Read Online When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris - Free Book Online Page B

eighteen-wheeler. “All I know is that if anyone wanted to give me a blow job, or have me give him one, I’d do it.”
    This came out of nowhere, and what threw me was the way he’d attached it to his previous observation. North Carolina is temperate and populated with well-meaning people; therefore I will engage in oral sex with another man.
    “Well,” I said, “they’re not
all
friendly. I remember one time I was walking down the street and a group of men grabbed me by the arms and spit in my face.” The story was true, and, at its mention, I recalled the stench of their sour, phlegm-clotted saliva. I expected, and reasonably so, that the tow truck driver might ask for details: “Who were these men? Why did they spit in your face?”
    But instead he picked up where he’d left off. “I mean to tell you that I would actually crouch down on this seat and perform fellatio,” he said. “Either that or I’d sit up while someone performed it on me. I really would.”
    “Then, another time,” I told him, “another time this guy threatened to knock my teeth down my throat. I was just standing there minding my own business, and all of a sudden there he was.” This was a lie, or at least the last part was. The man had threatened to knock my teeth down my throat, but only because my friend and I had given him the finger and called him a crusty old redneck. “I was twelve years old at the time,” I said. “In Ohio you’d never threaten a kid like that, but down in North Carolina it’s par for the course.”
    Par for the course.
I was sounding more idiotic by the minute — not that it mattered.
    “I mean, why
not
give someone a blow job?” the driver said. “It’s just a penis, right? Probably no worse for you than smoking.”
    Outside the moving truck were flat, barren fields, some bordered by stands of trees and others stretching without interruption out to the horizon. One second they’d appear as a blur, and then the windshield wiper would make its shuddering pass and everything would leap back into focus. A station wagon pulled in front of us, and the children in the backseat signaled for my driver to blow his horn. He seemed not to notice them, and just as I thought to bring it to his attention I realized that the request included the word “blow.” And so I let it drop and turned my attention back to the landscape.
    Had I been able to address the real subject, I’d have told this man that I was saving myself for the right person. I wanted my first time to be special, meaning that I would know the other guy’s name and, I hoped, his telephone number. After sex, we would lie in each other’s arms and review the events that had brought us to this point. I could not predict exactly what this conversation would sound like, but I had not imagined it to include such lines as “I knew this would happen five minutes ago, the moment you climbed into my tow truck.” Not that I minded this man’s profession. It was the other stuff that bothered me: his dent, his forwardness, and his persistent refusal to turn the goddamn page. He sounded like me when I sensed that drugs were around: “All I know is that if someone wants to get high, or wants to watch while I smoke his dope, I’ll do it. I really will.”
    I cringed to think of myself, skeeving pot off my friends and believing all the while that I was sounding casual. After dropping in uninvited and basically forcing someone to share his drugs, I’d pocket the roach and take my leave, saying, “That’s the last time I let you fuck me up like this, I mean it.”
    “Yes, indeedy,” the tow truck driver said. “A little oral give-and-take would feel
pretty
good right about now.”
    I could have ended it so simply. “I don’t think my girlfriend would like that too much,” I might have said, but I wanted to put that particular lie behind me. There was my life
before
I told a strange woman in a negligee that I was a homosexual, and now there would be