Abandoned by the distance of time and miles I sit fingering mediocre stemware doubting if I was as happy then as I believed I was. I know there came a time when I sobbed, actually moaned, wailed like a baby, believing I did so because of the incredible beauty of life and the never ending fullness of my days; but I am wondering now, three martinis in, if the tears weren’t induced by something all together different.
I sit with other teary eyed women in the Dew Drop Inn, a mobile home turned into a bar along an otherwise desolate Main Street in the middle of Bumfucked, USA, the town where I was born and immediately plotted to leave, just down the road from the hospital where my mother awaits her destiny. Discussions quickly shift from the best fried catfish recipe to the sexual expertise of a certain neighborhood high school basketball coach, when I notice a man who takes my breath away seated at the far end of the bar. This is no small feat in a god-forsaken town such as this where few men, if any, have all of their teeth. He looks like a man who would take you on the kitchen table before dinner, inhaling the sweet scent of just killed animal flesh searing on his hot charcoal grill; or in the front seat of his car at one of those old drive in movies, as Cary Grant throws his ninety foot long shadow over your exposed heaving breasts and his perfectly proportioned glistening bare ass as you taste his sweet breath rammed down your throat.
My therapist calls it a disorder: this ability to lose myself in sensual fantasy when faced with stress. Actors are sent away to rehab for such a disorder after their wives catch them with women half their ages. I slip a coin into the jukebox; take another sip, pop a vodka soaked olive in my mouth, cross my legs, arch my back and focus on the beast. Is it really a disorder? Or is it actually order: to crave something so raw and primal, when faced with something as raw and primal as death; your parent’s, your own?