This guy tells me how he got poison oak on his dick and balls. Then he says, “Don’t ever develop a foot fetish.”
We’re sitting across from one another and he’s scratching at his groin. He grabs at the skin over his jeans using a pinch-roll motion that incorporates the pad of his thumb and the strength of his forefinger. His face is all mashed into itself, all the flesh pushing in deep around his nose.
He takes a deep breath and his face returns to its normal state. He pulls away from his crotch and rests his hand on the table. The menu is flat on the table in front of him—and just out of thumbs reach.
“Something alright?” I ask him. His thumb finds its way to the surface of the menu. It begins caressing the laminate up and down. A second goes by and that same hand is under the table again. He digs deeper with each pass. His arm animates more and more. His elbow starts tapping into the table. Tablecloth sliding and silverware shaking.
Around us children eat soup and chicken nuggets. A boy tugs at his fathers sleeve and they both are eyeing us over their shoulders. My eyes are looking back at the families. The table jerks into my ribs and my eyes go toward the commotion across from me. He flaps his arm with more vigor and his face reddens. “Naw man,” he says, “it’s just this, thing . . .” He unbuckles his jeans and his hand goes deep. Then the sound comes: Chk chk chk schk schkt.
A girl wearing a black apron holding a pad and pen is walking up to us. His left hand keeps grabbing below the table. His elbow frantically locks and unlocks bouncing his shoulder up and down, up and down. The waitress is standing there trying not to look at him, but she can hear the sandpaper sound his fingernails are making. “Um . . . are you ready to order?” she asks.
She’s standing there, gum in her mouth, not chewing. She’s just following the dry raking coming from underneath the tablecloth. The girl’s nametag says, “Janet.” I’m looking at Janet, and Janet looks at me, then back at the sound coming from under the table. You can hear the hair snagging. Skin flaking. Her eyes shoot back and forth from his crotch to me. A long minute sludges by. You could feel the eyes around us all being drawn toward the sound. Janet opens her mouth: “I can . . . come back if, you’re not . . . um, ready yet.”
My hands lower my menu flat on the table and I look across at him. “Ron . . .”
His eyes are squinted shut. His face is scrunching tighter than a second ago.
“Ron . . .”
Chk chk chk schk schkt . . .
“Ron.”
Eyes are crowding our table more and more. Ron is breaking a sweat. Janet slides her pad into the front pocket of her apron and lifts her arm to put the pen up behind her ear.
“Um, I’ll just come back . . .”
I lunge into the table. “Ron!”
The scratching stops. His eyes snap open. Everything is frozen. His eyes stare into mine, hand jammed into his shorts. His head slowly turns at an angle until his eyes are looking up at Janet. With his head still in position, his eyes blink a few times and they shoot back to me, then back to Janet.
“Um, can I . . . would you like to order drinks, to start?” Janet asks. Her shoulders are positioned high up, very suggestively.
“Sure,” is all I can say.
The pad comes out of the pocket and the pen is upright and ready. Ron leans back and unfolds his napkin, covers his lap. He’s catching his breath but manages to spit out, “I’ll have a draft beer.”
“Okay,” Janet says, scribbling, “anything in particular?”
You could see the urge to scratch again building on his face.
“No,” he says, “Doesn’t matter, thanks.”
People are going back to their dinners, shoulders hovering close to cover their plates. Ron stares straight ahead. Janet turns to me, “And you?”
I tell her the same for me.
She scribbles. “Okay, I’ll be right back with your drinks.”
I tell her thanks and she leaves.
“Okay,” I say to Ron. “What’s it all about?”
He’s cringing. The urge on his face is stronger. He starts working his hand back under the table. “Ron,” I lean in and drop my voice, “What the fuck are you doing?”
He looks through his brow at me.
“What’s ‘this thing’ you’re talking about?” I ask.
He flinches and brings his hand up. He’s breathing from his mouth. Between little ticks in his face when the urge to scratch comes he says, “I went out with Angela the other night. We went to that Thai food place I’ve been telling you about . . . She was looking good, man. You know that red dress she wore to when we went to the Christmas dinner?”
It comes to me. She did look good in that dress. It pushed her tits through the ceiling and it shaped her like it had been painted on.
“She had on these new pumps,” Ron continues. “She had just bought them after a hike she had gone on earlier that day . . . She and a girlfriend went to this remote area off the coast and afterward they went to the mall. . .”
His hand is striving to stay above the table. The sweat on his forehead reflects the colorful lights and the neon beer signs hanging from everywhere. “Man, those pumps,” he says. “Those fucking things. . .” His eyes drift somewhere far away. They drift and they find the Thai restaurant he took her to.
“. . . they were this dark red-brown color,” Ron’s hand wanders. He begins rubbing his silverware between his fingers. “They had a these straps that went around her ankles.” He licks his lips. “You shoulda seen them. . .”
Without looking, his hand lets go of his silverware, reaches over and begins fingering the salt shaker, then the pepper. “They had me hot man, I’m not gonna lie . . . She kept trying to find ways to show them off to me. She’d lift her skirt, she’d point her toes—and it was doing it for me, I swear!” His hand moves to the dish holding the sugar packets, then on to the vase that houses the plastic and wire flowers. “I had always heard about guys who get off from chick’s feet, but it never did anything for me before. But . . . it sure as shit hit me that night. . .”
Just before Janet comes back his hand reaches back down and starts working away at his crotch. He tries a rubbing technique and when it doesn’t work his hand reaches under his shorts again. Janet returns to the Chk chk chk schk schkt muffled by Ron’s napkin and places the beers on the table. Ron stops for moment, hand still deep inside his pants. We thank her and she asks if we are ready to order. Almost in unison Ron and I both say, “Burger.” She laughs, writes on her pad, and vanishes.
Ron brings his hand back out and immediately it goes to the bouquet again. His fingers stroke the petals. They run down the wire stems. The tip of a finger breaks the surface of the water. For a second I wonder why there’s even water in the vase. “So we finished dinner, and the whole time I’m thinking about those shoes, and her feet. . .” His gaze hasn’t changed. My hand reaches out and takes my beer. I keep it close after sipping it. His hand goes from the bouquet to his glass. He lifts it and looks into it. He sips it. “All the way home she’s rubbing my dick,” he says. “She had her hands all over me . . . I’m telling you, I could barely drive the whole time. When we got back to my place I had her take everything off except the shoes . . . And I was hard, man, I mean, it was really doing it for me.”
He sips his beer again. He sets the beer down and wipes his hand on the railing of his chair. The kid and his father are leaving their table and they stare at us as they walk past. I raise my glass and smile at them. The father scoffs and puts a leash on the kid. Ron is scratching again and I say we should go get him something. Maybe some kind of ointment or cream, I suggest. “No,” he says, “I already bought something for it. I think, it’s just the underwear I have on or something.”
He takes a gulp of beer and resumes, “She laid me down and I was a fire extinguisher—I mean I could have been working at a strip club being the pole . . . And all that was on my mind were her feet . . . Those straps, shit man— she even had her nails done that day. After some dirty talk, after things got really hot, I convinced her to try something new. . .”
He doesn’t need to finish the story. I already know what happened.
Janet comes walking up with two plates and sets one burger in front of me and one in front of Ron. She places a small stack of napkins along with a bottle of ketchup at the edge of the table. She asks us if there’s anything else we need and I tell her no, thanks. She walks away. Ron excuses himself and walks to the restroom. “I need to wash up.” As he stands he zips up and the napkin that was covering his crotch sails to the floor. I stare at it for a little while and try to picture the busboy picking it up later. Then I picture him going home to a family, or a girlfriend, or a computer with a loaded hard drive. Along the way I imagine the busboy picking his nose with the same hand that picked up the napkin.
My beer is finished by the time Ron returns. He picks up his burger and says, “Angela had been walking in a goddamn trail of poison oak all afternoon and didn’t even know it. Her friend was smart and didn’t wear sandals like she had. . .” Ron takes a bite and chews and chews. Between the mouthful he has of his dinner he says “I told her I didn’t want to see those fucking shoes ever again.” He eyes the ketchup bottle and his face makes the same look of suppression from before. After he swallows his bite he looks up at me and says, “Don’t ever develop a foot fetish.”
Author: Lawrence Goodwin
