“I’m going to a party,” Neva said. When I looked, her green eyes were sizing me up. “It’s just down 30 a ways.”
We were in Aurora, Illinois, in Neva’s apartment, across from what she called Needle Park. She’d been a poisonous asp of an ex in high school — actually, more of an emotional vampire — and we were just reacquainting after years of no contact.
This is one of them eras where I was an entirely different person: this old self was so monastically bookish and touch-deprived that going to Great Clips for a trim was a sensual experience — something between memories of big hands drying me with a huge, soft towel and a lap dance — for ten bucks and tip.
Neva’s curves had formed under my high school fingers and, having learned them before learning my own, I still thought of them as mine. Sure she’d stung me, but we’d gone to separate colleges — lost complete touch for all four years. Well, three years, ten months, and twenty-seven days. I figured now, in my early twenties, our on-again, off-again years were over. Now we were adults — we had jobs now, paid rent and everything.
Anyway, I lived in Joliet, flying between our places on the stretch of Route 30 passing through that tornado magnet called “Plainfield.” On the unincorporated outskirts of Aurora, Route 30 flies past a porno shop and a No-tell Motel. Neva worked nightshifts at the porno store which catered to good old boys with their ConAgra caps pulled low to hide their eyes. Ninety-two rigid-spined pounds, but she kept furtive perverts in line with the word “Hun.” As in, “Hun, you gotta buy five dollars of tokens if you wanna browse.”
Naturally, I was thinking of this stretch of Route 30, so I figured the party to be on the back roads around there. I wasn’t much on parties. Especially where Neva was concerned; it was usually a case of watching her have a splendid time while sitting discarded among the lepers.
But what if she’d changed? What if it turned out splendid? I was considering this as her Burmese cat — a miniature black panther, named Vinnie — jumped on my lap. I bent my knuckle for him to rub his jaw along. Got so absorbed in his purring, I forgot to say anything.
Neva squeezed my shoulder. “You coming with?”
“I got to work tomorrow evening,” I said, trailing off, but the squeeze felt like a promise, and I didn’t want to miss a moment if she was going to be generous with her warmth. Since those initial horny, exploratory days of puberty when she first dug her nails into my back, it’d obviously been meant to be. I’d held fast to that, even in her absence. Maybe she was finally beginning to see that we belonged together.
“Yeah?” She straightened, chewing on a wisp of dark auburn hair. “What’d’ya think, hun?”
I wanted to pick her up and throw her over my shoulder and carry her to my apartment where we’d stay and never leave again. It was on the hope of drunken kisses — maybe right after the party, for instance? — that I said, “I guess. For a bit.”
Suddenly there wasn’t time. We huddled in our coats, peering past where the yellow dashed stripes rose out of the darkness, coming at you, listening to the FAP of the wheels over the seams in the road and the Violent Femmes bouncing against the speakers.
She was a helldog driver in her Volkswagon — a white boxy car littered underfoot, so any time your butt got numb and you shifted your legs, the floor crinkled. And there was this smell of something rotten sweetening as it disintegrated. I hated that fucking smell; unlike most odors, it didn’t fade into the background and there was no getting used to it.
Pretty soon, we’d passed Plainfield and Joliet. Talking and talking as I daydreamed about our orgy for two, and then I woke to the fact that we were all the way over to Lansing, straight south of Chicago on the Illiana border.
“Where’d you say this party was?” I asked.
“Oh, down 30.”
I realized my mistake: Route 30 went forever. It was like going down Route 66: Start in Chicago, wake in California! And California wouldn’t’ve been so bad, but we were going east, to Indiana. Ugh! I didn’t even know the state the way I do now. If I were ubër-asinine and got in this situation today, I’d be like, “Pull the fuck over, let me out. I’ll find my way home.” Two, three phone calls, and done! That night, it didn’t occur to me, and if it had, I wouldn’t’ve dared inconvenience my friends by calling at the obscene hour of nine PM, let alone asking favors.
“Well, how the hell far down 30?”
Busted, Neva offered a wicked look. “To I.U. You know, Bloomington. Indiana.” Then: “Seriously, hun” — giving my knee a sympathetic squeeze — “I want you to meet someone. He’s brilliant. I swear. If you were a guy, you’d be him.”
Brilliant, she said. And I could meet this person I often felt I should’ve been? Did he wear Chuck Taylors? Did he like the Eurythmics? Were his shoulders as wide as mine? Me as a guy? I had to meet him.
When she parked in front of his frat house, though, I had no desire to set foot in that joint. I’d been a GDI — God Damned Independent — at the University of Illinois, and I wasn’t fond of the whole Greek thing.
“Make him come out here.”
“Come on in, hun,” she said, squeezing my thigh, “His frat brothers are nice.”
My heart was like a wad of wet tissues after she’d touched me. I went. Neva introduced me around. I forgot the guys’ names as she said them. They were watching a muted porno.
“Where’s Steve-o?”
A sleepy smug-nuts kind of guy slouched into the doorway, cutting eyes at her. This Steve was an ex of hers, picked up during one of our intermissions — an engineering student who pined after her, kind of like I did. She wiggled up to him and hung off his neck. This was the Someone to Meet.
Well, we shook hands and all, but I didn’t like his smile — looked like he just scored in some profane contest — actually, I just hated the guy on sight. Mr. Smug-nuts. Why was she still messing with him, when I was her fated love?
“Wanna beer?” he asked.
“Sure.” So everyone had a beer, and somewhere in the bustle of setting up the second round, Neva and Steve-o disappeared.
Which is how I ended up, miserable and stewing, on a couch in a frat house with a bunch of dudes I didn’t know, watching a silent porno. It featured an erect penis sticking up out of the center of a round, spinning platform, made of cheap chipboard. Didn’t look like it’d been sanded before the glossy blue paint job, so the owner of this penis was taking a pretty big risk. Being in a foul mood, I hoped for splinters. The screen alternated between that and waist-down shots of a woman bouncing on the platform center, smiling to bust. Watching anonymous nether parts spin and smack in silence was so damn fascinating for the first five dissolves, but then I got bored and one dude asked if I was tired, so I said yes, wondering at my chances of getting led up to sleep on the floor, at least, in the same room as Neva.
Instead, he offered me an abandoned couch on an enclosed back porch and went back to the old art film screening.
The porch was freezing, but it afforded a corner of semi-privacy. I curled on my side in my denim jacket, hands tucked between my thighs for warmth, wondering what the fuck just happened. Why meet him? We shook hands; is that a meeting? Somewhere upstairs they were in his cozy fuck-nest. Why was I here? To entertain during the long drive? To honor their union with my consent? To meet who she thought was my equal — my peckered double (which he most certainly was not)? To be punished for having dared escape her circus again and come back — again?
It was the wee hours of the morning, but I couldn’t quit shivering long enough to really drop off and sleep.
Claws scraping over the wood floor and rattling dog tags opened my eyes. I stayed, frozen, as a German shepherd put its front paws up on the cushions and sniffed my ear with a cold wet nose. Since this was maybe her couch, I offered a hand for her to sniff, hoping she’d lay over the top of me for a bit of warmth. Her ears dropped, she wagged her tail, but when I tried to scratch her ears, she snarled, and I just missed getting fangs sunk into my hand.
All right. Fine. I rolled my back to her, tucked my head into my jacket collar, and curled even tighter, hoping the dog would leave.
I shivered in that position — I don’t know how long, muscles knotted in pain — getting more pissed with Neva as the seconds passed. The dog would leave and return, whining, acting friendly again, then I’d think, “We’re making progress,” only to narrowly miss losing a finger.
Must’ve been four AM when I finally snapped. Rolling off the couch and marching through the darkened common areas downstairs, I shouted, “Neva, you rotten whore — TAKE ME HOME!”
Voices from upstairs, all male. “Shut up, man — people’re sleeping.”
Well, screw’em. I’d been duped again by that feral, Irish-waif bitch and wanted to go home. Not a peep from Neva.
“NEVA, get your ass down here before I call the cops and have you booked for kidnapping.”
“Shut up, Romeo! Juliet’s busy!”
“Dumb dyke…”
Finally I just roared, “NEEEEEEVVVVVAAAAA!”
On about the fourth summons, she descended with a rigid feline grace, wearing just her panties and bra, re-clothing her slim, curving figure in the dim light coming through the windows. “Will you shut up?”
“I want to go home. Freezing. Fucking dog’s tried to kill me twenty times already…”
We left, only so I’d shut up. After a long silence, we were talking, but not about anything anyone really cared about.
After some bullshit small talk, I asked, “So what’s up with the dog?”
“Gretch? She’s a sweetie.”
“Nah, she’s fucking psycho. Come all lovey dovey, whine-whine-whine, wanting to be pet, but reach to pet her, she goes for your throat.”
“No. What you have to realize, hun, is some of the brothers fed her acid when she was a puppy.”
“Nice,” I said, feeling a bit burnt because now her hands couldn’t be bothered to leave the steering wheel.
“She’s sweet if she knows you, once you know how to work her.”
“If it were my dog, I’d put the damn thing down.”
The car was quiet a moment before Neva jabbed a long fingernail at some imaginary button on my forearm and said, “No, you wouldn’t. I know for a fact, Deb Lewis, you wouldn’t.”
I watched a Route 30 sign fly past. After all these years, she still thought she had my fucking number, and yeah, that night, she might’ve — well, she did — but that’d been a hundred miles ago.
Deb R. Lewis has published work in Briefly Knocked Unconscious by a Low-Flying Duck: A 2nd Story Anthology (Elephant Rock Books), Windy City Queer: LGBTQ Dispatches from the Third Coast (U of Wisconsin Press), the IsGreaterThan Digital Omnibus 2010 (IsGreaterThan.net), and The Woman-Centered Economy (Third Side Press). Her honors include the Windy City Times Pride Literary Supplement Prose Prize, Top Three Finalist in the Project: Queer Lit novel competition, and a Pushcart nomination. Her work appears in many journals, including: Cellstories.net, Gertrude, Criminal Class Review, F Magazine, Susurrus, Zahir, Café Irreal, Outsider Ink, Velvet Mafia, The2ndHand, Blithe House Quarterly, Mobius,Dyversity, International Drummer, Bad Attitude, and SandMutopian Guardian. She is a teaching artist in the Goodman Theatre’s GeNarrations storytelling program. As a 2nd Story company member, she tells stories and, as a curator and director, helps others tell theirs. She earned her BA, Phi Beta Kappa, at University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and her MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. She is an adjunct instructor in Columbia College Chicago’s Department of Creative Writing. DebRLewis.com.
