There's a Latin name for what happened to Sid. Penis captivus. Three semesters of nursing school in Bakersfield, before the crystal, left me the closest thing to a medical professional working the blade on Figueroa, and the only bitch out here qualified to diagnose him.
Sid, whose name was not Sid. Sid of the '71 Corvette he kept in the divorce and washed more often than himself. He drove down from Reseda because a man buys his sins outside his own zip code.
"You party?" he said.
"You paying?"
That settled the courtship. He took his bump off my knuckle, a small communion. Three days without sleep, my heart tripping like it wanted out.
FREE AIR, the only honest advertising in this city. I flicked my tampon out into the weeds by the pump, spat in my palm, and gave him the twenty-dollar usual.
The twenty-dollar usual was a hand job, and he knew it. He put the sixty on top and said he wanted inside, so inside is where he went, my back against the ice machine, the compressor kicking through me, my skirt shoved to my waist and one boot up on the curb to make the angle he'd paid for. He was thick and short and cold from the drive, and I opened for him the way you swallow a pill without water.
No condom. He said he'd add another twenty and I said forty, and that's a whole autobiography right there. He worked at me with his eyes shut, one hand around my throat because a man like that needs to feel something fight him, the other gripping the car door for balance.
I was wet the way meth makes you wet, which is not at all, so I spat again, reached down and did the plumbing myself. His balls slapped my knuckles. He smelled like Armor All and old sweat and the deli sandwich he'd eaten on the 405.
Somewhere behind us the pumps chimed for a stranger. I looked over his shoulder at the mural of the Virgin on the liquor store wall, and she looked at the freeway, and we agreed to say nothing.
He finished the way they all do, apologizing, his cum going cold in me before his breath did. Then he moved to pull out, and my pussy said no. The muscles clamped. The cock stayed put. The textbook calls it rare. The textbook never worked a night out here.
He yanked, and the world went Christmas colors. Something tore, his frenulum if you want the Bakersfield word, and his blood and mine ran one bad marriage down my thighs. He screamed the way women scream in horror movies and vomited down the flank of that beautiful car.
"You did something. You did something to me."
"Honey, if I could do this I'd charge for it."
He yanked again. I hooked two fingers in his nostrils and cranked his head back. "Quit fucking pulling, or I swear to Christ I'll rip it off and we'll both go home short."
"I'm calling 911."
"And tell them what."
That held him. We stood there, sweat-glued, married by spasm, while the register beeped inside. A Civic gassed up ten feet over. Some kid whistled at the fucking nativity.
I lit a Parliament with his lighter. Heavy, engraved.
TO S ♥ FROM S.
I smoked while he cried into my hair. The 110 poured its dirty light. Nothing out there but weeds and the smell of period blood.
As he cried, the whole sad little inventory came out. He got the car and the lighter. "She had this made for me," he said, and his cock jumped on the word me. After that it was just the freeway talking. The prick hadn’t even bothered to take the booster seat out.
"What's your real name," he said into my neck.
Now he asks. Like the rest of them ever gave a shit. What the fuck's a name compared to a wet hole. You don't shake hands with a cunt, you just pay it and go inside.
He didn't get the name. No john ever has. So keep steppin'.
Then the whole picture arrived. The Arco, the vomit sliding down the fender, Sid of Reseda whimpering, my cunt holding his cock like Excalibur in the wrong stone, and I laughed, everything in me let go with it, and he slid out, dropped to the asphalt cradling himself, a man cupping a dying bird.
He put another hundred in my hand without counting it and backed the Corvette out slow over his own sick. I kept the lighter. Whoever S was, she isn't getting it back.
Forty minutes, his heart knocked on my spine. Longest any man ever held me. Took his cock stuck in me to do it.
I flicked the flame, lit a fresh one, walked back to my corner, and stood there working my thumb over the letters until the next car slowed.