When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,23
someone a blow job?” the driver said. “It’s just a penis, right? Probably no worse for you than smoking.”
Outside the moving truck were flat, barren fields, some bordered by stands of trees and others stretching without interruption out to the horizon. One second they’d appear as a blur, and then the windshield wiper would make its shuddering pass and everything would leap back into focus. A station wagon pulled in front of us, and the children in the backseat signaled for my driver to blow his horn. He seemed not to notice them, and just as I thought to bring it to his attention I realized that the request included the word “blow.” And so I let it drop and turned my attention back to the landscape.
Had I been able to address the real subject, I’d have told this man that I was saving myself for the right person. I wanted my first time to be special, meaning that I would know the other guy’s name and, I hoped, his telephone number. After sex, we would lie in each other’s arms and review the events that had brought us to this point. I could not predict exactly what this conversation would sound like, but I had not imagined it to include such lines as “I knew this would happen five minutes ago, the moment you climbed into my tow truck.” Not that I minded this man’s profession. It was the other stuff that bothered me: his dent, his forwardness, and his persistent refusal to turn the goddamn page. He sounded like me when I sensed that drugs were around: “All I know is that if someone wants to get high, or wants to watch while I smoke his dope, I’ll do it. I really will.”
I cringed to think of myself, skeeving pot off my friends and believing all the while that I was sounding casual. After dropping in uninvited and basically forcing someone to share his drugs, I’d pocket the roach and take my leave, saying, “That’s the last time I let you fuck me up like this, I mean it.”
“Yes, indeedy,” the tow truck driver said. “A little oral give-and-take would feel pretty good right about now.”
I could have ended it so simply. “I don’t think my girlfriend would like that too much,” I might have said, but I wanted to put that particular lie behind me. There was my life before I told a strange woman in a negligee that I was a homosexual, and now there would be my life after, two chapters so dissimilar in style and content that they might have been written by different people. That’s what I’d hoped, but of course it wouldn’t work out that way. I needed a story that I could live with, and so I compromised and told the tow truck driver that I had an ex-girlfriend. “We just broke up a week ago, and now I’m going home to win her back.”
“So?” he said. “I got an ex-wife. I got a current one, too, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t feel good to give someone a blow job, or to have somebody give you one while you laid back and enjoyed it a little.”
Mine was the lie that got you nowhere, and, as I berated myself for wasting it, the driver took his right hand off the steering wheel and laid it on the seat between us. For a moment it was idle, and then it began to lumber in my direction, its movement as hesitant and blocky as a turtle’s. “Yessiree,” its owner said.
There would come times in later years when I would have sex against my wishes. No one forced me, exactly — it wasn’t that. I just wasn’t sure how to say “Go. Get out. I don’t want this.” Often, I’d feel sorry for the guy: he was deformed through no fault of his own, he bought all his clothes at Sears, he said he loved me on the first date. Once or twice I’d be too scared to say no, but this particular man didn’t frighten me. I looked at him in much the same way that the fifteen-year-old, my father’s neighbor, must have looked at me: as a relic of an earlier era, when trees were stubs, women could be deceived, and everything inside your home was the color of rust or dirt.
When the shambling hand at last reached my coat, I thought of how I’d assert myself and tell the driver that