FUCK THE AMERICAN SICKNESS (PART 1)

“We go where we like

  We got overtime
  We get paid to rattle our chains” – Pink.

I wasn’t looking for anybody the night I met her. It’s always the same, and it’s always different. It was a chilly bastard of a February Chicago night in East Rogers Park, a block from Lake Michigan. I, a Scotland-born native, was sitting at the bar of some wannabe-stylish dump two blocks from my W Morse Avenue address. America was a frigid, hostile, unwelcoming environment, and not just because of the glacial weather. I was working as a caregiver (as carers are called in America) and was in and out of work as clients died or were hospitalised. My bank balance went up and down accordingly. I just didn’t seem to be able to get a foothold in the country, clinging on by my ragged bleeding fingernails, and it was destabilising and demoralising. I was in and out of work, in and out of my mind with stress and worry.

Ethan, an eccentric, stylishly-threaded, twirl-beard-moustache man in his early twenties, was playing an acoustic guitar to a couple of his young male pals and singing along. He wasn’t particularly good, but he was such a decent and gentle guy nobody said anything. I was chatting to, and being chatted up by, the sorta-attractive black African barmaid of around 30, the only woman in the weeknight place. Gently increasing teasing dark chocolate tickles, this and that, mentions of looking for a handsome man. No problem. I was half receptive, guarded, narrow-eyed, weary, wary, only half there. I hadn’t been with anybody since leaving my ex-wife eighteen months before, and it would be very easy to walk away from any too-difficult situation.

A young white woman came in and sat at the bar a few yards away. Looked to be early-twenties, red shoulder-length hair, very slight acne, average attractive, glasses, nerdy-looking, heavy black jacket bundled against the horrible skincutter lake wind. Ordered some spirit, sat and sipped it, stared straight ahead. I wasn’t paying much attention, half-calculating which barmaid directions the evening could end up going in, deep smothering snow tramped to new intimacy and beyond. My previous breakup had been difficult, prolonged, incredibly painful, devastating. I was now stuck in a foreign country where I knew very few people and had no real support system, with winter cold feet and a frozen heart and anchor baby blues. Just another lost lonely immigrant with dead American dreams in a country full of them, and boo…fucking…hoo.

So I partly spoke to the barmaid without hope or lust or trust, fuck it, what the Hell. I was just so, so fucking tired. It seemed like I had been like that forever; one foot in front of another, one weary day following the next. There would have been nightmares, but cheap booze was keeping my dreams at bay, gutrot rivers of Cobra and Natural Ice and Icehouse keeping me half-alive through the overwhelming, intolerable pain of it all.  42 years old and living in a shitty bedsit in a building full of bedbugs and cockroaches and lunatics and freaks and students, just living the scream.

I was in the most racially diverse neighbourhood in one of the most racially segregated cities in America. But really…where the fuck was I, and how the fuck did I end up here? None of it made any sense anymore, if indeed it ever had. There didn’t seem to be any point in looking for answers, so I didn’t even try. I was just totally lost, low, drifting, sitting at bars, wondering what the fuck was going on. I would put on Big Country on the jukebox of whatever dive I was in, that famous guitar-bagpipe sound reminding me of far away, homesickness lodged in my throat. As they played In a Big Country, I sang quietly along, “You can’t stay here with every single hope you had shatteeeeeeeerrrrreeeeed,” goosebumping. I thought of Stuart Adamson wandering lonely as a depressive cloud round this too-big country, far from his Fife roots, feeling like a nothing speck on an infinite black nowhere map, finally hanging himself in Hawaii. I could totally understand it, and feel it, but suicide was not an option.

Anyway. I felt a bit bad for the new arrival that nobody was talking to her, so went across to have a conversation. Was just in the mood for one, what the fuck, beat going back to my lonely shoebox and looking from my bedroom window out at the sodium-etched parking lot of Leona’s, the fast food joint poorly disguised as a restaurant next door. I wasn’t even really consciously thinking about sex, despite the barmaid’s come-ons. It was so long since I’d had it, and I was so burned out and alienated from my body, that fucking seemed to be on a different, long-gone planet. Hope doesn’t spring eternal in the middle-aged jaded breast. I got my drink and went up to the young woman, said hiya, she bid me sit down, and I did. Under the frowning watchful eye of the barmaid, we started an interesting conversation about this and that, you know how that goes.

Turned out her name was Ryanne, she was a Minnesotan, and she was a student at the nearby Catholic diploma mill, Loyola University. 24 years old, she had gained some sociology qualification and was now studying for some other degree. Made a change from the students I occasionally met studying English because they had read Harry fucking Potter. She was an Eternal Student type I suppose, racking up huge debts and future career prestige points, studious, serious, earnest, but not without humour. Heard the Scottish accent, intrigued, half-understanding, asking me to repeat, listening, nodding, debating, frowning, disagreeing, shrugging, agreeing, smiling. She was a very smart cookie. I have always been good with the extremely intelligent ones, though, like every other kind of woman, they bring a unique kind of trouble and beauty with them: hips, lips, tits, power, curves, hot inescapable riptides, lovely voice waterfalls, effortless oestrogenerated knowledge…loneliness cures or causes.

The barmaid faded into the background as earlier-evening wallpaper. Our conversation was one of those instantly charged oh-fuck-aye ones, where you both just stumble over new things to say to add strokes to the developing communication picture. Loops of alcohol, illuminations, prickly-skintalk. When the place we were in shut, we snow-crunched round the corner to the 4am-closing Oasis for a couple more drinks and some real lowlife divebar atmosphere. Gigi, the best barmaid in Chicago, was on, expertly juggling her usual load of comedienne, beerslinger, psychologist, mother confessor, artlover, and general zero-bullshitter.

But even despite the hours we had been talking for, Ryanne was still giving me a hard time. She would throw some hardwall feminist statement at me, cultures clashing and genitals opposing, and eventually I started getting tired of it and started fucking with her towards the end of the night. What the Hell, what did I have to lose? She had taken her jacket off and was wearing a tightfit grey kneelength dress and tights, ample breast curvature and vavavoomocity, slight babyfat but, given her age, that was acceptable and understandable and sexy and grabbable. “You have nice tits,” I said, smiling, tipping my can of PBR she had bought for me towards her. “Th…thank you,” she said, fazed, not expecting it, but, like any woman, taking a blunt, sincere body compliment where she could get it.

Then it was time to leave. We stood outside the front door, all pretences gone; the night could go anywhere or nowhere at all. “Well Ryanne, it was nice to meet you. I don’t know what to do, I think I’m gonnae go home…” “Or you could come over to my apartment and I could make you a grilled cheese sandwich,” she said, oddly sincerely, and that was it. Who was I to turn down a free cheese toastie? We walked the few blocks over to her building on Lunt, near where that rubbish rapper Bang Da Hitta got his car blown up, near the haunted childhood stomping grounds of dark-minded children's illustrator Edward Gorey, and less than a mile from where pathological pervert photographer Vivian Maier lived in her declining years.

We went into the building and into the ancient-seeming elevator, crashing the concertina-metal inner door behind us, then up a few floors, batter and clang and clatter and bang, to where she lived. She let us into her small crowded bedsit, even smaller than mine, mostly dominated by her mattress lying directly on the floor. Smalltalk, “Nice place,” then on some unspoken signal we started tearing our clothes off, kissing, licking, eyefulling, grabbing, sliding out of our underwear under the dim voyeur light of the window in the wee small hours of Chicago.

So much for the grilled cheese sandwich.

She looked good naked, off-white smudged against the dim tracing light, goddess Venus envy or something, me sucking on and licking her neck, and we stood and kissed hard, grabbing handfuls of each other, me cupping her lovely arse, her pulling gently at my cock, guiding ourselves down onto her bed. And I was right about her tits, too, nice perfect handfuls. We rolled and writhed and kissed on the bed, her playing with me a bit, but I wasn’t really feeling it. Too drunk, half-hard. I told her to go down on me. She shook her head. “I don’t like the dynamic,” she said flatly. “Well you’d better get down there, or we’re going nowhere.” She hesitantly went towards my uncut cock and started sucking and licking at it.

After a while, I was hard enough, and I told her it was alright. She quickly pushed herself back up the mattress to be level with my head: “That’s the most dick I’ve ever sucked!” she said in a sort of confusing, confused anguish, staring at my erection, as if she was surprised she had just had a cock in her mouth. Which she was, as it was the first time she’d ever sucked one, but right then I wasn’t contemplating cocksucking politics: I just wanted some fucking pussy. I wasn’t expecting this, but now that I was here I was sure as fucking Hell having some. Which I got, after slipping on a condom she gave me, giving it to her hard and sloppy. It wasn’t totally amazing, half-numb-drunk-dick, but it was good enough, I suppose, after a long self-imposed dry spell. You can’t expect too much from a ride if you have been drinking, and don’t have any previous experience of your sexual partner.

But we still exchanged numbers and I texted her and we hooked up again a couple of days later. This time I made sure I was stone cold sober and did her right, throwing her some good slip-and-slides, hot and wet and hard and heavy, fucked her brains out. For somebody as intelligent as she was, it took a while. After it she floated down to the bed post-orgasm, eyes closed, pretty face blissful, slightly sweaty and flushed with sexblood. “I wanna be fucked like that all the time,” she sighed contentedly, snuggle-cuddling her face into the pillow. 

It was a sentiment I could help her with.

(So that’s the way it was for the next six sweaty, sex-soaked weeks. I would walk over to her place on Lunt from Morse during the early evening when I got back from work or she got back from college, one block of building orgasm anticipation, ring her up, get buzzed in the front door. Then over and over again into the rickety ancient elevator, batter and clang and clatter and bang, fourth floor and into Ryanne’s bedsit. Catch-up smalltalk, backnforth chitchat, then on into the wet warm meat of the rising sexual matter. Kiss, strip, fuck, sizzle, scrape off the ceiling, heartbatter, rest, rinse, repeat. A 43-night-long erotic bedbound international slowdance. I quoted the Smiths song What She Said to her: "What she read, all heady books/she'd sit and prophecise/it took a tattooed boy from Birkenhead/to really really open her eyes"...and she agreed it suit the situation.

Surprised the powerful fucking heat we were generating didn’t speed up the transition from bitter, bare-branched Chicago winter to fertile blooming spring, moans and curses and combined body heatwaves driving and melting snow before them, a new early unseasonal change of warm weather front confusing traditional nature, but no denying the sudden climate change, flipped into blinding fire, steam-spitting snowbanks melting and flooding the groaning lake, grindcracky icechunks breaking free of their waterfront moorings and sailing off to Wisconsin or somewhere, not a footprint to be seen, a sudden devastating abundance of green on trees, bushes instantly blossoming as floral tribute to our fucking, our joined body smells mingling with the disturbed, bittersweet, tangy Lake Michigan air, making the other four Great Lakes jealous, one with the wind and sky, that perfect girl going into the redface quickbreath lipbite o-zone, soft pink tectonic plates grinding and slapping and pushing and rubbing against each other to create hot new continents from the slow-gushing spring of her comesoaked pussy, premature July 4th meteor fireworks lighting up the bedazzled sky and tame reflective dark water surface, gullcries and fuckgrunts meeting and mating in the vibrating night lake air to send news of nothing but multiple-orgasmic satisfaction to Canada or maybe to nowhere but fuck all and beyond as I shot my load time and time and time again.

That sort of thing.)

It wasn’t all just sex. I had to let her get used to my accent. That was the problem with American women: you had to train each new one to understand you, and it took some time. She got into it more and more. And random moments: we would sit and play music on her PC on Youtube, plugging sonic generation gaps. She would play me Janelle Monae and Cee Lo Green, and I played her old Two-Tone and The Pogues. Like half of the city she claimed to have some sort of Irish ancestry, hence her Celtic name, though she wasn’t exactly sure what or who or where or when; typical American, in other words. And I would sit naked on the computer chair across from the mattress looking at her in the dying daylight, satisfied, such a high-voltage smile, all the heat in the world caught up in one bedhaired unselfconscious beauty. I didn’t know who she was or who I was or why I was there with her, she was there somehow, just-fucked naked under the covers, yawning, sleepy, cat got the cream, in three dimensions, four dimensions, so real I couldn’t touch her, vivid and in her prime, receding wet crackles slipping into the woodwork, my five senses working overtime but failing to process the overwhelming female information in front of me, two people in a room somewhere for some reason, no filters between us, virtually a reality overdose, no thoughts in the orgasm-emptied head, half-smiling at her, frowning, confused, scared to breathe any harder in case the labia mirage vision scattered to the four winds of no-coming frustration forever.

Ryanne had only ever been with one guy before me. They had both been virgins, and he had turned out to be gay before it was even mandatory. He was studying someplace in Europe. She would send him anguished, still-sorta-in-love emails. The fact he was gay explained why Ryanne was into anal sex, him probably wanting to avoid the woman-hole and fantasise, and she let me try it for the first time in my life. When I was younger women just weren’t into it, and many still aren’t. Exit only, aye right, heard it before. So this was an amazing new experience for me. “I haven’t had it…much,” the good Catholic girl told me. Ryanne was excited to be doing something new with me, eagerly shoving the lube into my hands.

I asked her if she wanted me to use a condom from the box I had stolen from Dominick’s on W Howard. She shook her head. “Different plumbing.” Which, of course, I knew, but I just thought she might not have wanted an arseful of hot Scottish come. Apparently this was not a problem. She had no STDs, and neither did I, so bugger it. “Start slow.” And so start slow I did, edging my lubed up cock into her doggystyle, looking and listening for signs of pain or distress from her, but none came. So I carefully and slowly started fucking her hot, tight wee arse…and I fucking loved it, as did she. I built up speed and penetration depth until I was fucking her quite hard, getting balls deep, trying to drive my cock further in and not being able to, frustrated for some reason, cursing bonestruck anatomy and not even knowing why the fuck I wanted to get deeper into her. Her arse was just as tight as her pussy. My cock was rock fucking hard, and I had to slow myself down, savouring the hot wet tightness, the sensation of lubed skin gliding up her, her tiny occasional moans, the whole of Chicago suddenly having shrunk to the exact size of this skintight room. I made it last as long as I could, stopping, starting, stopping, starting, but it was just way too amazing a sensation to fuck with, and after a few messy minutes I came hard as fuck in her, flooding her tight wee young American arse with wave after wave of prime Scottish semen. It was one of the best orgasms I had had in a long time, the formerly taboo aspect of the fuck having helped in that arena, and I slumped quivering onto the bed.

Flushfaced, Ryanne muttered “I feel weird up in my business,” and went into the bathroom to sit on the toilet and drip and fart out lube and spunk as I grinned and was inwardly joyous at another conquered sexual horizon. “You have literally fucked me in the ass,” she said through the open bathroom door, and I thought that was one of the funniest fucking things I had ever heard. This wasn’t anything perverse of too off-the-wall, but it was new to me, and it was fun, and it was hot, and it was cool, and it was totally fucking brilliant. You had to love nerdy American students who took it up the arse, and love them often.

Because she had only ever had one somewhat dubious sexual partner, Ryanne obviously didn’t really know what she was doing sexwise, but she got better in the time we were together. I just praised and encouraged her, as any decent lover would, and she got more confident. She got pretty decent at rimming. Her blowjob skills went from zero to decent. The first time I came in her mouth she retched, her eyes bulged, and she ran naked to the toilet with her hand clamped over her mouth to spit into the sink. The male pig part of me thought that was a wee bit funny, though I made sure not to laugh. Wouldn’t have gone down too well.

But like a true trouper, she persevered.  She went to swallowing, then to waxing lyrical about the feeling of having hot come pumped into her mouth as she washed it down with water – “That is such a weird sensation, weird but hot” – to not even rinsing before falling blissfully asleep. I got to fucking her mouth like a pussy as she lay there, and she wasn’t complaining. One late night she sucked my cock on the pier down by the Loyola dorms, seemingly scarcely able to believe she was doing it: “Yes, this is happening.” She didn’t finish me, though, despite my protestations, so I wanked myself off the side of the pier and ejaculated white spraying ribbons to be dissipated by the lake wind and fall like foam on the cold dark water.

She didn’t want to suck my balls initially, but I got her to do it. On a more general front, away from oral, she wasn’t confident, saying “It’s not my forte,” or “I’m not very good at it” when I got her to ride me topside or try out some other positions. I just encouraged and urged her on, selflessly giving her my body and cock to practice her blossoming sexual skills on, and things got better. There were some other things we did, but modesty prevents me from being too graphic. You understand, I’m sure.

When I first met Ryanne she was almost a stereotype, an angry young feminist who would rant about men. She played mixed basketball at college, which kept her legs looking great. She told me she would slap out at the genitals of men who had the ball when she was passing them. I pointed out to her that this was a form of sexual assault, coming from a need, conscious or otherwise, to make contact with male genitals. Also that it was total fucking bullshit, and that she would not like it done to her.

Sometimes we would drink and a strange, vicious, irrational gleam would come into her eyes. She would square up to me for no good reason, ready to hit me. I told her she could do it if she wanted to, but I would hit her back. I have never hit a woman in my life, but I would be damned if I would have some angry young woman hitting me for no good reason whatsoever after the shit I had been through over the last few years. She would back down, choppy storms disappearing behind her dazed clearing eyes, seeing that I wasn’t kidding. Women commit domestic violence just like men, something which conveniently gets brushed under the carpet in this modern women-are-pure bullshit feminist fantasy era.

As for the age-related dynamics of the whole thing, well, she told me daddy, who was a corporate manager cunt in Minnesota, had been a drinker, but had stopped now. It’s easy enough to work things out for yourself. Maybe there was a bit of daddy resentment anger coming through in her, but that was fuck all to do with me. She was weirdly obsessed with violent American women, and would do research on them. I don’t know if that was to try and understand her own violent impulses, or was self-projection, or jealousy, or whatfuckingever, but I really wasn’t interested. I just wanted to fuck her then go home, and she could keep whatever other weird psycho shit she was storing up to herself. So it never got violent, but the undercurrent was always lurking there with her when she had a drink or two. But I just wasn’t having that stupid shit for one single second, and she knew it.

So that’s basically the way it was for six thawing-weather weeks. Drink and talk and fuck and fuck and fuck, filling condom after condom after condom, having orgasm after orgasm after orgasm, sweating drop after drip after drop. I’m not hugely into using condoms, and had a wee bit of trouble maintaining an erection once or twice. I kept myself going by imagining some very illegal, immoral, and very, very fun things.

I certainly paid Ryanne back in the oral stakes. We would get naked on her mattress (she never came across to my place; just a rhythm method we got into) and I would kiss and lick and smell her feet, then lick slowly up her thighs, taking soft nippy skin mouthfuls, sucking, licking, biting…pause over her sex to smell that sweet young getting-wetter pussy…personal cunnilingus fetish in action…then oh-so-gently graze her engorged clit with my tongue, licking up and down her labia, diving my tongue into her, cawing gull swooping into the ocean after a fish or something poetic like that, lightly sucking her clit, then licking my right middle finger and sliding it up her, palm up, stroking her internal G-spot as I lazily orally fucked her, nuzzling her peach-tasting cunt, smearing her juices over my face, like a desert soaking down rain, and on and on and into the moan-torn night, licking sucking fingering as the digital clock to the left of my head on the windowsill slowly ticked the red electric minutes by, half an hour, forty minutes, her come dripping down my wrist, multiple orgasm comecoma, her face hot with sexblood, eyes screwed tight shut, “Oh shhhiiittt,” bucking and arching and shuddering, nipples hard as bullets, soaked brown bedclothes looking black under the reflective voyeur moonlight, loving the power I was having over her, swearing blind she would give up before I did, getting a fucking neck cramp at the odd angle, finger tiring, fuck am I doing, but no, there she came time and time again, until finally, at the trembling end of the world she stiffened shook slumped sweatily to the bed, no more aftershocks, worn down and climax empty. “You got them all out of me.” And I would grin invisibly between her roasting soaked thighs and sit up and smile and look her in the brown eyes as I lazily licked her come from my liquid-wrinkled fingers. “I never knew I could come so much,” she said to me in overawed wonderment when she had eventually cooled off a bit. “Well then you’ve learned something,” I chuckled, and cuddled up beside her, loving the sensation of her orgasm-heated body next to mine, her arrhythmic thumping heart testament to her prolonged unrelenting arousal. The sex we were having was a revelation to her, and she was amazed at the hard wet climatic secrets she had been keeping from herself all her life. She would never be quite the same again, and that was very much for the better.

The shift in this young woman, from the time I met her until the time we parted, was almost startling. When we met she was angry, bitchy, cunty, vicious, waspy. After a couple of weeks of daily hot sex and soaking orgasms she was an endless slowflow river of sated sighs, big grins, neck-cricks, relaxed yawns and stretches. Her inexperience made her say things that other, more experienced women would have been more cool about. “I feel like I won the lottery.” Of my penis: “I can’t stop touching it.” And she certainly couldn’t. Of some altercation during basketball: “Can’t we just hug it out? I’m too happy.” It was bemusing, and it was poignant, and it was beautiful, like some reverse-sexes modern version of The Graduate.

This charming young woman was finally getting good sex for the first time in her young life, and it had changed her spiky temperament beyond all recognition. She came from a sexually repressed background, and said her parents would just change the channel whenever sex came on the telly. I couldn’t help but think, for the millionth time since arriving on these insane alien shores, that if America fucked more and hated less it would have been a much better and more sane place to live.  Still, I was glad to be doing my small personal bit towards Chicago societal stability – a city so horribly violent certainly needed it, after all.

I admit, the whole experience was therapeutic for me too. It was nice to be so desired for a change. A black friend of mine from my building, Rudy, remarked one time in a local bar that I was glowing. And he was right. Loneliness banished, I was having a good time for the first time in far too long. Being able to make this young woman so happy, and so sexually satisfied she purred, was a sorely-needed ego and self-esteem boost.

But it was never going to last. We both knew that right from the start. The age difference was the main thing, of course. She was embarrassed to have me meet her friends, though they wanted to, so I never did. As for her parents, there was no chance – not that I would have ever wanted to meet them anyway. She started to get annoyed about “us seeing each other casually – or whatever the Hell it is we’re doing!” But the fact we were fundamentally two very different people was a huge part of it. We were from different countries, different cultures, different mindsets, different places and times. They only thing we truly had in common was mutual orgasms. She was a nice, fundamentally decent person, but we just weren’t all that compatible, in many ways.

Her drunken rages and boring collegiate, sisters-together horseshit were really difficult to take. She was a fiery, feisty feminist out of bed, but the minute we got naked she got submissive, experimental, pliable, doing mostly whatever I wanted, a wet fucking ceasefire in the eternal unwinnable sexes battle. Of course, I would do things she wanted to try too. I could call her a bitch as I fucked her hard and she wasn’t bothered. Women will let you away with a lot if you can make them come. I was far older, had been through a lot in my life, and to listen to her immature, bitter-professor-regurgitating manhater shit was really more than I could bear.

After about a month or so I wasn’t even really into the whole thing that much anymore. I just got into the daily habit of walking a block to get laid, then going home in the morning. It certainly beat loneliness, but the cracks were becoming more evident. And she was starting to get attached, too, sitting on her bed crying, “And I bet you’re tired of it, huh?” I just shrugged and looked at her blankly. I was not really emotionally involved in the whole thing from start to finish. I had never regarded it as anything more than just a fling, as we both had made perfectly clear right from the start. These things take time, and we had none. So the whole situation was long overdue a mercy killing, really.

The last time we fucked was on the morning of Saturday, the 17^th of March. “It’s already been the best St. Patrick’s Day ever!” she gushed, then went off to meet her friends to watch the river getting dyed green. She was meant to contact me, and never did. She basically stopped seeing me for mental and emotional self-preservation reasons, which was totally understandable. It was clearly getting too much for her, and I didn’t blame her for cutting it dead. So that was that. Nothing dramatic, nothing anti-climactic, no love lost, no love found. I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart and wankbank for her. There’s more than that to it, but isn’t there always? Fuck it. I gave her the prose poem fond kiss goodbye I like to give women I have been with, and that was that.

I bumped into her again a year later, in the Oasis, when she was sitting alone at the bar. We talked, and I said I was going to put some music on the jukebox, asking her if she had any requests. She asked for something by Van Halen. I put on Hot For Teacher which, when I came back, she said was a good description of me. At first, the conversation was amiable enough. I had been working part-time in a nursing home in Morton Grove a few miles away. I had been promised full-time hours but the head nurse there, a bitchy black woman, had given the full-time hours available to a Latino woman who had started after me. It was straight, obvious racism in the workplace.

I was a white man in a foreign country doing a job normally done by black, Latino, Asian or Filipino women, for the most part. A white man was rare as hen’s teeth in an environment like that, and the racial animosity came out here and there. I talked about this, and Ryanne went off on me, about how black people could never be racist, because they had no power, and blah blah blah. You know the usual laughable American white middle-class ‘woke’ bullshit. Then she flounced off out the door, angry as usual, probably needing a good shafting. I only ever saw her once more after that, in a park down by Lake Michigan a few months later, but she didn’t see me and I didn’t bother approaching her. No point. That chapter of things was over and done with. After all, I could never be with somebody, no matter what age, who had a head full of The American Sickness.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Special thanks to Lauren Young for allowing me the use of the beautiful and erotic photo at the top of this post. She's a fine pianist; check out her work on Youtube and Instagram:

 https://www.instagram.com/lauren_young_music/

PS: Ryanne finally did make me the grilled cheese sandwich, after we had been together for two weeks. She made me fucking work for it.

PPS: I have changed Ryanne’s real name/home state/physical appearance/college major in this piece to protect her identity. No humans were harmed during the making of this reproduction.