Sound inside

The Sound Inside 9/24/19 32
I let him take me back to his motel room, at the Econo Lodge on Pond Lily
Avenue.
As soon as we enter his room, which smells like some strange combination of
cleaning fluids and chewing tobacco, he openly takes a Viagra and we have
sex in a classic missionary arrangement with the TV on.
Everybody Loves Raymond.
Just as Clint enters me, Ray Romano’s wife enters the kitchen and tells him
that she’s invited both of her divorced parents and their current significant
others to Thanksgiving.
Shortly after the whacky, extended TV family gathers in Ray Romano’s living
room, Clint begins to deploy a kind of herky-jerky trundling method of
intercourse that seems to involve indecipherable grunting, Tourettes-like
facial ticks, and the avoidance of acute back pain.
I do get lost in the activity for a few measures. His body is dense and hairy
and moves over and into me like some soft rectangular machine that pushes
smaller objects toward their inevitable path on an assembly line.
When he’s not grunting or trying to avoid back spasms, in curt, explosive
syllables he shouts “Good pussy! Good pussy!” Has he renamed me Pussy? If so,
I can’t tell if he’s scolding or praising me. And does he mean Good-comma-
Pussy? Or Good-pussy-period? Are the G and P capitalized, like some proper
noun representing the Official Legion of Handsome Clint’s one-night stands
known as Good Pussy?
When Clint comes he basically sounds like a woman running from a killer in a
horror movie.
During one of the more pleasant thirty-second stretches of our conjoined
apocalypse I think of Christopher Dunn.
I dress and our farewell is consummated with a businesslike handshake. We
don’t exchange numbers. Nothing more is said. I return home as if I’ve taken
a brisk walk and suffered a slightly sprained ankle.
It’s the first time I’ve been with anyone in over two years.