It Feels So Good When I Stop - By Joe Pernice Page 0,1

your ass.” He made an upwardly thrusting motion with his hairy, balled-up hand. The place where his wedding band had been for six years was still lighter than the rest of him. I had hardly been in direct sunlight in the three days since Jocelyn and I got married.

“You want to be found like that, naked, stuffed in a fifty-gallon chemical drum in a storage shed in Revere? How do you think that would go over with Carl and Lucy?”

“Not so good.”

“Not so good? They’d be friggin’ crushed. Your mother would slit her own throat to kill the pain. And Carl? Well, shit, he’d let her.”

Since those were my parents he was talking about, I started to gather up a comeback, but I just didn’t have the energy to get into it with him.

James and I were never exactly friends. He was generally a decent guy. He’d jump in the icy river without thinking and save the drowning truck driver. But, fuck me, if you didn’t agree with him when it came to what was what, he’d go on one of his correction trips and figuratively step on your throat until you declared yourself saved.

I guess I can understand on one level why Pamela was attracted to James. Older guy. Independent. Something to say—right or wrong—about everything. Physically imposing. Good father specimen. All Pamela wanted to be was a mother. She said so a number of times; said so with surety and—what seemed to me to be—a lack of ebullience. It was as if she’d said, “You know what? I want to take a cruise.” I’m not sure why, but it was embarrassing for me to hear her talk about wanting to be a mother. I told her there were plenty of better things she could do with her life than be just a mother.

Pamela had barely enough gas in the tank to get through two years at Massasoitt Community College. Since the time she was twenty, she worked as an administrative assistant for the Town of Mashpee. Before she got mixed up with James, she dated electricians or guys who drove snowplows for the town. She was four years older than me, and for most of my life she looked out for me. When I got accepted to a “real” college, I started trying to treat her like I was the older one.

I faked a loud shiver, hoping it would jar James onto a topic with less spice. It was late October on Cape Cod, and I was underdressed. A shiver was easy to come by.

As he executed the moves of a complex, nautically themed knot, James said, “That’s my real advice to you. Die. At. Thee. Curb.”

I started longingly squeezing one of the boat’s white vinyl headrests. As it slowly sprang back to its full size, I replayed one of the many dry-run breakups between Jocelyn and me.

I had gone down to New York to visit her for the weekend. Sunday was Father’s Day. The holiday was like a giant elephant turd in the room. Even dead, her old man was remarkably good at being a tyrant. She never got the chance to tell him off the way she had no problem telling me off.

We finally scraped ourselves from bed late on Saturday afternoon. We took the F train from Brooklyn uptown to Second Avenue and had lunch at B&H Dairy. A giant fan drove a vortex of warm air into the room, overwhelming the tiny space. Our napkins kept flying off the counter. The meal started out tenderly enough. We were debating which salad was better, whitefish or tuna. Before Jocelyn was able to convince me that tuna was where it’s at, she ditched the argument altogether. She said she was just as big a hypocritical asshole as me for eating what was once another living thing. I brought up corn, and wasn’t that a living thing? She said she didn’t feel great about killing anything—plant or animal—for food. I told her to give me a fucking break. Things got meaner and more personal very quickly.

Just because all sorts of shit happens all the time in New York doesn’t mean people don’t like seeing it when it does. A couple fighting in a restaurant is almost as entertaining as a medical emergency or a fire.

I kept telling Jocelyn to keep her voice down. She told me to grow up. She said people in “adult” relationships yell, and sometimes the yelling takes place in public. I told her