Slam Scream ‘N’ Shake
(La Cloque)
I was once at a house party in Mendocino where we were required to practice breathing together. Most of the guests spent four days breathing in a cabin and then talking about their insights into themselves and each other and their diets. They also cooked a lot of experimental organic food while I stayed in a sort of shed to one side, studying for exams like I was still in college instead of qualifying for a PhD in existentialist Scandinavian literature.
I wasn’t around for the group breathing exercises, but I went in to eat the food, mostly Mendocino bean curd, and then I did the dishes and left again so they could all breathe talk some more. The messier the food, the longer I had to stay at the sink every night.
One night it was very messy. An ethicist named Paul had tried to make Mexican mole with poblano chiles and TVP, and everyone was dyspeptic and testy. Especially Paul, whose hands were now covered in blisters from a King Kooker deep-fry kit. Then one of the guys, a neurobiologist writing a dissertation about nervous reactions and pleasure in leeches, said he could deepen the others’ awarefulness if they lay all flat on the floor and let him tap a spoon against the King Kooker stockpot over their feet and stomachs and heads. He had discovered something about certain vibrations, he said. They would set our bodies on a good path; our food would digest easily. We would feel for the first time in our lives. It had worked on the test leeches in his laboratory.
I rinsed the stockpot. I gave Leech Guy a wooden spoon. He did exactly what he’d said he would do.
Nobody liked this; it was boring and the sound gave us all a headache. I listened, though, while I scrubbed a pot caked with burnt beans. This is how intellectuals speak to each other:
“That fryer’s bullshitte,” Julie said from the floor. She almost had a doctorate in Chinese history. “The kale chips were soggy and the tempeh fritters burned.”
Sadie said, “Yeah, I know, huh.” It was her cabin. It was her Kooker. She was a former mathematician and current massage therapist; she usually chose someone to receive a deep-tissue before bed, but it was clearly not happening that night. She burped and then she burped again. She’d been in love with the leech guy in college; now even she was getting tired of him.
He still kept on tapping that damned stockpot. He was getting mad too, because the sound bath was his contribution to the house party and nobody wanted it. They weren’t even talking about their diets anymore; they just wanted him to stop so they could go off and swim naked in moonlight and possibly relieve themselves in the water or woods instead of the cabin’s lone bathroom. Everyone hated the leech guy.
When I was done with the dishes, I took one for the team. I invited him out to the shed.
“You can leave the King Kooker behind,” I told him. “We aren’t going to need any extra vibrations.”
But I knew he’d be bad in bed. He had too many opinions. He had just got out of a two-year relationship with a Frenchwoman from a family of nudists, and he walked around the place without seeming to realize that most of us didn’t care to see a naked dangle-and-buns in the kitchen every morning … let alone one that was carrying around a book called The Multi-Orgasmic Man, which looked like some kind of a how-to disguised as an advertisement and went with him everywhere.
So it was already established that he was packing a tiny vermiform, but he seemed to think he knew just what to do with it; proudly, he tried all his best moves and slammed into me hard. Nothing happened.
First he said he’d eaten too much. Then he said Paul had no idea how to cook anything. “Ethicist, my naked ass,” said the man who aspired to sacrifice leeches for a living.
“Let’s go where somebody does know what they’re doing,” I said, and we got in my car and headed to the Denny’s in Fort Bragg. For nine miles I drove along spectacular rocky coastline in the moonlight, and I listened to him talk about his leeches and their basic little nervous systems and how he was trying to figure out what gave them pleasure.
“You mean wormogasms?” I asked him. “Multiple wormogasms?”
His indignant answer—beginning with “You oversimplify everything, don’t you?”—took up the rest of the drive. It was a relief when I spotted the big yellow sign (Always Open) and parked.
Men have no idea how often we drive to Denny’s just to make them shut up. Fortunately it’s there for us all night. Plus which, breakfast anytime and a grand slam whenever you feel like saying the words.
Inside, I gave Leech Guy a twenty and excused myself. I asked the kid sweeping up in the dining room where he went to college. All I cared was that he was out of high school. We grabbed some Cheesy-Maple Stuffed D’Oh!Nut Holes and went into the bathroom and fed them to each other for about ten minutes, until the cash register rang and I just couldn’t pack in more holes. Then I went back to the table and watched Soft Slam eat his weight in Choconana pancakes.
While he ate, he informed me that leeches are not like other worms, just in case I had missed that part of his car diatribe. Leeches are special. They’re predators.
I picked up a half-eaten Grand Slamwich and asked for the change from my twenty.
While I was eating, he noticed I was holding my breath. He told me, “Breathe, baby, breathe,” like I found his Slamwich overwhelming. He watched me eat and he called me his girl and his lovely, ma fille, mon amour, but he didn’t mean either one, thank the goddess. During his long last relationship, he’d forgotten how to eat one-on-one without endearments.
I told him he didn’t have to bother with all that and he could just keep quiet and chew. I certainly didn’t want to hear any more about his pleasurable predatory leeches than I had to, or about his French girlfriend.
He asked me, “What are you even doing with your life? What is the point of writing about words? That’s not going to save the world.”
I said, “Hey, Wormogasm. Would you rather eat grilled cheese or something called a Flim-Flam Slam? See, words matter.”
… … …
He asked for a commitment-free relationship with me and I was open to something—no mountain unscaled, you know. But he got mad when I ate Denny’s with other men. I was thirty-four; I didn’t have room for a partner, so I dated characters instead. Moons Over My Hammy Guy. Bourbon Bacon Slamburger Guy. Melts & Handhelds Guy. And now Soft Slam, the Wormogasm. I ate with him when I needed to feel superior.
He lived in Anaheim but he would take a Greyhound up to Berkeley and stay at my place. Not because I was special—he made it clear that he was there for the protests, because nobody near Disneyland knew how to protest like Berkeleyites. The attraction was that I had a full-size bed and lived five blocks from a Denny’s that often had test items on the menu. I didn’t need to know how to cook kale chips to his liking; I just needed to be close to chips of any kind.
When I was with him we ordered off the Limited Time Only menu. I once burned my tongue on some Sizzling Jalapeño Pockets and he comforted me with a Halloween Slam Scream ‘N’ Shake from the test menu. I told him, “This is a special thing I will try with you and never with anyone else.” He melted like a milkshake himself.
I already knew that the Slam Scream ‘N’ Shake would never make the national menu. A little clove drizzle goes a long way.
The next time that Soft Slam wanted to protest something, I told him I had a date. It was true; I did have a date, and it was going to take all night. We planned to tie each other to my closet pole and force-feed Churro Chimichangas, as per our mutual fantasy.
Soft Slam took the Greyhound anyway. Then he complained that he had nowhere to stay, so I said he could borrow my car to sleep in. I was not going to let him into my apartment. He still wanted to go to Denny’s with me, as a sort of insult to my plans, and I said okay. I ordered from the test menu and fed him a Fried Tofurkey Roll-Up with Country Gravy Poppers because I just couldn’t stand to look at him anymore.
I should point out that his register had never cashed out more than once at a time with me, and mine didn’t at all with him. He really had no idea what to do with what he’d been given; his worms had more vermigasms than he did.
I knew who he was now. That night, I showed him what was possible.
“That’s right,” I said to his face, while the Denny’s staff and patrons gathered round. “You take that roll-up in. Okay, baby, leech daddy, here comes a popper. Yeah, you suck that burst of country gravy on down. You lick it all up, now.” The others cheered me on as I smeared it over his face and purred, “You want to put your Soft Slam in this mouth? I’m going to need to crisp it up first. That’s right, you know what I’m going to do. I’m going to buy a King Kooker and I’m going to chicken-fry the fuck out of you and your little leeches. And then I’m going to cover you and every one of your worms in Wham-Bam on a Slam sauce. You know how I love that back-country burn. Cloque-moi jusqu’à la chatte!”
That did the trick. I showed him the power of words, how they’re more than vibrations. And I know he liked it. He liked it so much that his pleasure scared him. He had me spell what I’d just said in French and he looked it up on his phone. Then he found somewhere else for the night and never emailed again.
I suppose he’s in his laboratory down in LA right now, banging a tiny gong over his leeches and giving them a sound bath before he cuts them up and … What, exactly? Where does he see pleasure within their elementary nervous systems?
J’ai envie! I hear those leeches screaming. J’ai très envie de me faire cloquer! And they sweep their blind heads back and forth, trying to home in on that which will bring them pleasure. They stretch themselves to touch flesh, and then they attach and suck, so ravenous, as all that hot oil running through his Soft Slam veins blisters their sinewy animal insides.
I imagine that feels very good to a certain sort of person.
Susann Cokal has made it into Gargoyle for the fourth time. Her four novels include Mirabilis and The Kingdom of Little Wounds, the winner of several national awards and mentions, including a permanent spot on prominent banned and challenged lists. Her short work has appeared in venues such as Cincinnati Review, Electric Lit, Prairie Schooner, The Los Angeles Review, The Journal, Writers on the Job, Hunger Mountain, and The New York Times Book Review. She lives physically in a creepy old farmhouse in Richmond, Virginia, and on the web at susanncokal.com.