Cunt Full of Python (edit 1, erotic memoir)

There’s a Python Inside Me



Although I resisted, the spiky woman entered my life. What I did for her: created monthly training sessions with each week brand new yet still flowing into the whole, weeks two and four focusing on strength training and compound exercises—my old squat I’ve grown to love, bench, the deadlifts Sam the Israeli Olympian taught me at Energy Gym that summer we escaped to the townhouse in the Danforth, clean and press John taught me and Garth perfected; illustrated proper form and how to eat like a builder; slabbed mass onto her scrawny disproportionate form; took her to Strictly’s.

What she did: revamped her brush cut hair color from bright red to faded yellow; giggled her way past the guard at the gatehouse and knocked on my condo door; charmed Garth with cheesecake; propositioned him and then me; brought the Soaps into Strictly; swiped my erstwhile training partner; wiped his sweat off his forehead with the flat of her hand as I watched; brought him bottled water; sent him sexy emails; chaperoned him around town in her BMW.

She sends me emails. She loves her biceps and bought a webcam to show off for her Australian cyber-lover. Every three hours she eats low glycemic food. She overdoses on protein. Lately she’s taken to giggling when she trains, which I bring home to Garth. “There’s something odd about her giggle,” I say. “It makes me uneasy.” Which makes Garth laugh and I love that, making him laugh. Laughing and music make me hot and we don’t listen to music all that much. Sometimes he calls me over to his computer. There’s a Garth Brooks song he likes and also ‟No Woman, No Cry,” a song he says most don’t get, but he does, and I believe him. One day he’ll email a tango to me that will just send me. I’ll stand beside him as he sits at his computer and my heart and cunt will wing out of my body, landing on him and smothering him with kisses deep and otherwise. I wish for laughter and music in my life.

“She’s gay,” he says.
“What are you saying?” I can’t hold back a smile, not that I want the woman, shit, but I’ve got him for this moment and we’re back at Nina Street, home on our stolen mattress and I’m reaching up under him, “I belong to you,” I say.
“Gay? Is not.”
“Let’s ask Talon.”
“That’s not going to work. You’ll coach him.”
“We’ll pick you up after one of your training sessions.” And that`s how Garth meets Sharon.
“So?” I say, buckling myself into the silver Stratus.
“Gay,” Garth says.
“Talon?”
“Way gay,” he says from the back.

I sit in the front seat when the three of us are in the car. As soon as I exit, Talon’s out of the back in a flash and into the front passenger seat. Before he gets in, Garth slides the passenger seat toward the back and shifts it back full tilt so the son is in line with the father who positions his seat to afford his massive height and girth.

Every once in a while, Garth decides to clean up his diet. He’s going to become a bodybuilder, he says. I get eight hours sleep. I eat every two-and-a-half hours. Once I refused a trip to Geneva with Abie, I was either bulking up or getting ready for a show that never happened. Abie smirked when I refused, since he knew I’d refuse anyhow and he was on his way to visit Petra in Germany. He slept on the pull-out in the living room, he said, Petra’s Italian husband and blond twin sons occupying the bedroom.

After a week on his clean diet, Garth asks me if I see a difference. “Not that you’d look or notice anyway,” he adds. Half an inch on a body that has to lose a hundred pounds is like removing a bucket of pebbles from a mile-long beach. “I’m clearing the beach, turning it into one of those sparkling sand places like Florida or Tahiti, it’s supposed to look like paradise in Tahiti.” And you point to the midday sun and your pail of pebbles. My new silver Sirrus is my guideline: when he sits behind the steering wheel, where on his chest does his mountain of a belly begin its ascent, and at its peak, how close to the steering wheel?

Every month I pay three hundred and twenty-five dollars for the Sirrus which we bought from a sales lot that had taken over a scrap of Scarborough farm land. “We accept bad or no credit,” the billboard advertised. Garth says this is how I can build up my credit. “But I have no credit, except Abie`s mess,” I say. “If you would only listen,” he says, and I say, “I am. I’m listening.” I want to be legitimate even though I don’t pay taxes. Every day I’m afraid until the mail arrives or when the phone rings. People depend on me.

Sharon brings homemade cheesecake and gives it to Garth. He smiles at her as he accepts it and cuts himself a massive slice. Smiles. Comments on how delicious the cake. Says she is always welcome if she brings this cake with her and forgets to mention his diet.

The proposition: she worries about me, says my happiness is everything to her which is why she accepted Garth’s offer to go out, maybe she could find out how he was thinking, which is why she accepted. “He says you’re a naysayer, a nitpicker, you’re like a top dizzy from overanalyzing,” she writes in a late night email. “He inquired about the seven-year itch, told me how he’d once gotten drunk and had mind-blowing sex.” She’s going to get him drunk and find out when and where and get back to me.

It was with me, you skinny shit. In the Comfort Inn on Finch Avenue West.

Then she suggests a threesome, not to worry she’s not going to touch me, Garth told her I’m the most homophobic person he’s ever met, think about it. She tells me I have no sense of adventure, that Garth says I’m no fun anymore and she believes him. It’s just a suggestion, mind you, but maybe it’s just what he might be needing. She gets that feeling anyway.

I push back the desk chair, walk over to the living room and stand in front of the television, a Springer show with fat arms waving and loud voices. “Sharon wants to fuck you and she wants me to watch,” I say. He doesn’t say anything and I wonder whether he’s turned on, whether his porn sites turned him on, the strippers in the bars he bounced in, why he told me to take off my panties that time we walked into a strip joint in Mississauga—I was wearing a spaghetti strap sparking dress—‟wear something that shows off your muscles,” he’d said, and I thought I’d buy a dress and surprise him so I bought a dress studded with stars.

Jealousy is a python coiling inside me, top to bottom, once, then reversing, and tightening. I want to know if I detest him as I do, why the python moves in? When he trains her, I drive by Strictly. I watch for body language when they finish training and walk to her car. I flaunt my two-hundred-and-seventy-five pound squats and two-hundred-and-twenty-five deads. Builders come by and chat with me. I watch Sharon’s right knee invert as she settles into a squat and shake my head.

I’m lying under the vertical leg press with three plates aside when Garth walks in. “Garth,” I say, after I rack the weight and put the safeties in place—when the gym first opened a guy bashed his skull in so now there’s a sign, ‟put your safeties in place.” I was once fucking an Amercian, some writer, and just as he was about ram his indigo prick up my cunt I said, ‟oh, you gotta wear a safe,” and he just looked at me. “What?” “A safe,” I said. “You know.” And then he laughed. “Oh! You mean a rubber!” When he went back to the States, he told all his friends about the difference between Canadians and Americans, used it as some kind of anecdote, which made me pissing mad because it was private, I told him. I’ve changed since then. I tell all my anecdotes and every one else’s.

So I rack up the safeties. “Garth!” He’s walking out, doesn’t turn round.
“Garth!” Louder this time.
“What do you want?” he says, his face darkening.
“I just want to talk to you.”
“You’ve embarrassed me in my own gym.”
I can feel the python waking up inside me.
“I’m sorry, it’s just that I’m working so hard and Caroline—” and then the damn breaks.
“I’ll see you at home,” he says and walks out.

I know everyone must be watching but I can’t see them. It’s like being on stage with the stage lights full on, you can’t see who’s in the audience but you know they’re there. Sharon’s car is not in the parking lot.


Lifespace Institute of Transformational Psychotherapy


She belts herself into the leg extension and places her feet under its turquoise pads.
“Did I tell you I’m going to an orientation session this Saturday?”
I hate when clients talk in the middle of a set. It’s like talking with your mouth full. In my Nautilus days with Bernie, you weren’t allowed to tense any other body parts except the one working. You did the work, no grimaces, no complaints. I’m better at the gym than at home. Still, I can’t look at Garth’s calves when I’m angry, their sheer size is a thing of beauty and the play of the sun on his red hairs, his height, the very girth of him—and although his cock is thick and a good length, it’s suits him. He doesn’t have an off-the-rack cock.
“Janice! I did tell you, didn’t I?”
“Maybe you were thinking of telling me.”
They’re always telling me their shit. If it’s good, I’ll bring it home and lay it out before Garth or I’ll write about it.
“No, no, you didn’t tell me. So, you have an orientation, huh? And how do you feel about it?” Dr. Stern used to use that line. I use it and even throw in supportive body language, leaning ever so slightly in with my upper torso and tilting my head to the side, nothing dramatic which Lisa would say goes against my grain. My grain, so parched and searching for a gentle breeze.

Sharon runs a successful nanny agency, matching profiles of nannies hungry for Canadian soil with women who must shop, must meet for coffee, do lunch, streak and straighten their hair, attend to their French tips, wax armpits and bikini lines. She has the idea she’s empathetic and wants to get out of the nanny business. People open up to her she says, so when she saw an ad in NOW about Lifespace Institute of Transformational Psychotherapy, she made inquiries. Now she’s having second thoughts.

‟Take your muscles with you, they’ll keep you company and protect you.”
She giggles.
‟I’ll go with you,” I say, feeling a heaviness pull at me. I’d have to cancel the Greek dental assistant whom I have on a pre-contest double-double split, although she’s not entering a contest, but splitting from her husband, an event requiring her to be in the best shape of her life. ‟Give up your beer,” I told her. I can’t understand spilling your guts in the gym and filling them with froth later, although the smell of beer is like jasmine, I can keep my nose in the froth indefinitely; at supper my father would drink, in a shapely tall glass, one golden beer, its thick tender froth skimming on top. I worshiped my father.

I cancel Christine who says she`s not really up to training anyway, she’d gone bar-hopping on Friday night and her head was really jazzy buzzing. ‟Things have a way of working out,” I tell Garth. I’m trying to look on the brighter side of life since I`ve been doing the silly walk for decades now, intentionally and not. So I’m looking on the brighter side of life whenever I can, even though I sometimes I forget or plain don’t want to. I see the brighter side beckoning me enthusiastically, then impatiently, throwing open his trench coat, and I turn away.