When Augustine walked in, I could tell he wasn’t alone. He was wearing an eau de toilette.
“A. Vulsa,” he said, “I’d like you to meet my best friend and creative partner, Attrition.”
What he meant was soft-bullying. I’d read about soft-bullying on my social media devices.
I laughed, confused but appeasing. I had met Augustine at the gym a few weeks earlier; he was giving me personal training sessions at a really good rate because, he said, he truly cared about my form. He said good form was his passion, and he could tell that I had some fundamental problems.
Perching on my barstool I wanted to evacuate from nerves, but over the years I have learned to subordinate those feelings, to act as my own antacid. Immodium-I. Sweat stung at the back of my calves. I was my elevated heart rate, which I tried to slow down to a rhythm that better coordinated with the sexy R&B song that was playing on the jukebox.
“I’m sorry, I don’t think I understood you correctly!” I said, embarrassed.
Augustine sat down at the bar with his well-toned elbow next to my cosmo. His eyes reached mine. For a moment he had the look like he’d seen a permanent cockroach, but it faded into grim delight as he began to insult me.
“You don’t understand? Are your ears clogged? You don’t understand that word? Attrition? You’ve never met someone whose best friend was a tactic?” He asked these questions in rapid succession, giggling, not expecting me to respond. “Where’d you grow up again A. Vulsa?”
“I’m from Burlington, Vermont, actually” I laughed.
Augustine let out another chortle, and laughter, at any expense, is delightful. I was charmed by his white teeth and his eyes like a cow, but the wearing down was embodied all around us. I felt it standing impolitely close to me and was suddenly aware of the mild acne on my chin, wondering if it was visible under Attrition’s gaze, even in the bar’s low lighting. I went absent wondering this. I had gone.
“Sounds like a blast,” said Augustine.
“It was a really fun place to grow up actually,” I said.
On our last Thursday @ 11:30 appt, my femur bone wedged between us as he stretched out my hamstrings, Augustine told me that he had never noticed how pretty my eyes were, that they looked really good up close. He wore a scent that dropped onto me in nauseating glugs, a distracting power that was impossible to look at. I’ve always been one to avoid confrontation because I’m a pleasant person, and it’s well known that reversing your socialization is a major, irredeemable cause of hysteria. I told him ‘thank you’ politely and waited until he’d finished loosening the major muscle groups found in my legs.
The bar’s playlist switched over to Pony by Ginuwine. “Did you live on a farm?” he asked me. “You look like you come from Good Solid Farm Stock.”
“Oh do I?” I said. I took a gulp of my cosmo. I loved this track. “You look like you have a big dick.”
Perhaps I had meant you look like a big dick and my meaning was somehow lost in expression. Dick, you look big. I’d like a big look at your dick. Your dick’s like a big you. Look you dick, I’m big.
“Woah!” said Augustine. He went greasy all over. “Damn!” he said, “you move fast!”
“Well how fast do you want me to move?” Suddenly, I was speaking without really caring too much how it sounded. “I bet you’re packing some heat down there, huh?” I slipped in.
We were sitting so close, I feared I would be sucked in by the dark light of his insecure loneliness.
“Um. So Vermont huh?” he shuffled out.
“Yep, where are you from?”
“I grew up mostly in Jersey, but I came to the city a lot.”
“I bet you were a lady killer in high school huh?”
Augustine’s smile grew up his face and he became shy. “Oh I don’t know about that...I didn’t start working out until college.”
“I bet you were still cute. Did you go to your prom?”
“No, I didn’t really know how to talk to girls back then.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“I guess so.”
“Do you shave your pubic hair?”
When Augustine texted me that he wanted to grab a drink sometime, I was excited by the possibility of a real conversation.
“What?” he said.
“Oh sorry. I guess I’ll just have to wait to find out, right?”
Augustine asked the bartender for a Corona. “Man, you’re forward.” He squished his lime wedge into the neck of the bottle. “I guess you kind of have to be with your looks, huh?” There was a moment when neither of us moved or spoke, the kind of happy hour standoff seen in bars and restaurants all over the city. “I’m just kidding. I think you’re really pretty, actually.”
“You wanna fuck me in the mouth?”
“Jesus!”
I took a closer look at his face. Up until now I had been intimidated by his good looks, but I noticed a specific lack of specialness, his head emanating from his, admittedly, impressive traps as if it were questioning which muscle it was. Augustine, in this light, was not a unified being. He was cut.
Attrition had a funny way of acting in the moment. Finding my usual line of defense mysteriously absent, Attrition made empty aggressions towards its phantom, acting like a 3rd wheel, inserting itself into the conversation where it had no place. I was flattered.
“So you work at a magazine, huh? Who’d you have to blow to get that job?” The whites of Augustine’s eyes were a little bloodshot, like he had sat too close to the television set while watching cartoons.
“Just the doorman,” I said.
“I’m just kidding, I’m sure you’re a totally capable administrative assistant, or whatever you do.”
“Not really,” I said. I took an olive out of the bartender’s fruit tray and snacked on it loudly. I felt very relaxed, as if I had been wondering about an important moment in my life, and immersed in the stale rum of the bar, I had made my decision. If you’re horny, let’s do it, ride it, my pony.
A woman more beautiful than I am walked by. She glanced down at her thighs and her shoes, gave a quick tug to her top. She wished for a screen against Augustine and Attrition’s gazes, a landscape for them, apart from the body she lived in. She thought that they might be able to see the sick tan color of the tampon string that rested inside of her pants and her panties, that they could smell its stickiness and the onion-musk of the sweat that seeped from the crease of her inner thigh, her crotch. The walk from her seat to the ladies’ room stretched out before her like quicksand, slipping beneath her, her bowels performing their monthly cowardice, her fallopian tubes wrapping around her colon in an effort to express the most of her womanhood, the worst of it. She raised the corners of her mouth at Augustine as she passed him, a diplomatic answer to his unambiguous stare.
“She’s hot,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s kind of thick like you. I like a girl who can eat.”
“Oh that reminds me, how are you at eating pussy? Like on a scale of one to ten.”
Augustine chewed on the canker sore on the inside of his bottom lip. “Depends on the pussy,” he said. He’d been eating candy on his way home from the gym some afternoons; it was a terrible habit he knew he should stop.
“You know what I could use right now?” I dropped my head back for the last drops of my vodka drink. “A massage. I look tense.”
I flipped my debit card onto the bar and told the bartender that I would settle up for the both of us, slipping my head through the strap of my purse so that it landed between my breasts like the string of an archer’s bow.
“Come on, I know a place,” I told Augustine.
I had been to this place, Foot Reflexology Massage, a few times before. For twenty dollars you could sit in a vinyl recliner and they would touch certain places on your nervous system that made your pain go away. A lot of times, the person next to you would burp uncontrollably, a reaction triggered by each poke of their first metatarsal. I liked to watch subtitled news programs as my masseur worked on the scar tissue in my right shoulder, remnants from a motorcycle accident I had years ago.
“We’d like a couple’s massage,” I told the woman at the front desk.
She led us to a sort of loveseat at the back of the room that comfortably sat two. A young woman bent down to line sinks with plastic and fill them with hot, soapy water for our feet. I sat down and zipped off my boots while Augustine stood on the other side of the chair, nervously shifting from foot to foot, his hands hovering at his belt buckle ready to fend off a waist-high attack.
“What’s the matter, Augustine?” I asked with my eyes closed.
“Like...what are you doing?”
Augustine had told me once that he didn’t like being touched, that when his personal bubble was infiltrated, it was like his whole body was shattering. He didn’t mind it if he had some control, but if someone walked up behind him and affectionately placed their hand on his shoulder, he lost his shit.
“I’m getting a massage. You should sit down.” I patted the seat of the overstuffed recliner next to me.
“Nah, I don’t think so, I’m not really into…”
“Sit down,” I said. You really shouldn’t force people to face their phobias like this, but enough was enough.
Augustine slowly dropped his loose-fit-jeaned bottom onto the loveseat and bent his torso over his knees. He untied his shoelaces, though I could tell that his sneakers were the kind that you never tie but trust that they will cling to your feet through all of your adventures. His socks were brand new bright white, I liked that about him, and his feet were clean and skinny looking, like they didn’t eat carbs. He rolled up his pant legs and tested the water with the balls of his feet.
“It’s fucking hot!” he said. The young woman rolled her eyes and let the water run full-cold for a minute. Augustine had crumpled his body to one side of his chair, feet tucked up against his butt and knees hugged in. He had the frail look of an ancient mummy found bound in the fetal position for thousands of years, muscles immaterial, face stuck in terror. When his water was lukewarm, we both sat soaking in silence, our forearms grazing each other each time we adjusted.
Eventually, our masseurs came over, squirming their hands into new gloves and kicking their stools into position at our feet. As the man who was working on my body lifted my left foot out of the water, I took Augustine’s hand in mine, interlocking our fingers like the bones of a spinal column. He was now fully alone, friendless in my presence.
Our masseurs went in on our plantar muscles, the tips of their thumbs hot pokers on our points of tension. Augustine squirmed and attempted to break free of my grasp.
“Breath into it,” I said.
“Ow, fuck man, you’re hurting me!” he shouted. His masseur looked up, exasperated.
“Just relax Augustine, it’s fine.”
“No man, I don’t like this.”
But his squirming was beginning to slow. The therapeutic benefits of reflexology were starting to enter his system.
I attempted to feel his pulse through our palms. I wanted to see if, as Augustine’s body relaxed, I could feel electricity running between us. Was I a conductor?
“Woah dude, what are you doing? That feels weird!” His masseur was palpitating the direct center of his foot, the area associated with the stomach and love of the impermeable self. He looked at me in bewilderment. “Is it supposed to…” Suddenly, his abs and his diaphragm gave two small contractions, like hiccups that shook his whole body, down to his butthole. His masseur instinctively let go of his foot and reached for a plastic lined waste basket a few yards away. But it was too late, Augustine was finally losing it. All of the strongest muscles in Augustine’s abdomen drew into each other and stayed in contraction, pushing the contents of his stomach up until finally the sphincter at the top of his esophagus relaxed and released the bilious combination of protein shakes and chicken with greens that Augustine had been collecting in his system since 6AM that morning. He had almost entirely made it into the sink at his feet, but some puke still clung to the rolled up hems of his pant legs, globs of blackened spinach plastered to the denim like flings from an artist’s paint brush. Throw-up sank to the bottom of the sink in yellow-brown gloobs. The room smelled of beer.
The two masseurs looked at each other and then at Augustine with their eyebrows raised, not unkindly. The whole thing had been quick, Augustine had emptied the contents of his stomach in just one quiet heave. I gave his hand two pulsing squeezes, trying to comfort him. He tightened his grip and sustained it. It grew a new warmth and softness for me, sweating and loose like a child’s just waking up from his nap. I felt guilty for what I had done, but hoped that his pain was not arbitrary, that it would lead somewhere peaceful for both of us. With the back of his other hand Augustine wiped his mouth and tried to still the subtle shake of his torso.
“Oh fuck,” said Augustine. “Oh fuck.”