Tim Tomlinson is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop, and co- author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing.  He is the fiction editor of the webzine Ducts.  Recent stories and poems  appear or are forthcoming in Perigee, Pif, Del Sol Review, Dogzplot, Medullla Review, Lunarosity, 3:AM, Hanging Moss Journal, The Toronto Quarterly, The Smoking Poet, and Tongues of the Ocean.

Three Poems (February 20, 2009. Issue 14.)

Bordello: Rue St Denis

Clinically, like a mother or a nurse, she washes
his sex at a sink alongside a mattress and he is
content to allow her this prolonged intimacy.

“This extra?” he asks, but he knows she doesn’t
speak a word of English, something else, he thinks,
she could charge more for. Couple of few

too many croissants have washed down her thick
gullet but that’s why he chose her. Meat
is for men, he once heard, bones are for the dogs.

This one’s flesh spills over the straps
of her lingerie and he is thankful for all
the vin ordinaire dulling his inflamed blood.

She is not—beneath him and with firm taps
on the buttocks she tells him “vite cheri,
vite,” and he has such a good time pretending
he doesn’t understand a syllable of French.

Bordello: Port of Spain

In the sitting room where the men make
their selection, the large women in white
underwear smoke blunts the size of Corona
Coronas and drink Guinness from brown bottles.

He was thinking Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge
but these girls look like they could carry one
of him under each arm easy. Tonight, this blind
drunken night, his mantra is stupid stupid stupid

and he can almost hear himself chanting it when
the petite Asian girl in the gray t-shirt emerges
from behind glass beads and he says, “Her.”
Hand in hand, they pass the linebacker thick guard

in shades who stands behind crossed arms and enter
a doorless room where she asks, “What you like?”
and he tells her everything, everything he admires
about Asians, and it looks like she actually listens.

Anniversary

Tonight, I have not drunk alcohol for
nine years, an anniversary of rebirth,
but one I fail to mention at dinner
with Ron, who has not drunk in even more,
except for last year’s experiment with
wine, five glasses of it, at a club event
at which he was required to sing, and his
habitual use of marijuana
before, after, and in between meals.
Carver did it, is his argument, why
not me? Plus it boosts his appetite
and he feels the need to bulk up for
the beach: 98 lb weaklings don’t get
the girls anymore. The bread here is good.
It comes with a tomato-garlic dipping
sauce we use to soften hard wedges. I
have just returned from Provincetown, where,
I complain, the natural, nautical state
of things has been erased by gewgaw
boutiques and tourist families and same-sex
couples wide as double-parked cars shouldering
their way down Commercial Street. Ron’s eyes
follow a woman tank-top tan. He nods.
His Provincetown—Ron’s from the sixties—
was different. His Provincetown featured
Norman Mailer losing fistfights nearly
nightly inside and outside the Anchor Bar.
Where have all the anchors gone, we wonder.
But don’t forget, Ron says, the natural
nautical state of things in Ye Olde
P-town included a lot of that same-
sex coupling. To wit, he says: Moby-Dick.

Ron tells an interesting story about
a woman he met on the ferry from
Boston to Provincetown. This is back in
the sixties, he reminds me, when a lot
of cool stuff happened. (An example he
invokes frequently concerns the blowjobs
he got from Carly Simon’s sister while
his girlfriend, Carly Simon, was away;
Ron moved in privileged circles—the family
fortune had been squandered down to next to
nil, but the manner and the circle would
not be broken, the Carter Family not-
withstanding, he winks.) But the story,
he says, about this chick on the ferry:
it began on the upper deck, she had
a guitar and she picked some canonical
tunes to which Ron knew the words. Ron had sung
in folk and folk-rock combos, he did a
good Ian Tyson, a better Ewan
MacColl, but his years on smack put the fuck
to his voice-box. Still, in the sixties the voice
was there, as were the balls, so he took a
seat alongside the guitar chick and began
singing along to the tunes she strummed.
“Four Strong Winds,” he sang, and “The Young Birds,”
even “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” on which
she joined him with a brandy-smooth contralto.
She was blonde and full-breasted and the
mini-skirt she wore had about as much
total material as a magazine
opened up to the middle. Ron thanked God,
or whomever one thanked back then,
for his good fortune. And he made plans,
to which the guitar girl assented.
Dinner first, at some lobster place along
the water, and a chaste kiss on Commercial
Street to delay the inevitable,
which in Ron’s plan was scheduled for
the next afternoon after a swim and
some wine and hashish. She missed their appointment,
so Ron called and a man, one of her
several roommates, said try the beach so Ron
strolled along the shore, jaunty and undeterred—
it’s the sixties, mind you, when all plans were
necessarily loose, just as loose as
the connections—and there she was, he said,
not far along the shore, seated in a
circle of men with the guitar on her
lap and she waved Ron over. They were singing,
but now the songs she picked had moved into
pop areas that reflected jukebox
tastes Ron had left behind in 1963.
“Walk Like a Man” was one, he remembered,
and “Johnny Angel.” He felt kind of funny,
he barely remembered the words, and though
he knew everyone was stoned, still, he thought,
they all laughed a bit too hard at what wasn’t
really all that funny in the first place.
His friend encouraged him to sing so he
sang, but his heart wasn’t really in it,
no, his heart was in between those beautifully
sculpted legs of hers that were crossed to support
the guitar and it was then that he noticed
something that made him turn his head and
literally, he stressed, involuntarily,
vomit right there into the sand and the
poison ivy because his beautiful
contralto with the world-class cleavage
and the miles-long legs and the half-decent
guitar technique had a dick that, in repose,
was at least as long as Ron’s. Of course
I asked what did you do then? Took her
inside and fucked her, Ron said and shrugged.
It was the sixties. You had to give
anything a chance. And the tits, he told
me, if you could have seen those, well, he said,
you add up all the parts on a person
and percentage them out, this chick scored at
least in the high 80s, and don’t tell me
you haven’t fucked around as low as the
60th percentile. And lower, I
admitted, but still, how many points do
you detract for a cock? Our salads arrive—

it is early summer, I am dieting
but then I always am. My salad is
greens with raw veggies, dressing on the side.
Ron’s is a pile of shrimp and grilled chicken
and eggs and bits of bacon on top of
a bed of lettuce that he manages
to avoid entirely. Why call it
a salad, I wonder, if it’s really
just a platter for other things, but
it’s not a thought I pursue too avidly.
Ron’s story has me unsettled. Or not
the story, but the fucking part. I’m
OK right up to there, but what did it
mean, in terms of categories I’m speaking,
about Ron’s sexuality? Was Ron
gay? If so, what was he doing on all
those Craigslist dates that formed the bulk of his
weeknights, the bulk of his conversation?
Was he gay in the past, but straight now?
To whom, I wondered, was I talking and
how did I need to modulate, if at all?
But more important: to whom was he
talking? Was I some phony fuck who espoused
positions I didn’t honestly feel?
Did who or what he fucked now or in the
past matter a damn in the moment,
if at all? Of course I knew it didn’t
but my stomach wasn’t thrown out of whack
by radishes and arugula, no
matter how unappealing a mess, Ron
said, they made. And it struck me as odd,
and wonderful, how you can get knocked off
your wobble board by a friend you think you
know over a dinner, or a drink, or
a story that starts at the menu and
ends up somewhere south of the border.
We proceed to more anecdotes, jokes,
remarks. References to Monica
Lewinsky. Jabs at Kenneth Starr. The check.
On Broadway, Ron objects to snooping
moralists. Closet moralists, too. He
suggests we answer the call of the wild
and grab some dessert and herbal tea and
I decline claiming work and fatigue, those
two chronic afflictions that New Yorkers
suffer the way fish swim water: without
question. On my walk home I find I’m looking
at people differently. How many dicks
swing under those skirts? And how many
swinging dicks can accommodate
contradictions as wide as Ron’s as if
they were just ingredients in a salad?