Ryan McBride graduated from the writing program at UC Santa Barbara in 2006, and has published short stories in journals and university magazines including Spectrum, The Dirty Napkin, Eskimopie and The Drill Press. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he is working on a novel and spending too much time at coffee shops. 

Webz (August 20, 2009. Issue 8.)

The graffiti artist moved out yesterday. I pretend not to have cared about him for a long time, like 'he was a jerk and I'm over it,' but the truth is him being gone kind of freaks me out. I don't know what bothers me more, that I will no longer have him to blame or that I will not be able to afford the rent. Anyway, I've been avoiding the apartment. It still smells of duct tape and magic markers and him, and I don't feel like I can be there, which is why I am out driving on the 10 west, watching the last, faint purple settle down behind the black mountains, the streetlights blur into constancy. It's also why I got wasted and slept with a club promoter/ fashion kid named Perry last night. He wears fussy scarves and I have no love for him. But he was there, I guess. I missed work today because of it.

For one calendar year I loved no one but “WEBZ”; wanted to spoon in bed with no one but him, and wished I could be there, that he could be there, with his skinny, tan arms around me all day and all night. Or thought I did. This is how I rationalize it: that love is a parabola, whose wavelength times amplitude is a constant, K of L, and since ours reached its peak so soon it had to go down from there. That and he did not have a job (he had a BFA) and could not afford to buy me Diesel jeans and nice earrings and other things I tell myself I am far too progressive to give a shit about. Not like my sister, whose ugly- ass lawyer boyfriend (Boyfriend, Esq.) took her to Tahiti for a week, and now she talks down to me as if my not having been to all the places she's been to, not tasted 100 year- old wine, makes me genetically inferior or something. Not as though I can't get men to buy me stuff. Hunter, for instance, this 40- something yacht enthusiast my ex (roommate? It all sounds weird.) was convinced I cheated on him with. Nice guy: leather- faced, vinegary, affectedly vulgar. We went went to the movies once or twice; he gave me a 500 dollar dress, which I did not thank him for.

I ride all the way down through the McClure tunnel and out onto the beach, in time to catch myself unconsciously following a cliché. I try to enforce realism; I am no rebel and here is no lost cause. The crushed- pomegranate sunset looks that way because of offshore haze, the marine layer. The earth's shadow races after me at 700 miles an hour (thanks, Pynchon.) and it will catch me no matter where I go.

I decide, parked on a lonely turnout north by northwest of Ramses, to check my email. (Thanks, Blackberry.) This, I figure, is the least romantic thing I can do. Far below, the waves beat gently, silver spray over the black water, a few Eucalyptus trees sway in the wind, and farther out, the zooplankton phosphoresce. A chance sailboat reminds me of Hunter, and my face feels weirdly hot, like I'm blushing. I keep having the impulse to close--

Oh-- one eye. I have been fired. In a brief email from an interim boss, couched in anesthetic jargon. I might want to 'utilize the time' this 'leave of absence' affords me to 'work over some personal issues.' Yes, I might.

I'm sitting on the red hood of my car, the salt- air blows in whiffs and whispers, and it's only because I cannot afford to replace this phone that I don't joyfully chuck it into the sea. It's weird, being fired from a job you dislike but need. My first reaction- anger, and a sense of injustice, surprises me. Of course I deserved to be fired, but still. I'm like a criminal, who's confessed to her crime and is shocked that she is sentenced anyway, that there is not some infinite mercy out there.

The next thing is a sense of almost giddy abandon. I walk out to the edge of the promontory, gaze out over the blue beach and the ice plant. Feeling, for half a second, that if I jumped off I would somehow not get hurt. That I would develop shamanic powers half-way down.

I step back. Realism, I remind myself. Then comes the hollow, ringing dread, emerging like a subplot in a soap opera. We are in a 'recession.' No other design firm will probably hire me. I am, as Perry would say 'tres fucked.'

All across the highway cars whiz by like bullets. I have to close one eye again; maybe there's sand in it. I need distraction. Watching a black steamer on the horizon (are they still called that? Do ships even still have steam engines? Why don't I know this?) I think of Hunter. Gray- bearded scoundrel and divorcé, unapologetically fraudulent, superficially rich, doomed, and perverse.

It only takes him a few minutes to respond to my text: 'clam- fishing,' to 'what are you doing?'

'Poon- hunting?' I type, and six or eight messages later I'm flying down PCH in the direction of the city, and the marina, where his ship (the Groucho) is parked. All the while having a text conversation about 'daggerboards,' and 'berths' and other various points of nautical anatomy.

I park by the dog run in the marina. Mom used to take us here, with Spiru, our long- lived border collie. Dew drops silver the grass. Yellow lights buzz toward the docks. Number 34, where the good ship Groucho bobs at anchor. Big and black, with its Bauhaus paint job, it dwarfs the sailboat in the next slip.

A text message as I walk up asks, of course, if my poop deck is ready for seamen. And there he is, standing by the rail, hands in the pockets of his silk pajama pants. We are alone here. He is wearing a red silk smoking jacket, nothing underneath but his hoary chest- pelt.

"Hey," he says. "You came. Welcome aboard, mariner." He hugs me.

I can't resist: "Unhand me, you grey- beard loon!"

"I'm just weary of grey-beard poon," he says, by way of apology. "To every fake- titted ex- wife in Los Angeles I'm George fucking Clooney. You're the closest thing to a real girl I've seen in weeks..." this with a wistful smile, followed by an ostentatious licking of the lips.

"Oh, good," I say. A nervous laugh. Like always, around him I feel like Cleopatra, or like a glamorous, tragic young moll. We go 'below' and I can't help but tingle with the thought that I am entering the antechamber of a murder- mystery. Hunter would have me believe that he is one of those 'dangerous men,' they talk about in previews for spy movies, that half of Los Angeles, as well as the Hell's Angels and the Bolivian government, wants him dead.

"I'm as giddy as a school girl," he says, "On discovering her magic button. I am rearing like a young buck."

"Huh. Why?" Now the main- cabin, all black- leather and wood paneling and modern art, outfitted like the set of Thunderball.

"Because we have Netflix aboard ship." He grabs a long, black, remote control, points it at one wall, clicks. The faux- wood slides away to reveal a huge flat screen TV. He wants me to be impressed and I appease him with a gentle gasp.

He then reaches in a drawer of the kidney- shaped coffee table and pulls out a handful of discs.

"Ooo 9 and a half Weeks," I say. Thick irony. Later, among the newly empty corners of my own apartment, the image of this room will suddenly pop up and I'll shiver...

We decide on The Big Lebowski. I sit down on the nautical sofa and Hunter settles in beside me. The leather squeaks and wrinkles. His silk jacket spreads beneath him like a stain. The movie plays.

Sometime before the Nihilists appear, an unnoticed black cat (a cat on a boat? I think) runs up between my legs and comes to rest on his lap, where he gently strokes. It seems to fit, somehow, that Hunter would be a cat person.

I feel the ship moving faintly up and down and side to side. I can hear the wind, beginning to actually howl, which when I was a kid I thought only happened in movies. There must be a window open, just a crack.

Hunter glances at me, the path of his eyes tracing an 'S' from my neck to my knees. Then slides forward and takes out a cigar from the coffee table, clips its end, lights it, and begins to puff. I realize that I have no intention of sleeping with this man, with his leery eyes and sagging whiskers, with the money that I know comes more from thrift than grift. He's more than twice my age and I'm not 'into it,' but I want to forget, to be removed, even if only by a brackish sliver, from my life on land.

"Would you like to stroke the pussy?" he says.

I reach out, but cats apparently don't like me very much, and it jumps down, to disappear behind a bulkhead.

The movie goes on above the sea- and- wind noise. By the time Walter's plan falls apart I've felt the first warm brushes of silk, against my thigh and my cheek. Hunter has let his cigar go out. The smoke still hangs in the room, giving it a God-father sort of look, but it smells like decay.

I let him run his large, old hand up my leg. I let him come a little closer. In a second I let him grab my tit, smaller than the breadth of his tan fingers. It doesn't feel bad, exactly, and I am wondering just how far I can go before there's no going back. Not looking forward to the conflict, to the collision of wills, the disappointment. I'm procrastinating my escape, dallying with Calypso. On the screen, Walter is destroying a car and screaming, “That's what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass," and Hunter's beard comes up close to my face. More a field of bristles, sharp and silverish, than a beard. A mariner's face- pelt.

The smoke dances when the boat moves. He has pushed up my shirt a little and leans down to kiss, bite and suck around my belly button. He squeezes the sides of my stomach like I'm a ketchup bottle. Not knowing what else to do, I pat his shoulder awkwardly.

I'm about to try and get up, get away-- this is too weird-- when suddenly he pulls back, his nose wrinkled, as if in disgust, a low yellowish tinge to his sultry eyes.

"That's the trouble with being a gross, filthy old man," he says. "You're just not that into it." He shakes his head, the outline of a smile flashing briefly over his beard. "If you only put up more of a fight I'd rape you. There might be some sport in that." Then he picks up, and relights, his poor cigar.

My heart, actually, I don't know how else to say this, breaks a little bit. I feel nothing but an intense sentimentality for this sad, old, man. He has obviously never raped anybody in his life. He is attracted to teenage girls because he is terrified of getting old and dying. He lives on a boat, (this, really, has been clear all along) because his ex- wife got the house.

"I'm sorry," I say, but it doesn't help. I am still about to cry. I am not a very 'good' person. I realize this, not for the first time, one of those candy- wrappers of revelation that tend to accumulate in a heap some people call 'maturity.'

The movie plays on but neither of us watches. Hunter grabs from a cupboard a bottle of scotch and two glasses.

"Cheers," he says, "to the only seaman's delight we two may share," but it's a toast I can't make.

I stand up, nearly hitting my head on the sloping ceiling. Later on, he will jerk off, this salty dog, remembering the way my skin felt on his lips. I try not to be too stirred by this. What he does with his image of me is his business.

I give him a hug. He kisses me one last time, underneath my ear, an iota of electric eel going all through me. With a jerk he pushes me away.

"All right, get off my ship, you jail bait wench." With that ghost- outline of what was once a cocky smirk.

"Well, uh... smooth sailing, Admiral," I say stupidly, though I know he isn't going anywhere.

When I reach the upper decks the ship is tilting hard in the wind. I stagger down to where the gangplank was but it's gone; either taken in or retracted or blown away. A few thin, orangish clouds have come to pierce the blackness. Palm trees bend sideways and a curious warmth clings to my skin.

I don't want to go back down there, to ask Hunter for help-- I don't think I could. I'm even half- scared he will have snapped, and decided to set sail and kidnap me. I want to be out of here, I'm shaking, and have a sudden, strident longing to be in my car, safe, away down the road. I go up to the railing, put one leg over, and then the other, and it's then that I freeze. Even though the boat bobs only a few feet from the dock, it's icy cold all of a sudden and the water's black like it's full of tar or oil. Flags beat against themselves in the wind, and the deck rises up under me and then sinks back down again. Sweating, my hair blowing into my face. Down in the bowels of his ship he is thinking about me and probably cursing me. I wait for the deck to rise again and when it starts to sink I jump.

The wooden planks ring in my feet and there's a loud crashing sound and I almost fall over. I have landed close to the other end of the dock. The boat was only two feet away. My face hot, flushing, my first impulse is to look around and make sure no one has seen me embarrass myself. For a second I stand there under the yellow lights, breathing hard. Then I take off running, as fast as I can, all the way down the docks, past the long line of pale masts waving, through the park and to the car. I start it up, mash the gas pedal and peel out. For some reason my hands don't stop shaking, my heart doesn't slow down, until I'm back home on the freeway, with the noise of the wind and the road for a mantra, the small lights skating by, the iridescent palms, and at every underpass I see WEBZ, for a split second, hanging there before resolving back into a hedge, a shadow, a stain.