Louisiana Purchase
20-Minute Fiction
It was Camp Street in New Orleans. We were walking. I was trying to keep up. My girlfriend walks much faster than I walk. I can't keep up. She has longer legs, I guess, a stronger stride.
"Hey," I said. "Slow down."
"What," she said. "This is how I walk."
"You're missing things. Little details."
"I'm not missing anything. I process it faster than you do."
This must be true, because even though she walks a lot faster, walks so fast she seems like some kind of cartoon blur sometimes, later she'll know twice as much about where we've just been. I don't know why this is the case, except that maybe she's a more advanced kind of human.
Anyway, we were walking down Camp Street in New Orleans, me some yards behind her, when this guy jumps in front of her and yanks out his dick. He's a white kid with a baseball cap with some Greek letters on it. He's got a plastic cup attached to his wrist with a string. You can drink in public in New Orleans, but I don't know about yanking out your dick. It's a cosmpolitan city with a rich cultural legacy, but I'm not positive about the dick thing. It could be a holdover from the Napoleonic era, but I'm not sure. There are many aspects of the Napoleonic Code still in place in Louisiana, as Marlon Brando actually mentions in "A Streetcar Named Desire," or "Streetcar," as the pain-in-the-ass theater people sometimes call it.
But I digress, and this is not meant to be one of those stories full of rich cultural digressions. That's not my legacy.
The guy yanks out his dick and waves it at my girlfriend.
Then he says, "Feast or famine, baby!"
That's what he says, I swear. So I rush up and stand between the guy and my girlfriend. I don't want to look down at his dick but of course I do and it's a big beautiful dick, much bigger and more beautiful than mine, and I'm hoping that my girlfriend was so horrified by this guy that she didn't really get a look at it, that it was just some cartoon blur to her, because even though I know she's had a lot of dicks in her life and has still chosen to be with mine, it would please me immensely if her visual purchase on this particular dick, no matter the monstrosity of the man, be of the cartoon blur variety.
So I get between them, my girlfriend and this monstrous creep, yell, "Famine, fucker!" Whereupon the creep snickers and slips his dick back in his pants and bolts past us to where all his buddies are waiting, laughing, puking into their Greek-lettered caps. Whereupon I put my arm around my girlfriend to comfort her after this awful assault. She seems a little stunned.
"God," she said. "That was awful."
"That jerk," I said. "That's why I don't want you to walk so fast."
"What, you're afraid I'll miss the details?"
"Not this time," I said.
"Did you see him tear back to his friends like that?"
"Yeah."
"Is it hard to run like that with such a big dick?"
"You get used to it, I guess."
