Fiction: Bicep Kisser

By Travis Flatt

 

My roommate, Andy, kisses his own biceps until they’re hickeyed.

He does this during sex—I know because I walked in on him once when I was drunk at a party. He also does this when he’s drunk. And has been huffing spray paint and achieved some euphoric state not unlike sex. I imagine, from the look on his face.   

He reeks of the Elmer’s glue he uses to spike his orange mohawk. He never works out, eats like shit, but somehow bulges with muscles, as if grime were steroids. 

When we moved in, it took three of us to carry the mirror up the stairs and into our apartment, the giant wall mirror he’s got across from his bed. The one he watches himself bang in, kissing his biceps and blaring Thin Lizzy on an old record player with a busted speaker. 

Or, if it’s a special lady, he switches the record to grindcore. 

He’s got four or five meth-acquainted girlfriends, who he calls the “whiskey mamas.” (They all call him “daddy.” I don’t know—maybe they’re a band.)

Most of them he meets at various odd jobs, or the part time jobs he somehow lands for a week or two before getting fired, either for drinking or for not showing up. Dollar General, Red Lobster, another Dollar General, dog walking. 

Today, a whiskey mama called Violet helps me do my taxes after Andy goes to Lowes to buy spray paint. I just got laid off from Books a Million for being too slow at making coffee drinks. When Andy returns, he stands in the doorway and takes in the scene: Violet and I at the card table, smoking a joint and hunkered over my laptop.

I watch him calculate his approval. Perhaps whiskey mama’s aren’t meant for this utility. 

It’s a tense moment. I’ve begun to apologize when Andy snaps his fingers. Violet hops up. We weren’t quite through the forms, stoned and lost in arithmetic, endless W-somethings. I’m bad at math. And organization. My ex helped me with these. 

They disappear into the back. Lots of her growling and him going “ook, ook, ook!” like a gorilla, at the top of his lungs. To be heard over Napalm Death one must be at the top of their lungs. 

Then Violet, looking like she’s found the Truth, just mesmerized by the profoundest of blisses, comes out and finishes my taxes, me standing back, nodding, and mumbling thanks. Andy sprawls out on the couch in his tightey-whities, seemingly pleased by the wholesomely domestic scene.  

He invites her to stay for dinner—Dominos—and a movie. I find myself distracted, my mind straying from the Boondock Saints to Andy giving it to Violet while kissing his biceps, flexing and grinning and winking at himself. Maybe slick-lipped from baby-oiling his muscles first. 

Halfway through the movie, her phone rings. Violet smirks, annoyed, when she sees the number, says it’s her husband—just announces this—and answers it without turning the movie off or anything, shouts the following over the gunshots: 

 

No–I didn’t, Thomas. Baby, she’s supposed to be with the nurse. They didn’t call the police, did they? Who called you? I’m with the big boy. The one with a mohawk.

           

Violet, pleads we go back with her to the north side of town, over by the interstate, where her daughter, who’s either schizophrenic or bipolar—I don’t really follow that part; Violet’s now high on spray paint, too—has slipped her nurse, or some kind of caretaker, and run away into the night, possibly in her underwear. 

We get in Andy's Buick, a tank of a car he sometimes drives into church parking lots and, like a pin ball machine, bashes into parked cars while blaring Slayer, a game he calls “Fuck’em Up,” which, I’m ashamed to say, while you’re stoned, is surreally hilarious. Some dark angel watches over Andy. To my knowledge, he’s never been caught or arrested. And we go to the north side of town, where Andy leaves the car idling in the street, leaps out, and charges off toward the projects, with me consoling a weeping Violet in the back. Within minutes, he returns, carrying a bathrobe-d woman, Violet’s daughter, who’s maybe thirty-five and around Andy’s height and weight—so tall and kind of blocky—carrying her like she’s nothing, like the cover of some deranged romance novel. 

Turns out the police have been called (by the husband) and are searching the area. Reporters got wind, and Andy’s hailed as a hero on the local news. Gives an interview rambling nonsense about being half wolf, the reporter lady smiling, nodding, and edging away. 

Later, I watched the interview on the TV station’s website. There’s a moment, near the end, where he flexes and slowly spins before kissing each bicep.

I watched it over. 

The look on the reporter's face—fascination, revulsion.

And Violet’s—a mixture of lust, and, also, revulsion 

The look on my face, as I stand in the background, just as mesmerized by Andy as the others. Or more so. Despite how I talk about him to my work or school (before I started indefinitely “taking semesters off”) friends. Andy is no curio, or jester, or larger than life story I’m collecting. I strip off my shirt, slink to the bathroom, and flex in the mirror; I’m scrawny and pale. No real spark. There’s nothing worth kissing there.

 

 

 

 

 

Travis Flatt (he/him) is an epileptic teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear or are forthcoming in Bull, Dodo Eraser, Scaffold, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs.