Free The History of Luminous Motion by Scott Bradfield Page A

poontang. I’m talking scuzz. I’m talking countless
good-looking, insatiable young women with really big tits.” Aimlessly Rodney’s
left hand began stroking the inner thigh of his Levi’s. Then, abruptly, he
leaned forward and reached for the margarita mix in the blender’s thick Pyrex
bowl. “I need money and sex and more sex. I been thinking about it every day
lately, Phil. I gotta get laid, man. I really gotta get laid.”
    Then,
contemplating his refreshed glass for a moment, Rodney slumped back against the
sofa while I tried to appear as calm and unaffected as a prayer. I was
practicing with a cigarette, sucking the thick smoke into my mouth every few
seconds and expelling it, pushing it out with my tongue and cheeks. Phooh, I said,
as quietly as I could, because it wasn’t a sound Rodney or Mom made when they
smoked. Phooh. An ugly miniature terrier lay asleep dribbling in my lap. Gently
I lifted it onto the sofa’s side. “Don’t talk about it,” I told him. “Don’t
talk about what you want too much. You’ll lose the edge.”
    “I
need to fuck women.” Rodney’s voice was growing subdued, distant, ritual and
dark. “I need to fuck fuck fuck until I can’t fuck anymore.”
    “It’s
all a dream, Rodney. If you talk about it too much, you wake up. Then there’s
just the bright sun. Then there’s just the cold bed.”
    Suddenly
Rodney sat up straight and placed his margarita on the table. He cautioned me
with his left hand and gazed off intently at the far wall, as if listening with
his eyes, poised like a diver.
    I
heard the footsteps too. Keys being shaken. Then a sack of something banging
against the porch while keys rattled more distinctly. Implicitly feminine
sounds.
    “If
you keep dreaming, you can have it all, Rodney. If you keep dreaming you can
even be a grown-up. You can even fall in love.”
    “Fuck
love,” Rodney said.
    We
were grabbing the most compact and obvious loot, then slipping down the back
stairs and out the rear garage door, through the yard and backyard gate while
upstairs that stupid terrier was yelping and throwing itself up and down in the
air as its master incautiously opened the front door.
    “Fuck
love, man,” Rodney said later at Burrito King. “Fuck family. Fuck people and
things. I want the real stuff , man. I
want currency, I want sex. Give me the stuff and save all the bullshit. I’ve had it up to here with all the
bullshit, Phillip. I’m tired of rotting away in Ethel’s lousy household. It’s
time I started living my own life. I’m telling you, guy. Life is something you
do. Bullshit is just something you’ve got.”

 
    CURRENCY
AND SEX were forces in our lives now, like smoky, violet surges of electricity
and light. Sex and currency, currency and sex. The hum and the pop, chirring
and turning, beating like electricity. We could drive cars with that force
radiating deep inside us. We could activate industrial machinery. We could
generate enough massive interior energy to drive cities, planets and suns.
    I
didn’t feel the same sudden push inside my flesh that Rodney felt, but rather a
sort of anxious intellectual charge. The energy whirled aimlessly inside my
head, where I nightly replayed that strange film I had watched with Mom only a
few months before on a hotel-room closed-circuit television, Sexually Altered States . Sexually
altered, sexually altered altered states, states of sexually altered states,
altered states of sexually altered states. Sometimes the images sped and raced
in my mind, and I imagined myself taking a seat in my own subjective cinema. I
imagined the curtains sweeping open and the light dimming, I imagined the
credits, and then the first exuberant breathless cinematic fuck. I tried to
contain all the events within the frame of a plot. I tried to imagine the
interstitial scenes, the dinners and champagne, the slow dances and undress, often
growing so involved in them that I never got around to thinking through to