Jason Lee Miller, MFA, has jobs that actually pay him, but writing fiction currently is not one of them. By day he is a curriculum developer and composition instructor at Eastern Kentucky University, and by night he serves as Beck-and-Call Boy for a small human he is at least partially responsible for creating.   Weekends and early mornings, he devotes time to his fantasy career by reviewing recently published books for the literary e-zine Gloom Cupboard and kidding himself about his novel, which will be complete sometime in 20__.   Shorter endeavors such as stories, poetry, and essays have appeared or will appear in The Bluegrass Accolade, Blood Lotus, The Copperfield Review, Danse Macabre, Dew on the Kudzu, State of Imagination, and Ontologica. In April 2011, he ill-advisedly launched a blog titled Off Topic ( offtopic.typepad.com ) , a blog about the writing life—“in gory detail.”

Variable (X) (August 20, 2011. Issue 30.)

I pull up to Hoss's place, a yellow-brick antique he shares with three other guys midway between campus and downtown—an area that tolerates a little rowdiness. People are spilling out the front door and onto the porch, holding their bottles and red plastic cups, a scene littered with backward baseball caps and the glow of lit cigarettes.

And three girls are doing naked cartwheels on the lawn.

Carlson waddles over and pats my shoulder. "Hey, man. You almost missed it," he says, round and ridiculous against the porch light.

"What are they doing?" I ask him. The girls twirl like synchronized windmills, their bosoms caught up in centripetal splendor. The laughter and the cheering breaks the cone of silence night would otherwise carry.

"Cartwheels," says Carlson, swigging from his bottle. "They lost a bet."

"What was the bet?"

Carlson shrugs. "Who cares?" He spits on the ground, raises his balding head up and shakes it. His smile is lopsided from the chew in his cheek, a dark wad of nastiness effusing a brown glaze over his teeth. "It's gonna be a great night," he says.

We stay put until the last bit of skin is gone, until our fields of vision are righted again by swaths of cotton and denim. Then we weave ourselves into the house until we are a piece of the overall lewd fabric of it. The house smells of alcohol and cigarette smoke, and faintly of pot coming from somewhere, probably one of the back rooms. The air is thick, the kind of air you can feel on your skin because it falls on your forearms and face like a mist, and you know it might take days to scrub the sin out.

Here we go again. Another Sunday, like an anti-Sunday, about to dissolve.

Hoss's bald head is easy to spot in the crowd, approximately the color of a caramel candy, shiny and smooth. He sees me coming and stamps out his smoke in the ashtray on the kitchen counter. Jumping off the stool he stands erect, still a head shorter than I am. He extends himself to greet my hand with his own, his veiny forearm removing the space between us with an ease that startles me as he twists his grip and pulls me in for a man-hug. He's a powerful force, Hoss, and he throws his head back to look down his wide, flat nose at me, his eyes small and round at the top of it, his mouth, as it elongates into a straight, toothy, white smile, taking up half of his face. "What's up nigga?" he asks me, knowing I hate it when it calls me that around people we don't know. I'm "nigga" on nights he decides I "got soul." He calls me "cracker," too, when it suits him, and he likes to tell jokes about my secret Mexican daddy. Cherokee, I'll remind him, and he'll remind me of what a mutt he is, too, as if it wasn't obvious: black, white, Blackfoot Indian, he says. Some days he says he's "Creole," but he's ugly every day. Even so, he gets more women than anybody I've ever met. Personality and confidence go a long way.

"Not much, Mr. Clean," I respond and give his shiny, shaved head a rub. The hoops in his ears dangle. "How's the party going?" I ask him even though I can see how it's going. His house is alive, crawling with people—people taking shots around the counter, pulling beers out of the fridge, pumping a keg by the stairs, and bouncing quarters at the kitchen table.

Hoss takes it all in with me. "You got eyes, don't you? It's off the fuckin' hook!" Hoss pinches his nose, rubs it back and forth. He sniffs. "It's snowin' upstairs, in case you innarested."

"I'm stickin' with beer tonight," I tell him, knowing he'll scoff.

"Oh, you got rent due or some shit, I get it." Hoss crooks his head dramatically to the right, then left. He places a crushing hand on my shoulder, pulls it toward him and looks behind me to see only Carlson. "Hey, where's yo girl?" he asks me.

"What girl?" But I know what girl.

And Hoss knows I know. "You don't gotta play hard with me, boy. That Jessica bitch been sweatin' you lately. I saw her here earlier."

I don't tell him I was just starting to wonder the same thing. The way she was pressing herself up against me today at work had been on my mind since closing time. She's nowhere to be seen in the living room or kitchen. From the sound of her message on my answering machine, you'd think she'd have tackled me at the door. "Ah, man, that's nothin'," I tell him.

"Nothin' my ass."

"It's nothin'," I repeat, not letting him call my bluff. I look behind me at Carlson, who's blank as a new whiteboard.

Hoss pops off the top of a Heineken, hands it to me. "Yeah, alright, nothin'," he says. He rubs his nose, sniffs. I see for the first time Hoss's eyes are distant, darker, a little mean, as though his pupils have taken over the real estate and evicted the irises. "Well, nothin' been lookin' all up and down the place for you." From a box on the counter, he pulls out a cigarette. "You make any money tonight?"

"About a bill-fifty," I say.

Carlson is suddenly part of our conversation, sort of rolls himself into it. "How much?" he asks me.

"A hundred fifty?" I repeat.

His round, rosy face accordions up as he hits the counter. "Goddamn it!" He hits the counter top again, making the ash trays and shot glasses bounce. Hey! Somebody says down the line and Carlson ignores them. "Seriously? You walked with that much?"

"Yeah, pretty standard on a Sunday double." I raise the bottle to my lips, let the tide begin to take me out.

"You made that after tip out?" Carlson continues, which tells me he didn't make near as much.

"Alright, like one-thirty something."

"That's bullshit! I walked with fuckin' sixty dollars. Sixty! On a double! Goddamn it." He shakes his head and wobbles around to lean his back against the counter, pouting like a six-year-old. "I had a ten-top that took up my whole section half the night." He reaches behind him and chicken-wings a Miller Light I'm not sure belongs to him. "Jesus freaks, you know? The women in those long, old-looking dresses," he twirls his finger over his head, "with their hair pulled up. You know what I'm talking about, right? Those in-a-crazy-cult ones that don't wear any makeup?" He swigs and I try to imagine them. I can see them. "They sat there for two and a half hours," says Carlson, holding up two fingers, "ran my ass off refilling their waters with lemon. You know what they left me? This…" Carlson pulls out a small, glossy pamphlet. If you died today, are you certain you'd go to Heaven? On the back is a map to the church and a phone number.

I've heard this story before, in one form or another, after four years of doing this job. It occurs to me server stories are always anticlimactic, full of sound and fury, and ending with a terrible tip. "Carlson," I say, "here's what you do the next time you get them. When you drop the bill, write 'Thanks and God bless,' draw one of those fishes you see on the backs of minivans all the time, and write Ecclesiastes…" I reconsider how to say it. "Write, 'ECC 10:19.'"

Carlson is listening intently, his body swaying more than I had noticed earlier. It occurs to me he's already drunk. "Why? What's that say?"

I tilt the rim of my beer toward him, grin. "It says, 'Money answers everything.'"

Hoss's cheeks balloon out; he doubles over holding a hand to his mouth. "Isaiah, man, you gotta wait till I finish my drink before you say some messed up shit like that! You goin' straight to Hell."

I tell him I'll see him at the gate. I tell Carlson even Bible thumpers won't know that verse off the tops of their heads, and they likely, if he's lucky, won't have a Bible handy at the table. If so, and they look it up and get offended, well, they weren't going to tip him anyway. I tell him sometimes religious people only take care of their own, and if it seems like he's one of them, he might score ten percent out of it. Once I'd scored thirty percent off a similar group and an invitation to see the oldest daughter play saxophone at church.

"But wait," says Carlson, his mouth seeming to drop progressively open as we talk, his eyelids drooping like heavy drapes. "Couldn't being a religious smartass to a customer get me fired?"

I tell him it might but he'd still have some dignity and a great story to tell at the next waiter gig. It's not like these jobs are hard to get. I don't tell him how I know that verse, that I've read the Bible all the way through a couple of times, that I marked that verse and a few others that surprised me, that I marked the entire entry of Song of Solomon—that "navel" was a euphemism for "vagina," and the jewel in the center of it, well… I don't tell him how I was at church three times a week growing up, how the same people who sought to save my soul were the ones who got mad because I asked too many questions. I tell him, "Hey, what could it hurt in the long run?"

"Or," Hoss interjects with his devastating hands on each of our shoulders. "You could stop being a shitty server."

Carlson seems to consider that for a moment, falling back on his heels and teetering forward again. But he focuses on me instead. "Hey, how come you know that verse off the top of your head like that?" Carlson's head makes small circles around his neck. "That verse from egg-lazy…"

"Ecclesiastes."

"Right. It's not like John 3:85 or whatever that everybody knows." He squints as though he suddenly doesn't trust me. "You religious or something?"

I don't tell him I used to be an acolyte. I just smile and keep it simple. "Used to be man. We went to church a lot growing up."

Carlson smiles that tobacco grin. "Pshh!" he exclaims, spraying from the mouth. "That's good though, right? Church is good."

"Yeah, church is good," I say.

"Yeah, that's good. Church is good." The smile disappears. Carlson looks out into the party as though pondering something beyond the cloud of smoke above everyone's head. "Isaiah?" he says finally. "You believe in God?"

I start to answer, "Um…"

But Hoss, in a weird way, is my hero tonight. "Christ almighty, Carlson!"

"Hossssss. Hoss. I'm trying to have a serious conversation here."

Hoss spies his exit, which takes the shape of a petite, bleach-blonde hostess we've all quietly watched while calculating in our heads the days until her eighteenth birthday. "While you two pussies find a place to pray," he says, "I'm gonna go find some ass!" And with that, he's off to do what he does best, next to bartending.

I tell Carlson I have to hit the bathroom, and hope he forgets his question.

At 1:30 a.m., I'm four beers into a fog to hide behind. The crowd has dispersed into small pockets around the house, flowing from areas of greater to lesser concentration as though by osmosis. The night is clear and starry, and not so muggy as to prevent a small troupe of post-adolescents from settling on the porch, not so muggy to prevent them from leaning into each other and swaying in some imperceptible wind, perhaps partly on the waves of the acoustic music of the lone guitarist, partly on the effervescence of youth and their intoxicant(s) of choice, euphorias induced by inhalation, by insufflation, or by imbibing, all of them fueled by the sweet pulsing of unspoken desire. The methods are different but the goal is the same: Take this reality and shove it up your ass.

Each room of the house has its designation: the kitchen is for trading shots and anticlimactic server stories; the upstairs bathroom is for coke; the bedroom on the ground floor is for pot; one of the bedrooms upstairs, I am told, has already fallen into the early, powder-keg stages of a small orgy. The living room, where I am now, is for running the century, one hundred shots of beer in one hundred minutes, which will begin shortly.

Still no sign of Jessica and I can't decide if that's a good thing or not. Someone said she got ahold of some ecstasy and is busy oscillating between scenes, watching with detached fascination the blue and red and gold and green of an aquarium, and then the raunchy entwining of tongues and nipples, of hands and inner thighs. It's getting crazy upstairs, says a seventeen-year-old busboy nearly sliding down the banister before protesting the discourteous, oblivious ant-line bumping shoulders with him as they head up, some to see the show, others following a bartender who announced the arrival of an acid sheet.

Having seen and done all that, I've taken my place on a tattered Salvation Army sofa, which is one half of a large L lining the two outer walls, nine sets of feet in various states—bare, besandaled, socked, or sneakered—planted at the base of two couches, eight or so bottoms interlaced between the feet, all of us piled onto or between each other as though trying to form a large centipede. I've settled back with my beer and into silence, looking into the heart of a chaos I once not only cherished, but also instigated. Hoss is topped with Miss Teen Living Room on one side of me, Carlson and his widening slur on the other, a small pyramid of green bottles separating us. "You're not going to the show upstairs?" I ask Carlson.

"Shee-ut," he says. "I was already up there once. All those assholes standing in the doorway you can't see nothin'."

I didn't know twenty-six could feel so old. I feel a sense of liability here, as though I'm the parent or captain of these heathens, as though I'll be the one talking to the cops and appearing before Child Services. Hoss is the next oldest at twenty-five. Carlson's still a twenty-one-year-old pup.

To my right the sound of lips smacking, and a pair of small feet is using my thigh for leverage, the soft pads warm through my jeans, and I ignore the accidental intimacy with which Hoss's hand brushes over the toes, my upper thigh, back over the toes, and up the hairless calf and knee before sneaking its way under the twill rim of her shorts. The blonde on Hoss's lap pulls his hand out of her shorts and playfully slaps him on the shoulder. He just leers and whispers things I'd rather not hear: oh baby, baby, you've got me so hard. But talking is soon replaced with the smacking of his enormous brownish lips over her thin pink ones, their tongues lolling like freaking camels. Hoss's shoulder is so near to being on top of mine that I half-seriously fear I'll be pulled into the middle of all that slobber.

I'd move, but there's no place else to sit. I'd leave, but there's only an empty apartment waiting. My mind drifts to Jessica, a twinge of hope, of anxiety, I pull myself back to reality—well, sort of reality. Something about her makes me uneasy and excited—but overall the feeling is…

Carlson leans forward to impose a massage onto the shoulders of the hostess in front of him with her knees to her chest. Next to her, the runner-up for Miss Teen Living Room pulls a few hairs on my shin, trying to elicit a response I barely acquiesce to giving, just to be polite. She giggles before leaning her shoulders back between my knees, her strawberry-ish ponytail bobbing there like a handle—and Gawd, there it is, that low, bottom-of-the-gut flutter, the movement within my jeans and a tiny voice (the Devil's voice, my mother would say) urging me to give in to it, to create a replica of what is happening upstairs. It wouldn't be that hard. No one would stop us. In fact, given our positions within this group, we'd be the leaders of the movement, a cue for the rest of them to strip or head home. Hoss is always up for anything—hell, he's a legend—and the two of us have a history, especially when we work together, of being able to talk girls into anything—into strip poker, into letting us draw on their naked bodies, into who-can-make-her-scream-the-loudest contests from adjacent rooms. It wouldn't take much, just a sly, playful suggestion, just a hand on the blonde's feet and ease it up, just a lean in to kiss her on her inner thigh; she'd gasp and heave her chest and spread a path for me as the busty eighteen-year-old (I think she's eighteen), the best friend, the phenomenal specimen of brimming strawberry-blonde youth between my knees twisted her pretty head around to take me into the hot wetness of her mouth. She's probably no good at it yet. Yeah, we could probably make that happen, just like on the Internet, just like a story in Penthouse Letters, Lord knows we've done it before. It's a perfect night for it, a night where inebriation and reckless youth make for events no one speaks of in the daylight of the next day, or at best is spoken of with a smile and a blush and the acknowledgment of temporary insanity. Everyone's forgiven. Now, can you drop this off at Table 61 for me?

The ritual is so rote and the participants so faithful we're almost an orgiastic cult, and this house is our Corycian Cave. I take a swig of my beer, try to ignore the swelling paroxysm of my betrousered membrum, and try to decide which one of us is Pan, that smelly, rooting – and dying – god.

The warmth and softness of the teen's shoulders are seeping into the backs of my knees, the sensation from which transubstantiates into a wild tingling where thigh meets pelvis. She has not yet traded that thin layer of fat over her body for ropey triceps and visible collar bones to emulate emaciated Hollywood actresses. She has not yet decided she's too fat for Panama City next year. I tend to like them "fat," because my definition of it is different from a lot of other people's. What they call fat I usually wouldn't even call chubby or Rubenesque. What they'll criticize for being a small belly, I'll see as that wonderful softness, a contour of raw sexuality that will sure enough lead me to a sloping hip and a round, squeezable bottom, all those splendid soft curves that make a woman a woman, that make her different from a man, as different as can be. Who the hell wants to squeeze a muscle-butt, anyway? Who, after a long day of battle, wants to nuzzle up to a pile of bones and armor?

With her knees pulled up to her chest, I can see her quadriceps have not yet been punished into producing distinct lines running the length of her outer thighs. Her neck is not yet thinned and elongated to the point you can see her esophagus; her face has not tightened to reveal the skeletal outline of her jaw and the ropes of tissue connecting her cheeks to her chin. She has not yet hardened herself against the realities of the fashion world, or at least the realities of modern-day chivalry. As she grins playfully, her head laid back between my thighs, I can tell she has not yet been taught, but is looking up to me to be taught, that sometimes young men are bastards—good Lord, they almost can't help it—who don't mean any harm but harm anyway, not because they're heartless—because at twenty your penis is smarter than you are, or at least makes a better argument.

As the last half of this bottle of beer washes down my throat in a cool, promising tide, I decide I like her the way she is, soft and unscarred. I am prepared to disappoint her, and that's the end of that. I'm old enough to win an argument with my cock, at least occasionally, at least I think so, at least tonight.

A voice breaks through my fog, and behind it a hand thrusts a plastic orange shot glass. "Hey, Doc," says Elizabeth, one of the girls doing cartwheels on the lawn earlier, clothed again and casual as though I hadn't seen her naked just an hour or so before. She and a few others call me Doc because I was in school long enough to become one. "Hey Doc," she says, "you alright?" I nod and take the shot glass. "You're awfully quiet." She inclines her head toward the girl at my feet, a silent question of whether she'll be partaking. The girl—I can't remember her name—nods in return and holds her hand out. Elizabeth smirks and says, "Be careful, Tiff," (Tiffany! That's her name!) "He's got dreamy green eyes but that stubble really chafes!" She gestures toward her feminine V and makes a pained face, "Ouch!" Tiffany and everybody else erupt into laughter. Carlson spews beer into the hair of the girl in front of him, who springs up and screams bloody murder. All I can do is smile and blush as the blonde in Hoss's lap gives me a light kick to the shoulder, and Hoss says he knew all along I was a goddamn pussy-licker.

Elizabeth finishes doling out her plastic promises of forgetfulness and pulls off her watch to keep time. I snap off the lid of another beer and carefully bring the amber liquid near the rim of my shot glass. In one hundred minutes or less, I'll be out of here one way or another.

None of us intend to be here beyond a certain age. Being young is being a god, and this is the time to push our immortal bodies to their limits. My back hurts. My limit is nearly reached. I've known two career servers since I've been in this business. One was a bitter old fag always bitching at the youngins from behind his creased khakis and starched shirt; the other one a 40-year-old potty mouth mother of three whose daily lunch regulars paid her bills and made her look ten years older than she was. Neither had the patience for the flippant way with which the college kids approached their jobs, and neither ever expressed the slightest bit of interest in participating in our nightly, debauched ritual suicides. Money was their only concern, how much they made of it, how soon management would cut the floor so they could have more tables, how soon you could get the hell out of their way.

The rest of us see our jobs as a means to pay rent until. Just until. And if there's any left over, we blow it on booze or drugs or whatever makes us forget the fastest how we spent the day or week pretending to care if strangers were happy, pretending it mattered to us beyond our percentages whether some red-faced asshole's steak was the right temperature. Waiting tables means cash on hand, some hands with more cash than others. Shelly, who's across the living room pretending not to notice the young men in the room noticing her, makes more than any of us. She works the bar tops on the weekends and she works the money out of bald-headed men's wallets. She's never in a hurry, doesn't have to be. The slower she walks the better. Me, if I'm lucky enough to get the bar on a Friday night, I'll be in a half-sprint the whole time and still make half what she makes.

Nobody said this job was fair.

But even making half what she makes, or half what I make, for that matter, is better than folding shirts and running a register, better than stocking at Target. What other customer service gig brings you an average of twenty dollars per hour? On a good week, I make six hundred dollars, mostly tax free. On a bad week, three hundred, which is still more than some poor schmuck makes working the drive-through, all excited because McDonald's starts you nine dollars per hour. I've applied everywhere since I graduated—absolutely nobody's called.

Over by the kitchen counter, a short fellow with a diamond stud in his ear. Otherwise clean cut in a black polo and khaki shorts. He drives the sixty-thousand dollar truck outside. The resident dealer. Every restaurant's got one. The job makes a good cover for unaccounted for money, and the market is perfect, ready with the cash and the will to spend it. Standing next to him, the lanky fellow with the Roman nose. He's the backup, the guy you call second because he can't buy in bulk like the other one does, which makes his prices higher. His grandfather was a high-ranking official in Frankfort—I want to say Lieutenant Governor—which means a phone call keeps him out of trouble. College serves as his cover even if he doesn't need one. He does this job because he likes it. It gives him people to party with. He told me he lost twenty-five pounds over the weekend once. Sounds like a lie, but an ecstasy diet might do that for you.

Hoss is the hub of the madness. He's the guy that knows a guy that knows a guy. Go clubbing with Hoss and you'll never pay a cover charge, never pay for drinks. He's studying to be a nurse. Carlson's parents run a construction company. That's probably where he'll end up, too. And me? All that education and nowhere to use it. My hometown is dying. The young move west, unless graduating medical school. Then they return (or come from places like India) to the foothills, where there's plenty of black lung, cardiology disasters floating on gravy and biscuit runoff, and heaps of cancer—cancer on the towns, cancer on the people—and a demand for black-market Oxycontin, or as we call it around here, hillbilly heroin.

Drugs because most counties over that direction are dry. Not that moonshine's all that hard to find. Everybody's got their way of escaping.

Elizabeth begins the countdown; she's the keeper of minutes. Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, shoot! Soon, I'll be courting oblivion:

Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, Shoot! Twenty minutes, twenty shots of beer, and the world around me is already starting to take on a nice fuzzy quality. Of course I've had four or five before this, I don't remember. There was some commotion earlier because one of the managers showed up. He went straight for the coke room. Kind of sad when you think about it.

Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, Shoot! Twenty-five minutes in. People are beyond caring management showed up and have started complaining about him specifically. Fuck him, says Elizabeth in response to a shush and reminder he's right upstairs. He shouldn't be here anyway. You know, he had the nerve to tell us at the pre-shift meeting that he so graciously gave up his bonus, which he was going to spend on a new steering wheel for his boat, so that we could have a new microwave – you know, one that actually heats things. Can you believe that shit?

Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, Shoot! Thirty minutes in and, hell, I'm almost happy to be here, whether I've been able to hook up with Jessica or not. Hoss successfully has gotten his hand under Miss Teen Living Room's shirt, and she's agreed, after some prodding, to his nonverbal instructions to stroke him through his jeans. Carlson, whose eyes are blood red by this point, is not about to push his luck with the girl in front of him again. Instead he has resigned himself to leaning on his elbow and breathing through his mouth as he waxes philosophical about Thomas Jefferson smoking pot and about how marijuana laws came about because the government didn't like Mexicans. George Washington, too, man. All the founding fathers did. That's how they got the great ideas. You think President Obama still tokes up every now and then? You know Willie Nelson did, rolled one up right on the White House roof. I fuckin' love Willie. Willie! He holds his fist straight up in the air waiting for an amen that never comes. Tiffany, who's fallen asleep on my leg, wakes up a little at the shouting.

Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, Shoot! Forty minutes in, and the room is vibrating a little. The fatigue, which a little while ago had settled as iron pellets in my shoulders and lower back, now feels wrapped in sufficient padding to comfortably anchor my body down to the couch. Tiffany has fallen into a light snore, and I'm as content to sit right here as though snuggled up with a lap dog. No movement, just sit here and run a hand through her hair every now and then.

Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, Shoot! Forty-five minutes. The full weight of Tiffany's head is on my leg, her arms draped around it, her ample breasts pressing into my calf. Maybe she's old enough, I start to think. The blonde on Hoss's lap has shifted so that she's supporting herself by leaning into my shoulder, and I can feel the heat of her neck and ear against mine, the wispy tufts of hair tickling my face. I have to whizz so bad it hurts a little. She quietly moans while Hoss—I can see by looking over her shoulder that his hand has disappeared up her shorts—pushes two fingers (I'm guessing) deep into her. Her back lurches up and she drops her hand back, runs it over my crotch and settles onto the meat of my upper thigh. I'm not sure she realizes it's my leg as she squeezes, or realizes it's my neck she turns her nose into as her breath shudders out onto my skin. I stiffen immediately and tug at my zipper. It's like a kind of torture. Carlson's asleep with his head parallel to his shoulder, drooling, missing completely the developing orgy to his right. He'll be upset about that in the morning, especially about not being conscious the moment Hoss raises up her shirt and places an entire breast in his mouth. Tiffany unconsciously lets her hand slide right to the crease of my leg and groin. People across the room are beginning to notice, some covering their mouths and giggling, others cheering on the action. The pressure is building in my bladder. But there's no rush. Something about that soft feminine warmth all around me makes me stay right here, and resist what will eventually have to happen.

Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, Shoot! Forty-seven minutes in and it's the blonde, not me who's up off the couch and headed for the bathroom. Tiffany's as still and quiet as the dead, still limp across my leg. All feeling is leaving my lips; my nose will be next. My jeans are a bit looser than before without a half-naked girl writhing on me. Things look to be getting back to normal. Smell my fingers, says Hoss, and before I can push them away he has them running beneath my nose, that musty, unmistakable aroma wafting up into my nostrils. But coming off another guy's fingers, it nearly makes me gag. I push his hand away. Dammit, Hoss! Which just makes him laugh harder. Don't even act like you don't like it, he says, and before I can respond he thrusts one of those tainted fingers toward the edge of the stairs. Here she comes, says Hoss, pointing toward Jessica, who has emerged either from one of the back rooms or from upstairs, and from behind a thick layer of eyeliner has spotted me. Didn't I say that bitch was looking for you? Jess is bent sideways at the waist as though she's had some kind of chiropractic accident, as though she's trying to look around some invisible corner. She straightens when she sees me and blows out smoke. A beer cup on the stereo speaker finds itself with a new lipstick-stained cigarette butt. I empty the rest of this bottle into my shot glass and put the bottle to the side with the others.

She strides over, looking like something out of a rock video, button-down white halter top unbuttoned just enough to show the black lace beneath it, the tops of her breasts sent into motion with each determined step, her flat, lined stomach exposed and adorned by a gold hoop and belly-chain held up by a pair of hips that could serve as paint shakers in a pair of low-rise jeans. Damn, she looks good, says Hoss, as if I didn't already know. There's a twinge of sharp pain in my bladder, and the fluttering in my abdomen makes me feel like I might accidentally release some embarrassing and noisy effluvia.

"Cortez!" she hollers, "I've been looking for you all over." That's a lie, of course. She calls me Cortez because she thinks I look Spanish, like a Conquistador, which is as much a lie as anything, but it's sweet, I suppose. When she's within range, she plants a sandaled foot on Tiffany's backside. "Scoot!" Tiffany, barely stirred, slumps off my knee and falls limp to the floor. Jessica pushes on her butt with her foot as though rocking a cradle. "I said scoot!" And Tiffany manages to crawl away into a dream on another part of the carpet. I make a note of the rudeness, but it is overpowered by surprise and delight at her sudden aggression.

Jessica plants her feet on either side of mine, making her legs into a perfect A-frame. I'm eye-level with her bellybutton, trying to decide whether or not to reach out and grab her by the hips and submit Hoss to the same torture he was giving me earlier. It's a perfect bellybutton, lightly tan, the tiniest fold of skin pierced by the gold hoop—Jessica's face drops into my line of vision, preceded by those globular and beautiful forbidden fruits, the scent of some flowery, deep perfume emanating from her chiseled collarbone. She puts a finger under my chin and raises my eyes to hers. I study them, how they have changed from crystalline blue orbs to almost fully black discs with rims of blue. I drop my eyes across her high cheekbones, the elegantly carved jawbone, the ribbons of connective tissue outlining her red, moist mouth. Twenty-two's one hell of an age. Ecstasy is one hell of a drug. She says nothing at first, just holds my chin and smiles, savoring the moment, allowing me to examine how perfectly white and straight her teeth are, how fully woman she is. "You are a beautiful man, you know that?" She drops my chin, straightens herself and puckers her mouth to the side as if blowing out invisible smoke. She leans back in again. "How's it goin, Cortez?" Her breath smells of smoke and vodka.

"It's goin," I answer, surprised at how slurred my speech is suddenly. "I'm a little tired, a lilldrunk, and scared to death Hoss is going to hump'is new girlfriend on top of me." That ho ain't my girlfriend, says Hoss, from somewhere outside my periphery.

Jessica brings her lips in close to mine, very near to touching, so near I wonder if, like me, she's having trouble restraining her neck muscles from pushing forward that final centimeter. "We'll have to give him a taste of his own medicine then, huh?" She read my mind, and even through my beer fog I realize this is like some kind of crazy male fantasy, that something's not right here, that it can't be happening, that reality is distorted. I wonder if the moon is full, if she's ovulating, if some subcutaneous psychological daddy issue drives her. Some decadent urge within me pricks my skin and only by tremendous force of will do I stop myself from dropping her to the floor and penetrating her, the two of us like a pair of chimps in the wild. Very clearly in my head I can see Jessica on all fours in front of me, people gamboling around us and jumping on couches and hanging from the banister as I drill her from behind, frothing at the mouth and beating my chest and sending my barbaric YAWP into a soul-resounding alpha-male crescendo of AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH….

Back in this pseudo-reality I say nothing, and do nothing. Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, Shoot! I raise my shot glass up to take another drink, but before I can, Jessica snatches it from my hand and drops her head back. The shot glass tilts up before falling into my lap and she lurches forward, planting her lips not just full onto mine, but wrapped around mine. The sharp taste of beer is still in her mouth as she licks my lips. "You taste good," Jessica says before she spins around, exposing the butterfly tramp stamp on her lower back, and drops that beautiful ass into my lap as though her second job is stripper. She swivels her hips in search of my rampant turgidity, finds it, settles on it, places it, before leaning back onto me and purring into my neck—"and you smell good"—and pulling my hands up to cup and squeeze her breasts, a motion that makes me lose my breath and all my sense all at once, and I think oh God, oh God, I'll give her anything she wants, my money, my car, whatever. She pushes my hands down her stomach, onto her thighs and between them as she wiggles in place. "There's some wild shit going on upstairs," she whispers. "We should get some wild shit going on downstairs, too."

She wiggles too much, settling at once on my bladder and the fluttering part of my intestines, and the pain of having to pinch at the prostate region brings me back to reality, a truer version of it anyway, a reality telling me I might just piss and shit my pants. Then another voice of truth splashes over me like a cold shower:

It's the drugs, not you.

I stand straight up with Jessica cradled in my arms, the very image of Tarzan and Jane. She's surprisingly light or I am surprisingly and suddenly strong as she wraps her arms around my neck for leverage. "Isaiah, take me to bed or lose me forever!" she says, doing her best Meg Ryan, and I am tempted to do just that. I drop her back down on the couch instead, and before she can vocalize a protest I announce that I have to pee and dart for the bathroom. Hoss's blonde queries the crowd about what happened as I fly past her.

Cold water over my face. Over the sound of the faucet I hear I've missed another shot. The soap and water bubble up in the bottom of the sink as I wash my hands of the whole thing. Propping myself upon the basin, I get a good look at myself. In the harsh light of the bathroom I look like hell. My five o'clock shadow is three hours ahead of schedule, and I've got what an old girlfriend used to call "Christmas eyes," bright green and red, the surest sign I'm drunk or tired or both. And there, right there, I can see a lone, stark silver strand of hair has parked itself amid my dark chocolate waves. I turn my face to see the faintest tracks of crow's feet. It's all very disappointing.

Someone knocks on the door, a female's voice follows. Hurry up, I gotta piss! I tell her to go upstairs. I can't. There's like eight people in there. I tell her to give me a minute, that she wouldn't be able to stand the stink anyway. Ew, really?

Not really. I don't know what really is anymore. I splash cold water on my face, hoping the shock will snap me out of the funk that is settling in around me.

Your eyes will meet and your souls will connect. Something a fortune teller once told me about a soul mate I'd find. A beautiful story. One everybody wants to hear. But what does that mean? What would that feel like? How would I recognize it? Whatever it is, it hasn't happened, it probably won't happen, and I'm an idiot for even thinking about it, for buying even a little into that psychic bullshit. What's wrong with marching back out there, grabbing Jessica by the hand and leading her out to my car? What's wrong with dropping the rear seat-back down and burying my face into her swollen enfolds? What's wrong with taking all I can stand of her, with pouring myself out over that flawless body and just walking away? She wants it. She's almost begging me for it. What if I decide not to walk away? What's wrong with that?

The images of her in my mind revive the now painful insistence emanating from behind scratchy denim. I double check the lock, the sound of which sparks encouragement in the girl on the other side. She groans in anticipation, but I tell her to keep waiting as I drop my jeans and sit on the toilet. The volume of her protest heightens as I take myself into my hand.

Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, Shoot! My personal storm passes, calmed by a spillage of nature's Xanax. The calm I feel afterward is whole and sweet to the point it borders on happy nostalgia. I smile, don't want to fight or fuck anymore, just want to chill out and enjoy whatever is going on. Hoss and I often have advised the younger guys to clean the pipes before any hot date. That stuff makes you stupid. My head is still a bit unsteady from the beer, but all is well. I look at my face again in the mirror as I wash my hands. Not nearly as bad as before, not so old or haggard. Still a little rough, but what would you expect of a drunk at nearly 2:30 in the morning after a double shift? I reassure myself that if there's anything to happen between Jessica and me, then it needs to happen naturally, not when she's sky-high on love drugs, not through that live porno she was trying to pull me into. But something tells me it's all over anyway. Something tells me it's okay that it's over.

You can't make a ho a housewife, says Hoss in my head, and when I exit the bathroom, whoever it was outside is not there anymore, and Hoss meets me around the corner with another beer and my shot glass. "You shoulda fucked her," he says, pouring beer into the glass. "I thought I taught you better."

"How you got time to lecture?" I ask him, stepping over a row of feet jutting out from bodies against the wall. "Figured you'd be balls deep about now."

Hoss points to the sofa where we were sitting. Jessica is stretched across the blonde girl's lap. "Yo girl's eyes rolled back in her head and she passed out. Brittany's dumb enough to think she's taking care of her." I make a mental note that her name is Brittany. "I think Jessica's peaking," Hoss continues, and explains she appears to be running REM patterns. "Hard to tell with X," he says. "Sometimes they drop a little heroin or acid in there." He says her pulse is normal, at least for someone with methamphetamine in her veins. "She's fine," he says.

"You'll be a good nurse, girly-mouth."

Hoss ignores it. We grab seats on the floor along the opposite wall and resume drinking. A dark-haired girl glares at me as she passes, tells me she had to go in the bushes. I turn to Hoss. "Let me have a smoke, will ya?"

After an hour I realize this is a two-ounce shot glass, not a one-ounce. Fourteen or fifteen beers is about right for how I feel right now, which is to say I can't feel much of anything except the sensation that my face is sliding down off my skull. Hoss is long gone, grabbing his, what was her name?, and scooting off somewhere to ply his trade. At least it's not on top of me this time. Across the room it's clear there aren't many of us left awake, and from here on the carpet I am perhaps the only one noticing Jessica sprawled across the couch cushions, her feet on the floor, her arms stretched above her head. At some point, she has taken her halter-top off, and now she lies in her jeans and brassiere.

I try to push myself up with my legs only to discover it is harder than I imagined. Instead I drop to my side and roll over onto my front so I can push myself up with my arms. I steady myself against the wall, reach down for my beer and shot glass. Not sure why I bother with the shot glass anymore—at this point I might as well just swig. The room is tilted. I take it at an angle, cocking my head to the side. The room reminds me of a World War II movie, smoke and bodies strewn everywhere. One guy's being carried out the front door by two of his buddies, hit by a Jaeger bomb. I can hear another one retching in the bathroom, a casualty of beer. Stepping over Tiffany, I reach the sofa and can see that Carlson and Jessica are ass to ass like they spawned from the same litter. I yank on his belt only to remember how heavy he is, and instead I grab him by the arm that's hanging over the side of the couch and lean back with my full weight until he flops like a dead fish onto the floor. He grunts, rolls over and drops an arm over Tiffany, who's in for a surprise in the morning for sure.

There's a blanket on the back of the couch. I pull it down and drape it over Jessica's body, making sure it's tight around her shoulders. She stirs a little, probably because in my off-balance state I knocked her in the shoulder. She looks up to see me and smiles. "I was so cold, thank you," she whines, and stretches out her neck to kiss me. "You're a good guy, Isaiah," she says with her eyes half-closed. "A really fuckin' awesome good guy."

And God, I hope she's right as I plop myself down on the other side of the couch, ready to drink myself further into oblivion. At what I figure is one hundred and fifty ounces, the world is taking on the feeling of an unplugged stereo, I and a couple of others existing on the final, drooping wave of sound just after the plug is yanked from the wall. I can't feel a thing except the race between nausea and sleep. The room spins, or else I am spinning, and the shot glass falls from my hand, my dear, dear friend this night, replaced by the necessity and comfort and promise of sleep…

Reality is tricky. Right now, for instance, I'm studying this clear crystal, and on each side of the crystal is a version of the same event. At this angle, you can see through a boy's eyes as he watches the back legs of his German Shepherd pup get smashed by a tire. It's in slow motion because moments like this often are, and the pup continues to pull herself forward with her front legs as though unaware that half of herself is flattened and hanging on by a shred of flesh or two. But she doesn't cover much ground before the second tire flattens the front half, from the neck to the middle of the spine, an odd, backward occurrence that would cause the boy's father to theorize later that the car's thrust alignment was slightly off. The boy, who is not allowed to go into the road, very quickly understands it was his loyalty to the rules that got his dog run over in the first place, and decides to brave the pavement anyway. He is appalled that the car did not slow down, did not even stop, just smashed his dog into a pancake and left. The boy looks down at the pup, at how the eyes reveal the pup, her essence, is no longer inside—they look like dolls' eyes—and he understands even at six that the spirit of his pet is draining out of the body, the spirit of his pup is inside the blood making lines and puddles on the road. The boy hears another car coming and, feeling at this point invulnerable and brave, stands up and puts his hands out toward the Chrysler and yells "Stop!" And the Chrysler does. The boy scoops up the dog and with his arms and legs covered in the blood and entrails of his beloved pet, scoots back to the safety of the driveway. He doesn't begin to mourn until he gets back to base and time returns to normal speed.

But if you turn the crystal, you can see the pup's point of view, which is a point of view without any measure of time, a point of view made only of instinct and love of her pack member, the small boy across the road who is calling for her to return and then blackness because she didn't even notice the tire tread. She was focused on returning to the boy.

The driver, the heartless vehicular assassin, was no assassin at all, but a grandmother who failed to slow down or stop in time because she was concentrating on the six-year-old standing by the road, fearing he would dart out in front of her and by the time she could process why he was there, a small dog ran out from the ditch on the other side. She swerved a little to the right, thus explaining how the back legs were hit and then the torso. For the old woman it happened very quickly, as though time had spun out of control, and the horror on that little boy's face was just too much to answer to, and so she drove on, feeling much like the criminal the boy must have thought she was.

The crystal shows many sides to the story. It shows how the birds saw it; it shows the confusion and panic of the boy's mother when she sees him crying in the driveway covered in blood.

What the crystal will not show you is how to feel about it because the crystal itself has no emotion; it only shows what is and what is not. You could say it shows the truth and that is true, but the rest is for you to interpret. For example we know these things about the boy: He is a good boy, a loyal child who desires to do what is right, and to follow his mother's instructions. Otherwise, he would have chased the pup when she first darted across to wallow in the little ditch on the other side of the road. We know he's a brave boy, because even though he could not save the dog, he broke the rule and stared down a moving vehicle to prevent any further carnage. This was his first lesson in when to say to hell with the rules. It was a lesson also in how unfair the world can be.

What you could not deduce from the crystal's stories is whether there was some kind of divine purpose to the slaughter, or whether that single incident was integral to another part of the boy's journey years on down the bloodstained road.

There are greater things at work in every event, I hear Miss Jeanette, the fortune teller say, from somewhere echo-ey, maybe from the back of my mind. There are greater things at work for you, at least. You should not fear the Death Card—it is the most misunderstood of all the cards in the deck. What it signifies is change, transformation, transcendence. This card is positive.

"Miss Jeanette?" I address the echo. "I'm sweating."

She utters a response I cannot make out.

"What?" I ask the echo again, which seems to me as a pinpoint of light at the back of abstract darkness. "Miss Jeanette, tell me, why am I sweating?"

The blackness slides from my mind, melts into an image of blue jeans soaked and heavy from a rainstorm. I see myself as though laid flat upon a griddle, my drippings in perpetual mid-drip, a rip in time as though Salvador Dali were my maker. "Seriously, Miss Jeanette, what's with all the sweating?"

Cotton mouth. The heat. My throat feels like a cat's tongue. Somewhere near the center of myself the hollow, sickly aches of wakefulness. This is the dawning of a hangover. A soft curtain of hair is strung damp across my chin. The smell of smoke and flowers tells me it's Jessica. It's not her weight that is uncomfortable; she seems somehow weightless, no heavier than the blanket pulled over us. But the heat! The couch and the blanket have engulfed us, accepted us fully, as though one, as though melting into one. Her groin presses painfully against an insistent, rigid, treelike tumescence—a morning wood, a morning oak any man could be proud of. The blankness behind my eyelids lends an abstractness to the discomfort, like it is all very far away but coming closer. Then the shock, as when I open my eyes the searing whiteness brings it all into sudden and close focus. I barely have time to process the half-naked girl using my chest as a kind of dream-catcher before the über-reality of a splitting skull creates a new urgency, an evil twin to the heat. But there is still a tenderness to this moment delaying my exodus. What comfort, what yearning, resides within the skin.

I can see the top of her head, her shoulders. I run my hand along her back. There is no bra now, just the bulbous sides of her breasts pressed outward from beneath by the arms tucked under them. Her skin is soft, especially along the tender area around the ribcage. My hand slides down and finds the beginning of a split in the flesh, but soon also there is a thong strap and the top of jeans. I am fully clothed, all the way down to my shoes.

That's a relief.

I place my hands around her upper arms and push upward. Jessica's hands and breasts dangle beneath her, but she is able to hold her head up enough to look at me a moment with distant, sleep-walker eyes. She exhales and I learn her breath is terrible. From the taste of it, mine's probably worse. Her eyes are sunken, her skin pale. Her lips seem larger than usual. She looks terrible. I lower her back down to rest on my chest and she promptly returns to snoring lightly. The heat is maddening, even if I do have a fallen, half-naked angel on top of me.

And so begins the escape. I push her up by her arms again, pausing to admire the perfection of her body, and by doing so I am able to gently slide out from beneath her and return her to her original position. She protests into the cushion, but is too far gone to commit. I run my fingers again down her sides, tracing the butterfly and the top of her butt, admiring, wishing something could be different, wishing I could justify what my penis is screaming at me to do. Instead, I tuck the blanket around her shoulders again. She'll be embarrassed when she wakes up to find herself naked, but at least she'll be covered (I hope) when she does.

The house is sweltering because of a lack of central air conditioning and the direct sunlight battering down on it. My thoughts have drifted to wondering what time it is. It's clear when I turn around to survey the room through squinted eyes that I am either the first one up or the sole survivor.

Carlson's got himself a handful of Tiffany. Too bad he's too asleep to enjoy it. Good thing for her she's too asleep to realize who's currently spooning and cupping her. I kick him in his big ass, and he snorts awake momentarily before drifting off again. I slap him on the back of his head and he turns his confused, squinched-up face toward me.

"Hey," I say, my head both aching and swimming. "Let go of that titty and come on."

"What?" says Carlson, still unaware he's holding a titty.

I kick him in the butt and whisper-shout, "Come on, let's go!"

He barely moves, drops his head back down on his arm. He pulls her closer and she grins, thinking of someone else I'd guess.
Well, shit. I figure I've done what I can. The next step is to pry it out of his hand, finger by finger, and I can't imagine that working right. It's her own damn fault, I decide.

The microwave reads 11:35 a.m., but the sun is bright enough for it to be mid-afternoon. Sunbeams break the overall darkness of the house, setting spotlights on the dead, their bodies at rest where they fell last night. I feel like I should say a blessing over the departed before I, myself, depart. Even on the porch they are crumpled, nearly piled onto one another: a young man—a kid—between where the door swings and the corner; another one balanced on the flat, wooden railing, his back against the wall. Can't say these were honorable deaths, but they sure seemed to have enjoyed themselves.

The car's already baked, the interior scorches. Immediately I am sweating again as I crank up the engine to hear her throaty growl. Leaving her in neutral, the parking brake set, the AC is still blowing hot, which is more than I'm willing to put up with. There's an elm tree nearby, and I grab a seat between the roots as she cools, my back and shoulders still complaining, my head still at full throb. Skipping gravel across gravel in the driveway, I begin to process what happened last night.

What happened was this: I turned down two unequivocal sex invitations, maybe three. And that's just not like me. It's not like any guy, really. It's one thing to turn it down from a distance, out of some vague adherence to moral acuity, but it's another to say no when it's right in your face. I keep seeing that body. I keep feeling it up against me, smelling the way it smelled.

And I want it.

I think I'll go in and get her, pick her up off the couch and bring her home with me. We'll have dinner later and take a shower together and when we've recovered, we'll jump in bed and we won't crawl out of the sheets until Thursday or one of us is hungry again, whichever comes first. I spring up from the ground and head back toward the house.

I turn back around and sit under the tree again. That blasted Voice is there, too, among the sights and smells and feelings, the Voice: It's the ecstasy, not you. And when it's not the ecstasy, it's a dream of another kind, her dream and your dream, and one day, maybe Thursday, when you discover your dreams don't match up exactly, what are you left with? Will it be denial? Or will one or both of you be left shattered and wondering what went wrong?

It's the ecstasy, not you. Isn't it always?

At home. Alone. My head is trying to become one with the couch cushion. Along the waves of the heat of a summer day coming through curtainless windows rides the sound of the telephone. I let the machine get it. Hoss's voice crawls scratchy around the corner. He had to take Jessica to the hospital. He doesn't know anything yet. He says he'll call me later, that there's a good chance he'll need bail.