MY SILLY MAN

SHORT STORY BY JONAH PARKER

Oh, funny to think back on it now. Getting sober, going to meetings and letting it out, I’d tell them over and over, “No one ever said, ‘You’re soo perfect!’ Not unless they wanted something from me.” And then I met my man.

My man is so silly. We met at BA: Barfers Anonymous. That was his silly name for it, he told me. He wooed me in because he did not look bulimic like the rest of us. He was the head of the support group, and shone as though his gut flowed fantastically. His heart was brilliant, and so was his mind. He looked strong and earnest, like Johnny Depp.

That night he said that perfection was a farce, and so I asked him, Then, why was I so hellbent on being called perfect? He told me that all people want that, and that I was just brave enough to admit it.

Of course we fucked that night. At first he dug his fingers into my hipbones, scooping inward, holding the wheel. You could see his dick through my belly. This was a grand realization. Flipped onto my back, we tried to make this more apparent. I massaged the tip by rubbing under my belly button. He got me pregnant.

And that’s what I mean when I say my man is so silly. He can’t get me pregnant. I’m a gay man. And if I were a woman, I’d be infertile—because of the vomit. It became a thing for him: the vomit and getting me pregnant, back and forth and back. For the past few months, that’s really all it’s been.

I had friends back home, friends from rehab, but they didn’t respect my fun at all. All they could talk about was how I was getting skinnier, and I was like, Ya, I know. I wanted to tell them, “And I’m also taking my Wellbutrin scrip through the nose and eating my own vomit then hurling it up and using it as lube every night, you bitch…”—but alas, I knew, I was not a character from a story who could just be unhinged in public and get away with it. And I was scared to say anything. So I blocked them, obviously.

So that was it. Me and my silly man, his nicotine-stained walls, his bare mattress, shifty on the bed frame that was rusted and sounded like it, the small Jesus on the small cross, the vomit stains on the walls and the ones we would sleep on and how I could differentiate them by smell and color and name them and talk to them when he was out of the house, how he would put the collar on me, lock it to the chain on the wall, and tell me to get it all out of my stomach before he got home or else there would be consequences, and the black and white television that played staticy reruns over and over and over until it gave up and died and I was left with my reflection in the screen.

Sometimes I would feel hopeless and destitute and ugly and ruined and cry out like a useless, neglected animal—but once he fed me, per say, chicken, something that lived and could breathe and cross the road—I knew that I was deserving of the antics, for sure. He should’ve been deserving of the dark treatment, too, because he would eat the chicken too, but that was the silly part, the absurdity of his entire existence. He had done something I was ignorant of, at least for now, that absolved him. That’s why I love him. Because I have no idea why he likes me, but he likes me. He chose me.