Hooking Up
You answer the door half-naked,
clearly expecting someone younger,
thinner and porn star perfect.
But it’s late, you need head,
and your “roommate” is away.
The shrine to your boyfriend,
this roommate, on the mantlepiece
gives it all away.
You come back from brushing your teeth,
unbuttoning your jeans,
see me at the altar figuring it out.
We will do this on the couch
so as not to soil the sacred bed.
No scents, stains, stray hair on a pillow.
We won’t kiss.
As I suck you, you watch the clock,
the door, the photos on the mantle.
Looking anywhere but at me.
Mutual satisfaction was our arrangement
and you comply with a look of disgust
then ask me to leave.
I pass your boyfriend in the hallway.
Hair ruffled, zipping my pants,
licking the last of you off my lips.
I picture you in the bathroom
frantically rinsing your mouth.
Your boyfriend knows everything.
I feel his eyes drilling
into the back of my head,
so I turn and blow him a kiss.
This is not my problem.
Accomplice
In this dream, people are robbing your house,
and although you deserve it, I double back
to the park where I last saw you.
My good deed. My last grab at good enough.
You walk over, wrap your arms around me,
say, “You loved me more than I loved you.”
And the park is suddenly a disco,
and you’re drunk and kissing someone else.
So I drive back by your house, catch the robbers
in the act, tell them to take anything they want.
A Fever Behind Both Ears
(Nelle’s Dream)
I went to bed with my glands swollen, little lumps behind both earlobes, red hot to the touch. In a feverish dream, bolts pushed through my neck, my limbs atrophied, my voice turned to grunts. And then I was walking the streets of Monroeville like the Bride of Frankenstein, scaring the children, their parents following me with torches and pitchforks. In the middle of town, Truman was sitting on the courthouse lawn smoking a cigarette with Johnny Carson, re-telling that story he made up with Tennessee about autographing some man’s penis in a restaurant.
Then Gore Vidal slithered by, singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Marilyn drag, trailed by a line of beautiful boys in tuxedos with jewelry draped over their arms. Truman pitched a fit, as you would expect, and told me I should do something about it, that Gore was, once again, humiliating him. And I said something horrible. I told him that since I was only good enough to be his secretary, he could handle his own ego pissing contests. Or maybe he could call up Lee Radziwill and have her do it for him because surely she needed a little more press. I declare! Oh, I don’t know what possessed me. I am not a mean person.
Then the dream shifted, and I was in my Eastern Air Lines uniform standing behind the ticket counter, but in a wheat field in Kansas. Truman came mincing up to me, waving his little Tyrannosaurus rex arms, telling me I shouldn’t worry about the rumors going around that he’d actually written To Kill A Mockingbird because it was a good literary mystery and would keep people talking about us forever. Out of spite, I told him that maybe he should read my second book, In Cold Blood. He started screaming and trying to crawl over the counter, but he was too short to pull himself up.
And then the dream shifted again, and I was inside Studio 54, and although I never went there, it seemed very real. Truman was pudgy, bald, and wearing thick glasses, draped across a sofa in the balcony trying to recreate his come-hither pose from the dust jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms, while that wild-haired spider monkey Andy Warhol took endless Polaroid pictures. The floor was littered with them, all in various states of development, but try as he might, Andy wasn’t genius enough to transform Truman from the leprechaun he’d become into the pouting pretty boy he used to be.
The dream shifted one last time, and I was walking back down the street in Monroeville with Margaret Mitchell. She was tiny and a little drunk, just like Truman. She said there are two ways to become a literary icon: you write one good book and keep your mouth shut, or you write a few good things and a whole lot of bad ones, but become infamous for all the things you’ve said and done even if they aren’t true. I told her Truman and the truth always were like ships passing in the night, and she thought that was funny. A taxi pulled up, and she pretended to throw herself in front of it before getting inside and speeding off into the night. As I turned to go up the stairs to my house, Truman was standing on the porch. Not the sad troll he became, but the precocious five-year-old I remembered as a child. Wide-eyed and frail, always talking too much, but back then it sounded like music. Like summer. When the center of the universe was a knothole in a tree and everything we could have ever wanted——chewing gum and Indian head pennies, a pocket watch and a knife——was waiting there for us.
Collin Kelley is a poet and novelist from Atlanta, GA. His most recent work is Wonder & Wreckage: New & Selected Poems, and he is the co-editor of White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology. He would have loved to be a fly on the wall during the Bette Davis v. Joan Crawford feud.
