The Strong One

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I should’ve been a priest, I’m thinking as I sit here with this college girl, hand on her thigh. God knows I’ve heard enough confessions—especially from college girls I’m trying to hit on, like this nursing student from some bumfuck Missouri town I picked up at the bar. I’m hot to get it on with her before my roommate gets back, but right now we’re on the couch at my apartment and I haven’t managed to make the right move yet. It’s dark except for streetlight fluorescence seeping in through the drawn curtains, just enough light to set the mood. We should be making out, but she’s acting like she’s in a confessional and I’m her goddamned priest. She’s telling me how she never wanted to go into nursing at all but how her parents made her, and how her mom, who’s an R.N., wants her to come back home after graduation to join her at the indigent-care clinic, and how she doesn’t want to go back home, ever, and how she never wanted to be a nurse. This girl with the wide round face and brown deer eyes and squat gymnast’s body is telling me she really wants to study dance, that’s all she’s wanted to do all her life, but she knows her parents would forbid her to change majors, and besides that she doesn’t want to disappoint them, it would crush them if she did, and she feels guilty for even thinking about it. Is that bad of me? she asks as I pet her thigh. Is that wrong of me? She’s asking like I’m not just a priest but also Ann Fucking Landers.

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I give her a hell-if-I-know shrug—because how the hell should I know? I’m just a college dropout who washes dishes at one of the college cafeterias, but I pretend to be a college student to hide the fact that I’m a loser. Even at twenty-three I look young enough to pass for a work-study student. I even still get carded sometimes. But right now, all I care about is one thing, and you know what that is. But I’ll wait. I’ll listen to her confession. I’m a patient guy. I’m like a spider waiting for the prey to fall into the web.

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You’re a real good listener, she tells me. I smile and nod and lift the album cover of London Calling from the coffee table. “Rudie Can’t Fail” is playing, all ska and blaring horns and good-time sing-along, Mick Jones and Joe Strummer laughing and singing like a couple of blokes stumbling out of a pub at closing time. I open the gatefold on the coffee table and rest a bag of weed on it. She pauses her confession to ask if we can listen to something different. Sure, I say, as I lick two Zig-Zags and stick them together. I pinch some weed into the conjoined papers and suggest she pick something from the stack of albums by my roommate’s sound system. She nods, steps toward the stack. But I don’t know much about music, she says.

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She thumbs through them, pausing to say Hmmm or Ahhh or Oh, until she pulls one out and holds it before her, displaying it for my approval. I like Santana, she says. Yeah, but Zebop!’'s not very good, I tell her, so she gives me a whatever shrug and tosses it back onto the stack while I set the doobie down, beside my beer, and drink her in. Her strong thighs and glutes look good in those cutoffs. She’s not built to be a dancer.

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She holds up another album. Bruce Cockburn? she says. Sounds painful!

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I smile and tell her it’s actually pronounced co-burn. Like the actor.

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Okay. She shrugs. I can tell she has no idea who Coburn, James Coburn, is. She’s probably never seen The Magnificent Seven or The Great Escape.

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If you say so, she says, but I like my pronunciation better.

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She giggles at that, so I laugh along and fire up the joint and suck in the sinsemilla.

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Is it any good?

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The weed? I hold my breath as I talk, let the weed scratch my lungs.

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No, silly. This album. Inner City Front.

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Oh. Yeah, I say, exhaling. It’s pretty good. Put it on.

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She slips the record out of its sleeve, leans the cover against one of the Sansui speakers, drops the needle on the first track, and prances back to me. I watch her move and think maybe she wouldn’t be such a bad dancer after all. Maybe a lap dancer.

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The reedy intro to “You Pay Your Money and You Take Your Chance” plays. What’s that instrument? she asks. Some sort of clarinet, I think, I tell her as I turn to face her and place the joint’s glowing ember into my mouth and with both hands on the back of her head, pull her close as she parts her lips. I blow the smoke steadily, not too fast, and watch her inhale. There’s something erotic about the shotgun.

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Mmmm, nice, she says, exhaling. Now let me do you. 

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I hand her the joint, tell her to be careful, and she smiles, holding the tip gingerly with the thumb and index finger of both hands, and returns the favor. Then we pass it back and forth, smoking it like normal, until it burns down to the roach.

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Track two, “The Strong One,” comes on. It’s a moody song, slower in tempo, heavier in synth, kind of trippy.

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We’re both leaning back now, letting the buzz weave its way into us, while Bruce Cockburn sings about how hard it is to be the strong one. My hand glides along her thigh, inching higher, moving in for the kill, when she turns, pulling her thigh out of reach, and gives me her wide-eyed, fawnish look.

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Oh my god, she says. 

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What? I say.

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That’s you!

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What? What’s me?

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You’re the strong one!

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What are you talking about? I extinguish the roach with a pinch and drop it into the ashtray.

 

She points with her chin toward the turntable. 

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That’s you, right? In the song. You’re the strong one. The one people turn to?

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Ah, I say. 

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It’s true, she says. That’s why you’re such a good listener! But it must be such a burden.

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She shifts again, moving closer to me.

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I return my hand to her thigh, squeezing it, and the next thing I know she’s put her hand on my thigh, too. She leans into me, whispers into my ear. Isn’t it hard, she whispers, to be the strong one?

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I turn to kiss her. She moans, breathless, opening, receiving my tongue. I move my hand higher. I’m almost to that sweet spot of her cutoffs when we hear a rumbling outside. Stumbling and voices growing closer with each step. The door flies open, and my well-inebriated roommate falls in. He’s got a couple of other guys and girls in tow. He’s cradling a twelve-pack under one arm. Everyone else is holding open cans.

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Hey, dude! my roommate shouts. He sounds like Jeff Spicoli.

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She scoots away, and I inhale deeply and let it out with a long sigh.

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We’re still partying, man. Hope you don’t mind. 

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He plops the twelve-pack on the kitchen table and shrugs out of his windbreaker.

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I wave him off. Not at all, man. Knock yourself out.

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What else could I say?

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He walks toward the turntable. 

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The fuck’s this shit? he says. Bruce fucking Cockburn?

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He pronounces the name wrong, like she did.

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She turns to me, says she should go, and “The Strong One” ends abruptly.

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We can go to my room, babe, I tell her, squeezing her thigh, trying to rekindle the fire, but she shakes her head and glances at the rowdy afterparty of invaders. Let’s par-tay! shouts one of my roommate’s entourage.

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The nursing student kisses my cheek, letting her hot breath linger in my ear like a seductive whisper.

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Isn’t it hard? she whispers. I hear a slight taunt in her voice as she pivots toward the door, twists with a backward glance and a flirty toodle-doo wave, and I’m thinking, Babe, you have no idea.