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324 Seth Gore The Buzz Buzz Boom We pinned the awkward on our second date. She told me she was pregnant on the fifth. She told me it was a pregnancy scare on the seventh. That’s probably why God rested on the seventh, because Gaea told him she was pregnant with a deformed daughter. I’m sure he did a magical abortion and put his dick and nuts on a six thousand year-spell of sterility. No wonder Jesus was a bit loony and God banished sex ’til after Marriage. I say, Jesus should have been sex-neutral. So should everybody else. That would have solved a whole lot of problems. She wanted to meet at a motel because she said it was a neutral zone and because we had to talk. That’s because she was telling me to move in with her, “because it isn’t sensible for me to buy an escort for my Tupperware parties when I could have a perfectly fine gentleman like you escorting, not with the dollar being so low,” she said or something like that. But I didn’t want to move in. I told her that I would move in when I felt ready. “But you won’t until my boobs sag, and by then you’ll leave me because I don’t look like Lolita no more,” she said. I said no, but she kept on sayin’, “you’ll leave me just like every other man.” “Mary Ann, look at me,” I said, “Do you think I give a flying robin’s damn about your looks? If I’m a so-called gentleman, there’s got to be a lot more I look for in a woman, so much more than good make-up and a good sense of fashion.” And, “Can we just wait a bit before we argue again? We just got here, for goodness’ sake.” She nodded and smiled, and said I Love You, and began to watch Seinfeld. And she muttered, “You know, I’m glad that you’re not as picky as Jerry.” Jerry was always finding flaws in women he dated. Mary Ann chuckled herself to silence as cable stole her from me. As she rested on my chest, I stared into the afternoon sky, and began walking out of my eyes, through the windows of the Bartleby’s Motel, and into the heavy afternoon sky. I brushed against the cars that sat in the parking lot, a few unused, some more than others. I saw a Thunderbird, radiant yellow against what was a gray sky, thick with the tactile roar of an imminent storm. Felt the wind coming against me, shrilling against the pearly skin of mine. Decided that I had to take a breather from Mary Main_Pgs_1-330.indd 324 3/28/2012 10:25:01 AM Seth Gore 325 Ann, from her acoustical world, from the question with which she burnt me. Leaned between the thunderbird and some other car parked tightly, and my eyelids leaned as well, almost closed. As I put my hand on the hood, I remembered how I loved the feel of a running engine. The deep buzz buzz boom. I remembered my uncle. “Don’t you hear this?” Uncle Richard would ask me in awkward, cumbersome sign whenever I sat on the hood of his Thunderbird. Waiting for the reply, he would look at me so eagerly, thinking that this time I would answer differently. “No, I don’t,” I would reply. Uncle Richard would ask me the same question incessantly—whether I could hear the engine. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays, the days he picked me up from soccer practice, out by the trash pile on which he chucked away his Coors, half-a-field away from the sappy evergreen Pine where everybody else parked. It didn’t matter if it rained a bit. It didn’t matter if Pops told him that he himself could pick me up from practice. He would be there and he would ask and always ignore my response and say, “You don’t hear that at all?” He would shake his head in chagrin for the entirety of the ride back home, “It’s too bad that you don’t hear that at all. You don’t know what it’s like, too bad—it’s too bad.” I would ignore him, not because I didn’t understand him, but because I felt squashed by the heaviness of the...

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