Oh, Ohio!

I know you won’t believe me when I tell you what happened after the accident, but it’s true: when death first presented me with its awesome possibility, I thought only of you. When the wheels of the SUV skidded in figure eights off an unexpected patch of black ice and careened into the grassy, ice-petrified ditch with the velocity of a three-thousand foot free-fall, I thought only of you. I know that most people, subject to such a loss of gravitational control, are overcome with a more democratic love, radiating to everyone, everyone—but for me: only you.

I know how you are with your karma and symbolism, so go ahead. You think everything is a sign (We can’t get a cab, we’re going to be late, the higher powers are telling us to skip the party). Here, I hand you the contents of my kitchen, make a cake, sweetheart, layered with everything you think I deserve.

The thing about black ice, city boy: you can’t see it, you only know it’s there by where it sends you.

After the truck had lodged itself into the ditch ten miles south of Freemont, Ohio, and I had assessed myself injury-free and the car as relatively undamaged, and I had called AAA (my mother’s vehicle, lent to me, her AAA policy, and me with no insurance whatsoever, not a cause or a limb on me insured at all), and I had cranked up the heat and began the mental mathematics of necessary phone calls relative to cell-battery power, I started to think about the last time we made love.

“Ten extra cases,” you said as you entered our Hell’s Kitchen apartment. “Ten extra cases from this outrageously mediocre winery in Washington. And our outrageously mediocre order-boy isn’t answering his phone. We’ll be hawking this stuff until I go gray.”

I ruffled your hair with my fingers. “You’ll never be gray, honey,” I said, and I cupped the back of your neck with my palm, pulling your face to mine. We kissed. You tasted like good wine, like Chianti.

“I’ll bring it to my freshman Comp class, the kids will buy it like hotcakes.”

“I don’t think that’s exactly legal.”

“It’s just exactly an idea.”

“It’s probably a sign. This is probably the next hot wine. Loads of people with terrible taste will be pounding down the doors—give us acidic, watered-down mediocre Chardonnay! We read about it in Bon Appetit!”

“Absolutely.”

You laughed, and kissed me again. “I’m sorry. Work, work, work. I miss you already. Can we get naked?”

Your tongue—which has been cultivated to taste wine like a samurai trains his arms for swords—intimidates me. I wouldn’t let you go down on me for three months after we met, and when at last you did, I had never felt so tasted—so devoured—in my life. I felt eaten out, the lips of my pussy full-bodied with a buttery aftertaste, oaky aroma, heavy on the palette, carved and succulent.

“Don’t go to Michigan,” you moaned, your fingers playing taps on my inner thighs. “Stay here with me. We can make love and eat Chinese food on Christmas, like a good Jewish couple.”

“Half-Jewish. I want to eat Christmas food on Christmas.”

“I want to eat you on Christmas.”

“I want to eat you right now,” and I scampered down to your dick, rubbing my palms on your shaft like I was starting a fire. I licked your dick, wetting you as my hand pumped away, my fingers covering the head and back down again, watching the eye expand and contract, slowly moving you deeper inside me, every inch of cock sliding along every bud of tongue, until it was as far back as it could go.

“Jesus Christ!” you yelled. Oh the irony. “Oh God!”

My mouth, your cock; you were a Push-Up Pop, the orange sherbet ones, the ones I used to get from the neighborhood ice cream truck in Michigan. I sucked them mercilessly and sloppily, unknowingly preparing for the future, for your cock, which is sweeter than orange sherbet, but leaves my hands slick but not sticky.

“You ready for a goodbye fuck?” I asked you, turning around, laying my grapefruit-sized breasts on the couch and allowing you to come at me from behind. Oh Jesus Christ. Oh God.

“Am I ever,” you said, entering me with a force flirting with violence, and I moaned, and you moaned, and we moaned, and moaned, Oh God Oh God Oh God.

Twelve hours later, I was on the plane to Michigan, joining the solo-mile-high club with my Pocket Rocket in the airplane restroom. Three days and twenty-three hours later, I get into my mother’s SUV and head down to Kentucky for Christmas with the Baptist clan.

An hour and a half after that, I hit a patch of black ice and just miss the rear-end of a semi. The Midwest, with it’s tall grass and hugs: everyone pulls over to help.

My boy has a red pick-up. He approaches me congenially, tapping on the window like a tourist asking for directions.

“You okay?” he asks in an accent that reminds me of Kentucky and Wal-Mart.

“Yeah, fine,” I smile. He’s cute. Wind-burnt, freckled, wearing a thick coat at least two sizes too big—but cute. Irrevocably cute. “Just waiting for triple-A.” I hold up my phone. “Hoping this won’t die on me!”

“You got plenty of gas?”

“Yeah, I’m good.”

“Where you headed?”

“Louisville. My grandparents.”

He nods. “Hey. look, hang on a sec.”

He runs back to his truck and returns holding something. I roll down the window and he hands it to me. It’s a car cell-phone charger.

“Oh—amazing. Wow. I can’t just take this from you—are you gonna wait for my phone to charge?”

He laughs. “Sweetheart, you’re beautiful, but even I’ve got places to be. Got a pen?”

I fish around and hand him a pen and paper.

“Okay, this is where I’m gonna be—right? It’s up the highway a bit. It’s a bar—right by the Days Inn—you could stay there tonight, matter of fact, ‘cause you shouldn’t keep driving this baby tonight, you oughta give it a rest. So, here’s my number, if you can’t make it, but uh—come back up there, and give it back to me, alright?”

“Alright.” I smile. “Thanks again—”

“Randy.”

“Randy. I’m Nicole.”

“Nice to meetcha, Nicole. I’ll see ya’ later.”

“Right. Thank you.”

He leaves and I am alone again in my stuck but salvaged vehicle. I hear his truck rev up, the engine roaring back onto the slick highway like he isn’t afraid, like he is reminding me that he isn’t afraid and I am. The heater blows warm wind on my ears.

I close my eyes and think of Randy’s hot breath, the hardened skin on his face. Randy is so not you. Randy doesn’t know Mer-loh from Mer-lott.

Safe in my balloon of heat and with nothing to do but wait, I slip my fingers underneath my jeans, underneath my panties, which are heather-gray (the kind you wear to visit your grandparents) and make me feel, again, like a college girl on laundry day. My fingers drift over my sparse bush until my middle finger reaches the top of my clit, the pearl that lifts and swells to meet my touch.

I think: I’ve made love in a pickup truck before. My high school boyfriend, graduation night, his cousin’s bright blue Ford pickup, the parking lot of the Grad-Bash Party. While the other kids practiced kegstands, my boyfriend pushed and exploded inside of me, quick but heart-felt, my butt against the cold truck’s bottom, the sky filled with stars like a movie set.

Now I let three fingers fill the whole space between my slick lips, pumping like I’m filling a tire. You shouldn’t keep driving this baby tonight. Randy does physical work, I can tell, I just know. You don’t; you put fingertips on keys of computers and wrap your hands around bottles and pour, you move your tongue like a connoisseur of pussy but your body has always been slack, agreeable.

Randy’s body is a mystery in a down coat and so I think what I want—he is Paul Bunyon with his phallic axe. He is a kid on a sandlot wielding his baseball bat, swinging, aiming, making contact.

The radio plays bad music. My cunt is wet as a melted snowdrift.

Baby you can ride my car baby let me ride you all night long rock me all night long. My walls contract inside me as I rub just above my hole, and then a jolt like something hibernating in the pit of my stomach untucking like the corners of bed sheets, filling me with a heady, urgent lust.

I come as the AAA man arrives with his tow truck. I yank my hand out of my pants and zip up, still wet, and I emerge from my car into the crunchy grass of the ditch. I am glowing, woozy.

I wait on the side of the road as he extracts the truck from the land like a tooth from my mouth. He has me sign some papers and sends me on my way.

“Be careful out there,” he says. “The car’s fine—but you’re not going to Kentucky tonight.”

“I know,” I agree. “I’ll stay here.”

Randy looks even better without his coat on. In a long-sleeved grey t-shirt and rumpled jeans, boots still caked with snow, his body is just as I imagined it.

“Hey,” I sit down next to him. “I’ve got a present for you.”

“For me? Aw, you shouldn’t have—“

“Close your eyes!” I tell him, and he does. He holds his hands in front of him like we are playing paddy-cake and I drop the charger into his palms.

He opens his eyes. “Shit, it’s just what I always wanted!”

“I heard you lost one of these today, so I thought I’d hook you up.”

I smile. He smiles. Then he looks down at the bar, back up, shameful like a boy. “Can I get you a drink, Nicole?”

“Shouldn’t I get you a drink? You’re the one who helped me out.”

“Yeah, but I’ve already had quite a few,” he says. “I need you to catch up.”

We are in a race and I am making strides with my Alabama Slammers a toast to Ohio! which is perhaps why I don’t notice when his hand first touches my thigh, don’t notice until it slides up towards my pussy, which is still sore from my fingers but still ripples at the first sense of touch.

“Okay, what do you really do?” I ask. “No more playing.”

“Really—I’m a farmer. We still exist, you know.”

“I thought it was all like—illegal immigrants and machines and stuff.”

“It is, mostly. But my family has stuck it out.”

“No shit, a real live farmer, not like a book or anything.”

He laughs. “What kinds of books are farmers in?”

“You know, Little House on the Prairie, or something? Or Old MacDonald had a farm—E I E I O—“

“Okay, you can stop.”

“And on that farm he had a cow—“

Randy jolts his hand forward like a magnet on my pussy, so strong I think he could pull me towards him from there. His middle knuckle presses right against the tight knob at the tip of my clit. I stop singing.

I resist the urge to tell bad jokes: How’d you like to dust my crops, baby? My fields could use some of that fertilizer. So, how big are the cocks in your coop? Ready to lay some eggs?

“When I saw your car I didn’t know if to stop or not,” Randy begins. “But I sure am glad I did. I called my brother right after I got on the road to tell him, shit, you won’t believe what I found on the side of the road!” He is still holding me, a blanket of pressure, like I’m riding a horse.

“And I’m not for sale, either,” I joke, but he laughs like he doesn’t get it.

“What was it, anyhow?”

“Black ice.”

“Aw, shit. Black ice. That’s brutal shit, right there. That really is.”

I smile.

“You’re gorgeous, you know that?” He lifts his hand to my face and pushes my hair back.

I feel like we’re in a bad soap opera, but it is below zero and I am in Freemont, Ohio, and the alignment on my mother’s SUV is shot and my grandparents in Kentucky are at home worrying like worrying is a hobby and back in New York you are missing me, I know you are, and so I don’t care what it feels like. Let this be a bad soap opera, let this man be swarthy and cool, let him help me with my coat; still suave, still his hand guiding me to my room like it’s his room, let us leave the lights off because we aren’t people anymore, just bodies.

The walk from the bar back to my room has frozen me again, and I am still clutching to my layers as I fiddle with the heat on the motel radiator, waiting until it blows like a typhoon in my face, like a hurricane in a desert.

“It’s hot in New York?”

“No, but it’s warmer than Michigan—than Farmington Hills.”

“Freemont is colder than Farmington Hills. ”

“Is it?”

“Yes. That’s why we’ve got some extra-special ways of keepin’ warm.”

“Do you?’

“But you gotta take off your clothes first, if you want me to show you.”

“I don’t see how that’s gonna keep me warm.”

“Trust me.”

He walks over to me and I lean against the wall, letting my coat slide off my body onto the ground, and he takes care of the rest. I stand, stubbornly, like a girl being undressed by her mother to be changed into something more appropriate.

“This isn’t fair,” I say. “I’m naked and you’re not.”

He smiles. His face is full of freckles and heat and a kind of lust so eager it feels somehow organic, essential, important.

He has the body of a high school athlete—still young and smooth as sandalwood. The kind that has never been anything but chiseled, because he uses his body, he does body work. He is still tan, even in winter. And he knows, as he sees my reflection in the window of the desk, that my body is a good one, too, and I like to think in my snooty-city-girl-fantasy that I am the opposite of corn-fed, that the Beach Boys would like me best if they got to know me, that they would re-write the song for me.

He pushes me on the bed, and I lie there with my knees bent at the bed’s edge, my feet square on the ground, and he takes off his belt and his pants and slides his cock out of his boxers. I rise to suck it but he pushes me back down.

“Stay there, baby, stay right fucking there.”

So I do. I spread my legs, waiting for entry. I want one thing: his cock, his pure, well-bred dick, fucking me with an intensity I imagine limited to the primitive, to him, to real farmers. To the roots of everything. To animals, to earth; to all of the things we don’t have on our pavement island, to all the humanity we lose every day in the tunnels of our underground trains and the erections of our mile-high office buildings.

First he rubs his cock, the giddy fish of it, against me, gliding up and down between my lips like cutting through oceans. I think: maybe this is fate. Maybe this is what black ice is for.

I feel like a girl who finally snuck over to the boy’s camp after weeks of confinement; a girl giddy and lucky to find herself with legs spread, with clothes on the floor, with a dick thick enough to make me gasp and long enough to make me scream, to tread my g-spot like it’s taking it for keeps.

He teases me for a while first, and I am writhing, my arm over my eyes, waiting for the moment when he enters me, takes me, a pressure stronger than gravity bearing on my pussy, filling it like a plug on a sink. He fucks me like that; slowly at first, testing the waters, and then plunging, deeply, a crane extracting pleasure from every reach of my anatomy.

I sit up and grab his ass, my thumbs against the bones of his slim hips, and kiss him. He tastes like cheap beer and I taste like vodka and together we taste like a couple on a first date, which is, almost, what we are. Me and you—we taste like old people leaving an Upper East Side restaurant, still enjoying the sommelier’s recommendation. Which is lovely, in its way, but this is Freemont, Ohio, and I almost died tonight.

Outside, the snow has turned to hail, the unbelievable nature of it, hard and merciless. He has to stay over, I think, this has to go on.

And it does. He slips out of me and jumps onto the bed, his dick still earnest and ready like an easy sort of hello. I meet it there as he mounts me, my heels on his shoulders.

“Flexible,” he notes, grinning like a cat in a children’s book. “I like.”

“Yoga,” I respond. I squeeze his arms. “Strong. I like.”

“Life,” he continues to grin, and I am distracted enough by the charm of it that I gasp when he begins his new assault on my cunt. We are on the hotel comforter, which I know from you I am not supposed to use, it is covered in germs, like other people’s sperm, but I don’t care, not now, we could be anywhere: outside in the mud in the ditch, on the floor with its own bacteria, in Randy’s house wherever that is, in the back of a pickup truck, a blue Ford, doing it for the first time, with stars above us like a movie set.

“I wanna hear you come,” he says.

Oh, Ohio! I think as I near the light at the end of my tunnel, Oh amber waves of grain, and on this farm there was a cock, Oh the joy of being fucked by a guy who didn’t go to some progressively liberal Greenwich Village middle school where even the boys had to read Our Bodies, Ourselves, a guy who knew that stuff just because he had been with bodies, himself.

And then it happens. Something lets loose in me like the penetration of the full speed of light, and I am too caught up in my own orgasm to notice his, which is inside me, water poured into more water, and both of us collapse, simultaneously, like wrestlers at the end of a match.

And then I think of you again. It’s a short-circuit from my cunt to my brain; orgasms mean you, you, you, so for what it’s worth, you still owned my afterglow.

And so he spends the night. He sleeps naked, his penis retracting into itself and snuggling between the cheeks of my ass. We wake up on the morning of Christmas Eve, and the waxy glow of winter sun is casting itself across the snow and ice, melting everything.

When I come out of the shower, he is gone, and in a panic I dress and step outside in my moon boots and sweatpants, and I see him standing by my car, inspecting it like a salesman.

“Nicole! It’s good to go,” he says. “Don’t drive too fast.” He starts walking towards me. “I gotta head home to see the family, but it was—a pleasure to meet you.”

“Yes.” I am overwhelmed, I am freezing cold. “And you, Randy.”

He smiles, again, the smile that I will be able, in years, to still see in my sleep like an anatomical ghost, all teeth and heart.

“Well—” he hugs me, kisses my cheek, and turns to go. I watch my breath expand and blow into the air, smell the acidity of his truck’s exhaust as it chortles its way out of the lot.

And then he goes.

And now, I am calling you, to let you know that I’m alright, that I miss you, that the alignment is workable, and that I’m good to go.