When I first moved up here, I had this idea that I would open up a diner. I saw the alarm clock read 5am; I smelled coffee brewing in an urn; I saw hand written orders hanging from a stainless steel roundabout; I saw me talking through a window into the kitchen over the sound of sizzling eggs to familiar faces at the counter. I’d say, “Hey! Any of you farmer Mary’s want to have a piece of fresh pie?” And I’d hear the rough crowd roar, “Sure! Count me in! I’ll take one to go!”
My secret boyfriend’s name is Arthur and he’s a game warden up here. Nice build on him; wears a tan, tight fitting policeman’s suit; has a gold badge and carries a gun to shoot poachers. Every day, he pretends to nonchalantly drop in for a something, coffee, pie, cup of white bean soup, then he’ll look for a reason to talk to me. “Didn’t you tell me you were from New York way? I heard on the radio you people are supposed to get one hell of a storm down there.” Or “ You said you heard coyotes out at your place? You know you have to be careful if you have cats. Those coyotes will eat cats.”
I say to him. “You know, the next time you’re out by my place, you should drop by. There is something shitting on the rocks in my stream, right next to a hole a in the side of the hill, and I would love for you to look at that crap and tell me what kind of animal laid it.”
He says, “Oh that’s probably a muskrat.”
And I say, because I want to wow him with my outdoorsiness, I say, “You don’t think it could be a mink or an otter?”
And he says, as though that didn’t faze him a bit, he says, “Nah, probably just a muskrat.”
I get this idea now, while I watch him blow over the top of his coffee and measure off another portion of peach pie with his fork. I have this idea that I’m going to talk this cocky son-of-a-bitch into my bed and fuck him with his legs up in the air. I work him over one more time with my eyes and take a moment to wipe up the counter space next to him. When he looks up at me, right into my eyes and says, “You ever seen a muskrat?” then smiles a big, illegal grin, I know that it will all come true.
Once I had sex with a trucker. I stopped off at some rest stop somewhere, don’t ask me where the hell I was, and I went into use the john and there was some thirty-something guy in one of the cans, sitting on the crapper and jerking off. So while we peered at each other through the crack in the metal door, we somehow made this agreement through finger gestures and head bobs that we were going to see each other outside.
The next thing you know, I find myself climbing into the cab of a big semi. It was the first and last time I’ve ever been in one and I was shocked to discover that behind the front row seat, they have a whole bed in the back!
So we start fooling around and the next thing you know, he wants me to fuck him. Well you know me, I’ll try anything once, but when he pulled off his overhauls, what did I find but him in a pair of pink girl’s panties! And he starts moanin, “Oh fuck me, officer, fuck me for speeding.” I don’t know where he came up with that one. The only thing about me that looked like a policeman that day was some leftover powdered donut on my shirt from the Krispy Creme in Clark’s Summit. But anyway, he’s going on, “I don’t have the money for a ticket, so you’ll just have to fuck me for speeding.” Then he proceeds to pull off those panties and I can see why he made up the speeding part, because tracked down the center of them was a thick, brown racing stripe. I mean, this Mary might have been speeding, but god knows he put on the brakes and left some pretty wide skid marks before he got to me.
Even then, I was ready to forge ahead. I had been driving for about 4 hours and had another 2 to go and I needed something to relieve the monotony, but just as I was about to go down, I was hit in the face with a smell that was packing almost as much cargo as that truck. I haven’t smelled that much shit since I saw the last Mamet play on Broadway. Then he wiggles around, and honestly this was the part that made me run screaming from that cab, he wiggles around and put that pink, pimpled ass of his up in the air and all I could see was hole hair and shit smears. I tell you, that was it. Good Night Irene. You could have forced me to drive another 2 hundred miles. I would have done every inch of them within the speed limit just so’s I wouldn’t have to take another look or have another whiff of that sewer.
But you know, now that I have the diner and Arthur, I have no need for rest stops and truck cabs. I’m fine with him, flawed though he is. Happy to watch his four wheeled drive, all-terrain Wrangler pull up the road and watch him fuss over any dog hair, Peter, our Labrador leaves on the seat. I built a bench on the hill overlooking the stream and Arthur and I sit there at dusk looking down into the ravine to see if we can catch sight of the Kingfisher that’s built a nest down there or watch a hawk dive from the pines to catch a small, sharp meal. We sit there sometimes almost an hour, before he says he’s got to go to bed or wants to watch something on the TV. His favorite shows are cop show. He likes to sit on the sofa, neat as a pin, and glue his eyes to the NYPD or Los Angeles Police Force and watch the drama unfold. When I catch him like that, from my vantage at the kitchen counter…leafing through a seed catalogue or fingering the handle of a coffee mug... I think to myself, ‘boy oh boy, can I pick ‘em’.
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