Maybe because he was busy kissing his girlfriend, Lindsey didn’t notice me putting a condom on. I was already in position and about to slide between Leah’s legs when Lindsey noticed what was happening.

“Whoa. Whoa there, bro. Hang on.”

Leah and I both just looked at him, saying nothing. He kept his hand there on Leah’s tit, and looked back and forth between us, like he assumed we knew what he was thinking. I did, but pretended I didn’t.

“It’s okay, sugar.” Leah put her hand to his cheek. “Just…feel the moment. Feel the energy.”

Lindsey sat up. “Yeah,” he stammered, “yeah, yeah, it’s cool, but…come on, man.”

“Right, it’s cool,” I said, and moved back in on Leah. Lindsey blocked me with a hand on my chest.

“WHOA!” he shouted. “Just don’t…do that, okay?”

“Hey, baby,” said Leah, sitting up. “Don’t worry, all right? We all wanted this.”

“Yeah, well…” Lindsey shook his head. “I didn’t want…that. I didn’t want…”

“You didn’t want me to fuck her?” I yanked the condom off, since it was clear the party was over.

“Well, yeah. I mean…I wanted to see you two together, I just didn’t want…that.”

“You just wanted to see us get to third base,” I said.

“Aw, shit.” Leah reached for her cigarettes. “I don’t believe this is happening again.”

“Again?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Leah, lighting her Camel. “This is just like last time, except that was with a girl.”

“And he didn’t want you to fuck her?”

“No, he didn’t want him to fuck her. I gave her a shitty blow job, then she wanted him, but when she climbed on top of him, he started to cry.”

“Oh, for chrissakes.” Lindsey stood up and put his hands to his head, his dick flopping around between his skinny legs. “I’m sorry, okay? I just don’t want us to be unfaithful to each other.”

“We’re all on the same plane here, honey,” Leah said in a voice containing little affection, dangling the cigarette from her lips like a Blues Brother. “We were all getting aroused together. We were all in the moment. We were all loving ourselves and each other. What does it matter whose parts are where?”

“It matters!” exclaimed Lindsey. “It’s the difference between making out and…and making love.” He put his hands on his hips. “Making love is for lovers.”

I reached for my clothes. “Listen, I’m…”

“No, hang on.” Lindsey dropped her smoke in a half-empty can of High Life. “Come here.” She grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down. “I want to finish this.”

“Should I get another rubber?” I asked.

“No!” cried Lindsey.

“Hey,” said Leah, “let’s just finish this on a nice note.” She reached for my dick, but before I could decide where to put my hand, I heard Lindsey choking back a sob.

I sat up. “I can’t do this,” I said. “You two figure your shit out.”

Leah sighed and shook her head. Crawling under the covers, she turned towards the wall. “Whatever,” she said.

“I’m sorry, bro,” said Lindsey as I pulled on my jeans.

“No,” I said, “it’s fine. Now I just have to go jerk off to a relatively recent memory of having my dick pressed up against your girlfriend’s naked ass. But don’t worry—we didn’t make love or anything spiritually intimate like that.”

Lindsey hung his head. “I don’t believe I suggested this.”

“I do,” I said as I buttoned my shirt. “You wanted to get laid tonight, and you knew nothing would happen unless you spiced it up. Now, excuse me.”

As I went down the cottage steps, I heard Lindsey try to say something to Leah, but she interrupted him. “No, just be quiet, lover. Come over here and work this knot out of my back. But put on your pajamas first…I hate it when your junk dangles on me.”

Unreality House is on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.

Photo by M. Orellana (Creative Commons)

Danny the caretaker. He lives in the basement, in an apartment that was full of waterskis and shit when we lived here last time. He’s pushing 60, and he has a lot of opinions about classic rock. He worships Hendrix, but has good things to say about Jackson Browne. His dad was a union man in Detroit, but he ran away from home and ended up in India. Three communes, four rehab stints, and one self-produced album later, he’s living in our basement. He’s always fiddling around with things on the property, but somehow nothing ever gets fixed.

Jenni and her kid. She’s Thirty and Flirty, and she’s recently divorced from the kid’s dad. The dad’s not a bad guy, I guess, he’s just boring as fuck. She brought her kid out to the country to get him some fresh air and to have some hot rebound sex with a moody, drug-addled creative writer. One out of two ain’t bad.

Lou and Barb the old folks. She reads, he fishes. Classic.

Leah and Lindsey the hippies. Lindsey’s a guy, named after Lindsey Buckingham. His parents were cokeheads, he’s a stoner. Leah’s his life partner who teaches yoga and makes tea from things she finds in the woods, a habit that’s already led to one hospital run when she picked the wrong mushrooms. They stay in one of the guest cottages, and they love all of humanity except the people who steal their stash. (That would be Danny.)

Bets the lone wolf. She has long flowing grey hair and looks pretty hot in her mom jeans. She makes a living as the author of a self-published series of erotic horror novels about lesbian mummies. Since we moved in two months ago, I’ve said four words to her and she’s published exactly that many e-books.

Unreality House is on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook.

Photo by San Diego Shooter (Creative Commons)

You lounge by your parents’ pool, getting tan and reading Ulysses and thinking about life outside of your bubble, life among the people who are hungry and angry and don’t get hand-slap house arrests when they run into the kind of trouble you did. You think about how glad you are that you live in a bubble and don’t do the kind of writing where anyone expects you to go outside of it. You decide that things are only going to get worse, overall, during your lifetime and that if you happened to do something that might risk hastening your death, that would be okay.

You work at a “clever people” job, an online job where you spend four hours a day writing paragraph-long blurbs about spa specials and Canadian getaways and sushi platters in a style that communicates intelligence and cultural savvy without ever betraying a hint of cynicism. This pays poorly, just enough to buy your sex and your drugs.

You buy sex from the kind of women who will come over, sell you drugs, use the drugs you just bought from them, talk to you about the classes they’re taking at Tallahassee Community College, and then casually ask you to pay them for sex as though the idea has just occurred to them.

You make your sister take a non-hooker to the emergency room when the non-hooker ODs, arguing that although, yes, it was you who invited the non-hooker over and supplied her with drugs, it was your sister’s tit that the non-hooker did her last line off of and, anyway, taking a coked-up chola to the emergency room is no way to break house arrest—especially when the entire reason you’re under house arrest is because a man died after doing drugs you allegedly supplied.

You wait nervously until your sister texts you that she left the non-hooker on an ER gurney at Capital Regional and got out of there without anyone seeing, and then you relax and jack off, thinking of the undergrads who used to fuck M.F.A. students not because—contrary to what most of the M.F.A.s thought—of their superior writing skill, but because they had enough fortitude not to get boner-blocking drunk.

You learn that a certain wealthy foundation has intervened with your parole officer, and that you have the option of leaving house arrest to resume your writing fellowship. You accept this deal, not because you’d rather be at a rural Minnesota B&B than a Florida McMansion, but because you’re fed the fuck up with writing about microdermabrasion.

Photo by Andrew Guyton (Creative Commons)

I am officially under advisement that I am under investigation for the drug-related death of William Hughes, and that I am not to leave Kandiyohi County.

I am day-drunk.

I am naked.

I am listening to Stevie Wonder.

I am sweating.

I am prone (body) and half-erect (peen).

I am sunburnt.

I am not thinking about the future.

I am not innocent.

I am not a murderer.

I am not a writer.

1. If you’re going to write a novel, you need a game plan. You can’t just do one chapter a week and hope it will somehow all come together, even if you’re being post-modern.

2. Sex sex sex, the kinkier the better. It seems obvious, but it’s true. If you want what you write to have any chance of actually getting read, make it somehow about sex plus something fucked-up, like cheating or pissing or drugs.

3. The more personal, the better. You think people are tired of reading memoir-like confessional writing? Bullshit. People don’t want us to write fiction, they want us to write about all the boring details of our boring lives in the middle of nowhere.

4. It’s better to be a girl than a guy. Because then people will follow your blog in the hopes that you’ll post hot GPOYs. No one’s gonna follow a guy’s blog hoping for a dickpic.

5. It’s hard. Open up a blank doc. Ready…GO! See?

6. Originality doesn’t count for shit unless you’re really good. In real life, you’ll get a way bigger crowd standing on the corner with your guitar playing Cat Stevens than you will reading your short story at a bookstore. On the Internet, you’ll get way more reblogs for a Katy Perry GIF that already has 14,000 notes than you will for an original essay—unless it’s really good (or about sex).

Photo courtesy Colorado Mountain College

Pros

• Have their shit together. If the kids are still alive, their mom has to have some kind of grip on reality.

• Experienced—by definition.

• Confident. Moms care about their kids, but in bed they tend not to have hang-ups. Moms’ time is limited, so they’re not going to waste time telling you what they want to do.

• Fundamentally sexy. Culture and some weird instinct cocktail (STD avoidance? I dunno) might have taught us to have the hots for virginal types, but at a fundamental level, your body gets excited about sex because it wants you to have kids. A woman with a proven record of having kids is just, at a baseline level, hot.

• Good snacks in the cupboard. Gushers, Goldfish, shit like that.

Cons

• Often married, or partnered. Inconvenient, and complicated.

• Limited hours of availability. You kind of have to be on their timetable.

• Anxiety about the kids walking in on you. Some moms are cool flying close to the flame on this one, but I try to avoid doing Mom when the kids are in bed. I’m already under investigation for drug possession, I don’t need some kind of boning-in-front-of-a-minor situation added to my dossier.

• Don’t drive sexy cars. Minivans might be hot from a girl’s perspective, but I can’t get a boner within 100 feet of an Aerostar.

• No prospects for the long term. Before you get offended by that, consider whether you really think I should become an adoptive father. And remember, this is real life—not an Adam Sandler movie.

Photo by The Bridge (Creative Commons)

Drinking: I drink every day. Usually at some point during the course of each day I get fairly drunk. But last week we ran out of booze and I was too lazy to get more for, like, two days. Wouldn’t an alcoholic have made that a priority?

Smoking: I can put ‘em away pretty fast when I have ‘em, but I smoked a lot less before I moved into a house where I can smoke. Now I’ll wake up at night and have a cigarette, but would I if having one required getting out of bed and going outside? Probably not.

Drugs: I was on Percocet all the time before the cops started staking us out. It was fucking great, and I fully intend to go right back to it after I get out of this place alive.

Exercise: Strictly to keep from getting bored/fat.

Sex: If I can reasonably have it, I do. I’m not too picky about with whom I have it, but I’m a pretty good-looking guy, so usually my options are good. I’ve been having sex in town once every day or two and jerking off once or twice more every day, which I wouldn’t have to do if Lucy still had pissing somebody else off as a motive for fucking me.

Photo by Steve and Sara Emry (Creative Commons)