10- Snow Cones in the Bronx

“They say,” I say to Pink, wiping ice from my chin, “that this is the best snow cone place in the entire city.

“I don’t think the best of anything is in the Bronx, Laird.”

“Well, that’s what Tim Tim said.”

She ran her tongue slowly over blue syrup-flavored ice.  “I’m not sure exactly how sugar syrup and ice can taste any different someplace else.”

She and I were walking past the bars and gift shops around the Stadium, the roar of a Yankees-Indians game going on behind us, when she said to me, kind of out of nowhere: “I’m not going to fuck you, Laird.”

            “Huh?” I asked.  “I didn’t say any…who said anything about fucking?”

            She was wearing a halter top and pink lycra mini-skirt.  She was looking good.

            “The eyes.  I can see it in your eyes.”  Her mouth was all blue from ice and syrup.  “You’ve looked at my ass at least five times this block- and you’ve been staring at my tits all fucking day.”

            “Your tits aren’t even that great.”  Her tits are fantastic.

            “This isn’t dinner or coffee or a drink or anything like that, you fucking dirt bag.  I’m not going to fuck you.”

            My arm was itching.  I stayed sober all day for this.  Well, mostly sober.  A little Xanax, a few sugar packets and some Bufferin because I had a headache.  I looked up and around, and there were people sitting on stoops and sitting by their windows and some of them were watching us pass.  I needed a bath.  I ran my hand through my greasy hair.

          “I think I hate the Bronx,” she said.  “I think we’re the only white people on this block.  And I hate baseball.”

            “We could go back to my place,” I said.

            “I could throw up.”

            “Why?”

            “Laird- this is not a date.  If I fuck you, you’ll love me, because that’s what you’re all about.”  She licked the snow-cone and laughed at me.  “You want love just like all the men in this town, and remember that I know a lot of them in a fairly intimate way.  And that’s just shit.  Love is…” she looked up at the sky- cloudy, gray.  “…disappointing.  I don’t see the point of getting all worked up about love when it’s just the right synapses firing in your brain, the release of the right neuro-chemicals telling you that this person you’re with is so fucking great.”

            “You’re a hooker,” I said.  “Sex and love aren’t the same thing, doll.”

            “Fuck you,” she said, calm, and then, “No two people are any different, and if you were in love with me, it’ll just be some kind of scam.”  She had bright magenta hair and it was cut really short and it was waving around as she talked.  “I love my kid.  I fuck for money.  Fucking and love aren’t the same thing, but for you, and for most of these assholes I see every day, it’s all the same thing.”

            “What if we were the last two people on Earth?” I asked.  A Korean woman standing in the doorway of a little grocery looked at me as if I was from another planet and she said something to a little boy at her side in Korean.  Maybe she was Chinese.

            “Are we it, or have other people survived as killer mutants or some shit?”
            “Doesn’t matter,” I said.

            “I’d rather fuck the killer mutants.  They’d just want sex, and maybe they’d let me live if I gave it to them.  Shit, isn’t that what my life is right now?”

            “So you’d rather cross-breed killer post-apocalyptic mutant babies than suck my dick?”

            “I’d rather lick the underside of a ’72 Gremlin with a bad transmission than suck that disease-ridden thing you’ve got dangling between your legs.”

            She was a very sweet girl. Sweet as a Snow Cone in the Bronx.