She’s enormous today, dwarfs my house, and she’s bouncing me off a tennis racket the size of my yard. Of course she wears the flowing white toga. The laurel crown. Chewing gum: spearmint. The neighbors speak over their fences, lob dumb questions over their fences. I’m trying to type the first paragraph.
With all the rain upriver you couldn’t really tell where the riverbank was, and the water was full of trees and dead cows and Zeb saw a church spinning in an eddy. It was a little shack church didn’t even have a steeple just a white cross paint on the door and no glass in the windows. Little Holiness church looked like the church he grew up in and Zeb watched it snag a tree and tumble over then break apart.
- You’re doing great, she says.
- This is unpleasant, I say.
- It’s your own fault.
- I know. That having been said, where were you?
- Walking up and down the Earth, and to and fro within. You’re doing great.
- Oh, hark at you, fawncy.
- I was fawncy for Gilgamesh and Galileo. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
- I love it when you talk old school to me.
- You’re doing great.
She grabs me out of the air at the very apex of the parabola. Her palm is cool, and probably six feet across, and smells vaguely like the flowers she likes to tear out of peoples’ yards, to wear in her hair, to shower onto police cars, to throw into the air so that they rain down miles away from a clear blue sky.
- Make me laugh, she says.
- I’m almost fifty, I say. That’s worth something. I’m middle aged and I’m still so very young, aren’t I.
- Come on, make me laugh.
- So the dog says, I guess I should have said Dimaggio. The horse looked up and said, Why can’t I just die? The manatee said to the bartender, Tragically my species is nearly extinct.
She’s not laughing. She’s thinking. Worse things happen, but not often.
- Why is it always animals?
- Because when it’s people it’s too close to home.
- Do you love me?
- I do. You mean the world to me. Do you love me?
- You make me laugh,
She tosses me in the air and volleys me three counties away. I come down in a pasture. The cows regard me with their warm kind stupid eyes until I fall asleep in the clover.
*
I am mixing some CBD into my Ovaltine, I regard the story on my laptop. It reminds me of a damp box full of mouse traps. The problem, of course, is getting from the beginning, where Zeb (short for Zebedee) watched a church float down the flood-swollen Ohio River to the end, where Zeb lies on the belly of Catarina, an enormous woman, and masturbates while she sings and masturbates. I had an idea about sad pornography. If it bends, it’s funny. If it breaks, it’s funnier.
“Cat there ain’t nothin’ wrong with you a poke in the puddin wouldn’t fix.”
“Is that so.”
“Cat there ain’t nothin’ wrong… with you… that a…” he waved his glass expansively, though did not spill a drop of malt. “Nothin’ wrong with you,” he continued.
“Hark at the sweet talker.”
“You know I love ya Kitty Cat.”
“Oh aye?”
“Ah, you know I can tell.”
“From down there?”
“A woman in love got a something about her. Yez can smell it.”
“Now you’re just bein rude, Mite.”
“Cat… Cat Cat Cat… why you call me that. Why you call me that. Why… you call me that.”
“Because ‘hop o’ my thumb’ is too long for such a teeny person.”
“That’s what’s wrong with you, I knew it! You always gotta get yer oar in.”
My dog wakes up and belches. She looks at me with her warm kind stupid eyes.
- What, I say.
- What in the fuck are you doing, my dog asks.
- I’m writing pornography.
- Where’s the fucking?
- It’s coming.
- Is it coming after the bad Matewan dialogue or is it coming… actually all you’ve written is bad Matewan dialogue. What exactly are you doing here?
- I’m writing pornography. I want to write a new kind of pornography. I want to write sad pornography. Did you ever see Mulholland Drive? I saw it and the place played it like 4% too slow. Everyone sounded like Paul Robeson.
- No. I’m a dog. Plus I wasn’t born yet. And you hated Mulholland Drive. You stood up at the end and gave the screen two middle fingers.
- I should probably watch it again. See if I get any ideas. My story needs some ideas. There’s a scene in Mulholland Drive where a woman masturbates while she cries?
- Where’s the fucking? my dog says, and falls asleep.
*
Zeb woke up the next morning, covered in crackling dried spit and itching like a bastard because he was covered with hay, which was nothing new. He tried to piece the evening together. He had woken up at Cat’s yesterday morning. They went down to the river but it was still too high. The rest of the day was not so clear, and the night… well, she’d either spat on him or they’d blown the grounsils. Could have been both. Did he want to wait for her to wake up and ask her? She was snoring and he knew from the tone of it, the sheer gut-loosening power of it, she wasn’t getting up for a while. He’d only been able to sleep through it because… well, it wasn’t sleep, was it. No, he couldn’t ask her. Not with her sounding like the mill at Oldham, not with the slow fuse headache that suddenly burst like water through a levee.
OK, here was the set-up. Write what you know. I know a couple of things. I know drinking. I know wanting to be with a large woman. I said that to a therapist once. She said, what, like three hundred pounds? I said, no. She said, what? I said, one hundred feet. She said, what?
I regard myself in the mirror with my warm kind stupid eyes. Do I look like a writer? Do I look like a pornographer? Do I look like a tiny man?
OK, here was the set up: Zebedee works at a mill near Louisville in the year 1900. The mill he works at is across the Ohio River. Zeb is an alcoholic, except in 1900 nobody knew they were alcoholic. Catarina is ninety feet tall. She is one of a family of giants that came out of the Appalachians that works pulling barges down the Ohio. Her hands are hard and calloused. She too drinks far too much. Zeb and Catarina love each other, but are so scared. They are scared to love something more than drinking, they are scared to love something, he is scared he will disappear into her vagina and drown, she is scared he will disappear into her vagina and drown, both of them are scared that they both want him to disappear into her vagina and drown. I had the first paragraph. And I had the last image: the two of them, him lying with his head on her mons, both of them masturbating, too drunk to get off. There was an ocean of words in between and none of them were in a language I knew.
OK: so here was the set-up. I know that I will never be intimately involved with such a woman. And so any pornography I write about it is tinged with a certain sadness. Pornography is sad because it never happens that way. Look: people just don’t put their dicks in pizza boxes and women don’t open the pizza boxes and. I will never be kissed by a woman whose kisses steal my height. For example. I know that. I don’t know what that would feel like. Write what you know. How a woman would kiss me and I would feel her hands on my back, her tongue light against my teeth, and when I open my eyes we are the same height. She kisses me again, or I kiss her. I open my eyes and I am looking at her smirk, now at eye level. I close my eyes and raise myself up on my toes, and feel her breasts move slowly up my chest. I shift and my tongue flickers against her lips. She catches it lightly between her teeth. Slowly I dwindle, kissing down the cords of her neck. She kneels and I am briefly once again taller than her, but her hand swallows mine. I love you, I tell her. She laughs. Pornography is sad because all of the lines are bad and all of the love is wrong and it just never happens that way, does it?
*
I don’t know the language, there is a black ocean between the beginning and the end dotted with islands where they speak every language I don’t know, there are times when I am sure I don’t know any human language, one time I woke up in the hospital and they asked me, how old are you?, and I told them, totally sure: I am two hundred and six years old.
*
She walks through the front door: my inspiration. She’s dressed for tennis this time. The white shirt, white skirt, the white shoes and socks. It’s not all that different from the toga. She has her tennis racket. She swings it carefully, as if she’s doing katas. A backhand clears the Hummel figurines off of the shelf. I stand biting my lip and popping my eyes on my couch, in an ecstasy of vexation.
She grows. She goes through the motions of a serve. The racket slicing through the ceiling. She reaches up and through, pries the ceiling apart. Sunlight streams through. Her skirt in tatters falling with the timbers as she grows and all the stories I had put in my attic, falling with the timbers. The first giantess story I ever wrote when I was twelve and wanted to write a modern day Gulliver’s Travels. She bends down, grabs me with one hand. The story I wrote about a bad man who felt pity on a woman he shrank and so he saved her from the worse man he worked for and built her a life with him with tiny stairs and pulleys and hand-cranked elevators in his basement apartment. She raises me over her head. I feel as if I am being offered, a sacrifice to nothing. A story about a man lost in the snow in the city who is found by a tiny woman and her tiny mother; he sleeps there and wakes up to find the tiny woman going through a ballerina’s positions, apologizing to him. My inspiration is naked and gleaming in the sun. Her tennis visor has grown with her, giving her face a greenish tint. Nothing else has grown, it is all in shreds and pieces, trampled into what’s left of my house. The neighbors talk to their fences. She sits down, drops her tennis racket, lies back. I am dropped onto the wide plain of her stomach as her hand darts over me to dip between her thighs, to touch herself with light deft strokes. “Make me laugh,” she breathes, “make me, make me laugh,” and I scrabble at my belt, tear off my pants. And my heart is going like mad and yes I said Yes I will Yes and as I come, she laughs.