Charlotte Roche Two-Book Collection: Wetlands and Wrecked

I’m telling you. Complementary colors. Brown skin complements pussy-pink.

It impressed me so much that since then I always put makeup on the inside of my pussy when I have a date to fuck. I use standard makeup that you’d normally put on your face. I have yet to find pussy makeup at the drugstore. A gap in the market.

Like when you’re putting makeup on your eyes, I make it darker the closer you get to the center. I start with light pink and pink tones, lip gloss and eye shadow, and work my way through the folds until I’m right at the entrance to the tunnel, where I use dark red, lavender, and blue. I like to color the brown-pink of the rosette with a few dabs of lipstick, too, rubbing it on with my finger.

It makes the pussy and rosette more dramatic, deeper, more beguiling.

Since I learned that black women have the reddest pussies, I only go to black hookers. There are no other black women in my world—not in my school, not in my neighborhood. Prostitution is my only chance. I’m sure plenty of men understand my problem.

I had a really bad experience with a white hooker. She had skin as pale as cheese and light-red hair. She was a little chubby and—totally unnecessarily—completely shaved. And I mean everything was bare. Not a single pubic hair anywhere. Her crotch looked like a sculpture of a newborn baby made out of cheese.

I had been looking forward to her tits. From beneath her shirt they made a good impression. Big but still pointing upward. When she undressed and took off her bra, it was a big disappointment. She had big droopy breasts with flat nipples.

Flat nipples are something really bad.

All a nipple is supposed to do is stick out. Flat nipples don’t do that. It’s as if someone had pushed the nipple back into the breast and it stayed there, cowering in fear. Like a little collapsed soufflé.

I thought, well I’m already here and I’m going to have to pay so I might as well close my eyes and go for it. Some of the hookers had told me that men who weren’t happy with their hooker once she got naked just walked back out without paying and picked a different one. I could never do that. I’m too much of a beginner—and too polite.

I would have to tell her to her face that she didn’t look good. I’d rather not. I wouldn’t have the heart.

I convince myself that it’s also an important experience to have sex with someone I find ugly, and immediately I go down on her on the bed.

She puts her hands behind her head and does nothing. I’m doing all the work. I lick her and grind my pussy on her bent knee. I come fast. I’m the queen of grinding. She hasn’t moved an inch the entire time. A very lazy hooker. Didn’t know there was such a thing.

After I’ve come, she starts looking around for something to munch on. Finds something. She knocks back a glass of the expensive champagne I paid for and munches on goldfish crackers. She can’t believe how fast I came and asks whether I’ve ever had anal sex.

I don’t understand why she’s asking. But I answer truthfully and say yes.

“How is it? Doesn’t it hurt?”

What? Who’s the hooker here? I decide that as a young client it’s not my job to explain anal sex to a hooker. I leave. But I pay. I did come, after all, even if the collapsed soufflés were no help at all. It was simple mechanics.

The hookers are always older than me—even the youngest ones. That’s why I always assume they’ve had more experience than me when it comes to sexual experimentation. But that’s not the case. They limit what they do professionally. They’ll say, for instance, no kissing and no anal. So they never learn anything new. I suppose they have their reasons.

Maybe there are a lot of johns who don’t properly prepare the asshole before they fuck it. That can hurt. And guys like that probably pretend not to notice the pain they’re causing, and that makes it hurt even worse.

Depending on how long and thick the cock is that’s supposed to go up there, I like to take plenty of time to stretch it out, or at least have a lot of alcohol or something else numbing.

Anal sex is great—even though sometimes you don’t notice until the next day that you overestimated your ability to stretch.

Overall it was a bad experience with the redhead. Now whenever I see a light-skinned redhead, I chuckle inside and think to myself she’s lazy in bed, has no hair—anywhere, like an alien—eats goldfish and has never had anything up her ass. And her nipples don’t stick out.

My dad, drunk at a party, once said to a redhead friend of my mother’s, “Ginger hair, always moist down there.”

Not at all!

And now, Helen? What are you going to do now? Got a plan?

I could look out the window and ponder nature for a while. It’s summer. The chestnut trees in the hospital yard are in full bloom. Someone—probably a landscaper—has made planters by cutting off the top halves of what look like big, green-plastic trash barrels. If I’m seeing them correctly from this distance, they’re planted with fuschia and bleeding-heart flowers. Those are my favorites. It sounds so romantic. Bleeding-heart. My father taught me the name. I remember everything my father has taught me. Always. The things my mother’s taught me, not so much. But my father doesn’t try to teach me things as often—maybe that makes the lessons easier to remember. My mother blathers on all day about things I’m supposed to remember. Things she thinks are important for me. Half of it I forget immediately; as for the other half, I purposefully do the opposite. My father teaches me things that are important to him. Everything about plants. He’ll say out of the blue: “Did you know you should dig up dahlias in the fall and let them winter over in the basement? And that you plant them again early in the year in the garden?”

Of course I didn’t know that. But duly noted, now I do. Dad derives great pleasure from knowing so much about the natural world. Mom’s afraid of the natural world and her knowledge of it. She always seems to be fighting against it. She fights against dirt in the household. She fights against various insects. In the garden, too. Fights against bacteria of all kinds. Against sex. Against men and against women. There seems to be nothing my mother isn’t bothered by. She once told me that sex with my father caused her pain. That his penis was too big for her insides. This is not information I wanted to know. Wait, I was actually hoping to focus on the natural world outside the hospital. That’ll put me in a better mood than pondering sexual intercourse between my parents. Unfortunately, I always picture things in intricate detail. Sometimes the images aren’t very pretty.

Helen, kill these thoughts of yours.

Boredom is creeping back.

Mom always says, “Boring people are bored.”

Oh well. She also says, “We aren’t put on this earth to be happy.”

Not your kids, anyway, mom.

Try again, Helen. If you’re bored, you can always make a date with yourself to look out the window. Good idea. Busy yourself getting to know your environment. No reason to stay fixated on things down below. Now would be a good time.

I snap my head to the side and stare out the window.

Lawn. Trees. Chestnuts. What else? I see a huge staghorn sumac tree. I guess I don’t even have to say it’s big. Staghorn sumac trees are always big. They scare me. My father taught me that, too. To be scared of staghorn sumac trees. They’re not from here. They’re not native. Asian or something. And they grow a lot faster than our trees. When they’re still small—which is the case for only a short period—they send up a long, thin, rubberlike trunk that puts all its energy into gaining height.

That way they overtake all the surrounding plants. Once they’ve exceeded the height of everything around them, they sprout a broad crown over everything else. That kills everything else had been growing beneath it—light no longer gets through, and the roots of the fast-growing staghorn sumac suck up all the water.

But it’s not all bad. Since the trunk shoots up so fast, it’s unstable compared to our trees. Entire branches break off in the slightest breeze. Serves it right. But the branches often hit people who don’t realize they’re standing under an Asian tree unable to withstand wind because it busies itself trying to outpace everything else in terms of height and forgets to build a sturdy base for itself.

I always walk in a wide arc around staghorn sumac trees. I wouldn’t want one of them to become the epitaph on my gravestone.

When I walk the streets, I see staghorn sumacs all over the place. They seem to grow out of every crack in the earth. They propagate like mad. The city government must be constantly removing them—otherwise they would have completely taken over long ago. Sometimes I notice people who have let one grow in their garden after it appeared. They have no one to blame but themselves. Soon it’ll be the only thing in the garden. But I can’t ring all of their doorbells and warn them. That would be too much work. Unfortunately, not everyone has a father like mine who can teach them such useful things.

The staghorn sumac fronds are big. In the middle a long stem, at the top end a little leaflet like a head, and then a series of very symmetrical lance-shaped leaflets along each side. Left and right, like ribs. I’ll pick out a branch from here and count the leaflets. I’ve got to do something. Twenty-five leaflets on one frond. Eagle-eyed Helen. Not really—like I said, they’re big. Too big. The trunk is smooth and greenish. It looks like uncut brown bread. It feels nice—if you’re brave enough to walk under one and touch it.

Enough about nature. My turn again. For a while now I’ve felt something on my right upper arm. I’m going to look at it. I shift my shoulder forward, grab the fat on my upper arm, and roll it toward me. Now I can see it. Just as I thought—a blackhead. I have no idea why my upper arm is full of them. My own poor explanation for it goes like this: hair tries to grow there but because of the friction from T-shirt sleeve edges, individual hairs stay under the skin and get infected.

And so I come to one of my biggest hobbies. Popping zits. I’ve noticed a big blackhead in Robin’s ear. More precisely in the flat area just outside the ear hole. I’ve often seen people with exceptionally large, black things like that right in the same area. I think people just don’t tell each other and the blackhead then has years to fill itself with dirt and grease. Several times I’ve forgotten to ask people ahead of time and have just reached for their zit in order to pop it. I practically grabbed Robin’s ear. I could barely control myself. But a lot of people aren’t cool with that. When you just pop their zit without asking. They think it’s overstepping a boundary. I’ll ask Robin, though, once we know each other better. I’m sure we’ll get to know each other better. Not going to escape. The blackhead in Robin’s ear, I mean. That’s reserved for me. I clench the blackhead on my upper arm between the thumb and pointer finger of my left hand and, with a squeeze, out comes the worm.

It goes directly from my thumb into my mouth.

With that taken care of, I examine the little wound.

There’s a drop of blood in the hole left behind by the blackhead.

I wipe it off. It doesn’t disappear. It just smears.

Just like on my legs when I’ve shaved them instead of Kanell. Fast and careless. Often I get goose bumps from the cold water and from standing around in the tub. When I shave over them, I tear open every bump. Then I think I looked better with hair because now there’s a pinpoint of blood where every hair was. At some point I put on a pair of nylons over my bleeding legs and discovered an interesting effect. The almost see-through, skin-color nylons smeared each speck of blood into a stripe as I pulled them up my legs. By the time I had them all the way up, they looked like an expensive pair of patterned nylons. I wear them that way a lot when I go out.

Wearing nylons over my bloody legs has another advantage, too. I like to eat my scabs. At the end of a night out, when I take the nylons off again, they rip off the dried blood, and new scabs form. Then, once they’ve hardened, I can pick them off and eat them.

Tastes almost as good as sleepy seeds. The snack brought by the sandman and left in the corner of your eye closest to your nose.

When I treat my little wounds so poorly, eventually a pore or two will get sealed and keep a hair from coming out. The hair still grows, but it coils up beneath the skin. Like the roots of the avocado in the base of the glass. At some point it gets infected and then Helen enters the game. I’ve been very patient. Despite the fact that the whole time the hair was calling to me, “Get me out of here, I want to grow straight like the other hairs, in the fresh air,” I’ve kept my fingers off it. It’s difficult. But it’s worth the wait.