Not Doing Enough Everyday
By Spencer Dew.
Friday night, I’m alone with a bottle of Garanacha from the year I was as young as she is now, plus her Facebook photo, the profile picture (since she’s de-friended me) blown up to the size of my desktop screen. Narratives of masturbation tend less toward the titillating than the banal, getting mired in all the minutiae of description, the angle of thrice-folded toilet tissue and the sounds made, verbal and non. I am forty years old and balding, face puffy from too many months of drinking alone, from early mornings and early nights, dull tube-lit days and lunches wrapped in plastic, the residue of a soft endurance. Here is a sort of visceral autobiography, puttered out in watery droplets, quickly spreading and absorbed. My life lacks both vigor and range. My lips turn purplish red in the middle, where they make steady contact with the edge of the glass, which proves, at least, that I do not drink straight from the bottle, that the mannerisms of civilization still shroud around me. I still have my mind, its knack for analysis and hatching pocket theories thick with jargon. Ubiquity precludes articulation, for instance. One doesn’t “surf Google” for her pictures, or the pictures of her ex-husband, or the pictures of her fiancé. One just searches, sometimes in vain and sometimes with a little, quickly liquid, luck. Yes, I can repeat, though each, in sequence, is less like a blast and more a sort of draining, like a juicy blister, lanced. With each, too, comes weariness, as if leaking from my bones. I’m kept awake, ultimately, only by the alcohol and the compulsiveness of my task, however ill-defined. Is it my memory I’m after or some voyeuristic glimpse into her life as it’s been since I’ve not been in it? Or perhaps the sense of being an outside observer to precisely those scenes in which I used to figure, imagining myself in a third person role, the guy at the bar who sees us walk in together, myself from outside myself watching my own, alien fingertips on the small of her back and sliding, easily and accepted, down? Such thoughts, not of my visceral recollection of her body, firm under my palm, but of some fantastic displacement and witness – to watch, from across the room, my hand, as not my own, cupping her, skimming, possessing this momentary but, from that position, ultimately untouchable person, her effervescent presence, her perfect form. I magnify my craving into dreams of other people’s desire, then draw it off, tapering into raw ache, wiping off the keyboard where the nearly seedless liquid has seeped through.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Spencer Dew is the author of the short story collection ‘Songs of Insurgency’ (Vagabond Press, 2008). He lives in Chicago where he is completing a novel and a book-length study on the writings of Kathy Acker. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications, and he is a regular review for Rain Taxi Review of Books.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, December 31st, 2008.
