Jason Caroll
By Katie Wheeler-Dubin
My mom had just died. I was twenty-one. My hair: newly brown. I was back at school in Santa Cruz after a quarter off. I was trying really hard to be strong. I hadn’t had good sex in four months.
It was January and I had been going to a lot of spoken-word events, listening to a lot of lesbian poetry. A lot of this was about squirting: Female ejaculation. This was something I was trying to practice, though I was finding it pretty hard. Clitoral orgasm is one thing, but vaginal orgasm, now that, that is something that feels a lot like pissing your pants. “It’s not gross,” they spat. “It’s milk on toast! It’s siren sod, it’s love rivu-
lets! It’s all the colors of the rainbow.” Fuck, they were powerful. They knew what was up, these women. I was listening hard.
Enter: Jason Caroll.
I met him in this lower division Lit class called Jewish Identity. He wasn’t Jewish but I was and we liked that; I felt in-the-know and he felt like he had an in. He wore these old-man hipster glasses; round, beige-colored ones and I wore really big old-woman glass- es. He had a soft voice and squinty eyes, short fingers and small lips. He couldn’t hold silence and he didn’t have good friends.
Jason had just gotten back to school from this commune in the desert outside San Diego, where he meditated for three hours, three times a day, every day. One time after class, the day he told me he liked my glasses, we walked into the woods behind campus and I asked him his thoughts on God. He knelt in the redwood dirt and spoke slowly about The Greater Power. “I don’t take the Lord’s name in vain and I think everything is holy,” he said. Then we walked to the bus stop.
Maybe I liked him because it seemed like he was looking for bigger answers. Maybe I liked him because he was a stranger to me, disconnected from the time before my mother’s death. Or maybe I was off.
FACES
By Joseph Bien-Kahn
He was a great man, I think. Larger than life, a patriarch in that old world sense. His face was a mess of lines by the time I knew him; dried riverbeds burnt brown by the Florida sun.
My uncle told me he once was young. My uncle said he was just like us. Before he was sick, I knew for certain just once.
It was a day in the spring, it was sunny. I was eleven, he was seventy-one. We gathered, more than twenty of us huddled around that hole in the ground. I was stiff in my suit, hot, the arms too short. My mother was crying, her siblings were too. I was fighting it back, sucking in thick, warm air that I hoped would dry my eyes. And then I heard him. And then I saw him. Loud breaths, violent spasms, water rushing through those riverbeds, wet on dried, cracked rock, tree trunk arms wrapped around themselves, gripping tight. I gave up; I could no longer stop the flood.
He was just a man again when he was sick. He still tried to dominate the room, still sat atop the dinner table. He still tried to find that little something to grab each of us. But his mind was jumbled, mushed by years and illness, and he couldn’t sort everything like he once had. Now his brain was a sundial in a bed of fog. Sure, there were moments the sun would peak through and it was right smack at twelve o’clock. But then came the darkness, and then it was another day. Perhaps every hour was there, but not in any predictable order. And I’d bet some of the times were borrowed.
He knew that his memory was leaving him; I’m sure of that. Six months before he died, he started cutting phone calls short rather than finding his bearings. There would be a question, maybe two, and then he’d have to go. But even at its worst, right near the end, he couldn’t resist the head of the table. See: he was a patriarch in that old world sense.
So there he sat, twenty eyes upon him, trying to dominate a conversation he could not track down. He spoke from anytime and everywhere. Some things seemed random, some may’ve been true. My cousins and I looked to our parents; our parents, they just looked down at their food. His repetition cutthrough all of us; we would die someday, that now was clear.
One late, wintry afternoon, we were hanging out at my house. Our second date. I made us a pot of chamomile tea and we talked about our professor, Murray Baumgarten, whom we both wanted to be our grandfather. We were in my twin’s room because she didn’t have a roommate. We moved to her bed. Things progressed and he started moving his short fingers inside my pussy and it felt good. So good that, twenty minutes later, I felt it happening. I was going to cum. Vaginally. Fuck yeah. I didn’t want to get Erica’s mattress wet, so I told him “let’s get on the floor.” We got on the floor and Jason Caroll kept moving his fingers inside me.
“Tell me to relax,” I told him.
“Relax,” Jason said. “Relax, Katie, relax.”
“Oh,” I moaned.
“Relax, relax,” he said.
“Oh,” I moaned.
This went on for a couple of minutes until his hand started to hurt. He withdrew his fingers and started massaging his wrist. I lay sweat-soaked beside him. “Relax, Katie,” I told myself. “Let it out, baby,” I whispered.
“What?” Jason said.
“Relax. You’re beautiful,” I told myself. “Relax. You’re gonna cum like all the colors of the rainbow.”
My ejaculation that afternoon was no glorious spurting extravaganza. It was no riotous exclamation of pussy power. It was tea-infused slow release. It was a puddle that spread out slow and creeping across the hardwood floor.
Jason Caroll stopped his wrist stretches. Jason Caroll started freaking the fuck out.
“Oh my God, you’re peeing, Katie. Shit. You’re peeing, you’re peeing.” Jason scrambled to his feet.
“I’m peeing,” I said.
“You’re peeing all over the floor, you’re peeing all over the fucking floor.” Jason started frantically looking around the room for a towel, for a shirt, for a rug, anything. Anything at all.
“I’m peeing,” I said. “I’m peeing.” I didn’t try to stop.
“Shit, you’re peeing all over the floor. You’re peeing all over your twin’s floor. Shit. Shit.” Jason’s eyes cast like bobblehead. His back was against the door and he didn’t look at my face.
“I’m peeing,” I said. “I’m peeing. Oh, God.”
His father was a hard man. From Pittsburgh, a boxer, cigar stuck to bottom lip. He was not a hard man. He was sweet and empathetic, dominant with a certain hypnotizing charm. His daughters never saw him fight, never heard him raise his voice. But then the years passed and he became that boxer in his memories. His navy service was now littered with fistfights, his time in St. Louis a mess of baseball bats and broken knees. He was an athlete, a hoop star, strong as an ox. Surely, he knew how to bare his teeth.
I remember waking one morning in the summer. He was drinking coffee at the counter, browned skin against the white of undershirt and boxer shorts. He said, Uncle Joe, take a peek outside. The tree that sat before his house was covered from top to bottom with sweets. It was magic, I swear it—I’m sureit could be explained away. I woke my brothers and we grabbed what we could reach. I saw him grin as we walked inside; then he sipped from his mug and kept reading the paper.
The service was emptier than I expected. He was old, sure; his generation was underground by now. But still, he was a great man. Every seat really should’ve been filled.
The shiva afterward was strange too; the stories didn’t come. There was well-wishing, there was small talk. There were second cousins and my uncle’s work acquaintances. There were vegetable trays and little sandwiches that no one touched. And there were cookies. We waited to hear legends; we all knew him to be legendary.
I sat across from an old man, sure that he would give me my history. My grandfather had taken him under his wing as a teenager; had raised him to prominence. He would give me the real memories.
He told of days in Denver, at a summer camp. Of the care of my grandma, of the tough love from my zayde. He told of Montgomery; told of MLK. He said Big Bill never feared a thing, never worried that he couldn’t get something done. It was nice to hear; I’d heard it all before.
Understand, he was a great man; he played catch with his son after work. Understand, he was a great man; he built structures that will survive him. Understand, he was a great man: he helped those who could not help themselves. So, that is a life.
I remember him most in the shallow end of a pool. Sun beat down upon us, I could hardly swim. His knees were not yet fixed, but he moved well in the water.
He was smiling, bone white against gold-brown skin and dark lips. We tossed a football back and forth, again and again; he did not tire of it. He said we would beat the intergenerational record for consecutive catches. I believed him. And we did. We always did. And he was always amazed by what we’d done. Truth had nothing to do with it.
Every night, before I sleep, I see his face the way it looked in the casket. They didn’t make him up but still he was beautiful. His eyelids had been closed. His face, it was sharp and narrow. But if I really try, sometimes, I can see it the way it was in that pool. I can see his high cheeks, can see the trouble in his grin. And the thing is, maybe both of the faces are true. None of them existed the way I remember them. Of that much I’m sure.