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throw this away, are you?” she says, and she’ll be talking about the grains of rice in the bottom of the salt shaker. “No, Mrs. Peacock, by all means, you take them. They’ll come in handy when your son gets out of prison and marries your niece.” She doesn’t want these things, not really. Her trick is to act like she’s happy with any little scrap. She does it to make us look bad and so that my parents will feel sorry for her. I can’t believe she made such a big deal out of those underpants.
    On the phone I told my mother that some guys at school had been horsing around, putting raw chicken livers in the seats of the brightest students and that I had sat on one. It sounded like a logical story to me. Those assholes in the eighth grade are capable of anything stupid and petty. In my manuscript, though, I have made them capable of anything period! I could just kick myself for not burning those underpants, and isn’t it a shame that it’s come to that, having to burn things? It started bleeding back there a few weeks ago, but I have it under control now.
    While the imagination certainly has its place, I feel that it is important for a writer to back certain chapters with a little experience, so a few months ago I started hanging out in the rest room of JCPenney in hopes of getting just that — a little experience.
    I stood at the urinal for almost two hours before someone finally took the bait and gave me a signal that he was there to play hardball. Meeting his eyes I understood that I could use him as my research stud, fodder for my manuscript a little footnote who would drive my future biographers wild and leave my readers breathless and hungry for more. Research Stud and I skipped over all of the bullshit that everyone else goes through: the formal introductions, the phone calls, the dates we just got to the exclamation point right there in the stall! Afterwards, he sort of ruined everything by telling me that he is a political science major at N.C. state and his name is Julian. I hate that name. In my manuscript he is named Dirk. I’ve made him about three inches taller and have then him a good, thick ten and one-half inches between his legs. Julian and I met in the rest room a few more times before we were interrupted by a store detective who, I am convinced, was interested in arranging a three-way. After that, we started doing it in Julian’s car. He’d drive us out into the country and park behind an abandoned house set on a dirt road.
    Julian was all right, but nothing at all like the hard-driving top man I’ve made him out to be in my manuscript. He was actually very stiff and uptight. We’d be doing it and I would whisper, “Talk to me, talk to me,” and he’d start telling me about his summer job as a page at the state legislature building. That was not the kind of talk I was after. I asked him if he had any friends he could invite along the next time. I wanted a good mental picture of what it might be like with three or four studs at one time, ramming away and taking it all. When Julian backed off, I went to the bathroom at the Trailways station and found some real men who could help me.
    Research Studs numbers five and six were absolute horses. I’m not changing anything about them. My readers are going to get the unbridled truth as far as those cocksmen are concerned. I just wasn’t prepared for the bleeding back there. Not buckets of blood but a slow and steady flow that lasted about five days, during which time I considered asking one of my sisters for a tampon.
    When my father brought up the priest I had a sinking feeling that something was up, that he knew more than he was letting on. It is confusing when a stupid man plays dumb.
    I’ll go out later tonight with a flashlight and check to see if my manuscript is still there, out behind the shed, where I keep it buried.

Barrel Fever
    FIRESTONE
    AS A favor to my pastor, Carlton Manning has hired me to work at his service station even