Candy’s dad says I ain’t no man because Roger’s still walking.

Candy and me have been dating for a couple months.

I met her at the train yard in Morgantown, WV while on my way back to Florida to visit Mom, and she on her way back from Boston from a porn shoot for some hippie outfit that does all-natural everything. The kind that prefers their ladies to have long toe hairs, happy trails, and well-formed femme staches.

I understand the appeal and why she earns so much money in it.

Candy and I hit it off over some weed and she asked me if I ever tried glue. I said no, and she said before you judge, people fear glue, thanks to the “brain trauma” lobby. Car exhaust? Folks don’t fuss on that shit, yet the whole world freebases gasoline. If people paid mind to stuff that mattered, the world would be a better place.

I said okay and she pulled out a baggie and huff, plastic baggy, huff, sneeze. Glue keeps demons from flying up my nose. Ring-around- the-rosie, pocket full of posies, with a scent of pig-iron. Glue.

We talked all night about stars (she’s Scorpio and I’m a Gemini) and our hopes and dreams. She wants to one day quit shooting porn and open a hair salon. I am hoping to make this music thing work if I ever figure out how to do mellotron in folk-punk.

I never made it to F-L-A. Instead, I’m in Cumberland, Maryland, living in this squat that smells like wet particle board and dusty fiberglass.

But Candy’s dad’s mad because I saw Roger, Candy’s ex on the street. He laughed at my dimple, saying, “What kind of man has a pussy on his chin?” and called Candy a slut for fucking a cuntface. Asked if I ever fucked my chin with my little tampon dick.

Candy corrected him, “You ain’t seen a dick like this. If it’s a tampon it’s one of those super absorbent ultra shits that scientists at Jurassic Park use to clog a dinosaur.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Whip it out! Let’s compare!”

“You’d think it was a rattlesnake or something!”

I rolled my eyes and walked back to our squat, but Candy said she wanted her man-fight. Fist to face. A dick-off. A bicycle race. Anything.

“Cheated!” she says.

I told her that I’m very protective of my privates ever since my dad died. I must be happy or turned on, or bad things will happen.

Candy’s dad said he ain’t care how wild my honch is, but with Father’s Day coming up, I either fix Roger or my balls hang on his Caddy’s mirror next to the fuzzy dice. No one calls his daughter a slut and ain’t no wuss gonna date his daughter. In fact, do it on Father’s Day.

Candy said a real man existed inside me, but right now I’m only a boy.

Roger says he is out of town for a couple days but’ll be back for Father’s Day, Candy says we pretend to seduce and take his manhood.  No, I ain’t lopping his balls off. I thought of Dad, so I hunted for crabs.

My dad got things done. He caught crabs once because Mom burned a meatloaf. He forced cooking classes. Dad ain’t know shit about food, but Mom got her certificate in culinary art. Dad refused her Kwellada.  He’d laugh when she’d scratch herself. She’d fall to the floor. Nits in her hair, eyelashes, and eyebrows, and Daddy standing over her, laughing. He’d make me laugh, too. My daddy, the former preacher, had to teach lessons, so he never gave her Kwellada. He made her shave every hair on her body.  In solidarity, he made me shave my head too. Said I looked too much like her not to join in.

“It’s important,” he’d say to me about the cooking. “We ain’t French, so no reason for us men to be near the stove.”

Mom grew her hair back. Shoulder length. I learned to cook one day, and Daddy got mad. Daddy decided to make a point. The man never whipped my ass before, but he needed to show me how to be a man. Mommy laughed. He pulled down my pants to whip me, but a crash at my feet and rat-tat-tat, my cock hisses like a cat, and Daddy died of a stabbing before he put leather to hindquarter.

Mom said the Lord blessed me with a gift that would make people who loved me happy and people who mistreated me dead.

According to the South Dade News Leader, he stabbed himself in the neck forty-eight times. Perfect little punctures, no bigger than a golf tee.

But ain’t no motherfuckers in Chokoloskee, Florida playing golf.

I sat on every gas station bathroom seat I found, jumped in carpet dumpsters, and rubbed myself all over used mattresses behind the Mattress Warehouse. Nothing. I went looking for every sex worker, but unless you’re Candy, everyone shaves.

But I know where to buy scabies.

Go to Wal-Mart, pick up glue and plastic baggies. Visit Ray.

Huff, plastic baggy, huff, sneeze. Glue keeps demons from flying up my nose. Ring-around- the-rosie, pocket full of posies, with a scent of pig-iron. Glue.

Ray kept scabies among other pests in stock. Indeed, I realized later he kept crabs, too, but Scabies is more excruciating than our little brothers with pinchers for hands.

It takes about two weeks for the itching to start. They crawl into your skin and lay eggs. Little momma scabies looking out for their children, their futures.

Just like we learned in third grade with the Puritans at Plymouth Rock. And scabies are just like Puritans, laying eggs into the upper layer of your skin. They use their mouthparts and chow down, and burrow into your body. Your body becomes their country, much like the United States lives off its own land. It’s the American way.

Of course, Candy has scabies, too and just started to itch.

We huff some glue before Roger shows. I look in Candy’s blue eyes. I kiss her beautiful lips covered in model airplane glue. I pull away, and our lips stick. I jerk back, and she grab her lip in pain. I tell her sorry and kiss her on the forehead.

She grabs my hair and sticks her tongue down my throat. She pulls back says she loves me. I tell her I love her, too, and that we’re fighting for the right to be ourselves. The right of men and women everywhere to express themselves. Like the ACLU. Like abolitionists. Like America. Writing our own Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

She laughs at me and says I’m crazy. That I’m writing my own Declaration from her dad fucking my shit up.

Roger knocks at the door. Candy answers, He wears the largest cheese ever. He looks at me and laughs, and says, “What’s up, girl?”

Candy rolls her eyes.

Now here’s the plan. Candy set up a meeting with Roger. She wanted this to be a porno shoot. I told her no. The only way my cock lets me fuck people is if I am turned on. I can’t be forced. It’s true, my cock is like a rattlesnake, because since it IS one.

She says she don’t know what I am talking about but the plan is to convince him into a threesome, and then fix him, porno or not. I thought that maybe she just wanted me to beat him up. She told me this was silly, and why else would he take his clothes off.

“Make him your bitch, and Dad will be fine,” she said. “You just need to prove that you’re more of a man than him. We’ll have a contest. Whip out your dicks, he’ll play along, and then fuck him in the ass.”

Right.

She said, “Look, I’ll be right here. You like me, right? I’ll kiss you and help you stay hard while you own him.”

I’m not so sure about this plan but Roger comes in. We drink some beer Roger’s dumpstered. Of course, he wants to start fucking right away.

Candy says, “It’s time for the tower of power! Whoever has the most powerful cock gets to have his way with me AND the loser gets to–”

In record time, Roger drops his clothes.

I itch like crazy. I guess I had been itching for a long time, enough to create scabs around my ankles where my little patriots were hiding, but this was supposed to be the moment. They start kissing and touching each other. I’m having second thoughts. Itch so bad that I lose my mojo. Not in the mood. Candy looks over and motions me to come over. She slips out of her dress and tells me to take off my clothes instead of standing like a nerd.

Given that Candy seemed to be enjoying herself, I needn’t be here.  Besides. Scabies don’t need maps or names, just a body.

When I was in third grade, we’d spin the globe looking and stop it with a finger, to find out where we are supposed to live. You, know, those globes that have every country, but only the United States has their states and provinces outlined. One day, I remember choosing East Germany, and getting called a dirty communist. I tried again and got the USSR. Again. Got China. Again, and I thought I was in the clear, it was Mozambique. The kids looked in their textbooks and sure enough, I was still a communist.

I ran home to my mother and explained to her what had happened. She told me, “When you look at a map, you see Germany. Most folks never think that maybe it’s just Germany staring right back at you, hoping that you’ll never realized that countries are arbitrary lines set by scared people who need nations to make them feel better about themselves.”

“Even America?” I asked.

I remember my Dad said it was bullshit. That Thomas Jefferson and George Washington worked very hard, by God, to make the place we live in today. Countries have reasons just god made men and women, and made them to be manly and womanly And, I believed Dad. Men got dicks and countries have borders.

Armed with scabies, I looked at Candy and Roger one last time.

Roger says, “Whip it out!”

I dropped my pants, leaving just my boxers. I looked at Candy all lusty. Then I thought the best sex I’d ever had. A man out in Texas. Hotter than hell. I needed to trick my body into hitting the skins. But to no avail.

Dad was wrong. Countries and being a man are stupid.

“Guys,” I said. “I can’t do this.”

“You can’t back out now!”

“I kinda hafta,” I say. “If I don’t, you’ll die!”

“We’re dying for you right now,” says Candy, blinking her eyes.

“You don’t understand,” I say. “I have to be in the mood, which is why I caught scabies.

“What?”

“Because I wanted to hurt him,” I say. “But now, I don’t want to. Now I’m all itchy, and I got to thinking about colonialism.”

Roger can’t say no and yolks my underwear off. They both stare at my crotch.

Candy eyes change from lust to confusion and then to fear.

Roger looks bewildered.

“I told you!”

A crash at my feet and rat-tat-tat, my cock hisses like a cat. It drops out of my

pelvis and slithers across the floor shaking its tail.  My cock opens its mouth and attacks! First Roger, who grabs his neck and screams. Candy flails around. I kneel down to grab her neck to stop the bleeding but I can’t help.

When it’s all done, two bodies lay on the floor with marks on their necks. Candy’s dad comes running in naked for his Father’s Day gift saying, “I like how Roger sounds” and rat-tat-tat, he falls on the floor, Candy’s dad grabs his neck.

I try to save Candy as the snake slithers back into my loins, but it’s time to leave. Ain’t nobody gonna believe this story about my detachable snake penis. So I leave the squat. I walk out to a road spange a bit and by myself a forty, and some glue. Huff, plastic baggy, huff, sneeze. Glue keeps demons from flying up my nose. Ring-around- the-rosie, pocket full of posies, with a scent of pig-iron. Feet on gray slab. Hand clutches black bar screwed into stone to stay stable.  The head rush leaves and a car passes behind playing “Southbound” by Sammy Kershaw.

I thumb it and a Freightliner slows down and says, “Where to?”

First lose the scabies. Then put this penis to good use. Maybe join a carnival, do porn, or fight crime as the Great Cockmando. Maybe therapy. Find Mom.

Find Mom. Mom always loved me.

“South,” I say. “To Chokoloskee, Florida.”