Bruce in Toledo

by Will Boucher

This Bruce is one of many.

SUM FLUX V.5 Chapter Menu

…R U R’ U’…

The sexy move. Sexy—at least for speedcubers. He’s in the bathroom, sexy moving his uncooperative cock, hoping to coax blood southward.

…R U R’ U’ R’ F R F’….

Tammy’s in his bed, nude, scissoring legs on the fresh linen.

…R U R’ U’…

He mouths it silently, quarter-turning his mushroom tip. He told her he had to pee. They’d come to his place for a nightcap. The moment she threw him on the duvet and bit his neck, he sprang up like a schoolboy: “I have to pee.” He nearly said “tinkle” or “tinky,” but (thank God) he had the poise to catch himself. Pee? The excuse does him no favors. Pee? Really? Amateur. Urination is loaded, ripe with sound and time; Tammy is out there, timing, straining her ears, waiting for Niagara.

The silence is damning. He debated cupping his hands—filling his flesh chalice with water, waddling to the toilet, opening a palmar urethra to manufacture a face-saving stream, but he decided no. He didn’t trust his hands these days. He reaches out with the non-sexying hand to flush the toilet. He counts five slow Mississippis and starts the sink.

…U2 L’ U’ R U R’ F2…

He cycles through his spank bank, lingering on the red scrunchied girl from sophomore year, the smell of the YMCA pool, her loose bikini revealing the first true human nipple…

…R U R’ U’…

Nothing.

…R U R’ U’…

It’s not that he’s soft, not at all. He’s been erect since Tammy kissed his neck, turgid the moment he waddled off to “pee.” He’s just not sufficiently erect, not Toledo erect.

…F R U’ R’ U’ R U R’ F’ R U R’ U’ R’ F R F’…

He loops an OLL skip into his cock. When he was twelve he performed it perfectly at the ‘89 Columbus Regionals (third place with 23.7 seconds, coming within 0.2s of pudgy Stevie Kowalski, that unremarkable pompous little—)

“BRUCE!!!!”

Tammy calls out. Knee deep in sexual frustration her voice retains the warm olly olly oxen free of mom holding a fresh lemon pie.

“Coming!”

He immediately regrets the phrase. He fishes his hand in the water, disturbing the stream to imply business. He imagines walking into the bedroom, unmaximally erect, watching displeasure sag the skin around her eyes, fill them with disgust—worse than disgust, patience, the patience of a woman forced to submit to the unmaximal, who has now factored it into her private Bruce math.

…L’ U2 L U2 L F’ L’…

He closes his eyes and remembers the same patience stealing his mother’s eyes.

…U’ L U L F L2…

Toledo. 1990. The civic center cafeteria, the folding chairs, the long plastic tables, the flaccid Buckeye flag—the smell of tater tots, of lemon wax, of boy-sweat. Bruce sat at table three, palms faced down, bookending the official WCA scramble in front of him. He was good back then—gifted, gifted to the point of suspected autism. He, not sad sack Kowalski, he was the kid everyone suspected to take state, the one the others must watch with envy and pretend they have a shot. A dozen fathers in the crowd had money on him.

He was living up to expectations. He was at the last layer. Last. Layer. Yellow cross already solved, just had to permute the corners—

…U R U’ L’ U R’ U’ L…

—easy. Child’s play. He could do it blindfolded, almost…usually, but something was off. Bruce felt it happening from the opening algo, felt his blood Bataan march south as his little fingers danced through T-perms. When the last layer came, the blood had tented his sweatpants with a charging-stag erection. Sweatpants—gray sweatpants. His mother (God rest her soul) thought they looked “comfortable” and “sporty” and offered “full range of motion” without considering the challenges they presented for teenage male anatomy, without factoring in the ways “range of motion” and Bangladeshi fabric could transform erratic tumescence into spectacle and laughs and brouhaha.

His mother (God rest her soul) sat in the front row wearing her good powder blue sweater, beaming with sweet casserole energy her arm around his father who frowned uncomfortable in his tie, stiff from the drive up. He is about to win. If he wins, he must stand—stand and let the seventy spectators, his neighbors and classmates and the damned World Cube Association ogle his brutal penis—

“BRUCE!!!!”

—the stranger that greets him in the morning triumphant after matting his new hairs with candied goop, his penis which, far as he can tell, is not very big, not the same as Noah Hofmann’s who often took his out at recess and let it throb like a wasp’s ass in his scabbed hand and everyone stared at the big thing, too angry and big—too big for a living thing—

…R U R’ F’ R U R’ U’ R’ F R2 U’ R’…

His hands made the decision for him, sabotaged his Y-perm with a U’ instead of U, scrambled the cube that was three moves away from solved. The judges looked confused and his mom’s face did that thing and—

“Everything okay?”

She’s at the door, soft-throated, trying the handle. Bruce kills the water and pulls up his pants, pausing to fix his eyebrows in the mirror before opening up.

“You okay, hon?”

Bruce nods, too fast, his hands sexy twitching at his sides.

“Good,” she says, throwing her arms around him, entwining the unmaximal. “Come here.”

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