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Laura projected her self-hatred onto me and began to eat the filet. Just then the Zanex kicked in and she felt like having a conversation. “So, getting lots of pussy lately?” she whispered with simpering enmity. I raised my left eyebrow, said nothing, and continued reading about Malaysia in The Economist. We were on the red-eye from New York to Los Angeles.

An hour later, the lights were turned off and “You’ve Got Mail” started. Laura might have felt ridiculous, but began to rub my crotch under the blanket. I stifled a fart and tried to go with it. She persisted, unzipped my jeans, and felt my flaccid failure. A cool drift of nothingness washed over me and Laura cried.

As the plane started to descend, an idiot lust descended on me and I grabbed Laura’s hand pathetically. I worried that my breath was bad and felt a tickling feeling of inadequacy in my belly that spread into my groin. Although I didn’t want to, I pictured myself naked and lost my erection. Laura lay asleep and I kissed her with genuine tenderness, but then I had the thought that ‘genuine tenderness’ was either a mental construct that couldn’t exist for me, or, more achingly stupid, I had simply fallen into a habit over many wasted years of talking myself out of anything genuine; moreover, I now had to reckon with the disgust I felt at the predictable lack of originality to that latter more self-reflective thought, because that sort of second-tier irony was so 1994. The plane landed, and I felt general pity for both of us – a little more for me than Laura because I was quite self-involved.

We fucked, Laura and I, by the early morning mist of Los Angeles at the DoubleTree in Marina Del Rey. As I approached orgasm, banging my muddled, flabby sadness into Laura’s endless anger and pain, Raymond Chandler popped into my head, and I reflected that thinking of him just because I was in LA was a typical gambit - trying to romanticize the paltry, banal aspect of a situation by tricking it out in the hues of authenticity – but not just any authenticity, mind you; the authenticity of Chandler, a fellow traveler in failure who raised his own dissipated alcoholic gloom up into the magic light show of a novel and adorned it with street smart savvy. Needless to say, my erection subsided and we moved to the bathroom. Finally, we both came together in a fit of urolagnia after Laura released a pussy enema of apple juice onto my chest, but not before I struggled with the suspicion that even that randy episode was not original, that we were just riffing on something we had read together recently in John Updike’s novel, “Wifey”. At that point, it didn’t matter because we were exhausted, and as we fell asleep, I held her in my arms with genuine tenderness for the first time.

Date Written: January 24, 2005
Author: Phony Millions
Average Vote: 4.5385