Smothered Under Heavy Cement…

It took a silvery sliver of a second. I was only thirteen. It happened so long ago…

Then why does it still weigh me down like a pair of gangster-style cement shoes?  

The sudden snap of light startled me from my transition into sleep…. I’d been edging into the relief of a dream…and then my eyes were open. 

She appeared from the murk behind her bedroom door and revealed her breasts to me…

Let me rephrase that…not for me…I hadn’t drifted into an 80s sex comedy…. She revealed them toward me…would be the wisest way to say it… 

I was just an innocent bystander…swear to God! We were both innocent back then. I was only trying to fall asleep…. I wasn’t spying on her…I’m not a creep or a voyeur or peeping tom… 

Her breasts just fell into my hands, so to speak…

She was merely being unassumingly human…absently decompressing…weary from her late-night shift. There was nothing between us except my own aroused, star-struck reaction… 

I stared, spied, peeked, ogled… hidden amid the dimness and puffed-up camouflage of my Star Wars sleeping bag…. 

I narrowed my eyes into slits so I could pretend to be asleep.  

She’d just arrived home from work. Her bedroom was across the hall. Both doors were open for some unfathomable reason. I lay stiffly on the hardwood floor. Her brothers…Peter and Richard…were fast asleep behind me.

She worked as a hash slinger at an all-night breakfast diner called, Rinky-Dink’s. Truckers and drunks. Introverted nocturnal weirdos…like I would one day become… 

They made great-tasting jellyrolls at Rinky-Dink’s. The checks were ripped from cheap pads of opaque, grayish-white paper…. Slapped down on marbled surfaces clumsily adorned with brown stains…loose granules of sugar and salt….flecks of egg and sticky, buttery crumbs…

She wiped down the tables with a dingy rag and a spray of oxidizing disinfectant. 

Her shifts were long and hard.    

Sexual harassment was part of the job back then. Waitresses ran a gauntlet between the tables. Crude drunks cocky with a late-night, blue-collar immunity they assumed they had. Crass comments and roaming hands were unavoidable workplace conditions…even off-duty cops tried to cop a feel in those olden days… 

What was a struggling young working woman to do? Quit? Complain? Demand hazard pay? Silly goose! 

She unzipped the back of her brown servant uniform and I in my sleeping bag became acutely alert…trapped right smack there in the predawn hours…a witness to her tired, absent-minded immodesty… 

The sun would rise in an hour and blanch the ambiguity out of reality, but right then and there I was still anonymous and disguised by the room’s penumbrae… 

She, on the other hand, stood bathed favorably in a milky light…

And then the stripes and red collar and pocket full of pens…the tools of her trade…all dropped with a sudden rustle and arterial rush. Her server’s uniform lay discarded…a heap of fabric at her feet…and her shirt and bra followed suit and I saw both her breasts in an exquisite display of exquisite Roman-statue exquisiteness…. Freed and breathing after ten long hectic hours tightly confined by cups and wire and her starched work shirt… 

I was stunned by the primordial power manifested before me…perky and perfect and inconceivably revealed… 

Mammary glands, they called them in health class…. Breasts in polite society… 

Consult a thesaurus for further terms…. There are many…

But the sight of her nipples did not pacify me…. Nay…they inflamed my brain!

I crouched in my head like a hunter with a spear…. I silently sputtered with muffled love…. What was happening? My tooth roots tingled like ginger ale…. I sat balanced on a thin, rigid filament…strung buzzing between two telephone poles…. I was perspiring under a fur rug…aging like a fruitfly hovering above a hole in a box of bananas… 

Every follicle in my body awoke and stood up with prickling attentiveness… 

Oh Jesus, save my skin…as I look! Look! Look! Look through the guilt! Look past the fear! Look like your life depended on it! Oh the shame of it! Oh Jesus…I shall erect my own cross of wood…. Please…nail my palms to the unyielding horizontal beam with pounding force! 

And thus crucified I shall await your Second Coming! 

She turned toward an offscreen mirror, checking for bodily things I could not hope to understand…. I did not dare blink…. Nor breathe…. Nor swallow…. I lay stiff as a frozen filet of flesh…of what variety—fish or steak or pig—I knew not!

I intuited pig. Tenderloin.   

This was REAL…this was LIFE…this was REAL LIFE…. This was history and science and theology and the origin of biodiversity on our precious, moist, forever-turning earth…all delivered by a loud, churning cement truck in my head…as I became helpless…smothered under a suffocating mudslide… 

Or run over like a dumb, frozen, hypnotized-by-headlights, soon-to-be-roadkill animal… 

I lay like a fetus in the stifling heat of my sleeping bag…. I may as well have been glued to the bottom of a blind uranium mineshaft…

I suddenly understood why strip clubs existed…. And Playboy magazine…. Why female nudity in movies sells extra tickets… 

This was worth paying for…. This was worth dying for…

I felt part of something HUGE…. A neophyte member of a lubricious club…. Like I’d entered a fecund, newly-discovered realm…with renewable resources!

Her panties were pink and had butterflies on them.

….And then she climbed into a modest white nightgown and turned off the light. I heard her get into bed… 

While I lay spent and sweating in the dark…reeling…trying to dissect the experience in my fevered brain….

Sleep was utterly out of my reach… 

I compulsively replayed the event in my throbbing head as if pressing a button on a VCR… I fed coins into my memory…. Flipped the images back and forth like pages in a glossy magazine… 

Over and over and over again for years…. Years! 

I never mentioned the mortifying matter to anyone…. Until right now…right here…

And now I feel ashamed…

Now then…. I must make amends…

I know I didn’t behave like a proper gentleman…and what I did was inexcusably….boneheaded, to be sure…. I also realize that even this turgid, purple-prose confession savors the unsavory experience in unsavory ways…I have prayed fervently over the matter…oh how I’ve prayed…to the point of red-faced exhaustion!

Yet my beseeching pleas never relieved me with a feeling of release…from my sin…from my memories…from this curse that was spawned within me on that fateful night… 

I wasn’t actually trapped…. I wasn’t straightjacketed in my Star Wars sleeping bag… eyeballs forced open with surgical lid-specula like the Ludovico Technique in “A Clockwork Orange.” 

I could have averted my gaze.… I could have averted this guilt…. I could have averted everything that turned me into what I am…who I am…

I know…. I know…. I know everything…I remember everything…. Everything is still all right there…

And I’m still right here… 

Goodnight.