Fiction:
Jonny’s Mid-Life Crisis Report: Entry #7
Something strange is going on with me. Suki Schroeder is the girl who has effectively ended my mid-life crisis, or at least my desire to continue my mid-life crisis. She’s a unique blend of German and Japanese and she had an intellectual curiosity that seems to know no bounds. She drills me on theories of comedic expression in literary contexts. She wants to fuck all the time, which is at once refreshing and draining.
She slides into my apartment after drinking with her fellow graduate students and she forces her opinions on me and she forces herself on me. And I am pleased for a while. Fucking Suki Schroeder is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. She is fluent in English, Japanese and German and she will shift between all three during sex. One minute it’s all: “Shiko shiko suru! Kuso! Omae o korosu! Mikosurihan! Yowacty!” The next minute it’s all: “Ich will dich ficken! Fick Dich! Frühspritzer!” And by the third minute, I’m usually asleep and she’s smoking a cigarette. Being with Suki Schroeder is like some sort of weird psychosexual World War II nightmare. But for some reason, you don’t really want to wake up. You want to see how it ends.
Lately, I have been having trouble coming. I don’t have a problem getting it up, it’s just I can’t seem to finish. It’s 3am. Suki knocks on the window of my basement apartment and I wearily make my way to the front entrance to let her in. She wants to fuck. She’s coked up and more than a little drunk. Her hair smells like a mix of apple shampoo and herbal cigarettes. Her tongue tastes of Jameson and Menthos. She paws at me. “C’mon, Jonny. Let’s fuck.”
I try to deflect. “Why won’t you tell your classmates that we are a couple?”
“We’ve been over this a billion fucking times, Jonny. You are a pedagogue. You teach at the university. I am a student. You are in a position of power, an evaluative position. You put me at an immediate disadvantage. And I will not be thrust into a position of potential scorn or micropolitical peril.”
“I don’t teach you. I only teach undergrads. And we’re the same age for Christ’s sake! There’s no imbalance. There’s no political fallout.”
“Jonny, listen to me. You hoard my desire. You are in complete control. This whole situation is way too Lacanian already.”
“What does that even mean? I think you are ashamed of me.”
“Shame is certainly a key component in this problematic.”
“Is problematic actually a noun as well?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I just wikipedia-ed it the other day.”
“You know that’s not a valid source.”
“Trust me.”
Suki bites my neck. Hard. And then all discussion ends and she takes over. To me, it’s clear she’s in charge. After twenty minutes or so of awkward fucking, Suki climbs on top of me and uses the second shelf of my Ikea bookcase for leverage. In her drunken exuberance, she shakes the bookshelf too hard and the top row of Asthmatronics comes tumbling down on both of us. We are covered in multiple copies of my moderately successful comedy book. Suki bursts into laughter and I take the opportunity to switch positions and move behind her. As I fuck her from behind, I look at the books strewn on the futon. I start reading the blurbs on the back. They say I am “an exciting young writer,” “a real talent,” and “a brash, confident young voice.” I feel my erection grow stronger. Within seconds of reading blurbs about myself, I come. A lot. It goes everywhere:
her ass, her back, her hair, the books.
“Wow,” Suki says. “Where did that come from?”
“A really dark place,” I say.
Jon Paul Fiorentino is the author of Hello Serotonin, The Theory of the Loser Class and Asthmatica. He lives in Montreal where he teaches writing at Concordia University and is the Editor of Matrix. This piece is taken from his first novel, Stripmalling, out in Spring, 2009, with ECW Press.