Notes, from the Upper West Side. A novel by Dan Wrench. Chapter 68. The Space Program.
So like I was saying, the day the rat came in and the boys chased it, that was a crummy day. I was confronted with a new reality about myself that was actually the same old reality I had been confronting ever since I was 17 and started enjoying the facial talents of Denise Jensen. It was pairs of things. Opposite things.
Again. It was like I had a genetic disease or was cursed from infancy, a choice. The other thing or the other? Why?
But the universe said I had to make a damn choice. On the one hand I think it's my birthright as an American to seek comfort. I don't care if it's puffing a pipe by the fireplace or drinking a tankard of ale and a tavern surrounded by other American seekers of comfort, it's what unites us as a nation. We have no common racial or cultural heritage after all.
Something must bind us together. And that's something is. We all want to avoid standing on our feet or thinking really hard. But now I wanted something that didn't actually fit into the comfort category.
It's like when I was really pushing the acting career instead of just doing my non-plus look in a music video so I could meet a fresh crop of theater sluts. I wanted to be an actor really bad, so I put up with the discomfort of going to auditions and slinging suds for a living and sharing an apartment in Washington Heights with a bunch of slobs. But when you do that, you're sort of hoping one day you'll end up a big star maybe. And people will recognize you and you'll live in a marble mansion with staircases and shiny floors and be, well, comfortable.
And you'll get to slam sweet ass without having to break all your bones in a gym five days a week. I was standing there in the apartment between the boys and the rat inside my bedroom and Jessica wasn't around right that minute to help me settle the auditor. Keep a notebook, she always says, so we can talk it out later. But I couldn't wait for later.
I had to solve the problem now. I left the rat in the bedroom and threw an overcoat over my robe and took the boys to school. It was Sammy's last day and he was kind of sad that dope. Then I came back home and called the exterminator and waited for him in my robe and socks with a cigarette balance between my lips.
No way I was going back into the bedroom for pants. Last thing I needed 17 days from fuck date was a rabies shot. Daddy, are they going to kill the rat? Daddy's trying to figure something out.
They started squabbling. Okay, that's enough you kids. Think about the space program while Daddy organizes his thoughts. Oh.
Harry whined like his mommy. We want to watch when they come to kill the rat. Sorry, Harry. I said they don't kill the rat anyway.
They don't. Sam asked. Nope. They catch it and take it out to a meadow and set it free.
Where it can be safe from sadistic little boys. Sockastic. Sadistic. It means very, very mean.
I said Sammy started the blubber. I'm not mean. He said. Harry said the blubber.
I'm not mean. He said. I'm not mean. I said.
I said. Harry said to stab it. They started squabbling again. Boys.
The space program. They were in sight of the school so they ran toward the clumpy line of kids standing on the steps outside the main door. They ran up the steps and got lost in the mob. Then the bell rang in the mob with my kids and it filed into the school.
One of the teachers holding the door opened saw me and smiled and gave me a little wave like she had no idea that in my head I was right that second draining my balls into some babe who was approximately her age. So like I said before, I strolled back home and called the exterminator and sat there thinking about Cammy and how wanting to bone her was forcing me into all these uncomfortable and sometimes painful activities. I had in my head a very clear picture of Cammy's smooth, hand back and her indented vertebrae and her inverted arch and her waist curved in and hips out and me looking down at it from the vantage point of fucking her from the back on her knees with her ass crack flared open. Yeah, I wanted it all right.
Was it worth the pain and the risk? Was it worth sacrificing the comfort that is my American birthright? It wasn't like I'd never craved ass before and it wasn't like I'd never wondered about the discomfort involved in acquiring ass. But my previous wonderings were all pretty casual.
I would gig cackling, call it mail conquest or something, I heard other people call it, but Jesus what is mail conquest to me? What are the, you know, gears of it? The guts. It's just a word like integrity.
My legs throbbed and begged me to please not do any more squats and certainly not to start running. But I had to fight comfort in order to get this conquesty thing. This thing I couldn't describe except as a pipeline from my dick to the center of me, my dopey walnut brain. You probably know already I was not used to thinking this way so I hung onto that image.
I called it the thing and I just had this picture of me, a mental picture of me with my dick and cami and connected all the way up through my guts and into my headwork, pumped storm waves against my eardrums and drowned out the all-winging world. Then the exterminator came and got the rat while I did my cagels. Notes from the Upper West Side is a work of fiction. The people depicted in this work do not exist.
Notes from the Upper West Side copyright 2013 to 2019 by Dan Rench.