The Last Weekend by Nick Mamatas

Author:Nick Mamatas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Last Weekend
ISBN: 9781597805827
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Published: 2014-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

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I fell in love with Boston’s T. Not the buses; the trains. The streetcars of the Green Line especially, that were dual-use subway and street cars. Boston had a token system too during my time there, forsaking the impersonal and authoritarian swipe card regimes of New York and San Francisco.

It was a small system—Colin called it a “wind-up toy subway” as compared to the transit systems of the world’s great cities, but to me the trains and their passengers were endlessly fascinating. When not in class I’d take my pocket change and ride all day. To Downtown Crossing and then to the Red Line all the way to the provocatively named Braintree. I still picture cartoon brains pulsing and thrumbing to themselves like hideous apples on the hundred-branched tree from my parents’ backyard. Or I’d take the Blue, which led to the water. The lines were color-coded that way. The Green Line cut under the lawns of Boston Common, Red brought passengers to Harvard Square. It was a subtle little thing, one I was told at some drunken party or other. The secret was knowing that the Orange Line runs down Washington Street, which was once called Orange Street.

I told myself I was taking the train for material. To eavesdrop on people’s lives, to record snippets of real proletarian dialogue that surely spilled from the lips of passengers over every inch of track. And I did hear a few good things. One guy swearing that he “didn’t never been there today,” to his girlfriend, on the topic of visiting the home of his other baby mama, grumbling about “our boy Chucky”—it was another drunken night in a pub when I learned that was slang for the members of the Irish Republican Army, and that I was helping fund the conflict just by ordering another pint; which I was happy to do twice more that night before switching to whisky.

An old Greek lady I followed all the way to Brookline mumbled Kyrie eleison for the entire trip. None of this stuff ever made it into any of my stories. Mostly I just spent time watching girls, the unself-consciously sexy Latinas with big hoop earrings and shocking black hair; white girls in cardigans and long skirts messing with their iPods; fat girls in even bigger Tufts sweatshirts. How did they fuck? Did they shave their cunts? Take it up the ass? Lay on their backs, heads hanging off the side of the bed, letting men fuck their mouths? Moan when they come, or whimper like a hurt little girl, or did they not come at all from sex—instead sneaking orgasms later with some ferocious clit-rubbing after their boyfriend rolled over and went to sleep? Did they ever try other girls, or just swap spit when boys were watching? Even older women, with their worn-out old tits and horrid eye makeup, I couldn’t help but fantasize about. The ones who were “bad girls” back when there was such a thing. Those who only ever slept with their husbands, and spent their whole lives regretting it.

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