sir,” Neill said, still slightly dazed. “We know where we’re going.” In the Corolla. In life. But not afterwards.
“Where ya gonna stay?”
“Um, don’t really know.”
“In tha city?”
“I guess so.”
“Ya won’t find anything in tha city.”
“Ok.”
“Where ya gonna stay if ya don’t stay in tha city?”
“Dunno. Sir.”
“Ya didn’t think it through.”
“No, sir. We’re just gonna drive into New York City and hope for the best.”
The peace officer looked at the boys, long-haired, youthful, nervous, the way Thomas looked at the Lord’s stigmata (Give him a break. It was the First Stigmata. Who knew?).
“Ya won’t find anything in tha city.”
“I guess we’ll stay in Newark, then,” Neill managed.
“Ya eva been there?
“No, sir.”
A Pinter Pause.
“It’s a shithole.”
There was a silence. The silence was inside Brack. The silence was inside the police officer, who was really thinking about getting home and talking to his wife about dinner; he didn’t want that vegetable casserole again, the one that gave him such heartburn he was up half the night. And the silence was inside Neill like a stone that covers the exit to his Cave of Thought.
“Ok then,” the policeman finally said. “You guys be safe.”
“Yes, sir,” Neill said.
The cruiser waited for them to return to the slab, to the highway of dreams. Then he passed them and hit his horn a couple times. The brothers waved but the policeman wasn’t even looking. He was thinking about roast pork.
The Wanderers See The City for the First Time and Are Agog Almost Exactly as if They are Walk-ons from Hooterville
There is an entrance into New York City across some bridge (look this up) that — unexpectedly — there it is, BAM!, the city you’ve dreamed about, the city you’ve seen in so many movies. You can already pick out landmarks. You have watched that much TV. The city glistens in the sun (on this day anyway) and looks, for the entire world, like Atlantis, surrounded by amethyst, wavering, watery light.
The brothers’ jaws went slack. Brack was now driving, having taken over at a rest stop right outside Newark.
“Oh my,” Neill said.
In response Brack picked up the map, whose wise counsel brought them from backwater Tennessee to the brink of one of the world’s greatest metropolises, and hit himself numerous times, smartly, in the face. Neill looked at him and smiled like a troll. He understood. They were brothers. When Brack put the map down, still wearing a grin as goofy as Goofy’s, Neill picked it up and aped Brack’s facial flagellation.
“Effing NYC,” Brack said.
“I sorta thought we’d never make it.”
“I know what you mean. What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s just. I always feel like great things can’t happen for me, that something will sour them, compromise them. When the cop pulled us over I just assumed we’d be busted, arrested, imprisoned in Newark, New Jersey, and then sent home with our hillbilly tails between our legs.”
“Yeah. I get that. But have faith, little brother. We did indeed do it. We are about to enter Oz.”
“The Emerald City.”
“Wherever.”
“I feel giddy. Do you feel giddy?”
“I do. I feel downright giddy.”
The Boys Drive In and Out and End up at a Howard Johnson’s in Newark
Does that chapter heading tell it all? Should we even write this part? Swift did that in Gulliver’s Travels, remember? At the beginning of every chapter were 3 or 4 sentences about what is about to happen. Theoretically, you could just read those chapter headings and finish up the novel in about 15 minutes. Seriously.
Yet: There is stuff to tell about that drive into New York City, as brief as it was. The brothers goggled and aw-shucked and gaped and pinched themselves and rubbernecked and acted like yokel tourists and found everything around them, including the street person whose sign said, “See my Dick. $1,” enchanting. They were in a new world. It might as well have been Katmandu.
They drove around. They found a parking place near Central Park. They walked a few blocks. The sun was setting. They were tired, adrenalin leaking out of their ears like yellow matter custard. They decided to go back to Newark (see, you already knew) and they slept in a Howard Johnson without even breaking into the grass. Presumably they ate dinner that night, probably in the motel restaurant, but we have no record of that. They vowed that the next day they would not only arrive but conquer.
They slept like bantlings. The next day crept into their dreams in ways surprising and mundane and when they woke, they were bleary and happy and ready to hunt for the Snark.
New York Fucking City
It’s said that fifty percent of the people who live and/or work in New York City have never been to the top of the Empire State Building, or visited the Statue of Liberty, or dropped into the New Yorker offices to talk to their editors.
Scratch that last one.
All the brothers knew was that they were tourists and they were not going to act like natives. They wore cameras. They wore spoony smiles. They eyed every woman on the sidewalk: they all looked like either Diane Keaton or Tuesday Weld. They gave pocket change to beggars. They stopped giving pocket change to beggars. They walked and walked and saw things, wondrous things.
They did go to the top of The Empire State building. They did have an egg cream whenever they wanted one. They did go to The Strand and Gotham Books. They did not take the ferry to the Statue of Liberty but they stood at the railing and, across the choppy river, waved to her. She waved back and then waggled her finger to warn the travelers about getting too big for their Tennessee breeches. Or at least Brack said she did. Neill thought she gave them the one-finger salute.
Central Park! And St. John still alive!
Times Square! MOMA!
So, on and on, boats against the tide, they walked those gray and grimy streets. They capped the evening off with dinner in a Russian deli where the Reuben sandwiches they consumed tasted of paradise, lost or regained. They had more egg creams. Neill said egg creams were the second best thing he’d ever put in his mouth, naming the nipples of Orbit’s supernally rounded tits as the first.
Neill said to the waitress, who was cute-sexy in an Ann Beattie way, “This is the best egg cream I’ve ever had,” as if he’d been drinking them his whole life.
The crusty guy behind the counter, possibly the cook, shouted out a little too loudly though none of the patrons turned their heads, “It’s made with shark’s eggs. Put liquor in your picker.” He said ‘picker’ so it would rhyme.
Neill and Brack laughed and toasted him with their glasses.
They returned to Newark and bedded down and dreamed about what they saw and didn’t see and what they imagined they saw and didn’t see and in the morning they still had big city stars in their puerile little crania and they prepared for a drive that would take them out of the United States of America and into Canada, the world’s second largest country, a land founded by Norsemen and minor gods, like Sandy the Goddess of Publicly Funded Health Care. The land of Marshall McLuhan and Anne Murray and Leonard Cohen and Frank Gehry and Alice Munro and Slumach Katzie and Molson’s and Neil Young and Dudley Do-Right.
Expatriates
So, they crossed the border the same way they had done dozens of times in their youth. Anything to declare? Purpose of visit? Length of stay? It took about 45 seconds. They left the U. S. of A.
They had planned ahead and booked a room in their Aunt July’s house on Coach Drive. Aunt July was close to their mother’s age (did the brothers know their mother’s age? they did not), both of them right in the middle of the 16 children pack their mother and father birthed out of the Canadian wilderness. Aunt July was very close to Neill when Neill was young. Was she his godmother (check this)? She was overjoyed to see them.
Also, living at Aunt July’s and Uncle Tulip’s was their cousin, Stretch. Stretch would go on later to have a successful baseball career. He was a helluva pitcher. Uncle Tulip called him “Ragarm.” Stretch and Neill were about the same age and had been good friends for most of their young lives.
Peameal Bacon
Sure, the brothers wanted to see their large Canuck family, the overabundance of aunts and uncles, the zillion cousins. But, if pressed, they would tell you that there was overwhelming reason to return to A Mari Usque ad Mare: Canadian Bacon.
Here in the states what is called Canadian Bacon is a poor substitute, a form of cured ham that is ok when put on a pizza or simmered in spaghetti sauce (to go one rung further down the evolutionary scale, McDonalds has something called an Egg McMuffin. It’s a blend of egg-like substances pressed into circular form that looks like a small slimy white puck, and an “English” muffin, and “Canadian Bacon.” God knows what is really in it).
Real Canadian Bacon is Peameal bacon: boneless pork loins, short cut from the leaner portions of the loin, to ensure a more uniform product. External fat is generally trimmed to within 3 mm. Smokeless and tender, sweet pickle-cured and rolled in a traditional golden peameal coating. It is the signature dish of Toronto and in Niagara Falls, across the Niagara River, across The Peace Bridge, from where the lads were born in Niagara Falls, NY, it was standard breakfast fare.
The boys spent much of their lives explaining what REAL Canadian bacon is. Every pizza ordered rankled. Every McDonalds commercial made them rend their garments.
And, and, later in life the brothers were heartbroken to discover they would never again eat peameal bacon unless they cross that Peace Bridge.
The Falls, The Tourist Traps, Their Most Minky Cousin
The Brothers Rhymer had one pre-stated purpose in visiting the Falls of their Youth: they were going to do all the tourist stuff their family eschewed. They were shocked that most of their cousins and aunts and uncles had never ridden The Maid of the Mist. This was the small boat service that took holidaymakers on a trip to the base of each of the three parts that make up The Great Niagara Falls: The American Falls, The Horseshoe (or Canadian) Falls, and the Bridle Falls, seemingly a tired God’s afterthought, a mere giant’s shower stall compared to its roaring and over-achieving siblings.
They dressed nicely in sharp, casual summer wear. Neill, a paisley short-sleeve and blue jean shorts. He splashed on Hai Karate (“Be careful how you use it!”). Brack was an English Leather man. It had the cooler bottle.
So, Stretch took his cousins down to the noisy, bright, hyperactive, colorful shops and museums that lined the beautiful brick walkway on the Ontario side of The Falls, down along Clifton Hill, where, during the summer, the beautiful Canuck teens made their mad money.
And, it was among these shops that a cousin of the cousins worked, and not just any cousin but the Page Three Girl of the multitudes of cousins created by the Rhymers’ mother’s enthusiastic parents, the heavily rutting grandparents all the kids loved with a mix of awe and curiosity. Bed Jarones was the beautiful daughter of the prettiest of their aunts, Aunt Queue and her husband, the witty, baronial Ron “Da Doo Ron Ron” Jarones. Aunt Queue, even to the eleven and twelve year old male cousins was a dish. She looked a bit like the actress Jo Ann Pflug, but Aunt Queue was sexier. And she passed those sexy genes on to her two daughters, Bed, who was a couple years younger than Neill, and Merry, who was a couple years younger than Bed. Bed had her mother’s easy grace and her perfect cheekbones. Neill had been in love with Bed his whole life. He wasn’t alone. All the male cousins wanted to see the back of her dress cut away and her white panties revealed.
Bed worked along Clifton Hill, at the bottom of the hill, in an information booth where she dispensed wisdom to the naked mob along with tickets to Viewmobile Tram, which was run by the Niagara Parks Commission, as were a number of businesses in this humming area. Neill was nervous about seeing Bed again. Surely, his lifelong crush had dissipated with his maturity (yeah, right), and, surely, he could now be cool around her.
He saw her from about 25 yards away, talking to some kids on bicycles. She shone like ambergris. She was a goddess. She was stunning. She shone like sunlight through honey. She was Bed, the Invincible, Bed, the Eternal.
“Hi,” she shouted as Neill and Stretch and Brack approached. “My mom told me you were visiting. How are you?’
She may have said some more introductory comments but Neill had gone deaf. He also had stopped walking.
Brack looked back at him. He slowed and whispered in his brother’s ear.
“Surely, your lifelong crush on Bed has dissipated with your maturity,” he said.
“Gurg,” Neill said.
“Good to see you, Bed,” Brack said, leaving his brother stuck in the mire.
“You guys get in last night?” Bed asked. She smiled. O, how she smiled!
“Yes,” Brack said. He reached back and grabbed his brother by the collar, dragging him closer.
“Hey, Neill,” Bed said. “Great to see you again. It’s been like ten years or so, eh? Remember that time down in Uncle Finn’s basement. You were so funny!”
“Gurg,” Neill said. “Urg.”
“Neill’s a little tongue-tied,” Brack said. “Bad mix of cough syrup and sitcoms last night.”
“You have a cough?” Bed asked. Her voice was the tinkling of chimes.
“Nurk,” Neill said.
Eventually, the brothers moved away, telling Bed they were about to do all the tourist things they could pack into their days here.
“Gonna do the Maid of the Mist?” Bed asked.
“We are,” Brack said.
More about the Cousin because Neill would Want it That Way
She had a head of sloppy butterscotch curls, a sneeze of freckles laid across her bobbed nose by a master artisan. Her lips were ample and seemed moist, even from a distance. They gleamed. Bed (short for Beddie, we think) turned men into gomers yet she was as sweet as the apple in their mouths. Sweet and funny and talented. There are women like this in the world. Why? Because no one promised an even distribution of pluses or minuses. At least we don’t think anyone promised this. Perhaps there is something in the ancient writings of Mesopotamia about such a guarantee, or carved among the still untranslated bits of hieroglyphics. Or in the expurgated books of The Holy Bible, the so-called Apocrypha, or Deuterocanonical books.
Perhaps in the same place we would find a rose garden promised.
When she was young, and they were all young, she could make the lights come on. If boys tried to talk to Bed it came out jabberwocky. Boys became jabbering monkeys within ten feet of her.
In short, she was as lovely as the first green in the wood.
On this day, returning a more mature version of himself to his hotbed past, Neill walked away frustrated and kicking himself. He wanted to say things to her. He perhaps didn’t know until he saw her that he wanted to say things to her but now the missed opportunity stung like a slap. He also knew that before sleep that night he was going to pine for his dishy Canadian cousin.
It was to be and not to be.
This May Not Have Happened
All biography is tinged with myth, even for so unknown and indefinite a personage as Neill Rhymer. This part of the story is, well, shaky. Its undercarriage is weak.
Stretch had gone on to work, leaving the Rhymer boys on their own. The brothers were doing the sightseer thing in their near-homeland. They visited Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum and Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum. Ripley’s brought back to mind the Rhymer Family car trips. Each child got his or her choice of 2 comic books and one paperback book. The comics were Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Archie, Green Lantern, The Avengers, Caspar the Friendly Ghost, or Thor.
The paperbacks were usually Mad collections or Ripley’s Believe it or Not. Neill, at age ten or eleven, delighted in reading aloud the descriptions of the man with the longest fingernails, or the man who was struck by lightning 14 times and lived underground, or the Confederate soldier who was shot in the face but lived and 58 years later coughed up the slug.
Good times.
After lunch, drowsy and jostled by the colorful crowds, the brothers were sleepily strolling toward the railing around the Great Falls itself. They were hailed from behind.
“Neill,” an unmistakably feminine voice called.
They turned.
It was her.
It was their cousin Bed.
Neill coughed into his fist.
“Steady, Brother,” Brack said.
“Hey, hey,” Bed said, catching up. “I was looking for you guys. I got off unexpectedly early.
“Wonderful,” Brack said.
“Wonderful,” Neill said. Dammit, he thought.
“Can I tag along? Where are you going?”
“Anywhere,” Neill said. This was a little better.
“I love anywhere,” Bed said.
So, the three cousins strolled slowly around the glittering landscape, half carnival and half paradise. Half hucksterism and half God’s munificent wonder. The roar of the falls was like some drum in their blood. One could feel it at all times, as if a second heart beat within you.
“You get used to this, I guess,” Brack said.
“I don’t really,” Bed answered. She looked thoughtful. “No, I don’t really.”
“If you could see it with our eyes,” Neill said.
Bed looked at him, squinted one eye, and took his measure.
“I will,” she said. She slipped her arm under Neill’s.
They walked and walked and that arm stayed there. And, consequently, Neill began to feel more like a functioning human male. Eventually, his wit and his loosened tongue made the whole day shimmery and bright.
He made Bed laugh and making Bed laugh was like creating the sun.
Toward evening, sitting in Victoria Park, which lay alongside the roar of the great cataract, the trio felt friendly and happy and the talk was lively and loving. Bed kept touching Neill here and there, on the shoulder, on the thigh, once on his cheek, a caress as soft as the breath of evening.
“I’m getting hungry,” Brack said.
“A bit peckish myself,” Neill said.
Bed laughed and playfully slapped Neill’s bicep as if he were up to some kind of devilish shenanigans. Maybe she thought peckish meant something else. Maybe that day it did.
“I think Aunt July is cooking pot roast,” Neill said.
“That’s tomorrow night,” Brack said.
It wasn’t.
“Listen,” Brack continued. “I think I am gonna go to Uncle Bart’s and drink beer and shoot pool. You two go on without me.”
God bless Brack.
After he left Neill hoped the concrete would not return to his tongue.
It didn’t.
“What do you want to eat?” Bed asked, re-slipping her arm under his. Even though they sat on a stone bench Neill felt as if they were about to make out on their parents’ couch.
“Peameal bacon,” Neill said.
Bed’s laugh tinkled like the green bells of Cardiff. “Of course you do,” she said. “I think there’s a good steakhouse near.” She was smiling like a shark.
“Or I could take you to my apartment and cook you peameal bacon.”
“You have an apartment?”
“I do. Just like a grownup.”
“You have a roommate?”
Bed gave Neill another one-eyed squint. “I do not,” she said, and pulled him to his feet.
Bed’s apartment was small but neat. Its walls were hung with tasteful art and her album crates were full of Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, The Moody Blues, and Leonard Cohen.
They ate fried eggs and Peameal bacon and warm buttery toast and for dessert a lime sorbet.
Afterwards they sat on her over-stuffed couch.
“TV?” Bed asked, settling very close.
“Or not TV,” Neill said.
“Not,” Bed said.
“I. Well, I don’t know what to say. Do you know how long?” He lost the thread.
“What?” Bed feinted left.
“How long,” Neill said.
“When we first met today, what was all the nervousness about? I thought perhaps you didn’t have fond memories of me, or you were disappointed in how I had grown up.”
“Oh, Bed,” Neill said. His throat caught. “Just the opposite.”
They were silent for a few moments. Bed took Neill’s hand and they were silent for a few more moments.
“I’ve wanted you my whole goddamn life,” Neill finally said.
“Ah,” Bed said.
“But, impossible, right? I mean, first cousins and all.”
Bed seemed to think this over.
“It’s not like we’re gonna procreate,” she said.
“True,” Neill said. Then: “Wait, what? What do you mean? You mean, we can, um, fool around?”
“You’re a beautiful man, did you know that, Cuz? You look like Roger Daltrey.”
“Ha.”
“And you smell good. Is that English Leather?”
“Hai Karate.”
“Be careful how you use it, right? Fool around, yeah. I think we could do that. After you walked away this morning I was kicking myself for not making you more comfortable. Plus, well, hell, I wanted to kiss you.”
“Jesus,” Neill said.
“Now,” Bed said.
She leaned in slowly. Her face, like an ancient visage on a coin, moved toward him out of dimness into clarity and then into dimness again. Neill forgot to close his eyes.
Her lips were soft and, yes, really that moist. Her mouth was like a freshet. Her tongue was firm and as erotic as electrical phenomena.
Neill kissed Bed’s butterscotch neck and shoulder. Bed ran a finger down Neill’s shirt front.
Soon, their hands were all over each other. The hands moved of their own volition. Neill tried not to think who this was, yet he wanted, simultaneously, to never forget for one second the who and how and why this was. After Bed had removed her shirt and bra and Neill his shirt and pants they sat back and looked at each other.
Bed’s breasts were small and perfect, fruits no mortal man should miss. Her nipples, against the lighter coloring of her fawn skin, were like sunburned stones.
“My God, you’re beautiful,” Neill said.
“Neill, Neill, Sweet man,” Bed said. “Let’s go.”
“Bed to bed?” Neill said.
Bed chuckled as if it were the first time she had heard it.
After they rose Bed let her skirt fall and Neill watched her walk away from him clad only in panties, a shade of pink only slightly different from her magnificent flesh.
Bed turned. “Come on, Cuz, quit staring and follow. That’s a flattering mass.”
Neill looked at the front of his skivvies. They tented outward as if Neill had secreted there a billy club. Ah, the erections of youth!
Bed lay down. Neill took another moment to look at her body, its perfection, its curves. Bed slipped her panties off and there was a delicious snarl of pubic hair like a smaller version of Bed’s head. Blond, helical and drizzly.
“My God, you’re beautiful,” Neill said.
“You said that. So are you. Take those off.”
Neill did. Have I ever been called beautiful, Neill wondered. Neil was rapt. “I could stand to look at that for a long time.”
“Come here, Sweet Man. Jesus, Cuz. Is that for me?” Bed asked nodding at Neill’s verga.
“Only two decades worth.”
“Ha. Like we knew how to do this when we were kids.”
Neill slid next to her. As their bodies came together Neill gasped. His erection against her silky skin felt like bliss.
“All I knew back then was that I wanted to do something with you,” Neill said.
“Like this?” Bed said, simultaneously covering his mouth with hers and taking his bobbed toy in her supple palm.
“God,” Neill said, when the intense kiss ended.
Bed expertly moved Neill’s nether-stone erection around in her hand. She was doing something to the head that seemed unprecedented in Neill’s short life. She knew magic tricks.
“I want to suck your dick,” Bed said.
Neill groaned.
“Wait,” he said.
“Ok.”
“No, I mean, if you did that it would be over so soon. I desire you so much, really a lifetime’s worth of whitewash is behind that barker. Lemme go down on your first.”
“By all means,” Bed said.
Then Neill did. When he put his lips to the moist center of his cousin’s body and tasted the honey there and began to lick and suck, the conversation, the witty repartee disappeared. It was replaced by intimate sounds and passionate squeezes and animal noises as the gloaming fell over the apartment and transformed the room’s browns and golds into grayer shades. At one point Bed turned on the bedside lamp so that she could see what her cousin was doing. What she saw was the Roger Daltrey top of his head moving like a sun-kissed stoper between her legs. When Neill began to work on her clit with his lips, while moving two fingers in and out of her, Bed gritted her teeth, grabbed the sheets in frantic fistfuls. She tensed her body upwards, not unlike Linda Blair. And then Bed released a sweet-sounding bray as her orgasm took her over.
Neill put his cheek against her stomach. His mouth was slick. She tasted like fruit punch.
Bed ran her fingers through his hair as she gathered herself.
“Now, may I suck your dick?” she asked.
They both laughed.
Until she took it all the way into her mouth and manipulated his testicles the way a gambler caresses the dice before his final throw for the night. Neill felt the sea rise within him.
“Bed,” he panted. “Do. You. Want. To. Fuck? Because. If. You. Do. You. Better. Climb. Aboard. Quick.”
She did.
“Birth. Control.”
“No. Worries.”
She sat on him and Neill saw her perfect, puckered, honey-pink body, lit by the small lamp by his head and by the light of Eden’s perfection before the, you know, Fall. She really was the most beautiful woman Neill had ever seen.
Bed came one more time. She sang like a silver-voiced thrush. Then Neill came and he came hard. It almost knocked Bed ass over teakettle.
Afterward they collapsed together, their sweat and other bodily humors made them adhere even if their passion would not have.
They both dozed a bit. Still tickling each other. Still caressing.
“Neill,” Bed said, somewhere in the dim early morning hours.
“Bed,” Neill said.
“I am on the pill.”
“Oh. Good. Thank you. I thought that was what you meant.”
“We’re safe. We don’t need a pregnancy.”
“No. Thank you. Especially since our kids might have four irises or something.”
“Something else we possibly should have asked beforehand: do you have a girlfriend?”
Neill’s impulse was to lie.
“I do,” he said. “She’s very special.”
“I’m glad. You deserve someone special.”
They circled each other’s private parts with damp fingers some more. Neill knew he had to ask too.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
“I would think you would.”
“Woof.”
“Don’t bark at me, Woman.”
“His name is Jeff Woof. Everyone calls him Woof. I love him.”
“I’m glad,” Neill said. He wasn’t.
“Where is he?”
“Toronto.”
“Oh good.”
“He’s visiting friends.”
“Oh.”
“He comes back tomorrow. I mean today. In about six hours.”
“Fuck.”
“I’m sorry.”
More silence, but still loving, still tender, still erotic.
“Was I wrong to take you this way when I knew it could only be once?”
Neill thought about it. He really wanted to have the right answer ready. So much seemed, in the moment, to hang by a precise response.
“I have no idea,” he said.
Corey Mesler has published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Good Poems American Places, and Esquire/Narrative. He has published 8 novels, 4 short story collections, numerous chapbooks, and 4 full-length poetry collections. His new novel, Memphis Movie, is from Soft Skull Press (April 2015). He’s been nominated for many Pushcarts, and 2 of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. With his wife he runs a bookstore in Memphis. He can be found at Coreymesler.wordpress.com.
