By Jon Doughboy
I did four pull-ups in the park and my arms are about to fall off. I’m in decent shape, or so I thought. Three days a week I do a little exercise routine in my basement. Body weight stuff like push-ups and squats. A few dumbbell exercises. I jog when the mood and motivation strike. But pull-ups are another story. Hefting the big hunk of aging meat that is me—my shoulders feel swollen. Like I’ve just been inoculated. But against what?
I jog to my girlfriend’s parents’ house in the less affluent part of an affluent New Jersey suburb, wheezing past lush, diligently-watered yards and professional-trimmed hedges. The odd raised ranch. My triceps are burning. Cape Cods. My shins are aching too. Stone Victorians. Even my forearms are tight. New bright white farmhouse McMansions with mass-produced timber—ooh, look at the grain! Feels like we’re in Jackson Hole, honey! My girlfriend and company are travelling as a family to the Canary Islands. I declined their invitation. The bill was a bit steep for me, the itinerary a bit tedious, the concept of family a bit strained, so I’m here housesitting. A neighbor walks up with two red mums. “For Nicole. I know she loves mums. I had a funeral last week. A wedding tomorrow. That’s life, right? But they’re with us, aren’t they?” she says, pointing to the sky and then resting her hand on her heart. “My grandfather fell off his motorcycle at 80. Then he developed kidney issues. But he fought, you know? Just like my uncle. We took him off dialysis and he lasted weeks like that. We thought he’d die in days. But life, you know? It wants what it wants.” She goes on like this for a while. Life and death. Funerals and weddings. I get an erection but lean against the door in such a way that she doesn’t notice. This is my midlife crisis, I guess. I can’t afford a Porsche or hair transplants or a mistress so I’m not complaining. Though they happen sometimes at random, without a stimulus. I’ll be cooking oatmeal or aerating the lawn or sitting in traffic listening to a podcast about the Hanseatic League and boing—my cock is practically erupting through my pants. The neighbor leaves eventually. I masturbate quickly in the bathroom. I have to remember to water the mums.
I meet my childhood friend later for beers. I tell him about my aching shoulders, my midlife erections. He’s married now. Has one kid with a second on the way. They’d been trying for almost two years with joyless, scheduled intercourse. He’d go out to Long Island for work—he’s an electrician in a tiny union and is sometimes the only guy on-site, wiring new supermarkets or big-box stores—and he used FetLife to find all these kinky women. One could only get off when he fisted her while wearing his wedding ring. He said, “I tried to take my ring off once because I felt guilty, you know. I’m not a monster. I felt terrible. But she froze up when I tried to. Stiff as a corpse. So I left it on. But I always wondered what would happen if my ring got lost in there. If I’d need to take her to the hospital. Or rent a metal detector or tie a magnet to a dildo or something.”
“My girlfriend has been very horny lately,” I say. “Some hormonal change. Perimenopause maybe. Not that she didn’t have a sex drive before but now every time we have sex, she wants to have more sex right after. And I tell her I’m old. That she needs to think about the refractory period. Then she takes my soft cock in her mouth just licking it, playing around, and I’m sort of embarrassed it’s soft but also flattered that she wants me or it or us so much and like fifteen minutes later we’re fucking again. I came three times in an hour. I haven’t done that since I was a teenager in heat.”
“Well, I say enjoy it while you can, man. Because we don’t really have sex anymore. It’s just work and parenting and on Sundays I watch football and fuck around on the guitar all day. Lots of Black Sabbath. The riff master.”
He shows me some videos of guitar prodigies on YouTube. Loads of fancy finger work. But the music sounds busy to me. Like they’re playing way too many notes.
The next day I meet my mom and my sister at a Chinese place for lunch. Mom points to the kitchen and says, “Look, they’ve got actual Chinese people cooking. That’s a good sign. On Queens Boulevard we used to get all-you-can-eat Chinese food for two dollars. Piles of egg rolls. Buckets of lo mein. Now dumplings cost ten bucks. Ten bucks! What happened to this country, huh?”
My sister is telling me war stories from the psyche ward where she works. “The schizophrenic patients aren’t that bad. It’s the bipolar ones you have to watch out for because they get manic. And the drug addicts. They’re disgusting. They’re all criminals with bedbugs and scabies. And so entitled. One of them refused to eat the food in the cafeteria and was screaming ‘my insurance pays for this shit’ meanwhile their insurance is Medicaid so actually my tax dollars pay for it, bitch.”
“Did you say that?” I ask. I admire my sister. She’s very strong. Until she isn’t. Then she’s staying in another psyche ward in another county for a week or two. Meds. Sleep. Repeat.
“No.”
“Ten bucks for dumplings! Dumplings!” My mother says.
My sister goes on: “But one time we had this real piece of shit patient who had cancer and he beat cancer but was back in the ward for something else, it’s a revolving door of nutjobs, and he was screaming, calling all the nurses cunts and saying he had AIDS and trying to spit on us and when we finally restrained him I whispered into his ear, ‘I hope your cancer comes back and kills you’ and you can bet your ass we were cackling about that on our smoke break.”
My mother calls the waiter over. She doesn’t have time for menus and likes the—any—attention. “Do you have a shrimp dish?”
The waiter, a young Asian kid, says, “Yes, many shrimp dishes.”
“With garlic?”
“We have shrimp with garlic sauce.”
And I get an erection. In this dumpy Chinese place while my sister is telling me psyche ward drama and my mother is nagging the waiter about the size of shrimp. Are they big shrimp? Are they prawns? How many shrimp come with the dish?
We order. I excuse myself to masturbate in the filthy bathroom by the fire exit at the end of the hall. There’s no soap so I use the hand sanitizer on the sink. There are dark fingerprints smudged on the wall. When I return to the table, the food is already there.
“These aren’t prawns,” my mother says, examining a shrimp she’s skewered with a chopstick.
“Did I tell you about the Bulimic girl who was really sweet and read my tarot but had the bones of an old lady because of her eating disorder? She was like sixteen or something but with 80-year-old bones.”
“Ten bucks for dumplings. Unbelievable,” my mother says.
I sit down and take a sip of Coke. My chicken smells like rancid fry oil. My shoulders still hurt.
The next morning the landscapers wake me up. Watering, mowing, seeding. Mornings in the suburbs are noisy with hired labor keeping yards tidy and clean. I lie in my girlfriend’s childhood bed wondering if she lost her virginity in it. If she had her first orgasm in it. Wondering how close the Canary Islands are to Africa. Wondering, remembering. Annalise. A Peruvian pre-law student who was volunteering at the library with me to teach new immigrants how to read. I was there for court-mandated community service. She was there to pad her resume. Afterwards, we’d fuck in my Ford Explorer under a huge, half-dead Catalpa tree at the back of the parking lot. She’s a lawyer now in North Carolina. Practicing law. What am I practicing now? Life? Except you don’t get a free trial. Or maybe you do. I should listen to the podcast I downloaded about karma. I go to the bathroom. I jerk off. I hope the landscapers watered the mums.
Two days later my shoulders and back are less tight. I jog to the park again. Step past the mums, across the tended yard and past the various architectural styles of the affluent houses. I do three pull-ups, four, five. I’m hanging from the bar. I have an erection. My abs are tight, my shoulders. I want to be young again, fucking in the back of a beat-up SUV and thinking about my future. I want dumplings that don’t cost ten bucks. I want money. I want to be on a Spanish beach with my horny girlfriend. I want to have a kid, to teach my kid how to master riffs. I want to be twenty pounds lighter, twenty years younger, twenty times stronger, smarter, better. I want. I don’t want to want.
But life, you know?
Jon Doughboy is a recovering “literary fiction” writer who now produces “prose entertainments” to pass the time, available for the amusement of none and all @doughboywrites