The Couch
Daniel LéVesque
Please don’t cuddle with me, or try to hold my hand.
I couldn’t love you less.
Possessing the only attached penis at a party for the women’s film festival- spelled wimmins on the invite- your exclusive genitalia made you the only valid option at the end of the night. You understand.
It’s my fault. I started it, I think. Maybe you started it. I don’t remember, but I knew instantly it was all wrong. You looked like your best friend, that dyke with the same chin as you. You looked just like her all of a sudden but it was too late to stop. My eyes pressed tight closed so not to see you, but even the shadows against my lids betrayed me, convincing me I was making out with her.
You smelled like her. You smelled like trying too hard. Like new plastic. You kept your eyes open, wrapped by the same expensive glasses as your friend. You kept becoming her, pointy blonde spikes of hair scratching at my face.
I heard you say that you just came from a “Bioneers” conference, which I’d imagine is admirable when viewed in a larger picture than the pukey back staircase of a Mission apartment, you with your hands on my neck.
Bioneer. I don’t know what that is but you’re real proud to be one. Wouldn’t shut up in the kitchen earlier. You were talking about beets for a long time, your loud voice driving the wimmin from the keg back out to the stoop as fast as they could fill their red plastic cups.
Bioneering. Somebody’s got to do it. I don’t judge you for your ideals, you can bet your hemp shoes on that. I enjoy the environment too, but find myself wishing that you weren’t part of it. Your jagged profile alone is an affront to all things soft and easy, the WASP-y cut of your chin eclipsed only by your sermon on the benefits of eating seasonally. You were hitting all of my red flags. The second you started telling me about your roommates and the communal practice of Wicca in your household, I should have stopped it. Right then. Goodnight.
Loathsome of any “white- light” religion, I would rather you told me you were a high-ranking priest in the army of Anton LaVey, with access to the black mansion in The Richmond. Even such a kitschy display of commercial spiritual rebellion would have impressed me at that point. Anything but Wicca. Please tell me you’re a voodooist, a conjuror who can hurt an enemy with no guilt, no fear of karmic repercussion. A spiritual badass. Anything. (Even if you told me right now that you were a card-carrying member of the KISS Army, it may be enough to scrape the taste of White Magic off the back of my tongue, where you left it.)
No such luck. You’re “green”. You care. Me, I couldn’t care less. Blame it on my upbringing; my mother would rather chop off her fingers than recycle. Chalk it up to class differences. Just don’t blame me. While you worry about your credit and all the things you’ve collected, I’m concerned with stealing enough quarters to buy a burrito. My teeth forced themselves into my lip when you told me how much your ugly shoes cost. Why would you tell me that?
God, I hate alcohol, and you drank a bunch of it. At first that’s why I thought your breath smelled bad. I mean bad in that REALLY bad way, where it smells like shit has backed itself up from your intestines clear to your esophagus, ready to kick forth from behind your perfect teeth in ribbons of fecal worms at any second, like hair in the Play-Doh Barber Shop.
It’s because you use that ‘natural’ toothpaste. That expensive, gritty stuff named after the guy who makes it, probably on a hemp mat with his feet bare. When I saw it in the bathroom, it hit me that somehow I ended up back at your house, realizing I had broken Rule #1: Never leave the first location.
You and your household coven should do a spell to eliminate the notion that natural toothpaste works on any level, from the texture to the taste to the packaging. Get some Colgate, folks. Your mouths all smell like shit tastes. (Yes.)
I know you brushed your teeth because you did it right in front of me- the most repulsive manifestation of exhibitionism I can imagine. Brushing your teeth in front of me with that chalky, useless toothpaste was the worst thing you could have done.
Now you want to kiss me. You want to breathe on my nose real close. Shitbreath. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you feel the tension, Shitbreath? My body is backing away from your clutch, my spine tweaking in a curve away from your mouth, but you still insist. We sat in your room until a threatening new sun came up, then I told you I have to go. I don’t have any money but I have to go.
You walked me to the train station and bought me a ticket, then smirked and walked away. I breathed relief when you went away, closing my eyes and waiting for the doors to close. Then there you were on the train next to me, smiling like you popped out of a cake. Like you were a long-lost friend. Like I knew you at all.
Grabbing my hand as the train rolls gutterball along the freeway, I pull away again hoping you are just going for a Sunday train ride, then home again to make recycled art. Unlucky again, I hear you step off the train behind me. Just because you bought a junkie a BART ticket doesn’t mean you get to go home with them. I have things to do, dig? Is presumptuousness part of Bioneering?
Following me home through slit port sky, me a confused wet magnet pulling you behind, I can hear your corduroys chafing, wearing on my ears like a proper British accent.
The suggestion of coffee at my house leads me into silent panic. I couldn’t be so stupid as to let you into my house, subjecting your invasion to the people I live with. No breaking the Nobody from the Outside Comes In rule at my house. Yet somehow you were still behind me when I pushed the door open, my roommates doing a double take at the unfamiliar shadow behind me on the wall. When confronted with outsiders, the people in my house scatter to the corners of the room, turning invisible with their various sewing projects, their shields humming paranoid growls- and here you are wanting fancy coffee.
You stuck around for an hour or two, silently watching the tweakers gluing pieces of paper to other pieces of paper. Collage. After I did my shot I couldn’t look at you, and I certainly didn’t need any coffee. Every second you lingered was excruciating, so I grabbed a glue gun and a mirror, finding a spot on the floor to begin my performance. When you finally looked me in the eye, I smashed the mirror on the floor into so many shards, then plugged in my glue gun. My roommates crawled around the floor looking for any useable pieces of shiny glass they may want to sew to their jackets later. You asked me what I was doing tomorrow and I didn’t answer. I didn’t hear you. I wasn’t even sure who you were anymore, sitting tight and sober on the couch above me. Now you were in my house, no more important than any other person there, watching my fingers bleed methamphetamine crimson as I glued mirror to fabric.
Someone told me you were asking me questions for ten minutes before you finally left. I didn’t know you were talking to me. Or I really didn’t hear you over the hum of firing synapses.
You were gone for an hour before I remembered you had been there at all, looking up from my box of Band-Aids at the ghost of your body on the couch, where you left it. It was obvious that someone had been here, sitting there on the couch for a while, since none of us ever sit on the couch.
We only brought it in off the curb when Erica told us her dad was coming to visit, a play to look responsible. We have places to sit. The couch is a prop, a settee for the Normals who we invite in on rare, or accidental occasions. Me, I can’t sit that long without access to my things. The couch makes me feel trapped in the upright position. Sometimes I lean against it if I’m sitting on the floor but that’s as far as I go.
My household discussed the couch for about ten hours after you left, how it attracts and hold deities after people sit on it, how none of us liked it, how we needed to get rid of it. Two days of sleep deprivation turned the couch against us. We stared at it from across the room and talked in hushed whispers about what to do with it. Sitting where you had been was a static-shape holding a grenade, left hand on the pin and ready to pull. The couch was my disappointed father, my angry probation officer, my hypercritical caseworker. We burned it in the street, peeking from behind drawn shades as firefighters put it out of commission. All remaining memory of you- and all other intruders who sat on it- went up like smoke signals. You were screaming, puddling into the melting naugahyde, and then you disappeared. The firefighters looked up as the last puff of smoke joined the low Oakland fog and I sat on the floor, filtering through the dusty rectangle where the couch used to be.
Daniel LéVesque, a/k/a El Lute, has been holed up in the New Mexico wilderness for four years, finishing the collection "Hairdresser on Fire". His short story "Excerpts from The Geographical Cure" was published in the anthology "Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person", edited by Michelle Tea and Clint Catalyst for Alyson Press. Daniel has traveled and performed extensively with the veterans of Sister Spit and has been featured several times at K'vetch!, San Francisco's longest-running queer cabaret. He has also been a featured performer at City Lights, Yerba Buena Gardens, A Different Light (which aint as different as it used to be), all in San Francisco, and has been featured with Mary Woronov in Los Angeles. He may be in your town soon. Watch your purse.