Free On My Knees by Periel Aschenbrand Page A

hear about your failed personal relationships?”
    By the time we got back to the apartment complex, I was more than a little wary. To boot, when I tried to open the front door of the apartment, my key didn’t work. I was sure I had been locked out. Every month I would send a rent check in and pray I would not come home to an eviction notice on the door. So far, so good. But now, of all times, I couldn’t get my key in the door. Those Tishman Speyer motherfuckers , I thought. They changed the locks . I started to panic. Steve was so dumb he didn’t even notice. It took about five whole minutes before I realized that I was on the wrong floor. My life was becoming more and more pathetic by the minute.
    Oh, if my grandmother could see me now. She’d be rolling over in her grave , I thought as I lit a cigarette in her living room. I sat down on the couch and Steve sat across from me, on the piano bench. In case I forgot to mention this earlier, the piano was another one of the “antiques” we were trying to sell. Uncle Bark was convinced it was worth thousands of dollars. I was fairly certain we weren’t going to be able to give it away. Steve was like, “Wow, this place is really interesting. Do you live here alone?”
    Me: “It’s one of the properties I inherited from my great-aunt and I’m staying here while we auction off her stuff.”
    Steve ran his hand along the piano and said, “Oh, wow. That’s really cool. So all this stuff is, like, antique?”
    Me: “Yeah, totally. The piano you’re sitting at is really rare. Christie’s has a Russian oligarch who is really interested.”
    Steve: “It’s really cool. My ex-girlfriend used to play the piano.”
    After some more strained small talk and me spewing even more nonsense, Steve started droning on again about his ex-girlfriend and the Jewish thing until I was finally like, “Can you please shut the fuck up? It’s like four in the morning and I’m really not in the mood to play Dr. Freud.”
    He eventually made his way over to me and we started hooking up on the plastic-covered pink couch I had been languishing on for so many months. I realized that the couch had probably never seen so much action in its entire life. I also realized that Steve was kind of fat, which I hadn’t noticed earlier.
    Why, oh why, hadn’t I just stayed home and watched Law and Order ? I could always count on Ice-T for a good night. I had become increasingly fond of his character, Fin Tutuola. As Steve maneuvered his hand up my shirt, I began thinking about a recent episode when he said to a criminal he had arrested, “You have the right to an attorney and if you throw up in my car, I’ll kill ya.” That really cracked me up. I was also obsessed with his real-life wife, Coco, who had made a cameo appearance in that episode. In real life, Coco was famous for, among other things, her prominent camel toe.
    Steve, of course, had no way of knowing that I was fantasizing about Coco’s camel toe and took my pause as an opportunity to take his shirt off. I was horrified, absolutely horrified, to see that he was covered—absolutely covered—with hair. When I say hair, I don’t mean regular dude body hair like most guys have. Steve was covered in coarse, pubic-like hair. And he looked like a fat horse. If that weren’t bad enough, he also smelled like a barnyard animal. It was eminently clear to me that under absolutely no circumstances was I going to have sex with this guy.
    Steve, of course, had other ideas.
    But when he realized there was no chance I was going to fuck him, he changed direction. In one of the most shameless displays I have ever borne witness to, with absolutely no warning whatsoever, Steve removed his maple-leaf-covered boxer shorts, exposed more of his fat, hairy body along with his revolting short, stubby dick, and began to masturbate.
    As if my life weren’t pathetic enough, I now had a plump, hirsute Canadian man stroking his penis on my grandmother’s