The Spider Man and I

I fumble in a final search at the bottom of my jumbled purse for one of my lighters. Damn. Oh well, he'll have a light. I also have a matchbook in my leather jacket pocket, but it doesn't have the same allure as the flint flick of a lighter. Leaving my still-unzipped purse on the cluttered kitchen table, I open the front door.

I hang around the outside of my apartment looking down from the front balcony. This is one of the few occasions where I don't bother locking the door. The others are when I go downstairs to take out the recycling or garbage or when I go to do laundry. He'll come soon, the Spider Man. He'll come bearing a pack of Kamel Reds and a lighter so we can get this otherwise mundane weekend evening started.

Sure enough, he comes, always wearing dark clothes. Sometimes I worry that some dumbass drunk speed freak is going to hit him one of these nights as he crosses the street from his place down the alley to mine by the bridge. When we're both in each other's sights, we keep staring. I wonder if I need a new contact lens prescription. He seems blurrier than usual as he makes his way up the brown-painted wood outdoor stairs.

The first thing he asks me is if there are still enormous spiderwebs covering my building. I tell him I don't know since it's so dark. He looks at the lighting fixture above my head and points out the seven or so orb webs surrounding it as moths hover around the light. At some point, he tells me that this is one of the few reasons he's glad that he's short, so his head doesn't run into the webs. The moths seem to have no problem flying around and into the webs.

And this is why I call him the Spider Man. He's no superhero. He's just a guy with a preoccupation with spiders. After a brush with death resulting from a brown recluse bite as a kid, I can hardly blame him. Now as an adult, although he would hardly refer to himself as one, he hunts the wolf spiders around his duplex. 710. A really big one with an egg sac on its back. I vaguely recall the details of his last hunt as chronicled in his online journal. This is why I call him the Spider Man.

The first thing I ask him is for a light. He obliges with a flick of a green lighter similar to one I had for awhile. Maybe I left it at his place during one of my late night visitations, but I don't feel like asking him about it. After all, who knows how many green plastic lighters there are in this town. I tell him that I feel like a character in a film noir with my black leather jacket and pretentious British cigarettes (Dunhill lights, in a package of 20 Class A cigarettes minus the five I smoked earlier this week). I blow a bit of smoke into the light fixture causing the moths to rearrange their well-hidden positions on the brown wall. They pass into and out of the spiderwebs as easily as they pass into light out of shadow and back again.

For awhile, we watch in rapt attention at this live, in-your-face nature documentary of the cruelty of nature. Not so much the cruelty of the spider against the moth, but vice versa. He jokes about how the moths are being teases. I refer to them as the "catholic schoolgirls" of the insect world, flaunting about in their pleated skirts, barely covering their panties but giving enough of a glimpse to know what you're missing. I never went to Catholic school, but I still had the skirt.

From the look of it, the network of orb webs are a family complex. There are two larger spiders and several smaller clones around. The two larger spiders are probably females. The father was probably not so much a deadbeat dad who left the house as soon as the kids were born, but the first meal for the children. With him gone, everyone has to fend for themselves, which is probably what it would have been like even if he was still around. At least this way, they get one meal out of their father. Sometimes the large mama is lucky and hauls in a big catch of dusty wings and a bloated carcass. Even the little ones have to work to survive. In a tiny, nearly-ruined web still barely visible on the edge of the light, one of the little ones has caught a mosquito.

After awhile, my neck starts to creak. He tries to crack his neck and comments that he could possibly break his own neck in the process. I tell him that he shouldn't since I don't think I could dispose of a corpse as easily as the spiders can, that they probably wouldn't like him anyway since he's already been tasted.

I start to think of the brown marks slowly taking over his body since that first bite. I remember all the times I ran my tongue along his ribcage and stomach, all the times I ran my fingertips down his back. I didn't even know it had spread to his back until he turned on the light once after our late night visits before he put his clothes on to leave.

I think about the mark I had willingly had inflicted onto my back in bold blues and yellows. Maybe that was why I did it, to see if I could finally understand him. Then again, we've always been completely different creatures and gotten along fine with our limited understanding of each other.

The moths stop flying about and he and I are long finished with our cigarettes. We go in my apartment and fuck as usual, but this time, I don't lick his markings. I'm sure he's been tasted enough there already.