by J.D. Smith
(10/06/04)

I've never been a man for ass. The allure of the gluteal has always eluded me; the female form offers far choicer real estate just around the corner, and just a few blocks to the north. Jennifer Lopez's hip-checked rise to stardom is a bigger mystery to me than the tax code, and when Sir Mix-a-Lot recorded “Baby Got Back,” I admired his enthusiasm but couldn't share his bulbous faith.

There have been exceptions. From time to time a particularly taut or ample-and-inviting derriere sheathed in a tight skirt might catch my eye, but those were but merely passing things.

The biggest exception, the one that changed my life, stood in front of me in the cashier's line at the company cafeteria. I nearly dropped my tray.

As she turned I saw a fairly pretty woman. Her eyes were a pleasant blue, but watery and a little too far apart. Her breasts stood like Appalachians rather than Rockies.

Then there was, in all its subequatorial splendor, her ass. Not a “bottom,” or a “behind,” or some other euphemism. Not a butt or a rump, one of those labels that sounds like a cut on a butcher's chart. No. An ass, and one that had to be taken on its own round terms.

Ample? Yes, like the lower reaches of a cello. This ass could claim its own zip code. Taut? I couldn't say—yet; it was too soon to bounce a dime off those lower slopes of Paradise. Soft? Again, I couldn't say, but there was no jiggling or sag, no speed bumps of cellulite. Firm seemed to be the safest guess. Not sculpted or overflowing, but molded like an English pudding. Remember the bumper sticker? Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.

I reached in my pocket for cash, and when I looked up she was gone.

My cafeteria receipt was my only souvenir of our not-quite meeting. I tucked it, a scrap of hope, under a refrigerator magnet at home. I resolved to save my money: I'd need every spare dime for flowers and chocolates, for reservations at fondue restaurants, for ties that didn't clip on.

For the next week the time stamps on my receipts ranged from 11:58 to 12:47, but I'd received none of them in her presence.

At a corporate headquarters of more than two thousand people she had many places to be present, and many ways to go absent. She might have been a temp, a consultant on assignment from one of the regional offices, or an interviewee who didn't make the final cut. Or she might have been an embezzler, absconding to the south of France or packed off to prison. I had no way of knowing. The employee directory wasn't searchable even by gender, let alone ass.

Each day at a different time I'd wolf down a mini-pizza—or frozen yogurt, sometimes so quickly that my head hurt while looking over the room. Other times, playing periscope for my manly parts, I'd linger over broccoli-and-cheese soup or a slow-nursed double espresso, scanning every table twice. Or I'd make multiple trips, buying first a bagel, then a sandwich, then a cookie.

In five weeks I gained seven pounds. I began to explore for her in other restaurants, partly to walk off my meal.

To paraphrase the song, I was looking for lunch in all the wrong places: the food court of a boutique-ridden mall, the mysterious buffets with fluorescent macaroni and cheese, the nouveau-deli sandwich shops and malt chains with aspiring folk singers perched on stools. I never looked in the hamburger chains or chicken shacks. I couldn't bear the thought that she might keep her figure—especially its most prominent feature—by frequenting grease pits.

Wandering, and some days walking instead of eating, I lost the seven pounds I'd gained, and then some.

During my beret phase in college, I read a short story titled “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” I never learned what the hell that meant, but dreams did provide a great starting point.

Such as spanking that ass. Not hard, and not with anything but my open hand, but just to get the feel of it. Her ass. Name, apostrophe-s, ass.

I wondered what Tito Puente could have done with that ass. What had he done with others? To the end of his days, after a hundred albums, Tito never stopped smiling. I know why. Have you ever seen the women on the covers of salsa albums?

Maybe I was falling into a fetish. There was only one thing to do: research.

Two hours in the library stacks among old National Geographics left me unmoved. An Internet search at home, where no one could look over my shoulder, proved no more help. The paintings of Rubens showed too much of a good thing. The animated Betty Boops did nothing for me. Betty Grable packed an ass that was simply unfinished, as if the sculptor had gone out for cigarettes and never come back. I got a little misty-eyed realizing that the generation that saved the world from Tojo and Hitler couldn't have enjoyed a better fantasy. I clicked into a narrower but jam-packed niche, filled by sites like Cheekster, Back 40, Ass-o-rama, GluteGlutton, and ButtSteak. I marveled at the sheer variety: skirted, jeaned, hot-panted, gartered, thonged and bathing-suited, as well as bare-ass naked asses. Their shapes and sizes ranged from fashion-model meager to vast mud flaps. Between these extremes were the majestic bubbles of Rio's Carnaval and the spring-loaded buttocks of competitive ballroom dancers.

Alas, none moved my blood from its usual course.

Homework done, I went into the field. At the theater I watched an eye-level parade as the end credits rolled, and at coffee shops I pretended to read while women walked out. On the bus I gave up even the pretense of reading. A week of this gave me only caffeine-spiked insomnia, teeth gummy from Jujubes, and a fragment of popcorn kernel stuck in a filling.

At work e-mail piled up ethereally in my inbox, and the message light on my telephone blinked like an eye splashed with picante sauce.

Anything truly awful gets an acronym. TB. DOA. HR. The white top copy of the form that also named me a marked man lay on my chair like a metaphorical thumbtack when I returned from another lunch hour where I had walked but did not eat. The time appointed, hand-written on it in a round, feminine hand, was 11:45 the next morning.

I divided the afternoon between vending machines and housekeeping. After animal crackers, I moved my personal files from hard drive to disks, in case the next day was my last. The security guys don't give you much time as they escort you from the building, and they don't necessarily care if the door hits you in the ass on the way out. After yogurt-raisin trail mix, I scavenged empty copy-paper boxes and started filling them with the objects that had for three years and seven months made my desk my very own space: bobbleheads from all four major team sports and two political campaigns. The picture of me with the previous CEO at the company picnic, taken only weeks before he won an orange jumpsuit for insider trading. After cheese curls late in the day, I speculated about who might have an opening or offer a letter of recommendation.

I went home to a night of fitful sleep, tossed through dreams about voluptuous sand dunes and swelling loaves of bread, hot from the oven. But overnight, my stomach had shrunk to the size of a pea. I couldn't eat breakfast; I nursed my coffee like warm beer while an idiot DJ talked about how many moon pies he had eaten on a dare.

The first hours at work passed like kidney stones. I watched my e-mails mounting like so many love-starved rabbits and filled a few more boxes until it was time.

At HR, before I could so much as read a New Yorker cartoon, I was whisked out of the reception area and down the hall. The receptionist knocked once on a door and opened it just wide enough for me to pass through, like the entrance to a lobster trap.

The face on the other side of the desk looked vaguely familiar. At first it was a struggle, like a baseball announcer trying to figure out the destiny of a long fly ball on a windy day: it can't be...it can't be...it may be...could be...looks like...probably is...has to be...yes, yes, it is -- a Home Run!

It was her.

Visible only from the desktop up, truncated like a newscaster, and, just as cruelly, visible only from the front, was the object of my dreams—who would also serve as the agent of my termination.

I'm sorry. At least she was getting closer. Mr. Jones?

Third time was the charm.

I settled for a chair.

Not really. My imagination, though, had done a good job of filling in the blanks. Am I being dismissed?

She lowered her voice like a funeral director comforting the bereaved. Oh, no, Mr. Jones. Nothing of the sort.

I waited for the other shoe to drop, and it did, on my head.

You are probably aware, Mr. Jones, that your productivity recently has not been consistent with what your supervisor tells us is your usually impressive level. Part of what we'll be discussing in our session is the company's policy of assisting employees who are experiencing personal difficulties that affect their performance.

The polysyllables rolled along. I nearly looked for a Teleprompter on the wall behind me, but knew my looking would only be looked at in turn and find its way into my ever-expanding file.

She passed a form across the desk. My name and contact information were already filled in; I simply had to mark boxes next to conditions from alcoholism to yeast infection. I stopped for a moment at endometriosis to ask what it meant, then wrote a particularly large X.

I passed the form back across the desk with the gravity of a chess move, then waited. She—I could not think of her as Irene, or even Ms. Nalgala—scanned the form with the ease of someone who had seen every possible combination before.

It looks like we have a baseline to work from, she said, and it's certainly good that you're not facing any of the challenges listed. As I'm sure you know, however, not every potential source of difficulty appears on the form. Are there any other issues that might be drawing your concentration away from work?

One or two, depending on how she counted. Such as?

Bereavement, financial difficulties, the end of a relationship, some other recent loss or disappointment.

I mentally checked other “no” boxes. Over the last five years not even a car had died on me. Relationships had come, fortunately, and gone. What other losses? The credit card that slipped through my still-greasy fingers and down a manhole as I walked out of a rib shack in Memphis had long since been replaced. What disappointment? Basketball? On no day, on no court, would I ever dunk, but I had grieved and moved on.

None of her “other” categories quite fit. What would fit? Someone who had worked retail lingerie might know, but not me. For now, though, I didn't have to volunteer anything. I could ingratiate myself, maybe even declare myself later. All I had to do was sit back and wait for the next question, which was:

Are you having an intimate relationship with another employee? My inner lawyer emerged. What was “intimate”? What was “relationship”?

Please, Mr. Jones.

At least she knew who I was.

“Crime”? Did she have a license for that ass?

I told what seemed like the most useful truth. No, I'm not having an affair with anyone in my department, if that's what you mean.

Funny she should ask. It has crossed my mind.

Me, too.

As she sorted through the stack of forms that was becoming my dossier, the bare ring finger of her left hand emerged from between the pages, unlined and smooth as her magnificent lower slopes. My heart, and other organs, leapt. Yet this didn't seem to be the time to speak.

Her delicate hands sifted through the papers a second time, more quickly, then came to rest like the wings of a disheartened bird.

Ms. Nalgala—or was it Dr. Nalgala?—stood and walked to a file cabinet behind her desk. She crouched to open the bottom drawer and rocked back on her heels like a major league catcher.

Words formed in my brain and turned into action that I could muffle, like a sneeze in a theater, but had no way to stop. Hold that pose! And then two more syllables slipped out. Baby.

She turned. Excuse me, Mr. Jones, did you say something?

Yes, but not something I wanted to repeat just yet. I, uh, might need to blow my nose.

I pulled a tissue out of the box and brought it to my nose. I blew once, then again. Nothing. My sinuses had become a small Sahara.

She stood up—to my eternal sadness—and returned with a final form that forced me to give my voluntary consent to counseling.

She scooped the papers into a folder with an air of finality. We have come to the end of our session for today, but we will be in touch—There was an idea—to schedule your next appointment. She said something about needing lunch before her next appointment, and I was wafted out of the room in the way that people behind desks know how to do these days.

But I was not fired. The knot in my stomach unraveled, and at once I was terribly hungry. Hungry like the wolf, as the college kids said who hadn't even been born when the song came out. Unpacking my boxes could wait. A thought seized me. Where would she, Irene Nalgala, go for lunch if she had only a short time between appointments? The burrito cart on the next block fell by a voluptuous wayside. My destiny might be served on the steam tables.

No one seemed to hear me singing snippets of songs as I made for the cafeteria. Almost every song that included the word love, I discovered, could be sung instead with the word lunch. Who's to say that the O-Jays wouldn't have taken the Lunch Train, or that the Ohio Players might not have taken the Rollercoaster of Lunch? Certainly not me.

A plan came as I waited in line for purportedly “Athenian” chicken. I could see if she needed Tabasco sauce, or some other, more appropriate condiment. Or I could simply take a table that would let me watch her lushly appointed coming and going. I took my laden tray and added a slice of pie and a cookie, perchance to share, to my usual diet cola. If there had been birds in the cafeteria, they would have sung sweetly.

I lined up at the left-hand cashier and watched the right-hand line began to move faster until there stood ahead of me, at about a two o'clock position, her. And her ass.

My blood sugar must have plunged, or at least that's the explanation I prefer. My hands shook as I set my tray on the rails. Which was still a foot away. The tray fell, carrying me with it. I hit the floor with a clatter of stainless-steel silverware and the clank of unbreakable foodservice crockery.

I couldn't tell if my bones had proved as unbreakable. Still shaken, with one lavish mashed-potato sideburn, I sat up and checked for damage. Others came to help, but I waved them off and gathered myself. Waiting for heads to turn away from me, daubing foodstuffs from my face, I saw the lunchtime crowd as I had never seen it before: a profusion of shoes and pants, a moving forest of legs.

Just a little above two stiletto heels rested a pair of exquisitely chiseled and delicate ankles, detailed like the ivory sculpture that fills Asian gift shops in every shopping mall.

I could clasp each of those ankles in a hand like a prized gem or a precious egg. I could polish them with my tongue. The ache of my bruises faded. The embarrassment of being spattered from head to foot with lunch vanished.

I have never been a man for ankles.

But there are, of course, exceptions.