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from "Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?"


Cris Mazza

The first day of the women food servers, he said, "You don't just work here to earn a salary, you have to earn the right to work here!" So maybe I was naïve to trust him. To ever set one foot in that bar without a suspicion of what could happen to me. That same ordinary old beer party was going on in front-same music, same dancing, same clack of pool balls and whooping laughter-you'd never believe the scene in the back room. It may've looked like a typical orgy at first-sweating bodies moving in rhythm, groaning, changing to new contorted positions, shouts of encouragements, music blaring in the background. But wait, nothing ordinary or healthy like that for the girl who was chosen to be the center of his dark side-she'll have to be both the cause and cure for his violent ache, that's why he's been so relentless, so obsessed, so insane, he was driven to it, to the point where he had to paint the tip of his hard-on with 150 proof whiskey then use the fancy revolver to ignite it, screaming-not like any sound he ever made before-until he extinguished it in the girl of his unrequited dreams. Tssss.


"Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?" first appeared in the 1990 anthology American Fiction (Birch Lane Press) and later in Cris Mazza's collection Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? (Normal, Illinois: FC2, 1991). It has been reprinted many times since.




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