Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles by Ron Currie Jr. Page A

weird infantile Freudian thing, like the shame we all supposedly learn to feel very early in life about our shit itself, over the very fact of it. But I came gradually to understand that that was not the nature of my particular shame. No. The shame I felt was deeper and broader and more complex and, frankly, more grown-up. It was the shame of one who has betrayed himself repeatedly, and knows he has, even if he won’t admit it to himself. But how could he admit it to himself, with no self to confess to?
    And so because I did not recognize the source and nature of my shame, I couldn’t talk about it, and certainly not with Emma. But neither could she talk to me about what she no doubt realized, at least subconsciously, and was affected by: a strong if ineffable sense that the me she dealt with on a daily basis, went to sleep with at night, wrapped her arms around and allowed to penetrate her, was not the authentic me.
    No doubt it sounds silly. But these things have consequences. And I think, sometimes, that one could draw a straight causal line between my reluctance to shit when Emma was around and the fact that today she is married, once more, to a man other than me.

E ventually the caballeros grew weary of fighting me. Not because I was any good at it, really—I lost more fights than I won, though no one walked away unbloodied—but because I was dogged, and probably, in their view, a little crazy. I bit and scratched and wasn’t above a nut-punch or two, and the caballeros eventually wanted no more of it. So they proposed one last fight with their biggest guy, a hulking, home-tatted
cabron
who, because he was gigantic, and because I never found out his name, and because our fight had all the elements of a champions’ duel straight out of Homer, I came to think of as Ajax.
    Which, I suppose, made me Hector by default.
    The challenge came one hot morning when the local drunk (a genuine distinction on an island full of drinkers) pounded on the door of my casita. I left Charlotte in bed and went down the stairs, found the drunk grinning at me through the aluminum bars of the security gate. He was a whip-thin, anemic man with the features of a Latino weasel and a pint of Palo Viejo always jutting out of his back pocket. I thought I recognized his scheming eyes and crooked smile, the teeth like rusted, broken knife blades. Then I placed him in a specific memory, beyond his ambient, rambling presence on the
malecón
: I’d once seen him tumble off the pier fully clothed, so drunk at nine in the morning that he couldn’t swim the twenty-five yards to shore and had to be fished out by a gringo bartender setting up for lunch at Duffy’s.
    Bueno día,
the drunk said, grinning, grinning. He hooked his fingers around the bars. Give me rum, and I give you a message.
    I don’t have any rum, I lied.
    I smell it on you.
    It’s not the rotgut you like.
Muy caro,
my friend.
    This is not a problem, he said, pulling the empty pint from his pocket and tossing it in the dirt. I didn’t always drink this
gasolina.
I had money when I was young.
Mi padre
the car dealer.
Mucho dinero.
All the Bacardi I wanted.
    He grinned wider, revealing black gaps in his mouth where molars had gone missing.
    I eyed him a moment longer, then went back up the stairs and returned with a near-empty bottle of Don Q. That’s all I have, I lied again, handing it through the bars.
    He twisted the cap off and downed the two fingers or so. I waited.
    They say you like to fight, he said finally, his grin disappearing and reappearing in intervals as he licked rum from the corners of his mouth.
    There was a pause. So? I said.
    So maybe you like to fight tonight. At
la gallera.
    La gallera?
I asked. You must be mistaking me for a rooster.
    No no, he said. A special fight. Man-fight. Just two of you. No funny business.
    I laughed. ‘Funny business?’ Where did you learn English?
    They say to tell you, the man