The Nix(146)

Tonight was one of those nights that would not have happened if she carried a purse, or keys, or money, or hang-ups regarding easy necking with motley strangers. She went looking for free kicks and found them so quickly, so easily: two men downtown who invited her up to their dirty apartment, where they drank whiskey and played Sun Ra records and she danced with them and swayed her hips and, after one of the men passed out, gave gentle kisses to the other until the weed was gone. The music was not hummable, was not really even danceable, but was excellent to kiss to. And it was fun until the guy unbuttoned his pants and said, “Would you do something with your mouth?” That the guy couldn’t even ask for it correctly, couldn’t even name the thing he wanted, was, she thought, pathetic. He seemed surprised when she said so. “I thought you were liberated,” he said, by which he meant that she should indulge all his various wants and like it.

Such were the expectations of the New Left.

She still felt the pot in her body, in her legs, the way her legs felt like stilts, harder and thinner and longer than normal sober legs. Step after westward step, through downtown and back to Circle, Alice walked a clownish walk that made her love her body, for she could feel her body working, could feel its various wonderful parts.

She was testing her legs when the cop saw her. She was hopscotching past an alley where his car was hidden and he called out to her: “Hey, honey, where ya going?”

She stopped. Turned to the voice. It was him. The pig with the ridiculous name: Officer Charlie Brown.

“What you been up to, honey,” he said, “out so late?”

He was large as an avalanche, a big pumpkin-faced enforcer of petty laws—panhandling, littering, jaywalking, curfew. The cops had lately been stopping them for minor infractions, stopping and searching them, looking for anything contraband, anything arrestable. Most of the pigs were idiots, but this one was different. This one was interesting.

“Come here,” he said. He leaned on the hood of his police cruiser. One hand on his nightstick. It was dark. The alley was a cave.

“I asked you a question,” he said. “Whatcha doing?”

She walked to him and stopped just out of arm’s reach, stared up at him, at the great imposing mountain of him. His uniform was a light blue, almost baby blue, and short-sleeved, too small for him. His chest was shaped like a keg and strained against the buttons. He had a light blond mustache that you couldn’t really see unless you were up this close. His badge was a five-pointed silver star directly over his heart.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just going home.”

“Going home?”

“Yes.”

“At five in the morning? Just walking home? Not doing anything illegal?”

Alice smiled. He was obeying the script she’d given him. One of the few things she admired about Officer Brown was his persistence.

She said, “Fuck off, pig.”

He lunged for her then, grabbed her neck and brought her to him, to his face, pressed his nose into her scalp and sniffed loudly right above her ear.

“You smell like weed,” he said.

“So what?”

“So I’m gonna have to search you now.”

“You need a warrant for that,” she said, and he laughed a laugh that was admittedly pretty fake-sounding, but she appreciated it, that he was trying. He spun her around and pinned her arm behind her back and walked her deeper into the alley, then forced her over the trunk of his cruiser. They’d been through this once before, only a couple of nights ago, and had gotten this far, bending her over the car, before Brown broke character. He had shoved her onto the car a little too forcefully—to be honest, she had let him shove her, had gone slack at the key moment—and when her cheek met the metal she was momentarily dazed, which is exactly what she wanted, a brief escape from her head.

But it had scared him, her face hitting the car like that. She bruised almost immediately. “Little piggy!” he had cried, and she admonished him for using their safe word, had to explain to him that their safe word was reserved for her only and it didn’t even make sense for him to use it. And he shrugged and looked at her penitently and promised to be better next time.

Here is what Alice had asked of Officer Brown: She wanted him to find her some random night when she didn’t expect it and act like he didn’t know her and certainly not act like they’d been carrying on a summer-long affair, just act like she was another hippie freak and he was another brutal cop and he’d take her into a dark alley and bend her over the trunk of his police cruiser and rip off her clothes and have his way with her. That is what she wanted.

Officer Brown was deeply perturbed at this request. He wondered why on earth she would want that. Why not have some more normal backseat sex? And she gave him the only answer that mattered: Because she had already tried normal backseat sex, but had yet to try this.

Her face against the car now, and Brown’s hand pressing hard against her neck—it seemed like he was going to go through with it this time, and she was not exactly enjoying it, but more like hoping she would enjoy it very soon, if he kept it going.

Officer Brown, meanwhile, was terrified.

Terrified of hurting her, but also terrified of not hurting her, or not hurting her in the correct way, not being good enough for her, terrified that if he wasn’t good enough at the weird kinky things she wanted from him that she’d up and leave him. That was the biggest terror of them all, that Alice would lose interest and go.