Sunday

Twentytwo

I never, never hit her. Not once. Never raised my hand, never raised my voice. Never thought a single time about taking that beautiful face and slamming it against the wall, about grabbing her slender wrist and wrenching her arm up over her head. I never thought about shoving her to the floor and kicking her in the ribs until she was curled up into a weeping little ball on the floor. I never thought about taking the big chef’s knife from the wooden block on the counter and thrusting it into her pale, smooth stomach. I never once thought about wrapping my hands around her throat until her tongue was hanging out and her lips had turned blue.

I never thought about what she had done with her days before I came around. I never wondered how many of the books on the shelves in the parlor she’d read over the course of long, languid afternoon. I never thought about why she chose to paint the walls of the kitchen pale pink, the walls of the living room deep blue, why the bathroom had the ornate tub big enough for a half dozen people but no shower. I never thought about why she had spent so much time planting rose bushes along the path to the front entrance when she only went in and out through the patio door in the back of the house. I never even began to contemplate why her wardrobe was comprised of nothing but tailored dresses, high-heeled shoes and elaborate lingerie. I never asked what she’d named her cat.

I mean to ask her things, when I jump the wall next to Little Gate and head back to her cottage, but I forget to, once I see her. I grab her up and carry her to the sofa or to the bedroom or just take her, gently, down to the rug on the wooden floor of the foyer. Her clothes fly off, she smiles, I sink into her and my mind is white noise and bliss. She’ll make a snack and we’ll eat it together, feeding each other tidbits, smiling, giggling. I tell her that she’s beautiful, tell her that she’s wondrous, tell her that I love her, that I will love her unendingly. Immortally. Endlessly. She strokes my cheek and kisses the corner of my mouth and smiles and falls asleep in my arms. It’s a pristine moment, every time.
And then that’s it, that’s all. She sleeps and I hold her, feel her warmth, stroke her strong back and listen to her breathe. The cat twines around our feet and settles in to nap, purring. Sunlight, moonlight, the light of the burning logs in the fireplace, it plays across her features and I watch as a flicker catches the line of her jaw, the swell of her cheek, the strands of her thick black hair falling across her brow. Going over her inch by inch, every millimeter of skin and hair, my eyes roving, coming to rest on every angle they find. Luxuriating in every swell of her body, every smooth curve, every kissable, lickable angle of her. She’s flawless, perfect. Sculpture. A portrait made of flesh.

She’s, Jesus, she’s everything I despise. Everything I’ve railed against since I was a boy. She’s every fashion model, every debutante, the hope and dream of every vain woman who went under the knife for high cheekbones and pouting lips and perky d-cups, she’s the goal every time someone turns on a liposuction vacuum, slides into a tanning booth. Every woman that’s ever walked into a beauty salon and said ‘Make me beautiful!’, they meant Mags Verbosa. Every fashion show in Milan, every beauty pageant, every twelfth-grader hoping for Prom Queen. All the lip discs, the neck rings, filed teeth, tattoos, piercings, the endless parade of hairdos, corsets, makeup, fashions to bolster and conceal and accentuate, it’s all down to attaining that perfection. That flawlessness. That pristine, absolute beauty. Mags Verbosa, the template against which women place themselves, without even knowing that she’s out there, without ever knowing that they haven’t got a chance in hell.

And she’s mine. And once I’m spent and drained and watching the light play over her remarkable face, once the drowsy, blissful afterglow has passed, I can’t stand the sight of her.

And so I walk away, past the rose bushes, through the desert, jumping the wall at Little Gate, walking into The Broken Promise and waving at Breven to line up shots of whiskey along the bar. Drinking myself stupid until the Sheik shows up and takes me away to shoot machine guns at damned souls and drive fast cars down open highways and bang strippers in the ass in the alley behind the club. And he’s grinning and telling me that I’m better off without her, there’s a million fish in the sea, blah, blah, blah, and I’m thinking about her the whole time, remembering the curve of her hips, the play of shadow in the hollow her neck, about a bead of sweat sliding down one perfect breast, slithering around her erect nipple, trailing down her stomach to fill the cup of her navel. Knowing that I’ll go back, knowing that it’ll be just the same, that it will be perfect and wonderful and that I love her and that I’ll hate her and that I’ll be back at the Promise in a week or a month downing shots and waiting for the Sheik to take me away to jump dirtbikes in the desert or whatever and that this is what I’ll be doing for now until I die, because, God, how can I stay away?

How do you walk away from perfect?

Thursday

Twentyone

The guy, he’s just a guy, right? A guy in the elevator kiosk on Fifty, a building in NYC, Midtown. A suit guy, gray and white with a slash of red down the middle. Shiny black shoes. A face and some hair. Manicured fingernails and hands that have just enough knuckle and just enough bulging veins to be masculine. Scent of…what? Something expensive and subtle, musk and flowers and fruit, just at the very edge of noticeable. An accent that’s every suburb in the U.S. You know that he goes home to an apartment that’s furnished in the kind of way that would work for a catalog shoot, you know that his girl is desirable in that I’m-a-business-woman-but-fuck-like-a-hooker fantasy kind of way. You know that he drives his car from underground garage to underground garage and that valets spend almost as much time behind the wheel as he does. You know that he meets other suit guys for cocktails after work. You know that he drops the name of his school whenever he can. You know that he’s been slotted & tracked, destined from birth for an eventual promotion to VP in charge of whatever, a corner office, a giggling secretary, alcoholism, passionless affairs, stock options, retirement to a house on Cape Cod and a condo in Miami. He’s maybe five years older than me, and he’s done.

The package, it’s a package. It’s brown. It’s paper, but not an envelope. A wrapped box, maybe, but it doesn’t have the rigid feel of cardboard. Not stiff, but not spongy. Just there. Really. That’s it. There. It’s about so big by so big, comfortable to carry, but you know that you’ve got it under one arm. It’s not heavy, not light. Something that won’t make it hard to run up a flight of stairs or open a fire door. Would probably fit in my messenger bag. It’s whatever. It’s a package. I’ve carried hundreds. It’s just a package.

There’s the handoff, in the elevator kiosk on Fifty, the suit to the polo shirt. “Hey, how ya doin’?” Handing over the clipboard, the tag ready to be filled out and signed. “Good, good, sorry about the delay.” A scritch-scratch with my ballpoint, destination point and that signature, the signature which is God in this business, jotted along the dotted line. “No problem, that’s the job, right?” Dry little chuckle, the whitecollar giving props to the bluecollar as the clipboard comes back to me. I could strangle him to death right here, clock him in the head with the hard edge of the clipboard and send him to his knees, leap on him, bury my thumbs into the soft hollow of his neck, an inch above that red slash of a tie. Strangle him to death in front of all the security cameras and they’d never stop me in time. Catch me on the way out, sure. Blocking the stairwells, locking the lobby doors. Rentacops pounding leather through the maintenance hallways, hellbent on earning their minimum wage plus 10% bringing down the psycho who just took out a promising young exec from the heralded firm of Whomsoever & Whomsoever. A blurb on page six of the Metro Section, twenty seconds and a couple of soundbites on the 11 o’clock local news. My shaved head and leering grin getting marched out of the courthouse in an orange jumpsuit. Would I be a force, in prison? Would I find previously untapped reservoirs of internal steel and sheer brutality? Or, really, would I just be one more ugly bitch traded for a rock of crack and a handful of stale Marlboros?

The handoff, and there’s that package, just a package, into my hands from his and all the legal paperwork in the world, all the screaming and whining and arguing, all the denial and tantrums and outright lies in the world won’t refute that I took it of my own free will, with a smile on my face, completely uncoerced, absolutely of my own volition. Just like hundreds of other times. That’s the job, right?

And I’m stepping into the elevator and suit guy, with his woefully unmolested throat, is buzzing into the security door with his white plastic keycard, I’m glancing down at the tag, seeing where I’m going. And the doors are closing, and my eyes are bugging and I’ve got just the time to say it before the suit escapes into his safe, locked inner sanctum.

“Fucking Pennsylvania?

And maybe it’s just me playing tricks on me, but just before the doors click shut, somewhere there’s a dry little chuckle. The elevator hums, and I’m descending.

Tuesday

Twenty

The Sheik gets it, even if no one else does. The drama, the pathos, the quest. This, this whole fucking out of control, pointless, frustrating thing, I love it. It’s perfect. It’s too much drama and too much emotion and too much action and too much sorrow and too much joy. It’s all about being too much. It’s about finding the edge of limits, about finding that elusive internal fire.

The quest, man. Is there anything else that we want? To go and go and push and strive and brace ourselves against the worst things that could possibly come our way. Prepared to fight, die, kill, to run and jump and scream across the wilderness, to climb over walls and swim moats, to fling ourselves over cliffs, draw our weapons in the face of overwhelming odds, to feel our blood boil and our voices rise. Everything we got promised by Star Wars and Spiderman comics, everything we hoped for when we were pretending to be the team from S.W.A.T., the crew of the Battlestar Galactica. Every time we were brave GI’s storming across an open field to rescue our POW friends, every time we were jungle explorers, private eyes, pirates, cavemen, rock stars and the six million dollar man.

All that they gave us as children, all those dreams that rose up over the mundanity of the world, that made us think that we could be famous and important and brave and strong and essential. That allowed to ignore how miserable our parents were and maintain blissful ignorance of the trudging, slogging adults that hemmed us in at every side. The visions and hallucinations that kids are allowed to have, that are slowly peeled away by every timecard punch and hour in line at the DMV, drowned out by standardized tests, psychotherapy, by the 40-hour workweek and rush hour commuting.

We don’t get to imagine once we’re adults. Oh, sure, we have desires, have our fantasies, but we only dream of what’s possible. Minds filled with giant houses and wide green lawns, fast new cars, dream jobs with full dental and a 25% raise, spending our lives thinking about buying Jaguars and getting laid by the new redhead in the secretarial pool. We’re not allowed to dream about spaceships to Venus and submarines shaped like octopuses. We’re laughed at if we spend too much time imagining that we can fly, if we like to make believe that we’re wizards brewing up potions in the tallest tower of the biggest castle ever built. We can’t spend an afternoon in the woods building a clubhouse out of scrap boards and old shingles. We can’t wish to be heroes dashing across rooftops on our way to delivering jaw-shattering right hooks to purse snatchers. We can’t spend our oh-so-precious time wishing for things that can’t happen. We’re watching the clock and waiting to die and demanding of ourselves to hope only for those things that we can buy or fuck or consume. We’re forced to take the world and narrow it down to only those few things we can lay our hands on, to only accept those things that we can point to, that can be measured and laid out and examined. As children, we’re given everything. As adults, we have to fight for every scrap of food, every stitch of clothing, every gallon of gas. Dreams are cheap; you don’t have to fight to have them. In the world of the measured and examined, they’re utterly worthless and absolutely disposable. Laughable. Pointless.

The Sheik, he gets it. It’s all about dreaming, about desire and wish and hope. It’s all about throwing yourself into the void, trusting that you can handle whatever comes. It’s about your fantasies being as worthwhile as your reality. It’s about knowing there’s things that haven’t been laid out and measured and examined, and knowing that you’re just the guy to go find them.

Jesus. Starting to sound just like the motherfucker.

Out.

Monday

(Sorry about the lack of updates, for anybody out there who might be waiting with bated breath. Been a rough few weeks. But I'm back for the nonce, with a little bit more of this...stuff. Enjoy...)

Nineteen.

I suppose that I’d read somewhere that the sun comes up fast in the desert. I’m guessing that I had, because that was my first thought when the pale gloom of sunrise turned into a blaze of heat on the back of my neck in the space of a dozen steps. Oh yeah, the sun comes up fast in the desert. Maybe it was just something I put together as it was happening, a thought that sprung into my head fully developed based on the immediate evidence I’d been presented with. Sometimes my mind is quick. But only when it doesn’t truly matter.

So, yes, in case you’re wondering, the sun comes up fast in the desert. You go from damp and shivering to parched and burning in the space of a commercial break. You can feel the blacktop getting soft and sticky and sucking at the tread of your shoes. You can feel your scalp burning through your shaved stubble. You can feel the first trickles of sweat between your shoulderblades followed closely by the dead fish feel of a polo shirt that’s drenched from collar to hem plastered against your back. You can turn to look and see if the sun is rolling along the road directly behind you, as it feels it must be, but you’ll only get dazzled by rays of pure white light blasting at you across the sand, your only reward your pupils slamming down into tiny pinpricks that turn the world around you into nothing but shadow and murk.

Whatever road I was on, it wasn’t the one the locals used to get from hither to yon. My Timex called it almost exactly eight hours between the time the BMW did the big spark and the time I finally just collapsed on the side of the highway, and not once did I see a car going either way. Nor did I hear engines rumbling in the distance, on some Interstate that I couldn’t quite see. Nor did I hear any kind of aircraft moving overhead. All I heard was the sound of sand being blown across the road, the scuff of my $20 oxfords on the blacktop and the beating of my own heart.

I got as far as I could, smoking the rest of my cigarettes as I sauntered along, figuring that Fort Stockton had to be coming up just over the next dune, hidden behind the next mesa. It was an idea that I had been rapidly losing faith in, if for no other reason than the lack of markers on the road.

You drive enough, and you get a feel when you’re getting somewhere. You’re out in the wilds of New Jersey, nothing around you but rolling hills and stands of old oaks and you start to wonder if the maps in your Thomas guide are totally fucked, and then you see a little green sign somewhere, a mile marker or a street sign or an intersection informational with arrows and town names and numbers next to them, and you know that you’re all right. Somebody, at some point, figured that somebody else would be on that road for a reason, and that they’d want some indication that they were headed in the right direction. It’s a cultural thing, I suppose. People want to get from here to there, and those signs are a common agreement that achieving your destination is a good and desirable thing. We all want to know that we’re working together on this whole navigation deal, and that any time now, we’ll pull into a happy little spot with gas stations and diners and hotels. Or at least a 7-11 and a pay phone. Something. Those little green signs make all the difference between knowing that society has done its job to keep you on the right track and wondering if you’ve wandered into the Twilight Zone.

The road to Fort Stockton didn’t have any of that. There was that first sign, that first indicator that yet another outpost had in some way thrived out in the middle of nowhere, and then nothing. No mile markers, no sign reading FORT STOCKTON 21 MILES, no speed limit signs, no signs prohibiting hitchhiking or littering or announcing a no passing zone. The road was there, sure, but it felt like it had been laid down and then simply abandoned, as though the Fort Stockton that it had announced at its head had, at some point, simply failed to come into existence, and the road had been left, unmarked, to disintegrate under the blazing sun.

Thinking this particularly cheering thought, I turned on a heel, blearily imagining that I would walk back the seventy or eighty miles to the last gas station I’d passed, and then promptly passed out. And just as my head slammed into the blacktop, it occurred to me that my phone might just work out here.

Again, I am not a quick thinker, when it truly matters.


Eighteen.

“Davey to base, Davey to base.”

“Base, Davey, base, Davey. Go ahead.”

“Okay, I’m in midtown. Got an address for me?”

“Uh….skkkkkkkkkk…nope. Negatory.”

“Oooookay….”

“Sorry, Davey. Someone’s in a meeting or something. I should have something for you within the hour. You’re still on the clock, so just find somewhere to park, get some dinner, keep your radio on.”

“It’s almost eight, base. Are these guys still working?”

“Uhhhh…skkkkkkkkkkk…yeah, got a message here from the guy. They’re pulling an all-nighter. They’ll need the package before…uh…midnight.”

“Jeez…think I might be in late tomorrow, base…”

“Yeah, that’s all right. You’re gonna make out good on this one, Davey. Just hang tight. I’ll call when I hear something.”

“Right. Davey out.”

“Base, Davey, out…skkkkkkkkk…”
Seventeen.

The bastard made me pick up the package. Kneeling down in front of the driver’s door, retrieving it from the sand, on one knee, looking up at him. The Sheik smiling down with his dazzling, perfect grin.

“Hey, Davey, I’m not anyone special.” He took a drag off his smoke. “No need to bow.”

Later, bouncing across the desert, he took a hand off the wheel, pulled a white business card out of the air and handed it over to me.

SHEIK EUROPA

SPECIALIZING IN HIGH CONCEPTS
AND THE UTTERLY KICKASS

“What’s that mean?”

He smirked and dug into the gas just in time to fling us over a dune. I grabbed the roll cage just in time to keep from being thrown.

“Means I’m an idea man, Davey. Means that you stick with me, you’ll have more story ideas than Stephen King, Michael Crichton and Joe Esterhaus put together.” He goosed the throttle and we bounded over another dune. He pulled a lit cigarette out of the air and handed it over to me. I took it and bit down on the filter to keep the wind from whipping it away. “Means that we’re a match made in heaven, friend.” He turned to me and grinned. “Means we’re just about to lay down an epic that’s gonna be the most classic of classics that ever was.”

I closed my eyes and smoked my cigarette and dreamed about Mags’ thighs as the Sheik arrowed across the desert.