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.