technobang

It’s this laborious sweaty shuffle of grunting and moaning that I more or less force myself to participate in. I feel about it the same as I would taking out the trash or mowing the lawn. Maybe worse – those acts don’t require me to pretend I care about it.

At one point I think I was attracted to her. It feels like a distant memory which sounds really hilarious coming from someone my age. I can’t help myself though, it feels like years since I’ve felt any kind of spark between us other than loathing and disgust.

When we first met I honestly felt she was out of my league. Funny, witty, could hold a conversation with me. Had a big ass which I felt was an excellent attribute. Now she’s, well… you know one of those hot air balloons you’ll see sitting in a used car dealership’s parking lot? The giant ill-inflated ones that wobble in the wind when it hits it right? That’s her. Wobbly and ill-inflated. Although I guess I shouldn’t complain, I’m not exactly a looker either. I’m a gumpy fatass with hair that’s too big and a head that’s shaped like one of those Japanese square watermelons that was left out in the sun.

Whatever.

I have a problem with sinking into my own head during crucial moments. I know this because she’s right now naked, on top of me, looking at me for some kind of validation for what she accomplished. Apparently she got off, good for her. Maybe I’ll give her a medal. Or a tomahawk to the neck.

“Are you even paying attention?!” she manages to screech out in a voice that sounds disturbingly similar to that of a pissed-off crow, which in turn causes me to jump and fall off the bed slightly.

She may have figured out I wasn’t paying attention.

“Do I even EXCITE you anymore?”

Oh my God I have to answer this. ohshitohshitohshitohshit

“Um, yeah, of course you do… I guess I’m just tired is all.”

Heh heh. Works every time.

Except now she’s looking at me – through me, even – with a gaze that could probably make the most hardened man cringe if he held it. I, of course, am the farthest thing from a hardened man so I immediately look down and make an effort to crawl away from her before this becomes more uncomfortable.

Somehow I manage to succeed and pull some pants on so that I might recover a drink from the kitchen. I make it about halfway there when I realize something is amiss.

Her drunk, extremely unpleasant stepdad is right there. Right in the hallway. Staring at me. Me, without a shirt and unbuttoned pants.

Did I mention I’m 15? Hi.

He starts toward me. Hell, starts toward me may be an understatement. With one step he manages to clear about 10 feet somehow. Probably my imagination but he’s 6′4″ and all muscle, I’m 6′0″ and all flab.

I let out a girlish yelp and stumble back into her bedroom and slam the door shut and use my body to hold it that way. Hopefully excess weight comes in useful.

She looks at me wide-eyed “I..is that?!” – “Oh, yeah, he’s here! Glad you noticed!” I yell back. She tosses me my shirt and my shoes, I start eyeing her bedroom window.

As it turns out, I’m capable of incredible speed. At what felt like light-speed, I rush the window, throw it open, and dive out feet first as if I’m going down the best waterslide ever.

A waterslide that ends with a thorny bush. Fuckin’ awesome.

This of course forces me to elicit a very loud “FUCK!” as I throw my shirt over my head and start running for my car – an act that causes me to wheeze and cramp and wish death upon my crappy, out of shape body.

Then I hear a door open. In my mind I secretly hope it’s either a cop or the ice cream man or the guy who fixes the vending machine at my school and hands me a free pop because I told him how to get his wife’s AIM password.

No. Wrong. Stepdad with a shotgun.

“This CANNOT be fucking happening” I mutter to myself as I close on my car. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him taking aim at me. My heart stops.

I can see this whole thing coming to an end. My crappy life, filled with lies and secrets and betrayals and hurting the people I love the most all coming to an end because I knocked up a girl and am now forcing myself to fuck her and take care of her because I’m not man enough to leave after I catch her blowing some dude repeatedly. All of it for nothing.

Click. Was it a click? What did I just hear? Oh. Right. The gun.

The irony of this statement is that I count living dodging (to varying degrees of success) the various pots and pans being hurled at me by my very pregnant girlfriend while tiptoeing through the minefield of cat feces and cigarette butts that litters her floor. That’s right folks, I’m 15 years old and I’m living the American dream. I dare you to do better.

Not sold yet? Neither am I, I’m fucking lying. I’m not living, I’m dying. But as far as anyone else is concerned, I’m living, so shut your gob and nod a very cautious “yes sir, I understand, you ARE living” to me.

My name is Dan. I work at McDonalds, I go to highschool, I drive a beat up Cadillac and I’m keeping the fact that my girlfriend is, again, _very_ pregnant from my parents. I’m fairly sure no combination of this is socially acceptable or healthy but I’m going to go ahead and continue doing it because I’m fairly sure that my newfound life will come to a very swift end if any of those carefully balanced items falls to the floor.

I’m a liar. More accurately, I’m a good liar. I realize that calling myself a good liar is a recipe for disaster, but like most things I will pretend I don’t see the obvious “DANGER” signs until the problem goes away. And at this particular moment, I’m lying to my girlfriend by telling her that I have indeed told my parents.

“How did they react?” she asks me. It doesn’t take a genius to see she doesn’t believe a word of my bullshit. I’m thinking to myself that I’m some kind of super-sleuth detecting the tinge of dryness in her voice.

“They reacted! My mom yelled at me. My dad sat there with a ‘I’m going to fucking murder my son’ look in his eye. Were you expecting a hanging at dawn or something?” I shoot back.

“Well I don’t know! Why couldn’t I be there?!”

Because… they don’t like you, you fucking cow?

“Because you know what happens when you and my parents are in the same room. Tears and shouting and all sorts of unpleasantness.”

At this point I’m just begging for an out.

Meanwhile, she’s squinting at me as if she’s waiting for that one telltale drop of sweat to form on my brow—the Benedict Arnold of sweat that will villify her and make my lies absolutely transparent.

So I gather up all my wits, open my mouth and quietly say “So… is the fat slob working with you today?”

Whatever she says next goes in one ear and out the other. From my limited understanding of the situation, a rather rotund girl named Jenine makes her life a living hell at Hungry Howies, or as I like to call it, ‘Please, Filter More Grease Into My Mouth So I Can Launch It Out of My Bowels In One Greasy Spurt Hours Later…. LTD.’ I personally think it’s the most clever name I’ve ever come up with.

I realized I was dazing off right about when she yelled “DON’T YOU THINK?!” in a screechingly loud voice. Admittedly at that moment all I was thinking about was the number of ways to trip her down a flight of stairs and make it look like an accident. It sounds harsh—and it is. I hate her with a passion so deep that if properly converted, I’d probably be the greatest lover or musician or artist of all time. However it’s not, nor ever will be, so instead I’ll daydream about a large angry dog chewing out the inside of her skull instead.

I hate her because one bright and shiny afternoon, after I had discovered she was pregnant and was feeling fairly good about myself for actually being competent enough to knock a female up, I stroll into her home and came upon her on her knees servicing another man. He was a little skinny redheaded twerp with freckles on his arms and chest that made him look like the sun was trying to bake him slowly. I look at the two of them and I probably said a few angry words that rhymed with “ducking bunt” and I may or may not have threatened to castrate the man with what may or may not have been a dull pocketknife. Needless to say, the 5′4″ redheaded twerp ran out the door with his pants around his ankles while I stood in the doorway possibly brandishing something that resembled aforementioned knife.

Now the intelligent 15 year old male would likely tell his girlfriend of 18 to go fly a kite (gosh, pardon my French) after discovering them in the throes of something I like to call smiling like a donut. I, however, did not. You see, I loved my child. He or she was unborn, but a collection of cells swimming in a sea of fluids and organs and whatever the fuck else was swimming in her womb… but I knew that if I were to walk out now I would never be a part of its life. So in my infinite wisdom, I smiled and forgave her right on the spot and thought nothing of it.

Until it happened again.

And again.

Aaaand again.