by Mitch Luckett
(02/20/02)

"An earthquake?" I asked.

"An earthquake," Susan Spanbauer said. "I felt an earthquake."

I, Mo Grady Manos, was working my ass off, holding back, thinking of obscure train tunes in minor keys, 8 note banjo rolls with snappy syncopations and such. I was slowly bringing Susan to orgasm, when her pelvis froze and she whispered "earthquake" against my neck. However many times she'd stopped in mid-poke before, I was always caught off guard.

I threw a couple more momentum humps against her rigid Venus bone before my piston butt realized she'd quit for good. Damn! We had this slow rhythmic slurping sound going when we were working together, but when I'm the only one pumping it sounds like a drill bit probing a dry hole and hitting a coal pocket. The yeasty, sulphurous brew of wooden matches, candles, and sex made the air ripe enough to peel my cheap melody-note wallpaper all the way off the bedroom walls.

Uh oh, I'd done something wrong again. Two weeks together and no consummation yet, not in the deepest sense, anyway. Neither of us has had an orgasm. And if Susan couldn't have an orgasm, then by God she wasn't about to let me have one. Susan Spanbauer expected, no, demanded, equal orgasmic opportunity.

I'd already decided this fuck would be our last. If it didn't happen tonight, it never would. It was over. Our relationship was kaput, and the best potential music duo I'd ever been part of was down the tubes. I say potential because, although Susan was a world-class fiddler and I was a pretty damn good banjoist, we couldn't seem to find that groove, that synchronicity, that complimentary fit that elevates banjo and fiddle music, when played together, to a higher plane. It's a divine and rarefied goal, a symphony of expertise, empathy, and risk.

Risk being the key. Susan and I were not willing to risk all, surrender our individual egos and plunge down that dangerous path to musical ecstasy. "I felt another tremor," Susan said, her voice low and pregnant with unfulfilled lust. She pushed me back with her left hand on my chest, her sexy callused fingertips rough against my skin. Sliding on my sweat, re-igniting my lust. There's nothing more erotic than the rough fingertip touch of a woman who plays stringed instruments.

"You should just go with it," I said, nibbling her earlobe. "Why'd you stop? It's the earth-shattering force of our fucking, is what it is. It was just that new technique I'm working on, sort of a tour-de-force "Under the Double Eagle" syncopation with a surprise roll and tag for the grand finale. Let's get back to it."

At this, my dick -- burdened by a typically one-track mind -- chimed in. "Tour-de-force, my ass," my dick said. "Not again. Let's go, let's go, Boss. I'm ready, tuned and primed. I'm right there. Doing my job. Marking my time. What is the meaning of this rudeness? What the fuck is the hold up?"

Susan's callused fingertips pushed harder against me. "No, you clod," she said. "I'm not talking about your quirky, syncopated love-making. I really did feel an earthquake. Look at that candle."

Candle, for Christ's sake. Looking at candles when my loins were liquid heat. Fiddlers are great at rushing down dark, unnavigated paths, expecting banjo pickers to blindly follow. So I humored her. The romantic-mood candle I'd set on the dresser flickered. So what? That's what candles were supposed to do, right? But as I watched, as my dick wiggled a raunchy ragtime tune called "Don't Let Your Deal Go Down" inside Susan's warm sex, the glass candle holder tilted and slid off the dresser. It clunked on the wood floor and set the mauve window curtain on fire. And my old house was a tinderbox.

I pulled out of Susan, a glop sound like an upright bass string breaking in high humidity, jumped off the bed and clapped the flames between my hands. No help there. The old curtains burned like pine pitch. I ripped the curtain away from its runner, opened the window and tossed the burning material out into the snow -- a little campfire for the frigid, unloved and unfucked nocturnal winter creatures of southeast Portland.

I stuck my blistered hands out the window, into a winter snowstorm. Cold snowflakes took the sting out. My head followed. The curtain fire was snuffed out by a fierce wind, and my yard fell dark. I closed my eyes and listened.

Just two weeks before there had been a 6.8 earthquake 150 miles north of Portland. The nightly news ran endless scenes of brick buildings falling apart in Tacoma, Washington, cars crushed like beetles, and downed 20,000 volt electric lines that danced around like spitting cobras on speed.

I listened, expecting to hear ambulance sirens, dogs barking and babies crying, all those background noises you associate with grade-B disaster movies. But all I could hear was the evil east wind and the atonal disengagement boogie of my house, crying out to me. It was shouting so loud I could hear nothing else.

My home was saying, "Help! Save me!"

I ducked my head back inside the bedroom, closed the window, and looked at Susan for approval of my survival antics. Man against the elements, conquers fire, arousing the erotic gratitude of a rescued mate. Susan, cold as the east wind outside, lies rigid, her naked legs crossed, hands covering her sex. Green eyes like swirl buttons on a cheap winter coat. I had never been in an earthquake but...weren't they short and abrupt, lasting minutes at most? This was already one for the record books.

My penis, oblivious to survival and other such irrelevancies, was still stiff and sorely insulted. It knew it was over. The sex and the relationship. By way of sealing the split, I ripped the condom off, tearing out unsuspecting pubes by the dozens. I gasped in pained surprise, and slung latex, pubes and all, against the cheap melody-note wallpaper. It stuck like glue, a hairy dot on a high D.

Susan pulled the blanket up, covering her inverted nipples. She had that temporary catatonic look she gets when overwhelmed with undergratification. She lay there, grinding her teeth, as if plotting revenge on me for failing to halt cosmic interference.

"Maybe it's mudslides, like we had in the West Hills a few winters ago," she suggested. A pale light bleeding in from the hallway bathed her body, surrounding her green eyes with a peculiar glow. Glass broke somewhere near the kitchen. "Do something," she said.

I did something -- I observed my penis lose tumescence. Poor fellow. So close, for so long. "This is southeast Portland, Oregon," I said. "Poverty Flats. We're sitting on level ground. And it's not raining outside, it's snowing. No, you were right the first time. It has to be an earthquake. And a damn long one, too. The whole Oatfield fault must be shifting. Get your buns up. Throw the cover around you and get outside."

I, of course, had no idea if that was the right thing to do in an earthquake, but I did know the foundation of my house was faulty. Well, my foundation wasn't exactly faulty; my foundation was non-existent. There was no concrete whatsoever under my house. My house was 90 years old, supported only with odd-shaped posts situated at random in a 6-foot high dirt basement. That's why it was dirt cheap.

My plan, way back when I bought the place, was to jack the house up and put a strong foundation and concrete basement underneath it. This was the same plan, metaphorically speaking, that I was forever trying to execute -- mostly without success -- in my life. I prayed, as only a fallen Pentecost can pray, that I hadn't waited too long with my foundation.

A strong east wind, in pre-earthquake times, could cause my decrepit house to sway and groan. The Tacoma quake caused only minor tremors in Portland, but afterwards, my house had an additional unsteadiness to it. Just that morning, I'd been down in my dirt-floor basement and noticed that a couple of the support posts had little piles of sawdust around them. As if tiny carpenters with tiny tools had chopped the woody guts out of my collapsible supports.

I suspected ants. The same carpenter ants that kept invading my kitchen, big black scouts cruising the countertops and crevices like Darth Vader insects on a search and destroy mission. I'd been fighting a losing battle for years. I never thought much about it before, but where did all those ravenous chewing machines live when not mauling my watermelon?

Perhaps crisis begot clarity, but all of a sudden the myopia of love and lust did a minute correction. I realized that, especially when Susan was around, my old house took the opportunity to fall apart. Every time she came over, a ceiling tile fell, a picture tilted or a glass broke. Since I became involved with Susan, my house seemed to be in an accelerated state of mortal decline. After a visit from her, I always did a damage survey, amazed at the coincidental havoc in her wake.

An aberrant thought occurred: the clash of our musical styles and the abrasiveness of our sexuality was ripping the support posts apart. Causing the ants to agitate. Banjo and fiddle, two instruments as different as drums and piano, sending disengagement tremors through the walls, along the floor joists, rattling the support posts, signaling ants to undermine the very structural integrity of my dwelling. Maybe Susan and the ants were in cahoots.

The earthquake continued. Floorboards swayed underneath my feet. Old wood and rusty nails doing the disengagement boogie. Joists creaked and groaned. Walls cracked, and plaster dust puffed into the air, smelling of ancient decay. More glass broke inside the house. Definitely a never-ending earthquake.

It finally sank into my sex-addled brain that this was the big one, hitting the Oatfield fault. All the seismic doomsayers warned it could happen anytime, and wouldn't you know it had to happen now, during my last attempt to salvage a relationship with Susan. This combination -- the Oatfield, Susan and the ants -- meant my old house didn't stand a chance.

I wrapped Susan in my bluebird quilt, threw her over my shoulder and headed for the back door. Coitus interruptus was not her fault this time. Or mine. Still, it was clear there was no hope for the relationship. Even the universe wanted us to fail. Who was I to oppose the universe?

Susan felt like a canted sack of stiff concrete over my shoulder. "I know what you're thinking," she said to my back. Her rough fingertips rasped my ass.

I trudged down a dark hallway. Tried the back door and found it stuck closed. "Leave my ass alone," I said. "Can't you see we just had our last chance? We're history honey. So get your files off my buns."

My dick, ever the optimist, raised its frustrated head and screamed, "Around here, hands. Around here."

Susan's breath burned my skin. "You're thinking this is all my fault, aren't you? They all say it's my fault," she said. "I should have known you'd be like all the rest. They all panicked, and you're panicking, too."

A hum sounded in the house, coming from dozens of old stringed instruments being shaken. My collection, accumulated through years of garage sales. I repaired and kept them all in tune. And now they were talking to me, saying, "Save me, save me." The only way I could save all of them was to save the house. But first, I had to save Susan and myself.

The house swayed and I bumped into the wall. The impact knocked a little sense into my head. This was no sustained earthquake at all; my house was just collapsing from neglect and disregard.

"I'm not blaming you," I told her, heading for the front door. I was afraid to turn on the lights -- electrical fire. "I'm blaming myself. I should've put a foundation under here years ago. Now it may be too late."

"You should blame me," Susan said. "It is my fault. Listen to all the instruments talking, lamenting. They're whispering about me. 'She did it. She's an uptight musician and a frigid lover. An utter failure.' They know it's my fault. I've never destroyed a house before. I mean, things usually just break around me. But then I've never been in a house that was so cheap and vulnerable before either. I guess it was just a matter of time."

I tried the front door. Also stuck. I was starting to panic. I put Susan on her feet. "What the hell are you ranting about? I need to open a window. Get us out of here." I tried the windows, finding them all stuck. Trapped in the house.

I had an idea. I grabbed Susan's fiddle case and shoved it in her hands. "Throw your case through the window and follow it outside," I said. "I'm going down into the basement for a look-see."

"You'll be killed," she said, "I can't stop it. I'm...it's out of control."

I took my wall-mounted flashlight and tiptoed down the basement stairs. Steps wobbled as I tread. My nose filled with the smell of old dust and butchered wood. I shined the light on the support posts drilled with tiny holes. Alas, one of the supports was not there; it had collapsed into a large pile of sawdust. Sawdust in a foot high cone. Sawdust that was writhing.

I flattened against the wall. What now? Poltergeists in the basement, bent on chewing up and ripping out my support? But no. I shined the light and crept closer. Those busy carpenter ants at work, on three full shifts. Hive insects with jaws powerful as steel traps. Millions of them. They, like some rampaging cancer, had killed their own host. Their house had fallen down, too, ant house in chaos. They had gnawed and chewed and chewed and gnawed until they devoured themselves out of a home.

Fascinating. I could've watched them all night, scurrying about in panic. I tapped my knuckles on the 6" x 6" cross brace spanning the length of the house. It was still solid. Solid, but it popped and snapped above my head. I followed it down with the flashlight, to the other damaged support beam eight feet away. It swayed and bucked, puffing plumes of sawdust from hundreds of tiny ant holes, the puffs acting as a kind of bellows, emitting little eeks of pain. Could let loose any second, and I'd have the whole house down on my head. Crushed like the cars in Tacoma. I turned to run.

Music stopped me. I heard fiddle music upstairs. A tune called, "Crossing the Cumberlins." Susan was playing fiddle as my house fell down. With me under it. Typical revenge of the lyricist. But oh, it was a lovely sound. I could not help but be enamored of it. A siren's song, leading me to crash against the breakers.

She switched to "Under the Double Eagle," a marching song. My dick's favorite tune. An action song. My feet lifted and stomped in time. Dust from the dirt floor swirled around me. It smelled like 90 years of shoe leather. I marched around the basement, looking for something to use as a support brace. Nothing. Nothing obvious, anyway. Lots of musical instruments in various states of disrepair. I shoved a big bass fiddle aside -- hold on there. A bass fiddle? And big. I tapped it with my knuckles. A lousy tone, which is why I got it so cheap, but a good, solid sound. Why not? What did I have to lose?

I dragged the bass fiddle over to the cross brace that ran the length of the house under the floor joists, and shoved the huge instrument in place. The bass fiddle was an inch shy. I had boxes full of music magazines in the basement, so I grabbed a stack of Down Beat magazines and put them under the bottom of the bass fiddle. Perfect, except for the fiddle head top. Definitely a slip fit. I grabbed a roll of duct tape from a bench and secured the fiddle head to the beam. More perfect. Slow it down anyway, if it held. But I still needed one more brace.

I spied an old cabinet the original owner of the house had long ago used for canning, left all these years in the basement. It was as solid as a Mac truck, built with 4 X 4 uprights. I pulled and jerked it right next to the puffing beam. Still six inches shy of reaching the overhead cross brace. I stacked the last of the Down Beats under the cupboard's feet, finishing up with Bluegrass Unlimited. With all four feet elevated, the cabinet top was snug against the cross brace. Theoretically, the cabinet was ready to absorb 40 tons of pressure, but for now the old sawdust-puffing beam was still supporting the weight. I was finished, having done all I could to save my house.

Suddenly ants began rushing out of the damaged brace by the hundreds, thousands, jumping on me, an avowed enemy. Fleeing for their lives. I remembered reports of animals fleeing Mount St. Helen minutes before it erupted. Insect survival instincts highly developed. Not dulled by unconsummated sex.

It was cold and drafty in the basement, but my still-naked body was awash in sweat. Ants bogging down in sweat, crawling over each other on my arm. I backed away, out of range of the leaping insects, and brushed the ants off my arm onto the dirt floor. "Settle down," I said to the writhing mass, "and go find your queen. I suspect you need her in these desperate times as much as she needs you."

The ant mass disentangled and headed for the big bass fiddle.

Above me, the music played on. Now a waltz, "Ashokan Farewell." The Civil War theme song. Susan and her fiddle hadn't jumped out the window, after all. I was wrong about her. My fingers flexed. For the first time since we'd been together, I could hear how to fit in the banjo, how my rhythm and syncopation could compliment her melody and lyricism.

Maybe there was one more thing I could do to avert catastrophe.

Susan's music made me, like the ants, agitate. I shook more ants off my ankles and took flight. Upstairs. If the house was going to collapse, I needed to be with Susan. Playing with her, holding her, loving her. Us ants have to stick together. Or, if we chose, there might still be time to break a window and escape outside.

Upstairs, there was never a more erotic sight in the cosmos. Susan was in the music room, a naked fiddler, eyes closed, lips drawn back in a smile, breasts at high salute, nipples distended; romancing the beams, serenading the studs.

She opened her bottomless green eyes and looked at me, nodded toward my banjo in its holder. "Play me a tune, Mo Grady," she said. "Play it soft and play it sweet. Play me a tune like you've never played before. Let's seduce this old house into settling down."

I picked up my banjo and threw the strap over my shoulder. My fingertips pulsed, anticipating that good feel of frets and wood grain. I didn't have to hesitate; the song found me. A slow love song called, "Before I Met You." I played the tune. Susan played the tune. The tune played us. My penis, a glutton for rhythm, played the tune. It found the beat and swelled with concupiscence.

Susan crowded me. I leaned back over a large ottoman. Still picking, penis pointing toward the heavens. Susan climbed on top of me, her bowing arm a ballet of elbow and alabaster.

She eased down, straddling my hips. My penis suffered an unusual pang of conscience. "We can't do this without a condom," it said. "This is not right. There'll be hell to pay. Little banjo pickers running about full of bawling and shit. Hey Bozo, listen to me, I'm telling you, we can't...oh my oh my, oh me oh my, oh well, forget it." My penis slid into her resonant cavity. Tuned up to her wave length.

Every instrument in the house hummed in harmony.

Susan played "Paradise," swayed in three quarter waltz time, a gentle motion. Her bowing stokes across the fiddle's strings, deeper and more drawn out, building sustained tension. Sucking every bit of soul out of the strings, creating a fever of richness on the resolution notes.

I was lying on my back, 23-pound banjo across my chest, 110-pound goddess across my hips, and my fingers were flying, matching her note for note, dancing on top and below and inside of her melody line. My eyes were closed, and I sensed that hers were closed, too. Everything was sound and touch. Sharing. I had never played such music before, and neither had Susan.

Only my back was keeping tabs on the falling house. The rest of me no longer cared. Let it crash and kill us both. Play together. Love together. Die together. Together.

My penis intruded with its usual vulgarity. "What a way to go, eh boss? But you better slow it down, ol' hoss. Or I'm going to sock a load into her that'll blow the roof off this jam session way before she's ready." My penis, the braggart. My penis, the betrayer. I couldn't slow it down. A waltz is a waltz is a waltz. By its very nature, a waltz is slow as sorghum molasses. Only my fingers were moving, anyway. My body was still. It wasn't up to me. Susan was conducting this orchestra, with my wand totally under her control.

And, oh no, she dropped "Paradise," and charged right into a kick-ass rendition of the "Orange Blossom Special," a tune about a powerful train bringing the singer's baby back home. Anything, anything at all would've been better than the "Orange Blossom Special."

My penis got ready. Thought it was a train. I groaned. The house groaned. Susan's fiddle groaned.

I had to take my mind somewhere else. Thank God my falling house was a commanding diversion. My back felt the puffing beam give way. A momentary silence. Silence, like that terrible moment when an old-growth tree is cut, and before the magnificent carcass clobbers the ground.

That cheap bass fiddle and old canning cabinet caught all 40 tons of building. The strings on the bass fiddle screamed in agony. Jars still sitting in the cabinet tumbled out and crashed on top of each other. I waited for us to crash, too. I waited. The house still swayed and creaked, but it changed tempo. Settling.

Susan was oblivious to the collapsing house. I didn't have the heart to tell her that now was not a good time to be creating undo stress, choo-chooing and chug-a-chug-chugging. She was bringing that speeding train into the station, and that train didn't have brakes. And I, not yet ready for that "Orange Blossom Special" to arrive, had to slow that train down, throw up barriers, create an invincible wall. The absurdity blockade!

I have always managed to conjure up some absurdity to distract me in troubled times. My mind went there: I wondered how our newest act would play in Peoria. Yes, yes. Imagine that. The possibilities were endless. Sex and music. An audience magnet. Move down to Branson, Missouri, Little Nashville. Build a football-sized stadium. Three -- no, four -- performances a night, if you skip those tedious rehearsals. Capture the middle-aged, conservative country crowd. Negotiate a spot on national TV.

The "Orange Blossom Special" picked up momentum, coming into the station hard and fast. My fingers felt it first and hauled me away from my distractions. My fingers, even though my consciousness was elsewhere, never dropped a lick and never missed a cue. I matched Susan's frenzied playing, note for note. My beat was impeccable.

My fingers felt Susan's fingers, bringing it home. And I let my fingers do the talking. She lashed out into one final melody rift, speeding up the closer she got to the station, and ending it by thrusting her bow and fiddle over her head. Screaming through the blockade.

My penis, who had been waiting at the station forever, exploded too. Wreckage scattered to the wind. A sustained resolution note hung in the air. Around us, one thousand strings hummed in harmony. The house nestled onto its new supports. Settling down. Healing. Waiting. After untold years of doubt and insecurity, a permanent foundation now possible. All was quiet.

Susan laid her fiddle and my banjo aside, collapsed her sweaty body onto mine. She spoke the most soothing words I have ever heard in all my born days.

"An earthquake," she said. "I felt an earthquake."

Our permanent collection of erotic stories