The Sound of One Hand Clapping
originally published in Shelflife Magazine

“Did I ever tell you about the first time I got laid?” I asked.

“No, I can’t say that you have, Wilbur,” Dave replied.

We had picked up some plywood and supplies he kept at a nearby storage facility. Throw in a long, slow CSX freight train which stopped us on the way back to the store, and we were there twiddling our thumbs, waiting for the tracks to clear. Dave still had on his polka dot gloves too.

He was more interested in the train groaning and wobbling across the track, but I hoped once he heard more of the facts the more interested he would become. I needed an answer, his take on it. I just wanted his I’m Okay, you’re okay.

“I lived at home and was on my way to the library one evening during my first year of college. I went there to work on an overdue English paper for Dr. Cavanaugh.”

“The library, huh?”

“That’s where I was going. But on the way, there was this skinny girl with long red hair alongside the road. She had a vacant, almost scared look on her face, and she had her thumb out, so I picked her up. She had a little brown package in one hand. I thought it was a snack maybe, but I misspelled it. It turned out to be smack.”

Dave took his eyes off the train, I think he was counting cars just to pass the time, and glanced in my direction.

“She smacked you, huh? On the ass?”

He seemed interested now, even though he had the facts mixed up.

“No. Smack. Horse. She worked at the Dog’n Suds and sold heroin on the side to make both ends meet the middle is how she explained it to me. That’s where she was going and, I was her mule. I couldn’t say no. It was either that or the library and freshman English class. We delivered the package to someone out by the river and she got paid. I stayed in my car while she went inside. Then we drove to her place so she could take a shower and wash eight hours of the Dog’n Suds off herself.”

Dave tapped on the steering wheel with his polka-dotted gloves.

“She walked around with no clothes on throughout the house without a care in the world like she had never taken freshman English before, like we had lived together comfortably for years, and we knew every little nook and cranny of each other, and we could slip in and out of each other, slip on each other like a favorite pair of pajamas. I still think about the soft, red hair between her legs I saw as she dried herself off. She sat down next to me, naked not as a jaybird but a cardinal because she was a genuine redhead, and I stroked between her legs like I knew what I was doing. I became something instinctual. Primordial. As simple as an amoebae and as complex as the Milky Way. I became something connected to an immense, invisible force that transcended Dr. Cavanaugh’s auditorium filled with bored freshman reading “Pigeon Feathers” by John Updike. I became as knowledgeable as anyone with a preset plan, a set of instructions throbbing between my legs, informing my entire body of what to do next. No learning curve, only the curves of her thighs sitting next to me, my hand thrust into her rabbit hole leading to a world of the Queen of Hearts. Just like that I’m there, the place I’d always wanted to be. Layla played on the stereo, or maybe, Bell Bottom Blues. It was Eric Clapton, I know that. Master of the guitar, the Les Paul, the Gibson, the slim pseudo-phallus sticking up at an angle of elevation that drove women wild. We went back to her bed and by then I had my clothes off, and I’m not playing the air guitar.

“Thirty, thirty-one,” Dave said, counting cars on the train. “This is a long one.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I fell on top of her like a drunken bear. I practically crushed her. I’m anxious to get it going, to begin the riffs, the guitar solo. Foreplay? I didn’t know anything about it. I’m an amoebae without any past or future. I’m an amoebae preparing to become a Milky Way, a galaxy studded with diamond-like stars leading to a spiral staircase far into the depths of the universe. But I couldn’t find the right place to put it, and I’m all thumbs without polka dotted gloves on, and I didn’t want her to know what a dumb ass I was. I fumbled around like a linebacker. All taped up. In pads. High topped cleats. Helmet. Neck brace. I was no Eric Clapton wailing on the guitar.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I replied. “But I still hit the wrong spot. My preset plan of instructions didn’t come with a Loran and that wouldn’t have worked finding the glory hole I was looking for anyway. She grabbed the shank and stuffed it inside herself tight like one of those green Spanish olives with the red thing in the middle that you buy at the grocery store though, personally I prefer black olives without the pits. It slid all the way in, and she swung her legs up on both my sides like she was a jockey riding Secretariat at the Derby. She changed me from her drug mule into a love thoroughbred. She didn’t have to whip me either. I was ready to run for the roses, tulips, chrysanthemums, what have you. I had been in a stall in the paddock area for too long. I didn’t need anyone laying leather to my backside to get me going. I rubbed her breasts, but she was embarrassed because they were small, but I didn’t care. More than a mouthful is too much, I consoled her, trying to sound worldly and confident, even though I wasn’t. I rubbed them and rubbed them like they were made of Play-Doh and they could be molded into a thousand shapes. I smelled them to see if they smelled like Play-Doh, but they didn’t. Hers still smelled like the evening shift at the Dog’n Suds even though she had just showered.”

“Forty-two, forty-three. Jeez Louise,” Dave said, marveling at the length of the freight train.

“Then, someone rang the doorbell of her apartment! The two of us, horse and jockey, galloping as one unit for the homestretch, sheets and pillows cast aside, the bed squeaking like a buckboard in a western movie. They kept ringing the doorbell like they knew someone was home, and wouldn’t go away until someone answered. She was on the verge of something involuntary and tidal. I could feel it rising from the depths, but the doorbell continued ringing so I got up. I slid out of the Spanish olive that we had become with her legs locked around me, me inside of her. My pants were barely on when I opened the door and looked outside.

“Garden of Memories,” the man in the dark suit said.

My hair was messed up. No shirt on. My pants were unzipped. Fingernail marks covered my sides and shoulders. My neck had bruises in the shape of lips. Get the fuck out of here, I said.

“We have a ten percent discount for any of our products purchased during this special offer period. May I come in?”

He was selling a final destination, a one way ticket on a cruise to nowhere. He was peddling an abstraction. I didn’t know the Grim Reaper made house calls.

“Absolutely not. I’m busy, I said, adjusting my zipper.”

“May I leave a brochure, just in case you discover someday that you are not immortal?”

“Sure. Whatever. I grabbed his materials and went back to her bed, and she stuffed me back inside of herself again. It took a couple more minutes before we were done and she wiped up like someone had spilled a vanilla milkshake at the Dog’n Suds. Both of us laid there, exhausted, half-dead, ready, it seemed, for the Garden of Memories.

“Sixty-two, sixty three. Isn’t there some law that says these freight trains can’t be this long?” Dave fumed.

“Not that I know of,” I said, “and I went looking for her a week later, but she was gone. She was a gypsy. I’ve never seen her since. I don’t remember her name. When I’m eighty years old and can’t do it anymore and think back on the first time. I don’t have a name to go with the face. It’s a blank hole.”

“It’s about goddam time!” Dave said. “Seventy-four cars not counting the caboose.”

I glanced in the direction that he pointed. Sure enough. The faded, red caboose was a short distance away.

“The first girl I had sex with is a girl with no name,” I said. “I didn’t finish the overdue English paper either, and Cavanaugh flunked me. I remember his name but not hers.”

Dave and some of the other drivers around us had turned off their engines earlier. Everyone started them up again.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

“That’s the longest fucking freight train I’ve seen in a while,” he said. “Here’s the caboose.”

The caboose inched across the intersection. The top part had windows and someone had an arm sticking out, tapping the side of the caboose.

“Did you hear any of what I said?”

“Yeah. You don’t remember the name of the first girl you porked.”

“And?” I asked, looking for a bit of fatherly advice or consolation or his specialty, I’m okay, your okay.

“You gave yourself a hand job,” he replied.

“What?”

The caboose cleared the roadway. The arm in the window stopped tapping the red siding and waved to us.

“Hand job. That’s the sound of one hand clapping,” Dave said.