I was in a state of ambivalence when I finally met up with Jesse. I had been friendly with her for some time: The random anonymity, even among friends, on the internet afforded the ability to speak with someone candidly and not to have to worry about it getting out to your friends or family.
Jesse spent most of her time working the Occupy angle. When she wasn't doing that, she was handing out pamphlets for Planned Parenthood. Portland has a huge homeless population, a population I would soon be joining myself. The problem didn't seem to be going away anytime soon. The kids came for the culture, the sex drugs and food carts, and many of them left with broken teeth or busted heads from billy clubs gifted by Portland's finest.
I had always appreciated the idea of the Occupy movement, but never had much of a chance to be involved with it, living as I did so far away from any major metropolitan area around the time the movement had begun. Jesse was my entry point into a life I had never seen, or rather, several lives. The life of a political activist, the life of a permanently disenfranchised street person, and later on down the line the many tangent realities I stumbled drunkenly through while I was a resident of Portland.
I left Jean and Richard's in mid-afternoon. I took a train to meet with Jesse at Pioneer square. She had a fuzzy and brightly colored hat, so she wasn't difficult to spot. We walked and chatted a while about banal things. She had to walk some distance to go pick up a paycheck, and I trekked up the Hawthorne bridge with her. I decided to pop a squat at a local convenient store about half of the way there. I was parched and dehydrated. I got something to drink and sat outside near a garbage dumpster, parsing through my illustrated book on demonology, "The Lesser Key of Solomon." Portland is big on witchcraft, and I had swiped the book from Richard and Jean's apartment after Jean told
me she no longer cared to count it among her possessions. "I don't trust
them," she had told me.
The Goetia and the Lesser Keys had always fascinated me. It is told that these lesser familiars were employed to build Solomon's temple. I found myself greasily fondling its pages with the enthusiasm of a snark hunter. The bestial illustrations, equal parts toad-cat-Jeb-Bush sometimes made me wonder if we truly did inhabit an exclusively demonic reality. The fuck suck kill foodchain at work and personified, its pages brimmed over with horned princes buttfucking oversized weasels and curmudgeons with dark, slimy pulsating erections. Light reading, to say the least.
After about 45 minutes time and a few odd stares from punkers passing by on the sidewalk, Jesse finally returned. She told me she still had to cash her check, so I spent a little time in a vinyl shop near food cart square while I waited for her to do her thing. The usual posters of Frank Zappa and Iggy Pop taking shits, Black Flag t-shirts, and some bearded Rick Rubin lookalikes with black, thick framed glasses. Wank booths for vinyl fetishes lined the back wall...
We met back out on the front sidewalk, and walked to get a bite to eat and finally to the Occupy spot that was a row of some 20 odd people camped in lawn chairs and sleeping bags outside of city hall. Everyone seemed on the level and nice enough, but at the time I had no inclination that I would become involved in the Occupation of Portland City Hall. It was night time now. We bullshitted a while with the regulars and then hopped a bus to Jesse's. We stayed there briefly, due to a no guest policy from her roommate who was out and about at the time. We chatted a bit and left to buy some beer. I would drink it with her at the bus stop, I thought, and then head back to Jean and Richard's apartment.
Sitting at the bus stop, Jesse reiterated to me that she had a boyfriend who was out of town. She had been flirtatious with me all day, and I didn't mind. It'd been too long since I had any female attention. I had ignored it most of the the day, explaining that I typically don't go after other men's women as a matter of respect. But by this time I was half drunk, rambling about the failed Katherine affair, and she took the liberty to shut me up by raising herself up over and above my pelvis, grinding herself down upon it forcefully, while she silenced me further by jamming her tongue into my mouth in the most lewd and lascivious manner. Several stray teenagers on bicycles road by and beat their fists against the bus stop windows, and I pitched a full beer at one of them, beaming him in the face and screamed at them to go to bed. I slipped my hand into Jesse's shirt, pinching her nipples and tweaking her nipple rings. I cupped her breasts and fondled them as she continued to suck my tongue.
This continued in this manner for several moments or a half an hour when her hand found its way into my pants, slipping my now erect cock from its trousers in full view of the cars and buses passing by on the street. She had me in a corner of the bus shelter, and now her mouth was exploring my body- the inside of my shirt collar, my nipples, my ears and my neck. She stroked me gingerly and then more forcefully, until I could feel the beginnings of pre-cum leaking from my now fully engorged member. I pushed her away and told her that was enough.
"Why?" she asked, laughing and pouting playfully.
"Let's buy some rubbers."
Which we did. We trekked a ways away from the gas station and the bus stop to a semi-secluded playground. We talked for a bit. She told me stories about her boyfriend, and why she didn't want him. It took several minutes of her talk about the man she was dating as foreplay before I pushed her down onto the playground equipment, unbuttoning her pants hurredly. I ripped her underwear away and entered her forcefully. She was already wet. We played like that for a while, I fucked her from behind while pinching and playfully tugging at her nipple rings, smacking her ass as hard as I could and pulling her back by her hair, her ass grinding against my pelvis.
I thrust into her like that until I felt exhausted and close to orgasm, and at that moment I flipped her over to ride me. My knees were already bloodied and scraped from the abrasions of the mulch and the metal children's play place, and my body was trembling. She rode me hard and furiously, her fingernails digging into my body... my chest, my neck and my ass, occasionally drawing blood. I pulled her forth by her nipple rings, bringing my mouth in reach to suck down, hard, and then bit them so as to inflict some measure of pain upon her. She continued to up the pace and frenzy of her thrusts, and by now I was afraid her moaning would draw attention to our little hiding spot there in the park. I bit into her neck, slapped her ass as hard as I could, and I pulled her hair then to shove her mouth back down onto mine to silence her, sucking her tongue into my mouth. She slammed me back against the playplace grate, my head hit the ground and I shot long and hard into her cunt. Rinse. Repeat.
After all was said and done, I sat there silently with my knees pulled up to my chest in my boxers, drinking and staring off into the stars above.
"I want you to be my boyfriend," she told me.
"Wait, now? Why? You already have a boyfriend."
"But I want for you to be mine."
"See, Jesse," I began, standing up. "This is why I can't be with a woman. It is what it is. I can't trust anyone. You spent most of the day telling me about your boyfriend and most of the evening fucking my brains out, quite literally. It's not like I don't appreciate it, but tell me what makes me any different? My last girl. All I wanted to do was please her. I just wanted to love her. But she couldn't love herself. So I was ready to go down kicking and screaming until I realized she didn't even care anymore."
"That's beautiful."
"No, it isn't. It's a lie, and a cultural prefabrication. The hopelessly romantic misconception that there is some nobility in lying to yourself. There is nothing I detest more than the stench of a lie. And anyway, the last time I spoke to her, she called me a pathetic worthless junkie. The things people say to you when you are on junk. Like you aren't even human. I'm not really into letting people in right now."
"I would never call you that."
"Yeah, you say that now."
"When did you start drinking so heavily?" she asked me. "Why do you drink so heavily?"
"Well, I relapsed on junk while I was in California. I turned to booze. Back and forth, you know. I've been off and on IV opiates since I was in college, from a chronic series of cluster headaches that pain me day in and day out. Kills me to not have them, so when I'm trying to stay clean I let the alcohol numb the brain. But I've been drinking since I was 13. I had so many problems with my father, who never understood me. That is a cliched, hackneyed old line of bullshit so I'll stop there and tell you the truth. I'm a drunk. Some things just are."
"I want to hold you, but I'm afraid I'll fall in love."
I didn't want her to fall in love, but she forced her way into my arms anyway.
I sighed and acquiesced.
