1987

Posted on Jul 7, 2011

Mr. Fish

By Mr. Fish

She looked Mediterranean or something, and I wanted to get close enough to see if she had a mustache. 

Not just any mustache, but the original never-been-shaved-or-bleached-before mustache. I’d always figured that by finding a girl with her original mustache that I’d be finding some re-creation of the original woman, like meeting Eve, although probably a lot more enriching than that. Especially since, according to the fossil record, when Eve wasn’t basking in the magnificence of God’s Creation she was probably eating bugs out of old logs with a stick. Even so, finding a girl with a mustache would be finding a girl more likely to make the sort of bad decisions that favored the ruddier and more salacious pleasures of life, like nose-picking and peeing at the side of the road. A girl with a mustache is a girl who will wipe herself with a fistful of leaves or a mitten. Or a subscription card. Or a sock. A girl with a mustache will have an insatiable sexual appetite broad and crappy and imprecise and unflattering enough to touch on real poetry, the sort that poor dancers seek out when they want to experience grace and weightlessness without begging acceptance into the dull hooray of decent society. A girl with a mustache will have a sexual appetite crummy enough to include a guy with biceps as soft as old bananas and glasses as thick as any accent attempting to speak clumsily through the handicap of having nothing remarkable to say once, let alone twice for clarification. At least that’s what I hoped.

Or how about this?

The mustache that I was looking for on a full-grown woman was the mustache that an 11-year-old boy discovers on himself, with his face four inches away from the bathroom mirror, that all of a sudden makes his whole existence seem just on the brink of becoming worthwhile. It is the same mustache that appears on the right kind of 11-year-old girl and that stops growing there, following her into womanhood unchanged and arresting, from the point of view of the full-grown man’s subconscious, that particular euphoria that he remembers from his boyhood, like a block of Lucite arresting a dead tarantula for savoring up close or a photograph arresting Mickey Mantle in mid-swing when he’s about to whack another baseball out of Yankee Stadium. A woman with a mustache reminds a man’s guts, as if, spiritually speaking, she were a taxidermist of some impossibly moving bird extinct from his soul, of all those sexual fumes that rose up off his puberty when it was being jump-started like a small gas motor for the first time and all the terrible excitement that accompanied him as he was sent puttering into the dark adventure of the rest of his life, his sword being forged beneath deck in the warm glow of a raging furnace for the future slaughter of defenseless kitties and menacing windmills and so much empty air.

Anyway, there she was. 

No makeup, closely bitten fingernails, sitting cross-legged on top of an old washing machine reading a book in the corner of the basement at a party at my big brother Jeff’s fraternity house, having just sneezed a single sneeze as sloppy as an exploding frog that loosened a black curlicue of hair from her ponytail, dropping it down over her forehead; a sneeze that immediately made me want to change my name to Kachooshitppzzzz! just so I had an excuse to walk up to her and to blame my presence on her wet lips and watery eyes and nipples that had been pulled into stiff almonds inside her Have a Nice Day T-shirt that was baby blue and bore, beneath the smiley face, the caption: I Just Fucked Your Mom. (Bless you, indeed!) With concentration lines clenched so tightly in her brow, I imagined every measure of bullshit having to gnaw its own legs off to escape being skinned alive and devoured by her contemplation; her breasts, I imagined, judging from how they moved my insides like some sort of radiation, attracting much more chauvinistic bullshit than was probably good for her contemplation’s diet, as if she were forever cupping her ears and trying to listen to the words of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech through a rowdy sea of heehawing Klansmen and snarling German shepherds.

Yes, there was something decidedly smart about both her stunning plainness and bold isolation, like her existence was a statement of fact rather than the vague assemblage of other people’s opinions that defined the rest of us and made us all seem slightly out of focus to each other most of the time. Sure, I wanted to dip my boner unprotected into her and discover its tiny lips sealed up two hours later as if it’d kissed a lollipop, but I’d had that same exact thought a thousand times a day about a thousand different girls, all ages, all colors, all sizes—occasionally, even different sexes. It was the rare circumstance, however, when I saw a girl whose opinion about my ejaculation I imagined valuing, or at least considering in conjunction with her ejaculation, figuring that she had a clitoris that, instead of attacking with all the cloddish enthusiasm that one typically reserved for the scratching off of a lottery ticket, was most definitely worthy of some sensual caressing and kissing and tasting; the couplet at the end of a sonnet, all at once moving and insightful and memorable for private and repeated recitation.

But after four and a half hours on two very slow-moving trains from my college campus in New Brunswick, N.J., to my big brother Jeff’s fraternity house at his college campus in Philadelphia, I needed to take a piss, like needing to set down a heavy suitcase full of old books. 

So, with my crotch screaming like a teakettle and the sudden realization that pissing might allow me greater focus on exactly what I might like to say to this girl, this Eve, something to make her want to see me with my pants off and my glasses on—assuming that after pissing I would somehow be able to muster up the courage to cold-sell my nuts and personality to her, in that order—I scanned the crowd quickly for my brother’s cacophonous brown hairdo, his head always immediately recognizable in a crowd as if it had been scribbled into reality by a vandal, and, not seeing it, turned and excused myself up three flights of busy stairs to his bedroom, where I found him trying to wave marijuana smoke out of the air with an empty pizza box, pizza bones strewn at his feet like he’d just devoured a small monkey.

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