11seven (final)

Knock Yourself Out - Filligar (mp3)
You Don't Know How Lucky You Are - Keaton Henson (mp3)

This is the final entry of my unfinished fiction work, tentatively titled "11seven." I offer it in small mostly digestible doses of between 700-1,100 words. It contains strong language and sexual situations as intended for a mature audience. Parental discretion is advised. (I got all that from watching "Justified"!) Each entry will come with a song from our BOTG mailbox and discussion questions for Oprah.

PART ONE: Solitary Confinement in a Convenience Store
PART TWO: Stu & the Lost Male Art of Subtlety
PART THREE: All Desperate Horny Teens Deserve Charity
PART FOUR:  Going Steady

11seven
six.

Clash of the Titans

A few weeks later, the inevitable happened. Jimmy the cop shows up when Stu’s hanging out at the counter.

Stu looked like he’d just been caught with a kilo of cocaine, the latest issue of Hustler sitting right there on the counter next to him in a brown bag. Except, he was trying to act like he wasn’t doing anything wrong. It’s the stupid guilty-looking green-under-the-collar criminals who get caught.

Jimmy smiled at Stu and leaned over the counter. “Hey hot stuff.”

“Where you been, stranger?” I asked. “It’s been so lonely I’ve had to force boys at gunpoint to hang out with me past curfew.”

I looked over at my boy, and he’d already slinked toward the exit. He looked like I’d shot him, this wounded gunshot puppy. Stu mumbled a goodbye with lightning efficiency and backed out the door.

Jimmy was looking at me. Then I looked back at him, and he looked at the door where Stu had been, and then back at me. And he had that funny halfway one-sided grin.

So I gave him my big ol’ cheerleader ear-to-ear, and he cocked his head to the side. Then he looked back at the door. And then he started taking steps toward the door.

“Jimmy?”

He was gonna go after Stu. Who the hell knows what he was going to do with Stu, but he was gonna do something. Probably just be all coppy and talk stern-like to him ‘til the kid pissed himself or something, but still.

“Jimmy.”

He stopped halfway there and watched the kid’s car putter out to into the great beyond. And then, after his display of alpha male possessiveness, he walks over to me at the counter, with his cop poker face of 20 emotions at once.

“I betcha I’m gonna love this story,” he says to me.

“What story?” I tell him, biting on my straw like some bad scene out of Grease! or something.

“That kid couldn’t’ve looked guiltier if y’all’d been fucking on the counter,” he says.

“Awww, aren’t you a sweetie, all jealous and such,” I said, and I leaned over the counter and gave him one of those June Cleaver ya big galoot lovey punches to his cop jaw.. “Even with that pretty little ring on your finger.”

“What’s there to be jealous of?” he says.

“You tell me Officer Jealous.”

“You’re not fuckin’ him are you? I wasn’t even sure he was old enough to drive.” He was sorta kidding and sorta not. But it was adorable.

“I’d answer you ‘cept that you’ve turned into exactly the kind of guy I don’t owe explanations to,” is what I told him. “If you’re that sweet cop who keeps me company and cares about my well-being and who ain’t jealous of some old widow who hardly ever leaves her store just ‘cuz she’s made pals with some sad lonely kid, then I’ll talk ‘til I’m blue in the face about every last detail. But if you’re gonna be some Rottweiler who wants to pee on my front door, then you can politely just kiss my ass.”

Cute Jimmy. If there’d been some disco strobe lights, each blink would have revealed some new microscopically-noticeable expression on that face. Pissed off. Amused. Confused. Tender. Pissed off again. But he finally settled on the worst of all: the disappointed daddy.

“I’ve hardly ever touched a hair on your pretty head, Gladys.” He pointed at the door. “That’s a boy. A boy who you said yourself is a sad and lonely boy. You are a sad and lonely woman, and you being beautiful and funny and sweet don’t change that. What kind of idiot would I have to be not to see something going on with the little drama scene I walked in on?”

I just kinda smiled and shrugged.

“You wanna play this off as me being some jealous oaf? Have at it. Merry fucking Christmas. But what it is is weird.”

“Oh get off it,” I told him. I don’t even know if it made any sense to say that, but that’s what came out.

I took another sip of my drink and chewed some more on my straw. The silence was pretty intense. I gotta tell you, it was the first time in a long time I’d really been aroused quite like I was just at that moment. In fact, the idea of dragging Jimmy into my back office and ripping every last thread off his body flashed joyfully through my mind.

“Fine fine fine. Fair enough,” I said to him. “But it’s not like that. It’s just nice to have someone to talk to sometimes. That’s as far as it goes, and that’s as far as it’ll ever go.”

I mostly meant it.

“Just like you,” I told him.

He chuckled a little and rolled his eyes. “Honey, ain’t nothing about that boy gonna ever be anything like me.”

“That kid’s gonna be a successful something or other. Big time. You can just tell.”

“Like I said, nothing, ever, anything, like me,” he says, and starts walking over to get him a coffee.

11seven (five)

Doubt - Amanda Mair (mp3)
Dandelion - The Asteroid Shop (mp3)

Presented this month is my unfinished fiction work, tentatively titled "11seven." I offer it in small mostly digestible doses of between 700-1,100 words. It contains strong language and sexual situations as intended for a mature audience. Parental discretion is advised. (I got all that from watching "Justified"!) Each entry will come with a song from our BOTG mailbox and discussion questions for Oprah.

PART ONE: Solitary Confinement in a Convenience Store
PART TWO: Stu & the Lost Male Art of Subtlety
PART THREE: All Desperate Horny Teens Deserve Charity
PART FOUR:  Going Steady

11seven
five.

A Port in a Storm

The second time Stu come in was something special. There was a part of me that was surprised, ‘cuz I’d done told myself I’d never see that adorable boy again, and he had already gone down into my little personal private history book of memories that made me love owning this store – maybe I’ll share a few others with you sometime, but it’s not a long list. Seven or eight at best. There was another part of me, though, that saw him walk in and didn’t think nothing of it.

I don’t mean like I was hedging my bets or nothing like that. But deep down, I felt this connection between us, the kind of connection you don’t want to tell people about, the way people don’t talk about love at first sight until months or years later. And especially since there’s nothing noble about connecting like that with a boy barely old enough to drive, I wasn’t exactly giddy about rolling around in that particular feeling too much.

Stu, on the other hand, must’ve stewed on it – ha, yeah, I know – a lot. I bet he spent that whole week trying to decide whether or not to follow his gut and come back. I was trying to deny myself that feeling of intense connection; he didn’t have a name for it. He only knew it seemed dirty and bad, but he couldn’t explain why to himself.

Maybe it’s not right for me to speak for the boy, but trust me I know what he was thinking. Or I’m in the right ballpark anyways. When I told him that first day that I was psychic, yeah I was kidding, but the truth of it is that we seemed to get each other almost like we were psychic. I just always had more benefit of experience.

Just like a guy, he just walks in and walks straight up to me at the counter. Johnny’s monologuing in the background, and there’s this gleam in his eye. Later on I’d fantasize that he was walking straight up to the counter to lean over and shove his tongue into my mouth, some intense Top Gun kind of kiss. But I shoulda known he was a guy, which means that instead, he walked up to me and says, “So, like, are you OK with me buying those magazines from you, or was that, uh, just a one-time thing?”

I bet I sounded like a donkey in heat the way I laughed at that one. He was a little taken back with it – the volume, I think – but he also knew why I was laughing. He knew I wasn’t laughing at him. Which also means he knew that my laugh was all but a guarantee what my answer would be.

“Well you ain’t getting another free one ‘til you turn 17, Stuart.”

Here's another thing about guys. He came in so confident and direct because he had created this illusion that the conversation was about porno mags. He had sold himself and worked up the nerve by convincing himself it wasn't about him and me, like I was merely the toll booth operator rather than the destination. And even if he deep down knew it was bullshit, it didn't matter, because it was enough of a lie to keep him comfortable.

“Oh. Oh I know. Totally. I’d totally pay,” he says, and he’s almost bouncing on the balls of his feet like some eager puppy.

“Just make sure no one else is in the store when you do, OK?” I says to him.

“Oh yeah of course totally. Totally.”

“There’s one other thing,” I tell him, and I know his mind got kinda dirty a little on that one. He kinda looks up like he’s expecting me to say something about doing me from behind or who knows what, and I fight hard not to donkey laugh again. “Just hang out with me and talk for a little while. It gets kinda boring in here, you know? And you seem like a good kid.”

I know I know. Pathetic. Totally. I felt like I was back in sixth grade when I said it, like I was askin’ him to go steady or something. So then I kinda had to backtrack.

“Not for long or anything," I tell him. "Just, you know, a few minutes.”

Qualifying it was even more pathetic than the first request.

“Must get kinda boring in here, huh? Do you have to be here all night?” he asks me. Like I said, he felt the connection too.

Here’s what’s messed up. Right there that very night, I pretty much told this kid, this horny testosterone-addled boy, my life story. And even more messed up is that he sat there and listened to the whole thing. Asked me questions. Paid attention. Never drifted off to Johnny on the screen behind me or anything. Just totally involved himself in my story.

A lot of the stuff about Ralph, like how we met (except without as much of the story about being deflowered) and how we come to own a 7-11, and how I hurt my neck and lost a kid and lost a husband to fantasies of Elvis. How I was locked up in here for so long. This conversation kept going after Letterman signed off.

“Did you love him?” he asked me when I got to the part where Ralph run off.

“Well yeah I loved him. I didn’t love all of him,” is what I said, “but I loved a whole lot of him.”

He mulled on that one. “And that’s good?” Stu says to me.

I kinda rolled my eyes on that one. “Hell yeah that’s good. Hon, if you can be with someone for more than 20 years and still love a whole lot of ‘em, then it’s true love. Ain’t no two people, not real people I’m talking about here, can live and spend time and pass through a decade or two without finding parts of each other they hate. They can pretend like it ain’t true. Or they can be all polite about it at least. But true love is about loving a whole lot of somebody a whole lot of the time.”

He shook his head like I'd just told him God was dead, like I'd just denied him some clear and unbreakable truth of life that was just too obvious to reject.

“I want to love all of someone all of the time,” Stu says. And not, like, to insult me. But because he’s just a damn boy with visions of gumdrops and lollipops and bad romance novels in his head. And then he melted me: “But it’s, like, really cool for, you know, like, how you managed to come out of everything OK. I admire that.”

I mean Christ on a cracker, how many guys are there who’ll do that for you, who’ll just sit and let the story be about you for a change? Who’ll tell some older lady he admires her?

For a while I thought maybe he was just afraid to back away from the counter ‘cuz he had some serious boner and didn’t want me to see. But who can keep a boner with some wrinkly lady going on about her suicidal husband and boring convenience store life?

Stu more or less explained that nerdy awkward boys, barely old enough to drive who have never once in their whole goddamn lives gone on a single date, are absolutely enthralled at the idea of talking to a female. Or, in this case, of listening to one. Any drop of water in the desert, I guess. Or is it port in a storm? Whatever.

And me? Hell yes, I took full advantage. I exploited a weakness. But that’s OK as long as I wasn’t working some sinister angle, right?

Discussion Questions: Is Gladys right or wrong with her definition of true love? Is the connection between Gladys and Stu sexual?

11seven (four)

What Do You Want Me to Say? - The Dismemberment Plan (mp3)
Mace Spray - The Jezabels (mp3)

Presented this month is my unfinished fiction work, tentatively titled "11seven." I offer it in small mostly digestible doses of between 700-1,100 words. It contains strong language and sexual situations as intended for a mature audience. Parental discretion is advised. (I got all that from watching "Justified"!) Each entry will come with a song from our BOTG mailbox and discussion questions for Oprah.

PART ONE: Solitary Confinement in a Convenience Store
PART TWO: Stu & the Lost Male Art of Subtlety
PART THREE: All Desperate Horny Teens Deserve Charity

11seven
four.

Going Steady

That was a year ago last February, so, what? Fifteen months I’ve known Stu? Fifteen months he’s come into my store once, sometimes twice a week? Always later at night, because his parents are older and tend to pass out by 9 ‘cuz Stu’s a nerd and never been in a lick of trouble his whole sad nerdy clueless jerkin’ off life.

I wouldn’t say we’re dating, because I’m married to Johnny and keeping Jimmy the Cop on a leash, but we’re doing something fun and a little wrong, like cowtipping or Ding Dong Dash.

But we’re seeing one another regularly. And at that time of night, it’s almost exclusive. Maybe an occasional alkie comes stumbling in, and maybe a few people stop for an emergency fill-up, but mostly our time is ours. Well, and Johnny Carson. I can’t totally leave my second hubby out of it, so he watches over me in the background while Stu and I talk about all those things 40-year-old women and 16-year-old boys just don’t and apparently shouldn’t talk about.

Which is to say tits and pussies and asses and cocks and sex. And sometimes all that other stuff, too. Like school, girlfriends, marriage, drinking, friendship, running a business, sleeping in an office, wondering if your parents really love you. What’s been a little frightening is that, beyond the sex, where Stu is utterly clueless, so much of how he sees and experiences the world ain’t all that different than how I do. People say men don’t listen, and men can’t have really great conversations. What they really mean is, men don’t listen and can’t have really great conversations unless once in a while something about sex gets thrown in the mix.

There was that experiment I saw featured on PBS one time, where these lab rats got trained to push a lever and get cocaine. Anyway, they called it random intermittent something or other, and what it meant was, the rat never really knew exactly how many pushes it took to get the drug. Maybe two pushes. Maybe 20 pushes. Maybe 100. But if it was convinced that it would get the drug at some point, it would push forever. The rats would literally kill themselves pushing that button, ignoring water and food and sleep until they just keeled over and died.

Men are like that with conversations as long as sex is some random intermittent topic. As long as they think sex talk will show up – two seconds, 20 seconds, 100 seconds, whatever – they’ll pay attention and listen attentively to knitting stories if you like.

I’d love to tell you that the reason I haven’t jumped across the counter and thrown sweet little Stuie up against the chip rack and ridden him like a rented Shetland Pony is because I’m a queen of morality and self-restraint, but if I’ve learned anything about people, it’s that most of us are only as moral and well-behaved as we have to be. When given opportunity and capability, we’ll usually ruin ourselves.

You see, the reason it’s been so easy for me to swear off sex isn’t as simple as wanting to get back on my feet. When I was 19, I chipped a vertebra in my neck, right near the base of my skull. Doctors said it was a miracle I wasn’t paralyzed from the neck down for life.

I’d miscarried earlier that month, and Ralph and I kinda had ourselves a tough time dealing with that. We’d been engaged before I got knocked up, if you’d believe that, and we both really wanted a kid. What the hell else is there to hope for when being a rocket scientist is out of reach, right? Anyway, I didn’t handle it too well and must’ve spent most of the month drinking myself silly.

At 5’3” and barely 100 pounds, which is what I was back then, drinking a pint of whiskey was about three times more than I needed to get good and shitfaced, and I did it pretty much daily. Poor Ralph was in his own world o’ hurt and kinda let me alone for a while. Finally, though, he’d had enough and set me down to tell me I had to stop. We had words, and I eventually hit him with a frying pan and jumped on top of him and started wailing away at him. He shoved me off, and my neck cracked against the seat of one of the kitchen table chairs.

If all that had happened today, with no witnesses, poor Ralph woulda been put away or something. Everyone woulda just assumed he’d beaten me silly for no reason, and that I was only trying to defend myself. People really are stupid about couples and fights. All I would have had to say is that Ralph started it, that I was just a sweet innocent victim, and there he goes into the clink.

Anyways, I’m all laid up in the hospital with my neck when more problems happen with my private parts, and next thing you know, me and my broken neck are getting rushed in for an emergency hysterectomy. Bye-bye babies.

Meanwhile, my neck injury left my fingertips and toes pretty numb. I’ve cut myself slicing a tomato or something and not even noticed for a while. It’s kinda spooky. I also get real dizzy when I bend my neck too far in any direction. You might not believe it, but when your neck movement is limited, some of the fun of sex goes away. Some people talk all about how pleasure and pain mix real nice, but those people don’t have massive neck trauma where one degree of extra torque leads to this fiery sword feeling straight down the length of their spine followed by this weird all-body charley horse thing. Ain’t no perverted fetish groups out there with that particular interest.

Not to mention we couldn’t have kids, and we weren’t quite as liberated about the whole Sex Is Fun shit as maybe we coulda been in the first place. So what we ended up becoming was just really good business partners who occasionally helped each other get their rocks off.

Once I’d mostly recovered was when Ralph decided to buy into the franchise. I’d always told him it would be easy for me to do most of the work inside a store like that, and he’d always been one to save every damn penny he could, so we jumped in and never looked back. And with both of us putting every bit of sexual frustration and useless parenting instinct we had into this store, we were making bank and then some by the end of the first year.

Sure, it’s kinda tough to stock things and unbox things with all my medical ticks, but sex, God bless it, is kind of a choice. Surviving ain’t.

Discussion Questions: Is sex a choice? How do you react to her observation about Ralph being arrested for abuse?

11seven (three)

Talking Out of Turn - Sleeping in the Aviary

Presented this month is my unfinished fiction work, tentatively titled "11seven." I offer it in small mostly digestible doses of between 700-1,100 words. It contains strong language and sexual situations as intended for a mature audience. Parental discretion is advised. (I got all that from watching "Justified"!) Each entry will come with a song from our BOTG mailbox and discussion questions for Oprah.

PART ONE: Solitary Confinement in a Convenience Store
PART TWO: Stu & the Lost Male Art of Subtlety


11seven
three.
All Desperate Horny Teens Deserve Charity

“Cut the shit, Stuart,” I says. “I’m not gonna turn you in or call your folks, and I’m not gonna preach at you. I’m just testin’ out my own psychic abilities,” I says.

His eyebrows furrow, and he looks a little more intently at me. He don’t believe me, and I reckon I didn’t blame him. “Well I’m right, right?” I said.

His chickenshit-brown hair cocks over to the side, and he acts like he’s got one up on me now. “Are you one of those Tarot card people? Like, a gypsy or something?”

I chuckled a little at him. “OK, I ain’t so serious about that part, but the part about not callin’ anyone was true. So tell me, which one was it? Playboy or Penthouse?”

He kept staring me down, trying to decide what to think of me. And I gotta tell you, it stirred me up. I’m not some horny monster of a woman who needs to tickle myself to orgasm every day. About once a week does me just fine. And between the day Ralph disappeared and the day Stu walked in, I hadn’t so much as nudged a man’s testicles. It’s tough to get too horny when you’re subsisting off Twinkies and Pepsi and cramping from trying to catch every last Z in a fucking office chair.

The only nuts I even tease are owned by Jimmy the Cop. A woman alone in a convenience store gotta make the right friends if she wants to keep safe, so Jimmy comes by a couple times a night on his shifts for free coffee, free hot dogs, free whatever the hell he wants. And I don’t consider it stealing or even taking advantage. If anything, I’m getting off cheap. More Jimmy, less armed robbery. Simple as that.

Jimmy’s married, and I lucked out that I’m pretty sure he’s interested in staying that way, so mostly we just do this harmless flirt thing with each other, and he swears he’ll never come in drunk and off duty or in any way touch me inappropriately, and in return I swear I’ll never show up on his doorstep in the middle of the night or boil a bunny in his kitchen. (Didja see that movie? It ‘bout pulled my eyelids back, that one did.)

I know cops. Trust me, most of 'em mean to be decent guys, but something about that gun and those handcuffs clinging to their hips every day, feeling like John Wayne or Ponch, it messes with their heads. But Jimmy actually believed he was doing good work, that people are good and his job is to protect them. All that crap. It's not his fault he's a guy, with a dick, and a wife that apparently forgot about it plenty. Most decent family men only just need to know there's someone out there waiting for them in a definitely maybe sort of way. If they have that, just a little bit of teasing, just a healthy dose of flirting, they can get by. Most of them. That's kinda how Jimmy and I had arranged things.

But back to Stu, who was standing there trying to figure me out, which had me all hot and bothered and feeling a teensy bit naughty, since the boy had only barely probably figured out the whole wet dream thing.

Finally, he broke. “Penthouse.”

“I KNEW it!!” I shouted and did a cheesy Icky Shuffle-looking thing that probably risked giving away my gin intake, except that Stu was young and seemed pretty clueless about all that stuff. When I looked up from my moment of joy, my celebration of feeling I was capable of looking into other people’s souls and knowing what’s there – porn, usually – Stu had made it most of the way to the door, apparently thinking my dance was meant to humiliate him.

“Wait!” I says, probly a little too excited-like, but who cares. Stu turns around, like, what else is this wacky bitch gonna do to me, and I say something silly: “Don’t you wanna know what I got for your birthday, Stuart?”

Again with the furrowed brow. All intense and trying to peer into my skull. “Go grab that issue. It’s on the house. Happy birthday,” I says.

Stu looked at me, and them brows unfurrow, and he laughs a little, then he stops laughing and looks down the aisle at the mag rack, and then he whips his head back to me like maybe I’m testing him or entrapping him in some massive horny teen sting, and I gesture my arms Vanna White style back toward those mags and nod my head like a Beatlemaniac, and Stu raises those precious eyebrows up. “Really?” is what those precious eyebrows are saying.

“Really. Mean it,” I says.

And this was the part where I knew I loved Stu. He walks all the way down the aisle toward that March 1988 Penthouse, never once taking his eyes off me the whole way, scrutinizing my face every step of the way to make sure I’m not shitting him. Then he looks up, grabs it, and walks slowly back toward the door, still looking at me.

At the door, he stops. “Really?” he says.

“Happy birthday, kid,” I says. “Just keep your pants on 'til you get back home. Don’t want you to wreck or nothin’.”

Poor boy gets a little red – I guess he didn’t realize I might know the magazine had a utility purpose beyond mere boner-inspiration – and then backs out of the door with a barely-audible “thank you” before hopping in his 1980 Toyota Carolla hatchback and inching away like a grandpa.

Actually, he said, "Thank you, ma'am."


Discussion Question: Is there ever any scenario where it is acceptable to discuss one's own onanistic habits?

11seven (two)

Higher Love - James Vincent McMorrow (mp3)

Presented this month is my unfinished fiction work, tentatively titled "11seven." I offer it in small mostly digestible doses of between 700-1,100 words. It contains strong language and sexual situations as intended for a mature audience. Parental discretion is advised. (I got all that from watching "Justified"!) Each entry will come with a song from our BOTG mailbox and discussion questions for Oprah.

PART ONE: Solitary Confinement in a Convenience Store

11seven
two.
Stu and the Lost Male Art of Subtlety

Stu. I swear. I didn’t have to be captain of the cheerleading squad to know the minute that kid walked into my store what he was looking for. Boy looked every bit of 14 and was rolling in right before midnight. He coulda practically pushed the door open with his boner at the thought of a Penthouse if he hadn’t been so damn nervous about the whole thing.

He was cute enough, though. First stopping and looking through my aisle of automotive crap, like what he really came in to buy was some 10w-30 or a gas cap. And then he’s looking at the damn dental floss and playing cards, at the rows of candy bars and potato chips, all the while making glances over at me, and glances over at the magazine rack in the back near the beer.

A greener soul might’ve thought he was scoping the beer, but that kid was so dialed into the thought of titties he was practically projecting them onto the back wall.

I just kept on watching Johnny Carson. He and I got to be good buddies after Ralph left. I sorta secretly married the guy in my head. Not, you know, like I’m crazy. It’s not like I’m in that “Purple Rose of Cairo” movie, which sucked, by the way. But I swore to God I didn’t want to deal with men for a long time, not ‘til I got back on my own feet and had enough cash that I never needed to depend on any man with pork breath, not even my own daddy, God bless him. Johnny gave me a strong imaginary commitment. He was my televised teddy bear. Besides, he’d been married so many times, I figured he’d never even remember whether we’d actually gone and got hitched.

I was three months from 40 when Stu walked over to that magazine rack, peering at those issues of Vogue and U.S. News & World Report.

What is it with teenage boys and dirty mags? Do they all read this secret field manual on how to look pathetic in a convenience store? They all do the same damn thing, swear to God. Up and down a few aisles. Over to the rack. Peruse the other items, as if you don’t really quite know what tickles your fancy and just wanna flip through everything. Hmm, I wonder what the latest NASCAR Weekly has to say for itself. What about the latest Better Homes & Gardens? Nah. Hmm, Penthouse. Wonder what’s in that?

I’d had a couple of shots that night – don’t worry, it’s not an every night kind of thing; maybe once or twice a week, and never more than two or three, swear to God. But when you swear off men, you gotta find something to take their place, right? And just like a man, gin is wonderful in short spurts when you can put it away at your own leisure.

The guy who delivers my Dolly Madison stuff, his name’s Rodney, and we’ve got a sweet deal going where he throws in a fifth of gin with every delivery. I mentioned it to him one time, how I needed to tie one on but couldn’t get out long enough to stock up, and the next time he pulled up with his treats truck, he handed me that fifth of Gilbey’s and smiled and said it was his contribution to the cause. Maybe he thought he’d get laid, too, but I mostly think he was just being all paternal. And if you have a fifth of gin for me, I’ll allow a little condescension to go with it.

Anyway, poor Stu had me so tickled at his sad attempt at subtlety – peacocks are more subtle, seriously – that I just couldn’t help myself.

“Hey kid,” I says.

Stu just looked over at me, all doe-eyed-like, blinking.

“Come over here please,” I says.

He looks around him, back at the beer fridges, and then around the store, and then back at me and points to himself in the chest, like, Who, me?

“Yeah. C’mere please.”

Instantly, he looked like a scalded dog. His chickenshit-colored hair drooped down over his bowed head, and his hands immediately stuffed into his pockets, and his shoes barely rose above the tile enough to keep from scraping.

“Yes ma’am?” he says when he finally gets over to me.

“How old are you?”

“Um, 18?” he says. Yeah son, you’re 18 and I’m the Mata Hari. But I didn’t say that. I think I just kinda chuckled.

“Is that a question?” I says. “Sounds like you’re not too sure.”

He wasn’t scared or anything, but he was definitely ashamed. Shame and fear are different things, but on a teenage boy’s face, sometimes they look the same. Maybe he was a little scared I’d call the cops or something, but he wasn’t scared of me. Hell, he hadn’t even looked long enough at me to form any opinions at all.

“Sixteen,” he says.

“Really?”

“Yes ma’am,” he says.

“’Cuz you don’t look a day over 14,” I tell him.

“Yesterday was my birthday. Got my driver’s license today and everything,” he says.

“Oh really? Well congratulations.”

He didn’t say nothing back.

“So,” I says. My Johnny’s saying something to Kevin Costner on his show in the background, and our third wheel Ed is giving off that God-awful laugh of his. Poor ol’ Ed. “It’s Penthouse, ain’t it?”

His face rockets up and his eyes meet mine, “I was just lookin’ through –”

“Oh cut the shit… what’s your name?”

“Stu?” he says. Like he’s asking me permission for it to be his real name.

Discussion Questions: Is there any modern equivalent to the rite of adolescent male passage that was entering a convenience store for the chance to see boobies? Does this entire scene require a more thorough description of the actual convenience store, or is it better to leave it to the reader's own idea as to the store's layout and appearance?

11seven (one)

Amor Fati - Washed Out

Presented this month is my unfinished fiction work, tentatively titled "11seven." I offer it in small mostly digestible doses of between 700-1,100 words. It contains strong language and sexual situations as intended for a mature audience. Parental discretion is advised. (I got all that from watching "Justified"!) Each entry will come with a song from our BOTG mailbox and discussion questions for Oprah.


11seven
one.
Solitary Confinement in a Convenience Store

Of course I’m not going to sleep with a boy less than half my age. But I’ll be good and goddamned if I didn’t fantasize about it until my entire laundry basket smelled like a brothel.

Stu first entered my store a year ago last January. The bell dinged while I was watching Johnny give one of his monologues. So I have it down to a 5-minute window on precisely the date and time I first saw him. Thursday night. 11:35 p.m. January 28. 1988. Shit like this happens when you least expect it. Usually during Carson.

I’d only had the store to myself a little over a year at that point. Ralph and me ran it together for a while. Six years, I think? Maybe seven? Yeah, it was ’82, I remember, ‘cuz ET come out the same year. Anyway, Ralph up and disappeared on me late in ’86 and took most of our money with him. I figured he’d fled the country, but cops found him dead in a Vegas hotel bathroom eight months later. Ralph always idolized Elvis. Died same age, same hotel, different damn bathroom. Cops swore it was an OD, but that’s just ‘cuz nobody really appreciates just how much Ralph loved Elvis.

Me? Fuckin’ hated him. Elvis, not Ralph. Ralph was good to me. Good enough, anyways. He was a lineman on our football team when I was a freshman, and I was cheerleading of course. I was a hot little number like you wouldn’t believe, honey. Anyway, we were all over at Stan Crawford’s house at a party, and Ralph got all sweet on me ‘cuz we were both drunk. His breath smelled like a pulled pork sammich, and he didn’t really give me much of a choice. They call that kind of thing date rape today, but I only said no a couple of times. I don’t mean to go excusing all the assholes in the world who pull that kind of stunt; most of ‘em should have their peckers cut off with a butter knife. I just mean to say that deep down I objected only just because I thought I was supposed to.

Once he actually pushed himself inside me and we got past that first sensation of someone sticking an M80 up my twat, I knew damn well I didn’t mean “no.” I meant “I had no idea.”

Then, after I knew – some folks call it “enlightened” – I didn’t say “no” no more. And to just know all that about sex and men even with some fella smellin’ all like a pork barbecue sammich? I mean, even if it’s a good damn sammich – and I love me some pulled pork – nobody fantasizes about screwin’ one. Sex, even at its unsexiest, is still sex.

After Ralph up and left, by something close to the grace of God I somehow got by enough to hold onto this convenience store. My daddy gave me a loan of $16,000 and took out a second mortgage to do it. I let go of all our staff but Maria and slept in the office for 11 months. I’d be crying behind the register in that pathetic sniffly one tear at a time way proud women do, and people who knew me thought it was about Ralph, but I was mostly crying because I couldn’t believe Daddy gave me that loan, and I couldn’t believe I was in a situation where I had to ask for it. Shit, I get all misty just remembering it. Misty and pissed off.

Right about when I’d started pulling back in the black, I found out about Ralph croaking in the Vegas shitter. I’d repaid Daddy after four months and was pissed it took that long, but not a penny of profits went into my pocket until I’d paid him back. Took me seven more months to get enough saved up to feel damned good about finding a cheap pre-furnished one-bedroom and to pay back Maria for the time she worked at less than minimum wage.

Way I figure, there wasn’t much difference between a prison term and that stretch of 11 months where I never once left my store. And when I tell you I didn’t leave, don’t take this as some Big Fish story. I mean I didn’t. Leave. The damn. Store. I bathed most of the time using just a washcloth and the bathroom sink, but I got by pretending I was Scarlett O’Hara, roughing it and waiting for the perfect opportunity to kick Rhett’s ass. (Yeah, I would have rewritten the script a little bit.)

Seriously, showers are one of those things modern idiots think are necessities, but bathing out of a sink is just as effective and uses less water. It just don’t make for a very good Calgon commercial.

Sure, I got visitors, and plenty of them, but they weren’t much by choice, and they sure as shit weren’t conjugal. And half the visitors who come into my store act an awful lot like prisoners. No bars, no cells, maybe, but they sure don’t act free. If we are all judged by how we treat others and how we behave in our darkest or most mundane moments, then I could be the Almighty Judge of lots of folks, and ain’t many souls would make it past those pearly gates on merit. People are mostly overcast, distracted, rude, and pissed off to pay so much money for cigarettes or a gallon of milk that costs half a dollar less down at the Food Lion. When they grouse, I just smile and say, “That extra bit pays for the convenience part” and wink. Sometimes they cheer up a little, and sometimes they act like I cheered ‘em up, and sometimes they just cuss me under their breath. I just enjoy the bald cute truth of it.

By the time Stu first entered the store, I was back down to working about 80 hours a week and had even got my own little apartment. I’d hired Sha’nice and Tracee to help out me and Maria. No, it wasn't much, but it sure as shit beat living out of a 12x14 office and eating convenience store food 24/7 to survive.

Discussion Questions: When did the concept of "date rape" come into vogue? Roughly how many women had been date raped prior to our cultural acceptance of such a thing? Is it unbecoming for a woman to have a potty mouth? Did she love Ralph? Who's the evil villain?