Hot Pockets & Lions
I don’t know which was dirtier, the talk or the sex. Or maybe dirtiest of all was how we lounged about afterwards, each eating a Hot Pocket while splayed out on sweat-soaked sheets. His and hers; meatballs and mozzarella, Philly steak and cheese. David Attenborough was narrating, muted, on the television. Something with zebras, with the lions that hunted them.
I’d never met anyone quite like Val. Or even remotely like her. I didn’t know lions could be so wild, let alone a girl. A five-foot-one, ninety-eight-pound little thing. She didn’t have claws or canines quite like the lions, but she had claws and canines all the same. My back could vouch for that. My lips and nipples. I’d seen a lioness or two behind bars in zoos. But I’d never seen one wild and free. Not in bed. Not until now. Except on the television.
Something roared, and I thought it must be a lion, but then I remembered the t.v. was on mute. It was my tummy. Doing the I-want-more grumble. ‘You got any more of these?’ I asked.
‘Sure,’ she told me. ‘But only the cheeseburger ones.’
‘That’ll do,’ I’d eat raw meat. Such was my hunger. I was feeling savage, like the lions on the soundless tube. Silent but deadly.
‘I hate the cheeseburger ones,’ she admitted. ‘They’ve been in there for more than a year. They’ll be all freezer burned for sure.’
The old rust of last year’s frozen shards will shed after a nuke in the microwave. Crust all golden brown, synthetic, almost plastic cheese oozing out of the cracks in the charred pastry. Molten lava, cholesterol, and heart disease simmering within. I was well and truly high. I was getting poetic. Lost in Hot Pocket thought.
‘So why did you get them?’
‘What?’
‘Why did you get them,’ I asked. ‘The cheeseburger ones. Why even buy them if you don’t eat them?’
Val sat there for a long while. Thinking, I think. ‘Variety is the spice of life,’ she offered.
Maybe. I mused. Or maybe eating your favorite every time is what gets your jollies. Now that I had tasted Val, I’d not be thinking of variety. Spice be damned. I wanted Val, and only Val, every time.
Something roared, and this time, it was a lion. Val had unmuted the telly. The lions were having their jollies, much to the misfortune of the zebras.
I held what looked more like a snow cone than a Hot Pocket. She wasn’t kidding. This thing was well iced. Like a space traveler in cold sleep for centuries. Suspended animation. Deep freeze. I dropped it with a heavy thud back into its hibernation chamber. I’ll abandon the encore of food I’d regret in the morning. I’ll go a little hungry. Use a lot less toilet paper come the a.m. It was a hard decision, but a good decision.
I hopped back into bed with Val. Speaking of encores.
But she wasn’t into it. She was keeping me at arm’s length. Her Philly steak and cheese had dribbled onto the bedsheets. I picked at the congealed strand, like dried glue, and peeled it backward. Held it up over my gaping maw and let it fall pointlessly into my mouth. Not even a snack. Just a dainty morsel with more dust on it than nutritional substance.
The lions had moved on to wildebeest.
‘Did you know the lionesses are the ones that do the hunting?’
‘Really?’
‘It’s their role to provide for the pride, to present the fresh kill to the lazy lion.’
I thought of Val getting dressed and driving to the minimart. I thought about her bringing back a Ham and Cheese or Pepperoni Pizza Hot Pockets box and presenting it to me.
‘But the lion, surely he has his role.’
‘He mates,’ Val told me.
‘Sounds like he gets the lion’s share.’
‘Exactly.’
Later on in the program, I learned that the lion doesn’t just laze about, eating food brought to him and fucking the waitresses. He also has to fight. Fight other lions that want the role of the big cheese for their own. Big cheese. I eyed the freezer. I was jonesing for some really bad food. Bad, good food. You know exactly what I mean. Deep-fried candy bars or cheeseburger Hot Pockets.
I heard a growl. Val’s cat, Mellow. Good name, but she was anything but. I had as many scratches from Mellow as I had from Val. But I didn’t savor the Mellow ones. Just the savage ones from the lioness. The ones from Val.
I heard a roar. My tummy, again.
‘You got any Pop-Tarts?’
‘No.’
‘Damn.’
My hopes up. Gone. I decided to watch the rest of the program hungry. My intestinal growls will blend with the rest of the pride’s vocal ones. My hunger will mellow, though Mellow will not. My gastric mewling, her irritated spitting. The death throes of the wildebeest and Sir David Attenborough’s melodic tones, his splendid insights. Val, wheezing due to her ungainly slouch. The bedfellows’ choir was a strange one.
When the lions found the waterhole dried up, I couldn’t help but feel a kinship with them. A bond in our mutual suffering. The lions with no water, me with no cheese-dripping heart-attack-for-the-future Hot Pocket.
Val had fallen asleep. It was Attenborough’s narration. It was so lulling. So pristine and utterly sincere. I took the loveliness of his narration and formed it into a Hot Pocket-sized sound wave and ate it through my ears. I felt better for it. The hunger went away.
When the program ended, I ventured to take a leak so I wouldn’t have to an hour or two later in the middle of the night. With the t.v. off, the only light in the room came from a purple lava lamp. I could hardly see in the bruised gloom and tiptoed like a careful thief or a man who was walking on thin ice. Despite my great efforts, I tripped up. Mellow threaded through my ankles for an untimely cuddle. Or, more likely, very timely. A premeditated ambush. Like a lioness pouncing on a zebra from her well-concealed vantage within the Savanna grass.
I rose to my knees, and my late-stage scab caught on the carpet. I felt it pull with my motion to rise-–mild sting.
Under the bathroom light, I observed that it hadn’t peeled off completely. It hung, barely, a drab and ugly thing. That scab held by one edge, like a rusty hinge or a scorched flake of Hot Pocket pastry, peeling away.
I made it back into bed without further mishap. I collapsed onto the mattress and felt myself drifting off quick, rapidly speeding towards my dreams. The last thing I recalled before arriving at Z-town was the smell of the sheets. Sweat and sex and burnt cheese.
Under the faint glow of a purple lava lamp, I slept the sleep of a corpse. Like a zebra savaged by a lioness or a wildebeest presented to the lion, I lay unanimated. All except my breath.
Under the dim, mottled aura of a purple lava lamp, I dreamed of Hot Pockets and Lions.