have i ever told you about the time Y called the police on me? this is one of my most popular stories. by self-appointment: the shock value of the collision between sex, the public, and state discipline is arresting. literally, but not literarily; an illegible move by an otherwise legible girl, certainly not. we have no time to entertain the full anticipation of curiosity so i start with a yield with the finish: have i ever told you about the time the police overheard me having sex? loud sex is gauche. unwittingly inviting witnesses to a laborious performance of public passion is an exponent of the aforementioned gauche. knowing that the subject of the gaze is in fact not a subject at all but the impersonal gaze of the state-as-voyeur–the most abstracted incar(n/cer)ation of the polis–is not an exponent but negative square root, or c sharp minor, or a pentatonic dissension in opposition to the gauche. which is to say it is really like the graph of a natural logarithm, disoriented just enough to obscure the possibility of a felicitous coordinate, or a natural progression toward g major, or a diatonic resolution.
suanother time i start from the middle, when the highway gave way to liquid lanes and the inner city haze turned glassy like a roman noblewoman’s morning toilet. frozen swirls and glossy stares all around, and oh he had a roman nose, did i mention that? but he was rolling where his nose was not, white powder that dusted freckles and already dulled bambi eyes. i inhale deeply and sneeze chalky excess across terrain more dim but less treacherous than midnight sahara, and somewhere across the world Y felt the shiver of a rattlesnake scale like teeth against glass, so he called the police. i tell you when i knew my secret had been so surreptitiously sliced open: door stilled by the pink barrel of man, who said my name too heavily, and from here the details get murky, something about smooth talking suburban kids and the slippery privilege of light skin and shame and furtive phone calls. then, under the flickering light of frat row’s finest–street lamps that never sleep–walking by water spilled through metal arms, above evaporating concrete that welcome cohabitation. so that the precise functions of the hydrosphere, particularly where the evasive, ephemeral, and especially the vapid were concerned, are guarded by the rubber flotilla of the polis’ finest, for whom the weight of sound had been amputated to afford the allure of an arched back. from duplicitous to serene: the police.
so basically, to wrap up the story, i lean with ease–too much ease?–into postcoital banter with the man of all men and i find that he’s brought his friends and they’d been there for half an hour. polees. the implications are ripe for the picking but luckily i’m walking on air, or so i think, so the detonation of pulpy flesh and split skin doesn’t even hit me, i just take a deeper breath of concrete vapor and we both deal with the repercussions of our actions, i to Y’s dank smelling car and they to the otherwise quiet of exhaust. i wonder if my moans haunt the crisp dawn wind; otherwise, do they think of me at night when they collapse on our mother and surrender her to whispering plains? to each her own. when light again heats the porous grey, they hear a wailing from the shower, but, energized by the memory of eager groans, they convince themselves it is only an echo they concocted from monotony, tempered by steamy sweetness and the blink of wavering blue light.
