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Not
a Pussy
By
Eugene Taitelbaum
"There's some fine pussy in that there fifth-wheel trailer!" said Macky. I had to call him Macky. He admitted that his name was really Vern, but "nobody calls me Vern 'cept my ex-wife and my dead mom."
I looked out the passenger window and rolled my eyes. It had gotten almost dark out, and the storm clouds from the south were almost on top of the freeway. Macky couldn't see my annoyance, but he must have noticed.
Macky hadn't stopped talking since he picked me up. I had only counted 10 mile markers, but it already felt like an hour. I already knew about his kids in West Virginia, his new oil job in Alaska, and why his car reeked of pot smoke in the middle of Utah, where it doesn't take a big pot to cook you a prison term. But most of all, I knew about his love for pussy.
"There goes one of them lady truckers," he said, as a Wal-Mart rig roared by. I don't know how he could tell who was in the cab from the driver's seat of his tiny early-80s Corolla. I guess he could just smell it. "Them lady truckers have some nasty gash. I been with a few of them," he said.
"So," I said. I held back from asking him if he thought of anything above the waist. "What kind of music you like?"
"Country music, mostly," he said. Silence. Then he laughed. "Get it? Cunt-ry."
"Been a while, hasn't it?" I asked him, glancing at his grizzled, rosy face.
"Shee-at," he said, and shut up. For a minute. Then, "Could you grab me one of those beers from back there?"
I was on my way to Moab to go mountain biking. I had shipped my bike from Denver, then took the train to a ghost town thirty miles from Moab. It was one of those relict train stops from some long-gone mineral rush, but it was the closest stop to my destination.
Before I got off the train, one of the stewardesses, or whatever they call them on Amtrak, said "I hate letting people off here. You sure you don't want to stay aboard 'til Salt Lake? We'll let you ride for free. There's no bus stop here or anything. Is anyone meeting you? Look, it's almost dark. And it looks like rain."
She had the same tone in her voice that my grandmother got when I told her what Moab was like. If anything, it made me more motivated to get there the hard way. Moab is supposed to be x-treme, right? So why not walk the 30 miles into town?
I walked from the train to the interstate, through the wasted sagebrush landscape toward an A-frame gas station in the distance. I got to I-70 with dark too near, and the stewardess was right - lightning had started to flash over the mountains to the south. I stuck a red blinkie bike light on my backpack and walked west.
It wasn't a half a mile before a car pulled over, uninvited, in front of me. It was a silver Corolla missing a taillight but carrying half the rest of the world in the back seat. I hesitated a long time before getting in. I knew it was rude, but I was in no mood to go to a Utah jail or a Utah cemetery. I looked back and forth between the grimy, overloaded car and a noisy, dark freeway overpass up the road. I rememberd the last time I waited out a rain under a freeway. I didn't sleep, it was boring, and I ended up sick. I got in the car.
When we got to the Moab off-ramp, Macky had a new idea. "How's about I drive you into town and you buy me some gas and a six-pack?"
"Some gas sounds fine with me," I said. "We'll see about that six-pack." Beer isn't cheap in Utah. And as a bicyclist, I have a bad attitude about drunk driving.
"I bet there's some fine pussy out there in California!" he finished.
The highway to Moab was the kind of desert road everyone knows from Road Runner. There were wrecks off to the side, flashing in the lightning. Cliffs rose on one side and plummeted away just as quick on the other to the overflowing whitewater of the Green River.
"Wanna grab me one of those beers out of the back?" asked Macky.
"Not if you're going to drink it now," I said.
He grabbed it himself, and I had to admit he did a good job of staying the course while he fumbled around in the back seat. He popped the top of the can and said, "I'm OK." He sipped and put the can between his legs.
Suddenly, he swerved off the road. I was holding on tight, but it wasn't necessary - he was just stopping to take a leak.
He got back in the car, soaked with the mounting rain. I told him the beer made me uncomfortable. He said OK, and dumped it on the ground. Not so bad after all, I thought.
We made it to Moab and Macky looked a lot more tired than when he picked me up. I got him his gas at the gas station, but I didn't pay for the beer. He just shrugged.
He took me to my motel room and asked if he could come in and use the bathroom. He trailed his smoky smell as he walked through to the can. I heard him pissing. "You're gonna get some fine pussy here," he called through the door.
When he got done, he came out and walked toward me, his smell growing with each step. He came right up next to me and put his hand on my crotch. "Mmm," he said.
It was like rolling over a big drop-off on the mountain bike. You can't do anything to change it once you're there, you just look through to the next place you want to be.
The world emptied into one clear statement. "That's not a pussy," I said.
Macky's eyes opened wide. He lurched back as if I was an electric fence.
"I guess I'll get on my way," he said. "Have fun here, OK?"
"Good luck," I said.
"Go get that pussy," I thought.
Copyright ©
2003 Eugene Taitelbaum
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