Удушье (Choke)

On the sidewalk, Denny looks around, his arms hugging a rock to his chest.

'Up here,' I say. 'Do you need me to help you?'

Denny heaves the rock into his shopping cart and shrugs. He shakes his head and looks up at me, one hand shading his eyes. 'I don't need help,' he says, 'but you can help if you want.'

Never mind.

What I want is to be needed.

What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my atten­tion. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.

See also: Paige Marshall.

It's the same way a drug can be something good and some­thing bad.

You don't eat. You don't sleep. Eating Leeza isn't really eating. Sleeping with Sarah Bernhardt, you're not really asleep.

The magic of sexual addiction is you don't ever feel hungry or tired or bored or lonely.

On the dining-room table, all the new cards pile up. All the checks and best wishes from a lot of strangers who want to believe they're somebody's hero. Who think they're needed. Some woman writes about how she's started a prayer chain for me. A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully Him around.

The fine line between praying and nagging.

Tuesday evening, a voice on the answering machine is asking for my permission to move my mom up to the third floor at St. Anthony's, the floor where you go to die. What I hear first is this isn't Dr. Marshall's voice.

Yelling back at the answering machine, I say, sure. Move the crazy bitch upstairs. Make her comfortable, but I'm not paying for any heroic measures. Feeding tubes. Respirators. The way I react could be nicer, but the soft way the administrator talks to me, the hush in her voice. The way she assumes that I'm a nice person.

I tell her soft little recorded voice not to call me again until Mrs. Mancini is good and dead.

Unless I'm scamming for money, I'd rather people hate me than feel sorry for me.

Hearing this, I'm not angry. I'm not sad. All I feel anymore is horny.

And Wednesdays mean Nico.

In the women's room, the padded fist of her pubic bone punching me in the nose, Nico wipes and smears herself up and down my face. For two hours, Nico laces her fingers together across the back of my head and pulls my face into her until I'm choking down pubic hair.

Tonguing inside her labia minora, I'm tonguing the folds of Dr. Marshall's ear. Breathing through my nose, I'm stretching my tongue toward salvation.

Thursday is Virginia Woolf, first. Then it's Anais Nin. Then there's just enough time for a session with Sacajawea before it's morning, and I have to go to work in 1734.

In between, I write down my past in my notebook. This is doing my fourth step, my fearless and complete moral inventory.

Fridays mean Tanya.

By Friday, there are no more rocks in my mom's house.

Tanya comes by the house, and Tanya means anal.

The magic of getting butt is she's as tight as a virgin every time. And Tanya brings toys. Beads and rods and probes, these all smell like bleach, and she smuggles them around in a black leather bag she keeps in the trunk of her car. Tanya works my dog with one hand and her mouth while she presses the first ball on a long string full of greasy red rubber balls against my trapdoor.