Choke Read Free

around a paint-stained table, squeezed into a child’s plastic Sunday school chair.
    All these people you think are a big joke. Go ahead and frigging laugh your frigging head off.
    These are sexual compulsives.
    All these people you thought were urban legends, well, they’re human. Complete with names and faces. Jobs and families. College degrees and arrest records.
    In the women’s room, Nico pulls me down onto the cold tile and squats over my hips, digging me out of my pants. With her other hand, Nico cups the back of my neck and pulls my face, my open mouth, into hers. Her tongue wrestling against my tongue, she’s wetting the head of my dog with the pad of her thumb. She’s pushing my jeans down off my hips. She lifts the hem of her dress in a curtsey with her eyes closed and her head tilted a little back. She settles her pubes hard against my pubes and says something against the side of my neck.
    I say, “God, you’re so beautiful,” because for the next few minutes I can.
    And Nico pulls back to look at me and says, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    And I say, “I don’t know.” I say, “Nothing, I guess.” I say, “Never mind.”
    The tile smells disinfected and feels gritty under my butt. The walls go up to an acoustical tile ceiling and air vents furry with dust and crud. There’s that blood smell from the rusty metal box for used napkins.
    “Your release form,” I say. I snap my fingers. “Did you bring it?”
    Nico lifts her hips a little and then drops, lifts and settles herself. Her head still back, her eyes still closed, she fishes inside theneckline of her dress and brings out a folded square of blue paper and drops it on my chest.
    I say, “Good girl,” and take the pen clipped on my shirt pocket.
    A little higher each time, Nico lifts her hips and sits down hard. Grinding a little front to back. With a hand planted on the top of each thigh, she pushes herself up, then drops.
    “Round the world,” I say. “Round the world, Nico.”
    She opens her eyes maybe halfway and looks down at me, and I make a stirring motion with the pen, the way you’d stir a cup of coffee. Even through my clothes, I’m getting the grid of the tile engraved in my back.
    “Round the world, now,” I say. “Do it for me, baby.”
    And Nico closes her eyes and gathers her skirt around her waist with both hands. She settles all her weight on my hips and swings one foot over my belly. She swings the other foot around so she’s still on me, but facing my feet.
    “Good,” I say and unfold the blue paper. I spread it flat against her round humped back and sign my name at the bottom, on the blank that says
sponsor.
Through her dress, you can feel the thick back of her bra, elastic with five or six little wire hooks. You can feel her rib bones under a thick layer of muscle.
    Right now, down the hall in Room 234 is the girlfriend of your best friend’s cousin, the girl who almost died banging herself on the stick shift of a Ford Pinto after she ate Spanish fly. Her name is Mandy.
    There’s the guy who snuck into a clinic in a white coat and gave pelvic exams.
    There’s the guy who always lies in his motel room, naked on top of the covers with his morning boner, pretending to sleep until the maid walks in.
    All those rumored friends of friends of friends of friends … they’re all here.
    The man crippled by the automatic milking machine, his name is Howard.
    The girl hanging naked from the shower curtain rod, half dead from autoerotic asphyxiation, she’s Paula and she’s a sexaholic.
    Hello, Paula.
    Give me your subway feelers. Your trench coat flashers.
    The men mounting cameras inside the lip of some women’s room toilet bowl.
    The guy rubbing his semen on the flaps of deposit envelopes at automatic tellers.
    All the peeping toms. The nymphos. The dirty old men. The restroom lurkers. The handballers.
    All these sexual bogeymen and-women your mom warned you about. All those scary cautionary