Strip Rodeo

They said Asher tried to hang himself with an extension cord.

It was something he joked about a lot. Hanging himself. The punchline being a blue rope or an extension cord. Why the rope had to be blue I don’t know, but he would bring it up whenever we went out drinking. Sometimes at birthday parties, barbecues, once at a baby shower, always when we smoked in the street alone. It made us laugh, these hangman jokes, but when our laughter died, so did speaking about it.

Now, we don’t speak anymore.

Last I heard, they said Asher wanted to crash his Chevy pickup truck into Callahan’s bar. Girls had been complaining. Said he was running his hand up and down their legs, inching into places he was not allowed to go. He would pull at the hems of their dresses, the back pockets of their jeans, anything he could get a hold of whenever they tried to walk away. At first it seemed like a misdemeanor. A drunken misunderstanding. The girls waved no. No, thank you. No to drinks from a stranger, but Asher bought them anyway. More for me, he would say, throwing back cocktail specials well into the close of happy hour. When it was time to go, he insisted on walking the girls home.

The owner said there had been complaints. Many girls felt unsafe.

Asher said he was finishing his drink, told the owner not to worry – he would walk the girls out, make sure they got home safe at night.

The owner said Asher didn’t understand. This last round was on the house.

Asher said he worked hard for his money, didn’t need any handouts.

The owner said it was time to leave.

They said Asher stood up right under the nose of the owner and eyed him up and down. Took his glass and tipped beer real slow over the table, the floor. He called the owner a faggot, the owner’s wife a lesbian. He slurped up a puddle of beer off the table, then called the owner’s wife a dyke instead. He took off his shirt and stumbled around the bar, saying fight, saying who wants a fucking fight before waving his hand at a passerby and shuffling down the steps into the night.

***

I can’t say where it all went wrong.

Maybe that time Asher didn’t listen to me and got into the Chevy Pickup at 2 AM to go smoke crystal meth with an old high school buddy on his farm. He was there for a week, lost his job and all, said he saw demons now, luciferian angels flapping behind his closed eyes. He stopped dunking his head under water.

Maybe it was that time Hazel, who he called the love of his life, tricked him into paying for the abortion of another man’s seed. Sometimes I can’t believe it: the way semen can grow baby arms and legs in a woman’s womb like those creature growing toys you would leave in water overnight until they were triple the size of your palm.

Maybe it was that time, years later, when Hazel, that same love of his life, now became the love of my life. We were drinking on the couch and watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on VHS, Asher, Hazel, and me. Hazel got up and excused herself, said she had a bad headache, maybe had some leftover Aspirin in the bathroom vanity.

I can’t remember if I looked at Asher or acknowledged him before I followed Hazel down the hall, past the bathroom, the exposed circuit breaker, down two steps and into the private world of her bedroom. We kicked off the covers and fucked on her hardwood floor while Asher sat there by his lonesome self, drinking beer in the living room and ringing with the sound of rain on the roof, rain gushing down the gutters, Marilyn Burns screaming for her life from a videotaped world inside the TV screen and my name in Hazel’s mouth, breathless and loud, filling all the cracks and the walls of her house.

I was the one who got her number first after all. Asher had no game. When he drank, he got real religious. Always thought the first woman he saw was a vessel from God – like Eve from the ribcage of Adam, he said a woman was a vessel made from man and belonged to man alone.

That night he watched her from a faraway booth, lapping at his beer like a kenneled dog. He kept saying one more drink, one more whiskey sour and it would be him and this pretty blonde in his Chevy pickup taking the scenic route down to the roadhouse for a while. But for all his talk, Asher never made it past the booth, never dropped down on the barstool next to the blonde lady smoking Parliaments at the bar – this girl called Hazel, always keen on sharing her smile in the evening light. I gave Asher her number because I was sure nothing would come of it.

But Hazel was a tease. She was always eager to show what it would look like if she sank her teeth into drinks and music, hinting at a night alone in her bite – her and her body with the lights off: she was like a shipwreck in the break, always sinking deeper into the waves, clutching at her bedpost and into the rock of my body, her nails like beached wood dragging deeper down the mast of my back, dropping deeper until she was completely lodged in this bed of island sand, arching her back into the throwback of an ocean-fuck, eager on thrusting in her room like she was shooting a sextape for all her walls of movie poster stars. Hazel had a massive kink for Jungian dreams and in this fantasy she said she was a cowgirl and I was the mechanical bull she had to mount. She said she wanted me to buck her until she lost all her clothes, buck her until she was naked and nameless on the floor, poised to go on every ride in this erected carnival of man where her boyfriend hangs himself like Judas in the living room and his best friend pounds her like a circus minotaur from behind.

***

They said ten minutes later Asher was back at Callahan’s bar. He had parked his truck in front of the entrance and just sat there, staring at the festoon lights hanging from the ceiling. Window down, cabin open to the night music outside. Men and women were laughing, smiling at each other and pointing him out from their chairs on the decked veranda.

He revved his car, spun his tires. He dropped the clutch and quickly braked again like a bull gearing up to launch head first into the entrance of the bar. Hazards on, blinking yellow-orange over the wet asphalt of the parking lot. He flashed his brights on and off, on and off. Drinks lit up, faces lit up, walls with mounted fish, cabinets lined with liquor, mixers and shakers, the cut fruit behind the bar – it all flashed alive and dipped again in a spark of shadow.

And in all corners of the bar there was light, then there was the shadow. Light, then the shadow.

Ask anyone and they’ll tell you Asher was just sitting there, red eyed and swaying behind the grip of his steering wheel, revving his Chevy pickup and flashing his headlights into the entrance of Callahan’s bar.

They said it looked like he was shooting laser beams from his car and everyone agreed, looking out, that he was shooting to kill.