Average American Male (18 page)

She says, “So what do you think we should name it?”

I am a statue.

She says, “I was thinking Willamena for a girl and Kerry for a boy.

What do you think?”

I hate both of these names. I say, “Casey, do you really think we should have this baby?”

“Uh . . . yeah. What else would we do? Give it up for adoption?”

“You could have an abortion.”

“An abortion?!? Why would I abort a child that was conceived through love?”

“Do you remember the conversation we had in the coffee shop a few days ago?”

“Yeah, but you were just confused. You didn’t know what you were saying. This baby, our baby, is going to bring us back together and make you see that you still love me, that you never stopped loving me.”

I want to open the salt shaker and dump it in my eyes.

The waiter comes over and takes our orders, giving me a quick breather from the worst conversation I’ve ever had in my life. Then he leaves and it’s back on.

She says, “Don’t you want to see what a baby that’s half me and half you would grow up to be like?”

I think about this for less than a second and say, “No,” with more certainty than I’ve ever had about anything in my life.

“But that will change once you actually see the baby. They say no man can stop himself from crying when he first sees his little baby.”

“I don’t want a baby. Have an abortion.”

“No. I’m not having an abortion. We’re having this baby and starting a family.”

“What?”

“I’m sure if you just apologize to my parents and tell them you were like confused when you blew up on my mom and everything, they’ll forgive you and we can still get married.”

“I don’t want to get married.”

“Well, I’m not having a child without being married to the father.”

“Then get an abortion.”

“I can’t believe you’re being such an asshole about this.”

She wants me to say something. I don’t.

She says, “It was meant to be. I mean, if I was on the pill and still got pregnant, then this baby is meant to come into this world and we’re meant to be its mother and father.”

Now she really wants me to say something. I don’t.

She says, “Well, aren’t you going to say something?”

“Get an abortion.”

She says, “I am not getting a fucking abortion,” right as the waiter brings our drink orders to the table. He pretends he didn’t hear it, but he must have. I wonder briefly if he’s ever been privy to any identical dinner conversations.

She says, “We’re going to get married. We’re going to have this baby and we’re going to start a family.”

“I’m not.”

“What do you mean, you’re not?”

“I’m not starting a family.”

“You don’t have a choice. I’m going to have your baby. You’re going to be a father.”

“But I don’t have to be around for it. All I’m required to do is pay you, which I’ll do as the law dictates.” I’m hoping this line of reasoning will make her realize she doesn’t want to have a baby if the father won’t be around.

She says, “You wouldn’t want to see your child grow up?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I just don’t want to.”

“You wouldn’t want to help me raise our child?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Same reason.”

Our food comes. Over the course of the meal, Casey continues to try to convince me that the best thing to do is to get married, have the child, and start a family. I stand firm in my disinterest in her plans.

On the drive home I continue to try to jar the fetus loose with more abrupt driving maneuvers.

At the end of the night, she once again invites me in to have “crazy sex.” Upon my refusal she reaches for my pants and says she won’t take no for an answer. She explains that she’s missed me and “my penis.”

Although I’m very tempted to fuck her just to see if a few deep thrusts might knock the fetus out of her uterus, my genuine affection and respect for what Alyna and I have keep me from leaving my car.

Once I finally get Casey to go back inside her apartment by promising to at least think about getting married, I drive to a party where I’m supposed to meet Alyna. As I drive I wonder if Alyna ever had an abortion or ever would. I assume she would but is careful enough to not get pregnant in the first place.

Ex-Boyfriend Duane

Other than Alyna’s hippie roommate Simone, I haven’t met any of her friends. Despite her telling me that she really doesn’t have many friends and the party I’m at is being thrown by more of an acquain-tance, I feel uneasy about the fact that I want to make a good impression, which I find even more unsettling than the party itself. I can’t remember the last time I was conscious of trying to make someone happy or giving a shit about something I normally wouldn’t.

As soon as I walk in Alyna takes my hand and guides me through the packed apartment. My dick brushes a couple of hard college asses as we make our way to the kitchen and a counter full of Ralph’s brand hard liquor and various bottles of juice. Alyna makes herself a screw-driver and I pour myself a blue plastic cup full of scotch from a jug with a Distiller’s Preference label on it and a price tag that indicates the entire gallon was a price-conscious $6.34. Even though I immensely enjoy getting drunk with Alyna, I drain the scotch in one swallow in an effort to numb the memories of my dinner with Casey and the thoughts of my bleak future.

Alyna leads me around to two girls standing by an open window.

Alyna says, “Okay, I’ll introduce you to these two girls. They’re both complete bitches and one of them supposedly got crabs last semester from the other one when they were drunk and got dared to rub their pussies together.”

Alyna introduces me.

One bitch says, “Hi. I’m Carolyn.”

The other one says, “I’m Mandy.”

I say, “Nice to meet you,” as I’m imagining them both naked rubbing their cunts together in a drunken frenzy, which isn’t bad considering they’ve both got late-teen bodies that haven’t yet started to show the signs of wear associated with too much drinking and little to no exercise on a steady diet of eating anything they want.

The conversation I wade through yields nothing interesting aside from Alyna starting to get semi-drunk and moving her hand from the middle of my back down into my pants and pinching my ass from time to time.

As I move my hand down her pants to reciprocate, I notice she’s wearing a thong. My hard-on is almost instantaneous. As I squeeze her rock-hard ass, I wonder how long it will be before she loses it, before she gets cellulite, before she becomes an old woman eating a cup of yogurt in the airport. Somewhere in the pit of my stomach the unrealistic but not entirely impossible scenario of her ass never losing its firmness and fuckability gives rise to a giddy excitement that combines with the first sip of a new plastic cup of scotch to make me feel better than I’ve felt in a while about anything.

The two bitches use a momentary lull in the boring conversation to announce that their drinks are empty and they have to get refills.

As they leave I wonder why I was so worked up about making a good impression. A completely hot bitch who’s a little taller than Alyna with slightly bigger tits comes over to talk to us, and the hope that somehow Alyna and this girl would have no problem double-teaming me is accompanied by the urge to make the best impression of my life.

The hot bitch says, “Hey, Alyna. Who’s this?” in a way I interpret as indicative of her entertaining the idea of fucking me.

Alyna introduces me as her boyfriend and the hot bitch’s formerly flirtatious tone changes to something closer to repulsion as she says,

“I’m Brooke.” I’ve always wanted to fuck someone named Brooke.

Brooke says, “Is he the reason you haven’t been hanging out as much?”

Alyna says, “No. I mean, we’ve been spending a lot of time together, but I don’t know. . . .”

Brooke says, “Does Duane know you have a new boyfriend?”

Who the fuck is Duane? I think he’s Alyna’s ex-boyfriend but I’m not sure. I am sure that I’m slowly starting to hate Brooke. As she continues to talk to Alyna like I’m not in the room, I imagine myself fucking her doggie style, pulling her head back by her hair. I imagine her crying somewhere alone. I imagine her pregnant and fat—like Casey.

Alyna says, “I don’t care if Duane knows.”

Brooke says, “Well, he’ll find out soon enough.”

And fucking Duane walks up, puts his arm around Brooke, and says, “Hey, Alyna, how’s it going?” with a forced confidence and nonchalance that make him seem more drunk than he probably is.

Alyna introduces me to her ex-boyfriend.

Duane says, “Yeah, I think we met once before, but that was when I was still fucking Alyna.”

Brooke laughs.

Alyna says, “Jesus Christ, this is why I fucking dumped you. You’re a complete dick.”

Duane misuses the phrase “That’s what she said.” Then he says to me, “So aren’t you like thirty years old or something?”

Alyna answers before I can. “You know what, Duane, he’s not thirty, but even if he was, it doesn’t matter because I sucked his cock three times today and it stayed hard every time. So no matter how old he is, he can make me happier than you.”

The fact that Alyna and I are both well on our way to being com-pletely shit-faced helps me explain away the slight insult I feel at her reduction of our relationship to its sexual components.

At this point I’ve noticed that a small group of people who have obviously followed the mini-drama of Duane and Alyna in their circle of friends have gathered around us, unfortunately for him.

They watch, waiting for the rebuttal from Duane that never comes.

He takes a drink from his cup and opens his mouth to say something, but instead puke comes out. His puke lands mainly on the floor and his shoes, but some of it gets on Brooke. The small crowd that’s gathered around the scene disperses with the spread of Duane’s cloud of vomit stink.

Alyna says, “Let’s get out of here.”

We leave and walk down the street to IN-N-OUT, where I buy Alyna a number one plain. We get our food and sit down.

She says, “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know he was going to be there.”

“It’s okay.”

“I know the last thing you want to see is my asshole ex-boyfriend who’s still not over it.”

“Is that true about him not being able to get hard-ons?”

She kind of laughs and says, “Yeah, it is, actually.”

“Why’d you stay with him so long?”

She laughs again and says, “There’s more to a relationship than sex.”

Hearing those words come out of her mouth scares the shit out of me for two specific and conflicting reasons. Reason 1: My earlier disappointment at Alyna’s trivialization of our relationship dissolves, meaning that I actually want her to think there’s something more between us than just sex. Reason 2: Casey used that exact phrase more times than I can count as an excuse to not have sex.

At the moment reason number two seems more pressing, so I say,

“But that’s one of the most important parts, right?”

“Oh yeah. Don’t get me wrong. If I don’t get sex once a day I go crazy.”

“So didn’t he drive you crazy?”

“Yeah. I guess it just took me a while to realize it. Why’d you stay with your girlfriend for so long?”

It’s the first time anyone’s asked me this and the first time I’ve even thought about it. It wasn’t the convenience, it wasn’t the boring sex, it wasn’t the unemotional response I had to everything she did, it wasn’t the disinterest with which I approached everything about her. As I chew my plain number one sitting across from Alyna, I pinpoint the single exact reason I stayed with Casey for a year and a half.

I say, “I guess I just didn’t think there was anything better.”

Alyna smiles, thinking I’m talking about her specifically as the “anything better.” I don’t ruin it. I smile back knowing to a large degree her smile is justified.

She says, “Do you still talk to her?”

I’m pretty sure Alyna wouldn’t care if I did still talk to Casey, but fear of any conversation that could lead to my accidentally divulging the existence of my unborn child causes me to say, “No.”

“When was the last time you did?”

I don’t count the time she showed up on my doorstep or the time I had coffee with her and she told me she was pregnant or the time we ate dinner and I tried to convince her to have an abortion thirty minutes before I showed up to the party we just left when I say, “I don’t know. Months ago.”

“Do you think she’s okay with everything?”

I say, “Probably.”

We finish eating our number ones and then go back to my apartment, where Alyna insists on fucking in front of an open window. As we do, some people walk by on the street outside, but I don’t think they notice because the lights are off.

We rest for a while and then have sex again. This time it’s less ag-gressive, slower, with us lying side by side, and it ends with her falling asleep a few seconds after we both cum. I stay awake for a few minutes trying to imagine how pissed off Duane must have been when Alyna explained to him that she sucked my cock three times today.

I try to imagine Casey sucking some guy’s cock just to see if it elicits any reaction. It doesn’t. I throw in another guy fucking her doggie style while she’s sucking another guy’s cock. Still nothing. I think about her getting fucked in the ass and the cunt while she’s sucking some other guy’s dick who I imagine to be Persian. Still nothing. I end up falling asleep imagining Casey sitting in the middle of a basketball court as the entire Lakers roster surrounds her, coating her in a six-inch-thick layer of semen, and I still feel nothing except the growing paranoia created by the rising probability that the cum-drenched girl sitting center court will soon be the mother of my child.

Gwen Stefani

No Doubt’s first CD plays in Alyna’s car and I still don’t understand why anyone has ever bought any of their records or why Alyna and almost any girl I’ve ever known loves their shitty music.

This mystery remains unsolved as Alyna and I pull into the un-derground parking garage at the Virgin Megastore on Sunset with the intent of buying Jefferson Airplane’s Crown of Creation because mine has been lost. As we come up the elevator and the doors open, we see a giant mob of teenage girls standing in a line that snakes around the side of the building out onto the street.