Flux

Patricia Q. Bidar

1. On a Sleepless Night, Your Slumbering Spouse Beside You

Ever think about how another student from the film department introduced us, and how I started calling you late at the adult theater you managed and how you’d chat with me between ticket sales? Ever think about the night I visited you at your apartment with all those Russian housemates? How someone brought out firecrackers, and I made a dumb joke about calling the police and was met with those hard, pale stares? How we went to your room and you said I shouldn’t joke about the police because of the firearms? How you told me you were a professional typist and played me the outgoing voicemail message and it was a funny take on your business name, “Finger King,” that had out of work pianists pounding out final papers for rich college students?

How you’d brought a six-pack into your room and how we started fooling around how you couldn’t get hard, and how just before you passed out I asked for cab fare and you gestured to your wallet and how all it contained was your driver’s license—I was suspicious enough to check your unusual last name but there it was on the government document—and some expired coupons for cat food? How a few days later I got you to come to my apartment and you couldn’t get hard and I asked if it was me and you said, not in a million years, and made me cum with your fingers?

And how you, carless like me, accompanied me on the airport shuttle to SFO for a visit to my folks? And how we got there early and started drinking beer and kissing and how I missed the plane even though we were sitting in the waiting area right in front of the boarding gate?  And how you ghosted me for real after I returned, and I obsessively called your number from pay phones all over the city? 

Remember how you kept that stupid Finger King/Pianists outgoing message on there? And how, one rainy night in front of the La Brea Tar Pits, I called you one last time and your outgoing message was clearly for your girlfriend, who had a Catholic-sounding name like Mary Theresa or Catherine Anne? How you pleaded with her, weeping, in your outgoing voicemail message to give you another chance? How you swore I was just a lost soul whom you’d helped at school and who wouldn’t stop calling you and how you promised you were still pure for her, for Mary Tess?

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2. The Finger King’s Best Times Are Behind Him

In his salad days, he’d studied literature at Santa Monica College. His professors had been encouraging, especially once they heard he was from San Francisco and had once managed an XXX movie theater on Market Street; that he’d known Hunter S. Thompson, then famously serving as the night manager at the Mitchell Brothers on O’Farrell.

The Finger King had been a big drinker of beer or vodka shots out on the patio with his Russian roommates or every night alone in his room. He had a girl back home, a nice Catholic girl who was saving herself for marriage. That was okay with the Finger King.

He practiced on pretty, insecure girls from the theatre or film department. Grew adept at eliciting orgasms using his hands. The joke was that The Finger King was also the name of his business. He was a nimble typist, and prepared papers for other students.

Every month, he’d take the Greyhound back home to San Francisco. Church, then brunch with his widowed father and of course Mary Theresa. “I’ll leave you kids to visit,” the old man would say after they ate, and retire to his room for a lie-down. The Finger King and Mary Theresa would make out with The Wide World of Sports turned up.

The Finger King grew up without a mother. This pulled a certain kind of woman to him and would for most of his life. One such woman, twelve years his senior, became his wife and the mother of his children. He thinks of those adult theater days as his misspent youth. “But I sure had fun!” he always adds with a wink and a grin before his mouth settles back into its slot-like form.

Now, alone in the car on I-5 after driving his daughter to college in Berkeley, he thinks of a certain blue-eyed girl from the film department. How she used to call him from phone booths all over town. He never answered. He’d been so loyal to Mary Theresa he’d never done anything with these girls but fool around.

He can’t recall the name of that little gal from the film department, with her dimples and sad eyes. The way she’d curl her body around him as he used his fingers on her. How he’d put her in a cab afterward and return to his vodka and his tippity-typing. Maggie, was that it? Marnie? Suddenly, with the marriage and child rearing part of his life behind him, it seems crucial for him to remember. He has to pull over at Mission San Miguel and pace the hushed flagstones there, a self-pitying sob caught in his throat; it nags at him so much. 

He’d had a cat back then, too. At least, he thinks he did.

Bio: Patricia Q. Bidar is a working-class writer from San Pedro, California. She lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area. Connect with Patricia at her website (https://patriciaqbidar.com).