The Average American Male Read online

  The Average American Male

  A Novel

  Chad Kultgen

  contents

  chapter one: Christmas with Mom and Dad

  chapter two: The Flight Back to L.A.

  some chapter: Casey at the Gym

  chapter three: Century Fucking City

  chapter four: Brunch

  some chapter: An Average Sunday

  chapter five: Groundlings Party

  chapter six: My Gay Buddy

  some chapter: Closure

  chapter seven: I Don’t Believe in Destiny

  chapter eight: Casey’s New Diet

  some chapter: Communication Is the Foundation of Any Good Relationship

  chapter nine: Burbank Strip Club

  chapter ten: Stevie

  some chapter: Scarface Part 1

  chapter eleven: I’m Starting to Believe in Destiny

  some chapter: Scarface Part 2

  chapter twelve: Plans

  chapter thirteen: A Call from Casey’s Mom

  chapter fourteen: First Date

  chapter fifteen: The Morning After

  some chapter: Hobo

  chapter sixteen: Casey’s Homecoming

  chapter seventeen: Chance Encounter

  some chapter: Internet Personals

  chapter eighteen: Casey’s Parents

  chapter nineteen: Apartment Hunting

  some chapter: Blood Cock

  chapter twenty: Bon Voyage

  chapter twenty-one: Be the King

  some chapter: Little Kids

  chapter twenty-two: Hi, Mom

  chapter twenty-three: The Griddle

  chapter twenty-four: The Drive to Casey’s House

  some chapter: Veggie Love

  chapter twenty-five: The Day After

  some chapter: Rubbernecking

  chapter twenty-six: Letter from Casey’s Mom

  chapter twenty-seven: Psychosis

  some chapter: UCLA Party

  chapter twenty-eight: Second Date

  chapter twenty-nine: Post-Lunch with Carlos

  chapter thirty: Casey’s Shit

  some chapter: The 98 Percent Rule

  chapter thirty-one: Introducing Alyna

  chapter thirty-two: Halo 2

  some chapter: Jenna’s Picture

  chapter thirty-three: Coffee with Casey

  some chapter: Milla Jovovich

  chapter thirty-four: It’s Official

  chapter thirty-five: Alyna Finds My Stash

  some chapter: Subway Whore

  chapter thirty-six: Dinner with the Mother of My Child

  chapter thirty-seven: Ex-Boyfriend Duane

  some chapter: Gwen Stefani

  chapter thirty-eight: Two-Month Anniversary

  chapter thirty-nine: Another Chance Encounter

  chapter forty: Carlos’s Gay Party

  some chapter: Finger in the Two-Hole

  chapter forty-one: The Test

  some chapter: Hot Girls Give Gay Guys Partial Handjobs

  chapter forty-two: Casey’s Underwear

  chapter forty-three: Cap and Gown

  some chapter: Scarface Part 3

  chapter forty-four: The Final Final

  chapter forty-five: Graduation Day

  some chapter: Diamonds in the Rough

  chapter forty-six: Long Story Short

  chapter forty-seven: The End

  An Excerpt from The Average American Marriage

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  acknowledgments

  about the author

  copyright

  about the publisher

  chapter one

  Christmas with Mom and Dad

  Same old bullshit.

  chapter two

  The Flight Back to L.A.

  It’s two days after Christmas. I’m in Denver International Airport watching this old fat bitch eat a cup of yogurt. My blood is boiling.

  She has this weird little baby spoon, and these leathery fucking jowls, and this twitchy mouth, and her little tongue keeps jerking around to lick this shit off her lips—it’s really fucking disgusting me. But even more disgusting to me is the fact that her mouth has had cocks in it. I wonder what it is, other than age, that turns a mouth a man would want to put his cock in into a twitching hole getting yogurt shoveled into it with a baby spoon.

  At some point in this old cunt’s life some guy was paying for her dinner, buying her presents, and being as nice and romantic as possible just so he could put his cock in that disgusting fucking hole.

  On the plane—

  There’s a girl sitting next to me with red hair and perfect rock-hard C cups. She can’t be more than nineteen and I’d love to know her name so I could see if it fits. I don’t ask her even though she’d probably tell me, and it might even lead to a full-on conversation, which might lead to something else, like getting her number or taking her out to dinner. Instead, I just lean back, get a big whiff of her shampoo, and wonder if she could ever possibly know that I’ll think about her for the next few weeks every time I jerk off. Probably not.

  And I’m out like a light.

  I’m still in a weird kind of dream when I get off the plane at LAX so I’m not sure if Trent Reznor walks past me at the Delta baggage claim. I am sure that the redhead is standing by me, and even though I don’t have any bags to wait for, she does, so I pretend to.

  I look at her luggage tag when she picks up her suitcase. Alyna Janson. It fits.

  Satisfied, I go wait for twenty minutes to pay twenty dollars to ride a Super Shuttle back to my apartment in Westwood. Coincidentally enough, Alyna gets on the same Super Shuttle and tells the driver she’s going to UCLA, two blocks from my house.

  I stare at her without her knowing or caring until we get to her stop. When she gets out I don’t make any effort to move out of her way, so she has to brush me with her ass, and she has a nice fucking ass.

  When I get off the bus at my own stop I’m glad I never talked to Alyna. When I walk through my front door I wish I had. When I hit my bed, I’m glad I have a girlfriend I can fuck on a regular basis. When I wake up the next morning to a phone call begging me to spend my last days off going to the gym and shopping at Century City with her, I wish I didn’t.

  some chapter

  Casey at the Gym

  Casey has a fat ass. She’s a pretty cute brunette with a completely normal upper body, just with a big fat ass attached. She knows it’s fat and got a membership to my gym so she could go with me and “get cute tight buns.” She even toyed with the idea of getting a personal trainer and she bought an exercise book called The Daily Butt Regimen.

  So I’m sitting on the calf machine ready to put my head through the fucking mirror. Casey’s across the gym, smiling at me, doing curls. For the past six months, since she started her ass-slimming campaign, all she’s done is fucking curls and bench presses—and her ass shows it.

  I’ve tried to get her to do squats with me, leg presses, quad extensions, hamstring machine, any fucking thing having even the most remote influence on the movement of muscles in her lower body, and she always says, “I think I’ll just do some curls.”

  I finish my set and move to another part of the gym so I can’t see her.

  That night, after suffering through a TiVoed three-episode Real World marathon, I’m rewarded by her letting me fuck her doggie style. As I look down at her fat ass, I wonder if fucking her hard enough will have any kind of slimming or toning effect. Couldn’t hurt.

  chapter three

  Century Fucking City

  The one good thing you can always count on at Century City, and a
ny place in this fucking city for that matter, is that there will always be a shitload of hot bitches with perfect bodies walking around. As chance would have it, I’m staring at one when my girlfriend says, “Do you wish I looked like that?”

  I wonder if the three hours I’ve spent looking at shoes and other gay shit could possibly earn me one second of honesty with Casey. Probably not. Instead of answering her, I just look up at nothing in particular and say, “Do you smell pizza? I’m hungry.”

  On our way to the food court we pass a bookstore with a big line of middle-aged women, housewives mostly, some with kids, snaking out the front door. None of them are hot. They all seem like they’re from the Valley or maybe Pasadena. I hate myself for being able to make the distinction. The window advertises that Marie Osmond is inside signing copies of her book Behind the Smile: My Journey Out of Postpartum Depression. I turn my head to ask Casey if she wants pizza, too, but she’s already in line behind a woman who has a fat ass similar to her own and could easily be Casey’s future self.

  I’m pretty sure Casey knew about this and actually wanted to come to Century City just to see Marie Osmond, which means the fucking hours of looking at stupid shit were just insult to injury. Because of this, I kind of want to disappear into the food court and spend the rest of the day changing my phone number, but I decide it’s not worth the effort of finding someone else to have regular sex with and get in line with my girlfriend.

  Future Casey turns around and begins the following unsolicited conversation:

  “Are you fans of Marie?”

  Casey says, “I love her. I think it took so much courage to write about what she went through.”

  Future Casey says, “You know, a lot of women go through postpartum depression.” She holds up her right hand like she’s swearing on a Bible before she testifies, then she testifies, “Speaking from experience here. And I think this book is really going to help a lot of us. I mean it just makes me feel better to know that even somebody as important as Marie Osmond has felt what I felt.”

  I then end the conversation with this: “Maybe that woman in Houston who drowned all five of her kids should have read it.”

  Future Casey turns around and buries her nose in the latest issue of Women’s Health magazine. Casey gives me an accusatory stare. I respond by saying, “I guess Marie can’t help everyone.” Casey responds by rolling her eyes and picking up the most recent issue of O from the magazine rack, which the bookstore has conveniently moved outside and stocked only with O and Us Weekly.

  She reads it for the next fifteen minutes while we wait. I read it over her shoulder and these are the results:

  Pictures of Oprah: Twenty-two (including her standard cover appearance).

  “Articles” “written” by Oprah: Six (including the O magazine staple “What I Know for Sure,” in which Oprah lies about how hard her life is and hammers home how much more spiritual she is than the average person).

  Uses of the phrase “Self-realization”: Ninety-four (in thirteen different “articles”).

  Ads for Oprah-related products: Seven (including one for Dr. Phil’s show).

  Paragraphs containing poorly veiled condescension: Four hundred sixty-three.

  Impulses to ram the magazine up Oprah’s cunt: One (that lasts for the entire fifteen minutes I stare at O).

  The other conversations around us might as well be the same as the one Future Casey started with Casey, the main difference being that I can’t stop any of the others with the uneasiness of honesty. I try to keep myself entertained by explaining to Casey the importance of the Nintendo Wii as a next-gen console actually being able to compete in the marketplace against the vastly more powerful Xbox 360 and PS3. She reopens O. So I decide to just stand there and not listen to the cackling around me.

  This is what I hear: “Marie Osmond has amazing courage…. Marie Osmond is a genius writer…. This book should win an Oscar, or whatever the writing Oscar is…. The writing Oscar is the Nobel Prize…. She’s a hero…. Yesterday Dr. Phil was giving women the courage to leave abusive relationships and lose weight at the same time…. Today I think the Dr. Phil show is about teaching women how to be independent…. Dr. Phil is probably a great husband…. Cloning and stem cell research is evil because they have to murder babies to do it…. If Oprah was sick or dying, it would be worth sacrificing one child to save her, though…. Carney Wilson wrote a courageous book about her lifelong battle with weight…. It took amazing courage to have her stomach surgically reduced to the size of a thumb.”

  The uneasy rage all of this creates in me starts out as something general, shapeless. But as it continues and we move up in line, Marie Osmond becomes the focus of everything I feel and the reason I feel it. I leer at her.

  She smiles the same smile every few minutes. She sips from the same lipstick-smeared Diet Coke can every few minutes. She gives the same genuinely concerned expression every few minutes. She checks the same clock on the back wall every few minutes. She makes the same $150 every few minutes.

  I try to calm myself by thinking about the fact that someday this woman will die, when she says, “Who should I make this out to?” and we’re standing a foot away from the courageous Marie Osmond.

  Casey says, “Casey Childress, please,” and continues with, “I really love your work and I’m a huge fan.”

  Osmond follows up with a concerned face and, “Well, I just hope this book has helped at least a few women out there.”

  I want to say something mean, something wrong, something that will make me feel like this entire day isn’t a complete waste, but I know if I do Casey won’t suck my dick until tomorrow at least, maybe even the next day. So I shut up and steal a quick peek down Osmond’s shirt while she’s signing the book. Not bad for an older bitch.

  She looks back up at Casey, smiles, and says, “There you go, thanks.” I picture myself behind her, pushing her head down on the table right in the middle of all her books and fucking her until she goes catatonic. I smile and say, “Thank you, Ms. Osmond.” Then we leave.

  Back at Casey’s place, I kiss her and take off her shirt. “Aren’t we frisky?” she says.

  “No, I’m fucking horny and I want to fuck you right now,” I whisper, knowing after a year of being in this relationship that whispering “fuck” in her ear makes her feel naughty enough to let me do anything I want to her. She unzips my pants as I sit down on her couch. She jerks me off a little before I push on her head and she gets the hint to stop fucking around and suck my cock. While she does, I look over at Marie Osmond’s smiling face on the cover of Casey’s new book. I pretend Casey’s mouth is Osmond’s cunt and I try to hear Casey slurping as Osmond sobbing. Aside from Casey spitting my semen all over my stomach, which she always fucking does, it ends up ranking in my top five blow jobs of all time.

  chapter four

  Brunch

  Casey’s telling me that she doesn’t like it when I come to her house drunk. She says, “Last night was like having sex with a different person.”

  I want to ask her if that’s good or bad, but by the time the question gets to my mouth I’m thinking about the dream I had last night and Casey still has a lot more to say, so I never do.

  The dream:

  I’m walking around the halls of my old junior high trying to find my locker. I think it’s on the second floor, but the school doesn’t have a second floor. So I go to the principal’s office to get a map and a piece of bubble gum, which for some reason I’m sure will help me. Once I get there, though, the office is really this comic book store I used to hang out in when I was a kid, and Alyna, the girl that sat next to me on the plane, is leaning up against a magazine rack reading an old issue of The New Mutants.

  I say, “What’s the deal? Where’s my locker?”

  She says, “I don’t know.” Then she kisses me with one of those dream kisses that make you think when you wake up you’ll have been married to the person who kissed you for twenty of the happiest years of your life.


  I get tipped off that this probably isn’t real when my old family dog who died when I was ten walks in and says, “Do you guys have change for a five?”

  At that point I was just a little too conscious to hold on to it and I woke up with that awful empty feeling you get when you realize the person who can make you happier than anything is a fucking dream.

  Casey’s chewing off the corner of a grilled cheese sandwich and I’m so sick of the fucking cows on the walls in this place and the bitchy waitress. I think I smell dirt but it’s just the hippie-type girl next to me with blonde dreadlocks and a bent-up straw cowboy hat.

  Casey says, “You don’t like the cows? I think they’re the cutest.”

  And I guess I must’ve said that last bit out loud. I wonder if the hippie cowgirl heard me, but she’s not looking at me so fuck it.