First Day of Hummer

It was the first day of hummer and everybody in the house was excited. However, the scientific data appeared to indicate that most of the work to be done would be clerical. A lot of filling out of forms and photocopying of sunrises. A team of interns was set to the job, but some of them snuck off to get naked in between puffs of pot.

As with the popular TV shows of the day that were reproduced in order to repeat the future to itself, my lover, my boss, copied her action in longhand into the corners of my eyes. She usually got me the same thing on the first day of hummer: mango and sticky rice. It was my favorite and she knew how to score big without damaging her purse.

Before lunch, the mail came and razed disaster. I open all my boss’ mail for her, sorting out the ass from the crack, and I knew the blue airmail letter wasn’t good. Her brother in Toulouse had written again. He always provided bad news of this or that spooge he’d gotten himself wrapped up in. It wasn’t that my boss was anti-gay, she was simply anti-sleep with whole blocks of French men. She’d told me about her fetal once-only experience of sharing a crib with a Parisian, how he was all ball-hog, wouldn’t pass when she was wide-open, etc., and I couldn’t blame her for dissing expatriatism for the more tragicomic climes of Cleveland. Life in Ohio wasn’t as bad as the non-natives made out and especially on the first day of hummer, everything shined like a period stain.

I read the letter to my boss aloud. “Falling in love,” her brother wrote, “is tantamount to suicide, spontaneously as perfect as perfect can be.”

My boss wasn’t in the mood for his asinine sentences. She herself doesn’t even finish half her sentences anymore because she’s bored by where they’ve been.

“I feel sorry for him,” she said, “but I don’t think he qualifies as a dog.”

I read a few more lines about a trip to St. Petersburg. “Throw it away,” she said. But I kept reading his words and some of mine. “He’s got AIDS,” I said.

“Good lord,” she said and sat down where I wanted my face. I knew he didn’t really have AIDS, but I also knew this hollow-sorrow would put her in the fuck-me mood.

For this wasn’t going to ruin the first day of hummer. “I want a beer,” I said, “and I want a woman!”

I started to feel her up, much to her repression, and then I felt only what I can recount as a little gay.

“Fucking Plato,” she said, “it’s all his fault.” And then we had a discussion about ideals and idyllic and idols and Mormonism, and I wasn’t in the mood anymore either, so I agreed that Plato was a big fat jerk for inventing Aristotle.

I wanted to get off of philosophy and get out there, into the first day of hummer. So I told her a story to put her arthritic tits at ease.

“This isn’t going to be allegory,” I said, “and not quite story.”

Then I got out my box of arts and crafts from the file cabinet. I had to teach her what a household god was. I had to let her know that her brother’s murder-suicide mission wasn’t the end of hero-worship. I took out a crayon and held it up to the new light of the first day of hummer. And as easy as teaching a child what a blue crayon is, I didn’t describe how she might be feeling or what AIDS meant to Africans.

One has to understand, you don’t describe life. You take one of its instruments and you illustrate: blues. After the crayon melted enough in the sun, I waxed her lips and planted myself there, shod nicely like a cage in a zoo.

It gave my boss the idea.

“Let’s go see the Pandas!”

“Right now,” I said. I wanted to say I long to call you Lightning but instead I said, “I’m kind of in the middle of something here."

Her skirt was beginning to look frowzy, so she shimmied off her panties and let me view jewelweed city. Suddenly it was overcast and I was afraid it might storm right there in the middle of Main. I opened my yellow umbrella just in case. Sure thing, I began feeling the pelts of schmaltz. Timid, whitish, large-like barf balls knocking against the plastic of my Made-in-China.

I have to admit I have often enjoyed bim-battering to the sound of hard rain against the windows. It’s so Foucault: the rain there, my hand here, writing or wrestling, on skin or paper. Windows shaking, streetlamps flicking, eyes gamboling, mouth rocking open and opening.

My boss. My, my. She came and she came with a lot of alliteration: like a schoolboy liberating a crushed cookie from a pants pocket. And I bit down. Her orgasm began in exacting earnest, sustained like a three-day weekend, and finally squiggled out, embarrassed by the sound of stifled hee-haws that my little Pierre was making.

She didn’t like when I euphemized my penis into Pierre. But Pierre was now euthanized. Little bastard was a bit drugged from morning coffee.

She made a move for a napkin on my desk. She said, “I’ve got to get cleaned up. Board meeting in ten minutes.”

I didn’t like this unraveling. Bored meeting? What about getting out there into the sunshine? I said, “What about the zoo?” And I gestured expertly, long-practiced, conjuring up shadow puppets à la Pierre against the cubicle wall.

“Listen,” she said, “I began studying piano at age six, took a serious interest in juggling at ten, Mandarin Chinese at fourteen, recreational math at... well, what I’m trying to say is that I don’t need a lot of advice. Please remove your brow from my thigh.”

In fact, she was inaccurate in her diction: I was resting on her perineum. But I obliged.

“What about your brother’s AIDS?”

She looked at me in faux-realism. “My brother’s been dying for a long time, you whore.”

She dismissed herself from cubicle H-58 and I scrolled up my boxers. Although it was a beautiful day for the first day of hummer, I knew I would have to wait until tomorrow or next week or next month or next never to get out there into the sunny spaces which everybody else seemed to be shadowing from me. I would have to work on my reproach, get my words into a faultless order, the cadences and roles recast, the home which Pierre and I shared renovated. Later that night, I told Pierre it might be a long time before the snows melted again and the grass shot up in our lane. The time was coming, I said, when he would have to make a choice between permanent residency with me or exile back in the motherland.