so Louie and I packed it in
and headed for the Strip Club in Smithton
and it was snowing outside
beautiful flakes messing the roads
and the owner said
“I just sent home my best girls”
and one of the three remaining strippers
said “Fuck you, Frank”
and walked towards the stage.
Louie and I handed over 20 bucks
and the owner said “I’ll take $10
because of the weather”
and we each got 10 back
and found chairs around the stage
which was not much of a stage
and the walls were all aluminum
and the floor was muddy
and flecked with road salt
and Louie said “This really is a dump”
and I said “You never noticed that?”
and the women danced a little
which is to stay stripped a little
and I handed over some singles
and Louie handed over some singles
and the blonde stripper—
well, the older blonde stripper—
said “You can beat it
in the back room for 15 dollars”
and I said “Sounds great”
and Louie just sort of sat there.
A couple other women
came from the back room
and they were talking about
how expensive it was to get your nails done.
I got up to head to the back room.
The strippers concerned with their fingernails
started to give the same pitch
to Lou about beating off.
Louie is a more complex person
than I am, and nurturing too
and significantly more masculine
which also adds to his kindheartedness
so there were things for him to consider
like the impact of prostitution on women
ages 38-56 during a snow fall
on a Thursday night in Smithton
whereas I accept that most people
make choices in their own best interests
and jerk-jobbing at a strip club
probably beats working at McDonalds
or sitting in a cubicle somewhere
so I headed for the booth
and paid an extra ten dollars
for the stripper to finger
her ass and pussy at the same time
and she was nice, knew all
the right words and sexy sounds
and when I came she said
“Did you have fun?”
and I said “I did, thanks”
and I went back to the stage
and she did too
and I pulled up a chair
and she sat crossed legged
her robe covering her lap
and she said “Your buddy’s back there
with Sheena and Tina”
and I said “Sheena and Tina?”
and she said “It’s a winter special”
and laughed and I said “Oh”
then Louie appeared
but not Sheena and Tina
and Louie said “Let’s get out of here”
and I said “Sure”
and the stripper said “Thanks
for the extra ten bucks”
and I said “You’re great at what you do”
and she said “I know.”
Outside, I asked Louie
why he wanted two strippers
and he said “I don’t know”
and I said “What’d they do?”
and he said “Giggled”
and I said “What’d you do?”
and he said “Nothing.”
Then he said “I asked them some questions”
and I said “That was a nice thing to do”
and the snow was everywhere now
the flakes bigger than pennies
and the road reflecting white
and Louie said “At least
they’ll have money for manicures”
and I said “At least there’s that.”
The small pool at the hotel, in the dizzying Los Angeles midday heat, looks inviting. Wire fenced from the streets and parking lot, it glistens like a diamond in the concrete. Having just survived a near miss with a big, strong fellow in black shades which hid the madness in his eyes, outside the men’s room at an all you can eat restaurant in Hollywood, to escape and hide underwater seems a good idea. Stripped down to my shorts, I dive in. The water refreshes me – hides me.
It seems futile and above me the LA sun still shines as the darkness in the water grows…
It had only taken two years for his wife to leave him.
She’d grown sick of the small town, the smell of shit on his boots, and the fact that Ethan was just angry all the time. He could not blame her for wanting to leave, but he also did not follow her or try to make her stay.
Somewhere along the line, Ethan had started drinking in the mornings.
No one was around, so no one ever noticed. Booze made the work easier, or so he thought, but the truth was it just made it easier for him to ignore all the farm work he’d been putting off.
It started when the first cow died. Ethan left it in the field for weeks rotting in the summer sun, and it would’ve stayed there had the neighbors not complained about the smell. As the turkey buzzards began to crowd the fields, his mother complained to him as well, finally paying some local college kids to scrape the rotting carcass off the ground.
Ethan kept drinking and ignored the world around him, fantasies of going back to Chicago and his wife drifting through the haze inside his head. He knew he’d never go, but the idea allowed him to believe he had a plan.
Five more cows would die within the next year, and each time Ethan would ignore their bodies until the neighbors brought the law out to talk to him. In the end, he would hire someone to do the work and he would continue with his drinking, and the farm continued to limp along like a horse that had just thrown a shoe.
Eventually, Ethan and his mother stopped talking altogether. She grew tired of the arguments and disappointed in the son she raised, so they took to haunting opposite sides of the house. She lost herself in mourning her dead husband and wore her sorrows like an old dressing gown.
The morning Ethan found her hung from a rafter in the hay barn, he realized that he hadn’t known his mother at all.
For the first few days, Ethan ignored the barn entirely, telling himself he needed to find the note she was sure to have left. He searched her room and the rest of the house but found nothing.
An envelope of money under her mattress distracted Ethan for a few more days, as he finally had the means to drink like he’d always wanted to. Three days later and staggering drunk, he had finally worked up the nerve to walk into the barn.
The smell and the fact that she was covered in her own excrement convinced Ethan it would be best to leave her hanging for a spell, at least until he’d hosed her down. It took about an hour, but once he’d cleaned her up, Ethan decided to go back into the house and grab some fresh clothes for her, so she’d be dressed when he cut her down and called the authorities.
The feeling of control Ethan felt as he picked out her dress and slipped on her panties was nothing short of electric. After he’d finished dressing her, he went back to the house to get his mother’s makeup kit and spent the afternoon combing her hair as well.
One week later, it was the smell which once again prompted the neighbors to summon the police.
Their visits to the farm were becoming fairly routine by this point, but no one was prepared for the sight of Ethan drunk and doing a slow waltz with his mother’s rotting corpse, still dangling from the rafters.
For the first time in years, Ethan looked like a man contented. In his mind, he was back home in Chicago, his old life finally restored. In reality, however, he’d finally lost everything but his farm and its herd of starving cattle.
The trees were filled with turkey buzzards, and only they seemed to know how this was all going to end.
After owning a beeper for decades and not receiving a single page on the damn thing, I concluded there must be something wrong with my beeper number. So I called my service provider to change it.
As a consequence, I also had to order a new batch of social calling cards, ones that displayed my new beeper number. I placed a bulk order online, got a pretty good deal for 5,000 cards.
After the weighty box arrived in the mail a few days later, I got into my car and spent the day driving around to place my cards all over town—to let people know I was out there in the world, that I existed, that I was a person in need of social interaction.
I left my calling cards on tables and chairs in the waiting rooms of doctors’ offices, dental practices, psychiatry practices, and law firms.
I left them on the sinks in public bathrooms—men’s and ladies’ rooms alike—in movie theatres, shopping malls, restaurants, and gas stations. On park benches, in bus stops, on the seats of subway cars.
I tacked them to utility poles underneath garage sale fliers, above notices for missing cats and dogs. I left them strewn about on the floors and shelves of discount retail stores and supermarkets.
I slipped them into the mailboxes of houses, apartments, businesses, and places of worship.
I left my calling cards all over downtown. All over midtown and uptown too. Three days it took me to get rid of them all.
Several months passed before my beeper finally went BEEP, BEEP, BEEP… I was at home in my trailer when it happened, relaxing in my recliner, playing Sega Genesis, and smoking a fat clown tear-laced primo. That my beeper had finally beeped was exciting enough, but I also noticed the number flashing on the device had an uptown area code, which was cause for even more excitement. See, in depositing my calling cards all over my city and its environs, I sought acquaintanceship, friendship, romance, meaningless sex, and anything and everything in between. But the ultimate payoff of this practice was to land a date with an uptown girl. At least that had always been the dream of thisdowntown man.
“Hello,” a young woman’s voice picked up when I called the number.
“Uh, hi. I’m Chesterwinkle Kristofferson VIII. Did you, like, just page me?”
“Yes. Hi, I’m Juliet. I found one of your calling cards in the tomato bin at the grocery store.”
“Oh. Cool. So, are you like a real uptown girl?”
“Yes, I am. I’m beautiful, blonde, rich, classy, cultured—the whole nine yards. Hey, did you just call me on your cell phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why didn’t you just put your cell phone number on your calling cards instead of your beeper number? I didn’t even know what a beeper was until I googled ‘beeper’ after I found your card. You’re probably like the last person on Earth who still uses one of those things.”
“I suppose I could’ve put my cell number on the cards instead.”
“And what’s with this whole calling card thing to begin with? Who even does that? It’s weird. And creepy. I mean, has anyone ever passed out social calling cards like this?”
“Uh, yeah. I mean, I think so. I think people did it back in the olden days sometimes.”
“Is it still the olden days?”
“Are you always this sarcastic?”
“Yes.”
“Hey, would you like to maybe… you know… go out on, like, a date with, uh, like, me sometime, maybe?”
“Pick me up at seven,” Juliet said before she hung up.
***
I used up most of my life savings to rent a stretch limo for the date. Unfortunately, I was only able to afford the limo and not a driver to drive it, so I was obliged to be my own chauffeur. After I picked up the wheels, I purchased a James Bond costume from the bargain bin at a Halloween store. See, I wanted to impress Juliet by wearing a tuxedo, but I didn’t even own a cheap suit, let alone a tux. I sure as shit couldn’t afford to rent one after shelling out the dough for the limo. The James Bond Halloween costume was essentially a fake tuxedo. It would have to do.
Back at my trailer, I shat, showered, shaved, and doused myself in Axe body spray. On my way out the door, I grabbed a CD I’d created earlier in the day consisting solely of the song “Uptown Girl” by Billy Joel played over and over again hundreds of times.
Somewhere along the highway during the ride from downtown to uptown, with “Uptown Girl” playing at a low, comfortable volume, I realized I didn’t know where the hell I was going. Juliet had never given me her address. So I called her on my cellie.
“Hello, Chesterwinkle,” my beeper’s unmistakable, tinny, babyish voice answered on the other end.
What the fuck! I thought as my right hand fell from the steering wheel to grapple at my right hip, where my beeper should have been clipped to the elastic waistband of my fake tuxedo pants.
It wasn’t.
“Where the hell are you?” I barked.
“I’m at Juliet’s mansion. You know, uptown. I’m on a date with her. A fuck-first-eat-later kind of date, if you know what I mean. Heh-heh. Sorry, but I gotta go now.”
“Now just you hold on a minute, you little shit. That’s MY uptown girl you’re with! Tell me where you are. Gimme her goddamn address. RIGHT NOW, ASSHOLE!”
“Sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t do that, Chesterwinkle. And by the way, I quit. Go find yourself a new beeper. Better yet, maybe it’s time you catch up to the twenty-first century and stop using beepers and those ridiculous calling cards. You might want to lay off the terrible Axe body spray too.”
“Why you motherfuck—”
“Don’t be cross, boss. Or ex-boss, I should say. Hey, I’m not such a bad beeper. In fact, I felt kinda bad about this whole business, so after I slipped away from you earlier today, I decided to hook you up, mofo! Press the button to lower the privacy partition in your limo. Take a look in the back, and you’ll see just what I mean.”
Though I was bristling with rage, I pressed the button to lower the tinted sheet of glass that separated me from the passenger area. I glanced up at the rearview mirror to see a ripe corpse propped up all the way in the back.
Despite the bloating and the liquefying stage of putrefaction, I recognized the body as belonging to a former neighbor of mine from the trailer park:
Ol’ Man Jenkins, an elderly, morbidly obese man who had somehow managed to hang himself in his trailer not two weeks prior. Now this colossal stiff was in my limo, still wrapped up in his plus-size death-suit, only now he sported a wig of long, straight, shiny platinum hair, and his thin, receding lips were all gooped up with garish, blood-red lipstick, producing a grotesque clownish effect. That enormous belly of his looked like it might burst at any second under the mounting internal pressure of the corpse gases brewing within.
“Ta-da!” my beeper said. “I made you your very own uptown girl!”
“I’m gonna find you, you obsolete little shit,” I said through clenched teeth. “You hear me, you sonofabitch? And when I do, I’m gonna spike you down on the ground and stomp you into thousand bits and pieces!”
“Hey, good talk, bro, good talk. But I gotta go, yo. Juliet’s about to give me an A+ uptown blowjob!” To my chagrin, I heard Juliet giggling in the background. “Sorry you don’t appreciate the parting gift that took me so much trouble to prepare for you. So I guess this is see ya never again, dickface. Ah-hahahaha…”
My former beeper hung up on me.
I glanced back at the grisly thing in the backseat. Shuddering, I slapped the button to raise the tinted glass so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. Not sure what to do next, I turned up the volume of “Uptown Girl” a few notches and just kept driving, eventually getting off the exit ramp to uptown.
As I navigated the mansion-lined avenues of the uptown hills, I couldn’t help but glance in the rearview mirror at that tinted glass barrier, a pit of dread ballooning in my guts. At some point the intercom beeped, startling me.
“Taaaake meeee back to the cemeteeery,” Ol’ Man Jenkins’ croaked through the speaker. “Lower me back into my graaaaave. Then stay down there with meeeeeee. We can play Empire Strikes Back down there. You can be Luke Skywalker, and I’ll be that tauntaun that froze to death on Hoth. You can cut open my gas-filled belly and climb inside. It will smell bad, but it’ll keep you warm and protect you from the frigid Hoth niiiiiiiiiiiiight!”
Fuck.
Shit.
But sadly enough, it appeared I didn’t have anything better to do.
“Okay, Ol’ Man Jenkins,” I said, defeated. “I guess we can go play Empire Strikes Back in your fucking grave.” I paused, sighed heavily. “Hey, you know what?”
“Whaaaaaat?” the horrifying, undead voice rasped through the intercom.
“You’re my uptown girl.”
“And youuuu, you are my downtown maaaaaaan.”
I smiled and frowned at the exact same time, blinked away boiling hot, chimpanzee-semen tears from my crispy tater tot eyes, and took a big bite out of a Rubik’s cube that I’d brought along for a snack.
“That’s what I am,” I said, grinding colorful plastic between my molars.
I stick my hand up Jennifer’s skirt at Hippies Pub while we’re sitting at the bar. I begin playing with her pussy right then and there. Pretty much anyone who wants to take a look can see what’s going on.
We leave and take a cab back to the college where I teach, Xiang Guang University of Technology. Halfway up my stairwell she stops, grabs me and kisses me hard, pushing me back against the railing. It appears that if I want her, I can have her right here on the steps.
I glance at the doors to the other teachers’ apartments, up and down the landings. I can tell that the danger is getting Jennifer hot.
She starts reaches down and starts rubbing my crotch, but it would’t do to get caught fooling around with one of my students in the stairwell. I send her up the steps with a smack on her ass, heading for the privacy of my apartment.
I close and lock the door and we are out of our clothes in a matter of seconds.
Moments later I’ve got Jennifer on the bed, lying on her belly as I lick and kiss that soft ass, working my way towards her pussy, when we hear the teacher across the hall entering his apartment. For a second, a vision flashes through my head of the scene we would have caused had he arrived home minutes earlier.
Also, I seem to recall something about the statement, “inappropriate relationships between students and teachers not permitted,” being somewhere in the contract I had signed with the school eight months earlier. Fuck all that, I think to myself, getting back to the business at hand.
Soon I’m kissing Jennifer’s sweet, wet snatch. Then I’m drilling away and she’s moaning, “I… love… you,” in between labored breaths. She stifles a scream as she begins to climax.
“I want you to come inside me,” she says as I get close myself. And although getting my nineteen-year-old college student pregnant would be quite a fucked-up scandal, it is impossible for me to refuse in that moment.
“I didn’t really mean what I said when we were doing that,” Jennifer informs me, almost immediately after I roll off of her.
The next morning we wake up at six o’clock and fuck again. I can’t help but wonder if the teacher in the bedroom below us can hear her muffled cries of ecstasy.
Then Jennifer is off to her dormitory, and at eight o’clock she has my English class. Halfway through class I spot her crashed out, sound asleep on her desk.
***
A month later, after summer vacation has started, I’m standing outside of Hippies Pub ordering some barbecued chicken legs from a street vendor. My cell phone rings, and it’s Jennifer. I’ve been looking forward to her return ever since the last time I’d seen her, before she’d left campus last semester.
She has been calling me every hour or so since mid-afternoon, telling me she is on her way back. There is a trip planned with the school’s photo club that she is going on. She asks me to order a couple of chicken legs for her. I grab a few Harbin beers to go, then get in a taxi and head back to the uni.
Sitting together in my living room, I wash down the chicken we’ve just finished with a big swig of beer. Then, sliding towards Jennifer on the couch, I’ve just begun kissing those thick, luscious lips when she pushes me away and asks, “Why does mans always want to touch girls?”
“I missed you,” I reply.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “but I can’t do that no more… Whenever I see my father, I feel so guilty. Like when he look at me he know I let man touch my body.”
“Fu-uuck…” I moan, just barely audible. I grab my beer and take another couple of big swallows, trying to blot out my frustrations.
I don’t view this girl as simply some piece of ass. I am absolutely crazy about Jennifer and have suggested marrying her after she graduates. “If you were ten years younger,” had been her reply.
I crack another Harbin and contemplate how I am going to get laid tonight. Whether or not I am in love with Jennifer, I need some action very badly as it has been sometime since anyone has given it up.
I think back to a situation in which a male student of mine had been dumped by his girlfriend because he had been too nice to her. At that time, the subject of the break-up had come up at dinner with some other foreign teachers at the school. The general consensus was that some Chinese girls don’t like to be treated too nicely and that, in fact, a number of them might like being treated badly.
And while I’m not normally one for mistreating my girlfriends, tonight, in the interest of getting some pussy, I decide to give it a shot.
“So? What..?!” I yell a little. “Do you wanna fuck Dennis?!” I motion towards Dennis Zhu’s apartment across the hall. “That fuckin’ asshole..?! You want his cock instead of mine..?!”
She seems a bit shocked, as I have never raised my voice to her before. But I continue, wondering if this act is working.
“You fuckin’ leave last semester, don’t even say goodbye..?! Don’t even come to the goodbye dinner with the other students..?! What the fuck..?!”
After a bit of this, I can see that she is visibly upset, that this strategy is not working after all. She even seems to be shaking a bit.
“Maybe, I should go back to dormitory…” she suggests.
“No,” I tell her, “no need for that… Hey, what shall our English conversation topic be for tonight? And where are you going for your photography trip tomorrow?”
“The home of Qi Bai Shi,” she replies coldly.
Later, with Jennifer in bed beside me, I drift off to sleep having completely given up on the idea of fucking her this blazing hot Hunan summer evening.
Suddenly I’m roused by Jennifer’s soft, angelic little girl voice, the one she uses only after having been a total fucking cunt before.
“I want you to touch my body…” she whispers in my ear.
Soon I’m riding that sweet nineteen-year-old ass once again, loving every minute of it.
“I want you to come on my breasts,” she says, after she’s gotten hers. I gladly oblige, pulling out and jerking my cum all over those lovely, firm tits. Having drained myself dry, I collapse beside her feeling relieved.
“I didn’t fuck you because I love you,” she tells me then. “I fucked you because I wanted a man inside of my body.”
I fall asleep thinking, I don’t give a fuck why you fucked me.
richly saturated colors swept
into her trail of
undulating frame & torso
then infused
throughout her wispy,
pulsating face
& intensified to a
pitch of
turbulent
flame
arms, legs
& hair converged
into flowing
movements of
sinuous trails that
melted
into
air
I dreamed
I had open-heart surgery,
completely awake (inside the dream)
All the lights were sharp
and all the knives were dull
You were the surgeon
and you kept promising, over and over
that you had washed your hands
which meant that you hadn’t.
I’ve been slowly turning over the contents of my wallet to the girls at Mary’s, the oldest strip club in Portland. It’s a shady landmark and so am I—shit faced, suicidal, dreading the arrival of closing time, reckoning the end of the ride.
I’m afraid to go home. There’s nothing there. I’m always afraid to go home. Tonight the feeling is magnified. There’s a guy sitting next to me at the rail who’s been tipping nothing but twenties for the last three hours. It’s Christmas Eve, rapidly crashing into Christmas day.
“LAST CALL!!!”
I order one last whatever I can afford and toss the remainder of my cash onto the stage. The dancer scowls as she scoops it up. She’s beautiful. I like her. She’s totally beyond me. The guy sitting next to me taps my shoulder and screams into my face, “Where the fuck can you get a drink in this town?” Red hair, baseball hat, big ears, nose full of broken blood vessels.
I tell him the bars stop serving at 2 a.m.
“All of ‘em?” he says, blue eyes, bad teeth. “Follow me. I’m staying at the Benson. We’ll hit the mini-bar.”
“Right,” I slur, and stagger after him. Stagger Lee. Good Seattle band, since disbanded. I hum one of their tunes while trying to walk a straight line.
It’s cold out but the Benson is close. We get there and dude tips the doorman forty dollars. He tips the elevator operator, waves to the desk clerk. They all smile and seem to know him: Mr. Big Bucks.
I flop down on a couch in a two-bedroom suite, way up high with the pigeons and the stars and, to answer a question, tell Big Bucks I’d like a vodka, not a gin, tonic. We make small talk, about drinks and drinking, small drunk talk.
“I made six million dollars this year,” he tells me. He dials the phone and when the bellhop appears he gives him a handful of cash and sends him down to Burnside for drugs—the street. I didn’t know you could do that, ordering drugs like room service. I don’t know a lot of things.
“What’s your story?” I ask. But I’m not all that interested. I have a drink in my hand.
“Six million dollars,” he says. “I tried twice and failed. This third time, I got lucky. I started this thing on the internet, and then I sold it. Now I’m a consultant. I’m on my way to Seattle. Wanna go?”
“I have a job to be at. I didn’t make six million dollars this year.”
“Fuck it, man. How much do you make? What do you do?”
“I’m a bartender.”
“Come up to Seattle for a few days. I’ll put five grand in your bank account right now. We’ll hang out and get fucked up.”
“Right.”
“I’m serious—I’ll give you five grand. What’s your account number?”
“Fuck that. I need my job.”
The bellhop raps on the door and Big Bucks gets up to let him in. They do their business and I fix myself another drink from the mini-bar. Big Bucks tips the kid sixty dollars, twenty, twenty, twenty, quick in the palm, shuts the door and tells me all about it.
“All he could find was crack,” he says, sitting down and hooking himself up an empty Coke can to smoke it from. “You want some?”
“I hate that shit,” I tell him. Truth is I’ve never tried it before.
“You’ll want some later.” He gets up and turns on the television: Cable porn. No penetration.
I go to the bathroom. I check my eyes, throw some water on my face, spit into the mirror like it’s some stupid movie.
When I get back, Big Bucks has a chair pulled up close to the TV. He has his pants off and he’s trying to jerk off.
“I love this chick,” he says. But he can’t get it up. His piggly wiggly little dick is useless. He keeps working at it, breaking every few strokes to bring the Coke can to his mouth. His dick lays there like one of those dead worms you see on the sidewalk after a hard rain.
I close one eye and look at the TV. The smell of the crack reminds me of a cancer ward, dead relatives, open wounds. The girl on the TV is beautiful. I know her but I can’t remember her name.
“God,” Big bucks says, “I wanna fuck her. Are you bi?”
“No,” I tell him. Her name is Blake. That’s her last name. I’m no good with names. But I’m right about this one.
“I think I’m bi,” he says.
It strikes me as funny to think I was once married and in love, that I used to eat meals and go for walks and kiss my wife goodnight and not feel terrified on the holidays—so funny I want to cry. But that will come later, when I get back to my apartment. The sun will be streaming through the windows and I’ll want to be dead. Not that it matters now.
I pick up the Coke can, put a rock in there, and fill my lungs with chemicals, exhaling a noxious cloud of hopelessness. Six million dollars. Money can buy just about anything. But it’s not enough. Big Bucks probably won’t live long enough to spend it all. Or worse, he will.
“Can I suck your dick?” he says.
“No thanks,” I tell him.
I lay down on a love seat and let Big Bucks do his drugs. The crack makes my brain feel like a pinball machine, but I close my eyes and try for unconsciousness anyway. Why is crack so much easier to find at 4 a.m. than weed? Because the dealers are using and the stoners are all asleep.
I have some Xanax in my pocket. I take a few, let them dissolve under my tongue, slip in and out of bad dreams. Hours seem to pass. I lift one eye and see Big Bucks squatting in front of the TV, blue flickering light, shadows, people fucking. He’s squatting over a hotel towel, sticking mini-bar bottles up his ass–still smoking crack, still no hard-on.
I sit up, collect myself. I’m clean now, pure of heart, half crazed. “Hey, you know that magazine you brought back from the club? You can call a hooker. There’s a whole section in the back–photos, numbers, everything.”
“No shit? Call us one!” He pauses before pulling a bottle out of his ass. “I hope this isn’t freaking you out.”
“Hey, listen, I’m out of cigarettes.”
“There’s some money on the table,” he says. “Take a ten. Get us a couple packs, Camel Lights.” He turns his face back to the TV.
I page through the magazine. It’s called Exotica. The girls are called “escorts.” I zero in on the ugliest, most psychotic looking tranny I can find, dial the number. Give the address, the room.
There’s a pile of cash sitting on the end table by the door, hundred dollar bills, fifty dollar bills, twenties, tens, fives—the whole fucking bag of bones. I grab a handful, then decide to grab it all. I stuff the bills into my pocket, every pocket.
I light a match, toss it in the waste basket. A flame leaps up—and I leave, out the door, up the hallway, into the elevator, down down down, off the elevator, through the lobby where I wave to a drunk in a Santa Claus suit, out another door and into the street.
The sun is up, bright, alarming… unreal. The air smells of sleigh bells and gasoline, and the Christmas people are awake, making their way to where? A communal meal with family and friends, presents and ham and mashed potatoes with gravy, cookies and gingerbread houses and eggnog minus the booze, or too much of it.
They all have stories. They are all full of secrets. I’d tell mine to God, if I believed there was a God. I think God would understand.
