{"id":19399,"date":"2024-04-11T06:36:40","date_gmt":"2024-04-11T10:36:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/?p=19399"},"modified":"2024-04-11T07:15:22","modified_gmt":"2024-04-11T11:15:22","slug":"broth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/fiction\/broth\/","title":{"rendered":"Broth"},"content":{"rendered":"

I found my roommate Bill\u2019s foreskin stretcher in a shoebox labeled broth. He was at work and I\u2019d been rummaging in his closet looking for these mushroom chocolates we\u2019d bought off this guy at an Allman Brothers Band show the month before because I was bored, in that moment specifically and with my life in general, and had long ago finished my half of the supply. To fight this boredom, I was working my way through all of Paul Schrader\u2019s movies. The whole filmography, stuff he\u2019d written from scratch like Taxi Driver and scripts he punched up like Raging Bull<\/em> all the way up to his latest movie, the Card Counter<\/em>. I was in a Schrader state of mind you could say, God\u2019s Lonely Man, a little incel-ish, angry, feeling forgotten or ignored, scribbling in my little notebook\u2014this, what you\u2019re reading, is one such scribble. His movies spoke to me, yes, moved me even, but Schrader was raised a Calvinist and was always yakking on and on in interviews and articles about transcendence, transcendent cinema, and yes, as I said I was drawn to his work, but did I feel transcendence? That\u2019s where I thought the mushrooms might help.<\/p>\n

But instead of some magic mushrooms hidden in clumps of cheap milk chocolate, I found a little plunger and some bands and, beneath them, a packet of information that told me it was a foreskin stretcher. A mini plunger or bell, a tiny cone like a dunce cap for your dick to wear. I picked it up and found the directions beneath it. I started to read about tugging to restore your foreskin, complete with helpful step-by-step photos of some guy stretching his little 2D black-and-white dick out, when I heard Bill\u2019s girlfriend Tommie say, \u201cIt\u2019s better for your hygiene.\u201d<\/p>\n

I froze for a second, then dropped the stretcher back in the box labeled broth. \u201cI didn\u2019t see you there, Tommie.\u201d It was three in the afternoon and she was in Bill\u2019s loft bed, wedged between it and the ceiling fan and under two huge comforters. Bill worked nights so I knew he\u2019d be gone but I didn\u2019t even know she was in the apartment.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt improves a cock\u2019s sensitivity too. Improves your sex life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re really selling it,\u201d I said. \u201cYour idea originally, I take it?\u201d<\/p>\n

She swung her legs over the side of the bed, her thin blonde hair hanging over her face like that creepy kid from the Ring. They were thin legs, not my type at all, but Tommie was sexy in other ways. Open and free about her body, at home in it in a way that neither my exes nor I ever were. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t my idea but we like masturbating together and he likes a good hand job too, especially when we\u2019re watching a movie, you know, because you can get off but still follow the film and then the experience becomes eroticized.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI see.\u201d<\/p>\n

She raised her pointer finger, then asked, \u201cAre you circumcised?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you doing now?\u201d She dangled her feet, making circles with them and I was mesmerized by the dirty soles of her feet, the little flecks of the world sticking to them, and the way that finger was still pointing to the ceiling, the sky.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m on a Schrader kick,\u201d I said, my mouth dry. \u201cI wanted to take some mushrooms and watch Mosquito Coast.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe finished those mushrooms last week. But I\u2019ve got a joint. Can I join you?\u201d<\/p>\n

With my dry mouth I croaked out \u201cof course\u201d and went into the living room and put in the DVD. I kept getting them from the library and I liked how tangible they were but also that they\u2019d been handled and watched by a bunch of other people out there, entering the homes of who knows how many strangers across the county, which created a fitting sense of both interconnection and alienation. I thought Schrader would appreciate that.<\/p>\n

She came in with her hair up and wearing the ratty sundress she always wore around the apartment, highlighter orange, and I could see her nipples through the thin cotton. Not that I was attracted to her. Or to anyone, really. The whole idea of other people had exhausted me. People, bodies, desires, material reality\u2014exhausting. I just wanted to watch Schrader flicks preferably while fucked-up.<\/p>\n

We smoked the joint and ate popcorn and didn\u2019t talk much as Harrison Ford\u2019s character, this autodidact tinkerer, an American Yankee preaching self-reliance who moves to central America to escape American consumerism or planned obsolescence or authority, starts going mad like Kurtz and I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that Tommie was rubbing herself. Harrison Ford is a looker, that I understand, but masturbating here, now, on this crummy couch in the late afternoon watching Mosquito Coast? I couldn\u2019t make sense of it. Then she started breathing a little more heavily and lifted her sundress and if I looked I could have seen everything but I focused on the movie, listening to the DVD spin in my old player, watching these actors play characters, but her breathing was getting to me because we were breathing the same air, two relative strangers, and maybe it was the weed affecting me but I got a whiff of transcendence for a second, felt the world pouring into me and me pouring into it and it smelled like Tommie\u2019s wetness and popcorn and a central American jungle.<\/p>\n

Then I felt Tommie take my right hand and lay it on my crotch. I left it there until she picked it up again and moved it back and forth so I got the idea and I was hard, despite all my protestations about my lack of interest in sex, so I unzipped and started masturbating and we both masturbated casually like that on opposite ends of the couch, slowly, while watching Mosquito Coast on this dark afternoon. I came into my hand and it didn\u2019t feel like simple semen but like an expulsion of venom or the exorcism of some demon that had been haunting me, weighing me down, draining life of its joy and meaning. I wiped it under the couch cushion and we finished the film and then she said she wanted to make pasta so Bill had some food ready when he got home and I said I had some errands to run which wasn\u2019t true but I thought I shouldn\u2019t be there when Bill got home so I went out driving aimlessly in the night like a good Schrader character but a little lighter, perhaps, and wondering why Bill labeled the box broth.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We fell into an unspoken rhythm. Bill worked nights. I worked early mornings. Tommie, as far as I could tell, didn\u2019t work at all. So come late afternoon, I\u2019d nuke some popcorn and as the kernels were blooming in their bag, I\u2019d hear Tommie making herself comfortable in the living room. We\u2019d watch half a Schrader flick, maybe more, then she\u2019d start touching herself and I\u2019d start touching myself and we\u2019d both come before the end of the movie and these silent masturbation sessions where neither of us ever touched the other became the highlight of my day, of my life, simultaneously the least involved relationship\u2014for I knew next to nothing about Tommie\u2014and the most intimate. Was Tommie helping me, through the act of mutual self-pleasure, to rediscover the pleasure in life? What was I to her? Or was this bigger than both of us? By the third afternoon I\u2019d started to feel something before I came, a floating feeling or a sinking feeling or a bobbing buoyancy, as if the world were watery, a liquid universe and I was part of it, a wave in the churn. Was this transcendence?<\/p>\n

I was chasing this feeling with Schrader and Tommie but the problem was we\u2019d masturbated our way through most of Schrader\u2019s work in two weeks and I didn\u2019t know what would happen once we\u2019d finished them all. Could we pick up some other dark cinematic classics or make the shift to something adjacent, his friend Scorsese or his influences like Pickpocket and then hop, wet and hard, onto the Bresson train and ride it towards transcendence?<\/p>\n

We never got the chance to find out. As we were watching the Card Counter, Schrader\u2019s latest about a torturer who becomes a card counter drowning in his horrific past until he\u2019s forced to confront it, just as Oscar Isaacs was about to torture his torturer, so to speak, as Tommie was rubbing and I was yanking, at the climax of our afternoon arousal, Bill came home early with a busted thumb. We hadn\u2019t locked the door. Hadn\u2019t thought to. It was as if that afternoon Schrader space was another world, a private terrain that only we had access to. That\u2019s how I felt anyway. But Bill came in with his thumb wrapped in gauze all mangled from work and saw us sitting there, even with Tommie pulling her dress down quickly and me with a blanket mostly covering my lap, and with one look, he knew.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt smells like pussy in here,\u201d he said. Then he looked hard at me and my blanketed lap. \u201cPussy and cock.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re just watching a Schrader flick,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

Tommie said nothing but, to my disbelief, started rubbing herself again.<\/p>\n

Bill began pacing the room, holding his bloody-gauzed thumb up and in front of him like a torch lighting his way through the strange night he just found himself in. \u201cI know, yes, Schrader, of course.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not what you think.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow do you think we met? But then it was Paul Thomas Anderson. She was all hot and wet for Anderson, then. Now it\u2019s this Schrader, you say?\u201d<\/p>\n

My erection fully wilted, I discreetly zipped my fly up and said, \u201cI think I should go for a drive or something. Let you two sort this out.\u201d<\/p>\n

But before I could stand and make my escape, Bill sat down between us and started rubbing his crotch. \u201cWe\u2019ll finish the movie together. That\u2019s the only solution. We\u2019ll come together on this couch, understand? And in this coming, we\u2019ll be closer, we\u2019ll be equals, before each other and before Schrader, brothers and sisters in come, ok?\u201d<\/p>\n

Tommie seemed to like the idea because her sundress was up and she had two fingers inside her up to her knuckles. Bill was half-hard, his dick free of his pants now, a little pale slug sliming its way out of his jeans. \u201cI might need some help, though,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause of my thumb.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t do this, Bill.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you circumcised?\u201d he asked, ignoring me and fumbling with his dick. \u201cAnd what\u2019s this movie about anyway? Bring me up to speed.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was out the door in under three seconds.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I moved out a month later after avoiding them both as best I could. Even with that residual glow I felt from our afternoons with Schrader, I kept on avoiding them for nearly a year until I ran into them unexpectedly at a friend\u2019s party. They were still together. Tommie had moved in. When she went to the bathroom, I asked Bill about the box labeled broth.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love a good hand job and Tommie noticed that there wasn\u2019t a lot there to work with, you know? So, we found this thing online. Tommie did. It\u2019s genital mutilation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cForeskin stretching?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, circumcision. I\u2019m just righting a wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut why broth?\u201d<\/p>\n

Bill got serious for second, put his drink down. \u201cPromise you won\u2019t laugh?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cPromise.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, once I started tugging, you know stretching back my foreskin, I got more sensitive and hornier too and started masturbating more and more and more, all the time, so dick-focused, dick-obsessed, you know, and I guess I was dehydrated or a little stoned one day when we were camping and Tommie was asleep in the tent and I stumbled outside to piss but then got horny out there so I started jerking off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tommie returned, smiling. She ran her pointer finger along the back of my neck by way of hello.<\/p>\n

\u201cI still don\u2019t see the broth connection.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs I was jerking off with this new sensitivity in my dick I felt it radiate out, you know, from my dick to my balls to my guts, up and down, head to toe, and I\u2019m looking at the stars and shooting my wad onto the earth and I felt God or something bigger than me, some big sort of soupy presence sloshing all around within me and outside me, dissolving those distinctions, like I was one sperm in God\u2019s load and God was one in mine, and I thought broth, \u2018it\u2019s broth\u2019, a voice said to me in a booming whisper, \u2018we\u2019re broth, broth, broth,\u2019 and I don\u2019t know why but the next day I wrote it on the box.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s all?\u201d I asked, goose-pimpled and sweating.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah.\u201d Bill said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d Tommie corrected.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, right,\u201d Bill said. \u201cAlmost forgot. Did you see that Schrader has a new movie coming out? It\u2019s in theaters next week.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the word Schrader I suddenly got hard and they both noticed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe thought you\u2019d want to see it,\u201d Tommie said. \u201cIt might be a good way to reconnect,\u201d she said, and I heard a wet invitation in the cs in \u201cconnect,\u201d in the way they sat in her mouth.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve kind of given up on movies lately, actually. You know, reading more. Less screen time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bill shrugged. Tommie smiled. And somehow, incredibly, we shifted topics.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t think I\u2019d hear from them again but two weeks later Bill CC\u2019d me on an emailed receipt for tickets to Schrader\u2019s newest flick. A late afternoon showtime at a nearby theater. Tickets for three.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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