Read Online My Life in Heavy Metal by Steve Almond - Free Book Online

say. Oh my god, Gala, you have no idea. I was on my way to lunch today and he was sitting there on the floor of his office with these parts all around him and this big screwdriver and these forearms.
    A handyman, Gala says.

    A handyman who lives with this parents.
    You don’t know that.
    That’s what all the strutting is about, I say.
Overcompensation.
    Maybe the strutting is just strutting. Maybe he’s hung, Gala says.
    Which, I mean: How did we get from
disposable washcloth
to
hung
?
    Call him, Gala says. You’ve got a phone list, right? Just call him.
    What if his mom answers? What am I supposed say: Hello ma’am. You don’t know me, but I want to lick your son’s balls. Is he expected home later?
    A door slams over at her place and my godson, Justin (who is so cute I would actually eat him if not monitored), comes howling in. Gala tells me to hang on a sec and yells at Justin to please go into the other room, mommy’s talking to someone on the phone right now, which makes me feel very much like a depraved auntie.
    He does know this computer stuff, I say, so he’s got to have some kind of an intellect, right? Besides, I’ve always been kind of a geek, haven’t I Gal? In school. Wasn’t I always kind of a geek?
    But Justin’s going crazy now, hollering something about pizza, daddy gives him pizza, he wants pizza. He’s such a little
man
I want to laugh, though actually what happens is I start crying a little bit, thinking about Gala and how she looked in her bridal gown, how she gazed at John during their first dance, with such dreamy trust that me and the other bridesmaids could feel the hammering of our hearts. Not that marriage is any bowl of mousse, but at a certain point you realize it’s better than tearing around town with the big scarlet
Un
on your chest. Getting involved with guys who are either dogs outright or else sensitive guys, which just means their molten core of misogyny is buried a little deeper, takesa little longer to get to, that place where you’re eating breakfast at some lousy diner after a night of wild angry sex, at-least-we-still-have-this sex, or no sex at all, and you want to ask him:
What happened to that other thing we had?
But he’s looking down at his plate, hacking up a waffle, and his face is like a cursor, a dead blink, so you just ask him to pass the syrup.
    Only it’s worse than that, because maybe it’s not them at all. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the one who somehow fucks it up, demands too much, needs too much, gets too angry, weepy, moody. Maybe I’m unlovable is the truth, and I plunge into one of those moments where I can see everything I’m never going to get—the guy, the dress, the one dance—and Justin’s wailing away and Gala says she has to go, so I hang up.
    Brisby and me are heading out for some tacos, but the elevator’s taking forever and the whole office seems trapped under a glaze of late-afternoon discontent, except for Computer Boy, who we can hear laughing, one of those insincere machine-gun laughs—
chut-chut-chut
—like the modern-rock jocks do all the time. Brisby looks at me and we drift toward his little tittie-poster-festooned office. It’s not like we’re eavesdropping either, because he’s practically shouting:
No way, dude! She looked like ass. What were her stats, dude? You fucking liar! She was fucking bacterial! Chut-chut-chut. Yeah, if it was me, I’d send that shit out for dry-cleaning! Wait, where’d you find that? In the crack? Bleach, dude! Clorox! Chut-chut-chut. I’m fuckin’ serious, dude. That shit will make you go blind. Penicillin, dude. Penis chillin. Chut-chut-chut.
    And what’s remarkable is not that someone who has been alive for nearly three decades would speak like this (though that is kindof remarkable) but that it goes on and on and on, this proto-fratboy-speak that’s not so much