Erotica, Exotica, and Essays
Erotica
Wealth
by B.D.Fischer
Probably the weirdest thing about growing up working class and then
coming into all this money was I’ve never liked good food.
We went out to eat sometimes, sure, but I don’t think I had
an entree over $10 until my college graduation.
My mother’s menu consisted of an unfailing rotation of
spaghetti with meat sauce (meatballs only on special occasions),
honey-mustard chicken, broiled bluefish, this
macaroni-and-cheese-dyed-red-with-ketchup casserole that was
actually pretty good, meatloaf, split-pea soup, sloppy joes, and
something called “Bobby’s Chicken,” the remnants of a boyfriend with
a talent for legs, thighs, mushrooms, and wine.
Late in life, she added basic stir fry, long after every
kitchen in America already had a wok.
Lasagna, every few years, if there were people coming over
and she had a whole day to spare, and to this day it’s the only
thing I can order from good Italian restaurants because my mom had a
strange isolated capacity for quality lasagna.
It’s not like we’re Italian.
I can’t eat steak because on my birthday every year she made
London broil, marinated overnight in some Worcestershire shit that
was just about to die for, and I can’t eat a cut of quality beef
without it. Seafood,
forget it; I never liked bluefish, even.
Even more crazily, fast food draws me now like mosquitoes to the
light. We weren’t so
poor that we ate fast food all the time, and in fact it was almost
completely verboten:
maybe twice a year.
I can afford (and get into) Lomita seven nights a week, but
my condo’s garbage now is least 50% McDonald’s wrappers.
Same thing with sugar cereal.
I only got sugar cereal when we went to my grandparents’,
which to be honest was the only thing I could look forward to on
those trips to Lancaster County.
But almost all my breakfasts now include the words “puffs,” “choco,”
or “cookies,” and I’m in better shape than I’ve ever been because of
my workout regimen, which works on six-day cycles and includes both
cardiovascular and strength training, although I don’t lift to get
big; I lift so that clothes fall off me in a way that seems
effortless, although to be honest it probably isn’t worth the effort
because not many girls want to stick around when they learn I’ll
never take them out except to places with drive-thru windows.
I never wanted to be rich.
Not that I grew up poor, but I wasn’t one of those poor kids
who spent all his time thinking about how great it would be to be
rich. After the divorce
my mom got us into a good school district but all that meant was
that I was the only kid in the neighborhood who had to buy the
first-generation Nintendo with the Mike Tyson Knockout with his own
money. You couldn’t let
Mike Tyson hit you even once in the early going, was the thing.
It’s one of the few video games I ever really mastered, in
part because I couldn’t afford continual state-of-the-art-upgrades
but also because I always kind of lacked the patience, which in
retrospect may have been because I was always playing at friends’
houses, friends who were understandably less than keen on sharing
their Atari and then Colleco and then Nintendo and Sega, so it’s a
chicken-or-the-egg thing.
The other game I mastered, also Nintendo, and which for a
time served as a source of serious pride and local acclaim, was
Super Mario Brothers, the original, the first of the
narrative/shortcut/knowledge games which were all the rage until
Doom and first-person, which I never got into. (Nowadays the
first-person games contain way more involved storylines and require
a far more complex store of knowledge than even SMB, like
light-years beyond, which just about blows my mind.) I can still say
with confidence that at the time I probably knew more about that
game than anyone living.
The thing was, you didn’t have to go through every level to
save the princess. You
could bypass huge portions of the game if you knew a few shortcuts.
Most everyone who won the game used the shortcuts and then
stopped playing--after all, they’d won it--but I reached a level so
obsessed that I needed to win without shortcuts and also without
losing a single life.
You could get ninety-nine lives, by the way, if you knew which brick
to jump into, and my goal was saving the princess with no shortcuts
and the full complement of ninety-nine lives.
That meant 64 total levels, as opposed to the ten or so you
needed to win with shortcuts, and they saved a lot of the best, most
dangerous stuff for those middle levels, knowing that most everyone
would skip them. It
behooved the video-game companies, early on, to make games
relatively easy to win; people had to be incrementally trained to
enjoy the challenge of a game that takes months and consultation
with other experts to win, market research has shown.
See, if they’d made everybody climb the wall of
lava-breathing turtles, the majority would have given up.
That was the video game industry’s early genius; they got who
they could and addicted the rest.
I did a case study in B-school.
Of course, we never had the money to keep up, and by the time
I’d reached all my goals people had stopped playing Super Mario
Brothers I went through a kind of withdrawal, more from the acclaim
than the game itself, I have to admit.
Girls I like I take out once or twice to nice places and just pick
at my food. It’s not
that I couldn’t eat it if I were starving, I just make sure to down
a Whopper or two before we go out.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but large quantities of fast
food, like two or more Whoppers, three or more double cheeseburgers
(four from McDonald’s), or four Wendy’s junior cheeseburgers deluxe,
have an almost Xanaxian effect on you.
It’s impossible to be nervous on a bellyful of Burger King,
so the girl is impressed (by your serenity, not the Whoppers, which
you don’t tell her about) even more.
If she’s particularly uptight, I just drop the food into my
napkin, if I suspect she’ll hassle me about not eating, and if I
like them I take them out once or twice and then kind of drop the
bomb on them, that we can’t go out any more.
Almost invariably, they accuse me of not being really rich,
which is usually a sign I ought to drop them anyway.
But if I really like them I’ll try to explain things
logically and rationally, without too much scary-sounding Oedipal
business, and I’ll assure her I am very rich.
This has never worked.
If I don’t like them, I’ve set a personal limit of four
dinners, which is half of eight, and if we haven’t had sex by that
point I drop her. I
usually only need to have sex with them once before the dinners
become too onerous.
Have you ever tried to sit through a professional dinner without
eating? It’s Chinese
water torture.
My condo: definitely
old school, never gangsta style.
A lot of my friends try to live somewhere trendy, close to
South Street or in the Warehouse District.
They do up their apartments in dark colors and abstract art
(although I myself have two Callisons) and slight mismatches and
have pride. Mine
occupies half the floor below the top floor of a famous building
overlooking Love Park.
My understanding is that the original plans called for my floor to
be cut diagonally: two
triangular apartments.
That’s gangsta style. I
would never buy a
triangular apartment.
Even with my wealth I would never take a risk like that.
My friends call me conservative, but I don’t think that’s it.
One of the great things about being rich in a city like Philadelphia
is that you can get McDonald’s or Burger King (always the two-headed
serpent kings of the fast-food world to me) delivered any time, day
or night, if you’re willing to pay enough, which of course I am.
I’ve become a profligate tipper, although I’m careful not to
seem ostentatious. On a
$14 delivery, I’ll hand a over a twenty, no questions asked.
If the delivery takes more than forty-five minutes, I ask for
$2 back, which is still nearly 30%.
There is no better way to start your day than with three Egg
McMuffins and two orders of hash browns in your own robe in your own
home. My robe remains
terrycloth, albeit high-quality plush terrycloth.
One of the last real girls I asked out worked at a café I never go
to. A meeting ended
early and I needed a cup of coffee, and I hadn’t wanted to ask my
hosts because it’s a sign of weakness and these were high-stakes
negotiations. You can’t
flinch a bit. You don’t
get to where I am without knowing how to fake alertness in the face
of desperate exhaustion, or else use the outward appearance of
sleepiness as a tactic.
But now that things were over I needed coffee.
I even considered a depth charge, a big cup of coffee with a
shot of espresso, preferably cold-filtered.
The place was right across the street (this was down on 29th,
I don’t remember where), Le Café Mahon.
The girl made pleasant banter, which I parried although
ignored, but then out on the street I somehow dribbled my first
swallow down my chin and onto my shirt.
I ought to have been more pissed (that shirt cost almost $400
and was ruined now), but the negotiations had gone well and I just
went back inside and she said, “Couldn’t stay away from me, huh?”
There was no one in line,
and I inexplicably smiled back and said, “No, just spilled some
coffee.”
“Do you want a refill?” she asked, reaching.
“The coffee is bottomless.”
“No, thanks, I just spilled a little on my shirt and I want to wipe
it off.”
It was totally unlike me to talk like this.
She laughed.
Feeling something, I asked her then if she wanted to go to the
Phillies game with me that night, saying I had been planning on
going, which was kind of true.
Baseball hot dogs just about can’t be beat, I said.
She looked kind of stunned, and asked if I was serious.
I said I was, still smiling but beginning to panic.
She said she’d have to think about it.
I asked her what time she got off work.
She said six. I
said I’ll stop back then. She
said OK, and was smiling, which made me feel confident.
The girl was young, but I didn’t think about this at the time.
She seemed normal-young.
I did, though, when I returned at 6:20, mostly due to traffic
on Chestnut, and she was nowhere to be found.
I went inside and asked the ethnic man behind the counter,
who seemed to be the owner, where she was.
He said that she got off at 6 but had only left five minutes
before, he wasn’t sure why she had stayed late.
I tried to pump him and he said something about her not being
allowed use her cell phone on school nights.
I asked him if he had her cell number.
He mumbled something about college someday, continuing to
sweep. Then he said
that this had been her last day, which in time took on a symbolic
significance.
All of which is backstory to this really awkward exchange with the
very last I girl I went honestly out with, whom I genuinely liked.
The thing that doomed my relationship with Carla was that we
had been friends first, peers, even, and the first time I took her
out on a true date, by which point we’d already slept together
twice, I kind of tried to play it real smooth.
We’d been good friends for a long time, and then we started
Xing, and I thought this would probably impress her:
I said something like, “Just because we’ve been friends, I
don’t want to be deprived of the opportunity to go out on true/real
dates with you.” I
thought this would make me the sensitive guy, and just kind of
generally impress her with how much I liked and respected her, but
not in any kind of needy or annoying way.
And so we go out on this date, to a real nice restaurant, not
Lomita, but still nice.
You wouldn’t just go there under normal circumstances.
It was a date. I
paid, of course, and but so in the car afterwards, she says next
time she’ll take me out.
As in pay. And I
kind of object to this, in principle.
I say it would emasculate me.
I really do feel this way.
She says that’s no way for our relationship to proceed
according to the egalitarian grounds on which it must proceed if it
is going to succeed.
She is half-joking, but also serious.
She’s a feminist, but awkward.
And she asks how I propose she can really keep her end of the
bargain, if I’m always paying.
Now I wasn’t saying that I would always pay, only that I
didn’t really feel comfortable with her paying for me.
We make about the same amount of money.
Only I don’t say this.
I say: “You can
give me blowjobs.” And
that was pretty much the end of the relationship right there.
It wasn’t too much later that I found out about the Agency.
*
It’s an early Sunday in Eagle season and I wake drenched in sweat,
sitting up for a minute staring, forgetting.
It’s very cold.
I can’t sleep if it’s not cold.
I throw back a triangle of covers and swing around and plant
my bare feet on the hardwood floor, cold.
I wear a pair of red flannel pajama-type pants with no shirt.
It couldn’t have been more than sixty in the bedroom.
Out in the hall I saw Amy as if from a great distance, standing at
the kitchen counter mixing something with apparent deftness in a
metal bowl, sucking on one finger.
The microwave oscillated and hummed and pots and pans on two
of the four burners bubbled on the stove.
She stood there mixing, pleasantly tousled, in white socks
going a little brown around the edges, one of my button-down shirts
down almost to her knees, and pink panties, I knew, even though I
couldn’t see them. I
had mentioned offhand to my case manager that I liked them wearing
my shirts over pink panties back at the beginning and it’s just
stuck. She was very
very pretty and saw me and took her finger out of her mouth and
smiled and waved, and as soon as I was a little more awake I would
throw her down somewhere and have sex with her.
I sat down on a stool across from her, slumped, and didn’t
say anything when she wished me good morning.
I could see her trying to figure out whether to kiss me good
morning. It was good
that she didn’t.
Last night we sat in the living room with the lights out and
listened to the dwindling Phillies on the radio and passed back and
forth a bottle of ’93 St. Remy Beaujolais.
The wine sometimes makes me miss Richie Ashburn, but last
night it seemed OK that he was gone, although Harry Kalas still
sounds woeful and sad.
They pair him up now with these total assholes, guys who went to
college and majored in Broadcast Journalism.
But at least he’s still alive.
I listened to the endless off-key mixing of metal on metal until I
could no longer stand it and I got up from the stool and went around
the island and stood behind Amy mixing, pressing against her.
I put my arms around her soft middle and squeezed, wanting to
squeeze her much harder than I did, as hard as I could.
But that would have hurt her.
Instead I pressed my face into the gentle upward arc of her
shoulder and neck, my impatient chin and two days of stubble digging
past my shirt, my own goddam shirt, it belonged to me and had cost
almost $400. I
struggled past her brilliant red hair entangling my nose and cheeks
and closed my eyes, cleared it away with a series of gentle
plosives, my skin to her skin.
She smelled like the wordless gestalt flight of pigeons from
power lines, like the atelier storage of objet d’arts, like she had
just woken up, like possibility, which always gets me going.
She stiffened and then relaxed, reflexively.
I felt the sharp intake of air, and then thought she might be
smiling. I know these
girls. She tried to
turn around, but I held her.
“Rich,” she finally said.
“Breakfast’ll burn.”
My great-grandfather worked as the night doorman in a big downtown
hotel. I never met him,
he died before I was born, but my grandmother used to tell me that
he called whenever Bernini came on the radio he kept playing quietly
behind the desk, no matter what time it was.
Sometimes I get nostalgic for the radio.
I haven’t listened to the radio since I was a kid, barely,
except for baseball.
Before I took my first bite of something vaguely fishy, I felt an
intense longing for the radio, for that uncertainty.
They might go months without playing Bernini, but even though
you have the record right there the surprise is so much better on
the radio. Then he left
the hotel and opened up a shoe store that failed.
This was down on Bainbridge, where Bernini and de Bussy were
my young grandmother’s favorites.
The girl sat on the floor and leaned against me and kept perfectly
still while I ate, slowly, which made me like her a little more.
I don’t keep the rest of the house as cold as the bedroom,
but it was still pretty fucking cold.
The bare hardwood must have been literally freezing her ass
off.
After I was done I got up and told Amy it was time to take a shower.
I like long hot showers, long enough to fuck her twice.
I felt much better as we dried each other off.
I always feel good after a long hot shower, which is one
reason why I hate work, because you can’t take a long shower and
still be at the office by seven.
Or that could just be why I love long hot showers so much,
and hate work for entirely different reasons.
But that train of thought just left the station, and I had no
interest in getting on.
Then I remembered the screaming matches of the early ’80s, how I
always got up before my older brother so I could shower first, and
how in the winter I just stood there in the steam, hunched over,
trying to get as much of my body under the water as possible.
Every morning was the same, him pounding on the door and
screaming, Mom finally telling me that I was taking too much time,
infringing on other people’s rights and wasting water and costing
too much money and I’d better get out within a hundred-and-twenty
seconds, and finally I would and Eric would punch me in the arm,
hard, as I walked out.
I had a permanent yellowish bruise on my right arm and couldn’t wear
short-sleeved shirts until Eric graduated to college.
But it just felt so fucking good to be in the shower.
Alone. I didn’t
blame him for being pissed, even at the time, not really.
But I couldn’t stop.
“What are you thinking about?” Amy asked, playfully slapping me on
the ass. I broke into a
full-fledged grin for what felt like the first time in a long time.
I snapped her with my towel and she shrieked and ran from the
bathroom. I lurched
after her, ignoring the Achilles I burst playing squash and that
still acts up when the weather changes.
We ended up on the bed again, still unmade and smelling more
like her than me, cuddling, I guess, snuggling, or whatever.
I lay there, propped up on two pillows, and she lay next to
me with her head on my chest.
We were both still naked.
I turned on the TV.
An NFL Sunday is damn near a holiday, but a commercial
snapped me out of my reverie.
One of those bankruptcy attorneys.
“Is the debt piling up?
Do you see no way out?
Are you afraid to answer your own phone in your own house because
bill collectors are harassing you?
You didn’t kill anyone …”
All of a sudden I remembered something I didn’t even know I’d
forgotten. Remembering
was like a handful of coins scattering across a metal surface.
“Shit,” I said, and sat up so suddenly my torso kind of threw her
head away from my body.
I couldn’t remember Bill’s last name, maddeningly.
He was George’s partner.
George was my best friend, from college.
He is gay. We
hadn’t spoken in more than two years.
Where had my best friend gone?
Not since I went out to visit them in Oregon, where George is
an orthopedic surgeon.
It was a good visit, a great time.
Bill, in finance like me (venture capital, I’m in investment
banking), could really hold his liquor.
I was impressed.
During Senior Week, just before graduation, George and I picked up
this slob in a bar. He
wasn’t gay yet. She was
just some slob. We
bought her drinks, I guess.
Who knows what we said, and then we went back to our
apartment and fucked her.
We fucked the shit out of her.
George did her from behind while I fucked her mouth, and the
bitch was just loving it.
We had talked about this.
We high-fived over her bent body, just as we’d planned, if it
ever happened. Neither
of us believed it would ever happen.
It wasn’t too long out of college when he told me.
I’ve never asked him about that night, and never told anyone
about it, not even one of these girls, and you can tell them
anything. It wasn’t one
of those, “I always suspected” kind of things.
I had no idea, but we were still best friends.
I was always proud of myself for that.
I sat there in bed, rigid, thinking about all this.
I sort of distantly noticed Amy still lying there beside me
but not touching me, looking up at my face for an explanation.
It occurred to me that I had no idea what Amy’s last name
was, and that under the circumstances that was entirely appropriate.
It was that second fact that made me sad.
I got out of bed for and began putting on clothes.
“Rich?” I pulled up and
cinched closed a pair of navy slacks.
I hated that I couldn’t wear jeans into the office, not even
on weekends.
“Rich? Do you want me
to ...” But she just
kind of stopped. I
couldn’t think of any good way for her to finish that sentence.
I walked out of the bedroom, shirt still untucked, still
half-unbuttoned, for Christ’s sake.
I called back to her, “I’m going to work,” and I packed up my
briefcase and walked out the door and got in the elevator with the
patent attorney down the hall.
We’ve played squash a few times, but I really didn’t feel
like talking. I walked
out into the stagnant underground parking lot.
I got in my car, which I had first seen and liked in a
certain James Bond movie, and pulled out with a good deal more
squeaking of tires than was absolutely necessary.
I kept my mind blank during the drive.
This made me admire myself, quietly.
It wasn’t that long a drive; the streets were deserted.
Early Sunday afternoon.
I sat at the final light before I could pull into another
underground parking lot, thinking nothing.
I didn’t even have a CD going.
I looked left and saw two men sleeping on park benches.
It was unseasonably cool for late September.
You got a hint of fall.
I saw the light turn green but there were pedestrians right
in front of me, a man and a woman.
The man was nearest to me, maybe my age but very fat, and he
wore a stretched and stained and threadbare T-shirt that I just knew
before I even read it expressed something witty, some witty burbling
thought. He didn’t even
seem to be thinking about holding up traffic.
Someone behind me honked.
He was holding hands with a tall thin girl, taller than him,
and of course much thinner.
She was very homely, long stringy hair and ugly glasses, just
like you’d expect. She
had her right hand over her mouth, laughing at something the fat man
was saying. I had the
top up, so I couldn’t hear what it was.
They walked past me and the road opened up like a ribbon on
your big Christmas present, a straight shot to our building and
right into another garage, but I couldn’t look away.
I watched them step up onto the curb, and she took that hand
away from her mouth and used it to smooth the front of her floral
print dress. She was
very ugly, but still smiling.
Now people were honking at me.
I couldn’t even see their faces any more.
He had to lean back when he walked, he was so fat.
The girl looked like she might be one of those unfortunate
ugly girls who isn’t even very smart.
His jeans stretched taut across his thighs.
The honking situation was now getting extreme.
A bus sped by, blocking my view of them, briefly.
It broke whatever spell, and I turned the wheel hard right
and gunned the engine and sped off down the side street, away from
the office. The car
doesn’t have as much power as you’d think, which always pissed me
off. But it is a very
beautiful car.
I didn’t know where I was going until I got to Veterans Stadium.
I had the sudden idea that I might see a Phillies game.
I might even call Amy and tell her to get her ass over here,
too. The traffic seemed
awfully heavy for a meaningless late-season Phillies game, though.
There’s always another Pat Combs.
I paid my $12 and parked, but I didn’t get out.
I turned on the radio to listen to the pregame.
The Phillies were in Atlanta.
It was an Eagles game, a hour from kickoff.
I looked around and it all made sense.
A small group of tailgaters staring speculatively at the
Beemer. I pulled out my
cellular phone, which I’d bought just weeks before.
Early adopter.
Rich.
“Beautiful day for a football game,” someone was saying.
“Almost fifty-five degrees right now, should be up to sixty
by half-time. Not a
hint of a breeze. No
clouds overhead.
Beautiful day for a football game, as young Donovan McNabb is
scheduled to make his first pro start.”
I listened to this and leaned back against the headrest and closed
my eyes, phone still in hand.
I thought about Bill and wondered if I had hugged him, even
once, that time I visited.
I sure as hell had hugged George, I had no doubt.
But I couldn’t be so sure about Bill.
“Doug Pederson …” Some
kind of ionic burst of something dissolved the broadcast into static
for a few seconds and I didn’t hear what they had to say about poor
old Doug Pederson. I
don’t follow the Eagles too closely.
I wondered why Harry Kalas, the voice of NFL Films for
chrissakes, doesn’t do Eagles games.
“Let’s go!” someone outside shouted.
The car was still running and the a/c was on and it was
fucking freezing in there.
I could barely feel my fingers well enough to dial the phone.
I realized I didn’t know their number.
I swore, was more dismayed than angry, and rooted around in
my leather briefcase for my address book.
I tried to remember a time when I hadn’t known George’s
number by heart. I
found the book and dialed again.
I prayed to God that Bill didn’t answer.
“Hello?” It was a
woman’s voice. I hung
up quickly and looked at the number again and redialed slowly.
The same voice.
My handwriting was very clear, though.
Driving home, I listened to young Donovan McNabb’s first NFL start
turn disastrouss. By
the end of the first quarter and he was 1 for 7 for 7 yards, with
two interceptions, three sacks, and a fumble.
The Eagles trailed 21-0.
But I didn’t feel sorry for him at all.
He’s young, it’s natural.
Things would get better.
It’s tough to be an NFL quarterback, and besides that he’s
already rich.
I pulled back into my parking space at home and wondered when the
last time a whole weekend had gone by without my going into the
office. But I didn’t
worry about it. It
would be fine. I nodded
and smiled at Jim, our doorman, whose wife just had a baby.
I had my secretary send over a very expensive gift of some
kind, but I’m not sure what it was.
I really smiled at him, though.
Genuine.
The elevator dinged softly as it sped up to the nineteenth floor,
but not so quickly as to be crass.
I unlocked the door to the condo and walked in and closed and
locked the door behind me.
Amy came out of the bathroom with an armful of toiletries and
then stopped short. I
didn’t know, and didn’t want to know.
“Oh,” she said when she saw me.
“I didn’t expect you back so soon.”
“I didn’t go to the office,” I said.
She nodded and then averted her gaze downward.
I didn’t say anything.
She wore jeans and a cashmere sweater I had bought her, hair
pulled back in a classy casual ponytail.
“Listen,” she said, and looked up at me, but that was another
sentence she couldn’t finish.
She just kept looking back down.
“What’s all this?” I said, walking toward her.
“I know you’re not happy.
And I just thought ... I’d save you the trouble.
I don’t want you to stop using the Agency.
That would look bad for me.”
The great oak grandfather clock in the corner said it was almost
two. It was a beautiful
piece, the only thing my family had ever owned that I had on
display. My mom had a
thing for clocks. It
was the nicest thing anyone in our family ever had, until I got
rich.
“No.” I thought of
young Donovan McNabb, who had gone number two overall in the most
recent NFL draft. “That
would look very bad for you.”
“So I just thought …”
My mother had been talking about that clock for years.
It was handmade, somewhere in Europe.
I have no idea how much it cost, but I’m sure it was a lot.
More than we could afford, when I was a kid.
She had a real thing for clocks.
“You just thought,” I said.
I closed the short distance remaining between us.
Her hands were too full for me to take one of them in mine.
Instead I brushed the back of my hand along her smooth
downturned cheek and cupped the back of her neck with my hand,
gently. It seemed
unusually warm there.
“No,” I said. “Please
stay.”
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